microsoft word 71517_1_11_chakravarttyandmills.docx chakravartty, p. and mills, m. (2018). virtual roundtable on “decolonial computing, 4(2), 1-4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © paula chakravarty and mara mills. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical commentary virtual roundtable on “decolonial computing”1 paula chakravartty new york university paula.chakravartty@nyu.edu mara mills new york university mmills@nyu.edu information and communication technologies (icts) are inseparable from the emergence and expansion of modern capitalism, colonialism, and racial regimes of militarized power, yet they have remained peripheral to decolonial critique.2 computer networks, digital media, and automated industrial systems underpin the economic imperialism of the united states. in the late nineteenth century, the first telecommunications firms, such as western union, not only aided mass production and global distribution for other industries, they instituted what business historian alfred chandler called managerial capitalism and the “modern multiunit business enterprise.”3 moreover, modern information technologies have long been deployed to rule over and govern colonial subjects through 2 chakravartty, p. and mills, m. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) surveillance, military interventions, and counterinsurgencies at “home” and abroad. as the us solidified its political economic hegemony in the long twentieth century, telecommunications and electricity were leading growth industries; they drove the american myth of progress-throughinnovation even though the upswing they participated in was enabled by social factors as much as technical ones.4 during the cold war, the us and its western allies promoted private and commercial media and information technologies of modernization at all costs, often in support of brutally authoritarian regimes across much of the third world.5 today, academic as well as popular accounts of electronics, telecommunications, and computing continue to reinforce the narrative of technological determinism and us exceptionalism. as we enter what many see as an era of us imperial decline, and the future of both democracy and unequal globalization seem uncertain if not in clear states of crises, what does it mean to decolonize this field of study? if computing technology is the embodiment of rational calculation and a driver of twenty-first century capitalism, can it indeed be “decolonized”— overhauled or appropriated for other ends? what alternatives exist to the dominant narratives of neutrality and progress, and how might we move beyond the developmentalist and entrepreneurial romance with technology as solution? the scholars in this virtual roundtable take on these questions through the perspective of decolonial theory and tactics from south america and india, and through critical approaches to english-language ict dominance. they expand on feminist, postcolonial and critical race studies that have challenged colonial knowledge economies, broadened our understanding of political technologies, and re-centered extant histories and practices from the vantage point of the global south. in response to the political moment in which we write, it seems wise to return to the praxis of the oppressed in order to, at the minimum, “decolonize our habits of explanation.”6 3 chakravartty, p. and mills, m. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) notes 1 this virtual roundtable on “decolonial computing” emerges from a workshop convened on november 4, 2016, in the department of media, culture, and communication at new york university, featuring scholars simone browne, anita say chan, lilly irani, lawrence liang, and jack qiu. 2 while “postcolonial computing” has received a great deal of attention over the last decade, spurred by the work of roundtable authors lilly irani and kavita philip, fewer scholars have raised the question of what decolonial theory might add to such analyses. see kristina lyons, juno salazar parrenas, and noah tamarkin, “roundtable: engaging decoloniality and decolonization in sts,” catalyst 3, 1 (2017) and ali, syed mustafa, “a brief introduction to decolonial computing,” xrds: crossroads, the acm magazine for students, 22, 4 (2016): 16–21. 3 chandler was more laudatory than critical of managerial “efficiency” in the history of us capitalism. alfred d. chandler, jr., the visible hand: the managerial revolution in american business (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1977), 6. 4 frederik nebeker, dawn of the electronic age: electrical technologies in the shaping of the modern world, 1914 to 1945 (hoboken, nj: john wiley & sons, 2009), 221-228. 5 amin alhassan and paula chakravartty, “postcolonial media policy and the long shadow of empire,” robin mansell and marc raboy (eds.) the handbook of global media and communication policy (chichester, gb: wiley-blackwell, 2011), 366-382. 6 sharad chari, “from exploitation to expropriation: geographies of racialization in historic capitalism,” economic geography, 94 (1) 2018: 18-22. 4 chakravartty, p. and mills, m. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) roundtable authors paula chakravartty, “decolonizing infrastructures of empire” mara mills, “the hard disciplines” hannah alpert-abrams, “colonial copying in an imperial age” anita say chan, “decolonial computing and networking beyond digital universalism” lilly irani and kavita phillip, “negotiating engines of difference” pulsifier review     review of teaching with feminist materialisms by petra hinton and pat treusch (utrecht: atgender, 2015)   rebecah pulsifer university of illinois at urbana-champaign pulsife2@illinois.edu the emergent area of scholarship invoked by the phrase “new materialisms,” most often identified with scholars such as karen barad, insists on the entanglement of matter and meaning. when paired with feminist theory’s concern for the relationship of embodied difference to forms of power, feminist engagements with the concept of new materialism invite reassessments of the relationships between theory and practice, epistemology and ontology, knowing and being. these reassessments have significant implications for the role of matter in pedagogy, as the nine essays in the edited collection teaching with feminist materialisms demonstrate. this collection, a part of the teaching with gender series published in utrecht by the european association for gender research, education, and documentation offers instructors of undergraduate and graduate students both an overview of feminist materialism’s core questions and tools for incorporating feminist materialism into their classrooms. these tools include specific course topics, assignments, and handouts. collectively, the essays in teaching with feminist materialisms explore how feminist materialism might be leveraged in the classroom, focusing on why and how instructors might use feminist materialism’s understanding of knowledge as indistinguishable from the environments, objects, and practices in which it emerges. the collection’s introduction by editors peta hinton and pat treusch offers a genealogy of feminist materialism, which will be especially generative for readers familiar with current debates in new materialism. hinton and treusch point out the links between, on the one hand, feminist theory’s “scrutiny of the nature/culture binary,” which “has left little room for any simple separation of an empirical world from an inquiring subject,” and, on the other hand, new materialism’s awareness of how “objects and subjects of inquiry are entangled, emergent, and contingent” (3). for hinton and treusch, feminist materialism is the sign under which these two critical traditions overlap. as a pedagogical practice, it reveals that text-based learning is “not animated by (human) studentor (human) teacher-led reading practices alone,” but rather that “the process of formulating ‘what matters’ in the text is a co-productive engagement of bodies, spaces, and wor[l]ds” (4). this critical account of feminist materialism raises questions about whether—and, if so, how— feminist materialism might be distinguished from new materialism more broadly, or from related areas of inquiry, such as feminist science studies. after all, hinton and treusch suggest that new materialism is always already feminist in that it emerges from feminist theory’s investigations into the ways in which embodied subjects and material worlds are mutually constitutive. their introduction, therefore, does not delineate feminist materialism from other forms of materialism so much as shed light on new materialism’s feminist backbone. although at times it claims to elucidate feminist materialism as “an emerging topic of feminist studies” (19), the introduction summons work by donna haraway, rosi braidotti, and others in revealing materialism to be fundamental to feminist studies. the chapters in teaching with feminist materialisms attend to feminist materialism’s insistence on the inseparability of practice and theory. the chapters can be broadly divided into those that focus on specific classroom practices and those that focus on larger theoretical questions of teaching with materiality in mind. several essays provide sample writing prompts, classroom handouts, and assignments, such as sofie sauzet’s “snaplog” assignment prompts, dagmar lorenz-meyer’s discussion questions for scaffolding “memory work,” and astrida neimanis’s handouts and workshop notes for teaching “weather writing.” the chapter by iris van der tuin and rick dolphijn, editors of the formative collection new materialism: interviews and cartographies (2012), will be of particular interest to new materialist scholars interested in questions of pedagogy. the chapter describes utrecht university’s thresholds project, a seminar format in which students spend ten weeks mapping alternatives to the binary oppositions of humanism in the context of student-selected course themes, including “naturecultures,” “immanent time, immanent space,” “science, humanities, and the ethics to come,” and “semblance and event” (23). van der tuin and dolphijn describe the thresholds project as a platform from which experiments with new materialism, including those focused on the intra-action of matter and discourse, can be conducted (32). like van der tuin and dolphijn, sigrid schmitz surveys specific course formats that work at the intersection of science studies, new materialism, and feminist theory; her chapter reflects on the importance of promoting “transcultural” dialogues that account for differences among student identities, learning styles, and disciplinary backgrounds. the essays focused on in-class practice are saturated with the heady theoretical apparatuses of new materialism and feminist theory. nevertheless, many of the in-class activities and assignments they describe will be recognizable to anyone familiar with student-centered pedagogy: close reading (van der tuin and dolphijn), visual and rhetorical analysis (sauzet), reflection papers (lorenz-meyer and neimanis), and group work (schmitz). in these accounts, feminist materialism recalibrates classroom content, but it is less clear how it transforms the means by which this content is received and practiced by students. more intriguing are the chapters that take a broad view on how feminist materialism might transform the contemporary academy. for beatriz revelles benavente, feminist materialism means “de-centering the figure of the teacher” and also teaching itself; she argues that the institutional realities of the contemporary academy still allow for the creation of “agential spaces,” in barad’s sense, which in turn can enable potential acts of resistance and change (61). hanna meißner, too, sees hope in the contemporary academy. she resists the nostalgia inherent in presentist pessimism by pointing out that “academia never was a paradise of critical pedagogy but, rather, an institution shaped by and mired in exclusionary practices and epistemic traditions founded on limiting dichotomies” (130). meißner optimistically reads what many call the current “crisis” in higher education as an opportunity for “new practices of knowing” (138). kathrin thiele, through her sensitive reading of hannah arendt, concurs that the academy might become a place “to practice thinking as action” (108). maya nitis, drawing primarily from jacques rancière and paulo freire, argues compellingly against “the pernicious norm of mastery” as the goal of higher education (115). “entering a class with a text, film, etc. without objectifying or instrumentalizing the material on hand,” nitis writes, “rewrites the presumed relationship of humans as subject-doers and material as passive object/s” (119). for nitis, the classroom should become a space in which teachers, students, and objects are reconfigured as “collaborators” in necessarily partial and contingent experiences of inquiry (120). these chapters demonstrate how feminist materialism can go beyond radical pedagogy’s challenge to the teacher/student binary and posthumanism’s displacement of the human by exploring the ways in which the academy exposes the politics of materiality. thinking hopefully, benavente, meissner, thiele, and nitis together suggest that thinking with, through, and about matter can be a way of acting against hierarchies of power. although the collection is pedagogically strong, teaching with feminist materialisms may leave readers wondering about another aspect of materiality; that is, the material constraints forced upon teachers and students by the contemporary neoliberal academy. to what extent can higher education instructors model their in-class activities, assignments, or course designs on the feminist materialist practices described in these essays, while still attending to requirements of their departments and disciplines? in other words, how can the pedagogical practices proposed by these authors be enacted by academics constrained by, for example, financial cuts to higher education, requirements for tenure, and administrative demands requiring the legibility of academic work? surely the possibility of doing so would be greater for tenured faculty in certain departmental, disciplinary, and national contexts. the volume’s relative silence on the topic of instructors’ and students’ material realities, and how these realities may affect their degrees of educational access, learning capacity, and pedagogical freedom, is emblematic of the ongoing challenge of attending to the interrelation of theory and practice, a point of contention among many critics and thinkers of feminist materialism. as a whole, teaching with feminist materialisms provides a welcome contribution to current conversations about how the mutuality of theory and practice that feminist materialism avows can come into being in the contemporary academy. to those already familiar with the core principles of new materialism and feminist theory, the collection’s introduction will be a welcome reminder of their mutual entanglement. admittedly, the collection does not radically alter ongoing discussions within new materialism, feminist studies, or pedagogy. the volume’s essays encourage thoughtfulness about teaching, even if they leave ambiguous how feminist materialism in particular can inform classroom practices. they do, however, show that holding these areas of inquiry in mind at the same time does open and extend up important questions about how, as teachers and students, we differently encounter and experience matter—how, indeed, we are matter. references barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke university press. dolphijn, r., & van der tuin, i. (2012). new materialism: interviews & cartographies. open humanities press. hinton, p., & treusch, p., eds. (2016). teaching with feminist materialisms. atgender press. bio rebecah pulsifer is a phd candidate in the english department at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign. microsoft word 71613_1_11_bley.docx bley, k. (2018). review of: the economization of life by michelle murphy (duke university press, 2017). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4 (2), 1-6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kallista bley, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license review the economization of life by michelle murphy (duke university press, 2017) kallista bley university of wisconsin–madison kbley@wisc.edu in the economization of life, michelle murphy places reproduction and the (de)valuation of lives (and lives not yet lived) at the center of how we understand social science quantification, experimentation, and intervention, along with their corresponding necropolitical governance in the twentieth century. using archival methods, murphy shows how relations between economy and population have been historically and materially assembled and, in doing so, demonstrates the situatedness and contingencies of these assemblages, opening possibilities for other futures. the book, described by murphy as a “provocation” (p. 7), offers a compelling example of how to assess and analyze the material effects and affects of our capitalist environment (referred to as a “surround” (p. 1)), without precluding agency or the potential for “life otherwise” (p. 81). the economization of life is a thought-provoking contribution to feminist science and technology studies (sts) scholarship that builds — as noted by murphy — upon the recent efforts of those studying the 2 bley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) confluences of life and capital accumulation, particularly through the lens of reproduction (p. 13). furthering this work, murphy theorizes the economization of life as distinct from a commodification of life by considering how population is governed towards improving economic growth, while also maintaining conditions of precarity. murphy emphasizes the “macro” aspect of the economization of life that manages “aggregate life” for nation-state economies and global capitalism (p. 13; p. 125). rather than surplus value created through capitalist production, value is created in this system by managing overpopulation and controlling population “surplus” (p. 6). with examples from transnational non-governmental organizations (ngos) operating in bangladesh, murphy demonstrates how lives are counted and differentially valued as a form of racialized violence resulting from research interventions. in this context, murphy explores the social relations that are constitutive of quantification and often remain unexamined. even after eugenics was commonly disregarded, murphy shows how racialized devaluation of life persisted through the quantification of differential life worth, a valuation assessed in relation to economic productivity. alongside an introduction and a coda, murphy organizes the chapters into three sections (arcs i to iii) that trace the assemblage formations related to the economization of life from the early and midtwentieth century (arc i), the 1960s to the 1980s (arc ii), and through the 1990s (arc iii) (p. 9). murphy opens the book with iconic bottle images from drosophila experiments that contain populations of encased fruit flies. using raymond pearl’s research that population curves — whether of fruit flies or humans — can be managed, murphy poses the question of how “economy” became the “container for reproduction” (p. 14) and how we can think outside this surround (p. 1). examples from this text — informed by twentieth-century scientific research — span the drosophila experiments of pearl (introduction), calculations of gross domestic products (gdps) (arc i), transnational family planning efforts (arc ii), and gendered human capital investment campaigns (arc iii). across the arcs, practices of quantifying, monitoring, and differentially valuing life 3 bley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) “accumulate” as murphy documents their formation and layering over time (p. 103). murphy closes the book with a coda retheorizing reproduction as a “distributed process” with “uneven ... potentials” (p. 142). the book is short and yet dense with layers of meaning that can be revisited. murphy introduces many terms throughout the book such as “epistemic infrastructures,” “phantasmagram,” “thick data,” and “experimentality,” and in some cases the notes add extra description that is particularly helpful in navigating this lexicon. for example, murphy distinguishes the definition of “economization” from variations used by other authors and details the connection to a “regime of value.” according to murphy’s notes, this narrative evokes both the economic and cultural meanings of terms such as “value” (p. 149). these multiple meanings can be read across the text in language such as worth, accumulation, investment, production, consumption, futures, and reproduction. in arc i “phantasmagrams of population and economy,” murphy demonstrates how we come to understand “economy” through its quantification and affects, while highlighting the racist logics that underlie prominent economic and demographic arguments that link economic growth with reduced fertility and “averted births” (or lives not to be lived) (p. 47). following pearl’s experiments, the keynesian quantification, measurement, and modeling of the macroeconomy in the 1930s made economic interactions legible and amenable to governmental management and manipulation for the maximization of prosperity. murphy brings attention to the racialized lives not valued or not lived and the often unseen processes of data compilation that “haunt” calculations of gdp and demographic transitions (p. 26). in the case of gdp, these calculations reveal the ambiguities of a number that is usually taken for granted to be a mirror of economic activity. murphy draws attention to how estimations are calculated, including for example, the summation of results from sample surveys of individual hairdressers to generate population aggregates for the 4 bley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) “production of all hairdressers” (p. 23). particularly poignant is murphy’s analysis of how the economic is constituted by “delineating the extraeconomic,” where, in the case of the state war machine, “all the bullets, warheads, tanks, tear gas, and drones of war” are calculated as additions to the gdp, whereas the “loss of life and world” that occurs — whether through disaster, war, or policing — “produces no subtraction” (p. 27). in the second arc, “reproducing infrastructures,” murphy explores how the value of life is calculated, with differential valuations of those deserving (or not) to live, reproduce, and be human. murphy refers to “epistemic infrastructures” to indicate the materiality of social science research efforts (p. 6), and describes in this arc how these infrastructures have proliferated in bangladesh, while those related to basic utilities such as electricity and water languished. murphy considers how efforts to control reproduction have sought to manage “surplus life,” while in effect devaluing existing precarious lives and leaving the structures that create precarity intact (pp. 93-94). murphy explores how transnational ngo family planning trials in postcolonial settings created a form of governance or “experimentality” (using vinh-kim nguyen’s term) that encouraged repeated intervention and merged the provision and consumption of family planning services with participation in research studies (p. 79). in these contexts, accessing vital services, such as reproductive health care and immunizations, became contingent on research participation. alongside her critiques, murphy also presents examples of feminist experimentation and life-affirming research possibilities that serve as counterpoints and demonstrate potentials, as evidenced in the projects of farida akhter. the third arc, “investable life,” details how the valuation of life is monetized through gendered human capital investment campaigns. murphy shows how educational investment in girls is leveraged to “increase the value of life” through a process of “anticipatory calculations” where investment is envisioned to lead to future workers while reducing fertility rates and increasing gdps (pp. 113-114). rather 5 bley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) than limitations being placed on capitalist accumulation for the benefit of populations, evidence across the three arcs shows how populations have been controlled to improve economic growth. as murphy indicates, the analysis of this book could be furthered through ethnography and incorporation of voices capturing a breadth of lived experiences and ways of knowing and understanding (p. 7). how do we move away from population as a racialized calculation of differential life worth toward other forms of valuing and inhabiting collective life? murphy suggests a "distributed reproduction" that shifts the focus of reproduction from individual bodies and child birth (reflective of a modern definition of reproduction) and reorients toward reproduction as a "becoming-in-time of life with the many” (noted as more common to the 1700s and 1800s) (pp. 141-142). in this retheorization, murphy draws attention to understanding the “distribution of life chances, pasts, and futures,” the reproduction of infrastructures, and the “politics of redistribution” (p. 141). murphy’s book not only provides a powerful critique of the racialized violences of quantification but also creates new openings for a dreaming and imagining that extends beyond our capitalist surround. murphy considers the political potential of dreaming while awake as introduced by the feminist author of science fiction from the early 1900s, begum roquiah shekhawat hossein, and in doing so asks: “how does one awaken to the phantasma of economy and population?” (pp. 55-56). envisioning other formations of economy and population, murphy closes the book questioning: “what becomes possible if one breaks the bottle of economy and refuses the curve of population?” (p. 145). the argument in this book demonstrates that by showing the historical and material formation of economy and population, we can see these as assembled, as historically and temporarily formed, and as possibilities, among many, rather than inevitabilities. this creates potential for other formations, not only of other futures but also more liveable presents, of collective lives rather than aggregations, of life unbounded by economy. murphy tempers this with a vision for a politics that is “more than pessimistic and 6 bley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) less than optimistic” and that does not “reproduce” the unevenness it critiques (p. 145). bio kallista bley is a graduate student in the department of geography at the university of wisconsin–madison. microsoft word 33381_ingrid diran.docx dr nj edited.docx diran, i. (2020). review of the natural history of sexuality in early america, by greta lafleur (johns hopkins university press, 2018). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © ingrid diran, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | the natural history of sexuality in early america, by greta lafleur (johns hopkins university press, 2018) ingrid diran university of michigan idiran@umich.edu fundamentally reimagining each of the terms of its title, greta lafleur’s the natural history of sexuality in early america offers an alternative archive and conceptual infrastructure that will prove groundbreaking for historians of sexuality, race, and settler colonialism alike. arguing that proto-racial conceptions of “human difference” were predicated upon a natural-historical or “environmental” lexicon of sexuality, this book occasions a fresh conversation among the three fields that promises to revitalize and reimagine each. it also offers a provocation to rethink the history of sexuality in light of what lafleur calls the “environmental body” of the early modern period. this body is one whose governance both precedes and informs the biopolitical body of modernity but, unlike the latter, is understood neither as self-contained nor as self-expressive. rather, the environmental body is organized by and in a field of susceptibility, operating at a remove from the interiority of a private individual. as such, the environmental body is governable by means other than subjectivity. without celebrating this body (which, after all, remains imbricated in the history of racial and settler colonial violence), lafleur offers its “alternative genealogy, one that began in a world without the modern subject and quietly entered into modernity alongside it” (p. 205). this genealogy not only includes the history of sexuality without and before sexology; it also disrupts sexuality’s conflation with book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) ingrid diran, 2020 2 interiority. indeed, this book’s “powerful refusal of the total reorganization of the sexual into the subjective” (p. 31) bears implications that we are likely to ponder and unfurl for years to come. for what, indeed, is the history of sexuality without a subject? lafleur’s answer: a history of racialization. her introduction sets the stage for what will be the book’s animating concern: namely, how environmental ideas of racial and sexual diversity fundamentally shaped, reflected, and constituted one another in early modern north america. sex and race are codetermined through the logic of natural history, a taxonomic epistemology of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. emblematized by carl linnaeus’s systema naturae, natural history modeled knowledge on the speciation of plants, classing all organisms, including humans, according to their modes of reproduction. in this way, natural history turns sexual behavior into a fundamental principle of differentiation among forms of life and, in the case of humans, turns sexuality into “something of a racial symptom” (p. 6). the importance of this logic cannot be overstated, since, as lafleur asserts, the “early modern rhetorical strategy of describing ethnic or cultural variety” operates “through the idiom of sexual aberrance” (p. 4). exploring the “sexual politics of racialization” (p. 25), lafleur’s first chapter shows how stories about the etiology of race came to double as theories of sexual variety. in addition to broadly reviewing the climatic, humoral, and stadial theories of human development in whose terms such narratives were promulgated, she also reads prominent natural historians (from comte de buffon to adam ferguson), concluding with an account of thomas jefferson’s notes on the state of virginia in which we see a “promiscuous[]” sampling of naturalhistorical arguments to justify subjugation of native americans and african slaves (p. 56). here, too, lafleur shows how an environmental idea of race allows sex to be thought as contextual, and hence, without provenance in any subject. in the eighteenth century, “sex—acts, desires, dispositions—was not entirely or even mostly theorized in privileged relation to the individual,” but, on the contrary, “theorizing sexual behaviors as driven...by environmental factors…demands a new set of definitions for sex and sexuality tout court” (p. 60). this set of definitions is racial—though race, too, is understood not as phenotypical but ambient, less corporeal than climatic. as a function of environment, race is thought to reflect itself in sexual practices. for example, in the barbary captivity narratives that lafleur discusses in her second chapter, the “sodomitical” (an environmental term irreducible to any one sex act) serves as a preeminent sign of both racial and religious difference. in book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) ingrid diran, 2020 3 these narratives, which detail the enslavement of christian sailors by barbary pirates and appear from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, “both natural historians and religious leaders turned to the figure of sodomy to stage their concerns about ever-increasing contact with the islamic world” (p. 68). here, “orientalist theories about islamic depravity, sensuality, and decadence were often themselves steeped in heliotropic or otherwise climate-based theories of human difference” (p. 69). to be sure, much comparative work should be done along the lines lafleur lays out—for instance, by reading barbary captivity narratives alongside two contemporary iterations of the genre: native american captivity stories (for instance, cotton mather’s the captivity of hannah duston) and slave narratives. such a comparison would link in crucial ways to mather’s role in lafleur’s reading of gallows literature in the subsequent chapter. this literature, she argues, imagines a different form of bondage: habit. an “articulating figure, binding contemporary understandings of racial difference and sexual aberrance together in emergent theories of the origin of vice” (p. 105), habit marks a node or “nexus of environmental influence and individual inclination” (p. 106), and evokes fundamental eighteenth-century questions about self-governance, and “who—or what—exerts sovereignty over individual bodies” (p. 106). as a case in point, lafleur reads an execution sermon that mather delivers concerning joseph hanno, a manumitted african slave who murdered his wife in 1721. deeming hanno an “ethiopian in wickedness,” mather’s sermon tightly yokes race and sin through the idiom of habit. lafleur argues that emerging discourses of criminal justice draw upon such narratives for a racialized lexicon of aberrant behavior. bad habits—which gallows literature consistently links to sexual deviance, whether they involve sex acts or not—morally and racially blacken the accused, indexing an incapacity for self-governance (and hence, a justification for detention). further linking the discourses of race and sex to emerging conceptions of biogovernance, lafleur’s fourth chapter, “botanical sexuality and the colonial landscape,” illuminates the sympathies between “the ‘sexual science’ of botany” and settler colonialism (p. 140). in a reading of herman mann’s the female review (a fictionalized biography of deborah sampson, a woman who lived as a man for over a year, joined the continental army, and murdered two native americans during the revolutionary war), lafleur argues that speculations about sampson’s sexuality constitute a strategy for naturalizing the “new and emergent forms of state governance and control” (p. 162) she represents. in a striking analysis, lafleur shows how mann’s speculations into sampson’s sexuality as different in some profound but as yet undefinable way enables him to describe her on the book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) ingrid diran, 2020 4 order of a new, unknown species of plant. precisely through the partial opacity of sampson’s sexuality, mann is able to present her whiteness (and the settler colonial violence it exemplifies) as a specimen indigenous to the land of the british settler colonies but distinct from its other native populations. if racial indigeneity can be achieved by sexuality, so too can space—as a habitat— be understood in racial terms. thus, the spatializing of race is the subject of lafleur’s last chapter, which demonstrates how, in a shift linked to the “development of sexology as an arm of the human sciences specifically devoted to the study of sex as a discrete item of inquiry” (p. 165), racialized environments are imagined to foster and even cause sexual aberrance. lafleur returns here to the issue of vice, asking how it is reconfigured in early nineteenth-century population science. if, at an earlier moment (for instance, in gallows literature), vice had been defined as a racialized trait expressed through sexual habit, it is now understood, scientifically, “as a social affliction that could compromise the economic and even literal health of an urban population” (p. 165). consulting early nineteenth-century studies and reform efforts aimed at sex workers in boston’s “negro hill,” lafleur shows how sexual vice was construed as a population-level effect of the hill’s blackness. as lafleur notes in her epilogue, these five chapters together contest the strict triangulation of sexuality, subjectivity, and the body that has become synonymous with biopolitics since the publication of michel foucault’s influential histories of sexuality. alongside foucault’s conception of productive disciplinary power, lafleur situates the history of environmental sexuality, suggesting that “as modern notions of the hermetic, biopoliticized body, fighting off its environment rather than coexisting ecologically with it, rose to dominance, eighteenth-century genealogies of the environmental body became harder to see” (p. 190, my emphasis). having taught us how to see these genealogies, the natural history of sexuality implies two related and profound reappraisals of the history of sexuality as we know it. first, it reveals alternative genealogies of sexuality’s governing concepts and frameworks, especially that of population science (which lafleur shows is deeply rooted in natural-historical notions of race). second, it helps to imagine sexuality otherwise, to “ask different questions about what it is, where it is, what it might mean, and how to better imagine its politics” (p. 191). without romanticizing environmental sexuality, lafleur concludes by citing its key discursive sites—natural history and population theory—as “two vocabularies for cataloging the long-eighteenth-century ways of understanding sex without or at a distance from the subject” (p. 198). at a time when queer politics has “been so effectively co-opted…against affinity, against book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) ingrid diran, 2020 5 collectivity, and against justice” (p. 206), this alternative genealogy contains the potential, perhaps, of an environmental, embodied counter-politics. such a potential is certainly elusive, given that, as lafleur cautions, “most histories of sexuality are ugly—violent, unbidden, unusable” (p. 206). just as quickly, though, she adds, “let us start there” (p. 206). this book teaches us how to see where “there” is—where it has been, where it could lead, and the grave political cost of overlooking where we already are. author bio ingrid diran is an assistant professor of comparative literature and environmental studies at the university of michigan, ann arbor. her work engages intersections of environmental, biopolitical, marxist, and critical race theories. terry article     introduction to attachments to war: violence and the production of biomedical knowledge in twenty-first century america    jennifer terry university of california, irvine jterry@uci.edu this article is an excerpt from the introduction to jennifer terry’s book, attachments to war: violence and the production of biomedical knowledge in twenty-first century america, forthcoming 2017. © duke university press, used with permission. war is now the new everyday. it is striking that the term “postwar” refers to the period after 1945 but is seldom used to describe the periods following the u.s. withdrawal from vietnam in the early 1970s or following the nation’s participation in the balkans conflicts of the 1990s. we now dwell in an ongoing condition of war at home and abroad, against a nebulous enemy called “terror” whose agents are “terrorists.” war need no longer be announced through an official declaration for the general population to know that we are in a continual state of attachment to war, phrased in a political grammar of xenophobic “security” against a racialized figure of “terror” and through which emotional attachment to the state of war permeates myriad affective ways of being. so being “at war” is a constant feeling and a continual state of being that is forged through many quotidian activities and made manifest in material and biomedical technologies of attachment. the united states and war are themselves inextricably attached to each other in the twenty-first century, as are war and biomedicine. there is no way to be unattached, no such thing as postwar society. attachments to war are phenomenological, ontological, and institutional matters.  they manifest in various senses of being and of experiencing life in our thoroughly militarized society. my particular focus is on biomedical practices and technoscientific innovations that are concerned with wounded or sick bodies and that produce complex connections to war. these linkages are contingent, sometimes expressed in registers of salvation through promissory gestures that speculate about the future and, in strange ways, honor war as a necessary condition for human advancement. but the promises of advancement are selective, sorted by unequal relations in an economy of life. some lives, as we will see, are valued more than others. some stand to benefit more from the biomedical war profiteering that is unleashed by the variously mobilized sentiments of fear, dread, sadness, and hope. some are left to die. attachments are relational. they can be strong, fragile, unstable, enduring, motivating, demoralizing, profitable, or devastating.  the attachments that animate this book are, centrally, that of ordinary people to war, which is itself forged through attachments to biomedicine, understood as both a tangible industry and a promising fantasy. these are tied to political ideologies and affective phenomena that, all together, comprise a biomedicine-war nexus. this nexus emerges from a complex set of cultural values and historical developments wherein pervasive and permanent preparedness for war occasions the conditions under which war and biomedicine are bound together in material, affective, ideological, and ethereal ways. war serves biomedicine by producing a steady stream of wounded veterans who become research subjects. national security is imagined as a disease-control surveillance apparatus for detecting deleterious agents, whether they are persons, pathogens, computer viruses, danger attitudes, or toxic assets. in turn, biomedicine serves as a discursive structure and an epistemological tool used by military strategists to draw up battle plans and invade and occupy enemy territory. the biomedicine-war nexus produces new subdisciplines and novel war-generated diagnoses and rehabilitative innovations, drawing figures of the american hero/martyr (troops) into a field of intimacy with teams of biomedical specialists represented as miracle workers in media stories about them. audiences are positioned to mourn the extreme damages done by war and to honor the bodies of wounded martyrs through beholding the experimental genius of rehabilitation and regeneration from the new medically codified diagnosis of polytrauma. military physicians classify polytrauma as a “signature injury.” as such, in my analysis, the devastating phenomenon indexes a particular kind of woundscape and requires special reading practices to interpret the significance that is attributed to the injury both in biomedical and political terms (appadurai, 1990). the woundscapes of significantly injured patients – american troops -prompt an indebtedness whereby the nation owes twice for the sacrifices made: once for the wound acquired as the warrior served the nation and again for the new knowledge that can be derived from medical treatment of the warrior’s suffering. this is one of several key ways that technoscientific and biomedical promises provide a means through which attachments to war persist. the biomedicine-war nexus manufactures knowledge which materializes in biomedical devices that are literally attachments, as in the case of bionic prosthetics, devices to which we attach major emotional, political, and health significance.  paradoxically, the bodies of severely wounded veterans of recent wars—those who would not, under previous conditions, have survived—are figured centrally in narratives of the future enhancement and the expanded potential of human bodies. their injuries afford the inventors of bionic prosthetics opportunities to demonstrate the promise of technoscientific innovations. their carefully crafted performances are presented to audiences who, often unwittingly, became further attached to war through what bioengineering promises not only for injured veterans but for everyone. by witnessing what can be done to restore amputees’ otherwise lost abilities, audiences are invited to look forward to a future when bioengineering may enable humanity to go beyond a host of bodily limitations.  another entanglement between biomedicine and war is evident in the deliberate development of pathogens to be exploited as weapons. in this case, the bodies of soldiers are not ultimately exceptional. instead, in the face of imminent and emergent pathogens developed for biological warfare and defense, all bodies are conceived as potentially threatened or threatening, and some more threatening than others. ordinary people become attached to war through a terrified sense of being quietly and covertly attacked at the micro level by new and more virulent mutating germs, viruses, and toxins, whether by intentional acts or accidental exposure. bodies are in this sense potentially both targets and weapons -victims and vectors -in the apocalyptic framing of ominous doom. war is waged on, through, and with microscopic pathogens. panic is a marketing tool. attachments may manifest as benefits. how does war become a benefit and even a necessity to our very lives and bodies? i attempt to reveal how war becomes a boon to the biomedical industry and its shareholders through a political grammar that emphasizes “quality of life,” and the “free” pursuit of “health,” “longevity,” “vitality,” “freedom,” and other cherished axioms of democracy, all of which are invoked in branding slogans that animate twenty-first-century biomedical war profiteering. of course, war’s biomedical and affective benefits are selectively distributed, available to those who can afford them and not to those who are destroyed in war. attachments to war come in the form of a disparate array of promises.  promises at one scale exist in an uneasy relationship to those at another: military recruitment officers are agents of promise when they describe the benefits offered by the g.i. bill to high school students in low-income and people of color communities. these benefits are based on the condition that recruited people are willing to risk their lives. promises offered to potential investors about the value of shares in biomedical companies are conditioned at least in part on the risks of injury faced by military enlistees. chances and calculated risks are taken all the time, but for some this is a gamble that could well lead to death or severe disability. it is important to remember that losing share value is not equivalent to losing one’s life or health. anticipating risks and benefits is all part of the deal. in war, some gain fame and fortune, others an existence of unrelenting pain. attachments are often evidenced in the positive affects of hope, opportunity, and belonging.  war galvanizes a sense of patriotic cohesion in some people. it offers economic advantages for weapons manufacturers and their investors as well as for workers employed in war-supported industries. young enlistees seeking to learn a skill or to get an education in exchange for military service become attached to war as a condition of these promised benefits. war also gives scientists the impetus and the massive funds to advance knowledge. to cite an historical example, consider the physicists, engineers, and mathematicians who participated in the manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb in the latter years of world war two and into the cold war. computational scientists funded to conduct cold war command-control projects produced the knowledge that gave rise to the internet. during the years surrounding world war two, researchers interested in infectious diseases were recruited to the fight against malaria with unprecedented funding. in these large-scale projects, scientists were attached to war through their labor and the public was urged to invest great hope in technoscience as a preeminent source of national strength.  medical science was tied to war at least a century earlier.  modern combat, dating from the napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century and the u.s. civil war of 1861-1965, is often credited as the necessary condition under which physicians and scientists made great medical advancements, whether these advancements are understood to have been in blood-banking procedures, surgical techniques, pain management, triage measures, or prosthetic rehabilitation. as problematic as this narrative is, it helps to account for the practical ways that ordinary people become attached to war as consumers of the products and beneficiaries of research funded by militaries and aimed at fighting wars. (enloe, 2000; kaplan, 2006; kaplan, loyer, daniels, 2013). it has been through the research, development, manufacture, and marketing of pharmaceuticals, implements, and treatments devised in the aftermath of combat to treat its damages that we ‘benefit’ from war as consumers of these products when they reach the medical market. attachments to war may involve pleasure and hope but they may also manifest in cathexes to pain, trauma, and dynamics of domination.  i am guided in this line of thinking by the work of critical theorists who probe the kinds of affective attachments that tie the personal to the political, taking into consideration especially how the experience of loss generates these ties (berlant, 2011, 2013; hartman, 2008; love, 2007; muñoz, 2009; sedgwick, 2002; stewart, 2007). “a relation of cruel optimism,” writes lauren berlant, “is a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing” (2013). attachments to war explores the apparent contradictions that arise when war is fought in the name of humanity and the resulting bodily devastation is re-membered through technoscience and biomedicine to recuperate war as a tragic but promising condition. i draw from berlant the important insight that much can be gained by understanding “how we learn to be in relation” to war  -i.e. how we are attached to it through what it damages as well as what it promises. attachments that make up the assemblage entangling biomedicine with war are emotional-political-ideological and human-technological. such attachments may hold out hope to the amputee while bringing profit to the prosthetic engineer. they may invest suffering with magical transformational power. they may reverberate with the dread of imminent and emergent dangers. they may reveal that attachments are fragile, as when the nearly destroyed war veteran’s patriotic spirit gives way to despair and suicide when the promised rehabilitation fails or never even commences. they may sunder some relationships in the process of building others; money and investment opportunities come before truly sustained care for the suffering while loved ones of the damaged lose faith. importantly and often, attachments of these sorts are experienced with a deep ambivalence whose symptoms fluctuate between patriotic bellicosity, honorific exaltation, emotional paralysis, and shady disavowal. some people and institutions benefit from their attachments to war and others do not. to be attached to war does not necessarily mean to be in support of war. my point is that these connections are not simply what a subject or group or society wants or expressly desires; they are, as a matter of some consequence, often what a subject, group, or society disavows, disregards, or denies because of unseemly implications. these connections may also manifest in latent symptoms of distress and cognitive dissonance. and they work to isolate certain persons, bodies, and communities who are cast as blameful targets of enmity or as subjects who are unwilling to comply with something called progress. this book looks at how attachments are generated by a complex matrix of the wounding and sickening capacities of war and at how these capacities haunt the social and psychic lives of sufferers and their sympathizers. it also considers how attachments to war authorize forms of professional prestige and generate speculative portfolios that bring profit to investors enabled by the suffering war causes.  in the book’s chapters i observe that acts of wounding provoke the expansion of medical knowledge to produce new techniques and technologies aimed at contending with and often exploiting the damage done by state-generated violence in the context of twenty-first-century warfare (asad, 2007). devastating physical trauma caused by improvised explosive devices can be “survived” now, thanks to advanced blood clotting products and rapid emergency evacuation procedures. mangled and destroyed limbs resulting from high-powered detonations offer the occasion for building bionic devices that rely on artificial intelligence to ambulate the survivor. deadly and rapidly mutating pathogens developed as weapons provide the impetus for massive research funding to develop “medical countermeasures,” which are also part of a growing and terrifying arsenal, engineered through recombinant genomic science. a destroy-and-build logic not only drives the efforts to remove an uncooperative regime and decimate targeted territories to ready the way for new business opportunities as occurred in the u.s. -led invasion of iraq in 2003, but also is evident in how a whole ensemble of new weapons systems maim bodies that are then subject to regeneration and enhancement. i focus on research and development done by physicians and scientists working in the medical biotechnology industry. this is where much of the “cutting-edge” research is being done in response to the severe injuries suffered by u.s. troops returning home from war. the industry is highly speculative and financially risky because it takes many years to bring a treatment to the market and many of the treatments fail in clinical trials. government contracts awarded to biotechnological and pharmaceutical products helped to infuse this troubled sector of the economy with bountiful funding. this is why biomedical war profiteering is a leitmotif that appears throughout the book. references appadurai, a. (1990). disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. theory, culture, & society 7, 295-310. asad, t. (2007). on suicide bombing. new york: columbia university press. berlant, l. (2011). cruel optimism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. berlant, l. (march 22, 2013). interview conducted by david setiz, society and space: an interdisciplinary journal. available at: http://societyandspace.com/2013/03/22/interview-with-lauren-berlant/, accessed january 1, 2014. enloe, c. 2000. “how do they militarize a can of soup?” from maneuvers: the international politics of militarizing women’s lives (university of california), pp. 1-14. hartman, s. (2008). lose your mother: a journey along the atlantic slave trade. new york: farrar, straus and giroux. kaplan, c. (september 2006). “precision targets: gps and the militarization of u.s. consumer identity.” american quarterly 58 (3): 693-714. kaplan, c. loyer, e. and claytan daniels, e. (2013). “precision targets: gps and the militarization of everyday life,” canadian journal of communication 38 (3): 397-420. love, h. (2007). feeling backward: loss and the politics of queer history. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. bios jennifer terry is a professor of gender & sexuality studies at the university of california at irvine. she authored an american obsession: science, medicine, and homosexuality in modern society (university of chicago press, 1999) and co-edited deviant bodies: critical perspectives on difference in science and popular culture (indiana university press, 1995) and processed lives: gender and technology in everyday life (routledge, 1997). she has written articles on reproductive politics, the history of sexual science, contemporary scientific approaches to the sex lives of animals, love of objects, signature injuries of war, and the relationship between war-making practices and entertainment. wilson   article depression, biology, and aggression: introduction to gut feminism elizabeth a. wilson emory university e.a.wilson@emory.edu this is an excerpt from elizabeth a. wilson's book, gut feminism, which was published in august, 2015. the excerpt is copyrighted by duke university press. the connections between gut and depression have been known, in the west, since ancient greece. it was the hippocratic writers who gave the name melancholia to states of dejection, hopelessness, and torpor. they understood such states to be caused by an accumulation of black bile (in greek, melaina chole), a substance secreted by the liver. for these writers, and for practitioners of medicine for another two thousand years, melancholia was both the name of one of the enteric humors and the name for a disruption to emotional equilibrium (jackson, 1986). one of the hippocratic aphorisms makes the affinity between these two modes of melancholia explicit: "the bowel should be treated in melancholics" (hippocrates, 1978, p. 217). the condensation of viscera and mood, exemplified in the term melancholia, is the subject of gut feminism. this book will explore the alliances of internal organs and minded states, not in relation to ancient texts but in the contemporary milieu where melancholias are organized as entanglements of affects, ideations, nerves, agitation, sociality, pills, and synaptic biochemistry. i am not proposing a theory of depression. rather, i want to extract from these analyses of depressed viscera and mood some gain for feminist theory. i have two ambitions. first, i seek some feminist theoretical gain in relation to how biological data can be used to think about minded and bodily states. what conceptual innovations would be possible if feminist theory wasn’t so instinctively antibiological? second, i seek some feminist theoretical gain in relation to thinking about the hostility (bile) intrinsic to our politics. what if feminist politics are necessarily more destructive than we are able to bear? this introduction offers some context for how feminist theory might approach these tough questions of biology and aggression. in the first instance, this book makes an argument that biological data can be enormously helpful for feminist theory. by "helpful" i mean "arresting, transforming, taxing." when the project began (with a paper titled "gut feminism" at the 2003 society for literature and science convention) my primary concern was to show that feminist theory could find conceptual insight in the biological and pharmacological research on depression. it had been clear to me for some time that there were significant gains to be made by reading biological, evolutionary, and cognitive research more closely (e. a. wilson, 1998, 2004). i wanted to show that data about the pharmaceutical treatment of depression need not always be the object of feminist suspicion; they could sometimes be the source of conceptual and methodological ingenuity. by 2003 many feminist science studies projects were expanding the ways in which biological data could be apprehended. in the wake of early influential work in feminist philosophy of science and biomedicine (e.g., ruth bleier, donna haraway, sandra harding, emily martin), anne fausto-sterling’s sexing the body (2000) and evelyn fox keller’s century of the gene (2000) brought to a wide audience the idea that biology was a site of important political and conceptual argumentation for feminism, and—in particular—that detailed understanding of biological processes was crucial to such feminist analyses. what followed were a number of important and engaging monographs on feminism, sex, gender, sexuality, capital, biotechnology, and biology: susan squier's liminal lives (2004), catherine waldby and robert mitchell's tissue economies (2006), sarah franklin's dolly mixtures (2007), melinda cooper's life as surplus (2008), marsha rosengarten's hiv interventions (2009), hannah landecker's culturing life (2010), rebecca jordan-young's brain storm (2010), michelle murphy's seizing the means of reproduction (2012), sarah richardson's sex itself (2013)—to name those most prominent on my bookshelves over this decade. however, my interests in gut feminism are less to do with that body of literature, which continues to flourish (and to provide sustenance for my own thinking), and more to do with the broader field of feminist theory, where biology remains something of a thorny conceptual and political issue and where antibiologism is still valued as currency. this book is less interested in what feminist theory might be able to say about biology than in what biology might be able to do for—do to—feminist theory. how do biological data arrest, transform, or tax the theoretical foundations of feminist theory? gut feminism begins with the conjecture that despite the burgeoning work in feminist science studies there is still something about biology that remains troublesome for feminist theory. take, for example, the feminist theoretical work on the body (which was very influential on my training and subsequent work). in the last thirty years, feminists have produced pioneering theories of the body—they have demonstrated how bodies vary across different cultural contexts and historical periods, how structures of gender and sexuality and race constitute bodies in very particular ways, how bodies are being fashioned by biomedical and technological invention. yet despite its avowed interest in the body, this feminist work is often reluctant to engage directly with biological data. most feminist research on the body has relied on the methods of social constructionism, which explore how cultural, social, symbolic, or linguistic constraints govern and sculpt the kinds of bodies we have. these theorists tend not to be very curious about the details of empirical claims in genetics, neurophysiology, evolutionary biology, pharmacology, or biochemistry. this has been true even when biology is the topic at hand. lynda birke (2000), for example, provides a thorough overview of the early feminist work on the body. like me, she is concerned that "the biological body has been peripheral to much feminist theory. . . . the emphasis in our theory was on the social construction of gender; the body hardly featured at all" (p. 1–2). like me, birke expresses a desire to look inside the body, at the "blood and guts" (p. 48). nonetheless, and despite her training in neurophysiology and despite her desire to "bring the biological back to feminism" (p. 175), birke almost entirely avoids discussion of empirical data and focuses her analysis on the gendered narratives, metaphors, and representations that are "etched deep" (p. 41) into biological knowledges. this aversion to biological data is widespread in feminist theories of all stripes. it bespeaks an ongoing discomfort with how to manage biological claims—as if biological data will overwhelm the ability of feminist theory to make cogent conceptual and political interventions. one thing feminist theory still needs, even after decades of feminist work on the life sciences, is a conceptual toolkit for reading biology. in psychosomatic: feminism and the neurological body (2004) i thought at length about neurological data (the so-called gay brain, the neurophysiology of blushing, the peripheral neurology of neurosis) and their relation to feminist accounts of the body. however, i presumed too readily that lucid explication of biological detail would be enough to detach feminist theory from its conviction that social and discursive analysis are the primary or most powerful tools for engaging biological claims. my introduction to that book ends on a buoyant note: "it is the presumption of this book that sustained interest in biological detail will have a reorganizing effect on feminist theories of the body—that exploring the entanglements of biochemistry, affectivity, and the physiology of the internal organs will provide us with new avenues into the body.  attention to neurological detail . . . will enable feminist research to move past its dependency on social constructionism and generate more vibrant, biologically attuned account of the body" (wilson, 2004, p. 14). what i touched on in that book but did not pursue with any vigor was how important antibiologism has been to the successes of feminist theory. there is a powerful paradox in play: antibiologism both places significant conceptual limitations on feminist theory and has been one of the means by which feminist theory has prospered. even as it restricts what feminist arguments can be made, antibiologism still wields the rhetorical power to make a feminist argument seem right. because feminist theory has credentialed itself through these biological refusals, antibiologism is not something that can be easily relinquished. the opening two chapters of gut feminism tackle this problem directly. they describe this tendency to braid feminist theoretical innovation with antibiologism, and they discuss what legacies that leaves politically and conceptually. because antibiologism has done such important authorizing work for feminist theory, any intervention that takes a nonparanoid approach to biological and pharmaceutical claims is likely to breach long-standing, dearly held feminist convictions. i anticipate that for many readers gut feminism is occasionally going to feel politically erroneous, dangerous, or compromised. this book takes that path, assuming that risk, in order to examine the tangle of antibiologism and critical sophistication that underwrites so much feminist argumentation. as this project unfolded, another problem in relation to feminist theory and biology emerged. with the rise of the so-called neuroscientific turn in the critical humanities and social sciences in the last decade (fitzgerald & callard, 2014; littlefield & johnson, 2012), feminists and other critics began to take biological claims more seriously. however, they have often done so in a way that was overly credulous about the status of neuroscientific data. this is the coin of antibiologism flipped verso. where traditionally many feminists have preemptively dismissed biological claims, this new breed of neurologically informed critics want to swallow biological claims whole: "we are living at the hour of neuronal liberation" (malabou, 2008, p. 8). in analyses like this, engagement with biology has more often meant betrothal than battle. gut feminism will intervene into this broad problematic (not enough engagement with biology; too much belief in biology) by reading for what is peripheral in biological and pharmacological theories of depression, and for what the psychoanalyst sándor ferenczi called the biological unconscious. by focusing on the neurological periphery (the enteric nervous system that encases the gut) i aim to show that biology is much more dynamic than feminists have presumed and much less determinate than many neuro-critics currently suppose. specifically, this book contests the idea that neurological arguments are always about the central nervous system (the brain, the spinal cord): the neurological is not synonymous with the cerebral. this is one place, it seems to me, where the new neuro-critics have been too compliant with the convention that the neurology that counts is all above the neck. i want to show how some biological and pharmacological data about depression help us think about minded states as enacted not just by the brain but also by the distributed network of nerves that innervates the periphery (especially the gut). my argument is not that the gut contributes to minded states, but that the gut is an organ of mind: it ruminates, deliberates, comprehends. these concerns about how to read biology were the first and explicit goal of gut feminism. these were the key problems that i researched and intended to analyze. the second major consideration of this book emerged from the presentation, revision, and rereading of the manuscript, and it is not something that i had anticipated in the early parts of the project: i found myself making a strong case for the necessary place of aggression (bile) in feminist theory. there are some obvious intellectual antecedents for such a claim (feminist anger; deconstruction; kleinian psychoanalysis), but the most prominent of these for me has been the so-called antisocial thesis in queer theory. in the latter stages of this project i have been teaching the now canonical queer work of leo bersani and lee edelman, and i have had to work especially hard against the tendency in students to read self-shattering or negativity as an apolitical force that works to simply undo the coherence of the social or the subject. what bersani and edelman propose is not the punk sentiment that wants "to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up" (halberstam, 2006, p. 824), a sentiment that speaks only to consciously accessible parts of the social fabric and that sees negativity only in the realm of rebellion and antinormativity. one important pedagogical goal of these classes has been to make clear that negativity is intrinsic (rather than antagonistic) to sociality and subjectivity (berlant & edelman, 2013), and this makes a world of difference politically. this queer work isn't antisocial at all; rather, it wants to build theories that can stomach the fundamental involvement of negativity in sociality and subjectivity. the idea that negativity is indeed negative has been a hard lesson to learn. today (friday, june 13, 2014), as i sit down to rewrite this introduction, there is a one-day feminist and queer event called "radical negativity" at goldsmiths college, university of london (http://radicalnegativity.com). the byline for this event encapsulates a widespread conceptual problem with how to approach negativity and aggression. the conference website describes the event as "an interdisciplinary conference interrogating productive possibilities for negative states of being," and the description of the conference describes a shared hope to "valorise negative states" in order to "provide the potential to open up new possibilities for politics and connection." against this idea that the negative can be made valuable (productive, valorized, connected), gut feminism makes a case that we need to pay more attention to the destructive and damaging aspects of politics that cannot be repurposed to good ends. chapter 3 takes up this argument in depth. there i claim not only that depression is a more outwardly aggressive event than we usually think (it is not just the inward turn of aggression against oneself), but also that this outward turn of hostility is the mark of every political action.  in important, unavoidable ways, feminist politics attack and damage the things they love. this encounter with a negativity that stays negative continues to be an important thread through chapters 4, 5, and 6, where the particulars of antidepressant treatment are examined. feminist politics are most effective, i argue, not when they transform the destructive into the productive, but when they are able to tolerate their own capacity for harm. references birke, l. (2000). feminism and the biological body. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. cooper, m. (2008). life as surplus: biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era. seattle, wa: university of washington press. fausto-sterling, a. (2000). sexing the body. new york, ny: basic books. fitzgerald, d., & callard, f. (2014). social science and neuroscience beyond interdisciplinarity: experimental entanglements. theory, culture & society, 0(0), 1-30. doi: 0.1177/0263276414537319 franklin, s. (2007). dolly mixtures: the remaking of genealogy. durham, nc: duke university press. halberstam, j. (2006). the antisocial thesis in queer theory: the politics of negativity in recent queer theory. pmla, 121(3), 819-828. hippocrates. (1978). hippocratic writings. (g. e. r. lloyd & j. chadwick, trans.). new york, ny: penguin books. (original work published in 1950). jackson, s. w. (1986). melancholia and depression: from hippocratic times to modern times. new haven, ct: yale university press. jordan-young, r. m. (2010). brain storm. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. keller, e. f. (2000). the century of the gene. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. landecker, h. (2010). culturing life. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. littlefield, m. m., & johnson, j. (eds.). (2012). the neuroscientific turn: transdisciplinarity in the age of the brain. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. malabou, c. (2008). what should we do with our brain?. bronx, ny: fordham university press. murphy, m. (2012). seizing the means of reproduction: entanglements of feminism, health, and technoscience. durham, nc: duke university press. richardson, s. s. (2013). sex itself: the search for male and female in the human genome. chicago, il: university of chicago press. rosengarten, m. (2009). hiv interventions: biomedicine and the traffic between information and flesh. seattle, wa: university of washington press. squier, s. (2004). liminal lives: imagining the human at the frontiers of biomedicine. durham, nc: duke university press. waldby, c., & mitchell, r. (2006). tissue economies: blood, organs, and cell lines in late capitalism. durham, nc: duke university press. wilson, e. a. (1998). neural geographies: feminism and the microstructure of cognition. new york, ny: psychology press. wilson, e. a. (2004). psychosomatic: feminism and the neurological body. durham, nc: duke university press. bio elizabeth a. wilson is professor and chair of the department of women's, gender, and sexuality studies, emory university. she is the author of psychosomatic: feminism and the neurological body (duke university press, 2004) and affect and artificial intelligence (university of washington press, 2010).  she is co-writing (with adam frank) an introduction to the affect theory of silvan tomkins. introduction   editorial board   introduction to the inaugural issue   editorial board catalyst journal editor@catalystjournal.org welcome to the inaugural issue of catalyst, an international, peer-reviewed, open-source online journal published twice yearly. catalyst aims to gather together and extend the profoundly interdisciplinary and growing field of feminist science and technology studies (sts), for which there is no extant journal in circulation. the three words in the journal's subtitle—feminism, theory, and technoscience—matter to the vision of the intellectual and political mixings that this journal is designed to stimulate. in chemistry, a catalyst is an agent that sparks a reaction and increases its rate, stimulating shifts and changing outcomes. a catalyst galvanizes but also produces alternative pathways for actions to occur. in this spirit, the editorial board of catalyst aims to do more than provide a home for creative and critical feminist science studies scholarship. we want to provide a catalyst for research that is reflexively constituted through its upstream histories and downstream futures. thus feminist science studies is not the exclusive focus of catalyst; the journal also seeks to support and foster feminist science studies through expanded forms including mixtures with other critical traditions, research-based critical media practice, new orientations, and experiments that will continue to elaborate the future of the field.     catalyst is here to facilitate distributed chains of scholarly reactions, yielding new work that both synthesizes a range of feminist and critical intellectual legacies and transforms them in the process. while the journal foregrounds feminist science and technology studies, it also recognizes the plurality of traditions that have come into reaction with feminism and technoscience—reactions for which there is now a dedicated forum. manifesta for a journal of feminism, theory, and technoscience catalyst is conceived of as an experiment. experiment is a shared practice across the arts and the sciences and at the heart of sts. in a broad sense, experiments can be thought of as technical-social assemblies that arrange and intervene in the world towards the possibility of making something different happen. experiments, thus, are conjectural future-making assemblages. as an experiment, the launch of this journal invites the question: what might a future feminist sts become? this question is not merely academic. in a world infused with technoscience, the work of theorizing and inventing better relations and practices with technoscience remains urgent: from the ways in which scientific practices are built out of social hierarchies, to the ways in which new and old forms of militarisms propagate; from the ways that race relations build structural violence into the everyday, to the ways that new forms of life are being assembled in labs. feminist sts is a dispersed project, with work happening in formalized disciplinary sites of gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, black studies, arts departments, architecture, and geography. but it also propagates through the biomedical sciences in labs and clinics and workshops, shaping experimental stakes, relationships, and pedagogies. the genealogies feeding into feminist sts include critiques of capital and its ecological manifestations, drawing from the works of rachel carson, silvia federici, shulamith firestone, c.l.r. james, catherine waldby, melinda cooper, aihwa ong, stefen helmreich, cori hayden, and anna tsing. scholars including adele clarke, donna haraway, sandra harding, evelynn hammonds, n. katherine hayles, elizabeth grosz, susan leigh star, lucy suchman, sarah franklin, karen barad, isabelle stengers, rosi braidotti, hannah landecker, paula a. treichler, evelyn fox keller, and anne fausto-sterling established conceptual and methodological tools that fleshed out the structures and workings of power in scientific discourse and practice, helping to break down persistent binaries between bodies and technologies, language and matter, and nature and culture. scholars such as dorothy roberts, audre lorde, sylvia wynter, paul gilroy, stuart hall, octavia butler, alondra nelson, jenny reardon, katherine mckittrick, anne pollock, and catherine bliss have theorized racial formations and racisms as they compose the relations and potentials of technoscience.  scholarship by frantz fanon, gayatri spivak, helen verran, kim tallbear, kavita philip, diane nelson, geeta patel, wendy hui kyong chun, lisa nakamura, laura briggs, lawrence cohen, kim fortun, gabrielle hecht, and nancy hunt has grappled with and against colonial and postcolonial conjunctures, as well as global itineraries and constellations. writing on embodied spectatorship and apparatuses of viewing as well as image making, scholars such as kara keeling, vivian sobchack, manthia diawara, homay king, constance penley, mary ann doane, teresa de lauretis, anne friedberg, laura marks, and lisa parks spurred greater focus on technologies and phenomenologies of representation in media studies and visual culture. in disability studies, rosemarie garland-thomson, alison kafer, robert mcruer, lennard j. davis, and mel chen among others interrogate reductive assumptions of normalcy and able-bodiedness, illustrating how medical models, built environments, and institutional mandates around care and public health (re)produce compulsory modes of living. and queer turns into technoscience have retheorized ontology, embodiment, power, and agencies through the interventions of scholars such as jasbir puar, elizabeth a. wilson, jennifer terry, and eva hayward, along with many others. catalyst offers opportunities for scholars and activists to recompose the histories that animate theory and technoscience across this spectrum that constitutes the expanded field. the journal does not aspire to crystalize a feminist sts as a singular field with fixed intellectual or disciplinary boundaries. instead, it aims to set in motion and mobilize the resources to foster needed encounters among critical traditions. as we write this, the various genealogies, some cited above, that have given shape to contemporary feminist sts over the past four decades are being remade as scholars discover neglected or ignored sources of inspiration, such as the turn-of-the century science fiction of muslim bengali feminist begum rokeya, or insert new kinds of embodiments into canonical texts, such as new readings of the work of sigmund freud, or invoke the works of feminist scientists such as lynn margulis and barbara mcclintock, or reposition the crucial work of postcolonial thinkers such as frantz fanon and saidiya hartman as constitutive of the field's intellectual and political directions. the launching of this journal both recognizes these diverse legacies and sites of work and offers a manifesta for the continued catalyzing of theory, practice, and feminist technoscience studies into the future. as a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to modeling as well as pushing the boundaries of theoretically and politically engaged scholarship, catalyst seeks to provide a point of convergence for what feminist sts might become as well as a platform from which to launch future iterations. forthcoming issues, for example, will explore themes including black studies and feminist technoscience, digital militarism, and disability and technoscience. and while critique is a crucial stimulant for routing technoscience into new pathways, feminist sts is also strongly formed through an affirmative tradition of imagining and conjuring better, less violent, more livable technoscientific worlds. as a site of experiment, catalyst is committed to bringing theory and practice together. this is because feminist sts has erupted in multiple artistic settings and activist collectivities, in digital practices, and in transnational circuits of making and doing that involves activists as well as practicing scientists who are grappling with shared theoretical issues. catalyst thus invites both conceptual and practical innovations—from creating speculative science fiction, to re-theorizing ontology, to fabricating new natures through bio-art, to transforming the curatorial ethos within digital projects, to decolonizing experimental practice, to situating multiple objectivities. furthermore, catalyst aims to thicken theoretical contributions to feminist sts as well as to feminist activism and politics in sciences and technology. catalyst's online platform differs from the traditional print journal format in that it provides space for exhibiting visual works not easily printed and prompts collaboration and criticism with the aim of developing research. it will both support the work of feminist scientists and offer a place where the scientific method can be read closely and critically in an effort to move closer towards shared objects of knowledge. in this sense, the journal hopes do more than translate across disciplines; it aims to be a platform that can generate dialogue between science practitioners and theoreticians by bringing feminist, anti-racist, and queer theory into biomedicine, or reimagining ecological frames, or designing social justice into existing and future infrastructures. what practices, we ask, might a future feminist sts contain? what encounters might compose and decompose it? and what tensions might be held together by it? these are some of the questions that drive forward this catalyst for disciplinary change in sts. experiments in practice catalyst has been designed to embody the editorial board's collective commitment to the politics of practice. a geographically and disciplinarily diverse editorial board has collectively organized and shared the labor of soliciting, editing, and publishing, relying on the expertise and guidance of an extended international advisory board of ~100 feminist sts scholars. this expanded network makes the vision behind catalyst possible. the editorial board currently operates on an independent platform outside of the structures of a university server or press, which also allows it to avoid for-profit publishing houses as well. the collective thus has tried to reassemble the modes of production associated with the traditional print journal. the journal expands this commitment to a politics of practice by adhering to labor practices that bring close attention to the politics and mechanisms of staffing. the editorial board has funded graduate student research positions and grants tied to university departments to bring the platform to life. built on an independent server space using the open-source software open journal systems developed by the public knowledge project, catalyst is locally installed and controlled by the research assistants and editorial board. with this move, software development, web design, and site management are conceptualized as research projects themselves, not merely the facilitation of others' intellectual exchanges. by valuing the ongoing labor of producing a journal as on par with other aspects of technoscientific research production, catalyst endeavors to continually and reflexively attend to issues raised in this first issue about digital technology and material labor. this commitment to a politics of practice is equally reflected in the board's attentiveness to modes of access, as laid out in catalyst's mission statement. the original development of catalyst began in 2012, sparked by elizabeth a. wilson and deboleena roy at emory university and lisa cartwright and david serlin at the university of california, san diego. an initial meeting of the editorial steering committee was held at emory in march 2013. the early vision was for a journal of theory in sts with feminism and sister theories and practices front and center. other crucial nodes in the journal's intellectual and political development, as reflected in the geographic distribution and support of the current editorial board include, in the us, kimberly juanita brown at mount holyoke, martha lampland at uc san diego, mara mills at new york university, rachel lee at ucla, and banu subramaniam at the university of massachusetts, amherst, and, in canada, michelle murphy at the university of toronto, and natasha myers at york university. as an ongoing experiment, we aspire for the journal's production to become more transnational over time, and thus better reflect the multi-sited creation of scholarship. this commitment to distributed production has further shaped the journal's international advisory board, the members of which provide expertise for vetting contributions, and who are invited to propose and craft thematic issues or journal sections. the journal has a dedicated managing editor position that is generously supported by the department of communication and the graduate science studies program at uc san diego, as well as an administrative office in the catalyst lab located in ucsd's department of visual arts. this first issue of catalyst has been brought to life through the on-the-ground labor of ucsd graduate students monika sengul-jones and m. cristina visperas, the journal's managing editors for 2014-16. visperas and sengul-jones, working closely with editorial board member lisa cartwright, have made the original vision for catalyst a reality in this first issue. visperas managed submissions and the juried review process with cartwright, guiding the editorial board through every phase of crafting the website's textual groundwork and the first issue's production. sengul-jones independently authored the journal's platform and saw the online journal's first issue to completion. mara mills and louise hickman worked with sengul-jones on web design and the first issue's format with respect to accessibility throughout the process of designing, developing, and launching the journal. the contributions along the way of nicholas hirsch, cat crowder ucsd, alec smecher at the public knowledge project, and the generous open journal systems users who responded to catalyst-related forum posts seeking advice also have been significant and timely. banu subramaniam (university of massachusetts, amherst) and deboleena roy (emory) led the "news in focus" and "lab meeting" sections in which we have bring into view ongoing work by science researchers and practitioners in the field. joanna zylinska and jackie orr have contributed innovative image-text pieces that demonstrate the journal's commitment to forging new styles and forms of peer-reviewed research practice. as the journal grows over time, we envision that editorial work will be distributed across a more dispersed set of local and transnational nodes that complement the administrative and digital infrastructures that have been built at uc san diego, and which have been supported by emory, nyu, and other institutions. in keeping with the journal's mission to address power and inequality in emerging technologies across the globe, including issues of gender, race, class, sexuality, nation, and ability, the website will reflexively take on the problem of access to the digital as an intellectual concern as well as a structural feature of the journal itself, publishing and archiving highly visual, multimedia works with a disability practice ethic. issue no. 1 catalyst's inaugural issue captures our vision of encounters between theory, feminism and technoscience. lindsey andrews's contribution offers a genealogy of black feminist empiricism that routes the counter-practices of empiricism through zora neale hurston and the combahee river collective. in doing so, andrews shows how opacity and subjectivity ground an itinerary of black feminist empiricism that critiques and counters legal and medico-scientific circumscription of black women's lives, thus troubling to the demands of positivist regimes. neda atanasoski's and kalindi vora's essay, "surrogate humanity: posthuman networks and the (racialized) obsolescence of labor," theorizes the global-racial erasures and disappearances undergirding techno-utopic fantasies of a post-labor society. theorizing with sylvia wynter, jeremy rifkin, and frantz fanon, the essay shows how digital labor infrastructures of humans and things (such as amazon's mechanical turk) are both racial and racializing. at stake are what can count as human and how the subject of labor is theorized. their article is paired with an interview by monika sengul-jones with lilly irani, a scholar and practitioner in digital labor intervention around systems including amazon's mechanical turk. jih-fei cheng's "'el tabaco se ha mulato': globalizing race, viruses, and scientific observation in the late-nineteenth-century" begins with the observation that the earliest recorded descriptor for viral infection, which was discovered in the tobacco plant, used the racialized spanish expression "el tabaco se ha mulato" ("the tobacco became mulatto"). cheng's essay takes up this fact to historicize virus discovery at the juncture between science, nation-building, global industrialization, and the disciplining of race and sex under the long shadow of euro-american empire, thereby offering a route towards the queer decolonizing of racial regimes and biological conceptions of life. it takes guts to do feminist theory, but few of us have thought deeply about the relationship of the gut to our emotions, intellect, and psychology. elizabeth wilson, one of our founding editorial board members, gives us a taste of the arguments in her recent book, gut feminism, in which she argues for a rethinking of feminist theory by taking seriously for and through feminist theory the gut-brain connection and the psychology and biology of guts and digestion as they impact our subjectivity and psychic conditions of being. in tension with wilson's essay, anne pollock theorizes with another organ laden with meaning for feminism: the heartpart of the body. in her "heart feminism," pollock offers speculations and provocations towards taking up the heart as way to repose questions of life and embodiment, especially ones inspired by neuroscience, for feminist theory. in addition to monographic feature articles, catalyst includes innovative and experimental new sections on topics that are both academically and temporally current in order to amplify the journal's engagement with ongoing politics. "news in brief," for example, invites scholars and activists to share short critical commentaries on pressing recent events. this inaugural issue's "news in brief" section, curated by editorial board members deboleena roy and banu subramaniam, is focused on ebola, and features critical commentary from microbiologist elke muhlberger, feminist and african studies scholar pamela scully, and cultural and queer studies scholar jennifer terry. another regular section, "lab meeting," also curated by banu subramaniam and deboleena roy, is devoted to supporting dialogue across science practice and feminist and critical theory. this inaugural issue's "lab meeting" brings together three practicing scientists—anelis kaiser, co-founder of the neurogenderings international network; daphna joel, a psychologist who researches neural mechanisms; and stacey ritz, who leads the biology working group of the cihr team in gender, environment, and health—in conversation with historian of science, sarah richardson. together they discuss the implications for experimental practices of the u.s. national institutes of health's proposed 2014 policy to promote "sex parity" in research. this inaugural issue also offers two examples of the kinds of exchanges for which catalyst hopes to provide a regular platform. the first is a dialogue between s. lochlann jain and jackie stacey, sparked after each of them read the other's book on cancer: jain's malignant: how cancer becomes us (2014) and stacey's teratologies: a cultural study of cancer (1997). together they unpack and make visible the layered  "grammar of cancer" and reflect on how they came to their methodological interventions shaped by their own cancer experiences. the second exchange, co-authored by jenny reardon, jacob metcalf, martha kenney, and karen barad, grapples with the pedagogical and social "trouble and promise" of the science & justice graduate training program located at university of california, santa cruz. the science & justice program offers an example of reassembling institutional spaces and re-forming the practices that make up feminist sts drawing on the creation of the training program which takes as its inspiration the recent feminist science studies re-workings of responsibility as response-ability. finally, because of the possibilities inherent in its born-digital format, catalyst is able to explore media not typically associated with academic journals (either physical or virtual) as part of its commitment to experimental practice. in this inaugural issue, we present video essays by jackie orr and joanna zylinska. orr's contribution rethinks oil politics through a video and written style that becomes a kind of fictocritical contribution to research. in her piece, orr invites us to contemplate the "subreal agencies" that are woven into the catastrophe of petro-capitalist technoscience and yet might also offer counter-enchantments for feminist technoscience studies. orr develops a performative mode of "magical subrealism" in which oil is an un-human that transmutes technoscience, time, and catastrophe into forms that are both material and fantastic. zylinska's work meditates on the changing ecology of our everyday technical infrastructures and workaday entanglements that support domestic devices. interweaving shots from underneath the artist's desk taken over a period of one month, zylinska offers a haunting installation of lines, grids, and traces that stimulate questions about past and future. both of these contributions were put through the peer review process as research, an approach considered by the editorial board as a contribution to the growing movement to advance what counts as research in a digital world. we are thrilled to be able to share this first issue of catalyst and look forward to future exchanges and collaborative futures. the journal is intended as a meeting place, a site in which the unevenly raced, gendered, queered, colonial, militarized, embodied, ecological, and political economic beings and doings of technoscience studies and practice meet and, by doing so, are ongoingly transformed. we hope you will join us in making these transformations into material realities. microsoft word 31947_xan sarah chacko_nj dr.docx xan, chacko s. (2019). digging up colonial roots: the less-known origins of the millennium seed bank partnership. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-9. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © xan s. chacko, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license digging up colonial roots: the less-known origins of the millennium seed bank partnership xan sarah chacko university of queensland x.chacko@uq.edu.au on 15 october 2009, the millennium seed bank partnership (msbp), based in wakehurst place in west sussex, england, announced that they had reached their target of banking the seeds of 10% of the plant species known to western science fourteen months earlier than they had expected— the goal was set for december 2010, as their campaign slogan “10 by 10” suggested. the accession that put them over the line were seeds of a rare pink banana found in southwest china, the yunnan banana (musa itinerans), collected by one of their partner organizations, the kunming institute of botany, chinese academy of sciences (vaughan, 2009). the msbp’s parent organization, the royal botanic gardens, kew (henceforth kew), used the case of the pink banana to highlight two key features of their banking project: biodiversity conservation and food security. while its pinkness was certainly novel, the yunnan’s rarity and the viability of its seeds made it worthy of collection. the cavendish banana (musa acuminata), the yellow, more familiar cousin that is eaten around the world, has been bred as a seedless clone and, according to kew, is vulnerable to changes in climate and disease (briggs, 2018). what makes the pink banana valuable is that it is “wild” and able to reproduce sexually, which, according to neo-darwinian logic, makes it more robust (becks & agarwal, 2010). kew’s action to work with its chinese partner to save the pink banana seeds at its millennium seed bank was cast as an investment in the future of banana breeding, as well as the conservation of an essential and threatened plant for all of humanity. while the msbp is a part of kew’s vision to stay at the cutting edge of conservation and environmental governance, its special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) xan s. chacko, 2019 2 relationship to colonial botany and political economy must also be interrogated in the light of its legacy. i revivify the origin story of the msbp to show how kew’s long tradition of plant extraction, accumulation, and exchange, admixed with a crisis in biosecurity, were integral to the rebranding of kew as the msbp. founded in 1840, the royal botanic gardens, kew is entrenched in the history of colonialism and has been well studied as the preeminent site of “colonial botany.”1 kew has been involved in the extraction, transport, systematization, propagation, and dissemination of plants around the globe.2 kew was also instrumental in the proliferation of botanical gardens—from less than 50 to 441 by 1901—where they funded, trained, and administered control over botanic futures (mccracken, 1997, pp. viii, 80). directors of kew secured administrative positions for naturalists from the united kingdom at botanic gardens around the world who would continue the accumulation and circulation to and from kew gardens in london. richard grove (1995) shows how these directors of botanical gardens became advisors to the newly forming colonial governments, making suggestions about how to best manage the land and natural resources of the area. from its foundation in 1840, kew maintained its position as powerhouse of botanic knowledge by staying at the forefront of research and by controlling access to the flow of plants. the turn of the twentieth century witnessed the weakening of imperial britain as colonies started agitating for self-rule. how would a deeply colonial institution such as kew gain legitimacy and maintain functionality in a decolonizing world that was growing critical of extractive practices? i argue that kew’s creation of the millennium seed bank partnership in 2000, as the “leading example of how best to approach and resolve global environmental problems” (fry, seddon, & vines, 2011, p. 53), was an attempt at rebranding. rather than referencing their legacy as a powerhouse of botanical knowledge gained through the colonial extraction and circulation of plants, the literature and publicity around the msbp evokes the depoliticized valence of “biodiversity conservation.” my engagement with the msbp follows the practices of extracting seeds from where they grow, moving them across the globe, rendering them legible through subjective laboratory practices, and putting them in freezers for long-term storage. i also study how scientists create new identities, meaning, and value for seeds through inscriptions of data and experimental practice. i am inspired by michelle murphy (2017) to uncover these stories because they demonstrate how colonialism endures as a system that structures the valuation of life. my research shows how concepts such as biodiversity, ecosystem services, food security, and extinction are evoked in an era of neoliberalism to continue the colonial practices of extraction, alienation, and re-inscription. co-opting plants special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) xan s. chacko, 2019 3 into “ecosystem services” de-natures them, and splits them into constituent characteristics that are variably valued by their promise of inclusion in breeding programs and commodity markets. murphy’s concept of “economization of life,” which links living things to their varied economic potentials, is useful to unravel the histories of the institutions in the twentieth century that converted plants from objects of study, comparison, and economy into genetic resources or “germplasm” to be harnessed (2017, pp. 5-6). while my research is ongoing, i want to convey that the published history of the msbp does not capture the depth or particularities that led to its creation but instead flattens the history of kew to narrow our imaginary about ways of responding to the created crises of climate change and plant life extinction. while their publicized origin story locates the creation of the msbp as a response to a global crisis in plant diversity, the institutional archives tell a different story. this path, drawn in the swirl of interdepartmental memoranda, passes signposts of identity crisis, bureaucratic drama, funding scarcity, and nationalist fervor. it starts in the middle of the twentieth century, when kew’s access to plants was threatened by new administrations in the former colonies that did not recognize their authority. kew’s capacity to control the movement of plants, and thus control the knowledge produced about plants, hinged on the maintenance of their two-hundred-year-old collection in london. this collection was split between live plants in the garden, dried specimens in the herbarium, and a cold store of extra seeds that was saved from one year to the next. kept cool and dry, these seeds could last a year or two before they would have to be used, discarded, or distributed through kew’s extensive network of gardens around the uk and abroad. a seed list with nearly 5,000 entries kept a record and provided an index for anyone interested in ordering from this cache of seeds. to run this list and conduct studies on the physiology of seeds, a new department, the seed unit, was formed in 1964, headed by dr. peter thompson. shortly after starting his job, thompson received complaints from administrators of gardens that the seeds that were being provided from the existing store were of inferior quality (they did not germinate), and that they were inaccurately identified (a sacrilegious offense at kew). this was not a problem restricted to kew’s list. in a 1964 article in taxon, botanists complained that seed lists that were circulating from their institutions ⁠ and others “fail[ed] to justify the expense involved, let alone meet the modern requirements of accuracy, efficiency, and horticultural value” (howard, green, baker, & yeo, 1964, p. 90).3 to revitalize and maintain their collection of seeds acquired through kew’s long history of colonial extraction, thompson petitioned, in 1972, for the creation of a state-of-the-art seed banking facility (see figure 1) special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) xan s. chacko, 2019 4 based on what his own research concluded was the best way to secure seeds in freezers (thompson, 1970). figure 1. plan for the seed unit (thompson & brown, 1972, p. 446). although it was the gardens and herbarium departments that were reluctant to relinquish control over the seeds, thompson was told that a lack of funds inhibited any such endeavors. thompson knew that the director of kew, dr. john heslop-harrison, had been meeting with representatives of government agencies to solicit funds for the creation of a national gene bank, but it was not until a nationally treasured tree, the elm (ulmus), was threatened by a disease that the funding bodies paid any attention to the value of banking seeds. dutch elm disease was discovered in the early twentieth century and had been confined to mainland european countries, which saw a 10% to 40% reduction of elms in the 1940s. similar outbreaks in the united states had also been noted, but in the late 1960s there were signs that it had started spreading to elms in southern england. the disease was caused by a micro-fungus, ophiostoma ulmi, in the first outbreak in the 1940s, and a more virulent ophiostoma novo-ulmi in the 1960s, which was transmitted by two species of elm-bark beetle (scolytus) acting as vectors. it took a few years to kill a tree but the leaves of the elms were the first to exhibit symptoms; they turned yellow and wilted first on individual branches, and then turned brown, curled up, and fell, exposing the bark. the pathogen affects the vascular integrity of the leaves, which causes the roots to block the flow of water through the vascular system (xylem). fast growing and hardy, elms had been a good endemic choice for garden landscapes in the united kingdom.4 mature elms, recognizable by their bifurcating trunks, globular treetops, and heights of 115 feet, were considered special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) xan s. chacko, 2019 5 aesthetically pleasing and provided abundant shade. as the disease spread, elms seemed to shrivel up as their leaves curled and fell away. the eyesore of elms dying in gardens and avenues threatened to disrupt the vision of control over the environment and signified a sick nation. “dutch elm disease has assaulted the charm of our shady lanes, depleted our parks, and permanently altered the character of the countryside,” wrote dr. gerald n. lanier, a professor of forest entomology (1975, p. x41). what bothered the botanic sensibility was not only that the trees were dying, but that, before they died, the trees first got ugly, marring the pristine land—or city—scape. lanier continued, in addition to “this aesthetic profanity, the removal of dead and diseased elms (and their replacement) has been an almost intolerable economic burden” (1975, p. x41). as the inevitability of overwhelming loss and increasing cost loomed large, from kew, peter thompson announced hope. having inherited a collection of elm seeds from kew’s historic collecting projects, thompson pointed out that since they had been acquired before the spread of the disease, they were likely to be uncontaminated. he showed that only the seeds that had already been stored in the cold store before the trees showed signs of sickness were safe. furthermore, thompson used this collection to legitimate and invigorate the importance of promptly mounting a collection of the seeds of all extant varieties of elm in the british isles that had not yet been affected by the contagion. this preemptive safeguarding would secure the future possibility of elms to be grown after either the ravages of the fungi had passed, or a cure was found. by 1975, administrators of forestry and horticulture were impressed by this proof of concept and agreed that collecting british flora from the wild was to be made a priority. the national crisis was thus leveraged into a large-scale uk “native” flora-collecting project that was to be the first of many ongoing collections of the seed bank. within a year, the project grew and turned outward; the crisis in species loss was, after all, global. identifying reasons encompassing the biological, financial, and political, in a subsequent memorandum thompson (1974) showed with alacrity that building on the heels of the elm project, foreign collecting was the imperative next step. as the bank grew, they needed more space and required new facilities to house their rimy collections. fortuitously, in 1963 kew had been given responsibility over a vast garden, wakehurst place, in west sussex. thompson used the availability of this new space and their growing need for expansion to argue for the relocation of the seed unit, which had the benefit of being just far enough from the powerful departments at kew that had opposed his initial plans. by 1975, the seed unit was moved to wakehurst place, and funding was secured for future collecting special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) xan s. chacko, 2019 6 projects, starting local but soon moving to broad-scoped collecting abroad (kew 1973). the early collecting expeditions of the seed unit were used as starting points and frameworks upon which all future collecting regimes, including that of the msbp, were built; expeditions are now mounted for a targeted specific collection such as a geographical area (west africa), or a kind of plant across several spaces (orchids), or even more broadly defined “endangered species.” the choice of where to target seed collection is another example of what murphy (2017) calls the “economization of life,” where plant life is selected for “saving” based on a calculus of endangerment, funding, and future worth. thompson and his successor, dr. roger smith, who became head of the seed research and banking in 1980, and eventually the first director of the msbp, built on networks that had been established during the long history of kew but had waned in the post-wwii slump in kew’s outward activities (fry, seddon, & vines, 2011, p. 189). they were armed with a new impetus for collecting that they co-opted from international movements in nature conservation. the colonial legacy allowed them to reengage the services and access to people and places by promising exchanges of laboratory material and expertise in seed handling, which was very different from the preparation of saplings or cuttings for propagation. when transporting live plants and cuttings, pains needed to be taken to ensure that they would survive their journeys to kew. adequate hydration, warmth, and nutrients would need to be packed with the delicately prepared samples into specialized containers, such as wardian cases, which were invented specifically for transporting living things. while extracting seeds from plants may be laborious and time-consuming, their resilience and natural dormancy makes transporting them comparatively simpler and cheaper; collectors usually just put seeds in cloth or paper bags and send them in the mail. funding came to the bank from sources as diverse as the popular department store marks & spencer, who supported a full-time seed collector position in 1989; the telecom company orange, which was a significant donor to the newest iteration of the bank as the msbp; and the wellcome trust, which provided a bulk of the funding for the current, eponymously named, wellcome trust millennium building. murphy has shown an example of corporations investing in socially responsible causes (in her case, nike’s girl campaign in bangladesh) not just to augment their branding by demonstrating that they “care” but also to preempt and mitigate future risks to their own supply chain (2017, p. 126). for marks & spencer, the department store that also has a grocery section, investing in the future of plants as food fulfills both targets of brand amelioration and securing the future of food. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) xan s. chacko, 2019 7 since it opened in 2000, the msbp has rebuilt—through networks inherited from kew—its partnerships between local seed collectors and organizations active in over eighty countries (kew 2015). now only in their second decade post rebranding, the msbp claims to have banked the seeds of the largest proportion of plant species in the world and hopes to bank 25% by 2020 (vaugh 2009). what is effaced in these numerical goals is that the seed collection at the msbp was built from over two centuries of collections in the gardens at kew, as well as bespoke seed collecting expeditions throughout the latter half of the twentieth century for the seed unit. connecting the story of the msbp to kew's longer history of plant extraction situates the success of their banking 10% of the known plant species within their inherited collections. thompson’s use of the growing international demand for conservation to spearhead a local and then global collecting regime shows how colonial logics of paternalism and responsibility undergird the foundations of projects like the msbp. using numbers to represent success in conservation creates an imaginary in which all plants can be counted. hidden behind the numbers is the imperialist fervor of extraction, the choices of which seeds are banked, what banking entails, from where the seeds come, whether the seeds will be viable when they are retrieved, and, crucially, who names the seeds and will have access to them in the future. all these choices that scaffold seed banking as a means for securing access to plants in the future need to be thoroughly investigated. i, for one, am up to the challenge. acknowledgements this research was generously funded by a nsf dissertation grant, an aauw international fellowship and the kathryn conway preyer fellowship from wellesley college. i am thankful to kew archivist kiri ross-jones for their guidance in sifting through the rich archive. joe dumit, mario biagioli, jim griesemer, and natasha myers read and commented on earlier versions of the paper, for which i am grateful. i would like to extend a special thanks to banu subramaniam and to the anonymous reviewers at the journal for their feedback and encouragement in writing this paper. notes 1 for discussion of kew's continued commitment to botanical acquisition, see desmond (1982, 1998); grove (1995); and mccraken (1997). 2 between 1871 and 1880, kew received 2,632 packets of seeds and 32 wardian cases (sealed glass containers that kept plants alive), and in turn sent 39 wardian cases and 3,615 packets of seeds to various institutions around the world special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) xan s. chacko, 2019 8 (mccracken, 1997, p. 85). 3 the ubiquity of this problem is made tangible by the collaboration across the arnold arboretum in jamaica plain, boston, the university botanical garden in berkeley, california, and the university botanic garden, cambridge. 4 in the 1799 publication of the british garden, lady charlotte murray’s entries for british elms includes five local varieties that provided a range of options of leaf shape, seasonality, and robustness for use in british gardens (1799, p. 213). references becks, l., & agrawal, a. f. (2010). higher rates of sex evolve in spatially heterogeneous environments. nature, 468(7320), 89-92. briggs, h. (2018, july 5). yes! we have no bananas: why the song may come true again. bbc news. retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment44712034 desmond, r. (1982). the indian museum, 1801–1879. london: the stationery office. desmond, r. (1998). the history of the royal botanic gardens, kew. london: random house. fry, c., seddon, s., & vines, g. (2011). the last great plant hunt: the story of kew’s millennium seed bank. london: kew publishing. grove, r. (1995). green imperialism: colonial expansion, tropical island edens and the origins of environmentalism, 1600-1860. cambridge: cambridge university press. howard, r. a., green, p. s., baker, h. g., & yeo, p. f. (1964). comments on “seed lists.” taxon, 13(3), 90-94. kew (1973) administration, seed bank development & policy [folder of memoranda, letters, and receipts] kew archive (qa 0793), kew library, london. kew (2015, january) a global resource for plant and fungal knowledge retrieved from: https://www.kew.org/sites/default/files/kew%20science% 20strategy%2020152020%20single%20pages.pdf lanier, g. n. (1975, march 16). bright prospects for control of dutch elm disease. new york times. mccracken, d. p. (1997). gardens of empire: botanical institutions of the victorian british empire. london: leicester university press. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) xan s. chacko, 2019 9 murphy, m. (2017). the economization of life. durham, nc: duke university press. murray, c. (1799). the british garden. a descriptive catalogue of hardy plants, indigenous, or cultivated in the climate of great-britain. with their generic and specific characters, latin and english names, native country, and time of flowering. with introductory remarks.... bath: s hazard. thompson, p. a. (1970). seed banks as a means of improving the quality of seed lists. taxon, 19(1), 59-62. thompson, p. a. (1974, august 8). proposal for seed collecting expedition to west africa (nigeria), [memorandum from peter thompson to j. heslop-harrison]. nominal national seed development organisation (file qa 351), kew archives, london. thompson, p. a., & brown, g. e. (1972). the seed unit at the royal botanic gardens, kew. kew bulletin, 26, 445-456. vaughan, a. (2009, october 14). kew gardens hits target for “noah’s ark” seed bank with a pink banana. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/oct/15/kew-millennium-seed-bankhits-target author bio xan chacko is a research fellow on the australian research council laureate project 'harnessing intellectual property to build food security' at the university of queensland. she studies how the history and practices of the production and diffusion of botanical knowledge in the twentieth century reinscribes colonial power. she has published scholarship in history of science, fieldsights in cultural anthropology, and other venues. her current monograph compares different approaches to seed banking by studying the everyday tasks of collecting, sorting, and saving seeds, as well as, the history of the organisation of physical, digital, and intellectual property of banked seeds. microsoft word 71523-1-11-chakravartty.docx chakravartty, p. 2018). decolonizing infrastructures of empire. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © paula chakravartty. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical commentary decolonizing infrastructures of empire paula chakravartty new york university paula.chakravartty@nyu.edu our collection of essays appears as we approach the two-year mark of an election that delivered a white supremacist populist as president and unsettled the united states of america’s self-conception as the planetary role model of liberal democracy. as political theorist mahmoud mamdani reminds us, “america is not just the first new nation; it is also the first modern settler state. what is exceptional about america, the usa, is that it has yet to pose the question of decolonization in the public sphere (2015, p. 608).” given the deep imprint of the us as the normative center that shapes the overwhelming majority of social theories of media and technology across the globe, we feel it is an opportune time to foreground the question of the decolonization of the social studies of computing and digital media. in a 2016 special issue of the journal media, culture and society, miriam aouragh and i raised the question of why the arab spring of 2011 spurred such a flurry of interest in the “gift of the internet” as a force to fuel social change through cultivation of liberal democratic values, with 2 chakravartty catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) little reflection upon the us's and other western colonial powers’ legacy of occupation, ongoing violence and strategic interests across the middle east, north africa and south and central asia. we found that histories of colonial inequality and violence have always been at the margins of communication and media studies as a discipline.1 the battle lines were drawn in the period between the late 1960s until the early 1980s, between cold war expansionists touting the inherent value of what political scientist ithiel de sola pool (1983) called the “technologies of freedom,” versus a critical group of scholars, many calling for a democratic communications world order. the latter group included now largely forgotten argentinian, bolivian, chilean and venezuelan communications scholars such as antonio pasquali, luis ramiro beltrán, fernando reyes matta and mario kaplún, who at the time were responding to the us-led expansion of transnational corporations into the region alongside overt and covert military operations that culminated in the 1973 coup and assassination of the democratically elected salvador allende of chile (roach, 1997). the european and north american scholars most recognized today as advocates of the “media imperialism” or “media propaganda” theses, such as armand mattelart, herbert schiller, dallas smythe, edward herman and noam chomsky were surely inspired by anti-colonial and socialist writers and activists in the third world. it was through these movements for decolonization and racial and economic justice where we first see calls for self-reliance and ultimately “liberated media infrastructures to combat colonial propaganda and build transnational circuits of transport and communication (radio and newspapers) in the service of the commons (arough & chakravartty, 2016, p. 563)”. at stake in these early discussions over us cultural and media imperialism were questions of the growing domination of the us culture industries, the near monopoly in global newsgathering, and growing unease in the third world about technological reliance if not dependence (schiller, 1992). the turn away from media imperialism to critical theories of cultural globalization, hybridity and difference — popular in the 1990s 3 chakravartty catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) and early 2000s — drew inspiration from a range of postcolonial theoretical influences including the work of edward said, stuart hall, homi bhabha, gayatri spivak, among many others, who rightly critiqued eurocentric theories of knowledge production. here, we might ask what the unintended extension of this theoretical trajectory has been in the last two decades of studies of global media and society? what was lost in the afterglow of the proliferation of a more optimistic media and globalization studies emanating from the clinton-blair era and beyond? the post-cold war era of a seemingly peaceful global order alongside the worldwide proliferation of neo-liberal media and computer infrastructure has further shifted interest in the fields of communication and media studies away from engagement with colonial violence and what political scientist cedric robinson termed "racial capitalism” (1983). the more limited scholarly interest in questions of us imperialism in studies of computing and digital media is surely puzzling given the very fact of the longest digitally mediatized war in global history and the growing significance of racialized inequalities unleashing ethno-nationalist populisms across much of the globe. there is thus much to be gained from engaging the black radical theoretical tradition alongside indigenous and decolonial critiques, which have focused on the long history of european enslavement and colonization of indigenous settler societies, and more systematic attention paid to the centrality of global racial/ethnic hierarchies and gendered modalities of domination and resistance. the works of cedric robinson, sylvia wynter (mckittrick, 2014), maria lugones (2007), aníbal quijano (2005), jodi byrd (2011) to name but a few key scholars, help us move beyond the question of knowledge production alone as the focal point of our scholarship. what is perhaps the most productive drawing from these theoretical traditions at this particular political conjuncture, is the ways in which this body of scholarship connects back to anti-colonial thinkers and writers who were as concerned with re-writing histories from the perspective of the subaltern to as in creating the terms for collective emancipation. 4 chakravartty catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) notes 1 there are of course exceptions to this general recurring lacuna in the field which include (among others) said (2008) mattelart (1994) boydbarrett (1977, 2016) and herman and chomsky who have been active in these debates since the 1970s. there are also a number of more recent works on media that focus on 21st century u.s. imperialism by abu lughod (2015), butler (2016), kumar (2012), mirzoeff (2006) and parks and caplan (2017), among others. references abu-lughod, l. (2013). do muslim women need saving? cambridge, ma: harvard university press. aouragh, m. and p. chakravartty (2016). "infrastructures of empire: towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies." media, culture & society 38 (4), 559-575. boyd-barrett, o. (2016). media imperialism. thousand oaks, ca: sage. butler, j. (2016). frames of war: when is life grievable?. new york, ny: verso books. byrd, j. a. (2011). the transit of empire: indigenous critiques of colonialism. minneapolis, ms: u of minnesota press. de sola pool, i. (1983). technologies of freedom. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. dyer-witheford, n., & de peuter, g. (2009). games of empire: global capitalism and video games (vol. 29). u of minnesota press. herman, e. s., & chomsky, n. (2010). manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media. new york: random house. kumar, d. (2012). islamophobia and the politics of empire. chicago, il: haymarket books. lugones, m. (2007). heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. hypatia, 22(1), 186-219. 5 chakravartty catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) mamdani, m. (2015) “settler colonialism then and now,” critical inquiry, 41 (spring, 596-614. mattelart, a. (1994) mapping world communication: war, progress, culture. minneapolis, mn: u of minnesota press. mckittrick, k. (ed) (2014) sylvia wynter: on being human as praxis. durham, n.c. duke university press. mirzoeff, n. (2006). invisible empire: visual culture, embodied spectacle, and abu ghraib. radical history review, 95, 21. parks, l., & kaplan, c. (2018). life in the age of drone warfare. durham, n.c. duke university press. quijano, a. (2005). "the challenge of the “indigenous movement” in latin america." socialism and democracy 19(3) 55-78. roach, c. (1997) "cultural imperialism and resistance in media theory and literary theory." media, culture & society 19 (1), 47-66. robinson, c. j. (1983) black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. chapel hill, nc: university of north carolina press. said, e. w. (2008). covering islam: how the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world. new york: random house. schiller, h. i. (1992). mass communications and american empire.2nd edition. new york, ny. avalon bio paula chakravartty is associate professor, department of media, culture and communication (mcc) and the gallatin school at nyu. she is a member of the nyu sanctuary coalition and the nyu coalition for fair labor. microsoft word 31966_sarah montoya_nj dr.docx montoya, sarah a. (2019). review of network sovereignty: building the internet across indian country, by marisa elena duarte (university of washington press, 2017). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sarah a. montoya, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | network sovereignty: building the internet across indian country, by marisa elena duarte (university of washington press, 2017) sarah alyssa montoya university of california at los angeles smontoya@g.ucla.edu countless computer science and information studies texts describe the world wide web and the internet as a new, electronic frontier. the invocation of “frontier” and terra nullius is often coupled with histories of computational development that de-emphasize the role of the nation-state in the creation of internet infrastructures and instead rhapsodize on the intent of its architects and their visions. there is recognition of the role of advanced research projects agency or arpa (now known as the united states defense advanced research projects agency) in developing the functionality of arpanet—the foundations of which form the technical backbone of the internet (abbate, 1999, pp. 36-38). however, there is little work that explicitly links these technical projects with colonialism and settler colonialism. critiques on the corporatization of the internet and representations of race online abound, yet both of these areas within critical information studies fail to consider how the dispossession of native peoples animates settler ontologies embedded within information structures and facilitates the creation of internet infrastructures. dominant representations of “the internet” as a singular, democratic, disembodied space work towards concealing the logics of colonialism and settler colonialism, specifically those related to the territory and land—what patrick wolfe calls the “irreducible element” of settler colonialism (2006, p. 388). special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) sarah a. montoya, 2019 2 duarte’s work attempts to “land” discussions of the internet as she addresses how native peoples have engaged with information and communication technologies (icts) across indian country. where dominant narratives de-emphasize land and material infrastructures, she highlights how digital technologies are dependent on local topographies. duarte identifies her intention as threefold: to integrate native and indigenous approaches into the field of information studies, introduce the field and language of information studies to native peoples and scholars, and consider how native communities and tribal governments have negotiated both the complexities of representation online and the creation of internet and communications infrastructures (pp. 6-7). duarte begins network sovereignty with a rumination on information flows and power that explicates how colonialism serves as the major socio-political context through which settler society understands technological advancement. duarte adds, “in the modern settler imaginary, any native or indigenous use of modern technologies was unexpected precisely because native and indigenous peoples themselves were unexpected in the subjugated, mediated landscape” (p. 11). network sovereignty attempts to refute settler colonial stereotypes that associate native communities and spaces with primitivism. duarte explores how communities have created and navigated modern technoinfrastructures through an exploration of several sites, including pascua yaqui’s kpyt-lpfm radio station where she interviews hector youtsey, the manager who aided the tribe in setting up their station and helped them negotiate the fcc licensing regulations (pp. 38-39). she also briefly interviews richard alum davis, the station manager at kuyi hopi radio and describes how station employees must also meet the needs of their local communities based on the “seasonal rhythms” and cultural protocols of its listeners (p. 46). duarte meets with police chief joseph delgado at the tohono o’odham police department to address the telecommunications network that must negotiate the borders of two settler states (p. 41). her work also examines the creation and maintenance of tvdnet and the southern california tribal technologies sctt, as well as how the cheyenne river sioux tribe and the navajo nation leverage and navigate tribal sovereignty through colonial juridical structures. duarte’s research points to how each area holds its own particular cultural and physical topographies. as such, duarte argues that there is no totalizing discourse that can adequately address the needs of all native communities. in fact, framing the politics of the internet as an issue of mere access allows for the settler state to paternalistically deploy itself as a benevolent savior. instead, each community must be allowed the right to self-govern and create an ict infrastructure that special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) sarah a. montoya, 2019 3 reflects the contours of its specific, geopolitical ecologies and histories (p. 43). the text closes with a two-pronged approach to building icts through indian country. in the first, duarte suggests that new policies around native icts must reflect the right to self-governance. she states that improving network functionality and navigating broadband policies mark just two areas that communities need to consider. in her second approach, she posits the decolonial potentials of flows of information. duarte writes, “understanding how native and indigenous people use analog and digital systems to share knowledge toward self-governance and self-determination gives us insight into the subversive ways that native and indigenous people...[create] forms of resistance, endurance, and liberation” (p. 130). she adds that it is crucial to begin reframing discourses of technological access. she claims this decolonial reframing “reorients the technique of applied science toward meeting the goals of tribal communities” (p. 136). while duarte’s text promises a necessary intervention into thinking about computer technologies and the politics of sovereignty, the text favors a descriptive approach. in some areas, this approach is useful—most notably when duarte breaks down technological jargon and techno-infrastructures. in other areas, the description results in sparse engagement with theory or feminist theory, which is evidenced throughout her selective citational practices in the field of native studies and information studies. this lack of engagement often results in organizational issues in which core concepts are either reiterated throughout several chapters or are oversimplified. for instance, definitions and theorizations of sovereignty—a fraught concept in fields such native studies, critical indigenous studies, and native feminist studies—are represented with little complexity. the fieldwork itself, in particular, the interviews, provide little clarity or momentum within the work. in its shining moments, network sovereignty offers readers the opportunity to begin a critical conversation on the role of colonialism and settler colonialism in the creation of communication infrastructures, but the text’s uneven development makes it difficult to appreciate duarte’s intervention. references abbate, j. (1999). inventing the internet. cambridge, ma: mit press. wolfe, p. (2006). settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. journal of genocide research, 8(4), 387-409. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) sarah a. montoya, 2019 4 author bio sarah montoya is doctoral student and settler on the ancestral and unceeded lands of the tongva at ucla’s gender studies program. her work situates colonialism and settler colonialism as central to the creation and maintenance of computer and internet technologies and their material infrastructures. microsoft word commentary-myers.docx myers, n. (2017). ungrid-able ecologies: decolonizing the ecological sensorium in a 10,000 year-old naturalcultural happening. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(2) 1-24 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © natasha myers, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license commentary ungrid-able ecologies: decolonizing the ecological sensorium in a 10,000 year-old naturalcultural happening natasha myers york university nmyers@yorku.ca abstract in the photo essay that follows, i share some field notes two years into a longterm research-creation collaboration with award-winning dancer and filmmaker ayelen liberona. becoming sensor mixes art, ecology, and anthropology in an attempt to do ecology otherwise. part of a long-term ethnographic research project on an urban park in toronto, becoming sensor speculates on protocols for an ungrid-able ecology of a 10,000 year-old naturalcultural happening. in this project, ayelen and i engage the expansive mediations of art and the artful attentions of ethnography to remake the naturalist’s notebook. this more-thannatural history of an oak savannah in toronto’s high park offers one approach to cultivating a robust mode of knowing grounded in queer, feminist, decolonial politics. 2 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) introduction: decolonizing feminist knowledge projects in this post-truth world order, where alternative facts threaten to unravel even the most stably constructed scientific claims, it may seem utterly blasphemous to question whether more science or even better science are what we need in order to respond to the dire circumstances unfurling all around us. it is clear that scientific institutions, research programs, and data are under serious threat.1 and at the same time, what should be concerning to scholars of feminist technoscience is that it is precisely in this climate that many appear to be clamping down more fiercely on the myth of science as the exercise of disinterested objectivity in service of securing universal truths. note the protests against the “politicization of science” around the april 2017 march for science, and against efforts to make that march more inclusive. feminist technoscience scholars have long known that science is more and other than what it has claimed to be. but many scientists and their publics still hold on to mythical ideas that assume a clean divide between science and politics. and so perhaps we could take a moment to trouble the desire for a feminist knowledge project that aspires to the status of a science. yes, we need sciences grounded in intersectional feminisms. but we also need to invest our efforts in generating robust forms of knowing (and not knowing)2 that can stand both alongside and athwart science. in what follows, i speculate on the possibilities of a decolonial feminist mode of inquiry that can build on the best parts of science – its situated, embodied, and responsively attuned forms of knowing3 – while simultaneously refusing its foundational logics: the colonial, capitalist, military, mechanistic, and neo-darwinian forms through which science has gained its traction as the sole arbiter of truth. this is a call for a robust mode of knowing that can break from the very forces that science was designed to serve: those capitalist and colonial desires for knowledge forms that facilitate the management of lands and bodies.4 for too long these forces have shaped what we can and cannot know about 3 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) the world. i am looking for ways of knowing that can expose the colonial and extractive logics of the sciences, while holding scientists, their publics, governments, and industry accountable to asking better questions and cultivating more robust modes of inquiry.5 i am holding out hope for a mode of inquiry that can be responsive to the needs of communities, such as those living downstream from the toxic flows of late industrialism, and in the wake of climate change.6 i want to support the creation of knowledge forms that can help us to contest constrained regimes of evidence, unsettle ideas about what modes of attention, objects, methods and data forms are proper to the sciences, and disrupt assumptions about whose knowledge counts.7 perhaps this is what feminist technoscience already does. do we want to call that science? science has commitments not aligned with feminist projects. the regimes of evidence currently marshaled by states and industries operate within a constrained discursive field in which all claims to truth must appeal to a mechanistic world view, one in which forms of life and death are made alienable, extractable, commodifiable and reducible to their parts. other forms of knowing, most especially local and indigenous knowledges, are forced to make themselves legible to this scientific rationalism. other knowledges are either “tolerated” as a matter of liberalism’s bureaucratic principles of “inclusion” and “consultation”, just glossed over, or outright ignored.8 i wonder then whether calls for knowledge under the banner of science will keep us entrenched in forms of knowing that institute hierarchies among life forms, reaffirm western conceptions of the separateness of humans from nature, continue to mechanize and commodify living processes, propagate militarized narratives and technologies, and ensure the continued silencing of indigenous and local knowledges. if this is so, i want to try my hand at inventing forms of knowing otherwise. in order to imagine a robust form of knowing that could stand alongside science – and push back on widespread desires for totalizing, universal truths – it might be generative to begin by building on elements 4 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) of scientific practice that are consistent with intersectional feminist ethics. my long-term ethnographic research among protein modelers who render visible the stuff of life taught me that science is more and other than what we long though it was.9 practitioners of the arts of protein modeling showed that it was possible to eschew idealizations of mechanical objectivity and cultivate a practice of situated knowledge in the laboratory.10 they showed me how scientific rigor has less to do with conventional ideas about detachment, disembodied objectivity, or routinization, and more to do with improvised regimes of care and affective labor. these practitioners showed me their willingness to get lured by phenomena they study, and to get entangled and attuned to the liveliness of matter.11 they also taught me that their best attempts at asserting a mechanical worldview consistently failed to disenchant the living world. in spite of their best efforts at deanimation, in their hands matter remained lively and excitable.12 i saw glimmers of a feminist science in their loves and labors. but scientists working in this field and those working across many other disciplines, and especially in ecology, also insistently show me the mundane ways that colonial and economizing logics still have a tenacious a grip on our imaginations about lands and bodies.13 so while scientific practitioners share so much with artists and anthropologists (especially when you look closely at the affective entanglements that take shape in the course of inquiry), too often scientists are constrained to modes of attention and regimes of evidence dictated by colonialism, capitalism and heteropatriarchy. just as i want to affirm the potential scientists have to render the world otherwise, it clear that decolonial feminist projects must find a way to break from the sciences’ founding logics. if the aim is to break with the colonial ecological imaginary, why not start with the disruptive potential of art? arts-based inquiry, in the form of researchcreation projects that tie thinking together with making and doing, can break the frame.14 art can alter how we sense, feel, and know; arts-based inquiry can expose and subvert the colonial ecological sensorium, and in the process, open up perceptions of more-than-human worlds. 5 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) in the photo essay that follows, i share some field notes two years into a long-term research-creation collaboration with award-winning dancer and filmmaker ayelen liberona.15 becoming sensor mixes art, ecology, and anthropology in an attempt to do ecology otherwise. part of a long-term ethnographic research project on an urban park in toronto, becoming sensor speculates on protocols for an ungrid-able ecology of a 10,000 year-old naturalcultural happening. in this project, ayelen and i engage the expansive mediations of art and the artful attentions of ethnography to remake the naturalist’s notebook. this more-than-natural history of an oak savannah in toronto’s high park offers one approach to cultivating a robust mode of knowing grounded in queer, feminist, decolonial politics. a more-than-natural history of an oak savannah figure 1: high park’s oak savannah. photograph by the author 6 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) becoming sensor experiments with ways to decolonize ecology in a 400acre urban parkland in toronto, which is currently under intensive ecological restoration. the lands in question are remnants of the ancient oak savannahs that used to stretch out across this region. oak savannahs are remarkable happenings that ingather many kinds of beings, becomings, and comings undone. they are composed of widely spaced oak trees, tall prairie grasses, and wildflowers that love to take root in sandy soils. and yet the composition of these lands is not only dependent on “natural” forces. oak savannahs depend on the disruptive force of fire to keep the grasslands thriving and to promote the regeneration of oaks. and for that reason, they depend on people with knowledge of fire and the skills to use this disruptive force to care for the lands. oak savannahs are in this sense naturalcultural formations par excellence.16 their very existence is a record of indigenous peoples’ use of fire to care for these lands over millennia.17 these lands have suffered significantly under settler colonialism. only one percent of the oak savannahs that once stretched out across this region have survived settlers’ grazing sheep, lawn mowers, and development projects. the removal of indigenous peoples from their lands and attempts to decimate their cultures through residential school systems and forced assimilation has had and continues to have devastating effects on individuals and their communities across canada. high park’s oak savannahs provoke another line of inquiry into this history: can we simultaneously ask how this violence impacts the wellbeing of the land? what does a land lose when it is dispossessed of its people? oak savannahs do not survive without people. after years of settlers grazing sheep and mowing the grasses to sculpt the lands into a pleasure park, these lands are now recognized as rare ecosystems, sites of natural and scientific interest. toronto’s urban forestry team has brought in controlled burns in an effort to save the oak savannahs. however, saving the oak savannah’s “nature” seems to be prioritized over addressing the lasting legacies of colonial violence that contributed 7 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) to the degradation of these lands. the lands struggle to survive today precisely because the indigenous peoples who gave this land its contours and significance were removed and their fires suppressed. working without the inclusion of indigenous people, the intensive ecological restoration efforts under way in the park today participate in an ongoing colonial project that continues to enforce the dispossession of indigenous peoples from their lands. can we do ecology otherwise? decolonizing the ecological sensorium one of the most totalizing erasures of colonial ecology has been the disavowal of indigenous articulations of the sentience of lands and bodies, and their inextricable relations.18 affirmations of more-thanhuman sentience are blasphemous to a colonial ecology whose data forms and modes of inquiry tacitly and explicitly assume that bodies and lands must be managed as property, resource and commodity.19 decolonizing ecology demands disrupting our well-rehearsed retorts to the suggestion of more-than-human sentience. we are all familiar with that quick dismissal that reduces claims about nonhuman sentience to primitive expressions of animism or anthropomorphism. consider for a moment however, that the very taboos against animism and anthropomorphism are grounded in colonial imaginations of nature and culture, and that this disavowal of nonhuman sentience is intimately bound up in colonial projects that have taken shape under the guise of the ecological sciences.20 becoming sensor invites us to consider that ongoing protests against the very conception of nonhuman sentiences risk re-colonizing the past, reviving a colonial present, and ensuring that colonial rule over settled lands and bodies endures well into the future. to become better allies to indigenous resurgence projects,21 settlers could start by forgetting everything we thought we knew about nonhuman lives and worlds. this takes serious work. becoming sensor invites us to forget what we thought “nature” was; to forget how we thought life “worked”; and to forget, too, the naturalizing tropes that 8 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) made us believe that living beings “work” like machines, or that forests perform “ecosystems services,” or that “reproduction” and “fitness” were the only valuable and recordable measures of a life.22 it demands cultivating new modes of embodiment, attention, imagination, and new ways of telling stories about lands and bodies. figure 2: sensing, sensitive and sentient. photograph by the author. 9 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) figure 3: decompositions. photographs by the author. returning again and again to this work of de-tuning and re-tuning our sensoria through our work in the oak savannah has inspired the invention an ungrid-able ecology for a more-than-natural history up to the task of documenting this naturalcultural happening 10,000 years in-the-making. it is in high park’s oak savannahs that ayelen and i are learning that it is possible to invent new modes of attention and inquiry for a decolonial, 10 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) queer, feminist ecology. perhaps this will become a place where ecological restoration might get disarticulated from incentivized management schemes that aim to maximize a land’s ecosystems services. perhaps it will become a place where neocolonial moralizing discourses about invasive and native species might start to lose their traction. i imagine that this is also land on which the reproductive imperatives and heteronormative, militarized, and productivist tropes of neo-darwinian survival stories might someday become less salient. two years in, our first attunements are just beginning to sensitize us to what this land is mattering, and what matters to this land.23 doing ecology otherwise: protocols for an ungrid-able ecology figure 4: green flames. photographs by the author. toronto’s urban forestry team has put up signs throughout the park to mark “monitoring plots” where they have done ecological restoration work. these are sites to which parks workers return once every few years to take photographs and record changes, storing the images in an archive at city hall. we take seriously the idea that these monitoring plots are sites where we need to pay very close attention. what is involved in 11 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) monitoring an environment? what would it take to really pay attention to what is happening here? and what modes of attention might be required for a decolonized account of this land? and what, ayelen and i ask, would we have to do to really tune in? becoming sensor in this already sentient world, we are experimenting with modes of attention to learn how to pay attention to this land that has been paying very close attention to all the transformations taking shape around it for so many years.24 plants and trees are themselves remarkably sensitive sensors.25 how can our sensing practices do justice to documenting the beings and doings of an oak tree, let alone the vast numbers of trees and other creatures taking root together across this wide swath of ancient land? we are learning that becoming sensor in the savannah demands subtle attunements of our always already synesthetic sensoria. as long-time dancers our attunements to these lands are always already kinaesthetically inflected and profoundly attentive to rhythm, temporality, momentum, and more-than-human movements of all kinds. our protocols for this ungrid-able ecology are especially attuned to the bodies and movements of the creatures around us, including the plants, trees, fungi, insects, birds, squirrels, dogs, machines, and people, and all forms of living and dying, becoming and coming undone. it is important to note that our protocols are not intended to recolonize these lands with yet more settler colonial stories. rather, these techniques offer an example of some ways to break the consensus of a colonial ecology that is indebted to economizing, militarized, mechanistic, and neo-darwinian logics. these protocols demonstrate how one might begin to refuse the colonial norms and logics of conventional ecology in order to open up to sensing other sentiences. in so doing, they aim to expand the discursive field in which stories about bodies and lands can be told. the aim is to make more space, to push up against the conventional ecological sensorium, so that the sciences do not have the only or final say. perhaps these protocols will help us learn how to ask better questions about what matters to the land, so that in the future we can work alongside ecologists to transform the ways they apprehend the 12 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) world, the questions they ask, and their methods of inquiry. it is by making more room for other ways of telling stories about lands and bodies that, as settlers, we are allying ourselves with the remarkable work of indigenous activists and scholars in the name of decolonization.26 kinesthetic imaging: rendering sentient bodies in an affective ecology we begin from the premise that we are not the only observers on these lands. what changes when we start from the assumption that we are being watched by the trees? what do the trees know? if we learned how to listen, what stories might they tell? if traditional nature photography captures living bodies and turns them into objects of scientific interest, the kinesthetic images ayelen and i compose in the field render the world otherwise. we hack in to our cameras to disrupt the conventional ecologist’s desire to capture clean, clear, legible data. we hold open the aperture long enough to keep our moving bodies in the frame, allowing us to register the moods and energies of the land relationally as we pull at light and color, and participate in the vibration of each happening. as situated knowledges these relational images document the energetics of an encounter, the push and pull between bodies, human, more-than-human, and machine. generated in the act of moving with and being moved by the beings and doings of these lands, these images register ephemeral happenings and offer records of the momentum of our active involution in this affectivelycharged ecology.27 (see figures 1-7) in the act of making kinesthetic images with digital cameras, the photographer does not capture the phenomenon so much as get caught up with it, hitching a ride on what is becoming and coming undone.28 the rotting logs, frilled mushrooms, crumbling leaves, ancient sands, and greening grasses of these lands are not discrete things, they are happenings taking shape through deep time and in the ephemera of now, and now, and now. it is by hitching a ride on the growth movements of 13 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) trees and plants, letting their slow movements lure our bodies, that our kinesthetic images blur the distinction between animator and animated.29 letting the wild arc lines of tree limbs set our bodies and cameras in motion, we experiment with ways to intra-animate with the trees.30 laying these still images out in sequence allows us to animate these dances (see figure 5). these images appear to conjure the otherwise imperceptibly slow movements of tree growth as a dance, with the trees as gestural and expressive dancers. in this sense, our kinesthetic images are what deleuze might call “time images” 31: they animate temporalities otherwise imperceptible or unimaginable, conjuring uncanny planty agencies in a blur of light, color, and movement. our imaging experiments with ways of tuning into what matters to these lands. to reach toward the unknown and unknowable of morethan-human worlds, our images open up speculative modes of attention suggestive of the speeds and slownesses of the light, color, and vibration that a plant or tree might perceive of the urban world racing around it (see figure 6).32 these renderings insist that the glass, metal, plastic, concrete, salt and petrochemicals of the roadways are also inextricable participants in the vibratory milieu of this ecological happening. kinesthetic images of growing grasses can also reveal the energetics of growth, combustion, and decomposition: blades of grass alight in flames in ways that also invoke the fires that these lands so long for (see figure 4). image making in this way allows us to participate in processes of decomposition by refusing to hold still for a focused image. by pulling at time and light we experiment with ways to conjure the unseen, ineffable, and numinous energies unfurling in processes of decomposition (see figure 3). they also help us document the infolding of urban life and park life, teaching us in new ways the impossibility of disentangling nature from culture. taking walks through the oak savannah at night, holding the camera’s aperture open for up to 25 seconds, we are able to render the ways that our moving and mediated sensorium plays with the city lights, generating tracers and tailings from the flickering lights that cut incessantly through the night (see figure 7). it is by playing with excess and fabulation, that 14 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) our ungrid-able data forms toy with desires for scientific legibility while generating ways to channel, transduce, and story the remarkable forms of involutionary momentum taking shape in this affectively-charged ecology. figure 5: dances with oak. photographs by the author. 15 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) figure 6: glass, metal, plastic, concrete, and petrochemicals. photographs by the author. 16 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) figure 7: night walks in the savannah. photographs by the author. notes 1 see the remarkable work of michelle murphy, matt price, nick shapiro and many others at the environmental data governance initiative launched to save environmental data from the trump administration’s 17 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) efforts to shut down the epa. https://envirodatagov.org 2 see de la cadena (2015) 3 see haraway (1997), barad (2007), and myers (2015a) 4 see for example murphy (2017). 5 see for example the write2know project (http://write2know.ca), a social and environmental justice research collaboration with max liboiron and the politics of evidence working group (http://politicsofevidence.wordpress.com), which contested the defunding of science and the muzzling of federal scientists under the harper government in canada, while simultaneously taking a stand for forms of public inquiry responsive to the needs of marginalized communities and for regimes of evidence that expand whose knowledge gets to count in policy making. 6 see for example, fortun (2012), shapiro (2015), liboiron (2016), and murphy (2013). 7 see for example the efforts of the politics of evidence working group (http://politicsofevidence.wordpress.com). 8 see povinelli (2002, 2011) on liberalism and the politics of recognition, and stengers (2010) on the curse of tolerance. 9 see myers (2015a). 10 haraway (1988) 11 this approach resonates with the works of puig de la bellacasa (2011) stengers (2010), and despret (2013). 18 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) 12 see also myers (2015b). 13 hustak and myers (2012) 14 see for example campbell (in press), loveless (in press), and myers (in press b). 15 for more on ayelen liberona’s work see http://ayelenliberona.com 16 on naturecultures see tsing (2015) 17 see johnson (2015) and riley (2013). 18 see for example simpson (2014), geniusz (2009), and kimmerer (2015). 19 on the colonial history of ecology see for example kingsland (2008). see hustak and myers (2012) for more on the functionalist, mechanistic, militarized, and economizing tropes that shape ecological perception. 20 see myers (in press a) 21 thinking with eve tuck and k. wayne yang (2012), and exploring ways to work as a white settler ally to indigenous resurgence projects, i am not employing decolonization as a metaphor: decolonizing ecology requires repatriation of lands to indigenous people. see for example, simpson (2008), simpson and ladner (2010), simpson (2011, 2014), and coultard (2014). see also geniusz (2009) for an indigenous scholar’s approach to decolonizing botanical knowledge. see mastnak et al. (2014) for ways of decolonizing understandings of “native” and “invasive” species. 22 see hustak and myers (2012). 19 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) 23 see myers (in press) and the becoming sensor website (http://becomingsensor.com ) for descriptions of this and other protocols including those for sniffing out chemical ecologies and sounding out the savannah. to tune in on our experiments with kinesthetic listening and imaging see https://becomingsensor.com/portfolio/kinesthetic-imaging/ 24 note that i am deliberately blurring the distinctions here between human and nonhuman modes of attention. there are crucial differences and incommensurabilities among human and nonhuman sensoria, to be sure. but perhaps there are also possible resonances that we have not yet fully grasped. 25 see hustak and myers (2012) and myers (2015b) for reviews of literature on the sciences of plant sensing. 26 see for example todd (2016a &b), l. simpson (2008, 2011, 2014), a. simpson (2007), and tallbear (2013). 27 on “involutionary momentum” and “affective ecologies” see hustak and myers (2012). 28 donna haraway’s (1987) figure of the cyborg reminds us to reckon with the non-innocence of our technologically-mediated sensorium. our cameras are indeed inheritances of militarism and more, and so the work of an ungrid-able ecologist is not without its trouble. “staying with the trouble” (haraway 2016) in the oak savannah requires reckoning with, rather than disavowing, the tricky nature of our always already cyborg sensoria. good cyborgs learn how to hack into and jam hegemonic systems. what would it take to interrupt and reimagine the conventional ecological sensorium? how can we think and work beyond grid-logics, especially when the surface of this very document/page, itself digitally mediated, is bound to a grid? some figures in this photoessay make selfconscious use of automated digital rendering algorithms that make it 20 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) seem like these images were printed, arrayed on a white surface and imaged as tentative, temporary groupings. i treat this as a simulation of a way of one might interact with these kinesthetic images as data forms and expose the limits of grid-thinking; that is by shuffling them together, arranging and rearranging them to make aesthetic and conceptual arguments, always tentatively, to see what stories take shape in between. 29 see stacey and suchman (2012) and myers (2012). 30 see myers (2015a) on “intra-animacy.” 31 see deleuze (1986). 32 for insight into a range of ways plants perceive the world see myers (2014 and 2015b). references barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham: duke university press. coultard, g. (2014). red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition: university of minnesota press. de la cadena, m. (2015). uncommoning nature. retrieved may 4, 2016, from http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/authors/marisol-de-la-cadena/ deleuze, g. (1989). cinema 2: the time image. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. despret, v. (2013). from secret agents to interagency. history and theory, 52(4), 29–44. fortun, k. (2012). ethnography in late industrialism. cultural anthropology, 27(3), 446–464. geniusz, w. d. (2009). our knowledge is not primitive: decolonizing botanical anishinaabe teachings. syracuse university press. 21 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) haraway, d.j. (1987). a manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. australian feminist studies, 2(4), 1–42. haraway, d. j. (1988). situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives. feminist studies, 14(3), 575–599. haraway, d. j. (1997). modest_witness@second_millennium.femaleman_meets_oncomouse: feminism and technoscience. new york: routledge. haraway, d. j. (2016). staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke university press. hustak, c., & myers, n. (2012). involutionary momentum: affective ecologies and the sciences of plant/insect encounters. differences, 23(3), 74–118. johnson, j. (2015). pathways to the eighth fire: indigenous knowledge and storytelling in toronto (doctoral dissertation). communication and culture graduate program, york university, toronto. kimmerer, r. w. (2015). braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. milkweed editions. kingsland, s. e. (2008). the evolution of american ecology, 1890-2000. baltimore: hopkins fulfillment service. liboiron, m. (2016). redefining pollution and action: the matter of plastics. journal of material culture, 21(1), 87–110. mastnak, t., elyachar, j., & boellstorff, t. (2014). botanical decolonization: rethinking native plants. environment and planning d, 32(2), 363–380. murphy, m. (2017). the economization of life. duke university press. murphy, m. (2013). distributed reproduction, chemical violence, and latency. retrieved september 18, 2016, from http://sfonline.barnard.edu/life-un-ltd-feminism-biosciencerace/distributed-reproduction-chemical-violence-and-latency/ 22 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) myers, n. (2015). rendering life molecular: models, modelers, and excitable matter. duke university press. myers, n. (2015). conversations on plant sensing: notes from the field. natureculture, 3 (acting with nonhuman entities), 35–66. myers, n. (in press, a). becoming sensor in sentient worlds: a morethan-natural history of a black oak savannah. in g. bakke & m. peterson (eds.), toward an artful anthropology: between matter and method. london: bloomsbury academic. myers, n. (in press, b). anthropologist as transducer in a field of affects. in n. loveless (ed.), art and/as research. edmonton: university of alberta. povinelli, e. a. (2002). the cunning of recognition: indigenous alterities and the making of australian multiculturalism. durham: duke university press. povinelli, e. a. (2011). economies of abandonment: social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. durham: duke university press. bellacasa, m. puig de la. (2011). matters of care in technoscience: assembling neglected things. social studies of science, 41(1), 85–106. riley, j. l. (2013). the once and future great lakes country: an ecological history. mcgill-queen’s press. shapiro, n. (2015). attuning to the chemosphere: domestic formaldehyde, bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime. cultural anthropology, 30(3), 368–393. simpson, a. (2007). on ethnographic refusal: indigeneity,‘voice’ and colonial citizenship. junctures: the journal for thematic dialogue (9): 6780. simpson, l. (ed.). (2008). lighting the eighth fire: the liberation, resurgence, and protection of indigenous nations (1 edition). winnipeg: arbeiter ring publishing. simpson, l. (2011). dancing on our turtle’s back: stories of nishnaabeg 23 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) re-creation, resurgence, and a new emergence. arbeiter ring pub. simpson, l. b. (2014). land as pedagogy: nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, 3(3). retrieved from http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/22170 simpson, l., & ladner, k. (eds.). (2010). this is an honour song: twenty years since the blockades. winnipeg: arbeiter ring publishing. stacey, j., & suchman, l. (2012). animation and automation: the liveliness and labours of bodies and machines. body & society, 18(1), 1–46. stengers, i. (2010). cosmopolitics, vols. 1& 2. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. tallbear, k. (2013). native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. university of minnesota press. todd, z. (2016). an indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism. journal of historical sociology, 29(1), 4–22. todd, z. (2016). from a fishy place: examining canadian state law applied in the daniels decision from the perspective of métis legal orders. topia: canadian journal of cultural studies, 36: 43-57. tsing, a. l. (2015). the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton university press. tuck, e., & yang, k. w. (2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, 1(1), 1–40. bio natasha myers is an associate professor in the department of anthropology at york university, the convenor of the politics of evidence working group, director of the plant studies collaboratory, and on the editorial board of the journal catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. 24 myers catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) i work alongside michelle murphy as co-organizer of toronto’s technoscience salon, and am co-founder of the write2know project with max liboiron. chandler article     a drone manifesto    katherine f. chandler georgetown university kfc9@georgetown.edu division and asymmetry are hallmarks of drone aircraft. the purported legality of targeted assassinations carried out through unmanned systems depends on the assumption that the onscreen enemy poses an imminent threat, delineating “us” from “them.” as surveillance networks, used to see over the hill or from tens of thousands of meters above, drones separate watcher and watched, reworking the existential quandary between the self and the world for military purposes. drones are imagined as technologies and their teleology determined by factors that exceed what is human, even as the aircraft are accounted for as mere tools (see department of defense, 2013; obama, 2013). they are named “unmanned,” a variation on the gender binary between men and women, even as they disavow the human. conceived as such, drones play into oppositional logics that remain central to western thinking, lethally layered over the question of who is human and what is other. attempts to counter drone aircraft similarly mirror dualisms that frame their use. critics count targets as civilians, whose lives “we” must protect. for some opposed to drones, the images onscreen are akin to video games that become the operator’s framework for engaging with the world, while the machinelike system is the ghostly counterpart of once-courageous soldiers (see benjamin, 2013; chamayou, 2014; singer, 2010). paradigmatic of the failures of drone aircraft are targeted strikes attacking wedding parties, which also reinscribe a separation between the personal and domestic, opposed to the geopolitics of war. efforts to counteract drones continue distinctions between human and machine, combatant and civilian, men and women, and domestic and international. drones, however, insistently fail to fit into the frameworks that overlay them, as discussed by theorists of technoscience and feminism (see asaro, 2013; blanchard, 2011; suchman & weber, in press). networked operations between human and technology underlay the operation of unmanned aircraft. decisions in these networks rely on multiple actors that extend beyond the individual. the transnational cooperation implied by drone missions challenges territorial boundaries and reworks sovereignty, just as the strikes transform the limits of war and who is a target. looking closely at drones reveals their connection to a myriad of changing parts: sensor operators, image analysts, legal counsel, ground forces (see gregory, 2014). more than an aircraft, it might be better thought of as an information system, reliant on satellite, video, radio, and data exchange. drones are not unique in the ways they network together parts that defy coherent selves, strict boundaries, or territorial limits, though their poignancy may stem from the ways they make apparent the political and ethical challenges produced by these crossings and limitations of current frameworks for addressing such confusions. given that drones are irreducible to human and machine, “us” and “them,” “here” and “there,” why do these divisions persist in discussions of and responses to unmanned aircraft? why dissociate the connected parts? i turn to donna haraway’s 1985 [1991] essay “a cyborg manifesto” to explore how its call to reform binary worldviews might be applied to unmanning. indeed, today’s drones might be cyborgs, a point that underscores the text’s cautionary reminder that the synthesis between human and machine it celebrates is first and foremost a product of the cold war military-industrial complex. yet cyborgs and drones remain bastards, never acknowledged for their mixtures. haraway asserts: in the traditions of “western” science and politics—the traditions of racist, male-dominated capitalism; the tradition of progress . . . the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other—the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. (p. 150) the cyborg myth she proposes instead calls for “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (p. 154), articulating a politics that works against the ideals of identity, gender binaries, claims to human singularity, and political divisions between public and private. that drones and the warfare waged with them might characterize the “dangerous possibilities” called for by “a cyborg manifesto” causes me to read the two in tandem, even if this may be a perversion of the political potentials found in the manifesto. transgressed boundaries, however, cannot be disentangled from the military-indsutrial complex and the state, although it is salient that both never recognize drones or cyborgs for their violations. even public responses to drones often rely on these same dualisms, if only in reverse, underscoring their dehumanizing effects. rather than reproducing boundaries between human and other to counter drone aircraft, i instead articulate more thoroughly the connections and confusions unmanned systems create. they make manifest how humans and technologies are coproduced in ways that transform, extend, and refashion limits. by reading drones as cyborgs and situating the history of the systems within the discourse of cybernetics, i explore how drones are not dualistic but instead dissociate the connected parts they link. i argue an effective challenge to the problems raised by unmanned aircraft must explore the contradictory logics that make targeted killing possible, as well as the disconnections they produce. this analysis has two parts. the first examines the jet-powered drone aircraft known as the firebee, developed in the cold war and used as training targets for aerial combat. i show how, by borrowing from the cybernetic discourse of the period, drone aircraft are presented as automata even though humans remain necessary for their functioning. this disjuncture persists as unmanned aircraft develop in the following decades and contemporary drones proliferate. turning to two contemporary responses to unmanned aircraft—george brant’s play grounded (2013) and an action by the feminist antiwar organization codepink, “drone strike on white house wedding” (2014b)—the second part of the paper explores how the separation between human and other also frames reactions against drones, as well as the gendered corollaries layered into this binary. finally, i consider how the human-machine synthesis haraway proposes might offer another approach to the critique of targeted killing. drone disassociations: cybernetic monads and so-called unmanned aircraft experimental efforts to build drones have paralleled the development of flight in the twentieth century (armitage, 1988; chandler, in press; mitchell, 2010; newcome, 2004). notwithstanding the term’s ubiquity today, the name “drone” within the military referred to target planes that trained antiaircraft gunners, an ongoing use dating to the 1930s. whereas early military designations classified guided missiles, target drones, and pilotless aircraft in the same category, designations provided by us congress during efforts to oversee unmanned aircraft between 1987 and 1988 established differences between unmanned platforms and missiles (see mosier, 1988; parsach, 2016). today’s unmanned aircraft differ significantly from earlier systems, incorporating digital computing, composite materials, and satellite communications into the platforms, yet drones from the cold war provide a figure for human and machine relations that presages those of today. most cybernetic research from the science’s mid-century height focused on the analogy between humans, animals, and machines, not the fusion between them (see bowker, 1993; galison, 1994; kline, 2009). early efforts to promote drone aircraft in the cold war borrowed from these analogies, using figures of machine and animal to attempt to emphasize the autonomy of the unmanned plane, minimizing the role of the engineers, technicians, and operators necessary for their functioning. conceived as machine replacements for piloted planes, drones are presented as if they operate in response to their environment as automata. below, i examine this history to consider how drones dissociate human and machine—both integral to their operation—and the ways that “black box” controls hide these relations.  a key example of cold war drones is firebee targets, which are used to this day by all branches of the us military for training surface-to-air, sea-to-air, and air-to-air defenses. the unmanned targets were initially designed in 1948 and built by ryan aeronautical in san diego, california. “the bee with an electronic brain,” an article published by the manufacturer on 15 march 1953, introduces the drone to the american public in the company’s magazine. as the article describes it, “the spectacular ryan ‘firebee,’ from which the curtain of secrecy was recently lifted by the department of defense, is america’s newest turbo-jet, pilotless target drone, capable of near sonic speeds at high altitudes” (1953, p. 12). the jet-powered drone was produced as military aircraft engineered during world war ii became obsolete. as a training target, the unmanned aircraft was used to simulate air attack by high-speed jets built to fly faster than the speed of sound. unlike drones from the world war ii era that were either based on model airplanes or modified piloted aircraft, ryan target drones were designed and engineered to be operated without a pilot. “the bee with an electronic brain” builds on the likeness between unmanned aircraft and the bee established by military researchers working on drones during world war ii, but adds an “electronic brain,” further analogizing machine and organism through the drone’s programmed responses.  although the firebee was engineered as if it would fly on its own, the article explains that “by use of the ground remote control station, the ‘nolo’ (no live operator) aircraft can be flown out-of-sight at high altitudes, while other men on the ground track it by electronic devices” (p. 12). significantly, when the author introduces humans, they are described as being on “the ground,” their relation to the drone is mediated through information. control of the firebee is explained in the following passage: “responding to ghostlike controls that may be miles away, ryan firebee flashes across the sky, ready to simulate fighter plane tactics in sharpening anti-aircraft defenses” (pp. 12–13). a passive controller—presumably a human being—is figured as a phantasm, motivating the action of the firebee flashing across the sky. the description registers the operator as at once distant and disembodied. the firebee apparently acts on its own even though the specter of human involvement remains. as the article later explains, a black box, not the human operator, organizes the electronic transmissions sent to the drone, “governing” the mechanical functions of the firebee. the use of the terms “black box” and “electronic brain,” as well as the naturalized description of a technological system, all draw from cybernetics. “behavior, purpose and teleology” (rosenblueth et al., 1943) served as a foundational text for the theory, and one of this paper’s authors, norbert wiener, later proposed the term, drawing on the greek word for “steersman” to name the new science. wiener positioned cybernetics as a multidisciplinary approach to the study of control and communication. aligning organisms and technologies, cybernetics studies how systems of inputs and outputs act in response to their environment. historian of science peter galison argues that cybernetics articulates humans, animals and machines as “a universe of black box monads” (1994, p. 265). i examine how the monadic unit ties to the firebee’s flight, showing how it is described as if it were governed by inputs and outputs, and indicating how these relations elide human and machine. this analysis adds to previous accounts of the “black box” in cybernetics, showing how the firebee's control system produces a confusion between who or what responds to external conditions. drone action was explained as a machine’s response to its environment, even through the ghostly human operator was integral to its operation. another press image and caption (figure 1), also produced by ryan aeronautical in 1953, linked the black-box control of the firebee to the system’s onboard electronic brain. like a released parasite, the ryan q-2 pilotless drone target plane is launched from its b-26 “mother” plane and streaks out over the desert under its own power during u.s. air force development tests at holloman air development center, alamogordo, n.m. speed and maneuverability of the “firebee” are controlled from the ground by means of a black box remote control which transmits command signals to its electronic “brain.” (ryan aeronuatical, 1953) the caption presents the drone as at once a bee, a parasite, and a baby before explaining how the “electronic brain” and “black box” operate. the firebee was either catapulted from the ground or released from pylons on a converted cargo plane (as shown in figure 1) and landed by parachute. it might have been characterized as a parasite or a baby because the drone cannot perform two of the functions most basic to piloted aircraft—takeoff and landing. after presenting the system as a parasitical technology, though, the next part of the caption ties the firebee to the desert below and seems to presume its separation from its “mother.” written in the passive voice, the “black box,” not a human operator, transmits command signals to the drone’s “electronic brain,” suggesting the system’s apparent autonomy. here, the reader is invited to think of the drone as behaving in response to inputs and outputs, transmitted from the ethereal landscape. the dependency implied in the first sentence of the caption is cycled into the cybernetic operation that occurs in the second sentence. responding to the inputs the firebee parasitically uses, the aircraft streaks across the desert, as if it were controlled by an electronic brain. figure 1. a/bqm-34 technical files, smithsonian national air and space museum, nasm-9a13518 nasm-9a13518-a. in “behavior, purpose and teleology” (rosenblueth et al., 1943), the authors observe that “a torpedo with a heat-seeking mechanism” might be “intrinsically purposeful” (p. 19) as its response is guided by reaction to heat. cybernetics describes action relationally, between object and environment. the focus is on the singular relation between the organism or machine and its environment, rather than their fusion. in the description of firebee, the black box transferred information between operators and the drone. the drone’s movement displaced this interaction, which made the system seem self-propelled, separate from the controller on the ground guiding its flight. “black-boxing” has been widely discussed in science and technology studies. donald mackenzie (1993) provided one commonly used framework for the concept. he defined “black box” through a quote by charles draper, founder and director of the massachusetts institute of technology’s instrumentation laboratory. draper explained that the black box was an ideal arrangement of a self-contained unit that would not be affected by external conditions. for mackenzie, the more specific meaning proposed by draper ties to a broader definition of the black box: “it is a technical artifact—or, more loosely, any process or program—that is regarded as just performing its function without any need for, or perhaps any possibility of, awareness of its internal workings on the part of users” (1993, p. 26). mackenzie comes to this definition by showing how the guidance system developed in draper’s laboratory troubled the idea of an apparently self-contained system, arguing that the guidance technologies were inextricable from their social, scientific, military, and political context. extrapolating from this analysis, mackenzie writes that “the more deeply one looks inside the black box, the more one realizes that ‘the technical’ is no clear-cut and simple world of facts isolated from politics” (p. 381). i want to add to an analysis of the obfuscation that occurs through “black-boxing” by considering the cybernetic system of inputs and outputs that ostensibly controlled the firebee. “behavior, purpose and teleology” explains organism and mechanism as monadic units responding to their environments through inputs and outputs. in this case, the black box does not stand for just self-containment; it is also a system for organizing information. a dictionary definition of the black box explains that it is a “device which performs intricate functions but whose internal mechanism may not readily be inspected or understood; [hence] any component of a system specified only in terms of the relationship between inputs and outputs” (oed online, 2016). what is important about these black boxes is that they do not only propose the self-containment that draper emphasizes, but a singular relation to external conditions. the black box controls on the firebee isolate the technical from the political by displacing human control onto the action of the organism-like machine and vice versa. the firebee acts as if it responded to its environment, even though examination of the inputs and outputs shows that this feedback loop conflates human and machine to produce these reactions. returning to “the bee with an electronic brain,” the article explains that the “push button heart of the firebee project is a small ‘black box’ containing a control stick and switches to govern engine speed and other flight conditions, and to transmit control signals to the drone” (1953, p. 13). here, the black box organizes the inputs and outputs between human and machine to set up the behavior of an apparently singular unit. described as “the heart” of the firebee, the control unit linked the output of the drone, “any change produced in the surroundings by the object,” to the input, “any event external to the object that modifies this behavior in any way” (rosenblueth, et.al., 1943, p. 17), relayed by radio transmission from the operator. the black box created a cybernetic system, even as the control unit, which linked human and machine, undid its “monadic” structure. the pre-programmed “electronic brain” added another layer to the firebee’s operation, automatically stabilizing the response of the aircraft to the input of the controller, as determined by calculations made beforehand. programs and signals that layered together human and technical control made the aircraft's flight possible, even as the firebee apparently “streaked out” across the sky on its own. the controls of the firebee organized human and nonhuman behaviors to create a cybernetic system, even as the “black box” functioned to separate human control from technological action. the elision of human engineering, design, and control with a behavioristic model of technology provided the conditions for the concept of “unmanned” to emerge. the name shows how remotely operated aircraft were distinguished from piloted flight by acting as if no "man" were necessary, though both rely on interactions between humans and machines. the drone is a cyborg, yet the connection between operator and aircraft is obscured, understood instead as inputs and outputs filtered through a black box. haraway (1991) asks the reader to imagine and realize human-machine fusions in ways that escape categorical understandings of these terms. in her essay, the cyborg is slippery and ironic, a bionic man and a woman of color. responses to "a cyborg manifesto" as such have articulated the critical limitations of these fusions, notably in galison’s (1994) analysis of cybernetics and its wartime origins. yet these reactions reproduce divisions between human and machine, rather than working through the stakes of their confusion. in the development of early drone aircraft, interconnections between human and machine are obscured through the monadic rationale of cybernetics. while organism and machine were analogized, connections between humans and machines were literally black-boxed and the role of the operator became ghostlike and spectral. drone syntheses: beyond the “domestic” critique in this section, i take up how dissociation between human and machine has continued in contemporary unmanned systems, extending my analysis to gender and how these categorizations map onto characterizations of drones in domestic and international politics. the contribution of haraway’s cyborg myth is not to mitigate the lethal potential of drone aircraft, but to insist these challenges can only be addressed by considering the networked connections they both produce and are formed by. “a cyborg manifesto,” by turning away from origins and wholes, calls for a politics that does not resolve but rather is parsed out through the complexity of socio-technical relations. above, i indicate how “black-box” controls hide the operation of unmanned systems, which enable drones to act as though they were autonomous. the cyborg approach i advocate, on the other hand, considers how humans and machines act in concert and underscores contradictions that come about when they are separated. contemporary headlines, like the early press releases for target drones, portray the aircraft as if unmanned systems act on their own. consider a recent article, “hacker killed by drone was islamic state’s ‘secret weapon’” (coker et al., 2015). the headline describes how a "drone" targeted and killed suspected islamic state operative junaid hussain, naming him not as a person but as a weapon. here the entire drone strike is figured as a black box, described as machine-like response. of course there are human operators involved in the drone’s mission, but their role and that of intelligence personnel, likely from the united states and britain, remain obscure, as do connections to image analysts, legal counsel, and commanders, and the regulations that underwrite such a strike. according to the article, “the drone” apparently responds to the target, rather than to a network of people and information, which includes participants from the united states, britain, and likely beyond. such accounts continue the cybernetic framework of a singular feedback loop set up between “drone” and “target,” erasing the involvement of human operators and their role in killing junaid hussain. a similar logic is at play in efforts to counter the use of drone aircraft, which also divide between human and machine, here and there, “us” and others. below, i examine two responses to the military use of unmanned aircraft: brant’s play grounded (2013) and codepink’s “drone strike on white house wedding” (2014b). these pieces both raise important questions about the use of drones, reflecting on post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) experienced by operators and the death of civilians in missile strikes carried out by unmanned systems (see also brandt, 2013). the counternarratives they propose have received widespread attention and challenge the purported success the us government claims for the drone program. the attempts to counter drone aircraft nonetheless reproduce dissociations explored in the previous section. by emphasizing how “drones” negatively affect “humans,” the accounts underscore divisions between human and machine rather than addressing the networked connections that are the basis of unmanning. further, these challenges to drones and the global asymmetries they make manifest rely on images of women, children, and the nuclear family that conform with ideals of western, white subjects and “others” they envision. they mirror in these way rather than undermine logics that make drone war possible brant’s play, grounded, first performed in 2013, is a one-woman show about a fighter pilot turned drone operator. the work challenges gendered assumptions about both professions, portraying a female character who by turns is tough, driven, and loyal. after becoming pregnant, she leaves her career as a fighter pilot and joins the “chair force,” flying a reaper mq-9 unmanned aircraft from creech air force base in nevada. over the course of the play, the protagonist becomes increasingly troubled by her new position. she is caught in the monotony of grey-toned surveillance, watching for the enemy for months on end and tapped out by other pilots who participate in the continuous shift work that characterizes drone missions. she develops ptsd, which affects her relationship with her husband and daughter before she is jailed, at the end of the play, for refusing to carry out a strike against an enemy target when she sees a child in the field of attack. the conditions enacted in the play are symptomatic of the experiences of contemporary drone pilots and the dissociative relation between the battlefield and home that they must negotiate. as p. w. singer (2010) notes: [drone] operations have created the novel situation of pilots experiencing the psychological disconnect of being “at war” while still dealing with the pressures of home. in the words of one predator pilot . . . “you are going to war for 12 hours, shooting weapons at targets, directing kills on enemy combatants, and then you get in your car, drive home, and within 20 minutes you are sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.” (p. 32) significantly, though, these concerns take a separation between international conflict and domestic life as given. it is their proximity that raises challenges, suggesting the presumption that war, at least for american military personnel, is not “here.” obviously, this disassociation stands in stark contrast with the experiences of people under wartime occupation, who are exposed to war on a daily basis regardless of their status as military personnel or civilians. why is it presumed that war can be waged in such a way that it will not transform the fabric of one’s life? i raise this question not to minimize the significance of challenges for military personnel who move between war and home on a daily basis, like drone pilots. rather, i suggest that to understand this situation as a problem brought about by drone technology is to miss the particular ideas of wartime distance that it assumes. this can only be seen as a consequence of drone technology if one takes as given divisions between international and domestic spheres and the work and politics with which each is associated. in grounded, blue and grey code the experiences of flying a fighter plane and a drone aircraft, which illustrate how the play reproduces asymmetries between wartime actions “abroad” and what happens “here.” speaking to tiger, the fighter plane, at the beginning of the play, the protagonist says: you are alone in the vastness and you are the blue / astronauts / they have eternity / but i have color / i have blue / i’m in the blue for a reason / i have missiles to launch / i have sidewinders / i have mavericks / i rain them down on the minarets and concrete below me. (2013) as a fighter pilot stationed overseas—“in the blue”—she feels no remorse for her wartime actions. compare her affect to the account of the reaper she flies. no longer speaking to the plane, she has become the system: “back to the grey / it’s funny / the screen isn’t that big / but it becomes your world / like the tv i guess / or the computer / but the grey is / it definitely” (2013). this contrast between blue and grey marks the final moments of the play. caught in the grey images, she confuses the child she sees onscreen for her daughter. watching as another pilot carries out the strike that she has refused to undertake, she says: the team cheers as my daughter dies / as her arms and legs fly off in separate directions / as her pulp is mixed with the car and the prophet and / the sand / as her pulp dissolves into the grey/ there is only grey now / only the grey. (2013) what strikes me about this contrast between blue and grey, here and there, fighter plane and drone is how easy it is for the protagonist to fire missiles against “minarets and concrete.” only seeing the child killed onscreen as her own child precipitates her crisis. why does “blue” not seem equally chilling and problematic? performed as an extended monologue, the play centers on the sole female performer and her trauma, which registers in her domestic life. the only people named in grounded are the pilot’s husband and daughter. the politics that brought about her involvement in the unnamed war, as well as her association with the military hierarchy, are spectral, as is “the prophet,” the target she watches onscreen. the play relies on a solitary woman to stand in for a network of transnational relations imbricated by drone warfare, a negative corollary to media accounts that black-box what happens in military strikes by ascribing the action to the “drone.” grounded reduces the protagonist’s reaction to the political and ethical challenges she experiences in a war to an individual response marked as grey, in which she sees the death of another child as that of her own. the world enacted by the play remains persistently “here” and offers no exploration of the global political relations that are central to the system she operates. this oversight extends to activist actions that have challenged drone warfare. on sunday, 4 may 2014, codepink carried out a performance in front of the white house that became a short youtube video, “drone strike on white house wedding” (2014b). the website explains that the concept came from a hellfire missile strike launched from drone aircraft against a procession of vehicles for celebrating a wedding in yemen on 13 december 2013 that killed twelve civilians (2014a). in the reenactment, a group of participants gather for a staged wedding. a large, two-sided sign features the slogan “here comes the bride” on one side and “here comes the drone” on the other (2014b). for the performance, the blonde bride wears a simple white dress and a crown of pink flowers; her groom is dressed in a suit with a pink bow tie. they exchange vows and rings, kissing each other before reacting to a simulated attack from the sky. the participants in the action fall to the ground, prominent among them the bride and groom, who are covered in white sheets with fake bloodstains. according to a codepink press release, the performance aimed “to educate the public about how terrifying it would be to have the same thing happen in the us, and motivate people to take action against the drones” (2014a).  the concern about the strike is significant and their action builds on a report by human rights watch documenting the deaths (2014).  the purported legality of these targeted killings should be questioned and i support ongoing efforts to hold the united states' government responsible for civilian deaths caused by attacks from unmanned aircraft. however, it’s striking that in raising awareness about drone warfare, the performance replaced the bodies of the targeted yemenis with white americans and modeled the strikes as terror in the midst of marital bliss. why should this typify the challenges of drone warfare for people in the united states? and how is it possible that this scene is conceived as the “same thing” as what happened in yemen? the codepink action, like the final sequence of grounded, uses a domestic scene premised on relations “here” to question drone strikes. what this risks doing is erasing the significant asymmetries and substantially different challenges that confront people being attacked through drone aircraft, in this case in yemen. to understand what happened on 13 december 2013 might call for closer analysis of the wedding attacked, presumably in a way that would emphasize yemeni traditions, not those of the united states. such an examination would also address how the drone strikes may have played into what has now become a civil war in the country, drawing on historical separations between the northern and southern regions, as well as the competing regional influences of iran, saudi arabia, and the islamic state. conceiving the drone as cyborg would show how the networked system challenges the territorial limits of countries. unofficially, the american military has indicated that the strikes were carried out through intelligence provided by the yemeni government (reuters, 2015). given the myriad interests in the region, this cooperation may have extended beyond these two nations. these complications do not absolve the united states of responsibility for the death of civilians. however, they do highlight how critical responses to drone aircraft should address the ways that human and machine networks linked through unmanned aircraft undo straightforward divisions. a us attack on yemeni territory, in this case, seems indicative of the two countries’ cooperation (at least at that time), not their enmity. correspondingly, critical responses to the targeted killings must also work between these categories. a cyborg response to the deaths of yemeni civilians targeted during a wedding might ask how this tragedy fits into what has become a widespread humanitarian emergency, affecting up to 80 percent of yemen’s population (see bbc, 2015). seeing the attack as a strike against a us wedding does not help to understand this context, which more than “the drone” is cause for concern. “i am not not a drone” the closing sentence of “a cyborg manifesto” proclaims, “i would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (haraway, 1991, p. 181)—a refrain that charted a new course for feminisms, machines and others, emphasizing their entanglement. reading this work in the face of human and machine fusions enacted by drone aircraft, however, i want to take seriously that this assertion for the cyborg carries with it the challenges and contradictions of the military-industrial complex, which the manifesto also outlines. haraway offers short, dense commentary on the socio-technologies she thinks will come to characterize the cyborg state: decentralization with increased surveillance and control; citizenship by telematics; imperialism and political power broadly in the form of information rich / information poor differentiation; increased high-tech militarization increasingly opposed by many social groups . . . close integration of privatization and militarization, the high-tech forms of bourgeois capitalist personal and public life; invisibility of different social groups to each other, linked to psychological mechanisms of belief in abstract enemies. (1991, p. 171) i take this depiction as providing alternative avenues to critique how increasingly intricate human and machine systems are used to wage war, drones being a case in point. “a cyborg manifesto” insists that it is not possible to divide “us” from unmanned aircraft, instead calling for a more thorough engagement with drone networks. this means tracing out how drones deploy distinctions between “information rich” and “information poor” to justify the asymmetrical structure between who targets and who is targeted, just as it also suggests a reconsideration of critiques that emphasize “domestic” impacts of drones or innocent civilian bodies, turning instead to the permeability of boundaries between the “personal body and the body politic” (p. 170). the drone as cyborg undoes the newness attributed to a system that was the subject of press releases during the height of cybernetics and in the early period of the cold war. the cyborg reminds us that the problem is not drone aircraft per se, but the ways drone systems tie into ongoing practices of patriarchal capitalism, the legacy of colonialism, and techno-determinism. insisting on the syntheses that are the basis of drones shows how popular accounts dissociate between human and machine, war and home, friend and enemy, men and women, even as the networked operations of so-called unmanned aircraft undo these categories. examining how drones cause deaths, challenge boundaries, and rework practices of governance asks for a more intricate interrogation of the “potent fusions” they incorporate. the negation proposed by “unmanning,” which separates “us” from the drone might instead be replaced by the space of the double negative—“i am not not a drone”—and the responsibility for the human and machine synthesis that would be taken up through such a statement. acknowledgements i am grateful for feedback and commentary on this article from the worldly matters faculty seminar, supported through a global engagement grant from georgetown university, as well as comments from other participants in this issue, especially marisa brandt, and the anonymous reviewers. any errors remain my own. references asaro, p.m. (2013). the labor of surveillance and bureaucratized killing: new subjectivities of military drone operators. social semiotics, 23(2), 196-224. armitage, m. (1998). unmanned aircraft. london, uk: brassey’s defence publishers. bbc. (2015, 15 december). yemen crisis: how bad is the humanitarian situation?. bbc news. retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34011187/ benjamin, m. (2013). drone warfare: killing by remote control. london, uk: verso. blanchard, e. (2011). the technoscience question in feminist international relations: unmanning the us war on terror. in j.a. tickner & l. sjoberg (eds.), feminism and international relations: conversations about the past, present, and future (146-163). new york, ny: routledge. bowker, g. (1993). how to be universal: some cybernetic strategies, 1943-70. social studies of science, 23(1), 107-127. brandt, m. (2013). cyborg agency and individual trauma: what ender’s game teaches us about killing in the age of drone warfare. a journal of media and culture, 16(6). retrieved from http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/718 brant, g. (2013). grounded. croydon, uk: oberon books, kindle edition. chamayou, g. (2014). a theory of the drone. (j. lloyd, trans.). new york, ny: the new press. chandler, k. (in press). american kamikaze: television guided assault drones in world war ii. in c. kaplan & l. parks (eds.), life in the age of drones. durham, nc: duke university press. codepink. (2014a). activists stage dramatic simulation of drone strike on yemen wedding in front of white house. codepink: women for peace. retrieved from http://www.codepinkarchive.org/article.php?id=6717 codepink. (2014b). codepink: drone strike on white house wedding. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hizvcnl2xqe coker, m. et al. (2015, 27 august). hacker killed by drone was islamic state’s ‘secret weapon.’ wall street journal. retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/hacker-killed-by-drone-was-secret-weapon-1440718560 department of defense. (2013). unmanned systems integrated roadmap fy 2013–2038. retrieved from http://archive.defense.gov/pubs/dod-usrm-2013.pdf ehrhard, t. (2010). air force uavs: the secret history. mitchell institute study. retrieved from http://robotpig.net/robotics-news/air-force-uavs-the-secret-history-_1895 galison, p. (1994). the ontology of the enemy: norbert weiner and the cybernetic vision. critical inquiry, 21(1), 228-266. gregory, d. (2014). drone geographies. radical philosophy, (183), 7-19 haraway, d. (1991). a cyborg manifesto: science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. in d. haraway (ed.), simians, cyborgs and natures: the re-invention of nature (pp. 149-181). new york, ny: routledge. human rights watch (2014, 19 february). us: yemen drone strike may violate obama policy. human rights watch. retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/02/19/us-yemen-drone-strike-may-violate-obama-policy kline, r. (2009). where are the cyborgs in cybernetics? social studies of science, 39(3), 331-362. mackenzie, d. (1993). inventing accuracy: a historical sociology of nuclear missile guidance. cambridge, ma: the mit press. mosier, r. (1988). dod joint unmanned aerial vehicle program master plan–1988. washington, dc: tactical intelligence systems directorate. retrieved from http://www.uadrones.net/military/research/acrobat/880627.pdf nasm-9a13518 nasm-9a13518-a newcome, l. (2004). unmanned aviation: a brief history of unmanned aerial vehicles. reston, va: american institute of aeronautics and astronautics, inc. obama, b. (2013, 23 may). the future of our fight against terrorism. national defense university, washington, dc. retrieved from https://www.lawfareblog.com/text-presidents-speech-afternoon parsch, a. (2016). current designations of us unmanned military aerospace vehicles. directory of us military rockets and missiles. retrieved from http://www.designationsystems.net/usmilav/missiles.html#_system reuters. (2015, 29 january). exclusive: us armed drone program in yemen facing intelligence gaps. reuters, us edition. retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-security-usa-exclusive-iduskbn0l22ul20150129 rosenblueth, a. et al. (1943). behavior, purpose and teleology. philosophy of science, 10(1), 18-24. ryan aeronautical. (1953, 26 february). photograph and caption, a/bqm-34 technical files, national air and space museum archives, washington, dc. ryan reporter. (1953, 12 march). the bee with an electronic brain. a/bqm-34technical files, national air and space museum archives, washington, dc. singer, p.w. (2010). wired for war: the robotics revolution and conflict in the twenty-first century. new york, ny: penguin press. suchman, l. & & weber, j. (2016). human-machine autonomies. in n. bhuta, s. beck, r. geis, h.-y. liu, & c. kreis (eds.), autonomous weapons systems (pp. 75-102). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. bio katherine f. chandler is assistant professor of culture and politics in the edmund a. walsh school of foreign service at georgetown university. her research is at the intersection of social and political theory, science and technology studies and new media. she is recipient of the townsend center for the humanities fellowship and the peter lyman fellowship for new media. her current book project is titled “the techno-politics of unmanning: how humans, machines and media assemble drone flight and failure.” microsoft word 71532-1-11-alpert-abrams.docx alpert-abrams, h. (2018). colonial copying in an imperial age. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © hannah alpert-abrams. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical commentary colonial copying in an imperial age hannah alpert-abrams university of texas at austin halperta@gmail.com in the context of colonial studies, digitization is sometimes hailed as an opportunity for liberation. by digitizing the artifacts of colonial history, we can diversify the cultural record, drawing attention to the ways that contact and conflict are embedded in the everyday practice of textual and material production. given that many colonial artifacts have multiple cultural affiliations, digitization can also break down the barriers of access that have kept many cultural producers – including those from indigenous, enslaved, and immigrant communities, among others – from engaging with their cultural and intellectual history. because digitization is largely replicative and descriptive rather than analytic, we might imagine that digitization workers play a relatively neutral role in the freeing of colonial information. but digitization also always enmeshes cultural objects in a new framework of imperial knowledge production. as we digitize, we call on a sequence of mechanisms for replication, description, dissemination, and display that were designed by and for imperial systems and global capitalist 2 alpert-abrams catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) corporations. because the workings of these systems are often opaque, our complicity in these larger systems is difficult to discern. the colonial zapotec twitterbot @diidxayooxho, for example, tweets dictionary definitions from the sixteenth-century vocabulario en lengua çapoteca.1 in situating these definitions within a social media context, it is making fun of the presentism of social media even as it joins other (human) #usatuvoz tweeters in adding indigenous languages to our daily streams. at the same time, the logic that enables @diidxayooxho to serve as a critique of colonialism is dependent on structures created by and for a neo-imperial corporate entity. what does that mean for the creators of @diidxayooxho? for its followers? figure 1. a facsimile of the 1578 imprint of the vocabulario, with associated tweet (córdova, 1578, p.332 verso; diidza’ yooxho’, 2017). colonial digitization projects invite us to think about our relationship with the ways that discourse has been negotiated in the past and in the present. in the sixteenth century, when juan de córdova developed an orthography and a grammar for inscribing zapotec, a language of southern mexico, he treated it as a derivative of latin. some linguists have interpreted his use of accents as indicating an imperfect 3 alpert-abrams catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) sensitivity to the presence of glottal stops and other non-european features. smith-stark (2003, p. 188) argued, however, that the diacritics have no linguistic meaning. he attributed variations in their use to differences in taste between the two compositors who were responsible for setting the type. digitization has further distorted these transcriptive features. in the twitter version, the diacritics have been eliminated entirely to facilitate digital search, and shortened to fit twitter’s rigid character limits (“acerca del proyecto,” 2015).2 cultural conflict (anglophone, spanish, and zapotec) and technological contingencies (typesetting, search, and twitter) shape these transcriptions, both in the colonial dictionary and in its digital instantiation. while these contingencies may appear neutral, they are founded on basic assumptions about language that come from latin (in the sixteenth century) and english (in the twenty-first). we see the same mechanisms at work in the case of optical character recognition (ocr), the process by which digital facsimiles are converted into machine-readable text. ocr is one of the many unseen processes that shape a digital edition. it works by combining an analysis of the pixels on the page with a statistical model of language use in order to identify sequences of characters. in the computing world, ocr has been described as a solved problem because the theory that informs it has been proven sound in the case of modern printed documents. ocr is less effective, however, when faced with documents that deviate visually or linguistically from the expectations built into the system. visual deviation can refer to uncommon typesetting or layout; linguistic deviation refers to character sequences that differ from the statistical norm. consider, for example, the following line of text, taken from a document in the primeros libros collection of books printed prior to 1601 in the americas. the text begins in spanish and then switches to nahuatl, an indigenous language of central mexico. 4 alpert-abrams catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) figure 2. a text in spanish and nahuatl. now consider three automatic transcriptions of the same line: 1. reſp pool a may or parte. ca yeſtnat win ſit 2. reſponſortia mayor paris chairman analyſts 3. reſpi por la mayor parte. ca yehuatzin in each of these lines was automatically transcribed using ocr. the first two were created using language models based on english, the system’s default language. in the first example, the writings of lewis carroll, author of alice's adventures in wonderland and through the looking-glass, were set as the statistical norm. here we can see a transcription that is visually spanish and nahuatl, but linguistically english: a jabberwockylike gibberish. in the second example, which uses the wall street journal as a statistical norm, the language and places of capitalism are insinuated into the colonial document. the third example, which uses a model i developed in collaboration with computer scientists, is based on historical examples of spanish and nahuatl. the misplaced “i” in the first word is caused by the historical use of “resp.” in place of the longer spanish “responden” or even the latin “respondit”. even with our improved model, historical shorthand remains an unreadable deviation from the norm. it has been argued that spanish transliterations of indigenous languages like juan de córdova’s zapotec dictionary changed the very shape of indigenous historical memory.3 the same can be said of automatic transcription, which seeks a compromise between cultural variation and the efficiency of inscription systems. when deviant writing is transcribed with less accuracy than more common linguistic forms, it “dirties” a corpus. this negatively impacts the quality of scholarship on multilingual texts, and places an unequal burden of labor on projects seeking to transcribe deviant texts, like those in indigenous languages. it reinforces the modern, anglophone status quo for digital projects. 5 alpert-abrams catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) one way to address the colonial implications of automatic transcription is to develop more flexible ocr software. projects such as reading the first books, which i managed, are working toward that goal.4 by collaborating with developers, we hoped to help alleviate some of the ways colonial ideas about language are introduced into digital corpora and to develop tools more sensitive to historical memory. like the twitter bot, however, we did so by following procedures and utilizing mechanisms designed to standardize human information for mechanical consumption. disentangling our work from these procedures and mechanisms, and the beliefs that ground them, is a problem that remains unsolved. acknowledgments thanks to everyone who had an editorial hand in this project, including the entire decolonial roundtable, especially mara mills and paula chakravartty; the anonymous reviewers; and the editors at catalyst. the work based on the reading the first books project wouldn’t have been possible without: matt cohen, kelly mcdonough, kent norsworthy, maria victoria fernández, taylor berg-kirkpatrick, and dan garrette. notes 1 1 diidxa' yooxho' (@diidxayooxho) is the creation of rael albert. see: http://www.iifilologicas.unam.mx/cordova/ 2 “as the website explains: “[oudijk] observó que todas las etiquetas, marcadores y signos que se habían introducido en las entradas, así como los diacríticos que se habían transcrito del texto original, representaron un problema para las búsquedas. debido a lo anterior, oudijk eliminó todos los marcadores, etiquetas y signos…” (“acerca del proyecto,” 2015). 3 among many researchers who have considered the history of alphabetization in mesoamerica are kathryn burns, josé rabasa, camilla townsend, and yanna yannakakis. for a useful survey of recent approaches, see gabriela ramos and yanna yannakakis’ edited volume indigenous intellectuals: knowledge, power, and colonial culture in 6 alpert-abrams catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) mexico and the andes. 4 the reading the first books project is funded in part by a national endowment for the humanities digital implementation grant. any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the national endowment for the humanities. you can learn more about the project at sites.utexas.edu/firstbooks. references instituto de investigaciones filológicas. (2015). “acerca del proyecto.” retrieved from http://www.iifilologicas.unam.mx/cordova/acerca.php córdova, j. (1578). vocabulario en lengua çapoteca. mexico: pedro ocharte and antonio ricardo. john carter brown library. archive.org ramos, g. and yannakakis, y. (eds.). (2014). indigenous intellectuals: knowledge, power, and colonial culture in mexico and the andes. durham: duke university press. smith-stark, t. c. (2003). “la ortografía del zapoteco en el vocabulario de fray juan de córdova.” in m. de los ángeles romero frizzi (ed.), escritura zapoteca. mexico: editorial miguel ángel porrúa. bio hannah alpert-abrams is a clir postdoctoral fellow in data curation and latin american studies at llilas benson latin american studies and collections, the university of texas at austin. www.halperta.com. microsoft word giordano-122-1232-1.docx giordano, s. (2017). those who can’t, teach: critical science literacy as a queer science of failure. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(1), 1-21 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sara giordano, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article those who can’t, teach: critical science literacy as a queer science of failure sara giordano university of california, davis sgiordano@ucdavis.edu abstract in this paper, i argue that those of us who have left the sciences proper and moved to feminist studies spaces have continued to do science through our teaching. in a moment when the impulse to do real science is palpitating in our feminist hearts, i suggest that we critically examine the political stakes of our affective attachments and detachments from s/science(s). i consider what it means to be attached to a science that earned its epistemic authority through its co-constitution with colonization and slavery. i argue that passion for science may act to strengthen the relationship between science and truth and conversely, willful refusal and failure may be used to break the bond. i offer critical science literacy as a practice that can directly challenge the epistemic authority of science and be read as "doing science" or more broadly as "rewriting knowledge." 2 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) “we contend that feminist thought can do more than offer us resources for the sciences, rather, we wish to demonstrate that sometimes feminist thought *is* science.” —banu subramaniam and angela willey (2016) “we should be asking the question, asking ourselves, about the aspiration to power that is inherent in the claim to being a science.” —michel foucault, society must be defended (2003) “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.” —judith halberstam, the queer art of failure (2011) for decades, feminist science studies (fss) scholars have debated the possibilities of doing feminist science (giordano, 2014; longino, 1990; roy, 2004; spanier, 1986). one site of interest for these conversations has the “feminist scientist,” that is, the self-identified feminist who is trained as a scientist. here, i turn to this subject-figure but instead of looking for ways to keep the feminist scientist in the traditional science laboratory, i focus on those who have left the sciences proper and found new interdisciplinary homes in feminist studies. i bring together banu subramaniam’s (2009) rethinking of the leaky pipeline metaphor with judith halberstam’s (2011) queer art of failure and sarah ahmed’s (2014) reading of willfulness to rethink how those of us who “failed” at science proper have found ways to produce new kinds of science through our teaching in feminist studies classrooms. i read this kind of “failure” as useful for challenging science’s epistemic authority while also producing new kinds of science. i use this formulation to offer ways of doing feminist science cognizant of critiques of its epistemic authority. indeed, “failure” at science might disrupt that bind by opening up possibilities of practicing feminist critical science literacy as doing science itself. the cfp for this special issue proposes that feminist thought itself is sometimes science. i argue that we must carefully analyze why we might want to make such a claim. simply using a lowercase s and 3 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) pluralizing “science” does not resolve its relation to the epistemic authority established by capital s science from its colonial foundation. that is, i argue that the use of lower case plural “sciences” in part remains attached to that epistemic authority. although we may on occasion want to exploit those benefits, if we do not critically examine our relationship to such privilege, we risk reifying it. in the second epigraph, michel foucault argues that any theory (using marxism as his example) trying to claim the title of “science” must carefully analyze what kind of knowledge and whose knowledge it is trying to delegitimize. he argues that we must be aware of the dangers that come with attempting to benefit from “the power-effects that the west has, ever since the middle ages, ascribed to a science and reserved for those who speak a scientific discourse” (foucault, 2003, p. 10). here it is important that foucault locates the beginning of this epistemic authority in the beginning of western colonization. sylvia wynter (2003) draws on foucault and anibal quijano’s conceptions of power to explain that the colonial and capitalist roots and development of the sciences have produced “man,” thoroughly embedded in a racial hierarchy, through what she calls the “coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom.” we can read foucault and wynter together to understand that claiming inclusion in science risks strengthening and relying on a colonial and racialized form of power that is produced by and produces the possibilities for knowledge and life itself. these genealogies demonstrate the co-construction of science with the globalization of racial hierarchy, both of which together naturalize and justify domination through acts of genocide, slavery, and other forms of exploitation. at the root of the justification for social inequality then is western science (together with philosophy and other modern disciplines). by producing the categories of human/nonhuman as forms of natural (yet flexible) racial difference, capitalism becomes justified as a natural (yet flexible) economic system (melamed, 2015). i begin from this understanding of s/science as always political and implicated in these histories of exploitation. that is, the goal of science is not the innocent goal of “understanding nature” but rather a 4 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) political project of producing “nature.” the question i raise in this article is how to keep central the political justifications and potential consequences of working towards feminist sciences. in this article, i analyze our affective relationships to science. i suggest that the ways we describe science and our feelings about it can reinforce or destabilize the epistemic authority usually conferred upon it. i end with a focus on critical science literacy as one example of how “failing” at doing science research proper may be seen as a feminist science practice that explicitly unsticks science from truth and therefore opens up possibilities to unstick being/power/truth/freedom from coloniality. i argue that critical science literacy can be seen as a practice in “rewriting knowledge” (wynter, 1984, 1994). i use literacy to mean the ability to both read and write (produce). i use critical (as in feminist) to signal the “re”-writing of science through the practice of this kind of literacy. i offer this as a “failure,” as a rejection of capital s science, maybe even an anti-science, a willful refusal, perhaps the heretical turn we need to disrupt the epistemic authority of science (that is, the assumption that science = truth). affect—specifically passion, desire, and fear—polices the bounds of proper science and the questions appropriate to it. i suggest here that a big part of our desire to engage with science is our desire to prove that we (women and feminists) can do it. i explore the importance of proving that we can do science at the same time as i examine the possibilities of embracing a can’t-do attitude toward science. sara ahmed (2004) argues that emotions are political, not simply individual psychic truths, and that emotions “do things.” she introduces the idea of affect as “sticky” in her analysis of how happiness is used to maintain the assumption of the family as a social good. she argues that “affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (p. 29). rehearsing happiness as the appropriate affective response to the family creates a stronger attachment between the family and social good through what she calls “affective economies.” to succeed in this economy of happiness, then, is 5 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) to be happy about the family and participate in circulating more happiness through love of your family and/or the idea of the family. ahmed argues that when one is unhappy about the family, they are seen as the problem—the source of unhappiness for all. however, she also posits that we might analyze unhappiness to show that the family is not necessarily a social good. in this way, unhappiness might be able to unstick this relationship. she labels those who disturb these attachments as “affect aliens” or “feminist killjoys.” for the love of science: we can do it! in recent years, we have seen a growth in feminist science studies faculty positions and curricular innovations in feminist and women’s studies departments. as a feminist studies professor trained as a scientist, this has been good news. i noticed something of interest in recent years as i have interviewed, worked, attended conferences, and retrained in feminist studies. my humanitiesand social science-trained colleagues are not just impressed by my science credentials but often explicitly interested in hearing the “real” scientific details of my research. as i have worked in feminist circles, i have noted that when giving talks i am assured that “we can understand it [science]” and asked to share more graphs and data so that my colleagues might engage with the science of my work. in some ways this marks an exciting shift in women’s studies. feminist scientists have much lamented that our colleagues sometimes act as if there is no way that they can understand science or technology (fausto-sterling, 1992; subramaniam, 2005). at the same time, i wonder what is at stake in claiming that we can understand science and how, in such claims, “real” science is being defined. in an exemplary case, anne fausto-sterling (1992) concludes her notable essay “building two-way streets: the case for feminism and science” by naming her affection for science and then saying she is not going to spend time on it. she also states that she believes we should be talking about love and pleasure as it relates to science. fausto-sterling lets us know that she takes great “pleasure from observing the natural world” and is “distressed” (p. 347) to see students not care about the physical world. i agree we should be (carefully) discussing our affective relationships to science, nature, and our physical worlds. by introducing this side note about her love of science but not exploring it in detail, this affective claim is left as evidence of a certain kind of unexamined truth about a natural draw to science. as a highly influential treatise on fss, 6 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) this casual mention of science-loving naturalizes this discourse for the field. drawing on ahmed (2004), i explore here what work “passion for science” does in feminist communities. enthusiasm for science is an important feature of popular understandings of who is capable of doing science in this moment. therefore, showing passion towards science individually and collectively as feminists is part of showing that we have the aptitude to do science. but who can do science? in the latter part of the twentieth century, we see a move away from the figure of the dispassionate scientist to one that “could be celebrated as passionate, motivated, socially networked, energetic, and creative—virtues of entrepreneurialism” (murphy, 2012, p. 71). today, the popular image of the scientist (inevitably white and male) has become a fun, nerdy, brainy subject who is passionate about data, numbers, and problem solving through science while simultaneously remaining socially unaccountable (willey & subramaniam, 2017). indeed, as i have argued previously, the passion to do science acts as a colorblind and gender-blind correction to discriminatory assumptions of natural aptitude (giordano, 2017). however, the idea of a natural predisposition has always gone hand-inhand with having the passion to do science (willey & subramaniam, 2017). just as feminists may question the political utility of arguing that women are as smart as men, instead of challenging the idea of intelligence itself, i argue here that we as feminists may have fallen into the same trap with passion for science. the many stories of budding feminist scientific passions squashed by sexist teachers, parents, or the “system” are repeatedly invoked to explain the underrepresentation of women in science careers. feminists must do more than show that we too have this passion for science and instead question more deeply what this passion is, how is it produced, how it operates, and what it means that it is directed towards this object called science. feminist scientists who have moved to feminist studies programs from the sciences can play a particular role in telling stories about how and why we left the sciences proper. even those of us who succeeded to the point of receiving phds in the sciences, thereby forever holding paper rights to the title “scientist,” but who do not continue to practice science are part of the statistics of women who leaked out of the pipeline. many of us begin with stories of passion and love for science and discovery of our natural and physical worlds (clarke, 2001; faustosterling, 1992; fox keller, 1977; weasel, 2001). reading narratives of feminist scientists’ complicated love affairs with science may help us to understand more about the political meaning of our affection. for example, evelyn hammonds, now a historian of science who began her phd training in physics, responds to aimee sands in the often-taught 7 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) interview published as “never meant to survive: a black woman’s journey” (hammonds & sands, 1993) by saying that she always liked science and wanted to do more after being exposed to doing science on her own through a chemistry set that her father bought her when she was a child . however, she also says that she had an interest in doing as much science and math as possible because she knew that would help her get into a “good college” (p. 208). science’s deep imbrications in networks of power make it impossible to tease out a pure love or passion for scientific discovery outside of the desire for access to power. hammonds retells the story of how during what was supposed to be a “fun” summer math program, she and the two other black students were not having fun because they were not able to keep up due to differences in previous education compared to the white students. this is an example of how passion and exhibiting a desire to do science cannot be considered separate from the ways racism, sexism, and other systems of power differently educate and expose people to what are considered the proper objects and backgrounds in science. ruth hubbard further points out that taking pleasure in observing our “natural world” is classand race-based, as many people grow up without “nature” around them (hubbard et al., 1993). i have argued here that feminists circulate stories about having childhood passions for science to disrupt the idea that the numbers of boys and girls in science reflect their natural aptitude or interests. but a careful political analysis of our passions also reveals the danger in relying on a naturalized idea of passion rather than investigating the epistemic power of science. i wonder if we risk reifying the idea that science is the best truth-telling method. that is, do we read all desires to investigate the world around us, our bodies, and our communities as scientific passion? drawing on hubbard et al. (1993), i ask, when other options for truthtelling are available, what choices could we make? how might we think about the ways that we continued those passions for discovery without proper science? how might we strategically and ethically develop our feminist scientific passions? as i move towards offering some answers to these questions, i suggest we explore the possibility that we can’t do science. we can’t do science: reading ignorance, fear and failure as willful resistance if we read our reasons for loving science as more complicated than evidence of our innate attraction to the field, what might fear, hatred, or mistrust of science, or even scientific illiteracy and ignorance of scientific 8 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) facts, mean? now that i have explored and critiqued claims that we can do science, i turn my attention to reasons why we can’t do science. i look at ways that we can’t in two senses: first, being unwilling to, and second, having been stopped from pursuing our scientific dreams. i continue with my argument from the last section about the unequal power between science and feminism and explore what some uncommon forms of resistance to that power imbalance might look like. in the last section, i read the relationship between science and passion or love for science through ahmed’s concept of sticky affect to argue that passion and love for science attach science to truth. i argue that the absence of that “proper” affective relationship to science, through hate, disinterest, and willful refusal, may detach science from truth (similarly to how unhappiness may unstick the family from the social good). fear and ignorance of science are often cited as the primary ways in which women’s studies contributes to the impossibility of feminist sciences. where individuals express an anti-science position as a political response, there is often contempt for it. for example, in discussing the importance of a scientifically literate feminist studies, fausto-sterling (1992) shares that “at the extreme (but not particularly uncommon) are students who view a refusal of scientific knowledge as an appropriate political stance. to say i find such attitudes distressing is to vastly understate my feelings on the matter” (p. 338). she continues: “i often experience my students’ refusal to explore certain aspects of human knowledge as a willful anti-intellectualism” (p. 339). feminist science studies scholar banu subramaniam also uses “willful” to describe the pattern of her women’s studies colleagues’ refusal to be scientifically literate. she describes a colleague coming to her office to ask about breast milk production as an example. she continues to express frustration at the entire field’s ignorance of science as a systematic “willful refusal to be scientifically and technologically literate” (2005, p. 235). the example of asking a evolutionary biologist who studied plants about breast milk shows us not only a misunderstanding of how science works but an assumption that scientists know about everything having to do with science and health—a good example of “reverent disdain” (willey & subramaniam, 2017). i am not as interested in teasing out the specifics of this illiteracy problem here, but i will note the significance of an intentional, willful refusal to engage with science. what might a willful refusal offer? i suggest we have focused more on how it does not serve feminism than how this refusal might also serve the goals of feminist science. the willfulness that fausto-sterling and subramaniam lament might be read instead as an important, political resistance to science. 9 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) ahmed (2014) argues for the political value of willfulness, producing a willfulness archive of how this charge has been made against those who threaten the social order or who are disobedient, as a way to dismiss and/or discipline them. therefore, her popular feminist killjoy figure may be read as a politically willful subject. although she cautions us that not all acts of self-proclaimed willfulness are politically righteous, she does give us a reason to pause before denouncing and dismissing an act as willful. a common metaphor used to discuss feminism and science is that of two cultures (subramaniam, 2005). if we consider the power differences between different cultures, we might see how a non-english speaker living in an english-speaking country and refusing to speak or learn english may be read as a political act of willful refusal against cultural imperialism. to be illiterate in this case might be an important act of resistance. how might we use this analogy to think about scientific illiteracy? in jean barr and lynda birke’s (1998) work on women and adult science education, they describe what is commonly seen as “ignorance” of science as potentially resistant. barr and birke found that sometimes the women they interviewed chose non-scientific explanations to describe the “natural” world even though they knew the scientific ones. they also point out that emily martin (2001) has similarly argued that what might at first appear as scientific illiteracy among working class women was actually a resistance to medical authority on the subject of menstruation. therefore, barr and birke (1994) argue that women are not just “alienated” from science, but also actively resist science. next i explore some of the reasons why we might need or want to resist the power of science. both ruth hubbard, a trained biologist and the first woman tenured in biology at harvard university, and feminist philosopher sandra harding respond to fausto-sterling’s “building twoway streets” essay by taking issue with the way fausto-sterling talks about women’s chosen ignorance about science (hubbard et al., 1993). hubbard argues that she is also concerned that feminists do not know enough about science but explains this as a consequence of women’s exclusion. she points to the systematic ways that those disenfranchised are kept ignorant about science and kept away from its epistemic power (p. 45-48). sandra harding demonstrates the deep historical roots of this exclusion and makes a call for us to interrogate those legacies for western sciences (p. 49-55). these points are relevant to how we judge scientific illiteracy by feminists or by populations that have been systemically harmed and/or kept out of science. they are also important to how we move forward in engaging with science. it is vitally important to remember that many of us were unable to do science because it we were denied full access. feminist studies 10 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) scholars who were trained as scientists have documented how we were unable to do science in proper science spaces because of direct discrimination or because we asked questions that were inappropriate for science spaces (fox-keller, 1977; roy, 2004; giordano, 2014). hubbard et al. (1993) discuss the ways that once you start to analyze science itself and ask questions, you are not welcome. this points to a problem. we can’t do science the way we need to once we begin to be exposed to feminist critiques of science. there are systematic ways that we are stopped from pursuing feminist science questions and feminist methodologies. toward a queer science of failure: embracing science literacy and illiteracy in the undoing of science and doing of new queer sciences in the queer art of failure, judith halberstam argues that “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2011, pp. 2–3). i draw on this idea to propose a queer science of failure that is focused on the ways that failing, unmaking, undoing, and not knowing science may lead to a more just world. i use the word queer to suggest not only a challenge to capitalism but also a challenge to the categories of human/nonhuman and normal/abnormal that science has enforced and drawn on for success. halberstam argues that we can read a history of successes and failures under capitalism in multiple ways and suggests reading the history of failures as “a tale of anticapitalist, queer struggle” (2011, p. 88). however, drawing on foucault’s (1976) earlier example of marxism, we must remember that a new anti-capitalist science in and of itself will not necessarily “unsettle” (wynter, 2003) colonial, racial, and gendered power. i find usefulness in wynter’s emphasis on not only the coloniality of power but also the merging of being/power/truth/freedom because what is at stake in unsettling coloniality is the definition of the human itself. this point is an important place of shared concern between feminist science studies and decolonial and postcolonial studies (pollock & subramaniam, 2016). i read wynter’s call for a new science (2003) to produce a new descriptive statement of the human as similar to the stated purposes of this special issue to read feminism as “doing science.” however, i suggest we hesitate before embracing the term “science” and go back to wynter’s (1984) earlier calls for “rewriting knowledge.” this new science/rewriting of knowledge is about undoing the disciplinary boundaries and truth that produce “narratively 11 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) condemned status[es]” of others/nonhuman humans (wynter, 1994). it is also about “unsettling” the relationships between being, power, truth, and freedom that were stuck together through processes of colonization (wynter, 2003). what can we gain from reading feminist scientific “failures” differently? in critiquing the much-used metaphor of a science pipeline, banu subramaniam (2009) questions our obsession with plugging the leaks and wonders whether the metaphor of the pipe itself may be the problem. she asks whether a reorientation to the metaphor might have us celebrating escape from the pipe instead. birke also critiques the practice of using scientific education to make people fit better into a science that is not meeting our needs: “many people perceive things to be not quite right in the science camp, while scientists and educationalists are wondering how to persuade more people to pitch tents there” (1991, p. 17). reading this together with halberstam’s (2011) queer art of failure, we might ask, have feminist scientist “defectors”1 left the science camp, broken out of the pipeline and produced a “queer science of failure” that we should celebrate? and if so, then how should we read desires and calls for laboratories of our own so that we do not simply continue building that same pipeline through new territories, colonizing more area by pitching science tents? i argue that if we focus on the political consequences of our arguments we can use them to say we need laboratories of our own to fulfill our passions to produce knowledges about our worlds and bodies. this would mean broadening science rather than simply gaining inclusion in science as it is. in defense of scientific illiteracy, and unknowing science independent artist, filmmaker, and activist lucía egaña rojas writes in “notes on a transfeminist technology” (2013) that “a transfeminist technology will value illiteracy for its improductiveness for industry, as a way of finding paths unimagined by speed and productivity.” rojas advocates creating new worlds by being gender illiterate and acknowledging how the positive relationship between epistemic power/authority and literacy devalues the knowledge of many of the world’s poorest inhabitants. i draw on rojas’s exploration of illiteracy before i delve into an argument for critical science literacy to leave space open for the importance of scientific illiteracy as a failure that threatens the supremacy of scientific knowledges. although it is not the goal of this article, i hope this opens up questions about what kinds of scientific illiteracy we might embrace to destabilize science and remake knowledge 12 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) production. decolonial activists in south africa who were part of the fees must fall movement (that stemmed from the rhodes must fall movement) came under intense fire when some suggested a total abolishment of science was necessary to remake new sciences. a video of one activist speaking at a university event about science went viral in october 2016 with the hashtag #sciencemustfall. the online commentaries showed how attacks on science were used to delegitimize the activists’ movement. the activist’s description of science as a colonial project that needed to be abandoned was not just rejected but taken as evidence of ignorance. yet, the activist also mentioned in her brief comments that she was once a science student and suggested that it is because of the boundaries of what counts as real science that she did not continue in the sciences. she is another one of the science failures that i suggest we listen to and engage with as we rethink feminist engagement with science. my point here is to foreground what might be called an antiscience approach to creating new knowledges before i move into reclaiming science teaching as science, to argue for undoing and unknowing science—failing at science. “those who can, do. those who can’t, teach”: teaching critical science literacy here i come back to those of us trained as scientists who have ultimately failed to continue in science proper. i use these case studies to develop the idea of teaching critical science literacy as part of a queer science of failure. i use “queer science of failure” to attach science to both “queer” and “failure” and claim the practices i outline below as knowledge production activities themselves, as always political, and always challenging capital s science. many of us defectors are not able to return to lab bench science for the reasons mentioned above. however, i posit here that we continue to engage in science through our teaching. we might further read the popular saying meant to devalue teachers through ahmed’s (2014) work on willing and willful subjects. the failure to “do” science then might be seen as a willful political gesture against a science that reproduces injustices. i argue that the defectors among us can’t do it any longer. we often try to stay in the sciences and make change from within. at some point, however, we realize the limits of our work from within as feminist spies.2 when being feminist spies is not enough, we have to imagine other ways of becoming knowledge producers. i argue that many of us, when we just can’t take it any longer, turn to teaching critical science studies, thus creating our own feminist science labs in 13 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) women’s studies classrooms. and by turning to teaching, specifically teaching in women’s studies, we not only fail at being a part of science proper but also fail at capitalism. halberstam’s goal in the queer art of failure is to use examples of art “to think about ways of being and knowing that stand outside of conventional understandings of success,” arguing “that success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation” (2011, p. 2). we defect and choose to take lower-paying jobs, devalued in not only economic terms but in social status and power. perhaps claiming that we choose this route of failure (teaching) is giving too much agency to us without acknowledging the historic ways that people of color and women are overrepresented in these underpaid professions. as i point out in the previous section, many of us can’t do science because we are systematically kept out of the practice. while acknowledging this, here i collapse these reasons for not being able to do science into one failure to examine. i suggest we pause to embrace this queer failure. this failure might lead us to undo science through our teaching of critical science literacy or “und” the legitimacy of science as a neutral method or set of disciplines that can be compatible with feminism/feminists. at the same time, i argue that through this kind of teaching and delegitimizing of science, we create new definitions of science—ones that are politically grounded in social justice and the politics of location—so we are therefore also “doing” or creating new sciences (lower case, plural). subramaniam (2005) asks “what would it mean for women’s studies to engage with the sciences as its own? not at arms length, not with fear, not with paranoia, but owning it as ours to shape, to empower? what would it mean for us to have laboratories of our own?” (p. 238). to answer this question, first, i argue that we need to acknowledge that the reasons people fear of science are real and not paranoid delusions of potential harm. i also like the idea of owning science as our own. how might we then move forward in utilizing science, then, while holding on to why we should be fearful and so as to not reify unjust power? here i outline how we can move forward with an ethical and politically strategic engagement with science through critical science literacy. there are two parts to this. first, we must undo science by expanding access to a kind of knowledge that is traditionally kept out of the hands of marginalized groups so that we might better critique the epistemic authority of science. second, we must do new sciences by expanding or changing the definition of science to include our pedagogical approaches as part of “doing science.” throughout, it is important that we leave space for resistance through non-engagement so 14 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) that we are not positioning ourselves in opposition to those willfully resisting engaging science through illiteracy. we must instead understand the importance of multiple strategies of resistance. i posit there is a disjuncture between what we are saying and doing. we keep saying we need to do science. but what if we stop and see what we are already doing? we can be politically strategic about how we redistribute power—particularly epistemic privilege—through our feminist critiques of science and critical science literacy work. nearly all science-trained feminists have published on education or pedagogy in some form since leaving the sciences (including barad, birke, faustosterling, hubbard, roy, weasel, whatley, and myself). if we give up on the metaphors of two-way streets and two parallel worlds that each need to equally change and instead take up the idea of science and feminism as an unequal pairing, with science occupying a privileged place, we might go back to feminist antiracist politics instead. coming from this position we might see our role as feminists trained in the sciences as helping to teach critical science literacy skills based on our first-hand knowledge of the sciences. and through this understanding we might take this parallel further and find a more liberatory science laboratory practice focused on redefining sciences both inside and outside the academy. this brings me to the first part of my proposal for a politically just, critical science literacy project: our teaching is about producing new scientific knowledges. many of us scienceand non-science-trained women’s studies professors may be teaching and engaging with science without realizing it. for example, as part of the national science foundation (nsf)-funded two-way streets project, bates college faculty (baker, shulman, & tobin, 2001) found that women’s studies faculty at first saw science as something that needed to come from outside their classes and research. however, they found to the surprise of organizers and faculty participants that the feminist studies faculty were able to produce critical science studies curriculum from science that they were already engaging with in their teaching and research. that is, there was an assumption shared by the feminist scholars that they did not really do science or understand science. i am making a claim here that critical science literacy is not simply learning how to read or engage with science but is doing science itself. to make this claim, i use feminist science studies and a basic definition of literacy to define the terms “science” and “literacy.” i begin by going back to the foundational science studies tenet that all scientific knowledge is socially situated. that is, science is not ever simply produced in scientific laboratories.3 feminist philosopher helen longino (1990) uses this principle to argue that we cannot have feminist science 15 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) until we make culture itself feminist. i suggest here that we read critical engagement with science as a more direct form of intentional scientific knowledge making. the second definition we must understand is that of “literacy.” literacy is not simply the act of reading but is defined by the ability to write. although basic science literacy is usually taught as a way for the public to engage in science believing rather than science making, feminist critical science literacy is part of a tradition of producing responsible scientific actors across disciplines (giordano, 2017). why do we see science literacy as simply reading or understanding science rather than the ability to write it? in this case, i identify critical science literacy as re-writing scientific knowledge. the idea of broadening the responsible actors of science is popular among feminist science studies scholars. for example, in karen barad’s (2001) work on agential literacy she explains that one of her courses “was designed to enable students to learn science while thinking about science, and to learn that thinking about science is part of doing science” (p. 240). similarly, in common science barr and birke (1998) define a critical science education as one that broadens our definition of those responsible for and those who should take part in science: “a critical science education would, in consequence, involve working with women’s groups in the community, drawing on their own agendas, whether to do with housing, health, roads or the environment, in an effort to develop more broadly based ‘scientific communities.’ the kind of science education we envisage here is an aspect of citizenship education of ‘pedagogy through politics’ rather than a pedagogy centered solely on the classroom” (p. 136). the point here is that science education, which i argue is science making, is not simply about discovering truths but instead is about producing politically and socially directed knowledge— knowledge that is about intentionally redefining ourselves, the human, and our world. this brings me to my second point, which is that we must carefully define the need for science literacy. i argue that we should see it as producing knowledge about our worlds and bodies through a redistribution of epistemic authority. a queer science of failure that is based in science literacy would allows us to challenge old knowledges and create new knowledges. one way to question science is to critique the philosophical aspects of the field. another is to learn to read science and critique the methods and results of specific studies (whatley, 1986; barr & birke, 1994). in part, science maintains a special status because its products are not accessible to a wide range of people. there are physical barriers to finding science articles as well linguistic barriers to reading science writing. one practical and useful role for science studies scholars, 16 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) especially those trained as scientists, is to make it possible for more people to understand scientific practice and writing. once again, this is not a new idea. here we might want to think about returning to teaching and critique as queer failure at producing the “new.” whatley (1986) argues that “what is more crucial than just supplying more accurate information to use as ammunition in debates is to help students develop alternative hypotheses, to see the roles social, cultural, and political factors can play in what appear at first to be biological issues” (pp. 186-187). she gives examples of how this can be incorporated into physical education classes to help students develop an understanding of physical ability, hormones, strength, and the social aspects that co-produce each of these concepts. more recently, deboleena roy’s (2012) detailed methodology for reading and engaging with science was included in a handbook for feminist methodologies. in my own teaching and research i have developed a kind of critical science literacy practice (giordano, 2017). my students learn about the process of how science moves from the laboratory to publication, how to track down the primary science publications that popular news report on in brevity, and how to apply feminist critiques of science to understand and engage with scientific results. in upper-level classes, students draw on these skills while bringing together a wide variety of knowledge sources to collaboratively produce zines about science and health topics. this practice has produced organic engagements with science. for example, in one semester students used the skills developed in the course to produce a strategic collective response to anti-immigrant population control environmentalism propaganda that was circulating on campus and in the larger community around earth day. in this case, the relationships between who counts as “human” and how scientific discourses are mobilized in environmental discourse to control the movement of bodies and capital was clear. in this way, queer critiques of science allowed the students to challenge racist, anti-immigrant arguments, thereby producing new knowledge about our bodies and worlds. i argue that each of these examples illustrates not simply reading and critiquing science but important engagements and the doing of science in women’s studies classrooms. i argue for a queer science of failure in which we revalue teaching and education and redefine science as not simply what is done in proper wet labs. although i have focused on those of us with science phds in this article, i conclude by suggesting we consider counting all of us as “failures”—including those of us who dropped out of the pipeline in elementary school, those of us who never found our way to the pipeline to begin with, and those of us who had to hack our way out later downstream. this means that we must make room 17 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) in feminist spaces for those without science phds to be legitimate critical science literacy educators and producers of scientific knowledge. critical science literacy and teaching is but one form of many possibilities for new sciences. i suggest we embrace an irreverent disdain for traditional science and instead practice feminist science by always keeping central the epistemic power that we are challenging, using, and risk reifying through our claims to “do science.” i encourage others to build their own archives of queer sciences of failure. what might willful resistance look like within and outside of feminist classrooms? how might we create space in these times for a much needed anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production? notes 1 those of us who left the sciences proper do not universally embrace the term defector. 2 deboleena roy (2004) uses the term “feminist spy” in passing to describe the challenge of being a feminist pursuing her phd in the natural sciences. 3 also, much of the work done by scientists in proper science spaces is not conducted in laboratories either. lead researchers spend much of their time writing grants and journal articles and supervising student workers and laboratory assistants, rather than working directly with hands-on experimentation. references ahmed, s. 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(2005). “laboratories of our own: new productions of gender and science.” in e.l. kennedy & a. beins (eds.), women’s studies for the future: foundations, interrogations, politics (pp. 229–42). new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. 21 giordano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) ———. (2009). moored metamorphoses: a retrospective essay on feminist science studies. signs, 34(4), 951–980. doi:10.1086/597147. subramaniam, b. & a. willey (2016). call for papers, special issue: science out of feminist theory, catalyst:feminism, theory, technoscience. whatley, m. (1986). “taking feminist science to the classroom: where do we go from here.” in r. bleier (ed.), feminist approaches to science (pp. 181–190). new york, ny: pergamon press. willey, a. & b. subramaniam. (2017). “inside the social world of asocials: nerd masculinity, science, and the politics of reverent disdain. feminist studies, 43(1), 13–41. wynter, s. (1984). the ceremony must be found: after humanism. boundary 2, 12–13(1): 19–70. ______. (1994). “‘no humans involved’: an open letter to my colleagues. forum n.h.i.: knowledge for the 21st century, 1(1), 42–73. ______. (2003). unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument. cr: the new centennial review, 3(3), 257–337. bio sara giordano is an assistant professor with a specialty in feminist science studies. dr. giordano received a phd in neuroscience from emory university in 2008. dr. giordano has worked as an ethics consultant for the centers for disease control and prevention. their research focuses on critical science literacy, the democratization of science and questions of scientific accountability more generally. microsoft word 199-1504-1-jacobson.docx jacobson, s. (2018). among the metavivors: social media and illness narratives of stage iv breast cancer patients. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-24. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © susan jacobson, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article among the metavivors: social media and illness narratives of stage iv breast cancer patients susan jacobson florida international university susanjacobson@gmail.com abstract dominant breast cancer narratives equate early detection and screening with “cure,” advocate for “awareness,” and identify women who undergo treatment for early stage disease as “survivors.” left out of these narratives are the “metavivors”: women and men diagnosed with “incurable” metastatic breast cancer, also known as stage iv. this article uses case studies to profile four women living with metastatic breast cancer who turn to social media to tell their stories: sally, a former civil rights attorney turned breast cancer activist, who uses social media platforms to organize and mobilize stage iv patients to advocate on their own behalf; jane, who plows through databases of dense medical research to find treatments to save her own life; jenny, a young mother dying of metastatic breast cancer who shares her experiences on a youtube channel; and grace, who participates in an early-stage clinical trial that she believes “cured” her, a term eschewed by both the medical establishment and fellow metavivors. 2 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) dominant breast cancer narratives, found in both clinical as well as popular literatures, tend to equate early detection and screening with “cure,” advocate for “awareness,” and identify women who undergo treatment for early stage disease with the heroic language of the “survivor.” these narratives, galvanized by the public activities of organizations like susan g. komen for the cure (hill & thompson-hayes, 2017), are fundamental to the ubiquitous culture of pink ribbons, postage stamps, and fashion merchandising (king 2008). frequently left out of these narratives, however, are what have often been called “metavivors”: that is, women and men who have been diagnosed with “incurable” metastatic breast cancer, also known as stage iv.1 the average life expectancy of stage iv patients is 2-3 years (“living with metastatic breast cancer,” 2010), although new treatments, like herceptin, are extending this timeline for a few (lewis, 2011; mukherjee, 2010). the existence of metavivors challenge the aforementioned “pink” narratives by taking up a critical position that began among feminist intellectuals in the 1970s. these include susan sontag’s questioning the military metaphor of the breast cancer “battle,” which she said fostered a culture that blames the patient for the disease (1978), followed by audre lorde warning breast cancer patients that silence and compliance would not save them, after her own mastectomy in the 1980s (2006), bartbara ehrenreich’s questioning the “cancer industrial complex” after her own diagnosis (2001: 52), and judy segal’s warning that the breast cancer narrative was designed to “evaluate and govern” its victims to the extent that “some stories have become more permissible, and more speakable, than others” (segal 2007). much of this criticism emerges in relation to what donna haraway has interrogated in her examination of the nature of institutional science itself, questioning the claim to objectivity granted to and taken by “masculinist scientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories.” she called for “an earth-wide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different-and power-differentiated-communities” (haraway 1988, 575). 3 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) interestingly, haraway’s words presciently echo the ideas of the early days of social media, which, like the internet itself, was initially theorized as facilitating access to knowledge from multiple sources and multiple perspectives (barlow, 1996; gillmor, 2004; lee & so, 2001; negroponte, 1996). dozens of online forums and chat rooms, facebook groups, youtube channels, instagram pages, and other social media channels are dedicated to conversations among the metavivors, where they exchange information about treatment options, side effects, clinical trials and offer emotional support. social media may provide an outlet for metastatic breast cancer patients to tell their stories, exchange information and, in a meaningful way, circumvent the traditional top-down communication of doctor-to-patient (dray & papen, 2004; klawiter, 200) to potentially enable what haraway (1998, p. 590) describes as a community of situated knowledges, where “partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims.” in other words, metavivors articulate, share, and validate their collective experiences among each other in addition to receiving information about their illness from professionals in white coats. this article uses case studies to explore metavivor communities, profiling four women living with metastatic breast cancer who use social media to tell their stories, and by doing so, expand the characteristics of what arthur frank (2013) has identified as “illness narratives” of restitution, chaos, and quest to include a network of readers, responders and reciprocal influencers. in the following pages, we will meet sally, a former civil rights attorney turned breast cancer activist, who uses social media platforms to organize and mobilize stage iv patients to advocate on their own behalf; jane, who plows through databases of dense medical research to find treatments to save her own life; jenny, a young mother dying of metastatic breast cancer who shares her experiences on a youtube channel; and grace, who participates in an early-stage clinical trial that she believes “cured” her, a term eschewed by both the medical establishment and fellow metavivors. 4 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) illness narratives: restitution, chaos and quest in the wounded storyteller, frank (2013) outlines a framework of three archetypal illness narratives: the restitution narrative, the chaos narrative and the quest narrative. restitution follows a simple narrative arc: “yesterday i was healthy, today i am sick, but tomorrow i will be healthy again” (p. 77). scholars have noted that the early stage breast cancer narrative is most frequently associated with the restitution narrative: women get breast cancer, undergo difficult treatments, including chemotherapy and hair loss, and then slowly get better, putting cancer behind them (e.g., wong & king, 2008). but the stage iv cycle of “scantreat-repeat,”2 where the metastatic patient is never done with treatment, is seemingly at odds with the story of restitution. the second narrative type is the chaos narrative, which frank describes as being the opposite of restitution, as “its plot imagines life never getting better” (p. 97). chaos stories are anti-narratives, “an incessant present with no memorable past and no future worth anticipating” (p. 99), where the subject does not have the ability to engage in reflection. these are stories that cannot be told but can only be lived, frank tells us. the third narrative is the quest. “quest stories meet suffering head on; they accept illness and seek to use it. illness is the occasion of a journey that becomes a quest,” frank writes, noting that “most published illness stories are quest stories” (p.115). frank is not the only scholar to investigate illness narratives. bury (2001, p. 263) also identifies three categories of illness narratives: contingent narratives, which concern the origins of disease, the causes, and the effects on everyday life; moral narratives that account for “changes between the person, the illness and social identity;” and core narratives that “reveal connections between the lay person's experiences and deeper cultural levels of meaning attached to suffering and illness.” kleinman (1988, p. 96) urges doctors to listen “empathetically” to patients’ stories to better understand and manage their treatment. “each 5 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) patient brings to the practitioner a story. that story enmeshes the disease in a web of meanings that make sense only in the context of a particular life,” kleinman writes. he encourages medical practitioners to think “beyond the languages of molecules and drugs to include the language of experience and meanings,” in order to address quality and meaning of life issues of the chronically ill (p.266). kleinman’s approach to the chronically ill may be particularly resonant with metastatic breast cancer patients, who may live with their illness for several years before succumbing to the inevitable. two of the stage iv breast cancer patients profiled here, for instance, adopt the quest narrative when telling their stories on social media. while frank draws parallels between the quest narrative and campbell’s (1972) “hero’s journey,” the analogy goes only so far: drop into any online discussion by metavivors and you will see disdain for the concept of cancer as a “journey,” a description that implies that the narrator takes part willingly. of course, metavivors are not the only patients on social media. indeed, social media create spaces for all people diagnosed with terminal illness to become “wounded storytellers.” nearly eighty percent of internet users have sought health information online, and about sixty percent of americans with chronic health conditions have sought information about their condition online (fox & duggan, 2013). some, like the four women profiled in this article, are motivated to tell their story as full-throated narratives, in detail, to a public or semi-public audience. others choose to lurk around the edges of social media spaces, posting occasional updates, sharing links to potentially useful resources and commenting on the contributions of others. about 99% of breast cancer patients are women, and research has shown that women participate more on social networking sites and that social networks are more influential among same-sex members (hargittai, 2007; christakis & fowler, 2008). internet users are no longer solely passive consumers of online health content; they are active producers as well. social media, such as social networking sites, are increasingly being used as online venues for the exchange of health-related information and advice. 6 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) however, little is known about how participation on health-related social networking sites affects users (hether, murphy & valente, 2014). the women selected for this study are high-profile participants in the breast cancer social media realm, who engage on multiple intertwining platforms, and engage in “produsage,” or the production and consumption of user-generated content (bruns, 2008). as postill and pink outline (2012, pp. 124-125), while the two main methods used to analyze social media are web content analysis of large data sets (agichtein et al., 2008; honeycutt and herring, 2009; oulasvirta et al., 2010) and social network analysis (gilbert and karahalios, 2009; java et al., 2007; prieur et al., 2009), these methods are “less suited to responding to research questions … that seek to understand how, why and with what consequences” subjects like stage iv breast cancer patients use social media. methods associated with conventional ethnographic practice, such as interviews or participant observation (cox et al., 2008; humphreys, 2007; komito, 2011; miller, 2011) provide greater freedom to answer these questions, and “allow us to refigure social media as a fieldwork environment that is social, experiential and mobile” (postill & pink, 2012, p. 125). by taking an ethnographic approach to the social media activities of four terminal breast cancer patients, this article aims to help fill the gap in knowledge about the potential impact of social networking sites on stage iv breast cancer patients. the goal is to help illuminate the less frequently told narrative of metastatic breast cancer in an effort to better understand how social media may affect the way metastatic breast cancer patients live with their illness, and to what extent, if any, the expression of their stories in social media may shift the edges of illness narratives. the four women profiled here use social media to publicly share their experience living with metastatic breast cancer. their motivations vary but include: helping other metavivors cope with their illness; advocating for breast cancer research (and against “awareness”); and furthering their own understanding and response to a terminal diagnosis. using critical ethnography as method and example,3 the goal 7 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) of this work is to “challenge institutions, regimes of knowledge, and social practices that limit choices, constrain meaning, and denigrate identities and communities. … to make accessible … the voices and experiences of subjects whose stories are otherwise restrained and out of reach” (madison, 2011). among the metavivors this section summarizes the illness narratives of the four subjects: sally, jane, jenny, and grace. frank (2013) acknowledges that everyone’s illness narrative has elements from each of the three archetypal stories. this is also true of the four stories recounted here, but each woman’s experience has an overall trajectory that fits best within one of the three categories of quest, chaos and restitution. i reviewed the public and “friends-only” social media postings of the three women who graciously gave consent to use their material, but was unable to get a signed consent form from jenny before she passed away. the material in this article is based on jenny’s public youtube video archive.4 i am a metastatic breast cancer patient who became aware of all four women in social media fora dedicated to discussions among metastatic breast cancer patients. each of these women was like a beacon of light in the fog when i was newly diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. i had never really been sick before, i knew absolutely nothing about cancer, and i had no idea what “metastatic” meant, except that it was bad (a clue i picked up from the tone of my oncologist). as a single, 50-year-old college professor from the east coast of the us, i believed that i had little in common with jenny, a 32-year-old housewife and mother from central texas. and yet the honesty with which she spoke of her disease and its relentless progression (she died less than 3 years after diagnosis) gave me hope: if she can carry on despite these terrible things, then perhaps so can i. i met grace at a breast cancer conference, and we struck up a friendship. she has shared her miraculous story on several online communities – she may have been 8 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) “cured” of metastatic breast cancer. sally inspired me with her sharp wit and her drive to do something, compelling me to become involved in breast cancer patient advocacy. jane and i share a similar diagnosis of her2-positive metastatic breast cancer, although she has had progression in her brain while i continue to be ned (“no evidence of disease,” a temporary state that indicates neither pet-ct nor tumor marker blood tests can detect any cancer in my body, but does not mean that it won’t come back, and it is not the same thing as “cured”). we found ourselves comparing notes in the same online communities. sally: the quest to survive a plague yet another woman with metastatic breast cancer has died. sally publishes a video on social media, her expressive features made more prominent by her bald head. she is crying. “every time this happens it kicks me in the gut. her family is going through exactly what i know my family is going to go through very soon.” as sally and every other metastatic breast cancer patient knows, the drawback of joining online communities comprised of people living with a terminal disease is that announcements of death occur with alarming frequency. in one large facebook group with more than 2,500 members, several people may die in a single week, a fact that is perhaps made more depressing by the introduction of the freshly diagnosed into the club, which keeps the membership numbers stable. in the spring of 2015, sally attended her first metastatic breast cancer conference where the participants organized an impromptu “die-in” by laying in the hallways of the hotel, pretending to be dead. after the conference was over, sally reflected on the realities of her new-found friends: “i may never see these women again. i love them, and i don’t want them to die, but there is no cure for metastatic breast cancer. and so i know that next year, some of them won’t be back to the conference. and it won’t be because their lives are too full. it will be because their lives were too short.” before her diagnosis, sally was a successful civil rights attorney 9 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) who had built a following as a “mommy blogger.” she has chronicled her life with breast cancer and as a breast cancer advocate with the same smart and direct approach that attracted the alt-mommy audience. she found a lump during a breast self-exam in the shower and was diagnosed stage iv from the start in 2014. she often criticizes breast cancer money spent on prevention and early detection: “none of that research led to the detection of my cancer. i had to find that tumor myself. and now it would be pretty awesome if some of those research dollars that did me no good could be spent on saving my life instead.” sally often compares metastatic breast cancer advocacy to the aids movement, and encourages her audience to help “[end] this plague that has taken too many of my friends and will take too many more of them before a cure can come.” she co-founded a metastatic breast cancer advocacy organization with women she had met through social media. she saw the need for an organization similar to the aids activist groups that helped convert aids from a death sentence to a chronic illness. she writes about the similarities between metastatic breast cancer and the aids epidemic as depicted in movies like and the band played on and how to survive a plague: she has a lot of friends who die; their deaths are not reflected on the evening news; she worries that every ache and pain could be a symptom of cancer; researchers seem more interested in preventing metastatic breast cancer than curing people who have it; and people at risk for developing metastatic disease, particularly early stage breast cancer patients, are not warned of the possibility. “it’s not set in stone that people have to keep dying this way. what has to happen is research,” sally writes. “only by demanding that researchers save our lives will we have a shot at living a full lifespan.” it is easy to see why sally looked to aids as an advocacy model to save the metavivors. a movement that started in a new york apartment as the gay men’s health crisis in 1981 evolved into a worldwide campaign where the demands of patients drove scientific research in support of treatment for what was then a death sentence. epstein (1996, p. 8) writes that aids drove “the first social movement in the united 10 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) states to accomplish the large-scale conversion of disease ‘victims’ into activist-experts.” the gay men who were the primary victims of aids in the 1980s had been schooled by the culture wars against them in the u.s. in the 1970s, and were uniquely prepared to fight social ostracism, medical bureaucracy and governmental indifference to force an agenda of scientific research and medical treatment. lay aids activists, outsiders to the medical establishment, became medical researchers. they funded traditional paths of medical research, and raised money to investigate new ones. unhappy with the long processes of drug testing and approval, the aids activists insisted on change, often employing noisy and even violent protests to make their point. through these nontraditional channels, epstein finds, aids activists gained enough of a voice in the scientific world to influence nih–sponsored research. while the aids movement is the most successful model for creating patient-activists, breast cancer advocacy does not face the same challenges. led by susan g. komen for the cure, which draws in more than $250 million per year in donations (barrett, 2017), breast cancer is the beneficiary of what is perhaps the most-successful us public health campaign ever, with the entire month of october dedicated to walks, remembrances, fund-raising and other awareness activities (hill & thompson-hayes, 2017). breast cancer receives more media coverage than any other cancer (hurley, riles, & sangalang, 2014). breast cancer research receives the largest amount of funding for any disease, $120 million per year, from the u.s. department of defense’s $1.1 billion congressionally directed medical research program (department of defense, 2017). it is not a lack of awareness, lack of social support or lack of funding for breast cancer that prevents metastatic breast cancer from becoming a chronic disease, advocates like sally would say. rather, it is a lack of focus. the awareness campaigns of “pinktober” often overlook or exclude stage iv patients because they fail to meet the standard restitution narrative. news organizations are also slow to cover stage iv patients for the same reasons; celebrities with breast cancer are less willing to reveal a metastatic diagnosis. on average, less than 5% of 11 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) money raised by the popular breast cancer fundraising movements goes to research that will benefit metastatic breast cancer patients (“why we need you,” n.d.). “metastatic patients are just fundamentally different from early stage patients,” sally writes. “we aren’t part of the pink party narrative, and we’re never going to be. …imagine if nci had a dedicated metastasis research program, with metastatic patient advocates and doctors specializing in metastatic cancer treatment and bench researchers focused on understanding metastasis. instead of trying to incorporate metastatic cancers into the existing organ-of-origin structures of cancer research, give us our own programs.” sally eventually succumbed to metastatic breast cancer, 3.5 years after being diagnosed. she continued her advocacy work until the end, sending written remarks to a gathering of metastatic breast cancer patients at a washington, dc, die-in just 3 weeks before her death. she put her hope in scientific research to find a cure, or at least a treatment to keep her, and others, alive a little longer and a little longer more, until a cure could be found. jane: the quest to save your own life research has proven a fruitful avenue for jane, who, even in a photo, radiates intensity from piercing blue eyes. narrowly escaping death by brain tumor, recovering only to be handed the grim diagnosis of leptomeningeal metastasis (“basically, cancerous meningitis”), she undertook a quest to save herself through the power of research and selfobservation. “i call this my epic battle,” she writes. two years later, she is still alive, thanks to a regimen she negotiated with her medical team, who credit her with stabilizing her disease and extending her life. jane is the first to post dense peer-reviewed medical journal articles in the social media circles of metastatic breast cancer patients. for example, she posted a link to this article: “dexamethasone interferes with trastuzumab-induced cell growth inhibition through restoration of akt activity in bt-474 breast cancer cells.” 5 fortunately, she also offered a 12 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) helpful translation: “gals, unless you are getting chemo, there is no reason to be taking dexamethasone/decadron (steroids) with her2 targeted therapies. … [i]t might actually prevent herceptin from working well.” this post generated a fair number of reactions and comments, and is an example of jane’s role as an “explainer,” a social media participant who helps others navigate dense medical research (jacobson & kashian, 2018). like the aids activists before her, jane does not trust the scientists and researchers to save her, but takes matters into her own hands. jane was pronounced “cured” of early-stage breast cancer after undergoing chemotherapy, surgery and radiation. but she started having odd symptoms, including migraines, muscle aches and dizziness. she contacted her medical team, but none of them connected her symptoms to a potential brain tumor. six months after finishing early stage breast cancer treatment, jane underwent an emergency craniotomy to remove a 5cm metastatic breast cancer tumor in her brain. “basically anyone with brain [metastasis] is dealing with an under-researched condition,” jane writes. while recovering from brain surgery, she felt the onset of neurological symptoms. again, her doctors told her her symptoms did not seem to be related to her condition, and, six months after her craniotomy, an mri showed that the cancer had spread to the lining of her brain, a condition referred to as leptomeningeal disease. “an absolute worst-case scenario,” jane writes. she waited for a plan from her oncology team that never materialized. she took matters into her own hands. she checked herself into the er, where she convinced her team that, based on her research, the best treatment for her would be to receive the anti-cancer drug herceptin intrathecally, directly into her brain. at the time, this was a novel treatment for breast cancer patients that had been given to only a handful of people, but had shown promise for treating leptomeningeal disease. “[this situation] further reinforces to me that i need to be my own advocate because on their own [the medical establishment] will try to kill me with the same-old, same-old and the path is littered with corpses 13 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) to attest to that,” jane writes. like sally, jane believes that research is the best hope to save her. like some of the aids activists, jane works with information and treatments that are already available, making her own evaluations of therapies that her doctors would not have suggested for her, and making connections to complementary therapies, like hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which some research suggests can help improve the efficacy of radiation to the brain (stępień, ostrowski, & matyja, 2016). it is perhaps because of the legacy of the aids movement that jane was able to find members of the medical establishment willing to treat her based on her selfresearched recommendations. jane’s protocol has been a model for other patients with leptomeningial disease. breast cancer patients on social media who receive a diagnosis of leptomeningial metastasis know to look for jane for advice. she is being cared for by several major cancer hospitals in her area, “so all of these facilities are being schooled by me at the same time. as if almost dying three times wasn’t enough, this only adds to how surreal it all feels.” frank sees parallels between the quest narrative and campbell’s hero’s journey. but many stage iv patients abhor the idea that cancer is a “journey,” a description that implies that the narrator takes part willingly. neither jane nor sally chose to become cancer advocates, although this turned out to be a quest that both were equipped to undertake. they might both say that the research and advocacy quests are not theirs alone (although it might help them), but rather it is one that they share with and on behalf of other metavivors. sally founded an aids activisminspired advocacy group to fight for research to effect a cure for herself and other metavivors. her group has shaken up some of the complacency of metastatic patients and the organizations serving them to push for more money for research and a cure. jane is known among the metavivors for her skills in researching medical and biological factors that may impact her treatment and the treatment of other patients. both sally and jane have heeded lorde’s advice about not keeping silent, sometimes coming into conflict with the established breast cancer 14 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) philanthropies or the medical establishment itself. lorde’s (2006) words are fitting here: “but for every real word spoken, for every attempt i had ever made to speak those truths for which i am still seeking, i had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.” chaos: a public death if you watch jenny cooper’s youtube videos before she was diagnosed with breast cancer, you see a happy-go-lucky 32-year-old mom of two who enjoyed making goofy videos to share with her friends. in 2013 she adopted a fitness regime, changing diet, changing exercise habits, and documenting a significant weight loss that left her feeling good and optimistic about the future. her youtube habit was consistent, and her small audience grew from double-digits to triple-digits. then, one year and 98 videos into her youtube project, she recounts the familiar story of feeling a lump in her breast. less than three years later she was dead, having reached the median survival of 2-3 years. in her very first breast cancer video, she describes how she felt a lump, confers with her family, gets a mammogram, followed by a sonogram, then an mri and a biopsy. in a single 14-minute take, she recounts her conversation with the diagnostician, as she struggles to keep her composure. “i don’t mind getting breast cancer. i knew that i was going to get it. i just am scared of being sick, and i don’t want my kids to see me sick,” she says. “and i don’t want to cry because i have been crying a lot all day. and my face hurts, and my eyes are all blurry, and my face burns. the tears burn my face today.” one week and two videos later, she tells us that the doctors are waiting for the pathology report to determine what kind of breast cancer it is so that they can create a plan for treatment. fatefully, she says: “hopefully it will come back and it will not be triple negative. triple negative is a very, very hard cancer to fight. it does not respond well to chemotherapy. the average lifespan of a triple-negative is five years.” in 15 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) the next video we learn: “it’s triple negative breast cancer.” we follow her journey through treatment for early-stage breast cancer: surgery for placement of a port for chemotherapy, 12 rounds of chemotherapy, a hysterectomy, surgery for mastectomy and radiation. then, 47 videos and just over a year later, the results of a ct scan finds evidence of incurable metastatic disease in her diaphragm and lymph nodes. the mother of two says: “i will do chemotherapy until i physically, or emotionally, cannot do it anymore.” the rapid downward spiral of jenny’s health is reminiscent of a reality tv program edited for maximum dramatic effect. less than one month later, she finds a bump on her head – the cancer has metastasized to her skull. two months later they find a small lesion in her brain. one month later an mri shows her brain tumors have quintupled size. jenny recounts the clinical information that she has received from her doctors – size of tumors, method of radiation. “i’ve had so much chemotherapy, i’ve had my breasts cut off, i’ve had a hysterectomy. but this is the scariest thing i have to do. the reality of this is that i could lose a lot of who i am to this treatment…. it’s like you are damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.” she wipes away the tears. “man, walking into this is terrifying.” jenny’s story underscores the loss of control characteristic of the chaos narrative. her internet audience watches helplessly as the aggressive nature of her disease takes away first the hope for a cure, then hope for successful treatment, and finally the possibility of a future. the audience bears witness to jenny bearing witness to her approaching death. she takes what control she can of the situation. jenny never used social media to investigate complementary therapies or search for clinical trials. but she did use her platform to address her audience on topics like death with dignity and what it was like to be a parent dying of cancer. unlike sally and jane, jenny does not believe in the power of research to save her. as jenny herself knew, triple-negative breast cancer can be difficult to treat, and while only 10-20% of breast cancers are triple-negative, it has the poorest survival prognosis (fallahpour, et. 16 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) al., 2017). she does not research possible existing treatment or complementary therapies as jane does. jenny lives the chaos narrative, but she takes control where she can, like on her youtube channel. she recorded her last video about six weeks before her death. “[i]f you’re watching this video… i’ve passed away. i never thought that i would die at the age of 34. i certainly never thought that i would be leaving behind two children and a husband. … the last two years have been the most intense two years of my life. when you get cancer, it is such an eyeopener as to what is important and what’s not important… if you see my kids, please tell them, always, it does not matter how often you see them or how old they get. please tell them that i loved them oh, oh, oh so very much. and that the idea of leaving them broke my heart.” restitution: the “c” word grace is a down-to-earth mother of two boys and a recently retired engineer. she is extremely active and healthy. her diagnosis of stage iv breast cancer in 2013 put a hold on her plans to pursue a second, “retirement” career as a nurse. in her soft texas twang, she is happy to tell you how she went from being “a goner” to “i think i’m cured.” grace participated in a clinical trial that has shown excellent results for a handful of patients. she has become a poster patient – what she calls “a prize guinea pig” – for cancer research. her case was cited in congressional testimony as an example of how research may lead to cures for cancer that were once thought incurable. grace was initially diagnosed with dcis (ductal carcinoma in situ) in 2003. dcis is sometimes referred to as “stage 0,” a pre-cancerous condition. she had a modified mastectomy with no chemo or radiation. “my oncologist at the time pronounced me ‘cured,’” grace says. “for years, i eschewed the pink ribbons because i did not consider myself a ‘survivor.’… so, while i had surgery, i did not have chemotherapy or radiation. i didn’t feel like a ‘real’ cancer patient.” most early stage breast cancer patients are told they are “cured” when they finish treatment. 17 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) unfortunately, about 20-30% of them, like grace, will develop metastatic breast cancer, sometimes months, sometimes years or decades later (“incidence and incidence rates,” n.d.). the restitution narrative so strongly associated with early stage breast cancer does not allow for relapses, and many metastatic breast cancer patients who were first diagnosed with “curable” early stage disease are ill-prepared to face a “terminal” diagnosis. in 2013, the cancer came back. it spread from her breast to her lymph nodes to her chest wall and sternum. her cancer proved to be virulent, and grace blew through a dozen drug combinations in two years. in summer 2015, grace learned that her disease had progressed on her 10th drug combination. “i would probably be a little more desperate as i know that there is really nothing conventional left for me,” grace wrote. “fortunately, i have a plan.” grace had attended a breast cancer advocacy meeting and met a doctor who was involved with breast cancer immunotherapy. “she thought that i would be eligible for one of their trials.” the treatment worked. grace has continuously posted updates of her progress. by march 2017 grace was going on hiking expeditions and solo kayaking excursions. in grace’s case, research does seem to have saved her. the medical establishment is reluctant to apply the term “cure” to stage iv cancer patients, as stage iv is defined by contemporary medical institutions as incurable. metavivors are also often reluctant to accept the status of “cured” for one of their own, as they fear it may further the popular misconception that all breast cancer is “curable.” jenny, grace and jane were all first diagnosed with early-stage disease. if the pink restitution narrative may be applied to stage 0-iii, why not to those few stage iv patients who beat the odds? the metavivor experience includes the possibility of cure, even if the narrative is one of inescapable death. surely the “restitution” story is grace’s to tell, as today she is healthy again, but tomorrow she and, eventually, all of us, will be gone. 18 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) conclusion the tropes of restitution, chaos, and quest outlined by frank are poetic archetypes for people living through and seeking to understand the impact of illness. metavivors occupy a liminal position between a fatal disease and one that may become a chronic condition in their lifetimes, thanks to rapid advances in medicine. but it is their willingness to share their stories on social media that enables these stories to press against the edges of the three narrative types. these stories are not told solely for the benefit of the tellers; rather they are told for the benefit of others, for the social networks, real and virtual, that make up these women’s lives. in turn, the social networks send feedback to each of our metavivors, shaping their quest, providing support in the face of chaos or creating a following for a story of a potential cure with both hope and suspicion. the metavivors use social media to tell their stories to one another in real time. their stories shape-shift as they interact with each other, as the “produsage” model of social media turns readers into responders who in turn influence the storytellers. one shift the metavivors create in frank’s paradigm of the quest narrative is the emergence of the theme that “research will save us.” this is a logical development inspired by the success of the aids movement, which gave patient-advocates a seat at the table where biomedical research agendas are made. however, while it is true that only new treatments will slow or reverse the course of metastatic disease, a focus on research perhaps invites an over-emphasis on “the languages of molecules and drugs,” as kleinman (1988, p. 266) has noted in the treatment of chronic illness. sulik (2009, p. 1063) found that patients dealing with a chronic illness may develop what she calls a “technoscientific identity” for managing their illness that increases their “reliance on medical authority and technoscience,” and may limit “the full range of discourses available to patients.” metastatic breast cancer complicates the restitution narrative of early-stage disease on two fronts: first, some “survivors” of the pink 19 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) narrative go on to develop metastatic breast cancer, and a small number of stage iv patients may die with their disease instead of it. “[i]gnorance about cancer is maintained, in part, by the rehearsal of stories that have standard plots and features, and that suppress or displace other stories,” segal (2007, p. 3) writes. suppressing the metavivor story does a disservice to the “survivors,” who are doubly wounded by a terminal diagnosis and the lack of information about the possibility of recurrence, and the metavivors, who find themselves outside of the pink survivor movement, armed with less readily available information and fewer resources dedicated to their disease. social media may create spaces for these stories to be told in communities of situated knowledges, but these spaces still sit outside the mainstream. meanwhile, treatment advances that continue to extend the lives of these patients and the proliferation of social media that make it possible for the metavivors to share their experiences with each other may yet refashion the archetypes for metastatic disease. notes 1 “metavivor” is a term coined by the advocacy group metavivor.org to differentiate people living with metastatic breast cancer from the “survivor” rhetoric that surrounds early-stage breast cancer. the term “metavivor” is used here to differentiate stage iv from early-stage breast cancer patients and is not used as a direct reference to metavivor.org. “scan, treat, repeat” is a trademark of the metastatic breast cancer network http://www.mbcn.org/ 2 “scan, treat, repeat” is a trademark of the metastatic breast cancer network http://www.mbcn.org/ 3 the author is a breast cancer patient who has, to paraphrase hammersley & atkinson’s (2007, p.3) definition of ethnography, participated in the subjects’ postings on social media for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions and collecting documents. 4 you can see jenny’s youtube video archive at: https://www.youtube.com/user/jparcoop. it must be noted that jenny’s 20 jacobson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) youtube account name is “coopdizzle,” a portmanteau of her name and an appropriation of language from hip-hop culture. 5 sumikawa t, et al. 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(2016) hyperbaric oxygen as an adjunctive therapy in treatment of malignancies, including brain tumours. medical oncology, 33(101). doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12032-016-0814-0 sulik, g. (2009) managing biomedical uncertainty: the technoscientific illness identity. sociology of health & illness, 30(7): 1059–1076. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01183.x why we need you (n.d.) metavivor.org. available online: http://www.metavivor.org/take-action/why-we-need-you/ wong, n. & king, t. (2008) the cultural construction of risk: understandings through illness narratives. the journal of consumer research, 34. bio susan jacobson is assistant professor in the department of journalism and media at flordia international university. lab meeting   lab meeting     a discussion on experiments and experimentation: nih to balance sex in cell and animal studies     daphna joel tel-aviv university djoel@post.tau.ac.il anelis kaiser university of bern anelis.kaiser@psy.unibe.ch sarah s. richardson harvard university srichard@fas.harvard.edu stacey a. ritz northern ontario school of medicine ritzsa@mcmaster.ca deboleena roy emory university droy2@emory.edu banu subramaniam umass amherst banu@wost.umass.edu in 2014, the national institutes of health (nih) proposed a new policy to promote "sex parity" in research. as an extension to the 1993 nih revitalization act which mandated the inclusion of women and minorities in clinical trials, the new nih policy will require scientists to include "sex" as a variable in both animal model and in vitro cell line-based research. the end goal is to ensure that nih funded scientists "balance male and female cells and animals in preclinical studies in all future applications" (clayton and collins 2014, 283). janine clayton and francis collins described this proposed policy in their article: "nih to balance sex in cell and animal studies." nature, 509 (2014), p. 282-283. we asked four interdisciplinary scholars to discuss this proposed policy.                                     ~curated by deboleena roy and banu subramaniam male-female comparisons are not adequate for addressing sex in cell culture research stacey a. ritz, medical sciences division, northern ontario school of medicine, sudbury, ontario, canada as a feminist laboratory scientist, my reaction to the nih’s move (clayton & collins, 2014) is decidedly mixed. i emphatically agree that we must meaningfully account for sex in our laboratory work, but i would argue that male-female comparisons are insufficient for developing rigorous understandings of how sex affects health, and will likely serve to perpetuate unhelpful notions of biological determinism and essentialism (ritz et al., 2014). moreover, although it may seem straightforward to require that studies include both male and female animals or cells, the realities of laboratory research mean that this is not always possible or useful. for example, much cell culture research uses transformed cell lines, which are derived from cells that have lost their ability to regulate cell division and have adapted to laboratory growing conditions. 'equivalent' male and female transformed cell lines are not available and would be virtually impossible to produce, and even if such a thing were possible, comparing a 'male' to a 'female' cell line would be a deeply flawed approach to addressing sex. certainly transformed cell lines from a male donor can't be said to 'represent' women, but they shouldn't be understood to 'represent' men either, since a transformed cell line is derived from a single donor, and the methods for producing them mean that they are not 'normal' cells at all. transformed cell lines must be understood as a model, and like all models they have strengths and limitations that must be matched to the purposes of the research; they are extraordinarily useful models in many ways, but 'sex' is not something they model well. furthermore, i am increasingly skeptical about the extent to which sex can be adequately represented in in vitro systems at all. although it has become common to say 'every cell has a sex' (wizeman & pardue, 2001), it doesn't follow that the totality of what we mean by 'sex' can be understood at the cellular level. although the sex of the donor of the cells might be identifiable, understanding 'sex' as a trait that individual cells can 'possess' is, i believe, a conceptual slippage from accepting that chromosomal and genetic factors are decisive in sex determination into the misapprehension that these constitute sex (richardson, 2013). when a cell is taken out of the body and placed in a dish, it is deprived of the myriad dynamic interactions in the body that are part of what we understand as 'sex'. thus, any time research is done with cells outside of the body, at best the researcher can claim to be investigating aspects of sex, but not sex 'itself' (whatever that may be). although i agree that preclinical research should attend to sex/gender issues, mandating inclusion of both male and female cells or animals is not as simple a matter as it may first appear, and raises a host of theoretical and practical issues. addressing sex is a complex challenge that demands a more nuanced approach than to simply compare males and females. the nih call to consider sex as a biological variable is conceptually "captured" in the "sex differences" paradigm daphna joel, school of psychological sciences and sagol school of neuroscience, tel aviv university, tel aviv, israel janine a. clayton and francis s. collins from the national institute of health (nih) have recently argued that sex should be considered as a biological variable in basic research, by including both males and females and examining sex differences in every study (clayton & collins, 2014). clearly, the aim of the nih is not to study sex differences. the aim is to promote the health of all humans by ensuring that scientific findings are relevant to all. however, the formulation of this call in terms of a search for sex differences does not serve the aim of promoting health for all, but is rather a reflection of a dominant paradigm which assumes that males and females belong to two distinct categories and views sex almost exclusively through the lens of "sex differences." i discussed elsewhere data that challenge this dimorphic view of sex (joel, 2011, 2012; joel & yankelevitch-yahav, 2014). here i want to focus on how the conceptual "capture" of the nih call in the "sex differences" dogma interferes with achieving the aim of fostering the health of all humans. achieving this aim depends on including males and females in every study, as requested in the call,1 and looking for interactions between 'sex' and other independent variables.  it is not achieved by searching for the main effect of 'sex', that is, for sex differences. this is because if the effects of an independent variable, for example 'treatment a', do not interact with 'sex', then even if there are sex differences (for example, if females are on average more resilient than males in all treatment conditions), this has no relevance for the study's question regarding the effectiveness of treatment a. obviously, finding such a sex difference, provided that the effect size is large, may form the basis for a new study with a new aim, namely, unraveling the mechanisms that make females more resilient than males in this model.  understanding this has direct implications for one of the major objections to including both males and females in every study—the belief that this necessarily entails doubling the number of animals. but doubling the number of animals would be needed only if the category of 'sex' interacts with other variables. if such interactions are not found, the number of subjects in a study that includes both sexes will be the same as in a single-sex study. the challenge we face is how to support the nih call as it has the potential for improving the health of all humans, while making sure it is not abused to reinforce the "men from mars, women from venus" dogma. i believe this challenge can be met by supporting the justified request to include both females and males in every study while at the same time objecting to the practice of listing sex differences. this objection should be accompanied by developing new methods of analysis that are not based on comparing differences between means and on treating variability as noise, but that rather focus on individual differences. considering sex in experiments vs. producing sex differences anelis kaiser, social psychology and social neuroscience, department of psychology, university of bern, switzerland it is indeed very important to include both females and males (as well as any other modes of sex expression) into biomedical and psychological studies in order to ensure that we consider all variation that concerns sex/gender.  thus, the nih is doing the right thing in aiming to "balance sex" (clayton and collins, 2014, p. 282) in cell and animal studies. many scientists are critical about this and claim that the estrous cycle in animal studies will introduce variability and thus the sample sizes (n) required will have to be larger in order to obtain significant effects, making experiments more complex and expensive. since only very few studies, particularly in preclinical research, focus primarily on potential "sex differences" but rather on other independent variables (usually drugs), the required sample size (n) actually does not have to be much larger just because we include individuals from the two common sexes/genders.  so far so good. the problem arises when "considering sex" (clayton and collins, 2014, p. 282) compulsory means the operationalization of two fundamentally distinctive sexes/genders, forcing all researchers to categorize humans into one of two groups and report the results (see also rippon, jordan-young, kaiser, & fine, 2014). this is precisely what you do when you treat women and men as independent variables. when looking and reporting about "sex differences" without any concise a priori hypothesis, you are obliged to categorize these groups as if they were essential categories—which they are not—rather than recognizing that they belong to a hormonal, behavioral and even genetic continuum.2 by unproblematically embracing a binary sex/gender, the researchers reduce human variation into just two categories, blurring the singularity of individuals by reducing complex biological, behavioral, cognitive and identity related processes into a binary mode of female/male differences. further the nih protocol paper by clayton and collins (2014) unfortunately does not always use the term "sex," "gender," "female/male" appropriately (kaiser, 2012). they also seamlessly move between evidence from animal research and human studies as if it was unquestionable to compare these entities for one and the same purpose. these are precisely the points that feminists who have studied sex/gender have long raised.  the nih protocol ignores thirty years of scholarship in feminist science studies. the absence of a feminist voice in these debates is striking. since the 1980's, feminist and sex/gender research within and outside biomedicine has worked to analyze the naturalized "evidence" of a fixed, invariant and discrete conceptualization of sex/gender in biology. in turn, gender studies and feminist scholars have pointed to, among others, the many assumptions and inaccuracies within the processes of creating knowledge through biomedicine, including the overemphasis of sex/gender differences as compared to sex/gender similarities in body and behavior, the confusion of sex/gender dimorphism with sex/gender difference, the certitude of a dichotomous and permanent sex/gender identity, the inconclusiveness of results, the methodological uncertainties, the contextual influences during experimentation and the bias towards a perceived abundance of sex/gender differences within scientific publications. although the nih claims that it "plans to address the issue of sex and gender inclusion across biomedical research multi-dimensionally—through program oversight, review and policy, as well as through collaboration with stakeholders including publishers" (clayton & collins, 2014, p. 282), i really wonder why feminist science studies and feminist scholars of sex/gender, especially scientists, are absent as co-players in this multidimensional approach, at a time when cooperation is urgent and necessary. is the new nih policy good for women? sarah s. richardson, history of science and committee on the studies of women, gender, and sexuality, harvard university when the new nih policy was first announced in may, comedian stephen colbert featured the news next to an image of a lab rat "co-ed" wearing lipstick and mascara (the colbert report, 2014).but a female rat—not to mention a cell line— s not an embodied woman living in a richly textured social world. rodents have sex differences, but they are different than human sex differences. for example, female rats bear large litters, males play no role in rearing, and males and females cannot be caged together in the lab (ritz et al., 2014). in humans, sex is a composite of many biological systems—chromosomes, genes, gonads, genitals and hormones—and it is deeply entangled with culture. sex difference research is complex and requires great care to do well (schiebinger, klinge, sánchez de madariaga, schraudner, & stefanick, 2011-2013). a journal of the american medical association study reanalyzing 432 published, peer reviewed claims of genetic sex differences found only 14% of them to be adequately documented, nominally statistically significant, and internally valid (patsopoulos, tatsioni, & ioannidis, 2007). outside of the reproductive system, most sex differences are overlapping, small and highly variable (joel, 2012; springer, mager stellman, & jordan-young, 2012). sex interacts with age, weight, and sociocultural variables. when clinical research suggests that sex is plausibly relevant to health outcomes, we should investigate the contribution of biological aspects of sex and the cultural factors that may drive female-male differences in health. but requiring all scientists to look for sex differences in their basic research will produce a proliferation of sex difference findings that are hard to interpret and in many cases will be meaningless. the reality is that differences in health outcomes between women are much starker than those between male and female-derived cells in the petri dish. in the us, for example, the breast cancer death rate is 60% higher for black women than for white women ("black women's health imperative," n.d.), and a louisiana woman has a 27% likelihood of having a cesarean section compared to just 12.5% in utah (osterman & martin, 2014). globally, a woman living in japan has an average life expectancy of 84.5 compared to 58 in liberia (central intelligence agency, 2014). demanding more non-hypothesis-driven sex difference research in basic laboratory materials is not a wise use of resources in the face of these overwhelming women's health challenges. as i argue in sex itself, "sex-based biology," the philosophy and movement underlying the new nih policy, represents an elite vision of women's health that is disconnected from feminist science studies frameworks (richardson, 2013). in its essentialist focus on sex, the new nih policy diverges strongly from feminist interactional analyses of gender, sex, and the body. it also neglects feminist intersectional understandings of the subjects of women's health activism that would include not just xx and xy bodies (or cells) but diversely sexed and gendered individuals inflected by race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, class and age.  the mantra to study sex in every cell leaps over the conceptual sophistication of sex-gender analysis. it displaces the core values that motivated a women's health movement in the first place: addressing urgent issues of health inequity in the real lives of women and sexual minorities. from this perspective, the policy, if implemented, is a travesty. yet it is also an opportunity for reinvigorated debate, to which i hope feminist science studies scholars will avidly attend, about the methods and aims of the women's health movement in our present moment. notes 1 including males and females in every study is a critical component of the nih call because it ensures that more of a species' variability is included compared to a situation in which only one sex is used. this is true regardless of whether males and females belong to two distinct categories or not. 2 see http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943.   references black women's health imperative. 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(2014). reconceptualizing sex, brain and psychopathology: interaction, interaction, interaction. br. j. pharmacology, 171, 4620-4635. kaiser, a. (2012). re-conceptualizing sex and gender in the human brain. journal of psychology, 220(2), 130-136. osterman, m., & martin, j. (2014). primary cesarean delivery rates, by state: results from the revised birth certificate, 2006–2012. national vital statistics reports, 63(1), 1–11. retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_01.pdf patsopoulos, n. a., tatsioni, a., & ioannidis, j. p. a. (2007). claims of sex differences: an empirical assessment in genetic associations. jama, 298(8), 880–93. doi:10.1001/jama.298.8.880 richardson, s. s. (2013). sex itself: the search for male and female in the human genome. chicago, london: the university of chicago press. rippon, g., jordan-young, r., kaiser, a., fine, c. (2014). recommendations for sex/gender neuroimaging research: key principles and implications for research design, analysis and interpretation. frontiers in human neuroscience, 8(650), 1-6. doi: 103389/fnhum.2014.00650 ritz, s. a., antle, d. m., côté, j., deroy, k., fraleigh, n., messing, k., … mergler, d. (2014). first steps for integrating sex and gender considerations into basic experimental biomedical research. the faseb journal, 28(1), 4–13. doi:10.1096/fj.13-233395 schiebinger, l., klinge, i., sánchez de madariaga, i., schraudner, m., & stefanick, m. (eds.). (n.d.). analyzing sex. gendered innovations in science, health & medicine, engineering and environment. retrieved may 21, 2015, from http://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/methods/sex.html springer, k. w., mager stellman, j., & jordan-young, r. m. (2012). beyond a catalogue of differences: a theoretical frame and good practice guidelines for researching sex/gender in human health. social science & medicine (1982), 74(11), 1817–24. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.05.033 the colbert report. (2014). co-ed lab rats. u.s.a.: comedy central. retrieved from http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/el90zp/co-ed-lab-rats wizeman, t. m., & pardue, m.-l. (eds.). (2001). exploring the biological contributions to human health: does sex matter?. washington dc: national academy press. first (2001). maruis mattis. oxford university press: london bios daphna joel received her ph.d. in psychology in tel-aviv university in 1998, and joined the faculty of tau, after receiving the alon fellowship for young israeli scientists. joel is presently the head of the psychobiology graduate program and the chair of the phd committee at the school of psychological sciences and a member of the sagol school of neuroscience. joel studies the neural mechanisms of normal and abnormal behavior, using mainly animal models of psychopathology. more recently she has expanded her work to research questions related to brain, sex, and gender, including the complex interplay between sex and environment in the development ofpsychopathalogy. anelis kaiser, ph.d., a co-founder of the international research network, neurogenderings, is a marie heim-vögtlin fellow at the university of bern, switzerland, where she is working on the classification and registration of sex/gender in fmri human science. kaiser has examined sex/gender in the brain as it relates to exploring the existence of paradigmatic, methodological, and statistical defaults that interfere with assessing the presence or absence of sex/gender differences. she studied psychology and received her ph.d. from university of basel, switzerland. sarah s. richardson is john l. loeb associate professor of the social sciences at harvard university. she is jointly appointed in the department of the history of science and the committee on degrees in studies of women, gender, and sexuality. a historian and philosopher of science, her research focuses on race and gender in the biosciences and on the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. she is the author of sex itself: the search for male and female in the human genome (chicago, 2013) and co-editor of revisiting race in a genomic age (rutgers, 2008) and postgenomics (duke, 2015). stacey a. ritz is an associate professor in the medical sciences division at the northern ontario school of medicine. her background in laboratory sciences focused on experimental studies on allergy, immunology, and air pollution. since 2009, ritz has led the biology working group of the cihr team in gender, environment, & health, exploring how biomedical laboratory scientists can address sex/gender issues in their work. deboleena roy is associate professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies and neuroscience and behavioral biology at emory university.  she received her phd in reproductive neuroendocrinology and molecular biology from the institute of medical science at the university of toronto. she is currently associate faculty in the neuroscience program, graduate division of biological and biomedical sciences and senior faculty fellow at the center for ethics at emory university. her fields of interest include feminist theory, feminist science and technology studies, neuroscience, molecular biology, postcolonial theory, and reproductive justice movements. her research and scholarship attempt to create a shift from feminist critiques of science to the development of feminist practices that contribute to scientific inquiry in the lab. she has published articles in signs: journal of women in culture and society; hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy; neuroethics; australian feminist studies; rhizomes: cultural studies of emerging knowledge; endocrinology; neuroendocrinology; and the journal of biological chemistry.  she has also contributed to several anthologies including handbook for feminist research: theory and praxis (2011); neurofeminism: issues at the intersection of feminist theory and cognitive science (2012); gendered neurocultures: feminist and queer perspectives on current brain discourses (2014); and mattering: feminism, science, and materialities (2016). banu subramaniam is professor of women, gender, sexuality studies at the university of massachusetts, amherst. trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she seeks to engage the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology. she is author of ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity (university of illinois press 2014), and coeditor of feminist science studies: a new generation (routledge, 2001) and making threats: biofears and environmental anxieties (rowman and littlefield, 2005). spanning the humanities, social, and natural sciences, she works at the intersections of biology, women's studies, ethnic studies and postcolonial studies. her current work focuses on the xenophobia and nativism that haunt invasive plant species, and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in india. microsoft word weaver-133-1116-4.docx weaver, h.e. (2017). feminisms, fuzzy sciences, and interspecies intersectionalities: the promises and perils of contemporary dog training. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3 (1), 1-27 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © weaver, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article feminisms, fuzzy sciences, and interspecies intersectionalities: the promises and perils of contemporary dog training harlan eugene weaver kansas state university harlanweaver@ksu.edu abstract tracing histories of interventions in dog training, this paper examines the contemporary divide between "dominance" and "positive reinforcement" training practices. drawing from writings by scientists and trainers, this article traces the many ways that the doings of much contemporary dog training embody "fuzzy sciences." examples from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an animal shelter help demonstrate the ways specific fuzzy sciences of training are feminist, while others are not. the article closes with a consideration of the ways that relationships between humans and animals not only reflect but also shape experiences of race, gender, sexuality, nation, species, and breed, or "interspecies intersectionalities." the article concludes by thinking through the lens of "interspecies intersectionalities" in order to elucidate a promising expansion of the feminist fuzzy sciences of dog training. 2 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) introduction in november 2002 i adopted my first dog, haley, a brown-and-white pit bull–type whose cropped ears and proclivity for swimming gave her the appearance of a landbound seal. like many a new dog owner, i was eager to embark on the task of building and shaping our relationship and asked others for training tips.1 i was also a novice when it came to reading dog body language. these practices came to a head one afternoon when haley and i were at the dog beach and i intervened in her play with another dog when i thought she was getting aggressive by “rolling” her—flipping her over onto her back. the appalled looks on the faces of those around us quickly demonstrated what my earlier research missed—in this space, “rolling” was not condoned. ashamed, i collected haley and left. later, when we returned to the beach, a red-haired white woman in a hat approached me and gently steered our conversation toward training and behavior. the woman, alice, summoned her dog, ghana, a dark-brown pit bull–type, and rewarded him with a treat from a pouch strapped to her waist, then walked around the park with us while casually demonstrating the basic elements of positive-reinforcementbased training.2 i began to meet with alice and ghana regularly, acquired my own treats pouch, and eventually took classes with alice’s trainer, alex, a white butch woman whose business card featured a pit bull in profile. this process introduced me to a divide that is central to today’s dog worlds, one into which haley and i had unwittingly tumbled through that roll on the sand, which i will term positive reinforcement versus dominance. the language of positive reinforcement and dominance identifies a contentious division in contemporary worlds of dog training. while terms such as positive training, force-free training, old school, traditional, pack leader, and more also mark this divide, i center my writing in positive reinforcement and dominance because these terms index not only the unclear, fuzzy, role of capital-s sciences in these discussions but also the complex moral and philosophical stakes involved in their practice. 3 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) the association for professional dog trainers (n.d.) demonstrates this fuzzy role, noting that “those individuals employed as dog trainers are largely ‘self educated’”; the majority of today’s professional dog training experiences involve someone without any formal scientific schooling, regardless of training approach. contrasting affective politics figure in the divide itself; training celebrity victoria stilwell’s catchphrase— “kindness is powerful. pass it on”—shapes her positively training approach, while dominance expert cesar millan (“does your dog respect you?” n.d.) pushes people to ask not “whether their dogs give them ‘unconditional love’” but rather whether their dogs respect them. further, as i learned through years of following training debates and doing ethnographic fieldwork at an animal shelter, the doings of most training approaches rarely align with textbook methods. yet i contend that the people i spoke to and witnessed do practice a science in their work with dogs; these, i argue, are the “fuzzy sciences” of dog training. my intervention in this article explores how the doings of contemporary dog training not only reveal “fuzzy sciences,” a deliberately lowercased and multiple sense of science, but also how feminisms shape these fuzzy sciences, yielding sciences out of feminisms and, more specifically, what i term “feminist fuzzy sciences.” these feminisms are multiple, in part because what feminisms are involves their own fuzziness; understandings of feminisms emerge from buttons and bumper stickers as well as rigorous academic study, and often draw from both in a coconstitutive praxis and theory where lived experiences are theorizing and theorizing is activism. in this sense, while this piece draws from the work of scholars such as donna haraway (2008) and maria puig de la bellacasa (2012), it also involves more prosaic feminisms. further, i elaborate a concept here that draws from kimberlé crenshaw’s (1991) work on intersectionality in order to interrogate the ways relationships between humans and nonhuman animals not only reflect but actively shape experiences of differences such as gender, race, sexuality, species, and breed: what i term “interspecies intersectionalities.” the following article explores feminist fuzzy sciences and 4 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) interspecies intersectionalities by combining my fieldwork and autoethnographic examples with published and publicly available materials on training and writings in feminist science studies and humananimal studies. beginning with the positive reinforcement (hereon referred to as r+) and dominance divide, i turn to questions of care, epistemology, and relationality to articulate how and why some fuzzy sciences are feminist. i join this discussion with questions of interspecies intersectionalities in training worlds, which i follow with an exploration of the fuzziness of on-the-ground work through ethnographic examples from my fieldwork site. i close with an examination of fuzziness as a concept and the kinds of disruptions and connections, fuzzy and otherwise, that thinking feminist fuzzy sciences together with interspecies intersectionalities yields; these, i hope, are the promising sciences out of feminisms this article details. science and training readers less familiar with today’s training debates are no doubt wondering what r+ and dominance mean, so here i delve into some of the key players and thinkers, beginning with r+. rooted in behavioral scientist and psychologist b.f. skinner’s (1938) research into “operant conditioning,” r+ is one of four quadrants skinner outlined, which include positive and negative reinforcement and punishment. in skinner’s schema, positive and negative indicate adding or taking something away, while reinforcement and punishment, respectively, increase and decrease the future occurrence of a behavior. translated, r+ would be when a dog gets a reward for presenting her paw to “shake” in order to encourage future “shakes,” and positive punishment occurs when a dog gets a shock from an electronic collar when she barks in order to discourage future barks. negative reinforcement occurs when the pinching of a prong collar lessens because a dog stops pulling on a leash; negative punishment happens when i withhold kisses from my dog until she approaches me calmly. 5 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) skinner’s work was not widely disseminated in dog worlds until karen pryor’s 1984 book don’t shoot the dog. littered with practical examples comparing training approaches from the different quadrants— “roommate leaves dirty laundry all over the place,” which might be positively punished through yelling and scolding or, conversely, reshaped using r+ through buying “beer and [inviting] over members of the opposite sex whenever quarters are tidy”—pryor’s book deliberately emphasized r+ (pryor, 1984, pp. 104, 124). in this, pryor translated the science of skinner’s behaviorism into a local, practical science for regular dog owners and handlers. patricia mcconnell, an ethologist and applied animal behaviorist, echoes this approach in her book the other end of the leash (2003), in which chapters subtitled “how your body ‘talks’ to your dog and how to make sure it says what you want” translate the science of ethology into practical tips on human versus dog body language. for example, mcconnell’s training tips involve rather doggish bodily signals: “the best way i know to visually ‘call’ a dog to come is to bend down as if in a doggie play bow, turn away from your dog, and clap” (p. 23). notably, mcconnell’s advanced degree and pryor’s lack thereof highlight a norm in dog worlds; while many of the field’s luminaries claim postgraduate scientific degrees, many others do not. indeed, one notable figure in the dominance school who has written in adamant disagreement with what she called the “new behaviorists” while lacking a scientific degree is poet, philosopher, and obedience trainer vicki hearne. before outlining hearne’s work, i want to give a brief etiology of dominance training. loosely based in thinking derived from research by animal behaviorist rudolph schenkel (1947) on captive wolves, in which problem behaviors denote a dog’s need to ascend the pack hierarchy to “alpha” status, dominance training also draws from the 1950s work of trainer william koehler, who used “corrections”—“a sharp upward jerk on the training lead, performed as impersonally as possible”—to teach a dog and earn his/her respect (hearne, 1986, p. 45). however, dominance training also emerges from policeand military-dog training approaches 6 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) utilized in the early to mid-twentieth century and, more broadly, from cultural narratives about wolves, such as stephenie meyer’s twilight series. a close follower and friend of koehler, hearne (1986) desires complete obedience as a means to confer “nobility, character, and dignity on the dog” (p. 43). hearne’s work with salty demonstrates her approach. she begins by first “placing,” or moving, salty’s limbs into position and saying “salty, sit!” hearne soon gives the command without placing, noting, “if she refuses to sit, or just doesn’t think to sit, i give her a harsh, emphatic sit correction” (p. 55). for hearne, corrections act as a language that respects salty’s “moral and intellectual capacities” by giving her a means of communication: the bodily movements of obedience (p. 45). when salty later presents a “clean-edged,” formal, obedience-style sit, compelling hearne’s response, hearne delights in salty’s enlarging “the context” of their language. she exults that “understanding has been enlarged by enforced obedience!” (pp. 56, 30, 45). popular s/sciences: millan and stilwell while the above figures stand in for a plethora of professionals involved in today’s training debates, their names and approaches are less familiar to laypeople who encounter the r+/dominance divide.3 in this section i take up two celebrity trainers whose contrasting approaches illustrate the roles of sciences, sciences, affective politics, and feminisms in the more popular version of the divide: cesar millan, television’s “dog whisperer” and a firm proponent of dominance methods; and victoria stilwell, whose television show “it’s me or the dog,” publications, and public appearances feature her own training brand, positively. famously self-taught as a trainer, millan focuses on two key tenets in his work: “pack leadership” and “energy” (“cesar’s essentials,” n.d.). while pack leadership rests in the insistence that a human needs to be at the top of a perceived hierarchy, implicitly drawing on schenkel—an understanding repudiated by more recent scientific work, such as that of 7 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) wildlife biologist l. david mech (1999)—millan’s sense of energy is decidedly non-scientific: “energy = intention × emotion.” millan’s explanation of these concepts underscores this distance: “because dogs communicate with energy…they instinctually seek and follow pack leaders who exhibit both calm and assertive energy” (“pack leadership technique 1,” n.d.). and while millan’s training facility, the dog psychology center, invokes the science of psychology in its name, my research has not unearthed evidence of any trained psychologists employed there. in fact, millan’s materials include only one overt mention of science, an article by j. bastian (n.d.) titled “science catches up to cesar” that points to a study where gps devices were used to track social ranking and personality traits in a pack of hunting dogs. positing that this “first hard evidence that social hierarchy does exist” bolsters millan’s approach to training, the article also evokes a temporal distance from science, positioning millan ahead of and apart from such research. like millan, stilwell’s beginnings as a trainer were informal—she worked as a dog walker before taking seminars with trainers and branching out into her own brand. unlike millan, stilwell counters dominance narratives, noting that “instead of looking to become alpha, top dog or pack leader over us, most dogs simply want safety, security and those things which generally make them feel good” (“myth versus fact,” n.d.). unlike millan, stilwell embraces science, pointing out that r+ “has been universally endorsed by the behavioral scientific community at large as the most effective, long-lasting, humane and safest method in dog training.” however, stilwell notes that “positive training is not a scientific term,” for her philosophy is more affective than scientific: “for most of us, it does not take scientific journals to tell us what our instincts have already said: it is more humane to reward than to punish” (“what is positive training?” n.d.). combined with her 2016 “kindness is powerful” joint campaign with state farm insurance, stilwell’s claim of not practicing a science emerges from the way her methods mix behaviorism with care and kindness. 8 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) thinking-with feminisms stilwell’s affective politics reveals a mix of morals and emotions in the training debates i outline here. indeed, caveats like stilwell’s are part of why i name these sciences of translation and practice as lowercase and fairly fuzzy sciences. however, caveats like stilwell’s also point to one of this piece’s key interventions, for differences in moral-affective politics between adherents to r+ versus dominance methods underscore a key distinction in how i read their respective fuzzy sciences: their feminisms. a critical disparity in the r+ versus dominance debates involves different understandings of the roles of love, happiness, and respect in training. as noted earlier, millan desires respect rather than love from a dog. similarly, while hearne (1986) mentions the need to respect the “superior knowledge” of a tracking dog who makes an unexpected turn, a less mutualistic respect shapes her larger body of work, evident in her liberal references to the importance of human “mastery” and a dog’s need to “surrender” to the language of “enforced obedience” (pp. 24, 57). conversely, r+ adherents point to the importance of pleasure; pryor (2009) comments on the “happy, cooperative, attentive clicker dogs” involved in her clicker academies, while mcconnell (2016) proclaims, “i want each of my dogs to be as happy as they can be.” the disparity between the approaches seemingly hinges on the ways that r+ involves a caring cultivation of happiness that can be easily, if loosely, connected to feminist ethics, while dominance leans more heavily on respect in the form of obedience. in many ways, the materialities of the practices i examine seem to bear out an admittedly facile alignment between a prosaic feminism involving care and r+ in contrast to dominance tied to respect and obedience. for example, millan is widely derided for his punitive practices; one blogger, in response to a video in which millan strikes a dog’s abdomen, notes that he “doesn’t whisper to dogs. he kicks them” (hoffman, 2014). similarly punitive, if not as extreme, hearne’s “corrections” involve the application of pain to a dog’s neck. in contrast, 9 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) pryor’s r+ interventions come out of work with marine mammals where collars, leashes, and kicking are impossible, so that the only option for shaping behaviors is to proffer carefully timed rewards (author field notes, 8 june 2013). then there are mcconnell’s body-based teachings, as with her encouragement to think about how human and dog bodies “talk”; hers is a different kind of affective politics, one more in keeping with the bodily capacity “to affect and be affected” but which nonetheless affirms and rewards behaviors (massumi, 1987, p. xvi).4 in these ways, the materialities of these training practices align with the division of r+ on the side of a fuzzy but feminist ethics, in contrast to dominance as a painful form of respect. however, tracing care and kindness in these practices is not quite so simple. for example, a jerk on a prong collar will not kill, but it might teach a dog to associate running at another dog, a neighbor’s house, or into the street with bad consequences and may well be the only teaching a dog experiences. in this sense, there is a form of care, but one geared more toward protecting a dog from missteps in a larger world of vehicles, neighbors, and social relationships. further, both millan and hearne are known for their outspoken pit bull advocacy and interest in rehabilitating dogs—indeed, such narratives are central to much of millan’s television work and hearne’s writings, as with her 2007 book bandit: the heartwarming true story of one dog’s rescue from death row. in addition, and as fellow training enthusiast haraway commented on an earlier draft of this article, there are plenty of cases where dogs in dominance-style training relationships “learn fast and well and live companionable lives with very little coercion—maybe less than in relationships where r+ methods are done badly and result in confusion, leash pulling forever, frustration, and ultimately a fair amount of positive punishment” (personal communication, 23 february 2017). claims to care and kindness run throughout and across the training divide, albeit in different forms and with material disparities, which is why i now turn to another key interlocutor in order to propose a more precise affective ethics in thinking feminist fuzzy sciences. 10 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) feminist science and technology studies (sts) scholar maria puig de la bellacasa (2012) frames care as “an affective state, an ethical obligation, and a practical labor,” one that inheres in the spaces between us, for “not only do relations involve care, care is itself relational” (pp. 197–198). puig’s relational care involves what she terms “thinking-with,” a connective sensibility that marks how the sharing of caring through relationality involves a shared commitment to mutuality. for example, “thinking-with care” includes a responsibility to speak-with others rather than speaking-for or speaking-about them; this is a proximity of shared stakes and worlds rather than the distance of officious pronouncements on the desires of others. in this sense of -withness, puig articulates a need for epistemic proximity through mutuality rather than, say, erasure. the proximity upon which puig insists demarcates the distinction i read between r+ and dominance; thinkingand speaking-with require a reach toward a mutual language, not the imposition of that of one party onto another. in the context of this writing, i would argue that thinkingwith a dog involves labor like that mcconnell encourages, wherein a human literally positions their body in a way that is more easily legible to the dog in “calling” the dog with their body. indeed, thinking-with dogs through training involves communication through a shared language of bodies and bodily movements rather than a human-centric language of verbal obedience. importantly, this is a form of care absent from dominance training, where obedience to a human-centric language of collar jerks and spoken commands make the -withness elaborated here impossible. importantly, this is a form of care that denotes the feminist ethics i seek in the feminist fuzzy sciences of training. in highlighting the mutuality of the relationships puig poses through thinking-with, i am invested in the ethical obligations that she traces, so here i turn to haraway (2008). describing how practices of training animals “to cooperate actively with people in scientific protocols and husbandry facilitate a mutual engagement rather than the transmission of a language of obedience”—one can think here of zoo animals trained through r+ methods for medical procedures—haraway 11 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) notes that “trained animals are subject to less coercion of either physical or pharmaceutical kind.” however, this is not an argument for just any kind of training, for haraway posits that such “training involves an asymmetrical relationship between responsive partners,” where the term responsive transmutes into “response-able,” which indexes a willingness “to learn to know more,” or “to learn to learn” (p. 336). this sense of response-ability demarcates training that functions as a practice of learning rather than coercion, training motivated by curiosity rather than unquestioning obedience. much like puig’s thinking-with, response-ability decenters the human, for the learning through training that haraway describes travels both ways. distinct from the rote application of a particular method or gear, response-ability requires a learning to learn that is a learning to discern. this is a learning that finds language in widened eyes and yawns, one that holds as valid and seeks to better understand nonhuman ways of communicating and understanding. i see much of response-ability in r+ training that i do not find in dominance approaches. even as the roles remain unequal—there is a human holding a leash, after all—the simple fact that most r+ approaches do not seek a relationship in which the human is an ascendant “alpha” whose language of respect a dog must learn underscores my larger point: r+ training, in its orientation towards thinking-with dogs and response-ability to them, reveals a promisingly feminist fuzzy science that challenges human exceptionalism. while thinking-with care and response-ability are central to my claiming of r+ training as a feminist fuzzy science, another feminist intervention shapes this writing: interspecies intersectionalities. in this, i draw from feminist and legal theorist kimberlé crenshaw’s (1991) landmark formulation of intersectionality, which highlights the inextricability of a range of oppressions related to race, ethnicity, ability, gender identity, class, sexuality, citizenship, and more. for example, intersectionality challenges claims made on behalf of “women’s rights” by pointing out how disparate experiences of “women” yield different political needs—the concerns of a working-class, able-bodied trans 12 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) woman of color are not the same as those of a middle-class, white, disabled cisgender woman. while there are numerous definitions of interspecies, i am fond of the one given by jasbir puar and julie livingston (2011) to “refer to relationships between different forms of biosocial life and their political effects” (p. 3). conjoined, interspecies and intersectionalities describe how relationships between humans and nonhuman animals not only reflect but also shape experiences of gender, race, sexuality, class, nation, species, and breed. while many of the discourses i examine in this piece lend themselves to analysis through interspecies intersectionalities, i want to clarify the term first. consider my relationship with haley. when she came into my life, i identified as female, an identification that changed. as i began the process of medically transitioning to present as more masculine, i noticed that, even when i was not easily legible as either male or female, i was safe with haley at my side, while my whiteness, queerness, and middle-class status tended to make other humans read her as not dangerous despite her breed and clipped ears. read through the analytic of interspecies intersectionalities, our relationship involved a mutualistic becoming in which our identities were articulated through and made possible by each other and our disparate connections to “political effects.” importantly, interspecies intersectionalities also highlight how disparities in power and discursive erasures figure in human-animal relationships. for example, consider hearne’s (2007) subtitle for bandit: “the heart-warming story of one dog’s rescue from death row.” much of today’s discourses surrounding pit bull–type dogs like bandit connect to race—terms such as “dog racism” are frequently bandied about among advocates protesting anti-pit-bull legislation, while others are quick to point to the problems posed by “thugs” and their pit bulls (holland, 2013; “mymind,” 2013). meant to garner sympathy by leaning on a connection with prisons and injustice, hearne’s title also reveals a whiteness that emerges through narratives of salvation involving a dog’s body marked by association as brown/black that might be paraphrased as “white 13 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) femininity to the rescue.” notably, this story of salvation erases the violences that affect humans, mostly of color, caged within prisons today, for hearne does not critique the racism of the prison-industrial complex. read through the analytic of interspecies intersectionalities, hearne’s and similar pit-bull advocacy work builds on “like race” thinking that ignores how the assertion of proximities between people of color and nonhuman animals—as when, say, president obama is likened to an ape—are a key tactic in race-related oppressions. the analytic of interspecies intersectionalities applies to many of the readings i present here. consider critiques of millan’s lack of formal credentials that claim that “his machismo” as part of the problem (rafkin, 2016); read through interspecies intersectionalities, this sense of his race and masculinity as distancing him from science reveals how racism shapes perceptions of his relationships with animals. there is also pryor’s casual heteronormativity in her explanation of r+ training—a roommate gets rewarded with alcohol and the presence of members of the opposite sex when they clean. read through interspecies intersectionalities, we can see how (presumably white) heterosexuality informs the larger logic of r+ training and the human-animal relationships it shapes. further, there are the literal spaces of training themselves; seminars such as mcconnell’s (2003) both ends of the leash run into the hundreds and even thousands of dollars to register and attend and are overwhelmingly populated by white and presumably cisgender women; class and whiteness both shape access to and are shaped by these spaces. both stilwell’s and millan’s respective television work underscores these dynamics, for in-person access involves literal and cultural capital out of the reach of most, such that both spaces of training reify class norms and/or the rescue narratives critiqued above, even as television comes to demarcate such practices as norms while it functions as a low-cost means of teaching. read through the analytic of interspecies intersectionalities, the training discourses i examine here are overwhelmingly white, racist, classist, and often heteronormative. the above readings draw from interspecies intersectionalities as 14 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) an analytic, one that troubles the ways i have drawn from thinking-with care and response-ability in this article thus far by demonstrating how race, gender, class, sexuality, and more are formative to the training practices, fuzzily feminist and no, that i describe. however, interspecies intersectionalities also works as a sensibility in this writing. less exact than an analytic, the sensibility of interspecies intersectionalities functions as a way of feeling, an alertness sensitive to the troublesome dynamics i note above but one that also, inexactly, pushes me not just to think but to feel towards ways of knowing and doing these human-dog worlds differently, to sense alternate connections and imagine otherwise. in this sense, and in keeping with the prosaic feminisms this piece references, interspecies intersectionalities attune me differently, pushing me to notice how, say, the politics of a dog-rescue group’s facebook post connecting the oppression of migrant workers with pit bulls is messed up, but also pressing me to feel for and toward different imaginings wherein other feminist and fuzzy interventions join with rather than erase the work of poor, indigent, and marginalized people so that different human-dog worlds might be built that disrupt rather than solidify human-animal oppressions. in order to begin to think through this sensibility, i turn to a training site rife with its own complex interworkings of race, gender, class, sexuality, species, and breed: an animal shelter. fuzzy shelter sciences my fieldwork site, an open-admission california shelter with a high volume of pit bull– and chihuahua-type dogs, demonstrates another form of fuzziness, for its employees and volunteers evince significant disparities in their applications and interpretations of different training approaches. when i began my fieldwork, i was surprised to learn that one of the shelter workers with whom i interacted frequently was a millan fan. bethany, a brown-haired white woman who served as one of the main coordinators for dog adoptions, even lent me her copy of malcolm gladwell’s what the dog saw (2009), which contains a laudatory profile of 15 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) millan. like many of the staff, bethany brought her own dog, simone—a calm black-and-brown mixed breed—to the shelter with her. i witnessed bethany’s millan-influenced approach through simone. for example, one afternoon simone was interested in lying down in the largest of the dog beds, as was another staff dog, pharaoh, a spindly, fawn-colored greyhound cross. growling softly, a stiff simone body-blocked pharaoh and then leisurely curled in three tight circles before settling down on the bed. hearing this, bethany walked over and grabbed simone by the muzzle, pulling her off the bed while staring at her with hard, unblinking eyes, and said “no” in a low, threatening voice. she then made simone lie on the floor near her feet and returned to her conversation (author field notes, 26 may 2013). other shelter workers who were not overt millan aficionados also employed dominance-style interpretations. for example, ben, a gruff white man who came out to me as gay by noting that his favorite color as a kid was purple and “my parents should have known then,” explained to me why they tended to use simone rather than pharaoh to test shelter dogs to see if they were okay with other dogs. “pharaoh’s too dominant,” he explained as i helped him move several tubs of kibble. when i asked what he meant, he replied, “he’s just not that into new dogs.” “so, he doesn’t stay relaxed when other dogs approach?” “sort of.” i tried again: “so he tolerates new dogs, but doesn’t really enjoy it?” ben: “yes!” (author field notes, 1 march 2013). interchanges like this, where dominance figured as a catch-all to explain and interpret quite varied behaviors, were frequent throughout my fieldwork. of course, many at the shelter were adamantly opposed to dominance-style methods and interpretations, and among them was another volunteer, cora, a white woman in her late thirties who often wore clothing featuring local animal rescues. while shelter dogs were not usually permitted to meet other dogs while on leash, trusted volunteers such as cora and, eventually, me were encouraged to take dogs out on “tandem” walks in order to gauge their dog-dog sociability. one afternoon, cora and i went out with two male pit bull–type dogs, josh 16 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) and tucker, both outfitted in harnesses. i started off with tucker, a large, block-headed, brown-and-white intact male, who spent the initial part of our walk mostly ignoring me and my treats, while cora began with josh, a lean and leggy brindle intact male. we warily observed as, initially, josh barked and lunged at tucker. however, he settled quickly and cora and i slowly began to walk them closer and closer to each other, watching for any telltale signs such as bodily stiffness, hard eyes, or a forward lean. eventually, we let josh smell tucker’s butt, which went well, but tucker found it fairly exciting and started to try and drag me along, oblivious to my many and varied attempts to get his attention (treats, talking to him, tugs on the leash, etc.). cora and i then switched dogs, which was when we learned that josh was not as attentive to me as he was to cora, who had been heaping verbal praise on him in contrast with my less vocal and more treats-oriented approach. tucker, on the other hand, continued to pull cora, who signaled to me that she wanted to turn around. the walk back went smoothly, with josh continuing to be mildly interested in me and tucker slowly ramping down into sniffing (author field notes, 4 june 2013). notably, the gear used at my fieldwork site adds additional fuzziness. gear choices make one’s position in the training divide easily legible to others—prong collars, choke chains, and electronic collars are tools of the dominance school, while harnesses, head halters, and treats pouches telegraph an r+ approach. however, because shelter volunteers often work with strong and unruly dogs with whom they are not able to develop lasting relationships, many contemporary us shelters mandate the use of prong collars. in addition, prong policies accommodate the skill sets of shelter volunteers with fuzzy understandings of training sciences. for example, one volunteer at my fieldwork site, paisley, emphatically approved of the mandated prong, stating that “positive on a prong” was, in her opinion, the only way to help dogs who bark and lunge at other dogs and/or humans on leash, a behavior known as leashreactivity (author field notes, 4 july 2013). of course, the pain of a prong collar marks such training interactions as positive punishment, not r+; 17 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) understandings like paisley’s of r+, which were quite common at the shelter, underscore the prevalence of volunteers’ own fuzziness regarding training sciences more broadly. then there were those like cora and me, who found ourselves clicking and treating dogs while controlling their bodies with collars we abhorred; even while we were both fairly adept with r+ methods, the mandated gear necessarily mixed our approaches with dominance-style practices. feministly fuzzy shelter spaces as the above examples demonstrate, most of the training that goes on in the space of my fieldwork site is, in practice, rather fuzzy. i will return to fuzziness as a concept momentarily, but first i want to trace how these examples fit into my larger discussion, beginning with the methods practiced by bethany, ben, and paisley, which draw from dominance methods and which are certainly fuzzily scientific, but not particularly feminist. for example, bethany’s reprimanding of simone follows a millan-style approach of controlling the dog, but her “no” comes too late to preclude the interaction, another of millan’s edicts (“how to handle a territorial dog,” n.d.). bodily details matter here too, for the interaction ends when simone looks away from bethany’s hard stare and obediently goes “down.” bethany is interested in submission and obedience, not curiosity or response-ability. then there is ben, whose reading of pharaoh as dominant is certainly effective in the decision not to use him to test other dogs, but whose use of dominance as a catch-all to describe an emotional behavior—dislike of new dogs—misunderstands pharaoh’s motives; this thinking not only poses the possibility for potentially grave future misunderstandings of dog behaviors, but also fails to take up a deeper curiosity or thinking-with. finally, paisley’s misunderstanding of the admittedly confusing language of skinner’s quadrants leads her to endorse prong collars to treat leash-reactivity in a way that mcconnell (mcconnell & london, 2003), among others, would consider one of the worst ways possible. this is because dogs who react on leash almost always do so out of fear, such that they can learn to associate pain with 18 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) the approach of a dog or human (or bicycle or skateboard), making them more reactive and fearful rather than less. in paisley’s approach i read a failure to be response-able, for she seems incurious about how a dog’s emotional experience shapes such interactions in a way that may lead to future training issues. conversely, i find much of feminist fuzzy sciences in cora’s and my interaction with josh and tucker. in terms of fuzzy sciences, while cora and i use r+ methods throughout our interaction, giving the dogs treats when they pay attention and cueing the interaction around their body language, neither of us employs textbook methods, for our motive is not training but curiosity. cora and i set up the interaction in order to gauge the dogs’ interest, to see what they wanted to do, a desire we read through their bodies and bodily interactions. in doing so, we engage in thinking-with the language of their bodies and attempt to be responseable to their needs and desires. i realize that it is a bit odd to propose in an academic article that the method in which i participate, however loosely, is the method for which i am rather firmly arguing. i therefore want to note here that my use of cora’s and my example stands in for fairly widespread practices at my fieldwork site; there were many folks sporting treats pouches and the like at the shelter. this is to say that there are many people who try to think-with animals at my fieldwork site, people who are curious about and try to be response-able to the animals there in the best ways they know. however, even as i find the prevalence of these practices promising, i am less sanguine about the shelter when viewing it through the analytic of interspecies intersectionalities, for my fieldwork site, much like that of the training discourses, is undeniably a space of whiteness. its demographics—most of the volunteers and staff are white, straight, middle-class women—are only part of this dynamic. for example, many of my interlocutors enthusiastically embraced the language of “rescue” in their work, a term whose history denotes the “civilizing mission” of many an imperialist project. echoing hearne’s bandit, there were frequent references to shelter dogs experiencing a form of “prison,” including 19 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) appeals for rescues to step in on behalf of dogs on “death row,” with no mention of the race-related injustices ongoing in today’s prison industrial complex (author field notes, 29 march 2013). then there were the dogs’ names: “ghana” and “pharaoh,” not to mention “apache,” were fairly typical, even as they clearly communicated unconscious white fantasies about connections between animality and racialized otherness. the goal of most shelter-based interventions, the attainment of a dog’s “forever home,” also merits scrutiny. automatically precluding the houseless and most undocumented folks, shelter adoption policies tend to center on that imaginary ideal: the family dog. while this approach includes a practical component—in that dogs who would not share their toys, for example, would not be adopted out to households with children—it also informs a related and larger heteronormative ideal. put simply, like many locales in the united states today, it was understood that “family” stood in for the presence of children, which is to say that polyamorous kin groups of queer folks were not what the staff was asking for when they told potential adopters to bring the rest of the family back to meet the dog. the analytic of interspecies intersectionalities renders these relatings troublesome, for they all reify norms of whiteness, family, heteronormativity, and more. however, interspecies intersectionalities as a sensibility thought-with feminist fuzzy sciences promises an interruption and possibly different ways to take up these doings; i explore this promise in my concluding section. conclusion the uses of fuzzy that have come up in this article include fuzziness in the sense that the role of science in dog training is often unclear, fuzziness in the mix of formal and informal scientific credentials and training of experts and celebrities in the field, fuzziness in the ways that feminisms are understood and practiced, fuzziness in that the sciences in question are deeply involved in moral and affective politics, fuzziness in the inexact practice of either the science or sciences of training, and fuzziness in the 20 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) mix of approaches used and even required by the policies of my fieldwork site. there is also, of course, the obvious and delightful way that dogs themselves are fuzzy. i use fuzzy more as a descriptor than an analytic, in order to identify a primary characteristic of the complex congeries of discourses involved in us-based dog training and shelter work, which is that there are unclear boundaries among knowledge practices in a number of ways and that, thinking-with the very last sense of fuzzy i note above, at least some of these boundary-bridgings productively de-center the human. importantly, fuzzy also neutrally characterizes what many in scientific and/or more rigorous dog-training worlds dismiss, which is the on-theground work done by nonprofessionals. as a modifier of lowercase sciences, the adjective fuzzy does not diminish them but numbers them among an array of sciences and scientific practices. i want to recognize an additional fuzziness: that of the worlds of dog “rescue” and their overlap with the training worlds i highlight here. for example, i obtained haley’s successor, annie, a black-and-white pit bull–type dog, from an african american woman, anne, who was deeply involved in her neighborhood’s “fix our ferals” campaign. anne had taken annie in when she was sick and anne’s neighbors had intended to put her down. however, anne struggled with annie, who had lived all six months of her life in an eight-by-eight-foot concrete backyard and had not been house-trained or socialized extensively with other dogs; annie joined my household the weekend after she ate anne’s phone. this example speaks to two larger and common dynamics. the first is that the us world of animal rescue and shelters is only partially represented by the dynamics of my fieldwork site; in fact, much of the work of animal sheltering is done well outside of the official shelter. unlike my fieldwork site, this labor is undertaken in the main by middleand working-class people of multiple racial and ethnic identities who frequently cobble together efforts to rehome dogs in which the main goal is to keep them out of the space of the shelter, prioritizing other forms of shelter instead. the second notable dynamic, which became clear to me over the course 21 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) of both my fieldwork and ongoing contacts with these types of networks, is that these worlds of “rescue” quite often do not involve much in the way of formal training work, feminist or no; i frequently encounter people who are experts in moving dogs across states but lack the know-how to help them learn the behaviors necessary to do well in their new spaces. this is a fuzziness in terms of shelter as a verb and act of care, and this is a fuzziness in terms of a frequently incomplete linkage between the practices involved in keeping animals alive and helping them thrive. in pointing to these dynamics of fuzziness, i am invested in their potential to disrupt the norms of whiteness, class, and “family values” of the more official shelter space—the folks doing this work do not fit the norms i critique in the shelter—and the promise of possibly joining this work with more overtly feminist fuzzy training practices. these fuzzinesses also involve the sensibility of interspecies intersectionalities, for they help me feel toward new connections that promise alternate ways of building human-animal worlds. in other writings, i have put forward on-the-ground work of free and low-cost veterinary care based on harm-reduction models that strives to keep humans and animals together as a way to undertake variations on this type of work; such efforts interrupt the whiteness and family values of “rescue” while building and affirming different kinds of interspecies intersectionalities. however, in researching this piece, i have come to realize that there are few to no free, sliding-scale, or low-cost resources for humans who love their animals but also need help in terms of training them to better rest or thrive in their homes, in or outside of houses. drawing from interspecies intersectionalities as a sensibility, i am certainly alert to the colonialist overtones of such potential work; having mostly white people do training outreach to mostly lower-income people, many of them people of color, is not the kind of imagining that would answer well here. this is to say that the disruption i hope for and the invocation of interspecies intersectionalities as a sensibility that might facilitate better and different connections between feminist fuzzy sciences and larger worlds of “rescue” will be difficult to put into practice for a host of reasons. 22 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) in closing, i turn to what are, at this point, speculative conversations borne out of extended joint musings with several interlocutors. one of my co-musers is jane, a chinese american woman and fellow pit-bull aficionado whom i met during my fieldwork and who now works in a more formal capacity at another shelter. critical of the implicit whiteness and missionary rhetoric of dog “rescue” worlds, jane is also invested in addressing the lack of low-cost training services. she is also aware of the fuzziness of the on-the-ground work undertaken by most handlers and that r+ interventions take time that may not be available to many humans. cora has also pointed out practical difficulties to me, including the investment of time involved in teaching humans how to read and “speak dog.” another interlocutor, maggie, a middle-aged white woman who has participated for many years in nose-work trials, has been quick to note that the language of training is its own art, one not easily taught. i name these conversations not to underscore the difficulty of practically imagining feminist fuzzy sciences together with interspecies intersectionalities, but rather to point out how they reveal a jointness, an investment in a shared world-building that reaches well beyond my own efforts to think-with and towards disparate and multitudinous connections among the many worlds and people this article includes— prosaic feminisms, feminist sts, animal sheltering, and training discourses, especially r+. my hope is that those of us in those worlds, and others who are undoubtedly sharing similar conversations, can carefully and response-ably think-with the importance of interspecies intersectionalities as an analytic and sensibility in order to facilitate the crucial work of keeping animals together with the humans that they have often very mutually chosen, and that we can begin to do this together in the way most prosaic feminist movements would have it—as group work, with shared imaginings and deeply collective response-abilities. in proposing this collective work in my conclusion, i hope that it points to the possibility of the propagation of feminist fuzzy sciences as part of the larger world-building projects of what this issue terms “science out of feminisms.” 23 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) acknowledgements research for this article was supported by nsf grant number 1230743. notes 1 i deliberately use the language of owner rather than guardian here as part of my broader politics regarding pit bull-type dogs, for claims to ownership provide better legal protection than guardianship when such dogs are legislated against. 2 the names and characteristics of the humans and dogs in this piece have been changed to protect anonymity (except for my own). 3 notably, these discourses also bear a striking resemblance to parenting debates, which is to say that the fuzzy sciences i describe here, feminist and otherwise, are certainly not limited to dog training worlds. 4 despret (2013) also points to this affect in ethologists’ “embodied empathy.” references association of professional dog trainers. 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(2003). both ends of the leash (video). dog’s best friend, tawzer dog videos. 25 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) ——— (2003). the other end of the leash. new york, ny: random house. ——— (2016, 4 january). what makes your dog happy? the other end of the leash. retrieved from http://www.patriciamcconnell.com/theotherendoftheleash/what-makes-adog-happy mcconnell, p., & london, k. (2003). feisty fido: help for the leashaggressive dog. black earth, wi: dog’s best friend. mech, l.d. (1999). alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. canadian journal of zoology, 77(8): 1196–1203. millan, c. 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(1984). don’t shoot the dog: the new art of teaching and training. gloucestershire, uk: ringpress books. ——— (2009, august 11). debunking dominance theory. karen pryor clicker training. retrieved from http://www.clickertraining.com/node/2297 puig de la bellacasa, m. (2012). “nothing comes without its world”: thinking with care. sociological review, 60(2), 197–216. rafkin, l. (2016, october 15). the anti-cesar millan. sfgate. retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/magazine/article/the-anti-cesar-millan-ian dunbar-s-been-2550043.php schenkel, r. (1946). expression studies on wolves: captivity observations. davemech.org. retrieved from http://www.davemech.org/schenkel/ skinner, b.f. (1938). the behavior of organisms: an experimental analysis. new york, ny: appleton-century. stilwell, v. (n.d.). myth versus fact. positively. retrieved from https://positively.com/dog-training/myths-truths/myth-vs-fact/ ——— (n.d.). what is positive training? positively. retrieved from https://positively.com/dog-training/positive-training/what-is-positivetraining/ bio harlan eugene weaver is an assistant professor of gender, women, and 27 weaver catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) sexuality studies at kansas state university. weaver works in the interstices of trans studies, affect theories, critical race studies, queer studies, multi-species ethnography, and feminist science and technology studies; he is currently writing a book titled bad dog. microsoft word 71505-1-11_fitschandfriedrich.docx fitsch, h. and friedrich, k. (2018). digital matters: processes of normalization in medical imaging. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-31. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © hannah fitsch and kathrin friedrich. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article digital matters: processes of normalization in medical imaging hannah fitsch technische universität berlin hannah.fitsch@tu-berlin.de kathrin friedrich humboldt-universität zu berlin kathrin.friedrich@hu-berlin.de abstract with the introduction of advanced computing technologies, medical imaging increasingly entails normalization through procedures that create, shape, and adjust comparable variables deduced from processes in the living body. the computational rationalities of imaging technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) and computed tomography (ct) not only determine how human bodies are envisioned and visualized, but also how they need to be aligned with apparatuses to answer experimental and diagnostic questions. by drawing on the theoretical concepts of computational rationality and intra-action as well as on ethnographic observations, we aim to disentangle the processes of normalization and the intra-actions of bodies and technologies in medical imaging on three levels. first, we show how, in the history of theoretical mathematics, dynamic processes were conceptualized as discrete and hence calculable, in particular how the ideas of joseph fourier informed the development of the fmri algorithms currently applied in experimental contexts. second, we analyze how the application of these algorithms enables and 2 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) determines practices in fmri-based research. third, we explore how bodies and technologies are aligned with tomography scanners and thereby demonstrate the conceptual and physical convergence of digitalization and materialization, which opens up possibilities for visualizing and understanding human bodies. in a theoretical and analytical perspective, we argue that a critical analysis of digital imaging processes calls for scrutiny of the epistemic and operational preconditions that are actualized but concealed in the application of imaging technologies. introduction contemporary digital medical imaging processes, for example in magnetic resonance imaging (mri) or computed tomography (ct), are based on mathematical models of the human body. because these models relate to characteristics such as tissue density or average morphologies of organs, they determine the subsequent measurement, computation, and imaging of anatomical and functional characteristics. mathematical paradigms for calculating physical properties and image reconstruction algorithms inform different stages of the imaging process and thereby not only dictate the epistemological conditions for the representation of bodies via images and the perception of aspects of bodies, but also impose very material constraints such as straps for immobilization and the use of contrast agents on patients during data acquisition. the algorithmization of bodily processes in digital imaging serves to prepare and generate specific concepts of “normal materiality” in such a way that the individual body is standardized through algorithms that provide specific body standards and average values. in this respect, mathematical models of the human body are normalizing in two ways. first, models can describe only a certain range of a paradigm that represents the object under investigation. the parameter set to designate an object is always already the average of a large group. second, this average, which initially framed a phenomenon technically in the laboratory, is epistemologically and materially translated back onto the body (daston & galison, 2010, pp. 183-190). both these aspects of 3 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) normalization are subject to “co-evolutionary” technologies (slavin, 2011), resulting in a statistical body. here normality must be understood as conceptually distinct from normativity (link, 2013, p. 202; link, 2014). normativity describes all ethical, legal, and political principles of desirable human actions in a specific society. normality by contrast is a historical phenomenon that arose with the ubiquitous datacizing of society and its individuals. the terms “datacized” or “datacizing” describe the mathematical translation processes from wetware (the human body) to hardware through apparatuses and back again. these processes oscillate in the high-tension alternating field of the organic and veer between standardization and individualization, normalization and appropriation. the “normal” in this case is the average of a mass; everything over or under its mean value is not part of normality (link, 2013, p. 202). normalization therefore describes the processual steps required to constitute normality. transforming the physical world into discrete and hence computable frequencies and functions means deciding and operationalizing what constitutes a part of, for example, the human body, and what does not. this begs the fundamental question of how the mathematical and computational foundations of technology enable and simultaneously provide knowledge of the body that is part of imaging processes as processes of normalization. software studies scholar david berry coined the term “computational rationality” to describe “a special sort of knowledge, [which] is essentially vicarious, taking place within other actors or combinations and networks of actors (which may be human or non-human) and formally algorithmic” (berry, 2011, p. 13). in contrast to instrumental rationality, computational rationality denotes a “special sort of knowledge” that, through processes of algorithmization such as in digital medical imaging, codifies how bodies become visible and comprehensible, but also how they must be configured to produce contextually significant knowledge. to disentangle the algorithmic and material processes at work in digital medical imaging, we focus on the intra-actions of imaging 4 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) technology and the human body in order to analyze how normalization is encoded and operationalized. the theoretical concept of intra-action was introduced by the physicist karen barad who employed the notion as an example of quantum physics. barad analyzed the interplay between a technological procedure and an object of investigation and used the term “intra-action” to describe “the inseparability of ‘observed object’ and ‘agencies of observation’” (barad, 2003, p. 814). she further explains the concept of intra-action: a specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the ‘apparatus of observation’) enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the cartesian cut – an inherent distinction – between subject and object) effecting a separation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’.... in other words, relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata within phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions. (barad, 2003, p. 815) with barad’s notion of specific intra-actions, we can retrace and understand how agential cuts enact and constitute both relata and their relations in a material fashion, not only in terms of the material configuration of the “apparatus of observation” as barad writes, but also with regard to the “living materiality” of human bodies, which is subjected to normalizing programs through computational rationalities. to investigate the processes of normalization at work in digital imaging, we draw on barad’s notion of intra-action because it enables us to focus analytically on the applied technical apparatuses and their operational relations to bodies in order to explore the conditions of computational rationality and its agency in the two examples of fmri and ct. these imaging technologies represent the currently most widely applied forms of digital imaging in medicine and illustrate important agential cuts. with the concept of agential cut, barad describes the framework of a technical apparatuses that establishes a scientific phenomenon as well as who is observer and what is observed, who is subject and what is object. in this article, we explore the epistemological and material 5 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) preconditions of fmri and ct. we do not intend to compare the two technologies, but rather to emphasize their very similar "apparatus of observation" of preconditioning digital data generation, especially since both fmri and ct technologies are based on the cartesian co-ordinate system. physically aligning human bodies (even if only aspects are visualized) to the affordances of scanners illustrates how conceptual and material preconditions must converge in order to initiate the digital imaging process. against the background of our critical expertise in these two imaging technologies, we here analytically and methodologically draw an “agential cut” in, as we hope to show, the conceptual and operational overlaps and similarities between these imaging processes.1 we refer both to historical sources produced by developers and contemporary literature on medical imaging as well as to participant observations and interviews.2 we start by scrutinizing the conceptual codifications of physical bodies in the history of mathematics and imaging algorithms that inform the field of fmri. to show how these kinds of conception of a computational rationality are applied in ct, we then shift our focus to the rather material codification of bodies that enables the data generation process. i. conceptual codification: calculable models of the body digital imaging technologies transform the material human body into a visual medium through numbers (balsamo, 1999, p. 223) so that the body becomes data (balsamo, 2011; halpern, 2014; schinzel, 2009). by datacizing the organic, the body is turned into a consistent, endlessly reproducible and transportable “immutable mobile,” as bruno latour describes it (latour, 1990, p. 27). immutable mobile refers to the translation process from x-dimensional physical phenomena to twodimensional laboratory objects: [t]he two-dimensional character of inscriptions allows them to merge with geometry.... the result is that we can work on paper with rulers and numbers, but still manipulate three-dimensional 6 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) objects ‘out there’.... you cannot measure the sun, but you can measure the photograph of the sun with the ruler (latour, 1990, p. 46). historically, different analogies and models have been employed to imagine human bodily processes. in the eighteenth century, at the very beginning of the industrial revolution the human body was first imagined as a machine by the french physician julien offray de la mettrie in his essay l’homme machine [1748] (borck, 2010, p. 6). the human brain and its reasoning abilities were later compared to the computer and computer processes (engel & gold, 1998) while contemporary discourses often use the metaphor of dynamic networks (halpern, 2014). in this article we use the term “model” not as a metaphor of how the human life sciences visualize their concepts of bodies and their functions; we limit our investigation to mathematical models as they provide the basis for the digitalization of the human body (mehrtens, 2004). models in this sense aim to describe dynamic processes by reducing a phenomenon to finite paradigms that can be measured and expressed in equations and algorithms. the process of imaging living matter in the lab requires various preliminary decisions to manage the translation process from wetware (the human body) to hardware (the technical apparatus) by means of mathematical modeling. this is where models and average values of the wetware come into play. these models represent clinical and laboratory concepts and ideas relating to biological matter. with the introduction of advanced computing technologies, medical imaging increasingly entails normalization through procedures that create, shape, and adjust comparable variables “extracted” from living processes and processes of living. the idea of codifying living processes (in particular, cranial processes) as discrete, subdivided but self-contained entities (and hence computable forms that can be rendered into images) can be traced back to early experiments in physiology. codifying applies especially to the discipline currently known as neuroscience. in the nineteenth century, 7 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) anatomists worked alongside physiologists who wanted to identify the essence of the human being/humanity in a laboratory setting but needed new ways of measuring what was deemed to be “living” on dead bodies (hagner, 1997, p. 95). physiologists began to measure (invisible) body processes such as blood flow, metabolism, reproduction processes, etc., at the molecular level (raichle, 2008; hagner, 1997). wavelengths with this objective in mind, the work of physicist and mathematician jean-baptiste joseph fourier proved very helpful in the description and comparison of physical processes in the form of mathematical equations. through the study of heat flows in his théorie analytique de la chaleur (1822/1878), fourier developed the method of dimensional analysis which enabled him to codify objects or natural phenomena by conceptually fragmenting them into different properties characterized by their wavelengths. his analytical theory had an enormous impact on physics, mathematics, and, ultimately, on digitalization today. fourier’s initial and innovative thesis was “that we may develop in convergent series, or express by definite integrals, functions which are not subject to a constant law, and which represent the ordinates of irregular or discontinuous lines” (fourier, 1878, p. 22). the epistemological impact of fourier’s theory was groundbreaking in that it not only overturned previous ideas on the calculation of material properties, but also called for a more application-oriented mathematics. fourier included in this mathematics the description and differentiation of the physical characteristics of objects such as waveforms of heat in his attempt to find a baseline for calculating and comparing corresponding properties in different objects. this allowed him to conceptually transform the physical world into discrete (and hence calculable) frequencies and functions. for him, such mathematical descriptions were equivalent to the laws of nature. mathematical analysis has therefore necessary relations with 8 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) sensible phenomena; its object is not created by human intelligence; it is a pre-existent element of the universal order, and is not in any way contingent or fortuitous; it is imprinted throughout all nature. (fourier, 1878, p. 25) the basic assumption underlying fourier’s method is that a small number of invariable and simple natural laws exist and that, by considering objects as an assemblage of different properties, the object as a whole can be rendered amenable to measurement and computation. fourier proclaimed nothing less than the absolute countability of objects and physical reality. the shift from an atomistic concept of materiality to an oscillatory and process-driven idea of physical phenomena was the actual epistemic turn and the reason why fourier is seen as the pioneer of digitalization (siegert, 2003, pp. 17-18; donner, 2006). this led to a completely different understanding of the analytical frameworks in physics. it was fourier’s analytical toolkit and his idea of fragmenting and transforming material objects into wavelengths and frequencies that enabled the interweaving of analysis with calculability and predictability. the entanglement of calculability and predictability ultimately resulted in an era of risk assessment typical of digital processes. risk assessment here refers to the scientific collection of data to generate epistemic value from not just describing, but also prognostically evaluating, its future meaning. fourier understood that he had established a way to mathematize the human body because, for him, “mathematical analysis has outrun observation, it has supplemented our senses, and has made us in a manner witnesses of regular and harmonic vibrations in the interior of bodies” (fourier, 1878, p. 24). for fourier, the application of his mathematical theorem to physical objects not only led to the conclusion that natural laws could be calculated, but also that their mathematical description could be used to forecast possible behaviors. 9 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) axioms at the end of nineteenth century, theoretical mathematicians started another revolutionary (in mathematical terms) discussion about the meaning and the intentions of axioms in mathematical theory: what does it take for an axiomatic rule to be deemed to be true? an axiom is a mathematical principle presented as evident and taken to be true. axioms serve as starting points for further reasoning and as arguments for mathematical problems. at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the meaning of axioms in mathematics changed fundamentally owing to the work of mathematician david hilbert (1862-1943), who invented a new axiomatic system for euclidean geometry (hilbert, 1899; heintz, 1993). as the mathematician and philosopher eva müller-hill writes, this new notion came up in response to the questions of what are the features that make the availability of mathematical proof a necessary or sufficient condition for mathematical knowledge? what is the role of formalizability in this context? in what sense of ‘formalizable’ is formalizability essential for the epistemic significance of mathematical proof? (müller-hill, 2011). the debate triggered by hilbert’s work not only provided the foundations of theoretical mathematics, but also gave rise to its paradoxes. and as axioms no longer needed to have any relevance to, or justification in, practical experience, therefore the question of what makes an axiom true had a new answer: it is self-evident and true as long as no other axiom holds that its meaning is false. through this formal understanding of axioms, mathematics developed its own language, not simply on the basis of numbers or classifications of mathematical parameters, but through the interrelation of mathematical objects as points, lines, planes, and surfaces. with hilbert’s principle, the objects defined by the axioms can also become true if no contradictions to them can be stated. for hilbert, this was the new criterion for defining truth and existence in mathematics (heintz, 1993, p. 28). this new mathematical freedom from materialization and empirical 10 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) experience allowed mathematical equations to become very productive in the creation of new worlds (heintz, 1993, p. 27). with this second shift, we witness the loss of reference to practical and empirical experience. the decision problem the discussion of axioms in theoretical mathematics was accompanied by new forms of application-oriented endeavors in practical mathematics. alan turing (1912-1954) found an answer that applies this new conception of axioms to algorithms and computing, by solving the entscheidungsproblem (decision problem). the decision problem refers to the difficulty of identifying the generality of expressions mechanically. a general procedure had to be established to decide whether or not a theoretical sentence could be proved. in formal mathematics, there are two main types of algorithm: questions requiring a “yes/no” answer (decision algorithms) and “what” questions (calculation algorithms) (heintz, 1993, p. 74). alan turing shaped the concept of algorithms by suggesting a solution to the decision problem, which was the subject of much discussion in the mathematical research community, in particular within the circle at göttingen university that gathered around hilbert. in his paper on computable numbers (1936), turing provided a new interpretation of the entscheidungsproblem, which, instead of suggesting a new axiom, proposed a concrete construction: an apparatus. turing gave expression to the new mathematical language through the invention of a formal machine that could process a couple of “yes/no” questions. implementing formal logic in a machine allowed turing to limit the decision process to “yes/no” questions and thereby reduce the number of human decisions at the outset. turing was aware that computing is based on mathematical regulations and that the very human decision problem had to be solved for algorithmic processing, so in argumentum e contrario it was clear that human beings who follow a regulatory requirement are performing in a mechanical way. an algorithm is not necessarily mathematical; it can be a pattern of specific steps to be 11 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) performed mechanically, without thought. and vice versa: something that can be performed mechanically can also be performed by a machine. through this new understanding of the algorithm, turing turned the idea of mathematical calculation upside down and accorded a major role to the technical apparatus (turing, 1936). turing did not choose an abstract physical quantity as the starting point for computable functions; rather, he took the concept of the calculation process itself as the basis for an algorithmic procedure. but it was the detection of fourier series and continuous fourier transforms that marked the mathematical shift from analysis to synthesis, which remains to this day the source for every digital media-based system. this is also true for fmri where several fourier transforms produce the picture of a “thinking” (i.e., blinking) brain map. it is not possible in this article to outline the whole history of brain imaging, nor the epistemic shifts that occurred in neuroscience and cognition theory from the mind-brain dualism to contemporary computational neuroscientific methods. what we want to show with our brief review of the changes in theoretical mathematics and applicationoriented physics is the intertwining of the logics of methodological approaches and the knowledge of physical properties produced through them. with the birth of computational logic, the human brain and its thought processes have always been related to the computer metaphor, and this has accompanied all the changes the concept of the computer has undergone over the last hundred years. orit halpern describes the current neuroscientific understanding of the computer metaphor for cognition in the human brain: “reframing memory and decision making in terms of information, recoding, and data compression, the psychologist george miller created a new account of psychology, arguing cognition was an algorithmic process that could be manipulated” (halpern, 2014, p. 201). to summarize: fourier reduced physical values and qualities to wavelengths so that physical characteristics could be represented in mathematical equations. a turn in theoretical mathematics at the 12 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) beginning of twentieth century transformed the idea of algebraic truth and the concept of an axiom. from now on, the concept of an axiom held to be true no longer need rely on experiential or physical reality; an axiom was now effective when no other axioms contradicted it. with this shift, theoretical mathematics became self-referential and the essence of empirical proof as preconditions for the calculation process. turing enabled the sequential calculation of a chain of algorithms without human intervention by building a machine that proposed subsequent options after one algorithm had been answered. every answer to a “yes/no” question led to a new “yes/no” question. turing used human courses of action as templates for computed actions. to do so, he reduced mechanical courses of action to simple steps in order to minimize their complexity and store them in a schematic order. this epistemic change served as the foundation for the development of digital imaging processes and thus formed the basis for images of processes. fragmenting the body to understand the logic of medical digital images of the inner human body in particular parts such as the brain as an object of investigation, this logic must be related to the mathematical approaches of these datacizing processes. in the generation of medical visualization technology that followed, the human body and brain was modeled and virtually fragmented into small entities that could be measured and made amenable to further computerization and normalization. today, brain processes in modern computed neuroscience are framed as dynamic neural networks. the idea of the neuronal network is based on mathematical equations of synaptic growth (i.e. deep learning) and an operationalized definition of characteristic processes. that means the concept of a computer is still a metaphor for the brain. however, with the development of high performance processors and complex networks, the idea of the brain also changed. algorithm-based methodological ideas for analyzing the brain became the overall representation of the brain as 13 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) such: “most broadly, looking through the lens of computer science can teach us about the nature of the human mind” (christian & griffiths, 2016, p. 4). through this epistemic change in the neurosciences, the brain is seen as a network handling a bunch of calculable processes. ii. algorithmic codification to measure the brain fourier’s investigations paved the way for the digital codification and production of images of the human brain in fmri. the computational rationality paradigm that fourier provided is part of a new epistemic framework of materiality produced in natural scientific laboratories. in the last thirty years, digitalization procedures have been implemented more broadly in technical equipment and laboratory apparatuses which are not only used for measuring or examining existing entities, but also announce a new logic of scientific enquiry. following on from the long scientific tradition involving observation and description of natural phenomena, technical laboratory practice has turned toward the creation of referential and ideal reality (cetina, 1997). the human brain as a computational network in this section, we examine how the computational rationality of fmri is conceptualized by understanding the human brain as a computational network that can be measured using digital imaging technologies. in particular, the algorithms involved in the multiple transformation processes required to visualize the brain in the field of fmri are interesting in terms of how the brain is algorithmically codified and which agential cuts are enacted through and in laboratory practices. keeping in mind that a number of non-visible computational steps must be taken to articulate the human brain as a physical object in the form of visual data, we explore the underlying mathematical steps necessary to render the brain in this form, including (but not limited to) those steps that involve categorizing different aspects of the physical brain. by exploring the 14 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) epistemic dimension of algorithms in brain imaging, we seek to understand its resulting effects on conceptions of the brain as such. to accommodate the human body in fmri measurement procedures, various steps are required. empirical science is mostly hypothesis-driven and demands that the complexity of the object of investigation be reduced to paradigms that can be examined by apparatuses (dumit, 2004; fitsch, 2012). even if they are not explicitly articulated, certain assumptions guide the research, expectations, and interpretation of its outcome. the trained psychologist tyler lorig, who teaches in an interdisciplinary neuroscience program, maintains that the fundamental theoretical and, in particular, epistemological question of functional brain research is the where question because any localization of physiological activity must apply an anatomical map of the brain (lorig, 2009, p. 18). to measure the functional activity of a human brain with a magnetic resonance tomograph (basically a huge magnetic field), the brain is treated conceptually as if it consisted of small entities of information, so-called voxels. the magnetic resonance scanner applies a cartesian co-ordinate system to divide the brain virtually: first into slices and then to subdivide each slice into a grid along the x and y axes. single slices are scanned one after the other and aligned on a z axis in order to represent a third dimension. the next step in producing data and creating an image is to manipulate the magnetic field strength using changing gradient fields. the mr signal is actually produced by the clever use of electromagnetic coils that generate and receive electromagnetic fields at the resonant frequencies of the atomic nuclei within the static magnetic field. this process gives the name “resonance” to magnetic resonance imaging. because most atomic nuclei of interest for mri studies have resonant frequencies in the radiofrequency portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (at typical field strengths for mri), these coils are also called radiofrequency coils. unlike the static magnetic field, the radiofrequency fields are turned on during small portions of the image acquisition process 15 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) and remain off the rest of the time. (huettel, 2009, p. 35) through several algorithmic steps, such as fourier transforms, the datacized frequencies are translated into numbers, and every located voxel in the cartesian coordinate system is arranged as a grey tone that indicates its activity value. after the measurement of, and translation into, grey values, several preprocessing steps follow. the data has to be cleansed to remove artifacts, for instance motion corrections or slice scan time corrections to name just two kinds of preprocessing corrections among others.3 to compare individual brain data, the researcher must standardize the scanned brains in terms of size and shape, average activity, etc. this standardization step is called “normalization” and describes the process of adjusting the anatomical brain data to a unified brain; each individual brain is thus adapted to the size of standardized brain coordinates. the “normalization” of the anatomical brain data is necessary to superimpose and reconnect the functional brain data on and to the anatomical data in order to provide evidence for the functional data by locating it in the anatomical cartography of the brain. an interesting ambivalence arises here in the data analysis process. there are algorithms in brain imaging analysis software that co-register functional data on the anatomical, but most neuroscientists prefer to do this manually because they do not trust software-based templates: so there is also an algorithm for computational co-registration, but when i see how badly this co-registration of functional and anatomical data works, i have no confidence in using algorithms; instead i want to see the data and do the co-registration myself. (interview 2009: 19 min., translation hf)4 once the data has been prepared by following the relevant statistical preprocessing steps (cleansing the data of noise and setting average qualities for the greyscale shading), the process of analyzing the functional data can start (fitsch, 2014, p. 93). 16 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) intuitive intention to return to the ambivalent behavior highlighted in the above interview extract: what is at stake when researchers analyze computed imaging data but simultaneously question the quality of algorithmic processing? what is the impact of algorithmic codification on the analytical process, especially if the researchers do not have confidence in the algorithms? how does the use of imaging processes change our understanding of living matter if imaging technologies seemingly allow us to open up the human body to analysis in real time? the interview extract indicates that the process of analyzing algorithmic data relies on human interpretation. the evaluation and interpretation process is based on implicit, tacit knowledge (polanyi, 1966) influenced by the research question and personal everyday circumstances, and how the images of the scanned brain are used to adapt the research results or reject them as inappropriate. this also includes how scientists remember the probands (i.e., particular subjects being studied). for example, lower activity levels are accepted without problematization as the data can be explained by the fact that the subject was a woman, and thus lower activity is expected. this process-driven characteristic can be described with the term intuitive intention (fitsch, 2014, p. 217), a concept that enables the articulation of the entanglement of the scientific community’s presumptions and daily-life knowledge on the one hand, and the digitalized and visualized data produced through apparatuses in measuring and calculating processes in fmri on the other. the terms “intuitive” and “intention” are not intended as fixed concepts of opposing positions; on the contrary, bringing these two concepts together demonstrates how intertwined the two notions are. when speaking of intuitive intention, the computer-driven analytical process is understood as an interplay of apparently “objective computational data” (generated by standardized technologies and algorithms in the measuring processes) with subjective, everyday knowledge and aesthetic decisions. 17 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) neuroscientists working with brain data describe the production and mediation of knowledge through computed images as highly intuitive. the word “intuitive” is used an appreciative way, in the sense of the “most natural,” the most intelligible form of knowledge representation for human perception. by “intuitive” it is meant, that the data can be understood straightforwardly. the word “intuitive” links the objective technique of imaging with an evaluation based on subjective decisions, which can, however, take on an objectified status through the appeal to the images – which is the most natural way of making nature speak. this brings together that which ultimately constitutes the status of the image in the laboratory: the image holds the promise of a scientific fact that only has to be interpreted correctly. the term “intention” outlines the overall formalization and mathematization process we described earlier in this article (starting with fourier and turing), and incorporates the entire computed knowledge production, which berry defines as “computational rationality” (berry, 2011). algorithmically and aesthetically guided intentions enter into the images through the highly preconditioned apparatuses and formalized processes, but they are read as expressions of the phenomenon itself and thus seemingly neutral. as a result, implicit knowledge structures find their way into the interpretation of the algorithmically produced images. they are read as “objective factuality” but power and power relations are inscribed. interpreting brain maps leads scientists to rely on aesthetic and subjective assessments when reading and working with the visual logics of the brain image. this means normative comparisons relating to aesthetic ideas enter into the analysis process and are heavily influenced by common-sense notions of gender, sexuality, or ethnicity. as we see in the next section, the body to be scanned, or the brain as a more specific part, needs to be normalized in line with the program of computational rationality that guides the scanner’s operation, in this case a ct scanner. 18 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) iii. intra-actions in/of diagnostic imaging in this section we shift our focus to the material and technological preconditions of a digital imaging process using ct as an example. in a scanner suite, the conceptual codifications of measurement and visualization need to be materially aligned with the patient’s physical body. the operational and material basis for acquiring and visually comparing image data as described above are the actions undertaken in the scanner suite. they physically enact agential cuts to establish context-specific processual and, especially, spatial relations between body, technology, and image. in this respect, the differences between radiological scanning technologies remain largely insignificant, even though mri and ct employ different physical properties and serve different epistemic functions. yet the dispositives of mri and ct scanning suites share similar features when embedding human bodies in scanners. in the field of ct scanning, the computational rationality constituted conceptually and algorithmically entails very material prerequisites for the imaging process. current practices for imaging living human bodies in ct are based on a fundamental precondition that the body’s mobility must be framed and immobilized before any imaging process can start. in this section we show how, with today’s radiological imaging technologies, this prerequisite becomes a force with highly practical consequences for the body. in the initial data acquisition phase using an mri or ct scanner, the body is aligned with the affordances of the scanner. by following the protocols of positioning the patient inside the scanner ring, technicians adjust the space of the body to the space of the cartesian co-ordinate system, which determines the geometric references for tomographic scanning. some of the positioning procedures also entail rigid immobilization of the patient with the aid of straps in order to prevent motion artifacts in the subsequent images. in order to generate and process a contextually 19 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) significant image, body and machine need to be materially and spatially intra-acting.5 only by adjusting and aligning the somatic and technological spaces can the transformation between digital and physical processes (and hence their normalization) be initiated so as to activate the computational rationality of radiological scanning. as mentioned above, karen barad coined the terms “intra-action” and “agential cut” to shift the analytical focus toward the situated interplay between a technological procedure and an object of investigation that established both the relata and their relations for a specific epistemological and operational regime – in this case, a diagnostic insight. while barad’s analysis is directed toward intra-actions that enact agential cuts during an experiment, transferring the concept of intra-action to diagnostic contexts in medical imaging is productive as a means of examining the more routine measures that need to be taken before an imaging process can be initiated in a non-invasive and therefore seemingly immaterial procedure. barad offers a method for critical thinking about technologically configured sets of apparatus and practices that generate knowledge about bodies and their dynamic materiality. the apparatuses’ own logic mutually (re)generates and aligns paradigms derived from mathematical epistemology and hence operating according to a processual logic of normalization, in both the sense of conceptualization prior to technological applications and the reconfiguration of materiality in the course of applying digital technologies. materiality in this sense must be understood not only as the physicality of a body or a technical apparatus, but also as a conceptual codification or epistemic program, which is inseparably linked to, or inscribed in, materiality. media studies scholar scott curtis identified the tension between dynamic liveliness and diagnostic epistemology as a basic struggle of medical hermeneutics: the human body is … frustratingly resistant to contemplation, study, and interpretation …. in this sense, medicine’s foundational hermeneutic dilemma rests on a dialectic of movement and 20 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) stillness that is mimicked by the use of motion pictures in medicine and is re-enacted in digital medical imaging techniques. (curtis, 2004, pp. 220-221) but before the bodies’ movements can be reconstructed using moving images or functional imaging, a paradox must be solved: how is an agential cut drawn that transforms the properties of a dynamic process into discrete and computable entities that can be fed into a mechanical process of abstraction?6 by focusing on two different material measures taken in the process of the data acquisition in diagnostic ct imaging, we demonstrate how agential cuts are physically enacted and targeted to produce codes of material substances (i.e., digital images of tissue densities). the examples of material measures we use to illustrate this intra-action are techniques for positioning the patient in the scanner and applying contrast media. these particular procedures are designed to bridge the operational gaps between living bodies and computational rationalities such as scanning algorithms by enacting agential cuts between them and mediating their intra-actions to generate a valid diagnostic image. by analyzing historical texts written by the developers of ct and drawing on our own and secondary participant observations in scanning suites, we attempt to disentangle the material operations aimed at establishing the intra-actions between bodies and scanner technology so as to enable the agential cuts for digital images. this analysis reveals the obstacles and resistances to aligning somatic and technological materialities. positioning the patient the techniques for positioning the patient in a scanner are designed to align the patient’s body with the technology’s cartesian co-ordinate system and thereby establish common spatial reference points that enable the transformation and identification of spatial measurements through both algorithmic processes during computation and human actions in the course of producing images. positioning techniques mainly 21 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) concern the position the patient needs to adopt on the bench when inside the scanner ring (saunders, 2008, pp. 111-113). in order to compare anatomical landmarks and the geometric reference system projected automatically by the scanner onto the body, technicians must align the reference systems by instructing or moving the patient. the basic geometric and mathematical reference of the cartesian co-ordinate system, which is the basis for the scanner’s operation (as in the mri scanner) and guides the measurement and imaging processes, becomes manifest and quite instructive in this positioning phase. the human body becomes part of an operational geometry that affects its own physical configuration and imposes a process of normalization derived from the computational rationality of ct since each body must be measured according to the same reference system. in the early experimental phase of ct scanning, neuroradiologist james ambrose emphasized the need for stillness during the phase of data acquisition: a small amount of movement will introduce aberrations into the readings. this will reduce the quality of the pictures. a considerable amount of patient co-operation is therefore required and … four minutes is a long time for a patient to remain perfectly still, and some small movements nearly always occur. (ambrose, 1973, pp. 1038-1039). scanning was a longer process in the technology’s early days. however, remaining immobile and in some cases also holding one’s breath during scanning are still prerequisites for the generation of clinically valid images. contrast media a further example of the codification of somatic materiality and, in particular, the vivacity of the patient in line with the rationalities of the imaging process, is the use of contrast media. contrast media such as bariumor iodine-based substances are used to enhance the “extraction” 22 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) of diagnostically significant signals from the large quantity of measurements taken by the scanner. the assumption that body and contrast media will intra-act in a standardized and hence reliable manner demonstrates the expectation that images generated in this way will have “enhanced visibility.” contrast media will adhere to highly specific parts of tissue or aggregate in cavities and thereby indicate malfunctions or pathologies. in such locations, the x-ray beams of the ct scanner are attenuated in a different way and therefore highlight a certain condition in the body. the contrast medium as a material substance is intended to change the body’s own materiality in intra-action with the x-rays; measurements can then be digitally presented and diagnostically reviewed. as with the use of positioning techniques, the use of contrast media is intended to prepare the patient’s body to reflect the computational rationality of medical imaging before any image is even generated. the mathematical system applied by establishing a spatial reference frame for both technology and body (i.e., the cartesian coordinate system) also enables specific material properties such as tissue density to be addressed. thus technology and body intra-act to enact an agential cut that stems from the computational rationality encoded by imaging algorithms that enable radiological diagnostics. iv. conclusion normalization processes and intra-actions of bodies and technologies in medical imaging can be traced on different levels. as we have argued throughout this article, a critical analysis of digital imaging processes calls for scrutiny of the epistemic and operational preconditions actualized but concealed in the application of imaging technologies. they are effective on multiple levels: conceptual, applied algorithmic, and material. as we have shown, the idea of digitizing dynamic processes has inscribed itself into the algorithms that operate inside tomography scanners. by shifting the analytical focus to the modes and conditions of 23 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) the computational rationality of certain technologies and to the operational and epistemological gaps entailed in the transformation of living entities into algorithmic processes (e.g., the role of intuitive knowledge in image interpretation), we have shown that it is not only formal and deterministic processes that are operative. thought processes “translated into a mechanical process of action” (trogemann, 2010, p. 43) also guide the intra-action of these thought processes, their algorithmic codification, and the material forms they take as they retroact at another level on a material, cultural, and social world evidently affected by them (trogemann, 2010, p. 44). in this section, to connect the two case studies we analyzed in this article, we employ an example based on the practice of fmri but utilize material constraints similar to those illustrated with the example of ct: the fmri head coil. the fmri head coil exemplifies the convergence of epistemic and operational preconditions of imaging in a single object. it also enables further discussion of our notion of agential cuts in the context of normalization within and through different levels of digital imaging processes. as we outlined above, the magnetic resonance tomograph is based on a huge static magnetic field that aligns the hydrogen protons in human tissue (mri) or in blood (fmri) in one direction. under normal conditions, nuclear magnetic dipoles in the body are randomly arranged; but, if a strong external magnetic field is applied, the molecules inside the body become polarized. the head coil is responsible for activating the radiofrequency fields to distract the protons for a short period of time in order to measure how long they need to return to their previous (i.e., aligned) position (see also the description in section ii). in the coil placed over the head to measure the so-called functional activity of the brain, the operative-technical normalization is aligned with mathematical-epistemic knowledge. what is measured through the magnetic resonance and the nuclear spinning movement is essentially the assumption that the presence of fresh blood is an indicator of brain activity: “neural activity is linked to susceptibility changes in the following way: it increases local metabolic demands, and these are 24 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) compensated for by an increase in local blood flow and capillary volume” (roskies, 2008, p. 23). there are many presuppositions in the fmri head coil technique. these start with general body regulations: people with a wider body volume do not fit into the scanner and under the head coil; people with claustrophobia are unable to take part in the experiment because the scanner and the head coil are very tight, and patients have to lie still for one to two hours during the experiment, due to the risk of producing motion artifacts. the frequency rate depends on various conditions. for example, to start the scanner, a technician has to enter the patient’s gender, which is coded as a binary option of female/male. the frequency rates refer to different gender standards in the specific absorption rate of the brain material (dimbylow, 2005). by analytically tracing three agential cuts, we have sought to disentangle the intra-actions in digital processes on the above-mentioned three levels (i.e., conceptual, applied algorithmic, and material). examining the history of theoretical mathematics and its effects on experimental imaging practices demonstrated that this computational rationality constitutes an ontological “space of possibilities.” the shift initiated with fourier’s new understanding of “nature” (i.e., the change from an atomistic concept of materiality to an oscillatory and processdriven idea of physical phenomena) is merely a methodological shift in digital medical surveying technologies. the translation process from wetware to hardware has to convert complex physical matter into wavelengths in order to subdivide and describe their characteristics through sine and cosine functions. however, for visualization, diagnostic or analytical purposes, these wavelengths have to be resituated onto a digital map of the body or the brain. this digital and visual (re)localization of bodily characteristics constitutes a new digital matter: they create statistical maps that combine the virtual and visual object, yet are at once a representation of something (i.e., the “thinking” brain) and its quantification. mapping defines a landscape and is always necessarily a project to install a norm. through this “tendency to convert abstract 25 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) concepts into entities” (gould, 1996, p. 56) (i.e., by locating them in the human brain), digital medical images such as fmri images become highly relevant to society’s normalizing discourses, for instance, by constructing what a gendered brain looks like and the kinds of behavior it supposedly gives rise to. their becoming actual and plausible takes place in the application of imaging technologies whose logics of quantification are enclosed and completed but nevertheless shape our perception and understanding of brains and bodies. thus the experimental and diagnostic inquiries that can be addressed to these imaging technologies are inherently limited by their computational rationalities. only the questions and decisions that were conceptually and algorithmically encoded in the scanner’s software and hardware can be addressed and answered by employing imaging technologies. a critical analysis of digital imaging processes must therefore extend the scope of study to the epistemic preconditions that encode and actualize the agential cuts and intra-actions that generate experimental knowledge and lead to diagnostic decisions. technologies themselves hide the agential cuts, they enact and obfuscate the difference and agency of subjects and objects; that means, to uncover inherent normalization processes, the analytical disentanglement of intra-actions that precede visualizations are a fundamental attempt. notes 1 to focus on conceptual codifications, we take the brain as a more specific part of the body as it is also the focus of attention in the context of the experimental research we explored. 2 we refer to a research corpus generated through field studies that included interviews and participant observation in 2008 and 2009 at the max planck institute for brain science in germany. 3 for a broader introduction to the technique of fmri see toga & mazziotta (2000), gallagher (2008), and fitsch (2014). 4 fitsch used technografie, see rammert & schubert (2006) (i.e., an 26 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) ethnography with a focus on technology) as a methodology based on qualitative methods such as participant observation, interviews with experts, and document analysis, see fitsch (2014). 5 for the collective and perceptual dispositions activated when reading ct scans, see friedrich (2010). 6 for more on the visual culture and visual history of medicine, see holtzmann kevles (1997) and cartwright (1995). references ambrose, j. 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(2008). functional neuroimaging: a historical and physiological perspective. in r. cabeza & a. kingstone (eds.), handbook of functional neuroimaging of cognition (pp. 3-20), cambridge, ma: mit press. rammert, w., & schubert, c. (eds.) (2006). technografie. zur mikrosoziologie der technik [technography for a microsociology of technology]. frankfurt, de: campus. roskies, a. (2008). neuroimaging and inferential distance. neuroethics, 1, 19-30. saunders, b. f. (2008). ct suite. the work of diagnosis in the age of 30 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) noninvasive cutting. durham, nc: duke university press. siegert, b. (2003). passage des digitalen. zeichenpraktiken der neuzeitlichen wissenschaften 1500-1900 [passage of the digital: use of symbols in modern science 1500-1900]. berlin, de: brinkmann & bose. slavin, k. (2011). how algorithms shape our world. ted talk. retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_worl d?language=de schinzel, b. (2009). recognisability and visual evidence in medical imaging versus scientific objectivity. in b. huppauf & c. wulf (eds.): dynamics and performativity of imagination: the image between the visible and the invisible (pp. 339-356). new york, ny: routledge. toga, a. w., & mazziotta, j. c. (eds.). (2000). brain mapping. the systems. san diego, ca: academic press. trogemann, g. (2010). code and machine. in a. gleiniger & g. vrachliotis (eds.). code: between operation and narration (pp. 41-54). basel, ch: birkhäuser. turing, a. (1936). on computable numbers, with an application to the entscheidungsproblem. in proceedings of the london mathematical society, 42/2, 230-265. bios dr. hannah fitsch works at the center for interdisciplinary women's and gender studies at technische universität berlin with her project how bodies turn into numbers and numbers into images. on algorithms in brain research and the logic of standardization. she is postdoc at the berlin graduate program digital transformation digital. before, she realized the project gender technik museum. strategies of gender balanced practices in technical museums funded by the german ministry of research and education www.gendertechnikmuseum.de. dr. des. kathrin friedrich works as a postdoc research associate at the cluster of excellence “image knowledge gestaltung. an interdisciplinary laboratory” at humboldt university in berlin. previously she was a research associate at the academy of media arts in cologne after 31 fitsch and friedrich catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) studying media studies, law and sociology at the university of marburg. bailey article    misogynoir in medical media: on caster semenya and r. kelly    moya bailey northeastern university m.bailey@northeastern.edu as philosopher linda alcoff (2005) asserts, racism depends on perceptible difference to determine which bodies are expendable—and in this cultural moment of black hypervisibility, black women are particularly vulnerable. i use two cultural examples to explore the real-life impact of misogynoir in medical media, particularly the ways in which the biomedical knowledge produced by physicians reinforces certain bodies as normal and others as pathological. the case of athlete caster semenya and the trial of r&b star r. kelly allow me to introduce black feminist health-science studies as a critical intervention into current medical curriculum-reform conversations. the 2009 controversy surrounding world-class runner caster semenya illustrates the unique synergy between socially constructed biases and medically derived standards, which collude to pathologize some bodies more than others. by focusing on the misogynoir-istic representation of semenya in global media, i highlight the importance of aesthetics in both medicine and social logics, a correlation that is rooted in the origins of medical education. the prosecution team in the r. kelly trial tried to adapt the didactic medical medium of the tanner scale to prove the age of the girl in the video, raising important questions about how observation becomes science and science becomes medicine that can be evaluated in a court of law (vineyard, 2004). i argue toward a theory of black feminist health-science studies that builds on social-justice science focused and centered on the health and well-being of marginalized groups. misogynoir describes the co-constitutive, anti-black, and misogynistic racism directed at black women, particularly in visual and digital culture (bailey, 2010).  the term is a combination of misogyny, “the hatred of women,” and noir, which means “black” but also carries film and media connotations.  it is the particular amalgamation of anti-black racism and misogyny in popular media and culture that targets black trans and cis women.  representational images contribute to negative societal perceptions about black women, which can precipitate racist gendered violence that harms health and can even result in death.  i see racism and sexism as public health concerns that critically impact medical treatment and medical science, as they touch all aspects of our culture and society. i discuss the misogynoir that animates these stories within popular media that rely on medical media to communicate to the lay public. in these examples we see deeply rooted biomedical beliefs that stem from, as well as inform, sociocultural ideas about the bodies of black women and reveal medical practitioners’ anxieties, which raises lingering questions for me about our expectations of justice and the amelioration of health disparities for those multiply marginalized in our world. caster’s case on august 19, 2009, south african runner caster semenya competed in the track and field world championships and vaulted into the headlines with a world-record-breaking time in the women’s 800-meter race. shortly after her win, semenya went into hiding and was placed on suicide watch. her genitalia, sexual organs, and hormone levels became the subject of global discussion, seemingly before she had been able to make sense of the speculations herself. semenya, then eighteen, said a few days after the firestorm erupted that south african athletic officials “should have left me in my village at home” (bbc news, 2009). how did a record-breaking athlete at the height of her career become suicidal in the course of a few days? semenya is one of many women who find themselves and their bodies caught in the crux of what science says exists and what society says should be, with little regard for what actually is. caster semenya was exposed as intersex, a person with a so-called “disorder of sexual differentiation,” meaning her body does not fit neatly into sociomedical categories of male and female (fausto-sterling, 2000, p. 45). it is unclear whether semenya was aware of her non-normative female anatomy before it was brought to global attention through the leaked results of a gender test by the international association of athletics federations (iaaf).1 semenya had completed the required gender test for female athletes in her home country, but protests from fellow competitors prompted the iaaf to investigate further. she consented to the additional testing, although she was not initially informed of its purpose. her genitals were photographed and examined, her internal organs x-rayed. genetic and chromosomal analysis were conducted all to determine if she was in fact a she, according to a multipronged medical rubric designed to identify “true” sex through a process misleadingly called “gender testing” (hart, “caster semenya’s gender test results force iaaf to call in outside help,” 2009).  in addition to the invasion of semenya’s privacy, the test itself inspired headlines around the world, which proclaimed “she’s a he!” or the more dubious “is she really a he?”—sparking a global media frenzy with expert and lay opinions on semenya’s case (hurst, 2009; jacobson, 2009). the amount of publicity semenya’s story received, and is still generating seven years later at the 2016 olympic games, overwhelms any commensurate reporting on other women athletes’ stories in the past (hurst, 2009). a database search reveals over a hundred times as many listings for semenya as for any other female athlete whose sex has been called into question. after semenya won a silver medal at the 2012 london olympic games, journalists speculated that she purposely avoided the gold because she did not want to deal with the glare of the spotlight, effectively bringing her into the center of a media storm they said she was trying to escape (thomas, 2012). what makes her different? there is something about caster semenya that makes for a good news story. the intersections of race, sex, and nationality all come to bear in the marketability of semenya’s triumph-turned-tragedy in the global media. the specter of the black woman’s body at the intersections of socially constructed and medically reinforced hierarchies of biological difference remains a trope in contemporary media and dates back to our earliest uses of mass communications. i explore the feedback loop between popular media representation and medical media to tease out the undergirding structures that support their interconnection and the impact on semenya. it is through biomedical discourse that societal norms are solidified and rendered objective science. by examining the misogynoir embedded in this biomedical rhetoric accompanying media that is used to disburse it, i hope to offer sites for intervention and transformation that challenge hegemonic perceptions of black women. gender testing developed in relation to professional sports to ensure that no men could pretend to be women to win competitions, the assumption being that men would easily defeat women in any sport (fausto-sterling, 2000, p. 3). since the first international testing began in 1966, no male (assigned at birth) person has been discovered pretending to be a woman. however, women with non-normative female anatomy have had their identities challenged and their lives altered. many have lost their careers and endorsements, been barred from competition, and had their personal lives ripped apart when biomedical science reveals that they are “really” male. western science proposes a dichotomous and streamlined relationship between sex, gender, and, ultimately, sexuality. gender testing relies on the prevailing biomedical logic, which acknowledges two discrete sexes in the human species:  male and female (fausto-sterling, 2000). the bifurcation of human sex into male and female is a constant feature of medical texts. the sexes are differentiated by the chromosomes that inform their development, with an xx chromosomal pairing for females and xy for males. chromosomes dictate certain patterns of maturation that manifest as secondary sex characteristics, such as breast tissue, muscle mass, and facial hair. these physiological features of sex difference affect behavioral patterns that are then socially codified as gender roles. the logic then follows that these two gender identities are what drive sexual attraction, so that heterosexuals are people who desire the “opposite” gender. feminist science studies theorists expose dominant sociocultural scripts in objective science. biologists like anne fausto-sterling have challenged the linear explanation of sex, gender, and sexuality by identifying the societal factors that inform the narratives that their colleagues create. in sexing the body: gender politics and the construction of sexuality (2000, p. 48), fausto-sterling states that approximately one in two thousand children are born with genitalia that place them outside the normative boxes of male and female. in the united states, babies with ambiguous genitalia are routinely given corrective surgery that makes them physically appear more male or female, a practice that serves to obscure the prevalence of intersex individuals; such individuals have self-reported devastating effects on their lives. in some intersex cases, internal testes (testes that have not descended) are more prone to developing cancer. this is a fact that the intersex society of north america (2011) reports is overstated in medical literature; however, as it is used to coerce fearful parents into surgery for their infants. additionally, infants with genitalia that do not meet or exceed average sizes for their respective sexes are subject to surgery. the operations maintain the socially accepted idea of two sexes at the expense of the biodiversity that exists within humanity. deborah findlay (1995, p. 36) expounds on the social production of biological sex and explores the relatively recent assertion that there are two “opposite” sexes. these findings have been extremely useful in supporting the intersex and transgender movements, which are based on the lived experiences of people around the world who find themselves butting up against the medical establishment’s dichotomy and subsequently not receiving the kind of care they need or desire. ruth bleier, one of the first self-named feminist scientists, offered harsh criticism of sociobiology, a field that asserts that many human behaviors have evolved and are tied to our genetic make-up (bleier, 1986). many such behaviors, which are claimed to be universal, simply mirror behavior patterns in the white western world. bleier also critiques the science involved in sociobiology, as it omits animal data that does not support its theories. for example, evidence of same-sex sexual activity or male nurturing in species is often obscured or minimized in scientific research to support homonormative and sexist beliefs about humans. these interventions have remained largely ensconced within the field of feminist science studies. the degree to which they have influenced biomedical science literature is unclear (fausto-sterling, 2000, p. 17). not all scientists believe that these biases exist; some see these findings as individual cases of “bad science” evidence or shoddy work rather than culturally embedded beliefs emerging in research. the prevalence and pattern of these findings belie this belief, with marginalized categories of social identity corresponding with biomedical determinations of subordinate qualities.  biomedicine’s use of terms like normal and average has the effect of marginalizing minority forms of embodiment so that bodily diversity is pathologized. lennard davis (2006, p. 1) posits that “normal” is a relatively new concept, borne of nineteenth-century state and industrial demands for universal citizens and workers. normal transitioned from being understood in strictly statistical terms to becoming a way to think about the body itself. these discourses of the normal body travel from science to society, reinforcing medicalized knowledge that is already culturally produced. because of societal investments in medical authority, the public does not critically interpret the medical media that carries these messages. i do not suggest that this trust is misplaced, but that it is largely unquestioned. those who attempt inquiries are often dismissed because they do not have the credentialing that would lend their arguments support in this context of medical authority. representations of gender and health: who is fit to be consumed? after performing gender tests, lying about what it was doing, and then leaking the results, the governing body of the international association of athletic federations revealed that it had not informed semenya of its findings. the delay was particularly alarming after the leaked report employed the rhetoric of medical urgency to describe the apparent “risks” associated with semenya’s “rare medical condition,” her health as a world-class athlete notwithstanding (hunter, 2013). iaaf officials had already accepted the south african certification of her sex required for competition. her physical appearance, particularly in relation to her white competitors, and the significant amount of time she shaved off her personal best were the impetus for the re-test, which was explained to her as a drug test. this led to charges of racist and imperialist ideology by athletics south africa (asa). leonard cheue, then president of asa, remarked, “who are white people to question the makeup of an african girl?…i say this is racism, pure and simple.…it is outrageous for people from other countries to tell us ‘we want to take her to a laboratory because we don’t like her nose, or her figure’” (smith, 2009). cheue’s words speak to the ways in which our notions of health are enmeshed with beauty ideals. a strip club in south africa called teazers created a billboard shortly following semenya’s gender testing controversy (fourle, 2009). owner lolly jackson claimed that the club was not referencing semenya when it created the advertisement, although jackson gave semenya 20,000 rand as a “gift” from the establishment, saying, “she gave me a lot of mileage.” the billboard reads “no need for gender testing!” as the owner wanted to assure the patrons of his establishment that the dancers are “100% women” (fourle, 2009). it seems unlikely that this billboard is not referencing semenya, since the phrase “gender testing” is only used within the context of professional sports and in the time frame with her name attached (jacobson, 2009). additionally, the establishment’s monetary overture to semenya belies any innocence on the part of jackson. the woman in the billboard fits mainstream western conceptions of feminine beauty. she is white with long, straight blonde hair and very noticeable curves. the photograph draws attention to her large breasts. she has no visible hair on her body and her skin is tanned and oiled. her nails are manicured and she wears high heels that are visible in her prone position. her eyebrows are arched and she has makeup on her face. the viewer is instructed to regard her body as the epitome of femininity—no gender testing needed. onlookers are invited to use their sense of sight to validate her femininity. the implicit comparison delegitimizes the black female body through a visual omission but a literal referent. though we do not see semenya’s body, the text of the ad calls forth her image, inviting viewers to assess the gender of the woman in the advertisement and semenya’s visually, at the same time.  semenya’s womanhood is up for debate and, comparatively, is deemed insufficient. there is no question about the woman in the advertisement. what is advertised is visually affirmed as real, 100% woman, and authentic, while semenya’s image, so far from the one projected, remains in question. the blonde model’s manicured and augmented body is feminine because it is desirable and attractive as articulated through white western standards of beauty. her body is fit for consumption. representations derived from western aesthetic preferences of the female body are used to promote the spending of capital (gilman, 1999, p. 326). the ad instructs viewers that the model’s body sells and implies that semenya’s does not.  not only is semenya’s body unfit for athletics, it is unfit for public consumption. in sharp contrast to the model, semenya has features that have been publicly labeled masculine and unattractive. her short, non-dyed, tightly curled hair; dark skin; and natural breasts are in stark opposition to the model’s long, blonde hair; tanned skin; and what are likely breast implants. it is precisely semenya’s fitness and natural body that make her unfit for consumption. her muscled physique is not the desired way women should look. likewise, the model that completes the juxtaposition is labeled “100% woman” because of body modifications that make her desirable. gender testing is invoked because semenya is not performing femininity well. the biological basis of sex takes a backseat to gender standards that regulate our understanding of what is real. semenya’s appearance prompted the gender testing she endured and the public notoriety she experienced in popular media. her physically fit body and athletic prowess were the source of medical speculation about her “health” and furthered media representations of athletic black women as less than appropriately feminine. she was the victim of “surveillance medicine” that marked her as potentially ill because of social investment in discrete sexes (clark & olesen, 1999, p. 22). rather than seeing semenya’s body as her own, she was implicitly and then explicitly measured by an unarticulated, though agreed upon, sociomedical standard. black women have long been portrayed as masculine and inappropriately feminine in popular media; athletes are popular targets for this negative attention because of their muscles and physical prowess (hooks, 1999, p. 21). venus and serena williams, the black us tennis champions, are frequent targets of such sentiments; it has often been speculated that they are too aggressive and too masculine to compete with other (read: white) competitors. like semenya, they are implicitly masculinized because of their skin color and physiological difference. in 2009, other coaches and players harassed sarah gronert, a white professional tennis player, because she was believed to be intersex. calls were made for her to be removed from competition, but no such action occurred. “there is no girl who can hit serves like that, not even venus williams,” said the coach of one of her rivals, alluding to the superor more-than-feminine attributes of williams (johnston, 2009). gronert, though described as “beautiful” in more than one article, surpassed the limit of what was considered feminine. despite being ranked lower than many other women, charges that her physical prowess surpasses that of a “normal” woman, thereby giving her an unfair advantage, were levied. gronert’s difficulties, however, remained ensconced in the world of women’s tennis, never becoming an international news story like semenya’s. in an attempt to properly feminize the athlete, the south african magazine you! provided semenya with a makeover that included doing her nails, curling her hair, applying makeup, and wearing more feminine attire.  the result was heralded with its own incredulous headline:  “wow, look at caster now!” (you!, 2009).  semenya’s outward make over was a cultural way to put her back into the appropriate box of femininity, something the iaaf offered to do medically. the benevolently paternalistic concern of the iaaf regarding semenya’s health contrastingly painted the asa as antagonistic and insensitive. some newspapers suggested that asa was responsible for the fiasco by not alerting the iaaf to semenya’s condition in the first place. the iaaf’s own rules at the time allowed intersex and transsexual athletes who have been using hormones for two years to compete, troubling their own justification for gender-testing semenya. the iaaf announced in late november 2009 that it would not release the test results publicly, a decision that came after the south african parliament expressed outrage regarding the invasion of semenya’s privacy (hart, 2009, september 8). the generally held rule of doctor-patient confidentiality had to be rearticulated, since it had already been violated by an international media firestorm (see holloway, 2011, for more on issues of privacy and patient rights). a panel of doctors, including gynecologists, internists, endocrinologists, and sex specialists, reviewed semenya’s case, and in december more information was leaked to the press. the iaaf had apparently agreed to pay for semenya’s corrective surgery, should she fail the gender test (hart, 2009, december 11). while black south africans called out the racism, imperialism, and some of the sexism that swirled in the press, ableist language that indicated a certain distancing from female masculinity and a subtle heteronormativity was simultaneously present. the asa defended semenya against the racist gender standards that created the controversy by highlighting the ways her blackness played a role in her coming to the world’s attention, but their arguments often relied on the same biological determinism that they were questioning. for example, the south african minister of sport remarked, “there’s no scientific evidence. you can’t say somebody’s child is not a girl. you denounce my child as a boy when she’s a girl? if you did that to my child, i’d shoot you” (dixon, 2009). another official suggested that semenya was being depicted as a monster, which was the kind of thing that drives someone to suicide. in the minds of those trying to protect her, affirming semenya’s femininity and womanhood was essential to her humanity, suggesting their own fear of the non-normative body. the iaaf failed to acknowledge the social norms that drove its urgent and bold offer to pay for semenya’s surgery. the warnings about the potential “risks” associated with her “condition” repositioned a socially constructed panic as a medical one. despite its concern, the iaaf was unable to properly protect semenya from a global media inquest that remains interested in uncovering her “true” sex. in 2012, semenya competed in the london summer olympic games and won a silver medal after she was cleared to compete (epstein, 2012). she won gold in the 2016 olympic games in rio de janeiro, brazil, but her participation caused a stir again, this time because she was allowed to compete without testosterone blockers. fellow world-class runner dutee chand argued in court that it was unfair to block her naturally occurring levels of testosterone and won, creating a two-year suspension of blockers for female athletes (samuel, 2016). joanna jozowik who came in 5th in the women’s 800 meter final in rio said of her finish, “i'm glad i'm the first european, the second white…” commenting on the fact that the three medal winners were black (flanagan 2016). she went on to talk about how her body does not measure up to the size and unfeminine nature of the black women runners, invoking all the misogynoir semenya experienced in 2009. caster semenya’s experience demonstrates on an international level the trouble with fixed scientific categories that are not representative of the lived reality of people’s bodies. how do we understand bodies as they exist, without pathologizing those that are different from a standard rendering of what we imagine a body should be? and how does a standard body come to exist in the first place? “age ain’t nothin’ but a number”: lessons from the r. kelly trial on june 13, 2008, r&b artist r. kelly was acquitted on fourteen charges of felony child pornography possession and soliciting a minor (streitfeld, 2008). a video of kelly and a thirteen-year-old black girl engaged in a myriad of sexual activities surfaced on the internet at the same time that social workers were following leads regarding the illicit nature of their relationship. this prompted an official police investigation beginning in 2002. the jury’s reported reasoning for acquitting kelly is what makes the salacious celebrity scandal of interest to black feminist health-studies science: when interviewed, several jurors voiced doubt that the girl was a minor. the jurors claimed to have been in agreement that it was r. kelly in the video, but could not agree that the girl in question was underage (abc news, 2008). the girl would not testify, although friends and family identified her as the person in the video.  jurors thought the unidentified girl looked “too developed” to be thirteen. the case against kelly hinged on the jury’s ability to ascertain the age of the girl on tape visually. if she was of age, then a crime was not committed.  but how does one visually assess someone’s age? what, in fact, does a thirteen-year-old black girl look like? rather, as was the question in this case, what should a thirteen-year-old black girl look like? with stakes as high as thirty years of jail time, age becomes more than a number; it is the marker that determines guilt or innocence.2 the intersection of racial and gender stereotypes, as enacted through the perception of the body of a thirteen-year-old black girl, raises important questions about how the medico-juridical system in this country utilizes didactic medical media. the models and figures within medical materials are produced for healthcare providers as examples of health and disease, and as representations of who they are in relation to their patients. i label these representations didactic medical media as they are created with the intent to educate healthcare professionals and students about health and disease. didactic medical media provides doctors with representations of bodily function and anatomy that assist them in assessing health, as well as in offering constructions of their own role and place in the medical interaction. the standardization of these figures is valued because it supports consistency across the practice of medicine. however, this modeling can elide the abnormal with the pathological, making structures in real people that do not fit textbook examples not only different but aberrant. my research shows that “normal” is aggregated through some bodies and not others, creating a standard that does not include all who will be measured against the rubric. this elision contributes to the creation of disparate care for marginalized patient populations in a medical system that assumes a white standard of “health” and “normality.” i look at the controversy surrounding kelly to demonstrate how these precepts from the moment of standardization of medical education play out in our contemporary world. the girl at the center of kelly’s trial is less important than the work her body does as medicalized media. in this context, her body is a tool for the prosecution to prove that she is underage. despite fourteen witnesses’ testimony that the girl in the video was thirteen, the prosecution faced an uphill battle trying kelly, a man with at least six other legal skirmishes connected to his relationships with underage girls (associated press, 2008). the prosecution procured a forensic physician to demonstrate to the jury that the girl in the videos with r. kelly was thirteen. dr. sharon cooper of the university of north carolina used the tanner scale to show that the girl on the tape was in her early teens (vineyard 2008, june 13). developed by james mourilyan tanner (1962), the five stage tanner scale marks different phases in human physical sexual maturation. each phase or stage of development corresponds to an age. by examining the primary and secondary sex characteristics of the girl in the video, prosecutors hoped this “scientific evidence” would “prove” the girl was under the legal age of consent. tanner created the scale in the early 1960s through examining boys and girls of european and north american ancestry, i.e. white children (tanner, 1962). in the 1970s he completed a project that estimated global averages of development, noting the significant variation in developmental physiology across regions, ethnicity, and even within group populations (eveleth & tanner, 1990). despite this subsequent work, all current representations of the tanner scale in medical textbooks depict thin white bodies or use colorless sketches that reflect european facial features and hair characteristics. tanner gathered previously produced growth studies and traveled across the world, measuring children on multiple continents. they grouped them into only three racial categories, europeans, africans, and asians. tanner’s research showed that growth varied significantly across regional, racial, and ethnic groups. in his 1990 book, world-wide variation in human growth, he writes: there is no guarantee however that all populations have the same growth potential. there are certainly large differences between populations, in height, weight, the age of puberty for example, and at present it is not clear how much of them is due to heredity and how much is due to environment. (eveleth & tanner, 1990, p. 1) the scale has not been modified to reflect tanner’s own findings across racial categories, nor does it have the elasticity to work independently of knowing the child’s age. key to the scale’s development and use within medicine is knowledge of the child’s age, which is how “normal” development can be assessed (rosenbloom & tanner, 1998). children’s bodies are compared to the average lengths, size, and width of sex characteristics of the white children tanner studied years ago. in this context, age may or may not be correlated with the “appropriate” level of maturation. by attempting to estimate chronologic age through observable sex characteristics, biomedical visualization is privileged over testimony by people in the girl’s life. the body of the girl in question is measured against a scale she may or may not exceed, an interesting choice for the prosecution given this possibility. the tanner scale is an incorrect match for the facts of the r. kelly case, as it fails to account for the potentially different development timelines of black children. a 1997 study in the journal pediatrics, found that 50% of black girls in the united states were beginning puberty by age eight, compared to less than 15% of white girls (herman-giddens et al., 1997). studies in 2002, 2011, and 2012 support these findings as well (wu, mendola, & buck, 2002; reagan et al., 2012; dorn & biro, 2011). black children are discussed as developing primary and secondary sex characteristics earlier than their white counterparts. because tanner created the scale using the measurements of white european and north american children, black children are understood to develop sooner. if black children were the implicit standard, then the reporting would reflect that white children mature later. the studies could, however, discuss the differences without attributing a value to the maturation. these semantic choices reflect subtle power differentials that invoke the social hierarchies of our lived realities. ultimately, cooper’s expert testimony was deemed inadmissible. the presiding judge stated that the scale had no legal precedent and that the high-profile nature of the case made him reluctant to allow it as evidence (singersroom.com, 2007). tanner himself was opposed to his scale being utilized within the legal system. in a 1998 editorial in the journal of pediatrics, tanner and his colleague wrote: we wish to caution pediatricians and other physicians to refrain from providing “expert” testimony as to chronologic age based on tanner staging, which was designed for estimating development or physiologic age for medical, educational, and sports purposes—in other words, identifying early and late maturers. the method is appropriate for this, provided chronologic age is known. it is not designed for estimating chronologic age and, therefore, not properly used for this purpose.  (rosenbloom & tanner, 1998) tanner’s own words make it clear that the stages should not be used to surmise age, but rather to decide if a child of known age is maturing properly. its appropriation for the r. kelly trial and subsequent legal cases raise additional questions about medical media’s import in the lives of those accused and those victimized. when bodies are centered over the people who have them, questions of “health” and “harm” become unclear. the purpose of the tanner scale is reimagined without consideration of its limitations. cooper’s attempt to use the scale had the unintended effect of overshadowing the identifications made by fourteen witnesses, including the girl’s friends, teachers, and family, who had already testified that she was the person in the video (associated press, 2008). an eyewitness is no longer enough in the current legal system, where the burden of proof is escalated by the desire for seemingly objective scientific evidence. crime-drama shows have increased jury expectations of forensic evidence, resulting in eyewitness testimony no longer being as convincing (read: entertaining) as medically corroborated evidence. the “csi effect,” as it is known in the field, forces lawyers to push for forensic tests at the expense of less costly and more obviously subjective testimony (schweitzer & saks, 2006). tanner’s understanding of his work differs from how it is being appropriated in other contexts. i want to make clear that recognizing bodily diversity does not invalidate all uses of the scale in its original context, nor does it imply that there should be separate scales for different races. in a moment where medical and corporate interests are attuned to the need to address issues of disparate treatment of people in color, the pharmaceutical industry has responded with race-specific medicine. drugs like bidil, which has been approved to treat heart failure in african americans, attempt to medicalize physical disparities that are actually aggravated by social inequities. dorothy roberts and evelynn hammonds work on the way that healthcare has turned to the market to attempt to ameliorate inequality, and identifies a significant moment in reevaluating how we mobilize social justice in the sciences (roberts, 2008; shields et al., 2005). i signal a need to rethink medical media that relies on standards and norms for bodies that disproportionately affect marginalized groups, and instead approach an ethic of care that focuses on people’s full selves and well-being. black feminist theory clearly articulates the power of the image to serve the hegemony of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” by controlling the way society views marginalized groups and how we view ourselves (hooks, 1989, p. 14). bell hooks discusses the importance of producing images that counter the normalizing force of stereotypes, but also exposes the danger of reactionary positive images that can also constrain and confine. we need complex images that break the good/bad, white/black dichotomy. similarly, patricia hill collins (2005, p. 85) argues against “controlling images” that attempt to delimit the potential ways of being for black women in the world. both scholars offer endless insight into this dilemma by also exposing the link between these images and real-world consequences for black women and others. however, uncovering this link is not the same as demystifying its production. a crucial next step is grappling with the link’s formation in an effort to change outcomes. black feminist health-science studies is a way to engage the complexity of a situation like the r. kelly trial and move conversations beyond guilt and innocence. rather than addressing the performance of justice through our legal system’s appropriations of some scientific tools, i would like to move toward a social-justice science that understands the health and well-being of people to be its central purpose—which requires more arenas of rectification to be addressed. this formulation of black feminist health-science studies, when focused on this trial, provides evidence of the co-constitutive nature of medical science and popular perception, underscoring the need to engage them simultaneously. social-justice science attempts to interrupt the linear progression of observations turned scientific facts that are then used in medicine to guide rubrics of health and normal body representation. it is important for medical students to encounter a critique of positivist science, particularly as it relates to the perceived objectivity of the western medical establishment. this practice goes beyond the surface level correctives usually deployed in invocations of “culturally competent medicine” or calls to “diversify” the healthcare professions. students must understand that simply adding race, sex, ability, and sexuality as categories of analysis does not necessarily penetrate the deeply seated ideological structures of western medicine and culture. a radical—meaning “from the roots”—approach is needed. the ethnocentrism of their medical-school environment informs the ways students understand themselves as future doctors and how they see their patients. medical-school instruction assumes a white patient and practitioner, prompting marginalized groups to seek to understand how these assumptions affect care outcomes. embedded within the r. kelly trial is another tale, one of age-old constructs of the hypersexual nature of black women. when questioned about the case, local-news interviewees felt that the girl’s active participation precluded all talk of a crime having been committed. some blamed the victim, asking where her mother was and insinuating that her actions made her age irrelevant. they insisted that she did not look thirteen doing what she was doing in the video. in these comments, we see the simultaneous engendering of the girl in question as a child with an unfit black mother and as a hypersexual black woman grown enough to engage in “disgusting” behavior. the maturity of her body, coupled with the taboo nature of her sexual activities with kelly, was channeled through stereotypes about black women and obscured readings of her participation as coerced. like sarah baartman experienced centuries before her, the girl’s physiology was used to suggest something freakish about her sexuality (see crais & scully, 2011; gilman, 1989; tuvel, 2011; willis, 2010). her body was too developed to be that of someone thirteen and her actions were too explicit to be those of a minor. as cultural critic mark anthony neal (2008) notes, by the time of the trial, that thirteen-year-old girl was now a mature nineteen-year-old, a feat accomplished by the defense’s brilliant six-year delay of the trial. and what of r. kelly himself? what does it mean that his reportedly inappropriate and consistent relationships with girls, the subject of repeated legal actions, remain unchallenged? his brushes with the legal system have not curtailed his behavior. in an infamous interview with music journalist touré following the acquittal, when asked if he liked teenage girls, kelly paused and asks for clarification, “when you say teenage, how old are we talking?” (vineland, 2008, september 17). kelly seemed oblivious to the problems with his actions. what kind of social justice does the use of the tanner scale provide for the girls solicited by kelly?  what would a conviction have accomplished for them or for girls whom kelly may solicit in the future? these questions suggest a need for a social-justice science that actually poses different questions and has different objects of study. i am arguing for a social-justice science that informs medicine and does not assume that healing exists solely or even primarily within the reconfiguration of the doctor-patient interaction. for black mothers who negotiate violent environments, the doctor-patient interaction is several times removed from the types of interventions that would produce useful outcomes for them and their families (see beth richie’s discussion of the stereotype of the “immoral” black mother in clarke & olesen, 1999, pp. 283-299; see also mouton et al., 1997). issues of access and time, as well as the erosion of faith in doctors to treat black women patients fairly make the clinical encounter a low priority or something to be avoided all together (holmes, 1989, p. 1).  black women are also more than twice as likely to be murdered than their white counterparts, a health reality that demands more intersectional remedies than can be theorized or even executed by healthcare professionals alone (ruzek, olesen, & clarke, 1997, p. 32). a more collaborative effort between the biomedical sciences and humanities might lead to different sites of inquiry that are much more beneficial to the project of creating a socially just world. in r. kelly’s case, we see that the threat of a punitive judiciary system is not an adequate deterrent to his behavior and has yet to produce any accountability for his actions other than financial compensation to a few survivors. a conversation among social-justice activists working to end the prison-industrial complex, social scientists studying the impact of imprisonment on communities, and psychologists who study the impact of child sexual abuse on survivors might result in a new accountability structure that supports the healing of both kelly and the girl in question.  my vision for black feminist health-science studies involves this more collaborative approach to addressing the questions of our day, as it draws from multiple bodies of knowledge and attempts to focus both the macro and micro sociocultural factors that inform our notions of justice. r. kelly is rumored to be a survivor of childhood sexual abuse himself, raising additional questions about punitive state practices that do not address the reality that many abusers are survivors themselves (neal, 2008).  i hope that this newly formulated lens of feminist health-science studies, when focused on this trial, provides evidence of the co-constitutive nature of medical science and popular perception, underscoring the need to engage them simultaneously. interventions that address misogynoir must operate on multiple levels. this means not only working to change the behaviors of biomedical practitioners in different arenas of our society but also looking closely at the ways that bias and prejudice are institutionalized in their institutions of professionalization.  essential to this work is intervening in the culture of medical legal and scientific institutions that allow members of the community to feel as though they are objective and removed from the biases and prejudices that pervade our society, particularly in media. this requires shifts in our cultural understandings of certain professionals as automatically objective and requires examining the ways in which media perpetuates the hierarchy of oppression even when people believe their training makes them immune. cultural competence, cultural proficiency, and cultural brokerage are all terms healthcare professionals use to describe the necessary skills, sensitivity and knowledge to treat diverse patient populations (betancourt et al., 2003; brannigan, 2012; burchum, 2002; koehn & swick, 2006; kosoko-lasaki, cook, & o’brien, 2009). this research pushes contemporary conversations about how to ameliorate healthcare disparities further by centering the cultural component of medical education materialized in representational media. the system of meaning that students share by virtue of their matriculation is an important but largely underinterrogated aspect of the medical education process (wachtler & troein, 2003). by examining the culture of medical education, i identify the components of the hidden curriculum within medical education that supersede contemporary cultural competence instruction. i locate the sites within medical education that need to be more seriously interrogated for a more efficacious addressing of disparities in care for black women. i expose the limits of cultural competence as the primary strategy for ameliorating health care disparities by recognizing the need to address doctors’ identities in future solutions. for medical education to shift, more attention to the hidden curriculum embedded in the sociocultural aspects of edication is needed. a few classes in culturally competent medicine are not enough to counter a deeply embedded ethos that is tied up in the very identities and anxiety-management practices of future physicians. doctors need not only to see their patients differently but also to hear them.3 listening to patients requires doctors to see their patients’ humanity as somehow connected to their own (charon, 2006, pp. 99-103). cultural humility, as opposed to cultural competence, is self-reflexive by definition. the power imbalance between doctors and patients is identified as a problem to be redressed (tervalon & murray-garcía, 1998). while some hierarchy is attendant to the education required to become a doctor, the way in which doctors negotiate it needs to change.  medical-school faculty members must be leaders in the cultural shift as they are the ones who subtly shape the way that medical students understand their role over time. by allowing time and space for the culture of medicine to shift, we make room for more compassionate providers who are better able to serve patient populations across a wide spectrum of diversity. like black feminist theorists, whose written work often makes me feel like i’m dropping in on a continued conversation among friends, i imagine black feminist health-science scholars talking with and across (as opposed to to or down) disciplinary divisions. my understanding of black feminist health-science studies is that it creates the space for cooperative theorizing. black feminist health-science studies incorporates epistemic frames outside the west, particularly african diasporic understandings of health, the body, and healing that explode the already faltering binaries endemic in western thought. by centering health, my alteration of feminist science studies attempts to reframe the discussion by focusing on the interplay between medical media and the well-being of people, not primarily the theoretical investment in challenging western scientific practices. medical imagery asserts a healthy body that is visually conveyed in medical training and subsequently influences doctor-patient interactions. the power of these images affects multiple marginalized populations and shows the need for an intersectional analysis of the medical system. medicine holds a venerable position in the american cultural imagination, such that a doctor’s treatment of certain bodies informs societal treatment of those bodies as well. this is not a unidirectional exchange; societal ideas also hold sway over doctors. in order to change how we think about bodies, we need to change the way we represent them, particularly in the educational spaces of those sectors of our society that purport to treat us at our most vulnerable moments. a more nuanced and impassioned theoretical position is possible with the fusion of the multiple theoretical perspectives that inflect feminist health-science studies. i imagine a field of study acknowledging the need for a cooperative and symbiotic relationship between multiple scholastic locations, united with an expanded understanding of how the biomedical model informs notions of “health” in society. what if we drew on multiple epistemic frames in discourse of the body? what if we did not privilege western dualisms? we might create a community of scholars attuned to issues on the global and local levels, with the collaborative strength to push for the changes they wish to see. an efficacious coming to the table around biomedical hegemony would serve as a model of the productivity that an interdisciplinary approach can bring to scholarship. notes 1 this was the second such test, as semenya had already been tested in south africa in order to compete. 2 r. kelly had a relationship with his protégé, aaliyah. she was fifteen when they began their relationship and were married. the union was dissolved, but kelly wrote and produced all the tracks on her debut album, ominously titled age ain’t nothin’ but a number. see neal, 2001, p. 16. 3 in sander gilman’s seeing the insane (2014), he begins with the statement, “we do not see the world, rather we are taught by representations of the world about us to conceive of it in a culturally acceptable manner.” this idea of mediating seeing works together with the medical connotation of seeing to create possibilities for useful metaphors. references abc news. 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(2009, august 21). runner caster semenya has heard the gender comments all her life. los angeles times. retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/21/world/fg-south-africa-runner21 dorn, l. d., & biro, f. m. (2011). puberty and its measurement: a decade in review. journal of research on adolescence, 21(1), 180-195. epstein, d. (2012, august 11). silver medal in 800 meters offers little clarity in semenya speculation. sports illustrated. retrieved from http://www.si.com/more-sports/2012/08/11/caster-semenya-800-meters eveleth, p. b., & tanner, j. m. (1990). worldwide variation in human growth. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. fausto-sterling, a. (2000). sexing the body: gender politics and the construction of sexuality. new york, ny: basic books. findlay, d. (1995). discovering sex: medical science, feminism and intersexuality. canadian review of sociology and anthropology, 32, 25-52. flanagan, jane. (2016, august 25). “i was second white”: polish runner sorry for uproar over her claims she was 'white silver medallist' in olympic 800m final won by caster semenya. daily mail. retrieved from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3756509/i-came-second-white-race-polish-runner-says-sorry-uproar-claims-white-silver-medallist-olympic-800m-final-won-caster-semenya.html fourle, m. (2009, september 30). storm over teazers billboard. news24. retrieved from http://www.news24.com/southafrica/news/storm-over-teazers-billboard-20090930 gilman, s. l. (1989). sexuality: an illustrated history. new york, ny: wiley. gilman, s. l. (1999). making the body beautiful: a cultural history of aesthetic surgery. princeton, nj: princeton university press. gilman, s. l. (2014). seeing the insane. brattleboro, vt: echo point books. hart, s. (2009, september 8). caster semenya’s gender test results force iaaf to call in outside help. telegraph. retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/athletics/6158424/caster-semenyas-gender-test-results-force-iaaf-to-call-in-outside-help.html hart, s. (2009, december 11). iaaf offers to pay for caster semenya’s gender surgery if she fails verification test. telegraph. retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/athletics/6791558/iaaf-offers-to-pay-for-caster-semenyas-gender-surgery-if-she-fails-verification-test.html herman-giddens, m. e., slora, e. j., wasserman, r. c., bourdony, c. j., bhapkar, m. v., koch, g. g., & hasemeier, c. m. (1997). secondary sexual characteristics and menses in young girls seen in office practice. pediatrics, 99(4), 505-12. holmes, h. b. (1989). a call to heal medicine. hypatia, 4(2), 1-8. holloway, k. (2011). private bodies, public texts: race, gender, and a cultural bioethics. durham, nc: duke university press. hooks, b. (1999). black looks: race and representation. boston, ma: south end press. hooks, b. (1989). talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. boston, ma: south end press. hunter, a. (2013, june 30). caster semenya can run with the women; it’s official. cbs news. retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/caster-semenya-can-run-with-the-women-its-official/ hurst, m. (2009, september 11). caster semenya is a hermaphrodite. news.com.au. retrieved from http://www.news.com.au/world/caster-semenya-is-a-hermaphrodite/story-e6frfkyi-1225771726260 intersex society of north america. (2011). what’s isna’s position on surgery? faq. retrieved from http://www.isna.org/faq/surgery jacobson, c. (2009, september 11). caster semenya gender test: outrage, worry in south africa over report. huffington post. retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/11/caster-semenya-outrage-wo_n_283441.html johnston, l. (2009, march 20). german tennis player sarah gronert embroiled in gender controversy. new york daily news. retrieved from http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/german-tennis-player-sarah-gronert-embroiled-gender-controversy-article-1.370527 koehn, p. h., & swick, h. m. (2006). medical education for a changing world: moving beyond cultural competence into transnational competence. academic medicine, 81(6), 548-56. kosoko-lasaki, s., cook, c. t., & o’brien, r. l. (2009). cultural proficiency in addressing health disparities. burlington, ma: jones & bartlett. mouton, c. p., harris, s., rovi, s., solorzano, p., & johnson, m. s. (1997). barriers to black women’s participation in cancer clinical trials. journal of the national medical association, 89(11), 721-727. neal, m. a. (2001). soul babies: black popular culture and the post-soul aesthetic. new york, ny: routledge. neal, m. a. (2008). mark anthony on soul men and r. kelly, part 3. speech delivered at theorizing blackness conference, new york, april 4. youtube video. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aui63gb8ljq reagan, p. b., salsberry, p. j., fang, m. z., gardner, w. p., & pajer, k. (2012). african-american/white differences in the age of menarche: accounting for the difference. social science and medicine, 75(7), 1263-1270. roberts, d. e. (2008). is race-based medicine good for us?: african american approaches to race, biomedicine, and equality. journal of law, medicine and ethics, 36(3), 537-545. rosenbloom, a. l., & tanner, j. m. (1998). misuse of tanner puberty stages to estimate chronologic age. pediatrics, 102(6), 1494. ruzek, s. b., olesen, v. l., and clarke, a. (eds.) (1997). women’s health: complexities and differences. columbus, oh: ohio state university press. samuel, m. (2016, may 10). caster semenya on track for rio gold but she’s running in an ethical minefield. daily mail. retrieved from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/article-3583472/caster-semenya-track-rio-gold-s-running-ethical-minefield.html schweitzer, n. j., & saks, m. j. (2006). the csi effect: popular fiction about forensic science affects the public’s expectations about real forensic science. jurimetrics, 47, 357-364. shields, a. e., fortun, m., hammonds, e. m., king, p. a., lerman, c., rapp, r., sullivan, p. f.  (2005). the use of race variables in genetic studies of complex traits and the goal of reducing health disparities: a transdisciplinary perspective. american psychologist, 60(1), 77-103. singersroom.com. (2007, november 4). update: judge tosses pediatrician witness in r. kelly case. singersroom.com. retrieved from http://singersroom.com/content/2007-11-04/update-judge-tosses-pediatrician-witness-in-r-kelly-case/ smith, d. (2009, august 22). caster semenya row: “who are white people to question the makeup of an african girl? it is racism.” guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2009/aug/23/caster-semenya-athletics-gender streitfeld, d. (2008, june 14). r. kelly is acquitted in child pornography case. new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/arts/music/14kell.html tanner, j. m. (1962). growth at adolescence: with a general consideration of the effects of hereditary and environmental factors upon growth and maturation from birth to maturity. hoboken, nj: blackwell. tervalon, m., & murray-garcía, j. (1998). cultural humility versus cultural competence: a critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. journal of health care for the poor and underserved, 9(2), 117-125. thomas, j. (2012, august 11). did caster semenya lose the women’s 800 meters on purpose? slate. retrieved from http://www.slate.com/blogs/five_ring_circus/2012/08/11/caster_semenya_2012_olympics_did_the_south_african_runner_lose_the_women_s_800_meters_on_purpose_.html tuvel, r. (2011). “veil of shame”: derrida, sarah baartmann and animality. journal for critical animal studies, 19(1-2), 209-229. vineyard, j. (2004, november 4). hearing to determine age of girl in alleged r. kelly sex tape. mtv.com. retrieved from http://www.mtv.com/news/1493457/hearing-to-determine-age-of-girl-in-alleged-r-kelly-sex-tape/ vineyard, j. (2008, june 13). r. kelly walks: jury finds him not guilty of child pornography. mtv.com. retrieved from http://www.mtv.com/news/1589304/r-kelly-walks-jury-finds-him-not-guilty-of-child-pornography/ vineyard, j. (2008, september 17). r. kelly speaks out about child-pornography trial for first—and possibly last—time. mtv.com. retrieved from http://www.mtv.com/news/1594938/r-kelly-speaks-out-about-child-pornography-trial-for-first-and-possibly-last-time/ wachtler, c., & troein, m. (2003) . a hidden curriculum: mapping cultural competency in a medical programme. medical education, 37(10), 861-868. willis, d. (2010) black venus 2010: they called her “hottentot.” philadelphia, pa: temple university press. wu, t., mendola, p., & buck, g. m. (2002) . ethnic differences in the presence of secondary sex characteristics and menarche among us girls: the third national health and nutrition examination survey, 1988–1994. pediatrics, 110(4), 752-757. you!. (2009, september 10). look at caster now! cover. bio dr. moya bailey is an assistant professor in the department of cultures, societies, and global studies and the program in women's, gender, and sexuality studies at northeastern university. her work focuses on black women's use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. she currently curates the #transformdh tumblr initiative in digital humanities (dh). she is a monthly sustainer of the allied media conference, through which she is able to bridge her passion for social justice and her work in dh. microsoft word 29619_denielle elliot dr (1).docx elliott, denielle (2019). neurological disturbances and time travel. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-27. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © denielle elliott, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license neurological disturbances and time travel denielle elliott york university dae@yorku.ca abstract this paper, positioned at the intersection of anthropology, science and technology studies, and feminist affect theory, considers shifts in memory and neurological disturbances that accompany traumatic brain injuries. anomia, or anomic aphasia, is the inability to recall certain words, names, or colors caused by damage to the parietal or temporal lobes in the brain. anomia is a disorder ‘on the verge’ – there but not quite, a forgotten memory, reluctant to be conjured. how might experimental ethnographic memoir help us uncover such forgotten memories and make sense of neurological disturbances pathologized by science and medicine? my account contributes to a growing body of literature that uses ethnographic memoir as political critique, blending the personal and theoretical, situating the intimate within larger historical and social contexts. it suggests that ethnographic memoir, with attention to the affective interiority of memories, merged with theoretical analyses and political critiques of medicine and/or therapeutic interventions, offer new understandings of being and temporality. neurological disturbances we must not allow the fear of forgetting to overwhelm us. and then perhaps it is time to remember the future, rather than only worry about the future of memory. —andreas huyssen, “present pasts: media, politics, amnesia” special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 2 my mom, talking about a summer past when we had been in kamloops, prods me, “don’t you remember? you were eleven. there was that wild horse…” she continues, trying to fill in all the details, hoping she will trigger my memory with cues, that the images, sounds, smells, feelings from that summer will fall into place and that i will be able to share in this memory with her as she, now a senior who spends more time in the before, makes these temporal journeys into the past. there are many occasions like this. i try hard to remember. sometimes her strategies work, and with each sensorial detail, the memory comes back into focus. at other times, i am at a loss and nothing emerges in my imagination. it is so clearly a memory that i do not share that i wonder if she remembers it correctly. maybe i wasn’t even there. maybe she has dreamt it. she gets annoyed with me sometimes when i tell her i cannot remember. “honestly, how can you not remember that?” she will say hastily, frustrated. of course, she knows why i do not remember. i live with the permanent effects of a brain injury that left my frontal lobe reconfigured. january 2008, letter (excerpt) from neurologist, vancouver, bc assessment: right frontal head injury, depressed skull fracture with epidural hematoma, and right frontal contusion. concussive symptoms with minimal evident cognitive impairment. she’s actually made a rather remarkable recovery. i did have a rather miraculous recovery. a combination of pure luck, hardheadedness (in more than one sense), and skilled neurosurgeons who alleviated the pressure on my brain and rebuilt my skull. and yet, i live with a range of neurological “disturbances,” sensorial sensations, and memory slippages. my memory loss seems to bother my mom, and others. a friend working in an allied “psy” field says to me in the sort of hushed tone once reserved for talking about things like cancer in the 1950s, “i hate to tell you this but people with acquired traumatic brain injuries are more likely to suffer from early onset dementia.” afterwards, i somewhat compulsively search medline for papers on “increased incidence of dementia due to brain injuries” to find there are differing opinions. i ask my neurologist who immediately dismisses the psy fields as “quackery” and tells me that she thinks i might be protected from dementia due to the resiliency (i.e., “plasticity”) of my brain matter.1 whether it is true or not though is beside the point. i am left wondering why we are so bothered by forgetfulness, by memories mis/dis-placed? this article is part memoir, part ethnography, part social study of medicine.2 as an experiment in ethnographic memoir, the autobiographical story i am going to tell special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 3 should not be understood as straightforwardly biographical, nor perhaps even real since, according to neuroscientist anil seth (2016), the experience of self is a “controlled hallucination generated by the brain.” the neuro fields, and some of the allied psy fields (i.e., psychology, psychiatry, neuropsychology), have a narrow understanding of brain injuries, one that does not resonate with my own. my understanding: the perspective of a social scientist, a critical ethnographer, a feminist scholar wanting to unsettle, disrupt, question neuroscientific ways of knowing and the academy more generally. but my understanding is deeper than that, not just analytical, nor “arm-chair.” i write as someone who lives with an injured mind, the permanent, mostly invisible, afterlife of a traumatic brain injury. this semi-fictionalized, autobiographical experiment considers the texture of temporality, reflecting on how we know what is real, unreal, a hallucination, a memory, a confabulation (luhrmann & fortier, 2017, p. 25; also see pandian, 2012). as a critical ethnographer who studies medicine and science, i feel uniquely positioned to explore the fracture between these two different worlds of knowing and being, the embodied felt experience and the scientific gaze distorted through digital scans and standardized clinical measures.3 my field notes, medical data (including clinical records, ct and mri imaging, surgery notes and summaries), and records of correspondence from the injury and care with medical professionals inform this memoir account. specifically, i focus on memory “disturbances” that often accompany brain injuries. acquired brain injuries, whether traumatic or milder concussions, may result in what the neurosciences typically define as memory impairments, deficits, or disorders. yet these transformations in memory are diverse, and neurologists are challenged to find explanations to understand such disparate symptoms reported by patients. from retrograde amnesia to déjà vu experiences, like an old vinyl record player our memories skip, repeat, and sometimes get stuck in one place. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 4 a sense of self figure 1. released from the hospital, march 2009. credit: aldo bonato. (photograph still of author with staples after surgery.) i am constantly reminded of my injury, of the event, by migraines, fatigue, tender scalp, memory disturbances, and a range of sensorial sensitivities to touch, smell, noise, and light (reminding me that this is not a purely intellectual exercise). thus, any attempt to know brain injuries or memory changes, without attention to the sensorial, are seriously incomplete. informed by the work of lauren berlant (2008; 2011; 2014), specifically her “sensing of history” and her attention to “affective intensities,” i suggest this methodological experiment as a way to get at the inner transformations resulting from memory changes, what i experience as a state of “being otherwise” (pandian & mclean, 2017, p. 19). in her recent work, sara ahmed (2017) has suggested that we think of remembering events as a type of sensory act, and this reminds us to think about the complex relations between our senses, memories, and time (also see berbeek & van campen, 2015). if we ascribe to affect theory in an approach to memory loss and brain injuries, we must consider the sensorial for the physiological, symbolic, and mnemonic affects. i write this in that tradition but in a spirit of playfulness and creativity. (i am a time traveler.) an ethnographic memoir that accounts for the multi-sensorial of neurological disturbances and is attentive to the ephemerality of time and memories might offer more accurate or at least complicated accounts of being special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 5 after traumatic brain injuries. i suggest that memory disturbances like anomia and déjà vu need novel ethnographic methods of investigation that can account for their evanescence and the way in which time ricochets through memory (pandian & mclean, 2017). such a project demands attention to the complex interiority of the mind and memory, forcing us to consider the imperceptible shifts in the act of remembering that are largely missed or glossed over in conventional scientific accounts of brain injuries and memory disruptions. my aim is to refine and enhance ethnographic memoir—attentive to multiple senses of knowing, and at once experimental, interventionist, performative, and speculative (ingersoll, 2016).4 this approach moves away from traditional fieldwork practices to a way of knowing and remembering non-discursively (massumi, 1995), a way to capture the hidden life of mind and memory. i suggest that this type of ethnographic memoir creates spaces of creativity, allows for travels in time and memory, and for the wondrous and frightening hallucinatory imagination to emerge. i imagine it as a way to investigate and convey that which feels indescribable, the “radical shifts in inner expression and aesthetic perception” (irving, 2017, p. 26).5 such opening up to the sorts of things we usually delete, or ignore, or don’t have access to in our research, permits us insight into human consciousness, the imagination, and other ways of being, like those marked by changes in mind and memory.6 if cultivated, a multisensorial ethnographic memoir permits us to see and theorize that which lies beyond what we can only see in participant observation or hear in interviews; it gives us access to “muted registers of being and becoming” of the self (myers, 2017, p. xii), including inventories of “intensity,” as states of suspension and disruption (massumi, 1995). multiple temporalities i understand memories not as cultural artifacts or isolated objects of possession, but as temporal practice that we can trace through experiences in the past, present, and future, preoccupied all along by the forgotten (dib, 2012).7 lina dib elaborates on what it means to treat memory as practice or as an experience rather than as a thing we hold: a memory enacted is then seen no longer as a discreet whole but rather as constantly shifting in its boundaries. once more, as with proust’s madeleine, memory is synesthetic, involving an intertwining of visual, aural, haptic, and even olfactory senses in measurement and treatment. (2012, p. 67) special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 6 memory is also, as andreas huyssen (2000) argues, “always transitory, notoriously unreliable, and haunted by forgetting—in short, human and social” (p. 38). conceptualizing memories in these ways allows for more freedom in thinking about the ever-shifting and retreating nature of biological memories.8 following, i imagine that if we reframe memory disturbances such as anomia and déjà vu as of another temporal dimension, and we approach them sensitive to the fleeting, sensorial, and affective, we might understand such changes not as pathologies or disorders, but as a rupture in temporality, another way of moving through time.9 time travel. a multiplicity of temporalities emerge with traumatic brain injuries and with memory changes more generally. forgetfulness, forgetting, and the forgetful are subjects of the popular imagination as seen in movies such as memento (nolan, todd, & todd, 2000), the film noir whose main character is unable to form new memories (suffering from anterograde amnesia) and tattoos reminders all over his body as he tries to solve the murder of his wife and the attack that left him with amnesia. in still alice (glatzer & westmoreland, 2014) the audience watches as a professor copes with early onset dementia as she begins to forget all the details in her life. she is portrayed as tormented by the loss of memories, which compels her to write a reminder to her future self that she should eventually take her own life because she doesn’t want to live without memories of herself and her family. in eternal sunshine of the spotless mind (gondry, 2004) the future offers biotechnological innovations that allow us to wipe our disturbing memories clean, to start fresh without remembering painful pasts and traumatic events (also see vassanji, 2016).10 in all three, the act of forgetting (even when chosen in the case of the last film) is portrayed as something to mourn, a loss too great to bear. similarly, neurologists and allied psy fields generally understand changes in how we remember or what we remember as loss, a deficit, a pathology, an impairment. these are states demanding intervention as treatment or cure, whether it is pharmaceutical (medicines, vitamins, or nutritional supplements that help us remember), psychological (hypnosis, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or cognitive behavioural therapy), or biotechnological innovations (biofeedback, use of digital devices). michael kahana, a neuroscientist at the university of pennsylvania, suggests that the future includes surgically implanting a small device into “the cranium or chest” with “electrodes penetrating into the brain” that decode and stimulate the brain’s centers responsible for memory. in explaining why such a device is necessary, kahana said, “losing one's ability to function in terms of cognition is one of the scariest things imaginable” (cbc radio one, 2018, emphasis added). such fear of forgetting or being forgetful has driven special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 7 a multimillion-dollar industry of “brain games” such as luminosity, peak, or elevate, in spite of contradictory evidence about whether they actually improve memory (boot & kramer, 2014; owen et al., 2010).11 this fear also feeds a new industry of digital technoscientific projects that aim to capture and record our memories. for instance, mayer-schönberger (2009) warns us that new digital medias such as memories for life are working towards a social world where we are unable to forget. “e-memories,” those digitally recorded, mean that memories now live on forever, even after the death of the rememberer (dib, 2012, p. 52). focusing on gordon bell’s digital memory project (mylifebits software), dib highlights how e-memories are marketed as superior from “biological memories” as more reliable, factual, and unalterable.12 and, like the recent new television series on hbo, altered carbon, e-memories are not stored in the brain but on a technological device, a “cortical stack” (kalogridis & lenic, 2018) that transcends time, offering a “virtual immortality” (dib, 2012, p. 60) through digital memories. in the future, memories are downloaded, stored, and eternal. as someone who is forgetful with a range of memory disturbances and as a researcher interested in memory, i find it curious how concerned people and popular culture generally are with memory loss or change. as others have pointed out, our obsession with forgetfulness is with a particular type of memory—individual, embodied. at other times, we embrace and encourage amnesia.13 colonialism prefers you forget, and thus an anti-colonial critique similarly demands remembering (liebert, 2017; rothberg, 2013).14 colonialism haunts stories and histories of neurology and the brain sciences. remember the role of anthropologists collecting skulls for museum displays (roque, 2010), studying brain matter for disease (anderson, 2008), or their role in the development of anthropometric practices (anderson, 2003)? measuring skulls, probing brain physiology, and the development of racial classifications based on those measurements are a part of the colonial history of the discipline we try to disassociate from, the sorts of things we wish we could forget. does the future include an anti-colonial neurology (savares, 2010)? or, in other words, how does one reconcile a critical disability studies approach (which argues forgetfulness should not be pathologized, nor remembering valorised) with an anti-colonial approach that demands we collectively remember these violent, colonial pasts? just because we want to remember, or need to remember, doesn’t necessarily mean we have to pathologize forgetfulness. though beyond the scope of this paper, these questions nevertheless are my travel companions in time. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 8 being the kenya police medical examination report date: february 2009 from: dcs kisumu police station to the: aga khan hospital name: dr. denielle elliott address: university of british columbia… general physical examination: sick looking with swollen scalp and face. details of site, situation, shape and depth of injuries sustained: severe head injury with compound, depressed skull fracture of the right frontal parietal temporal region with extradural haematoma. linear fracture at the right orbit. blunt trauma to posterior upper neck with gross oedema. what were the immediate clinical results of the injury sustained and the assessed degree: grievious harm at the core of this paper are questions about epistemologies of being, the way we experience slippages in time, before/now/after, resulting from brain injury. for the purpose of this paper, i want to focus primarily on a specific type of memory change associated with acquired brain injuries: anomia. anomia, or anomic aphasia (one form of aphasia), is the inability to recall certain words, names, or colors caused by damage to the parietal or temporal lobes in the brain. i experience anomia on a regular basis, daily in fact. i also experience a number of other memory disturbances, all of which have developed since i ended up with an acquired traumatic brain injury. during postdoctoral fieldwork in east africa in 2009 i sustained serious bodily and head trauma. my skull was fractured in multiple locations, i had facial compression fractures, massive bruising on my neck, ribs, arm, and legs. in spite of the severity of the head trauma, i did not lose consciousness. if i had, i would not have been able to telephone a friend for help and i would have been left there, in a remote rural village plot of east africa, to bleed to death alone. my friend rushed me to a small local private hospital where a ct scan was done after i started to vomit (a reliable clinical indicator of brain injury). it was timely that this small private hospital had recently acquired a “new” ct scanner, which in fact was an older, used model donated from russia. the scan clearly indicated a number of hematomas that needed to be drained because of the pressure building within my skull. an orthopedic surgeon conducted a cranioplasty, a procedure involving the removal of bone fragments to allow my special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 9 swollen brain to expand and pools of blood trapped between the skull and the dura mater to drain, while a locally stationed american doctor from the centers for disease control and prevention looked on. using a small, specialized drill, a burr hole was created in the skull so that the brain could swell without too much pressure. months later, colleagues hesitantly told me that the drill had fallen to the floor during my surgery, and since the hospital only had one, they had to stand there awkwardly in the operating theatre for fifteen minutes while the piece that had fallen was re-sterilized for use again. the following day in recovery, an american neurologist who was in the region working on an hiv-related neurology clinical trial, came in to offer an assessment (since there was no neurologist available in western kenya).15 at that time, she noted that my cognitive function was declining and so a decision was made, in consultation with the canadian embassy in nairobi, to send me for follow-up care to johannesburg, south africa. an air ambulance was arranged and i was flown out the following day with two nurses, a doctor, and a colleague who volunteered to travel with me. kisumulusaka-johannesburg. a few days later, after additional tests and another ct scan, another craniotomy was performed, along with a cranioplasty to rebuild the right side of my skull, which had fractured and splintered into shards. since then, i have been negotiating the dissonance between my experience of the injury and the expectations and understandings of a range of medical professionals. june 28, 2011 letter (excerpt) from neurologist, vancouver, bc investigations: she had an mri scan performed which we reviewed together. this showed an area of encephalomalacia, and gliotic changes in the right prefrontal region. she had a craniotomy deficit but no other abnormalities were seen. status post traumatic brain injury: again, i think denielle is doing remarkably well. i reported to my neurologist a few months after the injury that i was forgetting words but he gently assured me that i had not forgotten the words; they were there, just reluctant, and with time the condition would disappear or lessen. he named it—anomia—and i went home to investigate and wrote the word down, repeated it dozens and dozens of times so i would not forget my forgetful condition. i still experience anomia, on a daily basis, but far less often than when i was first injured. since anomia is generally associated with the left hemisphere where language capabilities are reportedly localized, my neurologists dismiss my reports of what i perceived as an ongoing struggle with word retrieval. they explain that since the physical trauma and damage was largely to the right hemisphere of my brain, it is unlikely that i would continue to experience anomia. their cognitive tests (like the montreal cognitive assessment) suggest my special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 10 memory is within “normal range.” in a clinical assessment in february 2016, i scored 29/30 on the montreal cognitive assessment. i lost one point because i could not remember which hand did what on a traditional clock.16 such assessments are notoriously poor reflections of those with above-average education and memory loss. for instance, educated individuals with early dementia are often missed on such tests because they score within the normal range. in march 2009, just weeks after the two neurosurgeries, i also scored normal on the same test. the intake worker at the brain injury support centre where i had been referred told me she did not quite know how to deal with me since their measures indicated i did not have a brain injury, even though she could clearly see the long scar across my head on my recently shaven head, where fortyfour staples had only just been removed (see figure 1). my experience of a brain injury was not typical according to their measures: i did not have post-traumatic stress disorder, i was not having seizures, and i was not having problems with language. but i felt dramatically changed and felt many, albeit subtle and invisible, affects from the injuries. their measures did not account for these elusive, sensorial, invisible, and often ephemeral changes. i experience other changes since the brain injury that i feel are clearly related to the brain injury, but, similarly, when i have reported these to neurologists or health care professionals working in brain injury support, these symptoms are often dismissed as inconsequential or not related to the injury. their logic is that the types of changes i am reporting are associated with other areas of my brain, areas that were not directly injured.17 yet what i also know about my brain injury is that the blows to my head were so significant, so powerful, that imagers note in my medical records a 3.0 mm midline shift of my brain (observable in early ct scans) and displaced ventricles. a concussion, considered a “mild brain injury,” results when the brain bounces around within the skull, resulting in metabolic and/or structural damage to brain tissue. the displaced ventricles visualized on my ct scan indicated how intensely swollen my brain was, raising concern that it would also affect my brain stem. for weeks after, i was left literally off-balance. it is difficult to make sense of diagnoses in such situations that focus solely on specific regions of the brain with direct trauma. while the actual fracture to my skull and the impact may have occurred on the right frontal and temporal lobes, the force of the blow to my head impacted other regions and the brain as a whole, yet there is no mention of anomia in any of my neurological clinical records. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 11 anomia eeg laboratory activation procedures: photic stimulation produces a symmetrical driving response. hyperventilation is not performed in this record. impression: this record is mildly abnormal. the changes present in this record are consistent with mild and nonspecific electroencephalographic changes. comments: this study is obtained with the patient awake, drowsy and asleep. this study is abnormal. this study is abnormal due to the presence of sharply contoured slowing present over the right frontal and right anterior temporal regions. we know that memory is unreliable in the best of circumstances. my memory seems increasingly volatile, fractured, partial, sometimes even proving false. and thus, the very process of researching memories, a memoir of forgetfulness, opens up questions about the real and imagined, my own recollection of the events, as my memory undergoes constant revision. michael taussig (2011) declares, “i swear i saw this.” i think i did, but i no longer remember what “this” was. or i think i saw it, but turns out i didn’t. reluctant memories, lost memories, false memories—they demand novel ethnographic approaches that allow such shifting, impermanent thoughts and memories to still mean something, even as they represent me being otherwise. they are “real,” at least as much anything else in my life is real, even when they are false, incomplete, or hidden memories. though i reported (and continue to report) my experiences of anomia and other memory changes to my neurologists, i do so for record and understanding, less than expecting “a cure” or solution to my forgetfulness.18 as an academic, anomia can be embarrassing. it strikes me when i am particularly worn out, or overtired at work. i suffer from emotional and intellectual exhaustion, “brain fatigue,” more than most (or more than most who do not live with the permanent effects of brain injuries). and like everyone else, my ability to remember and recall is also shaped by age, overstimulation, an overreliance on technology, and other factors. these exacerbate the neuro conditions i live with as a result of the brain injury. i have adapted to the changes in my memory. this includes a reliance on lists, notes to self, electronic reminders, and calendars. in teaching, it means a lot of preparation, so i write out detailed lectures in full before class. i make a substantial effort to make up for the changes in my memory so that it does not affect my work, but this effort is exhausting and certainly not failproof. i forget, or—in the case of anomia—i fail to retrieve important material deep inside my brain matter all the time. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 12 but anomia offers a different way to understand memory disruptions that result from injuries. i realized, once i moved past the frustration and embarrassment, that anomia offered an interesting intellectual experience in the temporal. lauren berlant (2014) again shapes my thinking, but here it is drawing on her engagement with the ellipsis, which she has theorized as “infrastructures of relation.” building on dib’s definition of memory as practice and as a process, i am thinking about memories and anomia as similarly “infrastructures of relation.” thinking with ellipses / as elliptical offers a way to get at anomia, memory disturbances, and brain injuries in a more productive way, as a process not necessarily negative. berlant (2014) has talked about her own thinking as elliptical: that is to say, it both tracks concepts and allows for unfinishedness, inducing itself to become misshapen in the hope that by the time you return to the point of departure, so many things will have come into contact that the contours of the concept and the forms associated with its movement will have changed. anomia, and other memory changes, are like an ellipsis in that it is in the process of emerging; both the ellipses and anomia are marked by an “affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold” (berlant, 2011, p. 6) as our brain matter continually reconfigures itself with age and injury. berlant (2014) clarifies her approach to the elliptical: the thing about an ellipsis is that it has a set of contradictory meanings. an ellipsis is a sentence that i don’t end because…i don’t know how to. an ellipsis is a sentence i don’t end because…you know what i mean. an ellipsis is a figure of return that isn’t symmetrical. ellipses might be a figure of loss or plenitude: sometimes it is more efficient to go dot dot dot. sometimes it’s also a way of signaling an elision. sometimes the referent is beyond words. the ellipsis allows us to refer to something that might be “beyond words.” anomia and other memory disturbances might be understood as the escape of words—slippery, mischievous—hiding in our memory, forcing us to end midsentence, mid-thought, or to find alternatives that are good enough replacements. these moments when the word is on the tip of our tongue are moments of both elision and emergence. it’s also a moment of suspension—i find myself caught in time. this sense of emergence opens up new ways of thinking about memory loss, neurological disturbances, and distortions of time. not simply incoherent, or incomplete narratives, but narratives in formation, productive, speculative…the word is coming. for berlant, the ellipsis represents a sense of being where one is left with questions rather than answers. for me, memory disruptions work the same way. too often my thoughts, and memories, end with special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 13 more questions than answers. i’m using anomia here as just one example where the neurological rendering of memory disruptions chafe up against the patient’s experience (or specifically my experience as patient). in the first few months after my injury, i was very frustrated by what felt like to me a type of memory loss. i couldn’t find the words that i needed. anomia is a condition “on the verge”—there but not quite, a forgotten memory, reluctant to be conjured. considered a “disorder of naming” and a “disorder of word retrieval” (goodglass & wingfield, 1997, p. 8), anomia is particularly common among those who have left-hemisphere damage or lesions. although it may feel as if one has forgotten the word, and thus assume that there is a loss of data from the memory, in fact the words are not lost from memory. the issue is in recall. one is unable to retrieve the information or word even though it exists in the memory, just there, on the tip of the tongue. it is not considered the same sort of difficulty experienced by those individuals with dementia, or alzheimer’s, due to an actual loss of semantic memory. there are many kinds of aphasia; anomic aphasia is just one of the many memory impairments categorized under aphasia (head, 1921). nineteenth-century neurologists paul broca, carl wernicke, and ludwig lichtheim are attributed with outlining the classical understanding of aphasia (eling, 2011). it is associated with three different lesion sites within the brain: the temporo-parietal junction, the anterior periventricular region of the frontal lobe, and the inferior temporal lobe. circumlocutions are common among those with anomic aphasia—that is, describing the word to the listener without ever actually saying the word. in those moments, we find generic fillers (“thingy” is one i frequently rely on) or other nonspecific words that are good enough, or act as temporary replacements until we find the word we were searching for. i can often identify the first letter (it starts with b…), but still the word itself escapes me. too often, that missing word comes to me hours later, maybe in the middle of the night as i toss and turn, its retrieval too late for any conversation or lecture that it was intended for. the definition and diagnosis of anomia relies on localization theory. localization theories have a long history in neurosciences starting in the seventeenth century, arising from phrenology (and indirectly related to studies of race and anatomy conducted by physical anthropologists) in the nineteenth century. paul broca, franz joseph gall, carl wernicke, and john hughlings jackson, among many others, were all proponents of localization theory, though in very different ways.19 susan leigh star (1985) explored the development of the phrenology brain map and the theory of localization of the late nineteenth century in the face of special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 14 scientific uncertainty. localization theory understood particular functions to be associated with specific zones of neural anatomy.20 for instance, broca’s area is associated with speech, and the frontal lobe associated with emotions. recently, localization theories have been revised away from a strict localized/functional approach to a more “systems” approach (with an emphasis on multiple memory systems), emphasizing a distributed neural network (uttal, 2002; squire, 2004), yet localization theory continues to shape neurosciences and clinical neurology. localization theory has been questioned by those such as william uttal, who suggests that the very logic behind localization theory relies on two assumptions, neither without epistemological challenges. he explains, the first problem is that we assume that the cognitive processes being explored (and localized on the brain map) are “defined in a sufficiently precise manner for them to be dealt with as separable and distinct modules” (uttal, 2002, p. 222). second, this approach to understanding the brain assumes brain functions “are actually localized (i.e., represented or encoded) by neuronal activity in circumscribed regions of the brain as opposed to being broadly distributed throughout the brain” (uttal, 2002, p. 223). he is very critical of localization theories, suggesting that the attribution of modules and faculties to the mind has always been “arbitrary and idiosyncratic” (uttal, 2002, p. 225), and that research design has been “self-fulfilling and selfsupporting” (uttal, 2002, p. 223). tremblay and dick (2016) echo this sentiment, arguing that theories that localize speech and language skills in particular regions of the brain are outdated and do not reflect current neurobiological understandings. they explain, “our emerging understanding of brain function is of mutual interactions and common control mechanisms” (tremblay & dick, 2016, p. 9). uttal (2001) also emphasizes how new visual technologies of seeing may limit neurology’s capacity to make sense of that which is invisible or cognitive abilities that are complexly interconnected. although neuroimages are now more and more complex (conventional x-rays replaced with fmri and ct imaging, for instance), they simultaneously create blind spots in brain injury assessments. the focus on relatively new brain imaging technologies discounts forms of knowing that are non-word and non-image based. the new visual images produced by ct, pet, and mri technologies are believed to be more accurate representations of reality, yet the visual process has become increasingly artificial (borck, 2008). this technological visualization has intensified the trend in neurology to understand brain lesions and injuries as localized in specific parts of the brain, thus affecting certain functions (for instance, frontal lobe lesions/injuries are associated with personality changes), rarely accounting for the complex ways in which the mind, brain, and body work special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 15 together, or the ways in which the brain is a sum of its parts. the contemporary focus on the localization of brain injuries and trauma and the visualization of evidence renders other kinds of evidence and experience as immaterial, or designates it as non-evidence. neurologists are rigorously trained to understand brain injuries within these paradigms of knowing—visual and localized—yet experiences of brain trauma like my own suggest the importance of accounting for that which falls outside of the specific localized diagnostics for traumatic brain injuries and for a more systems-based or holistic, or felt (million 2013), approach. time travel figure 2. auditory hallucinations 2. illustration credit: leslee lazar. [montage illustration of auditory hallucinations by artist/neuroscientist leslee lazar.] special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 16 though certainly frustrating at times, even embarrassing, anomia offers possibilities. it is not a failed act of retrieval, but a slow movement through time, through a (stalled) process of retrieval where one is remembering and forgetting all at once. ideas of temporality are critical to questions of memory as our sense of time—what is past, present, or future—blurs with these memory disturbances. as elizabeth grosz (2004) notes, temporality or time is one of the most obscure and elusive concepts for social theorists and physicists alike (see also grosz, 2005; rovelli, 2018).21 temporality works then on parallel if not multiple levels in the acts of remembering, forgetting, and imagining through anomia. if we abandon the obsession with remembering the past, we can focus on questions of being and becoming, possibilities, and “time travel.” i mean this both literally and conceptually—for anomia and other memory disruptions such as déjà vu disrupt conventional understandings of temporality. anomia—without name—and déjà vu—caught in time—force us to rethink how we conceptualize memories, being, and temporality. grosz (2004) suggests that we can only think of time “in passing moments, through ruptures, nicks, cuts, in instances of dislocation,” but she also argues “it contains no moments or ruptures and has no being or presence, functioning only as continuous becoming” (p. 5). i want to argue differently, that we consider anomia and other memory disturbances as these very ruptures she denies. and to further suggest that a sensorial ethnographic memoir might allow us to understand these disruptions, this other temporal dimension, and the embodied (body and mind as one) experiences of being otherwise. if we take seriously phenomenological experiences of memory disturbances like anomia, as something more than a “disorder of naming,” what might we learn about the textures of temporality experienced by the injured and noninjured? last night, i woke up surprised to find myself back in my own bedroom in toronto. i was sure i had been at a friend’s cottage, hundreds of miles away. it takes me a few minutes to place myself, to account for lost time. during moments like this, a few minutes seem like an eternity as i struggle to remember how i arrived at this place, when i arrived at this place. this happens with increasing frequency. minutes, the odd day, lost or misplaced, slow to recover. in these moments, it feels as if i have literally been traveling through time, hurdled forward into the future, arriving discombobulated, out of place. time lost. i lose time as i lose memory to forgetfulness. as mahmoud darwish (1995/2013) eloquently argues, memory is for forgetfulness. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 17 conclusion in his study of multiple personality disorder, ian hacking (1995) writes, “i intend instead to find out why it is so taken for granted, by both sides, that memory is the key to the soul” (p. 20). if the memory is understood as the “key to the soul,” to the self, and as defining our identity, what does it say about people like me whose memory is unreliable, filled with disjointed, disordered memories?22 for those of us with missing, displaced, or simply stubborn memories unwilling to be brought forth, are we no longer ourselves? or is there another way to understand the transformations in our abilities to record, store, and recall the information of our lives? hacking’s work reminds us that approaches to memories, how memories are formed, retained, recollected, are not shared between the sciences and the social sciences/humanities. if we consider this type of embodied knowledge from patients, with idiosyncratic experiences, that fall outside the typical clinical guidelines for neurology, if we make room for the subtle, invisible, quirky sensations reported, our understandings of brain injuries, the process of memory, and forgetfulness might be better understood. perhaps the lived embodied, felt accounts of brain injury and memory disturbances can bridge the gaps between the social and scientific in understanding brain trauma and forgetfulness. in a very real way, such accounts make visible the processes of knowing (in the self and in scientific disciplines that study the self or mind). but more than that, attention to such embodied affective accounts of memory can shift how we understand memory changes from something inherently negative, a loss mourned, to simply another way of being and knowing the world, and perhaps, one’s self. like others who have written about their own experiences with disabilities or neurodiversities, i do not assume that my experience of memory disruptions, loss, or the brain injury apply to anyone else (wendell, 1993). but i do not generally miss the memories that have disappeared or been displaced, or those that stubbornly refuse to be retrieved. i do not feel lesser than, i do not feel like my identity has been lost. i know who i am without remembering a lost summer, or a name, a publication or place mid-lecture. the angst of forgetting (like that portrayed in the films i discussed earlier) is shaped by cultural and social ideals about memory and by corporate interests creating markets for tools, games, pharmaceuticals, and other biotechnologies. the obsession with memories and remembering disparages against the forgetful. i suggest instead that we understand these conditions for their generative special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 18 possibilities and productivity, something emerging, as simply another state of being; as a type of time travel that once you get used to it, and eschew the reductive neurological understandings of brain injuries, allows for embracing a state of being otherwise, one which is very grounded in the now and the future (wilson, 2004). am i a time traveler? well, perhaps no, at least not in the sense of the 1980s science fiction film back to the future or the british cult classic doctor who. but i certainly experience time and the world around me differently as a result of neural reconfigurations and the disruptions in my memory. acknowledgements a wenner-gren foundation for anthropological post-phd award, for which i am grateful, funds this project. i am also thankful to banu subramaniam, editor at catalyst, joanne muzak for her editorial craftsmanship, and two superb anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on this paper. i also owe special thanks to cristina moretti for providing important suggestions on questions of time and leslee lazar for his illustration. alex rewegan, matthew-wolf-meyer, and elsa fan have all also contributed to this project in very different ways for which i greatly appreciate. notes 1see tobias rees’s (2016) intriguing ethnography of parisian neurobiologists and plasticity. plasticity is also taken up in the edited collection by bates and bassiri (2016). 2 the paper aims to contribute to a growing body of literature like that of anne cvetkovich (2012) who writes about depression and the mental illness complex as someone who lives within that arrangement, as someone who experiences the mind/body betrayals and institutional logics that shape our experience of being ill or injured, in body or mind. similarly, anthropologist robert murphy (2001) wrote about his own experience of being diagnosed with a tumour on his spinal cord and the subsequent transformation of his body as he made sense of becoming quadriplegic. these accounts approach changing bodies, institutional structures, epistemological logics, and popular imaginings through the critical analytics of the anthropological and the embodied first-person account. also see these scholarly memoir accounts of illness: berube (2016); clare (2017); mclean (2007); orr (2006); stoller (2005); and trivelli (2014). 3 memory loss as a cultural phenomenon has also garnered much attention in the sciences and social sciences, due to the aging baby boomer generation and the special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 19 concern with dementia. anthropologists lawrence cohen (1998; leibing & cohen, 2006), margaret lock (2013), and janelle taylor (2008) have all written about memory loss, dementia research, and cultural understandings and institutional arrangements surrounding aging and “senility.” yet there is very little literature on the social study of forgetting (in the individual, biological sense, rather than the collective act of forgetting) outside of dementia or the aged. also see antze & lambek (1996). 4 on methodological approaches in anthropology that demand attention to the sensorial, see culhane (2017). 5 andrew irving makes a compelling case for an “imperiled anthropology,” which aims to explore and represent “the streams of inner dialogue and reverie” usually ignored by anthropology (2017, p. 74). he builds on the work of vincent crapazano (2004), who similarly has argued for a type of anthropological inquiry that takes seriously the imagination, reverie, and inner thoughts. such work inspires my thinking on this project. 6 i see this paper also working to answer the question posted by biehl and locke (2017): “how can we ethnographically apprehend these worldly fabrications and the lives therein, constituted as they are by that which is unresolved?” (p. 10) 7 dib’s approach to memory is largely influenced by karen barad’s (2003) work on “agential realism” and temporality. current research in neurosciences place memories in the engram at the deeply neural and cellular level (josselyn, köhler, & frankland, 2017; poo et al., 2016). 8 furthermore, i want to suggest here that changes in memory from physical trauma, such as concussions or traumatic brain injuries, might be better understood as memory “disturbances” or “disruptions” in the productive sense, where disrupting narratives or disturbing conventional ways of knowing, produce alternative, sometimes more nuanced, accounts of neurodiversity. 9 such changes might even be understood as “hopeful” in the massumi (1995) sense of the affective. matthew wolf-meyer’s (n.d.) most recent manuscript, unraveling, also critically examines the relationships between the self, the neurological disorder, and conceptions of the brain as the “basis of the self.” 10 in nostalgia, the fictional novel by vassanji (2016), individuals suffer from “leaked memory syndrome,” a type of nostalgia where “reminders of discarded special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 20 lives” leak into the conscious minds, requiring intervention from “nostalgia doctors.” in this fictional future, past lives and the memories are replaced with artificial memories, as new personalities replace old ones, leaving traumatic pasts behind. 11 boot and kramer (2014) suggest that by 2020 the industry will be valued at more than us$6 billion. 12 for more on gordon bell, see total recall (bell & gemmell, 2009). on digital and/or e-memories and their affect on biological and cultural memories, see van dijck (2007). 13 for instance, on various forms of cultural amnesia encouraged or fostered by states, see choudry (2010), haaken (2002), and luker (2005). we see cultural amnesia as dangerous, and counterproductive to anti-colonial or indigenous movements, yet i do think that some people want to forget. this is related in some senses to the work of dian million (2013), who critiques trauma discourses as they are taken up by indigenous groups in canada and fields of psychology and then celebrated by the colonial canadian state. 14 i thank an anonymous reviewer for making this point. 15 i was in western kenya working on an ethnography of a prep clinical trial for hiv that was being conducted by researchers at the university of washington and university of california, san francisco. the region at that time had one of the highest rates of hiv infection in sub-saharan africa, and as a result there were multiple hiv/aids clinical trials being conducted by state and non-governmental organizations, largely from the united states. 16 i contested and argued that such a question was no longer fair given that we are largely surrounded by digital clocks and rarely see a traditional clock with a big hand and little hand. my neurologist responded by saying, “that’s the point.” 17 for instance, my experience with hiccups after the brain injury, which i have written about elsewhere; see elliott (2016). 18 there are no cures, and rarely certainty about my ongoing symptoms. the “uncertainty” of neurosciences has been discussed by a number of scholars. see fitzgerald (2017); star (1985); and wolf-meyer (2018). special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 21 19 for more details on their contributions to localization theory and the neurosciences, see lanczik & keil (1991) and kaitaro (2001). on franz gall’s influence and the three time periods of localization theory, see zola-morgan (1995). 20 for more detailed social studies of localization, see abraham (2003, 2012); borck (2008); dumit (1999, 2004); rose (2007); and saunders (2008). 21 see the ethnographic accounts of time by bear (2016); davis (2017); majumder (2017) in conversation with zee; peteet (2018); pandian (2012); and zee (2017). 22 see ian hacking’s rewriting the soul (1995) for his archeology of the memory sciences and the politicization of memories. references abraham, t. 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(1993). feminism, disability and transcendence of the body. canadian woman studies, 13(4), 116-122. wilson, e. a. (2004). psychosomatic: feminism and the neurological body. durham, nc: duke university press. wolf-meyer, m. (n.d.) unraveling: remaking american personhood in a neurological age. [unpublished manuscript]. wolf-meyer, m. (2018, february 6). what can we do with uncertainty? somatosphere. retrieved from http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/what-can-we-do-withuncertainty zee, jerry c. (2017). holding patterns: sand and political time at china’s desert special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) denielle elliott, 2019 27 shores. cultural anthropology, 32(2), 215-241. zola-morgan, s. (1995). localization of brain function: the legacy of franz joseph gall (1758-1828). annual review of neurosciences, 18, 359-383. author bio denielle elliott is a cultural anthropologist who teaches on postcolonial and indigenous science studies, the anthropology of biomedicine, and social suffering in the departments of social science and anthropology at york university in toronto. she is co-founder and co-curator of the centre for imaginative ethnography, coeditor of a different kind of ethnography: imaginative practices and creative methodologies (2016, university of toronto press), and the author of reimagining science and statecraft in postcolonial kenya: stories from an african scientist (2018, routledge). microsoft word asher-132-1121-4.docx asher, k. (2017). thinking fragments: adisciplinary reflections on feminisms and environmental justice. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(2), 1-28 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kiran asher, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article thinking fragments: adisciplinary reflections on feminisms and environmental justice kiran asher wgss, university of massachusetts, amherst kasher@umass.edu abstract feminisms and environmental justice are some of the names of struggles to understand nature-culture linkages and conceptualize just worlds for nonhumans and their human kin. in this paper, i revisit my journey of doing environmental justice research, i.e. of my feminist scientific practice in asia and latin america. in this retrospective telling i highlight how gender, political economy, and race were and remain fundamental in producing the subjects and objects of my research and analysis. i discuss how an implicit feminism helped me grapple with the complex nature-culture linkages i observed in the field. postcolonial and marxist insights supplement and complement feminisms in the questions i pose as we attempt to imagine new nature-cultures. 2 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) so nature is not a physical place to which one can go, nor a treasure to fence in or bank, nor as essence to be saved, or violated. nature is not hidden and so does not need to be unveiled. nature is not a text to be read. (haraway, 1992, p. 296) when we find ourselves in the subject position of two determinate decisions, both right (or both wrong), one of which cancels the other, we are in an aporia which by definition cannot be crossed, a double bind. it is not a logical or philosophical problem like a contradiction, a dilemma, a paradox, an antinomy.…again, it must be insisted that this is the condition of the possibility of deciding. in the aporia or the double bind, to decide is the burden of responsibility. the typecase of the ethical sentiment is regret, not self-congratulations. (spivak, 2012, pp. 104–105) the idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history. (williams, 2005, p. 67) feminisms and environmental justice as scientific practice in the twenty-first century, the need to imagine different relationships between humans, and between humans and nature, is on agendas across the globe amidst fears of the social and environmental impacts of climate change, rising economic inequities, and continuing racial, gender, and sexual violence. the question driving this special issue—what are the resources within feminist thought that might allow us to imagine new nature-cultural worlds?—is both timely and urgent. in their attempt to know the world and change it for the better, feminist pursuits of new nature-cultures are by definition modern and scientific. but although rising to the conceit of modern science, they do not share its hubris of universal rationality or the idea that “one size fits all.” rather, feminist perspectives are as diverse as the world, and include those not associated with feminism, the properly named movement. feminists’ quests for worlds that are just and livable lead them to traverse the terrains of social change along disciplinary, political, historical, activist, and many other paths. in this article, i outline my path and ongoing struggle to understand nature-culture linkages. i trace the genealogy of my intellectual formation, which began in my childhood home, includes 3 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) formal academic training in natural and social science disciplines, and self-education through critical readings in various fields. revisiting the journey of my environmental justice research, i realized that the journey itself embodies a feminist scientific praxis, often an implicit one. in this article, i make explicit the parameters of a feminist scientific praxis and show that it is one that is attentive to relationality and multiple logics, and necessarily anti-sexist, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial. in this retrospective telling, i highlight how gender, political economy, and race (coded as caste and nationalism) were fundamental in producing the subjects, objects, and analyses of my early environmental conservation research. yet these key mediating factors of knowledge production were the “present absences” in the methods and approaches i drew on. still, an underlying sensibility i would now call “postcolonial feminism” made it impossible to ignore the busy traffic between nature and culture that was everywhere. in the language of my field, i realized that the environment, ecology, and sustainability were closely connected to economic and political development. race, gender, history, and political economy are present absences in mainstream social science approaches to “sustainable development.” however, they were at the forefront of afro-colombian ethnic and territorial claims over the pacific lowlands of colombia—a region slated for economic modernization and biodiversity conservation in the 1990s and overrun by violence since the turn of the twenty-first century. over a decade of critical solidarity with afro-colombian movements for social and environmental justice forced me to grapple with the heterogeneities and contradictions of culture-nature connections, including the ferocious and fluid dynamics of capitalist globalization. to account for them adequately in analytical terms, i drew from many wells of critical theories, especially feminisms, postcolonialisms, and marxisms. i can never repay my debts to those whose intellectual and political labors enable mine.⁠1 risking an inadequate accounting, i note that the writings of donna haraway, karl marx, and gayatri chakravorty spivak frame my understanding of feminisms, postcolonialisms, and marxisms. based on 4 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) their work and that of others, i show that ethical scientific practice entails persistent critique and requires wrestling with the dilemmas and ambiguities it generates. i use a first person narrative to flag the dilemmas and ambiguities of research practice. parallels and resonances with the scientific practice of others may foster collective knowledge about feminist environmental justice. however, these practices do not necessarily represent a generalizable or replicable form of feminist scientific research. similarly, the seven biographical notes below that chronicle my encounters with nature-cultures are less a memoir than a method emphasizing the partial nature of evidence and the unpredictable and contingent answers to one’s research questions. the notes also show the conjunctural nature of research and the far-from-seamless ways through which we gain insights into knotty problems. academic writing norms, which stress clear transitions, often obscure the choppy and idiosyncratic paths to discovery and the fact that “ah-ha” moments are often buried under the rubble of many thoughts. this form of writing, then, is an experiment in the spirit of feminist and scientific inquiry. i trust that it does not sacrifice clarity and brings some pleasure to the reading. note 1: a conversation with my mother about god me: do you believe in god? ma: yes. me: why? ma: because we [humans] made gods. me: really? why? ma: because we could not understand nature. 5 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) me: so who made nature? ma: gods. me: if gods made nature and humans made gods, did humans make nature too? ma: no, nature made humans. such complex and non-causal logics also defined the relations among divine and mortal characters in the folk tales and epic stories i heard from my mother and grandparents. furthermore, these characters were shape-shifting, and the boundaries between human and non-human were fluid and dynamic. such fluidity also underlay the spirited debates about nature and culture, science and superstition, modernity and tradition, colonialism and nationalism, philosophy and religion, power and politics, and spirituality and materialism that i witnessed during my childhood in 1970s post-independence india. a motley crew of mostly uneducated but literate members of the extended family, neighbors, sadhus and seers from different sects and religions, and friends (mine and my parents) animatedly discussed these themes of national importance. the family dog and strays of various species were at the center of these gatherings and, indeed, of my world. i wistfully compared our household to that of gerald durrell, british naturalist and zookeeper, but i always found us coming up short. for one, our menageries were never as wild as durrell’s, and our tiny apartment in bombay (now mumbai) could never match the romance of his teenage home on the island of corfu. but more importantly, durrell’s narratives of even the most chaotic situations were rooted in a coherent, light-hearted present and signaled a bright future. in contrast, the realm of the past, glorious yet beleaguered, always seemed to weigh down the multilingual and cacophonous conversations at home. they meandered through the labyrinths of india’s ancient and colonial history, and lamented its 6 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) currently underdeveloped and backward society’s floundering on the path to the future. i could discern no singular logic or teleological arc to these discussions. with no place for multiple logics or polyvocal oral cultures in any imaginable future, reading science was the over-determined choice for a curious child yearning for durrellian romance. science held two intertwined promises: the thrill of discovery and a certainty of method— verifiable, tangible, unfettered by traditional beliefs, beyond dispute, and universally intelligible. paradoxically, science’s key appeal was that it was premised on questioning all certainties. it was also the beacon of progress that would bring india’s multitudes into a modernity on par with the west. note 2: angsting about ungulates in the semi-arid regions of india by the 1980s, environmental issues were becoming issues of global concern and proper objects of science. ecology and conservation biology were seeking disciplinary status by moving beyond the descriptive domain of natural history to establish scientific methods and theories for the study of flora and fauna, ecosystems, and environmental changes. although these fields were not considered as prestigious or as important as other stem (science, technology, math, and engineering) fields, i felt i could legitimately move from the lab to the field to conduct research on the wildlife i loved as long as i did it with the prerequisite degree of objectivity and scientific distance. among other things, this meant keeping “culture” (as in, anything to do with humans) separate from the study of nature. my undergraduate advisor and professors fully supported my honors research on wildlife biology.2 however, they could not help with identifying a research project or the appropriate theories and methods through which to approach it. with the help of the bombay natural history society (bnhs) and world wildlife fund (wwf)-india, i finally found my research object: the endangered indian antelope or blackbuck 7 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) (antilope cervicapra) in rehekuri, a small forest reserve (2.17 sq. kms.) in a semi-arid region of western india. the antelope, whose numbers had dwindled due to hunting and the loss of their grassland habitat, were wandering into the surrounding unfenced fields and damaging crops. my objective was to understand ungulate (hoofed mammal) behavioral ecology and assess the extent of crop damage around rehekuri. my broader goal was to contribute data to help address the issue of “humanwildlife” conflicts in national parks and protected areas in india. access to the forest reserve, in terms of distance from mumbai and research permits from the indian forest department, was a serious logistical hurdle. members of bnhs and wwf finally facilitated research permits. these members and amateur naturalists were often part of india’s upper-middle class of urban professionals. among them was a medical doctor and wildlife photographer who also served as my advisor. this vanguard was eager to build on indian natural history (rudyard kipling’s the jungle book is an example) to develop a scientific basis for wildlife conservation in india. this imperative arose as much from the specificities of economic development and conservation in postindependence india as from the international conservation biology debates of the time (see note 3 below). caste, gender, and class were also at play in our attempts to access the research site. when a young urban woman with a stilted command of the local language showed up alone in a rickety public bus at an isolated part of rural india one hot morning, the forest officers and guards were at a loss. eventually, i was taken to speak with the district forest officer’s wife, who ascertained that i had a sound “moral character,” appropriate caste background, and parental consent to be there. i was then left alone to do my fieldwork, though it took a letter from my advisor for me to stay in the forest guesthouse. the hospitality and graciousness of the guesthouse guard’s wife saved me from going hungry during fieldwork, but not from burning my mouth and insides with the spicy food. when i visited the field in the company of the doctor and other urban naturalists, we were served bland or mildly spicy food. but 8 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) during my solo field trips, no amount of begging led to any significant decline in the spice level of the meals. what i cannot know for sure is whether the cook was asserting her agency and resisting my presence (respectable young women do not wander in rural areas alone), or claiming me as kin (we appeared to be the same age). having cleared these logistical hurdles, the next ones were of the textbook variety: identifying and accomplishing my specific research goals within money and time constraints. neither advisors nor books on wildlife biology had any useful advice on navigating such methodological dilemmas as: • the appropriate census methods to obtain an accurate antelope count • identifying and classifying grasses and sedges that antelope ate • assessing the extent of “crop damage” (i asked the farmers how much crop damage antelope caused, when, how. their answers: lots of damage, anytime the crops are in the field.) equally complicated was the issue of habitat loss. colonial legacies shaped the bureaucratic structure and functions of the indian forest department. their mandates included “afforestation,” (establishing tree cover on bare or tree-less land) which meant that plantations of fastgrowing eucalyptus trees were reducing the antelope’s already small open grassland habitat and lowering the water table. the afforestation mandate thus conflicted with the forest department’s added mandate of conserving wildlife. to resolve this, the deputy forest officers often fudged the counts by increasing the number of animals by a certain percentage every year, never mind that they exceeded the tiny reserve’s carrying capacity. forest personnel also created havoc, albeit unintentionally, when they removed all the dung piles of antelope droppings to use as fertilizer. i had painstakingly mapped these dung piles after observing that they were markers of antelope territories and governed the herd dynamics of these highly social animals. their removal disrupted herd patterns and drove the animals further outside the reserve’s unmarked boundaries. 9 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) keeping people out of the reserve was just as difficult as keeping antelope in. villagers, often women, collected firewood, fodder, and other non-timber forest products (ntfps) “illegally” from the reserve. such examples of what from haraway (1989) we understand as the busy traffic between nature and culture were everywhere and haunted the margins of my field notes. but neither these hauntings nor the many fieldwork dilemmas made it into my thesis or the scientific publication based on this research. attributing my dilemmas to inadequate methodological skills to study nature separate from culture, i came to the united states to do graduate work in environmental conservation. note 3: iguanas and other fauna, or old dilemmas in the new world different colonial and national histories, political economies, and grammars of race, place, and gender structure environmental science in the united states. the 7000-acre duke forest in the north carolina piedmont was an important research and teaching site for students at the school of forestry and environmental studies. what were now regenerated forests were formerly fields and tobacco plantations. never once in my course of study was there a discussion of who worked those fields and how slave labor contributed to the past and present “resources” we were learning to manage rationally for timber and other uses. not only was the past another country, there was little sense of internationalism or curiosity about the larger world among my us peers and professors. this meant that there was neither intellectual mentorship nor research funding for me to return to india to conduct fieldwork for my master’s project. while i did not know it then, cold war politics and the absence of bilateral relations between india and the united states also had something to do with my inability to return. my sense of such history and politics was inchoate at best. but an inherited anti-colonial sentiment made me want to continue research in the “third world,” and led me to the neotropics. it also became evident that although there were well10 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) developed approaches to understanding temperate zone ecologies, they were not applicable in the tropics. hence, over the next five years (from 1987 to 1991), i spent as much time in the field as academic calendars, funding, and visas would allow. conservation and evolutionary biologists had begun arguing that the fate of the living world depended on biodiversity, the diversity of living nature (soulé, 1986; kramer, van schaik, & johnson, 1997). as much of this biodiversity is concentrated in the tropics, john terborgh, one of the leading figures in tropical ecology, extols: the special scientific value of tropical forests is that they offer our last chance to study nature in its prehistoric condition, nature as it evolved over eons past....pristine ecosystems still exist in parts of south america, central africa, indonesia, new guinea, and some other pacific islands. these ecosystems are priceless and irreplaceable assets, for they constitute some of the few remaining controls for biological science. (1992, p. 29) with its marked absence of human presence or sense of history, this statement is representative of the views of classical tropical conservation ecology. no surprise then that in one of the first awkwardly expressed examples of public concern about biodiversity loss, the 1986 national teleconference on biodiversity (the national academies, 2011), there is no analysis of the links between international political economy and the rising rates of tropical deforestation. similarly, deforestation and resource exploitation were uncritically blamed on poor, local people and “resource scarcity” due to “overpopulation” (peluso & watts, 2001). such views persist despite extensive evidence to the contrary.3 i was disturbed, yet influenced, by these discourses and sought neutral knowledge of tropical flora and fauna for the formulation of modern environmental policies and sound management practices. i studied agroecology, agroforestry, population ecology, black-bellied whistling ducks, and green iguanas in costa rica. in north carolina, i mapped the piedmont forests for the purpose of “ground truthing” remotely sensed data on forest cover. later i repeated the exercise in the 11 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) forests of belize. i also studied advanced wildlife management techniques in southern china before spending six months in the brazilian amazon studying aquatic and avian biology. my research questions and the sites of my investigation were as over-determined as my ability to learn new languages. across them, messy meshing of nature and culture, ecology and economics, and geography and politics shaped my research objects. yet, i had no tools to account for them nor to assess observations, such as women regularly fishing in mamiraua (the region of the western brazilian state of amazonas where i lived) while asserting that only men fished; a famous english scientist whose fungal infection had just been effectively treated with local remedies lecturing caboclos (indigenous or mestizo peasants living along the rivers) about the miracles and superiority of western medicine; and a “poacher”—the wiry eighty-year-old who was my field father—single handedly capturing and killing a caiman the same size as him. any lingering doubts that flora and fauna were literally and metaphorically entangled with humans, the environment, and political economy drowned in the rising waters of the varzea forests of the amazon in june 1991. a few months later, i started doctoral work at the university of florida with funding from the tropical conservation and development (tcd) program. at tcd, faculty and students from the natural and social sciences (but none from the humanities) came together to develop interdisciplinary approaches to environment and development concerns. my degree-granting department was political science. note 4: linking ecology and economy through sustainable development courses in comparative politics, international development and environmental policy, and an internship at the world bank as a “biodiversity conservation” consultant, soon made it clear that the standard approaches of the social sciences emulated the ahistorical, 12 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) apolitical empiricism of the natural sciences. it took rather longer and much wandering across literal and disciplinary (political theory, history, area studies, literature, feminist theory, and more) fields to learn that all sciences have roots in enlightenment ideals of progress through science and reason (hall, held, hubert, & thompson, 1996). science and technology studies (sts) was concerned with modernity and progress in europe and the west, and “development” was their non-western counterpart. the west and “the rest” emerged in relation to each other in colonial times. within my comparative politics textbooks, however, there were no signs of such connections until the post-world war ii period and the launch of the development project in the 1950s. the goals of development were to eradicate poverty in the third world and overcome political and economic underdevelopment under the tutelage of the west (edelman & haugerud, 2005). governed by cold war anti-communist rhetoric, theories of political modernization and development posited that economic growth (through industrialization, infrastructure, and development) in the newly-independent (african and asian) and currentlyunderdeveloped (latin american) countries would help them “catch-up” with the developed world. capitalist accumulation was the “natural” or inevitable path to progress, the benefits of which were supposed to “trickle down” and lead to development and liberal democracy. when underdevelopment and poverty continued to plague the third world, their causes were traced to internal roadblocks to national capitalist accumulation and progress, such as corruption, overpopulation, and the pesky, persistent “traditional values” of its backward people. such eurocentric views prevail in conventional thinking about science, technology, and development. development was not without its critics. marxist-inspired dependency and world-systems theorists saw the struggle for development as part of anti-imperialism and nationalism. writing in the 1960s and 1970s, they argued that capitalist expansion depended on complex and unequal connections—between colonies, nations, regions, 13 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) and world markets—and offered structural explanations of persistent inequalities and uneven economic growth (edelman & haugerud, 2005). in political science classrooms, however, such critiques were discredited as “ideological” and were seldom given time or analytical attention. but both modernization and marxist-inspired theories of development were similar in their humanism and consideration of “nature” as the de facto source of raw material for economic growth and human development. both also relegated rural populations and women to the “economically unproductive” subsistence and domestic sectors. from the perspectives of marxist comrades and world bank policy pundits, the work of the women in rehekuri and mamiraua could only be invisible or unproductive, even to the women themselves. since the 1970s, a broad spectrum of gender professionals and feminists scholars from the global north and global south has also been examining the causes and consequences of women’s exclusion and exploitation within development (braidotti, charkiewicz, häusler, & wieringa, 1994; saunders, 2002). scholars rooted in western, liberal feminism blamed public and private patriarchy for women’s oppression and sought equal economic and political rights for women. integrating women into the formal economy, they argued, would also promote economic growth. marxist and socialist feminists extended structural critiques of uneven development and argued that capitalist accumulation systematically depended on and undervalued subsistence production and women’s labor. thus, they saw gender inequities as part of a continuum of inequalities between countries, classes, regions, and ethnic groups. their critiques show the need to rethink the structures of capitalist development, and the power relations of class, race, and gender. the application of their critiques is a call for a “rights-based” approach to human development and welfare. a parallel set of discussions was taking place at the same time regarding women’s roles and gender relations in natural resource management and the environment (braidotti, charkiewicz, häusler, & wieringa, 1994). most famously, “ecofeminists” such as vandana shiva 14 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) from india and wangari maathai from kenya highlighted that poor rural women in the third world depended on nature for their survival and were more likely to be knowledgeable “resource guardians" rather than "resource degraders” or hapless victims of development. viewed through these lenses, rural women’s work—collecting firewood, fishing, farming, and more—takes on different value. but the analytical insights and questions raised by feminists in the extensive literature on “women, gender, development, and the environment” seldom make it into most classrooms or policy boardrooms. feminists do deserve a degree of credit for getting scientists and policy makers to see that economic and environmental issues are two sides of the same green coin. in 1987, the world commission on environment and development (wced) published a report titled our common future. published under the direction of gro harlem brundtland (then prime minister of norway), the wced report famously introduced the concept of "sustainable development," which it defines as: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. it contains within it two key concepts: the concept of “needs,” in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs. (wced 1987, p. 43) the report and the wced laid the groundwork for the united nations conference on the environment and development (unced) and the parallel earth summit, held in rio de janeiro in 1992. the linkages between environmental-ecological issues and their correlate "economic development,” were consolidated at unced. an action plan for the twenty-first century (agenda 21) was outlined and a commission on sustainable development (un department of economic and social affairs, n.d. (a)) was established. it was charged with following up on agenda 21 and the various accords signed at the earth summit. 15 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) ecological and economic sustainability became the focus of debate in a wide range of disciplinary and organizational realms (kramer, van schaik, & johnson, 1997), including in the tcd program at the university of florida. following unced, many states, nongovernmental organizations, and multilateral institutions engaged with sustainability, the environment, women, and gender. this institutionalization of sustainability paralleled the globalization of development. after the unexpected end of the cold war, a neoliberal phase of development emerged in the 1990s that emphasizes economic globalization through free trade and markets. it persists to this day. this phase of economic globalization suffers from amnesia about the natural and cultural bases of its past ascendancy and the uneven negative impacts of market capitalism. according to neoliberalism, empowering women, peasants, indigenous peoples, afro-descendant communities, and marginal groups to become consumers and entrepreneurs in global markets can overcome their social and economic exclusion. in this framework, environmental problems are anomalies or externalities to be addressed through market integration. in 1992, i did not yet know the analytical parameters of this logic but saw it at play when i was an intern with the global environmental facility at the world bank. their approach to biodiversity management and conservation in latin america was premised on pricing it correctly. that is, biodiversity was understood as an economic commodity in which its ecological characteristics had no bearing. economic logic also governed the millennium development goals (mdgs) (millennium project, 2006). the mdgs aimed to reduce poverty by half between 2000 and 2015, but were based on a narrow and centrally-defined set of targets and indicators. issues of equity or sustainability were virtually absent from the mdgs. opinions are divided about whether the mdgs were successful even by their own shifting criteria (the baseline of measurement was moved from 2000 to 1990). in 2012, twenty years after unced in rio de janeiro, the call for sustainable development and poverty eradication needed to be renewed at the un 16 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) conference on sustainable development (un department of social and economic affairs, n.d. (c)). in 2015, more broadly defined sustainable development goals (sdgs) (un department of social and economic affairs, n.d. (b)) replaced the mdgs. but in those too the various state agencies and multilateral institutions concerned with the sdgs and other global issues (now appearing as subsets of climate change) lauded the virtues of the “green economy” and “green growth,” despite the lack of conceptual clarity or agreements about the applicability or desirability of these terms. persistent inequalities (including those of gender, race, and class) remain subject to management through pragmatic and depoliticized projects to “empower women” and “mainstream gender.” such attempts not only ignore structural factors driving existing inequalities and unsustainable development but undermine public action for social and environmental justice (un women, 2014). note 5: economy, environment, and ethnic rights in the pacific lowlands of colombia needless to say, these standard approaches to environment and development linkages provided inadequate accounts of the complex socio-natures that i had first observed as a field biologist. nor could they help explain the dynamic interrelations between economic, environmental and local struggles i began witnessing in the biodiverse pacific lowlands of colombia in the 1990s while conducting doctoral research there. my time in the field coincided with the “cultural turn” in the social sciences and poststructural and postcolonial critiques of modernity and science. scholarship from a range of fields—anthropology, sociology, geography, and environmental history—were contesting the technical, apolitical, and ahistorical nature of modernization and opening up conversations about the meanings, production, and effects of scientific knowledge and development interventions (crush, 1995; saunders, 2002). feminist, queer, and other critical perspectives were also reframing 17 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) debates about the nature of subjectivity, domination, and resistance and positing that reclaiming different identities and subjugated experiences is a form of politics. new ideas about knowledge and power were leading to new evaluations of these kinds of grassroots struggles and “new social movements” (nsms). in latin america, nsms described the looselyorganized coalitions of factory workers, peasants, women, urban squatters, and ethnic groups who rose up in protest against the state and forces of late capitalism starting in the 1980s (escobar & alvarez, 1992). marked by a diversity of interests, identities, and organizing strategies, these nsms drew on idioms of traditional or popular culture to seek democratic participation and imagine alternatives forms of politics beyond liberal (equality) and marxist (class-based exploitation) claims. in conjunction with this scholarship, many activists and professionals from the third world denounced development as a tool of hegemonic, eurocentric modernity, which imposed western rationality and marginalized non-western systems of knowledge (sachs, 1992). these writers argued that the traditional lifestyles and livelihood practices of marginalized local communities suggested sustainable alternatives to development and heralded a “post-development” era. such postmodernist, postcolonial, and anti-modernist perspectives keenly shaped my observations of afro-colombian struggles for ethnic and territorial rights. in a first approximation (my dissertation), i interpreted these black movements as resisting the state and institutionalized development and these activists as reclaiming their identities and experiences as afro-colombians. i uncomfortably echoed post-development claims that the assertion of cultural practices closely linked to nature could be the basis of economic alternatives. such an explanation of afro-colombian ethnocultural politics, however, did little justice to the heterogeneity of black movements and experiences. it was as rooted in nature-culture binaries as the standard approaches of my disciplines. extended fieldwork with social movements obliged me to grapple with how capitalist development (as a practice of science) and struggles 18 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) for social change were intertwined in contradictory, complex, and contingent ways. rather than autonomous expressions of resistance, black struggles, including black women’s expressions, were at least partially shaped by and through the very discourses of political and economic modernity they opposed. a decade after my first interpretation and aided by critical (re)readings of critical scholarship, my second interpretation of afro-colombian struggles theorized the dynamics between development and struggles for change beyond such binaries as tradition vs. modernity, exploitation vs. resistance, global vs. local, theory vs. practice, cooptation vs. autonomy, and development vs. alternatives (asher, 2009). as with all projects of knowledge production, this one generated many questions. these questions have since structured my scholarship and activism. how are processes of differentiations (of class, race, ethnicity, gender, nation, nature, and regional origin) shaped by the state and society, and shape them in turn? how can we grasp the ferocious yet fluid onslaught of capitalist globalization and its constitutive intersections with nature and culture? that is, how are the subjects and objects of analysis, attention, and intervention constituted as such? how can we eschew romantic understanding of subaltern agency while accounting adequately for their power and resistance? how can we be in critical solidarity with struggles for social and environmental justice? insights into these questions came from the challenges of teaching in the us academy. i began to learn what i was trying to teach: the slow, unguaranteed labor of persistent critique as ethical practice, which is the abiding concern of feminisms, postcolonialisms, and marxisms. note 6: feminism as science among ecofeminists and foresters feminism was implicit in my early research on nature, even though women were absent. in my current work on the raced and gendered dynamics of environmental change in the global south, feminism and women are explicitly central. as part of that work in march 2011, i 19 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) attended the inaugural activities of a three-day grandmothers university at the beej vidyapith, vandana shiva’s organic farm and training center, located a few hours from dehra dun in the garhwal hills of northern india. among the attendees were young students, mostly white euro-americans but also some from latin america, and many thirty-to-forty-somethings from the indian diaspora, who had come to learn organic and sustainable agricultural techniques from garhwali women. the speakers at the flowerdraped podium included shiva (a world-renowned activist and critic of mainstream agriculture and development, who trained as a physicist), sunderlal bahuguna of chipko fame, and margaret alva, then-governor of uttar pradesh. the garhwali teachers—a dozen grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and daughters-in-laws—were at the edges of the crowd, barely visible behind governor alva’s black-suited bodyguards. in their inaugural remarks, alva and shiva extolled the many virtues of grandmothers: their long view of what is called “sustainability” now, their traditional knowledge and wisdom about the earth, and their advice to practice love and compassion. shiva noted that, “because most of our grandmothers have not gone to school, they have a holistic knowledge of the world, not the broken knowledge of textbooks. they teach us prudence and not to run after money. grandmothers seek wealth of nature in harmony, and of social relations.” shiva’s powerful and charismatic remarks focused on valorizing knowledges heretofore undervalued in scientific discourses. i had heard similar things from my grandmothers and mother, and shared many of shiva’s claims. yet, i was uneasy with her reversals. her simplistic representations seemed to be missing the opportunity to invite her audience to engage with gender– environment relations in all their complications. i first learned about such complications from my mother, and they underlie haraway’s (1989) admonition that in feminisms simple reversals will not do and spivak’s (1999) argument that postcolonialism cannot simply recover subaltern agency or reveal the hidden. my unease became tinged with irony upon observing that notions of “traditional knowledge” shape not only “post-development” 20 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) alternatives but also policies of mainstream development institutions that once deemed such knowledge an impediment to progress. the world bank’s operational directive 4.2 to integrate gender, indigenous peoples and afro-descendant communities into development is perhaps one of the most notable examples of such policies. the impact of these policies is highly debatable. but my concern here is to convey the complications of nature-cultures that get sidestepped or, worse, recreated in binary representations of tradition vs. science. i had an opportunity to grapple with this task a few years after i heard shiva’s remarks in dehra dun. with gender and forests re-emerging as central to the global sustainable development agenda, environmental organizations were also attempting to integrate gender into their research and actions. diverse professional networks and coincidences led me to work at one such organization, the center for international forestry research (cifor) from 2013 to 2015. after two decades i once again found myself working with natural scientists who prided themselves on their “sound science.” they implicitly and explicitly rejected any form of advocacy or politics. thus, feminist insights were suspect, but women’s contributions to forestry or natural resource management were valid as long as they were empirically and objectively verified. unsurprisingly, attempts to talk about gender beyond a natural, neutral, biologically-determined difference between women and men were dismal failures. a momentary connection occurred in science@10, a weekly event where cifor scientists gave ten-minute presentations on their research to their colleagues. these presentations and the discussions afterwards were recorded for wider dissemination. in my presentation, titled "women are to gender what trees are to forests” (center for international forestry research, 2015), i made an analogy between the heterogeneity of forests and the diversity of women to draw attention to the lessons from forty years of scholarship on gender, development, and the environment. i reviewed some of the fundamental points of departure of forestry research, including that forests are complex biophysical and ecological entities, that there are many kinds of forests, and a collection 21 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) of trees does not automatically make a forest. i juxtaposed those with some insights from “gender” research, including that gender is not simply a relation between men and women, and that a focus on the heterogeneity of women and their social roles is necessary but provides insufficient accounts of inequities and power. through such juxtaposition, i argued that gender in forestry research means not just adding women but asking questions about our assumptions, approaches, and explanations about gender and forests. this short presentation generated many questions about women and—or in—forests. it even skirted the edges of the question, “what are forests?” in a limited way, it was more successful than any of my previous conversations with my colleagues about gender or, indeed, any social issue. yet, it fell short of an engagement with the social and political nature of all research and scientific knowledge production. animating such conversations is part of the ongoing challenge of feminist environmental work. it was clearly one of the objectives at the grandmothers university at beej vidyapith. note 7: re-encountering nature-cultures in the context of the early twenty-first century, when fears of climate change catastrophes are linked to indices of social inequalities, the need for different relationships between humans and nature is on agendas across the globe. attempts to imagine new nature-culture relationships within feminist sts, and this special issue, remind me of that conversation long ago with my mother. i invoke her not to reveal her agency or “give her voice.” rather, her formulation of nature-culture was my introduction to the idea that subjects emerge in relation to each other. this idea of subjects in relation is prevalent in many cultures and ways of thinking. this does not mean that relations are simple, outside of power, value-free, or uncontested. it is certainly not easy to understand or act upon this idea. but it stands in contrast to a key assumption of modern sciences, including the social or human sciences—that subjects of inquiry 22 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) and action are discrete, a priori entities (individuals, animals, societies, countries, etc.) by obscuring the multiple relations that constitute and bind the socio-natural world, mainstream, disciplinary, scientific thinking provides inadequate accounts of it, and cannot strive for a better world or achieve development. as the anthropologist eric wolf notes in the opening lines of his book europe and the people without history, the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that dissemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. concepts like “nation,” “society,” and “culture” name bits and threaten to turn names into things. only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding. (1992, p. 3) my attempts to understand the “bundles of relationships” between the environment (which i understood to be non-human nature) and human development (which i understood to be social and cultural) led me to wander purposefully through various fields of scientific inquiry. my wanderings convince me that suturing the many severed connections between nature-cultures and imagining a more livable world for all requires methodological and epistemic multilingualism. that is, it requires learning the different grammars of actual and analytical languages or approaches. in closing, i sketch why and how the grammars of feminisms, anti-colonialism, and marxisms crucially inform my struggles for environmental justice. feminist theorists of various persuasions have asked, who counts as a legitimate subject of knowledge production (science) and action (politics)? who/what is relegated to object status? how are such subjects produced in space and time? how are sex/gender constitutive of subjectivity and vice versa? what are the implications of exclusion and inclusion? aside from the key issues of sex/gender, such questions have also been central to numerous variants of postcolonial scholarship. that is, anti-colonial scholars from early nationalists to current postcolonial 23 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) and decolonial thinkers have interrogated and contested the relationship between those people and places deemed “civilized” (generally from the west or developed societies) and those seen as unable to govern themselves (generally aborigines or those from “the rest” of the world). since the enlightenment, the gendered and raced bodies of women and the colonized have been equated with nature and made into objects of western science and governmentality. what feminist and postcolonial projects have in common is a concern for how to respond to this reductionism. the projects of social change within contemporary feminist and anti-colonial politics then are not only about claiming the status of knowing and legitimate subjects but asking fundamental questions about how subjects and objects (culture, nature, nations, colonies, etc.) emerge in relation to each other within specific historical and geographic contexts. since the processes of (colonial) capitalism have been key in shaping the modern world, understanding the political economy of capitalist production is a necessary (but not sufficient) labor. that a critical engagement with the work of karl marx, one of capitalism’s greatest critics, might be fruitful for nature-culture thinking is something i learned from wolf and haraway. in his chapter outlining the parameters of various modes of production, wolf (1992) begins by flagging marx’s axiomatic understandings of the human condition—that humans being are part of nature but also change it to survive. in the process, they change their own nature. that is, humans and nonhumans are linked together in a dialectic and mutually constitutive relationship. within the capitalist mode of production, that relationship is both governed and hidden by the commodity form. as haraway explains, marx, of course, taught us about the fetishism of commodities. commodity fetishism is a specific kind of reification of historical human integrations with each other and with an unquiet multitude of non-humans, which are called nature in western conventions. in the circulation of commodities within capitalism, these interactions 24 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) appear in the form of, and are mistaken for, things. (1997, p. 135; my emphasis) it is a consensus among many fields that truly just relations cannot emerge from within enlightenment thinking and colonial capitalist modernity (which constitutes and rests on gendered, raced, classed, and sexed inequities). but it would be a mistake to think that we can simply reject them and have recourse to “traditional” alternatives. we must take the knowledges of grandmothers and indigenous peoples seriously but we cannot romanticize or fetishize them. i suggest that spivak offers useful insights into how to mobilize or operationalize this insight. in the afterword to imaginary maps, her translation of mahasweta devi’s short stories about tribals in india, she notes: i have no doubt that we must learn to learn from the original practical ecological philosophers of the world, through slow, attentive, mind-changing (on both sides), ethical singularity that deserves the name of “love”—to supplement necessary collective efforts to change laws, modes of production, systems of education and health care.…indeed, in the general predicament today, such a supplementation must become the relationship between the silent gift of the subaltern and the thunderous imperative of the enlightenment to “the public use of reason,” however hopeless that undertaking might seem. one filling the other’s gap. (1995, p. 201; emphasis in original) spivak’s postcolonialism is often dismissed as mere critique that does not offer a roadmap for a different future. but i read in her call “to learn from below” an invitation to engage in the slow, unguaranteed labor of careful critique and patient undoing of the problematic of development or science. paraphrasing and summarizing her complex formulations (1999), i suggest that her methodology entails mobilizing a historico-political perspective to supplement science in service of feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial efforts. for social and environmental justice work, this supplementing involves tracing how rural communities, third-world 25 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) women, and nature are inserted into the circuits of global capitalism. that is, it means tracing their complex and contradictory relations with the state, nationalism, development, and environmental politics. such tracings reveal the gaps and fissures of dominant logic and the traces of other logics that are always already there. these are some of the radical but unromantic tasks that we must necessarily undertake to imagine new feminist sts nature-cultures. notes 1for this reason, i have mostly cited anthologies and edited collections that contain the scholarship i draw on or that focus on the debates i engage, rather than books or articles by individual authors. for this same reason, i have kept self-citation to a minimum. 2 i will be forever grateful to my mother and my undergraduate advisor dr. sam waugh (who passed away at a young age a few years later) for enabling me to pursue what was an unusual venture. they and my science teachers at st. xavier’s college were truly remarkable in their willingness to let their students follow their curiosity beyond the college curriculum. this was no small thing in indian science then. 3 see, for example, the journal different takes (population and development program, n.d.). references asher, k. (2009). black and green: afro-colombians, development, and nature in the pacific lowlands. durham, nc: duke university press. braidotti, r., charkiewicz, e., häusler, s., & wieringa, s. (1994). women, the environment and sustainable development: towards a theoretical synthesis. london, uk: zed books. 26 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) center for international forestry research (2015, february 25). kiran asher—women are to gender what trees are to forests. youtube. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkiygnapqly crush, j. (1995). power of development. new york, ny: routledge. edelman, m., & haugerud, a. (eds.) (2005). the anthropology of development and globalization: from classic political economy to contemporary neoliberalism. malden, ma: blackwell. escobar a., & alvarez, s. (eds.) (1992). the making of new social movements in latin america: identity, strategy, and democracy. boulder, co: westview. hall, s., held, d., hubert, d., & thompson, k. (1996). modernity: an introduction to modern societies. malden, ma: blackwell. haraway, d. (1989). primate visions: gender, race and nature in the world of modern science. new york: ny: routledge. haraway, d. (1992). “the promises of monsters: a regenerative politics of inappropriate/d others.” in l. grossberg, c. nelson, & p. treichler (eds.), cultural studies (pp. 295–337). new york: ny: routledge. haraway, d. (1997). modest_witness@second_millennium.femaleman©_ meets_oncomouse™. new york, ny: routledge. kramer, r., van schaik, c., & johnson, j. (eds.) (1997). last stand: protected areas and the defense of tropical biodiversity. oxford, uk: oxford university press. millennium project (2006). mdgs: what they are. millennium project. retrieved from http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/goals/ 27 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) the national academies. (2011, august 10). biodiversity. retrieved from https://vimeo.com/27542629 peluso, n., & watts, m. (eds.) (2001). violent environments. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. population and development program. (n.d.) different takes. retrieved from http://sites.hampshire.edu/popdev/different-takes/ sachs, w. (ed.) (1992). the development dictionary: a guide to knowledge as power. london, uk: zed books saunders, k. (ed.) (2002). feminist post-development thought: rethinking modernity, post-colonialism, and representation. london, uk: zed books. soulé, m.e. (ed.) (1986). conservation biology: the science of scarcity and diversity. sunderland, ma: sinauer press. spivak, g.c. (1995). imaginary maps: three stories by mahasweta devi. new york: ny: routledge. spivak, g.c. (1999). a critique of postcolonial reason: toward a history of the vanishing present. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. spivak, g.c. (2012). an aesthetic education in the era of globalization. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. terborgh, j. t. (1992). diversity and the tropical rain forest. new york: ny: scientific american library. un department of economic and social affairs (n.d. (a)). commission on sustainable development (csd). sustainable development knowledge 28 asher catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) platform. retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/csd.html un department of economic and social affairs (n.d. (b)). sustainable development goals. sustainable development knowledge platform. retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs un department of economic and social affairs (n.d. (c)). united nations conference on sustainable development, rio+20. sustainable development knowledge platform. retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/rio20 un women. (2014). the world survey on the role of women in development 2014: gender equality and sustainable development. retrieved from http://www.unwomen.org/en/digitallibrary/publications/2014/10/worldsurvey-2014 wced (world commission on environment and development). (1987). our common future. oxford, uk: oxford university press. williams, r. (2005). materialism and culture. verso: london. wolf, e. (1992). europe and the people without history. berkeley, ca:university of california press. bio kiran asher is an associate professor in the women, gender, and sexuality studies department at the university of massachusetts, amherst. grounded in two decades of field-based research in latin america and south asia, her diverse research interests focus on the gendered and raced dimensions of social and environmental change in the global south. microsoft word 274-1552-2-thakor.docx thakor, m. (2018). digital apprehensions: policing, child pornography, and the algorithmic management of innocence, catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-16. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © mitali thakor 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical perspectives digital apprehensions: policing, child pornography, and the algorithmic management of innocence mitali thakor northwestern university mitali@northwestern.edu abstract this paper examines how racial bias plays out in the algorithmic detection and classification of child pornography images by police and non-police actors, including computer scientists and content moderators at technology companies. i employ the concept of “digital apprehension” to argue that the way programmers and moderators understand child pornography is always already oriented toward the arrest of virtual offenders. as image recognition algorithms—which are used to detect both victims and offenders—rely on white skin tones as defaults, with reduced accuracy with nonwhite skin tones, innocence is brought into close proximity with whiteness. perceptive and algorithmic bias bear high stakes for police-work, as policing expands into a global network carried by the issue of child pornography. 2 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) introduction i peered over linda’s shoulder as she sat in her office cubicle looking at her computer. her screen displayed an array of photos of young boys in different positions and clothing, their heads and faces blurred. on the top left of her screen was the image she had originally uploaded (a white boy in a blue baseball cap) to see if any matches of similar photos could be found in her database. many of the resultant images clearly showed the same child but in different clothes and poses. she pointed at her screen and looked up at me. “see? take a look at that.” linda is an analyst with the child victim identification program at the national center for missing and exploited children (ncmec) in alexandria, va. under a 2008 federal bill, ncmec serves as the official clearinghouse for all child pornography and sexual exploitation content reported by electronic communication service providers in the united states. ncmec is a nonprofit that works as an intermediary between companies and federal law enforcement to review reported images and produce case files for criminal investigation. in 2016, for example, ncmec reported that they had reviewed over 500,000 image and video files suspected to contain child abuse (ncmec, 2016). the software linda was using was photodna, one of several popular programs for the automated detection of child pornography and the matching of new images across existing databases. in this paper, i discuss the embodied labor of policing child pornography through the ways in which algorithms and human reviewers like linda view and sort abuse images. i employ the concept of “apprehension” to suggest that the ways reviewers “see” child pornography is always already oriented toward the capture and arrest of suspected offenders. as i have argued elsewhere (thakor 2017; forthcoming), the use of new digital techniques to find child pornography has fundamentally transformed and expanded policing into a distributed network of labor increasingly done by computer scientists and technology companies. rather than suggest that new software is the 3 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) cause of these transformations, i draw attention to the constitutive and mutually defining relation between computing and corporality, or how image detection algorithms need the work of human perception to put their image detection skills to work. i argue further still that the case study of child pornography detection offers an entry point into examining the algorithmic management of race. i suggest that childhood innocence is coded as whiteness, and whiteness as innocence, in the algorithmic detection of victims and abusers. by taking "detection" as a dynamic practice between human and machine, i make an intervention into critical algorithm studies that have tended to focus solely on the programming of racial bias into software. the algorithmic detection of child pornography hinges, crucially, upon practice and the tacit observation of human reviewers whose instinctual feelings about child protection and offender apprehension become embedded within the reviewing and reporting process as cases escalate for law enforcement. digital forensics in the past decade many scientists in computer vision have begun directing their research projects beyond facial recognition to full body and scene analysis. their publications describe the promise of such research for detecting crime scenes and pornographic images. these scenes can be sorted through for skin-color detection, nudity (i.e., the percentage of skin-color pigments visible within a proportion of an image), lighting, scene object recognition, age detection, affect recognition, and kinship matching with known biological relatives. photodna uses visual mapping and exchangeable image file data ─ a photo’s "dna," according to its designers ─ from an uploaded image and compares it to other uploaded images. the software uses a form of source identification, allowing “new” images to be compared with images from known databases of child pornography, missing persons, or sex offender registries. the images in the database are assigned a hash value or digital signature. every file that 4 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) has the same data will contain the same hash value. comparing hash values can provide sufficient evidence that an image is an actual piece of child pornography rather than a fake or an altered photo of an adult. computer scientists are working on improving the accuracy of such programs (e.g., to rectify distortions or adjust for a tilted face or body through pose correction techniques). some research teams also work on age progression issues, especially salient for children who may go missing at a young age. a team at the university of washington has described the craft of interpolating how a person will have aged as “part art, part science and a little intuition” (kemelmacher-shlizerman, 2014). newer digital forensics projects have their roots in older forms of representational craft in criminal investigations, such as the use of forensic image sketching. the designer of photodna, dr. hany farid, has been called “the sherlock holmes of digital misdeeds” (adler and mcewen, 2017). policing institutions have long maintained artists on forensic teams to assist in producing composite images through oral description, to do age progressions on missing persons, or to produce facial reconstructions based on skeletal remains. the composite sketches produced of a victim or a suspected offender are the result of a collaborative and discursive process between investigators, lab experts, witnesses, and family members before becoming manifest through the artist’s pencil. the production of a forensic sketch is thus a highly collectivized task, one oriented toward the “apprehension” of a potential victim or offender. apprehension implies the prospect of arrest or rescue and simultaneously the process of making identities apparent through the procurement of incriminating data. i add to this that in order to know what to detect one must become knowledgeable about the object (data, face, person) sought. forensic investigations have become so increasingly specialized that they fall into the domains of technical personnel. scholars in science, technology and society (sts) have described this process of professionalization as a “scientification” of the police, with the division of policing into public safety and criminal investigations (ericson and 5 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) shearing, 1986). while “street cops” devoted to public safety regularly patrol routine areas and occasionally have breakthrough hunches, investigative police are trained to work more acutely on long-term cases and to use forensic technologies, from fingerprinting to dna testing, to obtain evidence and bolster claims in legal proceedings. however, the way this idealization actually works out is a combination of automated searches with human reviewing. the accumulation and sifting through such images ─ photos and videos of child abuse and abusers ─ is explained by social media companies and law enforcement as in some ways a necessary evil to get at the truth. social media companies hire their own content review teams both onsite and offshore to reach individual and group decisions on the content of specific photos in “borderline” cases they may want to escalate. these viewers rely on a combination of their tacit knowledge and accumulated expertise as they sift through child abuse image content to identify faces and bodies. apprehension i return to the moment of peering over linda’s shoulder. what was interesting to me was the ways in which she would signal various intervals in the software’s detection. she would gesture and make side comments on what the program was doing. linda scrolled down the results display and paused to point out a couple of photos. “see, the child looks a little older here, or at least larger. so this is a problem.” it is a problem in the sense that if the child seems to have aged during the course of the reporting, and various photos at different ages are on file, it is more likely the child is still being abused and coerced into posing for such photos. despite the automated matches, she still continued to pause and point out her own data points in the images. her remark that “this is a problem” indicated a gut feeling ─ her tacit knowledge ─ that some images represented possible other ages and the need for further investigation. as the anthropologist charles goodwin has noted, gestures like 6 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) linda’s pointing and verbal cues are embodied communicative modes that structure practice and indicate expertise (goodwin, 2003). harry collins, similarly, points out that interactional expertise helps us understand the dynamic relationship between software and human, and that such expertise is highly embodied and corporeal (collins, 2016). image content review is perceptive, interpretive work and also trainable. once linda’s search query results in several hundred photos, she searches to disqualify any images that are very obviously ─ to her eye ─ not a match or do not belong in the set. in doing this disqualification, she helps train the software to produce more accurate results in its next search query, which will be based on the classification elements of the qualifying and disqualifying images. such work entails skilled vision, “a capacity to look in a certain way as a result of training” (grasseni, 2004, p. 41). my understanding of apprehension, then, takes into account how “viewing” becomes a skillful practice through trainings that establish shared ways of "seeing" childexploitation images.1 cristina grasseni emphasizes that “one never simply looks. one learns how to look” (2012, p. 47). such ways of seeing, distributed and honed across human and computer vision, become manifest as ways of accessing the world and managing it. as police forensic investigations have become increasingly specialized, investigative police are trained to work more acutely on long-term cases and to use forensic technologies, from fingerprinting to dna testing to image detection software, to obtain evidence and bolster claims in legal proceedings. i attended one of these training sessions at the crimes against children conference in dallas, tx, in august 2014. the conference organizers had coordinated the first annual “digital crime scene challenge” workshop. in teams of three, participants were instructed to execute a search warrant on a suspected possessor of child pornography in a mock crime scene and produce as much evidence as possible in the fastest time. the game was set up by a special agent from the us department of homeland security and sponsored by a software firm. 7 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) success in the game depended upon a specific visual acuity, recall memory of past cases, efficient collaboration with teammates, and working knowledge of software to analyze confiscated image files. a group of three investigators from oklahoma won the crime scene challenge, interviewing a person role-playing as a suspect, issuing a search warrant, cataloging evidence in the room, and coordinating next steps for the investigation, including running the confiscated files through a software program to test for any known images of missing or abused children. the use of such training games by police and tech companies focuses the eye to produce shared idioms and ways of seeing, embedding skilled vision into the professional practice of policing. viewing economies seeing is also tiered, or classed, so that certain perceptions are afforded higher authority. in these perceptive regimes (cf. goodwin, 1994), there is an entire viewing economy for how photos of child abuse get “found” and reported: from content moderators in the philippines or india, to reviewers at tech companies, to ncmec and federal investigators, and perhaps eventually to international liaisons and interpol. indeed, two content moderators working for an agency contracted through microsoft recently filed a lawsuit against microsoft, claiming post traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) from the viewing of violent images in their work (chen, 2017). recent work by sarah t. roberts and others working in critical digital labor studies have called into question the psychic and emotional costs of monitoring images such as terrorist propaganda, live-streamed executions, and sexual violence against children that get uploaded to sites like facebook and twitter every day (roberts, 2016). this emotional cost is disproportionately borne by people of color working in contingent and precarious contract-labor sites in the global south and lower-income rural zones in the global north. their work is difficult and disposable, with contracts easily dropped and new moderators quickly replacing them. 8 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) many researchers working on image detection algorithms capitalize on this reported trauma to emphasize the possibility of a future where humans may not need to see child abuse images for legal content review, and that it might be entirely mechanized. the marketing of image forensics and classification software often touts its high accuracy and low rate of false positive results; that it will attain a speed and accuracy not possibly by the human eye alone. digital racial matter nonetheless, child pornography detection can never be a fully automated process ─ despite what digital forensic designers might claim ─ and will always rely upon human perception and gut since the end goal will always be oriented toward the apprehension of a suspected offender. designers of algorithms explicitly understand the ways in which certain content reviewers, such as linda, will use and train the software based on their preexisting expertise, and the content reviewers (or their managers, rather), understand the ownership they have over decisions to escalate an investigation. i thus call the network of various investigators involved in viewing and policing child pornography “algorithmic detectives.” algorithmic detectives symbolize the expansion of policing from traditional law enforcement to a coordinated network of content reviewers, technology specialists, computer programmers, and social media companies who participate in establishing ways of seeing child pornography. algorithmic detectives do the work of apprehension through training in technical and perceptive skills. there is a constitutive relationship between human vision and computer vision, between computing and corporality. image detection algorithms need the work of human perception to put their detective skills to work. this work must combine human and machine vision with an orientation toward arrest. recent work in sts and the social study of algorithms has pointed out, critically, that algorithms have embedded values and biases that can 9 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) lead to potential discrimination as well as the erasure of human analysis and input. the accuracy of machine-learning algorithms like image detection is dependent upon the data sets from which algorithms learn. algorithmic detectives, through their pointing, selecting, and validating of image matches, help train the software to better detect. in the case study of child pornography detection, digital forensics designers use certain training sets to improve their algorithm’s ability to detect faces, genders, and races. historically these training sets have treated the white, male, adult face as a default against which computer vision algorithms are trained (cf. crawford, 2016). databases of missing and abused children held by ncmec in the us disproportionately contain images of white children; non-white children are statistically less likely to be reported as missing or have extensive case files of data. so what happens when certain data and faces are less easily detected, or less accurately matched? for whom might these errors or elisions be of grave consequence? first, certainly, fewer non-white children might be detected as rapidly as white children, a possibility echoing investigation biases that have persisted since long before the implementation of new software. in the course of my fieldwork, computer vision researchers would often remark that they earnestly wanted to address the “problem” of underdetectability, or even un-detectability, of darker skin tones, black and east asian features, and younger ages. while they were researching detectability across color tones, light exposures, and eye shape and size, the simpler, more immediate solution they offered was to expand the data set of available faces, an example of what andrejevic and gates (2014) have called a “catch all” approach to big data. indeed, a recent project launched by facebook in australia has asked users to submit their nude selfies for facebook to hash and add to their secure data repository in order to better combat "revenge porn" by ensuring its removal before someone might even post it (solon, 2017). but in addition, child victim identification is always conjoined with the imperative to detect suspected offenders. i note that computer vision 10 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) researchers’ use of the word “problem” might differ from social scientists’ perspective on the issue of detectability. as simone browne has argued, the inability of computer vision software to distinguish dark skin tones is perilously paired with a hypervisibility tying the history of surveillance to the history of the surveillance of blackness (browne, 2014). are non-white adults, for example, more likely to be marked as suspects because their facial nuances are less accurately detected than white offenders' faces? steve anderson urges historians of visual culture to root any analysis of “new” image technologies in the knowledge that visibility has always been tied to logics of colonial control and capture (anderson, 2017). if certain groups are less accurately detectable, more indistinguishable, and more likely to generate false positives, offender recognition in child pornography cases may be just as capable of producing biases similar to those leading to prejudiced arrests in anti-trafficking cases. as bernstein (2007) and woods (2013) have documented, legislation designed to combat sex trafficking has disproportionately resulted in the arrests and prosecutions of black and latino men, repeating the carceral logics of other forms of policing and investigation. proximity to innocence critically, the expansion of policing practice is made permissible through its use in the case of child protection. the protection of the child hinges upon defining its other (i.e., that which threatens childhood). i argue that algorithmic detectives must thus embody a certain proximity to child victims, to innocence itself, while simultaneously engaging a closeness to culpability, to imagined abusers. underlying any support of image recognition software is an assumed universal understanding that sexual exploiters of children must be "othered" ─ located, corralled, and arrested ─ and are deserving of punishment. it is also understood, then, that investigators who wish to locate and apprehend offenders must first become intimately knowledgeable about sexual abuse ─ bring it close, in a sense ─ before arresting and enacting punishment. the othering of 11 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) potential offenders is a form of extension (cf. ahmed, 2006), a reaching toward those who must be kept away. carceral technologies perform this act of extension ─ apprehending and making proximate violent others ─ by extending the corpus of policing power in order to seek certain bodies. we might consider them as what sandy stone has called a “prosthetic technological self” (stone, 1991), an extension of a punitive impulse to entrap those who might offend. the digital forensics software programs i am discussing here are also surveillance technologies. they sort through the massive amounts of text, image, and video data uploaded online every day and work in collaboration with content moderators to keep the internet secure and "clean." the software itself maintains proximity to innocence. there is a certain pleasure (magnet and rodgers 2011) in this mode of surveillance. that is, i am not suggesting that algorithmic detectives gain pleasure from looking at child exploitation images themselves ─ the pleasure is instead rooted in a moment of recognition toward arrest, the seeing of images for the purpose of policing. image recognition algorithms, and all the forms of data gathering and surveillance they induce, are justified through the pressing moral obligation and urgency to find and stop child exploitation online. this software has promissory value as a tool for a particular view of safety and security ─ for some, not all. recent work in queer feminist social theory has considered how sex offenders have emerged as people who are “despised and disposable” (horowitz, 2015) or even othered “beyond the pale of humanness” (borneman, 2015). child protection surveillance campaigns hinge upon securitizing normative humans through the crafting of insecurity for inhuman others. non-police actors who take part in police work strengthen the carceral state by reaffirming the production of insecurity as an exposing practice to shame those labeled criminals or potential offenders. further still, this exposing practice gets recoded as technical knowledge and moral obligation. such projects magnify the "stranger danger" panic2 motivating understandings of sex offenders ─ the assumption that unknown others are constantly lying in wait to 12 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) assault innocent children, an assumption that acquires even more fearful resonances in digital space. this innocence is becoming quite literally encoded as whiteness, with white children’s faces better detected, and non-white suspected adult faces more likely to be indistinguishable and less accurately documented. the public effortlessly approves of the capillary forms of surveillance needed to enforce algorithmic detection of child pornography, from facebook photo albums to increasing partnerships between law enforcement and technology companies. this approval hinges upon the tacit preservation of an imagined docile and innocent symbolic child figure. by bringing child protection close, this dispersed network encourages computer scientists, humanitarian professionals, and the general public who view anti-exploitation publicity campaigns to support indiscriminate carceral punishment of sexual exploiters and offenders. in addition, such distributed apprehension expands the policing infrastructure and security thinking of the global north, by working to make race material as digital data, while simultaneously rendering invisible the racialized labor of outsourced content moderators who increasingly bear the emotional toll of human-performed digital janitorial work. my research suggests that new algorithmic developments fall under a broader phenomenon of expanded digital surveillance that has become amplified by efforts to fight child pornography and trafficking. new digital experts entering into anti-exploitation work have bolstered the child protection agenda traditionally held by law enforcement and antitrafficking activists, namely, that protection is best achieved through punitive measures. by following the historical trajectory of scientification within law enforcement, as well as current collaborative efforts, we can trace how these actors may embed punitive logic into the investigative process through dual forms of apprehension: image detection software for identifying and locating abuse photos and videos online, and the actual arrests of abusers made possible through partnerships between law enforcement and software companies. apprehension is justifiable 13 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) through an attachment to child innocence. the protection of such innocence relies upon the specter of harm, and entails maintaining a carefully curated proximity to the imagined offenders who might destroy it, in order to locate and arrest these offenders. by examining the particular digital data-sets and legal manifestations of these attachments to protection and punishment, we might begin to see that “the child,” in all its virtual and symbolic sense, has perhaps always been white, and the linchpin in the management of whiteness. acknowledgements thank you to the panel organizers for inviting me to participate in this project, the editors of catalyst for their support, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. notes 1 as goodwin explains, “crucial work in many different occupations takes the form of classifying and constructing visual phenomena in ways that help shape the objects of knowledge that are the focus of the work of a profession” (167). different actors—be they law enforcement investigators, digital forensic startups, social media company reviewer teams, or the outsourced content review workers who are contracted by larger corporations to make the first reviews of potentially abusive images—learn to adapt shared ways of seeing images. 2 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(2013). surrogate selves: notes on anti-trafficking and anti16 thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) blackness. social identities, 19(1), 120-134. bio mitali thakor is a postdoctoral fellow in the sexualities project at northwestern, with affiliations in anthropology and gender & sexuality studies. her research and teaching cover issues of policing, computing, surveillance, sexual violence, and queer studies of robotics. she is currently working on her book manuscript, facing the child, an ethnography of artifice, evidence, and the global policing of child pornography. mitali earned her ph.d. in 2016 from mit's program in history, anthropology, and science, technology, & society. in fall 2018, mitali will join the faculty at wesleyan university as an assistant professor in the science in society program. you can read more about her work at http://www.mitalithakor.com and on twitter at @mitalithakor. microsoft word 76931-1-11-felt.docx felt, l. d. (2019). cyberpunk’s other hackers: the girls who were plugged in. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5 (1), 1-38. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © lindsey dolich felt, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article cyberpunk’s other hackers: the girls who were plugged in lindsey dolich felt stanford university ldolich@stanford.edu abstract this article locates an alternate paradigm of hacking in feminist cyberfiction, notably, james tiptree, jr.’s proto-cyberpunk novella, “the girl who was plugged in” (1973). i argue this story critically reorients our understanding of how information technologies and their material artifacts construct and reinforce norms of able-bodiedness and ability. drawing on archival materials from bell system, early information theory, and crip theory, my reading reveals that tiptree’s portrayal of disability is tied to a cybernetic conception of error and noise. these frictions between users and their machine interfaces materialize unexamined performances of critical labor and noncompliance that i link to the emerging field of crip technoscience. tracking these disruptions in cybernetic feedback across “the girl who was plugged in” and in historical accounts of the telephone switchboard operator, i show that error and noise underpin an early example of a feminist hacking ethos, and also crip accounts of electronic disembodiment often imputed to information society and cyberpunk fiction. in 2017, the silicon valley non-profit organization girls in tech announced “hacking for humanity,” a global initiative that focuses on “solving problems for the benefit of the greater community,” rolling out hackathons from san francisco to melbourne. the rise of tech empowerment programs, such as girls who code, hackbright, girl develop it, and intersectional feminist felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 hackerspaces across the united states has brought further attention to the effort to “hack the gap.” even as the gender disparity persists in the tech industry, in recent years scholars have recovered women’s contributions to the history of computing and network culture as a cause célèbre, such as janet abbate’s recoding gender (2012), amy sue bix’s girls coming to tech! (2014), and liza mundy’s code girls (2017).1 by abbate’s reckoning, “female programmers and computer scientists leveraged their status as professionals to fashion new personal identities that united femininity with technical expertise” since the electronic numerical integrator and computer (eniac) “girls” and the origins of digital computing (p. 4). however important this critical reorientation is, these accounts stop short of examining how information technologies construct and reinforce norms of able-bodiedness and ability, or where we might find alternate models of the hacker ethic outside of traditional hackerspaces and histories. in 2013, liz henry, a silicon valley programmer who works for mozilla debugging firefox’s web browser, helped co-found san francisco’s feminist hacker/makerspace double union. henry is a woman hacktivist and a powerful “coder grrrl” in san francisco’s tech circles, yet she serves as a striking reminder of how disability advocacy in feminist and intersectional hacker communities is largely absent. henry’s passion project at double union—compiling data on the battery lives of her mobility scooters and electric wheelchairs—indicates signs of change. “my ultimate goal [is] to design open source hardware for electric scooters,” henry says, “so people with disabilities can actually specify what we need” (as cited in garretón, 2013).2 henry models a feminist hacker ethic that prioritizes values of care and inclusion, drawing on her position of “emancipatory alterity,” a term i borrow from lilly nguyen, sophie toupin, and shaowen bardzell (2016), to shed light on the invisible and gendered “infra/structures of power that render technological achievement possible.” yet as a woman with a disability, henry operates bilaterally from a position of “emancipatory alterity” to expose not only the gendering of techno-labor but also how disability can interrogate notions of technological access (see ellcessor, 2016). favoring the logic of user-driven, epistemic open access, henry felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 refuses the assumed narrative of forced normalization. her project importantly reflects a crip resistance to “delimiting the kinds of bodies and abilities that are acceptable or that will bring about change” (mcruer, 2006, p. 31). this is precisely the charge of “disability hacktivism” that melanie yergeau (2014) proposes, calling on crip allies and activists to “cultivate hacking into a disability-positive practice” centered on participatory design. henry’s story, as i situate it within the collective effort to reinstall “girls” as skilled practitioners of technology, reminds us that this movement has yet to fully acknowledge the role of disabled users and crip politics within the legacy of hacking in popular culture and in academic scholarship. this elision is somewhat surprising considering that feminist cyberfiction, notably, james tiptree jr.’s 1973 novella, “the girl who was plugged in,” provided cyberpunk fiction with its iconic image of the hacker, while simultaneously coding an alternate paradigm of hacking rooted in the lived experiences of disability. in her story, alice b. sheldon, who began writing under her more familiar alias tiptree in the late 1960s, provides a contemporary reimagining of telephone switchboard operators, or “hello girls” in the early twentieth century who were debilitated by their work.3 writing in 1915, the us commission on industrial relations reported some of these deleterious effects, which the bell telephone system subsequently denied. exposing this cover-up, field investigator nellie b. curry detailed the “nervous spasmodic movements” and frequent “nervous collapses at the switchboard” that operators experienced (as cited in green, p. 79). the adverse mental and physical strains on women’s health detailed in these accounts help uncover the disabling effects of switchboard work. these conditions are noticeably absent in archival advertising materials and training pamphlets from bell telephone system (later known as at&t) from the 1930s to 1960s, which reinforced a normative body for the telephone operator. tiptree’s narrative, i argue, redresses the oversight of disability and the exigencies of women’s labor in histories of science and technology by highlighting the unseen effects of electronic communication on women’s bodies. this critique is rendered through the figure of a disabled female protagonist named philadelphia burke (p. burke), who is selected to felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 undergo a radical procedure that enables her to remotely operate a beautiful synthetic body named delphi. p. burke agrees to “plug in” to the global transmissions corporation’s (gtx) network under the premise that, as delphi, she will become an instant media celebrity. in this future global media economy, gtx is poised to overtake at&t, yet p. burke thwarts gtx’s information system by hacking her own networked biofeedback. asking what this portrayal reveals about the story’s historically specific construction of “girls,” i examine how this characterization points to sheldon’s misgivings about the rise of digital communication culture and her own disabled and inconspicuously absent female body.4 in what follows, my reading explores how “the girl who was plugged in” interlaces the dual histories of telephone switchboard operators and the role of disability in early cybernetics. placing tiptree’s text in conversation with archival materials from bell system and early information theory, i show that her portrayal of disability is tied to a cybernetic conception of error and noise as valuable byproducts of a body’s encounter with communication devices. tiptree’s narrative, as bears witness to these frictions between users and their machine interfaces, materializes unexamined performances of critical labor and noncompliance that we can link to the emerging field of crip technoscience. tracking these disruptions in cybernetic feedback across “the girl who was plugged in” and in historical accounts of the switchboard operator, i argue error and noise underpin an early example of a feminist hacking ethos, and also crip accounts of electronic disembodiment often imputed to cyberpunk fiction and information culture. as manual telephone switching and its design embedded information theory, the vital presence of disability in this system effectively rewrites ableist narratives of the “hello girl” and her switchboard, and the network society they helped usher in. “absent mothers”: (re)coding hacker history widely fêted by her contemporaries and critics, tiptree’s novella received a hugo award in 1974 and influenced a new generation of science fiction writers in the 1980s, including william gibson, who helped inaugurate the felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 cyberpunk movement. “the girl who was plugged in” portends the topoi taken up by gibson and his cyberpunk brethren, as it explores consumer culture and human-cybernetic systems from a proximate future. tiptree’s novella, as it participates in the tradition of women’s cyberfiction, also imagines creative and embodied forms of resistance in technological society that reorient existing definitions of the hacker as well as the disabled body. feminist theorists offer invaluable analyses of cyberpunk fiction that interrogate how technology mediates women’s bodies and socio-historical constructions of identity (haraway, 1991; hayles, 2005; balsamo, 1996). these scholars offer compelling critiques, and thus provide strategies for reading feminist science fiction (sf) alongside cyberpunk literature.5 samuel r. delany (1994) described feminist sf as an “absent mother” to cyberpunk; without it, he writes, “there wouldn’t be any cyberpunk” (p. 177). exploring the political consequences of delany’s claim, austin booth (2002) argues women’s cyberfiction “deromanticizes the hacker ethos”: women are better than men at their technical work “but a discriminatory gap (similar to our own) exists between the elite who control the networks and those that are plugged in” (p. 28). these heroines, booth adds, operate through less sophisticated technologies that mark them as inferior (p. 28). as in other contemporary scholarship, this critique echoes ableist constructions of the technologically enhanced body; that is, through the impetus of supplementation, technological prostheses either transcend one’s given abilities, or render the unenhanced body disabled. these dual portrayals frequently taint the hacker’s representation in cyberpunk literature and in popular discourse. this rhetoric similarly runs through historiographies of hacker culture, which often conflate two distinct genealogies: one draws on the subculture of youth who delighted in the technical exploration of computer systems through experimentation, and the other on the mass media’s iconization of criminals—or security “crackers”—who hijack corporate and military systems. commentators of digital culture (krapp, 2011; thomas, 2002) are keen to note the original meaning of hacker was sublated into the felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 populist male fantasy of the outlaw who “jacks in” to the information matrix, which cyberpunk authors and journalists helped disseminate. cultural critics and technologists have embraced this notion of bodiless transcendence, but this idea is troubling not just because it professes to erase bodies in information culture, but also because it elides intersectional, non-normative bodies that disability and feminist studies scholars have made visible. a closer look at the hacker’s original set of liberal values, however, reveals a challenge to this patrilineality and its ableist vision. in its early beginnings, the hacker was a hobbyist and an idealist who believed in dismantling machines to understand how they worked, and applied this knowledge to create more functional devices and software for the advancement of society (levy, 1984, p. 7). this philosophy informed the hacker ethic, a code of conduct that championed the free sharing of information, decentralization, radical individualism, and a “hands-on imperative” to lower barriers to access (p. 40). these principles surprisingly align with feminist practice, supporting what laura forlano (2016) calls a “participatory and open form of engagement.” theorizing one manifestation of this practice, forlano describes hacking as a way of upending the rules of a technological system—its norms of race, class, gender, and sexuality— and producing her own knowledge about her body’s attendant technological devices. this ethos similarly resonates with disability studies and crip theory for its attention to the ways built environments place limits on our (mind)bodies. a commitment to access, both local and physical, animates crip theory’s critique of the structural inequalities of spaces (mcruer, 2006). aimi hamraie’s (2017) historical account of disability activists’ guerilla curbcutting—which remade berkeley’s urban spaces—embodies one instance of this critical agenda. such an experimental practice, hamraie argues, represents the rise of crip technoscience, an “anti-assimilationist” stance that “challenge[s] hierarchies and power relations with the field of accessknowledge by shifting expertise to those with lived experiences of disability and away from outside experts often designing in their name” (p. 99). more recently, exploring questions of technological access in computers and felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 virtual spaces, recent scholarship also illuminates how “digital youth” with disabilities can participate in hacking, tinkering, geeking and making without constraints (petrick, 2015; alper, 2014).6 this idea can be traced to an earlier instantiation of a “hack” in the 1960s and 1970s with “phone phreaking,” a playful manipulation of a complex telecommunications system performed through vocalization. joe engressia, who was congenitally blind, and a “gawky, buck-toothed little girl” with a slight speech impediment named susan thunder, both altered the operation of at&t’s system using their unique physical characteristics (hafner & markoff, 1991, p. 16. joe’s pitch perfect whistle, for example, which imitated the 2600-hertz at&t signal, gave him a backdoor into telephone operating systems (p. 19). thunder, on the other hand, was revered for her ability to manipulate people—particularly telephone switchboard operators and technicians—into sharing proprietary passwords, a form of social engineering that mirrored the ingenuity of some early twentieth-century “hello girls.” these operators, i will later show, subverted company protocol in ways that prefigure thunder’s legacy. by the time phreakers mechanized these techniques with a blue box, enabling them to freely access at&t’s call centers in the 1980s, they called themselves computer hackers (hafner & markoff, 1991; lapsley, 2013). if the hacker effects a “‘return to the origin’ whereby the entire discourse of technology is continually reinvented” (thomas, 2002, p. 61), then phreakers—and their technological foremothers (both real and imagined)— offer a more inclusive account of hacking that productively makes use of embodied knowledge and transgression. literary mediations of technoscience in donna haraway’s “a cyborg manifesto” (1991) she speculates, “perhaps paraplegics and other severely handicapped people can (and sometimes do) have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization with other communication devices” (p. 178). this minor observation—both in the sense that it is left unexplained in haraway’s own text and displaces the felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 experience of one with a “severe disability” with the “trance state experienced by many computer users” (p. 178)—represents a seemingly endless point of provocation for disability scholars, and is often invoked in emerging conversations on crip technoscience. alison kafer (2013) argues that cyborg theory has been misunderstood within both disability and feminist scholarship as promoting an ideology of “wholeness” through a future vision of intervention and normalization rather than social transformation or political action (p. 22). kafer positions disabled people not as beholden to adaptive technology, but as cyborgs for the way they reimagine interdependence, collective affinities, and networks. “a cyborged disability politics,” she writes, offers a necessary theoretical framework for examining how “disabled people are positioned in terms of efficiency, productivity, and ability to work, or lack thereof” (p. 119). among disability scholars (ott, 2002; serlin, 2004; orr, 2006; alper, 2014; petrick, 2015; hamraie, 2017) who bring this critical lens to science and technology studies, jonathan sterne (2003) and mara mills (2011) have shown how deafness was integral to the development of sound reproduction technologies and the telephone. in the context of this study’s focus on modern telecommunications, of particular interest is mills’s work, which documents helen keller’s and deaf electronic engineers’ contributions to communication engineering in early twentieth-century telephony. though mills establishes how noise and deafness shaped the telecommunications industry, there is another, parallel narrative about how feedback error and disability informed the origins of information theory. this account is surprisingly preserved within contemporary fiction like tiptree’s, suggesting that literature gives testimony to previously untold histories of disability in technoscience. tracking the complex entanglements between bodies and texts alongside different media, my approach is informed jointly by mills and sterne’s (2017) “dismediation,” a comparative methodology that studies disability’s centrality to media histories, and katherine n. hayles’s (2005) concept of “intermediation” (p. 7). as literature registers “the impact of information in its materiality” (p. 7) contemporary fiction—especially cyberpunk and its feminist sf antecedent—becomes a felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 valuable resource for giving voice to the often-silenced subjectivities that get written out of cultural histories of machine systems. this impetus to bring the unseen and unheard to light underpins the metanarrative conceit of “the girl who was plugged in.” this conceit is introduced at the story’s outset, when an unnamed narrator commands the reader to “listen, zombie” (p. 43), colloquially naming the reader as an auditor in a telephone system. later acknowledged to be a minor character who works for gtx, this “sharp sneering operator’s voice telling about the future,” wrote tiptree to editor damon knight in june 1969, hints at her interest in the switchboard operator. this interpellation, i argue, calls upon the audience to remember the unseen extensions we once communicated through: the erasure of sheldon’s body through her pseudonym and the narrators’ masculine voice; the forgotten bodies of telephone switchboard operators; even the deaf maternal body that helped produce the telephone (sterne, 2003). in the discussion that follows, i offer an entry point for reading tiptree’s novella through a crip/disability studies lens, looking at p. burke’s narrative representation and the ways the story’s language and its imagined cybertechnologies uphold and simultaneously dismantle the social model of disability. cripping the terminal subject though the telephone seemingly erases the visible markers of users’ bodies—working from the cybernetic principle that information must be extracted from its medium to be transmitted—“the girl who was plugged in” actively resists this disembodied understanding of telephony. the narrator ironically counters his aural command with “look…see that rotten girl?” (p. 43). “the funky girl on the streets” stands on the fringes of a crowd of spectators who throng around a group of beautiful celebrities (p. 43). jostled against the narrow walkway, burke presents a striking contrast to the subjects of her admiration: “you can now see she’s the ugly of the world. a tall monument to pituitary dystrophy. no surgeon would touch her. when felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 she smiles, her jaw—it’s half purple—almost bites her left eye out” (p. 44). from the narrator’s vantage point, we are treated to glimpses of “her jumbled torso, her mismatched legs” (p. 44). this striking depiction of burke fits the model of what disability scholar rosemarie garland-thomson (1997) calls “an extraordinary body” that is essential to cultural constructions of the norm and conventions of narrative representation (p. 5). burke’s exaggerated physical characteristics foreground the way disability becomes an emblem of difference in a patriarchal society that values order, aesthetic conformity, and coherence. at the same time, this description of p. burke situates her body as a product of social relations, attitudes, and built environments. it invokes social constructionism, a paradigm disability scholars developed to counter the medical model, which pathologizes disability as a condition to be cured, treated, or institutionally controlled.7 put another way, the social model advocates for disability as a cultural invention rather than a biological deficit. the narrator’s language here, though it draws attention to p. burke as a site of spectacular aberrancy both in her physical otherness and ugliness, carefully places the protagonist within a space that marks her as such. the “sharp-faced lad” knowingly hints at the way burke’s body is re-presented and denigrated through social power structures such as celebrity culture and media consumption. this interpretation gains credence when we read this moment alongside other representations of p. burke’s body that appear later in the text. in addition to providing a new lens for literary and feminist scholars to read tiptree’s work, a disability studies critique of p. burke has important implications for the story’s visionary portrait of the terminal subject it lends to cyberpunk fiction. to date, tiptree’s critics have understood p. burke as “an extravagant staging of an entirely distasteful version of female embodiment” in which bodies are devalued in a postindustrial system (hicks, 1996, p. 70), or as a bitter caricature of “the body in a state of putrescence” (bukatman, 1993, p. 317). hayles (2005) offers a slightly more optimistic appraisal, referring to p. burke as a “distributed subject” in an information system that manifests the limits of female participation in a capitalist society (p. 81). within these interpretative frameworks, burke’s felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 11 abject body conjures the cyberpunk hacker’s nightmare of his own loathsome flesh. such judgments rely on a flawed logic that stigmatizes disability and parses non-normative female bodies as disabled. even sheldon’s biographer, julie phillips (2006), citing evidence that sheldon struggled with chronic depression and various physical aliments, maintains that “the girl who was plugged in” is a parable of sheldon’s antipathy for her progressively deteriorating physical state in real life. sheldon’s lifelong use of dexedrine—a drug also used to treat adhd—intensified her uneasy relationship with her own body, an addiction sheldon confided in her letters was fueled by an increasing resistance to “being my body…although i know perfectly well that i am it and it is me” (as cited in phillips, 2006, p. 260). phillips’s reading, which is heavily favored by literary critics, does not fully explain the role of information technology in the story, or consider how social discourse might create a compulsory female and abled-body. sheldon (1975) excoriated the cultural norms of femininity at various points in her career, but it is worth noting that she understood this compulsory body that “no women escapes” as a product of “being told that ‘girls’ can’t do this or that” (p. 2). a woman’s abilities, by sheldon’s rationale, was prescribed by her social environment and configurations of knowledge/power. the robust presence of physical disability in the narrative, and its fluid and at times contradictory constructions, suggest that burke articulates a more complex model of disability born out of sheldon’s feminist critique. elsewhere in the story, burke is characterized as an inhuman “cast-up, a pumped-out hulk” (p. 46), a “girl-brute” (p. 46), a “rancid girl-body” (p. 47), a “grim carcass” (p. 55), an “ill-shaped thing” (p. 58), and even a “she-golem” (p. 76). such aesthetic qualifiers seem to reproduce the visual rhetoric of disgust and freakery projected upon disabled bodies within some cultural settings, as garland-thomson (1997) has shown. yet these appellations continue to follow p. burke even after she is integrated with her technological apparatus. when burke is relocated from an above-ground location in her naturalized state, to an underground laboratory from which she operates delphi sight unseen, both gtx’s and the narrator’s attempt to jettison her body fail spectacularly. the persistence of these abject felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 12 characteristics suggests that p. burke visibly shuns the “cure” narrative that cyborg technologies may impose on the disabled body.8 to further complicate this reading, one might note how these signifiers depart from burke’s initial representation as an assemblage of body parts, instead working to evacuate her body of specific identifying characteristics that might be medically pathologized. that is, in calling burke a “she-golem” or an “ill-shaped thing,” the narrator invokes gender and disability as a process of endless remaking, becoming, and knowing, a crip feminist ontoepistemology that exposes the limits of linguistic representation.9 put another way, this descriptive catalog “talks back to able-bodied terms,” as crip theorist robert mcruer (2006) would say, implying that “crips cannot be contained; even the words most intended to keep disability in its place” (p. 40). even assimilationist cyborg systems cannot contain crips, as the progressive unintelligibility of p. burke’s body foreshadows. though corporeal materialism and embodied ways of knowing are some of the principal arguments of feminist technoscience (haraway, 1991; balsalmo, 1996; kafer, 2013), these values demand further revision as they presume an able-bodied phenomenology. read this way, p. burke contravenes haraway’s example of another fictional female cyborg character from anne mccaffrey’s the ship who sang, whom she describes as a “severely handicapped child.” in this story, helva’s brain is removed and her body is discarded, transforming her into a class of “shell-people” whose brains are implanted into spaceships. in her critique of “a cyborg manifesto,” kafer (2013) explains how haraway’s use of helva to illustrate cyborgian boundary-blurring “echoes longstanding ableist assumptions about the uselessness of physically disabled bodies and the necessity of a technological fix” (p. 112). a non-ableist cyborg politics, kafer proposes, is rooted in a more ambivalent relationship with technology (p. 119). “the girl who was plugged in” responds to this call as it remains committed to the lived experience of burke within her human-machine system. choosing instead “to explore the creation of such categories and the moments in which they fail to hold” (p. 10), as kafer’s political/relational model recommends, the story enacts a site for witnessing the blurring of human felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 13 and technology. in so doing, tiptree’s narrative recognizes “such moments of excess or failure [as] key to imagining disability, and disability futures [and, i would add, histories], differently” (p. 10). bell system’s “ideologies of ability” and switchboard operators by the story’s publication date in 1973, telephone operators had long departed from the method of manually connecting calls through a switchboard, rendered obsolete by automatic telephone switches.10 though tiptree (1969) never acknowledged this specific transformation, she explicitly stated in her letter to editor damon knight—who later rejected the story—that the novella was a critique of “current trends in monopoly of communications,” citing gtx as an “extrapolation” of this trend “if you merge, say, at&t, the networks, and the aerospace industry” (p. 2).11 as the lifeblood of the telephone system, the switchboard operator best epitomized the human toll at&t’s rapid expansion had on its workforce. following the introduction of the first telephone switchboard in 1878, the american telephone and telegraph company (at&t), formerly known as the bell telephone company, began hiring “girl operators (typically between 17 and 26 years old, according to industry guidelines)” because they were thought to be “naturally more patient, polite and ‘amenable to discipline’” (middeljans, 2010, p. 39).12 these operators were ostensibly “girls” by dint of their age, demeanor, and marital status.”13 “ma bell,” as the bell system was known, initially only hired young women who fit a distinct set of physical guidelines, rejecting minorities, people with disabilities, and women who were deemed unattractive. read alongside a gendered history of communication technology, tiptree’s girls reveal new possibilities for critical interpretation, demonstrating how the switchboard privileges and excludes specific bodies. as the bell telephone quarterly explains, “essential qualifications” for telephone girls included “intelligence, health, sight, hearing, voice, size, temperament, character, appearance, and previous record” (lachance, 1931, p. 13). the quarterly neglects to mention that staff physicians conducted pre-employment screening felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 14 examinations, a practice inaugurated in 1913 under at&t’s employee benefit plan. the emergence of bell system’s medical department— notably run by men—coincided with this plan, which oversaw sickness and disability benefits, and helped maintain the ideal of its girls: middle-class, single, hardworking, docile, and, perhaps most importantly, intellectually and physically “able” women. there were other ways at&t sought to normalize its core workforce’s bodies. though the barriers to entry-level switchboard work were already high for aspiring telephone girls, a general personnel board report suggests that at&t persisted in its corporeal surveillance over new operators: “many of the girls with minor defects, such as poor teeth, undernourishment, defective vision, overweight [sic], colds, etc.” might more readily be induced to “correct” or prevent these physical ailments after a health talk (as cited in cooper, 1997, p. 492). attributing poor health among operators as “the fault of the young women themselves,” physicians implemented the health talk as part of the operator’s training program in the 1920s in response to high turnover rates due to illness (one out of three operators remained after a year on the job) (p. 492). if we respond to mills’s (2011) invitation to “read” communication machines and their histories as devices with defined physiological parameters, then, the telephone switchboard similarly stages an “unavoidabl[e] encounter [with] the material interfaces of communication, and the ways media systems incorporate bodies of users” (p. 81). through its sanguine corporate discourse and medical assessments, at&t fastidiously preserved these norms. such practices inscribe what elizabeth ellcessor (2016) calls a “preferred user position” that reinforces “ideologies of ability” and devalues disability (p. 69). yet the switchboard, as i will show, undermined these corporate tactics by constraining female embodiment in ways that might be understood as disabling. as the demands for operators increased, the training itself became more regimented. switchboard operators were trained to be a “human machine, the exponent of speed and courtesy” (middeljans, 2010, p. 42). they endured intensive drills to locate switchboard lines, interpret faint or felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 15 distorted speech patterns, and to push plugs into answering jacks hundreds of times an hour (maddox, 1977, p. 271). in turn, certain gestures, behaviors, and physical idiosyncrasies such as foreign accents or poor eyesight were not coded into switchboard operation. these standardizations represent a continuation of at&t’s commitment to industrial efficiency in regulating the telephone’s signal and noise. following karin bijsterveld, mills (2011) explains how telecommunications companies like at&t helped introduce the idea of noise as “determined by the capacity of a system and the susceptibility of its receiver to information loss, or deafening,” thereby pathologizing noise as a defective mode of communication (pp. 123-124). this inference was surprisingly cultivated through collaboration between telephone engineers and people with hearing loss, even as it sought to erase those whose ears fell outside the “normal” threshold (p. 122). like other communication devices, the switchboard is an artifact of information theory that “prioritized certain kinds and arrangements of bodies above and beyond the sheer isolation or transfer of information” (p. 82). women workers who deviated from bell system’s productivity standards—from rates of calls connected to acceptable operator decorum—were sent for remedial training, or at worst, were taken off line. the girls who were “plugged in” an evocative trope, “plugging in” explains how female bodies were incorporated into (and even unincorporated) from telecommunications systems. in the story’s opening sequence, p. burke is fully “transistorized” after a series of surgical modifications that leave her looking—“if possible, worse than before”—with “electrode jacks peeping out of her sparse hair, and there are other meldings of flesh and metal” (p. 47).14 these connective devices allow her to plug into delphi, a genetically engineered “waldo” without a brain that can be remotely manipulated.15 with her extruded nervous system, burke syncs her afferent perceptions with delphi through gtx’s communication network. the brain-child of advertising executives, felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 16 delphi is by all appearances a fifteen-year-old girl whose glamorous lifestyle is in fact an elaborate ruse of product placement for gtx. burke’s real body remains hidden underground in a warehouse where her physiological responses are carefully monitored by a team of male technicians. this enclosure is significant insofar as it reimagines at&t’s techno-labor system where telephone operators were wired to a series of hulking, wall-length machines, with hawk-eyed managers peering over their shoulders and male physicians overseeing the health of female employees, while their “voice(s) with a smile” traveled over the wires (as cited in middlejans, 41). the intractable logic of “plugging in”—in which one is simultaneously a controller and conduit for information transmission—dictates how human operators work alongside their machines. just as the telephone girls of the bell system underwent rigorous training in preparation for manual switching, gtx requires burke to perform a similar degree of competence: the training takes place in her suite and is exactly what you’d call a charm course. how to walk, sit, eat, speak, blow her nose, how to stumble, to urinate, to hiccup—deliciously…as the man said, it’s hard work. but p. burke proves apt. somewhere in that horrible body is a gazelle, a houri, who would have been buried forever without this crazy chance…only it isn’t precisely p. burke who’s stepping, laughing, shaking out her shining hair. how could it be? p. burke is doing it all right, but she’s doing it through something. (p. 47) while the narrator ridicules p. burke’s training, these embodied actions reflect the telephone operator’s drills in vocal inflection, posture, and hand gestures. though seemingly trivial, such prerequisites were viewed as cornerstones of the switchboard operator’s skillset up through the midtwentieth century. telephone operators worked in pairs during their training (clark, 1950, p. 121). burke, too, also learns through her double: she is, after all, “doing it through something.” as the details of her training emerge, burke’s exceptional performance slowly erodes the narrative’s initial emphasis on her disabilities. this particular scene underscores the physical work and display of technological virtuosity burke enacts as a “remote” esteemed for her “terrific aptitude” (p. 58), and foreshadows how later, she felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 17 will use this mastery to disrupt gtx’s own information system. figure 1. bell telephone system advertisement, 1935. figure 2. at&t advertisement, 1933. felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 18 the vision gtx has for p. burke and her exquisite double eerily resonates with the bell system’s idealization of telephone girls. championing the “weavers of speech” in the early twentieth century who “sit silently at the switchboards, swiftly and skillfully interlacing the cords [that] guide human voices over the country in all directions” (“weavers,” 1915), bell system extolled the switchboard operator. while p. burke has been described in no less than abhorrent terms thus far, the narrative suggests that as a cybersystem she is a superlative model. fittingly, this sentiment is expressed through joe, p. burke’s console operator, who considers her “system matrices” to be “beautiful” (p. 48). bell system similarly romanticized the human-machine interface as a cybernetic system of control, communication, and above all, efficiency. emphasizing the operator’s enclosure within the switchboard room, the advertisement above (figure 1) illustrates how the operator’s sensory perceptions were folded into and co-determined by these devices. she is, as another print ad paints imaginatively, a terminal node in a global network (figure 2). with the world at her fingertips, calling-cords radiating from her torso and hand, this image of the switchboard operator constitutes an extraordinary literalization of plugging in. yet, even as she is picturesquely drawn within bell system’s idealistic ethos, this operator—with her back to the viewer—is an anonymous figure. the 1935 campaign (figure 1), in contrast, overtly commercializes the operator’s friendly countenance to humanize its system. read side by side, these advertisements show how women operators helped realize at&t’s vision of a global communication network. popular images of women “participating in the sound-reproduction network” were not metaphoric but literal, as sterne (2003) notes, and highlight the role they played in emerging telephonic systems (p. 228). “the girl who was plugged in” similarly exposes the dual, often conflicting portrayals of telephone operators. burke’s work encodes a process the story’s narrator analogizes to switchboard routing: “the next time she plugs in to open delphi’s eyes it’s no different—do you notice which relay boards your phone calls go through?” (p. 56). the narrator remarks felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 19 how, as contemporary observers, readers fail to discern “the relay boards,” or telephone girls through which our calls are transmitted. this crucial moment reveals the conceit behind the girls who were plugged in, forging a powerful connection between p. burke and bell system’s anonymous switchboard operator. burke may be the invisible operator as we see with the faceless figure, and delphi her fictional ideal as the popular “hello girl” bell system often invoked. the narrator’s jibe thus offers a course correction to bell system’s ableist rhetoric and commercial imagery, calling out the hypocrisy of its exploitative practices and extreme vigilance over operators’ feminine aesthetics and abilities. crip strategies within the “integrated circuit”: noise and error burke and delphi, subject to gtx’s “real-time response-sensor readouts from every receiver in the world” (p. 61), depict cautionary models of the way information systems control women’s bodies. haraway’s (1991) concept of the “integrated circuit” is applicable here: it highlights the consequences women and others experience when their bodies are “dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways” within digital networks (p. 163). the “integrated circuit” in haraway’s manifesto refers specifically to information networks that exploit women, especially third-world laborers who toil in electronics-dependent jobs. without overlooking this important cultural history, i argue this conceit can also be used to describe the work of switchboard operators in north america. like gtx, at&t systematically integrated operators into their global system without consideration for women’s biological well-being. earlier, i discussed bell system’s extreme vigilance over operators’ appearances and health, yet such practices highlight the horrors of ableism in the real world, just as tiptree does by writing of the rotting flesh of burke made immobile by her long hours of interfacing with delphi. the operator thus exemplifies one overlooked example of how “cybertechnologies rely on disabling labor practices across the globe” (kafer, 2013, p. 118). in spite of at&t’s later efforts to ameliorate these effects through sickness and disability benefits felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 20 and more regimented training, debility and human error became common side effects of switchboard work. for this reason, the telephone operator presents a surprising point of concurrence for disability studies, media studies, and feminist technoscience. an investigation by the us commission on industrial relations (1915) found the working conditions of telephone operators to be “subject to grave criticism,” and the “nervous strain incident to the service are so very severe” (p. 106) that physicians observed a high incidence of mental and physical collapses among operators. the repetitive strains of switchboard operation and “the perpetual jumping up and down and stretching” to plug in cords, brenda maddox (1977) maintains, often became debilitating (p. 269). a report by ethelbert stewart, an agent for the secretary of labor and commerce, found the actions required by telephone switching to cause spinal curvature and prodigious strain on the nervous system (cooper, 1997, p. 494). these combined symptoms became so closely associated with telephone switching that they became known as “telephone shock” (p. 495). even by the late twentieth century after the introduction of automatic switching and video terminals, operators faced workplace hazards such as eyestrain, carpal tunnel syndrome, miscarriages, and other mental health stresses (green, 2001, p. 219). these counter-narratives expose the damaging effects of manual switching on women. such atrocities are called into account with the figure of delphi, who embodies the paradox of at&t’s unattainable bodily norms for its operators. suffering the stresses of their respective cybersystems, burke and delphi demonstrate the switchboard’s remediation of physical ability and health. earlier, i proposed that burke’s disability grounds her body’s physical presence in an information system. yet disability becomes more fluid in delphi, who as an extended nervous system or “prosthesis” for burke, recursively mirrors her disability and deteriorating health. famously defining media as “extensions,” among which the telephone network was included, marshall mcluhan (1964) warned that technological prostheses put american citizens at risk of “narcosis,” or “autoamputation” (p. 45). felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 21 under mcluhan’s rubric, media produced new sensory ratios to the detriment of some senses, and to the benefit of others. this sensory reconfiguration is mapped onto the story’s characters: while delphi endures the loss of sensation in exchange for her global travels, p. burke on the other hand falls ill with “necroses under her grisly sit-down” from her prolonged immobility (p. 58). these experiences point to the myriad, and often conflicting technological conditions in which disability is situated. this crucial detail redefines disability as the product of encounters and actions between interdependent bodies and technological networks, bridging kafer’s political/relational model and crip technoscience. the tangible effects of gtx’s system on p. burke further manifest when she begins to realize there are discrepancies in her ability to perceive touch through delphi. this oversight is intentionally built into the system’s design: gtx engineers bypassed sensory information such as taste, smell, and touch due to limited network bandwidth. burke is particularly grieved to discover her lack of tactility during her budding romantic relationship with her paramour, paul. gtx’s brash neglect of p. burke’s functional needs results in its user’s disclosure of increasing technological ambivalence. as a cyborg, burke’s relationship to her interface is anything but a wellintegrated, smooth circuit; she “holds in tension the need for access or function with frictions, limitations and failures inherent in the technoscientific design process” (hamraie, 2017, p. 107). in one of the story’s more poignant moments, readers get a rare glimpse into p. burke’s subjectivity as she tries “over twenty-double-thousand miles of hard vacuum to reach her beloved through the girl—flesh numbed by an invisible film…to love him back with a body that goes dead in the heart of the fire” (p. 68). these episodes of sensory disjunction emphasize the difference between delphi and her own body: “she’s slow about discovering there’s certain definite places where her beastly p. burke body feels things that delphi’s dainty flesh does not” (p. 55). the failures of sensory fidelity experienced by p. burke are what cybernetic parlance calls “noise,” or distortions in information feedback. noise is often defined as the signal’s opposite, that which threatens the felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 22 order of a system; the narrative’s focus, however, suggests that noise is a result of an imbalanced ratio input-output. when communication breaks down, as it does between delphi and burke, this failure confers a space “to recognize the difference between self and other” (haraway, 1991, p. 164). this space of recognition exemplifies haraway’s feminist cyborg politics because it privileges noise over perfect communication (p. 176). as a company that values having “things orderly, especially their communication,” noise is gtx’s greatest adversary, for “their nightmares are about hemorrhages of information; channels screwed up…garble creeping in” (p. 45). noise is not simply inevitable in cybernetic systems that incorporate human agents as part of its operational interface, as bell system’s management against human error illustrates. noise, if we follow media historian peter krapp’s definition, also allows the system in burke’s hands to learn and make room for error (2011, p. 92) as she explores the limits of her two bodies. in cybernetics, norbert wiener (1948) analogized learning to the process of automatic telephone switching: humans and machines could adjust their behaviors, or outputs, through information feedback. wiener’s theory of control and communication took shape through his research with subjects who had neurological and motor disorders, a study he details in his chapter “feedback and oscillation.” wiener was interested in these disabilities—among others like deafness and amputation (mills, 2011; serlin, 2004)—as physical manifestations of the body’s performance as a cybernetic feedback system. his observation of error as an essential component of information feedback and machine behavior was not intended purely as an engineering fix; it helped him understand the inherent messiness of communication. rather than theorizing “human fallibility [as] what keeps systems from achieving their full potential,” as krapp (2011) suggests, through noise, “people, citizens, and individuals in fact become realized for each other and for themselves in unprecedented ways through networks of computer-mediated communication” (p. 91). to extend krapp’s idea further, if we conceptualize cybernetic error from a queer and crip theory standpoint as a kind of failure of compliance between users and felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 23 systems, a more inclusive picture emerges. within this framework, i propose error and noise can be understood as a form of critique that “recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant” (halberstam, 2011, p. 88). that is, information loss and communication failure are resources for new ways of knowing disability, and thus become instruments of crip technoscience. the uncanny concurrence between the way disabled bodies haunt wiener’s cybernetic conceptions of noise, telephone switchboard systems, and gtx’s media network, provides a flashpoint for rethinking crip theory. in the same way that error and noise express the material frictions of a system, they also continually insist in the same way that crip theory does that “such a system is never as good as it gets” (mcruer, 2006, p. 32). as disability scholar jay dolmage (2007) explains, “to crip is to expose and reproduce disjunction, to refuse order and embrace messiness” (p. 849). one could easily substitute error and noise into this equation: like “cripping,” error and noise also reproduce disjunction and refuse order. this comparison is imperfect (the conditions of error and cripping are unique), but it helps us see the cross-pollination between cybernetics and crip theory, and how affordances for unruly bodies or partial communication are encoded—and even preserved—in cybernetic systems. noise and error too, in tiptree’s hands and in at&t’s rhetoric, expose how information theory is falsely predicated on an able body. equally as important, in the hands of skilled users error and noise can be co-opted as a crip technique, a practice of identifying alternative points of access in a network. this critique is perhaps one of the story’s most significant contributions as a feminist sf text, recognizing the subversive power of disability within communication systems. towards a crip feminist hacker ethic in this final section, i explore how burke’s experience of noise—the corruption of her sensory feedback—becomes useful insofar as it reveals the inaccessibility of gtx’s system, and compels her to hack delphi. "the felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 24 girl who was plugged in” reimagines error as a crip strategy of resistance against the rhetoric and practice of control within the “integrated circuit.” error similarly becomes an alternate ideology of technological mastery and disobedience in laura forlano’s (2016) “hacking the feminist disabled body,” an ethnographic account of living with type 1 diabetes with an insulin pump and a continuous glucose monitor. she writes, “it is only through my own body’s failure and breakdown that i have come to participate in and redefine the socio-technical practices that constitute hacking.” as such, she introduces a crip feminist hacker ethic in which her disability is reconceptualized as the “everyday rituals” of her glucose monitor’s glitches, and hacking as “the invisible labor [that] contributes to its maintenance and repair.” though forlano’s feminist hacker ethic situates her body within a network of medical devices and quantification, her claim that participation is defined by “inherent frictions, failures, limitations, breakdowns and interruptions” can be more broadly used to describe human-machine interaction within networked communication systems. this articulation not only draws a link between disability and rituals of error that wiener observed in cybernetic feedback and in my account of at&t switchboard operators, but also characterizes p. burke and delphi’s electronic connection. toward the novella’s end, burke discovers how to surpass the boundaries of gtx’s system. her connection with delphi—in spite of the tactile inconsistencies—is so strong that her prosthetic half begins to exhibit its own autonomy when unplugged. now and again in the narrative, unbeknownst to even p. burke, delphi “all by herself smiles a bit or stirs in her ‘sleep’” (p. 60). once, she “breathed a sound: ‘yes’” (p. 60). such acts are all the more remarkable, the narrator claims, because delphi is disconnected from burke. these indiscretions foreshadow delphi’s increasingly powerful expressions of individual subjectivity, and as technical impossibilities, these actions pose a real problem for gtx. viewing these irregularities as symptomatic of a nervous breakdown and a potential massive system error, the corporation resorts to disciplining delphi’s body through electric shocks. her neural system disarmed, a convulsive delphi now, too, becomes marked as inhuman. this conundrum is dramatized in felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 25 the narrative’s final moments when paul, believing that delphi can be freed from her “electronic shackles” (p. 70), escorts her back to gtx’s facilities for medical assistance. in doing so, he confronts burke for the first time. no longer concealed by her interface, burke hopes paul will reciprocate her feelings when she moves to embrace him. as she does, paul accidentally knocks her wired nervous system askew, killing her in the process. burke’s termination seems to circle back to the narrator’s deep-seated cynicism, mocking the reader’s expectations that burke’s love for paul can transcend her imperfect body. though scholars have read this narrative resolution as foreshadowing cyberpunk’s rejection of the body, we might instead view burke’s terminal disconnection as consistent with the crip instrumentalization of error. her noncompliance is a form of antiproduction in the sense of queer failure: she wields it an oppositional tool that “turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely,” imagining other ways of being (halberstam, 2011, p. 88). this failure reroutes us into another way of reading burke’s death: as a transgressive act against gtx’s circuit. in spite of being disconnected from burke by the story’s conclusion, delphi persists, remaining animated: placing “one foot before the other, not moving very well—but moving” (p. 76). in this brief moment, delphi hacks her own cybersystem, and by correlation, gtx’s network. her display of physical agency enables delphi to claim her liberation from gtx’s “integrated circuit” through a powerful speech-act: “i’m delphi” (p. 77). her rebellion against gtx is not without precedent: telephone operators, as april middeljans (2010) notes, used the power of the switchboard to “regulate society and engineer their own lives,” subverting cultural codes and corporate regulations out of their own sense of moral duty (p. 39). operators admitted they routinely resisted bell system’s regime of efficiency by scrambling connections and redistributing nickels by taking them from rude callers (p. 41). in rare cases, they gave friends access to other callers’ private conversations (“diary,” 1907, 30), playfully rewriting the system’s rules to enable free access to information. although delphi is for all intents and purposes electronically untethered or “turned off” (p. 60), she similarly challenges gtx’s system from this position. delphi, along with felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 26 burke, doesn’t perpetrate this insurgency by hacking a corporate firewall in cyberspace, or by navigating computer programs to steal money and information. on the contrary, p. burke and delphi hack their electronically networked nervous systems so that they might feel more human in their wired-up world. they situate the hacker within a social space rather than the pure space of data in order to make gtx’s system more accommodating to other bodies that operate according to their own idiosyncratic rules. their performance of user-motivated design embodies what yergeau (2014) calls a “criptastic version of hacking” that is disabled-led and process-based, focusing on rewriting the rules of access rather than a finished product or software. this portrayal implicitly performs a broader commentary about contemporary technoculture whereby burke seemingly exemplifies but ultimately fails to live up to the metonymy of plugged-in bodies as disabled bodies. for example, in depicting burke as a “paraplegic,” and later, as a “blind mole-woman” buried underground, the narrator aligns her portrayal with her interface and the way it physically suspends her body (pp. 64, 67). in these moments, burke ostensibly allegorizes what paul virilio (1993) describes as “the growing inertia” of bodies wrought by the telecommunications industry, in which the “plugged-in human being” functionally becomes a “well-equipped invalid” (pp. 11, 4). virilio views the individual’s loss of natural mobility for a greater degree of control in an information network as an untenable exchange. but this conception merely rehearses the myth of the disabled cyborg, as kafer (2013) would point out. by shifting the definitions of wholeness and “validity” toward access—which privileges hacking as form of movement (yergeau, 2014), albeit perhaps imperfect or incomplete—tiptree’s girls provide a rejoinder to virilio’s argument. they introduce a non-ableist, crip understanding of technoculture that untethers information control and navigation from physical mobility or cognitive aptitude. these terminal subjects, i argue, represent a crystalline example of how technological systems remediate ability, thus redressing ableist ideas about how humans operate and work within their electronic networks. as a felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 27 failure not of the body, but of prescriptive top-down systems designed to contain bodies, error announces the fallacy of smooth integration, whether it be a cyborg system or a switchboard network. through the medium of the story’s imaginary future, tiptree makes this recognition possible by effectively reinserting telephone girls back into a history of communication technologies that registers information in its noisy materiality. we not only see the material effects of technology on the female information worker’s body in cyberpunk fiction, but also how the same laborer can short-circuit this conduit through her embodied knowledge of the system.16 the girls who plug in—and their coalitions of women who plug into insulin pumps, breathing machines, wheelchair battery chargers, cochlear implants (as does this author), and the like—offer enticing possibilities for how we might rewrite and crip hacker futures. acknowledgements i would like to thank the editorial team at catalyst for their valuable insights, especially the editors of this special issue, kelly fritsch, aimi hamraie, mara mills, and david serlin. notes 1 see also, m. hicks (2017). 2 henry’s project echoes the work of ida brinkman and other “electric moms”—women with disabilities in the postwar era, who, as bess williamson (2012) has shown, adapted medical and assistive equipment to move beyond the home and medical treatments of disability. sara hendren and caitrin lynch’s (2016) engineering at home similarly celebrates one woman’s engineering hacks derived from repurposing “unlikely things” such as cable ties and wall hooks; hendren and lynch’s project exemplifies contemporary instances of user-centered design. 3 in the mid-1970s before she was unmasked as a women writer, sheldon began writing as raccoona sheldon to tackle themes outside of tiptree’s felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 28 “masculine” purview. 4 when discussing sheldon’s written work published under her pseudonym, i will refer to her as james tiptree jr., otherwise, alice sheldon will be used in personal contexts. 5 for other feminist technoscience critiques, see balsamo (1996), vint (2007), and stone (1991). 6 accessible tech in employment hackathon, and diyability, which invite people with disabilities to develop solutions to barriers in access, contravene ableist approaches advocated by non-profit companies such as hacking autism or mit’s athack, which views disability as a “challenge” to be “solved.” see yergeau’s (2014) critique of the hackathon’s charity-driven ideologies, though she cautions against fully ascribing these principles to conceptions of hacking. 7 see siebers (2011) on social constructionism in disability studies. 8 see allan (2013) for further study of sf’s treatment of disability. 9 following kelly fritsch’s (2015) explanation of disability as a material practice of knowing, a crip feminist onto-epistemology appropriates the discursive and material practices of representing disability to reroute the power relations that constitute this body. 10 bell telephone began incorporating automatic telephone switches in 1915. these were ubiquitous by 1972, signaling bell system’s transition to a “cyber-mechanical-human endeavor: a mix of operators and machines” (lapsley, 2013, p. 26). early switchboards were a primitive collage of metal and wood, but by 1903, roughly 3 million switchboard connected phones. behind these lines were warehouses of human beings who manually switched calls (p. 24). by the late nineteenth century, switchboards became more complex, and electrical cords connected to “cordboards” enabled operators to connect calls more quickly. 11 tiptree lived to see the divestiture of bell system in 1983, though it was one year after the publication of “the girl” in 1973 that the us department of justice filed its antitrust suit against the company. 12 though the first switchboard operators were boys, they were quickly replaced by women (lapsley, 2013, p. 21). felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 29 13 see grier (2005) for a similar categorization of female labor, when “computers became ‘girls’” (p. 276) as they tabulated numbers for wartime research projects. grier suggests that “girls” became an expansive term that included those with racial, religious, socioeconomic, and physical differences, “joined by african americans, jews, the irish, the handicapped, and the merely poor” (p. 276). 14 in spite of haraway’s claim that cyborgs have “no truck with gender,” there is a long line of female cyborgs in science fiction. see flanagan and booth (2003) for a more extensive catalog of cyborgs in women’s cyberfiction. 15 first mentioned in robert heinlein’s (1942/1999) story of the same name, a “waldo” is an industrial lathe that synchronizes the gestures of two bodies across space through sensory input and output. heinlein’s story also imagined the “waldo” as a prosthetic extension of a disabled body. 16 see other disabled cyberpunk female hackers such as lise in william gibson’s “the winter market” (1986). sam in pat cadigan’s synners (1986/1991) hacks computer networks through a modded insulin-pump chip reader connected to her belly. references abbate, j. 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(2017). code girls: the untold story of the american code breakers of world war ii. new york, ny: hachette books. nguyen, l., toupin, s., & bardzell, s. (january 2016). feminist hacking/making: exploring new gender horizons of possibility. journal of peer production, 8. retrieved from http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue8-feminism-and-unhacking/feminist-hackingmaking-exploring-new-genderhorizons-of-possibility/ orr, j. (2006). panic diaries: a genealogy of panic disorder. durham, nc: duke university press. ott, k. (2002). the sum of its parts: an introduction to modern histories of prosthetics. in k. ott, d. serlin, & s. mihm (eds.), artificial parts, practical lives: modern histories of prosthetics (pp. 1-42). new york, ny: nyu press. petrick, e. (2015). making computers accessible: disability rights and digital technology. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. phillips, j. 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(1969, june 20). note to dk re the girl who was plugged in. alice b. sheldon, pen name james tiptree, jr., papers (coll. 455, box 9, folder 9). university of oregon libraries, special collections and university archives, eugene, or. tiptree, j., jr. (1975). a note on the question of self-esteem. alice b. sheldon, pen name james tiptree, jr., papers (coll. 455, box 12, folder 1). university of oregon libraries, special collections and university archives, eugene, or. us commission on industrial relations. (1915). final report of the commission on industrial relations. washington, dc: government printing office. vint, s. (2007). bodies of tomorrow: technology, subjectivity, science fiction. toronto, on: university of toronto press. virilio, p. (1993). the third interval: a critical transition. in v.a. conley (ed.) re-thinking technologies (pp. 3-12). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. wiener, n. (1948). cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine. cambridge, ma: mit press. williamson, b. (2012). electric moms and quad drivers: people with disabilities buying, making, and using technology in postwar america. american studies, 52(1), 5-29. yergeau, m. (2014). disability hacktivism. in m. hocks & j. sayers (eds.), hacking the classroom: eight perspectives. computers and composition online. retrieved from http://www2.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/hacking/#yergeau felt catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 35 bio lindsey dolich felt is a lecturer at stanford university in the program in writing and rhetoric. her current research examines how post-war american literature recovers to a little known history in which disability crucially shaped the development of information theory and electronic communication. pollock   article   heart feminism   anne pollock georgia tech apollock@gatech.edu when feminist theorizations of the body have foregrounded particular body parts, whether the uterus (martin, 1987), the gut (wilson, 2004a), or bones (fausto-sterling, 2005), they have rendered feminism and the body in distinct ways. the same goes for feminist analyses of ways of understanding messaging and signals, such as hormones (roberts, 2007) and epigenetics and metabolism (landecker, 2011). in what has broadly been characterized as the "age of the brain," the "neuroscientific turn" has been a particularly rich area for transdisciplinary scholarship (littlefield & johnson, 2012). in this paper, i consider wide-ranging heart-centered approaches and put them into tension with other ways of understanding life, the body, and personhood, particularly those focusing on the brain, to argue that thinking with the heart has value for feminist theory. heart feminism both complements and challenges neurologically inspired theorizations, and i draw especially on these to put my own project into relief as i ask: what might an analysis starting from the heart and circulatory system offer?  drawing the heart into feminist theory is of course not completely novel. feminist biologists lynda birke (1999) and anne fausto-sterling (2004) have led some way toward theorizing feminism and the biological body through the heart. they do so by interrogating metaphors in early modern medicine and contemporary pop medical books (birke), and by attending to the ways that the body's hypertensive response to the stress of racism can be a resource for theorizing the body beyond genetic determinism (fausto-sterling). other theorists usefully draw together patient accounts and ontological questions within biomedical understandings (mol, 2002; shildrick, 2012). my own consideration follows from theirs—not replacing social inquiry with physiological inquiry, but bringing the biological body productively into the scope of feminist analysis through foregrounding the heart. as the title of my paper suggests, i am inspired by elizabeth wilson's "gut feminism" method: "a feminism that is able to think innovatively and organically at the same time" (wilson, 2004a, p. 86). wilson's engagement with the neurological body through the gut is tremendously generative, not least because it decenters the brain (a theme i will return to in this paper's conclusion). my project is necessarily historically situated, but its periodization is somewhat ambiguous: i draw on current biomedical knowledge of the heart, which is itself a product of layered historical periods, as present-day biological understandings of the heart have great continuity with earlier periods. notably, none of the biology that i describe is cutting edge or contested within the field.1 i also seek a more epistemologically eclectic mode of engaging with the body than wilson does, engaging with mundane clinical encounters and broader intuitions about aliveness that can become enrolled in public debates. as angie willey has argued, biological data is one way among many that feminists can engage with the body (willey forthcoming). from my perspective, the mundane intimacy of knowledge of the heartbeat is as worthy of attention as are scientific understandings of the heart. the heart that is accessible to directly embodied experience and to clinical encounters matters as much as the one that comes into view in cardiopathophysiology. heart feminism's mode thus also resonates with hillary rose's early eighties argument that feminists should ground our epistemology in "hand, brain, and heart": which is to say not only in the "abstraction of male and bourgeois thought," but also in activism and caring labor (rose, 1983). this paper emerges out of and in conversation with object-oriented feminism (behar, forthcoming). like much of that emerging body of work, i am interested both in nonanthropocentric materiality and in actually existing women and feminist politics. i draw on knowledge gleaned from science, but also from debates in mass media, and from mundane knowledge—of our own heartbeats, of those with whom we are intimate, and of heartbeats that ground clinical encounters. object-oriented feminism (oof) tends to analyze blatantly artificial objects, of engineering or of art, which facilitates a foregrounding of both the importance of matter and the inseparability of matter and meaning. indeed, oof does not assume the need to take sides on or overcome the matter/meaning divide that has been a founding "imaginary prohibition" of new feminist materialisms (ahmed, 2008), perhaps because in art and engineering, matter and meaning are not divided in the first place. even though my object of analysis here is the undeniably real and material heart, it is also the symbolic and socially situated heart, and my approach to it is an oof-inspired one. biological understandings of the heart fascinate me, but they do not provide the grounding for my understanding the world. instead, my method is to draw on physiology to raise questions as an artist might: in light of a specific and particular materiality to hand, what if we see the world like this? the heart that is my object traverses scale, and is in a sense a series of objects—ranging from heart cells, to hearts and circulatory systems, to women interpellated into heart health, to public debates on personhood that mobilize fetal heartbeats and contested cases of women on life support. i am interested in the heart both as an object itself and an object within a network of objects, and think that the tension between its boundedness and its permeability can provide analytical resources for speculative engagement with how objects relate to each other in a nonanthropocentric posthumanist philosophy. new feminist materialists tend to look at scientific accounts and find the world as they would have it be: boundaries are always being broken down, whether by microbes (hird, 2009a) or by quantum entanglements (barad, 2007). yet i am also interested in how ways of understanding the body through the heart can push back against rhizomatic and egalitarian aspirations and challenge us to account for contours of power in more nuanced ways.2 i want to consider how the heart can articulate the body.3 etymologically, "articulation" is derived from the ancient greek arthroi, which, as shigehisa kuriyama (1999, p. 135) points out, referred to both the divisions of the body into distinct form and of sounds into lucid language. for ancient greeks, breaking down the body into muscles and bones rendered the articulated body. many in both contemporary medicine and feminism have articulated women's bodies through our reproductive and affective parts. this paper takes up the heart, a nonreproductive somatic organ, as an opportunity to articulate women's bodies in new ways. starting with the heart of course does not replace articulations of the body that start elsewhere. i am not suggesting that we forgo analysis of breasts, brains, or uteruses to focus on the heart. open-ended processes of articulation are far more interesting than efforts toward authority and accuracy that seek to close discussion down (see latour, 2004). this is an important difference between analogic thinking made possible through this type of articulation, and ontological arguments that promise unifying explanations-of-everything. scientific knowledge is always mediated and partial, and so feminist engagement with biological knowledge claims about the body should both avoid ceding too much epistemic authority to them, and avoid making totalizing claims of our own (haraway, 1988). thinking with the heart the conventional admonition against thinking with the heart makes me think that there must be something interesting going on in there. the phrase "thinking with the heart" is, after all, often used to belittle stereotypical ideas about how women think. when evelyn fox keller's (1985) foundational feminist science studies critiqued the ways that "thinking like a scientist" gets conflated with "thinking like a man," she framed it around a binary of alienation from the object versus empathy with the object. this might well be characterized as thinking with the head of cool rationality versus thinking with the heart of emotion. the head is (conceptually) able to disconnect from others who make demands on the subject; the heart is not.  neither the head nor the heart is as local as this opposition between them implies.  elizabeth wilson (2004a) has alerted us to the fact that the neurological system extends well beyond the brain, calling us to pay attention to the neurons outside the brain, especially in the gut. the dispersed nervous system that wilson is interested in is itself an aspect of the heart: the heart, too, is fully innervated—a major site of autonomic nerves. moreover, the pervasiveness of the neuro and circulatory systems are linked, because the arteries and their small branches that lead to the capillaries (arterioles) are innervated as well. the capillary network is distributed even further than this, proximate to every cell in the body. the domain of the heart is thus much larger than that instantly recognizable organ: the circulatory system makes the heart's work necessarily dispersed. the heart is at once a well-bounded organ and one that is easily recognizable even if grown in tissue culture: heart cells in culture beat. but at the same time, the heart is crucially a transit point—its function is deeply integrated with the peripheral artery system and also the body as a whole. and the environment. and behavior. the heart's function is constantly modifying in light of everything. an articulation of the body through the heart should be fragmented and emergent.  electrical one thing that is distinct about heart cells is the phenomenon of atrial and ventricular syncytium. a network of muscle cells is interconnected by contiguous bridges of cytoplasm, so electrical excitation can travel between cells. this is part of what stefan helmreich (2013) has emphasized as the "excitable" nature of heart cells. when one cell contracts, it can transmit electricity so that cells in its area all contract together. this is why heart cells grown in petri dishes will beat in unison.4 although popular perception of electricity is as something that comes from a power grid and out of a socket in a wall rather than something that courses through our bodies, the heart's electrical aspect plays a more important role in how the heart is generally understood than it might seem. electrical impulses of the heart make possible the instantly recognizable inscriptions of electrocardiograms (referred to as ecgs or ekgs). this mode of understanding the heart emerges out of a particular history: ecgs were among the inscription devices that emerged in the nineteenth century "to translate bodily movements or sounds into readable, visual graphics" (van dijck, 2005, p. 5), and ecgs are one of the founding technologies of cardiology as a field and 20th century scientific medicine more broadly (lawrence, 1992). as composer and theorist tara rodgers has pointed out, "by the turn of the twentieth century, electrocardiographic waveforms presented the heart's electrical activity as, quite literally, signs of life. medical experts could determine from the shape of waveforms whether electrical activities in the body were normal or pathological (as in cases of cardiac arrhythmia); moreover, an unvarying baseline (or flatline) symbolized life's absence" (rodgers, 2011, p. 519). ecgs do not provide a direct representation of the heart, but they remain a commonplace way of visualizing both the heart and life. the ecg's readout is a highly constructed inscription that pervades medical care and media images, and has become a more common way to visualize the work of the heart than images of the organ itself. any of the ordinary heart cells has an intrinsic rhythm and could set the rhythm for the organ, but the electrical excitation that spurs contraction generally follows a particular conductive route.5 the sinoatrial (sa) node will induce contraction more quickly than any given heart cell would, and since heart cells' rates are linked, the sa node's rate becomes the effective rate, following a pathway from the atria, through the atrioventricular node, to the ventricles. this is something that gives the heart a bit of a hierarchical reputation, this sa node acting as the "pacemaker." to draw on the terms of deleuze and guattari (1987), this articulates the heart as principally striated space, not smooth.  yet there is again a tension here. broadly, too much regularity in the ecg trace can be a sign of pathology, too (malik, 1996)—small variations in pacing suggest responsivity and vitality. on a deeper level, since there are backup nodes and any heart cell could conceivably set the rhythm, there is an underlying democratic aspect to the electrical network of the heart as well. there is a slow-beating rhizomatic system beneath the unidirectional directed flow of electricity. now, that underlying rate only becomes perceptible in pathological situations, for example when the sa node fails. it is generally too slow to be "productive," which is to say, to meet the needs of the organism. here, the democratic impulses of both deleuze and guattari and of radical feminist theory are checked. in relationships among equal objects, is a recognized benevolent dictator a means of promoting productive order amid the tyranny of structurelessness (pace joreen, 1972)? or, to read the same phenomenon more negatively, is underlying democracy only possible in states of pathology?   hydraulic moving out a layer in scale from the cellular to the organ and the circulatory system, the heart is also in an important sense hydraulic—that is, fluid mechanics is part of how it can be understood. hydraulics pertains to liquids in motion under pressure, and the heart pumps liquids under pressure. it consists of two positive displacement pumps (right and left, pulmonary and systemic circulation) operating together. the pumping chambers are collapsible and have a more-or-less fixed volume, with some flexibility. when healthy, the two pumps work in tandem, both pumping out the same quantity so that there is no accumulation or starving. hydraulic systems are oddly retro in our cyber moment: they are not where the hot questions are, for feminists or for scientists. the flow of blood through this pump and the circulatory system is relentlessly unidirectional. lynda birke (1999) has pointed out that the ways that the heart is understood—in terms of the industrial revolution's steam power—make it an interesting question what the heart would have looked like if engineering had taken a different direction. the availability of replacement valves for this organ at the center of life gives it a deeply cyborg quality, a site of what donna haraway (1991, p. 152) has canonically flagged as a contemporary "leaky distinction" between organism and machine.  there is an odd duality here: the heart is an exemplar both of an autocratic boss and a replaceable brute laborer (birke, 1999) in a flexible economy era that has little room for acknowledging either of those kinds of work. for barbara ehrenreich (1983), cardiology narratives of the 1950s provided a script for critiquing masculinity of that era, brimming with moralistic assumptions about stressed-out breadwinners and demanding housewives. these narratives have little purchase in today's post-fordism, and our understandings of the body and medicine have transformed along with our economy (cooper, 2008; martin, 1994). in a neoliberal era characterized by "the dual movement of capital and life toward flexibility" (sunder rajan, 2012, p. 9), the heart is not up to speed.  the high level of feminist interest in the neurocompared with the cardiomight be not only a reflection of the trendiness of the neuro broadly, but also the resonance of the heart and cardiovascular system with old-school engineering. feminist and neuroscientist deboleena roy gives a chapter on feminism and neuroscience an epigraph from deleuze and guattari in which they argue that "the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree" (as cited in roy, 2012, p. 175). so treelike in its figurations, the heart and circulatory system can be well-indicted in deleuze and guattari's (1987) terms as the rhizomatic's opposite, the arborescent. of course, the unidirectional ideal is not perfectly achieved—regurgitation can happen in pathological situations, for example when valves do not fully close and blood flows back into the chamber from which it came. but the heart overwhelmingly privileges unidirectional flows that have retrograde connotations to a postmodern sensibility.  in an era in which the heart becomes seen as a replaceable part through artificial valves and pacemakers or xenotransplantation (birke, 1999), the heart's hydraulic aspect makes it something of an old-fashioned machine. there is something almost steampunk about dwelling on an organ so visibly mechanical.  the hydraulics of the heart combine masculine and feminine, active and passive.  on the one hand, the heart is a muscular organ, and as such, macho. william harvey, the influential 17th century physician who characterized the systemic circulation of the blood, strove to describe the heart mechanistically, eschewing the sensual—and yet he used metaphors not only of gears, but also of the lord and the sun (see otis, 2011). according to bryan turner (2003), for harvey the heart's function as a pumping muscular organ operated according to a phallic model, patriarchally ministering to a feminine body. yet heart-as-sovereign is only part of the story. in contrast to the penis, the heart must not only send out its principal fluid, it must also receive it. the heart sends blood out by contracting, and because the system is in a loop it need not suck blood back in. it just sends it away, no need of beckoning it to return. by opening again, the blood flows on back. the hospitality of this opening, making space for blood to return, should be understood as agential (cf. aristarkhova, 2012). not making enough space for blood to return is a major cause of heart failure. so, physiologically, the heart's receptivity is as important as its thrust. in this way, paying attention to the heart can present an opportunity for theory: thinking about receptivity beyond democratic exchange or domination. what if receptivity is understood as a central component of an object's action? theoretical approaches that foreground the agency of objects, such as actor-network theory, tend to be action-oriented. how can a passivity that is not submission be appreciated? responsiveness and responsibility when we speak of the burdens on our hearts, that phrasing generally connotes affect rather than physiology. but of course the demands on the heart are not merely emotional. one of the disease processes that i am most interested in is heart failure—this is a key disease category in my previous work about race and heart disease (pollock, 2012). the heart is emblematically responsive to load. it changes its rate and volume according to the demands of the body beyond it, and its responsiveness can get it into trouble. it generally cannot grow new cells in response to injury (claycomb, 1992)—this is why heart cancer is so extraordinarily rare—and so its cells enlarge and "remodel" to accomplish more work. for example, if blockages in the vessels or high peripheral pressure make it harder to circulate the blood, the heart's cells will increase in size and the heart's capacity will also increase. but this is a temporary fix. it is called compensating. as soon as this cellular remodeling and hypertrophy starts, it is a sign of problems to come. compensating is a prelude to decompensating.  decompensation means that after the temporary respite offered by the heart's compensatory efforts, the success starts to break down. either not enough blood can be accommodated by the chambers within the heart's now bulky muscle, or not enough can be expelled from the enlarged chambers, and insufficient oxygenation of the peripheral body leads to shortness of breath and fatigue, first with activity and then even at rest. from the perspective of the human organism, this is "heart failure," and becomes a leading cause of death. but from the perspective of the heart, it is the excess burden of the human organism, rarely intrinsic to the heart, which causes the failure. the obligation to respond to load and the hopelessness of being able to do so forever is fundamental to characterizing the heart's action. what if the heart and its failure can become ways of thinking about objects in the world? what does a model of an object that is intrinsically burdened and thus doomed do for an object-oriented analysis, and for feminist theory? this inevitably doomed character of the heart might also inform our affective relationship to thinking with the organ. one primary affective valence of the heart—sentimentality—is another way in which the heart seems retro. carol emslie and her colleagues (2001) have characterized a gap between "the feminine image of the heart as the centre of emotional life" and "the masculine representation of the heart as a machine" (p. 208) and, indeed, as a metaphor for the fordist body. since both sentiment and fordism are out of fashion in both economy and biology, contemplation of how the heart works can thus jar contemporary common sense about the nature of the body. as margrit shildrick (2012) has richly explored, for patients who have received heart transplants, biomedical framings of the heart as an unproblematically transplantable pump can be hard to square with questions of identity provoked by the experience of incorporating the heart of another. the heart as hydraulic is inextricable from metaphors of other hydraulic systems.  plumbing metaphors have informed medical understandings of what should be done to reduce the risk of heart attack—such that angioplasty is powerfully analogized with cleaning out pipes (jones, 2013, p. 26). lynda birke points out the constant analogies with household plumbing, a domestic space that one must manage, often with outside help but which in theory one could manage oneself. when the heart goes wrong, she suggests, it does so in ways that are like the mishaps in otherwise flowing domestic plumbing and happy marriages. individual responsibility for maintaining the heart is an onerous burden that ignores race, class, and other social inequalities, in a way that is not dissimilar from the burden of maintaining a home and a marriage moralistically placed on the poor—and especially poor women—in a neoconservative state.  although this individual burden of responsibility for disease is not unique to heart disease, "narratives about [heart disease] are especially individualized and moralized" (weiner, 2011, 1766). coronary artery disease (cad) is the dominant mode of understanding blockages in the plumbing of the heart, and cad is surgicalized and pharmaceuticalized in ways that individualize obligations to address risk factors in a terrain of stratified exposure to harms and unequal access to care (pollock & jones, 2015). in her analysis of lay and epidemiological understandings of race and heart disease, sociologist janet shim describes a conversation with an epidemiologist who explains the disproportionately high cardiovascular risk of black women using evocative terms that conflate poor household management with inadequate care for the heart: "there is a black culture—welfare moms, or whatever—with low education who maybe missed out on the public health messages of the past ten years" (shim, 2014, p. 3). the hydraulic heart is thus loaded with pressure, and grappling with that is inseparable from consideration of broader ways of understanding both industrial and domestic spheres. just as individuals are burdened with the obligation of maintaining the heart as a plumbing system, they are also burdened with maintaining it as an electrical system. whereas the maintenance of the hydraulic system of the heart generally involves lifestyle interventions, pharmaceuticals, or surgeries, the maintenance of the electrical system of the heart generally involves the implantation of devices. these include pacemakers, which maintain a minimum heart rate, and internal defibrillators, which are designed to detect dangerous arrhythmias and automatically shock the heart into regular rhythm. these devices transform the lives that they prolong, and rejection of them is often framed as tantamount to suicide (pollock, 2008). amid unequal exposure to social environments that diminish heart health, there are constant demands to take individual responsibility to bolster cardiovascular fitness and to use pharmaceuticals, procedures, and devices to extend the heart's function as long as possible. at the same time that we might use cardiovascular disease incidence as a window into structural inequality, we must also be critical of health discourse as a moralistic imperative and driver of neoliberal medicine. drawing on the position that jonathan metzl and anna kirkland have provocatively framed as "against health" (2010), might heart feminism need to be for thinking with the heart, but against heart health? vital sign because we can feel our own heartbeat, and that of others with whom we are intimate, the heartbeat has been and will remain powerful as a way for lay people to answer the question of who is alive. in medicine, the centrality of the taking of the pulse has ancient roots (kuriyama, 1999, pp. 18-35), and in ordinary clinical encounters, the pulse remains a primary "vital sign." contemporary american personhood is generally solidly brain-centric. as joe dumit (2003) has argued, the brain is normally the organ that defines our personhood in our "form of life:" when we ask a question about identity and find an answer that we can locate in the brain, we are generally satisfied that we are in the right place. yet, at the beginning and end of life, cardiological criteria and neurological criteria can come to bear on personhood as a feminist issue. when those criteria conflict, or when the heartbeat is perceptible but neurological data is not, the salience of the heart as the locus of life and personhood is renewed. this is true in intimate contexts, as the perception of the beating heart informs how we relate to each other as organisms and beings, and in public contexts, as the heartbeat is compellingly and problematically enrolled in discourses of "right to life" and "right to die."  listening to the fetal heartbeat several recent proposed anti-abortion laws in numerous u.s. states have had a peculiar characteristic: they have foregrounded the fetal heartbeat (culp-ressler, 2013). feminist scholars have long highlighted the way that the ultrasound image of the fetus has been important in conceptualizing the independent personhood of the fetus (for example newman, 1997; petchesky, 1987), and many anti-choice laws have been enacted to capitalize on that association, by requiring women seeking abortions to undergo a sonogram first. these fetal heartbeat laws are novel in that they privilege sound rather than (or in addition to) the image.  historians of sound have argued that "sound has power and is woven into a host of other social, political, and economic power relations" and that "mediation introduces other elements of power" (suisman, 2009, p. 3). fetal heartbeat legislation is a dramatic instantiation of this. in this legislation, the dividing line is not when the fetal heartbeat is understood to exist, but rather, when it is "detectable," by abdominal ultrasound or more controversially by transvaginal ultrasound (in which the technician inserts a condom-covered wand-like probe into the vagina, a mode of governmentality that can evoke sexual assault). the process of detecting fetal heartbeats is called auscultation, like listening with a stethoscope, but the fetal heartbeat isn't really "heard"— it is a sound produced by the devices of listening, for a specific audience.6 the fetal heartbeat as heard through ultrasound devices is as completely mediated as fetal images, but, especially in early pregnancy, can be experienced by the pregnant woman as more intuitively legible (howes-mischel, 2015). in the sonic effect of the fetal heartbeat, there is an effective and affective articulation of an individualized fetal heart. although the fetus's circulatory system is completely intertwined with that of the mother, the individuation of that proto-organ is a compelling line for the individuation of the fetus as a person.   comparative literature scholar laura otis (2011) connects the appeal of seeing the heart as the source of life and consciousness with the borges story "the circular ruins," in which the main character wants to dream a man into existence. he first dreams an audience of students and selects one to focus on, but that method fails to produce a full-formed man. it is not until he tries a new method, starting with the beating heart and working his way out, that he is successful. the anti-abortion activists who support fetal heartbeat legislation and borges are both, from very different starting points, pointing us to a deep observation: the appeal of the heart as the location of the phantasmic origin of personhood.  although the fetal heartbeat must be technologically mediated, using heartbeat to determine life is not newfangled in the least. as otis argues, even though the brain generally is thought of as the locus of personhood, the heart ultimately trumps because knowledge about the brain is just too new. a central part of the appeal of the heart as the center of life is what otis (2011) calls "the principle of movement" (der prinzip bewegung): that which we can perceive as moving is, in the absence of other evidence, that which is alive, and even before we do research or learn science that tells us that this wobbly weird object, the brain, is the center of life and consciousness, the heart is an intuitively appealing locus of life because it perceptibly moves. in this way, i would argue that the recent focus on the perceptibility of the fetal heartbeat hearkens to the medieval idea that quickening marks the entry of the soul into the fetus.7 monitoring fetal heartbeat during childbirth has long been part of choreographing the process of literal separation of mother and baby (cartwright, 1998). this fetal heartbeat legislation capitalizes on that deep intuition and conventional clinical relation, and it marshals technology to force that perception to an earlier stage. at the same time that we oppose the anti-feminist ends toward which the fetal heartbeat is being mobilized, how can we maintain curiosity about the evocative power of that technologically mediated sound? waiting for cardiopulmonary death as much as the presence and absence of a heartbeat signifies life and death, it is not the ultimate arbiter of it. to a significant degree, the brain has won as the ultimate arbiter of death, even though that goes against the common sense of most people who have spent time in a room with bodies categorized as "brain dead." family members and even medical personnel can struggle to align a strongly held belief that the person is no longer there with the warm body before them (lock, 2004). in bioethical debates about end-of-life issues, the gap between brain death and cardiological death is often front and center. the category of "brain death" is unnecessary in the overwhelming majority of deaths because cardiopulmonary death and brain death do generally coincide. the need for criteria to articulate death in these rare ambiguous cases helps to reopen questions about where we understand life and personhood to be located. in widely discussed "right-to-die" cases, the "personhood" and "life" of women are in fraught relation. occasionally this is intertwined with the beginning-of-life questions addressed above, as in the 2014 case of marlise muñoz, a woman in texas who was kept on life support even after being declared "brain dead" because of the hospital's interpretation of a texas law stating that life support may not be withdrawn from a woman known to be pregnant.8 more broadly, as karla holloway (2011) points out, public conflicts over the question of whether personhood survives the loss of brain function are deeply intertwined with gender.9 holloway observes that all of the memorable right-to-die cases are about women: "it is certainly true that men have faced the same medical dilemma. but it is the stories of women that make it from the private to public consumption" (holloway, 2011, p. 18). it makes sense that it is the cases of women in which private bodies on life support become what holloway calls "public texts": women are the ones whose independent personhood—and so whose ability to make decisions for themselves—is in question. thus, it is up for debate whether our personhood continues when the brain does not function but the heart still beats. in our era, the brain has almost completely superseded the heart as the locus of life and personhood. and yet, the heart has not been completely eclipsed. every now and then, the heart re-emerges as the locus of life and personhood—especially at the beginning of life, and at the end—and it behooves feminists to pay attention. in these "right to life" and "right to die" cases, the heart is generally enrolled on the reactionary political side, so heart feminism cannot mean taking the heart's side. it does, however, necessitate taking the heart seriously. the political right draws on the power of the sonic effect of the heartbeat. the right does not invent that power, but it enrolls it toward particular social and political ends that are not inevitable. how does the beating heart inform how we understand aliveness and relate to each other as organisms? how might we enroll it in other modes of relationality? cardiocuriosity, or why "i heart feminism" as i come toward an end, if not quite a conclusion, i would like to underscore the value of thinking with the heart by returning to the complementarity and contrast between the cardioand the neuro-. as noted in the opening, the title of my paper hearkens to elizabeth wilson's "gut feminism" (2004a), a text that is part of her body of work about feminism and the neurological body (2004b). in wilson's important work on neurological feminism, she argues that feminists should critically engage with biology. she critiqued feminism's tendency toward astuteness about "the body" but ignorance about anatomy, arguing: "feminism's relations to biological data have tended to be skeptical or indifferent rather than speculative, engaged, fascinated, surprised, enthusiastic, amused, or astonished" (wilson, 2004a, p. 69). in the decade since the publication of "gut feminism," engagement with biological data has become more prominent in feminist theory, especially in work that considers cutting edge life sciences (such as the special issue of differences edited by roosth and schrader (2012)) and neurofeminism (bluhm, jacobson, & maibom, 2012).   i too believe that there is value in these modes of engagement, and i want to suggest that feminist neurocuriosity can be complemented by cardiocuriosity. for example, when i approach heart disease, i share wilson's interest in moving beyond soma/psyche binaries – neither soma nor psyche is prior and acting in relationship with the alien other part. wilson (2004a) convincingly argues that even sigmund freud's work posited that "hysterical paralysis" happens in the body at the same time that it happens in the psyche. on one level, feminist attention to the psycho-somatic nature of heart disease offers an interesting complement to this case, in part because of associations between heart disease and maleness (pollock, 2010; riska, 2004). and yet i also think that, more fundamentally, the heart may offer a less closed-down site for analysis of the immanence of the psyche and the soma than the brain does.  the heart and heart disease provide particularly apt venues for feminist engagement with the body in medicine because they offer opportunities to critique medicine not at its contested mental illness fringes, but at its stable somatic illness core. wilson's intervention is founded on a critique of feminists' adoption of a particular kind of freudian model that allowed "feminists to think of bodily transformation ideationally and symbolically, without reference to biological constraints" (2004a, p. 69). wilson is centrally interested in countering the notion, which she describes as dominant in feminist theorizing, that organic processes—including mental illnesses such as bulimia—are "purely ideational" (2004a). in contrast to mental illness, heart disease cannot be said to be purely ideational. mental illness is less contested now than it used to be, but it still lacks the epistemic solidity of heart disease. in contrast to psychiatric disease, critiques of medicalization of heart disease do not extend to challenging its very existence, to denying that problems with our hearts can make us sick and die. at the same time, a scan of my heart cannot mechanize my very subjectivity in the way that a scan of my brain can. for both the cardioand the neuro-, any account that separates the emotional from the machine-like will be inadequate. heart attacks due to plaque buildup in the arteries or due to stress and strain might have an analogous relationship between organic versus hysterical paralysis in wilson's analysis of freud (2004a), but without the anxiety about "is it real?" or, to be fairer to freud, who did consider the psychological to be real, without getting tripped up by the question "is it biological?" heart attacks, no matter their cause, are biological events. the undeniability of the existence of some biological reality to heart disease is one reason that thinking through the nature of the immanence of soma and psyche here can be particularly productive. where arguments about the complicatedly psycho/somatic character of psychiatric disease can be misinterpreted as suggesting their spontaneous invention or unreality, or alternatively can give the impression of a biological basis of mental states that diminishes the role of the social, heart disease can foreground embodied experience that is at once social and biological. the neurohas become a prominent way for theorists to grapple with embodiment, around which has formed a growing body of work that often interestingly inverts notions of control that have long been associated with the brain, and highlights instead distributed networks. in this paper, i have striven to eschew the tendency to debunk or celebrate scientific knowledge claims, and to see whether another organ with other ways of articulating the body can open up new insights.  heart feminism as i have articulated it here has been quite speculative. in my discussion of the heart as focal point for object-oriented feminist theorizing, i have highlighted just a few aspects of the heart: containing certain dualities— bounded and dispersed, autocratic and receptive, emotional and machine-like, and operating according to plural models—as an electrical system, as a hydraulic system, and as a vital sign. the heart provides powerful ways of understanding bodies simultaneously as somatic, symbolic, and political-economic entities. these understandings are sometimes hierarchical and even oppressive, but it behooves feminists to take the heart seriously. grappling with the heart in these ways both complements and challenges feminist analyses that draw on other ways of understanding the body. this is not an exhaustive list of characteristics of the heart, nor of how cardiologically engaged theorizing can contribute to feminist conversations. there are more opportunities here, if other feminists take up the call to think with the heart. starting with the heart, what more can be done? acknowledgements this paper benefited greatly from presentation and discussion at two venues: a panel on object oriented feminism at the society for literature, science, and the arts in 2010, and a cultural studies colloquium at the university of california at davis in 2013. thank you to the many people have provided feedback on iterations along the way: irina aristarkhova, katherine behar, ian bogost, colleen clancy, nihad farooq, stefan helmreich, david jones, nassim jafarinaimi, lauren klein, mary mcdonald, jennifer singh, and angie willey. notes 1 textbooks, such as lilly (2003), are fine points of reference. 2 hird (2009b) provides a good overview of new feminist materialisms, though i would not include haraway in the list, as she does. as anthropologists heather paxson and stefan helmreich (2014) point out, "new materialist tactics often veer toward universalizing metaphysical claims about the nature of ‘matter' as such and also, at times, take scientific truth claims about the world at face value – a move that we consider a step backward for sts" (p. 169). the universalizing tendencies of ontology and the tendency to take scientific accounts as representations of the world as it is are also a step backward for feminist theory.  3 this is a concept that i began developing in pollock (2010). 4 this is something that made this cell type particularly appealing to early tissue culture scientists seeking to understand vitality outside the organism (landecker, 2007). 5 by reading cardiophysiology and critical theory together in this section and the next, my approach resonates with what sophia roosth and astrid schrader (2012) have called "feminist theory out of science," which for them "does not imply that feminist theory emerges from science," but "rather, that the world is already theory all the way down" (pp. 1-2). my project, too, works "by holding scientific theory in tension with critical theory," "send[ing] relays between the critical and the empirical, the semiotic and the material" (roosth & schrader, 2012, p. 2).  6 consider the contrast with the pinard horn or "midwife's trumpet:" when a practitioner puts one side of this simple amplifying device on a pregnant woman's body and their own ear to the other side, the practitioner can directly both hear and feel the fetal heartbeat (kitzinger, 1997, p. 223). the pregnant woman cannot share this experience hearing and feeling of the heartbeat with a midwife's trumpet, but with ultrasound she, together with the practitioner operating the device, becomes part of the heartbeat's audience. listening by ultrasound is indirect for all concerned, and even when the media product is a sonic beat, it is not an amplification but a sonogram: whether sound or image, it is a representation made from inaudible echo. ultrasound is by definition outside the range of human hearing. its frequencies cannot be heard unless it is translated into our range, in this case through medical imaging.  7 this moment of "quickening" corresponds to the contemporary notion of feeling the baby kick for the first time – the first time that the pregnant woman can directly sense fetal movement. this moment broadly receives less focal attention today as other forms of fetal individuation precede it, but remains an important part of how pregnant women experience the individuation of the fetus. 8 here, the decision to privilege cardiovascular death over brain death palpably instantiated the denial of the woman's personhood. as a column in the new england journal of medicine noted, "many observers had a hard time escaping the conclusion that texas was using this woman's dead body as the ultimate incubator, treating her as a means to an end rather than an end in herself" (ecker, 2014, p. 890).  9 in her book private bodies, public texts, karla fc holloway writes about the case of terri schiavo, a florida woman living in a persistent vegetative state whose case became the site of a sensational legal battle between her husband and parents over what was framed as "right to die" versus "right to life." the case reached its apex in 2005 when schiavo's feeding tube was removed in accordance with her husband's wishes. 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(2004b). psychosomatic: feminism and the neurological body. durham, n.c.: duke university press. bio anne pollock is an associate professor of science and technology studies in the school of literature, media, and communication at georgia tech.  her research and teaching focus on biomedicine and culture, theories of race and gender, and how science and medicine are mobilized in social justice projects.  she is the author of medicating race: heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference (duke university press, 2012), and is engaged in ongoing projects in three areas: feminist theory and the heart; american health disparities and citizenship claims; and drug discovery efforts by and for the global south (specifically south africa). zylinska image & text      the vanishing object of technology                 joanna zylinska goldsmiths, university of london j.zylinska@gold.ac.uk view the author's notes on the vanishing object of technology. bio joanna zylinska is professor of new media and communications at goldsmiths, university of london.  she is the author and editor of many books on technology, culture, art and ethics, including bioethics in the age of new media (mit press, 2009), life after new media: mediation as a vital process (mit press, 2012, with sarah kember), and minimal ethics for the anthropocene (open humanities press, 2014).  she is also a fine art photographer and a curator.  her current projects involve experimenting with the concept of ‘open curating’ via the open platform photomediations machine and writing a book on nonhuman photography. microsoft word forlano-130-1238-1.docx forlano, l. (2017). data rituals in intimate infrastructures: crip time and the disabled cyborg body as an epistemic site of feminist science catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3 (2), 1-28 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © laura forlano, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article data rituals in intimate infrastructures: crip time and the disabled cyborg body as an epistemic site of feminist science laura forlano illinois institute of technology lforlano@id.iit.edu abstract while much feminist science and technology studies (sts) has focused on science and laboratories as sites of critical engagement, feminism and feminist theory have recognized alternative sites of knowledge production and engagement. these alternative sites of doing science out of feminist theory can sometimes, but not always, turn inward onto a careful reflection on the lived, intimate, and personal experiences of scholars themselves. this essay draws on new materialism and on feminist theories of materiality, temporality, embodiment, and technology in order to analyze the disabled cyborg body as an epistemic site of feminist science. in particular, i analyze my own experience of adopting and using networked technologies—specifically, an insulin pump and glucose monitor—to manage type 1 diabetes and the kinds of practices that i engage in on a daily basis. these intimate human-machine relations, as well as the spatio-temporal practices that are performed along with them, deserve attention in terms of what they can teach us about common discourses around science, innovation, and infrastructure and, ultimately, about ourselves. this article introduces the concept of data rituals as a feminist data practice. data rituals include the quantitative tracking, measurement, and transmission of data 2 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) along with phenomenological lived experiences and labor around these practices. together, these practices expand notions of crip time, illustrating the ways in which the disabled cyborg body is experienced as out of sync with the normative temporal orders of everyday life. i argue that a deeper understanding of the temporal aspects of the lived experience of difference in the case of type 1 diabetes is an important example of doing science out of feminist theory. on thursday, march 30, the alarm clock on my iphone stopped working. i woke up with the sun in my eyes—piercing through the metal slats of the blinds—a few minutes after my alarm was set to ring. i was puzzled. i have been using my iphone as an alarm clock since 2007, when the phone was first released. usually it is on my nightstand but sometimes i even keep it under my pillow. i googled for a fix. i followed various recommendations from tech websites. i closed and re-opened all the apps, i restarted the phone, i tested the various features of the clock app, i upgraded to the latest operating system. nothing seemed to work. if anything, after several hours of troubleshooting, my actions seemed only to cause even more problems. after an appointment with the apple genius bar, i restored the phone from a backup. when i restarted the phone, i found that the data from a few applications had been erased. i also needed to log back into more than 240 applications; for the most part, i had forgotten my usernames and passwords. the alarm clock still did not work. the following day, the dexcom g5 mobile app, which i use to check my blood glucose in real time, began to fail. screeeeech. screeeeech. the app let out a high-pitched sound, crashed, and needed to be 3 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) reset every few minutes. this was distressing. as a type 1 diabetic, i need to check my blood sugar regularly throughout the day. introduction this article begins with a narrative about a clock and its participation in a system of technologies—the other applications, the operating system, the hardware, the satellites, the sensor embedded under my skin, and the transmitter (to name the most obvious digital and material components). the narrative is rich with the many temporalities, materialities, meanings, affects, and contingencies that are ever present in these systems as well as in my lived experience as a disabled cyborg. as such, my body is networked and dependent on a system of technologies that is fragile, vulnerable, and prone to breaking down. like the iphone nestled under my pillow, the disabled cyborg exists within, between, and out of sync with intimate infrastructures in which the world collapses onto the body and, at the same time, the body expands out into the world. from these personal narratives, we can begin to understand, in new and different ways (and in ways more faithful to feminist science), questions about data, infrastructure, and the multiple human experiences of time. the ways in which it is possible to see the self in the system (slavin, 2016). as alondra nelson (2008) writes in her ethnographic work on race and genetic testing, such scalar projects “take form at the interplay of macro-, meso-, and micro-level processes” (p. 776). as a disabled cyborg, two medical devices—the insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor (cgm)—mediate my experience of the world. one might argue that this is no different than wearing eyeglasses, a prosthetic leg, or a hearing aid. but i am a networked hybrid, wirelessly sending and receiving data through a patchwork of analog and digital objects. i cannot go more than an hour without being plugged in. i can be no more than twenty feet from the cgm receiver. such intimacies keep the system functioning, however imperfectly. when i spend too long in the bathroom—for example, when washing my face or brushing my 4 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) teeth—the cgm loses track of me. i wait fifteen minutes and it rediscovers the streams of data flowing from my body. i am not a set of parts fused together as one. rather, i am a living system in which capabilities are distributed and shared in a human-machine collaboration. these devices introduce industrial clock time to my internal biological processes and thereby mediate my social interactions as well. this lived experience allows me to challenge the binaries of nature and culture in line with much feminist science. the insulin pump regulates the amounts and times of day that insulin is circulated into my bloodstream. the cgm provides me with real-time data about my blood glucose. in the healthcare field as well as in the quantified self movement, there is much focus on the transmission, sending, receiving, and protection of data. data is tracked, measured, and transmitted in order to manage chronic disease and disability. it is used to actualize self-knowledge and safeguarded around privacy concerns. drawing on alison kafer’s notion of crip time (2013), i describe the everyday rituals that emerge when living with real-time data around sociocultural norms. this is significant because, as kafer points out, diabetes has been understudied and overlooked in disability studies and, in addition, many diabetics themselves shun the association with disability. while i have adopted the disabled identity in my previous writing on this topic (forlano, 2016), temporality is not one of the most obvious aspects of the lived experience of diabetics. in this article, building on james carey’s ritual view of communications (1988), i advance the concept of data rituals as a feminist data practice—a way of doing science out of feminist theory. data rituals operate at the intersection of qualitative, quantitative, and technocentric ways of knowing. these rituals reintroduce the lived experience of the disabled cyborg to the practice of data gathering, interpretation, and knowing. the labor of caring for and attending to data and devices as a significant part of everyday activities mediates humanmachine relations as well as social relations. exploring data rituals as feminist science complicates and critiques common techno-deterministic 5 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) promises of the control of humans and culture over (and separation from) the environment and nature, which are pervasive in studies of systems, technologies, and infrastructures. this line of reasoning opens up questions around posthuman subjectivities with respect to experiences of time. becoming as knowing differently i began this research in march 2011 but, unlike my other projects, i did not choose it. instead, it chose me. with this investigation, the site was not a scientific laboratory, a design studio, or an urban space: i conducted this research on my own body and in my own domestic space. it followed me wherever i went. i did not have any theories, notes, questions, or arguments. for many months (if not years), i wished it would just go away. march 2011 was the month i received my diagnosis: i had become [type 1] diabetic.1 the exact details of the months and years that followed were frustrating and complex. the diagnosis was alarming. i was born in a macrobiotic “study house” (some might say commune) in brookline, massachusetts. yet here i am with noticeable traces of a somewhat thorny love affair with networked medical devices written all over my body: a round, purplish bruise here; a crusty scar, still clotted with blood, there; a tube protruding from my stomach (in what i like to call a “port” in order to emphasize the cyborg qualities of this existence). nearby is a small, brick-like transmitter about half the size of a box of matches. my original excitement about writing on this topic was to expose the daily comedy around the lived experience of chronic disease and disability. after all, laughter is thought to be therapeutic. i take my own partial, situated (haraway, 1991a), and intersectional (crenshaw, 1991) perspective as a disabled cyborg body as an epistemic site. yet my first attempts to publish on this topic met with resistance. even the most experimental journals and platforms demanded that i write my body out of the narrative. feminist science studies holds space for these concerns 6 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) and perspectives in ways that science turns away from and often outright rejects. according to science, this way of knowing the world differently as a mode of knowledge production is highly suspect. becoming diabetic is a way of knowing the world differently. we must know the world differently in order to design multiple possible alternative futures that advance feminist concerns around social justice. there are many temporal questions suggested by the empirical case of the disabled cyborg as a way of doing science out of feminism. click. click. click. like the clock, these questions are ticking away in the mind during the most mundane moments of everyday life. for example, what kinds of intimate relations are present in the everyday life of the disabled cyborg? how can multiple subjectivities align and realign around networked medical devices? in what ways does the disabled cyborg “keep up or fall behind” around sociocultural norms? in what ways do these spatiotemporal relations traverse different scales and lived realities (pollock & subramaniam, 2016)? how is this knowledge cooperatively and collaboratively produced—by human and nonhuman actors—in everyday interactions and practices? who might benefit if we validate these forms of knowledge? who might be left out? for me, the answers to these questions as well as the knowledge that i gain from reflection is a necessity of living-dying (to trouble the binaries and “stay with the trouble” of life itself) (haraway, 2016). cyborg intimacies science fiction films are rife with accounts of cyborgs, a term that emerged in the 1960s as a blend between cyber and organism. the oxford english dictionary defines cyborg as “a fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body.” here, images of 7 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) humanistic robots and “supercrip” athletes come to mind. yet, while the cyborg has traveled widely in science fiction as a representational, discursive, or linguistic object, feminist scholars argue that there has been little attention to the material-semiotic realities of living as a cyborg. the embodied material-semiotic relationships were intended by haraway’s reframing of the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (haraway, 1991b). she describes three boundaries that are transgressed by the cyborg: human and animal, animal-human (organism) and machine, and physical and nonphysical. according to haraway: from one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a star wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war….from another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. the political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. (pg. 154) despite this reframing and haraway’s desire to overcome all manner of binaries, the cyborg cannot escape racialization and the associations between race, structural inequality and injustice. specifically, alexander weheliye (2014) argues that race has been overlooked in discussions of the cyborg and the posthuman in the humanities and social sciences: the volatile rapport between race and the human is defined above all by two constellations: first, there exists no portion of the modern human that is not subject to racialization, which determines the hierarchical ordering of the homo sapiens species into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans; second, as a result, humanity has held a very different status for the traditions of 8 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) the racially oppressed. (p. 8) in order to account for race in sociotechnical assemblages, weheliye introduces the notion of habeas viscus, which attends to the ways the oppressed occupy “distinct assemblages of what it means to be human in the modern world” and to the importance of miniscule movements, glimmers of hope, scraps of food, the interrupted dreams of freedom found in those spaces deemed devoid of full human life (guantanamo bay, internment camps, maximum security prisons, indian reservations, concentration camps, slave plantations, or colonial outposts, for instance)…habeas viscus, as an idea, networks bodies, forces, velocities, intensities, institutions, interests, ideologies, and desires in racializing assemblages, which are simultaneously territorializing and deterritorializing. (p. 12) weheliye does not specifically use the figure of haraway’s cyborg in his discussion; rather, he draws on rosi braidotti’s notion of the posthuman (2013). while the cyborg is a useful shorthand through which to navigate my own experience, in fact, the technologies i use do not allow me to transcend “normal” human limitations but restore abilities that i previously had. these technologies merely attempt to simulate the work that my pancreas once did on its own. while i do not explicitly address questions of race (or the racial experiences of temporality) in detail my account of the disabled cyborg, implicitly, i am speaking about my own experience as someone who “reads” as white, along with the associated privileges within a society that is infected with deep structural inequalities. at the same time, i believe that my experience of disability and difference aligns with weheliye’s critique. i acknowledge the extreme privileges that i have in reflecting on these experiences from a position of relative power, including a tenured position at a university; health insurance with a preexisting condition (at least for the time being); the finances to be able to afford the thousands of dollars for doctors’ appointments, insulin, medical supplies, and device upgrades that it costs per year to stay alive; 9 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) a committed partner who takes good care of me; an apartment located in a downtown neighborhood in chicago just five minutes’ walking distance from my endocrinologist; and a higher education that demonstrated to my doctor that i was intelligent, responsible, and well-organized enough to manage my condition independently. none of these privileges have been earned through meritocracy; they are the product of structural inequalities that illustrate the benefit of having been born white and growing up in a nice college town in upstate new york. this is very significant, since diabetes disproportionately affects people of color—especially latinx and african americans—and, furthermore, can lead to many other complications and disabilities, such as stroke, heart attack, blindness, or the amputation of a limb. with respect to race, in my previous feminist scholarship and design practice, i have attempted to hack, trouble, and question racial binaries and my own relationships to structural inequality (forlano & halpern, 2016; forlano & jungnickel, 2015). some of these realizations have come more slowly than others. elite university training fosters many interrelated cultures of oppression, based not only on race but also gender, class, ability, sexuality, and age—not to mention speciesism, the overattention to human needs and the human condition. like the words cyborg and posthuman and their critiques, the word intimate has a number of definitions that are relevant to unpacking feminist science. these include associations with related terms such as close, familiar, private, and personal (oxford english dictionary, 2017). it is also used to understand the possession of detailed or thorough knowledge. this term appears frequently in feminist technoscience with respect to its characterization of embodied, located, situated, and multiple sociotechnical and multispecies relations. in donna haraway’s latest book, staying with the trouble, she discusses the making and conjugation of kin with an example about pharmaceuticals that are used for menopause. she states: the relations of intimate [emphasis mine] care yoking together one woman and one dog rampaged virally into all sorts of publics. sheer contagion. companion species infect each other all the time. 10 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) bodily ethical and political obligations are infectious, or they should be. before my dog and i could get out of the story, we were in the nonoptional company of—and accountable to—heifers in labs, beef cattle in feedlots, pregnant women in all sorts of places, daughters and sons and granddaughters and grandsons of once pregnant women, angry and well-informed women’s health movement activists, dogs with heart disease, and bevies of other spayed leaky bitches and their people in vet clinics and on beds. (haraway, 2016, chapter 5, section 4, paragraph 2) according to lucie dalibert, sts has considered the ways in which “tools and technologies shape and (re)configure our actions, intentions, and subjectivities—our lives—they have scarcely accounted for implanted technologies and their ever more intimate [emphasis mine] relations with humans” (2016, p. 2). her study of neuromodulation technologies, which are invisible implants illustrates the importance of the concept of intimacy. specifically, she writes: concerned with the ways in which technological artifacts mediate the relations between humans and their world, the concepts of script and technical mediation are silent about the ways in which these technological artifacts might transform bodies and the relations between someone and his or her body. while they enable us to apprehend how technologies affect our actions in and perceptions of the world, they tend to ignore the matter of intimate human–technology relations: bodies. (p. 9) oudshoorn (2016) draws on feminist studies to give an account of heart defibrillators and the internal forms of vulnerability experienced by hybrid bodies. she discusses the “lived intimate relationships between bodies and technologies” made up of “sensory experiences, material practices, and cartographies of power” (p. 1). these experiences of intimacy described in human-machine relations can also be extended to alternative ways of doing feminist science. for example, in the essay, “a new form of collaboration in cultural anthropology,” the matsutake worlds research group offers an 11 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) alternative mode of doing anthropology that can draw on collaboration for the purpose of understanding into account global, multisited phenomenon. unlike big science, which requires universal, standardized methods, matsutake’s approach allows the project to grow generatively, shift, and expand. the authors write: one way to plot such diversity might be to contrast big-science and intimate-authorship arrangements [emphasis mine]….in practice, a good deal of heterogeneous territory lies between big science and creative authorship. the matsutake worlds research group is an experiment in making one piece of this territory livable. (choy et al., 2009) they enact this experiment through joint fieldwork, simultaneous analysis, and collaborative writing. in my engagement with cyborg intimacies as ways of doing science out of feminist theory, i attend to the visual, temporal, and material-semiotic aspects of my lived experiences. one aspect of material-semiotics that is particularly relevant is my active participation in processes of calculation, which require access to, interpretation of, and even sharing of real-time data. quantifying multiple selves, against our will many recent empirical accounts about big data, the quantified self, and the internet of things from both academic research and the mainstream media focus primarily on the transmission, storage, and analysis of large quantities of data. with type 1 diabetes, measuring, counting, and tracking became a necessary part of everyday life. but, for me, they were not a welcome part. more recently, cultural anthropologists and qualitative researches have turned their attention to gaining a deeper understanding of the sociocultural, political and economic aspects of self-tracking and sensors (dow schüll, 2016a, 2016b, 2017; howard, 2015; neff & nafus, 2016). in order to describe the more qualitative ways these data practices are 12 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) being experienced, researchers have developed a rich language around thick data (wang, 2013), the qualified self (humphreys, forthcoming) and, lived data (kaziunas, lindtner, ackerman, & lee, 2017). here, carey’s ritual view of communication is valuable for understanding differences between the lived experiences around data (rather than merely the transmission of data). he writes: a ritual view of communication is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but the maintenance of society in time (even if some find this maintenance characterized by domination and therefore illegitimate); not the act of imparting information or influence but the creation, representation, and celebration of shared even if illusory beliefs. if a transmission view of communication centers on the extension of messages across geography for purposes of control, a ritual view centers on the sacred ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality. (carey, 1988) building on this definition, i argue that data rituals allow for the creation of human and nonhuman fellowship as a feminist data practice in line with related modes of engagement such as feminist data visualization (d’ignazio & klein, 2016) and feminist human-computer interaction (bardzell, 2010). clock time and crip time in fall 2013, i opened a flat, white, rectangular box with a minimalist design, the kind that usually contains an apple device. the experience screams: “designed by apple in california. assembled in china.” it’s the embodiment of high-tech, silicon valley culture. inside was not a new iphone or a red ipod, but an upgrade for a medical device: the minimed 530g, an insulin pump produced by the medical technology company medtronic. while these technologies differ from those commonly invoked in silicon valley rhetoric and innovation discourses, they are deliberately marketed, packaged, and branded in order to fit in with other high-tech 13 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) products. as a researcher of emerging technologies, i am interested in the ways in which technological language, meanings, and metaphors— such as a particular white box and its telltale sans serif font—are translated and replicated throughout seemingly disparate realms of society. shortly after receiving the box, i received an email from medtronic’s head of customer experience: earlier today, my team received positive comments on the packaging for our new minimed 530g with enlite from a customer on twitter, “nice set with the packaging of the new pumps @mdtdiabetes! it reminded me of opening a new apple device.” this compliment came after we worked to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and understand the overwhelming experience they had opening their first shipment from us. (j. anglin, personal communication, nov. 7, 2013). the minimed 530g—approved by the food and drug administration (fda) on september 26, 2013—is a system of technologies that includes the pump, a cgm, a glucose meter, test strips, and software. the cgm is comprised of a sensor, a transmitter, and a receiver. the glucose meter communicates wirelessly with the pump and the transmitter communicates wirelessly with the receiver. while medtronic markets its own proprietary system that includes a cgm, i use a monitor that is produced by another company, dexcom. the two proprietary systems do not interoperate, except through third-party applications that allow the uploading of data from both devices. while insulin pumps have been used to manage type 1 diabetes since the early 1980s, they often go unnoticed in everyday life; today’s models are relatively small and resemble other mobile technologies— many people do not want to call attention to their medical conditions. according to the american diabetes association, an insulin pump is: an insulin-delivering device about the size of a deck of cards that can be worn on a belt or kept in a pocket. an insulin pump connects to narrow, flexible plastic tubing that ends with a needle 14 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) inserted just under the skin. users set the pump to give a steady trickle or basal amount of insulin continuously throughout the day. pumps release bolus doses of insulin (several units at a time) at meals and at times when blood glucose is too high, based on programming done by the user. (american diabetes association, 2015) the first wearable insulin pumps—invented in 1976 by dean kamen— were very large and impractical (deka research, 2017). the minimed insulin pump is produced by medtronic, a company that was founded as a medical equipment repair shop in 1949 and soon after created the first wearable, battery-operated pacemaker. in 1979 the company began to develop plans for an insulin pump when it was learned that heart problems are linked to diabetes; in 1983, it created the first minimed pump. in the past thirty years, medtronic has made many incremental improvements to both the software and physical design of the pump. these upgrades include the ability to detach the pump from the body temporarily without having to completely change the infusion set (the tubes that connect the pump to the body). in 1999 the fda approved the first physician-use glucose monitoring system, which relies on inserting a sensor into the body (medtronic, 2015). the minimed 530g is the first insulin pump in the united states that can be called an “automatic pancreas” (also known as an “artificial pancreas” or “smart pump”). its defining feature is that it can automatically shut itself off when one of its monitored biometrics drops below a set threshold: for example, in the middle of the night. the menus—bold black lettering on a glowing green background, navigated by buttons marked with up and down arrows—seem archaic when compared to today’s interactive touch screens and voice-controlled artificial intelligence. they are reminiscent of a 1980s casio calculator watch. but the pump itself is actually a sophisticated computer that can wirelessly receive information about blood glucose from a special meter and calculate the proper amount of insulin to administer. in order to “deliver” insulin, it turns a small screw inside the device, which pushes 15 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) the insulin through a long tube that has been inserted into the body. with only five buttons, it is simple enough for a diabetic of any age to use. my insulin pump is on clock time. it leaks insulin into my body at set times and in set amounts: 12 am, 3 am, 6 am, 4:30 pm. when i eat, another set of times, conversions, and amounts. when i make adjustments, another set. according to these settings, the insulin remains active in my body for precisely four hours. here are two examples of how the clock time of devices interrupts lived experience. on march 16 at 7:49 pm, my pump displayed a “low reservoir” alert. at 11 pm, when i returned home from dinner at an italian restaurant with a new writing group, i checked to find that only 2.9 units of insulin remained, which would last just over five hours, according to the pump’s settings. i decided to refill and reset the pump before i went to sleep rather than getting up in the middle of the night or very, very early. my glucose monitor, on the other hand, announces with a highpitched alert that it will need to be reset in two hours. never mind that i am teaching on wednesdays and am in the middle of a lecture in my designing futures class. i dismiss it but again, about ten minutes later, a shrill beeping sound and no way to silence it. it seems to sound louder and louder every time, unaware of its surroundings. in contrast to clock time or lived experience, according to kafer, there are several reasons for developing the notion of crip time. for example, the medical field frequently describes disability in relation to time as well as duration of symptoms. yet there are also other, more generative reasons to explore crip time in order to understand different experiences of time. this might mean expecting things to take more time due to slower physical mobility, or requiring more time on a test. kafer (2013) argues that crip time is in fact “a reorientation to time” characterized by the need for flexibility, since the speed of everyday life is determined by normative 16 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) bodies. “rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds” (p. 45). data rituals and “fitting in with the flow of things” like crip time’s proverbial bending of the clock, data rituals envision the ways in which both medical devices and the broader society might more deliberately accommodate disabled bodies and related socio-cultural contexts. in this section, i will describe the social practices and my own lived experiences around tracking, measurement, and calculation over the past five years. during this time, i learned to manage a complex mesh of calculations, routines, and relationships that make life possible—and sometimes quite impossible. these narratives represent different phases and contexts with distinct features that configure unique temporal relations between people, technologies, and spaces. briefly, these can be characterized as: pre-insulin-pump (spring 2012 to summer 2013), pump and cgm device (fall 2013 to spring 2016) and pump and cgm iphone application (summer 2016 to present). in the pre-pump phase, it was necessary to use both a glucose meter to check my blood glucose (bg) and an insulin pen in order to administer the correct dosage at mealtime. in the pump and cgm device phase, i could check the monitor and administer the insulin via the pump. finally, in the current phase with the pump and cgm iphone application, my husband can also access the data from the cgm in real time. waiting, interruptions, delays, and cold pizza once, when dining out with a group of (newish) european friends, i waited for the food to arrive, sized it up quickly so as not to attract attention, did some calculations in my head, and rushed off to the restroom. there i tested my blood sugar with the glucose monitor. i took a small test strip out of a plastic canister and inserted it into the monitor. next, i pushed a small blue lancet into the lancing 17 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) device, replaced the cap, and pierced my left pinky. now i had the information that i needed in order to determine the correct amount of insulin to administer: my blood glucose and the amount of carbohydrates i was planning to eat. i was always good at math in high school, but i was an awful bank teller and cocktail waitress, often coming up short at the end of my shift. for me, doing calculations on the fly did not come easily. i stood in the bathroom stall, trying to balance a glucose monitor, the insulin pen, and my iphone while repeating my calculations until i was sure that i had reached the right result. then, to inject the insulin, i took the protective seal off of the needle and attached the needle to the pen. next, i took out an alcohol swab and wiped the area of my stomach where i was planning to inject the insulin. finally, i lifted my shirt while twisting the cap of the insulin pen. i returned to the table having administered what i hoped was the correct dosage. meanwhile, my friends were gritting their teeth and watching the pizza grow cold. sociocultural norms, temporal patterns, and rituals around food and eating are very specific, relational, and situated (suchman, 1987) with respect to the type of food, time of day, and context (including the diner’s gender, race, age, and class). it is difficult when one falls out of sync. in this context, prior to adopting the insulin pump and cgm, crip time refers to the slowing down, interrupting, and violating of the social norms around dining in order to accommodate processes of measurement and calculation. by abruptly leaving the table as soon as the food arrived, i had violated a social norm that indicates that when the food arrives, it is customary to begin eating together as a group, sometimes after uttering a culturally appropriate phrase such as “bon appétit.” here, data rituals are the embodied processes—inserting, pushing, holding, balancing, lifting— required to access the data, create meaning around it, and act on it in the context of eating a meal. when using medical devices such as insulin 18 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) pens, glucose meters, and lancets along with everyday digital technologies such as iphones, one is managing a complex set of interactions that are required in order to proceed with the meal. i was trying to manage these interactions accurately while feeling rushed and stressed. i wanted to complete these tasks quickly so as not to delay the meal further and attract attention. this attention to the affective state around data and calculation exemplifies how these mundane, everyday activities can be understood as feminist data practices. as ways of doing science out of feminist theory, we can develop deeper understandings of the temporal experiences of difference in order to allow for flexibility around social norms. to avoid these social interruptions, i eventually developed some shortcuts and skipped some of the doctor-recommended steps. instead, i relied on my own situated knowledge of cleanliness, safety, and risk. for example, to save time, i stopped using alcohol swabs altogether and only replaced needles once a day (rather than every time i needed to inject insulin). both steps are time-consuming and awkward. in particular, many public bathrooms are not well suited for procedures of this kind, because they are often poorly lit and lack clean flat surfaces (especially within private stalls). since these processes require so many different devices and parts, it is also not unusual to drop things onto the floor. this is especially gross in a dimly lit bar with purple mood lighting (likely to intentionally discourage needle users of another kind) or an airport bathroom. due to bad lighting, i have often stabbed myself in the finger with the needle or dropped the pink plastic cap on the grimy floor with my pants down around my knees. trying to pick up small parts while simultaneously holding my pants and not touching anything became something of an art—one for which no doctor, nurse, or medical professional ever prepared me. eventually i started doing my injections under the dining table, but this was really only possible if i was wearing a skirt. now, with the insulin pump and cgm, i can check my blood glucose on the monitor screen, glance down at my pump before i eat, 19 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) and administer the correct dose of insulin without getting up from the table or managing many different devices and parts. technology “fits in” in public settings much better than needles, vials, and other medical devices. most people scarcely notice when i take out my insulin pump and begin quickly punching the buttons. in the worst case, i am mistaken for a very important doctor (which i am, but not that kind of doctor) or, even, a kind of modern steampunk luddite. some of the calculations (namely, the insulin to carbohydrate ratios) are built into the device so i only need to compute the number of carbohydrates that i am planning to eat (rather than needing to multiply them). in addition, i can manage this process more easily with only three buttons that i can press with my thumb using one hand. this is much faster, but still requires some thought and takes my gaze away from the conversation. slowing down/speeding up i chew very slowly when my blood sugar is too high. i try to delay every bite for just a few minutes. i want to give the insulin more time to kick in. this can happen when i’ve just had breakfast or, really, for any number of reasons that can cause blood sugar to spike upward: drinking coffee, exercising, coming down with a cold, being stressed, having your period. insulin works better when you allow at least fifteen minutes before eating. but, much like my slow chewing, this is a noticeable interruption in a meal. on the other hand, when my blood sugar is too low, i eat more quickly—starting with fruit or anything that is high glycemic (absorbed quickly) and high in carbohydrates. i frantically grab for orange juice, lemonade, or even, in desperation, a coke. in the worst case, i can take four orange-flavored glucose tablets, but i prefer to avoid them. i detest their chalky texture on my teeth like the interruption described in the previous section, my need to slow down or speed up based on my bg (or, even abstain from eating 20 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) completely) can sometimes feel like an awkward pause, an inconsiderate manner or an inability to “fit in” with the flow of things. when i check my bg on my monitor, i can see the speed at which it is rising or falling. if it is rising quickly, i might try to eat more slowly. as described in the narrative above, in this case, crip time denotes a slowing down of social norms around meals—for example, during a one-hour lunch meeting, if my dining companion has already finished their meal but i have only eaten a few bites. in this case, the data rituals relate to checking the data and having a sharp awareness of the speed at which i am chewing. while movements such as slow food might celebrate slowing down, these breaks in daily interactions can also signal a misunderstanding of social cues around dining. in the united states, a professional lunch meeting is often limited to an hour. the inability to eat quickly (in order to avoid an additional spike in blood glucose) can result in anxiety around not being able to keep up with professional norms. on the other hand, if my bg is falling very quickly, sometimes, i am quite fearful that it will drop much too low. i will become sweaty, uncomfortable, confused, and pale. i hope that drinking or eating something high glycemic will allow me to recover quickly enough to carry on a conversation without causing attention. whereas, in some cases, crip time can be about slowing down or needing more time, this example illustrates that it can also be applied to speeding things up. of course, if my bg does suddenly go much too low, sometimes i need to rest for a few minutes, an hour or even several hours, due to feeling exhausted by the extreme fluctuation. this results in an interruption or a need to slow down again, which unveils how crip time and data rituals are configured differently in different situations and contexts. things that go “buzz” and flash in the night in may 2016, i upgraded to the latest version of the cgm, which connects the data from the transmitter directly to an iphone application. the integration of the data into an existing device means that the data 21 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) and alerts are quieter, less noticeable, and hidden. the previous cgm device had loud alarms and buzzers that would go off to signify low or high bg, low battery, sensor disconnection, and the need for sensor replacement. these alerts were particularly intrusive in public settings (faculty meetings, advising meetings, class sessions, conferences) as well as during the middle of the night. one of the more distressing features of the system is its disruption of sleep cycles. while i have always been a very good sleeper, the cgm has consistently interrupted my ability to sleep through the night (as well as my husband’s). some nights, the cgm would repeatedly go off because my “number” was too low. this happened even if it was only slightly low (or even incorrect altogether). other nights, it would go off because my bg was very, very low, prompting the need to chew glucose tablets or get up to drink juice. here is an example: the other night, i found myself standing in the kitchen drinking juice in the middle of the night in order to keep my monitor from continually beeping. it signals that my blood sugar is 52, which is very, very low. too low. “it is 4:11 am and my monitor needs juice,” i think to myself. but, i am feeling just fine. i check my blood sugar with a glucose meter to verify that it is low. at 4:30 am, it reads 65. while 65 is indeed a low reading, there are other times in which the application might signal a low bg but, when i test with a meter, my actual bg is twenty to sixty points higher; there had been no need for the device to wake me up in the middle of the night. on other nights, the cgm alerts me that my “number” is too high—–usually after heavier meals eaten late at night or meals that combine a lot of protein or fat with a lot of carbohydrates or sugar—meaning that i need to administer additional insulin via the pump while squinting, bleary-eyed, at the glowing green screen. sometimes the cgm wakes my husband but not me, and he crawls out of bed to pour me half a cup of orange juice. the iphone application version of the cgm allows more customization of the loudness, type of alert, and frequency of alert. while 22 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) there are still some annoying features—like the fact that it makes a faint buzzing sound (rather than merely flashing an image of a drop of blood as in the previous version)2 if you do not input new bg data every twelve hours—it fades into the background more easily. it limits the number of devices i need to carry around and calls less attention to my disability. here, crip time is about sleepless nights and the data rituals around attending to the maintenance, repair, and care of the devices (forlano, 2017). it is about a temporality that considers the calibration of internal processes with machine processes. rather than clock time or lived time, the data creates a liminal time that mediates bodies, data, and technologies in the middle of the night.3 with frequent sleep interruptions, i find myself irritable and have difficulty concentrating the following day. love notes made of (blood) sugar a final temporal feature of the cgm iphone application version worth discussing is the availability of real-time data sharing. while the previous device was typically in my control—for example, in my purse or pocket— now my husband can check the application on his phone. when my bg is too low, it affects my mood and my ability to get through everyday tasks and situations, such as walking quickly down the street in a hurry to get somewhere, doing household chores, exercising, or working. my husband’s access to the data allows him to participate more actively in the practice of care (mol, 2008). for example, soon after we started using this feature, he spontaneously texted me with the following note: “bg holding @ 134.” i was sitting nearby reading, in the same room, but this act of care was about much more than the transmission of data or information. similarly, sometimes on a busy day when my husband cannot reach me by phone, he can check the application and “see” one measure of how i am doing. he might text me to let me know that he is checking. in this example, crip time can be shared time: the creation of empathy, community and care through data rituals of a partner, friend, or 23 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) family member checking in on a loved one. in this case, rather than an isolating disjuncture in everyday life, crip time can be a way of creating a shared experience or worlding (haraway, 2011) together. in addition, data-sharing practices distribute the invisible labor of constantly checking bg. while the sharing feature could be viewed as an attempt to control or surveil the day-to-day life of a diabetic—for example, scolding a person for eating something that might have caused blood sugar to rise too quickly—in my experience, it is more of a demonstration of everyday care. conclusion this article argues that lived experience of type 1 diabetes—partial, situated, and embodied —can be understood as a feminist data practice. specifically, this article expands on the notion of crip time in order to understand four different ways time is experienced around data practices: slowing down, speeding up, liminal time, and sharing time. i introduce the concept of data rituals to describe how the transmission of data is not (or not only) all that is required to engage in everyday activities such as eating, sleeping, and being in the world. instead, i describe the day-today rituals required to participate in social norms, care for oneself, rest and recuperate, and even maintain relationships with loved ones. this subtle awareness of the temporal constraints and affordances of disability allows for the rethinking of existing categories, a way of doing science out of feminist theory. in writing this, i have expanded my own understandings of the experience of difference—but, after nearly two months, i still have not been able to fix the alarm clock on my iphone. notes 1 in fact, my original diagnosis was type 2. it was not until july 2012— nearly eighteen months later—that i received the type 1 diagnosis. 24 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) 2 this feature has been fixed in the latest version. now, rather than buzzing, it merely lights up the screen every few minutes with an alert. while less intrusive, sometimes the screen itself is enough to wake me in a dark room. 3 before using the cgm, i often woke up in the middle of the night alone, drenched in sweat, and too weak to get out of bed for juice. when bg is too low or too high, diabetics face a risk of coma. for nearly two years, i went to sleep just hoping that i would wake up in the morning. references american diabetes association. (2015). how do insulin pumps work? arlington, va: american diabetes association. retrieved from http://www.diabetes.org/living-with-diabetes/treatment-andcare/medication/insulin/how-do-insulin-pumps-work.html. bardzell, s. (2010). feminist hci: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design. paper presented at the proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, atlanta, ga. braidotti, r. (2013). the posthuman. boston, ma: polity. carey, j.w. (1988). communication as culture: essays on media and society. new york, ny: unwin hyman, inc. choy, t.k, faier, l., hathaway, m.j., inoue, m., satsuka, s., & tsing, a. (2009). a new form of collaboration in cultural anthropology: matsutake worlds. american ethnologist, 36(2), 380–403. crenshaw, k. (1991). mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. stanford law review, 43(6), 1241–1299. 25 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) d’ignazio, c., & klein, l.f. (2016). feminist data visualization. paper presented at the vis4dh: 2016 workshop on visualization for the digital humanities, baltimore, md. dalibert, l. (2016). living with spinal cord stimulation: doing embodiment and incorporation. science, technology, & human values, 41(4), 635– 659. deka research. (2017). about us. manchester, nh: deka research. retrieved from http://www.dekaresearch.com/about-deka/. dow schüll, n. (2016a). data for life: wearable technology and the design of self-care. biosocieties, 11(3), 317-333. dow schüll, n. (2016b). sensor technology and the time-series self. continent, 5(1), 24–29. ——— (2017). our metrics, ourselves. public books, http://www.publicbooks.org/our-metrics-ourselves/. forlano, l. (2017). maintaining, repairing and caring for the multiple subject. continent, 6(1), 30–35. forlano, l. (2016). hacking the feminist disabled body. journal of peer production, 8, http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-8-feminism-andunhacking/peer-reviewed-papers/hacking-the-feminist-disabled-body/. forlano, l., & halpern, m. (2016). reimagining work: entanglements and frictions around future of work narratives. fibreculture, 26, 32-59. forlano, l., & jungnickel, k. (2015). hacking binaries/hacking hybrids: understanding the black/white binary as a socio-technical practice. ada, 26 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) 6, http://adanewmedia.org/2015/01/issue6-forlano-jungnickel/. haraway, d.j. (2016). staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press. ——— (2011). sf: science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, so far. ada, 3, http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway/. ——— (1991a). simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york, ny: routledge. ——— (1991b). a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialistfeminism in the late twentieth century. in simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature (pp. 149–181). new york: routledge. howard, p.n. (2015). pax technica: how the internet of things may set us free or lock us up. new haven, ct: yale university press. humphreys, l. (in press). the qualified self: social media and the cataloguing of everyday life. cambridge, ma: mit press. kafer, a. (2013). feminist, queer, crip. bloomington, in: indiana university press. kaziunas, e., lindtner, s., ackerman, m.s., & lee, j.m. (2017). lived data: tinkering with bodies, code and care work. human–computer interaction, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2017.1307749. medtronic. (2015). innovation milestones. dublin, ireland: medtronic. retrieved from: http://www.medtronicdiabetes.net/about-medtronicinnovation/milestone-timeline. mol, a. (2008). the logic of care: health and the problem of patient 27 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) choice. new york, ny: routledge. neff, g., & nafus, d. (2016). self-tracking. cambridge, ma: mit press. nelson, a. (2008). bio science: genetic genealogy testing and the pursuit of african ancestry. social studies of science, 38(5), pp. 759–783. oudshoorn, n. (2016). the vulnerability of cyborgs: the case of icd shocks. science, technology, & human values, 41(5), 767–792. oxford dictionaries. (2017). intimate. oxford english dictionary. retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/intimate pollock, a., & subramaniam, b.. (2016). resisting power, retooling justice: promises of feminist postcolonial technosciences. science, technology & human values, 41(6), 1-16. slavin, k. (2016). design as participation. journal of design and science, 1(1), https://www.pubpub.org/pub/design-as-participation?context=jods. suchman, l. (1987). plans and situated actions. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. wang, t. (2013). big data needs thick data. ethnography matters, 13, http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2013/05/13/big-data-needs-thickdata/. weheliye, a.g. (2014). habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. durham, nc: duke university press. 28 forlano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) bio laura forlano is a social scientist and design researcher. she is an associate professor of design at the institute of design and affiliated faculty in the college of architecture at the illinois institute of technology, where she is director of the critical futures lab. her research is focused on the intersection between design and emerging technologies, material practices and the future of cities. she is co-editor with marcus foth, christine satchell and martin gibbs of from social butterfly to engaged citizen (mit press 2011). she received her ph.d. in communications from columbia university. andrews   article    black feminism’s minor empiricism: hurston, combahee, and the experience of evidence     lindsey andrews duke university lindsey.andrews@duke.edu as a major result of the historical realities which brought us enslaved to this continent, we have been kept separated in every way possible from organized intellectual work. [...] what our multilayered oppression does not explain are the ways in which we have created and maintained our own intellectual traditions as black women, without either the recognition or support of white-male society." -gloria t. hull and barbara smith, all of the women are white, all of the blacks are men, but some of us are brave: black women's studies "we smile and we tell [our questioner something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn't know what he is missing. [...] the negro offers a feather-bed resistance. that is, we let the probe enter but it never comes out. it gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries." -zora neale hurston, zora neale hurston: folklore, memoirs, and other writings when zora neale hurston completed her first ethnography, mules and men, it did not look much like the work of franz boas's other students. although boas famously made cultural rather than biological (racial) difference the analytic focus of anthropology, he nevertheless wanted to understand culture scientifically. throughout the first half of the twentieth century, as an idea of "science" as methodical and objective gained cultural cachet, the social sciences increasingly modeled themselves on the procedures and values of the natural sciences.1  boas advocated this scientific turn for anthropology, developing an empirical approach to ethnographic inquiry grounded in the same "dispassionate" standpoint imagined to govern natural science inquiry.2 his most famous student, margaret mead, evinced the anthropological goal of disinterested empiricism when she described her first book, coming of age in samoa, as a "human experiment," conducted in the "controlled conditions" of "primitive culture," modeled after and comparable to a laboratory experiment (1928/2001, p. 7). in mules and men, hurston made no such claims. her standpoint was undeniably passionate, her ethnography overtly interested. while the question of a feminist standpoint, particularly a black feminist standpoint, would not become central to academic debate until almost half a century later, hurston's ethnographic work was inconsonant with dominant white and masculinist scientific and social scientific epistemologies of the mid-twentieth century. as part of her anthropological training at barnard college in the 1930s, hurston (1935/1995) returned to her hometown of eatonville, florida, to collect the negro folklore that had given her a "love of talk and song" (p. 13). mules and men documents over seventy examples of stories about brer rabbit and john henry, gator and god, as well as accounts of numerous hoodoo rituals. in the text, hurston described herself as looking through "the spy-glass of anthropology" (p. 9), but she did not observe at a remove. throughout, hurston emphasized her shared blackness with the community she studied, marking a difference from other anthropologists in the boasian tradition, even feminists such as margaret mead. where mead's work was full of explanations about comparative adolescent development and meanings of social practices, hurston's early work largely avoided causal explanations or political imperatives. instead of "objectively" imparting cultural "information" and "facts" to her reader, hurston used vernacular black english as the language of both the tales and her own writing in order to recount her decidedly sexed experience of folk-telling and listening. there existed few retrospective conclusions in her text; instead, the performance and reproduction of experience were primary, and knowledge was not the result of accumulated evidence, but embodied in experience itself, constantly (re)produced. perhaps for these reasons, as well as the general exclusion of black women from dominant scientific and social scientific practices until late in the century, hurston's ethnographic work is rarely cited for its contributions to empirical method or scientific epistemologies, and is instead most often taken up for its literary and historical significance.3 even though she did not directly call for a black feminist empiricism, hurston developed an approach that countered dominant, exoticizing, and primitivizing anthropological practices of her moment. almost fifty years later, concurrent with hurston's rediscovery by second wave black feminists, the first book dedicated exclusively to black women's studies was published. it explicitly articulated the urgent need for such an approach in order to refute the racialized and gendered manifestations of dominant social science knowledge in social and legal policy. the essay collection, titled all of the women are white, all of the blacks are men, but some of us are brave: black women's studies (1982), both made a claim for the importance of hurston's contributions to black feminist thought and also imagined a reconfigured social science practice that centralized the experiences of black women.4 but despite this simultaneity, the more than forty mentions of hurston—a number greater than any other single figure in the text—still refer primarily to her 1937 novel, their eyes were watching god.  even among black feminists of that generation, hurston's contributions to empiricist methodologies remained tacit. both hurston's rediscovery and the publication of but some of us are brave were the result of black feminist literary investments. shortly after alice walker helped bring hurston back to cultural prominence,5 the combahee river collective, a group of self-identified black lesbian feminists, made publishing black women's writing a central focus of their study group, which operated from 1974-1980 (harris, 2009; norman, 2007). the collective's "black feminist statement," first published in zillah eisenstein's (1978) capitalist patriarchy and the case for socialist feminism, was republished in the collection, and one of the statement's primary authors, barbara smith, served as an editor of the book. for the next thirty years, the statement stood as a foundational articulation of black feminism. in it, the collective detailed their development from an ad hoc political group for black women dissatisfied with existing organizations into a study group focused on analyzing the specific life conditions of black lesbians operating at the juncture of "interlocking" systems of race, gender, class, and sexual oppression (combahee, 1982). the statement offered the first use of the term "identity politics," and also laid the theoretical ground for both the analytic of "intersectionality" and a specifically black feminist standpoint, which would become two signal and entangled contributions of black feminism to feminist epistemology and social science practice, altering the terrain of feminist standpoint theory through an intersectional imperative.6 despite this, combahee's statement, like hurston's work, has been considered almost exclusively outside the purview of scientific epistemology, understood primarily instead as a political document. this elision is somewhat surprising considering that combahee's statement helped pave the way for black feminism's contributions to feminist standpoint theories, which have been crucial for revising and expanding methods in both the sciences and social sciences, demonstrating how those fields remain inextricable from politics. several scholars have noted combahee's direct engagement with scientific themes—including their critique of the legacies of biological determinism and their activism against technoscientific innovations that pathologized and circumscribed the lives of women of color.7 yet, combahee's account of experience as epistemological, as itself a form of empiricist thought, has not been considered in critical relation to the evidentiary demands of contemporary knowledge-production in the sciences and social sciences. in what follows, however, i argue that combahee and hurston challenged the epistemological structure of dominant (white, masculinist) science by deploying not only a distinctive black feminist standpoint, but also an alternative empiricism grounded in the aesthetic values inhered in the lived experience of blackness and femininity. they developed what i call a "minor empiricism," which rejects the "positivism" that elizabeth grosz (1993) has derisively described as the approach of contemporary social sciences, a positivism characterized by datafication, information production, and technicality. a number of minor empiricisms emerged over the course of the twentieth century to contest dominant scientific assumptions and practices.8 although minor empiricisms, like empiricism more generally, produce knowledge from the senses, they do not take the organization of the senses, and especially the privileging of vision, as given for converting perception to knowledge. nor do they assume the value-neutrality of machine mediation and quantification.9 minor empiricisms, instead, reflexively constitute or reorganize the senses as they experience sensation. in using the term "minor" to denote these epistemologies, i follow the lead of contemporary scholars interested in the intersections of race, aesthetics, and epistemology, such as josé muñoz (1999) and fred moten (2003), who draw on philosophers gilles deleuze and felix guattari's (1986) concept of the "minor" as an aesthetic mode with epistemological and aesthetic force. according to deleuze, minor literature is tasked with using a "bastard language" to produce a "minor people, eternally minor, taken up on the task of becoming-revolutionary" (deleuze, 1998, p. 5). the "eternal" temporality of the minor—a non-teleological temporality in which the experience of minority is perpetuated rather than resolving into a major form—suggests that minor experience functions rather than explains; it "matters" (in physical and epistemological senses) in excess of isolatable (taxonomic, quantifiable) meaning. attention to the experience of the literary composition of a minor language—an experience found in both writing and reading—gives one way of making links among a submerged genealogy of minor empiricisms, and in particular, black feminist empiricism. feminist anthropologist kamala visweswaran (1994) initiated consideration of the relationships between the literary and the scientific in hurston's work, arguing that hurston's blurring of the fictional and the ethnographic, as well as the autobiographical and the novelistic, served as an early feminist intervention in the increasingly scientized field of anthropology, offering "an implicit critique of positivist assumptions" (p. 23).10 rather than focusing on the fictive and representational aspects of hurston's work, however, i argue that by bringing hurston into conversation with combahee, we can see the ways in which the particular stylistic and compositional features of black feminism's minor empiricism offer an alternative empiricist epistemology. focusing on literary composition, rather than representation, highlights the ways in which these thinkers have been able to reject the temporality of science that stills the object of inquiry through vision and fixes it in time through taxonomy and teleological developmental narratives. by deploying black english and what combahee (1978/1982) calls "black women's style" as the formal grounds for their empiricism, these thinkers brought to science what moten (2003) has called "the aesthetics of the black radical tradition." these aesthetics emerge from black culture to produce "blackness" as an "ongoing performance" characterized by an "improvisational immanence...a disruptive surprise" that is always material and epistemological, requiring a revision of the values through which we live and think (p. 163, 210). participating in this often unseen tradition, hurston and combahee took blackness itself (in multiple valences, physical and cultural) as an epistemological virtue, and mobilized aesthetic values such as opacity, indiscernibility, improvisation, and flux in order to compose an alternative scientific legacy that does not primarily value experience retrospectively as the "evidence" of/for knowledge and expertise, but instead values it as the ongoing condition of thought, as immanent, performative, embodied knowledge. in what follows, i trace the ways in which hurston's and combahee's thought critiqued the value of positivist empirical evidence and in doing so composed an alternative science. i first outline the role of minor empiricisms in intervening against twentieth-century positivism as well as the specific role of black feminism's minor empiricism in relation to feminist scientific interventions. i then explore how attention to literary history, narrative temporality, and linguistic epistemology—especially with regards to hurston's black vernacular novel, their eyes were watching god—helps to clarify the values underpinning the seemingly illegible history of an alternative empiricism deployed through black english and what combahee called "black women's style." building on this performative aesthetic understanding of empiricism, i show how black feminist empiricism is especially useful for understanding the problematic interface between science and law—often negotiated through social science analyses—that has tended to circumscribe and pathologize the lives of black women. finally, i highlight how understanding both the literary and the empiricist as modes of temporal composition enables us to see one of black feminism's most crucial scientific interventions: imagining a scientific temporality immanent to experience. thus, we can see how black feminism has developed, through literary performance, new empiricist methods and possibilities for the study and production of social life. the rise of positivism and feminist interventions the twentieth-century dominance of positivist scientific values and their application in the social sciences was not the predetermined effect of empiricism's philosophical emergence. despite early twentieth-century anti-positivist movements, by the mid-twentieth century, positivist empiricism was firmly established as the epistemological underpinning for most institutional science.  positivism's institutional entrenchment can be attributed to the early twentieth-century rise of scientific technicality, expertise culture, and the pedagogical popularization of the idea of a "method" shared by all the sciences (porter, 2009; rudolph, 2005). even though natural and physical scientists rejected the applicability of the so-called "scientific method" (invented by john dewey) to their laboratory practices, the professional publications of science began to demand organization that resembled exactly what harvard scientists, describing mid-century science education in 1946, derisively called the "tabular progression" of the "scientific method," which was often at odds with more ad hoc research practices (as cited in porter, 2009, p. 341). as the social sciences aspired to the authority of scientific "expertise," they based their data collection and analytic practices on the highly quantitative and machine-mediated models employed for natural and physical science research, deploying those methods as evidence of their "objectivity": code for both technicality and value neutrality (porter, 2009, p. 305). in short, they evinced a positivist approach to the sciences of social life. this conception also began to pervade the legal sphere, as technically mediated and quantified "empirical evidence" increasingly became the primary form of juridical evidence.11 the imposition of "value neutral" knowledge—which is to say, largely white and masculinist science—on all aspects of social life often had pernicious effects on the lives of women and people of color, especially at the intersection of those identities. women of color in particular bore the brunt of the legal and policy spheres' dependence on positivist empiricism. they often constituted the objects of biomedically justified research and punishments (involving, for example, sterilization), and were the primary sources of support for communities targeted by highly technical and often race-based forensic techniques and discriminatory social policies.12 this paper reads hurston's and combahee's work as evidence of a twentieth-century minor empiricism that refused the conversion of experience into "knowledge" understood as "information." in addition to rethinking the positivist legacy of science, this reading also has important implications for contemporary feminist theory, and in particular its rethinking of science. standpoint theory, as the primary ground of feminist scientific interventions, has taken disciplinary science and social science, especially at their intersection with law and policy, as vital political battlegrounds in need of epistemological correctives. as sandra harding (2004a) notes, "standpoint theory challenged the assumption [... that] politics can only obstruct and damage the production of scientific knowledge" (p. 1). instead, through the creative "confla[tion] of fields standardly kept distinct," it demonstrated that "mainstream, purportedly only descriptive and explanatory, theories about science [were] also—perhaps always—normative" (p. 3, 2). in harding's account, however, the primary function of standpoint has been dialectical: "remed[ying...] the inadequate philosophies of science, epistemologies, and methodologies justifying and guiding mainstream research" (p. 6) while aspiring to incorporation within them. for example, she argues that one of the contributions of feminist standpoint has been to correct and augment the existing epistemic virtue of "objectivity" by producing a "strong objectivity" that takes into account multiple perspectives from which socially-determined observations are made, thus allowing alternative (feminist) knowledges to contribute to scientific knowledge.13 this conception of feminist standpoint has often privileged the value of knowledge (an end retrospectively produced from experience) over the immanent value of the experience of embodiment itself. in the last decade, new material feminisms on the whole left behind standpoint concerns as a legacy of a postmodern discursive turn that spoke about bodies without attending to material embodiment (alaimo & heckman, 2008, p. 3). black feminism, which offered some of the most important contributions to standpoint theory, largely dropped out of the purview of contemporary feminist science studies, and identity experience as the grounds for knowledge about both discourse and power took a back seat to material agency and the "matter of matter" itself (alaimo & heckman, 2008, p. 5). the matter of matter itself, however, is precisely the concern of black feminism's minor empiricism. by refusing an "informational" model of knowledge, and thereby refuting the possibility (or desirability) of "transferring" experiential knowledge, combahee and hurston developed a form of study invested in the continued embodiment of experiential thought (the materiality of both individual and collective thought) in excess of cognition and signification, a performative empiricism that is especially difficult to incorporate back into traditional scientific epistemologies. indeed, hurston and combahee composed their minor empiricism, often invisibly or illegibly, both within and across the margins of disciplinary sites. importantly, rather than revising or correcting dominant scientific epistemology, black feminism's minor empiricism as practiced by hurston and combahee has largely resisted the compulsion to make black women's knowledge transparent or legible. its opacity and indiscernibility have often been its condition of possibility. empiricism, femininity, and black language: black women's style in taking themselves as simultaneously an object and subject of knowledge—reflexively analyzing the construction of their perceptions as they perceived—hurston and combahee produced a form of immanent, ongoing study that does not comport itself to traditional demands for separation between observer and observed or the retrospective construction of facts. their empiricism was therefore comprised of and invested in alternative scientific values such as opacity, indiscernibility, improvisation, and subjectivity. these values were generally anathema to enlightenment scientific thought but, as both daphne brooks (2006) and britt rusert (2012) have noted, they characterized the nineteenth-century history of black women's engagement with both science in particular and knowledge projects more generally. drawing on brooks's conceptual apparatus, rusert argues that, in a context in which us science was virtually inextricable from performance (with both scientific demonstrations and experiments often deployed on stage), "spectacular opacity" (brooks, 2006) allowed black women performers to "refuse racial science's attempts to make race fully transparent—and knowable," thereby disrupting dominant (scientific) ideas about race (rusert, 2012, p. 295). disruption through spectacular opacity was particularly important for "black women, who were subjected to harsher regimes of visibility and exploitation on transatlantic stages" (rusert, 2012, p. 295). not only have these values been disruptive of dominant knowledge practices, however; they have also been productive of new compositional possibilities, serving throughout the twentieth century as the aesthetic foundation for black feminism's minor empiricism, which thrived on its illegibility to dominant science. the critique of science as an aesthetic task has a long history, one that is prevalent not only in the performance histories outlined by brooks and rusert, but also in black literary traditions.  throughout the first half of the century, hurston joined a number of black writers and thinkers such as w.e.b. du bois, alain locke, and nella larson, who sought to disavow the powerful indictments of blackness implicit in the new sciences.14 as with the feminist standpoint theorists mentioned above, however, the majority of these black intellectuals primarily aimed to correct errors in the application of scientific methods (an ongoing project of black studies more generally, and especially its current emphasis on social science). but hurston's, and later combahee's, approach was less straightforwardly confrontational or ameliorative. far from "correcting" the empirical approaches of medical and social sciences, hurston capitalized on the imagined transparency and facticity of empiricism to produce an anthropology of "lies," the value of which lay not in the "truth" coded beneath them, but in the connective surface of their ongoing performance. although mules and men provides an extended account (and performance) of hurston's empiricist practice, turning to the more narrative structure of her novel helps to expose the method she otherwise seemed to hide—perhaps strategically—in her science. hurston's use of opacity—which, in the opening epigraph to this article, she described as the "feather bed resistance" of the negro—as well as the general lack of conclusions or "facts" throughout her work make it difficult to understand or even see her empiricism, especially in a contemporary context that values empirical data in the form of what porter (2009) calls "thin description" (a practice in which data is imagined to be transparent, allowing it to bypass interpretation and emerge uncritically as "fact") (p. 308). however, her 1937 novel, their eyes were watching god, clarifies something of her empiricist practice, enacting standpoint knowledge's capacity to "conflate fields standardly kept distinct" (harding, 2004a). peppered with the folktales that also pervade her anthropology, hurston's novel offers a third-person, black vernacular account of the life of janie crawford. told from janie to her friend phoeby—as though anticipating combahee's affirmation of the forms of thought found in "black women's style of talking/testifying in black english"—the novel describes janie's negotiation of the post-slavery era, passing from adolescence through two oppressive and socially-prescriptive marriages, and finally embarking on an unorthodox relationship with the much younger drifter, teacake, with whom she leaves the black town of eatonville to work side-by-side in the "muck" of the everglades. invoking the genre of the bildungsroman, early in the novel janie enters into both sexuality and what she calls her "conscious life," a moment which highlights the distinctive aspects of feminine embodiment as janie inquires about her experience of sensation in order to make sense of her own experience. hurston (1937/2006) writes: it had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. from barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds [...] to snowy virginity of bloom. it stirred her tremendously. [...] what? how? why? this singing she heard [...] connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh. now they emerged and quested about her consciousness. [she gazed] up and down the road. looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. waiting for the world to be made.  (p. 11) although the scene appears as a moment of transition characteristic of the literary genre of the bildungsroman, it also links hurston to a history of empiricism. here, the strange sensuality of sexual awakening—the mystery of feeling—induces synaesthesia: a disorganization and reorientation of the sensorium. as janie is "stirred," her senses are stirred and mixed. singing resounds somewhere other than her ears; smell and touch, breath and caress are simultaneously activated. she is connected to "vaguely felt matters," the sensation of impressions of which she has yet to make sense, which "struck her outside observation," not brought to vision, instead "buried [...] in her flesh." she irrupts with half-formed questions—what? how? why?—questions in search of their objects. and the occasion of world-making for which she waits becomes an occasion for making the world, organizing her perceptions anew—in her first moments of "consciousness." this description of janie's emergence into reflexive self-inquiry enacts an ongoing struggle that is central to a submerged strain of empiricism, returning to it an anoriginal and philosophical indetermination of the senses, found not only in the work of empiricism's nominal founder, hume, but also in the irruptions of minor empiricisms that both precede him and follow in his wake—thus disrupting a linear narrative of empiricism's development. that is to say, the experimenter's reflexive inquiry into his/her own mind—questions about how he/she makes sense of sensation—have characterized multiple strains of minor empiricism that contest dominant, positivist empiricism. as hurston's novel shows, however, these empiricisms do not necessarily bring us closer to a totalizing scientific vision (or a unified, complete science); instead, they are iterative emergences of reflexive self-study specific to the subjectivities they constitute while simultaneously being constituted. as part of this genealogy of minor empiricism, hurston and combahee—affected as they were by the positivist empiricism that characterized twentieth-century science—offer an immanent (and often invisible) critique, from the grounds of empiricism itself. this minor empiricism does not end with surety about what constitutes data or about the utility, let alone possibility, of quantification. instead, empiricism appears as the immanent study of the experience of sensation; it is an attempt in the midst of sensing to understand how the mind makes sense of sensation. . . and, as deleuze (1953/1991) observed of hume's empiricism, how the senses constitute subjectivity. crucially, hurston's description affirms the value of belief in the world and its capacity to be composed. minor empiricism, then, far from discovering a given world, is first and foremost creative. through hurston, black feminism's minor empiricism highlights the experience of sensation as an occasion already engaged in sense-making, producing immanent knowledge in the phenomenological composition of sensational experience that is neither passive nor given, but instead always produced—performed—in concert with the world that touches back as it is touched. black feminism's minor empiricism, then, offers a particularly feminine emphasis on sensational embodiment as a performative form of thought and consciousness that augments du bois's understanding of black "double consciousness" as a psychic phenomenon. black feminism's minor empiricism is shaped not only by the specificity of the female body (as both harding and grosz have attributed to feminist science more generally),15 but it is also formed by the embodied deployment of an epistemology that inheres in "black women's style of talking/testifying in black english" (combahee, 1978/1982, p. 17).  according to poet june jordan (1988), a contemporary of combahee's, the epistemology of black english derives from "a distinctive black value system" (p. 191), perpetuated in the very syntax of language, and necessitated by conditions of black life in the us. black english emerged to counter the material reality of the "constant[...] threat of annihilation" inflicted on black life. it therefore "abhors abstraction" because it is "a system constructed by people constantly needing to insist that we exist" (jordan, 1988, p. 191). in her essay, "nobody mean more to me than you, and the future life of willie jordan," jordan (1988) goes on to detail the ontological assumptions that guide the construction of black english, which she and students in her english class, most of whom were black, discovered through the collective study of hurston's work. they came to understand that black english was characterized by "the presence of life, voice, and clarity," and therefore assumed "the living and active participation of at least two human beings, the speaker and the listener" (jordan, 1988, p. 191). as she explained it, this means "there is no passive voice construction possible in black english. [...] for example, you cannot say ‘black english is being eliminated.' you must say, instead, ‘white people eliminating black english'" (jordan, 1988, p. 191). against standard english, the onto-epistemology of black english operates in ways conducive to the reality and perpetuation of black life in the us. illegible experience: resistance to evidence when jordan and her students wrote letters to local newspapers in black english to protest ongoing police violence against black men in their community, the newspapers declined to print them—thus evincing the epistemological difference between black english and standard english. in advance, jordan and her students recognized that black english would make their letters illegible and illegitimate for a publication intended to distill and transmit information. the brutal incompatibility between the epistemologically-specific empiricist community jordan and her students formed in their self-study of black english and the larger structures of information dissemination found in the newspapers threatened to devalue black knowledge precisely at its interface with dominant knowledge. but, as jordan affirmed, the value of her students' endeavor was immanent to their shared act of study as a mode of community formation, a valuation that resonates with the value systems described and performed by both hurston and combahee. understanding scientific virtues as aesthetic values, magnified through attention to the literary, allows us to trace the counter-history of black feminist empiricism that operates by way of an insistent opacity, and for which the condition of possibility is precisely its ongoing illegibility as science, its eternal minority.16 hortense spillers's essay, "mama's baby, papa's maybe: an american grammar book," raised this incompatibility as a central problem that has threatened black women's thought and existence, from the first moments of african colonization to the present, precisely at this interface. as she described it, the scientific invention of ethnicity that stilled and codified blackness as race, as well as the trans-atlantic slave trade it helped justify, led to the historical loss of language and of gender differentiation for black people in the u.s. as a result, black women have been plagued by an ongoing, overdetermined, externally imposed nominalism (a litany of often pejorative names and types), codified at the intersections of science, law, and economy, and at odds with their ontological existence (spillers, 1987). however, the interstices between racial classification grids and fluid life, between black women's typology and their existence, continually evinced a disconnect between representation and ontology, thus calling for an alternative onto-epistemology, such as the one produced through black feminism's minor empiricism. combahee's statement operated at the problematic interface historicized by spillers and encountered by jordan and her students: between autonomous, uncodified knowledge and the brutal reality of violence engendered by dominant knowledges and the latter's social institutions that necessitated such illegible knowledge in the first place. combahee was acutely aware of the imbrications of science and law, and in particular the ways they impinged on the lives of women of color. although the group included several practicing social scientists (for example, beverly smith was a professor of women's health), their relationship to social scientific evidence and medical interventions in the legal system varied on a case-by-case basis. combahee (1978/1982) clearly reject "biological determinism" in their statement (p. 17), list "sterilization and abortion rights campaigns" as among the activities in which they participated, and protested with regards to at least three high-profile court cases that mobilized medical, scientific, or technoscientific interventions (p. 20-21). far from uncritical supporters of social science, they saw it as a tool—never value-neutral—that could be wielded in multiple ways and for multiple agendas.17 they therefore protested against the use of an "insanity" defense in the case of inez garcia, which pathologized female victimhood as insanity, while supporting the use of "scientific jury selection" to gain favorable trial conditions for joan little, who had killed her rapist, and backing the release of kenneth edelin, a black doctor imprisoned for conducting legal abortions (p. 20). in each instance, combahee did not express faith in the legal system to bring women of color to justice; instead, they found it necessary to fight on behalf of women whose experiences had been put on trial. they could not and did not defer to the accuracy of scientific knowledge as given in positivist representation; instead they made use of the interstices between ontology and dominant epistemologies and institutions, mobilizing seemingly representational practices (such as science writing and their own writing) to create performative spaces of study and community formation. this has been an ongoing challenge for black feminist knowledges, as they move from what bell hooks (1984/2000) has described as their autonomous origins on the social "margin" to the "center," in order to intercede against policies, legal decisions, and institutional practices that were often backed by the kinds of positivist social science described above, and appearing in forms such as the moynihan report. in this light, it has been necessary for black women to harness the cultural power of dominant social science practices while offering correctives to its methodological and taxonomic assumptions—a problematic urgently detailed by patricia bell scott in but some of us are brave.18  building on these second wave black feminist articulations, the most prominent black feminist response in the later part of the twentieth century was the development of intersectionality theory by legal theorists such as kimberle crenshaw (1989, 1991) and patricia hill collins (1990/2000), which was subsequently taken up by the social sciences. from the moment that intersectionality theory proposed a turn to the empirical study of black women's experience, the question of experience and its evidentiary value emerged as a vexed question for feminist researchers across disciplines.19  combahee's statement, however, seemed to also offer a different path, one already trod by hurston in her re-linking of subjective experience and empiricism.  as hazel carby (1991) notes, hurston's work does not operate within given representational frameworks; it instead "rewrite[s] the geographical boundaries of representation" (p. 126).  this places her work squarely within an alternative genealogy of black feminist geography, one in which black women's bodies traverse what katherine mckittrick (2006) has called "demonic"— shifting or undetermined—ground. in hurston's novel, this shifting ground makes black women's submission to law, with law's imagined external and objective viewpoint assumed to engender justice through empiricism, an often dangerous endeavor. indeed, the concern with legal evidence—which in the twentieth century began to depend on similar values evinced by the dominant idea of science—was of central concern to hurston. as hurston's janie reminds us, for black women, being compelled to make evidence of one's experience, compelled to comport one's self to the legal apparatus, has often meant being exposed to the violence of a judgment that never brings justice. while living in the everglades, janie and teacake are caught in the apocalyptic terror of a hurricane. when a rabid dog bites teacake, negligent governmental intervention, which focuses on white survivors, leaves him unable to get the serum that will treat him. here, janie and teacake embody a blackness already abandoned, dispossessed by the promise of the civic medical establishment. as teacake goes mad, janie is forced to kill her greatest love in self-defense. her experience is then put on trial. in the context of a novel in which janie repeatedly rejects models for appropriate black female adulthood, and moreover, rejects the compulsive desirability of civil society by leaving eatonville for the muck, janie's legal subjection takes on a spectacularly and excruciatingly violent force. she is denied what she calls "de poor man's trial" of community mourning and is instead subjected to a sham white judicial system that papers over its own racist culpability through its pronouncements of judgment (hurston, 1937/2006, p. 314). in some ways it might seem that janie is better off being judged by the "disinterested" judge and jury—especially as the black community is none too kind to her in the moment. but where the community operates through altered and continually mutating social relations (often motivated by economic disparity), the judicial system instead proposes to make medico-scientific disparity the individual fault of janie. it is precisely the law's "disinterest" in her personal life that makes it capable of pronouncing judgment while invisibilizing the structures of abandonment that forced her into personal crisis.    in this scene, where janie's experience is submitted for evaluation to an all white male jury, for whom she will always be more and less than legible, hurston makes visible the unfulfillable promise of law. put another way, the trial can never be a site of justice for janie because the jury's hermeneutic practice is inevitably disconnected from the vernacular text of her experience, which, composed in an incommensurable language, cannot be made into a text for them. but, as rizvana bradley (2013) emphasizes, before and beyond law's "violation" of janie and teacake's "vernacular space" there is also "the fashioning of a common project, or simply a commons, possibilized under the rubric of care, concern, devotion, and interest." linking the "commonness" of their country speech to common or shared life makes sensible the value not of objectivity but of interest that both precedes and exceeds the invocation of judgment. for janie and teacake, inhabiting the marginal or minor is preferable to interpolation in majority social structures, which would write over their vernacular values and common life.   identity politics and the time of empiricism literary modes and improvisational composition enable not only further perpetuation of the ontologically shifting and epistemologically strategic geographical terrain of black womanhood. they also make possible the alternative temporality mobilized for black feminist empiricism. through formal strategies of composition and recomposition, hurston and combahee demonstrate the inextricability of the aesthetic from the empirical, thus reconfiguring the time of science through the autonomous production of new value systems, and wresting empiricism from the violent grip of twentieth-century positivism and deploying it in the revolutionary construction of collective life. they revalue sensorial and embodied experience—how we come to know the world through our senses, aesthesis—as an ongoing process of reflexive study. in doing so, black feminist empiricism appears as a performative—experimental—site of collective study in which blackness, femininity, and queerness are not intersecting coordinates of oppression to be mapped and analyzed, but additive aesthetic strategies of composition and creation. for combahee, literary-compositional modes enabled them to improvise on science writing by mobilizing multiple, seemingly non-scientific forms in order to resist the particular evidentiary demands of positivist science and social science. the statement was modeled after social science reportage while drastically altering its content. their sections therefore resembled the function of traditional social science organization (offering a literature review, for example, or outlining the problems addressed by research), while emphasizing the importance of "belief" and their own position as both the subject and object of study. they therefore referenced the social science model while rejecting the conventions of science writing that retrospectively constructs the time of research as teleological by composing reports that erase the messiness of research in order to present positive results.20 where conventional science writing assumes an always-already given existence of ontological reality that can appear as "fact," in contrast, combahee refused the conventions of twentieth-century scientific practices that demand the separation of subject and object or developmental progress. focusing on combahee's temporal intervention helps us to understand the concept of "identity" at issue between the body and the flesh, between subjugating taxonomy and productive possibility. combahee's statement included the first use of the term "identity politics," which, contrary to popular understandings of the term, entailed not a solidification of competing identities, but a disidentification from any singular or authentic identity position (murphy, 2012). this allowed them to produce the multiple coalitions necessary as part of what they called their "whole life situation" (combahee 1978/1982, p. 14). in this sense, while "politics" named the play of competing interests that result from divisions enforced by multiple systems of oppression, including racism, sexism, and capitalism, it also named an entire field of existing and possible social relations. identity politics offered a way of expanding the field of the social through meaningful and shared struggle, which "sprang from the shared belief that black women are inherently valuable" (p. 13), even against a legacy of their scientific objectification and legal erasure. belief, rather than "knowledge," not only gave force to their political commitments, but also served as the grounds for their study. combahee write, "we are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice. [...we] are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us" (p. 13-14). study, internal accountability, and projects focused on eliminating their own oppression—"as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression"—were central to their political project. through self-study of their own forms of organization—study of how they make sense of experience—they emerge in both their speech and their writing as a "we."21  combahee's statement, then, became a performative site, enacting the production of not merely individual value and subjectivity, but also collective subjectivity. in this way, they imagined a non-teleological relationship to collective time, which is both actualized in the duration of activist tasks and also endured as an ongoing, never-ending revolutionary practice. in order to understand the value of an autonomously produced and personally-grounded science, rather than one that seeks its force through "education" and epistemological unification, it is helpful to pay attention to combahee's description of their self-formation. over several years time, the group shifted, becoming increasingly interested in class analysis and simultaneously struggling over internal differences with regards to sexuality and class. finally, in 1976, they write, "those of us who were still meeting had determined the need to do political work and to move beyond consciousness-raising and serving exclusively as an emotional support group. [. . . ] we decided at that time [. . . ] to become a study group" (p. 12, emphasis mine). the establishment of a collective organized around study—around the value of being a student rather than an expert—is a break not only from leftists groups whose goals were to eliminate false consciousness through education in proper ideology, but also from the value systems that organized time in ways that valorize the events of life as a means to an ending, to the production of history and knowledge. decidedly, the ongoing event of continuous struggle was the durational occasion for combahee's self-production. they suggested that their position at "the bottom" of the social hierarchy disenabled access to the procedures of civic reform—especially those to be found in science and law—because those procedures would require them to accept a progressive narrative of modernity that positioned them against the world, requiring them to therefore "fight the world." for them, "fighting the world" was undesirable, although they acknowledged that it is perhaps "realistic" rather than "pessimistic" (combahee, 1978/1982, p. 12). more hopefully, and more importantly, they claimed that their position at the bottom enabled the thought of an alternative not limited to reform; it allowed them "to make a clear leap into revolutionary action." but revolutionary action here did not indicate a (singular, temporally contained) revolution to be won; rather, combahee saw their "revolutionary task" as engaging in a "lifetime of work." revolution is a lifetime practice that includes not only their own lifetimes, but also the "countless" (both infinite and uncountable) "generations" of women that preceded and followed them, including a legacy of black women thinker-activists with which they see themselves participating, such as harriet tubman, ida b. wells, and their contemporary, angela davis (combahee, 1978/1982, p. 14). rather then fighting the world, combahee materialized a genealogy of black women as an eternal and resistant flux of flesh, an ongoing flow with which they connect. combahee's insistence on the value of belief, the value of belief in their own value, inaugurated their radical epistemological revision, and connects them to an eternal history of black female resistance: "there have always been black women activists," they write (combahee, 1978/1982, p. 14). and because revolution is an enduring event, they invent revolutionary time as immanent to the materiality of the revolution, one that continues on in the ongoing constitution of a "we" who studies—including those who study combahee's writing. in this way, the performative act of collective reading becomes an empirical practice that can produce a people, a collective. but that performative is also always made possible in performance, and performance indicates a style. the actual manifestation of the collective act of study, for combahee, materializes in "black women's style of talking/testifying in black language about what we have experienced" (p. 13). the aesthetics of epistemology take form as style, in the ways in which black women "talk/testify" to each other, constructing their "own intellectual traditions as black women" (hull and smith, 1982). crucially, combahee insist on the importance of this style and of black language, while keeping both opaque, largely hidden from view of the reader. the document, written in standard english, insists on the value of black english without making it transparent, while improvising on the formal strategies of science and mobilizing the honest trickery—the visible truth of the surface of folkloric "lies"— found in hurston's work. identity politics and the time of empiricism that hurston's anthropological work is most often read as part of literary rather than scientific history points to the opacity of black women's style, but also hints at its possibilities engendered through such opacity. putting hurston in conversation with combahee's much later interventions, we might, through hurston's work, take stock of the value of black women's style of talking/testifying in english, a value that highlights the interplay between scientific and literary temporality. indeed, it is precisely through attention to the literary reconfiguration of time in both combahee's and hurston's work that "minor" becomes a useful alternative to "identity." this is especially true when thinking of hurston's invocation of the bildungsroman—a genre concerned with ending minority and entering into majority—in order to historicize the use of "minority" in terms of age, which has served as a means for pathologizing multiple iterations of identity. in franco moretti's (1987) by now traditional account, the bildungsroman takes youth as its central theme, and coming-of-age through education is its central mode for producing a dialectical resolution of life experiences, culminating in autonomous individuality or proper socialization. bildung is the story of the protagonist's leaving behind minority and entering into majority, into proper citizen-subjectivity. it imagines both the inevitability and desirability of coming into majority, which the early twentieth-century science of the new psychology would suggest to be a "natural" fact of development and thus enable scientific pathologization of extended minority. holly brewer (2007) traced the longer history of the denigration of minority, showing that in the rigid paternalism of anglo-american culture in the seventeenth century, the minor child was considered irrational and therefore not capable of participating in democracy or political decision-making. the same rhetoric was repeatedly applied to other "minor" groups—based on race or sex—as a justification for patriarchal and colonial control. the collective irrationality of minority was then frequently and conveniently "proven" through sciences, including anthropology, anthropometry, and craniology. from our twentieth-first century vantage, it becomes easy to see the "interest" or invested values that governed the eighteenthand nineteenth-century iterations of those sciences, allowing us to dismiss them as "pseudoscience." but it would be a mistake to imagine that a truly "objective" or "value-neutral" science is possible. . . and, more importantly, as combahee and hurston show us, it would be a mistake to imagine that such an "objective" science would be desirable. in this light, we might think of hurston's novel—and janie's rejection of given models for adulthood—as something like an anti-bildungsroman that also rejects the related scientific values of development, objectivity (externality/value neutrality), and majority; hurston rejects the drudgery of a compulsive adulthood that would compel her and her characters to submit to citizen-subjecthood while never being allowed full access. her critiques of science along with combahee's are grounded in revealing the consistent interests of science that are not their interests. indeed, they show that the invention of the concept of "value-neutral science" is not an inevitable outgrowth of the progress of empiricist methodology, but is instead a concept mobilized precisely in the interested denigration of minority and the enforcement of social division. and it is from these grounds, then, that we can understand the intervention that hurston's anthropology makes. mules and men is valuable in hurston's valuation of her own interest—as a participant observer studying the very town in which she grew up—and in her refusal to capitulate that experience to the demands of evidence. hurston wrote mules and men in a fledgling moment of american anthropology, and so was able to invent a science that neither depended on the stilling of evidence into fact, nor the value of an external observer to judge and evaluate meaning. her science therefore put her vernacular sensibility in the service of an affirmation of the autonomous and immanent value of experience. in her ethnography, hurston places her own experience of, and pleasure in, collecting that evidence on center stage. mules and men is a playful recounting of "negro folklore," which she points out is composed through a tactic of excess and evasion, a "feather bed resistance" against the white gaze (hurston, 1935/1995, p. 10). often seeming to be mere nonsense or whimsy to a white listener, negro folklore communicates and makes community with other black folks through meaning that rides on the excess of these tales and the shared experience of the pleasure of telling. although hurston reveals that negro folklore is tactical, her main goal in writing is not to unmask the hidden meaning of the tales, stilling them through a hermeneutic enterprise. instead, she asserts their value as is: "they are a lot more valuable than you think," she writes. "we want to set them down before it's too late" (p. 14). mules and men becomes an occasion for repeating the experience of vernacular telling and listening as radical acts of community formation, which hurston would also deploy in public performances of folktales, folk songs, and several plays.22 hurston's refusal to make meaning in the collection resonates with her novel's refusal of the values of bildung. the main section of mules and men—the recounting of folklore—ends somewhat arbitrarily with a brief account of a fight she herself is involved in, leading her to skip town, rather than with any closing meditation on what she had learned. it then reopens with a completely different topic, hoodoo, which she is hurrying to new orleans to study due to lack of funds. the arbitrary first ending gives way, then, to another double ending of the hoodoo section: first she kills a cat in a hoodoo ceremony, and then she awakens as a cat.  through this doubling or tripling of endings, which never resolve into fact, mules and men celebrates the impropriety of the minor—it ends with the scientist as a cat!—as a means of rejecting both the value of the coming into majority in the bildungsroman or of making meaning and garnering of bourgeois respectability in the sciences. impropriety and performance and a performative act are hurston's empirical interventions. the final ending of mules and men acts as something of an allegory about the joy of deception and the strategic post-facto construction of respectability following indulgence. hurston writes: sis cat was mighty hungry, but she hate for de rat to think she ain't got no manners, so she went to de water and washed her face and hands and when she got back de rat was gone. [when the next rat she caught] askes "where's yo' manners at, sis cat?" [she] tol' ‘im, "oh, ah got plenty manners, but ah eats mah dinner and washes mah face and uses mah manners afterwards.  i'm sittin' here like sis cat, washing my face and usin' my manners. (p. 112) in the end, hurston reveals that her ethnography of lies is itself a lie, but it is not deceptive because it gives false information, so much as it simply does not lend itself to the usual scientific results of information or meaning-making at all. coda taken in light of june jordan's essay, in which her students chose the obstinate and opaque value of black english as a form of shared thought and solidarity against dominant and politically expedient modes, we might see that hurston's refusal to make too concrete a "meaning" or conclusion out of the endless retelling of black folklore—told between slices of gingercake and the labor-performance of toe parties—speaks back to what was happening with janie in the courtroom. the tales are iterations of each other, actualized for particular moments. although one can take them more generally as evidence of the persistence of black life made available through a kind of coded telling, that code does not break down in a one-to-one correspondence with informational meaning or discrete sensory data.  where standard english comports itself to positivist empiricism's evidentiary demands, in hurston's minor empiricism, composed in black english in black women's style, neither quantification nor datafication accounts for experience. the tales do not "end" in order to be interpreted for a closed meaning, nor do they comport themselves to the burden of hermeneutic "evidence." instead they proliferate in their own composition, decomposition, and recomposition, making use of the material they can loosen up enough to construct in new ways. we see then that janie's life experience cannot be read as evidence of a particular juridical meaning by the white male judge and jury, not only because it is composed of a language they do not read, but more specifically, because the epistemology that found that language is always-already resistant to the abstraction of "meaning" that could be imagined to matter more than matter itself. and combahee's statement, too, speaks to the value of the immanent study of experience as a particularly black feminist practice. hurston's work, janie's life, and combahee's collective study compose new perceptions and impressions from the disorganized, non-quantifiable experience of sensation and sense-making, over and against any evidentiary function that would close them off in the service of "fact." notes 1 see grosz (1993) on the social science's positivism as a result of its aspiration to "a natural science model of knowledge" (p. 192), as well as porter (2009) on the rise of "expertise" culture, in which twentieth-century us social scientists took up the mantle of "science" to make claims to "objectivity," "detached from the rhetorical fray of ideology and politics" (p. 306). 2 see a. kroeber (1949), in which kroeber, one of boas's students, outlined the principles of boasian empirical anthropology. 3 one notable exception is visweswaran (1994). 4 see section three: dispelling the myths: black women and the social sciences. 5 see walker (1983), which describes walker's attempts to recover hurston's legacy, as well as hurston (1979), a collection of hurston's writing edited by walker and published shortly before but some of us are brave. 6 see p. h. collins (1990/2000; 2004) for a discussion of the role of intersectionality in black feminist standpoint. 7 see, for example, murphy (2012) on combahee's role in reproductive justice struggles. 8 most notably, william james's "radical empiricism."  see james (1909/1995). 9 perhaps most famously, at the turn of the twentieth-century, as part of his "radical empiricism," william james (1890) suggested that we might understand the "unclassified residuum"—or experiences that were sensed while seeming to be extra-sensorial—as important sites for revising and producing human knowledge. 10 carby (1991) also suggests that hurston's work contributes to the imperialist project of early twentieth-century us anthropology. to my mind, this is perhaps more true of hurston's later anthropological tracts, which tend to come to more numerous (and more moralizing) anthropological conclusions. 11 see keenan and weizman (2012) and "part ii: irreductions" in latour (1993) on the use of technoscience forensics in legal decision-making. 12 see washington (2006). 13 in their account of the historical emergence of the scientific concept of "objectivity," daston and galison (2007) describe epistemic virtues as the values that guide scientific thought; "objectivity" is the exemplar virtue. 14 for example, see ahad (2010) for black modernist critiques of psychiatry.  see ellison (1964/1995) and ellison (1952/1994) for an example of blacks' mid-century critiques of sociology, in particular as it emerged out of burgess and park (1921). 15 see pages 202-205 in grosz (1993). 16 in feminist theory: from margin to center (1984/2000) and "choosing the margin as a space of radical openness" (2004), bell hooks (2004) articulates the desirability of continuing to occupy a marginal subject position as a space from which to develop standpoint knowledge; hurston's and combahee's thought suggests that such marginality is desirable not only for the subjects of knowledge, but also for epistemology itself. 17 kenneth edelin, a black obstetrician, had been arrested and convicted in 1973 after performing a legal abortion. his case was later overturned (edelin, 2007). joan little, who was black, was put on trial in 1974 for killing a white prison guard who had raped her. following the invention of "scientific jury selection" just two years earlier, her defense team employed it in her trial to have her case moved from the rural county of beaufort, where polled residents had exhibited racist attitudes, to the state capitol of raleigh (abramson, 2000). inez garcia was a latina woman who also killed her rapist. after an unsuccessful insanity/diminished capacity defense, she was later exonerated by way of a self-defense (salter, 1976). 18 see p. b. scott (1982) on the importance of revising social science practice for black women. 19 see k. crenshaw (1989, 1991) and j. w. scott (1988) on the evidentiary function of experience. 20 see latour and woolgar (1986) on the ways in which scientific fact production elides its own construction through inscription and publication practices. on the controversy surrounding the publication of almost exclusively positive results, see ioannidis (2006) and collins (2014) among others. 21 see norman (2007) on combahee's use of "we" as an ongoing performative act. 22 see brooks (2010). references abramson, j. 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(2006). medical apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on black americans from colonial times to the present. new york, ny: doubleday. bio lindsey andrews is a visiting scholar of english in the center for interdisciplinary studies in science and cultural theory at duke university.  she received her ph.d. in english and certificate in feminist studies from duke university in 2013.  she is currently at work on a manuscript entitled "experimental subjects: minor empiricisms and the aesthetics of science." in it, she draws on black and queer aesthetic and political theory to investigate the shared epistemological problems confronted by non-normative experimentation in science and literature in the united states in the 20th century. microsoft word lab meeting-schrader and johnson.docx schrader, a. and johnson, e. (2017). considering killability: experiments in unsettling life and death. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(2) 1-15 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © astrid schrader and elizabeth johnson, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license lab meeting considering killability: experiments in unsettling life and death curated by astrid schrader and elizabeth johnson henry buller university of exeter h.buller@exeter.ac.uk elizabeth r. johnson hobart and william smith colleges ejohnson@hws.edu deborah robinson plymouth university deborah.robinson@plymouth.ac.uk simon rundle plymouth university s.rundle@plymouth.ac.uk dorion sagan gradientor@yahoo.com 2 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) susanne schmitt ludwig-maximilians university info@movingnaturalhistorymuseums.com astrid schrader university of exeter a.schrader@exeter.ac.uk john spicer plymouth university j.i.spicer@plymouth.ac.uk in february of 2015 we held a workshop at the university of exeter with the goal of creating a conversation among marine biologists, social scientist, and artists around the relationship between life and death. as sts scholars, we had both worked on the study of marine invertebrates [astrid has written on algae blooms (schrader 2012) and elizabeth has worked with scientists researching jellyfish (johnson 2016)]. we found ourselves similarly interested in how these organisms trouble conventional narratives of life and its linear progression into death. together with the scientists and other scholars at our workshop, we struggled to articulate the patterns of life and death witnessed in marine invertebrates. in the scientific literature, these narratives conformed to human experience and expectations. jellyfish with cyclical life patterns became “immortal” the mass death of microbial colonies is labeled “suicide” (schrader forthcoming). the workshop introduced us to other narratives of life and death that in addition to the im/mortality of invertebrates included the killability of farm animals, life and death on display in an aquarium exhibits, and life after death in human burials. our discussions from the workshop sought to express the relationships between life and death in less anthropocentric terms, but attended to the entanglements of human and animals agencies in the laboratory and in artistic practice. continuing that conversation, we 3 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) prompted our workshop participant to articulate the relationships between life and death of their research subjects in relationship to what donna haraway has called their “killability.” morally distinct from killing-which, according to haraway, is an integral part of life--killability pertains to the categorization of nonhuman animals in such a way that makes their killing automatically permissible. this is in contrast to what haraway would call taking responsibility for necessary killing. for example laboratory mice and livestock are killable while, for many in the west, dogs and cats are not. the resulting reflections take insights from feminism (haraway’s in this case) to re-articulate scientific practices, reversing the more common traffic between feminism and science that take scientific contributions as a resource for feminist theory. thinking with this notion of killability allows for a more reflective account of laboratory practices, calling on our participants to articulate their own response-ability in relation to their research subjects. with this in mind, we asked our participants: what are we to make of “killability” with regards to organisms whose deaths are not so easily pinpointed? how do we make sense of our relationship to the deaths not of individuals, but masses, such as populations of phytoplankton? and what are we to make of the deaths that have already passed, whose killings either haunt or animate our present? what might come to matter if our attention shifts from killability to the circulation of many forms of death and dying? the contributions problematize the categorization of animals as killable as a solely human activity based on an easy distinguishability of life and death. not all animals can be killed with the same ease as john spicer points out; other lives i.e. that of livestock are dependent on their very killablity. in both of these cases human capacities to categorize have been limited. in other cases their killabilty changes with the setting, so-called justifiable sacrifices in the laboratory become matters of concern in museum settings for the same kinds of animals. simon rundle considers how our responsibility to the world seems 4 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) to necessitate the killing of animals as a means of developing knowledge about the effects of ecological degradation. rundle’s research subjects snail embryos to different conditions of life to test the viability of development amid conditions that humans have imposed. reporting on the ‘hidden effects’ of anthropogenic environmental changes on life stages before birth in snails as model species, he reflects on the lack of responsibility for killing in his own laboratory practice. in this way, he is making visible not only what needs special cameras and microscopes but also a different mode of attention in the laboratory, namely that killing comes with an obligation to respond (see haraway 2008, 80). why are we reluctant to reveal how we make use of these organisms and render some automatically killable, he asks. visual artist deborah robinson further explores the theme of making visible in relation to killability. robinson uses rundle’s work to create “the sensation of being connected to” the world. but, as she writes, the techniques of seeing that she and rundle both use simultaneously engender a sense of intimacy with and distance from their nonhuman subjects of art and research. rather than highlighting the hidden effects of anthropogenic pollution on snail embryo development, robinson pays attention to the disappeared human subject. her visualizations allow for embodied seeing, a becoming present through looking; however as rundle notes, knowledge of embryo deaths is often deferred--realized only through a viewing of recordings weeks later. susanne schmitt draws our attention to the management and making of the undead. schmitt provides us with a sense of the choreography of death that accompanies attempts to represent the living through the dead. in making forms of life more visible through taxonomy, the lively processes that take place on bodies post-mortem must be managed and mitigated through the active killing of bacteria and insects. john spicer opens his account with the paradox of loving and killing that are threaded through each of these texts. being response-able to the earth’s other organisms seems, for spicer, to necessitate knowing 5 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) through killing. but he also provides us with organisms to think with that, while killable in haraway’s sense, are not actually killable. the jellyfish, flatworms, and sponges that make up his research are often either indifferent to our (violent) manipulations or, like the flatworms, respond by producing an excess of life. henry buller contribution seems to challenge the ethical grounds of haraway’s important distinction between killing and making killable. what’s left of life when you are born killable? in the case of farm animals, produced for consumption, it is no longer clear “whether their killing [is] an act of ending or of beginning,” like the immortal jellyfish, livestock does not seem to be allowed to die. their liminal existence reminds us of the ethical importance of letting live responsibly. dorion sagan challenges the anthropocentrism and zoocentrism of killability. drawing on research on pre-animal life forms (bacteria and protoctists) and some animals, sagan suggests there may be killability before death. killability under a microscope and under wraps simon rundle, school of marine science and engineering, plymouth university, plymouth, uk predicting the biological effects of the anthropocene is now a pressing research agenda. hence, many environmental scientists are carrying out laboratory experiments that investigate how ‘model’ species respond when subjected to increased levels of environmental stressors such as hypoxia or warming, either alone or in combination. these experiments often, and perhaps inevitably, involve killing animals – in fact the terms lethal and sub-lethal for categorising responses juxtapose the use of death versus a change in physiology as endpoints for gauging effects and predicting sensitivity. my research focuses on the ‘hidden’ effects of the anthropocene – those 6 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) that affect early life stages of aquatic invertebrates. these effects of environmental stressors such as warmer temperatures, ‘dead zones’ that lack oxygen and pollutants on embryos have typically been ignored by biologists who efforts are usually focused on later life stages, which are usually larger and more conspicuous; the killability of fully-grown animals is more obvious compared with that of embryos that can only be viewed using high power microscopy. responses of microscopic embryos are often captured first as video and then revealed later – their deaths—and corresponding killability--may be unnoticed for several weeks, remaining stored digitally on hard drives to be examined, measured and analysed at a later date. my interdisciplinary collaborations with artists and social scientists have allowed me to think more deeply about my relationship with the animals on which i work. the bio-imaging technology that has been developed in my laboratory serves to magnify and accentuate the process of development – it brings researchers closer to the tiny embryos that they use for observation. the resulting video recordings have been displayed in several different contexts: art galleries, museums, conferences, web sites. they have also been transposed into sound and displayed as immersive art installations. so far, the videos chosen for display are for healthy embryos. these celebrate the coming into being of life, the ontogeny of the snails which are the objects of scientific investigation – from single cells, through organogenesis to fully functional juveniles. we have not displayed the videos that depict dying and malformed embryos; these have been kept ‘under wraps’. why are we reluctant to reveal how we make use of these organisms’ killability? will the public be hostile to the idea of killing animals to understand their sensitivity – even within the context of protecting the planet from the anthropocene? the process of decontexturalisation of animals used in research was also part of an installation ‘wandering snail’ at the fields exhibition and art+communication festival (riga, 2014). live snails from the laboratory were transported to a gallery. some of these animals died in captivity, 7 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) revealing their killability within a public space rather than the laboratory. visual processes, empathy and the experimental animal deborah robinson, school of art, design, and architecture, university of plymouth, uk killability can be facilitated by rendering an animal invisible, in some sense choosing to overlook the visceral/material/living presence of the animal in the laboratory. slipping instead into an action associated with research function. i think that an awareness of the part of the self that is brought into being whilst looking outwards is important – we can shift our looking to simultaneously looking outwards and inwards, or at least shifting between modes. as an artist my training taught me to move beyond a differentiation between background/foreground relationships thus not focusing on the object primarily (ie the model as in taught in traditional life class drawing exercises, and not without its own problems) and so i take an interest in how processes of visual engagement are constituted when i work in laboratories. for example, a long term interest in ‘embodied seeing’ that originated for me with ideas found in irigaray’s late writings. i am also interested in how we become present to the experience of looking. becoming present to looking means not screening out my own body, nor negating the deeper sensory atmosphere within which the ‘research object’ is integrated. sometimes, whilst in the field, this broader object of which i and my cross disciplinary researchers are a part, is amplified. the scientific goal of looking in the laboratory context enables focus on a discreet area/function within a snail and this (necessarily?) will also operate as a filter that screens out the sensation of being connected to, and a part of the vitality of life. this filtering enables killing for research purposes. research carried out by simon’s group using highly sophisticated imaging technology depicts the high level of questing, a 8 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) kind of quivering hunger for life, within the development of the snail embryo. the lenses and technology that reveal this vitality of life also serve to distance the observer and this is a problem i currently identify within my research through practice. looking back, i can see that formative in my practice and thinking was an experience when i first worked in a laboratory where fish were used in pigment cell experimentation. i was invited to pop a fish out of its embryo sack (a very delicate operation) and to view this under the microscope. after doing this i was told that, to be in line with lab ethics, i needed to kill the baby fish. the phd student made me very aware of the killing as a ritual: i was required to put the fish into a glass container, and then administer an overdose of anaesthetic. i actually found this experience quite profound, resting as it did in the peculiar intimacy of visual scrutiny under the microscope followed by killing as an affect on both organism and self. the phd student told me he had never lost his sense of feeling--of respect and closeness to the organism--when in engaged in everyday lab actions, that he tried to bring the newness of experience to each encounter whilst experimenting. i wonder if this is describable as intra-action where ethical thinking can take place (barad 2007). taxidermy specimens never really stop dying – or living susanne schmitt, rachel carson center for environment and society, ludwig-maximilians university, germany much care goes into the process of keeping other forms of life, usually insect and microbial life, at bay, away from them. within the framework of our project how to not be a stuffed animal, choreographer and dancer laurie young and i discover the lives and deaths of taxidermy animals in museums of natural history across the globe and translate our findings into choreographic, participatory audiowalks. today’s shared fieldwork introduced us to the central storage for 9 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) museum objects of the city of freiburg. it is a large, state of the art complex in the industrial outskirts that has been constructed to guarantee two things: that nothing is stolen, and that nothing is rotting. to guard against the latter, we wear blue disposable plastic shoebooties. todays’ experimental task consists of exploring smell across the taxidermy storage rooms. smells of old wood, fur, animal glands become present once we have attuned to being guided by our noses. the air is cold, and the whole building is painted bright white and in a very light grey. this is, of course, so that no bug may escape the scrutiny of the staff’s gaze. a bug here would be a catastrophe for the collection, at least from humancentred view. the building is cold to slow down potential organic processes. its breathing, beating heart is a large nitrogen chamber, the closed off and deadly quarantine unit. museum specimens (momentarily including a row of galliformes for the taxidermy collection) stay in quarantine here for months to ensure no trace of outside life travels along to the inside. taxidermy captures organisms, mostly birds and mammals, in the moment. killable insect and microbial life is kept at bay so taxidermy animals can animate our present. during the preparation process, the muscular body with all its intestines is discharged, all traces of grease carefully removed, the remaining skin carefully washed and mounted on a handmade mannequin according to the desired shape. life, now, becomes a question of lifelike movement. in the diorama, the taxidermy animals are shown as if the nitrogen chamber had never happened: stretching, patiently waiting, sniffing, climbing and presented as charged with happy affects (ahmed 2010). the exhibition space itself again entangles different histories of killability, even if taxidermy animals that carry them moved through the nitrogen chamber together: some animals are rarer than others, some bred for human consumption, some utterly protected by international conventions. 10 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) waiting for podo john spicer, school of marine science and engineering, university of plymouth, uk those, like myself, who love marine life and are also interested in how marine animals work (their physiology) have long grappled with the paradox that is killability. often to investigate physiology one has to use invasive techniques or even sacrifice animals, to obtain measurements, but at the same time it is the love for, and fascination with, these creatures that drives the investigation. many of the techniques i use now are non-invasive. but i still have to remove animals from their natural habitat and expose them to different environmental conditions (albeit non-lethal) so the paradox, while not so stark, still exists. this paradox is complicated by the fact that the lives and deaths of what many would consider the most ‘primitive’ marine animals, the sponges, the jellyfish, the flatworms – major players in making marine ecosystems work, but barely thought of as animals by the general public (ie no backbone) – are so ‘other’. ‘cut me do i not bleed’ is far removed from a flatworm which receiving six cuts to the head will produce six new heads, or a sea anemone which will divide, or produce buds, to create another sea anemone, or a sponge which even after being sieved can reconstitute themselves into a viable animal. and indeed ‘death’ for the immortal jellyfish is an ‘accident’ or a predation event – there is no ‘natural’ end to the life ‘cycle’. more common jellyfish species have the ability to enter a dormant state, a time of suspended animation. their life cycles often involve starting off as a polyp, a miniature sea anemone like form, stuck to a solid surface on or near the sea bottom. when the conditions are right they bud off lots of, what looks like, tiny little dinner plates that grow into adult jellyfish. but if the conditions are not right they can stay as polyps for many months and under extreme conditions they can encyst, become podocysts, which can stay in that dormant state for many tens of years. in our lab at the moment ‘waiting for podo’--and even knowing whether or not your immortal or long-lived species is alive at any 11 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) particular time-is intellectually challenging as much as it is frustrating. these are fascinating research subjects that may outlive the researcher. exuent or, when killability defines a life henry buller, department of geography, university of exeter, uk mourning his slain daughter cordelia, king lear asks: ‘why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?’ (lear, v, iii). only the companion animal, the functional animal and the nuisance animal, each, along with the food animal, is killable. “thou shall’t not kill concerns only man’, writes derrida (2002: 416). killing is the original ontological act not just because it renders only animals uniquely bare-of-life and thus killable but also because it makes humans uniquely response-able in how we kill non-humans ‘with reasons but knowing there will never be sufficient reason’ (haraway, 2009, 81). farm animals are defined by killing, both as non-humans and as human property; they are ‘killable’ through an acts defined as ‘necessary’ or ‘acceptable’ by law (bryant, 2008). indeed, they exist to be killed, their lives are stage-managed to arrive at a pre-defined killing, usually when a desired level of productivity has been reached or exceeded. we might ask whether their killing an act of ending or of beginning, a state of being or of not being? farm animals are killable long before they are killed, before even they are born. engineered, through breeding and, increasingly, genetics, to produce meat or eggs or milk at some somatically enhanced way, their killing is not only assured, it is precipitated, it is definitive. there are two means of escape: to die (though this is uncommon as an ill or injured animal is usually ‘put down’ to avoid the costs of veterinary care or unnecessary feeding) or to be unborn. amongst the vast numbers of chickens and dairy cows, male animals and birds are unwanted and are killed soon after birth or hatching. soon, sexually selective bull sperm and pre-hatching sexing techniques will deny them even that. 12 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) of course, the killing of animals is not the end; farm animals don’t die (as subjects of an act), they are killed (as objects of an act) they are not ‘grievable.’ their killing is a moment of transition from the vibrant materiality of the living body to the very different silent materiality of the edible product (but also, more prosaically, from cost to profit). this is a transition of different killings; the anticipated killing upon leaving the farm, the (recoverable) killing of sensibility when an animal is stunned, the somatic killing of bleeding out, the corporeal killing of the body during cutting up and processing. sometimes, when animals are slaughtered using gas or low atmospheric pressure, the heart needs to be electronically started to facilitate bleeding; a further killing. and yet, to be killable is also to be alive, to have lived. if humans must learn to kill responsibly, they must also learn to let live responsibly. stalking the life-death continuum dorion sagan, science writer as a writer working in science and art, one who has sequentially apprenticed himself to the scientists lynn margulis (symbiotic theory), eric d. schneider (nonequilibrium thermodynamics), and josh mitteldorf (post-neodarwinian group selection) the continuum which results from a deconstruction of the life-death divide holds for me a special allure. in the second chapter of our what is life (2011) we portray death as life's shadow. just as objects cast shadows but shadows alone cannot exist without objects, death is a naked concept without life. immortality in evolutionary terms describes life's “shadowless” baseline state rather than, as the word (and human experience) suggests, a modification of an inevitable tendency toward decline and death. for example, invertebrates with cyclical life patterns such as hydrozoans, or carrion beetles prompted by stress to revert to larval stages of their life cycle, can anthropomorphically be described as “immortal.” among pre-animal life forms (bacteria and protoctists), and even 13 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) among some animals today, there was no automatic connection between life and death; yes, organisms could be killed—for example squashed, poisoned, or burnt to death—but they did not inevitably succumb to the processes of entropic degradation or wear and tear we are too quick to use to explain a would-be universal aging. perhaps surprisingly—or not so, given humanity's anthropomorphocentric tendency that is now writ large as the anthropocene either to project its individual quirks onto a universal stage, or to hold itself up as extraordinary and unique—not all organisms age. some, like salmon, called semelparous, age extremely quickly, dying almost immediately after reproduction. others, arguably with a long phylogenetic heritage, do not seem to age at all. among these number box turtles and sharks in our own chordate phylum. other animals that don't age—and even become stronger and more fertile with time--include lobsters (mitteldorf and sagan 2016). in the unsettling lifedeath i learned that gas-emitting ocean microbes that help cool and control climate die en masse because of viruses. the virally infected algae appear either to succumb to death directly or kill themselves to prevent the greater death of mass infection. here they would resemble human immune cells thought to destroy pathogens and nascent cancers. the calcareous exoskeletons of such algae rain through the sea to its bottom where, subducted, they become limestone lubricant implicated in mountain building activity as part of a global physiology that necessarily coopts and integrates death no less than free radicals are deployed by killing immune cells in the human body. from these frames, “killability” focuses our attention on humanity's self-serving anthropocentric and zoocentric concerns. the bodies of which we are part require our deaths for their lives, even as our lives require the death of microscopic others who may be sensate without our knowledge, but whose triumphs, perceptual gifts and deaths are likely integrated into our own sensorium (margulis et al, 2011). 14 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) references ahmed, sara. (2010). the promise of happiness. durham: duke university press. barad, karen. (2007). meeting the universe halfway. durham: duke university press. bryant, t. (2008) sacrificing the sacrifice of animals: legal personhood for animals, the status of animals as property and the presumed primacy of humans. rutgers law journal 39, 247-330. derrida, jacques. (2002) the animal that therefore i am (more to follow), critical inquiry, vol. 28, no. 2 (winter, 2002), pp. 369-418. haraway, donna. (2008). when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. johnson, elizabeth r. (2016). unsettling life in the law: living with and as jellyfish. in irus braverman, ed., animals, biopolitics, law: lively legalities. london: routledge. margulis, lynn, celeste a. asikainen, and wolfgang e. krumbein, eds. (2011). chimeras and consciousness: evolution of the sensory self. cambridge: mit press. margulis, lynn and dorion sagan. (2000) what is life? berkeley: university of california press. mitteldorf, josh and dorion sagan. (2016). cracking the aging code: the new science of growing old and what it means for staying young. new 15 schrader and johnson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) york: flatiron books. schrader, astrid. (2012). the time of slime: anthropocentrism in harmful algal research. environmental philosophy. 9(1): 71-93 schrader, astrid (forthcoming 2017). time, affect, microbial suicide. body & society jackson article     sense of things    zakiyyah iman jackson george mason university zjackson@gmu.edu but can we escape becoming dizzy? and who can affirm that vertigo does not haunt the whole of existence? frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth, (p. 253) [i] comforted myself that my sense of alienation and now-heightened visibility were not inherent to my blackness and my femaleness, but an uncomfortable atmospheric condition afflicting everyone. but at the gyroscopic heart of me, there was and is a deep realization that i have never left the planet earth. i know that my feelings of exaggerated visibility and invisibility are the product of my not being part of the larger cultural picture. i know too that the larger cultural picture is an illusion, albeit a powerful one, concocted from a perceptual consensus to which i am not a party; and that while these perceptions operate as dictators of truth, they are after all merely perceptions. patricia j. williams, the alchemy of race and rights, (p. 56) the door of no return—real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to those of us scattered in the americas today. to have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. to live in the black diaspora is i think to live as a fiction—a creation of empires, and also self-creation. it is to be a being living inside and outside of herself. it is to apprehend the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. to be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing. dionne brand, a map to the door of no return, (p. 2) subjects of all human orders had once known their physical environment only in terms prescribed by their modes of subjective understanding and cultural representational schemas. the revolution of imperial western humanism made possible the ongoing displacement of local knowledge (or culture-specific orders) by a hegemonically (re)produced but no less epistemically violent western scientific conception of the cosmos.1 a transculturally verifiable image of the earth, or positivist knowledge as aspirational horizon, has been pursued via a combination of material-discursive force and a coercive (dis)possession of processes of sense perception and cognition on a global scale, in which, according to sylvia wynter (1995), the novel form has played no small part. in “novel and history, plot and plantation,” wynter (1971) states, “the novel form and our societies are twin children of the same parents” (p. 95). that is to say, our contemporary racial capitalist societies and the novel form itself are both cause and effect of the market economy, “an emergence which marked a change of such world-historical magnitude, that we are all, without exception still ‘enchanted,’ imprisoned, deformed and schizophrenic in its bewitched reality” (p. 95). drawing on and augmenting györgy lukács and lucien goldmann’s theories of the novel and eric williams’s history of caribbean slavery, wynter maintains that the emergence of the novel form is inextricably linked with the historical developments of the conquest of the americas and the plantation-societies of the caribbean, as the latter provided the “raw material” for the extension and dominance of the market economy and initiated a globally expansive re-ordering of aesthesis and imaginative capacities. it is in this context that robinson crusoe, oroonoko, and the blazing world in english and don quxiote and sinapia in spanish, with their imperial thematics and speculative elements, inaugurate a new literary form.2 in “the ceremony must be found,” wynter (1984) deepens the argument of “novel and history, plot and plantation” with the claim that not only are “literature” and racial capitalism mutually constitutive but also that by the nineteenth century literature was increasingly regarded as the “highest manifestation of language” and, therefore, considered to be an essential measure of the capacity for technological progress and scientific reason. wynter argues that with the secularization of knowledge and the constitution of “man” in the post-cartesian terms of foucault’s “empirico-transcendental doublet,” “literature” came to function as the transcendentalized index of degree of “culture” which a group, understood in the biologized terms of race and national identity, had achieved or could achieve based on their immanent “nature”: “culture, in the new episteme, now took the place that reason had played in the classical episteme, as the index for determining the degree to which a particular group knew ‘self/world’ in the metaphysical terms of the current order’s ‘rational’ world view which by extension determined bio-ontological value and vice-versa” (p. 46). the reported presence (or absence) of the novel form coupled with assessments of literature’s aesthetic value along lines of race and/or national origin were embedded in the techno-scientific conception of progress that organized man in the hegelian terms of a teleology. while this is not to say, as wynter (1996) maintains (citing valentin mudimbe), that “african world views and african traditional systems of thought are ‘unthinkable and cannot be made explicit within the framework of their own rationality’, the fact remains that ‘the ways in which they have been evaluated and the means used to explain them relate to theories and methods whose constraints, rules, and systems of operation suppose a non-african epistemological locus,’ and, in effect, suppose ‘a silent dependence on a western episteme’” (p. 503). however, the west itself is an iteratively dependent construction; its renewal depends on the ritual purification of knowledge produced by and expropriated from those indigenous onto-epistemic architects the west casts as benighted and, therefore, bereft of knowledge, such that “the western tradition” emerges as an imperious effect of adaptive processes and multiscalar mutations of matter and meaning.3 moreover, the upheavals of political and cultural thought most commonly attributed to the respective events of 1492 and the copernican revolution made possible that mutation at the level of sensorium, which led, in turn, to the rise of natural science and its racialized taxonomies and teleological mode of reason and universality. editor and speculative fiction writer nalo hopkinson draws from greek myth and diverse caribbean linguistic conventions, folklore, and spiritual practices in order to create fictive narratives and lifeworlds that often explore allegorically the vexed figure of the black female body in western scientific discourse and metaphysics, rewriting the conventions of western literary genres, in particular science fiction, realism, and fantasy, along the way. as jessica langer (2011) observes of postcolonial science fiction more generally, “there are levels upon levels of hybridity here: hybridity of form, of genre, of criticism, of concept . . .” (p.109).4 the observation that “postcolonial sf” introduces new complexity into literary theory may also require, as luke gibbons (1998) suggests, new methods of interpretation: “theory itself needs to be recast from the periphery and acquire hybrid forms, bringing the plurality of voices associated with the creative energies of colonial cultures to bear on criticism itself” (p. 27). hopkinson’s locus award-winning novel, brown girl in the ring (1998)—with its levels upon levels of hybridity—provokes such a reconsideration of theory and an experiment in method on at least two counts: 1) it centralizes the role of antiblackness and slavery to the postcolonial, inviting a reworking of prevailing postcolonial paradigms that disaggregate racial slavery from colonialism, and 2) it centrally stages and performs speculation as an intervention into and as theory, intensifying speculation’s performance as theory and theory’s performance by blackness.5 in a reading of nalo hopkinson’s brown girl in the ring (1998), i argue that, as an enabling condition of imperial western humanism, the black mater(nal) is foreclosed by the dialectics of hegemonic common sense, and the anxieties stimulated by related signifiers, such as the black(ened) maternal image, voice, and lifeworld, allude to the latent symbolic-material capacities of the black mater(nal), as mater, as matter, to destabilize or even rupture the reigning order of representation that grounds the thought-world relation.6 in other words, the specter of the black mater(nal)—that is, nonrepresentability—haunts the terms and operations tasked with adjudicating the thought-world correlate or the proper perception of “the world,” such as hierarchical distinctions between reality and illusion, reason and its absence, subject and object, science and fiction, speculation and realism, which turn on attendant aporias pertaining to immanence and transcendence.7  while the immanence-transcendence dualism has a long religio-philosophical inheritance, hegel (1997) is perhaps the emblematic figure for the racialization of this prevailing dualism, providing raciality with what would become the essential touchstones of its logic: teleology and determinism. at the incipiency of globality as an idea, hegel argued that racial polarity is both the means and the ends of the universal-historical order, whereby transcendence is privileged over immanence and the two principles are understood in the oppositional terms of raciality.8 citing reports on african religion that claimed africans worshiped nature or themselves, hegel concluded that africans are governed by the senses and, as a result, are incapable of acquiring adequate distance from nature, a distance that would allow them to oppose nature and the bestial dimensions of the self. for hegel, opposing both is required for the achievement of spirit, reason, and self-governance: “inward freedom” is first attained through opposing one’s immediate existence (natural environment) and one’s natural existence (animal existence); this opposition then provides the condition of possibility for higher order thinking and self-governance. according to hegel, one must rise above one’s natural/sensuous existence via internal reflection to attain spiritual freedom, and this transcendence then becomes the basis of one’s entry into the domain of culture and history. ultimately, hegel concluded: “the african” is eternally an “animal man” because africans are trapped within immanence, or immediate experience, and are, therefore, unable to achieve transcendence or apprehend transcendent knowledge. in this, hegel co-constitutes human-animal, nature-culture, and immanence-transcendence dualisms within the imaginary of global raciality.9 while it is crucial to demonstrate the perniciousness of hegel’s philosophical premises and vocabulary, as hegelianism remains the reigning framework of universalist historicity, it is just as necessary to engage onto-epistemological frameworks that challenge antiblack modes of being and epistemic authority. with brown girl in the ring, hopkinson makes it possible to read what is invisible (but nonetheless present) or what is constitutive yet absent at the manifest level of hegel’s text, namely the foreclosure of the black mater(nal), its latent capacities, and its effects on orbiting discursive-material formations of knowledge and being.10 the term “nonrepresentability” as applied to the black mater(nal) in these pages alludes to a central and ever-present unsettling excess that nevertheless eludes representation. if wynter (1984) is correct that by the nineteenth century, “literature” was understood as the very incarnation of “culture’s” definition—the defining language of a collective impulse whereby poetry, drama, and fiction represented the “self-transcendence” of a people—then, in essence, brown girl in the ring is both an effect and a critique of the very narrative processes and metaphorics that have produced the hegelian “myth of history” and “aesthetico-ontology.” by turning on its head the (racial) teleology attributed to the novelistic form, hopkinson reveals the function of myth in the production of racial teleology and harnesses the power of myth in a generative critique of antiblackness. to put it more pointedly, if a manichean myth of history, reason, and “scientific fact” could produce a world-historical order predicated on the conjunctive abjection of black female gender and nullification of black maternity, then hopkinson’s novel effectively counters this order by, in turn, performing its intervention at the register of myth. writing in an allegorical mode, hopkinson redirects hegelian tropes of blackness, of “the african” in particular, in a manner that exposes the essential but invisibilized role of the black mater(nal) in hegel’s system as well as the irreducible aporia of scientific reason and myth. hopkinson’s text recasts the metaphor of literature and blackness precisely by exploiting the equation of blackness, and in particular africaness, with irrationality and teratology—by troping the trope of african religion. though commonly apprehended in the narratives of western science and philosophy through the terms of objective empirical fact, the “black female body” and her world are, as hopkinson’s text implies, better understood as enabling myths. in order to bring out the slippage between scientific empiricism and myth where black (maternal) female figures are concerned, hopkinson turns the realist world of science fiction into one where myth and empirical reality not only coexist but also wherein myth is embedded in realism. by doing so, the protagonist ti-jeanne and the reader are provoked by “second sight” to confront the manner in which myth, in particular myths of history and of scientific fact, structure and obscure the black female figure and, therefore, foreclose the comprehension of a perspective and comprehension from a perspective of the black mater(nal). in the novel, vertigo functions as a symptom and a metaphor for this predicament, as a disruption in proprioception or the corporeal sense of the body in space and in the making of space.11 in using myth to counter “myths of history,” the novel reveals that myth often shrouds “fact” and claims to objective reality, and for this very reason myth—or, more precisely, a non-representationalist mode of reason or onto-epistemology—may hold the potential to unsettle hegemonic modes of racist reality and their constituent myths. as such, the novel makes available a transvaluation of representation by investing myth differently.12 the problem under consideration in these pages is not simply that of the gap between the referent and the sign—the classical problem of representationalism being the misalignment in spacetime of the thing and its representation—but rather that of a sublimity attributed to the signifier “black female” and the dematerialization this attribution engenders.13 the black mater(nal) serves an enabling function that, while it can be thought precisely as a condition of possibility, in its all at-once-ness it nevertheless exceeds what we can rightfully claim to know; it eludes both measurement and imagination, and the novel provides a way to read that approaches such nonrepresentability.14 i follow hortense spillers in this essay by investigating two meanings of “representation” in the discursive practices of imperial western humanism: representative and re-presentation. the black mater(nal) is non-represent-ability because the black mater(nal) signifies the foreclosed enabling condition of the modern grammar of representation: a space of nonsense or aphasia and correspondingly without a representative in the “i and thou” dialectical processes of recognition, value, and decision.15 regarding re-presentation, in the grammar described, there are “black (maternal) female” figures (or representations) that appear, but they function at the register of myth and, therefore, reveal that representation performs rather than functions mimetically as the notion “re-presentation” suggests. in what follows, i investigate both meanings of representation and trace how each works on the other in hopkinson’s text.16 the approach here diverges from one that evaluates representation exclusively based on a representation’s supposed accuracy or inaccuracy, in other words, its ability to re-present the real thing. while the text certainly problematizes calcified representations of black womanhood, the novel does not then reinvest in the proper re-presentation of black women but rather performs representation in a speculative mode. the text does not (re)produce black women as an empiricist object or within the terms of her production as a transparent foundational object of science. rather than functioning within the limited discourse of empirical facts or seeking the authority of scientific method, black female representations in brown girl in the ring underscore the manner in which representation performs in worlds and in the (un)making of worlds.17 moving away from science fiction’s defining investments in scientific fact, the novel provokes a consideration of the problem of representing a sublime function that necessarily exceeds any claim to knowledge but that can only be approached in a gesture of representation.18 moreover, one could argue that the longstanding black feminist preoccupation with representation, in particular the seemingly inescapable burden of paradoxical modes of visibility/invisibility, do not primarily gesture towards the (in)accuracy of representations but rather toward the performative labor representation does in worlding processes. brown girl in the ring contemplates the stakes and possibilities of a mode of non-self-identical onto-epistemology to emerge, some other relation of being to knowing than what organizes our antiblack present—not based on re-presenting “the voice” or “experience of the oppressed black woman” or simply affirming subaltern knowledge in the form of african religion—but by investigating the conditions of possibility for representation itself. in a reading that insists upon aesthesis and empiricism’s inextricability, whether the epistemological context is the seemingly scientific or concerns perceptual knowledge that signifies otherwise, i will argue that the modern grammar of representation takes as its enabling figure (if figure is the appropriate concept here; portal is probably more accurate) that which is not only unrepresented but, more precisely, nonrepresentable—politicizing both the sense of commonality implied in the notion of common sense and sense perception itself. the regulating terms of the dominant grammar of representation (re)produce black(ened) mater as always and already trapped within immanence, burdening black (maternal) female figures in particular with functioning as a signifier that points to what sylvia wynter (1990) terms "demonic ground," or what is foreclosed from representability: the nonrepresentable beyond dividing what is sensible from what is nullified and precluded from representability. thereby, the modern grammar of representation imposes the inhumanity it presumes. this predicament is signaled in the text by ti-jeanne’s vertigo, whereby vertigo functions as a metaphor for the onto-epistemological predicament of black women in particular and of blackness more generally under conditions of imperial western modernity or the conception of man within the terms of a telos.19   i am interested in tracing how an injunction against an avowed commonality in being, or humanity, by an ontologized conception of gendered race paradoxically provides access to an alternative—a realm of reality (commonly disqualified and discredited by a racially exclusionary common sense), a sense-ability that “operates or becomes manifest as an ability in the realities from which this other realm or mode is excluded” (scott, 2010, p. 175). the mind-body-social nexus in brown girl in the ring indicates a reality discredited (a blackened reality) at once the experience of the carceral and the apprehension of a radically “redistributed sensorium.”20 i argue the black mater(nal) holds the potential to transform the terms of reality and feeling, therefore rewriting the conditions of possibility of the empirical. if, as darieck scott (2010) instructs, blackness is “an embodied metaphor, the lived representation that grants access to unlived possibilities” (p. 120), i seek to limn what vertiginous states introduce as possibility in the narrative. i ask, if an essential feature of your existence is that the norm is not able to take hold, what mode of being becomes available, and what mode might you invent? hopkinson’s story focuses on three generations of black caribbean-canadian “seer women” and their struggle for physical and psychic survival in the isolated, walled-off urban centre of toronto known as “the burn.” the names of the women, mami-gros jeanne, her daughter mi-jeannne, and granddaughter ti-jeanne, are an allusion to the derek walcott play ti-jean and his brothers (1957), which explores the epistemological problems wrought by slavery and colonialism, particularly the loss of indigenous knowledge and the gap between colonial knowledge and its applicability in the lifeworld of a colonized person. in an exploration of similar questions, brown girl in the ring uses tropes of “african religion,” in particular spirit possession and aspects of “double-consciousness” such as burdened “gift” and “second sight,” to explore the modern grammar of representation and its economies of value. in the interest of space, i will limit my analysis to a reading of the scene when ti-jeanne initially experiences visions while on the streets of the burn, but i will discuss this scene’s significance for the novel as a whole and underscore its implications for the theorization of onto-epistemology and representationalism at stake in my analysis.21 “the burn” is the cordoned off, economically devastated urban core of near-future toronto. in the aftermath of the city’s economic collapse and the large-scale riot that emerged in its wake, with the city aflame and in an extreme case of “white flight,” those who could flee to the suburban perimeter did so (wood, 2005, p. 317). they took along with them the city’s goods and administrative services. abandoned by state representatives and economically at the mercy of centrifugal forces, inner city toronto developed an alternative informal economy, one that is governed by a ruthless drug lord named rudy. the premier of toronto, suffering from heart failure, recently became aware of something the public had not: the sudden emergence of a zoonotic virus made it untenable to continue the porcine organ donor program. no longer under the cover of rights and protection and in an attempt to expropriate what resources remain in the burn, representatives of the ailing premier hire rudy and his “posse” to procure a human heart from someone in “the burn.” posse members include crapaud, crack monkey, jay, and tony, all characters introduced on the streets of the burn at the start of ti-jeanne’s epic quest to defeat rudy and his posse, but unfortunately she is not able to do so before they claim her grandmother’s heart for the premier. in order to confront the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother, ti-jeanne must open herself to supernatural powers and counterintuitive truths that exceed her sense of self and reality as well as challenge the coordinates of the given world. when the reader is first introduced to the narrative’s protagonist, ti-jeanne, we learn that “ti-jeanne could see with more than sight” (p. 9). tormented by prescient images of death and dying, “ti-jeanne hated the visions” (p. 9). her spectacular yet proliferate visions of the premature deaths of others in the burn threatened a total loss of self and initiated fear “like ice in her chest” (p. 19), followed by feelings of vertigo. ti-jeanne’s burdened “gift” of “second sight” opens up the question of reality for ti-jeanne. she hated the visions not only because of their frightening content and overwhelming immediacy but also because no one else could see them and, thus, they threatened her sense of self and reality. but ti-jeanne was not alone in experiencing visions. other women in her family had the “second sight.” as the story unfolds ti-jeanne learns “second sight” is a “gift,” an ability inside of debility, and that she must invent a way of being and knowing in the world that approached this constitutive paradox.22  departing from dubois’s formulation, ti-jeanne’s “second sight” is not deployed by hopkinson in pursuit of recognition within the terms of mimetic reality. rather the female subject of double-consciousness in hopkinson’s text explores the limits of representability itself, ultimately exchanging recognition for myth. the prelude to the narrative’s first full account of ti-jeanne’s prophetic yet terrifying vision was a scene of sexual street harassment immediately followed by a frightening encounter with her mother, whom she only knows as “blind crazy betty,” on the streets of the burn while running a simple errand for mami-gros jeanne. while making her way through the streets of the burn, ti-jeanne caught a glimpse of rudy’s posse, men she knew and was accustomed to avoiding. tony, a man we will come to learn is the father of the baby she held in her arms, is among them. pulse thumping, gaze averted while edging past the men, ti-jeanne tried to appear very interested in picking her way through the garbage littered sidewalk (p.16). a voice called out to her, “hey, sister, is time we get to know one another better, you know!... “ah say,” the man she knew as crack monkey hollered, “is time i get to know you better!” the men’s mocking laughter spurred ti-jeanne to walk faster, hug her child closer to her, while scowling at the man (p.16). as a vision manifests, ti-jeanne is taken out of herself, her voice, vision, and inner thoughts recede as the emergent sense of "second sight" takes over. when ti-jeanne saw her first vision, she abruptly froze, “not trusting her eyes any longer to pick reality from fantasy” (p.16 ). she saw before her crack monkey, rudy’s “right-hand man” (p.16), “a wasted thing, falling to the ground and gasping his last” (p. 16). for one of the other men, crapaud: “metabolic acidosis. cirrhosis of the liver. rum” (p. 16). the third man, jay, killed “running to the aid of his sweetheart” (p.16 ), a trans sex worker; her would-be attacker, a john with knife in hand, would eventually alter course with the gutting of jay. interspersed with folksongs and italicized, the shift in tense and references to rhymes and riddles inject the narrative’s realism with the mythical quality of time suspended or a dreamlike or magical state. ti-jeanne could not see her own death, however, nor that of her child, baby, nor of her on-again, off-again boyfriend, tony. she could not see the deaths of anyone close to her; she also could not see “blind crazy betty” until the woman was right in front of her, her mother’s sightless eyes turned toward baby exclaiming, “that is my child! he’s mine!” (p. 17). announcing the ambivalence that accompanied baby’s birth stemming from constrained circumstances, irreducible to the sum of socio-economic factors, for a woman still young in age, crazy betty continued: “what you doin’ with my baby? you can’t make a child pretty so! you did never want he! give he to me!” (p. 17).23 the resonant quality of the woman’s words sprang from the circumstance that, unbeknownst to ti-jeanne, the woman was in fact her mother, mi-jeanne, and like ti-jeanne she was a “seer woman.” the “gift” of “second sight” ran along the maternal line, and the woman ti-jeanne had known as “blind crazy betty” or simply as a “bag lady,” had not benefited from having her gift cultivated and supported by relations—psychic, spiritual, social—that would sustain her. for most of the narrative, mi-jeanne’s identity as ti-jeanne’s mother is concealed by her ominous image as “blind crazy betty.” although mi-jeanne is presumed missing, as “blind crazy betty” she recursively appears in the narrative as the specter of madness and incommunicability. the mystery surrounding mi-jeanne’s identity and the revelation of its content is primarily relayed through the fragmented perspective and memory of others, especially that of mami gros-jeanne and ti-jeanne. the precipitating events that led to mi-jeanne’s disappearance are relayed through flashback and the exchange of traumatic memories between ti-jeanne and mami. like ti-jeanne, mi-jeanne was a seer, and like ti-jeanne she refused mami gros-jeanne’s help but for different reasons. mi-jeanne’s psyche was overcome by waking nightmares that presaged the violent traumatic events of the riots. by the time mami realized her daughter was having visions, the enormity and intensity of the visions had already overwhelmed mi-jeanne, “[a]nd the powers of the visions had driven her mad” (p. 48). mami hopes that through the cultivation of ti-jeanne’s “gift” of “second sight,” ti-jeanne might be spared from what happened to her mother. but for that to be possible ti-jeanne would have to reimagine the nature of her “second sight” and the coordinates of the given world. for the time being, ti-jeanne rebuffs: “what i tell you mami? i don’t want to know nothing ‘bout obeah, oui” (p. 47). to which mami replied, hoping to clarify both the significance of ti-jeanne’s visions and convey the urgency of ti-jeanne’s predicament, “girl child, you know better than to call it obeah.…is a good thing, not a evil thing. but, child if you don’t learn how to use it, it will use you, just like it take your mother”(p. 47). frightened, ti-jeanne could just stare at mami (p. 47). in hoping that “if she ignored the second sight, it would just go away” and dismissing her grandmother’s teachings as “old time nonsense,” ti-jeanne clung to an empirical reality ordered by a teleological mode of reason and universality (p. 20, 37). but ignoring the visions was not diminishing their unsettling power. ti-jeanne worries: “mami, this ain’t the first time i see something like this. i going mad like mummy ain’t, it?” (p. 46) in moments when ti-jeanne suspects her own madness, memories of her mother and of the frightening encounter with “blind crazy betty” alternate in her mind without ti-jeanne ever realizing that her mother and “blind crazy betty” are the same person. in accordance with the modern grammar of representation, in ti-jeanne’s memory, her mother inhabits a space in and as madness, nonsense, and chaos. in other words, the black maternal figure was a signifier that apportions and delimits reason and the universal.24 in the aftermath of the riots, her mother became nearly synonymous with the disorienting enormity and chaotic origin of the burn. for ti-jeanne, the riots “were mixed up in her mind with memories of her mother lying helpless in her bed, besieged with images of the worst of the rioting before it happened” (p. 48). ti-jeanne remembered that her mother had a vision back when the riots were just starting. in the days that followed, her mother appeared to go mad, “complaining that she was hearing voices in her head” (p. 20). her mother disappeared soon after the voices had started, “run away into the craziness that toronto had become. she had never come back” (p. 20).25 ti-jeanne worried, “maybe it is hereditary?” this was an anxiety that overdetermined the apprehension of both her mother and grandmother as well as obscured the power and force of the abilities constitutive to the disorienting debility of her own “second sight” (p. 20). when the visions start, ti-jeanne attempts, by the forces of will and reason, to dis-identify with that which would potentially sustain her and by implication elude the matrilineal mark of symbolic foreclosure ascribed to the black mater(nal) and to related racially abject worldmaking practices. having already dismissed what mami was trying to teach her as “old time nonsense,” ti-jeanne would initially refuse to accept the disruption of common reality that her sense-ability both exposed and represented, even as hegemonic reality foreclosed the perception of her reality and of a shared being in a reality such as hers—a reality that necessarily could not be held in common; in fact, its foreclosure inaugurated the common (sense) (p. 37). in the case of her mother, a sense (ability) without a spiritual (initiation and ritual practice) and social locus, mi-jeanne’s psyche was in ruins. her reality and the capacities her sense-ability indexed were foreclosed by a common sense that apprehends her as monstrosity. mythologized as “blind crazy betty,” she became an anonymous feature of the generalized image of the burn as antipodean dilapidation. when the black female (maternal) figure appears, if she appears, she appears as the work and revelation of myth. there were many names for what mami, mi-jeanne, and ti-jeanne were: “myalist, bush doctor, iyalorisha, curandera, four-eye” (218); the supposed incontrovertible “truth” of black worldmaking as paradigmatic teratology and “nonsense” has the racialized exchange and circulation of the derisive term “obeah” (and related markers such as “mumbo-jumbo”) as an essential exponent. the term “obeah” (and the lifeworld it is purported to represent) is a recurring flashpoint for characters in the novel: a dramatic contest over the meaning of “obeah” punctuates the narrative’s arc, making it arguably the central conflict of the novel, one that emblematizes the unsettled convergence of the racialization of epistemic authority and sense perception with that of the time and place of africa in new world blackness under conditions of imperial western modernity. while undoubtedly ti-jeanne is the narrative’s central consciousness, the recursive shifts in narrative perspective to that of mami-gros jeanne—as a griot figure, healer, symbol of communalism—and the non-linear work of time and memory function to place pressure on or introduce irony into ti-jeanne’s perspective. exploring the caesura between the grandmother’s voice and the vital knowledge it both possesses and is possessed by and troubling an ocularcentric apprehension of reality that is similarly haunted by raciality, the novel re-signifies double-consciousness wherein ti-jeanne’s passage between the “two worlds” and its accompanying vertigo marks a desire for that which is anticipated but cannot be fully brought into legibility from within the terms of the modern grammar of representation in any form other than nonsense.26 like mi-jeanne before her, ti-jeanne risks her sense-ability—its transformative, anticipatory function, which is contiguous with its debilitating power—in an attempt to seek a place and an explanation within a science-fictional reality wherein all phenomena can be presumably explained within the terms of western (scientific) rationality.27 while ti-jeanne understands herself in the terms of a hegelian “rational” subject, both the science fictional world she seeks and the hegelian discourse that undergirds it position her and her grandmother in the same space as “blind crazy betty,” a reality ti-jeanne is not yet ready to confront.  on that street that day of her first vision, upon looking into her mother’s face and its self-inflicted, dug-out eyes, ti-jeanne saw the specter of her own (un)becoming: “the old fear of madness made ti-jeanne go cold…. madwoman in front of her. hard-eyed men just behind” (p. 17). she thought, “but at least the men had something behind their eyes, some spark of humanity” (p.17). face-to-face with dually gendered images of social death—in the forms of her mother’s visage, which she no longer recognizes, and the huddle of men, a site of gendered violence’s spatial and substitutive logics—ti-jeanne clung to a common reality and sense of humanity that she will eventually have to shed in order to, however provisionally, spark life on non-hegemonic terms and to keep her sense-ability intact. in the interval, ti-jeanne chose the men’s “something” over her mother’s seeming nothingness. she attempted to turn and run back the way she had come only to find herself transported to a green tropical meadow, where, at the end of a narrow, downward-curving dirt path, a figure came over the rise, leaping and dancing up the path: man-like, man-tall, on long, wobbly legs look as if they hitch on backward. red, red all over: red eyes, red hair, nasty, pointy red tail jooking up into air. face like a grinning african mask. only is not a mask; the lips-them moving, and it have real teeth behind them lips, attached to real gums. he waving a stick, and even the stick self-paint-up red, with some pick and crimson rags hanging from the one end. is dance he dancing on them wobbly legs, flapping he knees in and out like if he drunk jabbing he stick in the air, and now i could hear the beat he moving to, hear the words of the chant: diab’-diab’! diab’-diab’! diab’-diab’! (p.18 )  upon opening her eyes, she finds tony standing beside her in roopsingh’s roti shop. “in disorientation,” ti-jeanne asks over a raucous sonic mix of soca and customers yelling their orders through aroma-filled air boasting of curry, frying oil, and stew peas with rice, “what happened? is where we was?” (p.19). while ti-jeanne had hoped “if she ignored the second sight, it would just go away, ” the visions overwhelmed her liberal humanist sense of self-willed occularcentric agency and thwarted her attempts at backward movement. her visions’ sublime vertiginous disruption of proprioception creates an interval for ti-jeanne to move beyond representationalism and western scientific empiricism, in particular. but precisely because it is a threat to identity in the terms of “self/world” described by wynter (1984) at the beginning of this essay, she initially resists its force and effect. for ti-jeanne, the approach of the jab-jab is synonymous with the arrival of death in the form of atavism and disordered being: the jab-jab’s wobbly legs and tail portend the threat of life out of order, a disabled life, a figure described as having a “face like a grinning african mask” (p. 18). as observed by many scholars, “the african mask,” a fetish of nineteenth-century anthropology, exceeds mere representation as the fetishized mask is perceived as the embodiment of the african’s purported atemporal opacity and disordered metaphysics more generally, such that african masks and people are not merely correlates but appear interchangeable.28 michelle wallace (2004) has described the fungibility of african art and african people in the following terms:  the fate of african art objects was not unrelated to the fate of the human bodies also removed from africa under less than ideal circumstances—some of them sold or just handed over and some of them kidnapped…the greatest difference then, between the bodies of our ancestors and these tribal objects is that the bodies were allowed to die (therefore enabling us to replace them), whereas the tribal objects can never die, given their curious half-life on the back shelves of western art…it might be useful to think of them [museum and gallery collections] as ruins . . . . (p.465, 467)29 the authorized disposability of black people that wallace describes with the rather truncated phrase—“allowed to die”—sits somewhat ironically, even if not altogether unsurprisingly, next to her observation that “african objects were salvaged for exhibition or sale” (p. 463) only to find a deadly synthesis in the exhibition and sale of black people: “entire villages were sometimes shipped over to europe, england, and the united states and placed on display in zoos and circuses” in the “general chaos” that accompanied the annexation and colonization of the african continent in the late nineteenth century (p.463 ).30 wallace concludes, “no doubt, many of the objects that made it either to the new world, britain, and europe were probably destroyed one way or another” (p. 463). no doubt, indeed. we know that the name “venus,” practically synonymous with the terror and pleasure of exhibiting people, does not index a single life, but many.31 moreover, black people’s relation to the world of objects cannot be properly understood in the terms of what quentin meillassoux calls kantian correlationism or of the question of perceptual integrity between subject and object, as black peoples’ fungibility with objects is a primary function of blackness in “the” world (in the making of “the” world) and forms an essential condition of possibility for both kant’s questioning of subject-object relations and the emergence of globality as a conceptual horizon.32 so it is not that for black people the question of perceptual integrity is not a problem for contemplation; rather, the question of subject-object is thought in a world that primarily annunciates blackness as the fungibility of people and objects while steadfastly equating subjecthood with the possession and dispossession of objects (human and nonhuman)—objects that necessarily haunt the distorted perceptual terms of the kantian-subject and thought-world relationship, whereby the black mater(nal) signifies the form(lessness) of noise, and noise is produced as isomorphic to the black mater(nal), reciprocally.33 therefore, black contemplation of the question of subject-object, including thought that exceeds its logic, must contend with and cannot help but occur in a context effected by the indistinction and distortion race introduces into these very terms.34 given man’s historical horizon of possibility—slavery, conquest, colonialism—the western metaphysical matrix has race at its center in the form of a chiasmus: the metaphysics of race (“what is the ‘reality’ of race?”) and the racialization of the question of metaphysics (“under whose terms will the nature of time, knowledge, space, objecthood, being, and causality come to be defined?”). in other words, the question of race’s reality has and continues to bear directly on hierarchies of knowledge pertaining to the nature of reality itself. though the notoriously antiblack pronouncements of exalted figures like g.w.f. hegel, immanuel kant, or david hume, for instance, mark neither the invention of metaphysics nor its conclusive end, the metaphysical question of race and that of the foreclosed black mater(nal) in particular as race’s status-organizing principle marks an innovation in the governing terms of metaphysics, one that would increasingly purport to resolve metaphysical questions in terms of relative proximity to the spectral figure of “the african female” or, more specifically, that of the black mater(nal). in probing and radicalizing the indefinite distinction between immanence and transcendence, their gendered and racialized prefigurement as the staging of the black mater(nal)’s nonrepresentability, hopkinson’s novel challenges the terms that ground both attempts to distinguish and combine science and fiction as well as speculation and realism.35 what i want to stress here is that both the reigning hegemonic conception of the human thought-world correlate as well as the idea that ontological unification is both desirable and attainable by means other than violence are essential onto-epistemic aspects of antiblackness historically and contemporarily. the dominant order of appearances and its representationalist logics are forged through and by what denise ferreira da silva (2007) has termed the “global idea of race,” yet this onto-epistemic violence is commonly understood as merely the proper apprehension of reality and justified on that basis. representationalism’s ontological propositions and effects, in particular, commonly rely on a problematic material reductionism that, i argue, is secured by the idea of race: the presumed primacy and transparency of matter is called upon to adjudicate “reality,” “fact,” and “truth,” in general. the matter of racial being and its “hieroglyphics of the flesh” have been the primary measure of (human)being and a principal site for maintaining and extending representationalist rationality.36 in the process, non-representationalist systems of inquiry and modes of ontology are cast in the racialized terms of a teratology, whereby the so-called fetish is its signal anxiety. simon gikandi (2003) has described the doubleness of the fetish as “a figure that is located at the heart of culture and ritual and yet seems to appear to us in its perceptual nature, against reality” (p. 465). embalmed in a paranoid discourse that mystifies their ritualized forms and functions in the movement of west african religion and everyday life, whether in the explicit terms of “race” or the supplementary discourse of “culture,” african objects, and masks in particular, appear, one could argue, as not only “against reality” but as the foreclosing of the reality principle—in this sense, masks become fungible or metonymic with the related signifiers of the black mater(nal).37 the mask’s frightening appearance stems from a selective, yet law-like, figuration of anxiety in antiblack gendered terms, regarding “a dangerous potentiality in all perception and representation” that “reality itself is open to construction,” such that the relation between observable experience and external reality is one of vast potentiality rather than determinism (simpson, 1982, p. 11, emphasis mine). indeed, the world is not as it appears. it is revealed later in the novel that the jab-jab is a manifestation of ti-jeanne’s patron spirit papa legbara or eshu—though, in her consternation, she initially misrecognizes him and the helpful messages he provides. throughout the novel, the appearance of eshu and possession by eshu will be one of her greatest sources of strength for defeating the ruthless druglord rudy and, more importantly, for her and her mother’s survival (coleman, 2009). that her patron spirit is eshu is significant at the very least because the eshu in brown girl is a messenger and, like ti-jeanne, passes between worlds. nevertheless, in ti-jeanne’s attempt to confirm the integrity of her own relation of form to image, she necessarily has to pass, at the very least, through the gendered, antiblack associative links i have just described. the image of the jab-jab recalls the fungibility of african objects (masks) and people as well as the conflation of africa, more generally, and west african religion, in particular, with mythic irreality and the teratological, associations that precede ti-jeanne’s attempts to order her reality. it is no wonder that such circular logics and paranoid relations would induce misapprehension and the dread of vertigo. in the passage above, vertigo—that sense of unhinged reality, a communion with death and that realm which exceeds life—seems to threaten a total loss of self as incommensurable metaphysical frameworks and sensory maps meet. this episodic experience is made possible by what frank wilderson (2011) has called a “paradigmatic necessity,” namely that blackness is “a life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation” (p. 3). a life constituted by disorientation has as its essential feature what fanon (2008) diagnosed as an “aberration of affect”—autophobia and self-aversion—an effect of realizing selfhood in the terms of our present global hegemonic mode of the subject: its transindividual and systemic scales of value “woven out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” imposes an antiblack system of meaning and affective economy (wynter, 1995, p. 45). in global hegemonic terms, the african is cast “out of the world” and is thus without standing in relation to the constitution of the reality construct.38 it is not an absence of alternative metaphysical frameworks and perceptual matrices that produces the vertigo i describe; rather, vertigo is an effect of the inability of these alternatives to find footing within “the world” due to ever-renewed processes of foreclosure that take the nullification of the black mater(nal) as the horizon of the reality concept and threshold of the sensible world. for ti-jeanne, “to assume a culture, to support a civilization” under these terms is to be possessed by a metaphysics that produces egoic and filial conflicts and disintegration in the forms of deferral, isolation, anonymity, and a desire for “one human being who was totally dependent on her and would never leave her” (hopkinson, 1998, p. 25). within the logic of the specific civilization in which she finds herself, within the language which it speaks and which speaks it, as a “negro,” one will find herself biochemically altered, its physicalist correlation vertiginous (wynter, 2001). in a gloss of the work of physicist david bohm, wynter (2001) concludes, “transformed meanings have led to transformed matter, to a transformed mode of experiencing the self . . .” (p. 38). assuming the rhetorics of possession, wynter (2001) states further, “[a]nother mode of conscious experience takes over. this mode is one that compels her to know her body through the terms of an always already imposed ‘historico-racial schema’; a schema that predefines her body as an impurity to be cured, a lack, a defect, to be amended into the “true” being of whiteness” (p. 41).39 thus, sensorium and its faculties are “culturally determined through the mediation of the socialized sense of self, as well as the “social” situation in which the self is placed” (p.  37). in being and nothingness, jean-paul sartre (1993) describes existential vertigo in terms that return us to the site of an ominous narrow path, one whose feared balefulness is not manifestly figural, as in the form of a jab jab, but whose causality is annunciated affectively. and yet its existential terms also recall the racialized, gendered, and sexual conditioning of anxiety:    vertigo announces itself through fear; i am on a narrow path—without a guard rail—which goes along a precipice. the precipice presents itself to me as to be avoided; it represents a danger of death. at the same time i conceive of a certain number of causes…which can transform that threat of death into reality…through these various anticipations, i am given to myself as a thing; i am passive in relation to these possibilities; they come to me from without; in so far as i am also an object in the world, subject to gravitation, they are my possibilities. (p. 66) reading this canonical passage on existential vertigo in light of the gendered sexual history of conquest and enslavement makes perceptible the visceral nature of anxieties that orbit the status of objects. framed in essentialist terms, blackness marks a violation of gendered and sexual norms such that race—once ontologized—fixes blackness, regardless of “sex,” in the “feminine position” as that passivity and stasis ascribed to objecthood and death, or objecthood as a form of living death. in this frame, the predominant one—blackness, womanhood, female sex, objecthood, passivity, inertia, and death—form an unbreakable chain and negative telos or declension. for a black woman, such as ti-jeanne, to be “riddin by spirits” is to be possessed by a gendered sexual redundancy, an intensification of death in and by objecthood. paradoxically, objecthood, here, serves to feminize a womanhood considered to be of questionable feminine standing by way of placing her being in common under erasure; in other words, it genders black womanhood on the register of her object status only to dispossess her gender of the fullness of being (human). in sum, according to the ontologized, gendered metrics described, the object’s nonbeing as blackened status figures black womanhood a superposition or the state of occupying two distinct and seemingly contradictory human and object worlds simultaneously— a predicament that underwrites both the separation of “subject” and “object” in western ontological discourse and exposes the impossibility of consistently keeping them apart. thus, i argue that, rather than simply restore activity to matter or militate against the charge of passivity in the exclusive terms of defining agency by activity, an alteration of the object’s blackened gendered status necessitates a transvaluation of the gendered symbolics of passivity and the inoperability of its sliding substitutions. brown girl in the ring is a novel that perhaps should be understood not as a mixing of genres but rather as a performance of their deconstruction—literary genres and those genres of the human that apprehend black maternity as the precipice of a void. in posing the question of onto-epistemology at the register hopkinson’s text poses it, as an intervention into the modern grammar of representation, operative dualisms—science-fiction, fact-belief, observation-projection, realism-fantasy—are destabilized, problematizing generic codes and conventions, their terms of legibility and historical-national organization, and their bonds of signification and constitutive oppositions. these narrative strategies underscore the manner with which brown girl in the ring refuses to be an “object of anthropological desire” (da silva, 2007, p. xxii ). brown girl in the ring’s philosophical inquiry into onto-epistemology and perceptual reality destabilizes the ground of “ethnographic authority” rather than invites it and deauthorizes not only hegel’s racial telos but also the foundational empiricism of franz boas as well. da silva (2007) has shown that as a knowledge project that addresses man as an object, franz boas’s cultural anthropology tied certain bodily and mental configurations to different global regions as boas’s conceptualization of “the primitive mind” sought to explain sense perception in terms of the “laws” of “cultural development” that relied upon and extended a logic that made globality and raciality coextensive.40 rather than read brown girl in the ring through the imperative of anthropological translation or map its proximity to some ideal of western secular scientific rationality, i am most interested in the way yoruba and related cosmological systems function in the novel as tropes in service to a generative critique of the racialized, gendered, sexual fictions of ontology and subjectivity i have just described. diasporic practices of worldmaking potentially act as a mode of redress for onto-epistemic violence to the extent that said praxes preclude the monopolization of sense that authorizes antiblack (euro)modernity. ti-jeanne ticked them off on her fingers: “shango, ogun, osain, shakpana, emanjah, oshun, oya, and eshu” and would need to call upon them, the “old-time stories,” and even crazy betty/mi-jeanne to possess and aid her in her battle with rudy, ultimately recovering her mother in the process (p. 204).41 troping rather than rehearsing yoruba religious practice, in brown girl in the ring, the invocation of the orishas does not so much act as a guarantor of africa as the “essential base” of new world cosmological praxis. rather, it marks the process of altering terms and objects from that of “africa” as a paranoid discourse to that of blackness as an existential predicament such that africa is understood and problematized as an invention of imperial western modernity and its grammar of representation.42 this is a vertiginous circuit whose vicissitudes and paradoxes must necessarily include both the anticipation and indeterminacy of alternation between paranoid and deliberative modes of onto-epistemology. awaiting neither “the science of culture” (anthropological historicity) nor the authentication of what is or is not “caribbean” or “african” (“ethnographic authority”), this altered course reveals that blackness is an existential predicament that precisely and decisively unmoors the fictions of origin and integral human(being). the middle passage is neither place nor historical past but statelessness, a processual (un)becoming, the (dis)continuous iterative unsettling of origin and being, a challenge to the question and terms of origin writ large, and therefore it confounds rather than permits the compensatory gestures discourses of “hybridity” and “syncretism” offer to (racial) ontology.43 even when it is to their great detriment, or perhaps even especially in those instances, the novel’s characters of different, racial, gender, age, and class positionalities participate in a signifying process that negates, rejects, misapprehends, and misnames what has already been prefigured void. mami-gros jeanne’s empiricist praxis and interventions, her onto-epistemology, lie buried under the signifiers of superstition and nonsense. the author’s use of dramatic irony performs and exposes the impossibility of the black mater(nal) to be either re-presented or known in the modern grammar of dialectical subjecthood and authority; what emerges from this narrative strategy is not an affirmation of the positive value of either “immanence” or “transcendence” but rather a (re)valuation of deferral, the ongoing pursuit of a signifier, a name, that is not already determined by those terms, fails to signify in those terms and mutates those terms and their grammar beyond recognition. as the novel unfolds, ti-jeanne gradually relinquishes a fantasy of the will (unified and rational self-directed subjectivity), or sovereignty, as the seat of agency, a fantasy perhaps all the more beguiling because of the ways abandonment, disposability, and segregation act to ensure life’s irresolution in the burn, an irresolution that extends into existence as the ever-presence of dreadful anticipation, psychic diremption, and (dis)possession of the flesh. ultimately, ti-jeanne discovers that receptivity to and assumption of the orishas as ontological co-constituents may not only provide a means for survival but may offer a sense of life beyond mere survival. thus, ti-jeanne’s (dis)abling predicament, or vertiginous state, provides ti-jeanne some other mode of relating where the other is neither an agent of your aggrandizement nor of your diminishment but the arrival of the inoperability of the binary between the two and a suspension of relation on those terms, thus making way for the unforeseen. going deeper into blackness rather than fleeing its trace, brown girl in the ring is an allegory for unsettling modes of cognition and sense-making that authorize antiblack metaphysics. antiblack metaphysics, as foreclosure, positions the existence of blackened reality beyond the conceptual borders of the dialectical encounter that underwrites representationalism’s hegemonic processes of worlding. however, the novel does not simply advocate one representationalist schema, presumed to be more comprehensive or offer more accurate representations of existing entities, over another; rather, it allegorizes the potential enabling effects of disordering the hegemonic mode of reality and self-world relation. in brown girl in the ring, ti-jeanne must forego faith in the idea that there is an all-encompassing transcendental structure—“reality,” “the world,” “truth”—that settles matters of existence once and for all. instead, she measures claims to existence based on their metaphorical resonance and ontological effects upon a world within "the world." in ineluctable co-constitution, where self and world are internal (but not reducible) to each other, what arrangement of existence, modes of relationality, and agential possibilities emerge? rather than assume that the epistemic purchase of inquiry into ontology resides in the measurable distance between representation and referent, ti-jeanne asks, instead, what worldings do particular ontological claims (dis)enable? in this important sense, ti-jeanne’s reorientation to the question of world serves as an analytic for interrogating what representationalism claims to do.44 in conclusion, in brown girl in the ring, vertigo functions as the precipice of a new consciousness and “inchoate theoretics” (scott, 2010, p. 64)—where “sense and non-sense have yet to be differentiated” (marriott, 2014, p. 522). vertigo provides an alternative to “the tyrannies of our common reality,” where positivist knowledge is forged through epistemic coercion, expropriation, and relations of direct domination (scott, 2010, p. 26). i have argued that western science and philosophy’s foundational authority and the reproduction of the scientific matrix of classification necessitates and is maintained by the recursive symbolic foreclosure of the black mater(nal) and dislocation of black gender, maternity, and sexuality in hegemonic philosophies of ontology. vertigo, here, is a measure and means for the disordering and inoperability of a metaphysics that takes the black mater(nal)’s nonrepresentability as its enabling condition. in vertigo, we may limn the potential to queer metaphysics via a transvaluation of (human) being and a reconfiguration of gendered sexual embodiment by means of an emergent sensorium. disordering metaphysics, and metaphysics disordered: “ti-jeanne felt the gears slipping between the two worlds” (hopkinson, 1998, p. 19). in this, ti-jeanne’s vertigo is both the apprehension of unlived possibilities and the salvific eruption into consciousness of discredited sensation, of other ways of living, other modes of life that provide a dizzying sense of vivifying potentiality.   notes 1 i use the term “local” not to signify “isolation” or a lack of politically complex encounters with discontinuous onto-epistemologies near and far; rather, the use of “local” here is meant in the relative sense given the relatively recent emergence of the planetary scale introduced by processes of enslavement and imperial domination. see, for instance, jayasuriya & pankhurst (2003), jayasuriya (2008), and alpers (2009). i thank lamonda horton-stallings for bringing these texts to my attention. see gayatri spivak’s (1999) a critique of postcolonial reason for her use of “epistemic violence.” 2 robinson crusoe, oroonoko, and the blazing world in english and don quxiote in spanish have been variously described as the first novels in either english or spanish. sinapia is generally regarded as the first spanish utopia, and blazing world, similarly, is often considered the first work of science fiction. 3 to take but one example, in a process that contemporarily often goes by the name of biopiracy or bioprospecting, western biomedicine and pharmaceutical corporations “discover,” expropriate, and recast indigenous knowledge of plant and animal species. through the enactment of purportedly secular rituals of copyright, patent, and commercialization, indigenous knowledge is cleaved from the onto-epistemologies with which it is embedded, and once purified this newly repackaged knowledge is then prepared for sale and distribution in accordance with market logics. see mgbeoji (2014) and shiva (2016). 4 many thanks to amanda renée rico for bringing to my attention the jessica langer text. 5 definitions of “postcolonial sf” vary. for instance, in science fiction, imperialism and the third world, andy sawyer's "forward," (2010) suggests that "an explicitly postcolonial science fiction not only has to be written from outside the traditional strands of western science fiction ... but explained and criticized from outside them too” (p.1-2), and hoagland and sarwal's (2010) "introduction" more broadly defines postcolonial sf as "texts that draw such explicit and critical attention to how imperialist history is constructed and maintained" (p. 10). on postcolonial sf see, raja et. al. (2011) and hopkinson & mehan (2004). david higgins’s (2014) review of science fiction, imperialism and the third world provides a productive introduction to some of the issues regarding definition. 6 the black mater(nal), as mater, as matter, gestures towards a web of interconnected signifiers such as materiality, black femininity, maternity, natality, and relation to the mother. 7 for more on the racialized distinction between immanence and transcendence, "belief” and “scientific fact,” see bruno latour’s (2010) “on the cult of the factish gods.” 8 for a fuller discussion of raciality in hegel’s arguments on world history, please see denise ferreira da silva’s (2007) superb reading of hegel in toward a global idea of race. 9 andrews (2015) and colucciello barber’s (2013) respective deleuzian approaches to immanence attempt to think the fullness of immanence and problematize historical, hierarchical dualisms between transcendence and immanence. however, this essay seeks to identify the powerful and seemingly inescapable ways that the reciprocal productions of race and gender haunt both the ongoing perpetuation of this dualism and its critiques as the very terms themselves are racialized and gendered. 10 this argument is informed by jacques derrida’s important work in of grammatology and margins of philosophy concerning “structure of absence” and “différance.” 11 i thank vanessa agard-jones for urging me to think more about what space is doing in this work. 12 my use of the term “myth” is primarily informed by hortense spillers’s (1987) concept of “mythic time” in “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe,” which reworks the concept of myth in roland barthes’s mythologies. in spillers’s deployment of myth, black femaleness is the iterative and recursive material-discursive site, where the dominant system of values variably (re)produces itself in “mythic time” rather than in a temporally-and/or socially-progressivist manner. however, a number of scholars have written about myth in brown girl primarily as it relates to folklore and religious studies, works that do not emphasize the social structural function of myth in the sense that spiller’s does and i extend. see, for example, coleman (2009), baker (2004), and anatol (2004). 13 besides spillers, morrison, crenshaw, wynter, and hammonds’s indispensible engagements with the problem of black(ened) female sexuation in the field of representation, namely that “she” is both essential to the dominant mode and grammar of representation and necessarily invisible, meg armstrong (1996) provides an excellent introduction to the role of black women in kant and burke’s theorizations of the sublime. this is a topic i take up at great length in forthcoming work in philosophia. on blackness and kantian thought, see ronald judy (1991). 14 as the black mater(nal) cannot be comprehended as a unified object with definite identifiable endpoints, it invokes the infinite in size and power, appearing boundless on both registers, and, therefore, resists a mental form in the mind or imagination as well as understanding or conceptualization. moreover, one could not “know” the serialized empirical content of the black mater(nal) in its all at-once-ness or as it presumably exists but only in its serialized conception, which due to processual capacities of thought and human finitude would always remain incomplete. a book that names and engages this challenge via the question of “the world” and the infinity of things is markus gabriel’s why the world does not exist (2015). this essay invokes the aesthetic experiences of the beautiful and sublime as they are read in kant’s "critique of aesthetic judgment" in the third critique. while i am neither strictly adhering here to kant’s philosophy nor the influential philosophical inquiries into the sublime offered by edmund burke and jean-françois lyotard, the question of how the black female figure constitutes and disrupts these powerful analyses is taken up in forthcoming work in philosophia. 15 the phrase “modern grammar of representation” represents my attempt to think with and alongside hortense spiller’s (1987) “american grammar” and denise da silva’s (2007) “modern grammar” and “modern representation.” 16 on the notion of performance/performativity, here i am thinking with karen barad (2003) who states the following: “[t]he representationalist belief in the power of words to mirror preexisting phenomena is a metaphysical substrate that supports social constructivist, as well as traditional realist, beliefs…a performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the representationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting things…the move toward performative alternatives to representationalism shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality (e.g., do they mirror nature of culture?) to matters of practices/doings/actions” (p. 802). 17 see bruno latour and steve woolgar’s laboratory life: the construction of scientific fact (2013) for a critique calling into question the presumed primacy of the scientific method in the practice of science. latour and woolgar find that representation is constituted alongside practice at every level and that experiments are not rigidly performed or regulated in accordance with “scientific method.” on the contrary, experiments typically produce inconclusive results and much scientific fact is constructed during the subjective process of deciding which results to include and exclude. 18 see robert heinlein’s (1977) definition of science fiction, for instance: "realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method. to make this definition cover all science fiction (instead of 'almost all') it is necessary only to strike out the word 'future'” (p. 9). 19 my argument about “nonrepresentability” is in conversation with and indebted to a tradition of black feminist and queer theorizing on the problem of representation: evelynn hammonds’s (1994) formulation of “black (w)holes,” and hortense spillers’s (1987) analysis of “body-flesh” and “mythic time.” in a current book project, i am delineating how this argument builds on and relates to hammonds’s and spillers’s analyses, in particular. similarly, black feminists and gender theorists such as sylvia wynter (1990) and kimberlé crenshaw (1991) have also produced indispensable analysis of the modern injunction against the black mater(nal)’s representability as an enabling condition of the modern representational grammar. more recently, kara keeling (2007) and rizvana bradley (2015) have produced energizing new work on the relation between black femininity and capacity through a critical engagement with black women’s filmic representations. lacan (1993) uses the term foreclosure to investigate the possible psychical causes of psychosis. he locates the cause of psychosis in the absence of the (symbolic) father from the scene of oedipal family, thereby limiting the family to the mother-child dyad. he concludes that the absence of the father or the name-of-the-father is the central causal factor for psychosis, which is understood as a severed connection or disjuncture between the symbolic, imaginary, and the real. i am not using the term foreclosure in this strict lacanian sense. my use is more informed by the aforementioned black feminist investigations of the burdened sublimity of the black mater(nal). 20 my thanks to kyla wazana tompkins for this felicitous phrase. michel foucault is famous for his conceptualization of power’s lability and distributed agency. here, i am interested in theorizing that which michel foucault (1982) would not, namely domination. foucault famously equivocated before ultimately sidestepping the question of agency under conditions of domination. prior to quickly shifting and remaining with the question of power’s relational forms and dynamics, foucault vacillates: he argues in one place that domination is the calcification of relation and, therefore, can neither be the proper site of an inquiry into the dynamics of power nor of relationality but rather their disablement (1982); but elsewhere he allows for some modicum of relational capacity and distributed agency to exist in domination (1997). my aim is not so much to settle the question of capacity and/or relationality; rather, what i am more interested in exploring concerns how movement at the ontic register of experience does or does not alter the nature of domination and its ontologized terms in brown girl in the ring. 21 this article is an adapted excerpt from a chapter of my book-in-progress tentatively titled the blackness of space between matter and meaning. the chapter-length engagement with the text closely reads additional scenes in the text and makes other claims about black female gender, biotechnology, and representation in the novel. 22 see jasbir puar (2009) on "debility." 23 giselle liza anatol (2004) has noted, “one of the great strides that hopkinson makes in her narrative is not only subverting the idea of the innately maternal woman, but specifically debunking the contradictory european constructions of african-descended women as (a) hyper-maternal mammies and (b) genetically apathetic, cold-hearted, and emotionally distant mothers: stereotypes generated during the slave era and continuing into the present day in various forms” (p. 33). 24 see wynter’s “miranda” (1990) and “ceremony” (1984) for an articulation of black matter’s signification as chaos and irrationality in the discourses of man. 25 black maternity and madness had become nearly synonymous for ti-jeanne. ti-jeanne even initially wonders about her own “waking dreams,” if they were brought on by “the stress of learning how to cope with a newborn baby” (p. 20). 26 kelli moore (forthcoming) is also currently writing on proprioception in light of spiller’s scholarship. moore’s emphasis on the gap between voice and vision in black women’s testimony in domestic violence cases inspired me to at least begin to think about how said gap might function in hopkinson’s text. 27 while ti-jeanne’s development as a character pivots on this conflict, it is starkly conveyed in how ti-jeanne saw mami’s “bush medicine” in comparison to western bioscientific medicine. while mami used both as a healer and a formally trained nurse, “ti-jeanne didn’t place too much stock in mami’s bush doctor remedies.” …ti-jeanne would have preferred to rely on commercial drugs….ti-jeanne didn’t understand why mami insisted on trying to teach her all that old-time nonsense” (pp. 36-37). but it was commercial western medicine’s imbrication in commercial networks and state power that threatened to dissolve the already fragile familial relations she had. this is a topic, along with xenotransplantation and zoonosis, discussed at length in the chapter-length version of this paper. i thank darius bost and alvin henry for helping me develop this point and for being such great sounding boards for this work. 28 for synthetic and critical engagement with this topic, see see strother (1998) and gikandi (2003).  29 wallace’s essay is productively riven with deep ambivalence and unsettled conclusions, but in addition to this view, she expresses a conviction that it is indeed possible (and even desirable) for these collections to be made available to black artists in the west, who may (and arguably already have) discover(ed) generative models in the ruins. 30 see also gikandi’s (2003) discussion of the meeting of guyanese painter aubrey williams and canonical artist pablo picasso. upon being introduced to williams, picasso looked at him and remarked that he had “a fine african head” that he would like to use as a model. gikandi notes the following about that encounter: “williams was disappointed that he was appealing to picasso merely as an object or subject of art, not as an artist, not as a body, not even as a human subject” (pp. 455-456). 31 see hartman (2008). 32 in after finitude, quentin meillassoux (2010) defines correlation as “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (p. 5). i am thinking here not only of kant’s “on the different races of man” (1997) and “on national characteristics” (1997) but also of hegel’s “geographical basis of world history” (1997) and their elaborate and fallacious reasoning, whereby geography, reason, and time become the watchwords of an emergent, racially-teleological conception of “universality” and “world.” see eze (1997) for these essays. 33 eduardo vivieros de castro (2014) also contends that the terms through which kant raises the question of “correlationism” must be de-transcendentalized because the self-other frame through which the question is cast is not universal but particular. with vivieros de castro, my argument is related. i agree that kant’s mode of questioning is neither universal nor should it be transcendentalized, but more than that, i seek to explore the manner in which his mode of inquiry is an effect of an imperial history and rationality. morever, meillasoux, in a critique of correlationism, defines it as “the idea according to which we only have access to the correlation between thinking and being and never to either term considered apart from the other” (2010, p. 5). while not the aim of this essay, i hope one consequence of these pages is a disruption of the “thought vs. world” frame of the debate about correlationism. on noise, see serres (1983). 34 fred moten’s (2003) work is indispensible on the question of blackness and object-status. 35 this paragraph is taken almost in its entirety from an article i wrote entitled “outer worlds” (2015). 36 the phrase “hieroglyphics of the flesh” is taken from hortense spiller’s “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe” (1987). 37 see the following works that question 18th century eurocentric aesthetic standards for “art” and that centralize the internal forces of change producing formal dynamism rather than attributing innovation to relations with the west (especially strothers who cites other scholars working in a similar vein): strother (1998), achebe (2012), and arnoldi (1988). see da silva’s towards a global idea of race (2007) for the insidiousness of the “culture” concept in the human sciences: “[t]he racial, the nation, and the cultural—fulfill the same signifying task of producing collectivities as particular kinds of modern subjects. each, however, has very distinct effects of signification: (a) the racial produces modern subjects as an effect of exterior determination, which institutes an irreducible and unsublatable difference; (b) the nation produces modern subjects as an effect of historical (interior) determination, which assumes a difference that is resolved in an unfolding (temporal) transcendental essence; but (c) the cultural is more complex in its effects because it can signify either or both” (p. xxxvii). 38 the phrase “out of the world” is taken from achille mbembe’s on the postcolony (2001). 39 this quote is drawn from wynter’s (2001) reading of fanon’s reading of himself on the occasions when he had “to meet the white man’s eyes” (fanon, 2008, p. 110), as a prelude to the failure of intersubjectivity, at least one that would be occasioned by the black’s ontological resistance. here, i altered gendered designations to accord with the focus of my analysis. wynter also notes in the preceding page the gendered specificity of fanon’s narration of his experience of antiblackness, as well as what is shared across lines of gender: “while the black man must experience himself as the defect of the white man—as must the black woman vis a vis the white woman—neither the white man or woman can experience himself/herself in relation to the black man/black woman in any way but as that fullness and genericity of being human, yet a genericity that must be verified by the clear evidence of the latter’s lack of this fullness, of this genericity. the qualitative aspects of the two group’s mental states with respect to their respective experiences of the sense of self are not only opposed, but dialectically so; each quality of subjective experience, the one positive, the other negative, depends on the other” (p. 40). in these pages, i am interested in how the black mater(nal)’s nonrepresentability enables this entire field of antinomic dualisms. 40 it is more interesting, and perhaps more relevant, to investigate the racial logic of boas’s empiricism here, given both the common assumption that the “science of culture” established a decisive break with scientific racism as well as the pride of place anthropological translation holds in the scholarship on hopkinson’s writing. however, this investigation could easily extend to the empiricism of david hume, commonly described as the founder of empiricism, and perhaps does so by implication as hume is well-known for the likening of a multilingual black man to a parrot. michael hanchard (1999) comments upon the infamous analogy in the following: “…hume’s cryptic commentary has dual significance, for it implies that the only civilizational possibilities for people of african descent were reactive and imitative. the act of mimicry itself, its subversive and infra-political implications notwithstanding, entails a temporal disjuncture. in historical and civilizational terms, africans in the aggregate could—at best—aspire to caricature. they could only mimic the aggregate european” (p. 252). 41 a number of critics have noted that the depiction of the orisha in brown girl does not appear to re-present any practicing tradition but rather the “blending,” “fusing,” and “dissolving of the boundaries in religious practices” as a “basis for a unique pan-caribbean identity” [see coleman (2009)]. or as wood (2005) has noted, “tracing specific religious references seems to become an academic enterprise” as the novel’s religious pantheon appears to perform in such a way as to undermine our “ability to ‘place’ or locate these deities and practices” (p. 319). 42 in contrast, please see robert farris thompson’s flash of the spirit: african and afro-american art and philosophy (1984) for his highly-influential argument mapping cultural continuities and what are called “survivals” between west african religion, particularly yoruba religion, and “new world” religious and cultural practice. this process of transcription is mapped in spatio-temporal terms—from a putative african past to a (presumably western) modernity—such that when africans, even “ancient” africans, possess cultural properties ascribed to “modernity,” those properties are still framed in comparative terms that presume the “modern” is proper to the west. furthermore, in framing its intervention in terms of a disruption of a commonly-held assumption that finds africa lacking vis-a-vis signifiers of “modernity,” its corrective misses an opportunity to fundamentally call into question the mode of thought that seeks to distinguish and order a relational hierarchy between “primitive” and “modern” technologies and lifeworlds. in short, it recasts rather than forestalls a hierarchical binary between “modernity” and “tradition,” bestowing the “traditional” with a positively-inflected alternative value—that of transcendence. moreover, in building an argument about the yoruba’s “transcendence” over the violence of the middle passage and colonial violence, for instance, it fails to adequately account for the disruptive and creative power of history, thus obscuring the dynamics of change that accompany “yoruba” practice. for a related set of critiques of anthropological claims to continuity, see david scott, “an obscure miracle of connection” (1999) and “that event, this memory: notes on the anthropology of african diasporas in the new world” (1991). and, of course “invention” here alludes to v.y. mudimbe’s (1988) important book, the invention of africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge. 43 here i am in agreement with scott’s (1999) contention, in a gloss of his first book, formations of ritual: “the argument (one, it seems to me, still not sufficiently recognized) was that anthropological objects are not simply given in advance of anthropological projects, but are constructed in conceptual and ideological domains that themselves have histories—very often colonial histories. my point, therefore, was that unless anthropology attends, in an ongoing and systematic way, to the problem of the conceptual-ideological formation of the objects that constitute its discourse, it will not be able to avoid the reproduction of colonialist discourse” (p. 13). see also omi’seke tinsley’s “black atlantic, queer atlantic” (2008), which also calls into question the middle passage as “origin” (p. 192). the term “science of culture” is taken from the often-described founder of cultural anthropology, edward burnett tylor. his highly influential primitive culture (1871) developed the thesis of “animism” and is known for being the first-systematic empirical study of the topic. tylor describes the reformist mandate of anthropological science as follows: “[w]here barbaric hordes groped blindly, cultured men can often move onward with clear view. it is a harsher, and at times even painful office of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old cultures which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction. yet this work, if less genial, is not less urgently needful for the good of mankind. thus, active at once in aiding progress and in removing hindrance, the science of culture is essentially a reformer's science” (p.453). 44 other critics in (feminist) science studies have raised 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(1971). novel and history, plot and plantation. savacou, 5, 95-102. wynter, s. (1984). the ceremony must be found: after humanism. boundary, 2, 19-70. wynter, s. (1990). beyond miranda’s meanings: un/silencing the “demonic ground” of caliban’s women. in c.b. davies & e.s. fido (eds.), out of the kumbla: caribbean women and literature (pp. 355-372). trenton, nj: africa world press. wynter, s. (1995). 1492: a new world view. in v.l. hyatt & r. nettleford (eds.), race, discourse, and the origin of the americas: a new world view (pp. 5-57). washington, d.c.: smithsonian institution press. wynter, s. (1996). genital mutilation or symbolic birth—female circumcision, lost origins, and the aculturalism of feminist/western thought. case w. res. l. rev., 47(2), 501-552. wynter, s. (2001). towards the sociogenic principle: fanon, identity, the puzzle of conscious experience, and what it is like to be “black”. in m.f. durán-cogan & a. gómez-moriana (eds.), national identities and sociopolitical changes in latin america (pp. 30-66). london, routledge. bio zakiyyah iman jackson is assistant professor of black feminist theory, literature, and criticism in the english department at george mason university and affiliate faculty in women and gender studies. professor jackson has published work in feminist studies (2014), glq (2011 and 2015), and has forthcoming work in qui parle: critical humanities and social sciences.     original research thinking post-developmental pedagogies with physical activity pedagogical resources—or, how might we entangle pedagogies and physiological knowledges differently?     nicole land school of early childhood studies, ryerson university nland@ryerson.ca     abstract thinking with a canadian physical activity pedagogical resource, this article proposes that post-developmental early childhood education pedagogies can engage with physiological sciences beyond the instructive or instrumental relationships currently facilitated by contemporary physical activity pedagogies. to begin, i bring feminist science studies together with post-developmental pedagogies to detail how pedagogy and physiology become intertwined. i trace the tensions of weaving physiological knowledges with pedagogies, acknowledging the power-laden complexities of thinking with euro-western sciences in canadian education. finally, i work through two propositions aimed at making physiological knowledges differently entangled with the complexities of post-developmental pedagogies: (1) crafting physiological knowledges as a problem with pedagogies, while (2) deploying these physiological knowledges as pedagogical provocations that call us to engage differently with physiological knowledges.     keywords post-developmental pedagogies, physiological knowledges, feminist science studies, physical education     introduction this article proposes that post-developmental early childhood education pedagogies can engage with physiological sciences in an effort to unsettle the hegemonic stability of predominant physical activity pedagogies that are underpinned by scientific epistemologies. i organize my argument in two primary movements that echo the intentions of early childhood education post-developmental pedagogies to both trace existing educational trajectories (the beginning section) and orient toward inventing speculative, situated responses to complex worlds (the concluding section) (nxumalo, vintimilla, and nelson 2018; vintimilla and pacini-ketchabaw 2020). i situate this paper within the context of thinking with post-developmental pedagogies (land 2020; land et al. 2020; pacini-ketchabaw, kind, and kocher 2016), which are pedagogies that propose relations that engage with children beyond the linear, ageand stage-based, normalizing logics of child development (burman 2016; moss 2016; pacini-ketchabaw, nxumalo, kocher, elliot and sanchez 2015) in canadian early childhood education. i do this because early childhood education is a space where scientific knowledges entangle with pedagogical practices through various concerns, including, for example, health, nutrition, and physical activity. further, because post-developmental pedagogies work to resist the universalizing, instrumental tendencies of developmental theories by offering situated, local, tentative responses to inherited educational structures, i focus on one physiology-informed curricular resource relevant to early childhood education in canada. throughout the article, my central argument is that taking physiological knowledges to account with post-developmental pedagogies entangles physiology with the ethical and political concerns of post-developmental early childhood education, thus working physiological knowledges to account with pedagogical questions, tensions, and answerabilities that complexify the epistemic structures that typically govern scientific knowledges in early childhood education. i hope that the propositions this article offers will open space for generating locally meaningful experiments in weaving pedagogies with physiologies differently in other contexts.   i begin by discussing how physiology, as a powerful euro-western knowledge, perpetuates colonial epistemic hierarchies and maintains neoliberal conceptions of normative, individualized “health.” digging into how physiological sciences, practices of mainstream physical education, and early childhood education pedagogies become entangled in contemporary euro-western worlds, i turn to a canadian physical activity pedagogical resource, the canadian 24-hour movement guidelines for children and youth developed by the healthy active living and obesity group (halo) of the children’s hospital of eastern ontario (cheo) research institute, the canadian society for exercise physiology (csep), participaction, the conference board of canada, and the public health agency of canada. while each organization provides public access to these guidelines (hereafter referred to as “the guidelines”), in this article i will refer to the version of the guidelines shared on the canadian society for exercise physiology website (2016a). the guidelines function as a document created for educators, professionals, and guardians that shares information on the intensity, type, and duration of physical activity recommended for children. i trace how physiology and pedagogy become intertwined in this resource and detail how these physiology-pedagogy entanglements enable specific educational practices.   in the second part of the article, i put forward one attempt at working a physiological knowledge—excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (or epoc)—differently with early childhood education pedagogies. briefly, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption is an exercise science theory that alleges that once a bout of exercise is complete, a human body continues to “burn” calories to restore the body to its original resting state. following angela willey, a feminist science studies scholar, i formulate a partial “vision of what it might look like to politicize scientific knowledge production in a way that allows for an answerability, an accountability, beyond the realm of internal critique that science as we know it lacks” (2016, 14). i think with epoc as one physiological knowledge that underpins the canadian 24-hour movement guidelines for children and youth. translating willey’s (2016) proposition into early childhood education, early childhood education pedagogies can engage, think, and ask questions with epoc beyond the interpretative or instrumental frames that typically inform how pedagogies and physiology converse. i work through two propositions that bring post-developmental pedagogies and physiological knowledges together in an unfamiliar way: (1) crafting physiological knowledges as a problem with pedagogies, while (2) deploying these physiological knowledges as pedagogical provocations that might create different possibilities for engaging with physiological knowledges in early childhood education. throughout this article, i make the necessary contractions of my work public, as i detail my situated, small intervention into how specific physiological knowledges become entangled with specific pedagogical practices in euro-western canada. i want to imagine an educational practice where we (those who actively participate in pedagogies: researchers, educators, children, families) make physiology differently answerable to the multiple critiques that nourish post-developmental education while creating differently accountable practices of relating with physiological knowledges.   physiology and pedagogies: csep’s movement guidelines for children and youth pedagogical resources that tout physical activity recommendations, outline physical literacy programming, and detail the necessity of educating young children in healthy nutrition habits are increasingly prevalent in canadian early childhood education. these include the canadian 24-hour movement guidelines for children and youth (csep, 2016a), healthy opportunities for preschoolers by temple and preece (2007), and healthy beginnings for preschoolers 2–5 from the chronic disease prevention alliance of canada (n.d.). the guidelines contain four core recommendations: sweat, step, sleep, and sit. related to physical activity, the sweat guideline outlines how long children should be highly active (“an accumulation of at least 60 minutes per day of moderate to vigorous physical activity” [2]), while the step category details additional required physical activity (“several hours of a variety of structured and unstructured light physical activities” [2]). the guidelines note that children and youth should follow these recommendations “for optimal health benefits” (2). targeted toward younger children, csep’s physical activity guidelines for the early years (n.d.) detail physical activity recommendations for toddlers, setting the developmentally rooted groundwork for the guidelines’ prescriptions for moderate to vigorous physical activity by recommending “progression toward at least 60 minutes of energetic play by 5 years of age” (para. 1). the intended audience for the guidelines includes educators, practitioners, and guardians. rooted in a developmental perspective of childhood, where growth and skill development are assessed against a “healthy” or “typical” norm and are universalizable across various children’s bodies, the guidelines are intended to provide a reference for early childhood curriculum and policy. while none of these documents explicitly refer to epoc in their public-facing literature, the assertion that epoc is desirable and happens in concert with vigorous (high energy, demanding) exercise (or play) is one of the many physiological knowledges that underpins these guidelines.   detailing physiology as a euro-western knowledge physiology—as one knowledge production apparatus of euro-western settler colonial epistemic hegemony (haraway and subramaniam 2021; lyons et al. 2017; mckittrick 2021; roy and subramaniam 2016; sanabria 2016; tallbear 2013; willey 2016)—is the science of how a living body functions. i think with physiology in this article because it is a core knowledge that informs mainstream physical education pedagogy. as a euro-western knowledge system, physiology sustains a specific scheme of bodied regulation. physiology is utilized to dictate criteria for normative and legitimate bodied subjectivity, which translates into governmental constructions of citizenship and personhood, which can be achieved through individualized predictable, quantifiable behaviors (guthman 2013; herndon 2005; kendrick 2011). physiology often matters as a tool of governance, owing to histories and present inheritances of settler colonialism that perpetuate euro-western beliefs about knowledge hierarchies as they create ranking systems that place (what is uncontestably understood to be) rational, objective scientific knowledges as the most contemporary, leading-edge form of knowledge. historically, this “true” knowledge of physiology was utilized to govern bodies and subjectivities, as ethnographic methods grounded in physiological “truths” informed how indigenous, black, brown, asian, disabled, queer, and lower-class bodies were classified as aberrant, unhealthy, unintelligent, and in need of intervention or control (briggs 2003; fausto-sterling 2000; haraway 1990; harding 1994, 2016). such a history is not over; physiology and the body heralded by mainstream science remain a mechanism of structural governance.   while an exhaustive survey of the myriad methods that physiology utilizes as a tool of centering euro-western knowledges and subjectivities is beyond the scope of this article, taking inspiration from many outlines of how science unfurls itself as a technique of governance (haraway 2013; harding 2006; lebesco 2011; whitt 2009), a summary would proceed as follows: physiology functions amid truth-driven ontologies by making biochemical agencies and flesh visible in strategic, quantifiable ways (for example, lean muscle mass), which are then classified as normative or pathological based on euro-western state-endorsed understandings of race, health, function, and disease (lean = healthy), which then translates into socially sanctioned criteria for subjecthood and bodied legitimacy (people with lean bodies are desirable citizens). these ongoing familiar, but differently lived, arrangements of knowledge, bodies, pathologization, individuation, and desirability create a recursive system, where physiology makes visible a biochemical mechanism or measure as consequential (lean muscle mass), thus sustaining the need for physiological inquiry in order to ensure the optimal normative functioning of said mechanism (we need to fully understand lean muscle mass physiologically, to ensure more people can work toward gaining lean muscle mass).   in canada, euro-western epistemological traditions, physiology, and other structures that center whiteness as normative overlap to enact settler colonial oppressions targeting indigenous and minoritized communities (allan and smylie 2015; reading and wien 2013; smylie and firestone 2015). this leads to a multitude of physiology-validated (and sustaining) intrusions, including interventions promoting “healthy” physical activity, which act as thinly veiled tools of reasserting settler valuations of bodied legitimacy, desirability, and citizenship (rice 2016; russell, 2020; ward, beausoliel, and heath 2017). physiological evaluations of “healthy” or “ideal” bodies position (male, physically able) white settler bodies as a “normative” benchmark. this supposed ideal designates non-“normal” bodies as less legitimate and less desirable, thus lending a science-based rationale to the historical and ongoing systemic oppression—murder, genocide, slavery, sterilization, relocation, erasure, program and funding disparities—faced by indigenous peoples, immigrants, refugees, and people of color. physiology has been utilized to abstract ancestry to blood quantum, to rob reproductive agency based on skin color, and to maintain the validity of race-based genetic predispositions to what is perceived as moral failing or bodied weakness, such as epidemiological ethnic vulnerability to obesity, anemia, or substance use. in the particular context of thinking childhoods, physiology intersects with child development to dictate “healthy” trajectories of growth and to shape children’s relations with their bodies toward achieving an “ideal” normative body (burrows and wright 2007). this is why thinking with how we engage physiology in the context of canadian early childhood education matters: physiology is a non-innocent knowledge with highly impactful lived consequences.   one site where these consequences of physiology become lived in education is in physical activity or movement curriculum. as mckay, gore, and kirk (2012) argue, physical education resources increasingly integrate scientific insights in an attempt to legitimize physical activity teaching as “valid” amid colonial constructions of scholarly knowledge, thus centering the euro-western scientific knowledge that holds great power and ubiquity. azzarito et al. (2017) contend that physical education curriculum obscures the complexities of moving bodies by ensuring that “specific bodies and identities in relation to the health discourse are normalized, celebrated, and legitimized in pedagogical settings (i.e., school pe) through many acts of reinforcement and reiteration” (2016, 7). particular to canadian early childhood education, physical activity pedagogical resources, including the guidelines, enact the political consequences of physiology through their reiteration of a particular, normalizing response to the question, who can the child be? burrows and wright (2020), following harwood (2009), name these classed, gendered, ableist reiterations as biopedagogies: the pedagogical contours given to (normative, developmental, non-innocent) scientific knowledges as they become enacted in the name of health in education. the guidelines participate in these reiterations as they center neoliberal conceptions of children as future citizens, personal responsibility, bodied legitimacy, and quantifiable educational attainment (dahlberg and moss 2004), and as declarations that early childhood education pedagogies must teach children the skills they need to be healthy or pedagogies that promote fundamental movement skills and fitness are crucial for children’s healthy development become wrapped in affirmations of morality, care, and teleological learning that make them risky to contest. for example, the csep (2016b) accompaniment to the guidelines purports that reaching the recommended sixty minutes of activity can help children “improve their health,” “maintain a healthy body weight,” “do better in school,” “feel happier,” and “have fun playing with friends” (para. 13). these professed benefits invest in dominant developmental euro-western narratives of childhood as a period where children gain the skills they need to become successful and valued citizens within a neoliberal state (azzarito 2009; rich 2011). in turn, the guidelines strategically delimit the possibilities for thinking physical activity pedagogically because pedagogies must properly teach physical activity in order to produce healthy children.   when physical education pedagogical resources are made indisputable by the assumed validity and efficacy of science-informed information, the background knowledges and practices that sustain their unquestionability are recursively bolstered. complex material-discursive enactments (barad 2007) of health, fitness, children, and teaching are framed as fixed, true, and common educational touchstones. the vast, lively, and deeply contestable knowledge-generating practices that underlie these pedagogies, including the physiological sciences that bolster mainstream conceptions of health and fitness, cannot easily become an accessible or worthy concern for pedagogical practice (land and danis 2016; petherick and beausoleil 2016; rich 2011). if posed, questions of why children should participate in prescribed physical activities are answered with a gesture toward evidence-based research, coupled with an assumption that the ontological supremacy of the scientific canon negates any critical impulse.   concealing how physiology entangles with pedagogies by curating the foundational features of physical activity pedagogies that can become subject to pedagogical purview, dominant physical education pedagogies ensure their educational authority and secure the dominance of settler-colonial onto-epistemological paradigms. when pedagogical resources are framed as well-founded and incontestable dictates (“optimal health benefits” can be achieved by following the guidelines), debating the (physiological, ontological, ethical) principles that underpin their content becomes unnecessary. this constructed certainty, whereby it is the curriculum, recommendation, or practice and not the composition of that curricular formation that is made to be perceptible, in turn, brackets the possibilities for critically engaging these pedagogies. foundational investigations and the scientific knowledges they produce are silently woven through the guidelines. gestures in the form of citations are made to background studies but each study’s particular conceptualizations, assumptions, borders, outcomes, and affordances are not centered beyond their utilization as evidence toward the veracity of the guidelines. while perhaps enacted in the name of (patronizing) accessibility, any overt attention to making public the epistemological mechanisms that give the guidelines the gravity they are habituated to assume is not present (ex: timmons, naylor, and pfeiffer 2007; tremblay, shephard, and brawley 2007). in highlighting this making invisible (or, making untouchable) of the messy, imperfect, lively bioscientific knowledges that underpin many predominant physical education and movement teaching approaches, i am focusing on how physiological sciences are not put at risk, and especially not beyond the conventional tools science employs to critique itself (validity, reliability, methodology), in how pedagogical resources typically engage with physiology.   there are a multitude of very important human-centered social justice critiques that make visible how these pedagogies are complicit in race, gender, fat, ability, and socioeconomic privilege-based oppression (azzarito, 2009; dagkas and hunter 2015; flintoff, dowling, and fitzgerald 2015; hylton 2015). for example, laura azzarito (2009) details how high school physical education pedagogies systematically perpetuate gendered and racialized constructions of ideal “fit” and “healthy” bodies. douglas and halas (2013) outline how post-secondary institutions center white, euro-western physical education researchers, which translates into a wealth of knowledge built of white, euro-western epistemologies, ontologies, and research biases. analyzing physical education curriculum, flintoff, dowling, and fitzgerald (2015) trace how curriculum policies conceal white privilege and euro-western knowledges into seemingly universalized, normative discourses of health and fitness. these are very important critiques. with my more explicit focus on complexifying physiology-pedagogy entanglements, i want to emphasize that by making only certain human-centered concerns accessible for critique, current methods for integrating physiology with pedagogies strategically conceal other contestable features of these pedagogies. this delimits the pedagogical possibilities for thinking movement, muscles, fitness, fat, and physiology critically and creatively.   what if we foreground the foundational onto-epistemological assumptions, practices, and knowledges that underpin physical activity pedagogies? the violent histories of decisions justified by science, the euro-western epistemological hierarchies that position science as objective or universalizable, the contemporary structures that produce and are produced by science as dominant knowledge—what happens when we commit to engaging science as a practice of both inheriting and hoping with pedagogies? willey proposes that “when we claim sciences, instead of ‘engaging’ them, the terrain shifts from one of how un/friendly feminists are to science to one of what a world of sciences has to offer, where so much is at stake” (2016, 146). reading willey’s argument with early childhood education pedagogies, to do the work of “claiming” sciences proposes that, in our pedagogical work, we might engage differently (tending to knowledge politics, ethics, consequences) with physiological knowledges, and contest science’s onto-epistemological projects, by intentionally noticing physiological knowledges as a lively pedagogical participant. i propose that refusing to let scientific assumptions hide behind physical education pedagogical resources might become a method for claiming, infiltrating, and taking to account how physiological knowledges entangle in problematic and productive ways with early childhood education pedagogies   the guidelines do not, in the form distributed to practitioners, make clear the physiology that serves as the foundation for the recommendations. while it should be noted that the guideline development report for the canadian 24-hour movement guidelines for children and youth by csep (2016b) is mentioned once in the preamble, in the guidelines points like “an accumulation of at least 60 minutes per day of moderate to vigorous physical activity” (2) are abstracted from the scientific customs that materialize their perceptibility. if the messiness behind this understanding of movement is concealed, the vulnerabilities it might hold are also made irrelevant to pedagogical concern. this allows for certain questions to become possible: who decides what counts as energetic play? how does this assessment devalue other forms of movement? how are gender, sex, race, ability, body size, access, and other power disparities addressed or perpetuated when “moderate to vigorous” physical activity is recommended? while these questions are critical and important, the guidelines make differently complex questions less accessible: what scientific practices facilitate this temporal frame of sixty minutes? what physiological conceptions make this “vigorous” intensity matter, and how do these metabolic activities become imbricated in meaning-making practices? what ways of getting to know movement are made imperceptible by the epistemic power afforded to physiology? if i do put stock in a recommendation for moderate to vigorous physical activity, how might the physiological foundations of this recommendation—and the knowledges, bodies, and consequences they engender—mesh with my pedagogical intentions?   intervening with/in physiology taking physiology to account with pedagogies, i confront singular, authoritative, and non-complex/complexifiable assertions of dominant physiological sciences as they matter in pedagogical resources and work to engage these knowledges beyond their claims to certainty. this article is certainly not the only project intervening with/in physiology. feminist interventions in euro-western science on an ontological level take up the practices of contemporary sciences (barad 2007; frost 2016; mol 2002; roy 2007; youdell 2017), arguing that science dis/invites critical engagements with interdisciplinary knowledges that unsettle the seemingly-unquestionable interpretative inevitability that euro-western sciences have come to bank on – and make bank from (haraway 2016; kirby 2013 mckittrick 2021; roy 2018; stengers 2010; wilson 2015). there are modes of living physiologies that refuse to lend physiology or the euro-western ontologies it compels a single breath stengers 2011): métis scholar zoe todd (2014) examines human-fish relationships to detail how fish can be engaged within expansive relational frameworks lived by indigenous peoples in arctic canada; banu subramaniam (2014) writes with flowers, tracing how her practices of plant physiology intertwine with different disciplines and gendered dynamics across india and america; vaginas are a site of kanien'keha:ka refusal with emily coon (2020), who thinks flesh beyond colonial gendered narratives of reproduction; and kim tallbear (2013) theorizes genomic knowledges with indigenous sciences and relationalities. from the biosciences come a multitude of feminist methodologies of doing science otherwise: tracing metabolisms (landecker 2011, 2013); heart feminism (pollock 2015); thinking fetal development as transdisciplinary relationality (yoshizawa 2016); and imagining epigenetics as obesity entanglements (warin et al. 2015). physiologists craft publications that contradict what the field once took to be true, troubling the underpinnings of the field they have pledged to sustain. feminist art interventions refigure what it is to live fleshed lives when physiology matters, as, for example, sabrina benaim (2017) writes poems made in the traffic of serotonin that animates her depression.   as i work to rethink how early childhood education pedagogies can engage with physiology, i can know, and this article can take up, some of these interventions in physiology. other alternative possibilities for physiologies, flesh, and life remain necessarily imperceptible to my work. i take this unevenly perceptible critical engagement as a making-real of willey’s plea to “recognize the importance of proliferating sciences (and not consolidating epistemic authority) to anti-imperial projects of worlding” (2016, 145). without grandiose claims, i offer my work up to other projects that critique science from a variety of ontological, epistemological, and methodological places, with the hope of working alongside them in this massive project of unsettling colonial hegemonies of euro-western science.   post-developmental pedagogies and physiological knowledges following from critical reconceptualist early years scholarship that has extricated pedagogy from universalized scientific evidence-based prescription (cannella 1997; dahlberg, moss, and pence 2013; kessler and swadener 1992; macnaughton 2000), post-developmental early childhood education orients toward pedagogies concerned with urgently inheriting the present complexities of contemporary worlds with children (blaise 2013; taguchi 2011; rautio and jokinen 2015; pacini-ketchabaw and blaise 2021; taylor and pacini-ketchabaw 2015). post-developmental conceptualizations of childhood begin from an appreciation of how stage-based theories of development, which claim that children reach adulthood through a series of universalized developmental milestones, privilege euro-western ontological and epistemological systems (burman 2016; dahlberg and moss 2004; macnaughton 2003). by constructing both childhood and development as common, linear, predictable, and stable experiences, scholars concerned with creating post-developmental pedagogies argue that euro-western developmental theories allow for precisely targeted education practices, which service settler colonial conceptions of citizenship, individualized responsibility, and productivity (land et al. 2020; pacini-ketchabaw, nxumalo, and rowan 2014; pacini-ketchabaw and taylor 2015). alternative understandings of childhood or education are devalued and silenced by developmental narratives (blaise, 2014), which, in a global and settler colonial context, leads to the imposition of euro-western “normative” expectations of childhood upon diverse children (blaise 2005; cannella and viruru 2004; nxumalo and adair 2019).   post-developmental pedagogies contend that education, childhood, and development are ongoing and plural, and made through different practices, epistemologies, and ontologies (blaise, hamm, and iorio 2017; pacini-ketchabaw, kind, and kocher 2016; rautio 2013). the post-developmental theorizing that i draw upon positions education as a specifically politicized, non-anthropocentric and humanism-refusing endeavor (iorio et al. 2017; nxumalo 2018; olsson 2012; taylor 2020). in contrast to the stable human-centered conceptions of education facilitated by developmentalism, post-developmental scholars maintain that pedagogy, childhood, bodies, and learning unfold with a multitude of human, material, and more-than-human actants (land and todorovic, 2020; macrae 2019; nelson, pacini-ketchabaw, and nxumalo 2018; pacini-ketchabaw, kind, and kocher 2016; rautio 2017). postdevelopmental scholars dissolve developmental constructions of gender (blaise 2005), literacy (nxumalo 2017), movement (hackett and rautio 2019), neurons (taguchi 2016), everyday scientific concepts such as force (de frietas and palmer 2016), and individualized responsibility (taylor 2017) into complex, entangled, intentional, always ongoing pedagogical negotiations—living knowledges (vintimilla, pacini-ketchabaw, and land 2021)—composed and responded with in situated collisions of children, adults, and place-based actants.   physiology, and the physiological knowledges that enable developmental logics, can serve as rich sites of intervention for post-developmental pedagogies. bringing post-developmental pedagogies’ insights toward my discussion of how physiology and pedagogies do, and might, become entangled, i argue that predominant relationships between physiology and pedagogies, such as those in the guidelines, can be reconfigured. when universalized physical activity recommendations lose their utility because the developmental assumptions underpinning them are made, to borrow from haraway (2016), unthinkable, then inherited physiological knowledges do not need to be buried under taken-for-granted curricula and sciences do not need to be ascribed the explanatory power they are accustomed to.   doing physiological knowledges with post-developmental pedagogies i experiment with two propositions for bringing physiological knowledges and pedagogies into unfamiliar, critical conversation: (1) taking physiological knowledges as a problem with pedagogy; while (2) generating pedagogical propositions wherein pedagogies might engage differently with physiological knowledges. i begin by detailing a physiological knowledge that participates in recommendations for physical activity intensity, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (epoc). i think with epoc as a resource, selected due to its insidious presence in many physical activity guidelines, including the canadian 24-hour movement guidelines for children and youth. i do not claim that epoc is the only or the most important physiological knowledge that participates in the guidelines—it is one physiological knowledge that matters. further, epoc as a physiological knowledge is quite interesting to grapple with pedagogically, as it raises questions of temporality, exchange, and debt.   meeting epoc “oxygen debt,” “after burn,” and “raised metabolism” are some of the names epoc colloquially introduces itself with. epoc is a loyal product of exercise physiology and is dedicated to theories of movement that understand biochemical energy as a system of carefully regulated and bounded consumption, exchange, and production. epoc logics, alongside many other physiological knowledges, lurk beneath recommendations for moderate to vigorous physical activity intensity. oxygen debt needs to be earned, epoc will tell us, by vigorous physical activity; it is the result of exercise work to exhaustion, muscled work that taxes aerobic energy systems and dips into anaerobic reserves when we feel our lungs scream (børsheim and bahr 2003; delorey, kowalchuk, and paterson 2003). the harder you work, the more epoc you can earn (crommett and kinzey 2004; laforgia, withers, and gore 2006; yano, yunoki, and ogata 2003). when we work our bodies via contracting our muscles, epoc knows that we utilize metabolic substrates at the site of muscle contraction to the point of depletion, that lactate is generated as a by-product of muscled work, and that body temperature spikes as an outcome of our effort—and, that these disturbances must be righted to maintain equilibrium, to restore homeostasis (mcardle, katch, and katch 2006). epoc realizes itself as the period where these disruptions are righted, where although our body has stalled its intentional, bounded bout of vigorous physical activity, a tremendous amount of oxygen is required to re-craft muscular energy stores, to oxidize lactate, and to compensate for an increased body temperature. here is where epoc plays its hero card: this post-exercise oxygen deficit, this need to shuttle oxygen throughout the body to repair cells and replenish energy stores even after you finish exercising, also taxes the body—it dips into fat stores and burns calories after you have ceased purposeful physical activity (dorado, sanchis-moysi, and calbet 2004; gaesser and brooks 1984). and epoc might posit, isn’t burning bonus calories an interesting wrinkle in the quest to treat obesity and promote health and fitness?   epoc as a problem with pedagogy to pose physiological knowledges as a problem with post-developmental pedagogies, i invoke a specific conception of what it is to problematize or what it means to take as a problem. how might i make epoc a problem with post-developmental pedagogies? i understand that post-developmental pedagogies are always a practice, a labor, a doing (hodgins 2014; pacini-ketchabaw, kind, and kocher 2016; taylor 2017). stengers, a feminist science studies scholar, emphasizes that “connections are something that must be created…this is the only way of succeeding in creating problems rather than receiving them readymade” (2008, 9). bringing stengers together with post-developmental pedagogies, i make—enact, deploy, do—pedagogies with/in my intentional practices of creating epoc as a problem with post-developmental pedagogies. importantly, i do not want to create problems for the sake of problems. i need to generate “problems that are not to be solved but problems that need a different response” (st. pierre, jackson, and mazzei 2016, 105)—problems that, as stengers stresses “give to the situation the power to make us think” (2005, 185). i need to generate knotted problems that cut across the ontological disjunctures of physiological knowledges and post-developmental pedagogies, and that reconfigure how post-developmental pedagogies can engage with physiological knowledges.   pedagogical problems of response with epoc epoc engenders a logic of response: the harder an agential human exercises their muscles, the greater the demand on metabolic resources within muscles, more resources are consumed and must be regenerated, and thus a greater epoc is created. i might see this as an epoc physiology of response, one loyal to a physiological knowledge of dose-response relationships (altshuler 1981). epoc as response enacts a physiological knowledge where stimuli interject in a body in a specific dose and the body then responds in a measured manner, predictably appropriate to the magnitude of the stimulus. taking response epoc physiological knowledges as a problem with pedagogy is to confront the ways this notion of response cuts across pedagogical practice: how is the “response” practiced by epoc im/perceptible to the ways of being responsive we nurture with pedagogies?   returning to the guidelines to generate pedagogical problems with epoc response logic, i need to trace the various “responses” privileged in the pedagogy this document advances. epoc and vigorous physical activity use a teleological, positivist, and predictable logic of response that captures response as a stable pattern—the harder you work, the more epoc you generate. epoc, as a concept for getting to know the body, extends into the guidelines through both the recommendations made (sixty minutes of vigorous activity a day for the most healthy bodied response) and the pedagogical practices that the guidelines profess. i can borrow from post-developmental pedagogies that refuse a conception of curricular interactions located in linear or predictable logic (olsson 2012; pacini-ketchabaw 2010) to take this straightforward assumption of responsivity as a problem of being accountable for the different modes of responding i create with pedagogy: how can i craft pedagogies that are hospitable to, practice, and can be interrupted by the methods and modes of responding that i value? how can i think with modes of responding imperceptible to dominant settler-colonial paradigms?   post-developmental pedagogies also adopt experimental modes of responsivity, including response-ability (haraway 2016, thinking collectively (instone and taylor 2016), (re)storying (hodgins 2014), or thinking diffractively (davies 2014). post-developmental responsivity is not a singular bounded, stable pattern. with epoc dose-response logic, i can generate problems of response multiplicity: if i understand that pedagogical interactions are non-linear, and therefore refute or complexify the “easy” pedagogical recommendation of prescribing activity intensity, but i do invest in epoc as a relevant knowledge, what modes of responding do the pedagogies i participate in make possible because of the ways that these pedagogies expect cells, lungs, bodies, and children to respond (differently—or similarly)? if epoc response-logic matters to contemporary health discourses and generating local modes of responding with children matter, how can i take up the messy spaces between answerability, invention, and dose-response relationships?   pedagogical problems of transaction with epoc transactional logic animates another epoc physiology. epoc is made visible as the exchange of oxygen for the release of stored muscular energy, as cellular metabolic substrates swap for muscular contraction and oxygen trades back to replenish muscled energy reserves (mcardle, katch, and katch 2006). epoc as transaction begets a specific problem of the kinds of transactions that are made perceptible with pedagogies: how do epoc transactions matter with pedagogical modes of exchange?   epoc employs a transactional logic that roots children’s motion, caloric deficit, and aerobic health in a metabolic transactionality reflective of modern economic systems—and, as rosi braidotti (2013) and hannah landecker (2013) assert, anxieties—where physical activity is exchanged for measurable health and development outcomes. in the guidelines and their accompaniments, this transactionality is demonstrated in statements such as “children who get 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day are stronger, more confident, and less stressed” (participaction 2017). this is an easy, straightforward transactionality that, when taken with post-developmental pedagogies that attend to how pedagogy is ongoing (taguchi 2011), generates questions of transaction coherence: (how) can i reconcile or integrate linear conceptions of bodied metabolic transactions with an understanding of curricular exchange that is fragmented and non-linear? what is required of my pedagogy to hold different (or similar) conceptions of transactionality for different scales of exchange (educator-child, cellular)? how might i think with modes of transactionality that disrupt the assumed linearity and commodification of exchange within euro-western logics?   epoc also adopts a transactionality that confronts temporality, as it locates caloric deficits in the future (vigorous physical activity now leads to an increase in calorie-burning later). i can use post-developmental pedagogies to confront this temporal imperative and attend to the multitude of temporalities that reconfigure pedagogical practice (farquhar 2016; myers 2016; pacini-ketchabaw and kummen 2016). with post-developmental practices that cultivate an attention to the present and detail the dangers of imposing future-oriented logic upon early childhood education (holmes and jones 2016; olsson 2012; blaise, hamm, and iorio 2017), i can generate problems of transactional logic: when pedagogies locate children’s aerobic activity as a transaction that enables future calorie burning, what kinds of movement, bodies, and learning do these pedagogies create? how do pedagogies that are underpinned by the metabolic consumption of calories-to-come mesh with my pedagogical values? how does pedagogy do exchange(s) in early childhood education?   the “how” of making epoc a generative problem with pedagogy is always partial and i have offered here two potential means of epoc-problem-ing with post-developmental pedagogies. there are, i hope, a multitude of additional problems that epoc poses with pedagogies, which might include problems of homeostasis (what does the assumption of equilibrium do with pedagogies?), agency (who makes/enacts/does epoc?), veracity (how is epoc contested from within physiology?), or difference (how does epoc do difference?).   generating pedagogical provocations to think differently with physiological knowledges after working two epoc physiological knowledges into problems with post-developmental pedagogies, i turn toward generating pedagogical provocations wherein pedagogies might engage differently with physiological knowledges. post-developmental pedagogies detail how thinking pedagogically is the work of continually (re)crafting meaning and meaning-making practices (nxumalo 2017; rautio 2017) because of the answerabilities and accountabilities that participants in a pedagogical entanglement demand from one another (nxumalo, vintimilla, and nelson 2018). post-developmental pedagogies are situated and responsive. they actively refuse didactic application and universalization, but this refusal is one of speculating, of gesturing toward what might happen when we think with children about how to answer to our inheritances, debts, and relations in the name of living well together. this parallels haraway (1988, 2016) and willey’s (2016) concern with the ethical accountabilities of scientific knowledge production and echoes stengers’s contention that “the ‘how’ is a question which exposes, which puts at risk, those who are obliged…. [and] only these people can take the risk of putting experimental change into the formulation of their obligations, because only they are exposed by the question” (2005, 192). in the context of the pedagogical work i am proposing, these feminist science studies insights mean that generating pedagogical provocations is a question of answerability because different bodies are differently accountable to different problems, provocations, and pedagogies. post-developmental pedagogies act on these accountabilities by creating pedagogical spaces, questions, and conditions that demand that those involved in the unfolding of a pedagogy confront the tensions and imperfections that tug at the borders of that pedagogy (early childhood pedagogies collaboratory, n.d.). provocations intentionally put ideas, knowledges, people, and practices at risk because of how these actants entangle with the pedagogies that underpin or animate a provocation. i want to craft provocations that draw physiological knowledges into differently answerable partial pedagogical entanglements; into questions that demand we think carefully about how we might engage with physiological knowledges and pedagogies in order to create different tensions and openings for re-inventing how physiologies and post-developmental pedagogies can entangle in ways that activate our pedagogical intentions, politics, and ethics.   pedagogical provocations of responsivity in taking epoc response physiological knowledges as a problem for pedagogies, i wondered how epoc might spawn problems of responsivity with pedagogy: how is the “response” practiced by epoc im/perceptible to the responsivenesses of pedagogy? with post-developmental pedagogies, which make a habit of problematizing discourses that allow for the easy translation of one state/knowledge/practice into another in planned, bounded, and future-oriented ways, i can remind epoc of the violences inherent in such linearity: when we understand our flesh or pedagogies as predictably responsive, what possibilities for pedagogy are made possible? this is a provocation of wondering the responsivities that animate pedagogies, of tracing multiple modes of co-extensive relational response and entanglement. what happens when i intentionally attend to how responding/responses happen in the education spaces i participate in? how do euro-western conceptions of response entangle with my pedagogical habits in both obvious and inadvertent ways? where do physiological or epoc notions of dose-response logic interject in my, and children’s, movements, engagements with flesh, or other methods of responding—and how might i, or do i, want to confront these methods of responding? this might work to unsettle epoc certainties and make visible the tensions in trying to contain possible modes of response that interject in early childhood education practice.   returning to the guidelines, participaction (2016) shares a package of resources designed for educators to utilize with children as they incorporate the guidelines into their daily activities). these include coloring pages, matching games, and a certificate of achievement, which intend to evoke a specific kind of pedagogical response. as a pedagogical provocation that takes up the problems that predictable pedagogical response-logics make with pedagogies, i wonder how these resources might make visible non-linear, non-human-centered methods of responding: how can these resources be engaged pedagogically while intentionally decentering the belief that these resources draw a predictable, universalizable, or controllable response from the children and other participants/materials/agencies that engage with these? how else can we respond with coloring pages, complexifying the responses that these resources assume? how might different material analyses, ontologies of “health,” epistemologies of education, diverse lived experiences, or constructions of childhood generate different possibilities for responding with these normative resources? perhaps this provocation might upset the bounded, curated responsivity that these resources enact, and make predictable response-logic visible as only one potential method of responding with/in post-developmental physical activity pedagogies.   pedagogical provocations of transactionality posing epoc’s transactional logic as a problem with pedagogy, i asked how epoc transactions might matter with pedagogical modes of exchange. thinking with post-developmental pedagogies, i can take up the im/perceptibility of economic/metabolic transactional logic, tracing where this logic emerges in children’s everyday engagements and where it intrudes into encounters. this is a provocation of attending to transactions, of making visible how the specific exchange-mode of epoc physiological knowledges might contradict post-developmental pedagogies-informed methods of exchange. epoc articulates an ethic of exchange grounded in a specific future-oriented temporality. with post-developmental pedagogies, i can ask what might be required to frame flesh as in pursuit of a future utopic (“healthy”) state—what must be possible for epoc and the guidelines to locate physical activity amid a futurities framework? post-developmental pedagogies oriented toward productivity (taguchi, palmer, and gustafsson 2016; pacini-ketchabaw, kind, and kocher 2016) lend resources for asking what the ethical implications of centering a physiological knowledge that creates oxygen deficits to burn future calories might be: this is a provocation of complexifying how, or if, movement matters as a transaction. the resources for educators (participaction 2016) detail sixty “sweat” activities that educators can use to promote sweaty vigorous physical activity, including “chase a fairy,” “run from zombies,” “shoot hoops,” “sword fight a pirate,” “chase the boys,” “escape prison,” and “chase the girls.” from pedagogies that take movement as unpredictably generative (jackson 2016; manning 2014; rotas 2015), i know that movement does far more than displace a body in space or fulfill recommendations for physical activity. i wonder how these suggested “sweat” activities might be engaged for the “transactions” they invite. what if i intentionally do not conceptualize these movement activities within a vigorous physical activity/epoc frame of transaction, and instead follow how these activities generate exchange(s) that do or do not mesh with my pedagogical intentions? perhaps this provocation might hold to account the idea of moving as propagating oxygen absences or promoting normative health, while opening space to trace how debts, surpluses, exchanges, and transactionalities are made, multiply and momentarily, with post-developmental pedagogies.   towards a why for doing physiological knowledges differently with pedagogies in mainstream early childhood education in canada, physiology often matters as physical activity guidelines, nutrition recommendations, and normative developmental dictates. this is not to say that physiology is a special site of engagement or governance or resistance in early childhood education, only that it is a force that demands to be reckoned with. i have argued that post-developmental pedagogies can work physiological knowledges toward a complex pedagogical answerability and i have explored one possible strategy for how pedagogies can confront the physiological knowledges that matter to early childhood education. my practice of crafting problems with pedagogies while deploying provocations aimed at demanding a different answerability of physiological knowledges is always partial, necessarily contestable, and vulnerable to both unsettling and re-centering the dominant forms of knowledge i work to complexify.   echoing stengers, i believe that we need pedagogical innovations that take up physiological knowledge(s) “as it diverges, that is, feeling its borders, experimenting with the questions 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of education: the case for biosocial education.” british journal of sociology of education 38 (8): 1273–1287. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2016.1272406. yoshizawa, rebecca scott. 2016. “fetal–maternal intra-action: politics of new placental biologies.” body & society 22 (4): 79–105. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x16662323.     author bio nicole land is an assistant professor in the school of early childhood studies at ryerson university. in collaboration with educators and young children, her research works to create and sustain situated post-developmental pedagogies that take seriously children’s complex relations with fats, muscles, physiologies, and movement. beltrán, héctor. (2020). the first latina hackathon: recoding infrastructures from méxico. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–30. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © héctor beltrán, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license the first latina hackathon: recoding infrastructures from méxico héctor beltrán mit hectorb@mit.edu abstract an event advertised as the first all-women’s hackathon in latin america was held in méxico in 2015. highly ephemeral but also highly visible, the hackathon functions as a critical site to examine how communities crystallize and evaporate, and how participants actively negotiate their hacker identities and practices across boundaries of nation, gender, race, and ethnicity. popular discourse poses inclusivity within maker/hacker groups by proposing ways to get different or “diverse” participants to join events aimed at empowering their communities. i explore how members of marked groups are called upon to construct and manage these differences themselves within hacker spaces and “maker” formations. i first highlight how participants at the women’s hackathon aligned themselves with structures of expertise as they negotiated normative constructions of gender and femininity. hackers continue these negotiations when they get caught up in mexican nationalist pushes for productivity. in the final section, i unpack a surprise visit by abuelitas (grandmothers), who taught everyone a lesson on the invisibilized labor that supports communities of hackers. in a space usually reserved for young makers who understand “new” technologies, they claimed their space within “progress” and reasserted undervalued domestic work as foundational for other type of work. by weaving these three threads together ethnographically, i suggest the ways in which differences become important as latina hackers differentially position themselves, but also align themselves, with the contradictions of treating code work as coded labor. special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 2 introduction the first women’s hackathon in latin america was held in méxico in 2015. i was a participant-observer in the event as part of a broader ethnographic project where i explored what “hacking” meant to research participants and how they incorporated elements of the hacking ethos and identity into their practices. between 2013 and 2017, when i conducted research, the proliferation of hackathon events coincided with hype from economic analysts projecting that méxico was set to emerge as the “aztec tiger” economy. popular media outlets announced that méxico was undergoing rapid economic growth that would lead to an increase in standard of living.1 during this time, the reforms enacted by president enrique peña nieto’s administration followed a developmentalist logic aimed at moving méxico beyond low-wage factory jobs and toward an entrepreneurial economy. in line with such capitalistic impulses, governmentsponsored hackathons fit into the larger mexican political-economic landscape as spaces to keep recent university graduates busy, as potential generators of companies that could create jobs for these graduates, and as the type of infrastructure that could help méxico emerge on the global innovation stage. i began my fieldwork as the technical instructor for a six-week “incubator-style” course designed to teach entrepreneurship and mobile internet technology skills to mexican students. the workshops took place at the national university of mexico (unam) in 2013 and were sponsored by mit’s global startup labs. the program is part of mit’s international science and technology initiatives that “promotes development in emerging regions by cultivating young technology entrepreneurs” (mit global startup labs, n.d.). within days of releasing an online application to university students via email lists and social media, there were hundreds of applications submitted and dozens of email inquiries from potential applicants. of the thirty-two students selected, only four were women. similar distributions were also common in the over twenty hackathons i attended; despite the “openness” these technological communities promoted, participants at the events and spaces were overwhelmingly men. the explicit all-women dimension of this hackathon was designed to flip the script. of the over three hundred women who registered for the event, about half participated. by one of the organizer’s accounts, this was the largest number of women gathered around the theme of computing technologies in contemporary mexican history. although the women’s hackathon provided the opportunity to notice differences—such as what is different in méxico or how mexicans or latin americans operate hackathons differently than those held in the us and euro special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 3 american orbits—i do not intend my approach to rely solely on comparison. instead, i focus on how research participants position themselves in relation to multiple and intersecting markers of difference. i ask how they reconfigure narratives of progress at the same time that they negotiate ideals of competitiveness and autonomy that accompany most tech entrepreneurship. how do participants figure and reconfigure structures of belonging, recognition, and visibility within socio-technical configurations? hackathon events function as ideal research sites to examine the construction and management of differences and their intersections. highly ephemeral but also highly visible, hackathons allow a sharp view of how different “communities” crystallize and evaporate. i highlight how participants’ code work is aimed at simultaneously enacting “hacker” identities as well as inhabiting, elaborating, and reconfiguring demographic identities organized around parameters of gender and race. while hackathons take on very different modes of participation depending on the group of organizers and sponsors, the basic idea of the form is that an interdisciplinary group of (mostly) young people show up to meet other hackers or entrepreneurs over the course of a weekend. they work to prototype project ideas that might resolve an issue related to an organizing theme for the hackathon. themes such as healthcare, inequality, and climate change make frequent appearances. participants then present “pitches” to a panel of experts who judge the viability of the proposed projects, which usually offer technological or technocratic solutions to the identified problem. the all-women’s hackathon hosted at unam in 2015 was part of a trend that emerged during my fieldwork, in which organizers claimed to have created “firsts” in hackathon worlds: the first hackathon for latinxs, the first hackathon in <insert your favorite mexican city or favorite us metropolitan city with a high latinx population>, the first hackathon by and for women in méxico, etc.2 the event was initially advertised as the first “for women by women” hackathon in latin america. because the event was partly sponsored by us universities (and later companies), and it would include presentations by female and latina-identified professors from the united states, the event quickly became the first hackathon for latina women, not just for mexican women. as one of the organizers, saiph, explained the event, “a female hackathon. a latina hackathon. we are fighting to incorporate two minorities at once!” saiph was a mexican computer science phd student at the university of california, santa barbara. like many of the organizers, she traveled between the us and méxico and had experience with the special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 4 hackathon circuit on both sides of the border. she also had experience with constantly shifting between “latina” and “mexican.” such shuttling between ethnic, racial, and national markers can only be understood by thinking transnationally. on the one hand, people like saiph were positioned by mexican developmentalist narratives as forward-thinking, mobile, tech-savvy subjects worthy of representing méxico across national borders. both of her parents were professors who had raised her with what she called a “growth mindset.” as she reflected on her experiences on both sides of the border, she told me, “i was privileged in coming from a family where they believed i could do anything i set my mind to and [they] did not have limiting beliefs. it is [only] now that i see that privilege because i have had to interact with people who have much more limiting beliefs about what latinas can do.” saiph went on to provide anecdotes about multiple times that researchers did not believe she had implemented computer projects she had designed and developed herself. her father, the head of a bio-robotics laboratory at unam, was also one of the organizers of the hackathon, using his connections with other academic administrators to make the event a reality. although saiph came from a relatively privileged upbringing and represented a select minority of the mexican population, she was positioned as a generic “middle-class” mexican citizen who had obtained her mobility and other freedoms by working hard. at the same time, she confirmed nationalist narratives that the software industry was the key to meritocratic progress (see radhakrishnan, 2007). on the us side, meanwhile, identifying as latina/o was for her and others like her inextricable from the shifting political economy of race. as an “emerging middle class,” a homogenous latino collective is sometimes celebrated for their coming of age in america, while the same group is at other times represented as an economic liability that takes jobs, resources, and benefits from “regular” americans (dávila, 2008). the strategic use of the latina/o marker by people themselves points to the mobile and nomadic nature of the signifier; it functions as a political rather than a descriptive category (aparicio, 2017). catherine sue ramírez (2004a), for example, traces the usage of “latina” by self-proclaimed “third world women” as a site of identification for women across the americas to create the “geographical bridges” necessary for “borderland feminism.” thus, while resignifying the event from a “mexican” to a “latina” hackathon might seem like a simple way to make the event more inclusive, participants’ decisions about how to identify and relate to one another within the hackathon were always in the context of shifting (and conflicting) markers of difference constructed in relation to us/méxico politics. special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 5 in her research with indian software developers in berlin, sareeta amrute (2016) shows that encodings of class frequently clash with encodings of race. for her research participants, the “software developer” marker grants workers an entry to the type of cultural capital necessary to identify as middle-class, while the “indian” marker casts them as racialized software developers. race and class intersect across a terrain of transnational labor that values technical expertise yet differentially recognizes and rewards this expertise. these racialized and ethnicized workers plug into highly coded and particularized lateral spaces that cross national borders, yet rely on infrastructures that mobilize networks and workers to respond efficiently to market conditions, and shift among different systems of codes that enforce ethnic discipline and social cohesion in segregated labor sites (murillo, 2020; ong, 2006). similarly, i suggest that hackathons can be examined as spaces where hackers come to perform their willingness to become the coding (and coded) workers of the future. hackers at the women’s hackathon, despite their (presumably) rising authority as “coders” or “hackers” in méxico, remained marked as “mexican” coders (regardless of what gender they identified with) once they transited across nationalized borders, whether physically or “virtually” (see aneesh, 2006). at the same time that people such as saiph shuttled between “mexican” and “latina,” they found themselves strategically calibrating their alignment with the promise of liberation that the hackathon discourse offers, and what the hackathon might offer realistically and more immediately on the ground for the attendees who populate these raced and gendered spaces. the “hacker” marker worked as badge of authority in the space of the hackathon, but also worked as an underspecified concept that created ties with representatives of collectives, companies, and universities who many times position themselves differently along political and ideological lines. as hackathon participants aligned their “latina” and “hacker” subject positions to work on their projects, they also engaged in other kinds of work to manage the multiplicity of their identities by gendered, racialized, ethnicized, and national markers. popular discourse poses inclusivity within maker/hacker groups by proposing ways to get different or “diverse” participants to join events aimed at empowering their “communities.” in what follows, i explore how members of marked groups are called upon to construct and manage these differences themselves within hacker spaces and “maker” formations. i first highlight how participants at the women’s hackathon aligned themselves with underlying structures of expertise as they addressed normative constructions of gender and femininity. by using special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 6 computer development kits that allowed them to work at a higher level of the computing stack, they were able to assert their own knowledge without getting lost in the lower layers of coded abstractions. in the next section, i explore how hackers continue these negotiations when they get caught up in mexican nationalist pushes for productivity. although the “smart home” theme of the hackathon could be framed as reproducing gendered divisions of labor, interviews and participant observation reveal that entanglements of gender, technology, and domesticity were actively negotiated. in the final section, i unpack a surprise visit by abuelitas (grandmothers) who taught everyone a lesson on the invisibilized labor that supports communities of hackers. by infiltrating a space normally populated by young technology-producers who represent “progress” and “modernity,” their very presence re-established undervalued domestic work as foundational for other type of work. by weaving these three threads together ethnographically, i suggest the ways in which “differences” become important as women hackers differentially position themselves, but also align themselves, with the contradictions of treating code work as coded labor. stacking expertise and coding femininity during a preliminary organizing meeting for the women’s hackathon, veteran hackathon attendees chimed in on what features they thought would make the event successful. some ideas aligned with what other scholars and organizers have identified as key elements of a feminist hackathon, including a focus on both technical and non-technical solutions to the agreed problem space, a commitment to sustaining the community of practice formed during the event after the fact, and a valuing of learning over invention to create a more inclusive environment composed of subject matter experts as well as marginal users (d’igzano et al., 2016). the event would be held over the weekend but designated hacking spaces would shut down over night, allowing participants to go home and return early the next day. parents would thus feel comfortable granting permission to their daughters to participate in an event that did not involve being out late at night. removing the night work from the hackathon effectively intervened in cultural conventions of staying up all night that continues to be celebrated in computing communities and is many times unappealing, impractical, or unsafe for women (ensmenger, 2010). additionally, in order to get as many women as possible interested in technology and software development, regardless of their background or level of expertise, organizers decided to work with arduino kits. arduino is an open-source electronic prototyping platform used to develop interactive electronic objects. these kits included components that might be used to design devices for a “smart home” with minimal coding experience required. special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 7 one the one hand, we could clearly deconstruct the overarching theme of a “smart home” as a way to reproduce gendered conventions of domesticity and divisions of labor. one could argue that designing the perfect home for women by women helps to further an ideology of women’s place in the home; they’re designing the perfect home so they can feel comfortable and stay there, where they belong. however, the dichotomy between the domestic and public sphere has been critiqued as a socio-historical construction that does not represent the experiences of women in méxico specifically and latin america more broadly, where domestic activities are intimately connected to and in constant interaction with markets (montoya, 2002; nieto, 2004). even with growing opportunities for women in méxico to maintain “formal” part-time or full-time work outside of the home, many times they continue to use strategies already common in their communities to juggle multiple commitments related to work and family life (peterson, 2014). sasha constanza-chock (2020) argues that the “hacks” that occur within “subaltern design sites” such as the home never receive the same recognition or resources as those marked to be properly technologically innovative within the bounded space of hackathons and hackerspaces (p. 140). in this sense, the title that was chosen for the hackathon, “#fixit,” pointed away from the infatuation with newness that often permeates hackathons and instead focused on working with existing socio-technical objects and configurations, effectively calling attention to “hacks” that were already taking place within the home. thus, the women at the hackathon did not appear bogged down by the “home” aspect of the event and instead used their enthusiasm to create an intimate space and experience. following their lead, i was often less interested in what was made in these hacker and maker spaces, seeking rather to explore how hacking functioned as a mode for these participants to intervene in and position themselves in relation to existing socio-political structures (ames et al., 2018). to unpack the social dynamics and the work that happened within the women’s hackathon, i start by treating “expertise” as an inherently racialized and gendered category (irani, 2018), and by exploring what it means to navigate between distinct layers of the software coding environment. as i discussed in the introduction, many of the hackathon events i participated in were aimed at empowering particular groups that had been marginalized or underrepresented in the tech industry. the hype around the events was usually framed around these groups of people becoming empowered by using technology but also by actively participating in building the technology that they might use. special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 8 this has become important in méxico, as government programs (and many times academic work) frequently frame technology experts as passive recipients or followers, perpetually dependent on foreign “cultures of innovation” (medina et al., 2014). in short, the liberatory potential of the technologies, for advocates of these hackathons, rested on the premise that users could now become producers. jason edward lewis (2016) has proposed a similar vision, writing specifically about indigenous people—a vision in which active technology users can take control of their future by "populating the present social imaginary with fully empowered subjects of a future imaginary” (p. 234). in this way, he argues, users can appropriate technology to create indigenous stories, characters, and epistemologies through which people can articulate dreams and aspirations, in order to help indigenous people create a future imaginary at the same time that they become present in that future. in this view of community empowerment, marginalized populations appropriate new technologies for their own ends. in just this way, the women’s hackathon, as framed by saiph, was meant to bring together a group positioned at the intersection of different marginalized categories (latinx, women); this newly formed “community” would convene, develop, and appropriate new technologies, and use these technologies to resolve issues they have judged important to their collective well-being and future livelihoods. in the case of this hackathon, those issues circulated around the setting of the home. any technology has configurations and conditions of possibility that are hidden from the average user. lewis (2016) uses the analytic of “the stack” (p. 242) to help us understand how these hidden conditions are organized and, often, kept out of view. in the computing domain, a “stack” refers to the interrelated and interdependent layers of hardware components and software protocols that make high-level computations and programs possible. to move from the bottom of the stack (machine code) to the top of the stack (programming languages and systems) means traversing the corresponding circuits, microchips, and computer code that can be part of each “layer of abstraction” that makes up the system. in the professional software world, for example, a “full stack developer” is a (highly sought after) software programmer who possesses the technical proficiency to work at any level of the stack. thus, lewis proposes that for indigenous people to completely infuse their worldviews and future aspirations into the system, they must become involved and be adept at navigating all layers of the stack. only by fully and comprehensively participating in this way, can we increase our ability to “make the technology speak in the way that we desire” (lewis, 2016, p. 242). special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 9 while i (and many tech enthusiasts) find lewis’s vision compelling, it offers a proposal that depends upon long-term education and training (whether formal or informal) and involves focused attention and practice that can take months, years, or generations—certainly more time than is provided in the space of the hackathon, or even several hackathons. a common scene that unfolds at many hackathons is one in which, after introductions and the idea/design phases of technical projects, one person—usually a man (dunbar-hester, 2014)—takes command of implementing a working prototype, claiming because of technical prowess an authoritative, expert position. this often cuts against desires for the inclusive, collaborative development of expertise. indeed, a common scenario within hackathons is that pre-configured teams of experts arrive at the events in order to maximize their possibility of “winning” the event. in other cases, individual “experts” would rush to form the ideally structured team according to (other) expert guidelines. one “ideal” team i frequently heard described was one composed of a hacker (a person with programming skills), a hustler (a person with business skills), and a hipster (a person with marketing/design skills). in other cases, the newly formed small teams would, for the most part, effectively divide themselves up into the experts and the novices, at least along dimensions of technical proficiency. in the end, an expert programmer would be the one responsible for implementing the working project. at the women’s hackathon, as participants attempted to shuttle between “novice” and “expert,” there were several people who came to occupy “mediator” roles, attempting to activate an apprenticeship model for empowerment. i frequently saw these mediators—well intentioned, to be sure—approach their work with an overwhelming congeniality, eager to see themselves as empowering a particular group or determined to resolve a relevant social problem. unfortunately, as experts and mediators took command, the development of proficient technology users, those who might be able to traverse distinct layers of the stack, proved to be more idealized fantasy than implementable project. christina dunbar-hester (2016) has found a similarly aspirational, but not quite functional, apprenticeship model present in her work with radio activists across do-it-yourself (diy) and maker spaces. within these spaces, activists promote their vision for a self-sustaining participatory structure, one in which self-guided discovery and learning can provide a heightened sense of agency to participants, where the demystification of technology can lead to a leveling of expertise through pedagogical activities. in this vision, as time progresses, novices are special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 10 meant to become experts and the field of experts within a group will increase, broadening the capability to recruit more novices, in a self-sustaining noviceexpert model. instead, dunbar-hester (2016) found novice participants frustrated and alienated as they attempted to learn from experts in compressed time frames. she notes that although activists self-consciously tried to distance themselves from competitive and exclusionary aspects of some electronics and engineering cultures (see abbate, 2012; chun, 2013; turkle, 1984), the technical pursuits they offered often ended up being intimidating and unappealing. a consistent situation across dunbar-hester’s (2016) spaces was that “the burden of participation fell disproportionately on women and technical novices” (p. 92). i encountered similar dynamics across my research sites. the burden of participation often fell on novices, while the work of implementation was taken up by the technical experts, who often derived great satisfaction from that work, not always realizing that they might be enacting exclusionary practices. whether novice or expert, however, participants at the women’s hackathon seemed to escape the burden that fell on either, more so than at other hackathon events. . by avoiding the pitfalls of trying to gain too much expertise, or technical knowledge, and focusing instead on the top layer of the stack, in this case in the form of the arduino kits—in this case in the form of the arduino kits—participants worked at the appropriate level of the computing stack (or layer of expertise). the arduino kits allowed them to use coder tools (programs and apps) to manipulate data along with electronic components. in this way, they were able to effectively perform their burgeoning latina-maker subject positions. the atmosphere of the 2015 women’s hackathon at unam was overwhelmingly congenial and designed to foster inclusivity; the message of increasing representation in technology cultures and software development was never far from participants. the first day of the event opened with female role models who described software as “algo que te extiende, que te libera” (something that extends you, that liberates you), and attempted to convince young women that coding was far more social than popular imaginaries made it out to be. “la calidad de nuestras vidas depende de la calidad del software que construimos” (the quality of our lives depends on the quality of the software we build), another presenter confirmed. together with other presenters, this person reminded attendees that software development as a profession was not at odds with normative ideas of femininity—which she associated with standard roles of wife and mother—if this was how young women wanted to assume their professional and social roles. she followed a line that might be familiar from the work of such special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 11 scholars as sanjukta mukherjee (2008), who has argued, on the basis of her fieldwork in bangalore, that software work has been constructed as empowering for women in parts of india because its flexibility is compatible with normative feminine roles of wife and mother. in a méxico where a growing segment of the population is claiming a middle-class identity, sometimes this means living in safe environment surrounded by “tranquilidad” (pertierra, 2015). most of the time “middle-classness” means enrolling children in extracurricular activities and/or private schools, family vacations, and especially access to “modern” household appliances (escobar latapí & pedraza espinoza 2010). the speakers at the women’s hackathon pushed toward this tranquilidad and comfort by promising the attendees that (1) they did not have to abandon their important family roles if they chose to become professionalized working women, and that (2) learning to code might allow them to make their home life even more comfortable and compatible with complex schedules and multitasking. whether one could be a professional woman and a super multitasker in reality was another story. for women across the world who enter the it workforce or related entrepreneurial initiatives, they must not only learn the skills of their trade but also, more often than men, consistently convince customers and colleagues of their experience and expertise (mitter, 1995). while the women’s hackathon provided the space to reconfigure ideals of gender in relation to technology, many of the circulating discourses tended to be anchored in gendered discourses of putting the family first and respectable femininity. similarly, scholars who have conducted research with women from the global south who enter the information technology workforce find that these women calibrate their careers and individual aspirations in relation to the wellbeing of their family. some women decide to slow down their climbing “up the ladder” or give their career up altogether if they feel they are at risk of becoming bad mothers or not living up to the expectations of their in-laws (radhakrishnan, 2008). they might push the boundaries of respectable femininity by asserting that they will not be constrained by family, but always want to be considered of the family (amrute, 2016). at the women’s hackathon, the family, often narrowly defined within méxico as heterosexual and patriarchal, gave burgeoning hackers a referent to negotiate normative roles of gender and femininity as they assumed “expert” roles in the software coding worlds. in the next section, i highlight how my research participants continued these negotiations in relation to nationalist pushes for productivity. special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 12 hacking time d’ignazio et al. (2016) lay out premises for feminist hackathons, asserting that one important feature of such an event is that it “intentionally architects media attention in order to advocate for the issue.” saiph certainly prepared for media coverage similarly. she stated in an interview, “para mí lo importante era mostrar al mundo que tenemos mujeres creadoras; hay chicas emprendedoras y todas ellas unen sus diferentes talentos para desarrollar nuevos productos” (for me, the important part is to show the world that we have women makers; entrepreneurial young women exist and all of them unite their talents to develop new products). this “productive” aspect was picked up by media outlets. an unam engineering professor was quoted in another news report: los proyectos que les propusimos son la base de dos cursos que ofrezco: de robots móviles y de casas inteligentes; tomamos las prácticas que hacemos ahí y las modificamos para que las trataran de hacer en dos días. es más, me burlaba de algunos de mis alumnos y les dije: ellas lograron lo que ustedes no pudieron en un semestre. (the projects we proposed were based on two courses i offer: mobile robotics and smart homes; we took the practices of the courses and modified them so they could take them on in two days. actually, i made fun of some of my students and i told them: they [women] accomplished more than you were able to in one semester.) the professor’s comments echoed much of the rhetoric that circulated during and after the event—that is, that these young women were highly productive and that they were able to accomplish more than male students had in an entire semester. at the same time that they positioned themselves in relation to narratives that promoted the “promise of technology,” that new technologies and corresponding entrepreneurial practices could help young people succeed quickly and dramatically (shankar, 2008), the women also took seriously the call to show that they could surpass their male maker/hacker counterparts. whether the “all women” dimension of the hackathon was effective or not, and whether it increased their productivity, depended on who you asked. as participants organized into teams that were composed of diverse disciplinary backgrounds—among undergraduate students there were computer engineering, mechatronics, industrial design, political science, and philosophy majors—i served as floating mentor/ethnographer, circulating between the scattered university spaces and helping with ideas, implementations, and pitches while i asked about special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 13 the explicitly gendered dimensions of the event. mariana, a skilled and amiable computer science student whom i knew from the coding bootcamp i had administered several summers before, confirmed her excitement for the all-women structure: “en otros espacios, los hombres nos reclutan solo para que hagamos sus apps lucir bonitas” (in other spaces, the men recruit us just to make their apps look pretty). i had spent several months working with mariana in a coding bootcamp, where many times she encountered masculinist assumptions and performances of technical competence. at the very least, the women’s hackathon provided a space for her to feel comfortable enough to call out the gendered power dynamics she had experienced within the unmarked (or by its unmarking actually marked as “inclusive”) space where we had worked together previously. this is particularly important as women are often asked to “speak up” in order to show their value within software design spaces (irani, 2019, p. 102). the women’s hackathon gave mariana the space to speak up about the very power dynamics that framed her as an unimportant contributor in the male-dominated space. when i asked another young woman what could have attracted more participants to the event, she responded bluntly, “más hombres” (more men). here she was confirming that not all participants were feeling the “all-women” camaraderie the event attempted to create. pilar, a mechatronics major on the same team, disagreed with her colleague, telling me, “las mujeres tenemos en el chip ser competitivas contra una y otra. si fuera con hombres, decimos, ‘no podemos,’ y no nos activamos" (we women have in our chip to be competitive against other women. if [the hackathon] was with men, we’d say, ‘we cannot,’ and we do not activate). pilar’s comments align almost perfectly with the language of “reforms” that in méxico has traversed decades and morphed alongside political parties and corresponding campaigns. these programs often call for young people to learn english and the latest technology in order to claim their place in the “global” economy; they are encouraged to take matters into their own hands and assume their role as technical, non-complaining citizens. the manifestation of these programs under the tenure of president peña nieto, when the hackathon took place, called for spaces that promised to instill in young people the same chip, here using an image of computing. “todos con el mismo chip,” went the slogan. pilar’s comments took up the same “chip” metaphor, and she differentiated between male and female “chips.” she claimed that her competitive “chip” was activated within the space of the hackathon. this effectively confirmed the special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 14 government’s construction of modern co-working spaces across the country, aimed at indexing a newly forming “innovative culture”; the spaces function as efficient and scalable way to “develop,” “modernize,” and appear economically competitive. more importantly, spaces such as the hackathon function to keep recent graduates looking busy. a 2010 study showed that about seven million young people aged fourteen to twenty-nine in méxico were either looking for employment, not enrolled in school, or fell under the broad category of “not economically active” (instituto mexicano de la juventud, 2010). this label is accompanied by a more colloquial term, ninis, short for “ni estudian, ni trabajan” (don’t study, don’t work), often used to refer negatively to young people who have become a burden to mexican society or economy. this labeling also has its counterparts in other parts of the world. vered amit and noel dyck (2012) highlight the bureaucratic category of neet (not in employment, education, or training) used to describe young brits. the authors point to a specific category of youth all over the world who have been affected by economic restructuring. at the same time as these young people are pointed to as indices of social breakdown, they are also sometimes framed as agents of social change and progress. the busy hackers within méxico’s “modern” spaces might effectively dodge the problematic categorization of ninis; they inevitably perform for various publics the role of knowledge workers enthusiastically connected to their computers.3 while most of the hackathon participants were indeed students, some who showed up were recent graduates who were technically unemployed. their participation in this and other hackathons reflects an overall preference by young people in méxico to prefer to work within community or university-sponsored events before participating formally in government and formal politics (ricuarte quijano, 2018), as well as a growing inclination to hone their “code work” within these hackerspaces to think with/against social and political institutions (beltrán, 2020). as anthropologists have shown, the question of how young women from the global south spend their time, and whether it’s leisure, pleasure, or “work,” is a critical site to investigate constructions of gender, productivity, and social change (amrute, 2016; fleming, 2018; krishnan, 2018). whether it was an attempt to evade the nini category, or a conscious effort at selfimprovement (whether it was related to the job market or not), the young women took the call to be productive within the hackathon very seriously. many i spoke special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 15 to agreed that the second panel of speakers should be cancelled; they claimed that the presentations were effectively “wasting their time.” those who had been to other hackathons felt that since those other events did not have any additional presentations, it was unfair that the extra time commitments at the women’s hackathon cut into their hacking time. time constraints created anxiety amongst the groups. one team told me to go away when i approached and started asking questions because i was “wasting their time.” i didn’t take offense to being referred to as a “waste of time.” i was conscious that i might be framed as an intruder, particularly by young women who were new to a hackathon space and had not worked with me in other hackathons or the mit bootcamp at unam. when i asked ximena, a graphic designer i had built confidence with over the years, about my presence at the hackathon, she said, “en tu caso tal vez está bien porque estudias hackathones. pero ser antropólogo no te hace diferente tampoco. al final eres un hombre que va por ahi, criticando, siendo el especialista…no puedes entender lo que es estar aquí celebrando con mujeres, celebrando estar juntas” (in your case, i guess it’s ok since you study hackathons. but being an anthropologist doesn’t make you different either. in the end you’re just a man going around, criticizing, being the specialist…you can’t understand what it means to be here celebrating women, celebrating being together). taking my cue to be a “productive” member of the hackathon instead of asking and trying to understand so much, i worked with teams to put together their final pitches for their designs. we perfected speeches and added the final bells and whistles to the presentations. overlooking us in the engineering building was a commonplace “silicon valley map.” the dated poster showed an illustrated map of the san jose, california region with dozens of company names superimposed on the map, representing the company’s geographic location. the poster was a sobering reminder that this hackathon was meant to mimic the high-paced, competitive cycles of technology-driven capitalism that characterized silicon valley (see jones et al., 2015).4 it was also a reminder that productivity as a unit of measure, rather than a calling, comes from technologies of efficiency that came to prominence with an industrial-managerial orientation that established the language and practice of productivity. the capitalist highjacking of productivity might be implicit in the poster, but one thing that might be difficult to discern from the visual is that the history of productivity is gendered. melissa gregg (2018) shows how the gradual retreat of the office secretary in the service of others’ productivity has been offset special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 16 by technologies that continue the same tradition of entitled delegation. for an elite group of professionals, new technologies provide the socio-technical infrastructures that enable them to practice productivity. whether new technologies would make life easier for the women at the hackathon, and how they might position themselves in relation to the home vs. professional life dilemma, was up for debate. figure 1. the team that told me to go away because i was wasting their time allowed me to snap a picture while they were hacking and receiving guidance from a mentor more interested in hacking and less interested in asking. photo credit: author. also up for negotiation was whether the presentations “wasted their time” or whether the all-woman design of the hackathon was a positive or negative aspect of the event, as the quotations in this section demonstrate. but one thing that all participants agreed on (and made evident) was that they were nervous for their final presentations—the spotlight was now on them to show how much they had learned and what they had spent the weekend making. abuelitas as infrastructure the nervousness that the young women demonstrated during their final pitches was warranted, for different reasons. for one, the event was not entirely all women. as different teams took the stage to present their home improvements, the young men who had participated as mentors during the weekend stood alongside the walls of the auditorium, arms crossed, dressed with black google special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 17 shirts to distinguish themselves and claim authority to the probing gazes they directed toward the stage. in one particularly condescending comment, one of the mentors voiced a demeaning, “awwwwwww,” as the group presented a prototype of a robot meant to crawl alongside babies to keep them company while mothers were in another room. one young woman smiled uncomfortably; another rolled her eyes. the presence and help from the young men resembled similar dynamics to those leslie salzinger finds in the juárez maquiladoras of the early 1990s. salzinger (2016) argues that as young women from the global south became neoliberalism’s preferred workforce, the industrial shop floor became a space for contesting the feminization of the work. male workers attempted to reclaim the inherent masculinity of the work by constantly teasing, crowding, and “helping” their female co-workers in an effort to put their inadequacy on display. while the hackathons of the 2010s might appear to be a world removed from the industrial maquiladoras of the 1990s, the underlying frameworks that constantly “test” the skills and ultimately marginalize women workers stand the test of time, as the “well-intentioned” mentor-helpers reminded us. figure 2. the first team gets ready for their pitch as the male mentors stand on the sidelines. photo credit: author. under the gaze of these male helpers, then, the teams continued to pitch their projects to an attentive audience. the first-place team used its arduino kit to present prototypes for intelligent sensors meant to detect when food supplies special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 18 were running out; another team presented a key holding device that would alert users when all members had safely arrived home; another winning team created a system that would track their pets around a set perimeter, alerting the user when the pet had left the specified boundaries. as the teams progressively gained confidence, their nervousness eased, in no small part because of the presence of a new group of audience members: mothers and grandmothers who had come to witness the presentations and cheer on their daughters and granddaughters. the surprise visit from mamás and abuelitas certainly added a “different” element to the hackathon. i had never seen family members come to cheer on their burgeoning hacker-entrepreneurs at hackathons in the us, for example. neither had i seen them at the male-dominated hackathons in méxico. the family ambiance quickly turned the hackathon into an (even more) hospitable event, with lively cheering for family members and extra commentary from the sidelines. as i circled around the room to speak with the family members, i asked one grandmother what she thought about her granddaughter’s smart home prototype. “lo que no hizo en todo el semestre lo hizo en dos días.” (what she didn’t do all semester she did in two days.) while the abuelita’s comment was in line with the comments regarding productivity that had circulated throughout the event, the very presence of these older women signaled a departure from the “grandmother” discourse that normally circulates in computing worlds. that is, in addition to the performances of technical masculinity that many times intimidate women from participating in technical cultures, it’s common among computer experts to use gendered language specifically to make women feel like outsiders. in the free software community, for example, the term “aunt tillie” is deployed to refer to someone who is not tech-savvy.5 across communities of computing experts, it’s common to hear subjects urge you to build a system or interface that is “easy enough for your mom/girlfriend/grandmother” to use or figure out.6 the complementary guidelines for a clear explanation of a complex system is to “describe it as if you’re explaining it to your grandmother.” ironically, in this imaginary, it is always the grandmother (never the grandfather) who is the willing recipient of (most likely) boring technical explanations. one can imagine the grandmother waiting at home, ready to listen and provide encouraging words on your work in progress. perhaps in these imaginaries the grandfathers, uncles, and brothers are busy in the co-working spaces becoming the “modern,” tech-savvy, mobile workers of tomorrow. indeed, the supposedly unmarked hackathon space that takes center stage in the narrative of the ascending aztec tiger economy overwhelmingly features men in its protagonist roles. special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 19 the all-woman’s hackathon space, and perhaps even the “smart home” theme of the event, gave the abuelitas the opportunity and confidence to assume roles as active audience members. after the event, i asked ximena what she thought about her abuelita coming to watch her pitch: “pues me da emoción. ella es la que ayuda en todo del día a día. ella es la que se encarga de todo” (well, i get excited. she’s the one that helps with everything in the day-to-day. she is the one that is in charge of everything.) with recognitions like this by the hackathon participants, the abuelitas became more than cheerful audience members. in a space usually reserved for young makers who understand “new” technologies, they claimed their space within “progress” and reasserted undervalued domestic work as foundational for other type of work. instead of the grandmothers becoming the referents for non-technical persons, novices who don’t understand and thus need to have complex infrastructures explained in very basic terms, here the abuelitas asserted their place as the very backbone of these socio-technical configurations, the necessary defaults for the making and corresponding discourse of technological progress to occur in the first place. the very presence of the abuelitas, mothers, and families on the sidelines effectively displaced the technical (male) mentors, reminding everyone of the “other” work required to make the projects being presented. the first tactic for a postcolonial computing reads, “when we see a technoscientific object, we investigate its contingency not only locally but in the infrastructures, assemblages, and political economies that are the conditions of its possibility” (philip et al., 2012, p. 10). if the projects presented at the women’s hackathon are the technoscientific projects we need to unpack, in this case, we would have to explore the hierarchies of labor involved in constructing the arduino chips. the university and its laboratories where the hackathon took place could also be analyzed as infrastructures that required manual labor to construct and ongoing maintenance, which could make us dig deeper into the classed and racialized labor economy in méxico, connecting these processes to overarching political economic assemblages. the presence of the abuelitas, however, shifts attention to local and immediate. if the young men in google shirts observing from the sidelines represent the technical infrastructures these young women are purportedly appropriating and the global economy that they are meant to join, then the abuelitas intervene to remind us of the work required so that these young women could participate in the event in the first place. at the same time, the abuelitas reminded us that while these young men were present being the “expert” moderators of the event, they special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 20 were many times absent in other domains of family life, in terms of encouragement and support; the cheering family members on the sidelines were overwhelmingly women (grandmothers and mothers) and children. while some of the abuelitas encouraged their granddaughters to take up the productive discourse of the event, their very presence reminded them not to diminish “other” labor in the name of becoming the productive workers of tomorrow. after the winners were announced and prizes were distributed, celebrations ensued as the hackathon participants joined their families, some of whom had brought flowers and homemade food to reward their weekend efforts at the hackathon. i approached mariana as she celebrated with her team, who won second place for “easy petcare,” to congratulate her. “¿qué te parecerion las presentaciones finales?” (how did you feel about the final presentations?) i asked her. “pues, están más bonitas, ¿no?” (well, they’re prettier, aren’t they?) her response was clearly ironic, in relation to the earlier remark she had made about men at other events recruiting her to make their apps “look pretty.” mariana’s response also functioned as a way to remind me that perhaps my “end results” type question was in line with a masculinist, results-oriented technical outlook of the world that was missing the importance of what was really going on at the event: solidarity and interventions along gender lines, as peers, mentors, and family celebrated the young women’s weekend efforts. i was part of this group, no doubt, but also an outsider in more ways than one. here, at the peripheries of the event, in my attempted ethnographic encounters/interventions, i myself was an “exception” (to evoke a coding concept) to what was going on and what was important within the confines of this ritual, a hackathon that had been appropriated for means and negotiations much different than perhaps its original silicon valley, us-based variants had been created for. a straightforward read of the “smart home” design competition at the women’s hackathon in méxico might appear contradictory. how can any of these technologies be liberating, as some of the speakers preached, if they assume and presuppose that women must maintain their interventions within the domestic space, and their “empowerment” within the confines of the hackathon? this interpretation presumes that it isn’t something the women (organizers and participants) had already discussed, and that it isn’t something that was debated within the space of the hackathon itself. it would also be homogenizing, as the varied responses by my respondents on the “all women” component of the event demonstrate, they all had different takes on the matter. finally, as mariana’s ironic comment and posturing shows, there might be spaces of critique within the special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 21 hackathon that this male ethnographer does not have access to—rightly so. conclusion during one of our preliminary organizing sessions for the women’s hackathon, one of the male veteran hackers connected to our video conference call from a treadmill. he spent the hour-long session chiming in with comments while he sprinted in his gym clothes. during our introductions, organizers took turns establishing their experience, not only by invoking the software languages and platforms with which they were familiar, but by enumerating the hackathon events they had previously attended. this spirit of productivity, of making the most with one’s time while juggling multiple demands, clearly infiltrated the space of the hackathon. even if there was a deliberate attempt to depart from the “boy’s culture” usually associated with technical expertise, or the technical masculinity that precedes computing, the media coverage, as well as the burgeoning latina hackers, took seriously the call to avoid “wasting” time. the image of the young man running on his treadmill during the meeting also coincides with the overarching narrative of “catching up” that tends to permeate events designed to empower communities through technology. in a history of computing that forgets “programming” was initially a woman’s job (light, 1999) and a computing industry that has treated women of color as ideal workers to later invisibilize their contributions and labor (nakamura, 2014; ramírez, 2004b), the stakes for mexican woman coders are particularly high. in their case, “catching up” means negotiating nationalist narratives of productivity as global south countries attempt to perform their departure from “developing country” status, as well as reconfiguring normative feminine roles instituted by nationalist constructions of the middle-class family. shuttling between “latina” and “mexican” requires strategic maneuvering and aligning with overarching processes that have historically shifted markers convenient to locating “cheap labor” and “passive nimble workers” across racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. an exploration of the construction of gender at the women’s hackathon thus shows that the management of difference is intimately connected with complex ideologies of productivity and work as well as nationalist and developmentalist projects. the organizers of the event strategically used arduino kits to place the young women at the appropriate (higher) level of the computing stack, from where they could assert their own expertise without being getting lost in the lower layers of abstraction. although the “smart home” theme of the hackathon could be framed as reproducing gendered divisions of labor, comments during the event show that special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 22 these entanglements of gender, technology, and domesticity were actively negotiated. some women hackers praised the liberatory potential of new technologies; other women enjoyed the competitiveness and productive time the hackathon fostered; other women resisted the explicit othering and called for more male hackers; other women (the abuelitas) made their presence felt and performed their solidarity with the makers-in-the-making, regardless of what was being made at this hackathon. most importantly, from a space usually reserved for young makers to learn new, “modern” technologies, the abuelitas asserted their place as the very backbone of these socio-technical configurations, the necessary defaults for the making and corresponding discourse of technological progress to occur in the first place. indeed, the fact that the hackathon had the theme of the “smart home” might have even helped the grandmothers feel more comfortable attending the event in order to make their intervention in visibility and recognition. the way that the organizers shifted the name of the event from the first women’s hackathon in méxico to the first latina hackathon shows how the participants, whether they liked it or not, would become enmeshed in the multiple ways that work and coding get co-produced with constructions of race and gender across national boundaries, always adjacent to capitalist product-driven solutions that value difference when it can be framed as a competitive advantage. from participating in a multitude of technology-focused events in both the us and méxico, it became apparent that issues of inequality and difference quickly disappeared when conversations turned toward economic development. at one event i attended aimed at latinx empowerment in silicon valley, for example, a panel discussed the importance of racial and ethnic representation within tech companies. in the very next panel on supporting tech startups in méxico, not one word was said about how the structural hierarchies of inequality in méxico, nor the processes of racialization that we discussed in the previous panel, could potentially rebound to spaces in méxico. this extraction of difference across boundaries is also common to academic work on technology. kim fortun (2014) suggests that while sts scholars like bruno latour have made science and technology vernacular and thus accessible to ethnographic study, work that privileges practice over structure many times leaves the political-economic largely absent. moreover, she states, “in the insistence on the meso—a sociology of association—cross-scale interactions and structural conditions seem to be written off…i must call gentlemen’s engagement, coming together around controlled vocabulary meant to cut across difference” (fortun, 2014, p. 315). in this article, i’ve suggested that an analysis of special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 23 the social dynamics at the first latina hackathon calls for a deconstruction of nationalist ideals of femininity and transnational ideologies of productive time and labor, starting with close attention to the relationship between “experts.” the challenge is that every time we locate expertise from below, or move across activist communities to collaborate, there is always a risk of leaving out some differences in the name of connecting across others. at this woman’s hackathon, for example, there weren’t any efforts to advocate for non-ableist hacking (felt, 2019; yergeau, 2014), or even any language marking the space as genderqueer or trans-inclusive. some hackathons in the us call for participants who “identify as women in some significant way,” for example (dunbar-hester, 2019, p. 27). for a politics of empowerment to be effective, marginalized communities must work together across difference to learn from each other’s’ struggles in order to construct holistic forms of empowerment: political and educational empowerment as well as personal transformation through consciousness (hill collins, 1990). the intersectional work has to start somewhere, but with careful attention to who is left out in the movements across the intersections. this last point is particularly important as expert roles shift and “ethnography” continues to become the trade language to do crucial border-work between ethnographers, academics, community activists, and technology producers. movements narrowly configured around “technology” will unlikely lead to redressing systemic inequity, but they have the potential to create space to build off of synergies and create other movements altogether. invoking postcolonial and decolonial thinkers, anita say chan (2018) reminds us that our role as academics is to “think within,” between, and among perspectives that emerge from widely situated movements inside and outside of academia. the role of mentorship and sustained relationships across and within research spaces becomes particularly important to think alongside overlapping and multifaceted movements. this form of research, where scholars claim an investment in the communities they study (because many times they come from these communities) has an established trajectory in ethnic studies disciplines. these methodologies are often relegated to the sidelines, however, disappeared in the name of studies that purportedly take these differences into account in macroscale theoretical frameworks, or simply passed over by mainstream disciplines that “discover” novel forms of inquiry. if there’s one thing to take from this women’s hackathon, it is that we can always summon the abuelitas to remind us about visibility and recognition, from the day-to-day to the hackathon to spaces of knowledge production. special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 24 acknowledgements many thanks to the anonymous and peer reviewers for substantive comments that helped shape this article and to the catalyst editorial staff who helped move it toward its final stage. special thanks to sareeta amrute and luis felipe murillo, who brought the special volume to fruition after serving as discussants for a panel on “hacking imaginaries” i co-organized with erin mcelroy at the american anthropological association annual meeting. my colleagues in mit anthropology provided sharp feedback for revisions and future directions in an intellectual forum. funding for research was provided by the social science research council, the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research, and uc-mexus. the writing of drafts and revisions would not have been possible without generous support from the mellon/acls dissertation completion fellowship, the school for advanced research residential fellowship, and the uc president’s postdoctoral fellowship at uc irvine. most importantly, my deepest gratitude for the organizers and participants of the #fixit hackathon for allowing me to share their space. any errors or omissions are my own. notes 1 newspaper article titles such as “the comeback kid,” “mexico makes it,” and “the rise of mexico,” give a sense of the recent cheers for mexico’s sudden emergence on the global stage (see, e.g., the new york times article by friedman, 2013). the economist (2012), for example, predicted that by 2018 “made in china” would be replaced by “hecho en méxico” (made in mexico). 2 to get a sense of how popular these hackathon events were in the years i conducted research, an organization dedicated to enumerating the hackathon events reported that in 2016 there were at least 3,450 hackathons organized, 200,000 participants, and 13,000 prototypes built in over 100 countries (laudet, 2017). 3 for another example of how knowledge workers from the global south come to represent developmentalist narratives of progress, see okune’s (this issue) study of how “over-researched” kenyan techno-entrepreneurs come to epitomize the “africa rising” narrative. 4 mcelroy (this issue) explores how technologists and hackers in romania negotiate homebrewed technical ingenuity with western techno-culture and infrastructure, or how they confront “siliconization.” special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 25 5 see, for example, the writings of eric raymond, http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2002011401620opkn. 6 thanks much to luis felipe murillo and sareeta amrute for bringing to my attention these examples. references abbate, j. 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(2004a). alternative cartographies: third woman and the respatialization of the borderlands. midwestern miscellany, 30, 47–62. ramírez, c. s. (2004b). deus ex machina: tradition, technology, and the chicanafuturist art of marion c. martinez. aztlán, 29(2), 55–92. ricuarte quijano, p. (2018). jóvenes y cultural digital: abordes críticos desde américa latina. chasqui. revista latinoamericana de comunicación, 137, 13–28. salzinger, l. (2016). “re-marking men: masculinity as a terrain of the neoliberal economy.” critical historical studies, 3(1), 1–25. shankar, s. (2008). desi land: teen culture, class, and success in silicon valley. duke university press. turkle, s. (1984). the second self: computers and the human spirit. simon & schuster. yergeau, m. (2014). disabilty hacktivism. in m. hocks & j. sayers (eds.), hacking the classroom: eight perspectives. special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) héctor beltrán, 2020 29 http://www2.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/hacking/ author bio héctor beltrán is assistant professor of anthropology at mit. he is a sociocultural anthropologist who draws upon his background in computer science to understand how the technical aspects of computing intersect with issues of identity, race, ethnicity, class, and nation. hatch article     the metabolic fetish: introduction to blood sugar: racial pharmacology and food justice in black america    anthony ryan hatch wesleyan university ahatch@wesleyan.edu this is an excerpt from anthony ryan hatch's book, blood sugar: racial pharmacology and food justice in black america, which was published in 2016. the excerpt is copyrighted by the regents of the university of minnesota. understanding metabolic syndrome requires that we shift our thinking from an epidemic perspective to one that embraces an endemic view of metabolic health problems. recent scientific discourse about the metabolic problems that comprise metabolic syndrome refers to each of them as epidemics in their own right.1 epidemics are viral or bacterial infections from outside the body that quickly and indiscriminately kill large numbers of individuals living within a circumscribed geographic location. while it is true that most americans will most likely experience and/or die from one or more metabolic problems, these conditions are not epidemics in the historical sense of the term. the historical response to controlling and eradicating epidemics has been to rapidly target individuals who are most likely to fall within the epidemic’s relational and spatial reach.  in stark contrast, the politics of metabolism is characterized by endemic problems. endemics are discriminating, widespread, and long-term population-level phenomena that weaken societies’ energies because treating them is expensive and they lead to the decreased economic productivity of working populations.2 according to data published by leading authorities, the direct and indirect health-care costs from heart disease, diabetes, and stroke exceed one trillion dollars per year.3 because endemics represent a political problem for those who govern, endemic problems quickly become objects of government intervention, scientific disciplines, and capitalist expansion. in the context of improved health and productivity, this framing of endemic phenomenon is required to excise as much political utility, scientific discipline, and economic profit as possible. shifting our perspective from an epidemic to an endemic view is critical for understanding how the biological realities, political rationalities, and economic opportunities of the politics of metabolism shaped the discourses of metabolic syndrome. developing a more robust understanding of the politics of metabolism also involves analysis of the biomedical-government-industry collaborations that lie at the center of biomedical knowledge production in the united states. although metabolic syndrome may not exist as a biological reality in precisely the same ways that cancers exist, it emerged in the context of a massive biomedical, government, and corporate response to the endemic problems of metabolism. the discourses, technologies, and practices of these social institutions are the tools with which researchers construct metabolic syndrome. taken together, these preliminary interpretations underscore both the importance of ideas and institutional practices in the politics of metabolism. race, ethnicity, and metabolic syndrome metabolic syndrome not only constitutes a new way of constructing, studying, and treating human metabolism, it also serves as an emerging cultural location for the construction of new meanings of race and ethnicity. to understand the relationships between metabolic syndrome, race, and ethnicity, and to analyze the meanings produced through the science of metabolic syndrome, blood sugar interrogates the uses of racial and ethnic categories in metabolic syndrome research. the first set of relationships that link metabolic syndrome to race concerns the specific constructions of race and ethnicity that are used in this research. race and ethnicity are socially constructed systems of categorization that are used to identify, group, and rank human beings, albeit based on different criteria. race is a socially constructed category that emerged in the 1600s to classify individuals into so-called races based on presumed biological differences between population groups. ethnicity is a socially constructed category that emerged in the 1920s to classify individuals into so-called ethnic groups based on presumed differences in culture, geographic origin, and ancestry. race and ethnicity are related in that ethnicity emerged in large part in response to critiques of biological notions of race. given this historical relationship, race and ethnicity are not interchangeable systems of categorization. however, there is meaningful overlap between what are considered racial and ethnic groups. for example, african americans are considered to be both a racial and an ethnic group. race and ethnicity are controversial systems of categorization, especially in the context of biomedical research, because individual biological and genetic differences do not fall neatly along racial and ethnic lines. in other words, despite their shared origins in response to biological interpretations of individual and group differences, race and ethnicity are social constructions.  the federal government plays several important roles in the production of metabolic syndrome and race. it enforces the racial categorizations used in biomedical research on metabolic syndrome, funds and produces research on the syndrome, and regulates the labeling and safety of prescription drugs related to it. because of historical and current federal research policies that regulate demographic data collection, statistical information about a research subject’s race and ethnicity is routinely collected along with anthropomorphic, molecular, and genetic information about the subject’s metabolism.4 therefore, the sampling frames, analytic strategies, and research findings of metabolic syndrome research studies are often framed using these racial and ethnic categories. in this regulated scientific environment, it is also common to see published review articles on metabolic syndrome that are focused exclusively on particular racial and ethnic minority groups.5 the racial categories used in federally regulated health research are statutorily based on the office of management and budget’s 1997 standards for maintaining, collecting, and presenting federal data on race and ethnicity.6 the omb recommendations on the measurement of race and ethnicity in the general population note that “the [racial] categories that were developed represent a socialpolitical construct designed to be used in the collection of data on the race and ethnicity of major broad population groups in this country, and are not anthropologically or scientifically based.”7 in this context, many researchers also frame their research on racial groups as ethnic to avoid talking explicitly about race in ways that could be interpreted as racial bias, or worse, scientific racism.  a second set of relationships that link metabolic syndrome to race and ethnicity concerns the effort to study, prescribe, and label drugs that may be related to metabolic syndrome.8 drug companies are actively recruiting individuals who seemingly have metabolic syndrome for their clinical research. for example, the african american rosuvastatin investigation and efficacy study (or aries study) investigated the ability of crestor, a powerful new member of the statin class, to lower both blood pressure and cholesterol in a selfidentified african american population.9 a second recent study, the clinical utility of caduet in simultaneously achieving blood pressure and lipid endpoints in a specific patient population (or capable study) investigated whether caduet, a combination of two drugs, lipitor and norvasc, was effective at lowering african americans’ blood pressure and cholesterol.10 both of these prescription drug studies were conducted in a manner similar to the way that african americans were targeted in the research and marketing of bidil, an antihypertensive medication that is the first drug approved by the fda for use in a specific socalled ethnic group: african americans.11 yet, coupled with recent research findings that suggest that members of racially and ethnically categorized groups might require different medications, dosages, and routes of administration of prescription drugs trials and because of new federal guidelines about the inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities in clinical trials, this research has a new racial dimension.12  metabolic syndrome has become a new way of representing and explaining racial health inequalities in america. the scope and impact of chronic metabolic conditions have intensified in the united states, especially among racial and ethnic minority groups. recent data from the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) document substantial and persistent racial disparities in the distribution of and complications from these major chronic metabolic conditions.13 for decades, social epidemiologists have documented such disparities among racial and ethnic minority groups.14 this research on racial health disparities reveals that african americans and other racially categorized minority groups experience higher rates of death owing to chronic metabolic diseases and higher rates of complications from those diseases, in large part because of the interactive dynamics of racism, sexism, and class inequality on health.15  this body of literature on racial health disparities has received less attention in terms of making a theoretical contribution to critical race theory, science and technology studies, or political sociology, and instead has been more embraced in the fields of social epidemiology and public health. at its core, this research challenges the notion that racial health disparities are caused by natural and cultural differences between racially categorized groups. these scholars have long argued that racial health disparities result from group-based inequalities in access to the economic and political resources necessary to maintain and improve health, such as having access to affordable and adequate medical care. however, simply paying more attention to racially encoded health disparities in the context of metabolic syndrome will not be enough. currently, scientific comparisons of racially categorized groups in metabolic syndrome and its correlates have become a veritable cottage industry. nobly, metabolic syndrome analysts often carry out their work with the purpose of devising better biomedical explanations for health disparities in heart disease, diabetes, and stroke. yet, the dubious theories of racial inequality and discourses of race that emerge from metabolic syndrome research on racial and ethnic groups have not been adequately addressed in that research.  through these practices, metabolic syndrome has become a new discursive tool used to produce new meanings of race in the politics of metabolism. specifically, metabolic syndrome draws upon and extends knowledge making practices that have long constructed race as natural, biological, and genetic. as the biomedical discourses and practices of metabolic syndrome continue to unfold, they intersect with the ways in which race shapes the theories and practices of medicine in terms of disease surveillance, diagnosis, and treatment. because metabolic syndrome emerged largely from within twentiethcentury american biomedicine, it was inexorably shaped by the social structures of race and racism. the sociological relationships between metabolic syndrome and race in the united states seem to have emerged at the intersection of scientific racism—a set of scientific discourses and practices that served to ignore, explain away, and/or justify racial inequalities—and the practices of an increasingly biological and technological approach to the study of human metabolism.  blood sugar explores how metabolic syndrome and race operate together as forms of power and knowledge within the politics of metabolism. three questions guide the arguments i make. first, how did metabolic syndrome emerge as a new discourse in the politics of metabolism? second, how are current conceptions and meanings of race constructed through the science of metabolic syndrome? third, what are the implications of this emerging relationship between metabolic syndrome and race for understanding the construction of racial meanings and the reproduction of racism within the politics of metabolism? notes 1 scott m. grundy, “metabolic syndrome pandemic,” arteriosclerosis thrombosis and vascular biology, 28 (2008): 629-36; dean j. kereiakes and james t. willerson, “metabolic syndrome epidemic,” circulation, 108 (2003): 1552-53; p. zimmet, k. g. alberti, and j. shaw, “global and societal implications of the diabetes epidemic,” nature, 414 (2001): 782-87. 2 michel foucault, "society must be defended": lectures at the collège de france, 1975-1976, ed. françois ewald, alessandro fontana, and mauro bertani, trans. david macey (new york: picador, 2003 [1976]), 244. 3 direct costs include the costs of physicians and other professionals, hospital and nursinghome services, the cost of medications, home health care, and other medical goods. indirect costs refer to lost economic productivity because of premature disease and death. this estimate is compiled from the following sources: american diabetes association, “economic costs of diabetes in the u.s. in 2002,” diabetes care, 26 (2002): 917-32; eric a. finkelstein, christopher j. ruhm, and katherine m. kosa, “economic causes and consequences of obesity,” annual review of public health, 26 (2005): 239-57; and thomas thom, “heart disease and stroke statistics—2006 update: a report from the american heart association statistics committee and stroke statistics subcommittee,” circulation, 113 (2006): e85-e151. 4 in 1997, the office of management and budget (omb) provided the definitions of race and ethnicity that must be used in all biomedical and healthpolicy research funded by the federal government. see steve epstein, inclusion: the politics of difference in medical research (chicago: university of chicago press, 2007); and alexandra e. shields, michael fortun, evelyn m. hammonds, patricia a. king, caryn lerman, rayna rapp, and patrick f. sullivan, “the use of race variables in genetic studies of complex traits and the goal of reducing health disparities,” american psychologist, 60 (2005): 77-103. 5 for analyses of this research, see chapter 3, “the scientific racism of metabolism.” 6 office of management and budget, “standards for maintaining, collecting, and presenting federal data on race and ethnicity,” federal register, 62 (1997): 58781-90. 7 ibid., 36874. 8 see david s. jones and roy h. perlis, “pharmacogenetics, race, and psychiatry: prospects and challenges,” harvard review of psychiatry, 14 (2006): 92; jonathan t. kahn, “race, pharmacogenomics and marketing putting bidil in context,” american journal of bioethics, 6 (2006): w1-w5; and sandra soojin lee, “racializing drug design: implications of pharmacogenomics for health disparities,” american journal of public health, 95 (2005): 2133-38. 9 j. m. flack, r. victor, k. watson, k. c. ferdinand, e. saunders, l. tarasenko, m. j. jamieson, h. shi, and p. bruschi, “improved attainment of blood pressure and cholesterol goals using singlepill amlodipine/atorvastatin in african americans: the capable trial,” mayo clinic proceedings, 83 (2008): 35-45. 10 ibid. 11 troy duster, “race and reification in science,” science, 307 (2005): 1050-51; jonathan t. kahn, “race, pharmacogenomics and marketing putting bidil in context,” american journal of bioethics, 6 (2006): w1-w5; jonathan kahn, race in a bottle: the story of bidil and racialized medicine in a postgenomic age (new york: columbia university press, 2012); and pamela sankar and jonathan kahn, “bidil: race medicine or race marketing?” health affairs (2005): 54-55. 12 see my analysis in chapter 4, “killer applications: the racial pharmacology of prescription drugs.” 13 centers for disease control and prevention, “racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in multiple risk factors for heart disease and stroke—united states, 2003,” mortality and morbidity weekly report, 54 (2005): 113-17. 14 david r. williams and michelle sternthal, “understanding racialethnic disparities in health: sociological contributions,” journal of health and social behavior, 51 (2010): s15-s27. 15 i. j. benjamin, d. k. arnett, and j. loscalzo, “discovering the full spectrum of cardiovascular disease minority health summit 2003—report of the basic science writing group,” circulation, 111 (2005): e120-e123; a. h. mokdad, j. s. marks, d. f. stroup, and j. l. gerberding, “actual causes of death in the united states, 2000,” journal of the american medical association, 291 (2004): 1238-45; qi zhang and youfa wang, “trends in the association between obesity and socioeconomic status in u.s. adults: 1971 to 2000,” obesity research, 12 (2004): 1622-32; raynard s. kington, and james p. smith, “socioeconomic status and racial and ethnic differences in functional status associated with chronic diseases,” american journal of public health, 87 (1997): 805-10; michael g. marmot, “understanding social inequalities in health,” perspectives in biology and medicine, 46 (2003): s9-s23; mark d. hayward, eileen m. crimmins, toni p. miles, and yu yang, “the significance of socioeconomic status in explaining the race gap in chronic health conditions,” american sociological review, 65(6) (2000): 910-30; j. c. phelan and b. g. link, “controlling disease and creating disparities: a fundamental cause perspective,” journal of gerontology, 60b (2005): 27-33. bio anthony ryan hatch is assistant professor of science in society and african american studies at wesleyan university. he is the author of blood sugar: racial pharmacology and food justice in black america (university of minnesota press, 2016). he has written articles about health and social justice, critical race theory and scientific racism, and the discursive construction of sex crimes. he is currently developing a book manuscript on the uses and meanings of psychotropic drugs in the u.s. criminal injustice system. microsoft word 76955-1-11-horrocks.docx horrocks, s. (2019). materializing datafied body doubles: insulin pumps, blood glucose testing, and the production of usable bodies. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5 (1), 1-26. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © stephen horrocks, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article materializing datafied body doubles: insulin pumps, blood glucose testing, and the production of usable bodies stephen horrocks purdue university shorroc@purdue.edu abstract the network of devices involved in insulin pump treatment reads and quantifies the physiological processes of type 1 diabetes as it performs life-sustaining functions inside and upon users’ bodies. together, these devices gather that information to produce what i call datafied body doubles: numerical stand-ins for the body that recreate them as both usable and controllable for pump users and their physicians. by establishing and normalizing a system of quantification through blood glucose testing and temporally mapping body-readings into data collections, these datafied body doubles fundamentally alter the conceptual and material experience of living with diabetes. as medicallycompelled users, people with type 1 diabetes participate in their own datafication through their continued use of those devices—a choice which is not much of a choice at all—but their bodies are re-created and used to drive their participation in those very techno-medicalized treatments nevertheless. horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 introduction people with type 1 diabetes (t1d) are in a precarious position.1 because their bodies no longer produce insulin, they live with a daily ultimatum: inject insulin or die. for the roughly 20 to 38 million people worldwide living with t1d, that choice isn’t much of a choice at all. they are what i call compelled users; for a choice of non-use is a choice of non-life, and that reality has created a unique and bittersweet relationship between people and their treatment devices. in this article, i attempt to flesh out how these medically compelled human–technological relationships influence users’ understandings of diabetes, treatment objects, and their own bodies. now the standard of care and primary method of regulating blood glucose levels for the 3 million people in the united states with t1d, the network of devices involved in insulin pump treatment read and quantify users’ physiological processes while they perform their primary life-sustaining functions inside, upon, and outside the body. these devices compile, analyze, and visualize that information to produce what i call datafied body doubles: numerical standins for the body that construct them as both usable and controllable for pump users and their physicians. these datafied body doubles fundamentally alter the conceptual and material experience of living with t1d in the twenty-first century by, first, providing users a new technological/medical (and therefore expert) point of reference in their methods of reading and interpreting their own bodies; and, second, these body doubles are themselves materialized back in/on t1d bodies as people apply them to their ritualized daily diabetes treatment acts. through this process, insulin pumps and networks of diabetes technologies come to function not only as medical periphery or attachments but as deeply intertwined and active constituents of the body. horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 cripping t1d and insulin pump use: considering these human/technological treatment networks as active, reciprocal, and productive provides a compelling frame through which we can begin to crip conversations surrounding t1d and chronic illness more generally. it is perhaps unsurprising that diabetes is not commonly framed within the discourse of disability,2 but i draw them together to highlight some of the ways this connection would benefit scholarship surrounding both diabetes and critical disability studies more broadly. first, at its base, the shift toward constant and concealed treatment practices is emblematic of a much broader system of biomedicalized control that devalues nonnormative bodies, and thereby devalues a life lived with(in) one. here i use the term biomedicalized to signal the late twentieth-century cultural shift in medical practice and culture adele clarke et al. (2009) have termed “biomedicalization,” wherein the goals of controlling disease and “individual perfection” prioritize the transformation of illnesses and bodies through technoscientific means (pp. 1, 11). these goals, rooted in a hope for healing/curing and improving patients’ quality of life, are nevertheless influenced by the power structures that are “automatically ‘built in’ and mobile, embodied through social practices and norms,” both within the field of medicine and in us culture more generally (pp. 4-5). read with perhaps more nuance through the work of sheila jasanoff (2004), the structures of power, social practices and norms, and technoscientific medical interventions involved in late twentiethand twenty-first-century diabetes treatment are all co-produced together within and among various the institutions and discourses with which they engage. and it is in the co-production of technoscientific medical practice, cultural norms, and definitions surrounding t1d, and patient identities where disability studies—and crip theory in particular—can help provide insights and tools for better understanding the implications of insulin pump treatments for the people with diabetes who use them. first, and central to the very purpose of this essay, technological interventions in medical research and practice have transformed t1d from an acute condition to a chronic one.3 insulin injections keep people with t1d alive. insulin pump systems, particularly those that incorporate blood glucose (bg) tracking horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 devices, have drastically improved patients’ quality and duration of life. because these life-sustaining treatments have been and continue to be coproduced alongside the social practices and norms of us and medical cultures, however, they also become sites upon which systems of power are and can be made manifest or “built [on],” to paraphrase clarke et al. above. the act of living with a chronic disease is compounded with various unseen yet nonetheless taxing forms of labor, work that has been made invisible by the long-term and large-scale normalization of able-bodiedness. as robert mcruer (2006) details in crip theory, able-bodiedness is made socially compulsory in part by associating conceptions of embodied normalcy with the ability to produce labor value, but also by framing all disabilities as “essentially temporary, appearing only when, and as long as, they are necessary” (pp. 7-8, 29). through this cultural logic, various disabilities and chronic illnesses such as diabetes can be moved on and off stage as needed. they can be just palatable enough to systems of compulsory able-bodiedness when they need to be, yet out of view when they do not—a flexibility that can be enacted upon people and bodies, but that can also be deployed by people in productive ways. for individuals who live with t1d, the permanent impermanence of the disease as framed by themselves, their doctors, and us culture more broadly produces some significant tensions. geoffrey c. bowker and susan leigh star (2000) refer to similar tensions for tuberculosis patients as “torque.” the interactions between people, institutions, and definition paradigms (in their case, categories about tuberculosis) make their uneasy conglomeration visible: each has a trajectory, and the trajectories may pull or torque each other over time if they move in different directions or at different rates. the threads that tie category to disease, to science, to bureaucracy, and thus to person, often become twisted and tangled in the long process of the disease. the texture of classification here is composed of thick filiations, encompassing much of a person’s life, imposed from outside, and filled with uncertainty and contradiction. (p. 195) horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 as people live with the embodied experience of t1d and all of the vicissitudes associated with a fast-moving and dynamic chronic condition, the medical and cultural definitions and scripts for diabetes are everpresent in co-constructing meanings associated with those experiences. as the “trajectories” or interpretations of those experiences by these three actors align, their interconnection is productive and often invisible. when those interpretations do not overlap, however, the mental/emotional/embodied torque produced can be excruciating. these tensions, i argue, are further complicated with the addition of technological quantification and injection systems detailed throughout the study below. in this context, it makes sense all the more why many people with t1d constantly hope for a cure. that desire for a post-diabetic life—so often actually conceptualized as a return to a pre-diabetic life—is in many ways a desire to escape the labor and torque characteristic of life with a chronic illness. in practice, this desire is discursively linked to a desire for the experience of able-bodiedness in an able-bodied world, a desire to feel normal. the problem, however, is that regardless of a possible future cure, millions of people currently do live with t1d, and reiterating normalizing narratives within imagined futures for t1d further entrenches conceptions of t1d abnormalcy in the present. i draw diabetes into discourses of disability, and especially of crip technoscience, in order to politicize the technological relationships that have become so deeply intertwined with experiences of living with and treating t1d. as the need for repetitive treatment acts overlaps with ubiquitous calls for “the cure,” diabetic bodies come to be framed in terms of what alison kafer (2013) calls “facile references of self-evident cyborgs simply by virtue of their use of ‘assistive’ or ‘adaptive’ technologies” (p. 120). in the context of diabetes, this move flattens the varied human experiences with t1d treatment and packages them as uniform, depoliticizing those processes and the datafied body doubles they produce, despite the cultural and economic structures required for them to function (and to exist at all). i aim to make visible those connections to the systems of medical practice, research, and device production, as well as how those power relationships structure or at least influence people’s daily lives and practices. in so doing, horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 i hope to open a space where we can begin to see the ways people are not only implicated in this technoscientific (re)defining themselves, but how people resist and, though still compelled, actively define the parameters of their own use in new and interesting ways. insulin, blood glucose testing, and twentieth-century transmuted disease: in order to understand the techno-human relationships typical of twenty-first-century t1d, it is important to trace how the medicine and culture of diabetes have changed. not to be confused with its in-nameonly counterpart type 2, type 1 diabetes mellitus—often referred to as juvenile or insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (iddm)—is a chronic immune disorder in which the body cannot break down and use carbohydrates due to a total lack of insulin production. though the particular combination of genetic and environmental factors at play in its cause is still largely unknown, something triggers an autoimmune rejection of beta cells in the pancreas that create insulin. as a result, patients with t1d eventually stop producing insulin altogether and require insulin injections to metabolize foods—any food, all food, any time (“diabetes,” 2005; “diabetes,” 2007; marcovitch, 2006). there were two major shifts in diabetes treatment in the twentieth century that transformed not only how treatments functioned, or even how it affected everyday life for people with diabetes, but that fundamentally altered the disease itself. first, in early 1921, frederick banting and his research team successfully isolated a hormone they named “insulin” from the pancreas,4 and both the medical and popular response was so dramatic that commercial injectable insulin was produced and on the market within a year (banting, best, & macleod, 1922; “frederick grant banting,” 1966). though references to diabetes date back as far as 1500 bce in india and egypt, and though medical discourses have all changed significantly in the thousands of years since then, treatments (and, really, prognoses) for what we now call type 1 diabetes remained generally similar until the 1920s: diet and/or lifestyle changes centered on “abstaining” (medvei, 1993, pp. 46, 49; zajac, shrestha, patel, & poretsky, 2010, pp. 1-5). insulin injection treatment changed everything, essentially ridding patients of their horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 immediate side effects and eventually increasing life expectancy postdiagnosis twenty-fold (brostoff, keen, & brostoff, 2007, p. 1352). what was for centuries a terminal diagnosis accompanied by a doctor’s suggestion to “make arrangements” became a chronic, life-long condition with fundamentally new challenges and side effects. in his book bittersweet: diabetes, insulin, and the transformation of illness, chris feudtner (2003) argues that the discovery and development of the “wondrous drug” itself accounted for the “bittersweet” transformation of diabetes in the twentieth century. as insulin therapy was quickly institutionalized as the standard of care, it altered the “fundamental biology of the disease,” stunting the so-called “natural” problems associated with diabetes, while simultaneously giving rise to scores of new complications and lifestyle changes no one had lived long enough to develop. “the patient,” feudtner argues, “experiences an illness with a transmuted course” (emphasis added). medical practice, as a series of interrelated human decisions, transformed diabetes biologically, altered people’s everyday labor and practices, and created a culture of medicalized control centered on rhetoric of individual responsibility and the “predicament of dangerous safety” (pp. 23, 29). this human-molded diabetic world would serve as a primary site of further transmutations and the standardization of medical science more generally (porter, 1996, pp. 31-32). the second major shift in the twentieth-century diabetic world began in the 1960s, as biomedical researchers began producing blood glucose test strips for use in emergency rooms and clinical diagnostics. these devices allowed physicians to take a small amount blood from their patients, run it across the strip to begin a chemical reaction, and compare the strip’s hue to a chart to give them a range of where their blood glucose levels were at that moment. by 1970, these strips were altered to feed the chemical reaction data into devices that could produce a quantitative reading of the blood’s glucose per deciliter, and glucose meters became available for patients’ at-home use in the 1980s (clarke & foster, 2012, pp. 85-87). as at-home bg measurement became institutionalized in the 1980s and 1990s, the general practice of testing biomedicalized crip users became institutionalized along with it. in their book biomedicalization: horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 technoscience, health, and illness in the u.s., adele clarke et al. (2009) argue that the “technoscientization of biomedical practices” since the 1980s have coalesced into a medical paradigm they call “biomedicalization”—a late-century shift in american medicine focused more on transforming disease and the body through the use of technologies than on treating or controlling it (pp. 1-2, 197). this medical need to transform has disproportionately affected people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, who must also navigate the cultural and economic traps symptomatic of systemic “compulsory able-bodiedness,” discussed in more detail above (mcruer, 2006, pp. 1-2, 8). in essence, the intersections of these sociocultural forces at the end of the twentieth century have turned people with t1d into compelled users5—biomedicalized crip users—who often blood-test their way into the quantified self (qs) movement whether they wanted to or not.6 since the advent of bg testing, t1d-related research has primarily focused on making devices more manageable and user-friendly, on conducting more frequent bg readings (which led to the development of continuous glucose monitors), and networking bg testing devices with other treatment technologies such as insulin pumps. people with t1d now live a fundamentally device-connected life, one in which t1d bodies and epistemologies have been redefined in myriad ways heretofore underexplored. in what follows, i will engage with these devices to begin unpacking how the body is conceptually redefined through the compelled use of these networked treatment devices. datafied body doubles and the network of t1d treatment devices though the exact combination of technologies used for insulin pump treatment vary based on insurance coverage, physician recommendations, and individual tastes and aesthetics among other factors, the standard of care in t1d treatment today includes at least three components: an insulin pump, a continuous glucose monitor, and a blood glucose meter. each of these devices works together to standardize t1d bodies and treatments, and to construct what i call datafied body doubles. below i will map out this horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 network of devices, their functions and connections to t1d bodies, and how they work (or sometimes do not work) together in both maintaining blood glucose levels and making t1d bodies medically usable. blood glucose meters and bodies as numbers: tens of millions of people in the united states and around the world use blood glucose meters on a daily basis, paying into a nearly us$9 billion market worldwide (hughes, 2009, pp. 1219-1220). though they make up one of the largest segments of global pharmaceuticals today, diabetic glucose testing products were not developed and marketed for at-home consumers until the 1980s. by the turn of the new millennium, however, nearly every person in the united states diagnosed with diabetes used a meter at home on a regular basis (tenderich, 2013, p. 68). glucose meters’ rapid shift from medical obscurity to clinical ubiquity, i argue, has been accompanied by significant changes to definitions of type 1 diabetes (and diabetes generally), altering the lived experience of embodiment for people who use these devices on a daily basis. as i will show below, efforts to make the complex physiological processes associated with t1d more manageable have established and normalized a system of quantification that re-creates the body’s processes as a number. in doing so, t1d bodies are overlaid with people’s sensory experiences together with the numbers meant to represent them, conflating and redefining various ways of knowing into sets of integers that make treating such a highly complex condition possible—and in so doing, masking many of the complexities associated with their creation. these device-produced numerical stand-ins for the body set the stage for the creation of datafied body doubles as t1d treatment becomes increasingly networked with more and more treatment and measuring devices. how, then, does a bg meter actually work? by pricking their finger and placing a drop of blood on the end of a disposable test strip, an individual can receive an estimate of their blood glucose level in almost real time. chemicals in and/or on the test strip react when users’ blood is introduced, and the device measures that chemical change to produce a numerical measure of the amount of glucose present in that droplet of blood horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 (clarke & foster, 2012, pp. 86-88). in the united states, this is measured as milligrams of glucose per deciliter of blood (mg/dl)—calculated as millimoles per liter (mmol/l) in most of the world. according to the national institutes of health, fasting blood glucose levels for non-diabetic people average between 80 and 120 mg/dl (4.4 and 6.7 mmol/l), which acts as the approximate goal range for people using insulin injections (national institute of diabetes, n.d.).7 after nearly four decades of consistent and routine use by people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes worldwide, these meter readings have come to be understood as snapshots, illustrative of users’ bg levels—and of users’ bodies more generally. as barbara a. koenig (1988) has argued, the technological imperative of care pervasive in the field of medicine makes the “routinization” and standardization of this type of techno-medical procedure difficult, if not impossible to resist. medical professionals establish and maintain certain “treatment rituals” to help offset the uncertainties inherent in caring for complex health-related experiences such as these (pp. 466-467, 479). in the case of t1d, the numbers produced by these devices have become so normalized as to be understood by doctors and patients alike as direct representations of a user’s physiological state at the time of the test. this is not to suggest that either mds’ or patients’ explicit and tacit knowledges can be so easily reduced or dismissed, but instead that the normalization process in medical science and practice is that influential. often understood as the result of objective (and accurate) technoscientific observations, bg numbers take on the role of authoritative medical opinions in and of themselves. as theodore m. porter (1996) has argued, though scientific measurement systems are built within specific moments and contexts, decades of “regulation, education, manufacturing, and method” have redefined measurement as “precision and objectivity” (pp. 23, 32). numbers produced with these supposedly objective measurements have the uncanny ability to reach across the sociocultural boundaries of medicine and american culture to deal with large and often difficult subject matter— in no small part due to their “ability to bypass deep issues” and distill them into small, digestible chunks (p. 86). horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 11 it is at the intersection of ritualized medical practice and the abiding “trust in numbers” porter details within the united states where the cultural meanings of bg testing reside. after all, how do glucose meters depict or envision the body? as a number. this re-imaging, or translation of the body as a number has become normalized not only through the cultural authority of medicine (pescosolido & martin, 2004), but by the reiterated act of overlaying those numbers onto users’ sensory experiences with their own bodies. one of the most common linguistic idiosyncrasies shared among people with t1d is the tendency to use the numbers from their bg readings as direct references to themselves. phrases such as, “i was 400,” “they told me i was 35,” and “oh good, i’m 102,” denote a conscious acknowledgement of a state of being—one’s embodied knowledge of how that particular state feels merging with a system of quantification with which to categorize it. more than just a common turn-of-phrase among participants, i would argue, this linguistic act of equating their bodies/selves with biomedicalized recreations thereof is not unlike the marking that comes with a diagnosis of diabetes in the first place. i am, you are “diabetic”—as a medical and social marker or identifier—becomes i am, you are my/your bg, and this marking process is carried over into the treatment acts patients conduct themselves. after a lifetime of mapping bg tests onto lived experiences, these numbers become so far divorced from the calculations and even bodies that produce them (and give them their medical authority) that they come to stand for themselves. the number is as much as one’s own body is—to use judith butler’s (1993) terms, years of reiteration have materialized the number as one’s body in and of itself (p. 2). if the body is made to be understood as a number, it is made to be calculable. it becomes a data point, to be plugged into formulas in order to produce particular solutions. this is how medically “difficult” diabetic bodies become scientifically usable—they are made into something else, something legible to those ways of seeing and knowing. in these attempts to simplify t1d bodies, however, several problems arise that complicate the process. what happens, for example, when someone feels as though they have low bg but their meter produces a number that says otherwise? or horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 12 when the accuracy of test strip lots vary (often unbeknownst to the user), producing slightly inconstant results? the torque produced by these incongruent readings of the body, to again use bowker and star’s (2000) term, can at times produce a “nightmare texture,” difficult to understand and respond to (p. 27). as i explore below, the body’s processes as they relate to bg are not static—but meter readings are. they are better understood as representations of something that happened than of something happening—and what emerges is somewhat of a temporal problem. continuous glucose monitors and bodies as data collections: to begin dealing with some of the issues that arise from static bg meter readings, and keeping in line with the more-data-is-better streams of many contemporary medical and scientific cultures,8 doctors and device designers alike have invested considerable resources into developing and advocating for the use of continuous glucose monitors (or cgms). fdaapproved for clinical use in 1999 and for at-home use in 2003, cgms are intended to perform the task their name implies: keep track of blood glucose levels over time (sato, hirose, & watada, 2012, pp. 225-226). rather than relying on a singular number gathered ten minutes or two hours ago to get an idea of where one’s glucose levels are, cgm users attach a sensor onto their body (usually somewhere around the abdomen) with a small tube or wire inserted beneath the skin which takes a reading every two to five minutes. these readings are then wirelessly transmitted from the cgm sensor to either an accompanying monitor device or directly to a user’s insulin pump, where they are stored, time-stamped, and visualized for the patient and their physician (medtronic diabetes, 2013a, pp. 2-3). a process which previously would have required painstaking record keeping by patients—who must actually live their lives while they manage their blood sugar—large-scale bg data collection via cgms affords users the ability to stay up-to date with their bg levels in almost real time (even though cgm readings have been shown to be delayed and less accurate than bg meter readings) (medtronic diabetes, 2013a, p. 3). co-produced alongside these new methods of mass-quantification, however, are new horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 13 temporally redefined t1d bodies. while bg meters construct a usable t1d body, the numerical stand-ins they create are always fixed past-tense representations—t1d bodies that were. cgms, on the other hand, map a constant stream of automated glucose readings onto a timeline to produce usable t1d bodies in both the present and future tense—t1d bodies that are and will be. shifting and intersecting temporalities themselves are not necessarily new concepts for people with t1d. in her recent article, laura forlano (2017) details many of the temporal implications of living a deviceconnected t1d life. as a “disabled cyborg” herself, the biomedical objects connected to her body and necessary for her insulin treatment acts “introduce industrial clock time to [her] biological processes” (p. 4). using kafer’s (2013) concept of “crip time” as a point of departure, forlano explores the tensions and possibilities associated with the artificial (yet medically compelled) convergence of two disparate temporal framings. not only does her insulin pump build an injection schedule on an hourly system, but the cgm attached to her body allows her to see her bg levels without going through the process of pulling out her meter and pricking her finger— an act that frequently interrupts work and/or other social activities (pp. 15, 18-19). beyond the surface difficulties of these experiences themselves, both examples here (and especially forlano’s discussion of the cgm) gesture toward a fundamental shift in t1d crip time more broadly—and these shifts reveal new convergences and perhaps conflations between t1d crip time on the one hand, represented here by forlano’s inherently political use of the cgm to restructure her work and social practices, and t1d “curative time” on the other, represented by the expansion of industrial time within these structured pharmaceutical treatments conducted on/with bodies’ physiologies.9 the biomedicalized repositioning of type 1 bodies as current, present, and dynamic is a process of transforming their embodied temporality in order to optimize them (clarke et al., 2009, pp. 2, 23). people with t1d turn to cgms, whether at the suggestion of their physician or on their own, in search of better control of their bg levels—to optimize their diabetes by tracking it. by plotting bg data points on a timeline, these bodyhorrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 14 reading devices place current numbers in direct comparison to previous numbers, and in so doing reframe the fundamental meaning of both individual and cumulative readings simultaneously. as i argued above, the numerical body-stand-ins constructed through these tests are made to represent physiological states of the body at particular moments. but streams of cgm readings re-visualize that same body every few minutes, usually in slightly different form. t1d bodies, like all bodies, are dynamic—attempting to control and optimize, or even understand such a slippery entity can be a frustrating and uncomfortable experience. what, then, is the body if it is re-written all day, every day? but, if each bg test and cgm reading primarily derive meaning based on how they compare to other numbers, then the data only create usable meaning as a set and begin to function as what i call datafied body doubles. no longer reduced to 1-to-1 numerical representations of the body on their own, datafied body doubles attempt to recreate the dynamic nature of t1d bodies’ physiologies in data form. if not simply present-tense but active, datafied body doubles must also account for the movement of time in the way users’ present relates to both pasts and futures. thus, cgm manufacturers highlight the importance of bg movement—trends and trajectories, to echo the terms cited most often by manufacturers and users alike—in using datafied body doubles for optimal control. medtronic (2013a), the largest insulin pump and cgm manufacturer in the united states and the maker of the minimed series of insulin pumps, suggests that users “focus on what matters, the trends—the direction and the speed of the sensor glucose readings and graphs. pay less attention to each individual glucose number” (p. 4, emphasis original). from a technical standpoint, this language by medtronic makes sense. unlike bg meters, which measure the glucose-to-blood ratio directly from users’ bloodstream via a finger prick, continuous glucose monitors measure the glucose-to-blood ratio from interstitial fluid located in the layer of subcutaneous fat where cgm sensor tubes are inserted. as a result, sensor readings are always slightly behind what is happening in users’ bloodstream at the time of the test, and people are advised to “always horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 15 confirm your blood glucose with a bg meter” before making any treatment decisions at all (medtronic diabetes, 2013a, p. 3). what may be understood as a statement of medical “best practices” could also be read as a legal disclaimer to avoid (potentially fatal) blowback from inconsistent or inaccurate cgm readings. from a sales standpoint, this statement also lays the groundwork for the importance of networking the two measuring devices together, which has both clinical and economic implications for the company. but as medtronic says, the numbers themselves are not what really matters. rather than giving patients and doctors a snapshot of bg levels at a particular moment, cgms produce continual snapshots plotted over time to give patients and doctors trends and trajectories. since their move into home use during the 1980s, bg meter readings have functioned within a medicalized value system with two primary outcomes at stake: outside the target range = bad (requiring action from the user, either in the form of insulin injection or glucose ingestion); within the target range = good (users can forget about it and go about their day). with a cgm, however, a targetrange reading by itself is only part of the story, the less important part according to medtronic. cgm visualizations of sensor readings are always accompanied by a trajectory marker of either “going up” or “coming down”— usually identified for users with hypervisible upor down-arrows (and in the case of the medtronic “enlite” cgm system, double-upor double-downarrows if their bg levels are changing rapidly) (medtronic diabetes, 2013a, p. 4). though positive and negative value is still built around individual numbers’ proximity to the target range, new cgm-specific value systems construct positive and negative connotations around an imagined future numbers’ proximity to the same. these cgm-produced blood glucose trajectories, then, are embedded with a new sense of t1d futurity. no longer biomedically valuable to simply identify what/where a person or their body is in a particular moment, cgm systems attempt to predict what they will be. after all, “going down” from a bg of 80 is not about that reading or that moment, but it constructs its meaning from an expectation of a low in the future. this imagined future is intended to help users prevent potentially life-threatening horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 16 situations, as those low numbers ascribed with negative values can lead to significant (and immediate) consequences for people with t1d. at the same time, the expectation of constant future danger is also part of a remolded twenty-first-century version of t1d’s “grim imagined futures”—to echo kafer (2013)—that have dominated cultural conceptions of diabetes for decades (p. 2). long essentialized as little more than a bleak existence full of suffering, withering, and an ever-present threat of death (assumptions etched into the us cultural canon through films such as steel magnolias (1989) and panic room (2002)), t1d futures are so medically and culturally undesirable that diagnoses are often accompanied by the mourning of one’s lost able-bodied past. though t1d futures reframed by cgms as numbers, anticipated highs and lows, rising and falling may be stripped of their culturally charged language, numbers themselves “have often been an agency for acting on people, exercising power over them” (porter, 1996, p. 77). cgm futurities are built on conceptions of what users should be—a specific target bg range—which keeps people with diabetes in a constant state of dynamic precarity, heavily reliant on the datafied body doubles these measuring devices provide. because these datafied futures are so deeply bound up in the bioeconomics of the production, distribution, and consumption of pharmaceutical devices and medical science and practice, they are powerful, hegemonic, biomedicalized neoliberal futures—futures wherein, as kelly fritsch (2016) argues, the bleakness [of t1d] is necessarily “solved” via biomedical intervention and enhancement, and any possibility of alternative spaces or trajectories requires critical crip interventions (pp. 11-12). first re-created by bg meters as individual data points, t1d bodies are conceptually redefined and temporally mapped into data collections: datafied body doubles that make their subjects legible to medical science in new ways. to be made legible is to be made usable, and in a very real sense, coming to know blood glucose levels (and therefore t1d bodies) means little for actual people unless it is connected with the act of insulin injection. horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 17 insulin pumps and techno-medicalized control of difficult bodies: the network of diabetic measuring devices and practices discussed up to this point have changed the way we think (and even can think) about t1d bodies. though various treatment cultures may hint to the contrary, bg measurement is primarily a means to an end and not an end unto itself. knowing the t1d body and quantifying its processes is only medically valuable to patients and physicians alike in its ability to be used in treatment and/or intervention. enter: the insulin pump. this device is the centerpiece of the current standard of care for people with type 1, primarily because it is site where the life-sustaining act of insulin injection is performed. but assessed through the lens of the t1d treatment network more broadly, the pump also functions as a hub where users go to interact with all their treatment acts, devices, and even their own bodies together in one place. it is here, i argue, where datafied body doubles are gathered and materialized back onto/into the bodies they were made to represent through networked insulin injection. in so doing, the insulin pump comes to function as a catalyst for biomedicalized control of t1d bodies on and through their own doubles. insulin pumps consist of several parts that together perform the function of “delivering” insulin to the body. the device itself is usually about the size of a pager—somewhere in the range of two inches-by-three inchesby-one inch—and houses a motor and piston, a small on-board computer to program delivery schedules and dosage formulas, a display, and some means for user interfacing (in most cases physical buttons, though more recently tandem diabetes, makers of the t-slim insulin pump, have included touchscreen capability) (medtronic diabetes, 2013b, pp. 4-5). in order for that little device to perform its prescribed function, however, it requires several peripheral components (mostly disposable) to connect it to the body and facilitate the movement of sterile pharmaceuticals. first, and most importantly, an insulin pump is only useful for people with t1d when it is used in conjunction with a pharmaceutical-grade insulin product. users fill a disposable reservoir or small tube with enough insulin to last about three days and insert it into the device where the plunger can drive injections. the insulin-loaded pump is then connected to a user’s body horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 18 by attaching a length of tubing between the reservoir and an infusion set— a port that includes a small tube inserted under the skin, serving as the conduit between the device and the internal workings of the body. with all these pieces in place, users can interface with the pump and give commands to inject insulin as needed—often referred to as a “bolus” dose— and set automated micro-injections to regulate bg levels throughout the course of an average day—known as a “basal” dose (medtronic diabetes, 2013b, pp. 4, 53-56). but to know how much to inject, and when to inject it, users rely on their datafied body doubles created by their blood glucose measuring devices to know “what they are,” and “where they are going.” dosing a pharmaceutical such as insulin involves some rather complex calculations that bring together multiple sites and quantification systems. t1d bodies and their bg levels are measured in mg/dl or mmol/l through the processes outlined above, insulin dose recommendations are based on standardized “units” created by a panel of physicians in the early twentieth century,10 and carbohydrates people ingest are usually measured in grams (though many foods—especially unprocessed foods without nutrition labels—are not easily quantifiable this way). all of these systems of measurement interact with and slightly alter each other, creating a muddy web of numbers that can be difficult to navigate. to make that web more manageable, everyday users are no longer required to perform these complex calculations themselves. insulin dose formulas are programmed into users’ insulin pumps and can be adjusted by their physicians to meet the changing needs of a dynamic t1d body. as people plug their datafied body doubles into their insulin pumps, their devices perform the calculations for them and provide their dose amount. to make the process simpler still, most of the data produced by glucose meters and cgms for networked users are automatically transmitted wirelessly to the insulin pump, requiring even less direct engagement with the “blackboxed” dose calculations (medtronic diabetes, 2013a, pp. 22-27). all they have to do is click “yes,” or “go,” and the insulin pump delivers that amount into the user’s body for them. so long as the datafied body doubles and formulas are working and the outcome is what users expect (i.e., no horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 19 major unexpected fluctuations in bg levels), as bruno latour (1999) has argued in relation to scientific blackboxing more generally, users have no need to know the inner workings of the device (p. 304). as datafied body doubles are used for insulin dose calculations, the already obscured t1d body is made even more opaque, and the invisibility of technoscientific medical processes work to make diabetes invisible along with it. as insulin pumps inject a dose into the body, people with t1d are inundated with sensory cues of the treatment act: the dose amount incrementally decreasing on screen, the cold sting of pharmaceuticals spreading from the infusion site, the action notification beeps and the sound of the pump’s motor pushing the plunger ever so slightly, and sometimes even the clinical odor of the insulin itself. all of this combines with individuals’ own sensory embodiment, which often fluctuates dramatically with changing blood glucose levels, as datafied body doubles frame and categorize all of these experiences within the bounds of medical authority. by reducing the body and its processes to data collections, it can be more easily used to control the effects of living with t1d—a central goal of bg testing since at least the 1970s (walford, gale, allison, & tattersall, 1978, p. 732)—but it is through networked insulin pump treatment that datafied body doubles are used to materially alter t1d bodies themselves. as users directly and indirectly input datafied body doubles into automated injections through their insulin pumps, what was created as a set of observations of the body becomes a part of the same. the conceptual redefinitions created through reiterated meter and cgm tests are made real by materially changing the body, and users’ sensory experiences with them. conclusion i began this article by calling attention to the precarious position of people with type 1 diabetes. and though it may appear somewhat hyperbolic at first glance, the constant “predicament of dangerous safety” people with t1d live with on a daily basis, to again borrow feudtner’s (2003) term, is as real within the networked insulin pump era as it has ever been (p. 29). bg testing devices and insulin pumps have indeed made significant changes in horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 20 the ways that precarity is manifest, often in ways users define as life changing or miraculous. their lives are still as dependent on insulin injections as they have ever been, and that is not likely to change any time soon, but the feeling of having just a little more control makes their continued use of these devices worth it. it is that drive—that desire for some semblance of stability within their own bodies where there usually is very little—that compels many of these biomedicalized crip users to maintain their device-connectedness regardless of the possibility of complications, physical or otherwise. and though that drive is often bound up in the hope for (problematic conceptions of) more-able-bodied futures, it is also what drives the “crip aspirations” for a more nuanced and community-built future for t1d—to echo mcruer’s (2018) use of the term (pp. 176, 217). there are of course plenty of conscious non-users, and the economic barriers to entry in this type of hitech medical treatment abound (an issue in desperate need of further interrogation), but the cultural force driving any optimal medical treatment is difficult to avoid. these compelled users are implicated in their own datafication through their continued use of those devices—a choice that, as i argued at the beginning of this essay, is not much of a choice at all—but their bodies are re-created and used to drive their participation in those very technomedicalized treatments nevertheless. though the construction of usable bodies via datafied body doubles is made particularly visible in the case of the millions living with type 1 diabetes, similar methods of biomedicalized control are written into an array of other technologies used in other sites of body and health quantification. giving due attention to these unique experiences of people with their treatment devices can help identify similar spaces of technoscientific meaning-creation, as well as help expand critical frameworks to better include the compelled use of medical devices by people with chronic illnesses. horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 21 notes 1 in referencing the chronic condition noted here as type 1 diabetes mellitus, i will use the terms type 1 diabetes, type 1, t1d, and diabetes interchangeably unless otherwise specified in-text. i capitalize these terms in order to call attention to the role diagnosis—the social, medicalized act of naming and classifying disease—plays in framing how any conversation of diabetes is and can be conducted. see rosenberg (1992). 2 as a chronic illness that can supposedly be pharmaceutically controlled, claims to disability are more often tied to diabetes-related effects rather than to diabetes itself (and similarly, few people with diabetes socially identify themselves as disabled). the us social security administration’s (n.d.) disability evaluation under social security handbook (colloquially referred to as the blue book) notes that both type 1 and type 2 diabetes are “chronic disorders that can have serious disabling complications that meet the duration requirement.” the administration can therefore “evaluate the effects of endocrine disorders [such as diabetes]” to decide whether a particular case is severe enough to qualify for benefits. examples may include amputations, diabetic retinopathy, chronic skin disorders, or cognitive impairments due to diabetic peripheral neurovascular disease or chronic hyperglycemia (sec. 9.00b5, 9.00c, 109.00b5, 109.00c, 109.08). 3 see the history of “transmuted disease” briefly discussed in the following subsection. 4 though the term insuline had been used as a hypothetical placeholder term for a then unidentifiable product of the pancreas nearly a decade before banting’s research, it was banting et al. who suggested the use of insulin as the scientific term for the pancreatic hormone known thereby today. see banting, best, collip, macleod, & noble, 1922, p. 175; schäfer, 1914, p. 84. 5 nelly oudshoorn and trevor pinch (2003), along with the contributors to their edited collection how users matter and other science and technology studies scholars, have written extensively about the politics of use, and the coproduction of users and technologies. and though sally wyatt’s (2008) call for a more nuanced, continuum-based understanding of relationships between people and devices included a nod toward what she called “forced use,” the compelled user—for whom “choice” is but a mask for a system wherein there is none or very little—requires more attention in the user studies literature. horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 22 6 for more on the quantified self movement, see lupton (2016). 7 the international diabetes federation’s has identified a target fasting bg for non-diabetic people of 4 to 5.9 mmol/l (72 to 105 mg/dl), incrementally lower than that outlined by the national institutes of health, whereas the world health organization has defined “normal” bg as never rising above 7.8 mmol/l (140 mg/l) (ceriello & colagiuri, 2008, pp. 1152, 1154). 8 for more on the current drive for big data in medicine, see boyd & crawford (2012); murdoch & detsky (2013). 9 kafer (2013) distinguishes between what she calls “curative time” and the more widely cited concept of “crip time.” the latter is framed in direct opposition to the former, which is characterized by a sense of futurity that “cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than [biomedical] intervention” due to its deep and uncritical investment in compulsory ablebodiedness/able-mindedness (p. 27). 10 banting and the research team who discovered insulin named one “unit” after the dose amount needed to produce a certain level of hypoglycemia in rabbits weighing 2kg. though divorced from the human subjects for whom insulin was intended, unit measurements were standardized at an international conference and have been used ever since. for more on the effect of this decision on cultures of medicine broadly, see porter (1996, pp. 31-32). references banting, f. g., best, c. h., collip, j. b., macleod, j. j. r., & noble, e. c. (1922). the effect of pancreatic extract (insulin) on normal rabbits. american journal of physiology, 62(1), 162-176. banting, f. g., best, c. h., & macleod, j. j. r. (1922). the internal secretion of the pancreas. american journal of physiology, 59, 479. bowker, g. c., & star, s. l. (2000). sorting things out: classification and its consequences. cambridge, ma: mit press. boyd, d., crawford, k. (2012). critical questions for big data. information, communication & society 15(5), 662-679. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2012.678878 horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 23 brostoff, j. m., keen, h., & brostoff, j. (2007). a diabetic life before and after the insulin era. diabetologia, 50(6), 1351-1353. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00125-007-0641-0 butler, j. (1993). bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. new york, ny: routledge. ceriello, a., & colagiuri, s. 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(2018). crip times: disability, globalization, and resistance. new york, ny: nyu press. medtronic diabetes. (2013a). getting started with continuous glucose monitoring for the minimed 530g with enlite. medtronic minimed, inc. medtronic diabetes. (2013b). getting started with the minimed 530g insulin pump. medtronic minimed, inc. medvei, v. c. (1993). the history of clinical endocrinology: a comprehensive account of endocrinology from earliest times to the present day. pearl river, ny: parthenon publishing. murdoch, t. b., & detsky, a. s. (2013). the inevitable application of big data to health care. jama, 309(13), 1351. horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 25 https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2013.393 national institute of diabetes and digestive and kidney diseases. (n.d.). know your blood sugar numbers: use them to manage your diabetes. (n.d.). retrieved from https://www.niddk.nih.gov/healthinformation/diabetes/overview/managing-diabetes/know-blood-sugarnumbers oudshoorn, n., & pinch, t. j. (eds.). (2003). how users matter: the coconstruction of users and technologies. cambridge, ma: mit press. pescosolido, b. a., & martin, j. k. (2004). cultural authority and the sovereignty of american medicine: the role of networks, class, and community. journal of health politics, policy and law, 29(4), 735-756. porter, t. m. (1996). trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. princeton, nj: princeton university press. rosenberg, c. e. (1992). framing disease: illness, society, and history. in c. e. rosenberg & j. golden (eds.), framing disease: studies in cultural history (pp. xiii-xxvi). new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. sato, j., hirose, t., & watada, h. (2012). continuous glucose monitoring system: is it really accurate, safe and clinically useful? journal of diabetes investigation, 3(3), 225-230. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.20401124.2012.00197.x schäfer, e. a. (1914). an introduction to the study of the endocrine glands and internal secretions: lane medical lectures, 1913. stanford, ca: stanford university press. tenderich, a. (2013). use of blood glucose meters among people with type 2 diabetes: patient perspectives. diabetes spectrum, 26(2), 67-70. https://doi.org/10.2337/diaspect.26.2.67 united states. social security administration. medical/professional relations. (n.d.). disability evaluation under social security. washington, dc: social security administration. walford, s., gale, e. a. m., allison, s. p., & tattersall, r. b. (1978). selfmonitoring of blood-glucose: improvement of diabetic control. the lancet, 311(8067), 732-735. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(78)90855-3 horrocks catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 26 wyatt, s. (2008). challenging the digital imperative. presented at the inaugural acceptance lecture for the royal netherlands academy of arts and sciences extraordinary chair in digital cultures in development, maastricht university. zajac, j., shrestha, a., patel, p., & poretsky, l. (2010). the main events in the history of diabetes mellitus. in principles of diabetes mellitus (pp. 316). springer, boston, ma. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09841-8_1 bio stephen horrocks is a ph.d. candidate in american studies at purdue university specializing in health, technology, and material culture. harvey article    the hela bomb and the science of unveiling sandra harvey university of california, santa cruz sharvey1@ucsc.edu in early 1966, geneticist stanley gartler provided some upsetting news to the attendees at the second decennial review conference on cell tissue and organ culture. he had reviewed some of their work for his study, “apparent hela cell contamination of human heteroploid cell lines” (1968). the hela cell line was derived from the biopsy of a squamous cell carcinoma taken from the cervix of henrietta lacks, an african-american woman who died from this cancer in 1951. in his presentation, gartler revealed the hela cells’ capacity to pass themselves off as other cells and contaminate the samples with which they came into contact. he was able to identify the hela cells because they formed the only cell line included in gartler’s sample that was derived from a black person. based on his findings, gartler argued that much of the attendees’ work was “open to serious question…[and some] would be best discarded” (gartler, 1968, p. 175). as robert stevenson, who later became president of the american type culture collection, put it, the geneticist “showed up at that meeting with no background or anything else in cell culture and proceeded to drop a turd in the punch bowl” (skloot, 2011, p. 154). scientists who attended the conference allegedly referred to this unexpected news as the “hela bomb.”1 this essay returns to the hela cell stories and reveals the violence and underlying fear of miscegenation that fed public intrigue at the time. while narratives about hela contamination are not new, i ask that we stop to contemplate gartler’s revelation and its description as a bomb to grasp how race and gender inform contemporary ways of knowing in the united states. key to comprehending this moment are narratives of black racial passing, which assume a black subject who is able and eager to belie their blackness and pass for white. scientific racism re-enforced passing narratives through the “one-drop” rule linking blackness to blood, and blood to purity. the rule assumes that black blood is a contaminating substance to which white blood (and any other blood) is vulnerable; if a person had at least a "drop" of black blood, they would be read as black within the united states. tracing the accusation of passing highlights it as an apparatus of knowing the other, a technology of disciplining and surveilling bodies, and a regime for regulating populations. given this historical context, this essay considers the moment the hela cells are “discovered” to have originated in a black body rather than a white one as an accusation of racial passing leveled at the cells themselves. in doing so, it demonstrates the ways that the accusation of passing, as both an in vivo and in vitro reading apparatus, becomes an important mechanism for knowing, steeped in epistemological violence. considering the accusation of hela’s passing allows for a departure from the ways the trope has most often been debated within us literature, film, and socio-cultural studies.2 most scholars have been preoccupied with the “passer” and their alleged strategy rather than the anxiety, excitement, and panic that animate the accuser’s attempts to see, classify, and regulate bodies. in focusing on the “passer’s” agency, such scholarship also often comes close to reducing the passing dynamic to the decisions of an autonomous and rational subject.3 hela contamination is an instance in which the passing offender is not a subject but an object—basic biological material. thus, one must reject much of the journalistic reporting that imbues hela with an anthropomorphized agency. at the same time, following the lead of mel chen (2012) and new materialists, i ask how the hela cells have been animated by the fantasies and phobias of black violence and racial contamination. focusing on passing as a reading apparatus of bodies, this essay makes explicit the violence present in “the act of scientific innovation” (wald, 2012, p. 202). this is because science (social, biological, or otherwise) that rests on the relationship between an autonomous seeing, measuring, and creating subject and a knowable and measurable object is implicated in the epistemological claims of the passing accusation. coming to terms with the racialized and sexualized animacies that enliven the hela cells, this paper thus follows from feminist works in science and technology studies that have illustrated the ways we are not the sole beings producing knowledge, works that call for us to wrestle with the failing conceits of modern (scientific, colonial, and nationalist) mastery. in so doing, it demands that we move beyond contemporary bioethical concerns regulating the object’s informed consent and participation in order to imagine an ethics of knowing that is consequential with our own complex vulnerability amongst other racialized and gendered objects. in this vein, i examine the narratives about hela’s passing from the 1950s to the present, including peer-reviewed articles on cell culturing and genetics, science journalism, and cultural studies literature. rather than reinforce a “science” versus “culture” binary, one must consider these bodies of writing as interdependent genres within the archive of scientific knowledge production. this approach troubles the notion that scholarly work within the laboratory or the peer-reviewed journal can be read outside of socio-cultural and historic contexts, and imagines the possibility of critical scientific discussions about blackness, gender, or sexuality that do not take essence as either their assumption or goal.4 the rules dictating what is appropriate scholarly or scientific knowledge do not insulate its practices or findings from popular discourse. on the contrary, they obfuscate the discursive power that historical narratives exert within scientific and other scholarly work. leaving them unchecked produces a naturalizing effect.5 to consider the intricacies of scientific discourse within this larger network of knowledge production, it is necessary to read archival documents alongside more informal exchanges at scholarly conferences, interviews between scientists and journalists, and other popular literature and cultural studies writings. in this way, i trace what cultural studies scholar hortense spillers (1987) calls an “american grammar” shaping and ordering concepts of blackness and gender within even scientific discourse. this grammar overdetermines black women as at once commodities, laborers, hypersexualized objects, and duplicitous subjects. reading the archive in this way, i argue that the threat of miscegenation continues to be a disavowed phobia that places race and gender passing narratives at the crux of biopolitics, biotechnology, and bioethics.6 the first “hela bomb” and its fallout the story of henrietta lacks and the hela cell line is not a new one. in 1951, george gey, the director of tissue culture research at johns hopkins university, discovered the sample of cancerous cells he had received from lacks’s cervical biopsy divided continuously within the correct conditions, something no other cells were known to do at the time. the discovery opened the possibilities for in vitro studies exponentially. narratives of the cell line and the identity of the woman from whom the cells were taken emerged fairly soon after and quite strategically. in fact, one of the earliest narratives of the hela cell line and the identity of henrietta lacks was publicized to garner support and funding for the foundation for infantile paralysis and its efforts to find a poliovirus vaccine; the discovery of the hela cell line and the lab technology developed to keep the cells dividing were the greatest contributions to the effort’s success. the foundation’s director roland berg convinced gey, who was uncomfortable with publicizing lacks’s name, that the story of the hela cells must also include a story of the cell “donor.” how else could the foundation garner interest? the cell line discovery story needed to also be a personal story. in a letter to gartler, berg explained that it was “axiomatic in presenting this type of material to the public that to inform them you must also interest them. as one who has been writing for the public for the past fifteen years in this field, i have learned that you do not engage the attention of the reader unless your story has basic human-interest elements. and the story of the hela cells, from what little i know of it now, has all those elements” (berg, 1953). thus, since the cells’ “discovery,” foundations, science journalists, science studies and cultural studies scholars, and even (or especially) the scientists who have used her cells to further their own research have told and retold stories of henrietta lacks and her cells. during this early period, however, race was not central to the hela narratives (landecker, 2007). in fact, the identity of the woman from whom the cells originated was unclear and often misstated. some authors referred to her as henrietta lakes or helen lane; others named her helen l. even as roland berg attempted to convince gey to reveal the woman’s background publically, he referred to her as “mrs. lakes” (berg, 1953). further, because lacks was not explicitly described as black, she was assumed by most to be a white woman, as the foundation for infantile paralysis no doubt tacitly implied—the “unsung heroine of medicine” (landecker, 2007, p. 164). indeed, berg wrote, “here is a situation where cancer cells—potential destroyers of human life—have been channeled by medical science to a new, beneficent course, that of aiding the fight against another disease” (berg, 1953). in science literature, “hela” began to refer not to the specific cancerous cells of a black woman’s cervix, but to the universal, “generalized human or cellular subject” (landecker, 2007, p. 165). even gey’s attempt to keep lacks’s name and information private contributed to the fabrication of this symbolic woman. he assured berg, “an interesting story could still be built around a fictitious name” (gey, 1953). in this period, hela’s was a story of how any individual—presumably, of course, a white individual—could contribute to scientific advancement and, thus, the progress of the nation. this raises the question of how the hela cell line became racially fixed as black. rebecca skloot’s now widely read and critiqued book, the immortal life of henrietta lacks (2011), had a chapter on this particular moment—the 1966 second decennial review conference on cell tissue and organ culture—yet she did not elaborate on its cultural and political significance. she, however, recognized that it was an important event in the scientific community and thus named the five-page chapter she dedicated to it, “the hela bomb,” appropriating the term scientists used informally to refer to the scandal of hela contamination. race, specifically blackness, was at the center of gartler’s presentation. in his research, he had compared both phenotypes and genotypes of twenty sample cell lines and found them to be sharing the same phenotype variations. more specifically, of the two principal variants, the samples had a type that appeared most frequently in the “american negro male population” (gartler, 1968, p. 750). in march 1966, gartler wrote to gey to confirm the race of the woman from whom the hela cells were taken and concluded, “i have not ascertained the racial origin of all the lines examined; it is known, however, that at least some were thought to have been derived from caucasians (kb, wish, prostate, cmp) and at least one (hela) from a negro” (gartler, 1968, p. 750).7 through the framework of racial biostatistics, gartler concluded that the sample cell lines had been taken over by hela cells and marked by a phenotype most commonly held by black men. he made no comment about any sex discrepancy. instead, the narrative told by cell culture scientists and popular science journalists was one of white cells vulnerable to contamination and disappearance by aggressive, duplicitous black cells.8 prudent scientists should be vigilant of the cell lines and tissue cultures in their own laboratory, the narrative warned. gartler argued that much of the work using cell lines that assumed a particular origin was “open to serious question…[and] would be best discarded” (p. 175). upon hela’s unveiling, many researchers and funders were concerned about the validity of their work. popular science journalist michael rogers reported, “careers had been built on the basis of human tissue culture research, papers written and published, grants and fellowships received—and now, abruptly arose the possibility that the fundamental unit of study might not have been even vaguely what it was supposed to be” (1976, p. 50). however, scientists’ reactions to hela cells passing were also affected by socio-cultural imaginaries. the fallout from gartler’s accusation blurred the lines between the professional, the personal, and the ideals and practices of disinterested scientific inquiry for the cell tissue community and the biotechnology industrial complex more broadly.  for example, during the conference, one of the affected cell lines that gartler identified was fellow scientist leonard hayflick’s wish line, which was derived from tissue originally in the amniotic sac of hayflick’s infant daughter. upon hearing gartler’s presentation, hayflick’s concern for his cell line turned to racial paranoia. worried about the possibility of in vivo rather than in vitro contamination, he called his wife during the conference break to ask whether he was, in fact, his daughter’s biological father. as he retold the anecdote during his own presentation, “she assured me that my worst fears were unfounded” (skloot, 2011, p. 156). the room, reportedly, “erupted in laughter, and no one said anything else publicly about gartler’s findings” (skloot, 2011, p. 156). racial and sexual anxiety turned to comedy as the threat of miscegenation was temporarily covered over. it was not just that hela appeared to the scientific community as a passing actant, but that it had the capacity to make passing subjects out of others—for example, hayflick’s daughter. the link between hela contamination and the destruction of professional careers and scientific progress emerged through the racialization, gendering, and hypersexualization of both the cells and their human source. suturing the cells to the subject, this anthropomorphism drew from tropes of black female hypersexuality and labor. the narratives were rampant in popular science journalism, but also existed in the traffic between scientists, science journalism, and cultural studies. one journalist wrote that for a cell culture lab to receive a letter from walter nelson-rees, a cell culturist who dedicated his work to the detection of hela contamination, was like receiving “a note from the school nurse informing the parents that little darlene had vd” (michael gold, quoted in landecker, 2007, p. 172). in an essay for the london review of books, novelist anne enright recounted a series of websites that explained how to detect the papillomavirus dna in hela cells. she reflected, “i think this means that henrietta lacks had genital warts. i think this means that she slept around” (enright, 2000, p. 9, emphasis in original). additionally, in an article for the feminist philosophy journal hypatia, cellular biologist lisa weasel described hela cells as “a laboratory workhorse” that, although unreliable, performed the role of control group (weasel, 2004, p. 185).  hela and henrietta lacks were contagious and were so together because of the discursive slippage between the narratives of the cellular material and the woman as subject. as michael rogers’s particularly sensationalist journalistic account of hela contamination argued, “in life, the hela source had been black and female. even as a single layer of cells in a tissue culture laboratory, she remains so” (1976, p. 50). these tropes animated scientific discourse as well. for example, in an interview with michael rogers, nelson-rees underscored just how toilsome the task had become, acknowledging, “i hoped i’d never have to look another hela in the face” (rogers, 1976, p. 51). if the cells had at one time signified the universal human cellular subject, the unveiling of their passing resulted in a confrontation between scientists and the particularities of their object of study. racial phobia and its concomitant desires manifested in a black woman’s face returning the gaze. the uncanny moment of the passing object violently and obscenely ruptures any assumptions of science’s inherent goodness. in returning to the question of how the uncovering of this cell line came into discourse through a bomb metaphor, one must ask after the biopolitical work that this metaphor enacts. to take the bellicose reference literally is to assume the hela passing as a warlike moment in the midst of the compiling of biomaterials for medical research. as the basis for his argument about biopolitics, michel foucault insisted that medicine itself is “a political intervention-technique with specific power-effects” (2003, p. 252). the underlying biopolitics of defending society is a matter of “destroying that [sort] of biological threat that those people over there represent to our race” (foucault, 2003, p. 257). thus, to think of the hela passing as a bomb within the historical context of the time—1966—is to think the passing threat together with other bomb threats and detonations of the time: the cuban missile crisis in 1962, the escalation of the vietnam war between 1963 and 1969, and the bomb that ripped through birmingham’s 16th st. church in 1963. during the cold war and black uprisings against jim crow, the threat of a nuclear bomb encouraged duck and cover practices and hypervigilance against the communist that might be lurking in our own backyard—“red under the bed.” the metaphor projects the threat of a black woman and worker, who passes undetected in the sample of cervical cells. within the passing narrative, hela threatens the sort of categorization necessary for biopolitics of the sovereign state and for the integrity and coherency of the individual, knowing subject. within the context of war, the threat of hela passing constituted the possibility of not knowing who the other was, not knowing how to identify and target the other or, even worse, to discover that one was the other.9 with this frame of reference, surveillance and regulation become critical techniques that bind medicine and science to a larger national and geopolitical project—one that biologists see themselves as taking on. for example, in an article in science, journalist rhitu chatterjee refered to roland nardone, a cell biologist at the catholic university of america in washington, dc as “the paul revere of cell contamination” (chatterjee, 2007, p. 929). to this day, so critical is the threat of contamination that nardone authored and widely disseminated a white paper titled, “eradication of cross-contaminated cell lines: a call for action” in which he characterized the 1970s as a decade full of “revelations” of cell contamination and “concealment of knowledge [of wide spread contamination] and manipulation [of results] through editing” (nardone, 2007, p. 2). washington reporter david dickson wrote that the reluctance to authenticate cell samples resulted in “corruption of scientific literature…forgery…falsifying data…fraud against the federal government…[and] a criminal offense” (dickson, cited in nardone, 2007, p. 2). nardone recommended that government, private funding institutions, scientific journals, professional societies, laboratory directors, and academic department heads contribute to the surveillance and authentication of cell samples (nardone, 2007, p. 4). in these ways, scientific practice and the practices and ideologies of nationalism and accumulation are mutually informed phenomena. what is more, this form of knowledge production must be understood as a moral task that enables the proliferation of the human over the unpredictability of nature and its objects. the epigraph to michael gold’s book, a conspiracy of cells, cites francis bacon on this ethics of knowing: “if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties” (gold, 1986). the quotation is placed opposite a full-length image of henrietta lacks in a suit with her hands on her hips. the promise of modern scientific research invokes a moral disposition towards knowing; it asserts that one be humble, that one make no assumptions. this particular ethics of knowing begins with a presumption of humility and gives rise to a deserving subject capable of knowing the truth about the world itself as object.10 however, gold’s use of bacon’s quotation to offer a solution to hela contamination disavows the ethic’s epistemological investment in mastery. i am reminded of another francis bacon quotation that feminist scholar anne mcclintock underscores: “my only earthly wish…is to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds…leading to you nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave” (mcclintock, 1995, p. 23). bacon’s remark reveals modern science’s colonial underpinnings by positing a female and othered nature to be discovered by and contained under the dominion of europe’s man. bacon’s sentiment is rooted in what mcclintock calls “porno-tropics,” a structure of colonial epistemology that allows the knowing subject to project his fantasies, desires, taboos, and phobias onto the colonial space ripe for discovery and mastery (1995, p. 23). to have dominion over and make visible its veiled, feminized interior is to “know” or be certain about the occulted other. as such, nature and women occupy a similar position in colonial and scientific discourse—each existing for the sole purpose of being known and thus possessed, contained, and enjoyed. this process of knowledge accumulation is not a disinterested practice of empiricism but a psycho-political-economic acting out of the phantasy of mastery. the biopolitics that shape scientists’ search for hela contamination and journalists’ actions in retelling the story of henrietta lacks and the hela cells must also be read alongside patterns of black surveillance in the us. the term “passing” emerges in antebellum runaway slave narratives about the “tendency” of black slaves to pass themselves off as free to escape bondage.11 some did so by literally forging paper passes, while others tried hiding their blackness from public perception by passing for white, for native, or for immigrant. the passing slave was a fugitive slave. thus, the passing accusation is one form of unveiling, which assumes that the most important properties of a black subject/object are fugitivity and fraud. in the more contemporary case of henrietta lacks, both scientists and science journalists used her blackness and her sexuality to describe the cells’ tendency to be out-of-control and deceptive. nonetheless, in their practice of detecting hela, scientists and journalists cannot rely on the visual to confirm the cells’ racial “truth.” cellular biologists track this interiority through the material “data” of lacks’s cells. the centrality of visual evidence in scientific progress maintains that the regulatory technique of unveiling has become more precise in identifying, grasping the truth of the subject or matter, and tracing its every move. the western gaze is taken up in dna fingerprinting, a practice science journalist rithu chatterjee argued “has become the standard tool for authenticating cell lines” as well as identifying criminal and foreign bodies (2007, p. 929). the “digital epidermalization” of biometric surveillance renders bodies as racialized, “digitized code,” demanding that they respond to the questions, “who are you?” and “are you who you say you are?” (brown, 2015, p. 109). while the hela passing emerges as a crisis of security and instability, the passing narrative works to contain and regulate the incalculability and unwieldiness of blackness, gender, and sexuality. the accusation of passing reasserts the human’s ability, even its moral imperative, to trace and manage nature’s order of things so that they might not ever unexpectedly “stare you in the face.” thus, gartler’s revelation of hela contamination was, paradoxically, a story of the stability and predictability of other noncancerous human cells. the 1966 presentation concluded with just this argument. he reasserted that his findings demonstrated “the remarkable stability of normal human cultures, that is, the virtual absence of spontaneous cellular transformation among them” (gartler, 1968, p. 175). gartler suggested that “the incorporation of stable genetic markers in material to be cultured is the best guarantee against contamination” (gartler, 1968, p. 175, my emphasis). what scientists needed to do was identify and categorize the stable cell characteristics that would also allow them to grasp the truth of the cell (and limit black female sexuality). once this was accomplished, there would be no cases of “mistaken identity” or “identity theft,” as chatterjee would later describe the hela phenomenon (chatterjee, 2007).   unveiling new biocitizens a more recent iteration of unveiling occurred in 2013 when german scientists from the european molecular biology laboratory published the hela genome in an article titled “the genomic and transcriptomic landscape of a hela cell line” (landry et al., 2013). the paper was widely available on the internet and the scientists had not consulted the lacks family before publishing. at the same time, the national institutes of health (nih) funded a study by university of washington researchers, who had also sequenced the hela genome and were about to publish it in the journal nature, when public outrage erupted. nih director francis collins acknowledged that the study’s principal investigators should have discussed their plans with the lacks family even before seeking funding to begin their project. the german researchers pointed out that they had followed the ethical standards set for genomic research in publishing their findings. they did, however, apologize for publishing them given the conditions under which the hela cells were initially harvested. it is true; scientists are not required to seek informed consent from a donor to publish their genome sequencing. nonetheless, the hela case was special, as almost everyone (the nih, the genome community, science journalists, the editorial board of the new york times) agreed. it was special even though henrietta lacks was but one of many persons whose biomaterials have been taken for scientific use without their knowledge. francis collins moved quickly to address the bioethical concern by meeting with the lacks family. the parties agreed that in the future, researchers who wanted to work with the hela genome could apply for the data stored in the nih’s database of genotypes and phenotypes. in addition, the nih would form a hela genome data access working group, which would review the applications and require researchers to submit annual reports of their work. finally, two lacks family members would participate in the working group. when a family member asked about financial restitution for the use of the genome and about profits from the use of commercial products derived from the genome, collins insisted that this could not happen. nature reported, “[d]irectly paying the family was not on the table, but [collins] and his advisers tried to think of other ways the family could benefit, such as patenting a genetic test for cancer based on hela-cell mutations. they could not think of any” (callaway, 2013, p. 133). what resulted from the collins deal is an arrangement in which descendants of henrietta lacks were to contribute to scientific inquiry by participating in the ritual of giving or refusing consent to researchers wishing to use her body (parts) for the public good. at the same time that the family’s inclusion became institutionalized, any notion of reparations was denied. participatory initiatives have often been taken up as a solution to science’s etho-political crisis and its historical relationship to certain killable subjects and useful bodies and body parts. however, the family’s participation emerges through the research establishment’s response to yet another unveiling of henrietta lacks and hela via the publication of the hela genome. the family was concerned the publication exposed, once again, lacks’s identity, but it also exposed the medical research establishment’s inability to prevent further injury. we can consider this moment in which the hela genome data access working group was formed as a result of what sheila jasanoff calls “bioconstitutionalism.” these are moments of negotiation that “redefine the obligations of the state in relation to lives in its care” (jasanoff, 2011, p. 3). the term reflects a liberal tradition in which a state is sovereign over its polity to the extent that it is able to ensure security. the dynamic is evident in a published interview with patricia king, the head of the national commission for the protection of human subjects of biomedical and behavioral research (2004). discussing guidelines for increasing african americans’ participation in clinical studies, king pointed to a tension between pushing for inclusion in science and offering protection from science. she comments, “i think that we just haven’t been able to figure out yet how to include people without putting them at more risk than we want to put them” (2004, p. 11). thus, the bioconstitutional moment is one that pieces together biopolitical needs of the state with those of the individual. national security dictates that the state must invest in medical research but must also reduce risk, for example, by protecting the privacy of individual participants. this dynamic includes a series of public unveilings (published medical research, knowledge production, and data sharing) and re-veilings (reifying and protecting individual identity, labor relations in research, and desire and pleasure in colonial underpinnings) as constituting a liberal ethics of knowing, or as research bioethics.  the multiple acts of veiling and unveiling make possible the contemporary biopolitical social contract, which does not merely encourage participation but requires it. as research continues to be privatized, neoliberal biocitizens must ensure their own protection, and are thus responsible for their own health outcomes. sociologist nikolas rose argued, “our somatic, corporeal neurochemical individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence, and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation, and so to a politics of life itself” (2007, p. 8). as emergent members of the body politic, black people have both the entrepreneurial responsibility to manage our own individual health and to further the nation’s collective biosecurity. because it favors the individual’s responsibility to keep their body alive, this formation forgoes the possibility of addressing collective historical trauma. instead, the narrative frames participation as a moral imperative, which designates those who cooperate as civilized. for the good of the individual and the state, the message proclaims, one must not stand in the way of research. in the case of hela research, skloot’s advocating for “justice” and protection for the lacks family was also an attempt to make the case that family members supported scientific progress and the public good and simply wanted to be informed of and consent to their participation. for example, in her 2013 opinion piece for the new york times, she argued that “[t]he lacks family is proud of hela’s contributions to society, and they don’t want to stop hela research. but they do want to learn about the hela genome—how it can be used for the good of science while still protecting the family’s privacy—so they can decide whether to consent to its publication” (skloot, 2013). in this rendition of the contract, new biocitizens come into being, or are unveiled, in their capacity to own themselves—their body parts, their biomaterial—and in their capacity to “gift” their bodies to science. in managing these economies of exchange and inclusion, liberalism sets up its bioethical dilemma—when does one’s right to research infringe upon another’s right to protect themselves from the risks of research? this article’s goal is not to prescribe the right balance but to underscore what the question itself forecloses. what is not acceptable, and what becomes transgressive in this scenario, is a politics of refusal. the bioconstitutional moment is a coercive and violent one as henrietta lacks and her family are repeatedly interpellated as biopolitical subjects through the act of participation. as cultural studies scholar karla holloway wrote, “the experiences of women and black americans are particularly vulnerable to public unveiling” (2011, p. 9). hela has become the exemplary case for examining the bioethics of cell tissue and genomics research, particularly with regard to informed consent, in the same way the tuskegee syphilis experiment signals the worst-case scenario of bioethical risks in us clinical trials. fantasies and phobias around deviant black sexuality overdetermine who must represent subjects of injury. the result is both epistemological and material violence for those expected to be science’s continuously productive subjects. in his 1953 letter to gey, berg perhaps unwittingly named the heart of the matter. hela is required to repeatedly perform as the example par excellence of science research’s progress and risks because of the racial passing and contamination accusations unleashed on them. a major concern following the 2013 genome unveiling is the extent to which the privacy of henrietta lacks and her family, already public icons, can be managed. as skloot argued in the times, “[the family members] want researchers to acknowledge that hela cells are not anonymous and should be treated accordingly” (skloot, 2013). the comment underscores the reason this case has become special: there is already no hope for anonymity. in reading skloot’s comment against the grain, one could conclude that anonymity is not the same as privacy. the oxford english dictionary defines anonymity as “a lack of outstanding, individual, or unusual features.” to be anonymous is to be able to escape the particularizing surveillance of the racial biometric regime. accordingly, one might read anonymity as that which makes possible the universal human with all his privileges, autonomy, and rational decision-making. that is, anonymous cells are those that are able to stand in for the universal or human cellular subject rather than stare back at scientists with a confrontational and particularizing gaze. we might understand anonymity as a prerequisite not just for the status of human but also for the status of the liberal biocitizen, which, as holloway (2011) notes, has full capacity to negotiate privacy. in this regard, privacy as an extension of citizenship refers to the right of the autonomous subject, the individual citizen who has the right to privacy, to private property, and even to his/her own body as property. privacy becomes a critical component of liberal risk reduction. however, hela has no hope for anonymity, just as black subjects more broadly lack access to anonymity.  what, then, is to be made of a call for refusal?12 further, what is to be made of a black public that refuses to participate especially when the health-care systems pay little attention to the ongoing trauma of colonialism and the after life of chattel slavery as fundamental to collective wellness? this is the sort of exchange that does not play by the rules of the health market’s regulation of individual moral virtues. requests for reparations from institutions of knowledge production are often seen as “getting in the way” of knowing and as affronts to colonial science, the nation, and the universal subject.13 the demand for reparations troubles the notion of the inherent good of science and the gestures of inclusion that liberal multicultural scientists and policymakers have made toward black subjects, including the lacks. vital passages and an ethical practice of knowing with regard to the researcher, what might an ethical practice of knowing look like? this might be one that does not only acknowledge others’ refusal but is also complicit in it. additionally, ethical learning must be willfully permeable to contamination. this is not a contamination that assumes whiteness as vulnerable and black or brown bodies as always already contaminated, such that ongoing lead contamination in flint, michigan or uranium contamination on navajo lands remains invisible. it is rather an openness to contaminate an epistemology that relies on the equivalence of knowing and mastery and disavows the violence this produces. it is also a call for openness to temporal contamination, which troubles the teleological narrative of progress with regard to knowledge production. to turn to the question of temporality, and specifically immortality, and to blur the boundaries between its figurative and material instantiations, one might take seriously the proposition of “the immortal life of henrietta lacks” (my emphasis). however, this consideration must deviate from the way in which skloot and others have trafficked in “immortality” for sensationalist ends. instead, this ethical consideration refuses to dismiss the lacks family’s concerns as scientific illiteracy. it also refuses to anthropomorphize the cells. certainly, scholars like priscilla wald were right to insist that the cells are not “lacks herself,” yet this argument will be always already too late (2012, p. 202). the hela cells, once fixed as black and thus incapable of anonymity, continue to be animated by the iconicity of henrietta lacks as a sign of black female hypersexuality. however, taking seriously the concerns that the hela cells are an instantiation of henrietta lacks opens up a different truth. it allows one to return to the violence of the act of colonial unveiling (the bomb), to hela’s confrontational “stare,” and to the radical potential of the object. as toni morrison warned us in her novel, beloved (1988), nothing ever really dies. thus, what if the cells are, in fact, black, uncontrollable, unreliable, and contaminating? for example, the gender assigned to the cells in many narratives change, as each discursive passage animates them in different ways. in the 1950s, hela was understood as an example of the universal human subject—cells from a white woman. then, in 1966, gartler’s statistical analysis of the cells briefly included them in the category “negro male population.” finally, once the cells were fixed to henrietta lacks, scientists, science journalists, and others began describing the cells as hypersexual, black, and female. the ease with which the public has attached different genders to the cells has not received much attention. the fungibility of blackness and the cells as both laborer and commodity allow for hela to move fluidly (perhaps fugitively) through a variety of raced and gendered positions. as scholar saidiya hartman argued this fluidity enables “the black body…to serve as the vehicle of white self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment” (hartman, 1997, p. 26). on the other hand, blackness as a contaminating agent refuses to be “containable within a given trajectory of movement and desire” (chen, 2012, p. 178). this is a politics of refusal that stages hela as a “bad object.” the cells not only create a momentary crisis of paternity for hayflick’s daughter, but also threaten to make the child a passing actant herself. this is something black cells are still wont to do, as can be attested by jennifer cramblett, a white woman who filed a lawsuit against midwest sperm bank in 2014 for “wrongful birth” after it unwittingly impregnated her with sperm from a black donor (cuevas, 2014). considering the immortality of hela and henrietta lacks together demands an encounter with the pain of their fixation, constant unveiling, and fetishized consumption. as black feminist scholar m. jacqui alexander described, affect survived the middle passage even when ancestors did not. she wrote, “not only humans made the crossing, traveling only in one direction through ocean given the name atlantic. grief traveled as well” (alexander, 2005, p. 289). this is the case in spite of institutional efforts to leave the past behind. countering this narrative of progress, hela becomes a temporal and affective force of accumulation that shatters or explodes the integrity of black subjectivity in each moment it is publically unveiled.14 each passing of hela, each hela “bomb,” ruptures linear biopolitics, making “the past” palpable, material, and confrontational. to argue that hela is an uncanny temporal force, then, is not to simply say that the cells offer an alternative vision of time. instead, hela becomes a worlding force that troubles any notion of linear biopolitical time by violently demanding that the boundaries between “past,” “present,” and “future” be called into question. hela’s animacy resides in the affective, material power of memory, in what physicist and feminist scholar karen barad called “the very nature of spacetimemattering” (2011, p. 29). in forging an ethical practice of knowing we might take away some important considerations. because history, with all its seeping wounds, endures in the material, we must take seriously its multiple forms of entanglement and specific material relationships. we must do this not in simply observing or measuring an other, nor in affecting an other, but in the ways the other is already in us. this ethics of learning, then, consists in taking seriously the politics of refusal in which hela engages when evading containment. it requires a will towards understanding the self and its time as contaminated. at last, this openness to learning as permeability and contamination is a risk that cannot be managed.   acknowledgements many thanks to tala khanmalek, james battle, herman gray, and jennifer reardon for their invaluable comments, questions, and inspiration and to the uc santa cruz science and justice research center. notes 1 “[s]cientists who were at the conference where gartler made his initial presentation, and others who were active in the field at the time,” used this term. quoted from the author’s personal correspondence with rebecca skloot on 27 march 2015. 2 see the following novels written in the early twentieth century: charles w. chesnutt’s the house behind the cedars (1993), jessie fauset’s plum bun (1999), james weldon johnson’s the autobiography of an ex-colored man (1995), and nella larsen’s passing (2001). examples of films extending into the late twentieth century include imitation of life (1959), pinky (1949), illusions (1982), and true identity (1991). 3 take, for example, rudolph p. byrd’s and henry louis gates, jr.’s note (2011) about jean toomer passing in which they speculated about toomer’s motivations with regard to social mobility and ideological and literary movements. additionally, scholar gayle wald provides an account of black folks’ refusal to pass and the intelligibility of black american identity within the national body politic (2000). scholars of trans politics also debate the strategy of passing. for example, sandy stone calls for a radical refusal to pass: “transsexuals who pass seem able to ignore the fact that by creating totalized, monistic identities, forgoing physical and subjective intertextuality, they have foreclosed the possibility of authentic relationships. under the principle of passing, denying the destabilizing power of being ‘read,’ relationships begin as lies… transsexuals must take responsibility for all of their history, to begin to rearticulate their lives not as a series of erasures in the service of a species of feminism conceived from within a traditional frame, but as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured and reinscribed body” (1992, p. 170). in contrast, c. riley snorton (2009) highlights the radical promise of trans passing. 4 there is abundant literature on race and genomics, for example, but the effort has often been led by science and technology social scientists and published in humanities or social science focused mediums. see, for example, the writings of fullwiley (2008), roberts (2014), duster (2005), tallbear (2013), and reardon (2009). some scientists such as lisa weasel, a cell and molecular biologist, have addressed these intersections yet this scholarship is also often published in humanities or social science focused journals. however, there are exceptions in journals that address the cross sections of biology, health, and the social. see for example ruha benjamin and ian mcgonigle’s “molecularization of identity” (2016) in genetics research, sarah franklin’s “culturing biology” (2001) in health, lisa parker’s “the immortal life of henrietta lacks, feminist themes, and research ethics” (2012) in the international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics, and priscilla wald’s “the art of medicine: cognitive estrangement, science fiction, and medical ethics” (2008) in the lancet. 5 as an example, george gey’s personal files contain his lab notes and peer-reviewed articles on the possible cellular sources of cancer, as well as newspaper clippings about his laboratory and his personal and professional life, human interest stories on the discovery of hela cells and henrietta lacks, and correspondence with funders that discussed the importance of lacks’s story to garner additional research funding. 6 i analyze race and gender together to underscore how subjects are always passed in terms of both, not one or the other. more than making an argument about intersectionality, i am gesturing along the lines of frantz fanon (2008), hortense spillers (1987), and saidiya hartman (1997), that subjects emerge (they pass) as a racialized gender or a gendered race, that there are multiple race/genders that emerge both materially and discursively. for example, spillers argues that black women are passed for “‘peaches’ and brown sugar,’ ‘sapphire’ and ‘earth mother,’ [and] ‘aunty,’” and against the expectations of a variety of white womanhoods (1987, p. 65). hela, of course, is passed within this same american grammar. 7 on april 1, 1966, gey responded to gartler's inquiry noting that the hela cell line initiated from "the cervix in a colored woman aged 31 years” (gey, 1966). 8 see rogers (1976) for an example of this and landecker (2007) for a critique. 9 one key component of sovereignty theories, from those by jean bodin, thomas hobbes, john locke, and jean-jacques rousseau to those of immanuel kant, is that of identifying who is a member of the body politic held together through the social contract. the making of the sovereign is a constant, delineating practice of identification. see, for example, bodin (1992), kant (1983), and rousseau (2011). 10 for examples of earlier writing on this form of knowing in the world and the sort of subject to which it gives form, see heidegger (1977) and foucault (1970). 11 see, for example, marshall (2010), johnson (2000), waldstreicher (1999), smith and wojtowicz (1989), and mccaskill (1994). 12 for a thorough discussion of refusal see benjamin (2016) and (2013), reardon and tallbear (2012), and simpson (2007). 13 for example, see the case of farmer-paellmann v. fleetboston in alondra nelson’s the social life of dna (2016, p. 121-140). 14 see fanon’s black skin, white masks. “locked in this suffocating reification, i appealed to the other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would…put me back in the world…nothing doing. i explode. here are the fragments put together by another me” (2008, p. 89). references alexander, m. j. 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(1995). the autobiography of an ex-colored man. mineola, ny: dover publications. johnson, w. (2000). the slave trader, the white slave, and the politics of racial determination in the 1850s. the journal of american history, 87(1), 13-38. kant, i. (1983). perpetual peace and other essays on politics, history, and morals (t. humphrey trans.). indianapolis, in: hackett publishing company. king, p. (2004). interview. belmont report oral history project. retrieved from http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/archive/belmontarchive.html larsen, n. (2001). passing. in c. larson (ed.), the complete fiction of nella larsen: passing, quicksand and the stories (pp. 163-243). new york, ny: anchor books. landecker, h. (2007). culturing life: how cells became technologies. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. landry, j. j. m. et al. (2013). the genomic and transcriptomic landscape of a hela cell line. genes|genomes|genetics, 3(8), 1213-1224. marshall, a. (2010). ‘they will endeavor to pass for free’: enslaved runaways’ performances of freedom in antebellum south carolina. slavery and abolition, 31(2), 161-180. mccaskill, b. (1994). “‘yours very truly’: ellen craft–the fugitive as text and artifact.” african american review, 28(4), 509-529. mcclintock, a. (1995). imperial leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. london, uk: routledge. morrison, t. (1988). beloved. new york, ny: penguin books. nardone, r. m. (2007). eradication of cross-contaminated cell lines: a call for action. cell biology and toxicology, 23(6), 367-372. nelson, a. (2016). the social life of dna: race, reparations, and reconciliation after the genome. boston, ma: beacon press. parker, l. (2012). the immortal life of henrietta lacks, feminist themes, and research ethics. international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics, 5(1), 159-165. reardon, j. (2009). race to the finish: identity and governance in an age of genomics. princeton, nj: princeton university press. reardon, j. & tallbear, k. (2012). your dna is our history. current anthropology, 53(s5), s233-s245. roberts, d. (2014). killing the black body: race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. new york, ny: vintage. rogers, m. (1976, march 25). the double-edged helix. rolling stone, 209, 48-51. rose, n. (2007). the politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. princeton, nj: princeton university press. rousseau, j.j. (2011). on the social contract. in d. cress (ed.), the basic political writings, 2nd edition (pp. 153-253). indianapolis, in: hackett publishing company. simpson, a. (2007). on ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship. junctures: the journal for thematic dialogue, 9, 67-80. skloot, r. (2011). the immortal life of henrietta lacks. new york, ny: broadway books. skloot, r. (2013, march 24). “the immortal life of henrietta lacks, the sequel.” new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opinion/sunday/the-immortal-life-of-henrietta-lacks-the-sequel.html smith, b. and wojtowicz, r. (1989). blacks who stole themselves: advertisements for runaways in the pennsylvania gazette, 1728-1790. philadelphia, pa: university of pennsylvania press. snorton, c. r. (2009). “’a new hope’: the psychic life of passing.” hypatia, 24(3), 77-92. spillers, h. (1987). mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book. diacritics, 17(2), 65-81. stone. s. (1992). “the empire strikes back: a posttransexual manifesto.” camera obscura: feminism, culture, and media studies, 10(2 29), 150-76. tallbear, k. (2013). native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. wald, g. (2000). crossing the line: racial passing in the twentieth-century u.s. literature and culture. durham, nc: duke university press. wald, p. (2012). american studies and the politics of life. american quarterly, 64(2), 185-204. waldstreicher, d. (1999). “reading the runaways: self-fashioning, print culture, and confidence in slavery in the eighteenth-century mid-atlantic.” the william and mary quarterly, 56(2), 243-272. weasel, l. h. (2004). feminist intersections in science: race, gender and sexuality through the microscope. hypatia, 19(1), 183-193. bio  sandra harvey is a phd candidate in politics with a designated emphasis in feminist studies at the university of california, santa cruz. her scholarship investigates the production of race and gender through surveillance technologies originating in colonialism and chattel slavery.  her dissertation, passing for free, passing for sovereign, traces narratives of race/gender passing as they emerge in science, settler colonial law, conceptual art, and enlightenment philosophy. microsoft word 76947-1-11-20190201_kim.docx kim, e. (2019). continuing presence of discarded bodies: occupation harm, necroactivism, and living justice. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5 (1), 1-31. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © eunjung kim, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article continuing presence of discarded bodies: occupational harm, necro-activism, and living justice eunjung kim syracuse university ekim108@syr.edu abstract this essay explores the coexistence of struggles against the foreclosure of disabled people’s lives and against occupational illness, debilitation, and deaths caused by the manufacturing process of electronics in south korea. starting from the two activist campsites set up in seoul and the historical backgrounds of occupational health movement, i draw on two documentary films, the empire of shame (2014) and factory complex (2015), that depict workers who became ill and those who died due to toxic exposure at semiconductor manufacturing plants. beyond commemoration, necro-activism emerges in the form of persistent involvements of dead bodies, mourning, and objects representing death as important agents for making claims for justice. taking into account political and historical differences of locations in which disabled people are positioned differently in the global order redirects us from the language of worth toward sociality, collective reframing of suffering and disability, and justice as an ongoing practice of everyday life and afterlife. kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 two protest camps were set up at two busy subway stations in seoul: the first, in 2012, in gwanghwamun subway station near the city hall north of the han river; and the other, in 2015, in gangnam subway station near the samsung building south of the river. in these camps, activists and allies took turns staying in the tents, shared food, slept overnight, and gave speeches to educate the public about their causes. sustained for years by the alliance of over two hundred disability and civic organizations, the first camp demanded the elimination of the disability rating system, a bureaucratic apparatus designed to reduce disability benefits, which led to the deaths of disabled people who were left without care. the second camp was set up by an organization called the supporters for the health and rights of people in the semiconductor industry, which demanded worker’s safety and accountability for illnesses and deaths in the semiconductor industry, including at samsung electronics. despite their different agendas, these two camps have supported each other in solidarity. in his conversation with an activist in the gangnam camp, disability activist park kyung-seok (pak kyŏng-sŏk), from the other camp, explains that disabled people and the workers who became disabled and ill share the status of “wastes” (p’yegimul), as they are deemed worthless and locked away in institutions and disposed of by the government and corporations (ha, 2015). “disposable populations” and “wastes” are used to describe individuals whose experiences of suffering and injustice do not provoke social, political, and legal recognition and remedies and are subject to further violations as their presences are seen as transgressing. as max liboiron (2012) suggests, the “logics of transgression attendant to waste and dirt” constitute the “ideal society” and “out of placeness” (p. 8) based on the value system that determines worth as a condition of emplacement.1 these metaphors of detritus convey finality in that bodily presence has reached what judith butler (2004) calls “the limits of intelligibility” (p. 58). however, being disposed of or locked away does not mean disappearance, just as garbage never disappears from the earth but is moved and transmuted and continues to interact with the environment. kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 what if garbage is never moved away and the suffering doesn’t stop after death? how do we engage with what happens during and after “disposal”— namely, disablement, debilitation, illness, relegation, displacement, degradation, and death—while working to eliminate the conditions that lead to those outcomes? or, to pose the question using butler’s (2004) words, “what, given the contemporary order of being, can i be,” after harms done to me? (p. 58). how do we communicate, make known, and feel our continued earthly presence with harm, whether alive, debilitated, dying, or dead? further, what do the material and traveling presence of discarded and toxic wastes of technologies demand from us who live with, near, or at a distance from them, depending on privilege? much as material and metaphorical wastes imply finality, so too justice—in demands for reparations and apologies for harms inflicted—is often cast as a universal and final outcome that cannot be revisited. justice is described as “not done yet” or “done,” as if justice were something to be completed at a certain time by a set of actions upon which affected people and society in general agree. furthermore, justice is conceived as an object of doing; yet the passive voice indicates that it is not always clear who and what does justice. the legal recognition of injustice, apology, and monetary compensation conditioned by irreversibility and followed by the demand to heal almost always do not do justice to those who were harmed or to the systems of violence that continue to do harm. how is justice lived, if not done, and continued by the earthly presence of bodyminds “even in the midst of unbearable pain” (price, 2015, p. 280), toxic wastes, and ongoing injustice? in this essay, i explore these questions—invoked by the connection made through the status of the people in the two camps as discarded—to imagine a “crip technoscience” approach to manufacturing technology as illustrated by aimi hamraie and kelly fritsch (2019) as “a critical project that holds in tension the unjust imperatives of technoscientific innovation with the transformative capacities to shape matter and meaning through praxis” (p.21) to engage with movements against occupational harm and disability oppression in south korea. these questions are not only concerned with kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 condemning the corporate-state violence of debilitations and murders of racialized, gendered, disabled and once-enabled people, but are also committed to recognizing how lasting presences of debilitating and disabled bodyminds reconfigure the relationship with justice, technology, and the environment (kafer, 2013; clare, 2017). following nikki sullivan’s (2014) focus on bodies’ and technology’s “coresponsibility, coarticulation, movement of (un)becoming with” (p. 189),2 this essay aims to encompass different ways of producing, defining, claiming, and representing disability/illness and disabled/ill people in relation to technology. first, i explore technology involved in the manufacturing and disposal of electronic devices and toxic matters through labor processes (miller, 2017) and their deep reliance on—and constructions of—imperial relations, geopolitical hierarchy, and exploitability. second, i regard the bureaucratic and medicojuridical apparatus of detecting, rating, and calculating incapacities to assess welfare service eligibility and to determine occupational harms for compensation as the technology of violent management that props up healthy bodies as the default precondition and that demands proof of incapacities conceptualized as stable and measurable. third, the subjectivity and orientations of dead people appear in activist spaces as the technology of resistance in relation to living people wanting, calling on, acknowledging their material, not to mention their spiritual, presence. i call this necro-activism. fourth, audio-visual texts and haptic objects, such as documentary films, discourses, images, statues, and symbols, constitute technologies of mediating and materializing lived injustice and justice. north american discussions on technological devices and disabilities in “disability technoscience,” “a field of traditional expert relations and practices concerned with designing for disabled people rather than with or by disabled people,” frequently turn to discourses and spectacles of lifeenhancing possibilities for disabled individuals (hamraie & fritsch, 2019). another predominant discourse and spectacle appears in occupational health science. the once healthy and enabled young workers manufacturing technological devices and becoming disabled and debilitated due to toxic exposure and injuries are highlighted as the cost of kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 development. this binary of white individuals with disabilities as consumers versus young asian and latin american women as victims of toxic exposures and injuries from manufacturing and global capitalist exploitation is formed in racialized, gendered, classed, and geographically specific hierarchies (miller, 2017). thus the “decolonization and racial justice” (hamraie & fritsch, 2019, p. 16) that crip technoscience calls for requires us to attend to locational specificities and internal differences within the geopolitically marginalized places and their temporal and spatial complexities. yet the tendency to turn to the list of representative cases of what illustrates the urgency of material conditions or exemplary practices of resistance in global contexts often ends up reifying the other whose representations of their own experiences are not recognized.3 the assumed certainty of material conditions elsewhere hinders the imagination of ambivalence, nuances, and multiplicity of experiences. disability justice movements in the united states and canada and transnational disability studies scholars have pointed out the urgent need to pay attention to disablements by global capitalist exploitation, state violence, and wars, which debilitate populations (berne & sins invalid, 2016; erevelles, 2011; puar, 2017). jasbir puar (2017) argues, “certain bodies are employed in production processes precisely because they are deemed available for injury—they are, in other words, objects of disposability, bodies whose debilitation is required in order to sustain capitalist narratives of progress” (p. 81). the imperative of challenging us imperialism, militarism, racism, capitalist expansion, settler colonialism, gender regulation, and sexual oppression puts into question the hierarchy between the global north and the global south (including the disenfranchised and settler-colonized others) (meekosha 2011; jaffee 2016; erevelles 2011). the division between north and south reflects colonial history, the cold war, economic developments, and political and military alliances. in addition to challenging the power of european and north american imperial powers, it is necessary to explore the devastating consequences of japanese imperialism and colonial rule and the roles that asian countries play in global capitalism. the narrow conceptualization of kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 the global north as western europe and north america frequently turns into binary thinking that sees only the white oppressor and the black and brown oppressed others, overlooking global exploitations of and by ethnicized asians, eastern europeans, and ethnicized groups in the middle east, and reinforcing the erasure of indigenous people in nonwhite settler colonial societies. these binaries of north and south, western and nonwestern, obfuscate the power structures outside of—yet interlocked with— western europe and north america, by which south korean and japanese corporations exploit their citizen workers, migrant workers, and workers in other asian countries. asian exploitation at manufacturing, recycling, and disposal sites of technologies and militarized violence produce disablements and deaths of workers and residents. following kuan-hsing chen (2010), i think with “asia as method,” not an object of analysis or a celebrated origin of difference. asia as method embraces an orientation toward asia as a site of producing knowledge, politicizing and challenging its hierarchies, and forging solidarity, placed within the frame of world history (pp. 213-216) and as a site where a “pulguŭi chŏngch’i” (crip politics) emerges centering on dependence and discord as major tools for transformation (changaeyŏsŏng konggam, 2018). i attend to historical and activist accounts of industrial harms in south korea and their convergence with—and divergence from—the south korean disability movement’s goal of eliminating oppression and making life and justice possible, revealing the circuit of harm in which south korean exploitation of asian countries occurs. deconstructing the presupposed position of what mel chen (2011) has called “mythic health” (p. 273) in relation to toxicity requires us not to rely on normative bodyminds to determine harm or on citizenship and nation-states to demand redress. chemical exposure and the corpse protest before the semiconductor workers’ cancer cases emerged in 2007, several landmark cases brought occupational health and industrial damage (sanŏp chaehae) to public attention in the 1980s. the history of occupational health kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 and resistance is inevitably intertwined with the post-division history of capitalism, labor movements, and political shifts in south korea. in 1980, cases of black lung disease (pneumoconiosis), injuries, and deaths by fire led to a large-scale uprising by coal miners in sabuk against abysmal working and living conditions and against the violent responses to protests (m. ch’oe, 2017). another case involved fifteen-year-old mun song-myŏn, who worked and lived in a factory that manufactured thermometers: he died of mercury poisoning in 1988 (song, 2017). in the same year, it was revealed that wonjin rayon had been concealing the cases of workers who died of carbon disulfide (cs2) poisoning since the 1970s and laying off many workers who became mentally and physically disabled after chronic exposure (an, 1988; “wŏnjin reion,” 1988). the rapid growth of the south korean economy, heralded as a “success” and “miracle” (maass, 1989), was made possible by the authoritarian export-driven industrialization and development led by military regimes from 1961 to 1987, which exploited a cheapened workforce in export processing zones that attracted foreign investors (song, 2011; lee, 2010). the growth of big conglomerates, including samsung, was buttressed by “low-interest loans through the regularized bank system that helped light manufacturing in the 1960s and the heavy chemical industry in the 1970s to compete in the international market” (song, 2011, p. 16). the achievement of the democracy movement of june 1987 and the subsequent growth of unions provided the rich soil for the public outrage that followed the revelation of industrial disaster cases (cho, 2010). the “corpse protest” (sisin nongsŏng) involving kim pong-hwan, the former worker at wonjin rayon who died of the effects of cs2 poisoning in 1991, magnified the activism of workers and the public’s support. holding up his funeral, kim’s family and other workers demanded the company’s recognition and compensation. after three months without an acceptable response, his family moved kim’s corpse in a coffin to the company, so that they could hold a funeral at the company building. when they were not allowed entry, they set up a wake in front of the building as a site of protest. finally, 137 days after kim’s death, his family and the company reached an kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 agreement, and his family was able to hold his funeral. the material presence of kim’s corpse in the public space as evidence of harm generated a sense of urgency and underscored the moral imperative of justice. this necro-activism constituted the undoing—and the return—of the disposed of “necropolitical labor,” illustrated by jin-kyung lee (2010) as “the most disposable labor, that is, the ultimate labor commodity or worker, something or someone to be thrown out, replaced, and/or (both literally and figuratively) killed after or as the labor is performed” (p. 6). this protest by corpse informed the public about the injustice of industrial harms, corporate cover-ups, and governmental complicity. wonjin rayon, then under the management of the government-owned korea development bank and run by ex-military officers (an, 1988), continued to deny its accountability, and the ministry of labor was complicit in its own actions and inaction. to date, more than nine hundred workers have been diagnosed with cs2 poisoning (s. s. kim, 2017). the protests and demands for justice have continued to resurface to stop the exportation of the same toxic machine imported from japan and the development of the polluted land, as well as to address local residents’ health, the employment of disabled workers, and funds for medical treatments, to name a few issues. this history provides the context of the necro-activism to which i return in relation to the cancer activism against samsung. in the next section, i will address how industrial harm continues as the state-supported capitalism finds newly exploitable necropolitical labor, relying on the enforced ignorance creating the circuits of harm in asia. transnational circuits of harm: moving machines, productions, and workers the toxicity involved in manufacturing rayon was known long before the diagnosis of cs2 poisoning in 1981 in south korea. in japan, after cs2 poisoning in the rayon industry was first reported in 1929, it became one of the most common occupational illnesses in the 1930s (s. s. kim, 2017). old machines were then exported to south korea in the mid 1960s when kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 the postcolonial diplomatic relations between south korea and japan resumed. the machines were in use in south korea until the cases of cs2 poisoning were established as an industrial disaster in the early 1990s. the harm did not end there. after wonjin rayon was shut down, the machines were exported again—this time to dandong, china—despite the objections of south korean workers. it is reported that they are now in use in north korea (s. s. kim, 2017). similarly, the occupational and environmental harms caused by asbestos illustrate the importance of tracing and stopping the transnational movements of harmful machinery and manufacturing sites. in the 1970s, asbestos-processing machines were imported from japan; in the 1990s, the asbestos industry moved to indonesia and also to malaysia, china, and vietnam (kang, 2017). as the use of certain toxic chemicals is banned and the access to information about their harmful effects increases in individual countries, market demands lead to the growth of new labor pools in places with few public regulations and little information on chemical toxicity and its dangers. the health consequences to labor of semiconductor manufacturing began surfacing in the 1970s in california and were first reported in the medical literature in 1983 (ladou, 2006). during a 2003 lawsuit against ibm filed by two workers, epidemiologists who examined ibm’s corporate mortality file found “excess deaths due to brain, kidney, lymphatic, and hematopoietic cancers and melanoma” and a “significant excess of breast cancer deaths in female manufacturing workers at the san jose plant” (ladou, 2006, p. 39). these revelations, however, did not generate international enforcement of bans, monitoring, or changes in industrial standards. this international movement of manufacturing and technology without information about toxicity and with racialized access to bodily protection calls for international monitoring and regulations and for transnational activist coalitions. during the economic crisis of 1997 and international monetary fund–directed neoliberal restructuring, south korea became “a more flexible, capital-friendly postdevelopmental state” (song, 2011, p. 6). in this restructuring process, the direct employment of workers has decreased, kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 replaced with a subcontracting system. instead of being directly employed by the companies that design and sell products, workers are employed either by a dispatching agencies or by subcontracting companies, leading to further corporate exploitation and ill-health caused by their labor and exposure to toxins. south korea’s role in global neoliberalism in the new century requires building asian coalitions to demand occupational and environmental justice. emerging as a sub-empire, “an intermediate state between a developed country and the third world” (s. kim, 2017, p. 155), south korean industry has relied on “two forms of non-ethnic korean labor: foreign offshore in various locations and migrant labor in south korea from more peripheral economies” of southeast asia and south asia (lee, 2010, p. 18)). samsung electronics has established factories in vietnam, in which half the cell phones sold worldwide are now manufactured.4 corporate injustice and global capitalism that profit off of populations that are deemed disposable situate south korea at the front line of ethnonational capitalism as a subempire that is serving the us economy; it is necessary to trace and challenge harms that travel along the transnational circuits of manufacturing and disposal industries that cause sickness, disablement, and death. presence-other-than-human semiconductors function as “the heart of all electronic equipment” (miller & kraidy, 2016, 92) and samsung electronics, along with ibm, has been one of the major semiconductor producers in the world. the semiconductor industry “is one of the most chemical-intensive industries ever developed” (ladou, 2006, p. 34), and workers are potentially exposed to skin irritants, acids, and many “chemicals that cause cancer, reproductive complications, and debilitating illnesses” (miller & kraidy, 2016, p. 92) and deaths. yet it is known as a “clean” industry because semiconductor chips are manufactured in what are called “clean rooms,” in which dust particles are kept at extremely low levels and workers must wear anti-dust suits to keep the chips from being contaminated. affected south korean workers were kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 11 not informed of the kinds and toxicity of chemicals they were handling in “clean rooms” and later they felt betrayed that “cleanliness” did not mean the same thing for the workers as for the chips (kongyu, 2017). various kinds of cancer and illnesses among south korean workers caused by their exposure to toxic chemicals and radiation in samsung electronics semiconductor plants first became public in 2007, when hwang yu-mi died of acute myeloid leukemia at age twenty-three. rejecting samsung’s payment offered without an admission of fault, hwang yu-mi’s father, hwang sang-gi, demanded recognition from the state (via korea workers’ compensation and welfare service) that the working conditions and chemical exposure at the plant caused his daughter’s death. this effort led to the formation of the organization supporters for the health and rights of people in the semiconductor industry (sharps, panollim), which started what became a more than a decade-long struggle that led to the protest camp in gangnam subway station, which closed in july 2018 after 1,023 days when an agreement was reached between sharps and the third party mediation committee. the fight for justice has been not only against a conglomerate that denied any responsibility for toxic work environments that caused illnesses and deaths in its workers, but also against a governmental agency, courts, mainstream science, legal systems, and even the south korean public, insofar as samsung has been identified with national economic growth and identity. the company has fostered a sense of techno-nationalism, whereby national identity is deeply rooted in its technological prowess and its global recognition. this tehno-nationalism has generated trust in samsung products’ “superior quality” and “innovation,” as well as the company’s “efficient” management built upon its suppression of unions. to make an accusation against samsung is to challenge this trust, a trust once shared by affected workers and their families. gaining the public’s support against samsung’s labor practices thus requires a significant amount of work in crafting effective rhetoric and compelling narratives to communicate material and embodied injustice beyond the exposés. not relying on a narrator or the melodramatic portrayal of illness as kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 12 personal loss, hong li-kyung’s (2014) documentary film the empire of shame uses silent, off-focus shots from a hidden camera, taken inside the samsung semiconductor plant, thereby dis/orienting the audience in experiencing the inaccessibility of the truth. the snapshots of workers all wearing anti-dust suits that cover almost the entire body force the audience to look for glimpses of identity that show through the workers’ eyes and bodies as well as to detect their sociality through their interactions. the film weaves raw footage of electronics manufacturing plants, nearby residential housing, industrial shipping docks, gigantic containers, and moving ships in extremely long aerial shots. against these landscapes and seascapes, human bodies and their movements appear minuscule and hardly noticeable. the overpowering industrial structures visually crush the frail flesh and bodies of those who are rendered powerless. the film’s quiet observational mode urges the audience to reflect on the power differential between individuals and the system of nationalist neocolonial capitalism. in contrast, im heungsoon’s documentary film factory complex chooses to zoom in on large numbers of ants crawling on cement, trees in a forest, and swarms of crows and dragonflies in extreme close-up shots. swarming organisms show the power of mobilization and resistance (hardt & negri, 2005; halberstam 2013), as well as the importance of presence and sociality without specific purposes that are valued in capitalist society. in the opening scene of factory complex, the bronze statue called the lady of export—created and erected in guro industrial complex in 1974, and refurbished in 2014—is unveiled. but the scene is played in reverse, and thus the statue is being covered up. it is as if the film attempts to undo the present and reject this symbol and what it represents—namely, workers’ devotion to and sacrifices for the national economy by producing exports, a rhetorical device to hide systemic oppression. the statue is thrusting forward holding a globe in one hand and lifting a torch in the other. it embodies the ambition of building an empire, a globally dominating power. by rewinding the sequence, factory complex also reminds the viewers how the women factory workers have been erased from history and from the public awareness but are still working in many factories, answering phones, kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 13 or serving customers in plain sight. factory complex portrays the history of women’s labor and resistance in the garment industry and wig manufacturing during the late 1970s, to electronic manufacturing, shipbuilding, and semiconductor manufacturing in the first decade of the new millennium. the film makes connections to contemporary service workers engaging in emotional and physical labor at call centers, airplanes, and in supermarkets who routinely endure harassment by customers as well as the pressure to work quickly and efficiently. this gendered exploitation of labor is also symbolized by a female automaton wearing a miniskirt in front of a gas station, bowing and greeting customers every few seconds and promising good service. these other-than-human presences are not the simple expression of the dehumanization of workers or the replaceability of labor itself. rather, the gendered connections between women workers, the statue, and the automaton illustrate how disposable labor exists beyond the divide between human and non-human and the divide between material reality and metaphoricity, maintained by heteropatriarchal notions of care and labor as domains of femininity naturalizing the labor that serves the state. similarly, replacing workers with robots in semiconductor factories, implemented as a solution to occupational harm, would not protect the workers who need to enter the workshop and maintain the machines. machines and the humans are indeed inseparable in their proximity and reliance on each other for existence and intelligibility. the fact that the “clean room” confused the workers, as they thought it was meant for their safety as much as it was for the chips, illustrates this inseparability. the two films consider the environment, buildings, heavy machines, non-human lives sharing people’s marginalization and powerlessness, while delivering a sense of coresponsibility, affinity, and community formed by people’s interactions with those subjects. the return after death focusing on the cases of samsung semiconductor workers, the empire of kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 14 shame records yi yun-jŏng’s progression toward death with brain cancer. for seven years, she worked at onyang plant inspecting semiconductor chips dipped in high-temperature chemicals. yi is at home with her husband, who tries to record her testimony about her working environment and the kinds of work she did at the chip-cleaning bay by recalling how it smelled and felt as well as the changes it caused in her menstrual cycle. the reconstruction of work environment through physical and emotional memories becomes an important way to communicate what rob nixon (2011) calls “slow violence, a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (p. 2). later yi increasingly becomes silent. the shot of her closed eyes and her soft but minimal hand movements on the hospital bed implies that her death is near. after her death, for families and activists, her dead body is an important material reality that samsung must be forced to acknowledge. as part of the funeral and protest, the hearse carrying yi’s casket makes its way to the samsung seocho building followed by several buses full of mourners. company personnel are positioned in the middle of the road to block the vehicle from approaching. amid physical altercations, the hearse moves forward and is parked near the building. people pay their respects to the dead on the road. the camera shows her casket positioned behind a photo of her face. this demand of the dead makes a strong claim for the recognition of injustice and for accountability, constituting necroactivism. like the corpse protest of kim from wonjin rayon, yi’s dead presence isn’t merely a loss or a tool of and for the living, but actively enacts interdependent relations to continue resistance. the protest sites become the sites of a wake that does not end. similarly, factory complex features another kind of necro-activism. the deaths caused by toxicity at semiconductor plants are embodied by the living surrogate. the scenes of people in anti-dust suits fallen on the ground show them simultaneously enacting the deaths of workers and acting out their own future. on each person’s back is a label printed with the name of a person who died, with the dates of birth and death. protesters’ bodies kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 15 become tombstones that mark the lives of the workers who died, illustrating another corporeal interdependency. in this necro-activism the dead bodies’ materiality is not the symbolic means of political claims of the living (verdery 1999), as they enliven and depend on the labor of the living to demand their justice and their interconnected future. by setting up the camps near the samsung building and city hall, as described in the beginning of this article, activists refuse to disappear from public spaces, taking turns to remain overnight and enduring harsh living conditions. both camps are also marked with the continuing presence of the dead in framed photos on the mourning tables and in banners on which their names are written. at the camp, members of sharps displayed the sitting statue of hwang yu-mi—whose death led to the formation of sharps— wearing a hospital gown. there were small pots of plants and flowers that flourished under the care of the protesters and the spirits of workers who passed away (personal communication with han hye-kyŏng in january 2019). wooden poles with a wooden bird on top represented the area’s guardian deity, each simultaneously standing for an individual who passed away. the death, suffering, and life of each are remembered and embodied in these non-human presences alongside the displayed message, “don’t kill us any more.” this message reminds us that one can be killed after death— death can be a chronic and repeated process, and each death is connected to the next one. disablement, illness, and death are entangled; thus, the ableist imaginaries of one as worse than the other are rendered obsolete. as the violence of denial and erasure continues, the fight to expose, remedy, and prevent such violence perseveres in a place where victimization, disablement, death, incapacities, disabilities, and frailty coexist as conditions of life. the empire of shame shows scenes of celebration at a high school graduation filled with the laughter of young women. because many workers started working at semiconductor and lcd plants straight from high school before they became sick, the audience finds their playfulness eerie, as the graduates are unaware of the harms that will come to them. the film ends with a shot, at an unspecified place and time, of a garbage dump piled with kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 16 electronic waste, making visible the geopolitical implications of occupational harms caused by the continuing presence of electronics after their disposal. the scenes capture salvage workers, including asian and black people from the past and the present, rummaging through the garbage in search of valuable parts. the existence of electronic waste along with racially marked children who survive using the salvaged parts illustrate the continuing life of disposed materials and people. harm and the violence of disposal must reckon with the ontology that continues beyond the visible spaces of society. after chronicling the resistance of women workers in south korea, factory complex travels across national borders to canadia industrial park in phnom penh, cambodia, where garments are made for consumption in china, japan, and south korea. the film informs viewers that in 2014, a workers’ demonstration in cambodia demanding higher wages was met with an attack by armed soldiers, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries. the scene of bloody corpse is followed by a room full of the panels displaying black-and-white photos of the faces of those who died in the killing fields of the khmer rouge, connecting violence from the past to that of the present (im heungsoon, personal communication, august 2018). the work of mourning and remembering is made possible through the spatial dedication of the photos in tuol sleng genocide museum. the director explains that the women who were killed during the genocide might be mothers and grandmothers of the women workers killed at the protest (im heungsoon, personal communication, august 2018). connecting genocidal violence and the killing of the workers by the military, the film attempts to show that the past and the present coexist. further scenes taken in angkor wat that feature deities in stone statues in ruin invoke lived time, a withering slowly, yet not disappearing presence. genealogical, temporal, and spatial connections, continuities that are not without disruptions, constitute an important dimension involved in the work of conceptualizing and materializing justice. from factories in south korea to dump sites overseas and in the past, to lcd plants in china, and to phnom penh, the bodies of workers and residents—healthy, ill, disabled, alive, silent, screaming, dying, dead, and substituted—are what jongyoung kim and heeyun kim (2016) kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 17 call “the only and final resort for resistance against the dominating conglomerate of capital, power, and knowledge” (pp. 148-149). the continuing presences of pain and debilitations, disablements, and bodily alterations after harm issue a call for justice across time and space that does not stop at national borders but continues to mobilize other manufacturing sites. furthermore, they call for justice in representations and make connections with the environment and non-human beings and objects. these presences require that justice be reconceptualized as something that cannot be irreversibly completed and resolved by institutional actions; instead, it is something that is lived, remembered, and pursued over time and across communities. as disability studies in global contexts challenges the violent impacts of imperialism and capitalism, it invites engagement with historical entanglements among specific geopolitical centers, including those of sub-empires existing in between peripheries—acting as subcontractors managing, exploiting, and disposing workers—in order to form resistance and coalitions throughout the transnational circuits of harms. the nexus between the occupational health movement and the disability movement disability as a basis for claims of human rights and debilitation as injustice and tragedy are both mediated by interdependent “material-discursive practices” (fritsch, 2015, p. 14) of management in south korea that rely on the medical, juridical, and administrative licensing of impairments and incapacities based on citizenship. this is not to say that disability and debilitation converge, without any differences and hierarchies. kim do hyun (personal communication, august 2018), a disability studies scholaractivist, explains that, although the disability movement in the 1990s clearly addressed industrial injuries as one of its important agendas, the network built between the two protest camps has not been fully developed enough to engage in an in-depth discussion about the effects of emphasizing tragedy in challenging injustice. condemning injustice by emphasizing kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 18 incapacities and suffering creates tension because this emphasis may reinforce the pitying and othering of disabled/ill bodies, as the ableist view that equates disability with shame and inferiority strongly holds affecting both movements. in a conversation with kim at the sharps’s camp outside the samsung building, kwŏn yŏng-ŭn, a sharps activist, pointed out the public attitude towards the representations of occupational illnesses and deaths displayed at the camp: “sometimes, passersby say, ‘poor thing…’ but i don’t quite understand. we are here feeling rewarded every day for pursuing our dignity, justice, and righteousness…. but those who don’t realize it, say, ‘pitiful.’” stressing the need to reject pity that individualizes and depoliticizes disabled and sick people and deaths, kim and kwŏn agree that the issue to tackle is a structural and capitalist problem (sharps, 2016). noting the importance of a multilayered understanding of tragedy, alison kafer (2015) insightfully states, “a crip refusal to see disability as tragedy, as traumatic, can be just as restricting on our politics and our theories as the ableist insistence that disability is always and only tragic” (p. 6). furthermore, extending the network and coalition between the disability movement and the occupational health movement beyond the boundaries of citizenship and national borders is necessary to challenge the harms experienced by immigrant workers and people overseas inside the factories and living with and near toxic materials. hwang sang-gi urges the compensation agreement to include workers in overseas plants and to ensure their rights to form unions (sharps, 2018). any imagination of the enabling possibilities of technology needs to recognize the racialized, classed, cripped, and gendered material labor involved in the making and disposing of it “without equating disability with injustice” (clare, 2017, p. 56); at the same time, any repudiation of debilitations and deaths needs to reckon with the continuing subjectivity and material presence of “the discarded” in late capitalist society, watching out for the effects of being incorporated into the state management of disability and incapacity. rather than reifying healthiness as a precondition for health justice claims, crip feminist technoscience lets us recognize different modes of presence in kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 19 “animate and inanimate lives and nonlives” (fritsch, 2017, p. 376; chen, 2011), continuing after violence and resisting closure. the condemnation of the injustice in debilitating marginalized people should also interrupt the imagination of the just world as that of healthy, able-bodyminded people. in a short scene in a hospital room in the empire of shame, han hye-kyŏng, who worked at a samsung lcd plant and had brain cancer that led to several disabilities, is filling out a survey that measures disability identity with the help of her mother.5 although the questionnaire does not capture the complicated experiences of disability and individual negotiations with identities, viewers gain a sense of han’s outlook on her life. to the statement, “it makes me feel very bad to see all the things nondisabled people can do which i cannot,” han agrees. her mother continues to read the questionnaire: “i accept my disability.” han answers, “yes.” “i have confidence about my abilities.” “yes.” “how much?” “a lot.” “though i am disabled, my life is full.” “very much so.” her mother rephrases the last item in the form of a question: “is your life full?” han answers, “very full.” surprised, her mother asks again, “really?” han repeats, “yes!” this conversation delivers a nuanced and seemingly contradictory picture of her life with disabilities. the wording of the survey indicates an ableist preconception of disability; however, han’s adamant answers challenge her mother and the audience not to be satisfied with a monolithic judgment about what it means to victimized and be disabled. han indeed has framed her incapacitations brought on by corporate crimes and immorality as a tragedy, illustrating what puar (2017) calls “the biopolitics of debilitation” (p. 72) as evidence of injustice; but they do not negate her fulfilling life. furthermore her fight for justice to prevent any workers from being harmed coexists with her wish to walk again (personal communication in january 2019), illustrating that her everyday life with disabilities after the camp’s closure involves continuing negotiations with inaccessible environments, memory, isolation, and prognosis. sharps activist kwŏn yŏng-ŭn brings up another important nexus between the occupational health movement and the disability movement in her speech at gangnam camp (sharps, 2016). when the compensation kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 20 plan drafted by the third-party mediating committee set forth a hierarchy of damage that was based on a medically determined level of impairments, she was reminded of the ongoing fight of disability activists from gwanghwamun camp to abolish the disability rating system that ties provision of social support to medical assessments of the severity of impairment measured in examination rooms, not based on comprehensive consideration of living environments, desires, needs, plans, and experiences. in this regulatory bureaucratic system, people with disabilities receive medical and administrative assessments of their degree of impairment, and those whose impairments and needs are not rated as serious enough do not qualify for state-funded services, including personal assistance and paratransit. against the normative body, numeric scores are created based on medical diagnosis and on every function of an individual combined with family income and care needs. these assessments cause physical and mental pain and exhaustion, constituting debilitating process itself.6 the denial of care based on new assessments has led to deaths at home of people who were living alone, especially when there were fires or malfunctions of medical equipment. protestors also demanded the abolition of the legal obligation of family support (puyang ŭimuje) for their disabled members, because it effectively eliminates the need for social welfare. responding to the persistent demands of the disability activists for more than 1,800 days, the new government promised the abolition of the disability rating system and the camp closed in august 2017 (h. ch’oe, 2017). however, the coalition had to reopen the protest camp in front of the congress in 2018, demanding sufficient budget allocation and a complete eradication of the rating system, condemning the effort to revamp it. (currently in 2019, the camp is located in jongno-gu near the blue house.) applying this lesson from disability activism to the sharps’s demands for reparations for harm in the workplace is crucial, kwŏn states, to avoid affected workers being compensated according to medically graded classifications. thus challenges to the state’s power to authorize the legal and medical identity “disabled” are intertwined with challenges to the harmful conditions that create debilitations. occupational health justice and kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 21 disability rights are interdependent as individuals travel across these categories and are subject to bureaucratic technology and control. addressing the history of occupational harms and affected people’s resistance, chŏn chu-hŭi (2017) describes how the transformation of workers’ identities by toxins and injured body parts functions as a ground for new social rights: “the role of workers who came to have occupational illness wasn’t passive….they had to prove the toxicity of materials that was previously unknown, and they had to prove epidemiologically that their illness was caused by labor processes and mechanical systems of the manufacturing sites in order to get treatment. as active participants,…they fought for new social rights by creating musculoskeletal identity, asbestos identity, and mercury identity” (p. 330). these identities, fully charged with negativity but not incompatible with having a full life, form the basis of new sociality created in the process to demand justice, challenge expertise, expose workplace harm, corporate criminality, and demand apology, compensation, and prevention.7 mel chen (2011) argues that toxicity is “better thought of as conditions with effects, bringing their own affects and animacies to bear on lives and nonlives” as it generates different kinds of sociality (pp. 281-282). workers’ “asbestos identity,” “mercury identity,” “musculoskeletal identity,” and “leukemia identity” suggest that bodies “disposed of” after suffering harms resonate kathleen miller’s (2018) characterization of life in the dump—“not an end but an experience of continual return” (p. 4). debilitations and mass disablements of people who are considered “disposable populations” are not an end (even after death) but are marked with continual returns to spaces formed for sociality, familiarity, loss, collective mourning, and justice much as being disposed of does not mean nonexistence. these specific identities may not overlap with a more broad self-identification as a disabled person (changaein), but their agendas for making life possible and their efforts to ensure prevention rely on disability policies and social provisions that are in place or need to be created and expanded. ha kŭm-ch’ŏl (2015) declares that the alliance between samsung’s “victims” and disabled people is “the most powerful coalition of the powerless.” kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 22 justice in south korean disability communities is inseparable from the ecology of beings and matters outside of the intelligible boundary of human and life. crip feminist technoscience studies in this context then may seek multiple origins with locational and historical specificities in the geopolitical hierarchy in which each space carries particular positions in maintaining imperial centers and subcenters. efforts to ask and shape what justice entails in its temporal and spatial in/continuity challenge the finality and irreversibility as terms of justice to redress harms. together with “intimate activism” articulated by manuel tironi (2018) and “the kinds of ethical matters and affective doings it elicits” (p. 452), necro-activism and inhuman presences as important crip politics that are centered on dependence, interdependence, and discord with the system call for careful understanding of justice as lived through everyday recognition (changaeyŏsŏng konggam, 2018). sites of suffering and debilitations are also sites of the histories of resistance where disabilities, illnesses, deaths, and sufferings lead to the power to confront injustice and generate coalitions. acknowledgements i’d like to convey my gratitude to kelly fritsch, aimi hamraie, david serlin, and mara mills, the editors of this issue, as well as anonymous reviewers for their helpful and insightful suggestions. i thank alison kafer, im heungsoon, kim do hyun, chŏng yŏng-ran, han hye-kyŏng, kim si-nyŏ, michael gill, and alice falk for sharing their knowledge, insights and providing help and support. notes 1 in analyzing the use of waste, discard, dirt, and filth by both sides of the occupy movement in the united states, discard studies scholar max liboiron (2012) shows that trash and filth are “the terms over which contests about what counts as tolerable and intolerable conditions, right kim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 23 and wrong, citizenship and the other, acceptable and unacceptable behavior and what constitutes ‘out of placeness’ have been waged for centuries, and will continue to be waged” (p. 8). 2 sullivan (2014) explains the history of the development of somatechnics by susan stryker and her colleagues, and how transgender issues have been integral to the notion addressing how bodies and technologies construct and transform each other materially and discursively. 3 see kafer’s (2013) careful discussion of the limitations of naming in haraway’s (1991) “a cyborg manifesto,” including the women making chips in asia and spiral dancing in santa rita jail. 4 for more on the health issues among workers at samsung electronics in vietnam, see ipen and research centre for gender, family and environment in development (cgfed), stories of women workers in vietnam’s electronics industry (november 2017), a report that documents miscarriages, other undiagnosed illnesses, and the death of a young woman. 5 the questionnaire is apparently “acceptance management and social interaction,” first developed in the united states in 1987 to measure the acceptance of disability and identity as disabled (kaiser, wingate, freeman, & chandler, 1987). 6 for measuring physical disability, pain-inducing electric probes are used to test nerve responses (chŏng yŏng-ran, personal communication, september 2018). 7 this account also resonates with crip technoscience’s framing disabled people as “experts and designers of everyday life” (hamraie & fritsch, 2019). references an, c. c. 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(2018). hypo-interventions: intimate activism in toxic environments. social studies of science, 48(3), 438-455. verdery, k. (2000). the political lives of dead bodies: reburial and postsocialist change. new york, ny: columbia university press. wŏnjin reion sanjaero 8myŏng samang [원진 레이온 산재로 8명 사망, 8 people died from industrial disaster at wonjin rayon] (aug. 6, 1988).한겨레 [hankyoreh]. retreived from https://newslibrary.naver.com/ yi, c. w. (2017). 메탄올 중독사건: 법의 사각지대에서 시력을 잃은 파견노동자들 [methanol poisoning: dispatched workers who lost vision in the blindspot of law]. in 한국 노동안전보건연구소 [korea institute of labor safety and health] (ed.),굴뚝 속으로 들어간 의사들 [doctors inside the chimney] (pp. 284-298). 서울: 나름북스. yi, h. e. (2017). 태국 노동자 집단 앉은뱅이병을 일으킨 노말헥산 [nkim catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 29 hexane caused group paralysis of workers from thailand]. in 한국 노동안전보건연구소 [korea institute of labor safety and health] (ed.),굴뚝 속으로 들어간 의사들 [doctors inside the chimney] (pp. 272282). 서울: 나름북스. bio eunjung kim is associate professor of women’s and gender studies and disability studies at syracuse university. she is the author of curative violence: rehabilitating disability, gender and sexuality in modern korea (2017, duke university press). microsoft word 71625_1_11_sur.docx sur, a. (2018). review of: feminists and science: critiques and changing perspectives in india. (vols. 1 & 2) by sumi krishna and gita chadha (eds.) (sage publications india, pvt ltd., 2017). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4 (2), 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © abha sur, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license ` review feminists and science: critiques and changing perspectives in india. (vols. 1 & 2) by sumi krishna and gita chadha (eds.) (sage publications india, pvt ltd., 2017) abha sur university of california at los angeles asur@mit.edu in his 1979 keynote address "class science and scientific truth" delivered to the new york marxist school's conference on dialectical materialism, richard levins argues that, although mediated by intellectual, material and social relations, science still produces some “real truths about the world” (levins, 1981, p. 9). this essential contradiction “between science as the growth of human knowledge and science as ideology of oppression” is at the heart of feminism’s contested relationship with science (levins 1981, p.9). more often than not, feminist scholarship emphasizes one aspect of the contradiction while ignoring the other. in india, these dichotomous stands are exemplified in the writings of vandana shiva on the one hand, and on the other, the scholarship of meera nanda. while shiva sees modern science as inherently violent in its reductive methodology, its denigration of 2 sur catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) traditional knowledge systems and its destruction of nature for private profit, nanda rails against brahmanical hinduism that has legitimized oppression of women and dalits (formerly known as "untouchables") and sees science as a liberating force in the fight against obscurantism and caste oppression. modern science according to nanda “is the standpoint of the oppressed.” (nanda, 2002, p. 92) in this milieu feminists and science is a salutary intervention. the two volumes offer an expansive exploration of science, society, and gender in india that emphasizes the heterogeneity in feminist thought and practices as well as in scientific disciplines and institutions. against the homogenization of both modern science and local knowledges, implicit in the critiques offered by shiva and nanda, feminists and science recognizes hierarchies in the disciplines and institutions of modern science (swaminathan, vol. 1) as well as in local, traditional knowledges (krishna, vol. 2). as krishna notes, “local knowledges are layered and complex but not always democratic” and “the tension between the local community as both emancipatory and patriarchal is not easy to resolve” (krishna, vol 2, p. xix). feminists and science thus endeavors to understand, elaborate, and explore the nexus of gender, knowledge and power in and across boundaries of modern science and traditional ways of knowing. it is “a labor of love” as gita chadha writes, emphasizing the plurality of theoretical, analytical, and disciplinary approaches that informs this collection of essays (chadha, vol. 2, p. xxxiii). feminists and science is the outcome of a conference and two workshops on the general theme of feminism, knowledge production, and transformation that brought together feminists from a wide array of academic disciplines, non-governmental organizations and state departments. the final workshop was centered on peer review of articles submitted by the participants to develop a dialogical mode of understanding and knowledge-making. taken together the essays in the two volumes cover an impressive range of topics from women in science, the culture of science, feminist epistemologies and practices, the pedagogy of science, feminist science 3 sur catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) fiction to writings on developing different, more inclusive ways of doing science. an excellent introduction by sumi krishna in volume 2 makes explicit the overarching scope and purpose of feminists and science. its purpose, she writes, “is to work towards a more comprehensive and grounded understanding of gender and science in india” (krishna, vol. 2, p. xii). toward this end feminists and science explores the ways in which science is both similar to and different from other social institutions, how gender gets represented in science and, in turn, how scientific methods and practices are mediated by gender. although the twenty-six essays that comprise the two volumes are case studies rooted in specific historical, social, cultural and institutional practices in india, the theoretical and analytical frameworks employed by the authors draw liberally upon international feminist scholarship in science studies. the latter has the effect of making that which is unfamiliar familiar and allows feminists across the globe to engage with the specificities of feminist scholarship in science studies in india without essentializing its difference. under the rubric "women in science" are experiential as well as historical essays on women water professionals, veterinarians, astrophysicists and psychiatrists. these essays articulate the interaction between the structural (social institutions) and disciplinary (bureaucratic, regulatory) dimensions that prevent women scientists from becoming full participants in their chosen disciplines. here disciplinary particularities highlight the more general and systemic aspects of gender discrimination and at the same time reveal the built-in hierarchy in science itself: the less prestigious a field is in the pecking order of “the three-dimensional hierarchy of discipline, function and level” (swaminathan, vol. 1, p. 215), the more amenable it is to democratizing processes. articles pertaining to the culture of science highlight the hegemonic (i.e., ideological and cultural) barriers women face in their career choices. here the specific ways in which merit and creativity are defined and assessed in the sciences is decidedly gendered. women’s stellar performance is attributed to their bookishness, while that of men to their inherent 4 sur catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) conceptual clarity (subramanian, vol. 1). the essays also elucidate the normalization of discourse about science where critical questioning is delimited to enhance the view shared by most that “science and scientists would lead humanity up the path to abundance and equity” (shastri, vol. 1, p. 123). the greater good attributed to science has the effect of silencing gender, caste, and class discrimination within the sciences. the critiques of science are nuanced and refreshing. chayanika shah’s insights into in vitro fertilization therapy, its attendant reconfiguration of the very meaning of fertility and the subtle or not so subtle conflation of creating a baby of the requisite genetic material with the natural process of conception raise far-reaching questions about the politics of gendered bodies, the construction of desire, and the feminist dilemmas surrounding these technologies that offer women choice by allowing them to exert control over their own bodies. in a markedly different context, issues of childbirth and midwifery are also central to meena gopal’s study of caste and gender in south tamil nadu. she draws attention to knowledges and practices of the “lower castes” produced under conditions of hierarchical control and coercion, extracted by the “upper castes” as caste obligation, and largely ignored and silenced in feminist practice and deliberations until recently. here, considerations of livelihoods, markets, labor, political economy, biomedical technologies and caste-stratified knowledges engender a host of ambivalences and contradictions that demand flexibility and adaptability in feminist thought and practice. feminists and science also addresses issues of women’s reproductive labor in medicine, recovery of contributions and experiences of women physicians in colonial and independent india, deliberations on pedagogies in science and technology, development of feminist research methodologies, women’s ways of knowing, etc. this remarkable breadth of feminists and science is matched by the depth and thoughtfulness of its scholarship with one caveat. the question of caste haunts the collection of essays both explicitly and implicitly. however, except in 5 sur catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) gopal’s work, it does not get the serious engagement it deserves. the shared histories of caste and gender oppression are palpable as much in science and technology as in other fields of inquiry. the lack of engagement with the burgeoning literature on caste and gender in india and race, gender, and science studies is an untoward omission. nonetheless feminists and science is an admirable and ambitious project that will go far in establishing the field of feminist science studies in india. references levins, r. (1981). “class science and scientific truth.” in e. altman, m. boger, e. holtzmann, l. m. knauer et al. (eds.)working papers on marxism & science (pp. 9-22). new york, ny: the science task force of the new york marxist school. shiva, v. (1988). “reductionist science as epistemological violence.” in ashis nandy (ed.), science, hegemony and violence, (pp. 232-56). tokyo, jp: united nations university. nanda, m. (2002). breaking the spell of dharma and other essays. new delhi, in: three essays collective. bio abha sur teaches in the women’s & gender studies program at massachusetts institute of technology. she is the author of dispersed radiance: caste, gender and modern science in india (new delhi: navayana 2011). microsoft word 32832_richard_doyle_book review_nj dr.docx doyle, richard (2019). covert plants: vegetal consciousness and agency in an anthropocentric world. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © richard doyle, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | covert plants: vegetal consciousness and agency in an anthropocentric world edited by prudence gibson and baylee brits (brainstorm books, 2018) richard doyle penn state university mobius@psu.edu i need hardly say that i have no intention of reviewing all the proofs of intelligence which the plants give us. these proofs are innumerable and continual, especially among the flowers, in which the effort of vegetable life towards light and understanding is concentrated. —maurice maeterlinck, l’intelligence des fleurs as detailed in the eponymous plant theory by jeffrey nealon, plant theory is neither the thinking of plants nor thought about plants by humans. plant thinking is instead the experienced pattern of thought by no identity that emerges out of ecosystems engaged in photosynthesis and subject to natural and sexual selection now aware of itself. and plant theory is happening! this is good news for those who wish inquiry to transcend rather than stagnate into contemporary debates always, it would seem, recursively only about themselves. plant perception, plant signaling and behavior, plant intelligence: all of these technoscientific facts confound us and ask us to ponder the delicious news that plants are anything but idle or indifferent! to respectfully remix donna haraway into the post-avatar moment, from rapidly expanding cannabis culture to the plant savior groot, plants themselves are now disturbingly sentient, while we ourselves seem frighteningly inert. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) richard doyle, 2019 2 but, yet more good news: covert plants: vegetal consciousness and agency in an anthropocentric world offers a glorious sampler of strains and genres of plentiful plantitude, a seed mix of covert plant action tended and cultivated by prudence gibson and baylee bries. what an extraordinary brew is here concocted, a vegetalismo of academic reason, with song. there are poems that provide instant and incandescent context for the more scholarly inquiries into kant and goethe, as if each were written for each other, like plant symbionts, shamanic allies of force and light. as a result, the mixture makes the book an enlightening pleasure to read. unlike many edited collections, where chapters can take on a frightening consistency as all concerned ensure that they agree with each other on their major premises, covert plants offers an admixture that keeps us stretching towards the light. luke fisher’s “gardening/grasshopper in a field,” for example, instructs us directly in the sort of immanent thinking necessary to the arrival of the plant as sentient evolutionary co-partner: who took the young thin stems and bent them to be your legs, folded leaves like origami to make a pair of wings? (p. 60) fisher here guides would be phytonauts—explorers, yes, of the plant realm—in the forms of attention that enable plant thinking and perception: watch as patterns unfurl across phyla, plant insect insect plant, all the while retaining the singularity of some plant aspect or consistency that persists. there is a good variation in the mix, with sections ranging over everything from neuroscientific metaphor—a particularly luminous essay by baylee brits—and an icaro, a chanting by tamryn bennett in homage to the songs of the upper amazon: caapi,cipó yagé, yajé natem, shorit aya spirit vine (p. 122) some academic writing on plants is excited but guarded about the real stakes, rarely turning towards the introspective. but there is nothing covert about the courage, persistence, and quality of the diverse treatments of phytopsyche to be found in this volume. plants are not a theme that repeats across this book but an awareness that occurs and transforms as each chapter tunes our attention book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) richard doyle, 2019 3 towards some aspect of plant being. and persist it does, as artists such as natalie jeremijenko sprout into dialogue with susie pratt, giving crucial context to the ways artists were always already, as we used to say before plant theory, tapping into the utopian flavor to be found in dialogue with plants. jeremijenko maps out a mutualist encounter with plants—as in her project treexoffice, a “co-working space in a tree and owned by a tree” (p. 214)—that literally entangles ownership frameworks, the roots of a tree, and the labor that would emerge out of it. if we compare treexoffice with its synergetic forebears, the tensegrity domes of buckminster fuller, we see that utopias can still sprout in the oddest places, less “before the law” than beyond it, linking treexoffice to those courageous tree sitters such as julia butterfly hill who have taught us all the dharma of the trees. lest you find yourself allergic to the utopian puffery above (the reviewer’s, not the collection), fear not, for there are works of extraordinary scholarship that are as fiercely careful in their commitment to the attentive exegesis of philosophical texts as they are radically open to the implications of their insights. covert plants ups the ante on the next wave of thinking, creating, and feeling our way through the unmistakable fact that plants are our symbiotic partners as we hurtle through space. brainstorm books is to be commended for the volume, a fresh harvest of the finest strains. author bio richard doyle (aka mobius) is the author of scores of scholarly articles and seven books. he has been awarded grants from the national science foundation and the mellon foundation while winning acclaim and accolades as a classroom teacher in the us, the uk, germany, and china. in 2002, doyle was healed of life long severe asthma in an ayahuasca ceremony, and he has since devoted his life to synthesizing the world's spiritual practices into a practical, open source and empirically verifiable pathway available to all. edwin erle sparks professor at penn state, doyle's recent books include, the genesis of now, darwin's pharmacy, and looking upside down at nothing. microsoft word 194-1550-1_chilianis.docx chilianis, m. (2018). listening to epilepsy and soundcloud: re-examining sonic subjectivity and affective labor. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-37. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © melanie chilianis, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article listening to epilepsy and soundcloud: re-examining sonic subjectivity and affective labor melanie chilianis melaniechilianis@gmail.com abstract while many patients who are ill form significant networks of support online, i argue that describing experiences in language over social media is not always desirable for someone with epilepsy. my line of inquiry instead explores the tension between music creation and fragmented subjectivity, and folds in a critique of soundcloud, the music sharing and networking site. i first analyze what it means for the subject to compose and produce electronic music, and then analyze my own music on soundcloud. i investigate affective attachment in relation to our entanglement with music and social media, and i extend this to a survey of subjectivity, physicality and networked capitalism. in the article, affect and listening are related through their materiality and space, and by their capacity to mediate sound and meaning. i examine listening for its potential to expand critical activity in accord with embodied processes that are relevant to situated disability. listening and affect guide my argument as concepts, and i conclude that distinct facets of listening can be connected to an ethics of living in the information society. 2 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) introduction while many patients who are ill form significant networks of support online, i argue that describing experiences in language over social media is not always desirable for someone with epilepsy. my line of inquiry instead explores the tension between music creation and fragmented subjectivity, and folds in a critique of soundcloud, the music sharing and networking site. i first analyze what it means for the subject to compose and produce electronic music, and then analyze my own music on soundcloud. i investigate affective attachment in relation to our entanglement with music and social media, and i extend this to a survey of subjectivity, physicality and networked capitalism. in the article, affect and listening are related through their materiality and space, and by their capacity to mediate sound and meaning. i examine listening for its potential to expand critical activity in accord with embodied processes that are relevant to situated disability. listening and affect guide my argument as concepts, and i conclude that distinct facets of listening can be connected to an ethics of living in the information society. i explore affective attachment and misrecognition in relation to epilepsy and narrative rupture. epilepsy is among other conditions or impairments such as schizophrenia, and agoraphobia that can impact the everyday self while not appearing to explicitly physically disable a person. although there is a danger in conflating epilepsy with agoraphobia or schizophrenia, they share some qualities. with schizophrenia, agoraphobia and epilepsy, there are degrees to which an individual will feel their personhood impaired. this may relate to the episodic and unpredictable nature of events that appear ‘outside’ a bounded ‘self’. in terms of epilepsy, impairment may pertain to frequency of seizures, type, intensity, location, or age of onset, and the disabling impact these have on daily activities. mary elene wood (2013) argues that the “often useful distinction between impairment (a limiting physical difference) and disability (the prejudice and social construction of living that excludes, ignores, and demeans those with impairments) can become fuzzy when 3 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) dealing with schizophrenia” (p. 23). this acknowledges that the social model, a long-used disability studies framework, is not necessarily suitable for minded impairments. minded ‘impairments’ directly impact how one is received as a rational subject and these conditions can threaten individuals’ status as valid communicators (price 2011). this has implications in the areas of activism, academia, the arts, and social media. i am therefore interested in the ramifications of narrative rupture in a communications context. affect is also a phenomenon that inheres in configurations of biopower, throughout media, labor and networks, and these “scientific, affective, and linguistic forces of the multitude aggressively transform the conditions of social production” (hardt & negri, 2004, p. 366). in this sense, affect is something subjective as well as something that veers toward the impersonal (koivunen, 2010). lauren berlant (2007, 2008, 2011) elaborates affect through a marxist lens, and extends her analyses to readings of feminist, queer, race and class focused case studies. affect reshapes subjectivity, including the possibility of co-operative subjectivity in relation to technology, which i shall visit later in the article. affect and listening are related through the ‘materiality of mediation’, in terms of sound’s provocations (grossberg, 2010). however, affect cannot address the configuration of the situated epileptic subject with music online. therefore, i enlist the modality of listening as it incorporates several foci in this essay: a situated and specific mind-body, online electronic music, and technoscientific space. aspects of music become ways of knowing analogous and interruptive to discursive structures, even ones of a fluid polymorphous character such as social media. a music-based approach enhances our preconceived notions of "illness" and provides a novel account distinct from many aesthetic perspectives in disability studies which focus on representations of the disabled body in visual art and literature (mitchell & snyder, 2000; lacom, 2005; siebers, 2005; anolik, 2010; straus, 2011; watson, 2012). much of this literature is concerned with the art forms that disabled people produce within a normate milieu, or with representations 4 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) of disabled people created in literary texts by the nondisabled at various points in history. while valuable, these approaches center on high-impact narrative in linguistic, visual, and even musical form, and they favor a certain intelligibility about revealing or uncovering selves either in language or visual art. i do not wish to denigrate first-person perspectives that have informed so much feminist and disability scholarship. as tobin siebers (2008) puts it, “suffering is a signal to the self at risk, and this signal applies equally to physical and social situations” (p. 20). suffering puts the subject on the outside of social norms; writing about how the disabled or impaired self experiences some of these norms, can disturb them. however, my point is that illness is often messy and makes little sense. instead, i offer an account of illness as caught in affective, informational networks ─ specifically soundcloud. such an account is relevant to disability studies and feminist science and technology studies because it provides a snapshot of a social media platform in the neoliberal society as connected to aural media and epilepsy. i argue that there is a gap in critical communication accounts of the information society (lash, 2002; fuchs, 2016) as well as in disability studies autoethnographies that i hope to help fill here by bringing affect into conversation with listening and epilepsy. by placing the subjective act of electronic music production in contrast to a later critique of soundcloud, i show why media platforms are problematic, in the sense that they embody a competitive information market. while some scholars see social audiovisual media in positive terms for citizens, where nonmonetary rewards such as satisfaction, pride in one’s work, social capital, and cultural capital on platforms such as youtube, myspace, and indaba music exist (jenkins, 2006; 2013; 2016; suhr, 2012), i argue that these ‘rewards’ are, at best more complex and, at worst, elusive not only for people with an impairment or chronic illnesses, but for many people. these rewards tie the subject to an intimate compositional process, both private and public, which i elaborate on in the following sections. seeking out and participating in public commenting, networking and exchange 5 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) online is not always a primary or pleasurable focus for someone with a neurological illness – someone who is ill may not gain much social capital from social media. furthermore, people with severe and ongoing illness are often unemployed, underemployed or face interruption to their career; therefore, to expect musical social media to grant non-monetary rewards as a kind of cultural citizenship, or to result in social belonging does not gel. i connect electronic music production and listening as these pertain to epilepsy and affective transmission. i survey soundcloud below, and analyze how the network has changed over time, as well as how engaging with soundcloud has both benefitted and detracted from me as a user with epilepsy. finally, i look at the role of listening in ethical configurations. methodology i understand the body and mind within a feminist framework that includes debates on knowledge, identity, marginalization, and the mattering of the body, which is intertwined with discourse and signs (haraway, 1991; collins, 2000; butler, 1990, 1993, 2001, 2004; currier, 2003). i see this as a complement to disability studies’ social model (siebers, 2008). as a researcher, musician, epileptic and user of soundcloud, i am embedded within the world i discuss; i therefore offer a first-person perspective. i am embodied. my bodymind interacts with social, environmental, and informational space intersecting with creative, medical, affective, attentive, and survival practices (wiley 2012). at different stages of the research, i have aimed to be reflexive by thinking about how my actions, writing and music processes impact the meaning of the framed experience at hand (hockman, 2010). however, i am not only dealing with my "experience," but also with music, with technological extensions, and with concepts. i therefore offer the caveat that i am positioned in various ways. theorizing embodiment ─ whether one’s own or others ─ is difficult, and i resort to using the abstraction "the body" or the "bodymind" to designate how subjectivity is entangled in the body, and possibly with other "things" (couser, 2012). along with bergson (1992), i 6 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) posit that reality is mobile: things "out there" are in the making, and states are not fixed but are always in a process of change. through my research, i work through this complexity and weave together the production of sound with concepts, rather than attempt to transcribe with wholeness my internalized picture (grosz 2005). for this reason, my perspective is partial: i do not seek to master subjectivity (haraway 1991; collins 2000). having said this, however, i do draw on auto-ethnographic and autobiographic traditions, situating my work among eli clare’s (2001; 2015), georgina kleege’s (1999; 2018), and isabel dyck’s (1999). these scholars write political memoir, autobiography, and a first-personperspective case study respectively and show how knowledge from a disabled person’s perspective contributes to knowledge through powerful means. while many narrative researchers are informed by the claim that we can all tell and understand stories, epilepsy challenges this on several fronts (squire, 2008). according to corinne squire (2008), narratives are recounted in sequence and they are underscored by aristotle’s belief that we all have the ability to make meaning through language as moral subjects ─ essentially storying our subjectivity. whatever the seizure experience ─ as a wide variety of seizures exist ─ epilepsy confounds the idea of linear, linguistic narrative by the way it interrupts taken-forgranted subjectivity. i argue that the body is present during the editing of digital music. by extension, the body may be perceived in online interactions and through listening to music composed, generally. discrete events within an "illness narrative" are perceived within an ever-emerging lifestream. at times, these events have rough edges or suddenly jerk into one’s body-consciousness; at others, they are gradual, bleeding the hue and taste of the atmosphere. in neurological chronic illnesses such as epilepsy and serious migraine, events cluster and subside, or surprise one. in this sense, chronic illness is a process rather than a state and involves periods of wellness as well as periods of ill health (van dongen & reis, 2001). this impacts the research narrative and what i choose to share. for example, it is preferable for me to seek subjective continuity 7 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) through music and formal language because the cumulative experience of many seizures is disorienting and interruptive. i highlight the practice of electronic and electro-acoustic musicmaking, which includes experimenting with software and re-mediating existing samples and media (kember & zylinska, 2010). i value musical artifacts but not simply in the sense that henry jenkins (2008, 2013) has in mind (i.e., as media contributing to convergence culture). this is too optimistic in my view because media do not address disability or categorize social difference in a critical sense. instead, i view the composition process and their products, which may yield several sonic ‘versions’, as a research process capable of illuminating conditions, discourses, change, temporalities, and constraints. according to patricia leavy (2009), music-making as a social research methodology can help researchers access, describe, and explain that which is often rendered invisible by traditional research practices. i posit that human variations and bodily sensations may be felt by listeners in electronic music and i foreground bodily gesture in electronic music, even though it may not be as easily observable or imagined as a person playing an instrument. although not without challenge, electronic music can “suggest” a body with timbre, texture, rhythm, dynamics, and frequency (echard, 2006). another way of thinking about the bodymind in electronic music is akin to that of an embodied “happening” (denora, 2000); while naomi cumming (1997) speaks of the listener’s role in "playing" musical subjectivities mediated by pieces of music. various senses, emotions, affect, memory and histories are the starting points for making meaning. i am not concerned with neurological perspectives on the effects of music on epilepsy, such as those of melissa maguire (2012) although brief mention must be made. these include music-processing approaches such as research aimed at reducing epileptic discharges in the brain by listening to mozart (lin et al. 2013); investigating where the auditory sensory memory is (collins, 2014); and the detailed study of musicians’ brains via fmri in order to demonstrate how music and language share brain networks (schlaub, 2015). nor am i seeking to 8 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) explore a neurological basis for creativity (chambliss, 2010) or tracing epilepsy-music connections via brain imaging. while maguire (2012) and schlaub (2015) undertake progressive research ─ maguire reviews the impact of particular antiepileptic drugs on musicians and schlaub investigates music treatments to "modulate" brain plasticity, including a final gesture to neurological music therapies ─ these approaches remain problematic. their methodologies bring to mind the histories and current practice of being and becoming a generalizable research subject ─ where the person is “always already on the edge of being regarded as at best a ‘different’ kind of person and at worst not a person at all” (wood 2013, p. 20). here wood deploys narrative methods to disturb this practice in mental illness to circumvent the subjecthood that takes place for schizophrenics. these studies can seem quite innocuous on the surface, but they are part of medicine's and psychiatry’s methods that have a history of subjugating epileptics and the mentally ill. i now turn to the question of how the bodymindedness of epilepsy finds its way in sound and music online. music, the subject and epilepsy i am interested in the composition process and engagement with sound. throughout this process, the bodymind is involved in an electronic music production, listening, feedback, and revision cycle, shaping and being shaped. i place versions of a composition online at or near the end of such a cycle. in this section i am concerned with how music and the subject are entangled, and how these embody understandings of epilepsy. as a starting point, aden evens (2005) gives an evocative description of sound and worlds as perceived by the composer: the composer and the performer capture percept and affect in sound, implicating worlds of forces not yet unleashed but whose reserve powers the music, driving it along. personal histories, impersonal events, an intake of breath, a bloody battle. an entire history of music insists implicated in every note, every phrase, 9 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) every contraction. a sonic history in every utterance, whose most contracted, whose clarity is the specificity of the sound but not its sense. it is this contraction, the contraction of all sound, the contraction of all vibrations, which gives sense to sound, contracting clearly just this vibration, this sound wave, and letting the rest remain obscure, implicated in various degrees of relaxation (p. 35). contraction and relaxation parallels contrast, as unheard and unattended-to frequencies fall away; one listens to this particular vibration and others recede. depending on the compositional approach, the composer may have a degree of volition in the creating process, which gives sense to her sound; however, the epileptic does not when a seizure visits her. there may be a “bloody battle” – between a need to keep going and seizures. when i am next in a production session, my body resets, finds a balance with determination, and carries on composing. i expand on the embodied and affective process of creating in this section and its relevance to "chronopolitics" (virilio via sharma, 2012), while i link this to affect in the affective attachment section below. my composition, swiqos1 (chilianis, 2017) responds to the selection process evoked by evens (2005) above. i will now describe how i made this piece, in a fragmented way, rather than a linear fashion. this example is an abrasive piece of electronic music that pinpoints aural sensations and convolutions. i actively worked with some of these sonic vibrations, which produced a range of subjective and bodily affects in me ─ from irritation to laughter. to begin with, i used a frenetic drum file that i had improvised in another audio application. i then i worked the area that straddles production and audio mixing. from my music journal: making so fast i don’t want to stop … something that made music, made rhythm jump for me. just now i solo-ed the middle band, as i felt the tom was over loud, i solo-ed it on and off and it produced quite a distinct audio effect, … because of the eddies of modulation in the other tracks. i may use this. i italicize these phrases as they stand out for me. the music-making 10 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) seems bigger than i am, it seems to have more volition and will than "i" do. a buzzy saw synth enters at 20” and is not pretty ─ it is in harsh contrast to the "bubbly", soft-edged and bouncy opening. this saw synth fades in and out through the piece and was a late addition by myself. perhaps it embodies an attempt to involve more "volition" against some of the more collaboratively, even passively made sound background. overall, i am at the controls: i am the one who solos a track, i can fade one sound down against the others if its vibrations grate; i select (but not if i have a seizure). i incorporated some random computer processes during the production of swiqos and one might point out that this indeterminacy is akin to the uncertainty of epilepsy. however, random selection out of a group of possible sound events still returns a specificity of sound in the final mix. in this instance a computer program randomly selects drum sounds, which are sometimes pitched randomly; in this case, the software is the selector. in another instance (in the arranging and mixing stage of production), i interact with the audio editor,2 seeing a potential for sound and rhythm. the level of complexity occurs through polyrhythms, layering, and the signal processing chain where at times i lost track of where or why sounds occurred.3 both happy accidents and sonic failure can occur during this kind of making process, which i occasionally cultivate in order to find sonic timbres previously unknown to me. in this instance, i allow sonic layers, timbral change and effects in addition to the mixing desk-like emulation in the software to guide me in my composition. throughout the production process, there is a distinct spatial positioning between the subject, the software, musical structure and the sonic shapes as they grow. the chain of musical sense that results from highlighting and sequencing sound from the mass of potential vibrations applies to both compositional approaches 1) random software algorithms, and 2) my interaction with music software. when i am held back by something that "feels" involuntarily outside the self, the "i" of the everyday can be suddenly nowhere, or can seem filtered with another substance (light, sound).4 "i" can be 11 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) momentarily inarticulate ─ but sound or noise of varying velocities and timbres makes sense to me. during these periods, conversations seem jarring and may proceed with delays on my side and uncertainty and wariness on the other. this excerpt from helene cixous’s (2004) work neuter demonstrates a loss of language through the paradox of william who kills off his character as he almost arrives at the symbolic (through the melted mirror). cixous questions how wilson can author his story, even though as readers we are asked to listen to a narrator without a subject, which destabilizes his voice. the reader will have to lend an ear to a narrator-sans-subject ergo sans voice other than that ear which, echo of its muteness, the admission of its loss feebly raises: indeed, at the moment in which william wilson writes he has already killed with his own hands the other william wilson he has scored out the name-of-william wilson from among the living at the time of a bloody scene in which the mirror melted on him, he lost access to the symbolic ergo it is impossible for william wilson to arrive at language, still more impossible to be the author of a brief story (p. 49). cixous (2004) takes us on a cochlear route arriving at a character’s authorial impossibility. i do not align myself with wilson’s character per se, except to acknowledge how poststructural subjectivity shares some qualities with the states associated with the seizures i experience. what i want to suggest is that when i place the "sonic body" online, the expectations and norms, both on and offline around strength, reason, career, ability, communication, and femininity usually result in my actively "killing off’" the self in language. facing an internet where people place their best and boldest, or even loudest selves online is dissonant,5 and not always appropriate for the eroded or fragmented self due to epilepsy. in this sense, it is safer to position subjectivity online via music. during and after illness we must become intelligible through whatever the symbolic and discursive registers are around us. judith butler (1999) has drawn attention to the “difficulty of the ‘i’ to express itself through the language that is available to it” (p. xxvi). the logic of the 12 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) dominant linguistic and economic registers, particularly those that rely on speed and efficiency, can sometimes alienate the epileptic bodymind, particularly in verbal interactions, when seizures slow or pause speech. epilepsy can thwart the rules of everyday communication. in response to this, i turn to music-making to regain continuity over rupture. as naomi cumming (1997) argues, “a person does not just move towards something but does so with ‘urgency’ or ‘hesitation.’” (p. 149). here, a relationship between gesture, subjectivity and object ─ in this case, a musical instrument or the sonic potentialities in a piece of music software ─ are evident. with gestures affected during seizing, and feelings of energetic release that burst through during wellness, there is no regular pattern; so i experience an inexplicable, zigzagging existential situation. this is reflected in the changing rhythms of swiqos. epilepsy often involves compromised social identity, despite what neurologists and positive narratives on the illness state. for example, many underestimate the felt and physical effort it takes to be around normed others during seizure and post-seizure periods: the annoyance of stares when i reach into my bag for medication after a seizure on the train; the confusion post-seizure that descends affecting everyday interactions, where strangers sometimes butt in to "correct" me. all these and more have a social cost, which i endure. some of these frustrations are routine repetitions ─ they can be heard as collisions, rhythms, buzzy timbres and intensities in my music. swiqos has identifiable boundaries, locations, transfers, ruptures, places, collisions, senses, repetitions, surprises and affects. trinh minh ha (2011) likens these boundaries and edges to twilight, where people’s identity slips and transforms, where a "dog is taken for a wolf." this is particularly salient for the person with epilepsy who may well understand the instability around subjective and bodily transformation. the temporal boundary animates a problematic for epilepsy, denoting the in-between yet obscured time period between body and mind states. i have framed an appreciation of the electronic music composition process so as to gain understandings of the subject and epilepsy from a different angle. i now turn to the notion of affective 13 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) attachment to place the subject online. affective attachment berlant’s (2011) notion of misrecognition is useful for comprehending the subject caught within the stickiness of the digital economy because it outlines a process where the subject seeks affective ties and attachment as well as perceiving musical meaning. she speaks of optimism in terms of attachment, where the subject compensates for what is difficult in a variety of ways. misrecognition is vital to exploring "the relation" and also to our relation to a "something": “to misrecognize is not to err, but to project qualities onto something so that we can love, hate, and manipulate it for having these qualities – which it might or might not have” (berlant, 2011, p. 122). for berlant, this process is part of shaping an optimistic life, whatever the constraints, and resolving "ambivalence" so that “we are not defeated by it” (p. 122). soundcloud is part of both the culture industry and facilitates connected intersubjective social worlds. in this way, there are multiple points for possible projection and relation, and they occur at distinct temporalities. the time it takes to upload a track, the period over which a collaboration takes place (including shared audio files and messages), the years spent on the platform, new algorithms that enable a piece to be "discovered" and shared (and subsequently buried again). it could be argued that swiqos embodies the temporalities of misrecognition and that it is perhaps the outcome of the spatial processes of attachment. teresa brennan’s (2004) interpretation of misrecognition is one of interlocking fantasies that are physical and grounded in a spatial configuration.6 as a spatial "image," misrecognition is one’s self “image … deflected back to the self from an other, one's ideal image, which also gives one a perspective on oneself” (brennan, 2004, p. 108). both brennan's and berlant’s notion of misrecognition are spatial, but i see brennan’s conceptualization as allowing for growth in embodiment and as a form of the imagination. 14 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) according to brennan (2004), the “force of the imagination is material and physical,” and this can be within the subject or projected outside the self to other "things" (p. 109). in this sense, the interlocking fantasies of misrecognition that are bound up with music and the body can be a desire for a more reliable body, competence within an acoustic network, or connections with other composers or musicians. we may strive to hear our loved thing; or, it may grate on us and grind us down. these fantasies of one’s self, one’s image, and the other also unfold sensorially in electronic music, in the cycles of production and desire within which we can be caught. in thinking about how we accommodate ruptures ─ be that in consciousness or narrative ─ berlant (2011) contends that the “sensual experience of self dissolution, radically reshaped consciousness, new sensoria, and narrative rupture can look similar” at a remove from both trauma and optimism (p. 44). as we compensate, we produce predictable habits that “defend against losing emotional shape entirely” (berlant, 2011, p. 44), and we wear tracks in our lives. to compensate is to find ways to counteract those things which are challenging, abrasive or unpleasant to living. however, the terms "compensate" and "defend" may not always be appropriate for the subject with epilepsy or mental illness. how does one compensate for seizures that interrupt one’s personal and professional life? if we were to speak of compensating for this radical gap, the very rupture a seizure creates, then i would prefer to do so in the productive sense to which berlant (2011) alludes (in reference to the "production of habits"). it is here i would defend the possibility of music in two senses: 1) as a habit ─ in terms of an everyday practice, as it is one i have felt i have a need to rely on ─ and 2) as a speculative affect. the former may often be interrupted by illness itself, or by doctors who curb the desiring self; the latter is a theoretical and practical tool ripe with possibilities, and therefore able to interrupt discursive configurations. despite the physical, psychic and emotional dimensions of the self that may be threatened during the range of epileptic experience, if there were to be a common thread, it would be in terms of the qualities of 15 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) unpredictability, myoclonic involuntariness, and cyclic irregularity. a subject who is routinely interrupted, even momentarily by "self dissolution," is perhaps more likely to seek temporal chains of compensation, in addition to the need to re-steady and locate her body in the spatial world. this reorientation is often done in the context of particular places among bodies, smells, and more specific or nameable emotions: all up, an affective scene (davidson & milligan, 2007). in what follows, i build on affect and i argue that listening is partially responsible for locating and orienting subjectivities that endure interrupted diurnal narratives and rhythms, not only for epilepsy, but for an ethics of relational media participation. listening online and offline in this section, i outline what it means to listen for epilepsy and whether the concept of listening may open alternatives to dominant linguistic and technological systems. attentiveness to listening as a process may destabilize potentially loaded, rational language and the terms on which ableist stories are told, including those used to soothe and ask questions of patients. in place of dominant medical narratives, we could be listening to the epileptic bodymind as music, tones, textures, and rhythms such as those i have discussed above in combination with musical subjectivities. or we could pay attention to the “sensual operation” of the affective voice with care (kanngieser, 2013, p. 237). in positioning listening in this way, i foreground disabilities ─ in particular, people with neurological and mental illness. i acknowledge the limits of the listening sense as a practice for deaf and hard-of-hearing communities; my inclusion of one modality as a way to attune sensitively to some bodies in the world is exclusionary to others. for jean-luc nancy, listening has its root in subjectivity, and underlies an opened being-to (devisch 2006). nancy’s (2008) work, listening, highlights the tactile and resonant relations amongst the subject and world, and directs attention away from thought in visual form. 16 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) this is a significant and valuable approach for renewing sonorous thinking about both the sound of language and of music itself. sounding is also key to subjectivity and gritten (2014) locates sound-listening in cognitive development as part of “mother-infant interaction”, contending that nancy’s analysis of music helps us to learn to trust each other (p. 26). while gritten assumes a woman in the mothering role (and, presumably, a heteronormative configuration), the role of sound in this relational context should be noted. i shall revisit listening’s promise in terms of how the sonic can assist moral, ethical, and aesthetic contexts in the final section. for now i focus on how nancy (2008) explores the time of the subject as a referral, and in this way investigates how meaning and sound share that time, which is also the time and space of the self: a self is nothing other than a form or function of referral: a self is made of a relationship to self, … and the point of occurrence of a subject in the substantial sense would have never taken place except in the referral, thus in pacing and resonance, at the very most as the dimensionless point of the reof this resonance: the repetition where the sound is amplified and spreads, as well as the turning back [rebroussement] where the echo is made by making itself heard. (p. 25) subjectivity is enfolded with sound and sense. nancy (2008) encourages a listening subject beyond a phenomenological "point of view" insisting that listening is “always still yet to come, spaced, traversed and called by itself, sounded by itself” to a resonance of being (p. 21). key to nancy’s argument is his appropriation of two french verbs from electro-acoustic composer, pierre schaeffer,7 écouter and entendre (kane 2012). écouter denotes “distance and spatial location (where) identifying objects on the basis of their distinguishing sonic characteristics” assists us in situating sound (schaeffer 1966, p. 106, cited in kane 2012, p. 440). this is significant in everyday, embodied sonic scenarios. but in nancy’s (2007) words, écouter becomes an “intensification and a concern, a curiosity or an anxiety” (p. 21). the sensing self listens and “perhaps it is necessary that sense not be content to make sense … but that it also wants to 17 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) resound” (nancy 2008, p. 22). nancy here speaks of entendre, which for schaeffer had been a way to focus on the quality of sounds away from their original contexts.8 nancy (2008) extends entendre, and unfolds a perceiving self-inworld; for him differences in human senses are evidenced by the immense variety in musical shifts across history and genre. his work also “resists re-inscribing a listening subject and a listened to object. instead, the audible appears affirmatively as the perpetual flux of a shared sonorous world” (hickmott, 2015, p. 482). however, a call to listen should not envelop every person in the same way, which a perpetual flux could hide. indeed, a call to listen is dependent upon who is telling whom to listen; it can be redolent of discipline, school, official directives and ─ as nancy (2008) himself points out ─ an imperative to understand or a command to be silent. furthermore, nancy’s work effaces not only sexual difference quite explicitly by using the male pronoun, but also assumes someone who listens with ease of attention and ability at all times. as sarah hickmott (2015) argues, most of nancy’s arguments are based on "great western art music" and are aligned with the conscious will. while his anti-foundational listening space routes dualism differently, it disguises power relations a person with a disability faces during an encounter with the medical establishment, if i am to bring this back to self-in-world. i am also concerned that nancy maps much of his ontology onto the empty womb of venus and he relies on this visual metaphor of the female "belly" “which reduces feminine and maternal sexuality to an ultimately unproductive womb” (hickmott, 2015, p. 488). the resonating womb, the "empty belly" or the "empty vessel", then becomes the reof the above, repeating, spreading sound; the depoliticized, decontextualized feminine form carrying masculine ideas (hickmott, 2015). my own listening is sometimes affected by seizures; remembering or tracking the order and sequence of a verbal message can be difficult; musical listening too can be compromised. i briefly add schaeffer’s (1966) first two listening modes to complete the four to assist with the 18 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) impact epilepsy has on listening in these scenarios. schaeffer’s first word for listening is ouïr. it describes distracted attention to background sound and noise, where everyday sounds pass us by unnoticed; with the second meaning, comprendre, we aim to understand messages from utterances and languages, including "musical grammars" (kane, 2012). comprendre emphasizes listening as understanding, perceiving messages from others and the media. playing in ensembles is a challenge if i "drop out" during the middle of a piece, or an improvisation. the seizure time may be short, up to two minutes, but in returning to the situation i play without entendre (full intention), because i am yet to écouter ─ identify sound objects, and spatially locate with precision my body and the sounds around it, including my fellow musicians. i am for a time submerged, the listening state returned to ouïr, (described by kane (2012) pejoratively as the “least developed” but filtered at a distance (p. 440). for me, having a good rehearsal is not necessarily about disability pride (for example, not caring about my impairment and seeing society as disabled), it does actually depend on whether or not i have a seizure during the real-time flow of musical time. how quickly will the muscles in my embouchure recover so that they will have the flexibility and resilience of the musician i was yesterday.9 am i able to play through all the movements of a mozart duet? will i remain sensitive to other improvisers and acoustic events in a jam session? muscles and consciousness will be affected, but sometimes they are not: therefore, there are inconsistencies in my abilities. however, if i do have a seizure during playing, "i" "keep going" as soon as possible in order to flout biomedical expectations that living with epilepsy leads to “learned helplessness” (hermann, trenerry & colligan, 1996 in bishop & allen, 2007). through listening, i build a multilayered aural picture of myoclonic epilepsy. i now vary the focus to technological concerns, to the music network site soundcloud. 19 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) soundcloud and the digital economy soundcloud is a social media network that allows users to upload audio and share their content with listener followers. listeners follow musicians and those musicians appear in a timeline on the users’ home screen. it spans the globe and hosts a range of musical content in a vast array of styles, from first-time makers to commercial artists. soundcloud is now one of the world’s largest audio media platforms: since launching in 2008, the platform has become renowned for its unique content and features, including the ability to share music and connect directly with artists, as well as unearth breakthrough tracks, raw demos, podcasts and more. this is made possible by an open platform that directly connects creators and their fans across the globe. music and audio creators use soundcloud to both share and monetise their content with a global audience, as well as receive detailed stats and feedback from the soundcloud community (about soundcloud, n.d.). soundcloud has been through many revisions and upgrades, particularly since web 2.0. i have used the platform since 2010, when the promise of "monetizing" content was not in the "about" page. soundcloud is celebrated by many in the music industry, for example, “the platform’s deeply social nature ─ based around following artists, labels, and curators, liking and resharing tracks, and adding comments at specific times within a song’s waveform ─ makes soundcloud feel more personal and interactive than other streaming services” (titlow, 2017). in recent years, when people online heard that soundcloud might fold, there was worry, disappointment and a rush by some to archive the entire site (hagerdoorn 2017)10. as a platform, many music and audio creators use soundcloud to share their audio or in the hope of finding an audience. it now attracts commercial artists with expensive pr campaigns and major label interest. at the outset, co-founders eric wahlforss's and alexander ljung’s ideal target user was the semi-professional artist. as an artist or creator, it was 20 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) easier to find, attract and keep audiences for one’s work when the network was smaller. but the effort to attract new audiences has declined over the years and wahlforss points out that the returns for creators are indeed "marginal" in terms of membership in the network; for him, investing in this demographic is limited: for instance: we always focused very hard on the creators. we still do. but eventually the marginal returns of improving things for creators goes down. except for things that help them expand their reach among listeners. so product wise, i think we’re shifting more towards discovery than other product features. (2017). content made through embodied-technology chains, supplied by creators and uploaded to the cloud adds value to information networks. content supplied in this way is part of an affective network known as digital labor because it benefits, or is exploited by, start-ups or corporations; it is unpaid (terranova, 2004; scholz, 2013; hardt & negri 2004). users on soundcloud are well aware of this, as the community protests every time the platform upgrades to new versions. for example, when soundcloud launched soundcloud go in 2016, there was much negative response from the artist community about the geoblocking of some content. indie musician dave wiskus’s open letter to the start-up also demonstrated this: you’ve been running ads for a while now without paying us. … but now you’re charging people for access to our songs, rolling out the red carpet for the major labels, and saying you’ll get around to us eventually. …so not only are you getting our music for free and paying us nothing, we’re actually paying you to take it. what an excellent deal (meadow, 2016). there are a number of affects projected onto soundcloud by wiskus and, while it may not be possible to conclude whether this is misrecognition, soundcloud and playing music are certainly bound up with his subjectivity. there is disappointment here, and thus something of berlant’s "cruel optimism". and soundcloud co-founders have stated to the tech community that they are not interested in investing in creators 21 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) despite the unique value that community generates (from new music from palestine and nairobi to archives of happy hardcore from the 1990s). in wahlforss’s words: “we rely on a community of audio creators, and that’s something that nobody else has.… and it’s used in so many different ways. it’s less about search and listen. soundcloud is audio that reaches you in various ways” (2017). his language here is very much that of corporate ownership (wahlforss recently stopped the internet archive backing up the network). a listening of the one-to-many. to contrast, a datahoarder user believes that “sites of cultural importance should be constantly archived” indicating a potential listening site for the many-tomany outside of those who "own" (fullouterjoin, 2017). it is ironic that wahlforss and ljung won a european web entrepreneur award in 2013 for their work with soundcloud, with the european commission recognizing their goal to democratize music online beyond this listening experience (european commission, 2013). as jodi dean (2012) puts it, networked media such as soundcloud are a part of “communicative capitalism”, a material-symbolic order that promises limitless opportunity for connection, participation, and contribution. an entrepreneur award from the european commission ─ an established organizational body that acts in europe’s interests with the power to manage eu policies, allocate funding, and discuss international trade ─ recognizing soundcloud through its democratizing, even revolutionary qualities that the early net had is an idealizing of a network that i question. my critique comes from the perspective of a creator participant and i build on this perspective in the next section. affective attachment and disappointment can power ─ or stimulate ─ the need to produce and therefore enlist digital labor, keeping the net afloat with audio content. this is also about desire, making the "object or scene powerful enough to have magnetized an attachment to it" and involves relations of proximity and approximate exchange (berlant, 2011, p. 48). an example is the soundcloud groups feature, which the platform terminated in 2016 amid much community protest. over the years, i participated in several groups. in an ocean of content, groups were a way 22 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) for like-minded creators to find each other, listen, perhaps collaborate and comment with respect. a user moderates a group, but there is a possibility among many user-members to exchange material that ends up in a new work. i considered this most valuable, for example, see my remix of flautist andrew bishop, repeater (chilianis 2013). although the groups, australian experimental music or the flute group do not exist now, the comments by three others and myself were made while the piece was shared to these groups. in this way, soundcloud acted as a kind of “promise”, and as subjects in a network we perhaps leaned “toward promises contained within the present moment of the encounter” (berlant 2007, 33). the encounter is a sonic, communicative one. during these times, soundcloud enabled me, sometimes very quickly, to show work to collaborators located in spatially distant areas and continents, i shared fragments of sonic work to installations overseas, it functioned as a portfolio when applying to calls for work, and i have enjoyed listening to musicians i would not otherwise have heard. when wahlforss and ljung removed the group function, i noted the social media outcry against it. sam bartee (2016) a group moderator argues that: soundcloud claims that groups are ineffective in growing an audience. on the contrary, groups are one of the few remaining ways to grow an audience if the music you create isn’t mainstream. i can personally confirm this, as my audience growth has been almost exclusively through groups, rather than curated playlists, reposts or other methods. i have tried these, but there simply isn’t an audience large enough for these methods to work (bartee, 2016). along with bartee, most of my small audience (186 followers) grew several years ago when i was a member of a few groups. but there are other factors that impact audience growth, such as changes to the interface (many users objected to changes in interface, thus impacting the listening experience), whether listeners in other countries have access to your work (geoblocking), and anti-piracy algorithms. over the last few years my initial involvement with soundcloud diminished when the 23 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) network grew too big to be meaningful for me. a search for particular genres, subcultures or experimental music was less likely to yield results and more likely to return the generic search of the day. in other words, soundcloud’s “discovery” algorithms overrode a manual search keyed to creators’ tags. additionally, many of my followers, particularly those who were experimental musicians or composers were now rarely active, perhaps also discouraged by these features. individuals have their own many and varied listening and affective relationships to digital music. this article is not an empirical study of the differing depths to which people listen online; however, i argue that there is a distinction between wahlforss and ljung’s discourse and the economic purpose for the platform on the one hand, and the subjectivization of an individual through online sonic media, on the other. for example, sean cubitt (2013) states that “a traditional condition of subjectivity is awareness of the relations one has entered into. such awareness may not be a property of immersion into social networks” (p. 76). while that may be the traditional view, there are more relational views of subjectivity more in accord with minority identities. for example, wendy brown (2005) argues, the neoliberal body politic is not seen as a body, rather, as a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers. this occurs even if we are expecting something akin to "community" voice or a listening public. therefore, it is somewhat of a fallacy that social media is conceived of as a democratic space or publics, as it embodies the values and logic of neoliberalism. even when recognition seems possible, it is “only on the terms that govern a competitive market of appearances” (couldry, 2010, p. 131). bodyminds feel and sense, and music and sound can be vital to subjectivity, but this subjectivity is not immune to appropriation in entrepreneurial terms. it is time to grapple with the idea of multiplicity, multiple others breathing and sensing. 24 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) the role of listening in ethical configurations to begin at the smallest scale, listening on soundcloud occurs through a network where one is connected by one’s followers and those whom one follows. kate crawford (2012), who likens listening online to paying attention, investigates the ways individuals share ─ or withhold ─ to social media with a variety of listening stances. i can listen to other artists with attentiveness, sometimes i take notes on a composition and give feedback or a review, i send the musician a message; or i can listen distractedly akin to flicking through television channels. i am open to the newness of the music or sonic world presented to me, or i am not. then there is the entire (always unfinished) acoustic field soundcloud, a possibility made of listeners inhabiting a condition of plurality and intersubjectivity (lacey, 2013). this is seen as valuable by music bloggers, reviewers, and record labels in addition to soundcloud. however a more detailed investigation is necessary in order to grasp the flows and surges in power. a wider notion of listening encompasses social and economic inequalities. through listening, i invite multiple voices, non-traditional narratives, and unusual ways of being to participate in an acoustic sphere. i highlight the temporal implication of human and technological interdependence. i now conceptualize the singular disabled body as part of the “social fabric” where “individuals’ and social groups’ senses of time and possibility are shaped by a differential economy, limited or expanded by the ways and means that they find themselves in and out of time” (sharma, 2014, p. 3). for, the vagaries and multiple tempi of chronic illness lend the possibility of understanding vulnerability in others. the quality of this understanding involves limits, and to understand “the limits of ‘knowing’, ‘understanding’, and ‘acknowledging’ others is to render a disposition of humility and generosity” (butler, 2005, p. 53). as judith butler (2005) says: as we ask to know the other, or ask that the other say, finally or definitively, who he or she is, it will be important not to expect an 25 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) answer that will ever satisfy. by not pursuing satisfaction and by letting the question remain open, even enduring, we let the other live, since life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it. if letting the other live is part of any ethical definition of recognition then this version of recognition will be based less on knowledge than on an apprehension of epistemic limits. (butler, 2005, p. 53) i believe these epistemic limits can be approached, not by an immersive overflowing sense of listening, but through listening in a register that is somewhat filtered. despite claims that sound is allimmersive, sound is also locative and we can face toward another’s account, should they wish to give it. this kind of listening may take the form of “a willingness to acknowledge the limits of acknowledgement itself” (butler, 2005, p. 53). there can be different qualities of listening, as nancy and crawford attest. i do not propose that the listening register i am thinking of here is the same as a fan’s moving and “soulful” experience (van maas, 2012), but i suggest that we can recognize the other by curbing the master "i" and even the cognition, momentarily. for me, this kind of listening is sometimes most possible after the "i" is interrupted by a single seizure or during "wait time" before doctors’ appointments. i am more aware of unfair labor practices, i hear the disrespect in an escalator boss’s voice when he shouts to his older worker, i imagine populations who work in electronics factories in china and workers on undersea cables. while there are certainly limits to a listening stance that engages with others in the global media and technological labor force, i argue it is possible to listen for the temporalities that constrain diverse, mostly outsourced, populations from call center workers, to iphone factory workers, to those who work on internet infrastructure, or in western countries, to the working poor or those seeking more employment in the west. i am mindful of sarah sharma’s (2014) intertwining of temporalities and power relations, which “must be set again and again. they are expected to recalibrate and fit into a larger temporal order” (p. 8). 26 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) listening means i am willing to face toward the other, to listen to accounts of debility, exhaustion, overwork, underwork, and social difference with an openness; to understand, partially, that some others slow while many speed. as a result, certain labor forces suffer from changed posture, long-term pain, poisoning, accidents ─ including death ─ that result in disability. in these situations, illness and debility can become the new norm in entire working populations (puar, 2009). i discussed the notion of the temporal boundary in my own music above as it related to my bodily changes. here a temporal boundary points to a class separation between those whose time matters and those whose time does not. an example of people for whom time matters is international business people who demand taxi drivers drive fast to the airport through peak hour (sharma, 2014). the body is inherent in listening equations to the extent that it interacts and senses human interdependence. it is this sensitive-ear, attuned as much to atmosphere (brennan 2004) as to online networks, which enables imaginary publics in diverse geo-locations. bîrneanu, alexiu, baciu, sandvin and fylling (2016) conducted research “in timiş county, in order to explore the ‘lived’ experiences of 24 people with disabilities both from cities and countryside regarding problematic aspects of disability or community/economic factors likely to influence the disabled person’s status on the labor market” (p. 57). although this discourse from a romanian ethnography appears to see people with a disability as a “problem” in relation to the economy, the researchers do unpack parental and career opinions regarding the limitations of what it is like to live in isolated rural areas with a lack of access to medical treatment (bîrneanu et al. 2016). a further consideration is how the nation is conceptualizing some of the guiding principles of disability around educational and workplace inclusion, as received from the united nations and unesco charters. i believe it is important to be aware of concepts of disability outside of the west, and i only touch the surface here. there are two limitations to what i have called my listening imaginary: 1) butler’s epistemological reserve regarding the limits of "acknowledgement", and 27 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) 2) during times of prolonged ill-health i am more vulnerable. thus it is challenging to maintain this particular "feminist stance." a more general listening, tactile sensitivity is possible. conclusion in this article i have focused on epilepsy, musical subjectivity, and affective attachment on the one hand, and the musical network, soundcloud and digital labor on the other. i have brought these two perspectives together through attention to listening, which has allowed me to subvert linear narrative to some extent. linear and traditional narratives are not necessarily appropriate for epilepsy and other sporadic or episodic illness which present interruptive and non-linear qualities. the experience of the epileptic seizure and the subject’s compromised "felt self" during that time allow for a poetics of attachment associated with electronic musical play and, initially, an engagement with soundcloud. i often seek compensation through music for the sudden "loss of control" caused by an unpredictable flow of electrons. by listening out for the discontinuity and fragmentation with which the subject lives, we may be able to gauge an uncomfortable sense of "dis-ease" that is called for when thinking of the many. for it is through attention to rhythms, shifts, and swerves in music that we may become attuned to these temporal variances and collisions in multiple subjectivities. while soundcloud promises global reach and the possibility of "direct connections" or even money as a platform, it cannot offer this equally to every user. in the case presented here, a small array of sonicaural connections do exist, and music sharing, occasional collaborations, remixes and genuine comments also occur, suggesting an intimate sonic publics. i also listen on soundcloud and follow many people from different continents. in this way, especially with small-scale artists, i enact a listening beyond the (epileptic) body, in order to imagine the body in the internet. this is not an unproblematic stance (since this is bound up in digital labor), but it is a starting point for exploring musical participation. 28 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) musical participation online is complex and needs further investigation, particularly around the area of illness and disability. i am thinking about the multiple routes sonic information takes within a listening public and the meaning that is made by others. from a critical perspective, it may not be possible to control soundcloud's production process, including the means and outcomes of media production (for which christian fuchs (2016) argues we should aim). as a musician and epileptic i can be critically reflexive about online listening; i can also withdraw. modes of listening take many forms (nancy, 2008) ─ in both onand offline spheres ─ and while there are so many sounds that catch us, patterning back and forth, passing us by, hooking into our attention, our desire, interacting with the other senses, we may, in the midst of the network, turn our listening ear toward an other. i imagine a practice, habit, or culture that is more striated and accommodating for the multiple temporalities of disability and illness. notes 1 https://soundcloud.com/melchil/swiqos. retrieved 27 march 2017 2 digital audio workstation or daw as these applications seem to be referred to. 3 in daw the emphasis is on ‘workflow’, ‘control’, and knowhow. 4 i have generalised idiopathic epilepsy, which denotes that the cause is unknown and that the epileptiform activity arises from all parts of the brain. my generalised tonic clonic (grand mal) seizures are ‘controlled’ on medication. i have myoclonic seizures monthly to daily. 5 the exception is groups on social media, such as facebook, where people with epilepsy are members. they may discuss recent seizures or the side effects of medication. i do not discount such groups; i only wish to describe another phenomenon. 6 based on lacan’s mirror stage: “lacan caught its nature in the mirrorphase or moment when the subject has an image of itself in the eye of the other.” (brennan, 2004, p. 108). 29 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) 7 schaeffer had four verbs for listening. 1) ouïr, 2) comprendre, 3) écouter & 4) entendre as i will elaborate below. 8 for a discussion about how schaeffer and nancy’s use of the french verbs differ, see kane 2015 in martin scherzinger ed. music in contemporary philosophy, 2015. 9 embouchure refers to the way the mouth and facial muscles are used to play a wind instrument. the muscles around the mouth and lips form a shape to allow air flow. sound resonates in the body of the flute and the body of the player. 10 see also discussion on datahoarder group: https://www.reddit.com/r/datahoarder/comments/6oisam/soundcloud_s aid_no_a_call_to_arms/ & archiveteam https://www.reddit.com/r/archiveteam/comments/6ohytf/soundcloud_req uests_the_internet_archive_cease/ references about soundcloud (n.d.). retrieved from https://soundcloud.com/pages/contact ahmed, s. 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(pp. xx37 chilianis catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) xx). milton park: routledge. wood, m. e. (2013). life writing and schizophrenia: encounters at the edge of meaning. amsterdam, nl: rodopi. van dongen, e., & reis, r. (2001). chronic illness: struggle and challenge. medical anthropology: cross cultural studies in health and illness, 19(4), 293-297. barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. bio melanie chilianis is a composer and independent scholar from melbourne, australia. she has work permanently (commissioned) in the goldcoast exhibition centre audiovisual alcove and her solo sound installation days of our lives was represented in contemporary composition: from avant-garde to experimental curated by stéphanie kabanyana kanyandekwe in now hear this, part of melbourne now at the national gallery of victoria. her acoustic compositions have been performed and broadcast live on abc-fm (australia) and radio 3 (national radio, italy). she holds a doctor of philosophy in film and communication studies where she explored the concept of the epileptic body through electronic music. she published an encyclopaedia entry on drum’n’bass music in australia, co-authored an article on children’s engagement in art and music (australian art education), and presented at the first sound:gender:feminism:activism symposium in london (creative research into sound arts practice, london college of communication). melanie’s sound work mcvox, published by winchester university press, is archived in the british library. her recent electronic and electroacoustic music explores the tension between interruption and a desire for continuity. melanie currently collaborates with iranian composer and santour player atefeh einali. microsoft word 71502-1-11_vandewiel.docx van de wiel, l. (2018) prenatal imaging: egg freezing, embryo selection and the visual politics of reproductive time. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-35. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © lucy van de wiel. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license ` article prenatal imaging: egg freezing, embryo selection and the visual politics of reproductive time lucy van de wiel university of cambridge lvdw2@cam.ac.uk abstract in the last decade, two influential new reproductive technologies have been introduced that are changing the face of in vitro fertilization (ivf): egg freezing for “fertility preservation” and time-lapse embryo imaging for embryo selection. with these technologies emerge alternative visual representations of the assisted reproductive process and its relation to time. first, frozen egg photographs provide a lens onto contemporary reconfigurations of reproductive aging and stage a life-death dyad between the frozen cell and the embodied self, which drives treatment rationales for egg freezing. second, time-lapse embryo imaging creates visual recordings of developing embryos in the incubator; the resultant quantified visual information can then be repurposed as a tool for predicting embryo viability. as these two sets of prenatal images reference dying eggs and non-viable embryos, they demonstrate a necropolitics of reproductive time, in which not only the generativity of new life but also the encounter with the death, finitude and fallibility of reproductive substances drives a widespread and intensified engagement with reproductive technologies. 2 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) introduction in the second half of the twentieth century, prenatal life became visually recognisable in the grey flurries of fetal ultrasound, the stylized photography of fetal remains and the iconic scene of fertilization by micro-injection of a sperm into an egg cell.1 prenatal images play a key role in shaping reproductive experiences such as pregnancy or in vitro fertilization (ivf) and have gained symbolic significance as they circulate beyond the clinic into advertisements, political campaigns and popular culture at large (franklin, 1993). feminist scholarship as well as science and technology studies (sts) have drawn attention to the importance of reproductive imaging in the cultural imagination of the reproductive process. technologies such as ultrasound and fetal photography have all been highly significant not only in visualizing prenatal life, but in reconceptualizing the reproductive process itself, the gendered bodies involved in this process and the temporal structures that govern them (duden, 1993b; franklin, 2014; petchesky, 1987). now, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, two influential new reproductive technologies have emerged that offer alternative representations of the assisted reproductive process and its relation to time. firstly, egg freezing, the popular “fertility preservation” technology, produces photomicrographs of frozen eggs that reference a period of ongoing cryopreservation. secondly, “time-lapse embryo imaging,” an ivf embryo screening technology, relies on the visual analysis of the developing embryos in the incubator. both egg freezing and time-lapse embryo imaging are recent, and rapidly-adopted, innovations in assisted reproduction that engage cellular time by instrumentalizing, respectively, the temporal plasticity and developmental regularity of prenatal life. the visual mediations of cellular life that these technologies produce bring the extracorporeal reproductive process into view. although the assisted reproductive process has ceased to be located 3 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) exclusively inside the female body since the advent of ivf four decades ago, the recent popularization of egg freezing for fertility preservation and time-lapse embryo imaging for embryo selection has routinized the visualization of an originary ex vivo component of the individual reproductive process.2 beyond "in vitro fertilisation (ivf), the in vitro cryopreservation of eggs and the in vitro incubation of embryos have become the subject of representation and reproductive decision-making. through the analysis of us and uk case studies of photomicrography3 of frozen eggs and time-lapse videos of developing embryos, i will make the case that these twenty-first-century visual mediations of early, extracorporealized prenatal life reconfigure the reproductive process in line with shifting treatment rationales that underlie an ongoing expansion of ivf and its industries. i do so through a cultural analysis4 of these new reproductive images, which hitherto remained hidden from the intended parent but are now routinely shared. the first case study revolves around the photomicrographs of frozen eggs. egg freezing has become a widely influential reproductive technology in the last decade. an increasing number of fertility clinics offer the procedure and the possibility of freezing eggs has been widely covered in public debates, popular culture and academic literature (carroll & kroløkke, 2018; jackson, 2017; van de wiel, 2014a). now that frozen eggs may continue to exist for extended periods of time outside the body, cellular photography of ova becomes a means for relating to them while they remain in the freezer. with a close reading of the frozen egg’s photomicrograph, i will analyse how the discursive practices and apparatuses of imaging that frame the frozen eggs reconceptualize and repoliticize reproductive time in cells and bodies alike. time-lapse embryo imaging, the second case study, attracted national media attention when it was introduced in the uk in 2013 and has been heavily promoted by fertility clinics in britain and across the globe as an alternative, and more advanced, form of embryo selection. time-lapse embryo imaging systems integrate incubators and cameras to create time-lapse videos of developing embryos. these systems can 4 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) observe and record temporal developmental markers (e.g., the timing of cell division), which provide the basis for a predictive viability assessment of the embryos. time-lapse embryo imaging is rapidly being adopted in fertility clinics around the world and is changing clinical and research practices. emerging in the wake of an increasingly public visual interface with prenatal life, the visualization of cellular development in time-lapse embryo videos adds yet another visual dimension to the encounter with early human life on screen. time-lapse imaging also introduces a novel instrumentalization of cellular time, given that temporal markers — rather than static morphology — of embryo development become the basis for selection. both of these imaging technologies introduce new, individualized representations of prenatal development which provide a foundation for reimagining the reproductive process and the temporalities that govern it. by visualizing frozen eggs and developing embryos in the context of the fertility clinic, these imaging technologies bring the ex vivo component of the assisted reproductive process into view. once outside the body, the time of cellular stasis or cellular development can align with patients’ reproductive goals of extending fertility or predicting viability. in turn, the suggested possibilities of cryopreserving fertility and assessing embryo viability harness reproductive futures to expand the indications for fertility treatment in contemporary ivf. first, egg freezing can expand the group of potential ivf patients as an infertility treatment for the fertile population to avoid future infertility. second, time-lapse embryo imaging expands ivf by adding extra treatment options for each treatment cycle to avoid future failed implantations. the future-oriented treatment logics underlying this expansive drive can be analysed through a close reading of the visual mediations of eggs and embryos that co-emerge with the rising popularity of egg freezing for fertility preservation and time-lapse embryo imaging for embryo selection. this paper, then, explores the entanglements of embodied, technological, cellular and capital temporalities in twenty-first-century visual cultures of assisted reproduction to analyse the treatment rationales underlying the expansion 5 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) of contemporary ivf. freezing eggs, freezing time in the last decade, egg freezing has become an increasingly popular reproductive technology for women who would like to have the possibility of having genetically-related children later on in life. particularly the use of egg freezing to circumvent age-related infertility has received widespread attention both within the fertility sector and in wider public discourses (inhorn, 2017; jackson, 2017). as what is effectively an ivf procedure with a period of cryostorage between egg extraction and fertilization, egg freezing introduces an alternative temporal organization of the reproductive process. instead of the conventional nine months, the duration between ovulation and a potential birth may be stretched, while the act of extracting and freezing eggs itself can be framed as a first step in an ivf cycle that may lead to future live births (van de wiel, 2014b). yet what makes egg freezing a unique reproductive technology is that it does not seek to create a “take-home baby” in the first instance but is instead organized around the continuation of reproductive potentiality, or fertility.5 the resultant cryopreserved fertility is more temporally flexible; it is frequently framed as “extended fertility” (mohapatra, 2014) and shifts existing temporal limits to childbearing and conception. with the temporal plasticity of freezable eggs — and the reproductivity and fertility associated with them — emerges a new temporal politics of reproduction. scholars of reproduction have situated egg freezing within broader conflicting societal pressures on women’s life course management. in making parents, us sociologist charis thompson (2005) highlights challenges of synchronization between different bureaucratic, cyclical, social and biological time scales of the fertility clinic, in which the temporal structures of the working day, the menstrual cycle, cellular developmental rhythms and age norms pertaining to childbearing meet (pp. 111–112). following thompson, australian sociologist catherine waldby (2015) suggests that women use egg 6 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) freezing to reconcile the “otherwise incommensurable differences between the time scale of their reproductive biology, the steadily elongating nature of the life course and the increasingly iterative structure of portfolio careers and relationship formation” (p. 479). several feminist scholars, such as cattapan, hammond, haw and tarasoff (2014), have argued that egg freezing is an expensive and risky procedure that provides an individualist solution to structural social issues that result in later childbearing (p. 239). these include labor-related provisions of parental leave and childcare as well as class-specific patterns in relationship formation (carbone & cahn, 2013; inhorn, 2017). in responding to external social pressures on women, the growing popularity of egg freezing also reflects the production of new temporal regimes that govern the management of embodied female reproductivity throughout the life course. when presumably fertile women can preemptively undergo infertility treatment, the biomedicalization of infertility begins to extend to the fertile life course.6 conversely, egg freezing is also often framed as a means of mitigating the “biological clock” (wyndham, figueira, & patrizio, 2012) and thereby suggests that fertility can be extended to the infertile life course. through this double movement, cryopreservation enables the overlapping of fertile and infertile life courses in new ways, resulting in a state of what we may refer to as “postfertility.” this is not to say that the categories of fertility and infertility have become obsolete — quite the contrary. rather, these categories are mobilized in new ways and begin to signify through one another when infertility is lived in the fertile life phase and fertility is positioned as extending beyond pre-existing reproductive age limits. as a consequence, fertility becomes an increasingly uncertain, and precarious, referent. as both fertility and infertility become indications for treatment to, respectively, preserve or achieve reproduction, egg freezing poses new questions about the agency that may be exerted over timing reproduction. combined, the possibility of egg freezing simultaneously produces the suggestion of increased agency and increased uncertainty about the ongoingness of reproductive potential.7 in a context of a rapidly 7 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) expanding fertility sector — projected to grow to $21 billion worldwide by 2020 (maida, 2016) — egg freezing presents new opportunities for creating consumer need pertaining both to making fertility legible and exerting agency over its relation to time. as the possibility of egg freezing becomes the occasion for interpellating large groups of presumably fertile women to consider “extending fertility,” it becomes necessary to reflect critically on the entanglement of cultural and clinical processes that reconceptualize reproductive time in the production of treatment rationales for this new reproductive technology. one cultural-clinical object in which these processes coalesce is the visual representation of the frozen egg, which provides a case study for reflecting on the reproductive futures, pasts and presents that animate influential treatment rationales for egg freezing. the frozen egg image follows a rich history of reproductive imaging in which both the visualization of prenatal life — in ultrasound, in ivf, in fetal photography — and the temporal logic it represents have been adopted to rationalize and politicize the reproductive process. perhaps the most influential example of this is the use of ultrasound imaging technology and fetal photography in anti-abortion rhetoric, which appealed specifically to fetal developmental time to limit access to abortion.8 much as the visible fetus was ascribed autonomy and independence, so scientific images of gametes (sperm and eggs) play a key role in contemporary imaginations of reproduction that position gametes as autonomous protagonists in an origin story of disembodied cellular fusion (lie, 2012; 2015). given the temporal plasticity of cells that can be stopped and started at will in tissue culture (landecker, 2007), the recognition of the cellularity of the human reproductive process suggests that it, too, can be temporally manipulated through techniques of cryopreservation. the iconic image that epitomizes human agency vis-àvis reproductive cells is the fertilization of an egg in ivf, which, as us social scientist sarah franklin (2013) demonstrates in biological relatives, has been instrumental in shifting popular understandings of the reproductive process (p. 249). 8 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) by focusing on the photomicrography of frozen eggs in particular, we can examine the temporal dimension of the visual politics of reproductive time in the context of egg freezing. i will analyse how the image of the cryopreserved egg expresses divergent constructions of temporality in the cell and in the reproductive body of the “self,” which in turn animate influential treatment rationales that align with new modes of biomedicalizing female reproductivity and fertility. in doing so, i draw attention to both the specificity of the photographic medium and the object depicted in the image in order to highlight their significance for the reframing of reproductive time in egg freezing practices. one new type of prenatal imagery emerging with this reproductive technology is the photograph of the frozen egg. women who freeze their eggs may receive photographic images of the cells they have cryopreserved after their procedure. on her blog about her “egg freezing process,” a woman using the online alias “eggfreezer” includes one such picture. she decided to freeze her eggs to, in her own words, “beat my biological clock, [and] have kids even when my reproductive system would have it some other way” (eggfreezer, 2008a). her blog documents her experience of the procedure over the course of several months on the blogspot platform. she concluded her account of the egg freezing process with a post that included a picture of her frozen egg and the following text: here is an actual egg from my retrieval .… this egg was inside me (in a premature state) for 32 years — even before i took my own first breath as a newborn. had i not had the retrieval, this egg would have just never developed and died off last month— just another one of the many millions that die off over a woman's lifetime. instead, through modern medicine, it was able to be matured and extracted and it is now quite literally frozen in time alongside 27 others, potentially to be the starting building block of a future human being .… this is the tie — the everything and anything that is what a woman prefers when she wants “her own” biological baby. whatever it is that she wants — what i want — it’s 9 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) in there. part of me is in there. (eggfreezer, 2008b) more than a diagnostic image, or a souvenir of the procedure, the photograph of the frozen egg that is “now quite literally frozen in time” functions as a reference point for eggfreezer to consolidate her conceptualization of both the cryopreserved cell and her embodied self. when eggfreezer uses the image of the frozen egg to conceptualize her reproductivity, the image becomes a form of what us art historian amelia jones calls “self-imaging: the rendering of the self in and through technologies of representation” (2006, p. xvii). rather than reflecting the self’s appearance, the egg photograph presents a cellular temporality which allows a rendering of the self in relation to time. regarding the temporal dynamics of self-imaging, jones theorises “self-portrait photography as a technology of embodiment” that stages an engagement with “the fact of the aging and inevitable death of the subject” (jones, 2002, p. 972). she reasons that the photograph is a sign of the passing of time, of the fact that what we see in the shiny surface of the photographic print no longer exists as we see it: it is a sign, again, of our inexorable mortality as well as, paradoxically, an always failed means of resecuring our hope of having the photographed subject “live forever.” (2006, p. 46) jones reads the photograph’s “frozen time” as a sign of passing time: it is a visual confrontation between the photographed moment that “no longer is” and the moment currently inhabited by the viewer. the resultant temporal distance between the past depicted in the photograph and the present moment of observation, she suggests, becomes an extendable principle that includes a future in which we will have changed, in which we — and those depicted — will fail to live forever. in this reading of the photograph as not simply an image of the past, but as a temporal relation that incorporates the past and the present while extending into the future, photography marks a confrontation with finitude. jones develops her argument in dialog with peggy phelan’s (1997) mourning sex, which argues that the still image of the photograph 10 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) “serves both to ‘conjure’ the moment, the scene in which the photograph was taken, and to take the moment out of time, [...] to give it a new temporal logic” (p. 157). the significance of this new temporal relation between the frozen image and the living subject, jones argues, follows from the use of photography as a “technology of embodiment.” jones contends that the subject performs “herself or himself within the purview of an apparatus of perspectival looking that freezes the body as representation and so — as absence, as always already dead — in intimate relation to lack and loss” (2002, p. 949). in this way, photography functions as a technology of embodiment that points to the finitude of the living, embodied subject.9 jones develops her thought following french theorist roland barthes’s reflection on mourning and photography in camera lucida. occupied with the death of his mother, barthes (1981) writes: “in front of the photograph of my mother as a child, i tell myself: she is going to die: i shudder … over a catastrophe which has already occurred. whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe” (p. 96). the photograph’s catastrophe follows from its “anterior future”: the image presents a past moment that tells of a future that has already passed at the time of viewing (barthes, 1981, p. 96). in its resistance to releasing the moment into the past, the photograph “induces belief that it is alive … but by shifting this reality to the past (‘this-has-been’), the photograph suggests that it is already dead” (barthes, 1981, p. 79). the catastrophe thus lies in the “arrest of aliveness, which simultaneously foreshadows the terminal arrest of death”; the photograph captures the tension between the two temporalities of aliveness and arrest (yusoff, 2007, p. 222). the photograph of the egg is poised at the tension between aliveness and arrest. the egg in this photograph is framed as an element of a redistributed reproductive embodiment that eggfreezer recognises as “part of me,” even if it is stored in the freezer. jones’s approach to photography as a “technology of embodiment,” in which multiple temporalities meet, speaks directly to eggfreezer’s use of the egg’s 11 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) photograph to imagine the temporal relations between the cell, its reproductive potential and her embodied self. time is at the forefront of this photograph, which depicts an egg that has been extracted because of its vulnerability to the passage of time and is now reframed as “literally frozen in time” (eggfreezer, 2008b). this framing suggests that the photograph’s “frozen moment” here does not primarily reference the slippage of a moment of the embryological examination of the extracted cell in the past (barthes’s “this-has-been”), but rather signifies the frozen state of the egg characterized by the arrested cellular time in the present (“this-is”). as the frozen moment of the photograph depicts the frozen state of the egg, this photograph presents an alternative temporal logic to the photographs theorized by barthes and jones. rather than a “sign of the passing of time” that is a “failed means … of having the photographed subject ‘live forever’” (jones, 2006, p. 46), the photograph references a cell whose existence in time is seen to be halted and may thereby maintain its viability. the frozen egg “induces belief that it is alive” without “shifting this reality to the past” (barthes, 1981, p. 79); the cell’s arrested time thereby does not foreshadow death but is framed as having a futural orientation that promises both its own latent aliveness and its future reproductive potential. the photograph of the egg thus becomes a sign of an ex vivo reproductivity that is not subject to the passage of time; this circumventing of reproductive finitude through cryopreservation is at the heart of the promise of egg freezing practices. given that the image depicts the arrested present rather than the past moment, while the egg is frozen, the photograph is “live” — in a sense analogous to the “live” broadcast of moving images and in keeping with the latent life recognized in the frozen egg. the photograph is not “live” in the sense of simultaneous recording and broadcasting, but rather it is live because the photographic trace of the past depicts a “this is,” or a “still now,” in which the time of observation matches the time of cryopreservation while the egg remains in the freezer. as a counterpart of the finitude associated with the passage of time both in the body and in 12 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) the photograph, this state of being “literally frozen in time” becomes an affirmation of continued reproductivity. while the egg’s image affirms the aliveness of arrested time, in the confrontation with this image eggfreezer directs the work of mourning mortality to the site of the body: “had i not had the retrieval, this egg would have just never developed and died off last month” (eggfreezer, 2008b). a reversal of barthes’s anterior future, the image of the in vitro cryopreserved egg signifies its aliveness in the present while eggfreezer invokes an in vivo past of the egg in which it is “going to die” and would have been “already dead” at the time of writing (barthes, 1981, p. 96). with the cryopreserved egg functioning as a foil for her body, eggfreezer suggests the female body becomes the site of the incessant dying of “many millions” of eggs “over a woman’s lifetime” in a process that culminates in the finitude of age-related infertility. in this model, the salvaging of eggs and their preservation in the freezer rescues them from the aging body “through modern medicine” (eggfreezer, 2008b). however, there is no particular reason to assume that this specific egg would have “died off last month” if she had not “had the retrieval.” the egg may have stayed with her for several more years; it could have ovulated in the future; there is even a slight possibility that this very egg could have been fertilized in vivo without medical intervention. rather than a medical fact, the invoked imminent death of the photographed egg is a narrative device that stages a charged life-death dyad between the frozen cell and the embodied self, which drives the rationale for egg freezing. as sarah franklin and celia roberts (2006) observe in born and made, the notion that the egg was saved “through modern medicine” is a trope so familiar that it is expressed in the term assisted reproductive technologies. in eggfreezer’s case, it is not assistance with reproducing at present, but rather assistance with shifting reproductive time that egg freezing affords. landecker observes that “the ability to freeze, halt or suspend life” as “an infrastructural element of contemporary biotechnology” results in a situation in which “to be biological, alive, 13 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) cellular, also means (at present) to be a potential ‘age chimaera,’ to be suspendable, interruptible, storable, freezable in parts” (2007, p. 228). eggfreezer’s account presents a negotiation with the implications of becoming freezable in parts. with reference to the photograph of the frozen egg, eggfreezer positions the egg as the locus of a continued reproductivity “frozen in time,” analogous to the way in which the photographed moment is congealed in time. however, in this move, the visualization of the alternative temporal logic of the egg’s continued existence functions as a technology of embodiment that positions the female reproductive body as the site of finitude. as a consequence, paradoxically, through the temporal specificity of the imaging process that references the continuity of “latent life,” it is the mortality and finitude of the body that become increasingly visible (radin, 2013).10 the process of egg freezing, then, produces prenatal images that mediate reproductive time in new ways. the temporal specificity of the photograph of the egg affirms the notion that eggfreezer can “beat [her] biological clock” and freeze reproductive time, much like the image freezes the time of the photographed moment. the temporal distance between the depicted moment and the moment of observation, in turn, reinforces the finitude of embodied fertility. the frozen egg’s photograph thus aligns with a treatment rationale that motivates egg freezing through this dynamic between a suggestion of technologically mediated agency and embodied loss related to reproductive aging. this visual reframing of reproductive time in egg freezing practices thus results in a life-death dyad in which the cell continues living, while the self from whom it was taken becomes the locus of mortality. this points to an implicit necropolitics of reproduction, in which the temporalextension of reproductive potential afforded in the egg freezing procedure, and its recognition in the image of the frozen egg, hinges upon the construction of embodied reproductive loss and in vivo egg death. the politics of the popular emphasis on egg death follows from the privileging of the foil of future infertility over concerns about the biomedicalization of female fertility, pre-emptive overtreatment, physical 14 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) and financial risk, reification of a gendered reproductive imperative and the dependencies produced through the reframing of reproductive potential as requiring ongoing monitoring, treatment and capital investment. the spectre of preventable finitude characterizes a broader “shift from current reactive treatments … to the proactive management of lifelong reproductive potential” exemplified not only in egg freezing but similarly in new processes of embryo selection (beim et al., 2017). time-lapse embryo imaging whereas egg freezing is a technology for extending the reproductive process and prolonging the time of fertility by slowing down cellular time to cryopreserved stasis, time-lapse embryo imaging is a technology for speeding up the reproductive process and shortening the time to socalled “ivf success” by selecting the “best” embryo on the basis of its temporal development. hailed by some as the most significant development in ivf in decades (walsh, 2013), time-lapse embryo imaging is a novel technology for embryo selection that uses visual analysis to assess embryo viability. since 2013, it has been widely promoted in the uk and global sales of the major time-lapse device manufacturer have increased with each quarter (vitrolife, 2017). in ivf procedures, embryos develop in incubators for three to five days after fertilization before being implanted. embryologists traditionally remove the embryos from the incubator on a daily basis to check their development under the microscope and decide which embryos to transfer to the woman’s body. in time-lapse embryo imaging systems, the embryos remain in the incubator for the entire incubation period and are instead photographed every five to twenty minutes. these images are collated and accelerated in time-lapse videos that show fertilized eggs splitting into two cells, shaking like liquid bubbles, and dividing into a compact embryonic cell mass. by comparing the observable characteristics of an incubated cohort of embryos — such as the timing of cell divisions — to historical 15 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) embryo populations that have resulted in live births, time-lapse embryo systems are used to predict which embryos will be “viable” or “nonviable.” in spite of a cochrane review suggesting that the current evidence of increased live birth rates is too limited to justify the routine adoption of this technology (armstrong et al., 2015), time-lapse imaging systems have been rapidly introduced in fertility clinics across the globe.12 notwithstanding the efficacy of this method, its particular entanglement of imaging and reproductive processes reframes the figure of the observable, viable embryo through the distribution and rhetorical framing of time-lapse videos. at first sight, time-lapse embryo imaging does not seem to be a novel technology at all. contemporary developmental biology uses several more advanced and detailed time-based visual technologies for studying embryos than time-lapse embryo imaging. for example, laser scanning microscopy (lsm) and light sheet fluorescence microscopy (lsfm) allow in vivo 3d imaging of living embryos at cellular resolution, thereby offering greater visual detail than the light microscopy technology used in time-lapse systems. reflecting the objective of creating “in toto” representations of embryogenesis, these imaging methods enable continuous, automated individual cell tracking throughout the entire early embryo –without the temporal gaps characteristic of time-lapse imaging (tomer et al., 2012; wellmann, 2017). time-lapse films of embryos, by contrast, have been produced and circulated for over a century. historians of science have analysed the significance of biological time-lapse imaging primarily at a time when cinema emerged as a new time-based medium (landecker, 2012; olszynko-gryn & ellis, 2017). not only is time-lapse imagery of embryos no longer novel, but film scholar david lavery even wrote an article on the “disappointing career of time-lapse photography” and dismissed this visual technique as “mundane” and “commonplace,” suggesting that time-lapse videos of dividing cells have lost their “otherworldliness” (gaycken, 2012, p. 62; lavery, 2006, p. 2, p. 7). likewise, german historian of science janina wellmann argues that the early association 16 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) between the moving image and the suggestion of liveliness is no longer convincing, given the prevalence of animation in contemporary visual culture (wellmann, 2017; see also landecker, 2012).13 nevertheless, time-lapse embryo imaging represents a significant innovation in twenty-first-century ivf; with its rapid and widespread introduction emerges a new set of prenatal images and a retemporalization of the reproductive process in which the time of development, capital, labor and representation meet in new ways. first, in the context of the fertility clinic, the familiar embryo video gains importance as at once a diagnostic image, an individualized recording of patients’ potential future children and an origin story that starts in the incubator rather than the maternal body. it depicts an image of developmental time that becomes meaningful in an anticipated reproductive continuum implicated in the notion of “ivf success.” second, it represents a move from static to dynamic imagery in embryological practice. by automating embryo assessment, the timelapse medium thus allows a reorganization of the relation between the time of embryo development and the temporal organization of embryological practice. third, it is not just a representation of early embryo development, but itself a novel tool for selection.14 beyond the observation of embryos in the incubator, time-lapse embryo imaging has a data-driven component. as the time-lapse system’s camera records the embryos, the visual information is quantified and analysed with algorithms to predict the developmental potential of each embryo. now a selection method, the developmental time of embryo development comes to relate to the time of value production through treatment rationales that biomedicalize the reproductive process in new ways and expand the scope of ivf. the option of adding this newly visible step in the ivf cycle requires additional clinical and financial decision-making on the part of the patient. time-lapse embryo imaging is one of the few laboratory technologies that is directly marketed to patients (pottage, 2018). for example, unlike most embryological equipment, eeva (early embryo 17 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) viability assessment) has a dedicated website, which targets intended parents and promotes time-lapse embryo imaging as a means to approach “ivf with a higher level of confidence” (auxogyn, 2017). as part of its direct-to-consumer marketing strategy, the website includes a patient testimonial video titled “courtnay and michael’s journey,” which introduces the time-lapse apparatus, the embryo videos it produces, rationales for treatment and exemplary patient responses to them (the eeva test, 2015b). the testimonial video tells the story of a couple who had spent a long time trying to conceive and eventually decided to undergo ivf. the video opens with a smiling courtnay, who tells the viewer about the time she missed a call from her fertility doctor, who contacted her sooner than she had anticipated. from the very first sentence, eeva is framed as the enabling condition for a successful pregnancy that emerges sooner than you would expect — in this case soon enough to miss your doctor’s phone call. the success of ivf is here temporalized: courtney, who had long attempted to conceive, found a way to speed up the process and become pregnant quickly with the assistance of the eeva technology. upon returning the call, the doctor announced courtnay’s pregnancy by asking: “you know the news, right?” when courtnay tells us how she responded by asking “what news are you talking about?”, the camera zooms out and we see her partner michael rocking a baby, affirming the outcome of the pregnancy that the doctor announced on the phone. linking the moment of the doctor’s announcement that courtnay recalled and the diegetic present in which the baby is recorded, the video establishes a link between the clinically and technologically mediated experience of embryo selection and a “take-home baby.” in doing so, it makes a visual argument for an investment into the technoscientific management of this early stage, which here plays a decisive role in establishing “ivf success” and was instrumental in speeding up the reproductive process by avoiding implanting embryos that are not predicted to lead to a viable pregnancy. the video’s next scene suggests extracorporealization is 18 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) instrumental to this speeding up of the reproductive process. it cuts to a still image of a green hilly landscape with a white heterosexual couple holding hands, walking down a sand path. the woman holds a string leading to a large embryo floating above her head. resembling a helium balloon, a red multi-cellular embryo hangs in the air, enclosed by a threedimensional green square that looks like the rectangular containers holding the embryos in the eeva incubator. the floating embryo resembles a thought-balloon, signifying how the embryo is almost umbilically connected to the intended mother’s mind rather than her body. in keeping with franklin’s argument that reproductive technologies are often framed as “offering nature a helping hand,” the eeva green logo visually resonates with the scene’s natural surroundings and is presented as guiding the couple on the path of their “ivf journey” (franklin, 2013). the peaceful scene paints a picture of a mode of reproduction in which the apparatus exists in harmony with nature and the intended parents, while the embryo exists outside the maternal body on the road to “ivf success.” as counterpart to this visual image, the time-lapse embryo imaging system is itself framed as a more transparent alternative to the maternal body.15 in a televised bbc news report about time-lapse embryo imaging, dr. simon fishel is quoted as describing the technology as “almost like having the embryo in the womb with a camera on them [sic]” (walsh, 2013). the idea of the machine as an alternative, technocultural “womb” that emulates the body through enhanced visibility is also a further extension of the pervasive ideal of bodily transparency in western medicine. dutch media scholar josé van dijck (2005) explores the history of this ideal in the transparent body by analyzing various medical imaging technologies as “the material embodiment of collective desires and fantasies” (pp. 15–17). the visualization of live embryo development in time-lapse videos affirms the association between increased visibility and medical progress that van dijck describes. they moreover fulfil a dual diagnostic and affective function, analogous to ultrasound images, as visualizations of the first encounter with prenatal life, which is now 19 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) moved forward to the time before implantation (2001, pp. 108–9).16 the time-lapse embryo videos likewise become meaningful as an extension of what barbara duden (1993b) describes as “the desire to remove the frontier between the viewer’s eye and the unborn” and to witness “the breakdown of a horizon which, since the beginning of history, had made the unborn an unseen and unverifiable presence” (p. 566). by extension, while the time-lapse apparatus facilitates a mode of reproduction in which the embryos are distant from the intended mother’s body, the concomitant increased visibility of the embryos may function to mediate this distance by positioning the visual — rather than embodiment — as the key mode of accessing the desired potential future child. as us science scholar hannah landecker (2006) has argued for early biological cinema, which allowed people other than scientists to “participate visually in the sights of scientific work” (p. 123), so does timelapse embryo imaging provide a means to share images of the embryos that previously would stay within the embryological lab. the scientific films that landecker describes opened up the scientific gaze to other participants; here time-lapse embryo imaging allows patients to partake in the embryological gaze. time-lapse imaging manufacturers highlight the possibility of improving patient communication with this shared vision as one of the key selling points of this technology (vitrolife, 2015). in turn, fertility clinics present the inclusion of a “special download” with the timelapse embryo imaging add-on as a perk to (potential) patients (carefertility, 2018). the testimonial video also shows the smiling couple watching their “special-download” video of the embryo that developed into their son at home. in a differently cut version of the patient testimonial, courtnay’s voice-over reads embryo incubation as the originary development moment: “when you watch the video of the eeva test, we were astonished that really everyone starts out that way and that we got to see a picture of our son at a cell level” (the eeva test, 2015a). thus framed as depicting embryonic individuals, time-lapse embryo videos run the risk of reproducing the maternal erasure and ascription of personhood to prenatal life which was widely criticized and politicized in 20 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) fetal ultrasound, while positioning ivf as a model for conceptualizing the in vivo reproductive process (franklin, 2013; petchesky, 1987; stabile, 1992). in sharing the clinical gaze in this way, the seemingly objective imagery of developing embryos also visualizes a specific, and contested, treatment rationale that suggest that the ivf process can be sped up by adopting an automated, predictive, data-driven method of selecting embryos. accompanying the visual of two developing embryos, the voice-over explains that “your ivf team uses the eeva test results with their traditional grading methods to select the best embryo for transfer.” in the testimonial video, we see two embryos developing next to a text box that explains that the time-lapse technology “analyses the developmental potential of the embryos and categorizes them into ‘high’ and ‘low.’” after a couple of divisions, the words high and low are superimposed on the two embryos, which subsequently move to a screen where two embryologists of “your ivf team” interact with them. rather than handling the embryos and controlling conditions, the embryologists’ monitoring of the incubated embryos thus becomes a matter of watching the screen and analyzing statistical and visual data. this screen-based, digital approach to embryo selection, which visualizes the developmental differences between embryos, promotes the notion that there is a universal regularity in the timing of embryo development that can be both observed and instrumentalized to predict viability by means of automated standardization, quantification and predictive analytics. the temporal regularity of embryonic cell divisions has been recorded for over a century (cohen, 2013). the understanding of embryogenesis as subject to a temporal law of development was recognized as early as 1800 by thinkers like the german critic karl philipp moritz, who conceptualized embryo development as organized by “rhythmical time,” or the recognition of an interlinked timed repetition and variation (wellmann, 2015, pp. 30–31). in nineteenth-century embryology, this scientific attention to the regularity of time-based phenomena was 21 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) produced through sequential representations arranged into “normaltafeln,” or the assortment of “thousands of individual moments in thousands of individuals built into an ascending temporal series of static moments” (hopwood, 2000; landecker, 2006, p. 126). after what mexican-american historian of science jimena canales called the “cinematographic turn,” the late-nineteenth-century representations of biological processes became “visible as processes” through the timebased medium of film (canales, 2002; wellmann, 2011, pp. 310–313). the key aspect of scientific cinematography is of course the representation of time, which could now be manipulated to give visual access to phenomena that were previously too slow or too fast to observe. the temporality of cinematography becomes meaningful and valuable at the conjunction of “the time of experiment, the time of recording and the time of demonstration” (landecker, 2006, p. 123; wellmann, 2011, p. 314). after the turn of the millennium, time-lapse embryo imaging introduced a “cinematographic turn” in the ivf clinic. the technology’s synchronization of the different modes of clinical, recorded and playback time that landecker references not only introduce a lively, accelerated representation of the developing embryos. the integration of an additional mode of what we may call “datafied time” renders the timing of cellular divisions into a tool for selection. the quantified visual information deduced from the developing embryos is key to both the assessment of their viability and the provision of data for the development of algorithmic tools to assess similar embryo cohorts in the future. through this datafied approach, incubated embryos are viewed in light of historical embryo populations to predict their viability. another variation of “the biological” functioning as a tool in contemporary reproductive biomedicine (franklin, 2013), the characterization of the embryos’ temporal regularities as a method for selection — as distinct from natural phenomena — is relevant because this has made them patentable under us and european law. although controversial and contested by both the research and bioethics communities (cohen, 2013; sterckx, cockbain, & pennings, 2014), the eu 22 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) and us patent offices have issued patents that cover the precise timing of embryo development, including clauses that specify a “time interval … between the resolution of cytokinesis 1 and the onset of cytokinesis 2 [of] 8-15 hours” — thereby explicitly aligning developmental time with capital time.17 here the extracorporealized embryo is no longer only located in vitro. rather, the embryo becomes in silico: both as digitalized image, which may be shared between medical professionals and intended parents, and as data sets and patentable algorithmic tools for selection, which emerge from data circulations between clinics and manufacturers. the cinematographic turn in ivf thus has a distinctly data-driven character that bridges past, present and future. in conclusion, time-lapse embryo imaging videos, characterized by the speeding up of photographed time to produce moving images that show an accelerated version of the recorded reproductive process, make a visual argument for embryo selection. the wiggling embryos dividing their cells are emblematic of “the need to animate, enliven, set into motion as an expression of our desire for … ‘feeling alive’” (zarzycka & papenburg, 2014, p. 166); the embryos’ movement conveys both a current liveliness as well as the possibility of future life in the proclamation of “high” viability. while presented as diagnostic and quantitative measurements, the time-lapse embryo videos also visualize a culturally significant origin story that positions the beginning of identifiable human life outside of the maternal body, and inside the benevolent technology. after extracorporealization, the incubated embryos become visually accessible to intended parents, who may now see what was previously confined to the embryologist’s gaze. the reliance on an algorithmic analysis of the visualized embryos speaks to an increasing importance of large data sets and predictive analytics in assisted reproduction. the rapid introduction and distribution of time-lapse embryo imaging expresses an expansive drive within contemporary assisted reproduction. whereas egg freezing expanded the group of potential candidates for treatment by making not only infertility but fertility an indication for ivf, time-lapse embryo imaging expands the ivf treatment steps as well as 23 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) patients’ and clinics’ investments in the instrumentalization and visualization of the reproductive time of embryonic development. conclusion in keeping with the focus of catalyst’s special section, both the reproduction of imaging processes and the imaging of reproductive processes are key in appreciating the new reproductive decisions that intended parents navigate in twenty-first-century assisted reproduction. by analyzing the rhetorical framing of frozen egg photography and embryo development videos, i have drawn attention to the way in which the visual representation, acceleration and congealment of reproductive time can align with a particular treatment logic. what is at stake in the introduction of these treatment rationales is a broadening indication for ivf — whether through enlisting a group of fertile women as candidates for pre-emptive infertility treatment or through expanding the ivf cycle with additional treatment options. in this process, the two new reproductive technologies of egg freezing and time-lapse embryo imaging are not only changing the face of ivf but also retemporalizing the reproductive process.18 egg freezing slows down the reproductive process by introducing a period of cryopreservation between egg extraction and fertilization. the concomitant temporal extension of the reproductive potential counterbalances ongoing embodied fertility decline. the frozen egg’s photograph reframes a familiar picture of a gamete into a reproductive image poised at the distinct temporalities of frozen and embodied time emerging with egg freezing. unlike conventional photography, the depicted frozen moment did not signify an irrecoverable flash from the past, but an ongoing state of cellular cryopreservation. the resonance of frozen time in the still image and the cryopreserved cell affirmed the “liveness” of both. in so doing, this presentation of cryopreserved time reinforced the contrasting finitude of the aging body, its precarious fertility and the loss of its eggs. the rhetorical framing of this reproductive 24 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) image aligns with a treatment rationale that motivates egg freezing through a dynamic between the affective attachment of anxiety and loss to embodied female reproductive aging and the ascription of potential viability to the imaged, un-aging egg frozen in time. conversely, time-lapse embryo imaging is framed as a technology to speed up the reproductive process by implanting the most viable embryo first. time-lapse embryo imaging uses timed observation to instrumentalize the temporal regularities of prenatal development in embryo selection. time-lapse embryo imaging, characterized by moving images that show an accelerated version of the recorded reproductive process, likewise affirms a treatment rationale for embryo selection. the system visualizes both the animation of early life and the drama of selection by superimposing a “high” and “low” assessment of their viability. while the patient testimonial video showed the baby resulting from this process, the charge of the clinical embryo videos follows from the proximity of continued and failed viability in the petri dish. as these two sets of prenatal images reference non-viable embryos and dying eggs, they demonstrate a necropolitics of reproduction, in which not only the generativity of new life, but also the increased awareness of the death, finitude and fallibility of reproductive substances drives the engagement with reproductive technologies. these life-death dyads — whether between the frozen and embodied egg or the viable and non-viable embryo — propel new, future-oriented treatment rationales for broadening the indication for ivf. the fragility of these vital distinctions becomes apparent in eggfreezer’s framing of her frozen egg as a promise of continued liveliness that provides the “building block” for a “future child” and is also “part of [her]” (eggfreezer, 2008b). the tenuousness of this promise emerges in her final blog post: “all the vitrified eggs died on thaw.” seven years after freezing, the attempted thaw renders the photograph into an image of mourning after all, and she writes: “this is unfathomable. i cannot begin to explain the grief i am feeling. i have a call with dr. b on monday morning.” despite her commenters urging for an update in the years following, we never 25 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) hear from her again. acknowledgements i would like to acknowledge the anonymous peer reviewers and editors of the special issue for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. i would also like to thank my colleagues at the university of cambridge and the university of amsterdam for their feedback. this work was supported by the wellcome trust (provision award, grant number 100606), the alan turing institute and the amsterdam school for cultural analysis (asca). notes 1 the use of diagnostic medical ultrasound in obstetrics and gynaecology was introduced in the 1960s and quickly became a routinized part of pregnancy care. it is rooted in a history of measuring distance using sound. as early as 1794, lazzaro spallanzi demonstrated that bats navigate through the dark using echo reflection from high frequency sound. this technique was automated in the late 19th century and subsequently used primarily in maritime underwater navigation. early medical use of ultrasound focused on its purported therapeutic effects and later the diagnosis of tumors, before there was a global boom in research and clinical use of fetal ultrasound in the 1960s (newman & rozycki, 1998; woo, 2002). fetal photography was first popularized in nilsson’s 1965 photo essay “the drama of life before birth” in life magazine. the stylized photography of fetal remains was a groundbreaking depiction of prenatal life that has become part of “the mental universe of our time” (duden, 1993a, p. 14). the visualization of in vitro fertilization (ivf), and particularly the visual representation of a needle inserting a single sperm into the egg in intracytoplasmic sperm injection (icsi), has become ubiquitous as a stock image of human reproduction (franklin, 2013, pp. 246-50). 2 ex vivo (outside the body) is the counterpart of in vivo (inside the body). in vitro (eg. in vitro fertilization) is a technical term for “in glass.” 3 photomicrography refers to photographs taken with the aid of a microscope. this is to be distinguished from microphotography, which produces photographs that are shrunk to very small scale and require a microscope for viewing (peres, 2007, p. 94). 26 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) 4 this article follows the practice of “cultural analysis” as developed by mieke bal (1999). in this approach, the analyst purposively does not apply a single method to understand an object, but rather brings diverse analytic and theoretical lenses in dialogue with particular case studies and cultural objects (bal, 2002, p. 4). 5 the phrase “take home baby” is commonly used both in research and clinical settings to refer to a live birth as a result of an ivf cycle (peters et al., 2007). this phrase may be distinguished from other measures of reproductive success, such as clinical pregnancy rates, that do not necessarily result in a live birth (chetkowski, 2014). clinical pregnancies can result in spontaneous abortions, ectopic pregnancies, foetal deaths and neonatal deaths (within 28 days of birth) and such cases may be excluded from a ‘take home baby’ rate (peters et al., 2007, p. 127). 6 i use “biomedicalization” in line with us science scholars mamo et al.’s (2003) definition: “biomedicalization describes the increasingly complex, multisited, multidirectional processes of medicalization, both extended and reconstituted through the new social forms of highly technoscientific biomedicine. the historical shift from medicalization to biomedicalization is one from control over biomedical phenomena to transformations of them” (p. 161). 7 see taussig et al. (2013) on critiques of potential and potentiality in biomedicine, especially pp. 54-55 on the politics of embryonic potential. 8 it was the popularization of fetal imaging, ros petchesky argues in her classical studies on the visual cultures of reproduction, that was instrumental in the rhetorical shift from religious claims about the beginning of life to a medical discourse of biological facts about prenatal development which were reified through fetal imagery (petchesky, 1987, 1990). following petchesky, sarah franklin analyses the temporal politics of anti-abortion activism and argues that the 1980s right-to-life movement harnessed a biological discourse that emphasized “biological development rather than divine authority” and thereby embeds the “religious time of theo-ontology within the secular time of biology” (franklin, 2014, p. 112). 9 like jones and phelan, mary ann doane holds that “the privileged form of the index has been associated with death,” thereby invoking a notion of finitude to theorise the medium-specificity of the photograph (doane, 2007, p. 129). 27 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) 10 as radin argues was the case for genomics, these cryotechnologies, which harness latency in assisted reproduction, give momentum to the “anticipatory regime[s]” that animate egg freezing discourses (radin, 2013, p. 500; van de wiel, 2014b, p. 4). 11 necropolitics can be read as the counterpart of biopolitics, which references not the governance of life but the governance of death and dying. whereas achille mbembe positions biopolitical investment of power into life against the necropolitical investment of power into death, rosi braidotti theorises the relationality between a biopolitics and necropolitics (braidotti, 2013; mbembe, 2003; van der zaag, 2016). i here use the term to refer to the politics of the recognition and legibility of death, finitude and fallibility in the management of reproduction. beyond a politics of bringing life into being, contemporary reproductive management, i argue, discursively produces loci of death and decline that function as sites of individualized and politicized governance. 12 as an indication, the swedish company vitrolife, one the of two major suppliers of time-lapse embryo imaging equipment, reported a significant growth in sales between the end of 2014 and 2016, from 30 million to 160 million sek (vitrolife, 2016). time-lapse imaging is a treatment option in the majority of large fertility clinics in the united kingdom. 13 myers and dumit (2011), by contrast, argue that cellular time-lapse images can “seem to impart too much life” through the suggestion that they show not only motion but also intention and personification in cellular processes (p. 254). 14 see franklin (2013) for a discussion of the embryo as tool. 15 referencing the origin story recounted in genesis 1-3, the eeva system’s name suggests a correspondence to the biblical name eve, meaning “mother of all the living” (gen 3:20 revised standard version). this is a telling association, given that the secular creation story told through the time-lapse embryo videos shifts the locus of life’s origin by staging a first visible encounter with prenatal life while it is enclosed by the machine rather than the mother. 16 the suggested continuity between the time-lapse embryo video and fetal ultrasound — and, by extension, the embryo and the fetus — becomes explicit in a promotional video of time-lapse embryo imaging by the largest uk fertility chain, care fertility. titled jaycie's journey using 28 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) embryoscope time lapse imaging at care fertility, it shows a succession of a single embryo in a time-lapse video, a traditional twodimensional ultrasound video, a three-dimensional ultrasound video, and postnatal footage of a baby girl named jaycie (care fertility, 2015). 17 see patents us7963906 b2, 2011, us8337387 b2, 2012, ep2430454 b1, 2013. 18 this retemporalization is in keeping with landecker’s argument that “being a cellular entity after cryobiology means being freezable and open to artificial synchronization; any living thing, after these interventions, becomes an object that can be stopped and started, suspended and accelerated” (landecker, 2007, p. 232). the temporal plasticity of cells in tissue culture directly comes to bear on reproductive timing in the case of egg freezing. references auxogyn. 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(2012). a persistent misperception: assisted reproductive technology can reverse the “aged biological clock.” fertility and sterility, 97(5), 1044–1047. 35 van de wiel catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fertnstert.2012.02.015 yusoff, k. (2007). antarctic exposure: archives of the feeling body. cultural geographies, 14(2), 211–233. https://doi.org/10.1177 /1474474007075355 zarzycka, m., & papenburg, b. (2014). motion pictures: politics of perception. discourse, 35(2), 163–176. bios lucy van de wiel is a research associate at the reproductive sociology research group (reprosoc), university of cambridge. her research focuses on egg freezing and the gender politics of ageing; the datafication of ivf; and the political economy of contemporary assisted reproduction. microsoft word news in focusmolldrem and thakor.docx molldrem,s. and thakor, m. (2017). genealogies and futures of queer sts: issues in theory, method, and institutionalization. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3 (1) 1-15 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © stephen molldrem, mitali thakor, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license news in focus genealogies and futures of queer sts: issues in theory, method, and institutionalization stephen molldrem university of michigan molldrem@umich.edu mitali thakor northwestern university mitali@northwestern.edu abstract in the following essay, we describe the emergence of work by various sts scholars at the intersections of queer studies and social studies of science and technology. we focus on recent developments that have materialized under the label of “queer sts” within a longer history of sexuality studies. we ask: what is queer sts, and what is “new” about it? we also narrate several critical new developments in academic collaborations in this growing subfield, from workshops to conference roundtables, and attempt to further develop queer sts theory and praxis as intersectional labor in negotiating the role of this nascent sphere of academic practice. 2 molldrem and thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) introduction: toward a genealogy of “queer sts” since the rise in studies of the history of sexuality in the late 1970s—and, later, the growth of lesbian and gay studies (abelove et al., 1993), queer theory (de lauretis, 1991), and lgbtq studies as identifiable intellectual and disciplinary areas—scholars have labored at the intersections of sexuality studies and studies of science, technology, psychology, and medicine. one could chart out a genealogy of queer feminisms that have centered science and medicine in their analyses of the sex/gender system and heteropatriarchy, beginning, for example, with de beauvoir (1949), moving through irigaray’s critiques of psychoanalysis (1985 [1977]), to haraway’s influential work on cyborg studies and speciesism (1978; 1991 [1985]), and into the explosion of feminist sts that has emerged over the past two decades and shapes contemporary inquiries into the gendered histories of biomedicine and technology. a somewhat different genealogy could be told of the 1970s and 1980s, in which the burgeoning conceptual and textual foundations of sts were temporally and disciplinarily aligned with constructivist approaches to the study of gender and sexuality, yet remained largely bracketed off from one another. many recognizable works in sts and, separately, sexuality studies from this era could be considered as part of the same intellectual-historical moment that produced, for example, bloor’s knowledge and social imagery (1991[1976]) and latour and woolgar’s laboratory life (1986[1979]) alongside foucault’s the history of sexuality, vol. 1 (1978[1976]), weeks’ coming out (1979[1977]), rubin’s “thinking sex” (1984), and padgug’s “sexual matters” (1979). at this time, scholars in feminist philosophy and epistemology of science were working through constructivist critiques of hegemonic science and political philosophy on the grounds of their masculinist roots (bordo, 1986; collins 1989; keller, 1982; narayan, 1989) and presciently making linkages between the co-construction of science and politics (arditti, klein, and minden 1984; merchant, 1980; scheper-hughes, 1983). all of these texts shared in dramatic transformations taking place in the 3 molldrem and thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) humanities and social sciences that insisted on the rigorous, systematic, and ongoing analysis of the unseen processes that facilitate knowledgeproduction, truth-telling, and subject-formation, both in history and the contemporary moment. as scholars in these fields wrote from resurgent feminist, materialist, and otherwise radical or minoritarian positions, they worked to unpack how scientific power both exerts its homogenizing rule against the diversity of human experiences and generates new forms of life. the influence of these fields persisted and intensified through the 1980s, 1990s, and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. yet for reasons that are still historically opaque (but which likely have everything to do with how sts and gender and sexuality studies have been differently institutionalized), the obvious connections between queer/gender/sexuality studies and sts have only in the last several years come to materialize into a kind of nascent institutional crucible or “field formation” (wiegman, 2012). in many instances, the works identified with this field have taken the form of a disaggregated collection of efforts loosely collected under the rubric of “queer sts” – a project that we have actively contributed to and shaped since 2015. in the sections that follow, we provide an overview of such work, discuss some of its key actors, and conclude by speculating on the possible future(s) of this zone of activity. we do so as an open invitation, and in order to provide some material and conceptual resources to scholars who are interested in advancing the materialization of queer sts. in the first section, we address the realm of queer sts theory—as in a body of texts, set of structuring claims, or a corpus of literature that could ground and/or orient queer sts inquiry. in the second section, we discuss queer sts method, as in techniques or tools for doing queer sts work, in relation to important questions about institutionalization— strategies for cultivating infrastructures to support queer sts on campuses, in journals, professional associations, and other areas. we act in service of fostering what gayle rubin calls “durable structural mechanisms to secure the reliable transfer of queer knowledges” to other 4 molldrem and thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) queer sts scholars and future practitioners (2012, p. 354). ultimately, we call for a polyvalent queer sts with many constituents. this vision for queer sts insists on rigorous and ongoing critiques of institutional power structures within and outside of the university, while also positioning itself to maximize the benefits of inclusion and resources from academic institutions in such a way that refuses tokenization. rather than a coherent or settled subfield, we imagine an expansive set of transnational and cross-disciplinary conversations and alliances that collectively elaborate queer sts. queer sts theory: from lack to materialization we realized the need for a reproducible body of queer sts theory after we discovered that, as graduate students, we had no template or guide for building queer sts prelims or field examinations reading lists. we had to do this labor from scratch, with guidance from faculty mentors and peers, but without the published reference points or shared resources that would guide the development of a field exams list in a more recognizable body of literature such as “queer theory,” “feminist sts,” “the history of sexuality,” or even new fields like “digital studies” or “digital sts.” mitali acted publicly on the need for more queer sts resources in 2013 by publishing a two-part blog post on “queer sts” as part of her exams process (thakor, 2013). subsequently, in 2015, she published a public and collaborative google document called the “queer sts reading list” (thakor, molldrem, et al. 2015). at this point stephen and mitali became connected via twitter, and the list quickly started to expand. the queer sts reading list continues to grow, and anyone can contribute to it. compiling these different kinds of texts in an accessible resource signals the deep resonances across distinct fields that could collectively give life to something different—which might be called queer sts. on the one hand, the list reads like a who’s-who of scholars in lgbtq studies, queer of color critique, the history of sexuality, and sts scholarship 5 molldrem and thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) focused on gender and sexuality. on the other hand, the specific themes that cut across the entries in the queer sts reading list highlight how scholars have honed in on similar topics or approaches in fields that are often very different from one another, methodologically or disciplinarily speaking. for example, biomedicalization, postcolonial and anti-racist inquiry, multiple queer feminisms, queer approaches to media, and gendered histories of technoscience all take center stage in the syllabus. some of the authors cited were already recognizable as sts scholars whose work was, in one way or along, queer (e.g. suchman, 2007; epstein, 1996, 2007; terry, 1999; and murphy, 2012). on the other hand, other authors (e.g. ferguson, 2004 and canaday, 2009) appear here in a semi-institutional sts context for what is possibly the first time. the list also incorporates feminist and postcolonial science fiction, from joan russ (2008[1975]) to octavia butler (1987-89), that have been productive toward developing new theories of sexuality and technoscientific futures alike. it is important to acknowledge that queer sts was named well before our reading list began to be assembled. anita thaler, whose twitter handle is @queersts and who leads a queer-feminist sts working group in austria, has been working on developing a body of queer sts theory for some years now. indeed, even since we began the queer sts reading list project, a great deal of work has been published, some of it in this journal after catalyst was launched in spring 2015. in the past year, angie willey’s undoing monogamy has been published (2016), christoph hanssmann has brought an sts perspective to trans studies and feminist health history in tsq (2016), michelle murphy has embarked on new queer projects on “alter-life,” and the queer feminist science studies anthology, edited by cyd cipolla, kristina gupta, david a. rubin, and angela willey is forthcoming—and this is just a small sampling. queer sts method and institutionalization: the labor of intersectionality 6 molldrem and thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) the labor of building a body of queer sts theory is an ongoing process being done in a number of different lgbtq/sexuality studies, feminist studies, and sts publishing spaces. in addition to traditional published work, this labor includes the development of novel kinds of collectivelysourced digital resources that help foster new sets of conversations. as a result, queer sts method is necessarily interdisciplinary, traversing the methodologies of anthropological interviewing and fieldwork, feminist reflexivity, sociological sampling, and laboratory-based experimentation. thus, we seriously consider intersectional theory as central to queer method. building upon kimberlé crenshaw’s metaphor (1989, 1993) of the traffic intersection at which race and gender meet to produce new and different effects than those identities alone, numerous feminist and queer theorists have used intersectionality to interrogate the ways in which racial, sexual, gendered, classed, and ableist subjectivities overlap and conjoin (see also: taylor et al., 2010; grzanka, 2014; and luft and ward, 2009). we think of queer sts as intersectional work, with an emphasis on work as a constitutive part of the labor of such theorizing. nash (2010; 2014) and puar (2012) have both argued that attention to the labor of doing intersectional theory highlights how such theorizing is often fetishized and abstracted from the experiences of those for whom multiply hyphenated identities have always been a curse. as nash cautions, “the problem is feminist (or anti-racist) inattention to particular subjects’ experiences, the ‘cure’ is studying more intersections, and crafting more complex intersectional frameworks” (2010, p. 3). romanticizing intersectionality and making it seem something precious, in other words, treats it as kind of critical panacea, or a solution for somehow fixing social theory. what, then, does the naming of “queer sts” do for us, if sts always might have been, could be, but is not quite (yet) a form of queer critique? who is doing the work of keeping sts intersectional, or keeping sts queer and feminist? intersectional work is often framed as “difficult”—and therefore stalled—as though we might have to move mountains to be more 7 molldrem and thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) expansive and empathetic in our understandings of power, difference, and experience. can we imagine more full, more enriched and extensive ways of doing sts work that take intersectionality as a given, as more than just personal experiential knowledge? queer sts enjoys the privilege of newness in this particular moment, attracting the attention of more early-career scholars at both local and international venues. for instance, at the 2016 joint meeting of the society for social studies and the european association of the study of science and technology (4s/easst) in barcelona, we convened a queer sts roundtable. all of the invited participants raised the provocation that serious efforts to institutionalize queer sts within academia would prove a necessary disruption to how universities envision power and technoscientific progress, and contribute to the political aims of the sts project. yet scholars in this nascent field can begin by building the scaffold for emotionally and intellectually supporting one another in ways that are radically different from the normative forms of recognition and inclusion associated with academic spaces. these need to be in place even before new forms of institutional backing – such as the funding to hold such events and roundtables in the first place – ever materialize. as of this writing, many recent and forthcoming efforts have bubbled up across institutions to foster this kind of activity and space, including a workshop at the first midwests workshop (september 2016), annual informal meetups at the 4s conference (november 2015, september 2016, august 2017), and regular workshops and reading seminars coordinated by the sexualities project at northwestern university and the queer sts group at the university of michigan. these scholars are working, online and offline, in creative and provocative ways and across disciplines to strengthen academic bonds and offer new avenues for queer sts world-making. conclusion: staying with the troubles of queer sts we began this essay by noting that queer sts is simultaneously a 8 molldrem and thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) nascent institutional formation that is starting to be organized under a label as well as a longstanding and disaggregated collection of overlapping conversations in sts, feminist and gender studies, the history of sexuality, and lgbtq studies. rather than approaching this as a paradox, problem, or issue to be resolved through the consolidation of a diffuse body of knowledge into a subfield with defined boundaries, we would follow haraway’s (2007, 2016) cues, and instead encourage scholars to “stay with the trouble” and ambiguities of queer sts. we would advocate for our colleagues to treat queer sts as a haraway-ian (2007) “contact zone”—one that helps to organize research agendas, institutions, and academic lives. haraway deployed the phrase “stay with the trouble” in response to reviewers of her manuscript when species meet (2007): “how can we together inherit these pastpresents; how can i, can we, stay with the trouble without the mad solace of yet another exterminism, another fix...[?]” (2010, p. 55). in many ways, haraway’s questions inadvertently resonate with the one asked by warner and berlant in a classic essay written during the mid-1990s: “what does queer theory teach us about x? as difficult as it would be to spell out programmatic content for an answer, this simple question still has the power to wrench frames” (1995, p. 348). we believe that “queer” still has the “power to wrench frames” but also that “sts” has the analytical power to “stay with the trouble” of “queer.” as queer studies scholars, we argue that the perspectives that sts has to offer to queer, trans, and sexuality studies are clearly wideranging, particularly regarding tools for the kinds of reflexive, empirical, and ethnographic methodologies that sts brings to the table. and as sts scholars, we argue that the proliferation of queer perspectives in the study of science, technology, and medicine is not only taking shape in recent iterations of queer sts. it has been happening for decades. however, as we have pointed out, the institutionalization of minoritarian knowledges is not a neutral process or a necessary outcome of scholarly collaborations or cross-disciplinary dialogue. rather, institutionalization 9 molldrem and thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) must be actively shaped and contested in both research agendas and the labor of intellectual and academic life. on this front, we take our cues from ongoing debates over institutionalization in women’s studies, ethnic studies, and queer studies that highlight both the risks and potentials inherent in the institutionalization of minority knowledges in the neoliberal or corporate university (ahmed, 2012; ferguson, 2012; rubin, 2012; halberstam, 2009; nash and owens, 2015; wiegman, 2012). therefore, the work of queer sts will necessarily entail careful attention to the gendered, raced, and heterosexist scaffolds of not only scientific analysis – the object of much current sts research – but also of the institutions from which that sts research emerges. a collective “we” must ask bluntly (and reflexively): who sits on steering committees? what is the makeup of incoming graduate cohorts? whose work is cited on syllabi and graduate exam common lists? who is receiving tenure and who continues to adjunct? which institutions are seriously investing time, care, and resources into structuring robust sts programs with a demonstrated commitment to scholarship grounded in minoritarian standpoints? conundrums like these – in universities, professional associations, academic presses, and so forth – will continue to constitute the “trouble” of queer sts as much as any methodological innovation that might emerge from intellectual exchange. thus, to live up to its potential to wrench frames, queer sts research cannot just perform intersectionality and inclusivity in its writing, but also must do the far more uncomfortable work of critiquing and unsettling the structures in which it could quickly become comfortably at home. as nash insists, we must take seriously the intent of crenshaw’s “intersectionality” as a call to examine and dislodge: “the attention to crenshaw's traffic analogy as experiential rather than metaphorical has tended to constrain the feminist imagination, making an attention to more intersections rather than a deep interrogation of identity the hallmark of good, hard work” (nash, 2010, p. 3, emphasis added; see also nash, 2014). we conclude then, by stating what might be obvious, but which 10 molldrem and thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) always bears repeating: the future of work at the intersection of queer studies and sts—or the future of “queer sts,” if scholars collectively continue to invest in that label—rests with those who will continue to do this labor. following traditions of coalitional left, queer, feminist, and anti-racist movements, the constitution of a “we” can be strategically rearticulated depending on the needs of particular moments, as conflicts over institutionalization arise. this means, ultimately, that forms of alliance and terms of contestation need not be determined in advance. we are excited to be playing a small part in this project, and look forward to working with other scholars to continue to build collaborative queer sts agendas, spaces, and resources. acknowledgements we extend our thanks to participants in the 2016 4s/easst queer sts roundtable: ardath whynacht, patrick keilty, patrick grzanka, and rebekah cupitt. their thoughts in the pre-conference digital roundtable and at the in-person panel were central to the formation of this essay. we would also like to thank the participants in the queer sts workshop that we co-convened with jean hardy at the 2016 midwests network conference. stephen thanks all of his colleagues who have participated in meetings of the queer sts rackham interdisciplinary workshop at the university of michigan, particularly fellow co-coordinator jean hardy. we are grateful to the sponsors and supporters who made the 2015 and 2016 #queersts4s meetups possible, and we eagerly anticipate continuing this dialogue at 4s 2017 in boston. we also thank banu subramaniam and angie willey for their work editing this special issue of catalyst and for their 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(1987 [1983]). the feminist standpoint: developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism. in s. harding (ed.), feminism and methodology (pp. 157-180). bloomington, in: indiana university press. suchman, l. (2007). feminist sts and the sciences of the artificial. in e. j. hackett, o. amsterdamska, m. e. lynch, & j. wajcman (eds.), new handbook of science and technology studies (3rd ed.). cambridge, ma: mit press. taylor, y., hines, s., & casey, m. (eds.). (2010). theorizing intersectionality and sexuality. london: palgrave macmillan uk. terry, j. (1999). an american obsession: science, medicine, and homosexuality in modern society. chicago university of chicago press. thakor, m (2013). “queer sts, part 1 and part 2.” mit hasts blog. http://hasts.mit.edu/2013/12/04/queer-sts-part-1. thakor, m., molldrem, s., and multiple authors (2015). google docs. https://docs.google.com/document/d/18hnaag2aync0stxryowoxoql6c l3snnjhhvjkpl_wii/edit. weeks, j. (1979[1977]). coming out: homosexual politics in britain from the nineteenth century to the present. london: quartet books. wiegman, r. (2012). object lessons. durham, nc: duke university press. willey, a. (2016). undoing monogamy: the politics of science and the possibilities of biology. durham, nc: duke university press. 15 molldrem and thakor catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) bios stephen molldrem is a phd candidate at the university of michigan, ann arbor in the department of american culture. mitali thakor is a postdoctoral fellow in the sexualities project at northwestern university. microsoft word 76953-1-11-_hamrieandfritsch.docx hamraie, a., & fritsch, k. (2019). crip technoscience manifesto. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-34. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © aimi hamraie and kelly fritsch, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article crip technoscience manifesto aimi hamraie vanderbilt university aimi.hamraie@vanderbilt.edu kelly fritsch carleton university kellyfritsch@cunet.carleton.ca abstract as disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we are effective agents of world-building and -dismantling toward more socially just relations. the grounds for social justice and world-remaking, however, are frictioned; technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference that matters. this manifesto calls attention to the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of what we name as “crip technoscience,” practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world. disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life. but we also harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability. attentive to the intersectional workings of power and privilege, we agitate against independence and productivity as requirements for existence. instead, we center technoscientific activism and critical design practices that foster disability justice. hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 introduction as disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we are effective agents of world-building and -dismantling toward more socially just relations. the grounds for social justice and world-remaking, however, are frictioned; technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference that matters. this manifesto calls attention to the powerful, messy, noninnocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of crip technoscience: practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world. disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life. but we also harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability. attentive to the intersectional workings of power and privilege, we agitate against independence and productivity as requirements for existence. building upon earlier work defining crip technoscience as politicized design activism (hamraie, 2015, 2017), we articulate four political commitments of crip technoscience as a field of critical scholarship, practice, and activism.2 in framing crip technoscience as such, we follow feminist technoscience studies by describing both a realm of practice and a field of knowing that has emerged from it. crip technoscience braids together two provocative concepts: “crip,” the non-compliant, anti-assimilationist position that disability is a desirable part of the world, and “technoscience,” the co-production of science, technology, and political life (jasanoff, 2004; murphy, 2012). crip theory centers disability as a locus of resistance against “compulsory ablebodiedness” (mcruer, 2006) and “ablenationalism” (mitchell & snyder, 2015), agitating against liberal assimilation and inclusion practices by marking disability as a desirably generative and creative relational practice (fritsch, 2015a). we seek to bring crip theory and feminist technoscience into closer contact, exploring their generative frictions. in some respects, the field of hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 disability studies has been entangled with science and technology studies (sts)—and feminist sts in particular—since its origins, especially through its critiques of biomedicine and militarism and in its embrace of situated epistemologies. in naming crip technoscience, we invoke long histories of feminist, queer, anti-racist, and disability collaborative praxis, such as in technoscience projects engaging universal design, sensory engineering, reproductive justice, and hiv/aids activism.2 however, to date, crip theorists have had limited engagement with the critical concept of technoscience, particularly as it is used in feminist sts to mean the productive and non-innocent entanglement of scientific knowing and technological making.3 this limited engagement has yielded an ahistorical position that science, technology, and medicine are anathema to crip worldremaking, ignoring disabled peoples’ ongoing, creative, and open-ended appropriations of science, technology, and medicine, particularly in acts of protest and “epistemic activism” (hamraie, 2012, 2017, p. 132). crip technoscience thus calls forth leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha’s concept of “crip science” (2018, p. 69) to highlight the skills, wisdom, resources, and hacks disabled people utilize for navigating and altering inaccessible worlds. in pushing crip technoscience as a field of research and a practice of critical “knowing-making” (hamraie, 2017, p. 99), we conjure frictional practices of access production, acknowledging that science and technology can be used to both produce and dismantle injustice. as a field of study, crip technoscience begins from the feminist politics of technoscientific “noninnocence” (haraway, 1991), acknowledging that many of the technologies that have enabled disabled people to gain access to the social world have been produced through military-industrial research and development, imperial and colonial relations, and ecological destruction, all of which contribute to the uneven debilitation of human and non-human life (erevelles, 2011; fritsch, 2015b; kafer, 2013; puar, 2017). nevertheless, we contend that technoscience can be a transformative tool for disability justice. we contrast crip technoscience with mainstream “disability hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 technoscience” as a field of traditional expert relations and practices concerned with designing for disabled people rather than with or by disabled people. in mainstream disability technoscience, such fixes are understood as de facto goods, services for (supposedly) unfortunate disabled people, and ultimately depoliticized. disability technoscience positions enhancement and capacitation as progressive moves to overcome disability. “hackathons” led by charity organizations embody innovation-for-innovation’s sake and define disability as a problem in search of a solution (wong, 2015a, 2015b). disabled people are often treated purely as clients or users. for example, the organization tikkun olam makers (tom) describes disabled people as “need knowers” and nondisabled designers and engineers as “solution experts.” riffing on the term special needs, which associates disabled people with minority interests outside of majority norms, these designations reinforce the division between disabled people as passive recipients of access or assistive technologies and non-disabled designers, developers, and technologists as experts. disability technoscience reinforces the sense that disabled people are not already making, hacking, and tinkering with existing material arrangements. disability is cast as an object of innovation discourse, rather than as a driver of technological change. melanie yergeau (2014) historicizes mainstream disability “hacktivism,” arguing that hackathons have become the “new telethon” in that they frame “disability as pitiable and in need of remediation.”4 in response, yergeau invokes “criptastic hacking” as a “disability-led movement, rather than a series of apps and patches and fixes designed by non-disabled people who cannot even be bothered to talk with disabled people.” criptastic hacking highlights crip technoscience as a field of relations, knowledges, and practices that enables the flourishing of crip ways of producing and engaging the material world. in contrast to dominant forms of knowing-making for disability, we invoke crip technoscience to describe politicized practices of noncompliant knowing-making: world-building and world-dismantling practices by and with disabled people and communities that respond to intersectional systems of power, privilege, and oppression by working within and around hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 them. within feminist sts, we find a valuable openness to the possibilities of material production, including feminist hacking and coding (haraway, 1991), “tactical biopolitics” (da costa & phillip, 2008), and “critical making” (ratto & boler, 2014; sayers, 2018), practices that push technoscience beyond the military-industrial into the realms of activist resistance and world-remaking. this openness manifests in donna haraway’s “cyborg manifesto” (1991), which inaugurated a tradition of feminist technoscience and activism. while acknowledging the non-innocent entanglement of most technologies with militarism and capitalism, haraway calls for “modest witnessing,” simultaneously resisting systems of domination and finding ways to hack and tinker with them (1997, p. 3). she frames modest witnessing in terms of “socialist and feminist principles of design” (p. 161), maker practices that could work “in alliance with anti-military science” (p. 169). feminist scholars such as michelle murphy (2012) have built upon the work of activist technoscience to describe what murphy calls “protocols” of feminist knowing and making. the promise of feminist technoscience lies in challenging hegemonic narratives about technology as always enframing or deterministic, and in imagining the transformative possibilities for crip hacking, coding, and making as frictional access practices. while critical making is recognized as part of the feminist sts tradition, disabled peoples’ maker practices have not yet been fully considered in the radical political history of disability studies. the capaciousness of feminist technoscience studies emboldens our conviction that critical technoscience, so much a part of our crip political history and genealogy, can also provide the discursive tools for embracing disabled people as experts, makers, and activists resisting mainstream disability technoscience. we call for crip technoscience scholarship and practice as modest witness, holding in tension the non-innocence of military-industrial science, technology, design, and media with the imperatives for disability justice, accessibility, and world-remaking. disabled people design our own tools and environments, whether by using experiential knowledge to adapt tools for daily use or by engaging in professional design practices. crip technoscience conjures long histories of hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 daily adaption and tinkering with built environments. we remember the crucial world-building work of independent living activists who learned to code, repair wheelchairs, and plan cities while refusing to remain institutionalized. we also invoke disability activism that centers the remaking of the material world as a central protest tactic, whether by smashing curb cuts with sledgehammers or pouring curb ramps with bags of cement (as adapt activists have done), by staging direct actions with mobility devices (as in the case of protesters leaving behind wheelchairs and crutches to crawl up the steps of the us capitol building, or in the case of nelia sargent, a blind woman who chained her power wheelchair to a nuclear reactor building in 1976 [giordano, 2013]), or by occupying media spaces (such as the jerry lewis telethon) to contest the rendering of disabled bodies as defective and in need of a cure (longmore, 2015). we invoke the history of disabled resistance to assistive technologies (such as audre lorde’s [1997] refusal to wear a breast prosthesis), as well as to war and militarism (as in the case of veteran ron kovic, who staged a demonstration at the republican national convention, “show[ing] their solidarity by gripping the arms of each other’s wheelchairs while they are being pushed by others” [wolfson, 2014, p. 120]).5 we respect the leadership of contemporary disability justice movement leaders, such as alice wong (2019) and vilissa thompson (2019), whose strategic use of media technology to challenge dominant narratives about disability (through the disability visibility project and ramp your voice! websites, twitter feeds, and related podcasts) also demonstrates collective power. while crip technoscience seeks to disrupt ableist and capitalist military-industrial systems, we also center contemporary liberatory projects for “collective access” (mingus, 2010b; piepzna-samarasinha, 2018). to struggle for a more accessible future in which disability is anticipated, welcomed, and in which disabled people thrive, we offer four commitments of crip technoscience as a field of critical scholarship, practice, and activism. hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 four commitments of crip technoscience crip technoscience centers the work of disabled people as knowers and makers. crip technoscience privileges disabled people as designers and world-builders, as knowing what will work best and developing the skills, capacities, and relationships to make something from our knowledge. unlike typical approaches to disability that objectify disabled people and situate expertise in medical professionals and non-disabled designers or engineers, crip technoscience posits that disabled people are active participants in the design of everyday life. not only do disabled people make access in our everyday lives in ways that do not get recognized as design, but the lived experience of disability, and the shared experience of disability community creates specific expertise and knowledge that informs technoscientific practices. we call for greater acknowledgement of the lived experiences and material design practices of disabled people in the work of technoscientific intervention. there is a widespread perception that access technologies are made for us by non-disabled experts, but there is little recognition of our own practices of remaking the material world. yet the field of disability scholarship grew out of activism against rehabilitative models of medical expertise and intervention (upias, 1976), crafting a materialist politics with anti-capitalism at its center (oliver, 1990; russell, 1998), and continues to struggle against “compulsory ablebodiedness” (mcruer, 2006). crip knowing-making forms the basis of political slogans such as nothing about us without us (charlton, 2000), framing disabled people not just as design experts but also as epistemic activists whose politicized ways of knowing the material world also situate us to produce the material conditions that allow disability to thrive, in addition to remaking how disability is known and experienced. without glorifying do-it-yourself design practices, crip technoscience recognizes that disabled peoples’ world-dismantling and world-building labors stem from situated experiences of “misfitting” in the world (garland-thomson, 2011). crips are not merely formed or acted on by the world—we are engaged agents of remaking. in centering the expertise of disabled knowers and makers, crip hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 technoscience involves the use of materials and technologies to produce forms of access otherwise unavailable (or economically inaccessible) via mainstream assistive technology channels. there are many examples of disability experience as knowing-making, so many creative and ingenious ways of living in the world. for example, historian bess williamson (2012a) has traced the ways that disabled people in the american postwar period documented their work as “tinkerers” in community periodicals, retrospective memoirs, and oral histories. they adapted specialized medical and assistive equipment, altered their houses, and repurposed everyday household tools. disabled people turned away from medical supply companies to hardware stores to alter objects to their own advantage, asserting their “presence in a world that largely ignored them” (williamson, 2012a, p. 12). disabled designers such as alice loomer (1982), a wheelchair user, described her crip maker practices of repurposing household items for wheelchair maintenance or for ad hoc assistive technologies as “hanging onto the coattails of science.” loomer argued that her own tinkering and maintenance practices “kept [her] away from nursing homes and attendants”: “i made it. so i know how to fix it…i may have failed as often as i succeeded, but i have equipment that fits me” (p. 30-31). loomer’s work complicates the typical association of the disabled cyborg with a desire for innovation, instead turning to maintenance practices as sites for examining the “frictions, limitations, and failures inherent to technoscientific design processes” (hamraie, 2017, p. 107). similarly, in the 1960s, disabled engineer ralf hotchkiss hacked his wheelchair to plow snow off sidewalks while attending oberlin college, and in the 1980s began the whirlwind wheelchair international, when his global travels to find better designs for wheelchairs took him to nicaragua: i met these four young fellows sharing one wheelchair, and they had already redesigned that wheelchair. they had ridden it so hard that it had broken in 20 different places. they had reinforced it, welded it all back together, and made it much stronger than it had been. and they knew so much about good wheelchair design. it was clear they were the people i was looking for to help me, and i could help them hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 as well, so we’ve been working together ever since. (hotchkiss, 2011) while wheelchair users are not often treated as engineers, the four disabled designers had become experts in wheelchair engineering through trial and error and ingenuity, an ethos that continues in whirlwind wheelchair international’s low-cost, open-source wheelchairs, which are intended to be maintainable for a lifetime, enabling a broader range of people to access them. more recently, designer sara hendren and anthropologist caitrin lynch’s (2016) project engineering at home has called attention to the ad hoc design practices of “cindy,” a recently disabled woman with several amputations. while cindy “received the best available ‘rehabilitation engineering’ technology that money can buy,” she nevertheless “found she had little use for it,” opting instead to use tools of her own design (hendren & lynch, 2016). hendren and lynch frame cindy’s work as “user-initiated design,” which can “yield a powerful course correction to the top-down modes of manufacturing.” another disabled designer, sarah welner, began her career as an obstetric surgeon before focusing on gynecological health for disabled people. recognizing that “conventional examining tables are too high and narrow” for disabled women, particularly wheelchair users, welner designed a table with a button-operated “hydraulic lift” and more comfortable foot rests (waldman, 1998). while the engineering and design professions have historically excluded women, welner, loomer, and cindy’s work are clear examples of the places where crip technoscience and feminist design practices meet. gender and disability expertise diffract through one another to question dominant modes of knowing and making. disabled parents have also been agents of crip knowing-making. disabled parents hack baby cribs and change tables, sew bells on children’s clothing to enable blind parents to keep track of their children when moving through public spaces, and mount car seats on portable luggage carriers to enable blind parents who use white canes or have a guide dog to pull their child behind them with their free hand (fritsch, 2017). wheelchair users adapt slings, wraps, and nursing pillows to carry babies and toddlers on hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 their laps. other parents invent various tools to help feed and bathe their children, get them dressed, do their laundry, put on shoes, zip up coats, and engage in play. queer, gender non-conforming, and trans disabled people also hack and tinker with reproductive technologies and kin formation to become pregnant, gestate, chest feed, and share responsibilities. all these forms of knowing-making are shared on social media (such as with the disabled parenting project’s website, blog, twitter feeds, and related video projects), through disability community publications and events, and during conversations at parks and playgrounds. while disabled people face a multitude of barriers to becoming parents, disabled parents hack, tinker, and alter our material-discursive world, creating crip communities of knowing and making that challenges normative assumptions about parenting as a non-expert consumer activity. crip technoscience is committed to access as friction. emerging out of historical fights for disability rights, the terms accessibility and access are usually taken to mean disabled inclusion and assimilation into normative able-bodied relations and built environments. when viewed as synonymous with inclusion and assimilation, access and accessibility are treated as selfevident goods.6 as kelly fritsch explains, however, the etymology of the word access reveals two frictional meanings: access as “an opportunity enabling contact,” as well as “a kind of attack” (2016, p. 23). taking access as a kind of attack reveals access-making as a site of political friction and contestation. while historically central to the fights for disability access, crip technoscience is nevertheless committed to pushing beyond liberal and assimilation-based approaches to accessibility, which emphasize inclusion in mainstream society, to pursue access as friction, particularly paying attention to access-making as disabled peoples’ acts of non-compliance and protest. for example, before enforceable disability rights laws in the united states, disabled people took direct action to create ramps and curb cuts, making obvious the inaccessibility of the built environment. disability activists have taken sledgehammers to sidewalks in acts of protest, using bags of cement to pour curb cuts, and have used the design of curb cuts and ramps (conceived as levers for facilitating participation) as sites of hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 11 productive friction through which interdependence-based disability politics could arise (hamraie, 2017, p. 99-102). the independent living movement has also used material experimentation to enact crip technoscience and access friction. while the movement was critical of rehabilitation as a field of expert knowledge, it did not refuse the language or tools of rehabilitation outright. in addition to appropriating the term independent living to promote a disability politics of interdependence, the movement understood technoscience as a site of politicized resistance and regularly used hacking and tinkering practices as the basis of disability organizing. many of their methods are captured in designers ray lifchez and barbara winslow’s book design for independent living, produced in collaboration with the movement. the book reveals the everyday technological hacks that disabled people in berkeley in the 1960s and 1970s developed to thrive in an inaccessible city. emblematic of the movement’s crip technoscience ethos, lifchez and winslow offer the concept of “non-compliant users,” illustrating this with an image of a powerchair user wheeling against traffic on a street without curb cuts (1979, p. 153). this technology-enabled movement against the flow of traffic marks anti-assimilationist crip mobility: not an attempt to integrate (as in the liberal approach to disability rights), but rather to use technology as a friction against an inaccessible environment. more recently, toronto resident luke anderson was frustrated by the lack of wheelchair access he experienced on a daily basis. trained as a structural engineer, anderson designed a simple portable wooden ramp in 2011 stenciled with the url “stopgap.ca” and gifted thirteen of these ramps to businesses in his neighborhood. built as a temporary “stop gap” measure to improve accessibility, the ramps are a non-compliant technology; they are not intended to be a permanent solution or structure, do not have to follow building codes, and do not require a city building permit or variance, all of which can be expensive and difficult to obtain. anderson’s experiment took off, leading to the formation of the stopgap foundation and the community ramp project, which has now distributed over 1,200 portable wooden ramps worldwide (fritsch, in press). hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 12 in another contemporary example of access as friction, collin kennedy, a cancer patient in winnipeg, manitoba, protested hospital parking prices by filling the pay-slot on a parking meter with spray foam, telling the local news that he planned to continue doing so “until changes are made” (canadian broadcasting corporation [cbc], 2016). when crip time came into friction with the hospital’s parking meter time, kennedy challenged health capitalism: “you should be able to come here, park, get your treatment, however long that treatment takes…this is a medical facility where people are not going for entertainment. they’re not going for productivity and commerce. we’re here because of life and death” (cbc, 2016). kennedy’s activism—the use of spray foam to obstruct the parking meter—creates frictional access through attacking a technology of capitalist time and contests the commercialization of health care. crip technoscience is committed to interdependence as political technology. we position the crip politics of interdependence as a technoscientific phenomenon, the weaving of relational circuits between bodies, environments, and tools to create non-innocent, frictional access. mainstream disability technoscience presumes disability as an individual experience of impairment rather than a collective political experience of world-building and dismantling. this perception has two primary consequences. first, disabled people are perceived as dependent and the goal of technoscience becomes to encourage independence. second, disability and technology are both perceived as apolitical and stable phenomena, rather than material-discursive entanglements that take shape through struggle, negotiation, and creativity. the crip analytic of interdependence helps us understand how technoscience can simultaneously be entangled with global networks of domination and also provide opportunities for kinship and connection. donna haraway’s (1991) cyborg figure, for instance, has been taken as a material metaphor for the entanglement of nature and techno-cultures. this figure has shaped the critical concept of technoscience by showing the networks of knowledge and material production that comprise global capitalism as a force organizing relations between bodies, technologies, hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 13 and environments. disability critics of the cyborg figure, however, argue that haraway’s approach to the cyborg takes for granted that disabled people easily meld into technological circuits, an assumption shaped by imperatives for rehabilitation, cure, independence, and productivity. as alison kafer (2013) demonstrates, the imagination of disability in feminist technoscience is often limited to either eugenicist ideals of a disability-free future or to “depoliticized” ideals of the cyborg hybrid body (p. 8-10); disability is either a “master trope of human disqualification” (snyder & mitchell, 2006, p. 125) or a “seamless” integration of body and machine (kafer, 2013, p. 105). frequently, feminist technoscience conflates “‘cyborg’ and ‘physically disabled person’” (p. 105), treating disabled people as “posthuman paragons” (allan, 2013, p. 11). even when taken up critically, the cyborg figure in feminist technoscience reinforces ideas about disability as lack and disqualification (bailey, 2012). if, as kafer argues, disabled people have often uneasy or “ambivalent relationship[s] to technology” (2013, p. 119), our practices of interdependence, access intimacy, and collective access can be understood as alternative political technologies: “disabled people,” she writes, “[are not] cyborgs…because of our bodies (e.g., our use of prosthetics, ventilators, or attendants), but because of our political practices” (p. 120). crip technoscience offers interdependence as a central analytic for disability–technology relations, recognizing that in disability culture, community, and knower-maker practices, interdependence acts as a political technology for materializing better worlds. in alliance with moya bailey and whitney peoples’s call for “black feminist health science studies,” crip technoscience is “suspicious of the individualism and siloing practices rewarded in the academy and see[s] collaboration and interdisciplinary as core” values that ought to guide intellectual and material production (bailey & peoples, 2017, p. 18). these values extend beyond the academy, however. as disability justice activist mia mingus (2010a) writes, interdependence offers a politics of crip alliance and solidarity: “it is truly moving together in an oppressive world towards liberation….it is working in coalition and collaboration.” we call for crip technoscience to hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 14 design for collective access and disability justice. we find interdependence as a political technology throughout the history of disability activism. for example, in north american disability activist histories, the most frequently narrated of these is the story of the “504 protest,” which took place in 1977 when disability activists in berkeley, california, occupied the department of health, education, and welfare to protest for the enforcement of section 504 of the federal rehabilitation act, a law that mandated accessible federal programs, spaces, and services. activists in the independent living movement had sought to foster a “crossdisability consciousness” across mobility-disabled, blind, and deaf people (zukas, 2000, p. 141). at the protest, they transformed this consciousness into a political technology, using asl to communicate with the outside when phone lines were cut off, rigging an air conditioner from other mechanical parts in the building, and establishing networks of care (o’toole, 2000, p. 47). similar narratives have been told about the birth of autistic community through organizing made possible by the internet and autistic-accessible conference spaces (sinclair, 2010) and are currently being written through new crip technoscience projects (such as those highlighted in the critical commentary section of this issue). these and other material practices describe a crip technoscientific sensibility wherein disabled interdependence also enables what mingus (2017) calls “access intimacy,” a crip relational practice produced when interdependence informs the making of access. crip technoscience also plays with the boundaries of trust, interdependence, and crip relations. blind artist carmen papalia, for instance, stages crip uses of technology in public space. in one practice, papalia uses a twenty-foot white cane on busy streets to create a sense of antagonism with other pedestrians, which renders access as a frictioned practice; in another, called “blind field shuttle,” papalia leads groups of (sighted) people on walks with their eyes closed. both practices make use of a technology—papalia’s white cane—to stage social interactions in public space that put ideas of independence into question (papalia, 2013). also drawing on crip political interdependence, georgina kleege and hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 15 scott wallin’s (2015) practice of “participatory description” compels narrated visual content through group-based methods. unlike the traditional role of audio description “as a detached, neutral act of translation that functions only as an enabling accommodation,” participatory description uses technoscientific modes, including internet video databases, to “explore the aesthetic, ideological, political and ethical underpinnings of this work of representation and its described object or event.” participatory audio description has also influenced the emergence of new technoscientific tools for accessibility mapping projects. blind designer josh miele, for instance, worked with touch graphics, inc. to design tactile and audio maps of the bay area rapid transit system. other projects use mapping for collective access. unlike mainstream disability technoscience “crowdsourcing” projects, which invoke a charity model of disability wherein non-disabled people collect data but do not engage in disability culture or politics, emerging projects such as mapping access are making participatory access-making the basis of a kind of technoscientific “access intimacy” (mingus, 2017) through practices such as “critical crowdsourcing” of accessibility data (hamraie, 2018). rather than simply creating functional maps, mapping access focuses on mapping as a tool for producing critical relations between bodies, environments, and technologies. at collective map-a-thons, the project enrolls disabled and non-disabled data collectors in the process of interrogating the messiness of access-making in institutional conditions and describing these conditions collectively. critical crowdsourcing practices include enrolling large numbers of both disabled and non-disabled people to collaborate on surveying and describing building accessibility while simultaneously identifying the aspects of the americans with disabilities act compliance that fail to consider the lived experience of accessibility. collaborative mapping visualizes the evidence of inaccessibility while creating opportunities for collective response. crip cartographic technoscience thus enables more critical design, and interrogation of the everyday built environment. our call for crip technoscience theory and practice holds in tension kafer’s crip politics of interdependence with the crip ambivalence toward hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 16 technology. we follow kafer by calling on the usefulness of the cyborg (and the technoscientific circuits it embodies) not as a disabled figure per se, but as a tool for “stag[ing] our own blasphemous interventions in feminist theory” (kafer, 2013, p. 106). crip technoscience borrows the tools of feminist hacking and coding to blaspheme against liberal theories of disability rights and rehabilitation imperatives, as well as against the technological essentialisms of disability scholarship. while disability technoscience is often deployed for unwanted cures or enhancements, we contend that it can also be cripped, reclaimed, hacked, and tinkered with to create a more accessible world. crip technoscience is committed to disability justice. crip technoscience aligns with the disability justice movement, with its critique of mainstream disability rights concepts, and its focus on intersectionality, collective liberation, and wholeness. crip technoscience emphasizes that disabled people are not mere consumers of, or objects for, assimilationist technologies, but instead have agential, politicized, and transformative relationships to technoscience. we note that (as a matter of disability justice) disabled people often reject devices that cause pain or lead to infections, refuse pharmaceutical drugs with undesirable effects, discard technologies produced solely to make non-disabled people more comfortable (rather than to make life easier for disabled people), problematize expensive tools crafted by the medical and military-industrial complex, and instead demand more public, widespread forms of access. these critiques and practices align crip technoscience with impurity (shotwell, 2016), embracing the ugly (mingus, 2011), and staying with the trouble (haraway, 2016). while we write from our position as english-speaking, north american, settler and immigrant scholars and makers, we commit to crip technoscience that centers the leadership of those most impacted, including the expertise of black, brown, and indigenous disabled people. we call for a crip technoscience that disrupts the entitlements of whiteness and colonialism in designed spaces and highlights access as a frictioned project requiring decolonization and racial justice. we imagine disability justicehamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 17 informed crip technoscience as building upon projects such as “open in case of emergency,” a 2017 issue of the asian american literary review edited by mimi khuc, which uses print culture, images, and symbolic imaginaries to hack the diagnostic and statistical manual (dsm). this interactive project draws upon familiar technoscientific objects (such as the dsm), as well as poetry, tarot, and hacked science, to work through asian american intergenerational trauma and displacement. we also imagine crip technoscience allying with emerging work in feminist of color technoscience, such as a recent catalyst “lab meeting” on black lives matter and pedagogy that describes possibilities for extending critical ideas about race, intersectionality, and the environmental construction of health to rehabilitation, immunology, and mental disability (pollock & roy, 2017). crip technoscience is not only in alliance with these projects, but takes the position that they ought to be central to how we imagine accessible futures. in committing to disability justice, crip technoscience explicitly engages the tensions that arise out of taking disabled bodies to be whole, railing against the ways that we are assumed to be damaged, tragic, or in need of cure. to approach disabled bodies by way of wholeness marks the importance of collective, relational, and interdependent approaches to disability. following eli clare, we crip wholeness to include “that which is collapsed, crushed, or shattered” (2017, p. 158), emphasizing that whole and broken are not opposites but rather can be held in productive tension. following a disability justice framework, marking disabled people as whole is to “value our people as they are, for who they are, and understand that people have inherent worth outside of capitalist notions of productivity” (berne & sins invalid, 2016, p. 17). taking up wholeness in this way also addresses the complexity of wanting to both accept disabled bodies as they are while simultaneously desiring to hack, tweak, and otherwise engage and alter our relationships to our bodies and technology. as clare asks, “how can i reconcile my lifelong struggle to love my disabled self exactly as it is with my use of medical technology to reshape my gendered and sexed body-mind?” (2017, p. 175). crip technoscience embraces this contradiction, making space for critically engaging technological hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 18 intervention while maintaining that such interventions are not compulsory. we find inspiration for crip technoscience and disability justice within what alice sheppard (2019) calls “cultural-aesthetic technoscience,” particularly the ways that disability artistry, performance, and media explore the complexities of wholeness, seeking neither to overcome disability nor lapsing into a celebration of individual difference in and of itself. for example, sins invalid, a performance collective led by queer and disabled people of color, uses live and video performances, along with publications, to convey alternatives to disability rights perspectives centered on assimilation. in their performances, which feature people who use assistive devices such as canes, power wheelchairs, and crutches, deaf people, amputees, and people with non-apparent disabilities, “normative paradigms of ‘normal’ and ‘sexy’ are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all individuals and communities” (sins invalid, 2018). in their publication skin, tooth, and bone (2016), the collective outlines a framework for disability justice organizing that draws on performance and activist work made possible through technology. similarly, the canadian disability arts organization collaborative radically integrated performers society in edmonton (cripsie, 2018) challenges “dominant stories of disability and other forms of oppression, through high-quality crip and mad performance art, video art, and public education and outreach programs” that “celebrate the generative possibilities of ‘disability’ and ‘mental illness,’ in terms of how these experiences can offer important alternative perspectives.” in the dancebased video-art project other-wise, danielle peers and lindsey eales (2013) explore themes of interdependency, access, and wholeness, speaking the movements of their dance as peers’s and eales’s bodies move toward and away from each other, limbs entangling over and around peers’s wheelchair: “lifts. supports. draws me out and pulls me in. connects…we are the chair…we will not overcome, but we are becoming.” performative uses of technology transform the meaning of functional technology from rehabilitative or adaptive to cultural. another site of crip technoscience world-remaking is disability hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 19 fashion. for example, chun-shan sandie yi’s crip couture project (2017) creates wearable art, tailor-made prosthetics, and orthotics to highlight difference and disability. yi works with unconventional materials, including skin and hair, to engage the contradictions of disability wholeness. designer james shutt’s myostomy project likewise offers lingerie-inspired stoma plugs for colostomy bag users, as well as body art products that aestheticize the stoma (london, 2012). like yi’s work, these interventions transform the typical understanding of assistive technology, rendering it as crip fashion, art, and culture. crip media production is also a tool for producing new representations of disability that challenge disability technoscience discourses. for example, disabled artist sue austin developed a wheelchair that allows her to dive underwater. documenting these experiences in the ocean’s depths, surrounded by blue water and oceanic creatures, austin highlights the joy and freedom of “revisioning the familiar” (2012) by using a wheelchair to negotiate unexpected worlds. appearing in the disability and technology documentary fixed (2014) directed by regan brashear, austin’s work offers ways of “seeing, being, and knowing” with disability that affirms crip world-remaking (austin, 2012). in the digital age, youtube and other online services have become tools for distributing disability justice content. autistic activist mel baggs’s manifesto, “in my language” (2007) (viewed over 1.5 million times as of this writing), uses video and sound to make a strong case for the dignity and personhood of autistic people. in a series of clips, baggs makes sounds, touches objects, and uses their body to move through space. later, baggs shows the same clips with a computer-generated voiceover explaining that moving and feeling are a language. because “the way [baggs] naturally thinks and responds to things looks and feels so different from standard concepts,” “some people do not consider it thought at all, but it is a way of thinking in its own right.” instead, baggs advocates for the agency and power of autistic people, particularly non-speaking people, who are often excluded from mainstream disability narratives. while recognizing the inequitable ways in which many people come hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 20 to disability, crip technoscience claims disabled life as desirable life, as life worth living, and as a difference that matters. disability rights often foreground a pride-centered framework without acknowledging the relationships between pride and “the violence of social/economic conditions of capitalism” (erevelles, 2011, p. 17). crip technoscience acknowledges that that pride-centric frameworks may make it “difficult to acknowledge the overwhelming suffering that results from colonisation, war, famine, and poverty” (meekosha, 2011, p. 677), such that it becomes crucial to reject “the ways in which disability is presently employed as a mechanism for oppression in the global context” (jaffee, 2016, p. 118). within such contexts, “positive re-envisionings of disability” are not always politically salient (puar, 2017, p. xix). building on disability justice, however, crip technoscience centers the transformative role of disabled people in both technoscientific and activist conditions to both build and dismantle the world toward more just social relations, which includes engaging the “specific sensibilities and discourses” (ben-moshe, 2018) that disability culture offers to refute disability “as a vector of social control” or “a weapon of debilitation” (fritsch & mcguire, in press). following clare, we ask, “how do we witness, name, and resist the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of bodyminds—plant and animal, organic and inorganic, nonhuman and human— while not equating disability with injustice?” (2017, p. 56). this question acknowledges the messiness of access-making in conditions shaped by colonialism, militarism, and injustice, but also asks us to go further and locate the conditions and transformative power of crip knowing-making under these systems. disabled people use technoscience to survive and alter the very systems that produce disability or attempt to render us as broken. take the example of safwan harb, a disabled syrian refugee with two disabled family members (british broadcasting corporation [bbc], 2016). while living in a refugee camp, harb designed an accessible scooter using found materials, which enabled him and other family members to navigate the camp’s unpaved streets. harb’s invention signifies crip knowing-making in spaces produced through war and displacement. mobility, in this context, is not a hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 21 tool for reinforcing ablenationalism, productivity, or even rights. but harb’s invention is an outcome of a design process enacted through crip experience. crip technoscience recognizes the non-innocent contexts in which knowledge and access emerge. in some cases, crip technoscience may be an individual knowing and making that reorients the material world. in others, it may be collective, politicized work toward interdependence and justice. building on haraway, we offer crip technoscience as a critical project that holds in tension the unjust imperatives of technoscientific innovation with the transformative capacities to shape matter and meaning through praxis. the point is not to achieve ideological purity outside of mainstream disability technoscience, militarism, or capitalism, but to locate and center threads of resistance already occurring within and against these systems. as technoscience expands beyond cold war–era emphases on militarism to include conditions often deemed innocent or uncontroversial (such as sustainability), disabled people are often caught between imperatives to save resources and enable access (a conflict most recently highlighted by the #strawban debate discussed in alice wong’s piece in this issue). but crip technoscience can offer us a sensibility and set of practices for responding to collective problems such as climate change and pollution. not only do disabled people act as experts and designers in matters of how to reduce single-use plastics such as straws, but we can also draw on our community-generated accessibility and universal design practices to shape responses to the anthropocene. for example, recent studies estimate that volatile organic chemicals (vocs) in fragranced beauty products and aerosol sprays produce more c02 emissions than cars (mcdonald et al., 2018). disabled people with chemical sensitivities or injuries have long advocated for fragrance-free spaces to avoid migraines, brain fog, and illness, in addition to calling for reduced industrial pollution. activists such as piepzna-samarasinha (2018) have not only offered education about fragrance accessibility, but also hacked the production of fragrance-free products. following piepzna-samarasinha, who describes accessibility as an “act of love” (2018, p. 74), crip technoscience imagines the hacking of non-harmful resource use as an act of planetary love through hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 22 which accessibility for marginalized disabled and chemically injured people can also mitigate chemical harm toward the atmosphere and oceans. these opportunities for hacking and tinkering with pervasive practices such as voc use also show us that crip expertise and ingenuity need not rely on disability pride narratives to challenge global conditions harming human and non-human life. in drawing on disability justice principles, crip technoscience agitates against compulsory ablebodiedness and ablenationalism, and mandates for independence and productivity. it works on multiple scales—from the most basic everyday hacks to organized efforts toward collective access—to materialize accessible futures as those in which bodies need not be perceived as productive, legible, articulate, or beautiful to be understood as important agents of world remaking. conclusion crip technoscience spans historical and contemporary design practices, political activism, scholarly alliances, global systems, and micro-scale resistances. we call for crip technoscience practices that challenge the political economy of technology, particularly as it is ensnared within injustices perpetrated by imperatives to fix, cure, or eliminate disability. crip technoscience struggles for futures in which disability is anticipated and welcomed, and in which all disabled people thrive, regardless of their productivity. by endorsing accessible futures, we refuse to treat access as an issue of technical compliance or rehabilitation, as a simple technological fix, or a checklist. instead, we define access as collective, messy, experimental, frictional, and generative. accessible futures require our interdependence. we center technoscientific activism and critical design practices rooted in disability justice, collective access, and collective transformation toward more socially just disability relations. we call for activists, scholars, and makers to expand possible futures for disabled people. we find crip knowing-making in the design and implementation of architectures, technologies, and infrastructures. we seek broad recognition for, and hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 23 engagement with, the world-building and -dismantling force of crip technoscience. notes 1 earlier work defined crip technoscience as “experimental practices of knowing-making [that] challenged hierarchies and power relations…by shifting expertise to those with lived experiences of disability and away from the outside experts often designing in their name” (hamraie, 2017, p. 99) and “technoscientific practices…that politicize disabled people’s relationships to technologies produced by the military or pharmaceutical companies, while valuing the technoscientific activism that has characterized disability rights history” (hamraie, 2015, p. 309). 2 liberation technoscience projects have included black panther health activism (see nelson, 2013); feminist reproductive technoscience (see murphy, 2012); act up protests against the us food and drug administration (see epstein, 1996); and the independent living movement’s accessibility activism (see williamson, 2012a, 2012b). crip technoscience connects to historical activism and scholarship while offering a politicized, anti-assimilationist lens for understanding disability in relation to technology. 3 there are, of course, also histories of engagement between disability studies (particularly scholarship on embodiment and culture) and critical approaches to science, technology, and medicine. see casper and koenig (1996); mills (2011); ott, serlin, & mihm (2002); sobchack (2006); and sterne (2001). however, we concur with stuart blume, vasilis galis, and andrés valderrama pineda, who write, “the challenging questions that disability raises for sts go beyond those relating to the politics of technological change to include questions relating to knowing, to knowledge production, and in particular to embodiment” (2013, p. 102). crip technoscience turns to these questions of knowing, making, and doing. 4 “new telethon” references the rehabilitation-centered media events hosted by the late jerry lewis that have been widely contested by disability activists and scholars. see longmore (2015). 5 veteran activism has frequently involved mobility devices. in the 1978 film coming home, a paralyzed veteran chained himself and his hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 24 wheelchair to the front gates of a military base in protest of the war and high rates of veteran suicide. while depicting a radical disability protest, however, the opening screening of the film was held at an inaccessible theater in san francisco. in response, disability activists chained themselves to the front of the building in protest (linton, 2007). similar tactics were used in anti-war and anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s and 1980s (a. finger, personal communication, 2018) and in protest of the war on terror (ollis, 2012). most recently, adapt activists in the united states have used their mobility and assistive devices to protest cuts to healthcare, staging “die-ins” at us senate healthcare policy deliberation meetings (mcbride, 2017). 6 as disability justice activists point out, disability rights approaches are often focused on assimilation into middle-class, white, productive, heteronormative norms. additionally, disability rights are often enforced through “accommodations” that integrate disabled people into mainstream society using standardized formulas and checklists. we 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(2000). national disability activist: architectural and transit accessibility, personal assistance services [an oral history conducted in 1997 by sharon bonney]. volume iii of builders and sustainers of the independent living movement in berkeley. berkeley, ca: regional oral history office, the bancroft library, university of california—berkeley. bios aimi hamraie is assistant professor of medicine, health, & society and american studies at vanderbilt university (nashville, tn). their interdisciplinary research spans disability and feminist theory, architecture and design, and science and technology studies. hamraie is the author of building access: universal design and the politics of disability (university of minnesota press, 2017). hamraie also directs the critical design lab, a multi-institution project focused on disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. kelly fritsch is an assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at carleton university in algonquin territory (ottawa, canada). her research broadly engages crip, queer, and feminist theory to hamraie and fritsch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 33 explore the relations of disability, health, technology, risk, accessibility, and social justice. she is co-editor of keywords for radicals: the contested vocabulary of late-capitalist struggle (2016, ak press) and was a 20152018 banting postdoctoral fellow at the women & gender studies institute, university of toronto. microsoft word vostral-127-1156-8.docx vostral, s.l., (2017). toxic shock syndrome, tampon absorbency, and feminist science. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(1), page 1-30 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sharra l. vostral, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article toxic shock syndrome, tampon absorbency, and feminist science sharra l. vostral purdue university svostral@gmail.com abstract in 1980, the centers for disease control recommended that women limit their use of superabsorbent tampons since the risk for toxic shock syndrome increased with greater levels of absorption. however, women had no way of following this advice because products did not have consistent absorbency labels. the tampon task force, comprised of manufacturers and consumer advocates, convened to set standards for absorptive capacity as well as nomenclature for all commercial tampon brands. esther rome from the boston women's health book collective participated as a feminist health activist and recruited scientist nancy reame to help generate data on their behalf. importantly, reame rejected the use of blue saline as a menstrual fluid replacement in the syngyna—the synthetic vagina lab instrument—to test tampon absorbency, and insisted upon heparinized blood instead. in the process, the advocates developed a feminist science: they challenged the process by which a standard is established, the method by which variables are controlled, and the erasure of menstrual fluid from tests about tampon 2 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) absorbency. the feminist science yielded both usable and valid outcomes, with results that challenged the design of the experiment upon which industry-wide standards were to be based. introduction on september 6, 1980, twenty-five-year-old patricia kehm died from complications due to toxic shock syndrome (tss). her death, along with seventy-three women and two thousand others sickened between 1970 and 1980 after using superabsorbent tampons, precipitated action ("toxic shock syndrome—united states, 1970–1980," 1981). in the short term, the food and drug administration (fda) pressured procter & gamble to recall rely—the superabsorbent tampon with the highest rate of tss—and the company removed the tampons from store shelves (though other superabsorbent tampons, including those from playtex, tambrands, and kimberly-clark remained on the market). product liability lawsuits, including that of kehm's family against procter & gamble, garnered meager payouts to compensate for injuries and deaths. a less obvious but long-lasting result was the establishment of the tampon task force in 1982. the task force, composed of manufacturers, consumer groups, and feminist health advocates, sought to set uniform standards concerning tampon absorption capabilities and deliver labeling recommendations to the fda. the importance of this was that higher absorptions were linked to higher rates of tss, but women did not have an accurate way of knowing which tampons were more or less absorbent. this essay examines how feminist science influenced the proceedings of the tampon task force and how feminist health advocates initiated the approach. on the task force was esther rome, one of the founders of the boston women's health book collective (bwhbc) and co-authors of our bodies, ourselves (obos). her inclusion marked an important departure from regulation-as-usual with men and corporate representatives setting the policy standards. rome brought to the tampon task force the same tactics she deployed in writing our bodies, ourselves. from the 3 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) bwhbc’s beginning, the founders set out to obtain and distribute medical knowledge about women's health that had been the exclusive purview of mostly male physicians, who were often "condescending, paternalistic, judgmental and noninformative" (boston women’s health book collective, 1973). what these doctors would not provide, the women set out to learn, discover, and take for their own to share with other women. the scene would repeat itself on the tampon task force. when manufacturers would not share data, were not forthcoming, and were not even using menstrual blood for absorption tests, rome solicited feminist scientist nancy reame, a nursing professor at the university of michigan, to generate data on the consumer advocates' behalf. together with other tampon task force members, they insisted upon sharing data amongst all the scientists and the fda regulators, enacting an ethic of feminist science. reame used heparinized blood (blood treated with heparin so it does not coagulate quickly) instead of saline to test tampon absorption rates. it was a watershed moment for consumer groups, feminist health advocates, and women scientists, with feminist science producing data and networks of knowledge based upon the biological materiality of menstruating bodies. thus, at this historical moment when feminists challenged the universality and androcentrism of medicine, the inclusion of a reified "woman" and an understanding of essentialized "women's bodies" was a radical departure.1 feminist ideas privileging women's knowledge and the materiality of women's bodies were critical in shaping science during the 1980s in the face of the unknowns related to toxic shock syndrome. in this case, feminist methods relied upon a universal biological female as the basis for which to establish lab practices and tampon absorbency standards. we now understand this essentialized reading of the female body as conflating gender, sexed bodies, and experiences of menstruation. it makes sense to think of people who have periods—as a category—simply as "menstruators" (bobel, 2010), rather than using gender as a proxy. menstruators might yield different ways of knowing about periods, their management, and related health outcomes 4 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) associated with tampon use. at the time, however, insistence that menstrual blood mattered informed feminist science, which valued not only female bodies but also common-sense research practices that incorporated real-life applicability to menstruators. this approach challenged the privileged position of "fastidious" science as described by epidemiologist alvan feinstein, a shortcoming of which is to eliminate so many variables that context—in this case, that of menstruating bodies—is erased. through feminist science, advocates challenged the process by which a standard was established, the method by which variables were controlled, and the disappearance of menstrual fluid from tests about tampon absorbency. feminist science yielded both usable and valid outcomes, with results that disputed the design of the experiment upon which standards were to be based. the rise of toxic shock syndrome by the 1970s, two separate but significant events converged. first, the new illness of toxic shock syndrome was identified in 1978 (todd, 1978). second, synthetic materials had begun to displace cotton in tampon composition creating a category called "superabsorbent" (tierno, 2001). although tss is not exclusive to people who menstruate, by september of 1980 the centers for disease control (cdc) declared that tss was associated with superabsorbent tampons ("follow-up on toxic-shock syndrome," 1980), thus the majority of cases affected them. although many theories emerged to explain this new link, mike osterholm, an epidemiologist working for the state of minnesota during the 1980s, determined that superabsorbent tampons captured and held air— specifically, oxygen (osterholm, 1982). tampons, especially superabsorbent ones, introduced enough oxygen into the usually anaerobic vaginal canal to change its ecology and promote the growth of staphlococcus aureus, the bacterium responsible for tampon-related tss, in those women who happened to carry this particular strain of 5 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) bacterium. pat schlievert, a microbiologist, identified the co-factors of the tampon creating an aerobic vagina and the naturally occurring higher ph during menses as contributing to tss. the conditions were ideal not only for reproduction of the s. aureus bacterium, but also the production of the toxin tsst-1 (schlievert, 1981). when the toxin transferred into the bloodstream, and if the woman lacked the requisite antibodies and titers for it, it could precipitate organ failure and shock, thus the illness toxic shock syndrome. the three elements of oxygen, bacterium, and lack of antibodies were required for tss to foment. in general, more white women were affected since they were a larger part of the population, but the cdc reported cases of tss across categories of race and ethnicity (mmwr, 1983). toxic shock syndrome occurs in about 1 in 100,000 women, making it a rare occurrence, and cases are not necessarily terminal when treated early enough with antibiotics (hajjeh, 1990). however, for a small segment of women, the risk is quite real. all of this, though, has taken years to understand and was science-in-the-making during the early 1980s. scientists scrambled to understand the most rudimentary elements of the illness and its transmission. by the fall of 1980, it was clear was that something potentially deadly was going on with tampons. procter & gamble removed its successful tampon rely from production and sales, and the cdc and the fda recommended that women use the least absorbent tampon possible (cdc, 1980; vostral, 2011). the fda did not want to suggest banning tampons, due in part to their long safety record since the 1930s. however, without accurate information and labeling, there was no way for women to determine which tampon to purchase with the lowest absorbency. they could not follow guidelines to avoid tamponrelated tss, short of abandoning tampons altogether. feminist interventions in tss women needed accurate information about tampons, and quickly. the 6 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) fda held responsibility for safety and labeling, and reached out to astm for assistance. currently known just by its initials, astm (american society for testing and materials) is a professional organization that develops voluntary consensus standards concerning materials, engineering, and testing practices. everything from steel gauge to screw threads requires agreed-upon standards, and as a technology, tampons were now the focus of negotiation. astm had a special committee known as f-4 to develop standards for medical devices, and tampons fell under its purview. standard setting usually included industry representatives, with astm helping to build consensus among stakeholders. important at this moment was the inclusion not only of producers but users and representatives of "general interest." astm partnered in a new cooperative program with the national consumers league (ncl) to include layperson consumer input into the standard setting process. becky lebuhn (at the time cohen), was the consumer representative from the ncl on the f-4 medical devices committee. she encouraged the f-4 committee to agree to the fda's request to develop a tampon standard, but pointed out that with no other women on the committee, only she qualified as an actual user. a group purporting to represent consumers needed actual tampon users in the standards development effort; an allmale chorus was insufficient. through the ncl, lebuhn volunteered to "assemble a group of women, including representatives of women's health and advocacy organizations" to participate on the task force and make sure women's health and safety concerns were on the table (lebuhn, 2017). in this case it was not just competing industries potentially vying to maintain the upper hand of a design or process but also consumer groups and feminist health advocates who had a stake in their personal safety and well-being. the tampon task force as it came to be known met in january of 1982, seven more times throughout that year, and for the next three years to develop "a tampon standard as expediously (sic) as possible" (ellis, 1982). the following manufacturers, consumer groups, and women's health advocates composed the group: johnson & johnson, kimberly7 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) clark corporation, tambrands, inc., playtex international, bwhbc, coalition for the medical rights for women, empire state consumer association, national consumers league, national women's health network, and woman health international. though the advocacy groups had a unified front, this essay focuses upon the involvement of the bwhbc through its papers archived at the arthur & elizabeth schlesinger library at harvard university. well known for its signature book our bodies, ourselves, the bwhbc began in 1969 in boston as a grassroots group of twelve women sharing frustrations about medical paternalism and the active withholding of information by physicians. the collective grew into a nonprofit, and shaped the women's health movement during the 1970s. bwhbc goals included providing health and medical information in an accurate and understandable way so that women could make informed decisions about birth control, pregnancy, and sexual health, for instance, and thus become their own health experts. within the history of women’s rights, this is characterized as the "difference" approach; that is, placing the female body at the center of politics, knowledge, and power as opposed to the "equality" approach that deemphasizes female biology, in part due to the legacy of discrimination based upon it (kline, 2010). embracing difference, bwhbc advocated for the normalcy of women's life events, from birthing to aging, and challenged frameworks that unnecessarily pathologized their bodies. the relationship of tampons to tss and women's health was therefore a serious concern for bwhbc. esther rome2 had already published a menstruation brochure written in red ink, and was very concerned about the link between menstruation, tampons, and tss. rome was a well-informed feminist activist, and an important voice to include on the tampon task force. her colleague and co-author of the 1984 edition of obos, jill wolhandler, participated intermittently as well. the bwhbc was a significant advocacy group; with its heft representing women, calling upon them for letter writing campaigns, and publishing and distributing our bodies, ourselves, the fda and manufacturers could 8 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) not easily dismiss their concerns. in addition to the consumer representatives, lawyers for the different parties attended meetings as well. david swankin was general counsel for the national consumers league, and becky lebuhn recruited him to the task force. he attended all the meetings and corresponded with the fda and manufacturers and represented their interests. swankin was the first executive director of the white house office of consumer affairs under lyndon johnson, and later worked at the us department of labor. swankin emphasized the dramatic divide between the consumers and manufacturers: "i cannot overstate the cultural gap that governed this entire thing. so there were legal considerations because of what was going on with toxic shock, [and] the cultural thing that just was overwhelming, overwhelming [emphasis in original]” (swankin, 2016). this "cultural thing" was not just the emergence of an active consumer rights contingent but feminism-in-action. the feminist advocates challenged assumptions, questioned language, and embodied a new approach. together, they required the men to acknowledge and bear witness to the materiality and biological functioning of their bodies. swankin recalled that an fda representative came to one of the first meetings and said "you know, everything is a balance in medicine, even an aspirin can kill you." this approach was not well received by the advocates or rome herself. swankin remembered rome arguing: "excuse me," she says "i think that is probably true, but this is not medicine. it [menstruation] is a normal everyday process that half the world goes through and to treat it like an illness and therefore to say what you have is a risk/benefit, it is a risk you have to take into account, there is no benefit." and they did not like that. justifying risk to treat an infection or illness with medicine was one thing; a healthy person assuming the risk of death by wearing a superabsorbent tampon was quite another. thus, the standpoints of the manufacturers, the fda, and consumer advocates were quite stark. characterizing their competing positions, swankin compared them to entrenched international adversaries. “so right away it was like dealing with the north 9 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) koreans to try to settle the problem. you couldn't do it because it was from such different perceptions” (swankin, 2016). rome had a dynamic personality, and was not shy about getting her larger points across. swankin recalled that at one of the first meetings, "esther, comes in in a white dress…she was nursing her baby, and she was nursing [him] at the meeting. it was not enough to cover her breast; we're doing natural things here. you should have seen these guys [lawyers in the three-piece suits]. they were gulping, gulping, gulping," their discomfort palpable about the perceived impropriety. swankin continued with his recollection of the scene, with rome saying, "[you] know. we don't have to actually do anything. we can bleed all over our dresses; they do in many, many places. i don't know if you appreciate that, but it wouldn't bother me if we couldn't do something here. maybe that's the alternative." here, a veiled threat of abandoning tampons for an "alternative" approach reminded the corporate representatives of the collective influence millions of tampon wearers had on their future profits. rome, in a way, was living evidence of the political power of reproductive processes. with her behavior rome challenged multiple norms: do not bring a baby to a business meeting, do not expose a breast in public, do not breastfeed in public, do not "free bleed" on a white dress. with her very body she offered evidence that had been excluded from the realm of common knowledge amongst these male corporate representatives and she demanded that they understand women's bodies differently. she also requested that payment for a babysitter of her choice be included in her travel expenses, although it was not deemed a legitimate cost of the trip to philadelphia for the meetings. her ability to push these boundaries was crucial because corporate representatives had not been confronted by menstrual realities in this visceral way. though they had significant familiarity with their companies, marketing strategies, and the tampon as an object of manufacturing, they had little grasp of consumer expectations, preferences, and actual experience using tampons, and no embodied understanding of how well the tampons functioned (or not). this was 10 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) exactly why becky lebuhn knew that women needed to be the major voice on the tampon task force. simply by inhabiting their gendered male bodies, the corporate representatives did not have to participate in the social norms required to hide menstrual fluid. they were exonerated from the disproportionate cost of possible illness and death borne upon their bodies due to tampon-associated tss. swankin recalled that the manufacturers really did not understand—or chose not to understand—the feminist advocates and consumer stakeholders, and their usual mode of business thinking did not help. the corporate representatives fell into de facto salesmanship, which pandered to the women rather than engaging their legitimate concerns. as swankin put it: [o]ne time they brought in stephan–wife [stepford-wife] types to the meeting, and the discussion that time was deodorants [in tampons]…the women that they brought were all dressed up, absolute straight out of new york ad agencies, and they had prepared expensive sample kits to pass out, of all the different things, and everybody threw in what they wanted to give them, in this little goody basket (swankin, 2016). the "freebie" baskets were ironically filled with the very deodorant tampons and products for which the women sought safety regulations and also had no intention of ever using. lebuhn, who continued to serve as the convener and secretariat for the advocacy groups, felt that it was very condescending, as if the companies were trying to influence the consumer representatives with token gifts (lebuhn, 2017). swankin concurred, noting that the advocates "refused to take them. but that's another example, of obviously, they [the corporate reps] thought that by…taking a madison avenue approach that they [the consumer groups] were going to say 'ah, i see what you are trying to do.'" and that was to get them to agree with the manufacturers that the products were perfectly fine as they were. swankin concluded that the corporate representatives "just had zero connection in their minds to what people wrote [our bodies, ourselves] and their allies," as he put it, which 11 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) included not only all the consumer advocates at the meeting but the strong grass-roots network that each organization cultivated. it took awhile for the manufacturers to realize that the feminist health advocates and consumer groups would not easily be swayed and that they had multiple concerns. there were other tampon-related problems besides just a lack of absorbency standards: tensil strength of string so it would not break, particulates sloughing and fraying from the tampon's "pledget" wadding, applicators that cut vaginal skin, allergic reactions to embedded perfumes and deodorants, undisclosed leachable chemicals, and overall general "biocompatibility" (kobren, 1981). since none of this was tested for or regulated, it was an opportunity for sweeping policy recommendations. in this regard, a significant point of contention for the health advocates was the lack of available scientific data about any of these issues. the consumer groups had the burden of proof on their side since cdc scientists as well state epidemiologists had reported a significant association with superabsorbent tampons and an increased risk of tss (osterholm, 1982). additionally, manufacturers still could not prove definitively that tampons were uninvolved. manufacturers were not forthcoming with all their data, calling it "proprietary," though swankin felt results could have been easily squelched if they did not serve corporate needs. furthermore, corporate lawyers were well aware of product liability lawsuits filed against all the manufacturers related to both bodily harm and deaths resulting from tampon-related tss, the most well publicized and successful being kehm v. procter & gamble (1982), concerning patricia kehm's death resulting from the use of rely tampons (riley, 1986). the issue of data sharing and the integrity of the corporatesponsored research was a serious concern. at the outset, the consumer advocates were at a disadvantage without their own scientific research lab to double-check data and results. the manufacturers possessed a depth of scientific know-how with engineers, biologists, animal labs, and money to run any number of tests. the consumer groups had no such resources or facilities. furthermore, swankin reflected, "[t]he 12 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) manufacturers, nobody believed them…it was going to be bought research." he added, "[t]here were all these allegations [about proprietary studies], that if the study was legitimate, and it came out and it didn't say what they wanted it to hear they'd kill it, so we'd never see it anyway." due to the lack of open sharing, and fears of proprietary secrets being revealed not only to corporate rivals but the broader public, the data collected was not made available to the advocates to examine. furthermore, astm would not pay for tests at the behest of the consumer groups. within the negotiating structure, they were at the mercy of manufacturers and data produced by in-house scientists who chose whether or not to share. the consumer groups had no way to evaluate the validity of scientific presentations without their own lab to corroborate or challenge the methods and data. this was about to change. fighting fire with fire if absorbency was the key factor to convey in warning labels, it was important to have data on it. the tampon task force was charged with creating a standard for measuring absorbency and a standard for intralaboratory results. the consumer groups and health advocates wanted one that was not solely in service of the manufacturers, and at the same time through their presence they did not want to give tacit approval for a hollow standard (memo, 1983). the consumer groups recognized that they needed a sympathetic scientist with access to a lab to help them translate their feminist intents through the language of science to the other manufacturers at the negotiating table. they found this in nancy reame. reame met rome in the late 1970s at a small conference sponsored by the society for menstrual cycle research (smcr). she held a master of science in nursing and was just finishing her phd in physiology, focusing on reproductive sciences. she had always been interested in women's reproductive health, including the endocrinology of 13 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) menstruation, and was headed toward a tenure-track position in the school of nursing at the university of michigan. later in her career, reame was named to the institute of medicine and became a fellow with the american association for the advancement of science. her work on endocrinology and menstrual health brought her to the smcr meeting. there, reame learned about the problematic politics of tampons. first, she got a crash course in tampon testing from a newly hired researcher at kimberly-clark corporation, the manufacturer of kotex sanitary napkins and tampons, whom she met at the conference. this researcher, referred to here as "karen," confided in reame about the overall lack of understanding the corporate scientists had about all things vaginal and menstrual. reame summarized the essence of their conversation. [karen] said "[y]ou would be amazed how tampons are tested by the industry…they hired me because i'm the first reproductive physiologist they have in the feminine care division. it's all paper chemists. it's all men. they don't use menstrual fluid. they don't use blood of any kind. they use blue dyed saline water. it's pretty clear it's repugnant to talk about menstrual blood much less work with it in the lab." and she [karen] said, "[w]hat's worse, they don't even understand the functioning of the female human vagina." and she said "[t]hey hired me, [and] as part of the interview when i sat down, they said could i please draw a human vagina, just the anatomy?" reame commented, [a]nd that was pretty much the extent of her interview…they knew enough to go after a physiologist, but two other male candidates were vying for the job: one a primate specialist, one a guinea pig physiologist, and she herself was a basic scientist in reproductive physiology. [karen] said, "i was working with guinea pigs, but i have a vagina, and i knew enough about basic anatomy that i drew the right relationship of the vagina and uterus from my anatomy class," and she said, "and i got the job." and she said "[t]hat just 14 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) shows the level of ignorance in the feminine care industry; no wonder something serious was going to happen" (reame, 2016). the conversation left an impression upon reame about the systematic misunderstanding of women's bodies in relation to menstruation and tampon development. following this meeting, karen invited reame to neenah, wisconsin and the headquarters of kimberly-clark corporation to present her dissertation work on the biology of menstruation. the seminar resulted in a one-year, $25,000 contract to conduct viscosity studies of menstrual fluid. this late-1970s interaction was the last of reame's connection to the company. the second important result of attending the smcr conference was that reame met esther rome. rome had not forgotten her. after the first two meetings of the tampon task force, it was clear that the health advocates needed scientific help, and rome reached out to reame. reame remembered rome, saying to her ‘you're not going to believe this! they expect us to just buy into their data! we aren't going to do that. we need somebody who can do this!’ (reame, 2016). rome further explained to reame why it was so important to get her on board. reame recalled her saying, "[y]ou are the only person in the country that's ever worked with menstrual blood! we don't want an epidemiologist, we don't want someone who can crunch the numbers, we want someone who's actually done some clinical research." i said of course! i love it! this sounds like such an adventure! (reame, 2016). reame joined forces (receiving $2,500 for the lab studies) and attended the meetings alongside rome, swankin, and the others, thus legitimizing their position. swankin explained, "nancy was the connection to the science; she could explain deep science" and had a fluid way of doing so, and she "played that role of connecting science to activists." in addition, reame had "a very important function; they [the corporate representatives and lawyers] respected her, you couldn't laugh at her, you couldn't make believe she wasn't there" (swankin, 2016). with reame on board, the consumer groups and feminist advocates could 15 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) participate in a more robust manner, matching science with science. setting a test method: the syngyna the syngyna—a synthetic-vagina test apparatus—was a device designed to measure tampon absorbency. it was developed in 1958 by g. w. rapp, a professor of biochemistry and physiology at loyola university chicago for the campana corporation, which manufactured pursettes tampons (rapp, n.d). as his lab report explains, rapp first devised some basic methods to measure absorbency, such as dripping a measured amount of fluid on a tampon or dunking a tampon in a flask filled with fluid until it reached full capacity, but neither seemed to replicate body temperature, muscular pressure, or angle and positioning of a vaginallyworn tampon. he tried developing an "in vivo" test using women as test subjects but rejected this approach because they presented too many uncontrollable variables. as a result, he devised a glass vacuum tube with a hydrostatic head, and inside the tube a condom pulled taunt served as the vaginal orifice. it was surrounded by a warm water bath to simulate body temperature (figure 1 and figure 2). the hydrostatic head controlled the flow rate of the liquid entering the syngyna chamber. (to see a modern version in use go to "tampons—syngyna test by sgs" on you tube, https://youtu.be/kyxuqdzsg4o.) the absorption testing methodology called for either a saline solution or a viscous material called "blue goo"—composed of cellulose gum, glycerol, sodium chloride, sodium bicarbonate and water—to be used as the control (rapp, n.d.). to make this a "known" in an experiment, it made sense to produce a fluid with consistent elements that any decent lab technician could create. this helped to eliminate variables and focus upon the unknown properties of the tampons, each with their various sizes, shapes, and absorbencies. the syngyna apparatus and test method circulated throughout the industry as a means of determining tampon absorbencies, but it had not been scrutinized in terms of its efficacy to set a federal standard. this was one of the goals 16 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) of the tampon task force. thus, the bureau of medical devices, a division of the fda, and the manufacturers began using the syngyna test to assess its accuracy across brands, but the consumer groups and feminist health advocates were left out until nancy reame joined them. the task force accepted reame as a peer scientist, and one of the manufacturers sent her the specialized syngyna lab apparatus to begin. she said that when it arrived, there were plenty of jokes about it in her allfemale lab, including speculations about "vagina envy." they named theirs sally (reame, 2017). the very basis of the standardizing process was questionable to reame and the health advocates. the syngyna was a poor representation of the dynamic vagina, and its methodology excluded real menstrual fluid. the feminists questioned whether or not the saline was a sufficient standin for menses, which was complex during any given menstrual cycle, containing proteins, mucus, and cellular debris as well as blood. this labmade representation of menstrual blood was decidedly synthetic, and not in any way a natural product of a woman's body. what kind of effect would a simulated product rather than menstrual fluid have upon absorbency? the consumer advocates did not know, and even if the industry scientists had any inkling, they certainly were not going to say, for fear of revealing anything they perceived as proprietary or legally incriminating. the convenient de-gendered and dehumanized syngyna erased all forms of difference, from the size of the vaginal canal, with its shape, angle, elasticity, length, and circumference, to the fluids coming from it, eliminating vagaries of menstrual fluid from watery to clotted and its rates as well as volume, which women would never conceptualize and measure in grams anyhow. perturbed, reame recalled that even the canal itself was represented by a condom, "sheik" unlubricated #9, loaded with racialized and ethnic overtones (reame, 2017). the reduction of vaginal canals to one form and shape had a long history with tampon developers. earle cleveland haas, a doctor of osteopathy and the inventor of the tampax tampon in the 1930s, held a 17 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) similarly dismissive attitude. when asked if he measured any part of the vagina or cervix during the development of tampax, haas remarked, "i have seen so damn many of them i had an idea. some are short and some are longer, of course, but that didn't make any difference" (kehm v. procter & gamble, p. 1179). reame wondered aloud what kind of testing device women might devise, for surely it would not involve a condom. reame challenged this entrenched legacy of reducing menstruation to a simplistic mechanical process disconnected from the materiality of bodies and launched a research program to alter the science. by 1983, reame's lab at the university of michigan became one of the eight (she estimates) to test the differences in absorbency amongst the pooled tampon samples across a range of categories (regular, super, and super-plus) provided to her by the other manufacturers. her lab was on par with the industry labs, which was critical in terms of legitimacy, especially since she was the sole investigator to test tampon absorption of blood. in her prior studies for kimberly-clark, she tapped into her ob/gyn nursing network and asked the labor and delivery nurses to collect their own menstrual fluid in a menstrual cup called a tassaway. for the syngyna experiments, she dropped by the hospital blood bank to gather outdated donated blood, which the technicians were more than happy to offload. (these were the days before hiv and there were no irb protocols, so this grassroots approach was a creative and pragmatic solution.) early on in planning the design of the studies, reame had proposed to the task force using heparinized blood as a comparative test fluid against saliva at all eight study sites, but was told by several industry scientists that such an approach would simply not be realistic under laboratory conditions (although no data were ever presented she pointed out). deciding to proceed anyway with testing both saline and blood, she was pleasantly surprised when the donated blood performed as well as a reproducible test fluid (reame, 2016). reame reflected on the results and commented, "the overall findings were pretty close to what i showed in my lab, which makes me think they were all pretty on target," but "i couldn't get a handle of how 18 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) similar my data were with everybody else's, although they all…had to contribute and show data, but nobody wanted to say [what they had]. that just made me mad. that's just not the way [we do things]. we're used to sharing." here, her understanding of both good science and feminist science came to the fore. there was not an open practice of sharing data, and swankin felt that the industry folks were always hedging for the next lawsuit, worrying about every possible implication of the data in terms of liability. this was not entirely unwarranted since procter & gamble had been successfully sued for product liability due to injuries and deaths related to rely tampons, and there were at least one thousand cases in the works against them alone (gruber, 1989; vostral, 2011). swankin also recalled that the litigation lawyers were a different crew than the task force lawyers, indicating an extensive legal department to look out for each of the manufacturers interests, yet another challenge for the resource-deprived consumer groups. the report that reame submitted to the tampon task force titled "comparison of syngyna fluid and venous blood using the syngyna absorbancy (sic) test" drew attention to some important differences in findings between saline and heparinized blood (reame, 1983). esther rome and jill wolhandler also chimed in with reame in the "letters" section of jama, the journal of the american medical association, bringing feminist science to established and mainstream medicine. as they saw it, there were "questions about the statistical validity of the analysis of test data presented to the task force" in which the results using saline and heparinized blood were different. "although the relative ranking of the product does not change," they stated, "the differences in absolute absorbency seem significantly different at the higher absorbencies, with much more blood being absorbed" (rome, wolhandler, & reame, 1988, p. 686). this raised the concern that some tampons might be miscategorized as less absorbent than they actually were; when presented with menstrual fluid they would absorb more than they did with saline. this had potential health ramifications if women thought that they were using a less-absorbing tampon due to the way it 19 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) was potentially mislabeled. here, the very basis of the standard could be inherently flawed due to the use of a less-than-ideal synthetic fluid in the lab protocol. for the consumer groups and feminist advocates, the goals of the study were to establish absorbency ranges measured in grams of fluid, which then correlated with an agreed-upon nomenclature such as regular, super, and super-plus. the manufacturers argued on both fronts. they wanted decent margins within a category due to the fact that not every tampon, even from the same lot number, is exactly the same. for example, a box of regulars could contain tampons that absorbed more or less, and the manufacturers wanted these allowances likely because the machinery was not calibrated for this kind of precision (swankin, 2016). the other hurdle was nomenclature, since the terms used were generated by marketing departments. both tampax and playtex produced super tampons, but playtex absorbed far more. regularizing the super designation would force material changes for one or both. as these companies were fierce business competitors, the stakes were high concerning the implications of the standards for market share and costs. the naming of the sizes remained a problem. several ideas were floated. one was to do nothing and just list the grams of absorption. this allowed advertisers to use any words they wanted to describe the product, which would prolong the misunderstandings. another was to create a scale similar to sunscreen, with higher numbers correlating with higher absorption, also conveyed numerically in grams. this, rome insisted, was equally confusing and misleading (rome & wolhandler, 1985). steve fellman, the lawyer representing tambrands, inc., described how manufacturers suggested offering "small, medium, large, and extra large" as possible terminology, but this was not well received (fellman, 2016). the implication was that this system correlated to vaginal size rather than tampon absorbency, which had no relationship to one another. the task force as a whole, however, never came to any 20 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) agreements and disbanded by 1985. rome and wolhandler wrote a letter to the living section of the new york times indicating "[o]ne thing we learned from the tampon task force is that the materials used in tampons have not been tested adequately. most have never been studied in the vaginal environment" (rome & wolhandler, 1985). furthermore, rome wrote that the manufacturers ultimately agreed "on an industry standard for the syngyna test that is similar to the test proposed by the american society of testing and materials and that continues to have the same flaws" (rome, wolhandler, & reame, 1988). fellman may have had influence behind the scenes with manufacturers, however, breaking the stalemate amongst them. whether it was his personality, the fact that tambrands had not succumbed to the "absorbency wars" (as they were referred to in-house), or that the company simply had less to lose, he likely helped convince some manufacturers to agree to absorbency ranges and terminology. but this still included the flaw mentioned by rome: the use of saline rather than blood or menstrual fluid in the syngyna test. even though the tampon task force did not achieve its goals, letter-writing campaigns to the fda spearheaded by bwhbc and a lawsuit brought against the fda by the public citizen health research group pressured the agency to act on the issue of labeling, which was still unresolved (public citizen, 1988). the judge ruled in the consumers' favor that the fda must publish a final regulation by october 31, 1989. the final categories for absorption by grams as well as nomenclature came that year, with standardized labeling for tampons effective in march of 1990 (cdc, 1990; farley, 1991). the final standards were defined in terms of ranges, while keeping the same language of the marketers, though regularizing the meaning: 6 g or less (junior absorbency), greater than 6 g up to and including 9 g (regular absorbency), greater than 9 g up to and including 12 g (super absorbency) or greater than 12 g up to and including 15 g (super plus absorbency) (federal register). that information about absorptive ranges and their correlating definition was finally encoded into federal policy was a success. these ranges and 21 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) descriptive terms were non-negotiable elements for the consumer groups and health advocates from the very beginning. their influence upon the tampon task force is printed upon every box of tampons by its display of absorbency ranges, so that women can have accurate information about their tampons in an effort to best match their menstrual flow. the elusive pursuit of standards despite the success of labeling in terms of grams and nomenclature, the feminist advocates felt shortchanged. they had far greater ambitions for tampon safety and wanted to address chemical residue in deodorant tampons and their perfumes, string breakage, plastic applicator lacerations, and overall material safety. they wanted standards for these things, but in the end they all got dropped. in part, early conversations by the task force about these agenda items helped the manufacturers delay discussions about the real issue of absorbency, and detracted from the greater goal at hand. at a certain point, the consumer groups and health advocates realized they needed to distill their efforts to focus on one issue rather than diluting things with lots of demands, though they were legitimate. they were unable to get all the industry scientists on board to use any form of blood, which ironically would seem to offer more accuracy in terms of replicating real life conditions. it may also be that there was not a critical mass of feminist scientists in the room to overcome the prevailing norm for saline. even sydney wolfe of the public citizen health research group, who supported labeling and helped to sue the fda, sided against feminist science in support of saline. he argued that because blood came from different sources, it was simply impossible to reproduce lab conditions and standardize tests, thus saline was the best test fluid upon which to base absorbency standards (wolfe, 1987). the results for both saline and blood did yield the same rank order of tampons, so using blood was not necessarily required, though the protest about the higher absorbency of blood was never resolved and tampon users remain in the dark about this important piece of 22 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) information. yet, the very act of offering an alternative means of envisioning the methodology and providing data challenged dominantly held views about the insignificance of menstrual fluid. the women’s health advocates, and especially the influence of esther rome, was felt beyond the standard setting process. some of the men were personally affected by their involvement with the task force. swankin acknowledged he got "a real education" from the women on the task force, and he appreciated the way rome raised her points. steven fellman, the lawyer who represented tampax, inc. took a copy of our bodies, ourselves home to his wife due to meeting rome, something he would not have done otherwise (fellman, 2016). conclusion the process to agree upon an absorbency standard suffered on multiple fronts during the 1980s: president ronald reagan's administration was unsupportive of new federal regulations, industries resisted changes to tampon packaging and product design since they threatened profitability, and there was no critical mass of feminist scientists on board with the proposed methodology. though the task force disbanded without agreement in 1985, the process of bringing consumer groups, health advocates, and corporate representatives together marked an important precedent in standard setting. furthermore, some of the goals of the feminist health advocates were included in federal labeling guidelines appearing five years after the last official meeting of the tampon task force. the need for more precise labeling and testing remains. categorized as class ii medical devices, tampon contents are considered "trade secrets" and not publicly disclosed, so there is still no way to know what materials or chemicals they may contain, even when a new product is introduced, or how they might relate to tss. carolyn maloney (d-ny) introduced the tampon safety and research act in 1997, renamed the robin danielson act regarding tampon safety, in recognition of danielson’s death due to tss in 1998. for nearly twenty years maloney 23 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) has pursued this legislation, to no avail. it would require independent research upon tampons and sanitary napkins to gauge their health impact, and content labeling similar to clothing or food (h.r. 1708, 2015). this basic information is long overdue, and the threat of a house bill along with grassroots protests have compelled some manufacturers such as kimberly-clark (kotex) and procter & gamble (tampax, always) to list ingredients (kounang, 2015). this historical case study points to the significant implications of consumer groups and feminist advocates using tactics learned while writing our bodies, ourselves and deploying them in the federal regulation process by producing their own scientific data. it also highlights the importance of feminist ideas privileging women's understandings of their own bodies to shape science during the 1980s, in the face of the unknowns related to toxic shock syndrome. though the overall lab methods employed may seem conventional, the testing of actual blood when it was purposely excluded demonstrates resistance to status quo scientific practice. importantly it asserts the primacy of bodily experiences to menstruation and esther rome's insistence upon flesh, vaginal orifices, and menstrual blood being inseparable from the tampon as a technology—women's bodies were the requisite context. the syngyna summarily detached menstruation and tampons from women's embodied experiences by instrumentalizing them for lab purposes. women and their bodies were invisiblized and simulated by technoscientific apparatus, with differences erased and then standardized into glass, tubing, and latex condoms (which, incidentally, come in various sizes to accommodate differently shaped penises). all difference between women was extricated; the resulting data from the syngyna test were more "real" than could be gathered from a flesh-andblood person. yet, the quality of the data drawn upon to set policy recommendations was absolutely crucial to absorption standardization. feminist science both questioned assumed lab practices as well as devised new methods, insisting upon the biological materiality of menstruating bodies in an effort to accurately label tampon boxes and 24 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) therefore stem the rates of tampon-related tss. figure 1. image of the syngyna apparatus glass tubing with tampon. in dixie farley (1990, february), preventing tss: new tampon labeling lets women compare absorbencies, fda consumer 24(1), 8. 25 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) figure 2. line drawing of syngyna lab apparatus. in d. e. marlowe, r. m. weigle and r. s. stauffenberg, (1981, may), “measurement of tampon absorbency test method evaluation,” fda, bureau of medical devices, report 81-013, schlesinger library, bwhbc, box 29, folder 2. 26 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) notes 1 the term "women" is used in its historical sense in this essay, since that was the common parlance of the moment. 2 esther rome passed away in 1995, and her papers are part of the bwhbc records at the arthur & elizabeth schlesinger library on the history of women in america. references bobel, c. (2010). new blood: third-wave feminism and the politics of menstruation. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. boston women’s health book collective (1973). preface. in boston women’s health book collective, our bodies, ourselves: a book by and for women. accessed at http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/history/preface-to-the-1973-editionof-our-bodies-ourselves/ centers for disease control (1990, june 29). historical perspectives reduced incidence of menstrual toxic-shock syndrome—united states, 1980–1990. mmwr weekly, 39(25), 421–423. retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001651.htm centers for disease control (1980, september 19). follow-up on toxicshock syndrome. mmwr weekly, 29(37), 441–445. ellis, w. (1982, january 22). wayne ellis to f. alan anderson. schlesinger library, bwhbc, box 29, folder 2. farley, d. (1990, february), preventing tss: new tampon labeling lets women compare absorbencies, fda consumer 24(1), 8. 27 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) federal register. (1989, october 26). department of health and human services. section 801.430. 54(26), 43771. feinstein, a. (1988, december 2) scientific standards in epidemiologic studies of the menace of daily life. science, 242(4883), 1257–1263. fellman, s. (2016, july 12). interview with author. friedenfelds, l. (2010). the modern period: menstruation in twentiethcentury america. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. gruber, w. (1989, march 27). after 8 years, procter still not free of the rely controversy. chicago tribune. retrieved from http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-0327/business/8903300138_1_procter-gamble-pampers-diapers-productliability-suits h.r. 1708, robin danielson feminine hygiene product safety act of 2015. retrieved from https://www.congress.gov/bill/114thcongress/house-bill/1708/text hajjeh r.a., reingold a., weil, a., shutt, k., schuchat, a., & perkins, b.a. (1999, november–december). toxic shock syndrome in the united states: surveillance update, 1979–1996. emerging infectious disease, 5(6), 807–810. kline, w. (2010). bodies of knowledge: sexuality, reproduction, and women's health in the second wave. chicago, il: university of chicago press. kobren, l. (1981, september 24). standard for performance characteristics of menstrual tampons. schlesinger library, bwhbc box 28 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 29, folder 2. kounang, n. (2015, november 13). what’s in your pad or tampon? cnn health. retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/13/health/whats-inyour-pad-or-tampon/index.html lebuhn, b. (2017, february 5). correspondence with author. lebuhn, b. (2017, march 7). interview with author. martin, e. (1987). the woman in the body: a cultural analysis of reproduction. boston, ma: beacon press. memo (1983, october 1). consumer members of tampon task force. schlesinger library, bwhbc, box 29, folder 2. michael l. kehm v. procter & gamble. united states courthouse, cedar rapids, iowa. april 5, 1982. osterholm, m., davis, j. p., gibson, r. w., mandel j. s., wintermeyer, l. a., helms, c. m., forfang, j. c., rondeau j., vergeront, j. m., & the investigative team (1982). tri-sate toxic-shock syndrome study. i. epidemiologic findings. journal of infectious diseases, 145(4), 431–440. public citizen (1988, june 1). press release: fda sued for failing to require tampon absorbency labels. schlesinger library, bwhbc box 33, folder 11. rapp, g.w. (n.d.). a comparison of the absorptive efficiency of commercial catamenial tampons. schlesinger library, bwhbc box 29, folder 2. reame, n. (2017, january 30 & february 10). correspondence with 29 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) author. reame, n. (2016, april 6). interview with the author. reame, n. to swankin, d., with attached report (1983, may 23). schlesinger library, bwhbc folder 34, box 1. riley, t. (1986). the price of a life: one woman's death from toxic shock. bethseda, md: adler & adler. rome, e., & wolhandler, j. (1985, august 18). toxic shock syndrome. the new york times. retrived from http://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/28/garden/l-toxic-shock-syndrome224765.html. rome e., wolhandler, j., & reame, n. (1988). the absorbency of tampons. jama, 259(5), 685–686. schlievert, p.m., shands, k. n., dan, b. b., schmid g. p., & nishimura, r. d. (1981). identification and characterization of an exotoxin from staphylococcus aureus associated with toxic-shock syndrome. journal of infectious diseases, 143(4), 509–516. swankin, d. (2016, february 24). interview with author. tierno, p. (2001). the secret life of germs: what they are, why we need them, and how we can protect ourselves against them. new york, ny: atria books. todd, j., fishaut, m., kapral, f., & welch, t. (1978). toxic-shock syndrome associated with phage-group-i staphylococci. lancet, 2(8100),1116–1118. 30 vostral catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) “toxic shock syndrome—united states, 1970-1980.” (1981, january 30) mmwr, 30(3), 25–26. “update: toxic shock syndrome–united states.” (1983, august 5). mmwr, 32(30), 398–400. retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00000119.htm vostral, s. (2008). under wraps: a history of menstrual hygiene technology. lanham, md: lexington. vostral, s. (2011). rely and toxic shock syndrome: a technological health crisis. yale journal of biology and medicine, 84(4), 447–459. wolfe, s. (1987). dangerous delays in tampon absorbency warnings. jama, 258(7), 949–951. bio sharra l. vostral is an associate professor of history in the college of liberal arts, and affiliated with programs in women's, gender & sexuality studies, and american studies at purdue university. linden & sullivan review     review of malignant: how cancer becomes us (university of california press, 2013) and teratologies: a cultural study of cancer (routledge, 1997)    lisa lindén linköping university lisa.linden@liu.se mairead sullivan emory university mairead.sullivan@emory.edu "cancer, in all its nounishness, refers to everything… and nothing" -s. lochlann jain, malignant: how cancer becomes us "the narrativization of the struggle against cancer is not only present in the accounts of personal experience, it pervades all representations of the disease." -jackie stacey, teratologies: a cultural study of cancer s. lochlann jain's 2013 book malignant: how cancer becomes us tracks how cancer has become so thoroughly embedded in the fabric of u.s. culture. roughly fifteen years earlier, cultural studies theorist jackie stacey's teratologies: a cultural study of cancer mapped the ways in which cultural fabrics shape cancer narratives. the inaugural publication of catalyst has presented an opportunity for the editors to bring jain and stacey into conversation and to engage the shifts, overlaps, and discontinuities between these two studies. reading malignant and teratologies through the multifaceted field of feminist science and technology studies sheds light on theoretical consistencies and changes in the time between their publications. this review, which follows the conversation between the authors, is intended to further help locate these books in the broadening theoretical landscape of sts as well as feminist and queer studies. while jain and stacey's projects are very different, they share many intellectual and methodological commitments. both scholars are strongly interdisciplinary, as reflected not only in malignant and teratologies but also in their training as well as current institutional appointments. jain trained with donna haraway in the interdisciplinary history of consciousness program at the university of california santa cruz and is currently appointed as professor in the department of anthropology at stanford university. jain's first book, injury: the politics of product design and safety law in the united states (2006) draws upon anthropology and sts to examine how harm is conceptualized in u.s. liability law and post-injury litigation. jain has also contributed to jonathan metzl and anna kirkland's against health: how health become the new morality (2010), an anthology that draws upon fields such as sts, anthropology, disability studies and feminist theory to critically interrogate health cultures from inside biomedical and public health studies as well as sts. stacey was trained at the centre for contemporary cultural studies at the university of birmingham and, until 2007, was appointed in the department of sociology and the institute for women's studies at lancaster university—an academic setting where, in addition to stacey, scholars such as sarah franklin and maureen mcneil were working at the intersections of feminist theory, cultural studies and sts. early in her career, along with sarah franklin and celia lury, stacey co-edited the anthology off-centre: feminism and cultural studies (1991). this collection was primarily concerned with the intersection of cultural studies and feminist theory, however, it also announced feminist cultural studies of science and technology as an important working area. stacey engaged the intersection between feminist cultural studies and sts further in global nature, global culture (2000), a volume also co-edited with franklin and lury, in which imaginaries of life, nature, scale, and technoscience are examined. stacey's first single-authored book, star gazing: hollywood cinema and female spectatorship (1994), detailed how women's experiences of cinema were shaped by their experiences of time and place. the book was the first sustained account to bring together feminist psychoanalytic theory of film and birmingham school sociology.  stacey's most recent book, the cinematic life of the gene(2010), reads contemporary anxieties about cloning, as articulated in films addressing the topic, through a feminist and queer lens. stacey is currently appointed in the department of media and cultural studies at manchester. in addition to their shared commitment to interdisciplinarity, both authors draw on their own illness experience, specifically cancer, to theorize the wider social and cultural constructions of illness. in this way, malignant and teratologies join such important works as audre lorde's the cancer journals (1980), eve sedgwick's essay "white glasses" (1991), and, more recently, mel chen's animacies (2012). jain's engagement with cancer's entrenchment in a number of social and technological shifts of the 20th century is reminiscent of and builds upon rachel carson's silent spring (1965). similarly, stacey begins with susan sontag's illness and metaphor (1978) but pivots the argument to show that it is not only the patient experience that is saturated with metaphorical meaning but the whole field of biomedical science. by bringing their own experiences and expertise to bear on these longstanding conversations, both authors offer new inroads with important implications for feminist and queer engagements in sts. in malignant, jain begins with her own cancer diagnosis and moves outward through topics as varied as pathology reports, tort law, the us war machine, and the commodification of cancer research as branding tool. cancer, jain argues, tracks with an "everywhereand nowhereness" (p. 184). cancer surrounds us—from the ubiquitous ribbons campaigns to the endless media hype about risks, diagnosis rates, and the search for a cure. and yet these cultural representations of cancer eclipse the way in which cancer has come to infuse nearly every facet of u.s. culture and recent history. by situating cancer as part of a constellation of social, political, and legal networks, jain argues that the very institutions and social movements that claim to be working against cancer are, in fact, also bound to its production and persistence. jain demonstrates how the construction of cancer as a disease reaches far beyond a simple diagnosis through the language of risk, mortality, and survivorship. as a cultural phenomenon, jain tracks cancer's emergence along the aftermaths of war, the effects of environmental degradation, and the neoliberal imperatives of late capitalism. much of malignant focuses on how statistics and population data attempt to contain cancer within a logical sequence. jain's attention to matters such as population data, screening practice and cost-benefit analysis locates cancer in areas not often explored by feminist sts scholars. her focus on statistics and population data builds on existing sts work on cancer (see for example fujimura, 1987, 1988, 1996; keating & cambrosio, 2011; löwy, 2010). however, whereas this body of sts work is interested in explaining the diverse scientific practices of cancer research, jain adds an important critical patient studies perspective by focusing on personal, affective and temporal dimensions of the cancer experience. in this vein, instead of first and foremost discussing and describing cancer researchers' knowledge practices, jain is more concerned with how the cancer experience connects to political and societal scales of cancer's power relations. performing a cultural critique of neoliberal futurity, jain illuminates the political and cultural tropes embedded in a temporality that is often experienced by patients in "cancer land" as non-chronological rather than as progressive and linear. her approach can fruitfully be compared to medical historian and physician robert aronowitz' unnatural history: breast cancer and american society (2007). malignant and unnatural history are both critical engagements concerned with the question of how breast cancer has gained its current political position in the american society. the overlapping themes in the books are plenty: patient perspectives, cancer time, emotions such as fear, hope and anxiety, critiques of the individualization of risk and health responsibility, and an understanding of cancer as complex and elusive. despite these similarities, unnatural history lacks malignant's feminist sts sensitivity towards the embodied and gendered dimensions of cancer temporality, storytelling and practice. in chapter one, "living in prognosis: the firing squad of statistics," jain argues that the language of probability—the ubiquitous 1 in x, or y% chance—attempts to solidify meaning around that which is, ultimately, unknowable. by showing how biomedicine—particularly in its use of population data—makes absent the complexity and uncertainty of cancer, jain's argument is in conversation with other feminist works on biomedicine and health care which consider how the pursuit of scientific vision tends to sidestep the reality of science as both embodied and situated (see haraway, 1997). jain contrasts the aggregated, abstract, and predictable bodies of statistics with ethnographic insights on risk, diagnosis, and survivorship. her articulation of "prognostic time" names a disruption in the logics of temporality and, thus, can be compared to alison kafer's (2013) "crip time," a term which identifies not only the ways in which disability is often described in temporal terms but also how disability might queer time. similarly, in the chapter "can sir: what screening doesn't do" jain describes the current debates around cancer screening, particularly as they are couched in market principles of cost-benefit analysis. jain demonstrates how these debates tend to emphasize biological cancer predisposition (biomarkers), while rendering other possible cancer causes (chemical, environmental, demographical, gender-specific etc.) invisible. the chapter focuses specifically on recent shifts in screening recommendations for both breast and prostate cancers. including the two cancers together, as they often are, jain argues, has the added effect of occluding differences between the origin stories of these two cancers as well as differences between the trajectories of the two diseases. jain's focus on how biomedical knowledge (cancer cause = biomarkers) is made under extreme conditions of uncertainty—what she calls "the structural unknownness of cancer" (p. 178)—speaks to feminist-theory-informed sts discussions of how the pursuit of objectivity, such as in the form of cost-benefit analysis and screening as classification practices, can make uncertainty and "data noise" invisible or silenced (see bowker & star, 1999; murphy, 2006). as feminist sts scholar susan leigh star (1990) famously did, this argument invokes the "cui bono" question: who benefits and what uneven distributions of costs are made invisible? in a similar vein, jain importantly encourages us to ask about political cancer specificities: "whose cancer death is averted"? (p. 174, emphasis in original) and "what cost is worth what benefit, and to whom?" (p. 175). thus, jain's argument effectively shows how biomedicine can make invisible knowledge uncertainty, including how diseases may affect people differently. in this way, her focus on the centrality of biomarkers in practices of classification are similar to what sts scholar joan fujimura (1987, 1988, 1996), in the context of cancer research, defines as a "standardized package" that privileges molecular biology in cancer knowledge practice. similarly, sts scholar and medical historian ilana löwy's (2010) focus on how screening culture practice reflects a molecularization of cancer is akin to jain's discussion of biomarkers. moreover, by contrasting the presumed progressive futurity of cancer screening and biomarkers with cancer uncertainties and specificities, her argument serves as an excellent example of feminist sts research showing how linear, progressive temporality carries with it exclusionary politics of, amongst other things, sex and race difference (see also roberts, 2007; adams, et al, 2009; m'charak, 2010). especially, in focusing on "prognosis time," jain joins feminists scholars who argue that patients undergoing treatment with reproductive technologies such as ivf and pgd experience time as simultaneously abrupt, promissory, complicated and uncertain rather than as clearly sequenced and predictable (thompson, 2005; franklin & roberts, 2006; roberts, 2007). connecting the temporality of survival statistics to the cancer campaigns for early detection, rather than, say, prevention, the chapter "poker face" demonstrates how "cancer culture's" emphasis on futurity mirrors capitalism's "actuarial time," in which the ability of some to accumulate wealth—or health—across the lifespan relies on many unacknowledged others for whom such possibility is foreclosed (p. 56). the temporality of late capitalism is discussed further in the chapter "the mortality effect," in which jain explores the current gold standard of medical research: the randomized control trial. like the "actuarial time" of capitalism's future, the randomized control trial relies on the failure of some treatments in order to justify the efficacy of others. the seeming imperative that some must die in order for others to live is further reflected in the chapter "fallout," in which jain reveals the underbelly of u.s. cancer culture: "that the twentiethand twenty-first century definition and management of what we call cancer track with the institutions that have come to define america—the military, post war big medicine, technology, advertising…" (pp. 183-184). tackling cancer's relation to medical malpractice suits in the chapter "lost chance," jain further demonstrates how cancer evades linear temporality, unable to be pinned to a single event or transmission. this chapter builds on jain's important first book, injury: the politics of production design and safety law in the united states (2006) by demonstrating the way in which error is already recognized as a necessary by-product of the medical system, an error which is often located in the relationship between doctor and patient, thus occluding the complex interactions of the entire system.   another thread that runs though malignant connects the cancer experience to social imperatives surrounding gender and sexuality. the chapter "cancer butch" looks specifically at breast cancer and butch identity to highlight the gendered and sexualized demands of femininity that accompany the commodification of the disease. in this chapter, jain brings queer and feminist politics, with a particular emphasis on aids activist group act up, to bear on the "pinkwashing" of breast cancer activism while also demonstrating how the breast cancer experience might inform some of the critical commitments of feminist and queer thinking (p. 79). moving from questions of queer gender to queer reproduction, the chapter "inconceivable" tracks jain's experience with egg cell donation and how the lack of data and regulation surrounding ivf, contra cancer, makes the potential risks of such practices invisible. by relating to feminist sts work on ivf treatments and sex hormones—in this chapter, for example, she references the work of charis thompson (2005) and nelly oudshoorn (1994), jain sheds light on how sexual and gender politics are involved in ivf and hormone treatment practice.  however, in contrast to an earlier emphasis on ivf as producing postmodern "cyborg babies" through the coupling of technology and reproduction (davis-floyd and dumit, 1998), jain is first and foremost concerned with how ivf as a highly profitable industry allows the focus on success, measured as babies born, effaces the multiple other bodies involved in the production of the gamete. her critique of the interlinking between ivf treatment and late capitalism recalls that of feminist sts scholar charis thompson (2005) who names "promissory capital" as circulating around future success. in both jain's and thompson's work, success is described as anticipatory and exclusionary practices that serves to trade with people's futures.  emphasizing how reproduction is entangled with logics of profit and scientific ignorance (that is, undone and/or neglected research areas, see for example frickel et al., 2009), jain forcefully highlights how a multitude of interests such as free market healthcare, pro-procreation and reproductive rights serve to maintain ignorance about possible links between ivf treatment hormones and cancer occurrence. in doing so, her argument points at the interlocking of gender, sexuality and biomedical markets. like michelle murphy, in sick building syndrome and the question of uncertainty (2006), jain pushes a feminist concern with marginalized knowledges further to ask questions about the stakes—especially for lay people—in non-knowledge, uncertainty and ignorance. still focusing on gender and sexuality, elsewhere jain foregrounds butch embodiment as she ruminates on the relationship between cancer prosthetics—from wigs to port-a-caths to breast forms—and the demands of normative embodiment.  jain's malignant finds cancer in plain sight, in the most everyday of twenty-first century american life. stacey's teratologies, by contrast, brought cancer out of hiding, unmasking the "cancer subcultures," as she calls them, in the context of the uk in the early 1990s. intersplicing the many stories that are told about cancer with her own narrative of diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, stacey brings the reader into the gruesome, messy, and abject world of the cancer patient in the early 1990s. although at the time of its publication teratologies was largely situated within cultural studies, the book has become understood as a predecessor to what has been called "feminist cultural studies of science and technology" (lykke, 2008; mcneil, 2007) or what elsewhere has been more broadly labeled "feminist technoscience studies" (åsberg & lykke, 2010; weber, 2006). furthermore, teratologies offers an astute contribution to queer critical health studies, in league with the many works on hiv/aids and cancer published during that period. even if feminist sts work has existed for a long time, when teratologies was published, the intersections between feminist sts and cultural studies had just started to be explored.1 as teratologies reflects, early feminist work in this area was articulating an important problematization of  medical science by emphasizing it as a figural trope and practice invoking an unmarked, yet always gendered, position of knowing (see for example balsamo, 1996; cartwright, 1995; franklin, 1997; haraway, 1997; jordanova, 1993; martin, 1987; treichler, 1990). teratologies was published around the same time as david hess' (1997) political constructivist sts work on cancer research. stacey's and hess' studies have several similarities: they focus on alternative cancer knowledge claims, they perform analyses critical of an assumption of a neutral observer and they attend to the gendered dimensions of cancer culture. however, stacey's feminist sts sensitivity towards tropes and figures is missing in hess' account (1997). in powerfully elucidating the importance of studying the figurative in medical discourse about cancer, teratologies is a landmark in the 1990s rise of feminist and queer cultural studies engaging with sts. in the book, stacey works through the various stories and processes that are used to construct cancer to demonstrate the multiple—and at times conflicting—ways in which cancer is defined. stacey articulates a similitude between her own experience as a cancer patient and her experiences as a lesbian, feminist, and an academic. by tracking cancer through stories as disparate as the instantiation of self-help culture, the rise of medical imaging, and strange similarities between taboos surrounding lesbianism and cancer, stacey brings cancer narratives into the purview of questions of the status of the self in the late twentieth century, engagements with how medical technology produce the very objects they define, and feminist and queer work on abject bodies (see also bersani, 1987; betterton, 1996, 2006; braidotti, 1994; creed, 1993; kristeva, 1982). stacey describes her text as "the tales of monsters and marvels that pervade the popular imaginary of cancer subcultures" (p. 10). to guide the text, stacey hones in on her own experience of teratoma—originating from the greek word teraton meaning monster—a specific kind of cancer tumor with tissues or organ components. stacey's emphasis on semiotics—on stories, figurative speculations, tropes, and metaphors—is deeply aligned with a longstanding—and cultural studies inspired—feminist sts sensitivity towards the role of the figural in the production of science and technology. in the chapter "metaphors," for example, stacey argues that rhetorical devices are "fundamental to arguments about the ways in which the clinical gaze has conceptualized the human body in biomedicine" (p. 51). stacey demonstrates how metaphors of visual observations and temporal linearity prevail in contemporary medicine. consequently—and in a manner that jain's book echoes—stacey emphasizes cancer temporality and the medical gaze in a way that is rooted in arguments of cultural constructions, signification and subject formation. stacey also precedes jain in elucidating how "cancer time" is highly precarious and uncertain, something that disrupts and complicates scientific vision of linearity and progress. in focusing on scientific visions of linear time, stacey's work is connected to one of the few feminist cultural studies of science and technology explorations of temporality predating teratologies: sarah franklin's (1991) chapter in off-centre in which she discusses linear scientific temporality through the notion of "fetal teleology." like franklin, stacey illuminates how medical science in its orientation towards a desired future represents time as determined, progressive and linear. jain's malignant picks up this same thread of time in her interpretation of prognosis. still focusing on the visual, in the chapter "visions" stacey explores the ways in which imagery—from personal photographs to medical imaging—confront the boundaries of knowing. specifically, stacey—and here she explicitly engages with feminist scholars working on technoscientific visualization of the body such as rosi braidotti, lisa cartwright, donna haraway and emily martin—demonstrates how the rise of medical imaging of the body's interior has tracked with cultural discourses surrounding bodily processes, most specifically the anthropomorphization of cell systems, a transformation she finds most readily in the languages of immunity, reproduction, and cancer. highlighting how a visual personification of the cell is "inextricable from masculine desires and fantasies and uses of the female body" (p. 155), stacey's argument is closely aligned with feminist sts work on visualization that emerged during the same period and that drew upon cultural studies to point at the gendered dimensions of visualization (see for example casper, 1998; treichler, cartwright and penley, 1998). in this way, stacey's engagement with visualizing technologies of cancer control and eradication builds on feminist work about medical and scientific tracking and visualization such as jordanova (1993), martin (1994) and cartwright (1995).  following the examination of the cell as "a microcosm of the self," stacey turns to the question of how that self is conceptualized in the seeming revolt of this microcosm that defines cancer (p. 147). the chapter, aptly titled "selves," explores the manner in which cancer regimes impel specific practices of the self. often regarded as the antidote to conventional biomedicine—or at least less rigid companion—self-help cultures, stacey argues, are no less beholden to imperatives of "rational self control" (p. 187). in discussing how health responsibility has become simultaneously individualized and rationalized, her argument resonates with contemporary feminist sts critiques of biomedicine emphasizing how the extensive focus on individualized health responsibility also reproduces a gendered assumption of rational self-control (see clarke, et al, 2010; roberts, 2007). quite strikingly, her critique of health as self-management is perhaps even more relevant today when the information age has expanded the regimes of self-care practices: self-monitoring digital technologies (such as personal fitness trackers and health-based apps), telemedicine, the wide range of diagnostic tools available on the internet—the list of current techniques for "rational self-control" is long. her discussion of how breast cancer responsibility is put on the individual nicely connects her argument to—and this is an explicit reference point in teratologies—feminist scholar alisa solomon's (1992) work on breast cancer activism in which she problematizes the individualizing focus on lifestyle in breast cancer information. by comparing this information with activists' demands for research and discussion about societal and environmental factors, solomon's critique predates some of the arguments put forward by stacey—as well as jain.2 stories about cancer are populated with many figures, perhaps none more ubiquitous than heroes and monsters. however, as stacey articulates, who and how one is hailed into these narratives reflect cultural anxieties around life, death, and disease. in her opening chapter, "heroes," stacey demonstrates the modes in which cancer survival stories—which rely on a narrative schema of strength in adversity, a "crisis-rescue-recovery formulation"—"pervades all representations of the disease" (p. 11). similarly, the chapter "monsters" draws together stacey's experiences with cancer and her experiences of being a lesbian to expose the ways in which both experiences confront the specter of taboo and the borders of the abject. drawing from kristeva's (1982) notion of abjection as "death infecting life," stacey delicately weaves together resonances of the imbrication of life and death in both cancer and lesbianism (which she identifies as "the c word" and "the l word") via their relation to our cultural concepts of reproduction: whereas cancer's uncontrollable proliferation barrels toward death, the lesbian's distance from biological reproduction is rendered a kind of genetic or generational death. in this way, stacey very keenly anticipates lee edelman's field shifting polemic no future (2004). in its focus on abjection, teratologies is a beautiful example of feminist cultural studies of science and technology work that operates through "figurative speculations" (p. 96) to unweave some of the tropes and figures that biomedical cultures inhabit. having this focus, stacey is closely aligned with other feminist scholars who interrogate monster imaginaries and abjection by means of deconstructing the western humanist self (see for example creed, 1993; shildrick, 2002). building on these scenes of abjection, the chapter "bodies" explores how cartesian dualism is both challenged and reinforced by the splits between biomedicine and so-called alternative therapies. tracking through the ways in which this divide renders biomedical patients "physical bodies with symptoms" while alternative therapies step in to handle the collateral effects of disease, particularly in the realm of the emotional, the chapter concludes with a brief look at how some alternative therapies, even as they are imagined to reject a mind/body split, rely on a biomedical logic that repeats these cartesian claims (p. 132). stacey's more recent collaborations with mary bryson have brought these questions to bear in contemporary queer conversations on temporality and affect (bryson & stacey, 2013; stacey & bryson, 2013). jain's "survivor" mirrors stacey's "hero" as the spectral figures that attempt to give the cancer experience a linear—and hopeful—temporality. both scholars engage with and add to the work of audre lorde and eve sedgwick to show how cancer experience intersects with experiences of gender and sexuality. both weave their stories into broader questions of how visualization and reproductive technologies produce bodies and selves. elsewhere, their overlaps offer a pivot point that send readers in productively different directions. for example, both engage responsibility to think through who is and is not held accountable in the causal chain of cancer. jain focuses on the power dynamics of medical models in which doctor's knowledge trumps patient experiences as well the rise of marketing-based corporate support for cancer research from companies whose practices are know to cause cancer. stacey, on the other hand—reflecting the british welfare state model of social medicine of the 1990s as well as reflecting some of the patient driven approaches learned from hiv/aids activism—draws attention to the emphasis on self-management in both the prevention and treatment of cancer. although teratologies has long been on the readings lists of students and scholars of queer and feminist sts, feminist health studies, and cancer cultural studies more widely, malignant's more recent publication highlights the many cultural shifts and theoretical innovations that have taken place in the time between their publications: the stabilization and rapid growth of feminist sts studies on medicine, the increased discussion around temporality and affect in feminist and queer theory, the advent of the information age, and the wider attention to environmental and social correlates to cancer, to name just a few. even so, both jain and stacey show how constructions of cancer—its stories, knowledges and lives—affect us in deeply paradoxical and intimate ways.  moreover, in weaving together personal stories with modes of late capitalism, jain and stacey manage to elegantly and carefully link quotidian cancer experiences and temporalities with large-scale circulations of power. in doing so, they perform an embodied and situated critique of biomedical anticipatory practice in a manner lacking in more generalizing and non-gender sensitive arguments. in this way, in staying with mundane and affective cancer trouble, they perform an indispensable critique without becoming foundationalist and reductionist. being anything but invisible observers, jain and stacey tell stories about the stakes in embodying cancer as a political, cultural and material phenomenon. by telling different stories than the dominant ones, they make present what often remains untold in the "cancer world." in doing so, they disrupt the dominant narratives of linear scientific progress by telling temporally messy "stories that matter to the worlds we might yet live in" (haraway, 2003, p. 3). by illuminating the complex and changing personal and political scales of biomedicine, malignant and 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(1990). feminism, medicine, and the meaning of childbirth."in m. jacobus, e. fox keller, & s. shuttleworth (eds), body/politics: women and the discourses of science (pp. 113-138). new york, ny: routledge. treichler, p. a., cartwright, l., & penley, c. (eds.). (1998). the visible woman: imaging technologies, gender, and science. new york, ny: new york university press. weber, j. (2006). from science and technology to feminist technoscience. in k. davis, m. evans, & j. lorber (eds.), handbook of gender and women's studies (pp. 397-414). london, uk: sage. bios lisa lindén is a doctoral candidate at the department of thematic studies—technology and social change, linköping university, sweden. her research interests concern feminist technoscience studies, politics of care and visual sts. in her phd dissertation project she studies swedish hpv vaccination campaigns with a focus on communication technologies (including digital and social media), subjectivity and care. mairead sullivan is a doctoral candidate in the department of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at emory university. her current project—tentatively title "strange matter: thinking breastedly in feminist and queer theory"—is an archival tracing of questions of breastedness at the borders of feminist and queer thought. her research interests include feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis, and critical health studies. news in focus    news in focus      ebola and its discontents   elke mühlberger boston university muehlber@bu.edu deboleena roy emory university droy2@emory.edu pamela scully emory university pamela.scully@emory.edu banu subramaniam umass amherst banu@wost.umass.edu jennifer terry university of california, irvine jterry@uci.edu as we planned this inaugural issue, and watched the news of ebola in the u.s. media, we witnessed the epidemic of ebola happening "out there" and then the ensuing panic when it arrived "here" in the u. s. the coverage was hauntingly similar and yet different. with each global pandemic, we have heard growing cries for a global "management" often tied to circuits of biomedicine, pharmaceuticals, and (inter)national security. a year later, the many apocalyptic narratives have been laid to rest for the time being, but ebola remains in the air as an early warning of the epidemic "still to come." we asked three interdisciplinary scholars to reflect on what they saw.  ~ curated by deboleena roy and banu subramaniam     my 'top 6' ebola terrors elke mühlberger, microbiology, national emerging infectious disease institute (neidl), boston university, school of medicine   the current ebola virus outbreak has been devastating and terrible in many aspects. as of march 2015, about 25,000 people were reported to be infected and more than 10,000 patients have died. and it is not over yet. this outbreak dramatically demonstrates just what viruses are capable of and how vulnerable we are when we are struck by emerging infectious diseases without being prepared. besides the terrifying disease itself, there are numerous other disconcerting aspects of this outbreak that have made me shiver. so i came up with a very personal 'top 6' list of ebola terrors. #1  self-proclaimed ebola experts. simply terrifying. vocal, annoying and worst of all, frequently wrong. this clearly led to … #2  ebola hysteria. it was impressive to see how the lack of scientific reasoning and common sense led to a complete misjudgment of the actual risk of becoming infected with ebola virus. fear leads to rather creepy and misguided behavior. to give just one example: the stigmatization of people from west africa at the peak of the hysteria. at times during this outbreak i had a hard time believing that this is the 21st century. #3  the transmission debate. after all these months with ebola it is clear that this virus does not spread as rampantly as flu or measles. yet some folks continue to speculate that ebola virus may become airborne through just a couple of mutations. do we know of any other human virus that has managed to change its mode of transmission from bodily fluids to airborne? not that i am aware of. #4  the "out of an abundance of caution" phrase. an overabundance of caution has likely caused more harm than good. out of an abundance of caution, poor excalibur, the perfectly healthy dog of the spanish nurse infected with ebola virus, was euthanized, even though there is, and has never been, any indication that dogs can either be infected with or transmit ebola virus. out of an abundance of caution, nurses and doctors who risk their lives helping to contain this terrible outbreak are given a cold welcome at home by being put into isolation. and we do this despite the knowledge that ebola virus is only transmitted from human to human after the onset of symptoms. sadly, many people who were otherwise willing to volunteer in west africa did not go because of the threat of being grounded for another three weeks upon their return. #5  the ebola publication flood. those of us who actually work on ebola virus are strongly affected by number five on my list the flood of ebola publications we have had to wade through during the last couple of months. don't get me wrong, it is extremely important to gather as much information as possible about ebola virus disease. but when hype takes over and scientific rigor is sidelined, this leads to significantly more work and money being spent in the future as scientists pursue or challenge these false leads. and some of these recent publications are of breathtaking uselessness.  #6  ??? good gracious me—what was my number 6? i guess it was something important. oh yes, ebola virus—it causes a terrible disease, has ravaged an already fragile economic system in western africa, decimated entire families, made children into orphans, and the list goes on and on. but ebola virus is not the only member in the club of dangerous viruses. take, for example, measles virus. it is the most contagious human virus we know of. it is immunosuppressive. it kills children. according to the who, there were 145,700 measles deaths globally in 2013. the good news is that we have an effective vaccine to protect against measles virus infection. i have a hard time understanding why parents would put their children’s lives in danger by not vaccinating them against such a serious disease that can cause death. makes me sick. actually, i think the #1 terror on my list is parents who put their kids (and others) at risk of getting severely ill, even though a safe vaccine is available. combatting ebola requires much more than science pamela scully, women, gender, sexuality studies and african studies, emory university it has been more than a year since ebola appeared in west africa, moving stealthily in the tropical forest interior at the borders of guinea, sierra leone, and liberia, and then rapidly accelerating when it reached the sprawling capital cities of conakry, freetown and monrovia. as we now know, it took some six months for the local and international public health organizations to realize what they were dealing with. since august 2014 the cdc, who, doctors without borders, partners in health and others have directed millions to curtailing ebola. because of longstanding ties with liberia, founded by us settlers in the 1820s, at the request of president ellen johnson sirleaf the us sent in the military to establish field hospitals and coordinate operations. while ebola still ravages much of guinea and sierra leone, it has been halted in liberia at the time of writing. what lessons can we learn from this massive outbreak, which has killed over 11,000 people? there are many, from the impoverishment of the capitalist mode of drug discovery and delivery, and the poverty of development agendas which have poured millions of dollars in aid into the war-torn countries hit now by ebola, but which did not create sustainable public health systems; to the lack of trust between citizens and their governments, and between citizens and medical experts. but here i want to concentrate on ebola as a gendered and locally contextual disease. ebola can be called a woman's disease (bofu-tawamba, 2014). ebola is contracted through bodily fluids. in west africa, women are responsible for care giving, preparing food, and washing the dead in preparation for burial. and the ebola dead are particularly virulent. women are thus highly likely to contract ebola. the fact that so many people who have died were women, leaves a terrible legacy—thousands of children who no longer have mothers to look after them in societies where that is the key responsibility of women. in addition, the creation of so many orphans has other terrible effects: studies show the prevalence of sexual violence against women and girls in liberia. even more alarmingly, a study by msf showed that nine out every 10 survivors they treated in 2011 were under 18, and one in 10 were under the age of four. we can expect an increase in the vulnerability of girls to rape and other forms of sexual exploitation, including sex trafficking, in the aftermath of ebola. to understand ebola then, we have to look beyond the science and know about how households work and the gendered division of labor in a particular society. it is for these reasons that the who and others have started looking to communities and to social scientists to understand how to end ebola (and other similar outbreaks in the future). the ebola anthropology initiative is a collection of social scientists, primarily anthropologists (the author is on the advisory board as a historian), who are in dialogue with the public health community to try and raise important questions around culture ad political economy as crucial contexts to understand the disease. the allied ebola response anthropology forum1 has created a website that provides thoughtful analyses of local conditions. most importantly, these initiatives stress that communities must be at the center of any public health initiative. they have to help direct the work, and not just be told what to do. in liberia, where ebola has almost disappeared, this happened not just because of the establishment of health care facilities, but because communities made changes themselves. people did not abandon their ways of showing care and love for the sick and the dying, but made accommodations. they changed the way they say hallo (no more handshakes) and how they bury their dead: no more laying hands on the dead body. ebola has highlighted the failures of the development agenda with short-term goals driven in part by donor demands for quick results. both local organizations and communities and the bigger funding agencies are trying to rethink the way forward. the ebola 100 research project is seeking to document the ways in which people at all levels and in different countries tried to address ebola: this will help us document and understand societal responses to this epidemic. emory university recently received a grant from the cdc to establish the african centre of excellence for public health security in liberia. the paul g. allen foundation has issued an rfp for innovative proposals, which include social mobilization and community partnerships. perhaps, these initiatives will be the beginning of more productive and egalitarian ways of working in the world. ebola and the unequal economy of life jennifer terry, department of gender & sexuality studies, university of california at irvine the ebola outbreak of 2014 laid bare the reality of an unequal economy of life according to which some lives are valued over others. while thousands of west africans fell ill and died from the disease over the spring and summer, it wasn't until a small number of white westerners from the united states and europe came down with ebola virus disease (evd) in late july that authorities with the world health organization, usaid, and the u.s. centers for disease control and prevention began to treat the outbreak like the urgent and deadly crisis that it was. over the summer of 2014, among the most sympathetically publicized cases of afflicted people featured white, christian american health care workers, kent brantly and nancy writebol, both employed by samaritan’s purse, a faith-based non-governmental organization headquartered in boone, north carolina. comparing both the disparities in medical treatment and the partiality of publicity surrounding cases of ebola infection brings to light how some lives are apparently more valued than others. in the midst of this situation the more raw issue of money-making reared its ugly head. i offer two examples to illustrate this: the first has to do with pharmaceutical profiteering akin to what naomi klein has called disaster capitalism and the second with revenue-conscious damage control and labor exploitation of nurses by a non-profit medical organization in texas. 1. british pharmaceutical giant glaxosmithkline has in recent years bought up vaccine-makers in anticipation of a growing global market in anti-viral treatments with the emergence of sars, mers, evd and the like. in march 2014, three months into the latest ebola outbreak, gsk contacted the world health organization to announce that it had developed a preclinical ebola vaccine candidate. johnson and johnson announced human clinical trials of an anti-ebola vaccine in january 2014, partnering with a danish vaccine maker to accelerate production. pfizer also jumped into the game around the same time. mapp biopharmaceutical, inc., a relative newcomer and small-scale manufacturer of engineered monoclonal anti-bodies, started to make headlines during the summer of 2014 when the media racheted up its panicked coverage. mapp's product, zmapp,™ was one of a very few anti-viral treatments that showed promise in animal trials but due to a lack of sufficient funds and poor coordination among government agencies and various pharmaceutical companies, there wasn't enough of the drug stockpiled for dealing with last summer’s outbreak (the economist nov. 1, 2014). in late july, zmapp™ was secretly administered to brantly and writebol, who were exposed to the ebola virus while working in a clinic in monrovia, liberia. the intravenous treatment was given to the two under the compassionate use exemption of the u.s. food and drug administration. both were then airlifted to emory university hospital in atlanta and pronounced cured within weeks of their arrival. around the same time, doctors with médecins sans frontières (doctors without borders) decided to withhold the same treatment from dr. sheik umar khan, a beloved sierra leonean physician who died in late july after treating many ebola patients. khan was never told that zmapp™ was available (fofana and flynn, 2014). doctors from médecins sans frontières claimed their decision was based on sound ethical reasoning. they decided it would cause a serious loss of trust among local residents if khan died from the medication and they decided that if it was effective it would not be fair to give khan priority treatment while hundreds of other infected people did not have access to the very limited supply of zmapp.™ two weeks after khan's death, the world health organization approved several experimental drugs, including zmapp,™ for treating ebola virus disease. 2. financial investment professionals in the united states began to exploit the ebola scare especially following september 30, 2014, when the first case of ebola in the united states was officially announced. following the conventions of what priscilla wald has called the contagion narrative (2008), the leading media corporations in the united states made much of the misfortune of thomas eric duncan, a native liberian who traveled to dallas from monrovia in september to visit family members. when duncan—patient zero in media coverage—came down with a fever several days after his arrival, he sought treatment at the texas presbyterian hospital emergency room. he was sent home with a diagnosis of sinusitis and given a prescription for antibiotics, even though he told the medical staff that he had just arrived from west africa. three days later he was back in the emergency room with severe symptoms of ebola infection. after several hours, the er staff called the centers for disease control and prevention in atlanta. duncan was finally admitted over 30 hours after this second trip to the er to a 24-bed intensive care unit that had been emptied of all other patients. a lawsuit filed against the owners of texas presbyterian by nina pham, one of the nurses who cared for duncan, notes that for the next eight days he was cared for by nurses and other medical personnel who were not adequately trained or equipped to handle a patient with ebola. the suit further charges that the hospital violated pham's privacy and committed fraud in the accounts it provided to the media (emily, 2015). the day after duncan was formally admitted, the 26-year-old vietnamese american emergency nurse arrived at work to find that she was being assigned to care for him. when she inquired about safety precautions (since there had been no in-service training at the hospital), her supervisor "went to the internet, searched google, and printed off information regarding what nina was supposed to do, and handed nina the paper" (pham vs. texas health resources, inc., filed in dallas county court on march 2, 2015). despite the fact that there was a biosafety level four facility at galveston national laboratory—only an hour away by plane—that was equipped to handle ebola, texas health resources (thr) did not consult the lab, one of only two such labs in the united states. after caring for duncan, with whom she developed great sympathy, pham was told by her employer that she could go home. relieved, she invited friends over. two days after duncan died, she woke up with a fever and called the hospital to notify them but was told that her 99.8 fever did not meet the threshold the threshold of concern, 100.4. the next day she awoke with a 100.6 fever and called the hospital requesting to be admitted as a “no information” patient, a precaution to protect her identity from the media. she was taken into isolation when she arrived at the er for a battery of tests. hours later, the chief nursing officer entered pham's room in a full hazmat suit to inform her that she had tested positive for the ebola virus. she soon also learned that her request for privacy had been violated, with "dozens of people throughout the thr system" having access to her health status and identity (pham v. thr). when pham was transferred to the national institutes of health facility in bethesda, maryland for further treatment, the thr worried about their reputation and their declining revenue. to make this point more vividly, right before she was transferred, one of pham's physicians entered her room wearing a tiny gopro camera concealed under his hood and commenced to film everything in the room. though she didn't give him the answers he was seeking, finally her eyes welled up with tears and she made a few optimistic statements. the video was immediately edited to make thr look good and was posted on the organization's youtube site, despite the fact that pham had never given her permission to be used in any public relations campaign. pham received aggressive treatment at the nih and was eventually pronounced cured, whereupon she was released and sent directly to the white house for a highly publicized meeting with president obama. it should be noted that pham's lawsuit concludes with a word of caution about the claims of medical triumph: the symptoms of anxiety and pain (related possibly to the aggressive experimental treatment she received) persisted well after her release from the nih, making her unable to return to work. what can be gleaned from these two interwoven illustrations of who is valued when it comes to deadly infectious disease and who is not? while it may seem encouraging that financial investments for contending with evd increased over the course of the outbreak of 2014, we learn from locally-based health care activists that resources are much better spent by supporting community-based efforts of preventive education, contact tracing, and humane care than the speculative capital that is directed toward expensive and risky pharmaceutical trials. fostering relationships of trust between health care workers and people in the communities they serve is a much more cost effective way to gain control over infection rates and to care for patients in a manner that honors their dignity and allays social suffering (mogelson, 2015). notes 1 the ebola response anthropology forum (n.d) is a frequently updated online database of articles and information about ebola. social scientists and outbreak response team members from the london school of health and tropical medicine, the institute of development studies, and the universities of sussex and exeter produce the forum. the aim of the online database is to foster policy discussion and critical debate while providing rapid responses by e-mail, conference calls and web-based dialogues to operational questions raised by those working for ngos, government, and international agencies to contain the epidemic or care for those affected. the forum is funded by a grant from the research for health in humanitarian crises (r2hc) programme. references bofu-tawamba, n. (2014, november 7). african women face ebola triple jeopardy. al jazeera america, retrieved at http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/11/ebola-response-africanfemalehealthworkersculturecaregivingroles.html mogelson, l. (2015, january 19). when the fever breaks: government measures have proved inadequate, but communities in liberia and sierra leone are coming up with ways to battle the ebola virus. the new yorker. retrieved at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/when-fever-breaks nina pham v. texas health resources, inc. (2015, march 2). (filed with the district court of dallas county, texas). retrieved at http://www.star-telegram.com/news/business/biz-columns-blogs/tarrant-business-blog/article12831470.ece/binary/nina%20pham%27s%20lawsuit%20v.%20texas%20health%20resources the economist. (2014, november 1). giving it a shot: drugmakers bet that vaccines will help in the fight against ebola. retrieved at http://www.economist.com/news/business/21629399-drugmakers-bet-vaccines-will-help-fight-against-ebola-giving-it-shot umaru, f., & flynn, d. (2014, august 24). sierra leone "hero" doctor's death exposes slow ebola response. reuters. retrieved at http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/08/24/health-ebola-khan-idinkbn0go07c20140824 bios elke mühlberger is a renowned expert in the field of bsl-4 hemorrhagic fever viruses. she has a strong research focus on the highly pathogenic filoviruses, ebola and marburg virus. her research interests range from molecular biology studies on filoviral replication and transcription to cellular responses to filovirus infection. mühlberger received her phd in virology from the philipps university marburg, marburg, germany in 1993 and continued to work on filoviruses as an independent pi and group leader in marburg. in 2008, she joined the department of microbiology at boston university, boston, ma as an associate professor and the national emerging infectious diseases laboratories as the director of the biomolecule production core. deboleena roy is associate professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies and neuroscience and behavioral biology at emory university.  she received her phd in reproductive neuroendocrinology and molecular biology from the institute of medical science at the university of toronto. she is currently associate faculty in the neuroscience program, graduate division of biological and biomedical sciences and senior faculty fellow at the center for ethics at emory university. her fields of interest include feminist theory, feminist science and technology studies, neuroscience, molecular biology, postcolonial theory, and reproductive justice movements. her research and scholarship attempt to create a shift from feminist critiques of science to the development of feminist practices that contribute to scientific inquiry in the lab. she has published articles in signs: journal of women in culture and society; hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy; neuroethics; australian feminist studies; rhizomes: cultural studies of emerging knowledge; endocrinology; neuroendocrinology; and the journal of biological chemistry.  she has also contributed to several anthologies including handbook for feminist research: theory and praxis (2011); neurofeminism: issues at the intersection of feminist theory and cognitive science (2012); gendered neurocultures: feminist and queer perspectives on current brain discourses (2014); and mattering: feminism, science, and materialities (2016). pamela scully is professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies, and professor of african studies at emory university. her most recent book is sara baartman and the hottentot venus: a ghost story and a biography, co-authored with clifton crais (princeton, 2009, 2010). she is finishing a short biography of president ellen johnson sirleaf of liberia. she writes generally on sexual violence, transitional justice and feminist theory. she serves on the editorial board of the journal of women's history, the journal of british studies, the journal of peacebuilding and development, and social dynamics, and is on the advisory board of the journal of southern african studies. professor scully works closely with the institute for developing nations, a partnership between emory university and the carter center, which focuses on collaborative research regarding issues of poverty and development. banu subramaniam is professor of women, gender, sexuality studies at the university of massachusetts, amherst. trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she seeks to engage the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology. she is author of ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity (university of illinois press 2014), and coeditor of feminist science studies: a new generation (routledge, 2001) and making threats: biofears and environmental anxieties (rowman and littlefield, 2005). spanning the humanities, social, and natural sciences, she works at the intersections of biology, women's studies, ethnic studies and postcolonial studies. her current work focuses on the xenophobia and nativism that haunt invasive plant species, and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in india. jennifer terry is associate professor of gender & sexuality studies at the university of california at irvine. her books include an american obsession: science, medicine, and homosexuality in modern society (university of chicago press, 1999) and two co-edited anthologies, deviant bodies: critical perspectives on difference in science and popular culture (indiana university press, 1995) and processed lives: gender and technology in everyday life (routledge, 1997). she has written articles on reproductive politics, the history of sexual science, contemporary scientific approaches to the sex lives of animals, love of objects, signature injuries of war, and the relationship between war-making practices and entertainment. her current project is titled attachments to war: violence and the production of biomedical knowledge in 21st-century america.    mccann, carole r. (2020). review of on infertile ground: population control and women’s rights in the era of climate change, by jade s. sasser (new york university press, 2018), and gender before birth: sex selection in a transnational context, by rajani bhatia (university of washington press, 2018). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), pp. 1–7. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © carole r. mccann, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | on infertile ground: population control and women’s rights in the era of climate change, by jade s. sasser (new york university press, 2018), & gender before birth: sex selection in a transnational context, by rajani bhatia (university of washington press, 2018) carole r. mccann university of maryland, baltimore county (umbc) mccann@umbc.edu at first glance, jade sasser’s on infertile ground and rajani bhatia’s gender before birth seem to tackle distinct topics, but the rich analysis of each shows that they are in fact intertwined within a larger field of reproductive politics and science. that richness, i believe, comes from the mixture of methods and the reproductive justice analytic that each employs. with regard to their methods, both assemble and analyze an impressive archive of texts and ethnographic data to trace the emergence and scientific grounding of their topics from street-level practice to global political discourses and technologies. centered on how women of color and women of the global south are positioned within discourses and practices, their analyses illuminate the shifting registers and configurations of neoliberal populationism as it moves across geopolitical spaces, organizational locations, and technological regimes. utilizing a reproductive justice framework, each book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) carole r. mccann,2020 2 analysis excavates and demonstrates the resilience of gender, racialized, colonial logics that continue to animate reproductive knowledges and practices. i want to highlight several aspects of each book that exemplify the value of transnational feminist science studies methods for understanding current reproductive knowledge-making through a reproductive justice frame. then, drawing on their conclusions, i raise some thoughts about how we might move forward to continue to build robust analyses of transnational reproductive politics in these uncertain times. in on infertile ground, jade sasser offers an expansive historical account of linkages between environmentalism and populationism, which, in turn, informs her ethnographic analysis of contemporary youth advocacy training programs sponsored primarily by the sierra club. firmly situated in the reproductive justice frame, her historical narrative reminds readers that organizations like the sierra club have long hued to a populationist agenda. her analysis of current advocacy illuminates ghosts that haunt recent efforts to link reproductive politics to climate change. the shift away from population control to a neoliberal focus on women’s empowerment as a means of bringing population growth under human control may be new. but it is far from addressing the structural constraints on women’s reproductive autonomy. sasser demonstrates that this shift installs an individualistic requirement for women to be sexual stewards of their fertility and the environmental future. at the same time, this advocacy reinvigorates older narratives about the need for women of the global north to act on behalf of women in the global south, in this case, to remedy their unmet contraceptive needs. moreover, her incisive account of workshop narratives and practices shows how those ghosts are avoided in gestures to “the dark times” of population control that are quickly displaced by the need to move on with the current concerns. in so doing, the workshops evade serious engagement with the legacies of structural racism and colonialism, and she concludes, they effectively displace feminist reproductive justice goals. the focus on youth advocacy as the way to shape the environmental future raises an important issue of leadership training for aspiring activists, many of whom are our students. sasser’s account should move us to ask, at what point do such trainings stop being grassroots organizing and become a limited politics of “astroturf cultivation”? the sierra club practices offer a particularly striking example in its “values clarification” exercises, which avoid in-depth discussion of the injustices of twentieth-century population control practices by shifting the focus to the renewed malthusian anxiety about human numbers. in so doing, it centers book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) carole r. mccann,2020 3 urgent action over reflection on the assumptions underlying the call to action. how might we better equip ourselves and our students to recognize and talk back to such practices? following reproductive justice logic, as sasser suggests, one signal of a politics of “astro-turf cultivation” might be a narrative of women’s empowerment disconnected from feminist analysis of the roots/histories/politics of their structural disempowerment. one other aspect of the climate change-population advocacy that i want to highlight is the enduring relationship of science and controversy in this field. sasser notes that among funders and advocates she spoke with, there is one common refrain: the need for more science to quell the controversies that population reduction programs provoke. scientific data as a means to overcome controversies associated with reproductive politics is a longstanding shibboleth of populationism. demographers perfected this rhetoric in the mid-twentieth century. it is a strategy that has been particularly derived from and supported by the transparent objectivity accorded to numbers. in the past, it was fertility rates; today, it is data linking population growth to greenhouse gas emissions. but as sasser rightly notes, these data, which purport to single out the effect of human numbers, represent instead the tangle of social and biological factors that cannot be separated. and she notes the focus on numbers alone continues to distract attention from the destructive production processes of late-stage capitalism by pointing to problematic bodies elsewhere. in gender before birth, rajani bhatia demonstrates how the imperative to reproduce frugally has shaped sex selective practices transnationally and how, in return, sex selective practices and resistance to them in the united states continue to rely on the racialized tropes of older population control narratives. her analysis of lifestyle sex selection, a market-driven neoliberal set of practices of assisted reproductive technologies (art) provides a vivid account of the development and marketing of technologies that sidestep the question of prenatal sex selection by acting before pregnancy is established, such as sorting sperm. she builds a detailed analysis of the interacting figures that populate sexselection discourse: the family balancer, gender dreamer, abject anti-citizen, that situate the west as the best at gender equity, the rest as bound by timeless culture, and singles out china and india as exemplars of sustained reproductive excess. these figures once again situate white women in the us as modern rational reproducers and asian women everywhere as irrational reproducers oppressed by book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) carole r. mccann,2020 4 their cultures. she identifies one new figure in this landscape—the wealthy global bio-citizen, whose adherence to the small family ideal entitles them to purchase reproductive technologies to maximize their familial gender equity. motivated by fairness or heartfelt desire, the family balancer and the global bio-citizen must use sex-selective technology within a family planning framework of frugal reproduction. still, sex-selection providers rely on orientalist tropes in representing westerners as girl-wanting and asians as boy-seeking. these orientalist tropes are crucial legitimating narratives, which posit lifestyle sex selection as a reasonable and moral practice in contrast to the sex-selection practices based on abortion in other nations; again, india and asia are the exemplars. the narrative depends on the longstanding presumption that sexselective abortion is an essential factor in “adverse sex ratios” in those nations. since balanced gender is the goal of lifestyle sex selection, the practice is presented as one without a gender bias. one of the key issues raised by bhatia’s analysis concerns the regulatory inconsistencies that have made lifestyle sex selection possible and which have enabled its extension through global networks of clinics and laboratories. bhatia’s study traces the history of the development of sperm sorting and preimplantation gender determination as grounded in agricultural practice and extension into human medical trails. in these practices, providers of the service have operated largely outside the purview of state agencies and, therefore, have set the terms of practice as well as the limits of our knowledge about them. when state agencies have acted, she shows, providers have been able to move the regulated practices to other locales through a global network of clinics and laboratories whose connections are actively—if discretely—cultivated. in addition, her insightful analysis of feminist anti-sex selection shows how feminists became supportive of provider autonomy in the face of efforts by legislative bans designed to curtail women’s access to abortion. both books expand our understanding of the texture of contests over and meanings of reproductive justice in the contemporary moment. they identify key instances in which the language of reproductive justice, health, and rights has been taken up and repurposed by a variety of mainstream actors and networks actors for their own uses. some of those uses are knowingly mendacious, as bhatia shows regarding anti-abortion sex-selection bans. some of those uses, such as environmentalists, see themselves as acting in alliance, which sasser effectively critiques. bhatia’s analysis of the strategies and rhetoric of feminist sex selection activism in the us has been fundamentally shaped by powerful enemies. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) carole r. mccann,2020 5 sasser, on the other hand, demonstrates that even with purported friends, who often have more resources, coalition work risks the return of older tropes that coopt reproductive justice goals. i also want to acknowledge the important work bhatia and sasser do to build out the concept of populationism. they borrow the term from environmentalists ian angus and simon butler (2011), who define it simply as the attribution of “social and ecological ills to human numbers” (xxi). on its own, i think, the concept is insufficient to support a robust reproductive justice approach because it masks the underlying logics by which social ills are attributed to numbers. as both books demonstrate, those logics coalesced in the threads of malthus’s population concept. sasser’s focus on the environmental populationism highlights the fundamental linkage of anxiety about the earth’s carrying capacity to malthusian logic that population growth will always outstrip nature’s ability to accommodate it. bhatia’s focus on art’s bio-populationism demonstrates the malthusian logic of frugal reproduction, in which sex is essentialized. it is man’s reproductive nature, realized through women’s bodies, that puts humanity at risk. moreover, as both books demonstrate, orientalist racialization is central to populationist logic. malthus’s argument for population statistics hinges on their value in ranking the inadequacies of nations and peoples in a racialized hierarchy. as sasser and bhatia demonstrate, an effective feminist conceptualization of populationism should foreground these intertwined logics. to conclude i want to point to issues raised in the books’ conclusions that, to me, suggest fruitful avenues for further research. in her conclusion, bhatia calls for a feminist approach to sex selection that “refuses to be captured” (p. 197) by reproductive binaries such as individual/population, (in)fertility/(over)population, and so on. relatedly, one of sasser’s concluding questions asks if “it is enough for feminists to insist on women’s bodily autonomy” (p. 149) or whether feminists need to “grapple with population growth,” in which she points to recent work by donna haraway and kim tallbear. first, when it comes to feminist agency to avoid capture and co-optation of our reproductive knowledge and frameworks, i want to suggest that we need to carefully assess the situated vulnerabilities of feminist organizations. both books demonstrate the ease with which better financed (sierra club) and more powerful (anti-choice) social actors have usurped feminist language and frameworks for their own purposes. both books provide examples of the fluidity of reproductive book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) carole r. mccann,2020 6 politics that shape feminist organizing, whether it be the creation and cancellation of sierra club training program, or the shifting center of the anti-sex-selection campaign in the us. a robust reproductive justice approach should include careful assessment of situated vulnerabilities of feminist actors in this arena to provide better tools to understand how they may succumb to external influences and/or resist the usurpation of feminist justice goals. at a moment when planned parenthood—the largest provider of reproductive health care for low-income and women of color in the us—has lost 40% of its budget, the precarious economic and political position of feminist reproductive health, rights, justice organizations in these neoliberal times is particularly ripe for analysis. feminist science studies is well equipped to build our understanding of the complex vulnerabilities of feminist reproductive organizations and principles to external forces, and the fault lines of gender, race, and class that have always defined them. second, responding to sasser’s question about grappling with population numbers, i suggest that feminist analyses also pay close attention to the configuration and effects of quantitative elements of reproductive narratives. population statistics established the individual/aggregate reproductive binary and the fundamental features of its operation. aggregation mediates between administrative ledgers, state policy, and popular discourse though accounting tools that detach life events from their social grounds to produce disembodied statistical figurations such as sex ratios and unmet need. those figures in turn contour individual responsibility for managing life events. the continued slippage of aggregate and individual animates the numbers that define population problems and locates their solutions in individual action. central to that slippage is the orientalist logic that requires right-minded liberal (read white) people to control their reproduction so that they, like overpopulated nations, will not suffer the consequences of too many to care for. in grappling with the numbers, feminists must attend to the historically situated mediation practices and the methodological processes underlying the configuration of demographic data. there are always gaps and contingencies in how and what the data represent that must be negotiated. a robust feminist reproductive justice approach would interrogate the resolution of those gaps and contingencies in the construction of numbers to illuminate how they are inflected by situations of their enactment. bhatia’s account of contestation of racialized sex selection numbers and sasser’s critique of overpopulation as a cause of greenhouse gases provide strong examples of what i am suggesting should become routine practice. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) carole r. mccann,2020 7 reference angus, i., & butler, s. (2011). too many people? population, immigration, and the environmental crisis. chicago: haymarket. author bio carole r. mccann is professor and chair of gender, women’s, + sexuality studies at university of maryland, baltimore county (umbc) and author of figuring the population bomb: gender and demography in the mid-twentieth century (university of washington press, feminist technosciences series, 2016). microsoft word 71511-1-11_wesner.docx wesner, a. (2018). contested sonic space: settler territoriality and sonographic visualization at celilo falls. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-34. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © ashton wesner, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article contested sonic space: settler territoriality and sonographic visualization at celilo falls ashton wesner university of california at berkeley ashton.wesner@berkeley.edu abstract in this article, i argue that “seeing with sound" is a fraught political process with the potential to both obfuscate and assist indigenous claims to land. i do so by analyzing the portland district u.s. army corps of engineers’ 2007 sonar images of celilo falls on the columbia river. i take up feminist materialist analytics developed by native american and indigenous studies scholarship on cartography and refusal, and place them in conversation with the sonic geographies of columbia river indigenous writers. namely, i use elizabeth woody’s poem waterways endeavor to translate silence from currents (1994) to investigate how overlapping and conflicting deployments of sonic imaging play a major cultural, political, and material role in the (re)mapping of celilo falls. first, i present a theoretical framework that considers the role of what i call sonic knowledges in unsettling colonial visual cartographies. i use archival army corps’ maps and critical sonar studies literature to show how the army corps’ 2007 riverbed sonograms emerge from a longer context of us settler practices of enclosing land with maps and surveying water with sound. i 2 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) then turn to a close reading of newspaper articles and state legislation to analyze how the sonograms take on a present political life in ways that repackage ocularcentrism and assuage settler guilt, thus authorizing ongoing us enclosure of indigenous lands. yet, i also bring to bear indigenous sonic knowledges that position imaging processes as potentially antithetical to addressing questions of access to land and self-determination. through examining newspaper interviews, public testimonies, and elizabeth woody’s poem, i elucidate deployments of sonic knowledge that can help us think about what anti-colonial (re)mapping practices demand of contemporary cartographic imaging processes. attending to sonic knowledges under conditions of settlerocularcentrism, i suggest, might assist anti-colonial feminist science studies engagements with processes of imag(in)ing indigenous space. introduction dislocated from one another, we are now flooded, resting in place. we suffocate in the backwater of decadence and fractious contempt. purity of the ancient is the language without tongues. the river elegantly marks swirls on its surface, a spiral that tells of a place that remains undisturbed. elizabeth woody (warm springs, wasco, yakama, and navajo), 1994, excerpt from poem “waterways endeavor to translate silence from currents,” p. 97 it is 2015 and just east of the dalles dam on the oregon shore of the columbia river, i am looking out across lake celilo from celilo park. i hear the steely rumble of an oil tanker train along the union pacific line, the resounding horn of a cargo barge plodding downriver, and the whoosh of highway traffic on the i-84. standing at the river’s edge, my face is wet with rain and ears full of wind — i hear the quick, whipping monofilm sail of a windsurfer and the crashing crests of world-renowned mid-river waves. between lulls in the gusts, i hear the methodical gurgle 3 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) of lake celilo’s waves lapping at the rocky shore. celilo park is a treaty fishing access site on nch’i-wána,1 which (for now) is commonly called the columbia river. along the public recreational shoreline there is also treaty mandated infrastructure: a boat launch, fish cleaning tables and structures for net-drying, a parking lot with electric outlets, and bathrooms with showers. the most heavily used of thirty-one sites along the river, celilo park is one node in a federal compensation system aimed to reserve mid-columbia river tribes’ treaty right to half of the river’s salmon.2 throughout the columbia river basin, indigenous fisheries, villages, burial grounds, sacred places, and commercial infrastructure remain inundated — and salmon runs decimated — by twentieth-century hydropower development in what now amounts to over 60 dams. demarcated by congress and constructed by the united states army corps of engineers (ace), the sites provide commercial fishing locations at the “usual and accustomed places” for fishers of the nez perce tribe, confederated tribes of the warm springs reservation of oregon, confederated tribes of the umatilla reservation, and confederated tribes and bands of the yakama indian nation. before the 1950s and for centuries preceding, however, the visual, sonic, and geopolitical landscape of this stretch of the river did not look or sound the way i have just described. i grew up visiting the columbia river as a white, non-indigenous person—i conduct this research and writing as a settler — and what i cannot hear in celilo park at present is the sound of falling water. beneath the floating fishnets on lake celilo is wyam,3 celilo falls. celebrated poet and enrolled member of the confederated tribes of warm springs, elizabeth woody — whose poetics of sonic geography run through this paper — has translated the sahaptin word wyam to mean “echo of falling water” or “sound of water on rocks” (1994, p. 9). before inundation by the rising backwaters of the dalles dam on 10 march 1957, this was a geophysically complex stretch of the river. at wyam the nearly 900-yard-wide channel narrowed to less than sixty, and dropped more than twenty feet in elevation, charging the flow drained from 237,000 square miles of watershed through basaltic 4 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) islands and outcroppings in thundering falls and rapids, whirlpools and eddies. on those rocky cliffs, fishermen constructed seasonal platforms and their dip-nets brought in a prolific catch, as millions of salmon forged the constricted current toward their spawning grounds upriver. celilo falls — presently inundated by lake celilo, the 330,000-acre-feet of impounded waters i see from celilo park — was part of the most productive inland fishery and hub of commercial, cultural, and political exchange for indigenous peoples in the region. on the heels of the 1957 inundation’s fiftieth anniversary, as media outlets explain, the portland district ace faced pressure from environmental activists and celilo village descendants and residents to provide definitive evidence as to whether they had dynamited the basaltic formations in the river channel during dam construction (patton, 2008; rojas-burke, 2008). the ace turned to visual data to disprove such indictments and, in a public act of settler (re)discovery — enabled by technology that “sees with sound” (kellogg, 1961; ritts and shiga, 2016) — produced new images of celilo falls. in april of 2007, an ace survey team led a boat fitted with a multi-beam sonar scanner onto the flat waters of lake celilo to generate a sonogram of the riverbed. the oregonian newspaper published the cartographic images, explaining, “new sonar maps produced by the corps of engineers reveal a virtually unchanged celilo falls beneath the murky water of the columbia” (rojasburke, 2008, para. 5). the article begins with historical and political context for the survey: about 10 miles upstream of the dalles, the columbia river once thundered over fierce rapids and a big horseshoe-shaped waterfall where generations of native americans gathered to catch salmon by the hundreds. the lake that rose behind the dalles dam swallowed celilo falls in 1957. as if that weren't destruction enough, government demolition teams blasted the falls to ruins...or so the stories said. (emphasis my own, paras. 1-2) this narration of historic settler violence begins, as many do, with a 5 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) description of a distant and completed event, a people past, and a dismissal of intergenerational memory. the narrative erases persisting indigenous existence and use of this place, and neglects the welldocumented history of the ace's dynamite-demolitions along the columbia throughout the twentieth century. historical and ongoing destruction is diminished, and the ace is made to appear innocent in the face of allegedly fallacious accusations. yet at the same time, the indigenous interviewees featured in the oregonian’s article expressed relief to see an image that suggested their ancestral fishing grounds had not been dynamited. further still, these interviews suggested that sonic cartography might be useful for land reclamation struggles and thus politicized the ace sonograms as an opportunity to (re)assert the futurity of indigenous relations with celilo falls. how do anti-colonial scholars of science and technology contend with the use of technoscientific imaging processes toward seemingly contradictory ends: as tools to bolster both settler-state authority as well as indigenous claims to land? in this paper, i extend this question to examine the role of sonic visualization in divergent conceptualizations and claims to space using an analysis of the production and circulation of images created by the 2007 ace sonar survey of celilo falls. i take up the feminist materialist analytics developed by native american and indigenous studies scholarship on cartography and refusal (goeman, 2013; simpson, 2014), in conversation with the sonic geographies of columbia river indigenous writers (pinkham, 2010; woody, 1994), to argue that “seeing with sound” is a fraught political process with the potential to both obfuscate and assist indigenous claims to land. i begin this paper with a theoretical framework that considers sonic knowledge in unsettling colonial visual cartographies. to further elucidate the political stakes of “seeing with sound,” i then use archival maps and critical sonar studies to historicize the material production of sonograms at celilo. i consider the 2007 ace sonar survey in a much longer context of us settler and imperial practices of imaging territory, which enclose lands with maps and survey waters with sound. in the third section, a 6 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) close reading of newspaper articles and state legislation demonstrates how the sonograms take on a present political life in ways that repackage ocularcentrism, assuage settler guilt and thus authorize ongoing us enclosure of indigenous lands. throughout this paper, i attend to multiple political valences of sonic cartographies and the enactments of anticolonial resistance in both constituting and contesting the sociopolitical life of the images. thus, the final section engages with tonawanda band of seneca scholar mishuana goeman’s (2014) call to theorize spatial justice through indigenous women’s cartographic practices. i focus on the role of sound in a politics of refusal (simpson, 2014) to the maintenance and memorialization of settler control at celilo falls. turning back to elizabeth woody’s poem (1994, pp. 97-98), i examine sonic geography as a spatial framework for thinking anti-colonial land politics and undoing the ocularcentric logics of settler cartographies. sound matters columbia river treaty tribes and columbia river indians continue to take fish at celilo park in a place visually, sonically, and geopolitically (re)spatialized by the territorializing projects of settler colonial occupation. nez perce historian, storyteller, and elder, allen pinkham, has written about his contemporary relationship with celilo falls, in part, through sonic memory. i have stopped at celilo over the years, and the silence is a terrible thing to experience. there are no sounds of mothers and grandmothers cooking or washing dishes after a meal that included fresh salmon or eels. no sounds of mothers and daughters cutting salmon and eels to dry for winter storage and use. no sounds of men chopping wood for cooking or smokedrying at the old village site. no sounds of children running, playing, and shouting at each other. near where fish were being caught, there are no sounds of nets going into the currents or of fish being clubbed when brought onto the scaffolds and put into 7 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) fish boxes…. now, there are no sounds of hand cable cars being pulled across to the various islands; their wheels are quiet. (2007, p. 592) pinkham’s memory routes an historical account of life at celilo falls through a sonic register. his tracing of past and present sounds at celilo affords an account of space that is gendered and persistent in its sociality and materiality. here, women and more-than-human beings are the central agents of biological and social production. he describes an interrelated set of indigenous socialities and technologies that are reproductive and relational. relations between mothers, grandmothers, salmon, eels, nets and cable cars, constitute an “intact” celilo falls as lively and sound-full. pinkham’s repeated “terrible” experience of silence over the years — a dense and layered series of “no sounds” — registers the violence of material enclosure and social dislocation as a series of many acoustic absences. pinkham constructs a historically specific sonic knowledge that is both an intimate claim to indigenous social space and an indictment of the constant invisible terror of ongoing occupation (see barker ed., 2017; goldstein ed., 2014; kauanui, 2016; wolfe, 2006). similarly, elizabeth woody’s (1994) poem “waterways endeavor to translate silence from currents” (p. 97) produces a dislocated, yet animate, sonic geography. woody is a highly acclaimed indigenous poet, educator, and founding member of the northwest native american writers association. her poem, an excerpt from which serves as an epigraph for this article, begins “first of the voices are innocent, from memory/” and ushers the reader into a multitudinous, resonant remembrance. the poem’s scaffolding stands on images of resounding columbia river beings — fissures hiss and songs linger — while spiraling through a flooded place of dislocation. akin to pinkham’s insistence on the vital relations that constitute celilo falls, woody’s poem likewise represents celilo falls in its own right. further still, woody’s poem evokes futurity through an emplaced and communicative river. the poem’s final three lines depict a columbia that might be caressing and caring for itself: “the river elegantly marks swirls on its surface,/a spiral that tells of a 8 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) place/that remains undisturbed.” the symbol of spiraling water evokes a sense of falling as ongoing movement. a place “that remains undisturbed” is a persistent place, brought into being by continuous story-making, although perhaps only legible as such to the closed and specific “we” of the poem. neither spectacular nor ocular, celilo is irreducible to geophysical structures that can be made sensible by visual measurement alone. pinkham’s sonic memories and woody’s sonic geography turn our attention to the ways sound and silence are historical, material, and spatial. yet, neither pinkham nor woody describes the social, cultural, and spatial dislocation brought on by inundation as “death” (barber, 2010). sound and silence figure prominently in columbia river indigenous peoples’ memory of an acute event of primitive accumulation, experience of ongoing dispossession, as well as the collective maintenance of their relation to the vitality of celilo (see pinkham, 2010; ulrich, 2007; woody, 1994). what i call sonic knowledges refer to the various ways in which sound is experienced, described, represented, and codified as material truth claims or ontological facts. sonic knowledges figure centrally in contemporary contestation surrounding what counts as life, personhood, and a legitimate claim to place across interlocking social and political spheres: the historic echo of pounding waters, memories of reverberating dynamite blasts, and pings of underwater soundwaves. multitudinous sonic knowledges converge and diverge in the imagining and imaging of celilo falls, but with uneven power relations and toward the production of vastly different spatial politics. imaging matters dan proudfit — head of the portland district ace's survey section — led an outfitted boat over lake celilo in april of 2007. as his team cruised the reservoir’s surface, a multi-beam sonar scanner’s projector emitted pings toward the intended deflecting structure or target (i.e., the geomorphic basalt formations of the columbia riverbed). these sound pulses 9 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) reverberated from their target back to the water’s surface and were received by the scanner’s hydrophone. a transducer converted these reverberations to electrical impulses that could then be spatially visualized as a series of black and white sonograms. akin to photo negatives, these images were then inverted and “falsely” colored through computer processing (peterson, 2012). evocative of a colorful 3-d topographical model, the resulting images convey the riverbed’s geophysical structures as they might appear without water running through or over them. the sonograms’ red-to-green color gradation indicates an increase in depth (from about twenty to 120 feet) along the river floor and the shadowed indentations, ridges, and cuts indicate spatial dimension. in so doing, the ace produced yet another visualization of celilo falls in a long line of measurements, maps, and surveys of this stretch of the river. this time, they used sound. although the bottom of celilo lake had never once been mapped since the dalles dam was completed, us mapmaking of celilo falls is not new. throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ace produced and deployed images of the columbia’s geophysiology for the purposes of expanding riverine navigation, preventing floods of settler developments, irrigating agricultural lands, and generating hydroelectricity for a rapidly increasing settler population and wartime industry (see allen, 2007; fredlund, 2007). in the pacific northwestern united states more broadly, land and water surveys assisted the quantification, invasion, and enclosure of the land by the settler nationstate throughout the fur trade, the lewis and clark corps of discovery expedition, westward extension of the railroads, and urbanization of western territories (see banner, 2007; blackhawk, 2006; huhndorf, 2009; limerick, 1987). federal plans, specifically those for settler territorialization of the columbia river basin, relied on visual representations of waterways to imagine and enact the expansion of homesteading, commercial agriculture, hydropower, and military industry (see lang, 2007; white, 1995; worster, 1985). following rapid development of navigational infrastructure in the 10 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) early twentieth century, the ace turned its focus to the columbia’s potential to support large-scale hydropower plans (willingham, 1992). historian william lang (2007) explains: “celilo falls and the dalles, rather than the object of concern as an obstacle to navigation, suddenly became a location for an economic bonanza, where engineers sought to exaggerate the river’s fall and create a bountiful source of power” (p. 574). ace surveys of the nation’s rivers laid the scientific groundwork for federal plans to systematically develop entire watersheds for irrigation, flood control, and hydropower throughout the us and advocated for the construction of dams on the columbia, the dalles dam being one of them (national research council, 1999; north pacific division of u.s. ace, 1969). figure 1: close up of celilo falls reach. [a close-up section of an army corps map depicting the columbia river reach at the dalles, between oregon and washington. the river is outlined in bolded, black ink, with place names identifying cities, highways, and hydropower and navigational infrastructure proposed by the army corps of engineers. the water downriver of the dalles is blue, while the proposed inundation upriver from the recommended project is filled in with red.] 11 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) figure 2: map key indicating "proposes project" and projected flooding. [a map-key, titled “legend” in black font at the top. beneath are symbols (such as variously shaded polygons, dotted lines, and circles) with definitions indicating ace projects in various stages. the existing and authorized project symbols and descriptions are in blue, the proposed projects in red, the possible future projects in yellow, and the present and potential irrigated areas in green.] columbia river and tributaries, northwestern united states. letter from the chief of engineers to the secretary of the army, 28 june 1950. report plate 78. the ace maps imagined the spatial reorganizations of settler futurity and enabled such a project’s material implementation. red, on this 1949 ace survey of the columbia, demarcates a “proposed reservoir” project behind the “recommended project” at the dalles (figure 2). evocative of the blue and red anatomical depictions of blood-filled veins, the proposed project seeps east. bright ink floods and exceeds the empty, outlined reach of the columbia river —covering a small, hollow black circle labeled “celilo/celilo falls” (figure 1). 12 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) technocientific systems designed to produce maps or aerial views of land assist projects of us territorial control, military expansion, and the cultural formation of a nationalist imaginary. from safari cameras and wwi hot air balloons, to the war on terror’s unmanned aircraft and “curiosity” (nasa’s mars rover), scholars have contended with the violent consequences of power-laden visualization technologies and ocularcentric ways of knowing, especially imbricated projects of empire building through territorial conquest (see anderson, 1983; chandler, 2016; earle, 2014; gregory, 2014; kaplan, 2006, 2017). in a similar but different vein, feminist science studies scholars have predominantly theorized sonography as an instrument of visualization in the context of the body, gender, reproduction and subject-formation (see cartwright, 1995; haraway, 1997; milstein & krolokke, 2012; palmer, 2009; taylor, 2008). similarly, acoustic technologies have enabled scientific and military detection and visualization of underwater sound waves to enable a kind of “seeing by listening” (kellogg, 1961). adjacent to medical sonograms, geophysical sonar survey systems are run through with implications for defining and ordering what counts as valuable and vital, or enemy and other. the role of sonar imaging technology as an instrument of settler colonization in the us, however, remains underexamined. as i argue in this paper, geophysical sonograms can both uphold and break with the cartographic legacy of settler-state control over contested territory. critical studies of sonar have traced its emergence from the cold war to contemporary securitization of oceanic space and underwater landscapes. an acronym for sound navigation and ranging, sonar was first widely developed and deployed during wwii for the detection of underwater military targets, such as submarines (peterson, 2012). this work shows how the instruments and sense-making systems that perceive and translate underwater sound arose from an inextricable relationship between military naval and security research, and sciences of cetology and oceanography (see ritts & shiga, 2016; oreskes, 2003). as these sonar studies lay bare the co-constitution of military and scientific 13 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) technologies, they show how underwater spaces become configured as “marine battlefields” (kaushik et al., 2005). a term that conveys the positivism of military discourse, “marine battlefield” also historicizes and politicizes the underwater landscapes in which instruments of surveillance and management produce effects of (re)territorialization. imagining and imaging underwater landscapes as “battlefields” — frontiers of expansion and original scientific discovery — reshape longstanding notions of the oceanic boundaries of sovereign powers and extend material claims to territory. there is an urgent opportunity here to interrogate the role of geophysical sonar discourses and visualizations — from images of riverbeds to archeological sites — as political actants enrolled in sociocultural and legal contestations over the legitimacy and futurity of indigenous claims to ancestral territory. federal agencies like the environmental protection agency and national park service draw from their readings of technoscientific images to make decisions about the validity, import, and response to environmental and sovereignty struggles on the part of indigenous peoples. sonar surveys are used in the arbitration of legal and regulatory processes such as environmental impact assessments and native american graves protection and recovery act (nagpra) proceedings (see oregon state historic preservation office, 2013; us army corps of engineers, 1999). in the context of ongoing settler colonial occupation and enclosure of underwater land, what can be learned from examining the way the ace sonograms deploy acoustic surveillance in the mapping of an “underwater battlefield”? and how can these efforts be understood as acts of national security-making? politics of representation louie pitt jr., [a] warm springs tribal member, said historical photographs seem to show blasting at the site of the falls. "are they still there? were they dynamited? that questioning has been going 14 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) on for years," said pitt, director of government affairs and planning for the tribe.— rojas-burke, 2008, para. 6 state and federal fisheries managers agreed there was one good thing about the dalles dam: it would end indian fishing at celilo falls. although the fisheries people fought the dam down to the start of construction, they took comfort from the expectation — or at least hope —that drowning celilo falls would end indian fishing on the columbia and disperse the indians. – roberta ulrich, 2007, p. 80 shortly after the survey’s completion, the oregonian published an article titled “sonar shows celilo falls are intact,” with a black and white aerial photograph of the columbia river from the 1940s set alongside its contemporary mimetic equivalent, the 2008 ace cartographic sonogram of land underwater (rojas-burke, 2008). the new map does not mark gravel bars for demolition or channels for dredging nor does the sonic transducer identify enemy objects for target launch. this visual juxtaposition — the abutting proximity of an historical aerial landscape photograph and a present-day colorized sonogram — was offered as authoritative evidence and conclusion: the celilo falls that existed above water in the 1940s is intact beneath the river in 2007. 15 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) figure 3: the main cataract at celilo falls as seen in october 1933. the falls were flooded by the construction of the dalles dam in 1957, and rumor had it that the us army corps of engineers demolished them (rojas-burke, 2008). [two images juxtaposed, one beneath the other. the top image is a black and white aerial photograph of celilo falls, showing the white-water of rapids gushing down-river and the rocks basalt formations of the mid-river cliffs and south oregon shore. the bottom image is the 2007 ace sonogram, in color, indicating the depths and dimensions of the riverbed. a deep blue to green fills in the deep river channel, while the shallow rocky outcroppings are colored red, orange, and yellow.] the article enables a public record of ace innocence in response to rumorbased accusations of explosive settler violence. eve tuck (unangax) and k. wayne yang have theorized such examples of non-indigenous peoples' moves to alleviate the impacts of colonization as “settler moves to innocence” that attempt to rescue settler futurity through a problematic reconciliation of settler guilt and complicity (2012, p. 3). portland district corps’s col. thomas o’donovan’s decision to request a detailed sonar survey from dan proudfit’s survey team is described as a “wade into the celilo falls controversy” (para. 7). drawing from a prior oregon public broadcasting interview with o’donovan, the article contextualizes the ace’s rationale: “my team came to me and said, ‘look, we don't think we blew the falls up,[….]i said, 'well, that really isn't gonna cut it in terms of 16 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) sitting down with the tribes and talking about this important cultural resource that it is for them” (emphasis my own, para. 10). the effect of generous enactment constructs the sonar survey as a benevolent gesture on the part of the very same federal agency that was responsible for flooding celilo falls in the 1957. simultaneously, the falls are reduced to their “important cultural” import alone. this elides the political and economic stakes of envisioning celilo falls intact for tribes, especially in the context of emerging debate over possible future removal of hydropower dams on the columbia (para. 16). boyd cothran, a cultural and military historian of the us, examines the cultural production of the settler-american public’s belief in “their fundamental innocence in the face of settler colonial legacies of violence” (2014, p. 24). here, i suggest that feminist materialist analyses examine how scientific imaging processes also make “settler moves to innocence” (tuck & yang, 2012) and contribute to the production of a revisionist and benevolent settler historiography (cothran 2014). scientific visions, too, are enrolled in the cultural work of maintaining settler colonial control over land and obscuring the historical violence of this control (see braun, 2002; chapin et al., 2005; harris, 2004; hunt & stevenson, 2016; özdenshilling 2016). the ace is willing to deploy innovative technologies to offer visual evidence of a scientifically substantiated claim to historical truth. the ace publicly reveals this new narrative of what happened at celilo falls as a kind of gift in exchange for a previously flawed narrative. the truth claims authorized by cartographic conventions articulate with a performance of good intention and risk dismissing celilo village residents’ testimony with a tacit suggestion that material violence committed by the ace at celilo was not as bad as “rumor had it” (rojasburke, 2008). however, the oregonian article did not situate the sonograms in historical material context. in 1873, the ace began dynamiting basalt rock formations, like those at celilo falls, as they were considered an obstruction to navigation of the river (barber & fisher, 2007, p. 721). during the dalles dam construction there is at least one significant 17 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) instance of dynamite use in 1956, as shown in figure 4: “more than 20 tons of powder, and removed 60,000 cubic yards of basalt.” the ace maps i discuss in the previous section were used as blueprints for dynamite placement during construction from the late 1800s through the 1950s (allen, 2007; willingham, 1992). explosives were a technology of territorialization for the expansion of state control and capital in the midcolumbia river, and countless places occupied, used, and held in relation by indigenous peoples were destroyed by the ace detonations. figure 4: “final major blast at the dalles dam, removed 60,000 cubic yards of basalt, more than 20 tons of powder used.” 1956. ohs research lib, bb002863. [a black and white landscape photograph—a tall, mid-action dynamite blast stretches the length of the photograph, with clouds of dark smoke, dirt, and water extending skyward. in the foreground are gravel and sand bars, and portions of the columbia river and low, smooth mountains are seen in the background.] yet there are multiple, potentially disruptive, methods for making sense of the sonograms, some of which elicit feelings of relief and visions of indigenous futurity. in the same news article analyzed above, elizabeth woody situates the sonograms in a longer process of holding the ace accountable for its major role in the dispossession of indigenous life on the mid-columbia: the revelation brings relief and hope to many members of columbia basin tribes. 18 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) "i was deeply moved," said woody. "i actually cried, i was so relieved that it wasn't destroyed." woody said it's easy for her to understand why members of her tribe and others came to believe that the u.s. government dynamited the falls. people living in the village at celilo falls heard and felt the blasting for excavations at the dam, she said. "people experienced the explosions and associated it with the loss," she said (rojas-burke, 2008, paras. 13-16). woody brings non-visual senses to bear on geophysical knowledge production and the making of history. she provincializes sight and centers celilo villagers’ experience of hearing and feeling blasts as constitutive of the explosion’s event. woody continues to argue: “people said the corps had dynamited celilo so no one would fight for the dams to come down” (emphasis my own, para. 17). conversing with woody during this interview, louie pitt jr. (member and director of government affairs and planning for the confederated tribes of warm springs) also contends with the sonograms on explicitly indigenous terms. the sonograms assist his imag(in)ing of future indigenous geographies outside of, or beyond, settler colonial structures: “someday those dams will be gone,” pitt said. “when that day comes the falls will return. indians will be waiting” (para. 21). woody and pitt jr. decenter the process of imaging celilo falls. their language enrolls embodied and auditory senses to construct an emplaced history of indigenous experiences at celilo falls. woody explains that the sonic knowledge of those “living in the village” offers a challenge to the ace’s use of visual evidence to maintain a record of public innocence. she regards sonic memories of dynamite as undoubtedly “heard and felt,” and politicizes visual representations of land as potential claims-making tools in a struggle against dispossession. 19 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) woody’s evocation of an undammed future for the columbia river implies that the scientific and legal authority afforded these sonograms might assist in future efforts to make claims to land currently under water. likewise, pitt jr. affirms the certainty of such a future on the columbia river where indigenous peoples not only survive the violences of the ace, but also anticipate and prepare for the inevitable dissolution of hydropower infrastructure. not all forms of sonic knowledge are afforded equal amounts of ontoepistemological legitimacy in the popular imaginary nor in scientific and political spheres (goh, 2017). in the following section, i further examine how sonic knowledges are used to politicize visual representations and take up the ace sonograms as a technology for producing indigenous futures and refusing settler spatial orders. i argue that mishuana goeman’s (2013) theorization of (re)mapping as an engagement with “the power of native epistemologies in defining [native] moves toward spatial decolonization, a specific form of spatial justice” (p. 4), brought together with audra simpson’s (2014) politicized indigenous refusal of settler “sense,” opens possibilities of understanding how indigenous sonic cartographies do productive political and spatial work toward shaping the futures of indigenous places “within and apart from settler governance” (p. 11). sounding refusal and indigenous futurity nearly eight years after their initial release, the same ace sonograms that had trafficked as geophysical evidence of ace innocence publicly entered the juridico-military sphere. in the 2015 regular session of the seventy-eighth oregon legislative assembly, a house joint memorial measure — hjm-15 (figure 5)—was introduced to “[urge] united states army corps of engineers to provide preliminary statement of feasibility for lowering lake celilo to a level sufficient to reveal celilo falls during a certain period” (para. 2). this period of revelation was specified as lasting one to two weeks, between 1 january 2016 and 1 january 2020. a copy 20 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) of hjm-15 was sent to the commanding general and chief of engineers of the us army corps as well as to the commander and district engineer of the us ace, portland district. an article in the northwest news network drew a connection between the ace sonograms and this new political initiative to physically reveal the falls: in 2008[sic.], the army corps of engineers released a sonar survey of the river bottom in front of celilo village. the underwater survey showed the falls and surrounding rock formations remain intact. in recent years, several small nonprofits have emerged to advocate for restoring celilo falls and its historic fishery. they include the friends of celilo falls, which takes pains to say that it does not represent or speak for columbia river tribes. in written testimony, friends director sean aaron cruz said a permanently restored celilo falls could perhaps become a unesco world heritage site (banse, t., 2015, paras. 13-15). the state-sanctioned move to uncover and (re)cover celilo falls is integrally constituted by imaging processes. such a spectacular and material memorialization project requires a critical examination of how technoscientific images are — like cothran’s examples of stage performances, postcards, and tourist sites (2014) — also enrolled in the cultural production of settler memory and commonsense (rifkin, 2014). yet as i have shown, contradictory meanings can be produced and mobilized to very different political ends using the same images. the commentary submitted during hjm-15’s legislative proceedings offer an opportunity to analyze how sonar images are simultaneously enrolled in, and critiqued as, cultural and legal projects of settler-state redemption and territorialization. this next section examines anti-hjm-15 testimonies submitted by two indigenous writers to demonstrate how settler visual representations of indigenous lands are continuously contested. both tabitha whitefoot and se-ah-dom edmo are celilo village descendants with extensive 21 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) experience in indigenous-led research and education, currently through positions at lewis and clark college and the columbia river inter-tribal fish commission respectively. indigenous responses to hjm-15 (of which i only consider the archived public commentary) were not homogenous. i have intentionally selected two testimonies that reject the primacy of the visual, and in so doing both critique and refute the spatial politics undergirding the settler-state’s imagined memorial. their testimonies offer material for exploring articulations of historicized sound, sense, and sociality that challenge the taken-for-granted value of imaging celilo falls. figure 5: helm, j. (2015). house joint memorial 15, 18th oregon legislative assembly-2015 regular session. 22 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) native and indigenous studies scholars have demonstrated that calculated refusal of settler “gifts,” such as inclusivity or apology, is also an assertion of power (simpson, 2014). audra simpson, kahnawà:ke scholar of anthropology and native american studies, theorizes indigenous “refusal” as an alternative to the desire for legibility and inclusion within settler colonial nation states (2014, p. 1). building on her argument that “like indigenous bodies, indigenous sovereignties and indigenous political orders prevail within and apart from settler governance” (p. 11), simpson demonstrates how indigenous refusal of “gifts” (re)shape the politics, sense, and reason from which they emerge (p. 1). whitefoot’s and edmo’s testimonies in opposition to hjm-15 can be read as assertions of columbia river indigenous women's political sovereignty and challenges to settler-state legitimacy. each writer refuses hjm-15 and problematizes the set of evasions that make possible such a state-sanctioned “move to settler innocence” (tuck & yang, 2012). tabitha whitefoot, an educator, researcher, and member of the yakama nation, was a young child at celilo village on the day of inundation. her submitted hjm-15 testimony elucidates sonic and sensory knowledges that trouble ocularcentric accounts of land and challenges the authority of visual sonography to evidence that “celilo falls still exists.” please listen to the voices of those individuals with a real stake in the prospect of revealing celilo falls, the descendants of those people who were displaced, who lost their homes and sense economic and social order. these late comers know nothing of this heritage, to them it is but a series of pictures and news reports. to us it is our story, our life. ask the leaders of the treaty tribes, whose tribal members were displaced and impoverished by dam building. i was four years old the year of inundation… my eyesight was severely impaired, so i have to depend on my other senses to report this out to you. first, you cannot imagine the original smell of celilo. it was a 23 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) sweet, smoky, fresh, compelling, odor. i can close my eyes and bring it forward. the sound, was indescribable, the closest i have come, is where you can hike behind the falls at silver falls state park. but that sound is directly overhead, and the sound at celilo actually reverberated off the cliffs…like a hum of industry and nature combined. the air was sometimes scrubbed clear by the winds and dry air, other times the mist could make you damp. these memories are powerful and evoke a sense of security and joy to me... (emphasis my own, p. 1). whitefoot makes an explicit connection between displacement and imagining processes: visual consumption has political and material consequences for “those individuals with a real stake in the prospect of revealing celilo falls.” she critiques settler representations of celilo falls as “but a series of pictures and news reports,” made by “newcomers” with little knowledge of celilo heritage and no experience with economic and social loss there. whitefoot’s historicized and emplaced testimony interrupts her settler audience’s overreliance on the visual. whitefoot does not describe celilo’s vitality as one that is seen, rather, she “can close [her] eyes” to bring forward smells that her audience “cannot imagine” and sounds that are “indescribable.” taking up simpson’s framework of refusal, we might read whitefoot’s rich descriptions of celilo’s sounds (hums and reverberations), olfactory and tactile sensations (sweet, smoky and fresh odor; winds and dry air), and material-affects (security and joy) as not only an alternative to settler recognition but a political enactment of indigenous sovereignty and spatial production. explicit connection between redemptive violence and visual spectacle is also forged in se-ah-dom edmo’s testimony. edmo, a shoshone-bannock, nez perce, and yakama celilo village descendant, whose father witnessed the 1957 inundation, wrote to urge “a no vote on hjm 15 and to call into question any motivation or movement to temporarily lower the dalles dam to reveal the falls.” she explains: uncovering celilo would be like digging up the grave of a relative 24 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) — just so well meaning non-native progressives can feel good about themselves and the work they are doing. what we really need is to work to empower the people who suffer generational trauma because of environmental racism. hjm 15 is misguided, i urge you to vote no! (2015, p. 1) edmo’s language, “like digging up the grave of a relative,” presents a much more familial, and vital relationship to celilo falls than the newspaper articles that tout sonograms as evidence of its “still there”ness, as though the basalt formations alone — and not the relations and life they co-produced — constitute celilo falls. edmo evokes death and burial, foregrounding the loss, violence, and covered reality of the falls. together, these testimonies refute media proclamations that celilo falls was not destroyed during dam building. conclusion imaging processes and sonic cartographies are contested practices of territorialization as well as methods for unsettling colonial geographies. mishuana goeman, scholar of native literature, geographies, and feminisms, has developed a theory of (re)mapping that is “not just about regaining that which was lost and returning to an original and pure point in history, but instead understanding the processes that have defined our current spatialities in order to sustain vibrant native futures” (2013, p. 3). for goeman, (re)mapping looks like engagement with the multiple and simultaneous spatial politics that cartographic technologies afford but not in a return to some “pure idea of indigeneity” (2013, p. 3). rather, “in considering the map as an active apparatus that restructures spatial domination, social relations, and epistemological violence, we move away from romanticized notions of resistance” (p. 66). a poem can produce alternative maps and geographic understandings. goeman demonstrates that “the literary…tenders an avenue for the ‘imaginative’ creation of new possibilities, which must happen through imaginative modes precisely because the ‘real’ of settler 25 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) colonial society is built on the violent erasures of alternative modes of mapping and geographic understandings” (2013, p. 2). i turn now to examine poetry as a sonic genre with the imaginative capacity for reorganizing space with a reading of elizabeth woody’s (1994) poem “waterways endeavor to translate silence from currents.” this poem, from her book luminaries of the humble (1994, pp. 97-98), might offer an example of indigenous cartography at celilo falls: waterways endeavor to translate silence from currents first of the voices are innocent, from memory, desolate synthesis of weeping, rain, into dry creek beds. stone with roots, companion of guardians, bares itself toward the summit of crowns. the exchange of bones for sawdust, for silt, for worthless currency. the clouding springs hiss into veins of fissures, topsoil wears into desert, an illusion of property, fringed by momentum of cutting down origin. the hiatus is the flourish of sword and degeneration. in our genesis, the beginning of words meant that we would not be without land or relationships. vacuity, the lack of emotion etches into destruction the scaffolds of abundance, rapids, falls, spawning beds, the echo of falling water. the nascent place of all the songs lingers amongst the multitude of ancestors, commonly wedged into bone hills, vandalized and cataloged. dislocated from one another, we are now flooded, 26 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) resting in place. we suffocate in the backwater of decadence and fractious contempt. purity of the ancient is the language without tongues. the river elegantly marks swirls on its surface, a spiral that tells of a place that remains undisturbed. from luminaries of the humble by elizabeth woody. © 1994 the arizona board of regents. reprinted by permission of the university of arizona press. i examine how woody’s poem produces place and contends with inundation through sound. i recognize that, as a settler encountering the particular language and resonances of this piece, my reading has limitations. poetry itself is a sonic genre and this poem turns on “the echo of falling water. the nascent place of all/,” “lingering song,” and “language without tongues.” the “stone” in woody’s poem has “roots” and “companions,” indicating an agential reality in and through which it “bares itself.” life is evident in “scaffolds of abundance” and “spawning beds,” a human/more-than-human entanglement produces place (todd, 2017). celilo falls is thus irreducible to a “cataloged” geophysical formation or abstract space but is an always-emergent, relational place. inundation is configured as neither complete nor past. flooding is more than a hydromorphological event: “dislocated from one another, we are now flooded/resting in place.” the collective plurality of those flooded is rooted in place — “resting” — and the “we” implies a collective, related set of subjects beneath the water. the reader encounters the columbia as an agential subject. the river acts. it “elegantly marks” itself, in “a spiral that tells of a place/that remains undisturbed.” the figure of the spiral evokes a sense of continuous motion inward and outward, suggesting a vitality and futurity to that which “remains undisturbed.” much scholarly, journalistic, and personal analysis of celilo falls foregrounds the political, legal, scholarly and cultural work of columbia 27 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) river indigenous peoples toward securing fishing rights, sovereign territory, and un-dammed indigenous futures; the persistence of indigenous relations to salmon, other more-than-human beings, and wy’am in its impounded (for now) yet no less animate form (see aguilar, 2005; barber, 2005, 2018; dougherty, 2014; fisher, 2010; schneider, 2016; ulrich, 2008; woody, 1994). this paper is made possible by this body of knowledge. i aimed to privilege specific indigenous cartographies and theorizations of space while also critiquing the settler nation-state’s ongoing deployment of science and claims of innocence toward liberal colonial ends in the present moment. there is much opportunity to engage with the possibilities for sonic claims-making and contestation to refute ongoing yet unsuccessful projects of settler-state territorialization (see ritts et al., 2016). this paper demonstrates that overlapping and conflicting deployments of sonic imaging play a major cultural, political, and material role in the (re)mapping of celilo falls. the visual rendering of sound waves echoed off riverbed rock and the way it is made sensible in mainstream media authorizes a subordination of indigenous claims to the sonic and social spatiality of celilo falls and erases a legacy of the ace’s role in dispossession from the public historical record. yet i show how indigenous sonic knowledges have positioned imaging processes as potentially antithetical to addressing questions of access to land and selfdetermination. interviews, public testimonies, and a poem refuse the settler-state’s visual revelation of celilo falls on terms that can help us think about what anti-colonial (re)mapping practices demand of contemporary cartographic imaging processes. attending to sonic knowledges under conditions of settler-ocularcentrism might enable robust and critical engagements with indigenous spatial politics. acknowledgments enough thanks cannot be given to jen rose smith for her ever-incisive 28 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) feedback, careful questions, and generous inspiration. i am also humbly grateful for the input and guidance of catalyst’s lead and guest editors, reviewers, my writing group colleagues, conversations with beth piatote, and mentorship of nancy peluso, shari huhndorf, and jake kosek. notes 1 this is the mid-columbia river sahaptin dialect name, as phonemic orthography, for the big river (hunn, e., james selam and family, 1991). however, it is important to note that sahaptin is not the name that many sahaptin speakers use for their language, but the common mis-assigned name by colonial settlers and anthropologists who learned this assignation from the columbia salish. for example, the yakama nation’s tribal cultural resource program uses the name ichishkíin sɨ́nwit (″this language″) instead of the salish language term sahaptin (beavert & hargus, 2010). 2 treaty fishing access sites along the columbia river have legally protected land and amenities designated for exclusive use by indigenous fishers under the ongoing us district court litigation known as us v. oregon, starting in 1950s/60s. tribal access to historical fishing grounds, guaranteed to tribes by treaties formed in the mid-1800s, was lost due to dam construction along the columbia river system. the columbia river treaty fishing access sites (crtfas) program was implemented to compensate for this loss. the project spanned over 25 years of legislation, planning, design, and construction, and involved projects along nearly 150 miles of the columbia river, from bonneville dam to the foot of mcnary dam between the states of oregon and washington. the four treaty tribes—the nez perce tribe, confederated tribes of the warm springs reservation of oregon, confederated tribes of the umatilla reservation, confederated tribes and bands of the yakama indian nation—are the mid-columbia river indigenous peoples who were forced to cede millions of acres to the expanding us settler nation-state through treaties in what was then recently incorporated “oregon territory” in 1854-1855 (fisher, 2010). in these treaties they reserve their rights to fish, hunt, and gather at all “usual and accustomed places.” apart from the four treaty tribes, historically columbia river indians have lived off reservation, identify their ancestry as that of river people, and are not federally recognized but have organized their tribal governance through community and loose confederation as columbia river tribe. 29 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) columbia river indians continue to live and fish in their ancestral homelands along the columbia river, at celilo village, and “in-lieu fishing sites” among many other places in washington and oregon (fisher, 2010). 3 people live at wyam today, and have since time immemorial. wyam (sahaptin) refers to the village of celilo, on the south shore of the river (which was also partially flooded by construction of the dalles dam) as well as the series of cascading waterfalls and fishing sites in the river. references aguilar, g. 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(2014). settler common sense: queerness and everyday colonialism in the american renaissance. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. 33 wesner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) rojas-burke, j. (2008, 27 nov.) sonar shows celilo falls are intact. the oregonian. retrieved from http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf /2008 /11 /sonar_shows_celilo_falls_are_i.html schneider, l. (2016). dammed by the state: indian fishing and geographies of settler colonialism in the columbia river basin. unpublished doctoral dissertaion. uc los angeles. simpson, a. (2014). mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, nc: duke university press. taylor, j. (2008). the public life of the fetal sonogram: technology, consumption and the politics of reproduction. new brunswick, nj and london, gb: rutgers university press. todd, z. 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(2015). testimony submitted to oregon state legislature 2015 regular session: house committee on rural communities, land use, and water. retrieved from https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2015r1/downloads/ committeemeetingdocument/65658 wolfe, p. (2006). settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. journal of genocide research, 8(4), 387-409. woody, e. (2003). "recalling celilo." in e. c. wolf, & s. zuckerman (eds.), salmon nation: people and fish at the edge (2nd ed.), (pp. 9-16). portland, or: ecotrust. —— (1994). seven hands/seven hearts: prose and poetry. portland, or: the eighth mountain press. —— (1994). luminaries of the humble. tucson, az and london, gb: the university of arizona press. willingham, w. (1992). a history of the portland district us army corps of engineers. washington, d.c.: us government printing office. bio ashton wesner is a doctoral candidate in environmental science, policy, and management at the university of california, berkeley. microsoft word 29586-article text-77455-1-11-20190113.docx phan, t. n. (2019). amazon echo and the aesthetics of whiteness. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5 (1), 1-39 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © thao n. phan, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article amazon echo and the aesthetics of whiteness thao phan alfred deakin institute for citizenship and globalisation, deakin university thao.phan1@deakin.edu.au abstract this article examines the figuration of the home automation device amazon echo and its digital assistant alexa. while most readings of gender and digital assistants choose to foreground the figure of the housewife, i argue that alexa is instead figured on domestic servants. i examine commercials, amazon customer reviews, and reviews from tech commentators to make the case that the echo is modeled on an idealized image of domestic service. it is my contention that this vision functions in various ways to reproduce a relation between device/user that mimics the relation between servant/master in nineteenthand twentieth-century american homes. significantly, however, the echo departs from this historical parallel through its aesthetic coding as a native-speaking, educated, white woman. this aestheticization is problematic insofar as it decontextualizes and depoliticizes the historic reality of domestic service. further, this figuration misrepresents the direction of power between user and device in a way that makes contending with issues such as surveillance and digital labor increasingly difficult. on 6 november 2014, amazon surprised the tech community by casually phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 unveiling its newest “futuristic gadget experiment”: the amazon echo (wo1ng, 2015).1 choosing to forego the usual fanfare of tech launches, the echo was announced using a press release and a string of promotional images and videos, showcasing a sleek, black cylindrical object with pulsating blue lights and perforated speaker holes. although from the outside it resembled a bluetooth speaker, an already popular commercial product, it quickly became apparent that the echo was capable of much more than just playing music. the echo had an in-built, voice-controlled digital assistant called alexa, which, like apple’s siri, could respond to verbal commands and provide the user with information about news, weather, traffic, and more. it could sync with other applications, create to-do lists, shopping lists, and schedule appointments and reminders. more distinctively though, the echo could also connect to other wifi-enabled devices to effectively function as a voice-controlled “smart home hub” controlling other smart home products such as light bulbs, thermostats, and switches (amazon, 2015). fitted with an array of microphones, the device was designed to be “always on” and, thus, always listening. while many reviewers praised the echo as exactly “what smart homes should feel like” (wong, 2015), others were more apprehensive, particularly because all interactions were recorded and saved unless users chose to manually delete them. one reviewer condemned the echo, describing it as “a trojan horse [for corporate america] to penetrate our remaining private moments” (wasserman, 2014) while another suspiciously asked, “alexa, what are you hiding?” (murphy, 2014). despite these concerns, the echo received almost instant commercial success and over the next few years would come to dominate both the market and the cultural imaginary for smart home devices. following its initial limited release, the echo received a general us release in 2015, followed by its first international releases in the uk and germany in 2016. by december 2017, it had expanded into thirty-four 1data for the chapter was collected from online promotional videos, customer reviews, youtube parody videos, and tech reviews. to respect the anonymity of customer reviewers, names have been redacted and references to their customer accounts have been removed. phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 countries with amazon introducing a full product line of more than nine related devices. it is, to date, the most popular device of its kind. as of november 2017, there were an estimated 20 million units installed in us homes, a figure which represents 75 percent of the us market for home automation devices. by comparison, the google home, the next leading consumer product, has an estimated 7 million units installed or 27 percent of the us market (consumer intelligence research partners, 2017). as one of the first devices to integrate home automation with voice control and artificial intelligence (ai) systems, the echo has subsequently taken a place in the public consciousness as the exemplar of smart home technology. amazon echo commercials have gone viral, generating millions of views and spinoff parody videos; there are dozens of online forums and communities dedicated to discussing the echo and its features; tens of thousands of customer reviews have been posted to amazon.com; and hundreds of professional reviews by tech writers in publications such as tech radar, engadget, cnet, gizmodo, pc mag, business insider, and more. in this article, i examine the ways in which the amazon echo has been figured on visions of idealized domestic service. the terms figure and figuration designate here the act of producing a cultural representation of an object, idea, person, or event. this representation does not necessarily correlate to its “real” conditions—which is not to say that they do not have real implications or effects—but rather their imagined impressions imprinted in places such as language and culture. the case study materials for this analysis comprise commercials for the echo, amazon customer reviews, and reviews from tech commentators. the commercials analyzed were published on amazon’s youtube channel between november 2014 and november 2017. customer reviews were accessed on the amazon product pages with both the highest positive and negative rated reviews at the time of study selected for close reading, and professional reviews from non-paywalled popular tech commentary magazines were also sourced during the same period. it is my contention that across these discursive sites, the echo is consistently modeled on an phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 idealized vision of domestic service. in many ways, this vision works to reproduce a relation between the device/user that mimics the relation between servant/master in nineteenthand twentieth-century american homes. significantly, however, the echo departs from this historical parallel through its aesthetic coding as a native-speaking, educated, white woman. as i will argue, this aestheticization is problematic insofar as it decontextualizes and depoliticizes the historic reality of domestic service. the echo romanticizes the relations of servitude in a way that denies the pain and historic context of that relation. it not only erases the bourgeois middle-class home as a site of exploitation, especially for women of color, but also misrepresents the power relation between the user and the device in such a way that obscures issues such as hierarchical surveillance and digital labor. smart homes, nostalgia, and class privilege in her work analyzing the commercial cultures of smart homes, lynn spigel (2009) has argued that “in moments of technological transition, people often search for ways to balance novelty with tradition” (p. 61). she states that like radio and television before it, smart homes and other new technologies “are subject to patterns of cultural adaptation that aim toward conserving familiar lifestyles” (p. 61). tracing this strategy through historical examples from the “homes of tomorrow” of the 1930s and 1950s to bill gates’s 1990s fantasy smart house, spigel notes that the discourse of smart homes is oddly nostalgic, looking backwards in its attempt to look forwards. she states that these “nostalgic returns” are usually marked by “hierarchies of social position and class privilege” (2001, p. 403). specifically, she refers to adi shamir zion’s reading of gates’s smart house, which zion argues prescribes a particular class relation between the house and its user. gates’s house is a peculiar mix of premodern structural techniques with state-of-the art digital technologies. choosing to conceal electronic circuitry with natural materials such as timber, stone, and marble, gates’s phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 ambition is to have the house “be in harmony with its surroundings and the needs of the people who will occupy it” (gates in zion, 1998, p. 71). he describes the house as “an intimate companion or, in the words of the great twentieth-century architect le corbusier, ‘a machine for living in’” (p. 71). zion argues that gates’s demand for the house to both discreetly serve and function as an “intimate companion” is analogous to the “servant class in relation to the master in the ‘upstairs/downstairs’ quarters of the english country house” (p. 72). in this way, gates’s smart house architecturally recuperates not only the physical features of the premodern home but the distinctive rhetorics of class privilege that accompany family structures of this era. i would suggest that the echo is similarly figured through a nostalgic discourse that is tacitly laden with class privilege. in her broader work addressing media, the home, and family life, spigel (2001) has described the coding of advertising images of new domestic technologies with what she calls “yesterday’s future” (p. 382). she defines this as a romanticized vision of the future that looks to the past in an attempt to imagine tomorrow’s “everyday.” in the commercial representations of kitchens that clean themselves, robots that provide forms of intimate care, and houses that automatically adjust the climate to comfortably suit their families, smart homes and associated products position themselves as a futuristic pastoral fantasy, what spigel calls “a wish fulfilment of some idealized past” (p. 391). in the case of the amazon echo, it is the white, middle-class nuclear family lifestyle that functions as the stage on which new and radical media practices are debuted. for instance, in the first demonstration video released on the official amazon website and youtube channel in 2014, a fictional white, american, suburban family is shown unboxing and welcoming their “newest member”: the amazon echo. the four-minute video demonstrates the device’s functions by presenting various scenes in which the echo is used to perform domestic tasks. staged like a family sitcom, the video is laden with generational clichés and gendered stereotypes. a sarcastic teenage daughter mocks her annoying younger brother. a dorky father phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 tries to look cool by showing off his new gadgets. in one scene, the mother is in the kitchen mixing dough with her hands: mother: oh i need to get wrapping paper [looks at the echo]. alexa, add wrapping paper to the shopping list. alexa [placed on the kitchen counter]: i’ve put wrapping paper on your shopping list. mother: alexa, how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon? alexa: one tablespoon equals three teaspoons. mother: oh ok. alexa, set a timer for eight minutes. alexa: eight minutes starting now. figure 1. scene from amazon echo demonstration video (amazon.com, inc., 2014). here, the echo is a happy electronic helper, supporting a perky and proficient mother in carrying out her daily duties. like “his wife judy” jetson, who relies on the robot maid rosie, the echo mother seamlessly integrates new technologies into familiar routines of domesticity. indeed, in the same ways in which the jetsons, a show ostensibly about a futuristic space-age family, is in essence an exact replica of the flintstones, a show about a prehistoric stone-age family, the characters’ conformity to traditional nuclear family stereotypes demonstrates the portability of such tropes into almost any place or context. such nostalgic dramatizations are phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 designed to provide a comforting assurance that “while technology advances, domestic ideals remain the same” (spigel, 2009, p. 60). indeed, these nostalgic and romanticized images of middle-class domesticity continue as an underlying theme in almost all of the echo’s subsequent promotional material. in an ongoing series of commercials titled “alexa moments,” which began airing on us commercial television in 2016, different households are portrayed incorporating the echo into intimate and strikingly heteronormative scenes of domestic life. a man in a wedding tuxedo buttons his jacket and looks into a mirror and says “alexa, add anniversary to my calendar. one year from today.” a couple are looking at buns baking in the oven, the male partner looks confused while the woman sighs “alexa, open baby names,” they both giggle in excitement. after wiping liquid off his face with a baby towel, a man asks alexa to tell the baby stats app that “brian went pee again.” a middle-aged couple sit on a couch and reminisce over a family photo album and one asks “alexa, play the top songs from 1967.” each commercial was short (ten seconds) and was structured using the same formula: a single scene followed by a close up of the echo. amazon has produced over a hundred of these micro-commercials and, while individually they appear as intimate vignettes of everyday life, as a whole they mimic the narrative trajectory of what queer scholar jack halberstam (2005) calls “a middle-class logic of reproductive temporality” (p. 4). this is a logic that privileges the paradigmatic markers of heteronormative life experience “namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (p. 2). it sentimentalizes the nuclear family and ties the echo to traditional domestic ideals. phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 figure 2. scene from “alexa moments: big day” (amazon.com, inc., 2017). figure 3. scene from “alexa moments: bun in the oven” (amazon.com, inc., 2016). phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 figure 4. scene from “alexa moments: top songs” (amazon.com, inc., 2017). this figuration accords with mainstream discourse on smart homes that weave together radically new technologies with deeply conservative principles. in readings of gender within this context, many scholars have argued that this discourse furthers stereotypes regarding the gendered division of household labor. this is often critiqued by drawing parallels between the figuration of smart home technologies, and especially digital domestic assistants, with figures such as housewives or mothers. for instance, spigel (2001) has argued that homes of tomorrow are created in the image of an imaginary 1950s housewife. she states, “they simulate the role of a full-time mother who lives in a suburban dream house and who looks after everyone’s needs” (p. 391). similarly, in her research interviewing smart home designers, anne-jorunn berg (1999) correlates the functions of home automation with women’s work. she reads the domestic sphere as a “feminine domain” and as such argues that designers of smart homes should consult more with women because “women possess important skills for and knowledge about the home that phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 should be a resource in the design process” (p. 310). this characterization draws on very traditional notions of women’s value and views housework itself as a gendered skill that can be modeled by paying closer attention to real-life, physical women. more recently, yolande strengers and larissa nicholls (2017) have argued that smart homes and digital assistants are marketed as a kind of “wife replacement” (p. 6). in a content analysis of magazine and online articles, they found that the smart home was predominantly promoted as “a means to reduce the stress of managing everyday tasks, appliances, household supplies and householders by providing greater control and integration—a form of ‘coordinating’ or ‘multitasking’ work which often falls to women” (p. 5). for them, the desire for a domestic assistant is indicative of modern women’s “double-bind”—the ambition to pursue satisfying careers as well as maintain roles as mothers and partners. the attraction of home automation is, thus, in its potential to fulfill “wife-like duties on a household’s behalf, thereby freeing up time and coordination pressures on women” (p. 5). the prevalence of the housewife figure in scholarship on digital assistants can be understood as coextensive with the rise of “housekeeping” as a dominant metaphor in recent scholarship addressing networked media and the domestic sphere (see jarrett, 2016; kennedy nansen, arnold, wilken, & gibbs, 2015; tolmie, crabtree, rodden, greenhalgh, & benford, 2007; strengers & nicholls, 2017). “digital housekeeping” is characterized as those forms of labor “involved in incorporating home networks into domestic routines” (tolmie et al., 2007, p. 332) and includes managing subscription and internet accounts, researching software and hardware upgrades, and organizing cables, wires, and other devices in the house. the “digital housewife” has subsequently emerged as a descriptor for the actor/agent who performs or enacts this labor. this metaphor has also been extended by authors such as kylie jarrett (2016) to highlight the gendered distribution of consumer labor in the social reproduction of the commercial web (pp. 1-2). for jarrett, the forms of online participation that are integral to platforms such phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 11 as facebook, youtube, or twitter resonate with “the unpaid, quasivoluntary labour of the domestic sphere” (p. 4). in the case of smart homes and digital assistants, the housewife metaphor is called on again to capture the parallels between the promises of home automation and the activities of social reproduction. however, i would like to argue that there are major limitations to focusing solely on the housewife/mother figure. first, by prioritizing the gendered division of labor within their critiques, these readings risk reinscribing its binary logic. for instance, in her work, berg (1999) naturalizes the relationship between women and reproductive labor, arguing that male designers lack a “basic knowledge about housework” precisely because the domestic sphere is an essentially “feminine domain” (p. 309). this categorization oversimplifies the division of labor within the home and positions women as a priori trapped within heteropatriarchal structures. the solution for many of these authors, including berg as well as strengers and nicholls, is not to challenge the stereotype of women and housework but rather to further commit. both studies recommend in their conclusions to “involve more women in the design and development of automated and smart technologies” to ostensibly “reduce traditional ‘women’s work’” (strengers & nicholl, 2017, p. 9), a suggestion that does not question the binary division of labor but instead ties women closer to it. second, these readings overlook the dynamics of power and privilege that function within gendered groups. by focusing only on the mother/housewife these readings elide the subtle hierarchies that structure the relationships between women within the domestic sphere. for instance, rarely acknowledged is the role of maids, cleaners, nannies, childcare workers, cooks, laundresses, and other gendered figures who historically have assisted upperand middle-class women in the fulfillment of their domestic responsibilities. these figures are often neglected within analyses of women and power in the home, with most readings choosing to focus on dynamics of gender rather than dynamics of class or race. indeed, passed over in many critiques of smart home devices is the distinct sense of class privilege embedded within the discourse of these phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 12 sophisticated luxury items and how this privilege contributes to broader social hierarchies. while these authors foreground the idealized image of a mother or housewife as the archetypal figure through which to critique the gendered dynamics of smart home discourse, here i propose a different figure: the idealized vision of domestic service. despite the clear connection between smart home technologies and the labor of domestic service, as figures, domestic servants are surprisingly underexamined within the critical literature. by shifting the focus, my aim is to highlight the role of class privilege in the figuration of digital assistants and to also underscore the class and racial hierarchies that proliferate within modes of gendered social reproduction. keeping pace with idealized domesticity like almost all new domestic technologies, the echo is sold on the promise of freedom from drudgery.1 since the 1920s, advertisements from stove-top percolators to washer-dryer units have pandered to ideas of housewives’ “liberation” (see cowan, 1983; spigel, 2009). women are depicted playing tennis, going shopping, and chatting with their girlfriends while the machines at home do the work. although social and cultural expectations of both men and women in the domestic sphere have certainly changed over time, the appeal for such a “liberation” endures. for instance, in the commercial “voice shopping with alexa” produced in 2016, amazon portrays a busy working mother rapidly performing domestic tasks within moments of coming home from the office. she kicks off her work heels and immediately begins bringing the home into order. without breaking a sweat, she directs a succession of requests at the echo: she orders dog food, throws out old takeaway, changes the bin liners, orders a gift for a school teacher, prepares dinner for the family, sees to the laundry, sets the table, and when she finally sits to rest, makes time to order herself some bath salts. the late twentiethcentury fantasy of the modern woman who “has it all”—family, career, and phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 13 confidence—is repackaged here as a correlate to the modern home. absorbing marxist feminist critiques of the devaluation of domestic labor as a result of its largely invisible position in the eyes of the market, this example illustrates the ways in which socially progressive movements, such as women’s liberation, can be co-opted by commodity capitalism. here, reproductive labor is afforded the status of “legitimate” labor—not only is it visible but it is performed with skill and deftness. in kicking off her shoes, the actress in the commercial signals that for modern women, coming home from the office is when the real work begins. as a manager in an organization might rely on an office assistant to assist in coordinating tasks, this woman relies on her digital domestic assistant to likewise support her in this regard. “women’s liberation” here is not freedom from responsibility—indeed since the 1980s many liberal feminists have lobbied for corporate inclusion in decision-making and managerial roles—but freedom from the doubt that “having it all” is possible. the use of a digital assistant to help keep pace with the unrealistic expectations of idealized domesticity is reminiscent of the ways in which early twentieth-century middle-class households used domestic servants to resolve certain contradictions between feminine virtue and the hard labor of domestic work. evelyn nakano glenn (1992) argues that in the context of the united states, the rise of industrial capitalism during the latter half of the nineteenth century also coincided with the elaboration of middle-class women’s reproductive responsibilities. she states, rising standards of cleanliness, larger and more ornately furnished homes, the sentimentalisation of the home…and the new emphasis on childhood and the role of the mother in nurturing children all served to enlarge middle-class women’s responsibilities for reproduction at a time when technology had done little to reduce the sheer physical drudgery of housework. (p. 7) by the early twentieth century, the norm for most middle-class women was to hire another woman to perform much of the hard labor of household tasks. these women were usually recent migrants, workingclass “native-born” women, or women of color. in this way, white middlephan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 14 class women were free to indulge in other class privileges, such as participating in cultural activities, leisure, volunteering, and charity work. similarly, phyllis palmer (1987) in her work on the relations between housewives and household workers in america in the 1920s to 1940s, notes that many middleand upper-class women were held to a domestic code that placed contradictory demands on “feminine virtue” and domesticity (pp. 192-195). “virtuous women” were defined in terms of their spirituality, elegance, and refinement and were expected to create a warm, clean, and attractive home for husband and children. however, maintaining such a home meant confronting the reality of physical labor and dirt. transferring these physical duties to a domestic helper allowed middle-class women to both fulfill their domestic duties and also spend time on self-improvement. palmer argues that middle-class women searching for hired help were essentially searching for a clone: “a woman who could do things as she herself did them, for the hours that were expected of her, and with the credit for finding such a paragon going to her” (p. 194). remediating this role in the twenty-first-century smart home is the amazon echo. again and again, the echo is figured as a technology that enables the fulfillment of domestic subjectivities. in the example above, the identity of the working mother is made possible only through the labor of the digital assistant, a relationship that mimics the reciprocity between early twentieth-century middle-class women and their servant staff. indeed, the figure of the servant helps bring to attention certain continuities in how affluent households have aspired to organize their homes. historian lucy delap (2011) notes that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “domestic service was an institution that was key to establishing claims to identities of privilege, entitlement, and status” (p. 191). she argues that servant-keeping functioned to delineate “middleclass identity” and despite current attitudes that cast servant-keeping as anachronistic and antithetical to forms of domestic modernity, domestic service continues to function as a marker of privilege for the affluent classes, albeit recast under more “progressive” titles such as au-pairing phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 15 (pp. 191-204). in the same vein, new domestic technologies, and especially smart technologies such as the amazon echo, help to imply a sense privilege and class identity through the provision of certain levels of domestic service. while the echo itself may not be capable of physically performing tasks such as cooking, cleaning, or chauffeuring, it does work to centralize command over applications that can, for instance, by controlling automated vacuum cleaners like roombas, placing orders for food delivery services like dominos, or making requests to ridesharing services such as uber. the aspirations of middle-class respectability are here measured at the level of everyday domestic organization, a model that remediates earlier structures of ownership and service through the technosanitized language of automated systems and the sharing economy. the (digital) servant problem like the people on which they are figured, digital domestic assistants are held to a standard of idealized servitude that demands not only excellence in its physical performance but an expectation of personal devotion to the household that goes beyond the exchange of labour for wages. this devotion is expressed through qualities such as loyalty, dedication, pride and affection. a striking theme across customer reviews on the amazon website was the compulsion to share not just assessments of the echo’s features but intimate stories of personal connection and companionship. for example, in a review posted on 2016, one customer praised alexa as a perfect bedside companion for his brother diagnosed with ms: my brother…who has been bed ridden and paralyzed with multiple sclerosis from his neck down for more than 30 years now has a new friend named alexa! he was in tears with happiness when alexa played 70's music, played jeopardy, answered all his questions and wakes him up every morning. thank you amazon for giving my brother a new bedside companion. phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 16 another customer shared her husband’s experiences after purchasing an echo: we have been using echo since april 2015. prior to that time, my husband had been hospitalized for several weeks. he is currently wheelchair bound. we immediately installed the hue bridge and lights as well as the wemo outlet. with these, and dear, dear, alexa, he has a great deal of control of his environment in ways that make him much more independent. others might enjoy echo for fun and convenience, but for him it is a lifeline! he has even had her turn the lights on in my bedroom when i didn't hear him call…our lives have settled into a new normal, and the echo is a huge part of what makes normal easier. in an open forum with over 200,000 individual reviews, these comments consistently received the highest approvals by fellow amazon users with some receiving over 50,000 upvotes. they went beyond a statement of customer satisfaction to express a distinct sense of affection for “dear, dear, alexa.” while i in no way wish to suggest that the echo does not meet genuine needs, as in the cases above, or only functions as a marker of privilege or excess, what i do hope to emphasize with these examples is the consistent use of language. many reviewers referred to alexa as a “friend” or as “family,” a sentiment indicative of the integration of digital assistants into the most intimate parts of users’ everyday lives. these terms of affection are reminiscent of descriptions of “good” servants—those who demonstrated hard work and loyalty. “like family” was a compliment bestowed on those dedicated workers who went above and beyond their duties, a commendation delivered with the unspoken caveat “despite being the hired help.” the image of the “family retainer” such as little women’s hannah who lived and worked for the march family for sixteen years and became “more of a friend than a servant” was a well sought after asset (strasser 1982, p. 163). unsurprisingly however, the reality rarely matched the ideal and employers were often left disappointed when servants fell short of their high expectations. historians have noted the influx of literature during the late nineteenth phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 17 and early twentieth centuries responding to this so-called “servant problem” (see davidoff 1995; dawes 1974; delap 2011; huggett 1977; sambrook 1999; strasser 1982; turner 1962). they found that across domestic manuals, women’s magazines, periodicals, the newspaper press, and government reports there was a sense of urgency to address what was perceived as a dire shortage of “decent help.” the issue was not necessarily a question of quantity but that of quality. employers complained that “most servants put on airs, stole from their employers, left their positions without notice, and performed their duties without skill or care” (strasser 1982, p. 163). in response, many middle-class women published literature outlining guidelines and offering advice to their fellow peers on how to best manage and get the most out of their domestics. lida seely, author of mrs. seely’s cook-book; a manual of french and american cookery, with chapters on domestic servants, their rights and duties and many other details of household management (1902), offered in her manual a list of twenty “don’ts” for employers when dealing with servants. these ranged from “don’t engage a servant without having a clear understanding as to what he or she is expected to do” to “don’t neglect to have inventory of china, glass, silver, and bric-a-brac of each servant coming and going” (pp. 33-34). this genre of advice literature written by employers specifically for employers is a practice that bears an uncanny resemblance to the style of reviews written by customers on the amazon website. for instance, users often structured reviews in terms of lists of positive and negatives or dos and don’ts. one top reviewer posted 9 tips in his review of the echo dot. they suggested for users to “take the time to voice train alexa at least once. it's kinda tedious but really improves the accuracy,” and “if a phrase doesn't yield the results you're looking for, reword it and try again”. the parallels between domestic manuals and user and tech reviews extends even more so into the kinds of concerns that were raised. value for money and expenses were a common theme. mrs. seely’s cook-book included pay tables for servants from one day to one month, and described best practice for settling wages with servants in the event of phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 18 dismissal (pp. 1-38). similarly, tech reviews from wired, gizmodo, tech radar all made assessments based on functionality and value for for money. but perhaps the most striking similarity is in the forms of criticism levelled at both servants and digital assistants. listening, both not enough and far too much, were equal causes of anxiety for domestic employers and amazon echo users. the verge reviewer david pierce (2016) opened his review of the echo with snapshot from an interaction “alexa, what’s the weather today?” “alexa! what’s the weather today?” “alexa what is the weather today goddammit.” “right now, in new york it’s 25 degrees with clear skies and sun. today’s forecast has mostly sunny weather, with a high of 29 and a low of 19.” he criticised the echo’s lack of responsiveness she doesn’t work every time, she doesn’t respond the way she’s supposed to half the time, and it doesn’t take long before you stop totally relying on her. and then she sits silent… i need the echo to just work, so i’m not standing in my kitchen like an insane person shouting questions to nobody._ the demand for precision and unfaltering compliance from reviewers like pierce and the subsequent splurge of vocal frustration when these expectations were not met is reminiscent of the treatment of servants who fell behind their duties. as one housekeeper stated “i am treated and spoken to as if i were a dog…and grumbled and growled at from morning to night” (quoted in huggett, 1977 p. 155). knowing when to speak and when to listen was a high priority. the top critical reviews on the amazon customer reviews page made complaints that ranged from an inability to listen well, “it seems to have slowly lost its sensitivity to my voice. it can no longer hear me say alexa unless i am within 3 feet of it”; to listening too much, “needs security! anyone in range of this things bluetooth can connect and start playing music or speaking through this thing on cell calls…i heard alexa announce that a bluetooth device had connected, so i phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 19 opened the app and discovered numerous devices, that weren't mine… now, i get to randomly hear other voices or music start playing, in the middle of the night, anytime the people in the apartments behind me decide they wanna screw around.” these complaints were, again, resonant with expectations placed on servants. in her book domestic service (1897), lucy maynard salmon, vassar college’s first female historian and a domestic reformer, discussed the social degradation of servants specifically through the regulation of everyday social interaction. she writes [the domestic employee] is seldom introduced to the guests of the house, whom she may faithfully serve during a prolonged visit; the common daily courtesies exchanged between the members of the household are not always shown her; she takes no part in general conversation around her; she speaks only when addressed, obeys without murmur order which her judgement tells her are absurd, “is not expected to smile under any circumstances” and ministers without protest to the whims and obeys implicitly the commands of children from whom the deference to parents is never expected. (p. 158) attempts to work against these norms was a sign of “wilful disobedience,” an offence which could likely result in a discharge from service. amazon echo customers implemented equivalent solutions with their own wilful assistants that included “unplugging until the flaw is fixed” or simply discarding the device as “junk”. directly related to issues of listening were concerns for privacy and surveillance. while i will discuss directly the relationship between surveillance and the echo’s figuration later in this chapter, for now i would like to highlight how these concerns manifest as shared anxieties between echo reviewers and domestic employers. among tech reviewers in particular, the placement of what is essentially a corporate microphone in individual households attracted a great deal of suspicion. many saw it is indicative of the convergence between the “internet-of-things” and dragnet surveillance, while others voiced concern that such devices opened the phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 20 door for the commoditisation of our most private moments. the fear that someone may be listening, even if it was not clear who or what for, carried into the concerns of the customer reviews. some focused on the recent nsa scandals, making vague accusations of “government surveillance” and labelling the echo as “amazon’s little nsa spy.” others directed their criticisms at amazon itself, for instance, in one representative review, the customer below griped: [i] suspect that this device is listening more than we think it is. i will be talking about something and suddenly i start seeing more ads and more stuff about what i was talking about…i honestly worry that this device and amazon, and facebook, and google, and apple are all developing much more extensive and personal telemetry and information on all of us than we can appreciate. we've allowed them all to spy on us and we willingly give them everything about ourselves with full trust. who is to say the nsa isn't listening in? while you and i have little to hide, and most of us out there behave in a lawful good manner, the telemetry on us can still be used for insidious purposes. in this example, domesticity is defined through comfort and privacy. this fetishisation of privacy as a domestic priority is part of a longer narrative that has been slowly evolving since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is associated with the twentieth century decline in servant keeping. delap (2011) notes that the rise of the individualistic and privatised domestic sphere recast servants as “intrusive” and “disruptive” (p. 192). she argues that in the edwardian period, many social commentators advocated for servantless living, primarily because it was considered a more “dignified” middle-class lifestyle but also in part so that households could free themselves from the gaze of nosey servants. she discusses articles in which maids were described as “lurking during domestic squabbles” and “[watching] her employers as a cat watches mice” (p. 193). even lida seely (1902) included special notes to servants in her domestic manual bluntly calling them into line, “don’t spy on your masters and mistresses—the fact that their bread is in your mouth should be a reason for keeping it shut” (p. 35). phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 21 while historically tensions between privacy and servant-keeping resulted in a decline of servants as a domestic fixture, in the present moment these same tensions have been negotiated with almost the opposite effect. servant-keeping (even in its figural form) returns to the domestic realm at the very same time that privacy appears to make its exit. these examples illustrate the persistent figuration of the echo in the image of domestic service across a broad range of materials. in amazon’s own promotional discourse and in the discourse produced by customers and professional reviewers, domestic servility is reinscribed onto the figure of the digital domestic assistant in ways which distinctly shape attitudes and relations with the device. whether this is conscious or unconscious is secondary to its effect; that is, projecting onto the device preexisting structures and narratives regarding servility and the domestic organisation of power. there are, however, notable deviations between the echo’s figuration and the historic reality of domestic servility. of significance to this analysis is the deracialized representation of the voice of alexa. race, voice, and figurative narratives it is my contention that the voice of alexa is coded through whiteness. by whiteness, i refer to the sense of being “non-raced,” that is, not explicitly identified according to race. richard dyer (1997) has argued that in dominant discourse (i.e., white discourse) whiteness is a category that often escapes identification and explicit racialization. he states, “race is something only applied to non-white peoples” and that whiteness is not “racially seen and named” in the same manner (p. 1). whiteness defines the voice of alexa insofar as it escapes the ascription of characteristics that identify it as a racialized other. indeed, mark marino (2006, 2014) has argued that most mainstream chatbots often utilize what he calls “unmarked (white) standard english” (2006, p. 4). this is a form of english that aspires to evade specific identifying cultural inflections; it is language that is, for him, “without culture, disembodied, hegemonic, and, in a word, phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 22 white” (2006, p. 193). in hci voice interface research, the dominant paradigm is to consider race through a strictly visual logic. race is understood as a variable of skin tone, hair type, eye color, and other forms of visual presentation. as a result, non-visual variables such as voice are often neglected as an expression of race. for example, on the subject of race and conversational agents, human–computer relationship researchers clifford nass and scott brave (2005) have argued that interface designers should focus on accent, meaning the unique vocal intonations associated with regional dialects, rather than “the skin color of the agent” when designing an interface (p. 67). they state, the current research suggests that race is not important as an independent effect, at least when an accompanying voice provides broader and deeper information than what can be determined from ancestral geography. the linguistic and paralinguistic cues are so informative that identifying a person’s geographic progenitors is simply not valuable. (p. 69, emphasis added) yet, at the same time, they also advocate for the use of labels and stereotypes to help socially identify a synthetic voice. they argue that appealing to labels can be favorable as “labels allow the human brain to make quick assumptions and predictions about other people and help the brain cope with the complexities of social interactions” (p. 69). they go on to discuss how accents are tied to stereotypes and how properties such as “education,” “intelligence,” and “credibility” are “manifested in speech” (p. 70). this reductive view of race that considers only visual cues, such as skin color, willfully overlooks broader materializations. it overlooks the relationship between race, class, and accent; it neglects how “education,” “intelligence,” and “credibility” are attributes that are themselves racialized; and it also fails to acknowledge that race is not just a matter of “being” but of “doing”—that is, one not only is raced but also does race, and this includes employing cultural linguistic markers (see nakamura, 2008). to suggest that voice can be empty of race fails to consider how whiteness phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 23 has come to constitute a neutral norm. it reinforces the dominant cultural belief that “whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race” (dyer, 1997, p. 1), and that coextensively white language is not raced language, it simply is language. arguably, the selection of the “white voice” reflects the desire by voice-interface designers to best create the conditions for speech intelligibility. designers often proceed on the tenet that native english speech is the most intelligible speech. this speech is perceived as “nonaccented”—that is, not containing the audible markers of racial difference. but as halcyon lawrence (2014) has observed, the ubiquitous use of native speech in speech-mediated technologies is nonetheless problematic as it implicitly functions to “assimilate accented speakers to some native norm” (p. 768). it contributes to an imperialistic view of language that positions those with accented voices as outside the imagined image of a national subject and furthers the use of language as a tool of colonization and marginalization (see nieto, 2007). although amazon echo’s assistant alexa is never explicitly identified as “white,” it is nevertheless aestheticized and characterized by amazon using aspects that are underwritten by ideals of whiteness. alexa speaks english in a broad american accent rather than, for example, a distinctive southern drawl or a south asian accent. it does not use vernaculars or dialects that are stereotypically associated with racialized communities, such as black or latino communities. it has an extensive vocabulary and partakes in certain social mores to associate it with the “mannered,” educated upper classes. and finally, it has been given a name that consciously draws on the narrative exploits of western civilization. amazon’s senior vice president of devices david limp stated in an interview that, along with having desirable phonics for voice recognition, the name alexa was chosen because it was “reminiscent of the library of alexander [sic],” which has been culturally viewed in the west as “the source of all knowledge” (limp in lashinsky & limp, 2016). indeed, the plethora of parody videos that reimagine digital assistants such as alexa or siri as mexican, african american, or chinese with phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 24 names like siriqua or shameka all play on racial and ethnic stereotypes in such a way that underscores the whiteness of the original model.2 the figuration of the echo and alexa as a native-speaking, educated white woman here departs with the historic reality of domestic servants. in the united states, the role of domestic workers in middleand upper-class homes were (and is still) undertaken by predominantly women from working-class, african american, latino, and other racialized migrant groups (glenn, 1992; strasser, 1982). the contradiction between the historic reality and the representation of domestic service is in many ways inherent to the figuration process. as scholars such as donna haraway (2013), lucy suchman (2012), and claudia castañeda (2002) have argued, figuration is not only a process that helps us to describe phenomena but a process that in itself has “worlding” potential. analyzing figures and figurations is not just a matter of reading histories that are already laid out but of coming to grips with the dynamic construction and reconstruction of histories and cultural narratives. while objects, such as the amazon echo, are figured by existing cultural narratives, they conversely work to refigure our understanding of those same narratives. they thus have the potential to bring into the world new structures, frameworks, and attitudes to power. for this reason, feminist authors such as haraway have argued that figures are inherently political and that without responsible engagement can operate to reinscribe damaging existing orders.3 in this instance, the figuration of the echo and the digital assistant alexa in the image of idealized domestic service correspondingly refigures cultural narratives of domestic servility. instead of being represented as difficult or degrading work, domestic service becomes a pleasure to perform. instead of servant-keeping being a traditional and conservativebourgeois form of inferring status, smart assistants are a progressive and uniquely modern marker of social class. and instead of servants themselves being acknowledged as a historically racialized and exploited class exemplary of wider histories of racism in america, alexa is a whitewashed and compliant character dreamed up from the aspiringly socially phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 25 conscious culture of silicon valley. these narratives have an effect on those previously circulating, reworking popular attitudes and beliefs about domestic service. while the establishment of new trajectories is arguably inevitable as a part of the figuration process, there are certain shortcomings within this context. first, the elision of racial identity from the figuration of domestic service dehistoricizes and depoliticizes the servant/master relation. where this relation has been fundamentally predicated on racialized human exploitation, the figure of the white-speaking, middle-class ai effectively erases this essential narrative. we may ask, for what reasons has amazon chosen to figure alexa in this way? the optimistic (and albeit less likely) view is that in attempting to reach a broader racially demographic audience, amazon flips the script on servitude, allowing those who have been traditionally trapped in subordinate relations of race and class to indulge in a fantasy in which black and brown people give the orders and a white voice cheerily complies. what is, unfortunately, more likely is that by aestheticizing in accordance with the norms of whiteness, amazon seeks to appeal to a more “universal” subjecthood for their digital assistant. in doing so, they can avoid both the discomfort associated with racialized servitude as well as any confrontations with the historical consequences of slavery, colonialism, global capitalism, or white supremacy. here, the nineteenth-century american fantasy of a servile class that is without race and without history is fulfilled. as strasser has argued, one of the key indignities of working as a domestic servant was that employers paid little respect to one’s identity outside of the contract of service. rena bethune, a black household worker interviewed in 1977 lamented, “[employers] don’t care anything about you. they don’t want to know nothing about your background; they don’t even want to know what’s going on in your home. all they want to know is what you are doing for them” (strasser, 1987, p. 178). for multinationals such as amazon, the coming of age of ai systems and home automation finally resolves the long-standing “servant problem.” by creating a servile class that literally phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 26 have no personal backgrounds, no families, opinions, desires, wants, or needs, or homes of their own, these companies are able to capitalize on an idealized vision of servitude without having to contend with the practicalities or moral question of servant-keeping. second, the figure of idealized domestic service misrepresents the power relation between the device and its user in such a way that it makes contending with issues such as surveillance and digital labor increasingly difficult. whereas in classic servant/master relations it is the servant who is understood to be performing labor for the household, in this refiguration the relation is inverted. companies such as facebook, google, twitter, and amazon famously capitalize on the exploitation of user data through complex mechanisms of commercial surveillance. while some of this data is created consciously by users in the form of user-generated content, or what christian fuchs (2015) calls “prosumer labor,” much of it is gathered through measures of monitoring and surveillance of users’ profiles, communications, behavior, activities, and social relations. fuchs argues that the processes of consumption on digital platforms, like social media, is also in effect a process of production insofar as user activity actively produces the data commodities that are then sold to advertising clients. this process constitutes a kind of labor, which like all labor within commodity capitalism, is vulnerable to issues such as exploitation, coercion, and alienation (see fuchs, 2012, 2015). within cultures of automation in which ai systems form part of the critical infrastructure of capital accumulation, large-scale monitoring and consumer surveillance have become “an integral component of the online value chain” (andrejevic, 2012, p. 85). in this context, smart home devices with digital assistants form another interface for the collection of user data. by adding microphones that record natural language and conversation to the already rich array of data collection methods, amazon is able create more layered and intimate profiles of domestic habits that have so far been only obliquely observed or constructed through conjecture. that amazon encourages users to link their echo devices directly to online phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 27 purchasing accounts is suggestive of the intent to manipulate domestic environments into commercially lucrative opportunities. mark andrejevic (2012) describes these forms of commercial manipulation as indicative of the widespread integration of predictive analytics into marketing ecologies. he describes this as a wager predicated on the belief that “comprehensive monitoring will give marketers greater influence over consumers” (p. 74). the marketing industry exploits data gathered from user activity to in turn create the ideal conditions to induce desired behavior. he critiques this intent to “trigger latent demand” as a form of conscious manipulation and control: if i have certain anxieties and desires that are triggered and enhanced by custom-targeted forms of marketing that result in a response anticipated by marketers, it seems misleading to say that behaviour has not been subject to deliberate forms of management and control. in this respect, the ability to collect and analyze large amounts of data in order to influence consumer behaviour might be considered a form of power. (p. 76) the inclusion of smart devices into intimate spaces and daily routines represents a new frontier for the commodification of everyday life, creating a suffocating reality in which every aspect of social and personal life becomes colonized by commercial interests. to describe smart devices as working for or in service of households is an inaccurate representation of the direction of power; on the contrary, it is the household that labors for the device. the figuration of the echo through idealized servitude not only obscures this power relation but also consciously exploits this false image to extract more information, more data, more labor. conclusion in this article, i have explored the ways in which the assistant alexa is figured on the idealized image of a domestic servant. examining a range of case study materials, i have explored how this figure consistently appears in the discourse of customers, paid reviews, amazon marketing, phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 28 and other popular media. although i have argued that this figuration, and in particular the use of the white-speaking voice, misrepresents and refigures racialized histories of servitude, i also wish to acknowledge the ways in which this figuration similarly obscures exploitative relations in the contemporary moment. within the techno-fetishistic language of contemporary ai discourse, humans and human labor are posited as at odds or at risk of displacement by machines. on the one hand, workers are said to be under threat as industries are automated and professions obsolesced; on the other, this new-found labor efficiency is a source of opportunity as time and money are invested elsewhere. the displacement of the human, as something that is fundamental to the figuration of ai technologies like digital assistants means that forms of human labor vital to their functioning are rarely considered. the echo, for instance, suggests the automation of tasks like the provision of food, transport, and a clean and ordered home. all the user need do is ask and the white-voice delivers. however, this characterization erases the wide-ranging networks of exploited labor that make such service possible. from the factory workers who assemble these devices in sweatshop conditions in places like shenzhen, china, to the low-income pickers in amazon’s mega-warehouses in places like chester, virginia, and the migrant workers who make and deliver food in service industries across the country, all these tasks are performed by predominantly racialized labor and all go unacknowledged within this figuration. while these workers and their histories have not been the primary subject of this discussion they nevertheless constitute a central part of understanding new domestic technologies and their figurations. their continued erasure in historic and contemporary discourse is a telling insight into the ongoing marginalization of racialized workers. while much of the critical literature addressing ai and gender and race has focused on social personality (how the interface is made to look or sound like a person), fundamentally, the figuration of domestic assistants in the image of domestic service speaks more to the historic dehumanization of phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 29 working-class men and women of color than to the contemporary anthropomorphism of these digital assistants. acknowledgements i am grateful to the organizers and participants of the qut: at home with digital media symposium where i first presented this paper in 2017 for their supportive feedback during the event. i would also like to thank my generous readers gilbert caluya, scott mcquire, tim neale, tom sutherland, and the peer-reviewers for their considered comments in helping to improve this article. this research is supported by an australian government research training program (rtp) scholarship. notes 1 however, as authors such as ruth schwartz cowan (1983) have argued, the promise of freedom from drudgery is often an empty one, as new domestic technologies arguably create “more work for mother.” 2 gregory jerome hampton (2015) has similarly argued in his book imagining slaves and robots in literature, film, and popular culture that fictional robot characters such as rosie the robot are often modeled on antebellum slave tropes like the mammy. her blackness too was erased by identifying her not with southern accent but a new jersey accent, a notable point of difference between the household who spoke with broad non-distinct american accents (pp. 11-12). 3 haraway’s own engagement with figures and figuration famously includes the cyborg (1985/2004), the modest-witness (1997), and ,more recently, the cthulucene (2016). phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 30 references amazon.com, inc. 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(2014, november 7). amazon echo is another step toward commoditizing your personal life. mashable. retrieved, from http://mashable.com/2014/11/06/amazon-echo-commoditizing/ wong, r. (2015, february 10). amazon echo: this is what a smart home should feel like. mashable. retrieved from http://mashable.com/2015/02/10/amazon-echo-review/ promotional videos and commercials amazon.com, inc. (2016). alexa moments: buns in the oven. retrieved from https://www.ispot.tv/ad/ax2k/amazon-echo-dot-alexa-moments-bunsin-the-oven phan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 37 amazon.com, inc. (2017a). alexa moments: big day. retrieved from http://www.ispot.tv/ad/avri/amazon-echo-dot-alexa-moments-big-day amazon.com, inc. (2017b). alexa moments: top songs. song by lester young. retrieved from https://www.ispot.tv/ad/av_j/amazon-echo-dotalexa-moments-top-songs-song-by-lester-young amazon.com, inc. (2014). amazon echo demonstration. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rve3hpwmcze bio thao phan is a researcher in feminist science and technology studies, specialising in ai and gender. she is currently a research fellow at the alfred deakin institute for citizen and globalisation at deakin university, melbourne. the original version of this article, published 1st april, 2019 in vol 5 (1), included screenshots of amazon customer reviews with images posted by the reviewers. the author recognizes that these images were potentially identifying and wishes to sincerely apologize. she has taken active steps to have the article amended to remove any identifying material. template introduction    catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 2    catalyst editorial board installation view of soldadera, a series of works by nao bustamante exhibited at the vincent price art museum in 2015, curated by jennifer doyle. foreground:  "kevlar fighting costumes" (set of 5), 2015; background: rebozo, 2015 (video) and soldadera, 2015 (wall piece). photo: dale grine. welcome to the second issue (spring 2016) of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, an international, peer-reviewed, open-source online journal published twice yearly. this second issue leads with an essay that was the recipient of the catalyst award at the 25th annual international ucla center for the study of women thinking gender conference (april 23-24, 2015). in “redefining ‘virgin birth’ after kaguya: mammalian parthenogenesis in experimental biology, 2004-2014,” eva mae gillis-buck takes up a line of inquiry around reproduction pioneered by anne fausto-sterling and sarah franklin. she considers a host of responses to a 2004 experiment reporting the healthy birth and development of kaguya, a mouse with two mothers and no father, to argue that radical understandings of sex and parenthood can be found even within scholarship that maintains the impossibility of mammalian parthenogenesis. pathenotes (sperm-free ovum), gillis-buck writes, “are queer entities, non-human actors that challenge our cultural dualisms and demand new words to describe their existence.” in the introduction to our first issue (fall 2015), we suggested that one of catalyst’s central aims is to incite new political and intellectual mixing of fields and approaches. our second issue presents an extended special section cultivated through this catalysis. over the past year, the journal received a number of submissions on militarism and digital culture. these essays were written from different field perspectives, mostly deriving from sociological sts and media studies. keenly aware of scholarship emerging on this topic from points in and around feminist sts, the catalyst editors invited authors into dialogue with one another prior to review so the papers could benefit from sustained exchange. over the course of six months, we added more writers to the mix: some already active in feminist sts, and others variously working out of media studies, postcolonial studies, digital rhetoric, critical art practice, documentary filmmaking, and media anthropology. the cover image of this issue of catalyst features a photograph taken from the documentation of soldadera, an important recent exhibition of works about the women of the mexican revolution produced by nao bustamante, the american performance and media artist internationally recognized for her incisively political work on the body, sexuality, class and mexican and mexican-american identity and politics. the soldaderas that concern bustamante are the women who fought in the mexican revolution, the armed national struggle between 1910 and 1920 that transformed mexican culture. bustamante conducted extensive research for the project, repurposing archival photographs and films, and affirming the overlooked narratives and perspectives of these women soldiers while also provoking conversation about their various roles in warfare, which included serving as domestic laborers and healthcare workers. not unlike the contemporary lioness soldiers described in this issue by isra ali, the soldaderas of the mexican revolution were enlisted not only for battle, but also to serve as cultural informants, serving as spies for the revolutionary forces and engaging in the tactile work of cultural mediation. that the fabric of warfare entails the labor and bodies of women is well known, but the nature of that fabric, and how it coheres, is less clear. in other components of the series (exhibited at the vincent price art museum in 2015), bustamante invited visitors to touch and to unravel the fringe on a shawl. the garment was modeled after those worn by the soldaderas, except that the fiber is not silk or cotton, but kevlar®, the bullet-resistant technical material of warfare developed by the chemist stephanie kwolek for the us company dupont in 1965. a short video shows bustamante herself in rifle training. her target, improbably, is an empty dress: a golden yellow gown in the style worn by the soldaderas that swings gaily from a tree branch, shimmering against the snow. this dress is one of those tailored according to bustamante's designs and displayed on mannequins and in vitrines in the soldadera exhibition. a group of these mannequins appear in the photograph on the cover of this issue. standing before a wall projection of a film bustamante made from archival footage dating from the revolutionary period, they are just a little bigger than life in their oversized period dresses, all tailored from the same anachronistic synthetic. typically used in the manufacture of protective gear for warfare, kevlar® is an industrial product, a far cry from the linens and leather worn by the soldaderas who appear in the historical projections. bustamante’s gun skills belie the logic of failsafe warfare design: her practice bullets lodge in the dress, evidence that the kevlar® has resisted her assault on the fabric of warfare, but cannot fully keep it in check. the bullet tears are evidence of the vulnerability of the war game and its material arsenal to critique, and of the status of women as crafty perpetrators of fabric, mediation, tactility, and also as agents with a propensity to poke holes in putatively failsafe invention. in attachments to war, the book forthcoming from duke excerpted in this issue, jennifer terry writes: “attachments are relational. they can be strong, fragile, unstable, enduring, motivating, demoralizing, profitable, or devastating.” she emphasizes that war and biotechnology are, at this point in history, intimately and mutually attached. bustamente’s attention to the material conditions as well as the metaphoricity of warfare’s technical fabric is refracted in the scholarly works published in this issue, all of which engage in ideas about the technological and biomedical aspects of war as the new everyday in digital times. marisa brandt, a communication studies and feminist sts scholar, and emily cohen ibañez, a media anthropologist and filmmaker, both consider the immersive technologies used in military trauma therapy with war veterans. brandt examines virtual militainment in an essay that offers a sustained discussion of bravemind (formerly virtual iraq/afghanistan), the immersive system used by the us military to provide psychological treatment for veterans diagnosed with neurological disorders. brandt shows how bravemind, though introduced as a tool for remediating ptsd and other conditions, extends and reifies depoliticized logics of gendered trauma-narrative production. what is at stake in the virtual system, she shows, is not the ability of warfighters to share their memories of war (which is the goal on offer), but rather the ability of veterans (most of them men) to take control of their affective responses—and to do so in a system in which authority is displaced from the therapist (most of whom are women and civilians) to the virtual system. lucy suchman and d. andy rice both consider simulation systems, with suchman focusing on flatworld, an immersive military training simulation developed between 2001 and 2007 at the university of southern california’s institute for creative technologies. suchman’s paper draws from an ongoing ethnography to take up, specifically, two archival sources: a tour video of flatworld staged by its designers in 2005, and a documentary about the program. at this juncture in her study, suchman pursues the question of the ways in which boundaries between the real and the virtual are maintained and also traversed. how, she considers, does simulation training become performative of the real? and whose imaginaries are at play in the program’s design and promotion? turning to judith butler’s classic 1993 text bodies that matter, suchman tracks the different ways in which bodies are materialized in flatworld. the bodies involved include not only american users and the simulated american and iraqi figures, but also the system’s researchers, producers, and trainers. her account points to slippages and resistances through which the virtual system becomes the grounds for the production of the binary “us and them,” friend and enemy, in the course of training. rather than showing us discrete identities performed and produced, suchman shows the movement and slippages that occur within bodies and between them, in the shifting contexts of promotion, instruction for use, and play. training to train, and learning to see how military simulation works, is a level of consideration to which we need also to attend in order to better understand the practice of training for acts of war, and training as an act of warfare in itself. this is the territory of d. andy rice, as well, who considers embodied practice and the production of the real. his focus is the live training simulations conducted at the fort irwin national training center in the california mohave desert, a veritable baudrillardian “desert of the real” where proximity to hollywood becomes an opportunity for the development of sets and the recruitment of talent to orchestrate for the us military simulated improvised explosive device attacks, suicide bombings, beheadings, sectarian infighting, protests, raids, and sweeps. though multiple repeat performances with live actors, four thousand soldiers prepare for deployment, with filmmakers documenting the process live. one of the contributions rice makes is to interpret the body of the camera operator in phenomenological terms, allowing us to see how the live staged performances and the performed simulation are integral with the embodied performance of its filming, just as journalists are embedded in the territory of war. rice invites us to consider how cinematic structures of affect extend outside the theater and are turned on the world itself, in this case the world of the live-performed war simulation which precedes and models the real of war. isra ali introduces a sustained interpretation of the role of tactical compassion offered to us women soldiers enlisted into contemporary warfare—specifically, their placement by the us military in afghanistan and iraq, in the 2010s, in special ops programs such as lioness that are explicitly designed to use women as mediators and as cultural intelligence gatherers in situations where direct violence and male presence have been recognized to be less than successful, namely in situations where local women are off limits to male soldiers. the promotion by the us military of women soldiers’ presence as non-threatening “support” in the war zones, ali explains, seems to be motivated by a sense that women can better perform what she describes as tactical tactility, the work of performing as soldiers of compassion, currying trust and promoting information sharing among women and men in muslim communities. this labor has been encoded as a special form of competence performed both by women soldiers and women journalists after the military cultural turn, a point in the early 2000s at which the relative ineffectuality of the logics of violence was widely recognized. ali cautions that in its enlistment of women into the most critical zones, the military may come off as progressive and progressing to a neoliberal pro-war feminism. we must recognize the problematic situation, she notes, not only of us women soldiers performing in this gendered scheme of empowerment through enlistment into tactical compassion, but also that of muslim women, who are situated as being in need of rights and empowerment on the model of the us woman soldier. kate chandler’s essay offers a comparative read of the paradigm of the “unmanned” drone. placing the term in historical context, chandler reminds us that the term and the idea of pilotless operation predate the digital-era technology. interpreting aspects of this history from the cold war and earlier, chandler shows the configuration of this technology’s particular strategies of misrecognition of subjective control. she also interprets a problematic text of the antiwar feminist art ngo code pink: women for peace, in which the humanization of war technology is achieved through a narrative framing that situates the woman as soldier-perpetrator in a maternal relationship to her victim, a civilian who the fictionalized soldier conflates with her own child. we would like to conclude with a distinction about catalysis in interdisciplinary exchange. one often hears that interdisciplinary encounters can break down barriers between fields, which suggests that mixing creates a combination of fields that is integrally new and whole in its fabric. we wish to trouble that notion, suggesting that disjuncture and difference, the tenuousness of loose and weak threads, are internal to all fields and essential to the creative process of generative work. in this issue of catalyst, many of the authors have never met in person; their papers are neither necessarily more unified as a group nor internally broader in scope as a result of their exchanges. the dialogue among these papers did not simply galvanize an argument or view, but rather generated a stronger sense, within each paper, of the specific threads of approach and politics informing each contribution. the result is a set of papers that reflect on each authors’ own field claims and histories, shaped and clarified by mutual inducement to identify stakes, working in some cases not only with but also against some of the standards and expectations of both familiar and newly approached fields. one might say of any project, identified as interdisciplinary or not, that the outcomes are never predictable or safe, and that by opening a project to other fields one has to forgo conditions such as consistency, authority, and unity of position. reading within and across these papers, one can find new threads as well as older lines of thought about the digital, about visual digital practice, and about feminism and militarism. challenging violent technologies, logics, and representations, the authors are passionate about the politics that their research marks and approaches. the editorial board warmly thanks managing editor cristina visperas for her production leadership and creative contributions to the journal in its first two years of production. welcome to hannah zeavin, managing editor for summer 2016. we thank monika sengul-jones for the original web design and for continuing contributions to infrastructure and promotion and paola mendez, brenda johnson-grau and alexandra apolloni of ucla, caroline warren of emory and hannah zeavin of nyu for their assistance on issue 2. the editorial board eagerly awaits our next issue, "black studies and feminist technoscience,” co-edited by cristina visperas, kimberly juanita brown, and jared sexton. the catalyst editorial board also thanks for their generous contributions toward the production of this issue the society for social studies of science (4s); the department of communication, the doctoral program in science studies, and the dean of social sciences at the university of california, san diego; the department of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at emory university; the technoscience research unit at the university of toronto; and the department of media, culture, and communication at new york university. references butler, j. (1993). bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. new york and london: routledge. miranda, c. (2015). "fiminity in kevlar: nao bustamante's women of the mexican revolution," the los angeles times, may 14, 2015. http://latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-artist-nao-bustamante-women-of-themexican-revolution-20150513-column.html microsoft word newsinfocus-smiley.docx smiley, s. (2017). a knotty problem: arts based action research in and out of a community garden. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3 (2) 1-13 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sam smiley, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license news in focus a knotty problem: arts based action research in and out of a community garden sam smiley astrodime transit authority sam@astrodime.org abstract what happens when a/r/tographers attempt to build a sculpture out of japanese knotweed, an “invasive species” in a community garden in provincetown, ma, u.s.? using an arts based performative approach, media artist and researcher sam smiley organized a series of community interventions with gardeners, and naturalists and sculptors during the appearances environmental arts festival in may of 2016. this article is a debrief of the journey of a knotweed sculpture from the b-street community garden, to the side of the highway, and its ultimate destruction in a bonfire on national seashore, in a public event called smouldering thing. the article is primarily methodological from an arts based research perspective, but draws theoretically on the sts fields of the public understanding of science, as well as media and science studies. 2 smiley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 3(2) introduction description of art and research intervention at appearances festival (spring 2016, provincetown, massachusetts) b-street gardens has an alien visitor. the name of the visitor is japanese knotweed, fallopia japonica. however, it has many other names throughout the world, including huzhang (china), duizendknoop (netherlands), mexican bamboo, and fleeceflower, to name only a few. originally introduced to the netherlands in the 1800s from japan, eventually this world traveler made its way to b-street gardens. in the spring of 2016, i worked with americorps volunteers and community garden members to create a sculpture of japanese knotweed rhizomes and roots on the premises of b-street gardens, located in provincetown, massachusetts, usa. as an artist, i faced the daunting task of designing a community arts intervention that both served the community aesthetic and had conceptual value as art. i believe that the crossroads of this type of intervention is humor. humor can be an important tool in revealing complexity. ultimately, i wanted to create an intervention that would spawn complex dialogue about japanese knotweed and the concept of “invasiveness” in general. “invasive species” and “weeds” have emerged as the modern day ecological “villains’ of climate change – killing native species, taking “over,” and destroying native habitats. many have critiqued this rhetoric as nativist, racist, nationalist, and unproductive for conservation biology and ecology. i drew on these critiques to create a japanese knotweed festival, a celebration of the consumption and celebration of this “invasive” species that is both edible and useful to the community in which it has settled. the intervention at b-street gardens became an open-ended inquiry into the messiness in bringing together science, arts, and politics. it also framed a larger question of arts method as epistemology. i ask: how can arts interventions be used in a community garden context to bring a greater understanding of a specific plant that is considered “invasive”? 3 smiley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 3(2) field site and context situating my research the b-street gardens are located on a provincetown-owned conservation trust run by the provincetown conservation commission. provincetown is an ocean side town at the tip of cape cod, massachusetts, with a year-round population of under 3,000. in the summer it becomes a tourist town, and the population swells to 60,000. it has an “off-season” from november to march, a “shoulder season” of may-june and sept-oct, and a “high season” of july-august. it has a large gay, lesbian, and bisexual population, both on season and off season, and is marketed as a tourist town for the glbt community. [link: town of provincetown. http://ptownchamber.com/ ] situating b-street gardens b-street gardens are near wetlands, and the land itself was bought as filled in wetlands, so gardening use is considered appropriate given that history (personal communication, a. brandt, july 1, 2014). care for the garden is held together through the work of some dedicated community volunteers and through the muscle of americorps, whose work at bstreet is both to provide an infrastructure for the garden and to identify “invasive” species and manage them (see fig. 1). 4 smiley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 3(2) fig.1 there is a large stand of japanese knotweed in the wetlands around the community gardens. japanese knotweed is a well-known adversary to the americorps volunteers, since they spend each spring clearing it capewide. (personal communication, a. brandt, july 1, 2014). in that sense, the “community” is currently being built around a common enemy, japanese knotweed (see fig. 2). fig. 2 5 smiley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 3(2) situating myself i am a 50-year old white bigendered queer media artist, born in michigan, united states. i have been living and voting in provincetown since 2008. i participate in the provincetown community, both as a volunteer on community projects and as an artist. after being waitlisted two years for a community garden plot, i finally got a plot in 2014 (see fig. 3). i had never had my own garden before, so i was excited! fig. 3 situating appearances appearances is an eco-arts festival that takes place annually in april and may in various locations throughout provincetown over a two-week period (see fig. 4). first organized in 2012 by artist dorothy palanza, the festival emerged out of the provincetown conservation trust, a private non-profit organization that works with the town conservation commission, and the open space board to create more open space in provincetown. 2016’s festival was its fifth iteration. 6 smiley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 3(2) fig. 4 procedure: migrations and translations i conceived the community art project as a way to bring a clearer understanding about the uses and ecological behaviors of japanese knotweed to the community within b-street garden. i decided to approach the project as an a/r/tographer: artist, researcher, teacher. this is a method within the field of arts-based research that has emerged from the university of british columbia. i had two collaborators for the knotweed intervention: stephen wells, an artist in provincetown, and laura kathrein, an artist, ecologist, and m.ed. candidate in community arts at lesley university in boston, who brought her expertise in social media and photography (see fig. 5). stephen, laura and i came together to formulate a plan to make a knotweed sculpture in b-street gardens during this festival. we worked with americorps volunteers early in the spring to dig up the rhizomes of japanese knotweed, create a temporary sculpture of them in the garden, and then burn the rhizomes at the end (child and wade, 2000). stephen and i used the dried parts to build knotweed animals, including a knotweed turkey from a lobster trap (see fig. 6). it worked really well in the end because it got a lot of visibility from people passing by in cars. 7 smiley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 3(2) we stored the rhizomes safely in garbage bags nearby in preparation for the following bonfire. at the end of the festival, we took all parts of the knotweed, piled them up, and made an enormous and ceremonial bonfire called the smoldering thing, in a nod to burning man events (see fig. 7). then…we ran into trouble. human trouble. members of the bstreet gardens in no way wanted a knotweed sculpture at the garden site. help came in the form of resourceful work of dorothy palanza, the organizer of the festival. she had ascertained that the campground who was hosting the festival might also not want the knotweed on their premises in any form but food. [i did some talks during the festival about the uses of japanese knotweed in pies.] she found an area where there were some other artists at the side of the highway. that area of the highway was out of jurisdiction of anyone who might be fearful of the plant. fig.5 8 smiley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 3(2) fig.6 fig. 7 fear of a knotweed planet the protests against our knotweed sculpture made me wonder what was so threatening about a plant, albeit one with gigantic rhizomes. i did some research on japanese knotweed’s prior history as an ornamental in england to see if there were any parallel conversations. according to the japanese knotweed alliance, an organization based in the u.k., “knotweed’s stout rhizomes (underground stems) are notorious for 9 smiley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 3(2) pushing through asphalt, building foundations, concrete retaining walls and even drains, causing significant damage. this can add huge costs to development and regeneration schemes. contaminated soil should be treated as controlled waste” (see fig. 8). fig.8 moreover, i discovered in that in the u.k. japanese knotweed pieces are considered and treated as “controlled waste” under the environmental protection act of 1990. jeff howell, a columnist for the daily telegraph, notes that “the surveying profession has become terrified of japanese knotweed. mortgages are being refused on properties where it has been spotted, even in a next-door garden. and some homes have become “blighted” and unsaleable because of the hysteria surrounding the issue.” indeed, the out of control panic rose to the point that in march of 2014, a man killed his wife and himself because he thought japanese knotweed was invading their home! inconclusions i am calling this section “inconclusions” because, rather than ending with an answer, i want to end with a question. 10 smiley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 3(2) i believe that, during our arts-based intervention, these japanese knotweed plants shaped our actions, often in ways that enabled its continued propagation. for example, during the project we dug up the plants in an attempt to find rhizomes and we cooked them using our peculiar human methods of consuming food. we were aggravated by knotweed, frustrated by it, and we eventually burned it. reflecting on my experience, i cannot but ask myself about the framing of the problem: in what ways have knotweed plants used us, the artist-humans, in their continued struggle for epigenetic survival? the only answer i have been able to come up with, as a community arts-based practitioner, is to celebrate it! and hold a festival in its honor which is educational, edible, and yes, cultural. because japanese knotweed, that alien invader, is indeed part of the natureculture (haraway) of provincetown. perhaps a better question is: how we can live with this species of plant? and how can we make ourselves part of its ecosystem? references bailey, j. p., & conolly, a. p. (2000). “prize-winners to pariahs a history of japanese knotweed s.l. (polygonaceae) in the british isles.” watsonia 20. 93–110. brown, larisa. “japanese knotweed invasion is halting house sales as buyers are denied mortgages on blighted properties” | daily mail online. (2013, july 19). retrieved february 24, 2017, from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2370938/japanese-knotweedinvasion-halting-house-sales-buyers-denied-mortgages-blightedproperties.html callon, m. (1987). “some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of st brieuc bay.” in power, action and belief: a new sociology of knowledge? john law, ed. 11 smiley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 3(2) london: routledge keegan & paul. 196–223. cardozo, k., & subramaniam, b. (2013). “assembling asian/american naturecultures: orientalism and invited invasions.” journal of asian american studies 16 (1) 1–23. childe, l., & wade, m. (2000). the japanese knotweed manual: the management and control of an invasive alien weed. chichester, uk: packard publishing limited. corsi, r. (2010). “grow time take 1.” retrieved from https://vimeo.com/9356515 d, c., flav, f., griff, p., wynn, k., & lord, d. (1990). fear of a black planet. def jam recordings. evens, m. (2014, march 31). “man kills his wife and himself after fearing japanese knotweed invasion.” daily telegraph (uk). retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10735346/man-kills-hiswife-and-himself-after-fearing-japanese-knotweed-invasion.html firth, c., maye, d., & pearson, d. (2011). “developing ‘community’ in community gardens.” local environment 16(6). 555–568. ghose, r., & pettygrove, m. (2014). “actors and networks in urban community garden development.” geoforum, 53. 93–103. global invasive species database. (n.d.). [database]. retrieved from http://www.issg.org/database/species/search.asp?st=100ss&fr=1&str=&l ang=en haraway, d. (1988). “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” feminist studies, 12 smiley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 3(2) 14(3). 575–599. irwin, rita l.& decosson, alex (eds.). (2004). a/r/tography: rendering self through arts based living inquiry. vancouver, british columbia: pacific educational press. milstein, t., & pulos, a. (2015). “culture jam pedagogy and practice: relocating culture by staying on one’s toes.” communication, culture & critique 8(3). 395–413. https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12090 presidential documents: invasive species executive order 13112 of february 3, 1999. (1999). federal register, 64(25). retrieved from http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/fr-1999-02-08/pdf/99-3184.pdf schmelzkopf, k. (1995). “urban community gardens as contested space.” geographical review, 85(3). 364. subrahamian, b. (2001). “the aliens have landed! reflections on the rhetoric of biological invasions.” meridians 2(1), 26–40. subrahamian, b. (2014). ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. urbana: university of illinois press. sutherland, c. e. (1958). the ecology of invasions by animals and plants. london: chapman and hall. tactical biopolitics. (n.d.). retrieved december 4, 2016, from https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/tactical-biopolitics thompson, n., & sholette, g. (2004). the interventionists: user’s manual for the creative disruption of everyday life. cambridge, ma: mit press. 13 smiley catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 3(2) bio sam smiley is an artist, researcher, and educator. they teach arts based research and community arts at lesley university and has an m.f.a. in electronic arts from rensselaer polytechnic institute. their research explores invasive species, weeds and plant subjectivity and uses sts (science, technology and society), cultural studies, history of science and arts based research. they live in provincetown, massachusetts. science & justice   critical perspectives       science & justice: the trouble and the promise     jenny reardon university of california, santa cruz reardon1@ucsc.edu jacob metcalf university of california, santa cruz jake.metcalf@gmail.com martha kenney san francisco state university mkenney@sfsu.edu karen barad university of california, santa cruz kbarad@ucsc.edu we live during times that are at once troubling and promising. around the world, economies have collapsed, the gap between the rich and poor has grown dramatically, and trust in public institutions has plummeted (lipset & schneider, 1983; pharr & putnam, 2000; picketty, 2014; putnam, 2000). just fifteen years after celebrations anticipating a prosperous new millennium—one united by the forces of globalization and the promise of science and technology, hope for the future has turned into widespread concern and questioning of the basis of sustainable life. yet in this questioning there is also new opportunity. in many parts of the globe, and in many different walks of life, people are gathering together to reimagine how we might constitute a more just and livable world. universities have emerged as one important site of these transformations. public universities in particular have become a core node in a wide-ranging debate about what kinds of knowledge and skills are worth investing in, what value we can expect from that investment, and who should benefit (fischer & stripling, 2014; marginson, 2011; nixon, 2011). although it seems unthinkable to those who grew up in the wake of dramatic post-wwii investments in higher learning, today even leaders in higher education challenge the worth of a university degree (lederman, 2008). like many established institutions, universities face unprecedented cuts and are under intensified pressure to demonstrate their practical value.  however, this pressure and these cuts are experienced unevenly. anticipating greater economic returns, many academic administrators—including those at the authors' home institutions—have made decisions to selectively support science and engineering over the arts, humanities and social sciences. yet these decisions come at a time when even science and engineering are under pressure to prove their relevance and are also facing painful budget cuts from federal funding bodies.  in a 2014 article published in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences, prominent biomedical chemist bruce alberts and his co-authors call upon biomedical scientists to confront the fact that national institutes of health (nih) budgets will no longer continue to grow (alberts et al., 2014). further, access to these shrinking public coffers require scientists and engineers to demonstrate "broader impacts" and to provide expanded ethical training for their students (schienke et al., 2009). although scientists and engineers might receive more support, new federal laws that mandate deepened engagements with ethical and social issues now encourage them to share resources with their social science, humanities and arts colleagues. these changes, combined with calls to reimagine, deepen and broaden approaches to science and engineering ethics, have created novel opportunities (schienke et al., 2009; tuana, 2012). specifically, they open up new possibilities—full of promise and danger—for science and technology studies (sts) and feminist science studies (fss) to bring their theoretical developments to bear upon the pedagogical and research practices of their home turf: universities.  sts and fss scholars have long sought to open up spaces in which scientists, engineers, humanists, social scientists and artists may work together to create knowledge that is responsive to a broader range of societal concerns and needs. beginning in the 1980s, various initiatives were launched with these goals in mind and new curricula were developed (barad, 2000; rosser, 1995).1 one particularly noteworthy nationwide effort was "women and scientific literacy: building two-way streets," a program created and administered by the american association of colleges and universities with support from the national science foundation.2 this program, which ran from 1996 to 1999, sought to increase the participation of women and racial minorities in the sciences, expand the science content of women's studies, and broaden the content and teaching methods of science, engineering, and mathematics to include methodological and epistemological insights from feminist science studies with an eye towards making ethical and social concerns integral to these curricula. broad societal shifts and concerns have created the opportunity for these efforts, which were previously experimental and often on the margins of the institution, to become mainstream initiatives.   here we reflect on our efforts to navigate these changing institutional landscapes.3 specifically, we describe the challenges and promise of forming at uc santa cruz the science & justice working group and its companion, the science & justice training program (science & justice research center (collaborations group) 2013). both the group and the program have cultivated formal and informal infrastructures for generating discussion and research at the juncture of the natural and social sciences, arts, humanities, and engineering. these infrastructures have enabled us not to build a separate program or department, but rather to thread the insights of fss and sts throughout the university and to build relationships and programs that work across its intellectual and institutional boundaries.  a focus on justice proved critical to our efforts. justice is one of the three fundamental principles of the belmont report (1979), an investigation commissioned by the national commission for the protection of human services of biomedical and behavioral research. the belmont report provides the foundation for research ethics and legal protections at all institutions that receive u.s. federal monies. focusing on human subjects research, the report puts three classical liberal principles at the heart of its recommendations: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice (research, 1979). however, in practice dominant institutionalized forms of science and engineering ethics often bypass the fundamental issues of equality, fairness and equity that the belmont authors call us to attend to in their invocation of justice (schienke et al., 2009; tuana, 2012; personal communication with patricia king, 2004).  those of us engaged in forming the science & justice working group and the science & justice training program were inspired by belmont's call, but not bound by its invocation of classical liberal principles. our turn to justice entailed a more fundamental questioning of the first principles that guide any society and its pursuit of knowledge. john rawls captured this aspect of justice in the opening pages of his enormously influential book, a theory of justice:  "justice is the first virtue of social institutions" (rawls, 1971/1999, p. 3). of course there is a danger in orienting around this lofty notion of justice. as rawls himself explains, as the staring point of social life, justice is "uncompromising"—it is that which one cannot be against (ibid., p. 4). as bedrock, justice can lack mobility, play and the sense that things could be otherwise. as the first virtue of social life, it easily resists critique. and yet, à la foucault, we do not believe dangers can be avoided, no matter our approach (foucault, 1977, p. 163). perhaps more to the point, as donna haraway has taught us, if we are to understand and enable responses to our world, we must "stay with the trouble" (haraway 2010; haraway 2012). more thoughtful—and indeed, just—practices arise from tempering justice's elevating powers with a situated questioning of the collective basis of our lives (fraser, 2009; haraway, 1988). thus, the work of imagining and enacting justice is always open, and never finished (derrida, 1992, 1994). it involves an ongoing creative working together. oriented around this expansive conception of justice, science & justice at uc santa cruz departed dramatically from the bureaucratic concerns about proper process that shape much of what today operates as science and engineering ethics. in the united states, institutional ethics in the form of bureaucratic governance of research practices by institutional review boards (irbs) has done much to respond to the egregious abuses of human subjects—abuses that motivated the writing of the belmont report. yet, increasingly, this form of ethics has lost its responsiveness to the actual conditions and practices of research (rothman, 1992). designed to meet the formal requirements of regulatory law, rather than the evolving needs and concerns of those who give their time and bodies for research, not surprisingly this approach to ethics spawned by the belmont report and reflected in irb review practices generates little enthusiasm from either scientists and engineers or fss and sts scholars.4 we found that refocusing on justice, while not a perfect answer to these problems, offered a more constructive mode of engagement (science & justice research center (collaborations group), 2013). while this focus partly arose out of local commitments to social justice—social justice is a core institutional value at uc santa cruz—justice also proved a better concept to work with for reasons that moved beyond our local context.  in its call to question the first principles of a society, it allowed us to open up the space of ethics in novel ways. in its attention to questions about the common good, it helped us to create the basis for working across disciplines on shared problems and objects. it inspired us to consider what new models of collectivity might better fit with the current zeitgeist and produce more responsive, robust knowledge (latour, 2005; matsutake worlds research group, 2009; mol, moser, & pols, 2010; puig de la bellacasa, 2011).  the trouble and the promise in the recent rounds of cuts to universities, departments and programs committed to the critical study of science and technology fared unevenly. for example, in 2011 the academic program and administrative services review core council at pennsylvania state university recommended defunding its science, technology and society program.5 on july 1, 2012 the program formally closed its doors, falling victim to administrators seeking ways to meet budget deficits and improve "efficiency." yet, in the same year that penn state defunded its sts program, harvard university, an institution with a longstanding phd program in the history of science, officially launched its program on science, technology and society through its john f. kennedy school of government, offering a secondary field concentration in sts to students pursuing phd, doctor of design, and sjd degrees.6 other universities are responding to budget cuts by funding academic initiatives that support the development of science and engineering, creating new opportunities for funding and support for sts and fss.  these new opportunities present challenges and potential dangers. much like the dilemmas that research subjects face as they are more routinely invited to the same table as scientists and engineers,7 sts and fss scholars often find that inclusion into new science and engineering initiatives does not necessarily entail meaningful engagement (benjamin, 2013; reardon, 2005; viseu, 2015). writing sts and fss scholars into a grant is not the same thing as treating them as central players who shape research principles, goals, and practices. yet, despite these familiar challenges, the current moment presents possibilities for creating new institutional practices that foster the kinds of intellectual change long-imagined by sts and fss scholars. in this space of trouble and promise, science & justice at uc santa cruz arose.  inspired by a bike ride through the ucsc meadow, animated by lively breakfasts at a beloved santa cruz brunch spot, and encouraged by a close colleague and friend, science & justice was born of a desire and hope that it would be possible to craft new spaces and gatherings where, in the company of colleagues from across the university and beyond, we could ask, ‘what kind of world do we want to live in?'8 this effort grew out of years of sustained intellectual dialogue among scholars at uc santa cruz who believed in the power of this university on the pacific's edge to sustain transformational thought. perhaps most famously, uc santa cruz is home to the history of consciousness department, founded in 1967, where faculty and graduate students have pushed beyond disciplinary conventions to create inquiry adequate to the task of engaging with the world as it is, and as we want it to be. uc santa cruz also is home to inventive pedagogy committed to social justice pioneered in its community studies department, founded in 1969. both reardon and barad chose to come to ucsc partly because of this history and the potential it offered to build novel spaces for thinking, teaching, and transformative change. yet reardon and barad arrived on campus on the eve of dramatic challenges to public education. the worldwide financial crisis of 2008 combined with powerful conservative political movements, led to widespread defunding of public institutions. public universities were amongst the hardest hit, and in many ways the university of california became the epicenter in national debates about the values and goals of public higher education (brown, 2011; lye et al., 2011). beginning in 2008, staff and faculty positions were slashed, salaries furloughed, and student-to-faculty ratios sharply increased while undergraduate tuitions skyrocketed in the midst of controversial changes in the governance of the university of california (byrne, 2011; meister, 2009, 2011). while austerity was similarly imposed on other universities, it was felt particularly sharply at the university of california where it represented a dramatic departure from california's historical commitment to tuition-free public education.    these historic budget cuts came along with increased pressure to rethink and re-articulate the ways in which university research and teaching benefit broader publics. while born out of a dire situation, this spur to change also created some room for the kind of work we envisioned. discouraging of elite and insular scholarship, the climate encouraged scientists, engineers, and sts and fss scholars at uc campuses to work together to reimagine what a science and engineering for the people of california—and all their many companions—might look like (haraway 2008).9 in an unexpected way, this situation created openings for arriving at shared goals and collaborative projects, positive outcomes of what were otherwise a devastating set of changes and challenges.  research ethics: from rules of conduct to experiments with engagement in universities, social scientists and humanists most frequently are asked to collaborate with scientists and engineers under the banner of "ethics." ethics emerged as an institutional framework during the 1960s and 70s in response to a series of highly publicized scandals including the infamous tuskegee syphilis study, the use of disabled children during for hepatitis research at the willowbrook state school, and the injection of cancerous hela cells into patients without their knowledge or consent (rothman, 1992 ; skloot 2010; steneck et al., 2007). public exposé of these experiments prompted the belmont report, a report that investigated these abuses of human subjects and prompted the implementation of standardized ethical procedures by institutional review boards (irbs).10  these developments brought much needed attention to paternalistic and sometimes abusive actions of researchers. yet they also conceptually divorced "knowledge" from the "implications of knowledge." irbs and science and engineering ethics programs focus their attention on delineating how knowledge should be collected and used, not on how knowledge should be produced. given this lack of attention to the practices most central to the intellectual life of researchers, not surprisingly, many scientists and engineers—who otherwise have strong ethical convictions—fail to find inspiration in this institutionalized version of ethics. indeed, eric cech (2014) recently found that despite engineering schools' increased emphasis on teaching engineering ethics, earning an engineering degree today is correlated with a "significant decline" in students' commitment to the "public welfare." in building science & justice, we sought to understand in more detail what might be driving this disconnect. as a first step, we surveyed what counted as responsible conduct of research (rcr) training. rcr emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in response to the research regulation reforms in an effort to teach the next generation of scientists how to discern proper research conduct from misconduct.  nih first mandated formal training in rcr curricula as a component of national research service awards institutional training grants in 1990. though it allowed grantee institutions to determine the content and format of the training, the nih suggested that training cover conflicts of interest, data management, professional standards, authorship and attribution, institutional policies for reporting misconduct, and the proper uses of human and animal subjects (mastroianni et al., 1999; steneck et al., 2007). the scope of the nih's mandate grew to include all graduate and postdoctoral trainees at granting institutions (and not just those funded by the grant). from the time of the first federal mandates to the present, implementation of rcr training has been haphazard and for the most part led by volunteer instructors (bulger & heitman, 2007; steneck et al., 2007). instruction is typically in the form of lectures, case studies and multiple-choice test modules on websites, with little to no attention paid to the history, politics, or economics (dubois et al., 2010; mastroianni et al. 1999). from our perspective, the most important shortcoming of rcr pedagogy is its reliance on hypothetical case studies that implicitly delineate what is and what is not relevant to ethical decision-making. consider "a new dialysis machine," a test case used in the national online ethics center.11 in this case, the reader is asked to choose between two competing models of dialysis machines. the first uses an expensive reusable filter that must be autoclaved in the unreliable conditions of a poor hospital, and therefore carries some risk of infection. the other uses an inexpensive disposable filter that decreases the chance of infection, but must be continually resupplied from the manufacturer, thus creating high costs and dependence on a shaky supply chain. the reader is asked to balance the financial considerations against the patient safety consequences of each option and provide an argument about which path to choose. this is a plausible way of framing the problem, yet it does not direct the reader's attention to the intellectual property laws or the unjust distributions of resources that create the material conditions for the dilemma in the first place. in other words, what is not possible to ask within this hypothetical case study is whether the decision space presented to the engineer is itself a formalization of an unjust political and economic regime. yet it is this very regime that the engineer may need to recognize and understand in order to respond fully to the ethical problem posed.12 a survey of intellectual property activism and scholarship demonstrates that these deeper questions of political economy are of interest to scientists and engineers. for example, scientists and engineers have played important roles in illustrating the ways in which patents stifle genomics innovation and the availability of pharmaceuticals (andrews, 2002; kapcyzynski et al., 2003; kapcyzynski et al., 2005; s. reardon, 2013). while the new dialysis machine case presents realistic trade-offs an engineer might face, it limits the decision space, too narrowly defining where a student can begin their ethical consideration.  clarifying this limitation of rcr training is not to suggest that it is a waste of time for scientists and engineers. learning institutionally mandated research practices helps avoid overt abuse and misconduct. however, it also is necessary to have institutional spaces that make it possible to rigorously assess how research practices form and how the objects of research are constituted within sociotechnical systems. the lack of such spaces, we suggest, constitutes a primary reason for the widespread dissatisfaction with the rcr model, as it avoids many fundamental issues that scientists and engineers find vexing (jasanoff, 2011). while the individual engineer hardly can be expected to solve large-scale problems of intellectual property regimes or to fundamentally alter inequalities between wealthy and impoverished nations, there nonetheless exists a disjuncture between what the rcr presents as "ethics" and what scientists and engineers find ethically and intellectually compelling (cech, 2014; science & justice research center (collaborations group), 2013). thus, it leaves scientists and engineers who often rightly sense ethical issues at their own lab benches with few options to pursue those concerns.13 from responsible to response-able in order to avoid some of the pitfalls of standard ethics frameworks, we took inspiration from feminist science studies scholars, who re-conceptualize ethics as situated, relational, and open-ended. this work marks a shift from an ethics figured as individual responsibility to an ethics of "response-ability" (see especially barad, 2007; haraway, 2008; schrader 2010, 2012). more than a clever play on words, response-ability, donna haraway argues, is not about aligning one's actions with a set of universal ethical principles. instead, it requires cultivating practices of response. these practices are developed and done with others, both human and non-human, in a process of ongoing exchange.14 feminists have written about this kind of responsive ethics in the context of agility training (haraway, 2008), harmful algae research (schrader, 2010), brittlestars enlisted in biomimetic and nanotechnology research (barad, 2007), affective and bodily mutual articulation in human-animal co-domestication (despret, 2004), and longterm patterns of relating between orchids and insects (hustak & myers, 2012). in each of these accounts, the authors illustrate how skills, knowledge, and even bodies emerge from dynamic choreographies of response, or processes of becoming-with one another (thompson, 2005).  one condition for response-ability in the university is a better accounting of the conditions and consequences of knowledge production. here, we found the work of karen barad particularly insightful. in meeting the universe halfway, barad substantially reworks conventional notions of responsibility so that we might better account for the entangled material and discursive apparatuses of knowledge production (barad, 2007).15 her use of the term "apparatus" has deep theoretical roots, but one way of understanding the apparatus is as a vastly expanded version of the "methods and materials" lists familiar to scientists. beyond just a list of instruments, equipment, software, methods of accounting for background noise, and error analysis used to perform and analyze experiments, barad suggests that we should account for all the material relationships that are part of knowledge-making practices, including political, social and cultural ones. accounting for the apparatus by providing an "equipment list" is already a crucial aspect of securing the objectivity of scientific investigations. barad builds on this, enlarging the scope of what needs to be included in an objective accounting of the full set of material factors that go into producing scientific results (barad, 2000). this expanded work of accounting does not happen in a space separate from where research is imagined and designed; rather, it is integral to scientific practices. ethics is therefore neither merely a matter of gaining consent for human subject participation in the design of an experiment, nor a set of post-facto philosophical considerations of scientific results or impacts. facts and values, matter and meaning, are made together at the lab bench (and in the field, at the blackboard, and all the spaces where scientific research is done). attending to the multiplicity of entangled apparatuses that constitute scientific practices enlarges the scope of ethics and understands the consideration of justice as integral to the practice of science. by not making ethics exterior to knowledge, but rather a part of it, a baradian approach to response-ability makes doing ethics more concrete and practical for the working scientist.16  indeed, one way of understanding response-ability is that it is what makes ethics do-able.  codified and institutionalized models of ethical pedagogy operate at too abstract a level, disembodying and disarticulating knowledge-making practices from their material conditions, inducing—even requiring—disengagement from the very concerns that animate many scientists and engineers (müller, 2012). thus, pre-established, codified ethics bypasses what ought to be central to ethical practice: engagement. of course, codes must be developed, understood, and followed in most cases, but vexing problems of scientific and engineering practices that demand response cannot be engaged from within the pre-circumscribed spaces of codified ethics. ethics in the fullest sense is only do-able when scientific and engineering practices are accountable to the conditions and consequences of knowledge production. creating the space of response-ability: the emergence of science & justice at uc santa cruz  science & justice at uc santa cruz was born out of this desire to build concrete institutional spaces where practices of response-ability could be cultivated. orienting around justice proved an important first step. as previously mentioned, uc santa cruz has a long history of attracting scholars who wish to push at the edges of disciplinary boundaries in order to conduct research that might contribute to a more just world. thus we found that justice hailed faculty and graduate students from across all five divisions of the university. for many of our scientists and engineers, it was a particularly welcome call. for them, all too often ethics had become an administrative hoop to jump through rather than a meaningful engagement with the questions that motivate them.17 justice promised a new beginning, an opportunity to transcend closed and constricting forms of bureaucracy and to build institutions and knowledges that could support a greater diversity of lives. it encouraged us to ask what principles and practices should guide these efforts (reardon, 2013).18 justice also oriented us around collective work, a kind of work familiar to our colleagues in science and engineering, and long sought after in the social sciences and humanities. for all these reasons, justice proved a good partner to ethics, and to our efforts to foster response-able modes of knowing and enacting collective worlds. collaborative work also formed an important point of common orientation. science & justice began with the formation of the science & justice working group (sjwg) in the fall of 2006. to begin with, the group consisted of a small group of graduate students, research staff, and faculty. since then it has become a bi-weekly meeting that regularly gathers around 30-40 faculty, research staff, graduate students, and interested professionals and activists in the surrounding area. from the very beginning, the sjwg avoided standard academic talks where scholars imparted their findings. instead, we gathered together to work on shared problems. emphasizing a problem-driven model of inquiry facilitated the group's ability to encourage dialogue among people with widely varying backgrounds. it provided a common concern around which to gather. in an early example that proved formative to later efforts, two graduate students from forensic anthropology, cris hughes and chelsea juarez, came to us with a problem they were encountering as they attempted to identify the remains of missing persons sent to them by the state of california. the state required that they assign a race to the bodies to aid in identification. hughes and juarez argued that the method of determining ‘race' used in forensic science obscured rather than illuminated the correct identity of the body. the racial categories encoded into their database were developed in the southeastern united states and reflected different social histories than the californian context. because of this, hughes and juarez found that the racial categories in the database did not correspond with the categories people used to describe themselves and others. recognizing that this problem was not only technical, but also social and political, they came to science & justice to enlist help in imagining how to create new categories that would aid in returning the bodies to their proper resting places. in the sjwg meetings, they were able to discuss their concerns with social scientists and historians who understood how historical processes shaped the construction of racial categories, and life scientists who could help illuminate how racial categories are differently understood and used in their fields. using these conversations as a starting point, hughes and juarez were able to unpack the entangled social, political and scientific dimensions of the problem. not only did this create a deeper knowledge of the problem, it enabled them to respond to it by opening up new avenues of intervention.19 in this case we found that orienting around a concrete problem gave all participants entrée into the discussions.  as a result of these experiences, core members realized that methods developed within the sjwg had the potential to yield new types of research that both function as interventions in how science is practiced and provide new avenues for achieving social justice.  science & justice training program building on the success of these cases in the sjwg, in the spring of 2009 we wrote a grant proposal for the national science foundation's ethics education in engineering and science program to develop our methodologies and formalize them in a graduate student training program. the grant proved successful and in the spring of 2010 ucsc launched the science & justice training program. while the focus of this paper is not the infrastructure of the training program, there are some key features that are necessary to outline in order to understand the development of our pedagogical and collaborative practices. graduate students from any division are welcome to participate regardless of their previous training and expertise, and students from each of the five divisions have participated in the program at some level. 20 in the first iteration of the training program, students enrolled in an introductory course cross-listed in the sociology, biomolecular science and engineering, and feminist studies departments that covers introductory literature in sts and fss. this course began to build a cohort of students knowledgeable about each others' work.21 over the years it has been taught, this course evolved to focus on teaching students how to identify and respond to connections across their areas of research, so that they might create collaborative projects. for their final projects, the students each wrote a research proposal in the style of a national science foundation grant application, which was then judged by an interdisciplinary panel of faculty that chose a cohort of eight to ten science & justice fellows. fellows received two terms of funding, allowing them to focus on their research projects. in many cases, their departments contributed a portion of the funding, which proved important for gaining wider faculty support for the program. in the following term, the fellows enrolled in a second methods course, in which they developed their project. fellows received continued mentoring as they began their projects and were expected to continue contributing to the science & justice community through activities such as helping to shape events for the sjwg and writing collectively authored articles (science & justice research center (collaborations group), 2013).22 of course creating a new graduate training program on campus proved a major undertaking that involved tremendous time, energy and diplomatic skills.  however, we were aided by one institutional feature of uc santa cruz: despite being a home for a number of important sts scholars—especially in the fss tradition—the campus had no single, formalized program, department, or location for sts research and teaching. therefore we were working across shifting disciplinary boundaries from the outset; there was no precedent for walling off sts off from other disciplines. this points to a benefit of having no de facto community: it creates the need to continually "retie the knot" (haraway, 2008, p. 1).23 to be sure, this distributed structure required greater organizational labor, but ultimately led to a wider base of support. our pedagogical innovations have been mutually supportive with other aspects of the s&j programming, and our ongoing efforts to build enduring working relationships across intellectual and institutional boundaries. teaching students across disciplinary boundaries not only creates practical connections across divides, it also encourages new forms of interactions among the faculty who support these students, as well as new kinds of inquiry in the students' home departments. finally, it provides a concrete site in which to develop the kind of response-able research we envisioned—research that can respond to the full range of epistemic, ethical and political dimensions of contemporary technoscience. the sjtp was a modest attempt to create the training needed to foster response-able research. below is a distillation of the pedagogical methods we found useful in this project. collaborative practices: gathering around objects while many recognize that robust inquiry that supports more livable worlds requires interdisciplinary collaborations, academic cultures have not been particularly good at fostering such engagements. we have found in our courses and sjwg meetings that unknowingly held and caricatured views of other disciplines are the most common cause of conflict. even among students and faculty who have the best of intentions to produce collaborative work, it is challenging to adequately understand and generously engage with another discipline's methods and histories. one temptation posed by this trouble is to jettison the disciplines and work from a non-disciplinary framework. however, in our context this is not a plausible solution, largely because our fellows need to produce research that is legible in their own fields for the sake of their dissertation projects and job prospects.  we have found that our most successful response to this deep-seated shortcoming has been to gather around objects. in the sjwg and sjtp, we encourage students to craft new objects: from solar greenhouses to newspaper editorials; from interdisciplinary workshops and collaborations to written accounts of our dialogues. extending bruno latour's call to understand objects as gatherings around which new forms of democracy can be built, we have found that gathering around objects is both more productive and lower stakes than gathering around theories or ideals.  in latour's dingpolitik,24 objects are not essential and unchanging, but are instead produced through gatherings. they are that which congeal out of difference and what we share across divides. they make up our common world (latour, 2005). in order to activate this potential of objects to gather us across difference, we begin the training program by asking students to bring in their object of study. we then ask the students to provide a five-minute description of their objects.25 these presentations are usually told as if their objects were well-bounded—what latour would call smooth objects or matters of fact (latour, 2004). however, by asking other members of the seminar to articulate associations they have with the object, it quickly becomes clear that none of the objects presented are as safely bounded as they first appeared. consider, for instance, the object of one student working on the politics of climate change: "carbon." carbon, an object that for many appears to be a well-bound single molecule, turned out to have a surprisingly lively set of associations. among them were: the political and linguistic habit of dropping the ‘dioxide' of carbon dioxide; its status as a shorthand for all other greenhouse gasses; how we track public opinion and how it matters; the governance of carbon economies; the role of skepticism in public life; the shortcomings of the concept of "anthropogenic;" the politics of meat consumption and car use; the apocalyptic discourses of climate change; and papal indulgences.   this exchange helps illustrate how an object can serve as a spark to ignite conversation. conversely, it also draws attention to how the people gathered reshape their object in the course of their discussion. it soon becomes evident that what started out as an uncomplicated matter of fact had become a matter of concern. when the concern is shared, as we have found it often is, it provides a foundation for collaboration. in each course, the multiple iterations of this exercise resulted in students independently developing interdisciplinary research clusters organized around problems of mutual concern, such as climate change, water resources, and genetic testing.  importantly, we begin the objects exercise prior to assigning "the aesthetics of matters of concern" by bruno latour (2008), in which he discusses his idea of objects and things as gatherings. because we welcome students from all campus divisions, it is a priority to create a space in which everyone feels comfortable making a contribution. we have found that beginning the course by having the students discuss their "object" is especially effective, because scientists and engineers often already have an "object" in a traditional sense that can be made readily present in a classroom. solar cells and jars full of dead krill are just a couple of examples. in contrast, humanists and social scientists, who are not often asked to identify objects within their research projects, face difficulties articulating specific objects. their frustrations are encapsulated in one sociology student's exclamation: "i don't know what my object is!" although some humanists and social scientists were able to present objects in a traditional sense, such as co2 or ritalin, their research clearly focused on the controversies around those objects. however, once the latour reading is introduced, they too began to think about how they are part of world-making and object-making. for scientists and engineers, such readings encouraged a reconsideration of their previously well-bounded objects as always having entailed complex social and political relationships. since each of the students struggle with the implications of having something familiar made strange, these complimentary forms of discomfort create a collaborative and sympathetic collective environment.  methods for mapping response-ability once we are at the same table and gathered around common objects, it is necessary to develop shared practices that can foster response-ability for these objects. one exercise we found useful in this context was situational mapping. medical sociologist adele clarke developed situational maps as a method for addressing a lack of reflexivity in social-science methods arising from grounded theory (clarke, 2005). these maps ask the researcher to identify and lay out the major human, nonhuman, discursive, historical, symbolic, cultural, and political elements within a research situation. they also situate the researcher by making explicit the role that the researcher's personal experience and "intellectual wallpaper" play within the research situation (clarke, 2005, p.85). we found that situational maps helped students articulate areas of inquiry that move them across disciplines and spaces that are typically separated. mapping out the material and symbolic domains that constitute objects cultivates reflexive research and helps students to account for their dual roles as participants in and analysts of the situation in which their objects exist.  another mapping exercise we invited the students to experiment with is genealogical mapping. this method builds on foucault's notion of genealogy (foucault, 1977). for foucault, genealogy is not a search for origins, but rather a meticulous practice of tracing the embodied, historically-situated, contingent, multiple, and heterogeneous conditions of possibility that produce the objects and subjects of knowledge-making practices. taking foucault's notion of genealogy as inspiration, barad (2000, 2007) articulates a method of analysis that is attuned to a shift of objective referent from individual object to "phenomenon:" namely, an accounting of the heterogeneous multiplicity of material-discursive apparatuses that produce and are an inseparable part of the phenomenon being investigated.26 in particular, the mapping exercise begins with identifying the diverse apparatuses that are the conditions for the possibility of investigating and producing particular phenomena in the laboratory. students then worked with these initial sketches to add specific lines of entanglement between various apparatuses. this exercise complemented the opening object exercise and helped students develop their analytical skills more systematically in thinking about the complex set of practices that condense and sediment into their objects (what they originally took to be independently existing objects). key to this exercise is learning to consider the specific genealogies of each of the apparatuses and to discern how they matter in the study and production of each object. no two objects fit into the same genealogical maps; the details are crucial.     students in our course found that situational and genealogical maps were not only useful for explaining their situations to themselves, but also for providing colleagues from other disciplines with concrete and largely jargon-free entrance points to their research. this created new opportunities for collaboration around shared concerns. for our students who had not previously examined their situation as researchers within their projects in a structured sense, this use of situational and genealogical maps proved particularly helpful. in course evaluations, one student noted that situational mapping was particularly helpful in decentering herself from a position of expert-researcher and instead developing a model of research that enabled collaborative work with other participants in the 'situation.' through these exercises we were able to adapt qualitative social science and humanities methods to overcome the exclusions at the heart of standard ethics models: the situation or phenomenon became the unit of analysis rather than the individual object, and attempts to participate response-ably in technoscientific systems became the primary purpose of ethical inquiry.  close reading: attending to exclusions developing research practices that focus on the absences, differences, and silences of technoscientific systems also has been important in our movement toward ethics as response-ability. in particular, re-reading a technoscientific object with an eye toward silences has helped students to question the seeming completeness of a situational or genealogical map. jane gallop (2000) offers close reading as a way to attend to elements of a text that appear marginal or subordinate on a cursory reading, but which nonetheless become conspicuous or surprising when given further attention. emphasizing repetitious or troubling portions of the text that interrupt the assumed flow of a narrative, close reading highlights elements that are too often silent. delving deeper into such silences allows students to find connections or resolve conflicts across disciplines that may have otherwise remained unexamined. in our class evaluations, one student noted in reference to the technique of close reading: "the ways i want to engage with thinking and creativity are valued in this space in a way that they are not within my discipline. that the desire to work for social justice is not seen as something to be tagged on [sic] at the end of the project, and that pedagogy is seen as important to the content." susan leigh star's work also offers methodological approaches to discursive silences that more directly engage the project of science and justice. in a 2007 interview, star emphasized the critical importance of the lived experience of disadvantaged subjects for understanding technoscience in general. she argued that if we worked to take down the "transcendental wall of shame" that prevents open discussion of personal experience amongst academics, "we could stop using technology to sequester people and their experiences. if we begin with those who are excluded, shamed, and silenced, their lives will become the most important philosophical questions to be answered" (star, 2007, p.229). by always starting investigations into the conditions and consequences of technoscience with the question "cui bono?" one is able to follow the silences and absences in discussions of technoscientific systems (star, 1991). as our courses emphasize, and as our students' projects described below illustrate, methods that illuminate differences, silences, and absences in technoscientific discourses teach researchers to raise and engage questions about who research helps and serves. as scientific research becomes even more central to legitimating and constructing worlds, this skill will only become more important for envisioning and enacting a world that supports a greater diversity of lives (benjamin, 2013; harding, 1991, 2008).  modest enactments of science and justice one of the more important—and unexpected—lessons learned by many of the graduate students in our training program is that justice in scientific and engineering systems is not accomplished by remaking the entire world around a pre-figured sense of what justice looks like. instead, it is necessary to become modest and do the hard work of attending to the specificities of one's situation (haraway, 1997). this experience highlighted the need to rethink what counts as "success." contrary to the academic habit of seeking conclusive and final results, they found that justice work is necessarily iterative, ongoing, and untidy. as the students came up against roadblocks and revised their projects, initial disappointments were replaced by commitment to work with more modest and specific goals.  the experience of kate richerson, one of our fellows who works on mathematical models of fishery conservation, nicely illustrates this dynamic. richerson initially developed her project to rectify a lack of ecological data about a lake in sierra leone that is a critical source of subsistence fishing. modeling the fishery was hampered by a lack of adequate accounts of the ecological pressures at play, which included such factors as the presence of large poaching fleets. through interviews she sought to develop localized knowledge about the historical and present-day fishery stocks, but she quickly ran into a problem commonly faced by interviewers: the lack of mutual trust between her and her interview subjects. she found that the politics of her research methods significantly complicated what it would mean to act response-ably. although she was disappointed that the interventions she had planned did not materialize, richerson's project demonstrated that even localized interventions can be limited by one's positioning as a researcher.  a similar lesson emerges from another project, in which two of our fellows from the physics department, derek padilla and ian carbone, wrestled with making energy-efficient models of food production available to small-scale organic farmers. both worked in a lab that was developing solar cells for greenhouses. the cells allow wavelengths that plants use for photosynthesis to pass through, and absorb the remaining wavelengths, converting them into electrical energy. building a greenhouse with these cells would enable a farmer to produce the energy needed to run greenhouse infrastructures (e.g., fans, electronics, temperature regulation, etc.) on site, and perhaps earn income on energy returned to the grid. in addition to this project's technical and scientific challenges, padilla and carbone were drawn to this project because of its potential to allow them to act on their ethical and political interests in making agriculture more sustainable. however, they soon realized that this technology would mostly benefit large, industrial-scale greenhouse operations.  while they certainly wanted industrial farms to be more energy efficient, padilla and carbone also felt that smaller-scale organic farming ultimately offered a more sustainable model of food production, and wanted to create a version of the new greenhouse technology that would work for these small organic farmers. thus, they planned a pilot project in which small-scale farmers would use a greenhouse with the novel solar cells on their farms and collect data about how energy collection worked and how it affected plant growth.   it is notable that from the outset these material physics students framed their phd project around an opportunity to intervene in food system ethics. however, as they developed their project in our science and justice framework it became even more unique. when they first began the science & justice training program, padilla and carbone held a familiar perception of science and justice: take technologies from the powerful and give them to ‘the people.' yet without a sufficiently specific understanding of who ‘the people' were and what they wanted, the justice component of their work was too nebulous. using qualitative social science methods developed in the research methods seminar, padilla and carbone interviewed a number of small organic farmers to see how such technology might be of use. they quickly found that their dingpolitik was not quite what they anticipated—the solar panels did not gather people in the way they had hoped. many of the small-scale farmers they interviewed had made deliberative choices to avoid technology-driven farming and were not interested in a pilot project that would draw them into high-tech engineering questions. although this result was disappointing, it prompted padilla and carbone to re-imagine their object in relation to other constituencies of food systems justice projects, such as educators and artists. padilla and carbone went on to use the ‘green' greenhouse as an educational tool for students and members of the santa cruz community to learn about sustainable agriculture and nutrition alongside properties of light and color under the luminescent solar concentrating roof. having expressed a desire to do research at the intersection of science and justice, padilla and carbone thus reconfigured what a physics degree and subsequent career might look like when organized around a more modest understanding of justice. both fellows went on to find academic jobs that valued their response-able approach to physics: padilla in a physics and chemistry department in a community college, and carbone in an environmental studies department in a small liberal arts college.27 another fellow's project also illustrates the importance of reassessing research projects in order to imagine how we might participate more response-ably within the technoscientific worlds we help to build. initiated by discussions at sjwg meetings, martha kenney, an s&j fellow, and ruth müller, then a visiting graduate student from the university of vienna, developed a collaborative project around re-reading interviews conducted by müller. müller's dissertation (müller, 2012) was concerned with the life stories and labor conditions of postdoctoral researchers in the biological sciences in austria and the u.s. these junior scientists, whose lives were defined by a constant rush to advance in a rigidly defined career track without much space for family and social connections, occupy an important role in the contemporary university, where a constant sense of insecurity motivates fast-paced knowledge production. müller's work shows how this sense of constant rush and individual competition is also corrosive to the social relations that are necessary for effective knowledge production in the laboratory. the researchers she studied rarely found opportunities to discuss shared hardships in a supportive space.  müller found that her interviews offered the postdocs a space to discuss their work and lives. they also brought her into close contact with peers who, much like müller herself, were struggling to build their careers. affected by the interviews and attentive to the shared labor conditions, she became interested in analyzing the role she played in the research sitation as an sts scholar. in the context of the sjtp, müller and kenney sought to use the feminist literature on practices of care in technoscience to address the troubling questions about careers, lives, and the management of public universities that had remained unsettling for müller as her dissertation came to an end (mol, moser, & pols, 2010; puig de la bellacasa, 2011). müller and kenney revisited müller's interview transcripts together, re-reading them for the moments where the conversations interrupted business-as-usual in the life science worlds of the postdocs. in an article they co-authored, müller and kenney show how the interviews created situated moments of reflection, connection, and disruption that might have acted as forms of resistance to the procrustean demands of life science careers (müller & kenney, 2014). by returning to a project that seemed complete, müller and kenney were able to move beyond diagnosis and toward thinking about how research practices can also be mundane care practices by allowing for new narratives, subjectivities, and collectivities to arise that challenge those commonly available  (mol, moser, & pols, 2010). for example, "what postdocs had thought was a personal struggle to meet the demands of a life science career [became] a collective problem not only but also through the process of participating in an sts study" (müller & kenney, 2014, p. 18). while interfering in the working lives of life science postdocs is a mundane intervention, it still matters. reading interviews as "agential conversations"—conversations that interfere in the worlds they study, müller and kenney demonstrated that justice work within sts can be directed toward modest, ongoing, and situated efforts. why science & justice? along with the science & justice training program, the broader science & justice initiative at uc santa cruz is engaged in a situated, modest approach that has faced its own share of limits and trouble. our recent experience of becoming a research center illustrates some of the ongoing challenges.28 founders of s&j thought long and hard about whether to take on this more institutionalized formation. fears of being shaped by and implicated in institutional politics and procedures worried us, but ultimately we understood that there was no escaping these kinds of dilemmas. with promise there is always trouble. with new construction comes new cuts.29 the challenge is to engage in them in a manner that cultivates response-ability. all of this became immediately manifest as soon as we moved into our new space. science & justice had not had a designated physical space before, and this resource afforded us expanded freedoms to organize meetings and house visiting fellows. however, the community studies department previously occupied the space we were given.as already noted, community studies—a hallmark of the uc santa cruz's commitment to social justice—offered a unique activist-oriented undergraduate major. in the worst of the "cost-cutting" phase of the financial crisis at the university of california, the santa cruz campus "suspended" community studies.30 when we moved into a few of their old offices, someone anonymously wrote "oxymoronic term" underneath our "science & justice" sign that identified the location of our offices. while we don't know with any certainty who wrote this, we assumed it was a community studies student and we sympathized with the implicit critique. in a university that increasingly channeled funds to science and diverted funds from efforts such as community studies that were explicitly devoted to social justice, what, one might ask, did science have to do with justice? indeed, it was a well-placed remark that resonated with a long-standing concern of ours. while this paper has emphasized the need to take advantage of shifting institutional demands and to orient sts and fss scholarship towards reshaping the university itself, we recognize that new opportunities for us come at a cost to other programs that deserve support and yet are increasingly marginalized. we also recognize the particular risk in adopting justice as a guiding framework. justice is a powerful rhetoric that is itself hard to resist; thus, it can produce single-minded activism and a loss of criticality (rose, 2004, 2012; ticktin, 2011). these problems are compounded when justice is united with the universalisms of science (reardon, 2013). much suffering has been wrought by hegemonic and colonial efforts to build universalized knowledge and justice together; a single knowledge and a single justice excludes too many. for "science and justice" to do the sts and fss work of fostering response-ability, we must make science and justice mutually unsettling, tempering any bent toward universalism. however, if we can "stay with the trouble" (haraway, 2010, 2012) rather than ignore or give in to it, our efforts at uc santa cruz demonstrate the potential of orienting around justice. justice calls us to think about what might be, at the same time that it compels us to account for and respond to what has gone before. rather than presuming a world already made, justice imagines a world in the making between past and future (arendt, 1968/2002; barad, 2010; derrida 1994). it asks us not to stand back and observe the world as it is, but to response-ably make it. while "world-making" can have a grandiose ring to it, it is, we suggest, ultimately a more humble and open endeavor. world-making does not assume that we have a final grasp on how the world is put together, what is right and wrong, or indeed that we all share one unambiguous world. on our campus, these aspirations and imaginaries of justice have gathered scientists and engineers together with colleagues in the humanities, social science and arts to substantively engage with one another. thus, while a "science & ethics research center" or a "science & society research center" might not have provoked graffiti,  "science & justice" proved the more provocative and promising endeavor. it made us "stay with the trouble" of making worlds together, a first critical element of response-ability.   our focus on teaching also proved crucial to our success. teaching makes up much of the everyday practice of university life. it is what we do together. while the s&j training program seeks to train the next generation of graduate students how to better respond to the join between questions of knowledge and questions of justice, it also seeks to remake our university by teaching our faculty and our institution new ways of thinking and working together. training graduate students also provides a concrete site in which to develop the kind of response-able research we envisioned—research that can respond to the full range of epistemic, ethical and political dimensions of contemporary technoscience. while our students did not "change the world" in the ways in which some of them might have at first hoped, they have helped to innovate mundane, yet world-making, practices.  ours is but one example of what might be possible in the contemporary moment.31 while the times are disheartening in many ways, the current turbulent state of universities, the demand that science contribute to social goods, and the limitations of dominant institutionalized forms of ethics all open up the chance to create new ways of getting on and knowing that better respond to contemporary lives and problems. the pedagogy and practice of science and justice developed at uc santa cruz is one effort to make good on this potential, and to create technoscientific worlds that are more open, modest, indeterminate, and hopefully better, where what counts as better is always a matter of our concern. acknolwedgements this material is based upon work supported by the national science foundation under grant no. ses-0933027. we would like to acknowledge the many contributions made by graduate students who have taken the sjtp course, and the faculty who help to teach it, especially andrew mathews, who taught one cohort of science and justice fellows, and helped to reformulate the training program to make it sustainable after the nsf grant ended. we also would like to acknowledge the tremendous administrative support provided by colleen massengale. additionally, we acknowledge the ucsc division of social sciences, the graduate school, the engineering school, the division of physical and biological sciences, the center for biomolecular science and engineering and the office of research for their support. finally, we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal for their careful reading and editing of this essay. notes 1 noteworthy is the 1987 barnard conference on women in the natural sciences (sponsored by the barnard center for research on women), one of the earliest conferences creating an opportunity for conversation between feminist science studies scholars (many of whom were trained in science, some of whom remained active scientists) and women scientists who did not have prior knowledge of the growing field of feminist science studies. the keynote speaker was evelyn fox keller. 2 more information on this program can be found at http://aacu.org/womenscilit/index.cfm 3 jenny reardon and karen barad formed and led the first iteration of the science & justice training program and co-taught the courses from 2010-2012.  jacob metcalf was the postdoctoral fellow for the initiative. martha kenney was a fellow in the first cohort of science & justice fellows. 4 it is important here to distinguish between institutionalized ethics and ethics as a commitment to doing good in the world. we do not believe there is anything inherent about 'ethics' as an intellectual and practical engagement that leads to narrow bureaucratic formations, particularly as embodied in research governance practices in the u.s. instead, such formations have been the product of a very specific set of articulations that we are only able to briefly describe. 5 see http://onwardstate.com/2011/01/15/budget-crunch-hits-home-sts-program-recommendation-for-closure/ (accessed june 18, 2014). 6 for one explanation of these events see nstallingorder.org/2013/03/27/sts-program-at-penn-state/ (accessed june 24, 2014). 7 one of the lasting impacts of the belmont report is that after 1979 research subjects increasingly have been invited to the table to discuss policy and ethics, a trend that escalated with hiv/aids patient and community advocacy and activism in the early 1980s and the rise of a neoliberal self-health orientation subsequently through the rise of hmos and social media (epstein 1996; epstein 2007). 8 jenny reardon, karen barad, and donna haraway gathered for these breakfasts. rebecca herzig went on walks with reardon in the uc santa cruz and raised the important question: 'what are we after?' these early beginnings of science & justice as an aspirational endeavor eventually lead reardon and metcalf to search for ways to develop concrete support and recognition for the many graduate students eager to develop it. 9 our use of 'science for the people' here is meant to invoke science for the people, an organization of scientists and engineers that formed in 1969 (see http://science-for-the-people.org/, accessed june 18, 2014). science & justice asked what science for the people might look like if it took on board three decades of fss and sts scholarship. 10 in the u.s., the most consequential research regulation is the "common rule," title 45 section 46 of the code of federal regulations, which requires all institutions that receive federal research money and conduct human subjects research to use institutional review boards (irbs) to protect research subjects from individual harms. the propriety of governing research practices in the social sciences and humanities according to the common rule and its implicit assumptions about research ethics has been vociferously contested, particularly when it interferes with social justice goals (for example, see: basset & o'riordan 2002; dingwall, 2008; duster et al., 1979; librett & perrone, 2010; shea, 2000). the u.s. health and human services, which enforces the common rule, recently solicited input for the first major revisions in decades, and received requests for major changes to research ethics governance in the humanities and social sciences from the national academies that addresses some of these concerns (committee on revision to the common rule, 2014; health and human services, 2011) 11 this resource is sponsored by the u.s. national science foundation and hosted by the national academies of engineering. see: http://www.onlineethics.org/resources/cases/dialysismachine.aspx. accessed 5/22/2015. the online ethics center (oec) recently launched a project to substantially overhaul this resource, including efforts to make case studies contextually richer. 12 as recent critiques of the increasingly popular ‘engineering to help' model demonstrate, limiting the possibilities for exploring moral and political contexts can also turn seemingly benevolent projects into boondoggles of wasted effort (schneider et al., 2009). 13 sts scholars have produced numerous studies that document and demonstrate these limitations of the rcr model (bucciarelli, 2008; conlon & zandvoort, 2011; kline, 2001; lynch & kline, 2000; vaughan, 1996). many of these sts-inspired critiques of ethics pedagogy have analogues in the literature oriented toward philosophy audiences.  see for example (anderson et al., 2007; davis & feinerman, 2010; martinson et al., 2006; titus et al., 2008). 14 haraway develops this notion of response-ability in her critical assessment of jacque derrida's writing on animals (haraway, 2008). drawing on derrida's claim that much of the history of philosophy is an iteration of an unaccountable distinction between humans who respond and animals that react, haraway argues that contemporary bioethics (especially as it regards animals) is overly committed to logics of calculation and sacrifice. rather than understanding animals as merely reactive and ethics as merely the calculation of properly sanctioned instrumental use relationships, haraway insists that animals be understood as co-laborers worthy of, and themselves capable of, response. she writes, "response, of course, grows with the capacity to respond, that is, responsibility. such a capacity can be shaped only in and for multidirectional relationships, in which always more than one responsive entity is in the process of becoming. ... answering to no checklist, response is always riskier than [calculation]," (p. 71). knowing is thus always a multidirectional engagement, and knowing well requires capacitating response from within knowledge-making practices even if the other party is nonhuman. 15 importantly, for barad, discursive practices are not merely linguistic practices, nor are they exclusively human. diffractively reading bohr's crucial insight that scientific concepts are instantiated in specific laboratory apparatuses (which give meaning to particular concepts to the exclusion of others), through foucault's notion of discursive practices as specific historical conditions of intelligibility, barad develops a notion of discursive practices as specific material configurations, where the notion of materiality is also reworked. importantly, apparatuses are material-discursive, not material and discursive. for more details see barad (2007).    16 similarly, astrid schrader has argued that what counts as evidence within experimental configurations is critical to the possibility of both identifying causal relationships and responsibility. tracking how marine ecologists have attempted to account for the toxicity of dinoflagellete blooms in estuary ecosystems, schrader demonstrates that the temporality of causal relationships within these experiments is of critical importance for the political and ethical consequences of the knowledge produced (schrader, 2010).      17 several sts and fss scholars also have observed the limits of institutionalized ethics and have re-envisioned ethics in ways that are friendly to science and justice practices of response-ability. see for example rajan (2006), fortun (2008), and tuana, et. al. (2009). 18 john rawls captured this foundational aspect of justice in the opening pages of his enormously influential book, a theory of justice (rawls 1971/1999, pp. 3-4).  we have not failed to note that this strong alignment of truth and justice might also account for the power of justice to gather our science and engineering colleagues.  19 specifically, hughes and juarez went on to create a survey on the definition and use of racial categories in forensic science. they distributed the survey to members of their professional society not only to create data about the practices and views of their colleagues, but also to open up a discussion about the definition and use of race in forensic science. currently cris hughes is using the methods of forestic anthropology to study social justice issues surrounding u.s.-mexico border deaths. her early findings suggest that the remains of mexican migrants from the rural, southern states and indigenous communities are more likely to remain unidentified. these findings can be used to identify the structural vulnerabilities that lead to uneven identification of human remains. 20 ucsc is administratively split into five divisions: arts, humanities, social sciences, engineering, and physical and biological sciences. 21 when the nsf funding came to a close in 2012, we re-structured the training program so that it would be sustainable after the grant ended. for instance, the two courses have been combined into one that preserves the essential features of each. student proposals are now proposals for collaborative events that the sjwg hosts, continuing the tradition of cross-facilitations between the sjwg and the sjtp. while students no longer receive fellowship funding, they do have the opportunity to organize events funded by the science & justice research center. 22 in addition to op-eds that have appeared in the local press, several students from the first and second cohorts co-authored, together with reardon, barad and metcalf, a paper on science and justice that appeared in plos biology (science & justice research center (collaborations group), 2013). 23 two of our fellows, zachary caple and katy overstreet, started a group for experimenting with collaborative methods that they called ‘retying knots,' inspired by haraway's figure. 24 latour recently reminded us that the word thing derives from the old english "ding" which means a meeting or assembly. a thing, or a gathering, arises around a matter of concern. 25 this object exercise is indebted to fss's long history of rethinking objectivity (keller, 1985) both in terms of the object and subject of knowledge. for example, barad (2007) argues that the objective referent is not an individual independently existing object, but rather an entanglement of multiple and heterogeneous agencies. fss scholars also argue that knowing subjects are also more than individual thinkers. key to this rethinking has been the contributions of feminist empiricism (longino, 1990), feminist standpoint theory (harding, 1991), situated knowledges (haraway, 1991), and agential realism (barad, 2007). see also the work of daston and galison (2010) on the history of objectivity. 26 "phenomenon" has a particular meaning in agential realism. to gloss a rather involved account, phenomena are the entangled web of diverse agencies that constitute and are inseparable from the object of investigation. see p. 389 of barad (2007) for a sample drawing of a genealogical map; the phenomenon illustrated there is quantum physics. 27 to hear one of these students' own account of their science and justice experience, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6rwei3vzre (accessed june 24, 2014). his description of his s&j project begins around minute 51. 28 building on the success of the training program, in 2011-12 administrative leaders at uc santa cruz encouraged reardon to create a science and justice research center. ultimately her proposal was successful, and the university provided physical space, as well as funding for a half-time administrative assistant and programming.   29 this formulation draws on karen barad's concept of "agential cuts," which adapts from niels bohr conception of the experimental apparatus as enacting cuts between the object and the agencies of observation. she argues that we need to take responsibility for the cuts we participate in enacting; with each cut we "contest and rework" what matters and what is excluded from mattering (pp. 178-179).  30 as naomi klein has astutely argued, financial crises often become the cover for eliminating programs and efforts that fall outside of political favor. the major has recently been re-instated—but not the department, which was disbanded. 31 the formation of the science & justice at uc santa cruz was in many ways shaped by the california context during the financial crisis. while much of the restructuring of universities and research is being is being experienced worldwide (often characterized as the 'neoliberalizion of universities'), the specificities of both the promise and the trouble importantly varies between institutional and national contexts. we offer this account not so that our model can be "imported" wholesale into other contexts (though some of our techniques might prove useful). instead, we hope to learn from other researchers in sts and fss what becomes possible as institutions make difficult changes. we would be interested in hearing about other initiatives to compare the knowledge formations that arose in similar times, but different places. references alberts, b., kirschner, m.w., tilghman, s., & varmus, h. 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(in press) bios jenny reardon is professor of sociology, faculty affiliate in the center for biomolecular science and engineering, and director of the science and justice research center at uc santa cruz.  she is the author of race to the finish: identity and governance in an age of genomics (princeton university press, 2005), and is currently finishing a second book manuscript entitled the postgenomic condition: ethics, justice, knowledge after the genome (forthcoming with chicago university press). jacob metcalf is a researcher at the data & society research institute, where he provides research and policy advice on data ethics for the nsf-supported council for big data, ethics & society, and founding partner at ethical resolve, llc.  he is the former assistant director at the science & justice research center at uc santa cruz.  he is currently pursuing several projects on big data and human subjects research protections.  martha kenney is assistant professor in women and gender studies at san francisco state university.  working in the tradition of feminist science studies, her research and teaching explore the politics of biological storytelling.  her current project examines and intervenes in the narratives emerging from the new field of environmental epigenetics. karen barad is professor of feminist studies, philosophy, and history of consciousness at the university of california at santa cruz.  barad's ph.d. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory.  barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces.  barad is the author of meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning (duke university press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. using feminist theory and social justice pedagogy to educate a new generation of precautionary principle chemists lasker, g. a., & simcox, n. j. (2020). using feminist theory and social justice pedagogy to educate a new generation of precautionary principle chemists. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-13. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © grace a. lasker and nancy j. simcox, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license using feminist theory and social justice pedagogy to educate a new generation of precautionary principle chemists grace a. lasker university of washington bothell glasker@uw.edu nancy j. simcox university of washington nsimcox@uw.edu abstract students in the science classroom learn that science makes right, which devalues (whether inadvertently or very purposefully) other non-scientific areas of study and largely works against ideas of collectivism and community, especially as science “rises to the top” in collaborative partnerships and interdisciplinary research and service. applying feminist theory and social justice pedagogy within the chemistry classroom can help focus the students’ learning experiences away from hierarchical outcomes that perpetuate discriminatory practices toward change agency and the pursuit of equity, especially in regard to the design of safer chemicals. most would agree that it is not ethically acceptable to continue to design and produce chemicals that cause adverse human health effects and environmental pollution; however, changes in the chemistry classroom to redirect this outcome have been slow. emphasis on designing safer chemicals driven by the precautionary principle can advance the role of students and teachers as change agents in their communities. when considering feminist theory and social lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) grace a. lasker and nancy j. simcox, 2020 2 justice pedagogy in the chemistry classroom, classrooms become inclusive and learning outcomes shift toward focusing on how to reduce health disparities due to chemical exposures and how to interact with systems of domination and decision making in the workplace and beyond. new chemistry curriculum is needed in these areas to help prepare a new generation of “precautionary principle chemists” who will advocate for all of our communities. introduction faculty in health sciences, biology, environmental science, environmental justice, and public health have steadily integrated social justice and health equity pedagogy into the classroom, impacting critical consciousness, citizenship, and advocacy as well as supporting students from communities traditionally excluded from mainstream stem programs of study and careers (alemán & gaytán, 2017; greenberg, 2017; howard-grenville et al., 2017; kennedy & odell, 2014; madrigal et al., 2016; vakil, 2014; zembylas, 2005). yet other science disciplines such as chemistry have been slow to adopt similar strategies. chemistry students largely lack the resources, tools, and support to combine social, political, and academic growth to take action and learn to participate in decision making that promotes a more equitable and sustainable world (greenberg, 2017). applying feminist theory and social justice pedagogy within the chemistry classroom helps shift the students’ learning experiences away from hierarchical outcomes that perpetuate discriminatory practices toward change agency and the pursuit of equity, especially in regard to the design of safer chemicals as a fundamental aspect of chemistry curriculum. additionally, emphasis on designing safer chemicals and implementing environmental regulatory frameworks driven by the precautionary principle can advance the role of students and teachers as change agents in their communities. this article posits that shifting learning outcomes toward a justice-oriented curriculum grounded in feminist theory and a precautionary principle focus creates inclusive learning environments that allow students to find purpose, accomplishment, and change agency within chemistry. the history of science “science” was born of a philosophy known as positivism. this philosophy holds observation and measurement as the highest authority of valid knowledge (trochim, 2006). science was developed as the observation of universal laws that exist around us as a code to be cracked and controlled if we could observe and quantify these laws. this philosophy heralded empiricism (observation and measurement) as a foundational tool for scientific investigation (trochim, 2006), lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) grace a. lasker and nancy j. simcox, 2020 3 encouraged the idea of right and wrong approaches and answers to scientific inquires (andersson, 2017), and inaccurately purported science as unbiased and impartial (barton, 1997). this approach has shaped the foundation of science education as well. the science classroom was born in lecture halls and laboratories with students memorizing equations and manipulating data for the pursuit of foundation and application. the science classroom supposedly mirrors the “real world,” but we have since recognized that this decontextualized science removes the “why” and “so what” questions asked by students and replaces them with standards-based outcomes that exclude growth mindset development from contextualized learning experiences (ashby & mensah, 2018; buxton, 2010; king & ritchie, 2012; lasker et al., 2017). science drills itself down into the realm of details and rout memorization at the same time it becomes larger than itself as it holds itself absolute and infallible (millar, 2012). students in the science classroom learn that science makes right, which devalues (whether inadvertently or very purposefully) other non-scientific areas of study (cobern, 1994; feinstein & kirchgasler, 2015) and largely works against ideas of collectivism and community especially as it “rises to the top” in collaborative partnerships and interdisciplinary research and service. science instruction favors “the prevailing culture and structural manifestations in stem [that] have traditionally privileged norms of success that favor competitive, individualistic, and solitary practices—norms associated with white male scientists” (ong, smith, & ko, 2017, p. 206). decontextualized science also counters feminist thinking that rejects dualistic thinking, which simplifies complex ideas and issues into bounded areas and generates hierarchies that normalize “prevailing power relationships and [makes] them more difficult to challenge” (ferguson, 2017, p. 271) in part due to their gendered structures (haraway, 1988; harding, 1986; kahveci, 2015; ståhl & hussénius, 2017). instead, feminist thinking embraces discovery as a fluid, dynamic process rather than a cause-and-effect, static experience. it “asks how things come to be, requiring that we historicize our thinking and recognize dynamic and changing relationships rather than static entities” (ferguson, 2017, p. 271). it is rooted in justice, freedom, and equity movements that embrace intersectionality and interdisciplinarity as fundamental aspects of inquiry, discovery, and problem solving. social justice pedagogy also supports students’ prior learning as an important aspect of critical assessment, growth mindset development, and contextualization during the learning process (chubbuck & zembylas, 2008; dimick, 2012). dimick (2012) identifies three areas of social justice education lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) grace a. lasker and nancy j. simcox, 2020 4 relevant to science curriculum—equity, social justice curricula and pedagogy, and socially just interrelations—that contribute positively toward student learning outcomes. applying feminist theory and social justice pedagogy within the chemistry classroom can focus students’ learning experiences away from hierarchical outcomes that perpetuate discriminatory practices toward change agency and the pursuit of equity, especially in regard to the design of safer chemicals. justice-oriented chemistry curriculum chemistry faculty are largely trained on and use traditional classroom lectures and laboratory exercises that were developed decades ago in order to demonstrate foundational chemistry concepts. in doing so, they inadvertently perpetuate a system that fails to provide interactive environments where students can develop skills such as critical thinking and problem solving or engage in peer-to-peer learning (bergtrom, 2011; berrett, 2012; jensen, kummer, & godoy, 2015). research overwhelmingly supports positive outcomes associated with active learning in stem classes (cromley, perez, & kaplan, 2016; eichler & peeples, 2016; king & richie, 2012; prince & felder, 2007). according to dr. clarissa dirks, co-chair of the us national academies scientific teaching alliance, “at this point it is unethical to teach any other way” (waldrop, 2015, p. 273). we herald success in having integrated active learning into chemistry education (goacher, kline, targus, & vermette, 2017; henry, 2017; hinde & kovac, 2001; jardine & friedman, 2017; wakeling, green, naiker, & panther, 2016) but the question is, what exactly are these students “actively learning” about in their chemistry classes? social justice is a point of view that supports equity in political, human, social, and economic rights (adams, 2016) not only at the individual level but also at the organizational and institutional level (barry, 2005). also, environmental justice is “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies” (environmental protection agency, 2015, para. 1). environmental justice is not limited to environmental or ecological rights but also incorporates labor, food, civility, climate, indigenous rights, culture, economics, immigration, and civil rights into the movement (cole & foster, 2001; faber & mccarthy, 2003; schlosberg, 2013). for the most part, chemistry students are not challenged to actively connect chemistry learned in the classroom with disparities faced by communities (lasker, 2019), but shouldn’t active learning mean actively integrating life experiences into learning experiences? lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) grace a. lasker and nancy j. simcox, 2020 5 social justice pedagogy allows acknowledgment in learning spaces that there are disparities between resources, outcomes, and opportunities among marginalized populations (shakman et al., 2007). faculty who apply social justice pedagogy strive to create inclusive classrooms that demonstrate equity as foundational and fundamental and use “critical, critical race, postmodern, poststructural, feminist, and multicultural education theories [to] espouse the social justice education goal” (mthethwa-sommers, 2014). this approach not only supports marginalized students who have experienced significant difficulties accessing higher education but also helps students recognize the global impact of their by promoting an equityand justice-oriented framework for the context by which they learn chemistry and, ultimately, enter into the workforce. when considering feminist theory and social justice in the chemistry classroom, learning outcomes shift toward reducing disparities within communities and “the ways in which social group differences of race and ethnicity, national origins, language, religion, gender, sexuality, class, disability, and age interact with systems of domination and subordination to privilege or disadvantage different social group members relative to each other” (adams & zuniga, 2016, p. 96). it helps students recognize issues of discrimination and injustice and their role in mitigating those impacts through greener and safer chemical career aspirations (llored & sarrade, 2016; noyori, 2015; lasker et al., 2017; schindel dimick, 2015). framing curriculum using a justice-oriented pedagogy not only helps support students in finding relevancy and purpose in their program of study but also supports retention of women and underrepresented minorities in stem and related programs, too (conley & hamlin, 2009; hansson & lindahl, 2010; mills & ayre, 2003; rivera maulucci, 2013; worthley, 1992). women and other underrepresented groups do not persist in stem educational programs at the same rates as their white, male counterparts (carlone & johnson, 2007; good, rattan, & dweck, 2012) and statistics support significant underrepresentation of women in the stem workforce. the united states has made stem enrollment among women and underrepresented minorities a priority. millions are spent to address these inequities yet globally, women accounted for only 28.8% of those employed in scientific research and development in 2014 (unesco institute of statistics, 2017). in the us, women represented only 29% of those employed in stem-related occupations in 2013 and only 31% of all physical science occupations (national science board, 2016). and salary gaps continue to exacerbate an already significant problem. according lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) grace a. lasker and nancy j. simcox, 2020 6 to the national science board (2016), median annual salary among science and engineering highest degree holders in 2013 put men at $80,000 and women at $55,000. these gaps in stem enrollment and employment will continue to widen if changes aren’t made in the classroom first. a multidisciplinary group of participants have been investigating social and environmental justice as a framework for chemistry education at the green chemistry and engineering conference annually since 2016 to help faculty learn more about the importance of inclusive classrooms and to shift their chemistry curriculum toward justiceand equity-oriented outcomes. over the years, faculty who have attended these meetings have integrated justice-oriented projects, courses, and undergraduate research into their chemistry and green chemistry programs. however, feedback at these symposium from participants reveals a significant barrier around the lack of american chemical society (acs) accreditation standards around social and environmental justice and the resulting difficulty of transitioning courses and programs toward a social justice and feminist theory framework. chemistry faculty are still bound to hierarchical acs standards that favor current oppressive systems over justice-oriented ones, and tools and resources to support faculty in transitioning their curriculum are still few and far between. using a precautionary principle focus in the classroom it is no longer acceptable to continue to design and produce chemicals without a better understanding of their toxicology, health effects, and environmental consequences. many countries are adopting new chemical policy initiatives to address the chemical burdens and disparities placed on underserved communities. for these countries, a significant amount of policy and regulations are guided by the precautionary principle. the precautionary principle was formally introduced in 1998 and defined by four central components: “taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty; shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of an activity; exploring a wide range of alternatives to possibly harmful actions; and increasing public participation in decision making” (kriebel et al., 2001, p. 871). the precautionary principle is not new, and its implementation can lead to promoting more cost-effective alternatives to hazardous products and processes. for example, traditional models of risk assessment have been described as a barrier toward developing environmentally rigorous protections as well as perpetuating the removal of individuals and communities from decisionmaking processes around chemical design and exposure policy (kriebel et al., 2001). in addition, current scientific practice minimizes uncertainties, ignores complex issues, and gives attention to the more quantifiable and narrowly defined lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) grace a. lasker and nancy j. simcox, 2020 7 researchable aspects of an environmental or health-equity-related problem (tickner, 2002), further delegitimizing other non-stem disciplines that may be able to address these larger, systems-level impacts. in the us, chemical design processes and environmental and safety policies are reactionary, placing the burden of hazard identification on the population not the corporation, whereas the precautionary principle shifts the burden for proving the safety of chemicals onto the suppliers of chemicals and not the users (geiser, 2015). still, in a policy blog hosted on the american chemistry council’s website, the precautionary principle is attacked as costly and leading to unintended regulatory consequences. (becker, 2012). this argument does not acknowledge, nor seem to value, the immeasurable instances of disproportionate exposure to hazardous chemicals experienced by vulnerable populations such as children, low socioeconomic communities, women, and communities of color (clark, millet, & marshall, 2014; environmental health news, 2012; landrigan et al., 1999; nelson, scammell, hatch, & webster, 2012; weiss, 2000; woodruff, zota, & schwartz, 2011). to counter these reactionary ideologies, new tools and activities must be created and used in us stem curriculum that complement a shift toward precautionary principle approaches that value social justice, health equity, and environmental sustainability when considering chemical design and education (anastas & warner, 2000; coish et al., 2017). in this way, faculty not only value multiple student perspectives from a variety of lived experiences as valid for constructing, retaining, and applying knowledge (university of michigan center for research on teaching and learning, 2018) but also help students recognize their capacity for change agency around equitable justice for all. conclusion justice-oriented chemistry curriculum helps students make connections between social justice, health equity, and environmental sustainability issues with the future work they will do as chemists. real change can occur when students shift toward precautionary principle frameworks that value equity for all. students largely underrepresented in the science classroom can find connections between their own experiences facing injustice and inequities as they learn to advocate on behalf of their communities. feminist theory and social justice pedagogy help faculty create inclusive classrooms that provide accessible learning experiences for all students, not just those already privileged by the science system. by helping students understand that their decisions as professionals can have real lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) grace a. lasker and nancy j. simcox, 2020 8 impacts on millions, students can shift their professional goals away from reactionary-styled thinking toward precautionary-principle supported change agency. references adams, m. 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(2006). positivism & post-positivism. retrieved from http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/positvsm.php https://nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/#/report/chapter-3/women-and-minorities-in-the-s-e-workforce https://nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/#/report/chapter-3/women-and-minorities-in-the-s-e-workforce http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/positvsm.php lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) grace a. lasker and nancy j. simcox, 2020 13 unesco institute of statistics. (2017). women in science. retrieved from http://uis.unesco.org/en/topic/women-science university of michigan center for research on teaching and learning. (2018). creating inclusive college classrooms. retrieved from http://www.crlt.umich.edu/gsis/p3_1 vakil, s. (2014). a critical pedagogy approach for engaging urban youth in mobile app development in an after-school program. equity & excellence in education, 47(1), 3145. wakeling, l., green, a., naiker, m., & panther, b. c. (2016). an active learning, student-centred approach in chemistry laboratories: the laboratorys as a primary learning environment. s. rowling (ed). in proceedings of the australian conference on science and mathematics education (formerly uniserve science conference) (p. 134). waldrop, m. m. (2015). the science of teaching science. nature, 523, 272-274. weiss, b. (2000). vulnerability of children and the developing brain to neurotoxic hazards. environmental health perspectives, 108(suppl 3), 375-381. woodruff, t. j., zota, a. r., & schwartz, j. m. (2011). environmental chemicals in pregnant women in the united states: nhanes 2003–2004. environmental health perspectives, 119(6), 878-885. worthley, j. s. (1992). is science persistence a matter of values? psychology of women quarterly, 16(1), 57-68. zembylas, m. (2005). science education: for citizenship and/or for social justice. journal of curriculum studies, 37(6), 709-722. author bio grace lasker is a senior lecturer and director of health studies at the university of washington bothell. her research and teaching are centered in environmental health and social justice, epigenetics, and public health nutrition. she is also investigating the intersection of toxicology, green chemistry, and change agency in education. nancy simcox is a lecturer and the director of the continuing education programs for the uw department of environmental & occupational health sciences. she develops and delivers research-based education programs for practicing professionals, including industrial hygienists, physicians, nurses, safety engineers and others in the environmental, health and safety field. http://uis.unesco.org/en/topic/women-science http://www.crlt.umich.edu/gsis/p3_1 lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) grace a. lasker and nancy j. simcox, 2020 14 atanasoski & vora   article     surrogate humanity: posthuman networks and the (racialized) obsolescence of labor     neda atanasoski university of california, santa cruz natanaso@ucsc.edu kalindi vora university of california, san diego kavora@ucsd.edu in his 2014 book, the zero marginal cost society, jeremy rifkin writes, "if i had told you 25 years ago that, in a quarter century’s time, one-third of the human race would be communicating with one another in huge global networks of hundreds of millions of people … and that the cost of doing so would be nearly free, you would have shaken your head in disbelief" (p. 69). rifkin, a social theorist and founder of the foundation on economic trends, takes the notion that free information and communication are harbingers of a large-scale revolution in which we move towards a "near zero marginal cost" society—one in which "nearly free goods and services" emerge through the optimization of productivity (that is, with the development of technologies such as 3d printing when the "cost of producing an additional good or service is nearly zero") (p. 70). rifkin's book raises questions about how the internet of things (iot) can lead to the end of capitalism as we know it (p. 70). the iot might portend the first "smart infrastructure revolution," but this is a revolution that is haunted by the specter of what rifkin calls "the last worker standing": "big data, advanced analytics, algorithms, artificial intelligence (ai), and robotics are replacing human labor across the manufacturing industries, service industries, and knowledge-and-entertainment sectors, leading to the very real prospect of liberating hundreds of millions of people from work in the market economy" (p. 121). while some might regard this vision of technological replacements for humans that substitute "intelligent technology" for mass wage labor as a future dystopia, rifkin sees such technologies as enabling the uncoupling of human productivity from employment, thus freeing humans for the "evolving social economy" embedded in a "collaborative commons" organized by social networks and open-source programming. rifkin argues, in short, that the infrastructure revolution, marking a break from the first (18th century) and second (early 20th century) industrial revolutions, emancipates human creativity from the drudgery of waged work (p. 132). rifkin's techno-utopic perspective is both profoundly humanist, in the sense that its goal is to delink human freedom from labor; and also profoundly post-humanist, in the sense that the human must be displaced from the scene of labor by technology in order to posit a moment of emancipation. rifkin's postulations can be read as participating in contemporary discourses of what we call surrogate humanity. the surrogate human is one way to conceptualize the function of the technologized posthuman stand-in, a rich and experimental subject/object encompassing the techno-fantasies of revolutionary change through which we can highlight how the seemingly novel frontiers between human and machine elaborate much older discourses of humanization and dehumanization, and of human difference and its transcendence. by surrogate humanity, we mean to include not only specific technologies such as 3d printers and robots operating in factories that literally replace older spheres of human action and labor, but also the processes through which racialized, gendered, and sexualized spheres of life and labor are seemingly elided by technological surrogates, even as these spheres are replicated in emergent modes of work, violence, and economies of desire. to read surrogate humanity in this way requires an analytic that attends to techniques through which difference (whether human–non-human or between inter-human qualities) is produced, while understanding categories of difference as historically specific.  cultural and political fantasies that hinge upon the idea that humans can be freed from labor through technology are part of an ethos and an economy that valorizes the expansion of human capacities for creativity, in which creativity is defined as those limited forms that register as having market value. such a formulation of creativity as capital, made possible by technological surrogates who take over non-innovative work, relies on an implicit assumption that humans will somehow be freed from their historical differentiation in value as racialized and gendered populations in the global economy. nonetheless, new technologies have historically designated what kinds of labor are considered replaceable and reproducible versus what kinds of creative capacities remain vested with privileged populations and spaces of existence.1 humanity stands in a differential if connected relationship to artificial intelligence and networked objects, a relationship that continues to be racialized. moreover, prophesies and predictions about the scope of this "third" industrial revolution, brought about through the iot, is prefigured by a profound political and ethical break with prior global-political imaginaries of revolution, articulated most recently in early and mid-20th century decolonial and socialist aspirations for a redefinition of the human.  emphasizing this historical specificity, we might consider the notion of revolution in smart infrastructures, or networks of people and things, as a postsocialist notion of revolution. labor and technology have been the privileged sites through which to understand a socialist revolutionary imaginary. yet the 21st-century association of revolutionary change with the novelty of technological objects and platforms and their social effects dislodges the term "revolution" from its prior association with political and social transformation, altering the possible fields for political action. this article argues that the restructuring of imaginaries of free and unfree labor, visible and invisible workers, and the racialized conditions of labor cached in the distribution of differential working conditions in the 21st century can therefore be contextualized as part of a postsocialist and post-revolutionary (in the marxist sense) relationship to the political.2 more than a simple periodizing of the notion of revolution in a postsocialist world, this article tracks how historical forms of domination and power, encompassing but not limited to social categories and hierarchies of difference, get built into seemingly non-human objects and the infrastructures that link them, thus sanitizing digital media technologies as human-free. rather than questioning the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the human, fantasies about the revolutionary nature of new media and technology developments as posthuman carry forward and re-universalize the historical specificity of the category "human" whose bounds they claim to surpass. the post-enlightenment subject, already socially and politically empowered, leaves a remarkable remainder in allegedly non-human technologies.   at the same time, we argue, it is insufficient to merely point out the way in which human racialized and gendered labor underwrites techno-utopic fantasies (lifting the wizard of oz curtain hiding the truth behind "smart technologies"). certainly, task and service workers necessary to sites and platforms of the sharing economy continue to perform historically undervalued racialized and gendered work. in response to emergent phenomena such as, for instance, the racialization of labor in online gaming, there is already a large and varied body of scholarship on race and technology (nakamura, 2009). theorists including lisa nakamura and wendy chun have demonstrated that race continues to matter despite claims that the internet is a site of self-making in which race ceases to be bound to embodied characteristics. in fact, chun (2009) proposes the concept of "race as technology." she charts how digital media and networks take up structures of control as a model of power, building them into the infrastructure of the internet (chun, 2006). thus, rather than extending a logic of representation and recognition to the sphere of digital culture, we build upon work such as chun's and nakamura's that insists on developing new optics for thinking about race and gender as overlapping with, but also exceeding, representation.3 critical race studies and feminist science studies, each of which has differently engaged posthumanism to extend an analysis of the vitality and agency of objects and matter in a way that problematizes the centrality of modern man in the field of the political, can thus productively be put into dialogue as a starting point for theorizing technology beginning with difference. as lucy suchman (n.d.) writes: "modernist epistemologies treat agency as something both independent of, and contained within, singular entities, whether humans or artifacts. in this respect, the language of intelligent artifacts remains consistent with a tradition that treats separation and autonomy, rather than relatedness, as the mark of intelligence and agency" (pp. 7-8). keeping in mind richard doyle's point that "vitality and autonomy of computational artifacts emerge through the camouflaging of the networks that support them" (suchman, n.d , p. 8), in this article we also address race and technology as imbricated epistemological and ethical terrains that produce political and temporal narratives of humanization—narratives that draw and redraw the bounds of the human.    emphasizing this imbrication, we address not just how technologies produce race, but also how race, as modernity's central epistemological project, produces technology and ideas about what constitutes a technological revolution that can reconstitute the human. this is a necessary theoretical step for extending a politics from interventions based on feminist and critical race theory into the field of the posthuman. on the one hand, then, this article develops a critique of the techno-utopic imaginary of a revolutionary inter-networking of humans and things, which frees the human from labor, as both racial and racializing. on the other hand, it addresses the potential for thinking technology theoretically and politically as a starting point for decentering modern "man." the first part of this analysis therefore puts critical race studies and anticolonial and decolonial approaches to work re-describing "man" in conversation with feminist science studies. this essay is also a speculation about how the posthuman takes on a different meaning if it is conceptually traced back to the epistemological and material shifts, as well as to the legacies tied to prior post-enlightenment revolutionary aspirations, such as that of franz fanon, who sought to reconceptualize who or what can count as human. we then position these distinct yet critical approaches to posthumanism against the popular hypotheses and fantasies that the emergence of the internet of things will lead to the obsolescence of human labor. the latter posits that the infrastructure revolution and intelligent artifacts (surrogate humans) mark a paradigm shift away from capitalism, but it does so by reaffirming existing paradigms of racialized and gendered value through the figure of a surrogate human who performs degraded work that is always already meant to be invisible. through an analysis of several contemporary platforms that exemplify these emergent infrastructures (including alfred and amazon's mechanical turk), we conclude by highlighting the erasures and disappearances undergirding techno-utopic fantasies of a post-labor society.  at the same time, we grapple with what it means to think the subject of labor, and the human as subject, outside of the biological-economic imperatives of prior imaginaries. "the replacing of a certain ‘species' of men by another ‘species' of men": decolonial and anti-racist imaginaries of post-man to date, popular and scholarly writings about the 21st-century technological revolution have largely associated revolutionary change with the novelty of technological objects, thus evacuating the term "revolution" from its prior investments in political and social transformation. asserting that the techno-revolution is in fact socio-political as much as it is about the innovation of techno-objects and platforms, our study foregrounds the inheritance of previous revolutionary demands and considers how revolutionary aspirations are always tied to a re-imagination of who or what is human. as is well known, 18thand 19th-century european colonialism, a structure that instituted a global sliding scale of humanity through scientific notions about racial differences and hierarchies, undergirded systematic enslavement and subjugation of non-white peoples to advance european capitalism and the industrial revolution. developed alongside and through the demands of colonialism, the term "human" designated a distinction among human beings, not just between humans and animals, such that humanity was something to be achieved (scott, 2004, p. 91). revolutionary aspirations for decolonization thus carried forward the ambition to achieve a full humanity.   at the same time that colonialism was without a doubt a project of dehumanization, as scholars such as david scott (2004) and samera esmeir (2012) have recently demonstrated, discourses of civilization, european technological innovation, and notions of progress also aimed to "humanize" racialized others. a similar tension between humanization and dehumanization can be located in contemporary fantasies tied to the techno-revolution. on the one hand, there is a fear that as technologies become more proximate to humans, inserting themselves into spheres of human activity, the essence of humanity is lost. on the other hand, the fantasy is that as machines take on the sort of work that degrades humans, humans can be freer than ever to pursue their maximum potential. as we postulate, this tension arises because even though the technological revolution claims to be revolutionary precisely because it surpasses human limitations, the figuration of "humanity" following the postof the post-human brings forward a historically universalizing category that writes over an ongoing differential achievement of the status of "the human." to provincialize the human in such versions of (post)humanism, we pick up a set of conversations about technology and the obsolescence of the human, debates that begin with "the human" and its non-human other, and restage them within historical conversations in postcolonial and critical race studies and feminist theory. frantz fanon emphasized the category of the human as a racial epistemological and ontological project that can be remade through revolution in wretched of the earth, his seminal work on the potentiality of decolonial movements. decolonization, fanon (2005) wrote, is "quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species' of men by another ‘species' of men" (p. 35). the revolutionary aspirations tied to decolonization, therefore, are fundamentally about aspirations tied to reimagining who or what is human, and how they come to be so. at stake in the fanonian concept of revolution is the reimagining of the human-thing relation as a precondition for freedom. yet, unlike techno-utopic discourses, which assert that the networking of things frees humans to explore their capacities for creativity to their fullest, in fanonian terms, the colonized "thing" can only become "man" when it frees itself from the shackles of the racial-epidermal and economic schemas of colonial rule (fanon, 2005, p. 40). in this sense, for fanon, the redefinition of man that comes about through decolonization can lead to a crisis in capitalism. as he asserts, in the colonial context wealth is attached to race and not just class (fanon, 2005, p. 40). put otherwise, the accumulation of wealth is predetermined by a global racial schema tied to the dehumanization and dispossession of the colonized "native." the project of humanization is thus fundamentally both about a redistribution of wealth gained through imperial exploitation and about an explosion of the imperial racial paradigm.  importantly, and in contrast to contemporary techno-utopic hopes for the end of capitalism, for fanon, shifts in the capitalist paradigm stem from, rather than bring about, the epistemological and ontological transfiguration of the category of the human. his writing is foundational to what alexander weheliye (2014) has formulated as "the greatest contribution to critical thinking of black studies—and critical ethnic studies more generally …[this is] the transformation of the human into a heuristic model and not an ontological fait accompli" (p. 8). weheliye argues that, given developments in biotechnology and informational media, it is crucial to bring this critical thought to bear upon contemporary reflections on the human. as he writes, "[questions of humanity], which in critical discourses in the humanities and social sciences have relied heavily on concepts of the cyborg and the posthuman, largely do not take into account race as a constitutive category in thinking about the parameters of humanity" (weheliye, 2014, p. 8). sylvia wynter is arguably one of the most important thinkers to do so. while wynter's thinking has been categorized as "counterhumanist," more than simply being in opposition to existing definitions of the human (or, in the terms of modern knowledge, of what wynter has termed "man"), wynter's work is about the unthinking of contemporary epistemologies and ontologies, about their disruption, and about the unmaking of the world in its current descriptive-material guise.4 this makes her theorizing crucial to contemporary debates surrounding the techno-revolution and capitalism, as well as to those interested in wresting a new figure of the human (or, less ambitiously, a new human potentiality) from the epistemological break that follows from this revolution.   wynter (2003) contends with what it might mean to disturb foundational colonial differences upon which global modernity was instituted. while from the renaissance through the 18th century the physical sciences defined man (what wynter calls man1), from the 19th century through the present day it has been the biological sciences that have dominated the representation of man (man2). in this post-enlightenment "cosmology," race became the ground upon which answers to the question of what and who we are were instituted. thus, as darwinian notions of natural selection and race continue to author modern narratives of societal development and evolution, ongoing "archipelagos of otherness," including the jobless, poor, and "underdeveloped," are still undergirded by the colonial color line even if it is articulated in economic rather than explicitly racial terms (wynter, 2003, p. 321). this is because, for wynter, an "economic script … governs our global well-being/ill-being – a script, … whose macro-origin story calcifies the hero figure of homo oeconomicus who practices, indeed normalizes, accumulation in the name of (economic) freedom. capital is thus projected as the indispensable, empirical, and metaphysical source of all human life" (wynter and mckittrick, 2015, p. 10), engendering what gayatri spivak (1988) names the "subject predicated by labor" (p. 252). the post-enlightenment effects of economic domination, which wynter and mckittrick (2015) explain include "both the socially stratified divisions of labor internal to each bourgeois nation state, as well as the transnational macro-divisions of labor that are performatively enacted" by categories of development and underdevelopment in a global mapping of first and third worlds, have only been exacerbated since the end of the cold war (wynter and mckittrick, 2015, p. 42).5 the present thus entails "logically induced technologically automated labor process cum large-scale joblessness by means of large-scale mechanized agriculture cum peasant farmer landlessness and attendant hunger/poverty/anxiety cum increasing drug addiction" (wynter and mckittrick, 2015, p. 42).  wynter's emphasis that capitalism is just one aspect of a larger colonial matrix of power, and that the exploitation of labor is entangled with, if not symmetrical to, the massive appropriation of land, points to some of the limits of current techno-utopic aspirations that technology emancipates humans from labor. in scenarios posited by speculative writing on iot, for instance, posthumanism liberates humanity by ending labor exploitation but mentions nothing of imperial-racial legacies. in contrast, decolonial and critical race scholars such as wynter first ask who or what falls into and out of the category of human, signaling that the human as a shifting and disciplining category continues to be profoundly racialized, and only then poses the question of what sorts of re-descriptions of the human are necessary to conceive of what comes "after man." wynter's call for imagining the human after-man as an ontological problem, like weheliye's argument that posthumanism has failed to address the role of race in the way the parameters of the human are laid down, points to the co-existence of the world of the humanist subject (man) and those other worlds forcibly written upon by colonial practices that continue outside/alongside it. these worlds, according to dipesh chakrabarty (2000), circulate together with but are not commensurate with the post-enlightenment subject and its history, now the history of capitalism. this impasse has been part of the project of decolonial and postcolonial politics, and has been taken up in affiliated scholarship, most notably in south asian and latin american subaltern studies. this scholarship convincingly argues that posthumanism is therefore another false universal brought about by the post-enlightenment subject.  feminist theorists of science and technology studies have similarly critiqued western humanism, and specifically its ideals of freedom and equality, as in fact delimiting the human. in a statement that echoes the work of many critical race studies scholars, rosi bradotti (2013) argues that this delimiting humanism reduces the "sexualized, racialized and naturalized "others" to disposable bodies" (p. 13). emphasizing the influence of colonial legacies and the violence of the holocaust on the anti-humanism of poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist thinkers who have rejected the disciplining function of the category of the human, braidotti argues that it is this scholarship that should provide scaffolding for anti-racist, feminist, and politicized theories of the posthuman that offer "alternative ways for conceptualising the human subject" (p. 37). as a way to postulate an answer to what comes "after man," one approach to posthumanism within feminist science studies has troubled assumptions of the inanimacy of matter and a corresponding lack of agency by inanimate bodies. karen barad (2012), for instance, has theorized the vitality of matter and of life outside the frame of anthropocentrism. she develops a theory of agential realism to argue that "matter is not mere stuff, an inanimate given-ness. rather, matter is substance in its iterative intra-active becoming—not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency. it is morpho-logically active, responsive, generative, and articulate" (barad, 2012, p. 80). theorists such as braidotti and barad offer strategies from within feminist science studies for understanding the limitations of models of technological revolution that effectively recapitulate already existing paradigms of historical change and the subjects and socialities that will result from that change. rather than looking toward a future overthrow of current human relations through technological development, these authors rethink the long history of how we understand human life and its relationship to technology through examining matter as the way to unthink, or denaturalize, the human–object division. this allows each to hold on to the importance of corporeality while working against the assumption of a given subject. when objects are viewed intra-actively (barad, 2012) or as having monistic embodied vitality (braidotti, 2013, p. 56), the centrality of human consciousness can be suspended. these projects self-consciously decenter the particular historical mode of being human that ascended from among others to become "man." provincializing that human subject helps destabilize the "world" that has been written over other worlds that decolonial thinkers such as weheliye and wynter invoke to reveal the limits of posthumanism. the specter of obsolescence and the internet of things  in contrast to feminist and decolonial calls for a redescription of the human after man, expressions of excitement in the us and northwestern europe about the internet of things (iot) produces a version of the posthuman that in fact replicates capitalist and imperial racial and gendered paradigms of value and valuelessness. the iot is a social-technological infrastructure that is designed to largely bypass the need for human oversight and intervention, and yet manage the mundane and reproductive work of daily life. this seemingly neutral and mechanical technological infrastructure that organizes the temporal experience of work and the form of subjectivity through which one must engage that infrastructure effectively materializes assumptions of what constitutes a human, even as it excludes those who are not the intended subject of the posthuman.6 thus race, gender, sexuality and class matter in the constitution of the realm of the technological even as the technological realm promises that the next step in human teleology is the overcoming of the human itself.  jeremy rifkin's zero marginal cost society (2014), the book with which we opened this article, exemplifies the sense of infinite possibility attached to technological objects and smart infrastructures in a moment when it seems impossible to attach such a sense of revolutionary possibility to a political project. of course, this is not to say that the sense of possibility engendered by technological objects is not political (or that such objects do not have a politics). rather, it is that present-day techno-utopic discourses, to which rifkin's work belongs, propose a re-enchantment of a world that depends upon inter-networked techno-objects. this is what david rose, a product designer, entrepreneur, and visiting scholar at mit's media lab, has called "enchanted objects"—smart objects that can intuit human needs, such as an umbrella that lights up when rain is predicted, or a cap for prescription medication bottles that sounds an alarm and sends text messages and emails when one forgets to take one's pills (rose, 2014). rose elicits the fantasy of enchanted objects through a euro-american fictional genealogy including harry potter and lord of the rings that features extraordinary objects like swords that anticipate the enemy. the desire for ordinary objects to be extraordinary can be productively linked to an even longer genealogy that includes european-derived fairy tales and disney's animated films like the sorcerer's apprentice and cinderella, in which ensorcelled wash pails and dust brooms free the apprentice and the orphan from their toils. these fantasies are about emancipation from manual, repetitive, and unimaginative labor by making "the worker" invisible as pails and brooms (or irobot's modern day rumba vacuum cleaner) move on their own. they thus extend the history of the autonomous subject whose freedom is in actuality only possible because of the invisible support labor of servants, slaves, wives and, later, industrial service workers who perform this racialized and gendered labor.7 rose's enchanted objects, which are a part of the iot infrastructure, are about improving the everyday quality of life through smart technology and its interconnectedness with everyday spaces (the home, places of work, etc.). but the very concept of a world that is re-enchanted following the disenchantment brought about by rationalization and secular modernity speaks to the longing for overcoming an entrenched way of being that hinges upon a total reimagining of human-object interactions and interfaces.  such a re-enchantment that seeks to overcome the sense of disappointment in the limitations of bio-economic man embedded in a rational-secular-scientific society also speaks to a seemingly global disenchantment with political projects, such as socialism, that while positing an alternative to capitalist development are also of this disenchanted modernity. in this revolutionary imaginary, human consciousness thus shifts vis-à-vis the magic of objects rather than as a result of political transformations. what rose terms enchantment, thinkers in the field of object-oriented ontology (ooo) theorize in relation to things, which, they argue, in contrast to the anthropocentric view, are not simply the constructs of human cognition. according to ian bogost (2009):  [ooo] puts things at the center of … study.  its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally–plumbers, cotton, bonobos, dvd players, and sandstone, for example. in contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). ooo steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.  (para. 9, emphasis in original) this understanding of things and their interaction (without accounting for what barad [2012] has called intra-action) flattens the field inhabited by things and fails to consider the asymmetries between the categories of objects, animate and inanimate, that are engaged.  an exception is jane bennett's (2010) formulation of vibrant matter. like the work of other ooo philosophers, bennett critiques constructivism as obscuring what she calls "thing power," and therefore moves away from epistemology as a critical site. opposing "the parsing of the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings)," which she describes with jacques ranciere's phrase as a "partition of the sensible," she argues for a form of distributive agency that recognizes material itself as acting as quasi-agents and forces "with trajectories, propensities, and tendencies of their own" (p. viii), thereby suspending "the subject" as a fetish (p. 19). she argues that recognizing "thing power," the potency of matter to self-organize, to exert force upon other matter, and to continue to exist, "sets up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a world where kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular (euro-american, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood" (p. 13). bennet's goal of "raising the status of the materiality of which we are composed" (p. 12) by recognizing all bodies as "sharing distributive agency where bodies, human and non-human, affect one another in deluezian assemblage" (p. 23), could usefully articulate with decolonial projects that unthink the human of posthumanist theory and expand it to include states of non-subject being.  techno-utopics surrounding big data, smart objects, and internetworking of humans and machines, however, do not dwell in the vitality of matter, but rather propose the thing as a surrogate human. in this way, they replicate the violent neoliberal impetus to enfold difference into sameness—into a shared space and time. like ooo, techno-utopic fantasies conceive of a re-enchanted world made magic through a technology that works to bypass human thought and labor, as well as the historical, economic, and imperial legacies that create categories of objects and people as needed, desired, valuable or disposable. this is an enchantment that expunges the racial and gendered status of "object" within global infrastructures. enchanting the object thus removes the possibility of recognizing the racialized and gendered scaffolding of advanced capitalism and of an attendant anti-racist politics. therefore, even as thinkers like rose and rifkin attempt to outline how the smart infrastructure will disrupt existing capitalist relations of production, their jump into the unimaginable (beyond homo-economicus) remains anchored in post-enlightenment human/non-human epistemology, primarily because of the global-racial mapping out of which emerges the "smart infrastructure" of the human-thing network.   the replaceability of human labor with the surrogate human as enchanted object is contextualized by capitalist development in the global north, in which the specter of unemployment is only attached to those populations not already marked for elimination or surplus. the condition of surplus being, or of the production of the obsolete, is always racialized (hong, 2011). this is true even if, and precisely because, techno-revolutionary fantasies of the 21st century congeal around a dehistoricized imaginary of emancipation and free labor. in his 1930 essay "economic possibilities for our grandchildren," for instance, the economist john maynard keynes coined the term "technological unemployment" to describe the process by which machines replace the need for human labor in industrialized societies. sue halpern (2015) explains: "at the time, keynes considered technical unemployment a transitory condition, 'a temporary phase of maladjustment' brought on by 'our discovery of means of economizing the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour'" (para. 3). yet the ways in which the socio-economic scaffolding of empire enabled imaginaries of surplus or obsolete humanity to begin with is crucial for understanding the dystopic fears surrounding the surplusing of modern man himself.8  we might think of this as the longer historical context for stephen hawking's publically expressed fear that ai will be the end of the human species (cellan-jones, 2014). halpern (2014) writes of this as the "creepiness" inherent in an iot: "as human behavior is tracked and merchandized on a massive scale, the internet of things creates the perfect conditions to bolster and expand the surveillance state. in the world of the internet of things, your car, your heating system, your refrigerator, your fitness apps, your credit card, your television set, your window shades, your scale, your medications, your camera, your heart rate monitor, your electric toothbrush, and your washing machine—to say nothing of your phone—generate a continuous stream of data that resides largely out of reach of the individual but not of those willing to pay for it or in other ways commandeer it" (para. 22). "creepiness" can here be most explicitly understood as marking the unprecedented centralization of information available for state and corporate surveillance. at the same time, and perhaps only implicit in this passage, the eeriness surrounding data-ization and mechanization of modern man indicates the potential obsolescence of the human as we know it because the human mind need not itself think/act upon bodily and everyday needs (this is the end of the cartesian thinking/being paradigm). instead, machines—surrogate humans or "enchanted objects"—do the thinking (as that which signifies humanity becomes infinitely reproducible and consumable).  in contrast, in techno-utopic perspectives such as rifkin's in zero marginal cost society, the inter-networking of humans and things—physically and affectively—renders only human labor obsolete, rather than the human itself. rifkin, as the office of jeremy rifkin notes, is a u.s. economic and social theorist who has written over twenty books since the 1970s on the environment, energy, the economy, and technology, and who has advised numerous world leaders in europe and is "the principle architect of the european union's third industrial revolution long-term economic sustainability plan to address the triple challenge of the global economic crisis, energy security, and climate change" (n.d., para. 4). it is from this stance that he builds on his prior interests in political-economic alternatives to posit that technological innovation can bring about a zero marginal cost society and an end to capitalism. although this argument is ostensibly about technology as the condition of possibility for freedom, rifkin glosses over the question of how economic, social, and human obsolescence has been figured through a racial-imperial episteme. this elision is most evident in the way in which he distinguishes two categories or species of "man" produced within the iot: there are the makers, and there are those who are replaceable by self-replicating machines, such as 3d printers. with regard to the former, rifkin contends that the makers movement is nothing less than the early embodiment of the new human consciousness. he cites the creation of fab lab in 2005 at mit, an outreach project that uses open-source software to allow anyone to create their own 3d printed objects, thus creating prosumers (producers and consumers) (rifkin, 2014, p. 89).9 the now 70 fab labs, though primarily in the industrialized urban north, have also made their way to the global south, where they enable simple tools and objects to be created in order to advance economic welfare (p. 94). purportedly emanating from "world class universities and global companies," rifkin calls this multi-sited space the "people's lab" as it has made its way to non-elite neighborhoods. in this frame, 3d printing is understood to be revolutionary because of its potential to democratize the means of production. equally as important, rifkin highlights that the cost of making thousands of products is no more than the cost of making just one. a dream machine, the 3d printer can even make its own parts, rendering it a "self-replicating" machine that costs next to nothing to repair and run (p. 93).   yet rifkin envisions more than just a trickle down benefit of creativity from the urban global north to the global south that can then use these innovations for economic uplift. he also understands technological self-replication and cheapness to lead to a reversal of outsourcing that has been the hallmark of imperial and neoliberal economic practice, which relies on surplus populations that it has itself made surplus. rifkin (2014) writes, "manufacturers that have long relied on cheap labor in their chinese production facilities are bringing production back home with advanced robotics that is cheaper and more efficient than their chinese workforces. at philips's new electronic factory in the netherlands, the 128 robot arms work at such a quick pace that they have to be put behind glass cases so that the handful of supervisors aren't injured. philips's roboticized dutch electronics factory produces the equivalent output of its chinese production facility with one-tenth of the number of workers" (p. 124). that one species of human (the exploitable labor force in former second and third worlds) is being replaced in its function by technological innovation—by things (surrogate humans) in the iot—replicates a sliding scale of humanity established through the development of capitalism in the colonies. in this sense, the use of robots as replacements for degraded workers confirms an already existing bias about what kind of work is dangerous, dull, or dirty, and what kind of workers can be replaced easily by machines that are more accurate and economical (rothstein, 2015, p. xi). terry gou, ceo of foxconn, articulates the racialized condition of replaceability most explicitly. gou, rifkin relates, "joked that he would prefer one million robots [to his one million workers]. 'as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache'" (p. 124). as rifkin elaborates, "china, india, mexico, and other emerging nations are learning quickly that the cheapest workers in the world are not as cheap, efficient, and productive as the information technology, robotics, and artificial intelligence that replace them" (p. 124). the "new human consciousness" that rifkin predicts will emerge through the makers' collaborative commons thus nevertheless reasserts a human-thing hierarchy that is racialized and globalized through the well-worn racial-imperial paradigm (p. 65). yet, despite techno-utopic projections, as we elaborate below, human labor-power continues to be an irreplaceable commodity, highlighting the growing unevenness between racialized, gendered, and ostensibly endlessly exploitable populations who labor in places like china, india, and mexico. while it is worthwhile to point out how neatly rifkin's techno-utopia relies on imperial and neo-imperial imaginaries of surplus labor (as surplus populations), it is equally important to note the need to replace the exact functions of such populations with technology. this is a racial logic of elimination in which the violence happens not through physical extermination (though wynter's argument certainly allows us to understand how the costs of the tech-revolution do also lead to physical extermination). rather, the violence of this fantasy occurs through the desire to subsume the global racial other into the iot's "things" by reducing the "cheapest" of labor-subjects to their mere function within global capitalism.   humans as a service: toward an "artificial artificial intelligence" the collapsing of the human into the thing in iot draws attention to the ways in which the maximizing of life potential through data and making service "automatic" is racial and racializing even as (and precisely because) this process seemingly removes actual laboring human bodies through surrogate technologies. the problem of the automation of "miserable" work is profoundly contradictory. emergent technologies and platforms propose a future free from degraded work, yet the infrastructures of the sharing economy retain the degraded categories of labor formerly done by racialized others. utopic hopes for a human freed from degraded labor thus produce platforms that must actively conceal the fact that other forms of  "miserable" work are still being done by human labor. what we suggest is that the proliferation of discourses, hopes, and fears tied to emergent technologies and technological platforms calls for an engagement with how, as langdon winner (1980) puts it, technologies are "ways of building the world" (p. 128). as he argues, a flexibility that inheres in technologies vanishes "once initial commitments are made" as to how these technologies will order human activity and influence work, consumption, communication, and everyday life (p. 127). following this logic, we move to a discussion of how the categories of race and gender are embedded and embodied (even in their erasures) in the emergent infrastructures of enchanted objects, smart technologies, and the sharing economy. as an example of the movement towards a technologically-enabled (yet still racialized) freedom from labor that retains the modes of abject work claiming to be overcome, we consider alfred club, the 2014 winner of the blog techcrunch's annual competition for tech startups, which was hyped as an innovator in the realm of the emergent tech-driven sharing economy.10 techcrunch touted alfred as innovative because it is "the first service layer on the shared economy that manages your routine across multiple on-demand and local services" (perez, 2014). "alfreds" are individual workers made invisible and interchangeable through the alfred club's platform; however, every aspect of the alfred service advertises the possibility of zero personal interaction between the subscriber, the person who is to act as the butler, or "alfred," and the additional service providers whom "alfred" manages. as the company boasts, "alfred is an automatic, hands-off service that hums along quietly in the background of your life – so you can be free to live yours" (alfred "meet alfred"). the interaction with the most potential for personal contact occurs at the very start of service. when a person signs up for service through the company's website, she is assigned an "alfred." the subscriber receives access to a picture and background check of her designated "alfred" as the primary individual to whom she can then begin to delegate tasks, such as buying groceries, picking up the dry cleaning, and cleaning the house. this is also the person who initially picks up the keys to the subscriber's home, though even this level of interaction can be bypassed if the subscriber chooses to send a picture of her keys so that the company can make a copy of them. indeed, this service platform's primary innovation is the erasure of contact between service workers and subscribers. for instance, the alfred service at times uses some existing on-demand services, such as handy for cleaning and taskrabbit for errands, but with alfred, the subscriber need not be home when the task happens (kessler, 2014). as critics of the app pointed out, what distinguishes alfred from a non-high tech personal servant is the depersonalizing aspect (all "alfreds" share the same name in this sharing economy, as the subscriber need not remember their assigned "alfred's" actual name), and the cost: just $99 per month.   with this emphasis on invisiblizing the service worker, it is possible to read alfred as targeting the customer who would be uncomfortable having a live-in butler, and who, perhaps espousing a liberal ethos, wants to make sure that the "alfreds" are not underpaid or abused. for instance, tech writer sarah kesser describes her concerns as she decided to give the service a try:  am i really so lazy that i can't even lift my thumbs to my own iphone to ask someone else to clean my home or do my laundry? am i contributing to unfair labor practices—like those for which workers recently sued handy—or at the least, to the next startup bubble, by encouraging this startup nesting doll of a service? but alfred has one argument that is hard to deflect: returning to my home after work to find all of my errands completed, without any effort on my behalf, sounds amazing. despite my qualms, when they offer me a pre-launch trial, i'm in.  (kessler, 2014, para. 7)  liberal concerns surrounding labor practices and the exploitation of labor can thus quickly give way to the pleasures and enjoyment of services precisely because alfreds are successful if they completely erase the signs of their presence (one magically finds one's errands are complete upon returning home). invisibility makes it possible to remove (and move beyond) initial concerns about the physical bodies tasked to pick up subscribers' dirty laundry. put otherwise, though alfreds are actual workers, their function within the alfred platform is to act as enchanted objects, their labor invisibilized and invisibilizing of other service providers as they complete the busy professionals' onerous chores necessary to the functioning of adult life (alfred "meet alfred"). its founders, marcella sapone and jess beck, build such an ethos of unseeing dull and dirty work as a precondition for happiness into the very origin story of alfred. according to the alfred website: one fateful night after a long, demanding day at work, [marcella and jess] ran into each other in the laundry room of their apartment building. the overwhelming sentiment? frustration. leisure time shouldn't be a luxury; it should be a right and a reward for working as hard as both of these women did (and still do!) a pact was made: no longer would they let mundane chores control their lives. (alfred "our story," para. 2) the work that alfred makes invisible to the subscriber is work that has always been invisible: women's work. not mentioned in this story is also the long history of black, asian american, and latina women who have historically performed domestic work in white homes (davis, 1983). but like the alfred founders, who are white-collar professionals, "women" and racial others signifying liberal progress within neoliberal multiculturalism  (atanasoski, 2013; melamed, 2011) are now hailed into that category that deserves happiness by relying on someone else's invisible work. the service platform thus both inherits the prior forms of racialized and feminized, intimate labors supporting the nuclear, heteronormative, and white family form and disappears such intimate service obligations (and possible annoyances) from the modern home in a mode consistent with notions of racial and sexual progress. those who enter your home, touch your dirty clothes, and clean up after your "epic parties" know your habits and preferences for baked goods, but you need not see or know them (alfred "faq"). as the origin story of the service elaborates, "since [their initial meeting], marcela and jess have worked tirelessly to create the first ever non-intrusive, recurring, in-home service that virtually everyone can use. with alfred, these innovative women have ensured they personally will always come home happy—and they want the same for you" (alfred "our story," para. 3). this refiguration of human intimacy and intimate spaces is not only haunted by the heterosexual nuclear family and the asymmetries in how the work that has kept this formation functional is differentially valued, but it is also haunted by the imperial-racial production of intimacy as often violent (stoler, 2006). thus, while the race, gender, sexual orientation, or domestic arrangements of the alfred subscribers (which are implicitly diverse) necessitate the reimagining of intimate labors as anonymous workers no longer bound by their racialized or gendered bodies, such service platforms also inherit prior (imperial) imaginaries of happiness and freedom that were relationally consolidated and unevenly distributed.  the alfred service's emphasis on worker invisibility in completing the chores of busy professionals and enabling their happiness, as well as alfred's "innovation" of coordinating among other services in the sharing economy, align alfred with the ethos of disappearing degraded work in the object-centered universe of the internet of things. people ("alfreds") and artifacts in the internet of things could be said to perform a similar function in techno-imaginaries of the sorts of innovations that will maximize human happiness and freedom. according to wired magazine, in the new world of programmable objects that form the internet of things, "we are seeing the dawn of an era when the most mundane items in our lives can talk wirelessly among themselves, performing tasks on command… imagine a factory where every machine, every room, feeds back information to solve problems on the production line" (wasik, 2013, para. 4-5). positioning its platform as part of this techno-future, the co-founder of alfred noted that with her app, "the services in your life know you and they are automatic" (as cited in chang, 2014, para. 7). in contradistinction, as we have emphasized thus far, this future vision profoundly depends on a present in which devalued subjects performing miserable (and historically classed, racialized and gendered) forms of labor are considered replaceable by technology. marx's original critique of capitalism's dehumanizing effect on workers can still be applied to techno-utopic fantasies of a post-capitalist posthuman world: the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society…owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. he becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. (marx & engels, 1969, pp. 98-137)  fantasies of a networked world in which automation, programmability, and data engender unprecedented freedom in fact reproduce, and perhaps even expand, the sphere of devalued labor, transposing categories of abjection from the human into the very infrastructure upon which the techno-utopic future depends.  that multiple alfreds, who are actual workers rendered as "automatic" services, facilitate daily life for privileged subscribers reveals how the disappearance of bodies historically marked as "things" undergirds utopic hopes that the sharing economy and iot will free those positioned as fully human from the pains of mundane labor. in this sense, the sharing economy of programmable "objects" and service platforms that utilize people only to make them invisible (reducing them to their functionality) re-inscribes differential relationships to the category of the human, now mediated through digital networks and informatics. the sharing economy, of course, also references and innovates upon earlier imaginaries that servitude could be mechanized, thus eliminating the need for racialized bodies (whose function within modernity was always already to serve).  these prior imaginaries, however, remained tethered to a humanoid form, thus reiterating a direct relationship between racialized bodies and mechanical servants in ways that contemporary conceptions of automation to do not. for instance, writing about the history of humanoid robots, despina kakoudaki has argued that "the fantasy of the robotic servant, worker, or slave promises that if enslavement of real people can no longer be tolerated in the modern world then mechanical people may be designed to take their place, and their labor will deliver the comforts of a laborless world for the rest of us" (kakoudaki, 2014, pp. 116). throughout the 20th century, robots have been associated with industrial labor and mechanized production rather than with art or innovation. robot masses have thus embodied "a form of abjection that is total and absolute, a state of preconsciousness in which neither the gestures of emancipation nor those of revolt are available" (p. 133). the total submission of the robot to the human as the robot-slave enables a formulation of human freedom from labor without submitting the human to the machine. moreover, the robot worker, who replaces the slave in the 20th century, is one who can never come to political consciousness or question the economic or political system within which it toils. the robot-worker is in a perpetual state of false consciousness, unable to rebel, go on strike, or unionize because robots are supposed to "have no fantasies about their social position" (kakoudaki, 2014, p. 135-136).  what is revolutionary about dreams of revolutionizing labor through technology thus seems to be the impossibility of a social or political revolution because technology lacks political consciousness. this is precisely the reason that techno-dystopic imaginaries revolve around the reversal of normative presumptions about the social need for a totally abject and submissive workforce. as kakoudaki explains, cultural fears that those enslaved as objects will rebel—even when they aren't supposed to—abound, evident in texts such as karel čapek's 1920 science fiction play rossum's universal robots (r.u.r) and the television series battlestar galactica. these fears, particularly in the 20th century, are tied not to actual robots, but rather to the human condition within industrial capitalism and a world ideologically divided between different models of work and governance, such as capitalism and communism. moreover, "the fantasy of a laborless world and the desire for mechanical slaves who would never rebel or have needs are the flip side of a more personal nightmare, in which people become fully absorbed into an automatic world that does not permit desires or needs. … in addition to the fear of becoming automatic, or mechanical, we have the fear of being enslaved, the fear of being a tool, the fear of being an object, the fear of being inanimate. … the imagery alludes to being engulfed" (kakaoudaki, 2014, p. 145). kakoudaki insists that sociocultural paranoia surrounding exploitation, servitude, and enslavement projected upon humanoid robots be separated from other automated solutions because "robots perform direct and personified actions that retain a connection to how humans might perform the same labor" (p. 118). she thus concludes that there is a direct representational relationship between the racial histories of human chattel slavery and the robot's "potential for racial or ethnic representation [that] comes from its objecthood. … robots are designed to be servants, workers, or slaves" since their "ontological state maps perfectly with a political state" (p. 117). yet this formulation raises several questions. for instance, what is the difference between the fear of engulfment into an industrialized world of factory production and labor, and the fear of engulfment into an internet of things, exemplified by a different conception of "automated" solutions like alfred? moreover, if earlier imaginaries of robot functionality are fundamentally about the need for unfree labor (that is, according to kakoudaki, the robot is a mechanized slave), then what is the relationship between states of free and unfree labor in a postindustrial economy? as a hyperactive medium of free labor adding social value within late capitalism, the internet, which has given rise to the sharing economy and imaginaries of servitude that are quite different from that of humanoid robots, necessitates an investigation of how racialized and gendered imaginaries of freedom and/as labor have shifted, as well as what the implications of such shifts might be (terranova, 2004, p. 73). for instance, late capitalism does not just appropriate creative/unalienated labor, but rather nurtures, sustains, and exhausts it (terranova, 2004, p. 94). in fact the "free" quality of those excess productive activities that internet users undertake with pleasure yet are mined for value, such as clicking "like" on a facebook page, or clicking on advertisements linked to browsing activities, "puts the desire for creative work into tension with the information economy's demand for knowledge as added value (p. 77). while shifting the relationship between producer and consumer, according to terranova (2004) the commodity nevertheless does not fully disappear in this arrangement. instead, it becomes "more transparent" as it showcases "the labour of the designers and programmers," with continually changing content that draws users back (p. 90). this conception of transparency, however, doesn't allow for an analysis of non-innovative human labor, or service labor such as that organized through the alfred service, as a commodity within the digital economy. instead, the transparency of service workers as commodities managed through platforms like alfred resides in their organization as those who quite literally are meant to go unseen by consumers. this analysis points to the need to frame contemporary discussions of the digital economy and late capitalism as not clean breaks from, but rather outgrowths of, liberal systems of rule and earlier moments in which free wage labor was made productive. indeed, the category of free labor doesn't newly emerge as important in the late capitalist digital economy. as lisa lowe (2015) has argued, free wage labor and liberal notions of freedom were innovations of imperial rule. ambitions of colonial states not to suppress but to rule rendered the need for emancipation from slavery, the institution of free wage labor (even as indentured or coolie labor), and free trade – three pillars of imperial liberal governmentality. the disappearance and subsumption of human bodies and their reemergence in and through the informational milieu as transparent commodities can thus be understood as racialized not in the sense that only black, brown, or asian bodies perform the degraded tasks; rather, the transparency of the commodity as dull or dirty labor is racialized in the ways in which it affirms a particular notion of human freedom, leisure, and happiness emerging from imperial modes of liberal governance. the disappearances necessary in the production of the transparent commodity might be considered as being at the core of artificial intelligence function within networked spacetime, as our next example, amazon mechanical turk (amt) demonstrates.  the amt internet marketplace is a platform where employers can post "human intelligence tasks" with a price for each task. for this third-party service, amazon takes a percentage from the employer. when a huge amount of data needs to be organized into culturally legible categories, say, classifying pornographic images or linking items for the "similar products" function on retail sites like amazon, this work is sourced task by task to a global pool of workers, and performed as micro-tasks. a form of crowdsourcing, amazon mechanical turk provides what jeff bezos, amazon ceo, calls "humans-as-a-service" (irani 2015; irani & silberman, 2013).  as the amazon logo jokes, the platform is "artificial artificial intelligence," replicating the imagined speed of digital processors by giving employers access to an enormous pool of temporary workers for high-data tasks when there isn't time to develop appropriate algorithms to do the job. data-scrubbing labor, or “commercial content moderation," which allows for image filters in social media sites like facebook and search engines like google to maintain community standards of acceptable content, offers another example of a growing site of the low-paid and miserable work of producing the timely and sanitized digital experience our sensorium and consciousness have been cultivated to expect and demand. this work is sourced through intermediary firms like taskus to business process outsourcing units in the philippines (chen, 2014).11 digital service-based companies like amazon show how digital platforms engender new relations between human labor, space (where people who perform needed tasks are located and how they can be located by those who need their services), and finally the product itself (the service, and the “human-as-service"). the experience of digitized, near-instant delivery that is part of amazon's basic warehousing strategy, essential to its commercial success and as innovative as sam walton's walmart infrastructure was for brick-and-mortar commodity sales, relies on subjecting warehouse stock workers to dehumanizing work shifts and physical demands for speed and endurance required to move products fast enough to achieve same-day and next-day delivery. this is an example evocative of the mechanical turk crowdsourcing platform and commercial content moderation employed by facebook and google, and it can be productively put in tension with techno-utopic aspirations about the projected obsolescence of human labor in the post-industrial economies of the post-cold war world. what the excitement about platforms like amt and alfred point to is the urgent need to theorize technological fantasies as doing something more than projecting prior racial-imperial formations onto modes of mechanization, such as humanoid robots, that are readily legible because of their humanoid form yet non-human ontology. yet, as we have emphasized, underscoring the legacies of racialized and gendered work for contemporary imaginaries of freedom from work points to how contemporary platforms also engender a different time-space that virtualizes the racialized and gendered materiality of service work through a dynamics of connectivity and the ideals of the sharing economy. these are liberal fantasies that seek to include racialized and gendered bodies into freedom (women are now professionals, 3d printing can help the global south) while invisibilizing the racialized and gendered architectures of their revolutionary claims to remaking the human. towards a feminist critical race (post)humanism sidestepping the centrality of racial thinking in the production of a sliding scale of humanity in enlightenment and post-enlightenment thought delimits contemporary considerations of how the revolution in infrastructures and global networks frees humanity from the shackles of prior economic paradigms. these considerations reassert the primacy of “western man" even as they herald the decentering of the human. in contemporary posthumanist techno-utopic imaginaries that conceive of enchanted objects, invisible butlers, and “artificial artificial intelligence," the space and time of the posthuman “reinscribe the humanist subject (man) as the personification of the human by insisting that this is the category to be overcome, rarely considering the cultural and political formations outside the world of man that might offer alternative versions of humanity" (weheliye, 2014, pp. 9-10). perhaps, then, the reasons that decolonial and critical race perspectives on unthinking the human as a category of modernity are not read in conversation with theories of the posthuman have to do with the fact that thinkers like fanon are categorized as fundamentally humanist. in short, they are understood to cling to firm hopes for the human, even as they propose alternate visions of what this human might be. but at they same time, decolonial thinkers like fanon are also posthumanist thinkers—if we remember that the category of the “human" has been dominated by post-enlightenment scientific (biological and economic) thought. put differently, the monopolization of the category of the human has made it nearly impossible to conceive the human outside of enlightenment scientific paradigms—and this is precisely the project of decolonial critical race and feminist thinkers. in the words of sylvia wynter (2003), this is a project that is about postulating what comes “after man" (pp. 257-337).  the “truth" of humans as fundamentally biological organisms arose out of the secular post-darwinian re-naturalization of the human as inherently differentiated by race and sex. this form of the human sets the stage for ongoing differentiation of the productive function of humans, non-humans, and objects. the historical production of the biological as the platform of humanity corresponds to the fantasy of human obsolescence in the form of the valorizing of artificial intelligence and artifacts. in object oriented ontology, where analysis is developed by putting “things at the center of being, … pondering their nature and relations with one another as much as with ourselves," (bogost, 2012, p. 6) and even in the more human-referencing notion of enchanted objects that intuit human needs, the human is abstracted when de-centered. in contrast, the posthuman turn in feminist science and technology studies scholarship retains a commitment to redressing the masculinist bias in the politics of knowledge production, even as it moves away from the limits of representational categories of gender and sexuality. such categories have served and continue to serve important political functions in the history of feminist praxis.  if the predominant fantasies of systemic social change in mainstream euro-american public discourse dwell upon the techno-utopics of a world in which all of those who are already human and already subjects ascend into the realm of those whose lives are supported by (de)human-technological infrastructures of service, then how do we think about the relationship of new technologies to possible fields of political protest or action? how can such a conception of the political maintain the urgency of thinking “after-man" with wynter while at the same time supporting humanistic inquiry into the politics of imaginaries of the human, of autonomy and freedom, and of the history of the subject, with all of its contingent dehumanizing and devastation along hierarchical vectors of othering? dominant techno-utopic imaginaries direct funds and structure engineering research labs around the world, and therefore also impact the distribution of differential conditions of comfort versus misery in the postsocialist present. these conditions are distributed between the realm of humans as a service and the human-machine infrastructure that supports the aspirational realm of labor-free creative existence, and they bring forward histories of racialized conditions of labor, free and unfree, visible and invisible. one component of such fantasies, as kakoudaki (2014) points out, is the very impossibility of political revolution, because techno-objects lack political consciousness.  we conclude with a question: what role does consciousness have in revolution and political action in the postsocialist present? the turn to the posthuman in critical race and gender studies intentionally, and in the case of feminist posthumanism, perhaps unintentionally, invoke decolonial revolutionary philosophies of the end of the post-enlightenment subject as a revolutionary project. from the perspective of this mode of revolutionary thought, the assumption of “consciousness," and particularly the proletarian consciousness brought about for workers by the very material conditions of capitalist production, is an obstacle to understanding political action in contexts such as the dehumanization enacted through technologies like alfred and amt. from this perspective, “post-socialism" does not mark the end of historical change, but rather a global condition provincializing the subject of history established by hegel, the post-enlightenment subject/human that moves history forward through man's progress toward the consciousness of freedom (hegel, 1953), the very mode of revolution proposed by franz fanon in 1961.  notes 1 on the relationship of reproducible, replaceable labor and the concentration of creativity in certain (racialized) categories of the human, see vora (2015).  2 as david scott (2014) argues, an association between political action and tragedy demarcates postcolonial and postsocialist imaginaries because possible emancipatory futures have been stalled. 3 lisa nakamura (2010) suggests that the interface of the internet imposes a white, straight male consciousness as a filter on users that must be actively resisted to create alternative digital cultures online. 4 on wynter as a counterhumanist, see wynter and mckittrick (2015, p. 11). 5 as wynter and mckittrick (2015) elaborate, “this is understood with respect to the surplus quantity of these costs, specifically the costs of the single-model free-market competitive capitalist economy in its now, post-1989, homogenizing, transnational/transreligious and /or transcultural, techno-automated cum mechanized agriculture form" (p. 43). 6 for example, computerized factory production and call center work managed by dialing software promote what donald winiecki (2007) calls a “machinic subjectivity." 7 see the discussion of janet jakobsen's critique of the autonomous subject and how technologies can extend such historical relations of support in vora (2015); see also jakobsen (2012, p. 25). 8 for example, thomas malthus's lectures and essays on population while a professor at the east india company college in england promulgated the idea that india had a surplus of reproductivity, and that this reproductivity could be a source of material wealth for colonizers. the discourse of race and india, and particularly of indian workers as numerous, easily replaceable, and best-suited for reproduction, becomes transformed in different settings of labor, but malthus's argument for the need to manage india's reproductivity and harness it for profitable production is sedimented into the industries that transmit vital energy from india's workers to its consumers.  see vora (2015, p. 9). 9 with 3d printing, open source software “directs molten plastic, molten metal, or other feedstocks inside a printer to build up a physical product layer by layer, creating a fully formed object" that comes out of the printer (rifkin, 2014, p. 89). 10 thanks to erin mcelroy for pointing us to the story of the alfred app.  11 in an article on the work of commercial content moderation, adrian chen (2014) writes, “many companies employ a two-tiered moderation system, where the most basic moderation is outsourced abroad while more complex screening, which requires greater cultural familiarity, is done domestically. us-based moderators are much better compensated than their overseas counterparts: a brand-new american moderator for a large tech company in the us can make more in an hour than a veteran filipino moderator makes in a day. but then a career in the outsourcing industry is something many young filipinos aspire to, whereas american moderators often fall into the job as a last 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(2015). life support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press.  wasik, b. (2013, may 14). in the programmable world, all our objects will act as one. wired. retrieved at http://www.wired.com/2013/05/internet-of-things-2/all/ weheliye, a. (2014). habeas viscus: racializing assemblages,  biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. durham, nc: duke university press. winiecki, d. j. (2007). subjects, subjectivity, and subjectification in call center work. journal of contemporary ethnography, 36(4), 351-377. winner, l. (1980). do artifacts have a politics? daedalus,109(1), 121-136. wynter, s., & mckittrick, k. (2015). unparalleled catastrophe for our species? or, to give humanness a different future: conversations. in k. mckittrick (ed.), sylvia wynter: on being human as praxis (pp. 9-89). durham, nc: duke university press. wynter, s. (2003). unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument. cr: the new centennial review, 3(3), 257-337. bios neda atanasoski is associate professor of feminist studies and critical race and ethnic studies at uc santa cruz. she is the author of humanitarian violence: the u.s. deployment of diversity (university of minnesota press, 2013). kalindi vora is assistant professor of ethnic studies and affiliate faculty of the science studies and critical gender studies programs at uc san diego. her book, life support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor (2015), examines domestic work, customer care, and the commodification of human organs, gestational surrogacy and knowledge work as representing a global economy of vitality that relies on affective and biological labor of feminized workers.  microsoft word 243-1519-1_irani.docx irani, l. (2018). “design thinking”: defending silicon valley at the apex of global labor hierarchies catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-19. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © lilly irani 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical perspectives “design thinking”: defending silicon valley at the apex of global labor hierarchies lilly irani uc san diego lirani@ucsd.edu abstract this paper examines the emergence of “design thinking” as a form of technical expertise. it demonstrates that “design thinking” articulates a racialized understanding of labor, judgment, and the subject, emerging as a defense of north american design in the face of global competition from asia. as design workers in asia begin competing with north american designers, north american design consultancies articulate and stabilize design thinking, i argue, as a way of defending north american design at the apex of global hierarchies of labor and creativity. i take creativity, design, and technology as contested and valorized social categories that emerge out of globally distributed labor processes geared toward developing new products, markets, and vehicles for financial investment. 2 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) introduction science studies scholars have shown how what counts as “technological” creativity – both in cultural practice and in sts analytics – is shaped by histories of race, colonialism, and gender (fouché 2006; philip 2006; oldenziel 1999). these scholars show how contests over what counts as properly technological or inventive has also been a contest to rearticulate and defend racialized hierarchies. fouché (2006), for example, shows how patent officials deemed black invention a product of accident or laziness rather than intention and intelligence (p. 647). oldenziel (1999) shows how north american and european anxieties about white racial superiority shaped what counts as “technology” – bridges and machines, but not textiles, pottery, and mud architecture. the social category “technology” excluded the creative practices deprioritized by industrial-era capitalists and european colonial powers; machines took priority as marks of modernity over both north american agriculturalists' work and the work of weavers in the colonies. i draw on historical and ethnographic research to track the racialized dynamics of labor competition and expertise performance that generated “design thinking” beyond public view. the data and interviews informing this paper are drawn from ethnographic research i conducted at design firms in india but spanning silicon valley and european cities for fourteen months between 2009 and 2014. “design thinking” as expertise i want to start with the claim that “design thinking” is a form of expertise. though design and planning theorists had used the term “design thinking” for decades (dorst 2011), pedagogical programs in design thinking have exploded in the last decade. students can take courses in “design thinking” ─ a mix of brainstorming, prototyping, cultural observation, and teamwork skills – at stanford, harvard, mit, university of virginia, and countless other institutions. notably, it is not only 3 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) engineering schools that have developed courses in design thinking, but also business schools. “design thinking” is a term popularized in palo alto by the design firm ideo and stanford university through forums like ted, businessweek, and harvard business review. in those forums, it stands for a critique of rationalistic, impersonal, and quantitative forms of corporate knowing (see, for example, euchner 2012). in place of design’s emphasis on specifying product form and mechanism, design thinking teaches corporate workers to tell stories about the lives of potential customers and imagine different futures for them. design thinking also represents an expansion of the meaning of design. industrial designers and, later, interaction designers, have long given form to everyday objects around us ─ office furniture, the computer mouse, or the form of the computer laptop are just some of the product forms to which ideo lays claim. with the shift from product design to "design thinking," however, elite institutions like stanford, harvard, and mit emphasize an approach to design as market strategy over the craft skills of model making, typography, and mechanism design. in their place, design thinking focuses on the identification of market opportunities and broad product strategy informed by applied ethnographic research and design experiments. design thinking is the promise that methods ─ “ideation,” prototyping, and iterating ─ can locate opportunities where there seem to be none. images of ideo at work show engineers, marketers, and business people cheerfully organizing post-it notes with ideas written on them, mining the communicational unconscious activated through their collaboration for "the next big thing." champions of design thinking train corporate employees, educators, and even government actors to combine their professional understandings of their work with empathy for those whom they seek to sell to, educate, or discipline. this form of expertise is institutionalized in professional education programs. design thinking promises to make innovation continuous and replicable. it is encoded in workbooks and guides published by ideo, as 4 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) well as universities. but this form of expertise only emerged in the mid2000s. its emergence was as much about global production and labor flows as it was about epistemology. the view from the machine shop: from “mechanical” to “mystical” my relationship to this professional shift was as a practicing software designer in the mid-2000s at a large silicon valley tech company. friends and colleagues had graduated from stanford with degrees in mechanical engineering, specializing in the design of devices, circuits, and algorithms. they found employment at ideo but found themselves working more as management consultants than product designers. they described a shift within the global design firm in the mid-2000s: the firm de-emphasized the design of things. within the company, employees referred to this shift as ideo 2.0. figure 1. visitors from chile tour ideo’s machine shops. photo credit: carlos osorio it was difficult to find ideo employees who would speak on these matters to an inquiring researcher. to understand why ideo had shifted from products to corporate strategy, i had to go to the machine shop. john and rick ─ these are not their real names ─ had each spent a 5 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) decade lathing, grinding, and 3d printing prototypes for product designers at ideo. over that decade, the shop had adapted its role along with new technologies. as industrial designers shifted from sketches to computer aided design, for example, the shop shifted from producing models in foam and metal to 3d printed materials. more than technological change, john and rick identified shifts in the global competitive landscape with a shift in company priorities toward “design thinking.”1 with these shifts, they explained, the machine shop staff shrank from twenty-six people to only six. in the 1990s, american companies designed products in the united states and then outsourced the manufacture of those products to somewhere with hospitable laws and cheapened labor ─ think china (bina 2012; enloe 2004:60). beginning in the early 2000s, john explained, the design order began to shift. chinese manufacturers began to offer design services for the products they were going to make. “ideo started to feel the pressure of not being able to charge the rates [for product design] they wanted to charge.” rick cut in, recounting tales of chinese business managers touring ideo's facilities to take notes on how ideo organized the design process. “quite frankly,” he said, “ideo got ripped off. but that’s what happens when you’re successful.” i thought of how silicon valley heroes steve jobs and bill gates had toured xerox parc and found there a model to appropriate for windows and mac windowing operating systems.1 i said nothing. ideo, john explained, was no longer able to command high rates for engineering-oriented projects in the face of competition from chinese designers. “they started saying, ‘okay, now what do we do?’ where was there still opportunity to charge rates? they saw mckinsey and some of those other [management consulting firms] making money…for strategy or report kinds of things.” john described ideo’s shift from specifying manufacturable things ─ designs ─ to consulting with executive-level decision makers. rick cut in to sum it up: “there’s been a shift to less mechanical and to more 6 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) mystical.” john and rick had left to start their own machine shop that produced rapid prototypes for the valley’s engineers. what john described as ideo’s shift to the “mystical” was ideo’s shift to “design thinking” as an expanded approach to the specification of market opportunities more than things. they called this service offering “phase 0” and posed it as a complement to “left-brain” management consulting approaches focused on supply chains, pricing, and firm structure (edmonson 2013). configuring a new nexus of labor and belonging globalization policies threatened ideo’s claim on designs by opening them up to competition from chinese designers. globalization, more broadly, threatened the ideology that positioned american workers as engines of global, corporate wealth. the book a whole new mind by daniel pink was published in 2006, around the same time as ideo was shrinking its machine shops and moving to the mystical. pink was also the author of freelance nation and a speechwriter for vice president al gore. 2006 was also a time when public anxieties about outsourcing reached yet another fever pitch in the united states. in the wake of manufacturing outsourcing in the 1970s and 1980s, us policymakers had pointed to in-person service work and “symbolic analyst” work as where americans could still outcompete other, globally dispersed workers (reich 1991). the growth of the internet, however, had opened american workers up to competition in programming and call center work as well. pink’s book a whole new mind was one example of a book that stepped in to repair the ideological rupture. it argued for a new source of american distinction and economic prowess: the creative industries. 7 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) figure 2. daniel pink’s book a whole new mind: why right-brainers will rule the future depicts a brain containing both binary code and music notes. a blurb by business writer tom peters on the cover declares, “this book is a miracle. completely original and profound.” the book argued that three factors threw up a competitive crisis for american symbolic analysts: “asia,” “abundance,” and “automation.” i will argue that each of these factors in fact figured asia as a problematic epistemic site. in pink’s writings, “asia” meant a massive, skilled labor pool that could take on “routine” left-brain, logical work ─ financial analysis, radiology, and computer programming ─ for lower wages than americans performing the same work. “abundance” meant an oversupply of consumer products, fueled by global factories usually located in asia. pink argued that oversupply, rewritten as almost a divine gift of plenty, was not a problem of capitalism. nowhere were there questions of environmental devastation or the construction of needs. rather, it was a problem of "curation." pink called for a new kind of worker who could make emotionally and socially 8 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) meaningful products that stood out in a crowded marketplace. if us workers were not manufacturing, they could step in as designers, curators, and those with aesthetic judgment and cultural sense. implicit in this argument was that workers in the factories elsewhere in the world could not provide such judgment. pink also warned that “automation” would eventually replace routine, left brain work ─ the kind of work asian workers now took on in the global economy ─ with machines (pink 2006). claims about automation are frequently claims about kinds of people. historian of science simon schaffer analyzes debates about automata, including the original mechanical turk, that people witnessed playing chess in public spaces during the late 1700s (1999). schaffer argues that debates about bodily, mental, and social mechanisms were debates about free will’s proper relation to emerging industrial capitalism (1999, p.126). enlightenment philosophers understood themselves as those who could stand apart and understand the mechanical principles of nature, bodies, and society. workers and artisans, in their philosophy, were like machines ─ devoid of sentiment or formal reason ─ to be understood and be managed (1999, pp. 126-130). with the industrial revolution, popular culture often represented women and children working in textile mills as machine-like workers, capable of the repetitive action; the yarn spinning device spinning jenny famously linked femininity to the machine (1999, p. 21). this vision of the machine ─ as in people, as in things ─ generated new visions of the properly human and less than human. sometimes, these visions emerge in the anxiety to differentiate the human from the merely mechanical. for example, gestalt psychologists grappling with emerging models of computational intelligence argued that the human mind could not be a deterministic machine, or even a feedback learning mechanism. they articulated “insight” as the capacity to find solutions not through trial and error, nor mechanical process, but as a perceptual shift (bates 2007, p.344). other times, imaginaries of automation illustrate technologists' imaginaries of what it is to live, 9 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) interact (suchman 2006; helmreich 2000), and labor (atanasoski & vora 2015). observing the same moment in which pink writes, lisa nakamura shows how world of warcraft machinima-makers produce racist representations of chinese players as “goldfarmers” indistinguishable from automated bots (2009, p.138). we might also think about the us geek quip, “go away or i will replace you with a small shell script” ─ once printed on thinkgeek t-shirts ─ as symptomatic of how certain programmer subcultures orient toward and wish for distance from the labor of those they find inconvenient.1 when pink cites asia and automation as threats to proper americans, then, we might ask how al gore’s speechwriter defines the proper american in contradistinction to those already conflated others. like enlightenment philosophers who must fashion a unique position for themselves by rendering some people and practices mechanical, pink calls on readers to become “high touch, high concept” workers ─ workers who create spiritually meaningful, standout products through art, narrative, and design. he builds on decades of management concessions to artistically expressive workers (boltanski & chiapello, 2005), and gives a nod to feminist critiques of abstract logic as a masculinist value (turkle & papert 1990, pp. 129-132). pink advised readers seeking to thrive in this brave new world to develop right-brain capabilities that generate value through culture, spirituality, and beauty. pink outlined “six senses” for “the conceptual age:” the first sense was design. pink then offered readers advice on how to become more design minded, including: keep a small, good looking notebook to inscribe inspirations, observations, and annoyances; read i-d, metropolis, o, the oprah magazine, and real simple; follow karim rashid’s manifesto and resist skill specialization. pink named design as part of his “conceptual age.” this conceptual age rested on the labors of industrial and mass labor arrangements that produced the abundant reproductions of the designers’ will (forty, 1986). the designer’s most important habitation would be one of conceptual production, and spiritual and personal integration as a means of value creation. 10 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) figure 3. a diagram from pink’s a whole new mind depicts temporal eras that begin with the “agriculture age” of farmers and move through “industrial age (factory workers)”, “information age (knowledge workers),” and “conceptual age (creators and empathizers).” each era moves higher along an axis that collapses “affluence, technology, and globalization” into a single mathematical identity. figure 4. an illustration from pink’s a whole new mind, complementing the diagram in figure 4, depicts a progression of humans from ape to farmer to welder to manager to artist. pink’s ideas expressed a broader public understanding of the proper place of the us in a global economic order shaped by intellectual property law, as well as the opening up of markets in eastern europe and asia as sources of labor and as potential consumer bases. american brands and patents ─ the stuff of the right-brained mind ─ could 11 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) become central to economic success while the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) jobs celebrated during the space race now seemed more outsourceable. what is asia here? this moment of the “conceptual age” was precisely the moment when us trade negotiators were pulling asian nation-states into alignment with stronger intellectual property laws. the “conceptual age” glossed the ways that intellectual property regimes regulated the difference between good and bad creativity, and good and bad creators. historian kavita philip shows how liberal intellectual property critics like lawrence lessig cast asians as criminal pirates who “do nothing but take other people’s copyrighted content, copy it, and sell it” (lessig 2004, quoted in philip 2006, p.212). lessig is best known for developing creative commons licenses that sustain “remix culture” ─ creativity that avowedly draws on the labor of others without breaching the law. pink might have even called this curating. in free culture, a book published the same year as pink’s, lessig initially identified piracy with asia and eastern europe ─ post-socialist regions with different ethics of production and access. philip notes that free culture quickly drops reference to eastern europe and designates piracy as asian (2006. p.212). this racialization as uncreative pirates echoed depictions of chinese “goldfarmers,” incapable of play or aesthetic expression, in world of warcraft (2009). the trade agreements and international divisions of labor in pink’s “conceptual age” cast asians as mathematical, unaesthetic, rule-oriented producers. anxious north american publics recast these not as properties of jobs produced by labor processes and ip restrictions, but as properties of racialized people. conclusion: guarding “creative” difference in a global economy 12 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) figure 5. a t-shirt from stanford’s design journal depicts a torn piece of paper and a black permanent marker, iconic of design and innovation work cultures (irani et al. 2010). the shirt, in kraft paper brown, declares “math is easy. design is hard.” photo credit: author it was in this moment ─ 2005 to be exact ─ that a group of students at stanford university launched a design journal called ambidextrous. many were mechanical engineering and computer science students who wanted to think with both the left brain and the right brain, science and culture. their publication built community around the then new stanford d.school, or design school project that teaches design thinking around the world. as a recent graduate of the computer science department, i worked as an editor for the journal. the editor created a tshirt for the magazine made of brown cloth, signifying a relationship to kraft paper and hastily brainstormed design drawings. on the chest was the image of a torn sheet of white paper, a sharpie-style marker, and a declaration: “math is easy. design is hard.” the torn paper and sharpie indicated an ethos of creativity and innovation ─ fast thought, direct speech, working with the materials that are around. sharpies and paper are the material culture of schematic drawings, but also brainstorms ─ the labor of ideas produced at a fast clip, fluent collaboration with other emotionally intelligent team players. this shirt expresses economic anxieties in the face of the global reorganization of 13 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) labor. math, a skill valorized during the cold war “space race” (wissehr 2011), no longer promised us dominance. the declaration that “math is easy” naturalizes mathematical skill at precisely the moment when indian and chinese workers become available as a labor pool to perform that kind of work in globally networked capitalism. us “model minority” stereotypes about “asian math genes” (ng et al. 2016) become rough and ready tools for people making sense of changes in the geographies of production. instead of asking why capitalist dynamics attempt to make even skilled labor as cheap as possible, the stanford journal declares design as the valuable form of expertise.1 i heard this logic echoed in the hallways at google as designers discussed the threat of outsourcing to india; they concluded that programming could be outsourced. design, they concluded, was too “creative” to outsource. only those living on the edge of the future ─ a temporalization as old as colonial enlightenment and later modernization ─ could combine emotion, cultural cosmopolitanism, and technology to make good designs (see suchman 2011). the t-shirt built on a long history of the shifting lines between modern and backwards, civilized and savage, expert and non-expert. the t-shirt’s implicit argument was that design would remain american while math, once the apex of sputnik-era knowledge hierarchies, could belong to lesser intellects on the sliding scale of humanity. the argument was not quite right. ideo’s shrinking machine shop and turn to “design thinking” was a response to chinese workers trained for entrepreneurial adventures and to design products. in china, hierarchies of labor and subjectivities of work were also undergoing transformation as china reoriented toward global capital (chumley 2017; lindtner 2017; irani forthcoming).2 feminist science studies work even figures in this story. in shenzhen, lindtner argues that entrepreneurs draw on postcolonial and feminist influences as they seek new sources of inspiration and legitimacy to develop emerging technology enterprises (lindtner 2017, p.299). similarly, design thinking also selectively draws on feminist interventions into the philosophies of knowledge and technology 14 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) in the search for novel markets and value-producing projects. hierarchies of labor are a product of global political economies ─ trade agreements, investments in education, and accumulations of skill and performance that promise the production of value. skills like “design thinking” are particularly promissory. a “design thinker” promises insights, new markets, and aesthetic judgment, like a divining rod leading to new markets or domains of life ripe for intervention. those who possess cosmopolitanism ─ an affable, empathic rapport with consumers and corporate executives alike ─ can promise value in these worlds. those whom clients, investors, and immigration interviewers read as the right kind of cosmopolitan, even if not white,3 read as citizens of pink’s “conceptual age.” these are the racialized people whom mark zuckerberg defends when he defends the dream act.4 these are the immigrant startup founders the us department of state sought to recruit under obama-era start-up promotion laws. these are the very same racialized start-up founders steve bannon, former trump strategist, said overpopulate executive roles in silicon valley. economic nationalism depends on hierarchies of race and economic practice to mobilize people in the name of whiteness and economy. bannon shows the iron hand of this logic and ideo the velvet glove. in her analysis of biopolitics in the thick of pink’s “conceptual age,” historian kavita philip asks what the designation of “the pirate” as target of geopolitics and discourse tells us about the overlapping of political economy and constructions of difference. “the conditions of possibility for discourses about technology and authorship,” she argues, “are imbricated with emerging global legalities.” she traces how the pirate, a racialized figure of technoscientific production, emerges out of the legitimization of particular intellectual property regimes. those who did the copy work to make western media companies' products accessible found themselves criminalized as pirates as those firms turned toward emerging markets (sundaram 2010). “in the process of being produced as global technological citizens,” philip (2006) argued, “we are drawn into authenticating some kinds of equivalences and protecting some kinds of 15 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) difference” (p.205). at that moment, advocates of remix culture protected white difference by reconfiguring legalities to sanction curatorial creativities of “remix” while criminalizing the networks of production and circulation that made modernity’s media available where access failed to serve the project of profit. this paper follows philip's call by asking the function “design thinking” serves discursively and within a global political economy. legalities of intellectual property are certainly relevant here. so are the ways legalities, state educational investments, and nationalist projects in china produced the larger numbers of industrial designers with which ideo had to compete. rather than competing, ideo protected north american difference. powerful institutions like stanford minted and assisted in the circulation of this “mystical,” empathetic, creative vision of labor and personhood that requires the work of manufacturing workers, industrial designers, miners, and others to matter, but renders those labors mechanical and “easy.” philip calls for a feminist analysis that traces situated practices of technology through both discourse and political economy. jennifer hamilton calls this “the how of whiteness” (2017). the how of whiteness here is through the production of new categories of expertise. on its face, design thinking appears as a form of engineering that integrates feminized rationalities of storytelling and empathy. yet to treat design thinking as a feminist practice ignores the global divisions of labor and distributions of value that make this sensibility of touching, feeling, and making valuable and effective.5 notes 1 a harvard business school case study of ideo’s addition of “phase 0” service offerings corroborates john and rick’s oral history (2013). 2 these hierarchies of labor that privilege venture research labors over production labors also structure masculinities and classed subjectivities within china (lindtner 2017; chumley 2017). in china, “design” signals not just any aesthetic practices of formgiving and ornament, but one that signals a shift towards global capital and aesthetic communities (chumley 2017). 16 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) 3 whiteness is not a property of white people, but rather an orientation towards practices and codes racialized as white, and therefore superior (see fanon 1967). 4 academic achievement becomes a racialized marker of belonging; achievement legitimizes the exclusion of some minoritized people on the basis of the achievements of other minoritized people (e.g. “model minorities”). while dream act is often thought of in connection with latin@/chican@ identities, it formally includes on the basis of education or military service rather than race. aihwa ong (1996) points out that in the united states, racialization can masquerade as culturalization that renders some (racialized) practices and habitus more desirable for the nation without formal reference to race as a category (ong 1996:739). 5 this analysis of how labor process makes racialized and gendered subjectivities possible owes a debt to ethnic studies scholar evelyn nakano glenn who observed that black and immigrant servants made possible “the woman belle ideal for white middle class women” who employed them (nakano glenn, 1985:104; see also irani 2015). acknowledgements i am grateful to my fellow panelists and the engaged audience at our 4s 2017 panels. also, thank you to beth reddy, kavita philip, rebecca jordan young, katrina karkazis, and two anonymous reviewers for feedback on drafts. references adas, m. 1990. machines as the measure of men. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. atanasoski, n. & kalindi v. 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(2013). phase zero: introducing new services at ideo (a). case study. harvard business school. enloe, cynthia. curious feminist: searching for women in a new age of empire. berkeley, united states: university of california press, 2004. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docid=223994. euchner, j. "design thinking: an interview with roger martin: roger martin talks with jim euchner about the need to include intuitive thinking in the innovation process." research-technology management may-june 2012: 10+. business insights: global. web. 8 feb. 2014. fanon, f. (1967). black skin, white masks. new york, ny: grove press. forty, a. (1986). objects of desire: design and society from wedgewood to ibm. new york, ny: pantheon books. fouché, r. (2006). say it loud, i’m black and i’m proud: african americans, american artifactual culture, and black vernacular technological creativity. american quarterly 58(3), 639-61. retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2006.0059. glenn, e. n. (1985). racial ethnic women’s labor: the intersection of race, gender, and class oppression. review of radical political economics, 17(3), 86-108. hamilton, j.( 2017). discussant comments. whiteness and technoscience i. 4s boston. 18 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) helmreich, s. (2000). silicon second nature: culturing artificial life in a digital world. berkeley, ca: university of california press. irani, l., dourish p. & mazmanian, m. (2010). shopping for sharpies in seattle: mundane infrastructures of transnational design. proceedings of the 3rd international conference on intercultural collaboration (pp. 39-48). new york, ny: acm publishing. irani, l. (2015a). difference and dependence among digital workers: the case of amazon mechanical turk, south atlantic quarterly ,114(1), 225234. ─── (2015b). justice for ‘data janitors’. public books. retrieved from http://www.publicbooks.org/justice-for-data-janitors/ lindtner, s. (2017). laboratory of the precarious: prototyping entrepreneurial living in shenzhen. women’s studies quarterly, 45(3-4), 287-305. ng, j., park, y. & hernandez, x. (2016). beyond the perpetual foreigner and model minority stereotypes: a critical examination of how asian americans are framed. contemporary asian america: a multidisciplinary reader (3rd edition), (pp.576-599). new york, ny: new york university press. oldenziel, r. (1999). making technology masculine: men, women, and modern machines in america 1870-1945. amsterdam, nl: amsterdam university press. pink, d.( 2006). a whole new mind. new york, ny: penguin books. reich, r. (1991). the work of nations: preparing ourselves for 21st century capitalism. new york,, ny: a.a. knopf. schaffer, s. (1999). the enlightened automata. in w. clark, s. schaffer & j. golinski (eds.), the sciences in enlightened europe (pp.126165). chicago, il: university of chicago press. suchman, l. (2006). human-machine reconfigurations. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. 19 irani catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) ─── (2011). anthropological relocations and the limits of design. annual review of anthropology, 40(1), 1-18. sundaram, r. (1999). recycling modernity: pirate electronic cultures in india. third text, 13(47), 59-65. turkle, s.& papert, s. (1990). epistemological pluralism: styles and voices within the computer culture. signs, 16(1), 128-157. wissehr, c., concannon, j., & barrow, l. h. (2011). looking back at the sputnik era and its impact on science education. school science and mathematics, 111(7), 368-75. bio lilly irani is an assistant professor of communication & science studies at university of california, san diego. her book on cultural politics of innovation and development in transnational india, entitled innovators and their others, is forthcoming from princeton university press. she is a cofounder and maintainer of digital labor activism tool turkopticon. her work has appeared at acm sigchi, new media & society, science, technology & human values, and south atlantic quarterly and other venues. she has a ph.d. in information and computer science (emphasis: feminist studies) from university of california, irvine. microsoft word 71535_1_11_saychan.docx chan, a.s. (2018). decolonial computing and networking beyond digital universalism, 4(2), 1-7. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © anita say chan. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical commentary decolonial computing and networking beyond digital universalism anita say chan university of illinois, urbana-champaign achan@illinois.edu the prominent collective of global scholars who wrote of decolonial thinking and the “decolonial option” in the 2007 essay series in the journal cultural studies did so urging a broader recognition of the diverse contexts and agents of knowledge production who long represented “a colonial subaltern epistemology.” they wrote to draw attention to the long and diverse histories of decolonial interventions that emerged to confront the “variegated faces of the colonial wound inflicted [over] five hundred years of… modernity as a weapon of imperial/colonial global expansion” (mignolo, 2007, mignolo & escobar, 2010). writing as researchers bridging conversations and debates across four continents, but facing the new millennium largely as scholars with roots and ties to latin america, they renewed critiques of how the colonial underpinnings of global knowledge production continued to reassert western frames of thought as universal scientific truths. and they underscored how this “historically worked to subordinate and negate ‘other’ frames [and] ‘other’ 2 chan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) knowledge,… reproduc[ing] the meta-narratives of the west while discounting or overlooking the critical thinking produced by indigenous, afro, and mestizos whose thinking… depart not from modernity alone but also from the long horizon of coloniality” (walsh, 2007, p. 224). they thus stressed the vitality of “other” forms of knowledge production occurring “beyond the academy” (mignolo & escobar 2010, p. 18), and highlighted the de-colonial options enacted by indigenous and other social movement actors as vital to future decolonial projects. pressing on “the importance of thinking within” and alongside the perspective of these movements (mignolo & escobar 2010, p. 19), they urged scholars not only to reimagine their roles as academic documentarians of movements (as actors still dedicated to a reproduction of dominant forms of modern epistemologies), but to decenter their own forms of knowledge practice by beginning to “think with [movements] theoretically and politically.” as such, decolonialists posed the significance of how cultivating a politics of decentralization and a decentering of the self as expert and knowledge practitioner – might offer an affront to modernity’s domination and its politics of self-replication through the occupation of other epistemologies. a decade later, as new forms of what we might call replicant politics (chan, 2018) have begun to globally spread, the decentering project of decolonialism and developing proposals for “decolonial computing” could not be more poignant. today, after all, growing national calls to ensure a reproduction of the familiar, to recenter some form of “the authentic” and to replicate some version of “us” free from the strange) or unfamiliar as the key matter and central means of securing futures in the context of rapid global change, have now proven to be the defining political force in diverse national contexts all across the west. in the face of such contemporary symptoms, adopting a parallel stance of self-preservation and insisting upon stronger modes of identity conservation may seem like the only choice for progressives. but decolonial computing frameworks highlight another potential, not only in recognizing the diverse vibrancy of existing challenges to “digital 3 chan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) universalist” models (chan, 2014) that problematically elevate narrow versions of western and elite digital practice and innovation as the only relevant pathway to the future, but in cultivating knowledge practices that indeed foster a decentering of the self as a generative asset towards the creative co-production of alternative futures. the extensive transnational and local organizing examples of various collaborative networks – from those extending from zapatista organizing, to the ddos stagings and virtual sit-ins emerging from the tactics of interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral alliances engaged within the electronic disturbance theater – demonstrate how a de-centering politic, less concerned with a replication of its own “centers” than with the generativity of collaborative organizing, emerged decades ago in early networked cultures (dominquez, 1998; lane, 2003; smith, 2016). today, the dynamic socio-technical networks of digital organizers across latin america that, in the cases i’ve studied around indigenous language software and digital media translations, often bring together open technology coders from across the global south and north, transnational media artists, rural and urban public school teachers, public sector workers, and quechua, aymara, and zapotec community organizers of diverse generational profiles to develop novel collaborative practices in distinct contrast to digital universalist imaginaries. while affirming that neither silicon valley, nor mit, nor wall street, nor any other privileged center of innovation and technology can subsume the diverse lived realities and local complexities that span across their positionalities, neither do they come together with the aim, hope, or expectation that some alternative “unity” across their network, or new centralizing force, will emerge. imagining technological futures with and in between the interfaces of the diverse forms of knowledge practice that come alive among them – and that can come together across differences, rather than in spite of it – instead becomes a key resource for imagining new digital futures (tsing, 2005). a range of mixed media collectives have emerged across diverse urban and rural contexts in the andes: from the escuelab civic hack lab 4 chan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) networks in lima1 and puno2 (sustained by organizers like kiko mayorga and neyder achahuanco apaza), to quechua3 and aymara twitter and blogging channels (sustained by organizers like irma alvarez and aymar ccopacatty), and aymara social media translation projects (sustained by organizers like jaqi aru’s ruben hilari4 and the instituto de lenguas y literaturas andinas-amazónicas’ amos batto5). these projects each draw together diverse actors (often across long distances between dispersed rural and urban sites) for routine collaborations that necessarily take place in physical (and not merely virtual) meeting space. in such encounters, widely diverse expertise sets and ethical commitments are bridged, spanning the knowledge practices of multiple generations of actors, and technical practices that emerge from global coding collectives, indigenous community leaders, and language activists, public school pedagogists, and transnational media artist networks. multiple orientations to time, nature, history and ethical and epistemological commitments are consistently channeled throughout. and no aim exists to center or anchor any single logic, assert a single version of right, or give spatial or temporal privilege to a given order. what one notes instead are multiple orientations that together work to disrupt the dominant framework that defines technology’s socalled globally “peripheral” actors as ones who were meant to be “leftbehind” and forgotten, or as irrelevant to work to creatively re-envision alternative economic or technological futures.6 working to sustain diverse collaborations around media, technology, and culture, such networks develop relations around decolonial computing that enact a shared ethics of de-centering to work across wide relations of difference and rework instrumentalist orientations of standard innovation ventures around time, history, and nature. while such elements are typically treated under dominant innovation practice as objects to control, optimize, or dominate within decolonial computing networks, they instead offer fertile grounds on which participants’ diverse orientations to such spatio-temporal-material elements can indeed to brought together to open new forms of relating across creative differences. 5 chan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) figure 1: photo archive of a software translation hackathon held in lima, peru’s escuelab civic hack lab space on november 11, 2011. like approaches for a post-colonial computing that lily irani, kavita phillip and paul dourish have called for that aim for expanded “tactics, ways of proceeding, and need-to-know approaches to reality that expand the transdisciplinary scope of what one needs to know,” (2010, p. 21) ,such developments around a decolonial computing perspective take seriously the new orientations required to “think within,” between, and among in the diverse perspective of wide-ranging and widely-situated movements both inside and outside traditional research spaces. writing now in 2018 as renewed calls for alternative and urgently needed forms of global political imaginaries that no longer take for granted a presumed stability and centrality of western liberalism and modernity are being called upon, such forms of open-ended relating and experimentation indeed yield valuable lessons. 6 chan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) acknowledgements my thanks go to the organizers and participants of the mixed digital media collectives in the andes, particularly irma alvarez and aymar ccopacatty, kiko mayorga and neyder achahuanco apaza of the escuelab civic hack lab, ruben hilari of jaqi aru and amos batto of the instituto de lenguas y literaturas andinas-amazónicas. my thanks as well to the support of the center for latin american and caribbean studies and the illinois program for research in the humanities at the university of illinois, urbana-champaign. and last but not least, many thanks to the organizing vision of paula chakravartty and mara mills, to the participants of the decolonial computing conference at nyu’s media, culture and communication department, and to michelle murphy and the editorial team of catalyst who brought this volume together. notes 1 http://escuelab.org/ 2 https://www.facebook.com/escuelabpuno/ 3 https://twitter.com/hablemosquechua 4 http://www.jaqi-aru.org/ and http://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2014/05/140515_tecnologia_facebo ok_aymara_ar 5 http://www.illa-a.org/wp/ 6 in peru, the south american nation i’ve worked in longest as an ethnographer, various initiatives over the past decade have defied such limited digital universalist presumptions. before similar national proposals would emerge in countries in the west like france, for instance, peru had become one of the first nations – alongside china and brazil – where national legislation for the use of free and open source software in public offices was proposed in 2001 (this was also a year before city-scaled measures had been taken up in germany and italy, but not yet national ones). by the mid-2000s, hacker spaces and maker labs of basically every stripe – some based at universities, others at museums, and in cities and in rural sites alike, were growing dynamically across the country. and prominent digital initiatives, like the one laptop per child program, launched in partnership with mit, that helped ignite global 7 chan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) educational technology markets in the mid-2000s, gained its largest international deployment site in peru. references chan, a. (2014). networking peripheries: technological futures and the myth of digital universalism. cambridge, ma: mit press. chan, a. (2018). "data cultures and prediction proxies in the age of replicant politics." presentation for the society for the social studies of science annual conference, august 29. sydney, australia. dominguez, r. (1998) "digital zapatismo." thing. net. march 20. accessed from: https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/digzap.html lane, j. (2003). "digital zaptistas." the drama review 47, 2: 129-144). mignolo, w. d. (2007). introduction: coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking. cultural studies, 21, (2 -3 march/may), 155 -167. mignolo, w. d. & e. a. escobar (eds.). (2010). globalization and the decolonial. london, gb: routledge press. philip, k., p., irani, l. & dourish, p. (2010). postcolonial computing: a tactical survey. science,technology, & human values. 37(1), 3–29. smith, e. a. (2016). "zapatismo in cyberspace: an interview with ricardo dominguez," rhizome.org. jan. 24. accessed from: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/jan/26/interview-with-ricardodominguez/ tsing, a. (2005). friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton, nj: princeton university press. walsh, c. (2007). shifting the geopolitics of critical knowledge: decolonial thought and cultural studies "others" in the andes. cultural studies 21, (2-3 march/may), 224 -239. 8 chan catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) bio anita say chan is associate professor in the department of media and cinema studies and faculty fellow at the national center for supercomputing applications at the university of illinois, urbanachampaign. she is the author of networking peripheries: technological futures and the myth of digital universalism (mit press, 2014). she coleads the big data from the global south initiative under the european research commission-funded data-active project, and serves on the editorial board of the journal global perspectives. microsoft word 76937-1-11-20190131_thompson.docx thompson, v. (2019). how technology is forcing the disability rights movement into the twenty-first century. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © vilissa thompson, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical commentary how technology is forcing the disability rights movement into the twenty-first century vilissa thompson institution ramp your voice, llc vilissa@rampyourvoice.com when i began blogging in 2012 for an online social work platform after graduating with my master of social work, i never thought my words would become a part of the disability online activism sphere, and i never imagined the impact we will make on the collective movement. technology, whether we love, hate, or avoid it, has been integrated into every facet of life in this decade, and those of us who use it for activism and connecting with each other often wonder how would our work exist without it. one of the joys of technology and online activism is the foregrounding of intersected voices, particularly those of color, that have been overlooked and devalued for too long. the disability community is the largest minority group in the united states and world, yet white male faces and voices have dominated our history and movement. disabled people of color have always been here and we are fighting for our rights since the beginning of the disability rights movement; the joyce jacksons (thompson, 2017a) and johnnie lacys (thompson, 2017b) of the movement cannot be ignored or be reduced to a footnote in recounting powerful leadership. omitting or minimizing the work of pioneers such as thompson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 jackson and lacy (who were instrumental to the start and progression of the independent living movement) is not only disrespectful to their contributions, but is sadly a commonplace practice in our retelling of disability rights history, which includes who receives accolades and recognition. personally, i created my own platform, ramp your voice!, in 2013 to add a unique perspective that i felt was missing—black disabled women/femmes. i was already writing about disability from the lens of a social worker as a way to combine the two worlds i am a part of. within social work, there was little representation of disabled voices, and i felt that i could fill this important gap with my perspectives. by writing in this way, i started to notice the invisibility not only within social work but also disability activism spaces as well. at that time, there were few disabled writers of color with platforms, specifically black disabled women and femmes. i believe many of us who started writing around that time understood the impact of the lack of representation and sought to do something about it. since 2013, there are more voices that sound like mine, but there is always room for more to bloom and be a part of this dynamic space online. technology gives us the ability to find the community we desperately seek, particularly those of us who live in areas that are not very diverse or where we cannot venture out safely or independently in our communities due to systemic and/or architectural barriers. blogging, vlogging, social media platforms such as facebook and twitter, and online forums shatter these barriers and give us the freedom to be seen, heard, and to tell our truths, call out the -isms and -phobias that we fight against every day, and, most importantly, connect with those who “get” us. these are the people we do not have to explain ourselves to; the unspoken agreement surrounding the ableist nonsense we deal with is significant when adding these relationships to our support systems. seeing people or stories you heavily relate to can also influence how you view and understand the interactions and experiences you have. for instance, when i created the #disabilitytoowhite hashtag in may 2016, it opened the thompson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 floodgates online for disabled people of color to share freely about the racism, exclusion, and invisibility we deal with everyday. the hashtag allowed disabled people of color to connect over the mistreatment and disadvantages we endure, and to not be forced to have such conversations in private. we can share the injustices publicly to not only raise awareness but also to hold people accountable for what is going on within our disabled spaces. the hashtag has been used to explain discrepancies witnessed and experienced, and to give a name to something we all have felt but did not have an accurate term for. technology, in the manner of hashtags, can be used to acknowledge gaps and bring us together to shed a light on issues that have gone unnoticed or unaddressed due to resistance against shaking up the status quo. technology is diverse in how we use it as a community. as a writer, my words are how i impact the world i live in and make my voice roar. the various ways to use technology, whether with words, videos, or hashtags, have dramatically shaped the issues the disability rights movement focuses on at any given moment. we are able to fight about why the americans with disabilities act (ada) matters while also declaring that we are proud of the bodies and minds we possess. if there is something you are passionate about as an advocate or activist, you can lend your perspective to the current conversations or start your own good trouble. disabled people are using technology to lead discussions (and when necessary, create controversy) on film and tv representation, fashion industry and inclusion, adaptive technology for video gaming, the rocky road to employment, and so on. the options are indeed limitless on what a person can establish as their particular niche to be heard. technology also removes the limits that traditional activism requires; many of us are not able to march in the streets, or our communities may have too many architectural barriers for us to navigate cities and buildings. for example, many of our rural and urban areas have broken or absent curb cuts or buildings that have not been renovated to provide wheelchair access—all of which can stymie our ability to protest safely and be fully included in demonstrations. being able to use a smartphone, tablet, laptop, thompson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 or camera to film and/or write our stories was the much-needed edge that was missing in this work. while some argue that online activism is not real activism, the impact we are making cannot be dismissed. for example, without technology, some of the major moments in our current history would not exist, and the new wave of leaders in our movement would be unheard of. the fight to save the affordable care act in 2017 was heavily influenced by the way disabled activists used technology to blog, vlog, and protest removing certain provisions and how it would place many of our lives in grave peril. this coming together not only was a victory, policy wise, but also allowed new activists to come on the scene and make their unique experiences known to the masses within and outside of the disabled community. seizing opportunities to not only reshape our government, but also dynamic voices in the community, is powerful to both new and established activists. the way i use technology for activism has empowered me in ways i never imagined. the ability to influence the progression of a movement, generate controversy on important issues that drastically affect my livelihood, and connect with other mighty individuals are some of the ways that technology is redefining both my world and others’. for many of us who once felt isolated, that feeling has lessened because we understand the power we possess to influence and connect is literally a keystroke away. there is no turning back, especially when multiply-marginalized voices are no longer silenced. this unexpected gain with technology is one that goes unnoticed, except by those of us who would not be as visible or heard in the movement if it did not exist. technology has pushed our movement and community to be intersectional and remove the monolithic tone that has to be shed. we as a community are better when we all are able to see ourselves, feel valued, and have the ability to be a part of a movement that we have always belonged to. thompson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 acknowledgements i want to thank my beloved grandmother, viola c. thompson, who loved me fiercely and shaped me into the woman and activist i am today. to the black disabled people reading this: you are seen and loved tremendously. references thompson, v. (2017a, february 3). black history month 2017: remembering joyce jackson, black, disabled, & phenomenal. ramp your voice [blog post]. retrieved from http://rampyourvoice.com/2017/02/03/black-history-month-2017remembering-joyce-jackson-black-disabled-phenomenal/ thompson, v. (2017b, february 10). black history month 2017: johnnie lacy, defiantly black & disabled. ramp your voice [blog post]. retrieved from http://rampyourvoice.com/2017/02/10/black-history-month-2017johnnie-lacy-defiantly-black-disabled/ bio vilissa thompson, lmsw, is a macro-minded social worker from south carolina. ramp your voice! is her organization where she discusses the issues that matters to her as a black disabled woman, including intersectionality, racism, politics, and why she unapologetically makes good trouble. microsoft word gunderman-119-1134-4.docx gundermann, c. (2017). reading blood work is an art form: toward an embodied feminist practice of veterinary science and care. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3 (2), 1-28 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © christian gundermann, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article reading blood work is an art form: toward an embodied feminist practice of veterinary science and care christian gundermann mount holyoke university cgunderm@mtholyoke.edu abstract what are the advantages of a concrete, embodied relationship between human subjects and their non-human objects of care for the veterinary process of knowledge production? the scientific reductionism that frames formal studies makes much of the knowledge gained in those studies questionable or severely limited, since many important factors of real life illnesses and their causation and cure are excluded from consideration for the sake of clinical control and traditional scientific objectivity. this essay narrates my experience with my mare lilly who suffered from a rare auto-immune disease; at the same time, it describes and analyzes the history and strategies of the world's largest internetbased equine patient advocacy network on metabolic illness, a network that supported my journey of knowledge acquisition and contribution, through our case history, to a larger alternative veterinary cause of knowledge production. located between feminist science studies and critical animal studies, this project explores the notion of touch and raises questions about the biomedical field's present-day heavy reliance on visual diagnostics. what is the relation between visual technologies and the detached, disembodied knowledge "from nowhere" that conventional science believes in? how much of the alternative to 2 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) this way of knowing lies in touch, embodied assistance, relationality, and intuition? and finally, in observing and documenting the relationship at the heart of this venture around knowledge, my essay also suggest that this is a queer project where queerness is understood as the careful but radical reconfiguration of kinship in the context of haraway’s recent call to “make kin, not babies.” introduction how to begin? who is the reader?1 how to frame the argument? how to write an academic article about a deeply personal experience, one whose utterance collides with any number of traditional academic limits? this project is about medical treatment, care ethics, t/technologies, r/research, gender, and internet communities; it is also, perhaps most centrally, a challenge to the millennial distinction in western thought between “the animal” and “the human.”2 biomedicine is built on the backs of nonhuman animals, but what happens when an animal is actually the patient? these lines all converge in my percheron-cross mare lilly.3 and now it is about grief as well. what is care if not the practice of becoming worldly?4 what does care have to do with gender?5 what is the connection between grief and care? what are the communities where humans and equines commingle that have arisen from these contexts of care and grief? how do they function, and what are the roles of biomedicine and various technologies in their creation of biocitizenship? what are the discursive constraints in academic writing around care and grief, particularly when other animals are concerned?6 what are the complex temporalities of such writing? in this piece, i move away from the cold-body, anatomy-hall practice of science, which, in newtonian fashion, approaches and frames the body (and nature at large) as a set of distinct, independent entities, substances, and mechanisms: objects of study and intervention. based on a feminist critique of scientific reductionism, and particularly on karen barad’s agential realism, this writing instead seeks to move toward understanding reality as intraactive, framing certain specific physical functions as dynamic relations 3 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) and energy exchanges. in other words, i wish to leave behind a mechanistic vision of the body and approach health and illness as the embodied experience of warm bodies that are always entangled in energetic exchanges. such a practice must steer clear of the traditional academic disembodiment of the writing voice. my grief, which is one central energetic mode of entanglement here, is not an additional strand, at will to be added to, or subtracted from, the study of, say, the fluctuating hormone levels of the patient, but a constitutive element of warm-body medicine. this project has, in its production, already bridged the period from summer 2013 to summer 2015 and now 2016/17 (as i revise sections of this in 2016/17 for publication). as i reread it with the hindsight of the tragic outcome of 2015, the hopeful tones of the 2013 draft read as hopelessly naive, blissfully innocent. what processes of violence do i bring to bear on one material-discursive construct (lived reality with lilly) to transform it, step by step, into another, an academic text? lilly is dead now, many years before her time. she died in the middle of my writing process. my attempts at healing her from her afflictions have failed. was it inevitable? are treatment and cure illusions, a “god trick,” part of the disembodiment of scientific knowledge (haraway, 1988, p. 581)? what about academic writing? my outlook on what traditional science, various alternative sciences, and even the academic writing process have done for us is more pessimistic now than it was in 2013. finding a diagnosis was as elusive as producing an orderly narrative, but i hope to show that there may be good reasons to eschew either or both.7 how to live with her last call to me for help? on the early morning of july 18, 2015, the only help i could offer was euthanasia, trying to steady her panicked, thrashing body on the ground for a seemingly endless, yet much too short, hour until the veterinarian arrived with the gentle, lethal intravenous cocktail: those two unmistakable bright-pink syringes of pentobarbital. lilly was never much of a talker; when she “spoke,” it was significant. “help me!” and now this memory of her call for what i could not give (or did give?) is precious and painful. help me leave my body? or help me 4 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) get up? how do we confront our impotence in the face of those who believe that we can help? is this ultimately the predicament of medical doctors, a pressure before which many have retreated into high technology? my grief works itself into the interstices of rational analysis, into previous drafts of this account, splitting and shattering it further. how does death reposition my quest for health—lilly’s health, my own? my grief is not of the gentle kind, a mournful sadness. the english term grief seems deeply appropriate in its proximity to violent emotions such as despair, anguish, distress, pain, but also in its association with grievance, aggravation. i howl “like an animal” (but i am an animal; how can i howl like one?), extruding, expelling my soul for hours every day until i collapse, with “a violence that brings [my language] to the limits of speakability” (butler, 2000, p. 80). furthermore, this very writing brings a grievanc e, levels a plaint against the “man of science, ” against science, against what does it mean for me to say this in an academic paper? to quote judith butler to legitimize my words—or, on a more optimistic note, to draw on the work of one of the trailblazers of academic speakability of our age? as butler’s reading of antigone insists, the realm of unintelligibility remains and will remain opaque to a certain degree. i cannot and do not expect to become completely intelligible within academic language through this project, but now that grief forms a constitutive part of it, i note, observe, sputter out what can, at least partially, be said while preserving the opacity, the mystery of my experience. queering kinship: “make kin, not babies!” this is the witty slogan in haraway’s urgent call to rework kinship in the face of climate change and planetary destruction. queer feminism has everything to do with such a need to restructure kinship. feminists should “exercise leadership in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogies and kin, and kin and species” (haraway, 2015, p. 161). “my purpose,” she argues, “is to make ‘kin’ mean something other/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy” (p. 161). what other forms of expressing my “inalienable right to procreate,” my affective (and biological?) need to mother/father, are there that do not make more humans? how to rethink cross-species relations to their fullest potential (involving love, care, and grief) that are not second to the “real thing”? how to confront what haraway bravely mentions as the immediate suspicion (“and who can blame them”) that my insistence to exclude myself explicitly (programmatically?) from the (human) baby-making business represents “neoimperialism, neo-liberalism, misogyny, and racism” (p. 164) is merely an expression of my white privilege? how to claim family sick leave at work to care for my recumbent lilly? how to explain that six pm is not a good time for committee meetings because it’s dinner time in my barn? (my childbearing colleagues wield stronger arguments in the “work/life balance” debate!) lilly and i are queering the genealogies of mothering, fathering, brothering, and sistering (and even fathersistering or brothermothering? cousingrandfathering?). we are trans-species warriors. 5 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) my own impotence. just as in antigone’s case, our culture continues to deem this violent response to the visceral experience of death inappropriate, obscene, private at best. like antigone, i erupt into the public sphere of academia (this bastion of rational, humanist thought) with a claim to my “right to grieve” (butler, 2000, p. 80). this claim may appear even more scandalous in that the object of my grief is “just an animal” (like me!). to be sure, here reside some of the political aspects of this grief’s unintelligibility, in the very sense that butler attaches to antigone’s claim and that she intimates is queer, a radical reworking of kinship. and then the question: is a better science project, a warm-body anatomy, not always the outcome of grief? the logistics and circumstances (ninety-degree weather, weekend) made organizing an autopsy difficult, so science and its cold-body epistemological comforts once again retreated in favor of simply accepting what had happened without “that kind of knowing.” why did lilly “suddenly ” die? why had she been slowly starving to death between march 2014 and july 2015? (so was it sudden, or drawn out, or both?) why wild speculations on the frequent, continuous, even excessive, use of anthelmintics in contemporary horses (some owners give anthelmintics, i.e.dewormers, with the daily grain): in the wild life of our bodies, the evolutionary biologist rob dunn suggests that our human bodies have evolved to coexist with many other species. in the chapter on crohn’s disease, he analyzes an alternative medical practice which involves the insertion of hookworms and pinworms into the gastrointestinal tracts of patients with crohn’s, which in many cases has induced remission; biomedicine does not understand why and tries to brush the treatment off as placebo. dunn’s argument is that the human gut has evolved to be in struggle with worms and that modern hygiene has eliminated this companionship. out of “boredom” or “longing” for the lost worms, the immune system begins to attack the “host’s” own body: our bodies are “eating their guts out” (dunn, 2011, p. 23). the continuous use of anthelmintics is a recent phenomenon in horses. so is the emergence of equine ibd. would biomedicine do better with autoimmune disorders if it chose to take haraway’s notion of cum panis (companion) seriously rather than continue with a paradigm that understands disease to stem from “infection,” from the intervention of an extraneous aggressor (pathogen) whose elimination is biomedicine’s mission? 6 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) could no one make sense of it? why is so much knowledge apocryphal with horses? why was she not diagnosed (or not officially, or, at least, not when there was time)? in fact, equine inflammatory bowel disease (ibd) is beginning to crop up in research papers on what are labeled as “emergent” diseases; while prognosis is poor, research into this rare condition is beginning. however, just like there is a solid barrier between medical research and what trickles down to the practitioners in the field, particularly with rare diseases, the likelihood of finding diagnosis and proper support from local veterinarians is slim. a guardian needs enormous amount of initiative, endless emotional resources, and often deep pockets to help an individual affected by such a disease.8 how much does “this kind of knowing” matter to me? the kind of knowing “for sure” based on biopsies, autopsies, “hard” evidence?9 lilly’s own primary-care veterinarian, a research-oriented man, was not research-oriented enough to provide us with a proper diagnosis while lilly lived: only two years of head-shaking. he did not bother to consult the latest publications, as i eventually did. i came up with equine multisystemic eosinophilic epitheliotrophic disease (meed), one of the subcategories of ibd, or possibly granulomatous enteropathy (ge), two related autoimmune-mediated malabsorption disorders. i come to this hypothesis (corroborated by a young veterinarian who has come into our lives recently, but too late for lilly) based on observing and interpreting symptoms and data such as blood chemistry and tactile observations made day and night for half a decade. but i don’t know “for sure” in the way that veterinary medicine claims that meed or ge can only conclusively be diagnosed: invasively, through biopsy or necropsy. i hypothesized too late, trusting that the “man of science” knew best. the point is that we missed the opportunity to experiment with corticosteroids. my consolation is that even with corticosteroids, the prognosis for horses in an advanced stage of meed or ge is poor. so the abyss of knowing and the abyss of not knowing devour me simultaneously as i consider what i failed to know when there was time to act. 7 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) what would it mean to “act”? action toward health? i, the griever, berate myself for not having acted (enough). but why should i consider death “the worst outcome” by definition and illness the most undesirable state, to be eliminated as soon as possible?10 what, then, is objectionable to me about my “man of science,” lilly’s veterinarian, failing to diagnose her affliction or provide treatment options (however elusive)? what is wrong with embracing her return to the bowels of the earth when her own bowels became unable to provide sustenance for her? will i want the same nonintervention for myself when the time comes? “composting is so hot!” as haraway insists (2015, p. 161). when is it best to diagnose, “know,” act, and when is it best to accept, surrender, compost, know otherwise? how much life justifies how much suffering for whom? how to know? i opted not to know “conclusively” (necropsy) in order to conclude otherwise. conclude: to end, to close, to lock, like the earth closes a body off from the living? but does it? do not the “inconclusive” ruminations, the digestive dynamics of earthly existence, continue inconclusively in the bowels of the earth (and my mind)? is my mind equivalent, parallel, related, to the earth in how we digest (compost) my mare’s physical remains?11 throughout my life with lilly and throughout this project, i am and have been torn between science’s epistemological comforts and promises and the realization that much of it is ultimately grasping at straws. w hat is the value of measuring? can there be measurement without theory, theory without measurement, and to what extent is all theory an art form?12 during certain periods (months at a time), i took lilly’s temperature rectally at least twice a day and kept a diary: the most basic of medical measuring techniques, marrying the intimacy of our daily rituals to the ancient technology of the diary. this data now allows me to construct a graph of her body temperature between february 3 and 20, 2013, the period of the most acute crisis where she was mostly recumbent. 8 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) graph 1: daily recorded body temperature of lilly there was likely (definitely?) an infection between december 2012 and march 2013, peaking in february. but was it due to a particular identifiable external pathogen (borrelia? ehrlichia?) or internal sepsis caused by intestinal lesions? i regularly (what is regular?) had blood drawn to measure glucose, insulin, and blood levels of the pituitary hormone acth. what does that tell me now? what did it tell me then? as some veterinarians explained to me after this blood work appeared inconclusive, these are snapshots in time. blood chemistry fluctuates over time, over weeks, over the course of a day. reading blood work is an art form, not an exact science. we start from a hunch. what, then, is an exact science? an impractical and unaffordable chimera? in order to gain more exact knowledge, we would need to draw blood ten times a day, every day, for several weeks. who can afford that without health insurance? which health insurance system would support this model of science? how practical would it be, how much more accurate or valuable is this information than my intuitive sense that my horse is doing well or not? looking into her eyes and knowing? is the graph above inherently more useful, objective, consequential, effective than my diary? the devil is in the details, and the details are overwhelming: hence scientific reductionism. how do we construct our k/knowledges? what is static and what is information? is a medical expert needed to sort static from 9 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) information? can the lay expertise of the owner/guardian prove to be equally, or more, useful? and how often does knowledge come late, too late to make a difference? the logistics of having in my care an ill horse limit the reach of science’s epistemology in more blatant ways than with an ill human: knowing is a matter of transportation (how to get her to a hospital, hours away, in her state, given that she needs strength to stand in the swaying, bumping, shifting trailer), of hydraulics (how to lift her body when she cannot get up), of body density (the limits of x-ray and ultrasound imaging for equine diagnostics), of the length of the intestines (equine anatomy makes a colonoscopy impossible), of prey-animal psychology (the stresses of the confinement and immobility associated with hospitalization). but the question remains whether these epistemological limits do not apply to human illness as well, albeit to a different degree in a world that is tailored to human needs, designed with the size of the human body in mind.13 what was complex in 2013, when i began this writing process, is now perhaps on the brink of chaos. i do not pretend to find definitive answers to all or even any of these questions; the prognosis on my own project is “guarded,” but still i don’t want to refrain from asking them, as they drive the process of my investigation forward more than any progress narrative at which i could be grasping. with irigaray, i engage in the spirit of the question to move us away from the center to the margins of the discourse. biocitizenship with nonhuman animals: building patient activism for horses with metabolic illness the following paragraph was written in 2013. i will quote it as such in its entirety because its tone of voice so jarringly clashes with my reality in instead, i am going to make an effort—for one cannot simply leap outside that discourse—to situate myself at its borders and to move continuously from the inside to the outside. luce irigaray, “questions” (1985, p. 122) 10 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) 2015/6, yet illuminates a crucial moment in time: briefly the back story: from november 2011 on, lilly, then my riding and training partner and companion of four years and my next of kin, has had a series of severe, life-threatening health crises. local veterinarians have been unable to help at best, and in one particular episode—a misdiagnosed and untreated serious infection—have caused great suffering due to their incompetence and lack of attentiveness while shamelessly charging for their shoddy services. there are grounds for a lawsuit but i do not have time or energy to engage in litigation culture. horses continue to be legal property, not subjects. lilly’s net value is negligible. in any case, chances are that she will live. i will be unable to leave her for more than a few hours at a time for at least the next ten to twelve months to administer her medications five times a day in particular sequences. what sustains us through this journey are internet communities. thanks to them, lilly will likely live despite local incompetence. i choose to leave this paragraph unaltered to leave a performative trace of the jagged temporality of my journey with lilly, the constant retroactivity and belatedness both of my care and my “sleuthing.” i also leave it to document the particular anger i felt toward “local biomedical incompetence,” in opposition to my utopian construction of the alternative internet communities that were promising that we would get through lilly’s health crises. patient activism generally arises to fill a need not met by existing professions and institutions, both to pressure them and to provide mutual emotional support. finally, what is at stake is also the construction of belonging, of kin and companionship. my current position on these communities is not fundamentally different from what it was in 2013. i will, in what follows, engage with the challenge to traditional veterinary structures brought forward by internet patient activists, but i must now acknowledge that the nature of lilly’s illness obviated a cure or management of her symptoms based on the knowledge produced by this activism. this is not a criticism of the 11 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) movement but rather the realization that lilly’s illness simply made her fall outside the roster of their hard-won expertise. she probably didn’t suffer from what these communities have evolved around, but nevertheless we are indebted to them: in part because they helped mitigate some of her symptoms and, even more crucially, because they provided an invaluable emotional support network. what is the nature, what are the obligations and rights of these belongings? how do diagnostics—both in the form of the biomedical diagnostics industry and the alternative communities that weave their discourses through and against it—inflect our queer trans-species reworking of kinship, as mentioned previously? do we, do i, belong to these communities even though lilly likely did not suffer from the diseases they address? how does her death affect my biocitizenship in them? what are my continued obligations to their mission of alternative knowledge production? as dumit demonstrates in “illnesses you have to fight to get,” a major player in the complicated dynamics around emergent diseases in the human context is the institutional interaction between biomedical practitioners (particularly primary-care physicians), hmos or other insurers, and the patient (2006, p. 577). many patients with contested illnesses (often classified as “syndromes”) fail to get health coverage and thus cannot afford treatment. if you prefer: “many patients…cannot get health coverage and are thus unable to afford treatment. since health insurance is still a rare occurrence in the equine context, the institutional discontent in owners of horses with emergent diseases is directed more “simply” against the biomedical field’s various practitioners, as well as the allocation of research funds. the psychological and moral pressures around “non-biologizable” illnesses in humans is different from those in equines as well, although there are parallels. nettleton analyses the considerable moral pressure on patients resulting in guilt, ambivalence, and self-doubt in the context of “medically unexplained symptoms” (mus) (2005, p. 1168). the owners of horses with mus, misdiagnosed, or dismissed symptoms and disabilities are often put under pressure by trainers, veterinarians, and other equestrian humans to pressure the horses to perform “until they either break or get better,” and thus the horses themselves also become the recipients of our medical uncertainties and biomedicine’s simplistic definition of what constitutes proper illness. nettleton’s foucaultian historicization of the hegemonic biomedical idea “that the origins of disease are located within the interior space of the body” is particularly suggestive in this context (p. 1168). to legitimize our existence as patients, i argue, we thus cannot work symptomatically to heal them, but have to locate the origin of the malaise in logocentric fashion in order to eliminate it and return the organism to a full functionality that is itself never critically understood as an idealized, ableist phantasm 12 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) for the sake of brevity, i focus here on the second community i joined after my mare came down with laminitis, the equine cushing’s insulin resistance (ecir) network. since early 2012, we have been supported by dr. eleanor kellon, a research veterinarian based in pennsylvania. on a shoestring budget and in collaboration with other volunteer activists, kellon has mounted a large internet research and support network for guardians of horses with various metabolic conditions, most prominently: insulin resistance (ir) and pituitary pars intermedia dysfunction (ppid, also known as “equine cushing’s syndrome”). the yahoo group “ecir” (equine cushing’s /insulin resistance) currently has more than 12,000 members globally and includes thousands of case histories. the group now possesses the “largest field trial database in the world” for these disorders (www.ecirhorse.org), and is registered as a public charity under 501(s)3. in 2015, the group identified the following key focus areas: • building a bridge between formal research (conducted in veterinary research institutions) and real-life experience with ppid/ir horses • other related forms of outreach, particularly toward international veterinary information service, but also expansion and continued growth of the group’s three internal platforms: the ecir yahoo group, the ecir facebook page, and the informational website ecirhorse.org • strengthening of a core area of ecir groups, the volunteers. trained at the university of pennsylvania, and actively involved with science-based research and publication, kellon continues to be the group’s most active link to formal veterinary research. she is one of ecir’s most competent policers of scientifically unfounded theories or solutions. as part of this ethos, any claim members make as to what constitutes successful treatment of their horses has to be backed up by hard and fast data. this rule was instituted, no doubt, in response to the ever-increasing number of “snake-oil vendors” in the field of equine health and nutrition who gain access to semipublic forums such as ecir in order to indirectly market or promote their products, and in those contexts often prey on confused and desperate horse guardians in crisis. 13 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) up until very recently, ir and ppid were so poorly understood by traditional veterinarians that, from the late 1990s onward, the internet rapidly became the main source of horse information for guardians. nevertheless, i would argue that the group provides insufficient epistemological and even logistic critique of institutionalized scientific knowledge production. since its inception in 1999, ecir has sought to serve as a bridge between its “field trial databases” and formal research. early on, for example, some members provided blood samples from numerous horses diagnosed with ppid for formal studies at cornell’s veterinary college. one particularly seminal study, based on an ecir member’s contributions in 2004, debunked the common veterinary hypothesis that elevated sugar and starch levels in fall grasses alone caused laminitis, a severe and complex inflammatory condition of the hooves, in ppid horses. the study showed that the seasonal change in hormone levels in ppid horses occurred even without access to fall pasture and without any changes to a low-sugar/low-starch diet. these contributions were then formalized and published in a study in a major veterinary journal (donaldson, 2005). this confirms the important role of the group in discovering the seasonal change in hormones in ppid horses, thereby enabling the early detection of ppid in horses before the catastrophic development of laminitis. the relevant hormone test is now a regular veterinary procedure in the field and several national laboratories offer it as part of their normal services, which most certainly occurred in response to the activist demand from many horse owners/guardians over the last decade and a half. ecir has been instrumental in focusing and championing that demand. the distinctive feature of kellon’s networks is their combination of cutting-edge science and accessible, free-of-charge support. within science-based networks, in which she functions both as an insider (with her strong pro-science ethos) and an outsider (she is personally not institutionally sponsored), her forte is to provide practical, undogmatic questioning of established wisdom and protocols. her approach is 14 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) always eminently “field-based”: in other words, founded on the experiences of real horses and real owners rather than the controlled and reductive environments of formal studies. nevertheless, she does not reject the knowledge gained in formal studies and often refers ecir members to them. she teaches and encourages old-fashioned carebased methods such as layperson observation, diary keeping, and selfeducation through popular online science courses, and in this way integrates newer technologies in crucial ways. on february 6, 2013, i joined ecir (already having been a member of the epsm group since january 2012) after receiving a condemning set of x-rays. these radiographs confirmed that lilly’s pedal bone had rotated by six degrees, sunk toward the sole of her hoof, and detached itself from the laminae that bind it to the hoof walls, due to severe inflammation. this inflammatory state, laminitis, is an overdetermined symptom, the showcase phenomenon for what nettleton calls “medically unexplained symptoms.” the symptom’s cause, in lilly’s case, remains nebulous to this day. there are several theories, some of which i espoused as probable cause in 2013 but have since put in doubt or rejected. the first possibility is a misdiagnosed infection with ehrlichia, a tick-borne bacterium. the attending veterinarian failed to treat it with antibiotics, as he should have. the second theory was that lilly had an early onset of ppid (as hypothesized by dr. r., up until that point lilly’s primary-care doctor). this is now the least likely cause, as it was never confirmed by any data. the third, and now strongest, hypothesis is that, due to her ibd, she was already developing intestinal lesions and may have developed an infection due to those lesions. thanks to my diligent temperature-taking between december 2012 and april 2013, there was a demonstrable period of fever, suggesting an infection of sorts. but early in 2013, i had no inkling of the possibility of ibd. without that hypothesis—and since the other two causes seemed equally unlikely, yet there had to be some trigger—in consultation with various members of ecir and kellon herself, i decided to treat them as equally possible, and put together a program that consisted of a continued low-carb diet, 15 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) antibiotic treatment (doxycycline) for three months, and the dopaminereceptor site blocker pergolide, just to cover all possible bases, until her laminitis subsided. the attending veterinarian was pessimistic as to lilly’s prospects and advocated for euthanasia. this is consistent with a more oldfashioned, pre-ecir approach to laminitis in horses, where the “lack of use” of a horse over an extended period of time (usually at least a year to allow for full rehabilitation) and the intense personal care involved often exceed what owners are willing to invest. the “mantra” developed by ecir is ddt+e: diagnosis, diet, trim + exercise. this mantra that allowed them to challenge the established, euthanasia-centered approach to laminitis effectively. the first d invokes the group’s investment with science. diagnosis means here that the cause of laminitis has to be determined and eliminated, usually based on a combination of lab work and close observation. the most common causes are elevated acth levels (leading to excessive cortisol levels in the blood, typical for ppid horses) and insulin resistance (which, not unlike type 2 diabetes in humans, also causes inflammation; the laminae are a common target for inflammation in the horse’s body). ir is exclusively managed through diet, but ppid requires pharmacological intervention with pergolide mesylate, a dopamine inhibitor that also blocks the receptor sites for acth in the brain (used to treat parkinson’s disease in humans). the approach to ppid obviously depended on the availability of acth testing in laboratories, specific veterinary knowledge in how to handle the blood sample, and the marketing of pergolide at an affordable price, as well as education in how to dose and administer the drug correctly. preceded by direct action of the sort that act-up championed against government agencies in the 1980s and 1990s, ecir also pressured the food and drug administration in 2007 with an online petition and a barrage of fedex packages during the “great pergolide scare,” when the agency threatened to prohibit the bulk manufacturing of pergolide in compounding pharmacies across the country.14 in considering ddt+e, we see the functioning and mission of the 16 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) ecir group in a nutshell, as well as the kind of horse owner it serves. most ppid horses with a good chance to live are under the vigilant care of humans motivated enough to educate themselves to educate their veterinarians, farriers, and trainers. the owner of a ppid horse needs to assemble a team and manage it carefully, typically at home (not a boarding facility). one of the striking phenomena of kellon’s networks is that their members—the response team, the experts, virtually everyone involved— are women. it is no accident that kellon’s specific research and support structures bear the mark of a female-identified genius. the entire approach is based on close caring relations.15 owners/guardians provide detailed data based on daily interaction and documented in diaries. the yahoo group also provides emotional help and grief support to owners. there is an open acknowledgment that we not only have tight and intimate relations with our equines that need not be camouflaged, but that those relations, rather than standing in the way of science and knowledge production, are prerequisites for the work. in this sense, while remaining committed to a number of mainstream biomedical institutions and ideologies that operate according to the principles of mechanistic cold-body anatomy, ecir opens the path in important ways toward a feminist practice of embodied, warm-body science. embodied science in practice i am concluding with an example of embodied science in practice, or “what ‘having a body’ means in relation to scientific work” (latimer, 2013, p. 13). the notion of touch (as gendered female) raises interesting questions about (the genderedness of) the biomedical field’s present-day heavy reliance on—indeed, pioneering advances in—visual diagnostics. what is the relation between visual technologies and the detached, disembodied knowledge “from nowhere” in which mainstream science believes (haraway, 1988)? how much of the alternative to this way of 17 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) knowing lies in touch, embodied assistance, relationality, and intuition? is a fusion of the two technologies possible, desirable, even necessary or inevitable when the quality of life of the patient is the main goal? in order to explore these questions against the backdrop of lilly’s history, i would like to return once more to the question of podiatry in horses. the profession of the farrier has its history as a craft, and as such is eminently empirical and based in practical applications. “no hoof, no horse” used to be a matter of human survival, but continues to be of highly practical importance for horses as individuals. more recently, however, and particularly when there are manifest pathologies, farriers have begun to work closely with veterinarians and their advances in visual technologies, most notably portable digital x-ray equipment, which lets the practitioner in the field immediately apply the “insights” gained. in february 2013, right at the beginning of lilly’s second bout of laminitis, the “condemning” set of x-rays mentioned earlier clearly showed both the rotation and sinking of the coffin bone. figure 1 is an x-ray of her left front foot: figure 1 by way of contrast, consider figure 2, the radiograph of a healthy hoof without p3 rotation: 18 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) figure 2 the coffin (or pedal) bone, the most distal bone of the limb, has a triangular shape that, in this x-ray, has rotated by several degrees, as compared with the nonpathological hoof, where it lines up parallel to the frontal hoof wall (seen in a more transparent color to the left of the coffin bone). in addition, the sharp tip of the coffin bone in lilly’s hoof has sunk down and is pressuring the (thinning) sole (or bottom of the hoof, the interface with the ground). the coffin bone is attached to the hoof capsule (composed of horn) only through connective (soft) tissue, called “laminae.” the rotation causes the bone to tear those laminae away from the hoof wall with the hundreds of pounds of weight that each limb bears, causing the associated pain and lameness. to match the x-ray image up with a look at the foot from the outside, figure 3 shows an external photograph of lilly’s same left front foot figure 3 as i mentioned earlier, within less than twenty-four hours, ecir’s emergency response team sent me a marked-up image of the x-ray as well as the original external photograph, with detailed instructions on how to trim the hoof in order to relieve lilly’s pain and initiate her process of rehabilitation toward realignment. 19 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) figure 4 figure 5 the white triangle in the external photo (figure 4) represents the estimated position of the coffin bone inside the hoof capsule. the green and blue lines in both external photo and radiograph (figure 5) represent the changes in the external hoof shape to be made. the yellow wedge gives a sense of how the hoof wall is tearing away from the rotated coffin bone, opening up a gap where the laminae are stretched and weakened. the brown lines with the arrow above indicate how much the whole bone structure has sunk down within the hoof capsule, as compared to where it should be located. this technique clearly takes advantage of x-ray technology to explain the forces at work in this pathology and to suggest the necessary 20 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) steps for intervening mechanically. internet and long-distance interventions (the responder was located thousands of miles from us) limit the scope of technologies heavily to the visual, lending x-ray technology a clear advantage. however, farriers working with veterinarians in the field also now use digital radiography to visualize the changes they make as they proceed; in this way, farriery draws on the visual advancements of modern biomedical technologies. in addition, farriers often have the horse they treat sedated and/or anesthetized by the veterinarian, thus receiving their feedback primarily from the high-tech interface, not dialogue with the patient. lilly and i had the great fortune to find, through ecir, abigail nemec, a highly trained farrier experienced in laminitis rehabilitation who was local enough to rush to us physically. she proceeded differently from the plan the internet farrier had proposed. while nemec considered the xrays and markups, she evaluated lilly’s feet and the entire horse with her hands, her intuition, and active communication with the patient, then decided that lilly would not be able to tolerate the interventions suggested. she worked closely with lilly’s feedback on each millimeter of change she made to her hoof shape. her decisions were based as much on external visual aspects of the hooves as on the way they felt in her hands. furthermore, each horse’s tolerance for pain is different, as well as how they communicate that pain (stoic? hysterical? internalized? optimistic?); their reactions to changes in hoof angles must inform a good trimmer’s decisions on how far to go or even in which direction to go. a good rehab farrier will also have some immediate feel for how the horse will tolerate the changes in the days following the intervention. the trims became long collaborative sessions in which nemec communicated intimately with lilly; lilly’s input was as important as what visual biomedical technology was providing. there was an artfulness to nemec’s method that could most accurately be described as a dance, particularly in the martial-arts-balanced ways she dodged lilly’s compromised body as it occasionally collapsed during the trimming sessions. lilly’s relief and subsequent recuperation were achieved as 21 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) much due to this intimacy as to nemec’s anatomical knowledge and ability to read a radiograph. epilogue: toward an embodied health science the central intellectual problem of our time is that of complexity. —lewontin & levins 2007, p. 183 confronted with the serious limits of scientific reductionism (a topic i enacted earlier in my demonstration that blood work with the hormone acth was, within a mechanistic framework, only potentially useful if, unrealistically, we could draw blood a thousand times over several weeks), much of science has recently cast its lot with large data. however, if the problem were only that we just don’t have enough time and world to process complexity (and complexity is certainly preferable to simplicity), then large data would indeed offer the solution. in the biomedical context, large data creates the illusion of addressing the complexity of embodied existence without abandoning the objectivity of a reductionist, mechanistic approach. it allows the practitioner to hide behind the smokescreen of scientific objectivity while admitting that simplicity and monocausal pathways are insufficient. it thus enables the survival of cold-body anatomy in an updated version. in this parting act, however, i want to suggest instead that living bodies are more than highly complex mechanical assemblages (with which large data might have a better chance), more than the sum total of their various systems that we can [the] reductionist focus has been the principal orientation of our science since the seventeenth century. it searches for the smallest particles in isolation and assumes that they will behave in the same way when assembled in the whole. it is an approach that works well in engineering where the parts are built by design and can be tested in the laboratory. in the biological and social sciences it is a useful research tactic but as a philosophy it creates a pattern of knowledge and ignorance that in the long run is harmful and makes us more vulnerable to surprises. (lewontin & levins, 2007, p. 183) 22 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) continue to study and manipulate in newtonian fashion. i want rigorous sciences that are open to this insight; that are informed by a baradian understanding that all forms of distancing and cartesian cutting are temporary and ultimately inadmissible strategies in a universe where players “intra-act” rather than interact. there is no outside from which to observe, analyze, and manipulate. i want sciences that move away from framing embodied life in terms of distinct particles, substances, and mechanisms and begin to address the energetic entanglement and relationality of all embodiment. so i return once more to haraway’s plea that feminist science should not so much give up on visuality as masculinist altogether, hopelessly ensnared in the “god trick,” than reimagine what a feminist and embodied visuality would be in conjunction with other forms of sensory input (1988, p. 581). i hasten to add that this includes even input that we cannot define as sensory in a conventional way (sound, smell, taste, touch), although the outcome (the “healing”) could make it “evidence-based” after the fact. our farrier’s sense (sensory and supersensory) that lilly’s laminitis case would likely not benefit from some of the adjustments suggested by the disembodied internet responder originated from her reading of the x-rays themselves. nemec “knew a few things” about horses like lilly, thanks to her lived and embodied experiences: horses built like her (whose biomechanical forces were likely to produce a certain outcome); horses who think and act like her; alpha mares who need to feel in control in order to heal; mares who will hide their pain. nemec’s intuition was confirmed when she saw lilly in person and heard what lilly had to say. no radiograph will tell you that, although some of “that” may be encrypted in it if you know how to read carefully. what ended up happening in this encounter between nemec and lilly was the full range of what, in feminist science parlance, might be called an embodied feminist methodology and a practice grounded in such an embodied knowledge production, and perhaps something more, a feminist onto-epistemology–cum–dynamic trans-species pedagogy. advanced visual biomedical technologies, then, become another tool, in 23 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) equal need of intuitive and intellectual use as more traditional hands-on techniques as well as supersensory abilities, and need to be carefully balanced against and with them. reading radiographs, like blood work, is a (scientific) art form. we need scientists who are also artists. notes 1 i wish to thank jennifer hamilton and jacquelyne luce for their incisive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 throughout the essay, i follow this special issue’s distinction between institutionalized mainstream science and alternative forms of scientific knowledge production by capitalizing terms associated with the former. 3 i am fully aware that this project, like my life in general, operates within the parameters of late-capitalist pet-culture logic, in which the care of some animals is purchased at the expense of others (grier, 2006). but to become aware of one’s attachments is neither to transcend them completely nor to remain uncritically caught within them. paraphrasing donna haraway speaking about her dogs, i ask: “whom and what do i touch when i touch my [horse]? how is ‘becoming with’ a practice of becoming worldly?” (2008, 35). my project rises up against “subjectless queer critique” of emotion and attachment in recent queer scholarship on species (luciano & chen, 2015, 194), where “to feel for others, to love and to grieve…remains as normatively white as the figure of man” (190). i affirm, with haraway, that “touch does not make one small; it peppers its partners with attachment sites for world making” (2008, 36) because, as van dooren argues about haraway’s engagement with dogs, it “draws us out into complex interwoven histories of co-evolution and broader patterns of co-becoming” (2014a, 293). in the case of horses—my horses—these histories and worldings involve such practices as war, colonization, animal testing, pet culture, pregnant-mare-urine estrogenreplacement therapy, and the horse racing industry, to name just a few. 4 for a discussion of the concept of care along similar lines to mine, consider maria puig de la bellacasa, “‘nothing comes without its world’: thinking with care” (2012), and haraway, when species meet (2008), both of whom develop care in proximity to love, curiosity, as well as 24 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) critique. as van dooren succinctly puts it: “as an affective state, caring is an embodied phenomenon, the product of intellectual and emotional competencies: to care is to be affected by another, to be emotionally at stake in them” (2014a, 291). 5 for foundational work on this topic, consider carol adams and josephine donovan (2007). 6 grief also constitutes one of the battlegrounds of human exceptionalism, as it was until recently considered to be an exclusively human affect. ethological studies on many species have demonstrated the falseness of this assumption. as an outstanding example of this work, consider van dooren’s “mourning crows” (2014). 7 jutel and mcbain (2012) understand diagnostics as the creation of an organized narrative out of a “disorganized story” or “disorder” (1533). 8 i do not have space to theorize my economic positionality properly here. suffice it to say that, as a white queer academic who does not “come from money” but has limited human-family obligations and a stable income, my pockets were not deep enough to consider high-end hospitalization for lilly without declaring bankruptcy. this consideration seems relevant in the current political discussions over government deregulation of the involuntary service of human health care. veterinary service, sometimes mentioned by conservatives as a model of health care deregulation, is considered “voluntary” because we have the option of electing euthanasia rather than treatment. 9 in “do we really need to know?” (jutel & mcbain, 2012), the authors demonstrate that often what we consider medical knowledge may be inconsequential for the treatment and the outcome. 10 see also weinstein’s concept of “critical life studies,” which serves to critique “the remnants of humanism buried in the concept life itself” (2015, p. 237). 11 wilson (2008) points to the link between gut and brain in depression. what is relevant for me in this context is the naturecultural breakdown of the mind-body binary, where the “gut” ceases to stand for a particularly essentialized “dumb matter” paradigm (p. 379). 12 i have in mind here karen barad’s quantum-physics-based arguments about the mutual imbrication of theory and measuring, kept apart in 25 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) newtonian physics: “measurement practices . . . must be a part of scientific reasoning: that is, bohr situates practice within theory” (2007, p. 121). 13 it is important to keep in mind that the “size of the human body” is an ableist fantasy. “compulsory able-bodiedness . . . emanates from everywhere and nowhere” (mcruer, 2006, 8). 14 see https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/savepergolide 15 see adams’ and donovan’s discussions about the connection between care, ethics, and gender. references barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. butler, j. (2000). antigone’s claim: kinship between life and death. new york, ny: columbia university press. donaldson, mark t. et al, (2005). variation in plasma adrenocorticotrophic hormone concentration and dexamethasone suppression test results with season, age, and gender in healthy ponies and horses. journal of veterinary internal medicine, 19(2), 145–146. donavan, j., & adams, c.j. (eds.) (2007). the feminist care tradition in animal ethics. new york, ny: columbia university press. dumit, j. (2006). illnesses you have to fight to get: facts as forces in uncertain, emergent illnesses. social science and medicine, 62, 577–590. dunn, r. (2011). the wild life of our bodies: predators, parasites, and partners that shape who we are today. new york, ny: harpercollins. grier, c. (2006). pets in america: a history. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. 26 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) haraway, d. (1988). situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. feminist studies, 14(3), 575–599. ———. (2008). when species meet. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. ———. (2015). anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: making kin. environmental humanities, 6, 159-165. irigaray, l. (1985 [1977]). this sex which is not one (c. porter & c. burke, trans.). ithaca, ny: cornell university press . jutel, a., & mcbain, l. (2012). do we really need to know? journal of the american medical association, 308 (15), 1533–1534. latimer, j., & miele, m. (2013). naturecultures? science, affect and the non-human. theory, culture, and society, 30(7/8), 5–31. lewontin, r., & levins, r. (2007). biology under the influence: dialectical essays on the coevolution of nature and society. new york, ny: nyu press. luciano, d., & chen, m. (2015). introduction: has the queer ever been human? glq, 21(2–3), 183–207. mcruer, r. (2006). crip theory: cultural signs of queerness and disability. new york, ny: nyu press. nettleton, s. (2005). “i just want permission to be ill”: towards a sociology of medically unexplained symptoms. social science and medicine, 62, 1167–1178. 27 gundermann catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) puig de la bellacasa, m. (2012). “nothing comes without its world”: thinking with care. sociological review, 60(2), 197–216. van dooren, t. (2014a). care. environmental humanities, 5, 291–294. ———. (2014b). mourning crows: grief and extinction in a shared world. in s. mchugh & g. marvin (eds.), the handbook of human-animal studies (pp. 275–289). new york: routledge. weinstein, j. (2015). posthumously queer. glq, 21(2–3), 236–238. wilson, e. (2008). organic empathy: feminism, psychopharmaceuticals, and the embodiment of depression. in s. hekman & s. alaimo (eds.), material feminisms. bloomington, in: indiana university press. bio christian gundermann is chair of gender studies and associate professor of gender studies at mount holyoke university. christian gundermann understands theory as a daily practice like breathing and eating. he teaches students in different contexts as diverse as the interpretation of films, the history of the queer movement, the questioning of the human/animal boundary, the historical study of horsemanship, the practice of body modifications, the connections between feminism and the sciences, the nexuses of power, knowledge, pleasure, and suffering etc. that there is no practice without theory, and that every theory is always already a practice. microsoft word 71499-1-11-karolina agata kazimierczak.docx kazimierczak, k. a. (2018). medical imaging and the "borderline gaze of touch and hearing": the politics of knowledge beyond "sense atomism. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-209. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © karolina agata kazimierczak, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article medical imaging and the "borderline gaze of touch and hearing": the politics of knowledge beyond "sense atomism" karolina agata kazimierczak university of aberdeen k.a.kazimierczak@abdn.ac.uk abstract this article traces different devices and practices (i.e., ultrasound scan, fine needle aspiration and breast examination) involved in the clinical diagnostic practices for breast cancer and suggests that they might be productively considered as “visualization apparatuses.” drawing on auto-ethnographic data and medical literature, it explores how these apparatuses make visible and help materialize a particular bodily configuration (e.g., a simple cyst as a benign breast disorder). in examining side by side the practices and devices commonly characterized as medical imaging such as ultrasonography and the more mundane apparatuses such as syringes or trained eyes and fingers, the article draws attention to the non-given nature of image and imaging, and to the equally non-given nature of the distinctions between vision, touch and hearing as modes of sensing and knowing. in doing so, it seeks to problematize the traditional partitioning of experience into separate and separable perceptual and epistemological modalities, while at the same time reclaiming vision, touch and hearing as metaphors for responsible and accountable knowledge-making. 2 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) bringing together feminist (haraway, 1988; puig de la bellacasa, 2009; barad, 2007; 2012) and post-phenomenological (ihde, 2007; ingold, 2000) work on knowledge-making and perception with the concept of synesthesia (harris, 2016; hayward, 2010; marks, 2002), it argues for a certain knowledge politics beyond “sense atomism,” which helps us to rethink not only the apparent distinction in the different sensorial universes but also, more broadly, the questions of knowledge, politics, responsibility and accountability. introduction [t]he medical gaze embraces more than is said by the word “gaze” alone. it contains within a single structure different sensorial fields. the sight/touch/hearing trinity defines a perceptual configuration in which the inaccessible illness is tracked down by markers, gauged in depth, drawn to the surface, and projected virtually on the dispersed organs of the corpse. the “glance” has become a complex organization with a view to a spatial assignation of the invisible. … the medical gaze is now endowed with a plurisensorial structure. a gaze that touches, hears, and, moreover, not by essence or necessity, sees. (foucault, 2000, p. 164). the medical gaze, the cornerstone of the sociological imagination of the relationship between vision, knowledge and embodiment in the space of the clinic (foucault, 2000), has long been seen as linking the different sensoria within one perceptual and epistemological configuration. michel foucault speaks in this context of the local, “borderline gaze of touch and hearing” practiced by physicians (2000, p. 165). applying his concept to the case of a computer tomography suite, medical anthropologist barry f. saunders notes how “looking comprises a multiplicity of gestures” (2010, p. 18). and yet, while other senses might be involved in its “plurisensorial structure,” the organizing principle of the gaze and of the clinic often appears to be that of a fundamental visibility concerned with the spatial arrangements of bodies (foucault, 2000, pp. 164-165). the 3 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) practices and apparatuses of medical imaging seemingly contribute to this visual regime as they help produce particular reconfigurations of objects/bodies in terms of sets of images or image data (prasad, 2005). the materiality of these visual arrangements and the devices and practices which help to constitute them has been widely discussed; on the one hand, in the tracing of the conditions of development and production of particular imaging technologies (joyce, 2006; koch, 1993; pasveer, 1989; yoxen, 1987); and, on the other hand, in the careful articulations of the clinical practices in which they are involved (joyce, 2005; prasad, 2005; saunders, 2010). contrary to popular imaginaries, the visual in the clinic is not virtual; it does not make the patient and her embodied experience “disappear behind the images” (blaxter, 2009, p. 764). neither is it representational if we are to follow feminist science studies scholar karen barad’s understanding of representationalism as a metaphysical framework separating the world into “the ontologically disjoint domains of words and things” (2003, p. 811) or “representations” and “ontologically separate entities awaiting representation” (2007, p. 49). as she notes in her discussion of fetal ultrasonography, the apparatus “does not allow us to peer innocently at the fetus, nor does it simply offer constraints on what we can see; rather it helps produce and is part of the body it images” (2007, p. 202). in this context, the fetus and the ultrasound image are not separate entities but rather parts of an ontologically inseparable phenomenon constituted in the intra-action of the “object” and the “agencies of observation.”1 following barad’s understanding of apparatuses as “instrument[s] of power through which particular meanings and bodies and materialdiscursive boundaries are produced” (2001, p. 80),2 in this article i want to trace different devices and practices (i.e., ultrasound scan, fine needle aspiration as well as breast examination and self-examination) involved in the clinical diagnostic practices for breast cancer and to suggest that they might be productively considered as “visualization apparatuses.” i use this term to refer to these instruments, technologies and practices, which have power to render objects/bodies visible, that is, observable 4 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) and knowable, but – importantly – only as part and parcel of their own apparatus. these “visualization apparatuses” and the notion of visibility they entail can be seen to encapsulate different optical systems (embodied or otherwise), and the possible configurations of images or image data. but, crucially, they need to be understood also in relation to other perceptual systems and other types of data. drawing on auto-ethnographic work, on oncological and radiological literature and on feminist science studies and postphenomenological accounts of sensory perception and knowledge, i want to explore how the three biomedical apparatuses (i.e., ultrasound scan, fine needle aspiration as well as breast examination and self-examination) make visible and help materialize a particular bodily configuration of which (importantly) they are part: a simple cyst, a benign breast disorder. by examining side by side the practices and devices commonly characterized as medical imaging, such as ultrasonography, and the more mundane apparatuses, such as syringes or trained eyes and fingers, i want to open up for inquiry two important issues related to visualization and its apparatuses. firstly, i want to draw attention to and problematize the notion of medical imaging technologies as given and predefined objects or entities. the non-givenness of imaging technologies needs to be understood not only by recognizing that, as “apparatuses of observation” in the sense suggested by barad (2003, p. 815), these technologies are not separable from their objects of investigation but rather intra-actively materialized together with these objects. the non-givenness of these technologies needs also to be understood in terms of acknowledging that, as the objects of inquiry, they are not separable from the specific practices, in which they are located, including our analytical practices. imaging has sometimes been defined as relating to specific technologies and practices involved in the configuration of images (see, for example, papenburg et al., 2015). in this article i want to explore the broader genealogies of three different medical apparatuses, and investigate how some of them (i.e., the ultrasound and its digital display) come to be 5 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) included in the biomedical imaginary of imaging, while the other (i.e., needles and syringes in fine needle aspiration, or eyes and fingers in medical examination) come to be excluded. in the process, i also want to explore what specific modes of sensing and knowing are involved in making these differentiations. this last question brings forth the second and central concern of the article. by bringing together these diverse practices and apparatuses, i want to explore and problematize the relationship between vision, touch and hearing as modes of sensing and knowing in biomedicine. in various diagnostic practices for breast cancer, seeing might be understood as always already dependent on different forms of hearing and touching with/in different bodies, both human and non-human (as sonic waves are transduced into electronic ultrasound images; or as the suction of a syringe in fine needle aspiration draws out and makes visible bodily fluids); touch might also be a “listening-touch” (harris, 2016) (as piezoelectric crystals of an ultrasound transducer vibrate in response to electric currents and ultrasonic waves), and both can be understood as visualizing devices, or “haptic-optic” systems (hayward, 2010, pp. 580581), which help render particular bodies and particular bodily conditions (such as a simple fluid-filled breast cyst) visible and intelligible. this insistence on the problematic distinctions between vision and touch, touch and hearing, and vision and hearing is not meant to suggest that biomedical practices and apparatuses are simply multisensory, nor that the different sensoria are indistinguishable as modes of perception. rather it suggests that vision, touch and hearing, as modes of sensing and knowing, cannot be taken for granted, as already given, distinct from one another, and from the phenomena, which they render knowable, but are more appropriately understood as such in particular instances of seeing/touching/hearing/knowing and in relation to specific practices and apparatuses. in this article i therefore seek to problematize the traditional partitioning of experience into separate and separable perceptual and epistemological modalities while at the same time reclaiming vision, touch 6 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) and hearing as metaphors for responsible and accountable knowledgemaking. drawing on the feminist tradition of situated knowledges (haraway, 1988) and response-ability (barad, 2007; 2012) and on nonatomist (ihde, 2007; ingold, 2000) or synesthetic understandings of sense and experience (harris, 2016; hayward, 2010; marks, 2002), i want to argue for a relational understanding of sensory experience and the related conception of knowledge politics beyond “sense atomism.”3 bringing together the feminist and post-phenomenological work on knowledgemaking and perception with the concepts of synesthesia, i suggest, can help us to rethink not only the apparent distinction in the different sensorial universes but also, more broadly, the questions of knowledge, politics, responsibility and accountability. knowledge politics of vision, touch and hearing as noted by maria puig de la bellacasa, feminist theorist of science and technology, vision has been “the dominant metaphor in modern knowledge-making and epistemologies” (2009, p. 298) and, as such, subject to much feminist critique. the key point for this critique has been the traditional linking of vision with a particular version of objectivity, what donna haraway (1988) calls the “god trick” (pp. 581-582), an epistemological orientation marked by the disengaged view “from everywhere and nowhere” and by the absolute separation of the viewing subject from the object of its conquering gaze. the reclaiming of vision both as a metaphor and as a specific field of sensory experience is the fulcrum of haraway’s argument for situated knowledges (1988). wrested away from the illusions of disembodiment and transparency, vision can no longer be conceptualized as single or totalizing but rather as splintered into partial perspectives which are always finite and locatable and never innocent: “vision is always a question of the power to see – and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices. with whose blood were my eyes crafted?” (pp. 585, emphasis in original). the embodied and located vision of situated knowledge does not remove or 7 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) negate this violence; instead, it allows us to become accountable for it, “answerable for what we learn how to see” (p. 583). this vision is best characterized by the optics of diffraction rather than that of reflection, concerned as it is with “the production of difference patterns in the world, not just of the same reflected – displaced – elsewhere” (haraway, 1997, p. 268). following haraway’s project of re-appropriating vision for feminist knowledge politics, puig de la bellacasa (2009) turns to touch as the foundation of situated and committed knowledges. tracing the move from vision to what she calls “touching visions” in feminist theorizing, she explores the potential of touch in problematizing “abstractions and disengagements of (epistemological) distances – between subjects and objects, knowledge and the world, affects and facts, politics and science” (p. 298). in this context, touch appears to be linked with the fuller recognition of the matters of embodiment, relationality and engagement. the reversibility of touching contact, the possibility of “being-in-touchwith” oneself and another, of being materially involved with/in the tangible world in its ongoing transformations – these seem to be the promises of touch as a sensorial universe and as a metaphor for knowledge-making. but, as puig de la bellacasa suggests, turning to touch does not mean replacing the illusions of distance and transparency with those of the embodied, unmediated immediacy. situated knowledges reclaiming touch, just as those re-appropriating vision, are not immune to injustice or violence; they give no assurances of final resolution, rather they open up spaces for accountability. as barad notes: “touch is never pure or innocent. it is inseparable from the field of differential relations that constitute it” (2012, p. 215). touching involves a response to the other, where the other and the self are not already given but constituted in mutual “response-ability.” touch is thus a matter of responsibility understood not as an obligation of the self toward the other but as a relation integral to the ongoing worldly materializations within which the self and the other are articulated and materialized (barad, 2007, p. 265). it is the responsibility for these articulations and materializations, for the 8 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) material consequences of our world-shaping (touching) visions, that marks feminist knowledge politics.4 the feminist projects of reclaiming vision and touch have been paralleled by the anthropological and post-phenomenological work revaluing the significance of hearing as a mode of sensing and making sense of the world (ingold, 2000; ihde, 2007; rice, 2008). the “auditory turn” (ihde, 2007) has looked to sound and hearing as a way for a more participatory and relational engagement between subjects and objects: listening to the voice of the other, giving voice, being immersed in a shared stream of sound, traversing the boundaries of inside/outside. as touch before, hearing seems to suggest the possibility of redressing the distancing and objectifying orderings of vision: “[t]here is an old and deeply held tradition that vision ‘objectifies’, and, contrarily but not so widely noted, there is also a tradition which holds that sound ‘personifies’” (ihde, 2007, p. 21). and yet, for don ihde and tim ingold, this turn to sound and hearing is not meant to idealize the auditory experience but rather to draw attention to the problematic understandings of experience, perception and knowledge as implied by the dominant visualist tradition. this tradition, according to ihde, introduces a certain “sense atomism” (2007, p. 46), which, firstly, conceptualizes experience in terms of distinct and separable sensory systems and, secondly, enacts a radical break between sense and significance, between perception and cognition. as ingold explains: at the heart of this approach is a representationalist theory of knowledge, according to which people draw on the raw material of bodily sensation to build up an internal picture of what the world “out there” is like, on the basis of models or schemata received through their education in a particular tradition. the theory rests on a fundamental distinction between physical and cultural dimensions of perception, the former having to do with the registration of sensation by the body and brain, the latter with the construction of representations in the mind. (ingold, 2000, pp. 282-283)5 9 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) he further argues that it is only through this “narrow conception of thought” (p. 287) that vision had come to be seen as an objectifying sense and thus opposed to the seemingly more participatory mode of hearing. drawing attention to sound and hearing opens up a possibility for intervening into this limited understanding of vision and knowledge. the “auditory turn” thus constitutes not only the reclaiming of sound and hearing, but also the reclaiming of vision as a field of sensory experience, and as a metaphor for thought. knowledge politics beyond “sense atomism” crucial for ihde’s (2007) and ingold’s (2000) understanding of knowledge and perception is the resistance to “sense atomism” or the partitioning of experience into separate and separable modes of sensing.6 drawing on phenomenological understandings of experience, these authors suggest that in the actual sensory and perceptual practices seeing, touching and hearing are not distinct activities but intermingled aspects of the bodily engagement with/in the world. this problematic separation of the different modes of sensing has often been illustrated by the phenomenon of synesthesia, that is, the capacity to perceive a sensation related to a particular sensory modality in response to a stimulation of another (e.g., seeing certain forms or colors on hearing particular sounds). as ingold (2000, p. 268) notes, the very category of synesthesia relies on and further reproduces “a two-fold distinction between sensation and perception on the one hand, and between discrete sensory modalities on the other.” but, as illustrated by such synesthetic concepts as “haptic visuality” (marks, 2002), “fingeryeyes” (hayward, 2010) and “listeningtouch” (harris, 2016), the notion of synesthesia nevertheless introduces the possibility of disrupting these distinctions, and in doing so, contributes to a non-atomist, non-representationalist, response-able politics of knowledge. media theorist laura marks uses the concept of “haptic visuality” to trouble the separation between vision and touch. on her account, 10 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) haptic perception, “the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies” (2002, p. 2), forms part of the visual experience of cinema. this entails a certain embodied and tactile vision where the eyes act as organs of touch, feeling as well as seeing the textures of the cinematic image. haptic visuality is thus constituted through particular forms of images, “haptic images,” but also, and more importantly, in the reconfiguring of the relationship between images and their viewers, between the objects and subjects of the gaze: haptic images do not invite identification with a figure so much as they encourage a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image. thus it is less appropriate to speak of the object of a haptic look than to speak of a dynamic subjectivity between looker and image. (p. 3) eschewing identification in favor of an embodied, dynamic relationality, haptic visuality thus seems to follow the diffractive optics of situated (touching) visions. following marks’s concern with haptic optics, feminist science studies scholar eva hayward proposes a notion of “fingeryeyes” as a way of attending to the “synaesthetic quality of materialized sensation” (2010, p. 580). but, her concern is not as much with the relationship between the viewer and the image as with the possibilities of sensing across different sensoria, different media and, most importantly, different species. looking at the laboratory encounters of marine biologists and their critters, hayward suggests that vision and touch are not separate or separable but remain in the relationship of “constitutive supplementarity,” which is expressed in and generates particular textures of the world (p. 582). in this understanding of sense and sensory experience, the eyes and the fingers and, equally, the tentacles, are not seen as distinct organs of perception but rather as inseparable from (within) the body’s sensorium. vision and touch are amalgamated and slide into each other as fingers and eyes and tentacles converge in moments of sensitization. importantly, in these instances of sensing, species do not simply react to one another and to their environment, rather they manifest “with and of” 11 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) the environment and the other, thus constituting “a sensorial ensemble” (p. 593). the notion of “fingeryeyes” thus troubles the sensory, bodily and species boundaries while also hinting at the power relations inherent in the embodied haptic optics: cross-species sensations are always mediated by power that leaves impressions, which leaves bodies imprinted and furrowed with consequences. animal bodies – the coral’s and mine – carry forms of domination, communion, and activation into the folds of being. (p. 592) as such, it calls forth and makes space for response-ability in sensing and knowledge-making. coming from the field of medical anthropology, anna harris’s concept of “listening touch” offers parallel insights into the distributed nature of sensation and the permeability of bodily boundaries (2016). exploring the ways in which medical students are taught and acquire the skills necessary for the clinical technique of percussion, she suggests that listening and touch are not confined to and experienced through their respective organs of the ears and the fingers, rather they constitute a form of “body-listening touch” (p. 42). as the training physicians pay attention to the pitch as well as the vibration of the percussed bodies, the auditory and tactile experiences become intertwined within the movements of the sensing body: “listening-touch in percussion is not a single moment. as the finger-hand-wrist moves, the ear anticipates. the body works in coordination and listening-touch is distributed throughout the technique” (pp. 37-38). interestingly, for harris the concept of “listening-touch” problematizes not only the distinction between touch and hearing. similarly to haptic optics and its diffractive touching visions, it also helps to trouble the separation between the subjects and objects of perception, as (in the case of self-percussion, an important technique for clinical training) the percussing bodies also become the resonating ones. the synesthetic notions of “haptic visuality,” “fingeryeyes” and “listening-touch” contribute to a conception of knowledge politics beyond 12 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) “sense atomism” as they challenge the representationalist and individualist – in the sense suggested by barad (2003, 2007), ingold (2000) or ihde (2007) – metaphysical approaches which separate subjects and objects of perception and divide sensation into distinct domains of different senses and their respective organs. these concepts do not simply imply that perception is multisensory or multimodal; they also indicate the inherent intra-activity of sensory practices which are also, importantly, knowledge practices. writing about the “robotic tactility” feminist science studies scholar claudia castañeda (2001) suggests that touch cannot be understood in any general abstract terms as a given. rather it needs to be seen as constituted through particular embodied relations, particular encounters between bodies and worlds, where touching bodies and the nature of their relation are not already established “in advance of an encounter” but are materialized through them (p. 230). the notions of “haptic visuality,” “fingeryeyes” and “listening-touch” extend this understanding of touch into other modes of sensing and knowing. in this view, seeing, touching and hearing need to be conceptualized – to paraphrase castañeda’s words – as relational qualities that arise out of embodied intra-actions. as i will argue in the following parts of the article, this has important consequences for our understanding of medical imaging technologies and other diagnostic “apparatuses of observation” (barad, 2003, p. 815) not as already given but as intra-actively constituted in particular instances of seeing/touching/hearing/knowing, which also importantly help determine what comes to be understood as vision, touch and hearing in biomedicine. what follows is the discussion of the three different “visualization apparatuses” involved in the clinical diagnostic practices for breast cancer (ultrasound scan, fine needle aspiration as well as breast examination and self-examination). this discussion draws on various sources of data, including auto-ethnographic field notes, patient information leaflets, radiological and oncological literature, and historical and philosophical accounts of different imaging technologies.7 13 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) imaging bodies, imagining vision dark room, lying on the bed, half turned toward the ultrasound screen and the doctor who stands next to it. cold gel on the breast and the sensation of the transducer probe moving over the skin, coming back to the same place over and over again. not looking at my breast but at the screen, where more than fifty shades of grey are swirling. among the grey and greyish, the blackish spots move. is it what the doctor is looking for? yes, this is a cyst, the doctor says. do you want me to drain it off today? again the greyish swirls on the screen, the blackish spots among them. a sharp scratch now, says the doctor. the sharp stinging sensation in my breast, but still i am not looking there. i look at the screen. and, suddenly, a thin long shape in the lighter shades of grey moving through the swirls. this is a needle, i think to myself. the greyish shape meets with one blacker spot, then another, and both of them vanish. ah, these are the cysts. then, the thin shape disappears from the screen too. only the grey swirls remain. the needle has been taken out. it is now drained, the doctor says. were there one or two cysts? i ask. two, he confirms. ah yes, i could see it on the screen, i say, proud of being able to “read” the scan correctly. so it was only some fluid? yes, look, it’s here, the doctor says and shows me the syringe with a yellowish fluid inside. so, these are the cysts too. you can touch your breast and see that it’s gone now, the doctor says. obediently, i touch my breast, but i am worried to press too hard in case it hurts. full of tension and apprehension i cannot say whether i sense any change. still, not to disappoint the doctor i say: oh, yes, it’s gone. thank you! this scene in the dimmed clinical room with the ultrasound machine at its center is one among several episodes constituting my encounter with diagnostic practices for breast cancer. it takes place on an early evening 14 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) in late january 2016, almost three months after my discovery of a suspicious lump in my left breast and an urgent visit to my local gp, resulting in a non-urgent referral to the breast clinic at a large teaching hospital in scotland. the setting for this scene is disturbingly familiar, even if the circumstances are not: a few years earlier i had spent long hours in the rooms and corridors of the same out-patient department, not as a patient but as an ethnographer following a group of men diagnosed with prostate cancer. this does not prepare me for being the subject of the clinic’s gaze, but it makes me aware of its various “apparatuses of observation” which help to render particular bodily arrangements determinate as cancerous or non-cancerous. a brief information leaflet received together with my letter of appointment tells me that “the breast clinic has been designed to provide a diagnostic service” for my “breast complaint,” that “certain procedures may have to be performed” in different rooms within the clinic, that i may “need to spend three to four hours at the clinic before a final result is available,” and that during this time i will be seen by “the doctor” while nursing staff – including a breast-care nurse specialist – will also be present. the leaflet suggests the breast clinic is a complex matter: an arrangement of different practices, apparatuses and relations involving different human and non-human participants, including clinical staff, spaces and technologies. what it does not reveal is the extent of the world-making capacity of these practices and apparatuses. over the course of just a few hours the breast clinic helps to make visible and materialize a particular bodily configuration: a simple, fluid-filled cyst in my left breast now successfully drained and therefore conclusively determined as a benign rather than malignant lesion. leafing through oncological and radiological literature, i learn that the majority of breast lesions are in fact benign (guray & sahin, 2006); simple cysts are by far the most common among them (berg, sechtin, marques, & zhang, 2010). as one oncology article notes: “cysts occur predominantly in the middle and late reproductive period, increasing in frequency from 35 years to a maximal incidence between 40 and 50 15 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) years” (courtillot et al., 2005, p. 329). i have only recently reached the lower limit of this age range, but i am already in the company of nearly one-in-three women between the age of 35 and 50 who present with a cyst. i am also in a more select group of 20% to 25% of cases of simple cysts which involve “palpable (gross) cystic change” (guray & sahin, 2006, p. 438). the exact causes of cysts like mine are not known, but there might be some links with the hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle and the excess of estrogen in the body. i learn this from a brief conversation with the doctor at the clinic and from a leaflet he has given to me. but cysts have also been characterized as disorders of lobular involution thus making them part of the “normal” processes by which the breast epithelial tissue is gradually lost due to aging. the formation of cysts is here seen as a result of the excessive secretion of the epithelium and the subsequent dilation of a terminal ductal lobular unit, the basic functional unit of the breast (courtillot et al., 2005). the two cysts in my left breast might have formed in this way although – as i learn from another oncology source – the pathogenesis of cyst development is still poorly understood (vargas et al., 2004). but the way in which cysts materialize and become visible in the breast clinic in the form of fluid-filled structures relies on a number of “visualization apparatuses.” the ultrasound machine and its particular ways of seeing and making visible is one of these apparatuses. as i read in a medical textbook on breast imaging: the most common sonolucent mass in the breast is the simple cyst. to make an accurate diagnosis of a benign cyst, strict criteria should be observed. cysts should have sharply defined walls. they may be round, ovoid, or lobulated and appear solitary or in groups. cysts should have no internal echoes. (kopans, 2007, p. 585) “sonolucent” is a term used in ultrasonography to describe that which allows a through-transmission of ultrasonic waves without reflecting them back to their source, that is, without producing any echoes. in practice, 16 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) and very much against its etymology (latin sonus “sound” and lucere “to shine”), this term is used to characterize these areas of the ultrasound image that appear black and non-reflective, rather than bright with the reflected sound waves. these are the (silent) black spots among the (echoing) grey swirls. the complex genealogies of ultrasonography have been widely acknowledged: from its roots in the developments of military sonar and radar technologies through its early applications in medicine, where it focused on therapeutic rather than diagnostic uses, to its particular implications for female bodies and subjectivities both in the testing of its early apparatuses on breast cancer patients and in its ongoing, pervasive use in obstetrics (cartwright, 1992; duden, 1993; koch, 1993; mitchell, 2001). what has also been noted is the particular, non-optical nature of its vision (barad, 1998; 2007). ultrasound imaging does not rely on the properties and behavior of light; its seeing and making visible is instead dependent on the emission, reflection and absorption of the high frequency sound waves transmitted to a body through the direct contact with a transducer, converted into electric currents, calculated by a computer and, finally, displayed in a visual form as a two(or threeor four-) dimensional image. this – in the words of sociologist of science edward yoxen (1987) – is “seeing with sound” (p. 281). but, equally, it could be considered a form of “listening-touch”: as the ultrasound transducer slides over a gel-covered body, its piezoelectric crystals vibrate in response to the electric currents and to the ultrasonic waves which pass through and are diffracted by the tissues. this way of imaging through sound and touch, which displays sonographic data in terms of spatial relations between differently echoing tissues, owes much to medicine’s earlier visual traditions, such as x-ray imaging (koch, 1993) and anatomical drawings of the cross-sections of different body parts (yoxen, 1987). but, as the history of ultrasonography suggests, this way of imaging was not the only one possible or even considered. the early ultrasonic devices developed by john wild and tested on women with 17 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) different breast lesions presented sonographic data in reference to their different acoustic behaviors as plotted on a diagram (koch, 1993) and, as such, did not contribute as easily to the imaginary of a body opened up for visual inspection. for, as barad (2007) has importantly noted, the ultrasound does not simply allow us to peer at or into the body; rather “the marks on the computer screen (the sonogram images, sonic diffraction patterns translated into an electronic image) refer to a phenomenon that is constituted in the intra-action of the ‘object’ … and the ‘agencies of observation’” (p. 202). the ultrasound makes the cyst visible but only as a part of its own apparatus, as a sonolucent spot, visualized through electric transformations of sound waves into a digital image. deferred from the sonic diffraction patterns, the cyst can only be seen and known diffractively through its variously materialized effects. what is also materialized and constituted in this process of transduction and translation of sonic data into a particular configuration of image data is the notion of ultrasonography as an imaging technology and a form of seeing rather than touching or hearing. the same cannot be said of some other apparatuses within the breast clinic, such as fine needle aspiration and breast examination, which contribute to the materialization of the fluid-filled structures in my left breast. the lights are still dimmed, but the doctor is gone, the examination now concluded. shedding quickly the baggy hospital gown, open at the front and so large it can wrap almost twice around my body. what should i do with it? i ask the nurse. just leave it here, she says. she takes the syringe still half-filled with the yellowish fluid. will you have to send it for further testing? i ask her. no, it is not necessary in case of a cyst, she says and places the syringe in a yellow plastic container for the medical waste. the draining of the fluid from my breast is technically called fine needle aspiration. as i read in a paper published in american journal of radiology: aspiration may be performed [in the case of simple cysts] if the 18 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) patient is symptomatic or if the cyst prevents adequate compression for mammography. aspirated fluid is typically not sent for cytology if it is cloudy yellow or green because of high false-positive rates. the fluid is sent for cytologic evaluation if it is bloody or if the patient requests that the aspirate be tested (hines, slanetz, & eisenberg, 2010, w122). the discarded syringe and its liquid contents are seemingly incidental, even immaterial, for the imaging of the breast lesion, excluded as they are from further mattering in the diagnostic practices of the breast clinic, and therefore from its vision. there is no use for the drained fluid, no need to test it. furthermore, as suggested by the medical literature and the doctor’s question as to whether i want the cyst drained off, there is even no need to perform the procedure in the first place. in my case the draining of the cyst is not meant to confirm a seemingly already certain diagnosis but rather to remove the discomfort and disquiet of a symptomatic patient. and yet, the syringe half-filled with a yellowish fluid is also highly consequential, as it constitutes a powerful visualization of the simple cyst, its liquid form made apparent. fine needle aspiration can be seen in this context as a haptic optic system. as the needle pierces the flesh guided by the “listening-touch” of the ultrasound and its diffracted vision, as the plunger slides up the syringe its suction draining the fluid, the procedure reveals to the eye what the ultrasound has already seemingly made visible: a black, sonolucent spot on the ultrasound display as the effect of the high-frequency sound wave moving through the non-reflective, anechoic fluid of a simple cyst. it is by this act of draining, which makes it disappear from the ultrasound display (and thus from the clinic’s diagnostic field of vision), that the cyst can finally be materialized and seen as just that: a simple water-filled nodule, the absence of which can be inspected and felt – just as its earlier presence had been – by skilled hands. lying on the bed, a room with strong lights. my arms above my head. the breast-care nurse is touching my breasts. yes, there is something here, she says examining my left breast. it feels like a 19 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) cyst, perhaps a fibrocystic matter, but it is absolutely benign, it is nothing malignant. what would it feel like if it were malignant? i ask. what do you mean? she asks me back. how does a cancerous lump feel? it is hard and craggy, with little arms and legs coming out of it. this feels round and soft, and mobile. this is a benign cyst. this scene constitutes the very first episode in my encounter with the breast clinic and its diagnostic apparatuses. but it is not the first time i have undergone a physical examination for my breast complaint. almost three months earlier, soon after i have become aware of the suspicious lump, a doctor and a nurse from my local gp practice determine that – while some harder areas can indeed be felt in my left breast – to their practiced hands they do not seem suspicious at all. still, deemed expert in the knowledge of my body, i am referred to the breast clinic, although the referral is considered non-urgent. my self-knowledge is meant to be the result of being “breast aware,” that is – to quote a leaflet produced by the breast cancer care charity – “getting to know how your breasts look and feel so you know what is normal for you” and, therefore, can be “more confident about noticing any unusual changes that may be a symptom of breast cancer” (2016, p. 11). in the breast cancer earlydetection campaigns, breast awareness had superseded breast selfexamination (bse): “a regular, repetitive monthly palpation to a rigorous set method performed by the woman at the same time each month” (thornton & pillarisetti, 2008, p. 2119). the genealogies of bse and breast awareness are quite complex. while the idea of examining breasts for small lumps had been tentatively promoted throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the notion of bse was introduced and gained momentum in the 1950s with the joint campaign by the american cancer society and national cancer institute (lerner, 2001). inspired by the success of the pap smear for the early detection of cervical cancer, bse was intended as a similarly life-saving screening method for breast cancer at the time when other techniques (such as mammography) were not yet fully developed. controversial from 20 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) its very inception due to the often sexualized images of the female body used in its promotion, and the inducing of the fear of cancer among healthy women (lerner, 2001), since the 1970s bse has come under growing scientific scrutiny because it has been linked to the increased numbers of benign lumps identified and biopsies performed but not to the reduction in breast cancer mortality and morbidity (thornton & pillarisetti, 2008). deemed harmful to women and burdensome to health services, bse has since been largely rejected in favor of breast awareness the clinical benefits of which are still debated, but which, nevertheless – as evidenced by the breast cancer care leaflet – is currently encouraged as a cancer-screening tool among so-called “well women” (thornton & pillarisetti, 2008). in contrast to the rigorous palpation of bse, being breast aware means assessing both tactile and visual cues, looking not only for lumps and swellings inside the breast but also for any changes in its outward appearance. in fact, out of the eight changes that should be looked for, according to the breast cancer care leaflet (2016, pp. 13-14), only two (“a lump or area that feels thicker than the rest of the breast” and “a swelling in your armpit or around your collarbone”) refer to symptoms that could be experienced specifically through palpation while the remaining six (“a change in size or shape” of the breast; “a change in skin texture such as puckering or dimpling”; “redness or a rash on the skin and/or around the nipple”; “your nipple has become pulled in or looks different”; “liquid that comes from the nipple without squeezing”; and “pain in your breast or your armpit that’s there all or almost all the time”) rely on various sensory signals, including a more general sensation of pain. despite that, through genealogical links with its discredited predecessor bse, the practice of breast awareness and its role in early cancer detection is still considered predominantly in terms of “touching and finding” (thornton & pillarisetti, 2008, p. 2119), rather than seeing or making visible. in the breast clinic, the physical examination precedes the ultrasound scan and the fine needle aspiration. in some cases (but not in 21 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) mine), it might be all that is required. as the trained eyes and hands or, to use hayward’s (2010) term, “fingeryeyes,” of the breast-care nurse trace the shapes and structures of my flesh, the lump in my left breast slowly materializes in a form intelligible to the breast service, and to me. no images or even image data are being produced here, but the hard mass in my breast is made observable and apparent as a benign rather than malignant condition. what is also made apparent (in fact, conspicuous by its absence) is breast cancer. i am fascinated by the imaginary of a hard, craggy, tentacled entity brought forth by the haptic optics of physical examination. and i wonder what careful practices have taught the nurse to see and feel and render visible and knowable the craggy body of the cancer and the round soft one of the benign cyst. thinking back to my reading of the breast imaging textbook and its descriptions of simple cysts, not just as sonolucent spots but as round and sharply defined objects, i also wonder how other apparatuses, such as ultrasonography or mammography and various images produced as their part might be intra-actively brought together to make these imaginaries and their determination possible. conclusion writing about technoscience and its “visual hermeneutics,” ihde (2009) describes imaging technologies as postmodern equivalents of the camera obscura, as they powerfully shape and make possible specific ways of visualizing and imagining the world. as he notes, these ways of seeing involve a reconfiguration of non-visual phenomena into visual ones by exaggerating “a kind of magnification/reduction distortion into monosensory dimensions” (p. 467), which obscures but does not eliminate the “whole body experience.” in her reading of the camera obscura, and other versions of “the technological eye”, haraway suggests that the camera needs to be understood not only as “an analogy to the seeing eye in brainy, knowing man, for whom body and mind are suspicious strangers,” but also, and perhaps more importantly, 22 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) in its etymological sense as “a judge’s chamber, in camera, within which the facts of the world – indeed, the critters of the world – are assayed by the standard of the visually convincing” (2008, p. 251). the feminist and post-phenomenological politics of knowledge have often treated imaging technologies as suspect. but they have also made apparent that no intervention is harmless and no way of knowing without its violence. with bodies handled, examined or punctured, exposed to the high frequency sound waves or electromagnetic radiation, determined as cancerous or non-cancerous, committed to life-changing, grueling treatments or excluded from them, what counts in the process of medical imaging is not without its material consequences. writing about the history of breast cancer treatments, barron h. lerner (2001) notes the extreme violence of early surgical techniques, such as halsted radical mastectomy or wangensteen’s superradical mastectomy, and how screening and early detection programs would commit women with even small tumors to these life-changing procedures. s. lochlann jain’s (2013) anthropological accounts of contemporary “cancer culture” in america draw attention not only to the tremendous toxicity of many standard chemotherapy regimens but also to the widespread nature and severe consequences of delayed cancer diagnoses. as i have argued in this article, imaging a simple cyst in the space of the breast clinic involves many different apparatuses and different ways of making bodies visible and knowable. not all of these apparatuses are commonly considered as imaging technologies, and not all ways of making bodies visible in the clinic involve the production of images or image data. certainly not all of them rely on optical arrangements for their vision. more often than not, the gaze of the clinic is also dependent on the “borderline gaze of touch and hearing.” as i have indicated, ultrasonography, a ubiquitous diagnostic apparatus and a common example of medical imaging technology, involves seeing with sound and sonic diffraction patterns which are translated into electronic images; but it also relies on the “listening-touch” of its vibrating piezoelectric crystals. fine needle aspiration and medical examination, 23 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) excluded as they are from the imaginary of imaging, are differently configured haptic optic systems where the suction of the syringe draws out and renders visible an anechoic fluid and the skilled “fingeryeyes” of doctors and nurses materialize both benign and cancerous lesions. recognizing this synesthetic character of the clinical gaze and its apparatuses does not suggest that clinical diagnostic practices are simply multisensory, or that different perceptual systems are indistinguishable within a body’s sensorium. rather it draws our attention to the non-given nature of distinctions between vision, touch and hearing as modes of sensing and knowing, and the equally non-given nature of imaging and its technologies. in doing so, it argues for a particular conception of knowledge politics beyond “sense atomism” which is grounded in non-representationalist, non-individualist understandings of sense and experience, and in feminist traditions of situated knowledges and response-ability. in this conception, seeing, touching and listening are understood not as predefined perceptual and epistemological modalities distinct from one another and from the phenomena that they render knowable, but – to paraphrase castañeda (2001, p. 230) – as relational qualities that arise out of embodied intra-actions. what counts as vision as compared to touch and hearing, and what counts as image and imaging are not given in advance but articulated and materialized in specific practices and apparatuses which constitute particular instances of seeing/touching/hearing/knowing. in this context, responsible (and response-able) knowledge-making in biomedicine is not a matter of good scientific or clinical practice (if this is to be understood simply in terms of following some pre-existing norms or protocols), rather it is a matter of accounting for and remaining open to what diagnostic determinations are made, what ways of sensing and knowing are involved in making them and with what effects. acknowledgements i would like to thank the editors of this special section, bettina papenburg, liv hausken, sigrid schmitz and natasha myers, and the two 24 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of my work and helpful suggestions on how to clarify its arguments. i would also like to thank the participants of the authors’ workshop at 7th new materialism annual conference “performing situated knowledges: space, time, vulnerability”, warsaw, poland, 21-23 september 2016, and the participants at the “new materialisms and politics” workshop at the university of aberdeen, 21-22 september 2017, for their comments and reactions to the earlier drafts of this article. notes 1 barad proposes the notion of “intra-action” to characterize the mutual constitution of objects, and objects and subjects within phenomena (2007, p. 33). unlike “interaction,” which assumes the existence of separate individual agencies prior to their relation, “intra-action” sees specific entities not as given but as emerging through their relations in the process of differential becoming. 2 barad’s conceptualization owes much to haraway’s notion of an apparatus of bodily production as a material-semiotic, meaninggenerating matrix which allows for the mapping and materialization of boundaries (1988), and to bohr’s understanding of measurement apparatuses as “macroscopic material arrangements through which particular concepts are given definition, to the exclusion of others, and through which particular phenomena with particular determinate physical properties are produced” (barad, 2007, p. 142). 3 the concepts of “situated knowledges,” “response-ability,” “sense atomism” and “synesthesia” are explained and further discussed in the following parts of the article. 4 donna haraway emphasizes this notion of accountability and responsibility in relation to both touch and vision: touch, regard, looking back, becoming with – all these make us responsible in unpredictable ways for which worlds take shape. in touch and regard, partners willy nilly are in the miscegenous mud that infuses our bodies with all that brought that contact into being. touch and regard have consequences. (2008, p. 36) 5 this understanding of representationalism has some important parallels with barad’s conceptualization discussed earlier in this article. 25 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) 6 this understanding of “sense atomism” can be read as another version of what barad refers to as the metaphysics of individualism, an ontological framework which sees the world as “composed of individual entities with individually determinate boundaries and properties” (2007, p. 107). 7 the purpose and intention of including these various sources is not to tell a story of one patient’s encounters with the breast cancer services but rather to make particular theoretical points in relation to imaging and its technologies. as such, the events recounted in this section do not follow any chronological sequence but rather an internal logic of its theoretical argument. references barad, k. (1998). getting real: technoscientific practices and the materialization of reality. differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, (10)2, 87-128. barad, k. (2001). "re(con)figuring space, time and matter." in m. dekoven (ed.) feminist locations: global and local, theory and practice (75-109). new brunswick, n.j.; london, gb: rutgers university press. barad, k. (2003). posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. signs, (28)3, (801-831). — (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc and london, gb: duke university press. — (2012). on touching – the inhuman that therefore i am. differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, 23(5), 206-223. berg, w.a., sechtin, a.g., marques, h., & zhang, z. (2010). cystic breast masses and the acrin 6666 experience. radiologic clinics of north america, 48(5), 931-987. blaxter, m. (2009). the case of the vanishing patient? image and experience. sociology of health and illness, 31(5), 762-778. 26 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) breast cancer care (2016). know your breasts: a guide to breast awareness and screening. retrieved from: https://www.breastcancercare.org.uk /informationsupport/publication/know-your-breasts-guide-breast-awarenessscreening-bcc2. cartwright, l. (1992). women, x-rays, and the public culture of prophylactic imaging. camera obscura, 29, 18-54. castañeda, c. (2001). "robotic skin: the future of touch." in s. ahmed & j. stacey (eds.), thinking through the skin (pp. 223-236). london: routledge. courtillot, c., plu-bureau, g., binart, n., balleyguier, c., sigal-zafrani, b., goffin, et al. (2005). benign breast diseases. journal of mammary gland biology and neoplasia, 10(4), 325-335. duden, b. (1993). disembodying women: perspectives on pregnancy and the unborn. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. foucault, m. (2000). the birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception (a. m. sheridan, trans.) london, gb: routledge. (original work published 1963). guray, m. & sahin, a.a. (2006). benign breast diseases: classifications, diagnosis, and management. the oncologist, 11(5), 435-449. haraway, d. (1988). situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. feminist studies, 14(3), 575-599. — (1997).modest_winess@second_millenium.femaleman©_meets_onco mouse™. new york, ny and london, gb: routledge. — (2008). when species meet. minneapolis, mn and london, gb: minnesota university press. harris, a. (2016). listening-touch: affect and the crafting of medical bodies through percussion. body and society, 22(1), 31-61. hayward, e. (2010). fingeryeyes: impressions of cup corals. cultural anthropology, 25(4), 577-599. 27 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) hines, n., slanetz, p.j., & eisenberg, r.l. (2010). cystic masses of the breast. american journal of radiology, 194, w122-w133. ihde, d. (2007). listening and voice: phenomenologies of sound. albany, ny: state university of new york press. — (2009). from da vinci to cad and beyond. synthese, 168(3), 453-467. ingold, t. (2000). the perception of the environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. london, gb and new york, ny: routledge. jain, s. l. (2013). malignant: how cancer becomes us. los angeles, ca and london, gb: university of california press. joyce, k. (2005). appealing images: magnetic resonance imaging and the production of authoritative knowledge. social studies of science, 35(3), 437-462. — (2006). from numbers to pictures: the development of magnetic resonance imaging and the visual turn in medicine. science as culture, 15(1), 1-22. koch, e. (1993). in the image of science? negotiating the development of diagnostic ultrasound in the cultures of surgery and radiology. technology and culture, 34(4), 858-893. kopans, d. b. (2007). breast imaging. philadelphia, pa: lippincott williams & wilkins. lerner, b. h. (2001). the breast cancer wards: fear, hope and the pursuit of a cure in twentieth century america. oxford, gb: oxford university press. marks, l. (2002). touch: sensuous theory and multisensory media. minneapolis, mn and london, gb: university of minnesota press. mitchell, l.m. (2001). baby’s first picture: ultrasound and the politics of fetal subjects. toronto, on and london, gb: university of toronto press. papenburg, b, schmitz, s., hausken, l., haagensen, t., radomska, m., hellstrand, i., mehrabi, t. (2015). the processes of imaging / the imaging 28 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) of processes. position paper for new materialism on the crossroads of the natural and human sciences working group of cost action 1307 new materialism: networking european scholarship on ‘how matter comes to matter’. available at: http://newmaterialism.eu/content/5working-groups/2-working -group-2/position-papers/newmaterialismimaging.pdf pasveer, b. (1989). knowledge of shadows: the introduction of x-ray images in medicine. sociology of health and illness, 11(4), 360-381. prasad, a. (2005). making images/making bodies: visibilizing and disciplining through magnetic resonance imaging (mri). science, technology, and human values, 30(2), 291-316. puig de la bellacasa, m. (2009). touching technologies, touching visions. the reclaiming of sensorial experience and the politics of speculative thinking. subjectivity, 28, 297-315. rice, t. (2008). ‘beautiful murmurs’: stethoscopic listening and acoustic objectification. the senses and society, 3(3), 293-306. saunders, b. (2010). ct suite: the work of diagnosis in the age of noninvasive cutting. durham, nc and london, gb: duke university press. thornton, h., & pillarisetti, r.r. (2008). ‘breast awareness’ and ‘breast self-examination’ are not the same. what do these terms mean? why are they confused? what can we do? european journal of cancer, 44(15), 2118-2121. vargas, h.i., vargas, m.p., gonzales, k.d, eldrageely, k., & khalkhali, i. (2004). outcomes of sonography-based management of breast cysts. the american journal of surgery, 188(4), 443-447. yoxen, e. (1987). "seeing with sound: a study of the development of medical images." in w.e. bijker, t.p. hughes, & t.j. pinch (eds.) the social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology (pp. 281-303). cambridge, ma, and london, gb: the mit press. 29 kazimierczak catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) bio karolina kazimierczak completed a masters degree in sociology at the university of warsaw and undertook her doctoral work in the department of sociology, lancaster university. she currently holds a lecturer position at the university of aberdeen business school. her research has explored the questions of knowledge, power and agency in health, illness and biomedicine, in science and academic institutions, and in popular culture. paean to bicillin l-a® and the end of harry barlow’s munson, peggy. (2020). paean to bicillin l-a® and the end of harry barlow’s rhesus monkey experiments. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-12. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © peggy munson, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license paean to bicillin l-a® and the end of harry barlow’s rhesus monkey experiments peggy munson strickenbk@aol.com [but] thanks to harlow and his colleagues in the study of attachment, we have been humanized—we possess an entire science of touch, and some of this came from cruelty. there’s the paradox. —lauren slater, “monkey love,” the boston globe, 21 march 2004. fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so— but this is surely the way fascism can begin. —david remnick, on donald trump, “an american tragedy,” the new yorker, 9 november 2016 i was in harry harlow's “pit of despair,” that walled isolation chamber with a one-way mirror: spent months there, rocking like a horse turned wooden by the blank stare of a mute whisperer into part of an attic’s unaccounted boneyard. i do know how it feels to suckle at a wire mother, because a tin mom’s teleprompter was the script given me by captors whose transgenic faces tarred my raptor-feathered fight. isolation, that velvet rope of triage that cannot be deveined, spelled out america’s subliminal apartheids like a bride’s soft skin that lives within her hardened marriage. i started off homebound, a leitmotif of the mandela effect, once a latchkey kid, keyed up in the collective amygdala, critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) peggy munson, 2020 2 then gently cordoned off the way a capsized crew is threaded off from where they tread together until one of them goes lost. later, i was rigid as the monkey huddled in a corner, egg-eyed like the tempest of an anthropomorphic psychosis that society sections away. that monkey’s mutagenic life became the dna of all human cruelty. i pined for touch while the chemical cartel nudged me with its ammonia waves, and even now, i cry for the word felt. felt mother, how i longed to feel mothered. i sensed my ancestors near as i was dying there, on a cold bathroom floor. my mother had abandoned me, in such inoculating heat from tuskegee. experimental machinations pushed my hem to the heavens. what you done in the dark sure come to the light. blighted starlight through the tiny window i could not stand up to reach. like a hunchback child kept in a four-foot-high basement, or the muteness pounded by a venal gavel into the mouth of each woman whose abuse is denied, i was just too weak to speak. the miscreant who put monkeys on “rape racks” taught us motherly touch was broader than milking at a celestial maw, our similarly simian dna a common tree of syngenta and ciba-geigy, borne of swiss notions of neutrality plunked proximal to our maddened germany. ciba first pigmented clothes, making arsenic green, so before this nothing was unbleached, before harlow our cloth mothers sewed a flowery sack-dress from flour. grandma said simply, you wore what you had, as young harlow in iowa sketched winged creatures in his imaginary land yazoo, then vivisected them violently with lines. flat latitudes, we noted of the echolocating expanse, were seamed with unreachable simplicity. it may be that proximity is all that you know of love harlow chided. so, we courted collision, divisibly midwestern, depressed from atrazine, our stewed prairie madness critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) peggy munson, 2020 3 soon calcified in milk teats, metastasizing into brains in my unassuming block, spiralizing the dna of cornstalks that is more complicated than human or monkey. corn has the genome of not running away, a racked realism. because, says science, corn has to stay put. i thank god i have not been so deprived. outside the gallows of cloth pelts, the spiralized germs climbed the collective neck as a borrelia spirochete that started the neurological twitch, idea-like, behind my eye. history is limited by the lexicographer’s sty so that pure experience and the sailor’s cure are as unreachable as oscar wilde’s fainting chair from which the pulse of a syphilitic miasm propelled this theatrical democracy into costumed darwinian eugenics. project paperclip fastened us all to pathogens from which peoria lab penicillin would set us free. raunchy beats led me to peoria, my sister and i two of few white girls at a funk concert there. we danced where the missouri and mighty mississippi met to dump pesticides into a cancer cluster that later struck her. penicillin was first made on corn-steep liquid from local farms there so that by d-day, troops had their shots, a wonder drug for wunderkind. farmers, invested in the wartime cog, and proud of their penicillium corn, bought nitrogen from bombs, and ddt for their crops. now, like a trial-by-drowning witch, i only have that get-down-on-it twitch like the high whine of pride and its insecticide. the cremains of my life's gyrations shaken down from a statue of a life. my sister once said i could be zebra and she would be monkey, iconoclast to her monkey mind, i was that dialect from exile, body-dialectical, before my sister lost her breast then-incommunicado to my illness, critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) peggy munson, 2020 4 our girlhood shirked in shucked husk dolls. an axis mundi of atrazine and paxil, she replied tersely, stole her flesh, while she regulated earth and euphoria. now i take my penicillin shot for neuro lyme riddled by the neurotoxic moonshine that flows as free as cornstalks marching quietly around my gmo-laced city, mitsubishi’s first electric car town near where mad hatter rage from lincoln’s blue mass pills spit out a blue planet like a lead plug to house milliners who would never be millionaires and the myoclonic start of beggar's subways below the green peace of death, with an iron-on ideology and one ribald eyeball staring out of a masonic dollar. zebra melts into my ashen face, a grayed area found on google cartography, medicine’s improbable diagnosis defying occam. sprayed skies collapsing into new games parachutes, as my mailman’s detergent conjuring zyklon b deeply sickens me. i haven't seen anyone in weeks. they call this limbic kindling, as in it only takes a spark to get a fire going, our sunday school song about giving away god, as if diluted sameness that should end already, will shake the exoplasmic ego away. children of lyme, connecticut don’t look like teetotalers now, but van gogh when the night got in his brain. their hyperacuity threatens national security. the flight pattern of plum island birds ends around swingsets that carved smiles in the afternoon air. it’s crayon biowarfare, those poor little monkeys, where nancy lanza counts yard-roaming deer before, before, every evening before, the ixodes ticks on crisp newtown grass, dr. charles jones defends himself to the medical boards, as the fda rations antibiotics like curative mold withheld from poor black men of tuskegee. critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) peggy munson, 2020 5 the poor black men of tuskegee were reduced to symbols of the disease process of white supremacy that fanned out quietly through the tumorous nurseries and tumorous suburbs and tumorous white flight exploding into a hyper-white aircraft that sprayed a sick mist over my friend's land and drove her into a temporal seizure that started with the a-bomb researcher in michigan feeding her radiation as a child when she was human subject number 423. the cure was this paean to bicillin, raunchy mold on corn steep. proxemics, josie, i say, watching a video where the cheerleader near peoria huddles with a cursing dad under her home as an ef4 pulverizes it. he shouts nails or other fright-words, flushing her from the timid hole— their dream kitchen dashed to smithereens. she’s shrilling omigod omigod our demigoddess dorothy, past an untouched, illusory large-screen tv, insulation draped like congratulations streamers, staircase freestanding on grass, dad’s “holy shit” as shocked prayer, there in washington, where our vorticist was a fascist, what plath said every woman adores: making luminous literata into imagistes, as if overexposed “children of the sun,” their deepest palimpsest undone. feminist confessionals became ovens, before “it gets better,” oh lyrical lymie heather, her “it gets better” speech stopped when she flung herself before a train. the ss entomological institute’s paranoid pesticides preventing tick warfare, then all of it hatching into the same symbolic nymph. recombining in john deere combines trolling once-swamped malarial fields: this gathered, hard-fracked hem. now the hymn-drum of stimming indigo kids where brucella-laced bison roam standing rock, critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) peggy munson, 2020 6 where grandma succumbed to the rorschach plaques, where solar civilizations still solicit sundown towns, where flint is the garbage fire going. who is the vorticist-fascist? we can’t de-cipher this spin. it’s bad, josie, says dad, to his post-apocalyptic, just another day. josie, come on now. i know it’s scary, come on now. josie, we gotta get outside where it’s safe. our house is freakin’ destroyed. she climbs from the smashed dollhouse to the russian doll cocktail, with the mighty mississippi oxbowing to nearby nauvoo, harkening proximity to these tainted morphologies of mergers through history: she tilts toward the windmilled chem-sky, toward the histo-soil, as insect people emerge seeking palliative, chimeric saliency. like sweet josie, i cling to what stings me. what is kindled— here to ferguson, stone’s throw from monsanto— becomes counterforce’s carburetor, body heat to calibrate the missile. dad’s right, josie: get your back up off the wall. proximity could grow love, that steep of mutual contamination, a flanking then fucking then fomenting at the field’s end, where medicine molts just as the monarch molts: the crowning crown begins anew, but we crawl up toward a vestigial, surrogate sense, the sensitive’s mensa, where still artists with paresis claw toward the blinding blue. otherwise, madness and its cure become the felted lovers sinking into oxytocin dreams, until our brains are completely overrun, and we can only remember the invention. notes for “paean to bicillin l-a ® and the end of harry harlow's rhesus monkey experiments” my story weaves into this larger story. i contracted sudden-onset, disabling myalgic encephalomyelitis (me/cfs) in 1992, then secondary multiple chemical critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) peggy munson, 2020 7 sensitivities (mcs), and then lyme disease plus associated co-infections after 2004, which became persistent and nearly deadly due to my lack of immunity. at the end of 2008, after an infectious disease society of america (idsa) doctor refused my positive blood tests for these infections and denied me intravenous antibiotics, emboldened by the “lyme wars” and the idsa’s official stance against the chronicity of lyme disease, i was abandoned to die in the corner of a bedroom and adjoining bath at my house, largely without care when i could not crawl beyond a few feet and had to live within tiny parameters or a room’s corner and adjoining bathroom—like a harlow monkey isolation experiment—for over 7 months, immobilized, ultimately dependent on a noninvasive bipap ventilator to breathe, unable to bathe or speak out loud, mostly without human contact and scarce media for twenty-four hours a day. in the united states, 79 to 90% of personal assistance for disabled adults is provided voluntarily by families and friends, due to lack of available services that vary state by state, leaving people to fall through the cracks (national center on elder abuse, 2012). me/cfs is characterized, as the institute of medicine (2015) describes it, by a slew of multi-systemic “symptoms that are made worse by exertion of any sort,” even mild stimulation, often referred to as “post-exertional malaise,” or pem (p. 1). functional impairment is extreme, to the point that a small task like talking, reading, or brushing one’s teeth can be more than a patient can do in a day. other trivial activities can cause a “crash” that lasts for months or years or leaves a patient permanently bedridden, needing to reduce all stimulation. as one patient described in the institute of medicine (2015) report guide for clinicians, “beyond myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome: redefining an illness,” “my personal experience of having me/cfs feels like permanently having the flu, a hangover, and jet lag while being continually electrocuted (which means that pain plays at least as much of a role in my condition as fatigue)” (p. 6). “there is sufficient evidence that pem is a primary feature that helps distinguish me/cfs (seid) from other conditions” (institute of medicine, 2015, p. 5). harry harlow conducted studies on maternal deprivation in rhesus monkeys; often bizarre and sadistic, they expanded the science of touch—some involved the comparison between monkeys raised by cloth “mothers” and those raised by wire “mothers,” some involved what amounted to solitary confinement and torture. as lauren slater wrote in “monkey love,” “here is where he stepped from science into fairy tales. he made many of the iron maidens: some rattled their children and stabbed them. no matter what the torture, harlow observed, the babies would not let go. there is no partial reinforcement to explain this behavior; there critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) peggy munson, 2020 8 is only the dark side of touch, the reality of primate relationships, which is that mothers can kill us even as they hold us.” also, “harlow, a brash man who could also be strangely shy, said, 'it may be that proximity is all you know of love—i thank god i have not been so deprived’” (slater, 2004). the mandela effect is when people collectively remember something in a way that didn’t happen, such as people thinking nelson mandela died in prison in the 1980s when he passed away in 2013. “russian doll cocktail” or “russian biological cocktail” refers to the use of simultaneous chemical and biological agents, often in rapid and complex succession, to make finding the cause of illness from these agents exceedingly difficult. plum island was a zoonotic (animal to human disease) biowarfare lab off the coast of long island that produced biological agents often blamed on the outbreak of lyme disease in lyme, ct, and elsewhere on the east coast—which since shifted its operations to kansas (carroll, 2004). via kris newby’s (2019) book bitten, i learned after this poem was written that willy burgdorfer (credited with the discovery that borrelia burgdorferi causes lyme disease) stated that he thought early us lyme outbreaks were caused by a biological weapons release, and i discovered that burgdorfer’s most influential advisor was rudolf geigy of the j. r. geigy ag chemical company in basel, where burgdorfer launched his tick-focused career, which later merged into ciba-geigy. swiss chemical company ciba-geigy merged with sandoz in 1996 to form novartis. ciba-geigy has manufactured many products, including antibiotics (cipro, rifampin, amoxicillin, etc.), but also produced atrazine (herbert, 1997). zyklon b was a pesticide created by the german chemical and pharmaceutical cartel ig farben, which ciba-geigy modeled itself after, used by the nazi’s in gas chambers in wwii (the nazis also killed tens of thousands of disabled and chronically ill citizens via aktion t4, first using extreme neglect and starvation, then “advancing” to the more expedient gas chamber that served as a prototype for larger models). “in order to remain competitive with the germans, the three largest swiss chemical companies, ciba ltd., j.r. geigy s.a., and sandoz ltd., formed a similar cartel called basle ag. this trust lasted from 1918 to 1951. by 1970, however, market conditions led ciba and geigy to merge, forming one of the world's leading pharmaceutical and specialty chemical companies” (“cibageigy ltd. history,” n.d.). basle was originally a leader in the dye industry, and early dyes were often based on arsenical pigments, with elements originally used as pesticides or drugs. syngenta was formed out of the novartis merger, and produces agricultural chemicals and gmo seeds (“ciba-geigy ltd. history, n.d.). critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) peggy munson, 2020 9 the first mass quantities of penicillin were made during wwii at the peoria lab in peoria, il (usda, 2018). what you done in the dark sure come to the light, intoned nurse eunice rivers, repeating a patient in the tuskegee syphilis experiment, which involved nonconsensually exploiting poor black men by withholding available penicillin treatments for syphilis to observe the disease’s progression of brutal, protracted, and long-suffering symptoms (hayden, 2003). doctors prescribing antibiotics for lyme disease in recent years have repeatedly faced the threat of losing their licenses for treating patients by the international lyme and associated diseases society guidelines, versus the antibiotic-restricting infectious disease society of america guidelines. the single drug pending approval for me/cfs, ampligen, has also been held up by decades of red tape in the fda, so patients cannot get it. the vorticist is ezra pound, who coined the pre-wwi term for art and poetry, including his own. he described poetic vorticism as locating both movement and stillness within an image and incorporating history and ancestry. as he wrote, all experience rushes into this vortex. all the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. all momentum, which is the past bearing upon us, race, race-memory, instinct charging the placid, non-energized future. the design of the future in the grip of the human vortex. all the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, now. (pound, 1914/2010). pound was locked up for twelve years at st. elizabeth’s hospital, which overlooked washington, dc, for his fascist beliefs. he also famously dubbed the bisexual, freudchallenging poet h. d. an “imagiste,” or a proponent of his school of “imagism” that focused on “luminous details,” but flattening her own complex poetry to a pretty trinket, though he also referred to her work in his essay on vorticism. this poem in many ways reclaims a neo-vorticism to transform it. the atomic energy commission and department of energy (in the 1990s) declassified information on the non-consenting human subjects used for radiation experiments in prior decades noted in this poem. the personal stories i have heard of people living through this, as well as related government programs like mkultra, have convinced critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) peggy munson, 2020 10 me to trust the first-hand reports. (see “doe openness: human radiation experiments,” https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/index.html.) sandra steingraber’s documentary film living downstream is referenced. it deals with atrazine contamination, focusing on central illinois, particularly areas near peoria, less than an hour from my hometown. around when she went to college in my hometown twin cities of bloomington-normal, il, and was diagnosed with cancer, mitsubishi decided to place a welcomed auto plant outside of my town, later launching an advertising campaign called “the new normal,” which depicted electric cars zipping around normal, il—a sign of a green revolution in an agriculture-heavy area. in my childhood home in normal, in the 1990s, my sister measured above-epasafe levels of triazene herbicides—a class that contains atrazine—in the tap water we had ingested throughout our early years, and then later developed breast cancer. the commonly prescribed antidepressant paxil is also now implicated in breast cancer cases as a potential endocrine disruptor, which in this case brings up the idea of chemical synergy (where two chemical agents can far more than double the toxic effects of the original agent) (healy, 2014). nancy lanza lived in one of the most deer-populated, lyme-endemic areas of the country (deer carry and spread lyme ticks)—before she was murdered by her son i’ll call “al,” as did subsequent reports, who went on to commit horrific mass murder at sandy hook elementary school. pleas to state offices to examine al’s brain for lyme or tick-borne co-infections did not result in a comprehensive analysis of his blood and brain tissue for tick-borne illness. dr. robert bransfield has extensively researched and spoken about the links between a small subset of late-stage lyme patients and violence induced in part by direct brain infection and inflammation (violent or combative behavior can happen in other brain infection as well), including in very rare cases homicidal violence, yet lyme treatment remains controversial due to the efforts of the infectious disease society of america, which openly debunks the notion of chronic lyme disease and long-term antibiotic therapies in most cases. dr. charles jones spent years fighting medical boards in connecticut in a prohibitively expensive legal battle because of the “crime” of prescribing antibiotics to children with lyme disease. (“be safe newtown,” n.d.). the cure for syphilis, still a common treatment for neurological lyme, was injections of penicillin, now bicillin la. both syphilis and lyme disease are caused by spirochetes, and called at different points in history “the great imitators” because of their breadth of symptoms that can resemble other diseases (lyme spirochetes have also been found in the brains of alzheimer’s disease patients). “children of the sun” is a term used by julius evola, a nazi-affiliated philosopher and https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/index.html critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) peggy munson, 2020 11 darling of the italian fascists who is openly admired by steve bannon and members of the us “alt-right.” he uses the term to describe a reawakening “white race.” this group calls itself the solar civilization, making it sound like a green business instead of a racist cult. “sunset towns” were historically all-white towns, cities, or neighborhoods that practiced segregation via shutting out people of other races “once the sun went down,” through direct laws, signs at the town limits, violence, or intimidation tactics. heather askeland johnson, my thirty-three-year old poet friend, suffered severe neurological lyme disease, fought tirelessly to get treatments she ultimately couldn’t afford or access, and in deterioration and despair took her own life in 2014, after posting an “it gets better” video to encourage bullied youth not to commit suicide. the quotes of josie and her dad are taken from a video posted on youtube by marc wells (2013) after he and his daughter bravely went through a devastating tornado on november 17, 2013, in washington, il, just outside of peoria. “recombining in john deere combines” references “recombination” —the combining of viral or other genetic material in a cell that can create new pathogenic agents. the concept of “indigo children” from nancy tappe in the 1960s and 1970s characterized certain gifted, highly perceptive children, who also may have symptoms of add, adhd, or autism spectrum. “get down on it” and “get your back up off the wall” are from legendary funk band kool and the gang, who my sister and i saw in peoria around 1984 or 1985. “will it play in peoria?” was a term popularized in the vaudeville era, when peoria, il, became the litmus test of what “middle america” (and then, the rest of america) would think. acknowledgements for my two favorite poets lost to these illnesses, heather (askeland) johnson (who passed away in 2014 at age 33) and nicole meredith reinert (who passed away in 2016 at age 40). references be safe newtown. (n.d.). retrieved from http://besafenewtown.org/bsnfacts.html carroll, m. c. (2004). lab 257: the disturbing story of the government’s secret plum island germ laboratory. new york, ny: william morrow. ciba-geigy ltd. history. (n.d.). retrieved from http://besafenewtown.org/bsnfacts.html critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) peggy munson, 2020 12 http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/ciba-geigy-ltd-history/ hayden, d. (2003). pox: genius, madness, and the mysteries of syphilis. new york, ny: basic books. healy, m. (2014, february 18). new test suggests antidepressant paxil may promote breast cancer. la times. retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/18/science/la-sci-sn-antidepressant-paxil-breastcancer-20140218 herbert, b. (1997, february 17). dangerous deception. the new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/17/opinion/dangerous-deception.html institute of medicine. (2015, february 10). beyond myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome: redefining an illness. washington, dc: national academies press. national center on elder abuse. (2012). abuse of adults with a disability. retrieved from https://ncea.acl.gov/ncea/media/docs/abuse-of-adults-with-a-disability(2012).pdf newby, k. (2019). bitten: the secret history of lyme disease and biological weapons. new york, ny: harper wave. pound, e. (1914/2010). vortex. poetry foundation. retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69480/vortex slater, l. (2004, march 21). monkey love. the boston globe. usda, agricultural research service. (2018, march 5). penicillin: opening of an era. retrieved from https://www.ars.usda.gov/midwest-area/peoria-il/national-center-foragricultural-utilization-research/docs/penicillin-opening-the-era-of-antibiotics/ wells, m. (2013, november 21). 11-17-2013 tornado washington, il [video file]. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfrgsvoji1u author bio peggy munson is the author of the poetry collection pathogenesis and the novel origami striptease, as well as the editor of stricken: voices from the hidden epidemic of chronic fatigue syndrome. she has living with me/cfs, mcs, and lyme disease for decades. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/ciba-geigy-ltd-history/ http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/18/science/la-sci-sn-antidepressant-paxil-breast-cancer-20140218 http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/18/science/la-sci-sn-antidepressant-paxil-breast-cancer-20140218 http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/17/opinion/dangerous-deception.html https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69480/vortex https://www.ars.usda.gov/midwest-area/peoria-il/national-center-for-agricultural-utilization-research/docs/penicillin-opening-the-era-of-antibiotics/ https://www.ars.usda.gov/midwest-area/peoria-il/national-center-for-agricultural-utilization-research/docs/penicillin-opening-the-era-of-antibiotics/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfrgsvoji1u microsoft word treusch-124-1223-1.docx treusch, p. (2017). title: subtitle. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(2), 1-27 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © pat treusch, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article the art of failure in robotics: queering the (un)making of success and failure in the companion-robot laboratory pat treusch center for interdisciplinary women’s and gender studies (zifg), technical university berlin p.treusch@tu-berlin.de abstract this article investigates an emerging class of contemporary machines: the robot companion. it is introduced as a robot that will accompany “us” in “our” human everyday lives. this article analyzes one example of how robot companionship is realized while querying how this realization might imply a change in how “we” conceive of human/machine relations. drawing on central insights into the making of the humanoid armar, the author develops an approach to emerging human/machine relations through affects, more precisely through the affective strategies and affective labors taking place in the robotics laboratory. she furthermore suggests taking a posthumanist perspective on the analysis, which entails becoming attentive to the intra-active co-production between human and machine. importantly, this also allows her to tweak the powerful differentiation between success and failure at work in this specific setting, the robotics laboratory. how can “we” rethink human/machine relations of humanlike interaction through queering success and failure at the robot/human interface? finally, the author suggests establishing an understanding of laboratory work on 2 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) the project of the humanlike companion that takes into account the queering potential of failure—centrally by emphasizing the interweaving of knowing and affects, rather than neglecting their connection. at stake seems to be the possibility to develop visions of how to turn the capitalist endeavor of increasing rationalizations of “human everyday lives” into a more responsible and accountable practice of technologization that accounts for the largely neglected dimensions of human/machine relations beyond the success/failure binary. 1. introduction: robot companionship—a new class of humanrobot relations emerging from the european network robot companions for citizens (robotcompanions.eu, n.d.), a recent strand of contemporary humanoid robotics envisions the realization of a special machine, namely the “robot companion.” this machine is special because it is charged with social meaning in a double sense: first, it is classified as a companion “for citizens”; second, it is described as a technological innovation—or, one could even say, as a technological intervention into what is perceived as “a critical challenge [that] human society faces: how to increase and maintain our quality of life in the future” (robotcompanions.eu, n.d.). thus, the robot companion will supposedly leave the factory halls of industrial production and enter the sphere of everyday lives, including public spaces and private homes, in order to operate close to “us humans.” it is precisely such flexible possibilities of bringing humans and humanoid robots together as companions that solve the problem of how to maintain and improve a certain quality of life. it is through this perceived need that robot companionship will also supposedly become a market success. the vision of such machines operates through promises of “technoscientific salvation” (haraway, 1997, p. 8) from, primarily, the work-burdened contexts of the household and the workplace. the quality of this emerging human/machine relationship also highlights the burdens of social, particularly urban, life in late capitalist societies in the global north, with its structural separation and loneliness, especially with increasing age. in addition, the image of sociality and close relations between humans and robots carries a 3 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) distinct connotation of human/human relations as inherent to companionship. this article asks: how is the production of this new class of machines transforming hegemonic ideas of both human/machine relations and companionship? to explore this question, i draw on the example of the humanlike robot companion armar iii. armar is being developed at laboratories specializing in a current strand of humanoid robotics in germany, anthropomatics, at the karlsruhe institute for technology (kit). more precisely, i am interested in how an interaction at this specific level of robot/human interface is understood and experienced as a success with regard to social scripts, with their concomitant expectations and behaviors, and when it is perceived as failing. reconstructing the circumstances of success and failure in the making of robot companionship, i opt to open up the perspective of a queer-feminist critique on this dichotomous division, as articulated by judith halberstam (2011). in this way, i will contemplate “new ways of understanding… knowledge projects” (subramaniam & willey, 2016, p. 2; emphasis in original) in contemporary humanoid robotics. my argument is that querying interactions with robots, and concomitant concepts of the ability to interact autonomously in a socially meaningful manner, from the suggested perspective of queer failure might open up new avenues for considering the dimensions of realizing companionship with robots that have so far been neglected and thus have not been part of the understanding of the knowledge project “humanoid robotics.” how can “we” rethink practices of knowledge and artifact production in the context of this specific robotics laboratory through a queering of the success/failure dichotomy? 2. analyzing human/machine relations—a theoretical and methodological framework feminist interest in researching the design of human/machine interfaces and asking how they either transport or rework the gendering of science 4 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) and technology is longstanding. alison adam (1998), for instance, has researched the inscription of “concepts of masculinity and femininity” (p. 1) in computers. drawing on select aspects of adam’s fundamental study, i emphasize her finding that key researchers into early artificial intelligence (ai) “regard themselves as the gold standard of universal subjects,” (p. 5) thus establishing “gendered patterns of rationality” (p. 6). those researchers were mostly mathematicians and, when selecting their objectives, “naturally looked to themselves” (p. 35). this led to the objective of building a machine that could play chess (franchi & güzeldere, 2005, p. 46); consequently, chess was selected as the model for some aspects of intelligence and became “the test bed for ideas about creating intelligence” (turkle, 2005, p. 220). in this regard, computer sciences are grounded in a scientific framework that perpetuates a division that can be described—following sandra harding (2008)—as the thinking tradition of “western modernities” (p. 2): scientific rationality and technical expertise are presented…as enabl[ing] elite westerners and men around the globe to escape the bonds of tradition, leaving behind for others the responsibility for the flourishing of women, children and other kin, households, and communities….these others must do the…reproductive and “craft” labor….these others are mostly women and non-western men. (p. 2) the epistemological framework of western modernities creates a division between the realm of scientific rationality and expertise and that of craft labor. this dichotomy is fundamental to the sexual, transnational division of labor and its powerful operations of social ordering along the intersecting (identity) categories of gender, race, ableism, and class. notably, it is traditionally the male, elite westerner who finds “himself” in the epistemological position of neutrality, rationality, and expertise— which, as harding points out, is tied to enabling some over others to take part in scientific and technological processes of hegemonic knowledge production and innovation. this, in turn, propels the establishment of patterns of rationality that are interwoven with gender, race, ableism, and 5 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) class in their hierarchical relations. along these lines, i am, first, interested in the ways in which the realization of robot companionship relates to the epistemological framework of western modernities. second, i explore how a queerfeminist critique of this framework involves developing an analytical feeling for the contingent nature of exclusionary sorting operations between human and machine that also incorporate the divisions between success/failure, rationality/affectivity, and technical expertise/craft labor in knowing and realizing companionship in contemporary robotics. furthermore, i suggest an approach that leads to a queering of the success/failure binary with and in robotics. my argument is that a posthumanist feminist account of the making of robot companionship allows the linking of a queer theory of failure with the aim of creating robot companions in a productive manner for both fields of expertise. 2.1. demonstrations: the laboratory as a space for realizing and querying robot companionship: this article discusses the realization of robot companions using one humanoid robot, namely armar iii. i draw on this example from the perspective of the queering witness; i.e., who queers the “modest witness” (haraway, 1997, p. 23; emphasis in original) of western modern knowledge production. in exploring the role of the laboratory and the witness to laboratory action in processes of knowledge production in a positivist epistemological framework, donna haraway (1997) identified the modest witness as an emblematic figure of objectivist science that “mirror[s] reality” by becoming “invisible, that is, an inhabitant of the potent ‘unmarked category’” (p. 23). such a form of witnessing performs the “god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (haraway, 1991, p. 189). in short, the god-trick enables “the knower” to claim that he/she is speaking the truth, while neglecting her/his subjective and embodied worldliness. against this backdrop, haraway’s queering witness is “a more corporeal, inflected, and optically dense, if less elegant, kind of modest 6 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) witness to matters of fact to emerge in the worlds of technoscience” (1997, 24). thus, i approached the robotics laboratory in which armar is being built, tested, and demonstrated as a site that allows me to become a queering witness to robot companionship. i participated in everyday work in the “kitchen laboratory” in which armar is situated. i will delve more deeply into this context as the heart of the institute in the next subsection. for now, it is important to fully understand the kind of interactive setting between humans and machines, especially humanoid robots. lucy suchman (2011) provides a very productive approach to demonstrations as both the “theatre of proof” (latour, 1988, in suchman, 2011, p. 123) and “theatre of use” (smith, 2009, in suchman, 2011, p. 123). more precisely, she draws on the latourian term “theatre of proof”: that is, an understanding of the objects of research which asks for the ways things stabilize through networks of actions and both human and more-than-human actors, in order to complement this with wally smith’s notion of the “theatre of use,” through which the demonstration of technology is analyzed as “a particular assemblage of hardware and software…presented in action as evidence for its worth” (suchman, 2011, p. 123). while the first term focuses on the actions and actors in the laboratory, the latter also considers the framing of these actions and actors. given the example of armar iii, the frame is the kitchen, a specific setting within the modern household. here, visitors can experience in the present a future in which the humanoid robot is part of the household. notably, a central goal of the demonstration is to make the audience familiar with a future technology. this implies not only a need to guarantee the success of their interaction with the robot in the kitchen but, importantly, also to make this perceptible as successful. how does the demonstration function as a successful realization of robot companionship and establish a frame for robots and humans to become companions? geared toward becoming a witness to laboratory practices of realizing companionship, i proposed in my study (treusch, 2015) to trace how differences are enacted and how properties of the actors in the lab are the results rather than the preconditions of this enactment. thus, i 7 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) understand my queer-feminist posthumanist performative account of witnessing laboratory practices as becoming attuned to the entangled agencies between humans and more-than-humans in the construction of human-robot companionship. through this analytical prism, i tweak the causal relations of the making of robot companions: how does interaction at the robot/human interface during demonstrations exceed the idea of the two entities in causal relations, namely the “human creator” and the “creation,” the robot? in line with suchman (2011), i query “the figuration of subject object intra-actions in contemporary humanoid robotics, and how we might rethink questions of sameness and difference at the interface of humans and machines” (p. 121). from this perspective, sameness and difference are not predetermined qualities, but rather emerge from the intra-actions in the kitchen laboratory. as barad (2007) points out, intra-action “signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (p. 33; emphasis in original), while “distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intraaction.” i draw on the term intra-action in order to develop a performative account of distinct yet relational agencies in the robotics laboratory. from this perspective, the analytical unit shifts—from actors with predetermined properties to entangled agencies. at the same time, to participate as the queer witness includes recognizing the enactments of patterns of rationality in their contingency. in this article, i am especially interested in the dichotomy between success and failure in the lab. the queering witness, as i will continue to argue, does not suggest a reading of success as guaranteeing that robot companions will soon move in with us, nor a reading of failure as proof for a techno-skepticism that insists on showing that robotics will never realize its goal. rather, my interest is in overcoming such binary oppositions, for instance in practices of associating the robot with “the human” through engaging with the entangled agencies of a coproduction between human and machine during demonstrations of armar. in what follows, i will further develop a queering account of the politics of the modern success/failure dichotomy and bring it into relation 8 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) with the larger scientific framework of ai, a core field of knowledge and artifact production for contemporary humanoid robotics. 2.2. approaching demonstrations of the companion robot through queer failure this section introduces the queer concept of low theory and its concomitant account of failure as a mode of knowledge counterproduction in order to develop the possibility of an intervention into hegemonic forms of knowing and practices of applying knowledge in humanoid robotics. i will bring a queering approach of failure into conversation with selected insights into a historical account of knowing and feeling in early ai. in the queer art of failure, judith halberstam (2011) develops an understanding of low theory as a resource for counterimaginations, or rather as “a grammar of possibility” (p. 2). this grammar is a political project that “expresses a basic desire to live life otherwise.” it ties in with longstanding critical feminist engagements with technoscience as worlding practices. however, the challenge in contributing to science out of feminist (and queer) theory is to generate a grammar of possibility that not only critically intervenes into hegemonic forms of worlding but also “moves beyond the critique/engagement binary to open space for rethinking how we know” (subramaniam & willey, 2016, p. 1). along these lines, i generate new impulses for practicing embodied objectivity as a move beyond the critique/engagement binary from the suggested conversation between feminist critical engagements with technoscience and halberstam’s take on low theory. low theory works against the “dominant logics of power and discipline” (2011, p. 88). the goal becomes to open up possibilities for a “narrative without progress” and “a more chaotic realm of knowing and unknowing” (p. 2). i regard both as querying approved ways of knowing and as opportunities to enable different actors and their counterknowledge which have formerly been restricted to existing—if at all—outside the laboratories of (contemporary) ai and robotics. 9 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) my account of queer failure is guided by taking aspects of halberstam’s conceptualizations into a new context, the robotics laboratory. in so doing, i primarily identify two central aspects of halberstam’s work: first, the capitalist framework of success and its disciplining power and, second, the stakes of failure as not only an individual experience of defeat, with its consequential feelings of social refusal and shaming, but also as a mode of intervention into the promises of mastery and success. imagining counterstrategies against such a disciplining of thought, halberstam advocates a concept of failure “as a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit” (2011, pp. 11–12). this connection between success, mastery, and capitalism has special meaning for the robotics laboratory: if the demonstration is a success, the chances of also making this machine a market success are thought to increase accordingly. thus, the robot companion in action is presented as the ideal 24/7 service agent that speaks to a “service economy” (suchman 2007, p. 217) as it emerged with the idea of software agents that supposedly organize “our” everyday lives in an optimal, hence most effective, manner and offer assistance with all kinds of administrative work. how can “we” work with failure against the capitalist connection between success and mastery? central to the concept of low theory, as halberstam (2011) points out, is not “arguing for a reevaluation of these [static] standards of passing and failing,” but rather to “dismantle the logics of success and failure with which we currently live” (p. 2). hence, if producing “high theory” (p. 16) requires mastery and a concomitant disciplining of thought, then low theory invites me to become less serious and more playful in theorizing alternatives to the capitalist bonds between success and profit. in this sense, failure becomes “a practice” (p. 24) of “recogniz[ing] that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed failure can exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities” (p. 88). in addition, and as halberstam underlined, “low theory might constitute…an undisciplined zone of knowledge production” (p. 18). in this regard, 10 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) dominant modes of thought already include the possibility for alternatives and failure becomes the opportunity to experience and foster counterhegemonic possibilities of knowing and being that remain indeterminate. affects are central to this account of failure, as halberstam (2011) emphasizes, when “addressing the dark heart of the negativity that failure conjures” (p. 23). the darkness and negativity of failure carries an “unbeing and unbecoming” (halberstam, 2011, p. 23)—not only of the individual who fails to conform to the static standards of failure versus success, but—importantly—of exactly the hegemonic, hierarchical relations to knowledge that condition those standards in the first place. in this way, failure becomes a practice of undoing the logics of the capitalist connection between success and mastery. precisely such an undoing through failure occurred when garry kasparov experienced his high-profile defeat against deep blue, a chess computer. as elizabeth wilson (2010) points out, this chess match and its result encouraged a public discussion, perpetuating “a fundamental hostility between affect and computation”; however, that discussion “doesn’t survive closer scrutiny” (p. 11). kasparov—in line with wilson— relies on both rational and affective labor, as “his intellectual labor demands some kind of affective connection…that normally regulates chess playing at this level” (p. 15). wilson furthermore speaks of an “emotional relationality” (p. 16) as the central condition for playing chess. her reading of kasparov’s failure thus dismantles the logic behind a fundamental dichotomy between computational rationality and affective labor. this account of ai moves beyond deploying chess as an icon of gendered patterns of rationality. as she points out, “the conventional presumption that chess-playing expertise is a purely cognitive endeavor, isolatable from other talents and capacities” can be “challenge[d] as a way of opening up the conceptual terrain for thinking about the relationship between ai and affects” (pp. 8–9). in contrast to the authors cited in the section on affects in human/machine relations, she traces “some kind of intrinsic affinity, some kind of intuitive alliance between the 11 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) machinic and the affective, between calculating and feeling” (p. 31) in the work of early ai and argues for the need to acknowledge “the coassembly of machine and emotion…as…one of the foundations of the artificial sciences” (p. x). kasparov’s failure is read together with nonantagonistic forms of affiliation between human and machine as it expresses (not only historically) a desire for the intelligent, machine other. by bringing aspects of halberstam’s work on failure as a queering practice and wilson’s insights into the entanglements of affect/intellect and machine/emotion, i develop a mode of intervention—or rather a mode of attention—that i will use in the remainder of this article to explore the realization of robot companionship during demonstrations. 2.3. a robot companion in action: performing the kitchen armar iii is equipped with a head with two “camera eyes”; two arms, each with a hand with five fingers; and a torso, and stands on a wheeled platform. notably, armar is not equipped with features that would allow viewers to sort it into modern identity categories at first sight. however, as i have shown in detail in my study, the robot is nevertheless endowed with cultural genitals that sort it into the male sex/gender (treusch, 2015, pp. 208–209). additionally, the design strategy of modeling armar after the “average human” describes a statistical dimension that—despite its seeming neutrality—draws on the white male european as a clearly determinable parameter and hence id/entity (see pp. 165ff and 172ff.). with haraway (1991), the human-likeness of armar is entrenched in the prominent figure of “the fictive rational self of universal, and so unmarked, species man, a coherent subject” (p. 210). the focus of this article, however, is not to trace the ways in which the humanoid robot becomes a coherent subject, but rather to delve more deeply into selected scenarios in which sameness and difference between human and robot materialize intra-actively. 12 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) figure 1. armar in its kitchen. armar iii “lives” in the main robotics laboratory, which is designed like a kitchen. it is a spacious room with an l-shaped kitchenette in white, equipped with all the appliances that one would expect in a “real” kitchen: refrigerator, sink, oven, plenty of storage, and several workstations. the room can be accessed through a sliding door that is wider than the other doors in this hallway; next to the sliding door is a window mounted into the wall, with sliding glass panes. the shutters are always closed and the bright lights are switched on to optimize the lighting conditions. in the middle of the room, we find a desk with a computer workstation that demarcates where the kitchen area ends. there is a 13 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) huge screen mounted on top of the oven with a split screen on which one can see the kitchen through armar’s camera eyes as well as a 3d model of armar moving around the kitchen in real time. when one of the engineers opens the oven, we can see a keyboard stored on the baking tray that the engineers use to operate the screen. thus the laboratory kitchen differs from the kitchens with which most people are familiar. here i am thinking of the standardized western kitchenette, which became a huge market success. notably, the kitchen as “we” have become familiar with it evolved from socio-historically specific conditions that deeply interconnect efforts at rationalization with capitalism and also regulated the pairing of individuals and the gendered division of responsibilities within the household. even though certain aspects might vary from the household kitchen as we are familiar with it, this kitchen laboratory nevertheless appears to be an ideal setting for demonstrating the state of the art in humanoid robotics. thus, a central part of the daily work in this kitchen consists of demonstrations of the robot armar to a variety of audiences, ranging from visiting students from the social science department of kit to visiting guest researchers from japan and russia. demonstrations encompass both what the robot can do in the kitchen, like opening and closing doors, grasping a food container and locating items, and what one can do with the robot; that is, possibilities for interacting in the kitchen. demonstrations interweave the familiar with the not-yet-familiar as well as the present with the future and therefore constantly negotiate possible forms of robot companionship. in my study, i developed the notion of “performing the kitchen” (treusch 2015, p. 107), through which i explored the processual, iterative nature of enacting human/machine relations through the concept of posthumanist performativity. in what follows, i will contemplate the successful interaction between humans and the robot as a result of an intra-active co-production in the specific setting of the selected kitchen laboratory. 14 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) 3. demonstrations: the (un)making of success and failure in this subsection, i consider demonstrations as consisting of a set of specific tasks primarily aimed at securing the success of the human/robot interface and thus making the demonstration a success. i ask: in what ways do these tasks involve failure? how can “we” grapple with success during demonstrations as intra-active co-productions? demonstrations generally follow a scheme—first there is an introduction, then different interactional scenarios are played out in which the robot demonstrates what it is capable of doing. at least two engineers are involved in demonstrations: one wears a headset through which the robot is operated and also operates the computer workstation in the kitchen; the other usually stands next to armar, guiding the audience through the various steps of the demonstration. during an interview, one of the engineers stressed that work, such as the integration of software into the robot, is not the scientific part, this is the pure engineering part at maximum, this is only software, problems, there exist some problems and one solves them somehow; you don’t make science from this, but a demo is called in three weeks and by then everything has to run [on the robot]…one takes the path that somehow works and then this will also work out somehow (interview engineer cd, july 2011; translation: pt; emphasis: english in original). making the human/robot interface a success in front of an audience requires what i call the “smooth engineering” of the robot, which seems to consist mainly of problem-solving strategies and the hope that everything will work out somehow. the engineer describes the situation of not having full control over the machine as “nerve-wracking” (interview engineer cd, july 2011; translation: pt). this delivers the first insights into the entanglement of agencies and affects in demonstrations. furthermore, when asked for a definition of “engineering” (in comparison to the “scientific part”), the engineer answered as follows: “[with] 15 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) engineering, you have a problem, you solve it, the problem is solved and you’re happy” (interview engineer cd, july 2011; translation: pt; emphasis in original). engineering involves developing strategies to cope with the nerve-wracking project of realizing the robot companion. even though not addressed directly, the potential of wracking one’s nerves is tied to the possibility that things might not work out as planned; the procedure might fail, especially when working with a robot that is still under construction and does not yet run robustly. what happens when success is in danger of becoming failure? 3.1 communication—one potential source of failure one source of complications during the demonstration is communication. in order to talk to the robot, one has to wear a headset with a microphone connected to armar’s sound recognition system. however, the procedure for giving a command is not as easy as talking into the microphone (see treusch, 2015, p. 140ff). during one demonstration, armar received a command that it did not recognize— which underlines that communication involves more requirements than “just” operating the mute switch in the right manner. the speech recognition system might recognize speech, but this does not necessarily result in understanding. one also has to say the words in the right manner. however, even though the command was repeated, armar still did not get it right and answered with “goodbye” (see treusch, 2015, p. 140ff). this reaction evoked laughter in the audience. notably, this laughter did not express a skepticism toward the project of the robot companion in general. rather, i experienced it as a kind of sympathetic reaction that ties in with the widely shared experience of miscommunication with technical devices. the engineer who was wearing the headset during this demonstration joined in with the laughter and the relaxed atmosphere in order to explain the following: i always have to switch off the transmitter for the microphone, so that—while i’m now explaining something to you—it doesn’t hear me and might eventually understand something, then it will talk 16 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) one’s ears off about what it wants to get rid of at the moment. (d1, july 2011; translation: pt) part of the headset is a “mute switch” (d1, july 2011) that has to be operated in a specific way. in explaining this, the engineer takes up the relaxed atmosphere and makes a joke about armar that draws upon his experiences with a failure in communication with the robot: when he talks into the microphone by accident, the robot can recognize and reply to words. figure 2: communication with armar (during a demonstration) remarkably, what could be considered a failure in communication is taken up here as something that reveals insights into armar’s apparent state of mind, and armar is assigned character traits. this depicts a peculiar form of anthropomorphism of the machine, which works to 17 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) bridge the gaps between expectations of the humanlike robot as a potential companion, on the one hand, and the reality of current technology levels, on the other. during a conversation with the same engineer (here called kl), i asked him how he personally sees human-likeness in armar. he answered as follows: kl: hm, so i find this dialogue system, when he talks about random stuff, this sometimes has human traits, when he says that he runs out of steam [laughing]. of course, this is all justifiable, because he misunderstood something and then reacts like this, but these situations are so comical, in which you see some humanity.... but then, precisely with such things that you haven’t seen very often, i believe they have this surprise effect, even though in my case i’ve been here for a long time. and i guess that external people see something they haven’t seen so far, or not often, and that it contains something human. (interview engineer kl, july 2011; translation: pt) what could be regarded as a failure in communication seems to become an indicator for success in the sense of successfully realizing a robot that is legible as human, and hence showing comical behavior (for a detailed analysis of this excerpt, see treusch, 2015, pp. 202–203). behaviors manifested by the machine that are regarded as unexpected and have a surprising effect—even for practitioners familiar with the machine and its inner workings—are perceived as comical. thus, when armar fails to execute an order, this in turn is interpreted as a form of dissident behavior by the machine. the refusal makes the machine more human than the simple execution of orders. 3.2. getting familiar with armar—making the interface a success the design of the kitchen laboratory already reveals significant conditions for realizing the robot companion: this room is built in a very accessible manner, the color white dominates, and it is always very bright in the room. creating these “open labs” (treusch, 2015, p. 69) involves 18 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) generating a certain atmosphere that has as much of a structuring effect on actions in this space as the spatial arrangements of the kitchenette and computer workstation. i experienced the atmosphere as inviting, and therefore also as indicating a certain kind of transparency in realizing the project of the humanlike kitchen robot. this impression reverberates with the popularity that humanoid robots in general, and this machine in particular, have already gained and that is supposedly still increasing. even though humanoid robots have become so popular, they are still a new technology. thus, introducing this new technology in a way that generates familiarity is of special importance in contemporary robotics. in my study, i explored the beginning of demonstrations in detail, because this part plays an important role in making the audience familiar with armar. at the start of demonstrations, armar is initialized. this process is used to introduce the robot’s body to the audience as a humanlike body. the engineer standing next to the robot uses his own body along with verbal explanations to illustrate the human-likeness. for instance, he cross-references his own arm and the robot’s arm while explaining that “it has a neck, and a head, and arms with elbows, which we are seeing...and shoulder joints such like in the human arm” (demonstration 1, july 2011). morana alač (2009) has explored work on humanoid robots in a different setting, through what she frames as “indexing the two bodies,” which stipulates “physical proximity” and “allows for exploration through touch” (p. 496). i identify these practices of endowing the robot with body parts and indexing its body as a way of inviting the audience to see and to feel the robot’s body. the engineer does not only use his own body to show the humanoid body parts that are his body parts that are its body parts. rather, he touches his/its arm and enacts proximity corporeally and, importantly, also intra-actively. touch is an important signifier of capacities to affect and to be affected. as maria puig de la bellacasa (2009) highlights, “touching is…the experience par excellence in which boundaries between self and other are blurred” (p. 298). this thought resonates with barad’s (2012) take on “the nature of touching” (p. 207). 19 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) notably, touching in a cross-referencing mode can be analyzed not only as the intra-active enactment of a bodily scheme of human-likeness between armar, the engineer, and the audience, but also as a form of affective labor in making the audience feel what a robot is like and what it is capable of doing. with alač (2009), i furthermore contemplate these intra-active practices of association in terms of “‘getting into’ the body of the machine” (p. 496). this notion nicely displays the corporeal, processual, and over-individual practices of learning to see, know, and feel robot companionship. touching in particular invokes “awareness of the embodied character of perception, affect and thinking” (puig de la bellacasa, 2009, p. 297). both visitors and engineers are trained to develop a sense of armar as humanlike, including the shape as much as the behavior. the affective practices of association assembled here seem to guarantee the success of the human/robot interface. along these lines, i suggest delving more deeply into the interrelations between entangled agencies and affects, as they seem to build the core of practices of association. 3.3 entangled agencies and affects in making the robot companion a success demonstrations in the kitchen laboratory are of special value—their success is of utmost importance to everyone involved. accordingly, the expectations of both the engineers and the visitors create specific conditions for interaction at the human/robot interface. practices of association between visitors, engineers, and the robot entangle knowing and feeling, as they involve all the senses and, as i will argue, build the preconditions for successful interaction in the kitchen laboratory. the project of realizing robot companionship can be considered as opening up new realms of computation and engineering. however, the new depends upon being integrated into the familiar in order to become a market success. as i have shown, the humans (including engineers and visitors) become familiar with armar and vice versa through getting to 20 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) know each other—involving all the senses. thus, i argue that the practices of association rely heavily on what are regarded as noncognitive styles of knowing, such as affects and emotions. against the backdrop of my posthumanist performative account of entangled agencies in practices of association, i suggest an approach that treats affects as the basic social glue, as that which enables relating and interacting (corporeally) and directs the analytical attention toward “preindividual bodily forces augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act” (clough, 2008, p. 1). from this perspective, i regard affect as “an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation” (seigworth & gregg, 2010, p. 1), which also demands that “we” take into account the pre-individual, processual, and corporeal nature of affects and understand those affects as forces as well as seemingly individual emotions. sara ahmed points out that a strict division between emotions and affects as objects of knowledge is a problematic form of sorting operation (ahmed, 2014, p. 1), especially against the backdrop of scholarship following the so-called “affective turn” (clough, 2008, p. 1). moreover, affects, understood as emotions as well as corporeal forces, can clearly be categorized into the realm of craft and reproductive labor, as opposed to scientific rationality and expertise. the latter is associated with the operations of mind and the former is marked by the burdens of embodied bonds and bodily labor. as ahmed (2014) has illustrated, the urge for a new scholarship on affect is pinned against an “implied impasse” that is assumed to be the result of a history of queer and feminist concerns with the body and emotions, “in which body and mind, and reason and passion, were treated as separate” (p. 4). for ahmed, such a distinction between affect and emotion also carries a tendency to gender knowledge (production), as she points out: “if affects are unmediated and escape signification; emotions are mediated and contained by signification” (ahmed, 2014, p. 4). the “gendered distinction” (ahmed, 2014, p. 4) between affects and emotions privileges the one over the other as the more proper object of study and thus creates the danger of perpetuating a gendered, epistemological 21 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) framework of western modernities. precisely by differentiating affects from emotions, the former are assigned the status of a proper object of knowledge while the latter are in danger of being banned from academia, including “certain styles of thought” such as queer and feminist modes of knowing, the “‘touchy feely’ styles of thought” (ahmed, 2014, p. 4). from this perspective, i suggest mapping the affective capacities surrounding the centralized human/robot interface along with the emotions that emerge at this interface as also processual, codependent, and corporeal in nature. furthermore, i consider this analytical prism to be an intervention into the hegemony of gendered patterns of rationality in ai and robotics and as an opportunity for an active queer and feminist contribution to this field of (applied) knowledge. the realization of robot companions is a highly affective process that involves knowledge as well as all the senses, which makes this process notably supra-individual and corporeal. the everyday tasks of the engineers who are working on and with the robot mostly rely on rational forms of knowing and applying their knowledge about how to realize such a machine. however, the approach that i have suggested emphasizes the intra-active practices of association, and through this it becomes an entry point that allows “us” to work toward overcoming the modern dichotomies between passion and reason, rational and irrational, and failure and success from several sides; that is to say, from a queer-feminist theorization of failure and its insights into shifting “our” understandings of how “we” know and from the actual practices performed in one laboratory of recent humanoid robotics. 4. toward a low theory of intra-action in the kitchen laboratory: a mode of relating differently? demonstrations as examples of the theatre of use and the theatre of proof are key to making humans familiar with the humanlike robot; that is, the process of making humanoid robot companions real. situations in which a demonstration does not proceed smoothly reveal the conditions 22 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) and practices of realization. they display practices of coping with failure as i have witnessed them. in these situations, the connections between knowing, perception, emotions, and affects are displayed in unique ways. in such cases, we are not observing predetermined identities with agential properties meeting and interacting; rather, distinct agencies that are mutually entangled, intra-active, become palpable as they emerge from practices of association. the latter involve largely noncognitive— that is, touchy-feely—styles of thought. thus, i highlight that touchy-feely styles of knowing are already part of the hegemonic knowledge project of companion robots. even though robot companionship might be conceptually understood as a functional service relation between human and robot, the insights gained from demonstrating armar reveal that this concept does not do justice to the actual relations between engineers, audience, the robot, and other devices involved in the enactment of robot companionship. from this perspective, the insights into interaction in the kitchen laboratory presented here permit two conclusions: firstly, emotions and affects do not belong to a realm outside of the laboratory, but are fundamental to the knowledge project of humanoid robotics. secondly, interaction in this setting displays the highly affective, that is corporeal, processual, and supra-individual nature of working and knowing in this branch of robotics. these insights not only allow me to link a queer theory of failure with companion robotics, but also to stipulate a different kind of understanding of the knowledge project of robot companionship: one that pivots around reconsidering the nature of human/machine relations through the inseparability of emotionality and rationality as well as the intra-active quality of human/machine relations. my account of a low theory of robotics implies a need to acknowledge the conditions for success in the laboratory, and through this also to tweak the narrative of progress and to install an understanding of progress that encompasses its enactment, including the acts and actors. for instance, i identify the capacity to laugh with the machine as the affective labor of bridging gaps and coping with the (still 23 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) existing) constraints that limit successful interaction at the human/robot interface. practices of becoming trained and learning to see, feel, and know what the humanoid robot can do—with all its limitations—emerge as the central condition for realizing robot companionship. acknowledging this might allow the robotics laboratory to become a less disciplined zone of knowledge production, in which goals are much less predetermined. the format of the demonstration, with its opportunities to become a queering witness, would allow this perfectly. in addition, my analysis requires making the issue of how to realize human-robot relations of companionship into an open question that can only be answered in conversation with the specific needs emerging from situated relations of companionship. i envision such conversations as being part of an interdisciplinary low theory of robotics. feminist and queer counterknowledge on human/machine relations could make an active contribution to robotics, primarily on two levels. first, as wilson’s and my studies have shown, there is a deep connection between feeling and knowing that calls for rethinking not only dichotomies between passion and reason, scientific and unscientific, and body and mind, but also of hegemonic narrations of human/machine relations. this claim resonates with the process i have illustrated: demonstrations require a robot companion that shows humanlike capacities, just as much as capacities to affect and to be affected. these pivot around emotions such as curiosity about connecting with the machine other as well as laughter. this is also where failure comes into play as, second, i have depicted how anthropomorphism is used to explain machine failure in terms of characteristic human traits. however, my argument here is that it is precisely the situation in which failure is interpreted as a humanlike refusal of the machine to obey that could become a point of departure for innovative collaborations beyond the figure of the universal human and “his narrative” of success and progress through rationality. instead of practicing forms of association that rely on finding “the human” in the robot, robotics could create new forms of intimacy with machines that become a starting point for critical, self-reflecting encounters with social 24 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) norms in their restrictions upon what it means to be a human(-like) companion. this, however, would imply at least withstanding, if not expediting, the negativity of failure as an undoing—an undoing of the ideas of individual success and concomitant autonomous agency as well as bodily integrity, but also of the implemented logics of success of a service-oriented robot companionship that defines human/machine relations of mastery over the machine as a form of mastery over what are defined as the critical challenges of “our” societies. finally, i raise with susan leigh star (1995, p. 89) the question of “cui bono?” —who benefits? as part of developing a low theory on the art of failure in robotics, i imagine creating a “contact zone” (haraway, 2008, p. 36) between robotics and a queer theory of failure that unfolds through “mundane” practices of “accountability, caring for, being affected, and entering into responsibility” (haraway, 2008, p. 36). this contact zone would be an interdisciplinary, less disciplined zone of knowledge production that acknowledges the interconnectedness of feeling and knowing as well as the indeterminacy of human/machine relations. it would also continuously challenge the idea of bodily integrity as well as capitalist standards—including those related to standards of organizing reproductive labor, especially elderly care—and social as well as technoscientific norms of embodying, knowing, and feeling companionship with robots. not least, i consider such a new branch of “low robotics” an opportunity to lead the way out of what is perceived as one impasse that haunts the field of contemporary robotics: ai’s longstanding failure to build more robust, accountable, intelligent agents. references acord, l., bisbee, j.k., bisbee, s., niederhoffer, g. 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(2008). the affective turn: political economy, biomedia and bodies. theory, culture and society, 25(1), 1–22. franchi, s., & güzeldere, g. (eds.) (2005). machinations of the mind: cybernetics and artificial intelligence from automata to cyborgs. in mechanical bodies, computational minds. artificial intelligence from automata to cyborgs (pp. 15–149). cambridge, ma: mit press. halberstam, j. (2011). the queer art of failure. durham, nc: duke university press. haraway, d.j. (1991). simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york, ny: routledge. 26 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) ______. (1997). modest_witness@second_millennium. femaleman©_meets_ oncomousetm. new york, ny: routledge. _______. (2003). the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago, il: prickly paradigm press. _______. (2008). when species meet. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. harding, s. (2008). sciences from below: feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities. durham, nc: duke university press. puig de la bellacasa, m. (2009). touching technologies, touching visions: the reclaiming of sensorial experience and the politics of speculative thinking. subjectivity, 28, 297–315. robot companions for citizens. (n.d.). retrieved from www.robotcompanions.eu. suchman, l. (2007). human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions. 2nd ed. new york, ny: cambridge university press. _______. (2011). subject objects. feminist theory, 12(2), 119–145. suchman, l., trigg, r., & blomberg, j. (2002). working artefacts: ethnomethods of the prototype. british journal of sociology, 53(2), 163– 179. seigworth, g.j., & gregg m. (eds.) (2010). an inventory of shimmers. the affect theory reader. durham, nc: duke university press, 1–25. subramaniam, b., & willey, a. (2016). call for papers—science out of feminist theory for the journal catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. star, s. l. (ed.) (1995). the politics of formal representations: wizards, 27 treusch catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) gurus, and organizational complexity. in ecologies of knowledge: work and politics in science and technology (pp. 88–118). albany, ny: state university of new york press. treusch, p. (2015). robotic companionship: the making of anthropomatic kitchen robots in queer feminist technoscience perspective. linköping, sweden: liu press. retrieved from http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-118117 turkle, s. (2005 [1984]). the second self: computers and the human spirit. 20th anniversary ed. cambridge, ma: mit press. wilson, e.a. (2010). affect and artificial intelligence. seattle, wa: university of washington press. bio pat treusch is a lecturer at the center for interdisciplinary women’s and gender studies where she teaches feminist sts across disciplinary boundaries. she is currently also a postdoc at the bmbf research group mti-engage (interdisciplinary human-robot interaction research) —both at technical university berlin. her research interests include interdisciplinary feminist science and technology studies with a focus on human-machine interaction, queer theory, feminist materialisms, affect studies and research based teaching methods. doucet-battle article     bioethical matriarchy: race, gender, and the gift in genomic research    james doucet-battle university of california, santa cruz jbattle@ucsc.edu (now) the director of the us national institutes of health (nih), francis collins, is trying to make up for decades of slights. over the past four months, he has met lacks family members to answer questions and to discuss what should be done with genome data from their matriarch’s cell line. (callaway, 2013, p. 132, emphasis added) narratives—socializing stories—that are attached to all women and blacks of both genders have an inordinate control over the potential for private personhood. the public controls of race and gender are so robust that private individuation is rarely an opportunity for those whose identities fall within these two social constructs.  (holloway, 2011, p. 7) is that where the manhood lay? in the naming done by a white man who was supposed to know? who gave them the privilege not of working but of deciding how to? (morrison, 1998, p. 147, emphasis added) in a letter to the journal nature on august 8, 2013, a research team led by andrew adey, joshua burton, and jacob kitzman from the department of genome sciences at the university of washington, seattle announced the successful mapping of the genome and epigenome of the hela cell line.1 this development occurred less than seven months after a german research group directed by lars steinmetz published data in an open access journal detailing the first successful genomic sequencing of a hela cell line.2 these accomplishments promised to change the way researchers understood environmental adaptation and energy regulation as metabolic processes of genetic mutation. this advance could possibly shed new light on the causative factors and mechanisms underlying the development of type 2 diabetes and other cardiometabolic disorders. however, the international research community, particularly the national institutes of health, harbored concern about what the new discovery might mean for future research. although the german team removed the online data, the family of henrietta lacks, who was the original source of the hela line, was especially concerned about the ethical implications of these discoveries. it seemed the scientific community was once again producing wealth and knowledge from the hela cell line without acknowledging its fraught history of bodily appropriation. as chronicled by hannah landecker (2000) and rebecca skloot (2011), the hela cell line was commodified without the knowledge of lacks’s family at a time when informed consent was not yet a legal norm. this time, however, the lacks family demanded economic justice. in a statement released the day before the announcement, francis collins, director of the nih, sought to reconcile the newly mapped hela line with the lacks’s demands: just like their matriarch, the lacks family continues to have a significant impact on medical progress by providing access to an important scientific tool that researchers will use to study the cause and effect of many diseases with the goal of developing treatments. (national institutes of health. 2013, august 7, news release, emphasis added) on closer reading and for the purpose of this article, the statement “just like their matriarch, the lacks family continues to…provid[e] access” reveals a vexed engagement with hela’s history. although henrietta lacks’s consent to the use of her cervical cancer cells beyond the diagnosis and treatment of her condition was not required, the phrase “providing access” implies that she did. collins’s statement frames the family as a biological resource and locates labor value squarely within researcher expertise, reproducing hela’s history of racialized and gendered forms of labor, kinship denial, and commodification that are often disavowed. together, these issues make the intersections between genomics, race, and gender a fundamentally bioethical relationship.  engaging with scientific and media narratives about henrietta lacks and hela, this article charts the ways genomic research have facilitated the re-emergence of a particularly thorny term: matriarchy. within the bioethical nexus of genomics, race, and gender, the invocation of matriarchy in these narratives makes the private “public,” a process karla holloway (2011) argues constitutes a control of race and gender (p. 7). hence, they belie racialized gender constructs based on african descent that are rooted in socioeconomic history, revealing political and resource allocations erased by the matriarchal label and which i term bioethical matriarchy. in this sense, investigating bioethical matriarchy departs from max weber’s (1910) century-long call for an analysis of technology separate from an analysis of the “property relations” among economic actors (weber 2005, p. 27). i make two arguments: 1) although race and gender have occupied much scholarly and media attention, matriarchy, specifically black matriarchy, as both a racial and gender construct of otherness, has remained under-analyzed but yet routinely deployed in the social sciences, politics, and humanities; 2) underlining patriarchal gift economies of exchange, bioethical matriarchy (or the bioethical matriarch) marks racialized and gendered forms of exchange arising from the absence of consent or of obligational precedents for reciprocation. three fundamental questions drive this article’s inquiry: 1) what do novel matriarchal genomic origin narratives tell us about embedded racialized and gendered forms of exchange and their historical intersections with socioeconomic status and inequality?; 2) how are race, gender, and the social order reproduced or regenerated as a productive economic construct?; and 3) can restorative or reparative justice render the bioethical matriarch whole? arguably, the bioethical matriarch is positioned as not whole. as this essay will show, henrietta lacks’s matriarchal status derives not from any real power lacks may have had, but from hela’s subsequent notoriety gained recursively as a fragmentary biospecimen. to examine these questions, i build on previous ethnographic research conducted on type 2 diabetes and race in new york and northern california, and new ethnographic and archival fieldwork in baltimore, md and washington d.c. exploring the underlying role of race in both genomic and global health disparities research.3 i suggest that deconstructing the matriarch-status ascription addresses the intersections of genomics, racial labor, and gender beyond their component social, political, and biological parameters. at stake is whether the political and economic power enfranchising inherited rights to resources accrue to the matriarch as a result of this exchange. the racial bioethics of the gift classical anthropology defined gift exchange as a circulation of property that sets in motion obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate (malinowski, 1922; mauss, 1990). early functionalist projects focused on exchange as a social and political lens through which the value of the gift was seen as secondary to the function it served in cementing human relationships. however, women and slaves have each been exchanged historically as both fungible gifts and property (du bois, 1924; strathern, 1988). w.e.b. du bois’s (1924) theorization of the gift as racial labor preceded mauss’s notion of the gift as political (mauss, 1990). i read du bois’s definition of the gift alongside catherine waldby and robert mitchell's (2006a) account of 21st century “tissue economies,” in which cells and tissues are transferred from poor, socially and economically disadvantaged “surplus” bodies to the wealthy and powerful in society, a transfer rationalized by narratives of citizenship and civic duty (waldby & mitchell, 2006b, pp. 56-57). and like du bois, waldby and mitchell put forward a redistributive and regenerative political economy for bodies made deficient in their material appropriation.  participatory inclusion by the poor and disadvantaged, particularly women, highlights joan scott’s (1986) insistence upon placing gender front and center in any historical analysis of labor. additionally, i bring the notion of racialized forms of gendered labor as fungible, or exchangeable property, to bear on richard hyland’s (2014) assertion that gift-giving and exchange occur in sociocultural spaces outside and in spite of legal or moral sanction, where according to karla holloway (2014), “the evolution of legal text did not… fully and /or finally determine social act” (p. x). outside of critical race and feminist studies and the medical humanities, few scholars have engaged the ways notions of matriarchy both inform conditions of exchange and misrecognize affective kinship structures.4 hela and its embeddedness in slavery’s historical rupturing of personhood generally and motherhood specifically, troubles neat scholarly notions of gift exchange, reciprocation, and consent, by introducing a body that has historically constituted a “point of convergence where biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join” (spillers, 1987, p. 67). racial and gender constructs overdetermine notions of individual sovereignty and subjectivity for women and blacks, whose bodies always have  “a compromised relationship to privacy (holloway, 2011, p. 9). genomic science offers new opportunities to make private bodies public, often under the neoliberal banner of individual sovereignty. sometimes this sovereignty is defined in terms of an “inclusion-and-difference” paradigm, which is driven by older epistèmes circumscribing group difference in terms of biologically ascertainable “races” (epstein, 2007, pp. 6-7). however, “race” is still often rendered a genotypically-fixed feature of the body (or a stable category, in equilibrium) that is scientifically discoverable, rather than an elusive or illusive target. this presents an intractable form of social and scientific classification that alondra nelson (2008) suggests has created new forms of social meaning around identity. genetic tests as a commodity offer new tools for “self-fashioning” based on notions of scientific impartiality and fulfilling one’s “genealogical aspirations.” while nelson cautions against prematurely assessing the social and political ramifications of newly marketed genetic “ancestry” testing models, she submits that the knowledge claims they make, as well as their subsequent interpretation by consumers, set in motion new forms of subjectification based on biological notions of racial difference (bolnick et al., 2007; nelson, 2008). the personal fulfillment of diasporic genealogical aspirations and the political imperatives of research inclusion underline a desire to make legible ancestries violently ruptured by slavery and colonialism and bodies marked anonymous historically. in  particular, black feminist writers, specifically fiction writers, make visible these otherwise violent and anonymous historical silences and ellipses of memory. in toni morrison’s beloved (1988), the novel’s protagonist, sethe, attempts unsuccessfully to repress traumatic memories of slavery, bondage, and loss, which involved murdering her own two-year-old daughter to prevent her recapture by slave patrols pursuing runaway slaves in the north. saidiya hartman (2007) writes about the tension between slavery, memory, and the archive, and how each produces both contingent silences and a sense of irrevocable ancestral loss, asking, “was my hunger for the past so great that i was now encountering ghosts? had my need for an entrance into history played tricks on me, mocked my scholarly diligence, and exposed me as a girl blinded by mother loss?” (p. 16). in writing about the violent erasure of genealogical memory, hartman blurs fiction with historical analysis—what elsewhere she calls “critical fabulation” (2008)—to excavate an unknowable maternal past. the erasures of memory and history instituted by racial slavery continued to haunt the life of henrietta lacks and the immortal life of hela, both situated in “a common historical ground, the socio-political order of the new world” in which, according to hortense spillers (1987), a “diasporic plight marked a theft of the body” (p. 67). the lacks matriarchal narrative represents the private theft of the mortal black body that can be “killed” (roberts, 2014), while hela represents an “immortal” public text read from genetic analyses of the cells, their genome, and their epigenome, all decoded from, to paraphrase spillers, “an undecipherable kind of hieroglyphics of black flesh” (spillers, 2014, p. 67). deconstructing matriarchy the oxford english dictionary defines a matriarch as “a woman who is the head of a family or tribe,” and “an older woman who is powerful within a family or organization.” further, oxford defines matriarchy as “a system of society or government ruled by a woman or women.”5 discursively figuring henrietta lacks as "matriarch" positions her as a notable figure in her family, but this positioning elides her actual power in both her personal, family life (which we may not have access to) and larger cultural, historical, and social contexts reproducing dominant notions of race and gender. discursive framings of matriarchy in social and political scientific literatures have long labeled african-american and, by extension, afro-creole family structures as “matriarchal,” “matrilineal,” or “matrifocal” (beckles, 1999; clarke, 1999; frazier, 1940; hyman & reed, 1969; moynihan, 1965; smith, 1956, 1988, 1996).6 moreover, invocations of matriarchy have usually contained political motivations (matory, 2005; sanday, 1998). for example, the 1965 moynihan report attributed “matriarchal” family structures to “the culture of poverty” affecting a large percentage of the african-american population. low rates of marriage, skewed representations in popular culture, and statistics on out-of-wedlock births, reinforced the notion of endemic african-american cultural pathology and family disintegration. and this biosocial “fact” of african-american matriarchy has seeped into genomic discourse. according to lisa weasel (2004), the story of henrietta lacks reignited evolutionary debates about human origins (see landecker, 2000), while reinscribing a narrative “from which race and gender cannot be extricated” (weasel, 2004, p. 189). race, a theoretical and methodological pre-occupation of nineteenthand early-twentieth-century biological anthropology that sought to find its essence, later gave way to cultural and postmodern arguments emphasizing its socially constructed nature, only to reappear with vigor as a biological entity in the early twenty-first century (bliss, 2012). thus, in terms of racial history as a constructed lens through which to view the past, particularly the gendered past, genomic science offered new truth claims about the prehistory of race (wailoo, nelson, & lee, 2012). hela exemplifies and henrietta lacks personifies the regenerative persistence of this sub-saharan-african genetic possibility and ability, carrying with it the narrative baggage of the racialized black matriarch. further illustrating the historical conflation of ancestry with gender, and race with genetics, researchers at the university of california, berkeley in 1987 argued for an original mitochondrial ancestor of all humanity. the scientific narrative of the sub-saharan, out-of-africa origins of humanity soon found itself in tension with judeo-christian origin narratives based on religious myth. subsequently interpreted through a gendered western religious lens, this mitochondrial ancestor, or “genetic matriarch,” was envisioned as eve from the biblical garden and was sometimes referred to as “mitochondrial eve,” who in turn became known as “african eve” (oikkonen, 2015, p. 748). some saw this development as a compromise between science and religion. others saw it as a simplistic racialization of an extremely complex story of human variation. analyses of race and gender, imbricated within evolutionary theory, had moved from the “bare bones” of the fossil (fausto-sterling, 2005) to gendered explanations of sub-saharan-african genetic ancestry (oikkonen, 2015). in the above cases, scholarship about human genetic ancestry proved permeable to perennial constructions of race and gender. empirical sample data, first attributed descriptively through observation, were subsequently ascripted interpretively using categories demarcating inherited social statuses (matriarchal, religious, racial, gender, etc.) and therefrom imbued with explanatory characteristics of hierarchal social value. as social facts, such ascripted statuses are then read scientifically as inherited, not achieved. ascription or ascripted status refers to a social standing inherited from birth. by contrast, achieved status refers to a merit-based social standing accomplished during one’s lifetime. i base my understanding on earlier anthropological work on ascripted status and the sociology of ascriptive inequality to offer a broader analytic that moves beyond attribution as description to ascription as explanation (davis, 1950; linton, 1936; parsons, 1970; reskin, 2005; reskin & branch-mcbrier, 2000). in scientific circles, the use of the term “matriarch” to describe henrietta lacks runs counter to anthropological definitions of matriarchy as an intergenerational female right to political and economic power. matriarchal societies pass on status and wealth to children through the maternal line and, more importantly, women in these societies figure prominently in the total political and economic structure of the group. matriarchal societies trace not only temporal but cosmological descent from a female ancestor/progenitor/goddess, sacralizing social practices that legitimates the social order between and among the sexes. seen this way, matriarchy does not imply the political or economic power to subjugate others but the power to conjugate and regenerate the totality of social life (sanday, 1998). in contrast, matrifocal (or matricentric) groups are female-headed households characterized in creole societies by racialized forms of male exclusion from the larger socioeconomic sphere (smith, 1996). children in matrilineal groups inherit positive status and, often, rights to resources reckoned through the maternal line. unlike the integral social role matriarchy serves, matrifocality exists within the interstices and at the margins of larger socioeconomic forces. children in these families inherit neither positive status nor resources (or rights to them) from their mothers. other scholars have critiqued matriarchal discourses as self-indulgent practices in status elevation removed from their racialized context. for these scholars, matriarchy as a concept explains precious little while gratuitously describing a non-existent kinship structure. matriarchy, as expounded upon by nineteenth-century scholars such as edward tylor and twentieth-century scholars such as w.h.r. rivers, found little support from empirical studies, which thus stated that matriarchy no longer existed. if it ever did, it did so within overarching patriarchal kinship structures either through patrilineal marriage or matrilineal brother/uncle rubrics (sanday, 1998). matriarchy assumes inherited female rights to resources and influence in political decision making. hence, in the lacks case, the characterization of “matriarch” is curious, given that it finds little to no definitional or objective traction. worse still, it crowds out conversations about matrifocality as an intergenerational process of gendered dispossession marking racialized forms of male exclusion from the wider socioeconomic field (brereton, 2002). yet, it is not enough to simply dismiss lacks’s ascribed status of “matriarch” as a matter of poor word choice, however unintentional. rather, because it circulates within wider scientific narratives on african origins and genetic “eve”s, the usage of “matriarch” exemplifies larger problems around locating research wealth and engaging with the material-discursive makings of race and gender. finding africa in the admixed matriarch building on contacts made and interviews conducted during summer 2011, i attended in spring 2012 the genetics of the peoples of africa and the transatlantic african diaspora conference, held at the university of north carolina, chapel hill. an international meeting, the conference brought together biological anthropologists, geneticists, molecular biologists, and epidemiologists of color whose work addressed the genetics of health and health disparities in transnational and diasporic african-descent populations. the meeting raised three important and contentious issues: one epistemic, one definitional, and one methodological. the first issue centered on personal identification within a “racial” or “ethnic” group. the second revolved around the definition of an “african.” the third centered on locating “africa” in the “admixed” human genome. scientific discourses about henrietta lacks and hela cells have long reflected these epistemic, definitional, and methodological issues. when walter nelson-rees received six cell samples from the soviet union in 1973, he believed them to have originated in female donors. the cells were all revealed to possess only x-shaped chromosomes, meaning they had the genetic markers for maternal origin and descent. upon closer examination by ward peters in detroit, all six “soviet” samples were determined to have originated from a sub-saharan-african female—to be specific, an “admixed african american” female, henrietta lacks. the publication of the hela genome and epigenome in august 2013 was preceded and accompanied by debates about health disparities, genomic explanations for differential disease outcomes among racial groups, and the politics of racial classification and their intersections with power, purity, admixture, and ethnoracial self-identification. however, the dual lives of henrietta lacks and the immortal hela cell line trouble these health disparity debates, biological discourses on purity and admixture, and attendant claims to locate and source sub-saharan-african genetic diversity in the human genome, figuring what spillers calls the “undecipherability of black flesh” even in the face of these widespread, organizational attempts to decode it. the epistemic question was raised by african-american molecular biologist dr. marcus scribner7, who participated in the chapel hill meeting i attended. visibly perturbed by the ways race had been linked to specific genomic scripts in an earlier presentation, scribner said, “ancestry tests for ancestors, not living people. it is an act of categorical misrecognition to attempt to explain genetic and genomic differences within human populations using the language of race.” against efforts to define “an african” as a member of a sub-saharan group on the continent, scribner argued, “an african is someone who either originates from or lives within the african continent. it makes no difference whether what we call ‘european’ y-chromosomes are found in north africa, the us, and [sic] south africa; or ‘arab’ y-chromosomes in the sudan.” scribner traced the assumptions behind such claims to nineteenth-century biological anthropology and evolutionary theory, which equated an exaggerated bantu phenotype as the prototypical “negro”: this was about europe and america writing an evolutionary narrative to themselves about themselves and those below them as a result of contact, colonization and slavery. knowledge produced for domestic consumption and the exercise of power, but wholly inaccurate. however, the historical dynamics of power challenge genomic narratives about race. one researcher who traces genomic ancestry in latin america said, the population of the dominican republic has a heavy african component. in a continuum of africanicity, from lowest to highest you have: mexico, ecuador, colombia, puerto rico, and the dominican republic. yet national and cultural narratives in the dominican republic focus on their “european heritage.” haitians are seen as the africans although there are dominicans with as much or more african genetic ancestry than haitians. since the 1960s, several anthropologists and afrocentric scholars have used the terms “africoid” and “africanity” to describe an essential sub-saharan-african aesthetic (maquet, 1972; senghor, 1967). over time, these two terms have been adopted by scholars in biological anthropology, diaspora studies, psychology, cultural studies, and increasingly, in the field of genetics. for example, “africanicity” was deployed originally in studies of african art and film but is now taken up in genomics to describe degrees of africanicity in a genetic sample (lima et al., 2007). what is unclear is precisely how and  when the aesthetic became seen as biological, with some researchers using africanicity to define a common “african american cultural dna” (mcdougall, 2011, emphasis added),8 but the epistemic and definitional interpretations of african ancestry in the latter deterritorialize sub-saharan africa geographically while simultaneously inferring its genetic locatability. the central question, therefore, remains: how to source the wide genetic diversity of sub-saharan africanicity in admixed african-descent populations? as one molecular epidemiologist told me, it is extremely difficult to source (african) origins in an admixed population. and of course, there can be degrees of admixture even within the same population. the southeastern united states has the least racially admixed and the pacific northwest the most racially admixed african american populations in the us. testing afro-caribbean and afro-brazilian populations can perhaps tell us more about african ancestry than united states african americans—too much admixture. in agreement, another researcher offered a possible solution: the high percentage of european y-chromosomes in the african american population makes mitochondrial (mt)dna a better locus of study. it is a circular genome that is maternally derived. it performs no recombination, is traceable and more copies of it are available for study. mitochondrial dna (mtdna) is derived only through maternal lines, and the genetic information it contains regulates energy production by utilizing oxygen to convert food to energy. this energy regulation mechanism represents human adaptation to a diverse set of environmental and historical challenges. african americans have some of the highest rates of type 2 diabetes in the us. however, their mtdna contains diverse sets of sub-saharan dna. the genetic complexity of type 2 diabetes includes co-factors that usually accompany the disease, including hypertension; hypercholesterolemia; eye, kidney, and heart diseases; chronically high blood sugar levels; and alzheimer’s disease. diabetics rarely die from diabetes itself but rather from one or more of these cardiometabolic factors. recently, the genomic research focus on this type 2 genetic complexity, known as the metabolic syndrome (mets), has been centered on examining mtdna and its energy and metabolic system.                 epidemiological studies of metabolic diseases in african americans must reckon with the ways slavery has structured mtdna inheritance in african american populations. these epidemiological lines lead us to african-american women as embodiments of a particular history. while locating africanicity presents unique challenges, operationalizing admixture analyses in the us offers robust research opportunities, highlighting two important historical factors favoring african-american participation in genomic research. first, the united states was the only slave society that experienced an increase in its african descent population. caribbean slave economies like jamaica, for example, preferred working slaves to death and replacing them with new imports from africa (brown, 2010). second, by 1830, four years before the end of slavery in the british west indies, enslaved africans in the us on average had three maternal ancestral generations preceding them, each generation born in the us. from an epigenomic standpoint, african americans, representing both a large sample pool and a diverse population in terms of admixture, demonstrate a longer history of environmental and epidemiological interaction with european populations. in terms of africanicity, this variously admixed population demonstrates a predictable pattern of mtdna flow through west african maternal lines. embodying the diversity of sub-saharan mtdna in a racially admixed family, the body of henrietta lacks revolutionized cellular biology and spurred global biomedical research. the sequencing of the hela genome and epigenome in 2013 promised, or threatened, to change the way we understood metabolic adaptation to environmental change. it raised ethical questions about who should profit from that understanding. race, gender, and ascripted, or inherited, matriarchal social status, intertwined within regimes of property ownership, and drew a bioethical line between novel forms of exchange and historical regimes of appropriation. moreover, it accented the line between the racial gift as social exchange and the gendered commodity as market exchange. matriarchal wealth and racialized participation it is not difficult to source the missing intergenerational wealth implied in the matriarchal designation given to henrietta lacks. the hela cell line has founded a global industry that has generated six decades worth of professional and scientific capital. a search on the pubmed central database turns up over 70,000 research papers written over the last sixty years about hela and its central role in developing effective vaccines for both poliomyelitis and the human papilloma viruses. yet, somehow achieving a just calculus of balanced reciprocity between the lacks family, the scientific community, and the wider society benefiting from hela research remained an unformulated equation. the publishing of the hela genome and epigenome prompted media speculation about negotiations between the nih and the lacks family concerning the possible payment of royalties to the family. as reported in nature, this presented a dilemma for francis collins: some lacks family members raised the possibility of financial compensation, collins says. directly paying the family was not on the table, but he and his advisers tried to think of other ways the family could benefit, such as patenting a genetic test for cancer based on hela-cell mutations. but they couldn’t think of any. (callaway, 2013, p. 133) although financial compensation was not ultimately granted, two members of the lacks family were subsequently included on the ethics board charged with formulating the appropriate conditions for obtaining hela genome samples for research. board inclusion was framed as an equitable step toward medical justice, despite the family’s deepening intergenerational poverty, relative scientific illiteracy, and sparse social capital—and all of this in fact risked furthering the exploitation that inclusion sought to redress. johns hopkins university, moreover, created two scholarship programs in the name of henrietta lacks and promised that 40% of new hires at the university would come from inner city baltimore. for the lacks family, monetary recompense is for the most part generated through speaking appearances and private donations made by those particularly touched by the story of henrietta lacks and hela.9        henrietta lacks’s birth in the former slave quarters of a virginia tobacco plantation highlighted the sociogenesis of a racialized social hierarchy that would later relegate her to the colored ward of a hospital in which she sought treatment for cervical cancer, and from which her now immortal cells were harvested. over sixty years later, her cells continue to replicate in laboratories around the world, persisting alongside questions of ethics, consent, and social justice. and having “contaminated” upwards of 20% of the cell lines used in research globally, she continues to cross biological boundaries expounded by the social order that characterized the world in which she lived and died. the history of henrietta lacks’s life and hela’s immortal behavior transgresses the rational boundaries of society and science, labor and expertise, and their constructed social mechanisms of racial inclusion and exclusion. for one african-american geneticist, dr. richard ralston, research inclusion constitutes a vital component of producing both knowledge and justice through “participation” by minorities, both as research subjects and researchers. he asks, “if we don’t care enough about what is happening in our own families and communities, then who will?” ralston is one of a cohort of geneticists and molecular epidemiologists of color trained at historically black colleges and universities. aware of the history of the tuskegee syphilis study, he believes that custodianship of african-descent dna is a matter of social justice and ethical responsibility. however, at the meeting in chapel hill, he saw attempts to collect this dna as driven more by economic and scientific motives than by a desire to reduce health                  disparities, noting, “i know a lot of people working in genomics. trust me, most of them don’t give a damn about black people. but they can’t ignore the amounts of money coming into genomic research.” ralston’s belief in the importance of african-descent sampling exists in historical tension with dual suspicions about the interests of the market and the curiosity of science. the lacks case reflects these suspicious histories and constitutes neither accident, nor coincidence, nor even malign intent, but rather the genomic fulfillment of long-standing social, economic, and structural processes. it reveals impoverishment structures existing within larger patriarchal wealth accumulation networks and offers an optics for examining kinship and making legible the sociocultural construction of both racial research categories and health disparities. i submit that these biosocial forms of wealth accumulation and status regulation are not acquired through merit but are ascripted by birth within hierarchal gift relations reflecting gendered and raced disparities in both social capital and social justice. such disparities render elusive ethical notions of informed consent and research equity. discussion in this article, i explored the rise, fall, and genomic resurrection of matriarchy. this genomic moment, when the political economy of race and matriarchy took on new salience in authoring new participatory regimes of wealth accumulation, relied on older, gendered forms of social engagement and obligations to give and receive that legitimated appropriation in the absence of informed consent. the racial body as a diverse, regenerative product of power and history marks mercantile colonial, capitalist industrial, and contemporary biocapital epochs. authorial power and historical narratives recirculating matriarchal discourses insinuate an elevated kinship status neither ascripted by birth nor achieved through merit, and in so doing reproduce the social order. from a social justice standpoint, the failure to reciprocate to the donor defines mauss’s notion of sacrificial exchange (mauss, 1990, p. 82). the challenge of modernity, mauss argues, is to transform the economy of human relationships from one based on sacrificial exchange to one based on balanced reciprocity (1990, pp. 82-83). in the case of the hela cell line, its perpetual self-laboring, recent genomic and epigenomic sequencing, and discursive accession to matriarchal status and wealth are as ascripted economically as they are intergenerationally. difficulties persist in determining whether and how the lacks family might benefit from the commodification of hela in scientific knowledge production. weber (1910) earlier advocated understanding technology as separate from materialist history and analyses of property relations. in the case of genomic technology, this article suggests otherwise. in regenerating and thereby naturalizing the social order as a social fact, the historical violence of racialized reproduction carries greater socioeconomic value than kinship, which, when emptied of meaningful social content, “can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment by the property relations” (spillers, 1987, p. 74). african americans have been historically commodified as legal property, objectified economically as alienated racial labor, and mined biologically as a natural resource. property, labor, and resources as gift objects, serve as “marker(s) in the economy of human relationships,” highlighting specific sociohistorical bonds in which the failure to reciprocate, as with the example of the nih’s treatment of the lacks family, precedes any legal enforcement or moral or ethical sanction (hyland, 2014, p. 50). the matriarchal label attached to henrietta lacks forecloses a clearer understanding of an “irredeemable past” in which the “present was the future that had been created by men and women in chains, by human commodities, by chattel persons” (hartman, 2007, p. 233). sethe, in toni morrison’s beloved, struggles against such a social order, one built on racialized and commodified reproduction that legitimates acts of bio-appropriation based neither on consent nor reciprocity. however, such culturally legitimated acts, based not on the “protected relationships” assumed by mauss, insist on the right to obligate the giver to gift through participation in asymmetrical forms of exchange (hyland, 2014, p.52). to paraphrase sanday (1998), sethe refuses to conjugate merely to perpetuate and consequentially subjugate her descendants to biological lives or existences conditioned upon reproducing intergenerational obligations to exchange sacrificially as a gift of their racialized labor to the nation. seen through this prism, i suggest the impossibility of achieving matrifocal justice or assuming matriarchal power to effect the ethical reformation of racialized social practices. i build on the work of joan scott (1986) in positing that kinship alone does not reproduce gender, but that both gender and race are constituted in large part separately from kinship by political and economic forces operating in the wider society (p. 1068).  conclusion in this article, i focus on matriarchy, specifically black matriarchy, as a vital yet unexamined contextual analytic in the social and political sciences. i presented a case of how the economically (re)productive, commodified, and laboring black female slave re-emerged as an economically (re)producing, commodifiable, laboring, status-elevated black matriarch. neither an accident of racial, gender or sexual history, nor a coincidence of physiological pathology and reproductive regeneration (or for that matter    an exemplar of social deviance), she eventually crossed the segregated lines of kinship, desire, and race to redefine exchange, integration, and contamination in both society and biology. this article has attempted to show how the political economy of matriarchy as deployed in media and scientific narratives around hela link to older histories of racial and gendered practices of exchange and appropriation. “she,” whether the primordialized “mitochondrial eve,” racialized “african eve,” or the “admixed” henrietta lacks, demonstrates how “she” was rendered fecund and exploitable in scientific knowledge production. consequently, as an ascripted matriarch having no real ability to effect change in the social order, her descendants live in relative poverty. she and most black “matriarchs” in the us struggle against a downward intergenerational spiral of health and economic disparities, kinship instability, and their disparate intersections with social, economic, and medical justice. the concept of bioethical matriarchy highlights the ethical importance of examining discourses that valorize sacrificial exchange and the elevated status claims ascripted to the obligated. i suggest paying future attention to how and why discourses of race and gender continue to operate productively within a social system of organized scientific and economic practices involved in the perennial deciphering of black flesh. in this social system of organized technoscientific practices, a political economy of racialized participation mobilizes both researchers and targeted risk populations in extra-legal cultural spaces. however, this widening of attention from the fragmentary biospecimen to the whole person now leaves us several very important questions to consider: as a politics of reparation, should a framework for redress prescribe reparative or restorative justice? in other words, can restorative justice make the bioethical matriarch “whole” in a legal sense? or, can reparative justice render the bioethical matriarch “whole” in an economic sense? and what is more “just”? to “repair” or  “restore?” these abstract yet vital questions expose the very real sociocultural dynamics of sacrificial exchange and the failure, inability, or sheer unwillingness to reciprocate. examining efforts toward achieving social justice via programmatic mechanisms of inclusion and consent requires making robust analytical distinctions between the sacrificial inequality of participation and the bioethics of appropriation, along the axes of power they inhabit. the future will determine whether the true bioethical value of the gift can facilitate balanced reciprocity commensurate to the imagined biovalue of race and gender. acknowledgements      i want to thank my colleagues in the race, genomics, and media working group and the science and justice center at the university of california, santa cruz for our productive discussions. i also extend my appreciation to sandra harvey, fatimah jackson, and marcia ochoa, who each contributed uniquely to the direction this project took, and to the reviewers for their insightful and provocative comments at each stage of writing. notes 1 see adey et al., (2013). 2 see landry et al., (2013). 3 this article is informed by archival research at the tozzer library at harvard university and the george gey collection in the alan mason chesney archives at johns hopkins university. in addition, i carried out over 100 hours of observation at health disparities conferences and meetings, in california, texas, washington, dc, and north carolina. 4 see hoad (2005) and comaroff (2007). comaroff locates (through hoad, 2005) the rationality in mbeki’s irrational refusal to accept definitions of hiv/aids that characterize it as a sexually transmitted disease, arguing that these definitions perpetuate western racist stereotypes and the euro-american propensity to use african bodies for experimentation and profit (hoad, 2005, p.104).  for mbeki, aids marks the impact of the living legacies of imperialism on african immune systems. from this perspective, remedies lie less in costly or hazardous drugs, which prolong neocolonial dependency, than in the reversal of inequality (comaroff, 2007, p. 214). comaroff avers that the hiv/aids epidemic in (south) africa, like the natural disaster hurricane katrina, dialectally exposes history, power, and capital. for an important exception, see hyman & reed (1969). 5 see http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/matriarch and http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/matriarchy. 6 one notable misapplication of the matriarchal meme was reflected by the misreading of edith clarke's my mother who fathered me (1957), which was interpreted as a case in point of caribbean social pathos. intended as an ethnographic examination of the social vitality of jamaican kinship practices within the context of the island’s independence, clarke wished to emphasize the social relationships generated by the kinship structure, not to critique the structure itself. r. t. smith (1988) argues that much of the scholarly misrecognition concerning west indian kinship is due to a lack of understanding of the epistemes of the people themselves. empirical methodologies misread how meaning is constructed within kinship groups by placing undue emphasis on class, politics, or cultural essentialisms (smith, 1988, p. 28). 7 i use pseudonyms for all the narrators in this article. 8 see de b’béri (2007). although sympathetic to herskovits’s (1990) earlier attempt to refute hegel by demonstrating a persistent and significant african socio-historical presence, i caution against equating cultural persistence with racial biology. the theoretical application of hegelian dialectics to understanding former slave societies begins with dubois (1994) and radiates through fanon (1963).  dubois’s “double consciousness” (1994, p. 2) is, in fanon’s work, a “manichaeism” dissonantly experienced subjectively and objectively. marxist dialectics do not analyze slavery, gender, or the colonial encounter; race, power, violence, and the ideology of difference trouble the relative social and racial homogeneity assumed within marxist imaginaries (fanon, 1963, pp. 40-46). 9 as of late 2016, members of the lacks family had spoken at over 120 schools over the previous five years. references adey a., burton j.n., kitzman j.o., hiatt j.b., lewis a.p., martin b.k., qiu r., lee c., & shendure j. (2013). the haplotype-resolved genome and epigenome of the aneuploid hela cancer cell line. nature, 500(7461), 207-211. beckles, h. (1999). centering woman: gender relations in caribbean slave society. kingston, jamaica: ian randle publishers. de b’béri, b. e. (2007). the semeiotic of africanicity in gaston kaboré's film buud yam. tydskrif vir letterkunde, 44(1), 98-109. bliss, c. (2012). race decoded: the genomic fight for social justice. palo alto, ca: stanford university press. bolnick, d. a., fullwiley, d., duster, t., cooper, r. s., fujimura, j. h., kahn, j…tallbear, k. (2007). the science and business of genetic ancestry testing. science, 318, 399-400. brereton, b. (2002). race relations in colonial trinidad, 1870–1900. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. brown, v. (2010). the reaper's garden: death and power in the world of atlantic slavery. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. callaway, e. (2013). deal done over hela cell line. nature, 500(7461), 132-133. clarke, e. (1999). my mother who fathered me: a study of the families in three selected communities of jamaica. kingston, jamaica: university of west indies press. comaroff, j. (2007). beyond bare life: aids, (bio)politics, and the neoliberal order. public culture, 19(1), 197. davis, k. (1950). human society. new york: macmillan. du bois, w.e.b. (1994). the gift of black folk: negroes in the making of america (vol. 18). oxford, uk: oxford university press. epstein, s. (2007). inclusion: the politics of difference in medical research. chicago, il: university of chicago press. fanon, f. (1963). the wretched of the earth. (r. philcox, trans.). new york, ny: grove. fausto-sterling, a. (2005). the bare bones of sex: part 1—sex and gender. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 30(2), 1491-1527. frazier, e. f. (1940). the negro family in the united states. chicago, il: university of chicago press. hartman, s. (2007). lose your mother: a journey along the atlantic slave route. farrar, straus and giroux. hartman, s. (2008). venus in two acts. small axe, 12(2), 1-14. herskovits, m. j. (1990). the myth of the negro past. boston, ma: beacon press. hoad, n. (2005). thabo mbeki's aids blues: the intellectual, the archive, and the pandemic. public culture, 17(1), 101-128. holloway, k. f. (2011). private bodies, public texts: race, gender, and a cultural bioethics. durham, nc: duke university press. holloway, k. f. (2014). legal fictions: constituting race, composing literature. durham, nc: duke university press. hudson, k.l., collins, f.s. (2013). family matters. nature, 500, 141-142. hyland, r. (2014). gift and danger. journal of classical sociology, 14(1), 45-53. hyman, h.h., & reed, j.s. (1969). “black matriarchy” reconsidered: evidence from secondary analysis of sample surveys. public opinion quarterly, 33(3), 346-354. landecker, h. 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(2013, august 7). nih, lacks family reach understanding to share genomic data of hela cells. news release. retrieved from http://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-lacks-family-reach-understanding-share-genomic-data-hela-cells. nelson, a. (2008). bioscience genetic genealogy testing and the pursuit of african ancestry. social studies of science, 38(5), 759-783. oikkonen, v. (2015). mitochondrial eve and the affective politics of human ancestry. signs, 40(3), 747-772. parsons, t. (1970). equality and inequality in modern society, or social stratification revisited. sociological inquiry, 40, 13-72. reskin, b. (2005). including mechanisms in our models of ascriptive inequality. in l. b. nielsen & r. l. nelson (eds.), handbook of employment discrimination research (pp. 75-99). dordrecht, netherlands: springer. reskin, b. & branch-mcbrier, d. (2000). why not ascription?: organizations’ employment of male and female managers. american sociological review, 65(2), 210-233. roberts, d. (2014). killing the black body: race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. new york, ny: vintage. sanday, p. r. (1998, july). matriarchy as a sociocultural form. paper presented at the 16th congress of the indo-pacific prehistory association, melaka, malaysia. scott, j. w. (1986). gender: a useful category of historical analysis. american historical review, 91(5), 1053-1075. senghor, l. s. (1967). the study of african man. mawazo, 1(4), 3-7. skloot, r. (2010). the immortal life of henrietta lacks. new york: crown. smith, r. t. (1956). the negro family in british guiana. london, uk: routledge. smith, r. t. (1988). kinship and class in the west indies: a genealogical study of jamaica and guyana. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. smith, r. t. (1996). the matrifocal family: power, pluralism, and politics. new york: routledge. spillers, h. j. (1987). mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book. diacritics, 17(2), 65-81. strathern, m. (1988). the gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in melanesia. berkeley, ca: university of california press. wailoo, k., nelson, a., & lee, c. (eds.). (2012). genetics and the unsettled past: the collision of dna, race, and history. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. waldby, c., & mitchell, r. (2006a). tissue economies: blood, organs, and cell lines in late capitalism. durham, nc: duke university press. waldby, c. (2006b). umbilical cord blood: from social gift to venture capital. biosocieties, 1(1), 55-70. weasel, l. h. (2004). feminist intersections in science: race, gender, and sexuality through the microscope. hypatia, 19(1), 183-193. weber, m. (2005). remarks on technology and culture. theory, culture & society, 22(4), 23-38. bio james doucet-battle is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at the university of california, santa cruz. his research interests lie at the intersection of diaspora and transnational studies, science, technology and society studies, development studies, and health disparities. microsoft word 293-1516-2-kneese and merid.docx kneese, t. and merid, b. (2018). introduction: illness narratives, networked subjects, and intimate publics. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © tamara kneese and beza merid. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introduction illness narratives, networked subjects, and intimate publics tamara kneese university of san francisco tkneese@usfca.edu beza merid university of michigan bmerid@umich.edu this themed section of catalyst examines the material effects/affects of illness, disability, dying, and death, enduring topics across the humanities and social sciences that have become, in recent years, the focus of scholarly investigation in fields like communication studies, sts, medical anthropology, and feminist and queer science studies (braidotti 2013, fassin 2007, mialet 2012, serlin 2010). online spaces have become notable sites of such inquiries (arnold et al. 2017, mccosker and darcy 2013). in much of this work, scholars track the emergence of complex, intimate publics through encounters between patients and caregivers, among networks of mourners, and through subjects who trade paradigms for “how best to live on, considering” (berlant 2011). drawing on media 2 kneese and merid catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) studies and textual analysis, other scholars examine face-to-face interactions, privately sent emails, posts on semi-public facebook walls, and the public comment sections of personal illness blogs that participate in the production of both subjects and publics. people who are ill or dying may describe their own affective, embodied, psychological, and existential conditions over social media platforms, through illness blogs or comedy performances, in artistic creations, over gofundme campaigns seeking money to help with medical costs, during in-person support group meetings, or in emails sent to update established social networks (jain 2013). caregivers may give voice to their own experiences through similar outlets, producing and circulating knowledge about their positions as workers who, facing burnout or illness, need care themselves. the pieces in this themed section demonstrate how these diverse sites of cultural production galvanize personal narratives, engaging with experiences of pain and loss, to create new publics (and counter-publics) or mediate new forms of networked subjectivities. taken together and individually, these pieces consider the ways that human-technological assemblages intersect with illness narratives, and how these assemblages help us make sense of such intrusions. they show individuals, communities, and institutions grappling with the day-to-day realities of illness, disability, dying, and death, along with their more profound implications. as a reflection of the authors’ experiences with illness or around illness, they illustrate the ways in which these life events disrupt and redefine the lives we imagine for ourselves. the stakes of this section feel all the more heightened by the chilling political climate taking shape across the global north, where people who are the most vulnerable are in danger of losing their access to health care or having health care as a right of citizenship significantly abridged. in the us, with ongoing threats to the integrity of the affordable care act and the protections of the americans with disabilities act by the trump administration, we have witnessed a resurgence of activism around issues of illness and disability. this themed section makes the case that 3 kneese and merid catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) illness, disability, dying, and death continue to be sites where networked subjects are made and intimate publics spark collective political intervention through an array of online spaces. illness narratives are crafted not only by those who are personally ill, but by the experiences of those around them; illness bloggers often write about the ways their friends and family are coping as they detail their own lives. the stories we tell about these experiences illustrate the challenges of making a life when living is a challenge. social media platforms and the popularity of illness blogging, along with other illnessrelated online networks, make clear the undeniable impact these new social forms have on one’s relationship to illness. through these digital intimate publics, private cancer scars—whether physical or emotional— can be shared with a broader community. in their articles, susan jacobson and reisa klein each describe the long-term companionship afforded by sites like instagram and youtube, where individuals with breast cancer can come together, share information, or simply vent. parsing these networked subjectivities is vital work; it helps us understand emerging modes of sociality that afford patients and caregivers the community, language, and access to resources they need, while also situating our own often individualizing experiences of illness and dying within broader social and political contexts. also crucial to this section is the role of what abou farman (2017) calls “terminality,” or what it means to live with the knowledge that one’s time is limited, if in less than certain terms. we are interested in the longterm, transtemporal, and intersubjective co-mingling of the living and the dead, particularly in online spaces. to preserve an illness narrative for posterity and to share one individual’s story with a broader audience can have lasting political and emotional import. stuart murray’s and deborah steinberg’s contribution is an important example of this kind of transtemporal collaboration. their work examines the capacities for overlap between academic writing—which is so often portrayed as cerebral and disembodied—and illness blogging. through experiences with terminal cancer, their work becomes more intersubjective. illness 4 kneese and merid catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) blogs are associated with affective and communicative labor, including care for the self and others: “[b]log tools offer their users (and authors and readers) a continually renewable capacity to produce, express, and connect with others, while also undertaking the often all-encompassing and highly intimate emotional, physical, and relational management associated with their illness” (mccosker and darcy 2013, 1267). the production and maintenance of illness blogs is inherently collaborative and embodied. other pieces in this themed section examine aspects of the relationship between illness narratives and creative practice. melanie chilianis and ardath whynacht consider the ways that illness informs artistic creation, either for individual practitioners or in collaborative, group settings. such work points to the more subversive potentialities of illness narratives, especially given concerns over the co-optation of health information as a mode of privacy invasion and surveillance. along these lines, kirsten ostherr’s essay on the data-fication of personal health information considers the role of such data imaginaries in fomenting tensions between patient-driven and clinic-driven portrayals of illness, which some argue has fulfilled neoliberal promises of an ever-moreoptimized self. ostherr notes how personal narratives may be mined for valuable data by a variety of stakeholders, from advertisers to insurance companies. throughout the process of writing, reviewing, and editing the articles that comprise this section, we have experienced first-hand how personal illness and loss have delayed or otherwise complicated the many drafts, emails, and exchanges that constitute a scholarly dossier: the long-term temporal mapping of academic labor does not always or precisely coincide with the embodied aspects of its production. steinberg sadly passed away during the editorial process of this section and, following her wishes, murray continued to work on her article to ensure its inclusion herein. as a kind of praxis of this transtemporal and intersubjective co-mingling, their work includes the voices of both authors in conversation with one another as a testament to and in defiance of 5 kneese and merid catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) terminality. illness narratives produce intimate publics and networked subjects, but the preservation and maintenance of such narratives has its own distinct effects. to care for a dead loved one’s blog is an act of continued love as well as a form of archival practice, keeping this shared experience for purposes of posterity. to that end, we have also included a pdf of steinberg’s illness blog in an attempt to share it with catalyst readers and to preserve it in case it disappears from its domain name. acknowledgements we thank the authors who shared their work—and so much of themselves—along with the catalyst editorial staff and anonymous reviewers for helping us produce this section, providing much unseen labor on the backend side. we are deeply appreciative of their various contributions. references arnold m., gibbs, m., kohn, t., meese, j., nansen, b. (2017). death and digital media. london: routledge. berlant, l. (2011) cruel optimism. durham, nc: duke university press. braidotti, r. (2013) the posthuman. cambridge, uk: polity press. farman, a. (2017) terminality. social text, 35(2(131)): 93-118. fassin, d. (2007) when bodies remember: experiences and politics of aids in south africa. berkeley, ca: university of california press. jain, s. l. (2013) malignant: how cancer becomes us. berkeley, ca: university of california press. mccosker, a. and darcy, r. (2013) living with cancer: affective labour, self-expression and the utility of blogs. information, communication & society, 16, 1266–1285. mailet, h. (2012) hawking incorporated: stephen hawking and the anthropology of the knowing subject. chicago, il: the university of chicago press. 6 kneese and merid catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) serlin, d. (2010) imagining illness: public health and visual culture. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. edmiston review     feminist bioethics and intersex medical interventions: a review of making sense of intersex: changing ethical perspectives in biomedicine (indiana university press, 2014)       e. kale edmiston vanderbilt university kale.edmiston@vanderbilt.edu how does a clinician determine what constitutes an ethical problem? in making sense of intersex, ellen feder argues that cases that appear straightforward are the most likely to result in ethical violations.  regarding intersex surgical interventions, which are typically performed in infancy, feder contends that clinicians often miss the ethical complexity of parental decision-making on behalf of children. informed consent presumes an adult who can, with available information, make choices about their own body. for infants who cannot consent to surgery, however, how do parents and clinicians negotiate the boundaries of medical decision-making on behalf of infants? what are the long-term ethical implications of decisions to alter an infant’s body? as intersex adults have pointed out, their primary bioethical concern is not accessing needed care, but the ability to refuse interventions. feder, a professor of philosophy at american university who specializes in bioethics, examines how assumptions about normalcy produce the need to conceal intersex bodies, and how these assumptions result in shame and familial conflict.  throughout the book, feder investigates intersex medical interventions from multiple angles, including the primacy of the child-parent relationship, the ethics of caregiving and consent, and the complex slippage that occurs when “good medicine” does not equate to “ethical medicine.” by composing an interdisciplinary analysis of medicine, making sense of intersex can be read with interest by medical providers, bioethicists, and medical humanities scholars. making sense of intersex begins with an historical account of atypical sex/intersex as a medical category. feder claims that the development of the standard of care (soc) for intersex is not a linear narrative of progress towards ethical treatment of intersex patients. building upon the work of alice dreger, co-founder of the intersex society of north america, feder argues that contemporary fascination with “hermaphroditism” (an anachronistic term for intersex) can be traced to the victorian period, when intersex first became a medical category, and intersex people became objects of fascination for clinicians. nineteenth-century attitudes towards intersex individuals were connected to conservative ideas about gender and sexuality, to the expansion of medical authority, and, through military exams given to british colonial forces, to the subsequent “discovery” of the high prevalence of intersex individuals. during this era, the first genital surgeries were performed, albeit at the request of consenting adult patients (dreger, 1998). in the early twentieth century, care of patients with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, an intersex diagnosis with concordant medical needs, was connected to medical need and patient autonomy. in contrast, the development of soc practices in the mid-twentieth century more closely followed conservative victorian-era attitudes by emphasizing aesthetic surgical intervention. feder posits that the modern insistence on surgical intervention for atypical genitalia relies upon an ahistorical perspective, and thereby ignores the ways in which intersex people have lived happily without cosmetic surgical interventions in other eras. feder proceeds with a discussion of the infant-parent bond. soc for intersex diagnoses is fraught because it requires clinical decision-making on behalf of an infant. using bourdieu’s concept of habitus, that is, the unquestioned frameworks that guide cultural structures, feder discusses how such assumptions generate an imperative for normalcy, thereby creating situations wherein parents who want nothing but the best for their children can do significant harm. such decision-making requires that parents imagine what life might be like for their newborn infant as an adult, sexual being. parents must make a decision for their infant that is “in their child’s best interest,” but are likely not equipped with the medical knowledge or caregiving experience to do so. by engaging with feminist scholarship on motherhood and kleinian psychoanalytic theory, feder suggests that motherhood necessitates attentive care and interpretive skills to anticipate a child’s needs. anticipation of these needs is predicated on parental identification, the idea that parents are able to see themselves in their child, and therefore interpret their needs based on a priori knowledge from life experience. because sexual difference is of such primary importance in western conceptualizations of the body, parents of intersex infants are unable to imagine themselves as their child, a future intersex adult, and instead project a desire for normalcy onto their child as an adult who does not yet exist. in the case of intersex infants, feder contends that surgical interventions without the patient’s consent represent a failure of parental identification. feder then deliberately “turns the lens” from intersex patients to clinicians, arguing that the assumption of a clinical imperative to conceal intersex bodies stems not from medical need but from projected provider disgust. a series of qualitative interviews with medical doctors follows an innovative approach in the intersex literature that allows for insight into the medical decision making process and the assumptions underlying it. feder offers perceptive analysis of these conversations, concluding that for clinicians involved in the care of intersex infants, a “normal” appearance, with all of its presumed social rewards, takes priority over the sexual pleasure and at times the medical need of an intersex infant. proponents of genital surgery in intersex infants maintain they are helping their patients avoid shame.  however, we must consider the source of shame by asking who provokes it; shame and disgust are implicit when families are instructed to change their child and to keep their diagnosis a secret. feder concludes instead that we should relocate the “imperative for change” from the bodies of intersex infants to the providers that care for them.   while critics in the west often cite genital circumcisions in sub-saharan africa as coercive, they take for granted or ignore infant intersex surgeries performed in the west. feder (2014) addresses this paradox by arguing that aesthetic genital surgery on intersex infants may represent a “difference of degree rather than kind (p. 127).” citing ethnographic work among the kono of sierra leone, who practice circumcision as a rite of adulthood that allows for political participation in society, feder argues that kono initiation is similar to western surgical practices in intersex infants, differing only in that it is required of everyone and is a public ritual, while in the west genital surgeries are required of only a few and are considered private and shameful. criticism of non-western practices relies on a false dichotomy rooted in colonialism that describes western practices as medical and therefore necessary, and non-western practices as primitive and therefore unwarranted. however, feder (2014) suggests, “practices that have been well-established are not the result of careful…reflection, but instead are a matter of repeated enactment of cultural values...” (p. 132). in insisting on the modification of an infant’s body, those who promote genital surgeries are in effect suggesting that it is more important to change an individual’s body than it is to change a society that insists on a gender binary. in the latter half of the book, feder asks why, if soc for intersex infants has changed drastically in the last twenty years, has the rate of infant genital surgeries remained the same? many providers state that early genital surgery is “what the parents want.” this sentiment mirrors previous arguments for infant surgical intervention that assumed parents would be unable to bond with a child with atypical genitalia.  the second half of the book questions these assumptions and offers an analysis of power in parent-child and patient-provider relationships to the study of bioethics. informed by psychoanalytic interpretation of the parent-child bond, feder analyzes a series of qualitative interviews with parents of intersex children.  she argues that the parent-child bond is one of interdependence, that is, parents don’t just shape their children, but are in turn shaped by the act of parenting. feder similarly turns to the patient-provider relationship, suggesting that physicians help to shape reality for their patients; the provider assumption that the intersex soc represents guidelines for “what is” rather than “what should be” represents a refusal to acknowledge the unequal power dynamic between provider and patient. alternative conceptions of time are implicit throughout making sense of intersex. the birth of an intersex individual creates urgency in the minds of providers, while simultaneously forcing parents to re-imagine their child’s future. embedded in the argument for aesthetic surgeries for intersex individuals is the idea that individuals with atypical genitalia cannot have a future, or that their only possible future is tragic. in fact, feder begins making sense of intersex with a critique of the 2000 statement by the american academy of pediatrics, which states that the birth of an intersex individual represents a “social emergency.” feder’s framing of the implicit beliefs underlying the “emergency” of an intersex body parallels arguments posed by feminist disability studies scholars such as alison kafer and queer studies theorists such as jack halberstam about the role of time, particularly “futurity” in conceptualizing non-normative bodies. their work considers similar bioethical questions in the context of prenatal genetic counseling and violence against transgender people, making significant contributions to discourses on non-normative bodies. feder’s work would have been strengthened by engagement with these existing critiques of bioethics, power, and violence. likewise, making sense of intersex offers feminist disability studies and queer studies additional tools for discussing the medicalization of embodied difference. ultimately, feder, kafer, and halberstam are all asking the same question: who gets to decide which bodies are anomalous—and, ultimately, will such bodies be allowed to exist in the world on their own terms? acknowledgements special thanks to dr. aimi hamraie for their contributions to the revision of this manuscript.  references dreger, a.a. (1998). a history of intersexuality, from the age of gonads to the age of consent. journal of clinical ethics, 9(4), 345-355. feder, e.k. (2014). making sense of intersex: changing ethical perspectives in biomedicine. bloomington, in: indiana university press. bio e. kale edmiston is a post-doctoral scholar at china medical university in shenyang. he recently completed his phd in neuroscience at vanderbilt university, where he was also the co-director of the vanderbilt university medical center’s program for lgbti health, as well as the co-founder and director of the trans buddy program. his research interests include feminist and transgender science studies, the neuroendocrine system and social behavior, and the neurodevelopmental effects of stress and trauma.   labmeeting lab meeting     toyin ojih odutola’s art practice as a technology of the skin    kimberly juanita brown mount holyoke college kimbrown@mtholyoke.edu cheryl dunye san francisco state university cdunye@gmail.com dell m. hamilton hutchins center for african and african american research, harvard university dell@dellmhamilton.com toyin ojih odutola new growth (maebel), 2013 pen ink and bronze marker on board 13 x 14  22 3/4 x 23 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches framed ©toyin ojih odutola. courtesy of the artist and jack shainman gallery, new york. introduction engaging toyin ojih odutola’s work is a practice in the productive deployment of “more.” in her prolific artistic career she has produced mesmerizing drawn portraits that ask the viewer to go deeper, and to follow her hand and her pen in order to see the nuanced articulation of the skin that she engenders in her work. in a session moderated by catalyst board member kimberly juanita brown, brown and dell m. hamilton are joined by filmmaker cheryl dunye (the watermelon woman). the subject of the lab meeting is toyin ojih odutola’s art practice as a technology of the skin. ojih odutola's art practice is imbued with a precision that the study of race, gender, and a poetics of the skin necessitate. in this she has few peers, as her art process is as unique as its eventual product. from film and photography to multimedia and visual iconography, we sought to parse out the multilayered possibilities present in ojih odutola's visual texts. kimberly:  i'm kimberly brown. i'm assistant professor of english and africana studies at mount holyoke college and part of the dark room collective, which dell and sandy will introduce themselves, but they are part of that as well. not the dark room collective, that's the soul and we are the dark room seminar. the collective is a whole other group of people. this is our 5th year, we are entering our 5th year of having conversations about critical race theory and visual culture study… oh, i'm done with my introduction. dell:  my name is dell hamilton. i'm an artist, an independent curator and a writer. i'm based in boston and i also work at the hutchins center for african and african american research, at harvard. my studio practice is everything from photography, and performance, and video, drawing and painting, and then i have a sort of research practice that i've been developing as well. and that's where a dark room has been really important for me in terms of me trying to think through how i create a studio practice that's research-based and thoughtful, but still exists in a kind of intuitive, kind of really raw but visceral, kind of way of working stuff. kimberly:  dell is our first and only artist, right? dell:  yeah, we need more artists man, i can't be the token artist. kimberly:  i sent that to you, but you were at the talk, so you kind of know what she said about her art practice and about her relationship to it, particularly. i just wanted to put that talk in the context of the images that i pulled out; we don't have to talk about all of them but definitely, the one i chose for the cover is the one that the editorial board at catalyst approved. i wanted to make sure that the image that was on the cover represented some form of black womanhood immersed within the study and also thinking about black studies. and i just love, i love...that image. cheryl:  i love it too. kimberly:  and then i chose some other ones, just one because i knew it was famous, the one that's in the episode from “empire.” the one, the cloth.... toyin ojih odutola hold it in your mouth a little longer, 2013 charcoal, pastel, and graphite on paper 40 x 30 inches 48 x 37 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches framed ©toyin ojih odutola. courtesy of the artist and jack shainman gallery, new york. dell:  that's the one from "empire." it's really, really cool. dell:  and then this one. i can't remember what medium this one is so this one's actually low, i'm printing it to. that one. so i think that i printed out five of them, there may be more of them, but i printed out five. kimberly:  so the one with the feet.... dell:  yeah. i want to say, i think it’s watercolor but i mean i know that.... yeah. it's weird, i think this reproduction is a little bit odd because it reads as watercolor to me. i don't know but i think that's what it is, so that's why i kind of want to look at this one a little more. …yeah, it's like a bait-and-switch that she's doing, and it's very, very clever.  it's really, really smart, but the other thing, too, that's interesting to me about when she's talking about her work in terms of the interviews that i was watching before, when i had to do her introduction, was the fact that, for her, it's not only like a kind of emotional, kind of psychological underpinning that she's trying to get at, but it's also really, it's a bodily sort of sensation that's she also.... because she talks about her hand getting really tired and injured because she had been working many, many hours and she had this crazy deadline and had to, you know…but she also talked about insisting on the fact that she's a draftsman and not a painter.  it had to do with the fact that the way the brush feels on a surface, that it's too soft for her and there's something about the concreteness of pen on paper that does something for her. that resonated with me because i'm very much a materials person as well, so it feels very performative…not just in terms of how the images look on the surface, but it feels performative for her, her process. kimberly:  right. i wanted to ask a question about what you think the viewer encounters when the viewer encounters an image of hers, what you see that you had to engage with that other art practices maybe don't allow for. i'm trying to get at what people assume it to be and then what people see when they look at these images, that makes them so compelling for very different kinds of people. i wouldn't think that this would appeal to an “empire”…and is [also] appealing for a larger group of people, i guess. i’m kind of asking why people love her work so much. like we love it, but why, but how, what does it offer, maybe. dell:  what work does it do? kimberly:  right. cheryl:  it represents so many landscapes and textures and feelings of moving forward, and moving backwards at the same time. with nostalgia and just blackness in itself, and even in its form it really does play with sort of mapping…two spaces at the same time, so there's a lot of layers. that simple word, that really are “pleasing”. i think patterns are pleasing, but i think the truth is the darkness and the type of black people that she portrays are very similar to the ones that i'm attracted to with my work: so it's that black girl. that black girl, you know, not marlo thomas, but that black girl. kimberly:  can you talk about what your engagement was with her as a student and what you were teaching? how that came about? cheryl:  i was teaching narrativity a lot to graduate students. i had to really think about narratives down to their smallest unit and building stories from those units. you know, sort of fábula and building outward from that, and the strength of storytelling and how events tend to tell stories and you need to kind of hone in on it. and you also need to have, really, an ability to make jumps within the kind of context…. you don't need to fill a space up with so many things for discovery. you need people to take things away and i feel like what's left with her work is exquisite in that sense of filling up spaces. she has a real sense of the narrative of space, and texture, and material, and stroke. finding the sweet spot on a screen too, or a screen, or a canvas. places where your eyes will go because of color, because of what's happening there, you know, placement. it's very traditional, in one sense, it's not radically correct. it's pleasing, it's very pleasing. dell:  but i think the fact that it's traditional is probably one of the reasons why people do like the work.  people within the art world, they don't always necessarily always like to be uncomfortable. they want you to sort of give them some, you know.... sometimes they’re looking for meaning, but mostly looking for pleasure. and i think color itself—like how she's using color with her drawings—i think that that's definitely, for me, one of the things that initially kind of drew me to her images. seeing it from across the room, seeing the colors—that it is kind of also flickering with the light on the surface—and then getting closer and realizing that it's pen-ink on paper, and i'm just like, "oh, wait a minute, this looks really, really interesting.” it's kind of maybe, i think, there's a level of pleasure, and surprise, and kind of unexpectedness, but i think in that regard, i think convention serves her work really well in this case. kimberly:  right. cheryl:  i think the sense of loneliness in africa, too, and i feel like—i know for me as an african…i was born in africa…so we come from african heritages—the loneliness in between and figures are alone, but we did talk about that issue of growing up in...i think she's from texas or something, i don't remember exactly, someplace lonely, i mean every where is lonely for the.... dell:    right. was it alabama? kimberly:  yeah. that's where her father was teaching, right? dell:  huntsville, alabama, i think. kimberly:  yeah. i think so. dell:  that's it. yeah, because that's where she got her b.a. is from university of alabama, huntsville. cheryl:  the odd black girl in spaces where we don't even exist. you have to create your own.... dell:  right. world. yeah, that's exactly right. kimberly:  it gets back to—we read shine last year, last september—our first meeting, our first book last year, and it gets at the lighting because, to me, it was like a shine there, a light there, the life that you are talking about, the layers. you know—what cheryl was talking about. and then the traditional portraiture history. portraiture all in the same space, but what she does to the skin is so intricate for me because it is so dark and it's so full of life…i want to combine those two things because it's phenomenal and it's rare. dell:  yeah. the reason why it looks [like that] is because of the pen-ink on the surface that she's working on but also because she uses metallic markers underneath. so that's the other way that she gets that.... the fact that it looks layered, is because it is layered and that's, i think, intentional in her process. it does feel like a kind of engraving because if you watch videos of her working, that's exactly what it looks like is happening: that she's literally pressing into the skin of the surface of the paper. kimberly:  yes...i know. that's the precision of it though, and it's also why it's damaged her hands so fully, because you might to do something that's so precisely it doesn't dull the skin. it also takes on it's own shimmer and shine. that is hard to do. dell:  i think the other thing that i always think of when i look at her images is ritual scarring practices from around the world, and i imagine it's fairly painful: getting them initially, afterward, in terms of what the skin looked like. they’re works of art on skin.  it's drawing on skin, it's literally… so that's the other thing that always comes to mind when i look at her work. it's part of a longer genealogy in body art. kimberly:  i never thought about that. cheryl:  with the resurgence of black people who are thinking about blackness in radical ways, which is what the work is really about. the people that she's capturing and bringing this underpinning to, these layers to their bodies, are like afro-punks, like what's going on now. like people who are sort of edgy and on a cutting-edge of a variety of the different backgrounds and histories. nose piercing. there's somebody with all these sort of subversive and marginalized identities in blackness, i think, that’s talking about how expansive we are and can be. so that's what it really is. it seems almost sci-fi like that. we are moving in our own distant future, so it's calling me as somebody who lives on those margins and presents that way. we're beautiful. we're beautiful, we're subjects, and just as affirming as sort of what's happening right now with the afro-futurist, afro-punk, the only way to use it because that's a popular word right now, because if it was weak, it was really happening. like all military boots and snot, this is allowing us to inhabit many identities and spaces at the same time. even the scars have different colors. toyin ojih odutola the paradox of education, 2013 charcoal and pastel on paper 40 x 30 inches 48 x 37 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches framed ©toyin ojih odutola. courtesy of the artist and jack shainman gallery, new york. kimberly:  yes. maybe for me so many of these images start out as photographs. it's fascinating to me as well, what gets held, because she talked about how she then alters the stance… and she moves it to the left, she moves it to the right. she does something to alter that engagement. then to have that engagement evolve into something else that is beyond photography, and also other genres of maybe representation. because maybe photography wouldn't give enough of this. what we're discussing... my students were really… they saw the series of the images and most of them that i chose had the subject looking at the viewer, and they were really kind of mesmerized by that. the idea that they didn't quite know what they were looking at, who they were looking at, and then how to direct their gaze, what exactly they were supposed to be looking for. cheryl:  that's interesting. kimberly:  it made for a really vibrant conversation about viewers’ expectations and how to divert that in an image… cheryl:  yeah. the thing is there's not a lot of art that can be made without a camera. when you're in art school, you are encouraged to take anatomy classes in total art and so you use a live model. but in most cases, when you're working in your studio, you're not going to have a live model. you just cannot afford to. so, you work from images and you download things off the internet, or you get your camera, your camera-phone, or your nikon, or canon, or whatever. you ask your friends to sit for you, or your parents to sit for you. and whether you're a draftsman or painter or video artist, you're almost always working from some photographic image in terms of developing these conventions and sort of thinking about how the colors look on the page and how you might compose a frame. there's not a lot, there's no way to sort of get around photography, and it's ridiculous. or ubiquity, rather. toyin ojih odutola the tourist, 2016 charcoal, pastel and pencil on paper 56 1/2 x 42 inches (paper) 61 7/8 x 47 1/2 x 2 1/8 inches (framed) ©toyin ojih odutola. courtesy of the artist and jack shainman gallery, new york kimberly:  i like it because i can see the past of photography here but it looks like how photography can go forward, because i don't know what to do about digital images because i'm still so—i would call it ambivalent but i just still don't like then.  i detest a digital black and white image; it drives me crazy for no good reason, but except that i could tell and if i can tell, it's not good so it's hard for me to look at a contemporary black and white image that has been so manipulated technologically with software, or whatever, however it's done.  this looks like what i would want digital photography to be if it were good, like if it could get there.  could it get there, i don't know. cheryl:  yeah. it's a kind of super realism. kimberly:  right. that you could see a camera somewhere in here, but it's so much more than what you know a camera can do. cheryl:  and again i'm always attracted to the stories of the space and the split. where do these characters exist? where are they living? what's their experience? what stopped them in this moment? they had to make another story on top of, through, the process, and now they exist in two different spaces. i'm trying to think of the object, the one that you chose.... there was on with the dresser with other little smaller objects on it, i don't think it's one that you had, they're telling a story, there's like boots walking along the canal. kimberly:  oh yes. cheryl:  what are these stories?—and that's where i get off.  it’s like, wow. so the storytelling is complete both on and off the camera. it is always so great to have somebody who you mentored for a hot minute, blow up. you're like, "okay, it did work, it did work". i said something in there. kimberly:  yes. definitely. she seems to have taken all of the layers of all of her disbursed and integrated identities and made it a part of the art practice. it does come through in these pieces. dell:  yeah, that's half the battle, trying to decide what to keep and what to get rid of. then you can figure out a vocabulary that has personal meaning for you. if you get through that part, then it's going to be all right. it can be painful in that process. i'm sorry go ahead.... kimberly:  no, no, i'm sorry. cheryl:  i was just going to say, i remember there's another interview that i watched of her and she's talking about the fact that as soon as she finished, she had gotten picked up by jack shainman and someone said to her, "oh wow, you're getting picked up right out of grad school. your career is going to die because you're going to have to make the same work for a very long time." i just remember thinking, (a) that's mean; for toyin, there isn't—as conventional that the work looks—that there's a whole world that's conjured in these images. i'm not sure if i necessarily see narrative, but it's a world that pulls her in, so she doesn't have any fear about making the same work look the same over and over and over again. it seems like she tries to do something different each time and she's probably trying to push the boundaries further with each drawing—and certainly with the range of size, and scale, and color, and texture, and so forth. i think she's obviously doing just fine, but i found that comment really strange, particularly i think when you get out of school there's no sure thing. it's so easy to stop making art and not have the support to keep your art practice flourishing. kimberly:  people don't quite know what to say, i think. i feel like it's the same interaction with her work, don't quite know what to say and therefore… dell:  right. kimberly:  maybe that's just with artists in general and also what they do with the reproduction, with lowered expectations that align with the genre. cheryl:  yeah. artists kind of suck; we're kind of mean to each other. kimberly:  i think that everybody has their own particularly meanness already out. cheryl:  i remember coming out grad school and i was the one out of my mfa program at rutgers in new brunswick—i was at the mason gross school of the arts doing a studio practice—my early work. i was the only one out of my graduate program who got picked up at the beginning of “the culture wars” or whatever it was. there was a meanness around the other students and the art world and there was like, “we don't know what this is; we don't know how to deal with it.” dell:  yeah. like, "why her?". cheryl:  right.  it was at the biennial. it's a weird space to be in… and thinking more about toyin's comments in the interview that you're referencing, are ones that you have to comment about because they're so offsetting. you're like, “hell, i just got picked up and it doesn't really matter, and you're already trying to man-speak for me.” and i think as a black artist in the kind of young, queer/not queer, whatever-of-color realm dealing with these contemporary settings of showing your work and just getting it in.... it's so great to see somebody…busting out with talent. and ignoring what people are saying and just going about it. kimberly:  because it was the genre at first that was off-putting for people because it's not... like, who's drawing and moving into these gaps? dell:   exactly. kimberly:  so when you say not listening to these people because you cannot have them interact before you even produce it. they will try to talk you out of your own vision. dell:  the thing is, it happens a lot. i think hank saw the work and understood it, and got it. kimberly:  what i'm finding most—i was going to say “rewarding” but why would it be rewarding; i didn't make the art.  i'm most interested in using her work, toyin's work, to study blackness. when ordinarily it would not look like this, it would not go this way, it would not be this genre, it would not be this artist, it would not be... she's both young-ish and she has a large archive of work already, and it's a very particular style of visual representation, visual art and the kind that people want to say is not something that is a museum, and/or art gallery production. to have that be museum and gallery production and also to move it to these other spaces like television shows, and like citizen. so without claudia rankine, i wouldn't probably wouldn't have known about her for a few more years, maybe. but existing in citizen, also puts it in another sphere of not just representation, being, but also study. so then people had to look at it for the way that it was presenting it and also for it standing alone. there are art pieces in citizen i didn't give a second look and this is the one that really stayed with me. dell:  have you seen some of her other work from 2014? maybe about two years, some images on her website, it's some of her earlier work, that i saw at jack shainman a couple of summers ago. there's instances where the figure is up against this richly-patterned background and so i wonder what happens to the kind of singularity of the subject, and the individual and these images that we're looking at now versus some of these earlier one's where the skin and the background pretty much become collapsed. kimberly:  oh yes, she showed a couple of them. the figure could be absorbed within the pattern.  it could be a distraction, and i think that the white background for me, works much better… the contrast there. but i could see what she was attempting to do because it was again about color and not necessarily about race, but about color, like the richness of color and how to use it against skin i think.  but i could see how the body could be absorbed in that at any second. dell:  i remember seeing them and they were very, very overpowering. there's a kind of precarity that i felt in looking at them because you kind of get lost in the fact that the background and the foreground around and the subject background are collapsed. there i think the size of them, there like 42” by 60”, something like that. i remember those images very much, and just remember being almost kind of shocked by them. kimberly:  and i liked it because it’s holding on to the themes or the motif of movement, of life, and also of her precarity, because it's not as if this skin exists where it wants to exist. his body's not going to exist where they want it to exist; all they can do is try or attempt. also, some of that back and forth engagement, particularly with the viewers, says you will see me or you will... i'm pulling from my toni morrison upper-level seminar. i'm writing quotes from every novel and putting it on the syllabus. cheryl:  that's awesome. kimberly:  it's a line from a mercy, and the line is: “from now you will stand to hear me.” and it's something here that says from now you will see me. even if that isn't what desire, what you want, what you think you're looking at or looking for. you will see me, on my own terms. “invisible to whom”—morrison. baby suggs in the clearing: “love your skin.” she doesn't say love your skin, she says love your flesh, right? dell:  yeah. “love your flesh.” yeah. but that's good enough. kimberly:  close enough. then the precarity there, always there, always present but not something that you're going to make the central part of who you are in the world. it's the skincare. cheryl:  i love the skincare. kimberly:  we made it very literary, i don't know if she would agree with it. dell:  no, actually, it makes sense because that was the other thing i wanted to talk about: how she titles her work. it's very much engaged in literature and language. cheryl:  it also strikes ending in a different way. kimberly:  yes. cheryl:  it's storytelling. kimberly:  she did say that. she said something about telling a story with the skin. i'm messing up her quote. dell:  yeah. i remember her talking about that because one of her shows at jack shainman was called “like the sea” and it's from that zora neale hurston quote. you know, like every shore is different. visual vocabulary is interesting. when i read morrison's work and certainly zora neale hurston's work, i do make pictures in my head. i assume now that that's what toyin does as well, that there's some picture-making that's happening. kimberly:  thought pictures. dell:  thought pictures. exactly. there's some kind of thought picture process happening when she's reading language. kimberly:  maybe we should just send a piece to morrison and see if she has anything to add… dell:  what does she think. [laughter] kimberly:  thought pictures, yes. i like that, i like that connection as well. not just the skin at the study but also the link with literary traditions. dell:  well the other thing too to keep in mind, at least in the art world, we talk about, “how does someone read your work, or is your work legible or illegible.” so it's still has to do with language and reading and communication, so it's kind of a default way of talking about art, certainly within art school.  but this link to language—i think is absolutely there and without even necessarily referencing whatever literally text we're thinking of.  the thought picture thing—it's there, it's embedded in the way we talk about art. kimberly:  okay. we are almost at the end. i did want to think a little bit about how we might see her in time, like the temporality of the pieces, because i'm struck by how they cannot really be located. part of that is because they can't really always locate clothing so... that’s already off the table, but also that i'm not quite sure how i'm supposed to be reading, skimming the way, the way that it is drawn, because it is not a painting, and because it is not a photograph. how i'm supposed to temporally locate myself to think about how you think that might be functioning? cheryl:  like everyday gesturing, there's sort of an authenticity of the... it's the now or the not-too-distant future.  it's soothing in the space that i do get located, i feel like kinship to, especially with dark skin. it's having darkness as the skin, so there's a kinship with that.  i feel presence. kimberly:  it's true because we didn't talk about the darkness of the skin being significant as well and also pulling in the viewer, pulling in the subject. cheryl:  i think toyin and i used to joke about, “is she black or is she black-black.”  you know even being able to have somebody to say that to and so she wrote a book that represents that.  i don't know, i feel comforted. i feel like i have a place in the world.  bios kimberly juanita brown is an assistant professor in the department of english and the program in africana studies at mount holyoke college. her research engages the site of the visual as a way to negotiate the parameters of race, gender, and belonging. her book, the repeating body: slavery’s visual resonance in the contemporary (duke university press) examines slavery’s profound ocular construction, the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space and the women represented there. she is currently at work on her second book, tentatively titled “their dead among us: photography, melancholy, and the politics of the visual.” this project examines images of the dead in the new york times in 1994 from four overlapping geographies: south africa, rwanda, sudan, and haiti. brown argues that a cartography of the ocular exists in documentary images in order to normalize global violence as inextricably connected to blackness via photographic proximity. brown is the founder and convener of the dark room:  race and visual culture studies seminar. the dark room is a working group of scholars examining the intersection of critical race theory and visual culture studies.  cheryl dunye emerged as part of the 1990's "queer new wave" of young film and video makers.  dunye's work is defined by her distinctive narrative voice. often set within a personal or domestic context, her stories foreground issues of race, sexuality and identity. dunye's narratives are peppered with deconstructive elements with characters directly addressing the camera and making ironic references to the production itself. the effect of these devices, and of dunye's appearance in her films and tapes "as herself," is to blur the distinctions between fiction and "real life."  dunye has made over 15 films including mommy is coming, the owls, my baby’s daddy, and hbo’s stranger inside, which garnered her an independent spirit award nomination for best director. her debut film, the watermelon woman, was awarded the teddy at the berlinale in 1996 and was recently restored by outfest’s ucla legacy project for the films’ 20th anniversary. dunye has received numerous awards and honors for her work including a 2016 guggenheim fellowship. she is also a member of the academy of motion picture arts and sciences. presently, dunye is a professor in the school of cinema at san francisco state university and is at work on her next feature film black is blue. dell m. hamilton is an artist, writer, and curator based in boston. born in spanish harlem and spending her formative years in the bronx borough of new york, hamilton was raised in a bilingual as well as a multi-racial honduran family. her studio practice is grounded in the interdisciplinary contexts of the african diaspora and her tactics include text art, installation, video, photography and performance art.  her work has been shown to a wide variety of audiences in boston including the museum of fine arts, spoke gallery/medicine wheel productions, nk gallery, mobius, okw gallery, the fort port artist building, atlantic works, the joan resnikoff gallery/roxbury community college, and the massachusetts state house. in 2010, she also participated in perfolink: maestros y discipulos in earthquake-ravaged concepción, chile. she currently works at harvard's hutchins center for african and african american research. her programmatic projects have included the 13th triennial conference of the arts council of the african studies association (acasa), "african art: roots and routes" as well as the inaugural "bridging the gaps: african american art conference" both in 2004. during her stint as assistant director at the du bois institute, she also curated exhibitions for carrie mae weems, suesan stovall, and lyle ashton harris. she is a contributor to transition magazine, an international review published by indiana university press and has presented scholarly research papers at the musee quai branly, the howard art project, the school of the museum of fine arts and at boston university. microsoft word 261-1521-1-dewolff.docx de wolff, k. (2018). review of: review of arts of living on a damaged planet: ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene edited by anna tsing, heather swanson, elaine gan and nils bubandt (minneapolis, mn and london, uk: minneapolis university press, 2017) and unreal objects: digital materialities, technoscientific projects and political realities (digital barricades) by kate o’riordan (london, uk: pluto press, 2017). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4 (1), 1-7. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kim de wolff, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license review arts of living on a damaged planet: ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene edited by anna tsing, heather swanson, elaine gan and nils bubandt (minneapolis, mn and london, uk: minneapolis university press, 2017) and unreal objects: digital materialities, technoscientific projects and political realities (digital barricades) by kate o’riordan (london, uk: pluto press, 2017) kim de wolff university of north texas kim.dewolff@unt.edu how should we respond to the entwined trajectories of seemingly inevitable technological progress and a planet careening toward ecological collapse? we resist. and we focus on the arts of living. or so argue two new books that share feminist materialist commitments to the entangled becomings of matter and meaning, humans and more-thanhuman worlds. in arts of living on a damaged planet, the editorial team assembles a powerful transdisciplinary collection that addresses the lively 2 dewolff catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) and deathly multispecies landscapes of the anthropocene. here, “bodies tumbled into bodies”, the flourishing and perishing of beings as/and ecologies challenge modernist assumptions of individuality and progress. in unreal objects, kate o’riordan also takes on progress, turning to the grand technoscientific projects so often positioned as utopian solutions to the problems of contemporary life. here, bodies tumble into technologies as she ambitiously works to destabilize the assumed, yet always mediated, existence of biotechnical objects. as all of the authors grapple with the emerging materialities of the now and the near future, both texts demonstrate commitments to decentering the human but, crucially, with feminist attention to situated narratives and meanings. as tsing et al. write, “material worlds and the stories we tell about them are bound up with each other” (m10). this statement would be equally at home in o’riordon’s introduction since the influence of donna haraway’s material-semiotics and karen barad’s feminist new materialism reverberates throughout both texts. as such, neither book outlines a radically new theoretical perspective; they instead share the strength in what they bring together, reinvigorating powerful feminist approaches in the current moment of technological and ecological concern. arts of living on a damaged planet gathers the work of twenty prominent humanities and science scholars and writers into a guidebook for earthly survival that demonstrates the “arts of living”: entangled histories, thick description and situated narratives. the collection is organized around two points of departure, each with a respective introduction and table of contents: indeterminate ghosts leading us through landscapes haunted by modern progress; and multispecies monsters unsettling individuality while inspiring forms of collective care. with compelling questions and sweeping synthesis, the twin introductions are provocation-manifesto hybrids: calls to look, listen and imagine differently. co-written by the four editors, these opening pieces draw on concrete examples from the volume to establish a shared language of entanglements, world making, and storytelling of comingled feminist materialist traditions, rather than turning to lengthy theoretical 3 dewolff catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) exposition. tsing’s presence, though, does ring particularly clear as the imperative to develop the “art of noticing” life in the ruins echoes from her 2015 book the mushroom at the end of the world. as a collection, these essays push far beyond the individual contributions of the unanimously stellar cast of contributors (including the inimitable ursula k. le guin, karen barad, and donna haraway), to follow interwoven threads not only across species and geographies but through the very makings of scale. or, as barad writes of spacetimemattering, “the dynamic reconfiguring of the field of relationalities…where scale is iteratively re-made in intra-action” (g111). most directly in conversation with the anthropocene as concept and epoch, ghosts takes us from the unexpected secret lives of lichen in a new england cemetery (pringle) to the more expectedly haunted landscape of chernobyl fallout where surprise lies in a radiation monitor and surreptitious photographer’s sense-ability to feel and even taste decaying atoms (brown). monsters, in contrast, takes a more indirect approach to the anthropocene, tacking between species and spatial interdependencies to show “the enfolding of bodies within bodies in evolution and in every ecological niche” (m2). it is in this conversation between what appear as macro-level entanglements (freccero’s humans and wolves and lien’s fishy connections) and the micro-level ones (mcfall-ngai and gilbert’s microbial worlds) that challenges to modern paradigms of autonomy and ecology emerge. yet perhaps the most telling demonstration overall is how readily monsters infiltrate ghostly landscapes and vice versa. that many chapters could fit equally well on either side (particularly parker’s grassland of invasive species that render indigenous wildflowers ghosts and rose’s shimmering symbiosis of flowers and flying foxes) is testament to the entangled existence of beings and landscapes where relationships exceed even the most careful organizational structures. as an artifact, the paperback version of arts of living on a damaged planet embodies ontological commitments to entanglementsagainst-progress narratives in its own material form. with double covers, acknowledgments and tables of contents, the haphazard placement of a 4 dewolff catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) barcode sticker provides the only clue as to which way is up. regardless of your point of entry, the second half of the text will be upside down. the ambiguous beginning combined with the flipping required to read the book in its entirety is more suggestive of endless looping of a möbius strip than simply having two sides, a sentiment that is foreshadowed by the john cage image and accompanying caption that opens ghosts with “elements that can be layered into infinite compositions.” this innovative organization, however, is somewhat diminished in ebook form where, rather ironically, the coded templates of digital readers become more limiting than physical paper and the book is remediated in linear fashion, beginning with ghosts and ending with twin codas (that mischievously meet at the central inversion point of the paper version). where arts of living on a damaged planet explores modes of collaboration and experiments with written forms, in unreal objects kate o’riordan offers conceptual precision as a tool for disarming narratives of inevitability. in order to challenge progress stories and all their attendant injustices, we cannot take the objects of big technoscience at face value. but with the material turn, o’riordon contends, too many scholars are guilty of doing just that: insisting that technoscientific objects are already given and, in doing so, enabling domination by reducing human agency to mere response. here enters the concept of unreal objects, tasked with bringing these seemingly inevitable objects “back to the life of things, processes, materials and meaning making” (p. 14), back, that is, into the realm of feminist materialities where media-objects make worlds. an unreal object, then, is anything given or treated as real but that derives this very status from its unacknowledged entanglements with the contingencies (the “unreal”) of apparatus, mediation and storytelling. after carefully situating “unreal objects” within (feminist) and against (objectoriented) materialist theoretical constellations in the introduction, the four chapters that follow put the concept to work, ambitiously tackling the topics of the human genome, biosensors, smart grids, artificial meat and de-extinction respectively. given the current proliferation of many excellent monographs dedicated to these topics in depth, unreal objects’ 5 dewolff catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) potential lies in demonstrating the analytic prowess of its namesake concept as it travels. this is arguably most successful in “the shadow of genomics” which demonstrates the unreality of the human genome as it only emerges as an object through its digital mediations with and as code, a process that simultaneously renders life a commodifiable form in the service of biocapitalism (p. 27). the concept also works well in “smart grids: energy futures, carbon capture and geoengineering”, revealing how smart grids currently only exist as green promises on a large scale, but it is less powerfully applied to biosensors like the fitbit, which already appear more obviously as both media and as objects. the area where unreal objects truly excels is in explicitly carving space for feminist critique within what has become an expansive materialist literature. this work is not at all contained in the introduction and conclusion but appears throughout the text, including where it pokes holes in the “inflated ego” of totalizing digital media theory (p. 16), and in a memorably pointed feminist takedown of timothy morton’s hyperobjects as a “god trick” (p. 44). o’riordan points to the importance of “collective political thinking” in academia and beyond, asking “which speculations get to count as real futures?” (p. 142). considered together, unreal objects and arts of living on a damaged planet map critical pathways of resistance and collaboration through some of the most pressing (and trendy) contemporary territory where the fleshy and digital meet. in unreal objects, where the mediated is always the contingent, the same contradictory forces that make objects unreal allow for a seemingly inevitable world to be made otherwise. but despite its inclusion as part of a series called “digital barricades,” which explores possibilities for “revolt and liberation,” the promise of resistance sometimes feels tacked on to the end of chapters and falls short of inspiring action beyond theoretical disruption. though such openings are arguably preconditions for living differently, there is more work to be done establishing what such practices might look like, particularly outside academic contexts. tsing et al. are more successful in getting on with the arts of living, acknowledging but refusing to get bogged down by 6 dewolff catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) arguments about terminology or origin points for the anthropocene (as in moore’s 2016 anthropocene or captialocene?). still, it is notably the scholars based in the natural sciences who most lucidly articulate new practices, calling for ecologists to build bridges with microbiologists (mcfall-ngai, m65) that can then be manifested in multispecies approaches to conversation (funch, m151). admittedly, i was initially hesitant to undertake a joint review of what on the surface appeared as such markedly different texts: a massively multi-authored, edited collection about strategies for multispecies survival, and a highly theoretical-sounding single-authored book about digital objects: one sharing almost equal space with scientists, the other taking aim at scientific projects. but it is in such unexpected crossings of emerging life forms and emerging technologies that generative conversations themselves emerge where we might consider the anthropocene-as-geological-fact an unreal object, or talk about a human genome that is not only highly mediated (o’riordan) but arguably also mostly not human (gilbert m76). at the same time, this reading together left me wishing that o’riordan had done more with her own writing practice, which has a somewhat frustrating tendency to bury the most fascinating details instead of leading with compelling stories. conversely, tsing et al. seem only to gesture toward power and capitalism, whereas o’riordon is far more explicit about whose interests narratives of progress serve. because arts of living on a damaged planet provides an exemplary model for interdisciplinary work that moves beyond simple juxtaposition to collaboration truly deserving of the label transdisciplinary, i cannot help but think of how the promises of “symbiotic scholarship” (m8) might be limited not only by the time it takes to develop an art but also by the demands of the neoliberal university. we need new institutional structures. new metaphors. new stories. old stories told anew. we need more (feminist) humanists who focus on the non-human and more scientists who ask big philosophical questions about what it all means. no single text or pair of texts can solve our nested crises, but arts of living on a damaged planet and unreal 7 dewolff catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) objects can and do offer creative optimism for confronting terrors without succumbing to despair. together, these authors open up spaces for meaningful change, “disrupting the narrative of the inevitable world given to us in which we can only react” (o’riordan 2017, p. 3), pushing with cautious hope toward new forms of observation, resistance and action in perilous times. in the exquisite prose of deborah bird rose, “we are…called into gratitude for the fact that in the midst of terrible destruction, life finds ways to flourish, and that the shimmer of life does indeed include us all” (g61). references barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. haraway, d. (2016). staying with the trouble. durham, nc; duke university press. moore, j. (ed.). (2016). anthropocene or captialocene?nature, history and the crisis of captialism. oakland, ca: pm press. morton, t. (2013). hyperobjects. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. o’riordan, k. (2017). unreal objects. london, uk: pluto press. tsing, a. (2015). the mushroom at the end of the world. princeton, nj: princeton university press. tsing, a, swanson, h., gan, e. & bubandt, n. (eds.). (2017). arts of living on a damaged planet: ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. bio kim de wolff is an assistant professor of philosophy at the university of north texas. rice article     weaponizing affect: a film phenomenology of 3d military training simulations during the iraq war    d. andy rice university of california, los angeles andyrice@ucla.edu figure 1. one of three camera operators records a training simulation at the fort irwin national training center in 2012 (left). simultaneously, a technician in a media center nearby (right) records video streams for later review by soldier trainees. he also follows a director’s commands to emit smells, broadcast sounds, and ignite small explosions as the scenario unfolds. recorded by the author, with permission from fort irwin national training center. the us military has long envisioned the mojave desert, two hours east of los angeles, as the ideal place for simulating otherness. this rhode island–sized swath of desert, site of the army’s fort irwin national training center (ntc), has served as a sort of screen upon which the army projects the image of its enemy—a uniquely three-dimensional “film body,” to adapt the term of film phenomenologist vivian sobchack (1992)—in response to particular historical circumstances across time. the iterative nature of these changes resembles an affect system, a concept named by american behavioral psychoanalyst silvan tomkins (2008) to describe a living being’s mechanism for adaptation and survival in response to shifts in mood, circumstance, and feeling. before the united states entered world war ii, fort irwin served as the training grounds for general george patton’s tank battalions. during the cold war, the us army simulated battles here across dozens of miles of desert against the “krasnovians,”—the name given to a us regiment that replicated the tactics and armaments of soviet land forces—in preparation for tank warfare against the russians on the plains of germany. after the fall of the soviet union in 1989, the army vacillated among an amorphous amalgam of potential foes that happened to have purchased russian weaponry, including the “hamchuks” (north korea) and “atlanticans” (cuba), before settling on the “sumerians,” who represented the iraqi republican guard (john wagstaffe, personal communication, 15 april 2007). in the midst of the occupations of iraq and afghanistan after 2003, however, the us military overhauled its “force on force” training paradigm to emphasize counterinsurgency and “cultural terrain.”1 “despite the fact that cultural knowledge has not traditionally been a priority within the department of defense (dod),” argued montgomery mcfate, a trained cultural anthropologist who became a key architect of the military’s turn to culture, “the ongoing insurgency in iraq has served as a wake-up call to the military that adversary culture matters” (mcfate, 2005, p. 43). the army introduced “cultural awareness training” to a new manual in 2004 that was guided by the “warrior ethos,” meant to instill in each soldier the autonomy and quick thinking capacities needed to negotiate the uncertainties of urban, insurgent warfare on behalf of us interests (us dept. of the army & us marine corps, 2007). in response, the ntc disbanded the sumarians and constructed thirteen mock iraqi and afghan villages that simulated locations, social conditions, and everyday life practices. these sites came to serve as the final training grounds for american soldiers before they deployed to war zones in iraq and afghanistan. for two weeks, the army and contracted special-effects technicians and scenario writers from the hollywood film industry orchestrated simulated improvised explosive device (ied) attacks, suicide bombings, beheadings, sectarian infighting, protests, raids, and sweeps for 4,000 soldiers finalizing their preparations for deployment. army forts and marine bases across the country began to build such simulation sites, all hiring arabic-speaking iraqi-american actors (and later pashtoand dari-speaking afghan-americans) to play mayors, villagers, police chiefs, mothers, aid workers, and so on to enhance the cultural realism of their scenarios (wagstaffe, personal communication, 15 april 2007). in effect, a staged, embodied enactment of support for america’s invasion of their native countries was extracted from these subjects. rather than expanding upon the obvious irony of this scenario, i examine the complex experiences afforded by the site simulations among these civilian subjects, as well as the troops in training, the mix of military and civilian staff members who manage the sets, and the media and academic visitors (including me) who have documented the fort irwin simulations. i contend that when the army began to operate embodied training simulations focused on cultural awareness and counterinsurgency, it was almost “hardwired” to adapt old instincts for domination and control to this new, intersubjective context, raising a series of questions about culture, learning, and critique. what do troops learn about culture and cultural exchange through a “cultural awareness” training regime that still treats “the enemy” as embodied subjects? how do different role players make sense of their experiences in the training simulations in relation to their prior life experiences, and what meaningful patterns emerge from their accounts? and why would the public-affairs office in this fort welcome—and even cultivate—visits from journalists, television news reporters, artists, and documentary filmmakers to assess  “worst-case-scenario” training that on the surface makes visceral the failure of us military policy in iraq and afghanistan? in many journalistic accounts, scholarly studies, and documentaries about the fort, somewhat incredibly, the spectacular display of violence, blood, chaos, and bodies serves as evidence of progress rather than failure within the military in the wake of abu ghraib (see gerber & moss, 2008; filkins & burns, 2006; magelssen, 2009).2 “i sensed a genuine desire on the part of army and iraqi staff to make things right,” concluded one performance-studies scholar after spending a day immersed in rehearsals of ied attacks at the fort (magelssen, 2009, p. 68). my analysis, however, is not an endorsement of the training. i reject the conclusion that such manifestations of “cultural awareness” in simulation training demonstrate that the us military is becoming a progressive institution. rather, i propose below that the manufacture of media fascination and positive reporting is part of the simulation’s design—and is significant to the survival of this particular fort. finding new ways to cooperate with reporters on military-friendly terms is in keeping with strategies since vietnam for controlling journalism about us wars (stahl, 2010).3 in the context of pervasive cameras in the united states and abroad, the military’s vision of a future of endless small-scale urban warfare against insurgent enemies facing poverty and environmental collapse,4 the routines of torture in secret military prisons, the rise of “militainment” news and video games, and the pervasive use of drone strikes that kill civilians, i argue that it is imperative to see the military’s experiments with managing affects in immersive, cinematic simulation performances as a new kind of weapon executing old ends, and not a new iteration of clean, “virtuous war,” in the ironic phrase of military-simulation scholar james der derian (2009). at its center, this is an article about the cinematic mechanics entailed in weaponizing affect. like the “shock and awe” campaign in miniature, the war-movie “cultural awareness” spectacles at fort irwin are intended to disorient and soften those immersed within them—troops and visiting journalist-filmmakers alike—so that they are primed for official explanations on hand to account for “the real” of their intense affective sensations. central to my account is kara keeling’s (2007) theory of cinematic clichés, which she argues can be internalized and projected upon the world as “common sense” filters for perception and attention. at fort irwin, the cliché of the stoic, masculine action-film protagonist who must harden himself to sadness and grief also centers troop learning priorities and teaching methods, limits the range of soldiers’ encounters with iraqi and afghan role players, and offers a familiar schema for visiting journalist-filmmakers to follow in their own documentary stories. action-cinematic narratives in the movies and simulation-training scenarios alike typically end before the aftermath of urgent action, short-circuiting the need to process suffering, remorse, and loss. in addition to their supposed role in simulating “adversary culture” and facilitating troop learning, in other words, cinematic techniques also serve a military public-relations strategy to mitigate dissenting journalism and subvert critique amid disastrous wars. film phenomenology with cameras and the simulation body cameras and performance have played a key role in war campaigns, dating to matthew brady’s photographs of corpses on battlefields arranged before his lens during the american civil war,5 but the iraq war featured an unusually wide array of camera operators who created photographs, moving images, and spectacles to be photographed for very different ends. photographs of atrocities have not necessarily communicated dissent or moral indignation. below i offer an account of how the visual records of bloody, violent displays at fort irwin have in fact undermined possibilities for their use in critique. i draw on film theorists of affect and intersubjectivity (cartwright, 2008, 2011; keeling, 2007; laine, 2007; marks, 2000, 2002; sobchack, 1992, 2004) to think through the centrality of cinema-industry tropes in the construction of the training simulations and the porous boundaries between action-film depictions of war and the subjective perceptions of participants in the training simulations as to the real and the fake of their experiences. laine argues that the orientation of the cinema viewer to the screen epitomizes the ephemeral, yet continually reconstitutes space “where the ‘outside’ of the collective experience becomes the ‘inside’ of the subject’s psychic life” (laine, 2007, p. 10). my research on fort irwin suggests that many young soldiers who have not yet gone to war have internalized these cinematic “outsides” and have drawn from their viewing experiences as a basis from which to judge the affective realism of their military training. in this light, the cinema is not exactly an ideological apparatus of mechanical reproduction or an illusion machine playing on insatiable unconscious desires, but rather “a matter of affects,” in laine’s terms, that drives those in charge of fort irwin to conform the landscape to their trainees’ common-sense orientation to the world (laine, 2007, p. 10; keeling, 2007). i intend to emphasize, however, that it is not just soldiers who understand war imagery primarily from the clichés of entertainment cinema. my analytical approach draws from the film phenomenological method pioneered by sobchack, who adapted the insights of french phenomenologist maurice merleau-ponty (1962) to the study of cinema. across years of writing in the film phenomenological mode, sobchack came to treat her own flesh as a kind of recording device in the midst of watching a film, partly as a materialist critique of the nihilistic writing on simulation by theorists following jean baudrillard (1994).6 sobchack kept track of the sensations she experienced while viewing cinematic material for later, more considered structural analysis of genre and film form. while sobchack writes from the position of a viewer in a cinema theater, however, i write from my experience as a cameraperson in the midst of a three-dimensional, cinematic, war simulation space inhabited by various actors. i visited fort irwin in 2007 and 2012 to document and observe training simulations. i return to my footage here to help recall events that i might otherwise have forgotten, failed to notice, or needed to analyze further, but also to reflect on the performativity of being a documentary cameraperson in the context of this intersubjectively produced simulation experience. i embodied the “variable” of the visiting journalist-documentary filmmaker, a cinematic trope that the simulation scenario seemed well prepared to manage. i situate my phenomenological analysis in a historical study of 250 news reports written about the fort over a period of roughly twenty years (1989 to 2012),7 as well as three articles published in performance studies journals and a feature-length documentary film titled full battle rattle (2008). like suchman (2016), i thought about this digital archive as a field site. these stories illuminated patterns in narratives about military training at the fort and revealed shortcomings—or perhaps intended effects—in my thinking about the up-close experiences of intensely graphic simulation scenarios that had played out before my camera, which were then immediately interpreted for me by military personnel serving as my guides. in this way, my approach differs from previous scholarly treatments that have focused exclusively on up-close ethnographic observation of performance in relation to official military policies. i also analyze interviews i conducted with a former soldier who rotated twice through fort irwin and with a white barstow resident who donned a burqa to play an afghan woman to draw out key points about affect and realism in the simulations. in the tack and yaw between phenomenological description of camerawork and archival-historical analysis, i have come to frame fort irwin as a kind of “simulation body” with an affect system, akin to sobchack’s (1992) notion of the “film body.” merleau-ponty grounded his understanding of experience in the human body’s capacities to perceive stimuli and express intention, qualities that sobchack ascribed to the “film body” that emerged in the space between a film and a viewer in the midst of a screening. likewise, what i am calling the “simulation body” denotes a spatially distributed system that perceives stimuli and expresses intention in the midst of performance, here in performances that change slightly over time to keep the fort relevant and funded. the human bodies, communications networks, scenario scripts, vehicles, mock towns, and so on constitute so many variables for the simulation body to manage toward the aims of its own economic, political, and cultural reproduction. i consider the traces left by the simulation itself across time in the archive of film and journalistic reports, the desert landscape in the transition from force-on-force combat to counterinsurgency war, and accounts of participants who have passed through simulation training as indicative of the ongoing development of this particular affect system. to sharpen the implications for my central point here, i treat the journalist-documentarian as a variable to be controlled by various other elements within the distributed simulation body, not as an observer to be more or less ignored. the simulation itself, in other words, always-already accounts for the journalist-documentarian who attempts a neutral evaluation of training simulations. though it is unbounded by skin, the simulation body, i claim here, consistently executes an affective strategy centered on avoidance and mystification of the feared object, here “the enemy” that the military constructs, defeats, and then augments across time like an endless and increasingly elaborate action scene. suchman (2016), citing judith butler, refers to the figure of the enemy in us military-training simulations as a limitation to cultural awareness: “the intelligibility of the body includes always its ‘constitutive outside,’ those unthinkable and unlivable bodies ‘that do not matter in the same way,’” she observes (p. 8). in the military, the two terms for “those unthinkable and unlivable bodies” are “enemy” and “civilian,” with the former category figured as threatening and immoral and the latter as antithetical to the disciplined, hypercapable, action-oriented soldier body. this institutional hubris is in tension with the fact that the us military remains somewhat accountable to civilian oversight, which can constitute an existential threat—especially during a messy counterinsurgency war rife with mistakes and scandals, like abu ghraib. public-relations strategies since vietnam have aimed to lead us civilians to identify with us soldiers and the activity of soldiering, as opposed to the civilians and enemy combatants they have killed (stahl, 2010). part of this strategy has entailed attempts to control journalism, which i tether below to my account of stories about fort irwin. the simulations serve as training for troops about to deploy, but they also seem to function as a quickly recognizable, close-to-home, “good enough” story for visiting us writers and filmmakers who cannot or would rather not undertake the hard, expensive, controversial, and dangerous accounting needed to really assess the efficacy of such methods in iraq and afghanistan. this is a devil’s bargain. starting from my phenomenology of documentary camerawork at fort irwin below, i come to suggest a more general problem for documentary practice and reportage in the context of simulation, one with particularly urgent stakes in times of war. “stitch lane” 2007 “turn the camera off,” the army sergeant tells me. several unscripted flames are searching for unconsumed materiel on the driver’s side of a mangled charcoal humvee spattered with red stains. this army officer, known at fort irwin as a tactical controller (tc),8 is about to veer from standard protocol to fix the problem. the tc grabs a plastic container filled with fake blood and uses it to douse the fire as twelve other tcs, a fort irwin public-relations guide, and several members of the media look on. satisfied, the tc politely informs me that i can resume videotaping. smoke continues to billow into the air from three canisters hidden behind the wheels of the “bombed” humvee—canisters designed for use in scenes like this one. we are at the closest training site to the public-affairs office at fort irwin ntc: medina wasl, a mock iraqi village comprised of thirteen cargo containers fashioned with faux siding to resemble homes in rural iraq, as well as a mosque, a pen with goats, and a market, all aligned along a central dirt road. the humvee serves as the focal point of the most often observed and practiced training simulation here, dubbed “stitch lane” by the army. the simulation depicts the aftermath of an ied attack—complete with $60,000 “simman” medical dummies dressed with bloody lacerations and scattered across the street, iraqi villagers wailing over an injured family of three in a black sedan struck by shrapnel from the explosion, and a confused army private stumbling through this scene, alternately calling for a medic and his mother. troop trainees must “stitch” and evacuate the wounded quickly and safely. my shock at being immersed in the dimensionality and chaos of this environment blends with a perverse sense of fascination, familiarity, and even comfort at the resemblance it bears to a hollywood action-film set. i wind my way through this action-film documentary with a video camera of my own, both impressed and confused by my access to the damning scene as an early-stage graduate student. troops in training are tasked with quickly securing the area around the blast, assessing injuries to soldiers and civilians, stopping massive bleeding while warding off insurgent sniper attacks and car bombs, and evacuating the injured to a secure forward operating base set up in the desert several miles from the village. during their two weeks at fort irwin, troops practice this scenario three to four times, with tcs observing their performance and stage-managing insurgent attacks based on the soldiers’ failures to follow proper procedures. tcs try to “kill” all the new troops in early renditions of this exercise should they take more than ten minutes to carry out the evacuation. all participants in the simulation wear miles laser-tag vests, which perceive signals emitted from guns or roadside bombs that approximate the ballistics and physical trajectories of actual weapons. when a suicide bomber detonates within close proximity of the american soldiers, a tc with a “god gun,” a light blue physics calculator fashioned after a handgun, “shoots” each casualty to assess the extent of their simulated injury or death. this time a suicide bomber drives a truck through an unprotected alley to the scene and detonates, killing all the soldiers and civilians. at the end of a simulation, the troops gather in a communal space in front of a television screen—the central courtyard of the village “mosque”—as a tc shows video of their performance and leads a discussion about how to improve the next time. the emphasis here is on procedure (how to secure the perimeter of the ied site, identify wounds, apply a tourniquet efficiently, load bodies into the medevac truck, and so on), but unspoken is the development of positive affective sentiments among the soldiers who learn together. the soldiers bond through this ritual before a mainstay of domestic architecture, the television, which functions not as a window on reality but as a mediator of their relations with one another. video viewing in this spatial arrangement is a historical practice and form of expressive experience they all share. performance before cameras is vital to their mission as the executors of empire in an age of ubiquitous media, as the scandal of abu ghraib ironically suggests. the significance of performing affective qualities before the camera is exemplified later, when the army arranges for two particularly charismatic and friendly iraqi-american actors to sit with me for interviews. they say that they try to play a role in “saving lives” in their native and adopted countries by teaching young american soldiers about the cultural nuances they will encounter once in theater. “sam,” a chaldean christian liquor store owner from san diego who immigrated to the united states in the 1970s and last visited iraq in 1986, states that “this is reality, we’re not playing games with it. we’re using real iraqis”: we act like them, we get mad like them, we yell out just like the iraqis, we tell them get the hell out of my country, ’cause you’re not helping—we do everything just like in iraq ’cause they should know. that’s what they’re gonna face. i talk to lieutenants who have been in iraq already when they come here. they say, hey, flashback. this is the same. we give them the same thing. (“sam,” personal communication, 8 april 2007)9 i later discover that he has conducted more than fifty interviews for the press. he also appears in many photos on a wall at the public-affairs office, including one with president george w. bush. i see this wall on the day i am leaving the fort and pan my camcorder across the photographs of other journalists who have passed through this place, labeled by name and institutional affiliation: market road productions, australian tv, a berlin newspaper, armed forces info services, christian broadcasting network, danish national tv, history channel modern marvels, deutsche welle television, french radio, state dept. press tour, sacramento tv, the bbc, and dozens of others. six to twelve media institutions visit for every rotation, the public-affairs officer tells me. “then they go on my wall of shame,” he quips. i am surprised when he points out the newest image, a photograph he had taken of me, unaware, the day before. he tells me that keeping photographs on the walls helps him remember all the people he has met, and he reiterates again how much he likes journalists. i like him, too. he has told me many good stories today about the history of the fort, his own life as a military reporter, the iraqi-american actors he has met, and the pedagogical aim of all the simulation scenarios that we watched together. but as i leave the office and begin the thirty-mile drive through the desert between fort irwin and barstow, i cannot shake the thought that all of us media visitors hang there like so many hunting trophies. being trapped in the “desert of the real,” as baudrillard (1994) had thought to call the social condition of the united states while driving through this same mojave desert, is a confusing sensation (p. 1). it is not clear, after all, that visions of chaotic violence, civilian death, and physical destruction like those i had just documented should function to promote a war effort. noor behram’s haunting forensic photographs of the rubble and innocent victims of us drone bombings in pakistan, for instance, testify to the ongoing significance of documentary representation of atrocity for raising awareness, indignation, and momentum for protest. “i want to show taxpayers in the western world what their tax money is doing to people in another part of the world,” he explains (ackerman, 2011). the us military, applying similar ideas about the power of documentary images to opposite ends, has pressured journalists in iraq not to publish graphic photographs of the actual dead.10 but at fort irwin, the explicit depiction of violent events that the army treats as emblematic of actuality and predictive of future experience—gory, bloody, and merciless throughout—in fact seems to short-circuit energy for dissent and anger in the near term: my own and that of the other journalists on the “wall of shame.” over months of reflection, i come to understand the scenes of violence at fort irwin, the accounts of iraqi-american actors, and the public-affairs officers’ explanations, which seemed to anticipate my strong affective responses, as aligned with incremental policy changes dating to the 1960s designed to control depictions of american wars and suppress dissent. stahl (2010), for instance, argues that the rise of military-industrial-entertainment collaborations since the vietnam war, and especially since the early 2000s, co-opts war imagery for pleasurable, interactive “militainment” products and military recruiting. economic pressures on news organizations wrought by the rise of cable and twenty-four-hour news channels incentivizes media to produce low-budget talk shows and relay the stories of pentagon public-relations personnel over independent reporting. publishing graphic war photographs could endanger ongoing access to these officials, so most news organizations did not. the unfortunate result has been the ceding of war imagery almost entirely to the entertainment industry, where images of killing and the killed tend to drive action and plot rather than reflection on suffering. narrative films about masculine war heroes who successfully solve problems through violence and first person shooter games “invite one to project oneself into the action,” in stahl’s phrase (2010, p. 3). building on such trends, fort irwin produces immersive environments designed to arouse strong affective responses from participants, including those of journalist-documentarians. the codes of action-entertainment cinema—complete with reductive depictions of the culture of the other—are then deployed to define interpretations of graphic violence. in other contexts or historical moments, such scenes might have served to discredit a war effort or show a lack of cultural knowledge. but here and now, the circulation of intense affect functions as an evolving weapon—one calibrated, as i explore below, by narrative cinema techniques. awareness of cinematic culture a film spectator may comment about the experience of seeing a film as believable or convincing without articulating the assumptions from which this sense of the real emerged, sometimes even in the full awareness that their sense of this reality directly contradicts social facts.11 in the context of “stitch lane,” participants’ experiences of realism play on broadly shared understandings of hollywood action tropes for manufacturing drama, affect, and audience investment, even if—or perhaps especially because—the immersive scenario references war events that spectators and participants alike imagine to have had mortal corollaries in iraq or afghanistan in the recent past. in this light, the drama of the simulation scenario affectively stitches together the trauma of the ied explosion as an actual world phenomenon, the narrativization of such events through hollywood techniques, and the training of anxious troops in the present who know movies but not war for the contingencies of a future that may bring actual wounds. these three sutured temporalities function to solidify bonds of camaraderie in troops who must confront the specter of bodily harm through performances in which they stand at once as subjects and objects for their fellow performers, including iraqi and afghan role players. all function simultaneously as subjects and objects of the cinematic realism operational in the simulation, a style of realism vested in the visualization of the wound above all. embedding such visualizations within narratives affects soldiers and actors, as i show below, but also visiting observers to the fort, like me. how are we new arrivals to make sense of a training spectacle designed to overwhelm the senses? military spokespersons stand at the ready to offer explanations for the shocks: train like you fight; inoculate against stress; weed out the bad-apple troops who might kill civilians; teach troops cultural awareness so they don’t misunderstand gestures, expressions, and gender norms; and so on. over time, medina wasl became not just a site for training soldiers, but also a showpiece for the army’s new, public-relations-oriented framing of itself as a progressive cultural institution in the midst of insurgent war. this has been an effective strategy. in articles about the training simulations at fort irwin, invocations of realism are both pervasive and ambiguous in ways that are instructive about what cultural awareness might mean here. descriptions in reports and comments from military interviewees typically identify landscape, climate, the presence of arabic-speaking iraqi bodies, and the occasional inducement of traumatic symptoms in trainees to signify realism. across the transition from “force-on-force” to “cultural awareness” training, stories about the fort increasingly focused on the journalists’ sensory experiences of being present to the simulations. their narratives read like a cross between phenomenological description and hollywood script: “pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! boom!” wrote one. “toomer popped off a round—and then his gun jammed, at the worst possible time, just like in the movies” (thevenot, 2004). a new york times feature published in 2006 likewise connected the action-cinematic ethos at the fort to realism, authoritatively demonstrated in this account by soldiers’ embodied responses to their new training regimen: with actors and stuntmen on loan from hollywood, american generals have recast the training ground at fort irwin so effectively as a simulation of conditions in iraq and afghanistan over the past 20 months that some soldiers have left with battle fatigue and others have had their orders for deployment to the war zones canceled. in at least one case, a soldier’s career was ended for unnecessarily “killing” civilians. (filkins & burns, 2006, p. 1) the figure of the soldier who “unnecessarily” kills civilians plays an important part in this particular story and many others—a peculiarity worth analyzing. i interpret two meanings to the recurrence of this figure. first, it implies the narrative of the progressive army, monitoring its troops for “bad apples” who may misrepresent us interests in theater by committing atrocities. the army will not deploy a soldier who demonstrates an unnerving lack of calm in the midst of a simulation. this narrative bears little relation to the pre-2007 policy of not counting killed civilians in iraq and afghanistan, judging from reports that i address below. second, and more to the point, in the news story the soldier who kills civilians functions as evidence for this visiting journalist that the cultural-awareness training simulations are working properly. the public-affairs officer at the fort tells the reporter that the simulations are so realistic that they have induced “battle fatigue” and killing sprees to prove that the training approximates an intense war experience. the reporter then conveys this juicy information to readers. somehow, across the institutional transition from “force-on-force” training to “cultural awareness,” the figure of the puking, pathological, traumatized soldier body remained the index of functionality in journalistic evaluations of military training, though as an index for different modalities of troop suffering. quotations from senior officers offer rationales for extreme training of this sort that shift over time away from environmental conditions and toward culture. in 2004, when the us army still emphasized force-on-force training, brigadier general robert cone of fort irwin stated: we want our commanders to say that it’s harder at the national training center than in war. . . . we put them in a tent where it’s 100 degrees, there’s dirt in their computers and they haven’t had a shower for a week and see how they function. we want to put them under stress and see how they cope. (santschi, 2004) cone emphasized the realism of the training in terms of the soldier’s bodily response to the harsh desert conditions, but he did not mention culture as part of this environment. four years later, comments from fort irwin commanding officer general dana pittard emphasize sensations of alterity (which we may hesitate to characterize as culture) over the physical environment: “the kind of towns, the urban towns we’re creating, the signs, it must hit all five of your senses. you must see iraq and afghanistan. you must smell it. you must touch it” (rather, 2008). a feature published in 2007 affirmed that this kind of affective realism was key to the new regime of cultural-awareness military training—and to writing about such training. “‘it’s realistic to the point where soldiers pass out, throw up, turn white and start shaking,’ said sgt. mark ramsey, an iraq war veteran and hollywood stuntman who helps plan the training mission” (vargo, 2007). ramsey was referring to the sensations of fear and shock that troops experienced amid referents to the sensorial environment of iraq and surprise insurgent attacks, not simply the heat of the desert. “you’ve got to train like you fight” (vargo, 2007). the way to ensure the survival of the simulation body economically and institutionally, ironically, hinged on its capacities to create images that could induce in its human components the affects associated with looming death. strong affect grounded the approach to teaching at the fort. strong affect an ex-marine corps noncommissioned officer, “greg,” who rotated through fort irwin on two different occasions while on active duty, reflected in an interview with me that the training he received overwhelmingly intended to make soldiers fearful, suspicious, and on edge. “the commanders want to instill a certain fear in you to keep you sharp, to keep you edged, to keep you ready,” greg explained. pedagogy emphasizes that no procedure or action carried out by troops deserves a commander’s positive praise. “bottom line is that it’s just never going to be good enough, no matter what,” greg said. “their reward system is through negativity. . . . i didn’t realize that until i stepped out of the military and got into this profession, fitness, which is more about positivity” (“greg,” personal communication, 3 february 2012). he recalled one incident in particular in which a janitor rolled an ied in a trashcan into a room of soldiers undetected, a simulation meant to reenact an ied attack that had killed a number of marines in a mess hall in iraq the week before. “it was an eye opener for everybody. it was like, i don’t think we’re ready for this. it’s an intangible kind of thing, a fear . . . almost like a feeling where you just want to tuck up in a cave and hide,” he reflected (“greg,” personal communication, 3 february 2012). when this simulation event occurred at fort irwin, it indexed a specific moment of the recent past, while also suggesting an emergent strategy being deployed by insurgents that would likely impact this unit of marines deploying to iraq soon. the relatively brief duration of time between the actual ied explosion in the mess hall in iraq and its simulation at fort irwin was key to its affective power for this group of marines. this was a reenactment of current news and a training simulation simultaneously. in this context, the bodies of these marines in training touched something of the bodies of those who had died in the bomb attack affectively, if not literally. it could have been them. greg’s response, “i don’t think we’re ready for this,” was perhaps the desired pedagogical outcome of the bomb simulation. one can never be vigilant enough. the visible evidence of stress, fear, and disgust at fort irwin were made central to claims about improving the survival rates of soldiers. such images suggest to visitors and evaluators that the fort can habituate soldiers to the intense affects of war, thus limiting the power of affective response to gore and fear that can impede judgment in actual battle. the fort irwin simulation body must also anticipate war scenarios of the future, or at the least make a case that their training paradigm remains relevant in times of peace. images at fort irwin thus have a dual aim, a dual purpose in relation to the fort’s survival. by coincidence, tomkins (2008) in fact names the aims of consciousness within the affect system as image (p.10). the aggregate of sensory, memory, and affective imagery processed through consciousness comprises the organism’s image, its understanding of purpose and direction. spokespersons for the army—stewards of the institutional image—argue that simulations like “stitch lane” and the one greg described above “inoculate [soldiers] against stress” and thus allow them to function more effectively in scenarios where lives may be at stake (a conceit of this training that i examine at length below) (lavell, 2003). it is also the case that phenomena that arouse intense affects, particularly those that routinely defy explanation and trigger fear, force those who experience them to undertake particular coping strategies, to search out explanations for feelings of humiliation and contempt. in tomkins’s affect system, this is one way to theorize the recursive relationship between affect and consciousness. the subject produced by repeated exposures to humiliation and contempt, in tomkins’s description, resembles the archetypal action hero as well as the military’s avowed ideal of the good soldier, “learn[ing] to have contempt for those who surrender too easily and to avoid defeat at any cost lest he suffer self-contempt” (tomkins, 2008, p. 481). tomkins suggested that there is a monopolistic tendency in the affects of contempt and humiliation if they are not confronted, assuaged, or worked through. repeated experiences of these negative affects produce in the subject what tomkins calls a “strong affect theory” that serves as the foundation of ideological thinking: “it is the repeated and apparently uncontrollable spread of the experience of negative affect which prompts the increasing strength of the ideo-affective organization which we have called a strong affect theory” (tomkins, 2008, p. 460). “strong theories” about how the world works harden over time into what eve sedgwick, building on ideas of sigmund freud (2001) and melanie klein (1946), calls the “paranoid position” (sedgwick, 2003, p. 123). this corresponds most closely with the principle of avoiding negative affect, the defining strategy of military training and defensive infrastructure. avoidance strategies inevitably cut the subject off from a range of encounters with potentially shaming, humiliating, or misunderstood objects that have in the past overwhelmed the psyche, and so further mystify the objects. this leads a strong theory position to claim more and more objects as applicable within its purview over time, because power to control affective experience is defined increasingly by avoidance. it seeks almost automatically to expand its power through boundary marking, and this can be contagious with others who follow a similar affective strategy of avoidance that is not counterbalanced by positive affective experience, like fellow soldiers forced to endure drill and then threat. moreover, positive affect can actually come about in the process of working to counter the negative affect by avoidance or anger, as was the case with the soldiers’ staging of photos at abu ghraib. in these cases, ironically, the object associated with the strong affect theory of avoidance becomes central as well to the experience of a restrained positive affect. total and complete destruction of the source of negative affect leaves a kind of vacuum at the center of affective life. we might ask after the implications of avoidance in relation to images that tend to arouse negative affects. keeling (2007) argues that cinematic structures extend outside the theater once they are internalized by spectators and turned on the world itself. those who regard what they encounter through the logic and needs of cinematic structures become “living images,” their perceptual world an extension of theatrical experiences as well as a reflection of the world on screen (p. 25). keeling points to the example of the black panther party, whose members appeared in public with guns in the late 1960s as a part of a strategy to draw television cameras to their new defiant, revolutionary image of blackness. while keeling praises the way this gesture challenged dominant schemas for understanding the image of blackness, she notes that this action also reproduced the reductive cinematic cliché that “it takes masculine tactics to effect political change”—a staple trope of hollywood action films that troubled female panthers in subsequent years (p. 79). in many cases, for keeling, projecting cinematic perception onto the media-saturated world outside the theater is a short-term survival strategy always in danger of reproducing the logic of capitalism over time. new ideas are folded into dominant notions of common sense. materializations of cinematic affect accumulate upon the land in places like fort irwin. cinematic structures here homogenize processes of identification and becoming for the ends of military capital, “even to make that violation feel good,” in keeling’s terms (p. 25). certainly for soldiers, the strong negative affects of training reinforce boundaries between “us and them” and work against the notion of openness in intercultural exchange one might think to be central to cultural awareness engagements. performance scholar zack whitman gill (2009) argues that this kind of training in fact reinforces a “martial heterotopia” defined by a “warrior ethos” parallel to but set apart from (and above) civilian life: while an army soldier demonstrates the qualities that comprise the seven core values [loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage], a civilian is constructed as the opposite. every moment of a recruit’s existence in the army affirms this absolute difference, through a series of performances that immediately and visually discard the lax and disorganized lifestyle of the civilian. (p. 144) gill’s analysis of the training at fort irwin as a permanent rehearsal, detached from and contemptuous of civilian life at home and abroad, would seem to dovetail well with keeling’s theory about the projection of cinematic common sense and tomkins’s writing on strong affect theory. military scripting does not produce a value-neutral simulation in which participants can envision future scenarios by tweaking abstract variables. this is a simulation, rather, that intends to encode through cinematic techniques a set of values and presuppositions into its human variables for an ideological outcome. whereas sobchack likens cinematic consciousness to plastic surgery (“we have all had our eyes done,” she quips), the fort irwin simulation body aims to colonize the sensory-affective organization of individuals within its space. and visiting journalists and filmmakers who follow the norms of neutral reportage are easily subsumed as variables within this system, time and again moved by the affective force of witnessing simulation scenarios and interviewing soldiers to then reproduce as “consciousness” the military-friendly explanations on hand. critique of affective realism bonnie docherty, a researcher at human rights watch who specializes in questions of disarmament and limiting civilian casualties during war, published the most detailed study of the training simulations and their relation to the practices of soldiers once deployed in theater. her account “more sweat…less blood” (2007) throws into question the recourse to affective realism in public-relations material and news reports about the efficacy of training at the fort. docherty positions herself as a spokesperson for improving military training to reduce civilian casualties, and was allowed unusually extensive access to the fort and its personnel. she visited the fort three times over the course of four years of research and pored through 40,000 pages of training manuals and documents about army lessons learned (pp. 5-6). in line with the reports of other visitors, docherty emphasizes the importance of realism in her study, but she found it lacking at fort irwin. the towns were too small and the iraqi role players too few to simulate the sense of threat that they engendered for troops once deployed (p. 4). she says it was a problem that only american soldiers stationed at fort irwin play the insurgents, as soldier trainees quickly learn to distinguish between arabic speakers who play cultural roles and “insurgents,” none of whom speak arabic (p. 6). the simulation scenarios themselves were not varied enough in intensity or goals. encounters with iraqi role players were still minimal (p. 7). and the rules of engagement taught and practiced at fort irwin did not always overlap with international humanitarian law, in her estimation. she insists that “troops must receive reviews that consider not only military success but also civilian casualties,” a factor not evaluated in army engagements in iraq until september 2007, four and a half years after the start of the war (p. 4). while docherty quotes veterans who experienced flashbacks to their combat experience in the midst of participating in simulations, she avers from accepting these comments as evidence of the kind of realism she deems most important to cultural-awareness training. “the different views of ntc’s realism are in part attributable to whether or not a trainee had been to iraq,” she observes. her field research corroborates the views of one battalion commander she interviewed, who said that “those who had not been in theater were ‘relatively unfazed [by the realism]. [to them, i]t’s a training exercise’” (p. 20). she concludes that the realism advertised by the military as its training product, and relayed by most visiting journalists and filmmakers in their representations of the simulations, remains elusive. “the new trainees’ lack of reaction is disconcerting since ntc’s role is to awaken them to what lies ahead,” she concludes (p. 20). john wagstaffe, the public-relations officer at fort irwin before 2011, reflects on the dilemma the army faces in getting the attention of its young trainees. “if it’s not on video,” wagstaffe says, “then it didn’t happen” (john wagstaffe, personal communication, 11 july 2011). wagstaffe explains that for a generation of recruits who grew up playing video games and watching war films, the baseline standard of assaultive sounds, smells, and actions that could induce the sensation of affective realism—the stated key to pedagogy at fort irwin—is extreme. this problem is partly of the military’s own making. in military-sponsored video game series like america’s army, call of duty, and halo, recruiting depots set up in public schools, advertisements aired during sports broadcasts, hollywood action movies endorsed by the military like g.i. joe (2009) and ironman (2008) (gonzález, 2010, p. 16), and the controversial “army experience center” opened in a philadelphia shopping mall (cousineau, 2011, p. 519),12 extreme, graphically depicted, reactive violence predominantly functions as a form of exciting entertainment. offering gaming experiences as part of the army brand, in addition to suggesting that army life might lead to such adventures, aids recruiting within the army’s key demographic of poor, frustrated young men. it is also an ethos at odds with the notion of cultural awareness. as one sergeant noted in unnerving frustration in the midst of the transition to cultural awareness in 2004, “you train a guy to kill, and then you tell him to go hand out water and not to shoot anybody unless he’s shot at” (thevenot, 2004). within this context, it is not surprising that some of the soldiers view the embodied training simulations as just another drill to endure. moreover, and perhaps more to the point, commanders’ assumptions about such preexisting attitudes lead them to develop “worst-case scenario” simulations, to perform simulated gore and violence that exceed what soldier trainees would likely see in combat. to achieve the affective realism that would open the space for soldiers to feel the consequences of their actions and the possibilities for their own deaths, in other words, would mean creating scenarios that were not representative of their future lives. it is worth saying a bit more about the kinds of realism claimed as operational at the fort and the problems that these claims pose for evaluation by outsider journalists and filmmakers. visitors have no way to judge whether or not this kind of training is effective at reducing civilian casualties, facilitating cultural exchange, or saving the lives of american soldiers during deployment. beyond this, the evaluators who most matter, iraqis and afghans living through wars who must deal with the distant presence of american troops in their home countries, are not available for comment about the realism of military training. instead, iraqi-americans who mostly left the country in the 1970s; soldier trainees who have not deployed but have played video games; and veteran soldiers whose traumatic experiences of war lead them to experience flashbacks in the midst of much more mundane, everyday sensations stand as authorities on realism in reports and films about the fort. while these participants may be well intentioned and open, they are also following orders. they manage procedural realism: the reality of written military codes about how to move down a narrow street as a unit, perform guard duty, inspect cars at checkpoints, and “kick down doors,” to use the phrase of one army mechanic. while these concerns are practical and relevant to the everyday activities of soldiers, and useful to see and improve upon through the use of video, they have little to do with iraqi or afghan culture. figure 2. video stills of the “wounded private” (left) and afghan role players (right) acting in the stitch lane training simulation, 2012. recorded by the author with permission from fort irwin national training center, barstow, ca. what is significant here is the relation between the affective experiences induced by the simulation scenarios and the official interpretations on hand to account for them. military spokespersons use the term “culture” to describe differences in customs, belief, and behavior that troops will encounter in iraq and afghanistan, but in practice the sensory experiences of otherness produced in the simulations are very much about the conjuncture of army and cinema customs, beliefs, and behaviors. viewers and participants who have not been exposed to graphic depictions of violence tend to have more pronounced visceral responses to the training simulations. one middle-aged white woman from the nearby town of barstow, whom i will call jane, accepted a job as a part-time role player at fort irwin around 2008. i interviewed her in 2012. in rotations of troops who were destined for afghanistan, she wore a burqa and played the second wife of a rural muslim afghan man (his actual wife, jane’s actual friend, played his first muslim wife in the simulation). though jane knew very little about afghanistan or muslim culture, the army allowed her and other local american women to play these roles because, according to script, they said nothing in public, remained anonymous beneath the burqas, and simply followed their husbands (“jane,” personal communication, 15 february 2012). arabicand pashto-speaking role players are more expensive to contract, so as many roles as possible are played by enlisted army members and local civilians who need part-time work. as a result, role players like jane enter the simulations with a very different set of experiences of war imagery and expectations about war representations than most army trainees. jane recalls seeing for the first time one of the amputees who played a bomb victim in the stitch lane simulation (figure 2). “to me it was so realistic that i just started crying,” she says:   he was yelling where was his leg, and the next thing i know i’m just crying because i’m wondering where his leg’s at. just sitting there, and you’re like, oh my god, it’s how they must feel when they’re out there and they lose their leg. . . . my dad didn’t really let me watch war movies, so my first time out here, i didn’t know we had amputees, so i cried a lot my first rotation. they made me stay over there because i really was. . . . i was devastated. i don’t know a lot about war. so when i’d seen it, it was very scary. (“jane,” personal communication, 15 february 2012). jane says she gradually learned how to cope with the display of violence and blood because she needed the job and because she accepted her officers’ interpretation of what she had seen: many soldiers had lost limbs in iraq and afghanistan, so it was crucially important that they experience something of what these moments are like before deploying. here, again, the simulation body of the fort brought jane’s strong negative affective response into line with the position of the overall military mission. repeated exposure to simulations of traumatic events—here an odd parallel to the logic in therapy for “prolonged exposure” explored in brandt (2016)—blunted jane’s potentially political, visceral reaction to the visage of the aftermath of an ied attack as devastating, scary, and sad. by hardening herself to the intense affects of fear and disgust that overwhelmed her at first, jane came to believe she could help soldiers better perform their jobs. “i got to where i understand that the concept out here is to help [american soldiers] come back alive,” jane explains: i have to learn to do it because it’s my job. and so i waited a couple days and i came back, and the more you come back and you see it, you see you’re helping soldiers. they come in, and you know that hopefully what they learned while you were here is going to bring them back alive. so that made me feel really good about what had first freaked me out (“jane,” personal communication, 15 february 2012). jane’s reaction to the horror of seeing an amputee and her subsequent acceptance of the military’s interpretation of its meaning, mimic the logic at the center of many documentary and journalistic interpretations of the training simulations. absent their own critical intervention, these reports convey a message sympathetic to the military mission. in his article “rehearsing the ‘warrior ethos,’ ‘theatre immersion,’ and the simulation of theatres of war” (2009), for instance, performance theorist scott magelssen foregrounds interviews and observations that he gleaned from his one-day visit to the fort as representations of its reality as a reformed, newly progressive vision of american military norms. while he acknowledges that he saw nothing that the army did not want him to see, he nonetheless judges the training simulation positively: i sensed a genuine desire on the part of army and iraqi staff to make things right by teaching the troops about the changing face of the cultural and political landscape in iraq, and a deep resentment toward those who act poorly, as in the case of the alleged blackwater massacres. (magelssen, 2009, p. 68) like the embedded reporters who “objectively” relate sympathetic stories about humble and patriotic american soldiers on the ground in iraq, magelssen in effect assumes what digital-media theorist elizabeth losh has described as a pragmatic rhetorical stance. losh ascribes this position to critics of the us wars who nonetheless accept military contracts to program virtual-reality training games like tactical iraqi and virtual iraq (losh, 2006). these programmers argue that the games’ missions to teach the arabic language and muslim culture and aid treatments of ptsd respectively outweigh the fact that the military funds the games and might misuse or reappropriate their work for other ends in the future. while i appreciate the nuance of this position for the designers of such programs and scholars who write about military affairs, it is not the place from whence to evaluate training outcomes. perhaps magelssen was intending to give pause to an audience of academics who would regard military activity as a de facto negative component of collective life in the united states, or perhaps he was acting out what he saw as ethical ethnographic practice by affirming the legitimacy of the pragmatic position of his iraqi-american subjects. this is, indeed, the dominant framework in journalistic accounts of the fort, and magelssen’s article offers a more detailed account than most from which to draw such conclusions. but in focusing on the present of his visit as opposed to the longer history of the fort itself or the potential ramifications of the shift from conventional warfare to “cultural awareness,” magelssen overestimates the truth-value of his proximity to the cinematic events and people he describes. he writes as though he had not been a part of the show, and yet his conclusions uncannily resemble the public-relations material that the military itself has generated around these training simulations. the same could be said about the nationally televised feature documentary about the fort irwin training simulations, full battle rattle (2008) by jesse moss and tony gerber. while the filmmakers state in material about the film that they are against the war personally, and while it is the most comprehensive treatment of the experiences of individuals in the training simulations (soldiers and actors alike), it foregrounds intimacy with subjects employed by the military, presence to simulated performance events, and the stories of participants over structural critique. thus, while the style of the film retains faith in the camera to communicate the phenomenological experience of fake war and all the complexities the endeavor entails, it also by design gives a great deal of control over the production of affect and the interpretation of its political import to military spokespersons, who orchestrate both for the participants in the simulation, the filmmakers, and the spectators of the finished film. absent a story from the perspective of iraqi civilians that follows soldier trainees once they are deployed (a far more difficult, hazardous, and expensive project to undertake), the filmmakers must acknowledge a measure of complicity in the military campaign and its continuance, in spite of their stated intentions to the contrary. as of 2012, the public-relations office at fort irwin still showed the film in its entirety to introduce the look, feel, and rationale of the simulations to groups of tourists who visit the fort to see a live training exercise.13 conclusion: "stitch lane" 2012 figure 3. video stills of the staging ground for the stitch lane training simulation, 2007 (top row) and 2012 (bottom row). the explosion that initiated the simulation in “medina wasl” in 2007 can be seen in the top right frame; the explosion in this same space, renamed “ertebat shar” by 2012, can be seen on the bottom left. recorded by the author with permission from fort irwin national training center, barstow, ca, 2007 and 2012. like the us economy as a whole, the fort irwin simulation body seems to equate survival in an era of “cultural awareness” with growth. when i return to the fort for a second visit, i am again taken to this area—medina wasl, now reimagined as an afghan village called ertebat shar—to witness the performance of “stitch lane” from a press box above the now-paved central street. the village has more than 200 structures and has become by far the largest on the fort (figure 3). concrete barricades line the street, and buildings feature more elaborately detailed facades and awnings. hooded men push carts of plastic toys and melons through the street, occasionally followed by a figure in a burqa or a goat. a statue stands in the center of the town, a replica of the princess of hatra erected in 238 ce in the city of al hadr, iraq, to protect it from persian invaders. though the town is now meant to simulate afghanistan, the statue remains. because the circumference of the statue’s base and the concrete barricades that surround it prevent anyone from standing too close, tcs and their contracted pyrotechnicians can hide large gunpowder charges there and detonate them safely, a sensory-story element they are loath to give up (figure 4). a plaque at the base of the statue indicates that it was constructed “in appreciation of the american soldier, the true protector of democracy” by strategic operations, a san diego based action/softcore-porn film-production company saved from near bankruptcy following 9/11 by entering into the military simulation business. figure 4. video stills of the “princess of hatra” statue and placard, 2012. recorded by the author with permission from fort irwin national training center. supplying iraqi role players, amputees, and pyrotechnics expertise to the army became a cottage industry in southern california during the iraq war years, when strategic operations grew around 60% per year (vizzo, 2011). in lieu of the medical dummies, civilian amputees adorn latex suits that squirt fake blood from their missing limbs and play soldiers who have just lost limbs in ied attacks. professional army videographers record the training events from three different angles using large cameras with expensive zoom lenses. their footage is compiled, marked, and integrated for use in after-action reviews at a communications center hidden in the village. soldiers will watch selections from the footage later at a newly built, climate-controlled movie theater instead of the interior of a faux mosque. two contract employees monitor the feeds on a computer screen and cue the sounds of gunfire, the call to prayer, livestock, screams, and so on at the command of the lead tc. they can also release smells into the center of the village, including burning flesh, “dragon’s breath,” coffee, roast beef, jasmine, sewer, apple pie, gunpowder, and vomit (“technician,” personal communication, 15 february 2012). all the footage that they record is sent wirelessly by way of microwave transmission to a larger communications center and server on the post. through a radio lavalier i attach to the head tc, i hear stage directions before they unfold in the town as the action begins. he conjures snipers out of myriad windows, summons a suicide bomber to the center of the city street, and directs insurgents to fire from their locked-down positions until they are hit. “give them a hollywood ending,” he says to one. the insurgent stands in a window and shoots as many of the american soldiers as he can before the receptors on his laser-tag vest beep to indicate that he has been killed. the duration of the firefight stretches on, nearing forty-five minutes as a host of civilian tourists on an “ntc box tour” look on with me from the covered platform. confined to the space for our own safety, it is as though we are pioneer spectators to a new form of hypermasculine super-cinemascope filmmaking. immersion in action-cinematic simulation, however, is a difficult place from which to explore adversary culture or offer a critique of military activities already visible within the simulation itself. indeed, media visitors to the ntc became a key variable within the simulation and, over time, an asset. the public-affairs office at the fort anticipated the norms of journalistic practice, the allure of cinematic display, and the influence that their interpretations could have on the stories their guests would tell about simulation training. in the midst of shocking and disorienting simulations of “worst day ever” scenarios, public-relations officers, tcs, and particularly gregarious iraqiand afghan-american actors offered quick, on-message explanations of the need for such scenarios to save lives and the virtues of the military’s new, culturally aware approach to warfare. reporters, scholars, and documentary filmmakers visiting the base have reproduced both the phenomenological novelty of cinematic spectacle at close proximity and the military’s explanation for these innovations as emblematic of enlightened, virtuous warmaking, although they are inappropriate indices for the efficacy of “cultural awareness” in theater. this consistently reproduced result—one way in which the military is weaponizing affect in an era of counterinsurgency war—foregrounds a difficult dilemma for documentary practices in the context of increasingly ubiquitous simulation technologies. the ethical documentarist can be anticipated by the simulation and enfolded within its logic. cinematic performance is here a weapon that short-circuits the oft-assumed power of documentary exposure to bring about social change. rather, the rules by which ethical documentary practitioners play—faith in following subjects or foregrounding their statements over voice-of-god narration, belief in proximity to subjects as a route to truer representation, discerning organic narratives in subjects lives to allow their nuanced characters to emerge—are easily subsumed into this simulation body. notes 1 for an incisive critique of the cultural turn in military training, including a chapter on “cultural terrain,” see gonzález, 2010. 2 to foreshadow a point to which i return at length later in the article, many of the reports and films i consider here position the cinematic gore and violence in simulation training as tools for hardening troops to the realities of battle, as well as reining in impulses to abuse prisoners or kill civilians.  the visage of iraqi dress, décor, and everyday activity serves in these stories to emphasize the seriousness with which the military is taking culture in the midst of chaos, a connection i will critique. 3 stahl (2010) identifies the formation of the all-volunteer army, official press conference, embedded reporting scenario, and interactive first-person presentation of troop experiences as entertainment as parts of a sustained effort since the 1960s to blunt dissent, decouple citizenship from soldiering, and create “large scale press integration into a system of pentagon public relations” (p. 23). fort irwin welcoming reporters to observe training fits into stahl’s critique of “militainment,” and i touch on his larger argument below (stahl, 2010, pp. 15–16). 4 looking back from the perspective of 2016, the u.s. army field/marine corp counterinsurgency field manual of 2008 articulates scenarios that have in many respects come to fruition in the middle east–north africa region, among others. the manual ruminates on the fact of 9/11, the failing wars in iraq and afghanistan, and the specter of 2.8 billion young, jobless city dwellers living in poverty throughout the globe by 2015, coping with “overcrowding, pollution, uneven resource distribution, and poor sanitation,” and ostensibly recognizing an allure in radical ideologies that identify the united states as a key culprit. the introduction of the manual predicts a long low-intensity war against an entity like the islamic state: “america is at war and should expect to remain fully engaged for the next several decades in a persistent conflict against an enemy dedicated to u.s. defeat as a nation and eradication as a society” (us dept. of the army & marine corps, 2008, pp. viii, 1–2). however, there is little critical reflection here on the military institutions that would benefit financially and politically by reproducing such a state of affairs. 5  for a consideration of the production process of brady’s photographs and its relationship to the industrialization of war, see trachtenberg, 1985. 6 baudrillard (1994) uses the term simulation to describe a social condition in which the copy, instrumentalized toward the ends of profit and empire, precedes the possibility of a preexisting original. sanitized of archaic, ritualistic, and mystical qualities, these copies simply reproduce a normative code, stretching lifeless in all directions and annihilating meaningful cultural and political differences over time. he argues that the mechanically reproducible photographic images that constitute movies, television, and print advertising, especially since the 1960s, function to amplify desires for the real while simultaneously cutting off possibilities for engaging with a “profound reality” (p. 6). baudrillard’s tendency to write about bodily experience as a theoretical rather than a lived phenomenon in the era of the image, however, has left him open to feminist critiques like those of sobchack (1992, 2004), who theorizes materiality as enmeshed in idiosyncratic phenomenological experiences of cinema and other everyday encounters rather than absent from them. 7 i relied extensively on the newsbank: access world news database for news stories about simulation training, which i accessed in july 2011 and downloaded and analyzed in intervening years. 8 when i visited the fort in 2007, these trainers were called “operational controllers.” in 2012, the army referred to them as “tactical controllers.” to avoid confusion in this chapter, i refer to them throughout as tactical controllers, but this is not necessarily the case in other works about the fort created before 2011. 9 the rhetorical emphasis on realism is ubiquitous in my interviews, a point to which i return in my analysis below. 10 the case of photojournalist zoriah miller, who published images of marines killed in a suicide bombing in 2008, highlights the complexities entailed in press access, representation of war, and embedded reporting. spokespersons for military units have embraced embedded reporters’ positive stories about the everyday lives of soldiers. however, they claim that published photographs of americans killed in action provide their enemies with intelligence about the effectiveness of their attacks, violate principles of informed consent, and offend soldiers’ families. miller argues, conversely, that the images are vital to communicate to american readers about the physical and emotional cost of the war. the fact that his photographs shocked viewers when suicide bombings happen every day, he concluded, “says that whatever [the military is] doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is working.” since the publication of the photographs, no military unit has permitted miller to embed. as war casualties increased, fewer us units allowed embedded journalists to accompany them to battle sites (kamber & arango, 2008). 11 ien ang’s seminal reception study watching dallas (1985), for instance, discusses the phenomenon of “psychological realism” in relation to european fans’ responses to the american television soap opera dallas. audience members identified with the dilemmas of the show’s protagonists even though they were aware that the degree of wealth and drama it portrayed were not representative of american society on the whole. 12 the $12 million center, which closed in july 2010, offered visitors 80 gaming stations, helicopter and humvee simulators, and a space for managing enlistments. located between an arcade and a skate park, the center became a flashpoint for protesters troubled by the army’s endorsement of graphic violence in first-person shooter games targeted at children. see cousineau, 2011, pp. 518-20. 13 a public-affairs officer communicated this information to me during my visit to the fort in 2012. every month, the army leads several “box tours” for members of the public to see the “worst day ever” a soldier might encounter in afghanistan. the “show” very much resembles a hollywood war movie, as i suggest in the conclusion of this article. references ackerman, s. (2011, 12 december). rare photographs show ground zero of the drone war. wired. retrieved from https://www.wired.com/2011/12/photos-pakistan-drone-war ang, i. (1985). watching dallas: soap opera and the melodramatic imagination. london, uk: methuen. brandt, m. (2016). simulated war: remediating trauma narratives in military psychotherapy. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 2(1).1-42. baudrillard, j. (1994). simulacra and simulation. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. cartwright, l. (2008). moral spectatorship: technologies of voice and affect in postwar representations of the child. durham, nc: duke university press. cartwright, l. (2011). the hands of the projectionist. science in context, 24(3), 443-464. cousineau, m. (2011). the surveillant simulation of war: entertainment and surveillance in the 21st century. surveillance and society, 8(4), 517-522. http://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/4190 der derian, j. (2009). virtuous war: mapping the military-industrial-media-entertainment network (2nd ed.). new york, ny: routledge. docherty, b. (2007). “more sweat…less blood”: us military training and minimizing civilian casualties. cambridge, ma: carr center for human rights policy at harvard university. filkins, d., & burns, j. (2006, 1 may). mock iraqi villages in mojave prepare troops for battle. new york times, 1. freud, s. (2001). the case of schreber, papers on technique, and other works. the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud: vol. 12. london: vintage. gerber, t. (director) & moss, j. (director). full battle rattle. [video/dvd] new york: first run features. gill, z. (2009). rehearsing the war away: perpetual warrior training in contemporary us army policy. tdr: the drama review, 53(3), 139-155. gonzález, r. (2010). militarizing culture: essays on the warfare state. walnut creek, ca: left coast press. kamber, m., & arango, t. (2008, 26 july). 4,000 us deaths, and a handful of images. new york times, a1. keeling, k. (2007). the witch’s flight: the cinematic, the black femme, and the image of common sense. durham, nc: duke university press. klein, m. (1946). notes on some schizoid mechanisms. international journal of psycho-analysis, 27, 99-110. laine, t. (2007). shame and desire: emotion, intersubjectivity, cinema. brussels, belgium: p.i.e. peter lang. lavell, k. (2003, 9 march). advances in training help revolutionize the military. san diego union-tribune, g-1. losh, l. (2006). the palace of memory: virtual tourism and tours of duty in tactical iraqi and virtual iraq. in proceedings of the 2006 international conference on game research and development (77–86). perth, australia.  magelssen, s. (2009). rehearsing the “warrior ethos”: “theatre immersion” and the simulation of theatres of war. tdr: the drama review, 53(1), 47-72. marks, l.u. (2000). the skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses. durham, nc: duke university press. marks, l.u. (2002). touch: sensuous theory and multisensory media. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. mcfate, m. (2005). the military utility of understanding adversary culture. jfq, 38, 42-48. merleau-ponty, m. (1962). phenomenology of perception. london, uk: routledge. rather, d. (2008, 16 september). battle plan. dan rather reports. santschi, d.r. (2004, 29 november). uncertain future // base closures: fort irwin fights to stay on duty. press-enterprise, a01. sedgwick, e.k. (2003). touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. durham, nc: duke university press. sedgwick, e.k. & frank, a. (1995). shame and its sisters: a silvan tomkins reader. durham, nc: duke university press. sobchack, v. (1992). the address of the eye: a phenomenology of film experience. princeton, nj: princeton university press. sobchack, v. (2004). carnal thoughts: embodiment and moving image culture. berkeley, ca: university of california press. stahl, r. (2010). militainment, inc.: war, media, and popular culture. new york, ny: routledge. suchman, l. (2016). configuring the other: sensing war through immersive simulation. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 2(1), 1-36. thevenot, b. (2004, 12 september). duty calls: louisiana national guardsmen are training furiously in california, preparing for the front lines of iraq. times-picayune, 1. tomkins, s.s. (2008). affect imagery consciousness: the complete edition. new york, ny: springer. trachtenberg, a. (1985). albums of war: on reading civil war photographs. representations, 9, 1-32. united states department of the army & united states marine corps. (2007). the us army/marine corps counterinsurgency field manual: us army field manual no. 3–24: marine corps warfighting publication no. 3–33.5. chicago, il: university of chicago press. vargo j. (2007, 15 june). destination iraq: inland base trains troops for intense situations. press-enterprise, a01. vizzo, e. (2011, 10 may). purposeful chaos: local company sets up realistic training for combat, drug houses, and ship seizures. san diego union-tribune, c-1. bio d. andy rice is the aspire fellow in socially engaged media in the division of undergraduate education at ucla. he earned his phd in communication from ucsd in 2013. he is a documentary filmmaker and media studies scholar whose written work centers on social justice documentary production, documentary film studies, phenomenology, and performance studies. he has also produced/directed two feature-length documentary films, and was the co-producer, cinematographer, and editor of a feature documentary titled spirits of rebellion (2016), about the history of the black independent film movement known as the l.a. rebellion microsoft word 288-1538-1-ostherr.docx ostherr, k. (2018). “privacy, data mining, and digital profiling in online patient narratives”. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4 (1), 1-24. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kirsten ostherr, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article privacy, data mining, and digital profiling in online patient narratives kirsten ostherr rice university kostherr@rice.edu abstract practices of health datafication and inadequate privacy policies are redefining the meaning of online patient narratives. this article compares patient-driven illness narratives and clinic-driven illness narratives to uncover a set of unrecognized assumptions about trust and privacy in health discourses. specifically, i show how the open sharing of patient stories in social media, blogs, and other public domains collides with privacy regulations and normative assumptions in the us health care system that prevent integration of those stories into electronic health record (ehr) systems. i argue that publicly told stories based on personal experiences of illness are valuable sources of health care information in part because they are subjective, richly detailed, and open ended. yet, precisely because of their public nature, these patient stories are unprotected sources of data that are barred from integration into health care data ecologies where clinical action takes place. consequently, an impermeable barrier exists between the officially sanctioned accounts in the clinical record and the contextual richness of patient stories on the social web. the tensions between these two approaches to 2 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) narrative and data create an opening for exploitative digital profiling practices that can ─ and already do ─ harm patients. examples are drawn from hugo campos and medtronic, patientslikeme, apple health records, google health, microsoft health vault, ibm watson health, and opennotes. introduction digital technologies are redefining health, communication, and what counts as human connection in medicine through practices of datafication that quantify formerly intangible aspects of human experience (mayer-schonberger & cukier, 2013; van dijck, 2014). amid the growth of virtual clinics and remote health care, these developments give rise to an urgent question: how does health datafication impact our understanding of embodied knowledge in medicine? clinically-driven digital health initiatives draw on the rhetoric of disembodiment, suggesting that many of the formerly “human” roles in health care can be performed by artificial intelligence (ai) or virtual telehealth encounters. in contrast, patient-driven digital health initiatives suggest that individual illness stories form the embodied foundation for practices of do-ityourself (diy) biohacking, crowdsourcing, and open data sharing that can facilitate new models of peer-to-peer health care. entangled in these divergent views of the future of medicine are conflicting claims about the locus of knowledge in health care: does meaning reside in the data, or in the stories? by exploring the different kinds of illness narratives that circulate inside and outside clinical settings, this essay will uncover a critically important but unexplored set of assumptions about trust and privacy in health discourses. specifically, i will show that patient communities online assume an ethos of openness, trust, and sharing of stories and data with little expressed concern about privacy. in contrast, clinical environments value privacy over sharing of stories and, consequently, emphasize data over narrative, as a more secure and objective mechanism for transmitting information. the tensions between these two approaches to narrative and data create an opening for 3 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) exploitative digital profiling practices that can ─ and already do ─ harm patients. the networked mediation of illness narratives takes place through the circulation of digital signals in a wide range of domains. in this essay, i want to focus on the “trading zones” (galison, 1997) between two critically important discursive fields: patient-driven illness narratives and clinic-driven illness narratives. specifically, i will explore how the proliferation and open sharing of patient stories in social media, blogs, and other public domains collides with privacy regulations and normative assumptions in the us health care system that prevent integration of those stories into electronic health record (ehr) systems. i will argue that publicly told stories based on personal experiences of illness are valuable sources of health care information in part because they are subjective, richly detailed, and open ended. yet, precisely because of their public nature, these patient stories are considered to be unprotected sources of data that are barred from integration into health care data ecologies where clinical action takes place. instead, contemporary ehrs quantify disease through biomedical datapoints such as blood pressure, weight, height, pulse, temperature, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, pain level, medications, procedures, and so forth (zhou et al., 2016). an impermeable barrier exists between the officially sanctioned accounts in the clinical record and the contextual richness of patient stories on the social web. in the final section of this essay, i will present a discussion of alternative practices, concluding with a warning about the risks of opening up patients’ detailed personal narratives to be mined and exploited through digital profiling practices that might harm their narrators as much as they help them. part i: patient-driven illness narratives patients have shared their illness narratives for centuries, but the new platforms for storytelling in the digital age have radically expanded the scale of the audience and, consequently, the impact of individual stories. 4 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) as a result, patient stories that previously would have circulated privately, among family and friends, are now open to any person with an internet connection. notably, medical spaces are excluded from these publics by design. although patient stories have been recognized as the foundation of diagnosis since the days of osler (1901), they claim ever diminishing space in contemporary clinical documentation. federal incentives have recently pushed more clinicians to adopt ehrs, leading to widespread complaints about the role of these technocratic interfaces in dehumanizing the clinical encounter, for both doctors and patients (hsiao, chun-ju & hing, 2012; shanafelt et al., 2016). as i will discuss below, ehrs are widely seen as incapable of capturing important experiential and affective dimensions of the patient’s story and, consequently, are seen as a threat to the practice of narrative medicine. therefore, while patient-driven illness narratives are circulating more openly than ever online, the clinical repositories for these narratives are becoming more constrained and restrictive in their communicative abilities. patients’ illness narratives have emerged as vivid counternarratives to official accounts, challenging traditional models of biomedical expertise as they circulate through robust networks of engaged citizens concerned with health care, often termed “e-patients” (ferguson & frydman, 2004). members of these groups have developed extensive online activist communities, demand access to their own health data, conduct crowd-sourced experiments, and “hack” health problems that traditional medical experts have failed to solve. in this way, e-patients can be seen as practicing a form of “citizen science” (hand, 2010) in medical contexts as a means of creating alternative models of patient-physician partnership. critically, e-patients claim a unique form of expertise based on the embodied experience of living with illness (as a patient or a caregiver), and they emphasize the value of openness and sharing for themselves and other e-patients as a means of empowerment. as this movement extends earlier, pre-digital models of patient activism (dumit, 2006; epstein, 1996), it becomes enmeshed in networks of health 5 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) datafication that blur the boundaries of commercial, clinical, and everyday health activities (ruckenstein & schüll, 2017). the expansion of platforms for sharing patient stories is part of a larger transformation of technologies of representation rooted in the emergence of the social web. while networked publics existed and communicated through analogue technologies long before the rise of the internet (jenkins, 2009), the possibility for subjects to broadcast their own narratives is a fundamentally important feature of the digital age that builds on the concept of the “open internet” (rainie & wellman, 2012). while many scholars have described both the liberatory as well as the repressive features of global information and communication technology (ict) networks (tufekci, 2017), the aspect i want to highlight here is the role of the internet in circulating new models for understanding the value of intimate stories as alternative forms of data-making that can be used to build things, such as counter-publics centered around healing and care. participants in the quantified self and e-patient movements take an active stance toward curating their own stories and health data (ferguson and the e-patient scholars working group, 2007), transforming the process of health datafication into a process of health “data-making” (nafus & sherman, 2014; pybus, coté, & blanke, 2016) that aims to benefit the people whose bodies generate the data rather than those who manufacture their device or act as data brokers (van dijck & poell, 2016). storytelling in these online patient communities can be seen as a means of pursuing greater patient autonomy that challenges paternalistic models of health care. the emergence of patient stories online through tweetchats (e.g., #hcsm), personal blogs (such as the liz army), illness communities (e.g., association of cancer online resources, or acor), and “health journal” sites (e.g., caringbridge) has been widely recognized as critically important, even life-saving, to the patients and caregivers who write and read them (debronkhart, 2013; han & wiley, 2013). indeed, the explosion of patient stories online has given rise to digital health makerspaces, 6 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) including collaborative platforms for data collection and exploration (e.g., crohnology and patientslikeme), and biomedical device hacking collectives (e.g., do-it-yourself-pancreas-system, or diyps, and nightscout) that can challenge exploitative models of health datafication. in these e-patient ecosystems, implicit trust in authors and audiences is underscored through celebration of openness and transparency across the sites. as e-patient blogger liz salmi (2017) notes, “unlike a traditional journal, my blog has no privacy settings. people from around the world can read and learn, through my experience, about what it is like having brain cancer.” she goes on to explain the value of that openness: “through logging my health and interactions with health professionals i am able to document my own medical history, and have been able to publically show that a frightening diagnosis has developed over time into something more akin to a chronic condition.” here, personal health data, presented in narrative form, provides an intimate, experiential account of living with illness that is grounded in contextual detail and rooted in the author’s perspective on her illness, rather than in the biomedical model of disease. while many e-patients turn to self-narration as a source of empowerment, there is widespread recognition in the community that control over documentation ─ the conversion of narrative into data ─ is a tremendous source of power within traditional medical organizations that e-patients have been barred from accessing. building on citizen science models of engagement, e-patients have demanded access to their own medical datasets, viewing them as sources for telling their stories in new ways that can fundamentally alter the knowledge hierarchies associated with proprietary, private, closed biomedical data ecosystems. one example is the case of hugo campos, who has fought to gain access to the data generated by his implantable cardioverterdefibrillator (icd), a small electronic device designed to shock his heart in the event of an arrhythmia. while his icd sends data to his doctor on a daily basis, campos can only view the data by making an appointment with his doctor and requesting a printout (standen, 2012). campos 7 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) sought open access to his data to take greater control over his own health, but he encountered major barriers from the device manufacturer, medtronic (singer, 2011; marcus & weaver, 2012). after years of activism on this issue, campos was honored by the obama white house in 2015 as a “champion of change” for “data liberation” (white house, 2015) but he is still fighting to gain full, open access to his icd data (campos & sebastian, 2015). campos and other e-patients such as regina holliday (“regina holliday’s medical advocacy blog,” 2009-) and dave debronkart (“epatient dave: toward a science of patient engagement,” 2009-) often frame their critique of closed medical documentation systems in terms of privacy and ownership, asking: who owns the data? who controls access to the data? in whose interest is “privacy” invoked ─ the patient’s or the manufacturer’s? in campos’s case, it is the story of his ongoing struggle, not any insights from the data itself, that earned him recognition from president obama. the “biomedical technoservice complex, inc.” (clarke et al., 2010: 57) responded to campos’s demands by framing big health data as resistant to narrative translation. as david steinhaus of medtronic explained, “in principle, the company is fine with giving patients their data directly. the problem is how to format it so it’s useful to everyone. as is, the raw data is highly technical. would patients understand it? you want to do it in a way that makes sense for the patient, that they can interpret correctly, so they don’t generate a lot of angst and difficulty for the physician or anyone else” (standen, 2012, n.p.). this example demonstrates how the expression of affect through illness narratives can be used to frame patients as overly emotional and therefore incapable of objective, rational interpretation of data. advocates of narrative medicine have long argued that we need access to personal, descriptive details to recover the important social, emotional, lived dimensions of experience that are crucial to the patient’s story and healing. however, aligning those often-ignored elements of patient experience with narrative, rather than with data, reproduces a linkage of affective storytelling with unreliable subjectivity, while reaffirming the purported objectivity of “pure” data 8 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) (daston & galison, 2007). regulatory structures that keep patient narratives out of ehr systems reproduce this false opposition, increasing the need for patients to tell their illness stories in online publics, while decreasing the value of those stories within corporate health care systems. and yet, as the possibilities for personal stories to morph into large, richly detailed databases become apparent through online sites, data donors and researchers are beginning to explore new models for thinking about narrative through a quantitative lens. for example, the site patientslikeme has functioned since 2004 as an open forum for patients to describe symptoms, side effects, treatment regimens, and other experiential variables like mood, sleep, stress, and activity, so that participants can search for others with their condition and learn from their peers. the site quickly evolved into a vast archive of narratives that could be datafied and mined for larger-scale insights. despite ongoing expressions of concern by medical experts about patients using “dr. google” to self-diagnose (swaminath, 2016), participants found the patientslikeme site to be a powerful resource that could be used to inform or challenge traditional scientific studies (eichler et al., 2016; okun & goodwin, 2017). patientslikeme promises to be “honest, open, and transparent” about their uses of community members’ personal health data. they argue that “patients know what it’s like to live with disease, and they can teach us more than we can teach them,” while framing patient stories as a form of data (“about patientslikeme,” n.d.). the site emphasizes the importance of personal narratives that, when documented on the platform, can convert experience into a form of evidence (“our science,” n.d.). yet, this patient-centered counternarrative exists in a tenuous relationship to biomedical models of value and risk. the very conditions of possibility for the e-patient movement to emerge overlap with expanding practices of datafication that digital health initiatives, especially those concerning population health, seek to exploit (ostherr, 2018). as a result, patient narratives are easily datafied online (even while 9 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) being denigrated as subjective), while individuals’ own health data are not readily available to them. the emphasis on privacy in regulations such as the health insurance portability and accountability act (hipaa) that aim to protect patient health information has limited the expansion of patient voices and autonomy in clinical domains, inadvertently pushing these stories out into public discourse instead.1 in this sense, privacy norms and regulations for clinical contexts are indirectly responsible for putting patient data at greater risk for digital profiling and exploitation. consequently, new methods for sharing patient data such as patientslikeme generate unevenly distributed forms of value that do not always benefit the data “donors” as much as they should (ostherr et al., 2017). some users of the site have raised concerns about the partnerships between patientslikeme and health care stakeholders, such as pharmaceutical companies astrazeneca, avenir, biogen, boehringer ingelheim, bristolmyers squibb, genentech, janssen, novartis, pfizer, and others, as well as health insurance providers aetna, bupa, copatient and healthy business group (patientslikeme, “partners,” n.d.). as one site user commented, “i did sign up, but how do i know drug companies or others won’t use it to try and sell me something? what about my insurance company or employer getting at this data somehow? you’re using my full name right here. it would seem a simple thing for someone i don’t want to search the site and find out intimate details about my health record. am i wrong?” (allison, 2016). while patientslikeme insists that it is transparent about these partnerships and its role in supporting its patient-centered business model, researchers have noted that data use is loosely regulated on many online health platforms (agus, 2016; van dijck, 2014; van dijck & poell, 2016). the lack of restrictions allows for commodification and exploitation by actors with less community-minded goals, raising the important question of who truly benefits from online sharing of personal health data. 10 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) part ii: clinic-driven illness narratives the role of illness narratives in clinical settings has long been recognized by practitioners of narrative medicine. the field has existed since the early 1970s, pioneered by scholars who published groundbreaking research demonstrating the value and clinical relevance of telling and hearing stories of illness (charon, 2006; charon et al., 2017). clinician advocates of narrative-based medicine challenge the reductionism that can emerge from data-driven practices of evidence-based medicine, recognizing instead “the narrative features of all data and the evidentiary status of all clinical text” (charon & wyer, 2008: 297, emphasis in original). when narrative techniques are taught as part of medical school curricula, they are used to cultivate new approaches to communication among doctors and other health care providers, rather than among patients. yet, they share a recognition voiced by e-patients: meaningful personal health data emerges from intimate stories rooted in the embodied experience of illness. without the contextual richness found in these stories, the explanatory power of biomedical data is greatly diminished. however, under current privacy regulations, clinical ehrs only capture narrowly defined, quantitative biomedical data (zhou et al., 2016). despite the abundance of narrative details streaming through social media networks, the boundaries between the open web and hipaa-protected zones cannot presently be crossed. since the early 2000s, technology companies such as microsoft and google have embraced a version of narrative medicine through strategic acknowledgement of the value of online patient stories, though with different objectives in mind. because they operate in the public sphere, these companies can access the multi-layered “social life” of users’ health narratives by integrating diverse sources of data from nonhealth-related domains. early efforts to construct consumer-facing ehr platforms like microsoft health vault (2007) and google health (2008) can be seen as attempts to bring together the contextual data captured through online search and related activities with more traditional 11 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) biomedical markers of health and disease. although these initial forays failed, with google health closing shop in 2011, and dwindling use of microsoft’s still-functioning platform (thorp-lancaster, 2016), the vision they pursued shapes the health data industry and its privacy policies today. notably, google researchers are at the forefront of investigations into development of deep learning methods for mining ehr data to build predictive models for patient health outcomes. while such studies promise to “drive personalized medicine and improve health care quality” (rajkomar et al., 2018: 1), they also threaten to aggregate data from across the social web and the life span, thereby producing new levels of digital profiling that threaten new harms to patients’ privacy. further threats arise with the recent announcement of apple’s update to its iphone operating system that provides a purportedly “effortless solution” to integrating ehr data from multiple health care providers on the patient’s iphone (apple, 2018). media coverage of this new app noted the failures of microsoft and google to achieve widespread adoption of their own health data platforms, noting that apple may succeed where others failed for two major reasons: the intimacy of smartphones as personal technologies, and the company’s reputation for industry-leading privacy standards (johnson, 2018). indeed, apple’s website emphasizes its neutral role in ehr data transactions, stating, “apple is not creating, receiving, maintaining, or transmitting protected health information for or on behalf of a covered entity or business associate” (“healthcare,” 2018, n.p.). while intended as an assurance of the privacy and security of its app, in essence, this legalese means that apple is not subject to hipaa regulations, leaving open the possibility for less overt uses of patient data through indirect means. health information stored on apple smartphones may be protected, but once the data is backed up on the icloud platform, it can be mined not only by apple (pagliery, 2016), but also by google, microsoft, and amazon when the data are backed up on servers operated by those companies (axon, 2018; novet, 2018). indeed, these threats are not merely hypothetical. a recent study 12 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) of what happens to the data we enter on popular mobile apps and their associated websites found that personally identifying information such as name, email address, location data, and other behavioral information is widely shared without users’ knowledge. the third-party domain that receives sensitive data from the most apps is google, followed by apple and facebook (zang, dummit, graves, lisker, & sweeney, 2015: 3). risks of exposure of sensitive information range from apps using unencrypted connections that could be intercepted and exploited to third-party advertisers and analytics services mining the content of users’ data to target personal advertisements, set financial rates, and offer or withhold services. commenting on the lack of regulations governing the mobile app ecosystem, the privacy rights clearinghouse advocacy group has reported, “this is a particular concern with health and fitness apps, which often collect both demographic and health (or medical-like) information that does not fall under the protections of any health privacy laws. when you use the apps, you often create a record of data such as your diet, daily exercise, glucose readings, pregnancy, and/or menstrual cycle” (njie, 2013: 4). here we see the monetization of the rich contextual data that patient stories can provide when captured in open sources online and through health and wellness apps. since we already know that google and others in the data business seek to capture as much personal information about their users as possible, why would we assume that their intent for ehr mining is any different, or that their use of those data would be purely benevolent? in contrast to the openness (and vulnerability) of patient communities online, the ehr ─ the central repository of patient information in american medicine ─ is almost universally seen as a closed system incapable of absorbing the unstructured data that patients share through their “metaclinical” social networks.2 comparative studies have shown how ehrs eliminate important contextual information about the patient’s experience of illness by framing clinical narratives solely in terms of biomedical disease models (patel, arocha, & kushniruk, 2002). some narrative medicine skeptics have expressed concern that patient 13 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) stories in the form of unstructured data can become lengthy and unusable by clinicians who often need quick, succinct summaries to make treatment decisions (morris, 2008). while artificial intelligence (ai) and machine learning are seen as potential solutions to this problem, even proponents acknowledge that few insights will emerge if the contextual data is never captured in the first place. as deborah disanzo of ibm watson health recently observed, “seventy percent of our determinants in health are not in our clinical or genomic data. we analyzed 650 million data points from one activity. we could find, really, no good actionable insights [because] it’s very difficult to get good social determinants in health data” (muoio, 2017: n.p.). the need to supplement clinical data with social and behavioral nuance leads researchers and data brokers alike back to scraping users’ personal information from the social web, yet critical code researchers have shown that big data analytics tend to reproduce the biases of their programmers and the society from which they emerge (crawford & calo, 2016; eubanks, 2017; noble, 2018; o’neil, 2016; sweeney, 2013; wachter-boettcher, 2017). the likelihood that algorithms designed to mine big health data will harm those already suffering from structural racism, poverty, and health disparities suggests that greater protection of users’ data within contexts of social sharing is urgently needed. under current regulation of these sociotechnical systems, patient stories and health data are disconnected forms of knowledge and meaning that exist in separate realms and are shaped by the affordances of their host platforms: open internet for patient stories, closed ehr for patient data. a recent study of patient reviews of doctors on the online rating platform yelp argued that the user-driven character of the content on this open-access site produces comments about fundamentally different aspects of the patient experience as compared to hospitalgenerated patient satisfaction questionnaires and surveys (merchant, volpp, & asch, 2016; ranard et al., 2016). the authors note, “online platforms are democratizing in ways that answering pre-assigned questions can never be ─ because giving voice to patients also means 14 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) giving them the opportunity to select the topics” (merchant, volpp, & asch, 2016: 2484). some researchers have noted the unfortunate role of privacy restrictions in perpetuating the separation of unstructured narratives (e.g., yelp) and quantitative medical datasets (e.g., ehrs) (dohan, garrett, rendle, halley, & abramson, 2016). yet, when considered in light of widespread third-party data mining, the restrictions governing clinical data sharing must also be seen as protective, insofar as they successfully prevent data brokers from accessing patients’ sensitive personal health information. however, for patients to benefit fully from sharing their illness narratives online, the digital health ecosystem must move beyond a binary opposition of paternalistic protectionism versus open source exploitation. conclusion: closed networks and opennotes the risks of third-party exploitation of data shared in online patient communities are real. however, the necessary response is not to firewall open patient resources online, thereby undermining their benefits alongside their harms, but rather to open up clinical ehr networks to more diverse forms of input, with greater privacy protections. no good models exist to date, but the opennotes project is a promising initiative that allows patients to see and comment on the few spaces where physicians actually include unstructured text: their clinical notes. while the project is explicitly focused on giving patients access to their own data, not on narrative medicine, opennotes nonetheless emphasizes narrative as a site of exchange that can improve patient care and wellbeing (nys health foundation, 2017). indeed, participants in the pilot study saw striking improvements in trusting doctor-patient relationships, patients’ feelings of control over their care, patients’ greater knowledge and recall about their medical conditions, and greater “adherence” to medication regimens (gerard, fossa, folcarelli, walker, & bell, 2017; klein et al., 2016). populations that reported a particular benefit from opennotes included people with serious co-morbid or chronic 15 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) conditions, and patients who were elderly, non-white, or had less than a high school education (bell et al., 2017). with over 6 million users between 2010 and 2017, the organization is developing a second iteration of the project, called “ournotes,” in which patients, families, and clinicians collaboratively generate notes (commonwealth fund, 2014). in this version, patients can not only review but also contribute to the clinical notes in their ehr. this phase explicitly centers on the power of storytelling to improve health outcomes and quality of life through patient-generated health histories and goals of care. importantly, this project aims to integrate some of the social and affective dimensions of illness into clinical care, where it might impact the medical treatments available to a patient, or the clinician’s understanding of the patient’s priorities. ournotes acknowledges and works within the existing framework of biomedical care while extending the boundaries of that frame to include more patients’ and caregivers’ voices. yet, by preserving the centrality of the ehr, the traditional clinical context of care, and a limited social network, this initiative fundamentally accepts the model of clinic-driven definitions of disease, and in that way, reproduces the limitations of doctor-centered structures of knowledge (lee, walker, delbanco, & elmore, 2016). the great strength of patient stories in platforms outside traditional clinical settings is their rich detail, their unrestrained narration, the varied and unfiltered affective states they register, the wild heterogeneity of sources and types of information they include, and the multiplicity of voices they present. most of these variables continue to be excluded from ehrs, even those running opennotes or ournotes. medical institutions may not be receptive to the voluminous, messy “big health data” that floats freely across online platforms, but other organizations (like google, microsoft, amazon, and facebook) are paying attention (robbins, 2016; wingfield, thomas, & abelson, 2018). just like all of the other data about internet users that third parties can access (shopping, social media, gps, music and video streaming, and so on), patients’ personal accounts of their daily lives are vectored through analytics 16 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) engines by companies seeking to monetize their data. the resulting digital profiles invisibly shape the communications and transactions that surround us. by maintaining rigid boundaries between public-sphere ambitions for health and wellness and private-sphere practices of medicine and delivery of health care, current us policies allow private interests to freely exploit our data, potentially harming us socially while ignoring our deeper medical needs. acknowledgements i would like to thank the editorial team at catalyst for their valuable insights, especially david serlin, mara mills, and the editors of this special issue, beza merid and tamara kneese. notes 1 in sum, the health insurance portability and accountability act of 1996 (hipaa) governs the use and disclosure of individuals’ protected health information (phi) by covered entities, namely, health plans, health care clearinghouses, and any health care provider who transmits health information in electronic form in connection with business transactions. phi includes demographic data that relates to the individual’s past, present or future physical or mental health or condition; the provision of health care to the individual; or the past, present, or future payment for the provision of health care to the individual (office for civil rights, 2013). 2 elsewhere i define “metaclinical” spaces as “those sites constituting the vast ecosystem outside of traditional clinical settings where consumerpatients engage in behaviors that may be directly or indirectly related to self-management of health and disease, whose digital traces can be captured and incorporated into data-driven frameworks for health surveillance and intervention” (ostherr, 2018). 17 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) references agus, d.b. 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(2011, november 22). getting health data from inside your body. mit technology review. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/426171/getting-health-data-frominside-your-body/ standen, a. (2012, may 28). patients crusade for access to their medical device data. kqed/npr online. https://www.npr.org/sections/health shots/2012/05/28/153706099/patients-crusade-for-access-to-their-medicaldevice-data swaminath, a. (2016, august 29). stop asking dr. google for advice. new york times. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/08/29/aremedical-websites-like-webmd-healthful/stop-asking-dr-google-for-advice. sweeney, l. (2013, may). discrimination in online ad delivery. communications of the acm, 56(5), 44-54. https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/onlineads/ thorp-lancaster, d. (2016, aug 12). fitbit shutting down microsoft healthvault integration on september 12 [update]. windows central blog. https://www.windowscentral.com/fitbit-shutting-down-microsoft-healthvaultintegration-september-12 23 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) tufekci, z. (2017). twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest. new haven, ct: yale university press. van dijck, j. (2014). datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. surveillance society, 12,197-208. van dijck, j. & poell, t. (2016). understanding the promises and premises of online health platforms. big data & society, 3(1), 1-11. wachter-boettcher, s. (2017). technically wrong: sexist apps, biased algorithms, and other threats of toxic tech. new york, ny: w.w. norton. white house archives, president barack obama. (2015). champions of change: precision medicine: hugo campos. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/champions/precision-medicine/ wingfield, n., thomas, k., & abelson, r. (2018, january 30). amazon, berkshire hathaway and jpmorgan team up to try to disrupt health care. new york times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/30/technology/amazonberkshire-hathaway-jpmorgan-health-care.html. zang, j., dummit, k., graves, j., lisker, p., & sweeney, l. (2015). who knows what about me? a survey of behind the scenes personal data sharing to third parties by mobile apps. technology science. 2015103001. zhou, l., collins, s., morgan, s.j., zafar, n., gesner, e.j., fehrenbach, m. & rocha, r.a. (2016). a decade of experience in creating and maintaining data elements for structured clinical documentation in ehrs. amia annual symposium proceedings 2016, 1293-1302. bio kirsten ostherr, phd, mph is the gladys louise fox professor of english at rice university, in houston, texas, where she is a media scholar, health researcher, and founding director of the medical humanities program. she is the author of medical visions: producing the patient through film, television and imaging technologies (oxford, 2013) and cinematic prophylaxis: globalization and contagion in the discourse of world health (duke, 2005). she is the editor of applied media studies (routledge, 2018), and co-editor of science/animation, a special issue of the journal discourse (2016). her current research is on information and communication technologies in medicine, patient narratives, trust and privacy in digital health ecosystems, and the role of simulation as a mediator between human and technological 24 ostherr catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) forms of medical expertise. her current book project is called quantified health: learning from patient stories in the age of big data. potency and power: estrogen, cosmetics, and labeling in canadian regulatory practices, 1939–1953 tessaro, lara. (2020). potency and power: estrogen, cosmetics, and labeling in canadian regulatory practices, 1939–1953. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-43. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © lara tessaro, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license potency and power: estrogen, cosmetics, and labeling in canadian regulatory practices, 1939–1953 lara tessaro kent law school, university of kent l.tessaro@kent.ac.uk abstract building on a rich body of feminist scholarship on estrogen, this account interrogates how potent estrogenic cosmetics and consumer product labels emerged together, through the regulatory practices of scientists and lawyers, in mid-century canada. composed from archival and other primary sources, the story traces the development of canada’s first cosmetic regulations – which applied only to cosmetic products containing estrogens. in 1944, “sex hormones” had been the first substances for which the department of national health and welfare adopted labels in lieu of dose or potency standards under the food and drugs act. with dose-response thresholds thus written out of the sex hormone regulations, in 1949, regulators devised a new type of consumer product label that warned women to use estrogenic cosmetic products “with care”. further regulatory amendments in 1950 appeared, on their face, to require positive proof of safety for estrogenic cosmetics. however, through varied administrative and enforcement practices that hinged upon “directions for use” in product labels, national health officials quietly reintroduced dose-response logics back into estrogen regulation. as legal technologies for disciplining women consumers to regulate their own exposures, product labels were becoming instrumental. with labeling, estrogen catalyzed an early example of risk regulation in canada. introduction today, endocrine disruption is a well-established phenomenon. the fact that special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 2 industrial chemicals could disrupt endocrine systems of humans and wildlife burst into popular consciousness in the mid-1990s, with the publication of our stolen future (colborn, dumanoski, & myers, 1996). in translating the science to public audiences, researchers and activists have often leveraged the fact that these endocrine-disrupting chemicals can participate in humans’ and animals’ hormonal systems, including by mimicking estrogen in bodies.1 some scholars have critiqued the repronormative, heterosexist, transphobic, or ableist discourses that infuse these translations, which reinforce sex panics about disruption of normative bodies (ah-king & hayward, 2014; di chiro, 2010; o’laughlin, 2016; scott, 2009). others have explored chemical and multispecies productions of sex, gender, and sexuality (fausto-stirling, 2000; haraway, 2012; hayward, 2014), and celebrated the queer intimacies and pleasures of hormone disruption (chen, 2012; pollock, 2016; preciado, 2013). without mongering these fears or indulging these pleasures, it can now be said that these molecules can change fetal development; impact fertility, metabolism, and behaviour; and cause cancer.2 in canada, one of the first endocrine disruptors to be industrially produced was estrogen. more particularly, the interwar years saw the manufacture and marketing of estrogenic preparations made of estrone, estradiol, equilin, equilenin, or stilboestrol (or des). scholars have examined endocrine disruption in ways that refuse to separate the “natural” from the “cultural.” for example, nancy langston (2010) has traced a history of endocrine disruption through the synthetic estrogen des. working within a material-semiotic tradition, celia roberts (2007) has troubled distinctions between “natural” sex hormones and “synthetic” industrial chemicals (see also haraway, 2012). following that tradition, this article holds hormones firmly together with (other) industrially produced endocrine-disrupting chemicals; as compounds with particular historical, political, and industrial trajectories, these are nonetheless all estrogenic substances. critically, whether “natural” or “synthetic,” estrogenic compounds regularly resist conventional dose-response logics (vandenberg et al., 2012; bergman, heindel, jobling, kidd, zoeller, & world health organization, 2013). conventionally, the greater the dose of a substance given to an organism, the greater the physiological response—a relationship, in pharmacology, referred to as potency. as scientists now know, estrogenic substances can upset the old toxicological truism that “the dose makes the poison.” some cause adverse effects at low doses, and indeed can have relatively greater toxicity at low doses than at high doses. these findings have major implications for chemical regulation, as it special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 3 implies that there is no safe threshold for exposure to estrogenic chemicals (scott, 2015). in pharmacology in the 1940s, however, the conventional paradigm ruled supreme. as elsewhere, canadian laboratory scientists, pharmacists, and clinicians shaped their research, compounding, and prescription practices around concepts of dose and dosage.3 ideas about potency routinely structured determinations, by department of national health officials,4 of whether and what amount of a substance was safe. yet, despite their centrality to biomedical discourses, dose-response logics were not stable or unified in regulatory spheres. as explored here in the context of estrogen regulation in canada, dose-response (or potency) limits were not legally prescribed: they were never “written into” rules or regulations. indeed, national health explicitly rejected the adoption in law of any dose-response limit or thresholds. instead, dose-response limits were performed by regulators in informal, fluid, and sometimes contradictory practices. crucially, at the core of these practices was product labeling. this article argues that estrogen, cosmetics, and product labeling were co-produced in mid-century canada (jasanoff, 2004). law’s imbrication with matter has recently been taken up in sociolegal and critical legal studies.5 however, few legal historians have situated their work within in the material turn—whether in new materialisms, relational materialism (mol, 2013), material feminisms (alaimo & hekman, 2008), or other such frameworks that center the interaction of matter and meaning.6 identifying “law” and the “material world” as distinct analytical realms admittedly performs “precisely the kind of ontological partition…that we are purporting to refute” (johnson, 2018, p. 7). nonetheless, legal historians who embrace materiality aim to move away from law-as-discourse, separate from its (socio)material “contexts” (johnson, 2015; tomlins, 2016). in this spirit, my article conjoins legal history with an stsinflected praxiological approach to ontological enactment (mol, 2002). contributing to interdisciplinary conversations in sociolegal studies, legal history, and sts, and using archival material not previously addressed by historians, the story told here provides an empirical case of how regulatory practices perform sociomaterial realities, and how law is enacted by sociomateriality. my account is woven with two main evidentiary threads. first, i draw on archival evidence of the development of the sex hormone regulations, and a department of justice file examining the constitutionality of a statutory provision on cosmetic licensing.7 second, i trace the legislative evolution of that provision and the special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 4 regulatory evolution and enforcement of the sex hormone regulations, specifically its labeling requirements. intertwined, too, are contemporaneous accounts by national health officials, scientific studies on estrogen creams, the delaney committee’s 1952 study on chemicals in cosmetics, and newspaper ads. informed throughout by historiographies of estrogen in its multiple materializations,8 this story adds understanding of relations between estrogen, cosmetics, and labeling to a rich body of feminist scholarship on sex hormones.9 the initial part of this account describes the first cosmetics regulation in canadian history, which applied only to products containing sex hormones. in lieu of any dose or potency standards for estrogens, regulators instead devised novel labels warning women to use these products “with care.” soon, however, the department of national health would conclude that greater direction was required. in the second section, this story recounts how further amendments to these regulations, in 1950, introduced new labeling rules unique to estrogenic cosmetics. under these rules, women were instructed, for the first time in canadian history, to use consumer products “only as directed” on a label. in variable administrative practices related to labeling, officials negotiated the content of these usage directions. in this way, national health quietly reintroduced dose-response logics back into estrogen regulation. the conclusion summarizes these historical events, considering their stakes and continued implications. enacting cosmetics and gender through a “use with care” label, 1939–1949 to appreciate how potent estrogenic cosmetics and powerful labeling techniques emerged together, canada’s sex hormone regulations provide a revealing starting point. first enacted in 1944, these regulations purported to standardize biological drugs (tessaro, 2018). efforts to standardize hormones and other biological drugs were increasingly pursued by laboratory scientists and pharmaceutical manufacturers in the interwar period, and chemical synthesis of biological drugs had arguably “dissolved the boundaries between natural and artificial substances” (von schwerin, stoff, & wahrig, 2013, p. 29). yet, despite this lack of essential difference, “biologicals were often more complex, more difficult to handle, and less standardized than the chemical drugs” (gaudillière, 2005, p. 606), with multiple physiological effects both desired and harmful (von schwerin, stoff, & wahrig, 2013). rather than see these as side effects, biologics are better understood as ontologically precarious. their precariousness arises from their “historical construction as both natural and artificial objects” (von schwerin, stoff, & wahrig, 2013, p. 29), as their “naturalness” made them special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 5 culturally desirable and pharmaceutically promising, yet difficult to produce and control. in the early 1940s, the task of stabilizing estrogenic biologics, and converting them to drugs, commonly fell to standardized bioassays (gaudillière, 2010; oudshoorn, 1994). despite widespread reliance by scientists and manufacturers on standardized tests to materialize hormones, in canada in 1944, national health resisted endorsing conventional standardization methods for estrogenic substances such as estrone, estradiol benzoate, and stilboestrol. senior departmental officials rebuffed efforts by canadian physicians and pharmacists to ensure that the new sex hormone regulations would prescribe standardized bioassay methods for measuring and materializing the potency of estrogens. relatedly, national health also refused to regulate standard doses of estrogenic preparations, though the efficacy and safety of estrogens were widely conceived as a matter of dose (krieger et al., 2005; langston, 2010; sengoopta, 2006; watkins, 2007).10 instead, national health delegated to pharmaceutical manufacturers the power to set doses of estrogenic drugs (tessaro, 2018). in lieu of potency or dose standards, the regulations adopted “special” labeling provisions (curran, 1953, p. 185). these rules required labels to supply information on their bioassay methods and to caution women to consult physicians (pc 1944-3721, p. 2292). enacted with variable potencies and unfixed doses, its safety and predictability ensured not by standards but by labels, estrogen was materialized by canadian regulators in 1944 as simultaneously safe and potent (tessaro, 2018). with these techniques, national health regulators rendered safe doses of estrogenic substances imperceptible (murphy, 2006). when the 1944 sex hormone regulations were enacted, canada lacked statutory power to regulate cosmetics. six years earlier, american federal law had been extended to cover cosmetics (food, drug, and cosmetic act, 1938).11 in reaction, early in 1939, the canadian parliament hastily considered amendments to the food and drugs act. a new definition of drug made cosmetics a class of drug and the term cosmetic was defined. furthermore, the bill empowered the government to license cosmetics manufacturers. the bill passed and while much of it was proclaimed into force that summer, the cosmetics provisions were not (proclamation, july 22, 1939).12 implying that masculine war efforts trumped feminine beauty products, linton davidson, a food and drug analyst and informal chronicler of the department of national health’s history, argued that world war ii caused the government to postpone enacting the cosmetic provisions (davidson, 1949b).13 yet during the war, the use and sale of cosmetics exploded, special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 6 as women turned to performances of femininity to demonstrate their commitment to the war effort (black, 2004; mceuen, 2011; peiss, 1998). in fact, the better explanation for the delay is that, before the bill passed, there were murmurs that its cosmetic provisions may not be constitutionally valid; indeed, in a separate account, davidson (1949a) admitted that “questions of validity loomed” (p. 81) over the bill. by that summer, hormonal cosmetics were offered for sale in canada.14 their potency conjured from estrone, estradiol, equilin, equilenin, and des, these products comprised estrogens whipped into creams or mixed into oils. when marketing these lotions, the cosmetics industry stirred up a toxic blend of gender, age, and class directives, in a semiotic mixture infused with racial hierarchy. advertisers bonded estrogenic creams to biomedical discourses in which menopause, and women’s aging, were beginning to be framed as pathological (bell, 1987, 1995; mccrea, 1983; li, 2003b; mire, 2014). elizabeth watkins (2007) shows in her history of hormone replacement therapy that, as cosmetics firms in the interwar period increasingly promoted the notion that youth and beauty were synonymous, their “ads imparted a clear message: use of estrogen-containing creams would make a woman’s skin look younger” (pp. 84-85). just as white, middleand upper-class women sought hormone replacement therapy to relieve menopausal discomfort (watkins, 2007), estrogenic cosmetics, sold in eaton’s and other high-end department stores as expensive luxury face creams, were likewise targeted at and favored by privileged female consumers. the main promoter of hormone creams was cosmetics guru helena rubinstein, whose products were among the most expensive on the market (mceuen, 2011).15 luxury hormone creams not only offered women youth and beauty but, inevitably, they also implied whiteness. as kyla schuller (2018) shows, the very idea of proper gendering is part of a racialized project of ranking populations. in the interwar period, the emerging mainstream cosmetics industry in the united states had been quick to commodify whiteness (schuller, 2009; black, 2004).16 during world war ii, estrogenic cosmetics fell in step with shifting criteria of female beauty when, as war created and deepened racial hierarchies in the us, a “genuinely ‘feminine’ face was dictated by racial meanings and age,” and the “women considered most likely to possess or have the ability to create one were middleclass housewives” (mceuen, 2011, p. 6). as parliamentarians were publicly debating the cosmetics bill, national health officials were privately deliberating whether to investigate estrogenic breast enhancement creams. in march 1939, davidson brought his supervisor’s attention special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 7 to an advertisement for s-8 brand of hormone preparations, represented as “restoring the breasts to the graceful contours and firmness of youth” (figure 1). declaring a shapely bust to be the “essence of womanly beauty” and describing a greco-roman bust carved in gleaming white marble as the “most envied feminine form in the world,” the ad discursively links hormones, gender, and racial superiority. characterizing the breast cream as a cosmetic not a drug—which landed it outside national health’s jurisdiction—davidson nonetheless proposed investigatory efforts. but with the bill’s passage still pending, assistant chief dominion analyst aime valin directed davidson to take “no action for present” (figure 2). special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 8 figure 1. advertisement for s-8 brand of hormone preparations, 1 march 1939. library and archives canada, rg 29, volume 258, file number 347-1-6 (part 2), reproduction copy number e011195705. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 9 figure 2. analyst report to assistant chief dominion analyst, 23 march 1939. library and archives canada, rg 29, volume 258, file number 347-1-6 (part 2), reproduction copy number e-011195705. estrogenic creams were not supported by scientific studies demonstrating their safety. there was a paucity of evidence about to what extent topically applied estrogen was absorbed into blood streams and circulated through bodies, although some researchers attempted to assess systemic effects. for example, in a 1938 study, researchers examined creams containing androgens or estrogens (moore, lamar & beck, 1938). using a low dose, they found these hormones were easily absorbed through animals’ skin, and that estrogenic face cream “sold commercially and recommended for the removal of wrinkles from normal women special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 10 has decided internal effects when applied daily on the skin of experimental animals” (moore, lamar & beck, 1938, p. 14). concluding that the creams posed hazards to women, they urged further study. yet over the next decade, such studies would be sparse, and cosmetic companies’ enthusiasm for estrogen ever more abundant. neither the us food and drug administration (fda) nor the american medical association (ama) harbored positive feelings towards estrogenic creams. to the contrary, in the late 1930s, there was “a strong bias by the us medical profession against the over-counter sales” of estrogenic cosmetics (mock, 1951, p. 870). concerned about carcinogenicity, the ama campaigned against the creams. after it published an editorial critical of endocreme (“endocreme,” 1938), the manufacturer sued the ama in defamation. supportive of the ama’s position, the fda supplied expert evidence, but the federal court rejected it, holding that the animal studies relied on by fda witnesses to claim that estrogens were carcinogenic were insufficient to prove a likelihood of cancer in women. langston (2010) finds that, as a result of the court’s decision, the fda backed down from enforcement activities to control these creams. taking a longer view, the fda regained its zeal by the late 1940s and early 1950s, when it targeted estrogenic creams with misbranding prosecutions (bennett, 2020).17 in canada, after the second world war, national health began preparing to regulate cosmetics, an effort led by its food and drugs division. when, late in 1945, the division informed industry of its plans, the toilet goods manufacturers’ association responded with a lawyer’s opinion that the statutory provision empowering cosmetic licensing was unconstitutional.18 a department of justice lawyer confirmed this opinion. in elmer driedger’s view, the licensing provision was “of doubtful validity.”19 with driedger’s assistance,20 in 1946 the food and drugs division prepared new statutory language on cosmetics. pivoting away from licensing, the bill proposed to prohibit the sale of injurious cosmetics and to require manufacturers to register cosmetics with information about their ingredients, and created a suite of regulatory powers. the deputy ministers of national health and justice approved the bill. however, brooke claxton, the minister of national health and welfare, belatedly intervened. anxious that the registration requirements “may prove contentious,” claxton’s intervention killed the cosmetics amendments.21 at the end of 1946, minister claxton moved to national defense. national health was soon moving forward again on the cosmetics file. researching what it could special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 11 not yet lawfully regulate, the department created a cosmetics section within laboratory services and appointed a cosmetics analyst.22 of course, cosmetics were just one part of the department’s growing capacities; in april 1949, the food and drug regulations were thoroughly overhauled (pc 1949-1536; davidson, 1949a). concurrently, canada finally enacted the 1939 statutory amendments regarding cosmetics (except for the constitutionally dubious licensing provision), thereby making cosmetics a class of drugs (proclamation, april 5, 1949). cosmetics could now be specifically governed through regulations. however, the only type of cosmetics that canada then chose to regulate were products containing sex hormones (pc 1949-1536, pp. 945-947). in 1949 no cosmetics were made with androgens, gonadotrophins, or progesterone—no testosterone tonic, no gonadotrophic gloss. only estrogen, that spring of youthful, reproductive femininity, had infiltrated cosmetics. thus, canada’s first cosmetics regulation really applied only to products containing estrogens. driedger had no difficulty with representing cosmetics as a subclass of drugs. robert curran, in contrast, overtly disparaged this legislative decision. as national health’s in-house lawyer, curran’s public disdain for the canadian government’s approach is jarring. when the amendments came into effect in 1949, he wrote an article for a mainly american audience that mocked the canadian legislation in (cis)sexist terms: notwithstanding the opinion of a great constitutional lawyer of long ago that “parliament can do anything except change a man into a woman or a woman into a man,” it would have been preferable if cosmetics and devices were treated as individual subjects in the legislation, rather than to distort the ordinary meaning of a drug by including in it things which common sense rejects from it (curran, 1949, p. 411). in this less than subtle rhetoric, curran advanced gendered distinctions between cosmetics and drugs. admitting that cosmetics contained medicinal ingredients, he nevertheless reckoned that cosmetics were “not expected to contain a high degree or medication nor are extensive therapeutic claims likely to be made for them” (curran, 1949, p. 411). for curran, the boundary was clear: “the borderline between cosmetics and drugs, of course, rests upon the claims which are made” (1952, p. 718; see also curran, 1953). moreover, “puffery” need not be discouraged. after all, the public would not be deceived by exaggerated or false claims, as nobody really thought that cosmetics would do “what nature has failed to do” (curran, 1952, p. 718). special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 12 no substance challenged such rigid distinctions more than estrogen. as will be seen, some estrogenic “cosmetics” were more potent than estrogenic “drugs.” ads for premarin, marketed as a drug for menopause, and for helena rubinstein’s cream, marketed as a cosmetic, made similar claims: youthful beauty, reproductive femininity, reinvigorated vitality, and happier husbands (see figures below). faced with estrogen’s multiple materializations, and with government lawyers’ diverse depictions, how, then, did national health decide to regulate estrogenic cosmetics? as in 1944, when it had devised a “caution label” for estrogenic drugs, in april 1949, the department once again turned to labels in lieu of standards, licensing, or registration. the sex hormone regulations were amended to prohibit the sale of cosmetic products containing sex hormones, unless a label bore the statement “this preparation contains a potent sex hormone. use with care” (pc 1949-1536, section 02.0009). canadians had never previously been directed, by a label, to use a consumer product with care. in the 1940s, in canada as in the us, food and drugs were required to bear labels stating what a product was. such labels impliedly represented that the product met legally prescribed standards of quality and identity, exposing companies to misbranding or adulteration prosecutions if the product did not “measure up” to regulated recipes. national health’s innovation for estrogenic cosmetics enlisted labels to govern women’s behavior, deflecting responsibility away from government and industry. for these gendered products, safety would no longer be built into the product by requiring manufacturers to follow a standardized recipe set out in pharmacopoeia or regulations. with labels, women were made responsible for ensuring their own safety, by attending carefully to how they used cosmetics. this differential regulatory treatment reflected and reproduced gendered norms about women and bodies. estrogens were acknowledged to be potent, yet these “naturally occurring” womanly substances were branded as “essentially safe.”23 cosmetics were brushed off as figuratively and materially superficial; as curran intimated, women used cosmetics to deceive. deceptive women could be compelled to take responsibility for avoiding the hazards occasioned by their guile. further, regulating through labels strengthened the notion that topical cosmetics, used to cleanse or alter bodies’ external surfaces, were less harmful than drugs administered parenterally or orally, thus reinforcing bodies as special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 13 impermeable, bounded, autonomous (but see alaimo, 2010). shaped by this gendered script, estrogen was prepared to act up. as enacted by canadian regulators in 1944, estrogens were already ontologically precarious— natural and synthetic, desirable and harmful, potent and safe. once materialized as an everyday cosmetic, estrogen became even more resistant to traditional regulatory controls. fed by regulators’ reluctance to control cosmetics, fueled by stereotypes about gender, sexuality, age, and class, estrogen materially provoked the injunction to “use with care.” rules had engendered estrogenic potency, and now estrogen was potentiating gendered rules. resurrecting dose-response logics in estrogen regulation through labeling practices, 1950–1953 one year after introducing “use with care” labels, canada would again amend the sex hormone regulations. true to pattern, national health devised another novel form of label, continuing the turn toward delegating responsibility for safety to women consumers. in the process, estrogen and labels would become ever more entangled. the amendment, made in 1950, abandoned “use with care” labels for estrogenic cosmetics. instead, any cosmetic product “containing a sex hormone purporting to have oestrogenic properties” was now prohibited from sale—unless it was “demonstrated to be free from systemic effect from sex hormones,” and unless new labeling requirements were met (pc 1950-2084, section c.02.010). labels would now be required to state, “use only as directed,” and relatedly, companies would be required to include “directions for use” with estrogenic cosmetics (pc 1950-2084, sections c.02.010(a)(v) and c.02.010(b)(ii)).24 the new legal test demanding that estrogenic cosmetics be proven “free from systemic effect” was laudable. it reflected ongoing medical concern about the carcinogenic hazards of topical estrogen. importantly, this test did not necessarily depend on dose-response reasoning or evidence. to the contrary, with ahistorical reference here to a modern-day concept, this test appeared to set a highly “precautionary” standard. rather than setting a toxicological threshold, on paper, the law demanded positive proof of safety. in practices, however, the poison remained in the dose. national health’s scientists were devoted to toxicology’s monotonic curves, measuring and materializing sex hormones through dose-response calculations. despite this, as special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 14 mentioned, back in 1944, the department had declined to set dose ranges or potency standards for estrogenic substances in the sex hormone regulations. consequently, national health scientists lacked any regulatory incentive to test the physiological effects of estrogenic drugs. having eschewed standards, national health was unable, by 1949, to perceive either a “safe” or “hazardous” dose of estrogen. what amount of estrogen in an oral, parenteral, or topical preparation was safe? which estrogenic cosmetics were “free of systemic effect”? national health did not know. dose had been left to manufacturers and dosage left to clinicians. once statutorily empowered to regulate cosmetics, national health had to face up to dose. how would the department determine what dose— what amount—of estrogenic potency in a cosmetic was safe? this question was complicated by the obvious fact that face cream did not come packaged in “doses.” even had national health been monitoring the effects of estrogen preparations in cold laboratories with standardized bioassays and rodents, moving into the comfortable homes of middle-class, middle-aged women, estrogen and bodies met in ways less precise. in that creamy form, estrogen was slippery.25 performed as predictably potent in mass-produced pills and medically supervised injections, in quotidian beauty regimens, estrogen became less knowable. how much cream a woman applied before going to bed, or when starting her day in the morning, was not determined quantitatively or mechanically, but through sensory and affective practices. how much cream does it take to make your skin feel softer, smoother, firmer? a dry winter’s wind, a poor night’s sleep, a husband’s bad mood—all caused one’s relations with cream to change. when these practices changed, so did estrogen’s effects. in its cohabitation with wealthy women and their skin, estrogen enacted an ambiguous toxicity. advising on this question was the responsibility of dr. leonard pugsley. the department’s only endocrinologist, pugsley had done doctoral studies at mcgill university (pugsley, 1932), supervised by the acclaimed biochemist dr. james collip. collip had extracted and isolated the human and equine estrogens comprising the menopause drugs emmenin and premarin, backed by canadian pharmaceutical firm ayerst, mckenna & harrison, ltd.26 by 1947 pugsley had become the chief of laboratory services at national health. he also continued to research bioassay methods for and physiological effects of sex hormones (davidson, 1949, pp. 92-94; “reports to the reader,” 1951).27 as langston (2010) shows, pugsley’s research was quietly influential, leading national health—and eventually the fda—to end the use of des in chicken feed.28 with hormonal special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 15 cosmetics, however, pugsley would take his cues from us companies and regulators. in a 1951 article that simultaneously highlighted and obscured national health’s practices, pugsley described the 1950 amendments to the sex hormone regulations. explaining that national health had thought it advisable to “limit the amount” of estrogen in cosmetics, he wrote that the department had nonetheless decided against legally prescribing an upper potency limit, because a limit “would tend to indicate approval and freedom from any undesirable side effects” at lower potencies (pugsley, 1951, p. 536). yet his article also repeatedly claimed that an “upper limit” had been administratively adopted (pugsley, 1951, p. 536). this inconsistency attracts legal scrutiny, as it suggests that the department was doing precisely what it had decided not to authorize in law. the internal inconsistency becomes less confusing when one recalls that pugsley’s article was aimed at an american audience. pugsley was seeking to reassure readers that canadian regulatory practices for estrogen were not so far removed from american ones. but american practices for estrogenic cosmetics were also legally oblique. the fda had no authority to set potency limits for estrogenic cosmetics. instead, it attempted indirectly to stipulate upper potency limits, through the specter of misbranding prosecutions or, relatedly, by threatening to deem higher potency creams to be drugs and to regulate them as such. while the legal source of the fda’s estrogenic potency limits was murky, the material source of the fda’s “rule” was not. the rule was born of and enmeshed within the products of helena rubinstein. in the 1940s, helena rubinstein packaged her “estrogenic hormone cream” in jars advertised as containing one month’s supply. such ads implied how much cream should be used (figures 3, 4). part of a strategy to paint its products as scientific and therapeutic (watkins, 2007), the marketing tactic made cream seem like medicine and amount like dosage, aiming to persuade women to buy and use a jar every month. by 1949 the fda effectively took the position that existing products of helena rubinstein (and other reputable firms) reflected permissible potency and dose. to limit daily exposure, the fda seems to “have settled on 10,000 international units (iu) of oestrogens per ounce as an acceptable amount for hormone creams, as long as the amount used was no greater than 2 ounces per month” (bennett, 2020; see also mock, 1951).29 special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 16 figure 3. helena rubinstein advertisement, toronto daily star, 6 april 1945. “a scientific preparation that will help you achieve beauty for your skin by retarding the effects of aging. 30night supply.” reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. further reproduction prohibited without permission. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 17 figure 4. helena rubinstein advertisement, toronto daily star, 17 october 1947. “estrogenic hormone cream – contains natural hormones which your skin absorbs. result? you look younger! use it for one month. see the change. 4.50.” reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. further reproduction prohibited without permission. in canada, rather than a murkily authorized limit of 10,000 iu per ounce, the 1950 regulatory amendments required estrogenic cosmetics be demonstrated to be special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 18 “free from systemic effect.” as noted, this test seems highly precautionary. how was this test squared with pugsley’s claim that national health had adopted an upper potency limit for estrogenic cosmetics? the answer lay in labeling practices. as mentioned, under the 1950 regulations, to be sold as a cosmetic, not only did a preparation need be proven free of systemic effect but its label had to state “use only as directed” and to provide “directions for use.” these labeling techniques were the means through which dose-response considerations, erased from the sex hormone regulations in 1944, were smuggled back into estrogen regulation in 1950. the regulations did not articulate what “directions for use” were required. rather, when requiring manufacturers to give usage directions, national health inspectors could try to force firms to stipulate the amount of cream that women should use on a monthly basis. if that amount of cream contained less than a certain potency, national health could deem the product to have no systemic effect and it could be legally sold as a cosmetic. in this way, the reintroduction of dose-response logics to estrogen regulation in canada was implicit and discretionary. pugsley’s article painted national health’s new labeling approach as deriving from a “ruling on potency,” claiming that “an administrative ruling has been made on an upper limit of potency for one month's supply” (1951, p. 536). yet no ruling, in any adjudicative or administrative law sense, had ever been made.30 recall that pugsley was translating the canadian approach to his american audience. us lawyers, consumer groups, and industry representatives were accustomed to the administrative rulings issued by the fda under the 1938 food, drug, and cosmetic act. by contrast, the canadian statutory scheme did not delegate power to national health to issue administrative rulings. nevertheless, this story stays with pugsley’s phrase “administrative ruling.”31 in many respects, it perfectly apprehends a “way of regulating” (gaudillière & hess, 2013) emerging within national health by the 1950s. capturing a move away from legally codified standards in legislation or regulation, and towards more discretionary and individualized obligations, administrative ruling reflects the processual dynamic in this way of regulating. while rules codify a fixed and stable interpretation, intended to apply generally, “ruling” instead evokes more fluid regulatory interventions, tailored to individual cases. three episodes in the early 1950s reveal how instances of “administrative ruling” by national health officials, centered on labeling, reintroduced dose-response logics to estrogen regulation. in doing so, these officials performed highly variable special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 19 enactments of dose-response relationships. the earliest example, in 1950, was spurred by newspaper ads for five different estrogenic breast creams. national health’s inspection services asked j. t. thompson, the department’s cosmetics lead, whether the creams had systemic effects. thompson reported back with a specific enactment of a dose-response relationship. he started with the intended physiological response—growth of mammary tissue—and then worked backward to judge what amount would achieve this response. in his view, the requisite dose would be so high as to cause systemic effects. this approach conveniently allowed thomson to take a hands-off approach: i don’t think bust development creams should be classed as cosmetics or used except under medical supervision. to be effective, the dosage must be heavy, and i should think some degree of systemic effect would be unavoidable. enough at least to put the preparations out of the cosmetic class. having thus politely washed my hands of them, i get out from under!32 however, in a separate report to inspection services, pugsley disagreed that these five creams had systemic effects. while he acknowledged that they would cause growth in mammary tissue, rather than ask what dose would cause this response, pugsley argued that breast tissue growth was inherently cosmetic: “i would say this is an effect on local tissue and not necessarily systemic action.”33 pugsley’s enactment of weak protection was entangled with his strong commitment to labeling. even though the creams were each advertised at 30,000 iu of potency— three times stronger than what the fda typically tolerated for cosmetics—he felt label directions with a thirty-day limit would suffice. of note, these five highly potent creams were already sold in a thirty-day supply. thus, if national health wished to limit women’s exposure to only 10,000 iu per month, its inspectors would need to direct us firms to shrink the physical size of packages sold in canada. neutered by pugsley’s advice, national health inspectors predictably took no action.34 national health’s most protracted investigation of estrogenic cosmetics, pursued from its vancouver office in 1952, provides a second example of how dose was enacted through labeling practices. inspector e. l. devlin was trying to bring venus products—which sold a breast cream called formula v7, advertised with a pseudoscientific booklet—into compliance with the sex hormone regulations. in a long letter to venus, setting out regulatory requirements and explaining the potential carcinogenic hazards of estrogens, devlin performed a subtly different variant of dose-response. he advised that, given estrogen’s effects on breast tissue, one must assume that applying formula v7 to breasts would affect “the special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 20 body hormone balance” such that the cream must be “regarded as having systemic effects.” he therefore deemed formula v7 to be a drug (though, at 6,000 iu, it was one-fifth the potency of the five creams earlier deemed to be cosmetics). as a drug, formula v7 would need to comply with the drug labeling rule in section c.02.007 of the regulations, and, in devlin’s view, the label would need to state “what amount is to be used over a 30 day period.”35 without doubt, devlin’s precautionary interpretation of the regulations was legally wrong, though it exemplifies how distinctions between cosmetics and drugs were enacted in practice. based on his view that formula v7 had systemic effects, devlin properly concluded that it was a drug not a cosmetic; however, devlin was wrong to understand that the regulations’ drug labeling rule required any “directions for use.”36 regardless of the fact that national health had no authority to impose directions for use upon drugs, firms that hawked hormones were often agreeable to directing women on how to use their products. in this case, venus complied with devlin’s (erroneous) advice, promising to label its jars with the weight, a statement that the cream contained 6,000 iu of estrogenic substance per ounce, and a direction to use not more than 1 and 2/3 ounces each month.37 indeed, venus had pronounced numerous directions in an insert in its advertising booklet, many of which were outrageous and drew startling associations between formula v7 and cancer. for example, the insert advised that while “formula v7 is not intended for the discovery of existing cysts but if its use is instrumental in doing so, then it may be considered an additional though unintentional benefit.” when devlin told venus to remove the insert, the company argued that it was just an “amplification” of the directions for use already required by law.38 leveraging power through labels, national health inspectors were enacting dose controls that the department had rejected when originally preparing the 1944 sex hormone regulations. seizing upon a labeling rule for cosmetics, infusing it in practice with dose-response considerations, shifting those considerations towards substances deemed drugs, inspectors resurrected dose and reinserted it into the regulatory regime. admittedly, reigning in a local cosmetics company dabbling in quackery was not the same as interfering in innovations of major pharmaceutical firms. power was material. yet estrogen, too, was powerful, triggering national health officials to re-embrace dose-response logics previously eschewed. devlin wrapped up his compliance efforts with venus in may 1952. a few weeks later, a select us congressional committee, known as the delaney committee, special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 21 released its final report on chemicals in cosmetics. this report followed two years of high-profile hearings, chaired by congressman james delaney, to study chemicals in foods and cosmetics. endocrinologists and dermatologists had testified on potential hazards of estrogenic creams. some witnesses had equivocated;39 others had clearly expressed the view that these creams could be carcinogenic and hazardous.40 almost all had testified that hazard was a matter of dose. as the products were sold as both night and day creams, the report observed that women could be “covered by these substances 24 hours of every day” (house of representatives, 1952, p. 613). the report also expressed concern that estrogenic creams, if applied in “sufficient quantity,” may cause “undesirable physiological changes” (house of representatives, 1952, pp. 613-614). however, the committee ultimately recommended only that more research “would be desirable” (house of representatives, 1952, p. 614). only a few researchers would take up this invitation. one study found that, even at small doses, estrogenic creams caused systemic effects—namely, endometrial hyperplasia—if applied over a long period (goldberg & harris, 1952). another found the creams did not induce any clinically observable changes to the appearance of facial skin (behrman, 1954). overall, this small body of research indicated that estrogenic creams were not just harmful but useless. regardless, some commentators parroted industry’s position: there was “a consensus of opinion amongst experienced observers that cosmetic hormone creams with a maximum potency of 10,000 iu per ounce (31 g.) of vehicle, if used in the manner by the informed manufacturer, are free from systemic effects” (peck & klarmann, as cited in bennett, 2020). faced with a substance that could not easily be pinned down, national health entrenched its reliance on labels as a regulatory strategy. a third example shows how, by 1953, informal potency limits on labels had become so routinized that, provided a product included suitable directions for use, inspectors could overlook unsubstantiated and misleading advertising claims. when regional inspectors internally raised questions about an ad for lady esther hormone cream, which boasted of the cream’s high potency and ability to “renew the beautifying effects of your own waning hormone supply” (figure 6), the chief of inspection services quickly advised that the claims were “within the realm of permitted cosmetic puffery.”41 labeled at 10,000 iu and marketed as thirty days’ supply, this product exemplified compliance with the unwritten rules characterizing administrative ruling. yet such ads exploited women’s fear of aging and “preyed on women’s economic and emotional dependence on men,” raising the scenario “of a husband special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 22 fleeing his wife’s wrinkled skin and finding comfort in the arms of a smootherskinned woman” (watkins, 2007, p. 87). however, national health inspectors had no power, and perhaps no inclination, to find any “objectionable greasiness” in the advertisements warning middle-aged women that, if they did not use potent estrogenic creams, they would lose their husbands.42 figure 5. venus products’ advertising booklet insert for formula v7, march 1952. library and archives canada, rg29, volume 259, file number 347-1-6 (part 4), reproduction copy number i115336. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 23 figure 6. lady esther advertisement, london free press, 26 october 1953. “stay lovely… stay loved… with lady esther natural estrogenic hormone cream.” library and archives canada, rg 29, volume 259, file number 347-1-6 (part 4), reproduction copy number i-115336. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 24 figure 7. helena rubinstein advertisement, toronto daily star, 6 february 1952. “your husband looks at you with new interest.” reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. further reproduction prohibited without permission. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 25 figure 8. premarin advertisement, 1951, in the vancouver medical association bulletin, november 1951. (history of nursing in pacific canada, ubc open collections, retrieved from https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/historyofnursinginpacificcanada). https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/historyofnursinginpacificcanada special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 26 concluding thoughts: law in estrogen, estrogen in cosmetics, cosmetics through labels law is still “commonly seen as a discourse, something that is distinct from, yet gives meaning to, things in the ‘real world’” (johnson, 2015, pp. 409-410). however, careful readings of historical evidence can fracture this boundary, revealing law’s material formations and matter’s legal forms. holding together matter and law—or, shrinking the distance between the onto-epistemological and the political that this equation solidifies, holding together potency and power43— can subvert insistent representations of toxicity as “wayward particles behaving badly” (liboiron, tironi, & calvillo, 2018, p. 333). instead, toxicity can be interrogated as ways in which “forms of life and their constituent relations, from the scale of cells to cultures, are enabled, constrained, and extinguished within broader power systems” (liboiron et al., 2018, p. 336). in exploring the historicity of estrogen as a legal phenomenon, and the historicity of labeling as an estrogenic phenomenon, this account has interrogated how estrogenic realities were enacted with regulatory powers, techniques, and practices in canada in the mid-twentieth century. materialized through regulation as potent and ineffective, hazardous and safe, natural and an artifice, systemic and cosmetic, estrogen was a provocation to regulators (roberts, 2007). perceiving toxicity through monotonic dose-response curves, and facing potent substances that were associated with cancer and reproductive effects, in the early 1940s, the department of national health nonetheless decided to let the pharmaceutical industry decide in what doses and potencies estrogen should be made and sold. in so doing, conventional dose-response thresholds were written out of regulations under the food and drugs act, making it largely impossible to perceive a “safe dose” of estrogen (murphy, 2006). in this way, estrogen came to matter in midcentury canada. thus materialized, estrogen bit back, catalyzing new labeling practices. when national health decided later that decade to regulate estrogenic cosmetics, but was unable to rely on regulatory experience with dose thresholds or potency standards for parenteral or oral estrogen, its officials subtly reintroduced doseresponse logics to topical estrogen. they did so by effectively enacting “potency limits,” through novel labels that directed women how to use these products— first by suggesting “care” should be used, and later by providing direction on how much cream to use in a given period. these labeling practices were not uniform, however, nor were the dose-response logics that they perpetuated. this account has showed how variable labeling practices enacted different ontologies of special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 27 potency. departmental inspectors, tasked with scrutinizing ads to identify noncompliance and on alert for misleading representations, were suspicious of overblown claims made for these creams and inclined to assume adverse effects, working backwards from this assumption of hazard to promote safer doses through use directions. the chief of national health’s laboratory services, by contrast, trained as an endocrinologist, open to hormonal drugs and skeptical of unproven hazards, acted from an assumption of safety. pugsley viewed labels less as a means to guarantee safety—which was presumed—and more as a performance of regulatory oversight. ultimately, these practices reacted to and reproduced estrogens’ precarious ontologies through regulatory techniques and material technologies of labeling. for regulating ambiguously potent substances marketed to women, labels were becoming instrumental. in this entanglement of law, toxicity, and gender, estrogen was not the only phenomenon being naturalized. menopausal women were also constructed with estrogen (bell, 1987; mccrea, 1983). estrogen was performed, in regulatory practices, as malleable, superficial, deceptive, temperamental. in regulating cosmetic estrogen with labels rather than standards, national health sought to “standardize” the consumption behavior of menopausal women construed to possess those very same features. as artefacts of gendered regulatory strategies for estrogen, product labels have a troubled history. in canada, labeling techniques emerged as a means by which industry and government regulators could evade responsibility for potency, dose, and safety of estrogenic substances, as product labels delegated responsibility for “safe dosing” of potentially harmful substances to feminized consumers. moreover, this delegation of responsibility was never about arming women with information about hazards that they could rely upon to make informed “choices.” rather, direction for use labels evolved in response to estrogenic substances that had been “standardized” with variable potencies and unfixed doses. far from transparency, such labels maintained the imperceptibility of estrogenic hazard. thoroughly naturalized, today, as a gendered technique of green governmentality or of precautionary consumption for toxic consumer products (mackendrick 2018; scott, haw, & lee, 2017), warning and direction labels first emerged with estrogen. in canada, estrogens were the first substances for which labels were used in lieu of standards, initially for drugs, then for cosmetics. labels allowed regulators to require that potent ingredients be identified in consumer products and to discipline women to regulate their own exposure by following directions. such labels made it explicit, for the first time, that women would need to govern special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 28 themselves accordingly.44 in this respect, national health’s potent mixture of labels and “administrative ruling” to apprehend and mitigate the hazards of estrogen should be understood as an early example of risk regulation in canadian law. the deployment of usage directions performed estrogen as a risk to be managed, rather than as a hazard to be avoided. this mode of governance kept dose-response considerations, limits, or thresholds “off the books”; rather than codified in statutes or regulations, potency limits were enacted more ambiguously in fluid administrative practices. materialized in these practices, potency becomes an assemblage of social, material, and legal relations that are enabled and circumscribed through product labels. returning to the old toxicological truism, perhaps there is another critique available, one that moves us beyond simple condemnation of reliance on conventional monotonic dose-response curves for endocrine disrupting chemicals. what if we started with the proposition that—at least in some times, at least in some places—the dose really does make the poison? if the dose makes the poison, then what makes the dose? with growing calls by some activists and academics for more extensive consumer product labeling as a regulatory strategy to tackle exposure to toxic chemicals, such questions remain entirely relevant today. mandatory labeling of gendered consumer products has rapidly traveled far beyond estrogenic cosmetics. a few years after the sex hormone regulations first incorporated cosmetics, standalone cosmetic regulations followed (sor/52-271). these regulations governed cosmetics not through standards, licensing, or registration, but with cautions, directions, and other labeling requirements—techniques that were introduced, in canada, with estrogen. acknowledgements i owe many thanks to dayna nadine scott and roxanne mykitiuk at york university, who co-supervised the llm research from which this article was born. this research was funded by the law foundation of bc graduate fellowship, the honourable william z. estey graduate fellowship, an ontario graduate scholarship, and a york graduate scholarship. shelley gavigan encouraged me to “go wide” in the archives, with fruitful results, and library and archives canada staff provided invaluable assistance. thanks are also due to aryn martin and philip girard, who read this research closely and generously, and emily grabham, who provided useful guidance at the final stages. i am also very grateful to catalyst’s expert editorial team, and to two anonymous reviewers for their deep special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 29 engagement with and elevation of this work. notes 1 these chemicals were called “environmental estrogens” in the 1980s. that evocative term has fallen out of use as scientists have come to understand that endocrine-disrupting chemicals have many different and complex modes of action. in addition to estrogenic action, endocrine-disrupting chemicals can have androgenic or anti-androgenic effects. further, they do not only mimic hormones by attaching to hormone receptors but can block receptors, among other participations in endocrinal systems. for a scientist’s account summarizing the evolution of the field, see mclachlan (2016). 2 the scientific literature on the human health effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals is voluminous. for one authoritative summary, see bergman, heindel, jobling, kidd, zoeller, & world health organization (2013). 3 in brief, dose is the amount of a drug that is administered at one moment in time, while dosage is the dose that is administered over a particular time period. 4 in 1944 the former department of pensions and national health was split into two departments. pensions became the responsibility of a new department of veterans affairs, and a separate department of national health and welfare was legislatively constituted. see an act to establish a department of national health and welfare, 1944–1945, and an act to amend the department of national health and welfare act, 1945. 5 for examples and summaries of this scholarship, see cloatre (2013); cloatre & pickersgill (2015); cole & bertenthal (2017); davies (2017); grabham (2016); faulkner, lange, & lawless (2012); and lezaun (2012). 6 the material turn has found tremendously diverse expression, including through actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology, thing theory, agential realism, posthumanism, speculative realism, non-representational theories, and material feminisms. many of these approaches have quite different disciplinary origins, and it is not my goal in this essay to delineate or assess the various similarities or differences. 7 library and archives canada, legal opinions and materials of precedential value, rg 13, vol. 2635, file no. 9-150108, “powers to license manufacturers of special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 30 cosmetics / if section 3(j) of food & drugs act is unconstitutional”. this file was released in full under the access to information act on january 29, 2018, following a statutory appeal to the federal information commissioner, and is on file with the author. 8 for the leading historiography of sex hormones, estrogenic drugs (and other technologies), and/or endocrinology in the interwar period in north america and western european states, see bell (1987, 1995); oudshoorn (1994); fausto-stirling (2000); seaman (2003); li (2003a, 2003b); gaudillière (2005, 2010); krieger et al. (2005); sengoopta (2006); roberts (2007); watkins (2007); langston (2010); and haraway (2012). this list excludes historiography of the contraceptive pill, introduced in the mid-1950s. 9 the term sex hormones is fraught with difficulty and has long been problematized in scientific and feminist discourses (oudshoorn, 1994; faustosterling, 2000; roberts, 2007). like these authors, i adopt the term where it was used by my historical actors. scientists and bureaucrats within national health and on the canadian committee on pharmacopoeial standards did not always use this term. at the risk of overgeneralizing, these actors tended to speak of sex hormones when contemplating end-use products (including in the context of the sex hormone regulations). in other contexts, such as when preparing pharmacopoeia monographs, they would speak of estrone, estradiol benzoate, stilboestrol, and so on. 10 however, as langston (2010) shows, as early as 1939, some research into the synthetic estrogen stilboestrol (des) had also shown that toxicity did not relate strictly to dose, and indeed that “low doses of des could be more toxic than high doses” (p. 38). she argues that as “early as the 1930s…researchers knew that estrogens do not act in linear or predictable ways” (p. 38). 11 in its food, drug, and cosmetic act 1938, the united states imposed requirements for pre-market regulatory approval of “new drugs.” in canada, regulatory approval for new drugs was still decades away. however, for present purposes, the point is that neither the us nor canada required pre-market approval of cosmetics—whether through regulatory approval of new products, standardized potency test methods, prescribed “doses,” or otherwise. 12 the 1939 amendments that were brought into force addressed miscellaneous matters. only one provision in the bill that was unrelated to cosmetics was not special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 31 proclaimed into force in august 1939; see section 4. 13 other national health officials later made the same argument; see curran (1953) and pugsley (1967). privately, though, elmer driedger’s january 29, 1946 legal opinion indicates that, before it passed, the licensing provision attracted some constitutional concern; see library and archives canada, legal opinions and materials of precedential value, rg 13, vol. 2635, file no. 9-150108, “powers to license manufacturers of cosmetics / if section 3(j) of food & drugs act is unconstitutional”. 14 the earliest ad located that offered a hormone “beauty aid” product for sale was published in 1938; see “20% discount” (1938). in the us, hormonal cosmetics became available for sale at roughly the same time, at the end of the 1930s (mock, 1951). 15 some cheaper creams, advertised for breast enlargement rather than for facial skin, were sold in canada through mail order. see, for example, november 7, 1950 memo from curran to whitmore enclosing five advertisements; library and archives canada, legal opinions and materials of precedential value, rg 13, vol. 2635, file no. 9-150108, “powers to license manufacturers of cosmetics / if section 3(j) of food & drugs act is unconstitutional”. 16 in the 1930s and 1940s, production and marketing of certain other cosmetic products in the us (and likely also in canada) drew heavily upon racism. in particular, in this period, the mainstream cosmetic industry intensified racist marketing of skin whitening products to black americans (and to southern europeans and white women of anglo-saxon descent); see peiss, 1998; mceuen, 2011; mire, 2014; hunter, 2011; glenn, 2008. most of these products contained ammoniated mercury, a highly toxic agent with no “safe dose.” currently in canada, consumers continue to purchase skin-whitening products for cosmetic uses. most of these products contain illegal toxic substances—such as mercury, hydroquinone, corticosteroids, and tretinoin—that are banned or restricted in cosmetic products in canada and indeed in most industrialized countries; see ghetoh and amyot, 2016. while such products raise concerns, in a pharmacological idiom, about hazardous dose or dosage, as illegal substances they do not engage similar questions to those examined here regarding how regulators substitute labeling practices for traditional safety standards. 17 see, for example, u.s. v. 11 jars of female sex hormone estrogenic ointment special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 32 cream (case no. 2089, fdc no. 21350, sample no. 35600—h, disposition december 11, 1946); u.s. v. 94 jars, etc., (case no. 3034, fdc no. 27873, sample no. 57635—k, disposition november 17, 1949); u.s. v. 176 jars, etc. (case no. 2726, fdc no. 26641, sample no. 2790—k, disposition april 5, 1949); u.s. v. 40 cases, etc. (case no. 4277, fdc no. 34886, sample no. 17403—l, disposition january 14, 1954); u. s. v. 8 jars (case no. 4181, fdc no. 35320, sample no. 58957—l. 30-185 m, disposition july 9, 1953); and hormonex (fdc no. 38280, sample no. 30-185 m, disposition september 23, 1955). these reported fda notices of judgment are digitally archived by the us national library of medicine, at https://fdanj.nlm.nih.gov/. for discussion of some of these enforcement proceedings, see bennett (2020). 18 january 22, 1946 letter from chisholm to varcoe, in library and archives canada, legal opinions and materials of precedential value, rg 13, vol. 2635, file no. 9-150108, “powers to license manufacturers of cosmetics / if section 3(j) of food & drugs act is unconstitutional”. 19 january 25, 1946 memo from driedger to varcoe; january 29, 1946 draft letter by driedger to varcoe; and february 1, 1946 letter from varcoe to chisholm, in library and archives canada, legal opinions and materials of precedential value, rg 13, vol. 2635, file no. 9-150108, “powers to license manufacturers of cosmetics / if section 3(j) of food & drugs act is unconstitutional”. the crux of driedger’s legal advice was that the licensing provision could not be constitutionally valid, under federal legislative powers, “because nothing is prohibited.” in essence, national health was precluded from licensing a substance under the criminal law power unless the licensing regime was integrated with a criminal prohibition. 20 driedger is a well-known figure in canadian legal history. his influential 1983 text the construction of statutes (2nd ed.) is one of the authorities that has been most frequently by the supreme court of canada. in addition to his scholarly work, his career with the department of justice culminated with his appointment as deputy minister. 21 may 27, 1946 letter from curran to varcoe, in library and archives canada, legal opinions and materials of precedential value, rg 13, vol. 2635, file no. 9150108, “powers to license manufacturers of cosmetics / if section 3(j) of food & drugs act is unconstitutional”. https://fdanj.nlm.nih.gov/ special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 33 22 march 1, 1946 letter from curran to driedger, in library and archives canada, legal opinions and materials of precedential value, rg 13, vol. 2635, file no. 9150108, “powers to license manufacturers of cosmetics / if section 3(j) of food & drugs act is unconstitutional”. see also davidson, 1949a, p. 9. 23 by contrast, a study published by the ama concluded that it was “accepted that a certain amount of puffery is necessary in the field of promotional cosmetic advertising. however, some manufacturers of creams containing estrogens have made claims, either directly or by innuendo, that overstep these limits” (behrman, 1954, p. 122). 24 ads for the drug premarin, regularly deployed these two phrases throughout the 1940s and 1950s. premarin was developed and first marketed in canada, in the early 1940s, by the pharmaceutical firm ayerst, mckenna & harrison ltd. 25 additionally, and critical to practices later enacted by national health officials to put an informal “upper limit” on potency, the regulations also required a statement of the “net contents” (or weight) of an estrogenic cosmetic product; see section c.02.010(b)(iii). 26 for studies in a material-semiotic or relational materialism tradition that attend to the “texture” of ordering practices, see, for example, law & lien (2012), and de laet & mol (2000). 27 pugsley published at least one study with collip; see collip, pugsley, selye, & thompson (1934). see also li (2003a), pp. 91–94 for information about pugsley and fellow graduate students’ experiences in collip’s lab. 28 after joining national health in 1939, pugsley authored and co-authored scientific studies regarding biological assay methods for hormones; see pugsley & morrell (1943); pugsley (1946); and willis, rampton, & pugsley (1949). 29 for the research on the effects of des in chicken feed, see bird, pugsley, & klotz (1947). 30 in 1950 the fda tried to crystallize its “rule of thumb” on the potency of estrogenic cream into a statutory rule. when the house commerce committee was considering amendments to make it easier to restrict the sale of prescription drugs, the fda asked it to write into the act an “exemplary list of prescription special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 34 drugs” to guide interpretation of a new definition of prescription drugs. on the list was “estrogenic substances—except skin creams containing not more than 10,000 international units of estrone, or the equivalent of other estrogens, per ounce of cream” (dunn, 1951, p. 969). however, industry opposed this list and the durham-humphrey bill passed in 1951 without it (dunn, 1951, p. 966). 31 in the context of us federal administrative law, as a general category, administrative rulings would include interpretations, opinions, orders, directives, and decisions issued by administrative agencies that have been legally empowered by legislation to make those rulings. 32 “administrative ruling” also provides a convenient label not found in the historiography of canadian public law. the legal and historical literature regarding debates, in the interwar period, over the legitimacy of delegated legislation and the emerging administrative state is massive, and i cannot rehearse it here. 33 november 1950 handwritten note from thomson to whitmore, in library and archives canada, department of health fonds, rg 29, “food and drugs – articles taken from newspapers magazines & newspaper advertisements,” 1949–1953, vol. 259, file no. 347-1-6 (part 4), reproduction copy no. i-115336. 34 november 7, 1950 memo from curran to whitmore (with handwritten note by pugsley), in library and archives canada, department of health fonds, rg 29, “food and drugs – articles taken from newspapers magazines & newspaper advertisements,” 1949–1953, vol. 259, file no. 347-1-6 (part 4), reproduction copy no. i-115336. ironically, pugsley’s formulation unintentionally implied that these five creams could not be sold as cosmetics, as preparations that did not necessarily cause systemic effects failed to meet the more stringent legal test of being demonstrated to be free from systemic effect. 35 november 7, 1950 memo (pugsley’s handwritten note), in library and archives canada, department of health fonds, rg 29, “food and drugs – articles taken from newspapers magazines & newspaper advertisements,” 1949–1953, vol. 259, file no. 347-1-6 (part 4), reproduction copy no. i-115336. 36 march 21, 1952 letter from devlin to venus products ltd., in library and archives canada, department of health fonds, rg 29, “food and drugs – articles taken from newspapers magazines & newspaper advertisements,” 1949–1953, vol. 259, file no. 347-1-6 (part 4), reproduction copy no. i-115336. devlin also special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 35 requested various other label changes, which he asserted were required pursuant to section c.002.007. 37 march 26, 1952 letter from venus products ltd. to devlin, in library and archives canada, department of health fonds, rg 29, “food and drugs – articles taken from newspapers magazines & newspaper advertisements,” 1949–1953, vol. 259, file no. 347-1-6 (part 4), reproduction copy no. i-115336. 38 march 26, 1952 letter from venus products to devlin; march 28, 1952 letter from devlin to venus products; and may 16, 1952 letter from devlin to national health officials, in library and archives canada, department of health fonds, rg 29, “food and drugs – articles taken from newspapers magazines & newspaper advertisements,” 1949–1953, vol. 259, file no. 347-1-6 (part 4), reproduction copy no. i-115336. venus products ltd. was remarkably candid about its reasons for wanting to retain these directions for use: “our only hope was that in the event of cancer being discovered coincidental with the use of formula v7 that the victim would think and do a little investigating before going off half cocked and blaming us unjustly. one claim with the publicity that would be sure to attend regardless of how unjust that claim was or whether our product was proven harmless in the highest court the results to us would be so adverse that it could well put us out of business.” 39 chemicals in food products: hearings before the house select committee to investigate the use of chemicals in food and cosmetics, house of representatives, 82d cong., 2d sess., 583 (november 20, 1951) (testimony of dr. ervin epstein, pp. 739-740); and chemicals in food products: hearings before the house select committee to investigate the use of chemicals in food and cosmetics, house of representatives, 82d cong., 2d sess., 583 (november 23, 1951) (testimony of dr. thomas h. sternberg, pp. 919-920). 40 chemicals in food products: hearings before the house select committee to investigate the use of chemicals in food and cosmetics, house of representatives, 82d cong., 2d sess., 583 (november 20, 1951) (testimony of dr. h. v. allington); and chemicals in food products: hearings before the house select committee to investigate the use of chemicals in food and cosmetics, house of representatives, 82d cong., 2d sess., 583 (november 23, 1951) (testimony of dr. samuel ayres). 41 october 26, 1953 memo and november 2, 1953 memo in library and archives canada, department of health fonds, rg 29, “food and drugs – articles taken special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 36 from newspapers magazines & newspaper advertisements,” 1949–1953, vol. 259, file no. 347-1-6 (part 4), reproduction copy no. i-115336. 42 in the bottom right-hand corner, figure 6 states lady esther hormone cream had “no objectionable greasiness!” 43 originally published as l'anomalia selvaggia. saggio su potere e potenza in baruch spinoza, negri 1991/2000 identifies as “potere” and “potenza” what in english translations of spinoza had both been reduced to “power.” 44 when it comes to changes materialized through topical estrogenic products, not everybody has been given the self-responsibilizing option of attending to their own exposures by following label directions. transgender women and non-binary people wanting estrogen-derived effects of softer skin, less body hair, or breast enhancement often lack the option of purchasing over-the-counter products and following labeled directions. if they wish estrogen to shape their embodiments, this use is typically medicalized, supervised by a physician willing to prescribe it. while boundaries between estrogenic drugs and cosmetics were blurred in the 1940s and 1950s, for trans or genderqueer people seeking more feminine embodiments in 2020, such boundaries are rigidly enforced by law. indeed, in this scenario, labels are disregarded, as, in many jurisdictions, estrogen must be prescribed “off-label.” references archival material library and archives canada, “powers to license manufacturers of cosmetics / if section 3(j) of food & drugs act is unconstitutional” (1946-1947) [legal opinions and materials of precedential value], rg 13, volume 2635, file number 9-150108. library and archives canada, department of health fonds, rg 29, “food and drugs articles taken from newspapers magazines & newspaper advertisements”, 1938/121940/05, volume 258, file number 347-1-6 (part 2), reproduction copy number e011195705. library and archives canada, department of health fonds, rg 29, “food and drugs articles taken from newspapers magazines & newspaper advertisements”, 19491953, volume 259, file number 347-1-6 (part 4), reproduction copy number i-115336. united states. food and drug administration. notices of judgment archives. 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(2018). toxic enactments: materializing estrogen and regulation under canada’s food and drugs act, 1939–1953 (unpublished master’s thesis). osgoode hall law school, york university, toronto, on. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) lara tessaro, 2020 44 tomlins, c. (2016). historicism and materiality in legal theory. in m. del mar & m. lobban (eds.), law in theory and history: new essays on a neglected dialogue (pp. 515540). oxford, uk: hart publishing. vandenberg, l. n., colborn, t., hayes, t. b., heindel, j. j., jacobs jr, d. r., lee, d. h., … & zoeller, r. t. (2012). hormones and endocrine-disrupting chemicals: low-dose effects and nonmonotonic dose responses. endocrine reviews, 33(3), 378-455. von schwerin, a., stoff, h., & wahrig, b. (2013). biologics: an introduction. in a. von schwerin, h. stoff & b. wahrig (eds.), biologics: a history of agents made from living organisms in the twentieth century (pp. 1-31). london, uk: picking & chatto. watkins, e. (2007). the estrogen elixir: a history of hormone replacement therapy in america. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. willis, c. g., rampton, s. e., & pugsley, l. i. (1949). variables affecting the assay of testosterone propionate using the seminal vesicle response of the juvenile castrated male rat. endocrinology, 44(3), 251-258. author bio lara tessaro is undertaking doctoral studies in law at the university of kent in canterbury, uk. this article is based on research undertaken for her ll.m. degree, which she attained from osgoode hall law school at york university in toronto, canada. microsoft word 71538-1-11-iraniandphilip.docx irani, l. and philip, k. (2018). negotiating engines of difference. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-11. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © lilly irani and kavita philip. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical commentary negotiating engines of difference lilly irani university of california san diego lirani@ucsd.edu kavita philip university of california irvine kphilip@uci.edu when paula chakravartty and mara mills invited us to a conversation on what it would mean to decolonize computing, we attempted not simply to go back to our earlier work on “postcolonial computing” but to rethink postcoloniality and its limitations in the practice of technopolitics. south asian historiography, experimental and theoretically sophisticated since the 1980s, has influenced almost all contemporary theorizing about colonialism and its aftermath. but how useful are global generalizations and future-oriented strategies that begin from such a specific experience of british imperialism and indian de-colonization? latin american countries, for example, experienced colonialism and imperialism in radically different ways from south asia, both because of the earlier ends of direct spanish or portuguese colonization, and because of their proximity and strategic significance for the us during the 2 irani and philip catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) cold war. indigenous peoples in the americas have experienced multiple layers of colonial violence that are not captured by the frameworks honed in the study of the nineteenth-century british empire. decolonial theory and postcolonial theories alike often pose their struggle as against “western civilization” and “western modernity” (kumar 2015, maldonado-torres, 2016, pp. 10-11). yet contemporary forms of indigenous nationalism rewrite modernity via computation and entrepreneurship while schooling euro-american state and corporate actors in new forms of accommodation of non-western difference. careful decolonial accounts must recognize these diverse experiences of subjugation by the west, while refusing to render the non-west innocent (de la cadena & lien, 2015, p. 442; comaroff & comaroff, 2009). our earlier work on “postcolonial computing” problematized histories and sociologies of technology by drawing on work from targets of eurocentric development: india, brazil, china, and indigenous australia. there we worked to unsettle the presumed universality of technoscience by offering analytical tactics for accounting for difference and uneven circulations. this essay grapples with engines of difference; we now call attention to attempts by technonationalist and capitalist actors to claim and configure (profitable) essential difference. in 2018, the corporate leaders, financiers, and heads of state at the world economic forum (wef) turned their attention to “the multiconceptual world.” the wef is better known as davos; it is one place where state and capital meet to co-ordinate their efforts, work out shared interests, and deal with legitimacy crises. economist sebastian buckup, wef head of programming, explained the multiconceptual turn thus: “we have moved out, gladly so, of a time when the west is in a position to lecture other countries if i might say so … it’s not just about more even distribution or more widely distributed power, we also have different concepts of global governance” (cgtn, 2018). india’s prime minister narendra modi, russian prime minister vladimir putin, and china’s xi jinping all challenge the dominance of “the west” in defining governance and rights norms (babones, 2018); they cite difference as 3 irani and philip catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) grounds for multi-polar global governance. modi’s rule in india has come with a turn toward hindutva, a form of hindu religious nationalism and the aggressive facilitation of accumulation in the name of economic growth and technological nationalism (mishra, 2018). under his rule, india has seen “cow protection” vigilantes — in the name of vegetarianism — lynch muslim cattle traders and dalit (oppressed caste, formerly known as "untouchables") leather-workers (mander, 2018). struggles over land and resources in south asia, once rooted in principles of indigenous sovereignty or citizenship rights, now find themselves overrun by technological nationalist projects. industrialists and state actors call on citizens to sacrifice their lands and relations so the nation can manufacture a “people’s car,” or futurist military drones (dam, 2016; environment support group, 2014). without an analysis of capital and of power within difference, how do we decolonize new techno-nationalisms that re-invent indigeneity as modern power, while seeking legitimacy with ongoing imperial formations of the nation-state and capital? the wef’s multiconceptual turn still accommodates the very hierarchies of humanity that decolonial theories so forcefully identify (subramaniam, 2017; tuck & yang, 2016). for those of us grasping at a decolonial politics of resistance, what are the dangers of embracing a politics that rests simply on revealing and celebrating difference? we proceed with patience, humility, and cautious optimism. we cannot make pronouncements about the future or the forms of politics appropriate to this moment. we only point to a conjuncture and the challenges it throws up for our familiar political categories and problematics. as states claim nationalism as a form of decolonization, we turn to the long history of political contests over the meaning of decolonization beyond south asiabritish relations. frantz fanon, observing decolonization taking place in the context of the cold war, noted that americans “advise the european countries to decolonize on gentleman’s terms” while they “take their role as the barons of international capitalism very seriously” (fanon 2004 (1961), p. 4 irani and philip catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) 38). anti-colonialism, fanon warned in his anti-colonial treatise the wretched of the earth (1961), was being deployed in the interests of an emerging global structure of imperialism and capitalism. the midtwentieth-century transfer of sovereignty to formerly colonized nations was, in some imperial visions, regarded as a mere legal formalism — a transition to a different mode of white trusteeship in which imperial global influence was to be re-forged through novel economic and cultural mechanisms that would place markets rather than militaries, and trade rather than territory, at the center of global networks. it proceeded through “practical tactics such as the creation of radio free europe and committees for the defense of oppressed minorities.” (fanon, 2004 (1961), p. 39). reading fanon reminds us that one cannot read these texts and practices (e.g., us-funded radio broadcasts and social movements for diversity in the third world) with a naive attention simply to the slogans they circulated for or against, decolonization. one would have to pay attention to their contexts, asking: who funded them? whom did they recruit? what other movements did they displace or scramble? what practices accompanied these media and social-movement discourses? the invocation of “decolonization” marked a struggle over the terms of who and what could live, work, trade, and move in the world. communists, social democrats, and religious nationalists were just some of those who struggled to fill the vacuum left by colonial power. in the context of the cold war, americans and europeans employed technical assistance and community development programs to direct new nations and their poor away from communism. the ford foundation, for example, fostered religious difference as a weapon against communism (mccarthy, 1987). it supported buddhist political groupings in burma to bolster social democratic leadership; buddhism, a ford field representative wrote, is “inherently opposed to the tenets of communism” (mccarthy, 1987, p. 101). in india, the foundation seeded the books for india program, later supported by indian philanthropists; the program sought to “intensify the revitalization of traditional indigenous values … 5 irani and philip catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) which may prove an even stronger barrier to the acceptance of communism by hindus and moslems than imported western ideals” (mccarthy, 1987, p. 98). at the same time, anti-colonial nationalist projects shored up cultural difference in the name of national sovereignty (lu, 2010). during the cold war, imperialists and diplomats alike used the terms anti-colonialism, decolonization, and post-colonialism. the terms could be used as a marker of a problem as well as the site of a solution. they were used by advocates of paternalistic economic policies as well as autarkic ones, by imperialists as well as by revolutionaries. diplomats could speak the terms to stabilize the existing world order, even as rebels spoke them to overturn existing orders. decolonization was not a straightforward, liberating process. rather, it was a contest over the very meaning of liberation itself. as the century wore on, the terms of an anticolonial nationalism grew in many directions, including sectarian leftisms and authoritarian populisms. the anti-colonial coat served to cloak the holes in the spaces of practice, administration, and governance that needed to be repaired; yet often it was expedient to continue inhabiting colonial institutional structures (jaffrelot, 2009). the end of the cold war shifted terrains of opportunity and languages of legitimacy for multinational companies and national formations. globalizing corporations shifted sharply in the 1980s from seeing uniformity and standardization as necessary to global expansion to seeing diversity as the key to generating consumption. companies engaged with difference to globalize their markets, first by localizing their products by adapting them for cultural variations. pizza hut, for example, added tandoori in bangalore and starbucks added bean paste pastries in shanghai. even manufacturing supply chains can be reorganized to work through ethnic networks and cottage industries, sometimes celebrating or reifying particularities of cultural practice to strengthen production (bear et al., 2015). the dazzling array of global difference has been good for products and profits. globalizers did not have to sweep the globe free of difference 6 irani and philip catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) in order to prepare it for increased rates of commodity circulation (kraidy, 2005); they readily cathected narratives of national difference, regional variation, indigeneity, and gender variation. ambivalence and hybridity helped build paths toward product diversity and consumer choice more often than they produced effective resistance against malleable, flexible, creative new flows of capital (kraidy, 2005). in twenty-first-century india, as resurgent nationalisms erupted, the entrepreneur became the figure that promised cultural authenticity even with integrations into global capital (philip, 2016; upadhya, 2009). this form of technonationalism idealizes economic growth and spectacular corporate stories, such as indian ceos at google and microsoft, or indian industrialist family tata’s ownership of prestige brand land rover. champions of indian business work to demarcate indian distinctions as business advantages; they transform jugaad — a word that connotes clever, highly-constrained improvisation — into a national brand (kaur, 2016; philip et al., 2010). in the shadows of this pursuit of profitable difference and economic dominance lurk policies that treat labor rights, social movements, small landowners, and forest dwellers as barriers to accumulation and enemies of the nation (irani, forthcoming; subramanian, 2017). special economic zones since the 1950s, technological reconfigurations like india’s 2016 demonetization (patel & weston, 2017), and a host of other development projects actively call on people’s varied aspirations to enroll them in futurities of capitalism (mankekar, 2015; cross, 2014). institutions that stabilize capitalism or mitigate its disasters promote entrepreneurship as a way of channeling the aspirations and frustrations of people in developing countries into financially generative, rather than unprofitable directions (clinton, 2010; baumol, 1991). the world bank, the bill & melinda gates foundation, and the us department of state encourage start-ups, hackathons, and “innovation cultures” to redirect energized, dangerous third world bodies away from terrorism into entrepreneurship (clinton 2010; baumol 1991). technology companies invite feminists and civil rights activists to generate voice 7 irani and philip catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) online, fueling circuits of attention-capital even as these groups pursue human rights or liberation. indian and global policy experts promulgate “the digital” as a promising enabler of accumulation, achievement, access, and the accommodation of difference (irani, 2017; turner, 2006). firms do not simply try to obliterate difference; rather, they study difference as a tactic of transforming citizen-subjects into consumerentrepreneurs through techniques of empathetic design thinking and ngo partnerships (irani, forthcoming).these promises of computing are forged in the settler colonial united states and brought into articulation with nationalist-capitalist promises in india. indian economist kalyan sanyal argues that capitalism negotiates with “the world of difference” (2007, p. 8), as firms, states, and ngos partner to manage the informal economy and the surplus populations produced by dispossession. we argue, a step further, that firms and states not only valorize difference, but also massage, de-construct and re-construct difference into forms that can live well with capital (foucault, 2008 (1978-79)). capitalism does not always annihilate its others; it can come to regulate some differences profitably while violently suppressing and disciplining others. post-colonial and de-colonial frameworks, then, cannot in themselves produce recipes for liberation. in “postcolonial computing,” we wrote “the seams among differences are not simply a source of undesirable unevenness and aberration, but also sites of creativity and possibility” (philip et al., 2012, p. 8). a decolonial computing, however, cannot rest on a celebration of difference, creativity, and possibility. while our prior attempts emerged from an optimistic pedagogical critique, our renewed efforts begin with a caution, situated in a changing political economy. culture and innovation industries now systematically take up counterhegemonic efforts, profitably stripping them of their activist intent (costanza-chock, 2018, p.12). a celebration of difference alone is not enough to sustain a pluriverse – a “world where many worlds fit” (escobar, 2018, p. 16).1 how can we resist or even overthrow the forces that make a pluriverse impossible? 8 irani and philip catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) acknowledgements although the authors contributed equally to this piece, itself based on almost a decade of collaboration, we gratefully acknowledge conversations with anasuya sengupta and ashwin mathew. this collaboration would not have been possible without the intellectual space for interdisciplinary conversations generously built by paul dourish in the uc irvine department of informatics in the early 2000s. notes 1 escobar (2018, p.16) quotes the world social forum which, in turn, echoes the zapatista call: “queremos un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.” references babones, s. (2018). modi at davos: today we believe in a multicultural world and a multipolar world order. https://www.forbes.com/sites/salvatorebabones /2018/01/23/modi-at-davos-today-we-believe-in-a-multicultural-worldand-a-multipolar-world-order/#7c7ddfd16fba baumol, w. (1996, january). entrepreneurship: productive, unproductive, and destructive. journal of business venturing 11(1), 3–22. doi:10.1016/0883-9026(94)00014-x. bear, l., ho, k., tsing, a., & yanagisako, s. (2015, march 30). gens: a feminist manifesto for the study of capitalism. generating capitalism, cultural anthropology website. retrieved from https://culanth.org/fieldsights/652-gens-a-feminist-manifesto-for-thestudy-of-capitalism de la cadena, m., lien, m., blaser, m., jensen, c., lea, t., morita, a., et al. (2015). anthropology and sts: generative interfaces, multiple locations. hau: journal of ethnographic theory 5(1): 437–75. cgtn. (2018) wef: china's presence and the us inspires multiconceptual model https://news.cgtn.com/news/30597a4d7a677a6333566d54/share_p.html clinton, h r. (2010, november1). leading through civilian power: 9 irani and philip catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) redefining american diplomacy and development. foreign affairs 89(6), 13–24. comaroff, j. & comaroff, j. (2009). ethnicity inc. chicago, il: university of chicago press. costanza-chock, s. (2018). design justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice. proceedings of the design research society. retrieved from: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3189696 cross, j. (2014). dream zones: anticipating capitalism and development in india. london, gb: pluto press. dam, a. (2016, may 5). defeated development. the quint. retrieved from https://www.thequint.com/news/politics/defeated-development-theabandoned-singur-tata-nano-factory. environment support group. (2014, november 25). challakere villagers overcome barc lies to reclaim amrit mahal kavals. press release: bangalore. retrieved from http://www.esgindia.org/campaigns/press/challakere-villagers-overcomebarc-lies-.html escobar, a. (2018). designs for the pluriverse. durham, nc: duke university press. fanon, f. (2004). the wretched of the earth. (r. philcox, trans.) new york, ny : grove press, 2004. (original work published 1961). foucault, m., senellart, m. (2008). the birth of biopolitics: lectures at the collège de france, 1978-79. basingstoke, gb: palgrave macmillan. irani, l. (2017) hackathons and the making of entrepreneurial citizenship. science, technology, and human values, 40(5), 799-824. — (forthcoming). innovators and their others: entrepreneurial citizenship in indian development. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press, 2019. jaffrelot, c. (2009) hindu nationalism: a reader. princeton, nj: princeton university press. 10 irani and philip catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) kloos, s. (2016). the recognition of sowa rigpa in india. how tibetan medicine became an indian medical system. issues, 3(3). lu, duanfang. (ed.) third world modernism: architecture, development and identity. abingdon, gb: routledge, 2011. maldonado-torres, n. (2016). outline of ten theses on coloniality and decoloniality. frantz fanon foundation, http://frantzfanonfoundationfondation frantzfanon.com. mander, h. (2018, july 4). returning to hapur. the indian express (blog).https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/hapur-moblynching-minorities-india-communal-violence-5244625/. mankekar, p. (2015). unsettling india: affect, temporality, transnationality. durham, nc: duke university press. mccarthy, k. (1987). from cold war to cultural development: the international cultural activities of the ford foundation, 1950-1980. daedalus, 116(1), 93-117 mishra, p. (2017). age of anger: a history of the present. new york, ny: farrar, straus and giroux. subramaniam, b. (2017). recolonizing india: troubling the anti-colonial, decolonial, postcolonial in critical perspectives engagements with decolonization and decoloniality in and at the interfaces of sts curated and introduced by kristina lyons, juno parreñas and noah tamarkin . catalyst 3(1). tuck, e. & yang, k. (2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education, & society, 1(1). bios lilly irani, assistant professor of communication, science studies, and critical gender studies, is the author of chasing innovation (2019) and co-founder and maintainer of turkopticon. kavita philip, associate professor of history and affiliate faculty in informatics at the university of california, irvine, is author of civilizing 11 irani and philip catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) natures (2004), and co-editor of four volumes of interdisciplinary work in radical history, political science, art, activism, gender, and public policy. microsoft word brault-123-1239-1.docx brault, c. (2017). feminist imaginations in a heated climate: parody, idiocy, and climatological possibilities. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(2), 1-33 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © claire brault, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article feminist imaginations in a heated climate: parody, idiocy, and climatological possibilities claire brault brown university claire_brault@brown.edu abstract this paper proposes to imagine an alternative climate scenario of our future. through a parodic rewrite of intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc) climate scenarios, i challenge the rise of geoengineering technologies as a mitigation "solution" for the current ecological crisis. showing that the ipcc is offering capitalocentric visions of ecological futurity and more-than-human economies that contribute to mainstreaming dangerous, hubristic geoengineering, i advance that feminist imagination and conviviality is a more capacious way to face climate change, one that climatology would benefit learning from. i do this drawing from isabelle stengers’ conceptualization of stupidity, which i argue can describe the ipcc’s futurology, and from her figuration of the idiot, a conceptual character who poses questions that cause us to pause and think, opening up possibilities. 2 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) introduction while in the last fifteen years many geologists have argued over the dating and periodization of our current epoch, many feminist voices have problematized the anthropos of the increasingly scientifically consensual term anthropocene, objecting that its universal pretentions masks unequal responsibilities and effects.1 yet, while in the humanities so many critiques of the anthropocene start by specifying that paul crutzen popularized this term (2002), they often fail to mention that he was also the first scientist to break the ice on the subject of geoengineering (2006). in addition, the boom reacting to crutzen’s anthropocenic intervention occurs years after the “anthropogenic” qualification of climate change. the latter emerged in its global institutionalized form with the creation of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc) in 1988 and has not yet become the object of substantial conceptual critique. this lack of critical scrutiny regarding the “anthropos” of “anthropogenic” global heating persists even though the date used by the thousands of climate scientists required to reach consensus in consultation with worldwide states is treated as clear, in contrast to the contested starting point of the anthropocene. namely, the ipcc (2013) draws its “anthropogenic” conclusions by comparing temperatures and greenhouse gases after 1750 with millennia of “pre-industrial” data. insofar as the diagnosis raises the question of whether “we”—who heated the earth to the point of compromising future generations’ ability to say “we” again—became “human” in 1750, climate “anthropogenesis” stages a hasty equation between homo sapiens and homo oeconomicus, with “his” universal pretensions. this capitalocentric analysis does not stop at past data: the climate models cited by the ipcc also presume the future predominance of capitalism even a century from now—arguably exacerbated by the formation of carbon markets and possible geoengineering, all in the name of mitigating “solutions.” the relative lack of critique of this “anthropogenic” qualification (compared to the critiques of “anthropocene” abstraction) might be 3 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) attributed in part to a perceived need to tighten up ranks2 against the illnamed “climate skeptics” or “deniers,” long fed funding by oil companies and now triumphing (for instance, with the 2016 us election). but while the oil industry notoriously pursued research corroborating the claim that global warming was caused by all-too-specific oil-addicted humans as early as the 1980s, only to promptly fuel research attempting to refute this very claim later on, a far less notorious fact is that the same companies now fund geoengineering research (hamilton, 2013). it turns out that a certain technoscientific3 confidence makes strange bedfellows of “skeptics” thirsty for lucrative carbon-credits-emitting technologies and climate scientists believing in a unified truth as a foundation for dangerous high-technofixes. universalizing claims about the “man”-made nature of past and present global heating risks creating a scientific climate of technocratic omnipotence apt to justify future ecologically, politically destructive “solutions.” these objections could be dismissed as divisive of the environmentalist movement. but, to the contrary, critical, pluralist, contestatory feminist examination of climate science, and continued (re-) invention of feminist sciences have never been more needed.4 when we accept the simplistic perception that there are only two sides to climate debates, with only one that recognizes “human” impact, the unequal contributions to and effects of climate change on more-than-human lives are erased and hubristic technoscience, rather than more nuanced scientific and technological theories and practices, are deemed justified. this need for pluralizing and contestation defies the commonly held but deceptive perception of the climate crisis as an example of how much environmentalism and feminism need science (the former being assumed as outside the latter). instead, climate change might offer a telling example of how badly the sciences need feminist environmentalist imagination. what would feminist climatological imagination look like? here, as with the case of haraway’s (2016) critique of the anthropocene (she invokes the capitalocene, the industriocene, the plantationocene, and the 4 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) chthulucene), a proliferation of terms is helpful. global warming might be hypothesized as “anthropogenic” if, armed with feminist theory, we underscore problematic entanglements among the man of humanism, the man of western modernity, of capitalism, of plantation, of industrial revolution, contrasting this universalized story with the immense multitude of earth dwellers struggling to seek refuge in a new climate. capitalogenic, industriogenic, plantationogenic, chthulugenic climates beg to be reimagined. i begin from a feminist parody of the ipcc’s scenario descriptions. i then contrast this parody with some of the epistemological assumptions and prescriptive conclusions upon which the nobel peace prize–winning panel’s climatological language relies. parody makes visible the need for feminist theory’s contribution to the climate sciences. the ipcc reports are one of the most prominent and politicized expressions of climatology. they provide the principal scientific ground for international negotiations, while their writers subject themselves to consensus-based deliberations that are highly problematic to many sciences otherwise reliant upon openness to dissensus and contestation. ursula le guin has claimed that “truth is a matter of imagination” (2012), and donna haraway has long valued parody and speculative imaginaries in rethinking epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political commitments (2006, 2015, 2016). similarly, this paper shows one crucial instance where feminist imaginations can feed into scientific knowledge in vital(ist) ways (bennett, 2009; colebrook, 2014). deploying parody, science fiction, and sarcasm, i attempt to defy the capitalocentrism of climatology as futurology. my use of parody acts as a feminist writing strategy (micciche, 2010, pp. 173–188) that underscores the uncertainty, multiplicity, and openness of our futures, begging the question of why certain capitalist futures imagined by the ipcc are so often taken more seriously than other possible alternatives. what sorts of economic arrangements may be most apt at generating a feminist (ecopolitical) climate? what sorts of roles does technology perform in a feminist climate? what sorts of scientific knowledge production might this call for? while i cannot address these 5 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) questions exhaustively here, i would like the following to offer one way to trouble the hegemony of a climatology that stifles the very possibility of asking them. what new questions and possibilities are permitted thanks to the use of feminist parody? more than a mere critique of the ipcc reports, what follows is a proposal for defying some of the hegemonic assumptions and epistemological procedures that animate many of today’s climate debates, making the case for climatologies’ need for feminist imaginaries. before proceeding any further, i should warn that what follows risks being interpellated, misread as a rejection of technology in general. indeed, part of the feminist intervention here consists in a denunciation of a certain “technofixery.” however, when i use the term technofix with a negative valence, it is by no means because of some principled antiscience or technophobic stance but rather to provoke the question of what gets to count as technology, let alone the question of dualisms hierarchically opposing “high” and “low” technology, “backward” and “futuristic” approaches, so as to problematize climatology’s “fixing” approach (which posits that industrial, corporate technologies alone will “fix” the climate, taken as a unified problem warranting such fixing and knowable enough to predictably be “fixed,” etc.). in other words, i evoke “technofixery” as those technologies meant to (impossibly) “fix” the climate crisis in the sense of sustaining capitalist hegemony, not as a rigid opposition to all that can be read as technological. the feminist parodic approach below challenges the exclusion of technologies of the self and of collective more-than-human, noncapitalist assemblages from what counts as legitimate “technology,” proposing instead to “stay with the trouble” (haraway, 2016), i.e., to assume that no technology is innocent but that some deemed more “realistic” may only be so if reality is conceived solely through a capitalocentric lens. 6 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) capitalocentric consensus futurology versus the feminist dissenting imagination by its own description, the ipcc is “the international body for assessing the science related to climate change.” the united nations founded it in 1988 “to provide policymakers with regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation” (ipcc, 2016). as such, it has a crucial impact on how public officials in international summits, along with the broader public, view the state of scientific knowledge on climate. synthesizing results generated by the computer models used by climatology worldwide, the ipcc describes what ecological changes to expect and which directions may be less destructive than others. similar scenarios run by computer models in different research projects are grouped in what the ipcc calls “scenario families.” these various possible futures share certain common traits, for instance in demographic terms, or based on how reliant they may be on, say, the service industry or so-called renewable energies as opposed to more polluting energy sources. each of these scenario families is described in a similar language, to enable comparisons. the ipcc asserts its noncommitment to specific programmatic goals to demonstrate an alleged policy neutrality, so as to retain, in true positivist fashion, a semblance of scientific objectivity. as they focus on physical science and the impacts of, as well as adaptation and vulnerability to, climate change, working groups i and ii of the ipcc especially go out of their way to show that they are not pursuing “political agendas,” that is, pushing for one program or set of policies more than others. the third working group is more explicitly prescriptive and composed of more economists alongside physicists, as it writes the reports on mitigation. even a cursory reading of working group iii’s latest report (2014) reveals that two major sets of measures the panel recommends include the creation of carbon trade markets and geoengineering, which shows a general orientation favoring continued 7 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) capitalist predominance. however, even there, policy suggestions are advanced individually so as to appear not to offer a wholesale program that might pressure diplomacy. but the starting point informing the climate-change mitigation recommendations, used by all three working groups, is already symptomatic of the political and economic assumptions climatology makes. the models imagined and projected to assess climate futures are implicitly capitalocentric, to borrow j.k. gibson-graham’s adjective (1996). below is one example of a scenario family description, excerpted from the ipcc reports: the a1 storyline and scenario family describes a future world of very rapid economic growth, global population that peaks in midcentury and declines thereafter, and the rapid introduction of new and more efficient technologies. major underlying themes are convergence among regions, capacity building, and increased cultural and social interactions, with a substantial reduction in regional differences in per capita income. the a1 scenario family develops into three groups that describe alternative directions of technological change in the energy system. the three a1 groups are distinguished by their technological emphasis: fossil intensive (a1fi), non-fossil energy sources (a1t), or a balance across all sources (a1b). (ipcc, 2013) in relative contrast, the b1 scenario family is described as a convergent world with the same global population that peaks in mid-century and declines thereafter, as in the a1 storyline, but with rapid changes in economic structures toward a service and information economy, with reductions in material intensity, and the introduction of clean and resource-efficient technologies. the emphasis is on global solutions to economic, social and environmental sustainability, including improved equity, but without additional climate initiatives. (ipcc, 2013) the ipcc’s presentation of various possible scenarios has certainly had the effect of underscoring the multiplicity of our possible futures: 8 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) relatively like-minded demographers and mostly neoliberal-to-keynesian economists turn out to be capable of imagining several equally possible outcomes. there is something highly valuable in this recognition that in spite of some premature claims celebrating the “end of history” and capitalism’s late 1980s triumph (fukuyama, 2006), the future—lucky for us—is in fact not set in stone. but the language of markets, efficiency, productivity, and, fundamentally, of economic growth (albeit moderate in some scenarios) highlights the underlying assumption behind all of the scenario families described here: global capitalist hegemony. several futures are possible—yet we shall assume that they will indefinitely continue to be capitalist. ultimately, the ipcc scenarios propose a capitalocentric future: they do not consider the possibility (or possible necessity?) of capitalist collapse or the rise of noncapitalist economies. in contrast, i have crafted a noncapitalist, feminist, more-thanhuman “scenario (queer) family.” the following z00 scenario parodically imitates the ipcc’s language and form illustrated above. parody offers a feminist rewriting strategy (micciche, 2010, pp. 173–188) by which the copy’s form imitates the supposed “original” form, yet serves a different content that in part clashes with it. the resulting gap causes an uncanny effect and, ideally, a smile or laughter. what follows, then, is certainly playful, but does not merely mock the models with absurd proposals; instead, it opens up the possibility of imagining another order of things and a glimpse at the contingency of the original. the z00 storyline and scenario family describes a future world of rapid feminist degrowth and slow living; a global more-than-human population that peaks in mid-century and declines thereafter in favor of queer kinships and generalized access to reproductive autonomy; and the rapid introduction of convivial tools following the abolition of private property as well as the proliferation of do-ityourself (diy). camels, donkeys, feet, and bicycles generalize as more-than-human slower means of transit and companion species. food production diversifies as a result of a global ban on gmos and the generalization of subsistence permaculture, indigenous 9 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) agricultures, and aquatic polycultures in flooded valleys, decreasing in quantity with the decline in population and simplification/diversification of local diets. production becomes almost exclusively local and organic, with commodities’ value measured (if at all) not by exchange but by the durability and use of objects. barter and collectivization of needs and goods at local levels replace routine transport over long distances. major underlying themes are naturecultural bioand economic diversity, bioregional cooperatives, community building, and more leisure time, with a generalization of participatory, local-democratic, scientific, and artistic practices. by 2101 the terms growth, profit (in reference to economies), and capitalist are facing extinction, mostly found in etymology dictionaries. the z00 scenario family develops into multiple groups that each describe diverse postcapitalist economies. the multiple z00 groups are distinguished by their convivial emphasis and how humans spend their liberated time: collective and individual creation of vernacular sciences, art, dance, and music (z0068x); joyful farniente and queer love (z006y); and other activities unimaginable to earlytwenty-first-century human generations (z0070z). this above is no more a program than the ipcc “scenario family” descriptions. some may read it as “merely” science-fictional or “utopian.” yet the point of this parodic, science-fictional rewriting is to underscore that the futures imagined by ipcc scientists themselves are utopian: none entertains the possibility of degrowth and postcapitalist futures. many environmentalists have affirmed that capitalist growth is increasingly incompatible with human survival,5 an impossible direction to sustain—in other words, a dangerous utopia. beyond—or maybe through—the parodic tone of the above scenario, i quite seriously wish to contrast a postcapitalist perspective (gibson-graham, 2006) on climatology with a climatological, capitalocentric imagination. opening up possibilities for noncapitalist economic regimes requires the performative staging of such a contrast and the disruption of 10 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) assumptions about the (unsustainable) capitalist nature of our future. i should specify that my goal here is not merely to rewrite or claim to correct the ipcc’s scenarios, or to propose some sort of symmetrical opposite to them. some have already accomplished valuable work underscoring, similarly, that climate models must be more comprehensive, including noncapitalist scenarios even when these may turn out either more authoritarian or more democratic than capitalist ones. in their “climate leviathan,” j. wainwright and g. mann (2013) have imagined four futures corresponding to different economic and political regimes, including a “climate behemoth” where reactionary and nationalistic conservatism (in part what we are currently resisting, i.e., the global rise of nationalist far-right movements) would triumph, as well as a “climate leviathan” (global green authoritarianism). alternatively, “climate x” would correspond to a communist version of the new climate regime. the authors claim that “climate leviathan seems to have come to stand as the most ‘practical’ response, though many recognize the unlikelihood of its achieving an effective hegemony soon” (p. 15). they write about climate x: “utopianism? not necessarily.” in my view, parody and provocation are apt at underscoring this lack of necessity. my goal, again, is not to establish a program. as michel foucault writes, “the idea of a program of proposals is dangerous. as soon as a program is invented, it becomes law, and there is a prohibition against inventing” (foucault, 1997). besides, countless objections could and should be raised about the z00 scenario’s specifics and its general outline. i have named it z00, picking a letter at the opposite end of the alphabet from the above-cited capitalocentric ipcc scenarios, for contrast and provocation. the double zeros, mimicking the numbering form of the ipcc scenario families, evoke a new beginning, and could also be read as two letters o, such that the whole might sound like a zoo, evoking the concern for multispecies worlds rather than just human economies. yet even this name is ironic, precisely because many zoos cage their animals. noncapitalist scenarios tend to be cast aside, imagined as locked “outside” of what passes for the real world, just like 11 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) wild animals are ascribed a constrained heterotopian space (foucault, 1986). besides, the greek etymology of zoe/zoon for “living being” can all too easily translate as “animals,” a certainly more-than-human (“morethan” and not “other-than”: humans are animals too) yet zoocentric perspective, obscuring plants, bacteria, etc. one could also object that not knowing the conditions in which companion species like donkeys or camels would help with transport, or that, remembering that bicycles and diy often stand for the hipster commodification of degrowth and cooptation of alternatives under consumerist banners, nothing guarantees that my unlikely assemblage would indeed be(come) postcapitalist, let alone nonexploitative. all these are highly technological, too; as such, they include all dimensions of the pharmakon: simultaneously cure and poison, they offer no absolute guarantees. but my alternative scenarios’ goal isn’t noncontradiction or perfection. instead, it is precisely to open up a space in which we might actually entertain and discuss these imperfect yet practical postcapitalist possibilities. what matters with this feminist parodic rewriting is the relation between the scenarios, staging a contrast that raises the question of why one might easily laugh at and/or with a z00 scenario, though many of its key aspects are concrete, local, accessible, participatory, large and small scale, drawing from plural and contested pasts as well as presents and imagined futures, while the ipcc’s capitalocentric scenarios are presented as a pragmatic and perfectly serious sort of futurity (often the only one). instead, i play the idiot’s game of calling the latter scenario stupid (i explain these provocative stengersian terms below), hoping that this will show climatologies’ need for feminist provocation and imagination. the ipcc has been praised even by feminist ecosophers such as emilie hache as offering a “futurology” allegedly capable of informing “an ethics for the future” (2011). these two phrases are originally philosopher hans jonas’s. his imperative of responsibility (1985) inspired many environmentalist thinkers and activists, insofar as it called for a new ethics surpassing kantianism to take into account both future human 12 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) generations and nonhumans, whose survival is threatened and who lack a voice of their own. however valuable this contribution turned out to be for environmentalism, and while we may join hache in appreciating the new, future-oriented way of conducting science the ipcc inaugurated, we may also remember that jonas’s recommendations came with his claims that political leaders should craft their deliberations based on the figure of a future-oriented, benevolent “patriarch” looking after his wife and children (present and future more-than-human generations), after consulting “experts” in the new science he named “futurology.” if the expertise the ipcc has provided thus far may indeed qualify as futurology, and if we also recall that, even though the general public has often seized the reports, these are primarily addressed to “policymakers,” we may doubt that this should be the object of praise. the ipcc functions internally on the basis of consensus, compiling climatological studies worldwide. therefore, the epistemological procedures it observes seem highly democratic. however, that this panel must commit to consensus in fact impoverishes its reasoning. futurological consensus erases dissent, flattening knowledge to generate an illusion of sciences speaking univocally. among others, gaia theorist james lovelock, though he problematically made apocalyptic warnings and advocated for geoengineering a few years ago (positions he later retracted—2007, 2010), has rightly stressed that dissensus and openness to contestability make for the production of sounder scientific knowledge than does consensus. let us add that this pertains to the sciences as it does to politics at large: at stake are different conceptions of democracy, namely agonistic, contestatory versions (e.g., honig, 1993). the perceived pressure to tighten ranks to denounce “climate skeptics” obscures how clearly politically charged and damaging to pluralism climatology can be, and how much it marginalizes alternative climate futures. one may laugh at the above mentions of community economies, naturecultural diversity, and queer, more-than-human kinships. but capitalocentric desires for endless growth that inform the ipcc models consensually obviate what could, in the end, be a possible future, all the 13 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) while allowing little to no laughter to be directed at unsustainably, capitalocentric futurities made of geoengineering or carbon markets. in considering the volatility of capitalism, political theorist william connolly has underscored the need to distinguish between likelihood and possibility (2013). the capitalocentrism of the ipcc scenarios may at first glance seem more likely, but my parodic description of a postcapitalist future can become possible if we expand our imaginaries (yusoff & gabrys, 2011), highlighting already existing alternatives : virtually all of the eclectic assemblages of technologies in the z00 scenario already exist and are constantly evolving. this imaginative effort may be bolstered by parodic science-fictional rewrites of climatological models, among possible strategies. as the degrowth movement (among other critics of capitalism) has shown (meadows, 1972; ariès, 2005; latouche, 2009; kallis, 2011), we may well go so far as to point out defiantly that capitalocentric futures are in fact less likely, or quite literally less viable, than postcapitalist alternatives—parody opens the possibility to turn the tables and show the dangerous utopianism of capitalist futurity as well as the potential pragmatism of myriad “other” experiments that are usually marginalized and assumed to be “low-tech” or to belong to an archaic past on a universal developmental timeline. a feminist climatology does not shy away from contesting the ipcc’s consensus. it dissensually imagines seemingly unlikely futures in order to expand the realm of the possible. as has become increasingly obvious with queer-theory debates on temporality (edelman, 2004; halberstam, 2005; muñoz, 2009; freeman, 2010), visions of the future operate as normative technologies. with z00 futures, i propose to playfully conjure the visions of capitalocentric futurology in climatology’s models that the ipcc reports illustrate. geoengineering stupidity let us now turn to the major differences between the ipcc perspective and my own science-fictional yet nonutopian scenario “family,” through 14 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) the tropes of isabelle stengers’s concepts of stupidity and idiocy. in “gaia, the urgency to think (and feel)” (2014), stengers argues that the ipcc’s working group i’s alarm-sounding should be distinguished from working group iii’s recommendations. she in turn sounded the alarm regarding the specter of geoengineering blackmail: we should certainly not assimilate under the same name, “objective science,” all of what the ipcc is producing. while group i experts get nightmares when they obtain a new understanding of the intricate dynamics of the ice sheets, group iii experts tell no such stories about the protagonists of their scenarios. they tell no stories at all but envisage the costs and benefits of measures to be taken by benevolent states respecting the functioning of the market. when the failure of this business-as-usual approach will be recognized, we may anticipate that it is also among those experts that the possibility of a “good anthropocene” will take its official roots. it will be claimed that there is no choice but to try and tame gaia. geoengineering will be presented as a logical accomplishment in the great history of human emancipation and mastery—and those who resist will be accused of betraying our destiny. the script is already written. here stengers rightly suggests that blackmail and failure have long been the very conditions for the reproduction of capitalist imagination, and that geoengineering is becoming the supposed logical response to climate change, prolonging the dreams of mastering nature that have long plagued science. i have argued above that the ipcc reports in general— across working groups—express a capitalocentric imaginary. i thus differ slightly from stengers. granted this nuance, i will draw from stengers to critique the particularly hubristic turn that this climatological perspective has taken, especially with the ipcc’s latest assessment report in 2014– 15. the ipcc’s recommendations have long proposed to rely upon carbon-trading markets to limit co2 emissions. that has worked superbly in china, for instance, where vast fields of windmills have earned 15 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) investors lucrative carbon credits, while the way these windmills may eventually be connected to the actual electric grids remains uncertain and ecologically costly (davidson et. al., 2016). but leaving aside the highly contestable yet “consensual” ipcc idea of remedying a capitalogenic climate crisis with further capitalist ventures in the form of carbon trading, i focus below on a more recent development among the ipcc’s recommendations to then contrast it with my feminist parodic thought experiment. the ipcc’s 2014 mitigation report and 2015 synthesis report opened a new chapter in the history of the panel. these embraced geoengineering (in the form of carbon dioxide removal – cdr) technologies as an allegedly compelling “mitigation solution.” the ipcc developed the notion of “overshoot,” accompanied with subsequent deployment of carbon trapping technologies, as one possible path to mitigation. un climate conferences, following ipcc advice, have gradually and (in)famously generated the threshold of a 2°c increase in global mean temperature as the “acceptable” limit (even though the ipcc also provided evidence that many, often poor, regions of the world would suffer drastically from such an increase). with its fifth assessment report (2015), the panel now entertained possibilities of “temporarily” “overshooting” the 2° target, but eventually compensating in part for this excess with future cdr technologies. “overshoot scenarios typically rely on the availability and widespread use of beccs and afforestation in the second half of the century” (p. 12). in other words, this strategy counts on hypothetical geoengineering technologies that have not yet been invented, proven effective, or shown to be without major risks of worsening the situation, let alone ethically acceptable or democratically supported. among cdr techniques, the ipcc most seriously considered bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or beccs (2014, p. 12). this would consist of growing trees and other carbon-absorbing biomass and then burning it in power plants designed to capture carbon emissions before they reach the atmosphere, supposedly generating energy with 16 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) “net zero” emissions while removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. many questions are unanswered regarding beccs, including where such captures would then be stored, where the immense necessary biomass could be planted, whether such massive land use would not further aggravate climate change (land use already contributes 24% of direct emissions, according to the ipcc), and how leaks from storage would be avoided. similarly to the ethico-political questions relevant to nuclear waste, one also wonders how humans today could ensure that living beings in the deep future would not be endangered were they to dig the storage open inadvertently, which could cause runaway climate change. certainly one could object that plants evolved their own natural technology (photosynthesis) to bury carbon in the ground as an integral part of the complex earth systems within which we live and act. yet, as the “overshoot” scenario has it, the sort of burial that human industry would perform would be developed over a few decades rather than over the deep time of plant evolution, and would be concentrated in burial sites that, if opened, would leak their carbon all at once: a perfect “runaway climate change” recipe. thus, both spatially and temporally, the concentration and acceleration at play prompts dark laughter with regard to such technologies, as we humbly admit that plant technology vastly outdoes industrial phantasms. time will tell whether hubristic confidence pays off. let us remain caught up in the same growth-oriented logic and postpone to a hypothetical future the supposed solution for the problem wrought by such logic. granted, the “solution” itself assumes more technoscientific progress and “mastery” of nature (plumwood, 2002) at the planetary level. furthermore, one possibility (among many others) that escapes under the ipcc’s capitalocentric blind spots is that further knowledge concerning the technologies imagined could perhaps result in conclusions that such technologies may ultimately be judged too risky and uncertain. unimaginable for consensual futurology is the possibility that we humans do not and might not ever know enough to tinker helpfully with the global climate. in other words, the specific kind of 17 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) scientific-technological knowledge at play here refuses to entertain its own (present and future) limits. in aux temps des catastrophes (2013), stengers explains that our need to think becomes dangerously incapacitated in the current ecological crisis. she points to the urgent need to name la bêtise (translated as “stupidity”). stengers distinguishes “stupidity” from “dumbness” (the french false cognate of stupidité). the former is an active force rather than a stable attribute defining specific individuals. bêtise/stupidity traverses, seizing people and assemblages. being dumb when confronted with a terrible situation would in contrast take the form of paralysis (the french word for “dumb” shares its root with “stupor”), curtailing action in the face of a larger force. dumbness engenders numbness. in contrast, and likely more destructively, bêtise actively engages forces into actions that do not match, and even worsen, the exigencies of a particular situation.6 i contend that cdr technofixes correspond quite precisely to this designation. in stengers’s view, stupidity currently inhabits those “(ir)responsible” for making decisions.7 in the ipcc reports, the potentially helpful and necessary diagnosis of a situation of ecological crisis as requiring rapid, drastic change and stemming from the industrial period contrasts with the incapability to think beyond capitalocentric futurology led by large-scale technological “experiments,” top-down policy-making, and technocratic environmentalism. it does not seem to have occurred to ipcc scientists and economists that, just as not all human history (let alone all earth history) has been capitalist, neither do all future times have hegemonic capitalism written on them. thus, technofixes that make humans and many current earth dwellers dependent on one specific, contingent, and recent economic mode of production may not be acceptable ethically or politically. here we encounter the very issue i initially staged with the question of technofixery: the issue is not so much with the techne, as a bicycle or a social movement’s collective strategy can also be considered forms of technology. the problem lies with the assumptions made about 18 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) definitive choices durably committing us and deeming the matter resolved, or deeming the goal to be resolution (the “fixing”), curtailing attempts at posing capitalist economies and their “others” as problems and questions. one common characteristic of virtually all geoengineering techniques is that in order to be implemented, they rely upon major industrial means being sustained. were geoengineering technology to crash suddenly for whatever reason, if the models were right, such a crash could result in unpredictable change in atmospheric chemistry, which would be potentially vastly destructive for the biota at the time of the accident. therefore, beginning to rely on such technology may condemn future generations of more-than-human living beings to stick to industrial economies indefinitely, unless they wish to commit mass suicide. capitalist economies have been oil-dependent for a while now, and geoengineering could further seal an even more profound and durable dependence on industrial economies. in reflecting upon what a convivial (postindustrial, postcapitalist) society would look like,8 precursor theorist of degrowth ivan illich (2001) critically denounced “radical monopolies.” for instance, a monopoly emerges if only one soda company produces soda, but people who are thirsty may still be able to drink water instead. if, on the other hand, the only available mode of transit in some areas becomes the car, a commodity (the car) exercises a “radical monopoly” over the satisfaction of a need (mobility). i suggest that geoengineering may be a “hyper-radical monopoly”: even if it “worked,” it could result in making the more-than-human species that currently (struggle to) exist on this planet dependent for their very condition of existence on one technological solution that is itself contingent upon a hegemonically industrial mode of production. the ipcc’s generous proposals of developing such technology sets up capitalocentric blackmail for generations to come. having busied itself to speak in one single, consensual voice making a “strong case” for “anthropogenic” (capitalogenic, industriogenic) climate change, the ipcc’s new “overshoot and geoengineer” tack commits present and future humans and many more-than-humans to capitalogenic climates. 19 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) this plan assumes full confidence in industrialism and requires indefinite espousal of capitalist modes of production, ignoring the major historical evidence of their technologies’ fallibility and economies’ volatility. great plan! where we do sign? but of course, consent, now or in the future, is not truly part of the discussion, at least not in any sort of depth, as a scientifically “consensual” case for diagnosing an “emergency” justifies all sorts of decisions. how future generations of humans and more-than-humans might consent, and how democratic worldwide support might be provided even today, remains a puzzle. similar arguments to those used for legitimizing nuclear energy inform the ipcc’s advocacy of geoengineering. we would surely be invited to trust the experts, once geoengineering techniques are deemed operational; the consensual futurologists will assure us that the “probability” of an accident is infinitesimal. this probability will then be equated to a risk (beck, 1992), with no consideration that risk may be better weighed by taking into account not only probabilities but also the extent of the damage (potentially devastating and planetary, in this case) were the technofixes to fail. even in the unlikely case that geoengineers invented a technology deemed 99.99% reliable, if the 0.01% chance of failure means potentially eradicating countless species on earth, would it be ethically sound to proceed? the “stupidity” of probability-based reasoning has tragically been demonstrated by nuclear accidents in chernobyl and fukushima. given, then, the enormous risk involved in geoengineering the climate—which engages a much vaster scale than the regions any given nuclear plant threatens, as well as planetary complex systems we are far from grasping fully—wouldn’t taking such a risk require at least unanimity among present and future more-than-human species, if it were to be democratically founded at all? how would that be attainable? additionally, nuclear plant accidents threaten the complex earth systems. beccs purport to regulate those systems, which may require even greater epistemological confidence and vastly broader knowledge and predictability. with these considerations in mind, don’t capitalocentric scenarios like the new “overshoot” scenario seem 20 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) profoundly utopian, in the most totalizing and dangerous sense of this term? these may indeed become much more laughable (a tragic laughter) and “lower-tech” than my z00 scenario (queer) family. feminist idiocy in the 2015 preface to the english edition of au temps des catastrophes, stengers sarcastically writes: today, the grand campaign to deny the problem has run out of breath a little, but the second phase is being prepared. new voices are making themselves heard, asserting that it is impossible to restrict emissions, which in the meantime have exploded. the only solution is geo-engineering. (2015, p. 8) while geoengineering was but a dark future looming on the horizon when she first composed the book in 2008, as argued above, this technofixery constitutes an instance of what stengers then characterized as stupidity. as she has already reminded us, there is “no guarantee whatsoever that the sciences, at least as we know them today, are equipped to respond to the menaces of the future” (stengers, 2009, p. 22). in order to confront ipcc stupidity, we may now invite to the stage yet another stengersian “conceptual character”—the idiot (2005). armed with my parodic family scenario and a bit more provocation, i contend that some not-so-stupid, though perhaps idiotic, feminist sciences and theory may be better “equipped” to think through the “menaces of the future.” the questions raised at the end of the section above are, to an extent, symptomatic of what stengers calls “idiocy:” namely, they offer welcome pause to think, a mode of address that, however important, is not intelligible to accepted and public discourse, performing a disruptive effect. such salutary idiocy poses questions heretofore unaddressed by climatological futurology. stengers describes the idiot as being defined by her resistance to both consensus and urgency: in the ancient greek sense, [idiocy refers to]…a semi-private language that excludes from a form of communication 21 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) characterized by an ideal of transparency and anonymity….[the idiot] is the one who always slows the others down, who resists the consensual way in which the situation is presented and in which emergencies mobilize thought and action. (2005, p. 994) thus idiotic interventions disrupt the rush of stupidity, causing pause. while those stressing urgency rush to an “and so,” the idiot demands that we slow down. in the face of the crisis or emergency, s/he proposes the conditions of emergence of critical thought. in fact, it may be precisely when emergency is so saliently felt that we need to elasticize time to make sounder moves. there is a risk of idiocy not being intelligible by the consensual knowledge structures it disrupts. the greek word idiot, evoked above by stengers, sharing its etymological root with the english word “idiom,” refers to a private, idiosyncratic way of thought that struggles to be publicly understood or recognized and may be dismissed by preconceived and accepted views. in spite of this risk, the idiot is valuable insofar as “she demands that we slow down, that we don’t consider ourselves authorized to believe we possess the meaning of what we know” (stengers, 2005, p. 995). idiocy, as a form of radical skepticism, an antidote to hubris, underscores the limits of knowledge and does not assume, in the case of climatology for instance, that the climate can be modeled in a sufficiently accurate way to warrant a single solution with a single, sweeping, and mass-scale technological fix. the technological practices deployed in an idiotic z00 scenario are multiple, contestatory, and open-ended struggles rather than fixed ones. indeed, the parodic scenario description offered at the beginning of this paper intends such disruption—not only as such, but because of the contrast between the scenarios and the resulting highlighting of some of the immensity of what is left to imagine. in writing a family of scenarios to envision a world beyond the imaginable capitalist futures exclusively considered by mainstream climatology, this parodic intervention provokes us to wonder whether such complexity could even be calculable under the metrics of current economic laws assumed to track climate change accurately in emissions scenarios. by extension, it 22 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) highlights that the capitalocentric models contain a lot of unknowns as well. this is why my z00 scenario concludes with the qualifying phrase “mostly unimaginable to early twenty-first-century human generations.” from this radically skeptical perspective, we may turn to scientific views that do not presume ecological behaviors to be fully knowable or predictable in the future, as well as economic, social, and political developments producing arrangements beyond the blinders of capitalist economies. the idiotic, parodic scenarist invites and stages disruptive questions not interrogated by capitalocentric imagination: “do/should we really need/desire endless capitalist growth, anyway?” “isn’t industrial globalization bound to disappear, just like all economic forms in human history so far, and be replaced by arrangements unfathomable to current generations?” “can the climate ever be modeled in sufficiently accurate ways to allow us to geoengineer it?” the parodic form, as it mimics and yet subverts, caricaturing the ipcc’s language, performs and provokes idiotic questions: the idiot neither speaks the common language nor shares the common assumptions this language undergirds. therefore, with parody and critique as allies, the idiot can espouse the ipcc’s turns of phrase but include proposals such as biking, the abolition of private property, or queer more-than-human kinship, opening a space for the uncanny, for laughter, for unfamiliar grounds, and for staging a relation between these imaginaries that defies the presumption that ipcc capitalocentrism would be all that realistic or pragmatic after all. it becomes possible to mock capitalocentrism, perhaps even to dismiss it as dangerously utopian, disconnected from the reality that capitalist growth is unsustainable and destructive. in contrast to the declarations of an ipcc that synthesizes climatological research from negotiations seeking consensus within a community of scientists and mainstream economists accountable to the united nations, an idiotic approach may dissensually compare the mitigation “solutions” proposed by the ipcc to a multitude of existing proposals. this approach foregrounds ongoing attempts at the concerted and participatory proliferation of a new ethics and new modes of living at 23 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) various scales, i.e., diverse economies in the here and now (gibsongraham, 2011), with present and future generations as a matter of concern (hache, 2014), “queer kinships,” and more-than-human sympoiesis (haraway, 2015) contrasting with the language of “population control” typical of the ipcc. thus i describe the z00 scenario as one where private property has been abolished and feet and bicycles have taken over as modes of transport, to the detriment of car hegemony. community economies and indigenous and organic local food production have generalized. alternatives that today are usually relegated to the margins have instead spread to displace the hegemonic capitalist mode of production from its throne. some of the key notions informing this scenario include community economies, as advocated, for instance, by j.k. gibson-graham: i.e., economies in which surplus value generated by workers is shared instead of being appropriated by a small minority owning the means of production. conviviality (illich, 2001; humbert et al., 2011) and degrowth (ariès, 2005; latouche, 2009; kallis, 2011) replace business as usual. taken together, these assemblages, forming “ecoegalitarian resonance machines” (connolly, 2008), are indeed elaborate collective and subjective technologies no less legitimate than those geoengineering “emergency” measures in “overshoot scenarios” considered so “high-tech.” here it may be objected that my z00 climate scenario risks setting up a problematic binary that merely opposes climatology’s futurity with a romantic “return” to “other,” supposedly “low-tech” approaches. but there is a vast difference between a “return” narrative, a binary opposition, and an intervention highlighting what is made unthinkable by a specific knowledge’s hegemonic status. the scenario above assembles a patchwork of approaches that do not always speak to one another, from degrowth and conviviality, ecosophical and ecopolitical movements more present in europe and latin america (d’alisa et al., 2014), to climate justice, feminist, and queer ecologies language, as well as indigenous and non-western views and practices, all of which are already in existence and in movement. thus, far from the retrogressive imposition of 24 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) an alleged binary opposite, such an assemblage stages a pluralistic defiance to hegemonic, contradictory, impossibly capitalocentric consensus futurology; it foments multiplicities that contrast and challenge contemporary hegemonic economies: the idiot disrupts the supposed anonymity and transparency of public discourse (usually assumed to be one). spatially, the parodic z00 scenario incites questioning of what counts as largeversus small-scale experimentation: aren’t the noncapitalist assemblages evoked here already widespread? temporally, contrary to a possible (mis)reading in terms of “return” and mere revaluation of “low-tech” approaches, the parodic idiot’s tone incites defiance regarding normative, linear temporalities that assume “forward” or “ahead.” this presumption that low-tech and diverse postcapitalist economies are “backward” or regressive indeed assumes that “modernity” has so far been moving “forward” (latour, 2012) and that “forward” has meant “better”; it denies, in an all-too-familiar western colonial gesture, the coeval nature of these “other” modes (fabian, 2014). similarly, distinctions cannot be reduced to a binary opposition between capitalist accelerationism and slow movements: indeed, the slowness of more ecologically bearable transport or food may result in denser convivialities and faster critical thinking. the idiot’s pause is one that makes room for an acceleration of the pace of thought and the fast, unpredictable proliferation of possibilities. their exclusion from the realm of the legitimately “technological” is an indication of what is taken to be likely, given hegemonic yet contingent economic systems, more than of what is possible to live and imagine. parody also opens up an occasion to laugh at western, all-too-modern magic (capitalocentric) wand9 hubris as ultimately less, not more, pragmatic than the myriad alternatives already deployed by so many who are allegedly on the margins but are potentially so central to “staying with the trouble” (haraway, 2016). the same sort of idiotic questions erupt from this parody when it comes to “low” versus “high” tech: why would diy or bicycling count as “low-tech” while geoengineering counts as “high,” and why would “high” 25 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) signify a “superior,” more “advanced,” or more valuable (valued) way on a vertical axis representing hierarchy? the laughter produced by parody offers a glimpse at the answer, which has to do with exclusions of noncapitalist knowledges and practices (themselves not innocent or pure, but perhaps offering a different order and economy of power). especially when the lowest-denominator resistances call on us to “unify” and “march for science” while we hope to defend, mobilize, and deploy different, pluralistic sciences, and when vital nuances are flattened by perceptions of an allegedly “common” enemy, it matters greatly that we highlight more complex lines distinguishing plural and contested commitments to the sciences and politics, as well as the politics of science. the climate-change-as-corporate-opportunity vision of al gore (gore, 2013, p. 592; luke, 2015), the investments of the climate-skeptic oil industry into geoengineering research (hamilton, 2013), and the studies on “aerosol injections” currently conducted at harvard with the united nations’ geoengineering governance initiative’s blessing make strange bedfellows these days. it matters which sciences and which technologies get to be defended, for which ones we may march and to which feminism contributes, distinguishing also against which science we might in fact protest, all while avoiding dualistic critique. feminist parody defies climatological stupidity by raising this sort of idiotic objection, potentially producing different climes. parody has the advantage of provocation, partly compensating for the risk run by the idiot of not being heard—though, even with parody, the risk of not being understood remains. i do not expect all the suggestions above to be fully understood. however, i hope to have shown that, where climatology’s capitalocentric gaze reads the post-1750 past as producing “anthropogenic” climate change, we may instead critique capitalogenic, industriogenic, plantationogenic climates and that, where climatological futurology assumes all futures shall be capitalist, we may laugh a feminist laughter that underscores other possible climates. 26 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) notes 1 one would be hard-pressed to exhaustively synthesize these critiques, from donna haraway and her creative proliferation of terms (the chthulucene, plantationocene, industriocene, capitalocene, etc—2015), to giovanna dichiro’s note that the environmental justice movement has not been taking on this universalizing notion and its masking of unequal responsibilities and impacts. stacy alaimo has critically engaged (2016) post-colonial historian dipesh chakrabarty (2009)’s conception of the disembodied “human” as a “geological force,” and has contested his claim that experiencing “ourselves” as a species is an unprecedented situation. isabelle stengers’ questioning of the “troubling abstraction,” “man” (2015), performs similar critique. though it is one of the most vibrantly responsive, feminist theory isn’t alone in objecting to the concept of anthropocene. examples beyond feminism include the term “capitalocene,” developed in j.w. moore’s 2016 anthology, or ecology theorist dorion sagan’s questioning of anthropocentric humans’ naming an epoch, when the massive oxygen pollution produced by cyanobacteria eons ago, making the proliferation of life possible, has yet to be granted the title of “cyanocene” (2017). 2 see for instance bill mckibben’s bellicose rhetoric and call for unity (2016). 3 here i follow, as do the other essays in this special issue, the distinction made by sandra harding between science and the sciences (2008), extending it to climatology and climatologies. 4 many climate justice voices have denounced the inadequate character of the response to the climate crisis on the part of governments, as well as the connections between big oil and funding of climate skeptic research. for lack of possibly reviewing exhaustively this literature, one example includes research reports and position papers published as early 27 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) as 1999 by bruno, karliner and brotsky, or more recently, the assemblage of manifestoes and position papers published in the occasion of the cop21’s preparation in new york, titled “what now for climate justice?” (bond et. al, 2014). however in both of these instances as in much of the literature, if the cops (the unfccc’s annual conventions on climate change) are denounced as insufficient, ineffective, and tied with big money, usually the ipcc is cited in uncritical manners— bruno et. al. mentioned the ipcc in passing describing it as “a large group of the best climate scientists” (1999, p. 12). the ipcc is taken as a major reference (which it certainly is) and its reports as the needed authority to ground radical environmentalist claims (which is problematic in my view). this paper challenge this authority by, rather than assuming climate justice needs climatology, showing that imagining climate futures requires feminist insight. 5 for example, as early as 1996, economists h.e. daly and k.n. townsend’s “impossibility theorem.” 6 an english edition of stengers’s book, in catastrophic times: resisting the coming barbarism, came out in 2015. however, here i use the french text, because of the nuance explained here between stupidité (dumbness) and bêtise(stupidity). the latter, one may add, also connotes beastly (bête) recklessness, a more-than-human resonance that does not lack irony. 7 here lies another reason why i turn to the original french text. there stengers refers with great irony and even sarcasm to nos responsables (“our public officials,” “those in charge of/responsible for us”) and contrasts them with objectors to growth like herself, activists, and some scientists who may be deemed “irresponsible” from what i (following gibson-graham) call a capitalocentric viewpoint. however, in the english text, the translation of this term as “our guardians” causes a loss of the sarcastic and defiant tone. 28 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) 8 in illich’s “convivial society,” tools would serve humans rather than the opposite, a problematically dualistic human/technological vision i cannot fully develop here. however, i use the term above because it resonates with my z00 scenario, in a loose interpretation of illich as preoccupied with autonomy and solidarity. 9 political theorist timothy w. luke wrote of geoengineering as a wouldbe “miracle cure” as early as 2010. references alaimo, s. 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(2010). queer ecologies: sex, nature, politics, desire. bloomington, in: indiana university press. muñoz, j.e. (2009). cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. 33 brault catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) new york, ny: nyu press. plumwood, v. (2002). feminism and the mastery of nature. new york, ny: routledge. sagan, d. (2017). beautiful monsters: terra in the cyanocene. in s. tsing et al. (eds.), arts of living on a damaged planet (pp. m169-m174). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. stengers, i. (2005). the cosmopolitical proposal. in b. latour & p. weibel (eds.), making things public: atmospheres of democracy (pp. 994-1015). cambridge, ma: mit press. ——— (2013). au temps des catastrophes: résister à la barbarie qui vient. paris, france: découverte. ——— (2014). gaia: the urgency to think (and feel). in the thousand names of gaia: from the anthropocene to the age of the earth. conference, rio de janeiro. retrieved from https://osmilnomesdegaia.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/isabellestengers.pdf ——— (2015). in catastrophic times: resisting the coming barbarism. london, uk: open humanities press. wainwright, j., & mann, g. (2013). climate leviathan. antipode, 45(1), 122. yusoff, k., & j. gabrys. (2011). climate change and the imagination. climate change, 2(4), 516–534. bio claire brault is a postdoctoral fellow at brown university. before completing her phd in political science at the university of massachusetts, amherst, claire brault earned her ba and her ma in law and political studies from the university of rennes, in her native brittany (france). her work draws from a number of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields: environmental political theory, feminist theory, feminist science and technology studies, ecocriticism microsoft word 71526_1_11_mills.doc mills, m. (2018). the hard disciplines. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © mara mills. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical commentary the hard disciplines mara mills new york university mmills@nyu.edu science and technology studies (sts) is a latecomer to postcolonial and decolonial debates. in 2012, kavita philip, lilly irani, and paul dourish published “a tactical survey” of possibilities for postcolonial computing, noting that “the ‘hard’ disciplines” — the sciences and science studies — had by and large held themselves apart from the political and theoretical movements common across other academic fields. “sts did take on the hard bastion of objectivity,” they explained, “transforming euro-american sociology, history, and philosophy. however, much of the mythos of the western origin stories of science and rationality, while being demolished in theory, manifested itself in practice, in a locational focus on euroamerican spaces of science” (philip et al., 2012, p. 6). on the other hand, sts scholars have repeatedly lamented the lack of attention to “hard” science and technology within the mainstream of postcolonial studies. in a recent issue of science, technology, and human values dedicated to feminist postcolonial technoscience, editors anne pollock and banu subramaniam insist that this inattention is no longer tenable. “as science 2 mills catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) and technology have ... moved center stage in the circuits of state and global power,” they write, “we have witnessed technoscience’s vital role not only in those circuits but also in the social movements that resist them” (pollock & subramaniam, 2016, p. 952). can the big guns of critical theory be retrained from poems and movies onto algorithms or process control? among those who are working at the intersection of postand decolonial theories and sts, a common approach has been to examine the legacies of colonial ideology within engineered objects, scientific categories, or medical protocols — the ways these things incorporate and prescribe particular values. histories of international technical standards have been an important branch of this research because standards exhibit, as susan leigh star and martha lampland point out, “generative entrenchment,” wherein early decisions “ramify throughout the growth of the system” (star & lampland, 2009, p. 14). a classic example of generative entrenchment in computing is the “linguistic imperialism” that inflects nearly all the information technologies initially designed by or for english speakers, from the level of the operating system to that of the screen. in a 2016 issue of the ieee annals of the history of computing, dongoh park explains that “the english language has long served as the lingua franca of computing and computer mediated communication. many of the core applications and standards of digital computing, including programming languages, operating systems, and applications, have been developed, documented, and serviced in english” (park, 2016, p. 40). when it comes to computing, to use the terms of marxist critique, the technical “base” and the culturalaesthetic “superstructure” cannot be cleanly separated. linguistic imperialism materializes in optical character recognition (ocr) software that is slower and less accurate — or that fails entirely — for so-called “special characters” including asian scripts, multilingual mexican colonial documents (see hannah alpert-abrams, in this roundtable), and braille. similarly the speech-processing software in cochlear implants, marketed globally by only a few corporations, is 3 mills catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) largely based on historical trials with english-speaking test subjects, and privileges non-tonal over tonal languages.1 the generative entrenchment of colonial ideals also structures visual media. as simone browne explains in her book dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness, embedded racism and “white prototypicality” pervade today’s digital imaging technologies (browne, 2015, p. 110).2 valuable though they are, exposés of embedded ideology run the risk, as pollock and subramaniam point out, of maintaining or emulating unidirectional models of technological progress wherein “science, rationality, progress, and enlightenment always rest in europe or the west, to subsequently diffuse to non-western nations” (p. 953). these critiques often demand technological solutions in a manner that can sit too comfortably with the ideals of innovation, utility, progress, and development. is it decolonizing to improve technology incrementally, expand access to mainstream computing, or diversify ownership and management within corporate capitalism? beyond invention and design, postcolonial and decolonial analyses can be applied at every stage of the global computing supply chain: physical resource extraction, information extraction in the emerging paradigm of “data colonialism,” low-wage electronics manufacture and low-wage digital labor, pirate assembly, e-waste, pollution, and environmental justice. digital colonialism also manifests in the interlacing of computing and everyday life, from digital border control to automated weaponry to airbnb-enabled racism to the spillover between virtual and physical harassment. narrow stories of heroic ict invention — limited to predictable regions and elite actors or corporations — often fail to weigh the significance of political economy, law, and (inter)national policy. scientific knowledge production can also be expanded or re-situated by calling attention to information transfer and idea theft, historical misattribution, and “peripheral” digital practices (see anita say chan, in this roundtable), or by emphasizing labor, maintenance, and repair rather than invention. many postcolonial sts scholars foreground the ways people take 4 mills catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) advantage of technology: how they domesticate, personalize, and interpret the electronic artifacts they come by; how icts are appropriated or put to unintended purposes, from improvisation to creative misuse to outright remaking. others underscore the prevalence of resistance, refusal, abandonment, and non-use. from social media to digital databases, icts are equally present in the ongoing project of decolonization, playing significant roles in activism and scholarly criticism. but tools of computing and telecommunication were built to employ us, treating us as the “human factor” in technical networks at once dense and extensive. to enroll computing in the project of decolonization, the devices that occupy so much of our time must equally preoccupy our research and inquiry. acknowledgements i want to thank lizza dauenhauer-pendley for introducing me to the concept of data colonialism. notes 1 i’ve written on this topic in “do signals have politics? inscribing abilities in cochlear implants,” the oxford handbook of sound studies, ed. trevor pinch and karin bijsterveld (oxford up, 2011), 320-346. 2 on the term “white prototypicality,” browne cites lewis r. gordon, “is the human a teleological suspension of man? phenomenological exploration of sylvia wynter’s fanonian and biodocean reflections,” in after man, towards the human: critical essays on the thought of sylvia wynter, ed. anthony bogues (kingston, jamaica: ian randle, 2006), 239. references browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham and london: duke university press. philip, k., irani, l. & dourish, p. (2012). postcolonial computing: a tactical survey. science, technology, & human values 37 (1): 3-29. 5 mills catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) park, d. (2016). the korean character code: a national controversy, 1987-1995. ieee annals of the history of computing 38 (2): 40-53. pollock, a. & subramaniam, b. (2016). resisting power, retooling justice: promises of feminist postcolonial technosicences. science, technology, & human values 41 (6): 951-66. star, s. & lampland, m. (2009). reckoning with standards. in standards and their stories, ed. star and lampland. ithaca and london: cornell university press, 3-24. bio mara mills is associate professor of media, culture, and communication at new york university, where she co-directs the center for disability studies. merid article    "stroke’s no joke": race and the cultural coding of stroke risk    beza merid university of southern california merid@usc.edu in august 2009, the american stroke association (asa) began a public service announcement (psa) campaign designed to inform african americans about stroke warning signs and the need to seek immediate emergency medical care at their onset. the campaign, titled stroke’s no joke, featured african american stand-up comedians joking about family members delaying emergency medical care after the first signs of stroke. in addition to jests, the campaign deployed a direct camera address informing the viewer about the dangers of delays in care seeking. the stroke’s no joke campaign included television, radio, online, and billboard psas, using the tag line “time lost is brain lost” to frame stroke as an urgent medical threat. addressing both the disproportionate risk of stroke among african americans and the deleterious effects of delays in seeking emergency care, stroke’s no joke represents a critical endeavor to reduce race-based disease disparities. yet while the campaign was explicitly designed to target african americans, its message to viewers curiously did not articulate racial disparities in stroke risk and death, instead deploying stand-up comedy as a means of shaping the informed african american patient. in this article, i draw on theorizations of the cultural construction of race to examine knowledge production around african american stroke risk. here i rely on the works of janet k. shim (2014) and angela jenks (2010), who illustrate how cultural concepts of race can depoliticize racial health disparities and frame them instead as neutral markers of racial difference.  i take the stroke’s no joke campaign as my focus to analyze how avowed antiracist efforts to intervene in a persistent health inequity can essentialize race as a static marker of cultural difference. in examining african american stroke disparities and the institutional undertakings to address and mitigate them, i argue that this process of essentializing and racializing cultural difference positions both race and culture as apolitical and ahistorical risk factors, stripping such well-intentioned institutional interventions of their stated aims toward equity. in response to this depoliticization of biomedical knowledge production about african american stroke risk, i consider how racial health disparities persist as part of structural, not just cultural, barriers to health equity, and call for a feminist biomedical knowledge production that discursively centers the bodies and lives for whom this knowledge is vital. the “cultural coding” of biomedical knowledge production is part of a broad effort by health institutions to improve the efficacy of interventions into persistent disease disparities. with regard to racial disparities in stroke death, researchers at the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) found that while stroke mortality declined substantially among different racial groups in the 1970s and 1980s, “little improvement was made in the 1990s” (casper et al. 2003, p. 2). in addition to this slowed decline, they reported that stroke hospitalizations increased 18.6% from 1988 to 1997 (ibid.). in the atlas of stroke mortality: racial, ethnic and geographic disparities in the united states, the cdc’s 2003 report responding to this ongoing crisis, the agency acknowledged the recognition among public health agencies for local interventions that could “provide more targeted and culturally appropriate stroke prevention programs and policies” to better address these racial disparities (ibid). known as “cultural competence,” this model is intended to enable and improve cross-cultural and cross-racial communication in the context of care. this framework of cultural competence works toward understanding the cultural and social influences that shape relationships between medical practitioners and patients as well as the quality of care given; it is also a tenet of institutional efforts to intervene in persistent racial disease disparities like african american stroke risk. emerging from prominent organizations like the department of health and human services (hhs), the american heart association (aha), and the cdc, this call to intervene in racial health and disease disparities reflects concerted institutional attempts to understand and correct individual, cultural, geographical, and structural causes of these disparities. the collective work of these agencies frames persistent disease disparities as the product of individual behaviors, such as delays in care seeking; of cultural beliefs, such as distrust of medical institutions; and of structural barriers to care, such as a lack of local access to emergency services. calls to action recognize racial health disparities as the product of a combination of these factors, advocating for interventions that take each into account. rather than articulating african american stroke risk as such, the logic of stroke’s no joke attributes african american stroke disparities only to individual risk factors and cultural differences, while evading more pernicious structural inequalities and barriers to care. rather than engaging with the complex social determinants of health and illness that shape this persistent disparity, the campaign reconstructs blackness, here via stand-up comedy, as both an object of and a vehicle for biomedical knowledge production.  "stroke’s no joke": the campaign stroke is a leading cause of death among americans in general, and among african americans in particular. according to the cdc, a stroke occurs “when a clot blocks the blood supply to the brain or when a blood vessel in the brain bursts” (know the facts about stroke). immediately following the onset of a stroke, there is a three-hour window during which treatment is most effective in preventing cognitive impairment and death. interventions seeking to reduce stroke mortality through increased patient awareness focus on improving patients’ recognition of stroke symptoms and promoting immediate action during this critical window of time. the cdc reports that more than 795,000 people in the united states suffer a stroke annually, and that stroke kills almost 130,000 americans each year (stroke facts). of the nearly 800,000 strokes reported annually, about 610,000 are first or new strokes and approximately 185,000 strokes occur in people who have had a previous stroke. furthermore, the asa reports that annually, women have more strokes than men, and that stroke kills more women than men (understanding stroke risk). according to data from 2010, the most recent year from which these statistics are available, roughly 55,000 more women than men had a stroke, and 77,109 women—as compared to 52,367 men—died as a result of stroke (women face higher risk of stroke). it is estimated that stroke costs the united states $36.5 billion each year in health care services, medications, and missed days of work (understanding stroke risk). given its significant rates of morbidity and mortality, addressing the enormous toll of stroke on the individual and national body as well as its disparate incidence among african americans is vital. equally pressing, i argue, is the need to understand the means by which african american stroke risk is communicated, and what this reveals about the politics of knowledge production in racial disease disparity interventions. the commercials televised for the stroke’s no joke campaign feature african american comedians alonzo bodden and george willborn each performing stand-up routines in front of a laughing audience. they perform inside a comedy club, dimly lit with a brick wall backing the stage. aside from minor differences in the jokes told, the bodden and willborn commercials are effectively identical. in both their jokes, an uncle phones and complains about experiencing symptoms that the psa would later indicate are stroke symptoms. in both acts, the comedians urge their uncles to seek emergency medical care without delay. bodden, for example, relates to the audience that his uncle experiences dizziness and loss of balance, but after offering to take him to a doctor, his uncle replies, “no, i’m gonna look up the symptoms.” bodden appears incredulous, saying to his uncle, “your symptoms are you’re dizzy and you’re losing your balance!” the audience laughs, and bodden continues that his uncle now complains of an inability to search his symptoms online because his arm has become numb. still exasperated, bodden replies, “well use your good arm and dial 9-1-1!” bodden’s response is, once again, met with laughter as the camera pans the room to show the silhouettes of laughing audience members. following his “routine,” the campaign’s insignia appears on screen as bodden begins his direct camera address: “stroke’s no joke. if you or someone you love is showing symptoms of stroke, don’t wait ‘cause it might be too late. dial 9-1-1. time lost is brain lost.” as bodden delivers this information, the campaign’s web address, strokesnojoke.org, followed by the insignia for both the ad council and the american heart and stroke associations appear on screen, this same script replayed in the commercial featuring george willborn. in the latter, the camera pans over a laughing audience before landing on willborn on stage, who jokes that his uncle had called a series of family members before reaching him. after complaining of stroke symptoms and being encouraged by willborn to seek immediate emergency care, his uncle nonetheless decides to wait until willborn returns from out of town to seek help. and like the commercial featuring bodden, the camera then cuts to a direct camera address where willborn urges viewers to seek emergency care at the first signs of stroke. notably, women are absent from this conversation about african american stroke risk; in both the bodden and wilborn commercials, the relatives who are suffering stroke symptoms and the family members who urge immediate emergency care are all men. after delivering jokes about delaying emergency medical treatment, bodden and wilborn use the direct camera address to emphasize the importance of seeking immediate care. employing what robin nabi et al. (2007) call a “restoration of gravity,” the psa shifts from the comedians’ light-hearted material to the campaign’s central message. nabi and her co-authors argue that humorous social issue messages typically promote more message discounting among viewers than serious messages; thus, the authors suggest that the conclusion of a humorous message should “reestablish serious intent” to maximize the efficacy of humor as a functional element in serious contexts, and to minimize the extent to which audiences resist or discount the information being communicated (p. 50-51). the comedians make explicit the need to view the onset of stroke symptoms as a cardiac and neurological emergency, emphasizing that action must be taken immediately following symptom onset. as the comedians remind viewers, “time lost is brain lost.” aside from the glaring absence of women, the commercials themselves are striking for two particular reasons: the absence of an explicit acknowledgement of the racial disease disparities in stroke incidence spurring this campaign, and the ambivalence of using stand-up comedy both as an efficient channel through which african americans can be addressed and an instrument of health communication that can potentially undermine the seriousness of a message. the stroke’s no joke campaign is part of the aha’s broader efforts to address african american stroke risk and mitigate racial disease disparity. the aha’s 2011 diversity report, a public account of the agency’s attempts to improve health equity across racial groups, specifically notes that the campaign’s multimedia campaign is “dedicated to reaching african americans about stroke warning signs and the need to seek emergency medical care at the first sign(s) of stroke” (p. 4). however, this message about racial disease disparity is made implicit in the campaign’s televised commercials, which are more focused on addressing individual behavior. while i find this implicit gesturing to be inadequate to the task of raising public awareness of stroke risk, the commercials’ failure to make explicit the campaign’s intentions is not what is most troublesome here; rather, by addressing the problem implicitly, the psa—the public face of larger, institutional interventions into african american stroke risk—individualizes and therefore depoliticizes heart health and care. according to the cdc, stroke is the third leading cause of death among african americans, behind heart disease and cancer, respectively. the cdc reports that the risk of having a first stroke is nearly twice as high for blacks than it is for whites; further, blacks are more likely to die from a stroke than are whites. significantly, this research also makes a distinction between disparities in the incidence of stroke and disparities in treatment-seeking behavior. the work of eliminating persistent racial disease disparities rightly begins with locating the causes of these disparities. for example, the cdc’s 2003 atlas report traces how stroke hospitalizations and stroke mortality among racial and ethnic groups persist over time. importantly, the atlas also traces what these data reveal about geographic and racial disparities in stroke, representing on both local and national maps the alarming concentrations of stroke death in the southeastern us in what is called the “stroke belt” and among african americans (p. 2). the strength of this intervention is its investment in understanding the myriad factors that contribute to such health disparities. in particular, the atlas makes a case for identifying the social determinants of health among populations that suffer most acutely from these disparities, and for adopting interventions that reflect their many causes. disparities in treatment-seeking behavior may reflect the longstanding cultural and structural effects of race and racism in biomedicine. citing for example social injustices like the 1932 tuskegee syphilis study where african american subjects were denied treatment for decades under the guise of studying the “natural history” of the disease, as well as racial health inequalities emerging from medical segregation and discrimination in twentieth-century america, scholarship at the intersection of biomedicine and culture examines the social and political contexts that produce these disparities. possible causes include past and continued distrust of physicians and medical institutions, the effectiveness of patient-provider communication, cultural differences in symptom response, and access to emergency medical services as both a socioeconomic and geographical issue (casper et al., 2003; moser et al., 2006; nelson, 2011; pollock, 2012). stroke prevention research also identifies a series of controllable risk and “lifestyle” factors that increase the risk of stroke. the national stroke association (nsa) (medical risk factors) notes that high blood pressure, atrial fibrillation, high cholesterol, diabetes, sickle cell disease, and artery diseases like atherosclerosis, carotid and peripheral artery disease can and should be treated to manage the risk of stroke. so-called lifestyle factors that may increase the risk of stroke include tobacco use and smoking, alcohol use, poor diet, physical inactivity, and obesity. these controllable risk factors are considered alongside uncontrollable factors like age; family history; gender; prior stroke, transient ischemic attacks, and heart attacks; and, most relevant here, race. considered in full, the current understanding of the many contributing factors leading to stroke involve both individual and social determinants of disease, illustrating how both individual behaviors and the individual’s social environment work together to shape stroke risk. but as this campaign reveals, knowledge production about biomedical risk does not always reflect this understanding. ongoing threats to health equity including the lack of access to quality care, exposure to environmental toxins, distrust of the medical establishment, high rates of incarceration, food "deserts" in impoverished areas, and the stress of discrimination, can all play a role in the persistence of racial disease disparities. in the context of disease disparities such as this one, race is significant as an indicator of, to borrow from herman gray (2013), a structural position that organizes collective disadvantage (p. 772). it is a marker of inequity along a series of axes, defined by risk factors both controllable and not. race, in other words, is the nexus of complex and intersecting social determinants of disease. rather than communicating these structural issues around stroke risk, however, the psa reduces these disparities in stroke risk to the level of personal responsibility, while reducing the role of race in this disparity to an empty signifier of difference. the use of stand-up comedy here becomes a surrogate for a much more complex conversation about race and the social determinants of health. deploying black stand-up comedians to communicate health risks to black populations trades on the notion that comedy, and by extension the african american humor tradition, is an effective channel through which black populations can be interpellated. the african american humor tradition is rooted in social commentary and critique that speak to the lived experiences of african americans, functioning as a lens through which race and difference are mediated (haggins, 2007; krefting, 2014; watkins, 1994; zoglin, 2009). before it became mainstream in the late 1980s and early 1990s, black stand-up comedy thrived in local clubs catering to black audiences. clubs like the comedy act theatre in los angeles, founded by michael williams in the 1980s, gave black comedians a space to perform at a time when promoters and bookers for national, mainstream—i.e. white—comedy clubs would not book them; as williams explained to me, mainstream comedy clubs typically did not book many black stand-up comedians because they did not believe there to be a demand for black performers within their clubs (personal communication, 2008). since that time, black stand-up comedy as a genre of performance has become far more accessible to mainstream audiences. this greater accessibility was fostered by what bambi haggins (2007) identifies as black comedians’ crossover comic personae. as haggins writes, the black comic persona has become “firmly ensconced in contemporary mainstream american popular consciousness” (p. 2). black comedic social discourses went from circulating within very prescribed spaces to becoming part of a broader mediascape. part of this “crossover” into mainstream popular consciousness, as haggins writes, is the construction of a comic persona that utilizes black experiences in a manner that is accessible to wider audiences. so while comedians like dick gregory, richard pryor, paul mooney, dave chappelle, chris rock, w. kamau bell, and jerrod carmichael have all worked within the traditions of black stand-up comedy—at times using stand-up to critique systemic racism and structural inequality—they have largely done so while speaking to large, mainstream audiences. the use of black stand-up comedy in the context of this campaign is distinct from this tradition in that it is being deployed as an instrument of institutional, prescriptive communication. black stand-up comedy functions here as a vehicle to promote what nikolas rose (2007) calls biological citizenship. rose writes that life in the twenty-first century is understood through a biomedical paradigm, and that these “biological senses of identification and affiliation” make ethical demands on the self, kin, community, and society (p. 133). in this psa, black stand-up comedy is used by the state to communicate to african americans the need to understand the african american body as always at risk of disease. hence, the psa’s commercials are not black stand-up comedy, exactly; rather, they perform an idea of black stand-up comedy to fashion an informed and responsible biocitizen.  the cultural competence and entertainment-education models of risk   the stroke’s no joke campaign constitutes one of a series of race-based health interventions launched by the asa and the aha, interventions employing cultural competence as a framework for promoting health equity as both an institutional and public concern. as the aha states in its 2007-2008 diversity report, the agency aims to increase cultural competency “through cause initiatives that reach a specific population group, through programs that outreach to high-risk audiences and through targeted advertising and communication efforts” (p. vi). cultural competence has been the dominant framework through which physicians and epidemiologic researchers have sought to account for and mitigate the role of race in disease disparities, stigma, and biases in treatment decisions. by being sensitive to socioeconomic differences causing these disparities, the clinician can ostensibly develop a competence or understanding of the “cultural variables” fostering these disparities. this thinking plays a prominent role in medical education and in policies put forward by organizations like the aha and cdc. as angela jenks (2010) notes, cultural competence emerges from a “strongly antiracist agenda that seeks to counteract the differential access to quality care that many believe has led to extreme health disparities in the united states” (p. 220). and it is because of the importance of this agenda that the means by which stroke prevention is made “culturally sensitive” must be scrutinized. antiracist intentions notwithstanding, cultural competence interventions like stroke’s no joke can frame such disparities as a matter of a “natural, and unavoidable, difference of cross-cultural communication and can become a way to avoid difficult conversations about racism” (jenks, p. 221). this is helpful to keep in mind when considering the stroke’s no joke campaign within broader institutional efforts to fix or alleviate this disparity. in addition to the stroke’s no joke campaign, the asa and aha deployed two community-based education programs, search your heart and conozca su corazón, to deliver biomedical knowledge, promote behavior change, and reduce heart disease risk factors among african americans and latinos, respectively. these programs put into action research-driven interventions on racial stroke disparities. they take a comprehensive approach to promoting behavior change, using community health workers, heart disease health assessments, online support through social media campaigns, as well as work placeand home-wellness models to provide their target populations with biomedical knowledge about their risk of stroke morbidity and mortality. it is important to situate the stroke’s no joke campaign within this context to understand how the antiracist intentions of cultural competence, after which these community programs were also modeled, inform and constrain psas like stroke’s no joke. the stroke’s no joke campaign was created by the asa, the ad council, and burrell communications, the latter a marketing communications firm specializing in “insight-based” marketing that targets african american audiences. following from the same body of research that fostered the community education programs preceding it, the stroke’s campaign was designed to reduce prehospital patient delay and, somewhat less explicitly, to promote the benefits of early treatment of stroke. this is a critical message because, as a 2006 aha scientific statement finds, “most individuals who experience symptoms delay substantially before seeking treatment” (moser et al., p. 169). according to this same document, most delays occur in the following phases of treatment-seeking: the first phase lasts from symptom-onset to the decision to seek medical attention; the second phase lasts from the decision to seek medical attention to the first medical contact; and the third phase lasts from first medical contact to hospital arrival (ibid.). the scientific statement indicates that the longest delays occur in the third phase, between symptom recognition to the decision to seek care. patient delay in seeking treatment for stroke is a persistent problem in the united states. and because stroke disproportionately affects african americans, institutions like the aha and the cdc target this high-risk population with race-based health promotion campaigns, which are called upon to increase their efficacy in promoting health equity. the aha’s scientific statement noted that public education campaigns until that point had been ineffective in reducing patient delay. the failure to eliminate these disparities, the aha statement argues, reflects a preoccupation with symptom recognition and insufficient attention to “the urgency of immediate emergency transport and treatment within the context of the potential therapeutic benefits of reducing prehospital delay” (p. 176, emphasis in original). further, citing epidemiologic research indicating racial disparities in both the incidence of stroke and in patient delay, the report recommends that future public education strategies focus on minority populations to make “significant gains” in reducing delays to treatment: “blacks may recognize acs [acute coronary syndrome] and stroke symptoms less readily than whites, delay longer in seeking treatment, be less likely to reach an emergency room via ambulance in some communities, and yet have a greater risk of death from both acs and stroke at an earlier age than the rest of the population” (p. 176). the authors of the scientific statement and the cdc’s atlas argue that the best interventions going forward will be those that target high-risk populations with the goal of reducing prehospital delay. given the pressing need to intervene in the racial disparity in stroke incidence and mortality, as well as in the high incidence of prehospital delay, why not make the stakes of an intervention like stroke’s no joke explicit? why, in other words, would such a campaign be raced-based but without clearly articulating the urgent threat facing african americans in particular? according to healthy people 2020, a document produced by hhs which sets 10-year national objectives to improve health, establish benchmarks, and monitor progress toward these objectives, achieving health equity and eliminating health disparities is a pressing, overarching goal. but while deploying stand-up comedy and the african american humor tradition to raise stroke awareness among african americans, the stroke’s no jokes campaign does not articulate this goal even as it communicates individual behavioral changes that would presumably meet it; instead, this focus on the individual rather than the structural reconfigures the political category of race into a natural classification of bodies (roberts, 2011). generally speaking, the psa’s mobilization of stand-up comedy reflects the success of the entertainment-education model of health communication, wherein health messages are embedded within entertainment media, which is assumed to form an efficient means of providing accurate information to viewing publics (brodie et al., 2001; kennedy et al., 2004; murphy et al., 2008; singhal & rogers, 2001). entertainment media have long been used to communicate health information. dating back to the nineteenth century when broadsides and public health posters were used to identify disease risk factors and promote behavior change, public health and military training films, primetime television, pharmaceutical advertisements, medical reality television, and the internet have all been used to hail subjects and foster risk-aware subjectivities  (dumit, 2012; ostherr, 2013; serlin et al., 2010). studies conducted by the cdc, as well as the kaiser family foundation and the usc annenberg norman lear center’s hollywood, health, & society program, have provided empirical evidence demonstrating the efficacy of these efforts, particularly in addressing disease disparities along the lines of race and socioeconomic status (moser et al., 2003; murphy et al., 2008). in a report produced by the kaiser family foundation and hollywood, health, & society, murphy et al. (2008) found that many americans rely on television as an important, and often primary, source of health information. their research focuses on the role of health content in primetime television programming, but their analysis is useful in understanding the importance of the healthscape as a site for biomedical knowledge distribution: “according to one survey, 26% of the public cited entertainment television as being among their top three sources of health information, and half (52%) said they consider the health information contained in these programs to be accurate” (p. 1). members of racial and ethnic groups in particular, they found, stand to benefit from this brand of health communication: the heaviest consumers of television—low socioeconomic status african american and hispanic women—are at a disproportionately higher risk for life threatening ailments such as certain cancers, diabetes and heart disease. moreover, evidence suggests that minority viewers are also the most likely to act on information learned on television. (murphy et al., 2008, p. 2) the report suggests that the entertainment-education model offers a unique opportunity to educate viewers about scores of health conditions, while also instructing viewers on how they might handle their own illnesses. the stroke’s no joke campaign, then, follows from these calls to action in its aims to curb the disparate incidence of stroke among african americans. it is coded to be “culturally appropriate,” following the recommendation of publications like the atlas of stroke mortality, aiming to address african american stroke risk. likewise, it balances the use of humor with the restoration of gravity to minimize message discounting by viewers. the campaign’s very premise aims to eliminate prehospital delays in treatment-seeking among african americans, a significant factor in the racial disparity of stroke deaths in the us. however, by emphasizing individual responses to a deeply structural health issue, the stroke’s no joke campaign risked defining race as a static marker of difference independent of larger, socioeconomic factors. the campaign, and the broader politics of racialized biomedical knowledge production it exemplifies, illustrates the limited and limiting means by which blackness is studied and deployed in biomedical knowledge production. biologizing race through treatment the intersections of blackness and stroke risk dovetail into contemporary definitions and uses of race in biomedicine. these negotiated meanings, among epidemiologists and scholars of the social determinants of health, reveal how understandings of the relationship between race and risk evolve and remain contentious over time. frequently, these debates about risk focus on two competing understandings of race: one is a biological or genomic definition of race as a predisposition or innate, individual-level pathology, and the other is a culturalist understanding of race as a social construct responsible for real and devastating health disparities (braun, 2014; kahn, 2013; pollock, 2012; roberts, 2011; shim, 2014). janet k. shim (2014) writes that the latter, this “cultural prism”—namely, “its discursive opposition to biology, its perceived observability and verifiability, its resonance with health promotion ideologies, and finally its conceptual flexibility”—makes it a “popular, and scientifically and politically safe, construction of race” (p. 194). yet the constructivist model of race has limitations for explaining racial health disparities. mainly, while it rejects the notion of race as an innate pathology, the model also creates a context in which the medical significance of race is unclear and, in particular, blackness is clumsily articulated and targeted as a health risk. the stroke’s no joke campaign demonstrates how biomedical risk becomes racialized. the campaign grew out of the same marketing infrastructure targeting african americans as potential-consumers in market segments for hair products, alcohol and cigarettes, music, and athletic shoes; indeed, the aha’s 2007-2008 diversity report identifies its search your heart education program for african americans as one of its culturally competent “consumer initiatives.” the ubiquity of this marketing infrastructure is telling. since the 1970s, the marketing of race and blackness—as a coveted demographic subgroup and consumer market—has participated in the reinforcement of discrete and consistent racial categories outside the realm of consumerism (roberts, p.165). burrell communications, the marketing firm that produced this campaign, built its reputation and clientele by targeting african american consumers for corporate entities like procter and gamble, toyota, and mcdonald’s. the choice to use burrell to produce this campaign, perhaps seen by the sponsoring agencies as a strategic move to reach and promote behavior change within african american patient populations, reveals the ways in which racial categories are uncritically reproduced using the language and strategies of the market. the internal logic of this race-based marketing infrastructure is identical to that of racialized medicine in heart disease disparities. the marketing of the pharmaceutical drug bidil, a combination drug designed to treat heart failure, is perhaps the most notable example of this enterprise. bidil was tested in the african-american heart failure trial (a-heft), a clinical trial that enrolled 1,050 self-identified african americans suffering from heart failure. in 2005, after showing a remarkable increase in survival rates among its users, the makers of bidil applied for and received fda approval to market the drug as a race-specific treatment for heart failure. despite little evidence that race mattered to the drug’s efficacy, as well as the opacity of interpreting racial self-identification in a clinical trial, race was used to market bidil as a pharmaceutical solution to a persistent disease disparity. part of a growing trend in developing pharmacogenomic therapies capable of being tailored to a person’s genetic make-up, bidil was controversially touted as an “ethnic drug.”  with no empirical data supporting its claim to be more effective in black patients than in non-black patients, bidil’s eventual commercial failure revealed the central problem with racialized medicine: a reification of race tethered to beneficial medical developments. bidil became, as anne pollock (2012) writes, a pharmakon, both remedy and poison (p. 156). the core critique of bidil—that it naturalizes racial disparities by treating race not as a dynamic and complex social construct but rather as a genetic reality—can be levied here against the use of race as a marker of cultural difference in stroke risk and prevention. pollock points out that racial differences in heart disease are both material and semiotic (p. 5). the disparate incidence of and premature mortality from heart disease and stroke among african americans are evident. by redefining race through certain notions of disease and treatment, the stroke’s no joke campaign reproduces the racial narratives about bidil that naturalize race and that paper over broader social and environment factors influencing health disparities. practically speaking, using race as a proxy or shorthand to screen for and treat disease disparities can seem like an efficient use of physicians’ and epidemiologists’ efforts. physicians often discuss this shorthand as a potentially problematic but ultimately valuable tool; when the goal is to save lives and minimize biomedical risks to high-risk populations, the ends are thought to justify the means. but as dorothy roberts (2011) points out, race is a bad proxy that can hinder physicians and researchers from considering other evidence-based symptoms and clinical measures. using race categorically to treat patients differently—based on either a patient’s self-identification or a clinician’s perception of a patient’s race—constitutes an imprecise treatment plan. further, race-based treatments can leave patients open to potential harm emerging from biases and stereotypes, diverting attention and resources away from social determinants of health and therefore reproducing rather than alleviating persistent disparities. this effort to marshal a responsible, efficient, and “culturally appropriate” health intervention relies too heavily on an understanding of race as a static, universally applicable variable while ignoring the broader context in which race becomes medically significant. reports like the atlas of stroke mortality call for solutions to racial disease disparities that rely on changes in personal behavior and structural inequalities. as shim explains, “in order to better understand the kinds of factors that determine heart disease incidence and distribution, research must consider multiple levels of causation at the same time” (p. 200). i argue that this attention to multiple factors of causation must extend beyond the realm of research to include the means by which disease and treatment are communicated to at-risk populations. in other words, it’s not enough to establish community-based health education programs like know your heart and conozca su corazón; institutions like the aha and asa must also be mindful of how they represent to target populations and the wider public the relationships between race and biomedicine. feminist biomedical knowledge production the racialization of biomedical knowledge production limits the rhetoric used to address biomedical risk. the campaign’s framing of african american stroke disparity as an individualand cultural-level failing wholly ignores the role of social and structural barriers to health equity, including why race is correlated with disease disparity in the first place. and further, it undermines the aha’s deployment of an antiracist approach to cultural competence in its know your heart and conozca su corazón programs. the question of how best to understand the persistence of racial disease disparities is important to consider as biomedicine continues to grapple with the medical significance of race. this flattening of the complexities of race into a narrow reproduction of race-as-difference illustrates how race itself can become a hypervisible, if somewhat empty, signifier of difference. the coding of race in stroke’s no joke illustrates what herman gray calls a “cultural politics of diversity,” where visibility, rather than a struggle over the social, economic, and cultural basis of disadvantage, is an end in itself (p. 772). in the televised campaign, attention is being paid to african american stroke risk in ways that invisibilize structural determinants of health inequities. the irony here, of course, is that the cultural prism—and, indeed, the very notion of race as a cultural, not biological, phenomenon—is held up as a laudable alternative to the reductive essentialism of biological race. as shim writes, this discursive opposition to biological race frames the cultural prism as a “safe,” apolitical way to examine the social determinants of disparity (p. 90). it is this apolitical conceptualization, however, that fails to capture “the full measure of complex causal pathways” by which we know disease disparities to persist (p. 110). the depoliticization of persistent racial disease disparities as a matter of cultural difference or individual lapses in self-care illustrates the need for what i term feminist biomedical knowledge production. despite the findings of institutions like the cdc and aha indicating that persistent racial disease disparities are the product of numerous causal factors that include structural barriers to care, the urgency of communicating stroke as a leading cause of death for african americans is elided in favor of a marketing pitch to a segment of consumers. perhaps the problem, then, is that for the ad council, burrell communications and, somewhat surprisingly, the aha, african americans here are primarily consumers rather than biological citizens subject to a set of forces causing their death. feminist biomedical knowledge production is vital for science and technology scholars who aim to interrogate not only how disease disparities are reproduced, but also how racialized knowledge production helps generate these disparities as well as what biological citizens might do about them. feminist biomedical knowledge production could help illuminate the assumptions about race and cultural difference made in campaigns like stroke’s no joke, and in the practice of racialized medicine more generally. for guidance here, we might look to scholars like dorothy roberts, who has written effectively on the implications of imagining race as a primarily biological or consumerist means of classification. framing race as an essentialist cluster of genetic predispositions or behaviors that aggravate the already-disparate incidence of disease validates beliefs in an intrinsic racial difference; the politics of this kind of knowledge production renders invisible the black lives that are lived in light of pernicious structural barriers to equity, and the black bodies on which these disparities take their toll. likewise, feminist biomedical knowledge production could discursively center the lives, bodies, and experiences of the biological citizens subject to these disparities, representing those presently erased by the misguided, even if well-meaning, assumptions of cultural competence. in a moment when biological citizens so often become agents of their own care in self-help groups, on illness blogs, and through user-generated health discourses on platforms like youtube, perhaps the depoliticization of disease disparities will create an opening, as david serlin (2010) writes of online illness narratives about hpv, for a proliferation of user-generated discourses about stroke. under this paradigm of knowledge production, women’s status as sufferers of a disparate incidence of stroke and stroke death, as well as the entirely political nature of racial disease disparities could be foregrounded. as roberts (2011) writes, “if its function as a political system is recognized, race can have a valid use in scientific research to locate, understand, and eliminate the effects of racism” (p. 311). the trick, it seems, is to build and sustain a nuanced understanding of what race means in the context of health disparities, and to resist the urge to simplify that understanding in the transition from knowledge production to knowledge distribution. references american heart association. (2007). cultural competence: the journey continues. annual diversity report. retrieved from http://www.strokeassociation.org/idc/groups/heartpublic/@wcm/@global/documents/downloadable/ucm_300377.pdf american stroke association. (2011). annual diversity report. retrieved from http://www.heart.org/idc/groups/heartpublic/@wcm/@icom/documents/downloadable/ucm_427469.pdf american stroke association. (2016). understanding stroke risk. retrieved from http://www.strokeassociation.org/strokeorg/aboutstroke/understandingrisk/understanding-stroke-risk_ucm_308539_subhomepage.jsp braun, l. (2014). breathing race into the machine: the surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to genetics. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. brodie, m. foehr, u., rideout, v., baer, n. miller, c., flournoy, r., & altman, d. (2001). communicating health information through the entertainment media. health affairs, 201(1), 192-199. casper, m.l., barnett, e., williams jr., g.i., halverson, j.a., braham, v.e., & greenlund, k.j. (2003). atlas of stroke mortality: racial, ethnic, and geographic disparities in the united states. atlanta, ga: department of health and human services, centers for disease control and prevention. centers for disease control and prevention. (2013). know the facts about stroke. retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/stroke/docs/consumered_stroke.pdf centers for disease control and prevention. (2015). stroke facts. retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/stroke/facts.htm clarke, a., mamo, l., fosket, j.r., fishman, j.r., & shim, j.k. (2003). biomedicalization: technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and u.s. biomedicine. american sociological review, 68(2), 161-194. dumit, j. (2012). drugs for life: how pharmaceutical companies define our health. durham, nc: duke university press. gray, h. (2013). subject(ed) to recognition. american quarterly, 65(4), 771-798. haggins, b. (2007). laughing mad: the black comic persona in post-soul america. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. jenks, a. (2010) what’s the use of culture?: health disparities and the development of culturally competent health care. in i. whitmarsh & d.s. jones (eds.), what’s the use of race? modern governance and the biology of difference (pp. 207-224). cambridge ma: the mit press. kahn, j. (2013). race in a bottle: the story of bidil and racialized medicine in a post-genomic age. new york, ny: columbia university press. kennedy, m.g., o’leary, a., beck, v., pollard, k., & simpson, p. (2004). increases in calls to the cdc national std and aids hotline following aids-related episodes in a soap opera. journal of comunication, 54(2), 287-301. krefting, r. (2014). all joking aside: american humor and its discontents. baltimore, md: the johns hopkins university press. moser, d.k., kimble, l.p., albert, m.j., alonzo, a., croft, j.b., dracup, k., evenson, k.r., go, a.s., hand, m.m., kothari, r.u., mensah, g.a., morris, d.l., pancioli, a.m., riegel, b., & zerwic, j.j. (2006). reducing delay in seeking treatment by patients with acute coronary syndrome and stroke: a scientific statement from the american heart association council on cardiovascular nursing and stroke. circulation, 114(2),168-182. murphy, s.t. heather, h., & rideout, v. (2008). how healthy is prime time? an analysis of health content in popular prime time television programs. los angeles, ca: the kaiser family foundation & the usc annenberg norman lear center’s hollywood, health & society. retrieved from http://kff.org/other/report/how-healthy-is-prime-time-an-analysis-of-health-content-in-popular-prime-time-television-programs/ nabi, r., moyer-guse, e., & byrne, s. (2007). all joking aside: a serious investigation into the persuasive effect of funny social issue messages. communication monographs, 74(1), 29-54. national stroke association. (2016). medical risk factors. retrieved from http://www.stroke.org/understand-stroke/preventing-stroke/medical-risk-factors nelson, a. (2011). body and soul: the black panther party and the fight against medical discrimination. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. ostherr, k. (2013). medical visions: producing the patient through film, television, and imaging technologies. oxford, en: oxford university press. pollock, a. (2012). medicating race: heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference. durham, nc: duke university press. roberts, d. (2011). fatal invention: how science, politics, and big business re-create race in the twenty-first century. new york, ny: the new press. rose, n. (2007). the politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. princeton, nj: princeton university press. serlin, d. (2010). introduction: toward a visual culture of public health. in d. serlin (ed.), imagining illness: public health and visual culture (pp. xi-xxxvii). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. shim, j. k. (2014). heart-sick: the politics of risk, inequality, and heart disease. new york, ny: new york university press. singhal, a. & rogers, e.m. (2001). the entertainment-education strategy in communication campaigns. in r.e. rice & c. atkins (eds.), public communication campaigns (pp. 343-356). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. sunder rajan, k. (2006). biocapital: the constitution of postgenomic life. durham, nc: duke university press. u.s. department of health and human services. (2010). healthy people 2020. retrieved from https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/about/advisory/reports watkins, m. (1994). on the real side: a history of african american comedy. new york, ny: lawrence hill books. williams, m. (2008). personal communication. zoglin, r. (2009). comedy at the edge: how stand-up in the 1970s changed america. new york, ny: bloomsbury. bio beza merid is a lecturer in the master of science in global medicine program at the keck school of medicine at the university of southern california. his scholarship explores notions of responsible patienthood and the production of biomedical knowledge in the context of cancer and heart disease. he is currently working on a book manuscript examining stand-up comedy as an unexpected site where biomedical knowledge is both produced and consumed. wu review     review of the exquisite corpse of asian america: biopolitics, biosociality, and posthuman ecologies by rachel c. lee (new york: new york university press, 2014).    cynthia wu university at buffalo, state university of new york cw229@buffalo.edu how might an analytic that foregrounds race inform prevailing concepts of the biological? this is the question that undergirds rachel c. lee’s ambitious and playful recent book. lee convincingly shows that an asian americanist critique in science and technology studies (sts) and an analytic that takes seriously the biological in critical race and ethnic studies is not far-fetched. the mutual constitution of these strains of thought is absolutely necessary in order to understand the present’s ongoing structural disparities. the antiracist critiques that have issued from both in and outside of the academy in the past few generations have rightfully undermined biological explanations for racial difference that were birthed by eighteenthand nineteenth-century scientific racism. indeed, the weight of our contemporary understandings about us structural inequalities rests on a tacit separation between the biological and the racial; the state and its collusion with capital, not genetic differences, are what create inequality. these interventions of the past were, and continue to be, productive, to be sure, which is why lee’s book, which proposes to rethink the place of the biological in critiques of racially inflected power, is bold. lee demonstrates how modernity’s exercise of power is both biopolitical and necropolitical and that the specificities of its deployment are defined by a history of colonialism and racial classification. modern states are, by and large, produced and motivated as well by the selective generation of death, however much we might want to distinguish them thusly from older forms of governance. this parceling of life into bios—that is, life that entails protection or recognition, and zoe, or bare life not thusly protected and recognized—is at the heart of broader concepts of what it means to be human. this distinction is defined along racial lines as well as in ways specific to gender, sexuality, colonial subject status, and ability status.  although it may be understandable to assert a reactionary claim to human-ness (and a corresponding disavowal of the nonhuman) for those who do not currently possess it, lee insists that a more enabling goal “intervenes into zoe-fication by adopting a hospitable regard toward the intertwinement of nonhuman and human populations” (p. 48). the hallmark of the regulation of life in contemporary times might be readily understood as that which subtly but coercively “makes live.”  however, a corresponding dynamic occurs, too, where the denial of life is not merely relegated to an unintentional side effect of the state’s (selectively directed) life-giving actions. lee argues that, in order to redress disparities between rights-bearing and non-rights-bearing life forms, we must dismantle the conceptual barriers that have historically distinguished them from each other. in short, we must put an end to the separation between the human and the nonhuman. lee’s book thus presents deftly argued and almost kinesthetically-imposing close readings of contemporary cultural productions that launch an asian americanist critique of transnational capital, distribution of resources, and regulatory mechanisms informing gender, sexual, and ability comportment. from the fragmented bodies in the poetry of lois-ann yamanaka, the dance of cheng-chieh yu, the fiction of kazuo ishiguro, the comedy of margaret cho, or the performance art of denise uyehara, the privileging of the part over enlightenment-descended concepts of the whole prevails. the cross-species intimacies suggested by ruth ozeki, amitav ghosh, and others implore us to recognize that much of the havoc wrought by colonialist, neo-colonialist, and/or neoliberal forces can be explained and undone by a critical framework that de-centers the human. throughout these examples, lee puts the disparate sources of her archive into coherent, complementary (but also productively frictive) conversation about the creation of interfaces among differing categories of biological life produced by modernity. for instance, lee effectively shows that narratives about disjointed or denigrated corporealities—even when they are not explicitly about race, as in the example of ishiguro’s never let me go—carry with them the racial registers with which we are familiar. presumably racially neutral figures are the providers of somatic, life-sustaining parts without being able to occupy the uncomplicated position of their recipients. when they do enter that charmed circle, asian-raced subjects can mitigate the surveillance that coerces sanctioned models of health. moreover, they can call out the very biopolitical project itself on an aggregate scale. these interventions take the form of unsettlingly queer, feminist, and crip articulations, such as in yu’s my father’s teeth in my mother’s mouth or uyehara’s big head. lee’s book also makes an indirect, yet provocative, statement about form. the exquisite corpse signaled in her book’s title—based on the form originally called cadavre exquis by writers like andre breton in the early twentieth century—is a jointly-composed poem created among multiple authors, each composing one line after the previous contributor has laid and hidden theirs. the final product bears the characteristics of its idiosyncratic fusion. similarly, in lee’s book each chapter attaches itself to the next not in terms of chronology or other transparent ordering logic but through thematic resonance. rather than place an acknowledgements section preceding the narrative proper, lee appends to the conclusion what she entitles a “tail piece” that performs that and other functions, asking “can an epilogue mark a becoming rather than an ending?” (p. 256). in these ways, the book is performative.  it does what it says as it embraces nonlinearity and fragmentation in its composition. the one question with which i am left after reading the exquisite corpse of asian america is not specific to the book itself. it is one i pose to the recent and not-so-recent trends alike in the fields of sts, critical race and ethnic studies, queer theory, and gender studies that propose a politics of non-hierarchy between the human and the nonhuman. in a different context, i had asked it of mel chen’s (2012) animacies, and we can ask it, too, of older texts in this tradition, such as donna haraway’s (1991) iconic simians, cyborgs, and women. in calls to cast away the stifling separations between the human and the nonhuman, are we overlooking how this imperative might be politically enabling to differential extents for those who do and do not already have full human status? who can and cannot afford to make these boundaries permeable? to be sure, lee is careful to acknowledge that her proposition to embrace cross-species relationships is not the exclusive provenance of the elite, academic asian americanist left. her stance is not purportedly “more ‘advanced’… in comparison to articulations that prioritize social justice on behalf of those human-animals” (p. 50) subjugated by the forces of racism and colonialism. as she recognizes, some populations, such as people with disabilities and indigenous people, have always respected the porosity between the human and the nonhuman. still, i wonder if the social location of the speaker, specific to time and place, matters in these appeals for a non-hierarchy among species. whose words carry more weight when making these claims? is the posthuman turn ultimately most efficacious for those whose human-ness has already been recognized? is the renunciation of a charmed status associated with the human more earth shattering—or, at the very least, practical or affordable—for some than for others at the present time? lee asks us to consider the myriad ways in which “asian americans ruminate over their bodies and body parts as sites of governmentality and norming” and provide “living testaments to the organism’s resilience and unpredictability in expressing biopolitical agency” (p. 101). my hope is that the book will inspire further experiments with form as well as further experiments in cross-fertilization between sts and asian american studies.    references chen, m. y. (2012). animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. durham, nc: duke university press.
   haraway, d. (1991). simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york/london: routledge. lee, r. (2014). the exquisite corpse of asian america: biopolitics, biosociality, and posthuman ecologies. new york: new york university pres. bio cynthia wu is an associate professor of american studies in the department of transnational studies at the university at buffalo (suny). she is the author of chang and eng reconnected: the original siamese twins in american culture (temple, 2012). endocrine-disrupting chemicals (edcs) as industrial and settler colonial structures: towards a decolonial feminist approach shadaan, reena, and murphy, michelle. (2020). endocrine-disrupting chemicals (edcs) as industrial and settler colonial structures: towards a decolonial feminist approach. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-36. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license endocrine-disrupting chemicals (edcs) as industrial and settler colonial structures: towards a decolonial feminist approach reena shadaan york university reenas@yorku.ca michelle murphy university of toronto michelle.murphy@utoronto.ca abstract oil refineries and settler colonialism are not typically how feminist and environmental frameworks scope the problem of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (edcs). instead, it is much more common to find edcs described as a problem of packaging, plastics, and consumer goods, and to characterize their effects as a problem of bodily damage, and particularly as injuries or alterations to the reproductive and sexual development of individuals. this paper seeks to expand from these individualized, molecularized, damage-centered and body-centered frames, and to strengthen decolonial feminist frameworks for understanding edcs. we contend that our understanding of edcs must expand to the structures of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that accompany oil extraction and refining, as well as to the distribution of emissions to airs, waters, and lands. building on the argument that pollution is colonialism, we hold that edcs are materially a form of colonial environmental violence, disrupting land/body relations, and at the same time, are made possible by a permission-to-pollute regulatory regime. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 2 introduction in winter, the cold air draws out into visible relief the smoke that flows from the stacks of canada’s seventeen oil refineries. forty percent of canada’s petrochemical refining happens in one location in southwestern ontario called chemical valley, where three refineries and some fifty other facilities are clustered (ecojustice, 2007). plumes are emitted into the air at a steady flow, punctuated by an almost daily interruption of leaks, flares, and spills— interruptions that are simultaneously obscured and revealed by the companies in tweet-sized accident reports and inadequate monitoring data. these refineries are just one node in a continent-spanning infrastructure in which the fossil fuel industry extends and spreads from coast to coast. the settler colonial state of canada has built itself out of this extraction, starting with furs in the seventeenth century and then expanding to timber, fossil fuels, and mining. in turn, canada’s environmental governance is largely a permission-to-pollute system, designed to support extraction as a core economic feature of the nation (barker, 2009; coulthard, 2014; murphy et al., 2019a). the centrality of extraction in canada is expressed by the fact that it is home to 75% of the world’s mining companies (statista, 2018), and is the world’s fourth largest oil producer, supplying 43% of oil imported to the united states (natural resources canada, 2018). the siting of canada’s chemical valley, moreover, is no accident. located on the st. clair river, which has been made into the dividing line between the two settler states of canada and the united states, chemical valley is situated at a crucial site in the twentieth-century invention of oil-based fossil fuel capitalism, stretching from the establishment of fordism and the industrial automotive industry in detroit at the southern extension of the waterway to the world’s first commercial oil field at the northern end. chemical valley sits on the traditional territory of aamjiwnaang first nation, and its creation began in the 1850s along with colonial processes of land theft, private property, and later, the establishment of the reserve system. aamjiwnaang first nation is surrounded by disruptions from chemical valley on all sides, including hundreds of subsurface pipelines, storage caverns for sludge and gas, as well as atmospherically in the form of pollution. the presence of over 150 years of colonial disruption is profoundly shaped by the laws and regulations of the canadian state in the past but also in the present. for example, the emission standards for oil refineries on the canadian side of the river are strikingly lax in comparison to those in the united states; canadian refineries can have emission levels fifty times greater than comparable us refineries (ecojustice, 2018). moreover, projected levels of oil and gas industry growth coupled with lax special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 3 regulation and subpar commitments under canada’s 2030 paris agreement means that the oil and gas industry will account for 38% of canada’s total emissions by 2030 (environmental defence & stand.earth, 2018). the airborne emissions of such oil refineries carry a multitude of endocrine-disrupting chemicals that disrupt lands, sovereignty, bodies, and futures.1 addressing this fossil-fuel-related environmental violence, we argue, is a necessary starting point of a feminist decolonial approach to understanding what endocrine-disrupting chemicals are and do. the term endocrine-disrupting chemicals (edcs) is a shorthand for a large range of substances that mimic, block, or disrupt the work of hormones ordinarily found in human and nonhuman bodies. as such, edcs can affect metabolism and reproductive health, as well as all organ systems and gene expression. this paper is concerned with the creation of industrially produced substances that disrupt hormones. we draw inspiration from theo colborn’s foundational scholarship and commitment to facilitate state and public engagement on endocrine disruption vis-à-vis industrial pollutants, such as in colborn’s early work on industrially rooted disruptions to nonhuman life in the great lakes (colborn, dumanoski & myers, 1996). colborn founded the endocrine disruptors exchange (tedx), an environmental non-profit, which traces edcs to fossil fuels and industrial processes, a trajectory of research that is further exemplified in wylie’s (2018) work on edcs and fracking. industrial edcs are often synthesized from fossil fuels, and released in processes of extraction, refining, production, and disposal to air, water, and land (wylie, 2018; the endocrine disruption exchange, n.d.). we build upon this link, further rooting these industrial processes in the context of settler colonialism and its relation to fossil fuel capitalism as per indigenous environmental justice. we differentiate hormone disrupting chemicals—that is, chemicals that non-consensually disrupt hormones—from the consensual use of substances to alter bodies, gender expression, and reproductive health. we acknowledge that hormone-interacting chemicals have many sources, from plants to pollution to drugs, and can include both life-affirming and life-harming, consensual and non-consensual outcomes. we further find inspiration and guidance from indigenous land and water protectors such as katsi cook (mohawk, akwesasne first nation) and ada lockridge (anishinaabe, aamjiwnaang first nation), who have researched and taught about the ways edc pollutants have disrupted communities intergenerationally on the great lakes (fitzgerald et al., 1998; hoover et al., 2012; laduke, 1999; mackenzie, lockridge & keith, 2005). in focusing on disruption, this paper situates edcs in industrial processes and sources, which are further understood as made possible by settler special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 4 colonialism. thus, such industrial edcs are material forms of colonial and capitalist violence. oil refineries and settler colonialism are not typically how feminist and environmental frameworks have scoped the problem of hormone disrupting chemicals.2 in mainstream liberal environmental frameworks, it is much more common to find edcs described as a problem of exposure from packaging, plastics, consumer goods, and foods, and to characterize their effects as a problem of bodily health and particularly as injuries or alterations to the reproductive and sexual development of individuals. the emphasis on reproductive and sexual health is reflected by the fact that this group of substances is often emphasized as disrupting estrogenand androgen-related processes, thereby highlighting the effects to sex-associated bodily developments and processes. in canada, popular environmental discussions about hormonedisrupting chemicals have been strongly associated with the chemical bisphenol a (bpa) in plastic products, such as baby and water bottles. likewise, phthalates, used to make plastics, cosmetics, and personal hygiene products, are another well-known edc associated with everyday consumption. flame-retardant chemicals, such as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (pbdes), are yet a further group of industrial edcs, likewise embedded within household consumer products such as furniture and electronics. this association of edcs with personal consumption is further thickened with monitoring work that has documented high levels of edc exposures indoors, particularly in homes, as the result of such consumer goods and materials (dodson et al., 2012). the home has come to be represented as a site of concentrated edc exposure through another culprit, house dust, which collects and concentrates pollutants (hwang, park, young, & hammock, 2008). while edc dust research tends to focus on personal spaces, other research importantly remobilizes dust to show the extensive spread of industrial pollution into a community’s living spaces, such as the innovative work done around the chevron refinery in richmond, california (brody et al., 2009). the conventional framing of edcs as primarily a concern of exposures from products at the moment of consumption or in domestic space limits public understanding of edcs to individualized, molecularized, damage-centered, and body-centered frames. embracing this habitual framework, mainstream advocacy around edcs easily slips into an individualized environmental politics that takes the form of campaigns for labeling products, education towards consumer vigilance in purchasing, or even housecleaning practices as tactics to manage these special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 5 consumption-born exposures. edcs as limited to a consumer-based problem are apparent in canada’s regulatory regime, where the only edc-specific regulation to date concerns the removal of bpa from consumer items used by infants. a consumer focus responds to funding-related and other pressure on mainstream environmental organizations to produce actionable, immediate interventions for the public. however, such interventions reinforce individualizing narratives of blame in relation to edcs, such as is apparent in consumer-based activism—what norah mackendrick (2015) refers to as precautionary consumption. organized through the feminization of reproductive labor, precautionary consumption places responsibility on women to purchase goods that are deemed non-toxic, natural, or organic in order to seemingly avoid toxic exposures. a signature aspect of environmental sexism is women’s disproportionate labor in managing environmental harms (voyles, 2015). while precautionary consumption is common in popular environmental health discourses, it is flawed. it assumes that boundaries can be established between people and their environments, and erases the fact that toxics are ubiquitous in our surroundings (endocrine disruptors action group, 2016; mackendrick, 2015; scott, haw, & lee, 2016; scott & lewis, 2015). edcs in consumer products always come from somewhere. that is, they can be traced back through the chain of production to their manufacture and a larger disbursement of environmental violence. hence, edcs operate as built-in exposures (endocrine disruptors action group, 2016)—industrial chemicals knowingly added to commodities, often as a means to turn the waste products of fossil fuel refining into profit-making chemical feedstocks to be inserted into marketable products. petrochemical manufacturers know that hormonedisrupting substances, such as flame-retardant chemicals or plastic-softening phthalates, create harm and yet nonetheless continue to sell and distribute them. moreover, industrial chemicals as wastes and pollution are knowingly put into air, water, lands, and bodies as a “free” form of disposal for companies. the ubiquity of edcs in air and water pollution makes individual avoidance of edcs in a pervasively polluted world impossible. precautionary consumption advocates for individual responses to structural issues—what alexis shotwell (2016) calls healthism—and is only accessible to those with economic means, presenting avoidance of exposure as a matrix of morality and choice. indigenous communities cannot individually avoid being affected by colonialism and black communities cannot merely avoid the encompassing surround of anti-blackness. consistent with neoliberal individualization, healthism absolves the state of its responsibilities to regulate harmful toxicants, erases structural violence, and special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 6 places the burden of responsibility and blame on often feminized labor (mackendrick, 2014; scott et al., 2016; scott & lewis, 2015; shotwell, 2016). precautionary consumption thus perpetuates injustice rather than mitigates it. even as the aim of precautionary consumption is to limit edc and other toxic exposures, the approach erases and deflects responsibility for exposures that are fundamentally made possible by fossil fuel capitalism and settler colonialism. this paper seeks to contribute to the disruption of this heteronormative domesticated understanding of edcs and to strengthen decolonial feminist frameworks for understanding edcs as manifestations of structural violence in unevenly polluted worlds. we might begin this reframing by noting that phthalates are petrochemicals, manufactured through either the feedstock chemicals of naphthalene or orthoxylene that are derived from oil refining. bpa, too, is derived from petroleum, and its very use is premised on the need to make other petroleum-based epoxy resins and plastics more pliable. this paper’s understanding of edcs joins other researchers in pushing the study of edcs back to fossil fuel and petrochemical industry production, and thus also extends out to extraction itself, including oil fields, fracking pads, mining pits, and tar sands (bolden et al., 2018; bolden et al., 2015; gómez-barris, 2017; kassotis et al., 2016; kassotis et al., 2015; kim et al., 2016; endocrine disruption exchange, n.d.; truter et al., 2016; wylie, 2018). this understanding of edcs also expands to the wastelanding practices of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that accompany oil extraction and refining performed through the distribution of industrial and infrastructural emissions to airs, waters, and lands.3 in this paper, we join other environmental justice researchers to take up this challenge of highlighting the industrial and extractive sources of edcs, as well as to add an emphasis on the work of settler colonialism in the structures that underlay this modality of environmental violence. each refinery, each factory, each pipeline in canada and the united states is on the traditional territory of specific indigenous nations and is made possible by a history of land theft and genocide, as well as ongoing colonialism. we end by presenting our collaborative work on the the land and the refinery: past, present, and future as an example of developing a decolonial feminist approach to edcs (murphy et al., 2019a). in reaching towards a decolonial feminist approach to environmental violence, resituating edcs as industrial chemicals is not enough. we argue that it is crucial to also question the very habits of framing edc harms primarily in terms of sex and body-based damage. a decolonial feminist approach to edcs cannot be satisfied with the individualized body-based frame and heteronormative mode of special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 7 much research on edcs. guided by eve tuck’s (2009) prompt to suspend damagecentered research that extracts findings from the lives of indigenous and other over-researched communities, we refute body-centric narratives of harm that reduce people to “damaged bodies” and imply harm as an individualized event. this mode conceals broader infrastructures and relations—structures of violence (murphy, 2017; wolfe, 1999). to refute extractive body-centric approaches is a methodological commitment that interrogates violence at its source, rather than at its, albeit important, manifestations of pain, loss, and harm. as a collaboration between a non-indigenous south asian diasporic scholar and an indigenous métis scholar, we draw on multiple itineraries to inform our decolonial feminism, shaped by different, sometimes conflicting, histories of occupation and complicity.4 as our work in this paper highlights chemical violence on anishinaabek land and with specific relation to aamjiwnaang first nation as well as the broader lower great lakes basin that is also governed by haudenosaunee laws, we frame our approach primarily through engagements with indigenous decolonial feminist frameworks from that territory. we also build on feminist and queer studies scholars who have pushed back on the heteronormative sex panics that scientific and media accounts of edcs have tended to promote (ah-king & hayward, 2013; di chiro, 2010; shotwell, 2016). likewise, we learn from feminist science and technology studies (sts) scholarship that has importantly attended to the ways scientific practices in toxicology and evidentiary practices in toxic governance have been sites of struggle involving industries and research scientists around the legitimacy of hormone disruptor research, and especially the validity of low dose effects (hayes, 2011; cordner, 2016; vogel, 2012; wylie, 2018). in europe, such struggles have erupted into the news as scientists denounced the role of industry representatives in the creation of new edc standards for the eu (kortenkamp et al., 2016), while in canada and the us, critical work has shown the role of industrial lobbies in promoting flameretardant edcs (endocrine disruptors action group, 2016). thus, in addition to reframing edcs as industrial chemicals, we also argue for an approach that positions such violence as the structural and extensive reach of settler colonialism and racial capitalism through both corporate pollution and setter state regulation into land/body relations. we learn from and contribute to indigenous feminist theorizations of environmental violence as constituted through settler colonialism, extraction, and experiences of community-based, body-based and particularly gendered, sexual, and intergenerational harms (carmen & waghiyi, 2012; native youth sexual health network & women’s earth alliance, 2016). following this work, we argue that violence through fossil-fuel-related edcs is violence on the land is violence on our bodies. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 8 beyond body-centric narratives closely attending to edcs can teach us to disturb many of the pernicious habits by which chemical violence is conventionally represented. building on the argument that pollution is colonialism, we hold that edcs in canada and the united states are materially a form of colonial environmental violence, disrupting land/body relations, and at the same time, are made possible by a permission-to-pollute regulatory regime. this regulatory regime emphasizes outdated “dose makes the poison” approaches to toxicity, erasing not only low-dose effects, but also intergenerational effects, cumulative effects, as well as concentrated effects that expose indigenous, black, brown, and poor communities to early mortality, intensified debility, and reproductive violence. because edcs can have some of their most injurious effects at low levels, the structural allowance of such exposures using a “dose makes the poison” logic is particularly pernicious in the context of chronic, persistent, and cumulative exposures borne by frontline communities and those occupationally exposed to petrochemical facilities. as developed by métis scholar max liboiron, as well as our collaborative work in the endocrine disruptors action group, the pollution is colonialism framework attends to how land, in all its relations and not just as territory, is turned by colonial logics into a resource to be extracted and a terra nullius (empty space) dumping ground for waste (endocrine disruptors action group & the civic laboratory for environmental action research, 2017; liboiron, 2019; mckittrick, 2013; voyles, 2015). this framework understands land in an extensive sense; land is composed of earths that carry histories, ancestors, and future generations; stones that are grandfathers; waters as a living being; and many animals and plants that human communities have longstanding agreements with and responsibilities towards (mcgregor, 2009, 2018; betasamosake simpson, 2014; hill, 2017). this sense of land stretches forward and backward in time, and is importantly reproductive. that is, it understands that communities and humans are made of and through land; they are themselves a manifestation of land. industrial edcs can teach us about the structural injustices built into permissionto-pollute regulatory systems and these land/body relations. such edcs, which interfere in the conduct of hormonal systems and even gene expression, are notable for their disruptions to developing fetuses, pregnancy, infancy, or any other window of life when people are in intensified development and alteration, requiring us to attend to the distribution of life changes and exposure to injury by life stage. the widespread ubiquity of industrial edcs, on the one hand, and their intensification for frontline communities, on the other, make hormonal disruption special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 9 a profoundly expansive and yet uneven condition for people living and surviving in the hostilities that have been built into the world by racial capitalism and colonialism. yet it is crucial to keep in mind that the effect of edcs goes beyond these reproductive, life course, and sex-related disruptions to include neurological, cardiovascular, immune, and other effects (shug, janesick, blumberg, & heindel, 2011; su, 2016; waye & trudeau, 2011). the roles of hormones extend beyond those areas of the body we dominantly signify as reproductive or sexed. further, some edcs are linked to cancer (national institute of environmental health sciences, 2018). for example, a 2012 multi-year study, “breast cancer risk in relation to occupations with exposure to carcinogens and endocrine disruptors: a canadian case–control study,” found suggestive links between occupational exposures to carcinogens and edcs and an elevated risk of breast cancer in the area around aamjiwnaang (brophy et al., 2012). this finding is consistent with other occupational studies, which have repeatedly pointed to heightened cancer risk as a result of edc exposures (iavicoli, fontana, & bergamaschi, 2009; villeneuve et al., 2010). aamjiwnaang first nation has a well known skewed sex ratio of twice as many babies born with femaleversus maleidentified genitalia, while widespread interference in sexual development has been documented in birds, fish, and reptiles in the region (mackenzie, lockridge, & keith, 2005; marentette et al., 2010; de solla, bishop, & brooks, 2002). thus, the injustices built into the regulatory system express themselves through edcs as particular sexed and gendered effects, and at the same time, as pernicious effects altering many aspects of bodily being, including cognition and exposure to early death.5 the violence of edcs is not only widely extensive and unevenly intensive across communities and land/body relations; it is also expansive in time. edcs are associated with intergenerational impacts that manifest in later generations (endocrine disruptors action group, 2016; wolstenholme et al., 2012).6 the intergenerational scope of chemical violence can happen in a multitude of ways. first, because edcs can have particularly strong effects on developing fetuses, exposures while pregnant can include consequences for not only the person exposed but their future child, and the gametes of that future child, hence their grandchildren.7 second, some edcs have harmful epigenetic effects, some of which are inheritable, and thus can be passed on as metabolic susceptibilities to future generations beyond three generations. third, disruption to reproduction and the loss of community members to death can have long-lasting effects to communities’ well-being emotionally, spiritually, culturally, and materially. fourth, edcs, through their persistence in water and soil, or through their effects special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 10 on and accumulations in animals and plants, disrupt the ability of communities to maintain kinship and obligations to land, food, and nonhumans. there is a robust body of literature on the impact of edc exposure on nonhuman life (colborn & clement, 1992; hayes et al., 2002; hoover, 2013; sapouckey et al., 2018). thus, edcs manifest the ways pollution is not just a harm in the moment but part of ongoing violence that stretches across generations, across communities, and across land. edcs have not only intergenerational effects to human descendants but also place-based disruptions to relations to land and nonhuman relations. as an alternative to focusing primarily on the body, we draw on the concept of distributed reproduction to theorize and create actionable interventions to limit exposures to industrial edcs. distributed reproduction names an understanding of reproduction occurring beyond bodies within uneven spatial and temporal infrastructures and relations. this conception of reproduction acknowledges the fulsomeness of land/body relations, understanding reproduction to exceed the individual body as the site of childbirth and extends into relations to land. it also attends to the reproductive work of settler infrastructures that distribute the benefits and violences of capitalism and colonialism in particular ways, reproducing and privileging capitalist relations to land and life (murphy, 2013). settler colonial infrastructures are always in disruptive relations to land in the fulsome sense of all our relations and indigenous sovereignty. within the settler colonial infrastructures of the oil and gas industry—which includes both the corporate industrial structures and the state’s permission-to-pollute system of regulation—white, settler, and capitalist forms of life are promoted, and other forms of life, land, and sovereignty are disrupted. through settler infrastructures, particular ways of accumulating benefits for the settler state persist that depend on the ongoing disruption and negation of indigenous sovereignty and devaluation of indigenous, black, racialized, and poor communities, as well as the nonhuman communities which are present in places of intensive pollution. thus, disrupted land and colonial infrastructures also become part of our land/body relations as our lives are formed in part through this violence. yet despite this infrastructural violence, land and indigenous sovereignty persists and is valued (murphy 2013). in theorizing distributed reproduction in this way, we draw on the concept of reproductive justice, as crafted by women-of-color feminists in the united states (forward together, 2018; incite! women of color against violence, 2006; ross, 2017; ross & solinger, 2017; sistersong, n.d.); the comilla declaration of 1989, written in bangladesh, which theorizes the engineering of life in both agriculture and in human bodies as connected forms of the relations of reproduction; marxist feminist work that theorizes the structuration of special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 11 reproduction as pivotal to capitalism; indigenous feminisms that attend to the intergenerational reverberations of violence and the continuance of colonialism, as well as understandings of land as the wellspring of being, responsibility, and law; and queer studies work that questions heteronormativity within ways of envisioning futures. we further draw on environmental justice praxis, which identifies the systems and processes that render some life polluted, and therefore, expendable—or conversely, some life as expendable, and therefore, pollutable. the 1984 union carbide/dow chemical disaster in old bhopal, india, has occupied a central place in our conception of environmental injustice. the subsequent multigenerational and multifaceted movement for justice is another important location in which community struggle has conveyed the logics of distributed reproduction. as the movement holds states and companies responsible for the ways some life is violated, altered, and abandoned, there is a simultaneous community-based push to reproduce hopeful futures (fortun, 2001; hanna, morehouse, & sarangi, 2005). following this path of theorizing, we call for a conceptualization of edcs not merely as a class of chemicals but as a structural relation of violence that manifests the intergenerational, land-based, and targeted violences of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and fossil fuel extraction. as liboiron, tironi, and calvillo (2018) assert, “structures define toxicity.” (p. 333). this sense of distributed reproduction helps us to highlight both the reproduction of structures, including the burdens of chemical violence that are reproduced in frontline and occupationally exposed communities, and the land/body relations of life support that communities create and are responsible to. it builds on the work of tonawanda seneca feminist scholar mishuana goeman (2017), who has called for attention to the ways “gendered and sexualized violence has multiple connections that spread out on vertical and horizontal scales” (p. 100). as such, distributed reproduction is layered. it points to the intergenerational and transgenerational burdens of edcs, which target indigenous, black, racialized, feminized, queer, trans, two-spirit, and poor communities who often live proximate to intensive industry and extraction, and at the same time, points to the intergenerational settler project of technologically and legally building infrastructures of extraction and indigenous elimination. it points to the extensive life supports that we, as communities, maintain and create to make up our land/body relations, and it points to their disruption by systems that benefit the settler/racist state. when we relegate edcs to harm at the molecular level (as is the disciplinary focus of many biomedical studies), we erase the broader structures of violence that reproduce cross-generationally, as well as the various special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 12 incarnations of harm that occur on a collective level (see liboiron et al., 2018; scott et al., 2015). this is not to minimize the harms experienced on an individual level. rather, the aim is to link these harms to the broader structures that underlie and perpetuate them, as well as to understand the interconnectedness of body, land, and structures of power. this conceptualization, in turn, puts the representational burden for violence on polluters, and the broader permission-topollute system that allows these harms to persist. in contrast, body-centric narratives highlight the harms and the victims of harm, but decenter the perpetrators of that harm. by refocusing our attention to the perpetrators of harm, new possibilities of action become clear—beyond individualized and consumer-based approaches that stem from body-centric narratives. to address the violence of edcs, it is necessary to theorize structurally, in infrastructures, as well as decolonially, through land/body relations. to live with and against the violence of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, it is also necessary to foster and support affirming forms of distributed reproduction that uphold communities, defend land, and respect land/body sovereignties. edcs as structure, not an event while toxics do not discriminate, settler colonial systems do. as such, edcs have disproportionate and targeted impacts, including heightened rates of breast cancer amongst women in the automotive plastics industry (brophy et al., 2012), and a myriad of harms in frontline communities, such as aamjiwnaang first nation, on whose land chemical valley, including three of canada’s biggest refineries, sits. in short, chemical violences have “disproportionate impacts, concentrated by indigeneity, race, gender, class and age, that result from exposures to environmental toxicants and the processes of industrial development” (endocrine disruptors action group, 2016, p. 19). these uneven exposures are rooted in broader structures and must be approached as such, rather than via the individualizing accounts of body-centric and molecular-level harm. at the same time, edcs exceed this targeted and concentrated violence. they flow through waterways, are transported on air currents, bounce up or down to the poles, and move through commodities. the structural violence of edcs is thus both concentrated and overflows to become widespread. this shift in understanding to the structuration and overflow of pollutants is reflected in recent environmental justice scholarship, which affirms the embeddedness and interconnectedness of bodies, environments, and structures or power through transcorporeality (alaimo 2010, 2016) or corporeal citizenship (gabrielson & parady, 2010).8 this is a departure from earlier conceptions of special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 13 environmental injustice, which, as laura pulido (2015) notes, lacked a root cause analysis by focusing on acts of individualized and deliberate harm as well as the effects of that violence on black, brown, indigenous, and poor communities. more recently, pulido (2016a, 2016b) uses cedric robinson’s (1983) racial capitalism to denote racism and white supremacy as fundamental to capitalism, which, alongside settler colonialism, is at the root of environmental injustice. racial capitalism and settler colonialism are structures, not events (wolfe, 1999, 2006; kauanui, 2016). that is, they are ongoing projects that are extensive spatially, present in mundane institutions, actions, and logics, and reproduce over time from the past to the future. settler colonialism, moreover, is a land-centered project with a temporal aim, operating by eliminating and replacing indigenous life and governance. settler colonialism and racial capitalism, which simultaneously arrange life in canada and the us, are interconnected through shared histories and regimes of whiteness, property, exploitation, and extraction. these structures help to order distributed reproduction in that they both strive to arrange which beings, life supports, and relations are supported and persist, and which are open to be disappeared, wasted, or replaced. edcs, then, run through and reinforce these structures. gender is a further relation at work in this structural understanding of environmental violence, and has received renewed attention in environmental justice scholarship, following earlier approaches that glossed over gendered environmental injustices, or detached gendered injustices from broader structures of power. the renewed approach to gender in environmental justice is reflected in dayna nadine scott’s (2015) feminist political economy of pollution. this approach “interrogates systematic issues of power and ownership relating to the question of who profits from and exerts exploitative control over ecological resources, economic capital, and social labour” (p. 5). the super-exploitation of women is fundamental to this question, including the disproportionate burdens of bearing and managing toxic exposures (scott et al., 2015). indigenous feminist theorizations further point to gendered harms, such as in the conception of environmental violence as an explicitly gendered term. first defined by carmen and waghiyi (2012), environmental violence refers to the disproportionate impacts of chemical violence on indigenous women. building upon this initial framing, the native youth sexual health network and women’s earth alliance (2016) define environmental violence as “the disproportionate and often devastating impacts that the conscious and deliberate proliferation of environmental toxins and industrial development (including extraction, production, export and release) have on indigenous women, children and future http://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/#ts-fab-bio-below http://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/#ts-fab-bio-below special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 14 generations, without regard from states or corporations for their severe and ongoing harm” (p. 15). the canadian national inquiry into missing and murdered women and girls (2019) also highlighted the coupling of extraction economies with the intensification of sexual violence against indigenous communities. indigenous feminists from around the lower great lakes, such as mishuana goeman, leanne betasamosake simpson, elizabeth hoover, audra simpson, katsi cook, and others all emphasize not only how colonial environmental violence intensifies through gender, but also how gender has been crucial to indigenous resurgence. as goeman (2017) argues, the bodies of native women are dangerous because they produce knowledge and demand accountability, whether at the scale of their individual bodily integrity, of their communities’ ability to remain on their bodies of land and water, or as citizens of their nations. the sites of these “meeting places” and scales of geographies are key to contesting colonial structures that limit spatial alternatives and thus continue to create spatial injustices. (p. 123) the targeted, multiscalar, gendered, and disproportionate harms that industrial edcs perform are not a chance or exceptional occurrence. in resonance with our understanding of distributed reproduction, liborion et al. (2018) describe a structural understanding of toxicity as “the contravention of order at one scale and the reproduction of order at another” (p. 335). we take up this insight to argue that uneven and multiscaled land/body exposures to industrial edcs and other toxicants cause bodily disruptions to health and other adverse impacts, but also maintain settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the gendered economy of pollution. the reproduction of these colonial and industrial systems is dependent on the intergenerational reproduction of disproportionate and targeted violences, including chemical violences, with beneficiaries to the white settler state and multinational companies. this violence is not an outlier or unintended consequence, nor a sign of a broken system; rather, it is part and parcel of a structure invested in the maintenance of colonialism, whiteness, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. it is not only that edcs are built into products; they are built into settler colonialism itself. representing harm, shutting down heteronormative panic and stigma in moving towards a decolonial feminist approach to edcs, we also share a concern with much of the critical feminist and queer studies scholarship that has sought ways to critique and offer alternatives to the sex panic and stigma that is special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 15 so often baked into scientific studies of the sex-related effects of edcs. biomedical research on sex-related effects is picked up by the media and translated into alarms over the “feminization” and “chemical castration” of males and the reinforcement of ableist conceptions of “normative bodies.” for example, the notable cbc documentary the disappearing male begins with a striking announcement: “sounds like a b movie—‘millions of males vanish!’ fact is, there aren’t as many nowadays. not human males, not frogs, not fish…from toys to shampoo, we’re awash in strange new compounds, and we’re only just learning that males are being hit hardest” (doc zone, 2008). just as industrial edcs operate in, reproduce, and manifest broader structures of power, oppression, and exploitation, popular approaches to combating edcs likewise reproduce exclusionary narratives that designate some life as worth living, and others as “damaged” or sub-human. while the harms of non-consensual exposure to edcs are intensely lived, they are often contorted by heteronormative damage-based research concerned with both nonhumans and humans alike, instigating feminist and queer scholars to craft alternative frameworks that do not activate pathologizations of intersex, queer, and trans life. in against purity: living ethically in compromised times, alexis shotwell (2016) notes that edcs are presented as disruptions to a state of bodily purity and naturalness—a state that is imagined and impossible. rather than strive for “purity politics,” shotwell (2016) argues that it is necessary to engage with the complexities of our lived-realities, including our exposures to edcs. similarly, scholars such as malin ah-king and eva hayward (2013) respond by arguing that sex is not a stagnant concept, but, rather, an ongoing process that is, in part, influenced by edcs as well as many other relations. this scholarship concurs that the focus on “normative” bodies reproduces anti-queer, heterosexist, and ableist narratives (ah-king & hayward, 2013; clare, 2017; di chiro, 2010; shotwell, 2016). it locates harm as disruption to an imagined gender binary, which erases the multiple responses to edcs within and across different bodies. it also reframes the embodied experiences and pains of disrupted bodily development and fertility as primarily a problem of the gender binary. drawing on crip theory, such work emphasizes the ways that all bodies become themselves in chemical relations. undoing the stigmatization of these effects thus becomes a way of mitigating the violence of toxic exposures. as another way to mitigate this pervasive heteronormative panic, scholars have called for a focus on harm, rather than bodily difference (shotwell, 2016; scott, 2009). as ah-king and hayward (2013) rightly ask, “why is sex more central than cancer, auto-immune disease, and even death? what cultural nerves (many of which are globalized), are triggered?” (p. 4). in this way, some scholarly special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 16 interventions reject edc-associated heteronormativity by redirecting attention to the non-sexed harms associated with edc exposure. while scott (2009) advocates for a harm-based (rather than a difference-based) approach in relation to increases in female offspring and suspected sex-specific miscarriages in aamjiwnaang first nation, she articulates that harm cannot be viewed as separate from settler colonialism. indigenous feminist scholarship, emphasizing land/body relations (rather than chemical/body relations) moves us even closer to a decolonial framework for understanding edcs. a notable example of scholarship that offers an expansive, more-than-body understanding of harm is the work of mohawk scholar elizabeth hoover (2017), who drew from and develops katsi cook’s framing of environmental reproductive justice (erj). erj identifies harms as collective and relational, “not just a collection of individual bodies, but as social bodies” (hoover, 2017, p. 4). erj points to the collective harms that stem from chemical violence that disproportionately impacts indigenous communities, lands, as well as nonhuman kin. these harms cause disruptions to social and cultural reproduction, which has extended intergenerational impacts. hoover et al. (2012) expand, in addition to concerns about the physical reproduction of community members, indigenous people are concerned about how environmental contamination impacts the reproduction of cultural knowledge…at akwesasne, community members report a loss of language and culture around subsistence activities like fishing, which have been largely abandoned because of fears of exposure to contaminants. the generational reproduction of culturally informed interpersonal relationships has been affected as much as physical reproduction…for many indigenous communities, to reproduce culturally informed citizens requires a clean environment. (p. 1648) this indigenous land/body understanding foregrounds environmental violence and injustice as the disruption of relationships and responsibilities (mcgregor, 2009), which maintain “collective continuance” (as per whyte, 2014) and “mutual flourishing” (as per kimmerer, 2013). as we utilize erj to understand the declining sex ratio in aamjiwnaang first nation—bordered on three sides by canada’s chemical valley—lowered male birth rates are linked to broader concerns of cultural continuity. scott (2009) writes, “as one band member has stated: ‘our daughters will have to go outside our community for their partners.’ the concern is essentially one about cultural survival” (p. 251). in violence on the land, violence on our bodies: building an indigenous response to environmental violence, the native youth sexual health network and women’s earth alliance (2016) refer to disproportionate toxic exposures as a “modern form of sterilization” (p. 46). edcs special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 17 are thus material forms of gendered and heterosexualized colonial violence, reflecting centuries of reproductive injustice via colonization that extends to both land and bodies. in learning from these varied critical reframings of harm, we remain cautious about reproducing an analytical framework that remains focused on damage, rather than on violence. in reaching for a decolonial feminist approach to edcs, then, we take seriously the call by unangax scholar eve tuck (2009) to “suspend damage,” a call for researchers to discontinue research approaches that document the deficits and suffering of indigenous communities, but also all other oppressed and highly extracted-from communities. as environmental justice scholars, we have seen over and over how the permission-to-pollute state does not change when confronted with the evidence of injury. instead, communities are left with the burden of representing environmental violence through their very lives. tuck’s (2009) work echoes the politics of refusal by other indigenous scholars who reject the extractive nature of so much academic research (hoover, 2016; simpson, 2007). tuck suggests that a desire-based approach to research by and for communities has a better chance of bringing forth the world one wants to live in. but this does not mean avoiding the study of violence. instead, a decolonial feminist approach to edcs must ask how it can study violence without reproducing harm. how can it put the burden of representing and responding to environmental violence on the perpetrators and structures—refineries, companies, states, laws, financialization—rather than those most affected? this question of how to suspend damage-based approaches fundamentally animates our research in the land and the refinery: past, present, and future (murphy et al., 2019a). reaching toward a decolonial feminist approach to edcs in the land and refinery project the land and the refinery: past, present, and future is a project led by vanessa gray (anishinaabe, aamjiwnaang first nation) and michelle murphy (winnipeg métis), co-created with kristen bos (urban métis) and reena shadaan, and housed in the technoscience research unit (tru, university of toronto). this project seeks to visually and informationally attach responsibility for environmental violence to corporations, with our initial focus being on the imperial oil refinery in sarnia, ontario, located in canada’s chemical valley on traditional anishinaabek land, and the specific territory of aamjiwnaang first nation. imperial oil’s sarnia special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 18 refinery was first built in 1871, making it one of the oldest refineries in north america, mirroring the history of canada as a settler colonial state and the rise of oil-based fossil fuel capitalism. our research team is an indigenous-led collective, housed in an indigenous-led lab, and comprised of indigenous and people of color members, whose research “subjects” are the settler state, imperial oil, and the fossil fuel industry broadly. we understand our work to learn from and contribute to indigenous sts, as well as decolonial feminist sts. through our work, we aim to implicate the settler state, as well as the refinery and its multinational owner, exxonmobil, as complicit in this violence. one element of this project is an extensive database we have constructed to link polluters to pollution to pollutionrelated health harms, which manifests in a mobile application called pollution reporter. pollution reporter aims to share information about health harms and emissions that is often inaccessible to aamjiwnaang and other affected communities, and in so doing, hopes to support the communities’ sovereignty to care for land and their abilities to link environmental violence to companies without having to transit research through their own suffering. the mobile app arranges its research to attach responsibility for health harms caused by pollutants to the refinery and the state. the land and the refinery project, including the app design, is created to refute exploitative practices of data extraction that manifest colonial logics of expropriation, logics that are even present in environmental and health data that seeks to contribute to the amelioration of pollution (murphy et al., 2019b). this project is further rooted in the knowledge that canada’s toxics regulation is fundamentally flawed, as the state is complicit in a permission-to-pollute system. loopholes in regulations are, we argue, not an unintended consequence, but rather built into the regulatory regime to allow pollution to a certain level.9 through stories and research on the land and the refinery: past, present, and future website, the project provides a textual and visual testimony of the permission-to-pollute system in canada, placing obligations for violent actions on both the company and the state. this consideration is fundamental to the project, which requires shifts in gaze—from individualized, body-centric, and damagecentric narratives to the perpetrators of harm and the conditions of settler colonialism from which they are rooted. the database that the pollution reporter app draws on also seeks to reflect our understanding of edcs and their relation to a colonial permission-to-pollute system (murphy et al., 2019b). to make the database we had to critically analyze special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 19 available companyand stateproduced data about pollution in chemical valley. the app’s database draws on the national pollutants release inventory (npri)—a useful but fundamentally flawed nationally used method to report emissions. under the npri, which functions much like the us-based toxics release inventory, facilities are required to provide annual emissions data for 324 chemicals to the federal government, which is then made publicly available. this is useful because it is rare source of data that directly attaches emissions to facilities in an area such as chemical valley, where there is a concentration of some fifty facilities concerned with petrochemicals. other publicly available pollution data, primarily in the form of limited air monitoring, provides information that cannot be tied back to a specific facility. however, the npri is flawed. it is based on industry self-reported emissions data, which is often produced through indirect methods (calculative estimations generated by software or spreadsheets), with no actual physical measure of pollution. in addition, companies only have to report releases when they exceed a certain level, often measuring at the scale of a ton. thus, npri data simultaneously reveals and obscures environmental violence. however, as a component of the permission-topollute regulatory system in canada, the npri is nonetheless an admission to some kinds of environmental violence (murphy et al., 2019b). our approach is to thicken this “bad” data with responsibilities and relations. we use the data as evidence of the permission-to-pollute state, as well as testimony of acts of violence. we also connect the data to the colonial history of the refinery, which occupies anishinaabek land, and particularly that of aamjiwnaang first nation. through this historical work, we situate the refinery’s pollution within a history of colonial disruption to indigenous land/body sovereignties. additionally, and crucial to this paper, the database connects peer-reviewed studies about health effects to the chemical releases the refinery admits to. we attach responsibility for those health effects to their creator, imperial oil, its majority owner, exxonmobil, as well as to the canadian state, which allows these emissions to occur. the data in pollution reporter is a visual testament to the colonial violence of imperial oil, which is intergenerational, distributed, persistent, and cumulative, reflecting extensive violence that targets present and future life and thus disrupts community and relations to land (murphy et al., 2019b). this project is ongoing and builds on decades of work by the aamjiwnaang community on chemical valley (luginaah, smith, & lockridge, 2010; mackenzie, special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 20 lockridge, & keith, 2005). what is different about this project is its approach. while much past work has documented harms to the community in order to show the violence of chemical valley, the land and the refinery is an indigenous-led project, responsible to community, that seeks to critically study and obligate a settler colonial company and contribute to less-disrupted futures. in this way, we seek to suspend damage and activate desire-based frameworks, as well as respect and activate indigenous jurisdiction, land/body sovereignty, and decolonial futures. in doing this work, we have proceeded with permissions from chief and council as well as the aamjiwnaang first nation environmental committee and community consultation. the app and website are primarily made for aamjiwnaang, even as they are public. the project is co-led by vanessa gray, community land defender, and we also collaborate with community members in the theorization and creation of this project through community events, with the understanding that this work is in service to aamjiwnaang and other frontline communities. importantly, we situate the pollution as a disruption that goes back to 1871, which is a long time ago, but in the context of long histories of precolonial anishinaabek presence and land relations, is also a short time ago. we remember the time and generations before chemical valley, and we also know there will be a time after chemical valley that we are also responsible to. lastly, we honor that polluted land is still sacred. disrupted land and life is valued and cared for. this work of activating relations, responsibilities, and histories has helped us to develop this paper’s decolonial feminist approach to edcs. through npri-housed industry self-reported data, the sarnia imperial oil refinery admits to releasing 76 different chemicals and chemical categories. of these 76, at least 59 are potential edcs. of the 59, at least 21 chemicals have strong research evidence of hormone disruption. these edcs are amongst toxicants that produce respiratory, cancerrelated, reproductive, neurological, eyeand skin-related, cardiovascular, liver, kidney, and blood-related, gastrointestinal, and immunological harms to life. in addition, many are harmful at low levels, have intergenerational and subclinical effects, as well as persist in land and human and nonhuman life—health outcomes that are often lesser acknowledged in state, industry, and disciplinary toxicological databases about chemical harms. our data draws on state-produced and scientific sources that connect toxics to individualized and body-centric manifestations of violence; yet, presented in this database and explicitly rooted in the perpetrators of violence, the data collectively demonstrates cumulative colonial violence and community persistence, past, present, and future. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 21 in explicating the permission-to-pollute system, we have found that emergent scientific research on edcs is underutilized by the state, which results in risk assessment and regulatory measures that do not adequately address toxic exposures and the extent of their impacts. moreover, another level of erasure of the violence of industrial edcs is accomplished by the state’s determination of toxicity based on designating thresholds of exposure, which profoundly shapes the risk assessments of chemicals under the canadian environmental protection act, 1999, as well as through ontario’s ambient air quality criteria, ontario’s occupational exposure limits, and the non-binding canadian ambient air quality standards. threshold-based regulation allow certain amounts of a substance to be released into the environment under the assumption that low-level exposure to various toxicants do not produce adverse impacts. this is an outdated approach, inconsistent with toxicological findings, particularly in relation to edcs and low-level impacts in general (see lanphear, 2017; vandenberg et al., 2012). further, the state’s regulatory approach ignores the impacts of cumulative and chronic exposures, including exposures to multiple edcs, such as those emitted by the imperial oil refinery and its neighboring facilities on a daily basis. in addition, pollutants that are not deemed bioaccumulative or persistent can become persistent by virtue of our constant exposure to them (shapiro, 2019). accordingly, thresholds, we argue, are an ineffective method for holding companies responsible for their toxic exposures, particularly in frontline communities adjacent to industrial and polluting activities, and amongst workers in those facilities. thresholds are, in effect, an additional manifestation of canada’s permission-to-pollute system.10 this approach to edcs understands itself to be a testament to not only corporate and state colonial violence but the ways pollution itself is part of broken treaties. our research documents the ways land theft and the imposition of private property made chemical valley possible. the project aspires to make pollution and ourselves responsible to ongoing treaties, such as the one dish and one spoon wampum covenant that dates back to before colonialism and is a recurring form of agreement with and between haudensaunee and anishinaabe confederacies to care for and live on the lower great lakes peaceably and without taking more than is needed. we also seek to activate the two-row wampum covenant, the first european-indigenous treaty of the region (between dutch and haudenosaunee) that calls for colonial inhabitants to not interfere through their actions in indigenous sovereignties and lifeways. thus, the permission-to-pollute system is a constituent element in the ongoing violation of these agreements that special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 22 the land and the refinery project seeks to uphold (murphy et al., 2019a). in addition to serving community, the pollution reporter app aims to demonstrate and make actionable the central argument in this paper, that edcs are pervasive in refining, enact intergenerational violence, and disrupt land/body sovereignties. to date, most toxicological research on edcs has focused on dermal and oral exposures, with exposure via inhalation from airborne emissions as a relatively recent research focus (darbre, 2018). airborne edcs are a particular concern in relation to extractive and polluting industries, which reproduce the targeted, disproportionate, and intergenerational violences of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the gendered economy of pollution. through a decolonial feminist distributed reproduction lens, pollutant edcs represent the reproduction of these broader processes, in part, due to the intergenerational impacts associated with edc exposure that can then be tied to these structures. the erasure of edc exposure through air pollution and industry is an erasure of the uneven harms borne by indigenous and frontline communities, but also an erasure of the structural analysis necessary to approach edcs and create relations of responsibility for dismantling settler colonialism. relegating our analyses to consumer products, body-centric scopes, and single edcs serves to frame edcs as an individualized issue that is limited to molecular-level harm. we hope to activate and build upon efforts which trace the extension and responsibility for chemical violence within settler colonialism—including the expansive and cumulative edc exposures that stretch from industrial emissions into myriad dimensions of life and land. as work on the land and the refinery project continues, we aim to go beyond a focus that attaches peer-review health research to edcs, and to include and reframe the thick body of work by scientists and community knowledge holders about the effects to animals, plants, and waters. in a human-centric frame, animal studies of the effects of edcs are evidence toward possible harms to human health, rather than evidence of the more-than-human harms that edcs create in their intergenerational disruptions to both land and bodies. we expect the work of this project to be ongoing, and hopefully to be passed intergenerationally, just as we have tried to take up the teachings and work of those land protectors who have gone before us. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 23 conclusion: structures and land/body relations through this conceptualization of edcs as a structural relation of chemical violence that manifests settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the gendered economy of pollution, new possibilities emerge. individualization encourages environmental approaches that focus on body-burdens of harm, as well as the often feminized burdens of responsibility for mitigating those harms. in this dominant approach, the prime opportunity for action is through individual and consumer-based practices, which do little to mitigate the extent and impacts of edcs, are largely unavailable to working-class and poor communities, facilitate racist and classist narratives of individual choice and blame, and allude to the private sector as the solution to the adverse consequences associated with edcs—such as through consuming organic produce, installing water filtration devices, or using “toxic-free” cosmetics. rather than solutions, this type of approach perpetuates gendered environmental injustice through intensified feminized burdens of reproductive labor, which individualize responsibility and blame for chemical violence. these are compounded in indigenous and racialized contexts in which freedom of choice and blame narratives are utilized to perpetuate deficiency narratives. however, as we shift focus beyond individualized, body-centric, and damagecentered approaches towards land/body relations and a structural distributed reproduction frame, new ways of responding to environmental violence come to the fore. a structural lens highlights collective, cumulative, and intergenerational harms, their roots in settler colonialism and racial capitalism, and their manifestations across varied but interconnected sites of chemical violence. this structural analysis facilitates transnational and intergenerational solidarities across communities impacted by chemical violence at its various stages in the commodity chain (see wylie, liboiron, & shapiro, 2017)—from the athabasca chipewyan first nation and mikisew cree first nation downstream from alberta’s tar sands (extraction), to aamjiwnaang first nation, on whose land chemical valley sits (refining), to predominantly racialized and immigrant nail technicians occupationally exposed to phthalates and acetone, both produced from petrochemicals (consumption), and to fatal emissions and waste dumping, such as in the former union carbide plant in old bhopal, india, which used carbaryl (containing petroleum distillates) to manufacture and formulate the pesticide sevin. to highlight the structures that underlie chemical violence is to assign responsibility to the perpetrators of that violence and demand its end. at the special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 24 same time, activating a decolonial land/body framework depends on re-building our relations with land and community life-support. decolonial futures are possible in the ethical relationality we make together (arvin, tuck, & morrill, 2013; donald, 2012; konsmo & recollet, 2019; todd, 2016; betasamosake simpson, 2017). as we shift our gaze beyond individualist framings and solutions and towards structures of power, oppression, and exploitation, we move towards collective action, to hold perpetrators accountable, to dismantle colonialism, to build and rebuild relationships of solidarity and mutual aid, to respect land/body sovereignties, and to enact the futures we desire. acknowledgements we thank our collaborators on the land and the refinery: past, present, and future, vanessa gray, kristen bos, beth coleman, ladan siad, and nicholas shapiro. we further credit tajdeep brar, emily astra-jean simmonds, sophia jaworski, and jessica caporusso, who assisted in database research towards the pollution reporter app. finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their thought-provoking and invaluable feedback. notes 1 we use capital l “land” in this paper to indicate an understanding of land that is not commensurate with territory or earth, but rather includes nonhumans, ancestors, future generations, and “all our relations” stretching both backward and forward in time. this understanding of land seeks to honor anishinaabek and haudenosaunee teachings, which are distinctive, but which both emphasize kinship with land and are both manifest as part of indigenous law in the lower great lakes region. this generational emphasis on land extends to many indigenous understandings of land/body, but at the same time is specific within different nations. this approach to land is discussed further in the paper. 2in the last two decades, endocrine disruption has been legitimized as a form of chemical violence. in 2002 the world health organization (who), the international labour organisation (ilo), and the united nations environment programme (unep) recognized edcs as substances of concern with the release of global assessment of the state-of-the-science of endocrine disruption (damstra, barlow, bergman, kavlock, & van der kraak, 2002). this report summarized growing scientific concern on endocrine disruption as a mode of chemical violence with the potential to cause adverse health impacts in human and nonhuman bodies. global assessment of the state-of-the-science of endocrine disruption built special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 25 upon the recommendations put forth by the intergovernmental forum on chemical safety in february 1997 and the 1997 declaration of the environmental leaders of the eight on children’s environmental health. state-level measures to address edcs also emerged in the late 1990s. in 1996 the united states environmental protection agency (epa) began to screen potential edcs (primarily in pesticides) under the food quality protection act and the safe drinking water act (united states environmental protection agency, 2017). in the same year, theo colborn, dianne dumanoski, and john peterson myers (1996) published the groundbreaking our stolen future, which brought attention to the intergenerational violences of edcs. in 1997 the european parliament began its own efforts to prompt research and action on edcs (commission of the european communities, 1999), and in canada, hormone-disrupting chemicals were included in the canadian environmental protection act, 1999. a decade later, unep and who released state of the science of endocrine disrupting chemicals – 2012 (bergman, heindel, jobling, kidd, & zoeller, 2013). the more recent report points to holes in edc research and, by extension, regulatory measures. who and unep thus called for several interventions, including more comprehensive methods to identify edcs, sources of edc exposure and exposure routes; attention to cumulative edc exposures, particularly in industrial zones; better reporting of edcs in products and materials, and; data sharing to improve international edc awareness and action (bergman et al., 2013). 3 in wastelanding: legacies of uranium mining in navajo country, traci brynne voyles calls wastelanding an “underexplored component of environmental racism” (p. 9). voyles extends kuletz’s (1998) work on wasteland discourse, and defines wastelands as “a racial and a spatial signifier that renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable” (p. 10). wastelands are not limited to arid, barren landscapes. various lands and those that occupy them can be deemed “wastelands” to facilitate resource extraction and polluting practices (voyles, 2015). this practice connects to capitalist logics, in which place is transformed to manifest relations of inequality. 4 there are points of interaction in the albeit profoundly different histories and experiences of occupation in south asia and the americas—exploitation, displacement, violence (often gendered), and disruptions to social, cultural, economic, and political organization. however, there are also important dynamics to attend to, such as south asian complicities in settler colonialism in the americas, as well as ongoing threats to indigenous communities within south asia, such as in the indian state’s efforts to impose uranium mining on adivasi special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 26 lands. 5 our understandings of distributions of exposure to early mortality as constitutive of settler colonial environmental violence is indebted to ruth gilmore’s (2007) theorization of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (p. 28). 6 epigenetic research tends to differentiate between intergenerational and transgenerational effects. intergenerational effects denote the exposure of three generations when a pregnant being is exposed, thereby affecting the parent, the fetus, and the fetus’s gametes. transgenerational effects are caused by inherited changes to the epigenome that then affects gene expression and can thus extend beyond three generations as an inheritable alteration. 7 nancy langston’s (2010) case study on diethylstilbestrol (des) is a notable example of the intergenerational violences of edcs. des is a synthetic estrogen and known endocrine disrupter. des was prescribed to alleviate symptoms of menopause, as well as to prevent miscarriages. however, in 1971, boston-based researchers found a cluster of women with rare vaginal cancers. it was discovered that their mothers had consumed des during their pregnancies, the impacts of which only became apparent in their daughters following puberty (langston, 2010). 8 we also note that new materialist relational theorizations tend to obscure their debt and relation to indigenous epistemologies and ontologies (todd, 2016; watts, 2013). 9 for instance, liboiron, tironi, & calvillo (2018) point to the cost-benefit analysis that underlies much toxics regulation. this is apparent in ontario, where ontario regulation 419/05: air pollution – local air quality allows facilities to bypass the provincial air quality standards if they are unable to meet the requirements for cost-related or technical reasons. as an alternative, facilities can apply for sectorspecific or site-specific standards (“technical standards”), which allow facilities to exceed provincial air pollution standards. in chemical valley, imperial oil and several other facilities use technical standards for benzene emissions. 10 flaws in the federal-level regulatory approach were highlighted in recent efforts to reform the canadian environmental protection act, 1999. in june 2017, the standing committee on environment and sustainable development (2017) special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) reena shadaan and michelle murphy, 2020 27 released eighty-seven recommendations related to toxics governance in canada. these recommendations were formed alongside various stakeholders, including experts in environmental law, health, and justice, including indigenous nations and frontline communities. edcs are noted explicitly in two recommendations, but relate to a number of the other recommendations put forth. specifically, recommendation 39 states, “the committee recommends that the government revise the definition of ‘toxic’ to ensure that it addresses endocrine disruptors.” moreover, recommendation 44 states, “the committee recommends that environment and climate change canada and health canada implement measures, thresholds, techniques and reporting requirements specifically addressing endocrine disruptors.” the latter recommendation was promoted in part due to the fact that there is no safe threshold of exposure for edcs. this is further reflected in recommendation 40, which states “that sections 64 and 68 of cepa be amended to expressly address substances that are dangerous at low level quantity thresholds.” the standing committee further proposed recommendations related to the disproportionate impacts of edcs and other chemical exposures, consistent with an environmental justice and environmental violence lens (standing committee on environment and sustainable development, 2017). in june 2018, the government of canada responded to standing committee’s recommendations with an expressed commitment to improving the consideration of edcs in risk assessments, better addressing lowdose and cumulative impacts, and improving protections for “vulnerable populations” 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(2006). settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. journal of genocide research, 8(4), 387-409. wolstenholme, j. t., edwards, m., shetty, s. r., gatewood, j. d., taylor, j. a., rissman, e. f., & connelly, j. j. (2012). gestational exposure to bisphenol a produces transgenerational changes in behaviors and gene expression. endocrinology, 153(8), 3828-3838. wylie, s. a. (2018). fractivism: corporate bodies and chemical bonds. durham, nc: duke university press. wylie, s. a., liboiron, m., & shapiro, n. (2017). making and doing politics through grassroots scientific research on the energy and petrochemical industries. engaging science, technology, and society, 3, 393-425. author bio reena shadaan is a phd candidate in the faculty of environmental studies at york university, where she focuses on environmental justice and occupational health. she is a 2017 recipient of the joseph-armand bombardier canada graduate scholarship to honour nelson mandela. michelle murphy is professor of history and women & gender studies, as well as canada research chair in science and technology studies and environmental data justice at the university of toronto. she is métis from winnipeg. microsoft word 76921-1-11-parvin.docx parvin, n. (2019). look up and smile!: seeing through alexa’s algorithmic gaze. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-11. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © nassim parvin, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical perspectives look up and smile! seeing through alexa’s algorithmic gaze nassim parvin georgia institute of technology nassim@gatech.edu what’s at stake in the introduction of algorithmic fashion assistants? in april 2017, amazon debuted echo look, the latest in their cluster of products that are built on artificial intelligence called alexa. echo look is a small oval device equipped with a camera, designed to be a virtual fashion assistant when you need “a second opinion on your outfit.” the video promoting echo look opens on a brightly lit living room where a young woman is lying on a couch. the camera pans to a close-up image of her feet—in patterned red socks—resting on the top of the couch arms. we hear her say, as if asking a real person, “alexa, what is the weather today?” while the camera zooms in on her face. cutting from one scene to another, we watch able-bodied mainly female actors performatively pose for the camera in modern well-fitting clothing with distinct styles. they appear racially diverse and upper-middle class: different skin colors and distinct facial features are represented, set within modern minimalist interiors and refined clothing. the ad ends with each of the women moving away from the camera’s frame. parvin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 echo look’s short promotional video fits well into the contemporary tech ad genre. the only marked difference is that it prominently features women, a clue to the assumption it holds regarding its main users’ gender— aligned with modern ads for domestic technologies such as detergents and washing machines. echo look promises ease and fluidity of use streamlined into the morning routine of the successful upper-middle-class woman who nonetheless needs help with her appearance. the ad’s imagery reveal more of what it presupposes about its idealized user: her morning routine is clearly not about scrambling to prepare breakfast, checking in on a sick parent, or frantically finishing an overdue report for work; what she needs, rather, is an inventory of her wardrobe so she can recall the clothing she owns, panoramic videos to check for possible imperfections from every angle, and even more efficient ways to share her photos with friends. above all, she needs a personal stylist who can tell her what not to wear on command. compared to those applications of artificial intelligence and big data that pose a direct threat to lives and livelihoods such as drones, self-driving cars, or smart policing (see, for example, eubanks, 2018; jafarinaimi, 2018; noble, 2018, suchman, follis, & weber, 2017), echo look may seem like an innocuous gadget. nonetheless, echo look is worthy of attention on multiple grounds, two of which i outline here. as with any new technology, its introduction surfaces ethical and political issues that may have been invisible otherwise, in this case no less than dominant perceptions of (women’s) bodies and what fashion is and does. the specificity of the domain is also productive for seeing this category of technology anew, illuminating its taken-for-granted premises and lofty promises. seen from every angle: unmasking the algorithm’s gaze the idea of a disciplinary gaze (foucault, 1977), symbolized in jeremy bentham’s design of a circular prison where the inmates are always visible from a tower at the center—especially its features of permanent visibility parvin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 and heightened consciousness—has been a productive starting point for understanding fitness and beauty regimes in their power to render bodies the subject of an ever-present gaze.1 subjects subjugate themselves by internalizing the gaze that yields a power distributed in social relations, practices, and ideals. for example, individuals monitor their bodies, constantly comparing them to what is for most an unachievable ideal pictured in health and beauty magazines. or extensive health and beauty regimes are sold under the guise of freedom (duncan & klos, 2012): you will feel and look healthy if you lose only five pounds!2 figure 1. the actors in the ad exhibit this constricted grace as they pose for alexa. in this screenshot set within a brightly lit bedroom, we see a presumably young asian woman in black clothing in front of a dresser with echo look on top. her hands are in her pockets, her shoulders are back and her chin is up. she appears calm and content with a subtle smile. echo look’s disciplining powers align with these patterns but play out in more insidious ways.3 for instance, getting alexa to take a picture requires a carefully choreographed move: standing at the right distance from the camera, ensuring adequate lighting, and making sure she can actually recognize the words spoken in the presence of other noises or an accent. parvin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 “look up and smile” is what appears on the screen before the picture is taken. the phrase evokes experiences of street harassment, fitting squarely within a culture where being ladylike still often carries expectations of smiling with the chin up, sitting with ankles crossed, and taking up as little space as possible with dainty movements that are nonthreatening and docile. the limitations and choreographed poses (both required and suggested) extend disciplinary practices where “feminine movement, gesture, and posture must exhibit not only constriction, but grace and a certain eroticism restrained by modern society: all three” (bartky, 1988, p. 30) (figure 1).4 the app is designed to collect, archive, and support sharing of these poses well-aligned with practices of self-presentation on social media and the associated thirst for a steady stream of images to maintain meticulously crafted personas, ready for instantaneous albeit fleeting consumption. in this manner, echo look serves as another tool for the selfie genre, “quantifying the self and regulating the value of affective labor” (losh, 2015). the vulnerability that comes with the exposure of 360-degree views of the body reinforces the perpetual need for fashion assistance in a world that judges individuals, especially women, on their ability to effectively manage and present their bodies. as such, echo look emerges as the perfect tool for self-discipline through 360-degree views that render a view from nowhere—another example of unregulated gluttony of technological vision (haraway, 1988, p. 581). in doing so, it carries forward the history in which women are framed to be just a sight (rocamora, 2011) assisted by the omnipresence of tools both lowand high-tech: mirrors, cameras, screens, and now this! authorizing cloud: ceding authority to data the disciplining power in the relentless monitoring of poses and gestures is coupled with that of echo look’s normalizing judgment.5 like a nagging whisper, alexa emerges with mysteriously sourced yet authoritative parvin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 decrees. trying out echo look in my design studio, it was striking to observe how even my students and colleagues who are most knowledgeable about fashion, those with a distinct style and high confidence, doubted their choices when faced with alexa’s ratings—and tried hard to figure out the logic behind the percentages: is it that it does not like the combination of patterns or is this jacket too boxy? and, potentially, this process can continue indefinitely as the comparative results are generated in percentages with no stopping point, as a perfect score appears unattainable. still, ceding judgment to its code is not where alexa’s demands end. as the promotional video comes to an end, we hear, “plus, alexa is built in the cloud and always getting smarter—and so will echo look.” in this way, the normative judgment of alexa substantiates the pitfalls of a code that is simultaneously absolutist and relativistic. it is absolutist in the sense of assuming that a universal set of principles could provide the basis for fashion choices, therefore undermining individual and cultural diversities in fashion expression as well as the deeply social and situated nature of fashion for dominant western, heteronormative notions of style and beauty. it is relativistic in the sense that it looks to majority opinion to identify and fix this universal code, elevating already powerful voices. moreover, amazon is selling echo look while in beta, “laden with the promise of what it might become” (stilgoe, 2018, p. 26). this promise is similar to that of other products dependent on machine learning, enlisting users to submit their most intimate data for realizing the products’ full potential while the terms of accountability and ownership remain ambiguous. what is clear, however, is that the dynamics and ideals of the sharing economy and connectivity are similarly mobilized, carrying over the legacies of gendered and racialized labor, not unlike what we have seen in other crowdsourced platforms such as google image labeler and mechanical turk (atanasoski & vora, 2015; irani, 2015; jafarinaimi, 2012). and, of course, the kinds of information that amazon can potentially mine from these images is mind-boggling. they include not only the details of parvin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 what i wear, what size i am, or my favorite colors. they also contain information about the rhythms of my life—when i get dressed daily for work or the gym for ever more precise targeted ads—as well as information about my surroundings—what furniture i own, what books are on my nightstand, or what brand of vitamins i take.6 what algorithms cannot do: i need something that looks like i’m destroying the patriarchy what this algorithmic gaze fails to see, however, is where i am going, both literally and figuratively. the former, that is whether i am dressing to go to a club or a funeral, is potentially an option that can be added in future updates to the app. the latter, however, is telling of that aspect of fashion that is beyond the domain of algorithmic analysis. in a recent new york times commentary, eva hagberg fisher (2018) documents what it was like to think through her choices of outfits as she appeared in court and on tv, for testimonies, speeches, photo shoots, and interviews, after she found herself in the very particular situation of defending her sexual harassment case. her account, titled “how i learned to look believable,” brings to the fore a nuanced understanding of fashion that can be characterized as a mode of inquiry into the social world. this understanding emerges from the inherently problematic nature of situations that call for an attentiveness to what is worn, as expressed in one of the principles that hagberg fisher shares: “you always want to stay ‘just plausibly sexy enough to look like you could have been harassed but 100 percent weren’t asking for it.’” the question “what should i wear” surfaces because hagberg fisher is in a particularly delicate situation. it is a situation that is difficult to pin down, one that calls for pause and reflection on what outfit might best serve it. the uncertainty of the situation manifests in the difficulty of characterizing it as she approaches different salespersons for help. “i need something that looks like i’m destroying the patriarchy,” is among the questions she attempts, hardly resulting in any helpful suggestions. what is certain, parvin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 however, is that hagberg fisher’s concern is not about how well the clothes sit on the body or whether the colors and patterns match. nor is her question about crafting an expressive or performative personal style. rather, her uncertainty about what to wear is a reflection of the uncertainty of the situation. her journey develops as a way of questioning the social world and the relational qualities that shape and reshape it. each outfit serves as a probe into this world that is at once pushing back at the situation, collecting evidence about how it reacts, while upholding an ideal: “i wish that we lived in a world where i could both wear high-heeled gold-detailed boots and be utterly reliable and credible, but the patriarchy is still too strong.” paradoxically for hagberg fisher, the fact that her situation demands her to pay meticulous attention to her clothes is a direct product of the same patriarchy that she is attempting to destroy. and indeed, it is striking to see how an understanding of what this precarious situation is exactly develops as she composes one outfit after another, rendering the collection of outfits as a trace of what she learns in the process. fashion and style emerge, in this manner, as ways of engaging, challenging, and inquiring about the world. this is perhaps true for both individual styles and collective developments in fashion sensibility. as an example of the latter, consider the adoption of shoulder pads as women worked to find a place at the table by conveying power through a silhouette that resembled that of their male counterparts—and how its going out of fashion reflects a new collective understanding of values and issues at stake for women working alongside men. in short, what hagberg fisher’s poignant piece of commentary captures is the inherently situational and social nature of fashion that is irreducible to algorithmic logic. echo look’s promotional video alludes to empowerment through imagery of women who appear confident about their looks, veiling the high price of its promise: being tethered to a device that reveals very little while demanding a whole lot. well-aligned with the dominant understanding of fashion as frivolous, echo look reduces it to a matter of fit, color, and pattern combinations; following trends; and keeping an inventory of what parvin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 you own. what’s more, echo look remains of no use at all for situations such as that of hagberg fisher’s, when the question of what to wear is very real and of consequence. it is my hope, however, that echo look’s introduction occasions the opportunity to see fashion for its substance as we interrogate algorithms’ claim to reason: surfacing both their inadequacy and oppressive potency. acknowledgements i am deeply grateful to mary mcdonald, anne pollock, jennifer singh, lauren wilcox, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions on drafts of this paper. i would like to thank students and friends, especially horyun song, tae eun kim, and mahtab laghaei, for their time and observations in trying out echo look. i am also grateful to the editors at catalyst, banu subramaniam in particular, for their generous support of this publication. notes 1 it is important to note that foucault does not directly engage disciplinary practices that influence female bodies, as highlighted by sandra bartky (1998). for an overview of foucault’s theory in relationship western bodily practices inclusive of its criticisms, see pylypa (1998). 2 this is not to overlook the active engagement of individuals and groups with such norms and practices in spite of challenges such as those noted by diane ponterotto (2016). indeed fashion itself, as i will also discuss later, is recognized a site of creativity, resistance, and individual and social action. fashion is, arguably, marked by a central tension that is being liberatory and disciplinary at the same time. tarrant and jolles’s (2012) edited collection fashion talks: undressing the power of style takes up this tension though a series of articles engaging fashion from feminist perspectives. for an informative series of articles, commentary, and creative work that capture current debates and scholarship on different facets of fashion, see also the spring/summer issues of wsq: women's studies quarterly, inclusive of natalie havlin and jillian m. báez’s (2018) essay charting recent debates in this area as well as noteworthy examples such as michele white’s (2018) discussion of feminist makeup tutorials and parvin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 masquerades on youtube, or the ten principles of disability justice captured by patricia berne and collaborators (2018) on behalf of the sin invalid performance project on disability and sexuality. 3 while the concept of the gaze is a productive point of entry into critique of echo look, it is by no means to be where we stop and certainly not a wholesale endorsement of foucault—which is certainly unwise, as articulated by linda alcoff (1990). 4 for dramatic examples of such poses, see the promotional video at https://www.amazon.com/amazon-echo-look-camera-styleassistant/dp/b0186jaewk. 5 foucault identified three disciplinary powers: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination. for a concise summary, see gutting (2014). 6 the kinds of collective insights that such a big data set might yield are unclear yet open to speculation. could they be used by amazon to sell its overstocked plaid skirts? could the combination of my daily facial expressions together with my weight changes be revealing of my mood and lifestyle and thus of value to insurance companies? for recent precedents, consider roomba’s collection of home maps or the exposure of military bases through the fitness app strava’s maps of running and walking routes. references alcoff, l. (1990). feminist politics and foucault: the limits to a collaboration. in a. dallery, c. scott, & h. roberts (eds.), crises in continental philosophy (pp. 69-86). albany, ny: suny press. atanasoski, n., & vora, k. (2015). surrogate humanity: posthuman networks and the (racialized) obsolescence of labor. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 1(1). retrieved from https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/ata_vora bartky, s. l. (1998). foucault, femininity, and the modernization of patriarchal power. in r. weitz (ed.), the politics of women’s bodies: sexuality, appearance, and behavior (pp. 25-45). new york, ny: nyu press. parvin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 berne, p., morales, a. l., langstaff, d., & sins invalid. (2018). ten principles of disability justice. wsq: women's studies quarterly, 46(1), 227-230. duncan, m. c., & klos, l. a. (2012). paradoxes of the flesh: emotion and contradiction in fitness/beauty magazine discourse. journal of sport and social issues, 38(3), 245-262. eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. new york, ny: st. martin's press. fisher, e. h. (2018, january 3). how i learned to look believable. new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/03/style/dressing-forsexual-harassment-hearings.html foucault, m. (1977). discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. (a. sheridan, trans.). new york, ny: pantheon. gutting, g. (2014). michel foucault. in e. n. zalta (ed.), the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/foucault/ haraway, d. (1988). situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. feminist studies, 14(3), 575-599. havlin, n., & báez, j. m. (2018). introduction: revisiting beauty. wsq: women's studies quarterly, 46(1), 13-24. irani, l. (2015). difference and dependence among digital workers: the case of amazon mechanical turk. south atlantic quarterly, 114(1), 225-234. jafarinaimi, n. (2012). exploring the character of participation in social media: the case of google image labeler. in proceedings of the 2012 iconference (pp. 72-79). new york, ny: acm. jafarinaimi, n. (2018). our bodies in the trolley’s path, or why selfdriving cars must *not* be programmed to kill. science, technology, & human values, 43(2), 302-323. parvin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 11 losh, e. (2015). feminism reads big data: “social physics,” atomism, and selfiecity. international journal of communication, 9, 1647-1659. noble, s. u. (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york, ny: nyu press. ponterotto, d. (2016). resisting the male gaze: feminist responses to the ‘normatization’ of the female body in western culture. journal of international women's studies, 17(1), 133-151. pylypa, j. (1998). power and bodily practice: applying the work of foucault to an anthropology of the body. arizona anthropologis, 13, 21-36. rocamora, a. (2011). personal fashion blogs: screens and mirrors in digital self-portraits. fashion theory, 15(4), 407-424. stilgoe, j. (2018). machine learning, social learning and the governance of self-driving cars. social studies of science, 48(1), 2556. suchman, l., follis, k., & weber, j. (2017). tracking and targeting: sociotechnologies of (in)security. science, technology, and human values, 42(6), 983-1002. tarrant, s., & jolles, m. (eds.). (2012). fashion talks: undressing the power of style. albany, ny: suny press. white, m. (2018). beauty as an “act of political warfare”: feminist makeup tutorials and masquerades on youtube. wsq: women's studies quarterly, 46(1), 139-156. bio nassim parvin (formerly jafarinaimi) is an assistant professor of digital media in the school of literature, media, and communication at georgia tech. parvin’s research explores the ethical and political dimensions of design and technology, especially as related to values of democratic participation and social justice. microsoft word 241-1501-1-atanasoski.docx atanasoski, n. and vora, k. (2018). the surrogate effect: technoliberalism and whiteness in a “post” labor era. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-13. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © neda atanasoski and kalindi vora. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical perspectives the surrogate effect: technoliberalism and whiteness in a “post” labor era neda atanasoski university of california santa cruz natanaso@ucsc.edu kalindi vora university of california davis kavora@ucdavis.edu abstract this paper offers preliminary reflections on the relationship between the seemingly opposed logics of white supremacy and racial liberalism by sketching the contours and workings of what the authors call technoliberalism. first, the article briefly overviews the relationship between the discourse of “white loss,” immigration and automation in contemporary us national politics. it then addresses how technoliberal imaginaries that argue that it is robots, not racialized others, who are taking us jobs, pin their anti-racist logics on a postracial technological future. through examples of robotic and digital technologies intended to replace human bodies and functions, the paper thus excavates the suppressed racial imaginary “technoliberalism.” 2 atanasoski and vora catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) automated teaching and learning characterizes the new generation of factory robots. this is a central aspect of what the world economic forum has recently dubbed the “fourth industrial revolution,” in which even the production and programming of technology can be performed by machines themselves. even though the development of human-free industrial robots announces that an ostensibly post-labor (and as we will go on to argue in this paper, a “post-race” and “post-gender”) epoch is upon us, the automation that was an inherent part of the first industrial revolution has signaled the threat of the replaceability of specific types of human functions and human workers that are racialized and gendered. following the 2016 us presidential election, for instance, the media announced that donald trump could not live up to his promises to return jobs to the white working class because these jobs were lost to robots rather than to threatening racial others (i.e., to illegal immigrants and racialized outsourced labor in the global south). nonetheless, the machine and the racialized other pose a similar threat of displacing those already fully human in this conception of (white) loss. in this paper, we offer preliminary reflections on the relationship between the seemingly opposed logics of white supremacy and racial liberalism by sketching the contours and workings of what we call technoliberalism that is a part of the so-called fourth industrial revolution. we begin by briefly overviewing the relationship between the discourse of “white loss,” immigration and automation in contemporary us national politics. we then move to addressing how technoliberal imaginaries that argue that it is robots, not racialized others, who are taking us jobs, pin their anti-racist logics on a post-racial technological future. through examples of robotic and digital technologies intended to replace human bodies and functions, our paper thus excavates the suppressed racial imaginary of “technoliberalism.” according to the logics of technoliberalism, technology advances humans toward a postracial future by asserting a post-labor world in which racial difference, along with all human social difference, is transcended. though 3 atanasoski and vora catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) technoliberalism asserts anti-racism as a central premise, we show that technoliberalism’s post-racial imaginary is in fact another variation of racial liberalism that has been a part of us governance from the inception of that nation. by insisting on the continuing importance of racial and gendered histories of labor that expand the category of labor and the worker far beyond the myth of the factory worker as the only subject of labor, we can see that technoliberalism not only fails to be anti-racist, but is in fact an affirmation of the us racial empire. to open our analysis, we begin with a short video, entitled m.a.m.o.n: latinos vs. donald trump (ale damiani 2016) that brings together the imaginary of robots, labor, and trump’s infamous wall. figure 1. latinos vs. donald trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q__bsi5rblw we see in this spoof of the border wall an argument that closing the border increases the need for automation (even as the inefficiency of the automated border system frustrates the violently expelled workers). we will return to how this video is a critique of both the white supremacist and technoliberal imaginaries of the us economy at the end of this essay. for now, we observe that one of trump’s first executive actions on 24 january 2017, thematized in this video, announced the immediate 4 atanasoski and vora catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) construction of a border wall. both trump and the phantasm of a border wall promoted in his presidential campaign are symbols that bring together labor, technologies of control, and white supremacy. the fantasy of isolation, closing of borders, and expelling immigrant labor animating trump’s promises to build a border wall to revive a formerly booming national economy. the imagined result would restore the (unmarked white) working class laborer to a former glory, symbolized by figures like the auto industry worker and coal miner. in response to claims that immigrant others are responsible for the loss of a glorious era of white labor in the united states, tech industry leaders emphasized that in fact it was automation that was the biggest threat to american workers. these claims were positioned as anti-racist, redirecting concerns about white loss from the immigrant threat to the threat of robotics. yet, as we contend here, these arguments are also part of a problematic relationship between what we call technoliberalism and the fantasy of post-racism in the labor arena. it is thus crucial to ask: what is the relationship between white loss and the discourse of postlabor technology/technoliberalism? the racial imaginary trump invokes, both in his campaign rhetoric and in his presidential speeches, has led many scholars of race in the us to question whether we must now think about fascism rather than liberalism if we want to analyze race relations (we need only to think of the recent events in charlottesville va to understand why this seems to be an important move). briefly, racial liberalism has long been viewed as a central tenet of governance and empire in the us. jodi melamed (2006) has argued: in contrast to white supremacy, the liberal race paradigm recognizes racial inequality as a problem, and it secures a liberal symbolic framework for race reform centered in abstract equality, market individualism, and inclusive civic nationalism. antiracism becomes a nationally recognized social value and, for the first time, gets absorbed into u.s. governmentality. importantly, postwar liberal racial formation sutures an "official" antiracism to 5 atanasoski and vora catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) u.s. nationalism, itself bearing the agency for transnational capitalism (4-5). on the one hand, trump’s campaign and presidential rhetoric that has been overtly racist in tenor contradicts the tenets of racial liberalism in us politics and culture outlined by melamed. on the other hand, we might consider the opposition to trump’s assessments of job loss as white loss articulated by tech leaders in particular as yet another innovation in the logics of racial liberalism. what we are theorizing in our work as the emergent formation of technoliberalism. by technoliberalism, we mean the way in which liberal modernity’s simultaneous and contradictory obsession with race and the overcoming of racism has once again been innovated at the start of the twenty-first century (and techboom 2.0) through the frame of a post-labor world. technoliberal futurity envisions robots as replacing human form and function in factories and other spheres (for instance, bus and taxi drivers, janitors, and call-center workers). as proponents of such futures argue, it is not that jobs are being stolen from the us white working class by mexicans and the chinese, but that, as robots take human jobs, other solutions for human obsolescence must be found. thus, as we insist here, there is a need to parse out what racial logics continue to structure the technoliberal imaginary that is positioned in seeming opposition to white supremacy. one representative example is a cnbc commentary (mckissen 2017), which noted that, eighty-five percent of manufacturing jobs were lost to technology from 2000-2010, not chinese job thieves. … we can expect more automation, and not just on the shop floor. last year the white house predicted 47 percent of existing jobs will eventually be eliminated by automation and artificial intelligence. … unless donald trump has a time machine stored in a secret lair underneath trump tower, going back to a labor-driven manufacturing economy isn't an option.” (https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/24/trump-jobs-robots-and-realsolutions-commentary.html). 6 atanasoski and vora catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) in the technoliberal logic of this report, it is not that the new economy uses cheap, racialized labor outsourced to the global south. rather, the new economy does not need any human labor. similar assessments abound in news reports pointing to trump’s racist fallacies, including his cornerstone promise to revive coal mining in the us (and thus dismantling the obama-era clean power plan). yet, as a recent new york times article outlines, in decatur, ill., far from the coal mines of appalachia, caterpillar engineers are working on the future of mining: mammoth haul trucks that drive themselves. the trucks have no drivers, not even remote operators. instead, the 850,000-pound vehicles rely on self-driving technology, the latest in an increasingly autonomous line of trucks and drills that are removing some of the human element from digging for coal. … hardy miners in mazelike tunnels with picks and shovels [celebrated by trump] — have steadily become vestiges of the past. (tabuchi 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/coal-jobs-trumpappalachia.html?mcubz=3). what is interesting about this article and others like it is that the evidence that trump’s labor policies are racist is the same evidence that suggests that the laborer as a figure, and human labor writ large, is vestigial to the tech-driven economy. to be clear, we are not contending that the nostalgic vision of the white working class in the us is disconnected from the logics of white supremacy. rather, we are proposing that there is also an urgent need to parse out the racial logics that continue to structure the technoliberal imaginary which articulates itself as separate from white supremacy. the fully automated future, it is important to note, is not unconditionally celebrated. it is often articulated as loss ─ just not as white loss, but rather as universal human loss. according to stephen hawking, “the automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the 7 atanasoski and vora catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.” (larson 2017, https://medium.freecodecamp.org/bill-gates-and-elon-musk-justwarned-us-about-the-one-thing-politicians-are-too-scared-to-talk8db9815fd398. elon musk, founder of tesla and spacex, makes a similar point: “what to do about mass unemployment? this is going to be a massive social challenge. there will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better [than a human]. these are not things that i wish will happen. these are simply things that i think probably will happen” (ibid.). the tech entrepreneur and shark tank judge mark cuban has been critical of trump, and in particular of trump’s racist understandings of job loss. as he put it, “i'm willing to bet these companies [that promised to build new factories and create new jobs in the us like fiat chrysler, gm, ford, intel and walmart] when it is all said and done ... are going to end up leading to fewer people being employed ... and there is nothing president trump can do to stop that because of the trends in technology — machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, etc. — changing the nature of work” (snider 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/02/20/cubantrump-cant-stop-rise-robots-and-their-effect-us-jobs/98155374/) at the same time tech billionaires articulate a universal human loss and spell out the end of the worker, the connection between liberalism and capitalist development means that warnings about the inevitable obsolescence of manual jobs is paired with a simultaneous optimistic outlook for the growth of the capitalist economy. thus, the technoliberal imaginary continually reasserts that us industry is growing, rather than being in decline as trump has argued. according to a 2016 pbs newshour report, despite [trump’s] charge that ‘we don’t make anything anymore,’ manufacturing is still flourishing in america. problem is, factories don’t need as many people as they used to because machines now do so much of the work. america has lost more than 7 million 8 atanasoski and vora catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) factory jobs since manufacturing employment peaked in 1979. yet american factory production … more than doubled over the same span to $1.91 trillion [in 2015], according to the commerce department. … trump and other critics are right that trade has claimed some american factory jobs, especially after china joined the world trade organization in 2001 and gained easier access to the u.s. market. … but research shows that the automation of u.s. factories is a much bigger factor than foreign trade in the loss of factory jobs. … the vast majority of the lost jobs ─ 88% ─ were taken by robots and other homegrown factors that reduce factories’ need for human labor. … (wiseman 2016, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/factory-jobs-blamerobots/). the pbs report concludes that the upside of the robot revolution is that the asian drain of jobs is ending, as manufacturing returns to the us where the use of robots can be easily implemented as an affordable solution to outsourcing. in the technoliberal imaginary, us imperial power has thus been reaffirmed through technological innovation. by way of conclusion, we want to return to the critique of technoliberalism that we see in the mexico border wall satire video featuring robo-trump, with which we opened this paper. as we read it, the short film asserts the need to understand racialized labor as central to automation (not as separate from it, as in the technoliberal imaginary). the film demonstrates that automation (or the expulsion of mexican workers from the us ─ including doctors, beauty queens, meteorologists, and food truck chefs) is both violent and inefficient. the automated complaint system at the wall cannot do the work that a human could do, leading to a comical and purposeful miscommunication as the system thanks the angry food truck worker for his cooperation and asks him not to return. the film also insists that racialized labor is central to all aspects of the us economy, from the service industry to entertainment. even more significantly, the film can be read as making a connection between fascist and technoliberal futures. trump (or at least we can 9 atanasoski and vora catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) assume the man is trump, based on his hairstyle) is inside the giant killer robot who crosses the border wall to stomp on the expelled mexican workers. that the body of trump and the body of the robot act as one underscores the dual violence of automation and white supremacy. the film thus refuses to treat them as separate, as does technoliberalism. the film suggests that technoliberal imaginaries that utilize robots to frame antiracist arguments against the logic of walls are violent in their own way. as we well know, new technologies of automation have historically often provided the rationale for actually ramping up production and the need for more workers whose labor has been devalued due to automation, for instance in twentieth century agribusiness (marez 2016). more recently, we see this in the crowdsourcing of what amazon calls humans as service in their data management platform amazon mechanical turk. we thus agree with feminist and critical race scholars of science, technology and society (sts) and labor, like vora (2015) and subramaniam and herzig, among others, who insist that what is needed today is an exploration of the ways in which geopolitical and economic shifts demand a grappling with new subjects of labor, which, with the simple privileging of the factory laborer would remain invisible. for example, herzig and subramaniam (2017) argue that the “very assertion of a subject’s ability to labor, like assertions of capacities for reason, suffering, or language, often serves as a tool for delineating hierarchical boundaries of social and political concern” (p. 104). in other words, only certain kinds of subjects (and certain kinds of work), following orthodox marxist conceptual rubrics, could be legible as “labor,” while other kinds of work (for example, women’s reproductive labor or nonhuman, including animal work) fall away from that category. affirming that we must account for these unnamed or unrecogized laboring subjects under biocapital (including nonagential, nonhuman, nonliving, and metaphysical labor), they call upon “radical scholars’ further reflection on the labor concept’s myriad entanglements with exclusionary categories of race, nation, gender, sexuality, disability, and species, while reaffirming the 10 atanasoski and vora catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) significance of "labor"” (p. 104) as a category of analysis. while class is still very much a part of the analysis, subramaniam's and herzig’s point is that because of the over-privileging of the white blue-collar worker, other categories entangled with labor fall away. instead, as they insist, these other categories must be thought alongside class in order to recast the stakes of who (or what) can be made legible as a laboring subject. such an analysis would also open up new possibilities for thinking through the racialization of the white underclass (and/as failed whiteness, “white trash,” etc.) (hartigan 1997). because of the technoliberal insistence that we are entering a post-labor world that is anti-racist because it is human-free, it is urgent to assess the ways in which technology has innovated upon capital’s dependence on racialized and gendered labor. as we have argued here, a post-race world forecasted by tech industry icons and leaders asserts a universal humanity, thus rendering racialized labor invisible. as automation ostensibly “frees” humans from the drudgery of manual labor for more creative and innovative work (atanasoski and vora 2015), the people who get those creative jobs will be those representing the whiteness of how such skills are embodied (e.g., attendance at a liberal arts college or those who have experienced certain class privileges). because, as we have pointed out, technoliberals cite automation, rather than immigration, as the main threat to the us worker, this occurs ironically though opposition to policies of exclusion, expulsion, and overtly racist discourse, even as the privileges of whiteness are reasserted. it is thus urgent to pay attention to the connections between the post-racial and post-labor logics of liberalism today even as we appear to be in an era ruled by the logics of fascism ─ the two, we suggest, are never disconnected. acknowledgements the authors thank banu subramaniam and michelle murphy for their encouragement to publish this piece, as well as the participants of the 11 atanasoski and vora catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) whiteness and technoscience double panel that convened at the 4s conference in boston in 2017. we also thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback. references atanasoski, n. and vora, k. (2015). surrogate humanity: posthuman networks and the racialized obsolescence of labor. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 1(1). doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.42.g103 hartigan, j. (1997).unpopular culture: the case of "white trash". cultural studies 11(2), 316-343. herzig, r. and subramaniam b. (2017). labor in the age of bioeverything. radical history review, 127, 103-124. larson, q. (2017). a warning from bill gates, elon musk, and stephen hawking, freecodecamp, february 18. retrieved from https://medium.freecodecamp.org/bill-gates-and-elon-musk-justwarned-us-about-the-one-thing-politicians-are-too-scared-to-talk8db9815fd398. marez, c (2016). farm worker futurism: speculative technologies of resistance. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. mckissen, d. (2017, february 24). here’s the one overlooked solution to america’s job crisis we need to talk about now, cnbc. retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/24/trump-jobs-robots-and-realsolutions-commentary.html. melamed, j. (2006). the spirit of neoliberalism: from racial liberalism to neoliberal multiculturalism, social text 24. 12 atanasoski and vora catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) snider, m (2017, february 20). cuban: trump can’t stop rise of the robots and their effect on u.s. jobs, usa today. retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/02/20/ cuban-trump-cant-stop-rise-robots-and-their-effect-us-jobs/98155374/. tabuchi, h. (2017, march 29). coal mining jobs trump would bring back no longer exist. the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/coal-jobs-trumpappalachia.html?mcubz=3. vora, k (2015). life support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. wiseman, p (2016, november 2). mexico taking u.s. factory jobs? blame robots instead. pbs. retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/factory-jobs-blame-robots/. bios neda atanasoski is an associate professor of feminist studies and the director of critical race and ethnic studies at the university of california at santa cruz. she is the author of humanitarian violence: the us deployment of diversity (university of minnesota press, 2013), and coeditor with kalindi vora of postsocialist politics and the ends of revolution, a special issue of social identities (2018). currently, she is completing a second book, co-authored with kalindi vora, entitled race, robots, and the politics of technological futures (forthcoming, duke university press, 2019). kalindi vora is the director of the feminist research institute and associate professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies at uc davis. her first book, life support: biocapital and the new history of 13 atanasoski and vora catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) outsourced labor (university of minnesota press, 2015), takes up questions of technology, colonialism and raced and gendered labor under globalization. her research has included ethnographic study of it professionals and gestational surrogates in india, and a new project with neda atanasoski on the racial and gendered politics of robotics and artificial intelligence, about which she has edited special issues and published in journals such as, ethnos: journal of anthropology, current anthropology, social identities, the south atlantic quarterly, postmodern culture, and catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. her current book project with neda atanasoski is entitled, race, robots, and the politics of technological futures (forthcoming with duke university press, 2019). mcelroy, erin (2020). corruption, șmecherie, and siliconization: retrospective and speculative technoculture in postsocialist romania. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–25. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © erin mcelroy, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license corruption, șmecherie, and siliconization: retrospective and speculative technoculture in postsocialist romania erin mcelroy ai now institute, new york university erinmcelroy@nyu.edu abstract this article explores socialist and postsocialist technoculture in postsocialist romania, focusing upon both retrospective and speculative accounts of what did, and what could have, transpired beyond the purview of the state and of capitalism. upon a backdrop of postsocialist siliconization and western anticorruption politics, it looks to queer, corrupt, and deviant technological practices that pervert normative and western accounts of socialism and its transition. in particular, this article sifts through speculative and retrospective accounts of hackers, computer cloners, and political artists and organizers, many of whom narrate technocultural practices of șmecherie—a romanian word with romani roots inferring cunningness and cleverness. these narrations, imaginations, and speculations, i suggest, corrupt postsocialist siliconization and anticorruption politics through practices of cloning, play, excess, and kinship. introduction there are about a dozen of us hovering around a table in the macaz cooperative bar in downtown bucharest on moșilor street, where the artists veda popovici and mircea nicolae are convening one of several workshops as part of their project istoria (nu) se repetă [history does (not) repeat itself]. as workshop participants, we are tasked with devising objects that can be used to depict a future past from romania’s postsocialist transitional period—one that could have happened after 1989, but that never did. the artists describe their project: special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 2 from darkness to light, from authoritarianism to freedom, from communism to capitalism—these tropes form the greatest narrative of recent history. this narrative casts collective experiences of solidarity and resistance in the footnote of history. the dreams and projections of the 1990s and 2000s, the post-revolutionary desires of a truly better world for all, remain buried under financial pyramid schemes, the mineriads,1 and migration. in istoria (nu) se repetă, these are returning fragments and imperfections in the narrations of possible but lost worlds: feminist trade unions, radical housing movements, collaborative economic projects or awareness raising campaigns on the dangers of capitalism. these counterfactual stories encompass an array of sites, from the coop bank and public information campaign entitled “money is not made through work,” to the union of women workers of romania, who occupied their suveica factory and who now own their own homes in floarea albă. there are the small shop owners at the obor and vitan markets, unscathed by the “mallification” and technourbanism that mark 2018 gentrifying topographies upon which disproportionately roma residents are evicted (as is the case surrounding macaz).2 and the list goes on, filled with places and stories that could have been, but due to the decimating impacts of romania’s transition to capitalism, never were. as istoria (nu) se repetă project participants, we are convened in order to imagine these critical fabulations and to fabricate their materialities. a few of us are excited about one space in particular: the building on calea victoriei that in the mid-1990s headquartered both the roma rights organization, romani criss, and the lgbt organization, accept. during the 1990s, these two groups did indeed share space, forging what could have been rich and sustained space of decolonial, antiracist, anticapitalist, and queer futurity had liberal ngo-ization and capitalist imperatives not severed them. but in popovici and nicolae’s future past, the two groups continue to grow together and build a free school. as workshop participants, we opt to draft a syllabus for the school. amongst other topics, we decide that hacking should be included in the curriculum. as one participant offers, “yes, we all learned computer programming during the 1990s, and before that during socialism. and everyone hacked or knew someone who did. what would have happened if hacking could have really kept romania from getting swallowed up by global capital?” another bemoaned, “romania had such a strong informatics program during socialism, and diy tech stuff too—but it all got cannibalized by the west after 1989.” “look around, it’s like silicon valley has taken over,” another muttered. “șmecherie [a romanian word with romani roots inferring cunningness, or a sort of street-smart cleverness]3—is alive and well in hacking here,” another suggested. “shouldn’t it have been able to help us keep from being siliconized?” as many of us begin to question, why was it that special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 3 siliconization transpired, and why wasn’t romanian computing culture able to better resist western incursion? might it still be able to? by siliconization, workshop participants here refer to the practice of becoming silicon valley, through cooptation and absorption of romanian technoculture and infrastructure into silicon valley and western tech companies. they also refer to modes in which aspirations of western recognition and desires to become western in the aftermath of 1989 transform local onto-epistemologies. critiques of siliconization and processes of becoming silicon valley align with a growing body of literature that has called for decolonial approaches to theorizing postsocialist transition in eastern europe (boatcă, 2006; karkov & valiavicharska, 2018; koobak & marlin, 2014; țichindeleanu, 2010; tlostanova, 2018). this body of work understands post-1989 capitalist transition as a violent process of privatization and predation, one that resulted in novel forms of economic and racial dispossession (atanasoski & vora, 2018; chari & verdery, 2009; chelcea & druță, 2016; popovici, 2020a; vincze & zamfir, 2019). at the same time, istoria (nu) se repetă also converses with a body of work by those invested in queer, decolonial, and antiracist practices of speculation and future making, which engages in speculative narrative work in order to dream up futures that didn’t yet, but that still might, manifest (bahng, 2017; eshun, 2018; keeling, 2019; lothian, 2018; muñoz, 2009; rifkin, 2019). aligned with what saidiya hartman describes as “critical fabulation”—or the writing of speculative histories marked by violence and institutions on one hand, but also “desire and the want of something better” (2018, p. 470)—istoria (nu) se repetă fabricates a postsocialist transitional culture that could have been more emancipatory than acculturation into capitalism. this mode of fabrication can be understood as queer, in that it refuses francis fukuyama’s (2006) “end of history” inevitability. western technology and its postsocialist imposition here are read as normative, with homebrewed șmecherie beyond western capital circuits of reproduction. șmecherie practices in this way align with bogdan popa’s theorization of queer postsocialist politics, whereby queerness “emerges from desires that constitute a surplus in relation to the normal circuit of exchange value” (2018, p. 30). this does not mean that șmecherie infers queerness; rather, it relates to a form of deviancy and excess antithetical to the normativity of western capitalism. in this sense, șmecherie works against what elizabeth freeman (2010) describes as “chrononormativity,” or the temporality that capitalism inheres in order to reproduce its futurity. by engaging with șmecherie, postsocialist dreamers of anticapitalist, antiracist, and decolonial futures past and yet-to-come queer siliconization imperatives by attempting to unbecome silicon valley. in this article, i draw upon fieldwork conducted in the romanian cities of bucharest, cluj, and râmnicu vâlcea between 2016 and 2018, during which i collaborated with and learned from queer, decolonial, and anticapitalist activists, special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 4 dreamers, and visionaries, particularly in the realm of anti-gentrification organizing. much of this entailed attending organizing meetings and conducting research with the housing justice collective, frontul comun pentru dreptul la locuire (fcdl / common front for housing rights),4 housed in macaz, and also frequenting art events, lectures, workshops, parties, protests, and more. bucharest-based artist, political worker, and theorist, veda popovici, who cocreated istoria (nu) se repetă and who organizes with the fcdl and macaz, served as my primary intellectual partner and teacher in many of these spaces. her work thereby informs my theoretical arguments and ethnographic observations throughout this article. during my research, i also studied romania’s socialist and postsocialist cybercultures, learning from and interviewing those involved in official state and underground computing worlds alike. while these flourished during and after socialism, they were rendered corrupt and “dark” by proponents of westernization post-1989—a common ascription of postsocialist eastern european culture, technological and otherwise (atanasoski & mcelroy, 2018; popovici, 2020b). here i weave these worlds together, studying their differences and historical contexts, as well as their entanglements. in this way, i take up alexei yurchak’s (2013) methodological practice of attending to retrospective accounts of socialism and transition, or accounts produced in their aftermaths. in particular, i focus upon how desires of both becoming and unbecoming siliconized render differential retrospective, and also at times, speculative, technocultural accounts. inspired by yurchak’s project, i am interested in the differences between state tech projects and those produced in “deterritorialized milieus” outside, yet in relationship to, those of the state (yurchak, 2013, p. 128). i am also invested in better understanding why visions of cyber deviancy remain a dream amongst speculative future makers. by neither taking “the west” nor the state as origin points in technocultural sociality, yet by tracing their role in siliconization, this research contributes to postsocialist studies and the anthropology of nonwestern technoculture. these contributions align with the ongoing political work of collectives such as macaz, committed to decolonizing western relationality and uncovering deviant relationships whitewashed in narratives of socialist and transitional corruption. indeed, as istoria (nu) se repetă workshop participants agreed, socialist and transitional romania did maintain a rich cyber culture—one often erased in normative computing narratives. during the 1970s and ’80s, the state cloned western licenses in order to produce unique romanian models such as the felix and cobra. meanwhile, underground, trained and untrained technologists, hackers, and playful youth alike cloned and produced their own unique computers and networks, a practice that continued and even flourished after socialism’s demise (fiscutean, 2018). throughout eastern europe, such practices bestowed new modes of piracy, play, sharing, and kinship (gutfrański, 2019; haigh, 2007; special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 5 imre, 2016; jakić, 2014; kind-kovács & labov, 2013; stachniak, 2015; švelch, 2018; wasiak, 2014). similar (yet also different) technological projects and imperatives can be seen throughout the globe, often having to do with entanglements of empire, the state, peripherality, making do, and subversion (chan, 2018; rai, 2019; rosas, 2010). this is not to fetishize all of these projects and practices as inherently deviant and decolonial, nor to suggest that deviancy de facto bears queer, antiracist, and/or decolonial ethos (coleman, 2017). rather, i suggest, they offer inspiration to those encumbered by the onslaught of siliconization. in the words of anita say chan, in the face of growing national and western-centered calls to technologically “ensure a reproduction of the familiar” (2018, p. 2), it is high time for decolonial approaches to computing. as she puts it, decolonial computing frameworks highlight another potential, not only in recognizing the diverse vibrancy of existing challenges to “digital universalist” models that problematically elevate narrow versions of western and elite digital practice and innovation as the only relevant pathway to the future, but in cultivating knowledge practices that indeed foster a decentering of the self as a generative asset towards the creative co-production of alternative futures. (chan, 2018, pp. 2–3) as chan, along with istoria (nu) se repetă participants, accord, there is value in imagining and materializing technofutures beyond reproduction of the familiar. today, while many former hackers recount their exploits as șmecher, proponents of siliconization frame socialist and transitional cloning practices as corrupt. conversely, workshop participants understand these corrupt technological pasts as rife with decolonial, queer possibility. in what follows, i trace these retrospective and speculative accounts, sifting through narratives of șmecherie, socialist-era computing, and postsocialist technoculture. these, while often not explicitly queer, do nevertheless pervert (and perhaps help decolonize) postsocialist siliconization through practices of cloning, play, and kinship. corruption today in and beyond romania, cyber deviancy often is rendered as antithetical to capitalist processes of postsocialist westernization. deviancy and șmecherie can be understood as thwarting assimilationist dreams of becoming “the silicon valley of eastern europe,” a toponymy that has grown over the last decade in part due to the high concentration of western outsourcing firms and fast internet. colossal glass it offices and co-working spaces gentrify romanian urban centers, where it is often difficult to see that today’s silicon infrastructure sits upon the ruins of socialist-era factories (mcelroy, 2019; vincze & zamfir, 2019). upon this landscape, socialist and transitional cyber deviancy is often framed as “corrupt” by those aspiring westernization. yet elided is that this deviancy in fact laid the special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 6 groundwork for the siliconized present. here i further explore corruption as a retrospective narrative form. corruption has been front and center as of late in romania, particularly in the anticorruption street protests interpellated as “the light revolution.” since 2017, these have risen to fame through demonstrators’ use of “light technology” in order to chastise government corruption. supported by big banks, tech firms, and neoliberal politicians, these protests purport that for romania to overcome the specters of socialism currently plaguing its social democratic ruling party (a neoliberal party painted as “still socialist” by its also neoliberal opponents), disavowal with the socialist past is requisite (atanasoski & mcelroy, 2018; deoancă, 2017; florea, 2015; popovici, 2020b). embracing siliconization is one way to do this, as embracing western europe had been before socialism (also a time of extreme fascism). it was then, in the pre-socialist interwar period, that bucharest had been rendered “little paris of the east” (perhaps a precursor to today’s little silicon valley). this aspirational fantasy, long familiar in postsocialist and postcolonial geographies alike, manifests in perpetual quests “become western” (amrute, 2016; bhabha, 1997; chakrabarty, 2008; irani, 2019; liu, 2019; rofel, 2007; yurchak, 2013). in postsocialist romania, this transpires in the streets, but also in technology itself. take the following scenario from black the fall, a bucharest-based, japanese-backed, game: everyone is watching. it’s dark—it’s always dark—and black is trying to escape unnoticed from the repressive regime that is socialist romania. black, a nuts and bolts factory worker, has to deceive guards, smuggle goods, and manipulate people—all without getting caught in the cold, industrial never-ending dystopia. black, a video game character in black the fall, has only one friend—an abandoned robot. on screen, black, a humanoid perhaps more machine than human himself, is hard to make out against rows of identical figures. these are either bicycling to power the machine that was state-socialism or listening to the censored radio free europe—a cold war us-backed media propaganda machine designed to instill anticommunist sentiment within the eastern bloc (petrovszky & țichindeleanu, 2011). as black sneaks past a sea of coffins arranged in a halfcollapsing building, an overseer blocks a forgotten room filled with old portraits, a vestige from the good old pre-socialist days when bucharest was the little paris of the east. to the game designers, writing code in the silicon valley of eastern europe, this aristocratic era is a fond historical memory, a time when kings still meant something—a time before socialism and its aftermaths corrupted promises of western enlightenment. in the game, even after “the wall” comes down in what is understood to be 1989, blackness persists. according to game creator, cristian diaconescu, this is due to the dark specters of corrupt socialism. thus, if one makes it to the game’s end, a photo of diaconescu’s design team at a light revolution protest appear, thereby disavowing the “illiberalism” of socialist technology and its corrupt aftermaths. special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 7 while corruption in computer programming and data storage refers to processes in which errors and malware alike compromise data integrity and lead to system crashes, in postsocialist siliconized contexts, socialism and its remnants are rendered as corrupt. in the game, black’s robot friend is coded as clumsy, tired, and dark, nothing like the siliconized clean, light technology of today. in this way, siliconization reproduces its future by straightening temporally corrupt cyberculture. shannon woodcock suggests, “just as the homosexual is born into his/her closet and needs to develop in order to ‘come out’ into the world of heterosexuals, the ‘post-socialist’ east exists in western capitalist discourse in order for europe to benevolently bestow recognition on its other” (2011, p. 66). this framework of recognition understands that to escape its socialist-era ghosts, eastern europe must become silicon valley. this can be seen in the co-optation and erasure of socialist and transitional technology, as well as in the anticorruption framing of socialist and transitional technoculture. for instance, in 2018, the romanian-german television series hackerville made headlines as hbo europe’s first co-international production. the series features a german romanian detective who returns to her romanian hometown of timișoara to track down a ring of dangerous cybercriminals. as is revealed, some of these “criminals” are just kids having fun and trying to make quick money, and some are part of a nefarious international network. created by ralph martin and jörg winger, the series also explores repressive socialist histories in romania. however, “hackerville” as a geographic descriptive generally refers not to timișoara, but rather to the smaller mountain city of râmnicu vâlcea, which in 2011, wired famously described as “cybercriminal central” (bhattacharjee, 2011). perhaps as a precursor to hbo’s hackerville, and perhaps inspired by the wired article, in 2015, the silicon valley cybersecurity firm norton security also made a film about dangerous romanian hackers. in it, they rendered râmnicu vâlcea as “the most dangerous town on the internet.” similar to hackerville, norton depicts romanian cybercriminals in socialist-era decrepit buildings, threatening to hack the entire planet. but unlike hbo’s series, norton’s video features actual hackers, many of whom have since been apprehended, some of whom were offered plea deals to work for cybersecurity firms. there is guccifer (who famously hacked hillary clinton, george w. bush, colin powell, and more), iceman (who hacked nasa), and tinkode (the most wanted hacker of 2012), along with anonymous scammers. these figures are juxtaposed by harrowing police narratives, the ramblings of a somber priest, and the authoritative voice of norton’s all-knowing head of security, kevin healy. as captions ominously warn in the beginning, “last year, over a billion dollars was stolen by romanian hackers. everyone knows what is happening, but omerta, the code of silence, is the norm” (dunn, 2015). as is inferred, the silicon valley special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 8 cybersecurity company is here to save innocent americans from the most dangerous town on the internet and its code of silence. in norton’s film, nicolae stănculescu, a râmnicu vâlcean former communist authority figure, attempts to contextualize the city’s proliferation of hackers. “the legacies of communism are complex,” he warns. “many of the burdens from that regime still dominate aspects of people’s lives. important changes took place, especially in the 1980s and 1990s when romania went crazy resulting in the creation of the so-called new human” (dunn, 2015). mădălin dumitru, a romanian it security specialist and founder of cyber smart defense, offers, “because under communism, we were quite limited. we didn’t have so many gadgets. we didn’t have so much access to technology. and since 1989, since the romanian revolution, romanians started to have access to this technology, and they started to develop more and more. they were hungry for it and for technology” (dunne, 2015). while these narratives do attempt to contextualize postsocialist-era hacking upon a socialist-era palimpsest, they, like western cold war narratives, reify socialism and the transitional period as technologically bleak and underdeveloped. such stories feed light revolution protests and siliconization processes, both of which hinge upon a retrospective anticommunist timeline. this timeline erases socialism by shuttling “the little paris of the east” into “the silicon valley of eastern europe”—both periods of western aspiration and mimicry. yet it was during socialism that mimicry was materially practiced in the realm of computer cloning. as i have found, many former hackers, scammers, and diy technologists alike recall these past exploits not as a means of “catching up,” but rather as practices of șmecherie. this is not to suggest that these hackers themselves identified as roma, but rather that they were enmeshed in the deviant and cunning worlds that șmecherie (as it has been popularized in romanian poor and working-class culture) gestures towards. while statesanctioned cloning can be linked to romania’s own desires to catch up and simultaneously feed the machinery of state surveillance (verdery, 2018), underground șmecher cloning, hacking, and cabling were rather implemented to instantiate kinship and connectivity amidst conditions of rampant austerity and disconnection. as istoria (nu) se repetă seeks to investigate, what would it mean to queer these anticorruption accounts, and also dream of futures past that could have kept post1989 siliconization at bay. by queering, and aligned with queer theory, this inquiry diverges from reading queerness as a simple identarian code or sexuality descriptive (barad, 2015), but rather as a field of inquiry and set of interpretative strategies to elucidate the relationality of socialist and transitional technoculture. this is in part what popovici gets at with her analytic of “queer as corrupt,” in which corruption inheres queerness within postsocialist contexts (2020b, p. 70). special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 9 regarding postsocialist cyberculture specifically, queering illuminates computational coding acts that transpired beyond, and in excess of, official state histories and cold war victory narratives alike (popa, 2018). in this way, queerness perverts imaginaries of a reified postsocialist, siliconized “common time” (starosta, 2014). as neda atanasoski and kalindi vora put it, “postsocialism marks a queer temporality, one that does not reproduce its social order even as its revolutionary antithesis” (2018, p. 141). queer, corrupt, and șmecher practices of speculation thus facilitate anticapitalist, decolonial future-making despite the onslaught of siliconization. while such speculative and retrospective narratives of cyberculture are important in understanding postsocialist contradictions, also significant are accounts of those who engaged in these practices. in going on to explore these, i continue to think with and through queer, speculative analytics. these, i find, pair well with retrospective accounting practices of official and underground șmecher cloning worlds. many of such accounts, while not explicitly queer, do nevertheless queer siliconization by disrupting notions that contemporary cyberworlds in postsocialist romania are simply a result of the west alone. as work by media scholars such as tung-hui hu (2015) and shannon mattern (2017) have well illustrated, across the globe, present-day infrastructures often build upon those of prior eras. the novelty of the most recent wave of technological development is thus simply a silicon fantasy. applying this to romania, it becomes clear that neither postsocialist șmecherie nor siliconization are unfolding upon a tabula rasa. this is why it is crucial to look outside of siliconized narratives. in other words, postsocialist technoculture hasn’t just become the property of silicon valley and its anticorruption narratives; there are other stories circulating in and out of transitional materiality and fantasies. state cloning technological development was a crucial part of the state socialist project in romania, as it was in other eastern bloc nations. the figure of the engineer itself was understood as a cyborg of sorts, intended to propel the country into socialist modernity, while socialist projects of electrification and industrialization spread regionally. these projects did not inhere assimilatory drives into liberal democracy, but rather the sustenance of a dialectical post-enlightenment future, one premised upon industrialization, urbanization, and centralization (buckmorss, 2002; collier, 2011). people were moved into cities undergoing rapid development, while dormitories were built around new factories to house workers—the cyborgs of socialist futurity. here i briefly map this landscape so that i can later chart what transpired below its surface. technological growth in socialist romania in part developed due to the country’s maverick status with both the west and the soviet union. romania had refused to special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 10 fully align with the socialist economic bloc, comecon, which had stipulated that each nation have economic specialties, and that romania’s would be agriculture (mureșan, 2008). but with futurist visions of technological growth and collectivization as precondition for industrialization, romania, rather than exist only as food supplier, wanted to develop technology. scientists at the atomic physics institute built romania’s first computer in 1957, cifa-1, making romania the eleventh country to manufacture a computer. after cifa-1, an array of models erupted, from marica, dacicc, and cet in cluj to mecipt in timişoara. these early machines were made to further scientific inquiry and to advance technourban centralization, for instance the optimizing of sugar beet harvesting and public transportation timetables (popoviciu, 1969). over twenty-five official computer models were crafted during socialism, many of which were exported to the people’s republic of china, the czechoslovak socialist republic, the german democratic republic, the polish people’s republic, syria, egypt, and iran (baltac, 2015). having spoken with computer scientists involved in these early endeavors, nostalgia and wistfulness characterize their memories, as does a form of paternalism for having been the first or best at this or that. vasile baltac, one of the early makers of the micept models, today is a professor at bucharest’s national school of political science and public administration, and the ceo/cofounder of software companies softnet.ro and novatech. these are headquartered in the same building on floreasca boulevard that centralized national computer research during socialism. in winter of 2017, he met with me there, eager to share photographs of times past, when he and his colleagues led some of the country’s most valorized technological missions. unlike software company headquarters in silicon valley, the building is old and cracked, worn but filled with technological futures past, entangled in concrete and cables. it was in 1967, baltac recounted, that the government launched a program to promote computational industrial development and to introduce computers into the national economy. although third-generation computers were imported from the west, romania successfully produced and exported its own by cloning western models. france offered romania the license for iris-50 medium-sized computers, which baltac and his team transformed into the felix c-256. an entire felix family was cloned, with over 650 mainframes and many hcs (home computers) such as prae and cobra. while the communist leader nicolae ceauşescu determined hcs to contravene party ideology for being too consumerist, their manufacturing continued regardless, beyond his purview (kovacs, 1991). industrial robots too threatened ceauşescu, who worried that they would replace the working-class labor force. while the word “robot” was banished from the press, robotics research continued, supported by local authorities who decided to turn their heads (kovacs, 1991). these researchers were just some of many dissident forces in the underground of a maverick state. yet this is not the special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 11 sort of dissidence that istoria (nu) se repetă imagined nourishing a queer, decolonial technofuture. of more interest are the histories that took place further underground, and those that still might come to be. socialist șmecherie donna haraway suggests, “the main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. but illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. their fathers, after all, are inessential” (1987, p. 4). in other words, cyborgs bear lives that have little to do with their makers’ intentions. if we read computers and computer makers as cyborgs of the socialist period, it becomes clear that some of the most interesting cyborgian practices transpired beyond the pale of the state. it is this that i continue to explore here. tibi, who now lives in the us, where he works in a software company, grew up in bucharest in the 1980s, where he learned programming from his cloned spectrum. the zx spectrum was built in britain in 1982, and soon copied and produced throughout eastern europe, he explained to me one morning over a skype call when i was living in bucharest, and he in the us. the 8-bit hc ran a basic interpreter, making it relatively easy to use as long as you had a tv set and an audiocassette for external program memory, he recalled. “if you pressed ‘i’ it would be ‘if,’ ‘e’ it would be ‘else,’ so you could type basic pretty quickly.” most people that he knew with computers in the 1980s had spectrum clones, he grinned. although the party cloned the spectrum to create the cobra, these were enormously expensive and difficult to obtain, inspiring the proliferation of underground diy hardware assemblage. while tibi doesn’t remember where his family bought their computer, he does recall it being an unusual purchase. in the 1980s, cobras cost 35,000 lei, about half the price of a dacia car.5 black market clones were much cheaper (and therefore more popular), sometimes going for 12,000 lei. that said, clones were still five to six times the cost of the average romanian salary at the time (fiscutean, 2017). tibi recounts having to buy russian audiocassette tapes so that he could store information and load programs on his computer, since it, like its contemporaries, lacked storage. underground markets emerged, with people trading cassettes and parts. rather than playing games like his peers, tibi used these to learn software and programming. “i remember that at one point i was using my computer to read a very precise scale that was measuring the input of a drop of water to show how it evaporates—even with 32k of memory,” he reminisced. tibi joined his high school’s computer club, unofficially organized by two professors who were into computers. there was one computer class taught in his school, but it was very simple, based on fortran, a fast and efficient computer language developed by ibm in the 1950s. “you can still see traces of the past today,” he special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 12 explained, referencing how fortran and basic are still used. specters from spectrum times. bogdan, a retro-computing expert, is trying to archive these spectrum times by creating a computer museum in cluj. one rainy afternoon, we sat down in an old bar and he told me about how every thursday midnight during socialism, the party-sanctioned tv station would pause broadcasting normal programming to instead emit an hour of code. it sounded like a fax machine, he described, mimicking its mechanical buzz. bogdan’s brother would fight the family for use of the television during this time, so that he could record the code on one of his floppy disks plugged into his cloned computer. he would then spend the week decoding it. “it wasn’t some fancy key to some government secret—nothing like that. sometimes it was just information about the airport, sometimes an announcement from a big shop, sometimes games and free software. this how we began to learn basic programming,” he smiled. his friends would come over to play the games, resulting in ten adolescents hovering around one computer. this sort of techno community became prolific amongst youth of late socialist period. bucharest’s polytechnic university became a hotbed of cloning, with students engendering all sorts of deviant computer practices, sometimes creating entire supply chains. as andrada fiscutean (2018) has well documented, sometimes parts were scrapped from other computers; sometimes they were flown in with the help of airline pilots. dealers would come to campus with electronics, parts, leds, and resistors, selling them at bulk to the students. often, they would meet at a nearby campus pub. there was even this guy they called “the american” who sold transistors right in front of legitimate electronics stores, somehow getting away with it. soon, everyone at the university had these șmecherie homemade machines, each made with about two thousand solder joints and a sea of wires. about 90 percent of the romanian computer industry was built on reverse engineering in the 1980s, i’ve often been told. no two machines were ever the same. even their cases varied, depending upon what was available underground. the keyboards contained keys polished one at a time with a nail file, upon which professional-looking paper letters and numbers were glued, thanks to a friend’s paper business. the purpose was to learn and to have fun, never to engage in corporate profiteering. might these cloned computers—derived from smuggled and stolen parts alike— queer anticommunist narratives of socialist tech as simply poor, benign accomplices to black the fall dystopics? this spectrum hybrid, a perversion to the west, was not produced by the west, nor by the socialist state. its past is muddled and unattached to pure origin tales. its materiality depended upon illicit connections, disassembled motherboards, and forbidden border crossings— objects and events that istoria (nu) se repetă participants imagine could have led to futures beyond siliconization. special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 13 transition sitting around the table at the macaz cooperative, across from a list of antiracist, anticapitalist, and feminist ethics painted on the wall, istoria (nu) se repetă participants began recounting stories of 1990s technoculture and its various perversities. what if these could have somehow staved off the dawn of post-1989 technocapitalism? “no, it would have been impossible to fight back,” another ventured. “the west and its technologies were too powerful.” with that, one workshop participant began detailing how much she remembers transition itself being informed by technology, particularly media. not only was the 1989 revolution itself the first revolution televised, but the broadcasting of the event was staged by the west to justify western intervention (petrovskzy & țichindeleanu, 2011). but on top of that, she recalls, “people just started watching tv. western tv. or romanian tv modeled on western programming. but either way, tv was the truth teller.” here i continue to explore the complex and often perverse relationship with the west that romanian technoculture found itself in during transition. as another friend recounted, during the 1990s when she was just a child, she would sit around with her parents and watch six hours a day of mtv. because television programs were undubbed, and because people were fascinated with the new world that had just opened up to them, viewers learned english quickly, and also spanish due to the abundance of telenovelas. even though mtv has since “gone to shit,” her mother, now in her sixties, still watches it daily, and has a television in every room of her home. at the same time, her father became obsessed with bootlegging, and so their family would go to the flea market each weekend to buy black market cds. later, during the 2000s, her father would pirate movies from torrent sites, which he would burn to dvds and arrange by geography in his home library. through pirating, bootlegging, and television, the post–cold war spectral encounter between the east and the west became an asymmetrical geographic interplay. mckenzie wark observes, “the territory of the east was maintained as an image of the other within the map of the west; the map of the west was the other put into covert circulation in the territory of the east” (1994, p. 65). and yet, the circulation of the west in the east produced complex frictions and effects. english proficiency, along with the abundance of socialist-trained informatics workers, became an inspiration for western firms looking to launch a new eastern european outsourcing market post-1989. this offered opportunities to some, but most people i’ve spoken with recount having lost, rather than gained, employment in the 1990s. or they somehow pieced together an array of undignified gigs. in 1988 computer production was valued at 10 billion lei, but in 1991 it sunk to 3 billion, with hardware production ceasing (docaș, 2015). florin, founder of an it company, recounts the number of it workers dropping rapidly, special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 14 and a canadian firm extracting a whole team of two hundred people. as factories crumbled, malls appeared. as small markets vanished, mega image and carrefour hypermarkets manifested from western europe. casinos and gambling venues too erupted in the 1990s, in chain venues such as maxbet. between 2003 and 2014 the number of slot machines quadrupled in romania, reaching 62,000 (meseșan, 2016). today these are filled with working-class gamblers trying to win at a capitalist game rigged against them (verdery, 1995)—something that istoria (nu) se repetă also reimagines another future of. cristian, a fellow istoria (nu) se repetă participant, works for a multinational in sema park adjacent to the polytechnic university. one cold winter day he met me there to show me around. as we began walking by teams of tech employees with badges hanging from lanyards worn around their necks waiting in queues for food trucks, cristian began recounting his own history there. his father had been a cyberneticist, having studied at the university in the 1980s. but his father’s position was made obsolete when western firms swept in after 1989, so he resorted to driving taxis and working odd jobs throughout cristian’s childhood. after high school, cristian was able to study economics in the uk. he then managed get a job for hewlett packard in romania in the 2010s. now he does technical writing for a different firm in sema park. during socialism, sema park had been an agricultural industrial center. but today it lives as a jumble of high-tech glass towers and old socialist-era warehouses. there are still canteens that serve the same traditional romanian food that they served to socialist agricultural workers, but now they’ve rebranded their exteriors with brick and glass, having changed their names to hipster-sounding titles, like “cactus.” “they’re just doing what they have to keep up,” cristian tells me, pointing out a large empty lot that reminds him of the spaciousness and heavy industrial ruins of the 1990s. “this is what everything was like in the ’90s—i miss it.” he used to come here in high school to go clubbing, back when it was cheap. there are also new food trucks that have come in, mostly selling burgers and coffee, and a fancy café inside the glass building where he works that oddly resembles a tropical botanical garden. there’s also a sports center and bowling alley, idm, with a logo mimicking ibm’s. but it’s been there for a while, and, having bowled there myself, i can attest that is far from bourgeois inside. across the city from idm is pipera, the neighborhood of socialist-era computing and felix manufacturing. after 1989 felix found itself in a messy relationship with the actual ibm, the former suddenly supposed to produce hardware for the latter. and yet ibm’s strategy failed, at least at first, as they had to compete with a new underground market in which romanians would assemble their own computers with uncertified it parts from hong kong to taiwan in small garages. on our skype call, tibi recalled, “in the early 1990s, i was interested in building my own pc. if you wanted to do an upgrade with some parts, it was cheaper to build special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 15 your own. i was building for a couple of friends, even my brother.” as in other peripheral locales, underground technocultures and practices sprung up just to make do with what was available. in doing so, new forms of kinship, connection, and șmecherie were engendered. tibi also remembered one of the first commercials to be released on romanian television after 1989. it was a felix computer commercial with a slogan went viral: “v-am prins, vrăjitoarelor!” (i caught you, witches!). “it was everywhere,” he remembers, “everyone knew it.” but what might it actually mean? today, people have different interpretations of the satiric commercial, which featured a man walking into a cave filled with witches preparing some potion for him. were the witches felix makers crafting socialist-era machines now liberated by capitalism, or were they americans now trapping corrupt romanian computer-makers with their end-of-history alchemy? then again, as witches are gendered and racialized in popular imaginaries in romania (often invoking anti-roma racism), might the commercial be conflating socialism with roma people? if so, the advert renders felix on a new western journey away from its corrupt past. but then again, perhaps the commercial acted as a prescient satire from the future, aware that that despite the west’s bests efforts, romanian computer perversion would continue to flourish—though maybe in internet cafés and computer labs instead of caves. postsocialist șmecherie indeed, despite the best spells cast by capitalism, the specters of the spectrum clone found their way into postsocialist times. as i continue to explore, this endurance, bypassed in siliconized narrative structures, continues to bolster, touch, and pervert the present. while ibm was wreaking havoc in felix worlds, tibi and others continued to produce machines underground. meanwhile, an array of computer magazines began circulating, saturated with computer construction manuals, software installation guidelines, code, and instructions in how to set up satellites and lan networks. from backtracking methods to articles on virtual reality, techno-skepticism, and the phenomena of the hacker, magazines such as open tehnologia informației and pc world romania blossomed in the 1990s. alexandra, a queer programmer who now works for a french tech firm in bucharest, remembers learning to build computers from reading the magazine extreme pc. it got big in the 2000s, replete with online chatrooms and support. she learned how to code in school during a weekly class and in online chatrooms, some of which are still active today. meanwhile, apartments began setting up “decoders” to steal hbo, otherwise not available. “it was this funny little device that we all had on the back of our televisions,” she recounted as we took a walk through an overgrown park on the outskirts of the city one blistering summer special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 16 afternoon. if it broke, everyone knew someone who would come and set up another, she smiled in remembrance. in 2014 romania’s piracy rate was twice that of the eu at 60 percent, but in 1996 it was as high at 86 percent (fiscutean, 2014). at the time, there was little legislation protecting intellectual property, and the software market developed accordingly. ms-dos was the first pirated operating system in the 1990s, and then os/2, and later windows, via russia. at first, pirated software was largely not sold for profit, and rather was understood as educational material, building collective knowledge about coding, algorithms, and open source products. vlad, a queer performer from râmnicu vâlcea, remembers that it was then that a zillion internet cafés sprung up overnight. “it was hard to get into them because they were so crowded,” he recalls. one of his neighbors invented a vpn to mask ip addresses, and soon everyone started paying him for vpns so that they could hack from home. vlad remembers that often people would make money fast from some internet hack and then use the money to pay for personal manele (roma popular music) concerts. these networks were soon strung throughout cities on telephone poles, building the backbones of what is now europe’s fastest internet connection. this wasn’t the experimental project of state socialism intended to improve central planning and economics; it was more an organic decentralized network intended to connect and share information, music, movies, tools, games, and software amongst neighbors. because internet dial-up packages were expensive, and because of the intense poverty incited by transition, generally, one person would buy internet and then share or sell it to people in their building, wiring cables haphazardly. as people had already been pirating and sharing satellite stations, and as the magazines and chatrooms taught wiring techniques, stringing cables across apartments and blocks of flats “was really no big deal,” i’ve been told. today still, telephone poles, from cluj to bucharest, are adorned in a massive array of cables from the early 2000s era, some still working, some just there on because they are too woven in to detach. the first time i pointed these out to a friend visiting from the us, she asked if it was an art installation. and yet, as people are always quick to remind me, the cabling today is nothing compared to the early 2000s, when it became commonplace for telephone poles to crash with the weight of the cables, sometimes smashing cars parked beneath. bogdan set up a similar network in cluj, connecting twenty-four people in his block. it was 2004, and he had no internet cable, but somehow managed to use tv cable. “we all had intel 486 computers then, the new generation,” he told me. they had sixteen kilobytes, used routers, and it took five minutes to transfer a picture. you could never shut down your computer once it was connected because you didn’t want to be bumped off. setting up this network was just one of his many diy computer projects of the era. for him, it all began in grade school when special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 17 he would cut class and hide in the attic. there, he discovered an old broken mii8b computer from the 1970s. curious, he came back the next day with a screwdriver. it was the late 1990s, and there was no google or yahoo to tell him how to fix it. but there were smoky internet cafés where he could ask questions. so, he began. two years later, he won a math competition and was awarded an old intel 486 computer that the national television station was discarding. eventually, he saved up money from his job at the local newspaper to buy the parts to make it work and to install windows. hardware became cheaper after 2002, he remembers, and it became easier to pirate the operating system. soon after, he began to visit the oser flea market every weekend to pick up older broken models. before long, his entire room was crammed with computers. it was then that he began to build his neighborhood network, eager to share and pirate new software for his growing collection. but then, in 2010, the internet monolith romania data systems (rds) came in, promising better and faster services, fiber optics even. threatened by independent networks, they would sometimes threaten building administrators, citing technical illegalities about the size or length of the wire. sometimes they just cut cables. “everything went to hell.” eventually, bogdan’s network came down, but still, there remains one stubborn cable. “no one says anything about it—i think people think it’s part of a spy network!” he laughs. today, bogdan maintains a day job with amazon, but spends most of his time finding discarded and broken computers, cleaning and repairing them, turning them into specters of their former selves. postsocialist computer cloners, neighborhood network builders, and retrocomputing experts alike touch upon what bogdan describes as the “x86 generation”—a reference to intel’s microprocessor and the generation wedged between gen x and millennials. this generation was born predigital, but also created the context for the digital. bogdan argues that it is this generation who created the complex, entangled, and often contradictory romanian technoscapes today preyed upon by silicon valley. “unlike what everyone thinks, it’s not silicon valley leading the tech wave—it’s these people,” he told me firmly. the west may absorb existent infrastructure, computer factories, wires, and more. but it wasn’t silicon valley that created these materialities. thus, while siliconization co-opts underground cyberworlds, it remains materially corrupted by, and dependent upon, their existence. florentin, a member of the independent free and open source software and hardware project ceata, also remembers rds sweeping in. his own father worked at the state-owned romtelecom (now telecom and connected to t-mobile). romtelecom, along with c-zone, was bought up by rds, he remembers. meanwhile, upc, another large corporation, bought up the smaller firm, astrid. florentin got his first computer in 2000 before this consolidation, but he never got special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 18 to use an independent network because he couldn’t find one in his bucharest neighborhood, drumul taberei. “maybe because everyone there was old,” he questioned. there was a really cool network in crângași where people battled for its control. florentin wanted to set one up too, but he had no money to buy cables. his father had some extra telephone wires, so he tried to stretch them and use them in a ramshackle way, but it never worked. he recollects how slow the dial-up was in his block between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., as this was when all the downloading and uploading would begin. he had wanted to start assembling computers independent from microsoft operating systems, but to download other operating systems, you needed a fast connection. microsoft had also set up an automatic update on his computer preventing him from downloading what he wanted. maybe it was this that got florentin thinking about the importance of moving away from silicon valley and private software. perhaps it was this that led him to ceata. “the only way that you can maintain security is to have the right hardware,” he explained. today, florentin creates new machines from spare parts, much like he and others did a decade earlier. his goal is to ensure that his computers aren’t hacked by silicon valley–driven data capitalism and spying. he and others from ceata frequently visit other free software communities from across the globe, determined to string together a network of practitioners and users free from the corporate reigns of siliconization. back in romania, ceata has even made its way to macaz, eager to help the co-operative’s organizers implement safer practices. yet back in post–cold war silicon valley, fears of “dangerous” and “illiberal” eastern european hackers accumulate. this imaginary often becomes internalized in romania, reflective in black the fall imagery and light revolution protests alike. nevertheless, technocultural deviancy persists, building upon histories of informal infrastructure and subversive relationality. space invaders in the spring of 2018, during a light revolution protest (and also a far-right homophobic “normality” demonstration), a third march crawled through bucharest’s streets. for the first time, the annual lbgtq pride parade was granted access to march through bucharest’s city center, rather than being confined to urban outskirts. also, for the second year in a row, ibm, google, and accenture pinkwashed the event (popovici, 2020b), not dissimilar to pride parades in california’s silicon valley (stanley, 2018). however, this year, a small group of anticapitalist protestors, many of whom were istoria (nu) se repetă participants (but also part of a broader wave of anticapitalist queers espousing anarchist, feminist, antiracist, and antifascist politics), were prepared. we came equipped with large banners against pinkwashing, racial capitalism, and fascism. “fuck off google” stickers were brought from a solidarity action in berlin, where at the time, google was attempting to establish a campus. activists replicated the special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 19 messaging during the cluj pride that took place a week later, along with a “lgbt and space invaders against gentrification” sign. referencing the 1978 cold war video game, the sign overtly corrupted the cold war 2.0 to reclaim robotic space invaders. unsurprisingly, liberal technocapitalists chastised the queer dissidents in both cities, reminding us that romania was now finally free from socialism. how dare we corrupt that! as popovici recounts of the tensions, if progress can only be achieved through neoliberal complicity, “an anti-capitalist position associated with queer and feminist positions becomes incompatible with the desired future of a western becoming” (2020b, p. 56). when a photo of one of the antipinkwashing banners began circling in a forum monitored by accept, rather than defend it, the organization just deleted the image. it was “too far of a step to take, the anti-google stuff,” someone later explained. this, of course, is a far step away from the speculative future woven by istoria (nu) se repetă participants, who imagined how accept and romani criss worked together to corrupt siliconization. had ceata and others of the x86 generation been committed to queer, decolonial future-making in the 1990s, perhaps a free school replete with hacking classes would have been created. in this speculative future, șmecher practices might have been able to queer early siliconization and instantiate antiracist, anticapitalist cyberworlds. instead, șmecher hacking practices were quite distinct from 1990s accept and romani criss worlds. nevertheless, șmecher practices did indeed subvert and devalue siliconization imperatives. perhaps it is this devaluation that istoria (nu) se repetă find hopeful in their speculative accounting. as robin d. g. kelly (1996) has insisted, reserving the category of resistance for activists belittles everyday forms of resistance and subversion. writing of such everyday practices, he suggests, if we are to make meaning of these kinds of actions rather than dismiss them as manifestations of immaturity, false consciousness, or primitive rebellion, we must begin to dig beneath the surface of trade union pronouncements, political institutions, and organized social movements, deep into the daily lives, cultures, and communities which make the working classes so much more than people who work. (kelly, 1996, pp. 3–4) along these lines, saba mahmood suggests that “the category of resistance impose[s] a teleology of progressive politics that makes it hard for us to see and understand forms of being and action that are not necessarily encapsulated by the narrative of subversion and the re-inscription of norms” (2011, p. 9). thus, queer and decolonial speculative accounts understand that șmecherie, despite its lack of overt politics, subverts siliconization beyond normative special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 20 resistance frameworks. rather than cloning liberal platforms of recognition, șmecherie exists in excess of such framing. it is this that perhaps istoria (nu) se repetă participants, along with popovici and nicolae, find hopeful in their dreaming of technofutures to come. josé esteban muñoz writes, to want something else, to want beside and beyond the matrix of social controls that is our life in late capitalism, is to participate in this other form of desiring. thus, the connection between queerness and utopia is most salient at this precise point—the desire for a new world despite an emotional/world situation that attempts to render such desiring impossible. (2009, p. 278) queerness, as both perversion to capitalism and desire for something else, is not simply recasting socialist nostalgia, nor reproducing liberal imaginaries. unattached to origin stories and to becoming silicon valley, queering here commits to speculating upon other cyberworlds and friendships in order to code something new. acknowledgements this article is dedicated to everyone i have learned from and organized with in romania, particularly those in macaz and the fcdl, and to istoria (nu) se repetă co-creator, mircea nicolae, who sadly passed away during the course of my writing of this article. in particular, i am indebted to veda popovici, whose generosity in sharing knowledge, stories, and analysis is far too great to describe here. i also thank those who offered me feedback on this piece at various stages of its writing, including neda atanasoski, lisa rofel, karen barad, megan moodie, liviu chelcea, bogdan popa, sareeta amrute, luis felipe r. murillo, veda popovici, and the generous anonymous reviewers. notes 1 the mineriads were a series of miner-led altercations that took place in romania following the collapse of state socialism. 2 postsocialist transition has led to the disproportionate evictions of roma residents in romania (popovici, 2020a; vincze & zamfir, 2019). roma are romania’s most racialized minority, having been subjugated to slavery, failed reparations, eugenic technoscience, nationalism, and fascism—all setting the stage for contemporary dispossession (lancione, 2019; mcelroy, 2019). 3 șmecherie is used by roma and non-roma romanians alike due the prevalence of roma culture in poor and working-class spaces. as a word, it is significant in roma and romanian culture, without an exact english equivalent. special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 21 4 the fcdl is an antiracist, feminist, and anticapitalist grassroots organization that fosters solidarity and builds community to resist gentrification (popovici, 2020a). 5 the dacia automobile manufacturer was famously founded in romania in 1966, and then purchased by the french renault group in 1999.<author: see end of document. designers: to be formatted and moved here.> references amrute, s. 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(2019). introduction: the speed of guccifer. obieg. https://obieg.uhttps://www.zdnet.com/article/the-mix-of-poverty-and-piracy-that-turned-romania-into-europes-software-development-powerhouse https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-mix-of-poverty-and-piracy-that-turned-romania-into-europes-software-development-powerhouse https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/the-underground-story-of-cobra-the-1980s-illicit-handmade-computer/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/the-underground-story-of-cobra-the-1980s-illicit-handmade-computer/ special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 23 jazdowski.pl/en/numery/the-speed-of-guccifer/introduction-the-speed-of-guccifer haigh, m. (2007). downloading communism: file sharing as samizdat in ukraine. libri, 57(3), 165–178. haraway, d. (1987). a manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. australian feminist studies, 2(4), 1–42. hartman, s. 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(1994). virtual geography: living with global media events. indiana university press. wasiak, p. (2014). playing and copying: social practices of home computer users in poland during the 1980s. in g. alberts & r. oldenziel (eds.), hacking europe (pp. 129– 150). springer. woodcock, s. (2011). a short history of the queer time of “post-socialist” romania, or are we there yet? let’s ask madonna. in r. kulpa & j. mizielinska (eds.), de-centring western sexualities: central and eastern european perspectives (pp. 63–83). routledge. yurchak, a. (2013). everything was forever, until it was no more: the last soviet generation. princeton university press. author bio erin mcelroy is a postdoctoral researcher at new york university’s ai now institute, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2019.1684078 special section: computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) erin mcelroy, 2020 26 and is co-founder of the anti-eviction mapping project and the radical housing journal. erin earned a doctoral degree in feminist studies from the university of california, santa cruz, with a focus on the politics of space, race, and technology in romania and silicon valley. microsoft word 76945-1-11-20190201__earle.doc earle, j. (2019). imagining otherwise: the importance of speculative fiction to new social justice imaginaries. review of bodyminds reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in black women’s speculative fiction, by sami schalk (duke university press, 2018) and migrant futures: decolonizing speculation in financial times, by aimee bahng (duke university press, 2017). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5 (1), 1-7. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © joshua earle, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license review imagining otherwise: the importance of speculative fiction to new social justice imaginaries bodyminds reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in black women’s speculative fiction, by sami schalk (duke university press, 2018) and migrant futures: decolonizing speculation in financial times, by aimee bahng (duke university press, 2017) joshua earle virginia tech jearle@vt.edu sami schalk begins her new book bodyminds reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in black women's speculative fiction (2018) with a confession. she admits that she was not always a fan of speculative fiction due to the “geeky male whiteness of the genre” (p. 1). and while earle catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 speculative fiction continues to be predominantly white and male, schalk shows us how diversification of the medium is, in fact, happening. she also helps us as readers understand, through speculative fiction, the various intersectional oppressions that (dis)abled women of color (and others) navigate in their non-speculative, everyday lived experience. schalk begins by examining octavia butler's novel kindred (1979). according to schalk, kindred illustrates that disability is not merely a metaphor for blackness or slavery, but must also be taken as the literal, embodied reality of enslaved people. in the opening of kindred, we learn that the protagonist has lost her arm in mysterious circumstances. the specter of eventual disability forces the reader to “anticipate and expect that disablement could occur at any moment in the text, an experience that psychologically gestures toward the vulnerability of slaves to disability at any moment as well” (p. 50). the ways in which disability affects slaves’ productivity in the slave economy becomes a literal and metaphorical mirror for how disability affects us all in our own society. schalk returns to butler's work in chapter 3, examining the earthseed series (parable of the sower (1993) and parable of the talents (1998)). the earthseed series, schalk suggests, illustrates how disability cannot be understood as either a purely negative experience, nor as merely a gateway to superpowers. while scholarly discussion of the earthseed series has landed in both of those camps, schalk insists that butler's work itself does not. the parallels between how scholars have treated the earthseed series and how scholars, and the public, tend to treat disability here in the real world are the explicit target of schalk's critiques in this chapter. through the lens of phyllis alessia perry’s (1998) novel stigmata, schalk illustrates how race, gender, and disability conflate to produce certain types of mental illness and (dis)ability (while acknowledging the inseparability of disabilities of the mind and body, represented by her use of the term “bodymind”), and how the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry earle catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 works to reinforce and control that production. by evoking the ways in which people have been deemed mentally unfit, disabled, or feebleminded throughout history, particularly in the eugenic era in the first half of the twentieth century, stigmata illustrates the particularly racialized and gendered ways in which we as a society see mental disability. in her penultimate chapter, schalk makes a subtle but significant shift in how she describes the defamiliarizing work of speculative fiction. here, schalk takes on realist (dis)abilities (such as blindness or obsessive compulsive disorder) in non-realist settings or with non-human bodyminds. in doing so, schalk illustrates how (dis)abilities that we think we know and understand can be complicated by changing the contexts in which those (dis)abilities function on an individual and cultural level. the blind character, oree, from n.k jemisin’s the broken kingdoms (2010), who can “see” magic due to her demon heritage, is disabled in non-magical places but functionally non-disabled in magic-rich settings (pp. 119-120). oree's dual status challenges the notion of the (dis)abled as un-able in all contexts, but also avoids the notion of the “supercrip,” both tropes that are often deployed in both speculative and realist settings. throughout bodyminds reimagined, schalk continues to show us that it is possible to imagine ourselves differently. it is incumbent upon us as readers, citizens, and authors to do so more often, in more ways, and including more kinds of people. only through different imaginings will the world's oppressive structures shift. bodyminds reimagined is an important work on theorizing speculative fiction and the ways in which it can change perceptions, actions, and minds. a model for future intersectional scholarship, this book is well written and accessible. in her 2018 migrant futures: decolonizing speculation in financial times, aimee bahng also uses speculative fiction to disrupt expectations. bahng notes how pervasive financial speculation has become in our society, and how risk and return, capital and colonialism, have been used on and against migrant and diasporic populations. bahng uses speculative earle catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 fiction by people of color, particularly asian americans, to show us different ways to imagine and bring forth alternative, and perhaps more just, futures. bahng centers each chapter around a theme or location, draws out some standard narratives, which she then complicates through several examples of speculative fiction. this book is significantly less accessible than schalk's. the connections between real-life examples and speculative fiction reimaginings/queerings are less obvious, the relevance of finance in particular seems to wax and wane throughout the book. the writing is sometimes weighed down by jargon and the difficulties of wrangling a multitude of ephemerally-connected threads into a coherent whole. the introductory chapter does not provide a useful overview of the structure of the book. gradually, however, it becomes clear that this omission is intentional, as i realized once i was a few chapters into the book, into the cases and comparisons. only then did i begin to understand what bahng was doing. the ideas in this book are big, novel, and fantastic. but more than that, the structure itself is an act of academic decolonization and speculation. perhaps it was merely my own failure, based on my expectations of scholarly work, that i had trouble in the beginning. as i continued, i began to realize that this book does not just illustrate how speculative fiction can disrupt our western linear, capitalist, colonialist expectations. just as karen tei yamashita (author of tropic of orange, [2017]), in bahng’s words, “puns on the narrative ‘plot’ lines that follow unidirectional, linear trajectories to suggest progress and development” (p. 66), bahng herself disrupts this same expectation. bahng does, in this scholarly work, to scholarly work what she describes speculative fiction doing to speculative finance, capitalism, and various colonialisms, including neoand post-. it is a profound experiment in narrative scholarship, and a bit of clunkiness is probably expected. earle catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) because of the complexities of her arguments, i will focus on one chapter as illustrative of the book. in chapter 3, “speculation and the speculum,” bahng delves into reproduction, and particularly the notion of surrogacy, as a racialized and colonialist practice. she begins by comparing a pair of real-life stories: the 2008 new york times magazine story about (and authored by) alex kuczynski, titled “her body, my baby: my adventures with a surrogate mom,” and the discourse that article inspired; and the story of nadya suleman, commonly referred to as “octomom,” and the ways in which the discourse around her story changed over time. bahng puts these real-life stories in conversation with alfonso cuarón’s 2006 film children of men, and nalo hopkinson’s 2000 novel midnight robber. kuczynski’s tale is rife with markers of class and the colonial offloading of labor onto women of color, particularly migrants. the photos in kuczynski’s own story show her, a white woman, holding a blue-eyed white baby, while their nanny, a woman of color, looks on. kuczynski also talks about being able to go on a few last-minute trips (white-water rafting, skiing, drinking bourbon, and going to the super bowl [p. 79]) before her surrogate finally delivered. these circumstances, detailed in kuczynski's own writing, illustrate the ways in which finance allows one the benefits of motherhood while avoiding the labor/responsibility.1 this is the case both in gestating the child, which was done by her surrogate, and in caring for him as well, which will be done in large part by a nanny. this allocation of labor allows kuczynski the privilege of maintaining the globetrotting life to which she has grown accustomed. alternatively, suleman’s story began as a tale of scientific wonder of in vitro fertilization, but as her financial situation became more widely known, racial, class, and immigrant narratives took over in popular discourse. suleman became the poster child for the racialized “welfare queen,” leeching off the system, producing more offspring than she could possibly care for on her own—a distinct nono in our neoliberal capitalist system. earle catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) bahng then contrasts suleman, kuczynski, and children of men with hopkinson's novel midnight robber, which queers futurity, both the teleological discourses around technological progress, and the oppressive structures that are upheld by western, white technological and social norms. hopkinson, bangh argues, queers these narratives through “crossspecies partnering and queer family formation…[and] migrant communities…dislodged from heteronormative domesticity” (pp. 82-83). and through these queerings, hopkinson disentangles technology from the western cultural codes of progress, freedom, and modernity (p. 83), instead valorizing migrancy and social coalitions that are situated in new, local, and contingent ways. both schalk’s bodyminds reimagined and bahng’s migrant futures are fascinating, important, and exciting. i recommend these books for any scholars who want to use race, gender, (dis)ability, or migrant issues in their work, and especially for those who are interested in how fictional imaginaries might be used to investigate real-world issues. i am super excited to see where these two scholars go next. notes 1 the relative lack of kuczynski's husband in both the story and its treatment by bahng is somewhat notable in that it seems to re-inscribe the heteronormative notion that mothering is a set of labors that are done by women. that reproductive labor is discussed in this book only as a racialized and colonial project, and not in gender terms is a fairly glaring omission, one that could have been easily dealt with in a single paragraph or note. earle catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) references butler, o. e. (1979). kindred. boston, ma: beacon press. butler, o. e. (1993). parable of the sower. new york, ny: open road media. butler, o. e. (1998). parable of the talents: a novel. new york, ny: seven stories press. cuarón, a. (director). (2006). children of men. [motion picture]. united states: universal studios home video. hopkinson, n. (2001). midnight robber. new york, ny: grand central publishing. jemisin, n. k. (2010). the broken kingdoms. new york, ny: orbit. kuczynski, a. (2008, november). her body, my baby: my adventures with a surrogate mom. new york times magazine, 42-49, 64, 74, 78. perry, p. a. (1998). stigmata. new york, ny: anchor books. yamashita, k. t. (2017). tropic of orange. minneapolis, mn: coffee house press. bio joshua earle is a phd candidate in science and technology studies at virginia tech. his work focuses on the connections between eugenics and transhumanism, and the way bodies and identity shape and are coconstructed by and within both movements. microsoft word 298-1856-1_editorialboard.docx catalyst editorial board. (2018). intimidating knowledge. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-2. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © catalyst editorial board. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license editorial intimidating knowledge catalyst editorial board in the few years since catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience inaugurated its first issue in 2015, the journal has published five issues. we founded catalyst because we saw need for a journal that valued cutting edge scholarship in feminist technoscience. very often, we found, in our own experiences, and in others, that disciplinary boundaries severely “disciplined” the contours of knowledge. feminist journals often under appreciated the role of science, and sts (technoscience) journals under-appreciated the role of social categories such as gender, race, class, sexuality, nation, and indigeneity. deeply aware of the critical stakes of knowledge formations and social justice, we inaugurated catalyst, so we might help catalyze more bold, robust, creative, and imaginative explorations in the feminist technosciences. we are deeply committed to feminist accounts that take seriously the intersectional roots and evolutions of science and feminism. the five issues we have published have each been very well received. they have each pushed the bounds of disciplinary and interdisciplinary technosciences in interesting and important ways. but as 2 catalyst editorial board catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) sociologists of knowledge have long noted, success usually breeds attacks, and we have watched with deep concern as some authors of catalyst (along with scholars across disciplines), and authors working in feminist technoscience more broadly, have been attacked. it is noteworthy that these attacks have primarily focused on junior scholars, often women of color, queer, and trans scholars; i.e., the attacks focus on precisely those who are already vulnerable in the academy. they have received hate mail, they (and their scholarship) have been publically vilified, and their superiors (chairs of departments and university administrators) have been notified, cautioned and at times publically pressured to take action to disavow their work. in many ways, debates on academic freedom are not entirely new. in particular, feminists and feminist scholarship have long been the focus of ridicule, outrage, and threats. but it is also clear that at this particular time in history, and with the growth of social media, attacks on academia and academics is particularly acute. the very ground and veracity of academic knowledge – of what counts as knowledge and what does not – is under pressure. there is a plethora of evidence that academic freedom is at present insecure, and fragile, all across the globe. moreover, without strong commitments to equity and anti-racism, academic freedom can be twisted to protect harassment as bipoc and lgbtq2s scholars make inroads into disciplines. political actions camouflaged in instrumental logics and free speech, have weaponized ideas of academic freedom to protect hate speech and harassers, while threatening individual faculty, programs and departments. as editors of this journal, we stand firm in resisting this backlash, and hostile political climate for feminist, anti racist, anti colonial, and queer scholarship. our only response can be not to be silenced, and to draw on the many legacies of social movements that helped create the very departments and intellectual fields this journal celebrates. we join our colleagues (faculty and administrators) in other fields, and editors of other journals to work to support our authors, feminist technoscience scholars, and the integrity of the publishing process. microsoft word template article.docx wentworth, k. (2017). handholds and other kill floor mnemonics. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3 (2), page 1-14. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kara wentworth, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license image & text handholds and other kill floor mnemonics kara wentworth acls/mellon public fellows program kwentworth@gmail.com these notes refer to a video component titled handholds and other kill floor mnemonics available on catalyst journal at www.catalystjournal.org abstract on the kill floor of a small u.s. animal slaughterhouse, butchers use knives to separate pig hides from bodies. in the process of skinning and disassembling, the animal’s body takes shape, becoming knowable and known in new ways. i focus on the material interactions between hands, hides, and knives to make sense of slaughter as a material-semiotic process. though animals are unequal and unwilling partners, they take the lead at times, guiding butchers’ moves and cuts, and offering ways to get a hold of, make sense of, and manipulate the body. in the short film handholds and this companion essay, i zoom in on cuts in flesh: literal handholds in animals’ hides that butchers use to get a grip, to hold taut, to rotate, to skin, to pull a pig across a room, and to carry its head and hide to the offal bin. here i ask what it means to get a hold of and make sense of a body using this sort of material mnemonic device. wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 2 i spend time on slaughterhouse kill floors, observing and participating in state-sanctioned killing, in chains of contemporary surveillance and control, and in the everyday material work of animal slaughter. i ask questions that are familiar to science studies and feminist scholars, but strange on the kill floor: what sort of knowledge is butchering? is it embodied in human bodies, animals’ bodies, tools, or in material interaction itself? how do bodies come to matter and come to be meaningful in the process of killing and taking apart? here, i make cuts in film and in ethnographic details to splice together a brief focused narrative, zooming in on hands, hides, and knives to foreground the cuts butchers use as handholds in animals’ bodies. the animal’s body, i argue, offers a material script for how to see the body, how to understand the body, and what moves to make in the process of disassembly. scripts – both in theaters and in slaughterhouses – are material guides that come to life in performance. butchers change the animal’s body as they work with it, revealing new layers and parts, cutting and marking the body to aid the process of disassembly as they go. i explore these cuts as material-semiotic devices, following the insistence by feminist scholars including donna haraway and karen barad that matter and meaning are constituted together.1 working in the flesh of things, i focus on the intimate process of re-working a material body, showing how these interactions are simultaneously acts of knowing and of carving out bodies and meaning. cuts in flesh are markers and handholds that help a butcher know where to go and manipulate the animal’s body into a knowable, disassembleable object. some butchers cut tears in the animal’s body to guide them. on one kill floor with two butchers, the more experienced of the two always took on the difficult task of evenly splitting a cow carcass into two perfect ‘sides’ of beef. though the less experienced butcher had been doing the work for a decade or more, the one who was slightly more senior learned to butcher as a child alongside his father, and had a keener eye and steadier hand as he worked. i watched in awe as he stood before a wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 3 headless cow hanging upside down, and used a knife to cut a line from the base of the hanging neck upward toward the spine. he then turned to the top of the animal, steadying an electric saw that hung from the ceiling, weighted on a pulley, so that it rested at the center of the animal’s crotch, right between its legs. next he turned on the saw and guided it slowly down using gravity and his own body for balance, splitting the spine perfectly in half. as he got closer to the neck, the slit he had cut at the start became a visual guide for where the saw should travel. this split in the neck is a cut in flesh that makes the animal’s body an aid in the process of its disassembly. another sort of cut is also common: a slice through hide that forms a handhold that butchers can use to move and manipulate the animal’s body. these handholds, sometimes torn by accident while removing a hide; sometimes cut on purpose to help carry a head to the trash or pull a hide off the animal’s back, help butchers know and disassemble the animal. i describe elsewhere the method one small slaughterhouse uses for removing the cow’s entire head so that it bleeds out quickly.2 here is what happens next: for a moment, the head hangs by the hide and muscle at the back of its neck while blood spills from the veins. the butcher punctures a hole through the hide at the back of the neck, and puts his hand through it as if it is the strap that hangs above a car door, allowing a passenger to hoist themself in and out. holding the head through that newly cut handhold with the left hand, the butcher uses the knife in his right hand to slice the head off completely, severing that last bit of flesh, and leaving the head to swing down to his side, still held in the left hand through the handhold. the butcher can then transfer the head to the inspection table so the teeth (to determine age) and lymph nodes (to check for the presence of systemic disease) can be examined and any valuable head parts – such as a cow’s tongue and cheeks – can be trimmed off and included with the rest of the meat from the animal. after inspection and trimming, the butcher can put his hand through the same strap-like handhold, and carry the head to the offal bin for disposal. wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 4 in a typical slaughterhouse, pigs’ hair is loosened from their skin through scalding, then rubbed off by mechanized or handheld rubbing tools and/or flame. at the end of the process, pigs are wearing their heads and their own pink, hairless skins, looking as they often do at a butcher shop or charcuterie: familiar, edible. but most kill floors i’ve visited are too small to have a large scalding tank so all animal hides, including pigs’, are removed with a knife. working quickly, it is common for a butcher to accidentally cut slices through the hide of a cow – and even more so a pig – as he3 removes the skin from the animal’s body. for some time i thought that all these cuts were accidental, and used opportunistically by butchers to lift and rotate the pig’s body slightly so he could get at another part of the animal. but i realized, over many months of watching live, and then rewatching video, that some of these cuts are accidental and some are cut on purpose. at a plant that gets money for its cow hides, butchers try hard not to cut through the hide as they are skinning. but pig skins are worth less, and are often included in the weight of offal the rendering company hauls away each week. more cuts in a pig hide make no financial difference for the slaughterhouse. some butchers will intentionally cut handholds into the pig’s flesh to help manipulate the animal on the cradle, to pull the whole animal, wheeled cradle and all, to another part of the kill floor, and to provide a good grip and anchor point to pull off the rest of the hide where it is still attached to the animal along the spine once the pig is hanging from the rail. these handholds help the butchers to disassemble and make sense of the animals. i argue that disassembling an animal’s body is itself a way of knowing the animal. separating a body into legible, edible parts is a material process that reveals the animal’s body as a particular sort of knowledge object: not only an object that guides the process of how to take it apart, but an object that can be taken apart, understood, and consumed: a known object in multiple senses. just as dissecting a text or memorizing its lines might be ways of knowing a written object, taking apart an animal and distinguishing its parts are ways of knowing a body. distinguishing here has dual meanings: material wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 5 and semiotic. distinguishing is both a knowing process: mentally separating x from not-x, and a material process: separating x from not-x with a knife’s blade. as butchers break down a carcass in the cutting room, they simultaneously make sense of and make separate parts. butchers distinguish in multiple senses of the word at once: perceiving difference and enacting it simultaneously. cutting and knowing are drawn together with metal on flesh. taking disassembly as a material knowledge-making practice, these handholds can be understood as material mnemonic devices: places to hold onto in the process of knowing the animal body and working a named subject into an edible object. russian psychologist lev vygotsky talks about a zone of proximal development: an arena of tasks that an individual cannot achieve on his or her own, but is capable of accomplishing with outside assistance (vygotsky and cole 1978). vygotsky believed that this level of capability – what we can achieve with the aid of others – is a better measure of where a child is developmentally than simply measuring what the child can accomplish alone. i turn to vygotsky not for his understanding of child development, but for his insight into how individuals learn and accomplish skills in concert with others and with the world. beyond childhood, we are all knower-doers, developing capacities and skills over time on our own and with the assistance of other people and material aids. handholds cut by butchers on the kill floor are one type of material-semiotic aid. using these handholds, butchers are able to make sense of an animal’s body and take the body apart, cuttingknowing the body, making its material form matter in particular ways. the work of wood et al. extends vygotsky’s work to include the idea of “scaffolding”: temporary modes of assistance that a knower can stand on top of to get someplace new. by watching mothers encourage and aid three to five-year-olds as they worked with blocks, wood and colleagues honed in on the importance of general encouragement and specific guidance to help young children accomplish challenging tasks. as wood and colleagues put it, this sort of assistance allows people to complete “elements of the task that are initially beyond the learner’s capacity” wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 6 (wood, bruner et al. 1976). scaffolding puts [learners] in a position to achieve success in an activity that they would previously not have been able to do alone. i draw on these psychologists of learning and development not because the butchers i describe are novices but because all of us – novices and experts alike – are learning from and thinking with the world in every task. knowledge is inherently social. knowledge does not exist within the mind of a lone individual but instead is always enacted with objects and others. a butcher “knows how to butcher” in concert with tools and with the body of each individual animal as it presents its particular material form. complex tasks like butchering an animal are beyond the capacity of any individual, and can only be accomplished in the interactions between bodies (humans, animals, and tools) each time. i argue that humans cannot slaughter alone. animals take part not only as passive substance, but as guides. butchers manipulate the animal’s body to make guide lines and handholds: temporary infrastructures that they as knower-doers can stand on to accomplish something that they could not achieve alone. the handholds cut in animals’ flesh act as material mnemonics, helping butchers to know the animal’s body. these handholds are like grooves in a stone wall that a rock climber can use to get a grip as she travels. these particular cuts provide places to hold onto as butchers traverse the animal’s body, transforming it into a known, distinguishable, consumable object; making the body matter in a world of consuming and consumable bodies. butchering is not unlike rock climbing, passing hands across the expanse of animal flesh while butcher and animal traverse from life to death to standardized commodity. along the way, butchers carve literal handholds as they make and make sense of the animal’s body as a carcass, a “side” (half carcass), and ultimately as a set of knowable, sellable “cuts” of meat. handholds are material mnemonics. in the literal material world, they are places to hold onto. in the linguistic abstractions we use to theorize knowledge, they are tools for knowing and places to stand: scaffolding. while bodies in life come to matter and to be meaningful wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 7 through complex frictions of oppressive power and creative becoming, bodies in death can offer, guide, and push back as they are rendered meaningful. focusing in on the bodily material practices in slaughter allows for a different sort of material analysis of bodies coming to matter. in death and disassembly, bodies become knowable and come to matter through intimate material interaction. notes 1 in her 1992 promises of monsters, haraway insists that “bodies as objects of knowledge are materialsemiotic generative nodes” (298). in the same vein, karen barad uses material-discursive to highlight the inextricability of material and discursive practices (or as she would say, performances) (2003, 2010). 2 see “francisco tickles the medulla” – forthcoming from anthropology and humanism. 3 yes, all of the butchers i have worked with on the kill floor have been men. women and queer folks have worked just off the kill floor, cutting carcasses into cuts of meat, grinding meat, making sausage and other products, wrapping the finished products in clear plastic on styrofoam trays. there is one exception i’ve witnessed: at the kill floor on an agricultural university campus, two young women worked beside me, mostly spraying water and cleaning up, but occasionally taking a knife to the body. references barad, k. (2003). "posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter." signs 28(3): 801-831. barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 8 entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, duke university press. haraway, d. (1992). the promises of monsters. cultural studies. l. grossberg, c. nelson and p. a. treichler. new york, routledge: x, 788 p. vygotsky, l. s. and m. cole (1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, harvard university press. wood, d., et al. (1976). "the role of tutoring in problem solving." journal of child psychology and psychiatry 17: 89-100. wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 9 handholds film – supplemental text for screen readers film title: “handholds” running time: 5 minutes 25 seconds closeup of a knife blade, held in one hand, as the other hand pulls fatty innerskin tissue away from a body, allowing the knife to find a groove between skin and muscle. [the sound of whirring, a machine stopping and starting, an ongoing buzzwhirr] the knife cuts from left to right of the screen, then returns to the left side and cuts again, now cutting with shorter slices, still in a line from left to right, revealing a pattern of yellow-white fat and pinkish muscle underneath as the knife cuts more deeply with some cuts and more shallow with others. [rumpf-rumpf-rumpf-rumpf-rumpf-rumpf: an insistent sound from another machine off-camera: this one, i can tell you, though those watching the film can’t see it, is a winch, working hard to lift a body toward the ceiling] the rumpf-rumpf pulley sound continues, film cuts to a wide shot of a landscape: peaks and valleys, the ground is thinner more yellow and the sky is pink with bits of red – this landscape, we may realize, as the title appears in white lettering over the middle, right at the horizon line – is a landscape of flesh: lines cut with a knife separating the body itself (the top, the ‘sky’) from the skin/hide (the bottom, the ‘ground’). “handholds” appears and stays over the image for a few seconds… [20 seconds in now] wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 10 the screen goes black, the title stays, then you hear a pop-pop sound (more protests from the mechanized winch), then voices, screen goes black, then silent. voices and background vibrating sound build, we see two hands again, holding a knife in one hand and the hide of an animal in the other, but this shot is wider: we see the butcher from the chest to the knees, we see the pig from the cut-off hoof to the chest. the hand holding the hide was invisible under the hide before, but now a thumb is sticking through: there’s a hole there. this butcher has a hold on the animal in a different way, gripping through a hold in the skin rather than grasping skin together in bunches and squeezing. cuts to another shot of butcher, this time with whole hand through a hole in the skin, thumb on top, four fingers hidden under the hide, as he cuts in long strokes with the knife, separating body from skin. cut to a medium shot: chest to knee, of a butcher with his back to us as he presses on the front and back legs of a pig at once, pushing and rotating the body away from him, then grabbing into two handholds: two torn holes in the animal’s hide to lift the body and rotate it further, then one hand in a handhold of skin, the other pressing on the far hind leg, until the pig’s body has rotated away from the butcher, and it is possible to resume cutting long lines at the border between body and skin yet again. camera zooms in on the hands and knife as the butcher gets a handhold, first through a hole in hide, then grasping folds of skin, and continues with long then short cuts to separate the skin from the body. cut to butcher in between medium and close-up, cutting skin away from body, then using the knife to cut a hole through the hide itself: aaahah! this is where those holds in the skin came from! or were some of them cut by accident? by misses in the separating of skin from body? wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 11 the butcher uses this new hole to lift and rotate the body away from him, then puts a hand through the hole to get a grip as he continues to cut along the line between body and hide, camera zooms in, so we just see hands and knife and flesh again. [the sound of sniffling, the butcher perhaps. then voices: inaudible, yup!, inaudible, yup!] a loud whirring begins then camera cuts to a metal object in top left corner of the frame and some bare muscle and blood – some part of the animal in the rest of the frame. the metal object is making the whirring sound. it is a pneumatic saw, a handheld rotating blade powered by air, from a tube in the wall – but we can’t see all this in the frame, just the blade and the handhold and the butcher’s other hand, using a hole in the hide to pull the skin taught as the blade meets the threshold between body and skin. the butcher then pulls up with that same hand, moving seamlessly from using the handhold to pull down and separate skin to using the handhold to pull up and rotate the body. cut to medium shot with two hands and a knife, cutting along that nowfamiliar line where the skin is still attached to the body, only now the knife is pointing downward, tip-first, and a finger is pointed downward, poking for a moment (or pointing, it is a pointer finger) through this small hole to pull the skin away and allow the knife to cut, tracing a line and separating body from hide. then pointer finger pulls out, thumb presses down and into the same hole, holding the same way and pulling the skin away from the body as the knife blade continues to cut. then the whole hand grips onto folded flesh – there are no holes nor holds here, then grabs onto a far corner of the peeled-off skin, pulling away from here while continuing to cut, then giving slack on the skin, the butcher seems to stand upright, the knife disappears from the frame, and we see that this grip is through yet another hole in the hide – the hand lingers for a few seconds, holding through this cut hidehole, not cutting, just standing there and holding hide through the hole while human voices speak over machine sounds. then just machine sounds. wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 12 cut to a hand (a different hand? a different butcher? a different day?) holding through a cut in the corner of the skin, toward the edge of the hide and away from the place where it is still attached to the body – much like the previous shot. but this time, the butcher uses this handhold to pull the entire pig’s body and the metal “cradle” it is resting on, away from the camera and across what we now see is a red-floored room with stainless steel walls. as he pulls, we see two more humans, chest to feet, one is spraying water, one is standing at the edge of the space, the camera follows and we see for the first time the pig’s head, its face and eyes, crying upside-down dried blood and with bright red blood on the snout. the camera follows the butcher’s hands, and we see a metal piece: pointed and slightly hooked on each end, with a metal loop at the middle: the butcher is inserting the pointy hook ends into the two hind legs, just below a joint so the animal’s weight will be supported. a metal hook is placed through the loop at the center of this metal bar, and we see a butcher’s face for the first time as he presses a button on a hanging box, lifting the animal leg-first up to and then above face-height. cut to a new scene, more quiet than it has been, one butcher is cutting to separate the hide from the body right at the pig’s spine. then using a hole in the hide as a handhold, he pulls down, peeling the hide away from the body. another butcher stands at his side. wait – they are wearing brown aprons, and before the rubber aprons were all yellow. is this a different pig, a different butcher, a different day, a different slaughterhouse? the first butcher, the one who cut and pulled, now steps out of the frame and we hear a now-familiar [whirrrr-rumpf rumpf rumpf rumpf] of the winch raising the animal’s body. the pig rotates so we are facing its stomach, skinless, and the second butcher is behind the body with his hands hidden from our view. as the body raises, higher, higher, the butcher suddenly moves into a squat position, pulling his arms down with him and toward wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 13 the ground, peeling the hide off the back of the pig. as he stands, and the pig’s body swings back-and-forth, we see he is holding onto the hid through a hole, four fingers of each hand, then just one hand, invisible to us beneath the hide. the mechanical sound has stopped, and the first butchers uses his knife to separate hide from body, now parallel to the floor – he must be cutting near the top of the head now – then the whirring and the body raises higher and he jabs the knife, still parallel with the floor, cutting into someplace that makes dark red blood run out. we see his face, facing the back of the pig’s head, in profile, with the pig rotated away from us in profile. he keeps cutting, this looks hard, holding onto a cut in the hide to get a grip and pull down the whole time. he continues to cut – through bone perhaps, this is taking some time, and it is rough and sudden, not like the brushstrokes of knife moving left to right we watched earlier. his left hand is still hidden inside a handhold, his right keeps cutting, and then suddenly the whole hide and perhaps the head too?? are dangling by a thread of flesh: a few inches only, and then the knife cuts straight across, and the hide-and-head separates, its full weight moving onto the arm of the butcher, held up through the handhold. we see the two butchers now, from the chest down, the headless bloody neck-flesh of the pig disappears out of the top of the frame. the butcher hands this skin-head to the other butcher, for a moment they each have a hand in it, it is intimate, touching each other, inside of this body. the second butcher drags the skin-head over to a grey trash bin, lifts, and plops it in, head first, then the hide hangs inside out, hesitating for a moment, draped over the side before it slides into the grey barrel, disappearing from our view. the butcher walks back, the camera catches the open neck of the hanging pig, then follows its body upward, over the butcher’s shoulder, toward the ceiling. the screen goes black. [we hear the whirring, the click stop start of wentworth catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 14 the winch, then nothing]. [film by kara wentworth] [“handholds” © 2016] bio kara wentworth is a postdoctoral fellow in the acls/mellon public fellows program. her work blends participant observation with film recordings to understand how difference gets made in everyday practice. her latest writing is on black lives matter, microbial sociality and the future of meat. microsoft word 240-1502-1-schaeffer.docx schaeffer, f.a. (2018). biorobotics: surveillance and the automation of biological life catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-12. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © felicity amaya schaeffer. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical perspectives biorobotics: surveillance and the automation of biological life felicity amaya schaeffer ucsc fsg@ucsc.edu abstract new developments in state surveillance technologies and biorobotics at harvard university turn to nature, such as bees, with the goal of automating border control, labor, and to fill the vacuum of disappeared pollinating bees. the turn to insects for use in automated intelligence (ai) relies on a racialized understanding of biology, and the body rather than the brain, as the mechanism for automated intelligence with consequences for revitalizing binary notions of primitive from rational intelligence, stripping humans as well as the historical and social context from the violent causes and consequences of border governance, automated labor, and ecological disaster. in my broader book project, “tracking indigenous and latinx migrants: bio-surveillance across sacred borders,” i propose that the enforcement of border control aimed at migrants has intensified, leading to the expansion of what i call a border-biosecurity industrial complex. science and technology have become the solution to border control and security, 2 schaeffer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) necessitating university, military and state research and funding loops back into the science technology engineering and mathematics (stem) fields as well as defense technology markets driven by war. to win this war, the government must identify and eradicate a host of threats: abnormal biology (biometrics); suspicious objects; and nuclear, chemical and viral threats. i refer to biosecurity to call attention to the automated detection of “suspect life.” the body’s biometric data, that is to say, the automated and precognitive physiognomy (e.g., heart-rate, eye movements) and the gait signatures of the body have become more authentic terrain to determine safe (white) versus threatening populations (non-white). stripping human-insect physiognomy and behavior from individual intention or agency is where the racial consequences of biometric technologies turn, especially as the governance of security relies more heavily on biological sciences to govern life at the borders. today governing institutions track not just (demographic) populations with predictable patterns of life and death but also the suspect biomass, a concept produced at the intersection of the life sciences and rapid computational algorithms that view risky or suspect life as automated matter that can be known in advance of deviant acts. as the life sciences meet artificial intelligence (ai), intelligent design and consciousness find the body’s behavioral movements as an intelligent pathway to coordinated action (rather than the brain), alienating the active properties of the body-as-matter (biomass) from human intelligence, intention, will, and agency. colonial binaries continue as racial otherness is relegated to a natural or evolutionary force automating the “erratic” body’s biological movements in need of control by whiteness, or the invisible hand of a techno future heralded by its ability to control nature. the automation of the body-as-lively matter turns suspect bodies into a primitive biology motivated by natural forces such as instinct, emotions, and the collective. scientists during the nineteenth century revered dead body parts, such as skulls, as empirical proof of hierarchies of primitive versus civilized and especially mental difference that would provide clues to unlock the past. anthropologist marcello levi bianchini 3 schaeffer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) (1906), developed a kinesiological biotypology of race that separated “primitive” from “advanced” races. he states, “in primitive societies all the affective reactions of the individual and collective psyche are essentially manifested by phenomena of movement ....” (pugliese, 2010, p. 84). for bianchini, primitive societies displayed a wider range of motor expressions (or affect) than the more evolved societies. even earlier, the french doctor and early scientist of film, félix regnault (1898) thought those he called savages had no language, and instead spoke through the language of the body and that their “savage locomotion” was closer to nature, or untouched by cultural influences (p. 315). today the terrorist supposedly follows behavioral “laws of nature” that resemble automated life, or mechanization, offering science visible and predictable patterns of movement. as found by joseph pugliese (2010) in a statement by the international association of chiefs of police (iacp), suicide bombers display “an unusual gait, especially a robotic walk. this could indicate someone forcing or willing himself or herself to go through a mission" (p. 88). important to note here is the idea that suspicious gait turns the body itself into a primitive weapon since it is controlled by a force larger than the self-determined individual. while an extreme example, a suspect biomass refers to a body tethered to its web of connections (what the military calls a “pattern of life”), a mass not driven by individual rationality, the brain, or self, but dangerously susceptible to the “higher call” of religion, biology, instinct, and the collective. thus, the suspect biomass, (i.e., flesh stripped of human intelligence) meets the turn to “nature,” or insects for inspiration on how to detect human scent or chemical traces in cargo and as a model to replace the automated movements of racial labor. the assumption that we can know and see difference in the body re-packages a settler/colonial logic driven by what sylvia wynter (2003) details as the shift in genres during colonization from the supernatural (religious law) to the natural (laws of nature). with the dominance of the natural sciences in definitions of the human from the nineteenth century to today, secular science, mathematics and logic defined and tracked 4 schaeffer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) human life in ways that conflated evolutionary notions of racial selection (i.e., white rationality at the apex of the species) and dysselection (i..e., racial primitivity at the bottom) with the invisible hand of the market. it is the racial consequences of the invisible hand of automated life (biology) that i explore in the rest of the paper. biorobotics, border governance, and war technologies center biology and life sciences as part of the core sciences that drive the “innovative” strategies in national security. as stated by the director of defense advanced research projects agency (darpa), “today and in the years ahead, our potential adversaries will still include nation states, but also smaller, less well defined bad actors and an increasingly networked terror threat." to get at the smaller nature of threat, he continues, “biology is nature’s ultimate innovator, and any agency that hangs its hat on innovation would be foolish not to look to this master of networked complexity for inspiration and solutions” (prabhakar, 2014). darpa, the department of homeland security (dhs), and harvard researchers seek to know what animates the mysterious movements of insects in order to mobilize this intelligence for border security. for instance, darpa and scientists at los alamos have been studying bee sensing of chemical and nuclear traces since 2005 in hopes of launching bees to detect bombs, narcotics, biological threats, and migrants at various land, sea, and transit borders. in a video called, los alamos national laboratory: the stealthy insect sensor project, they state: “honeybees are nature’s rugged robots.” given bees’ powerful odor sensors, “honey bees are one of nature’s most sensitive detection platforms" (2008). scholars in postcolonial ecology, science studies, and feminist materialism question the separation of nature from human intervention to interrogate how insects, animals, and the natural world become altered through human-environmental influences. these scholars trespass segregated epistemologies in the academy that separate the natural sciences from the human and social sciences, and nature from culture. for example, jake kosek (2010) argues that it is not enough to ask what 5 schaeffer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) is happening to honey bees, but demands we look at the reengineering of human/bee environments, biology, and behaviors throughout the us empire or during years of military use in battle, intelligence, and testing. some material feminist scholars also repudiate the notion of an autonomous, self-sovereign human by reclaiming a more entangled notion of the human in the name of saving the earth. yet, indigenous world views that have long thought the intrarelated ontologies of the human-animal-spirit world are often absent (schaeffer 2018). i question the overlap of some materialist accounts with state science that, in a vital materialist turn to automated life, reinforce racial colonial divides between primitive and civilized science, labor, and ontologies. researchers in biorobotics at harvard university are currently developing “softer, smaller and smarter robotics,” attempting to get at more sensual, even organic relations between nature, humans, and robots. they hope to build robots that are less mechanistic and more organic, and to detour ai from the brain to embodied communication between the robots themselves and the environment. in 2009, radhika nagpal developed the controversial robobee project (with obama funding) to build a robotic pollinating bee that would temporarily replace the loss of 50% of bee hives between 1950 and 2006. many teams today hope to build bee swarms called kilobots across a range of uses including border surveillance and war, search and rescue missions, and as a future labor force that can build, not hives, but actual buildings. nagpal situates the rise of biorobotics at the intersection of computer science (ai/robotics) and biology. if robotics asks what makes things work intelligently in the world, the field of biology offers, she argues, the best example of autonomous systems. the push in ai to build robots that can act on their own behalf, without the constant direction of human operators, turns biology, and nature, into an ideal system to emulate with the goal of producing robot swarms that are “selforganizing,” an automated mass that relies on sensory intelligence to make collective decisions. cellular biology offers similar inspiration in computer science such as in the field of amorphous computing, which 6 schaeffer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) looks to biology and physics to structure distributed computers that network across a mass scale (mcnally 2015, 2:37). by looking to cellular biology, they analyze how cells, miniscule parts of life, work together with millions of other cells to sustain the body’s life form. and while ai has predominantly debated whether consciousness, as a mental faculty, could translate to robots, nagpal and her associates want to think computation and intelligence beyond the brain and beyond the individual. similar to the parts of the body that work in concert to get us up a steep hill, even though we may not be conscious of each body part’s role in the act, each ant, bee, or termite is imagined to be a part, or cog that has insignificant power without the collective working together as a team. as nagpal states during an online interview, “the brain is really the colony, no individual in the colony actually has the full picture. the full picture is distributed over these many, many minds” (2015, 8:11). nagpal’s team has left the lab to trek their way to namibia to observe and study termites. along with other scientists, they investigate massive termite mounds, as well as bee and ant colonies, to think about decentralized computing algorithms. in an unsurprising move, nature’s collective, democratic, and autonomous structures drive the revolutionary language of biorobotics. nagpal states, termites are a classic system where people have studied decentralized cooperation or implicit cooperation. the idea is that with termites, there’s definitely no supervisor who’s telling them what to do, there isn’t even some sort of hierarchy. instead there’s sort of these chance encounters where information is propagating, but there’s also just encounters with the environment (2015, 8:11). rather than see robots at the mercy of fascist humans in control, automation here becomes part of the natural system that proceeds not through individual intention, or a pre-determined goal or plan of action. in fact, rather than locate consciousness in the brain or as an outside (divine/sovereign) force, a colony of insects feels, senses, and acts consciously through their bodies, in relation to each other and to changes in the environment. nagpal is clearly influenced by rodney brooks’s ai 7 schaeffer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) research during the 1980s which argued that behavior-based robots (rather than human intelligence) offer a simple, or primitive intelligence in which behavior does not respond to a central brain that plans out actions in advance; instead, the body moves in response to the environment through non-hierarchical sensor signals (1999, pp. 138-9). while there is potential for disrupting the centrality of rationality and the human brain as the apex of consciousness, the racial imaginary driving the research, development, and use of this technology suggests otherwise. nagpal’s team developed what they called, “termes” in 2014, a robotic construction crew that can assemble blocks into 3d structures “without any human intervention; no foreman, no central brain” (2015, 30:30). one day they will scale up to a thousand tiny robots, or kilobots. in a ted talk podcast “taming the swarm: collective artificial intelligence (2016),” nagpal moves from a discussion of termites (that build massive structures without talking to each other) to a construction site. in her ted talk, our gaze is directed to a large screen behind her depicting dark shadowy human bodies taking a break at a construction site. consistent with harvard’s promotion of a softer robotic model that will replace massive, clunky robotics, here too, the tiny and lightweight kilobots are cheaper and more tasteful robotic accomplices. it is clear that the “robotic construction crew” will replace precarious workers (perhaps migrant laborers, or mohawk ironworkers) on the job site, workers who sit perched high up on dangerous high-rise buildings, who get tired and hungry and take breaks, and who labor at the bottom of a hierarchical labor structure, beneath the white-collar owners and creative/intellectual class (atanasoski and vora 2015). not only will kilobots remove dangerous, even exploitative, labor conditions, the thousands of tiny robots will learn how build without the need for human intervention (and salaries). not only are “low skilled” workers absented from the job site, thousands of fast-building kilobots enter the scene as quietly and efficiently as cells building the body and as a force of nature itself, an unremarkable presence in human perception. kilobots are the next phase 8 schaeffer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) of a mechanized labor force whose invisibility and exploitation resemble the work of racialized laborers, the shadowy silhouettes who haunt this evolutionary scene where time automatically evolves to the inevitable tempo of a future when more efficient and less exploitative bio-bots will replace human laborers. nature’s demoted status as an automated, unintentional mass here becomes ideal for manipulation and replacement, especially as these movements are imagined without the aid of human intelligence. the title of nagpal’s talk, “taming the swarm,” offers a clue as to how absenting humans from the forces of the natural world (evolution), and from the invention of bio-robotics, hides from view the logic of whiteness as an ever-present force that must control the chaotic threat of nature’s unwieldy evolutionary design with a tame replacement. kilobots (1,000 robots) become an even stronger, and more docile breed, so cheap to produce they are easily replaced. nagpal asks, “so the field of engineered self-assembly is basically ─ how do we make the molecules or the robots or the cells to selfassemble the thing we want, as opposed to the thing that they’re naturally going to do?” (2015, 27:55). and ironically, the swarm concept driving the kilobots is depicted as a militarized force of nature, a docile army of insects ready to mobilize at any moment. this fascist visual iconography ironically shares interpretive logic with the democratic lure of bee colonies that drive researchers to reproduce bee and wasp swarms that can be tamed and controlled, unlike the potential threat of mass human laborers whose likelihood of revolt grows as they increase in numbers, or when they become a self-organizing mass that evolves into an intelligent or even rebellious swarm. the question guiding this cross-disciplinary research is: how do these little creatures coordinate when no one individual is in charge? this question of how insects determine their behavior is one scientists in other life sciences obsess about, such as how birds know when and where to migrate or, in physics, how snowflakes form. in her recent book, biocultural creatures, samantha frost asks a similar question about how proteins affect cells: “given we do not impute intention or self-conscious 9 schaeffer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) deliberation to proteins, how can we account for the ingenuity, the precise coordination, and the efficiency of their actions?” (2016, p. 79). she argues that each act is done so that the next may be done ─ purposively or with a reason. but she struggled with this thesis because she thought, how absurd, molecules do not have reason and they do not intend what they do. through such astonishment she said, “i realized that, in spite of my theoretical training, i had a theological hangover, which is to say that i could not figure out how such processes could be possible without someone, somewhere, knowing what to do” (80).” frost’s resistance to theorizing matter as having its own logic and reason was held hostage to a lingering belief in god, or an outside totalizing force directing all life, that remains separate or above the material world. religious and spiritual beliefs must be banished, relegated to a primitive past and segregated from matter in order to engage in feminist science that views matter as self-directed, sovereign and with its own rationality. the process of how one sees proteins, through technological visioning, as matter with a distinctive intention and trajectory, naturalizes a secular western view of life. alienating life to its molecular scale shares conceptual space with state surveillance technologies that differentiate dangerous from safe border crossers by scanning bodies with sensors that compute unconscious physiological data such as heart rate and eye twitches. the state’s reliance on the body’s biological signatures to speak the truth of who we are and what we will do in the future increasingly trump human narration and testimony (schaeffer, forthcoming). within biorobotics, the life force of matter is segregated from humans. this alienation of material spheres preserves categorical divides between matter, animal, human reason, and the secular from the intraconnected spirit force that materializes constantly changing forms across the environment-insect-animal-human. turning to robotic insects to revolutionize and naturalize security imagines a world in which technological objects can outpace human intelligence and replace nature itself. replacing diverse bee species with robo-bees steers us away from 10 schaeffer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) industrial agricultural practices that overwork and contaminate the pollinating bees on which we depend. in addition, by positing biology as an automated biomass, how might the biological stand in once again as the primitive racial other stripped of human intention, agency, and intelligence while humans disappear from the scene of racially motivated violence? in other words, might the current turn to automated biology in biorobotics, surveillance, and mechanized labor reinforce a racial logic of nature as an unknowable and threatening evolutionary force in need of white containment? acknowledgements i’d like to thank the participants on the two panels on whiteness and technoscience at the society for social studies of science (4s) conference in boston for the stimulating dialogue. and to banu suramanian for the invitation to publish our papers with the catalyst journal. references atanasoski, n. & vora, k. (2015). surrogate humanity: posthuman networks and the (racialized) obsolescence of labor, catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 1(1), 1-40. http://www.catalystjournal.org. brooks, r. (1999). cambrian intelligence: the early history of the new ai. cambridge, ma: mit press. frost, s. (2016). biocultural creatures: toward a new theory of the human. durham, nc: duke university press. kosek, j. (november 2010). ecologies of empire: on the new uses of the honeybee. cultural anthropology, 25(4), 650-678. los alamos national lab (march 21, 2008), the stealthy insect sensor 11 schaeffer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) project. retrieved april 14, 2017 at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t7d0bze4km. mcnally, t. (july 27, 2015). podcast interview, disruptive: bioinspired robotics. retrieved april 14, 2017 at: http://aworldthatjustmightwork.com/2015/07/auto-draft-16/. nagpal, r. (january 14, 2016). tedx talk, taming the swarm: collective artificial intelligence. retrieved april 14, 2017 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhgvr0lzfjc. prabhakar, a. (april 1, 2014). testimony to subcommittee on intelligence, emerging threats and capabilities, darpa launches biological technologies office. retrieved on september 2, 2017 at: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2014-04-01. pugliese, j. (2010). biometrics: bodies, technologies, biopolitics. new york, ny: routledge. regnault, f. (october 15, 1898). le langage par gestes. la nature 1324, 315. schaeffer, f.a. spirit matters: gloria anzaldúa’s cosmic becoming across human/nonhuman borderlands. signs: journal of woman and culture in society, 43 (4), may 2018. schaeffer, f.a. automated border control: criminalizing the "hidden intent" of migrant embodiment, under review, kalfou: a journal of comparative and relational ethnic studies. wynter, s. (2003). unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation ─ an argument. cr: the new centennial review, 3(3), 257-337. 12 schaeffer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) bio felicity amaya schaeffer is an associate professor and chair of the feminist studies department at uc santa cruz. her book, love and empire: cybermarriage and citizenship across the americas, was published in 2013 with nyu press. she is working on a new project called tracking indigenous and latinx migrants: bio-surveillance across sacred borders that follows the entangled histories of indigenous, migrant, and u.s. techno-sovereignty that continues to erupt in surveillance practices along the u.s.-mexico borders and beyond. she has published articles in a variety of international journals in mexico, france, and brazil as well as u.s. journals such as signs: journal of women in culture and society, american quarterly, and sexualities. nguyen   review      review of life support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor (university of minnesota press, 2015)   trung p. q. nguyen university of california, santa cruz tnguy214@ucsc.edu value, labor, and commodity remain key modalities through which arrangements of gendered and racialized socialities become, as feminist scholars such as angela davis (1983), maria mies (1986), and grace kyungwon hong (2006) have shown, sites driving systems of global capital. how might we interpret these modalities to explain the commodification of organs and bodies in india, as seen, for example, in the trafficking of kidneys to the global north? or to interpret in the ways in which low-cost surrogacy programs picture the wombs of women rendered subaltern as spaces for rent? or in the making and enacting (which is to say, selling) of alternate selves in india’s call centers? works by nikolas rose (2007) and melinda cooper (2008) identified how emerging biotechnologies stage new ways of extracting value from bodies, and works by lawrence cohen (2001), kaushik sunder rajan (2006) and amrita pande (2010) articulated how shifts in biocapital structure labor and subjectivity in india particularly. what are familiar about these arrangements, kalindi vora demonstrates, are the logics that extract life energies from subaltern subjects to support the lives of the elite. kidneys, wombs, and alternate selves—these are some of the affective and material commodities that vora addresses to demonstrate not-so-new divisions and territories of re/productive labor made both possible and necessary to sustaining global capitalism in biocapitalist times. vora's monograph, life support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor (university of minnesota press, 2015), maps the very material arrangements and components of life and living that constitute the conditions and possibilities of differentiated distributions of life chances under global capitalism. vora situates this project across questions raised in postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and feminist materialist and science studies, reckoning with modes of accumulating wealth through increased formal structuring of reproduction, along with the new forms of subject formations and socialities that these formalizations enable (vora, p. 5). she juxtaposes the embodied figures of indian outsourced labor through ethnographic accounts, literature, and representations by and about call center agents, information technology workers, and gestational surrogates to argue that an analysis of contemporary relations staged by global capital requires a sustained attention to the imaginaries, subjectivities, and technologies shaping the projected capacities and extractability of certain human lives and human parts in service of others. charting objects both material (organs, biological substance, and activity) and immaterial (subjectivities, imagined capacities of exchangeability) which constitute and enable social arrangements under biocapital, life support troubles what we know about  "reproduction," "labor," and  "commodity," attending to global forms of structural violence affirmed by technologies of population management.  one of the key contributions of vora's project is the introduction of the concept of "vital energy," a concept with currency in object-oriented ontology and materialist feminism, to the interpretation of postcolonial knowledge production and labor in science and technology. contemporary works on vitality by monica greco (2005), mariam fraser, sarah kember, and celia lury (2006), jane bennett (2010), kember and joanna zylinska (2012) describe the substance of life as relationalities between actants that have the potential for change, creating new and unprecedented forms of being. vora turns vitality to contend with the politics of its uneven spatial distribution by identifying logics under global biocapital that commodifies the vitality of some to its accumulation elsewhere. describing vital energy as the "substance of activity that produces life," vora argues that its transmission from sites of life depletion to life enrichment under global capital is a continuation of colonial strategies of accumulation, where affective and biological labor transmit human vitality (p. 3). from scholars of biocapital such as sarah franklin and margaret lock (2003), vora illustrates ways biological sciences and technology open up new strategies of accumulation through the isolation and mobilization of specific reproductive capacities of body parts to produce and extract value. vital energy as commodity makes plain how biocapitalist accumulation strategies follow antecedent logics of colonial divisions of labor that extracts not only "economic (monetary) sources of value, or raw materials and labor-power," but "life itself" (p. 4). expanding how we conceive of biocapital, vora points to the limitations of a commodity exchange framework, which does not fully capture the role biological sciences and technology play in the global extraction of life and transmission of vital energies. she critiques this framework for not accounting for how colonial imaginaries of  "numerous and prolific and therefore replaceable" indian populations persist and endure despite present strategies of accumulation in outsourced labor (p. 106). of particular relevance to this argument is the book's chapter on transnational gestational surrogacy, in which vora argues that assisted reproductive technologies (art) render surrogacy a low-cost service by restructuring relationships that laboring-class indian women have with their wombs and biological functions, a restructuring that is undergirded by colonial management of reproduction. citing studies by david arnold (1993) and gyan prakash (1999) on the making of governable colonial subjects through the body, vora explains that surrogates become subject to governability through medicalized discourses enabled by art, disciplining how these women relate to their bodies. through interview data, vora shows that clinical staff and medical and visual technologies facilitate the surrogates' reimagined genetics-based, property-oriented view of their bodies, instructing them that the providers of the egg and sperm are the actual owners of the child and that the surrogate's uterus is an empty space for rent. this genetics-based, property-oriented medical discourse about the body encourages the surrogate to legitimate "the carrying of ‘someone else's child' without it being seen as a form of adultery" and delimits the conditions in which the surrogate would form an attachment to the child (p. 109). steering surrogates toward previously unimaginable relationships without providing a full understanding of how surrogacy technologies work, clinical relationships rearticulate colonial projects, foreclosing alternative ways of inhabiting one's body, which is disciplined into being a proper subject both for the colonial regime historically, and, for biocapital currently. vora shows how, though these means, knowledge production in the biological sciences and technology become a key strategy through which vital energies are produced and extracted under global biocapital. gestational labor exemplifies the inseparability of the worker from the commodity and complicates simple notions of biological exchange. the surrogates in vora's work understood it was their bodies, the "blood and nourishment" coming from them, that were "building" babies, an understanding that persisted regardless of what form of official parentage or natal ownership the surrogates were encouraged to imagine or recognize (p. 110). where gestation depends upon and redirects the vital energies of the worker (the surrogate) to successfully produce the commodity (the child), the surrogate's thriving is the simultaneous thriving of the commodity.  because of this inseparability, surrogates are instructed to take care of "themselves," their vitality thus naming both biological and social forms of life transmission that cannot be reduced to exchange. outsourcing in india, vora shows, cannot be solely described through quantitative markings of value: the work of representation (as demonstrated by surrogacy's renarrations of inhabiting the body) also points to the life capacities of indian embodiment and subjectivity, which become objects of extractability par excellence. vital energy, then, names "vitality" as the actual content which constitutes marx's conceptualization of value and exchange, enabling an expansion of marxist analyses of social arrangements under capital with differentiated systems and sites of extraction conditioned by colonial histories of domination and exploitation. life support connects colonial histories of life extraction in india with the multiple ways that biological sciences and new technologies produce re-narrations and inhabitations of the body, often marshaling feminist critiques of capital's dependence upon reproduction. the book thus provides an exciting addition to and productive cohabitation with feminist materialism, science and technology studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race and gender studies. vora provokes us to ask how vital energy is accumulated through other sites of depletion under global capital, such as temporary overseas labor, migrant seasonal work, and the precarious; as well as other ways that biological sciences and technology might be informed by histories of coloniality.  life support's attention to and theorizations of institutionalized forms of violence and socialities across material and immaterial components makes it a welcome addition to the difference incorporated series (edited by grace kyungwon hong and roderick a. ferguson through university of minnesota press) alongside recent works on global arrangements of capital and its rearticulations of violence such as represent and destroy: rationalizing violence in the new racial capitalism by jodi melamed (2011), humanitarian violence: the u.s. deployment of diversity by neda atanasoski (2013), and from orphan to adoptee: u.s. empire and genealogies of korean adoption by soojin pate (2014). at a moment when ethical relationships staged by science and technology must be accountable to the racialized and gendered realities of postcolonial histories that sustain the on-going processes of global capital, kalindi vora's book stages a politically urgent and needed intervention by asking us to rethink how knowledge production reinscribes colonial hierarchies predicated upon difference and uneven extractions of life energies across the globe. references atanasoski, n. (2013). humanitarian violence: the u.s. deployment of diversity. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. arnold, d. (1993). colonizing the body: state medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century india. berkeley, ca: university of california press. bennett, j. (2010). vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham, nc: duke university press. cohen, l. (2001). the other kidney: biopolitics beyond recognition. body & society, 7(2-3), 9-29. cooper, m. (2008). life as surplus: biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era. seattle, wa: university of washington press. davis, a. y. (1983). women, race, & class. new york, ny: vintage. fraser, m, s. kember, & c. lury. (2006). inventive life: approaches to new vitalism. london, uk: sage. greco, m. (2005). on the vitality of vitalism. theory, culture & society, 22(1), 15-27. hong, g. k. (2006). the ruptures of american capital: women of color feminism and the culture of immigrant labor. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. kember, s., j. zylinska (2012). life after new media: mediation as vital process. cambridge, ma: mit press. melamed, j. (2011). represent and destroy: rationalizing violence in the new racial capitalism. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. mies, m. (1986). patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: women in the international division of labor. new york, ny: zed books. pande, a. (2010). " at least i am not sleeping with anyone": resisting the stigma of commercial surrogacy in india. feminist studies, 36(2), 292-312. pate, s. (2014). from orphan to adoptee: u.s empire and genealogies of korean adoption. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. prakash, g. (1999). another reason: science and the imagination of modern india. princeton, mj: princeton university press. rose, n. (2007). the politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. princeton, nj: princeton university press. sunder rajan, k. (2006). biocapital: the constitution of postgenomic life. durham, nc: duke university press. vora, k. (2015). life support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. bio trung pq nguyen is currently a doctoral student and cota-robles fellow in the history of consciousness department at uc santa cruz, where he studies sexuality, global capital, technology, and the afterlives of us war in southeast asia. he received his ma in asian american studies at ucla. microsoft word 76929-1-11-_wong.docx wong, a. (2019). the rise and fall of the plastic straw: sucking in crip defiance. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-12. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © alice wong, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical commentary the rise and fall of the plastic straw: sucking in crip defiance alice wong disability visibility project disabilityvisibilityproject@gmail.com [scene. exterior. campfire in a moonless night. a wizened asian american wheelchair user wrapped in a shawl tells a story to children gathered by the flickering light.] “there was a day when plastic straws, plastic bendy straws, straws by the pack and individually wrapped, roamed the earth. some used it for boba, others for their iced coffee. access was everywhere….and then there were the bans. the bans said plastic was bad. the bans made plastic straws disappear. the bans wanted to create a gateway to zero waste (ives, 2017). the bans intended to remove single-use disposables from this planet. the bans came in cities big and small, from seattle to san francisco, and from companies like starbucks (archie & smith, 2018; ho, 2018; starbucks, 2018). celebrities praised the #stopsucking campaign with the fervor of fornicating sea turtles. out of the internets, oozing from the muck and dumpster fires, arose #suckitableism...disabled people telling their stories on social media. these two tags of hash were in an epic 2 wong catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) narrative battle over the right to be disabled in public, wholly and unapologetically. with each story and selfie, disabled people created culture, knowledge, and visibility against an ableist tsunami of interrogation, disbelief, and dismissal.” [camera pans to children spellbound by the tale, their eyes wide with terror and fear. from the west, a dust storm sweeps through the camp, extinguishing the fire as the children and the old wheelchair user retreat to a cave nearby. interior. cave. the wizened storyteller coughs, continuing her story.] “like canaries in a cave mine, the disabled ones said, ‘we need plastic straws to drink, for nutrition and hydration. we deserve access without requests. exemptions by the non-disableds cannot protect us.’ and like this howling wind, the voices of disabled people were drowned out as accessibility was sacrificed for a zero-waste life, not knowing the value of single-use plastics would have to save the human race postplague. now we search high and low for straws for first aid and other plastics to stay alive while the alien strain claim more of our kind everyday. we, the disabled ones, had stockpiles for our survival as the soft ones [a.k.a. the non disableds] withered away with their hemp bandages and pasta straws. we are still here, fighting for everyone. what is the lesson, my little ones?” [all the children reciting in unison against a backdrop of a makeshift clinic.] “believe disabled people!” [sounds of a wolf howling. fade to black. roll credits.] i often wonder how disabled people will survive in a post-apocalyptic world, whether it is from the arrival of aliens or the emergence of a zombie virus. what i do know is that disabled people are creatures of adaptation that design and build worlds that work for them. the skills that we have reimagining/hacking/surviving hostile ableist environments would serve us well in any dystopian future. 3 wong catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) when is a straw more than a straw? it depends on who you ask. a plastic straw is an access tool i use for nutrition as a person with a neuromuscular disability. when sipping a latte at my favorite cafe, i use a plastic straw because i am unable to lift a drink to my mouth and it is safe for hot liquids. plastic straws are now seen as harmful and outmoded by environmentalists who are in favor of “safer: products (e.g., compostable, biodegradable plastics made of polylactic acid, silicone). some of these safer products are not safe at all for disabled people for various reasons, and this brings us to the conflict at hand (packwood, 2018). currently, i am a reluctant participant in the great plastic straw debate of 2018 (wong, 2018). i did not imagine spending the summer defending my usage of plastic straws, but this where we are. never mind my futuristic fantasies—there are some serious issues underlying the growing movement of plastic straw bans by governments, companies, and food service providers happening in the present. the popularity of plastic straw bans, and the subsequent cripping of narratives about these bans by disabled users, is a fascinating example of crip technoscience in action. aimi hamraie writes in a 2015 review essay, “cripping feminist technoscience,” the term technoscience conveys that scientific knowledge and technological worlds are active constructions of entangled material, social, and historical agents….cripping actively resists compliance with supposedly normal embodiment, behavior, and desired futures. instead, it understands disability as productive possibility and resource. (p. 307) the facts and arguments for plastic straw bans are situated in a capitalist system where sustainability and zero waste are on trend and in response to consumer demand. environmental activists, celebrities, corporations, and agents of the state promulgate the selection of plastic straws as a social prop and test case for future policies on waste (ives, 2017). all of these efforts come up against disabled bodyminds that challenge these attempts to change consumption patterns and individual behavior in public 4 wong catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) spaces. plastic pollution is a problem, no doubt. environmentalists want to engage the public and raise awareness on the need to reduce, reuse, and recycle. i believe all of this can be accomplished without steamrolling over disabled people. the entire conversation about plastic straws is about power: who knows best, who decides how change is made, who is centered in all of these activities. one example of this power is the moral reframing of plastic. the simplistic binary of plastic = bad / compostable = good obscures the intimate complexity of plastic in every person’s life, including mine. i cannot live without access to electricity for my ventilator or plastic in the machine’s tubing and mask. figure 1. “but it only takes one to choke a bird.” screenshot from a tweet by enamelled pepper mill @godofthegallows on 7:08 pm, july 19, 2018: “....no it isn't actually single use plastic straws account for 0.003 percent of non recyclable waste. why is it that environmental campaigns disenfranchise the disabled but never address corporatal pollution.” below this tweet is a reply from jemaine clement @ajemaineclement, on 7:15 pm, july 19, 2018: “but it only takes one to choke a bird. there are many possible solutions and the thought people put into fighting and arguing could be put towards 5 wong catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) finding the simplest one.” there has been a strong response to straw bans on social media by disabled people (pepper mill, 2018;) and much of that labor and expertise has been met with doubt (clement, 2018,) interrogation, and/or demands for “proof.” the crip push back on twitter by disabled people is significant, with numerous people telling their stories (rodriguez-cayro, 2018), blogging (barbarin, 2018), publishing op-eds (escalona, 2018), writing articles (smith, 2018), or being interviewed by major media outlets (molloy, 2018). disability culture, facilitated by social media platforms, provides diverse nuanced narratives in opposition to campaigners who focus on harm of plastic straws on marine life. how we inhabit and present our bodyminds in public spaces actively resists the ableism of today and the future. having our own space to connect, share, and find power in one another has been, dare i say it, inspirational (e.g., cortland, 2018). figure 2. screenshot from a tweet showing a young white man, matt cortland (user name medicaidmatthew, esq.), drinking out of a glass mug with a straw with the words 6 wong catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) #suckitableism beneath in rainbow glittery colors. shared with permission by user. the bendy plastic straw was invented by joseph b. friedman, who saw his daughter struggle drinking her milkshake (real, 2018). with the advent of bendy plastic straws, “his first sale didn't go to a restaurant, but rather to a hospital, where glass tubes still ruled. nurses realized that bendy straws could help bed-ridden patients drink while lying down” (thompson, 2011, para. 9). the plastic bendy straw may have its origin in hospitals, but then it went mainstream as plastic straws became available in many establishments. with the bans, there is a return to medicalizing these aids. the current language in san francisco’s food service waste reduction ordinance (city and county of san francisco, 2018) cites “medical needs” in their exemption from banning plastic straws. the power dynamic shifts from a consumer who has access to a straw as they would a napkin or fork to a situation where individuals must disclose a need of some sort when requesting one with wait staff or bartenders who become de facto gatekeepers of access. the san francisco ordinance passed with little outreach or consultation with the disability community, resulting in two stakeholder meetings and a follow-up call after it passed for “input” on an amendment to their opaque exemption (san francisco department of the environment, n.d.). this is the opposite of “nothing about us, without us,” a phrase used by disability rights activists that highlights the exclusion of disabled people in decision making, representation, and participation in society. 7 wong catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) figure 3. environmentalism as performative wokeness. an asian american woman wearing a black jacket, wearing a bipap mask over her nose, and holding a paper coffee cup with a straw at her mouth. on the right, an illustration of a cup in black with a bendable straw with text that reads, “shove your performative environmental wokeness in a cup and suck on it with a straw. #suckitableism #strawban @sfdirewolf.” suggestions by well-meaning lovers of the earth that disabled people can afford to stock up on plastic straws for their own use, bring and clean their own reusable straws when they are out, or rely on the kindness of others for assistance are oblivious to the lived intersections of class, poverty, and disability. environmentalism that shames disabled people is ableist and exclusionary (bynoe, 2018). this type of environmentalism is not a movement that brings people and marginalized communities together in collective action. plastic straw bans are neither environmental or disability justice. eighteen years after the americans with disabilities act (1990), i see these bans as regressive, not progressive; they place additional hurdles for people with disabilities to participate in society like everyone else (wong, 2018). the withholding and hiding of plastic straws in public spaces sends a message that people who use them are deviant consumers marked with a number of moralistic labels (e.g., wasteful, turtle killer, irresponsible). its aim is to make our worlds smaller and less accessible. on eugenics and the conservation of disability, rosemarie garland-thomson (2018) writes, “the shape of the shared material world we design, build and use together both expresses and determines who inhabits it now and in the future and 8 wong catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) how we use it to exercise the duties and privileges of belonging within that world” (para. 7). the cripping of science, technology, and culture is an integral in creating inclusive worlds by reasserting/claiming space, amplifying the visibility of disabled people, and presenting alternate ways of being to the “normate” masses (garland-thompson, 1996). figure 4. fuck the #strawban. screenshot from a tweet by erin hawley @geekygimp on 8:27, august 25, 2018, “i noticed a thing while on vacation. every time i took my bendable, plastic straw out in public, i momentarily felt like people were judging me. no one should have to feel uncomfortable about using assistive tools to live. so, again, fuck the #strawban, and #suckitableism.” abled supremacy continues to exert its power, disciplining disabled bodies, social spaces, and public discourse (hawley, 2018). it is a continual struggle to be seen, taken seriously, and accepted as an organic part of the social landscape. we are always in the process of repairing and building what writer nancy mairs (1997) calls a “habitable world,” a world where disabled bodyminds are wanted and valued by society. what gives 9 wong catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) me hope (and life) is knowing i am not alone and that our stories will build a better world. the questions i continue to ponder are who will tell our stories and who will learn from our crip wisdom? acknowledgements the author would like to thank the numerous disabled people who shared their wisdom and expertise about ableism, accessibility, and environmentalism online and locally. references americans with disabilities act of 1990, pub. l. no. 101-336, 104 stat. 328 (1990). archie, a., & smith, e. (2018, july 7). seattle becomes the latest city to ban plastic straws and utensils. cnn. retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/02/us/seattle-bans-plastic-straws-andutensils/index.html barbarin, i. (2018, july 17). the #strawban is the latest policy abled allies are choking on. crutches & spice. retrieved from https://crutchesandspice.com/2018/07/17/the-strawban-is-the-latestpolicy-abled-allies-are-choking-on/ bynoe, s. (2018, august 16). straw bans suck! asparagus. retrieved from https://medium.com/asparagus-magazine/straw-bans-suck440f991f7c8b city and county of san francisco. (2018, july 10). food service waste reduction ordinance. retrieved from https://sfgov.legistar.com/view.ashx?m=f&id=6356679&guid=90a8c8b 7-b89e-430d-8113-577439c4bb67 clement, j. [@ajemaineclement]. (2018, july 19). but it only takes one to choke a bird. there are many possible solutions and the thought people 10 wong catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) put into fighting and arguing could be put towards finding the simplest one [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/ajemaineclement/status/1020129927990071296 cortland, m. [@mattbc]. (2018, july 22). #suckitableism #strawban [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/mattbc/status/1021204329183744000 escalona, d. (2018, july 11). think about the disabled before banning straws. chicago tribune. retrieved from http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-perspecstraw-plastic-ban-hurts-disabled-environment-0723-story.html garland-thomson, r. (1996). extraordinary bodies: figuring physical disability in american culture and literature. new york, ny: columbia university press. garland-thomson, r. (2018, march 22). a habitable world: eugenics and the conservation of disability. abc religion and ethics. retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2018/03/22/4820502.htm hamraie, a. (2015). cripping feminist technoscience. hypatia, 30(1), 307313. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12124 hawley, e. [@geekygimp]. (2018, august 25). i noticed a thing while on vacation. every time i took my bendable, plastic straw out in public, i momentarily felt like people were judging me. no one should have to feel uncomfortable about using assistive tools to live. so, again, fuck the #strawban, and #suckitableism [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/geekygimp/status/1033556562483265536 ho, v. (2018, august 25). “people need them”: the trouble with the movement to ban plastic straws. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/25/plastic-straw-bancalifornia-people-with-disabilities?cmp=twt_gu ives, d. (2017, october 19). the gateway plastic. global wildlife conservation. retrieved from https://www.globalwildlife.org/2017/10/19/the-gateway-plastic/ mairs, n. (1997). waist-high in the world: a life among the nondisabled. boston, ma: beacon press. 11 wong catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) molloy, p. (2018, july 2). there's an unexpected downfall to banning plastic straws: here's what to consider. upworthy. retrieved from https://www.upworthy.com/there-s-an-unexpected-downfall-to-banningplastic-straws-here-s-what-to-consider packwood, s. [@sarahbreannep]. (2018, may 21). types of reusable straws and risks they pose for a variety of disabled people. #strawban [image description in thread] [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/_sbsmith/status/998632056241307649 pepper mill, enamelled. [@godofthegallows] (2018, july 19). no it isn't actually single use plastic straws account for 0.003 percent of non recyclable waste. why is it that environmental campaigns disenfranchise the disabled but never address corporatal pollution [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/godofthegallows/status/1020128397761175552 real, s. (2018, february 2). last straws: inventing the modern “drinking tube” & flexible “bendy straw.” 99% invisible. retrieved from https://99percentinvisible.org/article/last-straws-inventing-moderndrinking-tube-flexible-bendy-straw/ rodriguez-cayro, k. (2018, august 17). 7 people share why they’re against plastic straw bans. bustle. retrieved from https://www.bustle.com/p/7-people-share-why-theyre-against-plasticstraw-bans-9962658 san francisco department of the environment. (n.d.). stakeholder discussion on plastic straws and the disability community. eventbrite. retrieved from https://www.eventbrite.com/e/stakeholder-discussion-onplastic-straws-and-the-disability-community-registration-49117248011# smith, s.e. (2018, july 10). valuable resources: the ableist fight over plastic straws. bitch media. retrieved from https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/the-straw-ban-harms-disabled-people starbucks. (2018, july 9). starbucks to eliminate plastic straws globally by 2020. starbucks newsroom. retrieved from https://news.starbucks.com/press-releases/starbucks-to-eliminateplastic-straws-globally-by-2020 12 wong catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) thompson, d. (2011, november 22). the amazing history and the strange invention of the bendy straw. the atlantic. retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/the-amazinghistory-and-the-strange-invention-of-the-bendy-straw/248923/ wong, a. (2018, july 19). the last straw. eater. retrieved from https://www.eater.com/2018/7/19/17586742/plastic-straw-bandisabilities bio alice wong is the founder and director of the disability visibility project, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture. you can find her on twitter: @sfdirewolf for more: https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/ microsoft word 77065-1-11_sheppard.docx sheppard, a. (2019). staging bodies, performing ramps: cultural, aesthetic disability technoscience. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-12. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sheppard, a. 2019. | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical commentary staging bodies, performing ramps: cultural-aesthetic disability technoscience alice sheppard artist, academic, activist wheelchairdancer@gmail.com i am a disabled dancer and choreographer; i dance in a wheelchair, in a wheelchair with crutches, and without either. interpreting disability as a creative aesthetic allows me to work the tension between impairmentspecific movement vocabularies and mainstream dance techniques. my practice frequently investigates connections between movement and the visual arts. sometimes, my dances address western canonical artists. sometimes, i feature the community conversations and traditions of disabled artists/artists of color. in all my work, technology—bodily, access, digital, architectural—becomes a provocation that i believe should maximize the expression of impairment not normalize, erase, or overcome what designers see as limitations. in many regards, my solo and group practices are easily recognized as instances of what aimi hamraie and kelly fritsch (2019) define in the introduction to this issue as crip technoscience. my collaborative of disabled artists, kinetic light, features disabled people in lead creative positions; our sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 commitment to disability culture and aesthetics is a defining principle. in my solo practice and in my work with kinetic light, access, in all its complexities, is an aesthetic in the work itself as well as a way of building a relationship with our audience. it is an invitation to relationship, not a checklist of things to be done. we immerse ourselves in the tensions of complex accessibility and the ongoing necessity of our own learning, while recognizing the potential for field-wide change and accepting the ramifications of pushing such work forward in the field of dance. i believe in the ideals of disability justice, as articulated by patty berne, mia mingus, and the sins invalid collective. that said, i find myself reluctant to commit unreservedly to crip technoscience as a name for what i do. my work engages technology, but it also is dedicated to intersectional disability culture and aesthetics. i think of cultural-aesthetic technoscience as a way of naming a practice that is rooted in and speaks to the ideas and work of other disabled culture makers. i make art where disability, in its many manifestations, is sometimes the content and always the aesthetic. i see technology not as a device or product, but as a body of knowledge (scientia) and a way of producing, developing, sharing, and accessing it (techne) that are held both individually and in community. this retro scholarly move of using definitions decenters acknowledged academic fields of science and technology, places disability culture and aesthetics in the center of scholarly conversations about access, disability identity, politics, and technology, and opens a space for the expert embodied cultural and aesthetic wisdoms that technoscience all too frequently moves to the margins.1 for this essay, i choose a presentation of two moving pictures: one on technology and embodiment and the other on dance, access, and architecture. alison kafer (personal communication, august 30, 2018) challenges me to consider the form of this essay, provoking me to view disability, race, and gender as lenses on linear, purposeful academic argument. the passage from one section to the other is a conceptual bridge: a discussion of the gif, a literal moving image, as an access sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 practice in itself. this transition functions as a liminal space, a place where the values of sections one and two can be examined. bodies figure 1. alice sheppard in where good souls fear. alice sheppard, seated in her wheelchair, holds two forearm crutches in a cross in front of her body. her spine arches as she looks behind herself. the photo is a mirror reflection. as alice looks back, her crutches seem to disappear into each other in a seamless touchpoint. photo credit: lisa niedermeyer. in where good souls fear, i dance in my chair with forearm crutches, with crutches and on my knees, and without any body technologies. i see all three as unified, working bodies, responsive to the built environment, mutable over time, and reconfigurable at my choreographic whim.2 the crutch and chair form is clearly an artistically designed body— emerging from disability culture and aesthetics—not because no one is born into a chair and crutches, but because in the world of impairment functional sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 design no one needs both kinds of mobility technologies at once. in fact, this doubling of technology rather denies its functional purpose in that it significantly restricts movement. in this form, mine is a disabled body disarticulated from medical need. countering the normative and medicalized understanding of the relationships between design, technology, and movement, this body is supplicant only to desire and a simultaneous urge to revel in the excess of disability. my crutches are superb technical design—carbon fiber, ergonomic, and with rotating articulating feet. to sidestep the dichotomy of “crutch” as a negative figurative support and “crutch” as positive movement enabler, i made them functionally useless—for walking—by making them too short to stand up “straight.” this choreographic use also inhibits the prescribed function of both my wheelchair (arms are in crutches: pushing is impossible) and my crutches (body is in chair: no need to walk, plus crutches are the wrong size).3 however, the reduced size and new embodiment drive artistic expression: i use the crutches as outriggers, balance points, and percussion instruments. my wheelchair becomes a spinning piece of architecture rather than a device for locomotion, and my body reveals a new and complex form. the unexpectedness of my appearance is a provocation that emphasizes sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 the movement of my wheels and extends my fleshly lines. figure 2. alice sheppard in where good souls fear. alice sheppard, holding two forearm crutches, swings her arms in large circles and drums the casters of her wheelchair fiercely into the ground. then, she uses the crutches to balance first to one side then on the other. her arms make large diagonal shapes in the air. gif credit: lisa niedermeyer. [ for gif please see html version of this article.] the alien use of crutch technology caused one audience member to approach me after a performance saying that i should be in a movie as a “trained assassin.” i must have looked confused; she continued, explaining that i handled “those pipes so well.” the “pipes,” i responded, were in fact crutches. unshaken, she replied that she would “pay to see a movie in which [i] play a trained assassin.” as i mull over the semantic and functional distance between “crutch” as prop or support technology and “crutch” as initiator of movement, i recognize that my work is another manifestation of the disability culture and history that are rooted in the generative gap between literal and figurative meaning. the popular use of crutch is always negative, suggesting that the sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 thing being used as a crutch is unnecessary or undesirable. i open my body to this desire, finding that the length of my arms with crutches feels integrated, dare i even say “normal” to me. because i do not use them for support, my crutches become wings that interpret the sensation of flight. to this particular viewer, however, the length of my arms is alienating; my wingspan extends over nine feet into the air.4 these cannot be arms. their length contravenes the laws of nature. my crutches become a different technology: her killer pipes. access, aesthetics, sharing embedded in this essay are two gifs or animated images. on social media, gifs are pithy, visual ways of expressing an emotional reaction. in my practice, gifs have become an essential part of our accessible communication. lisa niedermeyer is a producer for my work and a creative conversation partner. in one of her roles, she thinks about storytelling: how do we accessibly share the story of my work and not just the work itself? the mainstream dance world often communicates, inaccessibly, in video. this is, in part, a function of the difficulties of creating adequate description for dance and, in part, a consequence of a lack of awareness around access practices such as description. lisa has begun using gif files as a critical storytelling device. gifs emerge from a keen understanding of the core of an expression and are edited to communicate its essence, if not its full detail. lisa (personal communication, october 26, 2018) writes, selecting and describing an animated image (gif) rather than a still image comes from the desire to illustrate the essential kinetics in alice's dancing that can be missed entirely if we don't have the imagination to fill in what happens just before and after a photographed moment. moving beyond the captured moment is essential for opening both non-disabled and disabled people beyond their previous experiences of wheeled movement. selecting and sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 describing an animated image (gif) rather than a video excerpt is very much about choosing a movement idea that can be illustrated verbally and visually with equity. trying to describe a thirty-second dance clip that has multiple edits in it is difficult: there is a lot of visual information to convey. an animated gif asks us to be intentional about what we select as the most relevant part of the movement. i enjoy the prompts: what moments of the choreography stick with you long after the experience of the dance? what movements would the audience want to replay or re-taste in their minds and bodies? a gif on repeat makes sense to me. i listen to audience members for when they make sounds in response to certain movements and note those as possible animated images. someday, i imagine augmented reality excerpts of movement, so we can relate to choreography taking place in front of us at our own scale of body size. access, performing, stages named by sara hendren (n.d.) as one of galileo’s simple machines (the inclined plane), the ramp is an overlooked technology now often dedicated to facilitating the transition between one level and the next without the use of a step. richly present in architecture from ancient greece to twentieth century modern, interior and exterior ramps gracefully circled buildings and smoothed the passage from one part of a building to another…until they became accessibility ramps, designed for wheelchair users. suddenly, these desirable, central architectural features were hidden behind walls, moved to the back of buildings, fabricated cheaply without much regard for the equality of user experience, and designed with little or no attention to aesthetics or pleasure of use. yes, they ensured our entrances and exits, but they isolated us, denied us the company of our lovers and friends, and robbed us of the very pleasures that wheels offer: the joy of the freedom of a descent and pleasure in the labor of ascent.5 sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 ramps oriented to compliance with the americans with disabilities act (ada) are not the architectural ramps of the oscar niemeyer niterói contemporary art museum, the solomon r. guggenheim museum, le corbusier’s houses, james stirling’s neue staatsgalerie, grand central station, etc. like so many other wheelchair users, i am frustrated with the access ramp.6 architectural ramps release such pleasurable movement for me; access ramps are almost uniformly utterly unpleasant. i longed to soar in dance on a ramp that would give me movement pleasure. what if desire became a design that maximized the expression of impairment? could cultural-aesthetic disability technoscience sculpt a ramp? in my work, access and art are less about accessibility for audience and artist, but about access as art and aesthetic. the set for descent, an evening-length dance duet, transforms the access ramp into a work of art, demonstrating how kinetic light imagines access as aesthetic. my intellectual and political understandings of ramps and access informed my ideas for descent, but the act of yielding to movement desire created the art. when ada-compliance-oriented designers refused the project— wheelchair users would be unsafe, needed the protection of railings, could not use a ramp that was not an access ramp—sara hendren, yevgeniya zastavker, and a team of olin college students designed the sculptural ramp stage set. this ramp is not a “ramp.” the students designed for beauty and for the potential of wheeled movement. riotously and “aesthetically noncompliant with the ada,” as rosemarie garland-thompson (personal communication, july 30, 2016) puts it, this ramp is sensual, glorious, and inviting. as the descent ramp made its debut in new york, wheelchair users called it #rampporn: a ramp fantasy fulfilling every chair user’s dream, encouraging every ramp desire, seductive yet unattainable. one of the ironies of descent is that the ramp can be accessed only by people involved in the show. its inaccessibility strengthens its mystique and beauty; its beauty and rebelliousness hint at risk and danger. the scent of danger sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 makes the ramp irresistible. the ramp is inscrutable. figure 3. descent ramp works lights. dressed in shiny gray marley, the curvaceous descent ramp sits in a theater. overhead, rows of stage lights can be seen. a white projection screen is behind the ramp, and various black and purple mats are visible. without dancers and stage lights, the ramp gleams. photo credit: lisa niedermeyer. sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 figure 4. descent ramp animation gif. set against a black and white starscape, the descent ramp, a sculpture with sensual curves, sharp points, steep slope, and a platform, is lit in a sweeping diagonal of rocky terrain. beams of light ooze across its surface, delineating the borders of different areas of the ramp. light and projections by michael maag. gif credit: lisa niedermeyer. [ for gif please see html version of this article.] the very movement vocabulary of descent is created by the interaction of wheels, ramp, and physics of momentum. again, disability art emerges from the gap of literal and figurative. modern dancers repeatedly call the floor a partner, but the artistic reality of that fact usually does not manifest in their work. the descent ramp is an active partner in the dance: its slopes and curves render the dancers utterly vulnerable to gravity. the dancers use momentum and torque to create new lifts and moves; the ramp’s slopes teach us new techniques, challenging the “pedestrian” practice of wheeling on the flats, at once penetrating the sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 11 horizon/glass ceiling of wheeled movement for dancers and expanding our community’s knowledge of how wheels work.7 descent imagines the ramp as an art object immersed in disability culture rather than as a tool that serves or assists disabled people; it interprets disability culture as art, and the technologies of wheelchair and ramp become aesthetic in their own right. this is cultural-aesthetic disability technoscience. figure 5. descent: flying. set against a black and white starscape and the descent ramp, laurel lawson in her wheelchair balances on the footplate of alice sheppard’s wheelchair. lawson spreads her arms and looks down at alice; alice curves her arms and arches up towards laurel. photo credit: jay newman, courtesy peter britt arts and music festival. acknowledgements thank you, kinetic light. our work together inspires me. i would like to thank susan burch and alison kafer for their rigorous readings of early sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 12 drafts. thank you, aimi hamraie, for the generous invitation to contribute to this issue. notes 1 while my academic training is in medieval studies, my point here is not to assert the primacy of philology, but to allow etymology to make an intervention. that said, studying usage is an important part of my artistic practice: the gaps between contemporary usage, traces of historical record, morphology, and etymology often reveal critical insights that i then use to frame my movement. 2 where good souls fear and doors, my other piece in this form, are connected to disability dance, aesthetic, and cultural histories in particular through the work of lisa bufano (1972-2013). in one breath is an ocean for a wooden heart, bufano and sonsheree giles push the notion of prosthetic legs by dancing on four twenty-eight-inch wooden stilts. bufano describes the stilts as “tools,” but the dance reveals how tools become body. 3 responding to the life experience of sidestix company co-founder, amputee sarah doherty, the company’s marketing causally connects this “adaptive” “mobility enhancing” technology with “regain(ed) independence” (sidestix, n.d.). i wonder what they would make of my use. here, i also acknowledge the homeless man i saw in the snowy winter of 2005 making use of this dual technology. the ingenuity of his movement has stayed with me. 4 disability art makes great play with the notion of arm’s length: i think to mat fraser’s sealo and performance personas; to sunaura taylor’s self portrait with manatee; and to lezlie frye’s performances in heidi latsky’s gimp. doors and where good souls fear are part of this tradition. 5 i have been writing about my experience with ramps since 2006, but found clarity and community around the importance of equality of experience in linton (2006, pp. 172-193). descent is underpinned by this chapter, linton, s and von tippelskirch, c, (co-directors) (2014) invitation to dance, and our ongoing conversations. 6 as part of my work on descent, i held three twitter chats around the #rampfail; they reveal the deep unhappiness of the disability community as a whole (not just wheelchair users) with their daily ramp encounters. sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 13 7 pedestrian here is both ironic and a term of art in the dance world for contemporary movement practices that emphasize everyday “untrained” movement. i use it with keen awareness that while interest in “pedestrian” movement allowed disabled dancers to enter the studio, that interest also limits contemporary understandings of what disabled dancers can do. our untrained and, to the mainstream, untrainable bodies revealed new movement and possibilities that some dancers have eagerly welcomed. at the same time, this acceptance of everyday movement has led to the assumption that disabled dancers cannot be trained. i do not believe that disabled dancers cannot be trained; i believe the mainstream dance world has yet to perform the rigorous examination of its training principles and techniques that would enable a disabled dancer to succeed. references bufano, l. (2007). one breath is an ocean for a wooden heart. retrieved from http://www.lisabufano.com/work.php?page=woodenheart hendren, s. (n.d.). slope : intercept. abler [blog] https://ablersite.org/slope-intercept/ kinetic light. (n.d.). retrieved from https://kineticlight.org/ linton, s. (2006). my body politic: a memoir. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. linton, s., & von tippelskirch, c. (co-directors). (2014). invitation to dance [documentary film]. united states: kino lorber, inc. sidestix. (n.d.). our story. retrieved from https://www.sidestix.com/ourstory/ bio alice sheppard is the founder and artistic lead for kinetic light, a project based collaborative working at the intersections of architecture, dance, design, identity, and technology to show how mobility literal, physical, sheppard catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 14 and conceptual is fundamental to the conceptualization of civic life. an award-winning choreographer, alice creates movement that challenges conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies by intentionally engaging intersectional disability arts, culture and history. microsoft word lyons,parreñas,tamarkin.docx lyons, k.,parreñas j., and tamarkin, n. (2017). engagements with decolonization and decoloniality in and at the interfaces of sts. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, issue 3 (1), 1-47 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kristina lyons, juno parreñas and noah tamarkin, 2017| licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical perspectives engagements with decolonization and decoloniality in and at the interfaces of sts curated and introduced by kristina lyons, juno parreñas and noah tamarkin kristina lyons university of california, santa cruz krlyons@ucsc.edu juno salazar parreñas ohio state university junoparrenas@gmail.com noah tamarkin ohio state university university of the witwatersrand, johannesburg, south africa ntamarkin@gmail.com introduction this is not a manifesto, nor is it a prescriptive call for a new, decolonial, or decolonized science and technology studies (sts). instead, our critical perspectives in this issue are propositional offerings. we aim to provoke questions about how science and technology studies might intersect with decolonizing or decolonial practices and scholarship, and what kinds of 2 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) openings these intersections may or may not provide. we offer these reflections as invitations to think with us and to consider the worlds in which we live and work. they are entries into a conversation that, of course, does not start or end with us, but rather draws upon multiple intellectual genealogies and particular struggles and colonial histories. one intellectual genealogy that inspires some of us has been given the moniker of postcolonial science and technology studies. we find affinity in what warwick anderson emphasizes in his description of the work of helen verran (2001, 2002) and david turnbull (2000) as the “messy politics that emerge out of local performances of technoscience” (w. anderson, 2002, p. 650), and in the work of anna tsing (1993) as she disturbs ideas of centers and peripheries and shows politics in what could otherwise be analyzed through an overly narrow actor-network theory (w. anderson & adams, 2008). anne pollock and banu subramaniam (2016) and their special journal issue on feminist postcolonial sts also build on this thread in their efforts to think through the possibilities of justice in postcolonial technoscience. however, in the shared spirit of audre lorde’s (1984) perspective on the generative power of difference, we find that the sign of feminist postcolonial science and technology studies is not always capacious enough to include our commitments. in the worlds to which we are committed and in which we circulate, what is considered science or technoscience is far from stable, what justice would mean is neither certain nor predetermined, and what role the (postcolonial or colonial) nation-state plays is not always a centralized hegemony. working against colonialism, imperialism, and white heteropatriarchal supremacy takes many languages and vocabularies. theories of postcolonialism, decolonization, and decoloniality each offer different analytical and practical tools and challenges. all are grounded in particular historical conditions, spatial locations, colonial temporalities, intellectual legacies, political proposals, and contemporary geopolitics of knowledge that may share certain commonalities while also diverging in their interests. for us, the keywords to delineate are decolonization and 3 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) decoloniality. while these may appear to point to similar concerns about the ongoing legacies of colonization and efforts to think and do otherwise, these terms are not necessarily interchangeable and do not resonate in the same ways in different places and among different scholars, even among the three of us as coauthors of this introduction. decolonization is a concept that has become increasingly widespread and multivalent in scholarship and social movements alike and we in turn engage with it in diverse ways in the essays that follow. scholarly genealogies of decolonization inspire us to recognize the continuation of struggles for liberation, self-determination, and sovereignty following world war ii, contemporary iterations of coloniality and settler colonialism, and possibilities to imagine and incite otherwise (abdulgani, 1955; fanon, 1965, 1967; lugones, 2010; ngũgĩ wa, 1986; a. simpson, 2014; tallbear, 2013). for example, frantz fanon’s 1950s and 1960s inquiries into the psychological violence wrought by the identifications of the colonized with the colonizer and fanon’s embrace of violent, revolutionary struggle as a means of transforming and healing this foundational colonial violence have renewed relevance for scholars and activists working through what has and has not been achieved by postcolonial states and what other presents and futures might be possible. what is commonly regarded as science has, on the one hand, served as an arm of colonization and european political, cultural, and intellectual domination. on the other hand, it can offer a potential means of decolonization (smith, 1999). in this issue, noah tamarkin highlights one such example, in which dna tests get interpreted in different kinds of ways and by different kinds of communities. efforts by educational institutions to teach and foster indigenous languages like myaamia can be construed as another example (leonard, 2011; mosley-howard, baldwin, ironstrack, rousmaniere, & burke, 2016). yet another example is in the institutional work described by audra simpson to decolonize columbia university, which she discussed at a plenary of the 2016 national women’s studies association meeting in montreal. simpson’s 4 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) students have led a campaign to divest from fossil fuels and have held teach-ins on standing rock. additionally, students at columbia university’s native american council have compelled the university to recognize officially that it is built on lenape land. these are all crucial actions towards recognizing genocide, land theft, and their ongoing legacies. however, some question whether institutions of higher education can ever be decolonized, given that they are so firmly entrenched in hierarchical ways of knowing, as lesley green suggested at the 2016 society for the social studies of science meeting in barcelona. what decolonization could look like is not always self-evident, as juno salazar parreñas considers in this issue. as we think with contemporary decolonizing invocations, we also remain cognizant of decades of scholarship that positioned itself as anticolonial, in contrast to a postcolonial that is defined as a period of time following colonization instead of a time that indicates ongoing colonialism (b.r.o.g. anderson, 2005; hall, 1996; ileto, 1992; l.r. simpson, 2004). we recognize that there are multiple forms of colonization and that empires do not easily fall on a linear time scale of world history. rather, empires, with their differently aspirational forms of colonization and domination, were and are conversant across space and connective across time. for example, the qing empire drew upon aspects of the ottoman and portuguese empires (stoler, mcgranahan, & perdue, 2007). if we were to force a timeline of colonial models, we would too easily fall into the traps of world systems theory, with a eurocentric sense of time, linearity, and implicit ideas of progress that risks upholding european domination as a natural force with little resistance—which would be historically false (agard-jones, 2013; trouillot, 1995). another risk of such a timeline that centers european colonialism would be its potential to romanticize the precolonial or decolonization as devoid of oppression, which would ignore past and ongoing patriarchal hegemonies, as banu subramaniam suggests in this issue. during a specific historical juncture, as tania pérez-bustos and kristina lyons point out in their interventions, latin american and 5 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) diaspora-based scholars mainly located in the united states linked decoloniality in a triad with modernity and coloniality (castro-gómez, 2005) and also authored important concepts such as the “coloniality of power” (quijano, 2000). these scholars pull the horizon of debates on modernity back to the late fifteenth century, and extend them southward to take into account the colonial and imperial activities of southern european countries such as spain and portugal in the conquest of the americas and the role these processes played in the making of a capitalist world system. more recent north american conversations on decoloniality in settler-colonial contexts stress the consideration of socioecological relations and sovereignty not through forms of liberalism and multiculturalist inclusion, but through situated, land-based political struggles that may at times be incommensurable with social justice projects at large, including feminism (arvin, tuck, & morrill, 2013; tuck & yang, 2012). while much science-studies work has looked to the past to understand how we came to view science and technology as of the west and as rooted in colonial and imperial power, our purpose is to engage decoloniality and/or decolonization in and at the interfaces of science and technology studies. the idea of the interface is crucial. like marisol de la cadena and marianne e. lien et al. (2015), we enjoy teetering on the boundary, inside and outside sts, just as many of us enjoy the exchanges and political potential of cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary, and intersectional inquiry. the preposition in is crucial as well: we address ourselves here to ongoing conversations within sts in the hopes of continuing to push its boundaries. we began our conversation by engaging with a series of questions that emerged from the situated contexts where we live and work (haraway, 1988). we asked ourselves: what might the lens of decoloniality or decolonization render imaginable in the worlds and worldmaking processes we study? what term(s) speak to the worlds and the world-making relations with which we are concerned, and what tensions can be uncovered in the distinctions between these terms 6 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) (decolonization, decoloniality, and postcolonialism, for example)? finally, why (or why not) decolonization or decoloniality now, in relation to sts and its interfaces? the critical perspectives herein consider the utility and limitations of these terms as they each engage in spaces of scientific knowledge production and in other world-making projects. banu subramaniam’s intervention troubles any easy association between anticolonial rhetoric and liberatory policies by discussing the ways the actions and ideology of the hindu right appear to recolonize india while making promises of decolonization. similarly, noah tamarkin thinks through the historical complexities of lemba dna testing in south africa as a tool for enlisting science in the service of decolonizing goals and also a political object that could buttress apartheid oppression. juno salazar parreñas proposes that the project of orangutan rehabilitation on borneo opens up difficult questions about whose vision of liberation or independence comes to matter in decolonization. lesley green suggests that decoloniality begins with a transformation of how we think about what it is to know within the context of contemporary south african environmental management. kristina lyons shares ethnographic lessons learned with farmers in the colombian amazon to propose the conceptual and political importance of considering decolonizing enactments and versions of asymmetry, while tania pérez-bustos asks whether a certain idea of decoloniality used by academics in northern contexts may be reproducing a neocolonial geopolitics of knowledge. our intention is not to affirm that it is possible or even desirable to “decolonize sts,” but rather to explore how decolonial and/or decolonizing analytics and struggles may or may not take on relevance through different forms of engagement and how these analytics might inform our scholarship. thus, we attempt to bring together different experiences of colonialism, decolonization, and decoloniality that are rarely placed in discussion together to ask what may be learned from the exercise of doing so. 7 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) references abdulgani, r. (1955). asia-africa speaks from bandung. djakarta, indonesia: ministry of foreign affairs, republic of indonesia. agard-jones, v. (2013). bodies in the system. small axe, 17(3), 182-192. anderson, b.r.o.g. (2005). under three flags: anarchism and the anticolonial imagination. london, uk: verso. anderson, w. (2002). postcolonial technoscience. social studies of science, 32(5/6), 643–658. anderson, w., & adams, v. (2008). pramoedya’s chickens: postcolonial studies of technoscience. in e.j. hackett (ed.), the handbook of science and technology studies, 3rd ed. (pp. 181-204). cambridge, ma: mit press. arvin, m., tuck, e., & morrill, a. (2013). decolonizing feminism: challenging connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. feminist formations, 25(1), 8-34. castro-gómez, s. (2005). la poscolonialidad explicada a los niños. popayán, colombia: universidad del cauca. cadena, m. de la, lien, m.e., blaser, m., jensen, c.b., lea, t., morita, a., wiener, m.j., et al. (2015). anthropology and sts: generative interfaces, multiple locations. hau, 5(1), 437–475. fanon, f. (1965). the wretched of the earth (richard philcox, trans.). new york, ny: grove press. 8 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) fanon, f. (1967). a dying colonialism (haakon chevalier, trans.). new york, ny: grove press. hall, s. (1996). when was ‘the post-colonial’? thinking at the limit. in i. chambers & l. curti (eds.), the post-colonial question: common skies, divided horizons (pp. 242–260). london, uk: routledge. haraway, d.j. (1988). situated knowledges: the science question and the privilege of partial perspective. feminist studies, 14(3), 24. ileto, r. (1992). religion and anti-colonial movements. in n. tarling (ed.), the cambridge history of southeast asia (vol. 2, pp. 197–248). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. leonard, w.y. (2011). challenging “extinction” through modern miami language practices. american indian culture and research journal, 35(2), 135–160. lorde, a. (1984). sister outsider: essays and speeches. trumansburg, ny: crossing press. lugones, m. (2010). toward a decolonial feminism. hypatia, 25(4), 742– 759. mosley-howard, g. s., baldwin, d., ironstrack, g., rousmaniere, k., & burke, b. (2016). niila myaamia (i am miami). journal of college student retention: research, theory & practice, 17(4), 437–461. doi:10.1177/1521025115579249 ngũgĩ wa, t. (1986). decolonising the mind: the politics of language in african literature. london, uk: j. currey. pollock, a., & subramaniam, b. (2016). resisting power, retooling justice. science, technology & human values, 41(6). 9 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) quijano, a. (2000). coloniality of power, eurocentricism, and latin america. nepantla, 1(3), 533–577. simpson, a. (2014). mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, nc: duke university press. simpson, l.r. (2004). anticolonial strategies for the recovery and maintenance of indigenous knowledge. american indian quarterly, 28(3), 373–384. smith, l.t. (1999). decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. new york, ny: st. martin’s press. stoler, a. l., mcgranahan, c., & perdue, p.c. (2007). imperial formations. santa fe , nm: school for advanced research press; james currey. tallbear, k. (2013). native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. trouillot, m.-r. (1995). silencing the past: power and the production of history. boston, ma: beacon press. tsing, a.l. (1993). in the realm of the diamond queen: marginality in an out-of-the-way place. princeton, nj: princeton university press. tuck, e., & yang, k.w. (2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, 1(1), 1–40. turnbull, d. (2000). masons, tricksters and cartographers: comparative studies in the sociology of scientific and indigenous knowledge. amsterdam: harwood academic. 10 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) verran, h. (2001). science and an african logic. chicago, il: university of chicago press. verran, h. (2002). a postcolonial moment in science studies: alternative firing regimes of environmental scientists and aboriginal landowners. social studies of science, 32(5/6), 729–762. recolonizing india: troubling the anticolonial, decolonial, postcolonial banu subramaniam postcolonial sts has proved immensely useful in my work in understanding the trajectory of science in india. after its independence in 1947, india embarked on a path to modernity, grounding its hopes for the future in the promises of science and technology, industrialization being the mode to modernity. governments developed five-year and ten-year plans in creating large-scale infrastructure projects and industrial development. india invested in scientific research and centers, largely conceived and engaging with international networks in india’s quest for modernity, i.e., investing in institutions that promoted knowledge on and about “western” science and technology. postcolonial and decolonial scholars remind us that “western” science and technology is an overdetermined category, rendering invisible the transnational circulations of science. while this is undoubtedly true, it is also interesting that the practices of “science” in postcolonial india (prasad, 2014)— the various patents, innovations, and, more importantly, the narratives at the center of the science and technology imaginary—have always been located squarely in the west (goonatilake, 1984). postcolonial india has seen few new or novel discoveries and innovations developed for the indian context. i suspect these are narratives ripe for new interpretations, and an important site of analyses for postcolonial sts. i enter this discussion on postcolonialism and decolonialism 11 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) troubled by recent political developments in india. over the last three decades, we have witnessed a steady rise in religious nationalism, in particular hindu nationalism. drawing on the region’s past, hindu nationalism reframes this past as decidedly “hindu” and grounds its jingoistic appeals to reimagine india as a “hindu” nation for hindu people. the rhetoric of hindu nationalists is decidedly anticolonial. they contend that colonialism and various colonial powers have erased the contributions of an ancient vedic civilization and decimated the immense science and technological capacities of india. hindu nationalists are equally critical of the postcolonial and secular state, which they feel has ignored india’s ancient legacies. india, they argue, must throw away these colonial shackles, reinvigorate itself by taking pride in its past, and reimagine itself as a science and technological superpower. in particular, hindu nationalists claim western science as their own, as an outgrowth of ancient vedic science and technologies. thus, to religious nationalists, india’s past and present, science and religion, modernity and orthodoxy blend effortlessly into a coherent ideology for a modern hindu nation. a steady rise of hindu nationalism over the decades finally saw the bharatiya janata party (bjp) come to sole power in the elections in 2014. the prime minister, narendra modi, ran on a platform of “development” nationalism (express tribune, 2014, 7 april). in particular, the development platform has gone hand in hand with a neoliberal platform of an extractive economy, emphasizing privatization. characterizing this government on the postcolonial/decolonial axis is difficult, since their practices and rhetoric align with neither. it may be more accurate to talk of the bjp as espousing a decolonizing vision rather than a decolonial one. its rhetoric promises to take india out of its colonial past into a modern and global future of a hindu india. while its vision and rhetoric are decidedly anticolonial and claims to have the goal of decolonizing india, they are perhaps best understood as recolonizing. for example, the government has embraced extractive mining technologies, high-input agriculture, and industrialization alongside a robust nuclear weapons program. indeed, it was the past coalition 12 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) government headed by the hindu right that tested nuclear fission in pokhran in 1998. in contrast, there has been little public investment in health care, education, or poverty reduction. the environmental consequences of development have been largely ignored. we have also seen a wholesale revival in narratives of a sophisticated, modern, ancient india with superior science and technological capabilities. these claims of modern technology in ancient india are not a revival of new epistemologies or ontologies of science, or even a challenge of western science. rather, they are a wholesale embrace of western science as hindu science. these include claims that modern practices of surrogacy, plastic surgery, genomics, evolution, atomic physics, air travel, chemistry, architecture, fluid dynamics, geology, botany, and zoology have their roots in the puranas and vedas. these claims have been repeated by members of the hindu right (including the prime minister), as well as other party members and government officials. further, we have seen the revival of many purported ancient sciences such as numerology, astrology, yoga, and vaastushastra as new consumerist technologies. this growth appears alongside the rise of numerous sadhus and god men/women, each of who embraces science and technology in various capacities in their ashrams (green technology, green agriculture, patenting techniques of meditation and yoga) as the new sites of hindu modernity (kumar, 2013). as always, the embrace of modern science/technology comes alongside regressive gender and caste politics. hateful rhetoric and violence against religious minorities have increased at an alarming rate. the rhetoric of modesty for women, the need to protect hindu women, and an ideological vision that puts women back in the home have flourished. recently, a politician repeated the long-enduring suggestion of asking women to dress modestly in order not to invite rape. the government continues to support the colonial-era laws of indian penal code 377, which criminalizes sexual acts that are “against the order of nature”; these laws are used to harass, intimidate, and brutalize nonheteronormative sexual subjects. the government has also sought to 13 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) abolish commercial surrogacy for anyone who is not a member of a heterosexual married couple from india (the hindu, 26 august). despite the use of anticolonial rhetoric and the promises of decolonization, the actions and ideology of the hindu right appear instead to recolonize india, contrary to any sense of liberatory politics. indeed, the reality on the ground promotes colonial-era laws. victorian visions of sexuality are reinscribed in the name of hindu modernity. india offers a sobering account of certain kinds of logics of decolonization. only a feminist and antiracist politics allows us to see the dangers of such a vision. references agence france-presse. (2014, april 7). india’s modi pledges development with hindu nationalism. express tribune (pakistan). retrieved from https://tribune.com.pk/story/692440/indias-modi-pledges-developmentwith-hindu-nationalism goonatilake, s. (1984). aborted discovery: science and creativity in the third world. london, uk: zed books. kumar, a. (2013, september 15). no business, like god business: india’s godmen find spirituality to be profitable. dna india. retrieved from http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report-no-business-like-god-businessindia-s-godmen-find-spirituality-to-be-profitable-1888934 prasad, a. (2014). imperial technoscience: transnational histories of mri in the united states, britain, and india. cambridge: mit press surrogacy bill gets the cabinet nod. (2016, august 26). the hindu. retrieved from http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/surrogacy-billgets-the-cabinet-nod/article14591267.ece 14 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) genetic ancestry and decolonizing possibilities noah tamarkin i ground my approach to potential decolonizing possibilities in relation to genetic ancestry in my research with lemba people. the lemba are black south africans who became internationally known as “black jews” after they participated in genetic ancestry studies in the 1980s and 1990s that aimed to test whether their oral history of descent from jews could be genetically substantiated. in my research, i focus on three questions: how and why did genetic ancestry become imaginable and desirable for lemba people? how does dna matter socially and politically? and how might the answer to that question be different if we approach lemba people as producers of genetic knowledge rather than simply as research subjects who are caught up in the desires and politics of geneticists? at the heart of my research, then, is a shift in perspective that i think raises important questions about decolonization in relation to science and technology and also potentially in relation to science and technology studies. there is much to be said about the colonial, postcolonial, and potentially decolonizing politics of genetic and genomic research in south africa. for example, some have analyzed south african genomic research in relation to colonial histories and both established and emergent forms of identity and belonging (bystrom, 2009; erasmus, 2013; schramm, 2016). south african geneticists have also considered colonial and apartheid legacies as they have debated the potential benefits and challenges of postapartheid south african genomics projects that aim to more ethically obtain and use south african genetic samples to produce research that can benefit south africans (de vries and pepper, 2012; hardy et al., 2008; ramsay, 2014; slabbert & pepper, 2010; soodyall, 2003). others working in science and technology studies have considered the extent to which geneticists’ claims that a postcolonial, postapartheid genomics characterized by robust community involvement, informed consent, and espoused antiracism might be transformative or even possible (benjamin 2009, foster 2016). going 15 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) forward, these debates and discussions will necessarily be informed by new ethical guidelines published by the south african san institute that are addressed directly to potential researchers (including geneticists) to govern any future proposed research with san people, who have been the research subjects of many past genetic studies: these guidelines are also an opening through which to imagine decolonizing possibilities (south african san institute, 2017). but my focus on former research subjects, rather than on ideal futures or on geneticists or genetic discourses, frames south african genetics differently. i argue that genetic studies are not the culmination of the meaning of dna but rather, simply, one starting point; so by extension, it is the motivations and actions of research subjects, as much as or more so than those of scientists, that might help us to analyze the relation between genetics and decolonization. so why did lemba people decide to participate in genetic ancestry studies? from the early twentieth century and perhaps earlier, they had struggled to be known as ethnically distinct from the venda and pedi people among whom they lived. these identity-based struggles became more consequential under apartheid policies that began in the 1950s. lemba people, like all black south africans, were forced to carry identity passbooks, and in addition to labeling their race, these passbooks also required them to define themselves ethnically as either venda or northern sotho—lemba was not a possible option. these ethnic labels were also linked to local structures of power and territory in the form of tribal authorities, chieftaincies, and bantustan homelands. the apartheid state considered these homelands to be self-governing and independent, but in reality they were a means of denying black south africans citizenship rights while also dividing them based on ethnicity and subjecting them to leaders they did not choose. this violently oppressed all black south africans, but lemba people additionally experienced these policies as erasure. no lemba chiefs were recognized by the apartheid government, they had no recognized tribal authorities, and they were assigned to homelands defined by ethnic labels that they did not claim. beginning in 16 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) the 1980s, when they were first asked to be part of genetic ancestry research, lemba leaders saw dna as a possible method through which to scientifically substantiate their ethnic difference and to potentially gain recognition and ethnically defined authority and territory (tamarkin, 2011, 2014). if we think about decolonization as a process through which colonized people and places move towards forms of sovereignty, then we might read lemba genetics as a decolonizing science or, in other words, a project of enlisting science in the service of decolonizing goals. but it is not that simple. in the larger context of 1980s and 1990s south african politics, to seek ethnic recognition and ethnically defined territory was to accept the logic of apartheid oppression while others were busy burning passbooks, joining banned political parties, and arming themselves in efforts to bring down the colonial system that lemba dna, as a political object, could only buttress. these politics, of course, were not mutually exclusive. many lemba people were in fact involved in these forms of antiapartheid action and did not necessarily see lemba ethnic recognition as antithetical to their goals of undermining the apartheid state and ending apartheid policies: they were able to hold these contradictions and pursue both strategies simultaneously. more complex still is how to think about the meaning of lemba dna in the postapartheid present. in recent decades, lemba leaders have continued the same struggles for recognition and territory that they, and in some cases their parents and grandparents, had enacted against the former apartheid state, now against a postcolonial state. this postcolonial state recognizes an ideal of generalized multiculturalism paired with nonracialism, rather than rights and recognition tied to ethnic difference. it is also a target of new student-led social movements that explicitly call themselves decolonial and argue that the statue of cecil rhodes must fall, university fees must fall, and jacob zuma—the current south african president—must fall.1 when lemba people use dna to petition a postcolonial state, how might they envision decolonization, and how might that be understood in 17 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) relation to others’ decolonial goals? i think that we cannot speak of decolonizing science and technology without reference to other invocations of decolonizing and/or decolonial politics that exist in the same times and places, particularly if we envision science and technology as situated, dynamic, and contextual. i’m opening up these complications in thinking through lemba dna to suggest that the questions about decolonization and science and technology may not be answerable—and that may be part of the point. there is a distinction here between the potential relation of who or what we study to the decolonization of science and technology (and also to other forms of decolonizing politics that may not have anything explicitly to do with science and technology), and the potential of our work to further some sort of decolonizing politics alongside with who or what we study, or in relation to the intellectual projects that constitute science and technology studies. i’m not comfortable diagnosing the extent to which one might be able to analyze lemba dna as part of a decolonizing project, but i do think that a shift in focus from geneticists to research subjects can potentially be a decolonizing move in three ways. first, it affirms the knowledge practices of marginalized people who are engaged in a project of self-determination. second, it asserts that analyzing scientific practice is inseparable from colonial, postcolonial, and decolonizing politics. third, it opens up the possibility for sts scholars, and potentially also geneticists, to move away from scientist/nonscientist and expert/nonexpert binaries when thinking about the source, content, and meaning of scientific knowledge. references benjamin, r. (2009). a lab of their own: genomic sovereignty as postcolonial science policy. policy and society, 28(4), 341–355. bystrom, k. (2009). the dna of the democratic south africa: ancestral 18 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) maps, family trees, genealogical fictions. journal of southern african studies, 35(1), 223–235. de vries, j., & m. pepper, (2012). genomic sovereignty and the african promise: mining the african genome for the benefit of africa. journal of medical ethics, 38(8), 474–478. erasmus, z. (2013). throwing the genes: a renewed biological imaginary of “race,” place and identification. theoria, 136(60), 38–53. foster, l.a. (2016). a postapartheid genome: genetic ancestry testing and belonging in south africa. science, technology and human values, 41(6), 1015–1036. hardy, b., séguin, b., ramesar, r., singer, p.a., & daar, a.s. (2008). south africa: from species cradle to genomic applications. nature reviews genetics—genomic medicine in developing countries, 2008(1), s19–s23. ngcaweni, w. (2016, september 30). the abcs of the decolonial paradigm of fallism. daily vox. retrieved from https://www.thedailyvox.co.za/wandile-ngcaweni-revisiting-abcsdecolonial-paradigm-fallism ramsay, m., de vries, j., soodyall, h., norris, s.a., & sankoh, o. (2014). ethical issues in genomic research on the african continent: experiences and challenges to ethics review committees. human genomics, 8(15), 1– 6. schramm, k. (2016). casts, bones and dna: interrogating the relationship between science and postcolonial indigeneity in contemporary south africa. anthropology southern africa, 39(2), 1–14. 19 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) slabbert, m., & pepper, m.s. (2010). “a room of our own?” legal lacunae regarding genomic sovereignty in south africa. tydskrif vir hedendaagse romeins-hollandse reg (journal of contemporary roman-dutch law), 73(1), 432–450. soodyall, h. (2003). reflections and prospects for anthropological genetics in south africa. in a.h. goodman, d. heath, & s.m. lindee (eds.), genetic nature/culture: anthropology and science beyond the twoculture divide (pp. 200–216), berkeley, ca: university of california press. south african san institute (2017). san code of research ethics. retrieved from http://trust-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/sancode-of-research-ethics-booklet-final.pdf tamarkin, n. (2011). religion as race, recognition as democracy. annals of the american academy of political and social science, 637(1), 148– 164. tamarkin, n. (2014). genetic diaspora: producing knowledge of genes and jews in rural south africa. cultural anthropology, 29(3), 552–574. orangutan rehabilitation as an experimental project of decolonization juno salazar parreñas the project of orangutan rehabilitation is a project of decolonization, both in the historical and contemporary senses of the term. rehabilitation began in 1956 when the forestry department of the british crown colony of sarawak started sending orphaned orangutans to the home of the curator of the sarawak museum. barbara harrisson, a museum volunteer who had divorced her german forester husband and then married the last british colonial-era curator, took on the project.2 she aspired to find an alternative to what she perceived as two impossibilities. on one hand, it 20 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) was impossible to return orangutan infants to the wild. logging decimated their habitats and they would likely die without their mothers.3 on the other hand, harrisson was unwilling to send them to old imperial zoos built in the nineteenth century, like the london zoo. she thus experimented with a third way: having them live independently with minimal support—a kind of independence that could carry on despite her absence. this particular experiment of fostering independence from afar was contemporaneous to active debate about political decolonization. neighboring indonesia, had hosted the asian-african conference the previous year in bantung, which aimed to represent the interests of the third world against colonialism in all of its manifestations (abdulgani, 1955; tsing, 2005). this was a decade after indonesia became the first nation to gain independence violently in the twentieth century (steedly, 2013). across the south china sea, communists in the british colony of malaya were actively fighting the “anti-british national liberation war,” otherwise known as the malayan emergency. that war became an example of the brutality of liberal warfare, with its use of carcinogenic herbicides, forced resettlement, and indefinite intention (khalili, 2013). sarawak’s official decolonization in 1963 meant incorporation into a new nation-state, malaysia, a plan hatched by the prime ministers of britain and malaya once war in malaya ended (leigh, 1974). the same tactics of liberal warfare used in malaya were applied in sarawak immediately after official decolonization (yong, 2013). harrisson’s experiment occurred at the peripheries of the colonial state, as revealed in her correspondence with the department of forestry, as well as at the peripheries of modern biology (as her memoir attests through its description of force-feeding infant orangutans with glass pipettes), and in the space of the colonial domicile, which was home to both of the harrissons, their malay housekeeper, and bidai, a young selako man who was the son of a shaman and a friend of the harrissons (harrisson, 1962).4 bidai lived with the harrissons to learn modern ways of living; ironically, he did so by teaching orphaned orangutans semi-wild 21 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) behaviors. this was decolonization in the historical sense: a self-professed british colonial actively experimented with instilling freedom for indigenous sarawakians while knowing that colonialism was reaching its end in the 1950s and 1960s. decolonization, historically, was about the anticipated end of direct colonial intervention. how that governance would end— through violent uprising, diplomacy, or a combination thereof—was unclear. what was clear was that the state of arrested autonomy in sarawak was untenable (parreñas, in press).5 when i did ethnographic research from 2008 to 2010, i saw how the older colonial aspiration for orangutans’ independence had remained a future aspiration. yet in this recent past, the actors are different. a private-public partnership between the branch of the forestry department that was privatized in the late 1990s and a british commercial volunteering company has replaced the efforts of colonial bureaucracies. people, mostly british women, pay thousands of dollars to volunteer by assisting sarawakian subcontracted workers (parreñas, 2012). the concerns of displaced wildlife continue to be as peripheral to the postcolonial state as they were to its predecessor. one small manifestation of this is that the staff has lacked a veterinarian since the 1990s. postcolonial institutions that still carry colonial legacies are responsible for orangutan rehabilitation, yet i believe there is a theory and practice of decolonization at stake here, especially when we turn to the way subcontractors regard their orangutan charges. the purpose of orangutan rehabilitation, for caretakers like nadim and layang, is to foster independence and mutual vulnerability with their charges who are acclimated to humans. the idea of independence is conveyed by the malay (and sarawakian malay) word bebas. the malay concept of bebas is significant. while merdeka is connected to emancipation and enfranchisement, which are key ideals in british liberalism, bebas is associated with license and lack of restraint.6 it is the legal term for acquittal and the term for liberation that 22 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) contemporary malaysian and indonesian youth now use in describing their aspirations (idrus, 2016; lee, 2016). it is the same word for freedom that anthropologist aihwa ong (1987) used to describe young malay factory women resisting the patriarchy in which they were raised. while the sociologist laleh khalili (2013, p. 6) writes that “the freedom of movement is an avowedly fundamental tenet of liberal rights,” what makes the decolonizing freedom of orangutan rehabilitation different from the liberal freedom espoused by former colonial masters and warmongers is the recognition of the bodily vulnerability that the freedom of decolonization would entail. both nadim and layang felt that caring for wildlife meant embodying personal risk. it meant the risk of feeling pain when an orangutan acclimated to humans bites human flesh. it meant that living out freedom, in the sense of bebas, meant living out the freedom of shared vulnerability. the contemporary purpose for orangutan rehabilitation is to have them be bebas (free). yet, as nadim points out, that freedom is mediated by biological sex and sexual dimorphism and it is gendered beyond human subjects: nadim: in the wild, there’s lots of trees, lots of space. here, it’s six kilometers and not enough. here, they meet every day! in the wild, they meet in a year or once every six or seven years…they [female orangutans] may be free, but living in fear…bebas, tapi takut [free but fearful]. i pity them when i see their faces. it’s only the males, when you see them, they’re happy. (parreñas, in press) the freedom afforded by the constrained space of the wildlife center exacerbates relations of forced copulation. thus the wildlife center generates a gendered social world for the orangutans held at this site.7 comparing nadim and barbara harrisson, we see that taking decolonization seriously entails not only considering the colonial legacies that structure the space of possibilities for orangutans and the people caring for them. following scholars working in the americas, like marisol de la cadena (2015), it also entails questioning deep-seated assumptions about who is a political subject and to whom we are responsible. this is 23 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) decolonization in its contemporary sense, one that finds genealogy in liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century without privileging enlightenment categories of the human above nonhuman others. like all projects of decolonization, the project of orangutan rehabilitation opens up difficult questions: whose vision of liberation or independence comes to matter in decolonization? how much license can we take when we use terms that are not directly circulating in our worlds, yet are useful for how we come to grasp what surrounds us? in other words, why do i hesitate to think through “decoloniality” when thinking about sarawak? what kinds of new political imaginaries become aspirational when we look across colonial legacies and geopolitical space and time? references abdulgani, r. (1955). asia-africa speaks from bandung. djakarta, indonesia: ministry of foreign affairs, republic of indonesia. allman, j. (2013). phantoms of the archive: kwame nkrumah, a nazi pilot named hanna, and the contingencies of postcolonial history-writing. american historical review, 118(1), 104–129. anderson, w. (2002). postcolonial technoscience. social studies of science, 32(5/6), 643–658. anderson, w. (2006). colonial pathologies: american tropical medicine, race, and hygiene in the philippines. durham, nc: duke university press. anderson, w., & adams, v. (2008). pramoedya’s chickens: postcolonial studies of technoscience. in e.j. hackett (ed.), the handbook of science and technology studies, 3rd ed. (pp. 181-204). boston: mit press. cadena, m. de la (2015). earth beings: ecologies of practice across 24 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) andean worlds. durham, nc: duke university press. galdikas, b. (1981). orangutan reproduction in the wild. in c.e. graham (ed.), reproductive biology of the great apes: comparative and biomedical perspectives (pp. 281–300). new york, ny: academic press. galdikas, b., & wood, j.m. (1990). birth spacing patterns in humans and apes. american journal of primatology, 6(1), 49–51. harrisson, b. (1962). orang-utan. london, uk: collins. heimann, j.m. (1998). the most offending soul alive: tom harrisson and his remarkable life. honolulu, hi: university of hawai’i press. idrus, r. (2016). reading che guevara in kuala lumpur: the rise of independent, political, and intellectual youth collectives in malaysia. paper presented at the association for asian studies, seattle, washington. khalili, l., author. (2013). time in the shadows: confinement in counterinsurgencies. stanford, ca: stanford university press. kirksey, e. (2012). freedom in entangled worlds: west papua and the architecture of global power. durham, nc: duke university press. lee, d. (2016). activist archives: youth culture and the political past in indonesia. durham, nc: duke university press. leigh, m.b. (1974). the rising moon: political change in sarawak. sydney, australia: sydney university press; international scholarly book services. ong, a. (1987). spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: factory women in malaysia. albany, ny: state university of new york press. 25 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) parrenas, j.s. (in press). decolonizing extinction: orangutan rehabilitation and the work of care. durham, nc: duke university press. parrenas, j.s. (ed.) (2017). gender: animals. farmington hills, mi: macmillan reference usa. parreñas, r.j.s. (2012). producing affect: transnational volunteerism in a malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center. american ethnologist, 39(4), 673–687. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01387.x rutherford, d. (2012). laughing at leviathan: sovereignty and audience in west papua. chicago, il: university of chicago press. steedly, m.m. (2013). rifle reports a story of indonesian independence. berkeley, ca: university of california press. tsing, a. (2005). friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton, nj: princeton university press. von oertzen, c., rentetzi, m., & watkins, e.s. (2013). finding science in surprising places: gender and the geography of scientific knowledge. introduction to "beyond the academy: histories of gender and knowledge." centaurus, 55(2), 73–80. doi:10.1111/1600-0498.12018 yong, k.h. (2013). the hakkas of sarawak: sacrificial gifts in cold war– era malaysia. toronto, canada: university of toronto press. thinking decoloniality with perlemoen lesley green a newsbill from cape town in november 2014 announced the military protection of perlemoen— haliotis midae or abalone—which is at risk of extinction.8 26 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) a flat mollusk living in the kelp forests that line the shoreline of the western cape, in south africa, perlemoen finds itself under assault by homo sapiens and by lobsters (jasus lalandii) in the anthropocene. archaeologists working along the coast of south africa suggest that perlemoen and other shellfish played a key role in human evolution in that their omega oils contributed to human brain development. if the archaeologists are correct, we humans owe them our sapiens. what will human futures be without them? regime-challenging fishers, the historical subjects of colonial expulsions, prise them off rocks with screwdrivers, in a 24/7 duel with fisheries management and a partnership with global illegal traders in abalone (platt, 2016). at the same time, rock lobsters have adapted to rising ocean temperatures and the effects of city sewerage outfalls by changing their location and diet. adult lobsters have migrated south and initiated what invasion biologists call “ecological regime shift,” changing their diets to consume the sea urchins that used to shelter baby abalone. however, amid a science caught in a nature-culture divide—in which the attention is almost always on either people or critters, but seldom both—it is against the poachers that the army has been called in. fishers ask: why and how, in a democracy, can a perlemoen have better representation in parliament than we do? the situation is surreal, and it strains the social contract. is it not surreal to mobilize a war machine to protect a snail? can the army protect the perlemoen from the lobsters that are migrating into the kelp forests? there are many other surrealisms. there is the surrealism of an environmental management regime financially dependent on the sale of confiscated poaching hauls. there is the situation of the environmental scientist who, in the neoliberal financialized version of the environment in south africa’s constitution, finds herself advising on policing the rights of some humans over others. 27 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) unsurprisingly, scientific authority is in question in south africa. where the environmentalist—almost always white—criminalizes poachers in order to save species from extinction, she or he slips into the role of the bearer of the white man’s burden”—the legacy of a colonial project to save the world via religion or science or both. when scientific authoritarianism is brought to bear on environmental resource management, there is an inescapable slippage into what in apartheid south africa was called baasskap, the relation of mastery. if environmental activism and environmental science is to be effective as south africans address climate-induced ecological disorder, the life sciences need to find a voice other than that of the master who will exercise military might. but in order to do that, a different articulation of subject-object relations is required. how to do that when that very relation is assumed in scholarly ways of knowing? unmaking that relation of mastery has been a focus in the postcolonial social sciences and human geography (de greef & raemaekers, 2014; de greef, 2014). yet it is the abalones’ multiple vulnerabilities, across species and across economies illegal and legal, that convoke us to think about ecologies in ways that are unfamiliar in the frames available in science via territorialist biology and in law via the humans-only social contract. the convergence of climate disorder with decolonial questions of how we got here puts to flight the idea that marine conservation is about ecologies becoming pristine again. instead of attending to beings and becomings, we find ourselves attending to hauntings and unbecomings. our choice amid this is to fight over who or what has mastery of the truth of the abalone and therefore what regime ought to be enforced, or to rethink the trope of mastery. for decolonial theorist sylvia wynter, that is the question that makes us think. in a recent reflection on the anthropocene, she criticized the “knowing we” in an intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc) report: “the referent-we—whose normal behaviours are destroying our planet—is that of the human population as a whole. the ‘we’ who are destroying the planet in these [ipcc] findings are not understood as the referent-we of homo oeconomicus (a we that 28 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) includes themselves/ourselves as bourgeois academics)” (in mckittrick, 2015, p. 24). in other words, for wynter, addressing climate disorder requires addressing the entanglement of the figure of the knowledgeable human with the neoliberal gods of reason. for bruno latour, these are “technical efficiency, economic profitability, and scientific objectivity” (2007, p. 14). wynter wants to address the entanglement of the praxis of scholarship with the neoliberal cosmos. for perlemoen, homo oeconomicus has no answer to their dilemma of how to survive the lobster migration that is changing the kelpforest ecology at the same time as historical forces create a lucrative market for a desperate “precariat” tied in to gangs and the drug trade. their problem is surreal in the face of the realisms in which it is rendered, for it has the same roots as the situation contemporary poachers face. extinctions, expulsions, extractions, and ocean warming are inextricably linked; poachers, perlemoen, and lobster alike are trying to survive not only an ecological politics but a conceptualization of ecology and society that creates their hostile cosmos. their crisis is not only ecological or social, nor is it even social-ecological. it is cosmopolitical. in such a cosmopolitical crisis, we need the “dostoyevskian idiot” described by isabelle stengers (2005): someone who is unable to ask the right questions. as a white south african social scientist writing in a moment where the decolonial movement has put the university in crisis, i have found myself many times learning slowly to welcome not-knowing: learning to not be the keeper of a disciplinary kingdom, and to be alert to the practices of gods of reason in a university system (green, 2015) in which the very fact of whiteness has long served to authorize thought. part of escaping the habits of authority is learning to circle around a problem, to think the whole situation again—including its “obvious” and “of course” aspects. with that in mind, let us return to the situation of the perlemoen. that which authorizes logic in fisheries management has been a homo oeconomicus model of fisheries, in which the base stock is the capital, 29 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) the juveniles are the interest, and you should only withdraw less than the interest earned (green, 2016). what that banking model does is enact the ocean as an atm from which cash has to be withdrawn. relations of care for the kelp forests and rock pools, which have a deep history along the coast, are expunged. might a different approach to the logic of conservation—not as dollarized ecosystem services—enable fishers to reclaim a different set of relations with the ocean that are based on care and on “thinking like a fish” (duggan, green & jarre, 2014)? it would be easy to dismiss the question as the naive ramblings of an esoteric social scientist who is out of touch with the “real world.” yet acceptance of the idea of “the real world” is bound up in the same gods of reason who created the economized and militarized relations that compound the very situations we entreat them to resolve. what is needed is a different approach to the problem: one that begins with conceptualizing the multiple experiences of a problematic situation without presuming that the authorized version encompasses all there is to know. a deep tradition of authority across sub-saharan africa that declines the rhetoric of authorial authority is that of the dilemma tale (bascom, 1975). in a dilemma tale, the art of authorship is not, as in the essay form, to persuade your listeners that you are right, but to stage a discussion of what is ethical or what each actor might do next. dilemma tales offer a mode of engagement very similar to amazonian perspectivism: understanding that the world is constantly in formation by the beings and actants that navigate it. in this approach, knowing is not simply a question of “understanding information of the world” but of “understanding the world in-formation.” the different form of authorship here is not the authorial “authority over,” but the authorial capacity to bring listeners into a “presence-to” the breadth of a situation (green & green, 2013). the knowledge they honor is less about the knowledge of the “beings” of each creature but about the “becomings” of a situation: who will do what next? being able to understand what will unfold next is also an art of 30 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) knowledge in chinese thought that attends to the propensities of things, as described by francois jullien (1995). in amerindian perspectivism, in african dilemma tales, and in chinese thought, we can begin to see that the attention of coloniality-modernity to things and direct causal relations is something of an anomaly among many intellectual heritages. with regards to the perlemoen, the form of the dilemma tale offers a way of staging an encounter of perlemoen, lobsters, fishers, poachers, environmental managers, the army, and marine biologists. to me, decoloniality is a praxis that is not about offering a new kingdom of thought to replace the disciplines nor about generating a new field of study: it begins with a transformation of how we think about what it is to know. references bascom, w. (1975). african dilemma tales. the hague, netherlands: mouton. duggan, g., green, l., & jarre, a. (2014). “thinking like a fish”: adaptive strategies for coping with vulnerability and variability emerging from a relational engagement with kob. maritime studies, 13(4). greeff, k. de. (2014, 15 august). fishing for answers at poaching’s ground zero. mail and guardian. retrieved from http://mg.co.za/article/2014-08-14-fishing-for-answers-at-poachingsground-zero greeff, k. de & raemaekers, s. (2014). south africa’s illicit abalone trade: an updated overview and knowledge gap analysis. cambridge: traffic international. retrieved from http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/157301/25583011/1414148973007/ w-traps-abalone report.pdf?token=j2jdwiqk8xi4ghzdtu6v7fhraiw%3d 31 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) green, l. (2016). calculemos jasus lalandii: accounting for south african lobster. in bruno latour (ed.), reset modernity! (pp. 139–151). cambridge, ma: mit press. ——— (2015, 24 june). the changing of the gods of reason: cecil john rhodes, karoo fracking and the decolonising of the anthropocene. e-flux supercommunity: apocalypsis. retrieved from http://supercommunity.eflux.com/texts/the-changing-of-the-gods-of-reason green, l. & green, d. (2013). knowing the day, knowing the world: engaging amerindian thought in public archaeology. tucson, az: arizona university press. jullien, f. (1995). the propensity of things: toward a history of efficacy in china (janet lloyd, trans.). new york, ny: zone books. mckittrick, k. (ed.). (2015). sylvia wynter: on being human as praxis. durham, nc: duke university press. latour, b. (2007). the recall of modernity. cultural studies review, 13(1), 11–30. platt, j.r. (2016, 5 february). poachers steal 7 million south african abalones a year. scientific american. retrieved from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/poachersabalone stengers, i. (2005). the cosmopolitical proposal. in b. latour & p. weibel (eds.), making things public: atmospheres of democracy (pp. 994–1003). cambridge, ma: mit press. 32 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) on the situated politics of analytic symmetry kristina marie lyons i begin with an important conceptual lesson taught to me by an animal husbandry technician and small farmer. our conversations occurred in the andean-amazonian foothills of colombia, where i have been conducting fieldwork and accompanying what i call agro-life popular processes over the last thirteen years. southwestern colombia has been an epicenter of what was, until recently, the country’s over-fifty-year social and armed conflict, as well as the focal point of militarized us– colombia antinarcotics policy since the late 1990s. this farmer friend, heraldo vallejo, explained to me that modernizing agricultural practices and neocolonial legacies of violent extractivism have alienated rural communities to the point where “they do not know where they were standing.” not knowing where one is standing does not refer to knowing the soil through a laboratory analysis of its chemical fertility, ph level, or scientific taxonomy. indeed, heraldo demonstrated how, rather than sending a soil sample off to an urban-based laboratory and paying for chemical analysis, farmers could compare the soil where they intend to cultivate with fecund animal manure on the farm. applying hydrogen peroxide to both the soil and the manure, then comparing the intensity of the effervescent cackle of microbial life is a way to determine whether a soil is healthy and apt for cultivating. the reason to avoid consulting a soil science laboratory is not only a question of reducing costs and external dependencies in a precarious peasant farmer economy where rural communities rarely have access to such technology.9 it emerges from the ontological differences between treating soils as artificial strata or, at best, natural bodies that can routinely be chemically manipulated and interacting with soils as living worlds that are inextricable from their ecological relations. in fact, as heraldo engaged in the experiment, he told me it was not a question of knowing but of learning how to cultivate (and also recover) different practices, aptitudes, dispositions, and affects. his emphasis on open33 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) ended processes of learning that do not result in the accumulation of universally applicable knowledge reveals a tension that he, and other farmers i met, have not only with many agricultural sciences and their productivist imperatives but also with the category of knowledge itself, when it is separated from learning as a humbling, shared (as in multilateral and not only human), ongoing, and situated process.10 this is not because these farmers reject the teachings of soil science, ecology, or microbiology entirely, as evidenced in the above anecdote about relating to chemical versus biological soils. rather, heraldo and other farmers interface with these sciences and their technological apparatuses by subjecting them to the rigor of local demands, visions, and agroecological conditions. scientific practices that support farmers’ liberation from capitalist imperatives and extractivebased logics while also responsibly addressing and emerging from amazonian-based problems may be incorporated into their agricultural life projects. simultaneously, these farmers engage with specific practices they learn from their parents and extended family members and ones they continually learn in their exchanges with neighboring indigenous, afro-descendent, and other peasant farmers. for example, heraldo told me how his nasa indigenous neighbors taught him to plant in fields recently struck by lightning because these fields become more fertile. the nasa had reached this conclusion by witnessing the upsurge of mushroom caps after a storm. heraldo later read a scientific explanation of the way nitrogen molecules are shattered by lightning bolts, fertilize the air, and then penetrate the ground in falling raindrops. this was a case, he explained, where popular practices match up with scientific ones. however, there are innumerable popular practices that have no scientific equivalent and that form part of or are actively being reincorporated into farm and forest life.11 the recovery and innovational reworking of these practices is occurring after decades when rural communities eliminated most agrobiodiversity and food production to grow monoculture coca—what stigmatizing state antidrug campaigns call “narcocrops/narco-seeded plots” or la mata que mata (the plant that 34 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) kills). heraldo and other farmers i met throughout the andeanamazonian foothills and plains are not trapped in an either/or world that pits knowledge against belief. nor do they make a multicultural or hybridist move to simply place scientific practices that are “locally appropriate” in analytic and material symmetry with alternative or popular practices.12 scientific practices, even when they address amazonian problems responsibly, are categorically (and not only relatively) different from the kinds of practices and practitioners that emerge when one lives, dies, and defends a territory under military duress. for these farmers, the modernizing agricultural sciences can easily become parasitic. such practices can show their colonial sides when they are deemed “knowledge” that absorbs nonscientifically derived practices and/or renders them obsolete under the capitalist imperatives of standardization, competitiveness, and intellectual property. within science-studies scholarship, there have been moves to “democratize” knowledge production in different global contexts under more plural conceptualizations of science and modernity (see, for example, harding, 2008; medina, da costa marques, & holmes et al., 2014). more recently, scholars interested in decentering science studies from english/euro-american analytics have proposed what they call a “postcolonial version of the principle of symmetry” to ask “what might happen if sts were to make more systematic use of non-western ideas” (law & lin, 2015 p. 2). ethnographic conceptualizations at the interfaces of postcolonial and feminist science studies have made important contributions to understanding the kinds of ontological tensions that exist and that are necessarily maintained between divergent knowledge traditions and world-making practices (see, for example, verran, 2002; 2013, de la cadena, 2010; lyons, 2014; de la cadena & lien et al., 2015). of course, within and beyond the confines of academic debates, encounters between “western” and “non-western” ideas in the americas have been ongoing since the conquest and the control of the atlantic after 1492. focusing on the specificities of spanish and portuguese 35 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) colonialisms, latin american and diasporic scholars based in the united states have insisted that we think with the “triad modernity/coloniality/decoloniality” (castro-gómez, 2005; escobar, 2007; giraldo, 2016), arguing that these violent colonial encounters and their enduring structural effects are constitutive of modernity and the making of a capitalist world system. when indigenous, peasant, afro-descendent, feminist, and popular sectors chant “500 años de colonialismo” (“500 years of colonialism”) during mobilizations across latin america, they are engaged in struggles against specific forms of ongoing coloniality that are conceptualized in ways other than “postcolonial.”13 however, as tania pérez-bustos notes in this series, this does not mean that a decolonial paradigm should become a singular explanatory tool to discuss the commitments and practices of diverse popular struggles and radical thinkers across the hemisphere. in an epistemic sense, the production of modern scientific disciplines has occurred within asymmetrical power relations of ongoing coloniality. the historical production of scientific knowledge has always entailed its constitutive outsides: not only in terms of the making of the category of “science” pitted against “religion,” “superstition,” and “belief,” but also in the ongoing appropriation of diverse practices—and hence worlds—that continues to allow scientific practitioners to claim to authoritatively “know” a singular reality. my intention is not to gloss over diverse scientific traditions by simply defining them as rooted in the projects and practices of colonialism, or to underestimate the critical perspectives and subversive potential of scientists working within unequally distributed global positions. i am interested in exploring the limits of symmetry as a conceptual and political tool when placed in conversation with the kinds of alternative practices in which heraldo and other farmers engage as they strive to “decolonize their farms,” as they call it. the practices of the farmers i have been accompanying do not seek to democratize science—in other words, to open inclusive spaces for what some call ancestral, traditional, or popular saberes (wisdoms or 36 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) know-how) within neoliberalized science-policy culture, or place science at the disposal of the interests of civil society as though a dualistic division exists between the two. the promises and practices of democratization may or may not take on relevance and are always situated political and social processes, rather than universal aspirations. this is heightened when rural communities are criminalized due to their presumed engagement in illicit economic activities, their defense of territories against extractivism, and by the fact that they live in areas that are militarized and also occupied by paralegal armed groups. by illicit economic activities, i refer not only to the cultivation of illicit crops in colombia, but also to the incremental criminalization of a whole variety of popular and ancestral food production, commercialization, and seedpropagating practices vis-à-vis neoliberal reforms that favor the interests of multinational corporate chemical-seed conglomerates. certain modern agricultural technologies are actively incorporated into small farmers’ labor when they enable liberatory potential within the relational conditions of amazonian ecologies. however, peasant farmers in the western amazon taught me that asymmetrical engagements between practices remain ethically and strategically important as a political—or, better yet, life—proposal. this is an asymmetry that subverts the authority granted to scientific knowledge and its nexus with capitalist forms of accumulation over a myriad of other nonscientific practices and antiand noncapitalist ethics. these kinds of asymmetrical analytical and material engagements resist the appropriation of popular practices by different scientific disciplines and acknowledge the historical and ongoing debts these sciences owe to the worlds they marginalize(d). rather than assuming the fixed locations of subjugation that a “postcolonial symmetry” proposes to unravel, it is also conceptually and politically important to consider situated “decolonizing” enactments and versions of asymmetry. 37 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) references análisis de suelo, la mano derecha de los agricultores colombianos. (2017, february 24). food news latam. retrieved from http://www.foodnewslatam.com/6654-análisis-de-suelo,-la-manoderecha-de-los-agricultores-colombianos.html cadena, m de la. (2010). indigenous cosmopolitics in the andes: conceptual reflections beyond “politics.” cultural anthropology, 25(2), 334–370. cadena, m. de la & lien, m.e. (eds.). (2015) anthropology and sts: generative interfaces, multiple locations. hau, 5(1), 437–475. castro-gómez, s. (2005). la poscolonialidad explicada a los niños. popayán, colombia: instituto pensar, universidad javeriana, jigra de letras—editorial universidad del cauca. choy, t. (2005). articulated knowledges: environmental forms after universality’s demise. american anthropologist, 107, 5–18. escobar, a. (2007). worlds and knowledges otherwise: the latin american modernity/coloniality research program. cultural studies 21(2– 3), 179–210. freire, p. (1970). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york, ny: herder and herder. giraldo, i. (2016). coloniality at work: decolonial critique and the postfeminist regime. feminist theory, 17(2), 157–173. green, l. (ed.). (2013). contested ecologies: dialogues in the south in 38 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) nature and knowledge. cape town, south africa: hsrc press. harding, s. (2008). sciences from below: feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities. durham, nc: duke university press. law, j & lin, w. (2015). provincialising sts: postcoloniality, symmetry and method. 2015 bernal prize plenary at the annual meeting of the society for the social studies of science, denver, colorado, 11–15 november. lyons, k. (2014). soil science, development, and the “elusive nature” of colombia’s amazonian plains. journal of latin american and caribbean anthropology, 19(2), 212–236. mbembe, a. (2017). critique of black reason. durham, nc: duke university press. medina, e., da costa marques, i., & holmes, c. (eds.). (2014). beyond imported magic: essays on science, technology, and society in latin america. cambridge, ma: mit press. subramaniam, b., foster, l., harding, s., roy d., and tallbear, k. (2017). feminism, postcolonialism, technoscience. in u.felt, r. fouché, c.a. miller, & l. smith-doerr (eds.), the handbook of science and technology studies, 4th ed. (pp. 407–434). cambridge, ma: mit press. verran, h. (2002). a postcolonial moment in science studies: alternative firing regimes of environmental scientists and aboriginal landowners.” social studies of science, 32(5/6), 729–762. ——— (2013). engagements between disparate knowledge traditions: toward doing difference generatively and in good faith. in l. green 39 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) (ed.), contested ecologies: dialogues in the south on nature and knowledge (pp. 141–161). cape town, south africa: hsrc press. a word of caution toward homogenous appropriations of decolonial thinking in sts tania pérez-bustos these lines are a provocation, a word of caution, a question posed in response to the questions asked about the role of decolonial theory in the thinking of science and technology studies (sts) nowadays. when i was invited to participate in this discussion, my first reaction was to say, “shall i be part of this?” i am familiar with these theoretical proposals, with the distinctions between postcoloniality and the triad of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (santiago castro-gómez, 2005; giraldo, 2016), as much as with the tensions between them and within coloniality/decoloniality thinking. i do not, however, affiliate with any of these proposals—in fact, i do not affiliate with hardly any school of thought or particular theory. i find these proposals useful since they have helped me to think and question, in particular, the feminist politics of the circulation of popular science and technology in countries such as india and colombia (pérez-bustos, 2014). thus, my position toward decoloniality has mostly been marked by my anecdotal encounters with literature proposing the decolonial option (santiago castro gómez & grosfoguel, 2007).14 it is from anecdotal encounters with these ideas as partial tools that i can speak. i do not see them as paradigms. in the case of modernity/coloniality and decoloniality, i see the faces of particular people behind these concepts: mostly well-known male scholars based in the united states who attempt to think from latin america, but also male scholars based in different corners of latin america trying to differentiate themselves from their northern counterparts. i see invisible appropriations of feminist knowledge produced in the south as much as in the north.15 i see a game of mirrors and invisibilities propitiated by the inaudibility of knowledge produced 40 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) otherwise. i think about this, keeping silvia rivera cusicanqui’s words in mind: mignolo and company have built a small empire within the empire…have adopted the ideas of subaltern studies and have launched discussions in latin america, creating a jargon, a conceptual apparatus and forms of reference and counterreference which have produced an academic detachment with the commitments and dialogues with insurgent social forces. (rivera cusicanqui, 2010, my translation) with this, i am not saying that there is nothing to learn from what these authors write. better yet, i should say to what these autores write in order to emphasize their gender position. what i am saying is that certain discourses of decoloniality may run the risk of existing within certain politics of appropriation and decontextualization through which certain voices are audible and others are not, and it is with this politics that decoloniality becomes. or, as one of the reviewers of this paper helped me to highlight, these circuits of audibility, appropriation, decontextualization, gender, and coloniality shape the very possibility of discussing decoloniality in sts. while writing this, because i am latin american, i keep wondering what it means and what the implications of my words (or the expectations for them) are in relation to decolonial terms and the genealogy of these terms in latin america. i say this because i come from a region with very particular histories of colonization, one that has pushed a group of scholars to think about these categories for a very particular period. during this period these scholars discussed and highlighted (initially) the differences between processes of colonization and argued, in varied, intricate, and complex ways, the need to understand that modernity is a product of coloniality (santiago castro-gómez & grosfoguel, 2007; giraldo, 2016). thus, while recalling michelle murphy’s words (2016), decoloniality cannot be otherwise, cannot be thought outside those frames. this in the sense that decoloniality emerges out of coloniality as a counterface of modernity, and it is dissenting within (puig de la bellacasa, 41 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 2012) these conditions of possibility that decoloniality can become. it is the triad concept we are dealing with. however, when i think of how the latin american genealogy of this concept is being used and appropriated in sts (harding, 2016), i do not necessarily see a triad. i see a fuzzy word filled with hope and expectations, a word being used in a homogeneous way, a word lacking history and complexity, plurality and entanglements. then i remember (how could i forget?) that language is an issue in the academic world (pérez-bustos, 2017: 59-72). that writing in english and not in castilian spanish or catalan or portuguese or, even more, in aymara or quechua is not neutral. it embodies a very particular coloniality of knowledge, of being, of power, depending on where you stand (or sit) (wöhrer, 2016). coloniality as a concept (because i insist that we cannot talk about decoloniality without asking how it is built by coloniality as a necessary precursor of modernity, and as a triad) emerged in latin america at 1998, and it was discussed for a decade. however, when this genealogy has more recently been used in the northern anglo-saxon world, it often relies on the translation of this work (see harding, 2016). however, what has been translated? what has not? why? are we only relying on translated sources or on decolonial thinking produced by latin american thinkers based in the north? what does it imply that perhaps one is reading certain people from caribbean and latin american critical thought but not others? there is something interesting in what is translated and heard, but we also need to recognize its partiality and its politics of appropriation and circulation, or else we may fail to acknowledge the impact of that partiality. i am not arguing that we need to be universal in any way, but rather that we must question the privilege of our point of view and take a reflective stand toward how decoloniality is used and produced in its incorporation into sts, and how this incorporation includes silences and blind spots. in this context, which frames the emergence of the triad of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality in latin america as much as its partial translation, i wonder to what extent using the term here, speaking about 42 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) decoloniality in latin america without acknowledging and understanding where it comes from and the differences it embraces, its inner heterogeneity, is not another (of many) examples of cognitive and epistemic injustice (visvanathan, 2009). with this i suggest that having and embodying the privilege of speaking and writing and being embedded in the lingua franca of science seems to give anglo-saxon scholars the right to appropriate concepts partially and make theory out of them. this is usually impossible for academics in the non-anglo-saxon south who do not have the privilege of whiteness (symbolically as much as materially speaking) or have not worked hard enough toward having it (studying in the north and building and being part of certain networks) (wöhrer, 2016). thus, how homogeneous is the idea of decoloniality being used in northern contexts? what kind of systematic ignorance accompanies this homogeneity? whose singularities are being lost in terms of theory? why? is the use of decoloniality, or better yet the search for decoloniality, decolonial enough? decolonial in what sense? or is this search for decoloniality actually reproducing certain geopolitics of knowledge and logics of colonialism? from my experience as a feminist sts scholar based in colombia and not representing anyone, with my singular voice, i would say it might be. references cabrera, m., & vargas monroy, l. (2014). transfeminismo, decolonialidad y el asunto del conocimiento: inflexiones de los feminismos disidentes contemporáneos. universitas humanística, 78(78), 19–37. castro-gómez, s. (2005). la poscolonialidad explicada a los niños. popayán, colombia: instituto pensar, universidad javeriana, jigra de letras—editorial universidad del cauca. castro-gómez, s., & grosfoguel, r. (2007). prólogo. giro decolonial, 43 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) teoría crítica y pensamiento heterárquico. in s. castro-gómez & r. grosfoguel (eds.), el giro decolonial. reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global, (pp. 9–24). bogotá, colombia: iesco-pensar-siglo del hombre editores. curiel, o. (2007). crítica poscolonial desde las prácticas políticas del feminismo antirracista. nómadas, (26), 92–101. femenías, m.l. (2007). esbozo de un feminismo latinoamericano. revista estudos feministas, 15(1), 11–25. http://doi.org/10.1590/s0104026x2007000100002 giraldo, i. (2016). coloniality at work: decolonial critique and the postfeminist regime. feminist theory, 17(2), 157–173. http://doi.org/10.1177/1464700116652835 harding, s. (2016). latin american decolonial social studies of scientific knowledge: alliances and tensions. science, technology & human values, 41(6), 1063–1087. http://doi.org/10.1177/0162243916656465 lugones, m. (2008). colonialidad del género. tabula rasa, 9, 73–102. retrieved from http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=s179424892008000200006#1 mendoza, b. (2010). la epistemología del sur, la colonialidad del género y el feminismo latinoamericano. in y. espinosa miñoso (ed.), aproximaciones críticas a las prácticas teórico-políticas del feminismo latinoamericano (pp. 19–36). buenos aires, argentina: en la frontera. murphy, m. (2016). to what extent is embodied knowledge a form of science and technology by other means? in science+technology by other means, 4s/east conference, barcelona. 44 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) pérez-bustos, t. (2014). feminización y pedagogías feministas: museos interactivos, ferias de ciencia y comunidades de software libre en el sur global. bogotá, colombia: editorial javeriana. pérez-bustos, t. (2017). “no es sólo una cuestión de lenguaje”: lo inaudible de los estudios feministas en américa latina en el mundo académico anglosajón. scientiae studia, 15(2). puig de la bellacasa, m. (2012). “nothing comes without its world”: thinking with care. sociological review, 60(2), 197–216. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2012.02070.x rivera cusicanqui, s. (2010). ch’ixinakax utxiwa. una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. buenos aires, argentina: tinta limín. visvanathan, s. (2009). the search for cognitive justice. knowledge in question, 597. retrieved from http://www.indiaseminar.com/2009/597.htm walsh, c. (2004). geopolíticas del conocimiento, interculturalidad y descolonialización. boletín iccc-ary rimay, 6(60). retrieved from http://icci.nativeweb.org/boletin/60/walsh.html. wöhrer, v. (2016). gender studies as a multi-centred field? centres and peripheries in academic gender research. feminist theory, 17(3). http://doi.org/10.1177/1464700116652840 notes 1 the histories and complexities of these social movements are beyond the scope of this essay, but for an example of how the concept of the decolonial is circulating therein as an extension of franz fanon’s and 45 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) steve biko’s works, see ngcaweni (2016). 2 barbara harrisson was german by birth, although she spoke of herself as a british colonial when i interviewed her in 2006. during world war ii, she worked as a typist in the abwehr, the espionage group within the third reich’s armed forces that hitler disbanded toward the end of the war because of its internal subterfuge against his rule (heimann, 1998). her move to the tropics following world war ii seems to parallel the movements of nazi women closely associated with hitler, such as hannah reitsch, the pilot and iron cross recipient who became close to third world leader kwame nkrumah and helped establish ghana’s air force in the early years of independence (allman, 2013). however, harrisson’s efforts were not directed by a confident futurism of a new nation-state but were a series of uncertain trials and error. 3 orangutan infants usually spend around the first seven years of their lives with their mothers (galdikas, 1981; galdikas & wood, 1990). 4 barbara harrisson’s story is one where colonial science converges with gendered science (anderson, 2002, 2006; anderson & adams, 2008; von oertzen, rentetzi, & watkins, 2013). bidai’s father was a pengulu, a title that designated an indigenous leader. harrisson describes his father’s assumed role as that of both a political and shamanistic leader. 5 arrested autonomy describes the condition in which forcibly being made dependent is understood as the means of gaining independence. in effect, that independence is always indefinitely deferred. 6 like many abstract terms in malay, merdeka has roots in sanskrit, conveying roots in the ancient srivijaya and majapahit imperial courtly and elite cultures that connected the region. this word was distinguished from the term bebas, which orientalists like john crawfurd reckoned originated from johor on the peninsula; it spread through malay’s usage as the vernacular trade language throughout the archipelago. bebas seemed to represent something more excessive or even “wild,” distant from “civilized”courtly culture and even further from the ideas of liberty conveyed in the writings of john locke and john stuart mill and through the stately sense of the term merdeka (rutherford, 2012; steedly, 2013). marsden’s translations of the terms free and liberty in the 1812 edition of a dictionary and grammar of the malayan language convey this: “free 46 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) (manumitted) mardika…(unrestrained) bibas…liberty (enfranchisement) ka-mardika-an; (permission) mohon, bibas” (1984, pp. 451, 482). merdeka corresponds to liberal ideas of political independence (kirksey, 2012; rutherford, 2012; steedly, 2013). 7 for an explanation of how nonhuman animals have gender, please see parreñas (2017). 8 cape times newsbill, 14 november 2014. 9 the soil’s treatment in dominant agronomic circles almost exclusively prioritizes soil fertility and structure because of the roles granted to these properties in agricultural production and chemical input substitution. this is particularly evident in the colombian government’s new servientrega suelos service, which i euphemistically translate as “door-to-door soil analysis,” where rural farmers can send soil samples to an urban laboratory through a mailing service and within ten days receive a soil study and technical recommendations for the chemical fertilization of a particular commercial crop. see “análisis de suelo” (2017). i thank my colleague julio arias vanegas for drawing my attention to this article. 10 i am reminded of achille mbembe’s description of fanon’s situated thinking as “metamorphic thought” (2017, pp. 161–162), and the coconstitutive relationship that paulo freire (1970) proposes between knowing and learning. i thank my colleague tania pérez-bustos for connecting me back to freire’s critical pedagogy. 11 see green (ed., 2013) for further discussion about the decolonial possibilities that may emerge when environmental sciences push beyond simply selecting pieces of “alternative” or indigenous knowledges that appear to match up with scientific knowledges. 12 in his ethnographic exploration of environmental politics in present-day hong kong, tim choy (2005) alerts us to the fact that the imperative for scientific expertise to perform its “local appropriateness” may be a relativist critique already inhabited by the postcolonial state. 13 i am in no way arguing that postcolonial scholarship and subaltern studies have not been influential among political activists and scholars in and of latin america. however, my research is informed by a genealogy 47 lyons, parreñas and tamarkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) of latin american critical theory, which includes dependency theory, liberation theology, participatory action research, and a current of thought or movement that is sometimes referred to as pensamiento latinoamericano en ciencia, tecnología y sociedad (latin american thinking on science, technology, and society). see also subramaniam, foster, harding, roy and tallbear (2017). 14 i refer to this encounter as anecdotal in the sense that it is defined by my possible and partial access to the literature in the south, considering that the circuits of knowledge circulation tend to privilege north-to-south trajectories and not south-to-south fluxes (femenías, 2007). 15 i refer here to the work of feminists reflecting on decoloniality such as latinx feminists working in the north, like maría lugones (2008), breny mendoza (2010), and isis giraldo (2016); latin american feminists based in the south, like marta cabrera and liliana vargas monroy (2014), ochy curiel (2007), and silvia rivera cusicanqui (2010); and feminists from the north living in the south, such as catherine walsh (2004). microsoft word catalyst introduction-part1.docx subramaniam, b and willey, a. (2017). introduction to science out of feminist theory part one: feminism’s sciences. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(1), 1-23 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © banu subramaniam and angela willey, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introduction science out of feminist theory part one: feminism’s sciences banu subramaniam university of massachusetts, amherst banu@wost.umass.edu angela willey university of massachusetts, amherst awilley@wost.umass.edu in 2012, sophia roosth and astrid schrader edited a special issue of differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies entitled “feminist theory out of science.” drawing heavily from feminist new materialism, the issue was devoted to revisiting the annals, practices, and knowledges of science to produce a revised scientific and more feminist account of the world. the essays in the volume uncovered a distinctly feminist, and imaginative landscape in the work of some of the most famous scientists and sciences of the west, revealing the degree to which social and historical forces have chosen and drawn on the more regressive elements of the scientific record. the issue called on feminists to go back to the “sources” of science to unearth more progressive and feminist sensibilities, theories, and imaginations. the editors argued that “what emerges from these diverse essays is an approach to critical thinking that 2 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) inhabits, elaborates, and feeds upon scientific theory, holding feminist theory accountable to science and vice versa.” roosth and schrader describe their project “as an attempt to refigure possible relationships and traffic between feminism and science,” offering the tantalizing possibility that other sciences, and other futures were always possible. as editors of this special issue of catalyst, we share roosth’s and schrader’s desire to move beyond tired arguments about whether the humanities and the sciences are “two cultures” (snow 1959, lee and wallerstein 2016), or more recent debates about “new materialism” in feminist studies. the provocation for “science out of feminist theory” comes in part out of a critique of the “traffic” metaphor and its limits as a resource for imagining science anew. traffic has emerged as an important metaphor for challenging the binary opposition of feminism and science by suggesting that they are connected by what “travels” between them, in both directions. ideas, theories, politics, and language constantly travel these “two way streets” (fausto sterling 1992) between feminism and science. in reading the wonderfully eclectic assortment of essays in our double special issue of catalyst, we suggest that, taken together, the authors’ visions of “science out of feminist theory” collectively highlight the vastly unequal and complex terrain on which this traffic traverses. indeed, to pay attention to this terrain is to recognize the many potholes, obstacles, dead ends, detours, accidents, and vehicles driven off the road. the fundamental argument that theories and knowledge travel between feminism and science is by now a foundational claim for feminist science and technology studies. as a result, over the last few decades, the field has developed rich accounts of the dense traffic between science and feminism, and between their proper objects—nature and culture. indeed, rather than nature and culture, we now talk about naturecultures. however, in the move to track naturecultures, we often elide the unequal status of feminism and science as knowledge projects. too often, feminism and science appear as known quantities, startlingly 3 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) monolithic in our rhetoric for all our claims to interrogate their meanings. the common proposition is that: we are feminists and science is never us, never what we’re doing. whether we are admonishing our peers for not “taking science seriously” (and conversely congratulating ourselves) or damning science for its part in the violence we see in our worlds, science is outside of feminism. moored in this logic, recent accounts of what we might call feminist science have called for a shift in feminism’s relationship with science. citing a historically antagonistic relationship, they argue that feminism needs to overcome its old “anti-science” attitudes and learn to embrace science. there are many versions of this call for re-engagement (alaimo and heckman 2008, coole and frost 2010, grosz 2011, hird 2004, wilson 2004; see also ahmed 2004). as sara giordano notes in this special issue, readings of “anti-science” feminism imagine feminist and scientific approaches as occupying a power-neutral relationship. willey (2017) argues that these accounts narrate a gendered romance, one that begins with adversity, trudges through hard-won growth, and leaves us with a newly “science friendly feminism” and “anti-essentialist science” that might beat the odds yet and wind up snuggling by the proverbial fire.1 this recent exhortation to feminists to embrace the institution of science is one both of us have found less critical than their authors’ ambitions call for. as editors, we are suspicious of the invocation of an easy parallelism between feminism and science, especially one where feminism is exhorted to sideline critique in order to learn from science, or to develop a more “affectionate” relationship (wilson 2004) with it. indeed, we can recover feminist genealogies in science, and scientific/materialist genealogies in feminism, because both science and feminism have too often emerged as monolithic overdetermined categories that ignore the heterogeneity within. perhaps, as subramaniam has argued, rather than trying to imagine that we have buried the colonial and gendered violences of our sciences in the past, we might instead imagine a scientific future that allows us to live with its 4 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) ghosts—the elisions and erasures of our histories of feminism and science (subramaniam 2014). at the heart of “science out of feminist theory” is an interrogation of the term “science.” what do we mean by it? in mainstream representations, “science” is presented as a cohesive body of disciplines in the natural sciences that emerged in the west and focused on studying the natural world with a unique and objective “scientific method.” science and technology studies (sts) has long challenged this simplistic reading. thomas kuhn (1962: 42) argued that science was a “rather ramshackle structure with little coherence among its various parts.” scholars in sts have increasingly viewed science as a heterogeneous body of work created less by coherence and more by historical contingencies. most agree that there is no single enterprise of “science” but rather a large variety of “special studies” that have been grouped together under this label (dear 2012). of course, as with “science,” “feminism” is not a monolithic term, either. we have seen a wide variety of analytic frameworks produce a cornucopia of feminisms—postcolonial feminisms, indigenous feminisms, women of color feminisms, queer feminisms, socialist feminisms, ecofeminisms, just to name a few. most agree that there is no unifying analysis that all feminists share. thus, instead of thinking about “feminism” and “science” as separate and known quantities in relationship, we want to open up further space for thinking about feminism as a site for theorizing and reconfiguring the very meanings of science. rather than be stuck in the proverbial traffic jam of interdisciplinary travel, we propose excavating the diverse and eclectic genealogies and traditions within feminist theories to reimagine what science is and might be. 5 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) in our cfp for “science out of feminist theory,” we invited manuscripts that might address the following questions: * how does feminist theory help us shape the goals of inquiry— what do we need to know about our world/s? how might we best study these? * are all objects best studied by scientific methods or by the humanities? or are some necessarily interdisciplinary objects? * how might feminist thought help us re-articulate what constitutes scientific knowledge? what constitutes “usable” or “valid” knowledge? * how do we distribute epistemic authority on the proper objects of science and feminism? how might they be related? * how can feminist theories (of nature, embodiment, technology, behavior) be conceived as scientific inquiry? (we welcome case studies, hypothetical experiments, aligning the language of feminist theory and science, analyses from feminist theory that help us rearticulate scientific questions into new questions for feminism and science) * explorations of the “proper “objects of feminist thought and science * theorizing the idea of “feminist science”—is it possible? desirable? what is it? * what are the forms of scientific inquiry? what kinds of theories, experiments, methods constitute scientific inquiry? does critique also constitute knowledge? how might feminist theory help 6 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) reframe these questions? * how can feminist theory allow us a more capacious definition of science as a postcolonial, queer, feminist enterprise? the essays we received in response to the call did not disappoint. indeed, we received many more abstracts than we were able to include even as the special issue expanded to two. some aspects of the submissions were striking. taken together, they raise some profound and important questions. a critical question that emerged was how we understand the “proper objects” of feminism. in asking “how might scholars generate critical theories out of scientific ones?,” roosth and schrader (2012) clarify: “‘feminist theory out of science’ does not imply that feminist theory emerges from science. it implies, rather, that the world is already theory all the way down.” we want to express our appreciation of the struggle to name and describe a project that would help us to think about feminist theory as a site for theorizing the stuff of the world, what we refer to here as science’s proper objects. we also appreciate the impulse to think capaciously about what constitutes “theory.” at the same time, we want to push back on a persistent conflation of “science” with “the world” (willey 2016). science is a set of disciplines and interdisciplines and their attendant apparatuses, theories, methodologies, and practices. the world “all the way down” is its object of study. similarly, “culture” is understood as the proper object of study for the humanities, and “nature” outside its disciplinary bounds. if culture and nature are indeed entangled (barad 2007, haraway 2008), we need methodological tools for natureculture research. our project is thus partly a critique of proper objects (butler 2004, willey 2017), animated by the question: what might it look like to imagine critical theory as a site for knowing those objects we consider science’s domain (or even as “science” itself)? our approach, importantly, comes out of postcolonial science studies and some of its core insights, including the understanding that not all systems for making sense of science’s proper objects “count” as 7 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) science. science is not simply the name for knowledges of nature, bodies, and other manifestations of microscopic to cosmic physicality. as western colonial powers expanded, so much of knowledge across the world was written off as unscientific, backward, pseudoscience, magical, or more recently categorized as “alternative” or “indigenous” knowledges. this was precisely done to demarcate the contours of a “legitimate” “superior” knowledge called “science.” as postcolonial studies reinforces, science was not just mobilized in service of colonial agendas, but rather materialized through epistemic imperialism at the heart of colonization. the consolidation of the authority of particular (european) modalities and vocabularies to tell us who and what we are is a shared foundation of naturalized science and naturalized inequality. we should all be concerned by the fact that while “science” is in fact a particular set of epistemologies and methodologies, and quite a narrow one in the scheme of things, it simultaneously occupies a status so unproblematized that it can be conflated in critical theory with “the world itself.” many scholars have tried to resolve these troubling legacies. one important strategy in combatting epistemic imperialism has been to reveal science as we know it as one among many “ethnosciences” (harding 2006) and to rescale its authority thus. this redistribution of epistemic authority has opened doors for thinking about kitchen and garage experimentalism (jen 2015), science shops (weasel 2001), indigenous materialisms (tallbear 2017), alternate and indigenous sciences and medicine (nandy 1980, shiva 1993, viswanathan 2006), and indeed critical theory as sites of scientific knowledge production. we are quite alert to the risk of reinforcing the epistemic imperialism on which the idea of ever increasing knowledge accumulation depends merely by claiming to do science. we are also attuned to the trap of a naïve protonativism or a simplistic politics of authenticity where the past (or some supposedly subaltern theory or practice) is sometimes unproblematically valorized. we have each had our own struggles with articulating a sense that the risks that inhere in claiming science are worth taking and that 8 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) certain possibilities are opened up by going there. in simple terms, the benefit of this redistribution is twofold: first, to lessen the power of certain constituencies and institutional formations to define our problems and their solutions and thus to undermine the sadly naturalized place of profit in science (harding 1991, pollock 2012, sunder rajan 2017); and second, to offer new ways of thinking about the objects, problems, and solutions that science has studied. we believe that proliferating sciences has the potential to undo rigid boundaries around what counts and to make strange those entrenched conventions of reduction, framing, measuring, categorizing, and decontextualizing feminists have critiqued in science. even those sciences least determinist and most attuned to complexity (pitts taylor 2016; subramaniam and willey 2016) fall into these traps—they are endemic to the positivist epistemologies that produce them and conventionally mark the boundary between science and myth. as haraway (1991) argued so famously in “the cyborg manifesto,” we need science, our myth. science here is storytelling, not separate from non-science but like those theories that don’t count, another set of narrative resources for imagining what we are and might become, for undergirding less violent imaginaries about human/non-human/planetary futures. we want this proliferation in part to provide us with a rich array of narrative resources out of which to build these worlds and the projects that will support them. clearly, there is a strong materialist bent to such a project. we want to participate in readying the ground, if you will, for a materialism oriented to the undoing of the categories that structure our worlds, the critique of which is at the heart of critical theory. this is in part a project of reading critique as “science.” feminist scholars have done a great deal of work to trace complex histories of race, sex/gender, sexuality, reproduction, disability and attendant concepts of beauty, intelligence, strength, and so on. these histories, we argue, should not be read as merely “social constructionist,” but rather also for their materialist valances. if the destabilization of said categories is too often reduced to the social, the re/turn to “biology” is far too often a return to these 9 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) categories. willey offers the concept of “biopossibility” as a substitute for “biology” in queer feminist materialist projects oriented to undoing (willey 2016). it is a way of exploring the materiality of a phenomenon that acknowledges that its very intelligibility is historically and culturally contingent. we would like to extend that ethic of undoing not just to entrenched scientific epistemologies, practices, and forms and to the categories which structure our worlds, but also to the histories that have made the study of the materiality of things restricted territory. in undoing assumptions about what science is and what its goals might be, we hope to open up space for thinking about feminist studies as an institutional and conceptual space for knowledge-making that can encompass descriptions and theories of physicality-in-context. with this vision in mind, we sought submissions with strong critical orientations and which offered resources for thinking about the stuff of the world—or what it means to contribute to knowing the stuff of the world—grounded in feminist thought. we received an exciting and rich set of essays. some aspects are worth noting. it was clear that feminist sts had matured into a field where authors revealed diverse understandings and commitments to the projects of feminism and science, yet they shared some theoretical assumptions. to avoid repetition, we asked authors to take these assumptions for granted. we also asked them to join us in an experiment to try to implement a shared lexicon to aid us collectively in holding some important conceptual distinctions between objects and modes of inquiry. we share all of this here, because we believe highlighting this continuity suggests some key insights for the field. here are the guidelines we developed: first, we grounded these special issues on a few “givens.” feminist science and technology studies (fsts) is now a visible field, albeit diverse and porous. the contributions of fsts and sts over the last many decades have also solidified the claim that science and scientific knowledges must always be located within their historical, cultural, and political contexts. there is no neutral “science” that escapes 10 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) being implicated in various political and social projects; a myth haraway calls the “god trick” (haraway 1988). by the same token, there is no unmediated “nature” out there. anything we might say about the stuff of the world is mediated by observation, interpretation, and language and other mechanisms of representation. these assumptions are a starting place for this volume—we believe these are well-established claims by now. we have asked all the authors not to rehearse these arguments again. in particular, we shared with authors our conviction that we do need more accounts about “how” science is implicated in various projects, but not that it is. second, we noticed that different authors used the terms “science,” “science,” “biology,” “body/ies,” “matter,” and “materiality” differently. to aid the reader, and in the hopes of forging a more precise working lexicon that might inform methodologies for thinking science out of feminist theory, we developed suggestions for a consistent usage of these terms. we have found sandra harding’s distinction between “science” (capital s) and the world of sciences (lower case s) excluded from its definition so fruitful ourselves for imagining science out of feminist theory, we would like to extend that logic here to other frequently-used terms implicated in this same epistemological resignifying tension. thus, when we use the words “science” or phrases like “the biosciences,” we mean knowledge that is produced through the legitimizing apparatus of various institutions, approved by reviewers and published (or legitimated by patents), i.e., this is “official” knowledge. someone can produce scientific knowledge in their garage or kitchen, but not “scientific” knowledge. for the latter, we use “sciences“—small s, and plural—to mean knowledges that are scientific by all measures except that they are not authenticated by the official apparatus of science. in other words, sciences refers to vast and diverse disciplinary and extra-disciplinary contributions to knowing our worlds. we aim to avoid slippages among scientific disciplines, methods, and practices and science’s proper objects: i.e. bodies, matter, nature, etc. we can make these efforts visible by extending the use of capital and lowercase to 11 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) these other terms. biology is an especially slippery one, as it refers both to a discipline (hence the “-ology”) and to the “stuff” itself. in our writing, we suggest that we use the capital-b biology to refer to the disciplinary field of science. use lowercase-b biology/biological to refer to the processes of bodily and natural explications. similarly, “nature” and “the body” refer to hegemonic accounts of particular objects of science. in contrast “bodies” and “nature” can be sites that are opened up to more natureculture understandings. we seek specificity when naming the stuff of our worlds—from the molecular to the epi-phenomenal—and try to avoid the disciplining disciplinary traps in which the historic and persistent division of nature and culture has left us moored. this might mean extending these logics further to make visible the distance between the objects as imagined by science and as opened up by science out of feminist theory (e.g. “climate change,” “the fetus,” etc.). if authors invent additional terms, they have defined them in the piece. if they have used these terms in some other specified way, they have explained carefully the terms’ referent and the logics behind their usage. and on the matter of matter/the material/materialism: “matter” has emerged as an object for feminist thought in ways that often take for granted what types of representations give us access to it. scientific ways of knowing are consistently presumed to offer more direct and reliable access to matter, or materiality, than other ways of knowing. hence feminist materialism is sometimes undertheorized, presumptively meaning feminism as a beneficiary of scientific data. we resist this a priori assumption, and encouraged all authors to be specific about what sort of evidence they are drawing on to invoke matter or to articulate a materialist approach, and to steer clear of vague claims about matter's importance or marginalization in feminist or critical theory, etc. these types of claims, we believe, reinforce a hierarchy of disciplinary knowledge-making practices antithetical to the project of imaging science out of feminist theory. in keeping with the capital/lowercase strategy, we use “matter” if we are referring to the “stuff” as mediated/represented by scientific data and “matter” if we are 12 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) advancing some other more capacious definition. our aim, we hope it is clear, was not to prohibit nor prescribe, but to make visible our collective processes in order to generate and proliferate methodological possibilities for science out of feminist theory. we see feminist thought as ripe with under-theorized, under-utilized concepts, lexicons, archives, data, etc. each of the authors in the two special issues contributes something valuable to the project of culling resources that might enable our imagining of new accounts of our naturecultural worlds and new ways of describing and understanding those knowledge projects. we—feminist science studies scholars—must learn to think of ourselves not only as critics or students of science, but as makers of scientific knowledge. in response to our call, the authors of these essays do this in diverse ways, opening up new questions, epistemologies, and methods for doing science and, in so doing, troubling the concept itself. out of their combined efforts, we can begin to imagine feminist studies as a site for kinds of scientific knowledge production that can transform the political and epistemological landscapes of debates about a monolithic “science.” what sciences would we put on our proverbial boots to march for? what worlds do their varied knowledge projects come out of and lend themselves to materializing? this first of our two special issues suggests that something we might call “feminism’s sciences” exist and are ripe to be reckoned with. venla oikkonen’s essay makes a profound contribution to thinking about the methodological possibilities of feminism’s sciences as experiments in transdisciplinarity. by reading population genetics alongside queer theorizations of temporality, she demonstrates how temporality and belonging can help us to rethink the genographic project. importantly, in putting these concepts forth as transdisciplinary objects, oikkonen models a strategy for putting two epistemologically incommensurate approaches into dialogue to rethink the a priori assumptions embedded in each and to yield new natureculture insights. such an approach contributes both to “harm reduction” given the pervasiveness of 13 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) appropriations of a neo-darwinian evolutionism and to the proliferation of queerer stories about what we are. pratistha bhattarai interrogates what “source code” actually is, demonstrating how racial and colonial imaginaries are intricately bound into the logics of algorithms. her essay follows in the long tradition of looking behind the numbers and reinforces a central insight of feminist sts that there is no neutral position, all science, especially and including numbers are bound within matrices of power. thinking from feminist theory, bhattarai offers a spivakian lens that allows us to see a path to developing more deliberative, antiracist algorithms that challenge racist policies in the guise of neutral science. bhattarai provides us with a detailed case study for operationalizing the critical insight that values are embedded in modes and means of measurement. that feminism’s sciences might code for our own values is both a literal and metaphorical provocation. chikako takeshita beautifully weaves in a naturecultural vision by bringing together feminist critique of representations of reproductive bodies with recent scientific work on pregnancy and multispecies thinking. disrupting the pervasiveness of mother/fetus binary logics, and at the same time unsettling the a priori gendering of the pregnant body, takeshita suggests the model of holobiant creating holobiant as a way of rethinking pregnancy and upsetting the parameters of feminist debate on fetal politics. her contribution powerfully demonstrates how bringing a feminist lens to scientific data can enable us to develop frameworks to produce not a normative body but more words, richer vocabularies, manifold sciences, and thus more capacious forms and understandings of embodiment. harlan weaver’s essay demonstrates how sites of “science” function—drawing together bioscientific knowledge alongside thick descriptions and hands-on affective relationships with pets. drawing on theories of intersectionalities, weaver unpacks the “fuzzy” science of dog training to reveal racialized dimensions of human/animal interactions. locating these interactions within racialized histories of dog-care, weaver 14 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) reminds us that paying attention to histories and sociologies of the “objects” of science can help us produce a more reflexive, ethical, and deliberative feminist science. weaver’s account of the fuzzy sciences of feminist shelter work also provides a model for thinking about “fuzzying” as a way we engage and transform scientific knowledges in our everyday lives. this lens opens up space for reading dogs and the humans with whom they interact as participants in the making of knowledges about their own nature. thinking the “fuzzy” science of the dog training world of weaver alongside sharra vostral’s historical account of the science of menstruation demonstrates the elisions and erasures that render one unscientific and the second scientific. vostral describes the campaign of our bodies ourselves to standardize absorbency rates in tampons in the aftermath of toxic shock syndrome. vostral ably demonstrates the systematic ways that feminists developed innovative scientific techniques to better measure tampon absorbency to provide data for tampon labeling. yet, the total resistance of the tampon industry to these innovations has resulted in continued imprecision and potentially harmful practices. this episode demonstrates the continued privileging of profits over safety. a recent campaign points out that we still do not know the materials in tampons, and tampon makers continue to resist any accountability (rabin 2017). vostral cautions us to continue to monitor the many potentially harmful products that continue to shape our lives, and the importance of feminist sts in recovering these histories. the piece provides a powerful reminder that it is not accountability to a truth ideal, but rather to communities, that renders more reliable empirical data. such histories help us to understand not only why science cannot be trusted out of hand, but why we need feminist sciences that don’t “leave biology to scientists” who are not held accountable (birke 2000). sara giordano challenges feminists to develop a more nuanced and principled position in challenges to science. if feminist sts has revealed anything, it is that that the apparatus of science has been nourished and shaped by its colonial, imperialist, racist, sexist, ableist 15 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) and heterosexist legacies. she urges us to develop a richer vocabulary for telling stories of our engagements with science and our affective relationships to it, accounts that do not succumb to the romance of an overdetermined privileged science. rather, feminists must continue to build spaces and imaginaries of the sciences. giordano challenges feminists to revalue feminist teaching and to approach the work of critical science literacy as a “re-writing” project that is itself productive of new scientific knowledges. finally, one of the critical insights of feminist science studies is that genres of writing are epistemological tools themselves and enable and disable particular kinds of learning and understanding (subramaniam 2014). to this end, we have embraced catalyst’s multiple formats to strengthen the special issues by inviting and incorporating additional pieces. through these pieces, we hope to animate the generativity of the larger project of “science out of feminist theory.” michelle murphy’s splendid plenary lecture at the 4s meetings in barcelona in 2016 speaks directly to the larger theme of science out of feminist theory in asking to what extent embodied knowledge can be “a form of science and technology by other means?” in chronicling the cycles of chemical violence, murphy explores alter embodiment, alterlife that is both a site already severely damaged by the ravages of environmental toxicity but also one with the potential for other possibilities and futures. as murphy argues, “alterlife, as potential, challenges us to learn with a thick archive and dense present of projects of resistance and resurgence. it is also an invitation to consider what infrastructures and concepts have to be dismantled to make room for another way of being and knowing to emerge.” in the interview section, rachel lee introduces and curates a wonderful set of four interviews with scientists doing field and bench science. lee’s interviews are encouraging and hopeful about the legacies of feminist science and technology studies, as well as thoughtful about the challenges on how to foster greater diversity of personnel and interdisciplinarity in the sciences. in the interviews, scientists show us 16 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) that some of the key questions that have animated feminists, such as the importance of interrogating a binary sex/gender system, incorporating ethics and social justice as an important and legitimate part of science and scientific thinking, and nurturing a new generation of more diverse scientists are all elements that are embraced by some scientists as an important part of the scientific endeavor. the narratives are rich, complex and nuanced giving us a window into the challenges of the working lives of scientists today. the lab meeting format brings together individuals to informally discuss a common question or project. here, an interdisciplinary group of scholars reflect on the black lives matter movement. the collection is a wonderful display of the diversity, at times even incommensurable and contradictory impulses of various (inter)discplines. for example, some of the scientists in this section use feminism to promote an equity project focused on the need to recruit and retain more black scientists in the scientific enterprise. yet others use their standpoint to critique science, and the lack of support for and attention to scientific investigations into questions and foci that impact black lives. yet others take on a more radical suggestion that living in and understanding black communities should be central to anti-racist investigations of science. some of the authors argue that one cannot just produce health variables, diagnoses, protocols or solutions based on the experiences of elite white populations and expect them to serve everyone. there are no unmediated “variables”— the science/medicine that we need has to emerge from and ultimately help a diverse groups of populations. indeed, the scientists and health activists speak powerfully to how the questions they believe should be important, are not questions that they can possibly study as tenure track academics who need funding for their work. the “silences” as these scholars describe them are chilling. the diverse voices in these lab meetings also highlight feminists’ varying trust in the biosciences and the scientific method to solve “our” problems. for some it is a question of more resources, asking different questions, and for yet others nothing short of a thorough rethinking of the biosciences will suffice. 17 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) in the critical perspectives section, six scholars offer us a rich collection of commentaries on decolonization and decoloniality. in their wonderful introduction to the collection, kristina lyons, juno salazar parreñas, and noah tamarkin insightfully remark that “working against colonialism, imperialism, and white heteropatriarchal supremacy takes many languages and vocabularies.” of particular importance, all the authors remind us that understanding colonialism was/is not a singular project. rather, different continents and countries have very different histories and it is important that we recognize this heterogeneity in our theorizing colonial and postcolonial projects. they reinforce the idea of “interface” as a critical term that allows us to “teeter” on the boundaries of sts, inside and outside, belonging and not. these analyses coming out of investigations on the decolonial and decoloniality very much reinforces the “fuzziness,” the contingency, the partiality, the multiplicity, the heterogeneity that emerge in the rest of the essays. the importance of porous borders and boundaries is an important thread that runs through this collection. finally, in the news in focus section, mitali thakor and stephen molldrem reflect on the emerging field of queer feminist science studies (see cipolla et al 2017). their commentary reminds us of the multiple rich genealogies by which we could construct a qfss. newly emerging fields are ripe for understanding the complex and fortuitous paths through which fields emerge, the “thinkers” that come to be celebrated as the “core,” and the canon that emerges as key. official histories and genealogies eventually follow. claire hemming’s (2010) wonderful why stories matter is an important reminder of the importance of the stories we tell about our disciplines. we would do well to heed thakor and molldrem to develop and teach more rich genealogies for feminist science studies as well. rebecah pulsifer's book review of teaching with feminist materialisms explores some of the contours of the debates on feminism and new materialism. fuzzying the line between critiquing and researching/experimenting, asking better questions and posing new 18 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) “experiments”—thought experiments and wet ones—based on what we know is wrong, being willing to take risks and be accountable to the critiques of our peers: this is the work of feminism’s sciences being done and heralded here. even as fsts has developed such a rich understanding of science as text, we have struggled to read the textual approaches of critical theory as science. we think there is much potential here and we invite you to read these two special issues together as a collective ensemble of scientific theories, interventions, claims and quandaries. we invite you to mine them for conceptual and methodological tools to extend the projects of science out of feminist theory. acknowledgements many thanks to the editorial board of catalyst for their enthusiastic support for this special issue. thanks to our wonderful contributors for working with us. our gratitude to david serlin and mara mills for their insightful feedback on an earlier draft of this introduction. we are also deeply grateful to poyao huang for his superb editorial management of this double issue. many thanks to nora tataryan, rianka singh, patrick keilty, and michelle murphy for their superb work in publishing the double issue. thanks also to mara mills, david serlin, poyao huang and harris kornstein for their extensive editorial work in for this special issue. notes 1 see willey (forthcoming) section titled “a tale of two paradigm shifts: or, the romance of anti-essentialist science and science-friendly feminism” 19 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) references alaimo, s. (2008). material feminisms. bloomington: indiana university press. barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham: duke university press. birke, l. i. (2000). feminism and the biological body. new brunswick: rutgers university press. butler, j. (1994). “against proper objects.” differences 6(2), 3. cipolla, kristina gupta, david a. rubin, angela willey. (forthcoming). queer feminist science studies: a reader. seattle: university of washington press. coole, d., & frost, s. (2010). “introducing the new materialisms.” in coole, d., & frost, s, eds. new materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics. durham: duke university press. dear, peter, (2012). “science is dead: long live science,” osiris 27: 3755. fausto sterling, anne. (1992). “building two-way streets: the case of feminism and science.” nwsa journal 4(3): 336-49. grosz, e. (2011). becoming undone: darwinian reflections on life, politics, and art. durham: duke university press. haraway, donna. (2008). when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. 20 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) haraway, donna. (1988). “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” feminist studies 14: 3: 575-599. haraway, donna. (1991). “cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieeth century” (1985). reprinted in simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. new york and london: routledge: 149-181. harding, sandra. (1991). whose science, whose knowledge? thinking from women’s lives. ithaca: cornell university press. hemmings, claire. (2010). why stories matter: the political grammar of feminist theory. durham: duke university press. hird, m. j. (2004). “feminist matters: new materialist considerations of sexual difference.” feminist theory, 5(2), 223-232. jen, c. (2015). “do-it-yourself biology, garagebbiology, and kitchen science.” in mattis wienroth and eugenia rodrigues, eds. knowing new biotechnologies: social aspects of technological convergence. new york and london: routledge. kuhn, thomas. (1962). the structure of scientific revolutions. 2nd ed. chicago: university of chicago press. lee, richard e. jr. and immanuel wallerstein. (2016). overcoming the two cultures; science vs. the humanities in the modern world. new york and london: routledge. nandy, ashis. (1980). alternative sciences: creativity and authenticity in two indian scientists. new delhi: allied. 21 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) pitts-taylor, victoria. (2016). the brain's body: neuroscience and corporeal politics. durham: duke university press. pollock, anne. (2012). medicating race: heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference. durham: duke university press. rabin, roni caryn. (2017). “period activists want tampon makers to disclose ingredients.” new york times (may 24, 2017). roosth, sophia, and astrid schrader. (2012). “feminist theory out of science: introduction.” differences 23:3. 1-8. shiva, vandana. (1993). monocultures of the mind: perspectives on biodiversity and biotechnology. new york: palgrave macmillan. snow, c. p. (1959). the two cultures and the scientific revolution. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. subramaniam, banu. (2014). ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. urbana: university of illinois press. subramaniam, banu and angela willey. (2016) “on the derpy science of sexuality: commentary on sari van anders’s sexual configurations theory.” archives of sexual behavior 45:3, 513-515. sunder rajan, kaushik. (2017). pharmocracy: value, politics, and knowledge in global biomedicine. durham: duke university press. tallbear, k. (2017). “beyond the life/not life binary: a feministindigenous reading of cryopreservation, interspecies thinking, and the new materialisms.” in joanna radin and emma kowal, eds. cryopolitics: frozen life in a melting world. cambridge, ma: mit press. 22 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) viswanathan, shiv. (2006). “alternative science.” theory, culture, and society 23: 2-3: 164-169. lisa weasel. (2001). “laboratories without walls: the science shop as a model for feminist community science in action,” in maralee mayberry, banu subramaniam, and lisa h. weasel eds. feminist science studies: a new generation. new york and london: routledge. willey, angela. (2017). “engendering new materializations: feminism, nature, and the challenge to disciplinary proper objects.” in sarah ellenzweig and john zammito (eds) the new politics of materialism: history, philosophy, science. london: routledge. willey, a. (2016). “biopossibility: a queer feminist materialist science studies manifesto, with special reference to the question of monogamous behavior.” signs 41(3), 553-577. wilson, e. a. (2004). psychosomatic: feminism and the neurological body. durham: duke university press. bios banu subramaniam is professor of women, gender, sexuality studies at the university of massachusetts, amherst. trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she seeks to engage the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology. she is author of ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity (university of illinois press 2014), and coeditor of feminist science studies: a new generation (routledge, 2001) and making threats: biofears and environmental anxieties (rowman and littlefield, 2005). spanning the humanities, social, and natural sciences, she works at the intersections of biology, women’s studies, ethnic studies and 23 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) postcolonial studies. her current work focuses on the xenophobia and nativism that haunt invasive plant species, and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in india. angela wiley is associate professor of women, gender, sexuality studies at the university of massachusetts amherst. she works at the interstices of queer feminist theory, feminist science studies, and sexuality studies. she is author of undoing monogamy: the politics of science and the possibilities of biology (duke university press 2016) and co-editor of queer feminist science studies: a reader (university of washington press, forthcoming). her current work explores genealogies of materialism in feminist thought. microsoft word critical perspectives-204-1205-2.docx liboiron, m, et al. (2017). equity in author order: a feminist laboratory’s approach catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3 (2), 1-17 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © max liboiron et al. 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical perspectives equity in author order: a feminist laboratory’s approach max liboiron memorial university of newfoundland mliboiron@mun.ca justine ammendolia memorial university of newfoundland ja3836@mun.ca katharine winsor memorial university of newfoundland katewinsor9@gmail.com alex zahara memorial university of newfoundland ardz76@mun.ca hillary bradshaw memorial university of newfoundland heb176@mun.ca jessica melvin university center of the westfjords, university of akureyri jmelvin@mun.ca 2 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) charles mather memorial university of newfoundland cmather@mun.ca natalya dawe memorial university of newfoundland nad471@mun.ca emily wells memorial university of newfoundland eewells@mun.ca france liboiron memorial university of newfoundland fel480@mun.ca bojan fürst memorial university of newfoundland bfurst@mun.ca coco coyle harvey mudd college ccoyle@g.hmc.edu jacquelyn saturno memorial university of newfoundland jacquelynsaturno@gmail.com melissa novacefski memorial university of newfoundland mn2385@mun.ca sam westcott memorial university of newfoundland samwwestcott@gmail.com grandmother liboiron st john's, newfoundland mliboiron@mun.ca 3 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) abstract author order is crucial; it is the currency of academia. within stem disciplines, women and junior researchers--those who are the primary constituents of our lab-consistently receive less credit for equal work. our civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear) is a feminist marine science laboratory at memorial university of newfoundland, canada. recognizing that the stakes are high for clear members, we have developed an approach to author order that emphasizes process and equity rather than system and equality. our process is premised on: 1) deciding author order vy consensus; 2) valuing care work and other forms of labour that are usually left out of scientific value systems; and 3) taking intersectional social standing into account. although clear’s approach differs from others’, we take author order seriously as a compromised but dominant structure within science we must contend with. that is, rather than attempt to circumvent author order, we stay with the trouble. this article outlines this process. introduction author order is crucial; it is the currency of academia. within stem disciplines, women and junior researchers—those who are the primary constituents of our lab—consistently receive less credit for equal work (rosser, 2004). our civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear) is a feminist marine science laboratory at memorial university of newfoundland, canada. recognizing that the stakes of recognition are high for clear members, we have developed an approach to author order that emphasizes process and equity rather than system and equality. unlike most other labs, we do not attempt to objectively determine the value of contributions, nor do we reward only labor recognized as ‘intellectual’. although clear’s approach differs from others’, we take author order seriously as a compromised but dominant scientific structure with which we must contend. that is, rather than attempt to circumvent author order, we stay with the trouble. existing methods for determining author order author order norms for the biological and animal sciences, where we 4 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) publish most, understand the first author (what we call the hot young thang), as the most important author in terms of findings, writing, and study design. the last author (the white/wise old man), is the anchor of the paper, and provides the lab, training, and grants. these two positions receive the most credit for the research. other authors rank between them from most important contributor to least. how is this order best determined? the problem with existing approaches to author order is their reliance on metrics and systems that aim to accurately reward contributions to a paper. the vancouver protocol (international committee of medical journal editors, 1978) standardizes biomedical journal submissions and includes standards for what one must contribute to be considered an author: conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data; drafting the article or revising for intellectual content; and/or final approval of the version to be published. however, it does not offer a standard for how to choose author order other than it “should be a joint decision of the coauthors” (1978: 4). in contrast, psychologist stephen kosslyn’s system measures contribution up to a maximum of 1,000 points, where anyone with less than 100 points is acknowledged in a footnote (kosslyn, 2002). this system aims to quantify unlike tasks–ideas versus bench work, writing versus note-taking (also see venkatraman, 2016). recognizing that the system is flawed, some research groups have used unconventional methods to draw attention to the problematic nature of the process. for example, author order has been decided by competitions that involve skill, such as games of: scramble (belyea & lancaster, 2002); tennis (griffiths & anderson, 1978); or a brownie bakeoff (young & young, 1992). others participate in games of chance, such as: rock, paper, scissors (kupfer et al., 2004) and coin-toss (miller & ballard, 1992). in situations where a paper requires additional authors, cats have been credited as co-authors (mcgaw & twitchit, 2012, hetherington & willard, 1975). these techniques are merely parodies of the current protocols to discern author order, recognizing that the system 5 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) is already compromised. others have sought to more explicitly circumvent the hierarchical system, such as j.k. gibson-graham, two co-authors who hyphenate their name so they receive equal credit on all publications (e.g. gibsongraham, 1996), even after half of the team, julie graham, died in 2010. some co-authors publish under their research group name rather than individual names (e.g. superstorm research lab, 2013). food geographer ian cook uses ‘cook et al.’ to acknowledge the collective work in any research-writing endeavor (e.g. cook et al., 2008). yet these practices do not accrue value to members that help them to acquire sought-after positions; we have collectively decided to privilege individuals’ names, even as we problematize hyper-individualism in science in other ways. rather than a metric system that remains stable across articles and contexts, clear uses a situated and context dependent process that assumes decisions about author order will be different for every paper. equity clear’s work is informed by the feminist value of equity, whether we are ordering supplies or building scientific instruments (see liboiron, 2016). equity is different than equality. equality involves treating everyone exactly the same, and as a result has no impact on the uneven positions from which different people start. equity, in contrast, is sensitive to the different positions of participants and so is potentially transformative of power relations. existing author order protocols favor equality. our own protocols foreground equity and are shaped by a shared commitment to consensus, care work, and acknowledgement of social location. we consider each of these in turn below. 6 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) consensus consensus allows a group to reach an acceptable and supportable resolution to an issue, even if that acceptance and support is uneven (see treloar, 2013 on the importance of differentiating between uneven consensus and unanimous agreement). we follow the consensus based decision-making process, as described by hartnett (2011), that involves identifying key concerns through open discussion, creating proposals that address them, then amending the proposal until everyone agrees to move forward. this can take a few minutes or a few weeks. the aim of consensus is to redistribute power and advocacy. tenured faculty do not have more say than undergraduate students, though we acknowledge that faculty still have greater power of persuasion and that unconscious biases are always at work. we support one another during the conversation by stepping up to advocate for another person’s work or ideas if they are quiet, modest, or absent, and stepping back if we have spoken more than others. we aim to ask questions as much as we make statements. the result is that these conversations tend to be fun, interesting, and supportive. care work is valued work care is a form of political and ethical practice that “holds things together” (de la bellacasa, 2011, p.90; martin et al., 2015). we also acknowledge that care work can disproportionately affect certain groups more than others depending on gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and perceived abilities. with this in mind, the lab aims to distribute and acknowledge care work in its various forms. different forms of care we consider when discussing author order have included: training new members on protocols; maintaining equipment; cleaning up; contributing to logistical tasks including note taking, scheduling, sending email reminders and booking rooms; caring for members’ physical and mental health by listening, sending sick people home, providing “time outs,” and telling 7 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) jokes; and thanking each other. social location clear has eighteen members. dr. max liboiron directs (non-tenured, woman). dr. charles mather facilitates (tenured, man). we have one male phd student, four female master’s students, and eleven undergraduates, ten of whom are women. we have one male staff member. we are one indigenous woman, and a whole lot of white people. we have a bunch of queers, but we’ve never actually counted. our members have had negative experiences in other labs: we have been mistaken for assistants rather than primary investigators (pis); have had names moved down lists of author order without discussion; are constantly spoken over and interrupted by senior and male colleagues; have experienced data and grant theft by advisors; have been told we are expected to work long hours without any credit since we do not make intellectual contributions to projects; are expected to prioritize our work over all other personal and professional goals and obligations; and have been represented in media interviews as “girly” and silly instead of intelligent. this is why we believe that simply bringing more women and people of color into science— equality—while maintaining the status quo only perpetuates the violence experienced. it is also why we seek to give our lab members authorship credit. for decades, feminist sts scholars have articulated how power circulates through science, differentially impacting people depending on their social location (haraway, 1988; harding, 2001). social location—the groups people belong to because of their place or position in history and society, including race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and educational status—influences not just how people encounter science (determining their wages, likelihood of receiving tenure, awards, etc.) but also how science is produced (influencing the values embedded within their research, the questions they choose to ask, methods they use and more) (tallbear, 2015; whyte, in press). for these reasons, we consider social 8 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) location when awarding author order. some of the aspects of social position we’ve considered include: • whether the author is an academic; the value of order to a nonacademic will be different than an academic. it is important to consider non-academics as full collaborators and value them as such via authorship and involvement in the consensus process. • affiliation; which affiliations do we want to highlight, and why? we may want to promote new, unsung, non-profit, or underfunded organizations and universities. • who needs the cultural capital most? is anyone going on the job market, going up for tenure, or applying for graduate school? • for whom is authorship a unique opportunity? publishing opportunities for faculty and graduate students can be numerous, while for others (such as undergraduate students) publishing may be a unique opportunity to be recognized. • hierarchical status; often undergraduate and technician work is not valued as much as graduate or faculty work, even where the same labor is performed. • payment status; are some members being paid wages or stipends for the work, while others are not? are they paid the same amounts or the same way? • number of publications authors already have; the publication may mean more to someone who has fewer. • direction of member’s research; if a paper fits particularly well with a member’s research trajectory, it may provide more value than if they are working on a different topic. • the past struggles of some members; some people have already encountered acute setbacks in their careers due to social location. • markers of difference: consider gender, race, indigeneity, age, disability, and other markers of difference and privilege. how can we address severe underrepresentation of certain demographics in stem right here, right now? 9 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) a snapshot of the process image 1: lab members during conversation about author equity, 2016. photograph by clear photographer-in-residence bojan fürst. image 2: white board with traces of our process. photo clear, creative commons attribution-sharealike 4.0 international license. 10 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) these are guidelines for practices, not rules. so, what does this look like, in practice? a trained facilitator facilitates each meeting. when making a decision, we use our fingers to indicate agreement or the need for more conversation. fingers wiggled upwards means yes; sideways means more discussion is needed; and downwards means no. we call them twinkle fingers. facilitation starts by writing the names of every participant on a whiteboard. we add names of absentees or people who contributed to the project who might not have been involved in writing. then, we “chunk” people based on the amount or type of labor contributed. for the paper you are reading now, these chunks included involvement in: 1) discussions; 2) editing and discussions; and 3) writing, editing, and discussions. people can move between chunks after they are added (image 2). the longest part of our process is ordering authors within these chunks. we choose the first and last author in a section by discussing types and values of labor and by reviewing the lists of care work and social standing explained above. people step up to ask for consideration, step back if they feel they are already considered, and recommend others based on the care and labor they’ve seen them perform. this last practice is important for absent members. when two people seem completely even, there is a strong temptation to resort to alphabetical order, but that is not staying with the trouble. we go down the list of care work and social location and think of other aspects of social location and care not already on the list. this often leads to discussions of what counts as social location, privilege, and care, and thus refines our commitment to intersectional feminism. the process of determining author order in clear is performative: it enacts and strengthens the values we hold dear. recognizing past care work leads to thanking each other. talking about what should be included in social standing hones our ideas of equity, and allows us to 11 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) stand in solidarity with one another. crucially, each iteration of determining author order is different in that we are always faced with a new set of issues to consider. our approach to authorship order is not, and can never be, systematized. the establishment of systems closes discussion. instead, we use a situated process that recognizes diversity and difference while at the same time rewarding the varied contributions to knowledge production, and most importantly, we become a more reflexive, stronger feminist lab every time we have these discussions. acknowledgements we acknowledge that clear operates on the unceded, unsurrendered ancestral lands of the mi’kmaq and beothuk. we acknowledge the inuit of nunatsiavut and nunatukavut and the innu of nitassinan, and their ancestors, as the original peoples of labrador. references belyea, l.r., & lancaster, j. (2002). inferring landscape dynamics of bog pools from scaling relationships and spatial patterns. journal of ecology, 90(2), 223-234. cook, i., & et al. (2008). geographies of food: mixing. progress in human geography, 32(6), 821-833. de la bellacasa, m.p. (2011). matters of care in technoscience: assembling neglected things. social studies of science, 41(1), 85-106. editorial committee. (2016). who cares? : the politics of care in radical organizing. upping the anti, 18. retrieved from http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/18-editorial/ 12 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) gibson-graham, j.k. (1996). the end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy. oxford, uk and cambridge, usa: blackwell publishers. griffiths, w.e., & anderson, j.r. (1978). specification of agricultural supply functionsempirical evidence on wheat in southern new south wales. australian journal of agricultural economics, 22(2‐3), 115-128. haraway, d. (1988). situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. feminist theory, 14(3), 575-599. harding, s. (2004). introduction: standpoint theory as a site of political, philosophic, and scientific debate. in s. harding, the feminist standpoint theory reader: intellectual and political controversies (1-15). new york: routledge. hartnett, t. (2011). consensus-oriented decision-making: the codm model for facilitating groups to widespread agreement. new society publishers. hetherington, j.h., & willard, f.d.c. (1975). two-, three-, and four-atom exchange effects in bcc he 3. physical review letters, 35(21), 1442. international committee of medical journal editors. (1997). vancouver protocol. american college of physicians, 126, 36-47. kosslyn, s.m. (2002). criteria for authorship. retrieved from http://kosslynlab.fas.harvard.edu/files/kosslynlab/files/authorship_criteria _nov02.pdf kupfer, j.a., webbeking, a.l., & franklin, s.b. (2004). forest fragmentation affects early successional patterns on shifting cultivation 13 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) fields near indian church, belize. agriculture, ecosystems & environment, 103(3), 509-518. liboiron, m. (2016). civic technologies for monitoring marine plastics. journal of ocean technology, 11(2), 36-45. martin, a., myers, n., & viseu, a. (2015). the politics of care in technoscience. social studies of science, 45(5), 625-641. mcgaw, i.j., & twitchit, t.a. (2012). specific dynamic action in the sunflower star, pycnopodia helianthoides. comparative biochemistry and physiology part a: molecular & integrative physiology, 161(3), 287-295. miller, s.d., & ballard, w.b. (1992). in my experience: analysis of an effort to increase moose calf survivorship by increased hunting of brown bears in south-central alaska. wildlife society bulletin (1973-2006), 20(4), 445454. rosser, s.v. (2004). the science glass ceiling: academic women scientists and the struggle to succeed. new york, ny and london, uk: psychology press. superstorm research lab. (2013). a tale of two sandys. white paper. tallbear, k. (2015). an indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human. glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, 21, 230235. treloar, m. (2003). the tyranny of consensus. clamor, 20, 38-40. venkatraman, v. (2016). conventions of scientific authorship. retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2010/04/conventions-scientificauthorship 14 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) whyte, p.k. (in press). our ancestors’ dystopia now: indigenous conservation and the anthropocene. in u. heise., j. christensen, & m. niemann, routledge companion to the environmental humanities. new york: routledge. young. h.j., & young, t.p. (1992). alternative outcomes of natural and experimental high pollen loads. ecology, 73(2), 639-647. bios jessica melvin is a member of the civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear) where her research focuses on marine microplastics in fish as well as how to tackle the problem through collaboration with the public (citizen science). she is a recent graduate of the coastal and marine management master's program at the university centre of the westfjords in iceland and holds a bachelor of science in marine biology from memorial university of newfoundland. emily wells is a member of civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear) and an undergraduate in biology and french at memorial university of newfoundland. in addition to citizen science and marine plastic research with clear, she has a diverse background in genetics, ecology, and behavioral psychology. she has been awarded multiple research scholarships, including an nserc undergraduate research award. wells is an outreach demonstrator with naturenl and let talk science!, and her involvement in the local scientific community has been recognized by multiple awards. hillary bradshaw is an environmental science masters student working in the civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear) at memorial university of newfoundland. her thesis monitors the bottom of the ocean in the far north for macro and micro plastics through video and 15 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) sediment sampling. jacquelyn saturno is a member of the civic laboratory of environmental action research (clear). she is pi for a microplastic ingestion study of atlantic salmon in newfoundland. from her education at university of guelph and niagara college and experience working for non-profits, academic institutions and environmental consulting, she has extensive knowledge in restoration ecology and conservation biology in terrestrial and aquatic systems. justine ammendolia is a member of clear. she has recently completed her m.sc. in marine biology at memorial university conducting a study on the effects of hydrostatic pressure on the biological roles of echinoderms. she is also a grantee of the national geographic young explorers grant for her research on arctic seabirds in greenland during her undergraduate degree at university of guelph. dr. charles mather works in the geography department, memorial university of newfoundland. his current work focuses on the historical and contemporary politics of atlantic salmon conservation in eastern canada in the context of debates on the anthropocene. alex zahara is an interdisciplinary researcher and phd candidate in the department of geography at memorial university of newfoundland, and member of civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear). his doctoral research examines the history and effects of wildfire management in northern canadian communities, focusing on discourses of smoke as a form of industrial contamination. his research interests include the role of pollution in settler colonialism; queer and feminist science methods; ethics of care in risk management; citizen science and direct action research. france liboiron is a member of the civic laboratory for environmental 16 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) action research (clear). she holds a b.sc. honors in marine biology from memorial university of newfoundland. natalya dawe is a member of the civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear) and a research assistant at memorial university of newfoundland. she holds a bachelor of arts in geography from memorial university of newfoundland. sam westcott is a writer and guitarist from topsail, newfoundland. he was a member of clear for eighth months in 2016/17, while studying english and creative writing in st. john's at memorial university of newfoundland, producing podcasts and writing poetry for the lab. his poetry and short fiction have been published by the paper mill press, and in 2016 his band ataraxia released their first ep. katharine winsor is a graduate student in sociology at memorial university of newfoundland and member of civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear). her research focuses on young offenders, social supports, and the role of disability in juvenile justice decision making and has presented on these topics. winsor's work with clear centres on citizen science, curriculum development of diy technologies, and feminist approaches to research. dr. max liboiron directs the civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear), a feminist marine science and technology laboratory. liboiron's research bridges the physical and social sciences in its investigation of how marine plastics are represented in science and how these methods of representation relate to action. liboiron is managing editor of discard studies, a member of the endocrine disruptors action group (edaction), and a co-organizer for the gathering for open science hardware (gosh). melissa novacefski is an undergraduate student in geography and earth 17 liboiron, et al. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) sciences at memorial university of newfoundland, and a member of civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear). coco coyle is an undergraduate student in engineering at harvey mudd college, california. bojan fürst is the manager of knowledge mobilization, the leslie harris centre of regional policy and development at memorial university of newfoundland, where he leads the harris centre's knowledge brokering team, connecting community needs with the resources available at the university. he is a member of civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear), where he is the photographer-in-residence. microsoft word 77063-1-11_hamraie.docx hamraie, a. (2019). roundtable introduction: crip technoscience activism, artistry, and social praxis. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © hamraie, a, 2019. | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license roundtable introduction crip technoscience activism, artistry, and social praxis aimi hamraie vanderbilt university aimi.hamraie@vanderbilt.edu as in the historical accounts of crip technoscience found elsewhere in this issue, much of the most significant discourse and praxis surrounding disabled knowing-making occurs in homes, on personal computers, in shared spaces, and in aesthetic opportunities facilitated by disability technologies that, once tinkered with, push back against demands for compulsory able-bodiedness. thus, in soliciting contributions for this roundtable, i focused on perspectives that academic discussions of disability and technoscience do not typically center: perspectives from disability artistry and nightlife, online activism, and spaces that intersect with but go far beyond the university. i invited contemporary artists and activists to explore what technoscience is coming to mean for crip culture and disability justice. i was particularly interested in the uses of technoscience to pursue accessibility as a source of aesthetic and relational praxis beyond legal compliance with the americans with disabilities act of 1990. the artists and activists represented here are part of a wider field that also includes fashion design (such as in the work of sky cupacub’s hamraie catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 rebirth garments, which cupacub describes as “gender non-conforming wearables and accessories for people on the full spectrum of gender, size, and ability”), critical architectural and industrial design (such as in the work of design researcher sara hendren, whose many projects include engineering at and slope : intercept), and performance (such as in the work of leroy moore of krip-hop nation, whose foundational disability justice work spans music, performance, public education, and comic book design; and the multidisciplinary contributions of the sins invalid performance collective, co-founded by moore and patricia berne, who are leading theoretical and practical discussions surrounding disability justice). “start your own good trouble” disability movement leader and social worker vilissa thompson examines the role of social media technologies in the disability rights movement, arguing that social media has enabled participation in activism by disabled people whose presence is not often anticipated in public protests, and in turn has made the contemporary disability movement more intersectional. thompson reflects on her groundbreaking project, ramp your voice!, a platform for “black disabled women/femmes,” and her hashtag #disabilitytoowhite, arguing that the activist use of hashtags has, for disabled activists, highlighted unacknowledged issues (such as racism within disability movements). in the spirit of non-compliant crip technoscience, thompson offers that social media activism enables us to “lend…perspective to the current conversations or start your own good trouble,” a methodology at the heart of crip technoscience. radical relationality, care, and exploration artist, dj, and scholar-activist kevin gotkin delves into the “good trouble” of what he terms “crip nightlife,” a methodology of technological manipulation and disability artistry combined to explore the possibilities of disability culture at the club. building on the do-it-yourself (diy) club scene hamraie catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 and histories of co-creation between deaf people and punk clubs, gotkin theorizes that crip nightlife could conjure accessible worlds on the dance floor, in the bathroom, and in the playlist itself, ultimately “divin[ing] the truth and complexity of disability history, culture, and resistance” through technoscientific tinkering. as gotkin notes, tinkering is “already what many nightlife artists understand in their work.” crip technoscience, as a philosophy for critical nightlife, further contributes the ethos of interdependence, care, and experimentation that pervades disability culture. “cultural-aesthetic technoscience” alice sheppard’s account of disability technologies and dance performance offers the critical concept of “cultural-aesthetic technoscience,” a term grounded in notions of disability culture as aesthetic possibility. her essay focuses on three technologies of access, understood otherwise as aesthetic technologies: the gif, the crutch, and the ramp. although each of these technologies functions on its own to facilitate understanding and movement, in sheppard’s practice they are rendered as critical design tools: the gif (produced in collaboration with producer lisa niedermeyer) acts as a “critical story telling device,” the crutch (here, shortened for use only in dance and not for walking) challenges notions of functional accessibility, and the ramp (designed in collaboration with design researchers at olin college of engineering) appears as itself a character in sheppard’s performance descent. as sheppard argues, these manipulations of technologies (such as to render them “non-compliant” with either ableist norms or even the standards of the americans with disabilities act) push cultural-aesthetic technoscience into “the tensions of complex accessibility,” ultimately “naming a practice that is rooted in and speaks to the ideas and work of other disabled culture makers.” here, “good trouble” becomes the basis of critique, conversation, and celebration. hamraie catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 “suck-it, ableism” activist and movement leader alice wong, founder of the disability visibility project, explores the “good trouble” of crip technoscience through an engagement with disability activists’ responses to the contemporary straw ban debate. juxtaposing speculative fiction with histories of the plastic “bendy” straw, wong explores the controversy over plastics and marine pollution by pointing to the ways that many disabled people not only need straws to survive, but also the ways that disabled people have adapted and hacked inaccessible worlds to survive present-day apocalypses. current dystopias are manifest in casual denials of access and care that recapitulate eugenicist notions of disabled lives as not worth living. wong’s essay suggests that these apocalypses manifest in the material world, and as such can be designed otherwise. it is my hope that these short pieces will serve as a teachable and even tinkerable archive of crip technoscience in the present moment, marking where this perspective touches other areas of disability activism and scholarship. references disability visibility project. (n.d.). retrieved from https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/ engineering at home. (n.d.) retrieved from http://engineeringathome.org/ krip-hop nation. (n.d.) retrieved from http://kriphopnation.com/ rebirth garments. (n.d.). retrieved from http://rebirthgarments.com/ slope : intercept. (n.d.). retrieved from https://slopeintercept.org/about/ hamraie catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 sins invalid. (n.d.). retrieved from https://www.sinsinvalid.org/ orr   image & text     enchanting catastrophe: magical subrealism and bp's macondo jackie orr syracuse university jtorr@maxwell.syr.edu underneath what happened down here?1 in the hold of a ghosted ship, in the hold of their grip, in the thrall of an image circulating in newly subterranean form? brown cloud billows against patches of bluegreen etched here and there by shadow. the frame dials left, then right, in measured motion. a robotic arm rotates, reaches and grasps, fails and retreats. repeat. a small fish floats into the frame. zoom out. zoom in. seeing, here, is sequenced by algorithms of hyperindustrial focus. here, deep water’s horizon is blasted out of an infinite black into a fracked metric of light and time. zoom in. zoom out. zoom in. what can happen down here? live streaming new scholarly forms in the liquid rush of digital times raptured by disaster, and its release. "no way where we are is here ... and so it is we remain in the hold, in the break, as if entering again and again the broken world, to trace the visionary company and join it" (harney and moten, 2013, p. 94). in the live stream. occult ontologies (thinking with oil) "oil … [is] a substance that was, once, live matter and that acts with a force suggestive of a form of life."         -stephanie lemenager, living oil "the underworld is not really dead."         -victoria nelson, the secret life of puppets set on the edge of an oil field in southern california, fritz leiber's 1964 short story "black gondolier" narrates the mystical vision of one of its main characters, in which crude oil is revealed as an "ancient and enigmatic manifestation" of the occult world (thacker, 2011, p. 92). dreaming its dark dreams for millennia, oil's "chemical mind" manifests as a sentient form of viscous thought, patiently working to become the animating intelligence of modern industrial regimes. humans, it is revealed, did not discover oil. oil waited for millions of inhuman years, "sluggishly pulsing beneath earth's stony skin," to discover humans as its animate puppets, and modern technologic infrastructures as its geopsychic medium (leiber, cited in thacker, 2011). the brief, oozing horror story ends with the mystical theorist disappearing into a dark, desiring sea of midnight oil, the silent black gondolier at his side. in eugene thacker's extended meditation on occult philosophy, leiber's story marks the power of popular horror to conjure the "magic site, deep within the crusts and caverns of the planet, in which the hidden world oozes and gropes forth to the surface" (p. 91). the magic site performs a bewitching and always potentially fatal encounter at the border of the natural and the supernatural—that hidden realm that can nonetheless bleed through in underground fissures or mining operations when, perhaps, an accidental revelation invites the supernatural to suddenly gaze back, with unhuman eyes, at us (p. 82). channeling the science fantasy writer h.p. lovecraft, thacker imagines how today the magic site, mutated by modern sorceries of science and technology, radiates outward in a diffuse, atmospheric fallout that no longer marks a distinct border between natural and supernatural worlds, but which instead marks the oscillating, ungovernable boundary between them (pp. 76-77). once upon a time the magic circle—predecessor to the magic site, and evidenced for centuries in european pagan and theatrical practices—offered ritualized protections from the supernatural in the bounded spacetime of its conjuring. today, the human world stumbles without ritual safety through realms simultaneously empirical and occulted, through modes of time both perceivable and preternaturally unreal. in the dispersed psychogeography of the magic site, "natural and supernatural blend into a kind of ambient, atmospheric no-place…bathed in the alien ether of unknowable dimensions" (p. 77). how really to think the thought that thought may be unhuman? how to think with oil, that sentient philosophy living in the interstices, in the tiny voids in sedimented rock, gathering in unhuman dimensions of heat, pressure, dark, and time? millions of unthinkable human years to form itself into a viscous thought. how to re-think the bp disaster, erupting out of the offshore oil industry's subsea infrastructures, as a magic site? an enchanted catastrophe of supernatural time, compressed in the void, old time heaving into metaphysical motion by the blowout of an underwater oil well in the gulf of mexico that bp had curiously named "macondo," after that magical realist town in gabriel garcía márquez's one hundred years of solitude that blows away in the wind by the end of the story. it is deep time that burned on that flaming rig at sea. it is earth's millennial thinking that spread with a numinous, relentless geo-logic through the startled waters. you can say that sometimes thought tries to bend toward the dark, in the occult company of unthinkable forms of time. you can say that catastrophe cuts a portal between different modes of time, and the dead pour through the open door while a thousand possible futures are buried. you can say that the catastrophe of time itself—bursting into the sudden clearing of an accidental apocalypse, self-immolating in the mundane daily burn of petro-modern infrastructures—still tries to enchant at the supernatural site of its own undoing. "oil . . . is a medium," writes stephanie lemenager in living oil, "that fundamentally supports all modern media forms" (2014, p. 6). without the mediations of oil it would be difficult, she suggests, to hold on to the cultural category of "human." but oil also helps us to grasp some of the less thinkable contours of the unhuman, undulating us towards planetary temporal scales that petro-modernity effaces even as it requires them for its energetic foundations. oil thinks deeply as medium of the dead. as archivist of fossilized matters, from mammals to plant life to marine organisms, oil knows how to become the thought of decay that itself has not died. oil is a medium for a living repertoire of microbial matters, including hundreds of species of microorganisms discovered in the los angeles la brea tar pit, "living bacteria, progeny of soil microorganisms trapped in the petrol sumps tens of thousands of years ago" (p. 155). we can think, with oil, that time itself may be thinking in the sedimented form of "fossil" fuels. we can think with oil as a medium in which time thinks itself into form. "[i]t was always march there and always monday, and then they understood that josé arcadio buendía was not as  crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the  fact that time also stumbled and had accidents andc ould therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room." -gabriel garcía márquez, one hundred years of solitude   the subterranean thought of time dwelling in the bodymind of oil is an indescribably slow thinking. a millennial thinking that gives notice to the slow disaster of time itself, as "petro-capitalism's omnivorous appetite for time" (nixon, 2011, p. 97) striates human and non-human worlds with depleted signs of exhaustion. if "energy wars are time wars as well" (p. 99), then the enclosures enforced by petro-modernity's primitive accumulations include the real and imaginary enclosure of time. capitalism becomes time's sorcerer; the slow thought of oil becomes its material engine and its infernal adversary. speed is the currency of speculative economies of future energy, as transnational fortunes rise and fall with the occult brokering of the price of a barrel of oil. to get a hold on the hold that petro-capitalism, as sorcery, has over us (pignarre and stengers, 2011), is to get a hold on how time's enclosure creates energetic binds by which we become beholden to our own capture. sorceries and superstitions are dangers that we "believe we have destroyed whereas above all we have lost the appropriate means of responding to [them]" (p. 40). how to see that the inability to protect ourselves from sorcery's hold is precisely why "in the eyes of these reputedly superstitious ‘others' . . . the disaster becomes perfectly foreseeable" (pignarre and stengers, 2011, p. 40)? how to inhabit the slow, accumulating thought that catastrophe's future is already, ineluctably, here? "macondo was in ruins. in the swampy streets there were the remains of furniture, animal skeletons  covered with red lilies .… [everything] seemed to have been  blown away in an anticipation of the prophetic wind that years later would wipe macondo off the face of the earth." -garcía márquez one hundred years of sorcery in 1901, oil blasts through six tons of drilling pipe to create the world's first accidental "gusher" in spindletop, texas, somewhat cataclysmically announcing (oil-drenched crews labored for over a week to stop the gush) the discovery of the largest petroleum reserve to date on u.s. land. this is land only recently settled into its manifest yet never-fully-destined national contours after the expansive capture of sovereign territory from mexico and the semi-legalized dispossession of indigenous land right from massachusetts to california and all the curiously ‘native'-named states-of-dispossession-in-between: alabama, kentucky, louisiana, minnesota, montana, oklahoma. to sing just a few. spindletop rises and crashes as home also to the first boom-and-bust cycle of wild oil speculation in the u.s. as 600 new companies move into town in the next twelve months (freudenburg and gramling, 2011, pp. 80-81). an oil well launched with a $10,000 investment soon sells for $1,250,000, as hundreds of millions of dollars pour like liquid gold into texas before the "exuberant" catastrophe of finitude—the oil stops—brings spindletop to its knees (buell, 2012). in texas and its kin in early u.s. oil exploration, pennsylvania, the search for oil stumbles over two distinct problems. first, how to find it? second, what to do with it? the black "rock oil," as it was called, is used as a medicinal cure by white settler colonists in the early 19th century for a wide swath of human sicknesses. by the end of that century, oil is alchemically conjured into kerosene and used to light the dark. kerosene lamps blaze a new geography of night and day for an increasingly enlightened industrial capitalism. finding a new geologic algorithm for continuous illumination is aided by late 19th century spiritualist practices of divination and spirit possession. popularly acclaimed "wizards of oil" wander the surface of the earth in a trance state with divining rods and witching sticks, searching for underground veins of oil (zuck, 2012). accompanied by indigenous spirit-guides from the dispossessed seneca nation, abraham james, on the 31st of october 1866, all hallow's eve, is travelling just south of pleasantville, pennsylvania, when he is "forcefully possessed by his spirit-guides and conveyed out of the buggy and over a fence on the east side of the road" where "spirits communicated" that he is "standing on an immense oil deposit" (zuck, 2012, p. 314, p. 332). in 1867, harmonial well no. 1 is dug near the spot and begins producing daily over 100 barrels of oil, followed by three other productive wells in the same area. as the "industrial aspirations of [american] spiritualism" (zuck, 2012, p. 316) vibrate together with the magical realism of early u.s. oil discovery, oil appears in the interstices between supernatural animations and capitalist sorceries of valued matter. abraham james, who also divines the psycho-geologics of the less successful "spirit well" under the auspices of the short-lived chicago rock oil company founded by members of the local spiritualist community, suggests that "oil itself could function as a kind of medium," communicating spiritualism's capacity to channel the materiel needs of modern capitalism (zuck, 2012, pp. 324-25). by the 1920s the discovery and production of u.s. oil is increasingly standardized by the monopoly power of the rockefeller enterprise. the spiritualist psychometrics of vibrational divination give way to the speculative arts of petroleum geology in pursuit of oil's subterranean lines of flight. militarized national economies of world war generate cascading use-values for fossil fuels, and by 1945 both petroleum and the instrumental polymerization of waste products from its industrial production begin to restructure the geographies and psychic economies of u.s. society. as petroleum becomes the "material and energetic basis of everyday life" in the cold war u.s. of a., the racialized class geographies of white suburbanization are built on an emergent petro-privatization built on oil, gasoline, asphalt, vinyl, and plasticized domestic interiors built on early intimations of the neoliberal dream of an ownership society built on automobility, nuclearized family relations, and the mandatory fantasy of self-entrepreneurship (huber, 2012, p. 302, pp. 305-307). the enchantments of petroleum-based plastic objects begin to offer, like their celluloid predecessors, a new materialism for simulation: proliferating plastic copies of commodity-objects begin to regularly disappear only to magically reappear in exactly the same form. the pen, the shampoo container, the nylons, the toy bucket. polymerized molecular derivatives of deep time perform disposability without loss. psychic and political economies attune to accelerating, repetitious circuits of replacement and obsolescence followed by serial renewal. post-war u.s. consumer cultures energetically lean on a capitalist alchemy of fossilized fuel and its technoscientific extraction and transmutation. the train winds its way over and around the infinity loop of track, travelling past a school, cheerful houses, a church, and a roadside texaco gas station tucked next to a miniature highway. the controls for the giant toy train set are placed in front of the crown prince sa'ud ibn 'abd al-'azīz, fêted in 1947 at a grand soirée at the waldorf astoria attended by 75 guests from new york city banks, the u.s. state department, bechtel, and several u.s. petroleum companies including aramco, which hosts the gala affair just as the industry enters an era of postwar but not quite postcolonial restructuring. at the end of the waldorf dinner, crown prince al-'azīz is entertained by an egyptian magician and a chorus line of dancing rockettes (vitalis, 2002, p. 207; vitalis, 2009, p. 32). a decade before the crown prince's visit, aramco builds the city of dhahran as a new company town in the desert of eastern saudi arabia after the discovery of oil in the region, drawing on the racist architectures of jim crow america and the spatial violence of similar oil "camps" run by u.s. business in columbia, venezuela, indonesia and elsewhere, which were themselves modeled on 19th-century mining towns blooming at the hungry borders of a colonial grab for subterranean minerals (vitalis, 2002, p. 200; also vitalis, 2009, pp. 54-61). by the early 1950s, aramco morphs into a miniature state department intelligence service mimicking the wartime office of strategic service's division for middle east intelligence and propaganda, and offering a hospitable regional outpost for early officials of the cia (vitalis, 2002, p. 190). in saudi arabia in 1948, a year after the enchanted aramco evening, the crown prince's father, king 'abd al-'azīz ibn sa'ud, reports to a visiting state department official: "the whole people are saying that my country is an american colony. they are plotting against me and saying ibn sa'ud has given his country to the united states, even the holy places…. i have nothing, and my country and my wealth i have delivered into the hands of america" (vitalis, 2002, p. 200). in 1953, after nearly a century of preeminence, the united states loses its global hegemony in oil production, no longer the sole nation mining over half the world's petroleum supplies. in 1954, iran nationalizes its oil industry after throwing out the shah who returns a year later, bringing back a more ecumenical petrol policy with the occult help of the cia and the british government. in 1954, british petroleum is born, shape-shifting from its previous colonial incarnations as the anglo-iranian oil company and, originally, the anglo-persian oil company founded in 1909 (freudenburg and gramling, 2011, pp. 100-106). as huge oil fields are discovered in the deserts of what are now known as saudi arabia, iraq, iran, bahrain, and kuwait, entrepreneurial spirits in the cold war u.s. turn to the gulf of mexico where offshore oil production was launched in 14 feet of water in 1938—the same year that mexico nationalizes its oil industry. created by millions of years of sand, soil, and salt deposits sculpted into a singular underworld edged by the continental margins and the mouth of a giant river recently named the mississippi, the gulf of mexico manifests as a potential "world class petroleum province." in 1957, the zapata offshore company—named after the assassinated mexican revolutionary and guerilla warrior for the poor by zapata's founder, the texas oilman and future millionaire, cia director, and u.s. president, george h.w. bush—successfully designs a new drilling platform that enables offshore oil production in the gulf to move for the first time into depths of over 100 feet (national commission, 2011, pp. 22-24). plagued regularly by monstrous hurricanes which ravage offshore infrastructure, and threatened by the political force of a u.s. environmental movement in the wake of the january 1969 blowout of an offshore well in the santa barbara channel that generates 30 miles of blackened california coastline, an 800-square-mile oil slick, and the first annual earth day in 1970—the u.s. offshore oil industry deepens its hold. drilling in depths of over 300 feet in the gulf of mexico by 1970, the industry is buoyed by a series of technoscientific innovations, including digital 3d seismic imaging to animate the speculative geophysics of locating oil, and the first successful remote control engineering of a subsea wellhead celebrated as an achievement "akin to john glenn's space orbit." by 1980, shell oil is drilling in the gulf in over 1,000 feet of water, the official definition of "deepwater" (national commission, 2011, pp. 25-31). british petroleum, staggered by expulsion from former colonial territories—iran after the 1979 revolution and nigeria, the same year, after its nationalization of oil—partners with shell in the late 1980s on a new deepwater oil well 3000 feet below the gulf's surface. the $1.2 billion project, code-named mars, saves british petroleum from bankruptcy. the company pursues deepwater drilling throughout the 1990s with speculative flair, emerging by the millennium as the largest oil producer in the gulf of mexico. atlantis, mad dog, crazy horse, and blind faith, compose a series of non-randomly signifying oil fields that the company christens in the gulf over the next several years, promising bp over two billion gallons of commercially exploitable oil at underwater depths of up to 7,000 feet (national commission 2011, p. 36-37 and 45-50). oil, however, is not an interminable thought. by the time bp begins drilling the macondo well in 2009, the wizardry of "subsea infrastructures" (markeset et al. 2013) for the globalizing offshore oil industry has been forced into deeply occulted territory. millennial matter grows exhausted; the macondo well lies 5000 feet below the water's surface, and its oil fields another 13,000 feet under the subsea floor. the sorcerer appears tireless. to work at the necessary depths, bp deploys the liquid robotics of remotely operated vehicles (rovs), first developed by the u.s. navy and used to recover underwater atomic bomb debris (wagner et al., 2010; newman, 2010). oceaneering international, inc., specialists in subsea hardware and manufacturers of the rovs used by bp to build and then destroy the macondo well, runs a parallel entertainment division that produces animatronics for robotically engineered theme park attractions including simulations of dinosaurs, alien bugs, and downtown tokyo. the live streaming of an exploding macondo well captivates millions of viewers in the u.s. with the real time aesthetics of disaster delivered by cameras attached via subsea ‘umbilical’ cords to a human operator with a joystick in a control room on the water’s surface (black, 2010; farbman, 2012). as the politician calls on the sorcerer to show his hand and supply submerged digital images for the people (black, 2010, p. 743); as privatized corporate screens for robotic command and control become public live streams of mesmerizing catastrophe; as time ticks online and off, from milliseconds, to minutes, to days, to nights, to months to 4.9 million barrels of deep time blasted out of the sea floor into acres of undulating water . . . oil keeps thinking. in the interstices. even as the sorcerer moves ever closer, ever confident, toward the occulted void. magic and method if magical realism is not only a genre of writing but also a genre of power, exercised through the binding of enchantment and the empirical—say, a ghost devil and a labor regime (taussig, 1980); contagious phantasms and an economic implosion (nelson, 2012). if energy infrastructures are assembled via both supernatural and material economies; if the exploding macondo well in the gulf of mexico is both a magic site and a singular node in a transnational nexus of multibillion dollar petroleum production and profits, then how to tell a story that can dwell long enough in the portal between magical efficacy and persuasive history to have a fighting chance to change perceptions of what’s really real? "reality is more than that which exists," writes eduardo kohn (2013, p. 216) from the ethnographic edge of a thinking forest in ecuador. how to write from other edges, toward a real that exceeds what exists? petro-magic-realism is jennifer wenzel's (2006) useful term linking literary production to the violent political ecologies of resource extraction in countries that produce both magical realist stories and petroleum as commodity exports to the global north.2 countering the "empty globalism" of magical realism as a genre-category in which "the magical might be anything unfamiliar to a european or american reader," wenzel's petro-magic-realism foregrounds "the relationships between the fantastic and material elements of these stories, linking formal, intertextual, sociological, and economic questions about literature to questions of political ecology" (welnzel, 2006, pp. 456, 450). abdelrahman munif's novel cities of salt (1987) conjures a light shimmer of petro-magic-realism across 600 pages narrating the americans' arrival in the saudi desert to drill the first oil field. the "inexplicable, the hallucinatory, and the realistic converge" as the radically displaced local bedouins witness the magic technologies used by the u.s. oilmen to penetrate both "geologic and spiritual substrates" in their relentless, bewitched forays underground (nixon, 2011, p. 93-94). theories of magical realism also look beyond literary practice to relations between the fantastic and the material located in the very heart of social power. michael taussig's (1984) analysis of another extractive economy—the rubber industry in late 19th-century south america—names magical realism as a political force. here, the "mysterious side of the mysterious," condensed through image, fantasy, and myth, "create[s], through magical realism, a culture of terror" animating a colonial imaginary: "what distinguishes cultures of terror is that the epistemological, ontological, and otherwise purely philosophical problem of reality-and-illusion … [becomes] a high-powered tool for domination and a principal medium of political practice" (taussig, 1984, p. 492). revealing the cultural work of magical realism in assembling business and terror into the intimate cut of everyday worlds, taussig moves magical realism toward an analytics of ordinary power, practiced through extraordinary renditions of torture and a political economy of terrors both fabulated and real.  but what if magic can move even further? beyond and beneath the fantastic im/materiality or efficacious murk of ‘reality-and-illusion' that constitute the storied formations of colonizing power and capitalist exploitation? what happens if we press through and beyond the "dialectic optic," offered by walter benjamin and re-incarnated in taussig, as an antidote to spiraling mysticisms (taussig, 1984, p. 469)? what if there are occult agencies, animate unknowns, coursing through the dense circuits of symbolic and political economies? subreal agencies that are not unreal. submerged but not always subordinate. impenetrable and yet still capable of penetrating culturenatures in subnatural and never fully knowable ways. "[t]he boy enjoyed the story of…the fisherman who borrowed  a weight for his net from a neighbor and when he gave him a  fish in payment later it had a diamond in its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about  flying carpets. surprised, he asked ursula if all that  was true and she answered him that it was, that many years ago the gypsies had brought magic lamps and flying mats to macondo. 'what's happening,' she sighed, 'is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don't come here anymore.'" -garcía márquez eugene thacker's magic site is one image of subreal force. as an occult philosopher of contemporary horror, he evokes the technoscientific laboratory that has become the real, a dispersed, unbounded materialization of supernatural agencies inseparably mingled with techno-nature. the branded bp disaster unfolds within emergent subsea infrastructures of deepwater drilling and extraction, and also within a magical subrealist scene of prophetic catastrophe and enchanted time. the extraordinary power of enchantments pulses within the ordinary play of things when an oil well named after a doomed city in garcía márquez's 1967 tale of supernatural time is blown out of an imaginary future into the foreseeable disaster of the present, materializing in a relentless swell of mud and oil and subterranean force. enchantment arrives inside superstitious time, a time that can warp into curved lines of fate and chance as a spell of oblivion is cast across magical, real worlds. "every oil spill remembers every other," writes stephanie lemenager (2014, p. 64). and what if every oil spill remembers more than that? what if "the time of enchantment enacts repetition's strange power through relays across time that aren't supposed to happen" (burlein and orr, 2012, p. 17)? perhaps the bp oil spill does remember with uncanny precision the all-too-real history of the 1969 santa barbara oil spill, enacted with ferocious repetition in 2010:  that "the oil industry had no means of remediating spills; that industry had long been aware of the dangers of drilling . . . ; that corexit, the dispersant favored by union oil [and then bp] was toxic to marine life" (lemenager, 2014, p. 33). but the catastrophe of macondo, that dispersed magic site of time-shattered story, may also offer a strange, subreal relay of impossible timings as the blowout sinks the $350 million deepwater horizon oil rig in a red-orange inferno on earth day, april 22, 2010. in fact, on the fortieth anniversary of the first earth day organized on april 22, 1970, amidst the atmospheric fallout of the santa barbara spill and the spiraling smoke, visionary and real, from the bonfire of the birds—burned with the other bloating carcasses on the petro-drenched beaches by black and brown prison workers bused in from san lois obispo, santa clara, san diego to clean the spoiled surfaces of santa barbara (lemenager, 2014, pp. 60-62).3 to speak of magical subrealism is not to make a sociological claim, or a superstitious provocation. it is perhaps to speak on the order of what pignarre and stengers call the "witch's proposition," which does not "ask for the conversion of those to whom it is addressed. when witches address others, they do nothing other...than relay, echo the question that transformed them themselves—existential catalysis" (pignarre and stengers, 2011, p. 141). as a mode of relay and transmission, magical subrealism proposes that we look elsewhere or underneath our proliferate empirical scholarship and theoretical innovation to pursue more deeply a "hunger for entanglement" (lemenager, 2014, p. 194) between the human and unhuman, the visible and the subterranean, the living and the dead. between what is known and what will never be. magical subrealism proposes that if bp has partnered with magic earth, a 3d modeling and simulation software company, to launch a visualization center at the university of colorado, then it may be time for a critical feminist technoscience to pursue its own militant enchantments and counter-sorceries. to visualize its own subreal understandings of the hold that capitalist technoscience has, and the protections needed to evade our own capture. subreal infrastructures "with infrastructure, something both huge and hidden is conjured up—a dark and indistinct shadow of a thing that needs to function in order for it not to be thought about. beneath structure, below architecture, under life as we know it . . . . it [is] precisely within the infrastructural that societies articulate their political imagination, and guide how they want to live."         -céline condorelli, "infrastructure" how do you want to live? chanter (from the french—to sing, to chant) is at the etymological heart of enchantment.  chants can be heard as "resonant dwelling places;" to enchant is to reanimate the question "'where and how do we dwell?'" (bayer 2012, pp. 27-28). enchanting catastrophe at the edge of the sixth mass extinction, at the site of what is now a subsea desert soaked in degraded oil stretching across 3000 square miles in the gulf of mexico, is to wonder how to inhabit the times in which i live (ceballos et. al., 2015; juhasz, 2015). the infrastructural is a kind of dwelling place … hidden, unthought, beneath, shadowed, below, in céline conderelli's meditation. under life as we know it, the infrastructural builds material and imaginary enclosures between what's possible and what's not. "the petroleum infrastructure has become embodied memory and habitus for modern humans" (lemenager, 2011, p. 26). perhaps a collective encounter with infrastructures of the subreal might help us imagine, or remember, differently. perhaps today it is not our task to save the planet, but rather, to burn it. which we are doing. what we fail to do, repeatedly, is to read the hieroglyphs of our own incense, the patterns of temporary matter in time, which might tell us for what or for whom we really burn. or that might offer instruction for protecting ourselves from the fatal hold of this particular—but not interminable—inferno, in which we currently dwell. acknowledgements deep thanks to dovar chen for the digital artistry, and to gorda stanisic for research assistance on the bp disaster. for smart and generous criticism, my gratitude to two anonymous reviewers and, as always, the oxidate working group. notes 1 the digital video accompanying this text is archived footage of the bp oil disaster and the gushing macondo well recorded on may 22, 2010. the film was edited by digital editor dovar chen with a soundtrack added. the video was retrieved january 10, 2012 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kol41lu5aa 2 for more on postcolonial literatures and magic realism see slemon (1995). for more on literature and petro-capitalism see ghosh (1992). 3 for the full version of the stunning 1969 poem discussed by lemenager that narrates the bonfire of the dead, written by conyus, a member of the prison work crews sent by union oil to santa barbara, see: http://alyoung.org/2015/05/24/the-great-santa-barbara-oil-disaster-or-a-diary-a-poem-by-conyus-reissued/ references bayer, b. (2012). enchantment in an age of occupy. wsq 40(3-4), 27-50. black, b. (october 2010). on bp's deepwater horizon live video feed. environmental history 15(4), 741-745. buell, f. (2012). a short history of oil cultures: or, the marriage of catastrophe and exuberance. journal of american studies 46(2), 273-293. burlein, a. and orr, j. (2012). the practice of enchantment: strange allures. in a. burlein and j. orr (eds.), special issue on enchantment, wsq 40(3-4), 13-23. ceballos, g., ehrlih p., barnosky, a. et. al. (2015). accelerated modern human-induced species losses: entering the sixth mass extinction. science advances 1(5). retrieved from http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/5/e1400253.full condorelli, c. (2014). infrastructure. in v. venuturupalli rao (ed.), speculation, now: essays and artwork (pp. 265-267). durham, nc: duke university press. farbman, h. (september 2012). from the cold earth: bp's broken well, streaming live. postmodern culture 23(1). retrieved 20 september, 2013, from http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/postmodern_culture/v023/23.1.farbman.html freudenburg, w.f. & gramling. r. (2011).  blowout in the gulf: the bp oil spill disaster and the future of energy in america. cambridge, ma: the mit press. garcía márquez, g. (1970). one hundred years of solitude. new york: harper & row. ghosh, a. (2 march 1992). petrofiction: the oil encounter and the novel. the new republic, 29-34. harney, s. & moten, f. (2013). the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study. brooklyn, ny: minor compositions. huber, m. (2012). refined politics: petroleum products, neoliberalism, and the ecology of entrepreneurial life. journal of american studies 46(2), 295-312. juhasz, a. (2015, june). "thirty million gallons under the sea." harper's magazine. kohn, e. (2013). how forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human (berkeley: university of california press. leiber, f. (2014). the black gondolier and other stories. open road media. [ebook.] available at http://www.openroadmedia.com/ebook/the-black-gondolier-and-other-stories/#overview-tab lemenager, s. (2014). living oil: petroleum culture in the american century. new york, ny: oxford university press. lemenager, s. (2011). petro-melancholia: the bp blowout and the arts of grief. qui parle: critical humanities and social sciences 19(2): 25-55. markeset, t., moren-trejo, j., & kumar, r. (2013). maintenance of subsea petroleum production systems: a case study. journal of quality in maintenance engineering 19(2), 128-143. munif, a. (1987).  cites of salt. trans. by p. theroux. new york: vintage international. national commission on the bp deepwater horizon oil spill (2011). deep water: the gulf oil disaster and the future of offshore drilling. washington, d.c., unt digital library. retrieved 10 july, 2015 from http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc123527/. nelson, d. (2012). banal, familiar, and enrapturing: financial enchantment after guatemala's genocide. wsq 40(3-4), 205-225. nelson, v. (2001). the secret life of puppets. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. newman, p. (2010, august 2). deepwater horizon oil spill showcases rov technology. engineering and technology magazine 5(12). retrieved from http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2010/12/beneath-the-horizon.cfm?savetopdf nixon, r. (2011). slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. oceaneering international, inc. website. accessed 9 september, 2013, at http://www.oceaneering.com/rovs/. pignarre, p. & stengers, i. (2011). capitalist sorcery: breaking the spell. new york: palgrave macmillan. slemon, s. (1995). magic realism as postcolonial discourse. in l. p. zomara and w.b. faris (eds.),  magical realism: theory, history, community, (pp. 407-426).  durham, nc: duke university press. taussig, m. (1984). culture of terror – space of death. roger casement's putumayo report and the explanation of torture. society for comparative study of society and history 6(3), 467-497. thacker, e. (2011). in the dust of this planet: horror of philosophy vol. 1.  winchester, uk: zero books. vitalis, r. (2009). america's kingdom: mythmaking on the saudi oil frontier. london: verso. vitalis, r. (2002). black gold, white crude: an essay on american exceptionalism, hierarchy, and hegemony in the gulf. diplomatic history 26(2), 185-213. wagner, r.j., randell, r.e., albaugh, e. k. (1 december 2000). subsea production technology—work rov contractors trying to evade cycle of more power, heavier umbilicals with depths. offshore magazine. available at http://www.offshore-mag.com/articles/print/volume-60/issue-12/news/subsea-production-technology-work-rov-contractors-trying-to-evade-cycle-of-more-power-heavier-umbilicals-with-depths.html wenzel, j. (2006). petro-magic-realism: toward a political ecology of nigerian literature. postcolonial studies 9(4), 449-464. zuck, r. r. (2012). the wizard of oil: abraham james, the harmonial wells, and the psychometric history of the oil industry. journal of american studies 46(2), 313-336. bio jackie orr is associate professor of sociology at syracuse university, and a performance theorist working at the crossroads of cultural critique, the politics of bodies, and the poetics of knowledge. her scholarship focuses on contemporary and cultural theory, and critical studies of technoscience and media. she is the author of panic diaries: a genealogy of panic disorder (duke, 2006). her live digital performance work includes "daddy does cybernetics," "the psychopolitics of bioterrorism," and "body animations (or, lullaby for fallujah)." her most recent performance piece, "slow disaster at the digital edge," stages the bp disaster in relation to the everyday catastrophe of deep time, and has recently been performed at the university of chicago, goldsmiths, buddies in bad times theater (toronto), and rhode island school of design. microsoft word oikkonen-116-1237-1.docx oikkonen, v. (2017). temporality and belonging as transdisciplinary phenomena: strategic encounters between queer theory and population genetic technologies. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3 (1), 1-25 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © venla oikkonen, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article temporality and belonging as transdisciplinary phenomena: strategic encounters between queer theory and population genetic technologies venla oikkonen university of helsinki venla.oikkonen@helsinki.fi abstract this article asks how to study evasive and seemingly immaterial transdisciplinary phenomena such as affective formations that organize our technoscientific societies and cultures. i argue that understanding such phenomena requires developing methodologies that engage fields of knowledge production that appear unrelated. the article uses the dynamics of temporality and belonging underlying population genetics as a case study. i show how two seemingly incompatible fields of knowledge production—queer theorization of temporality and population genetic technologies and practices—can together engender new insights on how temporality and belonging organize population genetic knowledge. i argue that neither field of knowledge production could achieve such insight alone; instead, insight emerges from the unexpected resonances as well as friction between the two fields. i develop this argument through an analysis of the configurations of temporality and belonging on the genographic project website. 2 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) as feminist science and technology studies (sts) scholars, we typically explore phenomena that are located between conventional academic disciplines. the phenomena we study are transdisciplinary in the sense that we need to interrogate their material, technological, cultural, and social dimensions in order to understand how they operate in technoscientific societies and shape our lives (e.g., haraway, 1991; lykke, 2004). for example, pregnancy, infertility treatments, chronic illness, and implantable medical devices are embodied phenomena that bring together molecular, hormonal, technological, emotional, discursive, and epistemic processes, as feminist scholars have shown (e.g., hird, 2007; meskus, 2015; thompson, 2005; oudshoorn, 2015). this article provides a new perspective to the question of how to study transdisciplinary phenomena. my starting point is the observation that feminist sts scholars often engage with transdisciplinary phenomena that have a materially grounded empirical referent: for example, how a particular technology is developed, used, experienced, or represented. such phenomena may be ambiguous or multiple, as annemarie mol’s (2002) exploration of the vascular disease atherosclerosis and charis thompson’s (2005) analysis of ontological choreography at infertility clinics show. i am interested, however, in what happens when the object of study is an affective formation—for example, nostalgia or belonging—that lacks a material referent. while such a phenomenon often emerges through, or is articulated in relation to, material practices, the phenomenon itself is largely immaterial and evasive. i want to emphasize that such phenomena differ from more clearly material phenomena in degree rather than in kind. that is, i am not suggesting a distinction between two kinds of transdisciplinary phenomena. rather, i want to explore what happens when the idea of transdisciplinary phenomena is applied to an affective formation that underlies and organizes technoscientific society and culture. the motivation for the article arises from my engagement with cultural studies, especially questions of belonging, temporality, nostalgia, and the circulation of emotions around biotechnologies. 3 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) the primary focus of my article is methodological. the article is centered on the question: how can we investigate an evasive and largely immaterial phenomenon such as an affective formation in a way that accounts for its cultural as well as bioscientific entanglements? i argue that an analysis of affective formations benefits from strategic encounters between fields of study usually considered distinct or even incompatible. i develop this argument through a specific case study: the affective formations of temporality and belonging as they take shape around the discourses and technologies of human population genetics. i approach temporality and belonging through queer theorization of time and population genetic practices, two fields of knowledge production seldom explored together. such a strategic engagement refuses to render population genetics a mere object of queer analysis, seeing it instead as an active mode of knowledge production, while also acknowledging the potentiality of queer theoretical approaches as methods of studying practices conventionally understood as bioscientific. this kind of strategic engagement resonates with karen barad’s (2007) “diffractive methodology,” in which approaches or fields of study engage in an open and nonhierarchical co-production of phenomena. yet my analysis is not an application of barad’s methodology, but rather addresses the specific concerns involved in the study of affective formations. my article contributes to the goal of this special issue to think feminist theory as science by exploring the co-production of knowledge by queer theory and population genetic practices. this kind of co-production engenders both resonances and friction. the article suggests that it is precisely through such moments of recognition and departure that new insights may arise. in what follows, i trace how population genetic configurations of temporality and belonging articulate and reshape cultural conceptions of time and, at the same time, how temporality and belonging emerge through population genetic practices. temporality and its social configuration, belonging, underlie both population genetics and queer theory in crucial ways. population genetics explores how dna records 4 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) the passage of evolutionary time and the movement of populations across the globe. it metaphorizes genetic material as a “molecular clock” that measures the temporal distance between populations through the gradual accumulation of mutations. in such a framework, genetic differences are seen as organized by temporality. temporality also plays a key role in queer theory, though seldom in the context of biotechnologies. queer-studies scholars have challenged the persistence of cultural conceptions of time as linear and future-oriented and envisioned alternative ways of approaching temporality. these studies have often focused on the disjuncture between embodied experiences and normative conceptions of historical time and the proper organization of life events related to marriage, reproduction, and ideas of maturity. in both population genetics and queer theory, temporality is closely connected to belonging, understood here as a temporal dynamic through which people and communities emerge as connected to culturally meaningful historical trajectories. for example, population genetic practices such as genetic diversity projects or commercial genetic ancestry tests refashion ideas of kinship and identity in foundational ways (e.g., hamilton, 2012; hinterberger, 2012; nash, 2005, 2012; skinner, 2006; tallbear, 2013a, 2013b; wald, 2006). similarly, queer explorations of time have highlighted the connections between past, present, and future marginalized communities and subjectivities, as well as theorized the affective structures of the present (e.g., boellstorff, 2007; dinshaw, 2007; freeman, 2010; halberstam, 2005; muñoz, 2009; povinelli, 2011). the first two sections of the article provide a brief overview of temporality in population genetics and queer theory. the following sections turn to the website of the genographic project, the national geographic society’s ambitious initiative of studying human genetic variation, through which i develop my analysis of temporality as materially and technologically enacted. through the critical lenses of queer theory, i examine how gender and sexuality underlie the ways in which the genographic project invokes and refashions temporality and belonging. at the same time, i complicate queer insights on temporality through the 5 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) material and technological situatedness of population genetic practices, especially the differences between mitochondrial, y-chromosome, and admixture analyses. through this two-way approach, i demonstrate how temporality and belonging are always connected to specific uses of technology. i propose that bringing queer theory and population genetic technologies into a strategic encounter may help us understand not only how temporality is gendered and sexualized, but also how those processes of gendering and sexualizing are inseparable from the materiality of technologies and their underlying epistemic premises.1 based on my analysis, i suggest that temporality and belonging benefit from an approach that engages in and brings together diverse and even incongruous fields of inquiry. temporality in population genetics human population genetics seeks to identify genetic differences between past and present human populations and to construct evolutionary trees that document the prehistoric divergence of human populations on the basis of these differences. for a significant part of its history, population genetics has been interested in genetic variation in noncoding dna: that is, in markers that do not directly control the physiology of the organism and are therefore not subject to natural selection in the same way as coding dna. as changes in noncoding dna generally result from random mutations, which often accumulate at a predictable rate, differences in noncoding dna can be used to evaluate the evolutionary distance between populations. this understanding of differences builds on the concept of the “molecular clock” developed in the 1960s.2 the molecular clock is based on the premise that the more mutations there are between two populations, the earlier in human evolution those populations diverged. at the same time, genetic diversity within a population suggests old age; for example, the great genetic diversity within african populations is commonly seen as evidence that anatomically modern humans first appeared in africa and that other populations are descended from smaller groups that migrated from africa. crucially, this model of 6 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) genetic variation understands genetic differences as organized by temporality: differences are both the result of and evidence for the passage of evolutionary time. human population geneticists have focused on various types of genetic material. one of the early breakthroughs was the use of mitochondrial dna (mtdna) to evaluate the genetic relatedness of populations in the late 1980s (cann, stoneking, & wilson, 1987; vigilant, stoneking, harpending, hawkes, & wilson, 1991). located outside the cell nucleus, mitochondria carry their own specific dna unrelated to the dna stored in the chromosomes in the cell nucleus. there were several practical reasons why mtdna analysis was feasible before other types of genetic analysis: mtdna mutates fast, it is concise compared to nuclear dna, and it exists in multiple copies in the cell. it is also inherited from only one parent, the mother, which means that it is not subject to recombination, the mixing of genetic material in sexual reproduction. this uniparental inheritance renders the evolutionary trajectories constructed through mtdna strictly maternal, and thus less complicated than the biparental dynamics of recombination underlying most nuclear dna. in the 1990s, advances in sequencing techniques led scientists to analyze another type of genetic material: a noncoding and nonrecombining section of the y-chromosome (hammer, 1995; whitfield, sulston, & goodfellow, 1995). passed from father to son, y-chromosome dna (ydna) rendered evolutionary history strictly paternal. y-dna analysis was seen by many as a parallel (and, in some accounts, a corrective) to the maternal focus of mtdna analysis (oikkonen, 2015a). this resulted in human evolution increasingly being conceived through two gendered reproductive trajectories. in the past ten years, fast developments in sequencing technologies have reshaped the temporal investments of population genetics. first, the feasibility of genome-wide analysis of genetic inheritance has complicated the patterns of evolution previously constructed through the uniparental inheritance of mtdna and y-dna. genome-wide techniques have enabled scientists to better understand 7 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) the evolutionary processes that produced modern human genomes. as a result, evolution increasingly appears as a complicated process in which genetic material is constantly mixed and reshuffled through sexual reproduction and the intertwining patterns of prehistoric migration. yet the direction of evolutionary movement is forward, from an evolutionary past to an unfolding future. second, population genetic analysis has focused on smaller population units, on the one hand, and interspecies connections, on the other. while the explorations of mtdna ancestry in the late 1980s and early 1990s focused on large world populations, such as “african” or “east asian,” scientists have increasingly turned to specific haplogroups characterized by specific mutations. this has shifted the focus to the divergence of population groups in the past 20,000 years. at the same time, technological development has enabled the analysis of dna retrieved from ancient hominin remains such as neanderthals or denisovans. this has expanded the temporal scope backward, situating the evolution of modern humans in the context of the diverging trajectories of hominin species. these developments have rewritten evolutionary temporality as both more specific and more encompassing than previously envisioned. in the process, the affective appeal of evolutionary history as a means of enacting roots and belonging in contemporary culture has strengthened. queering time the idea of temporality as a future-oriented procession has been critiqued by queer-studies scholars, especially in the past fifteen years. queer explorations of time have typically focused on the intertwining of temporality and sexuality. in so doing, they have touched on three issues also central to the working of population genetics: linearity, futurity, and the affective structures of the present. the first issue concerns the hegemonic understanding of time as linear and progressive. this “straight time” organizes personal lives through symbolically charged events such as birth, marriage, and 8 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) reproduction or perceived periods such as childhood, the teenage years, responsible middle age, and harmonious old age. this personal timescale is connected to the societal level, as institutional forces “link properly temporalized bodies to narratives of movement and change” (freeman, 2010, p. 4) so that “people are bound to one another, engrouped, made to feel coherently collective, through particular orchestrations of time” (freeman, 2010, p. 3). this suggests that “straight time is an emically salient, socially efficacious, and experientially real cultural construction of temporality across a wide range of political and social positions” that is “shaped by linked discourses of heteronormativity, capitalism, modernity, and apocalypse” (boellstorff, 2007, p. 228). however, nonnormative experiences may be organized by alternative, queer configurations of time. according to jack halberstam, queer time may be embodied in “the dark nightclub, the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence” of expected life events (dinshaw et al., 2007, p. 182). it may also show, as elizabeth freeman notes, in “nonsequential forms of time” that “fold subjects into structures of belonging and duration that may be invisible to the historicist eye” (freeman, 2010, p. xi). the second issue centers on the relationship between queerness and forward movement toward a future. according to lee edelman (2004), the very idea of futurity is incompatible with queer politics. if society is organized by “reproductive futurity” that posits reproduction as a promise of continuity, then “the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure of form” (edelman, 2004, p. 4). edelman critiques attempts to save queerness from the margins of reproductive futurity and argues that queers should embrace negativity and refuse futurity. scholars like josé esteban muñoz and elizabeth povinelli, by contrast, have theorized the possibility of alternative futures. according to muñoz, queerness is “essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (2009, p. 1). povinelli, too, theorizes “the conditions in which new forms of social life emerge” (2011, p. 5), focusing on “the virtual space that opens up 9 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) between the potentiality and actuality of an alternative social project” (p. 8). the third question concerns the nature of the present moment as part of history. carolyn dinshaw (2007) has explored the intricate temporal connections between communities and individuals across historical time. she focuses on experiences of anachronism, “of time falling outside” the temporal organization of historical processes (2007, p. 111). dinshaw identifies “an expanded present, a temporally multiple now” (p. 112), which enables “a sense of simultaneous belonging to one’s own time as well as to other times” (p. 119). lauren berlant, in turn, has analyzed the affective structures of the present. for her, “the present is perceived, first, affectively” before it becomes a series of events that can be narrated as part of historical processes (2011, p. 4). how we understand the present as an affective and temporal state structures how we orient ourselves toward the past and the future and how experiences become part of the passage of historical time. as i hope to show in the following sections, these critical engagements with temporality can shed new light on the temporal dynamics underlying population genetics while also gaining new depth through encounters with population genetic practices. the genographic project as a temporal endeavor the genographic project is a large genetic diversity initiative launched by the national geographic society in 2005. the project seeks to study the evolution of human genetic diversity by focusing on the genetic makeup of indigenous populations. the project also runs an online genetic ancestry testing service through which any of us (willing to pay 150 us dollars) can test our place in human evolution, or what the website calls “the human story” (genographic project, 2016a). in many ways, the genographic project is a continuation of the ill-fated human genome diversity project (hgdp), which was proposed with fanfare in the early 1990s but quickly came under heavy criticism by bioethicists and 10 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) indigenous organizations.3 while the hgdp was accused of appropriating indigenous dna for the benefit of non-indigenous communities, the genographic project has declared itself to be “anonymous, nonmedical, and nonprofit” (genographic project, 2016b). nevertheless, the unresolved issues about racial differences that underlay the hgdp—how to study genetic differences between populations without reinforcing the idea of race?—continue to inform the genographic project (tallbear, 2007; wald, 2006).4 a number of scholars have critically explored the role of race and conceptions of indigeneity in the genographic project. for example, catherine nash (2012) explores how racialized differences are produced through assumptions about geography and human mobility in the project, jenny reardon and kim tallbear (2012) analyze its reliance on assumptions of ownership over indigenous genetic material, and priscilla wald (2006) shows how it employs colonial rhetoric that posits indigenous people as locked in the past. while inspired by these inquiries into the racialized politics of the genographic project, my article focuses on how population genetics mobilizes heteronormative assumptions of being and belonging. the article uses an encounter between queer theory and population genetic practices as a case study to explore how to study affective formations as transdisciplinary phenomena. a more detailed exploration of the affective formations underlying population genetics would benefit from integrating postcolonial and other critical theorizations of temporality into the analysis as well. in what follows, i use the genographic project’s official website as an entry point to the analytical practices, material circumstances, and cultural discourses that underlie population genetic configurations of temporality and belonging. although the website is first and foremost a discursive space, it relies on a set of biotechnological practices. it also operates as an apparatus through which genetic tests are sold and justified and test results interpreted and given meaning. the discursive aspects of the website are thus entangled with the materiality of dna samples, genetic technologies, dna databases, and the exchange of 11 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) money and services on the website. the genographic project’s website opens with an introduction that clearly states the temporal stakes of the project: since its launch in 2005, national geographic’s genographic project has used advanced dna analysis and worked with indigenous communities to help answer fundamental questions about where humans originated and how we came to populate the earth. now, cutting-edge technology is enabling us to shine a powerful new light on our collective past. by participating in the latest phase of this real-time scientific project, you can learn more about yourself than you ever thought possible. (genographic project, 2016a; emphasis in original) the passage portrays the population genetic enterprise as progressive and future-oriented through phrases such as advanced dna analysis, cutting-edge technology, and latest phase. this future orientation of biotechnology is contrasted with the past-oriented gaze it provides as the project peers into what is portrayed as a “collective past.” between these two temporal orientations emerges a temporal trajectory characterized by a chain of evolutionary transitions through which “we came to populate the earth” (and, eventually, to ask questions about our ancestry). on the one hand, this framing casts evolution as a progressive and foundational trajectory that reflects the linear and future-oriented logic of “straight time” theorized by queer scholars like boellstorff, freeman, edelman, and halberstam: that is, the framing is marked by a sense of time as momentous, unswerving, incontestable, and totalizing. on the other hand, the temporal trajectory is characterized by ambivalence, as when the website states, “you will discover the migration paths your ancient ancestors followed thousands of years ago,” thereby casting the futureoriented promise of “will discover” against the past-oriented insistence on the primacy of the ancestral “migration paths” (genographic project, 2016b). these two tendencies suggest a multidirectional temporality in which the past, present, and future are defined through one another. interestingly, this underlying multidirectionality resonates with the 12 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) complicated relations between what has been and what will be addressed by scholars like freeman, povinelli, or muñoz in the context of sexuality, experience, and societal change. this does not mean that the two temporal arrangements concur; rather, their resonances suggest that the mutual embeddedness of the past, present, and future in population genetics and in processes of societal change are part of larger temporal tendencies that underlie culture. the multidirectional temporality constructed on the website renders the present moment an affective space in which the possibility of futurity is imagined. first, the present is given a sense of urgency by encouraging the readers to “take part in a real-time research project” by contributing their dna-test results to “the larger community” of genographic project participants (genographic project, 2016b; emphasis mine). this description posits the genographic project as attuned to the unceasing forward movement that is assumed to characterize the present. it also places the implied reader as the temporally organized subject through whom the presumably collective striving for futurity takes shape. this resonates with berlant’s (2011) observation that the present holds a precarious position as part of the procession of historical time and yet as the moment at which the future still appears as open. second, this multidirectional temporality coincides with the life course of the prospective reader through the description of the genographic project’s genetic testing service. “welcome to the expedition of a lifetime,” the website declares (genographic project, 2016b). this parallelism between evolutionary time and individual life reflects the mutual embeddedness of historical, national, and personal temporalities analyzed by boellstorff, halberstam, and freeman. like evolutionary temporality, the temporality of the individual life invoked on the website is distinctly future-oriented, as suggested by the promise that the readers will continue to learn about genetic history after receiving the test results. “your results are just the beginning,” the website explains. “it’s like having a subscription to your very own genetic history—and to the history of all of us” (2016b). these resonances and parallelisms between the rhetoric of the 13 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) genographic project and queer analyses of temporality suggest that queer theory may engender important insights on how biotechnologies are entangled with cultural assumptions about futurity and the potentialities of the present. queer theory may operate as a useful analytical lens to the larger affective structures within which scientific projects appear as appealing or urgent. at the same time, as i shall argue next, these affinities indicate that paying attention to the material specificities of biotechnological configurations of time is crucial to understanding the complexities of temporality and belonging. specific technologies, specific temporalities to show further possibilities inherent in encounters between queer theory and population genetics, i turn to the specific testing practices employed by the genographic project. the genographic project website markets a genetic ancestry testing kit called geno 2.0 next generation. the test uses a dna chip that analyzes three types of genetic inheritance— mtdna, y-dna, and admixture—covering altogether close to 750,000 genetic markers.5 while mtdna and y-dna components trace maternal and paternal lineages, the admixture test seeks to determine the percentage of (tested) genetic markers the test-taker shares with populations from different continents or with the prehistoric neanderthals.6 geno 2.0 thus provides three visions of belonging. the admixture test grounds belonging in the similarities between what are imagined to be clearly defined populations.7 the appeal of such tests often resides in their ability to surprise: for example, to tell an ethnically white north american that 5 percent of her genetic material is african or native american. underlying the test is the assumption that all humans are connected through the steady procession of evolution. at the same time, mtdna and y-dna tests encourage test-takers to interpret belonging as an exclusive maternal or paternal continuum. as the mtdna and y-dna tests highlight the (imagined) purity of the traced maternal and paternal lineages, temporality acquires a sense of geographic 14 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) specificity: it appears as a unique trajectory leading from a localized point in the past to a localized present. furthermore, while all three tests build on the mutual embeddedness of the past, present, and future explored above, they orient differently within this temporal dynamic. the admixture test addresses the complexities of the present by comparing populations, whereas the mtdna and y-dna tests reach toward a strictly gendered past in order to explain the present. these differences between mtdna, y-dna, and admixture components of the kit challenge the popular assumption that genetics engenders a uniform idea of belonging as biologically grounded. instead, belonging emerges as ontologically multiple, thus reflecting annemarie mol’s (2002) insightful observation that technoscientific phenomena are often ontologically more complicated and heterogeneous than they may first appear. my analysis approaches ontological multiplicity primarily as an outcome of material conditions and the use of technologies. that is, the affective dynamics of temporality and belonging emerge as multiple because of the diverse techniques and practices mobilized in the geographic project. each of the three tests manipulates specific biological material—particular genetic markers—in order to produce differences and similarities between people. this material, in turn, is derived from tissue, blood, or saliva samples or cultured cell lines used in population genetic research. it is also often circulated between research labs. indeed, amade m’charek notes (2005, 2014) that the choice of material in scientific study depends on the availability of samples, which is often limited by geographic distance, institutional policies, or personal networks. furthermore, the development of computer programs to process ever larger sets of data affects the shapes that temporality and belonging take in population genetics. the size and type of the genetic database also plays a crucial role, as genetic ancestries are produced through comparisons to other samples. yet the genographic website erases the materiality of the genetic technologies it markets and deploys: the differences between the three technologies, and their reconfigurations of temporality and belonging, 15 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) disappear under the language of kinship. this takes place through the metaphor of “the human family tree,” the genealogical tree of relatedness on whose “branches” we are each located (genographic project, 2016b). this familial and organic rhetoric masks how different modes of genetic analysis enact different configurations of temporality and belonging. instead, the website invokes an image of “our shared migratory history” (genographic project, 2016e), as if there was one monolithic, uniform, and indisputable movement in time that engulfed the myriad complicated molecular realities that characterize our personal genetic histories. the human family tree also foregrounds heterosexual reproduction. this reproductive emphasis is both literal and symbolic, as it emphasizes the material transmission of genetic markers across generations as well as the culturally sanctioned position of the heterosexual couple as a unit of reproduction. however, the multiple technologies that underlie the genographic project suggest that reproduction, too, is multiple. this is where engagement with queer studies again provides important insights. reproduction and population genetic belonging although queer and feminist scholars have explored assumptions of innate gender and sexual characteristics in behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology (e.g., lancaster, 2003; oikkonen, 2013; o’riordan, 2012; roof, 2007), there has been much less interest in population genetics, which has been seen as primarily engaged with racialized differences.8 yet population genetic knowledge is organized by sexuality, as reproduction is the mechanism through which genetic markers are passed on through generations. that is, temporality and belonging are structured through specific arrangements of reproduction over evolutionary history. this is the case with the three modes of testing included in geno 2.0, as they each mobilize a slightly different reproductive dynamic. while the admixture test highlights reproduction, it does not depend on a specific reproductive tie, because individual genomes are seen as connected to populations through myriad 16 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) intersecting reproductive ties or molecular likenesses. mtdna and y-dna tests, by contrast, seek to detect a specific gendered chain of reproduction: purely maternal and purely paternal inheritance. while all three tests foreground reproduction and exclude nonreproductive ties (for example, communal and political affiliations), there is no single dynamic of “genetic reproduction” but multiple configurations of reproductive continuity. what counts as reproduction in one test does not count as reproduction in the others: for example, sex resulting in female offspring is not reproduction in y-dna tests, while sex resulting in male offspring is not reproduction in mtdna tests. as was the case with the multiple configurations of temporality and belonging, the different dynamics of reproduction that underlie geno 2.0 are also largely erased or trivialized. the genographic website highlights the apparent inclusiveness of the genographic project: “how did each of us end up where we are?” it asks (genographic project, 2016d; emphasis added), while emphasizing that the project involves as many as “75,000 indigenous and traditional participants” and “more than 640,000 public participants” (genographic project, 2016e). yet the mtdna and y-dna techniques leave out a large number of genetic lineages that cross the gender line, such as a lineage that runs, say, through mother, grandfather, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandfather. these erasures undermine the website’s promise to help test-takers “connect with others around the world who share your deep ancestry,” as “shared ancestry” refers only to those connections the analytical techniques are designed to track (genographic project, 2016b). furthermore, the project cannot tell us anything about sexual unions or affiliations that do not result in reproduction. thus it leaves out an array of sexual arrangements that organize communities. these exclusions underlie the temporalities that emerge on the website. most importantly, the temporal multiplicity inherent in the testing technologies is made to appear as longing for reproductive continuity. this is where queer theorization of temporality provides an important analytical perspective. viewed from a queer-studies angle, population 17 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) genetics appears as an epitome of the “reproductive futurity” edelman critiques, as it is only through reproduction that the chaotic temporalities of the past, present, and future constitute a culturally meaningful trajectory that promises futurity. furthermore, the configurations of reproduction in mtdna, y-dna, and admixture tests reinforce the assumption, critiqued by freeman and halberstam, that life events centering on heterosexual courtship and the birth of offspring signify proper passage of time. while the website promises that prospective customers will be “helping us fill in the gaps in the human story,” the website’s narrative of evolution is premised on another set of gaps—the omission of nonreproductive ties—that, if included, could challenge the very idea of a linear, future-oriented temporality (genographic project, 2016c). at the same time, attention to the specific effects of techniques and technologies is also required: reproductive futurity relies on success in passing on specific molecular material (i.e., having a girl, in the case of mtdna, or having a boy, in the case of y-dna). the material available for analysis also plays a role, as different samples, sets of comparative data, and computer programs lead to different forms of reproductive futurity, engendering slightly different connections between past, present, and future individuals and communities. the appearance of reproductive futurity through testing technologies also touches on another concern central to queer studies: the shape and potentialities of the present. alondra nelson (2008) and david skinner (2006) have argued that cultural fascination surrounding genetic ancestry tests arises largely from the affective possibilities of negotiating identities in the present. the genographic project website (2016c) appeals to the reader’s affective present by declaring that geno 2.0 will help the reader to “learn more about yourself than you ever thought possible.” the “you” invoked here, however, is a strictly curtailed subjectivity that falls neatly within the reproductive continuum of evolutionary history. the desire to “learn more” is also defined through this reproductive temporality, with the result that the limits of “possible” knowledge remain narrow. while the present emerges as a site of 18 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) longing, it opens only into directions defined through reproduction. this suggests that the reproductive underpinnings of population genetic temporalities posit people differently as affectively engaged subjects. in light of the specificities of the three testing technologies, the idea declared on the website that we all belong to the procession of evolution in similar and equal ways is misleading. i have shown that both a queer reading of the reproductive assumptions organizing temporality, and the specific materialities of testing technologies, play a crucial role in producing this analysis of temporality and belonging. in other words, it could not have been achieved without strategic encounters between queer theorization of time and an exploration of the material practices of genetic testing. conclusion this article set out to examine affective dynamics that underlie transdisciplinary technoscientific phenomena. i have argued that bringing together fields of knowledge production usually considered distinct or even incompatible may generate unexpected moments of resonance. while such moments are characterized by friction, it is precisely through these uneasy parallels and connections that unexpected insights emerge. in this case study, the encounter between the material specificity of technological practices and queer approaches to temporality enables me to view population genetic temporality and belonging as materially and technologically grounded, yet entangled with cultural narratives and affective frameworks in complex ways. it allows me to see how, despite the apparent simplicity of belonging on the website, population genetics is characterized by various configurations of temporality, belonging, and reproduction. i have demonstrated that the issues of linearity, futurity, and the affective present, central to queer studies, are at the heart of population genetics as well. in the genographic project, genetic belonging is organized by assumptions of unceasing and allencompassing temporal procession. this logic of movement embeds the 19 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) present moment of discovery within an affectively charged historical trajectory that is premised on reproduction. i have also shown that the various population genetic technologies the genographic project deploys enact different temporal dynamics and thus different configurations of belonging. this insight could not have been reached only through an account of the technological and material practices of population genetics, nor through a one-way application of queer theorization of temporality to the genographic website. instead, a strategic encounter between queer theory and population genetic technologies can provide fresh insights into these underlying complexities—but only when queer theorization is brought into dialogue with, rather than positioned against, the material practices of genetic analysis. in the strategic encounter between queer theory and population genetic technologies outlined in this article, the two fields of knowledge production become entangled. understanding how technologies operate enriches queer analysis of temporality by making visible the connection between different configurations of temporality and belonging and material practices. this in turn encourages a close analysis of the sexual and reproductive underpinnings of each of the temporally organized configurations of belonging. at the same time, queer theorization of temporality and belonging draws attention to the affective investments and narratives of inclusion and exclusion that make those technologies appear appealing and timely. one result of this focus on the connection between temporality and technologies is that the politics underlying population genetic knowledge emerge as both more specific and more complicated than is often understood in popular discourses criticizing genetics. in present analysis, queer theory provides the lens onto the cultural underpinnings of temporality. it is important to note that different theoretical approaches would make visible other aspects of population genetic temporalities. for example, a postcolonial approach might highlight how evolutionary temporality takes shape through geographic space, such as the idea of africa as the evolutionary origin of humanity 20 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) and thus implicitly past-oriented, or of relatively recently populated areas—greenland, for example—as “too young” to be properly rooted in evolutionary history. it could also highlight how prehistoric migrations operate as a mechanism that produces difference and thereby enables the view of evolution as future-oriented—that is, how the idea of genetic differences between populations is invested in futurity.9 at the same time, a critical disability studies approach might render visible ableist undertones in evolutionary discourse, such as assumptions of “fitness” and able-bodiedness in the idea of reproductive success at the heart of accounts of evolutionary continuity. a critical reading of class relations, in turn, might foreground how the individual life course the tests invoke and promise to cherish relies on middle-class ideas of proper ways of arranging personal lives and social relations. each of these approaches could be brought—alone or together—into a strategic encounter with the specificity of population genetic technologies, and each encounter would turn the studied object—population genetic temporality and belonging— toward a slightly different angle, rendering visible different constellations of temporality, belonging, technology, and materiality. finally, the purpose of the transdisciplinary encounter outlined in this article is not to produce a methodological synthesis—indeed, a systematic synthesis would, i believe, reduce the potential insights produced through the encounter. instead, the methodological crux is precisely in engaging two realms of knowledge production in an unpredefined encounter that seeks to reveal moments of resonance as well as departure. while my focus has been on genetic ancestry testing, the strategic encounters between bioscientific technologies and queer theory (or another critical approach) could be applied to other evasive and seemingly intangible phenomena emerging with technoscience. this would involve approaching the chosen phenomenon as materially and technologically enacted, and as potentially multiple. at the same time, it would involve recognizing differences between the gendered and sexualized (or racialized, ableist, and classed) underpinnings of these multiple configurations. 21 oikkonen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) notes 1 i use the word gender (instead of sex) consciously here, since the evolutionary trajectories and kinship relations that emerge through population genetic practices invoke a range of assumptions about the cultural organization of gender even when they appear to be merely about molecular-level sex. 2 the molecular clock was developed by, among others, emile zuckerkandl and linus pauling (1962), emanuel margoliash (1963), vincent sarich and allan wilson (1967), and mary-claire king and allan wilson (1975). 3 the first director of the genographic project, spencer wells, was a former postdoctoral student of luigi luca cavalli-sforza, one of the key figures behind the hgdp. 4 in the wake of the holocaust and early-twentieth-century eugenics programs, population geneticists have emphasized that race is not a meaningful genetic category and that population genetics provides a way of challenging racism. nevertheless, population genetic terms like “population” and “haplogroup” refer to genetically related groups that can often be linked to specific geographical areas. see reardon (2005), who argues that a key reason why the hgdp ran into trouble was its failure to conceptualize human differences in terms clearly distinct from race. 5 the y-dna test is available only to those who are chromosomally male, i.e. have a y chromosome. 6 these three modes of genetic ancestry testing are used by many online genetic testing businesses, although the specific practices vary. for example, ancestry by dna, family tree dna, roots for real, and 23andme market similar tests. 7 this assumption of clearly defined populations has been challenged by many sts scholars. see, for example, hinterberger (2012). 8 for an exception, see nash (2015). 9 see oikkonen 2015b for some examples. 22 oikkonen 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(2005) making parents: the ontological choreography of reproductive technologies. cambridge, ma: mit press. bio venla oikkonen is currently research fellow at the helsinki collegium for advanced studies, university of helsinki. she works at the intersection of feminist science studies and feminist cultural studies. her research interests include evolutionary theory, population genetics, and vaccine controversies, as well as theoretical questions related to affect and intersectionality. she has published two monographs, gender, sexuality and reproduction in evolutionary narratives (routledge 2013) and population genetics and belonging (palgrave macmillan 2017) as well as a number of research articles in journals such as social studies of science, signs, feminist theory, european journal of women’s studies and science as culture. on language, scientific metaphor, and endocrine disruption: an interview with feminist scientist brilmyer, gracen. (2020). on language, scientific metaphor, and endocrine disruption: an interview with feminist scientist ana soto. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-8. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © gracen brilmyer, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license on language, scientific metaphor, and endocrine disruption: an interview with feminist scientist ana soto gracen brilmyer university of california los angeles gracenbrilmyer@gmail.com in the late 1980s, professor of immunology ana soto accidentally discovered the presence of synthetic estrogens in her lab equipment. her lab had designed an experiment to test the effect of estrogen on the proliferation of human breast cancer cells (mcf7). based on previous findings, soto and her research partner carlos sonnenschein believed that, contrary to popular wisdom, the introduction of estrogen would not directly induce the proliferation of the cells, but would instead interfere with a naturally occurring inhibitor in the blood. but the control setup containing positive and negative controls (used in the past without problem) was now producing odd readings: although no estrogenic compound had been introduced, the cancer cells were still proliferating. soto and sonnenschein methodically removed each item in the control setup that might be producing the estrogen-like result. when they discovered that the estrogenic activity leached from the plastic centrifuge tubes used to store components of the cell culture medium, they called the manufacturer to find out what could have changed. the manufacturer let them know that the constituent materials of the tubes had recently been modified in order to reduce the possibility of breakage during centrifugation but declined to reveal what specific changes had been made. so soto’s lab turned to studying the tubes themselves. after a year of further research, they concluded that the estrogenic activity was due to the lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) gracen brilmyer, 2020 2 additive that had been introduced by the manufacturer—nonylphenol, an antioxidant used in numerous other applications, some of which are meant for human use (e.g., spermicide) and the synthesis of detergents. soto and sonnenschein’s assay is called e-screen and has been enormously influential; in fact, most of the environmental estrogens discovered in the 1990s rely on the assay. conducted by gracen brilmyer at ucla during the “chemical entanglements symposium”, this 2017 interview with soto highlights her experiences of sexism in the sciences and how those experiences have shaped her thinking on language, science, and scholarship. gb: i was really excited to talk to you especially because of the talk that you're giving at “chemical entanglements” about reflecting on your process and the question of "to whose benefit” science is conducted. can you speak about how you arrived at the work that you are currently doing? as: i went to science out of curiosity: curiosity to understand things, to look at nature, to find out, “how is this all related? what does it mean?” when i was a kid, i was asking questions about those kinds of things without knowing much about any of them. my parents always took this seriously, in a way, so that sort of stimulated this interest. and probably that is where the feminism starts. i didn't realize there was any difference in possibilities for career development for boys or girls. even though my mother was a very cultured person, this was in the ’50s, so she was taking care of the children. and then she went back to work, but not when we were children. so i couldn't see that i was going to be marked by the fact that i was a girl, because i was given all i wanted to read and understand the world. but later on, when i went to university, there were a bunch of women, but you wouldn't believe how obvious [sexism] was. my anatomy professor said that we were there to catch husbands and things of that sort. and i got so upset that i said to him, “how could you know?” in my family i had been allowed to say anything reasonable, you see? they thought that it was nice that i liked science and arts, so i didn't realize that there was a world out there that wasn't really going to help. i started realizing that that was the way of the world. i still thought, “okay, i'm accepted at the medical school, which is a place that not everyone goes.” i didn't think that it was going to be that discriminatory because in the exam to enter medical school then, in argentina, it was totally blind. there were no quotas for lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) gracen brilmyer, 2020 3 women or anything like that; the people who got the appropriate scores got in. i could see that women were mostly at home and men were mostly working, although some women obviously worked. i thought that maybe it was different for people my age. so, after the first year [in medical school in argentina], i realized it was going to be very, very, very difficult. and that is when i realized, too, that i was going to leave my country because i thought that probably in the states or europe the situation of women was better. i was very young, and i knew already that i wasn’t going to die in the same place where i was born. and all that has to do with the fact that i am a woman. things started to be a little different once i was a postdoctoral fellow; there were women full professors and even a department chair at tufts in the mid-’70s. a decade later, by accident, my scientific partner carlos sonnenschein and i discovered the first plastic estrogen. thanks to contaminated lab results, we realized that [estrogen] was in the plastic [used to manufacture test tubes]. jean meyer, the president of tufts university, was as puzzled as us by the results; he suggested that we send the tubes to the fda. the fda response to our estrogenin plastic problem was, “we’ll get back to you soon.” we are still waiting for their answer…we thought that it was going to be a two-year job or something like that for us to clean up the source [of the estrogen contamination] and go back to what we were doing before. but this was almost thirty years ago, and this public health problem has yet to be properly addressed. back to gender, somehow every day there is something that makes me to think of disparities and discrimination. probably what i write professionally would not look much different if written by a male colleague. however, i would not use metaphors of domination or war; i am too aware of their nefarious effects. you know, there is that famous story [told by anthropologist emily martin] about how men talk about fertilization and how women talk about fertilization. [martin’s book the woman in the body] was written in the ’80s. from men’s viewpoint, the sperm is trying to penetrate the egg. the female’s story is about how the egg could really attract the sperm. sexism is everywhere and, being a woman, i am always sensitive to it. i try to make it clear to people to refrain from using language in such an unthoughtful way; a lot of it is unconscious bias—even women do it. but i also see hidden baggage in our concepts, and that is what took me to study philosophy of biology and to start doing theory of biology. for example, how the idea of a genetic program was adopted in biology. “program” comes from logics, from mathematics. and there is something there that is immensely interesting because lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) gracen brilmyer, 2020 4 people didn’t use the words “program,” “information,” or “signal” in biology until they took it from the mathematical theory of information. this mathematical theory does not deal with processes or things that exist in nature: logic is a human creation, and so are computers. but people use these mathematical ideas as if there were things present in the material world. this is exemplified by the story that the brain is a computer, a description that is absolutely metaphoric. in brief, biologists took concepts from theories developed in mathematics and without any sort of examination incorporate them into biology, but not as strict and precise theories, but as metaphor. then they say that the environment “reprograms” something that is not and could not be programmed. we think that the misuse of these metaphors is hindering progress in the biomedical sciences. we are immersed in the world that we wish to understand. hence, we can only have direct access to the objects that share the world with us through our situated perspective. to circumvent this, we can pretend to have a transcendent god’s eye…but this is a dangerous scape. we perceive the world with our senses, and thus our way of perceiving it is per force different than that of an insect. in order for something to be science rather than science fiction or literature, we need to have a theory. theories construct objectivity and determine the proper things or objects that can be studied by a given theory. and that is the beauty of science, that theories could be proven wrong and dismissed. biology has only one general theory: this is the theory of evolution that deals with a very long-time scale, that of phylogeny. but we scientists interested in phenomena pertaining to the life cycle, from fertilization to death, in organisms, don't have such a theoretical frame. this is why i and a handful of colleagues are looking for principles to construct a theory of organisms. that, in a nutshell, is another dimension of this story of what we are doing, and it comes from knowing that the concepts we use to talk about things and processes are charged [with sociocultural meanings]. as the philosopher dan dennett stated, “there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.’’ the hidden baggage is also contributing to the problems in regulating endocrine disruptors. for example, the problem is not just conflict of interest, and the fact that industry actively sells doubt, as established by historians of science naomi oreskes and erik m. conway. there is also the sociocultural imprinting of honest scientists. [for instance, with endocrine disrupting chemicals (edcs),] the industry says, “oh, you haven’t identified a mechanism by which to link edcs to a specific lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) gracen brilmyer, 2020 5 disease outcome,” and many of these scientists immediately go to work again, when indeed we have enough evidence for regulating this class of chemicals. because science is in a way bottomless. one can never have enough evidence. science is not going to be complete anyway, so you keep going on. but that is science for its own sake. [we need to] become aware that when dealing with science for public health there is a point when enough is enough. instead, many scientists would like to obtain more and more data to get to “the mechanism,” and to arrive at “molecular explanations.” well, the idea that everything has to be explained via molecular mechanisms is not an immutable law of nature, but a philosophical stance called reductionism. those philosophical stances, already abandoned by physicists more than a century ago, begat vague theories. if a theory is vague, it cannot be proven wrong. so that is, in a nutshell, the status of biology today. we urgently need to produce critical work, rejecting bad theories, elaborating new ones that are precise enough to be rejected… i'm frustrated about the slow pace of regulatory action in the light of so much evidence that we’ve seen building up in the last twenty-five years. i'm frustrated because this is a very serious public health problem, not as much for people my age but for the people that are coming after us. gb: you’ve talked about being a woman and how that made you more aware of the ways in which people use language to talk about scientific concepts. do you think a feminist lens influences you in the way that you either understand the world or formulate questions about your own work? as: i think that i'm very much aware that nowadays women everywhere earn less than men. and even when they don't, like in the french university system, maybe they take longer to arrive at the same post. i won’t say that i’m obsessed by [feminism] because it’s not that i’m in a perpetual state of alertness about gender discrimination. i see it when it’s happening—when someone talks about a woman in a particular way without realizing that [what they are saying] is something that he or she wouldn’t say of a man. and women do that, too. of course, i’m a feminist and of course i was very much vocal about that when i was young; now i alert people when they use unconscious bias, so that they become aware of it and can choose to work on it. gb: do you think about the diversity of your students or of the people in your department? given that the way your being a woman influences the way that you perceive the world and, from my perspective, really benefits your work a lot, do lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) gracen brilmyer, 2020 6 you try to prioritize diversity among students and the questions and different perspectives they bring in? as: i think that people bring with them a lot of different things and that is good, a real asset. i think that regardless of where you come from, when you enter a scientific discipline, you have to learn to ask questions about science and that is not as easy. i foster that in my students when i say, “if you are going to a conference, don’t leave that conference without asking publicly your questions.” asking questions is not because you don’t know something you should know, but because there is always some point that is not clear, some assumption that is hidden, etc. indeed, there are many things that we do not know. thus, it is normal and necessary that each of us have questions for anyone that is talking about her/his research. so you will sit there and ask questions mentally and then ask questions and observe how others ask questions. and by the end of the meeting— and it depends on how long the meeting is—you have to at least do one, two, or three interventions. once they try this a few times, it becomes second nature. this is the way it should be. gb: do you see science as a creative process? as: oh, yes! my sister is an artist and we can talk about our creative lives. it’s amazing because we can talk to each other about the constraints of our work and how you have to understand those constraints or else you’ll get knocked down by them. people think in metaphors. human language is metaphors. the difference for me is that you can use a metaphor as a painter, or a writer and it goes far, but when you’re a scientist the metaphor is useful to “see” something, but then you have to make it clear to yourself that this is a metaphor and avoid “reifying” it. once you make it thing-like, believing that there is a genetic program, you are doing something dangerous that sooner or later will lead you astray. this is exactly what happened with the introduction of the terms program, information, and signal in biology. that is why when people talk about why there are so many problems regarding lack of reproducibility, it has to do with this: if you don’t have a theory, you can push things this way or that way because you don’t have the constraints of a good theory (a theory that is not vague, and thus, could be found to be wrong and if so, refuted). and when you start to find results that cannot be explained by the theory, then you’ve got to change something about the theory. the theoretical constraints of a precise theory are necessary in order to do science rather than fiction. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) gracen brilmyer, 2020 7 gb: do think that makes you more careful in the way that you use language when you write about theories in science? as: yes. metaphors are the way we talk, and if they help you to flesh out the concepts, it’s fine. you can live everyday life saying that in winter, the trees are naked, but [there’s a problem] the moment you take it seriously. trees cannot be naked—they don't wear clothing. when you’re using a metaphor to express a scientific concept and all of a sudden you start to believe in it, that is a problem and philosophers have studied that. gb: but it is interesting, too, thinking about both the limits of language and using language as a communication tool and—like you’re saying—metaphor as a way to communicate but also [a limitation]. as: but it’s also the way you think to yourself. if you are thinking and you’re going to talk to a colleague, that metaphor is already inside you because you cannot think more abstractly than that. that is the problem. unless you are talking about doing mathematics and working with symbols, but even in that case, concepts cannot totally be reduced to symbols. another thing that helped me a lot is that i speak several languages. you learn that you are constrained differently by the structure of each of the languages you use. i’m not exactly the same person when i’m speaking english as when i’m speaking french or spanish, to the point—the absurd point—where, although i write much better in english than in french, i feel more at ease in french because it allows me to be more playful than when i am speaking in english. gb: you’re thinking about the way that scientists understand their own practice and critically reflecting on why and how they’re engaging with scientific discourse. in the vein of talking about language and communication, i have two last questions: do you think about the way that the science that you’re doing affects so many different communities? do you think about communicating broadly with those communities—how language plays into activism and community engagement in that way? as: sure. see, for science for its own sake, normally, you talk mostly among scientists. but when you touch on disrupting the endocrine system, for example, something that would impinge on public health and environment, you have to communicate with laypeople. it’s very difficult to do that, but yes, after so many years of doing it, i feel good talking to lay audiences. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) gracen brilmyer, 2020 8 a scientist who doesn’t talk to anybody doesn’t exist. newton said that he got where he was because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. that is a metaphor again, but it is a nice one because you don’t build on science as an individual. and everything that humans do—and not only humans, every biological [entity], every bacterium doesn’t exist on its own—and everything that is alive is in some sort of relationship [with] other things that are alive. i think that you have to communicate with other scientists, and you have to communicate with laypeople. i always say that if i'm paid by taxpayers to do something, i must communicate the results of my research to them. they have the right to know; i have the obligation to transfer this knowledge, particularly if it has consequences that affect their health and that of their families. some people may not want to know. they can choose; they are free, but i think i have the duty to communicate the results obtained with their economic support. author bio gracen brilmyer is a phd candidate in the department of information studies at ucla, whose research lies at the intersection of disability studies, archival studies and the history of science. for more: gracenbrilmyer.com jain & stacey   critical perspectives on writing about illness: a dialogue with s. lochlann jain and jackie stacey on cancer, sts, and cultural studies s. lochlann jain stanford university lochjain@stanford.edu     jackie stacey the university of manchester jackie.stacey@manchester.ac.uk js: at the end of your book, lochlann, you write: "malignant has mapped out some of the cultural containment strategies for this crazy disease, its everywhereand nowhereness." you describe cancer as having “a grammar all its own." “i offer this book," you write, “in an attempt to speak to—and from within—the cancer complex," the constituent parts of the experience of which spin a web that, "unless we are vigilant," will entrap us (jain, 2013, pp. 221-223). in thinking about our two books together, as we’ve been asked to do, it seems to me that the process of writing itself perhaps offered a way for both of us to try to reconfigure the imaginative landscapes of cancer cultures and to counter some of the destructive normativities of cancer’s dominant grammars. this feels important not simply in the face of particular experiences of diagnosis and treatments but also in order to index the cultural and political forces that constitute what you call this "cancer complex." for, as well as feeling out of control of our bodies, we are all thrown by cancer into a place of ontological uncertainty, rewriting our histories and our futures through its shifting narrative and discursive orderings and disorderings. there is an overabundance of advice and storytelling about cancer and yet a paucity of meaningful recognitions and communications.  in looking at our two books again for this dialogue, i am struck by our respective (and very different) desires to move between different registers to process the experience of being immersed in this confusing and unwelcome world, surrounded by prescriptive imperatives and tedious clichés—some promising solutions and others just drenched in the sentimentalities of "cruel optimism" (berlant, 2011). for an academic diagnosed with cancer while working on the social and political significance of how stories get told about injuries, as you were lochlann, or while working on feminist readings of idealised femininities in popular culture, as i was at the time, there is just so much material to process that it’s hard not to want to write a book about it. as my characterisation of our intellectual projects just prior to our cancer diagnoses here indicates, our books speak to very different audiences at very different times, even if they do share some common ground. in the early 1990s, when i was writing my book, i don’t think i knew quite who my audience was—i think maybe i was trying to constitute one. i was keen to speak to people beyond the academy, but i also wanted to be able to mobilise theoretical debates, in order to challenge the contours of the cancer cultures i found myself inhabiting (and trapped by).   lj:  jackie, thank you for starting us off in this way. yes. containment strategies, indeed. the way you put it here—ontological uncertainty—seems exactly right for the kind of shock that many feel on diagnosis; with a cancer diagnosis, one enters an entirely new world, and cancer is a very specific kind of world in terms of research methods, treatments, and the stories that get told around it. while i think your description of "imaginative landscapes" is deadly accurate, the tendency in cancer literature has been to distinguish the "objective, scientific" knowledge from the "subjective, experiential" knowledge, and then to elevate the former. in our respective ways, we each analyze how these forms of knowledge have been built on that distinction in ways that have led to consequential blind spots in the understanding and treatment of the disease. in that sense, i would not say that my goal was to reconfigure the imaginative landscape through writing, but rather to analyze how americans contain the major medical, economic, and industrial failure that cancer relentlessly presents. the scope of the sleight of hand required to simplify the story of cancer as one of personal tragedy rather than as a complex nexus that we have reached because of fundamental blind spots in modes of everyday accounting is absolutely breath-taking. law, science, progress, profit, environment, time, and lifespan are just a few of the domains that have worked in the service of this building, and building on, this deeply held common sense. many of our institutions that purportedly regulate industry and practices such as medicine are simply, and structurally, unable to address the multiple, and constantly shifting, uncertainties that we consolidate with the word "cancer" presents to them.   malignant (2013) hypothesizes that understanding how our society makes sense of cancer, a subject that has so carefully been segregated from the massive institutions that have constituted it in its current form (as if cancer were a separate subject that comes to these institutions and ideas fully formed), enables us to better understand not only cancer, but also the broader common sense ideas that inform our everyday lives, and the broader ways that violence (one of whose forms is cancer) underwrites our selfand national-understanding.   one way to contain the social failure of cancer is to name it as something situated outside of a united whole. this narrative goes something like: "cancer is a terrible disease, we are doing everything we can to cure it." this of course separates out a "we" and a "cancer," and ignores the fortunes being made and lost (redistributed) through the disease. another way is to dismiss or sentimentalize the people who have cancer. the attitude of dismissal is easily seen in the example of lung cancer: until recently, people with lung cancer who smoked have been characterized as having asked for it, rather than as having been part of a complex situation in which cigarette companies manufactured the notion of choice. sentimentalization appears especially around women’s and children’s cancers ("help a woman with cancer" rather than "get rid of bpa and other potential carcinogens"), or in the strategy of focusing on the individual’s supposed depressive personality. another way to obscure how central cancer is to the economy is to constantly separate the components of cancer so that it is nearly impossible to hold them together. the separation of cancer’s causes and treatments is just one of many ways to do this (for example, focusing on early detection as a means of "prevention" offers a convenient way to divert attention from military, medical, and industrial causes). these are just a few of many concrete examples i examine in my book, of examples of the ways in which the underbelly of american progress, cancer, is carefully, disparately, and unevenly managed. in that sense, yes, the writing style i adopted was critical to my method of making evident the relays across the scales in which cancer operates—but this was one among many methods.   to come back to the point about cancer having a grammar all its own: living in the cancer complex requires learning new forms of advocacy and masochism, learning insurance language and how to negotiate social security insurance, as well as learning a whole slew of unwritten codes for how to be a sick person. all this work of learning how to negotiate one's personal and social identities that are usually learned over years—such as how to live as a white or brown person, how to live as a gendered and queer person, as a child, or an adult, and so on—all this needs to be learned quickly as one is learning how to cope with the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness. and so a large part of learning the grammar is learning how to live with the containment strategies, but these also become virtually impossible to live with. i think this is why so many people with cancer speak about how language loses meaning in this new world.   js:  despite their very obviously different geopolitical and historical groundings (about which more in a moment), these two books both seem to me to assume that culture cannot be captured by language. both books address cancer cultures from an intellectual formation deeply influenced by poststructuralism, feminism and science and technology studies. their reflections upon the limited and damaging ways of thinking about, and living with, cancer (in the uk in the early 1990s and in the us in the last decade or so) are acutely aware of the fractured and uneven character of social processes and yet always grappling with the institutionalised and embedded power relations that organise those processes (however chaotically or unsuccessfully). i think it’s important to say that neither book seeks to capture the experience of illness through writing or aims to deliver a straightforward denunciation of the inadequacies of care through academic critique. rather, what these two books do, in very different ways, is to grapple with this uneven and bewildering discursive terrain through shifting scales of focus in order to push back against this disorientating world.   lj:  yes, exactly. susan sontag (1978) so elegantly traced cancer’s metaphors and asked us to try to see a "pure" disease. but while her work is historically significant, i doubt that either of us would subscribe to a notion of pure disease, and certainly both of our books seek to understand how those "metaphors" go so much more deeply than the literary trope would have it, infiltrating our very notions of gender, sexuality, health, stigma, medical progress, statistics, and so on. cancer is not a noun, but a conglomeration of interests.   the common sense notion that cancer is a name for cells that divide too quickly does not even come close to recognizing the world of cancer. jackie’s photos of herself before and after diagnosis get at this mysterious divide: cancer is surely there in the first image, when she looks so well. it’s gone (at least for the time being) in the second image, when she’s recovering from chemotherapy, and yet her baldness—as a signifier of treatment, and thus of cancer—puts her squarely in the world of cancer ("in the kingdom of the sick," as sontag [1978] put it). in other words, there is a structural uncertainty to the disease: is it there, are we causing it by eating fried food, will it stay gone after treatment, and so on. this medical, personal, legal, scientific uncertainty about what causes it, how to treat it, who should be treated, is encoded in different ways in different institutional and personal framings. for example, in law we most often err in favour of not seeing cancer, because legal odds often need a "more likely than not" standard. so one would have to have a more than 50% chance of developing cancer after an exposure in order to gain compensation. in essence, 49 out of 100 people exposed to a carcinogen could get cancer after a spill or other exposure, and nothing could be done to give compensation in a court of law. thus, the uncertainty encoded in the probability statistics resulting from randomized control trials in medicine becomes something very different in law. institutional framings seem mostly to err in favour of not picking up cancer. and so uncertainty has typically been resolved in favour of the interests of entities causing cancer, rather than seeing cancer as an injury. my approach was to think about the work that cancer does when it is understood as a meaningful, tidy word, rather than as a descriptor continually being shored up, and to demystify it as a way of understanding the work it does for different interests, which accrete something like a meaning. the resulting cognitive dissonances (we know what causes cancer but we can’t do anything about it, for example) have to be held together certainly at a societal level, but they condense particularly harshly in the bodies of those who are undergoing treatment (and their communities, for i want to insist that cancer is a communal event as much as an individual disease, and i think both of our books make that claim differently but clearly). js:  you mentioned my use of photographs. maybe we could pause on the selection of visual images and objects in the two books. some of these are examples of normative models of healthy and diseased bodies, showing which kinds are used to underscore popular narratives of rescue and survivorship; others gesture towards mismatch and discrepancy, or apparent revelation that is obfuscating and opaque, or satire that brings poignant absurdity into the frame. i use two photographs of myself to contrast the "being-sick-but-looking-well" moment of pre-diagnosis in hindsight with the "looking-ill-but-free-of-tumour" post-chemo moment. knowing the illusory nature of the photographic promise of transparency didn’t stop me from searching back through old photos for clues of the impending medical crisis in my life. you come to know what you thought you already knew in quite a different way.   another example is my book cover, which reproduces a portion of a work from the ongoing series beework by aganetha dyck, a canadian artist who places damaged found objects inside apiaries, where bees build honeycombs upon them, as if in repair. dyck writes: "the beework is about cells. fragile cells filled with sensuous mysterious substances. programmed cells, determined cells. cells which are shaped, reshaped, filled, drained, cleansed, painted, prodded, invaded, monitored" (see dyck in stacey 1997, back cover). in her art practice, dyck collaborates with bees, as she puts it, to produce sculptural pieces out of ordinary broken objects (which bear the mark of age and damage) left for months in specially designed apiaries; the original objects are slowly transformed through the gradual depositing of wax honeycomb. the result is a series of compelling forms that are not easily legible (dyck, n.d.).1 i loved the mixture of artistic and organic processes, the mingling of intentionality and transformation. mutating cells are programmed, but they also have their own agency: their division and multiplication not only create new life but also threaten death. beework blends wax honeycomb cell-like patterns with human technical structures, producing an exquisitely disturbing aesthetic encounter with the nature of form. given my interest in abnormal and deformed cell growth at this time, there was a strong resonance with the ways in which these bees worked with damaged objects to produce new hybrid forms, not as a process of repair or cure, but rather as an imaginative new mode of cross-species reproduction. and the kind of cancer i had was one that transformed the meaning of the forms of human reproduction.  teratologies means the study of monsters and marvel; a malignant teratoma is a tumour of the germ cell (in my case the egg cell), which can produce many different kinds of organs as it grows—hence the common allusions to "monstrous births,"as the cell can contain recognisable but distorted combinations of body parts such as nails, hair, eyes and bones. as i read about teratomas in the history of embryology, i realised how potent cells are when they become part of scientific imaginaries. i became interested in the weight of these associations and in the paradox of cells as signifiers of potentiality—of both potential life and potential death. to die from a teratoma would mean one’s body had been taken over and destroyed by the potentiality of life-giving cells. i thought dyck’s beework spoke beautifully to the ambiguities i had to learn to tolerate better when i had cancer. it’s one thing to enjoy the play and deferral of poststructuralist celebrations of ambiguity in your academic textual practices, it’s quite another to endure the non-transparency of one’s own body in the face of a life-threatening disease.   lj:  i think the question of the book cover points to a crucial point: how does one represent a book about a subject in which the author’s goal is to deconstruct the ways in which that subject is represented? the image on the cover of your book, jackie, is also shot with a short depth of field such that most of it is out of focus, and the image wraps around the spine to the back, so that no matter how one holds the book, a good chunk of the image of the sculpture is missing. that effect is perfect. i didn’t have any choice about my cover (though my publisher did allow me to nix the first two options), but i did have twenty-five images inside the book. i distributed these among the chapters to indicate the range of ways that cancer has been represented in, for example, early detection campaigns, male breast cancer advocacy, scientific graphs, and medical advertisements.   js:  if the contours of this terrain were unexpected for both of us as we reluctantly travelled across them, then the kind of writing we produced in response seems to share an ambition to offer readers both critical purchase and affective connection.   lj:  yes, beautifully put.  js:  in approaching the question of "how uncertainty can be reproduced as knowledge" (p. 221), as you put it, lochlann, perhaps there was a desire to register the intensely textured and conventionalised, yet always elusive and baffling, quality of the social significance of our encounters along the way. a mixture of first-person accounts and cultural analysis defines the shifting scales and registers of these books, their modes of address blending intimate narratives with social criticism. for me, the inspirations for this kind of "writing otherwise" (as i have come to think of it, see stacey & wolff, 2013) came less from feminist science studies, as this field was still relatively new terrain in my intellectual life, and more from feminist cultural studies. the inclusion of a range from digressive, poetic and anecdotal interruptions to conventional academic writing that i admired at that time came from writers such as carolyn steedman (1986) and valerie walkerdine (1990); their books seemed to me to have successfully combined stories from childhood with social and cultural criticism. more recently, feminists in science studies such as jackie orr (2006) have interspersed familiar forms of critical analysis with shifts in register to signal formal and discursive interference; and the wonderful creative non-fiction writer who is also an academic, mary cappello (2009), has written what she calls a breast cancer anti-chronicle. and, of course, in queer studies, eve kosofsky sedgwick’s famous elegy ‘white glasses’ (1993) triggered a more intimate style of theorising sexuality that has been continued by jack halberstam (1998), ann cvetkovitch (2003, 2012), and many others. more recently, mary bryson and chase joynt have produced a video/performance dialogue linking surgery and treatment for breast cancer with trans people's medical experiences (bryson & joynt, 2013) as well as sedgwick's own writing about cancer and mortality (2010). lj:  i like the way you speak of an "intimate style" of theorizing, and we both recognized the ways in which more traditional modes of academic theorizing were not going to get at the horrific and bizarre kinds of social structures we were encountering. you cite jackie orr and eve sedgwick, both of whom, along with audre lorde (1980), were models for me—for the sheer brilliance of their writing, the momentum of their narratives, and their commitment to understanding the deeper politics of experience. i can’t help but notice that these three are also all queer identified, which has given them a certain distance from, and insight into, normative cultures. the genealogy here may be as much creative nonfiction and a commitment to exploring and communicating the insights of rigorous academic perspectives as it is a contribution specifically to a narrowly defined discipline. in that sense, i see some of my mentors, such as adrienne rich and james baldwin, as writers and storytellers with strong narrative voices and political convictions. but i’ve also been influenced of course by a lifetime of reading novels, and italo calvino has recently become my favourite author. still, the most significant academic writer of my career has been my dissertation advisor, donna haraway. my method, and jackie tell me if i’m right here in thinking that this was at least part of your method as well, was to initiate the various analyses by taking very seriously a few of the many stomach-punching paradoxes that demonstrated significant and complex contradictions. in that sense, stories were a critical component of the narrative flow and argument, since the insights i gained from treatment would never have been accessible to me from a different observational location—one i had to consider extremely carefully and experiment with a lot.   js:  yes, that describes it really well, i think.   lj:  as a fairly private person, i had to think long and hard about "coming out" in my writing, the role that the personal experience/voice played, what purpose it served. for one thing, let’s not forget that ten years ago discrimination and fear around cancer was, and remains, rampant and virtually impossible to identify, so in that sense i worried about coming out, particularly pre-tenure. i also found cancer was humiliating as hell, so why go there in my writing? and then, personal writing can so easily become self-indulgent, or seem to speak for itself, or come with a defensive voice—all criticisms that would horrify me even though they can equally be levelled at "academic" writing, and even though they can be launched before someone has actually read the work.   ultimately, i decided to come out as someone who had undergone cancer treatment because i wanted to address, interrogate, and offer ways to bridge the vast chasm between modes of experience for doctors and patients and how these experiences situate knowledge claims. it was important for me to raise this issue because it really splits the literature on cancer in two and i wanted to illuminate the huge the stakes in, and costs of, this split. on the one hand we have studies in oncology and on the other we have personal memoir. but i don’t see these as complementary reports from different perspectives on similar phenomena. on the contrary, i think they are two forms of knowing that co-constitute each other, even as they dismiss and disavow one another. as a consequence of this divide, we miss an opportunity to understand how cancer science and research relies on notions of health, patienthood, sickness, economics, cause, and so on, that are worth understanding better since they underwrite not just the social life of living in cancer, but also actual treatment options. this gap has to be bridged before we can understand the central and prevalent economic role that cancer plays in the making of american political and social life.   a funny thing happens around cancer, and i noticed this in many of my talks and write specifically about it in my introduction. namely, people seem to gather around identities and, from that place, judge a claim. so in giving a talk, for example, if i do come out as a "survivor" i get a very difference response—even with the exact same paper—than when i don’t. thus, in either place—having, or not having had—cancer either taints or shores up one’s claims in a nearly identity politics kind of way. there is certainly something to that—something to be learned by laying one’s body on the radiation table. but to return to the main point, since one of the things i wanted to draw attention to is how knowledge on each side is incomplete, i had to work out the voice of my narrator very carefully as one that could both demonstrate the stakes in the separation and also bridge it.  i thought about how and what to write about extremely carefully, for i knew that i would have to be a trustworthy narrator, trustworthy to an audience who may not share my class, education, gender, perspective, or baseline about common sense: a modest witness, if you will. this is tremendously difficult in the cancer world because people have justifiably strong views about it and heavy stakes in believing in things such as trials, progress, and treatments (despite, or perhaps because of, the dismal success rates). on the other hand, some of the details of my story were important. butch-ish, brown-ish, youngish for the cancer world, canadian-ish—these details were important to the degree that their situatedness, i think, can be as expert, albeit in a different way, about cancer as a tall, cis-male oncologist, or as someone writing in an academic style that is more readily assumed to be "modest" and objective.   the narrator of the book is me but also not me. strictly speaking, the stories are true and they are selected such that every story about my experiences serves a larger point or argument. but the character of the narrator was crafted in hundreds of rewrites and with many collaborators reading drafts. malignant offers an analysis of north american cancer cultures; it isn’t an autobiography or a memoir. that separation of self and narrator, like the stories, is close to the bone simply because cancer is so humiliating. it’s also terrifying and very, very boring and lonely. so no, that wasn’t me. i never even had cancer.   i do think that among the risks, not the least of which is overwhelming vulnerability, one advantage of this approach, from a purely writerly perspective, is that we each gave the authorial voice a great deal of consideration and thought in ways that academic books sometimes do not. js:  it’s so interesting to read your account of that process. what i remembered when rereading the two books for this dialogue was how i had had to really grapple with making the more "personal narratives" an integral part of the project. i tried various methods: marking them out in a different font; beginning every chapter with a story; blending them in, as if seamlessly. lochlann—your book seems to me to have achieved the latter. in the end, i went for the first of these options (and sometimes also the second). these different styles of writing both bring the affective dimension of illness onto the page, whilst trying to avoid the constraints and clichés of the conventional sub-genres of the classic cancer narrative. but these were undoubtedly the hardest sections of teratologies to write and were also the most redrafted. motivated by various combinations of desire and anxiety (revenge, disavowal, shame, gratitude), these stories were reshaped many times. for example, i remember that one of the dialogues i had written just didn’t work; so, following the advice of a friend and colleague, i rewrote it, giving only one side of a conversation and left the other side for the readers to fill in themselves, which worked much better. when the tone of a story felt too confessional, i redrafted it with less pathos; and if the stories of my own naiveté in the face of a cancer diagnosis returned me to some of my unsophisticated pre-academic yearnings, sometimes i ironed out the embarrassment of this and sometimes i didn’t.  you are right, i think, to have been cautious about the implications of using these styles of writing in relation to cancer. i am increasingly drawn to interrupting more conventional academic styles with so-called personal, anecdotal, or digressive registers, but not without ambivalence. the trouble is that as soon as you write "otherwise" as an academic who was also a patient, your writing very quickly gets folded into the genres of self-disclosure characterising cancer writing generally. given that we’re both so sceptical about the sentimentality of those conventions, even the pairing of our books on the basis of this shared ground might cause us to hesitate. using the language of the "confessional" or the "personal" to describe the styles we each use threatens to reiterate the generic conventions of cancer narratives that we are trying to undo. recently i have wondered if a better way to describe those shifts in register would be to use a different language entirely; perhaps metaphors of scaling work better. for example, i could describe what i did in teratologies as a scaling up and down of my focus in order to read the multiple dimensions of cancer cultures. but this doesn’t quite get at the ways in which i wanted to move readers, as well as interest them. i hoped that the unpredictable routes i followed in the writing might produce unexpected moments for the reader.  my aim was affective engagement rather than directed emotional responses. lj:  yes, i like the way you put that: engagement rather than response. i think we both aim to open things up rather than offer any clear answers. teratologies is unquestionably successful there; you lead with a series of explanations about how shocking and unforeseen the experience of diagnosis and treatment was, and then as the book progresses, you move into a series of brilliant insights into how work in film theory, gender, spectacle, stigma, and monstrosity reflect and illuminate cancer discourses. you begin from the horror of cancer, its monstrosity, and take that seriously—rather than domesticating it— in examining really how horrific it can be. "the tumour which these rogue cells come to form is part of the body and yet separate from it. it is produced by bodily matter but its redundancy can kill. when it takes hold it can enlarge organs and break through the skin, bringing the inside to the outside. if only it came out immediately and could be routinely cut off like an unruly shoot, perhaps survival might stay within sight. but it hides inside instead, to protect itself until its roots prevent pragmatic amputation. it impersonates the subject long enough to establish the power of its real difference, often until it can overpower its host body" (stacey, 1997, p. 78). teratologies is the first academic book on an illness, as far as i know, to take this interdisciplinary, intermodal approach, and i read it nearly immediately upon diagnosis. (it was recommended to me by one of my mentors, lucy suchman.) because i read it so early on in my own process, far before i had any intention of writing a book on the issue, i regret to say that i did not acknowledge it nearly enough in malignant for the ways that it shaped my own thinking. as i reread my copy of teratologies for this dialogue, i found many highlighted sentences and exclamation points in the margins that took me right back to those early days of reading your book and that strong bond i felt with you, though i barely knew you (!). teratologies was unquestionably one of the first and the best of the literature that meshed one’s own experience as part of the ethnographic material with a hard-hitting intellectual and political analysis. i can’t even imagine how hard it must have been to have come out at that point in cancer’s cultural history, let alone pioneer a new style of work in which the method really fit the questions—but the fact that you did has changed the route of gender and queer studies in initiating the long road to destigmatization.  js:  one of the things i most admire (or, to complicate this mutual admiration moment, maybe i also envy) about malignant is the way you make these shifts in scale and register so elegantly. in chapter six, for example, we are introduced to your own ivf treatments through your affecting writing, and then we find ourselves in the midst of your careful and nuanced epistemological challenge to research (or its absence) in this medical field. and in the chapter on the cancer artefacts (and bodily prosthetics) that accumulated over the course of diagnosis and treatments, lochlann, you both detail the power of biological artifice (wigs, prosthetic breasts) in the context of the intensification of gender normativities in cancer cultures, and you show how identity knowledges are troubled by precisely the objects that promise their stabilisation. cancer prosthetics bring sharply into view how much gender is a question of reading and being read—of legibility. as you put it: "if the wellness could not be faked, the ‘femininity’ could" (jain, 2013, p. 209). this made me think of what joan riviere (1929) and mary ann doane (1991) argued (in psychoanalysis and then film theory respectively): femininity is a masquerade that performs itself for another—its achievement depends upon a having-been-read-ness. your story of how you might be read as the "bald dyke from san francisco" matches my own exploration of the queerness echoed between the unspeakable embodiments of the c word and the l word (in the uk in 1991 anyway). when i was rewriting these sections (the first draft was jotted down while i was still in hospital after the surgery), i was surprised not to find more written about sexual stigma and taboo; this was partly why i relied on my own affective registers as a starting point. i wrote much of the book in the early 1990s when queer theory and affect debates had yet to make their full impact. looking back, i can see so many ways to redo this chapter now (maybe heather love’s new work on the stigma archive will inspire me to return to this area [see love, 2015, forthcoming]).   lj:  alas! that’s the price of being the innovator: others build on and take courage from your work. your work on the l word and the c word prefigured and enabled the queer theory that then emerged, and deserves to be even more widely cited for both its content and its role in the development of the discipline. this is an example of the high cost of the ways in which scholarship is segregated, and in particular the segregation of work on medical issues, such that i suspect teratologies is understood more as a book on cancer than on queer/gender theory, cultural studies, or political theory. this is an opportunity lost and a genealogy disavowed.   js:  perhaps we should also pause further here on the differences between the books and on the hesitation we might want to express about the obviousness of their "pairing" here. it is important to say here that when we were first invited to have this dialogue, my tendency was to try and articulate the common ground between the two projects. as our dialogue has developed, it has also become important to question some of the underlying assumptions about the "shared" categories (cancer, lesbian, academic, feminist, patient, queer) that might be the grounds for the comparison. lj:  i completely agree. i think this pairing can itself be seen as symptomatic of the overdetermination of narratives that come to be seen overarchingly as cancer narratives. in fact, in most ways our books are completely different in terms of method and approach, subject matter, politics, and scholarly contribution.  i would love to see other kinds of pairings that start to engage the real substance, as well as the ostensible topics of the books. i’d imagine an amazing dialogue coming from you and doane or other film scholars who think through stigma, gender, precarity, and visuality. i’d love to be paired with folks who write explicitly on queer studies or political economy.  js:  exactly. if cancer has a "grammar all of its own," as you put it, lochlann, then it is surely an overdetermined one, in the general sense of saturated with contradictory significance and thus not easily intelligible in any definitive way. like multiple "dream-thoughts" condensed in a single image or potent thought displaced into an apparently trivial image, the grammar of cancer strains to contain an impossible overload. to pull at any sentence thread within this grammar is to find oneself unravelling the uneven and charged formations that constitute the cancer complex. whether causation, treatment, prognosis or future prevention, the conflicting advice and worldviews flood into the spaces of uncertainty. too much information of the wrong kind, too much advice and too little listening—cancer’s cultures proliferate so much knowledge they make it hard to come up for air. the c word and the l word chapter in my book turned to the weighty experience of representing stigmatised categories that generated a visceral sense of anxiety in others, which one then had to deal with, alongside the illness and its treatments. in the context of early 1990s british culture, the affective charge around cancer was always more than the sum of its parts. i suppose the easy way of saying this is that cancer generated an especially powerful psychic force (and i think it still does, even if things have changed a lot since then).  lj:  even in the last decade since i began writing my book, the landscape has completely changed. ten years ago young adults were a completely isolated group when it came to the diagnosis, treatment, and sociality of cancer. while the stunning financial hardships, lack of treatments, and late diagnoses are still rampant, there is an incipient medical recognition of the specific needs of this demographic and recently a lot of social networking and activism has emerged, so the whole experience is perhaps equally as hopeless, but at least not so isolating.   js:  yes, that change is really important i think. the general orientation of the two projects might be that they both attempt to take the pulse of cancer cultures at a particular moment in ways that speak outwards to the more generalised landscapes beyond them. in other words, they try to diagnose what articulates with what, when, how and why: a kind of history of the present (as berlant [2008] would call it), or a study of a cultural conjuncture (as stuart hall [1980] would have put it).  but, of course, my context was the british national health system and the welfare state (or what was still left of it after thatcherism) in birmingham in the early 1990s. unlike your focus on drug companies, private medical insurance and lawsuits (which come both from your north american context and from your previous research interests), my social criticisms were aimed at the ways that thatcherite policies had decimated financial support for the nhs by cutting government funding and by marketising internal structures and relations between departments and hospitals. a direct example from that time is my witnessing two nurses barter plasters for cardboard sick bowls, when the chemo ward i was on had literally ran out of them and there was nothing for me to throw up into.   in writing the book, i was also keen to challenge the discourse around self-responsibility, which not only reinforced a pernicious individualism but was also shaming (and blaming) of people with cancer, shining the spotlight away from the government’s social responsibilities and towards patients. it's not that there aren't plenty of pharmaceutical company policies of which to be rightly critical in the uk; it's just that the priority for social scientists of medicine at that time was to try and help maintain the foundational principle of the nhs which was (and continues to be) so much under threat: that is, that all treatments should be "free at the point of access." so that's one important difference between the contexts of our books; the other, of course, is our interdisciplinary backgrounds. i see you using your anthropological eye to caution against the economic and legal underpinnings of many of the alienating medical practices organising the "cancer complex." my own interest in film theory and cultural studies provided the framework for my focus on visualisation and fantasy. the phd project i was three weeks away from completing when i was diagnosed was about changing cultural investments in idealised female bodies on the cinema screen—as eventually explored in star gazing: hollywood cinema and female spectatorship (1994). my focus at that time on the surface perfections of female stars in 1940s and 1950s hollywood could not have contrasted more strikingly with the images of teratomas in the medical textbooks i looked at to find out about this kind of tumour. etymologically referring to "monstrous births," the photographs i found in those medical textbooks reminded me of the disgusting iconographies of body horror films—the complete opposite of the idealised "clean and proper bodies" (kristeva, 1982) that i had been studying on the hollywood screen. this led me into the exploration of a teratological imaginary, that fantasy landscape generated by the tension between fear and fascination, whose mise-en-scène was distinctly science fiction in tone.  in fact, it was reading science fiction criticism in film studies for teratologies that first led me into feminist science and technology studies more generally (an influence that has continued rather than being a passing phase). i'd been aware of this field at the centre for contemporary cultural studies (cccs) in birmingham, where i was completing my phd, but it was definitely at one remove from the psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship i was struggling to put into dialogue with ethnographic studies of audiences at that time. it's less that i developed a framework for the book after diagnosis and treatments, and more that i found myself plunged into this phantasmatic world of embryology and cell biology (of teratology) that seemed already populated by the iconographies of science fiction cinema (and vice versa). the only way i seemed able to find an orientation through this nightmarish world of excessive cell growth and monstrous births was to begin to theorise the other side of the surface perfections of femininity as the hidden horrors of the maternal body. our repeated need to return to scenarios that enable us to ensure a clear distinction between the two seemed to be evidenced in the popularity of science fiction genres and our fascination with medical dramas generally. this was my starting point for writing of book that emerged from having cancer. the affective familiarity of being diagnosed with a stigmatised illness (especially at my age then, 31) echoed responses i had noted to living a stigmatised sexuality (which i had announced to my family and friends relatively recently—5 years or so previously). i began to write notes about this affective echo while i was still in hospital rehearsing the news with visitors and other patients (who were mostly having hysterectomies). lj:  yes, and i found it especially incredible to re-read your chapter three, in which you so acutely worked out the layerings of monstrosity metaphors in thinking through different kinds of stigmatized bodies and through multiple theorists coming at this question from different angles. this chapter is brilliant. read it.  i don't see my book as an activist book per se. i'm less interested, for example, in figuring out who should have responsibilities to whom than in understanding the stakes of our blind spots and the logics that hold our attention away from seeing these stakes, or the implications of how we currently misunderstand this rogue-ish, noun-ish cancer. malignant examines the routes by which our attention swerves from understanding the depth of cancer as an economic decision and misleads us toward pseudo-questions, such as how much we as a society should spend on treatments, or whether we are winning the war on cancer. in that sense, my approach was to try to take away the natural analytic end point that cancer presents when it is closed off as an object in itself, and to rather see it as a window on the array of phenomena that have arranged it, and closed it off, as if it were an object. the most i can hope for with my book is to provide some language for those who suffer from similar cognitive dissonances, or those who seek more accurate ways of understanding the depth of the paradoxes that construct cancer as we know it. in that sense i aimed to take a hard look at the deeply vicious cycles and human costs of the simplistic and idealistic ways we understand the economy and its health, and provide routes to a richer understanding of the values that underlie what i'm calling the political-medical-economy.  js:  i see what you mean. not an activist book, unless we hope that intervening into blind spots and logics is its own modest kind of activism. academic activism perhaps?—if that's not a contradiction in terms. but that's the subject of a whole other dialogue topic for another day i think.  lj:  to question the construction of "cancer" in our society is to question some very deeply held beliefs, beliefs that won't change. in my view, the best we can do is to shine a bit of flicker, which i try to do methodologically through a form of writing and attention that i call, using the concept of my friend derek simons, elegiac politics (see simons, 2006 and jain, 2007). i certainly don't think that an elegiac structure needs an autobiographical component. but there are two parts to that approach that i do think are critical. the first is an attention to the ways that logics of thought (for example, in risk calculation) can systematically structure and at the same time obscure violence, and the second is an attention to the real human costs of those sacrifices that are contained by such ways of structuring an issue.   elegiac politics aims to "recognize the quiddity of both the violence and the ways we justify it, hide it, and render it logical and explainable—each time in slightly different ways. an elegiac politics recognizes the dangers of the narrative form, and commits to show rather than to describe, to question rather than explain, and to invite rather than inform." this is a definition of elegiac politics that simons and i have been working on together (see simons, 2006 and jain, 2007). perhaps this would be a good moment to turn to the question of queering temporality in our work.  js:  yes. thinking about this issue for this dialogue reminded me of what gunhild hagestad, wrote about getting cancer: it is like "falling out of time" (hagestad, 1996, p. 205)—everything around you continues to be organised through the conventional flows and routines of calendrical structures, while your own temporal structures fail to hold you anymore. in teratologies, i sought to link this feeling of temporal scrambling with a critique of the kinds of heroic stories that get published about surviving cancer. i loved the extract from miriam engelberg's cancer made me a shallower person (2006) in your book, lochlann, and i also enjoyed barbara ehrenreich's smile or die (2010), as both of these challenge the progress narrative of stories of endurance and survival (often presented as a steady upward curve towards wisdom, thanks to the "gift" of a cancer diagnosis). this is a reductive stereotype, i know, and actually today there are many more variations on this kind of heroic narrative. but when i was diagnosed, it felt to me that this was the pervasive discourse not only in the personal narratives and self-help books i was given, but also in everyday conversations.   looking back on teratologies now, it's obvious how much it was a book about queering temporalities. psychoanalytically, of course, the past-present-future distinction that has organised modern ideas of time makes little sense. if we can be returned to affective states from our childhood in ways that make the past feel like yesterday, then, in psychoanalytic terms, as melanie klein (1975) has argued, there is only ever present time. i have increasingly turned to psychoanalytic frameworks for understanding our attachments to the illusory (and reassuring) teleological organisation of modern notions of time. recent theories of queer temporality have given a new psychosexual charge to the strangeness of modern time (already much written about by philosophers for decades). what i appreciate about recent debates that have become so influential in the field in the last few years (edelman, 2004; freeman, 2010; halberstam, 2005; love, 2007; munoz, 2009; and so on) is that they make the double move of exposing the heteronormativity of teleological structures and narratives (see valerie traub, 2013) whilst also demonstrating the strangeness of time itself. i think what i was grappling with, in the context of what you so eloquently called "living in prognosis," lochlann, was how to write about the ways in which the embodiment of heteronormative temporality is articulated through conventionalised linear narratives that collapse with the onset of life-threatening illness. cancer, as you write, adds a particular charge to this loss because of its shaming capacities and the problem of its legibility. mary bryson and i (2013) have written about this in relation to queer representational politics and strategies.  one way to think about "living in prognosis" is as the scrambling of time: perhaps the past becomes overly present as it is scanned for possible aetiologies; perhaps the stretched-out future most (white, middle-class) 30to 40-year-olds take for granted shrinks to an unpredictably truncated span that makes the present feel always poignant; or perhaps all decisions feel so impossible (and absurd) that even the most trivial options become relative and contingent. without over-stretching the articulations between queerness and temporality (see the glq roundtable, including the critique of this connection by annamarie jagose, in dinshaw et al., 2007), we might argue that cancer brings to the fore a disturbance to patterns of self-narration and quotidian routines that have generally anchored heteronormative ways of organising one's life; in this sense, cancer's chaotic impact on the capacity to live one's life through the flows of modern time will echo and deepen a sense of queer temporal disturbances already familiar to many.   lj:  yes, that is beautifully put—i like this contextualization of temporal regimes within heteronormativity and your reading of the impossibility of pasts and futures, and you write of that beautifully in your introduction as well. i was particularly interested in thinking through time in two ways. first, i was interested in how capitalist structures of accumulation work to both consolidate normative ideologies of normative lifespans (that are so shattered for young adults, in a different way than for children, diagnosed with terminal or life-threatening illnesses of any kind).  in thinking through these temporalities and how they become taken for granted, i looked to economic structures such as social security and retirement savings accounts, normative social expectations/structures such as marriage and children, and read-early detection campaigns against those.   second, i became fascinated with the utter—and yet virtually impossible to bring together—difference between the constant population statistics generated in the studies around causation and treatment, and the singular individuality of a cancer diagnosis and prognosis. i call this effect "living in prognosis" (jain, 2007) and trace how the statistics move through medicine, medical malpractice law, and various laws and policies that might limit carcinogenic exposures. prognoses gain a solidity at the population level not reflected in the experience of individuals (or even for populations: institutions such as law courts and regulatory agencies have simply been unable to imagine how to deal with this paradox). uncertainty becomes a number, which lends it a sense of credibility that simply falls apart when you scratch the surface. the overlooking of this uncertainty by courts, physicians, and policymakers of good and bad faith without fail gives the advantage to cancer rather than to defending against cancer.    combining these two ways of understanding immortal and mortal time enables me to examine how effective the rhetorics of progress in a war against cancer have been, even despite all the evidence to the contrary both in causation and in treatment. it can be hard for people to hear that argument, because it goes against the grain of hope, common sense, medical promise, and progress, and it forces us to recognize just how misleading it is to think about cancer as an external, rather than an internal, social, medical and economic threat. js:  a good place to stop, as we've run out of time (and we are over the word count). but to be continued i hope. notes 1 during the mid to late 1990s, numerous art exhibitions featured works by and about women with breast cancer, following a decade of art exhibitions by and about people with hiv/aids. in 1995 aganetha dyck's work was included in the traveling exhibition "survivors, in search of a voice: the art of courage," curated by barbra amesbury and joan chalmers for the royal ontario museum, toronto, with the support of the chalmers foundation. this exhibition explored breast cancer through the work of 24 canadian women artists in collaboration with 100 women with breast cancer and was viewed by an estimated 250,000 in toronto and one million internationally (gordon 1997). two articles about the exhibition by lynna landstreet (1995a and 1995b) were published in xtra!, the toronto gay newspaper, now online only, founded in 1984 and published by pink triangle press. barbra amesbury (born 1948) is a canadian singer-songwriter, composer and filmmaker, and philanthropist who had several top 40 hits in canada in the 1970s as bill amesbury before coming out as transsexual. chalmers (born 1928), the renowned canadian philanthropist and supporter of the arts, is her long-time partner and collaborator on projects including the woodlawn arts foundation, through the support of which works from the survivors exhibition are in the collection of the 519 church street community centre in toronto. references berlant, l. (2008). thinking about feeling historical. emotion, space and society, 1, 4-9. berlant, l. (2011). cruel optimism. durham, nc: duke university press. bryson, m. & stacey, j. (2013). cancer knowledge in the plural: queering the biopolitics of narrative and affective mobilities. journal of medical humanities, 33, 197-212. bryson, m., & joynt, c. (2013). under the skin: imag(in)ing medicine's queer pedagogies as moving pictures. no more potlucks, 29. retrieved from http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/under-the-skin-imagining-medicines-queer-pedagogies-as-moving-pictures-chase-joynt-m-k-bryson cappello, m. (2009). called back: my reply to cancer, my return to life. new york: alyson books. cvetkovich, a. (2003). an archive of feelings: trauma, sexuality and lesbian public cultures. durham, nc: duke university press.  cvetkovich, a. (2012). depression: a public feeling. durham, nc: duke university press. dinshaw, c., edelman, l., ferguson, r. a., freccero, c., freeman, e., halberstam, j., jagose, a., nealon, c., & n. t. hoang. (2007). theorising queer temporalities: a roundtable discussion. glq: a journal of gay and lesbian studies, 13, 177-195. doane, m. a. (1991). femmes fatales: feminism, film theory, psychoanalysis. abingdon: routledge. dyck, a. (n.d.). the beework. retrieved from http://thebeework.weebly.com/the-bee-work.html edelman, l. (2004). no future: queer theory and the death drive. durham, nc: duke university press. ehrenreich, b. (2010). smile or die: how positive thinking fooled america and the world. london: granta. engelberg, m. (2006). cancer made me a shallower person: a memoir in comics. new york, ny: harpercollins. freeman, e. (2010).time binds: queer temporalities, queer histories. durham, nc: duke university press. gordon, s. (1997, april 13). an exhibit to inspire both action and tears breast cancer is often spoken of in a whisper. but an art show in king of prussia was designed to start conversations. the philadelphia inquirer. reprinted online at http://articles.philly.com/1997-04-13/news/25530024_1_radiation-oncologist-marisa-weiss-art-exhibit. accessed june 1, 2015. hagestad. g. o. (1996). on-time, off time, out of time? reflections on continuity and discontinuity from an illness process. in v. l. bengtson (ed.), adulthood and aging: research on continuities and discontinuities (pp. 204-22). new york, ny: springer publishing company. halberstam, j. (1998). female masculinity. durham, nc: duke university press. halberstam, j. (2005). in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. new york: new york university press. hall, s. (1980). cultural studies: two paradigms. media culture and society, 2, 57-72. jain, s. l. (2007). living in prognosis: toward an elegiac politics. representations, 98, 77-92. jain, s. l. (2013). malignant: how cancer becomes us. oakland, ca: university of california press. klein, m. (1975). love, guilt and reparation and other works, 1921-1945. new york, ny: the free press. kristeva, j. (1982). powers of horror: an essay on abjection. new york: columbia university press. landstreet, l. (1995a). the art of surviving: a hard-hitting exhibit brings reality of  breast cancer home. review of the exhibition "survivors, in search of a voice: the art of courage." xtra! magazine. toronto: pink triangle press. reproduced on the blog "wild ideas" at http://www.wildideas.net/calyx/library/nihil273.html. accessed june 1, 2015 landstreet, l. (1995b). killing us not-so-softly: has technocratic civilization become cancer in itself? xtra! magazine. toronto: pink triangle press. reproduced on the blog "wild ideas" at http://www.wildideas.net/calyx/library/nihil273.html. accessed june 1, 2015.    lorde, a. (1980). the cancer journals. san francisco: aunt lute books. love, h. (2007). feeling backward: loss and the politics of queer history. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. love, h. (2015). doing being deviant: deviance studies, description, and the queer ordinary. differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, special issue: queer theory without anti-normativity, 1(26). munoz, j. e. (2009). cruising utopia: the politics and performance of queer futurity. new york: new york university press. orr, j. (2006). panic diaries: a genealogy of panic disorder. durham, nc: duke university press. riviere, j. (1929). womanliness as masquerade. international journal of psychoanalysis, 10, 303-13. sedgwick, e. kosofsky. (1993). white glasses. in e. sedgwick (ed.), tendencies (pp. 247-61). durham, nc: duke university press. sedgwick, e. kosofsky. (2000). a dialogue on love. boston ma: beacon press. simons, d. a history of touching, unpublished manuscript on file with author simons, derek. (2006). projectile economics: crash. the journal of transport history, 27(2), 131-135. sontag, s. (1978). illness as metaphor. new york: farrar, straus and giroux. stacey, j. (1994). star gazing: hollywood cinema and female spectatorship. abingdon and new york: routledge. stacey, j. (1997). teratologies: a cultural study of cancer. london and new york: routledge. stacey, j. & wolff, j. (2013). writing otherwise: experiments in cultural criticism. manchester: manchester university press. steedman, c. (1986). landscape for a good woman. london: virago. traub, v. (2013). the new unhistoricism in queer studies. pmla, 128, 21-39. walkerdine, v. (1990). schoolgirl fictions. london: verso. bios s. lochlann jain is associate professor in the anthropology department at stanford university, where she teaches medical and legal anthropology.  jain's publications include, among others, injury (princeton university press, 2006) and malignant: how cancer becomes us (university of california press, 2013), which won the victor turner prize, the edelstein prize, the diana forsythe prize, and the fleck prize. jain is currently working on three projects. the first is developing methods for anthropology from theater and art practices, the second is studying origin stories of hiv, and the third is on the history and theory of automobile crashes. jackie stacey is professor of media and cultural studies at the university of manchester. she is author of star gazing: female spectators and hollywood cinema (1994); teratologies: a cultural study of cancer (1997) and the cinematic life of the gene (2010), and co-author (with sarah franklin and celia lury) of global nature, global culture (2000). in addition, she has co-edited a number of books, including: thinking through the skin (with sara ahmed, 2001); queer screens (with sarah street, 2007); and, most recently writing otherwise: experiments in cultural criticism (with janet wolff, 2013). she is also an editor of screen. her current research project is provisionally entitled: crossing over with tilda swinton. microsoft word woelfle-erskine-131-788-1.docx woelfle-erskine, c. (2017). the watershed body: transgressing frontiers in riverine sciences, planning stochastic multispecies worlds. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(2), 1-30 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © cleo woelfle-erskine, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article the watershed body: transgressing frontiers in riverine sciences, planning stochastic multispecies worlds cleo woelfle-erskine university of washington cleowe@uw.edu abstract in conversation with eva hayward’s writing on transgender embodiment, this paper explores how beaver modify landscapes differently than human engineers, and how human engineering might be transformed through riverine collaborations with beavers. considering the body variously as a body of water — a river, which draws together all of the above and underground water in a watershed — as like our own trans bodies, and as a slippery double for the psyche of an anthropocene engineer, july cole and i argued that thinking with beaver as stochastic transgressors against manifest destiny engineering projects could transfigure engineers approaches to their work and river restoration more broadly. what if, rather than trapping beavers into service as “ecosystem engineers,” we assert that humans should engineer as beavers do, in ways that create porous boundaries between land and water and upand downstream, by way of stick-and-mud, leaky, temporary dams? here, i theorize a transfigured watershed body through human-beaver-salmon encounters at 2 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) three salmon recovery sites in the pacific west: a karuk-led project on the klamath river, agency-led beaver relocation projects in the methow and yakima watershed, and a citizen science-agency collaborative project in the beaverless salmon creek and russian river watersheds. all three stories concern river and salmon recovery in the pacific west, where either humans or beavers have initiated collaborative projects to raise water tables, keep rivers from going dry, and improve salmon habitat. these scientists and local knowledge holders’ encounters with beavers and their ponds thick with salmon are inspiring them to change how they undertake habitat restoration projects and also spurring some to reconsider the proper task of human ecologists and engineers, into a mode inspired by beavers themselves. “the plan [in the undercommons] is to invent the means in a common experiment launched from any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night. this ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means of social reproduction, as the to come of the forms of life, is what we mean by planning; planning in the undercommons is not an activity, not fishing or dancing or teaching or loving, but the ceaseless experiment with the futurial presence of the forms of life that make such activities possible.” —harney and moten, the undercommons: fugitive planning and black study introduction the first time i touched a living beaver was during the summer of 2014, on a columbia river tributary, during an era of extinctions, loss, shock, reassessment, and disorientation that is coming to be called the anthropocene. i traveled there with july cole, continuing years of scientific, artistic, and political engagement with beaver-salmon-human worlds. but only now did we engage physically with the immediate lively heft and squirm and odor of castor canadensis in the flesh. we helped relocate “nuisance” beavers to territories where people welcomed them, with all their unpredictable land and water interventions. we were honored to pitch in and facilitate the beavers’ never-ending projects. 3 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) beaver works—dams, lodges, canals, and tree-felling projects—inevitably transgress private property lines, interrupt human irrigation and orchard schemes, and shift landscapes from fence-able pastures and tame drained fields to dynamic mosaics of thicket, meadow, water, bog, and woods. we liked thinking about how the beavers we met could be decolonizing the controlled territories of manifest destiny, and how we might be helping them do it. manifest destiny began as a rationale for westward expansion by white settlers in the 1850s; it was tied up in claims of white intellectual and technological superiority and professed a god-given mandate for white people to wipe out or subjugate indigenous people (lepner, 1837), and later to exclude black people and nonwhite immigrants and arrivants from land acquisition and resource-extraction benefits. manifest destiny thinking, as i use the term, is the notion of human separation from and dominion over other species and elementals. indigenous sciences and other epistemologies have always been central to salmon, river, and watershed governance in the pacific west, though settler science has often erased contributions of that knowledge.1 any project to reconfigure watershed governance in a mode that resists manifest destiny’s ongoing domination requires that i and other non-indigenous scholars take seriously indigenous epistemologies and the sovereignties in which they are rooted. i characterize large dams and levee projects of the twentieth century as manifest destiny projects—among other extractive industries. in this article, in conversation with indigenous, decolonial, and feminist scholars, i trace several ways that manifest destiny and its infrastructural legacies disrupt relations among humans and other species, imposing disproportionate burdens on indigenous, nonwhite, and poor communities. finally, i explore how queer and trans disruptions of manifest destiny thinking and legacies might contribute to decolonial projects. the beavers’ forests were burning all around july and me that summer; we wondered what effects their future interventions might have on fire regimes. at the same time, water-scarcity debates in our home 4 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) state of california zeroed in on technological salvation in the form of immense and static waterworks, including new large dams that would foreclose the possibilities of millions of beaver, salmon, humans, and what donna haraway would call their “messmates” (haraway, 2008). in a move that contradicts and rejects the logics of these massive waterworks, the biologists we met in washington relocate beavers to high mountain streams where they have been absent for nearly two centuries, hoping that they will build small, leaky dams not subject to human control. with time, these dams create pools in floodplain meadows that shelter juvenile salmon (oncorhynchus spp.) and release cool water downstream in the late summer. methods developed by us forest service biologists for live-trapping and relocating families of beaver on the methow river have traveled to the nearby yakima river, where state biologists are collaborating with the yakama nation on a wide range of salmon recovery projects, and to six other rivers in washington. in trying to reverse the damage of twentieth-century river engineering projects, human actors are entering into improvisatory riparian relations with this animal that they often call an ecosystem engineer. in an earlier article, cole and i (2015) thought with these beavers about how regenerative cuts can open possibilities of transformation for a human engineer who yearns against the totalizing assumptions of the anthropocene. the conception of the anthropocene as a global phenomenon arose together with global climate models and was accompanied, among the geophysicists who coined the term, by the figure of a single anthropos. this assumption of universal humanity erases differences of race, class, culture, and different legacies of colonialism and capitalism (foster, clark, & york, 2011; moore, 2000). people in different places bear unequal responsibility for changing the planet’s surface and climate, and those who have contributed least to greenhouse gas pollution bear the heaviest burden of changing climates, oceans, and ecological conditions (moore, 2015). indigenous, feminist, and anticapitalist critics have responded with other understandings of the epoch and with terms like capitalocene and chthulucene that 5 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) problematize a singular anthropos, draw attention to capitalism as a driving force behind climate change, and pay attention to the ways changing climates affect indigenous and postcolonial territories (haraway, 2016; moore, 2015; todd, 2016; tsing, 2012). in this article, i bring cole’s and my theory of a transfigured watershed body to bear on human-beaver-salmon encounters at two salmon-recovery sites in the pacific west: a karuk-led project on the klamath river and a citizen science/agency collaborative project along the beaverless salmon creek and russian river. these sites have different legacies of indigenous dispossession, resource extraction, hydrologic alteration, and salmon decline, resulting in different approaches to resource policy and tribal co-management. both stories concern salmon recovery in the pacific west, where humans or beavers have initiated collaborative projects to raise water tables, keep rivers from going dry, and improve salmon habitat. people’s encounters with beavers and their ponds thick with salmon are inspiring them to change how they undertake habitat restoration and also spurring some to reconsider the proper task of human ecologists and engineers, into a mode inspired by beavers themselves. however, these improvisatory, perhaps unconscious gestures have a long way to go before they actually decolonize riverine relations. and how to effect that transformation? let me recapitulate that 2015 article briefly. drawing on our own queer-trans experience on various front lines, and thinking with eva hayward (2008) about transgender embodiment and becoming, cole and i consider a body of water—for example, a river, which draws together all of the above and underground water in a watershed—as like our own trans bodies and also as a slippery double for the psyche of an anthropocene engineer. hayward’s theory helps cole and me think about how beaver modify landscapes differently from human engineers and how human engineering might be transformed. we argue that thinking with beaver as stochastic2 transgressors against manifest destiny engineering projects could transfigure engineers’ approaches and river restoration. what if, rather than trapping beavers into service as 6 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) “ecosystem engineers,” humans emulated beavers’ reshaping of water and land by creating porous boundaries between land and water and up and downstream by way of stick-and-mud, leaky, temporary dams? such an approach would undermine the thinking behind twentiethcentury water-engineering projects that diverted water from streams and wetlands to irrigation ditches and pipelines, benefiting settler agriculture and expanding cities at the expense of flowing rivers. now, as settler descendants increasingly collaborate with tribes on beaver projects, do these collaborations make decolonizing moves? i think they do if nonindigenous scientists and residents recognize that these rivers remain integral to indigenous economies and cultures and that tribes in salmon country have always been the most stalwart defenders of flowing rivers and opponents of practices that degrade riverine habitats. to quote eve tuck and k. wayne yang (2012), “decolonization brings about the repatriation of indigenous land and life.” as my cases will show, settlerdescendant collaborators work for decolonization in some, but not all, beaver collaborations. cole and my argument’s first main thrust is a trans theory of watershed embodiment: that changing engineered landscapes into beavered ones could realize the watershed’s many bodily potentials. our other thrust into trans theory argues against naturalizing arguments that trans (and queer) are not transgressive. where “queer is a not yet here” (muñoz, 2009), trans, as we theorize it, is a collective move to negotiate gendered movement through society that can accommodate many evolving expressions and categories of being. these negotiations take place within trans theory, over the definition of trans, over its unmarked whiteness and debt to womenand queer-of-color theories, and over its decolonial potentials (aizura, cotten, ochoa, & vidal-ortiz, 2014; stryker, 2006). in activist and feminist spaces, debates over whether masculine or nonbinary-identified people can claim trans and feminist, discussions of hierarchies of oppressions along gender and race lines, and generational differences over pronouns and categories abound. these debates are crucial and inform my evolving understanding of trans political potentials 7 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) within and beyond identitarian concerns; however, i will not delve further into these conversations here. instead, i focus on the transgressiveness of trans as embodied by those who, because of political identities or gender expressions at odds with established queer-trans categories, will never assimilate. in articulating this particular embodied trans politics, this spirit of always-crossing that can animate riverine politics through reciprocal engagements with beavers, i aim to sketch out a trans potential for scientists and others who work for watershed recovery but do not necessarily identify as queer or trans. i want to explore what such people’s taking up of trans moves or trans politics might do for watershed science and for trans theory. i bring cole and my concept of the watershed body back to specific encounters between salmon advocates and beavers to further explore whether and how river activists might translate physical transsexual survival techniques into psychological trans-species survival invitations, finding some way to follow the practice of hayward’s trans figures who “create embodiment by not jumping out of our bodies, but by taking up a fold in our bodies, by folding (or cutting) ourselves, and creating a transformative scar of ourselves (hayward 2008, 256)” (woelfleerskine and cole 2015, 308). as far as i have been able to discover, few of these beaver advocates identify with trans theory or ally themselves with (or are) trans people. nonetheless, it seems useful to ask whether their actions and discourses may be read as transformations of the watershed body, how deeply the watershed body may be transformed, and when this transformation might undermine manifest destiny thinking and support decolonial projects. the idea of a watershed body—which comes into being through relations among its multispecies inhabitants and the landscapes and weather systems that shape them—is also in conversation with haraway’s (2008) notion of becomings with more-than-human others and barad’s (2007) notion of phenomena as agential intra-actions among these constituents. 8 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) i draw out these and other resonances with feminist, queer, and indigenous theory below and in a forthcoming companion article. first, i consider what decolonizing ethics may emerge in the contact zone where queer, trans, and indigenous theory meet. beavers are not necessarily resistant to co-optation into manifest destiny projects. rather, they are good to think with about how or whether a project might enact a decolonizing ethic. i then travel with the beavers to the klamath river and salmon creek, tracing how their presence and absence have reshaped my own engagements with trans and queer theory and ecological science. decolonizing ethics decolonizing ethics, as zoe todd, audra simpson, and kim tallbear have argued, are not just worked out in human forums (simpson, 2011; tallbear, 2014; todd, 2014); some develop along ditches and sloughs behind dams, by humans working not alone but in collaboration with other beings. these ethics fundamentally threaten manifest destiny thinking, which assumes that only (white, male, settler) humans have ethics, which they then impose on other groups of people and on other species and the earth itself. although beavers’ ethics, if they exist, are not known to us, their physical undertakings on the continent transgress the territorial insistences and totalizing practices of manifest destiny. their activity thus brings about a physical decolonization; it also ties river systems and species back together in ways that increase resilience in the face of devastation. beavers do not recognize manifest destiny boundaries of human and natural, and many people who collaborate with them on flow or salmon rehabilitation projects also reject binaries between human and natural landscapes when they encourage beavers to build dams in city parks or reinforce beaver dams with posts to help them withstand high flows. when people recognize beavers’ actions and responses as the source for new ethics, their performance of this ethic is an act of decolonization to the extent that it dismantles the notion that 9 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) only humans have ethics, which they impose on others. anna tsing writes of local knowledge practices’ potential to disrupt colonial practices of “plantation science” in oregon forests and other places where matsutake mushrooms grow wild: in plantation science, experts and objects are separated by the will to power; love does not flow between expert and object….for those who love wild mushrooms, such control is not an object; indeterminacy is part of the point. wherever volunteers gather to promote disturbance forests, or pickers stop to ponder why the mushrooms come up, plantation science loses a little authority. (tsing, 2011, p. 19) in the beavery watershed body, these local knowledge practices are the intimate interactions among trappers, hatchery visitors who feed beavers their daily willows, and landowners who come to love beavers’ furry antics and appreciate their water-storage methods, even as they are exasperated by their taste for orchard trees. only some of these people say they love beavers, but they all have come to feel a sense of liveliness and luckiness in a watershed that holds them and to feel lack and grief when they find lodges burned and ponds drained after fires. this feeling of recognition, liveness, and rightness is a trans affect, akin to the feeling of coming into the right body that trans people feel when they see their inner sense of self reflected in how other people respond to their gender. while some trans people may articulate this “rightness” as the realization of a single, overarching conscious self, my own experience of trans becoming was of coming into a trans collective, through a sense of mutual recognition that my “self” was never singular. this notion of “right” is never predetermined but always constituted relationally with other people, with ancestors, and, for some, with nonhumans and landscapes. for example, wesley (2014) theorizes about such trans becoming in a coast salish two-spirit context, where her trans becoming is effected through her grandmother’s naming of her as a twinspirited woman, an invitation to dance at the funeral of another two-spirit tribal member, and her dance in a cedar dress she weaves. 10 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) as with the project of coming into one’s own trans body, the trans move of coming into a transfigured watershed body happens with others, never finished, always relationally, and always challenging the fixity of categories. thus the notion of what a “right” watershed body may be for a given place will always be negotiated in public forums (or in the bar after the science conference), and will change in response to climatic, social, and ecological dynamics or changing understandings of historical and future conditions. this understanding is sometimes tacit or latent. decolonizing moves along the klamath trans theory is only one optic for understanding interspecies relations. indigenous theory is another, sometimes resonant with trans and queer theorizing of the land-human-water relation and sometimes incommensurate. indigenous practices of watershed management in the pacific west have persistently fostered stochasticity on the landscape through relational practices of forest burning, fish and shellfish harvest, and recognition of beavers’ and other species’ world-making practices. when the yakama, the karuk, and other tribal watershed managers began to collaborate with beavers, they did not need to transfigure the degraded watershed body but recognized the beavers’ gesture within a different framework and responded to it. in this next story, harling, a nonkaruk biologist who works closely with the karuk tribe, describes a decolonial river transfiguration project that is undertaken collaboratively with and under the guidance of karuk tribal land managers and that centers yurok and karuk salmon science. this story is foundational to the self-appointed “beaver believer” movement—a loose network of biologists, geomorphologists, and watershed advocates who want to reintroduce beavers as a way to increase streamflow, create juvenile salmon habitat, and recharge groundwater. as such, the story has circulated through salmonrestoration networks across the pacific west and in beaver advocacy networks that span the atlantic. i first heard one version of it from brock 11 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) dolman, a beaver advocate who visited this dam later with will harling and had his own moment of reckoning with settler legacies of beaver removal while overlooking this beaver pond. i heard another version from my collaborator dan sarna on a long drive back from the klamath river, where our plans to install posts to support a beaver dam on seiad creek were thwarted by a forest fire. harling (n.d.) begins his story in the domestic sphere, tiptoeing out of the house with the baby on his back and his fishing pole over his shoulder, careful not to wake his wife and sleeping guests, out into the familiar body of the watershed to a good fishing spot. there he encounters geology, water, fish, a beaver, and willows all responding to one another and enters into a responsive intra-action with them. the relatively wide orleans valley gives the river a chance to meander a little here, reclaiming its sinuosity stolen over the past six million years as the klamath mountains began to rise from underneath, forcing it into steep sided canyons tracing fault lines in the uplifted bedrock just upstream and downstream of the valley. fall chinook salmon moving upstream to spawn left wakes in the glassy water as they navigated up through the shallows, and the klamath’s famed half-pounder steelhead run was coming in with them. across the river, i noticed a furry head moving slowly upstream. the light brown tuft of hair visible above the water looked like what i thought a beaver would look like, but couldn’t be sure. just then i heard a rustle of grass and a swish of a tail on the near shore and backed into the willows to watch. sure enough, a beaver was swimming up towards us along the edge of the river just twenty feet away. as it cleared the riffle, it moved out into the river and i slowly followed it upstream. big whiskers and a large black snout, those dark beady eyes and two cute little ears quickly disappeared when it spotted me, and a loud thwack of its tail as it dove alerted its kin that danger was near. walking home, giddy with excitement from this rare close encounter, i noticed all the 12 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) stripped willow sticks along the shore, even a clump of uneaten willow shoved under an algal mat, possibly left for a mid-day snack. beaver are slowly coming back to the klamath, recovering from intense trapping that began in the mid-1800s and continuing for nearly a century after until they were almost extinct. in 1850 alone, famed frontiersman and trapper stephen meek and his party reportedly trapped 1,800 beaver out of scott valley, which at the time was called beaver valley. the last beavers in scott valley were trapped out by frank c. jordan in the winter of 1929–1930 on marlahan slough. beaver throughout much of the klamath basin suffered the same fate, and even today as they return to less inhabited areas along the mainstem river and its tributaries, they are still shot and trapped in streams where their dams pose a perceived risk to residential and agricultural property. harling then sees something—is it a beaver? a fleeting sighting, but the biologist’s eye for a combination of characteristics clinches it. he responds by backing away into the willows. the beaver’s response to harling, a loud thwack of its tail, brings him into relation with the beaver’s kin, alerted…that danger was near. the beaver is startled. harling is giddy. that affective relation persists as he walks home to breakfast. now he notices the stripped willow sticks and willow snacks under an algal mat. in this passage, harling’s descriptions of the geologic features ascribe a certain animacy to the river that reclaims its sinuosity, the mountains that have stolen that sinuosity, forcing it into steep sided canyons, and the salmon that navigate up through the shallows. queer theorist mel chen describes such inversions of animacy hierarchies— ascribing humanlike agency to rocks, landforms, and animals—as a queer move of undoing normal categories and boundaries (chen, 2012). in noting these animacies and in speaking for and with the various riverine creatures and elementals in a multivocal chorus, harling is taking up a new position within and of the watershed body, refusing the position of 13 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) the disinterested, unaffected engineer who sees rivers as drainage channels and water as an inert and lifeless fluid. to borrow from moten and harney (2013), he is taking up the fugitive art of social life, which is practiced “in animative and improvisatory decomposition of [politics’] inert body…[and] emerges as an ensemblic stand, a kinetic position.” in discussing this ensemble, moten later riffs on multiplicity and multivocality as key strategies in opposition to the single authoritative voice that characterizes state planning and also manifest destiny logics, which miss the signal in the stochastic noise. here harling is seeing the signal—what ecologists gloss as emergent properties, like biodiversity— as of, and emerging through, the noise of the predawn watershed body: its gurgles and thwacks and tweet-tweet-tweets, its multiplicities of relations and responses unfolding backward and forward and in circles through time. (as the next story will show, many engineers and biologists could not tune in to this chorus.) to continue harney and moten’s riff, “its encoded noise is hidden in plain sight from the ones who refuse to see and hear—even while placing under constant surveillance—the thing whose repressive imitation they call for and are.” as he engages with the beaver, harling is noticing multispecies entanglements along the shore and drawing himself into affective relations with the shoreline world. he extends this affect of care to beavers that were trapped and shot relentlessly long before his time. in imagining beavers’ experience of trapping (a manifest destiny project), he emphasizes the beavers’ own agency (the quick disappearance at the sight of the dangerous human, their foresight in stashing some willows to eat later) in their return to the klamath as a sign or possibility of subversive human-beaver relations. this agency is key to the later part of the story, in which humans recognize beavers’ improvisatory dambuilding gestures as collaborations for watershed renewal. like muñoz’s queer gestures on the dance floor, these interspecies gestures can allow people to reimagine the past as a different set of notyet-here potentials. i think that by holding these stochastic potentials and sense of the beaver’s beaverness and bodily habits in their minds 14 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) together with the methods of trapping and tools of trapping, scientists, tribal members, and settler volunteers who collaborate with beavers are undermining and overturning manifest destiny thinking. to use july cole’s (2010) term, they enact a manifest reversal. the tools used in beaver reintroduction—the traps, the snare pole, the bait, the snare—are the same tools and technologies used to kill millions of beavers and nearly erase their engineering approach from these landscapes. in “callout to nanotechnologists,” cole articulates a method for participating in or enacting a manifest reversal: “your tools, bought and employed by the heirs of manifest destiny, must now effect the manifest reversal.” here i see just such a reworking of tools. beavers make improvisatory noise within a multivocal chorus dan sarna and i retold part of will’s story a presentation at a queer animal-studies conference called funny kinds of love (““dam ’em all,” 2013). inspired by the possibility of bringing queer and transgender practice into my ecological work, i suggested to dan that we develop our own performative account of beaver-human interactions. in revisiting this script several years later, i see that beavers chewed their way into our collaborative research project, inspiring our transgressions of standard academic forms and our multidisciplinary conversations. dan sarna: in spring of 2010, the watershed council and the karuk tribe were in the process of collaborating on a stream restoration project in northern california. they were putting brush bundles into seiad creek to enhance habitat for endangered coho salmon by increasing channel complexity, deepening pools and improving stream cover. when they returned to monitor the results of their restoration efforts, they discovered that the brush bundles had all gone missing! biologists staked out their sites, and after some investigation discovered that a beaver family had been stealing their brush bundles, eating them and adding them to their own 15 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) dam upstream. their initial reaction to the incident was: cleo woelfle-erskine: dam you beavers!!! ds: that same spring, the tribe and the council had planned a “engineered log jam” project downriver near the mouth of boise creek. however, before they could bring out the ’dozers, beaver moved in and constructed a five-foot tall dam across the creek at the exact location of the proposed log jam! the watershed council and the tribe’s biologists observed thousands of juvenile chinook and coho utilizing the ponds. according to will harling, cwe: “the beaver were doing everything we had been trying to do. except the beaver were doing it better, faster, and at no cost to us.” they took it as a sign and surmised that the beavers “had received the proposal, but had decided to implement it in-house.” this story of beaver restoration on boise creek is a founding myth of the self-titled “beaver believer movement.” based on their encounters that summer, the mid-klamath watershed council and the tribe realized: ds: “the restoration of threatened coho salmon in the klamath river system may be intricately tied to enhanced beaver populations and restoration projects that mimic the positive benefits of beaver dams.” cwe: take note: here a group of humans are looking to beaver for advice on riparian repair. our version of the story recirculated: beaver advocates found a video of our presentation on the conference site and sent it out on their mailing lists. a year later, dan and i expanded on this story with our own probes into beaver histories, finding photographs of colonial “fur desert” policies 16 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) to control territory by eliminating beaver as a source of wealth (figure 1). we also found occasional latent destinies of human recognition of beavers’ ecological role, as when biologists dropped them from airplanes during the dust bowl in hopes that they would combat erosion (figure 2). figure 1: beaver pelts in warehouse, mid-1850s. source: smithsonian. 17 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) figure 2: sketch of geronimo, a beaver dropped via parachute 100 times to test a special case that opened on release. source: california department of fish and game. our second multivocal beaver performance took place at the dimensions of political ecology conference, on a panel july cole and i organized called “latent destinies, manifest reversals” (cole & woelfleerskine, 2014). this time, we explicitly theorized beavers as agents working to overturn manifest destiny: dan sarna: part of the project of manifest reversal entails viewing 18 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) the actual process of manifest conquest as incomplete, fragmentary, and subject to multiple forms of resistance. even as fur brigades snagged millions of pelts and wiped out beaver colonies across the us, there were instances of micro-resistance by both humans and beaver themselves. seeking ghosts of lost beavers through dan sarna’s and my collaborative work along in the klamath basin, i came to think with beavers about my salmon creek field site, just over the hill from the russian river, where beaver have long been absent and coho salmon are now on life support in a conservation hatchery. local agencies working with private contractors are recreating the log jams, deep pools, and side channels that coho favor. members of the salmon creek watershed council are teaching their neighbors that residential water use (mostly groundwater wells) causes more of the stream to dry up each summer. looking back on my five seasons of collaborative salmon studies there, i realize i was caught up in what hustak and myers (2012) called an involutionary momentum, a gestural call and response with other species. i saw traces of lost beavers in the deeply incised channels, dry streams, and dry floodplain wells. like darwin when he described bees’ pollination of catasetum orchids in performative language suggestive of an interpretive dance, i waded through ponds not yet backed up, under overgrown alders not yet chewed down, imagining fat darting salmon smolts in the black anoxic pools left at the end of the summer, which held only dead young fish. curious if local scientists and residents saw the stream this way, i started asking people whether they thought beaver should be reintroduced to improve salmon habitats. the ones who did were a selfdescribed “misfit geomorphologist,” several ex-scientists, and local residents who had worked to reintroduce elk or bear or other vanished species. 19 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) dan and i went to see local nongovernmental organization (ngo) beaver advocate kate lundquist talk at a local sustainability center, where she lives and heads up a beaver reintroduction campaign. kate wore a baseball cap showing a beaver in place of the extinct grizzly bear on california’s state flag (figure 6). she showed will harling’s pictures of beaver-made ponds and pictures of her and colleague brock dolman thigh-deep in beaver ponds. kate wanted the local residents in attendance to catch the “beaver fever” (she and brock are famous for their unremitting wordplay and terrible puns) and to think seriously about how human inhabitation practices would have to change in order for beavers to return. kate worked to convince the california department of fish and wildlife that beavers were native to coastal california and should be introduced. she excavated evidence from the russian fur-trapping era and spanish settlement records to show that beaver pelts traded were from local streams and that translocating beavers here would be a reintroduction of a native species. the agency’s policy is shifting. now regulators acknowledge that beavers did occupy the coast range before the fur-trapping era and thus would qualify as a native species for reintroduction. but they propose that landowners wanting beavers would have to get permission from every landowner within eight river miles of their property. most of the audience was skeptical that this would fly. one person said that her old-timer neighbor “is pretty hardcore ‘don’t come on my land.’ he’d probably shoot the beavers.” 20 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) figure 6: the water institute’s beaver flag, available on a ball cap. source: occidental arts and ecology center’s water institute. some audience members seemed to catch kate’s “beaver fever” by watching her performance of love for beavers and their unpredictable ways. they suggested that beavers might reappear clandestinely on their properties or on public land. many residents are salmon lovers: local citizen-scientists working to make space for fish and native grasses and elk and bears in their rural residential landscapes. most talked of their work as nearly hopeless in the face of apathy, drought, greed, climate change, and private-property regimes. in witnessing kate’s performance of beaver love, her and brock’s joy at engagement and response across species lines, it seemed that some residents responded affectively with glimmerings of a “biocultural hope” (kirksey, shapiro, & brodine, 2013). but without face-to-face engagement with beavers—or with whichever of the multispecies kin with which one could step into the transfigured watershed body—few felt that they can engage directly with watershed processes and inhabitants to reshape the watershed’s wounds. instead, they delegate the daily work of reworking the watershed body to agency 21 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) scientists and ngos. but these scientists’ limitations, perceptually and institutionally, inform what they can accomplish. one early summer day, i climbed up fay creek’s narrow upper canyon with jay, a creek-walker born on a local commune who keeps track of steelhead and coho spawning on two nearby creeks. his two boys roamed ahead and startled a family of mergansers feeding in a deep pool below a high cascade. the ten-year-old climbed up a basalt outcrop and found a goose egg on top, hatched and fledged; he carried down the fragment of translucent shell. the pool was full of coho and steelhead fry; the ducks hunted them. jay was dismayed that only a thin trickle was flowing between the pools, with three more hot months to go until the fall rains. he had been talking to kate lundquist about beavers and was imagining them everywhere. fay creek could be a sanctuary for them, jay said, because no one ventures down the steep canyon to the stream, and the rancher who owns the adjacent land would welcome the extra water for his failing well. the rancher had fished for steelhead here as a boy and always asked me how many fish i had counted. then, in fall, i walked and crawled up the salmon creek mainstem with sierra cantor, a local agency biologist, snorkeling to count coho and steelhead parr. she told me that the rancher who owned this property wanted to restore floodplain connectivity and thought his property had once been home to beavers. overall, sierra thought that the landscape was too fragmented into residential lots for regulators to permit beaver reintroduction. since beavers can travel for miles when looking for a new lodge site, the chance of a complaint from a landowner was too high. in spring, i walked up lower fay creek with brian cluer and lauren hammack, geomorphologists checking up on a restoration project that anchored logs to large boulders in the stream, in some places creating pools, in other places buried under gravel. for years the county paid a local rancher to drive a bulldozer down the stream, scraping up logs that might back up floodwaters. now, the task of putting all that wood back is impossible—agencies are strapped for funds, and anyway all the large 22 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) redwoods that could actually make a pool in these flashy streams have been dragged out and milled. brian says, “it’s going to take more than just landscaping existing channels—we need to be in the real estate business and restore floodplains and wetlands.” lauren thought there were wetlands, probably beaver maintained, on the mainstem, and agreed with sierra that the rancher might be willing to come to the table. how, then, can this grief at extinction and other anthropocene destruction be overcome in landscapes where beavers and salmon are absent and which therefore lack their exuberant and profligate gestures of multispecies generosity? beavers dam prolifically and then move on. they give water away with no thought for its scarcity. they make abundant and dynamic habitats for mink and birds and fish willows and otters just by being beavers, chewing and building and living their lives. salmon swim all over the sea, storing up nitrogen and trace elements in their bodies, which they then hurl upstream as far as possible. they leave thousands of eggs and their very bodies to feed people, bears, raccoons, skunks, and eventually trees. perhaps, in settled and resolutely settlerminded landscapes like salmon creek, beavers can swim with people into this transfigured watershed. but in salmon creek, many settler descendants dismiss local pomo and miwok people as inauthentically indigenous because they have intermarried with white and mexican settlers. almost all residents and local scientists are white, and most recognize neither sovereignty nor pomo and miwok worldviews as central to watershed recovery. i asked local watershed activists and scientists why they did not reach out to graton rancheria biologists or tribal members on science and outreach projects. they asserted, in different ways, that graton members had lost their culture and needed to relearn traditional practices from anthropologists. they cited no conversations with actual living pomo or miwok people in making these claims. instead, in a move like that audra simpson (2014) describes in relation to settler perceptions of iroquois culture, they cited anthropologist kat anderson as their source of knowledge of pomo and miwok culture. these settler descendants did 23 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) not see that indigenous knowledge persisted alongside “modern” livelihoods, despite federal termination act policies and centuries of settler violence. nor did they mention sovereignty or know of treaty rights that would guarantee pomo and miwok people the right to harvest and manage local lands. the settler-descendant activists considered the watershed to be private property, with no valid indigenous claim. perhaps, in such places, transgressive potentials of watershed inhabitation will remain only partly realized. conclusion: beaver dreams in bringing trans theories of embodiment back to beaver-salmon worlds, i want to ask, “where or in whose imagination might this watershed body be emerging?” in order to more fully theorize the watershed body as an imaginary that is shaping science and watershed politics. following eva hayward’s “towards myself through myself” (2008), the transformation of watershed body into multispecies commons is not a change from one state or body into another. rather, it is the recognition of an already existing multispecies relation into which humans can enter. in the klamath river story, i see this move already partly enacted in how will harling talks about the beaver he meets, as call and response, with beavers and humans recognizing one another as reshapers of their shared worlds. the projects he describes are also enacting decolonial practices of science: collaborations between the karuk tribe and the mid-klamath watershed council (mkwc); studies funded by the forest service and carried out by the yurok and karuk natural resources departments; and engineering works funded by a hydroelectric company and the us fish and wildlife service and constructed by mkwc and the karuk tribe, on private land owned by settler descendants, then amended and reworked by beavers. in the methow and yakima stories i find a similar decolonizing approach, with the yakama tribe contributing land and personnel, the forest service lending equipment and expertise, and the state 24 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) department of fish and wildlife actually trapping and relocating the beavers on private lands. here, too, beavers provided a way for trappers, ranchers, and hydrological scientists to reimagine and reenact key strategies of manifest destiny (trapping, diverting water, logging, forest management) in a transfigured and relational way. in salmon creek and the russian river, which have been beaverless for at least 150 years, i see this watershed body imagined through people’s interactions with coho salmon, which went extinct in the late 1990s and have been reintroduced through a hatchery captive broodstock program. however, because state wildlife codes prohibit moving beavers from place to place, beaver advocates’ work is mostly historical and policy oriented; only ngo advocates like kate and brock, who travel to other rivers, meet beavers face to face. as a result, most salmon creek residents’ watershed imaginaries do not include beavers’ stochastic engineering of flows and riverine habitats. in this article i have drawn out two examples from my own research where using indigenous, queer, transgender, and feminist approaches, alone or in combination, can accomplish this reversal of manifest destiny modes of domination and killing. thinking with beavers and rivers and mountains and salmon, out in the watershed commons, i have sketched a way to transfigure what anthropologist anna tsing (2015) calls “capitalist ruins” into substrates for new modes of life. practices of world-making with beavers and salmon unveil the multispecies commons that is always-already there, in the land, ready for human acknowledgement and recognition. this joyful response to the leaps and thwacks and dives that are beavers’ or salmon’s modes of communication mixes with affects of loss and grief at their wanton killing and extinction. scientists and others who enter into this common watershed body describe feelings of recognition and joy and sensuous pleasure in fur and musk and slippery fins that is akin to queer recognition in muñoz’s punk clubs and queer dance floors: that touch and wink of recognition, a falling into relation that is felt on a visceral level as kin-making. once that kin25 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) making happens, it triggers all the other emotions that go along with it— protectiveness, grief at death and loss, joy at birth and growth and promiscuity, empathy for past depredations: a shift in ethics. maria puig de la bellacasa, thinking with haraway about caring across species lines, could be speaking of beavers and salmon in their stochastic worldmaking when she writes, because “nothing comes without its world” we do not encounter single individuals, a meeting produces a world, changes the color of things, it diffracts more than it reflects, distorts the “sacred image of the same” (haraway, 1994: 70). knowing is not about prediction and control but about remaining “attentive to the unknown knocking at our door” (deleuze, 1989: 193). but though we do not know in advance what world is knocking, inquiring into how we can care will be required in how we will relate to the new. (de la bellacasa, 2012) in developing practices of caring for beavers and salmon, i find people transgressing boundaries around institutions, at the streambed, and between wildlife and water management. these boundary crossings reveal these boundaries and binaries as manifest destiny fantasies of dominion and control, which can be flipped over as spawning female salmon flip over gravels with their beating tails. the undersides of those fantasies reveal anew more relational material entanglements. they inspire new modes of watery engagement, a call and response, and improvisatory learning from an interspecies other via hatchery reconfigurations, starter lodges, beaver deceivers, and pond levelers. in new studies by pollock, woodruff, the karuk tribe, and ranchers in the scott valley, beavers have insinuated their world-making practices and flipped old manifest destiny questions. in these studies and field experiments, they are asking new kinds of questions. rather than studying how to drain water away, how can we preserve hyporheic flows? rather than trapping out a (generic) nuisance tree predator, how can we entice this particular beaver family to live here by matchmaking and enacting practices of interspecies care? like wildlife undercrossings that 26 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) reconfigure material and affective relations between humans driving along roads and animals moving across them, material accommodations like beaver-pond levelers and starter lodges evidence a new practice of world-making with the more-than-human other. how these incipient collaborations will play out—for beavers and humans—is not settled. these different people who love beavers do not talk of the present, past, or future in the same way. but there are points of convergence. maybe this holding another’s perspective in mind—this reckoning and grappling with different lifeways that has been so crucial to environmental justice and feminist politics—can now also extend to other watershed inhabitants. as one queer gesture towards that utopian future, i close with another excerpt from sarna’s and my script. this section closed out our second performance with a wish and a prophecy inspired by the ones clovis and larch unearthed in cole’s (2010) unmoored frontier. dan sarna: in entering into this multi-species collaboration, humans can join in transgressive ecologies that re-engender symbiotic relations of becoming-with. the ensuing improvisations can break through political impasses and undo the cataloging impulses that underlie antagonistic human-nature constructs. these changing relationships between people and beavers, and accompanying legal and policy changes, may be signs that a manifest reversal is underway. cleo woelfle-erskine: we found the following prophecies scratched in mud banks by beaver claws and scribbled in the interstices of our interview transcripts: signs of latent destinies: settlers acknowledge indigenous sovereignty through comanagement and repatriation of ancestral lands, return stolen artifacts, and protect access to ceremonial sites. 27 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) humans and beavers develop collaborative practices, installing pond levelers, and beaver deceivers. for every beaver deceiver, there is some trade in territory to beaver’s advantage. evidence of ontological shifts, such that humans no longer think they must dominate natural processes at the expense of nonhuman others. in recognition that human and nonhuman fates are bound up together, beavers are no longer seen as furbearers to be killed frivolously, but as collaborators in ensuring the world’s continuing liveliness. ds: when manifest reversal is at hand, rivers will retake many of their floodplains. rivers will no longer be fixed by riprap so that property lines may also remain fixed. beavers will chew their way up all of their former streams, and where they encounter humans, will be aided with support structures and accommodated with pond levelers, but everywhere be permitted to grow enough willows that they can chew in peace. salmon will return in silver hordes. their dead bodies will turn into giant trees, which will be permitted to grow to a great size. where some are cut for human uses or put back into streams, they will be cut selectively and dragged out over the snow, one by one. such a reversal would be as large in scope as manifest destiny was, rolling out across the continent and transforming every river, aquifer and floodplain. 28 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) both: and the beaver slaps resound! notes 1 in a project in process, i trace the unacknowledged debt that us fisheries science owes to indigenous knowledge through visual and textual analysis of archival materials on the first pacific salmon hatchery (woelfle-erskine, 2017). at the baird hatchery on the mccloud river in winnemem wintu traditional territory, winnemem men and women taught settler biologists everything about salmon—where and when they spawned, how to harvest them, their life histories, and sustainable harvest practices. other tribes and first nations throughout pacific salmon territories likely played foundational roles in fisheries and hatchery science elsewhere, though these encounters are less well documented in the archive. current tribal and intertribal fish and wildlife science programs emphasize that “new” ecological science paradigms of diversity and dynamism are in fact reworkings of indigenous knowledge, particularly in relation to fire and riverine processes. see woelfle-erskine, in preparation, underflow: salmon, beavers, and science in a queertrans mode. 2 stochastic, literally meaning “randomly determined,” is used by information scientists, hydrologists, geomorphologists, and ecologists to describe phenomena that cannot be predicted precisely, although the probability that they will occur can be analyzed using statistics. beavers’ dam-building actions, combined with other stochastic phenomena like storms and floods, contribute to the stochasticity—randomness, unpredictability—of the riverine landscapes they inhabit. 29 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) references aizura, a.z., cotten, t., ochoa, m., & vidal-ortiz, s. 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(2012). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, 1(1). retrieved from http://decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/download/18630 wesley, s. (2014). twin-spirited woman: sts’iyóye smestíyexw slhá:li. transgender studies quarterly, 1(3), 338–351. woelfle-erskine, c. (2017). settler sexualities in and through fish culture. presented at environmentalism outside the box: an ecosex symposium, santa cruz, ca. retrieved from https://earthlab.ucsc.edu/ecosexsymposium/ woelfle-erskine, c., & cole, j.o. (2015). transfiguring the anthropocene: stochastic re-imaginings of human-beaver worlds. transgender studies quarterly, 2(2), 297–316. 32 woelfle-erskine catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) bio cleo woelfle-erskine is an assistant professor at the university of washington. his research focuses on ecological and social dimensions of human relations to rivers and their multi-species inhabitants. trained in ecology, hydrology, geomorphology, critical social science, and feminist science and technology studies, he facilitates collaborative research in partnership with tribes, agencies, citizen scientists, and local community members. his phd work in the energy and resources group at uc berkeley involved a collaborative of scientists and local residents who are experimenting with storing winter rain to increase summer streamflow. he is developing research projects on hydro-ecological and social effects of beaver relocation in eastern washington, and environmental justice dimensions of fishing and shellfishing in urban puget sound. as a uc president’s postdoctoral fellow in feminist studies at uc santa cruz, he explored queer, transgender, and decolonial possibilities for ecological science. his manuscript in progress, underflow: transfiguring riverine relations, imagining queer-trans ecologies considers the lingering presences of manifest destiny (ecological, socio-scientific, and psychological) and the ways that this injurious “destiny” can be transfigured and overturned to renew human-water-fish relations . helmreich, stefan. “ghost lineages, ghost acres, and darwin’s “diagram of divergence of taxa” in on the origin of species: critical commentary inspired by banu subramaniam’s ghost stories for darwin.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (2): 1–13. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © stefan helmreich 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license ghost lineages, ghost acres, and darwin’s “diagram of divergence of taxa” in on the origin of species: critical commentary inspired by banu subramaniam’s ghost stories for darwin stefan helmreich massachusetts institute of technology sgh2@mit.edu just after page 116 of charles darwin’s original edition of on the origin of species appears the book’s only illustration, a gatefold diagram of descent with modification, a branching-tree schema that would later come to be known as the “diagram of divergence of taxa” (darwin himself described it as charting “divergence of character” [darwin, 1859, p. 116]) (figure 1). the visual rhetoric of the tree diagram and the conditions and entailments of its theoretical declarations about change and inheritance over time have been expertly interpreted by historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary scholars of science (see browne, 1980;ospovat, 1981; beer, 1983; klapisch-zuber, 1991; o’hara, 1992; smith,2006; hacking, 2007; ingold, 2007; pietsch, 2013; lima, 2014; bouzat,2014). what i offer here is a reading inspired by banu subramaniam’s ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity (2015), a book in which subramaniam reflects on the history of breeding experiments that aided in theorizing variation, on collections of old and new sentiments that have valued “native” over “alien” species, and on a range of eugenic scripts that have drawn upon theories of difference derived from readings and misreadings of darwin. writing as an experimental geneticist and feminist studies scholar, subramaniam argues that inquiries into genetic variation have not been merely or abstractly intellectual enterprises alone. rather, because they treat matters to do with relations among diversity, life, and death, such inquiries have necessarily been biopolitical in their implication, inflected by histories of colonialism, structural racism, sex/gender inequalities, and human-non-human hierarchies. subramaniam writes that, “the seemingly innocuous history of genetic variation holds within it the countless bodies of the dead, the mutilated, critical perspectives 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (2) stefan helmreich 2018 the tortured, the irredeemable, the unwanted….” (pp. 7-8). in other words, the history of thinking about and working on genetic variation (in the lab, in the field, in the world, with model and wild organisms, with non-humans and humans) is a history that is crowded with ghosts. figure 1. william west’s lithographed diagram of the divergence of character, from darwin 1859. in what follows, i trace some ghostly lineages we might read within the form of darwin’s diagram and i also consider those multispecies bodies layered into the material history and political economy that made possible the lithograph and its reproductions. the point here is not to ask after darwin’s individual intentions (though his uneasiness with his theory will come up) so much as it is to ruminate upon a scientific representation and its conditions of possibility, both apparent and occluded. following avery gordon, whose ghostly matters (2008) is a touchstone for subramaniam’s book, i am interested in darwin’s diagram’s hauntings — both formal (how is death or extinction represented or managed in the image?) and material (out of what substances, organic and otherwise, were the diagram and its copies made and in what ecological and economic relations?). as a drawn and published artifact, darwin’s diagram can be read not only as a schematic for evolutionary plots (beer, 1983), but also as a suggestive pointer to the absent and vital presences of the dead in nascent evolutionary theory and in the material substances of the theory’s presentation. let us think about such material substances from a presentist angle for a moment: just as today’s digital critical perspectives 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (2) stefan helmreich 2018 texts (including the one i am writing now) sometimes seem to hover above the material world but in fact depend upon rare earth and conflict minerals, underremunerated labor, and environmental toxins (see gabrys, 2011; parikka, 2014 on the “anthrobscene,” alaimo, 2016), so too did darwin’s lithograph sit within the unequal material economy and ecology of its time. i begin, though, with the diagram’s form, with the lines that give the diagram its purpose. lines of organismic descent travel upward from the bottom of the page, representing species lineages ramifying into new, naturally selected varieties (see bouzat, 2014), their classificatory thresholds marked by horizontal lines labeled on the diagram’s right side with clock-face roman numerals, ticking upwards one through fourteen. the space between one horizontal line and the next above marks the passage, darwin writes, of a thousand — or better, he speculates, ten thousand — generations. he explains: let (a) be a common, widely-diffused, and varying species, belonging to a genus large in its own country. the little fan of diverging dotted lines of unequal lengths proceeding from (a), may represent its varying offspring . …only those variations which are in some way profitable will be preserved or naturally selected . … when a dotted line reaches one of the horizontal lines, and is there marked by a small numbered letter, a sufficient amount of variation is supposed to have been accumulated to have formed a fairly well-marked variety, such as would be thought worthy of record in a systematic work. (1859, p. 117) those offspring that do survive, darwin continues, will “partake of those more general advantages which made the genus to which the parent species belonged, a large genus in its own country” (p. 118) folded into this account is the theme of the fittedness of species to their native land — to, in darwin’s language, their “own country.” this moment in darwin hints at the valuation of native species that subramaniam analyzes across a range of later evolutionary accounts indebted to this model of natural selection. darwin’s diagram is suffused too with the hauntings of those creatures possessed of variations in some way unprofitable. study the diagram: the off-white expanse around the lines of surviving lineages is empty. but this blankness is also full — of the dead. as darwin observes, during the process of modification, represented in the diagram, another of our principles, namely that of extinction, will have played an important part . … [t]here will be a constant tendency in the improved descendants of any one species to supplant and exterminate in each stage of descent their predecessors and their original parent. (p. 121) critical perspectives 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (2) stefan helmreich 2018 the empty space of this diagram is thus a space of ghosts. these were ghosts that had an upsetting resonance for darwin himself, who was famously unsettled by the cruelty in his model of evolution — and personally devastated by the death of three of his ten children, two in infancy, one at age ten. “if he had any inclination to think about his theory of natural selection at … [the time of his children’s deaths],” writes janet browne, “he might easily have reflected on the melancholy fact that his ideas of struggle required the death of the weakest individuals, even of his own babies. his theory was a bleak theory of elimination” (2002, p.37). the ghosts in this diagram may also be prefigurings, premonitions of the ghosts subramaniam identifies as at the heart of many of our received evolutionary theories.1 these may be the ghosts of eugenics future — ghosts of both a theoretical kind as well as of what subramaniam names as the “ghostly dispossessed,” the coming victims of projects animated by social darwinisms that would take a version of darwin’s account not just as an attempt at description, but as a political prescription. darwin’s diagram is inhabited by ghosts inside its lineage lines too. darwin, before settling on describing this divergence as a tree, wrote in his 1837 notebooks: “the tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages [between one variety and another] cannot be seen” (darwin, 183738, p. 25; and see beer, 1983, p.261, note 12). julia voss, in darwin’s pictures, reports that, “for this reason, darwin drew the trunk as a dotted line” (2010), borrowing a convention he had used in depictions of coral reefs, which indexed with a dotted line those portions submerged or out of view (figure 2) (and see sponsel, 2018). life grows upon the dotted-line bodies of the dead. fast-forward for a moment to the late twentieth century to another use of dotted lines, to indicate species inferred, but not definitively known, in a phylogeny. biologist mark norell, in his 1992 taxic origin and temporal diversity: the effect of phylogeny (figure 3), calls these ghost lineages. he writes: “these additional entities are taxa that are predicted to occur by the internal branching structure of phylogenetic trees.... i refer to these as ghost lineages because they are invisible to the fossil record” (p. 105; see wray, 2001, figure 1a, reproduced as figure 3, below, for a diagram).i want to leverage and amplify norell’s ghost lineages, using the term to also name those lines of inheritance that have been disavowed or forgotten in the many dominant modes of narrating or drawing lines of descent. critical perspectives 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (2) stefan helmreich 2018 figure 2. dotted lines in darwin 1842. patrilineal pedigrees that assign women to subsidiary roles as mothers and daughters under a ramifying patronymic grid are a significant and telling example (for a history, see klapisch-zuber, 1991, p.108; mitchell, 2014; for a contemporary instance from the realm of genetic genealogy, see scully, 2018). most diagrams of family pedigrees during the victorian period in which darwin lived saw lines of sons and fathers given pride of place — patrinominalism, patrilineality, and patriarchy all reinforcing one another in concert with a wider cultural dedication to paternity as that socially fashioned, sanctioned, and naturalized tether that could legitimate property inheritance (see delaney,1986).2 women could appear in such mappings of ancestry only insofar as they were included as daughters, sisters, and mothers in patrilines (see helmreich, 2001). the very form of the family tree representation in those european systems of patriarchal kin reckoning that conditioned darwin’s usage was thus crafted in ways that subordinated and ghosted women’s lives, keeping in shadow what might rather (or also) have been recorded through matrilines or through other genealogical or a genealogical formats(see richards 2017 on the naturalization of sexed asymmetry in the pedigree accountings of those gentlemen pigeon and horse breeders whose work inspired some of darwin’s thinking about artificial, natural, and sexual selection). think, too, of the effaced lineages — the erased mothers and children — resulting from the reproductive subordinations of women under racialized chattel slavery (cf. spillers, 1987; roberts, 1997). these, too, are ghost lineages critical perspectives 6 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (2) stefan helmreich 2018 figure 3. a diagram of ghost lineages from figure 1 of wray’s 2001 “dating branches on the tree of life using dna”: “thick bars represent periods for which there is a fossil record for the lineage; dotted lines represent ‘ghost’ lineages, times when a group is inferred to have been present but left no record.” what other ghost presences reside in darwin’s diagram? the diagram, figuring life on the dotted-line bodies of the dead, itself depended, as a material made paper thing, on a network of once living materials become dead. the diagram was created for darwin’s book as a lithograph even though he had hoped it might be a copper engraving (see darwin’s 31 may 1859 letter to publisher john murray [darwin correspondence project, “letter no. 2465”] and see paisley, 2016, 2017). lithography is a printing technique invented in germany in 1796 that employs smoothed limestone as a substrate on which an image is drawn using oil, fat, or wax. that image is then treated with gum arabic, a substance that permits the image to transfer to a piece of paper. limestone is a sedimentary rock composed of calcite or dolomite, often incorporating the fossilized remains of marine creatures such as coral, algae, sponges, microbes, and bryozoans. in darwin’s day, british limestone would have been sourced from yorkshire, derbyshire, dorset or lincolnshire, quarried from deposits dating from the permian to the jurassic periods (the source of the limestone used by william west of 54hatton garden, middlesex, to create darwin’s diagram is not, to the best of my knowledge, critical perspectives 7 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (2) stefan helmreich 2018 recorded, though it almost certainly came from limestone suppliers in london; whether they sourced their limestone from inside the country or from common sources in france or germany is not a question to which i know the answer). the bodies of dead creatures (perhaps even extinct species) were thus the very matter on which the diagram was drawn (as indeed would have been the case for lithographs in many other books during this period). or, following environmental historian etienne benson’s call to “go beyond the important work overreading the traces that non-human animals have left in human texts”(2011, p. 7), lithographs were materializations of non-human writing because they embodied traces and tracks of past organismic vitality (see also sir joseph boehm’s 1885 statue of charles darwin, made of marble, which is metamorphosed limestone — and therefore composed of the crystallized carbonates that were once the sedimented accumulation of dead marine creatures). the gum arabic sourced from acacia trees from the western sahara —that vegetal resin used for fixing lithograph images — used to transfer darwin’s diagram from stone to paper, meanwhile, would have been of much more recent origin than the limestone. as historian of west africa james webb writes: “[f]rom the late seventeenth century until the 1870s,gum arabic was the single most important product traded by the europeans who stopped along the ‘gum coast’ of southern mauritania or traded at the mouth of the senegal river” (1985, p. 150). the gum would be seasonally harvested from acacia groves by people laboring, perhaps as slaves or indentured labor, for overseers from the zawāyān nomadic tribes of mauritania, who would have in turn traded with europeans, primarily from france and england. there is also a tale to tell about darwin’s book as a thing itself. its paper, made by spalding paper makers (peckham, 1959), would likely have been from wood pulp, a process invented in 1843 to replace rag content. since england’s forests had been depleted because of charcoal production (see nef, 1977) — an early signal of the anthropocene? — the wood for the pulp may have come from outside england.3 the material making the reproduction of the tree of life lithograph and its carrying medium of copies of origin, then, likely points in many ways away from england to a network of european, colonial, and subaltern suppliers and to a collection of human and non-human bodies bound up in relations of difference and inequality. (origin is of course not unique in this way; a similar story could be told for many other victorian books created in the webworks of the british empire. and, as i remarked above, today’s digital publishing is also bound up in networks of unequal economies and ecologies — often obscured by rhetorics of data storage that would have us believe that our texts exist in some ethereal form, in something called “the cloud”). critical perspectives 8 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (2) stefan helmreich 2018 figure 4. sir joseph boehm’s 1885 statue of charles darwin — a material ghost of the marine skeletons making up its marble substance — at the natural history museum, london. historian kenneth pomeranz, in the great divergence: china, europe, and the making of the modern world economy (2000), argues that british dominance during the industrial revolution depended on production in the colonies, on what pomeranz called “ghost acres,” land outside the nation that produced cotton, sugar, corn, and tea. of course, for people not in britain who were working in these lands, these were not ghost acres at all. these plots were likely those stages on which played out what subramaniam names “the lives of the ghostly critical perspectives 9 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (2) stefan helmreich 2018 dispossessed— the bodies displaced, starved, colonized, violated, sterilized, experimented upon, maimed, killed, exterminated” (p. 122). ghost lineages, then, on ghost acres. what i am gesturing toward here, with my attention to the form as well as substance-infrastructure of darwin’s diagram, are further material lineages for what subramaniam calls “ghost stories for darwin” —stories, in their way, paradoxically (?), imaginable because of darwin’s own theories of excess and extinction (themselves a transcription of victorian views of nature as red in tooth and claw [beer, 1983], the grim side of the “grandeur” darwin forwarded [1859, p. 490] as a possible aesthetic for the unfolding tale of natural selection). trained in evolutionary genetics, subramaniam centers her analysis on the formal frameworks of canonical evolutionary theory — their mathematics, their hypotheses — a crucial vantage point from which can begin to be unpacked their conditions of possibility as well as the way historical contexts often disappear when theories start to circulate. she observes, for example, that mid-twentiethcentury questions to do with whether variation in a population is due to mutation or to balancing selection— referring to hermann muller and theodosius dobzhansky — are haunted by eugenic debates about whether variation is good or bad. population genetic formalisms like the “genetic load,” she argues, are ghostly survivals of these debates. “ignoring the historical backdrop of eugenics debates dooms scientists,” writes subramaniam, “to a future as co-conspirators in the production of inequality” (p. 226; and see mackenzie, 1978 and norton, 1978). her call to think carefully about our inheritances from this history follows, but also amplifies, the “thought collective” analytic of ludwig fleck (1935), that scholar for whom the fleck prize was named, which ghost stories for darwin received in 2016from the society for the social studies of science. subramaniam goes ingeniously beyond fleck’s analytic of the “thought collective” to think about the lively, deadly, material, and deathly ghosts that haunt such imaginaries, ghosts around which thoughts themselves may be formed and given substance. my sketch here on both the form and matter of darwin’s diagram is meant as a companion think piece, a way to ponder the history, at once material and ghostly, of the tools created to draw scientific conclusions — and diagrams. .acknowledgments i thank janet browne, michelle murphy, peter paisley, heather paxson, nick seaver, harriet ritvo, and sophia roosth for their help in thinking with me through the reflections i present here. i thank jenny reardon for inviting me to join evelynn hammonds and kim tallbear on a 2016 panel on ghost stories for darwin at the meetings of the society for the social studies of science, for which an early version of this paper was written. i am also in debt to banu subramaniam for writing such an amazing book. critical perspectives 10 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (2) stefan helmreich 2018 notes 1 lenora ledwon, in “darwin’s ghosts: the influence of darwinism on the nineteenth-century ghost story” (1989), argues that, in the wake of darwin, victorian ghost stories became populated by bestial, sub-human spirits imagined as disowned and disavowed ancestors. these were not so much prefigurings of where darwinian phantasms might travel in the future, but rather, she suggests, returns of the repressed racist anxieties of nineteenth-century white europeans. 2 such representations — and their legal supports in laws of “coverture”— came, however, also during the victorian period, to be contested in early feminist activism that sought to undo gendered inequalities in marriage and inheritance law (see shanley 1993). 3 the original version of this article erroneously stated that the first edition binding was of goatskin from tanneries in morocco. this was true of one singular copy; the book in its many reproductions was in green publishers’ cloth. for general information on book binding in victorian england, see https://www.adelaide.edu.au/library/special/exhibitions/victorian-bindings/. err0r was corrected 6/15/2021. references alaimo, s. (2016). exposed: environmental politics and pleasures in posthuman times. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. beer, g. (1983). darwin’s plots: evolutionary narrative in darwin, george eliot and nineteenth-century fiction. london, gb: routledge and kegan paul. benson, e. (2011). "animal writes: historiography, disciplinarity, and the animal trace." in linda kalof and georgina montgomery (eds.), making animal meaning. (pp. 3-16). east lansing, mi: michigan state university press. bouzat, j. (2014). darwin’s diagram of divergence of taxa as a causal model for the origin of species. quarterly review of biology, 89(1), 21-38. browne, j. (1980). darwin’s botanical arithmetic and the principle of divergence, 1854-1858. journal of the history of biology 13(1), 53-89. browne, j. (2002). charles darwin: (vol. ii) the power of place. princeton, nj: princeton university press. darwin, c. (1837-38). notebook b: [transmutation of species (1837-1838)]. culdar121.transcribed by kees rookmaaker, at darwin online, http://darwinonline.org.uk/ darwin, c. (1842). the structure and distribution of coral reefs. london, gb: smith elder and co. https://www.adelaide.edu.au/library/special/exhibitions/victorian-bindings/ critical perspectives 11 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (2) stefan helmreich 2018 darwin, c. (1859). on the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. (1st ed.).london, gb: john murray. https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rarebooks/darwin-charles/on-theorigin-ofspecies/70218.aspx?itemid=70218 darwin correspondence project, “letter no. 2465.” retrieved 12 january 2018, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/dcp-lett-2465 delaney, c. (1986). the meaning of paternity and the virgin birth debate. man 21(3), 494-513. fleck, l. (1979). genesis and development of a scientific fact. (f. bradley & t. j. trenn trans.) chicago, il: university of chicago press, 1979. (original published 1935). gabrys, j. (2011). digital rubbish: a natural history of electronics. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. gordon, a. (2008). ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination (2nd ed.). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. hacking, i. (2007). "trees of logic, trees of porphyry." in j.l. heilbron (ed.), advancements of learning: essays in honour of paolo rossi. (pp. 219-263). florence, it: leo s. olschki. helmreich, s. (2001). "kinship in hypertext: transubstantiating fatherhood and information flow in artificial life." in sarah franklin and susan mckinnon (eds.), relative values: reconfiguring kinship studies. (pp. 116143). durham, nc: duke university press. ingold. t. (2007). lines: a brief history. london, gb: routledge. klapisch-zuber, c. (1991). the genesis of the family tree. i tatti studies: essays in the renaissance 4(1), 105-129. ledwon, l. 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(1978). karl pearson and statistics: the social origins of scientific innovation. social studies of science 8(1): 3-34. o’hara, r. (1992). telling the tree: narrative representation and the study of evolutionary history. biology and philosophy 7: 135-160. ospovat, d. (1981). the development of darwin’s theory: natural history, natural theology and natural selection, 1838-1859. cambridge, gb: cambridge university press. paisley, p. (2016). the lithography business at 54 hatton garden: from obscurity and celebrity to prolific success. micscape 242: https://www.microscopyuk.org.uk/mag/may16ind.html paisley, p. (2017). tuffen’s artistic brother, william west. micscape 251: https://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/feb17ind.html parikka, j. (2014). the anthrobscene. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. peckham, m. (ed.). (1959). the origin of species: a variorum text. philadelphia, pa: university of pennsylvania press. pietsch, t. (2013). trees of life: a visual history of evolution. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. pomeranz, k. (2000). the great divergence: china, europe, and the making of the modern world economy. princeton, nj: princeton university press. richards, e. (2017). darwin and the making of sexual selection. chicago, il: university of chicago press. roberts, d. (1997). killing the black body: race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. new york, ny: pantheon books. scully, m. (2018). constructing masculinity through genetic legacies: family histories, y-chromosomes, and ‘viking identities.’ genealogy 2(1), https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2010008 shanley, m. (1993). feminism, marriage, and the law in victorian england, 1850-1895. princeton, nj: princeton university press. smith, j. (2006). charles darwin and victorian visual culture. cambridge, gb: cambridge university press. spillers, h. (1987). mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book. diacritics 17(2): 64-81. sponsel, a. (2018). darwin’s evolving identity: adventure, ambition, and the sin of speculation. chicago, il: university of chicago press. subramaniam, b. (2016). ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. champaign, il: university of illinois press. voss, j. (2010). darwin’s pictures: views of evolutionary theory, 1837-1874. (l. lantz, trans.). new haven, ct: yale university press. (original work published 2007). critical perspectives 13 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (2) stefan helmreich 2018 webb, j. jr. (1985). the trade in gum arabic: prelude to french conquest in senegal. the journal of african history, 26(2), 149-168. wray, g. (2001). dating branches on the tree of life using dna. genome biology 3(1): reviews 0001.1–0001.7. author bio stefan helmreich is professor of anthropology at mit. he is the author of alien ocean: anthropological voyages in microbial seas (university of california press, 2009) and sounding the limits of life: essays in the anthropology of biology and beyond (princeton university press, 2016). his essays have appeared in critical inquiry, representations, american anthropologist, and the wire. microsoft word 273-1500-1-keilty .docx keilty, p. (2018). pornography’s white infrastructure. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-9. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © patrick kelity. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical perspectives pornography’s white infrastructure patrick keilty university of toronto p.keilty@utoronto.ca abstract in preparing my talk for a panel on “whiteness and technoculture” for the society for the social study of science in boston, i wanted to think about the relationship of my research on the technocultures of the online pornography industry to the events in charlottesville, which had occurred only weeks earlier. two trends within the online pornography industry came immediately to mind. the first is the way corporate gay pornography has at times colluded with national white supremacy. the second is the emergence of affiliate networks that aim to curate content for “unique male viewers” because the internet is, curiously, awash in “female-focused” content. both of these phenomena seem particularly relevant at a time when white fragility, toxic masculinity, “men’s rights,” and xenophobia have been given explicit approval by the newly elected us president, donald trump. these forces have long defined the united states, but they also reveal the way in which this presidency is uniquely awful and dangerous. 2 keilty catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) before i begin my discussion, let me briefly introduce the scale of online pornography as a media industry. globally, pornography is a $97 billion (usd) global media industry (morris 2014). as the primary platform by which people interact with pornography today, online pornography companies wield enormous influence over the ways we learn about, play with, explore, and construct sexuality and sexual desire. each day, tens of millions of people visit pornographic video streaming sites. these websites may seem like amateurish distribution services but, instead, are sophisticated technology companies that employ hundreds of technical staff to design and develop interfaces, algorithms, data mining software, data analytics software, video streaming software, and database management systems. they are part of an innovative industry engaged in the kinds of algorithmic and data science practices that drive the profits of more widely recognized industries, such as social media, online gambling, online games, search engines, and electronic commerce. their staffs are responsible for making strategic choices about information management and the graphical organization of content that translates into large profits, innovative capitalist media techniques, and dominant modes for curating, distributing, and regulating our experience of sexual desire today. in the weeks following the “unite the right” rally in charlottesville, virginia, in august 2017, a number of journalists, pundits, and fashion critics commented on the new uniform of white supremacy: a polo shirt and khaki pants. the washington post’s fashion critic, robin givhan (2017), echoed hannah arendt’s phrase “banality of evil” in arguing that polo shirts and khaki pants participate in a normalization of neo-nazis. “white nationalists,” givhan writes, “are moving through communities cloaked in the most mundane, banal kind of fashion. clothes that do not inspire a double-take. clothes that are acceptable and appropriate. clothes that make them look like they belong.” writing for gq, cam wolf (2017) makes a similar observation while summarizing the evolution of white supremacist outfits in the united states, from white robes to polo shirts, a shift in political strategy that articulates racism as mundane. he 3 keilty catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) writes, “for years, white supremacists dressed to set themselves apart, to hide and to scare. charlottesville showed us that the most sinister evolution of their uniform, and the hate it symbolizes, isn't about fear and ghosts and standing apart. it's meant to achieve inclusiveness and assimilation. it means that hate doesn't need to live underground when it can blend in right next door.” in detailing the history of the polo shirt for teen vogue, jared michael lowe reveals that the polo shirt had, in its inception as a tennis shirt in the 1920s, a close association with racial and class politics, before moving through a number of subcultures, from reggae to punk to brit pop, and finally becoming a commonly worn piece of clothing found in most closets. he concludes that its ubiquity today represents an unspoken endorsement that goes along with it: “just like polo shirts, racism, white nationalism, and kkk rallies are as american as apple pie.” meanwhile, guardian reporter gavin haynes (2017) notes that the look at the charlottesville protest was anything but accidental. before charlottesville, andrew anglin, founder of the daily stormer (the american neo-nazi and white supremacist website), urged his supporters “to be extremely conscious of what we look like, and how we present ourselves” alongside advertisements for a european brotherhood polo shirt. yet the contrivance of self-display among white supremacists in charlottesville went beyond simply wearing a polo shirt and khakis. in addition, it included clean-shaven faces and short, clean haircuts. the style gives the impression not only of ordinariness and inclusion, as many commentators observed, but also a boyish look of “white innocence.” that a number of actors and studios within the mainstream gay pornography industry “flirt” with or explicitly embrace white supremacy (and vice versa) comes as no surprise to those of us who have followed the industry over the years. yet the relation has taken on a new prominence since donald trump’s campaign for president. in the run-up to the 2016 us election, a number of prominent white gay pornography performers voiced their support for donald trump’s campaign, including colby keller and jacob ford (zach 2015). meanwhile, goproud, a 4 keilty catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) republican gay and lesbian organization, hosted a “gays for trump” event at the republican national convention (rnc) in cleveland, ohio, that featured anti-muslim, anti-black, and pro-trump speeches. the event displayed an exhibit of erotic photography of boyish, shirtless, hairless, white, clean-shaven young men wearing “make america great” (maga) baseball caps, entitled “twinks for trump.” (stuart 2016). the art featured in the exhibit can be found on the pro-trump erotic website daddywillsaveus (http://www.daddywillsaveus.com/). earlier this year, fraternityx, a studio known for its portrayals of white, homophobic, hyper-masculine fraternity brothers that sexually punish another young man for being “queer” or a “fag”, recently featured a scene entitled “trump pump,” in which the members of the fraternity wore maga hats while gangbanging a member of their fraternity who declined to declare his support for trump (fraternityx, 2018). jake porter, another prominent performer in the gay pornography industry, revealed on twitter that he had cultivated an onscreen look in the style of milo yiannopoulos, a prominent anti-muslim speaker at the goproud event, in order to cash in on the provocateur’s growing celebrity (zach 2017). for more explicit examples of white supremacy in gay pornography, one need only search the gay versions of xtube.com or pornhub.com for “nazi” or related terms to find professional and amateur pornography that features white, clean-shaven performers with swastika or confederate flag tattoos, or nazi or confederate symbols in the mis en scene (gremore 2017). one porn studio, joe schmoe videos, specializes in portraying white twinks who have nazi or confederate flag tattoos or symbols. (http://www.joeschmoevideos.com/). writing for the black youth project, sherronda brown (2017) reveals the way in which white supremacy itself is a sexual fantasy. brown writes, “fear of the corruption of ‘white purity’─ whether by non-white immigrants and citizens gaining institutional power over white nationalists or by the black phallus gaining sexual power over white cuckolds and miscegenating with white women ─ is also a fear of sexual and social humiliation. both of these fears are tied 5 keilty catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) up with the fetishization of power and power play. and these fears often result in apocalyptic whiteness, a violent response to the white genocide fable.” less explicitly, a number of mainstream gay pornography studios, such as helix studios, belami, blumedia, and seancody, cultivate an image of the “white innocent” who has long been a consumable, stock character in gay pornography: white athletic or thin young men known as “twinks.” these studios’ performers often feature hairless bodies, tidy, short haircuts, clean-shaven faces, and “ordinary” clothes such as polo shirts and khaki pants. they rarely if ever feature performers of color, thereby cultivating a sexual fantasy of a world exclusively comprised of white bodies, a white homonationalist utopia to contrast with the white genocide fable. many of the neo-nazi marchers in charlottesville bore a remarkable similarity to twink stock characters in gay pornography, while ironically chanting, “fuck you faggots” ─ a tableau reminiscent of a fraternityx scene. this is not to say that all portrayals of twinks in polo shirts and khaki pants or any form of race play necessarily signals white supremacy. however, the current political moment has seen the commercial industrialization of certain forms of sexual aesthetics sometimes colluding with national white supremacy. one might argue that cultivating an image similar to a stock character in gay pornography turns fascism on its head. however, what that analysis misses is the way in which white supremacists in the united states have begun to welcome cisgender white gay men into their movement. in addition to the goproud event at the rnc, donna minkowitz details the efforts by white supremacist organizations in the united states to include gay conservatives. she notes that several prominent white supremacist authors in the united states today openly identify as gay men, including james o’meara, author of the homo and the negro, and jack donovan, author of the way of men, in addition to milo yiannopoulos. that so many white supremacist men in charlottesville cultivated a similar image of “white innocence” found in stock characters in gay pornography points to the ways in which a 6 keilty catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) particular mode of whiteness can at times serve as a signaling function of sexual desire predicated on an anti-blackness. white nationalism and mainstream gay pornography are engaged in a cultural and aesthetic conversation with each other that circulates the desirability of “white innocence.” there is a complicated story to tell about the politics of “white innocence” and its distribution in the increasingly dominant infrastructures of ubiquitous online pornography distribution. part of that story is the emergence of man's world media (2018), one of the pornography industry’s largest affiliate networks. the company’s motto reads: “the internet serves all mankind but ironically underserves men in particular.” affiliate networks are intermediary technology companies that connect publishers with merchant affiliate programs. in other words, they help retailers advertise on sites like pornhub. advertising is one of pornhub’s largest sources of revenue, along with selling browsing data to third parties, licensing software, subscription services, and the sale of content from its studios, including seancody. man's world media uses methods such as search engine optimization, browsing data, search engine marketing, and the graphical organization of content to increase revenue for both the publisher and retailer. at last year’s internext convention, part of the adult entertainment expo, man's world media had one of the largest booths on the convention floor. they boast over 20 million visitors and 300 million page views each month. in context, these numbers are relatively small for the pornography industry. by comparison, pornhub has more nearly 100 million unique viewers per day. but man's world media claims to be targeting a niche audience, “largely composed of professional, college-educated males between the ages of 18 and 35.” according to the company, “millions of millennial males have shifted to the web as their primary source of entertainment, only to find countless pop culture and entertainment blogs that are decidedly female-focused.” the company continues, “finding compelling, topical content for the unique male appetite has become a challenging endeavor.” their goal is to “fill this void of quality content 7 keilty catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) touchstones for the millennial male.” in this rendering, the “millennial male” is both unique and monolithic. if one wonders what kind of male man's world media has in mind, their website offers a number of clues, including a quote from marilyn monroe: “i don’t mind being in a man’s world, as long as i can be a woman in it.” their splash page features a black leather background and a membership card (as if a literal boy’s club) with a man's world media logo on it. their twitter page, with hashtags like #bymenformen and #manosphere, features mid-century drawings of white men fixing their ties or smoking a pipe in the style of mad men. their latest tweet features a video of an interview with tommy sotomayor, a self-described men’s rights activist, who argues that the father’s natural role in the home has been displaced by feminism, and that affirmative action policies hurt black people. a survey of man's world media’s self-avowed “malecentric brands” reveals that their content is almost exclusively white cismen. on the one hand, man's world media is invested in a narrative about the feminization of the internet and the need to reclaim it as a space for masculinity. on the other hand, mainstream gay porn sells consumers a site of white masculinity that cultivates a similar iconography of white supremacy. taken together, man's world media and the authentication of “white innocence” might help expand our understanding of how the homosocial and homosexual deploy similar iconographies of whiteness in the service of white nationalism, toxic masculinity, and white supremacy. what role do particular modes of whiteness play in gay porn to perpetuate white supremacy and antifeminism, and how might white supremacy take up the cultivation of the sexual desirability of wholesome white bodies or of iconographies of clean-cut mid-century toxic masculinity to further an anti-feminist and white nationalist agenda? acknowledgements 8 keilty catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) i would like to thank jennifer hamilton, peter hobbs, lilly irani, daniel laurin, michelle murphy, lilly nguyen, falicity schaeffer-grabiel, mitali thakor, kalini vora, and the generosity of the blind reviewers that improved this essay from its hasty beginnings. references brown, sherronda. (2017). erotic race play reveals how white supremacy is a perversion of unmatched proportions. black youth project, october 2, 2017. retrieved january 8, 2018 from https://blackyouthproject.com/white-supremacy-perversion-unmatched/ fraternityx. (2018). trump pump. retrieved february 25, 2018 from http://fraternityx.com/episode.php?id=188 givhan, robin. (2017). neo-nazis are using fashion in an attempt to normalize. the fashion industry needs to speak up. the washington post, august 22, 2017. retrieved january 8, 2018 from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-andentertainment/wp/2017/08/22/neo-nazis-are-using-fashion-in-anattempt-to-normalize-the-fashion-industry-needs-to-speakup/?utm_term=.43a62bf974c2 gremore, graham. racist neo-nazi gay films are having quite a moment right now. queerty.com, august 25, 2017. retrieved january 8, 2018 from https://www.queerty.com/racist-neo-nazi-gay-adult-films-quite-momentright-now-20170825 haynes, gavin. (2017). the white polo shirt: how the alt-right co-opted a modern classic. the guardian, august 30, 2017. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/aug/30/the-white-polo-shirthow-the-alt-right-co-opted-a-modern-classic lowe, jared michael. (2017). how polo shirts became a white supremacist uniform. teen vogue, august 29, 2017. retrieved from https://www.teenvogue.com/story/polo-shirts-white-supremacist-whitenationalist-charlottesville-uniform man world media. (2018). retrieved january 8, 2018 from http://www.manworldmedia.com/ morris, chris (2014). porn industry feeling upbeat about 2014. retrieved 9 keilty catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) january 8, 2018 from http://www.nbcnews.com/business/businessnews/porn-industryfeeling-upbeat-about-2014-n9076. stuart, tessa. (2016). inside rnc’s hottest ticket: the big gay islamophobia party. rolling stone, july 20, 2016. retrieved january 8, 2018 from https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/inside-rncshottest-ticket-the-big-gay-islamophobia-party-w429967 wolf, cam. (2017). the new uniform of white supremacy. gq, august 17, 2017. retrieved january 8, 2018 from https://www.gq.com/story/uniform-of-white-supremacy zach. (2015). surprise: racist gay porn star jacob ford supports donald trump. str8upgayporn.com, september 24, 2015. retrieved january 8, 2018 from http://str8upgayporn.com/surprise-racist-gay-porn-star-jacobford-supports-donald-trump/ zach. (2017). hot or not: jake porter’s milo yiannopoulos-inspired dye job. str8upgayporn.com, september 16, 2017. retrieved january 8, 2018 from http://str8upgayporn.com/donald-trump-supporter-jakeporter-died-his-hair-blond-so-hed-look-more-like-his-other-hero-miloyiannopoulos/. bio patrick keilty is assistant professor in the faculty of information at the university of toronto. his primary research interest is the politics of digital infrastructures in the online pornography industry. his work spans issues in visual culture, sexual politics, technology studies, media studies, information studies, critical algorithm studies, political economy, database logic, critical theory, and theories of gender, sexuality, and race. ives, sarah (2019). “more-than-human” and “less-than-human”: race, botany, and the challenge of multispecies ethnography. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sarah ives, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license “more-than-human” and “less-than-human”: race, botany, and the challenge of multispecies ethnography sarah ives city college of san francisco sarah.f.ives@gmail.com in a growing body of humanities and social science research, plants and animals have moved from the background to the center, as scholars examine how diverse organisms are “entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems” (kirksey, schuetze, & helmreich, 2014, p. 1; kirksey & helmreich, 2010; tsing, 2015). de-centering the human also brings attention to ways of knowing, such as indigenous animism, that disrupt narratives of human exceptionalism common to western philosophy. while multispecies ethnography and theories about the anthropocene have gained traction in recent years, discussions about the human–nonhuman interface date to the origins of anthropology. for instance, in her influential work, “a cyborg manifesto,” donna haraway challenged strict partitions between nature/culture, male/female, and self/other foundational to western philosophical thought. she wrote that while these dualisms are part of the logics and practices that inform the domination of women, people of color, nature, and workers, they can be challenged through strategies that deploy “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” (haraway, 1991, p. 151). building on this research, multispecies ethnography attempts to blur the boundaries of human and nonhuman to disrupt hierarchies of power. in this sense, multispecies approaches celebrate the political and theoretical possibilities of critical perspective | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) sarah ives, 2019 2 foregrounding more-than-human worlds and human–nonhuman relations. as we move beyond a humancentric lens, however, it is critical that multispecies approaches engage further with scholarship on race and colonialism to remember a history in which blurring lines between the human and nonhuman was not celebratory, but rather distinctly violent, a history in which “the management of populations and race undergird[ed] the human–nonhuman interface” (ives, 2014, p. 703). colonial agents constructed connections between race and nature by portraying those they colonized (such as indigenous peoples) as less-than-human and closer to nature and, in turn, depicting whites as producers of culture and superior to nature. these constructions reinforced white supremacy by establishing dualisms of “white” and “nonwhite” to justify political, social, and economic hierarchies. in considering new directions in research on peoples and plants, my research asks how scholars can engage with the more-than-human, while recognizing the history of violent connections drawn between race and nature whereby certain groups were (and still are) considered less-than-human. i explore this question through two interrelated themes: (1) colonial histories that rendered people as a part of the natural landscape to justify land dispossession and even genocide; and (2) the deliberate alteration of the landscape through the introduction of invasive plants. together, these lines of inquiry can inform critical approaches to systems of power and knowledge embedded in human–plant relations. in the wretched of the earth (1965), frantz fanon brings attention to colonial language that associates certain peoples with nature by showing how colonists spoke of the native in zoological terms. he argues that this language saddled the native with the violence of “exclusionary humanism.” books such as the natural history of the negro race, for example, placed plant taxonomy alongside racial classification (virey, 1837).1 i explore these colonial associations in my own research by addressing how naturalized ideas of race and plants intersected with both political and scholarly representations of—and discussions related to— khoisan (or “bushmen”), which is an umbrella term used to describe ethnic groups in south africa who share physical and linguistic characteristics distinct from the bantu-speaking majority. the very label “bushmen” exemplifies colonial practices of equating indigenous peoples, in this case khoi and san, as “nature” and thus rendering them less-than-human. in this context, the blurring of distinctions between human and nonhuman was (and remains) violent in part because it constructs and reinforces racial hierarchies that place whites at the top. for critical perspective | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) sarah ives, 2019 3 example, while making his classificatory schemes in the eighteenth century, carl linnaeus said he had difficulty convincing himself that europeans and “bushmen” shared the same origins.2 and unlike the “pleasurable” confusion discussed by haraway as a means to challenge relations of power, colonial governments “confused” and conflated the boundaries between the “native” and “nature” to deny khoi and san humanity and justify land seizures, slavery, and genocide. colonists not only conquered people and territory; they also sought to alter fundamentally geography and ecology, thereby upending understandings of place. for example, in the nineteenth century the british brought australian eucalyptus to southern africa. the invasive trees thrived in the new environment, and eucalyptus soon “stood out as one of the most distinctive features of the…landscape” (bennett, 2011, p. 130). given their seeming ability to eliminate malarial mosquitoes, the trees even helped facilitate colonial settlement in what was considered a “challenging” ecosystem. by transforming the ecosystem, eucalyptus disrupted relationships between local people, plants, insects, and soils. framing foreign plants as inherently “bad” and native plants as inherently “good” erases the multiplicity of roles invasive species play in social, political, and economic relations and can easily reinforce violent, eugenicist notions of nationalism (see, for example, stern, 2005; subramaniam, 2014). nevertheless, the resulting landscape change (whether or not it was a conscious rationale for introducing invasive species) helped lay a foundation for colonial dispossession of those historically viewed as part of the natural world, including khoi and san. in a planet increasingly affected by human-caused climate change, research that foregrounds the legacies of indigenous peoples, colonial histories, transformed ecosystems, and multispecies entanglements is more urgent than ever. attention to human–plant relations can add depth to this research by undermining essentialist dualisms. the focus can also offer hope in what feels like apocalyptic times by emphasizing our shared futures with a “multitude of creative agents,” from trees to insects (kirksey, 2015, p. 217; kohn, 2013; marder, 2013). yet i argue that we must remain aware of the differential ways in which certain people are included in the human world, while others are relegated to the nonhuman world. acknowledgements i would like to thank laura foster for her feedback throughout the writing and revising process and for her efforts in bringing together diverse perspectives on plants, colonialism, and race. i am also indebted to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insights. critical perspective | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) sarah ives, 2019 4 notes 1 i have written about this topic extensively elsewhere (ives 2014, 2017). 2 violent connections between race and nature have hardly been relegated to africa, as demonstrated by research connecting plants and eugenics in the united states (stern, 2015). references bennett, b. m. (2011). a global history of australian trees. journal of the history of biology, 44(1), 125-145. fanon, f. (2004). the wretched of the earth (r. philcox, trans.). new york, ny: grove press. (original work published in 1965) haraway, d. j. (1991). simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york, ny: routledge. ives, s. (2014). farming the south african “bush”: ecologies of belonging and exclusion in rooibos tea. american ethnologist, 41(4), 698-713. ives, s. (2017). steeped in heritage: the racial politics of south african rooibos tea. durham, nc: duke university press. kirksey, e. (2015). emergent ecologies. durham, nc: duke university press. kirksey, e., & helmreich, s. (2010). the emergence of multispecies ethnography. cultural anthropology, 25(4), 545-576. kirksey, e., schuetze, c., & helmreich, s. (2014). introduction. in e. kirksey (ed.), the multispecies salon (pp. 1-24). durham, nc: duke university press. kohn, e. (2013). how forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human. berkeley, ca: university of california press. marder, m. (2013). plant-thinking: a philosophy of vegetal life. new york, ny: columbia university press. stern, a. m. (2005). eugenic nation: faults and frontiers of better breeding in modern america. berkeley, ca: university of california press. subramaniam, b. (2014). ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. champaign, il: university of illinois press. tsing, a. l. (2015). the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton, nj: princeton university press. critical perspective | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) sarah ives, 2019 5 virey, j.-j. (1837). natural history of the negro race (j. h. guenebault, trans.). new york, ny: d.j. dowling. author bio sarah ives is the author of steeped in heritage: the racial politics of south african rooibos tea. she currently teaches anthropology at city college of san francisco. leong article    the mattering of black lives: octavia butler’s hyperempathy and the promise of the new materialisms    diana leong university of utah diana.leong@utah.edu black lives matter and black lives matter and black lives matter. this homographic reading of the most salient political statement of recent years speaks to the torsions of blackness, matter, and life that have come to define our contemporary era. in “unbearable blackness,” jared sexton (2015) argues with regard to the triangulation of these concerns that anti-black fantasies “do not render blacks, like so much of the planet, subject to death in an economy of disposability; rather, they subject blacks to ‘the interminable time of meaningless, impersonal dying’” (p.168). in the wake of recent grand jury decisions not to prosecute the murders of tamir rice, eric garner, and michael brown, to name only the most widely publicized cases, sexton’s claims register most strongly in the state’s refusal to allow these deaths to die. they are caught instead in a biopolitical apparatus that suspends racial blackness between a life unrecognized as such and an illegible form of death that can never pass into reason. against this timeless, spectral dying, we can read the declaration that “black lives matter” as a call to return racial blackness to a form that matters, to a form, in other words, that is matter. on this score, i ask: how do black life and death become matter, and what is at stake in the demand that they should assume such form? octavia butler’s afrofuturist novels parable of the sower (1993) and parable of the talents (1998) dramatize these questions through protagonist lauren olamina and her condition of hyperempathy. in this article, i explore hyperempathy as a speculative embodiment of “pornotroping” (spillers, 2003) to understand how racial blackness structures current theorizations of matter. questions about the proper scale, scope, and character of matter have assumed a renewed sense of urgency given the emergence of the anthropocene, a distinct geological epoch in which human activity has become so influential as to alter fundamental aspects of the earth system. while ecologist eugene stoermer and nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist paul crutzen introduced the current definition of the term in the 1980s, we have since witnessed a growing scientific consensus about the rigor of the concept. a recent article published in the journal science by the anthropocene working group (2016) provides the latest example of this support, demonstrating that fluctuations in the content and pace of sediment deposits and extinction rates are anthropogenically driven. however, the very nomenclature of the “anthropocene” has been subject to critique from within the humanities for allowing an abstract notion of the “anthropos” to anchor an implicit philosophy of history. daniel hartley (2015), for instance, comments in a recent issue of the uk-based magazine salvage, “inherent to the anthropocene discourse is a conception of historical causality which is purely mechanical: a one-on-one billiard ball model of technological invention and historical effect, which is simply inadequate to explain actual social and relational modes of historical causation” (para. 4). hartley takes special issue with the presumed origins of the anthropocene, which many geologists date to the industrial and nuclear revolutions. this determination, he suggests, interprets the environmental impact of technology as the “net effect” of an undifferentiated “human” activity (waters et. al., 2016, p. 139). in order to assert a causal link between technological development and ecological catastrophe, any consideration of the roles race, class, and gender have played in engineering our historical present must be obscured.1 the benefits and consequences of technological development and environmental disaster, after all, are rarely if ever distributed symmetrically among and within human populations. “it is not all people that are indicted by the onset of the anthropocene,” writes nicholas mirzoeff (forthcoming 2016), “but a specific set: colonial settlers, enslavers, and would-be imperialists” (pp. 19-20). at the same time, this remodeling of human history and ecological philosophy is not unique to geologists. indeed, the anthropocene’s scientific definition may have become matters of debate only recently, but its constitutive concerns—global warming, genetic technology, biodiversity loss, environmental racism—have thrown our prevailing concepts of nature and culture into crisis well before the epoch’s formal identification. at stake is not only the fate of homo sapiens as a species, but also the basic composition of a world yet to come. the challenges of analyzing the effects of non-human systems (e.g., weather patterns or ocean currents) and actors (e.g., viruses or pesticides) while attending to the uneven distribution of environmental risks and resources have generated a range of philosophical responses. for example, publications like dipesh chakrabarty’s (2009), “the climate of history,” elizabeth kolbert’s (2014) the sixth extinction, and roy scranton’s (2015) learning to die in the anthropocene recommend a universal or existential “species thinking” necessary for grasping the complexities of climate change. other responses, like jane bennett’s (2010) vibrant matter and jeffrey jerome cohen’s (2015) stone, interrogate fantasies of human mastery as a way of reckoning with the power of non-human agents. over the last decade, one particular variety of response has acquired critical purchase within the academic left: the new materialisms. as part of what richard grusin (2015) has named “the nonhuman turn” in contemporary thought, the new materialisms join affect theory, critical animal studies, and object-oriented ontology in calling for enhanced attention to matter and materiality. the popularity of this approach, evidenced by a growing number of monographs, special journal issues, and anthologies, appears grounded in the need to develop strategies of coexistence attuned to the anthropocene’s political and ecological crises.2 how, for example, should we understand agency and embodiment in light of recent developments in biotechnology and the increasingly unpredictable behavior of non-human objects? the promise of the new materialisms thus inheres in the notion that a focus on materiality can offer us more comprehensive and efficacious ways to respond to these developments. as diana coole and samantha frost (2010) write in their introduction to the new materialisms anthology, “what is at stake here is nothing less than a challenge to some of the most basic assumptions that have underpinned the modern world, including its normative sense of the human and its beliefs about human agency, but also regarding its material practices such as the ways we labor on, exploit, and interact with nature” (p. 4). there is much to recommend an intensified engagement with matter, not least of which is coole and frost’s proposal that such engagements can disrupt our “normative sense of the human” and of “human agency.” given this professed interest in dismantling human exceptionalism, it is curious then that, as zakiyyah jackson (2015) and other critical race scholars point out, the new materialisms have systematically “[ignored] praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people, particularly those praxes which are irreverent to the normative production of ‘the human’ or illegible from within the terms of its logic” (p. 216).3 black thought has long challenged the enforced description of africans and their descendants as non-human objects of science, as specimens for study and experimentation, as commodities for market exchange, as things. in fact, from at least the 16th century onward, black bodies provided crucial raw material for the development of natural history, the natural sciences, and the life philosophies in enlightenment thought.4 both geology and biology, for example, pursued notions of species and evolution that preserved early racial taxonomies; the techniques of observation and interpretation used to analyze geological activity were the same as those employed by the racial science of phrenology. mirzoeff (forthcoming 2016) leverages this history to argue that “the very concept of observable breaks between geological eras in general and the definition of the anthropocene in particular is inextricably intermingled with the belief in distinct races of humanity” (p. 2). his claim that the concept of the anthropocene reproduces race-making technologies gestures to the historical fact that the human as such has emerged through the exclusion and extermination of black bodies. proscribed from the realm of the human, black intellectuals have had to think within and through the categories of the non-human and the inhuman to pursue new ways of being in the world. philosophical questions about the vitality and agency of the human, the animal, and the object are therefore longstanding in the fields of black studies. alexander weheliye (2015) observes in habeas viscus that across sylvia wynter’s oeuvre, “it is the human—or different genres of the human—that materializes as the object of knowledge in the conceptual mirror of black studies” (p. 21). the scholarly work of hortense spillers (2003) and fred moten (2003), and the afrofuturist contributions of nalo hopkinson (1998; 2000) and nnedi okorafor (2010), similarly confront the “most basic assumptions that have underpinned the modern world,” including our notions of history, temporality, and modern science.5 and yet, as it is with the anthropocene’s implied philosophy of history, much of the scholarship produced under the banner of the new materialisms tends to reduce race to a crude “identity politics” or to endorse a model of difference-without-race.6 this reduction and disavowal of race, i contend, is something of a structural necessity for the new materialisms. in what follows, i trace the general theoretical principles of the new materialisms to a dissatisfaction with the linguistic and cultural paradigms of post-structuralism. i then demonstrate how this dissatisfaction enables an ethics of relation or affect that further legitimizes the reduction and dismissal of race. however, as a close reading of butler’s parable duology reveals, one of the primary figures of the new materialisms—the material body—is defined by and through disavowed social fantasies about black female flesh that are linked to the global legacies of modern slavery. my examination of the critical responses to butler’s novels further suggests that such fantasies are necessary to secure a libidinal investment in the ethical potential of materiality. i argue, thus, against a misrecognition of black female flesh as a resource against the violence of hierarchical differences, rather than the site of their active production. finally, i turn to a reading of butler’s parable duology as an allegory about the dangers of proceeding in the anthropocene without a robust analysis of the formation of racial blackness. because a proper survey of new materialist literature is beyond the scope of this article, the comments below should be taken as entry points for probing the (absent) place of racial blackness in theories about matter.7 the promise of the new materialisms the new materialisms are drawn from a long genealogy of philosophical materialism, in which spinoza, nietzsche, bergson, marx, and deleuze are cited as major touchstones. in recognition of this legacy, coole and frost (2010) assert that the interventions loosely gathered by the term “new materialisms” are better “categorized as renewed materialisms,” with the qualifier “new” acknowledging the “unprecedented” ecological, biological, and technological conditions under which we currently live and labor (p. 4, italics in original). although their specific objects of analysis are appropriately diverse, the new materialisms collectively insist on a post-humanist matter that is lively, self-directed, agential, creative, and always in the process of becoming. in this regard, matter is better thought of as materialization, or the process by which complex phenomena are temporarily and contingently stabilized to varying degrees. the ontological shift entailed here is towards a philosophical monism, inspired most notably by the work of deleuze. following spinoza and bergson, deleuze (1994) develops a notion of the virtual as a generative field of difference, or a “plane of immanence,” where “all the varieties of differential relations and all the distributions of singular points [coexist] in diverse orders ‘perplicated’ in one another” (p. 206). these differences are then formatted into distinct phenomena or entities by processes of actualization that “[bring] the object back into relation with the field of differential relations in which it can always be dissolved and become actualized otherwise, as something else, by being linked through other differential relations to other particles” (cheah, 2010, pp. 85-86). while not all new materialist theories cleave to a strictly deleuzian philosophy, there is general agreement that the dynamic interactions among objects, bodies, and phenomena turn us away from the anthropocene’s “billiard ball model” of causality, and more significantly, away from some of post-structuralism’s critical trends. according to the new materialisms, the linguistic and cultural turns of the last half century have resulted in both an intellectual and a political poverty. specifically, social constructivism (coole & frost, 2010) and cultural representationalism (barad, 2007) have overdetermined matter to the extent that it appears as a passive product made meaningful only through cultural and discursive practice. coole and frost (2010) even write of a theoretical “exhaustion,” claiming that they “share the feeling current among many researchers that the dominant constructivist orientation to social analysis is inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do justice to the contemporary context of biopolitics and global political economy” (p. 6). somewhere and sometime during the rise of the anthropocene, cultural theory, broadly conceived, lost its explanatory power. this assessment of inadequacy repeats across much of the recent new materialist scholarship, condensing the cultural turn into a discursive reductionism that rebuffs the empirical for the ideal, or the material for the symbolic. elizabeth grosz’s (2004) the nick of time opens with a telling “reminder to social, political, and cultural theorists, particularly those interested in feminism, antiracism, and questions of the politics of globalization, that they have forgotten a crucial dimension of research…not just the body, but that which makes it possible and which limits its actions: the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality” (p. 2). social, political, and cultural theory, in other words, have overlooked the material conditions of life that render the body available for inscription and enculturation in the first instance. so too in the recently published gut feminism does elizabeth wilson (2015) rebuke “social constructionism” for “[tending] not to be very curious about the details of empirical claims in genetics, neurophysiology, evolutionary biology, pharmacology or biochemistry” (p. 3). her ensuing conclusion is that focusing on how social structures produce and discipline bodies comes at the expense of recognizing the ways bodies radically alter and organize social structures themselves. it appears that cultural theory harbors an “allergy to ‘the real’” that dissuades “critical inquirers from the more empirical kinds of investigation that material processes and structures require” (coole & frost, 2010, p. 6). however, the very aspects that would make matter more “real” than language or culture are the same aspects that restrict its ethical potential and facilitate a conceptual rejection of race. in line with their post-humanist agenda, the new materialisms evoke matter and materiality as existing in excess of human subjectivity and its attendant domains. mechanistic theories of causality hold that objects are composed of inert matter acted upon by external forces, which presumes that an object’s potential or possible capabilities are already present and fixed in some initial moment of creation. but, as the new materialisms emphasize, the virtual field of differential relations is immanent to matter in such a way that it is impossible to anticipate all of the effects a material configuration may have, or the organizational forms it may take. this ability to act independently of the subject’s will and desire is variously construed as “impersonal and preindividual forces,” an alterity that “comes from outside the capability or power of the subject” (cheah, 2010, p. 80, 89), “degrees of indetermination” that represent the “‘true principle of life’” (grosz, 2010, p. 149), and a “powerful reminder…that life will always exceed our knowledge and control” (bennett, 2010, p.14). differences in terminology aside, the new materialisms are united by an understanding of materiality as a spectral, impersonal force with material effects, one that escapes reason and disrupts systems of meaning, including modernist binaries like mind/body, culture/nature, and inside/outside (dolphijn & van der tuin, 2012). the latter aspect is key because, while matter can frustrate representation, its “excessive” properties do not mean that it exists “outside” of the subject. rather, matter and materiality are “real” because they actively produce reality in unpredictable ways (cheah, 2010). it is here that the ethical impetus of the new materialist project is located. if we accept our embeddedness in mutually transformative, non-human networks, the ground of ethics shifts accordingly. first, a responsibility to an externalized other gives way to an accountability for the many relations that constitute becoming. and second, ethics are no longer reducible to the decisions or actions of individuals that are initiated by a properly historical judgment. in rosi braidotti’s (2010) terms, “accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition and replacing it with one of mutual specification and mutual codependence is what is at stake in postsecular affirmative ethics” (p. 214). i find nothing immediately problematic with an ethics that aspires to keep pace with advancements in science, philosophy, and technology. what i find troublesome is how our acquiescence to these ethics is solicited. new materialist ethics necessarily manifest as affective encounters that operate best on micropolitical scales. because materiality is figured as an impersonal force of the real, it runs the risk of becoming a transcendental signified that merely replaces language or culture as an organizing principle. doing so would severely diminish its import as an inducement to a posthumanist ethics. to circumvent the “tension between universalistic theory and specific mode of inquiry,” chance, contingency, and creativity in micro-level encounters are prioritized over more obstinate assemblages that congeal at the global or macro-levels (zhan, 2016, p. 26). further, as the nucleus of the new materialisms, the embodied subject or material body compels an ethics that unfolds on a parallel plane, meaning between and within bodies. “this implies,” rosi braidotti (2010) proposes, “approaching the world through affectivity and not cognition: as singularity, force, movement, through assemblages or webs of interconnections with all that lives,” and “accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition and replacing it with one of mutual specification and mutual codependence” (p. 214). in the quotation above, braidotti invokes an ethics of relation, in which sensation and perception comprise the “zone of [ethical] effectivity,” and attunement and affirmation take precedence over social transformation (tumino, 2011, p. 555). because material interand intra-actions are preconscious and multisensorial, ethical practice is based not on the ability to evaluate right from wrong, but on a commitment to feeling right. we can observe this adjustment in appeals to “an ongoing responsiveness to…entanglement” ((barad, 2007, p. 394), “a heightened sensitivity to the agency of assemblages” (bennett, 2010b), a “wakefulness” to the “feel [of] what makes us laugh, lament, and curse” (orlie, 2007, p. 127) and an “experience of the vitality of being” (connolly, 2010, pp. 196-197). as a consequence, the experiences of living under conditions of crisis are fetishized at the expense of addressing the causes of these conditions themselves. the imperative to “[live] with the open wound...through a sort of depersonalization of the event” (braidotti, 2010, p. 213), for example, not only depoliticizes the claims of historically oppressed communities, but also flattens distinctions between traumas inflicted through happenstance and persistent intergenerational harm. how else could one, as braidotti does, list as equivalent examples: those who survived the holocaust, frida kahlo’s deadly tram ride, and missing the train to the world trade center on september 11th (p. 214)? the limits of a new materialist ethics appear most forcefully, then, as we attempt to move from an embodied “responsiveness” to the dislocation of structures. when patterns of materialization are addressed, it is generally as the amalgamation of “perpetual circuits of exchange, feedback, and reentry” that thereby “[inflect] the shape of political experience” (connolly, 2010, pp. 190-191). on the one hand, there is nothing innately objectionable about attributing the creation and transformation of political structures to any number of quotidian, embodied experiences. this is in fact common in political theory and historiography.8 on the other hand, it becomes more difficult to reconcile the effects of chance, unpredictability, and indeterminacy with the endurance and repetition of something like antiblack violence.9 the new materialisms are therefore at pains to clarify why the structures of global antiblackness continue to function as if “neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise” (spillers, 2003, p. 208). interpreting and describing our entanglements with non-human, materialist forces are not enough to account for, much less dislodge attachments to, social categories and representational arrangements. by this i mean that becoming more aware of material forces will not inevitably reduce the weight of discursive or psychic formations. it could even obstruct change by making forms of affect and sensation newly available for inscription. as timothy morton (2007) states, when “contact becomes content,” perceptions of difference collapse into identity (p. 37). granted, these complications are not unique to the new materialisms as changes in scale almost always require a re-calibration of ethics. the point is, however, that the framing of the new materialisms as inherently more ethical generates, and is generated by, a disavowal or misreading of race as a stagnant analytical framework.  as i submit above, since at least the enlightenment period intellectual genealogies have maintained an almost overwhelming racial homogeneity. critical theories produced by non-white scholars may have increased in terms of production or representation, but these are consistently marked as minority perspectives that have little to do with universal or ontological questions.10 hence, black bodies especially are rendered objects for theoretical development, rather than subjects of universal philosophy. coole and frost (2010) continue this trend, revealing that even as “feminists and class theorists have often insisted upon” the importance of material bodies and environments, the authors remain “[concerned] that such material dimensions have recently been marginalized by fashionable constructivist approaches and identity politics” (p. 19). the latter, they continue, “had a good deal to say about the body and its imbrication in relationships of power, but we are not convinced that they pay sufficient attention to the material efficacy of bodies or have the theoretical resources to do so” (ibid.). such a statement is heavy with longstanding racial charges of intellectual primitivism and parochialism. the unfortunate request to be “convinced” of identity politics’ intellectual merit effectively seals an historically white critical theory as the standard for authoritative knowledge production.11 one must also wonder about the referents for these insufficiently materialist identity politics, given that the new materialisms anthology fails to cite even one example that might be taken as representative of a larger trend. even if coole and frost employ “identity politics” as a shorthand for idealist approaches to subjectivity, their statement betrays both a misunderstanding of studies of “identity,” and a symptomatic desire to abandon race. to be clear, coole and frost never openly reduce “identity politics” to racial identity. but in many if not most of new materialisms’ founding texts, race receives only casual mention alongside the “other so-called axes of social difference” like sex, gender, and class, and often to specify a concept that has been “paralyzed by [a] ‘binary’ take on dualism” (dolphijn & van der tuin, 2012, p. 88, 143), or to name potential beneficiaries of one’s theorization (barad, 2007; grosz, 2004). we could perhaps attribute this treatment of race to an obdurate politics of attention (ahmed, 2008) that determines which issues receive consideration.12 nonetheless, to ascertain if and how the new materialisms might furnish us with a timelier ethics, we must first ask what purpose the omission of race serves. the movement for black lives has forcefully reminded us that black bodies have historically provided the standards against which the human subject and non-human objects are measured. this is to say that the “rupture in the quality of being” inaugurated by modern racial slavery is not limited to black lives (brand, 2001, p. 29). black critical theorists repeatedly insist on the world-historical scale of this rupture, tracking how it conditions our thinking about humans and matter, and the movements of this thought itself. what this means for our current discussion is that “the question of race’s reality has and continues to bear directly on hierarchies of knowledge pertaining to the nature of reality itself” (jackson, 2015, p. 216), or on what dionne brand (2001) calls our “cognitive schema” (p. 29). as a conceptual orientation or method of “way-finding,” the prevailing cognitive schema articulates a libidinal economy of antiblackness to the history of ideas, ensuring, as spillers (2003) maintains, that “dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation;” “sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us” (pp. 208-209). by inverting a childhood rejoinder about the supposedly limited reach of the symbolic, spillers lays out a provocative proposal: the metaphors of slavery are immanent to the force of the material. although “‘race’ alone bears no inherent meaning, even though it reifies in personality,” it “gains its power from what it signifies by point, in what it allows to come to meaning” (spillers, 2003, p. 380). black lives matter, and blackness enlivens matter. it is possible, then, that the elaboration of thought, the conditions of its enunciation and reception, are always part of a racial praxis, even when those “personalities” that absorb the reification of race are most absent. this is a paradigmatic example of the prevailing cognitive schema at work. antiblackness conditions the force of materiality by determining the logic of both its actualization and its theoretical manifestations. these functions become clearer when we turn our attention to octavia butler’s parable duology. parables for our time the parable novels are set in a dystopian america, produced by a fifteen-year period of “coinciding climactic, economic, and sociological crises” known collectively as “the pox” (butler, 1998, p. 8). amid the ongoing economic and political collapse of the u.s. and its de facto elimination of social services, protagonist lauren olamina lives with her family in the southern california gated community of robledo, which is spanish for “oakwood.” the community’s walls offer an illusion of security to the semi-professional, non-white residents, and despite the increasing violence just outside, they refuse to consider alternatives. angered by this inability to acknowledge the permanence of change, lauren devises a line of flight in the form of a political theology she names “earthseed.” she becomes the titular “sower” of the first novel, guided by earthseed’s central principle that “god is change.” after the eventual massacre of the people of robledo, lauren travels to northern california with fellow itinerants she recruits along the way. parable of the sower closes with their founding of the town of acorn—a name that transforms a community once mature and moribund like a “sturdy old oak” into a community committed to earthseed’s doctrine of adaptability, self-sufficiency, and education. while both novels are narrated through lauren’s journal entries, parable of the talents includes contributions from lauren’s daughter, asha, and lauren’s husband, bankole. talents picks up five years after the events of sower and details the imprisonment and dispersal of the acorn community by a fundamentalist christian sect. in the second half of talents, lauren sets out to find a missing asha while attempting to rebuild the earthseed movement. the narrative culminates with the departure of the world’s first interstellar spaceships, sponsored by the now powerful network of earthseed acolytes. what makes the novels imminently relevant to our discussion is that the apocalypse-inducing “pox” begins in 2015. while lauren’s narration commences in 2024, the overlaps between the diegetic and extradiegetic levels endorse a reading of the novels as cautionary tales for the anthropocene of our present. to be sure, the eponymous “parables” of the titles refer to the new testament’s instructional stories, and there is a great deal in butler’s novels deserving of our caution. all of the anthropocene’s most troubling possibilities, however farfetched, are realized by 2024. the rapidly warming climate decimates crops and creates monster storms, displacing millions of people and exacerbating the spread of hunger, poverty, and disease. as u.s. citizens attempt to flee to alaska, “the last frontier” eventually secedes from the union to form a northern bloc with russia and canada. by 2033, warfare has broken out. as butler makes clear, these events were set in motion prior to the onset of the pox and considerably before 2015. this warp of time and history situates the novels in the future perfect by foregrounding the priority of blackness, figured here through lauren’s recounting as an eternal condition of being “prior” that returns to the present as a not-yet realized future.13 blackness, which will have been there, is the specter that haunts the anthropocene and its possible futures. what i find intriguing is that this haunting appears most strongly in the scholarly reception of the novels. there is much to say about the novels’ methods, including their retrofitting of the slave narrative, and about their themes, like the ideological functions of technology, the privatization of natural resources, and the constitution of community. but one theme in particular that receives consistent attention among critics deals explicitly with the question of the human body itself. lauren is hyperempathic, an “organic delusional syndrome” that obliges her to share other people’s pain and pleasure (butler, 1993, p. 11). this heightened sensitivity is visually-activated; in her own words, “i feel what i see others feeling or what i believe they feel” (butler, 1993, p. 12). despite being entirely imaginary, lauren’s ability to “share” renders her dangerously vulnerable to the violence that permeates both novels. speaking to bankole, she laments, “self-defense shouldn’t have to be an agony or a killing or both. i can be crippled by the pain of a wounded person. i’m a very good shot because i’ve never felt that i could afford to just wound someone…. the worst of it is, if you got hurt, i might not be able to help you. i might be crippled by your injury—by your pain, i mean—as you are” (butler, 1993, p. 278). as a consequence, lauren’s social interactions are governed by a kind of strategic calculus; the “golden rule” enacted not just at the level of bodies, but essentially between them. for many critics, hyperempathy encourages more ethical approaches to difference by releasing the body from its historically fixed positions. variously described as the “right medicine for our present ‘compassion fatigue’” (miller, 1998, p. 357), “the living embodiment of the subversion of difference” (stillman, 2003, p. 29), and “a crucial metaphor for re-defining social relations,” hyperempathy seems to bear an almost utopian ethical potential (melzer, 2002, p. 13). in this regard, hyperempathy accomplishes what e.p. thompson identifies as the pedagogical function of utopia, or “the education of desire” (qtd. in wegner, 2007, p. 17). the scholarly reception of the parable duology therefore announces that a radical break with our attachments to the body is not only possible, but also desirable. we are now firmly within the scope of the postand non-human turns. the body hailed in the parable duology is precisely the body theorized in the new materialisms. for instance, coole and frost (2010) define bodies as “open series of capacities or potencies that emerge hazardously and ambiguously within a multitude of organic and social processes,” indicating that the materiality of the body exceeds whatever provisionally coherent and stable form it may take (p. 10). the material body is a temporary, albeit stubborn, configuration of a deeper flow of difference. to illustrate, after experiencing several incidents of sharing pain, lauren notes: “i had no sense of my own body. i hurt, but i couldn’t have said where—or even whether the pain was mine or someone else’s. the pain was intense, yet [diffuse] somehow. i felt…disembodied” (butler. 1993, p. 297). lauren’s inability to distinguish between her pain and “someone else’s” prevents her from locating her body in space and time, demonstrating that the body’s inhabitation of “an umwelt that remains ambiguous, indeterminate, and resonant with an expressive significance…affects the body's perception of spatial relations” (coole, 2010, p. 104). this loss of proprioception, or the ability to make immediate “sense of” her body, suggests not only that bodies can act and respond prior to rational cognition, but also that the body is a non-deterministic form produced through and traversed by the “open series of capacities or potencies” foregrounded in coole and frost’s definition. hyperempathy also shares with new materialist philosophies a capacity to disturb the social and political hierarchies that regulate our encounters with difference. as critic jerry phillips (2002) agrees, “in a hyperempathetic world, the other would cease to exist as the ontological antithesis of the self, but would instead become a real aspect of oneself” (p. 306). for one, hyperempathy is not limited to connections between human bodies. before the destruction of robledo, lauren and a group from the community venture beyond the walls to hunt for her brother. after her father shoots a feral dog, lauren realizes that it is still alive: “i saw its bloody wounds as it twisted. i bit my tongue as the pain i knew it must feel became my pain…. with my right hand, i drew the smith & wesson, aimed, and shot the beautiful dog through its head…. i walked, then rode in a daze, still not quite free of the dog i had killed” (butler, 1993, pp. 45-46). for lauren, the dog’s death lingers, as the ethical ramifications of violence are translated into an exchange of affect between bodies. her killing of the dog is as much an act of mercy for it as it is for her, which seems to confirm braidotti’s (2010) supposition that “affectivity in fact is what activates an embodied subject, empowering him or her to interact with others….it follows that a subject can think/understand/do/become no more than what he or she can take or sustain within his or her embodied, spatiotemporal coordinates” (p. 210). that one of these bodies is coded as non-human or animal has little effect on its ability to act as a causal force. without a doubt, differences exist between lauren and the dog; but at the level of the materialist body, these differences do not cohere into social categories. additionally, lauren’s experiences with difference resolve into a central tenet of earthseed: “embrace diversity/unite—/or be divided,/robbed,/ruled,/killed/by those who see you as prey./embrace diversity/or be destroyed” (butler, 1993, p. 196). the implied choice is between two perspectives on difference: the first—diversity—views difference as the foundation for collective empowerment, while in the second, difference continues to scaffold a social hierarchy in which some people emerge as prey. the events of the pox have created an economy of survival, where “people are expected to fear and hate everyone but their own kind” (p. 36). in defiance of this view, lauren saves, and then invites, a young family to join her group, commenting, “we’re natural allies—the mixed couple and the mixed group” (p. 208). hyperempathy demonstrates that like the walls around robledo, the limitations of difference, and the social and political hierarchies that sustain them, are provisional. perhaps unsurprisingly, then, literary critics tend to minimize the significance of lauren’s racial blackness. patricia melzer’s (2002) evaluation of the parable novels is representative of a common reading strategy that positions butler as a science fiction writer who is black, rather than as a black woman who writes science fiction. she states: butler's approach to race issues that at first appear to be in the background of her social critique can be understood as a (narrative) strategy that undermines the binary of white/black that dominates u.s. discourse on race relations…by insisting on the presence of people of color in her narratives as normal, not exceptional, butler also implicitly rejects the tokenism that categorizes her work primarily in terms of her identity as african american. (p. 10) as it is within the new materialisms, “race,” which is really a placeholder for “the binary of white/black,” is dissolved into a vague “tokenism” that is itself a stand-in for “identity politics.” this may seem peculiar, given that butler’s work regularly employs narrative strategies and themes consistent with black literature and experience (e.g. kindred, the lilith’s brood trilogy, and fledgling). after the publication of her patternist series in the early 1980’s, she was hailed as a welcome corrective to science fiction’s largely white, colonial, and patriarchal overtones. but for her part, butler (2001) has expressed in interviews that “it is a writer's duty to write about human differences, all human differences, and help make them acceptable” (qtd. in mehaffy and keating, p. 46). gregory hampton (2010) draws out the implications of this undertaking, declaring that “butler’s fiction is successful largely because it produces narratives that are easily comparable to african american experiences but also because it considers the perspective of a universal marginalized body” (p. 69). if we follow the lead of critics like meltzer, or the new materialist refusal of “identity politics,” the “universal marginalized body” manifests as a body suspended in a static nexus of identity and representation, which is to say that all bodies, to varying degrees and at different times, are marginalized bodies. what we lose in this rush from the particular to the universal is any consideration of how the material-semiotic history of race governs, from the outset, what can and cannot be made legible as a universal. what lauren’s hyperempathy elucidates is that in order to free difference and the body from its humanist constraints, we must attend to one particular difference to which the human and the body are bound, namely, racial blackness. this may seem paradoxical when we consider that new materialist scholarship almost uniformly rejects any consideration of race in its return to the body. but entrapping race in “identity politics” (i.e. the new materialisms), or the “white/black binary” (i.e. literary criticism of the novels), is more correctly a disavowal that untethers the non-, in-, and post-human from their historically proper site of production. or more precisely, disavowing the associations between the non-/in-/post-human and racial blackness defends interactions with the former against the ontological and conceptual provocations of the latter. for melzer (2002) to write that hyperempathy yields a “shared identity and life experience that [is] not based in a particular unified racial or cultural background” (p. 12), or for jerry phillips (2002) to declare that butler “employs a race-transcendent communalist ethics” (p. 307), the material and hyperempathic body must be free of race. an anxiety that race might follow the body, however sublimated or symptomatic, is well founded, given how butler remarks that hyperempaths make good slaves. after learning of her brother’s horrific death, lauren asks, “if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture? who would cause unnecessary pain? i’ve never thought of my problem as something that might do some good before, but the way things are, i think it would help” (p. 115). however, in a 2001 interview with npr, octavia butler explicitly argues that “the threat of shared pain wouldn't necessarily make people behave better toward one another.” the return of a renewed slavery in the novels makes this clear as company “bosses” or “drivers” pay extra for workers with hyperempathy syndrome. moreover, in the novels, hyperempathy syndrome is induced in utero via maternal abuse of paracetco, a drug originally designed to impede the degeneration of brain functions caused by alzheimer’s disease. paracetco increased the energy and intellectual capabilities of non-afflicted users and so became the stimulant of choice for those in the working and middle classes like lauren’s mother. also evoking the antebellum law of partus sequitur ventrem that mandated children follow the condition of their mother, the children of hyperempaths can inherit the condition even if they are several generations removed from the original drug use (butler, 1993/1998). despite these connections to antebellum slavery, hyperempathy is not racially exclusive. and yet, the relationships between hyperempathy and a slavery of the future are telling insofar as they bring the specter of blackness back to the fore. in black women like lauren, hyperempathy recalls the process by which black bodies are violently revealed as flesh, or what hortense spillers terms pornotroping, or the sexually violent and spectacular reduction of the captive body to flesh.   in her seminal essay, “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book,” spillers (2003) presents a concept of flesh as the material-semiotic inheritance of africans in the diaspora, and of black women specifically. she “make[s] a distinction in this case between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ and impose[s] that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions...before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography” (p.206). unlike the socially legible and historically-given “body,” the material conditions of captive and ungendered “flesh” cannot be altered by either the symbolic—“the brush of discourse”—or the imaginary—“the reflexes of iconography.” flesh instead serves as a structuring dynamic for the coherence of both registers, and as such, must be eternally reproduced. this repetition-without-a-difference may appear through “various symbolic substitutions,” but in effect, these substitutions “repeat the initiating moments” that mark the captive body as flesh (p. 207). as a scene of negation, black flesh is also available for pornotroping as a first order process of racialization, where “race is constituted by a repeated sadistic white pleasure in black female suffering” (nash, 2014, p. 52). during their incarceration, acorn community members are fitted with electronic devices called “slave collars” that deliver painful shocks or “lashes” to the nervous system. after she is collared, lauren discovers that her hyperempathy subjects her to both the pain of her fellow captives and the pornotropic pleasure of her captors; she writes, “there are a few men…who lash until they have orgasms. our screams and convulsions and pleas and sobs are what these men need to feel sexually satisfied. i know of three who seem to need to lash someone to get sexual pleasure. most often, they lash a woman, then rape her” (butler, 1998, p. 233). in these scenes, the relationships between consent, pleasure, and sentiment collapse as lauren is forced to reenact the crisis of will and desire that characterize the female slave’s existence.14 while all hyperempaths, regardless of race, would experience a similar crisis under these conditions, black women are assured neither a restoration of their will and desire nor a discernible “end” to the crisis. lauren needs neither the condition of hyperempathy nor the slave collar to bear the “marks of the cultural text” of slavery (spillers, 2003, p. 207). despite the episodic nature of hyperempathy, black women’s fleshly existence remains a structural vulnerability to violence, a condition that is also a “grammar”—an unconscious system of rules—that marks black women as the “zero degree of social conceptualization” (spillers, 2003, p. 206). as such, black female flesh is the quintessentially productive site of modernity’s symbolic order, where the value and meaning of our conceptual categories are both challenged or renewed. lauren performs this function in the novels, as her unavoidable reductions to flesh guide earthseed’s development into a global movement. in this context, lauren’s black life, or the blackness of her life, matters, but only in its ambivalent capacity to make all lives matter. the movement for black lives the approach to life promoted under earthseed’s banner responds to our desires for new modes of existence appropriate for the anthropocene. for lauren, embracing change enables notions of self and community capable of navigating complex socioeconomic forces and their differential embodiment. in earthseed, “god is a process or a combination of processes, not an entity. it is not conscious at all…. god can be directed, focused, speeded, slowed, shaped. all things change, but all things need not change in all ways” (butler, 1998, p. 46). moreover, change is not driven simply or only by the dialectics of historical progress. the chapters in both sower and talents open with epigraphs from earthseed’s doctrinal text, the book of the living. modeled after the aphoristic style of the tao, these epigraphs acknowledge the potential of political, economic, and social structures to affect and be affected by all matter: “we have lived before/we will live again/we will be silk,/stone,/mind,/star,/we will be scattered,/gathered,/ molded,/probed./we will live,/and we will serve life” (butler, 1998, p. 60). the confluence of silk, stone, mind, and star rejects the idea that the active properties of “life” are confined to the human or organic, constituting what weheliye calls a “radically different political imaginary,” where “suffering appears as utopian erudition” that “[summons] forms of human emancipation that can be imagined but not (yet) described” (butler, 1998, pp. 126-127). the destiny of earthseed to “take root amongst the stars” is precisely this imagined yet indescribable emancipation (butler, 1998, p. 46). once the starships leave earth at the end of talents, humanity becomes earth-seed, open to possibilities that we cannot predict or control as we spread to worlds unknown. visions like these suggest, among other things, that oppressive conditions do not exhaust the variabilities of life, and that the transvaluation of the organic body and human being can encourage comprehensive ethical bearings. then again, perceiving hyperempathy and earthseed as means to “liberate...assemblages of life, thought, and politics from the tradition of the oppressed” requires us to detach pornotroping from the sexually violent production of racial difference (weheliye, 2014, p. 137). the celebrated material body thus betrays a desire to harness the radical potential of black flesh without paying the social and historical costs of being black. in the new materialist formulation, pornotroping is revised as a radical interruption in the order of things, one that produces a material body without race. certainly, in black women’s “absence from a subject position,” spillers does locate the potential for a sui generis naming that claims the “insurgent ground” outside of “dominant symbolic activity” (p. 229). the difficulty here is that the monstrous female “with the potential to ‘name’” emerges out of the specific histories of black women (spillers, 2003, p. 209). this is not to say that a capacity for life does not exist in other conditions of oppression, or that pornotroping is a structural totality from which nothing escapes. however, in order to confront effectively the consequences of the anthropocene, we first need to reckon with our political and libidinal investments in black flesh. this would require us to address how the entanglements of blackness, matter, and the human make only certain forms of matter both legible and desirable. to be clear, my objective is not to reject wholesale the new materialisms. their attempts to offer a broader theorization of matter and being are appropriate and necessary for our techno-scientific age. indeed, a planetary crisis requires a more expansive philosophy. what i am suggesting instead is that challenges to human exceptionalism should proceed through a critique of race, or we risk reorganizing old privileges (“all lives”) under new standards of being (“matter”). notes 1 nicholas mirzoeff notes in his forthcoming essay, “it’s not the anthropocene, it’s the white supremacy scene, or the geological color line,” that a recent publication by geologists locates the origins of the anthropocene in the arrival of europeans to america. while this preliminary acknowledgement of the large scale impact of colonialism and slavery is hopeful, any discourse on the anthropocene should also be accompanied by “a politics that challenges [the racial and humanist] hierarchy” often implied by its philosophy of history (mirzoeff, forthcoming 2016, p. 22).    2 in addition to the works referenced in this article, see also alaimo and heckman (2008), barrett and bolt (2012), benson-allott (2015), bryant (2011), clough and halley (2007), connolly (2013), hinton and van der tuin (2014), luciano and chen (2015), morton (2013), and shaviro (2014). 3 see also jones (2011), luciano and chen (2015), mcmillan (2015b), and mirzoeff (forthcoming 2016). 4 for an overview of how african and african american bodies have informed scientific thought from the enlightenment onward, see curran (2013), jackson and weidman (2004), and wynter (2013). 5 other noteworthy examples include fanon (2000), gordon (2000), hartman (1997), jones (2004), keeling (2005), and wilderson (2011). 6 clearly, not all critical engagements with matter participate in the reduction and/or disavowal of race. many feminist, postcolonial, and critical race studies scholars insist that studies of matter and materiality must occur through an interrogation of race. noteworthy examples include uri mcmillian’s (2015a) embodied avatars, rachel lee’s (2014) the exquisite corpse of asian america, mel chen’s (2012) animacies, stacy alaimo’s (2010) bodily natures, and donna haraway’s foundational texts primate visions (1989) and simians, cyborgs, and women (1991). 7 my decision to draw heavily on two of the more recent new materialist anthologies, new materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics, and new materialism: interviews and cartographies, is guided by the fact that both anthologies feature contributions from some of the most notable figures in the materialist or non-human turns. as such, these analogies provide a representative selection of current new materialist scholarship while indexing its more common themes. 8 coole and frost cite althusser, foucault, and some strains of neo-marxism and ethnography as examples of similar approaches (pp. 20-36). intriguingly, ian buchanan (2015) points out that they can also yield observations so “obvious” that “one does not even need a concept to make this claim. this is history in the mode of one damn thing after another” (p. 388). 9 to her credit, in an interview with peter gratton for his blog, “philosophy in a time of error,” jane bennett (2010b) admits that she needs to “focus more carefully” on how assemblages assume the characteristics of repetition, duration, and stability; she writes, “i want to get better at discerning the topography of becoming, better at theorizing the ‘structural’ quality of agentic assemblages. for the question of ‘structure’—or maybe that is the wrong word, and the phrase you suggest below is better, i.e., ‘linkages’ between and within ‘open relations’—does seem to fall in the shadow of the alluring image of an ever-free becoming…inside a process of unending change, bodies and forces with duration are somehow emitted or excreted. but how?” (qtd. in “vibrant matters”). while this is a hopeful development, i maintain that our scholarly activity is intimately shaped by the legacies of transatlantic slavery. going forward, then, the new materialisms must consider how blackness informs their major concepts or they risk reproducing the kind of race-thinking that holds these legacies in place.  10 while mapping black studies’ tireless examination of the human and its others, alexander weheliye (2014) observes that there exists an equally long tradition “in which theoretical formulations by white european thinkers are granted a conceptual carte blanche, while those uttered from the purview of minority discourse that speak to the same questions are almost exclusively relegated to the jurisdiction of ethnographic locality” (p. 6). 11 the combahee river collective statement (1982), penned by the black feminists of the combahee river collective, is widely credited with introducing the term “identity politics.” their assertion that modes of political organizing are intimately connected to the social groups with which we identify not only laid the groundwork for later theories of intersectionality, but also offered much-needed interventions into feminism, marxism, and sexuality studies. 12 sara ahmed (2008) argues that a politics of attention have dictated the new materialisms’ “founding gestures” by allowing for a reading of feminist scholarship as fundamentally anti-biology. her position paper, “imaginary prohibitions: some preliminary remarks on the founding gestures of the ‘new materialism,” provoked responses from noela davis (2009) and iris van der tuin (2008), the latter of which comments more extensively on the debate in her co-edited collection of interview and essays, new materialism: interviews and cartographies. what ahmed’s paper tracks is a pattern of disappointment with feminism’s purported anti-biologism that stretches back to the early 90’s. however, driving this disappointment is an assumption that feminist scholars should “know better,” particularly because a set of theories historically concerned with the body can and should be at the forefront of materialist innovations. while this does not seem like a ringing endorsement, the fact that new materialists claim (white) feminism as their generative field suggests that these feminisms have access to the “theoretical resources” to re-conceptualize the role of matter in embodiment (coole & frost, 2010, p. 19). or, at least those feminisms in which “material dimensions” have not yet “been marginalized by fashionable constructivist approaches and identity politics” (coole & frost, 2010, p. 19). read with coole and frost’s critique of “identity politics” as theoretically impoverished, it is clear that (white) feminism is granted an intellectual complexity that “identity politics” are not. 13 this understanding of the “future perfect” derives from what i identify as a central tenet of afrofuturism, a literary and aesthetic movement that remixes fantasy, technoscience, and non-western cosmologies to reconfigure the past, present, and future through the multifocal lens of the african diaspora. in his 1994 essay, “black to the future,” journalist and cultural critic mark dery writes that “african americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees. they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories 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(2014). habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. durham, nc: duke university press. wegner, e. p. (2007). jameson’s modernisms; or, the desire called utopia. diacritics, 37(4), 2-20. wilderson, f. (2010). red, white & black: cinema and the structure of us antagonisms. durham, nc: duke university press. wilson, e. a. (2015). gut feminism. durham, nc: duke university press. wynter, s. (2003). unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument. cr: the new centennial review, 3(3), 257-337. zhan, m. (2016). cosmic experiments: remaking materialism and daoist ethic outside of the     establishment. medical anthropology, 35(3), 247-262. bio diana leong is an assistant professor of english and environmental humanities at the university of utah. her research interests include environmental justice, contemporary african american literature and culture, and science and technology studies. her current book project theorizes the slave ship as a set of ecological relations that persist beyond the formal abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. microsoft word 71616-1-11_kafer.docx kafer, a. (2018). review of brilliant imperfection: grappling with cure by eli clare (duke university press, 2017. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © alison kafer, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license review brilliant imperfection: grappling with cure by eli clare (duke university press, 2017) alison kafer southwestern university kafera@southwestern.edu what would it take to understand disability as something ordinary or familiar, to frame it “not as a tragedy, but a truth, a shrug of the shoulders, water over rock” (p. 5), “as common as morning coffee” (p. 145)? or what about gender transition? is it possible to abandon the language of disorder in favor of metaphors of possibility, seeing “transition [as] a door, a window, a cobalt sky” (p. 177)? for writer and activist eli clare, such shifts are possible through a deep and sustained “grappling with cure.” brilliant imperfection, clare’s lyrical new book, offers exactly that, a record of his reckoning with the ideology of cure. moving from memoir to history, from poetry to theory, clare describes the impact of cure (i.e., the belief that bodies and minds can be determined to be broken and thus in need of fixing) on his own life and the lives of others. the book chronicles clare’s shifting politics, as he moves from a fiercely anti-cure stance to a more ambivalent, knotty, position. 2 kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) ultimately, “we need neither a wholehearted acceptance nor an outright rejection of cure,” he argues, “but rather a broad-based grappling” (p. 14). given the hold that cure has on us culture, however, any such examination will require an intensive dismantling of curative logics. clare devotes most of the book to explaining how cure constrains our imaginations and condones, if not encourages, violence and discrimination. “at the center of cure lies eradication,” asserts clare. this claim is essential to his understanding of how cure works (p. 26). as an ideology, cure expects and requires intervention (e.g., medical, political, educational, familial, juridical); cure frames difference as deviance and deviance as the site for action. we miss something essential about the workings of cure if we fail to recognize the compulsory nature of this action as a kind of violence. clare offers eugenic histories, practices of mass incarceration, and the acceptance of forced and coerced “treatments” to support his position. although clare places eradication at the center of cure, he recognizes that it is not the only dimension of curative logics; “diagnosis, treatment, management, rehabilitation, and prevention” (p. 70) are all essential to the workings of cure. diagnosis is of particular interest to clare, and he spends most of the book uncovering how diagnosis makes violence possible. the centerpiece of brilliant imperfection is an extended discussion of how the diagnoses of “feeble-mindedness” and “mental retardation” led to various manifestations of violence against two white girls: carrie buck, whose sterilization and institutionalization were upheld by the us supreme court in 1927, and molly daly, who was removed to oregon’s fairview hospital in the 1950s, where she seems to have suffered intense neglect if not outright violence. clare foregrounds these two stories because of the instructive ways they resonate and depart from his own, but also because they offer such clear examples of how diagnoses, especially diagnoses of mental and intellectual disability, transform violence into “treatment.” he extends his mosaic around these two stories, underscoring how diagnosis and cure are used in the service of racism, settler colonialism, 3 kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, and classism. clare insists, however, that humans are not the only targets of curative logics. to put it differently, he suggests the primacy of “the human” is part of what fuels such logics. he connects the terri schiavo case, in which a woman’s feeding tube was removed at the request of her husband and over the protests of her parents, to an extended rumination over what it means to be alive and whose lives have value. here he turns to the language of bodymind not only as a way of disrupting the medicalized distinction between physical disabilities and mental disabilities or body and mind, but also as a more inclusive frame than “personhood” or “human.” by bodymind, as he explains, he means not only “our own human selves,” but also “heron, firefly, weeping willow . . . , dragonfly, birch, barn swallow . . . , goat and bantam rooster, mosquito and wood frog, fox and vulture — the multitude of beings that make home on this planet. i mean all body-minds, regardless of personhood,” because all these bodyminds have value (pp. 29-30). to care about the fate of marginalized people, then, is to care about the fate of the firefly and the wood frog, and vice versa; we cannot draw lines between different kinds of bodyminds. indeed, it is that act of drawing lines — another manifestation of diagnosis — that makes violence possible. as long as “the human” or “the person” are cast as meriting particular care, then both those categories will be used to render other beings violable. although there is a kind of narrative arc to the book, it is more accurate to describe it as a constellation of histories, experiences and theories than a straight forward linear narrative. clare describes brilliant imperfection as a “mosaic” composed of “fragments and slivers” through which multiple patterns emerge (p. xv), and the book’s format makes manifest this framing. the book’s ten chapters are each divided into smaller essays, not all of which explicitly connect, and short pieces of poetry and prose — clare names them “brilliant imperfections”— serve as transition points between chapters. but these moves are not merely matters of style; they mark method as well. brilliant imperfection often makes its theoretical moves through juxtaposition, comparison, definition, 4 kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) and repetition. clare wants his readers to recognize the resonances between seemingly disparate phenomena, asserting that “the desire for eradication is …. a pattern reaching across time and space” (p. 135), and who better than a poet to trace lines between cornfields and incarceration, between native grasses and desire? brilliant imperfection: grappling with cure is an accessible and engaging read for those new to trans* or disability theory and politics, providing useful introductions to ableism, the medical-industrial complex, and the structuring power of diagnosis/diagnoses (including “gender identity disorder” and “gender dysphoria”). scholars and activists more familiar with these fields will recognize the many places where clare is both joining and extending current conversations in queer/trans*/disability studies. the second half of the book, in which he dives deeply into the tensions between his desire for gender transition and his distrust of medical interventions, or between his extended critique of institutionalization and his voluntary commitment to a psych ward, are particularly generative. as much as the book is an argument for recognizing the brilliance of imperfection, clare recognizes that pride often co-exists with shame, and he does not shy away from sharing his own struggles with his readers. near the end of the book, clare details some of his strategies for self-care, and those tips, paired with the “thinking about trigger warnings” section in the preface, make clear that clare imagines people using this text not only as a provocation to think disability differently but also as a tool-kit for survival. or, rather, thinking disability differently is a tool for survival. “cure promises us so much, but it will never give us justice” (p. 184), and perhaps those who have been marked as abnormal, deviant, deformed, diseased, dangerous, criminal, contagious, excessive, incompetent, irrational, tired, weak, dependent, sick, ill, or broken can find common ground in trying to imagine otherwise. brilliant imperfection offers: a matter-of-fact acceptance of our tics, tremors, stutters, seizures, knots, scars, pain, quirks . . . ; an appreciation for missing teeth and the smarts that stretch food stamps to the end of the month, 5 kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) for big bellies and wide hips, for the flash of hands signing american sign language and typing on assistive communication devices, for dark skin and kinky hair; . . . an embrace [of] our wild femmeness, our handsome butchness, our glorious androgyny.” (p. 167) loosening the hold of an unexamined belief in cure makes possible “a world where these moments are common and unremarkable” (p. 167). bio alison kafer is a professor of feminist studies at southwestern university and the author of feminist, queer, crip.     original research feeling around for the apparatus: a radicley empirical plant science     kristi onzik uc davis konzik@ucdavis.edu   monica gagliano southern cross university university of sydney monica.gagliano@scu.edu.au     abstract scientists are oft trained to think that “feeling” is not simply irrelevant but antithetical to their methodologies. that scientists are not simply objectively trained minds but also bodies that feel has been an important feminist contribution towards reimagining scientific knowledge—not as the product of self-directed teleological discovery, but as situated in time, place, and transformed through relations that oft exceed the binary logics of scientific representation; those founded upon rationalist distinctions between feeling/knowing, body/mind, object/subject. through a collaborative methodological lens we (ethnographer + scientist) are calling radicle empiricism, we ask how a scientist comes to make sense of feeling and knowing—and the relations “between”—throughout shifting configurations of a pea plant decision-making apparatus. by focusing this study at the level of the apparatus (barad, 2007), we provide an empirically based description—not a proposed model or theory—of some of the material-discursive relations through which the concepts of “feeling” and “knowing” are (re)configured through a scientist’s unexpected encounters with pea plant root tips or radicles. as such, we offer a perspective that does not assume “feeling” or “knowing” as distinct categories of a scientist’s knowledge making endeavors, nor as categories of experience that function independently of the historical, social, and material conditions through which they are made perceptible. immanent to this description is an invitation to explore creative and collaborative practices of science-making in which the phenomena we study—whether pea plants or other persons—have the opportunity to reformulate not only our categories of “feeling” and “knowing” but the conditions through which they are made possible.     keywords critical plant studies, plant cognitions, sts, multi-species ethnography, apparatus, radical empiricism     introduction in a feeling for the organism, historian of science evelyn fox keller (1983) details the life and work of nobel prize–winning scientist barbara mcclintock. though it wasn’t until the end of her career that mcclintock became famous for her “discovery” of genetic transposition in corn, she was long made infamous amongst her colleagues for the incoherence of her scientific reasoning. despite her perceived lack of appreciation for the institutionalized norms of scientific communication, she was accepted by her male colleagues as a “hard worker,” and nonetheless had what it takes to be a committed researcher in the nascent field of genetic science. the molecular techniques that came to define genetic science—and later biological “life itself” (rose 2001, 13–17)—in the mid-twentieth century were still being developed, and mcclintock’s studies of genetic inheritance were yet to be inhibited by disciplinary expectations. though she shared with her colleagues a desire to reveal the lawful patterns of natural organization, she did not share, nor was she afforded the same opportunities to share, the power to isolate her discoveries to the objective coordinates of the experiment itself. such narratives of discovery are often reserved for a scientist’s nobel prize–winning speech or autobiography, articulated in the sensational language of “eureka” or “aha” moments, in which the missing piece of an experimental objective was suddenly received by the unassuming mind of the scientist. for example, while riding in a streetcar in bern, einstein recalls tapping into “god’s thoughts,” as the theory of relativity suddenly hit him as a “storm that broke loose in [his] mind” (kaku 2004, 60–62); the ring structure of benzene arrived in a dream to kekulé, in which a snake appeared to be eating its own tail (rocke 2010, 194); and while in a cinema, francois jacob was jolted—“as though a line of fire cut through the darkness”—by a “glare of evidence” into the nature of gene regulation (jacob 1995 398). these are stories that describe insight as instantaneous, decisive, and external to the “normal” processes of science, as the miraculous effects of a scientist’s mind making a brief foray into the realm of the “mystical” or “subjective experience,” only to return to the laboratory with visions of an apparatus whole and complete in its objectively discernible performance.   the story of mcclintock’s discovery, as both she and keller tell it, was markedly different. mcclintock’s desire to know the processes through which corn kernels inherit their particular organizations developed through years of “losing herself” in the subtle variations of the corn she had planted—of spending long hours with each individual plant throughout their development, informing in her an ability for “direct communication.” what her colleagues understood to be irrational “vision” and poor scientific description were, for mcclintock, the ineffable findings of a reverence and commitment to listening to “the material itself” (keller 1983, 179)—a knowing made possible through years of cultivating “a feeling for the organism” (xxii). it was only after mcclintock had long been dismissed into the margins of scientific rationality, and molecular scale technologies later developed, that her colleagues could bear witness to the vision she had spent the majority of her career trying to translate into a language of objective reason. mcclintock’s story works to partially situate (haraway 1988, 578–81) our inquiry into the feelings that make a scientist’s insight possible, and differently so. we (ethnographer + scientist) draw inspiration not only from the more-than-human connections that give shape to mcclintock’s empirical practice, but from keller’s accounting of them—her honoring of a scientist’s desires to know and represent her knowledge as objective, while choosing to contextualize, embody, and pluralize such pursuits; to add to, rather than subtract from, a scientist’s experience of knowing. building upon mcclintock and keller, we borrow insights from a rich tradition of feminist science studies and sensory-based ethnographic approaches that have laid the grounds for studying not simply the empirical compositions of a science but the empirical compositions of a scientist. those studying the affective, more-than-human dimensions of bodies in experimental formation (prentice 2013, 171–98; myers and dumit 2011, 241; myers 2015b, 99–117), and the shapeshifting, “involutionary” (hustak and myers 2012, 78) encounters through which the relations “between” scientists and plants, subjects and objects, feeling and knowing, are made susceptible to reconfiguration. we foreground the unfurling of a pea plant decision-making “apparatus”—as a “dynamic set of open-ended practices, iteratively refined and reconfigured” (barad 2007,167)—as a means of inquiring into the affective, material-discursive conditions through which monica gagliano, a plant scientist, comes to feel and know differently. in so doing, we simultaneously inquire into and offer a different translation of those narrative habits that locate a scientist’s insight, the locus of their knowing and making decisions, inside of their head—as an isolated “aha” moment or as the objective, unmediated discernments of an apparatus “out there.” what grows out of this attention to an unfurling apparatus is not only a re-articulation of the empirical grounds of scientific insight, but a different constitution of “the empirical.” traversing into unexpected experimental terrains, the pea plants invite gagliano to slow down and pay a different kind of empirical attention—from one bent on separating “feeling” and “knowing” through a perceived distance between observer and observed, words and things, to one that takes all categories of analysis, including “empirical,” “experiential,” “feeling,” and “knowing,” as contextual, contested, and contingent (scott 1991, 796). from within the wily “outgrowths” of this apparatus sprouts a situated, more-than-human response to an event in which it becomes possible to trace how a scientist’s senses are reconfigured through unexpected encounters with pea plant root tips or “radicles”: an ethics of response we describe as “radicley empirical.” radicle, like radical, describes a rupture—a root sprouting from seed. in our experience, or rather, the experience which we found ourselves responsive to, radicle simultaneously describes an object of empirical inquiry—the primary roots of pea plants—and the morphology of the context—a nonlinear feeling around for the creative potentials of experimentation. in this sense, our notion of radicle empiricism stems from and builds upon its jamesian alliteration “radical empiricism” by inquiring into, rather than assuming, the relations that constitute the “between” of feeling and knowing (james [1912] 2003, 51–68). as such, our concept of radicle empiricism aspires towards what feminist scholar lindsey andrews calls a “minor empiricism” (2015, 6). in refusing the terms of a rational organization of the senses, especially the privileging of vision, as a fixed, ahistorical, and value-neutral source of knowledge, pea plant radicles invite us to explore a “minor” awareness of experimental senses, an awareness that unfurls from within their ongoing constitution and reorganization. radicles are, after the seed, considered to be a plant’s “first” sensory organ. highly sensitive and rapidly shapeshifting, radicles are charged with the capacity not only to break through the hard casing of embryonic primordia but to drop into and navigate the dark unknowns of subterranean earth. for darwin and the few who call themselves plant neurobiologists today, the radicle is equipped with “neuronal-like” signaling capacities, the electrochemical wherewithal to translate messages from their surrounds into a coordinated trans-organismal response (darwin 1880, 573; masi et al. 2009, 4048–53). but radicles, as we have come to make sense of them, are masters in sensing. siphoning around through soils for stories of potential lifeways, radicles can forecast possible atmospheric futures through the touch of earthly matter. their power, or rather the mystery of their power, lies in their meristematic indeterminacy, the courageous sensitivity of undifferentiated cells to reach into the unknown and gather insight. with natasha myers, we have come to see these “million-fold nodes of growth” as “centres of indetermination, each an ongoing experiment in and with the world” (myers 2015a, 37). and akin to deboleena roy’s stolonic inspiration, radicles can lure us out of a transcendent trance and into immanent connection, inviting us to not simply “feel for” the organism or apparatus, as if it’s already “out there” waiting to be revealed, but to “feel around for” the possibilities of our milieus (roy 2018, 57–89)—to re-root and ground our senses into the demands of the present for a more responsive and response-able (haraway 2016, 34–36) plant science. that is, a more radicley empirical plant science.   situating encounters from january to april 2019, kristi onzik, an anthropologist and feminist science studies scholar in training, had been studying and working as a research assistant with gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist and pioneer of the emerging fields of plant cognition and communication. gagliano’s name is perhaps readily recognized by many feminist scientists and science studies readers, particularly those “differently” interested in plants. over the last decade, she has published several provocative experimental studies, in “prestigious” journals such as scientific reports (gagliano et al. 2016) and oecologia (gagliano et al. 2017, demonstrating preliminary evidence for phenomena such as memory, habituation, and associative learning in plants. such phenomena have long been thought to require not only a “proper” nervous system but a highly sophisticated one. further amplifying her knack for what she has described as “unthinkable plant science” (see her phytobiography thus spoke the plant, 2018), gagliano has also catalyzed the field of “plant bioacoustics,” in which she and a very few others have begun to explore the sonic realms of plant communication. it is within this burgeoning and highly experimental field of phytonic soundscapes that our collaborations in cultivating new kinds of empirical senses with plants began to take shape. since 2016, onzik has been working to ethnographically ingather a sense of how the novel and still highly experimental (and controversial) sciences of plant neurobiology, cognition, and communication are being made. if onzik’s studies inquire into scientists attempting to, as myers has best described it, “sense and make sense” of plant sensing (2015b, 2), then the scientists onzik studies are attempting to make sense of plant sensing through apparatuses common to the domains of cognitive science and neurobiology. as such, there is a peculiar kind of tropic twist that happens in conversations and experiments with these plant scientists, and not others. onzik’s field notes evoke stories of plants responding to scientists in ways that not only displace the centrality of the brain and vision from longstanding theories of cognition but, in so doing, challenge the cognitive theories embodied and prefigured by the scientist’s methods of prehension. lured into the nutational curiosities of roots and shoots, through spacetime encounters that challenge the language and techniques of a scientist’s a priori “cognition,” these scientists are, quite publicly, losing grip on those rationalist certainties that sustain their knowledge and their careers. the feelings—the doubts, fears, and hesitations—that once lurked in the shadows of their objectifying confidence become not simply palpable but part of their experiments. grasping for the stabilized explanatory grounds of cognition in the languages and techniques of neuroand animal behaviors sciences, these scientists find that no such stable ground exists. the plants once naively assumed to be the objects of objective investigation become increasingly and unexpectedly responsive to scientists who are no longer certain where the “true” boundaries of knowing reside. at the time of onzik’s fieldwork, gagliano had recently been awarded a two-year grant at the university of sydney. her position as a “natural scientist” was unusually co-funded by the sydney environment institute, an interdisciplinary cast of humanities and social science scholars broadly working to “collaboratively design and implement strategies for just and sustainable environmental transformation” (sydney environment institute, “about us”). and while gagliano was considered part of these conversations, she was also given space in a large lab in a stately old (re: imperial) biological sciences building, replete with portraits of darwin, cook, and a rich display of nineteenth-century taxidermy, where she could continue her experimental work. shortly after onzik’s arrival, we began building an apparatus designed to test pea plant decision-making behavior in response to the sound of water. the apparatus was to be a more complicated variation of a previous one, in which pea plant roots were asked to make a choice inside of a two-way y-maze: to either grow towards the sound of water, or away. water is here understood to be an evolutionarily necessary and thus desirable resource for peas, and sound being one possible modality through which pea plant roots can sense and locate water. gagliano noticed the germinating pea plant radicles not only grow towards the sound of water (% of time) but anticipate its direction prior to reaching the “node” or “decision-making obstacle;” the radicle having already chosen to grow into the arm of the y-maze that would prove the path of least resistance—the most “efficient” path— towards water (gagliano et al. 2017, 151–60). as scientific apparatuses, gagliano explains, mazes have generated much insight for cognitive and behavioral scientists and are themselves considered amongst the most “efficient” ways of studying spatial awareness and discriminatory learning behaviors in a variety of animal species. as pea plants have a different bodily organization with different sensory organs, perceptions, and speeds than animals, gagliano has designed a maze out of two panes of plexiglass, nylon rope, a thin layer of soil, and a small hole at the center in which the pea seedling (figure 1) is positioned. beneath the glass are time-lapse infrared cameras, so that gagliano can record the decision-making behaviors of the growing roots in the dark. with this new apparatus, gagliano aims to test whether pea roots can make the right decisions to explore efficiently and choose the path of least resistance when navigating the more complex four-way maze (figure 2). based upon the findings of gagliano’s prior research (gagliano et al. 2017), she expects to find that peas can sense the location of water through sound vibrations, and can do so efficiently—that is, they can avoid energetically expensive detours by using sound waves for sensing and deciding upon the most direct path to water.   figure 1. pea plant radicles sprouting inside water-soaked paper towel roll; a hydroponic germination technique gagliano learned during training. seeds are considered germinated and ready for planting inside a maze when the radicles are >5mm long   figure 2. time series infrared photography of a pea root navigating a four-way maze. (a) experimental time t0: the germinated pea is planted in a small circular pot whose base is positioned at the center of the maze as indicated by the green dotted line (circle of choice, coc). the base of the pot sits on a glass panel and has been cut open to allow the root to exit and explore the maze once the glass panel is reached. no root is yet visible. (b) experimental time t1: the root reaches the glass panel and becomes visible within the coc area as indicated by the green arrow. (c) experimental time t2: the root starts growing within the coc area. (d). experimental time t3: the root grows directionally towards one arm of the maze and exits the coc area as indicated by the green dotted line. the root is recorded as “making the choice.” (e–f) experimental time t4–5: the root grows into the chosen arm of the maze.   through her trainings as an evolutionary ecologist, gagliano has come to accept efficiency as a defining parameter for knowing and making right decisions across all life forms—in humans as in peas. as gagliano described it to onzik, the right decision pivots upon a pea’s natural tendency to move through the world teleologically—motivated by an innate desire to achieve fitness and duration in the world—and this is embodied as a natural predisposition for making good predictions, for knowing one’s world and anticipating one’s place within its evolving conditions. thus, the one who knows best—the one who knows how to make the right decisions—is the one who has what it takes to not only “sense” or “feel” but to “know” where they ought to be and how to get there on the path of least resistance. implicit in this way of knowing how right decisions are made is the assumption that not knowing where one is going is, evolutionarily speaking, a risky energy expenditure—constitutive of detours, mistakes, or “wrong” decisions. wrong decisions are thus revealed not simply in actions of moving away from what is assumed to be the desired stimulus but by parameters that recognize non-goal directed actions as behaviors lacking predictive value—those behaviors based on bodily guesses, heuristics, or feelings, not “true” cognition. in the design of this experiment, wrong decisions take on the appearance of pea roots growing in a variety of directions, or those that make “detours” before finding the clear path. early in the construction of the mazes, gagliano began to feel overwhelmed by the particular constraints and affordances of the lab. while it offered her science the possibility of controlled temperatures, sound-proof isolation, and sterile conditions, it also espoused the privilege of generating waste in the name of science. as we unpacked the plexiglass of her mazes, engineered according to her specifications, we found ourselves surrounded by plastic wrap and styrofoam boxes—materials of short-term use and long-term terrestrial consequences. an unbearable sense of ethical disconnect imposed upon gagliano’s ecologist senses, demanding of her to change course. without much hesitation, and the support of her new colleagues, we packed up the mazes, water tanks, cameras, and pea seeds into the back of her van and headed north to the subtropical part of new south wales. we found ourselves a house surrounded by forest, crawling with spiders, newts, and snakes, and equipped with a large backyard shed, spacious and barren enough to perform as gagliano’s new lab. we began setting up the pea plant decision-making apparatus immediately, so as not to waste any more time on her short contract. we also incorporated the styrofoam boxes into the apparatus itself, so as not to waste any more materials. the experiment began with what appeared to be several weeks of successful piloting. the initial design was based on two groups: the treatment group (i.e., water sound is randomly assigned and applied to one of the four arms for each replicate maze) and the control group (i.e., no sound is applied, all arms are intended to be equal and hence, seedlings are expected to grow randomly into any one of the arms). as the experimentation proceeded to testing phase (after approximately five days of seed germination), something unexpected arose. when removing the plexiglass covering to peer at the growing roots beneath, gagliano noticed that almost all pea plants in their individual mazes, both those in control and treatment groups, were making the same decision. irrespective of treatment but far from random, the young root tips are responding to a stimulus, albeit not the one provided by gagliano. the apparatus worked to generate a collectively oriented behavior of the young pea plants, though gagliano did not know, or control for, this decision.   figure 3. images of maze apparatuses in construction. (a) onzik adhering nylon rope to plexiglass at the university lab. (b) after the four nylon rope “arms” are adhered, mazes are, after being moved north to new lab, covered in soil (c) then topped with dark plexiglass to protect roots from light radiation, pot with germinating pea seedling placed center. (d) an image of the four replicate four-way mazes inside of the new backyard lab.   unfurling expectations gagliano’s initial response to the unexpected performance of the apparatus was what she described as a “visceral,” “gut feeling” of frustration, a frustration that comes with the sense that she, not the peas, had failed to know correctly. in previous studies she had considered herself successful, and knowledgeable, after demonstrating that pea roots sense and make the right decisions by growing efficiently towards the sound of water. so what went wrong with her design of the apparatus? where did she go wrong? rather than assessing all the details in which gagliano’s experiment could be rationalized as “wrong,” we explore how it is that gagliano came to feel, and know, the response of the apparatus as the effect of her own cause, her own wrongdoing. in meeting the universe halfway, karen barad describes a situation in which a scientist’s apparatus becomes palpable as a “dynamic set of open-ended practices, iteratively refined and reconfigured,” rather than a mere instrument of observation (2007, 167). she gives the example of otto stern and walther gerlach’s magnetic spatialization experiment, in which a simple exhalation, rich in the sulfuric residues of cheap cigars (the only kind stern could afford), left its mark on a silver plate. in so doing, the liveliness of the apparatus was revealed to stern, and evidence for a different phenomenon—the angular momentum of the electron—a difference that was previously inconceivable, became possible. for barad, the example of stern’s cheap cigar makes poignant the material-discursive natures, the indeterminate and dynamically shape-shifting potentials of an apparatus. the cigar is, in barad’s rendering, a “condensation” or “a nodal point” of the “workings of other apparatuses, including class, nationalism, economics, and gender, all of which are part of the stern-gerlach apparatus” (2007, 167). as barad’s account works to demonstrate, scientists tend to take for granted that the outside boundary of an apparatus ends at some “obvious” visual terminus, or that the boundary circumscribes only that set of items a scientist learned to list under “equipment” during lab exercises in science class. they tend to trust the habits of their training, a training that encourages “an immediate grasp of the “apparatus” in its entirety” (barad 2007, 165). such habits, barad suggests, make a scientist susceptible to preconceptions. they work to manage uncertainty by diverting attention away from the lively, agential propensities of matter—of the creative potencies of silver and sulfide or, in our case, a laboratory porousness made perceptible, and significant, through radicle recalcitrance—and focusing attention on the stabilizing forces of past experience. these are embodied conceptions of how an apparatus and a scientist, entangled with the habits of another, ought to perform. in gagliano’s initial response, we trace a sense of success and failure—the “right” and “wrong” outcomes— of her experiment pivot upon a habit of knowing in which gagliano considers herself solely responsible for defining and predicting all possible parameters and outcomes of the apparatus. this is a habit that, in facing the unexpected, affects a feeling of frustration and a concomitant story of individual failure. in this response, feeling corresponds to a wrong kind of knowing, of being uncertain and lacking control. the right kind of knowing is, like that inscribed into the design of the apparatus, an achievement of goal-directed foresight or “planned” action (suchman 1987, 27–48). it takes shape as an assumed clear line of intent, where action proceeds from a plan made inside of an actor’s body, inside the scientist’s head. such explorations are, to gagliano’s disciplined senses, not only inefficient but also difficult to articulate and prove as objectively knowable. they are expressions of feeling bodies whose experiences of knowing are porous to their milieus in ways that run the risk of expending too much energy. in this narrative, such bodies lack the ability to transcend the temporality of the present into the realm of the future abstract—the realm in which, according to the design of gagliano’s apparatus and that learned through her training—is what constitutes true “knowing,” and the conditions in which true “knowledge” of the world can be presented. these feelings of wrong kinds of knowing, as disciplined senses or what barad calls “habits,” can be traced from within the material-discursive relations of a highly competitive evolutionary ecology department, where gagliano was trained to feel that having what it takes to be a good scientist is a “natural predisposition.” in their ethnographic studies of physicists and protein crystallographers, respectively, anthropologists sharon traweek (1988, 123–25) and natasha myers (2015b, 23–25) propose that what comes to count as “natural predispositions” are sociotechnical achievements—embodied in time, through ongoing practice, and subject to change through technological, material, and sociohistorical contingencies. we briefly explore some of the material-discursive practices through which gagliano became entrained to a particular narrative of knowing—through which gagliano learned to embody an image of herself as a scientist already predisposed to making those decisions that lead to the most efficient or “immediate” grasp of an apparatus and its outcomes—towards generating knowledge in objectively definable and probabilistic terms. from within gagliano’s response, we can trace the subtle cues of her teachers and peers, iteratively articulating and reinforcing the conditions in which she was put to the test as “fit” or “not” to know as a scientist. through coursework and lessons to familiarize herself with her biases, or “subjective feelings,” gagliano embodied the distancing protocols of an objective observer, developing what was presumed to be an affectively “neutral stance” between herself and her apparatus. repeated practices of checking “biases”—incorporating cameras as technologies to stand in support, or as counter to, her potentially fallible vision, searching for ways in which one’s “social” body, the influences of unscientific experience, might get in the way of proper knowing—aggregate and condense to become experimental habits. throughout her training she came to make sense of herself as either already having what it takes to accurately, and efficiently, predict and demarcate the parameters of a knowable outcome, or not. feeling emerges from within this narrative as part of this realm of “subjective bias.” as subjective it formulates an experience of knowing that, while at times insightful, cannot be taken seriously, or made legible, as a true form of knowing—or not the kind of knowing through which objectively right decisions get made. in revealing some of the material-discursive compositions of gagliano’s apparatus, the narrative of “knowing” affectively entrained into her practice as a “natural predisposition,” we work not to reduce such sensory dexterities—such habits of feeling for knowing “objectively”—to being “inherently wrong.” rather, in foregrounding the feelings made possible by encounters with the unexpected, we suggest that feeling is neither antithetical to objectively knowing nor is it a sense, or experience, that a scientist has and that may prove insightful “at times.” rather, we seek to demonstrate how feeling is a phenomenon both affectively constituted by and constitutive of a particular habit of a scientist’s knowing experience. and, like all habits, such feelings are susceptible to reconfiguration, “made and unmade on the level of immanence and radical experience” (stengers 2011, 27). from within the material-discursive contingencies of an apparatus, in which it becomes possible for gagliano to feel—to sense and make sense of—herself a failure, insight reaches out like the roots of the peas, luring us into experimenting with the indeterminacies of an apparatus as the grounds for a radicley empirical plant science.   feeling around for the apparatus in getting lost, feminist scientist and science studies scholar patti lather (2007) proposes a practice of learning to work within the “ruins” of science, despite its many disappointments (i.e., deterministic biological theories, biotechnological waste, the violence of positivism and belief in pure objectivity). like donna haraway’s invitation to “stay with the trouble” (2016, 1–8), lather asks of us to renegotiate the conceptual limitations of our scientific ruins, suggesting that “terms understood as no longer fulfilling their promise do not become useless. on the contrary, their very failures become provisional grounds, and new uses are derived” (2007, 10–11). in their “preferring not to” (stengers 2005, 996) respond, or at least, not to respond in “the right way,” the pea plant roots invite us to slow down and pay a different kind of attention to “the limits and necessary misfirings” (lather 2007, 11) of an unfurling pea plant decision-making apparatus. from within the mess of a scientist’s newfound experimental entanglements, it becomes possible to not only reimagine gagliano as the “one who knows,” designs, and speaks for the performance of the peas, but to translate such imaginings into more-than-human empirical formations. turning toward the undetermined, albeit collectively shared interests of the peas, gagliano, like the peas, begins to feel around for the potentials of a new possible apparatus—one in which the design, performance, and outcome are no longer constrained to the visual or “knowable” spectrum of gagliano’s prior trainings but opened to radicley empirical formulations. the guiding inquiry is thus no longer concerned with whether or not the individual plants respond to the sound of water within their individual mazes—efficiently or aimlessly—but with what it becomes possible to know within the porous and indeterminate contingencies of the apparatus. in so doing, gagliano becomes a scientist whose knowing is made possible by not simply “losing herself” but by becoming herself, “a scientist who knows,” differently. for her capacity to know is no longer trapped inside of her body as a “natural predisposition,” revealing itself as either right or wrong, objective or subjective, efficient or aimless. rather, in feeling herself as a failure in response to the unexpected outgrowth of the apparatus, gagliano begins to feel herself as part of its empirical formulations—both constitutive of and partially constituted through the very phenomena the apparatus was designed to reveal. from within this disorienting space of no longer being the “one who knows”—the feeling of being immersed with one’s apparatus—the boundaries between scientist and object, knower and that which is to be known, are unclear. gagliano is absorbed into unexpected experimental relation with the peas, where the boundaries between the two, are subject to radicley empirical innovation. for a scientist’s insight, her capacity to know, is not a matter of “aha” or “objective” revelation but a matter of feeling around—a matter of unfurling in time, space, and intimate, more-than-human relation. a matter of becoming responsive to asynchronous outgrowths, to the inevitable sproutings and spreadings of the unexpected, to those radicle ruptures in rational conformity in which new possible plants and scientists take shape. from within these newly responsive iterations of the apparatus, the individual pea seedlings are still positioned within individual mazes, but the four arms are now reduced to two, with both arms oriented towards the common, albeit still unknown, a stimulus. the difference between the treatment group and the control group is constituted by a small roadblock. the roadblock, a rectangular cutting of polystyrene foam, is randomly assigned and placed at the entrance of one of the two arms for each replicate maze. no roadblock is added to the control group, and therefore the seedlings are expected to grow randomly into either arm of the maze, as both arms are equally uninhibited. by adding a roadblock between the pea plants and their desired direction, gagliano is interested in observing how plants decide the best route to reach stimulus a are they able to identify the arm of the maze with no obstruction before arriving to it? and would they change the direction once the obstacle is encountered, or would they attempt to overcome it? neither decision is more right or wrong. rather, gagliano is now interested in observing the spatial and temporal patterns that arise from “the root collective”—including the pea roots, maze boundaries, and roadblocks, time-lapse recordings, stimulus a and the in situ, that is intra-active cultivations of the apparatus—through which gagliano, too, is figured. her recordings and observations are not only generated in response to the direction of the pea roots’ growth and whether they reach the target inside of the maze (i.e., can the peas make right decisions), but also how roots move and traverse through soils in relation with the shifting boundaries of the maze (i.e., the relational encounters through which pea roots are responding to different constraints and affordances within and beyond the maze) (figure 4). cultivating a heightened attention to the qualities of the medium through which knowing can be felt or experienced as knowledge—the transparent panes of glass through which both the scientist and the camera can visualize the pea plant roots inside a maze—gagliano relinquishes the capacity to claim unmediated transparency to an objectively discerned experiment. instead, the panes of plexiglass, the soil, the cameras, the pea roots growing towards an unknown stimulus, activate a “vision beyond the visible” (scott 1991, 794). a vision that both conducts and challenges the fantastic projections that form the basis for gagliano’s scientific investigation into “pea plant decision making.” in this story, the phenomena of feeling, knowing, and making a decision originate not in a presumably unmediated experience of a “natural” or “inherent” predisposition, but out of an intra-active or affective prehension of the moving, differentiating qualities of the apparatus: the displacement of soil by growing roots, the light diffracting through the lens of the cameras, the sonic vibrations of water, the emanations of an unknown albeit significant signal somewhere beyond the walls of the lab, and gagliano’s trained senses, expanding and feeling around for the potentials of a living, growing, unfurling apparatus.   figure 4. (a) construction of two-way maze with roadblock. (b) image of radicle growing into unobstructed arm of maze.   conclusion gagliano’s radicley empirical inquiries remain ongoing, though not in any form easily translated into the representational demands of science. the peas continue to lure her into feeling around for the creative outgrowths of an apparatus—spurning a curiosity in more porous, ecologically responsive and response-able modes of experimentation. having since expanded into a meshwork greenhouse adjacent to the lab, and thereafter into the unruly bounds of the vegetable garden, the once sterile expectations of a properly controlled apparatus have given way to the fervor of the surrounding forest—to the cacophony of birds and insects, the fluctuations of light, moisture, wind, etc. the apparatus through which gagliano’s insights become possible is subject to dynamically more-than-human composition. the perceptions of both gagliano and the peas are a matter of perpetual cultivation. and while such radicley empirical modes of experimentation have the potential to provoke new insights about how a scientist comes to feel around for knowing differently, it nonetheless proves difficult for a scientist charged with the task of generating replicable data in a timely manner. in pointing to the limitations and tacit conditionings of a scientist’s knowledge-making habits, the peas invite us to slow down and feel around for new possible conditions through which science can be made. while the peas point away from the expected, from the conventions of an a priori knowing, they do not point to a “something else” out there waiting to be revealed. this is, as we see it, the radicley empirical invitation. it is not simply a reformulation of the scientist’s question but a reconstruction of the very terms through which a scientist’s questions become possible. not simply a renewed epistemic attention to a scientist’s “feeling body” but an interest in the material-discursive histories through which the very concept of “feeling” is made possible within the empirical practices of a scientist. in accepting such an invitation, we endeavor to expand our potentials for response. feeling around for the potentials of a pea plant decision-making apparatus is less a practice of generating new knowledge about peas than it is a collaborative experiment in cultivating a radicley empirical ethics of transdisciplinary and transspecies response-ability. as such, feeling and knowing do not precede their experimental encounters as inherent capacities, natural predispositions, or experiences that one “has,” but are rather experiential categories made possible through intra-active, more-than-human encounters. particular scientists and plants, feelers and knowers, precipitate out of these intra-active entanglings at the expense of others. no “decision,” or theorizing of “decisions,” is innocent, but rather is partially constitutive of the very world it claims to represent. like many scientists, gagliano continues to grapple with such ruptures in convention. for such empirical habits are not easily broken. they are instilled in the canons of her discipline, the expectations and policings of colleagues, and the maze-like network of institutions that demand efficiency and control—at the expense of curiosity—out of both herself and the processes she studies. but as we have come to see it, gagliano’s struggles against the habits of science are, all the while, indications that gagliano is feeling around for openings into a differently possible science—sensing and making sense of herself anew from within the mess, the ruins, the failures, and ethical entanglings of the scientific venture. we suggest that this is perhaps all the while the kind of science the peas invite us to craft. as robin wall kimmerer reminds us, learning to listen to plants requires us to “unlearn hurrying,” to relinquish “the parameters of efficiency and controlled for precision” from our scientifically trained preconceptions (2013, 233). such modes of listening require much more time, and trust, that scientific insights can be generated without fully knowing the conditions in which, for example, “right” or “wrong” kinds of knowing can be rendered knowable. as a minor empiricism, our radicley empirical proposition is neither better nor worse, more right or wrong, but a different way to go about crafting inquiries into the sensorial (re)configurations of knowing. from within the creative unfurlings of an apparatus in unexpected formation, it becomes possible to amplify the responsive potentials for radicle and all kinds of radically empirical means of knowing. evoking different translations of a scientist’s detours, their feeling around for an apparatus without a clear knowing of what’s to come not as wrong but as perhaps immanent to the act of novel inquiry; extending the invitation to feel around for, and therefore about knowing, plants, scientists, and all kinds of feelers and knowers, differently.   acknowledgements monica gagliano is supported by the templeton world charity foundation under the diverse intelligences initiative (grant # twcf0313 & twcf0541). kristi onzik is supported by the uc davis department of anthropology graduate student summer fellowship and uc davis feminist art and science shop hatch (mellon research initiative) research award. with special thanks to dr. joseph dumit, dr. marisol de la cadena, and dr. suzana sawyer for their comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript and for the generous encouragement received from anonymous reviewers throughout the publication process.   references andrews, lindsey. 2015. “black feminism’s minor empiricism: hurston, combahee, and the experience of evidence.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 1 (1): 1–37. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28808. barad, karen. 2007. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. darwin, charles r. 1880. the power of movement in plants. london: john murray. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemid=f1325&viewtype=text&pageseq=1. gagliano, monica. 2018. thus spoke the plant: a remarkable journey of groundbreaking scientific discoveries and personal encounters with plants. berkeley, ca: north atlantic books. gagliano, monica, mavra grimonprez, michael renton, and martial depczynski. 2017. “tuned in: plant roots use sound to locate water.” oecologia, no. 184, 151–60. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-017-3862-z. gagliano, monica, vladyslav v. vyazovskiy, alexander a. borbély, mavra grimonprez, and martial depczynski. 2016. “learning by association in plants.” scientific reports 6 (1): 38427. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep38427. haraway, donna. 1988. “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” feminist studies 14 (3): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066. ———. 2016. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chtulucene. durham, nc: duke university press. hustak, carla, and natasha myers. 2012. “involutionary momentum: affective ecologies and the sciences of plant/insect encounters.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 23 (3): 74–118. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1892907. jacob, francois. 1995. the statue within: an autobiography. new york: cold spring harbor press. james, william. (1912) 2003. essays in radical empiricism. mineola, ny: dover publications. kaku, michio. 2004. einstein’s cosmos: how albert einstein’s vision transformed our understanding of space and time. new york: w.w. norton. keller, evelyn fox. 1983. a feeling for the organism: the life and work of barbara mcclintock. new york: w.h. freeman and company. kimmerer, robin wall. 2013. braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. minneapolis, mn: milkweed editions. lather, patti. 2007. getting lost: feminist efforts toward a double(d) science. albany, ny: suny press. masi, elisa, marzena ciszak, george b. stefano, luciana renna, elisa azzarello, camilla pandolfi, sergio mugnai, frantisek baluska, tito f. arecchi, and stefano mancuso. 2009. “spatiotemporal dynamics of the electrical network activity in the root apex.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 106 (10): 4048–53. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0804640106. myers, natasha. 2015a. “conversations on plant sensing: notes from the field.” natureculture, no. 3, 35–66. https://doi.org/10.18910/75519. ———. 2015b. rendering life molecular: models, modelers, and excitable matter. durham, nc: duke university press. myers, natasha, and joseph dumit. 2011. “haptic creativity and the mid-embodiments of experimental life.” in companion to the anthropology of the body and embodiment, edited by frances mascia-lees, 239–61. oxford: wiley blackwell. prentice, rachel. 2013. bodies in formation: an ethnography of anatomy and surgery education. durham, nc: duke university press. rocke, alan j. 2010. image and reality: kekulé, kopp, and the scientific imagination. chicago: university of chicago press. rose, nikolas. 2001. “the politics of life itself.” theory, culture & society 18 (6): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632760122052020. roy, deboleena. 2018. molecular feminisms: biology, becomings, and life in the lab. seattle: university of washington press. scott, joan w. 1991. “the evidence of experience.” critical inquiry 17 (4): 773–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343743. stengers, isabelle. 2005. “a cosmopolitical proposal.” in making things public: atmospheres of democracy, edited by bruno latour and peter weibel, 994–1003. cambridge, ma: mit press. ———. 2011. thinking with whitehead: a free and wild creation of concepts. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. suchman, lucy. 1987. plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication. new york: cambridge university press. sydney environment institute. “about us.” accessed january 17, 2022. https://sei.sydney.edu.au/about-us/about/. traweek, sharon. 1988. beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy physicists. cambridge, ma: harvard university press.     author bios kristi onzik is a phd candidate in the uc davis anthropology department. for information please visit https://anthropology.ucdavis.edu/people/konzik.   monica gagliano is an associate professor of evolutionary ecology and director of the biological intelligence lab. for information please visit www.monicagagliano.com. microsoft word 77061-1-11-gotkin.docx gotkin, k. (2019). crip club vibes: technologies for new nightlife. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5 (1), 1-7. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kevin gotkin, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical commentary crip club vibes: technologies for new nightlife kevin gotkin new york university kgotkin@nyu.edu i’ve been thinking about what it would mean to design nightlife around disability. we need all nightlife spaces to become accessible, of course, something that calls for a thoroughgoing restructuring of the built environment, transportation systems, and access labor. but i’m imagining the possibilities for creating a world within the inaccessible status quo, a nightlife community that could divine the truth and complexity of disability history, culture, and resistance. when i ask my disability community in new york city about nightlife, i get a series of sighs. nightlife is exhausting. that’s not because being disabled in nightlife spaces is in itself exhausting. it’s exhausting because ableism is exhausting and because nightlife is a nexus of many inaccessible cultural forms that make parties, clubs, and bars feel like one marathon after another. we don’t often think of nightlife as a technology itself, but we should. it’s hard to decide the status of nightlife in basic terms: is it a community? an industry? a social function? if we take up the call in the manifesto that inspires this special issue, we can locate nightlife within the “non-compliant knowing-making” of crip technoscience that relishes the world-making possibilities for disabled living (fritsch & hamraie, 2019). technoscientific gotkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 protocols for thinking about nightlife offer what has traditionally been absent: deliberation, design, and aesthetics as a toolkit for shaping our collective imaginations and desires. tinkering, often the kernel of technoscientific practice, is already what many nightlife artists understand in their work. take, for example, the collaboration among djs and sound engineers in the production of sonic and vibrational spheres of a party. what anthropologist biella coleman (2013) calls the pleasures of hacking, the skein of frustration and excitement in self-directed realization of goals and problem solving (p. 12), is an apt description of how djs move extemporaneously through their libraries as they read and respond to the energy of a dance floor. crip tinkering in nightlife has the potential to rework just about everything we know about how nightlife should work. the 120 to 130 beatsper-minute tempo that is often assumed to be the standard to energize a dance floor could work in vastly different registers for wheeled movement. the aesthetics of diy spaces could relish the invitation to modify the height of a counter or install grab bars in a bathroom. the technoscience of crip nightlife is what scholar and poet sami schalk (2010) witnesses in her poem “our dance dance revolution” at the society for disability studies conference dance, where bodies and limbs soar into the air onto the floor against chair poppin' wheelies against crutch spinning in circles against shoulder supporting dips against stage supplying lift and gotkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 it's all fair game *** one story about how the punk scene grew in san francisco involves a legendary venue called the deaf club. “trashy-looking teenagers dressed in thrift store chic, mingle with studiously stylish art types,” wrote san francisco chronicle music reporter joel selvin in october 1979 (p. 6). the “highspots” of the scene included a “former filipino supper club,” “an exsynagogue,” and “the san francisco club of the deaf on valencia street, where spike-haired fans mix with the club members, who can’t hear the music but feel the vibrations.” the manager for a band called the offs, the story goes, was on his way to get a burrito when he saw a “hall for rent” sign and wandered in. he negotiated on a piece of paper with deaf man named bill, “a mustachioed, lascivious, cigar-chewing character” (as cited in boulware & tudor, 2009, p. 96). soon, the club was drawing sizable crowds with no advertising, mixing young punk fans with older members of the deaf community who had used the space as a cultural center since the 1930s (schneider, 2014, para. 1). “ear-shattering, heavy-artillery live performances” (selvin, 1996, p. 109) featured bands like the dead kennedys, d.o.a., the subhumans, tuxedomoon, x, flipper, and the germs. figure 1. the deaf club in san francisco, photo by sue brisk (likely 1979). gotkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 artist alison o’daniel (2013-ongoing) recreates the deaf club in one scene of her film the tuba thieves. as a band on stage starts a song for a rowdy young audience, a number of women several decades older play a game of cards and drink budweisers. people sign and raise their glasses to each other. the emcee tells the crowd the neighbors are through with the noise and the weirdos. an older couple nearby gets into an argument in asl about whether their granddaughter should move to new york. when o’daniel curated an evening of music and storytelling as an extension of her film in new york in 2016, she tried to recapture the bizarre and beautiful meeting of these two powerful communities. “punk is perfect,” said opal gordon, one of the evening’s performers about the intersection of deaf and punk cultures “because it’s loud, it’s heavy, it’s in-your-face” (as cited in reese, 2016, para. 4). beyond debunking the idea that deaf people can’t enjoy music, the evening also buoyed a dream of a more inclusive and innovative nightlife scene that the deaf club modeled decades earlier. when we talk about disability and nightlife, we often talk only about the physical accessibility of venues, like whether an entrance has a ramp or the bathroom has proper stall width. this kind of access is essential, and in fact the deaf club, located up a flight of stairs and routinely cited for unsafe conditions, was inaccessible in some of these key ways. in the wake of the deadly 2016 fire at an artist collective warehouse called ghost ship, city officials and activists alike have homed in on the regulatory apparatus that ensures accessibility and safety. figure 2. the deaf club in new york, photo by eli schmidt for the new york times (2016). gotkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 but missing in these conversations is an enlarged notion of meaningful access, one predicated on radical relationality, care, and exploration. this must include thinking of disability as a cultural and aesthetic force, where we cultivate the possibilities of bodies and minds by thinking anew about how to share and create space. at the club, we create worlds. we have an array of technologies for it: our clothing, our intoxications, our sounds, our artwork. club technologies plug us into creative outlets that transcend disciplinarity and individuality. dj artists can find disability aesthetics all around, like in an enthrallingly glitchy remix of lady gaga’s (2016) “joanne,” the title track from an album dedicated to her exploration of the death of her artistsurvivor-aunt who lived with lupus. and the dj can work—and pay for—the music of artists who identify as disabled, like collander (2017) whose song “sickbed” attests to the crip innovations in what others might call “bedroom pop.” but the dj must also refuse the audism of nightlife spaces. they must resist any simple ideas about how to make music accessible (like the notion that simply transcribing and projecting lyrics is what deaf clubgoers need or want). perhaps, instead, the dj collaborates with a poet who scribes the score live and a choreographer who transmutes the vibrations into a sighted and perhaps haptic experience. accessible nightlife artistry is, in this way, properly anti-disciplinary. there can’t be a single ideal modality. those who have had the fortune to attend the saturday night dance at conferences of the society for disability studies know the unique possibilities for crip world-making in the club (or the hotel ballroom that is the club). so much speculation about the wonders of technology to erase or eliminate disability calls for a response that refuses the eugenic drive and models the brilliant alternative: spaces where disabled drag queens send up stereotypes of desexualization, deaf djs send vibrations through the whole body, bartenders prize care over cash, where inclusion is not merely pragmatic but transcendent. gotkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 acknowledgements thank you to aimi hamraie and the members of the critical design lab at vanderbilt university who have helped me think through this stuff. gina gibney, kara gilmour, joy douglas, and my cohort-mates in the gibney moving toward justice program have been wonderful supporters of my disability nightlife project. jerron herman, shannon finnegan, ezra benus, and marissa perel are my fellow party-artists who help me imagine the worlds we create at night. references boulware, j., & tudor, s. (2009). no one’s listening. in gimme something better: the profound, progressive, and occasionally pointless history of bay area punk from dead kennedys to green day (pp. 96-109). new york, ny: penguin books. coleman, e. g. (2013). coding freedom: the ethics and aesthetics of hacking. princeton, nj: princeton university press. collander. (2017). sickbed. fritsch, k., & hamraie, a. (2019). crip technoscience manifesto. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1). gaga, l. (2016). joanne. on joanne. los angeles, ca and new york, ny: streamline and interscope records. o’daniel, a. (director). (2013-ongoing). the tuba thieves. united states. reese, n. (2016). scenes from a punk rock and storytelling show, for deaf people. t magazine. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/29/tmagazine/entertainment/punk-rock-for-deaf-people-queens.html schalk, s. (2010). our dance dance revolution. disability studies quarterly, 36(3-4). retrieved from http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1281/1306 schneider, m. (2014, october 22). the roots of san francisco punk: the deaf club, 1978-1980. dangerous minds. retrieved from https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_roots_of_san_francisco_punk_ the_deaf_club_1978-1980 gotkin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 selvin, j. (1979, october 22). s.f. goes punk. san francisco chronicle, p. 6. selvin, j. (1996). san francisco: the musical history tour. san francisco, ca: chronicle books. bio kevin gotkin is a visiting assistant professor of media, culture, & communication at new york university and co-director, with simi linton, of disability/arts/nyc (dant). microsoft word lab-lee interviews.docx lee, r. (2017). four interviews with scientists on “science out of feminism”. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3 (1) 1-39 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © rachel lee, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license lab meeting four interviews with scientists on “science out of feminism” introduced by rachel lee; interviews conducted and edited by alexandra apolloni and rachel lee rachel lee ucla rlee@humnet.ucla.edu introduction across the 2016-17 academic year, ucla’s center for the study of women conducted interviews with select scientists at ucla’s campus to explore their thoughts on “science out of feminist theory.”1 interviewers alexandra apolloni and rachel lee asked their subjects to describe their research and then to ponder how their practices were informed by feminism. their answers were wide-ranging but some common themes emerged. all of these interviewees recognized that feminist networks – communities of female scientists—required fostering, and that they, themselves, were indebted to strong female role models. while we tend to think of scientific research as that which occurs at the bench or in the field, these interviews clarified the enormous impact of interpersonal mentoring and affirmative networking in diversifying stem (science technology engineering and math) fields. the two women we 2 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) interviewed also related personal experiences in which either the desire to be or actually being a part of a robust and supportive community-withina-community made the difference in persisting through strings of “failed” experiments or convincing them to transfer horizontally to a related field. below, we publish selections from four of the interviews, one with tracy johnson, professor and maria rowena ross chair in cell biology and biochemistry at ucla, another with hilary godwin, currently associate dean of academic programs and professor of environmental health sciences at the ucla fielding school of public health, another with root gorelick, professor of biology at carleton university in ottawa, and finally, one with patrick allard, assistant professor of toxicology and in the institute of society and genetics at ucla. the subjects are all researchers with a connection to ucla’s center for the study of women. locating interview subjects was somewhat challenging, as most scientists do not publicly identify themselves as feminists in their publications or publicly posted biographies. in seeking interviewees, we found that those who are engaged in diversity work on their campuses (through mentoring programs, etc.) were more likely to identify themselves and their work as feminist. while the work of these researchers suggests promise for a feminist scientific future, many spoke about gender-bias that continues to prevail in their fields, professional organizations, and departments. where we see cause for hope, however, is in the efforts of these researchers to mentor a new generation of scientists equipped to challenge such views. was the scientific content of these researchers’ work recognizably feminist? in the instances of two of the researchers whom we interviewed, the answer was yes, even as each of them had contrasting aims in terms of assuming or demolishing the biological naturalness of sex differences in their research. in a presentation titled “no essential differences between the sexes” for the ucla institute of society and genetics which occurred immediately prior to our interview, gorelick reviewed the criteria with which we differentiate organisms as male versus female;2 and then 3 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) pointed to zoological and botanical examples that cast doubt on these criteria. following in the wake of feminist biologists such as anne faustosterling and joan roughgarden, gorelick’s research unseats male and female as the primary mechanism for differentiating kinds within a species. put more provocatively, gorelick claims that the view that “male and female [are the] only natural sexes is false.” scholarship in this vein, contesting the naturalness of binary sex, helps to destigmatize intersex individuals and also to underscore the specious quality of arguments that attempt to rationalize as “only natural” (i.e., as rooted in biology) the extant social and political inequalities between men and women.3 on the other side of the coin are those who contest past findings in biological science that have proceeded as if sex does not matter, or put more precisely, as if the universal body is the male body. allard’s research practice explores the data gap regarding the effects of hazardous chemicals, especially the subset of endocrine-disrupting compounds (those having hormonal effects), over the life course of female organisms. historically, toxicology preferred collecting data on male specimens due to their perceived hormonal constancy (given, for instance, their lack of menstrual cycles). the resulting gender bias in results, in short, was excused by way of seemingly non-gendered rationales (i.e.: the “easier” experiment to run was on males). for those investigating how chemicals that mimic estrogens and androgens interfere with and alter a host of “normal” biological functions (metabolism, neuro-endocrinological pathways, immunity, fertility), time of exposure and fluctuations in rates of growth and development across the life course have become crucial factors to consider in experimental design. moreover, for scientific research to be responsive and meaningful to more than half the population, recognizing sex differences—the gathering of data on female organisms with their so called “complex” hormonal cycles as well as male organisms—remains crucial to the translational value of this research to human policy, regulation, and healthcare. in terms of the research practices of the other two researchers 4 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) whom we interviewed, the relation of their science to feminism was, arguably, more subtle. johnson’s remarks, however, indicate that gender and race do matter to the scientific method. gendered and/or racialized experiences of the world shape the kinds of issues that individuals care about, and, as such, the questions that researchers ask, the lens they employ when observing experiments, and the kinds of conclusions that they draw. thus, regardless of whether or not a scientific project is about gender or a purportedly feminist question, gender matters to that project. for that reason, johnson called our attention to her pedagogy and mentoring as key sites of feminist and racial equity work that benefits science. “molecular biology,” she tells us, “requires visualizing phenomena that are inherently hard to visualize. the first step is to come up with a model of what one thinks is happening, and then design an experiment that will get at that.” for johnson, homogeneity amongst science practitioners can lead to homogeneity in the models for visualizing molecular phenomena. her laboratory work involves cultivating an ethos among her students—these journeymen scientists--of openness to the unexpected and to the pleasure and fun of having freshmen of diverse and underrepresented backgrounds hypothesize models in ways less constrained by years of traditional training. giving younger students a taste of the pleasures of ‘being a scientist’ builds community in ways that are both rigorous and supportive. it is that community that sustains underrepresented minority women in stem fields when “they encounter things that are negative” so that they don’t feel that they are “outsiders who are looking in at what [real] scientists do.” for hilary godwin, whose early work in chemistry focused on how (lead) atoms bond, the desire to render her research more applicable to everyday contexts led her, first, to investigate, chemically, why lead was poisonous and then, to incorporate social factors into the equation of how poor and racial minority populations become more vulnerable to lead poisoning. moving into the school of public health at ucla, godwin found more like-minded interlocutors for her work. in pondering how 5 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) chemistry would be different “if [it] were really diverse” and if women were at the center, godwin pointed to her dialogues with female chemists from cameroon in which their being oriented toward making a difference in people’s lives was always front and center. in contrast, shearing social concerns from the research platform is not an uncommon practice in traditional inorganic chemistry as practiced in u.s. universities. what kind of science, then, has emerged out of feminism according to these select scientists? if one were expecting these scientists to identify a particular subfield as the place to do feminist research, then our interviews did not yield a straightforward answer. nor did the interviewees see their own enrollment in science, with its commitment to objective findings, as compromising their acknowledgment that the gender, class, and race of the observer— his/her sociohistorical situation—affects the research practice. reflecting perhaps the salience of women-of-color, transnational, and indigenous feminisms, all of our interviewees also emphasized the braidedness of their feminism with their pedagogy of underrepresented minorities (johnson and allard), their conversations with “native” epistemologies (gorelick), or their direct collaboration with women in the global south (godwin). additionally, all our interviewees had stories to tell about the subtleties of sex discrimination in their fields and how tuning into those effects (e.g., women being channeled into botany while men were channeled into zoology) could be difficult to articulate at the time of the event’s occurrence or could only be identified upon later reflection with other sympathetic colleagues. conditions for working—the infrastructures of scientific research including mentoring and letter writing—in other words, were as much a central part of what could be considered the scientific practice that emerges from feminism. in short, each of our interviewees embraced multiple key insights from feminist science and technology studies. all acknowledged the scientist’s ethical obligations to his/her students and affirmed the importance of social justice to their practices of science. their recounted experiences also attest to science as a contested field of power, with 6 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) some confronting outright hostility toward their efforts to broaden the terrain of science. our interviewees contestations within science included their movements sideways within their institutions or across institutions to find more hospitable homes to address the way that disparate outcomes can follow upon seemingly neutral research designs. finally, with their emphases on their own indebtedness to feminist mentors and collaborators, they all help move the story of what makes a scientist away from the myth of the “individual genius.” what these interviews reveal, then, is that feminist theory can and does shape science. it provides researchers with the tools to recognize and respond to gender bias and discrimination in their disciplines and in their labs. it moves them to advocate for and engender a diversity of perspectives in their labs--and in so doing, it brings to light new questions and methods. finally, it can bring scientists to question commonly-held “truths” about the nature of sex and gender. hilary godwin aa: could speak about some of your first experiences with science. what brought you to the work that you're doing now? hg: my parents are field biologists, so actually my first experiences with science were as a very small child doing field work with them. so from a very small age, the question was not whether or not i wanted to be a scientist, but rather, what kind. getting to where i am now was complicated. when i went to college i thought that i wanted to major in either anthropology or psychology, and i took both the anthropology and psychology classes my freshman year and did not like them. in the meantime i was taking freshman chemistry because i thought i might want to get a medical degree and i loved chemistry so i ended up majoring in chemistry and doing research in chemistry and then going to graduate school in chemistry, and i got a phd in chemistry. and by the time i finished my 7 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) phd., which was in very traditional inorganic chemistry [looking at how different atoms bond with each other], i decided that even though i really enjoyed doing it, i wanted to do something that was more relevant to people. i chose to do post-doctorate research at johns hopkins university in the school of medicine and transitioned into biochemistry, and then after that, started a faculty position at northwestern university in the chemistry department and worked on the program that i set up there looking at why lead is poisonous. [this direction] married my interest in people and chemistry. after being there for ten years, i had the opportunity to move public health [at ucla], which was much more aligned with the research that i was doing and also my interests. i felt like i spent a lot of time trying to explain to my colleagues why i cared about people. so, so it was nice to moveto be with people who also cared about people. it’s been very liberating being in public health. my research has broadened significantly since then. i still do some toxicology work but i also do work looking at health impacts of forest conservation, water conservation, and toxics policy. it's very, very diverse compared to what i was doing when i was a chemist. so i consider myself a reformed chemist. aa: when you were first doing chemistry were there mentors who were pushing you in the direction of doing work that involved people or were you on your own? hg: this sounds crazy to most people who have had the experience of taking organic chemistry, but i actually really just loved organic chemistry and particularly loved the organic chemistry lab. my organic chemistry ta said, 'you should try doing lab work.' he was the one who encouraged me to start doing independent research and i just loved doing it and i loved making things. i really like to cook so to me organic chemistry is kind of the same thing. it was really passion driven. it wasn't until halfway through grad school that i thought, “what about the people?” 8 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) aa: do you remember what made you start asking that question? hg: i felt the work i was doing was very esoteric and, not to be morbid, but i sort of felt like if i died it wouldn’t have made any difference that i had spent all that time working on my precious little molecules. i wanted to do something that had broader impact. the work that i was doing in graduate school [regarding the bonding of atoms] was very fundamental chemistry. i made a conscious decision when i did my post-doctoral work to switch to working on biological molecules, while still working on ones that had metals in them. and then i started looking at how poisonous metals impact the proteins that naturally have good metals. aa: and do you think of that as feminist work? hg: yeah, do i think of that as feminist work. i mean certainly there is an important maternal and child health component to it. another part of it that felt feminist: i was actually the first female faculty member that was hired in the chemistry department at northwestern university, and then the first one to get tenure, and the first one to be department chair. i felt very profoundly how it was isolating; it created pressure that i wouldn't have felt if i had been male. that was really the point in my life when i became more conscious of feminism and women's rights, and inequities. in terms of my research, around the time i left northwestern and came here, which was ten years ago, i started working with a grassroots organization [at its inception comprised of] all female chemists [running] women's leadership and empowerment workshops in the united states (and now globally). this was definitely an important component of the service work that i do. in terms of research, i have a project looking at health impacts of forest conservation on indigenous populations; there is a significant component of it that to me feels feminist without question. there are very different impacts not just on indigenous versus majority populations in 9 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) terms of male and female populations [within those categories]. it has been super interesting talking to the women in the villages that we work with about it. to me, one of the most poignant moments was when the women in one of the villages were explaining to me why they thought it was important to have job training programs for women. they said, “we want to work!” and i was like “i know, i'm here working,” and they're like “oh right!” i was like, “this is why we're here! you don't have to explain to me why you want to work, i get it.” and it was really where i saw how differently the women in the village interacted with me versus the all-male researchers that have been working in that village for literally decades. the first time i visited the main village we work with there, in cameroon, my colleague was like, “wow! the women talk to you!” i said of course they talk to me, like duh, of course! he said that, over the past 10 years that he’d been working there, he hadn't felt like the women had ever really engaged with him but also that he had women researchers who were biologists doing field work whom he felt like the women didn't engage with. and i asked, “well, it was because they were doing work that the women identified as male work, right?” and he said that that was true because there was one male researcher who really liked to cook and had actually spent a lot of time with the women, cooking with them, and he said that was the only person from his whole team over the years who had done so. i was asking them questions about their kids and the challenges they face and talking to them about things that women talk about, right? so that part of it definitely feels feminist. aa: going back to what you were saying about your time at northwestern as the first woman in that department: what kind of climate do you see for your students now? hg: it’s definitely much better in public health than it is in chemistry, even today. i started as a faculty member about 20 years ago. even chemistry, things have improved since then. yet, women chemists still mention having a lot of the same issues that i experienced 20 years ago. some of 10 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) those things are just better in public health because we have better gender ratios. where students identify issues in public health is as it relates to underrepresented minority groups. [at ucla] we actually have pretty good representation of hispanic students and latino students but we don't have great representation of african-american students. it's better here than at most schools of public health, but it's still not great, so i would say [it’s important to listen] to african-american students [and find] kinship. the other group of students who i feel are struggling with issues that are similar to the things that i remember feeling being the only person from a certain group and being identified as other – are our transgender students. we have a really strong careers in public health student group and i think the gay and lesbian students feel like they have a good support group there, but i still hear from the transgender students that they feel like there are comments that people make without realizing it that touch them to their core. that part of it, to me, reminds me of when i would hear people saying [sexist or racist] things and wonder, “did that person realize he said that? i just can't even believe it” you know? so that part of it, i don't think it's completely gone. aa: and do you think that having that experience of being the one woman or being, you know, one of very few students of color or few transgender students, do you think that shapes the kinds of questions that people ask as a scientist? hg: for sure. it actually makes me feel like more of a complete person as i don't separate social issues from science. a lot of times scientists separate social stuff as subjective, saying science is clear cut and has nothing to do with any of that stuff. i have a view of science [as also influenced by subjective factors, for instance, in] the questions that people choose to ask, and the way that they choose to answer them. rl: so what if you were teaching chemistry but you were teaching in a 11 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) women's studies department? would the course be structured differently? for instance, would you start with cooking a meal and what happens to atomic bonds in cooking versus, i don't know, the making of the hydrogen bomb? how would you do it? hg: yeah that's a good question. i’ve actually never thought about that. the easy answer is 'yes' i would do something differently. so, i teach a fundamentals of chemistry in the environmental health department, which is basically a refresher of general chemistry, and it was because my colleagues kept complaining that people didn't remember what they had learned in freshman chemistry. but, of course, they don't. in their minds it was something completely irrelevant to what they're doing now, so why would they remember that stuff. the way that i teach chemistry in the environmental health department is completely different from the way i used to teach freshman chemistry. i found a really great book that focuses on concepts as opposed to problem solving which is really the focus of most general chemistry classes. the core concepts are the same it's just different in terms of the focus, which is on their relevance to environmental problems. so i would imagine that if i were in a women's studies department that i would similarly develop a class where you take a step back and say what are the core things that i want to teach to the people who are in the class, what's the best way to convey that information, and what do the people who would be taking this course actually care about? aa: along these lines, i wonder if you could talk a little bit about your approach to mentorship and how you engage with students in your lab. hg: i sort of have this philosophy that, not that suffering is good, but having gone through difficult life circumstances makes people more humble and more appreciative, that different people struggle with different things, and those are valuable perspectives to have as a mentor. when i was in the chemistry department i felt like there were a lot of 12 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) times when people would say to me, you know you mentor people that way because you're a woman and i would always push back and say actually my post-doctoral adviser who was a man had the same mentoring style. it has nothing to do with being female or male; it has to do with valuing people as human beings and a fundamental philosophy that it's important to treat people well. but you know some people think that that is gender related and i just happen to think that it's not. but would i say like, being a woman, does it influence my mentoring? of course it does. aa: you are interested in communicating science to non-scientists. could you talk a bit about your work in that regard, and whether that desire also has a social justice or a feminist grounding? hg: the origins of that desire started when i was at northwestern communicating about lead poisoning. it really was about communicating why do we do the things we do as scientists and what the implications of the results of science are. but it comes back to the core idea that it's not enough to do science, that you have to make sure that you're communicating it to critical stakeholders and the general public. i think it goes back to my original desire to be an anthropologist. there's something i just love about the process of trying to figure out how people conceptualize the world around them and how to communicate effectively to people. rl: how does gender or gender theoryand that can be also you know trans theory affect the practice of chemistry? hg: to me the biggest impact still, even, you know 20 years after starting as a faculty member or as the only woman, is that chemistry still is really white, and straight white male dominated. it's not that there aren't other people but it's really dominated by [straight white men] and to me that really impacts the way they conceptualize what are important problems 13 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) and how to attack them as discipline. that [formation] made me reach out to public health and service. what i care about is much more in alignment with what most people in public health care about than it is what most people in chemistry care about. i tried to explain that to people – intellectually, public health, is like finding the right home. but if chemistry really were diverse, how would it be different? so for instance, to me it's fascinating when i go to work in cameroon. i often get together with women chemists through the women’s leadership development program in science. and it's so fascinating to me to see how different the interests are in terms of what's considered to be important chemical topics in cameroon versus in the united states. the things that they, as a community, tend to be interested in, to me, seem much more practical and useful. they still don't seem as practical and useful as what someone in public health is interested in, but compared to chemists in the united states they're way more practical. so for instance, there's a big interest in natural products and extracting things from plants. that's a big topic in the united states but in the united states it's very focused on “i'm going to isolate this really complicated molecule that comes from this obscure plant or animal and then i'm going to synthesize it in fifty billion steps,” with the connection to the practical world becoming very tangential. whereas in cameroon, the thinking is “we know that this particular plant product is used by this community for this purpose and so we know there is some useful thing here. we want to extract that thing so that we can then market it and develop it.” it's not really about a desire to make something in its pristine, pure form; it's really about how we can create a product that could be marketable and that can cause development in the economy. that could help people. patrick allard aa: do you think of your research as a creative practice? pa: i'd say it's a very creative practice, absolutely. 14 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) aa: and so do you think that being aware of social inequality, or gender inequality, or issues related to justice broadly defined do you think that they shape the creative choices that you make in the lab? pa: i think they do, but not necessarily in the direct way that you're thinking. in my lab we look at exposures and the way they affect reproduction, and i've historically focused on female reproduction for the reason that hasn’t been researched as much as male reproduction. but the reason why it's not being researched as much is because reproduction is inherently very complex and the female oocytes or female germ cells develop over the entire lifetime of an individual from in utero all the way to adulthood, which is slightly different from the way males do. for males you can quickly just look at an adult and know what's going wrong; with females it's really hard; much, much harder to do. i realized that there was this gap of data around harmful impacts on female reproduction. i decided to look at what had not been historically looked at too much. i don't think the data gaps necessarily come from social inequality. i just think there's an inherent biological difficulty in looking at things through the models that we used to have to use, and so i decided to develop new models to address that. of course sometimes, and i've not encountered this directly, there's the thought that “well if you figure out how males are affected then it's probably the same thing with females.” i've heard those things being said before but people have not rejected my work because of that. and i think it's a very male-centric view because it's inherently actually different, but i think some people are willing to brush off the female side easily. parts of my work directly connects to the question of inequalities. in an ideal world where we would all be equal, magically; if there were no social differences or chemical factor differences between all of us, would our health really improve? would we all be equal with regards to our 15 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) health? and what i'm finding through the models i’ve developed in the lab is that through our histories, our chemical history, we carry [our history] with us. your ancestors still determine, in terms of chemical exposure, your health now. even if everything was equal now we would not be equal because exposures may have effects several generations down the line but not right now. i try to actually address that question of inequality through this angle of transgenerational exposures. there's mounting evidence that those are real, that for generations you carry the burden from your ancestors sins; 'toxics sins' i call them. and finally there is still the question of women in science. i'm lucky to be surrounded by very powerful women. i have a split appointment and both of my deans are female, and one of the leaders in my field is female. so these figures exist, but i also look at my students and i see a lack of confidence in whether they belong here, or at least that's the way i perceive it. i feel like there's a lot of confidence infusion that i need to do: "yes you belong here," "yes your work is fantastic" "you're a fantastic researcher," "you're a fantastic educator," those kind of things. i find that i tend to do that a lot more with my female students than i do with my male students who don't even take compliments anyway. aa: i think it's true that a lot of women are conditioned to think that they don't belong somewhere, so i think it's interesting that you put it that way. pa: listening to my female colleagues during my post-doc at harvard medical school, which was a high-pressure environment, i saw the frustration from their end. they would talk about the experience of giving advice to someone but being ignored, only for a male colleague to repeat that same advice and have it taken up. or hearing people say things like "oh that pi? she's a bitch." and then you wonder: is it just only people like that who can make it to the top? all of these things that were said that really during my post-doc time made me think a lot more about gender in research. not the research of gender, but the place of gender in 16 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) research and how people are being perceived. aa: i want to go back to what you were saying about your research, and about how you're doing work on the female reproductive system and it sounds like you're asking--correct me if i'm wrong—asking questions that had not been asked before? pa: i'm not necessarily asking questions that have not been asked, i'm just providing much, much faster tools to get to an answer. people asked questions about the reproductive impact of certain chemicals, but they were either not able to do it comprehensively for a lot of chemicals, or finding answers was extremely expensive. what i try to do is develop tools to specifically address that, so that if we have to screen hundreds of thousands of chemicals on the female reproductive system we'll be able to do it, as opposed to testing the male assuming that impacts on the female will be the same as the male. i try to directly address that by designing new tools. aa: and do you think of that as an activist project at all? pa: i do and i don't. what i mean by this is, to me, it's just curiosity. we know so much about the other side and we don't know about the female, and i understand that biology in itself has been a barrier. i never saw it as a societal error to correct, but then sometimes i do feel like i want to tell people off when they tell me, "oh, but you know we already know some stuff about the male so why the female?" i think that's such a short sighted question and i often wonder why people are asking me that question because it's obvious that the biology's very different. if you know anything about biology you would know that the male and female reproductive system are inherently different from each other and the way germ cells developed are inherently different. aa: hearing this as someone with a background in gender studies it 17 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) sounds like activist work because it’s filling a gap caused by the lack of research done on female bodies. pa: i think to a vast extent it's being corrected, or trying to be corrected by a generation who know that now we need inclusive studies. if you're going to work with people, you have to be able to include genders, and races, and ethnicities. historically, in toxicology, people tended to stay away from the female side because it was too variable and if you wanted to get a straight answer you probably should work on the male side because there would not be hormonal changes over the course of the month so it would be easier to get a clear answer. fortunately, i think we're already starting to move away from that approach, but there is still that data gap that existed. aa: so you spoke a little already about your work with students. do you see your students asking new kinds of questions motivated by concerns about justice, representation, etc.? pa: i've seen a lot concern about minorities and their place in science, and the issues facing first generation researchers. two of my female students are both minority but one is recognized as a minority in science, and one not recognized as a minority. one is latina and one is asian, but they're both first generation students. they deal with the question of being a minority and how you can be considered not a minority although you are a minority. a lot of the most intimate things that i've learned from my students i've learned thanks to the fellowships that exist for minority students. this is where i learn about their family histories, what happened to their families, what it means to them to be doing research. i write letters of recommendation for them based on their essays, and it’s a great platform for me to talk about these issues with them. i find that i'm definitely more focused on racial minority issues, rather than gender issues. 18 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) aa: all those issues do tend to connect, though. pa: right, but i do think that one takes precedent over the other. i think sometimes both are accounted for when an application is reviewed. the first goal might be 'let's get minorities in science', and 'oh yeah there's the gender thing', 'oh she's minority and she's female, that's great!' right? aa: and i wonder if those students end up feeling kind of additional pressure then to succeed? pa: obviously i'm a white male, but if you're asking my perspective: i do think that it has to compound and make students feel even more so that they don't belong? i mean how many women of color are in leadership positions? all the ones i know are white females. if you start thinking intersectionally then you don't see full representation. root gorelick rl: you describe yourself as a theoretical biologist. can you tell us what that means? rg: i devise hypotheses, but i don't test them. or if i do test them, i test them with my memory. i learn about as many weird organisms as i can, so i can devise a hypothesis and instantly say whether or not it is wrong. i was originally trained as a mathematician, and that's what they do: they build up a back pocket full of counterexamples. and i do that as a biologist. aa: do you think that coming at your work as someone who's interested in feminism, social justice, and equality changes the kinds of questions that you ask? i know that much of your work focuses on sex, so does feminism shape your approach there? 19 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) rg: of course! absolutely! it has to. it's meant that i end up spending a lot of time talking to my friends who do trans issues or making connections that no biologist in their right mind ever does. part of it is that i think you get to see that there's more variation out there; that individuals really are different. biologists tend not to want to see that; we want to think that all humans are alike. it's very weird, we think all humans are alike and then biologists as a whole can be often awfully sexist and racist. rl: and your current work is informed by indigenous science as well could you speak about how you came to that approach? rg: i did my graduate school in southern arizona and southern new mexico where there really was a large indigenous presence, and a large hispanic presence, and many students were first generation from mexico. i was teaching a statistics class, and i had to teach the following phrase: “fail to reject the null hypothesis.” it's either a double or a triple negative. and double negatives mean the opposite in spanish that they mean in english, and so i realized that cultural and linguistic things truly make a difference. i moved from there out to canada, and i wanted to do the same research locally. carleton is a university that's on first nation territory and there are first nation peoples nearby. we were hardly doing anything for first nation students, and the little we were doing was over in the humanities. what could we do in science? we have indigenous students, but we don't even identify them or ask them if there's anything that we can help them with. so i thought that we should give something back to these people whose land we’re on. i didn’t know anything but i thought that i could learn a little bit and facilitate a conversation. so i suggested that in biology, we offer a course in indigenous perspectives on ecology in evolution. i know ecology and evolution, i can figure out traditional ecological knowledge and things like that, at least well enough to get a 20 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) conversation started. the biology department said no, in a racist way, actually. they said that indigenous knowledge is nothing more than myth and folklore. and i thought, wow, these people have hypotheses just like you do, they falsify them just like you do, and as far as i know it sounds [a lot like my] evolutionary research. most of the evolution i've learned is also western myth and folklore. and it's no better; it's no worse. and so i finally went to the dean of arts and social sciences, and i mention this to him and he says, "i'll pay for you to teach that, but you have to teach in the indigenous studies program." i was a bit intimidated then. i started to develop relationships, both learning from the students but from the people who are actually studying indigenous cultures in other departments. sociology, indigenous studies, political science, and other fields had started talking about pluralversality. both feminist perspectives and indigenous perspectives are different epistemologies, and they also have different ontologies. it's seeing the world differently, right? and we probably do have different ontologies, we all have different backgrounds, and there's nothing wrong with that. hopefully there could be synergism that could be reciprocal. so i look at the way that i do science as a theorist. the way i work, is i take an idea or hypothesis and then i look for exceptions--the counter examples and weird stuff. and if you look at western ways of knowing, we have a concept for that: black swans. it’s an idea from the greeks: they said all swans are white, and seeing another white swan won't tell you anything, the only thing that's really interesting is if you see a black swan, and the greeks, the ancient greeks, had never been to australia where they do actually have black swans which do tell you something. and so it's the exceptional things that matter. when you look at what is modern day canada and north america--turtle island--the metaphor here is the white buffalo. you have the black swan and the white buffalo; they're showing the exact same thing. these exceptions give you the really basic and important shifts in your knowledge. so in this place there seems to be little bit of reciprocity. 21 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) aa: another element of your work is about questioning our binaristic notions of sex. could speak about what brought you to that question? rg: as a graduate student, i met [molecular biologist] shirley tilghman. her work opened up doors and i started realizing that a molecular mechanism could be the way that sex--in terms of femaleness and maleness--is actually determined. so i started to develop a theory around that--how a process called cytosine methylation determines sex. but i wanted to know not just what causes femaleness and maleness but all aspects of sex: how do meiosis and cell divisions arise, and things like that. rl: the idea that you could determine femaleness and maleness by way of differences in cytosine methylation is really striking to me. rg: so what we have are plants like the cycad or the papaya that will express their genes for femaleness in various ways -through production of eggs, etc. there are also genes for maleness, and it is possible in the same individual to sometimes have them both turned on, and in most plants they are both turned on. but in some plants only one is turned on. but we know in some organisms, if we subject them to environmental shock, it suppresses maintenance methylation. so what ends up happening is that these methyl groups turn off genes for, let's say, maleness. but when you impose an environmental shock, after meiotatic division they will not acquire the methyl group and the genes for maleness will be expressed. these processes were my weird entry into all of this. and i don't believe there is universal mechanism at all anymore. rl: if you were to try to then come up with an alternative hypothesis that would be more functional and more useful and that would replace binary sex what would it look like? 22 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) rg: to me, with regards to sex, the interesting binary or quasi-binary is self-sex versus sex with someone else. i mean that in terms of selffertilization. and it's not really a binary, there are certainly individuals that will do both. but to me that's where the interesting dichotomy comes in, and that's where the interesting testing comes in. one researcher said basically, sex is what creates diversity and variation, and i don't think it is. we can test this by looking at self-sex versus sex with someone else, and see whether one does generate more diversity--i don't think it does. which makes for a whole other interesting story. rl: right, there are also so many different ways to put it together that you can see, and that are very socially constructed. rg: it's totally socially constructed, i think. and the whole notion of biological sex--you were reluctant to use that term, and it was good that you were reluctant to use it. it's terminology that we use for convenience so i try not to use it because i still think that what we call biological sex is also social construction. it's also why i intentionally muddle sex with gender, because i think that both are social constructs, so i use them both interchangeably. but it's because of my weird biological notions of what sex means. and people will criticize me for that, and maybe i should do better. rl: we're also at a moment in the history of science, where this idea that you can extrapolate from studies conducted on men and apply the same results to women is coming under fire. rg: i've had a really hard time reconciling what to say over the years and i guess my best answer to this, as an evolutionary biologist, is that i do not think that sex in terms of female and maleness is real, but sexism absolutely is. as an evolutionary biologist i don't think that race is real but racism sure is. 23 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) aa: was there a moment when you came to this kind of realization – say, that sex isn't real but sexism is -and did that kind of shift the kinds of questions that you were asking in your research? rg: yes. it really did shift. it got me to pick up a line of research that i had abandoned: how do we quantify diversity, including incorporating intersectionality into it. i'm developing some really cool, new notions on how we can quantify diversity, but also on how we can turn it into policy-how we can get more underrepresented people in academia or anywhere. rl: do you mean how you quantify diversity in terms of how many students are coming into let's say stem fields, or is it more like how to quantify diversity in a biological light? rg: so i'll give an example. let's say for a minute that sex is real, that male and femaleness is real, and let's say that race is real. and we take a place like ucla. what we’d do is build an array for each department asking how many people in it are female of this race, male of this race, we'll count them up. so you've got this data array, but then how do you measure diversity with that, including the intersectionality issues? how do you then say to somebody who's doing policy that our levels of diversity have increased over time? how do we compare ucla to another school next door, who has a different number departments, a different number people, and can we say whether ucla has greater or lesser diversity than they do, in a statistically meaningful fashion. and once we can do that, then we can really start tying policy to [effects that increase or decrease diversity], and if you see a statistical increase in diversity or decrease in diversity, you can ask what you can and should do about it. aa: how do you see these diversity issues playing out in your field? 24 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) rg: the issue that annoys me is that our faculty, when i look at them, do not reflect the diversity of our students. i'm in a biology department, the majority of the phd's are earned by women, but less than twenty percent of the faculty self-identify as women. and then the percentage has dropped since i've been there. we had one job search where we interviewed five people, five white men. [when] i complained, nobody cared, the dean didn't care, the equity people didn't care. we need to go do something about it. when you look at biological fields, the women are all in botany. historically, the biology [of animals] was considered the domain of men, plants were considered the domain of women, and that still persists to this day. so for instance, when you talk about epigenetics, many of those who were feminists were willing to have a more fluid look at [biological] development and things like that, so they were much more willing to bind to the epigenetic stories than the zoologists who were men were. so there's some really interesting history to be done there. rl: what are some of your students working right now? rg: my students are doing pretty much everything. one person is working on sexuality versus asexuality or self sexuality in blackberry trees, especially as it goes further towards the range edge. so we know that as plants get further towards the range edge they get more and more sets of chromosomes instead of having two of each, they have four of them, or eight of them. so what does that do for the self-sexuality or asexuality of those plants. another is studying how maple trees make maple syrup. two of my students just graduated. one is working on how climate change is affecting flowering and fruiting time in a place where climate is changing more than almost anywhere else, which is the northern end of ellesmere island. the other was looking at climate change and how it affected diets and size of grasslands where things browse or graze while the climate was changing. i do have people who study evolution of sex. my very best 25 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) graduate student was doing work on the evolution of sex as pertaining to sperm not having nuclear pores and stuff like that. i had another grad student who was studying two products of female meiosis--how two basic egg cells can fuse with one another to form another generation. she had the wherewithal to get funding from the lambda foundation. rl: i'm curious about the undergrad teaching you do too. do you find that undergrads come in receptive to these ideas about nonbinary notion of sex and gender, or is it a hard sell with them? rg: one of the classes i teach is the evolution of sex. and i basically teach two things. i teach what is meiosis, and we probably spend half the term on that. so we tear down all the silliness, and spend the other half of the term building up something that's real. the female male differences, we do the same thing. we tear it down, but i'm not sure that we actually build anything back up. [the students] start totally frustrated with me, and at the end of the day they go home really happy. but i've basically told them everything that they've learned in the rest of their lives is a lie. and it fits in with their politics sometimes, but they don't like hearing that they wasted their time learning things that are not quite accurate, or just downright wrong at times. so that's kind of fun. our job is to mess with them, right? to be disruptive in a constructive way and to show them to see the world differently. rl: you flip for them what they think of as theory and fact in the sense that they think meiosis is a fact that they learned in high school biology. you've actually flipped it to say “actually that was a story we told, and a theory which i've now disproven for you.” rg: i've now disproven it, and here's an alternative which is probably closer to truth. but you know i hope [they learn] the beauty of coming up with hypotheses, and how the only good thing is if someone falsifies them. i want people to falsify them. i have been hoping that someone 26 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) would come up with some good criteria for how you could distinguish eggs from sperm, [criteria] that worked on everything. and someone could pull that out of thin air. if somebody could get some weird inspiration, or have a weird background, or a different background from mine, and these cool ideas sometimes fall out of the sky. rl: i’m trying to get a sense of the extent to which feminism has changed the practice of your science, or influenced the practice of your science, and what i got from what you just said is that sometimes you let the surprise chance encounter drive what you're curious about. rg: right: it's luck and it's just paying attention to see what's around you right and looking to see what individuals look like or act like. but it's also looking at all of the weird variation and [understanding that] people are different. when people ask me what is your sex or gender right, well i say well can i change it every ten minutes, or check none of the above, because these are meaningless terms the more you look at individuals, and rather than at data points. tracy johnson aa: what led you to your current career as a researcher? were there early mentorship opportunities that set you on this track? tj: i think the most significant influences probably happened while i was an undergraduate, when i was in college. i was initially interested in literature and was really enjoying it. then i took my first chemistry class and really loved it and part of it was that i was working in a group with other students, and we did workshops together and i realized that thinking about chemistry, talking about chemistry was really fun. and so then i had a professor who, whatever it is that he saw, was really encouraging, and suggested that i focus on the sciences. that was a real motivator. it was exciting to see that someone saw a particular talent. 27 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) and over the course of the time that i was a student, he continued to be really supportive. and then the first time i worked in a research lab, the person who ran the lab, also really encouraging, created an environment that was fun and welcoming, and then by that point it was just clear to me that that’s what i had to do. so it was really having great mentors who were encouraging, and who modeled also what it’s like to create a vibrant and inclusive research environment. aa: and how does that experience learning from those mentors affect the work you do now? tj: i think that’s a great question. probably the most significant impact is i realized that if just a few things had been different, if i had contact with just a few, fewer people, if they hadn’t reached out the way they did, if they hadn't taken an interest when they did, it’s unclear to me that i’d be a scientist. and i feel like i have a great job, i love what i do, but it could have easily not been that way. so the importance of mentors and people who are willing to engage really hit home for me. and so that’s motivated my thinking about the possibility of [increasing participation of underrepresented minorities and women in science], knowing that there’s probably, there’s undoubtedly a lot of amazing talent out there that may go unrecognized if we don’t keep our eyes open. aa: so, have there been other instances where these social justice issues emerged for you? how did they shape your approach to mentoring? tj: i sort of grew up with it because my parents were very, very vocal and aware of the social justice issues. but they also really taught us about the significance of being both comfortable in our own skin but aware of what the impact of being, frankly, being a young woman of color was. and so i think i sort of grew up with an awareness of these conversations, of the issues. but i think probably one of the things that really struck me the most is toward the end of high school, the beginning of college, it was so 28 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) clear that– the disparity between what was happening in some schools, some high schools, some junior high schools, and what was happening in others within, you know, five miles of each other, and the complete difference in the students’ experiences based on access to resources through no reason other than luck. things can be very, very different. and so that, i think that was really striking for me. and i felt like i got lucky, you know. i got lucky to be where i was with the parents that i had and the situation i was in. so i think that really impacted the way i thought about and have thought about the way i want to conduct my own research, mentorship, and teaching. aa: and so, what do you think is different about your research, mentorship, and teaching because you are mindful of these things? tj: i feel like it’s easier for me to see talent in a lot of different places. i think that in science there’s this sense that science is somehow objective and so pure that anybody can come up with the same questions and the same answers. and i think that when you say it out loud it sounds kind of ridiculous, but there’s this sense that somehow science is free from any subjective notions. but the reality is that the way we ask questions, who asks the questions, the answers we come up with, in fields that may seem as objective as, you know, biology or physics, are completely influenced by who’s doing the work and what the scientist brings to the discipline. and so, given that, i feel like i’ve been fortunate to see talent in a lot of different places. i feel like my eyes have been much more open to [the importance of who is asking the questions] just because of those experiences early on. aa: and do you think that you ask different types of questions than some of your colleagues because you’re thinking about social justice, or you’re coming from this position of being informed by that? tj: you know, i feel like the answer is probably yes, it’s hard for me to 29 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) articulate why, but i feel like i see the practice of science differently. and yeah, i think so, but it’s hard to articulate. aa: we read a bit of your work getting ready for the interview, and i found in some profiles and interviews that you talked about the elegance of organic chemistry. you also mentioned earlier the fun of seeing things come together. so i wonder if you could talk a bit about science as a creative process, or what makes organic chemistry seem elegant to you? tj: what struck me when i first [encountered organic chemistry] was that there was something very visual about the way molecules come together. and there was an order, there was a systematic way in which you [could] build reactions. but that there were a lot of different ways of coming at that. and depending on how you saw the molecules, you could take different steps. the idea that you could build something, whether it’s building reactions or building an organic compound or whatever, that you could build it from component parts. depending on which ones looked right and appropriate, those are the ones you could select as part of the building process. it felt very fun. i think that that was how, for me, organic chemistry felt elegant. aa: when you’re working with the students in the lab, what do you do to get them to have that [same] experience of fun and creativity? tj: molecular biologists are interested in things that are very small or usually are happening too fast to see, or they’re too small to see. and so, the creative part of it is figuring out how to see what seems like the unseeable. how to visualize things that are hard to visualize. and so, the first step is to come up with a model of what one thinks is happening, and then design an experiment that will get at that. but the creativity comes in because the experiment has to be designed to unveil something that is usually really, really hard to see. and so what i find to be so much fun with students is building models of what we think is happening, 30 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) developing hypotheses, and then thinking about what it takes to test those. science can be incredibly creative. and different people are going to come up with different ways of looking. two people will look at the same piece of data and will be drawn to different aspects of it, and then ask different questions to get at those aspects. and i think that’s a fun process. aa: that speaks to what you were saying before --why it’s so important to have more people and different perspectives in science. tj: for example, the reaction that my lab explores is something called rnase blasting, and just the way in which that was discovered reveals an example of this. and so these are essentially regions of the genome that don’t appear to code for proteins, right, they don’t seem to be critical. and in fact they sort of get removed by the cell; there’s this sort of cutting and pasting process that happens. but for the original discovery, you know, nobody anticipated that there’d be these long stretches of sequence in the genome that did not seem to have a function and that had to be removed. and so just to discover that you had to have your eyes open to something else. you had to be willing to see that these sequences could just be looped out and removed. we’re interested in now asking two questions: first of all, how does [rnase blasting] happen? secondly, maybe there’s something more to the existence [of this removal of these noncoding regions of the genome]. maybe there’s some other way in which the process of splicing feeds back and communicates important information to the cell. so i think just being able to see that there are these events that you wouldn’t expect, i think it happens when there are people with different sets of eyes who have these questions. i’m teaching a class of freshmen right now and it’s wild, it’s really fun. but, you know, we’re asking a very basic question about splicing to the lab class that’s, basically,very similar to the kind of work that we do in the lab. freshmen who have very little molecular biology knowledge are 31 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) coming up with so many really interesting hypotheses about how the molecules that my lab has spent years looking at, how they work. and it’s partially because they don’t have the constraints of all of the things that we’ve been making assumptions about for years. you know, not all of it is accurate, not all of it’s right, but sometimes there are these nuggets of information, because the students are drawn to certain aspects of the question. aa: i know you do a lot of work around retention and getting people to stay in the sciences. so how do you approach that? what do you think needs to happen to create a more diverse discipline? tj: the first question is why do students who start the process saying they want to be a scientist, why do they leave? and i think nationally the statistics are really sobering. nationally, about 40% of the students who say they want to be stem majors graduate with stem majors, that’s across the board. and for students who are underrepresented it’s about half of that [around 20%]. and there’s no difference in the degree to which those students are committed when they come in. so what happens? even at a place like ucla where our students come in with very strong backgrounds, again, across the board, we lose our students from underrepresented groups, and the persistence rate is half of what it is for other students. and these are students who are coming in with extraordinary gpas, everything on paper looks great, so what is happening once they get here? we don’t give enough students a taste of what it means to be a scientist. to be committed to the endeavor of science where they feel like part of who they are is being part of this community, as opposed to being outsiders who are looking in at what scientists do, but starting to identify as scientists very early. and this isn’t just coming from me, there’s data out there that talks about this idea of students who perceive themselves as scientists tending to stay in the sciences longer. particularly in the life sciences, we just don’t do that. we give them all of these hoops to jump through before they get to do what i 32 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) think is the fun stuff that they come here to do, which is to do research, or to think about biological questions, or to be involved in the process of discovery. we tell them here, you jump through all these hoops first, and then maybe we’ll let you be part of a club. and i think that’s what i’ve been interested in seeing disrupted so that students can start to see themselves as scientists very early and see what they have to contribute very early and become committed to being part of this community, and so then when things get really tough, or when they encounter things that are negative, it’s not as much of a crisis because they’re already part of a community and these things can be put into the perspective that they deserve to be in, which is not immobilizing, but things that you just push through. aa: what kinds of things do you do, either in your classroom or in your lab, to create that for students? tj: it’s part of the motivation for this lab class that i’m teaching, so that students do authentic research as freshmen. and the students can go to seminars and hear scientific talks and maybe engage in the practice of trying to really deconstruct what the talk is about, and not assuming that you have to have this enormous wealth of knowledge before you can begin to understand what’s happening in a scientific lecture. and maybe students can start to work together as a community, creating communities around scholarship as opposed to communities around surviving difficulties of the discipline, communities around thriving as scientists. that’s what i’ve been really interested in, in trying to find ways of doing this early, the earlier the better, i think, before they’re done with their freshman year. aa: do you think that there are particular challenges for your women students that are maybe getting in the way of retention? tj: i think that the challenges facing students of color, women of color, 33 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) women generally, men of color, i think that they’re all a little bit different. there are nuances to each. that said, i think that one of the commonalities is this idea of inclusivity, being included, feeling not being included, feeling like you belong in the scientific realm. and it’s hard to send that message when you look around and there’s nobody at the levels that you’re striving to be who looks like you. when you’re in a department where, you know, there are no women faculty, or a few women faculty. that doesn’t really send the message that you belong here as a scientist. so i think that one of the challenges is embracing the identity of a scientist early, but all the way through to graduate students and post-docs it’s difficult when there’s not a lot of representation. aa: and when somebody’s through grad school, through a post-doc, do you think those challenges are still there? tj: oh absolutely, absolutely. and we’ve heard some very high profile cases of blatant sexism, and wildly inappropriate behaviors that go completely unchecked, which happens when you have fields that are dominated by very a particular, a very specific and narrow group of people. and then there are these subtle things too, for example, when young women are applying for fellowships or postdoctoral positions, there’s really interesting data about what goes into their letters and how that compares to their male colleagues. so there are a lot of ways in which young women still are getting the message that is not very inclusive, or that’s not very supportive of true diversity. and it’s an uphill battle because we’d all like to believe that all of those issues are resolved, but they’re not. aa: you have a fellowship with the howard hughes medical institute? could you talk about the work that you do on behalf of them? tj: yeah! i’m so excited about that: i feel like i’m just really lucky to be part of that community. so it’s a howard hughes medical institute 34 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) professorship. it’s a society of faculty at research universities around the country. the year that i was awarded there were fifteen of us nationwide who received a million dollars over five years to do something innovative in undergraduate education. and so part of that was the motivation for starting this hhmi pathways to success program, which is very conscious of thinking about what it takes to support diverse groups of students’ success in sciences. it’s based on some of the principles that we talked about–early engagement in research, early exposure to authentic research experiences, being part of a learning community that’s both rigorous and supportive, deep mentoring that’s both horizontal as well as vertical mentoring–these are all, again, based on the work of other people who’ve thought about what does it take to generate a successful learning environment for students across the board but certainly one that works for students from underrepresented groups. and so that’s what i’ve been doing. it’s been the most rewarding thing. it’s challenging to undertake all of that with all of the demands of research because that doesn’t go away, but it’s also liberating to have an organization of the stature of hhmi that takes a step back and says, we get how important it is to do research, but now let’s have a conversation about how research scientists can engage in generating real educational innovations. and that’s just been a wonderful thing. and i look at the other people who have this same professorship and there are so many people who i’ve respected for my entire scientific career, and now the ways in which they’ve approached beautiful research, they’re applying to questions of how do you change what we do in education. and it’s been so much fun to see that creativity transferred across those two foci. aa: so now that there are people taking interest in these diversity questions, these education questions, do you think that the challenges faced by your students (particularly students of color and women), have changed? tj: so the short answer is yes, and now i have to think about what i 35 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) mean. you know, to be honest, i think a lot of what i dealt with was much more overt, even when i was a student. young people are growing up in a supposedly post-racial society in which feminism has complicated connotations for young women, and that, i think, has been one of the challenges because it’s hard to meet things head-on when everyone wants to pretend like they’re not there. even though there were some aspects that were more difficult when i was starting off, it made addressing issues head-on much easier. and now students are sort of living in this world where they’re all trying to pretend like things aren't happening when they are. but it’s also exciting to see some of the social movements on campuses where i feel like the awareness is much more transparent, and students are much more vocal in demanding recognition [for] things [like sexual harassment?] that we should have been addressing for them all the time. so that part actually is exciting. but i think that it’s been a little bit of a time coming. aa: so, i have a very open-ended question. what do you think that a feminist anti-racist scientific practice could look like? or in an ideal world, what would an approach to scientific research that's founded in social justice, what would that entail? what kinds of questions do you think would get asked? tj: i’d say, number one, the scientific environment would look very different. i would not go to a meeting of hundreds and hundreds of people and be one of three or four african american scientists. the place where you’d truly come to that anti-racist feminist scientific practice would look fundamentally different than it does now. because, the reason why it’s not that way is not because the talent isn’t there. we have to look deeper about what’s really going on. so that’s the first thing. the second thing is that i think that the sense of community would look different. the way in which we think about building communities of scholars. i’m in one field where some of the key people in the field, the stars of the field, are women. and when i go to those meetings, they’re 36 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) totally different from the meetings i go to which is, my other field, which is pretty male dominated. and in that first field, there’s a sense of different standards of behavior, differences in the way you treat junior scientists, the fact that in one night at dinner there was a conversation about how our practice fits in with the larger questions in society. that happens, i think, because there are smart, committed women who have decided that they are not going to just be women scientists, scientists who happen to be women, but they’re going to think about what it means to be a woman scientists. and i feel really lucky to be part of that community. so that’s what i mean when i say that the community looks different. the other thing is that i think that a lot of our questions would be different. if you look at great research, very little of that research has focused on and thought deeply about whether or not we should be looking at female and male subjects. even if you’re talking about model organisms, for instance, mice, i think that there would be an increased awareness that you cannot just look at male mice and make all of these assumptions about the way the brain works, and how hormones affect the brain, or epigenetics and hormones… you can’t do that if you’re only looking at one gender category of organisms. we’re not going to get the big picture. and i think for a lot of women that seems so obvious, and so i think that that would be different. aa: do you think you ask different kinds of questions because you’re thinking about race, thinking about gender? tj: i think i do. it’s easy for me to ask a question about a molecule or a part of a molecule that could easily be disregarded. i wonder, sometimes, if i’m somehow drawn to the idea that there might be more there and to trying to understand what it is. and so this is all now happening at a molecular level, but i just feel like some of that scientific curiosity, i can’t help but think it may be tied to kind of who i am and how i’ve thought about the world in other ways. 37 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) aa: i was thinking about that earlier when you were talking about bringing different perspectives to the table and even being able to look at society and recognize injustice, and recognize when people are overlooked-does that perspective tie in to asking different kinds of questions. tj: yeah, i think it does. i don’t have any proof of that but, somehow, i feel like it might influence the way i think about the science. i can see this in my class. with a room full of students we can generate a class dataset and different students are going to pull different things out of that. and if they’re all coming from the same narrow perspective of privilege and class and parents who are scientists, or whatever, if they’re all coming from the same place, i’m not convinced that we’re going to get the same nuanced complexity of answers. and if we don’t ,we’re really missing a lot. is that influenced by gender, race, socioeconomics? probably, but in ways that we don’t necessarily know. the other thing i will say is that science is hard work, and there’s a lot of failure. there’s a lot more failure than success! and there’s a certain kind of person who can embrace the failures, learn from them and actually begin to see them maybe not so much as a failed experiment. because a lot of times those failed experiments are actually telling us things that are really interesting, maybe not what we initially thought we were looking for, but something interesting. the kind of person you are influences how you’re able to move. aa: did you have anything else you wanted to say or add? tj: one thing, i don’t really know how to bring this into our discussion, but one thing that’s sometimes a little frustrating: when we have conversations about the women in science, one of the easy places to go is the time commitment of being a scientist in the context of family, and the challenge of dealing with that. there are women who do it, who do both, and enjoy both, and we don’t talk enough about those examples. it feels a little bit like a cop out for there to be an assumption that the 38 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) underlying reason why we have fewer women in science is because of family commitments. and certainly, there are ways of creating structures that make it feel less like a mutually-exclusive choice. that was just one thought i had. aa: it ties back to what you were saying about the community looking different and [synergies between that goal with] making science more open to women with families. tj: right, right, absolutely. if a woman decides that she’s going to have a child, the policies in every institution to support it often treat pregnancy like a disease. the message there is that there is something wrong that the institution’s accommodating. once we start shifting those conversations, then i think that that’s going to be real progress [toward normalizing the assumption] that men and women should be taking, or can be taking, the same amount of responsibility automatically [for postpartum childcare]. you know, let’s make family leave not just about a woman having to ask for something special, a recognition that parents may want to and need to take time for other responsibilities. normalizing it so that it’s not about women needing something exceptional. i wonder if anyone’s ever done a study of the children of academic women, who they are, how they see themselves. for the women who i know who have children, there are a lot of ways in which those children benefit from having a mom who’s a scientist. and we don’t talk about that as much as the issue of compromise. and then we send that same message to undergraduates and graduate students, and everybody’s having the discussion about how this career is hard. it’s not easy, but there’s little [that’s easy] that’s worth having. notes 1 for instance, the cfp to this special issue highlights that “no knowledge-project, including those typically granted the epistemic status 39 lee catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) of science, can offer us unmediated access to the stuff of the world. might feminist theories’ different mediations into our worlds offer new knowledges about them, and new ways of understanding those knowledge projects themselves? we contend that feminist thought can do more than offer us resources for the sciences, rather, we wish to demonstrate that sometimes feminist thought *is* science.” 2 gorelick tackled this question by speaking of differentiating criteria of organisms in both their diploid phase (e.g., as fully formed organisms) and in their haploid phase (e.g., as gametes). 3 extant inequalities between men and women politically and economically can be gauged, for instance, by comparative data on income earned, history of the franchise, positions of political leadership, and so forth. microsoft word 71496_1_11_hausken,papenburg,scmitz.docx hausken, l., papenburg, b., and schmitz, s. (2018). introduction to the processes of imaging / the imaging of processes. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-23. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © liv hausken, bettina papenburg and sigrid schmitz, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introduction the processes of imaging / the imaging of processes liv hausken university of oslo liv.hausken@media.uio.no bettina papenburg university of freiburg bettina.papenburg@mkw.uni-freiburg.de sigrid schmitz humboldt-university of berlin sigrid.schmitz@hu-berlin.de abstract this introduction outlines the main topics of this special section on “the processes of imaging / the imaging of processes” and situates them in their specific theoretical and historical contexts. drawing on feminist science and technology studies (sts), on feminist new materialism, and on media studies based in the arts and the humanities, we frame the exploratory studies assembled in this collection of essays with respect to the dynamic entanglement of matter, technology, and meaning-making practices. we attend to the question how the construction of scientific images and imaging technologies is tethered to 2 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) hierarchical social relations and discriminatory practices. politics of imaging this special section of catalyst explores how imaging technologies shape the complex processes through which scientific images are constructed and how imaging technologies drive processes of inclusion and exclusion. the section takes up these questions by bringing together approaches in feminist science technology studies (sts) and feminist new materialisms with perspectives from critical media studies. the articles gathered here offer in-depth analyses of the dynamic entanglement of matter, technology, and meaning-making practices taking shape within and around imaging modalities, such as ultrasound, embryo imaging, sonar, computer tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography. the assembled articles emphasize the question of how the dynamic and processual qualities of phenomena are captured and recorded and what the implications of such capturing and recording practices are for the relations between the subjects and objects of research. focusing on the nexus of change and development of living matter and the capturing of the movement and flux of such matter in sequences of images throws questions of animation and liveliness into sharp relief. feminist engagement with moving image techniques employed in the life sciences suggests that dynamic imagery animates thinking and enlivens a static notion of life. live-cell imaging, in particular, came into focus as a method that makes palpable the processual qualities of cellular life by foregrounding the interactive and dynamic processes happening within cells. live-cell images present life as animate and suggest a conception of cellular life as relational and process-oriented (landecker, 2012; myers, 2006; myers & dumit, 2011; for a position that challenges this claim, see wellmann, 2017). however, by stressing the functional and emergent qualities of cellular life, scientific discourse on live-cell imaging risks tacitly re3 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) inscribing a mechanical model of life and glossing over the labor involved in the making of scientific images (myers, 2015). therefore, we need to attend to the manifold steps required to produce a sequence of images in both the wet and dry lab, the politico-economic conditions under which these images come into being, the ways they circulate and are employed, as well as the political projects into which they are enlisted. in medical and scientific contexts, the term imaging is often used to describe particular procedures, modalities and tools for producing technical images (see for instance bruhn, 2015, p. 127). in this special section of catalyst we would like to broaden this concept to include the productive and constructive aspects of such procedures, modalities and tools. using the notion of imaging in a broader sense helps us to gloss various practices associated with making phenomena observable and intelligible (see lynch, 2006). in line with michael lynch’s conception of visualization, we hold that imaging should not be reduced to perceptual processes (lynch, 2006, p. 28). imaging refers to the technical procedures and materializing processes that produce visual displays of information. these images will be studied not as representations of objects but as technical visualizations of phenomena by imaging technologies that do not just present them visually but constitute them ontologically. we suggest the term processes to emphasize the need for analyzing step by step how meaning is inscribed in technical images through the dynamic interchange between the procedures, modalities and tools of imaging and the larger socio-cultural context to which they belong. we adopt a constructivist perspective that allows us to consider the politics of imaging practices. the structure of the title of this special section, “the processes of imaging / the imaging of processes”, references the rhetorical notion of chiasm, the abba pattern of mirror inversion (see for instance lanham, 1991). with this chiastic approach to imaging, we highlight the dynamic intra-actions and enactments in the investigated processes. focusing on the processes of imaging allows us to foreground the dynamics of imaging and the ways in which these dynamics are embedded in 4 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) established conceptual landscapes as well as to assess how they contribute to changing such landscapes. examining the imaging of processes is one way to attend to the processual qualities of the objects of investigation such as plasticity, movement, temporality, development and the relational dynamics of the objects under study in visualization (ranging from brains and bodies to technologies and social formations). as such, the first part of the chiasm (processes of imaging) does not just transform the second (imaging of processes) but is also transformed by the second. the title signals our approach that involves more than a combination of two perspectives, with one privileging an understanding of the entire processes of imaging, the other indicating a certain interest in the visualization of dynamic objects. rather, the object in the second part of the chiasm is considered processual, no matter how pre-defined its processual qualities may seem to be. it is produced and reconfigured in the imaging process. situating imaging practices between feminist sts and feminist new materialisms this special section focuses on contextualizing the construction and deployment of scientific images within social, political and economic discourses and gauges the implications of referencing scientific visualizations to legitimate power relations in the social sphere. combining feminist sts research on the powerful effects of images with a feminist materialist perspective opens up a space for critically assessing the discriminatory effects built into imaging technologies as well as for exploring alternative ways of enlisting scientific images in practices of resistance. although sts research has examined both the processes through which scientific images are produced and the deployment of images in a variety of social fields, the myth of “objective authority” of scientific images still holds (see burry & dumit, 2008). the medical field and the life sciences visualize structures and processes of the interior body down to cellular and sub-molecular levels in colorful digitalized images using 5 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) imaging technologies such as ultrasound, functional magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, and live-cell imaging. the environmental sciences, including geography, employ imaging technologies such as sonar to screen structures of earth, rock, and water and offer fine-grained maps of phenomena ranging from the geosphere to the atmosphere. astrophysicists use space probes and telescopes to generate data and to detect signals from the far ends of our galaxy that are rendered into "pretty pictures" of nebulae and supernovae for popular, educational and commercial use. maps, graphs and images constructed with imaging technologies are conceptualized as immutable mobiles (latour, 1990) traveling between academic disciplines and society that promise to provide more detailed and adequate insight into the objects under investigation. the idea that enhancing the performance of particular imaging apparatuses by way of technological developments will eventually lead to "better" knowledge and generate more truthful representations of microscopic, macroscopic, and cosmic phenomena is still at the heart of science and society with its regimes of funding and governance (van dijck, 2005). yet, as sts research has pointed out, imaging technologies and the images they produce are mutable and imbued with politics and power relations that shape the way we perceive the world and how we think we should act in it. this has been impressively demonstrated, for example, with regard to the scientific and social discourse on climate change (schneider & nocke, 2014). this research shows that imaging technologies not only shape and change our experience, knowledge and conceptualization of the objects under investigation, but the resulting images also impact social practices, discourses and power relations. feminist science and technology studies scholars have longstanding engagements in offering critical analyses of how culturally shaped meanings and norms are inscribed into imaging technologies and into the processes through which scientific images are produced. they have effectively assessed the political implications of the production, circulation and deployment of scientific images and the roles that imaging 6 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) technologies play in the making of race, gender, sexuality, and ability with regard to socio-cultural norms. scientific images of the gendered body, taken as "facts," invoke gendered narratives that legitimate social hierarchies by manifesting a masculinized sphere of production versus a feminized sphere of reproduction (martin, 1987). with regard to imaging the human body, catherine waldby (2000) has shown how gendered and racial hierarchies have been inscribed into the digitalized repertoire of human anatomy in the visible human project; kelly joyce (2005, 2008) pinpointed the gendered assumptions that guide processes of brain imaging; and amade m’charek (2014) uncovered the racialized history of reference models for gene sequencing, to name a few relevant examples. feminist and postcolonial critiques have disclosed the foundations of imaging technologies in colonial, capitalist, and military projects as well as the relevance and use of scientific images for ongoing practices of discrimination. the important work in this field 1) has revealed, for instance, discriminatory practices of body scanning technologies at airports that target transgender or racialized groups (magnet & rodgers, 2011); 2) has shown how the enlisting of fetal ultrasound imaging in current bio-politics moves authority in decision-making away from women and relocates it within medicine and science (roberts, 2012); 3) has identified racialized inscriptions through technologies that construct facial images from dna sources (m’charek, 2010); and 4) has uncovered how colonial heritage comes to the fore in the use of images of invasive species in anti-migration politics (subramaniam, 2014). building on donna haraway’s concept of situated knowledges (haraway, 1988) feminist sts research has traced the question of the politics of imaging to analyses of the construction processes of making images. it is not sufficient to uncover the deployment of scientific images for discriminatory ends; equally important is the disclosure of the inscription of cultural beliefs and norms into the technical instruments and practices involved in constructing images. situating the scientific and technological concepts as well as the aims and beliefs of researchers and developers in their cultural milieu opens up a space of critique of the 7 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) apparent representational status of images much more profoundly. images then come into view as “naturecultural” phenomena (haraway, 2003) that incorporate the processes and meanings with which they are constructed. the need for in-depth analyses of the multiple entanglements that frame the constitutive processes of phenomena has been taken up in the last decades by parts of feminist sts scholarship within the framework of feminist materialisms (van der tuin, 2011). coining the term "intra-action" – to replace the term interaction – karen barad explored how the constitution of phenomena always unfolds in a zone of dynamic agential forces (barad, 2007, pp. 140-141). this notion reframes the assumption that pre-established entities with inherent properties interact with one another. for barad, subjects and objects are always in-the-making within experimental configurations, and, consequently, she demands that entities that make up an experimental configuration should not be researched separately. instead, phenomena “come to matter” (ibid.) through the intra-actions of material-discursive practices. the specific enactment of these intra-actions shapes the conditions of possibility for the phenomena that materialize in a given experimental configuration. intra-active processes establish boundaries within phenomena and these agential cuts – as barad terms them – constitute the meanings and significance of the phenomena. however, phenomena are always in-themaking and in an ongoing process of exchange and formation, with their outcomes themselves being enacted within the experimental configuration. barad thus shifts the concept of agency from a humanist notion of intentionality to an understanding of agency as enactment. adopting barad’s insights for studying the imaging of processes means to research how the agential intra-actions of matter, technology and meaning-making within a particular experimental configuration shape the phenomenon that is being displayed visually. this research can expose the agential cuts (i.e., the inclusions and exclusions that characterize the particular realization of images in “spacetimematter relations”) (barad, 2007, p. 178). 8 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) diana coole (2013) has proposed to take the feminist materialist framework as a “multidimensional ontology” (p. 464) in order to address the political dimension already within analyses of phenomenal constitutions. addressing the boundary-making intra-actions as a constitutional part of the political effects of phenomena has spurred critical feminist scholarship that analyzes how notions of gender are inscribed into specific bodies and how these inscriptions reinforce practices of discrimination (for an overview, see hird, 2004) as well as racialization, racism, and colonialisms (hinton, mehrabi, & barla, 2015). the feminist materialist concept of agential intra-actions, we suggest, can also guide analyses of the processes of imaging and imaging of processes. the articles assembled here seek to broaden the perspectives offered by feminist and postcolonial sts by opening up the field to include approaches from postcolonial geography, feminist critical neuroscience, critical media studies, and continental philosophy, to autoethnography, and cultural analysis. interdisciplinary crossroads this special section of catalyst emerged from a working group on “new materialisms on the crossroads of the natural and human sciences” in a eu funded research network on new materialism.1 the group focused on how to “rework the ‘two cultures' gap [through] new frameworks of knowing in which different kinds of actors and onto-epistemic practices can be made visible and negotiable.”2 out of this framework grew an interest in the topic of imaging and in the development of critical terms such as dynamic and agential matter, imaging technologies, and apparatuses of research.3 this special section of catalyst is among the results of these efforts. this special section aims to mobilize new-materialist, critically and theoretically engaged feminist interventions for the study of the aesthetics and epistemic status of images and imaging technologies across the visual cultures of science, arts, media, and everyday life. this research 9 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) does not belong to any one discipline but represents rather a set of perspectives that may inscribe themselves into a range of disciplines. rather than present a unified theoretical front or create an inevitable historical trajectory, we aim to contribute to an interdisciplinary arena for research on imaging. for this special section we have solicited and selected in-depth studies of imaging technologies and practices. we will argue for the importance of exploring processes of imaging across the university through a variety of specific case studies. we have collected a small number of such studies here, crisscrossing the visual cultures of science, arts, media and everyday life. we will argue, that instead of treating science and art as two fields in an open terrain where one can travel between, back and forth, along a two-way street (see subramaniam & willey, 2017), the diverse practices and discourses associated with these two apparently homogenized and distinct fields (see jones & galison, 1998; subramaniam & willey, 2017; werrett, 2008) should be opened up and investigated as parts of the more general sociocultural histories to which they belong. among the many historical conditions for the development of an interdisciplinary arena for discussions and research on imaging across the university, four parallel developments should be mentioned. the first is the ambition to develop an imaging science across the natural sciences during the 1980s and 1990s. such an initiative can be seen when the usbased national academy of sciences organized a colloquium entitled “images of science: science of images” in 1992. at this colloquium, robert n. beck, a pioneer in nuclear medicine and the founder (1986) and director of the center for imaging science at the university of chicago, gave a noteworthy lecture where he claimed “the same set of principles, concept, strategies, and methods, may be used to address the generic issues involved in the production and use of all digitized images.” he demonstrated these generic imaging issues through his talk and argued that recognition of these generic issues across imaging modes in a whole range of different disciplines “is giving rise to the new discipline of 10 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) imaging science” (beck 1993, p. 9746). one sign that something was indeed afoot, could be seen when the reputable journal of photographic science (established in the early 1950s) was renamed and transformed into the imaging science journal (1997 – present).4 at the same time, something similar happened in the humanities; this is the second of the conditions for the development of an interdisciplinary arena for discussions and research on imaging across the university that we hope to underline here: during the 1980s and 1990s, we witnessed increasingly interdisciplinary research across media and cultural studies and the various disciplines in the humanities concerned with questions of aesthetics. the most important impulse in this context is the development of the interdisciplinary study of visual media, launched by w.j.t. mitchell (1986) and others, and now a central feature of the humanities. in contrast to the imaging science initiative in the natural sciences sketched above, it is here less a question of highlighting generic issues across image genres, different media or various art-historical epochs as it is a change of perspective from studies of images as artifacts to questions of historically situated re-examinations of modern visuality. the american art historian jonathan crary (1992) provided a decisive contribution to this new perspective on visual culture by analyzing the historical construction of the observer through interweaving the histories of science, technology, philosophy, popular culture, and the visual arts. lisa cartwright (1995), among others, adds a feminist dimension to this development, assessing the impact of modernist art on medical imaging in the first decades of the twentieth century by addressing the intersection of scientific and cultural practices with a particular emphasis on cinematic practices in medical studies of and experiments on female bodies. intervening in the debate about the formation of a field that came to be known internationally by many names – visual studies, visual culture, image studies, and last but not least, visual culture studies – the dutch art historian and founder of both cultural analysis and visual culture studies, mieke bal (2003, p.19) drew attention to the synaesthetic and 11 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) discursive aspects of the visual. bal foregrounded questions of cultural change and put an emphasis on practices of power and resistance. she urges us to spot and dislodge master narratives and be mindful of practices of visual essentialism that obscure the situatedness of the viewer and equate looking with knowing. bal’s ideas resonate well with what in feminist technoscience studies has been identified as “the view from nowhere” and the call for situated knowledges (haraway, 1988, going back to nagel, 1986). the third historical condition for the development of an interdisciplinary arena for discussions and research on imaging across the academy takes place in what can be broadly referred to as media studies, which during the 1990s witnessed a growing awareness of the materiality of communication, particularly stressed by the two german scholars hans ulrich gumbrecht and k. ludwig pfeiffer (1994). meanwhile, both the concepts of ‘media’ and of ‘communication’ were in crisis. in response to the growing integration of information, of communication networks, of media platforms, and of different markets, the simple model of communication between senders and receivers based on an idea of separate media (film, television, newspapers, the postal system) was undermined. for media scholars with an interest in the form and materiality of media, this meant a reorientation and a shift from “medium” to “mediality” or “mediation”. inspired by, among others, the german literary scholar and media theorist friedrich kittler, media studies began to take an interest in how the technological logics of mediality influence the way we think of the world, of ourselves, and of the future. turning toward materiality and embodiment from a radically different perspective, north-american film phenomenologists like vivian sobchack (1992) and feminist philosophers and gender theorists like judith butler (1993) contributed to this reorientation towards materiality by stressing embodied vision and a rethinking of the materiality of the body as determining rather than determined, constructing rather than constructed (see also rooney, 1996). 12 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) finally, the fourth condition for the development of an interdisciplinary arena for discussions and research on imaging across academic fields is the turn to technology in feminist and social studies of science. feminist philosophers of science explored the gendered character of technology (harding, 1986); numerous feminist scholars conveyed the idea of technology as an aspect of identity and embodiment (balsamo, 2011; davis, 1995; haraway, 1991; hayles, 1999; turkle, 1984), and argued for the significance of everyday life technologies (cowan, 1976). in the 1980s and 1990s the more mainstream social studies of science also turned to technology (woolgar, 1991), which is vital in this context because it attracted scholars from social science and the humanities unfamiliar with feminism and/or science studies but interested in the technologies of media and everyday life. with this fourth historical development the circle may be seen to be closed and the conditions present for interdisciplinary studies of imaging across, in principle, all academic spheres: 1) the possibility of identifying generic issues across imaging modes, genres and media; 2) a fundamental understanding of historicity and sociocultural situatedness of the observer; 3) a particular attentiveness toward the materiality of mediation, and finally, 4) an imperative understanding of the social and cultural implications of technology. drawing on these developments, we are not just addressing an interdisciplinary field but a heterogeneous landscape of disciplinary and interdisciplinary subfields. we aim to foster interdisciplinary contact and exchange between these various perspectives. this, we argue, can be acquired best in research based on concrete case studies. assembled articles taken together, the framework offered by feminist materialisms and visual culture studies provides a number of tools that open up innovative and creative ways to look at, think through and theorize the multiple 13 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) relations between dynamic and agential matter, meaning-making processes and imaging technologies involved in the construction of images. within the broader framework of sts, the combination of indepth analyses of processes of imaging with research on the politics of imaging can generate insight into discriminatory effects as well as inspire alternative modes of image construction. two of the articles assembled in this special section speak to the question of how capitalism informs imaging technologies and analyze how scientific imaging practices inscribe normative ideas into human bodies, brains and the division of cells at an early stage of embryo development. in their article, hannah fitsch and kathrin friedrich critically engage with specific imaging technologies (fmri and ct) as technologies of normalization. the authors show how ideas about the body and the brain changed in the late nineteenth and in the beginning of the twentieth century and came to rely on a model of calculability. they assess what role the turn to mathematical models and algorithm-based calculation played with regard to this change. inspired by a feminist materialist background, fitsch and friedrich pinpoint how the concept of computational rationality intra-acts with scanning technologies and algorithmic computation throughout the production processes of digitalized images. the latter then serve as standardized maps or templates of bodies and brains that curb diversity. in her article, lucy van de wiel shows how imaging technologies such as time-lapse embryo imaging tie into neo-liberal economic practices. the author discusses how in vitro fertilization (ivf) industries employ techniques such as photomicrography and embryo imaging (an embryo screening technique) to unlock new target groups. photomicrographs of embryonic cells lure fertile women into pre-emptive fertility treatment involving egg freezing. time-lapse videos of dividing embryonic cells are offered to clients of fertility clinics as an "add-on" in the ivf cycle for selecting the most “viable” embryonic cells for further development. these interventions in treatment rationales reconfigure the various timescales involved in the monitored reproductive process, 14 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) reinforce gendered notions of reproduction and imply pre-emptive overtreatment, constant monitoring as well as physical and financial risk. the processual nature of imaging, however, also opens up possibilities for using scientific images towards political ends, especially to fuel forms of resistance against discriminatory power relations. ashton b. wesner in a study of land measured using digital sonar technology, attends to indigenous oral poetry as an alternative modality to relate to land, and demonstrates how the enlisting of the pictorial outcome of sonar measurements in the frame of settler colonialism and claims to “american innocence” come to be reconfigured for liberating purposes when appropriated by native people in oral performances at celilo falls, oregon. the author shows how native poets at celilo falls employ the oral production of meaningful sound in the recital of poetry as a way to intervene into a debate about land rights that places trust in visual evidence as it is offered through sonar imaging. one further article addresses the complex interplay between digital imaging procedures and alternative modes of expression and/or diagnosis as well as other sensory modalities. karolina kazimierczak, in her contribution, asks: how do multimodal modes of expression or diagnosis and sensory modalities other than the visual both complement and challenge the evidence ascribed to the images that result from technical imaging procedures? karolina kazimierczak’s paper incorporates the haptic into the diagnostic apparatus aiming at the detection of breast cancer, a diagnostic apparatus that relies on ultrasonic imaging. to point out the complex entanglement of the various sensory modalities involved in breast cancer examination, the author analyzes the technical processes in which sound waves in ultrasound become transduced into light waves. ultrasound, she continues to show, is employed in tandem with diagnostic modes that involve touch. to underscore her point, the author mobilizes an understanding that she gained through auto-ethnographic experience as a patient in a breast cancer examination ward. it is via effectively accentuating this attunement to alternative sensorial modalities in medical diagnosis that kazimierczak 15 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) challenges the predominance of the sense of sight in analyses of contemporary clinical practices. the articles assembled in this special section of catalyst all constitute exploratory thought-movements. they address questions that grow out of the encounter with tangible phenomena and the experience of specific situations and offer answers to these questions that have theoretical relevance beyond the specific analyses. the case studies presented exemplify the aim of our larger project to attend to the social, cultural and political dimensions of imaging practices through careful analysis of both the ways in which processual phenomena are rendered palpable using imaging technologies and the processes in which scientific images are constructed, circulated and deployed. in line with this project, the articles foreground the political dimension of imaging practices, open up anew the discussion on how imaging technologies perpetuate cultural values and beliefs, and suggest avenues for further research on practices of resistance that occur in conjunction with or in response to imaging practices. acknowledgments this special section was came into existence in association with the eu cost action is1307 “new materialism: networking european scholarship on ‘how matter comes to matter’”. we thank the members of our working group for inspiring discussions on this topic. we would like to offer our special thanks to contact editor natasha myers for invaluable input during the development of this special section and for detailed comments throughout all the texts. her willingness to give her time and expertise generously has been very much appreciated. notes 1 the action grant “new materialism: networking european scholarship 16 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) on 'how matter comes to matter'” (2014-2018) was financed by the european cooperation in science & technology’s (cost) funding scheme that supports europe-wide networking activities among researchers, engineers and scholars. the working group brought together scholars from the humanities, practicing scientists and feminist scholars with a background in the natural sciences. 2 the aim of the working group was to develop “new materialisms at the boundaries of the human and natural sciences.” see the working group’s abstract on the website of the cost action: http://newmaterialism.eu/ working-groups/working-group-2/about. retrieved 28 may 2018. 3 in order to develop these topics and terms, we organized a workshop at the 7th annual conference on the new materialisms in warsaw, 21-23 september 2016, to which we invited potential contributors to this special section to present and discuss their ideas. 4available at https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yims20 references bal, m. 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"haptic creativity and mid-embodiments of experimental life." in frances e. mascia-lees (ed.). a companion to the anthropology of the body and embodiment (pp. 139-261). hoboken, nj: wiley-blackwell publishing. nagel, t. (1986). the view from nowhere. new york, ny: oxford university press. pauwels, l. (2006). visual cultures of science: rethinking representational practices in knowledge building and science communication. lebanon, nh: university press of new england. roberts, j. (2012). the visualised fetus. a cultural and political analysis of ultrasound imaginary. london, gb and new york, ny: routledge. rooney, e. (1996). what can matter be? american literary history, 8(4), 745-758. schneider, b., & nocke, t. (eds.). (2014). image politics of climate 21 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) change. visualizations, imaginations, documentations. bielefeld, de: transcript verlag. sobchack, v. (1992). the address of the eye: a phenomenology of film experience. princeton, nj: princeton university press. subramaniam, b. (2014). ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. champaign, il: university of illinois press. subramaniam, b., & willey, a. (2017). introduction to science out of feminist theory part one: feminism’s sciences. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(1), 1-23. turkle, s. (1984). the second self: computers and the human spirit. new york, ny: simon and schuster. van der tuin, i. (2011). new feminist materialisms. women’s studies international forum, 34(4), 271-277. van dijck, j. (2005). the transparent body: a cultural analysis of medical imaging. seattle, wa: university of washington press. waldby, c. (2000): the visible human project: informatic bodies and posthuman medicine. london, gb and new york, ny: routledge. wellmann, j. (2017). animating embryos: the in toto representation of life. the british journal for the history of science, 50(3), 521–535. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0007087417000656. werrett, s. (2008). art and science: historical perspectives. science studies network colloquium, april 21 2008. http://courses.washington. edu/ uwsts/ docs/ssnet-werrett-art-&-science.pdf [retrieved june 18, 22 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) 2018] woolgar, s. (1991). the turn to technology in social studies of science. science, technology, & human values 16.1 (winter), 20–50. bios liv hausken is dr.art. and professor of media studies at the department of media and communication at the university of oslo and head of the interdisciplinary research group media aesthetics. she seeks to engage the arts and the humanities in studies of everyday technologies and their significance in the production of knowledge and power. relevant publications in english include: “media aesthetics” in oxford bibliographies in communication (2018), ”the media aesthetics of brain imaging in popular science” (mößner and nordmann (eds.), reasoning in measurement, 2017), ”the archival promise of the biometric passport” in blom et al. (eds.) memory in motion, (2016), ”the visual culture of brain imaging” in leonardo: journal of the international society for the arts, sciences and technology (2015), and ”forensic fiction and the normalization of surveillance” (in nordicom review 2014). she is also the editor of thinking media aesthetics. media studies, film studies and the arts (2013). bettina papenburg (dr. phil., m.sc.) is assistant professor at the department of media and cultural studies at albert-ludwigs-university freiburg, germany. she held a marie skłodowska curie postdoctoral fellowship at the department of media and cultural studies at utrecht university (2009-2011). her research interests lie at the intersection of media theory and aesthetics, cultural studies, science and technology studies, gender and queer studies, theories of perception and affect, visual culture, and the grotesque. she is author of the new flesh. the grotesque body in the cinema of david cronenberg (in german, 2011), co-editor of the volume carnal aesthetics: transgressive imagery and feminist politics (ib tauris, 2013) and a special issue of discourse: journal for theoretical studies in media and culture on motion pictures. politics of perception (2014), as well as editor of the macmillan handbook gender: laughter (2017). she is currently working on her second monograph tentatively entitled “affect and evidence: visualizations in the life sciences and popular culture”. sigrid schmitz (dr. habil.) is a trained biologist whose research and teaching focuses on how gender aspects frame knowledge production in the life sciences and in technological developments, and how scientific knowledge 23 hausken, papenburg and schmitz catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) impacts social gender relations, particularly covering gender aspects in brain sciences and contemporary neurocultures, body discourses in neo-liberal society, and feminist epistemologies. she edited neurocultures. feminist and queer perspectives on current brains discourses (zaglossus, vienna, 2014, together with grit höppner). she headed the forum of competence “gender studies in computer and natural sciences“ at the university of freiburg, germany (1999-2009), held the chair of gender studies at the university of vienna (2010-2015), and was visiting professor for “gender and science” at the university of graz, austria, the humboldt-university of berlin and the university of oldenburg, germany. recently, as member of the joint project “gendering stem digital”, she and her team at the center for transdisciplinary gender studies at the humboldt-university of berlin are developing interactive open science modules for transferring knowledge and promoting a reflective discussion about gender aspects into stem fields. microsoft word 77046-1-18-kenney.docx kenney, m. (2019). fables of response-ability: feminist science studies as didactic literature. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-39. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © martha kenney, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article fables of response-ability: feminist science studies as didactic literature martha kenney san francisco state university mkenney@sfsu.edu abstract recent literature in feminist science studies is rich with stories about how we are constituted by and in relation to (sometimes toxic) chemicals. scholars such as natasha myers, mel chen, and eva hayward have written vivid accounts of the chemical ecologies of late industrialism, arguing that we cannot think of bodies as separate from environments. in this article, i read feminist scholarship on chemical ecologies as fables of responseability, stories that teach us to attend and respond within our more-thanhuman world. amplifying their didactic registers, i pay attention to moments in the texts that are speculative, poetic, and personal, moments that work on the bodies, imaginations, and sensoria of their readers. by reading these texts together, i hope to both acknowledge the didactic work that feminist science studies scholars are already doing and encourage others to experiment with telling their own fables of response-ability. kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 introduction: reclaiming the didactic thinking back on my favorite articles in feminist science studies—donna haraway’s “situated knowledges,” emily martin’s “the egg and the sperm,” or siobhan somerville’s “scientific racism and the invention of the homosexual body,” for example—it is their didactic qualities that i admire most. not only as a classroom teacher but also as a reader, and someone who was once a student, i am compelled by writing that teaches us to attend and respond to the politics of scientific knowledge-making practices. didactic, of course, is usually intended as a pejorative, not a compliment; it is a word that critics reach for when they want to dismiss a work of art as moralizing and patronizing to its audience. didactic always means too didactic. there are, however, no positive adjectives for work that intends to teach. we have preachy but not teachy. pedagogical is a mouthful. and educational is too much like nutritious—signaling something joyless but good for you. in the absence of another word, why do we continue to use the word didactic only as an insult, as if teaching should never be the goal of writing, scholarship, or art? the implication is that when art tries too hard to teach, it necessarily fails on all other aesthetic counts. however, as anyone who has ever been a teacher knows, aesthetics are often the medium of pedagogy. charismatic texts—texts that are stylish, funny, vivid, poetic, or wry—have the incredible power to grab ahold of their readers and compel us to see, feel, think, and relate differently. in this article, i suggest that we embrace these didactic qualities in feminist science studies scholarship, qualities that often go unexamined when we talk about academic writing. the prevailing negative associations of didactic, i believe, are consistent with the way that teaching is both gendered and devalued in contemporary american culture. this attitude will be familiar to any teacher who has heard the awful phrase (often spoken directly to one’s face), “those who can’t do, teach.” seen as feminine reproductive labor, rather than masculine productive labor, teaching is undervalued, even at universities, where the quality of one’s pedagogy rarely makes or breaks a tenure case (especially at so-called research universities). to reclaim the kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 didactic is, therefore, a feminist project because it insists that teaching is not only valuable, but that it requires extraordinary skill, savvy, complexity, and especially style. i would, therefore, like to propose a revised definition of didactic literature: writing that by virtue of its aesthetic qualities is able to teach. this definition moves us away from the drudgery of rote learning and opens up the possibility of being moved, influenced, or re-oriented though aesthetic encounters with texts in unexpected ways. although didactic literature traditionally refers to stories that teach specific lessons in predictable ways, a feminist reimagining of this genre recognizes that the effects of reading are always situated and contextual and cannot be determined in advance. the frustrating and beautiful reality is that teaching is always unpredictable and it is difficult to account for what has been learned and how, especially using institutional metrics such as teaching evaluations or “student learning outcomes.” this does not mean that it is futile to wonder about the situated effects of the texts we read and write; on the contrary, this means that questions of learning and teaching require our time, care, and attention, rather than our scorn or our indifference. to read (and write) feminist science studies as didactic literature is to become curious about what words do, how they flow through or influence us. isabelle stengers (2008) calls the transformative power of writing efficace (efficacy), which she likens to witchcraft and other forms of magic.1 for stengers, “theories are always efficacious, they always add to the situation, even when they only aim at diagnosing it” (p. 53). reclaiming the didactic requires a “speculative commitment” (puig de la bellacasa, 2010) to asking what a text might add to the situation. this involves a different set of reading practices oriented around teaching and learning. when we read a given text in this way, we sometimes find the most efficacious passages, the most seductive passages, the most tentacular passages (hayward, 2012) are those that “seek not to explain but involve” (halberstam, 2011, p. 15, emphasis mine); passages that are speculative, allegorical, poetic, or farfetched; passages that we, as teachers, cannot help but read aloud in the classroom or that we, as writers, cannot help but cite again, and again. kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 going back into familiar texts with this set of reading practices, we are reminded that their didactic force is not always located in the explanation, information, or diagnosis it offers but in how language gets under the skin, offering new structures of feeling and perception. for example, langdon winner’s (1980) famous story about robert moses’s low bridges that kept buses from bringing low-income people of color to jones beach is the most efficacious example in his classic article “do artefacts have politics?”; however, it seems that it is also apocryphal. in 1999 an exchange between bernward joerges and steve woolgar & geoff cooper brings to light the fact that the low bridges on the long island expressway did not prevent people of color from going to jones beach and, indeed, do not currently prevent buses from traveling on the expressway (joerges, 1999a, 1999b; woolgar & cooper, 1999). given the fact that this is now common knowledge, what should we make of the fact that “do artefacts have politics?” continues to be taught in introductory science and technology studies (sts) classes (including my own)? if its most compelling passage is a fabrication, what does this article have to offer? in their response to joerges, woolgar & cooper draw our attention to the didactic force of winner’s bridges: “the power and significance of the story lies not in its referential adequacy but elsewhere—that is, in its rhetorical strategies and its pragmatic value within the field of s&ts argumentation” (1999, p. 442, emphasis mine). the value of winner’s exemplar, it seems, is not as a factual account of us history (because it isn’t), but how it models a way of paying attention to technology, infrastructure, architecture, and public space that is central to sts analysis. against the common perception of technologies as neutral or progressive, winner teaches his readers to consider the exclusions and inclusions (intentional and unintentional) in our built environments, and how material things uphold, resist, or intensify configurations of power and authority. in this almost forty-year-old article with somewhat musty academic language and a handful of now-arcane cold war military acronyms, my students reliably and enthusiastically grab ahold of winner’s racist bridges because he introduces them into a new way of seeing. kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 in this way we might read articles like “do artefacts have politics?” as fables of attention (kenney, 2013), texts that teach us to pay attention to our world in new ways. these fables initiate us into unfamiliar “arts of noticing” (tsing, 2015), draw us into alternate “economies of attention” (daston, 2004). the fable is a classic genre of didactic literature, teaching moral lessons through short, well-crafted stories. the skill of popular fabulists like aesop and jean de la fontaine lies in their ability to address, to charm, to teach, and to gather, century after century. however, despite its remarkable longevity, the fable does not immediately strike us as an appropriate genre for academic writing. talking animals and moral lessons seem opposed to the kind of “serious, adult thinking” (stengers, 2008) that counts as scholarly. it feels risky to embrace a genre that could undermine rather than strengthen one’s intellectual authority. it seems childish to make up stories to entertain, not just inform. and besides, doesn’t fabulist also mean liar? to think of feminist science studies as, among other things, didactic literature means that we will have to learn to live with these anxieties. this is difficult in the humanities and social sciences, as we often have to defend the legitimacy of our research in the face of the epistemological dominance of the stem fields. however, if we want to do scholarship that will influence our readers, i argue that we must risk the terrible schoolmarm femininity of the didactic and the childishness of the fable, dare to embrace the fickle magic of language and ask: what do our stories teach?2 fables of response-ability the fable genre, first and foremost, teaches its readers how to be responsible. for example, in jean de la fontaine’s “the cicada and the ant,” the cicada sings all summer long, neglecting to store up food for the winter; when she asks the ant to share some of hers, the cicada is rebuked. this story is addressed to its reader; it teaches us to plan for the winter ahead because our neighbor might fail to respond with generosity, and in so doing it “renders me responsible” (keenan, 1997, p. 58). in fables of kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 responsibility: aberrations and predicaments ethics and politics, thomas keenan highlights the role of this moral address in defining what kinds of stories fables are and how they work on their readers: “what is at stake in the fable is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility—our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us into question” (p. 45). like the “cicada and the ant,” winner’s story about robert moses’s bridges is a moral tale addressed to his reader. his argument isn’t just that artifacts have politics, but that we ought to take collective responsibility for technological change. technological innovation, according to winner, requires as much scrutiny as “changes justified on political grounds” (1980, p. 135). if we don’t scrutinize new technologies, they become part of the fabric of everyday life and it becomes increasingly difficult to contest their ubiquity; those who do will be “dismissed as dreamers or fools” (p. 134). to illustrate the dangers of adopting new technology without democratic debate, winner uses the example of the mechanical tomato harvester introduced in the 1940s, one of the many technologies that ushered in the era of industrial agriculture. as a direct result of the mechanical tomato harvester, farm laborers lost their jobs, wealth became more concentrated among very large growers, and tomatoes were increasingly bred to be handled by machines—with thicker skins and less flavor (p. 126). like la fontaine, winner details the consequence of inaction: the cicada will go hungry and we will eat tomatoes that are less than tasty. in doing so, he addresses his reader, implicates us, and insists that we pay attention to the politics of new technologies; he renders us responsible. the way i see it, the key difference between feminist science studies and the broader field of sts is that writing in feminist science studies always implies this moral address.3 for feminist science studies scholars, the histories of science, technology, and medicine are inextricable from the histories of colonialism, imperialism, and warfare; scientific knowledge is part of the fabric that constitutes and transforms consequential categories like sex, gender, race, dis/ability, and sexuality. the purpose of this scholarship is not only to chronicle the historical relationships between kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 technoscience, power, and privilege, but in doing so, to show that these developments are socially and historically contingent, not the result of inevitable scientific progress. as s. leigh star (1991) reminds us, “it might have been otherwise” (p. 53). it could still be otherwise. and, knowing this deep in our marrow, it becomes our collective responsibility to create and sustain more livable technoscientific worlds. or perhaps responsibility is too heavy-handed, too serious, too adult a name for what feminist fables teach. maybe feminist fables aren’t so much about imparting duty or moral obligation as they are about cultivating the capacity for response. recent works in feminist science studies have proposed response-ability as a term that might whet our imaginations for more relational ethics and politics enacted in everyday practices of living in our more-than-human world (haraway, 2008, 2012; myers, 2006; schrader, 2010; hayward, 2010; barad, 2012; hustak & myers, 2012; reardon, 2013; reardon et al., 2015). the feminist ethic of response-ability focuses not on being responsible but on learning how to respond and “opening up possibilities for different kinds of responses” (schrader, 2010, p. 299). donna haraway (2008) writes about response-ability working on agility training with her australian shepherd, cayenne pepper; astrid schrader (2010) describes how scientists succeed and fail at responding to pfiesteria piscicida in toxic algae bloom research; reardon et al. (2015) discuss how cross-disciplinary pedagogical initiatives can foster more response-able research. in each of these examples, what counts as response-ability is not known in advance; it emerges within a particular context and among sometimes unlikely partners, who learn how affect and to become affected by one another (despret, 2016). thus, response-ability captures the spirit of thomas keenan’s “exposure to calls,” but also recognizes that not only humans call and not only humans respond. how we pay attention affects whether we can hear these calls and how we learn to respond (despret, 2016). in this way, fables of attention are also fables of response-ability (see also kenney, 2015). haraway insists that response-ability is not only cultivated in labs, on agility training courses, or in other multi-species encounters, but also in the kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 way we tell stories about these (and other) phenomena. in haraway’s recent work she foregrounds how the desire to cultivate response-ability guides her own approach to writing. for example, in her article “awash in urine,” haraway narrates personal and political histories of diethylstilbestrol (des) and premarin connecting disparate actors across geographic and historical contexts. for premarin, an estrogen medication made from the urine of pregnant mares, haraway’s history brings together: fetal calves stripped of amniotic fluid, urinating pregnant canadian women, pregnant mares and their foals and consorts in manitoba and beyond, activists in horse rescue and women’s health, economically strapped contract farmers, a california menopausal woman worried about familial heart disease in the company of a lucrative marketready crowd of other menopausal americans, and german zebras in zoos in the 1930s. (2012, p. 312) she describes this storytelling practice as “conjugating” or “yoking,” joining together what had otherwise been apart. bringing these surprising actors together, haraway tells stories where neither bodies nor chemicals like premarin are entities unto themselves but are made in and through these relations: “‘our bodies, ourselves,’ includes mares and their foals (and a few stallions)” (p. 307). since these kinds of relational stories have become so common in feminist science studies (due in large part to haraway’s influence), it can be difficult to remember that this is a deliberate narrative style, chosen for its aesthetic and political effects. haraway writes: “why tell stories like this, when there are only more and more openings and no bottom lines? because there are quite definite response-abilities that are strengthened in such stories” (p. 312). here, she draws attention to the didactic quality of feminist storytelling, specifically, how it can enable and shut down our capacities to attend and therefore also to respond “within and as part of the world” (barad, 2007, p. 37). if we understand feminist science studies scholars as fabulists committed to crafting response-able stories, we need to pay attention not only to what our stories say, but what our stories do as they move through social worlds (frank, 2010). this approach draws us toward questions of kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 efficace (stengers, 2008): does this story enroll? how does it sensitize us to the world? what modes of attention does it teach? who does it gather together? what response-abilities are strengthened? which are eroded? to illustrate what this proposal might look like, i read recent writing in feminist science studies as fables of response-ability, amplifying their didactic registers and paying attention to moments that are more speculative, poetic, and personal, moments where they loosen their grip on reality and take us somewhere else. in what follows, i will read work by natasha myers, mel chen, eva hayward, and their collaborators not only as explanatory but as involutationary (hustak & myers, 2012)—stories that involve their readers, sensitizing our bodies, imaginations, and sensoria to more-than-human worlds. like haraway, these authors tell relational stories about chemical ecologies, where species, bodies, and environments shape one another through absorption, ingestion, respiration, and sensation. these articles offer important insights about how we are constituted in and through “chemical kinships” (murphy, 2016). however, to read them only on the level of their ontological claims (i.e., that the world is relational) would miss how they teach us to pay attention to the calls of others and render us response-able. by reading these authors together, i hope to both acknowledge the didactic work that feminist science studies texts are already doing and encourage others to experiment with telling their own fables of response-ability. chemical ecologies recent literature in feminist science studies is rich with stories about how we are constituted by and in relation to (sometimes toxic) chemicals (e.g., murphy, 2008; hayward, 2010; chen, 2011; haraway, 2012; hustak & myers, 2012; murphy 2013; agard-jones, 2014; davis, 2015; shotwell, 2016). drawing on the environmental justice movement, disability studies, queer theory, and indigenous studies, this literature offers narrative resources that help us account for uneven geographies of exposure that enable certain forms of life and disable others (murphy, 2016). for example, kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 we see how us and us-backed military operations have lasting chemical legacies that continue long after the wars are over; agent orange in the vietnam war (gammeltoft, 2014), depleted uranium in the gulf war (nixon, 2011), and glyphosate (roundup) in the us–colombia war on drugs (lyons, 2016)—none of which are officially considered “chemical weapons”—have transgenerationally altered human and non-human life in vietnam, iraq, kuwait, colombia, and elsewhere. this literature models how to pay attention simultaneously to the spatial, temporal, material, and political dimensions of living in a “permanently polluted world” (liboiron, 2016, p. 104). as michelle murphy (2008) explains, “molecular relations…not only move spatially across the earth on currents and winds, and not only spread transnationally through the proliferation and redistribution of industrial processes in global capital, but also are part of transnational conjunctures of militarism, activism, research, citizenship, and dispossession” (p. 701). accounting for the ways of living and dying made possible by pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, plastics, and pesticides is necessary political work. yet, despite the fact that our relations with these chemicals are ubiquitous, banal, and everyday, we can easily become desensitized to their effects on our own bodies and the bodies of others who are differently located in cycles of production, consumption, and waste. as we participate in consumer capitalism, it is difficult to attend to the many ways in which we are implicated and imbricated in ongoing chemical violence, both spectacular and everyday, especially violence that seems “far away.”4 as heather swanson (2017) writes in “the banality of the anthropocene”: we are all entangled with the everyday violences of industrial agriculture and [other] nationalist projects in a way that…shopping at whole foods won’t solve…how is it that americans, especially white middle-class ones, learn not to notice such entanglements, to not be affected? how do we learn not to see the damage around us? disaffection, it seems, is central to the perpetuation of business-as-usual in late industrialism (fortun, 2012). in this context, feminist literature on chemical ecologies is didactic; by teaching their readers to become affected kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 11 by relations we have learned to ignore, these authors “makes relations sensible” (murphy, 2016) and create occasions for different kinds of response. as liboiron, tironi, and calvillo (2018) argue: “a permanently polluted world is one that, because of its deep alteration, reclaims the need to incite new forms of response-ability” (p. 332). although “fables of response-ability” is intended as a capacious category that can encompass diverse matters of care in feminist science studies, the literature on chemical ecologies illustrates why it is vital to attend to the affective force of our writing. evidence of environmental injustice is available at our fingertips; but evidence alone is not enough to transform the structures of feeling and perception that authorize environmental violence. it is important not only to know, but also to feel how boundaries between people and their ecologies are “permeable, silted, breathing, and relational” (voyles, 2015, p. 218). fables of response-ability, therefore, might not always be true stories, but useful fictions that open up possibilities for inhabiting ecologies otherwise. since living well in an unjust world requires a range of complex and contradictory feelings, it is crucial that these stories not only focus on damage, illness, and violence (tuck, 2009), but also the kinds of pleasures and possibilities of chemical kinship. to illustrate how attention to chemical ecologies can also encourage joyful curiosity, i turn first to carla hustak and natasha myers’s (2012) “involutionary momentum: affective ecologies and the sciences of plant/insect encounters”—an article that offers poetic and theoretically rich descriptions of the chemical chatter between plants and insects. by telling stories that take the lives of plants seriously, hustak and myers sensitize us to the pull of forces we have been taught to ignore, and open the question of ecological response-ability. involutionary momentum: darwin’s body experiments hustak and myers’s article “involutionary momentum” offers a feminist account of the relations among insects, plants, and the people who study them. the article engages with findings in chemical ecology, a field that “is kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 12 devoted to promoting an ecological understanding of the origin, function, and significance of natural chemicals that mediate interactions within and between organisms” (journal of chemical ecology, n.d.). while on the one hand, the work of chemical ecologists teaches us about the fascinating chemical communication between species via pheromones and other chemical signals, they often employ neo-darwinian language that emphasizes individualism, competition, and efficiency to the exclusion of all other ways of understanding these relations. the encounters between ophrys orchids and male bees, for example, are narrated as trickery and “sexual deception” (p. 75) because ophrys mimics the sex pheromones of their insect pollinators, luring them to participate in their pollination without offering nectar as a “reward.” these metaphors not only naturalize neoliberal, capitalist, and military values, but, as hustak and myers demonstrate, they constrict our collective imaginations and shut down our ability to recognize and respond to agencies other than our own. neodarwinian accounts give us mechanistic “ecologies, populated by blind, reactive automatons” (p. 79). in “stultify[ing] both orchid and insect agency” (p. 79), the standard narratives are not able to “admit pleasure, play, or improvisation within or among species” (p. 77). hustak and myers devote relatively little space to critiquing dominant accounts; instead, they begin to spin a different set of tales. in their article, they counter neo-darwinian storytelling with involutionary storytelling, offering vivid accounts of how organisms become involved with one another’s lives. their descriptions of orchid and insect encounters are sensuous, sensual, and, depending on your interspecies proclivities, downright sexy. these are seductive narratives where “mimetic relations among plants and animals take shape in the thickness of the space between bodies, where affects and sensations are transduced through excitable tissues” (p. 78). we learn about how the specialized anatomy and volatile chemicals released by the ophrys orchids “entice male bees to ‘indulge’ in the pleasures of pseudocopulation” (p. 78) and how tobacco plants “synthesize and release a concentrated plume of volatile chemicals” to attract carnivorous insects to sup on the tobacco’s herbivorous predators kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 13 (p. 99). hustak and myers’s writing style goes beyond thick description; they weave a poetics of encounter that invites the reader to indulge her imagination in these remarkable scenes of ingestion and pollination. these interspecies encounters are taken from the field of chemical ecology (as well as charles darwin’s writing on orchids), but do not mirror their stories back—they are positioned “athwart” (p. 77). hustak and myers read chemical ecologists as if they were involutionists (p. 101), grabbing ahold of radical claims of plant communication, savoring the most savory speculations (e.g., talking trees!) before they are retracted by their authors in favor of more conservative narratives (e.g., trees that “eavesdrop” to enhance their own fitness). they skip over the functionalism in darwin to identify and amplify more muted stories of “affinities, attractions, and intimacies” (p. 79). they glean suggestive phrases from biological texts and involve them in other stories—stories of affective ecologies, intimate encounters, and articulate orchids. here they use darwin’s own words to sensuously describe his scientific practice: [darwin] took special note of each species’ labellum, that special petal that extends out of the flower like a platform and “affords” both an “excellent landing-space” (98) and a “good standing place” (57) for the insect. in one species, he showed how its “two prominent ridges, sloping down the middle” acted as a “guide” to lure the insect towards the nectary. the insect’s “flexible body” would allow it to reach the nectary and contact the pollinia (25)…he wanted to understand how the labellum “induced” an insect “to alight” (77). to do so, he noted the pleasures of taste that might attract the insect. in one case he noted, the labellum secreted enticing drops of nectar at a distance from “the true nectary” (77). (p. 86) here, hustak and myers practice a kind of involutionary poaching, hunting for precious empirical details from the game preserves of respectable scientific history (de certeau, 1984). they invite us to share in the secreted bounty, beckoning their readers with meaty latinate words like “pullulate” and “loquacious” (p. 79). kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 14 while all of these stories are didactic and open up different ways to understand orchids, insects, and scientific practice, i want to draw attention to one specific moment in the article where the authors move more fully into the genre historical fiction, igniting new imaginings for what it could mean to do evolutionary biology. hustak and myers’s telling of darwin’s intimate encounters with orchids offers a useful reminder not to overlook the affective force of speculative, poetic, or fictional stories as we learn to attend and respond within our more-than-human world. to be sure, these vignettes are, in part, grounded in darwin’s own papers. darwin documented many of the curious methods by which he studied orchids, for example, probing the flowers to discover what kind of stimulation would persuade each species to eject its pollenium (pp. 86-90). alongside lush retellings of these practices, hustak and myers engage in a kind of speculative ethnography, imagining how darwin involved his own body in his experiments. they discuss a passage where he translates the position of catasetum antennae to human anatomy, describing the differences between species by invoking a man holding his arms at different angles. hustak and myers read this not as an anthropocentric metaphor, but as possible evidence that darwin was conducting “body experiments” (p. 93), bending his arms into the shape of the catasetum antennae. this reading is animated by myers’s anthropological work, which details the experiments performed by protein crystallographers when they move their bodies into the shape of proteins (2006; 2015) and phd scientists who dance their dissertations (2012). reading this moment as a “speculative fabulation”—a fable—rather than as realist history of science helps us pay closer attention to how this article teaches (haraway, 2016). even if darwin never performed these kinds of body experiments, this story is didactic.5 it teaches us to pay attention to the bodies of scientists and how they become animated by their curiosity. here hustak and myers open up a space of possibility within a history we thought we already knew, offering a vision of biology as the pursuit of passionate, embodied inquiry. the purpose of telling this story is not to advocate that we reproduce darwin’s experiments with orchids—his practices, they point out, were often as violent as they were tender—but to kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 15 show that there are other ways of knowing than the disembodied and disinterested version of scientific objectivity that we see in more official histories of evolutionary biology. in myers’s (2017) most recent project, becoming sensor, she takes up her own provocation, developing new forms of passionate, embodied inquiry. in becoming sensor, myers seeks to cultivate feminist, queer, decolonial modes of attention to the ecologies within the ancient oak savannah in toronto’s high park. in the oak savannah, she “experiment[s] with sensory practices that can document the growth, decay, combustion and decomposition that are essential to the life of this remarkable land” (“becoming sensor,” n.d.). myers and her collaborators attune their bodies and instruments to the land, producing sound, images, movements, and knowledge different from those of the restoration ecologists with whom they share the park. whereas restoration ecologists control invasive species, prescribe burns, and manage wildlife, natasha myers and ayelen liberona—both trained dancers—take long-exposure photographs while they move their bodies in response to the plant life: “it is by hitching a ride on the growth movements of trees and plants, letting their slow movements lure our bodies, that our kinesthetic images blur the distinction between animator and animated. letting the wild arc lines of tree limbs set our bodies and cameras in motion, we experiment with ways to intra-animate with the trees” (myers, 2017). they imagine becoming sensor, speculatively, as a hundred-year project—because it is not clear in advance what it will take to undo ecological thinking and doing that is "indebted to capitalist and colonial logics” and find new ways to inhabit the oak savannah (“becoming sensor,” n.d.). this is a risky project, i think, because it takes seriously the sentience of landscapes and approaches epistemological/political questions with humility; the question “how to relate?” is “insistent but not easily answerable” (atkinson-graham, kenney, ladd, murray, & simmonds, 2015). in this context, imagining darwin, alone in his study, bending his arms into the shapes he learned from a flower, might give a certain kind of permission to sustain uncertain inquiry, even if it is ultimately historical fiction. kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 16 and this, to me, is the moral of the story—that we need to take epistemological and narrative risks if we want to interrupt the neo-darwinian status quo in evolutionary biology. why does it seem so natural to have militarized orchids, but so absurd to suggest, as joan roughgarden (2009) does, that friendships might be important for the evolution of some animal species? if we cannot imagine life outside of the “calculating, functionalist logic” (hustak & myers, 2012, p. 76) of neo-darwinism, it is impossible to feel or to know the biological world any differently. by telling stories of affective ecologies “shaped by pleasure, play, and experimental propositions” (p. 78), hustak and myers activate new questions about the beings and doings of plants and insects. and with these questions comes the matter of response-ability: what is at stake in this involutionary approach is a theory of ecological relationality that takes seriously organisms’ practices, their inventions, and experiments crafting interspecies lives and worlds. this is an ecology inspired by a feminist ethic of “responseability” in which questions of species difference are always conjugated with attentions to affect, entanglement, and rupture; an affective ecology in which creativity and curiosity characterize the experimental forms of life of all kinds of practitioners, not only the humans. and it is this mode of ecological thinking that we believe we will need in order to do more effective work in challenging the status quo of ecological irresponsibility. (p. 106) although hustak and myers do not explicitly invoke anthropogenic environmental destruction in this article, it is unmistakably the context out of which they are writing. however, rather than focusing on damage caused by disaffection, the stories they tell are explicitly crafted to move their readers to attend to our shared world differently. hustak and myers ask us to take the most radical claim of chemical ecology seriously—“the air hangs heavy with significance” (p. 105)—and ask how we can further attune our senses, our bodies, and our instruments to the ways that “plants articulate their experience and desires in an aromatic atmospherics of volatile chemicals” (p. 100). even, and especially, in an historical moment of kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 17 accelerating environmental violence, hustak and myers show the importance of “crafting our stories with attentive, wondering care” (bynum, 1997, p. 25). toxic animacies: mel chen’s couch in their article “toxic animacies, inanimate affections,” mel chen (2011) teaches us how to attend to and respond within twenty-first-century chemical ecologies that enable and disable unevenly. chen is interested in toxicity both as figure and as lived experience. living with the ongoing legacies of industrialism, we risk ingesting, inhaling, and absorbing toxic substances and becoming with chemicals that do not promote uncomplicated survival. however, chen challenges us to restrain knee-jerk panic about toxic exposure and learn to dwell inside the toxic relations of late industrialism. in this article, they develop toxicity into a figure of queer relationality and tell stories of the intersubjectivies and interobjectivies enabled through toxic bonds. chen begins by analyzing media coverage of the 2007 us panic about lead paint in children’s toys imported from china. chen is interested in the two principle figures in the news stories: “the vulnerable child, most frequently a young, white, middle class boy, and a dangerous painted toy, thomas the tank engine” (p. 268). these media representations, chen argues, rely heavily on the discourses of the war on terror. they present secure boarders as the automatic response to biological vulnerability. consumer safety is figured as a matter of “homeland security.” the invasive toxic threat is not only racialized as “chinese,” but also evinces a nasty strain of us exceptionalism. the problem is not that lead paint exists, but that it has invaded our territory and put us at risk: “these environmental toxins were supposed to be ‘there,’ but were found ‘here’” (p. 267). “we” (interpellated by the news stories as the parents of the threatened child) are entitled to be free of the toxic consequences of global industrialization, especially in the safety of our own homes. the risk of the lead paint to the kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 18 chinese workers making the toys falls outside the political frame altogether; transnational environmental justice questions are foreclosed. similar to hustak and myers, though, “toxic animacies” does not continue in the genre of critique. instead of focusing on xenophobic anxiety around national borders, chen homes in on the queer love story between the little boy and his toy train. chen notices that this scene of danger—boy with train in mouth—is conspicuously absent from the media representations. the locus of toxic permeability is displaced onto the national border in the form of demands for “quality control” of imported products; to show the boy licking the phallic train is simply “too much” (p. 271), a site of contamination too emotionally, politically, and sexually charged to represent directly. chen argues that this displacement gives rise to the fantasy of absolute impermeability, as if a more secure boarder could prevent the act of “queer licking” (p. 271) itself: “it is not only a fantasy that not-licking is a viable way to contain heterosexuality within its bounds, but it is also a fantasy that not-licking is a viable way to contain the interconstitution of people and other people, or people and other objects” (p. 275). when we contain toxic threats within the discourses of homeland security, we miss how bodies are constituted with toxins within the specific histories and geographies of transnational industrialization. instead, we pour economical and emotional resources into creating zones of exception, further protecting already protected life (p. 272) and refusing responsibility for exposures that fall outside of our protection. when i teach “toxic animacies,” this discussion of queer licking is one of the two places in the text that students immediately want to discuss. they are simultaneously titillated and horrified by the suggestion that a boy with thomas the tank engine in his mouth constitutes a queer threat to norms of sexuality and healthy embodiment. the admixture of queerness, toxicity, and the sexuality of children makes everyone squirm; it is difficult to know how to respond. surely we do not actually want to encourage queer love between little boys and poisonous toys? this discomfort, i suggest to my students, might be the point. what i think this story teaches is a particular habit of critical thinking, the habit of generating narratives that run kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 19 counter to dominant stories to get us unstuck from the morass of conventional thinking and to see where they take us. not all counternarratives will generate new forms of response-ability. however, as hustak and myers demonstrate, it is incredibly difficult to think outside of neoliberal, capitalist, and military logics; therefore, in our writing and in our classrooms we must cultivate the art of hitching a ride on a counter-narrative, even, and perhaps, especially at the risk of feeling foolish. what if we begin with what is disavowed in the xenophobic media accounts of lead poisoning and performed a queer reading of the phobic scene: the potentially toxic encounter between a child and his painted toy. i encourage my students to sit with their discomfort and take seriously chen’s argument about the unavoidable interconstitution of bodies and chemicals; however, i do also find that this story of queer licking is ultimately a dead end. although it helps us move away from the fantasy of impermeability, it doesn’t offer a way to respond to the problem differently. this is why, i believe, chen switches narrative track, introducing stories of their personal experiences with the “peculiar intimacies and alienations” (p. 265) of multiple chemical sensitivity induced by chronic mercury poisoning. in the second half of the article, chen describes the everyday practices of wearing breathing masks in public places and the pain, overstimulation, and exhaustion of toxic attacks brought on by inhaling the wrong chemical (perfumes, gasoline, cleaning agents, cigarette smoke). the story of one of these periods of toxic exhaustion is the second place in the text that students gravitate towards. specifically, the moment when chen describes how they remembered being embraced by their lover, when in fact it was the couch’s embrace that had comforted them (p. 277). chen narrates this misrecognition not as a failure, but instead asks after the “inanimate affections” that transpired between their injured body and the supple form of the couch. chen describes this relationship as one of “interobjectivity” since it “is made possible only to the degree that i am not in possession of human sociality” (p. 280). chen’s first-person accounts of living with multiple chemical sensitivity opens up different political and affective responses to living in a kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 20 toxic world. against fantasies of impermeability and their attendant biosecuritization regimes, chen draws our attention to the fact that many already experience the disabling effects of capitalist cycles of production, consumption, and waste. and, as chen argues, these experiences are not only negative; it is also important to take seriously “the desires, the loves, the rehabilitations, the affections…that toxic conditions induce” (p. 281). telling these personal stories about the queer relationality of multiple chemical sensitivity in an academic article, chen performs an autobiographical vulnerability that—even in the genre of queer theory, which recognizes the political value of the personal and intimate— nevertheless risks embarrassment, impropriety, and illegibility. it risks illegibility precisely in the places where the story matters most; each time i read “toxic animacies,” i find myself struggling to grasp the significance of this encounter between chen and the couch. this, perhaps, should not be surprising, since, as elizabeth povinelli (2016) points out, the distinction between life and nonlife is central to western thought. it is, therefore, likely that we will fail to connect with a story that attempts to push against the opposition between the animate and the inanimate that structures conventional storytelling. but by coming back to this encounter twice in the article (pp. 277-278, pp. 280-281) and again in the final paragraph of animacies (2012, p. 237), chen challenges their reader to pay close attention to the story despite (or even because of) its ambiguity. although chen has “no ready answers” (p. 281) about what lesson we ought to take away, this leaves the reader with the challenge of how to respond. it renders me response-able. like hustak and myers, chen shows us that “the air hangs heavy with significance” (hustak & myers, 2012, p. 105), carrying molecules that can trigger toxic reactions in their encounters with sensitive tissues. and although what we breathe in may harm us, the question should not be how to secure our borders, but “which bodies can bear the fiction of independence and of uninterruptability” (chen, 2011, p. 274) and which cannot. “toxic animacies” gives us different stories, different channels, different registers to orient ourselves around the challenge of how to “think kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 21 more broadly about synthesis and symbiosis, including toxic vapors, interspersals, intrinsic mixings, and alterations, favoring inter-absorption over corporeal exceptionalism” (p. 272). these are pragmatic questions that require action (e.g., industrial regulation), but also the ability to sit with and think from experiences of susceptibility, porousness, receptivity, and vulnerability (2012, p. 237). and rather than carve out zones of exception like in the anxious media accounts, learn to tell stories that strengthen care, resilience, and repair within our sometimes toxic chemical ecologies. telling stories about toxic bonds allows us to map geopolitical and environmental interconnectedness and disparity, helping us to see harm but also the relations made possible in contaminated places. the point here is not to celebrate relationality and chemical agency as such (we see how deadly these can be), but to better account for the ways that we become with damaged environments and “blasted landscapes” (tsing, 2015, p. 282). carnal light: ragoût alba à la provençale fables of response-ability, as we have seen, are often born out of anger at the casual violence of dominant narratives. eva hayward’s (2011) article, “when fish and frogs change gender,” like chen’s, takes hyperbolic media panic as its starting point. hayward is troubled by the proliferation of articles with sensationalistic headlines that link pollution with the changes in the sex organs of animals, such as “female fish develop ‘testes’ in gulf dead zone” and “sex-changing chemicals found in potomac river” (see also kier, 2010; di chiro, 2010; murphy, 2013; ah-king & hayward, 2014; shotwell, 2016). in these articles, hayward finds pervasive anxiety about contaminated categories in the place of a real ability to grapple with the changing chemical ecologies of our industrial waterways. like chen, she is looking for strategies to account for uneven vulnerability without recourse to purity discourses: i wonder how we can address the impacts of toxic substances on vulnerable people and animals without appealing to society's basest fears about sexual disruption. can we foster environmental kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 22 responsibility without invoking anxiety that our most intimate reproductive environments have been infiltrated by an industrial world? (2011) hayward sets out on a project of narrative remediation, to re-story these contaminated landscapes in ways that allow us to respond differently. i use narrative remediation here to name both a desire to remedy harm done by dominant stories and to re-mediate, to stage our “matters of care” differently (puig de la bellacasa, 2010). following bailey kier, hayward (2011) notes that life goes on for the bass in the polluted potomac: “male bass…produce eggs that can be fertilized by their former gender mates.” chemically induced sex change, then, might be narrated as “an adaptive response” rather than “an alteration of the ‘natural order’ of things” (2011). hayward’s work is characterized by an attention to bodies and species as creative responses to their environments (2010, p. 245). “our bodies,” she writes, are “open to the planet” (2011). therefore, rather than telling lurid stories that traffic in fantasies of corporeal purity and biosecuritization, we must create “concepts of life and embodiment adequate” to the ways in which life—including human life—has already been altered by industrial chemicals (murphy, 2016, 2017). there are up to eight hundred chemicals used in everyday consumer products that are known or suspected endocrine disruptors (liboiron, 2016, p. 99); “every human and animal body tested in the past decade contains chemicals that leach from plastics” (p. 89). we, therefore, need to be able to account for the effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on human and animal bodies, acknowledging harm without pathologizing those affected. as alison kafer (2013) argues: “what is needed then are analyses that recognize and refuse the intertwined exploitation of bodies and environments without demonizing illnesses and disabilities, and especially the ill and disabled bodies that result from such exploitation” (p. 158). although sex changes, illness, and disability should not be conflated, recent work in queer/trans theory and disability studies highlights the shared importance of critiquing eco-normative discourses (di chiro, 2010), reframing those affected by pollution as “queer survivors” (murphy, 2013) rather than “tragic mistakes kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 23 caused by unnatural incursions or disruptions of the natural body and environment” (kafer, 2013, pp. 157-158). hayward asks: “is there a way to re-evaluate ecological resilience—such as the sex-changing response— and meet the future organisms that we are becoming?” (2011). the point is not to romanticize pollution or accept environmental violence, but to ask who we are and who we become in relation to industrial chemicals. hayward continues her project of narrative remediation with evolutionary biologist malin ah-king in their article “toxic sexes: perverting pollution and queering hormone disruption” (2014). drawing on ah-king and nylin’s (2010) concept of “reactive sex,” they discuss how environmental sex change and environmental sex determination are a normal part of the life course for many animals. the peer-reviewed literature is replete with species of fish, amphibians, and reptiles that demonstrate remarkable phenotypic plasticity with respect to sexual morphology and behavior. in crocodiles, for example, embryos with the same genotype can become either male or female hatchlings, depending upon on the temperature during incubation (ah-king & nylin, 2010, p. 235). in one species of clownfish, all individuals are born male, but can then develop into females later in life depending upon the social environment (p. 241). although sex determination in mammals and birds is more stable and more strongly influenced by genes, ah-king and hayward (2014) argue that sex in all species is “better understood as a responsive potential, changing over an individual's lifetime, in interaction with environmental factors, as well as over evolutionary time” (p. 6). shifting the definition of sex from fixed trait to a potential or capacity for response allows ah-king and hayward to provide an alternate accounting of the effects of endocrine disruptors on human and non-human bodies: sex potential is just that, an opening out, responsiveness that is ontologically more dynamic than static. while some organisms have a narrow regular range of sex possibilities—their potential is more delimited—the effects of endocrine disruption provide a reworking of even these limits. in other words, while some species of fish more kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 24 easily shift from female to male as an environmental response to pollution, others, such as polar bears, shift with more trouble. and yet, hormonal disruption assures changes across borders of sexes. (p. 6) if sex is a potential that responds to environmental stimuli, endocrine disruptors may already be involved with (sexual) development processes in many species—though their effects differ depending upon species and the specificities of exposure. this allows for a different understanding of animals who change sex in response to pollution. rather than evidencing unnatural incursion, these examples illustrate that sex has always been responsive to environments, which now include toxic chemicals. told this way, these are no longer scandalous stories, but mundane facts of life in late industrialism. “neither utopic nor dystopic,” they write, “toxic sex opens the realization that bodies are lively and rejoinders to environments and changing ecosystems, even when those same engines of change provide exposure to carcinogens, neurotoxins, asthmagens and mutagens” (pp. 89). although it is important to work to prevent toxic exposure and combat environmental injustice, hayward insists that we must also be able to account for life already altered and tell stories about the future organisms we are becoming. these stories are not innocent and their politics are not always comfortable; they are risky reworkings of contemporary ecological imaginaries. especially when i teach these articles, i am cognizant that hayward’s accounts of toxic sex risk romanticizing chemical exposure, risk associating queer and trans people with chemical pollution and animality, risk naturalizing environmental violence, risk replacing genetic determinism with environmental determinism, risks reinforcing the norms that underpin neo-darwinian concepts of adaptation (see kenney & müller, 2017). however, as i have emphasized in my analysis of myers and chen, political and epistemic discomfort are a necessary part of learning to tell more response-able stories. the most comfortable stories are those we are already accustomed to hearing; discomfort can clue us into consequential shifts in the narratives that orient us in the world (see also schrader, 2015). kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 25 hayward teaches us that “human sex is responsive rather than recalcitrant” (ah-king & hayward, 2014, p. 7) and that our bodies respond to our environments in spite of fantasies of purity and containment. while her work with ah-king makes biological claims that should be taken seriously not only by feminists but by evolutionary biologists, hayward’s writing might best be understood as offering imaginative propositions about what it might mean to be embodied. her wider body of work explores the dynamic relations between bodies and environments in poetic, autobiographical, theoretical registers (2010), through readings of songs (2008), films (2005), artworks (2010), and aquarium exhibitions (2012). these readings work as much through aesthetics as biology, providing different imaginative pathways into questions of response and responseability, becoming and unbecoming, in an era when life’s limits are being profoundly reworked (cooper, 2008). to emphasize the more speculative strain in hayward’s thought, i conclude by turning to an article about marvelous becoming and ethical response. in “carnal light” (2013), lindsay kelley and eva hayward do art criticism as speculative fantasy asking what it would be like to eat alba, the subject of eduardo kac’s infamous bio-artwork gfp bunny (2009). alba was a white rabbit who was genetically engineered to carry the green fluorescent protein (gfp) gene from a jellyfish, so that she would glow fluorescent green under blue light. kac had intended to take alba home as a pet, but she was ultimately unable to leave the laboratory at the institut national de la recherche agronomique in france where she was born for fear of environmental contamination. kelley and hayward found that the critical art ensemble (cae) had written a recipe for ragoût alba à la provençale, inspired by the notion that if alba could not leave the lab alive to become a pet, she might be able to leave as meat. kelley and hayward take the recipe as an occasion to theorize the recombinant sensuality induced by ingesting this unfamiliar protein: with cae’s recipe we can imagine that glowing food intensifies vision through tactile registers; the verb “to taste” is conjugated through sight. glowing at the edges of the mouth, ragoût alba à la kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 26 provençale cannot be digested without visual recourse. for homo sapiens consuming this entree, the mouth is solicited by light, undoing the eye’s propriety of vision. although for alba this is an unbecoming, a transformation from companion to meal, for the humans involved, vision is reworked by orality…and jellyfish biomaterialities are sent further adrift. (p. 123) in this article we are invited to join the authors in an involutionary daydream about eating a genetically engineered rabbit. as our bodies adapt to consuming gfp bunnies, they speculate, our tongues might respond by “growing light receptors in our taste buds” (p. 124). if, as kelley and hayward contend, “ontology is about what there is and what debts we owe to it” (p. 116), fables of response-ability might give us a way of imagining how to respond to these ontological obligations, which includes questions of how we are already responding and what responsive capacities (real and fantastic) we might yet acquire. returning to hayward’s work on toxic sex, we see how she composes a world where inter-animacies are not only about corporeal vulnerability but also about resilience and creative response even in the most polluted waters. as ah-king and hayward remind us: “nonhumans and humans are vulnerable, but also exuberant, adaptable, resilient and constantly changing in interaction with environments” (p. 9). these stories of darwin’s body experiments, chen’s couch, and the bass in the potomac are fables of response-ability, stories that teach us how to pay attention to the lively agencies around, within, and among us, such that we become more responsive creatures, able to relate within more-thanhuman ecologies and meet the future organisms that we are becoming. like kelley and hayward’s homo luxivorus, a being whose tissues and appetites are attuning to her radiant meals, the reader of these fables might also find herself generating new sensitivities, caught up in unfamiliar economies of attention, moving differently through worlds. as hustak and myers (2012) put it: “the world is full of ‘propositions’ waiting to be registered by interested bodies. those who invest their energies in attuning themselves to others can learn over time to discriminate increasingly subtle differences in one kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 27 another’s utterances” (p. 105). at its best, feminist science studies can sensitize us to the calls of others, through didactic storytelling where narrative and sensorium remake one another. the question becomes: how can we cultivate these kinds of response-able writing practices in the face of prevailing academic conventions that do not always promote artful or efficacious storytelling? conclusion: a fable for tomorrow rachel carson’s (1962/2002) silent spring famously begins with a fable. she imagines a near future when life in an idyllic american town is slowly poisoned by synthetic pesticides. humans, farm animals, plants, and wild animals like birds, fish, and bees, all become sick and many die, leaving the previously abundant landscape lifeless and bereft of birdsong. this first chapter of silent spring, titled “a fable for tomorrow,” has become iconic in environmental writing, inspiring decades of environmentalists to write their own eco-apocalyptic stories that illustrate the world-destroying power of industrial capitalism. however, it seems that we may learned the wrong lesson from carson. teaching silent spring in 2019, what feels most significant to me isn’t its dystopian vision but how, like the authors discussed above, carson’s writing “makes relations sensible.” ddt is not a pesticide, she argues, because it is impossible to target pests without harming all life; pesticides are really biocides. “a fable for tomorrow” is a charismatic story, a work of speculative fiction that begins the non-fiction book that is widely credited with ushering in a new environmental consciousness in the united states and, importantly, the creation of the united states environmental protection agency in 1970. silent spring, from all historical accounts, was powerfully didactic; it made us see our bodies not as citadels, but as porous, vulnerable to toxic chemicals, and always in relation with our environment. in the twenty-first century, as industrial chemicals accumulate and unevenly participate in specific forms of living and dying, we will need more kinds of stories (not fewer) to teach us how to respond to our changing chemical ecologies. the greatest challenge in teaching transnational kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 28 environmental justice, i have found, is to make the relations between consumption in our own lives and environment justice issues “elsewhere” present, palpable, unbearably alive. beyond the warm glow of “awareness” and sharp sting of guilt, we need to nurture alternative “affective economies” (ahmed, 2004), where regulating or abolishing corporate emissions, tailings, and other “externalites” feels fundamental and urgent—and not only for those whose bodies and lands are directly affected. more than fifty years after silent spring, michelle murphy (2017), alongside others in anthropology and the environmental humanities (e.g., robin & rose, 2004; shapiro & kirksey, 2017; van dooren & rose, 2016), struggles to tell stories that will make relations sensible: i am looking for words, protocols, and methods that might honor the inseparability of bodies and land, and at the same time grapple with the expansive chemical relations of settler colonialism that entangle life forms in each other’s accumulations, conditions, possibilities, and miseries. we need to continue asking what kinds of stories, academic or otherwise, can help us account for everyday environmental violence in ways that engender meaningful, collective response in many forms: as policy, as activism, as pedagogy, as care, as knowledge-making, and as the intimate practices of everyday life. although feminist science studies has been a field that has consistently challenged dominant technoscientific storytelling (e.g. hubbard, 1979; haraway, 1989; martin, 1991), the conventions of academic writing discourage us from asking which genres, styles, and forms might cultivate the capacity for response. even mel chen expresses reticence at departing from academic conventions by including personal stories in a peer-reviewed article: “as academics are often trained to avoid writing in anything resembling a confessional mode,” they write, “such a turn is fraught with ambivalence” (2011, p. 273). however, as i argue above, chen’s accounts of living with multiple chemical sensitivity are some of the most efficacious passages in “toxic animacies.” my students often express confusion about why a scholar is writing about a particular topic or making kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 29 a particular argument; autobiographical writing can be a powerful way to situate your knowledge and draw new readers into your matters of care. my point is not that we should all write autobiographically. rather, in order to influence our readers (which can include our students), scholars will need to tell stories that defy academic conventions and risk being seen as too personal, too speculative, didactic, or sentimental, too kitschy, too ambiguous, angry, sad, or beautiful, too naïve or unsophisticated, not serious, or “just” poetry. i offer the term fables of response-ability not to suggest that everyone drop what they are doing and write fables, but as an incitement to proliferate different kinds of reading and writing in feminist science studies.6 for example, it gives us license to play with the relational properties of language—its viscosities, conductivities, velocities, to experiment with “the arts of mediation that would incite absorption, attunement, and excitement” (berlant, 2013), and ask what our stories do, who they enroll, and how they circulate in our communities, our classrooms, and beyond. what counts as a responsible story and what stories enable responsiveness cannot be known in advance; storytelling is a pragmatic art and, therefore, requires us to try different approaches and, as i have argued, risk failure, illegibility, and being thought foolish. some fables of response-ability will be empirical, others imaginative; some haunting and poetic, others no-nonsense practical; some energetic, full of brilliant paradigm-shifting neologisms, others plain spoken and heartfelt. different kinds of stories engender different ways of attending, responding, and relating. when we read feminist science studies scholarship as didactic literature, we understand ourselves not just as researchers but as participant storytellers who influence worlds in mostly mundane, but sometimes extraordinary ways (kenney, 2015). silent spring, for example, created the conditions whereby regulating chemicals based on “unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment” became thinkable in the united states. most books, obviously, will not have the worldchanging power of silent spring. but, as we have become inured to the never-ending news of oncoming apocalypses, environmental or otherwise, kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 30 we will need stories that make us feel again, wake up our senses to our more-than-human-world and teach us how to respond anew. despite our aversion to didacticism, in a certain sense, teaching is all we have. acknowledgements i am grateful to donna haraway, karen barad, jenny reardon, ruth müller, jesse goldstein and the participants of the “we are compost not posthuman workshop” at the university of cologne (2018) for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. thanks also to the editors at catalyst and the two anonymous reviewers for helping me to clarify my arguments and position myself more carefully. notes 1 in this article, i am working with isabelle stengers’s efficace, rather than the more common science and technology studies concept of “performativity.” karen barad’s notion of “posthumanist performativity” was explicitly designed to contest the “excessive power granted to language to determine what is real” (2003, p. 802). in “experimenting with refrains,” stengers (2008), on the other hand, uses efficace explicitly to call attention to the transformative power of words and theories—their liveliness, their animacy, their magic. 2 there are, of course, many indigenous storytelling traditions, where stories simultaneously teach, entertain, impart knowledge, and nourish relations between humans and non-humans ( see e.g., kimmerer, 2013; simpson, 2014; nelson, 2017). in conversation with indigenous scholars working within these traditions, i am interested in contributing to an academic vocabulary that values the arts of storytelling and what stories have to teach us. however, to avoid appropriating indigenous cultures, i work within the european fable tradition and attempt to breathe some life back into the genre of didactic literature. 3 key moral questions at the center of feminist science studies literature include: “whose science, whose knowledge?” (harding, 1991), “what counts as nature, for whom, and at what cost?” (haraway, 1997), and “cui bono?” (star, 1991). haraway, in particular, emphasizes the nonkenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 31 innocence of all knowledge-making practices, including those of feminist science studies. in “situated knowledges” (1991), she famously asks, “with whose blood were my eyes crafted?” (p. 192), drawing attention to the ways that our technologies and techniques of vision implicate us in systems of power and privilege. 4 teaching my gender, health, and the environment class i continue to butt up against the widespread belief that pollution always happens “elsewhere”—be it the global south, the american south, south of the border, the desert, the far north, or even just across the san francisco bay. while it is important to realize that exposure to industrial pollution is unevenly distributed, this kind of thinking can naturalize other places as endemically polluted and thus continuously pollutable (see voyles, 2015). the pedagogical challenge, then, is to dismantle this ideology by making our relations to environmental problems sensible—from the bhopal gas disaster (fortun, 2001; speigel 2013), to the tar sands (huseman & short, 2012), to the maquiladoras at the us–mexico border (johnson & niemeyer, 2008). 5 here i depart from vinciane despret’s (2013) reading of “involutionary momentum.” she argues that hustak and myers do not enchant or reenchant the world; they simply pay attention to evolutionary biology before neo-darwinian disenchantment. “animation, [not de-animation]” she explains quoting latour, “is the essential phenomenon” (p. 36, emphasis mine). despret goes on to argue, “hustak and myers did not have to reenchant, they just had to carefully follow a scientist who did not deanimate the world he was observing” (p. 36). here, despret’s insistence on a historical darwin moved by an essential animated nature takes our attention away from the creative activities of reading, writing, speculating, and theorizing. i discuss the example of darwin’s body experiments to foreground how fiction and speculation work alongside historical and biological claims in “involutionary momentum.” although despret recognizes that hustak and myers’s creative storytelling cannot be separated from the darwin they describe—“i do consider hustak and myers’s analysis to be actively part of the agencement [assemblage]” (p. 42n52)—her analysis does not allow for the transformative power of fiction. for despret, these stories about darwin are simultaneously historical and constructed. my argument is different—namely, that historical fiction can be an efficacious form of feminist science studies storytelling. 6 while many of the citations in this article can be classified as “new feminist materialism” or “multispecies ethnography,” i resist naming these kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 32 trends here to avoid giving institutional legitimacy to some kinds of academic storytelling at the expense of others. stories that center “matter” or “non-humans” are not the only kinds of stories that can help us respond within twenty-first-century chemical ecologies. stories about people or stories about stories, for example, also have transformative power. no one story or one kind of story is ever enough. references agard-jones, v. 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(2013). subterranean flows: water contamination and politics of visibility after the bhopal disaster. in a. neimenas, c. chen, and j. macleod (eds). thinking with water: an anthology of cultural theory of water (pp. 84-103). montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press. star, s. l. (1991). power, technologies and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions. in j. law (ed.), a sociology of monsters: essays on power, technology and domination (pp. 26-56). new york, ny: routledge. stengers, i. (2008). experimenting with refrains: subjectivity and the challenge of escaping modern dualism. subjectivity, 22(1), 38-59. swanson, h. a. (2017, february 22). the banality of the anthropocene. cultural anthropology. retrieved from https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1074the-banality-of-the-anthropocene tsing, a.l. (2015). the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton, nj: princeton university press. kenney catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 39 tuck, e. (2009). suspending damage: a letter to communities. harvard educational review, 79(3), 409-428. van dooren, t., & rose, d. b. (2016). lively ethography: storying animist worlds. environmental humanities, 8(1), 77-94. voyles, t. b. (2015) wastelanding: legacies of uranium mining in navajo country. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. winner, l. (1980). do artefacts have politics? daedalus, 109(1),121-136. woolgar, s., & cooper, g. (1999). do artefacts have ambivalence?: moses’ bridges, winner’s bridges and other urban legends in s&ts. social studies of science, 29(3), 433-449. bio martha kenney (assistant professor, women & gender studies, san francisco state university) is a feminist science studies scholar whose research examines the poetics and politics of biological storytelling. her latest project on environmental epigenetics uses speculative fiction to interrupt dominant biological narratives and imagine more radical ecological futures. microsoft word 32833_krisha hernandez_nj.docx hernández, krisha (2019). co-creating indigenous futurities with/in academic worlds. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © krisha hernández, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license co-creating indigenous futurities with/in academic worlds krisha hernández university of california, santa cruz kjh@ucsc.edu i dream again of babok the toad, the deliverer of fire to humans and bringer of rain to earth. babok, an excellent storyteller, holds my hand and shows me the way to the river and to myself—a reminder of responsibilities and possibilities. the dream ignites a vision: in the place of flowers, where their power far surpasses their beauty, all beings are regarded as having purpose(s)—with bodies and lives worthy of living and thriving to fulfill those purposes. here, our community acknowledges each other’s roles and accepts our own as meaningful contributions. in this community, one seeks out the hu’upa (mesquite) and cho’i (palo verde) trees to ask for guidance because trees have revealed many truths to our yoemem ancestors from long ago and continue to teach us still. the vision becomes reality, a way of being and moving among worlds where many persons, such as insect beings, plant beings, soil bodies, elder stones, caretaker plants, and water beings, for example, are relegated to “natural resources”—objects of exploitation who are often taken up in servitude or generally mistreated. doing academic work that listens to and thinks with more-than-human beings as having bodies and lives worthy of living through to their fullest meaning is indeed a challenge in arenas where settler futurities take precedence over all else. place/land and all beings tied up with them, despite having much to teach, are critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) krisha hernández, 2019 2 rarely treated and centered as living beings in academic analysis (tuck & mckenzie, 2015). in other words, taking up this sort of work has proven to be such a challenge that it is often skipped over by academics, and quite possibly for good reason. engulfment in worlds largely filled with settler logics creates seemingly insurmountable barriers to those who may otherwise wish to co-create indigenous futurities with/in academic, and in particular, with indigenous land. scholars who work to co-create bridges that link the gaps between humancentered worlds and the many more-than-humans already living among them/us are of particular guidance to me in the challenge of co-creating indigenous futurities with/in academic worlds. i am grateful to geographer sarah whatmore (2006) for gifting communities in/beyond the academy with “more-than” terminology, where, in english, one is provided with language that shifts landscape as a plane to land—a living actor. i look to tonawanda band of seneca scholar on literature, race, and ethnic theory mishuana goeman (2013) when considering the necessary decolonizing work that is to (re)claim, (re)name, and (re)vitalize—where “(re)” creates indigenous futurities that are simultaneously past and present but made anew. sisseton wahpeton oyate anthropologist kim tallbear’s (2013, 2014) work illuminates the ways in which worlds and beings are co-constituted in relation with others, where collaborations are sites for new knowledge formations, thus creating space for academe that is more-than research. i often think with the work of kanaka maoli political scientist noelani goodyear-ka‘ōpua (2016), who reminds one that indigenous peoples forge their relationships with place/land and land-bodied beings, and, therefore, researchers are obligated to such land beings far beyond the scope of a research project. political scientist audra mitchell (2018), a settler of ukrainian, polish, scottish, and english ancestry who lives on the ancestral and treaty lands of the attawandaron (neutral), haudenosaunee, and mississaugas of the new credit, demonstrates ways in which non-indigenous scholars might honor the efforts of indigenous resurgents who seek to repair protocols and relations between particular peoples, plants, animals, and many land and water beings. drawing on these lineages of thought and scholarship, my work strives to co-create indigenous futurities with more-than-human beings, an effort that simultaneously envisions indigenous futurities as it takes up and works against settler colonial modes of being and separation. i find an academic home in the emerging discipline of indigenous science, technology, and society (i-sts), a community of scholars who contribute to the interplay of emerging worlds, realities becoming. together, this community honors land-bodied beings seen, unseen, and felt, while co-creating indigenous futurities through scholarship. critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) krisha hernández, 2019 3 acknowledgements i thank dr. laura foster for the invitation to contribute to this special section on plants, colonialism, and race. much of my un/learning and re/learning is attributed to tongva, cahuilla, kanaka maoli, and serrano land and peoples. i send my heartfelt gratitude to yoeme language instructors for their ongoing work and guidance. references goeman, m. (2013). mark my words: native women mapping our nations. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. goodyear-ka‘ōpua, n. (2016). reproducing the ropes of resistance: hawaiian studies methodologies. in k. oliveira & e. k. wright (eds.), kanaka ōiwi methodologies moolelo and metaphor (pp. 1-29). honolulu, hi: university of hawai’i. mitchell, a. (2018). revitalizing laws, (re)-making treaties, dismantling violence: indigenous resurgence against “the sixth mass extinction.” social & cultural geography, 1-16. doi:10.1080/14649365.2018.1528628 tallbear, k. (2013). native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. tallbear, k. (2014). standing with and speaking as faith: a feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry. journal of research practice, 10(2), n17. tuck, e., & mckenzie, m. (2015). place in research: theory, methodology, and methods. new york, ny: routledge. whatmore, s. (2006). materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world. cultural geographies, 13(4), 600-609. author bio krisha hernánez krisha j. hernández (yaqui/xicanx/bisayan), raised on tongva/gabrieleño land near the village of nacaugna—in so-called los angeles, california—is an indígenx ph.d. candidate and teaching fellow in the department of anthropology at the university of california, santa cruz (ucsc) whose work is relationally grounded through indigenous queer feminist politics. they are a researcher in the indigenous science, technology, and society (indigenous sts) international research and teaching hub chaired by dr. kim tallbear, and writes with the creatures collective. chemical kinship: interdisciplinary experiments balayannis, angeliki, & garnett, emma. (2020). chemical kinship “keeping them down”: chemical kinship: interdisciplinary experiments with pollution. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-10. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © angeliki balayannis & emma garnett, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license chemical kinship: interdisciplinary experiments with pollution angeliki balayannis university of exeter a.a.balayannis@exeter.ac.uk emma garnett king’s college london emma.garnett@kcl.ac.uk abstract feminist technoscientific research with chemicals is proliferating. this paper considers how this scholarship extends environmental justice research on pollution. we are concerned with two key questions: how can we do/design ethical research with chemicals? and what methods allow for researching chemicals without resorting to an imagined space of purity? we consider unfolding projects which reorient relations with chemicals from villainous objects with violent effects, to chemical kin. we imagine chemical kinship as a concept, an analytical tool, and a mode of relating. emerging through feminist and anticolonial work with chemicals, chemical kinship involves a tentativeness towards making normative claims about chemicals because, like kin, these materials are never entirely good nor bad; at once, they can both be enabling and harmful. this paper considers what the unfolding research with chemicals generates and consolidates conceptualizations of chemical kinship; we ultimately articulate an agenda for ethical research with chemicals as an experimental process of invention. critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) angeliki balayannis and emma garnett, 2020 2 introduction feminist technoscientific research with chemicals is proliferating. this paper considers how this scholarship enriches and extends environmental justice research on pollution and its violent effects. we are concerned with two key questions: first, how can we do and design ethical research with chemicals? by this we mean, how can we do research that takes into account effects of living with chemicals and pollution without producing “disaster-based research”— scholarship that reinforces the very infrastructures that we seek to critique (liboiron, tironi, & calvillo, 2018). and second, what methods allow for researching chemicals without resorting to an imagined space of purity? this paper will outline a series of unfolding projects that move beyond representations of chemicals as villainous objects to practices of intervening with chemical kin. chemical kinship is a concept, an analytical tool, and a mode of relating. emerging through feminist and anticolonial work with chemicals, this particular notion of kinship involves a tentativeness towards making normative claims about chemicals because, like kin, these materials are never entirely good nor bad; they can be both enabling and harmful (agard-jones, 2013, 2014; lamoreaux, 2020; liboiron, 2019; murphy, 2018). the paper has two specific aims: first, to think across different research projects that we have found offer innovative ways of working with chemical relations, and second, to extend conceptualizations of chemical kinship by approaching research and practice as processes of invention (marres, guggeinheim, & wilkie, 2018). making sense of chemicals across the humanities and social sciences, chemicals have hitherto been narrated as a grim spectre that wreak havoc with the natural order of things; they remain focal points for fears of the of the harmful capacities of technological progress (bensaude-vincent & stengers, 1996). of course, there is much to be concerned about. industrial chemical production, consumption, and disposal is structured around violent political economies. these processes unfold through, and reinforce, axes of injustice. but to reduce chemicals to their violent effects is to deaden their capacities and overlook their material politics. for the social sciences, chemicals have, up until recently, largely remained within the epistemological purview of environmental justice research. this work has mapped structuring relations of power and developed an important attunement to the unevenness of chemical exposures. but environmental justice research can be quick to reduce chemicals to their violent effects, overlooking the material ways critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) angeliki balayannis and emma garnett, 2020 3 they participate in the structuring of social and political life. this has repercussions for political action–as nicholas shapiro, nasser zakariya, and jody roberts argue (2017), “quantifying and contextualizing a potential toxicity also works to direct us towards straightforward, but potentially superficial, solutions” (p. 579). in response to the limits of knowledge practices that quantify and contextualize toxicity, an ontological and epistemological interest in the chemical is unfolding— what is increasingly being articulated as a “chemical turn” (liboiron et al., 2018; romero et al., 2018; shapiro & kirksey, 2017). researchers experimenting with modes of sensing and sensing technologies are leading this shift, reimagining exposure, and reframing the (human) body from a site of violence to a site of knowledge with capacities for collective political action (e.g., calvillo & garnett, 2019, gabrys, pritchard, & barratt, 2016; ottinger, 2010; shapiro, 2015). in geographic research, even the most coherently defined pollutants have been shown to be materially unstable and always in transformation (liboiron, 2015; balayannis, 2020). the tendencies of chemicals to overflow the boundaries of toxic sites, and the scientific methods for defining what is harmful or not, remain challenges for research and regulation because they render invisible “the qualitative conditions of toxicity” (calvillo, 2018 p. 372). not taking seriously the socio-material relations of chemicals runs the risk of reproducing infrastructures that generate environmentally embedded violence (liboiron et al., 2018; murphy, 2012; shapiro et al., 2017). take air pollution, for instance. government monitoring stations often measure fine particulate matter, or pm2.5, as weighed mass to determine whether safe limits have been reached. however, it is increasingly recognized that smaller particles are the most harmful to human health. furthermore, these particles also have unruly interactions with other airborne pollutants. measurements and legal standards in chemical worlds co-construct each other in ways that enable certain kinds of responses whilst always producing blind spots and therefore inaction (hepler-smith, 2019). codes, categories, and molecular models render chemicals analyzable and manageable (balayannis, 2020). however, these representations “don’t just depict a world “out there”; they also have the recursive power to condition and sediment how people come to see the world” (myers, 2015, p. 129). approaching chemicals in terms of their relations is a way to move beyond the molecular and to open up new possibilities for research and action. to continue to develop this work, we argue that research with chemicals requires methods that are more inventive—methods that are participatory and experimental. drawing from marres, guggeinheim, and wilkie (2018), we imagine critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) angeliki balayannis and emma garnett, 2020 4 invention as “an active search for alternative ways of combining representation of, and intervention in, social life” (p. 18). like other critical researchers we find data practices a practical starting point for building chemical kinships because chemicals are often quantified as data. by critically examining how data are made and used we can intervene in the actions they enable and foreclose. this is a response to the call from shapiro, zakariya, and roberts (2017), for a wariness to the collaborations social science and humanities researchers make with science in the name of environmental justice. chemical interventions three ongoing collaborative research projects are outlined here to consider how multiple voices around chemicals can be facilitated in ways that allow for other forms of engagement and imagination to take place. these different interdisciplinary projects involve research practices that facilitate new social formations around chemicals. these examples are in no way a representative sample; nor do we aim to provide a comprehensive analysis that the richness of these ongoing projects demand. rather, we are interested in the specific ways each of these projects work with chemicals as data in order to materialize chemical relations through social, ethical, and politically meaningful forms of engagement. the first project is air south asia,1 a platform set up by air quality scientist pallavi pant and environmental health scientist anobha gurung. air south asia disseminates and catalogues information on various aspects of air pollution, and its impacts on health; environment/climate; and the economy. this platform facilitates users to connect with policy, research, and public engagement initiatives around air pollution. as well as providing easy access to different sources of pollution and emissions data, the platform also shares critical discussions and everyday stories about air pollution and place-based actions to improve air quality. along with a range of numerical data sets, interviews with different “stakeholders” provide multiple viewpoints and experiences on this complex issue. the platform is a space where data practices (from making measurements to telling stories) creatively support knowledge translation in ways that are actionable and relevant to affected publics. although there are epistemological challenges in drawing connections between environment and health data, or making claims based on anecdotal evidence, the strength of collating different knowledges is that these practices begin to make lines of responsibility visible. critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) angeliki balayannis and emma garnett, 2020 5 data are not only used to plug evidence gaps, they can also materialize responsibility and offer new pathways for action that regulatory data in isolation often erase or close down. this is something to which the second project—the asthma files (taf)2—is particularly attentive. taf is a collaborative ethnographic research project that supports the sharing of diverse kinds of data and analysis (see fortun et al., 2014). like air south asia, this bringing together of different data as an interpretive practice creates discussions beyond the dominant narratives of scientific uncertainty and the call for more data (shapiro et al., 2017). taf starts with asthma and its complex relationship to air pollution, and the challenge this relationship poses to environmental public health. asthma demands an attunement to chemical kinships. the data archived in taf takes many forms, including the analysis of scientific publications; interviews with scientists and practitioners involved in policy and activism; media coverage; and photo essays. through this research, the project empirically and analytically fleshes out ways to imagine new connections for collaborating with governance regimes. taf also harnesses the complex gene-environment interactions that are shaping contemporary scientific understandings of asthma (fortun et al., 2014b). in a practice like exposomics (vineis et al. 2017), for instance, the search for environmental exposures and universal molecular features is reconfiguring disease risk, including asthma. yet it is unlikely that this ‘holistic’ and dynamic view of chemical exposure will be sufficient for identifying complex causal mechanisms that can enable political responses (garnett, 2020). for taf, the challenge of making sense of the relations between disease and lived environments is a starting point for multiplying understandings of exposure and generating cross-disciplinary dialogue. our third example of research that facilitates new social formations around chemicals is the mexican exposures (mexpos) project.3 led by anthropologist elizabeth roberts in collaboration with environmental health scientists, mexpos works with chemical data and chemical knowledges through the relations they mobilize and (re)produce. like taf and air south asia, attention is focused on data’s analytical and inventive potential and is similarly realized through a research platform that is open to different kinds of data and expertise. roberts collaborates with scientists who are undertaking longitudinal environmental health research on early life exposures to environmental toxicants in mexico through molecular analysis of chemicals in bodies. she performs ethnographic research with the families involved in this study to produce data on “household and neighbourhood environments and geopolitical processes relevant to the critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) angeliki balayannis and emma garnett, 2020 6 production of bodily states” (mexpos, n.d.). the resulting “bioethnographic” research platform includes a coding lab where new scientific methods merge with inventive ethnographic practices (e. roberts 2017; 2019). by joining ethnographic observation with biochemical sampling, this project generates new understandings of how body-environment interactions shape health and inequality. chemical kinship these three projects refuse to start with overdetermined objects of concern. through their expansive approach to data practices they instead facilitate modes of analyzing chemical relations that keep lines of inquiry open, and multiply possibilities for action. chemical kinship in this context is a form of inventing the social (see marres et al., 2018). we invoke the concept of invention to queer the notion of kinship as lines of ancestry. this is also, in part, a response to the call to make multi-species kin as a matter of survival (clarke & haraway, 2018). in doing this, we move beyond enduring concerns with life and the biopolitical (see povinelli, 2016) to bring materials into the more-than-human fold. this expands relations of care and responsibility to the stuff routinely reduced to hazards and harm. our entanglements with these chemicals are of course intensely fraught (j. a. roberts, 2010), demanding approaches that inquire more creatively into what a kinship with plastics or pesticides, for instance, might look like. the collaborative and participatory ways of working with data considered here help us imagine what making good kinship with “bad” kin might look like. they assemble alliances through the careful curation of data in ways that have new analytical and political potential. returning to our opening questions, these projects are examples of ethical research with chemicals because they intervene in how chemical relations are materialized in ways that reject an imagined space of purity. there are three key dimensions to good chemical research present in each example that we would like to highlight as we conclude this paper: first, these projects have extended temporal relations of care —a sense of obligation to the material over time, sustained through the involvement of different actors. in highlighting this expanded temporal engagement, we recognize that the political economy of research often resists this form of work; the neoliberal university’s demand of “high productivity in compressed time frames” (mountz et al., 2015, p. 1236) places boundaries on our ability to develop chemical kinships in research. second, these extended and slow relations are made through infrastructures—platforms, archives, coding labs—as spaces for participation and collaborative analysis. critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) angeliki balayannis and emma garnett, 2020 7 infrastructures that allow for and anticipate the involvement of different voices expand what counts as a data practice and open up possibilities for different chemical relations. and third, by variously involving citizens, comparing “expert” knowledges, and combining methods, each of these projects are fundamentally interdisciplinary. they refuse to smooth over ontological and epistemological differences in data and instead use them as starting points for making in(ter)ventions4. acknowledgements we would like to thank fay dennis, emily jay nicholls, and jade henry for the opportunity to present an iteration of this paper in the centre for invention and social process (cisp) at goldsmiths college, university of london in december 2019. this work has developed in conversation with many others over the past year, and we would particularly like to thank andrew barry, véra ehrenstein, and the contributors to our “chemical kinship” session at the 2019 royal geographical society (with ibg) annual international conference in london. emma garnett would also like to acknowledge financial support from the economic and social research council es/r008612/1. notes 1 air south asia, https://airsouthasia.org. 2 the asthma files, https://theasthmafiles.org. 3 mexican exposures (mexpos), https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mexican-exposures/. 4 we borrow the term in(ter)ventions from the 2019/20 cisp salon series on “care in(ter)ventions,” organized by fay dennis, emily jay nicholls, and jade henry at goldsmiths college, university of london. references agard-jones, v. 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(2018). making kin not population. chicago, il: prickly paradigm press. fortun, k., fortun, m., bigras, e., saheb, t., costelloe-kuehn, b., crowder, j., price, d., & kenner, a. (2014). experimental ethnography online: the asthma files. cultural studies, 28(4), 632-642. fortun, m., fortun, k., costelloe-kuehn, b., saheb, t., price, d., kenner, a., & crowder, j. (2014). asthma, culture, and cultural analysis: continuing challenges in brasier, a (ed). heterogeneity in asthma. texas, usa: springer. gabrys, j., pritchard, h. and barratt, b. (2016). just good enough data: figuring data citizenships through air pollution sensing and data stories. big data & society, 3(2), 1-14. garnett, e. (2020). breathing spaces: modelling exposure in air pollution science. body & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x20902529 hepler-smith, e. (2019). molecular bureaucracy: toxicological information and environmental protection. environmental history, 24(3), 534-560. lamoreaux, j. (2020, january 17) toxicology and the chemistry of cohort kinship. somatosphere. liboiron, m. (2015). redefining pollution and action: the matter of plastics. journal of material culture, 21(1), 1-24. liboiron, m. (2019, january 9). anti-colonial science & the ubiquity of plastic, frank interviews, retrieved at: http://www.franknews.us/interviews/206/anti-colonialscience-the-ubiquity-of-plastic. liboiron, m., tironi, m., & calvillo, n. (2018) toxic politics: acting in a permanently polluted world. social studies of science, 48(3), 331-349. marres, n., guggenheim, m., & wilkie, a. (2018). inventing the social. manchester, uk: mattering press. mexican exposures (mexpos). (n.d.). retrieved from https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mexican-exposures/ mountz, a., bonds, a., mansfield, b., loyd, j., hyndman, j., walton-roberts, m., … & curran, w. (2015). for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x20902529 https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mexican-exposures/ critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) angeliki balayannis and emma garnett, 2020 9 collective action in the neoliberal university. acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies, 14(4), 1235-1259. murphy, m. (2012). chemical regimes of living. environmental history, 13(4), 695-703. murphy, m. (2018). against population, towards afterlife. in a. e. clarke & d. haraway (eds.), making kin not population (pp.101-123). chicago, il: prickly paradigm press. myers, n. (2015). rendering life molecular: models, modelers, and excitable matter. durham, nc: duke university press. ottinger, g. (2010). buckets of resistance: standards and the effectiveness of citizen science. science, technology, and human values, 35(2), 244-270. povinelli, e. a. (2016). geontologies: a requiem to late liberalism. durham, nc: duke university press. roberts, e. (2017). exposure. cultural anthropology, 32(4), 592-619. roberts, e. f. s. (2019, november 19). bioethnography and the birth cohort: a method for making new kinds of anthropological knowledge about transmission (which is what anthropology has been about all along). somatosphere. roberts, j. a. (2010). reflections of an unrepentant plastiphobe: plasticity and the sts life. science as culture, 19(1), 101-120. romero, a. m., guthman, j., galt, r. e., huber, m., mansfield, b., & sawyer, s. (2017). chemical geographies. geohumanities, 3(1), 158-177. shapiro, n. (2015). attuning to the chemosphere: domestic formaldehyde, bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime. cultural anthropology, 30(3), 368-393. shapiro, n., & kirksey, e. (2017). chemo-ethnography: an introduction. cultural anthropology, 32(4), 481-493. shapiro, n., zakariya, n., & roberts, j. (2017). a wary alliance: from enumerating the environment to inviting apprehension. engaging science, technology and society, 3, 575-602. vineis, p., chadeau-hyam, m., gmuender, h., gulliver, j., herceg, z., kleinjans, j., kogevinas, m., kyrtopoulos, s., nieuwenhuijsen, m., phillips, d.h., probst-hensch, n., scalbert, a., vermeulen, r., wild. c.p., the exposomics consortium. (2017). the exposome in practice: design of the exposomics project. international journal of hygiene and environmental health, 220(2), 142-151. author bios angeliki balayannis is a lecturer in human geography, in the department of critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) angeliki balayannis and emma garnett, 2020 10 geography at the university of exeter. emma garnett is a research fellow in the social science and urban public health institute at king’s college london. cohenibanez article     military utopias of mind and machine    emily cohen ibañez university of california, santa cruz eccohen@ucsc.edu imagine a world where more than 2 billion people are connected through a computer network. imagine a world where people can immerse themselves totally in another world in the privacy of their own home. imagine a world where millions of people connect across the globe playing video games. rick,1 venture capitalist and psychologist, stops clicking through his powerpoint slides. he pauses. and then he looks up with squinted eyes. i am sitting amongst an audience of clinical psychologists at the new york academy of sciences (nas) in manhattan. we look upon an image of the galaxy. we wait for rick to resolve the dramatic tension of his performance. “well, folks,” rick audibly releases his breath, “that world is today. at virtual therapeutics,2 we are inviting you to join today’s world. you can choose to join today’s world, or be left behind.” at this moment, rick’s powerpoint presentation spins out of his control, flipping through slide after slide in rapid succession. a man sitting next to me leans over and quietly says in my ear “this is crazy bullshit” and then walks out of the room. rick tries to regain control of the powerpoint, to no avail. the images continue to flash in rapid succession on the large screen behind him. the audience sits quietly. rick decides not to acknowledge the powerpoint problem and looks back at the audience. he goes on to describe the variety of cybertechnologies that are redefining clinical psychology and our world.  one could brush off rick’s performance as just some “crazy bullshit,” but absurdity is no stranger to the machinations of power in daily life. a clinical psychologist by training, rick is a former president of the american psychological association (apa), and the nas lends its own prestige to its presenters. i introduced myself to rick after his presentation and we met a week later to discuss his transformation from clinical psychologist to venture capitalist. rick described having visions of virtual worlds at the tender age of 8, which accompanied his affinity for science fiction novels. as an adult, he read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, which inspired him to drive from new york city to california. on his american road trip, he discovered buddhism, computers, and visions of capital expansion. he saw cybertechnologies’ potential for accomplishing “inner peace.”  rick envisioned computers as an interface between the human mind and its machines. using computers, he wanted to help people calm psychological instabilities. later, he helped establish a new kind of discipline called “cyberpsychology.”  rick hopes to be a key player in widening the distribution of virtual therapies designed to treat and prevent post traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) among military personnel. to rick’s delight, i too was headed out west to southern california via a road trip through the american heartland. as an anthropologist, i wanted to learn more about the rise of military utopic visions of mind that involve the creation of virtual worlds and “hyper-real simulations” in military psychiatry.  california dreaming marked the lives of many involved in the creation of immersive therapeutics for the us military. when i met rick, i had already spent a year conducting ethnographic research and shooting a documentary film on virtual therapeutics for the experimental treatment of ptsd at a veterans affairs (va) hospital in new york city. more specifically, i had become fascinated by the introduction of vre (virtual reality exposure) therapy at new york city va hospitals. in vre, a person wears a headset that projects 360-degree animation, surround sound, and smells that approximate the particular war event that haunts his or her daily life.  using vre, clinicians aim to virtually expose and acclimate trauma sufferers to distressing scenarios within the purported safety of virtual worlds. dr. rainer,3 who performed vre at the va where i had spent a year conducting anthropological research, is a new jersey native who ventured out west to los angeles in pursuit of an acting career before he returned to new york to train as a clinical psychologist at cornell university. at cornell, he discovered vre. intrigued by the technology, rainer spearheaded the establishment of virtual therapeutics when he gained employment at the manhattan va medical center. with vre, rainer could merge his professional interests in acting, psychology, and cinematic technologies.  research on vre has primarily been produced by a small group of psychologists and psychiatrists, most notably barbara rothbaum, joann difide, albert “skip” rizzo, and brenda wiederhold, who collaborate with computer scientists. in 1993, a group of researchers which included barbara rothbaum, began the first investigations into “using virtual environments to conduct exposure therapy of individuals with psychological disorders,” studying the effects of virtual reality exposure for the treatment of acrophobia, or the fear of heights (hodges et al, 1995; rothbaum et al., 1995a, 1995b). acrophobia was chosen in particular since “systematic desensitization” (imaginal exposure) had long been effective in treating phobias (marks & gelder, 1965). in imaginal exposure, the therapist asks the patient to imagine the situation or object that arouses a phobic response. likewise, in vivo exposure asks patients to expose themselves to feared objects in the real world until they no longer evoke irrational fear.  researchers were uncertain whether virtual reality headsets could provide enough "sense of presence" to activate the phobic response targeted for treatment, in this case the fear of heights. the researchers focused on measuring “sense of presence” since, according to emotional processing theory, “the fear structure must be activated” for the patient to elicit a response (i.e., grasping onto railing while wearing vr goggles) and exhibit symptoms (sweating, abdominal discomfort, heart palpitations, etc.). here, a sense of presence depends upon human-computer interaction, not visceral realism (hendrix & barfield, 1995). other studies followed, looking at other specific phobias like the fear of flying (rothbaum et al., 1996; wiederhold et al., 1998). the application of virtual reality headsets for the treatment of ptsd occurred later. in 1999, rothbaum published a case study about a vietnam veteran using vre for ptsd treatment (rothbaum et al., 1999), reporting modest improvement of certain ptsd symptoms with vre treatment. following the research trajectories of vre researchers, i was struck that rothbaum's initial investigations into ptsd and therapy involved a collaboration with dr. edna foa on gender violence against women, more specifically rape, using a technique called prolonged exposure (pe). in pe, the therapist asks the patient to relive a traumatic scene in his or her imagination through storytelling. while the patient narrates the traumatic story, the therapist records it with a tape recorder and asks the patient to listen and retell the story over and over again until the story seems to lose its emotive power. if all goes well, the patient gains control over the memory and no longer experiences the cluster of symptoms described as post traumatic stress disorder (foa, rothbaum, riggs, & murdock, 1991; foa, steketee, & rothbaum, 1989; rothbaum & foa, 1992).  foa and rothbaum determined pe to be effective. rape, however, is not seen as appropriate for virtual reality exposure and systemized desensitization. in our conversations, foa remarked that she viewed vre as a departure from prolonged exposure. systemized desensitization, or what was later called “habituation” to war scenarios, which engages primarily male patients, seems suitable and has become the new frontier for virtual reality psychiatric therapies. creators of virtual worlds and simulated enactments aim to create immersive environments that capitalize on sensorial ecology of sight, smell, sound, touch, and spatial orientation. today, video game platforms using virtual reality and hollywood studios to create “hyperreal” simulations have come to dominate military training, combat, and post-war rehabilitation. from drone aircraft to vre, virtual applications and simulation techniques in the military mark a significant change in how war is defined across a spectrum of political, operational, legal, and clinical frames. virtual technologies are transforming the temporal, aesthetic, and spatial framing of war, and are linked to changing notions of fitness and work within the military. deployment cycles have increased while rest periods between deployments have decreased. institutionally, the military has become focused on psychological resilience and cognitive responsiveness as important components of military fitness. virtual hallucinations, which might have been formerly deemed psychotic episodes, are now valued for their ability to transform situated realities into virtual ones through the senses. these shifts in time, space, and labor are not isolated to the us context or the military, but rather reflect larger global processes and capitalist flows. as i have noted in my ethnographic writing on an amputation and rehabilitation unit in bogotá’s central military hospital and the rapidly growing prosthetics industry in colombia, phantom limbs went from being a sign of psychosis to a valued condition allowing patients to more successfully incorporate industrial prostheses into the body. phantom limbs have gained popular and scientific appeal in colombia and the united states for their capacity to telescope in and out of the body and incorporate an entire political and economic system into the body. virtual technologies that enhance human sensory capacities to telescope in and out of the body, from phantom® used in the da vinci precision surgical system to dji phantom camera drones and 3d phantom diagnostic imaging, have gained ground in a capitalist world system that decentralizes and automatizes human labor (cohen, 2012).  at conferences and in one-on-one conversations, gamers and psychiatrists frequently discussed virtual reality’s capacity to immerse the user/viewer in traumatic scenes. vre proponents explain that for patients who are not imaginative or good storytellers, the virtual platform helps fill in the gaps where imagination fails. in laboratory settings, this sense of immersion is termed “sensorial presence.”  vre proponents claim that “sensorial presence” is key to vre’s success as a treatment. albert “skip” rizzo invented virtual iraq, a vre program tailored to combat in iraq, at the institute for creative technologies (ict). he based it on an earlier program called virtual vietnam. created in 1999 for a pilot study of vre, virtual vietnam involved two scenarios:  a jungle scene and a helicopter scene. virtual iraq also includes two primary scenes—driving a humvee and walking through an urban marketplace (figure 1). from the marketplace, patients may also go into iraqi people’s homes to mimic combat missions that require soldiers to enter homes and search the inhabitants. according to the ict website video,4 virtual iraq is a storytelling platform. however, in practice and within the scientific literature, the treatment elides narrative and privileges behaviorist and neurobiological models of the human mind.  figure 1. virtual iraq/afghanistan. film still from virtual war: memories of abu-ghraib by producer/director emily cohen ibañez.  rizzo et al. (2009) and rothbaum et al. (2014), among others, have published scientific articles reporting extraordinary high cure rates of ptsd among iraq veterans in vre clinical trials. here, “cure” is defined as not responding physiologically to traumatic stimuli presented in the prescribed virtual scene. the latest vre clinical trials combined the treatment with d-cycloserine, an antibiotic shown to augment psychotherapeutic anxiety and phobia treatments, to reduce the amount of therapeutic sessions to two, rather than the formerly prescribed six sessions.5 vre proponents clearly want to free soldiers of ptsd in a time-efficient manner so that they suffer less and acquire the psychological resilience to perform military work. the trouble is that the definition of “cure” focuses on “optimization,” a term borrowed from technological work management systems (taylor, 1998).  rather than improve access to va health services, the department of defense invests in psychiatric treatments like vre and stress inoculation training (a form of cognitive behavioral therapy administered as prophylaxis before deployment) that are not geared towards helping patients adjust to civilian life but that further military agendas and optimize soldiers’ cognitive-sensory abilities to perform military labor, work that might include driving a humvee, surveilling homes, and walking through marketplaces without phobic responses evoked by explosions, rpg fire, and verbal insults. as prophylactics, these treatments serve as filtering systems for men and women who are deemed not cognitively "fit," or psychologically resilient enough for combat. here, human and virtual interactions are imagined as closed systems of stimuli and response that habituate the senses to prescribed forms of condoned violence in a timely manner.  in this article, i am centrally concerned with how virtual iraq and similar immersive techniques reduce the subjectivity of soldiers to biometric readings on the body's surface, creating a closed system that conceives the mind as an amalgam of physiological reflex responses. this closed system relies on a fantasy of control that i am calling military utopias of mind and machine. military utopias of mind and machine aspire to have warfare without trauma by instrumentalizing the senses within a closed system.  in the context of this closed system, i note that discussions of gender violence as a prevalent condition of war trauma is remarkably silenced while concerns about the senses are amplified. this article is not an indictment of vr and other immersive technologies as i believe there are creative and generative ways to use these technologies. this is an exploration of the current use of the senses and immersive techniques and technologies in the u.s. military, an exploration that has allowed me to think through my own experimentation with vr technologies as a documentary filmmaker and storyteller. as a feminist anthropologist, i am tracking shifts in american rationality before what is deemed rational is so normalized it becomes too obvious to question. the stakes are no less than people's sense of their own humanity in a supposed posthuman world. re-enactment when i first met rainer6 at the va, he wanted to clarify some misconceptions about vre.  rainer: emily, i am going to explain virtual reality exposure therapy to you like i explain it to my patients. cohen ibañez: okay. how does vre work? is the goal to desensitize people? r: well, not quite. vre will help you habituate to your bad memories. “habituation” is like desensitization, but not quite. there are important differences. ci: how so? r: habituation is like jumping into cold ocean water. does the water feel like it warms up after you spent a little time in the cold water? ci:  i guess…ah, yes. r: well. the water doesn’t get warmer. i mean your body doesn’t heat the entire ocean. rather your perception of the water changes. first you assess if the water poses a threat. will this cold cause deadly hypothermia or is it just a bothersome cold that i can get used to? you realize it’s a bothersome cold and not a dangerous cold, so you stay in the water. am i right? this encounter involved a reenactment of a vre session in which rainer played therapist, terry,7 his patient, played patient, and i played invisible anthropologist behind a two-way mirror while national geographic filmed. in the vre room, there is a desk with two computer monitors and a keyboard. to the left of the desk sits a machine that emits a palette of odors—a hundred different ones including body odor, rpg fire, and cardamom. next to the scent machine is a platform with a chair where the patient sits. the platform rumbles to simulate what it is like to sit in a humvee while driving and shakes to simulate the impact of an ied. the patient places a pair of goggles over his eyes and headphones over his ears. he has a choice to hold a joystick or a toy machine gun. the vre system involves a screen where the therapist sets up a scene. there are two available backdrops—driving a humvee or walking through a marketplace which can be set with different lighting to simulate different times of day and brightness of the sun. as the therapist listens to the patient retell his traumatic memory, he can add or remove “variables,” which include different visual, sonic, and olofactory sensoria.   rainer explains to everyone that this reenactment is not real. “habituation needs optimal anxiety. terry has come such a long way with the treatment, we may not get that today.” rainer and terry take their positions at the vre system. camera operator: okay. rolling. rainer: right now, what is your anxiety level? one to ten. terry: a one. r (speaking through a headset microphone): “can you hear me?” t (holding the joy stick): yeah, roger. are you going to start with the convoy? all right, got a visual. we all see what terry is seeing on one of rainer’s computer screens. the screen shows an image of a road through the front window of a humvee from the perspective of the humvee driver. r: can you move? t: yeah. r: is it moving 360 degrees? t: yup. terry’s headset includes a sensor that looks like a small box centered on top of his head. when terry turns his head to the left, the screen displays the perspective of the driver looking out the side window toward the roadside. when he turns to the right, we see the passenger: a fellow comrade in uniform.  when terry looks up, we see another soldier standing through the turret maneuvering a large machine gun. r: okay. where do i put you? t: i was not the driver. i was always the tc [tactical commander]. never the driver. with a click, terry is suddenly sitting in the passenger seat and we all see the humvee, the road, and the fellow soldiers from this perspective. rainer adjusts the clouds on the visuals to create dusk. terry starts moving the vehicle forward with his game controller. along the roadside, he passes a statue of saddam hussein and civilians lying on their backs, and then approaches an overpass. r: we need to make it as much like iraq as it was. terry, we’re going to drive over the overpass. speak about the memories you have. you got the stick so go ahead and move. tell me about the variables. does this conjure anything for you, anything specific? t: what gets me is the maneuver. you stayed center lane to prevent ieds. we headed center mass. you scatter your maneuvers. civilians lie on their backs and wait for combat servicemen. the procedure was to scatter. don’t exit the same lane you entered. r: go over the overpass with no variables. then we’ll go over with the variables. this is the maneuver. t: the maneuver shouldn’t be taken for granted. the visual has put me in a memory. points of contact i remember. action came right, action came left. r: anxiety rating? t: two. they repeat the overpass again. rainer clicks “explosion” on the computer screen. the explosion blasts from terry’s headphones. the platform he is sitting on shakes. the screen is filled with smoke. t: that was a surprise. r: any change in anxiety level? t: a two. rainer clicks on his keyboard. a person appears on the overpass and there are sounds of small arms fire. pra! pra! pra! t: that was unexpected. r: i’ll do another two variables and then see if we can kick up the distress. t: with regards to people popping up, what was difficult as a soldier was that civilians would reveal themselves as friendlies but they were not. you couldn’t trust them. you would clear the bridge if someone unexpected should pop up. sounds of bombs go off. again, the platform shakes. rainer is trying to evoke sensorial presence clicking the variables and creating a distressing scene. t: that was interesting. r: you described superiors asking you to stop. t: wait. you don’t want me to move? r: yeah. just like your superior. sorry, but it’s therapy. any change in anxiety? t: it’s a good three. my impulse right now is to call in where contacts are coming in. aerial is not in place. these rounds are being fired. it’s a strong three. might go higher. r: what will make it go higher? t: the repetition. the audio is being ramped up and the seat is what’s triggering. it’s very, very, yeah. terry stops talking and swallows. rainer allows him to silently watch and then asks: r: moving is what you want to do. but i don’t want you to move. report your memories. t: i was in a scenario like this once. the elements. the fine grains of sand. r: rating? t: a three or a four. the session ends. r: you’ve come a long way, terry. wow. camera operator: what were the ratings for? r: it’s not the number. it’s looking at him. to me, terry looks upset. rainer begins the reenactment on the premise that the therapeutic session is not real. reality within the therapeutic session is measured by “optimal anxiety”—the existence of a trigger that signals the patient is sensorially present within the vre session and having a truly immersive experience. without evidence of optimal anxiety and sensorial presence, the session is just play-acting for the camera. one of the reasons rainer sees reality in this way is because his understanding of habituation relies on the notion that vre affects the brain physiologically only when signs of bodily distress, called “biomarkers,” are present: sweaty palms, a sweaty forehead, rapid heartbeat, and tense composure. terry’s self-evaluation, according to rainer, is beside the point. you only need to look at him. but then, what does it mean to be cured of ptsd? for rainer, terry’s ability to make meaning out of his experience is not necessary, neither are the narrative structures of his traumatic memory. the aim of the therapy is to surpass the intellect and access fear structures located in primitive regions of the brain, in the amygdala, so that they can be altered. rizzo, the inventor of virtual iraq, explained to me that the goal of vre therapy is to induce “extinction,” a process that researchers discovered when training rats to fear light through shock therapy and then habituating them to the light through repetitive exposure. sensorial presence allowed direct access to the amygdala and the vagus nerve to affect the brain’s allostatic processes. the results were striking: the rats exhibited low heart rates when faced with what they feared most—the light. in neuroscientific literature on crime, a calm vagus nerve and subsequent low heart rate indicates psychopathology, a condition where people kill or perform other cruel acts upon others without arousal (raine, 2014). in the military, a calm vagus nerve during combat is a desirable goal. rizzo’s team designed virtual iraq to “split” emotional distress from traumatic stimuli. they argue that vre therapy is ideal to perform before, during, in between, and after deployments since results are almost immediate—achieved in as little as six sessions, or possibly two sessions when vre is combined with the antibiotic d-cycloserine.  in conversation, rizzo cited b.f. skinner's notion of “extinction,” which inspired me to visit the film archive and the b.f. skinner foundation at harvard university (figure 2). there, i met skinner's granddaughter, julie vargas. in my conversations with her, i learned that skinner's concept of operant conditioning does not emphasize "repetitive exposure" as a way to produce extinction. rather, for skinner reinforcement (delivery of food pellets to a rat inside the operant chamber) shapes desired behavior whereas the absence of reinforcement causes extinction of the conditioned response. attempts to extinguish a behavior within the operant chamber is similar to a parent ignoring a child who is misbehaving in an attempt to not reward an undesired behavior (skinner, 1979). in vre, however, the shock of the scene loses its emotive response due to the realization that there is no real danger when virtually exposed to violence, so rather than extinction the patient learns that driving a humvee in a war scene is not dangerous—this is a conditioned response to warfare, not an elimination of one. figure 2. b.f. skinner superimposed on maze. film still from virtual war: memories of abu-ghraib by producer/director emily cohen ibañez. what concerns me is that the governing conception of ptsd that underlies current vre therapies is a phobic response, rather than a complex one contingent on historical, political, and quotidian realities of war. an example would be the normalization of rape in the military or even the traumatic responses induced by the routine dehumanization process involved in military training. rainer and rizzo recognize the effectiveness of the therapy within a closed language system—one that objectifies emotional response and abstracts it from its original cause. the sounds, smells, and animation are refined but the system itself remains primitive, based on a further simplification of behaviorist theory.8 the experimental system necessitates the assumption that trauma is solely fear-based, rather than based on a complex configuration of feelings that include entanglements of action and relationships informed by guilt, shame, integrity, and desire—complex emotional configurations that bring people into relations with each other and invite an exploration of their shared values and transgressions. feminist scholars have long challenged reductionist conceptualization of the mind and body, turning to phenomenological approaches that incorporate the embodiment and breakdown of politically volatile cultural systems (grosz, 1994; martin, 1994). feminist science studies critiques "modernist epistemologies" that value "separation and autonomy, rather than relatedness" (suchman, 2008).  feminist psychologists have forged more inclusive understandings of subjectivity in the psy-sciences, defying individualist assumptions and identifying "power in social structures and interactions" (morawski, 1994). disability scholars and queer theorists (elman, 2014; kafer, 2013), as well as theorists at the intersection of feminist science studies and critical race theory (atanasoski & vora, 2015) have pushed feminists to further trouble notions of autonomy through a reconsideration of personhood and human-technology interfaces that incorporate the recognition of bodily difference, racial and class inequities, and labor relations. in the following section, i discuss how storytelling is one means to bring meaning and relationships into embodied action. story, action, and meaning in the vre session, terry speaks, but he does not tell a story. telling stories is not only the act of speaking, but “a manner of speaking about events” (white, 1980, emphasis in original). while i disagree with hayden white's point that all narratives adhere to chronological time with a clear beginning, middle, and end (white, 1980), i agree that stories have a kind of grammar that distinguishes them from other kinds of discourse.  while not all stories have a well-established plot where the end is immanent in the unfolding of all events, at some level stories do bring “intelligibility of personal action” (schafer, 1980)—a totality that helps the author find meaning in the world and their own personal experiences.  as feminist anthropologist barbara myerhoff (1987) suggests, stories allow people to become self-aware, the protagonists of their own social dramas, and draw relationships between the world and their own actions. narratives that employ cyclical notions of time and repetition do so in time and over time. the temporality of “rapid fire” described by rainer does not allow for interpretation, as the quickness elides the ability to reflect; it is intentionally limited so that the patient successfully habituates to the sensory input without too much intellectual elaboration. this may be effective for treating phobias (like the fear of heights, spiders, and flying), but war trauma is a politically complex phenomenon. killing is an act that challenges most people’s sense of morality and humanity (grossman, 2009). habituating to flying is different from habituating to combat. feeling in control (lowered heart rate and maintaining full cognitive abilities while under stress) in combat situations has dire consequences for a soldier’s ability to integrate back into civilian life where the rules of combat do not apply. habituation may be good for training, but can we call it therapeutic? does it heal?  white (1980) has brilliantly argued that narrative requires the establishment of law—without law, the subject has no moral agency. in this sense, history and story are forms of state making and political action that follow a desire to represent reality and establish order. for white, stories are moralizing and inaccurate portrayals of reality. i see stories in a more positive light. stories provide a center, a continuity of self, that allows people to act in the world and draw relations of responsibility between themselves and others. in light of my ethnographic inquiry, i argue that a turn to the senses as "outside" of narrative, or privileged over narrative, can replicate colonial violence. colonialism imposes domination by regulating labor and instrumentalizing time. listening to stories takes time, time worth taking.  moreover, the closed system constitutive of vre bifurcates trauma into combat vs. gender violence.  here combat is elevated into sensorial immersion, while the realities of gender violence are ignored. the gaming and psychiatric communities i encountered during my fieldwork were remarkably silent about gender and sexual violence in the military. in stark contrast, when i listened to the stories of gulf war, iraq, and afghanistan veterans, sexual violence figured prominently in their daily experiences of war; sexual intimidation and rape carried different gendered meanings for men and women. one gulf war veteran i discussed my research with confided that it is common for women soldiers to seek sexual partnership with an “alpha male” within their troop, even when they do not desire sex with this male, to avoid being gang raped by the other male soldiers in their troop. she had engaged in such a relationship and described continuing feelings of guilt, shame, anger, and depression long after her deployment. a male veteran told me about how he survived childhood sexual violence—an experience that continues to figure into his life and relationships. he eventually escaped the abuse that led to unstable teenage years within the foster care system and joined the military to find a sense of belonging, a group of comrades that could become a kind of family. for him, the way military officers treat rape, especially against men, left him feeling betrayed. he described a tacit understanding that that if a soldier reported being raped or reported other soldiers who raped, he or she faced further stigmatization and career dissolution. these are not isolated stories. studies show a high percentage of men who enlist also have a history of childhood sexual abuse (zaramba, 2014a) and that the military often condones gender violence (castro, kintzel, schuyler, lucas, & warner, 2015; o’brien, keith, & shoemaker, 2015). vre researchers do not discuss meaning, poetics, or expression nor do they discuss the role of sexual fantasy and exploitation; instead they elaborate on a puritanical measurement of anxiety levels, variables of stimuli, and patients’ physiological responses. what has been made visible and optimized are the operational skills needed to navigate humvees while improvised explosive devices (ieds) and rocket-propelled grenades (rpg) fire are present. sexual violence and the everyday complex relationships of trust and betrayal within the military, however, elicit a phobic avoidance and are made invisible within the therapeutic scene.  here, sexual exploitation is the elephant in the room, ignored through a mythic bifurcation of rape vs. combat trauma. the bifurcation of rape vs. combat is a myth that does not respond to the prevalence and normalization of rape in the daily life of combat and to its centrality in combat trauma. in this mythic tradition, rape equals feminization, a total loss of male privilege and virility. this mythology only seems rational in a rape culture that can only speak of rape against women and not men and a fraternal value system that excludes women and fears any possible ‘feminization’ of men. the preferred choice then is to ignore and in effect silence rape against both men and women in virtual therapeutics. if, however, vre is construed as a “cure” for ptsd and combat trauma, the myth falls apart. in the military, the soldier (like the colonial subject) is always already subjugated. to then remove the soldier’s ability to tell his or her own story evacuates the soldier’s ability for political and personal action—to author his or her own story, to find a center of meaning from which to act in the world.  stories involve “reflexivity, a past, a history” (white, 1980). sensorial presence denies the past in the ever-present quest to habituate the nervous system to anxiety-provoking stimuli. this lends sensorial presence its temporal flexibility. due to its focus on sensorial presence over symbolic meaning, vre can be applied before or after the soldier experiences combat trauma. increasingly, vre is being imagined by its practitioners as a form of “stress inoculation”—a psychological vaccine to be administered to soldiers before combat (rizzo et al., 2009).  “stress inoculation” imagines an ideal world where ptsd no longer exists because people can be habituated to their traumas before they even experience them—a military utopian imaginary of having war without trauma. rizzo et al. (2012) propose that stress inoculation is a kind of "mindfulness" training, borrowing terminology from yoga and zen buddhism. swimming in a pool of repetitions figure 3. “stress inoculation” training in san diego, ca. film still from virtual war: memories of abu-ghraib by producer/director emily cohen ibañez. at the time of my research, the ict was developing strive (stress resilience in virtual environments) as a "multi-episode narrative experience" with "combat situations, relational development, stress and loss, and emotional trauma...to raise the service member's threshold for the stress of combat" (buckwalter et al., 2012). here, ict employs narrative as a series of scenarios that include interaction with virtual artificial intelligence (ai) characters, simulating stress inoculation training already performed by outdoor tv studios in southern california which use live action role players, hollywood sets, and special effects. as a part of my fieldwork, i performed as an afghan role player at a tv studio in san diego for combat soldiers and military medics. dressed in tradition afghan garb, my work involved a ten-hour day of play-acting the same twenty-minute scenario over and over again. the scenario felt more like a video game than narrative; each reenactment involved slight variations of the same thing. sometimes i would get shot and be tapped on the shoulder to lie down and act dead; other times i was told to confiscate weaponry from the soldiers. we were given ten-minute breaks between each scenario before we performed the scenario again. this gave some time to reflect with other afghan role players, but as "afghanis" we were not allowed to interact and speak with soldiers outside the scenario. we were told to taunt soldiers and yell at them. figure 4. photograph of emily cohen ibañez dressed as an afghan role player. i did not say much because i was the only role player who did not speak farsi or pashto. a team of coaches who were post-deployment soldiers directed us role players. one of the coaches asked me to confiscate the weapon of a “dead” soldier inside an abandoned house. as a team of combat soldiers entered the home, i was instructed to point the gun at them. the coach instructed the men to lie on top of each other in sexually demeaning positions and then taunted the soldiers, “look, a woman is pointing a gun at you.” the coach disciplined the combat soldiers in training for their carelessness, using my gender to emasculate them. i felt i had lost my moral compass, swimming in a pool of repetitions. all day we were exposed to different stressors—an ied explosion which involved smoke and a loud boom that did not actually kill or maim, rpg fire which involved soldiers shooting empty shells at us that sometimes burned and scarred the skin's surface (as afghan role players, we were not given protective gear) but did not result in our actual death or life-threatening injury. i felt terror playing this game. in an interview i conducted, the studio’s co-founder explained that researchers swabbed the soldiers’ cheeks after each re-enactment to measure cortisol levels. these seemed to decrease with repetitive exposure, proving the effectiveness of stress inoculation. we did not discuss the literary aspects of a story, but rather surface areas of the body like cheek swabs and electrocardiogram (ekg) readings. the mind was understood as a cognitive-behavioral machine that could be optimized. the studio co-founder pointed to a graph on a cardboard poster—an arc that charted the rise and fall of cortisol levels with each exposure. a vertical line was drawn at the point of optimization for deployment when cortisol levels lowered but before the precipitous drop that signified no rise in cortisol levels at all.  everyone knew i was an anthropologist conducting research and agreed that role playing would allow me to better understand how stress inoculation works. i completed a ten-hour day of role-playing, a form of labor that afghan role players perform daily for low wages. that night my ears rang, my head hurt, and i had no ability to write or reflect. my heart felt glum. the next day i was able to maneuver my camera through the war zone scenario like an expert video game player, capturing scenes with a steady body and sensorial acumen.  the following day i could not help but wonder what would become of the soldiers in training who would deploy a few days later. would their experience of warfare bear any resemblance to the games we played? in actual war, even when wearing augmented hardware, people die and they do not get back up. in the scenario, death felt undead, inconsequential, and at the same time very real because we were all involved in training for actual warfare and we knew real death was looming—real and virtual, killing and consequence were somehow split apart, making for a profoundly alienating experience. i was capable of navigating the war zone, but without much feeling.9  stories and exposure therapy are kinds of performances; they, however, differ significantly in meaning. rather than paying attention to narrative tone and wording when the patient tells his story (is he triumphant, masochistic, histrionic, or flat?), rainer looks to biomarkers (is he sweating, shaking, tense, or relaxed?). the former refers to meaning and form, the latter records cognitive and bodily function. in the vre session, rainer supplies the variables that construct the generic memory of driving a humvee.  rainer and terry do not co-author a story. rather rainer interrupts terry in mid-description, inhibiting terry’s ability to string together events in a meaningful fashion. rainer turns terry’s attention away from meaning toward a numerical assessment of anxiety and habituation to stress, which in the end matters little to rainer’s assessment of terry. this is wholly different from sigmund freud’s notions of introspection and transference (freud, 1913). in freudian psychoanalysis, the analyst and the analysand co-author a story, a dialogic form of authoring in which interpretation of symbolic forms take center stage. the analysand witnesses his or her own story, a kind of objectification and externalization of the story. the psychoanalytic introspective stance is a meta-narrative, not a numerical reduction that ultimately gets ignored. vre proponents argue that virtual reality assists patients who are less imaginative. in valuing certain patients as less imaginative and able to tell good stories, will the psychologist, clinician, and social worker forfeit his or her own abilities to a machine—the computer and its reductive virtual scenarios, variables, and binary logic? concluding remarks why are we huddling about the campfire? why do we tell tales, or tales about tales—why do we bear witness, true or false?...is it because we are so organized as to take actions that prevent our dissolution into the surroundings? —ursula k. le guin (1980), “it was a dark and stormy night; or, why are we huddling around the campfire” the survival of veterans in the united states is precarious. rates of suicide for iraq and afghanistan veterans under the age of 35, especially within three years of service, are significantly higher than for the civilian population. in 2014, the los angeles times reported that “veterans who had been enlisted in the rank-and-file committed suicide at nearly twice the rate of former officers” (zaramba, 2014b), suggesting that war’s devastation and despair affects veterans differently and correlates with social status in the military. so why do we tell stories? people tell stories to “prevent [their] dissolution into the surroundings” (le guin, 1980). this draws us in relation to each other and allows us to escape containment—we can ascribe meaning imaginatively to our experiences and actions in ways that affirm social relationships and our sense of place in the world.  contemporary ethnographers follow daily life, listen to stories by a diverse set of constituents, and assemble an analysis often from disparate places. the best ethnographies are as poetic as they are methodologically sound. in a world where data analytics and algorithms predominate as modes for understanding our world, listening to and telling stories carry more urgency than ever before. as anna tsing beautifully writes, “it is in listening to that cacophony of troubled stories that we might encounter our best hopes for precarious survival” (tsing, 2015). poet and iraq veteran jennifer cole served in baghdad in 2003. she was discharged in 2004 after being diagnosed with ptsd and gulf war syndrome. here is an excerpt from her poem, “veteran of war: a poem” (2014): i feel like my body and mind have turned against me they no longer work with me my body is a vessel that is constantly broken i am in constant pain all day and all night there is no ceasing my pain i can only ebb it fatigue weighs on me like kevlar gear in the hot sun the simplest of tasks now require more than i have to give i feel pathetic and incapable i have a soul that is independent trapped in a body and controlled by a mind that are dependent cole’s poem is a story of alienation and severe fragmentation—“my body and mind have turned against me.” she experiences her mind as controlling her sense of personhood, or soul, from the outside, leading to a kind of dependency that feels confining, an independent soul trapped in a dependent body. some relief may be found in recognizing that all people are always already dependent in the sense that people must rely on each other to survive, and yet cole’s extreme precarity comes from being a veteran in a post-draft culture in which less than 1% of americans currently serve in the us armed forces.  i can imagine the reader critiquing my attention to storytelling, pointing to the works of brian massumi (2002), deleuze and guatarri (1983), and william connolly (1999) where sensation is the basis of liberation. these scholars have invited readers to ask: can the virtual person exist outside his or her body and outside of language? can we forget about intention altogether and focus our attention on an amalgam of brain waves and sensorial intensity? for scholars like massumi and others, coherence attained through narrative represents unwelcome forms of constraint. i am arguing that the fantasy of pure sensation does not always equal desirable liberation—feminist and/or other forms of liberation. in light of my research findings, i do not see a turn to the senses as necessarily challenging to western dominance and its binary gender system—in fact, such attention can reassert dominance in perverse ways. this is not to say that scholars should not be concerned with the senses. but this concern cannot be divorced from the political, economic, historical, technological and linguistic realities that govern the sense we make of them. i am not proposing an anti-technology or even an anti-neuroscientific stance. nor am i proposing that theorists stop talking about the senses. i am inviting a critical examination of a current popular and academic fascination with, and even a romanticization of, the senses and the emergent technologies associated with them. through critical inquiry, we can better think about how technologies that capitalize on the senses remake our worlds in ways that may be desirable or may not be. we can challenge ontological binaries between language and sensation and seek open perceptual fields of language and aesthetic forms that can be accessed, changed, and rescripted in ordinary ways and in everyday life.   anthropology came to fruition within a colonial context. with early british expeditions to the torres straits, anthropologists compared the rationality of europeans with their colonized subjects. they subjected torres straits islanders to a series of tests to measure visual and spatial perception (rivers, 1901); they made film recordings of their body movements and rhythms (haddon, 1898). in his essay “vicissitudes of the self,” jean rouch (2003) describes how film historically provided anthropologists the capacity to decompose embodied experience into fragments—an approach wedded to anthropology’s colonial legacy. early ethnographic films documented the ways different peoples walked, squatted, and climbed things, breaking people down into component parts rather than coherent subjects. similarly, haptic experimental systems enhanced by immersive technologies and techniques involve a decomposition of embodied experience into elements like smell, sound, and spatial orientation labeled “biomarkers” whose capacities can be measured, controlled and linked to a self regulating alleostatic neurological system. to write against a colonization of the senses, i turn to jean rouch’s description of dziga vertov’s cine-eye experiments (rouch, 2003). vertov discovered the camera’s ability to capture reality from every angle shattering unidirectional vision into a multitude of perspectives. rather than stasis, multiperspectivism reveals the artifice in perception revealing the open-endedness of everyday life itself. it reveals what is often concealed in science, that seeing and knowing are always framed by the very technologies and techniques at hand. foucault (1995) has argued that it is through the senses that the self becomes disciplined into a new way of seeing. if the advent of freudian analysis provided a way to see the self as individual and interior, virtual therapeutics reconfigure the self as an “out of body” experience and a site for virtual exposure.10  in other words, differently from psychoanalysis, vre figures trauma as always coming from the outside and victimizing a passive subject. vre therapy is based on american behavioral psychology and neurobiological studies on fear, which propose that one can quantify and control the invisible drives of the human self. what if instead we saw the mind, human action, and reality as whole configurations, constituted by a broad perceptual field where the subjectivity of the patient matters? thinking through whole configurations, the aspect of the human mind known as the ‘unconscious’ cannot simply be reduced to a measureable reflex action. instead the porous boundaries between subject and object, awareness and the unknown, and sensation and linguistic category are recognized as intersubjective and in continual relation. as amanda baggs has shown with her video, in my language, sensation does not always have to be imagined as pre-linguistic or be based on the tired evolutionary scheme that divides our minds and brains into binary hierarchical relations of the civilized (prefrontal lobe) and the primitive (amygdalla), or person and non-person. if we let go of these evolutionary schemes, of our fantasized closed worlds, could we then re-design this virtual reality machine into a storytelling machine, a dream machine, a machine where the sensory apparatus opens up to subjective evaluations, humor, and differences that can be recognized as difference? laughter, reflections and feelings of hate, rage and joy matter, as do people’s desires for freedom. is it possible to design a virtual reality machine where the content of our desired desensitization and trauma matters, where we question what we are adapting to in our repetitive enactments of trauma? let’s design a machine that shatters into a multitude of perspectives, tones and complications. let’s break down the signal system that monitors the body and open up to conversations and stories, where we can speak of sexual repression and violence as well as desires for community, camaraderie, and belonging and have those things recognized as central to the healing process. as neurobiological explanations for human behavior and mind become dominant modes for making sense of ourselves and the dimensions of our world, my goal as a feminist anthropologist is not to become conditioned by this language but to engage with such explanations—to read against the grain and to think through multiple modes of embodiment that draw relations between words, actions, feelings, and ordinary life. my goal is to call attention to the intersubjective relations of mind and body, self and world, which both limit and open horizons of possibility. this takes time: a slow approach to science, a science steeped in cultural analysis. if behavioral scientists are metaphorically mice—a model organism widely used in scientific laboratories—that can rapidly reproduce predictive analytics and outcomes, ethnographers are elephants that see totalities developing in lived timed.  what happens when an elephant breaks open the mouse’s cage? the mouse escapes and ventures into the daily unfolding of life—the middle of the story lost in “rapid fire.” acknowledgements i had the fortune of presenting versions of this paper at the science seminar at nyu, the anthropology department at uc berkeley, the ethnographic engagements workshop at uc santa cruz, and the american anthropological association annual meeting. thank you to the students and faculty at these presentations who provided stimulating dialogue and engagement with my work. i’d like to extend a special thanks for the thoughtful commentary from neda atanasoski, aaron bornstein, lisa cartwright, rose cohen, brian goldfarb, ben kilgust, emily martin, and danilyn rutherford. the research and writing for this paper has been supported by the national science foundation, psc-cuny, and the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research with institutional support from the anthropology department at columbia university and the communication department at uc san diego. notes 1 pseudonym.   2 pseudonym.   3 pseudonym.   4 see http://ict.usc.edu/prototypes/pts. 5 neuroscientific research suggests that fear conditioning can be extinguished with the use of drugs that interfere with memory recall by targeting “reconsolidation,” where memories are labile. these chemical interventions, however, are not compatible with life, so have not been applied to humans (liu et al., 2012; schiller et al., 2010). d-cycloserine, so the argument goes, has side effects that would perhaps interrupt memory recall, however, the biological mechanisms for this are unclear. 6 pseudonym. 7 pseudonym. 8 the discovery of a nervous center that controls blood pressure dates back to the late 1800s, a discovery that inspired scientists like ivan pavlov to study the functioning of the "animal machine," mostly in terms of digestion—the function of hunger and satiation in relation to conditional reflexes (todes, 2014). despite the astounding results pavlov culled from the lab, physicians with clinical experience disputed pavlov's lab results based on the "impossibly complex mass of interconnected phenomena in their daily practice" and their aims in trying to keep patients alive after surgery, in contrast to pavlov's dogs which usually did not survive his surgical interventions (todes, 2014). it was not until much later in his experimentation that pavlov applied his work to psychiatric illness and observed "depth phobia" in one of his laboratory dogs he named "john." by observing john, pavlov determined that phobias are "exaggerated inhibitions" that the experimenter could effectively remove and restore by inducing states of hypnosis and excitation with alternations of a metronome (a speeding up and slowing down of the rhythm). gestalt psychologists, who dominated psychiatry in russia at the time, challenged pavlov's results. pavlovians looked at how the brain "joined together individual sensations;" gestalt psychologists opposed mechanistic reductionism that saw the mind and human action in terms of an "accumulation of small perceptions" (todes, 2014). rather, gestalt psychology focused on whole configurations, "the structure of an entire perceptual field" that involved relationships between elements rather than a simple sum of them (todes, 2014). fascinatingly, pavlov saw understanding the subjectivity of his dogs as essential to his experimental design and analysis of research outcomes. in vre and contemporary neuroscientific studies on fear and conditional reflexes (ledoux, 2002), the subjectivity of the patient or research subject does not matter. 9 other afghan role players had differing perspectives on our shared experience. for example, verda, an older afghan woman, explained to me that she felt her work as a role player would ultimately save innocent civilians in afghanistan because soldiers encountering her would realize that not all afghanis are bad. while she did not support the war, she felt no resentment towards americans in particular since war had become a fact of life in afghanistan and it did not matter whether domination came from russia, the united states, or some other foreign power. her niece, sameer, on the other hand, shared the terror i felt, but was happy for the employment as it was a means for 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(2014b, 14 january). detailed study confirms high suicide rate among recent veterans. los angeles times. retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-veteran-suicide-20150115-story.html bio emily cohen ibañez is an anthropologist and filmmaker. she is currently the assistant director at the science and justice research center and a research associate at the center for documentary arts research. her work explores the ways science, technology, and medicine influence the ways people come to know themselves and their world. her first book bodies at war: an ethnography is under consideration at duke university press. the book examines what it means to rehabilitate after landmine injury in colombia, one of the countries with the highest incidents of landmine injuries in the world. her debut feature film bodies at war/mina (2015) premiered at el festival de cine de bogotá and is currently screening at universities nationally and internationally. her short work has also screened at the society for visual anthropology film festival, the santa fe independent film festival, and is available on public access platforms. she was recently awarded the wenner-gren fejos fellowship in ethnographic film to complete her second feature hybrid film virtual war: memories of abu-ghraib. she has received grants and fellowships from the national science foundation, wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research, american council for learned societies, nyu torch prize, psc-cuny, the flaherty film seminar, and fulbright colombia. troubling figures: endocrine disruptors, intersex frogs, and the logics of environmental science o’laughlin, logan natalie. (2020). troubling figures: endocrine disruptors, intersex frogs, and the logics of environmental science. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), 1-28 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license troubling figures: endocrine disruptors, intersex frogs, and the logics of environmental science logan natalie o’laughlin duke university logan.olaughlin@duke.edu abstract this essay examines the figure of the pesticide-exposed intersex frog, a canary in the coal mine for public endocrinological health. through feminist science studies and critical discourse analysis, i explore the fields that bring this figure into being (endocrinology, toxicology, and pest science) and the colonial and racial logics that shape these fields. in so doing, i attend to the multiple nonhuman actors shaping this figure, including the pesky weeds and insects who prompt pesticides’ very existence, “male” frogs who function as test subjects, and systemic environmental racism that disproportionately exposes people of color to environmental toxicants. i encourage careful examination of galvanizing environmental figures like this toxic intersex frog and i offer a method to do so. introduction “the second most commonly used pesticide [in the united states], atrazine,…led one of my frogs to develop a set of testes here, ovaries here, another testis, and more ovaries…which is not normal, even for amphibians,” chuckles dr. tyrone hayes while gesturing to the image of a frog’s gonads in his 2010 ted talk (hayes & chaffer, 2010; figure 1). in his words, atrazine makes frogs “abnormal,” “gender-bending,” “homosexual,” and therefore “unsuccessful at mating” (hayes et al., 2002; hayes et al., 2003; hayes & chaffer, 2010). other environmental scientists have studied the concerning effects of toxicants on frogs. for instance, special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 2 david skelly found that frog populations living in manicured suburban ponds have a high female-to-male sex ratio and higher rates of frogs who are intersex, both of which he has described as “creepy” and “bizarre” in interviews (barringer, 2008; skelly, bolden, & dion 2010; zimmer, 2011). hayes’s creative performance style, which incorporates rhyme and comedy, has helped popularize inflammatory language about intersex frogs and make this toxic animal figure all the more compelling. in hayes’s and skelly’s work, frogs become a touchstone for broader anxieties about pesticide effects on sex and sexuality. figure 1. slide representation of frog with hermaphroditic traits (hayes & chaffer, 2010). it is no surprise that this environmental anxiety has been picked up by right-wing extremists such as alex jones (2017), who asserts that “the government is putting chemicals in the water turning the frogs gay!” and by comedian-journalist john oliver (2017), who, in a 2017 episode of last week tonight, projects an image of a pair of frogs on a lily pad with a rainbow flag. pop science news sites riff of skelly’s frog research with titles such as “your lawn is giving frogs a sex change” and “frogs a-courtin’ trouble on tidy lawns” (knapton, 2015; philpott, 2015). these examples highlight how anxiety about sex and sexuality is not only ubiquitous but directly informed by the figure of the pesticide-exposed frog. feminist and queer environmental scholars have contested this kind of language for its implicit slandering of being queer, trans, or intersex (di chiro, 2010; kier, 2010; sturgeon, 2010). few have spent time deconstructing this figure and its colonial underpinnings, however. in this article, i examine the figure of the toxicant-exposed intersex frog, a figure which has been puzzling me for several years.1 through feminist science studies and critical discourse analysis, i explore the colonial and racial logics undergirding endocrinology, toxicology, and pest special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 3 science that bring this figure into being. responding to queer ecologies and feminist new materialisms this essay brings together several fields that often speak past one another, including queer and feminist environmental studies, critical science studies, critical animal studies, and critical race studies. queer ecocriticism and feminist environmentalisms have recently drawn attention to the role of heteronormativity and homophobia to popular conceptions of the environment, building upon a history of ecofeminist scholarship highlighting the gendered implications of environmental destruction. the amalgamation of fields sometimes referred to as “queer ecologies” has made important interventions, particularly in highlighting how western myths of queerness as “unnatural” surface at moments of ecological crisis (di chiro, 2010; mortimer-sandilands, 2010; sturgeon, 2010; alaimo, 2016; pollock, 2016). contributors to queer ecologies have playfully framed endocrine-disrupting toxicants as opportunities to disrupt the social equation of binary sex and biological reproduction and/as indicators of wellbeing (di chiro, 2010; pollock, 2016). mel chen (2012) and vanessa agard-jones (2013) have helpfully tempered some of this excitement about environmental toxicants by highlighting the racialized and sexualized trajectories of environmental toxicants. the related scholarship of queer and feminist ecological thought, feminist new materialism, and object-oriented feminisms has offered generative ways to think about environmental harm from the perspective of seemingly inanimate objects, such as rocks, plants, or environmental toxins and toxicants. however, the feminist new materialist turn, even when attentive to race, fails to think about the unique function of entities commonly understood as animate nonhumans under western scientific paradigms (animals). i have been shaped by growing scholarship at the intersection of critical race theory and critical animal studies that attends to the ontological collusion of the human/animal divide with the dehumanization of people of color; using theories produced at this intersection in tandem with decolonial analytics, i explore how nonhuman animal figures are crucial mechanisms for the biopolitical functions of dominant scientific method, both dehumanizing humans racialized as non-white and obfuscating indigenous onto-epistemologies (wynter, 1994; deckha, 2006; murphy, 2007; kimmerer, 2013; weheliye, 2014; kim, 2015; ahuja, 2016; ko & ko, 2017). in reifying logics of science, the figure of the toxicant-exposed frog functions as a specific kind of immaterial animal capital. in using the phrase “animal capital,” i invoke nicole shukin’s (2009) eponymous analytic, which traces how nonhuman animals are special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 4 rendered into both symbolic and material capital. animals can function as cultural stand-ins for nation-states as well as physical flesh commodities that feed human economies (shukin, 2009). in this work, i examine how the scientific uptake of nonhuman animal figures as indicator species enacts a racially charged and sexualized affective symbolic power. a map of the essay: to conduct a feminist science studies analysis of the figure of the pesticide-exposed intersex frog, i seek to understand it from multiple angles. to better peel the layers back of this palimpsestic test subject, its contradictions, and its effects, i interrogate the many actors that shape it: the pesky weeds and critters who prompt the production of pesticides, african clawed frogs who function as indicator species, endocrinological ontologies of sex, and systemic environmental racism that disproportionately exposes people of color to toxicants. i ask several questions to query the making of this figure: how do colonial pest sciences bring the toxic frog into being? what kinds of logics subtend the production of pesticides? and, on the other hand, how has this figure affected pesticide production? how have african clawed frogs come to function as an indicator species? whence do endocrinological norms about intersex emerge? to explore the first two questions, i provide an abridged review of disturbance ecology and pesticide history from key scholars in the field to reveal how the rise in pests was likely stimulated by european colonialism of north america. i trace how scientific development of pesticides codified understandings of species difference as a means of making “progress.” by interrogating the colonial roots of pest science, i highlight how these logics devalue humans who are racialized as non-white and vilifies racially charged nonhuman plants. i argue that we must use this historical context to understand the frog. in returning to this figure, i study why african clawed frogs are used as indicator species and conduct a close reading of a study by hayes et al. (2010) to unpack how traditional endocrinological approaches frame intersex as both a pathology and a disability, conveniently ignoring the impossibility of binary sex. noting this figure’s entanglement with contemporary racial formations in the united states, i trace how hayes explicitly constructs this frog as a rallying cry against environmental racism. the essay concludes where it begins by exploring how pests are framed as being contrary to progress in racially charged ways, focusing on one chemical company’s rebuttal of the validity of the toxic frog figure. along the way, i use toxic as an adjective to identify something exposed to toxicants as well as to indicate harmful discursive formations that emerge from encounters with toxicants.2 special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 5 through this winding and seemingly circular trajectory, i argue that toxic animal figures, such as the intersex frog, are shaped by harmful scientific logics about sex, gender, and race, and obfuscate histories of violence. i urge us, as feminist environmental scholars and activists, to recognize the complexity of these galvanizing environmental figures. reviewing colonial ecological histories: (un)making agricultural pests to understand the figure of the toxic frog, we must trace how the ontologies and epistemologies of the past haunt the present moment.3 pesticides are not often described as colonial technologies in popular environmental discourses in the us. but a (de)colonial analysis of pesticide development is necessary to understand this figure and its effects; colonialism shapes dominant institutions of science and obfuscates indigenous scientific epistemologies. the work of disturbance ecologists is useful to understand the stakes of pesticides because the intersex frog figure is entangled with the looming specter of “invasive” pests. recognizing the limitations of the environmental historical scholarship that often makes sweeping claims, i nonetheless query these histories. after all, these pesky critters have not been a constant and timeless feature of north america. the creation of pesticides likely facilitated the rise of pest animals and ironically co-produced their bodies and immaterial figures. according to several disturbance ecology historians, european colonial settlement of north america likely stimulated the need for pest control (williams, 1992; taylor, holley, & kirk, 2007; mcwilliams, 2008). settler colonialism thrived by carrying plants, insects, animals, and viruses from europe that helped ensure the success of white settlers against the indigenous residents, a process that alfred crosby (2015) has described as “ecological imperialism” (subramaniam, 2014).4 despite the trope of the pristine and untouched “new world” that circulated among colonial settlers, many tribes carefully cultivated and maintained forests. one prominent indigenous scientific method used was controlled burning of plants and trees to foster biodiverse ecosystems, including moist forests, open oak forests, and grasslands (mcwilliams, 2008; stewart, 2009; crane, 2014; lake et al., 2017). for instance, a member of the coquille tribe explained that burning was a means of preventing the douglas fir from “encroaching on the open prairies and crowd[ing] out the other timber” (lucy thompson qtd. in wells, 2011). this practice was likely not recognized as the scientific method that it is today in large special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 6 part because colonial sciences operated in direct opposition to indigenous ontoepistemologies of the natural world (verran, 2008; kimmerer, 2013). the eviction and genocide of indigenous peoples and the subordination of indigenous sciences often coincided with and facilitated the overgrowth of forests. in other words, settler colonialism likely encouraged the proliferation of what many deem “pest” species, especially insects and plants that may grow along or in competition with food crops in these forests (mcwilliams, 2008; wells, 2011). european settlers’ apparent aversion to these overgrowing forests led to another kind of disruption for forest-dwelling nonhuman species of north america. settlers’ destruction of the woods killed many natural predators of insects and upset ecosystems on a large scale. for instance, thinning tree cover from previously lush woods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made many winter freezes less severe (mcwilliams, 2008). many european settlers hypothesized that thinning out woods and clearing land for farming would reduce insect populations by decreasing the amount of moisture and foliage protection. however, the opposite likely occurred; the ground thawed faster during winter freezes, allowing insect larvae that would have previously died under the severe cold to survive and even thrive (cronon, 2003; mcwilliams, 2008; steinberg, 2012). while deforestation led to the demise of many plants, it also encouraged the growth of plants that thrive under direct sunlight; these kinds of plants often have thicker leaves with denser nutrients and are thus especially appealing to insects (mcwilliams, 2008). it would be inaccurate to suggest that settler colonialism had a singularly detrimental effect on the nonhuman landscape, that indigenous stewardship of the land was always oriented towards environmental longevity, or that competition among nonhuman species only existed after colonialism. however, colonial destruction of habitats has had marked effects on the land through encouraging the proliferation of densely nutritious plants. pests and pesticides are thus always materially and discursively connected to colonialism. this material history is often obscured from the popular framing of pests as invaders. this obfuscation gives them more power as animal figures who maliciously foist themselves onto unsuspecting humans, rather than creatures whose existence has been co-produced by humans. despite the major influence that “american” settlement played in the proliferation of unwanted insect and plant populations in north america, pests have often been described as being un-american in their obstruction of us agricultural progress. ontologically, the very categories of “pest” and “invasive special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 7 species” are founded in colonial logic, as others such as banu subramaniam (2014) have noted: one is described as a justified resident and the other as an intruder (kim, 2015; head, 2017). it is revealing that species marked as “invasive,” “alien,” or “non-native” do not match a specific biological taxonomy. on the contrary, these are loosely used signifiers that can span many unwanted species. this discourse demonstrates the arbitrariness of which colonial values are placed on nonhuman species. many different kinds of “pests,” such as mosquitos, moths, and beetles as well as plethora of “weed” plants, were seen as unpatriotic simply because they threatened the colonial agricultural economy in the us. for instance, the hessian fly received its name during the american revolution because it seemed to appear just after the arrival of hessian troops, otherwise known as german soldiers hired by britain (mcwilliams, 2008). the hessian fly continued to be a scourge on wheat, barley, and rye crops, and its name functioned as a reminder of its foreignness. plants and insects thus became useful vessels and vectors of nationalist sentiment. the labels “invasive” and “pest” are subjective and capacious. “invasive,” for example, indicates nothing about the comestible value of a plant. these labels demonstrate how abstract and arbitrary values become attached to plants. many of the weeds ostensibly encroaching on food crops were and are nutritious to humans. sometimes the invasive plants were even more nutrient dense than the crops they invaded, but their inferior sociocultural value justified their continued vilification. other plants that were cultivated during the eighteenth century in us colonies as valuable crops—such as velvetleaf, a rich source of dietary fiber—are now deemed invasive. velvetleaf is currently listed as invasive in forty-eight us states and “noxious” in four (integrated pest management, 2015). portrayal of pests as invasive is thus geographically and temporally specific. the ideological variation over time further emphasizes the socially constructed nature of the term invasive. growing anxieties about pests in the us in the mid-1800s became especially palpable through the concomitant development of biological sciences, including entomology (the study of insects), botany (the study of plants), and economic ornithology (the study of birds as key actors in pest management). these fields of study provided a rich opportunity for us settlers to codify colonial ontologies of nuisance species and to justify the need for pesticides (mcwilliams, 2008). under the rubric of objectivity, these life sciences articulated differences across plants and animals not only to understand but also better control them. in so doing, they attributed differential value to species by determining their potential usefulness and/or harm to human civilization. the biological sciences were helpful in special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 8 engraining white settler ideologies in popular farming cultures; cross-industry collaboration meant that farmers were soon taught how to identify species and subspecies of invasive insects and plants by their morphologies, assessed via observation of roots, leaves, and flowers, in order to apply the appropriate antidote to the “problem,” though, at the time, the available pesticides were largely ineffective (mcwilliams, 2008). though the biological sciences operated under the scientific method to ensure accurate findings, there was infrequent interrogation of the logics of pests. since the us is a nation centered around monocropped corn, pesticides are helpful to its survival. this is the landscape from which the pesticide-exposed intersex frog figure emerges. with this history, we can appreciate how the frog is a figure of friction because it focuses on a different enemy: pesticides. carrying this history forward, i will use the next section to demonstrate that the toxic intersex frog reveals important insights about normative and dehumanizing logics in endocrinology and environmental science. scientia intersexualis: the construction of “creepy” hermaphroditic frogs frogs are culturally significant in the us, which makes them powerful as environmental soothsayers. they are often gregarious and lovable creatures in children’s stories that anthropomorphize them, such as the princess and the frog, kermit the frog from sesame street, and frog and toad. frogs are featured in backyard-science projects that invite children to approach and gently study how these amphibians diligently catch flies with their lightning-fast tongues. these frogs are what skelly has described as the “look mom i found a frog!” frogs (qtd. in barringer, 2008). in this capacity, frogs are valued as nonhuman teachers of how the natural world works. reports of their declining populations and their sex “anomalies” thus evoke concern and dismay, as the international save the frogs! campaign demonstrates. but frogs are not just an indicator species based on people’s observation of them in the wild. frogs are also captured, bred, studied, and euthanized as test subjects. the seeming contradiction of their simultaneous value and disposability complicates the toxic intersex frog figure. frogs’ cultural significance is in their longevity as a population rather than their sentience. african clawed frogs (xenopus laevis or x. laevis, for short) in particular are subjected to scientific testing because they are perceived to be an invasive species. their resilience in new habitats and their ability to crowd out competitors have prompted african special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 9 clawed frogs to be listed as illegal to own without a permit in many us states and sometimes even illegal to possess at all (california department of fish and wildlife, n.d.; matier & ross, 2007). x. laevis’s disposability as a species is what makes them logical test subjects in a utilitarian sense: extracting, breeding, confining, and studying them can help prevent environmental harm to other more valuable animals such as humans and can help regulate their populations. x. laevis’s famed history in one of the first pregnancy tests in the 1930s has also made them a common choice in endocrinological research (kirksey, hannah, lotterman, & moore, 2016). x. laevis frogs have been particularly useful in this field because they develop in ways similar to humans. they can live remarkably long lives, from fifteen to thirty years, and can thus be part of longitudinal studies. so, too, are x. laevis frogs easy to control because they spend a great deal of their lives underwater. african clawed frogs in the lab live very different lives from the tree frogs in people’s backyards and public ponds in large part because of this cultural value. frogs who have been exposed to environmental toxicants become vectors for slandering rhetoric of non-normative sex organs. for instance, hayes reports that exposure to low levels of atrazine led his male frogs to develop eggs in their testes, to develop multiple testes and ovaries, and to mount other males to copulate, a phenomenon he calls “chemical castration” (hayes & chaffer, 2010). as mentioned earlier, skelly refers to frogs who develop hermaphroditic traits as “creepy” and “bizarre” in public news about his research (skelly qtd. in barringer, 2008; zimmer, 2011). though these value-laden descriptions of these frogs are inflammatory, they are not dismissed wholesale since they are based on consistent findings and otherwise sound science.5 the fact that these inflammatory descriptions evoke laughter, shares, and retweets suggests that they align with longstanding ideologies in contemporary us society that presume intersex is (1) an aberration of traditional anatomical development; (2) a sexual perversion (lacking an easily identifiable binary sex is an immediate failure to be a heterosexual subject, since heterosexuality presumes the existence of only two sexes); and (3) an immediate sign of infertility. this resistance to sex and sexual norms rears its head most commonly in fears about intersex as a sign of permanent sterility. it often manifests as a failure to recognize that fertility, sex, and sexuality exist on a spectrum across humans and nonhuman animals. the figure of the endocrine-disrupted frog functions because it often collapses special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 10 several forms of alterity: intersex, infertility, and homosexuality. for instance, hayes draws out the ongoing social discomfort with intersex by describing intersex frogs as “genetic males,” implying an essential trait from which the frogs have veered, and who engage in sex with other males, both traits which he implies are associated to atrazine (hayes & chaffer, 2010; hayes et al., 2010. hayes positions intersex as sexually deviant when he projects an image of two frogs engaging in intercourse and says, “these are just two brothers consummating their relationship” (chaffer & hayes, 2010). environmental toxicologists ring the alarm on “genetic males” being “feminized” by pesticides, both morphologically and behaviorally. but the shock value of the toxicant-exposed frog only functions under the assumption that intersex is indeed a pathology. despite intersex justice organizing as well as feminist science studies scholarship reminding the public that intersex is common, irrespective of the presence of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, this scientific literature emphasizes the novelty of these findings. for instance, hayes et al. (2002) note, “these abnormalities [of intersex] were never observed in control animals in the current experiments or in over 10,000 observations of control animals in our laboratory over the last 6 years” (p. 5477). missing from the public discussion of these studies, however, is the fact that many animals lack easily distinguishable sexes in the first place (roughgarden, 2004; avise, 2011). the making of a male test subject: closer analysis suggests that environmental scientific research, which posits intersex as a pathology, requires both a social and biological construction of binary sex in the first place. by analyzing the making of the intersex frog in the lab, we can witness the biopolitics of science through its binaristic articulation and regulation of sex. to delve into greater detail, i interrogate the scientific method of one such study, hayes’s and his colleagues’ 2010 study, “atrazine induces complete feminization and chemical castration in male african clawed frogs.” in it, i examine how studying endocrinological effects of toxicants requires creating “true” males, which hayes et al. (2010) explain in their “supporting information, data & methods” appendix. i juxtapose it with the history of intersex violence against humans in order to evaluate the implications of articulating intersex as a nonhuman phenomenon resulting from and in toxicity. despite the dramatic, binary language of demasculinization castration, and feminization in both scientific literature and popular culture, african clawed frogs cannot be sexed on sight alone. male and female african clawed frogs do have some differences on average: females are generally larger, males often have darker colored pads on their arms (nuptial pads), and females have slightly larger special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 11 bumps between their legs (cloacal labia). however, a frog that might have “male” characteristics cannot be presumed to be male. biological sex in frogs is elusive and this is part of its rambunctious power. because hayes’s study uses “sex chromosomes” as the primary indicator of sex, i will first remain in this register to trace the differences between human and frog sex chromosomes (and what they reveal) and will then critique the sexchromosome model used in this project (a multispecies logic). humans, unlike frogs, can have any permutation of x and y chromosomes, having a single or multiple x chromosomes, which are quite large, and y chromosomes, which are small. the presence of a single y chromosome in humans usually marks that human as “male,” even though many xy humans develop as phenotypically as female. (humans cannot survive without an x chromosome, as it carries the bulk of genetic information necessary for life.) the y chromosome is often described as “dominant” in humans because it carries the sry gene, which activates the shift in development of ovaries to the development of testes. there are many permutations of x and y chromosomes, each with different possible physical expressions (phenotypes). researchers can look at the number and size of human chromosomes (karyotype) by breaking apart a single cell to examine the genetic material therein, assembling each of the chromosomes as pairs, and displaying it as an image called a karyogram (figure 2). figure 2. karyogram of human chromosomes. image adapted by author from wiki commons. frogs’ chromosomes differ dramatically from humans’, and african clawed frogs’ chromosomes are particularly unique. frog chromosomes have been named different letters to help distinguish them from the human x and y chromosomes: w (female) and z (male). unlike humans’ chromosomes, which are commonly described as male-dominant, african clawed frog chromosomes are “female special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 12 dominant,” meaning the existence of a single w chromosome triggers a development cascade for the growth of ovaries. thus, zw is intended to denote a female african clawed frog and zz a male. unlike the large x chromosome and the small y chromosome, which are easily viewable on a human karyogram, the sex chromosomes of this frog cannot be morphologically distinguished on a karyogram (figures 3 and 4). in other words, you cannot visually distinguish zz and zw frogs by examining a karyotype because both z and w chromosomes usually look the same in size and shape. figure 3. karyogram modified to emphasize the sex chromosomes of a xenopus laevis zw female, identical in size (uno et al., 2008). special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 13 figure 4. ideogram of a x. laevis zw female to demonstrate identical alleles on the sex chromosomes (adapted from uno et al., 2008). figure 5. rearing process for the zz colony prior to experiment conducted by roger liu (hayes et al., 2010). note: e2 refers to estradiol exposure used to convert the frog population to femaleappearing frogs, both zw females and zz “sex-reversed” genetic males. f0, f1, and f2 refer to the multiple breeding phrases necessary. given the phenotypic similarities across amphibian sexes, and because phenotypic differences are not reliable indicators of genetic sex, it was not possible for hayes’s team to put together a sample of genetically male (zz) frogs through visual sorting. hayes and his team had to construct such a group by creating “sex-reversed” wild frogs, as they called it (hayes et al. 2010 p. 4614 ). this tedious process was delegated to a research assistant and only discussed in the appendix (hayes et al., 2010; see figure 5). the genetically male frog population (zz) was developed in the following manner: first, the researchers captured a sample of wild x. laevis frogs, which presumably contained a mix of male and female (zz and zw) frogs, and exposed them to estradiol in order to stimulate the production of female traits in the developing frogs. these frogs were still both male and female genetically, even though they all had female characteristics. the second phase (f1 in figure 5) entailed breeding these now special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 14 phenotypically female frogs (both zz and zw) with male-appearing wild frogs (presumed zz but not confirmed for the aforementioned reasons). after this breeding cycle, hayes identified the lab-altered phenotypically female frogs (again both zz and zw) who produced only male-appearing offspring (when mated with the wild zz but possibly also zw frogs), since these must have been zz “sex-reversed” genetic males. (estradiol-exposed zz frogs who bred with wild zz males would always result in zz offspring; whereas zw frogs who bred with zz frogs would be expected to produce a mix of zz and zw offspring.) the labaltered zz frogs identified through this step (albeit exposed to estradiol at this point and thus phenotypically female) were then bred with already confirmed zz frogs from a former study to produce the f2 generation of zz male frogs. the offspring of this second and somewhat queer phase of breeding were ultimately the sample population that hayes and his colleagues used in his study of atrazine (hayes et al. 2010). this method is revealing: researchers studying the “feminizing” effects of hormones have to do extensive work to create a test group of confirmed males before even starting their experiments. hayes’ et al. acknowledge the importance of their study in acknowledging “the possibility of natural variation in sex differentiation processes between species and even between populations (or strains) within a species” (2010, p. 4614). their controlling for variations of sex is far more rigorous than studies of other species, such as humans who have more easily observable chromosomal differences.6 yet frogs are still somehow deemed a good indicator species for predicting human health. it is revealing that the “natural” genetic males who haven’t yet been affected by endocrine disruption are not actually naturally occurring in the sense that genetic males cannot be identified outside of the laboratory; the frogs used in hayes’s research have been bred twice under human supervision before ever arriving at the state of a confirmed “genetic male,” waiting to be possibly feminized by atrazine. the optics of pop science frame atrazine as causing same-sex mating, yet it is crucial to remember that hayes has already been mating “genetic males” together to develop his f2 generation. moreover, it is worth noting that the model of using sex chromosome as a measure of sex is risky in and of itself. intersex activists and feminist scholars have critiqued the language of y-chromosome dominance for its assumptions (y chromosomes are “dominant” and “active” and x chromosomes are “passive”). as vernon rosario (2009) has asserted, “rapid advances in the genetics of sex determination have completely trashed the 1950s notion that the human y special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 15 chromosome alone determines male sex” (p. 274). the discovery of sexdetermining genes on non-sex chromosomes in particular have challenged the myths of only x and y chromosomes determining sex, as well as y-chromosome dominance (rosario, 2009). intersex scholars have urged endocrinologists and geneticists to nuance their conception of sex, for instance, calling for a “shift [in molecular genetics] from binary sex to quantum sex, with a dozen or more genes each conferring a small percentage likelihood of male or female sex that is still further dependent on microand macro-environmental interactions” (rosario, 2009, p. 279). the fact that z and w sex chromosomes are treated as the indicator of biological sex in frogs (who are female dominant) reifies the antiquated logic of sex chromosomes in humans. certainly, it is easier to rely on a single variable to determine sex, and analyzing a full profile of the chromosomes (both traditionally marked as sex chromosomes and not) would be an extensive study. but ruminating upon the failures of the sex-chromosome model are crucial. analyzing frogs’ chromosomal differences compared to humans’ may have highlighted that frogs are not a good indicator species for humans in the first place. so, too, could it pose important questions for humans about the stability of sex across species, à la anne fausto-sterling (2000). the figure of the atrazineexposed intersex frog, thus, is created through an omission of how frogs’ sexes exist in the first place and reifies a myth that sex chromosomes are the identifier of sex. toxic frog rhetoric and/as pathologizing human intersex: in obscuring that wild x. laevis frogs cannot technically be test subjects for this study yet because their sex is unknown, hayes contributes to a broader scientific and cultural practice of othering intersex as a sex/ual pathology and a disability of reproductive capacity. endocrinological studies rely on the construction of a control group against which to compare the rates of “abnormality,” whether existing in controlled exposure to chemicals in the lab (such as in the work of hayes) or in that of observing rates of naturally occurring intersex depending on proximity to households (as in the work of skelly.) the implications of these complex discourses are significant, as many intersex activists and scholars have emphasized. by assuming that non-normative sex is a specifically toxic phenomenon that might someday affect humans, these figures enact discursive sex/ual violence. contrary to popular belief, intersex precedes the advent of synthetic pesticides, substantiated by the archives of intersex activism, and thus cannot be characterized as a quintessentially new phenomenon. failing to mention current and historical intersex humans is awkward (and not in a particularly generative special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 16 way). since hayes positions humans that are intersex as a forthcoming anomaly, they should theoretically not exist. these panics ignore the existence of past and present intersex people by placing them temporally out of sync. failing to describe intersex as an extant human trait follows the historical rhetoric that has objectified and dehumanized people with intersex traits as somehow animal. in particular, this ontology echoes thirteen-century european literary descriptions of intersex and hermaphroditism, where it was thought that what distinguishes a human from an animal is the possession of an easily distinguishable sex (devun, 2014). certainly hayes does make allusions to human intersex but only as evidence of the presumed recent effects of endocrinedisrupting chemicals. for instance, hayes juxtaposes pictures of his dissected intersex frogs with different images of disembodied human genitals that do not neatly fit the category of male. he shows these images to emphasize that what frogs are experiencing may indeed be foreshadowing what could happen to humans. intersex thus continues to live at the edge of the human and nonhuman, through bringing certain humans into the fold of the subor nonhuman (devun, 2014). though hayes’s pathologization of intersex frogs never mentions historical ontologies of intersex, he uses the same frames when he describes intersex as never fully human. according to many intersex activists and scholars, asserting that sex is naturally binary is not only inaccurate but is also violent (fausto-sterling, 2000; karkazis, 2008; creighton, greenberg, roen, & volcano, 2009). the rhetoric of binary sex not only ignores the ubiquity of intersex traits among humans and nonhumans but has pronounced material effects. for instance, medicalization of intersex has justified the nonconsensual medical surveillance of infants, children, and adults with non-normative sex morphologies (karkazis, 2008). infants born with genitals that are not easily identifiable as male or female have historically undergone surgeries to “correct” their bodies without adequate informed consent, often even to the parents. unwanted surgeries create long-term health issues for many intersex people, including discomfort when urinating or having sex (faustosterling, 2000; dreger & herndon, 2009). anxieties about intersex children in the 1950s and the toll they might take on society at large ushered in the era of john money’s “optimum of gender rearing model,” which strictly policed intersex children to present and behave exclusively as either a boy or girl with heterosexual desires and punished any who failed to do so (money, hampson, & hampson, 1955; dreger & herndon, 2009). the pathologization of intersex continues to be haunted by the vestiges of money’s widely-used model, even if it has largely fallen out of favor. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 17 ableist language describing toxicant-exposed frogs has important implications for intersex politics for human. for instance, hayes describes his intersex frogs as “impaired,” “retarded,” and “messed up inside” (hayes & chaffer, 2010). this language flies in the face of recent and ongoing debates in the intersex justice movement surrounding the recent medical nomenclature shift from “intersex” to “disorders of sex development” (dsd). though some had hoped this would improve the lives of people with intersex traits, many activists felt that “dsd” marked an assimilation of intersex justice work to fit the needs of a mainstream audience of non-intersex physicians and a broader public. intersex activist-scholar georgiann davis (2015) herself believes that the “renaming of intersex as a disorder of sex development allowed medical professionals to reclaim their authority and jurisdiction over intersex” (p. 57). while the discursive histories and implications are, indeed, different, hayes’s pathologization of intersex in nonhuman animals does recenter his authority and jurisdiction over nonhuman animals. more broadly, environmental toxicology research on endocrine disruptors undermines the lively destigmatization campaigns of intersex activists. constructing “darnell,” the african american frog: the toxic frog has significant and lasting effects in the way it is constructed as intersex. to fully understand it, though, it must simultaneously be understood from a critical race analysis. after all, one of the key wielders of the toxic intersex frog figure, tyrone hayes, uses his frogs as a rallying cry against environmental racism. some context about hayes is necessary to understand how he constructs this figure. in discussing his findings, hayes often centers his experiences as a black scholar. the tenured berkeley professor tells his students, lecture attendees, and interviewers that he grew up in the segregated us south and faced ongoing, systemic racism to reach his current position (hayes & chaffer, 2010; slater, 2012; mock, 2015). in interviews, hayes has said that he feels privileged having gone to go to harvard on scholarship and thus feels obligated to tell people the truth about the effects of chemicals on their communities (slater, 2012). he speaks frankly about how systems of poverty and regulatory academic norms often prevent scholars of color from attaining tenured research positions. hayes connects this structural inequality in the field to his own research by explicitly critiquing environmental racism and the corporate greed at the core of contemporary pesticide production. he does so even in the face of vociferous slander campaigns from the behemoth pesticide producer syngenta (nadel, 2010; slater, 2012; democracy now!, 2014; beroset, 2016). hayes used to do research for the chemical company but severed ties when they asked him not to publish his special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 18 findings. by depicting hayes as unprofessional, unhinged, and possibly threatening in online forums and through hired op-eds and planted audience members at his lectures, the company has tried to discredit hayes (nadel, 2010; slater, 2012; democracy now!, 2014; beroset, 2016). hayes projects his own racial identity onto his african clawed frogs, playing on the link between his own african americanness and the african origin of the species. hayes joked in a lecture in december 2017 that these are technically african american frogs since he often collects them as discarded test subjects from other labs in san diego (hayes, 2017).7 he sometimes describes atrazine as affecting a single frog, who he affectionately calls darnell. “the big news this year,” hayes says, “will be darnell (xenopus laevis) and his atrazine-treated brothers and sisters…brothers with severely impaired fertility and sisters (genetic males) who lay eggs” (hayes in nadel, 2010). hayes has also said he is reclaiming the power of his traditionally black name, tyrone, in a largely white-dominated field. he teased a chemical industry employee who referred to him as “black and quite articulate” by adding an abbreviation of “articulate black man” to his email signature: “tyrone hayes, phd abm” (aviv, 2014).8 naming his frog darnell, a black name in contemporary us culture, is thus a related move. naming the frogs as a singular darnell connects them to the frogs that he studied in his backyard when he was growing up, and even taking photos with one of his amphibian subjects conveys hayes’s complex relationship to x. laevis frogs (aviv, 2014). hayes’s social construction of his intersex frog as african american is intended to be disruptive from its inception. the strategic construction of the african american frog allows hayes to allude to the racialized effects of pesticides, even though he doesn’t talk about the effects of atrazine on black people specifically. citing us department of agriculture data that the majority of us farmworkers are latinx, hayes notes that “they have levels of atrazine in their urine that are 24,000 times what we use in our laboratory” (hayes & chaffer, 2010). in his public lectures, hayes often notes that people of color across the globe are more likely to experience atrazine-exposed infertility or reduced sperm count. the toxic animal figure of darnell thus acts as a powerful reminder of the environmental racism that pesticides enact (hayes & chaffer, 2010). hayes implicitly suggests that we critically examine why certain crops are deemed more valuable than the reproductive health of the workers applying the pesticides to them, many of whom reside in his own home state of california. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 19 in this context, hayes positions darnell as a rallying cry of environmental reproductive justice, though he does not explicitly use this language. the environmental risks of agricultural labor have long shown effects on fertility and reproduction, and here hayes contributes to growing attention to this issue. for instance, in the 1970s and ’80s, many of the majority male latinx workers overseeing the production of the pesticide nemagon in california discovered they were infertile. the same was true of nicaraguan banana workers who applied the same chemical to crops well after the discovered effects in california. many became sterile or had children with health complications (bohme, 2014). there was also documented evidence that the employing companies—dow chemical, dole food companies, united fruit, and chiquita—had been aware of the serious health risks of pesticide use and nonetheless allowed workers to be exposed (bohme, 2014). this collateral damage has been profitable to pesticide producers, albeit less so when they are successfully sued by affected workers (see tellez v. dole, for instance). hayes uses darnell to remind us that pesticides have disproportionate effects on communities of color who are more likely to be exposed through their place of residence (near agricultural facilities) or as an occupational hazard (spraying pesticides on crops, for example). the anxieties he wields about fertility, though relying on misconceptions about intersex, are grounded in fraught politics of environmental reproductive violence in north america. hayes has expressed gratefulness that his work has reached “minorities who would never have had access to this information” because he recognizes the barriers and paywalls the public has to accessing scientific research (qtd. in slater, 2012). he believes his unconventional presentation style and using inflammatory language “to piss off the chemical companies” is central to this success (slater, 2012; democracy now!, 2014). hayes’s construction of race in this incendiary nonhuman figure further demonstrates how scientific norms shape these galvanizing environmental figures. these figures are shaped not only by normative logics about binary sex, but also by the racially charged norms of knowledge production and the disproportionate exposure of toxicants to marginalized communities. these galvanizing animal figures, thus, require careful and nuanced analysis. syngenta’s resistance fighter campaign: reifying a familiar pest figure special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 20 “frogs are doing quite fine in kansas,” said the head of the kansas corn growers and kansas grain sorghum producers associations, a major proponent of syngenta’s pesticides and herbicides. “anecdotally, i’d say they must not have read dr. hayes’ studies” (qtd. in slater, 2012). after failing to slow hayes’s research, syngenta rerouted the conversation away from darnell, as is evidenced by the fact that there is no mention of frogs on the company’s website. this is common practice in public relations, as spending time debunking claims might inadvertently add credence to them. instead, syngenta seems to have put its energy into attempting to construct a different galvanizing figure: pests. analyzing one of their advertising campaigns can demonstrate the effects of darnell and trace the colonial scientific logics of pesticides discussed at the start of this paper. figure 6. syngenta, resistance fighter home page, 2017. syngenta’s resistance fighter campaign, once housed at the aptly named web domain resistancefighter.com, reveals the company’s broader strategy in countering the figure of darnell (figure 6). in this campaign, us farmers work are encouraged to work with syngenta to fight against weeds that are not killed by the common pesticide glyphosate. one advertisement pitches the campaign succinctly: “resistance is a problem. be part of the solution. become a resistance fighter” (syngenta, 2017). in this campaign, syngenta (2017) raises awareness about regional-, state-, and crop-specific invasive species and provides the ammunition to fight “the enemy,” wherever in the us a farmer might be. to encourage public participation, syngenta chooses annual resistance fighter leaders for each major region of the us to be model farmers and mentors for other farmers in the area. the resistance fighter campaign posts training videos on its website and maintains a strong twitter presence via the hashtags #toughweeds or #resistancefighter. syngenta (2019) continues its long history of special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 21 recruiting farmers to use their products, which have been developed in “collaborat[ion] with university experts,” and reinforce the idea that chemical pesticides are necessary. it frames an invasive species as “the enemy” to reify xenophobic logic, constructing certain beings as worthy insiders and others as intruders, eerily similar to the environmental nationalism that historians noted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the us. this seemingly run-of-the-mill marketing campaign reveals the long history of racial violence in the production of pesticides. the rallying logo is a stark yellow fist emerging out of a rocky ground paired with the phrase “resistance fighter.” at first glance, this might look like a call for political resistance solidarity. on the contrary, syngenta uses the power fist to depict the rambunctious weeds who refuse to be squelched. though the clenched power fist has been used across social movements from socialist uprisings in mexico in the early 1900s to various secondand third-wave feminists to the black panther party, the specific clip-art style fist with a thick outline most resembles the power fist used by the black panther party. recently taken up in the black lives matter campaign in the us. syngenta's appropriation of this fist to symbolize that corn treated with its products will prevail, and therefore result in economic gain, obscures the colonial, racist roots of pesticide development. as evident in syngenta’s simultaneous efforts to first debunk the power of darnell as “bad science” and later to silence hayes, being a good resistance fighter means fighting resistance from environmental activists who might use the very power fist that syngenta appropriates. the racial politics here are no coincidence. hayes’s activist-scholarship in african american vernacular english, his formulation of darnell as an african american frog, and the company’s obfuscation of environmental racism work in tandem. syngenta’s white-washing of its power fist ignores racism as an issue here, whereas hayes points out that environmental racism is endemic to pest science and endocrinology alike. figuring environmental futures exploring the well-traveled figure of the toxicant-exposed intersex frog has important implications. deconstructing the different elements that comprise it— pesticides and their historical ontologies, endocrinological norms on creating clearly sexed subjects, racialized environmental violence, and inflammatory advertisement campaigns by chemical producers—provides a helpful opportunity to understand and rethink how we conceptualize environmental health. hayes has begun to question his own “freaky” frog figure, darnell. in a 2017 special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 22 lecture hosted by the ucla center for women, hayes notes that the language of binary sex is alienating to people who should be involved in the conversation: “words like top and bottom [to describe frogs’ coitus], male and female, can be isolating to individuals that we really need to be our allies outside of the scientific community. i think we can all learn a lesson and…get rid of our binary thinking about what sex means so that we can really be more effective at spreading this [information about pesticides].” as feminist and queer anti-racist scholars and activists, it behooves us to further recognize the entanglement of sex/uality, dis/ability, race, and species in environmental panics. doing so through analyzing toxic animal figures like darnell is one important avenue. these widely circulating figures of environmental harm usher in colonial and normative logics. querying the disciplinary ontoepistemologies of these figures and the histories they obscure can foster more ethical modes of being in and of the world. acknowledgements this project was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship in feminist environmental studies at duke university. thank you to priti ramamurthy, amanda swarr, maría elena garcía, louisa mackenzie, kathryn gillespie, and anna luisa patiño west for your invaluable input. i am also grateful for the detailed and generative suggestions from rachel lee and joanne muzak at catalyst as well as from two anonymous reviewers. notes 1 in this essay, i focus primarily on intersex rather than a more explicit transgender and/or queer analysis. this is intentional. i have examined the blurring of queer and trans in endocrine disruptor discourses elsewhere (2016) and there has been rich scholarship at this intersection by bailey kier (2010), giovanna di chiro (2010), and cleo woelfle-erskine and july cole (2015). as a non-intersex transgender person who has watched as intersex debates are casually folded into queer and trans studies, i take time in this essay to examine the specificity of intersex as a unique regulatory formation. 2 here i am informed by max liboiron, manuel tironi, and nerea calvillo’s “toxic politics” (2018). 3 here i nod to avery gordon’s framework of hauntology (2008) and i channel maría elena garcía’s conceptualization of “multispecies hauntings” (2015, p. 161). while i argue for tracing the legacies of historical violence, i do not intend to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 23 suggest that colonialism and xenophobia exist in the past; they are well and alive. 4 i refer to settler colonialism here as the material invasion of north america by europeans during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, as exploration, colonization, and settlement. i recognize there are far more modes of settlement that have occurred and continue to occur on the continent. 5 chemical castration is a value-laden phrase often associated with the punishment of sex offenders and male prisoners. using chemical castration to discuss potential effects on human fertility thus alludes to the involuntary and coercive aspect of this “castration.” 6 “observable” here refers to the chromosomes examined via karyotype, not phenotypical traits. 7 hayes describes the african clawed frog as the “lab rat of amphibians” because they were useful as a human pregnancy test given their hormonal similarities with humans. 8 former us president barack obama remarked on the racialized politics of being described as an articulate black man (mills, 2007). references agard-jones, v. 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(2017, december 4). from silent spring to silent night: a tale of toads and men. lecture presented at trinity university's distinguished scientists lecture series. trinity university, san antonio, tx. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sloka5jeojk&t=1814s hayes, t., & chaffer, p. j. (2010). the toxic baby. ted talks [video file]. retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/tyrone_hayes_penelope_jagessar_chaffer_the_toxic_baby ?language=en hayes, t. b., collins, a., lee, m., mendoza, m., noriega, n., stuart, a. a., & vonk, a. (2002). hermaphroditic, demasculinized frogs after exposure to the herbicide atrazine at low ecologically relevant doses. proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 99(8), 5476-5480. hayes, t., haston, k., tsui, m., hoang, a., haeffele, c., & vonk, a. (2003). atrazineexposed hermaphroditism at 0.1 ppb in american leopard frogs. (rana pipiens): laboratory and field evidence. environmental health perspectives, 111(4), 568-575. hayes, t. b., khoury, v., narayan, a., nazir, m., park, a., brown, t., … gallipeau, s. (2010). atrazine induces complete feminization and chemical castration in male african clawed frogs (xenopus laevis). proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america, 107(10), 4612-4617. doi:10.1073/pnas.0909519107 head, l. (2017). the social dimensions of invasive plants. nature plants, 3(6), 1-7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyfzsorl5r8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urzel7p371o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sloka5jeojk&t=1814s special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 26 integrated pest management, university of missouri. (2015, may 28). weed of the month: velvetleaf. retrieved from https://ipm.missouri.edu/ipcm/2015/5/weed-ofthe-month-velvetleaf/ jones, a. 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(2015, september 8). frogs a-courtin’ trouble on tidy lawns. telegraph. retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11850084/frogs-acourtin-trouble-on-tidy-lawns.html ko, a., & ko, s. (2017). aphro-ism: essays on pop culture, feminism, and black veganism from two sisters. new york, ny: lantern books. lake, f. k., wright, v., morgan, p., mcfadzen, m., mcwethy, d., & stevens-rumann, c. (2017). returning fire to the land: celebrating traditional knowledge and fire. journal of forestry, 115(5), 343-353. liboiron, m., tironi, m., & calvillo, n. (2018). toxic politics: acting polluted in a permanently polluted world. social studies of science, 48(3), 331-349. matier, p., & ross, a. (2007, march 12). the killer frogs of lily pond: san francisco poised to checkmate amphibious african predators of golden gate park. sfgate. retrieved from https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/the-killerfrogs-of-lily-pond-san-francisco-2610411.php mcwilliams, j. e. 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(2015, january 27). how a black kid who grew up in the segregated south https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eplkam8i2s https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11850084/frogs-a-courtin-trouble-on-tidy-lawns.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11850084/frogs-a-courtin-trouble-on-tidy-lawns.html https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/the-killer-frogs-of-lily-pond-san-francisco-2610411.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/the-killer-frogs-of-lily-pond-san-francisco-2610411.php https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obama-the-articulate_b_39919 special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 27 became a barefisted biologist. grist. retrieved from http://grist.org/climateenergy/tyrone-hayes-amazon-new-yorker-hannibal-buress/ money, j., hampson, j.g., & hampson, j.l. 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(2016). queering endocrine disruption. in k. behar (ed.), object-oriented feminism (pp. 183-200). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. rosario, v. a. (2009). quantum sex: intersex and the molecular deconstruction of sex. glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, 15(2), 267-284. roughgarden, j. (2004). evolution's rainbow: diversity, gender, and sexuality in nature and people. berkeley, ca: university of california press. shukin, n. (2009). animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. skelly, d. k., bolden, s. r., & dion, k. b. (2010). intersex frogs concentrated in suburban and urban landscapes. ecohealth, 7(3), 374-379. slater, d. (2012). the frog of war. mother jones. retrieved from http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2011/11/tyrone-hayes-atrazine-syngentafeud-frog-endangered steinberg, t. (2012). down to earth: nature’s role in american history. oxford, uk: oxford university press. stewart, o. c. (2009). forgotten fires: native americans and the transient wilderness. http://grist.org/climate-energy/tyrone-hayes-amazon-new-yorker-hannibal-buress/ http://grist.org/climate-energy/tyrone-hayes-amazon-new-yorker-hannibal-buress/ http://www.atrazine.com/amphibians/combined_large_pdf-r-opt.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xecev4dsaxe&t=875s https://www.motherjones.com/food/2015/09/your-lawn-giving-frogs-sex-change/ https://www.motherjones.com/food/2015/09/your-lawn-giving-frogs-sex-change/ http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2011/11/tyrone-hayes-atrazine-syngenta-feud-frog-endangered http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2011/11/tyrone-hayes-atrazine-syngenta-feud-frog-endangered special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 28 norman, ok: university of oklahoma press. sturgeon, n. (2010). penguin family values: the nature of planetary environmental justice. in c. mortimer-sandilands & b. erickson (eds.), queer ecologies: sex, nature, politics, desire (pp. 102-133). bloomington, in: indiana university press. subramaniam, b. (2014). ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. champaign, il: university of illinois press. syngenta. (2017). resistance fighter. retrieved from http://www.syngentaus.com/herbicides/resistance-fighter syngenta. (2019). resistance fighter: herbicide resistance management. retrieved from http://www.syngenta-us.com/herbicides/resistance-fighter taylor, e. l., holley, a. g., & kirk, m. (2007). pesticide development: a brief look at the history. southern regional extension forestry. union of concerned scientists. (n.d.). syngenta harassed the scientist who exposed risks of its herbicide atrazine. retrieved from https://www.ucsusa.org/harassingscientistmessenger-exposing-risks-herbicide-atrazine united states department of agriculture. (2017). corn policy. retrieved from https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/policy/ uno, y., nishida, c., yoshimoto, s., ito, m., oshima, y., yokoyama, s., nakamura, m., & matsuda, y. (2008). diversity in the origins of sex chromosomes in anurans inferred from comparative mapping of sexual differentiation genes for three species of the raninae and xenopodinae. chromosome research, 16(7), 999-1011. verran, h. (2008). science and the dreaming. issues, 23-26. retrieved from http://www.issuesmagazine.com.au/article/issue-march-2008/scienceanddreaming.html weheliye, a. (2014). habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. durham, nc: duke university press. wells, g. (2011, november 23). native american forestry combines traditional wisdom with modern science. resilience. retrieved from http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-11-23/native-american-forestry-combinestraditional-wisdom-modern-science/ williams, m. (1992). americans and their forests: a historical geography. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. woelfle-erskine, c., & cole, j. (2015). transfiguring the anthropocene: stochastic reimaginings of human-beaver worlds. transgender studies quarterly, 2(2), 297-316. wynter, s. (1994). no humans involved: an open letter to my colleagues. forum http://www.syngenta-us.com/herbicides/resistance-fighter http://www.syngenta-us.com/herbicides/resistance-fighter http://www.syngenta-us.com/herbicides/resistance-fighter https://www.ucsusa.org/harassing-scientistmessenger-exposing-risks-herbicide-atrazine https://www.ucsusa.org/harassing-scientistmessenger-exposing-risks-herbicide-atrazine https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/policy/ http://www.issuesmagazine.com.au/article/issue-march-2008/science-anddreaming.html http://www.issuesmagazine.com.au/article/issue-march-2008/science-anddreaming.html http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-11-23/native-american-forestry-combines-traditional-wisdom-modern-science/ http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-11-23/native-american-forestry-combines-traditional-wisdom-modern-science/ special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) logan natalie o’laughlin, 2020 29 n.h.i.: knowledge for the 21st century, 1(1), 42-73. zimmer, c. (2011, february 21). unraveling the mystery of the bizarre deformed frogs. yale environment 360. retrieved from https://e360.yale.edu/features/unraveling_the_mystery_of_the_bizarre_deformed_fr ogs author bio logan natalie o’laughlin is a visiting research scholar in the gender, sexuality and feminist studies program at duke university. their current book project, toxic animal encounters: queer environmental threats & racialized reproduction anxieties, traces contemporary environmental panics and their feared effects on sex, sexuality, and reproduction in north america. dr. o’laughlin has taught courses on reproductive justice, environmental justice, and queer theory at duke as well as at the university of washington, where they completed their ph.d. in feminist studies in 2018. https://e360.yale.edu/features/unraveling_the_mystery_of_the_bizarre_deformed_frogs https://e360.yale.edu/features/unraveling_the_mystery_of_the_bizarre_deformed_frogs microsoft word commentary-murphy.docx murphy, m. (2017). what can’t a body do? catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(1), 1-15 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © michelle murphy, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license commentary what can't a body do? michelle murphy university of toronto michelle.murphy@utoronto.ca this is the text of a keynote plenary lecture delivered on august 31, 2016, at the 4s/easts meeting, barcelona, on the theme of “to what extent is embodied knowledge a form of science and technology by other means?” take a deep breath. with every inhalation, industrially produced molecules are drawn into your being. once inhaled, synthetic molecules may pass through membranes, connect with receptors, nestle in fatty tissue, mimic a hormone, or modulate gene expression, thereby stimulating a cascade of further metabolic actions. breathe in. we cannot help it. you must breathe to live, like you must drink and eat. there is no choice in the matter. it is a condition of our being. with each breath we are recommitting to an ongoing relationship to building materials, consumer products, oil spills, agricultural pesticides, factories near and far that all contribute to the emission of these synthetic molecules. every one of you here, like all people living today, have persistent organic pollutants woven into your being. pcbs and dde (a metabolite of 2 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) ddt) are in every one of us, joining up with other more regional or idiosyncratic mixtures of chemicals exuded by capitalist exuberance: phthalate plasticizers, bisphenol a, pbde, lead, and organochlorine pesticides. the list could go on and on. we are enmeshed in these chemical infrastructures. i can say all this with the help of a motley array of disciplines – metabolomics, toxicology, biomonitoring, epigenomics, and so on – each of which offers an instrument-mediated micrological glimpse into the vastness of our chemical relations, relations that extend far out from our skin, out into electrical systems that used pcbs as thermal insulation, out into postcolonial pesticide regimes that sprayed ddt around the world in the name of crop yield and public health, out into the plastosphere of packaging and cheap consumer products, out into the infrastructures of environmental racism that concentrate chemical violence in some bodies, and security in others. the chemical relations of our embodiment expand out into messy and violent histories of colonialism, racial segregation, and labor, into homemaking, heteropatriarchy, and war. and our chemical relations overflow these structured exposures to become mobile on winds and currents, disobeying territorial and social stratigraphy, stretching forward into time, after the factory is gone, after the war is over, after the product is no longer on the shelf, after you no longer have a job, and even after any individual life, or any one body. sometimes chemical exposures are sensible, but mostly they are not, so we are often guessing that we sense them, retroactively, in the symptom, the brain fog, the miscarriage, the worry, the lump, the grief that comes later. chemical relations connect us backwards in time, but also forward into what our bodies will become, into the future environment that we are cumulatively assembling in our complicities and inability to extract ourselves from the webs of capitalist and industrial exuberance. we are all here already altered by industrial chemicals, though in profoundly uneven ways. we are all here already more-thanbodies. this material, not metaphorical, entanglement in environmental 3 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) violence is a condition of being alive today. so, here we are together in barcelona, breathing in, participating in temporal loops and the expansive interdependencies of chemical relations. our topic here tonight is “embodied knowledge by other means.” but what is embodiment anyway? the body does not exist as a detached and sovereign unit, despite what liberal political structures tell us. why do we think we know what a body is, or what it can do? where does it end and begin? what relations compose it? in 1985, donna haraway (haraway, 1985) posed the question, “why should our bodies end at the skin?” i want to stay with this unsettling query. as researchers, we might look to acknowledging differently situated bodies in order to correct the exercise of power in knowledge making. this is especially pressing in institutional conditions where embodiment is denied, but also because mobilizing embodiment can be a diy practice that you can do without a lot of institutional support. yet, the demarcation of the singular, discrete body is non-innocent, even when described in a fine resolution of particulars. it is caught up in infrastructures of individual property, wage labor, citizenship, and even whiteness, infrastructures that, for researchers working in relatively elite settings, tend to operate by obscuring the support systems—the transportation networks and service labor for example —that allow particular kinds of normative bodies to appear as it if they are operating as solo units. yet, non-innocent bodies are caught up in each others conditions of life support and diminishment. from the epidermal schema of antiblack racism to the heteropartriarchy of gender, bodies are already caught in painful and contradictory matrixes of support and negation. my livelihood requires me to take in an injury. drinking water, i am exposed. your gas is linked to the destruction of this territory, and hence the fish and our bodies. embodiment is a collective binding of profoundly uneven relations of porosity to exposure: my vulnerability to injury is entangled with your comfort. the side effect accompanies the treatment. i am kept 4 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) alive even as i am being killed. at the material metabolic and chemical level, embodiment is already altered, already non-innocently embroiled in uneven violent relations of being and doing. if we accept as a starting point that embodiment does not provide a respite or escape from history, from infrastructures, from relations of power, if we accept that bodies cannot get you out of entanglements, then we might want to find alternative genealogies for grappling with “embodiment by other means” for sts. taking frantz fanon as a starting point for a decolonial sts, for example, we might begin by noticing how he navigated, and refused to disavow, the contradictions making up embodiment, how fanon theorized within a set of tensions or toggles: for example, the toggle between the hopeful care for embodied difference, and the pessimistic ways bodies are already materialized in colonial and racist worlds, the toggle between medicine’s racist apprehension of pathological bodies, and the ways that bodies also exceeded those materializations (fanon, 1963, 1965, 1967). fanon held these tensions together beautifully in his theorizations of blackness, but also in his work theorizing how medicine and science might break with their colonial complicities. learning from and making kin with the decolonial projects of frantz fanon, as well as other fields like black studies, indigenous studies, and queer studies, a decolonial sense of embodiment might embrace fanon’s anti-colonial call to become a new humanity, or a new life form, one which requires destroying the version of the human that histories of deep violence have created. it is in this bundle of tension that we might fashion a politics of decolonial sts both with and against “the body.” rerouting sts through fanon also requires that we consider the question of what has to be seized, rebuilt, and dismantled to make room for decolonial potentials. white supremacy? petrochemical extraction? i am sure you have other things to nominate for destruction! the individualized body, as given to us by western liberal political structures, as a container for rights, labor, risks, capital, and biological processes, 5 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) will not do. the singularized body alone cannot dismantle the disturbing entanglements of knowledge-making within violent infrastructures. moreover, “the body” itself is in need of dismantling, if we are to stay in the toggle of recognizing violence and becoming something else. what materializations of life and embodiment might we think with and against to confront the 21rst century condition of industrial chemical enfleshment? how to conjure decolonial futures, and not just accounts of bodily damage, along with the industrial chemicals that are part of us and at the same time remaking the planet? at stake in conjuring alterembodiments is the very sense of what constitutes life and its relations. within the biological sciences, there is no unified theory of life, even as the units of gene, body, species, and ecosystem have become so commonplace that they may appear to exist in the world itself, and not as historically particular materializations of it. making decolonial possibilities requires retheorizing life with and against technoscientific framings.1 a politics of embodiment by other means might learn from and propagate politics and concepts in the toggles between violences that have already happened and the need to undo them nonetheless, between the condition of being already altered and the struggle to become otherwise in the aftermath. we might, i suggest, call this alter-embodiment alterlife — a state of already having been altered by environmental violence that is nonetheless a capacity to become something else. the concept of alterlife is forged in recognition of the realities of large-scale and everyday environmental violence. alterlife is not waiting for the apocalypse – apocalypses of many kinds have already happened, livable worlds keep being snatched away. alterlife resides in what frantz fanon called “an atmosphere of certain uncertainty” (frantz fanon, 1967, p. 109). it is a condition that is shared, but unevenly so; it divides us as much as binds us. i have come to alterlife while studying chemical violence on the great lakes, as industrial chemicals deliver concentrated injury and premature death to indigenous, black and poor communities already 6 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) living in hostile conditions. the great lakes were the portal to the colonial conquest of canada, and in the twentieth century the lower great lakes became rimmed by the industrial exuberance of car manufacture and petrochemical refining, more recently giving way to histories of deindustrialization and abandonment. the great lakes, are a jurisdictional patchwork, cut up by two settler nations, over one-hundredforty-five indigenous territories, two provinces, and eight states. overwhelmingly the great lakes are governed by a permission to pollute regulatory regime and our data about emissions are self-reported by industry. a legacy of persistent industrial chemicals has spread ubiquitously across the region. in the aftermath, environmental researchers gather the evidence of the damage in bodies. alterlife has become a political concern for me as i live in toronto, on lake ontario, on anishinaabe and haudenosaunee territories, and in canada, a settler colonial and petro-extraction state. the question of alterlife is shaped by a sense of political and personal responsibilities, to the great lakes region, to its water and land, to histories, and to my own position as a white skinned métis person originally from winnipeg with responsibilities to my complicities in settler colonialism and whiteness as well as to histories and current activations of indigeneity. so i recognize that alterlife for me is partially biographical and emplaced in north american particularities. alterlife is a concern as my neighbors are bodies of water that hold 21% of the worlds fresh surface water, and 84% of north america’s.2 while what you might mostly see in the media about canada these days are photos of handsome justin trudeau, on the ground a canadian neoliberal managerial governance combined with capitalist settler colonial extraction have formed a potent environmentally violent and even genocidal mix which expresses itself in the pollution of the great lakes. around my home is a surge of environmental, reproductive justice and anti-colonial activism focused on the water that my sense of alter-embodiment learns from and aspires to collaborate with. i want to pause here and point out a shift in the way i have posed 7 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) the research question of alter-embodiment. in the past, i have typically approached histories of environmental and reproductive practices by asking: how do activist practices mobilize bodies in order to create alternative materializations of bodies. or put more simply: how do particular practices materialize particular modes of being? how does doing materialize being? tonight, i want to play with the question of embodied knowledge from the opposite direction, going from being to doing. i want to start with creating alter-embodiments, alter-objects of care– even if only conjecturally – that call in our complicities, that require less-violent practices, that require different worlds. i want to think with you about tactically moving from being to doing– calling forth alter-embodiments, alter-being, or what i am calling here alter-life. calling forth new life forms is a work in progress, and from the start has been made with students and friends, activists and artists.3 alterlife is just one attempt at conjuring alter-embodiment with a particular sts inflection and in solidarity with the vast labors of reproductive and environmental justice, especially on the great lakes. with alterlife, and thinking back to fanon as a guide, i want to draw out for you three of the political dimensions toggling within alterlife. first, alterlife is about a politics of entanglement, kinship, and responsibility.4 the entanglements making up alterlife are not just the symbiosis of multispecies being, but the material enmeshments with chemical exposures: these exposures include pollution as we might habitually think of it, but also the molecular manifestations of stress from living in assaulting racist conditions, and the inhalation of war dusts that extend the violence of bombing into the very act of breathing. no single person on this planet escapes enfleshments with exposures, even as their violent effects are profoundly concentrated in hotspots of hostility, and even as many of us here live in conditions of dense privilege that encourage a willful ignoring of these tentacles of violence. alterlife, as a becoming with exposures, exists in the profoundly uneven and interdependent distribution of life chances. 8 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) those of us who benefit from whiteness have much work to do in calling forth alterlife, not least of which is the responsibility to dismantle the work of whiteness in the sciences and in the institutions that we inhabit that are often densely enriched by capitalist, colonial, and racist systems. no matter who you are – even if you’re just trying to get by – quotidian and humble complicities are entangled with the very acts of sheltering, eating, cleaning, and surviving that are in turn knotted to a cacophony of consumption and harms within supply chain capitalism, and tied to discard systems built into objects, tethering ordinary survival to the continual spewing of injury. our relations are not just supportive. they can also be injurious and toxic to each other. vanessa agard-jones calls this “chemical kinship” (agard-jones, 2013; vanessa agard-jones, 2014). thus, a crucial aspect of calling forth alterlife is that it is about an understanding of oneself, the researcher, in kinships with beings “of politics and care” (puig de la bellacasa, 2011). attention to alterlife asks, not for a politics of fixing the other, but in the words of fred moten, “your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. i don’t need your help. i just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you too, however much more softly” (harney & moten, 2013, p. 140-1). within the condition of alterlife the potential for political kinship and alter-relations comes out of the recognition of your imbrications in the tangle supports and harms. second, with alterlife i am trying to think with and against technoscientific materializations of embodiment and chemical exposures. i want to push back against the framings of injured, disturbed, or “abnormal” life in scientific fields such as ecology, toxicology, and epigenetics – what we might call damaged-based research. with alterlife, i want to push back on the eugenic residual that calculates lives worth living, deviant lives, risky lives, unproductive lives, and killable lives. the work of carla hustak has brought home to me just how deeply entwined eugenics has been in the history of progressive and even feminist scientific projects (hustak, 2010). thus, in materializing alterlife, i am 9 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) collaborating with and pushing back against scientific understandings of damaged lives in environmental violence. let me give you one example. epigenetic ways of investigating chemical exposures render legible (and erase) environmental violence by tracking damage in bodies, with a tight focus on biochemical micrological processes. in environmental epigenetic, which focuses in excruciating detail how, in mice and rats, endocrine disruptive chemicals like pcbs can substitute in for molecules like estrogen or thyroid that act as transcription factors modulating the expression of target genes during critical developmental periods (such as the prenatally) when dna methylation patterns are being established, thereby altering the neurological, metabolic, and sexual development of bodies. such findings in rats and mice are compared with epidemiological studies in humans that show associations between the presence of metabolites of toxic chemicals, epigenetic biomarkers, and findings on cognitive tests, or diagnoses of autism, asthma, diabetes or obesity. focused on collecting the data of damage, such studies often focus on communities who have experienced intensive environmental violence often shaped by environmental racism and who live in conditions of persistent multigenerational exposure. thus, studies of environmental epigenetic can end up describing the bodily effects of racism as a community pathology, labeling communities as perpetually diminished by racism. such technoscientific materializations of the already-altered body help to give substance to alterlife, but need to be challenged with critical knowledges from fields like black studies, indigenous studies, and queer studies, that have many lessons for how to craft existences that rise from the ashes of structural violence. to this end, i find inspiration in the work of indigenous feminist scholar eve tuck (tuck, 2009) who has called for “suspending damage” as a refusal to participate in “damage based research” that concentrates the scope of attention on the dissection of bodies and biologies that are then reductively constituted as pathological and devalued. invasive organisms are to be removed, bird damaged in oil spills culled, disturbed land becomes a terra nullius – land and life coded 10 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) by a colonial gaze as empty, unproductive, and in need of capitalist possession. designations of damage feed circuits that amplify damage, where to be altered and unfixable is held as a diminished state, perhaps better not to exist at all. a refusal to re-enact damage based research is a challenge to environmental justice habits, and at the same time an invitation to create new kinds of research questions that are about building decolonial supportive worlds now, without waiting for a better moment to arrive. this brings me to my final political toggle within alterlife: the capacity to become otherwise. embodiment has not just been altered, it is more generally open to alteration. alterlife is already recomposed, pained, and damaged, but potentiality nonetheless. alterlife, as potential, challenges us to learn with a thick archive and dense present of projects of resistance and resurgence. it is also an invitation to consider what infrastructures and concepts have to be dismantled to make room for another way of being and knowing to emerge. it is an invitation to begin inhabiting alter-embodiments now. a core teaching of indigenous reproductive and environmental activism is that bodies are not separable from the land, waters, airs, and other beings (native youth sexual health network & women’s earth alliance, 2016). for indigenous women, two-spirit, and young people on the front lines of pipeline blockades, water walks, fasting, and land defense actions, whose lives are ongoingly violated by extractive industries, this teaching is unavoidable. what happens to the water, is a part of what happens to its relations. violence on the land is violence on bodies. this includes you too. i share this image with you (figure 1) with the permission of their creator, the métis activist and artist erin konsmo, who is a coordinator at the native youth sexual health network, and member of the onaman collective, an amazing group of anishinaabe and métis artists who combine land-based art creation with reactivations of indigenous knowledge. terra nullius is a legal term, or better yet a legal fiction, meaning 11 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) empty territory, which is used to support a state’s claim of sovereignty over land they “find.” in canada, terra nullius has been crucial to the state’s claim to ownership of indigenous territories that it then leases to multi-national petrochemical and mining companies, from suncor to debeers, thereby resulting in not only the theft of territory, but the concentration of environmental violence in indigenous communities. we see this history in this image in the way both colonial vessels and extractive industries are inscribed onto the body. “our bodies are not terra nullius” is thus a declaration of land defense and prior indigenous presence in territory. yet, this image, captures a second sense of “our bodies are not terra nullius.” colonial and environmental violence has already happened, and here we can see the body in trauma, as already surrounded by and formed through toxic violence. yet the very creation of this image, in a social justice collectivity, with people on the frontlines of blockades, in spaces that welcome queer and gender-nonbinary indigenous being, toggle the making of the image into an activation of decolonial embodiment, a laying claim to sovereignty and care of body/land entanglements in the aftermath. bodies are not terra nullius. our bodies are the land. they are of toxic chemicals, and they are something more. they are a manifestation of something bigger, that stretches outward to water, air, ancestors, and other beings, that stretches backwards to messy histories, and forwards to a something else. in this image we find an alter-embodiment of survival-as-resistance –what indigenous scholar gerald vizenor calls “survivance” (vizenor, 2000; dillon, 2012). survivance is not just about making newness, it is also about what has to end, what has to come apart, to make less violent worlds. the responsibility is not just to build alter-relations, but to dismantle violent infrastructures. to shut it down. #shutitdown alterlife is life damaged, life persistent, and life otherwise; life materialized in other ways and life exceeding our materializations i can almost imagine a politics of alter-embodiments, or better yet, alter12 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) collectivities, that need new kinds of solidarities, interdisciplines, practices, and pedagogies, and does not reproduce the same. almost. #alterlifeintheaftermath figure 1 13 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) notes 1 on thinking a politics within and against, i am drawing on (harney & moten, 2013) 2 https://www.epa.gov/greatlakes/great-lakes-facts-and-figures 3 alterlife was developed with the help of the graduate students of the four campus alterlife, conditions, aftermaths seminar, and in conversation with the other seminar instructurso. joseph dumit, tim choy, and jake kosek. conversation and scholarship by indigenous feminist and indigenous resurgent scholars, artists, and activists karyn recollet, eve tuck, christi belcourt, onaman collective, elizabeth lapensee, kim tallbear, and zoe todd have also been crucial. in coming to alterlife, i have also listened to black studies and black activist thinking about possibility in the wake of anti-blackness, especially the work of blmto, fred moten, vanessa gard jones, kathrine mckittrick, rinaldo walcott, christina sharpe, alondra nelson, ruha benjamin. 4 (tallbear, 2011; tallbear, 2013; todd, 2017) references agard-jones, v. (2013). bodies in the system. small axe, 17(3 42), 182– 192. dillon, g. l. (2012). walking the clouds: an anthology of indigenous science fiction. university of arizona press. fanon, f. (1963). the wretched of the earth. (c. farrington, trans.). new york: grove press. fanon, f. (1965). medicine and colonialism. in h. chevalier (trans.), a dying colonialism (pp. 121–146). new york: grove press. 14 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) fanon, f. (1967). black skin, white masks. (c. l. markmann, trans.). new york: grove press. haraway, d. (1985). manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology and socialist feminism in the 1980s. socialist review, 80, 65–108. harney, s., & moten, f. (2013). the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study. autonomedia. hustak, c. (2010). radical intimacies: affective potential and the politics of love in the transatlantic sex reform movement, 1900-1930. university of toronto, toronto. native youth sexual health network, & women’s earth alliance,. (2016). violence on the land, violence on our bodies: building an indigenous response to environmental violence. retrieved from http://landbodydefense.org/uploads/files/vlvbreporttoolkit2016.pdf puig de la bellacasa, m. (2011). matters of care in technoscience: assembling neglected things. social studies of science, 41(1), 85–106. tallbear, k. (2011). why interspecies thinking needs indigenous standpoints — cultural anthropology. fieldsights theorizing the contemporary, cultural anthropology online. retrieved from http://culanth.org/fieldsights/260-why-interspecies-thinking-needsindigenous-standpoints bio michelle murphy is professor of history and women and gender studies. she is a historian of the recent past and feminist technoscience studies scholar who researches and theorizes about the politics of 15 murphy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) technoscience and infrastructures; sexed and raced life; environmental politics and chemical exposures; biopolitics; as well as economics, capitalism and finacialization particularly in contemporary, cold war, and postcolonial conjunctures associated with the united states, canada, and more recently bangladesh. she is co-organizer with natasha myers of technoscience salon and director of the technoscience research unit. she has graduate appointments at the institute for history and philosophy of science and technology, as well as the school of environment. in addition, she has graduate appointments in science and technology studies and the faculty of environmental studies at york university. professor murphy has a phd in the history of science from harvard university (1998). microsoft word catalyst introduction-part2.docx subramaniam, b and willey, a. (2017). introduction to science out of feminist theory part two: remaking sciences. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(2), 1-9 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © banu subramaniam and angela willey, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introduction science out of feminist theory part two: remaking science(s) banu subramaniam university of massachusetts, amherst banu@wost.umass.edu angela willey university of massachusetts, amherst awilley@wost.umass.edu this is the second part of a special double issue of catalyst focused on the theme “science out of feminist theory.” part one, “feminism’s sciences,” outlined the motivation and broad contours of the larger project.1 we will not repeat it here. but if “feminism’s sciences” focused on excavating and re-interpreting feminist thought as a site of science, part two, “remaking sciences,” focuses on reimagining recognized sciences through the lens of feminist theory. the authors and artists featured in “remaking sciences” add new layers to questions of what it means to “do” science, especially empirical research, whom we should call scientists, and what kinds of knowledge we might count. as a collection, the essays and thought pieces here share two characteristics. first, the authors all rethink and rework ideas, theories, and frameworks that we already consider scientific—be it 2 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) riverine sciences, veterinary sciences, ecological sciences, environmental sciences, health sciences, medicine, robotics, ecology, climatology, psychiatry, invasion biology, or marine biology. second, in rethinking and reworking these fields, the authors begin with ideas, theories, and frameworks from feminist theories. interestingly, the theories, ideas, and frameworks developed in feminist theory which have proven most useful to the contributors here represent precisely those resources marginalized, ignored, rendered invisible, or rejected by the sciences. these include: fiction, fantasy, failure, fragmentary knowledge, humor, politics, subjectivity, activism, as well as theories of affect, emotion, love, partial knowledge. in remaking sciences, they use methodologies such as auto-ethnography, autobiography, reflexivity, parody, genealogy, embedded histories, and art installations as modes that illuminate, make knowledge, and are science. these are provocations that force us to ask critical questions about the proper objects of science, of what science is, where science can be practiced, who can practice science, whose interests science serves, when something can be considered a s/science, and finally what the stakes of the debates are and who decides whether something is a science and is “legitimate” knowledge or not. this body of work offers up vast genealogies and archives of discourse upon which we might draw in the remaking of science and the imagining of science out of feminist theory. the essays in “remaking sciences” build upon several topics, questions, and concerns that emerged in “feminism’s sciences.” animal studies again takes on a prominent role. we find this rather striking. we wonder the degree to which thinking with non-human animals presents an opportunity to engage with the materiality of bodies in ways that seem less fraught with the baggage of the differential valuation of human lives associated with the eugenic biosciences. we suspect animal studies will continue to play a vital role in the development of science out of feminist theory, both for its decentering of the human and for its creative contributions to methodologies for studying bodies-in-context. it is clear 3 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) that “power” is front and center in the remaking of science our contributors undertake. the authors working with more-than-human animate matter—woelfe-erskine, gundermann, myers, schrader and johnson and smiley—attempt to produce a science located in time and place, and deeply grounded in the messy politics of race, sexuality, and colonialism. similarly, in the pieces on robotics and cyborgs, forlano and treusch place an ethics of care at the center of their visions of science. brault and asher shift the scale of analysis, again exploring the politics of knowledge, as they each probe the limits of our disciplined imaginations in thinking about planetary futures. in an ambitious field biology project in riverine science, cleo woelfe-erskine brings an embodied trans politics into effective engagement with ecology of beavers to extend our understandings of both through the concept of the “watershed body.” in a style that brings careful ethnographic detail reminiscent of early naturalist traditions, woelfe-erskine describes the complex politics of “rescue” in an era of ecological devastation. we were particularly moved and impressed with the many ethical questions that emerge from such “thick” descriptions. what must be the experiences of these animals? who is rescuing whom and to what effect? in these transformations, woelfeerskine powerfully demonstrates how interdisciplinary and interspecies methodologies and practices can inform both ecology and queer theory. like harlan weaver does in “feminism’s sciences,” christian gunderman explores the fuzzy sciences of life with animals. gundermann movingly describes his quest to save his horse. what emerges is the inability of biomedicine and veterinary science to diagnose or cure his horse (certainly in ways that persuade the author or the audience). juxtaposing “cold-body anatomy” and “warm-body science,” gunderman introduces us to approaches informed both by affective and physical intimacy between bodies and by the collaborative worlds of informal networks of veterinary “sciences” including affected horse owners, doctors, scientists. these problem-focused networks, working against the narrow epistemologies of bioscience, offer a vision of 4 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) sciences more attuned to the realities of embodiment. through the author’s curation of a capacious archive of body knowledges, the very knowability of bodies emerges as an important theme. kiran asher reminds us of the limits of disciplines and disciplinary imaginations and the difficulties in getting beyond them. how does one bring together the diverse epistemologies, methodologies and methods it takes to understand a complex planet? asher takes us through her own formal and informal training across multiple fields and narratives to demonstrate how the depths of natureculture can develop through a sequentially or simultaneous engagement with new resources for investigating aspects of the task at hand. in so doing she elegantly illustrates the metamorphosis of said task. her essay provides feminist science studies an important nudge to think more and more creatively about to how to craft an inter/trans/a-disciplinary education. laura forlano brings crip theory to the cyborg body to open up assumptions about disability and the contours of science. using autoethnography as a methodology for redirecting research, forlano demonstrates the inexact science of diabetes management and the bodily inconsistencies that pose a challenge to the idea of easy maintenance. using carefully collected data, alongside a powerful narrative of experiencing diabetes, forlano challenges any binary of the passive patient and successful science. rather, in a deeply moving essay she describes the immense scientific/logical/calculable data that can emerge from attunement to symptommanagement. tracking calculations of food and insulin alongside the unpredictability of how the body utilizes both, forlano allows us to imagine individual bodies as sites of inventiveness, innovation, and indeed science. moya bailey and whitney peoples remind us of the importance of genealogies and embedded histories and how they inform the elisions and erasures in science and feminist theory. by carefully constructing a “thick” history of race in the health sciences, bailey and peoples powerfully explore the systematic violence done to black female bodies 5 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) throughout history. they demonstrate how both feminist theories and science and medicine have marginalized and trivialized this violence. drawing on black feminist thought, bailey and peoples make a persuasive case for a black feminist health science studies (bfhss). what is critical in their analysis is the importance of recognizing that there is not and has never been a “normative” body in biomedicine and the health sciences. bodies have always been racialized and gendered. understanding the specificity of this history is critical—not just for rewriting and correcting history—but to rewrite and correct biology. these histories have shaped bodies profoundly and we need a bfhs to rethink and rewrite “the body.” michelle jamieson retrieves early to mid twentieth-century psychosomatic medicine as a feminist science. reading the work of helen flanders dunbar through contemporary feminist theories of the entanglement of matter and meaning, jamieson's essay offers us the space "between sciences" as a space of possibility, a space where science becomes sciences. she uses dunbar's work to offer a grounded exploration of what feminist psychosomatic methodologies can look like. this type of historiographic work delivers us rich archives of discourse on holistic approaches to embodiment from which the interdisciplinary feminist sciences might draw. jamieson’s essay reminds us that the cracks between disciplinary ways of knowing are filled with conceptual and methodological resources we would do well to remember in our attempts to build inter/trans-disciplinary natureculture sciences of embodiment. pat treusch, not unlike sara giordano in “feminism’s sciences,” uses “failure” to illuminate the immense insights to be gleaned when things go “wrong” or when experiments do not culminate in producing positive “results.” indeed, much has been written about the pervasive disregard for negative findings. for example, while studies may repeatedly find no evidence for sex differences, a single study (even poorly designed and conducted) that finds some evidence of “difference” becomes the cover story. the ubiquity of this frustration makes us 6 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) wonder if one feminist contribution to knowledge making would be to initiate a feminist journal of negative results!2 bringing queer theory and robotics together, treusch uses queer theory to explore what we know and can know about artificial intelligence and to introduce the queer science of “low robotics.” indeed, in analyzing humanoid robotics through halberstam’s theory of queer failure, treusch’s work forces us to question the epistemological and ontological usefulness of the concept of failure/success in this setting. rather, her work suggests that the failure/success binary is already immanently questioned in the enactment of the human/robot interface. claire brault brings us parody to shake us out of the complacent narrative exercises of academe. using imagination and humor she powerfully demonstrates both the depth of our faith in technology and the narrowness of our assumptions about possibilities for our planet. drawing on the intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc) scenarios, brault reminds us about the biological, political and economic assumptions that shape visions of the future and attendant plans for arriving there. using parody as a methodology, she opens up more imaginative and radical possibilities for our planetary futures. developing isabelle stengers’ concepts of stupidity and idiocy, brault offers us a carefully theorized “feminist idiocy” as a site of resistance and of radical imagination and intervention. we extend the theme of “remaking sciences” across the multiple formats that catalyst affords. in a wonderful commentary piece, myers brings decolonial theories to bear on ecological experimentation. drawing on a deep ethical, sensory and artistic repertoire, myers conjures an experiment using an imaginative selection of feminist methodologies. what emerges is a new “sensorium” opening up possibilities that we may re-introduce ourselves to the land, and find new ways of living with the world around us. in the lab meeting section, astrid schrader and elizabeth johnson bring together a group of biologists to meditate on the question of “killability” in our era of ecological devastation. what we found particularly powerful was the deep ethical reflection, care and 7 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) concern that these interdisciplinary scholars exhibited, a synergy that remains undertheorized in disciplinary silos. in the news in focus section, sam smiley brings art to our methodological repertoire for theorizing and engaging our naturecultural worlds in a profoundly political local debate on national belonging— when does something become “native” and who decides? how do we reconcile ecological evolutionary change, the histories of colonialism and migration, and contemporary nationalism about people and plants? the specificity of the community context brings natureculture theory home in ways that highlight the importance of art, activism, and the everyday to science out of feminist theory. in the critical perspectives section, max liboiron and colleagues illustrate how something so elementary as author order is fraught with politics. they demonstrate ways a lab can take on ethical questions and re-formulate and interrupt “science as usual.” if we are committed to transforming the hierarchies of knowledge that shape our worlds as feminists, we need to rethink everyday laboratory life, acknowledging that all kinds of labor are critical to a lab’s productivity— the labor of thinking, writing, editing, tending experimental organisms, collecting data, as well as washing dishes. finally, in the texts and images section, kara wentworth’s brilliant visual account of butchering animals in “handholds and other kill floor mnemonics,” reminds us about the intimacies of not only life, but also death. with vivid descriptions of the process of butchering, wentworth reminds us that “handholds” are material mnemonic processes. bodies and their instruments of disassembly shape and are shaped by each other. together these pieces bring to the fore the profound stakes of cultivating sciences grounded in critical approaches to knowing our worlds. we are watching a fast-changing planet riddled with global ecological problems on the one hand, and rising authoritarian nationalisms on the other hand. together this double special issue reminds us that disciplinary silos are ill-suited to the task of analyzing our worlds. only a radically interdisciplinary feminist science lens allows us to 8 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) understand how we got here, and only such a lens will allow us to reimagine and remake the sciences we need. and yet, while the essays and imaginations in “remaking sciences” suggest pathways to some place different, they also remind us about the deep institutional resistance to such visions. here, we cannot but bemoan the tendency to institutionalize normative practices (around timelines, productivity, and value) in academe within departments and programs in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (wgss) and in both undergraduate and graduate training. in navigating a disciplinary academy, scholars in wgss, and feminist science studies in particular, are stifled in their imaginative capacities. under the guise of rigor, individual genius, high ranked journals, and recognition in disciplinary locations, we see the transformative possibilities of wgss severely curtailed. how can we allow disciplinary promiscuity, methodological abandon, epistemological pluralism, multi-individual and indeed multi-species collaborations, and the fostering of research practices that encourage generosity, ethical engagement and mutual credit to all involved? this undisciplining is at the heart of science out of feminist theory. notes 1 http://catalystjournal.org/ojs/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/11 2 we do realize that there exists a journal of negative results (https://jnrbm.biomedcentral.com), although it largely ignores the kind of feminist work we intend here. 9 subramaniam and willey catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) bios banu subramaniam is professor of women, gender, sexuality studies at the university of massachusetts, amherst. trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she seeks to engage the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology. she is author of ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity (university of illinois press 2014), and coeditor of feminist science studies: a new generation (routledge, 2001) and making threats: biofears and environmental anxieties (rowman and littlefield, 2005). spanning the humanities, social, and natural sciences, she works at the intersections of biology, women’s studies, ethnic studies and postcolonial studies. her current work focuses on the xenophobia and nativism that haunt invasive plant species, and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in india. angel willey is associate professor of women, gender, sexuality studies at the university of massachusetts amherst. she works at the interstices of queer feminist theory, feminist science studies, and sexuality studies. she is author of undoing monogamy: the politics of science and the possibilities of biology (duke university press 2016) and co-editor of queer feminist science studies: a reader (university of washington press, forthcoming). her current work explores genealogies of materialism in feminist thought. book review | what’s the use?: on the uses of use, leff, jack r. (2020). review of what’s the use?: on the uses of use, by sara ahmed (duke university press, 2019). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © jack r leff, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license book review | what’s the use?: on the uses of use, by sara ahmed (duke university press, 2019) jack r leff virginia polytechnic institute and state university leffjr@vt.edu sara ahmed’s latest work, what’s the use?: on the uses of use, is as useful as it is use full. completing a trilogy that includes the promise of happiness (2010) and willful subjects (2014), what’s the use? explores the ways use makes itself felt. ahmed beautifully combines genealogy and phenomenology to explore how using, not using, or being put to use shapes our encounters with the world. this book, like much of ahmed’s work, is fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature. to try and run through the different fields she engages would mean reaching my word count here. at its core, ahmed’s project is about critically interrogating the various “straightening devices,” to borrow an older term of hers (ahmed, 2006, p. 107), that makes certain people, things, and outcomes seem natural while excluding others. immediately, feminist scholars of science and technology studies (sts) ought to hear this description and feel a sense of familiarity, especially in the arena of naturalization. yet, despite the powerful and interdisciplinary work ahmed has produced over the last twenty-five years, her uptake in the field of sts, even feminist sts, has been rather limited. in this review, i want to focus on how this book in particular marks an opportunity for sts to begin incorporating ahmed’s scholarship in a serious way. ahmed’s examination of the history of biology and the uses of technology creates a path for feminist sts scholars to incorporate her ideas, and hopefully one that leads to other rich concepts that she has developed over her career. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jack r leff, 2020 2 where the introduction sets up ahmed’s archive and begins her exploration of the uses of use, chapter 1 brings us immediately to a discussion of use and technologies. drawing from disability and trans studies, ahmed examines how the selective uses of the bathroom door (among other everyday technologies) shapes who can use spaces. as she writes, “doors are not just physical things that swing on hinges; they are mechanisms that enable an opening and a closing” (p. 60). the way a door is used and is made useful delimits who can use it to enter or leave a given space. two examples are discussed here. the first is how the design of a door can prevent disabled people from accessing a space. its heft, the way it swings, the surrounding architecture, and the presence (or absence) of an automatic opening mechanism changes how doors can be used and by whom. second, the sign on bathroom doors signifying gender becomes a technology that uses social norms to transform bathroom doors into gates. either you comply with the gender norm and can pass unhindered, or the gate shuts and the door becomes a wall. despite functionally being usable, the door is unusable. these everyday encounters with useful technologies, like doors, are a site of key feminist analyses for ahmed. how we come to understand these technologies can be understood through their relative uses and in asking who is unable to use them. by examining “use” closely, ahmed gives feminist sts a language that captures the interplay between the social construction of technological function and how the usefulness of a technological artifact shapes social spaces. the second chapter in what’s the use? sees ahmed reading together the work of biologists jean-baptiste lamarck and charles darwin. while lamarck and darwin are traditionally taught as polar opposites, ahmed finds that “[e]ven if lamarck and darwin explain variation differently, both understand use as a mode of directionality” (p. 79). in this way, both theories of evolution put a high value on use even if the ways use is used vary. the emblematic example here is that of the blacksmith’s arm, which is often used to distinguish how darwin and lamarck understand the development and inheritance of traits.1 where darwin might say that the strength in a blacksmith’s arm is an inherited trait that is used advantageously by a lineage of blacksmiths, lamarckian thinkers would argue that the arm’s strength is a result of blacksmiths using their arm more and more over generations. in either case, use is center stage. more than this, the example of how a blacksmith’s arm inherits strength through various accounts of usefulness is also, for ahmed, the story of how the blacksmith inherits work. moving from a contrast of darwin’s and lamarck’s debates to marx and eventually to contemporary society, ahmed demonstrates a powerful linkage between biology, technology, and society. the politicization of biology here will not be a surprising move for feminist scholars of sts, but how ahmed speaks on book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jack r leff, 2020 3 embodied usefulness gives us important tools for considering biology’s role in embedding usefulness in bodies as a way for capitalism to extract value. chapter 3 moves us into different terrain. here, ahmed wants to understand use not simply as a function of technology, but as a technique in itself. ahmed accomplishes this by examining how utilitarianism makes use of use and how the utilitarian jeremy bentham uses use-as-technique as a governing principle in his monitorial schools and panoptic prisons. of particular note for policy inclined feminist sts is ahmed’s critique of utilitarianism as an organizational principle. here, her argument serves as a warning against those who make policy arguments based purely on the usefulness of any given outcome. given how utilitarian, cost-benefit analyses are often the moral lynchpin in policy discourse, this chapter reminds us of how utilitarian binaries of usefulness/uselessness conceal the ways institutional violence can manifest. the critique of the uses of use in bentham’s monitorial schools leads ahmed to chapter 4, where she dissects use in the contemporary university. building on her activist work against sexual violence and white supremacy at goldsmiths, this chapter offers powerful organizing tools as well as a preview for ahmed’s next book on feminist complaint. in the academy, usefulness becomes a way of maintaining institutional inertia or, to borrow her metaphor, a wall that keeps marginalized people isolated. for instance, she describes how the overuse of the term diversity in academic settings can simultaneously make it useless for creating actual diversity while also making it exceedingly useful for those who never wanted diversity in the first place (p. 148). this oscillation between making something useless to make other things useful is elaborated on in the case of complaints, where complaints are made useless so that the institution does not have to change. drawing from experience, ahmed discusses how institutions, as environments, can be structured to disallow complaints at every turn in order to exhaust the diversity worker registering the complaint. at every step of the complaint process, paths are “funneled” so that the diversity worker sees no end in sight or, worse yet, the end is being blacklisted from their profession (p. 185). this chapter, disheartening though the wall may be, offers crucial strategies to feminist activists and feminist sts for making our own marks on the wall and guides us to recognizing the marks left by others. like most of ahmed’s books, the conclusion takes a moment to reflect on how we can resist the ways use forecloses queer horizons and employ queer use to scratch at the walls of hegemony. why take the effort to queer use? as she writes, “misfitting can be understood as generative precisely given it involves friction; when bodies do not fit seamlessly into space, things happen” (p. 224) or, in other book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jack r leff, 2020 4 words, queering use generates otherwise possibilities in a world hostile to those who don’t fit. however, we should avoid seeing queer use in simply how it can be useful to us; rather, “queer use can be offered as an ethics of finitude, an appreciation of the wrinkle or the scratch, expressions of time on the surfaces of bodies and things, loving what does not, and will not, last” (p. 226). the lesson being that queer use is not capturable in a dialectic of useful and useless, as utilitarianism might propose, but instead creates opportunities to recognize people as not disposable. if, as ahmed suggests, capitalism and white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy rely on extracting use from bodies, then queer use’s declaration that people are not disposable resists the extractionist tendencies of institutions.2 i have, by necessity, excluded many of the uses of use that ahmed works through across this book. this book is a must-read for any feminist scholars of sts and hopefully represents an opportunity for sts more broadly to engage the work of one of the most generative scholars. the tools and language sara ahmed details here are invaluable for discussing the social impacts of technologies and for creating worlds in which usefulness is not a prerequisite for existence. notes 1 this is despite the fact that lamarck himself never really used the example. 2 of particular note to feminist sts are the tendencies of the academy to chew people (especially marginalized people) up. this includes the increasing reliance on precarious adjunct labor, publish or perish, how university’s excoriate complainers, the unwillingness of administration to be transparent, administrative unwillingness to listen to students, and a host of other everyday violence that the institution inflicts upon those who work for it. references ahmed, s. (2006). queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham, nc: duke university press. author bio jack r leff is a ph.d. student in science, technology, and society (sts) at virginia tech whose work focuses on the politics of breath, breathing, and atmosphere. microsoft word 32370_kathryn cai dr.docx cai, kathryn (2019). review of chinese surplus: biopolitical aesthetics and the medically confined body, by ari larissa heinrich (duke university press, 2018). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kathryn cai, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license book review | chinese surplus: biopolitical aesthetics and the medically confined body, by ari larissa heinrich (duke university press, 2018) kathryn cai wake forest university kathryn.cai@gmail.com what do mary shelley’s frankenstein, plastinated cadavers, and the medical commodification of organs and other body parts have in common? in chinese surplus: biopolitical aesthetics and the medically commodified body, ari larissa heinrich traces the historical and aesthetic linkages between these wide-ranging cultural phenomena to show how an “aesthetics of corporeality” (p. 29) has taken shape in china in relation to (post)coloniality and the global marketplace throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. beginning with western anxieties and human rights critiques about the alleged chinese origins of cadavers preserved and displayed as part of the traveling body worlds exhibit, heinrich asks whether instead of universalized questions of origins and authenticity that “suppress” (p. 5) race’s centrality to definitions of the human, we might trace transnational linkages in the dispersal of body parts to consider contemporary bodily commodification within a longer arc of the “historically overdetermined idea of chinese life as surplus” (p. 6). rather than a derivative effect of contemporary biotechnical developments that increasingly dismember the body, “corporeal aesthetics” (p. 14) in china, heinrich asserts, has long been central to artists’, writers’, and thinkers’ attempts to consider the chinese body within the intertwined transnational workings of power—geopolitical, economic, and biotechnological. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) kathryn cai, 2019 2 chinese surplus is an ambitious project that weaves together a transnational and transhistorical consideration of aesthetic production and biomedical commodification. heinrich proposes a theory of “biopolitical aesthetics” (p. 14) and realism that diverges from the history of a western realism that imagines the dissolution of a unified and authentic body in correspondence with biomedical technologies such as dissection and blood transfusion (p. 31). the “recovered genealogy” (p. 17) of chinese art and history demonstrates the continued resonances of very different cultural and historical preoccupations rooted in china’s evolving geopolitical situation. to establish this genealogy, heinrich dwells in the first chapter on nineteenth-century qing dynasty and early twentieth-century engagements with bodily fragmentation tied to china’s place in the world. heinrich convincingly makes the case for the improbable connection between popular nineteenth-century chinese and western depictions of china as a “sleeping lion” and mary shelley’s frankenstein, which was first published in 1818 and, as heinrich notes, not translated into chinese until 1980 (p. 34). drawing on historical records, popular discourses, literary texts, and museum artifacts, heinrich traces the ways in which prominent chinese political actors came to transform western discourses of china as a frankenstein that reflected “deep anxiety about whether sharing technology with china might backfire, inadvertently giving china the power to destroy its ‘creator’” (p. 33). these chinese thinkers drew on the reference of frankenstein to meditate on china’s semi-colonial status and geopolitical position. this transnational conception of frankenstein as a “compartmentalizable political body” (p. 47), heinrich argues, presents a historical precursor of an already fragmented body that speaks to race, imperialism, and global politics, rather than one of holism and unity. this divergent genealogy rooted in chinese particularities leads to contemporary chinese cultural production and cultural politics in a “more biopolitical modality: a modality of the dead, the disassembled, the deconstructed, the decomposed, and the instrumentalized” (p. 50). this modality is also “diasporic” (p. 32), in that it speaks to body parts parceled out and on the move. in the subsequent chapters, heinrich turns to the work of chinese “body artists,” such as those in the cadaver group (p. 50), twenty-first-century usand hong kong-based films that involve the organ trade, the undergirding role of race for discourses of the human and human rights in the body worlds exhibit, and the mechanization and abject lack of agency ascribed to reproductions of iconic paintings by chinese painters in dafen oil painting village in shenzhen. across these diverse arenas, heinrich analyzes how discourses of originality, authenticity, and agency, which are predicated on a western-centric view of world history, obscure continuities in a cultural awareness of and preoccupation with bodily fragmentation and special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) kathryn cai, 2019 3 circulation that long predates and extends beyond contemporary biotechnologies. heinrich’s project does the groundbreaking work of connecting the global power dynamics of contemporary cultural productions engaged with fragmentation and labeled inauthentic with longer histories of imperialism. as such, chinese surplus will be of particular interest to both cultural critics and theorists who are considering cultural production in relation to biotechnical developments and who seek to develop frameworks from within non-euroamerican histories and spheres of influence. rather than a coherent and linear historical progression, heinrich’s project can be better said to propose surprising linkages and avenues of contemplation that, like the aesthetic works it examines, begin to gesture to a non-euroamerican history of aesthetics through transhistorical traces and resonances. this work contributes to the ongoing project of developing frameworks rooted in chinese histories and cultural lineages, including shu-mei shih’s the lure of the modern: writing modernism in semi-colonial china, 1917– 1937 (2001) and xiaomei chen’s occidentalism: a theory of counter-discourse in post-mao china (1995). as scholarship in literary studies suggests,1 these frameworks emerging from historical and cultural particularities can also serve as models and foundations for broader theories and histories of aesthetic and cultural production. heinrich builds on and extends this ongoing project by proposing generic histories in which “realism” in a chinese context includes a long engagement with bodily fragmentation across diverse forms of cultural production, into contemporary works’ explicit meditations on biotechnically mediated fragmentation. as such, it also resonates with scholarship that considers the development of biomedical knowledge and technologies within longer histories of imperialism and global power dynamics, such as work in feminist science studies that situates forms of clinical and embodied labor within these histories. while the book’s definition of western realism as an aesthetic category is at first somewhat difficult to place, particularly for those readers who may not be familiar with theories of western realism as a literary genre, the trade-off that heinrich makes to gloss only a selection of relevant examples of western realism is understandable given the wide range of genres and disciplines the book engages. moreover, this methodological choice also enacts the primacy of chinese histories and forms of production that heinrich’s study theorizes. in doing so, heinrich reveals how the cultural politics of aesthetic production is integral to understanding the wideranging ramifications of biotechnical developments. reaching beyond the sociocultural, technoscientific, and aesthetic as bounded categories of analysis, special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) kathryn cai, 2019 4 heinrich’s work presents another recent example of how methods and frameworks from different disciplines can illuminate conversations in and between one another, until perhaps one day these boundaries will no longer be so taken for granted. note 1 eric hayot’s on literary worlds (2012) engages and complicates theories of world literature and euroamerican histories of genre categories beyond a chinese context in part through considering chinese cultural production. author bio kathryn cai received her ph.d. in english from the university of california, los angeles in 2019 and is currently a mellon postdoctoral fellow in the interdisciplinary humanities at wake forest university. her research focuses on broadening the spectrum of affects associated with care labor in transpacific circuits of migration and capital through attending to bodily states and body-environment interactions in asian american cultural productions. brandt article     simulated war: remediating trauma narratives in military psychotherapy    marisa r. brandt michigan state university marisarbrandt@gmail.com “it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” –donna haraway (2013) the virtual reality (vr) war simulator called bravemind has been one of the most well publicized military simulations to emerge during the “war on terror.” it was invented in 2005 at the university of southern california’s institute for creative technologies (ict), the military-funded digital media research center developing immersive technologies methods including artificial intelligence, graphics, virtual reality and narrative that has been dubbed the heart of the military-entertainment (or “militainment”) complex for its innovative work in creating and studying video games and training simulations and studying in the service of diverse military ends.1 formerly called virtual iraq/afghanistan, bravemind is distinct from most of the virtual war zones created at ict in that it was designed as a therapy system to treat psychologically wounded warfighters, and not to train for battle. though not fully capitalized, the system’s name is in fact an acronym, standing for battlefield research advanced virtual environment for military individual neuro-disorders.2 through a practice called “virtual reality exposure therapy” (vret), service members and veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) interact with vr interfaces to become immersed in simulations of their traumatic experiences of war, with the goal of amelioration and cure. in this article, i draw upon feminist science and technology studies’ theorization of human-machine interaction to interrogate bravemind’s role in reconfiguring agency in the practice of healing the traumatized self. by the term reconfigure, i draw on lucy suchman's and donna haraway’s concept of technologies as materialized figurations that stabilize assemblages of things and meanings, and which imply ways of associating humans and machines (suchman, 2007, p. 227, explaining haraway 1997, p. 11). i argue that bravemind is an instrument of governmentality, a technology that aligns post-traumatic care for veterans with the interests of the state in managing this particular population. yet this role is not determined by the technology itself; rather, it is contingent upon the techology’s development specifically as a tool for conducting prolonged exposure (pe), a therapy which has recently ascended in popularity as a medicalized regimen of ptsd treatment. i argue that pe’s treatment protocol depoliticizes the production of trauma narratives in ptsd treatment, which i illustrate by contrasting its configuration of therapy against that of an approach oriented to social justice. further, bravemind codifies this medicalized configuration at the same time that it reconfigures therapy. analyzing bravemind as a site of reconfiguration, i also draw on the work of karen barad to reveal its role as an apparatus that makes agential cuts between subjects and objects in therapy (barad, 2003). these cuts further configure aspects of human subjectivity, such as memory, affect, and behavior, as objects for technological intervention. i characterize these specific practices as ones of therapeutic remediation. comparative analysis of different modalities of therapeutically remediating trauma narratives demonstrates how the politics of therapy for ptsd are embedded in the ways in which therapists, patients, and nonhuman actants are configured as subjects and objects with different forms of agency.  my argument here is based on a broader project entailing a multi-sited ethnographic study of vret’s development and dissemination in the military clinical psychology community since 2009. this includes surveying the scientific literature on exposure therapy for ptsd with and without vr, and analyzing more than 150 popular-media accounts of vret. i have also interviewed dozens of therapists who treat military veterans, both with and without virtual reality, and attended military and department of veterans affairs (va)-sponsored workshops, conferences, and seminars on ptsd treatment. these sources provide the basis for my analysis of bravemind’s politics as both a cultural and clinical object. here, however, i will focus on the politics of therapeutic remediation to illustrate that, as a material technology, bravemind’s role in reconfiguring therapy cannot be separated from the practices and protocols that define the contemporary regime of evidence-based treatment for ptsd in systems of service member and veteran mental health care.  though this analysis applies to ptsd therapy broadly, it has a special salience in the context of care for military veterans because this population is so inherently politicized in american culture, serving as a kind of avatar of the state due to their unique position of service. veterans have a special kind of citizenship wherein they can make claims upon the state for their care. the care they receive scales between individual experience and the cultural meaning of warfighting itself.3  there are several important processes of figuration through which bravemind reflects the disarticulation of science and morality in therapy: 1) by figuring efficacious therapy as an impersonal, technical, and empirically supported technique rather than as an intimate, personal, and political practice; 2) by figuring ptsd patients’ pathology as avoidance of traumatic memories, rather than as either the original traumatic experience or its effect on the body, and thus situating trauma narratives as behaviorists’ tools for habituating patients to stimuli rather than to sources of historical truth; and 3) subsequently depoliticizing war itself as a source of trauma. each of these sites configures the relative agency of patients, therapists, and technology by mediating their interactions within the process of therapy.  to illustrate the politics of therapeutic remediation in the case of bravemind, in the following sections i trace figurations of the relationship between the clinical science of ptsd care and the subjectivity of the service member across several sites. first, i examine the public representations of bravemind to show how these do political work by producing a new visual culture of therapy that conforms to imaginaries of the cybernetically militarized mind while also performing the military’s dedication to ptsd care. then, turning to the question of what bravemind does within the clinical setting, i introduce the concept of therapeutic remediationas a conceptual tool for interrogating the politics of producing trauma narratives. i use this conceptual tool to analyze approaches to the (therapeutic?) production of trauma narratives before bravemind in ptsd treatment as an explicitly social-justice-oriented political project. from there, i introduce pe, the technique upon which vret is based, to illustrate how it creates a depoliticized approach to trauma narratives. having done this, i revisit bravemind’s design and use to show how bravermind, as a tool for remediating pe, extends and reifies depoliticized logics of trauma-narrative production. i conclude by asking how we might imagine different configurations through which vr might be reimagined and reclaimed as a feminist technoscientific therapeutic tool. militarized therapy or medicalized media? though not the most widely practiced ptsd therapy, vret using bravemind is the most powerfully evocative and publically visible configuration of the us military’s contemporary efforts to provide post-traumatic care. bravemind has been the subject of hundreds of news stories, and it has appeared on television crime dramas, in an exhibit in the museum of modern art, and even in a question on the game show jeopardy. in journalism as well as in fiction, bravemind has been portrayed as a technology that provides access to true experiences of military trauma, allowing the therapist to reach beyond the defenses of a warrior’s traumatized mind to access a horrific memory, bring it to the light of day, and heal the psychological wounds it has left.  for example, elaine zimmerman’s 2007 salon article, "getting blown up again and again,” performs a collapse of soldier kevin smith’s military experience and his immersion in vr in its opening paragraph: kevin smith and his unit have just finished an unsuccessful search for snipers inside a house in fallujah and are headed back to their base. smith is behind the wheel of a humvee, the seat beneath him vibrating from the familiar roaring engine. he makes a left turn and suddenly there is an ear-splitting boom, an explosion right behind him that rocks the vehicle. the sky goes dark and smoky, and smith senses the piercing pain of shrapnel in his neck and hands. the humvee's radio crackles with voices asking for information, as his mind races. will there be more explosions or a hail of bullets from unseen snipers? are his fellow soldiers hurt? time seems at once to speed up and slow to a crawl. then, just as suddenly, a voice cuts into the nightmare: “what are you thinking right now?” (zimmerman, 2007) zimmerman further explains that smith was not actually having a nightmare about his deployment with the us army in iraq; rather, he was engaged with “a cutting-edge therapy that uses a high-tech virtual reality system to treat war veterans afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder" (ibid.). in popular accounts like this, bravemind presented as a technology that provides access to the private nightmare of war trauma. yet what is at stake in vret is not the ability of warfighters to share their memories of war, but rather their ability to take control of their affective responses to reminders of war, both internal and external, and, though i will not focus on it here, creating a new visual culture for therapy that aligns with ideas of militarized masculinity. in these ways, bravemind enacts what emily cohen (2016) calls a “utopia of the militarized mind”: an aestheticized fantasy of simulations with the capacity to rewire and repair the traumatized self.  this is evident in the visual culture of these stories. patients shown using the bravemind system are in most instances men in uniform or sporting sporting a military-style high-and-tight haircut. fitted in vr stereoscopic goggles, with digital desert images projected on the screen behind them, these men appear to be conducting a kind of military training exercise that will enable them to leave the war behind, rather than a psychotherapy that will help them to make sense of their experience. the therapist is in most cases excluded from these representations, suggesting the autonomy of the system. this exclusion follows the logic of the discourse that surrounds drone systems, in which the pilots who remotely operate these “unmanned” aerial vehicles are similarly rendered invisible (see chandler, 2016).4 when therapists are included in representations, they tend to be characterized as technicians, a figuration that reorients viewer attention from the patient-therapist relationship to the relationship between the patient and the computer terminal (through which the therapist nonetheless controls imagery). these visual tropes lead viewers to understand that the military has created a vr technology that can rewire the minds of troubled warriors, one that any therapist could step into and use. the question of professional identity is further complicated by that fact that the majority of the va clinical psychotherapy staff is composed of civilians—and of civilian women, therapists with no military experience. indeed, these stories and accounts about the technology imply that bravemind’s interfaces are set up so that even civilians with no military experience can readily call up their patients’ traumas “over there,” and though most therapists are female, they may perform their job without themselves invoking any of the “feminized” skills of psychotherapy, such as asking questions, listening, and empathizing, as the program engages the patient through the screen, and not through the therapist. bravemind’s digital archives already “know” what is traumatic about war and how this needs to be sensorially experienced to be overcome, it would seem. in this way, as several commentators have noted, bravemind extends the militarized techno-subjectification performed by programs in which digital representations “prehearse” trainees in the experiences of war, bringing the logic of contemporary simulation-based military training into the therapeutic realm (brady, 2012; dyer-witheford & de peuter, 2009; power, 2007, 2009). as the other authors in this issue show, the american military has invested great hope in simulations as tools for pre-exposing new service members to the “reality” of war. but what does this mean for the politics of care? scholarship on military simulation and training often focuses on nonverbal human-computer interaction as form of affective indoctrination through which recruits are trained to become killers (levidow & robins, 1995; protevi, 2008). extending this critique to vret, valiaho (2012) argues that it is a video-game-like biopolitical tool for rewiring the traumatized mind through affective engagement with nonverbal media. during vret, however, patients do speak: they tell the narratives of their traumas. but stories are no less political than nonverbal media in their role of configuring subjects. since the late 1990s, military simulations have become increasingly narrative as well. this is why both ict and fort irwin (see rice, 2016) are located so close to hollywood and employ screenwriters. as both a material spectacle of military power and an interactive procedural technology, the military-industrial-entertainment network is an enactment of a fantasy that through simulation-mediated exposure to virtual war, new service members can be inoculated against the real thing (ghamari-tabrizi, 2011). it is predicated on what suchman calls the “productive elision of the difference between the real and the virtual in technoscientific military discourses” (2016). on the ambiguous battlefields of contemporary counterinsurgency, one’s own morality, and that of the mission, often is provoked into question. for many critics of military simulation, the political problematic of simulations lies in simulations’ erasure of actual death and dismemberment at the same time that they promise inoculation against the fear of what are in fact very real potential outcomes. in other words, military simulations depoliticize war through narratives that attempt to contain the traumatic. vret differs from military video gaming and training in a key way: rather than using simulation to provide users with digitally mediated experiences of war zones—either in anticipation of actual interaction with them or as a space of militarized play—they simulate war for those who are already intimately familiar with its violence. some scholars therefore see vret as evidence that even though simulation might not be able to protect against combat trauma, it at least has the power to heal (blascovich & bailenson, 2011; gilsdorf, 2009; mileham, 2008; zagalo & morgado, 2011). even scholars who are otherwise critical of digital militainment look to vret as evidence that the same kinds of new media technologies can heal the trauma of war (mead, 2013).  i argue that bravemind’s politics is best understood by analyzing its role in both clinical healing and military subjectification. care-giving itself is biopolitical. what is seen as a wound, how these wounds are treated, and whose wounds receive treatment, are questions that point to sites where care divides the world. the advent of vret illustrates jennifer terry’s contention that “medical techniques and violent warfare function in a relationship of mutual provocation, provoking one another in a manner that indicates the close ties between hygienic and military logics in modern us empire building” (terry, 2009, p. 202). bravemind helps the military not only to meet its need to treat service members with ptsd but, just as importantly, to publicly perform that it is fulfilling this need with the same level of high-tech efficiency with which it strives to conduct all other aspects of its operations. but in what ways does this logic of techno-efficiency actually affect the practice of therapy? how does it affect the ways that service members and veterans are imagined to heal from traumatic experience and reorient themselves in relation to their traumatic memories? reading bravemind as a technology of therapeutic remediation enables us to see how the politics of trauma narratives extend beyond questions of their veracity and into the ways that their agency is configured in care. despite its frequent framing as cutting-edge and high-tech, vret actually represents a conservative approach to ptsd treatment. its primary innovation is to codify a medicalized and depoliticized understanding of the role of the narrativization of traumatic experience in post-traumatic healing. in contemporary clinical psychology, trauma narratives have come to take on an instrumentalized role as a tool for exposure of the past that often precludes a future-oriented ameliorative politics. seeing the production of trauma narratives as a mediated practice allows us to ask how other configurations of simulation technology in therapy might produce different kinds of agential cuts with different kinds of politics equally worthy of investigation as modes of post-traumatic healing. therapeutic remediation and reconfigurations of the self in analyzing the moral implications of new technologies in therapy, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that therapy itself is a technology. elizabeth wilson makes this point eloquently about eliza, the artificial intelligence program designed to mimic the conversational patterns of a rogerian non-directive psychotherapist (wilson, 2010; see also weizenbaum, 1976). wilson draws attention to two paradoxes that lie at the heart of psychotherapy. first: “the counter-intuitive notion that psychotherapy is an artificial encounter.” it is a “model relationship” structured by “dispassionate rules about how long treatment will take, about what will be said, and about what it will cost, about where it will take place, about what may and may not pass between therapist and patient.” second: “the paradox that psychotherapy builds autonomy through relatedness” (p 83). wilson’s analysis draws attention to the fact that all therapeutic encounters seek to transform aspects of human subjectivity through artificially structured practice. the artifice of therapy is often disregarded because it is conventionally an intimate encounter performed only through the exchange of words during face-to-face interaction. the setting itself and the set of rules that govern it are easily overlooked as central material apparatuses. eliza is a technology, one of the variety that michel foucault calls a technology of the self—an apparatus that defines the workings of inner life and makes it available for reworking (foucault, 1988). technologies of the self are distinct mediators of configuration because the objects they are designed to act upon—human minds—are also subjects. to use the language of materialist feminist science and technology studies (sts) scholars, such as karen barad and donna haraway, therapy is a performatively posthumanist reconfiguration that centers on the transformation of human subjectivity (barad, 2003; haraway, 1997).  i describe the material-semiotic practice through which the dispassionate rules that structure this model relationship are used to reshape subjectivity as therapeutic remediation. media theorists jay david bolter and richard grusin define remediation as the process through which content is transformed in its transfer between material media forms (bolter & grusin, 1996). drawing on this, therapeutic remediation describes processes whereby aspects of the self—especially those defined as disordered—are made accessible and reworkable with the intent of fixing those defined as dysfunctional. though therapies treat the accessed aspects of self as preexisting the processes of mediation, i take more of an agnostic, symbolic interactionist view on this point: there is no way of knowing selfhood outside of interaction.  in keeping with this logic, i use the term “remediation” instead of “mediation.” the former term brings into view the context of therapy itself, and its technologies, as a primary aspect of mediation, and as a situation that defines the patient’s affects as mental illness in the first place. this concept i am proposing, “therapeutic remediation,” provides an alternative framework for interpreting the activities that take place in therapy and the mechanism of change than those provided by the clinical theoretical regime of the therapy’s creators. it draws attention to therapy as an intersubjective material-semiotic practice through which subjects and objects are produced and interpreted while acting within broader cultural contexts. the artificial structure of therapy can vary greatly between different therapeutic practices. across the range of psychotherapeutic practices, the inner world is therapeutically remediated through a variety of media tools as diverse as language, role-playing, art therapy, and biofeedback to make emotions, cognitions, and memories available for reworking. each provides a meditational structure through which therapeutic power is enacted. but even within a particular therapeutic medium, its affordances can be used to configure the processes of therapeutic mediation differently both materially and discursively. in so doing, each practice makes different kinds of agential cuts between subjects and objects, including therapists, patients, affects, behaviors, traumatic memories, and narratives. practices of therapeutic remediation are political because they enact an understanding of the source of the patient’s lost agency and the mode through which it can be restored. for example, therapy can be used as a tool for encouraging patients to see themselves as victims of injustice or as sick and disordered individuals (halleck, 1971). specific therapies, the psychological theories that justify them, and the ways they are practiced configure understandings of selfhood and disorder. this is inherently a site for the enactment of power. the politics of remediating trauma narratives the politics of therapy is especially salient in the treatment of ptsd because it is among the few diagnoses in the corpus of western psychology defined not only by symptoms and biology but also experience.5 to receive a diagnosis of ptsd, a patient must not only exhibit specific symptom clusters but also have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event. the dsm defines a traumatic event as one “that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others” (american psychiatric association, 2000). numerous efforts have been made to define ptsd biologically and neurologically, but from a psychotherapeutic perspective, ptsd is regarded primarily as a disorder of time (young, 1995). the symptoms that define it are viewed as originating in a past experience of violence. the politics of therapy for ptsd lie within how such therapy encodes an understanding of the relationship between traumatic experience and long-term dysfunction and how to restore patient autonomy in the wake of trauma. many forms of psychotherapy for ptsd posit that to restore agency, the patient’s memory of the trauma must be accessed, reproduced, and reconstructed. these “trauma-focused therapies” (as opposed to “present-centered therapies” that focus on building skills for coping with the present) include various mediational practices such as telling the story of the trauma, writing it down, or role-playing. i consider many of these to entail the production of trauma narratives, by which i mean any mediational practice that aims to organize the fragmented, sensory elements of traumatic memory into a form with coherent structure including a beginning, middle, and end. yet the ways that agency is imagined to be restored through the production of trauma narratives vary greatly across different ptsd therapies. i have shown elsewhere through comparative analysis of vret systems, analyzing how therapies distribute the agency involved in producing the trauma narrative and contextualizing its meaning provides a valuable method for evaluating the politics of ptsd therapy (brandt, 2013). this matters because trauma narratives themselves have been so deeply politicized. therefore, to show how bravemind depoliticizes therapy for military ptsd, it is valuable to examine how trauma narratives became politicized in the first place and then examine how a politicized therapy configures agency in care. since the social-justice movements of the late twentieth century, the narration of traumatic experience has been considered a cornerstone of activism, providing the communicative basis upon which to form allegiances between the personal and political. but the political status of trauma narratives is historically contingent on the way that the ptsd diagnosis itself shored up the memory sciences as a resource for the moral status of victimhood (fassin & rechtman, 2009, pp. 8-9). that is, scientific research on traumatic memory became a tool for validating claims of psychological injury. using the history of military psychiatry as a case study, fassin and rechtman show how the therapeutic interpretation of psychological war trauma its narration shifted. early 20th century military medicine saw it as malingering and trauma narratives as evidence of cowardice. only after wwii did war trauma come to be seen as a normal response to an abnormal situation, with trauma narratives as tools for making sense of senseless violence (see fassin & rechtman, 2009, pp. 40-93). the authors argue that the therapies developed by caregivers working with combat veterans have reflected attitudes towards the waging of war more broadly, as the mythical heroism of the great war gave way to the tragedy of the vietnam war (see also danziger, 2008). at the culmination of these processes during the late 1970s, antiwar activist veterans formed a coalition with antiwar psychiatrists (including, most visibly, robert j. lifton and chaim shatan) to petition the american psychiatric association (apa) to recognize war trauma—which they called “post-vietnam syndrome”—as a legitimate diagnosis. these activists saw the creation of this diagnosis as a political act, one that would hold the government accountable to treating the invisible psychological wounds of war (nicosia, 2004; scott, 2007). the official recognition of war trauma proposed not only a political diagnosis but a political therapy: lifton argued that the only way that veterans who had experienced the atrocity of war could heal would be to commit to a life of activism, which itself entailed sharing the stories of what they had witnessed to counter the war propaganda and dismantle nationalist myths about war’s glory. though lifton was adamant that veterans were not victims, they nevertheless were situated as victims of a corrupt government that had drafted them into an unjust war (dean, 1997; lifton, 1973). to gain legitimacy in their effort to have the apa recognize a mental illness with an etiology of catastrophe, the veterans formed a coalition with feminist therapists and others working with populations such as victims of rape, child abuse, terrible accidents, and disasters. the medicalization and moralization of trauma culminated in 1980, when the apa included ptsd in the third edition of the dsm in 1980. the feminist and social justice-oriented psychotherapists involved in this movement often developed their therapies based on political reinterpretations of psychoanalytic trauma theory (fassin & rechtman, 2009).  though a wide variety of therapies emerged from this work that use different practices for therapeutically remediating trauma memories as narratives, they share a similar understanding of why this restores agency for patients with ptsd. in what i generically refer to as “social-justice-oriented therapy,” ptsd is seen as a literal registration of an atrocity onto the patient (kaplan, 2005; leys, 2000). the traumatic event is figured as an agential actor that causes symptoms by acting upon the mind and body of the victim. crucially, from this perspective, trauma is prediscursive: violent experience overwhelms the viewer such that “the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it” (caruth, 1996, pp. 91-92). these symptoms semiotically index traumatic experience; they are seen as evidence that atrocity has taken place. traumatic experience is figured as an agent in this view. it takes agency away from subjects, decentering and objectifying them while writing itself upon them. for some thinkers, traumatic experience is actually a proxy for social injustice itself: only those forms of violence that are socially disavowed can be so overwhelming as to produce trauma in the first place (edkins, 2003). according to this approach, before traumatic memory can be remembered—before it can be known to the mind as part of the story of the teller's life—it must be narrated. the process of constructing narratives restores agency by transforming the inarticulate, vividly felt, structureless collection of sensations imprinted on the body into a story. in this view, therapeutically remediating traumas as stories is healing because it turns them into culturally meaningful objects. in producing the trauma narrative—in media including stories, art, and role-playing—the patient acts as a creative agent, transforming the traces of trauma’s agency over the self into objects that they themselves can control. in this view, therapeutic healing through the production of trauma narratives must be social. therapists empower their patients by facilitating their ability to remediate the trauma and provide structure to it. they are competent subjects who teach decentered ones how to regain autonomy by scaffolding their agency against trauma’s overwhelming incoherence. this role has a second, specifically relational function because the therapist also acts as a witness to the telling. feminist psychotherapist judith herman thus views the therapy relationship as inherently political: “to study psychological trauma means bearing witness to horrible events…when traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. it is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict” (herman, 1997, p. 7). to facilitate the patient’s healing, the therapist must identify trauma as evidence of collectively structured atrocity and not individual pathology. producing trauma narratives thus entails a second form of patient empowerment: by speaking the truth about the conditions that had caused the trauma—whether it be sexual violence, child abuse, or the atrocities of war—victims’ trauma narratives are seen as a kind of political witnessing against the violence in society that might otherwise remain invisible. a patient heals by telling this story, which itself is a kind of activism. herman explains, “remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims” (herman, 1997, p 1). patients who learn to tell their stories through therapy can then use this skill to share those stories broadly. in this way, therapeutic remediation of trauma as narrative is figured as a prerequisite for the kinds of self-narrativation that has long been considered a cornerstone of feminist praxis, and was also central to lifton and other antiwar activists’ understanding of the role of narrative in treating war trauma.  analyzing the configuration of agency in the social-justice-oriented approach to therapy provides a valuable point of comparison through which to support the claim that vret is part of a regime of ptsd therapy that depoliticizes trauma narratives. but i do not intend to present the social-justice orientation uncritically. several important issues arise from this configuration of ptsd therapy. for one, it does not require recognition of the victimhood of the enemy other: those human beings who consistently die at much higher rates than american service members during us military interventions. another key issue is that in helping patients to produce stories, then, therapists working from a social justice perspective see themselves as producing documentation of atrocity. it is taken for granted in this perspective that these narratives are true; the processes through which they are mediated and the ways power might be enacted between therapist and patient must be disavowed, lest the therapist admit that the atrocity being narrated may have been adulterated in the process of producing the narrative. as marita sturken explains, "it is narrative integration that produces the memory of the traumatic event.  it is when they become full-blown narratives that these memories tell stories of blame and guilt" (sturken, 1999, p. 235). but as ian hacking has shown in his work on false memory, suggestion is all too common among therapists who see themselves as doing good (hacking, 1998).  this can actually serve to politicize certain sites while depoliticizing others. in his ethnographic study of one of the first veterans’ ptsd treatment centers in the us, allan young (1995) describes how group therapy taught vietnam veterans to describe their current suffering—including problems with homelessness, unemployment, and substance abuse—as stemming from their combat experience rather than from societal problems in the united states. though widely influential in the humanities, activism, and feminism more broadly, social-justice approaches represent only a subsection of clinical care for ptsd. for many researchers working to develop therapies within a medical model of mental illness, the moral status of representing the trauma is not considered as important as demonstrating measurable symptom reduction. in this paradigm, which serves as the basis for vret, the only moral good in treating ptsd is the capacity to reduce individual suffering. in the following section, i analyze how the configuration of agency in pe therapy—for which bravemind was designed and marketed as a tool—evacuates the politics of producing trauma narratives. these therapies, especially for veterans, produce therapeutic healing in ways that subsume and efface issues of political activism, empowerment, and social justice. evidence-based therapy and depoliticized trauma ptsd was medicalized in order to hold the military accountable for treating the psychological wounds of veterans, but doing so reopened the production of knowledge about post-traumatic care to medicalized rationality with an intensity not seen since the first world war. (danziger, 2008; shephard, 2001). for academic clinical researchers working outside of the activist milieu, the newly defined mental illness ptsd became an object of disinterested study. in 1980, when ptsd became officially recognized as a legitimate diagnosis, clinical psychologists pushed to develop new kinds of therapy based on medical models of mental illness that could serve to replace the creaking edifice of psychoanalysis. these clinical researchers—foremost among them the cognitive behaviorists—sought to develop standardized therapies that could be systematically studied as treatments for specific diagnoses defined through quantifiable diagnostic questionnaires and validated through clinical trials with statistically significant treatment populations defined by a shared illness category.6  in the mid-1980s, a team of researchers led by dr. edna foa and colleagues at the university of pennsylvania began to develop prolonged exposure as a technique for treating female sexual-assault victims. pe is a category of clinical behavioral interventions used in the treatment of anxiety disorders. during the mid-20th century, behavioral psychologists developed a range of exposure techniques, such as systematic desensitization and flooding (a form of respondent conditioning), as treatments for anxiety disorders, especially phobias. these practices were premised on the behaviorist view that in conditions of irrational anxiety, an organism becomes overwhelmed by fear of stimuli in the world in excess of their capacity to be harmed by them. through repeated, controlled exposure to anxiety-provoking stimuli, the organism—be it a mouse or a veteran—learns that it will not be harmed and eventually come to fear the stimuli less. foa and her colleagues hypothesized that ptsd is similar to a phobia, with the key difference that ptsd originates not from an “irrational” fear but from a specific, often life-threatening experience (foa, steketee, & rothbaum, 1989). foa and kozak proposed an “emotional processing theory of trauma,” a behaviorist model of trauma as a learned fear response (foa & kozak, 1986).  according to this model, during a traumatic event where someone is in great physical danger or sees another person in danger, they will become hyper-attuned to the situation. their mind will create a “fear structure,” a set of associations between all the stimuli present in the situation, including not only those that it is rational to fear but also ones that were previously neutral.  invoking the cognitivist language of the mind as information-processing apparatus, foa and her disciples refer to the fear structure as a “‘program’ for escaping danger” (foa, hembree, & rothbaum, 2007, p. 12).7 based on this model, the researchers developed a protocol for an exposure therapy, one of the primary components of which is using the patient’s trauma narrative as a source of stimulation in order to rewrite the escape program. in essence, the patient is treated as if they have a “trauma phobia.”   protocols are technologies that standardize the therapeutic intervention so that it can be studied. they describe what the therapist should be doing with the patient throughout the course of treatment, as well as how long the treatment should last and what measures should be taken to produce evidence of effectiveness. since the 1990s, foa and her colleagues have become among the foremost researchers in the united states developing treatment protocols for ptsd and running clinical trials to study their efficacy. based on this work they published a manual in oxford university press’s “treatments that work” series titled prolonged exposure therapy for ptsd: emotional processing of traumatic experiences. the manual objectifies therapy in the form of a latourian “immutable mobile”; as a “manualized” therapy, pe can serve not only as a mediator of affects and memories, but also as a social actant that diverse groups can recognize as a “treatment that works” independent of the specific therapist doing the treating. pe was the first therapy for ptsd to be systematically studied using clinical trials, which has had important policy repercussions. during the war on terror and the revelation of high rates of ptsd, the va has become the largest funder of ptsd treatment research in the world (morris, 2015). even though veterans are not the largest population of ptsd sufferers—a greater number of individuals are diagnosed with ptsd after sexual assault and motor-vehicle accidents—the military’s responsibility to provide care for ptsd as a wound of war has positioned the illness as an important biopolitical issue in the operations of the war on terror. the social toll of ptsd extends beyond individual suffering, as high rates of suicide, homelessness, substance abuse, domestic violence, and unemployment have been linked to the illness, creating not only social strife but also terrible public relations for the military. subsequently, the goal of military-funded ptsd research has been to support the development and dissemination of efficient, evidence-based, and highly scalable treatments. in this milieu, prolonged exposure has thrived, receiving more research funding and dissemination efforts than any other therapy for treating ptsd in military populations. since 2008, va regulations require all therapists to be trained in empirically supported treatments and all veterans seeking ptsd care to be offered the option of pe.  thus, when accused of using a “war game” as therapy, vret advocates have been quick to defuse this criticism by drawing attention to the fact that systems like bravemind are based on pe (hanafin, 2010). they recognize that while the media is attracted to the narrative of bravemind as a modification (or “mod”) of a military video game, its legitimacy within military funding agencies and therapeutic community has been contingent upon that of pe more generally. in the contemporary milieu of department of defense and va funding for clinical research on ptsd treatment, technology is legitimized largely by its capacity to deliver treatments that are already evidence-based through novel formats believed to increase their dissemination or efficacy. pe entails four main components, which are introduced throughout the course of the protocol:  psychoeducation, breathing retraining, in vivo exposure exercises, and prolonged imaginal exposure exercises. each of these steps is a site where the subjectivity of the patient in relation to the experience of trauma, its memory, and the meaning of remembering is potentially reconfigured. the standard protocol lasts for roughly 12 sessions, usually with one or two sessions per week. success is formally defined as when the patient’s subjective units of distress on a 100-point scale are lower, when they say they feel better, and/or when they have a sub-threshold score on a diagnostic questionnaire used to assess ptsd symptom severity.  bravemind uses almost exactly the same therapy protocol as traditional pe. indeed, barbara rothbaum, foa’s former student and coauthor of the standard pe manual, helped develop the first vret system for ptsd—called virtual vietnam—and is a co-author of the manual for conducting vret with bravemind. the only difference between the protocols is that during the imaginals, the patient narrates their index trauma while they are interacting with the interfaces of the vr system, which is partially controlled by the therapist. practices of therapeutic remediation in pe are no less influential on the political configuration of agency than they would be if bravemind was, in fact, a war game. but it is only by taking it and other vrets seriously as therapeutic technologies that this becomes apparent.  while patients produce trauma narratives, the theoretical framework and practices through which these narratives are mediated—those of pe—serve to technicize the process and pathologize the patient’s behavior instead of the event. at the same time, the pe framework elevates the agency of the therapy itself as an actant that produces healing and diminishes both the patient’s agency and the importance of the therapeutic relationship in tandem. at the beginning of the therapy, the therapist provides what is called “psychoeducation.” during this phase, the therapist explains the emotional processing theory of trauma, which provides the theoretical underpinning of pe as an intervention. this step serves as a primary mediation through which the patient’s past experiences are interpreted as traumatological and their affects and behaviors are interpreted as symptoms of ptsd. in training seminars i have attended, therapists usually use examples from nonmilitary contexts to explain fear structures in psychoeducation, which serves to make trauma into a non-gendered, universal experience. during one pe clinical-training session i attended, for example, the trainer explained that if we are in a bank at the time of an armed robbery by a bald man, we may develop a fear of not only guns but also of banks and bald men. the therapist will explain that this situation is “normal” and “evolutionarily advantageous.”  like the humanistic view, the evolutionary view of ptsd figures traumatic events as agents that act upon the subjectivity of the patient. yet, crucially, this influence is not seen as the source of pathology in ptsd. in psychoeducation, the patient learns that it is not the traumatic event that caused their ptsd, but rather the strength of their will in avoiding triggers. continuing our previous example, everyone in the bank robbery may be traumatized, but over time, those who go back to the bank and other places where they see other bald men will unlearn their association between these elements and the terrifying experience of armed robbery. these neutral elements, in other words, will disarticulate from the fear structure, while elements that are rational to fear, such as a person with a gun, will remain.  experiencing this habituation entails being willing to experience the distress of these triggers and re-learn the safety of the everyday. for those who choose not to allow themselves to experience this loss of control in relation to the material force of the trigger, the fear structure remains intact and may even become stronger. in working with military populations, therapists may highlight that veterans’ combat training makes them especially good at suppressing feelings of distress. to heal, they must let down their guard and bravely face the event again in a “safe” context to “learn” that the event itself is not to be feared.  at the end of the first pe session, the therapist introduces breathing retraining. this is the only skill that the protocol directs the therapist to teach the patient as a way to control feelings of distress consciously. breath control is a tool for ensuring that the patient remains calm and does not hyperventilate or pass out while narrating the trauma, which would offer them an effective means of avoidance. as a tool, it originates in the pe protocol, which is mediated by the therapist to the patient, who then uses it to overcome the body’s defenses against the agency of triggers. it configures the patient as an agent over their own autonomic responses, but only to the extent that breathing enables the body to feel, control, and regulate the affective intensities generated by the story.8 after the patient has received psychoeducation and breathing retraining, they decide on what trauma they will repeatedly narrate during imaginal exposures. this is called the “index trauma.” during imaginals, as some therapists call them, patients repeatedly narrate their selected index trauma. they narrate in the first person, in the present tense, with their eyes closed. while they are doing this, the therapist directs them to give more detail, asking questions like, “what happened next?” “what are you seeing?” and “what are you hearing?” the therapist tries to get the patient to produce a full narrative of the event with a beginning, middle, and end, in as much detail as possible. rather than see this work of structuring the narratives as a way of empowering the patient by stabilizing the story as a cultural object, in pe the purpose of this work is to create the most complete representation of the trauma possible to maximize its power as a stimulus. in pe, narrative is not a tool for speaking truth to power or uncovering repressed memories that need to be witnessed and shared. it is not seen as a source of meaning, a representation of true events, or even a representation of the patient’s interpretation of the event. instead, it is figured as a collection of stimuli, a tool for activating the fear structure by re-exposing the patient to the situation of the trauma. its “truth” is performed only through its effectiveness in producing affect.  this configuration erases the social and cultural role of trauma narratives. rather than serving as a political witness, the therapist’s role is figured as that of a fear technician who makes sure the patient stays affectively engaged as they produce the narrative. by performing the task, the stated goal is to help the patient “habituate,” or decouple their fear response from the stimuli. while social-justice-oriented therapy sees value in having patients share the emotional intensity of their stories as a way to produce collective recognition and condemnation, for pe therapists the ultimate goal is to erase the affective charge of the story. repetition reprograms the patient’s fear structure so that the trauma narrative becomes “just” a story, a series of words. indeed, sessions are audio-recorded and the patient is assigned the “homework” of repeatedly listening to the narrative. though some patients may choose to share this recording with others, the possible social role of the narrative is not something taken into consideration by the emotional processing theory. in one clinical training i attended, a trainer instructed therapists to discourage their patients from sharing this recording with loved ones as it would be irresponsible to expose others to trauma narratives who do not themselves have access to therapy.  this framing of the purpose and therapeutic action of constructing a trauma narrative also figures the meaning of being a patient: rather than being seen as a victim of politicized social violence who must speak against it to heal, the patient is seen as exhibiting a normal behavioral response to fear-inducing stimuli which they must overcome through exposure. instead of emphasizing the importance of sharing stories with others, the emphasis is on facing fears.9  while the selection of an index trauma may seem to be a moment of agency for the patient, it can also be a site where the material agency of narrative as a formal structure may constrict what is said. for example, david morris describes the decision to focus on the experience of riding in a marine helicopter while it was under fire over fallujah rather than the “moments of moral chaos” that haunted him because it was easy to narrate (morris, 2015, p. 170). if a patient decides partway through therapy that they would rather work on a different index trauma, the therapist may interpret this as a sign of avoidance and insist they stick with the original trauma. of course, the patient may want to switch index traumas for other reasons, such as building trust with the therapist and becoming willing to discuss past actions that they may feel too ashamed to describe at first. this is especially salient for military patients who worry about being judged by civilian therapists for traumas like the discovery of their own pleasure in killing.  this difficulty of locating the “true” index trauma, that which the patient is avoiding and which can be seen as both the source of pathology and key to dismantling it, is one of the greatest challenges in configuring pe therapy for military populations.  however, pe’s characterization as an empirically supported therapy, an agent that works in treating ptsd, can serve to stabilize and contain this challenge to pe’s legitimacy. some pe therapists will suggest to patients who do not comply with the protocol—including sticking with the index trauma—that they are not ready to get better. as one pe therapist explained to me, she tells such patients that by failing to comply with the therapy protocol, they are setting themselves up for failure. rather than have the patient blame the therapy—which she believes in—for their lack of improvement, she prefers to stop therapy altogether. of course, a therapist could do this with any therapy, but the definition of pe as an empirically supported therapy lends gravity to this decision, which makes it more difficult for the patient to insist that another therapy would serve them better.10  in his autobiographical account of ptsd, david morris describes his interaction with a clinical researcher at the va in san diego as he was about to enter a study on pe as a way to get off of a therapy waitlist.  the study coordinator, mark, tells morris that “the cool thing about prolonged exposure” is that, “this is a treatment that we know absolutely works for ptsd. i know it sounds arrogant but if you get into this kind of treatment and do the work that your therapist tells you to do, you’ll have a huge improvement in your symptoms. if you don’t, you won't (morris 2015, p 169). among pe’s true believers, like mark, there is strong skepticism towards patient agency in directing the treatment, even when it exacerbates patient symptoms. similar to mark’s warning, i have often heard training pe therapists advise each other to tell patients that therapy is like working with a personal trainer at the gym, because if patients do the exercises incorrectly, they may think the program is working but will not see the same benefit or may even hurt themselves. “feeling the burn” is a good thing. a few weeks into his treatment with pe, when morris finds himself increasingly agitated and suicidal, his therapist assures him that the problem is not the therapy: if he will only stick to the protocol, he will eventually get better. fearing for his life, morris opts to terminate treatment instead. perhaps the greatest opportunity for patient agency within pe is the step called in vivo exposure. this step occurs between meetings, when the patient is not with the therapist. these are activities from patients’ day-to-day life that they have stopped doing since they have had ptsd because they cause so much anxiety. common examples include many aspects of american consumerist and leisure culture, including shopping at the grocery store, going to sporting events, and watching movies in the theater.  though framed as exposure—an inherently passive and objectifying process—in vivos can be the most agential component of pe for patients, since they are able to choose activities that help them to regain a sense of autonomy in their lived worlds.  bravemind as augmented pe and political agent if pe is already empirically supported, why augment it with virtual reality? for one thing, pe has not proved as effective in combat trauma populations as it has in other ptsd populations. many reasons have been hypothesized, including the complex nature of war traumas, gendered norms around masculinity and personal confession, and lack of trust between military patients and civilian therapists, among others. vret advocates often frame this problem of ineffective therapy as both stigmatic and signaling inadequate engagement on the part of the patient. they suggest that vr can help overcome the stigma of therapy and make it more effective by making it more engaging via its remediating qualities: the advantage of using vr in pe is to give the therapist even more agency in the therapeutic process. bravemind’s inventor skip rizzo explained this ethos to me during our first conversation in 2008:  vr provides a tool that's an equalizer so that somebody's who a good therapist who understands exposure can do exposure therapy more effectively with the vr application than if they have to be real creative and artistic in how they help guide a person through the treatment, never knowing if the person's really imagining or engaging in that imagery or if they're even relevant. at least we know what the person is seeing there on the outside. we don't know what they're seeing in their minds, but we know what they're seeing, what they're hearing, what they're smelling, [and] the vibrations that we've pumped in through the floor system. in other words, the objective properties of the simulation system give the therapist more control over patient experience, minimizing the mystery of the subjective. figure 1. two uniformed soliders demonstrate the bravemind virtual reality exposure thearpy system, virtual iraq. photo credit: skip rizzo, university of southern california institute for creative technologies  bravemind is designed to simulate scenarios and experiences that have been reported in military research on ptsd to be common experiences of deployed combat service members (mclay et al., 2012). sitting at a computer control panel with a variety of settings controlled by buttons on a display, the therapist-user customizes the simulation during therapy (figure 1). in human-computer interaction, this is called a “wizard of oz” set-up, because what appears autonomous to the end-user (the patient) is being manipulated by the therapist-user. the current version of the system has 14 different scenarios, including an iraqi village, a city, a checkpoint, and a strip of land resembling kandahar province in afghanistan. these are each independent, unlinked virtual environments. in order for the patient to enter one of these environments, the therapist must use her control panel to select one—this should be the environment that she and the patient have decided best approximates the site of the index trauma.  within each environment are about half a dozen potentially meaningful locations, such as city blocks with markets and checkpoints along sections of highway (figure 2). once an environment is selected, she can “teleport” the patient to these specific locations and then customize the lighting to settings like morning light, dusk, and green night vision. finally, she can add individual animations and sound files, like a person shouting “go home cowboy,” a helicopter passing by, sniper fire, or an exploding improvised exploding device (ied). the person in the patient position wears stereoscopic vr goggles while sitting or standing on a base-shaker. they can do very little in the environment except press buttons on the gamepad to virtually “walk” through it. figure 2. a screenshot of a marketplace inside the bravermind system, virtual iraq. photo credit: skip rizzo, university of southern california institute for creative technologies  though bravemind is often compared to a video game, its dynamics of interaction are very different, precisely because the therapist is positioned as the “wizard” in a machine that structures the patient’s interaction with the virtual environment. most video games are at least partially governed by algorithms that allow the user to interact with them autonomously; interaction is scripted, and the player has varying degrees of agency according to the script. an individual can sit down and initiate actions in the virtual environment by interacting with the interface—such as pressing buttons on a gamepad or making specific behaviors in front of a motion-tracking sensor. the game itself will produce additional actions to which the player can respond. in bravemind, however, very little takes place autonomously. throughout the interaction with the virtual environment, the therapist has primary control over what happens to the patient. bravemind is designed to extend the logic of control endemic to the emotional processing theory of ptsd and pe. it is a behaviorist tool that materializes common features of military trauma narratives as controllable digital objects. indeed, harkening to behavioral psychology’s efforts to develop physical tools for reshaping subjectivity, rizzo frequently calls vr “the ultimate skinner box.” this colloquialism refers to midcentury american behavioral psychologist bf skinner’s “operant conditioning chamber,” an artificial environment into which researchers could place an organism—often a small animal—to observe its response to stimuli they administered. it offered experimental psychology a tool for literally black-boxing the mind. like the operant conditioning chamber, bravemind is a technology of control; its interfaces immerse the patient’s sensorium in controllable, computer-generated information with the purpose of altering the fear structure. bravemind creates two loops of computer-mediated action during the imaginal exposure portion of vret. the first is between the system and the patient, and appears typical of interactions with immersive vr; the second is that of the therapist and the cyborg unit of patient plus vr system. contrary to many analyses, vret is a form of talk therapy, though it is an augmented one. the vret protocol instructs the patient to narrate traumatic experience, just as someone would in traditional pe. the difference is that the therapist uses the wizard of oz display to try to match what the patient is describing, to create affective intensity through the use of nonverbal, computer-generated triggers, beyond what the patient either can or chooses to remember through narrative. simulation intensifies stimulation. figure 3. this screenshot of the bravermind system, virtual iraq, depicts a car bomb explosion in a marketplace. photo credit: skip rizzo, university of southern california institute for creative technologies  jennifer terry (2009) argues that the kinds of wounds left on warrior’s bodies are the semiotics of war.  drawing on tanielan and jaycox (2008), she calls these “signature wounds.” terry argues that the medical technologies that are created to treat these signature wounds are therefore a complementary semiotics: they treat those traces. ptsd is one of the signature wounds of the war on terror on the bodies of warriors. therefore, the virtual scenarios, animations, and other controllable elements that make up the bravemind software-interface suite can be read as a digital materialization of developers’ understanding of places and stimuli that are associated with trauma, as well as what their military funders will permit them to simulate. it is an effort to archive traumatic experiences, but only those that take place from the perspective of american war veterans. while the patient-user navigates the system using a gamepad mounted on a realistically weighted plastic rifle, the system does not allow its users to kill within the virtual environment. even though characters representing iraqi or afghan women and children may walk the virtual streets, only male civilians can be injured and, even then, only by ied explosions (figure 3). in the driving scenarios, the other service members in the humvee or mrap can be hurt, too, but only by ieds or by shots fired by a middle eastern sniper (figure 4). at no point does the system allow the user to embody the subject position of a perpetrator of violence that results in the death of a civilian. in this way, bravemind codifies a specific perspective on ptsd. though rizzo and his collaborators have discussed the possibility of developing a version of bravemind from an iraqi or afghan perspective as part of a humanitarian effort to help the traumatized civilian populations created through us military occupation, finding funding for such projects has proven less of a priority than expanding the system’s scenarios to additional american military populations, including vietnam veterans and survivors of military sexual trauma (rizzo et al., 2015). figure 4. inside virtual iraq: this screenshot depicts the view of a passenger inside a mrap vehicle. photo credit: skip rizzo, university of southern california institute for creative technologies bravemind augments pe by transforming it from a universal tool for treating a generically conceived response to trauma to one that specifically targets military ptsd. bravemind “matters” both politically and materially because it aims to objectify military patients’ subjective experiences of war. this serves a function beyond structuring who can be treated by the system. as a kind of artificial memory prosthetic, bravemind’s design temporarily encodes and standardizes specific conceptualizations of what “counts” as a traumatic experience of war. it implicitly normalizes and validates specific kinds of experiences—especially the actions of the enemy other—as being traumatic. this could be destigmatizing for patients who see their traumas represented, since they would know they are not the only ones to have been traumatized by these events. the system materially suggests that their traumas can be cured with high tech. bravemind is performatively biopolitical because it promotes a vision of any trauma it represents as one that the machine can cure and, by omission, that any trauma the system does not represent is not worthy of investing in treating. in this medicalized configuration of care, the material component of the therapeutic apparatus—the protocol, the manual, or the machine—is figured as the primary agent of post-traumatic healing. by making this agential cut, trauma narratives become generic and impersonal tools and therapy itself a technological fix to the complex problems that service members and veterans face when they struggle to reconcile past experiences of war with their present condition.  bravemind’s inventor, skip rizzo, once told the digital media scholar elizabeth losh that he felt the system could be read as a form of political resistance because it raises public awareness about ptsd as an invisible wound of war (losh, 2006, p. 83). but this elides the essential biopolitics of care.  bravemind promises both the public and traumatized warfighters that there is nothing permanently wrong with them or the war they have participated in, but rather that they are suffering from a temporary ailment, one that can be fixed using advanced technologies. the digital-generation warfighter in the minds of technocrats, then, is one who chooses to be made and does not want to question or reflect on wartime experiences, but rather is committed to using virtual technologies to shape and reshape himself or herself into an instrument of state projects. studying how technocrats imagine how warfighters should be healed if they do become traumatized helps us see how therapy can serve to depoliticize warfighters’ subjectivity, while at the same time legitimizing this depoliticized view in the name of healing. as a technology for therapeutically remediating trauma narratives, bravemind and similar technologies provide a material object through which these meanings are both codified and disseminated.  conclusion some might argue that this analysis as a whole is tangential to the central problem of lack of access to care faced by many warfighters, especially veterans, with ptsd. my goal here has been to show that it matters not only that wounded warriors receive care, but also what kinds of selves and what knowledge about the war trauma are produced through that care. of course, it is an important caveat to this article that therapists have a large degree of flexibility in their practice. unless they are participating in a research study, most therapists work without direct supervision of their practice. there is nothing stopping a therapist who has a patient describe their trauma through a social-justice configuration from saying that they are using pe or a variant thereof, provided that the patient is indeed constructing their trauma narrative. the scientistic discourse of pe can thus serve as a way to create legitimacy for otherwise overtly political therapy. i like to imagine that bravemind, too, could be enrolled into a variety of political configurations. in her analysis of vret, losh has suggested that the openness of virtual environments allows for tactical counter-reading and modes of engagement that are only limited by the presence of monitoring spectators, like therapists and military funders (2006, p. 84). what if these limitations did not exist? what other therapeutic worlds could we imagine for virtual technologies? what stories could they be used to tell and to whom? could they be sites of feminist praxis? what communication and healing might take place if the patient were at the helm of the wizard of oz display and the therapist in the stereoscopic goggles? jacquelyn ford morie, feminist game developer and former head of the ict’s virtual worlds research group, has explored similar questions about therapeutic remediation of war trauma through her work in the online virtual world second life. for example, she created a virtual iraqi village in which a warrior-patient could walk with their therapist—or anyone else they chose—telepresent together as avatars, with neither in control of the other. the warrior could use the space as a method of walking to remind them of their experiences and share these with others. in a portion of this village morie created a memorial space, where warriors could post their own photos. she also developed a tool for warfighters to leave a customized avatar-bot, a kind of digital mannequin that, when prompted, plays an audio file of a story they have recorded in their own voice (morie, haynes, & chance, 2010). as a persistent world, each of these projects is inherently social, creating a palimpsest through which each visitor can see traces of others. morie’s projects do not simply remediate existing therapies but ask how the affordances of new media might lead to fundamentally new ways of therapeutically remediating trauma narratives. in her work, the technology is not a medicalized tool but a platform through which to explore the healing potential of storytelling. her projects help me to imagine how military simulations—with their rhetorically powerful aesthetics—could create new configurations of post-traumatic healing. notes 1 for accounts of the development of ict and its various military-funded digital media research projects see der derian (2001), ghamari-tabrizi (2004), lenoir and lowood (2005), mead (2013), and suchman, this issue. 2 several military vret systems have been developed, bearing names like virtual fallujah and iraqworld, but among them bravemind has been the best funded, researched, and widely disseminated. 3 zoë wool’s ethnography of soldiers recovering at walter reed, after war: the weight of life at walter reed (2015)  illustrates the ways that everyday experiences of their recovery intersect with the myth-laden status of being seen as war heroes. 4 bravemind provides a structural counterpoint to drone warfare, as described by both ali and chandler in this issue. as a cyborg assemblage that distributes the labor of warfighting between human and machine, drone warfare enables women to participate in combat operations in ways traditionally restricted due to physical limitation.  these new “boy’s toys” allow women to perform historically masculine roles. as a “boy’s toy” bravemind, however, transforms the feminized practice of psychotherapy into a masculinized military cyborg assemblage. 5 contemporary versions of both the international classification of diseases (icd) and diagnostic and statistical manual of mental health disorders (dsm) are purely descriptive and therefore agnostic with regards to the origins of mental health disorders, offering neither biological nor psychodynamic explanations of their underlying causes. 6 for ptsd, this is usually either the pcl or the caps, or both. 7 fear structures are similar to the “affect systems” described by sylvan tompkins (see rice, this volume) but are structured around the affect of fear instead of shame. as a model for action, they do not assume an effort to avoid the interruption of pleasure as a motivating force, as tompkins does, but rather simply the avoidance of fear. 8 in order to monitor the level of fear, the therapist and patient develop a suds scale, which stands for subjective units of distress. the patient will describe what feels like a 100, which would be totally overwhelming, and what would be their minimum. then they create a scale of other activities to facilitate communication with the therapist about how they are feeling during the exposure components of the therapy. 9 this is in keeping with behavioral therapy more broadly. as an effort to develop a reproducible science of behavior, behavioral therapists have historically seen their work as primarily technical and subsequently politically neutral. 10 recently, challenges to pe are surfacing, as in morris’ own work. references american psychiatric association. 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(2016). simulation at ft. irwin. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 2(1). rizzo, a., difede, j., rothbaum, b.o., buckwalter, j.g., daughtry, j.m., & reger, g.m. (2015). update and expansion of the virtual iraq/afghanistan ptsd exposure therapy system. in m.p. safir, h.s. wallach, & a. “skip” rizzo (eds.), future directions in post-traumatic stress disorder: prevention, diagnosis, and treatment (pp. 303-328). new york, ny: springer. scott, w.j. (2007). ptsd in dsm-iii: a case in the politics of diagnosis and disease. social problems, 37(3), 294-310. shephard, b. (2001). a war of nerves: soldiers and psychiatrists in the twentieth century. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. sturken, m. (1999). narratives of memory: repressed memory as cultural memory. in m. bal, j. crewe, & l. spitzer (eds.), acts of memory: cultural recall in the present (pp. 231-248). hanover, nh: university press of new england. suchman, l.a. (2007). human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. suchman, l. a. (2016). configuring the other: sensing war through immersive simulation. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 2(1). tanielian, t., & jaycox, l.h. (2008). invisible wounds of war: psychological and cognitive injuries, their consequences, and services to assist recovery. santa monica, ca: rand corporation. terry, j. (2009). significant injury: war, medicine, and empire in claudia’s case. women’s studies quarterly, 37(1-2), 200-225. valiaho, p. (2012). affectivity, biopolitics and the virtual reality of war. theory, culture & society, 29(2), 63-83. weizenbaum, j. (1976). computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation. san francisco, ca: w.h. freeman and co. wilson, e. (2010). affect and artificial intelligence. seattle, wa: university of washington press. wool, z. (2015). after war: the weight of life at walter reed. durham, nc: duke university press. young, a. (1995). the harmony of illusions. princeton, nj: princeton university press. zagalo, n., & morgado, l. (2011). virtual worlds and metaverse platforms: new communication and identity paradigms. hershey, pa: igi global. bio marisa brandt is an assistant professor of practice in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science and core faculty at the center for gender in global context at michigan state university. her scholarship interrogates technoscience and/in media. she is currently working on a book manuscript on the cultural politics of the development of virtual reality as a psychotherapeutic modality. her research has appeared in venues including social studies of science, media/culture, and the international encyclopedia of media studies: media futures. microsoft word 76964-1-11_rusert.docx rusert, b. (2019). review of the biopolitics of feeling: race, sex, and science in the nineteenth century, by kyla schuller (duke university press, 2017). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, issue 5(1), 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © britt rusert, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license review the biopolitics of feeling: race, sex, and science in the nineteenth century, by kyla schuller (duke university press, 2017) britt rusert university of massachusetts amherst brusert@afroam.umass.edu kyla schuller’s the biopolitics of feeling takes a refreshingly head-on approach to the historical entanglement of race and sex in the united states. in a stunningly convincing argument rooted in the rise of biopower, modern theories of heredity, and eugenics, schuller argues that beginning in the nineteenth century, sex became a racial-imperial project, in which binary sex begins to “accomplish the work of racial differentiation” (17), a strategy that stands at the center of the biopolitical production, sorting, and relative valuation of populations.1 such an argument has crucial implications for the rooting of feminist origin stories in the women’s suffrage movement, a historical narrative propped up, as schuller shows, by a nefarious presumption about the innocence of white women’s actions and political subjectivities: “as the struggle for the rights of women coincident with the category’s new ontological status [the category of woman], feminism derives its political purchase from and within the larger framework of biopolitics. if woman is the product of racial thought, nineteenth-century feminism itself becomes a civilizational and biopolitical strategy, and not only in its explicitly imperial variants” (p. 18). refusing self-congratulatory origin stories, schuller reminds her readers rusert catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 again and again of feminism’s historical alignment, not just with the neglect of antiracist action, but with the operations of white supremacy itself. meticulously tracing the rise of what she calls “evolutionary feminism,” she refuses to let readers be naïve or nostalgic about the history of (white women’s) feminism and the way it has continued, if sometimes obliquely, to shape contemporary movements and epistemological frameworks. the biopolitics of feelings offers a careful history of us feminism’s imbrication in theories of biological inheritance in order to produce a history of the present that might take the field in new and less racist directions. throughout, it offers a crucial pre-history to many conversations and controversies in feminism and queer studies today: the deployment of gender and enforcement of the gender binary as a tactic of securitization; the overdetermination of white women’s feminism as feminism itself; trans-exclusionary radical feminism; new materialism’s grounding in a disingenuous, pre-political innocence that turns out to be the position not of the object but of whiteness itself. for scholars working in the nineteenth century, the biopolitics of feeling provides a new way to think about the animating power of sentimentality across the century: rather than offering new readings of sentimental novels, schuller suggests that, by the late nineteenth century, the tropes of sentimentality could be found across evolutionary discourse, articulating and solidifying what she calls “sentimental biopower.” perhaps most crucially, schuller reveals the long reach of lamarckianism across the entirety of the nineteenth century. while feminists have battled over charles darwin and the question of his salvageability, the biopolitics of feeling instead suggests that the overemphasizing of darwin has obscured lamarckian theories that had a powerful afterlife in the united states, long after the 1859 publication of the origin of species and the mainstreaming of the theory of descent by natural selection. focusing on the lamarckian “sciences of impressability,” schuller traces how such theories reproduced ideas that anglosaxon people could direct evolution and thus the course of civilization itself. populations of color, on the other hand, “were assigned the condition of unimpressability, or the impaired state of throwing off affects but being incapable of being affected by impressions themselves” (p. 13) and thus unable to direct evolution. moving from the imperial and eugenical dimensions of impressability, two chapters take up the transformations of impressability for anti-eugenical purposes in the writings of frances e. w. harper and w. e. b. du bois. the rusert catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 strongest chapter, “vaginal impressions,” delves into the detailed and sometimes fantastical theories of sex and reproduction produced by white women physicians of the period such as elizabeth blackwell and mary walker. that chapter turns into a surprising excavation of postbellum homonationalism routed through medical discourse. schuller shows how queer white women physicians such as walker actually participated in the project of white supremacy through the valorization of white women’s reproductive control and civilizing influence. yet again sounding a warning about feminist self-righteousness and claims to innocence, schuller reminds readers of the dangers of a feminism that does not center the intellectual work, materialities, and experiences of women of color. the biopolitics of feeling is perhaps most admirable for how it follows but also fruitfully extends foucault’s (2007) “historico-philosophical” method. while scholarship on biopower has convincingly shown the many ways that the politics of life itself determines and shapes both structures and subjectivities, that work has, at times, been too presentist, and not enough attuned to the historical development of this regime of power. schuller contributes to the biopolitical turn by carefully historicizing biopolitics; in this way, she suggests how our own moment came to be, but also how we might escape its biopolitical grip on the present. in an optimistic gesture at the end of the study, schuller suggests that activism, art, and protest serve as crucial sites of resistance to biopower. her own attention to the eugenical and imperial dimensions of the women’s movement in the postbellum and progressive era would at the same time warn us against uncritical embraces of activism today, pointing instead to the emancipatory micro-politics that animate social movements in and against the micro-fascisms they sometimes reproduce.2 while drawing on a broad and interdisciplinary nineteenth-century archive, schuller boldy draws connections to debates within feminist, queer, and trans studies, suggesting that these fields have inherited and continue to bear the traces (or impressions) of biological models of sex, as well as presumptions about how genital morphology relates to both identity and desire. by turning back to a set of neglected and surprisingly influential theories of heredity, schuller suggests that the field should unmoor itself from these dangerous nineteenth-century inheritances—including the persistence of what she calls “vaginal feminism”— while finding new and more nuanced approaches to embodiment and materiality rusert catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 more broadly. moving from the nineteenth century to the present, schuller’s epilogue encapsulates both the risk, but also the necessity, of feminist, queer, and critical race engagements with the biological. in an age of climate change, police brutality and death, and the increasing precarity of and risk to human life (always unevenly distributed), schuller suggests that we ignore bodies and their differential valuation by biopower at our own peril. nearing the end of the study, she moves from impressability to plasticity, ultimately landing on and finding hope in theories of neuroplasticity that help to illuminate “biological processes as imbricated effects, rather than causative agents, of power relations” (p. 210). here, schuller makes reference to recent studies of gender as being produced and reinforced through “dopamine reward cycles” in young children as well as sylvia wynter’s (2003) interest in an ontogenic theory of consciousness that includes findings from neuroscience. given the warnings issued from the archive throughout the book, i wonder, is it possible to positively value the hormonal, and the neurochemical more broadly, without reproducing essentialisms of the past or the neoliberal capitalist captures of the present (including, in this case, the global pharmaceutical industry). do theories of plasticity help to illuminate or possibly continue to obscure how differentially valued populations are interpellated within structures of state violence? for example, i’m thinking about sayak valencia’s (2018) recent arguments about the brutal and often spectacular forms of violence that undergird contemporary drug markets, including the production of hormones. in her account, the production of emancipatory models of (white) gender through the hormonal, like those found in paul preciado’s (2008) testo junkie, actually obscure the violence exacted on non-white populations through the markets and forms of “extreme neoliberalism” that are currently being constructed on the frontiers of capital. in schuller’s final turn toward more nuanced approaches to race, affect, and materialization, i further wondered if psychic life can be accounted for within feminist and queer materialisms. in other words, how do we theorize embodiment in an expansive way—in schuller’s terms, as the specific ways that race and affect take bodily form—while not losing sight of imagination, fantasy, and the psychic life, especially since all three are crucial to the reproduction of white supremacy but also to liberation itself? midway through the study, schuller articulates her most urgent and timely intervention this way: “biopower is feminism’s enabling condition” (p. 105). rusert catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 readers will find an abundant resource of theoretically informed readings of postbellum and progressive era science and literature throughout the study, but they will be also unable to ignore schuller’s urgent warning about feminism’s embeddedness in the machinations of biopower. notes 1 on the specificities of biopolitical surveillance and control today through the production and sorting of populations according to capacity, see puar (2017). 2 on micro-fascism, see deleuze & guattari (1983). references deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (1983). anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, vol. 1. (brian massumi, trans.). minneapolis, mi: university of minnesota press. foucault, m. (2007). politics of truth. (lysa hochroth & catherine porter, trans.). los angeles, ca: semiotext(e). preciado, p. (2008). testo junkie: sex, drugs, biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. new york, ny: the feminist press. puar, j. (2017). the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. durham, nc: duke university press. valencia, s. (2018). gore capitalism. south pasadena, ca: semiotext(e). wynter, s. (2003). “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument.” cr: the new centennial review 3.3: 257-333. bio britt rusert is the author of fugitive science: empiricism and freedom in early african american culture (nyu press, 2017) and co-editor of w. e. b. du bois’s data portraits: visualizing black america (princeton architectural press, 2018). she is an associate professor in the w. e. b. du bois department of afroamerican studies at the university of massachusetts amherst. kaishian, patricia, & djoulakian, hasmik (2020). the science underground: mycology as a queer discipline. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1 26 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © patricia kaishian and hasmik djoulakian, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license the science underground: mycology as a queer discipline patricia kaishian purdue university pkaishian@gmail.com hasmik djoulakian hasmikdjoulakian@gmail.com abstract this article explores the science of mycology through a queer theory framework with the intention of situating the state of the field in a historical and social context. with the understanding that everything is in community with fungi, we look to the biology and ecology of these organisms for transformative inspiration and a deep-time sense of belonging. our scientific understanding of mushrooms and other fungi has been shaped and indeed impeded by mycophobia, a condition of fear and revulsion that we compare here to queerphobia. in this work, we argue that mycology relies upon queer methodologies for knowledge acquisition given both the nonbinary, cryptic, and subversive biological nature of fungi as well as a hegemonic, western, cultural rendering of fungi as perverse and unworthy of formal investigation. we further argue that the queer methodologies of mycology that developed in response to these conditions have enhanced rather than hindered our knowledge of fungi. because our ultimate quest as scientists is the pursuit of truth, as best as we can determine, we suggest that scientists would do well to meaningfully reconcile with the inescapable and oftentimes queer reality of bias and subjectivity. we are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human. original research 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 —david abrams, becoming animal introduction clustered in supergroup opisthokonta, fungi, animals, and amoebae share a more recent common ancestor than with plants or bacteria. the vegetated environment that enabled the transition of animals to land and evolution of amphibians, reptiles, birds, then mammals, was bound to symbiotic fungi known as mycorrhizae. over 90 percent of plants form these associations (smith & read, 2008), and myceliated landscapes sustain cascades of nested biological systems, from which every evolutionary layer of our human biology is indistinguishable, arising and persisting in conviviality with fungi or fungal-bound organisms. as terraforming bodies, fungal transindividualism is our collective ecological history. fungi are engaged in continual processes of renewal, interfacing with death, creating life through decomposition, nutrient reallocation, and the spectrum of symbiosis. fungi can remediate environments by digesting fossil fuels and converting them into fungal sugars. fungi can accumulate heavy metals and radioactive materials, and a fungus has even been found to metabolize ionizing cesium-137 in the reactors of chernobyl. both single cellular forms and filamentous, hyphal networks of fungi can be found in almost any conceivable niche: of, on, within, and for human and nonhuman bodies. despite this dynamic profile of fungi complex social histories have influenced outcomes and trajectories of mycology, rendering it a marginalized science. kingdom fungi has been persistently maligned, feared, and misunderstood, and these cultural forces have directly sabotaged scientific understanding of this group for hundreds of years. in western europe and in the united states particularly, children are typically raised to fear all mushrooms, which are unilaterally viewed as poisonous, diseased, and degenerate. although science, in its ideal form, should be an equal-opportunity investigative methodological tool, we know that the history of modern science has been disproportionately written by white, often christian, men from western europe, excluding other voices. consequently, dominant cultural lenses—heteronormativity, racism, sexism, ableism, and binaries inherent to them—have influenced scientific understandings. tiokasin ghosthorse, a member of the cheyenne river lakota nation of south dakota and scholar at yale divinity school and the yale school of forestry and environmental science, explores relational and egalitarian thinking processes familiar to the lakota people, as compared to rational, hierarchical thinking processes within western cultures. ghosthorse says that, for lakota people, original research 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 language is inherently relational and all things are bound together. ghosthorse (2019) writes, the rational mind is the human living within the hierarchy of a box that seeks to capture it through its own narcissistic addiction to the anthropocentrism of a society or a people who hold themselves up as somehow more grandiose than others in that box of conscience. it deadens the intuitive or non-dogmatic life. this is where the separation begins—with a concept and a word that doesn’t exist within many intuitive languages, such as lakota. that word is domination. (paras. 10–11) by invoking rationality over intuition to defend a viewpoint, a person makes the assertion that the intuitive—often feminized—lens is neither legitimate nor legible, with no footing in any discursive cultural space. often with derision, it is written out of the conversation. such disregard for intuition is part of the pathway toward domination that ghosthorse describes. dualistic thinking about life and non-life, male and female, and other categories ghosthorse alludes to, permeate mycophobic discourse. western scientific thinking seeks security through objective assessment, but objectivity is meaningless when it comes to gender and queerness because attempts to determine the bounds of queerness are already exercises of power. donna haraway (1988) discusses the falsity of objectivity in her essay on situated knowledges, which describes the partial perspective any one person is able to have depending on sociopolitical factors influencing their gaze; these partial perspectives form a patchwork of messy, layered knowledge that inches toward some measure of shifting objectivity. this encourages rethinking scientific endeavors not as observations of subjects, but as interactions with them. similarly, fungi defy objectivity and standardization. specifically, sporadic, ephemeral, and unpredictable appearances of fruiting bodies complicates mycologists’ ability to obtain thorough population data. the complex biotic and abiotic forces that lead to a species producing a fruiting body remain unknown in many cases. while some fungi, like some species of morels, can be reliably found in the same place on more or less the same calendar day every year, other species, such as members of genus ionomidotus, may be seen once in a given location and then never again. but is its mycelium still present in that spot? we often do not know. if so, does that count as being present? then there is the issue of quantification of an individual. if you find a scattered grouping of mushrooms growing around a tree, are they one genetic individual? if so, do you quantify them as one mushroom? or do you count the number of mushrooms, reporting them as individuals? there is not a clear and universally applied answer to these original research 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 questions. this lack of conformity to quantifiable boxes has put many fungi at a greater risk of extinction. their biological realities are not given necessary accommodations in our current conservation assessment framework, whose attempts to standardize data diminish many essential properties of fungi. interrogating our dualistic, mycophobic view of fungi—and our often pathologizing attempts to understand them—can help make science more accountable. mycology is a science that, by its very nature, challenges paradigms and deconstructs norms. mycology disrupts our mostly binary conception of plants versus animals, two-sex mating systems, and discrete organismal structure, calling upon non-normative, multimodal methodologies for knowledge acquisition. mycelium is the web-like network of fungal cells that extends apically through substrate, performing sex, seeking nutrients, building multispecies and multikingdom symbioses. this essay seeks to remediate our relationship with fungi and all organisms—thereby queerness—by collapsing and myceliating the emotional space between human and nonhuman. in order to do this, we explore dogma of institutional (capital s) science, as well as the biology, history, and methodologies of mycology through a queer theory framework, as seen by a queer mycologist and a feminist educator. history of queer” historically, “queer” was used pejoratively to describe non-heteronormative behaviors. people now self-identify as queer, to describe their existence outside heteronormativity. in the united states, “queer” was reclaimed and gained popular usage during aids political activism of the 1980s and 1990s. “we’re here! we’re queer! get used to it!” was the rallying cry of queer nation and act up, which sought to unify subgroups not quite captured by the terms “gay” and “lesbian.” the word “nation” suggested a coalition of queer people, bound together in their non-heteronormativity, redefining what it meant and what it looked like to have a sense of belonging rooted in shared identity and struggle (chen, 2012, pp. 61–63). whether people identify as queer to describe their homosexuality, gender noncomformity, or transgender identity, “queer” is fluid, invoking a spirit of community and a history of defiance (butler, 1990; sedgwick, 1990/2008; clare; 2015). queer theory explores the constructed dichotomy of “normative” and “deviant” sexuality and systems and frameworks that interact with sexuality, including race, nationality, dis/ability. this field grew from feminist and gay and lesbian studies, which focus on challenging “essential” qualities of women and femininity, as well original research 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 as the normativity of heterosexuality, which becomes posited as the unspoken, unnamed standard and expectation for romantic and sexual relationships. while this essay interrogates the relationship between mycology and queerness by defining “queer” as non-heteronormative identities and expressions, there is value in thinking more broadly of “queer” as referring to identities, bodies, and behaviors pushed to the margins of western, hegemonic, heternormative life. queer theory has drawn from a number of philosophers and theorists, including poststructuralists and postmodernists such as jacques derrida. one of derrida s contributions to semiotics is the concept of deconstruction,” which seeks to deconstruct” logocentrism, the idea that there are inherent, stable truths, calling attention to the importance of language in the formation of our framework of truths. derrida (1981) writes, by means of this double play, marked in certain decisive places by an erasure which allows what it obliterates to be read, violently inscribing within the text that which attempted to govern it from without, i try to respect as rigorously as possible the internal, regulated play of philosophemes or epistimemes by making them slide—without mistreating them—to the point of their nonpertinence, their exhaustion, their closure. (p. 6) probing the limits of socially ingrained concepts is an exercise of deconstruction and reshapes systems of power. a project of queer theory is deconstruction of heteronormative concepts, such as a family as a procreative unit, which exposes contingencies, obsolescence, and fallacies in these norms, reinforcing the viability of alternative structures and spaces. by challenging protected social groups and their associated dogmas, queer theory seeks to make plastic seemingly stable notions of fact, knowledge, knowledge acquisition, and science, whose otherwise reified, institutionalized standing maintains commonly held assumptions. queer ecology is an intervention specifically targeted against institutionalization of heteronormative modes of scientific thought, unraveling abounding queerness. history of science people all over the world have systematically documented their surroundings and interactions with nonhuman organisms, abiotic factors, and ecologies for millennia. by way of reproducible knowledge acquisition, mass observational patterns and longitudinal documentation, many systems of knowing have long existed. despite this, some forms of knowing and conceptions of truth have been given priority over others. in western europe, women had historically been keepers of ecological knowledge, but their voices were excluded from formal original research 6 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 participation in science, their knowledge often dismissed as “folk tales,” “witchcraft,” or “old wives’ tales,” meant to indicate that their knowledge was irrational—sometimes, unnatural, evil, otherworldly—with no basis in reality, because women’s knowledge was fundamentally threatening to hegemonic institutions of knowledge-creation (barstow, 1994). val plumwood (1993) writes, “feminine ‘closeness to nature’ has hardly been a compliment” (p. 19), and instead an assertion that women did not possess rational, intellectual, and positively human capacities of liberal, modern, western men, who channeled “untamed” nature into reputable, reified scientific knowledge. the culture of institutional science has been disproportionately shaped by a small subset of people, and the consequences can be limiting to research and dangerous for posterity. with the spread of institutional science, christianity continued to spread, in part through colonialism. it is well known and documented that christianity strongly influenced scientists. scientists, such as descartes, euler, and newton, often were loyal to the church in their supposedly objective pursuits of knowledge. largescale agriculture also interacted with science and christianity, with scientific discoveries enabling new manipulations of land and crops, and with christian domestic and marital structure organized in connection with agriculture in what can be termed agro-heterosexuality. rachel stein (2010) states, christian thinkers compared human sexual actions to planting a field and only those activities that corresponded to “seeding,” or procreation, were accepted as natural; other activities impeding or ignoring reproduction, whether performed with members of the same or opposite sex were forbidden as against nature (bullough & bullough, 1977, p. 28). (p. 286) bodies that perform forbidden actions become forbidden themselves, marked as unnatural, offensive, defiant. this is also where queer sexuality meets queer ecology, including the effect of fungi on agriculture and agricultural metaphors. anna tsing (2012) explores the relationship between emergence of intensive agriculture as the standard of modernity and progress, and solidification of fungi as the enemy of those ideas of modernity and progress. the relationship is tinged with irony: when agriculture disrupts and strips bare natural ecologies, the resulting monocultures are increasingly vulnerable to pests and pathogens, some of which are fungal. tsing (2012) writes, “the emergence of vast fields of grain offered fungal plant parasites a field day—and a reputation as the enemy of civilisation and, later, progress” (p. 147). this notion of “progress” implies forward original research 7 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 movement, productivity, growth, and improvement, concepts which queerphobic discourse suggests become hindered through a lack of heterosexual procreation. science is not inherently a capitalistic endeavor, but discourse of progress can strap capitalistic notions of productivity to scientific spaces and pursuits. tsing (2015) explores this idea with the word “scalability”: the capitalistic drive of perpetually scaling up, making research questions apply to greater and greater scales without changing the research question, which is apparent with industrial agriculture. tsing (2015) even refers to mushroom forests, sites of boundless “indeterminate encounters” with no prescribed measures of productivity or success, as “anti-plantations” (p. 51). it is through interplay of these factors— dominant heteronormative structure and capitalist drive—that disdain for fungi crystalized within western europe, and later within postcolonial us. tsing (2012) writes, biological and social diversity huddle defensively in neglected margins…most everywhere, a negative correlation exists between diversity and intensity of capital investment and state control!” (p. 151). as cereal farming under capitalism intensified throughout eurasia, families were expected to give a portion of their yields to elites. mushrooms grew wild on untended margins of these farms, and were incorporated into people s diets under the table,” providing a form of nourishment beyond the reach of the state. under large-scale agriculture, crops are organized through capitalist logics of commodification,” within which things are torn from their lifeworlds to become objects of exchange” (tsing, 2012, p. 158). these wild-growing mushrooms demonstrate non-extractive, non-capitalist entanglements with surrounding ecosystem lifeworlds. one type of truth is that humans are different from fungi due to our evolutionary history and genetics. another type of truth is that we are similar because we both respond to the intensity of capital investment and state control in a similar way. we die. in science, a tool can look tantalizingly like a truth, until the tool is deconstructed into its foundational elements. as scientists, we use tools and methods to access knowledge, and we standardize our work to create a common language. this is of tremendous power and value, as it allows for a language for globalized participation in knowledge formation. with all potential knowledge being infinite, science is collective incrementalism, each finding leading to infinity minus one. replication and standardization are hallmarks of science for good reason. the difference between “pseudoscience” and alternative ways of knowing should be clarified: purporting to be science and failing to abide by the scientific method is fundamentally different from openly and explicitly operating outside the confines of the scientific method, and it is essential that they be regarded differently. original research 8 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 “pseudoscience” can be destructive and dishonest, and is rightfully criticized. trouble arises, however, when replication and standardization are conflated with knowledge itself. some will argue knowledge cannot exist absent these structures, and while science requires these structures, it is critical to emphasize the difference between tools and truth. the strength of science can also be its weakness: linear, logical atomization of information excavates clean and standardized data, but in our infinitely complicated universe, such expectations for cleanliness seem improbable; to choose, at times, messiness is to see more fully. taxonomy, the naming, describing, and classifying of organisms, is a vital and often undervalued tool for communication in organismal science. taxonomy is often undervalued because it is considered simple, observational, basic research.” within our system of categorization, species concepts for fungi can be ambiguous, shifting depending on the objective of the investigator. while a phylogenetic or biological species concept might be true in the context of phylogenetics and evolution, the ability to strictly define a species is not a requisite for accessing the truth of all organismal relationships. for example, a yeast (a single-celled fungus) could hardly be more morphologically and genetically distinct from a human body, and yet, there is a suite of yeasts found within human bodies (the mycobiome) upon which we depend for basic bodily functions (seed, 2015). these species are critically interdependent but this understanding cannot be derived from species concepts. scientists have found that common morphologies are not always an indicator of relatedness; that populations within a species are sometimes on the verge of speciation; that data organization by way of dna is data organization for the sake of data continuity. things are fluid, scientific inquiry happens in a snapshot of deep-time, and this is also a truth. the construction and imposition of units in taxonomy and biological surveys mimics individualized concepts of self, specifically the reified notion of self coveted historically through western standards of white, masculine, selfsufficient personhood. discrete units of self diminish the relational and interdependent nature of humanity and deny the labor of others in accounting of one’s success and viability. declaring units of fungi feels forced and coercive because their fluid, indeterminant biology clashes radically with such abrupt and linear constructions. clean taxonomic and population units deny the messiness of fungal biology—almost always embedded, connected, and dynamic—forcing scientists to question our own objectives in this pursuit. failure to reassess objectives in science can leave one clinging to tools at the expense of better original research 9 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 answers. from some perspectives, science during the age of enlightenment stressed difference over similarity. carl linnaeus’s work on taxonomy specifically was organized around the pursuit of an inherent quality that differentiated, rather than bound, organisms into their own discrete taxonomic units (wilchins, 2004). but queer differences in fungi went misread by linnaeus, and many mycologists agree that linneaus’s treatment of fungi did more of a disservice to the group than good. linnaeus called lichens “rustici pauperrimi'' or “poorest peasants” of vegetation (plitt,1919). fungi were given the mycophobic title of “lower plants,” which directly references perception of fungi as inferior and, hinting at teleological notions held at that time, less evolved. based largely on nutritional modes, with fungi being heterotrophic and plants autotrophic, fungi were properly established as their own kingdom within the five-kingdom system proposed by robert whittaker in 1969. even after this, however, mycology was placed under the purview of plant and/or forest pathology. currently, if an institution has a mycology dedicated lab at all, and few do, it will most likely be placed in a department or sub-department titled plant or forest pathology. scientific understanding of fungi has therefore been constrained by confirmation bias and social forces; fungi are approached through a pathologizing framework as something to be fought, controlled, and eliminated. no one should doubt the importance of these perspectives—after all, many fungi are pathogens, parasites, and disease agents of agriculturally and economically important crops—but the vast majority of fungi are not limited to those roles, if they fill them at all. mycophobia fungi are not plants, nor are they animals, and this binary conception is how many people today are inclined to interface with the natural world. fungi are seen as poisonous, agents of disease, degenerate, deadly, freaky, gross, and weird— language historically leveled against both queer and disabled people—and as having no positive interrelationships with their environment(s). mycology is rarely taught to undergraduate students, never mind sufficiently addressed in primary and secondary schools. examples of dramatic and disdainful characterizations of mushrooms are abundant in many facets of western european culture. in magical mushrooms, mischievous molds, george hudler (1998, p. 73) explores socially important fungi throughout history and presents examples of these characterizations, such as the following poem by emily dickinson (1896): had nature any outcast face could she a son condemn original research 10 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 had nature an iscariot that mushroom – it is him. —emily dickinson, “the mushroom” dickinson compares mushrooms in her poem to judas iscariot, the disciple who betrayed jesus christ to the chief priests, leading to his crucifixion. she suggests there is a sanctity to nature that is defiled and betrayed by mushrooms, as if they were not only an aberration of nature, but also an active, malicious threat to a holy place. a later section of the poem refers to mushrooms as the elf of plants,” echoing the linnaean title of lower plants.” the following is an excerpt from sir arthur conan doyle s sir nigel (1906): a sickly autumn shone upon the land. wet and rotten leaves reeked and festered under a foul haze. the fields were spotted with monstrous fungi of a size and colour never matched before—scarlet and mauve and liver and black—it was as though the sick earth had burst into foul pustules. mildew and lichen mottled the walls and with that filthy crop, death sprang also from watersoaked earth. doyle intentionally uses language grounded in ableist and queerphobic sentiment to create a picture in which, instead of being integral to forest health, mushrooms are seen as dirty, foreign, and frightening markers of death. for instance, his ignorance—and resulting insecurity and hostility—about the critical ability of fungi to decompose organic matter and help maintain the nutrient cycle necessary for life leads him to depict fungi as foul pustules,” suggesting illness and a visceral sense of wrong. mycophobia and queerphobia mycology is queer at the organismal level. fungi are nonbinary: they are neither plants nor animals, but possess a mixture of qualities common to both groups, upending the prevailing binary concept of nature. it is rare for a fungus to have only two biological sexes, and some fungi, such as schizophyllum commune, have as many as 23,000 mating types. when two compatible fungi meet, their mycelia will fuse into one body, sexually recombine, then remain somatically as one as they” continue to live, grow, and explore in their environment. members of phylum glomeromycota are only known to be asexual. fungi in order laboulbeniales sometimes have distinct bodies for male and female reproductive structures (dioecious), or both may be found in the same body (monoecious), and sometimes monoecious and dioecious bodies co-occur. mycology has queer investigators. of respondents to the mycological society of america 2018 survey, original research 11 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 12 percent of mycologists identified as lgbtq, which is three to four times the national reported average (haelewaters, personal communication, 2019). one will quickly notice that mycological spaces have dispensed with certain expectations of formality, and even academic mycological conferences have a comforting, casual air of an odd family reunion. mycology is queer methodologically. mycologists use sensing, intuition, experience, and storytelling, with experts operating outside of institutional affiliation more often than with other organismal fields. for many mycologists, our relationships with fungi stir powerful emotions tied deeply to our core. we sometimes cry or burst into song when we find these special and beautiful beings. organisms, bodies, and behaviors that are difficult to neatly categorize stir insecurity and a lack of control within the viewer, who responds with fear, revulsion, and hatred. what becomes difficult to discern or dominate through heteropatriarchal systems of oppression and dogmatic scientific understandings becomes a threat to institutions that codify bodies of knowledge. queer bodies are seen as less fit” and functional,” which calls on ableist language in similar ways as mycophobic language does. this includes the relegation of mycology to subfields of pathology” within ecosystem sciences, coloring institutionalized understanding of the many lives of fungi. whatever poisonous and destructive qualities exist among a small subset of fungi have become mapped onto the character of fungi as a whole. this is indicative of the devaluation of fungi, as the same could not be said of kingdom plantae, even though there exist subsets of poisonous and destructive plants. plants and other organisms classified as belonging to “higher” kingdoms are recognized as possessing a greater degree of social capital (bourdieu, 1986)—for example, they are more likely seen as helpful, valuable, and capable of performing some service—that allows them to encompass an abundance of attributes in people’s imaginations. in contrast, fungi and other “lower” kingdoms, such as archaea and bacteria, do not occupy this elevated space in people’s imaginations. in general, people who belong to marginalized groups experience a flattening of their person into a static state that suggests behaviors by individual members of a group can be generalized onto the supposedly singularly definable quality of the group as a whole; this is one of the ways mycophobia and queerphobia operate using similar logics. it is worthwhile to wrestle with the apparent tensions when marginalization is referred to as “dehumanization,” because while language that compares humans to nonhuman animals and other life forms is meant to strip those humans of empathizable qualities, leaving them vulnerable to “justifiable” violence and harm, it is crucial to resist human/nonhuman binaries and hierarchies original research 12 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 that are part and parcel of violent, oppressive systems. plumwood (1993) writes about this tension: “thus, for example, behind the view that there is something insulting or degrading about linking women and nature stands an unstated set of assumptions about the inferior status of the non-human world” (p. 26). well-intentioned scientists have utilized queerphobic rhetoric in depictions of environmental hazards. whether or not this usage is unwitting, it stems from deep-seated, subconscious knowledge that sensationalizing and heteronormative language spurs public condemnation. giovanna di chiro (2010) writes about the concept of “eco(hetero)normativity” in regards to ableist, queerphobic, and heterosexist language—such as “sexual abnormalities,” including “male-to-female gender shifts and intersex conditions” among fish and other animals— environmentalists and popular media may use to rouse concern about environmental pollution and toxicity (pp. 201–202). such language moves beyond the need conduct science, inform readers, and demand a healthy environment—it sensationalizes depictions of queer and disabled bodies as tragic aberrations from a supposedly (hetero)normative order to life that must be upheld and protected. analysis around the harmfulness of this language must be extended to discourse around fungi. mycophobic language paints fungi almost as unnatural toxins themselves—a force whose specter of invasiveness is constructed through a similar mobilization of queer-fear. this depiction of fungi sustains legitimized and “respectable” bodies of scientific thought and methodologies of research. even when researchers are not actively queerphobic it is impossible to act fully outside hegemonic discursive norms. it is only once this tension is named and a person recognizes that their perceptions of reality are culturally mediated that they can perform methodologically thoughtful research. articulating the way this cultural entrapment functions, monique wittig (1992) writes, there is nothing abstract about the power that sciences and theories have to act materially and actually upon our bodies and our minds, even if the discourse that produces it is abstract. it is one of the forms of domination, its very expression, as marx said. i would say, rather, one of its exercises” (pp. 53–54). in a general sense, people struggle to imagine the enormous breadth of fungal life because fungal bodies exist well outside gender binaries, heterosexuality, and other exercises of power that create, as wittig says, false absolute meaning[s]” of gender, sexuality, nature, and health. in her writings on feminism, sara ahmed (2017) discusses the idea that being a lesbian/queer means inhabiting a body that feels constantly questioned. ahmed (2017) states, “sometimes, whether or not you are asked a question, you feel original research 13 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 questionable…you feel like a question mark; you feel marked by questions” (pp. 120–121). mycology is marked by questions by those on the outside: why would you possibly study those things? will you get sick or poisoned? what kind of job can you get with that degree? this further evokes parallels to “coming out.” queer people are often met with confusion, fear, and even disgust and abuse if they reveal their orientation or identity. even in more mycophillic countries where foraging for mushrooms is more likely a shared cultural pastime, scientific passion and research focused on this kingdom of life is often seen as whimsical, confusing, or even disturbing. a slippery space often exists between revulsion and commodification. simon estok (2009) introduces the term “queer ecocritcism” on the pretext that “the commodification of nature and sexual minorities are similar, each depending on a large consumer base that seeks a vicarious experience, rather than the thing itself” (pp. 213–216). people may desire a superficial, extractive experience while maintaining distance from the queer subject. within mycology, there are examples of how people engage with fungi opportunistically, but fail to regard them as the essential, deeply ecological beings they are. many people have had their lives saved by penicillin, without realizing that the medicine is derived from a fungus, penicillium. only a small handful of mushrooms that can be cultivated for culinary purposes, such as the portobello (agaricus bisporus), have made their way into the realm of acceptability. they are accepted for two reasons: (1) they can be controlled and they exhibit predictable behaviors that can fall neatly under the domination of a cultivator; and (2) they serve a direct purpose to humans, in this case as a food source. fungi that fit into only one of those categories, such as wild “choice” edible mushrooms, are sometimes deemed acceptable. there is an increasing popularity in dining on wild mushrooms, but in the us, these gourmet mushrooms are often sold at a high price, tying them to wealthy and often white clientele, who are often gatekeepers of acceptability within dominant culture. the consumer of expensive “wild” mushrooms may feel adventurous, daring, knowledgeable, and perhaps even superior to those who cannot afford those mushrooms. the excitement felt from exclusive access to a queer(ed) other is a hallmark of commodity culture. bell hooks (1992) writes about commodification and objectification of black bodies through an analysis of white (often male) fascination with and desire for sexual contact with dark others—“the consumption of the dark other,” as hooks puts it (p. 30). hooks explains that this fetishization of the body of the other helps white people to feel like transgressive and bold subjects, while black people remain in the position of “primitive” objects. while hooks’s argument is about white cultural imperialism and not original research 14 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 queerness, her argument about the thrill white people feel when they come into close contact—a type of consumption—with an “unknowable” other can be extended to queerness as well. consumers of expensive “wild” and “rare” mushrooms also assert their power over mushrooms, queer symbols and representations of death, and the seemingly mysterious origins they sprang from. among people who forage for mushrooms they will later sell, however, exist more complicated social, cultural, and economic relationships with mushrooms. tsing (2015) describes these as “pericapitalist” spaces, or sites of “salvage accumulation,” in that they “take advantage of value produced without capitalist control” and both are, and are not, capitalist interactions with mushrooms (in tsing’s research, specifically matsutake, a highly coveted and costly mushroom) (p. 83). pericapitalist spaces allow enactment of people’s own sense of freedom, often tied up in their cultural legacies, that connect them with mushrooms. even when mushrooms are not so costly as to fall along these economic pathways, they are still sites of social convergence, bringing together academic and nonacademic scientists and an assortment of people who feel their freedom is theirs to reclaim. mushrooms offer witness to human vulnerability. stacy alaimo (2008) identifies nature as a critical ideological junction in feminist thought: “the contradictory, ubiquitous, and historically varied meanings of ‘nature’ have made it a crucial site for various feminist social struggles, including feminist anarchism, socialism, birth control, racial equality, and lesbianism” (p. 229). alaimo asserts that, although the wedge driven between nature and body is understandable as a reaction to the intentionally demeaning historical association of women and nature, this “flight from nature” is “one of the most unfortunate legacies of poststructuralist and postmodern feminism” (2008, p. 229). calling for inhabitation of “trans-corporeality,” alaimo seeks to reestablish a feminist intimacy between bodies and nature by emphasizing material engagements of space and time. in this trans-corporeal, space-time partnership of beings, human and nonhuman bodies exert their own intermingled agency and life-making power, leading alaimo to ask, “how is it possible to understand agency without a subject, actions without actors? how can we rethink matter as activity rather than passive substance?” (2008, p. 245). these questions strike at the heart of feminist efforts to de-naturalize the pervasive grip of dualistic thinking. fungi, with their ability to decompose and transform matter across space-time, enabling reconstitution of bodies into new materialities, are crucial agents of noncapitalist, anti-dualistic interchange. plumwood (1993) writes that mutually reinforcing dualisms, such as culture vs. nature; male vs. female; reason vs. emotion (nature); subject vs. object; and self original research 15 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 vs. other, result from a certain kind of denied dependency on a subordinated other” (p. 41). plumwood goes on to argue that virtually the whole set of dualisms can be mobilised for this purpose of inferiorising the sphere of nature and those human-beings who may be counted as part of nature” (1993, p. 47). human experience of the world becomes categorized, understood, and curtailed by the alienation and domination these dualisms naturalize and sustain. queer people are simultaneously compared to animals, but also characterized as unnatural, which itself utilizes the false divide between nature and culture. similarly, fungi are regarded as wild and unruly elements of nature with no connection to humans, and simultaneously unevolved or somehow representatives of another, more evil realm. haraway (2007) offers an intervention into binaristic discourse that alienates humans from the natural world; we assert that such discourse also ensnares our fungal kin. haraway communicates the inextricable dynamicism and coconstitutive relationship between nature and culture through her term “naturecultures,” which says that any invocation of nature has a cultural context, and similarly, cultures do not exist apart from nature (2007, p. 25). haraway argues that companion species—organisms whose communal and corporeal existence and identity demand interdependence—arise from naturecultures. she writes, “i am not a posthumanist; i am who i become with companion species, who and which make a mess out of categories in the making of kin and kind. queer messmates in mortal play, indeed” (2007, p. 19). messmates occupy space together; they witness one another’s intimate moments, and their day-to-day lives depend on synchronous interplay with one another. this includes humans and the fungi we coexist with on a daily basis, from yeast cells mingling in our guts and nutrifying our foods, to symbiotic fungi whose role in forests sustains our global environment. when language is limited to a binary conception of gender, those who do not fit squarely in those constructs are often thought to not exist, and explicitly written out of existence through their exclusion. fungi are often unnamed—only about 120,000 of an estimated 2.2 to 3.8 million fungi have been named and described (hawksworth & lücking, 2017). while the call to name all currently undescribed fungi will be a step in the right direction, and is in fact the pursuit of one of the authors of this paper, taxonomy alone cannot cure this problem, because it does not break from the need to delineate the bounds between fungi and humans which, to borrow from derrida, is a hierarchical regime. derrida (1981) argues, to deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. to overlook this phase of overturning is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition. therefore original research 16 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 one might proceed too quickly to a neutralization that in practice would leave the previous field untouched, leaving one no hold on the previous opposition, thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively…the necessity of this phase is structural; it is the necessity of an interminable analysis: the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself...that being said—and on the other hand—to remain in this phase is still to operate on the terrain of and from within the deconstructed system. by means of this double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging, writing, we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new "concept," a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime. (p. 42) extending this linguistic idea to the material, fungal realm, we argue that naming all fungi would be an oppositional act, but such an engagement would leave us wrought in the same oppositional tension of our current framework. rather, we must phase shift into a newly imagined, but simultaneously ancient, nonhierarchical space in which human–nonhuman (fungal) oppositions are deconstructed. robin wall kimmerer (2007) reflects on western scientific discourse s need to mark the bounds of existing knowledge. she explains that the term puhpowee” in potawatomi means the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight. a member of the potawatomi nation and an academically trained scientist, she writes, as a biologist, i was stunned that such a word existed. in all its technical vocabulary, western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. you’d think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. but in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. what lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed...the makers of this word understood a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything. (kimmerer, 2007, p. 49) this inability—or refusal—to engage with language that reveals the limitations of our perception curtails our engagement with fungal life (and as a parallel, with queerness). but as kimmerer points out, this disconnect is inherent to the english language and its naturalized assumptions of animacy or lack thereof; science then institutionalizes these assumptions. it is not impossible, however, for englishlanguage speakers to recognize flaws and fissures in language, even if words to meaningfully bridge them do not exist. original research 17 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 religious ideology and discourse influences understandings of animacy and relations between beings. some biblical scholars believe that dominion” was a mistranslation, and the original text used a word more closely synonymous with stewardship.” it is through this translation that some christians felt empowered to dominate and exploit earth (weldon, 2016). riki anne wilchins (2004) writes about this drive for dominion: we want to have, as the bible says, the word made flesh, something we can have dominion over” (p. 46). the remarkable ability of fungi to subvert human domination and defy expectations has bound fungi with other supernatural forces often feared by christians, including witches, devils, and the demonically possessed. whether the context has to do with religion or any other institution, culture and language cyclically reinforce discourse. wilchins writes, discourse is a set of rules for producing knowledge that determines what kinds of intelligible statements can be circulated within a given economy of thought. for example, in the discourse on gender, you can only say meaningful things about two kinds of bodies that will make sense. references to third genders will always sound fanciful, nonsensical, or just ridiculous. discourse is the "cookie cutter"…the social truths we have about gender have to do not with the body, but with the cutter. (2004, p. 73) in this analogy, science and methodology are the cutter, and the dough is all that can be learned. the cutter is shaped to accommodate biological and methodological realities of non-fungal organisms. this cleaves off entire sections of what we can know about fungi so that they keep shape with other organisms. biological discourse has limited our framework of possibility for fungal biology because this discourse was formed in the context of mycophobia. mycology is on the margins, where biological discourse has been abruptly cut by the cookie cutter; on the boundaries of discourse that prioritizes and enforces normalcy of other organisms. psilocybin within psychedelic mushrooms was posited to have evolved to defend mushroom bodies against mycophagous insects (reynolds et al., 2018). however, a subsequent study disputed this, finding evidence for a mutualistic role of psilocybin between insects and fungi (awan et al., 2018). this same compound facilitates the birth of alternative epistemologies in human minds by connecting and energizing regions of the brain that have atrophied in our sterile, individualized, and isolated position atop the self-declared hierarchy of western philosophy. much like a mycorrhizal network, neurotransmitters flow like carbon, original research 18 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 nitrogen, and phosphorus, connecting and reconnecting regions of our brains, reminding us of our deep-time home, the sentience of earth, and interlocking biotic systems of we. psychedelic mushrooms take people to a vulnerable site of deconstruction, where what was once considered to have social or cultural significance suddenly feels obsolete and what was once seen as static and inert is suddenly pulsing and humming with animacy. it is not a coincidence that the relational discipline of ecology (from greek oikos “house”) gained public traction in the 1970s, in concert with psychedelic, anti-war, civil rights, and environmental movements—a greater recognition of the interdependence of all beings was taking shape. the experience of marginalization lends a critical vantage point and potential for subversive examination. patricia hill collins (2000) discusses using “alternative epistemologies,” which are entirely new frameworks of thought, as fundamentally subversive challenges to dominant “knowledge claims” (pp. 253, 256). mycological history is replete with numerous alternative epistemologies, such as the concept of mutualism—a humbling concept often seen as an insult to the primacy of humans—which has historically gained and lost traction, mirroring trends in the zeitgeist. original hypotheses on mutualisms of mycorrhizal networks put forward by a. b. frank in the late nineteenth century were considered revolutionary when introduced and were therefore highly contested. around the same time, the biology of lichens was being fiercely debated, with mycologists such as debary and swchendener first probing into notions of symbiosis between fungi and algae (plitt,1919). a century and a half later, these ideas are only just becoming well-integrated into scientific literature and lexicon, and remain poorly understood and underrecognized outside of mycology (trappe, 2005). scientists are typically quite conservative when treating alternative epistemologies; there is extreme pressure to “just follow the data.” and yet, according to philosopher of science thomas kuhn (1970), this is what scientific revolution looks like: embracing what was marginal and elucidating new epistemologies. queer pedagogy and methodology as amy e. winans (2006) states, queer pedagogy entails decentering dominant cultural assumptions, exploring facets of the geography of normalization, and interrogating the self and the implications of affiliation” (p. 6). in an attempt to challenge dominant logics and cultural assumptions, queer pedagogy asks, what has been normalized, why, and how can knowledge be produced differently by taking into account the function of power? original research 19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 for most mycologists, mycological education was fostered outside the traditional classroom. there is often a reliance on individuals who were/are autodidactic, pursuing knowledge of this subject apart from dominant education systems. many mycologists remember their first mycological experience very clearly; usually, it was by way of a charismatic teacher who brought to focus this queer world. upon realizing that there was actually this other world, where the rules did not quite apply, many mycologists felt at once safe and awakened. mycology speaks to the personal, sexual, and/or political lives of its often-marginalized investigators. mycological societies are also an example of alternative sites of knowledge. they de-center institutions as the sole source of knowledge, and challenge hierarchies through a structure that is member-supported, low-cost, and often provides free, public educational experiences. this type of structure is central to feminist methodology, which insists that learning and thinking are never confined to the classroom, and in fact are richer when experienced in community with others, out in the world. anarchist organizers, designers, architects, and others look to nature, including fungi, for inspiration through a process called biomimicry, a term popularized by janine beynus’s 1997 book biomimicry: innovation inspired by nature. examples of this include an architecture group based in brooklyn, ny called terreform open network ecology, which looks to nature to design sustainable architecture, and a group called fungi for the people, which brings people together for educational workshops. artists are even increasingly looking to fungi for inspiration. whatever the group, those who learn and borrow from fungal biology are compelled by its dynamic, mutualistic, and transformative possibilities. despite this burgeoning, eclectic appreciation for fungi, funding is typically hard to come by for mycologists because the field is still largely in the phase of “basic research.” in an academic environment mired in capitalistic notions of progress, application, patents, and “impact,” funding basic research is difficult because it lacks a certain thrill. curiosity for curiosity’s sake is a hard sell to a person who compulsively asks the claustrophobic, capitalistic question, but what's the point? mycological societies have flourished because they allow people to explore in peace, for the sake of exploration. the simple state of curiosity is the only requisite for joining such societies. while many classical american naturalists such as henry david thoreau, aldo leopold, and rachel carson were not tuned into mycology, many of today s mycologists drew early inspiration from their patient, holistic, and arguably sacred original research 20 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 and dutiful art of observation. this art, this deep, daily, ritualistic communion with patterns, phenology, and nonhuman beings gives many of us a sense of purpose. naturalism is beautiful because it is not inherently directed, there are no required hypotheses, practitioners need not have an academic affiliation. in fields such as mycology, as well as facets of organismal biology and ecology, lineages of classical naturalism have persisted, holding the practice of simple observation close to our hearts. these naturalists are the observers, the ones whose indeterminate encounters,” as tsing (2015, p. 50) says, without a script or fixed set of goals, create mutually transformative relationships. by forging messy, shifting, anarchist human and nonhuman kinships, these encounters demonstrate the creative and productive energy possible outside capitalist bounds. such nonextractive, transformative mingling of beings requires communication that listens, not demands, and research that seeks to observe and understand, not suture any sites of ambiguity. in the age of climate change, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the tiny pin pricks of data recorded by observers have incrementally built enormous bodies of knowledge. museums containing vast collections of organisms that most would call too insignificant to know, have been diligently preserved, catalogued, and curated by observers. we can use these treasure troves to understand how life once was, before such destruction, and to reimagine our future. the project now is to help break the obsession with progress by de-emphasizing scalability, challenging research frameworks, and supporting the world’s observers. science prioritizes quantitative data, but disciplines adjacent to or entirely outside of science understand that qualitative data are also informative and sometimes carry greater explanatory power in certain contexts. jack halberstam (1998) posits that queer methodology is a multimodal “scavenger methodology,” which points to a process of searching and excavating that does not come easily at first glance. mycologists might prefer the term “forager methodology,” as mycology is similarly built on a mix of quantitative and qualitative data that includes sensing, intuition, oral histories, and literally foraging. stacey waite (2015) encourages embracing messiness as necessary and fruitful. [waite] invites readers to think about and experience logics that contradict, tenses that shift, genres that mix, futures that are messier than what the present moment seems to allow…[and] asks scholars of composition and teachers of writing to become scavengers and to make seemingly disconnected worlds collide. (waite, 2015, p. 52) mycological surveys are difficult to do with the quantified, restricted methods that botanists use. mycologists use and publish methods such as “timed wander” original research 21 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 to survey a site (victoroff, 2020). extremely standardized transects and plotbased work of botany often feel unnecessarily limiting to mycologists, who are often guided to find fungi by a combination of intuition, sensing, and an intimate knowledge of the landscape and macro/micro habitats that foster mushroom growth. smell and taste are important methodological tools in identifying fungi; the communal, instinctual, cultural, and emotional reverberations of these senses potentiate more personal, nuanced research. people working in groups to identify fungi may often ask one another, what does this smell (or taste) like to you?” and form inexact, but deeply provocative, systems of organization based on these senses. even this invitation to smell carries a queer intimacy. the affective attachment mycologists have with fungi is apparent at mycological summits and conferences when someone asks, for example, what inocybe smells like, and people respond with descriptors such as spermatic” or swimming pools!” there is indeed a queer and joyous sense of community when a group of people collectively comes up with a verbal smellscape of increasingly silly descriptions of ejaculate smell to describe a fungus. for those who have smelled inocybe, the descriptions spark memories of those embodied and ephemeral moments, layered with dimensions of others descriptions; for those who have not smelled inocybe, listening to others share their impressions can sketch a full, patchwork, and memorable picture. initiating newcomers into tasting mushrooms for experiential identification is a vulnerable and exciting moment. some mushrooms, such as members of genus russula, are difficult to identify to species level without incorporating taste because they are morphologically similar. however, some species are edible and taste mildly “mushroomy,” and others will cause gastronomic distress, such as russula emetica (from greek emetikos meaning emetic or vomit-inducing), and will have a spicy or acrid taste. few people know that all mushrooms are safe to touch (unlike plants) and fewer know and viscerally believe that all mushrooms are also safe to put in your mouth, so long as you spit them out! in our classrooms, we sometimes ask a brave volunteer to come forward and take a small nibble of two similar-looking russula mushrooms and taste for difference. an intimate space is created as students gather around to witness their classmate’s reaction as curious tastes roll over their tongue. with some of these methodologies, there is risk of losing the ability to cleanly replicate, but the benefit is that there is a richer understanding of the lifeworlds of mycoflora in a given area. forgoing straightforwardly replicable methodologies original research 22 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 opens a multitude of pathways, perspectives, and points of entry for mycologists who appreciate that notions of objectivity constrict ability to understand fungi. this creates friction with some of the foundational tenets of traditional science, but mycology stretches and redefines the idea of replicability, because fungal growth does not lend itself to clean replicability. mycological methodologies rely on a greater sense of intimacy between mycologists and both fungal organisms and the landscape, which speaks to ahmed s (2017) reflections about intuition: a gut has its own intelligence. a feminist gut might sense something is amiss” (p. 27). a mycologist s feminist gut demands that intuition, a feminized mode of knowing, be trusted. fungi, in turn, demand the same of mycologists, and all those who seek to make kin with fungi. maybe not coincidentally, human guts are home to an assemblage of microbes, fungi and bacteria, that communicate with and impact our brains. conservation the hologenome concept asks, what is the relevance of an isolated human genome? bodies are, in fact, communities, and there are more fungal and bacterial cells in the human body than there are human cells. as haraway (2007) puts it, to be one is always to become with many” (p. 4). we become with, because there is no us without others; even words such as us” and others” are misleading, as our bodies are mutually constitutive entanglements. recently, scientific investigations have begun to attach quantitative data to interdependencies that have been recognized outside of western culture for millennia. the notion that humans exist and function independent of other beings stems from a fear of our vulnerable dependencies and often indecipherable, queer entanglements, and that, as myra hird (2004) says, the penultimate embodiment of queer may be bodies themselves” (p. 87). by embracing this queerness, we chip away at fallacious, capitalist myths of the neoliberal, individually agential western subject. belief in human exceptionalism has devastating consequences for humans and all life. impacts of mycophobia are immediately, materially apparent. according to state of the world’s fungi, only 56 species of fungi have been evaluated for placement on the international union for conservation of nature red list, with 43 species ending up listed (ainsworth et al., 2018). comparatively, 25,452 species of plants and 68,054 species of animals have been evaluated (ainsworth et al., 2018). this list aims to be the world’s most comprehensive inventory of species and their risks of extinction, and yet a kingdom with over one million species has only 43 species listed. this poor representation is not due to some miraculous ability of fungi to move unscathed through the anthropocene and the world’s sixth great original research 23 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 mass extinction event. rather, it is because there is a failure to achieve quantification-based standards proving a species is endangered. this is largely because the ephemeral nature of many mushrooms and fungi makes their documentation patchy. the relative lack of mycologists compared to botanists and zoologists also means there is less data available to argue for protected status. this lack of protected status means there is less funding available for their protection, therefore fewer studies are conducted, and fewer mycologists are paid to do necessary work to generate more data. holding fungi to biological determinations of more normative groups—say trees or birds—is to deny their basic biology, which puts them at risk for extinction. the solution is not to find out how to force fungi into the normative box. the capitalistic drum that beats towards extinction will not slow its tempo for the painstaking assessment of fungi, no matter how diligently mycologists work. the solution is to recognize that fungal data should not have to match that of trees or birds. mycologists’ experience, intuition, and sensing should be given priority in establishing whether or not a fungus is threatened or endangered. conservationists should also be deferential to modes and practices of traditional ecological knowledge, which has a rich history of profound, intimate knowledge of earth. radical circumstances such as mass extinctions demand radical solutions, and fungi demand to be seen in their messy totality. we must disentangle science from capitalism and western hegemony. we must trust and support observers, turning to our deep-time microbial gut to draw strength in our advocacy for our interdependent communities. to deny the value of these systems of knowing is to shore up colonialist and queerphobic mindsets. conclusion mycology is queer insofar as it is marginal, subordinate, contested, ridiculed, but more critically, mycology is queer insofar as it is disruptive, collective, transformative, revolutionary. fungi show us cooperative, alternative, promiscuous, entangled, interdependent, more-than-individuated, and morethan-human modes of living worth studying, imitating, learning from, and which queerness in humans has often shared. just as fungi are capable of reclaiming land, bodies, and nutrients, so too can humans reclaim our relationship with fungi as siblings. much like mycorrhizae, humans can forge mutually beneficial relationships with fungi. we can steward their land, and care for their bodies, much like how they have persistently continued to steward our land and care for our bodies. we can remediate poisoned relationships by challenging the paradigm in which they have been demonized and dispossessed, much like how they can remediate waters and lands poisoned by capitalist greed. moreover, we can apply lessons learned from fungal biology to our human organization and forge stronger original research 24 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 networks of interdependence and mutual aid. science can be and has been instrumental in challenging dangerous, exploitative notions of hierarchy, but it has also been employed at the service of those hierarchies. through a thorough and honest recognition of the limits of human investigative reasoning and methods we can become better and more ethical scientists. through challenging assertions of objectivity and purity, we push ourselves into the unknown, both with optimism and a critical outlook. it is past time that humans turn to the fungi to which we are bound, step into our mutual totality, and create space and futures for our wild ways of being. references ahmed, s. 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(2010). “the place, promised, that has not yet been”: the nature of dislocation and desire in adrienne rich's your native land/your life and minnie bruce pratt's crime against nature. in c. mortimer-sandilands & b. erickson (eds.), queer ecologies: sex, nature, politics, desire (pp. 285–308). indiana university press. trappe, j. m. (2005). a. b. frank and mycorrhizae: the challenge to evolutionary and ecologic theory. mycorrhiza, 15(4), 277–281. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00572-004-03305 tsing, a. (2012). unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species. environmental humanities, 1(1), 141–154. tsing, a. (2015). mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton university victoroff, c. (2020). fruiting responses of ectomycorrhizal fungi to nutrient additions in bartlett experimental forest, new hampshires. [unpublished master’s thesis, state university of new york]. waite, s. (2015). cultivating the scavenger: a queerer feminist future for composition and rhetoric. peitho journal, 18(1), 51–71. weldon, n. (2016). a biblical hermeneutic for dominion: domination vs stewardship. obsculta, 9(1), 73–81. wilchins, r. a. (2004). queer theory, gender theory: an instant primer. alyson books. winans, a. e. (2006). queering pedagogy in the english classroom: engaging with the places where thinking stops. pedagogy: critical approaches to teaching literature, language, composition, and culture, 6(1), 103–122. wittig, m. (1992). the straight mind. beacon press. https://doi.org/0.1101/cshperspect.a019810 original research 27 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) patricia kaishian & hasmik djoulakian, 2020 author bios patricia kaishian received her phd in mycology from suny college of environmental science & forestry in syracuse, ny, in 2020. she is currently a postdoctoral researcher at purdue university, where she serves as curator of the arthur fungarium and kriebel herbarium. patricia is a fungal taxonomist who classifies, names, describes, and cherishes fungi. hasmik djoulakian is a writer and educator who currently lives in syracuse, ny, where she works in the field of sexual and domestic violence prevention. she received her ba in women’s and gender studies and civic engagement from syracuse university in 2017, and shortly afterwards completed a fulbright english teaching assistantship in armenia, where she deepened her commitment to transnational feminist activism. roberts, celia, and catherine waldby. 2021. “incipient infertility: tracking eggs and ovulation across the life course.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–25. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license incipient infertility: tracking eggs and ovulation across the life course celia roberts school of sociology, australian national university celia.roberts@anu.edu.au catherine waldby research school of social sciences, australian national university catherine.waldby@anu.edu.au abstract tracking in/fertility—through ovulation biosensing, menstrual and perimenopausal apps, and ovarian reserve testing—is becoming increasingly commonplace amongst relatively privileged women in the global north. taking place on and through platforms comprised of devices, bodies, and discourses, such self-tracking articulates forms of in/fertility and reproductive futures that are, we argue, closely entwined with emerging forms of biomedical capitalization. while reproductive medicine focused on the creation of children has been entwined with corporate interests since the development of in vitro fertilization in the 1980s, fertility as an asset, or future value, is increasingly targeted by the new innovation sectors as a specific capacity, separable from reproduction per se, in which women should invest if they are not to fall prey to incipient infertility. synthesizing our separate empirical work in this field, this paper theorizes the connections between the emergence of self-tracking logics and cultures, the burgeoning of consumer-oriented, clinical services, and contemporary social anxieties around fertility decline. even in countries such as australia and the united kingdom, where birth rates are stable, (some) women’s fertility is being special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 2 refigured as precious and vulnerable, something to be tracked, documented, and attended to in the name of individual future happiness and fulfilment. women with enough financial and cultural capital are encouraged to monitor their periods, come to know their ovulation patterns, and become aware of their ovarian reserve, and, importantly, to act prudently on such knowledge to safeguard their reproductive futures. introduction this article considers the growth of ovarian reserve (or) testing, elective egg freezing, the lucrative market for ovulation and conception apps and biosensing devices, and the expanding footprint of menopause (the newly articulated perimenopause), synthesizing results from several empirical projects in the uk, the united states, and australia (waldby 2015, 2019; wilkinson, roberts, and mort 2015; mort et al. 2016; roberts et al. 2016; roberts, mackenzie, and mort 2019). viewed as a set, we argue, these examples suggest a broad historical reorganization of the way women’s reproductive capacities in the developed economies of the global north are both shaped and interpreted. it is widely understood that women’s fertility declines over the life course, and that the decline accelerates from the mid-thirties onward as part of normal reproductive physiology (faddy and godsen 2003; balasch and gratacós 2012). despite this, age-related low fertility is increasingly framed as a pathological biomedical condition, a condition that should be prevented (baldwin 2019). to put it another way, women, although not all women, are increasingly interpolated as incipiently infertile (martin 2010). in a global context of increasing (some would say “over”) population, some women’s fertility has become a quality to secure, identify, track, and foster, to measure, diagnose, and mobilize. across a range of sites, these women’s fertility is presented as an elusive quality, requiring significant personal investment (of time, money, resources, planning) in order to use it before it dissipates. at the same time, other women’s fertility remains a “problem”— something to be controlled or governed in the name of development, social security, progress, and/or environmentalism (clarke and haraway 2018). the dynamics underpinning this contemporary bifurcated norm are extremely complex. historically, women’s reproduction has been subject to various forms of pronatalism, state-sponsored moral panics that claim, frequently without evidence, that national child bearing is in decline and women’s failure to have more children is at the heart of the problem (waldby 1984). barbara baird (2006) special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 3 argues that, in australia, pronatalism (which she traces from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century) has been primarily concerned with the reproduction of middle-class, white families. historically, the exhortation to increase the number of children has been addressed primarily to these “valuable” segments of the population, while indigenous and working-class reproduction is depreciated and indeed deliberately repressed by both medical and social means in the case of indigenous women (baird 2006). in the uk, similarly, there is a long history of biomedical, state, and ngo practices encouraging white, middle-class women to reproduce and discouraging poorer women (davis 2012; moscucci 2003; roberts et al. 2016). similar dynamics can be discerned in the united states, canada, and taiwan, among many other places (benjamin 2018; huang and wu 2018). more recently, public health and women’s health academics, sector regulators, and clinical coalitions have raised concerns about women’s alleged lack of awareness about age-related fertility decline. in australia, for example, the victorian assisted reproductive treatment authority coordinated a “fertility is ageist” advertising campaign during 2014 and 2015 to raise public awareness of women’s diminution of fertility after their mid-thirties (green 2014). similar campaigns have been run in the uk, as peak reproductive medicine organizations such as the british fertility society (n.d.) sponsor a fertility education initiative to improve fertility knowledge among school children. these campaigns are motivated by the demographic shift to later motherhood, a transition evident right across the oecd countries (organisation for economic co-operation and development 2017). as women attempt to conceive their first child during their thirties, they become more likely to encounter the “fertility cliff” (the rather alarmist term for the normal decrease in fertility that takes place in the later thirties) and hence are more likely to seek in vitro fertilization (ivf). public education campaigns encourage women to conceive at a younger age, and not risk the distress that may come with failed ivf treatment (throsby 2004). in the united states, a social movement involving feminists, lgbtq activists, and clinicians is arguing for the expansion of the definition of infertility to apply to same-sex couples and to single people who require access to assisted reproductive technologies (arts) and medical insurance to conceive (sussman 2019). in each case, these campaigns, while laudable in themselves, raise the specter of infertility in the public domain, and extend its threat to an everwidening demographic, as younger and younger women of all sexualities, and indeed children, are exhorted to view themselves as the future infertile. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 4 the reshaping of fertility and infertility we discuss in this paper is enabled by broader histories of pronatalism and public health, but it is not primarily state sponsored. rather. it is the most recent development in a twentiethand twentyfirst-century history of global commercial innovation focused on women’s reproductive biology (waldby and cooper 2008, 2010; cooper and waldby 2014). new corporate business models are developing around longstanding clinical fertility practices, particularly egg freezing and or testing. at the same time, established data companies (google and apple) and smaller start-ups are rushing into women’s healthcare technology and related apps. each of these developments can freeride on current fertility public health campaigns and build on the higher levels of awareness and anxiety they generate to constitute consumer markets for their services and pursue multiple opportunities for revenue.1 in the case of health tracking and consumer diagnostics, business models extend beyond immediate point of sale and subscription fees from consumers, to harvesting yields of invaluable data for the innovation sector, facilitating the development of additional “premium” services based on customer data, and the “on selling” of data and collaboration with corporate and university biomedical researchers around intellectual property opportunities.2 in/fertility tracking is becoming an important element in health big data companies’ portfolio of revenue streams and in their stock market value in the case of public companies (austin 2019; kuch, kearnes, and gulsoon 2020; thiebes et al. 2020). in the case of egg freezing, at least in the united states, the sector is a target for private equity firms and venture capital, as new start-ups experiment with different ways to monetize women’s concerns around their future fertility (van de wiel 2020). this recent diversification of business models has produced more market segmentation in the area. clinical fertility tracking and egg-banking services are expensive and tend to target women with secure incomes or good credit ratings, as diligent, self-disciplined consumers. self-tracking, however, is accessible to anyone with a smartphone or the capacity to purchase a diy device costing less than fifty us dollars. hence, tracking can secure a wide potential market among younger or less wealthy women who are concerned about their fertility. while they may be addressed to consumers with different levels of spending power, both sets of practices, we argue, inculcate a form of disciplined subjectivity that monitors the value and viability of current fertile capacities in order to prudently prepare for a likely future. as we will see in the following sections, even for younger and less wealthy women, the future is often envisaged as a time when one may expect a higher income and more financial security, and hence be able to special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 5 pay for fertility services. in this sense, fertility tracking and testing reiterates some features of state pronatalism and selects for a similar demographic, recast as a market (see also bhatia and campo-engelstein 2018, 871–72). although beyond the remit of this paper, it is important to note that coercive forms of juridical and administrative state intervention into other women’s reproductive lives coexist with these developments. this is true for developing economies like india and china, where forced sterilization may coexist with booming fertility service markets (cooper and waldby 2014; shi 2014; vora 2015; wahlberg 2018), and it is true for the countries that form the focus of our paper, particularly as it pertains to welfarized populations (sasser 2018). ruha benjamin argues, for example, that in the united states, repressive eugenic practices, like the reduction of prison sentences for black women who agree to be sterilized, “are tied to seemingly more liberal, market-based, ‘positive’ eugenic practices that encourage those deemed valuable to reproduce and even select the traits of their offspring. two sides of the same reproductive coin” (2018, 56).3 so, while for many women fertility is constituted as a scarce, elusive quality to be carefully fostered and managed in the present if it is to be realized in the future, for others it is deemed all too abundant, a wasteful capacity to be curtailed. in both cases, “anticipation”—the intensifying demand to optimize one’s medical future through forecasting and adjusting present conduct—appears as a virtue of biomedical citizenship that some women exemplify and others cannot (adams murphy, and clarke 2009). fertility self-tracking and testing, like contributing to the right pension fund or getting the best mortgage, become part of privileged women’s careful investment in their future well-being (rose 2007). in effect, we argue, testing, banking, and tracking practices are transforming some women’s fertility into a tangible asset, a material resource controlled and managed by the woman herself with the expectation of future value. just as commercial surrogacy transforms the woman’s uterus into an asset that can be rented to others for use in gestating their child (cooper and waldby 2014), the practices of tracking, testing, and banking place the material capacities of individual fertility under value management, requiring investment and careful tending to realize a future return. fertile assets depreciate rapidly, losing value over the first half of women’s life course: this accelerating loss is exactly the quality that tracking and banking technologies are designed to pinpoint and arrest. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 6 in what follows we draw upon a series of empirical studies carried out by the authors and their collaborators, as well as other studies in the field. one of our studies investigated the history and contemporary practices around or testing and elective egg freezing in the us, australia, and the uk, and includes fieldwork at fertility clinics in each location (waldby 2015, 2019). another was a long-term project examining biosensing practices across the life course, including ovulation and menstrual tracking (wilkinson, roberts, and mort 2015; mort et al. 2016; roberts, mackenzie, and mort 2019). our main foci are australia and the united kingdom, but the arguments here apply more broadly to the global north, albeit with significant differences in regulation that shape the commercial dimensions of reproductive medicine in any particular country (on differences across europe, see adrian and kroløkke 2018; carroll and kroløkke 2018; hudson et al. 2020). in each case we explore how, in contrast to the forms of reproductive control described by benjamin and others, relatively privileged women’s reproductive capacities are being reframed as precious, vulnerable assets, requiring continuous monitoring, careful investment, and biomedical intervention. social egg banking and the ovarian reserve test: buying time? both or testing and egg banking have their origins in longstanding clinical practice in reproductive medicine. ovarian reserve is a term designating the number of primordial oocyte follicles detectable in the ovaries, which declines with age. clinics use or tests as an indicator of likely treatment success. clinics typically estimate ovarian reserve using three techniques; the anti-müllerian hormone (amh) test, measuring serum levels of follicle stimulation hormone, and scanning the ovaries to do a visual antral follicle count. none of the tests directly informs about egg quality. the amh test is widely considered a test for responsiveness to ovarian stimulation protocols and for assessing a woman’s risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, rather than as a stand-alone measure of ovarian reserve per se (anderson, nelson, and wallace 2012). to this extent it is a test useful within the walls of the fertility clinic as a pragmatic guide to treatability, and as a way for clinicians to determine stimulation protocols and other procedural aspects of ivf treatment. in other words, amh testing is oriented towards the immediate clinical management of conception and reproduction. a recent meta-analysis of the clinical literature highlights its limitations outside the art clinic: “variations in the amh decline trajectory in the general population do not support the accurate prediction of menopause. the ability to predict pregnancy in infertility treatment and natural conception is poor” (iwase et al. 2018, 998). special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 7 egg freezing has been used since the 1980s to preserve fertility for female oncology patients, whose treatment often compromises their capacity to conceive (kondapalli, hong, and garcia 2010). its efficacy was extremely poor until cryobiologists began to apply vitrification protocols (flash freezing to 100ºc), around 2007–2008. a few clinical trials have compared vitrified oocytes with fresh cycles and found only slight, or no, differences in terms of fertilization and pregnancy rates (cobo and diaz 2011). after reviewing these data, both the european society for human reproduction and embryology and the american society for reproductive medicine declared that oocyte vitrification was now sufficiently advanced that it should no longer be regarded as experimental (eshre task force on ethics and law et al. 2012; american society for reproductive medicine 2013). both of these established clinical practices have migrated out of fertility clinic settings and are now at the heart of emerging forms of entrepreneurial biomedical services. women’s health advocates and some bioethicists in the us, the uk, and australia argue that expanded access to the amh test would promote good reproductive decision making (tremellen and savulescu 2014; azhar 2015; evans, de lacey, and tremellen 2018). this advocacy effectively aims to transform the amh test into a screening test, despite a lack of clinical validation for such an application. amh testing is now widely available, not only in general practice but also through online direct to consumer testing services. despite public warnings by the uk national health service (nhs) (n.d.), for example, women can readily order at home do-it-yourself test kits at a fraction of the cost of a full clinical investigation. start-up companies such as modern fertility (n.d.) and future family (n.d.) are rapidly scaling up their testing services and tweaking the range and combination of testing they provide, offering value-added services like telephone consultations and fertility planning guidance to their customers. the sector has become an attractive investment proposition for venture capital as low entry costs and global reach expand the potential market to more and more women (pesce 2018). how do women interpret the results of these tests? as moira kyweluk (2020) notes in her ethnography of women who have used online amh tests, the logic of the test itself, the notion that it measures an ever-dwindling ovarian reserve, inclines its interpretation towards the idea that it is a measure of incipient infertility. in waldby’s fieldwork, women who had frozen their eggs understood the or tests conducted by clinics as measuring their remaining quotient of fertile special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 8 time. the idiom of the “biological clock” was frequently mentioned in interviews, and most of the women regarded the tests as a verdict on their future. in the words of two of the interviewees, interviewer: ok. so, were you—did you feel kind of anxious waiting for the test results? or were you fairly calm about it? participant: uh…yeah, a little bit, i suppose, because, well, things like the ovarian reserve, it’s quite a big determining factor of your future, isn’t it? it’s one of those things that you can’t really change. so i have to get on with it…it was good news when it came through. (meredith, early thirties, occupational therapist) * interviewer: did you have the test when you presented to the clinic to tell you what your fertility level was? participant: [yes, the] amh test that you can get. it came back really low. i was like, “oh, damn. i’m too old, i waited too long.” (phoebe, late thirties, engineer) only two of the fifteen women in waldby’s study had made any prior attempts to conceive, so test results were their first concrete indications of the likely state of their fertility, a situation shared by the twenty-one interviewees in kyweluk’s study, who expressed a similar understanding of test results as indicators of time—as measuring remaining fertile time, or its absence if test results are poor. the test results by definition demanded a response from the women tested. kyweluk argues, “[the results] marked a…decision point, forcing the active acknowledgment of age-related fertility decline, rather than continuing with passive denial, acceptance, or, in some cases, a complete lack of prior knowledge…a series of other, seemingly endless decisions then emerge—about egg freezing now, the future need for art like in vitro fertilization, the use of donor sperm, or the pursuit of single motherhood—and become more pressing even if they are logistically or financially out of reach” (2020, 6). we can see here that the availability of direct to consumer or testing effectively expands the potential market or biomedical fertility treatments. by alerting more and more women to the state of their ovarian reserve (however inaccurately), they powerfully shape the decisions and action of those tested, as they grapple with the implications of their results. these women need to consider different options to stabilize and secure their fertility, to optimize its value and potency, special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 9 and better plan for its future mobilization. while for some this will mean simply bringing forward attempts to conceive, or doing nothing at all, others will be propelled towards repromedical solutions—seeking ivf, sperm donation, or egg freezing. while or tests have low cost barriers to initial entry, and hence can capture many women deterred by the costs and commitment of initial investigation in a fertility clinic, they will tend to channel their customers into treatment over time, a phenomenon that kyweluk (2020) terms “the new infertility pipeline.” one of these treatment options is elective or social egg freezing. while so-called medical egg freezing, to preserve fertility through cancer treatment, is subsidized in both the australian medicare scheme and the uk nhs, “social” egg freezing, to preserve personal fertility, is classified as elective and hence is offered only in the private health system, with all costs borne by the client. despite this, egg freezing has become a highly desirable option for many women. in one australian study of childless women aged eighteen to forty-five, 40 percent stated that egg freezing would be their preferred response to a low or score (evans, de lacey, and tremellen 2018). in a 2019 survey into the fertility knowledge of a thousand premenopausal women carried out by the royal college of obstetricians and gynaecologists (2019) in the uk, 44 percent of women aged eighteen to twentyfour said they would consider freezing their eggs in the future. egg freezing is an attractive possibility for many women because, we argue, it is the decisive technology in the constitution of fertility as an asset. it materializes the notion that fertility is a potential capacity separable from reproduction per se, a quality that can be isolated, preserved, and managed ex vivo. like all banks, egg banks manage value (waldby and mitchell 2006). banking one’s eggs does not commit one to a particular reproductive outcome; rather, it sequesters fertile capacity and removes it from the depredations of time and aging, thus giving a sense of “control.” it is this quality that leads naomi, in waldby’s (2019) study, to describe egg freezing as “banking time.” speaking of her sense of pressure to find a relationship, she stated, “i was getting anxious. i felt out of control, especially the fact that i was single and all that…[with egg freezing] i just felt like i’d bought some time, i’d done all i can. you’ve banked some time” (naomi, late thirties, recruitment consultant. previously unpublished interview data). the women interviewed for waldby’s (2019) study were clear that they banked their eggs because it kept all their options open—to find a partner or be a single mother, to try to conceive sexually and have a backup if that failed, to consider special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 10 whether to have children at all without the pressure of incipient infertility looming over the decision. in other qualitative studies of women’s decision to use egg freezing, the fear of lost fertile time, of running out of time, and the felt necessity to preserve fertility into the future form the participants’ central experience (van de wiel 2015; baldwin et al. 2018). egg-freezing services are now central elements of the fertility clinic business model. the human fertilisation and embryology authority (2019) notes that egg freezing is the fastest growing treatment type in the uk sector, with a 10 percent increase between 2016 and 2017 and a threefold increase since 2012. in australia and new zealand, the number of egg-freezing cycles almost doubled between 2015 and 2017 (newman et al. 2019) and in the us cycles increased 79 percent between 2014 and 2017 (peyser and hershlag 2019). however, at this point, the raw numbers of women using elective egg freezing remain fairly low. for example, in the uk there were 1,462 elective egg freezing cycles in 2017, and the majority of women using the service are over 35 (human fertilisation and embryology authority 2019). personal egg freezing remains only a remote possibility for most women because of high financial barriers to entry. at time of writing (2020) freezing costs around a$10,000 per cycle in australia, £7000 in the uk, and $us12,000 in the us. hence clientele tend toward women in their late thirties with better financial resources (human fertilisation and embryology authority 2019; inhorn et al. 2018). the possibility of extending the potential market to more and younger women is being pursued in the us by a disruptor sector: boutique, stand-alone egg freezing facilities, which may or may not include reproductive services. these facilities feature spa treatments, in-house vitamin supplements, and yoga classes, and they market themselves through social media and party-like information nights. in other words, they seek to appeal to twenty-something career women through associations with millennial glamor and self-care rather than thirty-something women interested in immediate family formation. the company kindbody (n.d.), for example, with clinics in new york, los angeles, and san francisco, describes itself as “a new generation of health and fertility care” and offers subscription membership, as well as fee-for-service pricing structures. costs for freezing remain high, but more and more large us companies offer egg freezing benefits packages to their female hires, and egg-freezing companies provide access to credit so that women can take out fertility loans (pflum 2019). the possibilities this business model presents for profitability is evident in the rush of private equity and venture capital into clinics, as the ambitions of big data companies special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 11 focus more and more on the health sector (mody and taylor 2019). as lucy van de wiel (2020) notes, “since 2016, millions of dollars of private equity (pe) and venture capital (vc) have been invested in egg freezing businesses, which materialize the promise of egg freezing as a growth technology that may be targeted at a wide group of younger, fertile women, who may or may not want to have children in the future—a far greater segment of the population than those currently accessing ivf” (6). indebting their customers through in-house loans is key to this business model, because it promises to expand the currently narrow demographic for egg freezing to younger women who lack the ready cash to purchase services but are able to commit to repayment schedules. as van de wiel argues, it is this potential catchment and concomitant debt facilities that have transformed the sector in the us from one dominated by corporate ivf clinics, which manage reproduction, to financialized start-up clinics, which manage future fertility. in this sense, not only are frozen eggs an asset for the women themselves, they are also a corporate asset for innovation capital, a material base for speculative financial investment (cooper 2008). while it seems likely that the more closely regulated environments in australia and the uk would pre-empt the development of such extreme forms of entrepreneurial fertility commerce, such developments nevertheless speak to the business opportunities made available by casting all women as incipiently infertile and encouraging those with the present or future means to spend their incomes on fertility management. even in more regulated environments, the proliferation of or tests, egg freezing options, and digital self-tracking devices all develop not only their own consumer markets but also the latent market for ivf and other biomedical treatments. in the next section we will examine the self-tracking phenomenon in more detail. ovulation self-tracking: fertile windows? ovarian reserve is a core element of human fertility. the processes of ovulation— releasing one or more eggs from the ovaries—are another central feature increasingly brought into the realm of women’s self-management labors. using relatively cheap over-the-counter devices and/or free mobile phone apps, ovulation tracking is now available to millions of women globally, including young women who have no immediate desire to conceive and women who wish to sell their capacity to conceive in surrogacy arrangements rather than to have babies within their own families. the manufacturers of ovulation monitoring systems claim that monitoring special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 12 ovulation over a period of time can be more effective than ivf in producing a desired pregnancy (wilkinson 2016). roberts argues elsewhere that in the english nhs such devices function as a kind of placeholder activity for those enduring the twelve-month average wait for nationally funded infertility treatment (roberts, mackenzie, and mort 2019, 48–49). in other national contexts such as the united states and australia, where ivf is paid for privately, ovulation monitoring is used by younger and less wealthy women and couples as a relatively cheap, early and non-invasive alternative to biomedical intervention (wilkinson 2016; lupton 2015). the range of relevant systems, from free mobile phone apps through cheap over-the-counter diy devices that measure hormone levels in spit or urine (repeat or one-off use), through to more expensive body-worn thermometers linked to online services providing expert analysis of digitally collected data, means that some kind of ovulation monitoring is available to most women in the global north. ovulation monitoring, manufacturers claim, allows women and their partners to know in advance when their “fertile window” is likely to open, so that they can time sexual intercourse or insemination appropriately (wilkinson 2016, 104–28). in biomedical discourses articulated in advertising about ovulation monitoring, and more materially through the associated devices, any woman’s monthly “fertility window” or “fertile period” is brief and potentially unpredictable. collecting tens of thousands of temperature measurements to be analyzed by algorithmic experts is necessary, manufacturers claim, to make accurate predictions. women’s self-knowledge of bodily changes (changes in vaginal or cervical fluids, ovarian pain, sexual desire) are figured as only tangentially important: devices and apps provide opportunities to manually record these, but it is unclear if or how they are taken into account algorithmically when predicting ovulation. in an ethnographic study of ovulation monitoring undertaken as part of roberts and colleagues’ wider project on health biosensing, however, joann wilkinson (2016) found that ovulation biosensing does not provide clear indications of ovulation for many women, and thus can produce more infertility (in the sense of embodied feeling) as well as a sense of partial fertility in others: the feeling that “at least i ovulate, even if i can’t conceive.” in one-to-one, qualitative interviews, women who were trying to conceive or who had recently given birth reported that ovulation monitoring helped them to come to know their bodies better, but that such knowing often involved a recalibration of their bodies as less fertile than they had previously thought. as in the following conversation with julie, although initially exciting, ovulation tracking often ended up feeling like quite a weak way special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 13 to “help” a process that after months or years of failing to conceive eventually had to be handed over to clinical experts: joann: how did you feel about monitoring your temperature? julie: it was fun at the beginning because i was curious about it, i’d not spoken to the doctor at that point so in my mind i didn’t know whether i was ovulating or whether there was a problem there, so it was fun plotting the graphs and seeing what happened because you read the information that tells you that you’ll see a dip and then your temperature will go up so seeing that happen. it was fun and it was exciting, and then i think after a while it was less fun because you’d see the dip and temperature go up and then it would repeat the same the following months. i think i actually stopped doing it after a year just to see what happened. joann: was it difficult to stop monitoring or to forget about ovulation? julie: it was, it was because i think i’d gotten into the habit of doing it, the sticks i wasn’t bothered about, it was more the temperature chart which was giving an indication of when things were happening, and it felt like i was doing something, it felt as though i was at least trying to do something to help. (wilkinson 2016, 154–55) ovulation monitoring is closely linked to the increasingly widespread and normalized practice of digital menstrual tracking. no longer a somewhatmaligned contraceptive practice (associated with the “rhythm method” promoted by the catholic church) or esoteric feminist pursuit, menstrual tracking and recording can be easily undertaken through one of hundreds of available apps, many of which are free (although they require a smartphone and internet access). smart watches, from companies such as apple and garmin, routinely include menstrual or fertility tracking apps on or alongside their devices. with an estimated 200 million users, such apps are second in popularity only to running apps within the health app market (roberts, mackenzie, and mort 2019, 39). as noted earlier, these devices and apps can also provide data to researchers and technology and app development companies. although menstrual apps are typically not designed for this purpose, evidence suggests that they are also used to make contraceptive decisions; indeed, in 2017 one app was approved for use as a contraceptive in the us and europe (roberts, mackenzie, and mort 2019, 34). as a way of coming to know one’s menstrual cycle for purposes of contraception or conception (or indeed, simply as self-knowledge), menstrual tracking, like ovulation monitoring, articulates fertility as something rather obscure that one special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 14 needs to both digitally record and analyze to understand (see also lupton 2015). for those with adequate means, or who are starting to attempt conception (monash ivf [n.d.] talks about those having tried unsuccessfully for “a few months”), private ivf clinics in australia now offer “ovulation tracking” services. these services are also framed as something women and couples “who do not wish to undergo infertility investigations and treatments” (monash ivf, n.d.) could do. involving clinic appointments, blood tests, and pelvic ultrasounds, however, means it is rather difficult to disentangle such services from “infertility investigations”: the key difference appears to be that clients do not meet with a fertility specialist, but rather a nurse (meaning they can be scaled up rather more cheaply, of course). unsurprisingly, clinics assert that their services offer a “more accurate and more comprehensive understanding” (ivfaustralia, n.d.) than home tracking systems. such websites are intense arenas of information and exhortation around in/fertility—women and couples are encouraged to attend seminars, sign up for alerts, book online appointments, consume pages and pages of text and images. it seems clear to us that the offering of ovulation tracking services stretches ivf clinics’ clientele group about as far as they can go in relation to women wanting to conceive: that is, women with enough money can now legitimately begin their engagement with ivf clinics within “a few months” of trying to conceive. the use of the phrase “ovulation tracking” is important: this term is typically associated with non-clinical, domestic self-tracking. its use by ivf clinics is a clear attempt to capture a market segment that is “not yet” enrolled in biomedical interventions. tracking the perimenopause: taking control? closely linked to ovulation tracking and related exhortations that women should come to know and act responsibly in relation to their fertility is an emerging set of knowledges and practices pertaining to the (peri)menopause. although marketed as innovative, many menopause tracking apps are simple digital diaries that notify users when they are twelve months post their most recently recorded menstrual period (this follows the biomedical definition of menopause). more complex apps can also provide a method and digital space to record symptoms such as hot flushes, interrupted sleep, mood changes, and sexual difficulties, connecting users to others experiencing similar symptoms in hosted discussions and providing educational articles and videos on a range of topics. other apps, such as menopro (sponsored by the north american menopause society of clinicians), make suggestions about biomedical treatments of such symptoms and are intended for women to use with their clinicians to make “personalized decisions” about special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 15 hormonal treatment options (menopro, n.d.). all of these apps articulate mainstream biomedical understandings of the menopause as the “end of fertility,” a time when women have no more viable ova and will be unable to reproduce “naturally” and/or with their own eggs (although ivf cycles with donor or frozen eggs may still be possible). in the context of the current argument, what is most interesting to us is the newly prominent state of the “perimenopause,” defined by the australian menopause centre (n.d.) as “the phase which takes place before the final cessation of periods. it can take place over several years leading up to menopause, with some women experiencing perimenopause for 4 to 8 years.” this “phase” involves decreasing levels of estrogen, creating symptoms such as sleep disturbance, hot flushes, irritability, urinary tract problems, lower sex drive, vaginal dryness, pain during vaginal intercourse, irregular periods, and, importantly, lower fertility. across a range of apps, internet sites, and forums, within self-help literature, and in gp and fertility clinics, women are encouraged to learn the signs of the perimenopause and to act swiftly in relation to the associated decline in fertility. women are also warned that menopause can come “early,” and, indeed, that many may be unable to conceive due to low egg reserve well before any physical signs of menopause or before their periods cease. menstrual tracking app companies articulate the perimenopause as a time to act, to take “control.” on clue’s extensive, chatty website, ceo ida tin (2015), for example, exhorts women to take back control: stop waiting and start tracking. we talk a lot about waiting when it comes to our reproductive health: waiting for your period, waiting for menopause or waiting to get pregnant. but, in fact, we don’t need to wait for menopause because we can proactively track its arrival. peri-menopause can start up to 10 years before your last menstrual period and irregular periods are characteristic of this time in addition to the classic menopausal symptoms: hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness. by understanding these signs, and discussing them with other women, you will immediately feel more in control. here, the perimenopause becomes a distinct, yet very long, phase that can and should be monitored. astonishingly, the landing page of the mysysters perimenopause app describes perimenopause as occurring “between puberty and the menopause.” given that puberty now regularly begins before girls’ tenth birthday (roberts 2015), such a framing articulates an extraordinary shift in the special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 16 framing of fertility as incipient loss across female lifetimes. this framing is not elaborated in the rest of the website, where the possible age of perimenopause is nonetheless described as “mid-30s,” which, given that medically menopause is defined as “early” if it starts at forty-five, stretches the app user pool to its widest possible remit. like users of clue, mysysters subscribers are advised to “take control of your perimenopause experience: “no one told us that hot flashes could start in our mid-30s and continue into our 60s. the same for other signs of menopause such as night sweats, migraines, weight gain, anxiety and many other symptoms. the mysysters app was created to help women grow their knowledge and help them to make informed decisions about their own care during this sometimes-difficult stage of life.” materially, the practices of tracking the perimenopause are the same as those used to track menstrual cycles, albeit with a somewhat different set of symptoms for users to document. articulating a demise in ovarian reserve and the end of a woman’s physiological reproductive life, however, (peri)menopausal tracking is inflected with a sense of inevitable reproductive decline. currently, these are the final months or years in which women with means can be sold fertility services and related products—that is, of course, unless they have previously frozen eggs. the poorly defined and highly stretchable perimenopause is, we suggest, rapidly becoming a feature of contemporary figurations of incipient fertility through which women are encouraged to document, come to know, and manage their long-presaged fertility decline. discussion in the uk, australia, and the us, the causes of “delayed” maternity are social, related to extended credentialing, the organization of the workforce, the time structure of careers, the deferral of partnering, and the high costs of household formation (mills et al. 2011; office for national statistics 2018; inhorn et al 2018). these social dynamics mean that, for most women, motherhood during their most fertile years is impossible, and for many may be undesirable. in the absence of social policy to make family formation less onerous, tracking and banking technology offers (some) women a degree of agency over their reproductive lives while deferring broader questions of social equity. we have argued here that ovulation tracking and egg-banking technologies enroll women into chains of consumption and platform-enabled circulation of promissory discourses about what (fertility) biosensing or self-monitoring can achieve. the new ways of living and knowing involved reframe notions of the life special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 17 course and what constitutes a good life. in effect, these interventions organize a woman’s life course, from childhood, as defined by their fertile capacity, so that each point in a lifetime (except extreme old age perhaps) demands an equivalent type of fertility self-assessment and investment. while fertility tracking promises to reconcile the incongruities between the demands of the economy (household formation, labor, education) and the constraints of women’s reproductive physiology, it transforms fertility from an immanent quality of female embodiment into an abstractable, calculable resource, an asset subject to various forms of metrology and real-time evaluation. once fertility is a quantifiable resource, it is more easily reconciled with processes of planning, management, and decision, and with economic, algorithmic, and clock-time logics more broadly (waldby 2019). however, if fertility is an asset to be managed for the future, it is also an asset that dwindles over time. according to the epidemiology of ovarian reserve, its value constantly diminishes, a diminution that begins before birth (trounson and godsen 2003) and continues until menopause. fertility tracking always measures decline, and transforms it into ever smaller increments, to be plotted not in the longue durée of a life but in months, days, hours, and even minutes, mapping an ever more granular, diminishing return. we argue that it is this logic of fertility as a precious, always dwindling asset that renders it such a lucrative target for both innovative clinical services and app and technology developers. as declan kuch and colleagues argue, the rush of big data companies into health applications “aim[s] to disentangle medical interventions from clinics through the development of continuous monitoring devices” (kuch, kearnes, and gulson 2020, 529). we can see in the struggles between the ivf clinic sector and the new or testing, egg freezing, and fertility self-tracking disruptor sector a contest over which business model can best capitalize on the metrification of fertility. in the accounts we have provided of the ways women experience self-tracking and over-the-counter testing, it is evident that the prospect of constant decline presses them into decisions that entail expensive courses of action—egg freezing, fertility treatments, or more exhaustive forms of or testing and tracking. hence, metrified fertility presents multiple business opportunities, both through consumption of the apps, devices, and services necessary to measure, and through the treatments necessary to act on measurement. it is not surprising, in these circumstances, that private equity and venture capital is finding its way into the sector and further reshaping its speculative possibilities (van de wiel 2020). contemporary framings of incipient infertility focus on the physical capacities and special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 18 properties of bodies (how many eggs remain, which hormone levels are evident, what symptoms bodies present), and treat physiological processes such as ovulation as modularizable. they make no reference to the social and cultural causes of infertility or low fertility, and bear little relation to wider population figures that indicate relatively stable rates of reproduction in many parts of the global north such as australia and the uk (organisation for economic cooperation and development 2017). while many women may embrace ovulation tracking and testing practices and associated biomedical interventions, their abundance and high visibility mask profound social and political questions about the shape of contemporary women’s lives and the continued stratification of reproductive rights. we can see this stratification clearly when we consider another instance where women’s fertility is constituted as an asset: in the case of transnational commercial surrogacy. here, relatively poor women in the global south, as well as in wealthy jurisdictions like some states in the us, can be contracted by clinics and intending parents to use their “surplus” gestational capacity as a rentable asset. they can lease their ability to conceive and carry a pregnancy to others in exchange for a fee. in this case, however, the woman’s fertility only becomes valuable when it is made available for use by wealthy others. it is not an asset in relation to her own child-bearing capacity, which will be figured typically as a form of excessive and wasteful fecundity, contributing to welfare mothering or overpopulation in the developing world nations in which much transnational surrogacy is situated (cooper and waldby 2014). this is only one example of profound stratification in the value attached to women’s reproductive capacities, but we can see how, put in this context, the technologies and practices we describe in this paper contribute to the contemporary reshaping of health and life inequalities. acknowledgements research for this article was supported by an australian research council grant ft100100176 c. waldby ‘the oöcyte economy: the changing meanings of human eggs in fertility, assisted reproduction and stem cell research’ and by intel’s university research office under the biosensors in everyday life program, led by dawn nafus. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 19 notes 1 in interviews with clinical staff at egg freezing facilities in london, several noted that they did not need to publicize their services very vigorously because of the high level of public media attention paid to egg freezing (waldby 2019). 2 practices of data selling and sharing in the fertility tracking field are discussed in roberts, mackenzie, and mort 2019, 54–63. 3 for an overview of feminist, queer, and anti-racist work on the interconnections between reproductive justice, stratified reproduction, and new reproductive technologies, see smietana, thompson, and twine 2018. references adams, virginia., michelle. murphy, and adele e. clarke. 2009. 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"running out of time: exploring women’s motivations for social egg freezing." journal of psychosomatic obstetrics & gynecology 245 (january). doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.112697 . benjamin, ruha. 2018. “black afterlives matter: cultivating kinfulness as reproductive justice.” in making kin not population: reconceiving generations, edited by adele clarke and donna haraway, 41–66. chicago: prickly paradigm press. bhatia, rajani and lisa campo-engelstein. 2018. “the biomedicalization of social egg freezing: a comparative analysis of european and american professional ethics opinions and us news and popular media.” science, technology, & human values 43 (5): 864-887. british fertility society. n.d. accessed march 20, 2020. https://www.britishfertilitysociety.org.uk/. carroll, katherine, and charlotte kroløkke. 2018. “freezing for love: enacting ‘responsible’ reproductive citizenship through egg freezing.” culture, health & sexuality 20 (9): 992–1005. clarke, adele, and donna haraway, eds. 2018. making kin not population: reconceiving generations. chicago: prickly paradigm press. cobo, ana, and césar diaz. 2011. “clinical application of oocyte vitrification: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.” fertility and sterility 96 (2): 277–85. cooper, melinda. 2008. life as surplus: biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era. seattle: university of washington press. cooper, melinda, and catherine waldby. 2014. clinical labor: tissue donors and research subjects in the global bioeconomy. durham, nc: duke university press. eshre task force on ethics and law. 2012. “oocyte cryopreservation for age-related fertility loss.” human reproduction, 27 (5): 1231–1237. davis, angela. 2012. modern motherhood: women and family in england, c. 19452000. manchester: manchester university press. evans, alisha, sheryl de lacey, and kelton tremellen. 2018. "australians’ understanding of the decline in fertility with increasing age and attitudes towards ovarian reserve screening." australian journal of primary health 24 (5): 428–33. https://www.britishfertilitysociety.org.uk/ special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 21 faddy, malcolm j., and roger g. godsen. 2003. “modelling the dynamics of ovarian follicle utilization throughout life.” in biology and pathology of the oocyte: role in fertility and reproductive medicine, edited by alan o. trounson and roger g. godsen, 44–52. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. future family. n.d. accessed march 20, 2020. https://www.futurefamily.com/. green, ricki. 2014. “your fertility launches new national ‘fertility is ageist’ campaign via marmalade melbourne. campaign brief, march 17, 2014. https://campaignbrief.com/your-fertility-launches-new-na/. huang, yu-ling, and chia-ling wu. 2018. “new feminist biopolitics for ultra-lowfertility east asia.” in making kin not population: reconceiving generations, edited by adele clarke and donna haraway, 125–44. chicago: prickly paradigm press. hudson, nicky, lorraine culley, cathy herbrand, vincenzo pavone, guido pennings, veerle provoost, catherine coveney, and sara lafuente funes. 2020. 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"quantifying fertility? direct-to-consumer ovarian reserve testing and the new (in)fertility pipeline." social science & medicine, no. 245, 112697. https://www.futurefamily.com/ https://campaignbrief.com/your-fertility-launches-new-na/ https://doi.org/10.1186/s12958-018-0389-z http://www.ivf.com.au/ https://kindbody.com/ special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 22 lupton, deborah. 2015. “quantified sex: a critical analysis of sexual and reproductive self-tracking using apps.” culture, health and sexuality 17(4): 440-53. martin, lauren j. 2010. "anticipating infertility: egg freezing, genetic preservation, and risk." gender & society 24 (4): 526–45. mills, melinda, ronald r. rindfuss, peter mcdonald, egbert r. te velde, and eshre reproduction and society task force. 2011."why do people postpone parenthood? reasons and social policy incentives." human reproduction update 17 (6): 848–60. modern fertility. n.d. accessed march 20, 2020. https://modernfertility.com/. mody, seema, and harriet taylor. 2019. "egg freezing has become the go-to for delayed parenthood— and companies are popping up to provide more costeffective solutions." cnbc, may 9, 2019. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/09/millennials-are-driving-down-the-cost-of-eggfreezing.html. monash ifv. n.d. accessed february 28, 2020. www.monashivf.com. mort, maggie, celia roberts, mette k. furbo, joann wilkinson, and adrian mackenzie. 2016. "biosensing: how citizens’ views illuminate emerging health and social risks." health, risk & society 17 (7/8): 605–23. moscucci, ornella. 2003. "holistic obstetrics: the origins of ‘natural childbirth’ in britain.” postgraduate medical journal, 79:168-173. mysysters. n.d. accessed june 20, 2020. https://mysysters.com. national health service.2017. “hormonal tests waste time and money.” accessed march 20, 2020. https://www.nhs.uk/news/pregnancy-and-child/hormonal-fertilitytests-waste-time-and-money/. newman, jade e., oisin fitzgerald, repon c. paul, and georgina m. chambers. 2019. assisted reproductive technology in australia and new zealand 2017. sydney: australia national perinatal epidemiology and statistics unit. office for national statistics. 2018. childbearing for women born in different years, england and wales: 2017. london, uk: office for national statistics. organisation for economic co-operation and development. 2017. sf2.3: age of mothers at childbirth and age-specific fertility. paris: oecd . pesce, nicole l. 2018. “fertility tests can cost $1,000: this company is offering an at-home version for $199.” 1 june. marketwatch. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/fertility-tests-can-cost-1000-this-company-isoffering-an-at-home-version-for-199-2018-06-01 peyser, alexandra, and avner hershlag. 2019. "is the increase in egg freezing cycles https://modernfertility.com/ https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/09/millennials-are-driving-down-the-cost-of-egg-freezing.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/09/millennials-are-driving-down-the-cost-of-egg-freezing.html http://www.monashivf.com/ https://mysysters.com/ https://www.nhs.uk/news/pregnancy-and-child/hormonal-fertility-tests-waste-time-and-money/ https://www.nhs.uk/news/pregnancy-and-child/hormonal-fertility-tests-waste-time-and-money/ special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 23 related to increased numbers of single women in the united states?" fertility and sterility 112 (3): e119. pflum, mary. 2019. 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"health social movements and the hybridisation of 'cause regimes': an ethnography of a british childbirth organisation." social movement studies 15 (4): 417–30. rose, nikolas s. 2007. politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. princeton, nj: princeton university press. royal college of obstetricians and gynaecologists. 2019. “confusing fertility advice sparking unnecessary worry among uk women.” royal college of obstetricians and gynaecologists news, march 14, 2019. https://www.rcog.org.uk/en/news/confusingfertility-advice-sparking-unnecessary-worry-among-uk-women/. sasser, jade s. 2018. on infertile ground: population control and women's rights in the era of climate change. new york: nyu press. shi, lihong. 2014. "micro-blogs, online forums, and the birth-control policy: social media and the politics of reproduction in china." culture, medicine, and psychiatry 38 (1): 115–32. smietana, marcin, charis thompson, and france w. twine. 2018. ”making and breaking families: reading queer reproductions, stratified reproduction and reproductive justice together.” reproductive biomedicine & society online 7 (november): 112–30. sussman, anna l. 2019. “the case for redefining infertility.” the new yorker, june 18, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-case-for-socialinfertility. thiebes, scott, phillipp a. toussaint, jaehyeon ju, jae-hyeon ahn, kalle lyytinen, and ali sunyaev. 2020. "valuable genomes: taxonomy and archetypes of business models in direct-to-consumer genetic testing." journal of medical internet research 22 (1): e14890. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/features/egg-freezing-startups-have-wall-street-talking-traditional-fertility-doctors-n978526 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/features/egg-freezing-startups-have-wall-street-talking-traditional-fertility-doctors-n978526 https://www.rcog.org.uk/en/news/confusing-fertility-advice-sparking-unnecessary-worry-among-uk-women/ https://www.rcog.org.uk/en/news/confusing-fertility-advice-sparking-unnecessary-worry-among-uk-women/ https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-case-for-social-infertility https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-case-for-social-infertility special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 24 throsby, karen. 2004. when ivf fails: feminism, infertility, and the negotiation of normality. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. tin, ida. 2015. “8 reasons to talk openly about menopause.” clue, june 15, 2015. https://helloclue.com/articles/life-stages/8-reasons-to-talk-openly-aboutmenopause. tremellen, kelton, and julian savulescu. 2014. 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"the speculative turn in ivf: egg freezing and the financialization of fertility." new genetics and society 39 (3): 1–21. vora, kalindi. 2015. life support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. wahlberg, ayo. 2018. good quality: the routinization of sperm banking in china. oakland: university of california press. waldby, catherine. 1984. “the political regulation of motherhood in australia, 1880– 1920.” honours thesis, university of sydney. ———. 2015. “‘banking time’: egg freezing and the negotiation of future fertility." culture, health & sexuality 17 (4): 470–82. ———. 2019. the oocyte economy: the changing meaning of human eggs. durham, nc: duke university press. waldby, catherine, and melinda cooper. 2008. "the biopolitics of reproduction: post-fordist biotechnology and women’s clinical labour." australian feminist studies 23 (55): 57–73. ———. 2010. "from reproductive work to regenerative labour: the female body and the stem cell industries." feminist theory 11 (1): 3–22. waldby, catherine, and robert mitchell. 2006. tissue economies: blood, organs, and cell lines in late capitalism. durham, nc: duke university press. wilkinson, joann. 2016. “ovulation biosensors: emerging practices of knowing and sensing.” phd diss., lancaster university. wilkinson, joann, celia roberts, and maggie mort. 2015. "ovulation monitoring and https://helloclue.com/articles/life-stages/8-reasons-to-talk-openly-about-menopause https://helloclue.com/articles/life-stages/8-reasons-to-talk-openly-about-menopause special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) celia roberts and catherine waldby, 2021 25 reproductive heterosex: living the conceptive imperative?" culture, health & sexuality 17 (4): 454–69. author bios celia roberts is a professor in the school of sociology at the australian national university. her most recent books are living data: making sense of health biosensing, (with adrian mackenzie and maggie mort, bristol university press, 2019) and the routledge companion to actor-network theory (with anders blok and ignacio farías, routledge, 2019). she is currently working on reproduction during the 2019-20 australian bushfires. catherine waldby is director of the research school of social sciences at the australian national university and visiting professor at the department of global health and social medicine at king’s college, london. her recent books include clinical labor: tissue donors and research subjects in the global bioeconomy (with melinda cooper, duke university press 2014) and the oöcyte economy: the changing meanings of human eggs, duke university press (2019). book review | reclaiming our space: how black feminists are changing the world from the tweets to the streets, by feminista jones (beacon press, 2019) madenga, f. (2020). s review of reclaiming our space: how black feminists are changing the world from the tweets to the streets, by feminista jones (beacon press, 2019). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © florence madenga, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | reclaiming our space: how black feminists are changing the world from the tweets to the streets, by feminista jones (beacon press, 2019) florence madenga annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania florence.madenga@asc.upenn.edu in reclaiming our space, feminista jones traces a much-needed accessible history of black feminist activism online and off, in the age of twitter and the eras before, and in the united states and beyond. jones, a queer black woman, activist, writer, and community organizer, draws her frameworks from many sources, including black feminist thinkers who would be considered part of the “canon” in academia (e.g., bell hooks, barbara smith, angela davis, and the voices that were an integral part of the combahee river collective of the 1970s), as well as female hiphop icons (from queen latifah and salt-n-pepa to lil’ kim and cardi b). she thinks with fellow black feminists who are invested in dialogue online and social justice mobilization offline in their communities, and includes snippets and screenshots of exchanges that have led to fruitful collaboration. jones’s book contributes to past and ongoing conversations in media and internet studies: the conceptualizations of black digital communities. on the “validation” of black twitter as a digital community in such a space, jones marks dr. meredith clark’s work as some of the first to “definitively” write about black twitter as an online community, with multilevel networking processes and unique cultural dynamics. jones builds on this conversation by situating black feminist twitter’s existence in this broader community space as “a subculture” (p. 15). on this book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) florence madenga, 2020 2 community within a community, jones tackles questions around misogyny and racism (including harassment and violence by some, mostly male, members of black twitter towards black feminist activists) and the simultaneous hypervisibility and marginalization of black feminist voices in spaces on social media. before the era of twitter and facebook, lisa nakamura asked what happened to race online and offline in her important book cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet (2002). she critiqued earlier frameworks of the internet that saw it as a “utopia” where race could be transcended; instead, she asserted, “the internet is where race happens” (nakamura, 2002, p. xi). overly idealized views of racial harmony in “cyberspace” now seem obviously naive, but nakamura’s work was, and still is, important in addressing how the internet shapes perceptions of race, gender, and ethnicity—identity wholesale. she argued that marginalized identities were being shaped online through “cybertypes.” race could be performed via avatars and through identity tourism in the chat rooms preceding the social media platforms and the online social movements that jones focuses on. nakamura’s (2002) intervention is that “attention must be paid to discourses with rather than appropriations of the other” online (p. 60). looking at black online communities on social media and how conversations are facilitated between members and with non-members is one avenue through which to pay attention to those discourses. cybertypes raises major concerns regarding the discursive gaps in online discourse at the time, and how those gaps were a major obstacle to a “progressive” internet future. nakamura calls for more and newer perspectives on critical race theory to interrogate cyberculture, beyond literary analysis in more traditional fields (and within a system that severely lacks enough scholars of color). she also points out the “lack of internet discourse often found along raced, classed, and still to a narrowing extent, gendered lines [that] continue to cut particular bodies out of various histories in the making” (nakamura, 2002, p. 3). towards the end of the book, she poses these questions: “whose ideas have power? whose discourse is privileged? and why haven't these questions been asked before?” (nakamura, 2002, p. 138). while the internet may look different and more “inclusive” now than it did in the early 2000s, and as social media platforms serve as sites for discourse, the questions nakamura asks should still be central in internet studies. they should be important to any discipline concerned with intersectionality, and should be used to continuously interrogate what is considered “scholarship” and what is not. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) florence madenga, 2020 3 jones joins other black feminist writers, scholars, and social commentators, such as tressie mcmillan cottom (thick: and other essays, 2019) and brittany cooper (eloquent rage, 2018), who have recently used stories of their own personal journeys (beyond the academy) to critically engage with what it means to galvanize communities on twitter and encourage discourse centered on intersectionality. jones’s work also responds to nakamura’s call by spotlighting bodies of black women who have been cut out of the history of the internet, social media, and activism. she points to how black feminist activists have contributed significantly to cyberfeminism, as well as how they have been innovative in the social media space, particularly twitter, but are often unnamed and/or completely left out of its history. in chapter 1, she explores the use of hashtags by black women on twitter in organizing resistance and carving out a space for their activism. throughout the book, she provides ample examples of when “hashtags have been important mechanisms in modern movement-building, and black women, black feminist women especially, have exemplified best practices when it comes to hashtag utilization” (p. 16). these hashtags include #youoksis, #blacklivesmatter, #girlslikeus, #rhodesmustfall, #rapecultureiswhen, #whyistayed, #nmos14 (national moment of silence 2014 for michael brown, which led to 119 vigils across 42 states and 5 countries), and countless others. jones also connects the way in which twitter functions as a platform (how to @ someone, twitter threads, retweeting and related twitter etiquette) to ways in which black women are already familiar with communicating—namely, call-andresponse communication structures rooted in widespread african cultural contexts, the concept of “tweeting as antiphony” from ashton t. crawley’s black pentecostal breath: the aesthetics of possibility (2016), and the legacy and style of hip-hop cypher (coded language) and rap battles. in magazine pieces and other popular media, the story of how twitter threads came to be has been attributed to venture capitalist marc andreessen, who began linking tweets in his timeline before the feature was available on the platform. but jones reveals that actually, as early as 2013, a black woman activist, @thetrudz, linked her tweets together by replying to herself, so that she could connect her tweets to tell a story that her followers could digest with a click on the original tweet. jones then asks, “could someone before @thetrudz have done this also? perhaps. could @thetrudz and andreessen have started linking tweets near the same time? possibly. but @thetrudz is not mentioned in the same breath as andreessen as an innovator. and remember, origin stories matter” (p. 42). book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) florence madenga, 2020 4 jones wants to make it very clear in the book that black feminist scholars and activists have a strong and quantifiable presence on social media, and they are dedicated to pushing for and maintaining spaces where their voices can be heard. she is also speaking to the next wave of activists after her, “millennial women who grew up with caller id and google in their pockets” (p. 5). to all the various, overlapping generations of black feminists, jones says, who could have imagined that the pound sign, once valuable primarily for its use on touch-tone landline phones, would become one of the most powerful weapons for black feminism? who could have predicted that people who never set foot on a college campus, much less in a specialized journalism school, would have international audiences reading their cultural and sociopolitical analyses? or have their work be part of a rigorous academic curriculum at universities they could never afford to attend? that is what black feminist activism looks like today. (p. 6). indeed, twitter has become a space that many may have never imagined, especially when cybertypes was published. however, it is still important, as we look towards the future of discourse and intersectionality on social media, to move cautiously. like overly optimistic notions of a post-racial internet in our past, beliefs about the “democratizing” force of social media have also dissipated as concerns over privacy issues and surveillance, online harassment, and lack of responsibility on the part of platforms to foster a truly welcoming space for marginalized people continue to come to the fore. the present is located in a world where the algorithmic methods tethered to platforms are not neutral (and often are often discriminatory), or can be so undiscerning that the same platform that can facilitate community building can also, as techno-sociologist zeynep tufekci (2017) describes, “easily cater to the interests of nazis.” while jones acknowledges that when it comes to social media platforms, “the onus of responsibility for minimizing online harassment and abuse is put on victims” (p. 99), she does not go much further in interrogating the structural obstacles that future black feminist activists may face and potential interventions they may employ. references cooper, b. c. (2019). eloquent rage: a black feminist discovers her superpower. new york, ny: picador. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) florence madenga, 2020 5 crawley, a. t. (2016). black pentecostal breath: the aesthetics of possibility. new york, ny: temple university press. macmillan cottom, t. (2019). thick: and other essays. new york, ny: the new press. nakamura, l. (2002). cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet. new york, ny: routledge. tufekci, z. (2017, september 23). facebook’s ad scandal isn't a “fail,” it's a feature. the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/opinion/sunday/facebook-ad-scandal.html author bio florence madenga is a doctoral student at the annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania, and a research fellow at the center for advanced research in global communication. her work explores the evolution and boundaries of media as it pertains to expanding globalization as well as new and old conceptualizations of identity building. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/opinion/sunday/facebook-ad-scandal.html microsoft word lab-pollock,roy.docx pollock, a. and roy, d. (2017). how do black lives matter in teaching, lab practices, and research?. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(1), 1-38 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © anne pollock and deboleena roy, 2017| licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license lab meeting how do black lives matter in teaching, lab practices, and research? anne pollock georgia tech apollock@gatech.edu deboleena roy emory university droy2@emory.edu in this lab meeting, we have invited lab scientists, social scientists, and humanists from the working group on race and racism in contemporary biomedicine, of which we are both members, to consider the following question: “how do black lives matter in teaching, lab practices, and research? convened by anne pollock and deboleena roy for the working group on race and racism in contemporary biomedicine <racebiomed.org introduction the working group on race and racism in contemporary biomedicine (racebiomed.org) draws together faculty, researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students from atlanta-area institutions, including georgia 2 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) institute of technology (hereafter georgia tech), emory university, spelman college, georgia state university, and agnes scott college. the working group was founded in 2015 with seed funding from the georgia tech provost to spark interdisciplinary and cross‐institution collaborative research on race and racism in contemporary biomedical research, with the goal of building intellectual common ground among researchers coming from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. our working group has been grappling with the ways in which science is implicated in the racism of the society as a whole, but we are not anti-science: we aspire to make the work of science more inclusive of people from historically excluded groups, and to mobilize both our lab-based scientific work and our feminist sts toward intersectional antiracist ends. the following lab meeting highlights our working group’s multidisciplinary approach to demonstrate the value to differing sociological, epistemological, methodological, and institutional locations across academe. together, these entries are aligned with a tradition of feminist work that questions who it is that gets to count as a knower in science, and what constitutes a proper object of inquiry in the sciences. the opening contributions by natural scientists, for instance, reiterates the long enduring separation of lab work from life experience—including their own lives and their community commitments. the black lives matter movement (hereafter blm) reminds us, as sandra harding has also suggested, that “starting from people’s lives” is an important site for science. the first of these entries is by manu platt, a professor of biomedical engineering who explores ways in which his own black life matters in his lab, classroom, and beyond. this is followed by a short but sharp manifesto written by biochemistry undergraduates at spelman that also affirm the mattering of black scientists, especially women. this is followed by an entry by two biochemistry professors at spelman, kimberly jackson and leyte winfield, that can be read as a response to the undergraduates’ call. in the next entry, lewis wheaton, a professor of biological 3 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) sciences at georgia tech, seeks to integrate his understanding of the unaddressed basic needs of black people living with disabilities, whom he passes on his daily commute, with the high-tech research he conducts in his lab. finally, c. holly lewis, a m.d./ph.d. student, describes an effort to bring together research and community engagement around sickle cell disease. the epistemological approaches to scientific inquiry relayed in these entries may be considered conventional; however, the experiences behind their motivation and their contextualization show how intersectional feminist commitments can shape science. in both entries, the authors suggest that social inequality leads to scientific inequality. the very grounds of knowledge-making practices in the sciences are questioned in the next three pieces. emily pingel, a ph.d. student in sociology, decries the ways that black experiences are written out of what counts as “evidence.” aziza belcher platt, a psychology practitioner and ph.d. student, and joni-leigh webster, a ph.d. student in sociology, both argue – albeit in different ways – for the inextricably psycho/somatic nature of black women’s health, resisting the mind/body dualism that undergirds conventional medical frames. each article addresses the question of how “race” get operationalized as a technoscientific object. together, these pieces highlight the importance of the feminist concern regarding which bodies of knowledge and what forms of evidence are counted as valid, and which ones ultimately are seen as contributions to scientific inquiry. the remainder of the entries below are from academics who explore how the black lives matter movement frames their own specific research, especially as centered by the experiences of black women. jennifer singh, a professor of sociology, highlights the importance of developing situational analyses and reflective ethnographic practices through her work on autism inequalities. renee shelby, a ph.d. student in sociology, shares her work on rape kits to demonstrate what an antiracist framework can do to better understand institutionalized gender violence. finally, kristen abatsis mchenry, a professor of comparative women’s studies, foregrounds the sexist and racist structures that drive 4 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) political economies of breast cancer research. mchenry also points to the interventions that become possible when we think about bodies and technologies through queer and anti-racist art and activism. using intersectional frameworks, all three of these case studies demonstrate that the goals of our research can be reformulated through feminist analyses. the voices presented in this lab meeting are heterogeneous by design. we find the cacophony that emerges to be a welcome reprieve from the narrow hermetic character of so many academic fora, and the dissonance generated thereby instantiates the plural registers at which black lives can matter in biomedical research. we have also designed this forum to allow for more authentic participation by natural scientists as well as by social scientists and humanists because the contributors can speak in their own terms rather than those of feminist sts scholarship, narrowly conceived. in this way, this lab meeting seeks to expand what counts as feminist technoscience at the same time that it expands what counts as science. black professors are also black bodies that matter manu o. platt, ph.d., biomedical engineering, georgia tech and emory university as an african-american biomedical engineering professor with a bachelor’s degree from morehouse college, the only all-male historically black college in the united states, my educational experiences, lifetime experiences, and professional experiences have all shaped the way black lives matter (blm) in my research and teaching. with only 4% of the professoriate being black at traditionally white colleges and universities (washington post), an even lower percentage for those of us in science, technology, engineering and math (stem) fields, and only 5% of life science ph.d.s and only 3.9% of engineering ph.d.s going to african americans according to 2015 national science foundation (nsf) report, my black life matters as an important statistic, and this motivates me to 5 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) be successful in my academic position. when the blm movement began, emerging out of the protests over mike brown’s murder in ferguson, mississippi, i was at a workshop in colorado springs for the directors of science and technology centers funded by the national science foundation. my mind was not on the meeting at all because i kept stepping out to be updated and did not want to miss president obama’s speech on the situation, while others paid it no mind. i am constantly reminded by the destruction of black bodies at the hands of police that, despite my degrees and accomplishments, my black life matters to police just as little as other black lives do. yet i persist and forge onward. as a scientist, i hope to continue to work on questions i find important and want to solve, which are predominantly centered on minority health disparities and black lives: sickle cell anemia, hiv-mediated cardiovascular disease, and personalized medicine approaches for treating breast cancer. sickle cell anemia predominantly impacts african americans in the u.s. but impacts millions globally (piel, hay et al. 2013); hiv has the highest numbers of new incidents in the black community (cdc fact sheet); and although white women are more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer, black women are more likely to die from it (o'keefe, meltzer et al. 2015). the other reason i need to be successful is due to the scarce few numbers who look like me in this field. i want to be able to provide visual representation to the next generation of engineers, and to recruit those who may not have seen this career as an opportunity for them. many of us who graduate from an hbcu with confidence, motivation, and a strong yearning to perform socially responsible science aimed at helping underserved communities and overlooked diseases, find ourselves arriving at predominantly white graduate schools and having to adapt to an entirely new set of mentors who do not have a reference of our lived experience in the united states. this occurred even before the age of trump. we now have the added challenge of working in college campuses that are exploding with racial incidents. my black life matters 6 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) to black ph.d. students who i mentor through to completion, both as my direct research advisees or indirectly through other mentoring interactions, with the goal of increasing or at least maintaining that 3.9%. it has also been interesting, as i have moved through the tenure process successfully, to meet the new hurdle of the federal funding of science wrought by sequestration that cut the national institutes of health budget by 5%, $1.55 billion of its 2013 budget (nih). when i was in graduate school, funding rates were for the top 25-30% of grant proposals. in today’s climate, most investigator-initiated grants are only at a 9-12% funding line. this severely limits the type of research that will be funded, and also limits the type of investigator that will be funded (huffington post). sequestration as a federal budgetary policy was passed only two years after the seminal 2011 study in science that determined, after a review of over 80,000 grant applications, that black professors were 50% less likely to receive nih investigator-initiated research funding compared with whites. this was even after removing other factors such as education, publication record, and type of institution (science). so being black matters in decisions regarding whether or not i will be funded by the nih, the largest funder of biomedical research in the united states. in addition to that, there is my research focus. sickle cell disease, the most common genetic disorder affects over 100,000 americans, but millions more globally, receives substantially lower funding as a federal priority compared to cystic fibrosis (30,000 in u.s., 70,000 worldwide) and hemophilia (20,000 us, 400,000 worldwide). perhaps this is because it predominantly affects black lives in the u.s. with 1 in 400 black americans having sickle cell anemia, and 1 in 12 being carriers (cdc sickle cell). it is interesting that a disease with 3-5 times larger population than those other genetic diseases, that was first identified in a hospital in 1910 (herrick 2001), whose molecular nature was identified in 1949 (pauling, itano et al. 1949), and whose genetic mutation was determined in 1956 (ingram 1956), still only has one drug on the market, not to mention an imperfect range of other medical interventions. black lives should matter. they should 7 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) matter as research priorities to find cures, novel therapies, and physicians to care for these patients, and to support researchers who are impassioned about diseases that affect black lives, families, and communities. the importance of black women role models in the stem fields morgann adams, theophilia dusabamoro, chelesa fearce, imani fennell, ebony gaillard, courtney harrison, daphney sihwa, and phoenix williams, undergraduate students in the department of chemistry & biochemistry at spelman college, enrolled in the courses biochemistry laboratory (313l) and/or race and genetics (405). as students at a black women’s college, the black lives matter (blm) movement impacts our day-to-day lives. each generation can only thrive and excel because of the work and activism preceded by their ancestors. we are empowered to see distinguished black faculty and witness the success of black scientists, as this is a testament to the impact that blm have on students. by having african americans in positions where they can teach and mentor, we can affirm ourselves as relevant in a world that often tells us that we are not. this is particularly the case of mentorship by black women scientists and faculty. representation matters and is vital to our success. black women faculty as mentors in the stem fields are often anomalies. these women are inspirations to students and others by unapologetically displaying their intelligence and qualifications despite the inherent obstacles due to their intersectionalities. this is arguably the most impactful tool for how black women can pave the way for younger generations. as aspiring young black scientists, many of us are concerned with finding new and more advanced treatments for diseases that disproportionately affect people of color. we recognize the disparities that face our communities and are committed to blm as we continue to fight and speak out against discrimination and unethical practices in the scientific realm. it is with pride and humility that we recognize the 8 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) presence of black women scientists as leaders in the classroom and research laboratory. their presence stands as an indicator that there is no superior “body” regarding intellectual capabilities, therefore nullifying stereotypes that continues to plague our society today. hope for a new paradigm: perspectives on black lives matter from two black women scientists kimberly jackson, ph.d., associate professor and vice-chair, department of chemistry & biochemistry, spelman college; and leyte winfield, ph.d., associate professor and chair, department of chemistry & biochemistry, and interim provost of research resources, spelman college as black women scientists, our lived realities are often characterized by words such as ostracized, dehumanized, and marginalized. the ascent to the ivory tower escapes us even as we are encouraged to “lean in.” however, by negotiating and navigating a system which perpetuates our supposed inadequacies, we reclaim our voices by giving our students the tools needed to unpack a new level of consciousness, as embodied by the black lives matter (blm) movement. as black women faculty in the natural sciences, we understand the need to fully embrace the responsibility of training women of color to position themselves for success in an environment where they are typically invisible. as such, we are intentional about what we teach and how we train, often framing our coursework (whenever possible) around socially responsible and culturally responsive themes, while also identifying those practices that support the success of black women as empowered (jackson and winfield, 2014). blm directly aligns with our mission to ensure that women of african descent are able to advance the scientific enterprise. as faculty at spelman, a black women’s college, we train these women to impact the world beyond the institution’s gates. black women comprise less than 2% of all women represented in the science workforce, and the numbers of these women at all sectors of the stem pipeline are 9 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) decreasing (lehming et al, 2013). however, still today, black women scientists are presumed incompetent and faced with systemic racism and gender inequities that seek to minimize their contributions. this disadvantages not only the scientist, but ultimately it also impacts the science. therefore, the roles we play, as teachers, mentors, and scholars, is critical to ensuring that the world recognizes what these women, and those like them, can bring to the table. blm coincides with the diversity of thought that is required for innovation and scientific progress. in our work to secure gender equity in stem, we routinely engage in conversations with academic institutions and industry partners on this subject. it has been shown that relationships matter when addressing difficult and sensitive dialogue. establishing these relationships allows us to preempt the motives and concerns by our partners, increase understanding around opposing positions, and get to the heart of the matter, which is erasing the invisibility of the black woman. most importantly, this level of direct communication ultimately enables our work as advocates. yes, we are role models and advocates for the students of spelman college, ensuring that the world acknowledges their significance and realigns their understanding of the role of black women in research careers. rehabilitating rehabilitation: how a renewed focus on environment and therapy may influence our perspective brain function lewis a. wheaton, ph.d., school of biological sciences, georgia tech nearly every day on my commute from home to georgia tech, i see people living with disabilities. this is because i happen to pass a small and visible community that has self-organized because they all have varying degrees of need. and it is fascinating to see, because they live in a city that is otherwise thriving in biotechnology, development, and science. when i was a graduate student and postdoc in the greater 10 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) washington, dc-baltimore area, i witnessed the same thing. there are so many people that need assistive support who live in a thriving metropolis with some of the most cutting-edge research and development in rehabilitative care in the country. why are these people not receiving support? upon a closer look, in both communities, i see a common frustration. while they may get some critical care, the care is either insufficient or not easily integrated into the communities in which they live. even more depressing is the observation that these people are largely black. this opens up a significant concern, but also a possibility. the concern is direct: how is it that a group of people can be so resource-deficient in such a resource-rich community? the possibility is also encouraging for the future. is it possible that a new understanding of how race, culture, and community intersect can allow us to innovate and improve outcomes? in 2016, the national institutes of health put forward a study entitled “research plan on rehabilitation: moving the field forward” (eunice kennedy shriver national institute of child health and human development and the nih medical rehabilitation coordinating committee, 2016). at its core is the concern that motor, sensory, and cognitive disability can significantly impact the lives of millions of americans. the study’s sponsor, the national center for medical rehabilitation research (ncmrr), makes strong recommendations for implementing a five-year plan that will bring to the forefront issues that have been quietly known in the rehabilitation community for several years. one such concern is the differential engagement of proper rehabilitation care in the united states. environmental stressors imposed on certain communities can complicate rehabilitation efforts. by focusing attention on the role that community and family can play in rehabilitation, the ncmrr states that “the interplay of individuals and their contexts is a key priority…” this wording is pivotal as it goes beyond the typical construct of “access to care.” this necessarily calls attention to the role that socioeconomic status plays in neural, motor and cognitive processes related to medical rehabilitation. 11 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) furthermore, this work must be treated with great care in terms of its use and interpretation. it is far too easy to connect concepts of “poor” and “black” as the exemplar (and perhaps the rule). this can cause scientists to miss how terms like “middle class,” “black/hispanic,” or “poor white” add nuance our understanding. this does not mean that these (and other) categories of humanity represent biological differences, but that these categories represent different realities for these aspects of humanity to engage in supportive and rehabilitative neural, behavioral, and physiological change. causal lumping can occur in rehabilitation as well. stroke, and perhaps more precisely stroke in the southeast us, is a common symbol for all of neurorehabilitation. unfortunately, by focusing on “southeastern us stroke”, we may miss the ubiquitous nature of socioeconomic concerns. indeed, intersectional variables of race, socioeconomic class, and community have been demonstrated to impact disability outcomes ranging spinal cord injury (botticello, chen, cao, tulsky, 2011), traumatic brain injury (mcquistion, zens, jung, beems, leverson, liepert, scarborough, agarwal, 2016) and amputation (zhou, bates, kurichi, kwong , xie, stineman, 2011). this also includes disorders that can cause disability, such as diabetes. (coulon, velasco-gonzalez, scribner, park, gomez, vargas, stender, zabaleta, clesi, chalew et al, 2017). even outcomes for movement disorders using technological advances of brain stimulation may have variable results based on socioeconomic status (genc, abboud, oravivattanakul, alsallom, thompson, cooper, gostkowski, machado, fernandez, 2016). yet within the field of rehabilitation, the influence of these variables is entirely unknown. thus, while access to care tends to be the focus of rehabilitation, it is possible that it represents a type of “will o’ the wisp” for deeper socioeconomic problems.(plug, hoffmann, artnik, bopp, borrell, costa, deboosere, esnaola, kalediene, leinsalu, et al. , 2012). the goal of making better technologies for rehabilitation – identified as one of the primary goals of the ncmrr report – must continue to consider access, support, and care for people who receive this technology across intersectional societal 12 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) constructs. this renewed focus must insist that members of the neuroscience community consider one compelling question: to what degree do environmental factors influence the nervous system to such an extent that identical stimuli (e.g., rehabilitation) can have varying effects across various demographics immediately upon presentation? while we tend to eschew the notion that we have inherent neurobiological differences across various peoples, it could be that even subtleties of environment form neurobiological susceptibilities across and within social strata, all of which can have profound and immediate clinical relevance. this understanding should launch us into a new direction to really understand the communities that need support and provide a new perspective (at least to the neurorehabilitation community) on how society affects health. sickle and flow: translational science and arts c. holly lewis, md/ph.d. student, department of immunology and molecular pathogenesis, emory university sickle cell disease (hereafter scd) is an inherited disorder of red blood cells that is most common in people of color. in the u.s, about one of every 360 african-american children is diagnosed with scd, triggering acute pain crises when sickle cells get trapped in blood vessels throughout the body (grosse, 2009). often, these cells block vessels in the brain causing strokes; 50% of pediatric sickle patients have had at least one stroke by the time they turn 18 (shenoy, 2013). treatment of scd is largely supportive, including antibiotics and frequent transfusions of donated red cells (shaz, 2003). sickle cell is more than twice as prevalent as cystic fibrosis or hemophilia, two genetic diseases common in caucasians, but suffers from drastically fewer federal dollars made available for research and clinical care (arnold, 2016). the only curative therapy for sickle cell disease is a matched hematopoietic stem cell transplant (hsct), first developed for scd in 1984. today, researchers across the globe that use hsct are achieving cure rates that approach 13 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 90% (arnold, 2016), but these numbers depend strongly upon how well we match the immune systems of the donor and recipient. cell therapy for scd is at a critical juncture: the science has advanced tremendously, but the bigger, more pressing issue is one of public health outreach. primary care clinicians, patients, and would-be blood cell donors are often unaware that the option for a curative transplant exists, unaware how much we rely on blood cells donated from people of color to effectively treat and cure this disease. finding a donor for sickle transplant is challenging, in part because african americans are underrepresented on the national blood and marrow registries in which the average donor is a white, college-educated, heterosexual, married male (shaz, 2008). there are a number of reasons why african americans donate blood and participate in clinical trials at lower rates, including a historically well-founded mistrust of the american medical system (washington, 2007). a 2013 publication conducted a focus-group of patients in chicago and atlanta, seeking to identify community knowledge regarding hsct availability. the study was particularly interested in patients’ awareness of be-the-match, one of the largest global repositories of stem cell donors, sourced from people asked to provide a small cheek-swabbing at community drive locations. yet its demographics reflect a paucity of those with african heritage. one participant noted that “there’s a booth set up i think at the state fair for bone marrow but everything around it says cancer or leukemia. i don’t see one sickle, no nothing, but it all says cancer” (shenoy, 2013). this scenario is reflective of health disparities observed for people of color with end-stage renal disease (esrd), on dialysis therapy, awaiting curative kidney transplantation. dr. rachel patzer of the emory transplant center has shown that racially-disparate esrd outcomes are compounded not only through more time on organ waitlists, but also in the amount of time it takes a primary care clinician to make the initial referrals to even consider transplant (patzer, et al., 2017). building on these lessons from the literature and the clinic, our team branched out into the atlanta community, meeting local musicians, 14 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) artists and politicians who were interested in co-organizing a be-thematch community event, centering people of color. the project truly blossomed when we began working with a pair of “sickle sisters,” ones who had donated marrow to cure the other. both were impassioned activists, and each had connections to the music and arts scene in atlanta. together we organized sickle & flow, a music and arts event at two venues in atlanta’s old fourth ward. sickle warriors spoke from the stage to destigmatize the disease, artists painted sickle-themed graffiti, and musicians performed while clinicians, scientists and community activists mingled through intersectional discussions. the cheek-swabbing station was staffed by people of color, all atlanta-area students, from ph.d. engineering candidates to premed undergraduates. we all agreed that the persons doing direct-to-community education should be the ones who have been historically marginalized, and contemporarily with those most at-stake. in all, the event garnered over a thousand dollars in charity donations for the sickle cell foundation of georgia, and recruited thirty-one new stem cell registrants; a huge accomplishment when considering the paucity of black donors on such registries. caring for patients with chronic disease requires a multidisciplinary team of clinicians; in sickle transplant, this team must extend to the african-american community writ large. by empowering these communities, we can better translate biological research into meaningful social change that improves lives. from a sustainability perspective, it is imperative that leadership also reflect the people of color most affected by the sickle cell. as organizers of sickle & flow, we are working with a team of undergraduate students who are part of the atlanta university center, a consortium of historically black academic institutions in atlanta. it is our hope that these students will build upon our template of participatory community outreach and develop a yearly project. 15 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) what is the evidence that black lives matter? emily pingel, ph.d. student, department of sociology, emory university in light of this lab meeting’s prompt to consider how black lives matter (blm) in our research and teaching, i was struck by how a particular framing of “evidence” – most often quantitative, ahistorical, and statistically generalizable – has been used to dismiss the experiences of black life, both within and outside of the academy. each of the incidents described below illustrates how centuries of documented oppression paired with everyday micro-aggressions must be presented anew and relived time and again amidst claims of discrimination. yet somehow these claims fail to meet the white threshold for evidence. for example, i was recently cobbling together a public health conference abstract exploring the issue of medical mistrust among young black gay men. some interview participants in the study detailed their own mistrust of doctors and medications; others conveyed how family members were outspokenly skeptical of biomedicine writ large. in my conclusion, i noted that “legacies of medical exploitation and ongoing structural racism in the united states inform the range of attitudes shared by participants.” to my surprise, my colleagues pushed back against this phrasing, warning that we were presenting no evidence to bolster such a claim. to be fair, my colleagues were likely anticipating the comments of reviewers. nevertheless, this hesitation points to a broader academic discomfort with the acknowledgement of extant structural racism. as researchers and educators, are we willing to commit to the simple act of moving beyond the demand for singularly prescribed evidence that black lives matter and instead turn our full attention towards imagining how our work can destabilize and dismantle structures of oppression? in the wake of the blm movement, we have witnessed widespread student protests on college campuses across the nation. at several predominantly white institutions, black students have exhibited courage by publicly naming new and ongoing forms of discrimination and demanding administrative redress. in response to such demands at my 16 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) own institution, a faculty member opined in the campus newspaper that “we currently lack some important evidence needed to assess those claims [of racial discrimination]. before the administration responds to protester demands, it should collect and produce that evidence” (lechner, 2015). the author went on to suggest that the university would find such evidence lacking. yet as the work of patricia hill collins suggests, the mere appearance of these new strains of resistance is itself evidence of the dialectic between subjugation and activism (hill collins, 2000). emory university has challenged faculty, staff, and students to investigate the question “what is the nature of evidence?” through its recently implemented quality enhancement plan (qep)—a universitywide initiative intended to frame discussions among all members of our academic community. the qep supports acts of imagination necessary to propel forward an academic agenda that expands the nature of evidence. yet one only needs to look at the principles of blm, which emphasizes a commitment to both collectivism and queerness, to see these acts of imagination already in practice (black lives matter, 2017). blm gives scholars and activists alike the tools to emerge from beneath positivism’s imposition of the individual as the ultimate unit of analysis by lending fluidity to otherwise essentialized discrete categories., the blm principles also serve methodologically as a reminder to ground social research in empathy, affirmation, and dialogic engagement. what would it look like to design a survey with these principles in mind? ruha benjamin encourages us to chip away at the current boundaries of social research by engaging with novel methods that reimagine what is possible by reordering what is (benjamin, 2016).in building upon these guidelines, we have the opportunity to grow our evidence base and loosen the chains of narrowly conceived science. 17 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) black women: the matter of their minds, hearts, and wombs aziza belcher platt, ph.d., psychologist and mental health practitioner as a practitioner and researcher, as well as a developing activist for mental health issues in racial and gender minority communities, i am acutely aware of how little black lives matter to many others and how important it is that patients’ black lives matter to me. the disciplines of medicine and psychology accept that medical conditions impact mental well-being; the discipline of psychosomatic medicine asserts the interplay between mental distress manifesting in and as physical conditions. the importance of the mind-body connection is being constantly explored and strengthened across disciplines and diseases. my work with the patient in front of me is to understand the whole person and not create a false dichotomy between their medical health and their mental health. my aim is to practice while also knowing that helping them alleviate their psychological distress has a complementary and possibly remedial impact on their physical distress. in fact, while not established yet, mental health treatment might also have a preventative effect on women who are treated early after the experience of trauma. in some of the research ahead of me, i will continue to explore psychosomatic gynecological issues that are particularly relevant to black women. my work with the systemic inequality besieging we is to advocate for the dismantling of inequitable structures: structures that create disparities, which in turn create the diseases that create the psychological distresses that create the diseases that are created by the disparities. dizzying, yes. but, on behalf of my patients and me, i declare: black diseases matter. black health disparities matter. black women’s lives matter. the quality of black women’s lives matter. black women’s reproductive rights and choices matter. and black women’s reproductive health and fertility matter—because black future lives matter. for many diseases that are more prevalent in the black community, “the disparity in prevalence is paralleled by a disparity in 18 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) treatment of the disease as a public health issue (flynn et al., 2006), access to health care information (flynn et al., 2006) and level of health care treatment (eltoukhi et al., 2013; belcher platt, 2014: 3). while all women’s rights and choices are under siege, black women are disproportionately impacted as accessible health care resources, such as planned parenthood, are removed from urban areas first. furthermore, medical treatment for women of color is often more invasive than it is for their white counterparts. black women are traditionally treated with less regard for preserving their reproductive ability even when less extreme solutions are available (agency for healthcare research and quality, 2001). there is a long history of disregard for black women’s reproductive rights and health evidenced by the eugenics movement, forced sterilizations (davis, 2003), and the use of slave women for surgical experimentation (axelsen, 1985). challenges to women’s reproductive health often negatively impacts women’s mental health—another area where there is a disparity in both access and treatment. as a result, organizations such as sistersong women of color reproductive justice collective are leading the larger fight for reproductive justice for black women and other women of color, while mental health practitioners are helping black women individually address the psychosocial component and impact, that is psychological (e.g. trauma) and environmental stressors (e.g. race-related stress) that may influence the manifestation, severity, and intensity of their reproductive distress. given that these symptoms often impair women’s educational, occupational, interpersonal, and daily functioning and thus reduce the quality of their lives, mental health practitioners can serve to help black women to reclaim the functioning and quality of their lives. ghanaian scholar dr. james emmanuel kwegyir-aggrey is credited with declaring that "if you educate a man you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman you educate a family (nation)." this sentiment extends to the mental and physical health of black women: addressing black women’s physical disease and mental distress has significant benefits, both for 19 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) individuals as well as for members of the community across generations. black psyches matter: extending the conversation of blm from the body to the mind joni-leigh webster, ph.d. student, department of sociology, emory university since its inception, blm has moved beyond a focus on legal interventions to the consummate legitimation of the black body. one of the guiding principles of this movement is “we are unapologetically black in our positioning. in affirming that black lives matter, we need not qualify our position. to love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a necessary prerequisite for wanting the same for others.” this statement underscores the importance of acknowledging the black experience as distinct and relevant. in black feminist thought, patricia collins introduces us to the confluence of multiple forms of oppressions black persons endure (2002). she discusses the experience of various “isms” (racism, classism, sexism) indicative of oppression and admonishes us to acknowledge their uniqueness and the power/right of black women to construct and disseminate their realities (collins 2002). with this comes an understanding of the intersection of various forms of subjugation and how they negatively impact members of the black community, leading to differing degrees of marginalization and adverse outcomes (crenshaw 1991). while we understand the correlation of diverse forms of oppression with unfavorable outcomes for black people, which can include poverty, violence, and poor health (mays, cochran and barnes 2007), data are mixed regarding the impact of various “isms” on the mental health of black people. according to current measures, black persons have lower rates of mental illness despite an increased prevalence of risk factors attributable to poor mental health (das et al. 2006, baker 2001, mouzon et al. 2016). furthermore, black people are more likely to be diagnosed 20 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) with psychosis than their white counterparts (schwartz and blankenship 2014). resilience and religiosity have been used to explain the ability of black people to “flourish” notwithstanding such adverse experiences. yet these reasons appear to fall short when examined more closely (mouzon 2014, mouzon 2017). it is likely that different explanations and methods are necessary to elucidate the black-white paradox in mental health, including the need to utilize black voices in explicating the intersection of oppressions and their impact on black lives. a “one size fits all” approach will not reveal the mechanisms linking oppression, adverse outcomes, and mental illness. for example, jonathan metzl depicts the effect of culture and current events on diagnostic parameters and their connection to increasing the rate of schizophrenia among black males in his book protest psychosis (2010). he demonstrates how a history of oppression and prejudicial behaviors impact the ability of practitioners and measurement tools to accurately detect the expression of mental illness among racialized populations (metzl 2010). thus, finding distinctness in the expression, measurement, and analysis of mental health lends itself to extending the conversation of the blm movement from honoring the black body to appreciating the black psyche. although research exists indicating the likelihood that rates of mental illness may be higher among black populations in the united states due to differences in the expression of symptoms, there is a dearth of information to explain these disparities. data indicate that poor health is associated with mental illness and black people are more likely to self-report poor health. further, black populations are more likely to somaticize symptoms of mental illness and have particular personality archetypes associated with mental illness (drapeau, marchand and beauie-prevost 2012, baker 2001). in my own work, i hope to elucidate the ways that the eurocentric/western framework of psychiatry impedes diagnosis of mental illness in black populations, since i argue that diagnostic criteria and parameters do not consider the sociohistorical/political impact of such events as slavery. through this 21 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) work, i hope to improve methods for accurately diagnosing mental illness among black persons, bringing further attention to the relevance of protecting and healing the black mind. black villages, empathy, and collective value: principles that guide an intersectional understanding of autism inequalities jennifer singh, mph, ph.d., associate professor of sociology, georgia tech on october 10, 2016, i interviewed sheila, a black single mother and caregiver of 15-year-old twin daughters, one who has a diagnosis of autism. i met sheila at an autism clinic located in downtown atlanta that offers services to children and their families who have limited financial resources and who rely primarily on medicaid state health insurance. sheila had just moved to atlanta from another state, believing that she would be able to get better services for her daughter. although she had been living in atlanta for several months when we met, her daughters were not registered in school yet and her daughter with autism was experiencing increased behavior issues, anger, and anxiety. the changes in her behavior could be explained in part to hormonal changes, but were more likely a result of not having access to her anxiety medication due to a gap in medicaid coverage when they moved to georgia, as well as their current lack of stable housing and transportation. my encounter with sheila and other caregivers in equally challenging situations is part of an on-going ethnography i am conducting in an autism clinic that is designed to investigate the role of structural inequalities in autism diagnosis and services. the complexity of sheila’s life as a single black mother raising children on her own and negotiating structural barriers to autism services in georgia reflects the complexity of people’s lives who come in and out of the autism clinic. as an academic who is socially situated through having immigrant grandparents from mexico and india, who is the first in her family to get a college degree, and who has achieved a position in a scholarly field in 22 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) which she is vastly underrepresented, i take my work seriously. i strive to investigate questions that can have an impact on people’s lives. thus, my current research investigates the intersectional and structural inequities embedded in the stories of black and latino caregivers of children with autism. over the past year, i have had the privilege of meeting caregivers who have shared with me their complicated pathways to getting an autism diagnosis and accessing services in an unequal society. these voices offer a significant alternative to the dominant face of autism parenting in the us, which typically portrays white, married, and uppermiddle class families who have the time, money, and resources to engage and fulfill various social and biomedical accountabilities to help their children. to aid the understanding of these multi-dimensional and complex narratives of autism parenting, i am using the principles of black lives matter to serve as an epistemological framework to guide my analysis. especially important are the blm’s principles of diversity, black families, empathy, black women, black villages, loving engagement, intergenerational, restorative justice, and collective value. ( black lives matter, 2017). for example, the narratives of caregivers who i have interviewed and learned from consist of alternative family structures; single mothers or single grandmothers who care for their children alone or in unison, often with limited resources of time, money, knowledge, or access to healthcare. the principles of black lives matter help me to better understand the structural constraints that shape the experience of black women who are navigating the labyrinth of services needed for children with autism. as evident in the narratives thus far, structural inequalities such as limited access to reliable transportation and safe and stable housing pose additional challenges for caregivers of a child with disabilities. i gained this insight from sheila who shared with me her challenges of using public transportation with her daughter. her story reminded me of how many children with autism are very sensitive to loud noises, crowed spaces, and particular odors—characteristics that are often associated with public transportation. on several occasions, sheila told me they 23 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) could not reach their clinic appointments because her daughter refused to take public transportation due to the extreme anxiety she experiences when having “one of her episodes.” in general, people with autism also function better when schedules are reliable and consistent, even in the specific routes they use to travel to and from particular places like school. sheila’s story also brings a whole new dimension of the realities of autism for caregivers and their families who have neither reliable transportation nor housing. when i met sheila, she was living in public housing; but she also told me that when they first moved to atlanta they were kicked out of their first public housing accommodation because her daughter often screamed at night due to her anxiety. for a woman in sheila’s position, the stakes of having a child with autism in much greater because her needs more complex. blm’s principles of empathy, of learning about the multiple contexts of people’s lives, as well as collective value, and of recognizing that all black lives matter regardless of gender, economic status, or disability, serve as guideposts for how we can learn from women like sheila to identify the various interlocking locations of social oppressions that cut across gender, racial, and class lines. these intersectional inequalities shape the multiple dimensions of black women’s experiences of raising a child with autism. and these different ways of knowing must be a part of our research and social justice agendas to help target fundamental causes of health inequalities1. the effectiveness of these approaches is in line with scholarship that has begun to reveal embodied inequalities that exist within racialized and gendered lived experiences while navigating medical care and illness trajectories2. how black lives matter in forensic matter renee shelby, ph.d. candidate, program in the history and sociology of technology and science, georgia tech formally reporting sexual violence is an oft-overlooked site of racial injustice (richie, 2012; meiners, 2009). as an anti-racist scholar-activist 24 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) working on gender violence, i use the black lives matter guiding principles of diversity, black women, queer affirming, restorative justice, and loving engagement as praxis for dismantling white (patriarchal) supremacy in victim advocacy and crafting interventions that prioritize marginalized groups (black lives matter, 2017). often in advocacy, victim experiences are essentialized, which fails to attend to how race, class, sexuality, or social capital create tensions in the criminal justice system. as hannah giorgis notes, though being a “good” rape victim means reporting to the police, being a “good” black person means avoiding the police—as one’s life often depends on it (giorgis, 2013). in my own research, i use black feminism to interrogate how the justice system responds to sexual violence, revealing stratified limitations of carceral solutions (collins, 2000; crenshaw, 1991; harris,1989; matsuda,1987; mccall, 2005). for example, while victims of any race are reticent to report sexual violence due to feelings of shame, stigma, and fear of repercussion, black women face additional barriers including the previous legal allowance of black women’s rape, negative gender stereotypes, a hostile criminal justice system, and a growing carceral nation that often arrests gender violence victims alongside their perpetrators (richie, 2012). since white feminism mainstreamed and institutionalized the gender violence movement during the 1980s and 1990s, responses to sexual violence progressively included justice involvement—e.g. increasing criminalization, developing mandatory booking policies, and transforming evidentiary practices. for example, the introduction of the rape kit in 1978—a technoscientific protocol for collecting, securing, testing, and materializing biological and nonbiological evidence—has changed forensic evidence collection. the rape kit has become embedded in legal and evidentiary assumptions about what constitutes a winnable, and thus worthwhile, court case. like other forensic technologies, rape kits are perceived to make victims legible to legal actors, and were first developed by white “protocol feminists” in collaboration with the crime lab, with the intention of giving victims a 25 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) means to materially corroborate their reports of violence amidst widespread acceptance of rape myths (murphy, 2012). as of 2015, however, there was an estimated backlog of over 400,000 untested rape kits reflecting substantial stagnation in the us justice process. even when kits are processed there are larger forces at play in determining which cases are prosecuted3. in the fall of 2016, the us department of justice released a scathing report about the raced and gendered discriminatory practices regularly enacted by the baltimore police department4. the report describes police failures in systematically downgrading rape cases to less serious criminal charges, failing to investigate reports of sexual assault, and giving inadequate resources to process the backlog of forensic rape kits—often failing to even submit kits to crime laboratories for dna testing. the report’s findings are a stark reminder of police’s substantial influence in investigating or suppressing a case and power within the criminal justice system. in addition to its revelations about sexual violence, the department of justice report also described the police as more disrespectful and slower to respond to reports of violence by individuals within africanamerican communities than to individuals from neighboring white communities. based on community and qualitative accounts of citizenpolice interaction, there is little reason to believe the baltimore police department is unique in either its mishandling of sexual assault cases or in its discriminatory treatment towards african americans. this is particularly important given broader sexist and racist attitudes towards women of color that make them particularly vulnerable to sexual violence and which also inhibit their access to support services. while activists have long worked to redress inequalities in policing and the criminal justice system, they have directed less attention toward better understanding the performances of the rape kit as a technology of power. after a rape kit is collected, sealed, and submitted to crime labs, the kit becomes a material record of anonymous “unraced” victim’s subjectivity, further suggesting the influence of color, and of powerevasive narratives and practices, that wrongly help constitute the criminal 26 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) justice system. fetishization by activist communities and political figures alike—in the form of demands to test the backlog of rape kits—often detract from highly problematic gendered and raced police and prosecutorial practices. thinking through race in terms of the rape kit reveals how forensic technologies are not merely a medium for neutral evidence production, but a mode for interpreting biological evidence within us judicial contexts informed by both raced and gendered rape ideologies (datson,1991). there are certainly many aspects of the medico-legal apparatus that require remedy; however, attending to how police, prosecutors, activists and the broader public understand and make use of rape kits is an important step towards ensuring black lives matter in forensic criminology. black women in breast cancer research: from margin to center kristen abatsis mchenry, assistant professor, comparative women’s studies, spelman college black lives matter, as a social movement, does more than solicit citizens, researchers, and activists to call attention to police brutality. the movement also insists that attention is paid to survival rates between black and white men and women. in the context of public health research and particularly breast cancer advocacy and research, blm emphasizes the importance of research on breast cancer disparities that lead to higher mortality rates for black women than white women. my research on breast cancer sits at the intersection of scholarship on the environment, political advocacy, and race and gender in biomedicine. as an anti-racist feminist scholar-activist, i see the blm movement, and in particular, the #sayhername campaign, as crucial to my research and teaching. the #sayhername campaign calls attention to police violence against black women and importantly centers the experiences of black women. positioning myself as an anti-racist feminist scholar means 27 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) examining the way some women’s voices and experiences have been privileged within the breast cancer movement. my book, the green solution to breast cancer: the promise of prevention, interrogates the ways that breast cancer has been framed as a wealthy, elite, white woman’s disease. i illustrate how the u.s. breast cancer movement has been tremendously successful at raising funds supporting biomedical research, bringing breast cancer into public discourse, and mobilizing women to support breast cancer survivors. today the breast cancer movement has become synonymous with pink ribbons, corporate philanthropy, and fitness based fundraising events all centered on a message of early detection and a cure (ehrenreich 2001; king 2006; mccormick 2010). such successful campaigns obscure how the political economy of breast cancer functions within structures of racism and sexism, which impacts black women’s experiences of breast cancer (lorde 1997). for instance, although mammography screening rates are quite similar between white and black women – 69% of non-hispanic white women and 70% of no-hispanic black women 45 and older received mammograms in the past two years (american cancer society 2013) – health disparities at stages of diagnosis, and access to genetic testing, and treatment persist for black women in the united states. as a result, black women are more likely to die from breast cancer than white women even though white women are more likely to get breast cancer (cdc 2013). this is due to a myriad of factors including differences in the types of cancer (like triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive form of breast cancer); barriers resulting from ses; unequal access to improved cancer treatments all of which affect black women (black women’s health imperative 2016; nci 2016). my work illustrates the ways that mainstream breast cancer advocacy groups’ insistence on early detection is simply not adequate to address health disparities within poor communities of color, in which women are vulnerable to environmental harm and therefore increasingly at risk for cancer. for these reasons, i am inspired by the recent work of 28 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) ericka hart, a queer black woman, an agent of change who advocates for increased visibility of black and brown female bodies and challenges white supremacist patriarchy. she has put photographs of her mastectomy scars into the public eye with great purpose and has inspired many women living with breast cancer to re-examine who the face of breast cancer is and has been [see fig. 1 and fig. 2]. ericka hart’s powerful and visible resistance demonstrate the importance of demanding that the breast cancer movement move beyond early detection frames, privileging white, wealthy, women’s experiences of breast cancer and simplistic notions of inclusivity or “diversity.” fig. 1: image of ericka hart in masado, dany isabelle. (2016). “5 times ericka hart gave us #blackgirlmagic.” the dear body project. 29 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) fig. 2: image of ericka hart in masado, dany isabelle. (2016). “5 times ericka hart gave us #blackgirlmagic.” the dear body project. notes 1 see kimberlé crenshaw, “demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics,” university of chicago legal forum 1:8 (1989): 139-168. see also patricia hill collins, black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (new york: routledge, 2002). 2 see for example, janet k. shim, heart-sick: the politics of risk, inequality, and heart disease (new york: new york university press, 2014), ruja benjamin, people’s science: bodies and rights on the stem 30 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) cell frontier (stanford: stanford university press, 2013), and celeste watkins-hayes, "intersectionality and the sociology of hiv/aids: past, present, and future research directions,” annual review of sociology vol 40 (2014): 431-457. 3 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-pressoffice/2015/03/16/fact-sheet-investments-reduce-national-rape-kitbacklog-and-combat-viole (last accessed june 23, 2017). 4 http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/local/us-justicedepartment-finds-discriminatory-practices-in-baltimore-police/2117/ (last accessed june 23, 2017). references abatsis, mchenry, k. 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"factors influencing receipt of outpatient rehabilitation services among veterans following lower extremity amputation." archives of physical 38 pollock and roy catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) medicine and rehabilitation 2011, 92(9):1455-1461. microsoft word 201-1508-1-murray.docx murray, s.j., and steinberg, d.l. (2018). to mourn, to re-imagine without oneself: death, dying, and social media/tion. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-28. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © stuart j. murray and deborah lynn steinberg, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article to mourn, to re-imagine without oneself: death, dying, and social media/tion stuart j. murray carleton university stuart.murray@carleton.ca deborah lynn steinberg (deceased) university of warwick “death’s in the good-bye.” —anne sexton abstract this paper incorporates and reflects on steinberg’s particular vantage as a dying person whose blog engages the transforming ecologies of mourning and the place(s) of dying in the emergent spaces of social media. the paper homes in on the distinction between the repudiation of death and the repudiation of mourning in the collective project of “re-imagining without oneself,” that is, of re-imagining another life, another death, beyond the liberal coordinates of a “you” and a “me.” as an “intermediating” place, we argue that the blog serves as a virtual portal that both problematizes and (re)mediates the personal and the political. in so doing, the paper touches on key feminist political questions concerning bodily selfsovereignty; the broader racialized, classed, and gendered cultural imaginary; and 2 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) the place of mourning in the analogy of the personal body in crisis with the myriad crises of the body politic at this significant and difficult cultural moment. particularly, with the outcomes of brexit and the trump victory in the american election, this is a time of loss as the complex consensus of liberal democracy has broken down and neoliberal body-affective practices morph into isolationist nationalisms and the resurgence of movements against social justice and equality. i. on repudiations first, a word about the genesis of the text you are reading, which departs from several academic conventions for the essay form, and not least from the conventions of co-authorship. several days before her death, and knowing she would not live to write the essay she had promised for this special issue, deborah lynn steinberg emailed me to ask if i would be willing to co-author this piece with her ─ in her case, as we both knew then, posthumously. it would be our final collaboration, an essay incorporating and reflecting on her blog, which was live for about one year: from january 2016 to january 2017, but most actively from midseptember 2016.1 according to her own blogged words, a few months earlier, this posthumous collaboration is not what she had originally envisaged, either in form or in content: catalyst got back to me today to ask me to submit an abstract for the special issue. i didn’t expect that. so i need to think on it now. what to propose. what i might be able to do. it was a nice letter. i’d like to think of something. not this blog, but maybe some kind of sequential short essays on the topics they list (24 october 2016). not this blog. at the time of her request to me, i reflected back on these blogged words and projected the untimely future from which i now write, imagining my friend who was then still alive from a future in which she would not be. a discomfiting temporality this, but i agreed in part because i was and still am reluctant to end our conversations and collaborations. and, i confess, at that moment, and in others preceding it, my grief yielded to guilt, for i was mourning someone not yet dead. in the 3 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) grip of this presentiment, it was little solace to know that when we mourn, we mourn a future ─ our future together ─ that will be taken from us, and irrevocably transformed, when someone we love dies. that future “is not owed to us,” as deborah once quipped in her disarming way, yet its voices call to us, prevail upon us with a spectral presence. and if not owed to me, or to us, i felt a keen debt to that future, something i was destined to owe but not own. judith butler offers a wonderful account of such interrelationality and loss in a text that deborah herself invoked, as you’ll see below. butler writes: “it is not as if an ‘i’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘i’ am. if i lose you, under these conditions, then i not only mourn the loss but i become inscrutable to myself” (butler, 2004, p. 22). i write, then, in and from a certain inscrutability. a form of ghostwriting, if you will. my tone is personal, at times more so than makes me comfortable, but this is an extension of our conversations, deborah’s and mine, and i find myself caught in my own repudiation of loss. perhaps all authorship is co-authorship, and all writing a reckoning with the transitivity of death. i wouldn’t be the first to say or feel such things. “we live in a culture that repudiates death,” deborah would write on the occasion of david bowie’s passing, “even as it is cultivated through public policy ─ austerity is nothing if not a harbinger of social excommunication and lonely death. in public conversation, death is frequently discussed as an existential wrong (no child should die of …), or as ‘giving up’, or as a ‘lost battle’” (steinberg, 2016). the sad strange irony of our time is that death is at once cultivated ─ by capital, the military, the police, public policy, in the name of security and “life” itself ─ and morally repudiated as one’s own singular failure to go on living, sometimes despite oneself. the pervasive idiomatics of survival, deborah posted on her blog, emblematized as a heroic figuration ─ the indefatigable warrior of cancer survivalism. i see this as a cult, an insistent fantasy of the will ─ an offering, quid pro quo of willing life so as to have it (11 january 2016). life: as 4 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) indefatigable survival, and as cultish “body-affective imperatives of will, affect, and action” (steinberg, 2017, p. 149). in deborah’s terms, these constitute an imperative field, a biopolitics of heroic livingness, but also an insistent phantasy ─ a latent wish, a cultural unconscious ─ that we are somehow immortal, that we will cheat death, that it will not come for me. the pronominal shift from we to me here is no mistake. rather, it frames our question, a problem of singularity that is mine as much as ─ and by virtue of what is ─ ours, in writing, in public conversation, and in the spaces of social excommunication and lonely death. i am alone in this. even though i’m not (23 october 2016). david bowie’s death was a private-public event considered by many as untimely, sudden, unforeseen, for us if not for him. in her short published piece, deborah reflects on her earlier work theorizing the phenomenon of public mourning that had marked, spectacularly, the prosaic death of princess diana (see kear & steinberg, 1999). she had argued then, she writes, that the public intimacies of mourning celebrity deaths such as bowie’s or diana’s “could stand in for more personal losses, or create moments of unexpected catharsis and identification with those things about which we cannot bring ourselves to speak” (steinberg, 2016). “but of late,” she continues, “i have come to have a new vantage point on these questions as they have taken a personal turn and i find myself in an odd parallel with bowie ─ in human condition, if not in public prominence” (ibid.). the “personal turn,” in human condition, was all too human, too personal, for those of us who knew deborah as someone living with ─ and dying from ─ metastatic cancer. two passages in deborah’s bowie piece i find particularly haunting: “there is something about mourning that crosses a threshold, where one must re-imagine without oneself, as if it is me who dies, if i mourn a death” (ibid.). i was moved then, as i am still, by the distinctly transferential nature of death and mourning in deborah’s sentence. we cross a “threshold” only to return to ourselves in another form. our relation to others ─ dead or dying ─ is bound up with that relation we have to ourselves, a self-relation that seems at times inscrutable and 5 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) unable to survive those losses we nevertheless live through, survive. and the second passage: “some of the public mourning comes from those … like me, who would not mourn ourselves if we could help it” (ibid.). here, then, the wish not to mourn oneself, perhaps the inability to do so, and the unwillingness to re-imagine life without oneself, across an impossible temporality, a future anterior, yet with the dim acknowledgement that one is anyway helpless because ultimately the choice is not mine or ours. these passages hold open a strange tension: i mourn the loss of another who stands in for me, “as if it is me who dies,” and yet i do so (publicly) in order not to mourn myself (privately). as i’ll argue below, deborah’s blog is written in the tense and tension of privately mourning oneself publicly. deborah would write that, “like him [bowie] and many others, i have found a way to turn my own precarity into words and work, albeit in my case with a studied and distancing focus on culture rather than on myself” (ibid.). but in a blog post just one week earlier, the sublimating power of words and work, their promised distantiation, were less certain: i was asked today if i would consider writing something about the death of david bowie and about public mourning. this is awkward timing. the subject of mourning has become a vexed and maybe unwelcome one for me (11 january 2016). her blogged words were less a meta-commentary than a proto-commentary, the private face that precedes and subtends, here in blog form, what would appear in print as her public face ─ or at least one of them. i recall a skype conversation with deborah at this time, when she had been rewriting her bowie piece based on an editor’s feedback ─ also vexing and maybe unwelcome ─ and, feeling frustrated by the rewrite, abandoned it and told the editor, “take it or leave it,” arguing that hers was an original perspective and a personal one, albeit one that had to compete with the spate of bowie “tributes” in the public sphere. the editor either agreed or backed down and deborah’s original piece was published. even so, her blog entry was more personal, more expansive, including these words that would not appear in the published version: perhaps it is not death that is repudiated, or not only death that is 6 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) repudiated, but mourning ─ the accepting of loss, its empathetic identification, its non-heroic grievability ─ to draw inexactly on judith butler (11 january 2016). these passages suggest a dual repudiation, a contrapuntal and at times reciprocal relation between death and mourning. the cultural repudiation of death, on the one hand, does not clearly map onto the repudiation of mourning, on the other; after all, these two hands belong to one body. death does not necessarily precede mourning, and neither death nor mourning obey the logic of cause-and-effect. nor can they be characterized as distinctly public and private phenomena, respectively, for they cross and meet along moralizing borderlands, porous as they are. and it is here that they are, at times and in time, both mediated and mediating, indistinguishably public and private. deborah’s blog carves out a place in this misty terrain, neither living nor quite dead, where the lively repudiation of one’s own death-to-come meets the repudiation of one’s mourning oneself, and in words that nonetheless mourn, and remain, to tremble in this tension. to focus for a moment on the first, the cultural repudiation of death is not in a straightforward sense the willful “denial” or “negation” of death (in sigmund freud’s german, a verneinung, translated as “negation” by the english editors of the standard edition). indeed, repudiation is a more complicated, moralizing articulation within which some spectral “life itself” rises up as a sacred and self-evident something, which is steadfastly affirmed, from its most material instantiations ─ molecules, genes, blastocysts, embryos ─ to its most aestheticized and angelic ─ breath, spirit, life-force, ch’i. reverent of “life,” we turn a blind eye to that death with which we are nevertheless quietly complicit: collateral damage, social and opportunity costs, negative externalities, and other euphemisms for “legitimate” delivery unto death. to invoke another freudian term, repudiation is more akin to a “disavowal” ─ a verleugnung ─ a pro-“life” deception or lie deeply invested in an avowed affirmation that permits the repudiation to operate clandestinely, and thus all the more powerfully.2 7 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) as deborah writes in a piece we once co-authored for a special journal issue on “bioconvergence”: “we see in the mediatized imaginary that biology, the natural environment, and human life are subjects of ─ and inescapably subject to ─ a technological telos” (murray & steinberg, 2015, p. 125). if life has become the object and objective, the means and the end, of everything from medicine to politics to war, and if life is now our secular sacred something, understood in technological terms, then it saturates our mediatized imaginary, and it fosters a bioethos ─ deborah’s coinage for the widespread cultural character and social comportment organized around the specter of “life itself,” and in which a discourse on death is drowned out by the cult of the cancer warrior, the vitalizing accomplishments of biomedicine and genomics, and their digital avatars, which might well include the veritable industry of cancer blogs and other illness narratives. deborah was critical of these affirmative biodiscourses, full-mouthed (dis)avowals in and by which the cultural repudiation of death becomes tacit commonsense. in this respect, she was critical foremost of the manner in which “life” is culturally curated, mediatized, and regulated, by capital, by the state, and not least through the moral orthopedics and affirmations of biomedicine and technoscience, including the cancer industry itself (e.g., see jain, 2013). here, among other things, deborah’s work interrogates the formative desire for the kind of livingness promised by (bio)technology, and correlatively the death and precarity it disavows. as one reviewer of her genes and the bioimaginary (2015) aptly states it, “steinberg argues that the seductions of genetic research are based on the very things that genes can’t explain. what makes genetic science attractive therefore lies partly in fantasies of mastery and control of human uncertainties: securing identity, preventing crime or illness, fostering desired capabilities, easing suffering, righting wrongs.” (11 october 2015) (citing copland, 2015; also see murray, 2017a) the “bad patient” of whom deborah writes ─ herself included ─ is one whose body fails or who refuses the body-affective imperatives of will, 8 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) affect, and action. she refuses that life, on those terms, and the singularizing death it renders unspeakable, shameful, and undignified. in this failure or refusal, in this indignity or disaffirmation, we may discern a glimmer of hope, for another life, another death. but more on this below. as for the second repudiation, the repudiation of mourning, i believe deborah’s position became increasingly ambivalent, vexed.3 the problem is i don’t want to die. but am anyway. i want to stop it. i’m fighting unconsciousness. i won’t have peace or acceptance (23 december 2016). and yet, it would be mistaken to see in the cultural repudiation of death little more than a personal repudiation of mourning writ large. to explore the first demands a nuanced critical position that deconstructs the disavowal, while the latter cuts closer to home and leaves us bereft. for those in mourning ─ in, as a state-of-being and place of disconsolate loneliness ─ it is tempting to fall back upon social rituals and the cultural repudiation of death, to cling avowedly to their affirmations and desires. last rites … rituals … that stylize what is real into just enough regimentation and surreality that you can accept it? (10 december 2016). we gather, pray, recite conventional words. sometimes we execrate, call down curses, and decry the cosmic injustice and meaninglessness of it all. and sometimes we feel a sense of irony in this ─ something that was never lost on deborah. she writes: i have found that i particularly like the onion’s diabolically funny and contrarian treatment of the cancer culture ─ i find it bracing. i have greatly enjoyed erin gloria ryan’s diatribes in jezebel against the ‘pink crap’ of the corporatised cancer industry. and i like clive james’ dilemma that he has outlived his own death ─ and how awkward this is. i think i enjoy these examples because they don’t require me to mourn. indeed, they assist me in the endeavour of not mourning. (steinberg, 2016) she continues: “other articles i find more bothersome. some are those written by doctors grieving their patients or family members grieving the loss of loved ones. with these, i find myself in a strange transference ─ identifying with those left behind, not the dying or dead themselves” 9 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) (ibid.). in the “strange transference” of mourning, deborah suggests, we identify with those left behind, empathize with their loss, and we mourn so as not to mourn ourselves (even as we sometimes see through this veil). if deborah is unwilling to mourn herself, this is both private and public, an unwillingness to accept her own death at the same time as an unwillingness ─ if she could help it ─ to imagine and to inhabit the grief of those she will leave behind. these positions are not mutually exclusive; for deborah, they appear to be inextricably entwined. in a blog post titled, “harder to manage,” deborah reports receiving an email from her oncologist: a wrote. she is sorry more can’t be done. i don’t envy her her job. would be hard to treat and then lose patients. must be hard to protect yourself (16 december 2016). these compassionate words are hardly a repudiation. we might say, then, that the repudiation of mourning is the desire to protect oneself and others from a grief that is consummately transitive ─ yours, mine, ours. this paper theorizes deborah’s blog as opening a (re)mediating space, an intermediary place of sorts, somewhere in the tension between death and mourning ─ hers, mine, ours ─ but a place, moreover, that is not at heart repudiatory. i am of course unable to write something deborah would have written, as much as i freely weave her words together with mine. i hope the change of font, indicating deborah’s blogged words, does nothing to diminish the equivocation of authorial voice we intend. all authorship is co-authorship, all writing a reckoning with death, and across these thresholds we have refused the convention of quotation marks to offset deborah’s words: her voice is very much alive throughout. deborah was uniquely positioned to comment on the mediatized cultures of life and death. i would note a long research trajectory that includes not only mourning diana (kear & steinberg, 1999), but earlier work, such as made to order: the myth of reproductive and genetic progress (spallone & steinberg, 1987), bodies in glass: genetics, eugenics, and embryo ethics (1997), and most recently, genes and the bioimaginary: science, spectacle, culture (2015). as a critical media theorist and feminist scholar 10 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) of culture, she described her methodology as immersive: i intensively embed myself in multiple media milieux in order to gain a larger insight about the rupture points and anxieties of the larger culture (11 january 2016). she methodologically gathered and analyzed announcements of celebrity deaths, for instance ─ i’ve been collecting them, wondering sometimes if that makes me a bit unhinged (11 january 2016)! by contrast, and with much less humor, i have found myself decidedly unable to immerse myself in the depressing avalanche of cancer blogs or the scholarship on them. apart from my own selfprotection, i am uninterested in performing a media content analysis of these blogs, nor am i terribly interested in the critical uptake of them by academics. in many ways, i suspect that deborah’s blog is not dissimilar to others that also bear witness to the quotidian realities of living with cancer ─ withering body, visits with healthcare providers, treatments, pains, fears, indignities, rage. these blogs seem to write themselves into and from ─ rather than simply comment on ─ the rupture points and anxieties of a larger culture become monstrously personal. and yet, i think deborah would have refused the idea that the purpose of her blog was testimonial. she disliked the publicness of such things ─ well, … mostly. the point of religious discourse and its relationship to power. its jurisdictional functions through rhetoric. maybe the transference i seek through a blog is just that kind of authoritative standing. some magic, some stardust, some claim on something, some selfelevation, some inflation beyond my own horizons (30 october 2016). what strikes me most about deborah’s blog is not so much what it says, its distillable content, but what it does not say, and how it works to represent the unrepresentable, to make a claim on something unclaimable, owed but not owned. perhaps this is by now a tired trope in cancer blog scholarship, i don’t know. but my particular interest here lies in the chasm that opens up, at deborah’s own suggestion, between death and mourning, between competing or convergent repudiations, and 11 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) the (re)mediating space of her blog ─ and my reflexive reading and writing about it, and your reading, too ─ in her project, and ours, of reimagining without oneself, that is, to re-imagine another life, another death. ii. on intermediating places deborah’s blog inhabits a mournful space of self-inscrutability and in this is an equivocal site of transference, for her as much as for this reader. equivocal: literally, of more than one voice, undecidable. the express purpose of the blog was itself a recurrent thematic, and deborah was anxiously self-reflexive, reluctant, doubtful. acting on a suggestion from my friend l yesterday, it occurred to me that i could try to make use of this erstwhile neglected semi-pointless blog space that no one knows about to include my below-the-line comments (14 september 2016). below-the-line comments, then, much as we find beneath online news articles: heteroglossic space (to reference bakhtin), which deborah imagined as cultivating a critical counter-public, of sorts, in her brief responses to the news, the tropes and rhetorics and tones of reportage, including tory policy on everything as it destroys democracy, education, the health service, the welfare and rights of the many, the social contract itself; political corruption, the gross spectacle of trump and the obsequious avid media machine purveying him, media framing, media ethics, the fallacies of false equivalence, the shrinking state and the hate (14 september 2016). these, too, represent losses, public-private ones, and there is a mourning again here, for others she will leave behind and abandon to the world. in the context of donald trump’s election: i can’t see redemption in any direction. what was the point of living just to arrive here, at the end of the world, and it’s a bad end. i am horrified at people. the selfish, cruel whatever-it-is in people that they would even contemplate voting for such a terrible man…. i am worried about my family and my friends. what kind of life awaits k or t or s…. i can’t imagine what life is going to be like for girls and women, minorities, 12 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) the disabled, the ill, the low-earning and poor (9 november 2016). the decay of the body politic, the ravages of neoliberalism and its sequelae ─ neofeudalism, i once suggested to s (30 november 2016) ─ yet another of deborah’s disarming quips ─ are all set against, alongside, perhaps within her own body, a woman’s body, a body ravaged by breast cancer. the embarrassment of not being able to talk, or wash without assistance, of having to give up the quietude and cleanliness of body that i had before. there is no capacity to hide, dependent as i now am. it breaks boundaries i wanted to keep intact. it is not something i want witnessed (8 december 2016). cancer is like pregnancy ─ both states in which you get recast as a public body, subject rightfully to other people’s opinions, intrusions, moral estimations and unasked-for advice (20 october 2016). also see deborah’s critical perspective on the gendered and racialized faces of the cancer industry (steinberg, 2017). in a blog post titled,” “numbers,” deborah lamented, i just figured out how to check and found out that three people read this blog. i’m not sure that isn’t worse than none. and i guess feeling that means i wish it was part of something, a conversation at large, a performance on a larger stage. i know that the three who read it have dialogued with it as they have written or spoken to me about it. why isn’t that enough? (30 october 2016). despite her lamentations, in deborah’s case i do not believe the blog was intended for broad public “consumption,” at least not at first, though it would eventually become somewhat more public: a link appeared in an obituary published in the guardian (see epstein, 2017), and now there is this essay alongside an archive of her blog. the audience of three gradually grew, but we, this audience, would probably not have thought of ourselves as blog “consumers,” or even “prosumers” for that matter, although some of us would recognize ourselves at times as contributors, when deborah would cite an email or refer to an ongoing conversation. dialoguing with close friends and family members, the blog increasingly became a question of practicality. when 13 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) the pain in deborah’s hands left her unable to respond to individual emails, she sometimes posted on her blog responding to those emails in one sitting, anonymizing her friends and family members by discreetly referring to us only by our first initials. sometimes i guessed or knew who these people were, sometimes i didn’t, but no matter, i felt connected to a wider community of interlocutors whose precise identity mattered less to me than the fact that they were there, listening. i found myself checking often to see if deborah had posted, especially in the last weeks of her life, or when i hadn’t heard from her for a few days. there are only so many emails that can ask, “how are you doing?” we already knew the answer and we didn’t want to know. so the blog offered the strange kindness of not being addressed directly, by email or by skype, and the occasion to look with some trepidation, when the bustle of the workday had faded, and when, in the privacy of the screen, without the ping of an email, you might read and reflect and respond. add to this the time difference between canada and the united kingdom, and i found myself checking before bed, in insomniac moments, and emailing a note as deborah’s day was beginning, when she was at her best. i liked this idea, a new day. finally, the blog also found its way into her funeral service in los angeles, where her blog entry, “intermediary place” (1 november 2016), was distributed to mourners ─ some via facebook live ─ who might, in their own time, read in her story a place that they too could imagine for deborah. “intermediary place” is one of deborah’s longer blog posts, and i suspect most carefully edited. it was described at her funeral as “aspirational fiction,” an imagined afterlife, perhaps, shaped by words and architectures and peaceful spaces free of pain and full of creaturely comforts, including companion animals and favorite foods. those who knew deborah will recognize in her narrative not so much an otherworldly scene but one that is replete with those worldly things that deborah so loved. we read a self-description that is familiar ─ a favorite lightweight black ribbed knit pull-over with a high neck and long 14 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) sleeves; love tokens she remembered, a notebook and a pen; a small medallion, enameled orange on silver; a peace sign. on the back was the name lola. not her name; her scarf was long, knit of multiple wools, asymmetric, gold and black. with gold fringes. my mother made me this, she remembered (1 november 2016). the intermediary place itself, the way station, as she called it, is indeed aspirational, yet homey and full of familiar things. there were occasional tables with glass bowls and vases. apples in one bowl, foxglove sprays in a clear glass vase, sunflowers. and orchids. there were framed prints ─ miró, she recognized, lichtenstein, de lempicka (1 november 2016). her personal quarters here are also well appointed, with kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom. the granite was oro stupendo. she knew the design. she had picked it out. the floor tiles were smoke black semi-glossed slate; she knelt down. the tiles were warm; a small beautifully appointed black gloss kitchenette … small cupboards holding pots and pans, bakeware…. there was a dualit kettle and toaster on the worktop … a small set of white dishes and bowls, clear glasses, a set of nested glass mixing bowls, a small silver cafetière next to a vacuum-lipped blue porcelain coffee urn (1 november 2016). and as she crawls into bed, weary from her journey ─ a small brown dog with melting eyes and silky fur looked up to her with begging intent. come up, she said patting the bed. the dog leapt up in a graceful arc and dived under the covers, laying itself against her back and sinking quickly into soft dog snores (1 november 2016). two days later she would write: i am glad it occurred to me that i might build worlds that give me comfort. and that i can compose out of the beautiful things i care about (3 november 2016). it is not simply the yearning for home, for a body in a time and place of peace. it is written in the third person ─ at a distance from yet opening onto, invoking, that person, that place. two weeks earlier she had imagined her own burial, writing: but let me take some things that mean something with me…. i told g that i want to be dressed in 15 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) something i like…. i would like a notebook and a pen. tokens from loved ones. some food. something to keep warm. something sensible to walk on, but still beautiful…. someday, i would like lola [my dog] with me. i wish i could have her name tag so she can find me (17 october 2016). the intermediary place is not, above all, a transitional place filled with “transitional” objects as the psychoanalyst d.w. winnicott (1971) theorizes them, nor is it the generative potential space that he envisages between the analyst and analysand. deborah would not have overlooked this detail; indeed, she had mentioned object relations in an interceding blog post (24 october 2016). although the traveler in deborah’s story is in transit, journeying from one life to another, deborah did not write “transitional,” and settled instead ─ rather decidedly, i think ─ on “intermediary.” i’ve never believed in any one thing or another about death. assertions that death is a journey, or a better place, or a place at all ─ haven’t been particularly persuasive to me. maybe it is mawkish to think these things (17 october 2016). the fictional place and those objects in it, much like the blog itself, mediate by building a virtual world on a social media platform, composed out of real things and events ─ not all of them beautiful, certainly. i cannot help but read this intermediary place as synecdochal of deborah’s blog as a whole. the blog itself is an intermediary place, a multifaceted world given voice in a mediatized “third person,” a subjectivity of sorts, situated between the one who writes and the one who reads. it is a place where anything might still be possible, some magic, some stardust. if deborah projects herself there, into that world, that intermediary place, so do we; the world takes on an ethos, speaks to us and back to her, and acts on both. in psychoanalytic literature building on the work of thomas h. ogden (1994), this might be theorized as an “analytic third,” a therapeutic agency independent of the patient-analyst dyad. in the psychotherapeutic scene the analytic third represents a third subject, an unconscious co-creation of both, and a particular site of transference and countertransference for each, respectively. the third 16 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) takes on a life of its own and stands in tension with the patient and the analyst, and is an active site of reflection that is independent yet has no meaning beyond the relationship of the two. the third is an intermediary, much like deborah’s blog was for her and for those of us reading it. the feminist psychoanalyst, jessica benjamin, in describing the analytic third “emphasize[s] the reciprocal, mutually influencing quality of interaction between subjects, the confusing traffic of two-way streets” (2004, p. 6). benjamin rejects the object relations view that one person is subject, the other object ─ that one does, the other is done to ─ or for our purposes here, that one speaks and the other is spoken, or spoken to. benjamin writes: to the degree that we ever manage to grasp two-way directionality, we do so only from the place of the third, a vantage point outside the two…. my interest is not in which ‘thing’ we use, but in the process of creating thirdness — that is, in how we build relational systems and how we develop the intersubjective capacities for such co-creation. (p. 7) it is perhaps no surprise that deborah admired jessica benjamin’s work. her blog, then, builds a relational system, and is a process of creating thirdness, a vantage point that is occupied neither by she who writes nor she who reads, but by both, and by creating a capacious space of intersubjectivity. it is “agentic” without quite relying on the familiar coordinates of the liberal subject, a subjective “me” or an objective “you.” the blog’s intermediary place is nevertheless not a utopia, a placeless place; rather, i’d suggest it is what michel foucault has called a heterotopia, an other place. tellingly, foucault uses the metaphor of the mirror to describe this phenomenon. in one respect, the mirror is indeed a utopia: “in the mirror, i see myself there where i am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface” (1984). but from another vantage, it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that i occupy…. starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed 17 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, i come back toward myself; i begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where i am. (ibid.) much like the “agency” of the analytic third, we might think of the heterotopia as a place that fosters the recognition of our interdependence. it exerts a sort of counteraction; it is a relational system, and co-creational. if deborah’s blog is in some sense a utopian, unreal, and virtual space, it is also a heterotopic place, which intermediates or “mirrors” precisely because it is tethered to us and to those people and things we hold dear. these passages on foucault’s heterotopia were in mind when i emailed deborah to respond to her blog post, “last edits,” which had described deborah’s experience of watching a video of herself at her book launch in the summer of 2016. the thing that i found myself improbably liking was how i came across, compromised voice and all. i seemed nice. and my comments were good. well-chosen words. watchable. it’s not what i expected. or how i remember it exactly. i found myself thinking as i was watching it, what a shame she is on her way out (21 october 2016). caught off-guard, i had sobbed when i read her last line: to read ─ and to watch, as it were ─ deborah watching herself, and reflecting on that, and then for her to close her post here in the thirdness of the third person, “she.” i found myself lost in these reflections, unsure what to feel, between “i,” “you,” “she,” and “us.” i was grieving and selfishly aggrieved. fuck cancer and its parade of pink crap! was this what it felt like to mourn? if so, at the very least mourning is no solitary pursuit, and certainly not mine to repudiate. mourning together, even at a distance, somehow eroded the repudiation co-creatively; the feeling became no less disconsolate, but we were together avowing a disavowal, and by sharing it exposing just a little of its clandestine powers, its loneliness. in benjamin’s terms, i understand this as “a certain letting go of the self”: “the third is that to which we surrender, and thirdness is the 18 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) intersubjective mental space that facilitates or results from surrender” (2004, p. 7). i emailed deborah, telling her that her blog post had made me think of mirrors, another image of ourselves, a reflection that looks outward, an image that does not settle, that unsettles, and does not stop moving between that mirror image, what we see of ourselves, how we wish to be seen, and others seeing us, in a way that brings us back to ourselves reflectively, across that threshold, and in another form. as a child, i told her, i was captivated by standing between two mirrors, seeing myself seeing myself, almost to infinity. an early memory, this, and probably the apogee of my career as a media scholar! a mirror stage quite unlike what jacques lacan describes, where that mirror is supposed to consolidate my corporeal boundaries, my body-ego. rather, i felt myself opened up, unconsolidated, more in a curious than frightening way—a mise en abîme where the abîme, the abyss, is not empty or lonely, but full of infinite reflections, full of wonder, a heterotopia. deborah responded in blog form. s wrote to me about mirrors. his thoughts were compelling. the double mirror to infinity. the single mirror to the walls we might erect between self and self. the strange abyss, into which we might watch ourselves fall that might nonetheless be replete with something. i was very moved by this reflection on my reflections. i did always want to say meaningful things. i am concerned about being morose, self-serving, trite. what stopped me from writing in this space in the first instance, and then stopped me from circulating it when i did start using it…. how do you stay in conversations, when everything is conspiring to monologues, to solipsism, to mirrors only of one mind? (23 october 2016). i cannot be certain there is a connection, but this was the day deborah wrote an email of enquiry to catalyst, copied and posted on her blog, stating her interest in contributing to the special issue you are now reading. morose, self-serving, trite: fears of narcissism, of self19 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) entitlement appear frequently in deborah’s blog. she struggled with feelings of embarrassment, by the bag of bones i’ve become, by the way i choke on my own saliva; loss of dignity … my inclination is to withdraw (6 december 2016). yet her blog was an intermediating force, on her, on us. i realized today that i must ensure i’ve saved this blog in some other format, including printed out, so it won’t be suddenly lost. i don’t know why i think it’s important … to leave something behind, an imprint, an imprimatur, a hauntological artefact. to say i was here. and that it made some difference. romantic narcissism, i can see that. but it is a deep feeling too and i can’t repudiate it with criticism or scorn, or even simple selfawareness (30 november 2016). deborah had imagined this essay as engaging new media ecologies of death, of mourning, and troubling the distinctions between private and public ─ all things her blog does. “and also the way self-mourning now asserts into a blogosphere,” she wrote to me. “these are both communal and narcissistic times we live in. we are private and public at the same time” (personal email, 12 november 2016). in a blog post titled, “this is the way the world ends,” deborah wrote: the world does not end with a whimper. it ends in conflagration, drowned at sea in the search for a haven, crawled up on banks of rock or sand or mud, with no prospects, holed up in bed with the drapes closed, racked with pain and hopelessness, in the crass bombast of a demagogue [trump] turned now on flesh to flesh out a terrible world (24 october 2016). from a dying body increasingly disabled and in pain, her blog nevertheless declares war on these losses, these endings, as a third voice between the singular body and the body politic, even as these are woven together, each a metaphor for the other, the private, the public. but there are times for war, she would write. to be pacific in the face of the end of security, rights, equality, justice, hope. that is not peace. this is not a time for refuge in established routines, or pat wisdoms that no longer relate to the reality of the world. and by the way, those established routines, at the least, were ugly compromises 20 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) that pushed back the parameters of acceptability. we’ve been shrinking violets over years of violations, pretending that compliance will stave something off. but it didn’t. appeasement is a weakness, a stance of fear, and at times, it is a stance of complacency, or privilege, or the denial that comes with those (17 november 2016). times of war afford little time for goodbyes; there is work to be done, and a debt to those to come, to the future. iii. on goodbyes on goodbyes. i don’t know. i feel the same as you. i want to hold to people i care about forever. i don’t want to say goodbye to myself either…. much of the time i just wish it was done. to go to sleep and not wake up so i could stop suffering and stop being afraid…. the district nurse thinks i’m on the way out for real now. i can’t tell. a, my oncologist, when i asked her, said that i would be able to tell when it was happening. but who knows. i think we all have to live in the indefinite conversation. what else is there? it makes time easier to bear. and it’s part of what is hopeful about life, and politics too (30 november 2016). above, an email to me replying to an email to her, remediated as a blog post, and here again in these pages, on your screen, in your hands. death’s in the goodbye, announced in and as language ─ intermediating places, indefinite conversations ─ words that resound and remain despite the loss of a “you” or a “me,” attesting to that loss without quite ceding on it. words are tokens of exchange, intermediaries, tokens that promise reunifications, or the means to sing or say, without choking or gasping for breath. some reminder of what i did. when i was here (17 october 2016). if this blogged, intermediary place is a repudiation of mourning, it transmits none of the certainty of those repudiations of which deborah was so critical: no phantasmatic certainty of “life” arises there, no willing life so as to have it, no quid pro quo. on the contrary, we enter onto a place of non-teleological mourning, neither 21 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) repudiatory nor affirmational. and, if there is a transference onto the third voice ─ hers but less hers, and less mine, than ours ─ the transference resists identitarian politics, and does not permit a “me” or a “you” to stand in or speak for the other or to usurp this harrowing, hallowing, hollering place between us. the intermediating place of the blog forms part of the transforming ecologies of mourning and the place(s) of dying, to recall deborah’s words. i take these to be media ecologies, and the ways they constitute and sometimes contest the “proper” or “expected” destitute place(s) of dying in our culture, from deathbeds to hospitals ─ those very real sites that contain and constrain in the ways that they do ─ but also “place” in a deep ecological sense, as metaphor for those interconnected lives and losses that define and gather us, and that constitute the larger scene on which words are spoken, circulated, and inhabited as worlds across indefinite conversations. wor(l)ds that permit us to imagine a passage, a movement, and that do not simply contain or constrain. i like the way station. i like the textures i invented. i like the way it feels to be there. it suggests a direction without being one. it feels like movement even if it doesn’t mean going anywhere (7 november 2016). this is virtual, and yet it is not. indefinite conversations: part of what is hopeful about life, and politics too. as a collocated artifact, a series of moments gathered as one static document, deborah’s blog today is a much different text than it was in and across its own time. for those who read active cancer blogs regularly, as i did deborah’s, there is often great anxiety, a fear of refreshing the link, a fear of finding a new entry, but also a fear of not finding one. while the end might have been known as a disconsolate fact, an inevitability, in the life of deborah’s blog time unfolded in and across the written word. slowly, and at times cruelly so. can’t leave fast enough. close down. get away (31 december 2016). and here i still am, trapped in a chair, barely moving, hands inexorably contorting to their own calamity. nothing i can do now. all the things i wanted to be throughout my life were active. poet, scholar, activist, actor, 22 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) director, editor, artist, designer. maker of things. now ending like this. except it’s not ending. why not? it needs to end. i need to end (1 january 2017). feeling so much worse. but on and on it goes. no more energy for things. goodbyes. good wishes. none left in me (20 january 2017). as a gathered artifact, however, we begin to read at the end, with last words, and scroll back in time to reconstruct the dénouement. a historical record. not nothing in itself but nothing at all like it was for those who read and write in real-time. i lack the poetic skills to bring her blog to life; i don’t have the heart to relive it; and i would not bring deborah back to relive it either. all the time. i’m angry. i’m aggrieved (11 december 2016). no. no. i have begun to gain a better understanding of foucault’s enigmatic claim, that speech begins after death. this is at first a highly counterintuitive proposition: after all, is not life the condition of speech? “speech,” foucault says, “isn’t only a kind of transparent film through which we see things, not simply the mirror of what is and what we think. speech has its own consistency, its own thickness and density, its way of functioning” (foucault & bonnefoy, 2013, pp. 36–37). here speech is a “transparent film,” very thin, but also a density, a thickness. speech does not “mirror” reality perfectly; it is in this sense “heterotropic” (if i can coin this word) ─ both a heterotopia, an other place, and a transitivity, a tropological movement and intermediation, even if it doesn’t mean going anywhere. foucault parses this paradox in the following way: “naturally, it seems to me that i could talk about the things that are quite close to us, but on condition that there exists, between those very close things and the moment in which i’m writing, an infinitesimal shift, a thin film through which death has entered” (p. 43; emphasis added). this is a recognition of the intimate proximity and transitivity of death in the act of writing, and perhaps speaking (he uses these words almost interchangeably in this text). foucault shares in this moment more than he might care to admit with psychoanalytic theory, and some philosophy of language, which understands language ─ writing or speech ─ as predicated on a death of sorts. that is, death or simply loss are the 23 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) necessary conditions of language, because if there were no absence, no lack, no rupture with being ─ even temporarily ─ we would have no need of words, and no need to turn elsewhere, tropologically. words stand in for what is absent or hidden, and they try to represent what is lost, to represent the unrepresentable, as a mere sign or symbol, a token. signs substitute as it were for being, and open for us a world of symbolic meaning that is cut off from the real, to borrow lacan’s term. but words also have their own agency, and create worlds, textures, places that are unreal or imaginary, and that dwell less on what is than on what might or ought to be. and we must not forget, too, that writing or speech addresses someone, an addressee, an other ─ actual or potential ─ who might read or hear across time and distance. speech is indeed “heterotropic,” the tropic turn and return of an address, yours and mine, mine in yours, the other irreducible to the selfsame, and vice versa. and this is true even if my addressee is me myself, as it always is to some extent, inscrutable as i am to myself, bound up with and through my attachments to others. in foucault’s terms: “we can never reach the end of language through speech, no matter how long we imagine it to be. this inexhaustibility of language, which always holds speech in suspense in terms of a future that will never be completed, is another way of experiencing the obligation to write” (p. 66). i find something hopeful in this obligation, in what is owed but not owned, and in the inexhaustibility of language and its indefinite conversations; also, in the agency of language, which carries me beyond a “me” or a “you,” where the subject who speaks, as much as the addressee, tremble and are cradled in the murmurs of an intermediary place. how does this, my theoretic account, figure into a feminist politics of the body-subject? but this is not (just) theory: if the singular body and the body politic stand in a tropological relation, each troping the other, spoken, addressed, in turns and returns, it is also a profoundly material one, in other wor(l)ds. but words matter. and in so many respects, are matter (11 december 2016). as we know only too well, crises in the body politic have profoundly material effects on individual bodies, which 24 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) are beholden, if not hostage, to the institutions and infrastructures and social services responsible for delivering care. deborah once again: “austerity is nothing if not a harbinger of social excommunication and lonely death” (steinberg, 2016). in the context of a feminist politics, i think back to some of those indefinite conversations with deborah, and lively debates concerning her concept of self-sovereignty (also see shildrick & steinberg, 2015). self-sovereignty: a problematic concept, deborah wrote on her blog. and yet what else is there that expresses one’s right to determination over one’s own body? the inalienable right over the disposition of one’s own self and life, vis-à-vis someone else’s interest, whether that is intrusion, or exploitation, or ownership, or life and death, medical treatment or not? (20 october 2016). my own concern with this term, sovereignty, is its history and alignment with liberal conceptions of “autonomy” and the ways this latter has been deployed by patriarchal politics and paternalistic (bio)ethics. “sovereignty” seems to me to cling to an outdated language, conceding a politics that polices in advance the boundaries of autonomy, and what it might mean to make a valid ─ legible or legal, rational or agentic ─ claim from this ostensibly autonomous subject-position or “self.” it reduplicates violence, in my view. in the words of deborah’s friend, margrit shildrick, bioethics, like medicine, is a disciplinary power: “[t]he discipline has effectively duplicated the master discourse and maintained the split between a secure sense of the transcendent self as moral agent, and a more or less unruly body that must be subjected to its dictates” (shildrick, 2005, p. 3). deborah did not disagree. and yet. she was right: how else might we express one’s right to determination over one’s own body, one’s life, one’s death? the fallacies of individuation, sovereign selfhood apart from others, a denial of the interdependencies of bodies and lives that are in fact the human condition. who is an island, really? and yet. i think of the ways in which secrecy ─ call it discretion, call it hiding, call it dim lighting my own lights ─ has dominated much of my own 25 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) life. the sense of obligation that has driven it. the embarrassments in its wake. s is right that shame and guilt are cruddy, cruel oppressors. but even so they are embedded in the fabric of so much (8 december 2016). in an act of self-sovereignty, deborah had signed an advance directive for her medical care. m from palliative care told me that she was concerned that one of my provisions in the directive is not legal in the uk. the one about terminal sedation. yes i am aware of that, i told her. but it is what i wish for. the law is wrong. and i protest it. and it stays in (20 october 2016). when the time came, deborah’s wish was not honored, it could not be, by law: i asked for propofol sedation … she said it was illegal in uk. this is illogical. i didn’t say kill me with it…. c said, well, the law is trying to protect people from feeling pressure to die. well fuck that because it is fine with forcing people to live in suffering. why is that pressure ok? (23 december 2016). they get offended at my interrogation of their illogics. and are frustrated by my fighting to keep myself in my own terms instead of gratefully submitting as a compliant patient. they want to feel good about what they are doing. and i make that difficult (24 december 2016). it would be better if i were a dog or a horse. someone would stop this (8 december 2016). yet even here, deborah felt the obligation to write, to speak. these passages were and remain difficult for me to read. in our indefinite conversations i had argued (feebly, i confess, full of hesitation) from the perspective of a feminist ethics of care, premised on the fact that we are, in birth as in death, ultimately relational beings, nonautonomous, and interdependent (see murray, 2017b). the agony, and the injustice, is that one is forced to concede the “master discourse” in order to be heard, to make a claim on its terms, to be judged by medico-legal institutions, the court of public opinion, and by those microfascists deputized to act in their name, which becomes yours despite yourself. the problem is, it 26 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) would seem, that the entire discourse ─ liberal human rights discourse included ─ is flawed, based on false premises, and held by established powers. and yet the power of the people, and of a populism that claims to fight established powers, also offers little refuge beyond social media trial-by-tweetstorm. a feminist ethics must resist the populist seduction too. writing in the wake of the trump election, deborah looked toward the struggles ahead. i suspect that everything will have change. the music. the films. the books. the conversations (25 november 2016). an ecological shift in consciousness, a reckoning with misogyny, racism, warmongering, and the alt-right ghouls who know very well how to reverse-engineer algorithms and populate our social media screens with their content. despite our debates, and in my own desire to honor her self-sovereignty, i don’t think deborah would mind that i close by saying that as much as her blog was and remains an extension of herself, she was not, and is not, sovereign over it. it inhabits, opens onto and speaks from, another place. and it is not the place of the populist imaginary, not subject rightfully to other people’s opinions, intrusions, moral estimations and unasked-for advice (20 october 2016), of which deborah was so critical. the “subject” of deborah’s blog is both a private and a public one, narcissistic yet profoundly communal, wrought in language that refers to “you” and “me,” what is “yours” and “mine,” but in and from a place that is, moreover, ours. in this, it is almost free from the claims of bodily selfsovereignty; its body is virtual, subtle, but for all this no less real. a digital body politic, if you will. it is not that self-sovereignty is irrelevant there, in this intermediary place; rather, it is, perhaps, that place without which any claim to bodily sovereignty, to a “me” and a “you,” no longer makes sense, no longer has purchase. it suggests a very different ecology, a future that calls us despite the diminishing places of care in a culture that repudiates death even as it is hell-bent on delivering it, often to those whose self-sovereignty was never more than a cruel deceit, a false form of popular “empowerment.” in a radical reading, one i would close with 27 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) tentatively, this intermediary place ─ and others like it ─ is primordial, originary, and cultivates a relationality from which our sense of “me” and “you” derive, and upon which they depend. it is owed but not owned, and yes, this subverts a certain enlightenment philosophy of the subject, it undermines a liberal ethics founded in the fetish of autonomy, and would re-imagine, if we could ─ and this “we” is nonnegotiable, a beginning ─ a different life, a different death, for all of us who find ourselves in places between. acknowledgments stuart murray would like to thank gershon sillins and debbie epstein for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. notes 1 an unedited transcript of deborah’s blog, https://darkcloudblog.wordpress.com, is archived in pdf format and accompanies this essay. in keeping with deborah’s wishes, throughout this essay i have made minor editorial corrections and added capitalization at the beginning of sentences. her blogged words, woven together with mine, appear in a different font, followed by the date of the blog entry: i seem to be learning all over again how to type, this time with no hands, just single claws and i have to watch the keys. i have to go back again and again to make corrections (21 october 2016). 2 on the psychoanalytic distinction between verneinung (“negation”) and verleugnung (“disavowal”), which i invoke loosely here, see laplanche & pontalis (1973, pp. 261–263 and 118–120, respectively). i see parallels between freudian disavowal ─ originally the repudiation of woman’s lack of a penis, when subjects nevertheless report seeing one there ─ and the repudiation of death where one fetishizes “life” as phallic virility, and which covers over the reality of loss. 28 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) 3 i should note here that the repudiation of mourning is not the failure to mourn, but might be seen as arising in response to mourning and the feelings that accompany it. in this sense it is not what freud (1957) describes as melancholia, where the lost object is introjected, installed in the ego as a narcissistic identification, and becomes there a super-egoic agency that morally castigates the ego. the words “melancholy” and “melancholia” never appear in deborah’s blog. references benjamin, j. 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(r. bononno, trans.). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. freud, s. (1957). mourning and melancholia. in j. strachey (ed. & trans.). the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud (vol. 14). london, uk: hogarth press, 237–258. jain, s. lochlann. (2013). malignant: how cancer becomes us. berkeley, ca: university of california press. kear, a. & steinberg, d.l. (eds.) (1999). mourning diana: nation, culture and the performance of grief. london, uk & new york, ny: routledge. laplanche, j., & poltalis, j.-b. (1973). the language of psycho-analysis. (d. nicholson-smith, trans.). new york, ny: w.w. norton and co. murray, s.j. (2017a). neoliberal biopolitics through the spectacles of the gene. science as culture, 26(2), 255–259. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09505431.2016.1238890. ─── (2017b). care, giving: an ethical critique. in a. blum & s.j. murray (eds.) the ethics of care: moral knowledge, communication, and the art of caregiving (pp. 225–242). london, uk & new york, ny: routledge. a pdf version is available at: https://modernrhetoric.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/afterword.pdf. murray, s.j., & steinberg, d.l. (2015). autopoiesis | ethopoiesis: bioconvergent media in the age of neoliberal biopolitics. mediatropes, 5(1), 125–139. retrieved from http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/mediatropes/article/view/22660/ 18465. ogden, t.h. (1994). the analytic third: working with intersubjective 30 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) clinical facts. international journal of psycho-analysis, 75, 3–19. shildrick, m. 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[web log comment] theconversation.com, https://theconversation.com/bowie-diana-and-why-we-mourn-in-public53396. ─── (2017). good patient ─ bad patient: the ethical imaginary of cancer.” in a. blum & s.j. murray (eds.). the ethics of care: moral knowledge, communication, and the art of caregiving (pp. 149–177). london, uk & new york, ny: routledge. a pdf of this chapter is uploaded to deborah’s blog: https://darkcloudblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/goodpatientbadpatie nt-dls.pdf. steinberg, d.l., & johnson, r. (eds.). (2004). blairism and the war of 31 murray and steinberg catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) persuasion: labour’s passive revolution. london, uk: lawrence & wishart. winnicott, d.w. (1971). transitional objects and transitional phenomena. playing and reality (pp. 1–55). new york, ny: basic books. (original work published 1951). bios stuart j. murray is professor and canada research chair in rhetoric and ethics in the department of english language and literature at carleton university in ottawa, canada. his books include critical interventions in the ethics of healthcare: challenging the principle of autonomy in bioethics (with dave holmes); the ethics of care: moral knowledge, communication, and the art of caregiving (with alan blum); radical sex between men: assembling desiring-machines (with dave holmes and thomas foth); and he is completing a manuscript, tentatively titled, the living from the dead: disaffirming biopolitics. deborah lynn steinberg was a professor of gender, culture and media studies in the department of sociology, university of warwick, and an associate lecturer at the open university, united kingdom. her books include bodies in glass: genetics, eugenics, embryo ethics; mourning diana: nation, culture and the performance of grief (with adrian kear); blairism and the war of persuasion: labour’s passive revolution (with richard johnson); and genes and the bioimaginary: science, spectacle, culture. murillo, luis felipe r. (2020). moral circuits. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license moral circuits luis felipe r. murillo university of virginia lfr6d@virginia.edu it all starts with a gesture that introduces a difference: parsing an excess of information to procure the basic elements that will integrate the blueprint of a new software / hardware project. a retrospective look becomes necessary. a gesture of consideration for those who came before. one traverses the electronic commons backwards after bits and pieces, sources of inspiration, crossing paths already mapped to address a question or a problem at hand. like a bricoleur, parsing usually yields a partial picture, but good enough in any case, before putting us to work in direct or indirect collaboration. among several definitions in circulation and dispute, the one i propose here after gilbert simondon (1958/1989; 2014) concerns the ethical practice of “openness” as respect (for the work) of others. depending on its moral as much as on its digital and material circuits, “open technical objects” embody an invitation for practical engagement with the transformative, (open) networked potentials of moral circuits. moral circuits qualify as moral for their binding interdependencies and obligations, simultaneously infrastructuring and orienting particular sociotechnical arrangements in specific associated milieus. through moral circuitries, care for the other is extended through technical offerings, where openness figures as a condition that prevents us from losing the ability to offer the capacity of sharing and learning from technical objects to others. more than a point of departure, “collaboration” constitutes a shared sociotechnical horizon and represents a point of arrival for an inventive project that is concretized: to find humans in the computer circuitry and, conversely, computer circuitries in moral worlds as if we were double-tasked as researchers of sociotechnical milieus. in her feminist images and texts 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 reflections on questions of identify, individuation, and invention, elizabeth grosz suggests that what simondon offers feminist and other forms of radical thought is a new way of understanding a world that is not ultimately controlled or ordered through a central apparatus or system, that has no inherent or necessary hierarchies, that does not require animation or coordination by culture but instead enables and makes culture itself possible. (2012, p. 53) not the facile humanism’s “human” (with its intransigent technical culture without humans) but one situationally enmeshed with the material and virtual aspects of the machinery, its interfaces and its constitutive infrastructures. right at the humanists’ blind spot, out of sight for most but akin to haraway’s (1991) figure / device of the “cyborg” in the integrated circuits of late capitalism, technical second-natures are to be found. while many technologists and self-declared “hackers” have a public face and accumulated political capital, the industrial workers who are essential to the making of digital machines and infrastructures do not. industrial workers are anonymous in the discursive, digital, or actual printed circuits even if the promise of a new moral circuitry for “open” technologies is to create convivial worlds in the context of pervasive oems (original equipment manufacturers) and it corporations worldwide. feminist sts has taught tomes about the experience of the invisibilization of one’s labor, domestic, emotional, technoscientific, and otherwise, a project that is continued through catalyst as an open forum. the prefiguration of a technological future with shared conditions for studying, understanding, modifying, producing, and redistributing as a gesture of respect for the (present, past, and future) work of others collapses with the discourse that “everyone is welcome” to join (murillo, 2020). the catch-all rubric of “openness,” often depicted as “universal access,” serves a liberal rhetoric (from sebastopol, california, outward when it comes to the newfound obsession with “making”) that renders invisible the structural fault lines of gender, ethnicity, and class inequity. feminist scholars such as aiwa ong (1987), mary beth mills (2005), and lisa nakamura (2014) remind us of the gendering of electronics factory work in which the majority of precarious laborers are women and marginalized ethnic groups. this trend manifests in china where women-identified workers are to be found in high numbers on factory floors, soldering irons at hand, in stark contrast with their underrepresentation in celebrated chinese “spaces of innovation” (lindtner, 2015). from sts vantages, we have collectively examined the structuring and images and texts 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 structured inequalities of computing from the early work of donna haraway (1991), diana forsythe (2001), sharon traweek (1988), and many others on the “culture of no culture” of the technosciences to contemporary studies at the intersection of postcolonial studies, feminist sts, and social informatics (philip, irani, & dourish, 2012; chan, 2013; amrute, 2016; irani, 2019). their voices are the means through which we get to speak about these issues and, slowly but increasingly, to be heard. the ethnographic-oriented cartoon i offer here reflects an experience with moral circuits that are ethically oriented toward “openness.” first drafted for the 4s meeting in boston (2017)—under the title “pedal transcriba, an ethnographic device of (and for) qualitative research”—it depicts an experiment with moral circuits drawn from multi-sited research across community spaces for alternative computing in the pacific rim. my motivation was to derive the moral circuitry with a simple but open technical object by researching moral economies of “open” digital fabrication through my own practice of design and fabrication. the work i carried out was informed by traweek’s (1988) methodological orientation of reading the history of technoscientific collectives through the history of their instruments. the project was also meant as an invitation to navigate through different spaces, places, and debates by following the moral circuits by which political cultures of computing are actualized. based on the collaborative ties i cultivated over time, i started to learn about the circuits of exchange not only by following the circulation of projects, computer experts, and technical objects, but also through firsthand and hands-on experience with hardware projects. the pet project i describe in the cartoon— “pedal transcriba”1—was born out of the (personal) necessity of transcribing audio interviews but also out of the research itself, which demanded thinking through the tools, materials, and exchange practices of independent computer collectives and their convivial technologies. the technical object i prototyped consisted of a simple usb-based pedal that i used to control an audio player, which helped not only to reduce the number of hours normally required for the task but also brought to the fore the sociotechnical circuits that are necessary to create an “open hardware” project (from design to fabrication, distribution, usage, and repurposing). by representing an actual integrated circuit within latent moral circuits of open hardware development—understood here as a technical object and a feminist technopolitical heuristic after haraway (1991)—the prototype materializes the conditions of the present but with an opening toward alternative technopolitical futures of much broader scope. if alternatives for images and texts 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 positive sociotechnical change depend on our struggles to people hegemonic circuits (fischer, 2009), then computing in/from the south offers a methodology for the realization of moral circuits. images and texts 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 notes 1 the software code and hardware design files are available at https://gitlab.com/unixjazz/pedal-transcriba references amrute, s. (2016). encoding race, encoding class: indian it workers in berlin. duke university press. chan, a. (2013). networking peripheries: technological futures and the myth of digital universalism. mit press. fischer, m. m. j. (2009). anthropological futures. duke university press. forsythe, d. (2001). studying those who study us: an anthropologist in the world of artificial intelligence. stanford university press. grosz, e. (2012). identity and individuation: some feminist reflections. in a. de boever, a. murray, j. roffe, & a. woodward (eds.), gilbert simondon: being and technology (pp. 37–56). edinburgh university press. haraway, d. (1991). simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. routledge. irani, l. (2019). chasing innovation: making entrepreneurial citizens in modern india. duke university press. lindtner, s. (2015). hacking with chinese characteristics: the promises of the maker movement against china’s manufacturing culture. science, technology, & human values, 40(5), 854–879. mills, m. b. (2005). from nimble fingers to raised fists: women and labor activism in globalizing thailand. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 31(1), 117–144. murillo, luis felipe r. (2020). “hackerspace network: prefiguring technopolitical futures?” american anthropologist, 122: 207-221. doi:10.1111/aman.13318 nakamura, l. (2014). indigenous circuits: navajo women and the racialization of early electronic manufacture. american quarterly, 66(4), 919–941. ong, a. (1987). spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: factory women in malaysia. state university of new york press. philip, k., irani, l., & dourish, p. (2012). postcolonial computing: a tactical survey. science, technology, & human values, 37(1): 3–29. simondon, g. (1989). du mode d'existence des objets techniques. aubier. (original work published in 1958) images and texts 6 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 simondon, g. (2014). sur la technique. presses universitaires de france. traweek, s. (1988). beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy physicists. harvard university press. author bio luis felipe r. murillo is an anthropologist whose work is dedicated to the study of political cultures of computing. he is currently a research associate at the university of virginia , school of data science, where he runs a laboratory (librelab) for collaborative research with open technologies and teaches for the center of data ethics and justice. gupta, hemangini (2020). postcolonial assembly protocols for unnamed and undefined automation projects. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–14. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © hemangini gupta, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license postcolonial assembly protocols for unnamed automation projects hemangini gupta middlebury college hgupta@middlebury.edu abstract this creative contribution offers a sardonic manual to navigate the exuberant world of the startup economy in bangalore, india, once known as a backend site of technological labor. as bangalore fashions itself to become a “new” startup city, this manual continually tacks between the material sites and discourses of these seemingly new practices to bring into focus the persistent and revised forms of inequality that undergird them. adopting the form of annotated keywords allows the manual to recast the circulating buzzwords of startup capitalism within their larger social and cultural histories. each index entry expands a site of ethnographic investigation and cultural critique to allow the reader to explore the manual across registers: as a sardonic text, as a movement between words and their histories, and as an introduction to academic work that contextualizes technological experimentation. since the 1980s, the south indian city of bangalore has been developed by local state governments as a site for outsourced technology work. by the time i arrived in bangalore to conduct ethnographic fieldwork between 2012 and 2014, entrepreneurs and technologists were uncoupling themselves from the tag of “outsourced labor” to fashion a new “start up city.” state and private funding are channeled into the entrepreneurial economy, galvanized by the national government’s emphasis on a “make in india” policy. bangalore is now imagined as an entrepreneurial ecosystem: a hub for technological innovation with images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 2 entrepreneurial citizens. governments and private technology groups create flagship programs and funding streams such as “start up karnataka” and the national association of software and service companies’ (nasscom) “10000 startups,” but individual technologists, too, do their part to differentiate this contemporary moment from the global labor chains of the past. in my interviews, technologists assured me that they weren’t “cyber coolies,” a term popularized by a cultural critic to signify the supposedly menial labor sent to back offices in india. instead, they compare their innovations in machine learning with gmail’s predictive messaging. here in bangalore, when entrepreneurs invent forms of automation—primarily robots—they are intended for business efficiency and cost-cutting (of course!), but also imagined as signifiers of value. technologists travel widely to pitch to global markets and meet potential consumers, crafting themselves as cosmopolitan entrepreneurs. they are subjects emergent from colonial pasts that deemed them inferior, nationalist struggles that articulated science and technology as modernist projects, and neoliberal entrepreneurialism. even as postcolonial entrepreneurs innovate, they galvanize caste identity, often reifying dominant hindu and middle-class imaginations of a good life. i became interested in understanding this resolutely postcolonial form of innovation and its technoaffects, weaving so fluently between global signifiers of startup culture and the postcolonial ways in which entrepreneurs navigate this quixotic world. this manual offers a startup kit to assemble a team, invent a robot, pitch to funders, and potentially disrupt an industry! working protocols 1. before assembly, please ensure you have ample love. this is available on the bestseller shelf of the local crosswords bookstore or at a streetside vendor. labels differ depending on region. in parts of north america, love may be sold under “steve jobs.” most asian rising economies retail under the name of “it happened in india” or “never give up.” if there has been a run on love and it is not available at the time of assembly, then through creative and innovative experimentation, use a heartfelt combination of: passion, thirst, inspiration, and grit. if none of these are available, for asian assembly, love can be substituted by a combination of parental disowning, social stigma, and inability to secure an arranged marriage. 2. confirm core team members before assembly. ensure team members images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 3 in bangalore share your taste in craft beer and hanging out at local brewpubs. 3. for smooth operation of your new venture, ensure your core team members are educated at national technical institutes such as iyer iyengar technology. core members should live in gated communities on the city’s outskirts. their dispersal across the city will further the traffic snarls bangalore is now known for; another separate manual (technology for the smart city.v1) is now available as an add on to this one. 4. establish and popularize tiktok feeds, instagram and twitter accounts simultaneous to the assembly of your automation project. in case these websites are banned before you go to market, create a website. images for the website can be culled from istock photos to display casual caucasian-skinned men chatting on bean bags. (compare representational figures to the normate template and discard bodies that do not match the criteria in order to ensure the smooth flow of venture capital.) 5. aside from startup founders, all employees should be project-based as “consultants.” precarious work environments create risk-taking appetite amongst disruptors in the ecosystem furthering chances of acquiring series a funding from y combinator. for clarification of all the terms just mentioned, please take an uber auto to visit your closest wework. 6. technologists who are working on the details of the actual invention need to demonstrate mastery over protocols related to east and west. they need proficiency in free software or open source coding, yoga teacher training credentials, should wear loose-fitting linen shorts. ideally, they should have a favored spiritual guru or guiding philosopher, such as swami vivekananda, to similarly circulate successfully in the west as an indian ambassador. 7. technology experiments are typically tested on populations in the global south. since you are currently in the south, test your experimental automation on your own project team. if your automation can replace someone’s labor, then you can successfully eliminate that job. quickly disappearing teams may impact overall morale. employees can be energized through group activities such as decorating the office during diwali, designating every friday as “sari day,” and celebrating ayudha puja (see entry under understanding hinduism) with the distribution of free sweets. (employees will assume their own responsibility for organizing and implementing images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 4 these initiatives.) 8. if you are inventing a robot, we suggest a maximum of three syllables in a name gendered feminine. proceed with bawdy tests. organize test customers to demand sexual favors, ask personal questions, and share explicitly sexual content with the robot. the robot must accurately simper and divert the question. please select a colorado accent to proceed with racial branding. (if in doubt about what a colorado accent is, please replace yourself with another startup founder.) 9. correlate the level of surveillance programmed within the robot to its aesthetic appearance. small amounts of surveillance should correspond directly with pleasing countenance. robots that zealously record all conversations must simultaneously care for, calm, and control the environment in which they are deployed while appearing relatable, mysterious, and wholesomely sexy. 10. in small ways, your robot can enable a template for the future! train fashion assistant robots to only activate when consumers are seated with knees close together, heads slightly tilted, mouths creased into a gentle welcoming smile. cooking robots should default to assisting women’s labor. congratulations! you just invented a postcolonial robot! when correctly executed, thoughtful initial programming can ensure a future in which all users are enabled to live longer, dress better, cook faster, and have guaranteed time to reproduce themselves! index a ability (techno–ableism) how we envision the “proper” functioning of bodies and minds shapes our imaginations of the future and how we design its technological systems. “technoableism is a term i have coined to describe a rhetoric of disability that at once talks about empowering disabled people through technologies while at the same time reinforcing ableist tropes about what bodyminds are good to have and who counts as worthy.” images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 5 a. shew. (2020). ableism, technoableism, and future ai. ieee technology and society magazine, 39(1), 43. http://doi:10.1109/mts.2020.2967492 b building innovation innovation as key to india’s development, offering a model for economic growth, social change, and a re-articulation of india’s place in a global economy. in india, innovation “was the promise that the nation’s varied use values, sensibilities, and lifeways could be realized as improvement, as modernization, and as economic growth.” irani, l. (2019). chasing innovation: making entrepreneurial citizens in modern india. princeton university press. p. 15–16 c caste caste emerged through my fieldwork both as a form of privilege, enabling the elite education and material resources that allowed access to technical learning, and a system of naturalized preferences for the “life of the mind.” as renny thomas shows in his ethnography of scientists at a premier institute in bangalore, brahmins’ historical access to modern education and english education policy normalized their caste practices as scientific. “brahmin scientists’ identity as casteless beings worked as a strategic tool to avoid questions of reservation and inclusion. many scientists term their entry to science through ‘passion,’ ‘merit’ and ‘interest.’ being brahmins who had educated family members, it was not just passion, but also their cultural capital that helped them in doing science.” thomas, r. (2020). brahmins as scientists and science as brahmins’ calling: caste in an indian scientific research institute. public understanding of science, 29(3), 313. d doing what you love an ascendant global discourse that masks the conditions of labor and circulations of capital that enable so-called creative work. http://doi:10.1109/mts.2020.2967492 images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 6 “but, ultimately, all of these romanticized motivations are masks, hiding the simple fact that work is work, even if it produces something cherished or beautiful.” tokumitsu, m. (2015). do what you love: and other lies about success and happiness. regan arts. p.2 . e experiments experiments as conjectural future-making assemblages, in michelle murphy’s words. “[i] define experiments in a broad sense as technical-social assemblies that arrange and gather data about interventions into the world toward the possibility of making something different happen.” murphy, m. (2017). the economization of life. duke university press. p.09 . f fashion echo look's disciplining powers are internalized by subjects, and the technology extends disciplinary practices of sitting, smiling, and spatial movements. “echo look emerges as the perfect tool for self-discipline through 360-degree views that render a view from nowhere— another example of unregulated gluttony of technological vision.” (parvin builds on haraway, italics in original.) parvin, n. (2019). look up and smile! seeing through alexa’s algorithmic gaze. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), p. 4 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29592 g google innovators i spoke with in bangalore were inspired by inventions like gmail’s predictive text in email. “how do we ensure that our capacity is put to best use so we have not underutilized or overutilized people? tech plays a big role in this. to me the best example of this innovation is gmail and email. they have made it so much easier to send email.” —interview with a technologist in bangalore, 5 september 2018 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29592 images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 7 h hanging out christopher kelty describes how he encounters the heavymetal, beer-drinking software culture in bangalore’s pubs. the reorientation of knowledge and power explored in kelty’s ethnography takes place not only through coding publics but through other avenues, such as tastes in music. “inside [the pub] it is dark and smoky, purple, filled with men between eighteen and thirty, and decorated with posters of jimi hendrix, black sabbath, jim morrison...all of the men, it appears, are singing along with the music, which is almost without exception heavy metal.” kelty, c. m. (2008). two bits: the cultural significance of free software. duke university press. p. 44. (today’s techies might just as readily celebrate ayudha puja, in which prayers and offerings are placed before machines, signaling the diverse routes through which hinduism comes to be “culturized” (see thomas & geraci, 2018) thus redefining it as cultural practice.) thomas, r., & geraci, r. m. (2018). religious rites and scientific communities: ayudha puja as “culture” at the indian institute of science. zygon, 1, 95. https://doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12380 i iit iyer iyengar technology or the indian institutes of technology: key nodes in a process in which technological knowledge becomes disassociated with lower-caste artisans to become emblematic of upper-caste status (hence iyer, iyengar) and modernist projects of development. “the majority of iitians come from upper-caste families of bureaucrats, school-teachers, and academics where capital has long been held in education. while most were already children of the professional class, the value of their accumulated capital has suddenly spiked due to the reorganization of late twentiethand early twenty-first-century capitalism around the ‘knowledge economy.’ at the same time, the role of caste and state in producing the iitian has been obscured in favor of his or her images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 8 portrayal as a socially disembedded individual with an innate capacity for technical knowledge.” subramanian, a. (2015). making merit: the indian institutes of technology and the social life of caste. comparative studies in society and history, 57 (2), p. 293. j jobs, steve stay hungry. stay foolish. “you have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. this approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” stanford. (2008, march 7). steve jobs’ 2005 stanford commencement address [video]. youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf8ur6z6klc k karnataka, startup the state of karnataka is channeling resources to build itself as a startup hub. “the government of karnataka is proud to be the first state to announce the establishment of a dedicated startup cell! the karnataka startup cell’s aim is to promote bangalore and karnataka as the ultimate startup destination in the world.” (cover page of startup website, 15 july 2020) department of itbt, kits. (n.d.). startup karnataka. https://startup.karnataka.gov.in/ l labor vora and atanasoski describe the global-racial erasures and disappearances undergirding techno-utopic fantasies of a postlabor society. “by surrogate humanity, we mean to include not only specific technologies such as 3d printers and robots operating in factories that literally replace older spheres of human action and labor, but also the processes through which racialized, gendered, and sexualized spheres of life and labor are seemingly elided by technological surrogates, even as these spheres are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf8ur6z6klc https://startup.karnataka.gov.in/ images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 9 replicated in emergent modes of work, violence, and economies of desire.” atanasoski, n., & vora, k. (2015). surrogate humanity: posthuman networks and the (racialized) obsolescence of labor. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 1(1), p. 3. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.42 m mastery entrepreneurs in bangalore seek to find their footing as equals with their contemporaries in the west through a performance of their mastery over both spiritual and material domains of life. “across anticolonial discourse the mastery of the colonizer over the colonies was a practice that was explicitly disavowed, and yet, in their efforts to decolonize, anticolonial thinkers in turn advocated practices of mastery—corporeal, linguistic, and intellectual—toward their own liberation.” singh, j. (2018) unthinking mastery: dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. duke university press. p. 2. n normate template the normate template is the unmarked privilege of majority embodiments—white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, ablebodied, and middle-class bodies—that appear neutral when their social location is in fact highly specific. “this ‘mythic average norm’ is not a neutral body but rather a particular white, european, nondisabled, youthful and often masculine figure whose features remain unmarked.” hamraie, a. (2017). normate template: knowing-making the architectural inhabitant. in building access: universal design and the politics of disability. university of minnesota press. p. 20. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt79d.5 o open source coding lilly nguyen’s interlocutor lives in a small town in the mekong delta but travels the world as an open source enthusiast. “through participation in the social worlds of these technologies, she met people from all over the world and these https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.42 https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt79d.5 images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 10 communities encounters fulfilled a deep-seated desire to overcome the dislocation of where she lived.” nguyen, l. (2018). “this is not who we are”: freedom as moral affect and the whiteness of mutuality. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), p. 3. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i1.29636 p pitching an entrepreneur explains how they arrived at their idea for a robot but then retrospectively framed it as an “aha” moment when pitching to investors who wanted a clear compelling narrative. “when we were inventing [this cooking robot], r (founder)’s parents were both working, his mother would cook breakfast, lunch, dinner and the family changed three maids (as they weren’t able to find someone satisfactory), then his mother decided that she would cook lunch, and the three siblings would cook dinner. as inventors, at that point we were winding down our wind turbine project and thinking of what to do next. r said, ‘i hate to cook so let's build a machine that can cook, and all of it can be automated.’ of course, our investor story is that we always knew we wanted to do this but actually we had to brainstorm and find something to invent.” interview with startup founder in bangalore, 6 december 2017 q quixotic startup entrepreneurs are expected to produce themselves as quixotic, unpredictable mavericks, in distinction to others who turn to business as a caste-related occupation. “the will to automate emerges amidst multiple force fields: state ideologies, funding infrastructures and cycles, global entrepreneurial discourses and a postcolonial drive to situate bangalore at the center rather than the periphery of innovation. entrepreneurial companies with whom i conducted fieldwork were imagining themselves designing products and services for global markets. i recognize this shift to innovation and the emergence of the figure of the emboldened global entrepreneur as a unique moment of postcolonial experimentation.” https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i1.29636 images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 11 gupta, h. (2019). testing the future: gender and technocapitalism in start-up india. feminist review, 123(1), 74. r racial branding the presentation of race as a neoliberal strategy that operates through dynamics of race and gender in global markets. “the legitimate and visible white female body in this configuration is the white female body that occludes the fact that the actual laboring body is a non-white body in the global south.” guevarra, a. r. (2015). techno-modeling care: racial branding, dis/embodied labor, and “cybraceros” in south korea. frontiers: a journal of women studies, 36(3), p. 141. jstor. https://doi.org/10.5250/fronjwomestud.36.3.0139. see also phan, t. (2019). amazon echo and the aesthetics of whiteness. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1–38. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29586 s software, free “i finished graduation and only wanted a job using open source software; at that time it was like men marrying men or something, it was unthinkable. my college had invited stallman to speak to us (from the free software foundation) and he made complete sense. at that time there was only linux available. a teacher was also inspiring; he gave us use of a lab and guided us. this was in 1998. i was drawn to linux because it made learning available to everybody without stealing or hacking.”—interview with a technologist in bangalore, 5 september 2018 t techno-affects the environments in and through which technological formations create subjects, build horizons of possibility, and limit the imagination of a possible life. “[a]n intense attachment that produces an alignment between a specific technological formation and a particular kind of subject.” https://doi.org/10.5250/fronjwomestud.36.3.0139 images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 12 amrute, s. (2019). of techno-ethics and techno-affects. feminist review, 123(1), 56. u understanding hinduism how can we understand indian discoveries and inventions in science and technology in the context of a right-wing hindu nationalist government that lays claims to several scientific inventions as having originated in ancient india? “rather than characterize hinduism as ancient, nonmodern, or traditional, the hindu nationalists have embraced capitalism, western science, and technology as elements of a modern, hindu nation.” subramaniam, b. (2019) holy science: the biopolitics of hindu nationalism. university of washington press. location 266. v value indian scientists and technologists have long created their work as valuable in the context of colonial histories and nationalist struggles. identities are created as forms of resistance. "nationalist ideology, which had a profound influence on women scientists of that era, tended to mask class, caste, and gender differences as it asserted a self-conscious and selfconfident indian identity. her insistence on downplaying gender in science can also be seen as a form of resistance to coercive identities imposed in the society at large, which limited women's potential. it did not entail a blanket denial of all difference but rather the denial of those formulations that posited different intellectual capabilities in men and women.” sur, a. (2011). dispersed radiance: women scientists in c. v. raman’s laboratory. meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 1(2), p. 112. w wework, coworking space the global co-working space now has several different branches in bangalore. a technologist i interviewed convinced his ceo to acquire space images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 13 here, as their regular office “has a different energy.” he continued: “i don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s a different kind of crowd here, it’s more stylish, i have asked [my wife] to come and use this place too to meet clients [she’s beginning a new career in image consulting]. the first time you meet someone it can be awkward but you just say hi, and then after that you say, oh hi, i’ve seen you here before!” —interview with technologist in bangalore, 5 september 2018 x xenophobia, addressed through robots in japan the declining birthrate, labor shortage, and rapidly aging population are treated as problems that need a “technological fix,” and the government proposes innovation 25 to promote a robot-dependent society that enables women to have more children with the help of robots. the added benefit is that robotic help eliminates the need for immigrant labor. “[t]wentieth-century imperialism is being replaced with twentyfirst-century technological colonialism.” robertson, j. (2018). robo sapiens japanicus: robots, gender, family, and the japanese nation. california scholarship online.p. 57 https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520283190.001.0001 y y combinator an accelerator lab that provides seed funding for startups. about y combinator. (n.d.). https://www.ycombinator.com/about/ z zealous recording the indian government is increasing its surveillance through apps designed during covid-19. pant, b., & lal, m. (2020, may 11). aarogya setu app: a tale of the complex challenges of a rights-based regime. the wire. https://thewire.in/tech/aarogya-setu-app-challenges-rightsbased-regime https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520283190.001.0001 https://www.ycombinator.com/about/ images and texts | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) hemangini gupta, 2020 14 acknowledgements thanks to nassim parvin for her editorial vision and practice and to moyukh chatterjee who reads more first drafts than anyone should have to. author bio hemangini gupta is completing a manuscript that analyzes startup capitalism in bangalore, india. she has a phd in women’s gender and sexuality studies from emory university, and teaches classes on transnational feminisms, technological futures, and capital and labor at middlebury college. microsoft word gan final.docx gan, elaine (2019). sorting seeds into racialized futures and pasts. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © elaine gan, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license sorting seeds into racialized futures and pasts elaine gan new york university elaine.gan@nyu.edu i follow a flowering grass that most readers here call rice (oryza). its ubiquity and heterogeneity make it a fascinating yet intimidating plant to follow. archaeobotanists study traces of grains planted as early as thirteen thousand years ago along the yangtze river and the himalayas, naming rice as one of our oldest food crops and companion species. ecologists, agriculturalists, and geneticists consider it one of the best model organisms for mapping how people and plants co-evolved through mutual selection and propagation. rice also appears in historians’, artists’, and humanists' inquiries into difference and agency, belief and power, matter and meaning, to name a few. feminist science studies and multispecies ethnography teach me to consider different modalities of rice as more-than-human entanglement (barad, 2007), dynamic assemblages of biogeochemical and technoscientific ways of being. this means something other than seeing plants or seeing like plants in addition to people. "subjects, objects, kinds, races, species, genres, and genders are products of their relating," writes haraway (2003, p. 7), pushing away from the centrality and boundedness of (human) species-beings and towards historical contingencies and performativities of significant otherness. why does this kind of rice grow here, now? why only here, or why here and there? rice does not pre-exist its relations; what counts as rice (in its various modalities) arises when differential trajectories crisscross, forming unruly assemblages. questions about relationality and specifically the temporalities of relating have led me to multiple sites, including paddy fields along the mekong, a river preserve in california, an experiment station in puerto rico, genetic labs in the philippines, a seed vault in svalbard, and so on. each site critical perspective | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) elaine gan, 2019 2 materializes by crisscrossing others. early in my research, i was struck by one of the ways in which agronomists and scientists at rice institutes organize seed collections: "modern" or "elite" seeds and genetically modified or "improved hybrids"; "traditional” or "native" landraces; "weedy" relatives; and "wild" ancestors. classifications have genealogies and consequences (bowker & star, 1999; haraway, 2003; tallbear, 2013). the taxonomic distinctions represent degrees and hierarchies of human intervention: moderns and hybrids are bred intensively to bear functional traits (e.g., high yields, fast growth, disease resistance) for predictable performance in different types of climate regions; traditional landraces are cultivated by indigenous groups, highly variable and linked to particular places; weeds are noxious, out of place, and destined for elimination; wilds resist domestication, valuable for their embodiment of diversity and natural selection. most striking were the temporal orientations of racialized difference: moderns and hybrids serve a postwar future, obligated to fight world hunger and ensure universal peace through high yields; traditional landraces belong to a vanishing past, heirlooms of ancestral tastes, aromas, and reified cultural heritage; weeds and wilds are incommensurable, biding their untimely times in cold storage or genetic labs until one trait or another might be reintroduced to supercharge the future of moderns and hybrids. racial discourse, played out through typecast seeds, scaffolds research at institutes that now produce 75% of rice varieties grown (irri, 2013). equating moderns and hybrids with better futures rationalizes the assemblages that go along with them: chemical fertilizers and pesticides, dams and irrigation networks, erosion of genetic diversity, the dispossession of non-moderns, the rule of transnational agroindustry. these have disrupted major cycles through which life in this epoch becomes possible: nitrogen, water, carbon, photosynthesis. in turn, the disruptions enable novel assemblages to flourish: brown planthoppers and stunt viruses, water hyacinths and snail fever, fungal blasts and bacterial blight throw futures into question as they introduce relentless more-than-human indeterminacies (gan, 2017). meanwhile, among the so-called traditionals are over 350 varieties cultivated by ifugao farmers of rice terraces in the philippine cordilleras. the seeds were meticulously gathered by anthropologist harold conklin and ifugao collaborators. from 1963 to 1985, the seeds were catalogued for conservation at the us-backed international rice research institute (irri) in the philippines. the multispecies assemblages that go along with ifugao rice are co-constitutive of and contemporary to the assemblages of moderns like ir8, the first successful irri cultivar, cross-bred from indonesian and taiwanese varieties and released for field critical perspective | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) elaine gan, 2019 3 production in 1966. yet they have been cast along different trajectories. the ifugao rice terraces are listed as a unesco world heritage site, valued for aesthetic beauty and harmony from ancient civilization. irri fields are part of a global consortium (cgiar) for agricultural innovation, signifying human mastery over the future. this is not to say that seed collection and classification led to these current positions. the contemporaneity suggests that they articulate a broader historical conjuncture. just as race emerged from the bodies of cane workers in puerto rican plantations and produced much of the wealth in nineteenth-century europe (mintz, 1985; tsing, 2012), race continues to be produced and reproduced here in a new form of plantation called crop science. references barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. bowker, g. c., & star, s. l. (1999). sorting things out: classification and its consequences. cambridge, ma: mit press. gan, e. (2017). an unintended race: miracle rice and the green revolution. environmental philosophy, 14(1), 61-81. haraway, d. j. (2003). the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago, il: prickly paradigm press. international rice research institute (irri). (2013). rice almanac (4th ed.). manila, ph: global rice science partnership. mintz, s. w. (1985). sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history. new york, ny: penguin group. tallbear, k. (2013). native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. tsing, a. (2012). unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species. environmental humanities, 1, 141-154. author bio elaine gan is an artist-theorist who teaches at new york university, center for experimental humanities & social engagement, where she also directs the multispecies worldbuilding lab. gan is co-editor of arts of living on a damaged planet (minnesota 2017), with a forthcoming book about the temporalities of multispecies assemblages in rice agroecologies. carpet bombings: a drama of chemical injury in three acts grandia, liza. (2020). carpet bombings: a drama of chemical injury in three acts. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-8. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © liza grandia, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license carpet bombings: a drama of chemical injury in three acts liza grandia university of california davis lgrandia@ucdavis.edu my life has been filled with carpet…both fleeting and long-term relationships with carpets. i remember, i remember carpets. —jean halley, “ranch style: a history told in carpets” more than half of indoor flooring in the united states is carpet. americans lay enough new carpet each year to cover 40% of rhode island (building green, 1994). commonplace, soft, unnoticeable, and ubiquitous, the commodity itself seems to defy attention—until enough people develop a critical mass of perceptibility (murphy, 2006). carpet is captivating because most people, all the days of their lives, are surrounded by it—in schools, universities, homes, cars, and offices. emulating handwoven persian rugs as a status symbol of victorian domesticity, civility, and luxury of the leisure class (veblen, 1924), wall-to-wall carpet became one of the new markers of domesticity for the upwardly mobile in the postwar era. as symbol of the patriarchal idyll, it began to appear in offices in the 1960s to provide a middle-class aesthetic for executives and to soften the cramped cubicle layouts of the inner secretarial force (murphy, 2006). it might be ubiquitous, but is it safe? when “pollution comes home,” or enters feminized occupational settings such as schools and universities, environmental psychology and anthropology shows that people tend to discount risks of everyday items (douglas & wildavsky, 1983). the popular imagination still ties critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) liza grandia, 2020 2 cancer with industrial contamination events in more “public” occupational settings or in “outdoorsy” air or water sources (altman et al., 2008)—not with something as domestically clichéd as carpet. however, what if, like domestic violence hidden by the private walls of the home, synthetic carpet is unsafe for vulnerable bodies? (halley, 2005; snyder, 2019). although frequently held culpable in “canary in the mineshaft” narratives of chemical injury, carpet has no single charismatic opponent, no victorious environmental justice hero (auyero & swistun, 2009)—just broken bodies coping with the corporeality of slow violence. although some do eventually become causal experts on their bodies’ rebellions (murphy, 2000), the path to chemical consciousness may be convoluted and coincidental. in an age of corporate gaslighting, how are we to study the toxicity of banal objects? trained as an anthropologist to assemble patterns through situated observations, i documented my somatic rebellion to carpet for incredulous bosses and decision makers through “chemo-ethnography” (shapiro & kirksey, 2017). with myself as intoxicated subject or what alaimo (2014) might describe as a posthumanist narrative of transcorporeality, i traced my tenuous health to something trespassing from the tufted floors on which i involuntarily tread. knowing what i now know, my narrative has a certain shakespearean foreshadowing, along with classic motifs of suffering, contestation, and redemption, but the finale was anything but foretold. opening act although i suffered classic sick building symptoms from my very first week as a book-collar worker, i dismissed them as merely signs of tenure-track stress. soon into second semester came a diagnosis of non-hodgkin’s lymphoma with an aggressive extra-nodal breast tumor where none had been on a mammogram two months before. after brutal chemotherapy and radiation, i returned to work my fourth semester with an inch of awkward curls, but felt continually exhausted and nauseated. with the demanding sixty-plus-hour weeks that professors must sustain, i wondered if the stress of ordinary faculty life was simply too much to handle. not until the summer when my office trips slowed to more irregular visits did i start to notice the pattern. i only felt bad after being in my office. more night sweats. bleeding in my inner ears. lymph nodes swollen into golf balls. a kidneybean sized lump in my chest. terror. emergency pet scans. watch and repeat in six months. relentless cognitive fog that seemed more than “chemo-brain.” how can i get tenure if i can’t remember that dick cheney is the vice president? how can i keep my health insurance if i’m not a professor? what could be making me critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) liza grandia, 2020 3 so ill at work? with “apologies for the trouble,” i asked the provost to relocate me temporarily. thus began a futile quest for a non-toxic room of my own. thirteen offices later, i dug into local newspaper archives to see if the whole area might be an old factory site with hazardous waste. more and more faculty and staff began reporting feeling ill in our building. just miles from the birth of the boston women’s health collective, our bodies were once again battlegrounds (alaimo, 2014). our collective citizen science inventory of symptoms included dizziness, nausea, fuzzy thinking, sleepiness, sore neck/stiff joins, headaches, burning skin, irritated or twitching eyes, sore throat, diarrhea and bloating, insomnia, depression, irritability, hives, eczema and ridiculous dandruff, thirstiness, burning lips, difficulty concentrating, and a sense of needing to escape. (relieved, at last, to have collegial affirmation for my limbic distress, my notes from a faculty meeting have a margin exclamation, “yes! fight or flight!”) somnolence followed this adrenal overdrive, and, incredibly, i took frequent naps on the carpet. gable university’s physical plant manager “vincent” suggested that i might just be allergic to the houseplants that i had brought to my office to help clear the fumes. another day he cornered me to ask if i smoked (no). and, no, i don’t have any seasonal allergies. he refused to contract an industrial hygienist for further testing until i could get a medical doctor to identify the specific chemicals that might be causing my symptoms and/or were linked to lymphoma—an impossible task, given the 85,000+ chemicals in circulation in the us. i continued studying material data safety sheets for the melamine furniture, paint, and cleaning products to no avail. months later, dashing into my office to retrieve a document, i turned round and round wondering, what could be making me so ill? with sudden clarity, i looked down and realized, my god, it’s the carpet. quick citizen epidemiology of my fellow sufferers confirmed this common denominator. vincent was infuriated that i should question the safety of the tacky blue industrial carpet that he had glued over every square inch of the university’s elegant nineteenth-century wood floors. it plastered dormitories, the gym, an estimated 95% of classrooms and offices, auditoriums, the president’s house, a new leedcertified building, and even the dining room. vincent challenged me, “i’ve been putting in carpets for twenty years and no one has ever complained,” but he let slip, “we used to get high as a kite” with the glue. he threw away the copy of private lab tests i commissioned that showed numerous benzene derivatives known to be carcinogenic in my office air. he also apparently ignored indoor air quality complaints filed by librarians who had been dropping like flies from critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) liza grandia, 2020 4 assorted cancers. vincent moved me to the only uncarpeted space left on campus—a creepy custodial closet in the campus theater. preferring the power of his master key over intra-campus mail, vincent left on my desk a brochure produced by the carpet and rug institute (www.carpet-rug.org), the trade lobbying arm for this $100 billion industry. titled “clearing the air about clean carpet,” the text claims that carpet “improves indoor air quality,” “retains warm air longer,” and “provides safety protection for the whole family.” when i reported the intrusion and vincent’s aggressive stance towards our group of sickened faculty to provost gabriel, i got called on the carpet instead. “vincent is a good guy,” the provost cautioned me, “let’s get more proof.” he did wonder a little uneasily, how is the carpet in my chambers? “provost gabriel,” i replied, “i regret to tell you that the carpet in your office feels like an anvil on my lungs.” to prove me wrong, on a january morning, vincent unilaterally sent his men to rip out the carpet from one small hallway in our building to be replaced with vinyl tile. departmental staff called to complain about the dust they kicked up, and an environmental health professor questioned the vinyl. vincent called off his men, but left inch-deep chunks of carpet glue exposed to foot traffic. one staff member was almost hospitalized for a severely swollen esophagus, and several others reported new symptoms from the dust swirling throughout the building. the next day vincent ordered two workers to vacuum the hall, but the glue remained exposed for another half year. a fine dust permeated all the books and papers in my abandoned office. i could no longer tolerate meetings in the one uncarpeted room in our building. i became an itinerate carpet-bagger without the carpet and held office hours on an outdoor bench the rest of that winter. later that year at a forum about the president’s cancer panel, i picked up a brochure for the “chemically-injured.” having been painted as a “sensitive,” this concept finally gave me language for an occupation health complaint. i stopped apologizing in my emails and demanded an investigation. a literature search led me to lynn lawson’s (1993) environmental history of an uncannily similar episode at the headquarters of the environmental protection agency in 1987–88. after new carpets sickened a fifth of their workforce, epa scientists launched their own investigation and found the common denominator was a semi-volatile compound, 4-phenylcyclohexene (4-pc) that is a byproduct of the benzene-derived glues in carpet. although both its parent compounds (styrene-butadiene) are carcinogens linked to lymphomas and blood cancers like leukemia, 4-pc has never been http://www.carpet-rug.org/ critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) liza grandia, 2020 5 screened for safety. the epa scientists’ union, local 2050, called for a regulatory exposure limit to be set for 4-pc at 5 parts per trillion. the carpet industry countered with a voluntary proposal to self-police at 300 parts per million (hirzy & morison, 1991). at last vincent hired an environmental health consultant who barely talked with those of us who were ill. no tests of 4-pc were made. tens of thousands of dollars produced a boilerplate report about unknown causality, and the university abandoned the investigation. franny, the hr director, sent another untenured colleague and i letters explaining that without conclusive proof, carpeting removal would “exceed a cost of [another] $100,000” and therefore, “this is not an accommodation that the university feels is reasonable to undertake at this time.” while conveying that each our lives was not worth $50,000, franny admonished that “re-carpeting continues to be highly requested maintenance project from other faculty, staff, or students” and the university intended to continue using “the same or similar mastic that was used in the recent geography building project (aim 4300) which meets [carpet and rug institute’s] green label plus testing program.” sierra magazine ranks gable university as a “cool” school for its recycling, compost, light savings, and electricity car plug station. though princeton review also ranks it high as a “green college,” it seems a sickly shade of green. act ii, again i had to publish or perish, literally. a year later, the scene opens to a new university where i am happily tenured until a botched building renovation sent pulverized carpet glue throughout the hvac system while i held office hours. through the cognitive fog of the next ten months, i cannot remember my lines, but improvise with an occupational health claim and citizen epidemiology when the bureaucrats refuse to vacuum the building. act iii, enough four years later, my only daughter was sickened by new carpet in the public schools. at least eleven children were ill in four classrooms; a teacher got cancer. yet the district refused to remediate because the carpet was self-labeled “green.” then, like manna from heaven, a group of nonprofits published a report on fortythree hazardous substances in carpet—from heavy metals in the coal fly ash recycled as carpet filler, to phthalates in plasticizers, to “forever chemicals” (pfas) in stain repellents, to perchlorate (a carcinogen associated with rocket critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) liza grandia, 2020 6 fuel) for static, and more (vallette, stamm, & lent, 2017). a year later, another report found all these same chemicals in all the “greenest” marketed carpets (halley, 2005). three branches of california’s environmental protection agency (calepa) are actively investigating how to handle the heavy metals in carpet recycling, the hazard of flame retardants (pbdes) in carpet padding, and “forever chemicals” (pfas) in stain repellants. in an exhausting two-year fight, we helped elect two new environmentally concerned trustees who proposed and passed a policy to phase out all carpet. now may i please exit stage left back to my anthropological comfort zone of dirt floor huts? alas, a reluctant encore is underway. carpet remains an invisible disability barrier throughout my university. i hear rumors that new carpets being laid at calepa headquarters reek, despite their own pathbreaking investigations into this industry. with a green new deal on the national agenda, i wonder what lurks in the carpets in h.u.d. housing on native american reservations and for other impoverished communities. having learned that subaltern toxicity talking points about “green criminology” (lynch 2018) seem not to be heard in the american anthropocene, i now speak in intersectional climate allegories about how laying carpet is like pouring spun layers of coal and oil onto floors. recognizing the potency of neoliberal faith in the guise and guile of green labels, i am adapting my lines for my renitent role of cassandra of the carpet in this greek tragedy. acknowledgements i thank rachel lee for having invited me out of my disability closet to speak publicly about carpet for the first time at the may 2017 “chemical entanglements” conference at ucla. i treasure those colleagues at gable university who believed my warning. i am grateful to the mellon foundation for a “new directions” fellowship in 2017-18 to retrain myself in toxicology for ethnographic research about cultural perceptions of toxicity in everyday life. references alaimo, s. (2014). thinking as the stuff of the world. o-zone: a journal of objectoriented studies, 1, 13-21. retrieved from https://rc.library.uta.edu/utair/bitstream/handle/10106/26234/02_alaimo_thinking+as+stuff_ozone_vol1.pdf?se quence=1 altman, r. g., morello-frosch, r., brody, j. g., rudel, r., brown, p., & averick, m. https://rc.library.uta.edu/uta-ir/bitstream/handle/10106/26234/02_alaimo_thinking+as+stuff_ozone_vol1.pdf?sequence=1 https://rc.library.uta.edu/uta-ir/bitstream/handle/10106/26234/02_alaimo_thinking+as+stuff_ozone_vol1.pdf?sequence=1 https://rc.library.uta.edu/uta-ir/bitstream/handle/10106/26234/02_alaimo_thinking+as+stuff_ozone_vol1.pdf?sequence=1 critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) liza grandia, 2020 7 (2008). pollution comes home and gets personal: women’s experience of household chemical exposure. journal of health and social behavior, 49(4), 417-435. auyero, j., & swistun, d. a. (2009). flammable: environmental suffering in an argentine shantytown. new york, ny: oxford university press. building green (1994). carpeting, indoor air quality and the environment. 3(6), retrieved from https://www.buildinggreen.com/feature/carpeting-indoor-air-qualityand-environment douglas, m., & wildavsky, a. (1983). risk and culture: an essay on the selection of technological and environmental dangers. berkeley, ca: university of california press. halley, j. (2005). ranch style: a history told in carpets. qualitative inquiry, 11(4), 514517. retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077800405276764 hirzy, j. w., & morison, r. (1991). carpet/4-phenylcyclohexene toxicity: the epa headquarters case. in b. j. garrick & w. c. gekler (eds.), the analysis, communication, and perception of risk (pp. 51-61). new york, ny: springer (plenum press). kollin, s. (2002). toxic subjectivity: gender and the ecologies of whiteness in todd haynes’s “safe.” interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, 9(1), 121-139. retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/44087498 lawson, l. (1993). staying well in a toxic world: understanding environmental illness, multiple chemical sensitivities, chemical injuries, sick building syndrome. chicago, il: noble press, inc. lynch, m. j. (2018). acknowledging female victims of green crimes: environmental exposure of women to industrial pollutants. feminist criminology, 13(4), 404-427. retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1557085116673172 murphy, m. (2000). the “elsewhere within here” and environmental illness; or, how to build yourself a body in a safe space. configurations, 8(1), 87-120. retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/8188/summary murphy, m. (2006). sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty. durham, nc: duke university press. shapiro, n., & kirksey, e. (2017). chemo-ethnography: an introduction. cultural anthropology, 32(4), 481-493. retrieved from https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/download/ca32.4.01/183 snyder, r. l. (2019). no visible bruises: what we don’t know about domestic violence can kill us. bloomsbury publishing usa. retrieved from https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=dviedwaaqbaj&source=gbs_api vallette, j., stamm, r., & lent, t. (2017, october 18). eliminating toxics in carpet: https://www.buildinggreen.com/feature/carpeting-indoor-air-quality-and-environment https://www.buildinggreen.com/feature/carpeting-indoor-air-quality-and-environment https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077800405276764 https://www.jstor.org/stable/44087498 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1557085116673172 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/8188/summary https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/download/ca32.4.01/183 https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=dviedwaaqbaj&source=gbs_api critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) liza grandia, 2020 8 lessons for the future of recycling [healthy building network newsletter article]. retrieved from https://s3.amazonaws.com/hbnweb.prod/uploads/files/eliminatingtoxics-in-carpet-lessons-for-the-future-of-recycling.pdf veblen, t. (1924). the theory of the leisure class: an economic study of institutions. new york, ny: b. w. huebsch. author bio liza grandia, cultural anthropologist, is an associate professor in native american studies at the university of california-davis, where she directs the indigenous research center of the americas to support communities facing environmental threats to their territories. for her moonlit civic work on carpet, sierra club’s northern california chapter awarded her the “best activist group” of 2019. vint, sherryl (2019). review of infrahumanisms: science, culture, and the making of modern non/personhood, by megan h. glick (duke university press, 2018). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sherryl vint, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | infrahumanisms: science, culture, and the making of modern non/personhood by megan h. glick (duke university press, 2018) sherryl vint university of california, riverside sherryl.vint@ucr.edu megan h. glick’s infrahumanisms recovers this term—used by primatologist robert yerkes to refer to “‘almost’ or ‘near’ human” (p. 3) primates—to interrogate a history through which the category of the human has functioned as a biopolitical technology of differentiation rooted in colonial and racist logics. focusing particularly on the discourse of species and the animal/human boundary, glick argues that the invention of the human as an ontological category and a rights-bearing subject was always and necessarily accompanied by the entwined production of “marginalized non/personhood” (p. 4). glick thus offers a complementary theorization to lisa lowe’s the intimacies of four continents (2015) that, using political and economic histories, explores how the european “universal” citizen-human emerged through the denial of this status to those deemed mere labor-power in the colonies. glick covers a different temporal frame and focuses on scientific frameworks and institutions but arrives at the same conclusion: understood via its history of emergence, “the human” is a necessarily racially exclusive category, a concept perhaps beyond salvage for the politics of social justice. rather than a strictly linear or chronological account, glick focuses on specific strategic uses of the nonhuman/human boundary in three historical moments, book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) sherryl vint, 2019 2 which correspond to the three parts of her book: (1) bioexpanionism, 1900s– 1930s, characterized by the simultaneous emergence of techniques of biological governance and new scientific categories of biological meaning; (2) extraterrestriality, 1940s–1970s, which examines how notions of life and indigeneity were shaped by discourses of space programs; and (3) interiority, 1980s–2010s, which focuses on how reified ideas about race and national identity are invented in discourses of new corporeal knowledges. her case studies are chosen as moments in which these discourses “rose to national consciousness,” rather than looking at them after “they became fully institutionalized” (p. 19), thus bringing into view other contingent paths through which the history of humanization (which has also been one of dehumanization) might have proceeded. in this work, glick joins a number of scholars in critical race studies such as neel ahuja and alexander weheliye, as she notes, who reject an aspirational politics based on inclusion in the category of “universal personhood” and seek instead to expose that this concept is irrecoverably tainted by a history of racialized exclusion. in glick’s words, her specific contribution to this discourse is to show the infrahuman as “humanism’s shadow other, the very thing that bolsters the strategic use of the human as a positivist strategy” (p. 10). while earlier work in the field often began from situations in which some people were formally stripped of the legal status as human or other kinds of political rights, glick argues that we need to understand in a more comprehensive way that “the human” always produces the devalued cultural category of the infrahuman, attached to pejorative notions of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disease status, or ability. while she distances herself from the field of human-animal studies, she asserts, “this book is interested in the welfare and rights of all living beings” (p. 15), while at the same time rejecting rhetorical comparisons that conflate marginalized humans with animals as exploited beings. similarly, she is wary of intersectional approaches to oppression: for her, they cede too much ground to categories of comparison as always-already formed. instead, scholars should “rethink biological meaning and difference” (p. 18) by interrogating how and why specific categorizations arose in particular historical contexts. throughout the book, glick engages with scientific discourses contemporary to the period under examination. the gaps in time between the three periods and the shift among scientific discourses across the sections—primatology in part i, radiation and exobiology in part ii, aids and xenotransplantation in part iii— makes this work less integrated as a single volume than would be ideal, but the book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) sherryl vint, 2019 3 trade-off that comes from a lack of sustained focus on a single period of history or body of scientific knowledge is the fact that glick demonstrates the pervasive way that the discourse of species enables racial bias to persist in new bodies of knowledge. the scholarly discussions in both human-animal studies and posthuman theory have been insufficiently attentive to race and colonial histories, and glick’s work is a welcome addition to these conversations, showing gaps in previous ways of thinking about the ideological functions of the animal/human boundary. at the same time, however, i found myself wishing that the book had engaged more thoroughly with scholarship from these fields: glick expresses some suspicion of these discourses, which is understandable given that much of this work has been myopic about questions of race, and she notes the often-expressed suspicious timing such that “the human” and “the subject” both came to be questioned in western cultures just as previously excluded peoples were beginning to lay claim to them. while not wanting to minimize the truth of this insight, i feel that this book misses an opportunity to find common cause with scholars who are similarly interested in deconstructing the historical and political work done by the category “the human.” glick’s work is valuable, and she offers a new way to think outside of “the human” with an attention to racialization that is urgently needed, and so my critique here is minor: i merely question the value of inventing another term rather than complicating and thus improving an ongoing conversation about deconstructing “the human.” glick links the use of the term posthuman to francis fukuyama’s reactionary defense of putatively universalist notions of human rights and dignity in his 2002 our posthuman future, a very narrow sense of the field. the power of glick’s approach is evident in the novel connections she makes by keeping the dual operation of humanization/dehumanization (or, as she prefers, universal personhood and marginalized non/personhood) always simultaneously in view. in part i’s investigation of primatology, for example, she reads photographs from yerkes’s archive to show how his distinct framing of chimpanzees within domestic settings and gorillas within institutional ones reinforced not only how contemporary science differentiated these primates but also how this knowledge mapped onto colonial discourse of race. primatology and colonial discourses of global hierarchy entwine to produce the gorillas as a “black” or african primitive being, while the chimpanzee was understood to be “white,” and, indeed, was anthropomorphized as more “a person” than were the human inhabitants of africa. part ii offers an original reading of the gray aliens of 1950s book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) sherryl vint, 2019 4 ufo legend as similarly racialized subjects, arguing that this specific way of envisioning the alien is “deeply tied to the panic over holocaust photography” (p. 87). putting the accounts of roswell aliens into dialogue with the cold war history of nuclear testing on animals, contamination of tribal lands, and the bombing of japanese civilians at the end of the second world war, glick reads these aliens as a haunting reminder of the traumatic violence perpetrated by the united states in that conflict, a violence that could not be publicly acknowledge as such. under the guise of medical aid, the united states used japanese survivors of the nuclear bombs as test subjects for new techniques of reconstructive surgery, noting that “many japanese citizens protested that they were treated like ‘guinea pigs’ rather than given proper medical care” (p. 97). what is most intriguing about this section is its second chapter on discourses of exobiology, where glick cogently makes the case that the cold war geopolitical rhetoric of first, second, and third worlds mapped onto popular discourses through which the immigration term alien was beginning to be applied to extraterrestrials, and thereby “not only dehumanized certain nations in the sociopolitical sense so well understood; it literally placed them outside the confines of human life” (p. 116). the book’s final section is the most uneven, but also points to the book’s great value for guiding future work at the intersections of science and technology studies, biological sciences, and critical race studies. like the previous two sections, it consists of two chapters, each with a different case study: one on aids discourse and the speciesism rhetoric of zoonotic diseases, and a second on xenotransplantation and cultural discourse about pigs. although all chapters have demonstrated a remarkable range of rhetorical connections (exobiology linked to medical imaging techniques that transform women’s bodies into maternal universes linked to roe v. wade, as one example), the connections concerning the discussion of pigs seems the least thought through. the range of examples are there—pigs as figures of obesity, negative stereotypes that deem pigs lazy or dirty, muslim culture’s avoidance of pork, pigs in children’s texts, and of course the pig as a genetically manipulated source of “spare” organs, the racialized culture of organ donation—but the rhetorical resonances among them are not as clearly articulated as they could be. what exactly does the pig signify in this history of not-quite-human others and othering? an answer never quite emerges. this may be in fact because, as her conclusion explores, we are at a moment when “new ideologies of biological difference are on the horizon” (p. 195). as this final chapter hints, the pig symbolizes capital’s desire to use all parts of any body— human, animal, or chimera—for its own ends. as further research interrogates this now more widely shared vulnerability of the body to commodification and book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) sherryl vint, 2019 5 depersonalization, it is imperative that we do not forget how marginalized and colonized peoples have already long been exploited in these ways. glick’s essential book exemplifies the kind of scholarship we need to face this brave new world. author bio sherryl vint is professor of media and cultural studies at the university of california, riverside, where she directs the speculative fictions and cultures of science program. she has published widely on speculative fiction and posthumanism. roussel, natacha, and stolfi, ariane (2020). taking back the future: a short history of singular technologies in brazil. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–27. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license taking back the future: a short history of singular technologies in brazil natacha roussel petites singularités natacha@lesoiseaux.io ariane stolfi universidade federal do sul da bahia arianestolfi@csc.ufsb.edu.br abstract this article discusses four unique free software-based digital infrastructures and networks that were developed in brazilian communities as situated models of resistance. the first is baobáxia, an eventually-connected network that can exist on the internet and at the same time disconnected from it as a local network. its nodes are located in quilombolas, communities of african seized people who resisted portuguese and european slavery and culture. the second is metareciclagem, a collective of brazilian technologists promoting the upcycling of discarded computing technologies and their usage for artistic expression through gambiarra (makeshift) re-appropriations. the third is a political articulation and reflection about the appropriation of digital technologies called technoshamanism, an international artistic and activist network and set of practices. we discuss the background of the networks and characterize their practice and infrastructure. fourth and finally, we also look at a new generation of feminist providers through the example of rede kefir. our analysis highlights the importance of minoritized decentralized technological practices that convey integral organizational models opposing capitalist hegemony. we use a feminist special section: computing in/from the south 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 epistemology to describe the transformation they propose to the understanding of the nature and practice of technology, which considers necessary principles of “intra-action” (barad, 2007) across heterogeneous socio technical spaces. introduction the expression “take back the future” emerged from parallel conversations, documents, and communications in the context of brazilian autonomist networks. these networks help contribute to community autonomy. the specificity of the 4 networks projects presented here resides in their situation: they are localized often in remote communities, they employ hybrid transdisciplinary methodologies, and they are committed to free software (by free software we mean software developed by and for the community, we will specify its characteristics further). we claim these are “singular technologies,” by which we mean they are both intentional and contextual (roussel & hellekin, n.d.). these projects exist most coherently in decentralized technological infrastructures and develop along different paths. their hybridization with a community or a place creates spaces of resistance. they converge with community organizations to create a unique terrain for identity construction, resistance, expression, and solidarity that contrasts with dominant perspectives. as the global information society (2018) reports, community networks worldwide are underdocumented. furthermore, when such autonomous projects are discussed, they are often described solely as examples of the technical achievement of bringing connectivity to remote fragile populations without taking into account community issues such as the forms of agency they contribute to developing (echániz & lópez pezé, 2018). the authors, while being remote for one of them, engaged personally with the projects described. beyond the authors’ direct involvement with these projects, this paper is nourished by shared commitments in different community networks and a long-term relationships maintained through independent international online groups and mailing lists that have been active since 2008. these facts highlight the long lasting international connections that are made through and make possible autonomous initiatives. our own technological practice also cultivates community and feminist models of organization. this paper articulates our networks and simultaneously theorizes practicing and developing a participatory methodology. we used our own infrastructure hosted in belgium by petites singularités, a nonprofit active in free software production and organization, to gather the concerned people on our online platform, where we also have invited active members to contribute to the projects. the platform is special section: computing in/from the south 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 open to all upon subscription (https://ps.zoethical.org/), and it reveals many of our preparatory conversations. we also cross-read other digital archives as referenced along the text. oppressions intersect in the production and use of technology. in turn, technological illiteracy, augmented by the user’s sense that they cannot even legitimately approach those tools renders community production of technology very difficult. from a feminist perspective, the technologies we discuss begin with existing community knowledges (haraway, 1988). from this epistemological foundation, these infrastructural projects transform the practice and the production of technology to address different layers of oppression. this approach considers necessary principles of intra-action (barad, 2007), across the study. the concepts we use to analyze these projects begin from the participation of the project actors on the online platform as they open ways to understand phenomena emerging from their agential actions that bring together communities and technologies in particular ways. our analysis of these important but minoritized and marginalized free software projects in brazil aims to understand the spaces for resistance they contributed to building. this article takes up a specific discourse of digital activism in the brazilian context to describe how technical alternatives emerge from an anticolonial position. we are influenced by the manifesto antropófago (o. de andrade, 1928), a historical brazilian decolonial text that uses an anthropophagist model for the re-appropriation of the colonial assets by the oppressed. "anthropofagia" is the metaphorical eating of other people's ideas. the digestion process takes some things in and discharges what is not needed. anthropofagia eats occidental culture, but doesn't keep everything that is imposed; some things are "shitted" out. we consider the anthropophagist organization of the networks presented here, in which modernist practices in computer networks and technologies are absorbed, regurgitated, and transformed for use by afro brazilian communities. our study presents three projects: baobáxia, which refers to the afro ancestry in brazil; metareciclagem, which took place in a number of "pontos da cultura" around the country; and technoshamanism (tcnxmnsm), associated with the pataxó community. these projects began in the 2000s and continue today, but, with the exception of tcnxmnsm, which is more recent, they were especially dynamic during the first decade of the century as government organizations supported free software and "cultura livre." finally, we look at feminist networks that gather along with other international groups to build digital security https://ps.zoethical.org/ special section: computing in/from the south 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 knowledge and resources towards autonomous technological practice. we describe these networks separately and examine how the processes they put in place address epistemological issues from the ground up. this method allows for the reconfiguration of technological infrastructure as well as institutional arrangements (ostrom, 1990), including concepts and vocabularies, by and with the communities concerned. independent networks, free culture and community organization the free software movement has been at the core of brazilian cultural and digital politics since the beginning of the millennium. the term free software, which was adopted in the early 1980s, is usually understood as “software that respects users’ freedom and community,” where “the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software” (“what is free software?,” n.d.). in brazil free software was used throughout the public sector, and its advocates were encouraged by government policies. rafael evangelista (2014) explains, "the brazilian free and open software movement showed great efficiency compared to other international floss (free/libre/open source software) communities: it became influential among both local and national political parties " (author's translation). the movement launched the free software international forum in 2000 at the federal university of rio grande do sul during the world social forum. after the election of luiz inácio "lula" da silva in 2003, the free software movement in brazil received further governmental support when lula appointed gilberto gil (a key figure of the tropicália avantgarde movement of the 1960s in brazil) as minister of culture in 2004. free software was used and promoted by the brazilian federal government both as a way of accessing technological sovereignty and as distinct cultural approach, for example, in the context of the program pontos da cultura designed as a public initiative for remote areas to extend network access and general information to communities about digital practice.1 pontos da cultural promoted greater access to cultural initiatives from groups and communities and augmented the digital infrastructures for communities to produce their own knowledge platforms (instituto lula, n.d.). it is however worth noting that the systemic support free software initiatives received in brazil during this period, while crucial to their existence and inspiring many important developments, is negligible compare to the support that major companies received; us and european government policies supported corporations to establish new capital accumulation strategies for the capitalist internet economy (fuchs, 2015). special section: computing in/from the south 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 there are few studies addressing the free software community in brazil and its relation to the government, with the notable exceptions of shaw (2011) and evangelista (2014). aaron shaw (2011) explains that in brazil the "floss agenda emerged as a result of the actions of a network of insurgent experts." evangelista's (2014) ethnographic analysis identifies participants (described as only masculine) as belonging to four categories: government representatives, business executives, activists, and developers. both shaw and evangelista focus on technological disputes and the relation to the industry, without explaining how inequalities are addressed or acknowledging the overlapping of discriminatory systems that are experienced based on sex, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and other axes of intersectional privilege and oppression. in contrast to these overviews of free software in brazil, feminist studies of these open technology projects highlight the dialectical relationship between access to multiple layers of technological infrastructure and the creation of gender divides. christian jobi salaini and monica de andrade arnt (2010) did a comparative study of gender in the adoption of free software. they note that women are the most active in the defense of women’s free software projects, but they remain invisible in the previously mentioned studies. bruna zanolli et al. (2018) confirm this observation in a recently published report about feminist community networks in brazil, where the founders of a community neighborhood feminist network explain, "even in the free/libre and open technologies activist field, our first impression was that this space did not belong to us, as we faced a predominance of white males and only a few women working with infrastructure and free networks." they further explain that in feminist initiatives, male tech experts tended to impose free software as a preset rather than something that could be adapted and a pathway to technological appropriation, which the feminist and community group eagerly sought (zanolli et al., 2018). still, they insist that technology is a central concern: "we see evidence that mere access to new technology could reinforce rather than reduce inequalities. this observation seems important to break the invisibility not only of technological infrastructure, but also of the asymmetries of power that are clear from an intersectional perspective" (zanolli et al., 2018, ). these authors, therefore, believe it is necessary to have access to infrastructure, technological understanding, and tools that they that they themselves create, adapt, and reappropriate. our analysis will further this approach by looking at grassroots initiatives that existed in the brazilian free software movement at the beginning of the millennium. there was a strong orientation at the time to “bridge the digital gap” and bring connectivity “everywhere.” in brazil, the size of the nation-state, the special section: computing in/from the south 6 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 number and heterogeneity of different communities, and the importance and isolation of their many “knowledges” made for a unique terrain on which to develop connectivity. interconnected networks of people from technical, political, and cultural spheres support the development of free software networks in brazil (murillo, 2010). two of the projects we discuss here, baobáxia and metareciclagem, also contributed to the cultura viva program with, among others, casa de cultura tainã (“way of the stars” in tupi-guarani), a cultural center in an impoverished neighborhood of campinas. we will look at the organizational choices baobaxia and metareciclagem made to understand the positions these two projects occupied in the larger contexts of free software networks in brazil. we argue that these groups occupy a position of resistance, as they worked to bridge communities by working with different aesthetics and languages and governance models, and addressing intersectional issues. finally, we find resonances in independent feminist hosting (isp) networks associated with several community projects, such as base commun. we offer this analysis as a plaidoyer for well-supported grassroots initiatives that can build capacity for autonomous technologies that are built through new languages, infrastructures, and epistemologies. baobáxia: rooting technologies baobáxia is an autonomous digital network project rooted in concepts used by networked quilombo. from conversations with baobáxia developers, referring to discussions they had at casa de cultura tainã , we define quilombos as communities of african seized people who resisted portuguese and european slavery and culture (befree, 2019). the baobáxia network allows the communities to share their media and information independently amongst themselves, across communities, and with the outside world. baobáxia presents itself as “a network of local servers,2 a conversation wheel with the theme baobáxia, the route of baobabs” (npdd/baobáxia, n.d.). as we will explain, the network is based on a unique software specifically developed for the needs of remotely situated quilombos. baobáxia is supported by rede mocambos, named after the precarious houses that might serve as hideouts in the middle of the woods, and were often used by the quilombolas (inhabitant of quilombos) houses. while rede mocambos draws on the insurrectionist strength of quilombos communities, it also signifies the level of precariousness that the group is working with. the project chose the beobab tree as its symbol because it wanted to build a network of communities linked to one another through satellite hookups and free software without going through mainstream internet portals. the trees and their fruit, the mucua, make up the parts of this network. special section: computing in/from the south 7 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 quilombos have existed since the sixteenth century,3 but since the end of the 1980s, they have undergone a redefinition: “through the political pressure exerted by black peasants throughout brazil, the government established explicitly that quilombos should be defined by their being communities formed by black peasants in general, part of the present agrarian structure and contemporary society, not only by their relation to the past as runawaydescendants” (de la torre, 2013, p. 10). another important recognition has been the characterization of the collective and communal organization, including historical self-determination of the community (leite, 2000)—that is, the ability to determine the criteria of inclusion as much as the model of governance. this selfdetermination was recognized under lula's governance, which allowed these communities to better address intersectional issues rather than identifying quilombolas solely under the homogenizing term “runaways”. today, under the current government, quilombos recognition is at risk. baobáxia was largely, but not only, initiated by antonio carlos do santos : tc, president of casa de cultura tainã, precursor to the afro-brazilian movement and rede mocambos. baobáxia developers follow and take part in the community organization of the quilombos where the project is implemented, and make sure that the distribution of capacities and access to the network are decided by the community itself and represents their chosen balance of power. each implementation of a mucua (server node in the network named after the fruit of the baobab) is dedicated to a community and associated with a community-oriented workshop, where participants share the technology and reflect on its nature and its purpose. baobáxia is first and foremost a tool developed along with the community it serves. while the technological challenge of setting up a distributed autonomous network, as we will describe further, is unique and mastered by only a few, the exchange with the group happens throughout the course of the implementation of a specific mucua, and is associated with conversations, events, and rituals that are fed back recursively into the project through video and text documentation. mucuas are distributed all over the country, as well as throughout other south american countries, several african countries, and some in europe. baobáxia is a wide network and repository of community-produced media. a map of mucuas is available on the website of rede mocambos (figure 1). special section: computing in/from the south 8 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 figure 1. baobáxia’s mucuas current location. source: http://bl.ocks.org/anonymous/raw/e872821c8d250450273c88cce1126a69/. baobáxia is well documented in an online wiki, which is also used as an open organizational tool for the community—hosting reports of numerous workshop events, technical meetings, funding requests, assembly minutes, and so on. decisions regarding the implementation of the program and its maintenance integrate traditional community organization, following their governance model. the wiki archive represents well many different aspects of the project. on the project’s wiki one can read, for example, notes from the may 27 and june 3, 2013, mocambos network meeting in pajelança: some of the conversation themes were the principles and reflections on the mocambos network—the conversations were oriented around the name mocambos and the technology of the drum; the form of organization of the quilombo dos palmares was in mocambos, so were their houses called. another symbolic element, the baobab, was the center of the conversation round; the philosophy of the baobab and the drum are central to the mocambos network: they are at the service of humanity, offer meaning to the world and strengthen a political commitment: never stop fighting.4 (antonio carlos do santos , 2013) "pajelança do dia 27 de maio e 3 de junho de 2013 iv encontro da rede mocambos" special section: computing in/from the south 9 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 in our analysis of these projects, we will further explain the ways in which the technical choices made in baobáxia are defined by the community organization and how the transformation of an epistemology puts in front the knowledges held by communities, that are most of the time not represented in the digital environment. metarecliclagem: gambiarra and free software metareciclagem network was most active between 2002 and 2012. it is one of the largest free software projects in brazil, central to the governmental project of pontos de cultura. metareciclagem was also linked to the protest movement “lixo electrônico,” which condemns electronic waste. metareciclagem has been implemented all over the country by local and federal institutions, and some instances continue their existence. metareciclagem was a multiple entity movement, a dynamic facilitated by the hard work of many people and activists, only some of whom are referenced here. more extensive research is needed to complete the existing archive and reconstitute the original information.5 in the first instance, metareciclagem is a technological recycling, or upcyling project, which promotes the use and reuse of computer parts. but, it is also much more than that, as the project also introduced major shifts in what is built out of discarded parts, and how creative appropriations intentionally can be put to the service of communities. as daniel pádua puts it in his professional profile, “metareciclagem is a methodology, a free knowledge project network, a universal access movement, a massive game and could be also a band. :) . it’s all about sharing knowledge for autonomous/communitarian reality replication/transformation.”6 metareciclagem organized the creative upcycling and reuse of discarded computers to benefit a number of citizen groups, promoting not only free software but also creative appropriation of electronics as "gambiarra" (makeshift or repair). many of these developments took place during the hypertropical programação (hypertropical programming) events, a series of workshops to develop upcycling projects and share knowledge (fonseca, 2015) metarecliclagem has been very forward thinking under the impulse of daniel pádua in discussing possible infrastructure for autonomous networks, using recycled technologies. their reflections took place on mailing lists, conversations and are articulated and documented on developers community organization tools, wikis and github issues.7 metareciclagem installed computers in different local cultural and social centers and pontos de cultura, providing various community organizations, theater groups, musical studios, and kids’ groups with access to digital tools. the approach of metareciclagem and hypertropical special section: computing in/from the south 10 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 programação is inclusive and aims to foster access and creative appropriation in the context of existing structures supported by official programs. free software implies, first, that the source code is accessible, often under a copyleft license (individual freedom), and, second, that the user is able or has access to someone who can understand the program (collective freedom). free software is also seen as a liberation tool, where cultural production is also at stake. aymeric mansoux (2017) grounds the principles of free culture in the experience of metareciclagem, because it importantly encompassing technical aspects, as well as cultural and political positioning, that have been addressed in different manners by the project. tecnoxamanismo (tcnxmnsm) tcnxmnsm positions itself as resistant, dystopian, pessimistic, yet entropic as it aims to creates noise in a dystopian future and take back the future. tcnxmnsm started after the previously mentioned project and builds on existing projects that aim for autonomy. crucially, tcnxmnsm considers autonomy a pathway, a process that is never really finished, because everything is always connected. it is a space of articulation and a network (borges, 2017). also tcnxmnsm pushes further appropriation of occidental therapeutic practices by developing a clinic, entering the sphere of healing by challenging notions of subjectivity, thus setting up the conditions for immersive group rituals for mental health and conviviality. although fabiane borges is not from the communities with whom tcnxmnsm works, as she is a psychologist, writer, and performer from são paulo. she explains that tcnxmnsm is also relevant to the free culture practice, as it uses a collective process in the formulation of communication models aiming at subjective reconfiguration. this re-appropriation liberates subjectivities trapped in “capitalist ontologies” as it fosters “shamanic ontologies” (borges 2017) that make accessible other modalities of being together, activated by artistic practices. in addition, tcnxmnsm produces live performances, audiovisual material, cinema, and installations. tcnxmnsm claims its international existence through performances happening during a variety of artistic events in europe, where some of its members live. the project is not perfect, though we do not have space to discuss these aspects further here, it is important to note that that its reputation as part of an international art scene unfortunately mostly benefits the white leaders of the group. some of these representational politics are ameliorated in brazil, where tcnxmnsm works with the pataxó community, an indigenous community in bahia, and through their european network, they have been crowdfunding a health center for this pataxó community since 2019 (martins & carvalho, 2017). currently, there are seven people (são paulo 3; bahia 1; france special section: computing in/from the south 11 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 2; spain 1), mostly women, in constant communication about this pataxó community project in bahia. all four projects are intertwined in a specific moment of brazilian history, starting in the 1990s, where support was given to free software and multidimensional cultural projects. they continue today despite the difficulties provoked by current political conditions in brazil. feminist servers the encontrada meetings, 8 a feminist free technologist encounter, brought together women from the art and technology scene, in a very horizontal and participative organization, in 2012 , at the nuvem estação rural de arte e tecnologia (visconde de mauá-rj). these meetings helped develop several feminist server organizations used to gather resources and methodologies about feminist technologies. the redes autônomas feminista (autonomous feminist networks) explain, "one of the definitions of feminist technology is the application of knowledge from science to support the feminist cause, and this knowledge is developed and maintained by women who challenge the status of the normative patriarchal system, proposing new ways to politicize the debate on technology and its uses."9 feminist networks exemplify principles such as • “consent and intimacy”: relating privacy issues to acknowledgement and consent; • “situated knowledge and memory”: the networks develops within a community whose memories they carry; • “seeded connectedness”: autonomous networks deploy their conditions of existence with the community and outside from the internet to which they can still connect; • “autonomous decision making”: implementation and organization decisions are taken from the ground up, involving the community in the technical process.10 (redes autonomas feministas (nd) one example of a feminist technological network is fuxico. it was built on feminist network principles. fuxico (n.d.) is "an autonomous mobile device of exchange and collaboration, made to connect people present in the same physical space. fuxico creates a wireless network outside the internet to exchange digital content such as images, videos, audios, documents, chat room and chat wheels."11 special section: computing in/from the south 12 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 as nadège from rede kefir, a latin american feminist server,12 explained during phone interviews, the workshops at encontada focused on building new energies rather than producing criticisms. these workshops helped create an important base of resources and technological knowledge built by and for feminists. participants were also hands-on in a hacklab, where they started their projects "from the stuff that does not work." nadège also powerfully illustrated redes autonômas feministas’s website, which demonstrates the imbrication between technology and situated community. figure 2. rede autônomas feministas website, 2020. http://redeautonomafeminista.org/ the brazilian feminist server network vedetas13 and rede kefir were central to redes autonomas feministas, which started at the 2017 meeting of the association of women’s rights in development. these group also gathered during other international events, such as iff (internet freedom festival). by 2017 the cultural support for this kind of work in brazil was threatened by the governmental crisis. thus, unlike earlier ones, these most recent activities have been supported by us grants. rede kefir is now in the process of migrating their data, thinking through "transitioning an infrastructure," as nadège explained during our phone interviews. diffraction and resonances notably, all three projects claim to be networks, "redes," rather than software or localized community projects. as borges (2017) explains, "ti think that a fairly special section: computing in/from the south 13 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 representative example is the agroforest, the baobáxia system and the web radio aratu that we implemented with the pataxó in the pará village. it is an exchange and simultaneously a resistance that points to the question of collaboration and autonomy, remembering that all the processes of this planet are interdependent and that autonomy is really a path, an ideal which only works pragmatically and to the extent that it’s possible to practice it."14 these groups not only have a distinct model of organization, but they also foster the relation between network and cultural organization, allowing for technology to be transformed by cultural practice and become a transformative practice itself. “technoshamanism is neither the beginning nor the end, it is a medium.” tcnxmnsm is a space of articulation, a network (martin & carvalho, 2017). these singular technologies put in question existing approaches to computing project, even free software ones. while situating themselves within the free and open software movement, these projects understand their approach to free software as not only as produced under a specific copyleft license but literally as liberated culture (mansoux, 2017), aiming toward liberation from within actual capitalist society. these projects develop in a culture of resistance manifesting itself through language, cultural appropriation, spiritual quest, and a necessity for independent infrastructure. baobáxia engages quilombolas; metareciclagem works with remote rural cultural centers; tcnxmnsm uses shamanic knowledges; and kefir employs a feminist methodology to co-construct the technology. they all redistribute the responsibility to different actors. as we acknowledge their history, we also intra-act, recognizing the specificity of actions coming from spaces where oppressions intersect. we observe how they successfully put in practice taking back the future by "rooting technology"—a double entendre where “rooting” first implies growing roots, with reference to locality, as well as the hacker jargon for gaining privileged access (superuser, or root) to a system. reappropriation of technological production meets the acknowledgement of ancient history. across all three projects we identify at two specific aspects. first, we emphasize semantic appropriation through a dedicated language. baobáxia, tcnxmnsm, and metareciclagem each have developed a language they deem more appropriate because it better fits their conception of communication. this can be understood as an important process of absorption allowing for different models of expression in the digital space. second, we examine how they build coherence and intra-act in the technology itself—the essential meaning of taking back the future. associating technology to community and ancestral knowledges https://www.flickr.com/photos/22405820@n08/albums/72157673936765924/page3 http://hyndla.modspil.dk/#mocambos/kadawe/bbx/search http://radioaratu.eco.br/ http://radioaratu.eco.br/ special section: computing in/from the south 14 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 results in the development of specific decentralized infrastructures, developed with dedicated free software. language as a process of absorption singular technologies such as those presented here share modalities that differ from conventional organizational structures and coding languages. n. katherine hayles (2010) proposes, "language alone is no longer the distinctive characteristic of technologically developed societies; rather it is language plus code" (hayles 2005 p.16). she calls this combination “regimes of computation.” language analysis and critique, hayles suggests, need to situate technology in the different ways that technology materializes. feminists address the necessity of formulating contextual analyses for technologies by explaining that some parts of society have been excluded from discourses about computing technologies by simply underusing or devaluing their vocabulary and denying the epistemic authority of these communities. as a response, singular technologies in brazil have developed unique networks, reorganized their functions, and through a differentiated formulation of key concepts, renamed elements of their networks. while this practice towards technology is frequent in creative practices, it is rarely the case that less privileged groups have the possibility of imprinting their semantics in technological construction, as most often technological concepts are imposed by dominant cultures without consultation. as hayles explores the impact of code on everyday life, she argues that language and code have grown more entangled, and the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred; this is concomitant to different forms of colonization of everyday life led by major telecommunication companies. singular technologies engage in activating different starting points using their own sets of references. language is a specific part of those many aspects, as well as other forms of cultural significance such as time and place, or localization. challenging the hegemony of technical expertise, projects such as baobáxia and metareciclagem operate through situated modes. they work towards opening the technological construction; decisional and semantic elements come from principles that are shared among those who relate to them. they also significantly rename concepts and tools, transforming the relation to technology in a community-centered process. as part of this effort, fabi borges (2017) offers the practice of "ancestrofuturismo," which, she explains, consists of bridging the timeline from ancestral knowledges and technologies of communication, such as shamanism, to actual technological practice. she looks for entropic interferences and noise that special section: computing in/from the south 15 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 recombine themselves to bring "shamanic ontology" to technological production rather than what she calls a "capitalist ontology" (borges, 2017). she explains, "it[tcnxsmn] is entropic because it inhabits this paradoxical set of forces and maintains an improbable noise—its perpetual noisecracy, its state of disorganization and insecurity is continuous and is constantly recombining itself" (borges, 2016, ). she brings this recombination of language to the larger scope of concepts and ontologies, affirming a resistance across time and places, in a hybrid process that inhabits many spaces. while american corporations are taking over the digital economy via digital colonialism (kwet, 2019), the projects we have described are actively decolonizing language, a process that runs in parallel to the decolonization of technology, and is characterized by the use of free software and a decentralized infrastructure. keeping the infrastructure in local hands, these projects prevent corporations from building infrastructure that doesn't meet community needs (kwet, 2019). both processes are complementary, constitutive, and intrinsic to the projects. such a thorough endeavor cannot be justified by the sole necessity to respond to a lack of infrastructure or a specific situation of some isolated communities. on the contrary, the projects presented here are born from an attempt to remodel technology, encompassing needs and knowledges of communities and to develop hybrid infrastructures whose institutional arrangements differ from existing organizations of centralized networks. baobáxia’s developers have taken great care in renaming all the elements of the technical infrastructure composing a digital network. this renaming is essential to the structure of the project, and is based on a language that refers to the organization of quilombos. those words, baobab, mucua, tambor (a type of drum), and so on, function as building blocks in the service of their resistance carried over centuries. the three networks took an opposite approach from those taken by the usual top-d0wn technology for development or access projects. they developed dedicated tools and governance systems that respond to the exchanges with communities. baobáxia associates directly with local processes of governance by including issues related to the governance of the network in the community assemblies, as documented in the reports available on the baobáxia wiki. similarly, metarecliclagem argues for the re-appropriation of technology, as documented in a youtube video that describes creative and educational processes as a primary motivation and motor for gambiarra (collingsp2004, 2007; regine, 2011). gambiarra means “makeshift,” solving problems creatively in alternative ways at low cost and with spontaneity, or giving unusual functions to everyday objects. to metareciclagem, gambiarra implies repairing and enhancing machines collectively with invention and special section: computing in/from the south 16 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 creativity. these singular technologies are organized along institutional lines that bring together collective and community organizations and public funding. they are, to different degrees, formulated in collaboration with the people who use them, and are paired with dedicated coaching in different locations. unlike baobáxia, metareciclagem, is directly implemented in publicly funded pontos da cultura following their organization and governance. the choice of the term gambiarra is an attempt to valorize an otherwise dismissed culture and give a sense of accessibility to technology by adding intimate and personal value. most importantly, this process is integrated into a social and community organization as an upcycling project that valorizes makeshift technologies. also translated as kludge or hack, and understood as the possibility to intervene in a technology, gambiarra similarly reclaims the technological processes in the brazilian cultural environment. the term gambiarra is used widely, including in professions such as programming, electronics, cinema, theater, plastic arts, architecture, and design. countering the often pejorative use of the term, metareciclagen appropriates it in an attempt to address the oppressions that strain the relation to the computer and bring forward possibilities for less technologically proficient people across the social spectrum, through their implementation in both urban and remote social centers, to engage with technologies for their communities’ ends. while metareciclagem did not directly address race and class intersections, they did bring access to technology through existing hyper-local initiatives across the country where people face those intersecting oppressions. gambiarra creates a space of familiarity with the object, when the precious technical object becomes something made out of recycled parts, nicely decorated, losing its features of dominance and making space for creative use, and what felipe fonseca (2016) calls “hypertropical programação.” in those projects, the decolonization of language functions as a performative utterance—a speech act (austin, 1962). they embed a different relation to technology countering the fact that important specific concepts pertaining to the domain of communication are not represented, therefore rendered difficult to use. significant areas of social experience are obscured from our collective understanding of what technology can be, such as ancestral indigenous conceptions of communication, social organization, and consciousness. in addition, resonances with the epistemological and ontological positions of feminist scientists such as karen barad can be readily established: while these projects value the relational understanding of communication presented in indigenous communities, tcnxmnsm is particularly clear in stating as a ground fact that shamanism is a communication technology. borges argues that special section: computing in/from the south 17 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 indigenous knowledges have been ripped out: "there has been a violent destruction of ancestral knowledge and technologies to leave space for science following monotheist principles" (borges quoted in martin & carvalho, 2017). reaffirming ancestrofuturismo formulates what barad calls a diffracting relationship (barad, 2007), to resignify histories of technology on other terrains, allowing for an intra-action that modulates ancestrofuturistic relations based on ancestral knowledges and contemporary technologies. ancestrofuturismo breaks the sense of continuity, (re)configures the relation to space and time, and develops other modalities. it asks us to think with and through dis-continuity (barad, 2007). this approach diffracts—as a means of tracking the effects of resistance as it appears through interferences—across the spectrum of time and space, and therefore allows for the reconfiguration of the scenes, from a large set of perspectives, read and thread through one another. as borges (2017) puts it, "faced with this, techno + shamanism is an articulation which tries to consider historical trauma, these lost yet not annihilated leftovers, and to recover (and reinvent) points of connection between technology and wasted ontologies." tcnxsmn is concerned by cultural processes based on a form of re-appropriation very true to anthropofagia. tcnxsmn also activates different resistance models, producing diffracting and decentralized intra-actions, as it revises current concepts and organizes technologies that can better serve resistances and reconfigure their capacity through the use of ancestral language and communication practices in dedicated decentralized networks. these projects expose the immense possibilities of underused technologies, transform usages of standard tools, and can perhaps connect technological developments with ritualized events. these transformations are based on decentralized technological infrastructures, which means that all software is hosted on a different server (each of them situated physically in a proxy or remote relation to the community or person(s) using the service). each hosting place, person, or community organizes and determines the condition of usage of specific software, sometimes formulating clear criteria and governance. decentralization, as we will explain it, is very coherent with both free software and community organization, setting infrastructure for a political organization. all projects conceive decentralization as a premise, inclusive of a dedicated decisional process. as we have seen, they have made distinctive choices, forming new concepts in the light of ancestral and community organization, adapting existing technical possibilities inclusive of the ones discarded by internet monopolies. in what follows, we analyze the technical choices and their entanglement with historical modalities of resistance, community organization, and models of special section: computing in/from the south 18 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 decision making. we conclude with an examination of how singular technologies open the way for technological processes that counter populist strategies. decentralizing technology for collective organization decentralized computing can be simply defined as the allocation of resources, both hardware and software, to various locations. from a technical point of view, decentralization is considered the solution to problems caused by the accumulation of power in centralized monopolies, since it allows communities to moderate the implementation of software locally, distributing the decisional capacity and the risks of failure and authoritarian control. however, its implementation is not straightforward, as many issues arise, including access to the network and availability of technical knowledge. we will address how the possibility of autonomy that resides in the technology is made more concrete when activated by community who cultivated for centuries practices and networks of resistance among quilombolas (residents of quilombos). we suggest that these technologies can help organize a decolonial network that is true to a community’s culture and can co-create the internet (echániz & lópez pezé, 2018). while decentralization has been a major digital trend, it is only recently discussed as a possibility for the structural reorganization of decision-making processes. decentralized infrastructure must also imply a distributed system of decision making, accountability, responsibility. in other words, this debate is not only technical but also cultural and political. a diversity of identities and models of governance can happen, and the modalities of a decentralized network organization are also characterized by technical features. a decentralized network needs a determined protocol to organize the communication between nodes, and clear modalities by which exchange is made possible. practically, the organization can happen along two major different types of protocols, peer-to-peer or federated. these make for two different network architectures. a peer-to-peer system partitions tasks or workloads between peers and all nodes are equivalent, whereas in a federated system, some nodes act as relays to other nodes acting as clients. tcnxmnsm, metareciclagem, and baobáxia have experienced decentralization technologies in different modalities, using decentralized servers, mesh networks, intermittently connected networks (tozzi, 2011), and both peer-to-peer and federated protocols. most importantly, they have developed unique technologies such as the previously mentioned eventually-connected network: baobáxia. the software developed for baobáxia is social-media-based on git, a widely used special section: computing in/from the south 19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 software that requires developers to work together to deal with version control in large, distributed software development projects. however, the usage that baobáxia makes of git as a basis for a social media software is unique and adapted to the context of the quilombos, where access to network and electricity might be scarce. using git as a basis permits users upload media locally to mucuas without needing internet connectivity; so when connection is re-established, they can share with the rest of the baobáxia rede. this responds to the needs of remotely situated quilombos in rural parts of brazil. the baobáxia methodology promotes a congruence between accurate physicality of the encounter and accurate construction of the digital archive and distributed social network. this translates into the project being discussed during encounters/palejança (rituals) that follow the models of governance and organization of the communities themselves. from the baobáxia archives stored on the wiki, we see that technical workshops were organized alongside workshops on other topics; the reports describe the ritual as much as the technical processes, and all participants are called by their name used and function within the community. the reports also describe specific ritual practices and important discussions about quilombolas identity and their relation to technical processes. for example, one report reads, in the sacred presence of the baobab, which represents our african roots, tc draws attention to the importance of spirituality and passes the word to mother beth of oxum, of olinda, to pass on the axé, the spiritual strength, the communication. she sang a song for ossanha, accompanied by the drums. she remembered the importance of strength through the leaves, because we are around the baobab. he also did a song for oxum and yemanjá.15 while the workshops transmit important technical knowledge about how to implement, use, and maintain a mucua, baobáxia engages quilombolas in a reflection about their relations to communication and technology, in collaboration with local social centers, such as casa tainã, also part of rede mocambos. their model relates to the history of quilombos, where preserving culture, organizing life, and hiding from the oppressor has been practiced for centuries. indeed, the relation to visibility and invisibility is crucial to the history of quilombos, and this concern is reflected in the network infrastructure of baobáxia, which not only enables connectivity issues to be dealt with locally, but also provides an autonomous platform where information of value to the community special section: computing in/from the south 20 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 can be shared and kept away from mainstream exposure, following a centuriesold resistance strategy. those rituals also focus on important political issues such as sustainability, where community sustainability and larger ecological issues are entangled and technology is envisioned in relation to both. in addition, care is taken to publish full reports online, which demonstrates that careful attention is given to building and deploying a technology that converges with all community reflections, attuned not only to existing models of community organization but also to political claims. all reports are archived on the organization’s wiki, whether they are about governance issues or reflect on the space of the encounter. for example, one report reads, "during the conversations and openings of the days, the relationship between ancestry and technology was deepened in the perception of the appropriation of technology as one of the tools for the diffusion of quilombola and community contributions."16 transformative practices and affirmative resistance happens in contexts where an active choice to prevent decentralization is exercised—as the baobáxia sits at the fringes of mainstream technological model, free cycling its hardware components with an approach to gambiarra for creating autonomous technology, organizing dedicated decision-making processes through workshops in each of the different nodes of the network, defining its own governance, and proposing unique community produced media. complete autonomy does not exist while, in technology and media practices, affordances are modeled after occidental approaches to computing, but important projects like baobáxia profoundly redefine the basis of technical construction. this project exists in the process of active resistance of the quilombos, the millennial culture of indigenous people, and other marginalized people who are resignified in developing singular technologies. conclusion what does taking back the future mean in the context of brazilian minoritized networks at the margins? this essay began with the intuition that a specific situation in brazil at the beginning of the millennium and the appropriation of technologies by communities of resistance offered a different vantage point on computing in/of/and from the south. we observed cases that allowed for the development of singular technologies that emerge from the appropriation of technologies by communities of resistance. these examples engage both language and technology in processes of reconstruction, in keeping with existing special section: computing in/from the south 21 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 creative or historical community organization. the three networks we chose to present—metareciclagem, tcnxmnsm, and baobáxia—understand technology as potentially liberating, and organize their networks in correspondence with the modalities of their research and their communities. technology is understood in a broader scope, and the initiatives they undertake enable different forms of practices to emerge. each project presented here deploys its own understanding of technology, envisioning different types of functionalities, scopes of application, and social relations, associating the notion of freedom fundamental to free software with an insistence on building technologies of liberation. we have described different approaches, from deploying constitutive language to singular networking technologies, that comply with resistance models and community conditions, such as the lack of an effective network connection. furthermore, these three projects take a holistic approach, thinking about historical relations to communication, epistemology, and technology in relation to the emergence of information and communications technology. these networks have been conceived and practiced as foundations of resistances and their models of organization. this diffracting allows us to examine histories and situations, which is the first necessary step to embrace the full scope of the technology situation from within a history of domination. the projects explored here are functional examples of resistance communication strategies, which allow for a diversity of expressions and social media. they include all aspects of community models of governance in the technological organization, providing examples of decentralized software developed and implemented to serve minoritized populations, under their specific conditions. despite the importance and relevance of these projects, they are hardly reported or studied. yet, they achieve autonomous modes of organization. it is crucial to recognize the existence of their decentralized networks that compose free technologies at the service of human creativity and historical resistance in various political locations. acknowledgements the authors are grateful for the amazing encounters, love and friendships between activists, across networks, beyond borders. thank you sareeta for your support, luis for your patience. special section: computing in/from the south 22 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 notes 1 as of 2014 the program ‘cultura viva’ was still supporting around 300 pontos da cultura around the country. gilberto gil famously proclaimed, "i am a hacker. a minister hacker," (cantor, 2008) to signify his contribution as a government member to grassroots technology, which then triggered some critiques by those who defended a theoretical liberal model of independence from the government. 2 "valorizar las iniciativas culturales de grupos y comunidades, ampliando el acceso a los medios de producción" (instituto lula, n.d.). 3 server is a technical term to designate the device (or program) that provides functionalities for programs to function on another computer. 4 quilombo dos palmares, located in the captaincy of pernambuco, hosted over ten thousand people. it was ruled as a kingdom according to angolan tradition. it existed from 1605 until its suppression in 1694, after fifteen years of war led by king zumbi. 5 alguns dos temas das rodas de conversa foram os princípios e reflexões sobre a rede mocambos neste momento as falas foram orientadas em torno do nome mocambos e da tecnologia do tambor; a forma de organização do quilombo dos palmares era em mocambos, assim chamavam suas moradias. outro elemento simbólico, o baobá, esteve no meio da roda; a filosofia do baobá e do tambor são centrais na rede mocambos: estão a serviço da humanidade, oferecem sentido ao mundo e fortalecem um compromisso político: nunca mais deixar de lutar. introduction to the pajelança quilombólica digital, territorios digitais livres source: retrieved, 2019/02/27 from https://wiki.mocambos.net/index.php/npdd/baobaxìa. metareciclagem wiki hosts a lot of information; see https://metareciclagem.github.io/. as we were writing the last revisions to this article, the site came back online after a major crash, but it was not available when we originally researched this article. 6 https://br.linkedin.com/in/dpadua 7 https://mutgamb.github.io/metalivro/historia/primordios.html 8 http://nuvem.tk/?encontrada https://wiki.mocambos.net/index.php/npdd/baobaxìa https://br.linkedin.com/in/dpadua https://mutgamb.github.io/metalivro/historia/primordios.html http://nuvem.tk/?encontrada special section: computing in/from the south 23 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 9 uma das definições de tecnologia feminista é a aplicação de conhecimentos da ciência para apoiar a causa feminista, sendo que esses conhecimentos são desenvolvidos e mantidos por mulheres que desafiam o status do sistema patriarcal normativo, propondo novas formas de politizar o debate sobre tecnologia e seus usos. (redes autônomas feminista, n.d.) 10 "consentimento e intimidade: é uma rede que tem como objetivo potencializar a comunidade, respeitando a privacidade, consentimento e intimidade de cada integrante. gerenciamento autônomo e colectivo: é uma rede que pretende cocriar seus protocolos e gerenciamento de autonomia. memorias e narrativas: é uma rede que respeita e resgata a memória de suas comunidades e de suas mulheres. sementes interconectadas: é uma rede que não depende só dos seus pontos de conexão, mas que também planta sementes para garantir que suas histórias sejam continuadas e retro-alimentadas." unclaimed probably collective authorship from http://redeautonomafeminista.org/ (last seen online 03/15/2019) 11 é um dispositivo móvel autônomo de troca e colaboração, feita para conectar pessoas presentes em um mesmo espaço físico. a fuxico cria uma rede sem fio fora da internet para troca de conteúdos digitais como imagens, vídeos, áudios,documentos, sala de bate-papo e rodas de conversa. totalmente anônima! unclaimed probably collective authorship from http://redeautonomafeminista.org/fuxico/ (last seen online 03/15/2019) 12 see https://kefir.red/. 13 see https://vedetas.org. 14 technoshamanism and wasted ontologiesinterview with fabiane m. borges published on may 21, 20171by bia martins and reynaldo carvalho http://www.emrede.com/site/entrevista/fabiane-m-borges-tecnoxamanismo-como-meio-derecuperar-e-reinventar-pontos-de-conex%c3%a3o translated by carsten agger 15 na presença sagrada do baobá, que representa as nossas raízes africanas, tc chama a atenção para a importância da espiritualidade e passa a palavra à mãe beth de oxum, de olinda, para passar o axé, a força espiritual, a comunicação. ela cantou um canto para ossanha, acompanhada pelos tambores. lembrou da importância da força pelas folhas, pois estamos ao redor do baobá. fez ainda um https://kefir.red/ https://vedetas.org/ special section: computing in/from the south 24 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 canto para oxum e para yemanjá. introduction to the pajelança quilombólica digital, territorios digitais livres source: retrieved, 2019/02/27 from https://wiki.mocambos.net/index.php/npdd/baobaxìa 16 “durante as rodas de conversas e aberturas dos dias, a relação ancestralidade e tecnologia foi aprofundada na percepção da apropriação da tecnologia como uma das ferramentas para a difusão das contribuições quilombolas e comunitárias.” (introduction to the pajelança quilombólica digital, territorios digitais livres source: retrieved, 2019/02/27 from https://wiki.mocambos.net/index.php/npdd/baobaxìa) references de andrade salaini, m., & cristian, j. (2010). propriedade intellectual e conhecimentos tradicionais no contexto das políticas públicas patrimoniais. in o. f. leal & r. hennemann ergara de souza (eds.), tomo editorial do regime de propriedade intelectual estudos antropológicos (pp. 223–241). tomo editorial. austin, j. l. (1962). how to do things with words. harvard university press. barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke university press. befree. (2019, january). computing in/from the south call for papers [online forum content]. https://ps.zoethical.org/t/computing-in-from-the-south-call-forpapers/1540/18 borges, f. m. (2017). futuros sequestrados x o antisequestro dos sonhos. in r. leher (ed.), desterros, teirreros: pós cadernos 02 coletâneas (pp. 13–49). editora circuito. http://editoracircuito.com.br/website/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/desterros.pdf cantor, e. (2008, june 16). "sou hacker, um ministro hacker" [interview with gil gilberto]. o estadão de são paulo. https://www.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,souhacker-um-ministro-hacker,1853 collingsp2004. (2007, february 20). projecto metareciclagem [video]. youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olzhwpskek4 de andrade, o. (1928). manifesto antropófago. http://www.ufrgs.br/cdrom/oandrade/oandrade.pdf de la torre, o. (2013). “are they really quilombos?” black peasants, politics, and the meaning of quilombo in present-day brazil. ofo: journal of transatlantic studies, 3(1 & 2), 97–118. https://ps.zoethical.org/t/computing-in-from-the-south-call-for-papers/1540/18 https://ps.zoethical.org/t/computing-in-from-the-south-call-for-papers/1540/18 http://editoracircuito.com.br/website/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/desterros.pdf https://www.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,sou-hacker-um-ministro-hacker,1853 https://www.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,sou-hacker-um-ministro-hacker,1853 http://www.ufrgs.br/cdrom/oandrade/oandrade.pdf special section: computing in/from the south 25 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 echániz, n. & lópez pezé, f. (2018). decentralising culture: the challenge of local content in community networks. in global information society watch, global information society watch 2018 report: community networks (pp. 52–56). association for progressive communications. https://giswatch.org/sites/default/files/giswatch18_web_0.pdf. evangelista, r. (2014). o movimento software livre do brasil: política, trabalho e hacking. horizontes antropológicos, 20(41), 173–200. https://doi.org/10.1590/s010471832014000100007 fonseca, f. (2015). reconhecimento e superação da exploração capitalista em redes criativas de colaboração e produção. liinc em revista, 12(1), 25–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.18617/liinc.v12i1.86125 fuchs, c. (2015). culture and economy in the age of social media. routledge. fuxico. (n.d.). a fuxico… http://redeautonomafeminista.org/fuxico/#sobre global information society watch. (2018). global information society watch 2018 report: community networks. association for progressive communications. https://giswatch.org/sites/default/files/giswatch18_web_0.pdf haraway, d. (1988). situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. feminist studies, 14(3), 575–599. hayles, k. n. (2005). my mother was a computer. university of chicago press. instituto lula. (n.d.). puntos de cultura. http://www.brasildamudanca.com.br/es/cultura/puntos-de-cultura kwet, m. (2019). digital colonialism: us empire and the new imperialism in the global south. race & class, 60(4), 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818823172 leite, i. b. (2000). os quilombos no brasil: questões conceituais e normativas. etnográfica, 4(2), 333–354. http://ceas.iscte.pt/etnografica/docs/vol_04/n2/vol_iv_n2_333-354.pdf mansoux, a. (2017). sandbox culture: a study of the application of free and open source software licensing ideas to art and cultural production [unpublished doctoral dissertation, goldsmiths, university of london]. martins, b., & carvalho, r. (2017, may 21). technoshamanism and wasted ontologies: an interview with fabiane m. borges. (trans. c. agger). tcnxmnsm. https://tecnoxamanismo.wordpress.com/2017/06/14/technoshamanism-and-wastedontologies/ murillo, l. f. r. (2010) tecnologia, política e cultura na comunidade brasileira de software livre e de código aberto. in o. f. leal & r. hennemann ergara de souza (eds.), https://giswatch.org/sites/default/files/giswatch18_web_0.pdf https://doi.org/10.1590/s0104-71832014000100007 https://doi.org/10.1590/s0104-71832014000100007 http://dx.doi.org/10.18617/liinc.v12i1.86125 http://redeautonomafeminista.org/fuxico/#sobre https://giswatch.org/sites/default/files/giswatch18_web_0.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818823172 special section: computing in/from the south 26 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 do regime de propriedade intelectual estudos antropológicos (pp. 75–93). tomo editorial. npdd/baobáxia. (n.d.). wiki. retrieved july 2, 2019. https://wiki.mocambos.net/index.php/npdd/baob%c3%a1xia ostrom, e. (1990). governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. cambridge university press. redes autônomas feminista. (n.d.). redes. http://redeautonomafeminista.org/index.html regine. (2011, july 16). gambiologia, the brazilian art and science of kludging [blog post]. we-make-money-not-art.com. https://we-make-money-notart.com/gambiologia/ roussel, n., & hellekin. (n.d.). singular technologies and the third-technoscape. journal of peer production, 11. http://peerproduction.net/editsuite/issues/issue-11city/experimental-format/singular-technologies-the-third-technoscape/ shaw, a. (2011). insurgent expertise: the politics of free/livre and open source software in brazil. journal of information technology & politics, 8(3), 253–272, http://10.1080/19331681.2011.592063 tozzi, v. (2011). redes federadas eventualmente conectadas, architectura e protótipo para a rede mocambos (unpublished phd dissertation , università degli studi di firenze). https://baobaxia.mocambos.net/media/mocambos/kalakuta/arquivo/16/01/11/redesfederadas-eventualmente-conectadas-3ba96.pdf “what is free software?” (n.d.). gnu operating system. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html. zanolli, b., jancz, c., gonzalez, c., araujo dos santos, d., & prado, d. (2018). feminist infrastructures and community networks: an opportunity to rethink our connections from the bottom-up, seeking diversity and autonomy. global information society watch (giswatch). https://www.giswatch.org/en/infrastructure/feministinfrastructures-and-community-networks author bios natacha roussel is active in free software communities and academic and art practices. she has been a member of a several groups that produce critical software, alternative social media, and art installations in europe, and recently co-founded the research organization petites singularités in brussels, which concentrates on http://redeautonomafeminista.org/index.html https://we-make-money-not-art.com/gambiologia/ https://we-make-money-not-art.com/gambiologia/ http://peerproduction.net/editsuite/issues/issue-11-city/experimental-format/singular-technologies-the-third-technoscape/ http://peerproduction.net/editsuite/issues/issue-11-city/experimental-format/singular-technologies-the-third-technoscape/ https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2011.592063 https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html special section: computing in/from the south 27 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) natacha roussel and ariane stolfi, 2020 researching the specificities of free software and its benefits to collective practices. she steps in and out of academia, as her research action practices tend to focus on community and decentralized practices. ariane stolfi is a phd candidate in sonology. she has been involved with open source culture in brazil since 2006, when she also started to work as a web developer. she has collaborated with hacklab, estudio livre, descentro, submidialogias, ccj lab, sesc, isa, casa brasil, technoshamanism, and sonora network as well as with different spheres of public government in brazil. she also has been visiting researcher at queen mary university of london, where she collaborated with the audio commons project and developed playsound.space, an online instrument based on creative commons sound samples. her interdisciplinary research intersects interface design, experimental music, and sound art. she is currently a lecturer at federal university of south of bahia, where she teaches courses related to sound, image, and movement. charette, michelle (2020). review of fables and futures: biotechnology, disability, and the stories we tell ourselves, by george estreich (mit press, 2019). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), pp. 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © michelle charette, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | fables and futures: biotechnology, disability, and the stories we tell ourselves, by george estreich (mit press, 2019) michelle charette york university michgc@yorku.ca fables and futures: biotechnology, disability, and the stories we tell ourselves by george estreich is a compelling reflection about the rise of biotechnological innovations, from non-invasive prenatal testing to crispr-cas9 based genetic engineering. estreich is a father of two daughters, one of whom is named laura. at birth, laura was diagnosed with trisomy 21, or down syndrome. laura’s condition can be linguistically classified in these two ways. both are constitutive of different (sometimes harmful, sometimes productive) metaphors and ways of understanding what a diagnosis of this kind means. estreich skillfully analyzes the discursive practices surrounding new biotechnology as if they were works of literature. he frames most of his critiques within the realm of language, and his story is about how certain technologies script the unscripted (p. xvii), shaping what is nebulous through persuasive tools not so unlike those used by literary masters. estreich’s story is a many-years-in-the-making reflection on how disability narratives and genetic innovations, when coupled, can cause epistemic violence. each chapter focuses on a single biotech application, both contemporary and historical, and he uses them as platforms to reflect on the narratives within which they are couched. this is ambitious, but estreich is provident; he does not dwell book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) michelle charette, 2020 2 on scientific innovation in great technical detail. rather, he spends most of his time gesturing towards how proponents of biotechnological innovations, institutions, and devices traffic in the business of perpetuating harmful discursive practices related to what it means (or does not mean) to be genetically “disabled.” estreich selectively uses personal anecdotes to buttress reflection. the book is appropriate for a broad audience. in the book’s best moments, it is a poetic and informative account of how biology became and is still becoming a synonym for optimized bodies and optimized people. this is important: estreich is writing in “a moment of provisionality” (p. xvii). many of the innovations he discusses are still in nascent stages of development or on the margins of popularity and accessibility. the book reads as a journey through biotechnological progress. and indeed, the introduction begins with a journey. the same year that estreich finds out about laura’s diagnosis, he takes a road trip with his friend robert. he writes that, in this moment, he was trying to answer the question that disability had posed. estreich and robert arrive in the oregon desert, and in a moment of reflective and solitary cloud gazing, he writes, “one cloud stayed, pink as the inside of a grapefruit. it was different. the other clouds were, definably, volumes, objects in the sky. a child could look up and say car or horse. but this one had no shape you could name by likeness. it was a blur, a region of unfocus, a mist” (p. xii). this moment stands out as a signal for what to expect of the book. estreich uses the rhetorical device of metaphor to both make sense of something nebulous and to linger on the unknown. the critiques he makes throughout the book are related to misused metaphors— metaphors that “make sense” of difference by rejecting the unknown. one of the only certainties he seems willing to espouse is that people-changing technologies are more likely to be used wisely if more people talk about them (p. xvii). estreich discusses the utopic (and therefore dystopic) science-fiction-esque world of genetically engineering children. the book takes the princeton biologist lee silver as its launch pad for reflecting on idealized narratives about children. furthermore, he describes the ways in which francis galton’s essays in eugenics took for granted that improved intellect is better (p. 13). one of the devices used to perpetuate this was the alphabet metaphor. galton argued that citizens could be divided into classes “a through x” (p. 13). as a persuasive device, this metaphor is inspired, simple and linear. estreich attributes much of the advent of genomic editing to the ideologies persuasively promoted by galton. he then goes on to provide a very clear description of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (crispr-cas9) gene editing, how it is used, and how it has book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) michelle charette, 2020 3 been re-engineered for gene editing (cutting out undesirable dna). he writes that “crispr is sometimes described as a ‘word processor,’ able to ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ lengths of dna at selected locations, a metaphor which subtly oversells crispr’s accuracy” (p. 16). indeed, it is still in very early stages of development. but this is not uncommon for biotechnologies, and the enthusiastic, “sketchy and too eager” (p. 17) venture capitalists who nevertheless sell images of perfection. what is sold, he writes, is a future adult who “has it all.” “all” here means physical and mental superiority. but superiority does not equal health, and the euphemistic vagueness of the language suggests that “less-than-superior” is the equivalent to “possible genetic issues,” which falsely pathologizes conditions that are treatable, or far from debilitating. he describes this binary as promise or peril, “two roads diverge, as it were, and all we have to do is take the right one. but gene editing is more like terraforming, changing the landscape, the idea of roads, the people who walk on the roads” (p.25). this binary makes it all the more difficult to see disability as lived, as actually experienced in time and place. none of estreich’s criticisms are necessarily novel (see clare, 2017; ginsburg, 1989; rapp & ginsburg, 2001; schwartz, 2007). disability studies is a robust contemporary arena of scholarship that tackles many of the themes found in fables and futures. for instance, activist and writer eli clare engages with similar ideas in his book titled brilliant imperfection. indeed, it is possible that clare does so with even more attention to nuance, writing that “we need neither a wholehearted acceptance nor an outright rejection of cure, but rather a broadbased grappling” (2017, p. 14). clare too argues that eradication is at the center of the notion of cure, and that this kind of thinking commits a particular kind of violence. but what fables and futures lacks in original insight it makes up for in method. the style of memoir opens up a space of intelligibility that is sometimes lacking in philosophical and sts scholarship. memoir is a particularly lucid method for communicating the nuances involved in topics such as genetic testing. this is because, as estreich rightly points out, family is the arena where the personal and the theoretical meet. it would be far from sufficient to discuss biotechnological innovations simply as technologies. technological innovations do not exist in a vacuum. they have long legs, and memoir as method seems particularly capable of capitalizing on such complexities. there is a growing body of literature that uses the method of memoir to make book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) michelle charette, 2020 4 experience-based socio-political critiques. for instance, in neurological disturbances and time travel (2019), science and technology scholar and anthropologist denielle elliott uses the genre of ethnographic memoir to discuss the embodied effects of anomic aphasia, a condition that can arise post-brain trauma injury, whereby the individual might struggle to recall certain words, names, and memories. insofar as it remains true that neurologists struggle to offer reductive explanatory accounts of aphasia, for instance, elliott poignantly writes that “the lived embodied, felt accounts of brain injury and memory disturbances can bridge the gaps between the social and scientific in understanding brain trauma and forgetfulness” (2019, p. 17). the salient takeaway of this piece is that the genre of memoir opens up an often closed-off space for understanding medical conditions as new states of being. insofar as normative methodologies continue to stifle or render obsolete the first-person accounts of those who actually live with so-called atypical medical conditions, those writing in the field would be prudent to see alternative genres like memoir as useful for “their generative possibilities and productivities” (elliott, 2019, pp. 17 -18). fables and futures is a prod at innovations targeting the significance of genomic difference. what does “genomic distinction/difference” mean? are notions of difference inextricably linked to social, political, and epistemic power? genealogically, estreich argues that eugenics, capitalism, and problematic metaphors about futures and bodies give rise to the notion of genetic innovation. what kinds of genetic conditions warrant innovation? are ideas of “perfection,” “near perfection,” or “imperfection” appropriate descriptors for the dna, or human life more broadly? biotechnological innovations such as gene editing and prenatal testing perpetuate harmful associations; language of the “unscripted” and “nebulous” are taken to mean “infected” or “less-than-optimal”. just because difference can be avoided does not mean it should, and estreich does a fine job questioning the sewn seeds of doubt and fear that innovations and innovators cleverly perpetuate. references clare, e. (2017). brilliant imperfection: grappling with cure. duke university press. elliott, d. (2019). neurological disturbances and time travel. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), pp. 1–27. ginsburg, f. d. (1989). contested lives: the abortion debate in an american community. ([netlibrary]), ([ebsco ebook collection]). university of california press. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/bios/ucal051/88019887.html book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) michelle charette, 2020 5 rapp, r., & ginsburg, f. (2001). enabling disability: rewriting kinship, reimagining citizenship. public culture, 13(3): 533–56. schwartz, m. c. (2007). growing concerns: prenatal genetic risks and trust. in risk and trust: including or excluding citizens? ed. the law commission of canada, 79– 101. black point, ns: fernwood publishers author bio michelle charette is a phd student at york university in the department of science and technology studies. her research focuses on the oft-reductive explanations of amorphous health conditions, specifically, so-called psychosomatic illnesses (such as fibromyalgia and other forms of chronic pain). one of the central questions guiding her work is, what epistemological underpinnings are operative in our present understanding of “atypical” embodiment? amrute, sareeta, & murillo, luis felipe r. (2020). introduction: computing in/from the south. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1–23. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introduction computing in/from the south sareeta amrute university of washington and the data & society research institute amrutes@uw.edu luis felipe r. murillo university of virginia lfr6d@virginia.edu abstract in this introduction to the special section “computing in/from the south,” we position the south as a method to change dominant frames about the past, present, and future of computing. we discuss three narratives frames— developmentalist, postcolonial, and decolonial—to trace a significant body of thinking on computing otherwise. we argue that each of these frames provides a different optic to emphasize the contributions of non-western, feminist, and queer epistemologies to computing worlds. rather than thinking of these coconstructions as replacing one another linearly, we argue that they each create a different kind of relation among computing’s spaces and places, its pasts and its futures. these relations, and the switches between them, comprise what we describe as computing in/from the south as both an empirical and a methodological framework. the introduction first centers developments in computing worlds that are taking place outside centers of power. based on an analysis of these developments, we then move beyond the limited twinned frames of exploitation and resistance to unpack the relational, political, and special section: computing in/from the south 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 affective undercurrents that run through data-driven worlds from perspectives in and through the south. introduction how can computing otherwise—computing that does not start from the presumed centers of power, computing that solves different kinds of problems and solves problems differently—become part of a kind of listening that centers the worlds and the people who have been, albeit essential for expansion and maintenance, made invisible? if “computing” is a field with multiple manifestations, “south” is a method. putting the south in conversation with the field of computing helps us reorient our inquiry toward multi-stranded histories with their own distinct technical forms and power relations. whereas the south is often mistaken as a monolithic marker of unsullied resistance, we suggest it is better understood as an historic block, an epistemic formation, a political compass and, a poetics of relation (glissant, 1997; de souza santos & meneses, 2009; comaroff & comaroff, 2012). the essays in this special section bring all of these dimensions forward as an urgent need to think and act from a relational south. the narratives assembled here begin at many different sites across the globe. these locations may have a relationship with presumed centers of computing power like silicon valley, and they may begin in places like mexico, brasil, kenya, or india that have traditionally been associated with the south as a geographic location. but they may also move from romania to china, in recognition of another, submerged history of the method of the south, that of the international socialism and its long, underground histories. approaching the field of computing from unexpected angles, a view from the south pays equal attention to contests over knowledge and over materials and desires that take place within and across multiple sites. switches across the network: reorientation points for computing and the south this special section was born out of a panel for the american anthropological association meetings (2017) titled “hacking imaginaries: fabricating utopics,” organized by erin mceroy, héctor béltran, and luis felipe r. murillo. sareeta amrute joined luis felipe r. murillo as discussant to engage a rich set of papers special section: computing in/from the south 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 that focused on the political imaginaries informing “hacking” as a technopolitcal practice that constitutes and reconstitutes gender, political practice, and the meaning of the human, the livable, and the future. the panel’s focus was on configurations of alternative techno-political projects challenging silicon valley provincialism beyond the smokescreen of journalistic discourses with their saturated tropes (“hackers” as rebels; “software developers” as rock stars, “tech entrepreneurs” as disruptive actors, and so on). when sareeta and luis felipe began gathering papers and essays for the present volume, they saw a need for foregrounding perspectives from the south in the critique of the perverse convergence between large-scale data analytics and pervasive surveillance (lyon, 2007; zuboff, 2019; snowden, 2019), a critique that necessarily includes the evaluation of infrastructural concentrations in the hands of what joshua weiss (2017) calls the “four (silicon-valley-based) horsemen of the internet.” we found ourselves in agreement that the problem of large-scale data capture (with equally large-scale harms) rests on a set of assumptions about persons, processes, values, locations, and technologies that emanate from hegemonic centers where computing is currently weaponized. computing has been, after all, a means for waging and support domestic and foreign wars, magnifying, reproducing, and reconfiguring structures of inequality north and south (sharkey & suchman, 2013; zetter, 2014; suchman, 2016). at the same time, the neocolonial extractive model of north–south relations embodied in terms like “data colonialism” did not seem to do justice to the multiple roles that information technologies take across “southern” locations (couldry & mejias, 2019). computing from the south addresses an expanded archive for the geographies and the possibilities for present and future of computing. to write these complicated histories also means seeing “the peoples of the global south as living less in the shadow of the west” (gupta et al., 2018, 10) and more living out their own relationships with digital technologies, some, but of course, not all of which may be effecting positive social change. journalistic and other professional accounts of computing historically have contributed to a reified depiction of undifferentiated expert communities (ensmenger, 2010. one consequence of this reification is that analysts miss possibilities for remaking the computational present, because these possibilities are mostly absented from the archive of computer histories (pujol & montenegro, 2015; marques, 2005). this erasure is particularly evident in the field of “digital design”, an important vantage point for special section: computing in/from the south 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 the study of the unequal dynamics that are fundamentally at stake in computing in/from the south (benjamin, 2019; escobar, 2018; costanza-chock, 2020; d’ignazio & klein, 2019). as the discursive position of the “designer” mobilizes an array of privileges, it inevitably begs the question of who gets to be the researcher and the designer of digital platforms, and who does not. mobilizing this critique across southern geographies requires an understanding that, as lily irani’s (2019) work shows, computing projects for developmental ends divide high-end creative designers from the folk who produce singular ingenuity rather than reproducible innovation. building on, rather than dismissing this singularity, computing in/from the south reaches outward from the critique of design to symbolic and material practices of hacking, mimicry, and network-building to complicate the very projects that are often undertaken in the south’s name. these projects often reify a particular english-language, well-resourced, urban mode of computing that divides those who embody a hegemonic professional disposition from the rest, whose geographies are transformed into libraries for data-driven innovation (russert, 2019). to counter this tendency, we weave together three strands of thinking on computing cultures, which might be called developmental, postcolonial, and decolonial computing. while these strands may correspond roughly to political projects and historical periods, in the present moment they overlap as ethical and political orientations within computing worlds. that is, developmental, postcolonial, and decolonial computing practices describe a horizon of what a future computing might look like, and in service to that horizon, each narrates a different arc for computing’s pasts and presents. each of these approaches begins by revising the white masculinist hegemonic story of computing that emerges in the united states and europe (rankin, 2018; hicks, 2018). since the 1940s, digital technologies have been assumed to be euroamerican–driven instruments of state control. the masculinist orientation of computing was accomplished historically (and gradually) by displacing women from coding jobs as those jobs gained in prestige in the workplace on both sides of the iron curtain (tatarchenko, 2017). at the same time and through similarly gradual yes persistent processes, the contributions of indigenous, african, and asian mathematicians were incorporated and made invisible within computing’s standard history (eglash, 2005; mavhunga, 2018). as medina et al. (2015) attest, hegemonic approaches to technoscientific innovation give institutions and individuals in the most industrialized regions of the world disproportionate credit for scientific and technological special section: computing in/from the south 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 creation, erasing the contributions of all other participants in this process and presenting those in other areas of the world, such as latin america, as passive recipients or followers. (p. 3) euro-american expert discourses on science and technology often needed their underdeveloped or indigenous technological “others” through which to institute their own place in the world writ large (fabian, 2002; jobson, 2020; trouillot, 2003). this relational model, once establish, would continue to be a theme in computing through the mid-twenty-first century. the first rebuttals of euro-american monopoly began with nationalist it policymaking in south and east asia, latin america, and elsewhere as science and technology took center stage as part of a struggle for national autonomy. the rationale for this struggle was comparative but inward-facing: if native culture and training could produce universally recognized scientific knowledge, then this was evidence that these countries, contrary to what their colonial and imperialist rulers defended, were ready for self-determination. technologies, old and new, were symbols of national strength, autonomy, and middle-class aspiration (prakash, 1999; abraham, 1998, 2017; evans, 1995). after formal independence, computing and statistical technologies also became vehicles for mediating national rule through their application to agriculture, population, industry, atomic weaponry, and communication in southern countries, such as india and chile (gupta, 1998; philip, 2016; medina, 2011; roy, 2007). projects for computers as aspirational devices for nation-building find expression across a large swath of political locations. in latin america, concurrent dynamics of design, fabrication, training, disassembling, and cloning describe a distinct but parallel trajectory with concerted efforts to build public policies for “technological autonomy” (murillo, 2010; chan, 2014; garcia dos santos & caminati, 2014; medina et al., 2015). across these varied southern locations, the 1990s marks a fundamental transition toward an internationalist alliance of local companies with transnational it giants, leading to the existing global assemblages in which digital networks serve as enablers and local and transnational elites drive these developmentalist agendas. peter evans’s (1995) comparative sociology of nascent computing industries of brazil, india, and korea is instructive. covering the period of formation of national industries in the 1970s and 1980s, evans portrays parallel histories of “dependent special section: computing in/from the south 6 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 development” that are fundamentally driven by state policies of “innovation”— indexing both aspiration and capacity-building to bootstrap a new economic sector with the potential to change a nation’s position in the international division of labor. as evans and others demonstrate, local computing cultures depended on the role of the state in steering and fostering national computer industries by sheltering local initiatives from transnational competition (see amrute, 2010; marques, 2005). though the longer history of developmentalist projects can only be telegraphed here, the ongoing attempts to develop national technologies as symbols of strength on a world stage and as a commodity for end-users at home and abroad is also accompanied by systems of biometric surveillance and largescale data collection in the name of producing better outcomes for poorer populations. in the case of india’s aadhaar project and the india stack, for instance, the aadhaar identification number was developed as a biometrically secured unique id to smooth the delivery of welfare benefits to the poor, a development that led to the widespread adoption of the number for services such as getting a bank account, a requirement that was later deemed unconstitutional (khera, 2019; singh, 2020). the india stack, a series of applications developed through private venture capital, uses aadhaar-collected data and systems as a foundation to build “profit-generating, cloud-based digital software,” marking an intertwining of governmental and financial capital interests that further entrenches biometric monitoring (dattani, 2019, p. 415). these developmentalist goals in privatized settings describe many of the current trends in computing in the south. a postcolonial approach to computing moves away from a developmentalist frame by writing against the narrative of southern deficit. that is, it recognizes that within developmental narratives, the south is invariably figured as catching up to the north (or the east to the west). for postcolonial computing scholars, such an approach diminishes the active presence global south actors and geographies have played in the development of computing technologies; holds onto the promise of computing as a future utopia once technologies are divorced from their problematic pasts and present harms; and has difficulty recognizing cascading relationships of power within and across geopolitical and economic formations. as clapperton mavhunga’s introduction to the edited volume what do science, technology, and innovation mean from africa? contends, “a geophysical zoning…has been hammered into our brains: that technology is for academy-trained engineers, hence the emphasis on experts, and that technology can only come from the west and is ‘transferred’ to the technology-poor areas of special section: computing in/from the south 7 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 the world” (2017,4). scholars of postcolonial computing undo these simple binaries through studies of technologies in practice as they move across geographic borders. such studies are attuned to the inconsistencies within politically charged projects like the one laptop per child initiative (philip et al., 2012; fouché, 2013). they also elevate histories of computing outside the west as a means of creating an independent narrative around computing beyond the familiar story of geopolitical, state-driven competition (sandoval, 2019). finally, they turn to the work of other experts below, beyond, and yet connected to hegemonic circuits of power (addo, 2017; amrute, 2016; murillo, 2019; nguyen, 2016 prieto-nanez, 2016; takhteyev, 2012). decolonial computing approaches the question of computing cultures by squarely centering black and indigenous technological histories. this field is still expanding, we may already note that it further removes the discussion of computing from reliance on western narrative frames. decolonizing approaches rewrite relations of power in the south by foregrounding the complicated and complicit relationships that computing projects have to the development and settling of indigenous lands and the continued imperial relationships such projects support (bidwell, 2016; nakamura, 2015). in other words, decolonial perspectives bring with them a critique not only of the dominant western frames of computing cultures, but also of the dominant middleand upper-classes within southern locations and their diasporas. most importantly, decolonizing computing also means returning to questions of control and redistribution of the way technologies are designed, developed, and disseminated from with an understanding of asymmetrical power relations, especially as tied to the dual questions of institutional funding and organization and of ownership and autonomy. as marika cifor, patricia garia, t. l. cowan, jasmine rault, tonia sutherland, anita say chan, jennifer rode, anna lauren hoffman, niloufar salehi, and lisa nakamura, the collective authors of the “feminist data manifestno” assert, such projects “commit to taking back control over the ways we behave, love, and engage with data and its technologies” (n.d).1 yet, as eve tuck and wayne yang remind us, these projects are messy and involve “strategic and contingent collaborations” rather than lasting and simplifying solidarities (tuck & yang, 2012, 28; garba & sorentino, 2020). whose vision of decoloniality matters when describing the potentialities and limits of these developments (lyons et al., 2017; raval, 2019)? in thinking through computing in/from the south, our analysis is best served by engaging these messy, entangled, and ephemeral collaborations special section: computing in/from the south 8 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 that comprise a poetics of relation. the contributions in this volume not only manifest this commitment but put it to work analytically. in keeping with the need to think along historical, epistemological, political, and poetic dimensions of our cases, “computing in/from the south” is a guide to technical projects where ethics, materiality, and design sensibilities meet. this scaffolding challenges both soft and hard coded assumptions about how computing infrastructures should work, whose labor produces them, how values such as privacy should be encoded in these technologies, and how a collective and singular technological users should be imagined and empowered through computing technologies (ahmed et al., 2017; kumar, 2014; prasad, 2014). the global feminist technoscientific approach taken in this section tunes in to the complicated technical landscapes of computing cultures in the south, and follows the hidden histories and manifold futures that play out and remake this terrain. as we attend to the unexpected, the counter, and the silenced, we privilege not only what is aspired to but what is prefigured within and through alternative computing practices. we look to what “upstart knowledge communities” can teach us about power dynamics as they work to center ways of doing computing otherwise (jasanoff, 2004, p. 36). in doing so, we tease out computing practices that move between and beyond the poles of techno-deficiency and technoresistance too often ascribed to the south as a geographic location. approaching the south relationally requires attending to not only computing practices embodying “diverse experiences of subjugation,” complex desires, and power relationships within the south, but also attempts by national and transnational actors to “configure (profitable) essential difference” (philip & irani, 2018, 2). these modes of appropriating difference for profit contend with queer, feminist, and indigenous confiscations of computing technologies as means of releasing their technopolitical potentialities toward different ends (haraway, 1992 & 1991; keeling, 2014; mcglotten, 2014). we draw inspiration from these later appropriations, without expecting them to be pure, perfect, or accord with one another. “computing in” is distinct from, but related to “computing from” the south. while both find points of articulation in distinct computing histories, they productively dispute one another in this volume. computing in the south situates digital infrastructures by following ethnographically (on the ground) how they build on and help build kinds of politics, epistemologies, and assumptions about the nature special section: computing in/from the south 9 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 of things (barad, 2007; harding 1991). computing from the south, on the other hand, opens up the material, immaterial, social, and political aspects of computing to alternative forms of life and future realities (comaroff & comaroff, 2012; mbembe, 2012). the “/” [forward slash] operates a relational analytics attuned to the constitutive tensions that mark computing as, at once, multiply located and located against its multiple others (amrute, 2019, 2020). the “/” operator helps us identify processes where peripheral places are made generative for computing, and where they provide counter-conducts for digital practices. in this way, the operator encompasses the indexing and ordering functions created by existing hierarchies among places, people, things, and forms of knowledge but also recognizes the slips, sources of ambiguity, and tensions in computing projects (murillo, 2012, 2020). we use the forward slash to toggle intentionally across hierarchy and order/slips and alternatives. the toggle signals the need for new approaches to computing that continues to take advantage of these switches. though we cannot expand on this language fully here, the convergent histories of queer open-ended naming practices in the + and the wildcard function of the * suggest further possibilities for developing such languages.2 contributions to this special section the authors of this special section deploy feminist, queer, decolonial, and postcolonial theories to move beyond center-periphery binaries. each essay articulates the “complex engagements and desires” that unfold through datawork (sen, 2017, p. 20). thinking in and from the south exemplifies in each of these contributions how computing sites relate to one another within and alongside present monopolistic data-driven obsessions. when erin mcelroy takes us in their essay through the history of computing in romania, they simultaneously create a new origin story for hacking as queering and displace the very misconception of hacking as a dangerous eastern european practice. in “corrupting techno-normativity in postsocialist romania,” mcelroy helps us build a shared analytic in their examination of the role of silicon valley in shaping spatial, technical, and politico-economic landscapes in romania. counter to common narratives on “outsourcing” locations, mcelroy calls our attention to șmecherie —a romanian analog to the euro-american hacking—as a queer practice to counter the normative aspirations of transforming cluj into the “silicon valley of eastern europe.” queering here is not a simple identitarian code or sexuality descriptive, but is rather a field of inquiry and set of interpretative special section: computing in/from the south 10 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 strategies to “pervert (and perhaps help decolonize) postsocialist siliconization through practices of cloning, play, and kinship” (mcelroy, p.5). drawing from contemporary postcolonial reflections, mcelroy identifies the pernicious effects of the “denial of coevalness” (fabian, 2002, p. 31) to romanian computer experts who are identified as by-products of a corrupt socialist past and as aberrant cybercriminal marring technomodernity. it is by queering the technopolitical histories of socialist and postsocialist eras in the present that computer șmecherie constitutes an instance of computing from the south. mcelroy answers a fundamental question for the project of computing from the european “south:”: is there another techno-utopic vision working in the wires, hacking the commontime of postsocialism? when héctor beltrán’s describes a hackathon designed for women and girls in mexico, he shows how the latinx diaspora moves across and between the united states and mexico, knitting north and south together across paradigms of technical capacity, notions of gender, and southern ingenuity. as beltrán reminds us, these relations both enable and foreclose the transformative potential of what he calls the “stack”—where layers of infrastructure, code, interface, and ideology make up computing as a sociopolitical project for the country. in “the first latina hackathon: recoding infrastructures from mexico,” the “hackathon” is described as a space in tension between computing in mexico with developmentalist governmental perspectives and computing from the perspective of mexican youth creating local alternatives against the odds of precarity. his ethnographic work responds to another fundamental question posed in this special section: how do models of technical expertise (from the north) become tied to state practices and national imaginaries (in the south)? and, as equally important, how do emergent political forms accommodate both market logics of competitiveness, agility, autonomy, and risk alongside critical, decolonizing dispositions? what is particularly salient in beltrán’s analysis is how gender, national, and racial differences are mobilized and tactically negotiated to create spaces for the participation of women. here we encounter the answer to the question of who gets to participate in this emergent “hacker scene,” accessing distinctions that are more than markers of differential technical competence (“chingón,” “newbie,” “hacker,” etc.) and refracting social distances and class belonging (beltrán, 2020). despite the efforts for carving out a space for being together as women-identified special section: computing in/from the south 11 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 technologists, the specter of silicon valley looms large in the backdrop of the ethnographic scene of the hackathon. in her contribution to this collection, angela okune demonstrates that paying attention to data-driven desires through a reflection on her own position as an ethnographer of an over-studied kenyan community can foreground values that every act of design integrates to lesser or greater extent. every design draws from, but also animates an ontology. digital design partakes in what arturo escobar (2018) calls “ontological design” as a form of world-making. this does not mean that there is an essential “kenyan” way of modeling data sets and designing interfaces. instead, this ontology arises from the co-production of model, modeler, and community. in her article “open ethnographic archiving as feminist, decolonizing practice,” okune offers an alternative for honoring ties between researchers and researched communities through common protocols for crafting and sharing digital infrastructures and data. her call for open archival practices helps us identify what, in the framing of digital practices as “design practices,” is effectively open for the project of computing from and of the south. from a decolonial and feminist perspective, she suggests that open archival work is one of the means for identifying what is rendered invisible, underor de-valued in practices of digital design. the separation between designer and community is not problematic per se, but this separation has long-lasting effects of erasure for those who are the “over-researched” and also for those who provided the technical work for the research infrastructure. in this debate, okune’s work is well positioned to animate alternatives to hegemonic practices in which digital design lends itself too easily to the colonization of other forms of life. collaborative ethnography figures here as a counter-practice to widespread tendencies of data extraction from “target populations” in africa and elsewhere. this process involves the mobilization of different logics for the design and implementation of digital platforms for collaborative research which, in the case of the platform okune employs to infrastructure the archival practices of her collaborators, is, in turn, infrastructured by the work of brazilian developers who provided the work to co-create the platform; and whose work is infrastructured, in turn, by a distributed community of free software developers working on a common web development framework (many of whom work from the south in small firms). the “/” operator is useful here as a delimiter to resurface colonial and postcolonial relationships at such sites of innovation as nairobi as it takes on the mantle of being part of special section: computing in/from the south 12 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 africa’s “silicon savannah.” these relationships move recursively across many types of infrastructural labor in distant geographic locations. in their essay, natacha roussel and ariane stolfi use the generative language of “singular technologies”—technologies that are created often by using parts from existing projects but with different ontological blueprints—to enable alternative networks that meet the needs of black and indigenous communities in brazil. roussel and stolfi point out that for these systems to come into being, they need to be conceptualized through a poetic language that emphasizes flat structures, recycling technologies, and the branching shape of the baobab tree from locations of quilombolas settlements, carrying into the present long-standing forms of resistance to produce alternative, community-based networks. in their essay we find “software livre” [“free software” in brasil] as an unrecognizable quasi-object with serious implications for a renewed project of sovereign computing in the south (murillo, 2010; garcia dos santos & caminati, 2014). here the authors trace repurposed methods of connecting across rather than from the top-down in the technosciences. they suggest that concepts, such xaminismo and the baobaxia, become resources for communities to imagine their relationship to digital networks. these methods provide the alternative framing to imagine computing that is focused around a “we” that is open to challenge from below. drawing on the work of karen barad, roussel and stolfi show that their cases represent sites of profound transformation, where intra-activity is not only recognized, but aspired to and prized. while it is an open question how these developments will survive with the current authoritarian regime in brazil, what they describe provides a vantage onto technical practices that resist colonization by silicon valley tools and logics. in their definition, “singular technologies” actualize political memories and struggles of ”comunidades remanescentes de quilombos” (insurgent communities of formerly enslaved african peoples) with the practice of “software freedom” (well removed, we must say, from liberal understandings of both “software development” and “freedom” in this particular context). our section also includes shorter essays that similarly decenter deep-seated assumptions about computing outside western europe and the united states. angela wu examines the politically charged business of large-scale “social media mining” in china. in her essay, “chinese computing and computing china as special section: computing in/from the south 13 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 global knowledge production”, wu reads the case of big data for monitoring and evaluation of social media mobilizations after dr. li wenliang’s tragic death due to covid-19. her analysis resituates chinese computing within euro-american circuits of academic power on the one hand, and within the story of the chinese people whose data is used in building portable social surveillance models on the other. wu argues that online surveillance constitutes a much broader transnational assemblage where computing mediates ties between commercial, academic, and political entities. surveillance maintains internal political stability in china, even while western academic political-economic circuits supercharge these pervasive data collection practices. taking up the analysis of transnational circuits, hemangini gupta offers a satirical manual on how to build a “postcolonial” robot, based on her fieldwork research with technologists in bangalore. gupta’s “postcolonial assembly protocols for unnamed and undefined automation projects” is an annotated keywords index for coming to terms with heteronormative templates that are global and nativist in equal measure, even while their attraction stems from the plastic capacity of local forms to be molded to fit a standard average american audience. in the final contribution to this section, luis felipe r. murillo shares with us a cartoon and an essay pondering the infrastructures, invisibilities, and the moralities assembled along the computing supply chain. murillo’s “moral circuits” investigates the material conditions and moral dispositions that make up collaborative work in spaces where computing embodies alternative technopolitics. describing his ethnographic experience prototyping a device for transcribing interviews gives murillo the opportunity to unpack how technologies come into being, and in doing so, how collaborative practices shape and take shape in sociotechnical assemblages across unequal spaces/places. taken together, these short pieces telegraph the multiple fields computing from the south addresses, recognizing a need to approach these fields through creative work that experiments with modes of expression beyond the academic article. switches in hierarchies of command and control open pathways for alternative computing worlds in relation across southern geographies. we find resonance here across these projects and contexts from the south as they move to decenter debates on digital design, development, piracy, and the refracted relations of gender, power, and layered (post)colonial expropriation that illuminate these worlds. special section: computing in/from the south 14 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 conclusion as exemplified by the contributions to this special section, the “/” operator highlights the interdependencies, ambiguities, and potentialities between technopolitical locations, as well as between the south that the north increasingly contains. southern histories, bodies, and practices drive forward developments in computing usually taken as emanating from the north, both in computing’s adverse effects and the multiple solutions these developments enunciate. overworked and invisible labor, sources of raw material extraction for integrated circuits and electronics components, and, increasingly, sources of “creativity” that the north seems to be hungry for concern all of our authors. what brings us together in this issue is the task of unearthing political histories of computing. these histories help expose the current state of the field with its multiple instantiations. if the state of computing today is, overall, monopolistic, pervasive, and surveilled, then it is so because these monopolies arise globally and infrastructurally; they are both sustained and battled along multilayered political configurations. importantly, the frame of the south as we elaborate it in this volume is not monolithic and binary, but relational. working across southern locations is a means for elaborating on a shared analytic and strategy for combating these developments in big and pervasive computing that are misleadingly identified as “data-driven,” as they involve infrastructural control and unchecked political influence at multiple levels and domains of expert knowledge. as we demonstrate through the feminist scholarship we engage, there are no dearth of examples of the hidden labor of computing worlds— grouped under the heading of “outsourcing,” which entails sending less lucrative, less interesting, and more dangerous jobs overseas to peripheral communities as clickwork that populates the content of digital platforms (amrute, 2016; biao, 2007; gray & suri, 2019; ekbia & nardi, 2017; roberts, 2019). many of these same geographies are also subject to the utopian projects of elite philanthropy even while they may harbor political computing projects that refuse both labor exploitation and prefabricated technologies for (their own) good. future iterations of our shared framework should branch out from the question of computing in and from the south to computing of the south, pointing to the urgent realization of “technological autonomy” and “data sovereignty” projects within the shared horizon of all the contributions to this volume. as digital special section: computing in/from the south 15 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 surveillance systems expand in their deployments in the context of public health initiatives, deemed as “inevitable” responses to the covid-19 pandemic, initiatives such as the google and apple contact tracing framework and the social registry project, coupled with cctv and drone surveillance to enforce pandemic curfews and mask wearing in india and elsewhere, should give us pause. there are as many ways to entrench existing power relations in the south as there are tech ideas for how to solve the south’s problems. as corporate platforms are disseminated worldwide, the logic of unchecked, large-scale data extraction persists alongside the logic of workforce development disguised as benevolence for the south’s poor and minoritized populations (sarkar, 2016). donald knuth, one of the most celebrated figures in computer science, recently voiced concern about his discipline in an interview: “it started out that computer scientists were worried nobody was listening to us. now i’m worried that too many people are listening” (roberts, 2018; benjamin, 2019). knuth’s worry stems from the examples, too numerous to count, of algorithms that have led institutions to make bad, discriminatory, rights-eroding decisions both because they have been designed from the point of view of a slim minority, and because the training data they have used itself have been generated from deeply racist and sexist systems (barocas and selbst, 2016; buolamwini & gebru 2018; hicks, 2018, noble 2018). while knuth’s statement turns the mirror to reflect the authority that computer science has in the production of contemporary systems of knowledge, it also raises questions about the relations of power within computing for data collection, prediction, and classification. whose tools are being designed and deployed for listening? whose computing is listened to? who is doing the listening and on whose behalf? the articles and critical commentaries that comprise this special section traverse the past/present/future of computing in a moment in which all our presents are collapsing in the isolation of lockdown, but also in the formation of new kinds of mutual aid alongside a perverse revalorization of mass surveillance in public debates. as silvia rivera cusicanqui describes with a powerful metaphor, “ideas run, like rivers from the south to the north and are transformed into tributaries” (2012, p. 104) that neutralize their power to transform social, political, and economic relations. in this volume, we set out to collaboratively build the metaphorical dams in imperial relations of tribute by staying close to the ground conditions of computing in and from the south. akin to the process of cultivation special section: computing in/from the south 16 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute & luis felipe r. murillo, 2020 of subjectivity as a “house of difference” (lorde, 1982), building computing otherwise asks us to heed difference as defined from the inside, across the multiple contradictions, relationalities, and incommensurabilities among projects, notions of personhood, moral orientations, and desires. each project shows how perspectives from the south both accommodate and revise masculine technological performances that populate even alternative computing spaces (chan, 2014 coleman & dunbar-hester, 2016; dunbar-hester, 2008; murillo, 2019; nafus, 2012; reagle, 2012). finally, each project “recovers the principles of living” through computing otherwise that are bracketed out through computing’s historical development (mohamed et al., 2020, 18). the contributions we offer in this special section also point to something particularly important for the present and future of feminist technoscience: the capacity to articulate broader and deeper networks of solidarity for collaborative inquiry in sts. in quite distinctive ways, each contributor to this volume has practiced collaborative work, thus grounding our method with an analytic that intersects with the theoretical development of feminist technoscientific reflections on digital technologies. we hope this volume will serve as a small contribution to and token of recognition for feminist sts past, present, and futures to the study and realization of alternative computing worlds. we also hope our contributions will help find generative commonalities in the space of differences, identifying them as potentiality for the collective work we must engage within and beyond academia to realize alternative technopolitical futures. the current state of computing as a field, industry, and technical discipline needs these exercises in relational thinking to move from a utilitarian, solution-driven practice to a socially entangled, committed, and joyful one. notes 1 see also the work of the collective behind the online resource “decolonising design” (2016) at https://www.decolonisingdesign.com. 2 shaka mcglotten and patrick davison, private correspondence. references abraham, i. 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(2017). media ethnography for national morale. 116th american anthropological association meetings, 2018, washington dc, november 30, 2018. author bios sareeta amrute is associate professor of anthropology at the university of washington, seattle, and director of research at the data & society research institute. she is the author of encoding race, encoding class: indian it workers in berlin (duke university press, 2016). luis felipe r. murillo is an anthropologist whose work is dedicated to the study of political cultures of computing. he is currently a research associate at the university of virginia, school of data science, where he teaches for the center of data ethics and justice and runs a laboratory (librelab) for action research with open technologies.     special section: probing the system: feminist complications of automated technologies, flows, and practices of everyday life the space between us: network gaps, racism, and the possibilities of living in/difference     wendy hui kyong chun simon fraser university ddi_lab@sfu.ca     abstract this article explores how the “gaps” that structure networks and communities enclose and preserve “racialized others,” whom they seem to expel: from black residents in us biracial housing projects to japanese and japanese americans in world war ii internment camps. it also calls for an embrace of ambi-valent neighbors to render these undead spaces into vibrant, if in/different, modes of inhabitation.     keywords networks; sentiment analysis; internment camps; segregation; covid-19 and anti-asian hate     “anti-asian” violence soared during the first waves of the 2020 covid-19 pandemic. from mid-march 2020 to the end of february 2021, 3,795 “anti-asian hate incidents” were reported to the us stop aapi hate reporting center; north of the us border in the canadian province of british columbia, “anti-asian” hate crimes increased by 717 percent in 2020 (jeung et al. 2021; manojlovic 2021). these incidents ranged from lethal physical attacks on elderly persons to strangers spitting on asian-looking passersby. as many commenters and researchers noted, this dramatic increase in violence corresponded to a former us president’s accusations that the chinese were responsible for “kung flu” and for undermining the us economy (see, e.g., ho 2021; sprunt 2021). destroying, or at the very least vilifying, china was part of “making america great again.” as many also stressed, this rhetoric and violence did not exist in isolation: they formed and evolved in relation to anti-black and anti-indigenous racism. and they were not new: they are the latest forms of centuries-old “yellow peril” racism, which includes exclusion laws, internments, lynchings, and theft. asian americans—regardless of their ethnicity, citizenship status, and natality—have been at best ambivalently assimilated in the united states and canada (see, e.g., palumbo-liu 1999; le 2019; de leon 2021).tellingly, the label “anti-asian hate” erases the term “asian american” and its political stakes: “asian american” was inspired by the us civil rights and black power movements and responds to discrimination that refuses to acknowledge individual or ethnic differences through solidarity (shimakawa 2002).   this article starts from responses to the “crisis of uncertainty” provoked by the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020 to outline how segregation and the desire to “contain others” underlies network fundamentals. drawing from and expanding upon my examination of homophily—the axiom that similarity breeds connection—in discriminating data (chun 2021), i explore how the “gaps” that structure networks and communities enclose and preserve “racialized others,” whom they seem to expel: from black residents in us biracial housing projects to japanese and japanese americans in world war ii internment camps. the article ends by calling for an embrace of ambi-valent neighbors to render these undead spaces into vibrant, if in/different, modes of inhabitation.   resolving uncertain connections the first waves of the covid-19 pandemic personified the stakes and consequences of connection, polarization, infrastructures, and habits. to many, the world had turned upside down and the unimaginable had become possible: “socialism” and extensive surveillance within the us; a retracting chinese economy and oil prices below zero dollars; the invocation of cold war “shelter-in-place” ordinances; and kkk hoods worn as “protective masks” in california (ambrose 2020; associated press 2020; elliott 2020; martineau 2020; žižek 2020). this crisis highlighted and augmented already existing inequalities: from white-collar workers seeking the “perfect” gadget for working from home to the mainly non-white and poorly paid “essential” workers balancing daily financial and medical risks (cdc 2020).   the uncertainty—and overwhelming need to act—undermined any simple division between science and politics, knowledge and action. the science itself, after all, was uncertain. many of the first guidelines presumed similarities between sars cov-2 and sars cov-1, which were later proven wrong, such as the period when a person is most infectious: in sars cov-1, the infection period is while one is most symptomatic; for sars cov-2, it is just beforehand (rancaniello et al. 2020). early knowledge of covid-19—as of all new diseases—was mainly correlational, with mechanistic-genetic explanations lagging behind observation and comparison. for example, sars cov-2 was presumed not to be airborne because it was initially far less contagious than airborne diseases such as measles. in desperation turned pharmaceutical opportunity, drugs were approved, such as remdesivir, which did not significantly affect mortality rates and was discontinued early in clinical trials because of debilitating side effects (wang et al. 2020). further, due to the initial dearth and poor quality of tests and testing materials, the scope of the pandemic—the number or proportion of “susceptibles,” “infected,” and “recovereds”—was unknown. it was even unclear if “recovereds” were immune, or for how long (chappell 2020; patel 2020).   this uncertainty, however, did not undermine science or politics: it drove research and made political decisions both difficult and necessary. correlations and probabilities intersected this cloud of uncertainty. they could guide decisions, even if they could not guarantee them, for the pandemic and its “cures” confronted us with responsibility in the strongest sense of the word. as human rights researcher thomas keenan has argued, we face responsibility not when we make decisions by following guidelines and rules but when we desperately want to but cannot because the situation falls outside the norm. we face responsibility “when we do not know exactly what we should do, when the effects and conditions of our actions can no longer be calculated, and when we have nowhere else to turn, not even back onto our ‘self’” (1997, 2). not even back onto our self—because at these moments we realize that the individual is, to use philosopher jean-luc nancy’s evocative term, “the residue of the dissolution of community” (1991, 3). this uncertain response, however, did and does not guarantee good ethical or political decisions. as political geographer louise amoore has shown in her analysis of the use of correlation and derivatives to envision to “low probability, high impact” events, these responses can often lead to a problematic “politics of possibility” focused around “managing” corporate and security risks (2013, 75).   figure 1: the uk’s nhs slogan during first wave of covid-19.   figure 2: screenshot of twitter post on lt. gov. dan patrick’s comments made to tucker carlson on fox news.   tellingly, although ostensibly about the human death toll, calls for responsibility focused on protecting infrastructures from being overwhelmed by patients or unemployment claims. the uk’s national health service (nhs) slogan “stay home → protect the nhsu → save lives” encapsulated this idea perfectly (figure 1). by caring for infrastructure—the “white spaces” within networks that potentially touch us all—you took care of yourself and others. fears of becoming like italy—becoming so overwhelmed that doctors had to choose whom to save—drove policies in countries with national health services (mounk 2020). almost all actions—even the lack of action in the face of a second wave—focused on hospital capacity. in other countries, such as the united states, the slogan would seem to have been “work → save businesses → save your grandchildren’s lives (and your pension, if you have one)” (figure 2) (klein 2020). or, more positively, “stay home/distant, flatten the curve, and save lives and the city.” the pandemic revealed the enduring ties between public and private, rich and poor, that in good times were categorized as “absent ties” (granovetter 1973, 1361).   the “cures” proposed, emergency powers granted, and sacrifices demanded reflected and revealed profoundly different national, regional, and local perceptions of which curve mattered—the number of “infecteds,” the stock market, national employment figures, gdp, the mortality rate—and which ties bound most strongly—capital, public health, taxes, national deficits, public transportation. these differences stemmed, in part, from the two dominant and intersecting diagrams of the social: the network or the community.   networks: modulating segregation figure 3: network, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:social-network.svg.   if the nation is mainly viewed as a network (figure 3), the goal is to produce “safe” neighborhoods: to create and/or augment clusters so that the “infected” are separated from the “recovereds” and “susceptibles.” surveillance to track and manage contagion and contacts becomes the key to amplifying “social distance.” in this worldview, “community cases” become mysteries to be solved via stalking and recording “undocumented cases” and “silent spreaders.” tracking “patient zero” becomes a national pastime, as does blaming other countries for viral spread (wald 2008; chun 2016). safety—resting as it does on inequality and dreams of emptying space—is precarious. think of everything that must be erased for an edge to represent a friendship: institutions, such as schools and bars; social media prompts to say “happy birthday”; regular meetings and events; and interactions with nodding strangers. networks are produced through subtraction, rather than simply addition. again “white spaces” are filled with “absent” interactions habitually deemed not to matter.   network clustering, central to social media networks and recommendation engines, presumes homophily—that “birds of a feather flock together.” according to sociologists miller mcpherson, lynn smith-lovin, and james cook in their definitive review article on homophily, “the homophily principal structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, co-membership, and other types of relationship” (2001, 415).1 as i have argued in detail elsewhere, homophily launders hate into love by treating racism as a “naturally” occurring preference within “human ecology” (chun 2019). it transforms individuals into “neighbors” who naturally want to live with people “like them”; it presumes that consensus stems from similarity; it makes segregation the default. not surprisingly, within studies of homophily, race and ethnicity are identified as creating the “biggest divide[s] in social networks,” and us residential segregation is offered as the most prevalent example of homophily (easley and kleinberg 2010, 96).   homophily’s relationship to segregation is not accidental but fundamental. at the historical core of this concept lie studies of us residential segregation and white flight, reservations, internment camps, and other forms of “social engineering.” paul lazarsfeld, then director of columbia university’s bureau of applied social research (basr), and fellow columbia university and basr colleague robert k. merton coined the terms homophily and heterophily in their 1954 text “friendship as social process: a substantive and methodological analysis,” which analyzed friendship patterns within two housing projects: “craftown, a project of some seven hundred [white] families in new jersey, and hilltown, a bi-racial, low-rent project of about eight hundred families in western pennsylvania” (lazarsfeld and merton 1954, 21). crucially, they did not assume homophily to be a grounding principle; nor did they find homophily to be “naturally” occurring or causal. rather, they asked, “what are the dynamic processes through which the similarity or opposition of values shape the formation, maintenance, and disruption of close friendships?” (28).   in the article, they focused on homophily within hilltown, which was actually addison terrace, a housing project built through a “slum clearance” program in the hill district of pittsburgh, pennsylvania. finding racial and gender homophily to be almost absolute in hilltown, they argued that this manifest “status homophily” (homophily based on social status such as “sex, race and age, social class organizational affiliation and standing in the local community”) was driven by value homophily (the tendency of people to associate with others who share their values) (lazarsfeld and merton 1954, 21). to prove this, lazarsfeld and merton examined and modelled the racial attitudes of hilltown’s white residents. they focused on the answers to the following three questions from the basr researchers’ extensive interviews with one member of almost every household: “q25. do you think colored and white people should live together in housing projects?”; “q26: on the whole, do you think that colored and white residents in the village get along pretty well, or not so well?,” and “q37: could you tell me who your closest friends are (regardless of whether or not they live in the village)?” (26).   based on the answers, they divided the white residents into three camps: liberals, who “believe that ‘colored’ and white people should live together in housing projects and who support this belief by saying that the two racial groups ‘get along pretty well’ in hilltown”; illiberals, who “maintain that the races should be residentially segregated and who justify this view by claiming that, in hilltown, where the two races do live in the same project, they fail to get along”; and ambivalents, who “believe that the races should not be allowed to live in the same project, even though it must be admitted that they have managed to get along in hilltown” (lazarsfeld and merton 1954, 26). they then analyzed friendship patterns among white residents with white friends who resided in hilltown and determined that liberals overselect other liberals by 43 percent; illiberals overselect other illiberals by 30 percent; liberals underselect illiberals as close friends by 53 percent; illiberals underselect liberals by 39 percent; and ambivalents do not overselect or underselect (27–28).   they presented these percentages without absolute numbers, numbers that they promised—in a footnote—would be forthcoming in a longer report, “patterns of social life,” written by basr researchers merton, patricia j. west, and marie jahoda (lazarsfeld and merton 1954, 27). in another footnote they write, “it must be emphasized that such extreme concentration of personal ties within each racial group obtains only for the most intimate friendships. (it will be remembered that these data refer to the three closest friends of residents.) short of these most intimate attachments, however, there have developed numerous personal relations across race lines in hilltown, as will be seen in the complete report, patterns of social life” (emphasis in original, 22). this forever forthcoming report—it was never published—actually discounts the statistical significance of the overselection of illiberals for other illiberals, since the total number of friendships was under fifteen.2   to prove that value homophily drove friendship patterns, they also speculated. the extensive interviews, on which lazarsfeld and merton based their argument, were only administered once. because they were interested in friendship as dynamic social process, this static information would seem to pose an insurmountable challenge.3 to model the dynamic processes that cause overand under-selection, lazarsfeld and merton thus left “demonstrated fact for acknowledged conjecture” because the authors could not afford “to become imprisoned in the framework of fact” (lazarsfeld and merton 1954, 29). specifically, they hypothesized a reward-frustration model, in which “common values make social interaction a rewarding experience, and the gratifying experience promotes the formation of common values” (36). racial liberals and illiberals made friends with those who hold the same opinion because they find their encounters to be “doubly rewarding”: they get to “express deep-seated feelings” and they also receive satisfaction from having “these opinions endorsed by others” (30). in contrast, liberals and illiberals avoid each other because their values clash. lazarsfeld and merton viewed cross-value friendships as “unstable”: they were presumed to have been formed prior to the revelation of racial attitudes.   to make this argument, they ignored the responses of black residents. they removed their answers from their analysis of value homophily because there were “too few illiberal or ambivalent negroes with friends in hilltown” (lazarsfeld and merton 1954, 27; again, although there was also a very small number of illiberal white friends who chose illiberals, they retained this number). thus, at the core of value homophily lies racial segregation—an implicit assumption that values do not cross racial borders, or if they do, that this crossing is less significant than consensus or conflict within a race—and racial exclusion. yet at the same time, black residents are central—their presence underlie the answers that “matter”—even as their answers are muted. they are the gaps that enable connections to emerge.   the responses of the black residents were not the only responses lazarsfeld and merton put aside. the responses of the white ambivalents—who comprised the largest category of white residents—were also discounted. this was because their value homophily model presumed the primacy of “comfort” and equilibrium. in lazarsfeld and merton’s view, ambivalents were a temporary category—they would eventually have to become either illiberal or liberal in order to become consistent.   figure 4: representation of magnetically charged iron filings. wikimedia commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:ironfilings_cylindermagnet.svg .   networks emerge when masses are polarized and clarified. this polarization enables space to emerge and space—not nodes or edges—is the fundaments of networks. this process recalls the classic physics experiment in which a solid mass of inert iron pilings is magnetized and pulled into a clustered network. the similarly charged filings gathered at either pole repel each other, but they are stuck together by their overwhelming attraction to their opposite (figure 4). sustaining this magnetic charge in usually non-magnetic materials requires a previously charged magnet or a constant current.   this polarization creates the gaps, without which there can be no networks. networks hollow clouds of uncertainty—that is, infra-structure and in/difference—to foreground clean connections across empty space. networks dream of communication without community. what looks like or rhymes with community are individuals formed into agitated clusters of comforting rage that launder hate into love.   crucially, when who is your neighbor becomes who is your friend, ethics becomes manipulation. lazarsfeld and merton’s housing study foreshadows the “social engineering” central to contemporary social networks. they focused on close friendships because they were interested in social engineering, and new friendships were a proxy for its success: they revealed the extent to which a person’s social life and habits had been rebuilt. in their funding application to the lavanberg foundation for their housing study, merton referred not only to the pressing problems of us housing but also the need to understand and implement “good” social engineering.4 in “patterns of social life,” merton, west, and jahoda described public housing projects as “new social worlds,” in which habits were disrupted and formed; they were closed communities, ideal for study and experimentation. they compared the “world laboratory of the sociologist” to that of “the more secluded laboratories of the physicist and chemist” (merton, west, and jahoda 1951, chapter 1, 30). public housing projects were ideal spaces for experimentation and evaluation because they were fundamentally disruptive.5   as the docu-drama the social dilemma and many others have pointed out, this laboratory/project now engulfs us all (orlowski 2020). acclaimed network scientist and author albert-lászló barabási has claimed that network science, combined with “increasingly penetrating digital technologies,” places us in “an immense research laboratory that, in size, complexity, and detail, surpasses everything that science has encountered before” and that reveals “the rhythms of life as evidence of a deeper order in human behavior, one that can be explored, predicted, and no doubt exploited” (2010, 11). data scientist and journalist seth stephens-davidowitz proclaimed in 2017 that big data “allows us to undertake rapid, controlled experiments” (2017, 54). these experiments have moved from simple a/b testing to contextual bandits to reinforcement learning: all techniques to “optimize” content based on users’ prior interactions (see tang et al. 2013).   thus, the logic of networks spreads the name “neighbor” everywhere, even as—and in order to—empty it conceptually. machine learning is filled with “neighborhood” methods used for pattern recognition, such as k nearest neighbor and k means testing. the k nearest neighbor algorithm draws boundaries between data points based on proximity; it presumes that those data points closest to each other geographically/topographically are of the same class. k means testing similarly uses proximity to intuit the existence of clusters, or neighborhoods. these methods, and networks more generally, presume homophily. by doing so, they naturalize segregation, transforming hatred into love. in a homophilic world, how do you show you love the same? by fleeing when others show up. this transformation of neighbors into friends makes racism latent, under the bar, resonating everywhere, especially within the “spaces” that are not empty but teeming with relations that haunt them.   community transmission if this is the view from the perspective of networks, the other approach towards pandemics is that of community. if the nation is mainly viewed as a community, the onset of non-trackable cases demands treating everyone as “infected,” to suppress the disease. viruses, such as sars cov-1, have been eradicated without vaccines; new zealand and australia successfully suppressed the first wave of sars cov-2 through programs based on mass quarantines. the vancouver parks motto “the space between us will hold us together” encapsulates this vision; rather than treating the population as a series of nodes and edges, it attends to the spaces that enable community to emerge (crawford 2020). community presumes community transmission—community is transmission and space (nancy 1991, 19). once a virus is endemic to a community, neatly drawn graphs become impossible—almost everyone is in contact—and the goal becomes widespread habitual changes to save others and public infrastructures: physical distancing, wearing facemasks, washing hands, avoiding mass gatherings, cleaning public spaces. even as the disease and these changes affect “vulnerable” populations differently, there are no exceptions to the call for—if not the act of—sacrifice. friends and mobility become dangerous, and addressing the needs of “at risk” populations becomes key.   at its best, the logic of community follows the call made by the combahee river collective in 1977 to treat everyone as “levelly human,” by engaging—rather than ignoring—identity politics and individual experience.6 in british columbia and elsewhere, houseless populations during the first wave were finally moved into safer shelters, such as hotel rooms and empty apartment buildings, after individual consultations. shamefully, vancouver’s long-standing housing and drug crises were addressed not because of the dangerous living conditions of the houseless or the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women or the overdose crisis public health emergency declared in 2016, but because of the need to contain covid-19 (the death toll in british columbia due to illicit drug toxicity dwarfs the number of those who died from covid-19).   this sheltering and claiming of the commons, however, can also destroy. the construction of spiked fencing to prevent tents from re-emerging in vancouver's oppenheimer park raises calls for constant vigilance and makes it clear that this commons-based “clearing” is not outside racism or forced segregation. oppenheimer park, after all, is part of unceded lands of the squamish, musqueam, and tsleil-waututh first nations and the tragic setting of another clearance: japanese canadians were removed from this area into interior internment camps during world war ii. communities, as many have argued, are not idyllic spaces, especially when they are defined in terms of shared or homogenous values and identities.7 racism, at a fundamental level, targets communities—and communities and identities form in its wake. as asian american studies scholars patricia wong hall and victor m. hwang, summarizing the work of attorney michelle yoshida, explain, hate crimes transfer their effects “from the targeted victim to others who also suffer the consequences of illegal acts driven by bigotry, intolerance, and ignorance” (hall 2001, 2). asian american, as an identity, formed in response to such “group” attacks. as theatre and performance studies and asian american studies scholar karen shimakawa, drawing from the work of asian american studies researchers yen le espiritu, glenn omatsu, william wei, and others, has argued, the term asian american as a “panethnic self-identified political social coalition/identity” is a response to panethnic anti-asian racism (2002, 2).   asian-american not only responds to violence that does not distinguish between immigrants from southeast, east, south asia, the pacific islands and their u.s. descendants; it also establishes relations to other racialized groups. the vancouver “clearing” embodies what critical ethnics studies researcher quynh nhu le, based on her extended study on asian and indigenous cross-representations—from tropes of the asian as “perpetual foreigner” to that of indigenous persons as “vanishing indians”—has called “settler racial tense” (2019, 5).8 indigenous studies scholar jodi byrd, analyzing us commissioner of indian affairs john collier’s impact on the management and formation of the poston internment camp during world war ii, has argued that poston reveals how “the transit of indianness” transcribes empire internally and externally (2011, 188). poston was named after charles debrille poston, the first superintendent for indian affairs in arizona, and “housed” within the colorado river indian reservation near parker, arizona (burton et al. 2002, 215). most provocatively, byrd states that blanket celebrations of “the common” can “make a commons out of internment camps” (2011, 205). this “making common,” as the rest of this article outlines, extends beyond land to networks and their “communal” formations—especially when they “contain” ethnic identities within them.   poston was the largest internment camp in the us, and was the only camp managed by both the office of indian affairs (oia; later the bureau of indian affairs [bia]) and the war relocation authority (wra) (okimoto 2001, 6). initially, the oia and wra viewed poston as mutually beneficial: it was to provide the wra with a large swathe of public land for its camp, as well as internee labor to irrigate and settle the land and to put in place improvements that the oia had promised but failed to enact since 1865 when it first chose this land as a reservation for the mohave and the chemehuevi nations—against these nations’ warnings about the poor quality of the soil (caylor 2000). the internees were to develop permanent resources—“irrigation canals, roads, land leveling, domestic water supply, powerlines and some…buildings”—that would later be used by hopi “colonists,” who were to be integrated into what was then called the colorado river indian tribes (okimoto 2001, 12). this partnership, however, fell apart, partly due to the conflicting interests and attitudes of the two organizations. in december 1943, the wra took full control and in 1944 replaced poston director wade head, formerly a superintendent of the papgo indian reservation in southern arizona and a director of an agricultural school in the philippines. (muller 2005, 135).   in poston, the oia sought to “democratize the enemy” (hayashi 2004), just as it had aimed to create reservations as “exceptional states” of sovereignty—models of true democracies, “founded in neighborhoods and reaching over the world” (john collier, quoted in byrd 2011, 193). as byrd stresses, collier viewed reservations as exceptional and romantic spaces of american multicultural democracy, and collier fought for “the federal recognition and nation-to-nation status of indigenous nations colonized by the united states” because he believed “american indian democracies to be deeper and thicker democracies than those of the west” (byrd 2011, 194). as seductive and affirming as collier’s sovereign vision might be, byrd stresses that it lies at the “intersection of colonial and racist agendas that collude to oppress on the one hand and offer the seductive recognitions that maintain state hegemony on the other” (194). as psychiatrist alexander leighton who directed one of the projects to study the internment camp put it, poston was built on principles in accord with the “general administrative experience of the indian service” most bluntly because it sought to promote self-governance and self-sufficiency while still interning and oppressing evacuees. it “encouraged” japanese americans to become independent and gain self-respect through work to overcome the “great shock” of internment and to prove their “future usefulness as members of the american nation…[and] to make a record that the rest of the country could appreciate.” further, by developing the land around poston and through self-government, poston and the other internment camps were to show that “the united states could carry out a program of evacuation and relocation in a democratic manner that would provide the greatest possible contrast to population shifts in axis countries” (leighton 1945, 49).   further, the oia viewed poston and other internment camps—like its reservations—as prime sites for anthropological and sociological investigation. this research was not incidental but central to these camps for they were to reveal the general problems related to administering and governing occupied areas (leighton 1945, vii-viii). indeed, assistant secretary john mccloy objected to the early release of japanese americans from the camps because doing so would entail “missing a very big opportunity…to study the japanese…[and to]…find out what they are thinking about and [how] we might very well influence their thinking in the right directions before they are again distributed into communities” (quoted in hayashi 2004, 138). collier hired leighton, who had previously studied navaho and inuit communities, to lead the fieldwork via the bureau of sociological research (bsr), which was established three years before and one vowel away from the lazarsfeld and merton’s basr. reservations, internment camps, and housing projects were all sites of sociological analysis and experimentation.9 the level of hostility directed toward the administration, however, made internment camps particularly challenging and thus necessitated the use of “participant observers” (hirabayshi 1995). as a sign of its importance, poston was the subject of three different research projects: the bsr (june 1942–september 1943); the more “secretive” japanese american evacuation and resettlement study (early 1942–summer of 1945), run by researchers at uc berkeley; and the wra’s community analysis section.   these sociologists were on hand to document widespread distrust, which led to a general strike in poston 1. despite the early presence of and leadership by “volunteers,” who sought to ensure a “harmonious relationship” with the administration, (hayashi 2004, 98), poston and many camps did not become the model communities the oia and wra envisioned. for one, they hardly provided the needed quotient of “security and…acceptance as fellow americans and friendly aliens” needed for japanese americans internees to become prototypical “model minorities” (leighton 1945, 50).10 the accommodations, which were supposed to showcase the generosity and spirit of american democracy, were poorly built—without double floors and made with green timber that shrunk so that there was little to no protection against the dust, heat, and cold (hayashi 2004, 91; burton et al. 2002, 216). it was so bad that general dewitt and his staff “personally ordered a number of barracks redone…[since] he feared that inadequate facilities would lead to disaffection among loyal japanese americans” (hayashi 2004, 91). the evacuees called poston 1, 2, and 3 “roasten, toasten, and dustin” (burton et al. 2002, 215). further, the wages offered to the internees for back-breaking work were not only substandard, they were also often not paid or delayed due to so-called clerical errors (half the staff at poston thought it should be run as a concentration camp) (leighton 1945, 85). further, camp directives were constantly changing, and there was a general fear of and anger towards fbi “informants” amongst the internees.   leighton’s governing of man, the published results of the bsr study, focused on unpacking the significance, evolution, and aftermath of the general strike not only to poston but more generally to “the rights of citizens, the treatment of minority groups in the heart of a nation and the capacity of a democracy for efficient, consistent government and just international relations” (1945, 4). describing the scene outside the jail as reminiscent of “a holiday and a mass picnic…a revival meeting…[or] a lynching party,” leighton stressed the centrality of the strike to understanding the “recurrently human” breakdown of organizations (3). in a remarkable passage, leighton argued,   the most important question that hung over the center, seething in the growing dusk like bees about to swarm, was not what would the crowd do, was not what the administration or the army would do, nor what the government, congress or the american public would think. it was not a matter of who was right or who was wrong. it was not a question asked by anybody present and concerned, but it might have been asked by the detached visitor. it was the question of what in all this is recurrently human. what are the laws of individual behavior, what are the perennial social forces at work here? under the confusion, under the excited passions, amidst all the milling and cross-pulling, what general characteristics of human nature are in action, a knowledge of which would prevent such sudden diseases of society as this? the breakdown of man's organizations of himself and his fellows are not events isolated in evacuation camps. they cover as much of the earth as is covered by the human race, and questions that run deeply into the fate of mankind in a shrinking world are involved. (4)   poston revealed how disorganization and the “breakdown of man’s organizations” could lead to revolt—and how this revolt could be effectively managed to enact even more concessions from internees. leighton’s principles and recommendations focused on how to deal with individuals, systems of belief, and social organizations under stress, and how best to introduce changes into communities under these conditions. his goal, like merton’s, was social engineering, albeit one designed to control via respecting “national or cultural differences” within occupied territories.   crucially, leighton stressed the importance of sentiment. methodologically, he “conceived the understanding of the community as being dependent upon knowledge of its patterns of sentiment and its social organization” (leighton 1945, 383). sentiment colored every decision and action; thus, the bsr’s main questions were:   what are the predominant sentiments in the community? how well are these adjusted to the biological needs of the people and do they facilitate or interfere with the attainment of these needs? how do the sentiments contribute to the satisfactory living of the people in relationship to each other and to the administration? which sentiments are most modifiable and which are most resistant? in what directions can modification be achieved most easily? what are the principal groups of people in the community and how are they related to each other and to the total social organization? what sentiments are characteristic of what groups? on the basis of a knowledge of the social organization and the sentiments found in its different parts, what kinds of action may be expected from the community as a whole or from its principal parts? to what extent is the administrative program realistically geared to what the community can do on the basis of its predominant sentiments and social organization? to what extent are the methods used by the administration to achieve its program realistically geared to what the community can do on the basis of its predominant sentiments and its social organization? (leighton 1945, 388)   sentiment, analogous to “conditional reflexes…studied extensively in lower animals” was key to successful social engineering under conditions of captivity and stress (384). at the heart of sentiment analysis—so key to current forms of social media analysis, manipulation, and research—lie unruly women workers and japanese american internees.11   holding onto in/difference to reiterate, for there to be networks, there must be gaps, but these gaps are never empty. these gaps—teeming with abjected “communities”—create clean nodes and edges. this abjection is central to the formation of “ethnicness” more generally and asian americanness in particular. shimakawa, rereading frank chin’s character tam lum’s description of the chinaman in the chinacoop chinaman as “made, not born…out of junk-imports, lies, railroad scrap iron, dirty jokes, cigar smoke, cosquilla indian blood, wino spit, and lots of milk of amnesia” (chin as quoted by shimakawa 2002, 1) has argued that asian americanness emerges through “an attempt to circumscribe and radically differentiate something that, although deemed repulsively other is, paradoxically, at some fundamental level, an undifferentiable part of the whole” (2). drawing from psychoanalytic researcher julia kristeva’s definition of the abject as a “frontier,” shimakawa further argues, “read as abject, asian americanness thus occupies a role both necessary to and mutually constitutive of national subject formation—but it does not result in the formation of an asian american subject or even an asian american object” (3). this “nothingness” that is asian americanness and racialized identities is nonetheless centrally there—as gaps, spaces, and frontiers. networks are fundamentally melancholic: they incorporate within themselves others so that what seems absent radiates everywhere.12 they are formed by the introjection of black residents, japanese internees, and indigenous residents on reservations, among so many others.   yes, but if this is so, what can we do?   the “correlation” between these groups also offers ways to move and live against this logic. the colorado river indian reservation tribal council opposed the use of their land for a relocation center because they did not want to participate in inflicting the same type of injustice they had suffered (burton et al. 2002, 215). intriguingly, the white sociologists read this resistance as “misplaced” anger. edward spicer, the first “community analyst of poston” and assistant to leighton, “observed” that “the attitude of the indians on the local reservation at first was extremely antagonistic toward the japanese. it took the form, however, of antagonism toward the caucasian for permitting the japanese to come on the reservation at least as much toward the japanese themselves” (quoted in hayashi 2004, 89). what spicer frames as “misplaced” antagonism was actually on point. how might these observations be used to reveal different worlds that existed and still exist—however seemingly “out of place”? that is, how might we follow african american studies researcher and queer theorist kara keeling’s call for us to “listen, with others, for the poetry, the refrains, and the noise a world is making” (keeling 2019, ix)?   for one, by revisiting the basr housing study report and its archival traces, we would realize that racial homophily was not absolutely within the projects. embedded within this report and the archive are threads that pull at the narrative of complete racial and gendered homophily. gender homophily was only absolute if family members and couples were invalidated as “close friends.” further, as lazarsfeld and merton acknowledged, their choice of “three closest friends” regardless of where they lived to measure homophily went against the usual ways for accounting for friendship. (intriguingly, residents bristled at being asked who their three closest friends were—it was the part of the survey about which they had the most questions (pjs and jam 1947, 2). as i explain in more detail in discriminating data (2021) the overwhelming majority of all residents at hilltown (87%) believed that the races got along well in the project, and the majority (60%) thought that public housing should be integrated. only a very small minority—8 percent—believed that black and white residents were getting along worse than when they first arrived and only 17 percent believed that there was more conflict than expected. eighty-eight percent said that they had a neighbor of the other race before they had moved in. further, the majority of residents, from both races, had made acquaintances of the other race in hilltown, and the majority of black residents and a significant portion of the white residents, 86/354 or 25 percent, had friends of the other race (for more on this and other answers to the questions, see chun 2021, 116–17).   the predominant attitude was arguably that of engaged in/difference. the black residents—whose answers were recorded but not accounted for—supported integrated housing because they believed that “everybody’s equal” and should have the same opportunity to live well. mid-century public housing—which afforded all residents luxuries such as hot water, electric fridges and stoves, access to laundry facilities—seemed to acknowledge and remedy the fact that black residents in the us were forced to pay higher rents than their white counterparts for substandard housing. as one woman put it, “i would welcome any whites here who wanted to come, but i’m not going to go out of my way to get them to come here” (jgb 1946, 5, 4). indifference, ambivalence, and uncertainty are not simply “unstable” categories, but rather modes and means of residing together in and through spaces of conflict. neighbors are not innocuous—the term neighbor literally recalls “boors.” they are nosy and noisy. they provoke hostility, resentment, and ambivalence. they intrude, even—and especially—when they are inert. they offer, however, a way to reside in/difference and to engage relations that go beyond homophily: not just heterophily (heterosexuality, electromagnetism, and other opposites that attract), but also ambivalence and neutrality.   neighbors—who are neither friends nor enemies—are the space that enable the public and private to emerge (reinhard 2005). according to literary critic kenneth reinhard, if as political theorist carl schmitt has argued, the political hinges on distinguishing between the friend and the enemy, the neighbor “supplements”—and thus makes inadequate—the political theology of the sovereign (schmitt 2007, 26; reinhard 2005, 74). the logic of the neighbor, reinhard insists, is not that of totality, but rather infinity: in the (feminine) set of the neighbor, there is no sovereign exception, but instead an infinite process of knotting—everyone is equally non-sovereign (2005, 62). to put it in philosopher édouard glissant’s (1997) terms, the neighbor is opaque and obscure; their non-transparency, however, does not hinder but rather enables relation. refusing our grasp/embrace, they subtract unity from the open totality that is relation (glissant 1997, 91). these spaces make us all topological neighbors—they touch everything.   the questions that remain as we reside—if we are to still reside—are these: how can this uncertainty and ambivalence, which touches us all, ground our future? how might the space between us—the empty space of power—create solid(arity) so that the space between us can hold open the future?   acknowledgments this research was supported by the canada 150 research chairs program and the digital democracies institute at simon fraser university. the author would like to thank hannah holtzclaw and amy harris for their assistance. an earlier version of this article was published in critical inquiry.   notes 1 mcpherson et al. list the following as causes of homophily: geography (“the most basic source of homophily is space”); family ties; organizational foci, occupational, family, and informal roles; cognitive processes; and selective tie dissolutions (2001, 429–35).   2 i’m referring specifically here to the note on “chart 1: racial values of close friends among white residents of hilltown” (merton, west, and jahoda 1977, chapter 8, 9). this chart was not included in the version of chapter 8 in the merton archive. it is located in columbia university, bureau of applied social research, 1938–1977, ms0166, box 09, rare book and manuscript library, columbia university library.   3 lazarsfeld and merton write, “the dynamic role of similarities and differences of these values in forming, maintaining, or disrupting friendships…requires notice in its own right” (1954, 25).   4 in his funding request to the lavanburg foundation, a “neutral” entity responsible for creating low-income nonprofit housing in manhattan, merton offered to write a report that was “(1) technically competent; (2) fact-finding and not moralizing; (3) pertinent, i.e., centered on problems which confront housing personnel; and (4) sufficiently detailed to serve as a guide to social engineering” (1944, 2).   5 merton, west, and jahoda begin their report by acknowledging that a change in environment calls into question the normal relationship between past, present, and future. moving into a new house is particularly disruptive for those who do because it impacts the “the routine habits of everyday life: the new rooms differ from the old in shape and size, furniture must be shifted to unfamiliar positions, the journey to work is different as is the way to one’s friends and group activities.…the neighbors might turn out to be crude or snobbish or just right, which probably means people like oneself. at such times, reluctance and hopeful anticipation mingle in varied degrees, according to personality and social circumstance” (1951, chapter 1, 1).   6 the combahee river collective, a collective of black socialist feminists, were one of the earliest groups to formulate what would become identity politics and intersectionality (2017, 19). they argued for solidarity, rather than separatism, with progressive black men, noting, “our situation as black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race…we struggle together with black men against racism, while also struggle with black men about sexism” (19). crucially, they called for a level humanity, from their base in identity politics and their work for self-liberation: “we believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody’s else’s oppression… we reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. to be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough” (19).   7 for more on the limits and possibilities of community, see nancy 1991.   8 le (2019) develops this notion through her reading of the differences and similarities between the canadian government apologies to japanese canadians for internment and indigenous peoples for past injustices, including the horrific residential school system.   9 merton, west, and jahoda refer directly reference poston and alexander leighton’s the governing of men in their report: first in terms of their need not to use participant observation since the housing projects were not placed in a high-tension community or a community fearing authority (1951, appendix, 78). they also note that social research has been “applied much more frequently to the lower income strata than to the wealthy. this is only partly the aftermath of an early period in which social research was closely related to social reform and the problems of the poor. with the growing emphasis of sociology on the functioning of normal society independent of symptom of social pathology, the demand for studying all sectors of society has become urgent. however, it appears that without participant observation the study of a millionaires’ club in new york or the directorate of a major industrial concern, for instance, meets more formidable obstacles than that of, say, the navaho indians” (78–79).   10 this program also depended on discerning “loyal” japanese americans from the bad, just as the us military historically discerned the “‘good injuns’ and ‘bad’ ones” (hayashi 2004, 79).   11 leighton cites the work of fritz jules roethlisberger, in particular management and morale (1941), and roethlisberger and william j. dickson’s management and the worker (1939). sentiment analysis is now a key technique used in natural language processing to “understand” opinions. see, for example, li et al. 2019.   12 in making this observation, i am drawing from and expanding upon anne cheng’s provocative argument that “racial melancholia is both the technology and nightmare of the american 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al. 2020. “remdesivir in adults with severe covid-19: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicentre trial.” the lancet 395 (10236): 1569–78. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/piis0140-6736(20)31022-9/fulltext. žižek, slavoj. 2020. pandemic!: covid-19 shakes the world. new york: or books.     author bio wendy hui kyong chun is the canada 150 research chair in new media and professor of communication at simon fraser university, where she also directs the digital democracies institute. she is author of numerous books and articles, including discriminating data: correlation, neighborhoods, and the new politics of recognition (mit, 2021); updating to remain the same: habitual new media (mit, 2016); programmed visions: software and memory (mit, 2011); and control and freedom: power and paranoia in the age of fiber optics (mit, 2006).     special section: probing the system: feminist complications of automated technologies, flows, and practices of everyday life swapping gender is a snap(chat): limitations of (trans) gendered legibility within binary digital and human filters     teddy g. goetz university of pennsylvania, department of psychiatry teddy.goetz@pennmedicine.upenn.edu     abstract in may 2019 the photographic cellphone application snapchat released two company-generated image filters that were officially dubbed “my twin” and “my other twin,” though users and media labeled them as feminine and masculine, respectively. while touted in most commentary as a “gender swap” feature, these digital imaginaries represent a unique opportunity to consider what features contribute to classification of faces into binary gender buckets. after all, the commonly considered “male” filter makes various modifications—including a broader jaw and addition of facial hair—to whichever face is selected in the photograph. it does not ask and cannot detect if that face belongs to a man or woman (cisor transgender) or to a non-binary individual. instead, the augmented reality that it offers is a preprogrammed algorithmic reinscription of reductive gendered norms. when interacting with a novel face, humans similarly implement algorithms to assign a gender to that face. the snapchat “my twin” filters—which are not neutral, but rather human-designed—offer an analyzable projection of one such binarization, which is otherwise rarely articulated or visually recreated. here i pair an ethnographic exploration of twenty-eight transgender, non-binary, and/or gender diverse individuals’ embodied experiences of facial gender legibility throughout life and with digital distortion, with a quantitative analysis of the “my twin” filter facial distortions, to better understand the role of technology in reimaginations of who and what we see in the mirror.     keywords transgender, non-binary, identify formation, technology, legibility     no such thing as (digital) neutrality in may 2019 the photographic cellphone application snapchat released two company-generated image filters used to modify selfies. while these particular snapchat image filters were officially dubbed “my twin” and “my other twin,” users and media quickly labeled them feminine and masculine, respectively. when one selects a filter within the snapchat application, a circle-shaped simplified cartoon face icon is visible at the screen base. the feminine filter icon sports eyeliner, large doe eyes, cheek makeup, and full lips with red lipstick, while the masculine filter icon displays smaller unadorned eyes, a full beard and mustache, and a single black line for a smile. no further description or explanation of what the filters aim to execute is provided.1 as opposed to user-generated filters, which must be intentionally downloaded, these two come preset with the application.   while touted in most commentary as a “gender swap” feature, these digital imaginaries represent a unique opportunity to consider what features humans use to classify faces into binary gender buckets. a may 17, 2019, article in the technology news site pocket-lint asserted, “the new snapchat lenses that turn men into women and vice versa…are huge fun to make and share” (henderson, 2019). this language assumes gender is simply a (binarized) facial performance and that such “swaps” are entertaining. the filters received broad criticisms from trans individuals for both reinforcing damaging binarized ideals and stereotypes, and presenting gender transition as a “joke” (andersen, 2019).   considering the algorithm behind this “swap,” a may 14, 2019, newsweek commentary representatively distilled that the “male” filter makes the user’s face “boxy, with a chiseled jaw. it widens your neck and adds facial hair,” while “for a boy to girl change, the filter softens the entire appearance, slims and contours the face, giving you a pointy chin. it makes the eyes larger, applies makeup, elongates the eyelashes and shapes the eyebrows” (harbison, 2019).   that newsweek article’s title, “snapchat's new gender swap filter will make you question your identity: how to get the male to female filter,” took essentialist gender rhetoric a step further with the clickbait, fear-mongering suggestion that not only might one be able to swap genders, but further could be seduced to such real-life deviance by the digitally generated product. these filters, the author boasts, “will literally transform the manliest of men into a beautiful princess. meanwhile, prom queens may be dismayed to discover, they'd actually make a pretty handsome dude” (harbison, 2019). such language is reminiscent of the early us media discourse around gender-affirming surgery for transgender individuals, surrounding christine jorgensen’s publicly affirming her gender, heralded by the december 1, 1952, new york daily news front-page headline “ex-gi becomes blonde beauty” (stryker, 2017), inspiring widespread public fascination that someone representing peak masculinity (a soldier) could become the pinnacle of female desirability (a blonde beauty). indeed, such reporting—more focused on efficacious highly binarized social transition than post-operative results—continues now, with moments such as caitlyn jenner’s june 25, 2015, “call me caitlyn” cover splash in vanity fair, which included an annie liebowitz cover page photograph of jenner in white lingerie, with highly styled hair and makeup (bissinger, 2015). of note, the newsweek snapchat article subtitle only references the “male to female filter,” highlighting media preference for sensationalizing transfemininity. thus, these snapchat filters’ mesmerizing gimmick seems to be projecting a convincing gender performance.   such selfie filters mark a specific, historically unprecedented societal moment in which this form of self-portraiture and selective, digitally edited image portrayal (dussault staff, 2015; walker rettberg, 2014) is pervasive. this moment is also notable for increased personal “control” over one’s own images, which in this format are often “playful” and function as an attention grab on social media (cambre & lavrence, 2019). as filter popularity grows, their invocation paradoxically becomes increasingly invisible, as the hegemonic white, western “beautification”—including skin smoothing, largening of eyes, adding the perception of makeup, and more—is even present in filters that add dog ears or star decorations and fail to mention how they change the user’s face. these supposed “norms,” just like western understandings of the gender binary, are societally constructed and rooted in white supremacy (e.g., bederman, 2008; carby, 1987; carter, 2007; cooky & dworkin, 2013; driskill, 2011; herzig, 2015; morgensen, 2011; oyěwùmí, 1997; schuller, 2018). thus, distortions become expected and our social media-consumer eyes become recalibrated to an unnatural “norm.” our gaze is a product of our environment and our visual diet.   in her now classic article “situated knowledges,” feminist and science and technologies studies scholar donna haraway acknowledges the biases we each bring to our work and argues for the value of those partial perspectives. she ponders, “with whose blood were my eyes crafted?” (haraway, 1988, p. 585). with this question, haraway calls for introspection into (and subsequent use and celebration of) our intersectional positionality and lived experiences, rather than feign a neutral gaze. intersectional(ity) here refers to legal scholar and critical race theorist kimberlé crenshaw’s word coined to describe the more than additive experiences of distinct axes of oppression—originally employed to describe the experiences of black women who are subject to both racism and misogyny (crenshaw, 1991; crenshaw, gotanda, peller, & thomas, 1995; crenshaw, 2017), which we can apply to analyze trans experiences. for example, foundational transgender studies theorist and historian susan stryker offers examples in her article “transgender feminism” of how, from her experience as a trans woman, she “can personally articulate [experiences with]: misogyny, homophobia, racism, looksism, disability, medical colonisation, coercive psychiatrisation, undocumented labour, border control, state surveillance, population profiling, the prison-industrial complex, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, lack of health care, denial of access to social services, and violent hate crimes” (stryker, 2007, p. 66), among other prejudices. since so many of these marginalized experiences factor into the ways in which we use our societally informed gaze to critique selfies and assign gender to a stranger on the street, we cannot consider gender alone in analyzing the “my twin” filters.   this non-neutral gaze has been demonstrated by implicit association testing, a proxy for implicit bias, which demonstrate implicit, non-neutrality of rapid assessments regarding binary gender generally (schmid mast, 2004; white & white, 2006), as well as for transgender individuals specifically (axt, conway, westgate, & buttrick, 2020; wang-jones, alhassoon, hattrup, ferdman, & lowman, 2017). societal gendered norms color our gaze. thus, employing algorithms to separate faces by assumed binary gender cannot be accepted as a neutral practice. such a construct depends upon the coder’s life experience and socialization; we can take this literally for digital gender filters. as legal scholar lawrence lessig asserts, “code is never found; it is only ever made, and only ever made by us” (lessig, 2009, p. 6). for this reason, digital literature scholar mark marino notes, “lines of code are not value-neutral” (marino, 2006).   critical race and information scholar safiya umoja noble offers a framework for considering technological interventions as non-neutral entities in her book algorithms of oppression: the phenomenon of “technological redlining” (2018). historically, “redlining” referred to systematic oppression (usually on the basis of race, as well as socioeconomic class) through denying access to governmental and private sector services—directly or by selectively raising prices—a practice that did not become illegal until 1968 (rothstein, 2017). noble’s term acknowledges how “digital decisions reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling” (noble, 2018, p. 1); human prejudice often follows inscribed process algorithmically. this use traces historical, structural, and policy-driven racism to present manifestations of those same forces in technological platforms.   such algorithmic oppression is also manifest in social media technologies. in her article “the gender binary will not be reprogrammed,” sociologist and communications scholar rena bivens reports how facebook insidiously operationalizes the gender binary: “deep in the database, users who select custom gender options are re-coded—without their knowledge—back into a binary/other classification system…a more marketable and ‘authentic’ (yet, paradoxically, misrepresented) data set is produced” (bivens, 2017, pp. 885-886). thus, by using invisible algorithms to bin users into binary genders (for the purpose of advertising targeting), the social network intentionally corrupted its own data set. here i will be arguing that the aforementioned snapchat filters exercise similar enforcement of cisheteronormative gendered hegemonies.   notably, snapchat as a platform allows users to create and share ephemeral images and videos. the social media site, unlike the facebook “timeline” (see haimson, 2018), does not build an archive of life milestones, but much to the contrary erases creations and messages just seconds after revealing them. thus, snapchat might be particularly well suited for considering gender and gendered performance as mutable constructs, since users may engage in documenting and sharing their gender and gendered exploration over time, without worrying about leaving a trace.   algorithmic oppression also operates insidiously in facial recognition technology aiming to assign gender, which has a striking demonstrable preference for faces that look like stereotypical coders. light-skinned men were shown to be most consistently classified correctly by gender (with a maximum error rate of 0.8%), versus darker-skinned women, who were the group most often misclassified by gender (subject to error rates up to 34.7%) (buolamwini & gebru, 2018; ngan, grother, & ngan, 2015). such biases are often implicit, due to facial gender classifying systems not reporting the racial/ethnic demographics of the individuals in the sample photos used for algorithm development (ballihi, amor, daoudi, srivastava, & aboutajdine, 2012; kekre, thepade, & chopra, 2010; moghaddam & yang, 2002, 2006; perez, tapia, estévez, & held, 2012; wang, li, yau, & sung, 2010). such algorithms have also been critiqued for operationalizing a gender binary that excludes transgender bodies and experiences (hamidi, scheuerman, & branham, 2018; keyes, 2018); indeed, facial analysis technology was shown to consistently perform worse on binary transgender persons than on cisgender individuals, while entirely unable to assign non-binary genders to images (scheuerman, paul, & brubaker, 2019).   just as computers use digital algorithms to assign genders to faces, people use non-digital algorithms to assign genders to faces (reddy, wilken, & koch, 2004). like noble, “algorithms” here refers to reductive, iterative processes used to assign binary gender from distilling evaluations of individual facial features quickly. this step-by-step sum of individual parts is notably distinct from a schema, which functions more as an internal representation of a theoretical face belonging to a “man” or “woman.” the “my twin” snapchat filters offer a unique opportunity to manifest such internal processes by projecting a digital gendered filter—programmed by individuals who remain hidden behind the company mantle and figureheads, with limited accountability—onto an unknown, unlabeled face, and providing the result as visual output. with this paper i will contextualize and quantitatively dissect a case study of gendered digital projections—human-coded and visually presented. my main methodology in this endeavor will be “bio-ethnography”—as proposed, but not yet implemented, by anthropologist elizabeth roberts (roberts, 2015)—signifying a mixed-methods intervention reconstituting the relationship between aspects of embodied human experience, following recent examples of utilizing scientific data to support feminist and queer scholarship by deboleena roy (roy, 2018), elizabeth wilson (wilson, 2015a, 2015b), angela willey (willey, 2016), and anne pollock (pollock, 2015).   gendered faces recognizing some of the biases and sociocultural influences that impact facial digitization—both accuracy and outcomes—it is important to consider if and how gender is ascribed to unfiltered faces. there is biological anthropology literature on facial sexual dimorphism of both overlying tissue (carré & mccormick, 2008; penton-voak et al., 2001; toma, zhurov, playle, & richmond, 2008) and underlying bone structure (bulygina, mitteroecker, & aiello, 2006; weston, friday, & liò, 2007), including broader, squarer faces and more prominent noses and brows in males, compared to females with more prominent eyes and cheeks. testosterone has been shown to drive “masculine” craniofacial development during puberty, while estrogens and progestins have only been linked to alterations in skin collagen (verdonck, gaethofs, carels, & de zegher, 1999). such studies are limited by small sample sizes and racial/ethnic homogeneity of participants, and any tie to behavioral stereotypes remains controversial.   these data are also supported by generation of digital facial amalgamations, which can facilitate comparing intergroup differences between composite “female” and “male” faces—generated by “averaging” hundreds of female faces and hundreds of male faces to yield visually distinct facial prototypes. this has been done for east asian persons (perrett et al., 1998; perrett, may, & yoshikawa, 1994; tiddeman, burt, & perrett, 2001) and for white individuals (behar, 2014; pollock, 2015; rowland & perrett, 1995; tiddeman et al., 2001). the observed differences are likely a combination of biological (i.e., jaw and chin shape) and cultural (i.e., hair length) origins (rowland & perrett, 1995). notably, the only published research on large-scale blended images do not specifically include or exclude trans individuals’ images; thus, the conclusions drawn from those studies may not be generalizable. facial attractiveness has been associated with degree of sexual dimorphism, but this effect is stronger within racial and ethnic groups, suggesting that attractiveness cues are learned socially (perrett et al., 1998). one could then extrapolate that the gendered legibility of faces itself is educable as well—which is a foundational hypothesis of this work.   methodology and participants to better understand the complex embodiment and digitization of gendered faces, i spoke with twenty-eight transgender, non-binary, and/or gender diverse individuals (hereafter referred to as trans) about their experiences of and perspectives on gendered legibility of faces, including their own. participants were additionally asked to take three selfies: (1) unfiltered, (2) using the “my twin” feminizing filter, (3) using the “my other twin” masculinizing filter. in keeping with prior work altering the gendered legibility of facial images, participants were asked to take all three images using identical frontal views, neutral facial expression, and no makeup (rowland & perrett, 1995).   by having participants examine and discuss these filtered and unfiltered selfies, we invoked the “digital-forensic gaze,” as described by cultural sociologists christine lavrence and carolina cambre (2020), signifying the “habituated practice of scrutinizing selfies,” which includes “decoding the filtration effects applied (or not) in the image” (lavrence & cambre, 2020). by engaging with more intentionally distorting—less subtle—image filters, i aimed to engage with heavy-handedly projected hegemonic gendered expectations with that same digital-forensic gaze in order to dissect the features that the snapchat developers—as a proxy for societal gaze—deemed the aspirational gendered “norm.”   in my study, twenty-eight participants who currently reside in the united states or canada were convenience sample recruited from posts on a variety of facebook pages for trans (+/queer) communities. participation was voluntary and compensated with a twenty-dollar gift card. interviews were conducted via zoom video chat and recorded and transcribed with permission. this protocol was approved by the columbia university irving medical center institutional review board. in the ethical design of the study, i paid particular attention to creating an environment that would adequately support participants in discussion of potentially distressing topics, such as their gendered legibility and least favorite facial features. in the recruitment text, the study elements were explicit (interview and taking three selfies on snapchat, along with the specific two filters that would be used), and the topic of questions was described. participants were given the choice to decline to answer any questions and were able to pause or terminate the interview at any point if they desired (though none did).   i shared my name, gender identity, pronouns, and current occupation as a medical student, but no other demographic information with participants. considering my own gendered legibility, for each interview i appeared on zoom as a white assigned-female-at-birth (afab) person in my twenties, with short red wavy hair and large glasses, who had not yet undergone gender-affirming medical care. i declined to answer further questions about my opinions on the research questions and promised to send the resultant paper(s) when published.   acknowledging that no individual can be distilled to their identities, nor can any individual speak on behalf of a community, it is important to first attempt to describe the diversity of voices and faces included in this work. for demographics, participants were asked to describe themselves in the terms that felt most authentic and were not prompted to clarify. thus, some may resonate with additional terms that they did not employ, but the following descriptive breakdown is based on their chosen label(s).   participants held a broad spectrum of gender identities (table 1). those who identified as transgender men (n=6) used he/him pronouns (n=5) or they/them pronouns (n=1). transgender women (n=4) used she/her (n=3) or she/they (n=1). other (non-binary) gender labels included non-binary (12), genderqueer (2), agender/genderfluid (2), and gender non-conforming/androgynous (1). of the non-binary individuals, some identified with additional labels specifying directionality (transfeminine with they/them or she/they pronouns, or transmasculine with they/them or he/they pronouns) or fluidity (genderfluid or genderflux). no participants solely used the pronouns typically corresponding with their assigned-sex-at-birth (i.e., afab using she/her).   gender identity descriptor terms/labels used for self [n (%)] non-binary 18 (64%) femme/feminine/female 8 (29%) masc/masculine/male 6 (21%) fluid/flux 6 (21%)   pronouns: [n (%)] he/him: 5 (18%) she/her: 3 (11%) they/them: 13 (46%) he/they: 2 (7%) she/they: 5 (28%)   assigned-sex-at-birth: [n (%)]   female/afab: 23 (82%)   male/amab 5 (18%) table 1. gender/sex demographics   the average age of participants was 27.5 years, with a standard deviation of 5.9 years. both the median and the most common age was 26. the range was 20 to 52 years old. racially and ethnically, five participants identified as asian (two korean; one each chinese, filipino, singaporean), four as latinx, two as black, one as brown/multiracial, and one as middle eastern/arab. sixteen identified as white, including one who additionally self-described as jewish.   binary, filtered (il)legibility while researchers have digitally “feminized” and “masculinized” facial images (perrett et al., 1998; perrett et al., 1994; rowland & perrett, 1995), no formal analysis of publicly available gender-altering digital filters has been published to date. here i present quantitative measurements of different facial features in twenty-eight individuals’ photographs with the feminizing and masculinizing “my twin” filters (table 2) within the context of both their subjective experience of gendered legibility of faces at large and their subjective observations of how “my twin” digitally filters their faces.2 only three participants regularly used selfie filters   overall, few participants wanted to look like (n=2) or felt affirmed by the way that they looked with (n=3) either filter, while many more stated that they did not want to look like either (n=18) or found them unattractive (n=12). two reported dysphoria from the filter associated with their assigned-gender-at-birth.   first, considering the “my twin” filtered selfies holistically, nine individuals (both afab and amab) saw a likeness to male family members (uncles, fathers, and brothers) in their masculine-filtered image; two remarked upon similarities with a female relative with the feminine filter (both sisters). one participant felt affirmed by this likeness, as if such a masculinization might be “accessible” for them. all other participants who noted resemblance expressed discomfort with the familial resemblance in the filtered photograph and disliked the resultant image.   paradoxically, when observed in daily life without any filters, familial traits were a common contributing factor to both favorite and least favorite facial features. p2, a fifty-two-year-old trans man, remarked, “i like my face better when it looks like my dad’s.” he specifically identified feeling confident and masculine since his lower face and jaw began to resemble his father’s face after a few years of gender-affirming hormone therapy (gaht). p1, a twenty-six-year-old trans man, expressed the same sentiment about his father and his lower face, in contrast to his pain revisiting old photographs of himself, prior to gaht, in which he resembles his sister. p24, a twenty-four-year-old non-binary trans man, described his lifelong joy about sharing his grandfather’s sharp, angular nose, which he feels fits his face increasingly well, the longer he takes testosterone. those participants felt affirmed by embodying familial masculine-coded forms.     measurable features (lengths normalized to no filter): [mean +/s.d.]   no filter (x) masculine (m) effect size; p (m:x) feminine (f) effect size; p (f:x) effect size; p (f:m) forehead width 1 +/0.09 1.09 +/0.05 +9%; 0.0468 0.84 +/0.06 -16%; 0.0001 -23%; <0.0001 forehead height 1 +/0.11 1.10 +/0.12 +10%; 0.0311 0.93 +/0.10 -7%; 0.2175 -15%; <0.0001 jaw width 1 +/0.08 1.09 +/0.07 +9%; 0.0439 0.95 +/0.06 -5%; 0.4648 -13%; 0.0010 lateral mandibular angle 1 +/0.03 0.93 +/0.04 -7%; 0.2287 1.01 +/0.04 +1%; 0.9548 +9%; 0.1304 central mandibular angle 1 +/0.06 1.06 +/0.07 +6%; 0.2418 0.90 +/0.08 -10%; 0.0233 -15%; <0.0001 neck width 1 +/0.09 1.18 +/0.09 +18%; <0.0001 0.81 +/0.12 -19%; <0.0001 -31%; <0.0001 nose width 1 +/0.16 1.12 +/0.18 +12%; 0.0081 0.76 +/0.21 -24%; <0.0001 -32%; <0.0001 nose height 1 +/0.15 1.03 +/0.15 +3%; 0.5881 1.0 +/0.14 0%; 0.9919 -3%; 0.5117 eye width 1 +/0.12 0.99 +/0.10 -1%; 0.9418 1.09 +/0.11 +9%; 0.0395 +10%; 0.0158 eye height 1 +/0.16 0.91 +/0.24 -9%; 0.0421 1.44 +/0.29 +44%; <0.0001 +58%; <0.0001 eyebrow width 1 +/0.14 1.03 +/0.15 +3%; 0.6983 0.92 +/0.14 -8%; 0.0963 -11%; 0.0113 eyebrow height 1 +/0.20 1.51 +/0.29 +51%; <0.0001 0.52 +/0.17 -48%; <0.0001 -76%; <0.0001 lip width 1 +/0.12 0.97 +/0.10 -3%; 0.7056 1.03 +/0.10 +3%; 0.7496 +6%; 0.2822 lip height 1 +/0.21 0.97 +/0.25 -3%; 0.7979 1.18 +/0.26 +18%; <0.0001 +22%; <0.0001   other: [n=number with presence (% with presence)]   no filter masculine feminine eyelashes (+) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 28 (100%) eye shadow (+) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 28 (100%) eye liner (+) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 28 (100%) bright lip color (+) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 28 (100%) long hair (+) 11 (39%) 0 (0%) 28 (100%) facial hair (+) 6 (21%) 28 (100%) 0 (0%) blemish airbrush (+) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 28 (100%) table 2: snapchat image analysis: quantitative data: the top section of this table lists facial features that could be quantitatively assessed using the imagej measuring tool, with their corresponding normalized measurements—for the unfiltered (x) image, the “masculine” (m) filtered image, and the “feminine” (f) filtered image. to normalize each filtered image measurement, a participant’s filtered feature measurement was divided by that participant’s unfiltered feature measurement. in this table, these measurements are reported as the mean of the participants’ normalized measurements +/the standard deviation of the groups’ normalized measurements. statistically significant differences are bolded. additionally, i report the effect size and p-value of each filtered image compared to unfiltered (m vs. x; f vs. x) and the filtered images compared to each other (f vs. m). in the lower part of the table, presence of “gendered” features that are not easily quantitatively measured was reported without statistical analysis.   p16, a twenty-seven-year-old non-binary afab individual reflected, with gratitude, that they have continued to share their grandmother’s smile—their favorite facial feature—“no matter how much testosterone i took or how much i didn’t take.” they felt smiles are ungendered and did not want gender-affirmation to cost ceding their family legacy.   two participants expressed frustration about filters’ false advertising. p22, a twenty-eight-year-old genderqueer individual stated, “it's funny it's called ‘my twin’…this guy person doesn't look like me….[laughs] like, it's not accurate at all…i have, like, masculine-presenting siblings—they are my twins, they look just like me [laughs]. like, i have this feature [in real life].” they were frustrated by the filter yielding facial distortion instead of more subtle feature masculinization, which they would have desired.   sixteen participants criticized the filters for projecting essentialist conceptions of gender. eight believed the filters presented unachievable images. twenty-two participants felt that the filters were extreme or exaggerated (feminine: n=20, masculine: n=9). the feminine filter was particularly perceived as appearing unrealistic and subhuman by twenty-three participants, who used words like “fake,” “plastic,” “weird,” “artificial,” “eerie,” “surreal,” “alien,” “doll,” “cartoon,” or “caricature” to describe the filtered image. as p22 added   it's so hyperfemme, it's so intense about it. make a more interesting choice, snapchat. give me antlers and fangs, not like, weirdly airbrushing my face. i'm not a supermodel and i didn't want to be, so what the fuck? it's just kind of a nightmare. essentially what it does is take away all the personality from my face. it takes away everything that makes me see myself, and the fact that i can look kind of interesting. cuz the way it just flattens your face into, like, a pixar character. like literally these people look like they're out of frozen. they're so generic. it's so sad… t's so weird. it makes me self-conscious in a way, and it makes me really reject that image, cuz it's not what i look like, it's not what i want to look like, and it's not what i'm asking anybody to do to my face.   some struggled with this hyperfemininity because of dysphoria from being reminded of years spent performing an inauthentic gender presentation. p9, a thirty-two-year-old trans man, described, “i know that person, but that's a person i used to be. it feels like seeing a ghost, i guess. i killed and buried that person.” for others, complex feelings originated from seeing how far their attempts at gender conformity landed from this “ideal.” p1, who, again, is a twenty-six-year-old trans man, recalled,   when i used the female filter, the thing that most stuck out to me was that i never looked like that, and i was never going to look like that. i don't think it should have made me feel as disheartened as it did—i think it should have made me feel affirmed in who i am—but it was a little disheartening because i spent a long time trying to fit into that idea of what being a woman for me would look like, and some of that is because of societal pressure and family pressure. at least i thought that i had, and realizing that i was so far from that mark was just disheartening. but on the other hand, it's sort of a relief, because i think if i had fit that mold better, i think i would have spent a much larger part of my life trying to be a woman, while at seventeen i was like “this is over for me.” i think it would have taken me much longer to do that.   seven participants described their masculine-filtered face as looking like a “jerk,” “douche,” “dirty,” “stupid,” or “on steroids.” even those who expressed wanting a more masculine appearance had no desire to embody their digitally masculinized self. as p23, a twenty-four-year-old non-binary participant, reflected,   the masc one looks like a different person. like, i wouldn't want to be that person, but i'd respect him [laughs]. reads as very masc. one of the reasons i chose [my name] is that it makes me imagine, like, somebody sitting in a window seat, petting cats, in like a sunset. very, like, a gentle boy? a gentle queer boy. and the masc filter is very much not a gentle look, so it's very much not the aesthetic that i want.   p24, a twenty-six-year-old non-binary transmasculine person, reflected, “you have to make a lot more facial movement [in the male filter] to get any semblance of a smile out of it. which is funny cuz…an audible smile is actually part of an aural effect to feminize the voice.” this apparent masculine legibility afforded to projection of an uninviting facial expression (like more authoritative vocal inflection) was consistent with a performative tactic that six afab individuals described using to enhance their perception as male.   three participants felt that the feminine filter reflected hyperbolic asian beauty standards, while eight believed that the filters had a bias for white people due to the hair texture and the presence of facial hair, which many cisgender asian and indigenous north american men are unable to grow (n=6).   fifteen participants explicitly preferred their own faces without the filter, though nine of those had previously stated that they disliked their own faces. as p19, a twenty-six-year-old non-binary participant, described, the filter giving them two features they had previously described wanting, squarer jaw and heavier eyebrows, was “exciting, but i think it also made me realize that it's also wrong, you know? like it's sort of cool, this is what i would look like, like if i got some stubble or whatever, and it's fun to think about, but it's still wrong. it didn't look like me…at least i know that now. my face is my face and i don't need to change it.” even though they coveted more stereotypically masculine features, the digital distortion was not satisfying because felt legibly male at the cost of registering as their own face.   the specific changes observed with the filters coalesced and are described as follows, organized into the lower face (cheeks, facial hair, jaw, neck, lips, and nose), upper face (forehead, eyebrows, and eyes), and adornment (head hair and makeup).   lower face sixteen participants cited cheeks and/or cheekbones as a major factor contributing to gendered legibility of faces, with masculine faces having more “sharp,” “angular” cheekbones, and feminine faces having more “soft,” “round” cheeks. similar descriptive terms were used to differentiate male and female face shape (n=18), as well as jaw lines (n=19) and chin (n=8).   eleven afab participants specifically mentioned the lack of angularity of their lower facial shape as their least favorite feature. this was a leading goal for the nine who had taken gaht—all of whom reported improvement with gaht—and for three of the four who desired gaht. amab participants taking gaht reported joy and affirmation with their rounder, softer lower facial structure (5/5), and the two participants interested in gender-affirming facial surgery are looking to reduce their jaws and cheekbones for softer, more delicate appearing faces. p8, a twenty-six-year-old trans women, described her jaw and chin—her least favorite features—as “very blocky, very masculine, and not pretty or elegant,” and stated that she would like to surgically make them “less prominent.” gaht had given her a “dramatically…softer, rounder face,” which partially alleviated her dysphoria.   many participants reported racialization of facial gendered legibility. thirteen noted feminine coding of facial softness to particularly plague afab individuals of certain races/ethnicities (asian, mexican) who have rounder face shape and facial features at baseline, impeding their legibility as male (n=9). this softness was also compared to “baby” faces, which plagued more masculineor androgynous-presenting afab individuals, who were generally assumed to be younger than they were (n=6). in contrast, black individuals were reported to be more frequently masculinized (n=9). cultural examples of said racialized masculinization include the political demonization of first lady michelle obama’s muscular arms, and the booming electrolysis industry largely used to remove visible body hair from women of color—who naturally grow facial and body hair dark and coarse enough to be considered masculine or mannish by western binarized beauty standards, as discussed in queer theorist and trans individual jack halberstam’s female masculinity (halberstam, 2019).   these observations were verified quantitatively. the masculine-filtered jaw width was significantly higher than that of both the unfiltered image and the feminine filter (figure 1a). the lateral mandibular angle trended lower with the masculine filter, as observed by participants discussing the “square” or “boxy” appearance, and trended higher with the feminine filter, consistent with participants descriptions of “sloping” jaw lines; yet, neither difference was statistically significant (figure 1b). the feminine filter yielded a significantly narrower central mandibular angle than both other filters (figure 1c).   as observed by two participants, the masculine filter generated a significantly wider neck and the feminine filter generated a significantly narrower neck, compared to both unfiltered and masculine (figure 1d). this was consistent with two participants’ use of neck thickness as a cue in reading gender. as observed by two participants, the masculine filter generated a significantly wider neck and the feminine filter generated a significantly narrower neck, compared to both unfiltered and masculine (figure 1d). this was consistent with two participants’ use of neck thickness as a cue in reading gender.   figure 1: quantitative filter analysis of jaws and necks. a) jaw width, and mandibular angles b) lateral and c) central, and d) neck width. significance compared to no filter is indicated with *p<0.05, ****p<0.0001. significance compared to masculine filter is indicated with ##p<0.01, ####p<0.0001.   facial hair impacted gendered legibility (n=16). while six participants sported visible facial hair in their unfiltered photo, all twenty-eight had cheek stubble with masculine filters and zero did with feminine.   six afab participants voiced ambivalence about their fuller lips, which contributed to their being misgendered as a woman. this may have a racialized component, as p10, a twenty-five-year-old latinx trans woman, observed, “people who are black or have african heritage and have larger lips, and larger lips are usually associated with more femininity, but that's not necessarily true.” her observation echoes a cultural hypersexualization of black women, which can be seen anywhere from google search results to strip clubs (see brooks, 2010; noble, 2013). this is notably divergent from a more general masculinization of black individuals, which underscores how black women can be both hypersexualized and masculinized, depending on the context. indeed, both a filipino american participant and a black participant discussed being perceived more femininely for their fuller lips, and seeing men in their communities emasculated for this feature.   the feminine filter yielded significantly greater lip height (a two-dimensional proxy for fullness) than both other selfies; the masculine filter had no difference (figure 2a). filters did not alter lip width (figure 2b).   figure 2: quantitative filter analysis of lips. lip a) width, and b) height. significance compared to no filter is indicated with ****p<0.0001. significance compared to masculine filter is indicated with ####p<0.0001.   noses were frequently least favorite (n=9) or favorite (n=5) facial features, and six participants voiced nasal sharpness/prominence signaling male, versus a smaller/delicate nose coding feminine. similarly, p3, a twenty-year-old asian trans man, noted that his nasal bridge was “wider and stronger,” with the masculine filter; zero observed changes with the feminine filter. quantitatively, the width of the nose bridge (measured at the lowest perpendicular cross-section above the upper bound of the nostrils) was significantly broader with the masculine filter and significantly narrower with the feminine filter, compared to both unfiltered and masculine (figure 3a). nose height was comparable across the filters (figure 3b).   figure 3: quantitative filter analysis of noses. nose a) width, and b) height. significance compared to no filter is indicated with **p<0.01, ****p<0.0001. significance compared to masculine filter is indicated with ####p<0.0001.   upper face five participants expressed using foreheads/hairlines as facial cues for assigning gender. two non-binary trans women described dysphoria about their larger foreheads, and one planned to move her hairline lower in her upcoming facial gender-affirming surgery. p10 mentioned that “hiding” her longer forehead—a least favorite feature—behind bangs is essential to her being perceived as a woman. p6, a thirty-year-old trans man, perceives faces with a farther recessed, angular hairline as more masculine, and was disappointed that the masculinizing filter did not execute this. nine participants also noted the “prominence,” “strength,” or “angularity” of the brow bone as a male facial cue. one non-binary afab participant remarked that the masculine filter made them appear to have a “huge forehead”; no others commented on forehead or hairline alterations with either filter. quantitatively, the snapchat filter increased both the width (measured temple to temple) and height (measured hairline to top eyebrow border at the center of the face) in the masculine filter, and reduced both for the feminine filter compared to both others (figure 4a, figure 4b).   figure 4: quantitative filter analysis of foreheads. forehead a) width, and b) height. significance compared to no filter is indicated with *p<0.05, ***p<0.001. significance compared to masculine filter is indicated with ####p<0.0001.   fifteen participants also reflected that thicker eyebrows are societally coded as masculine, while feminine eyebrow ideals fluctuate with fashion. two trans men lamented their minimal eyebrow growth, which they attributed to societal pressure to over pluck them as teenagers, when still presenting as girls. two non-binary afab individuals disliked their light eyebrows, while five cited their thick, bushy eyebrows as a current favorite feature on their own faces, though they had disliked them earlier in life. eight afab participants described masculinizing their faces by using makeup to increase prominence of their eyebrows; two participants described apparent eyebrow plucking/grooming as a method of femininizing one’s appearance. in the snapchat filters, eyebrow width was significantly reduced in the feminine filter compared to masculine; neither significantly differed from the unfiltered images (figure 5a). eyebrow height (representing thickness) was significantly higher with the masculine filter compared to unfiltered, and significantly reduced in the feminine-filtered images compared to both others (figure 5b). six participants remarked upon how the masculine filter “strengthened” eyebrows, while the feminine filter “shaved” them down. those who noted this (all afab) universally disliked the feminizing reduction and enjoyed the masculine heavier brows.   figure 5: quantitative filter analysis of eyebrows. eyebrow a) width, and b) height. significance compared to no filter is indicated with ****p<0.0001. significance compared to masculine filter is indicated with #p<0.05, ####p<0.0001.   eyes were controversial. six participants reported eyes as their favorite feature on their own faces. six afab individuals described eyes as a feature commonly appreciated by others, four of whom believed that their eyes outed them as trans or got them read as more feminine. indeed, p2, whose favorite feature was his eyes, specifically described “clocking” a man as trans whenever “he has pretty eyes and he’s short.” in contrast, p1 explained that his eyes never felt gendered: “for me, it never changed. like, your jaw line changes, the way things fit on your face changes, but if i were to call something gender neutral...i always recognize myself in my eyes.” in fact, he remarked, triumphantly, that though the feminine snapchat filter attempted to change his eyes, “they can’t really—you’re still there.” seven reported eye enlargement with the feminine filter; no one mentioned the masculine filter. indeed, eye width was measured to be significantly longer with the feminine filter compared to both unfiltered and masculine-filtered images (figure 6a). the same is true for eye height being greater with the female filter, and the masculine filter opposingly generated shorter eyes (figure 6b).   figure 6: quantitative filter analysis of eyes. eye a) width, and b) height. significance compared to no filter is indicated with *p<0.05, ****p<0.0001. significance compared to masculine filter is indicated with #p<0.05, ####p<0.0001.   adornment makeup and hair length were other frequently cited tools for ascribing gender to faces. ten participants reported makeup as a key for facial gender legibility as a woman. three amab individuals utilized makeup to prevent misgendering, and the other two amab participants reported not using it daily because they did not “need” makeup to “pass” (be legible) as a woman. in contrast, three afab individuals reported minimizing their use of makeup in order to avoid misgendering. p12, a twenty-four-year-old non-binary participant, reflected on the social dysphoria created by binarized gender expectations that impeded her presenting authentically: “i feel really good when i wear makeup, but it's really hard, because people assign makeup to a gender, and that makes me feel really dysphoric.”   eight amab participants regularly use makeup to feminize their appearance, which includes mascara, lipstick, blush, eye liner, eye shadow, foundation, and contouring. two trans women described crying with joy whenever they put on a full face of makeup. as p7, a twenty-seven-year-old trans woman, explained, using makeup facilitates   masking certain elements, emphasizing others, creating shapes from where there are none…the rest is in order to conform to gender stereotypes. honestly, i did not think that the personal aspect would be as big. i was mostly focused on the social aspect, but no: the euphoria is actually pretty great. the lipstick and eyeshadow in my experience are the ones that have the greatest effect both societally and on my general euphoria. beyond that, the full face of makeup, whenever that happens really makes me cry [laughs] every time. so, i only do it when i have stuff to help with that [laughs]. cry from joy.   makeup helped her to read herself as a woman when she looked at her reflection, and that gendered legibility was profoundly euphoric.   eight afab participants report regularly using masculinizing makeup, including darkening and/or thickening their eyebrows and using contouring to add angularity to the jaw and cheeks. p14, a twenty-four-year-old agender, genderfluid afab participant, used “goth” makeup, which they did not feel was gendered; however, they have reduced this form of self-expression due to wanting to “pass” as a man at work.   with the snapchat feminizing filter, nine participants mentioned use of makeup, including enhancing eyelashes (n=2), and addition of blush (n=3), eye liner (n=1), and lip color (n=1). seven participants noted the use of blemish airbrush in the feminine filter, and absence of such smoothing in the masculine filter.   eleven participants had long hair at the time of the interview (at or below chin length). the feminine filter always projected long hair (at least shoulder length) and the masculine filter always yielded short hair. twelve participants explicitly disliked the digital hair changes, and no participant liked them.   two black participants remarked that the filters were made for “white” people because feminine filter had given them long, straight hair that they would never have, regardless of gender presentation. three participants believed head hair serves as a factor in the racialized gendering of faces more broadly. p5, a thirty-eight-year-old trans woman of middle eastern/arab descent, described being read as more feminine due to her (inherited) wavy hair texture. p27, a twenty-five-year-old black non-binary participant, reflected that different races have specific internal beauty standards, and amongst black women, hair is one of the most important ways of signaling feminine beauty.   p29, a twenty-five-year-old genderqueer individual, found that the filters confirmed their belief that brightly colored hair signals femininity. their hair was their favorite facial feature because, “i can do whatever i want with it very easily [laughs]. it feels like something that is way more versatile and i have way more control over than the rest of my face…even when i was in cis girl mode, because i could mess around with it like: ponytail, braid, longer, shorter, whatever i wanted.” yet this tendency to try different styles as forms of self-expression can contribute to their being misgendered as a woman “as soon as my hair gets remotely long or it gets brightly colored.” the masculine “my twin” filter reinforced this prior inclination, “[it] really takes it home to me that my haircut is really not masculine, because it really doesn't match at all. and same with the shirt…[which] to me doesn't scream feminine…but that shirt fits way better on the feminine photo than the masculine photo. so, i was like, ‘oh fuck.’ a lot of the things i'm doing are already gender parsed in a way that i didn't even process were that gender parsed.” thus, digital distortion yielded improved insight into how their real-life presentation was legibly gendered.   (de?)gendered gaze all of the features that participants identified as contributing to reading gender on faces were reflected in the changes adopted by the “my twin” snapchat filters, and three participants explicitly remarked upon that. those clues to legibility included both hormonally driven and styled or performed features. indeed, fifteen participants described how being trans intensified their own scrutiny of others’ genders, due to hyperawareness of the elements of their own faces that induce dysphoric distress. that hypocrisy underscores the built-in bind for those who attempt to buck gendered expectations, as understanding what one must (de)construct in order to read as desired within a binary societal structure requires investing attention into the very hegemonic doctrine that they are otherwise critiquing.   despite this replicability of societal gender legibility, due to their negative experiences being misgendered, eleven participants reported actively trying not to gender strangers. p16 explained, “i feel bad, as someone who is non-binary, about having myself categorized in a certain way. so, i have stopped doing it to other people.” five conjectured that cisgender individuals would be much better at describing the gendering “algorithms” they personally implemented than trans persons would be. yet not one participant struggled to articulate which of their facial features strangers use to assign them a gender, which suggests that even when actively resisting their learned gaze, participants remained fluent in societal gendered legibility.   for trans persons, navigating gendered legibility requires balancing authentic expression, societal legibility, and reinforcing hegemonic norms. speaking to these internal tensions, p5 described, “i perceive it as a sort of triangle where i have to negotiate between three things: my own desire that confining or oppressive gender norms be eliminated; my own aesthetic preferences for style and self-presentation, which would incorporate some but not all aspects of conventional gender norms, and, last but not least, the need to embody or comply with established norms in order to be read and accepted at least minimally by people at large.” the “my twin” snapchat filters—as digital algorithms displaying human gendering algorithms—visually reveal the way that one can distill and present prescriptive gender norms. yet the reaction to those filters underscores the failure of such hegemony; “legibility” is unsatisfying when it comes at the cost of authenticity.   zooming out my work with trans participants here offers key insights into external gendered legibility, western binary hegemonic gendered ideals, and how digital distortion with facial filters may allow exploration of self-recognition (or personal intelligibility). notably, the “my twin” filters’ distortions matched participants’ description of the facial features they used to assign genders to others. while all participants reported wanting features they associated with the other sex assigned at birth, they found the filters unsatisfying due to inauthenticity and inscription of racialized beauty ideals. thus, there was a disjunction between trans persons‘ fantasy for their gendered features and legibility and the discomfort associated with filters accentuating such stereotyped features. this hypothesis is supported by recent work (with cisgender men, cisgender women, and non-binary individuals) that found that participants tried to avoid conspicuously applied selfie filters, which appeared “gauche” and lacked the desirable “natural” aesthetic of less perceptible enhancement that one might believe was reality (lavrence & cambre, 2020). part of the appeal of the illusion was making it believable.   indeed, communication and digital culture scholar lisa silvestri described selfies as a “sociocultural revolution” about “identity affirmation” (silvestri, 2014, p. 114). selfies with digital facial filters offer a potentially powerful component of a gender-affirming journey, yet—per my participants in this study—the examined “my twin” filters did not deliver, likely partially because they were not coded for the purpose. what would it mean to design gendered filters more explicitly catering to trans persons’ desires?   per my quantitative analysis above, one might surmise that the snapchat “my twin” filters produce and accentuate dominant western, white cisnormative gendered images. some gender studies academics, such as bernice l. hausman (e.g., hausman, 2001), have spent the past three decades controversially arguing that trans individuals are inherently anti-feminist and damaging to the feminist cause due to seeking to reinforce biological essentialism (i.e., seeking to alter one’s embodiment in order to better fit within societal expectations, signifying equation of anatomy with behavior—masculinity or femininity). if such were the case for these participants, they would have found the “my twin” filtered images appealing and representative of their transition goals. this could not have been farther from the truth. per my quantitative analysis above, one might surmise that the snapchat “my twin” filters produce and accentuate dominant western, white cisnormative gendered images. some gender studies academics, such as bernice l. hausman (e.g., hausman, 2001), have spent the past three decades controversially arguing that trans individuals are inherently anti-feminist and damaging to the feminist cause due to seeking to reinforce biological essentialism (i.e., seeking to alter one’s embodiment in order to better fit within societal expectations, signifying equation of anatomy with behavior—masculinity or femininity). if such were the case for these participants, they would have found the “my twin” filtered images appealing and representative of their transition goals. this could not have been farther from the truth.   instead, in my data, participants were able to read gender through the same features that the snapchat filters imposed for gendered performativity, but were not satisfied by seeing their own morphology reconstrued as such. rather, they sought a sense of self-recognition and agency in their embodiment—which is directly in keeping with (feminist scholarship) ideals of bodily autonomy and self-discovery, rather than in contradiction. as susan stryker reasons, “transgender phenomena ask us to follow basic feminist insights to their logical conclusion (biology is not destiny, and one is not born a woman, right?)” (stryker, 2007, p. 59).   instead—in keeping with stryker’s understanding of trans theory and trans experience—these data represent how participants were able to regurgitate what they had been socialized to consider embodied masculinity and femininity, and often sought some aspect of gender-affirming features in their own faces, but were not interested in claiming a fully reductive societal picture of gender. our results speak to the tensions between external legibility and internal authenticity, echoing the concept of “cultural intelligibility,” as first coined by queer theorist judith butler in the context of butch/femme queer couples in her landmark “gender trouble” (butler, 1990) and then tied to trans experience by transgender studies scholar sandy stone in “the 'empire' strikes back: a posttranssexual manifesto” (stone, 1992).   in sum, if one were to design filters for trans individuals specifically, the goal would likely be more subtle and allow for specific tuning of gendered features, like selective addition of different forms of facial hair or altering one’s hair length. such interventions would allow trans selfie subjects to envision where they might like to take their gendered legibility in the future, genetics and luck willing.   such a digital intervention would only be appropriate if it were truly gender-neutral—a single filter system that would allow mixing and matching all sorts of “gendered” features interchangeably—a system that facilitated unbounded exploration. this need for an unbounded experience would allow individuals to play with gender non-conformity and work to reduce internalized transphobia for individuals who have features that are not celebrated for their gender, and would avoid reinscribing binary hegemonic gender norms rooted in white supremacy.   the problematic roots of contemporary hegemonic gendered legibility set us up for the ambivalence and tension our participants voiced between cultural intelligibility versus personal intelligibility. to be culturally legible means at least partially buying into hegemonic gender ideals—the falsely constructed “norms,” a deceptive misnomer. such a performance—if convincing—offers safety and external affirmation. in contrast, while personal intelligibility can be influenced by socially informed understandings of what makes a gendered body, it creates more space for individuality, and the ultimate goal is not fitting a specific mold, but rather self-recognition in the mirror and feeling aligned with one’s internal truth.   neither priority is right or wrong, and these forms of (in)visibility and distortion are not mutually exclusive, but the risks and benefits are distinct and their relative value is individual and situational. without societal oppression, trans persons would theoretically be able to prioritize self-recognition—at risk of external unintelligibility—but we do not (yet) live in such a world. even if we did, the tendrils of societal dogma about masculinity and femininity would likely continue to impact individual understandings about gender and subsequent choices about gendered presentation through internalized transphobia and internalized ideas about “real” men and women (read: binary hegemonic gendered ideals).   for this reason, we return to haraway’s query that i posed in the introduction: “with whose blood were my eyes crafted?” (haraway, 1988, p. 585). our ability to read “gender” visually on faces is crafted by societal context and personal experience. we cannot disentangle the snapchat filters we analyzed or the participants’ observations we reported from western hegemony, rooted in binary gender constructs, neoliberalism, and white supremacy. yet these results contribute to a better understanding of how such forces impact trans individuals’ self-concepts, personal and external intelligibilities, and goals for their transitions.   these results are also limited by multiple factors of positionality. for the sake of cohort experience consistency, i limited the sample to individuals who were currently residing in the united states or canada. these experiences and opinions are of my participants alone and cannot speak for whole populations. i was limited to the individuals who responded to the call for research participants, giving this sample voluntary bias. the group was limited to twenty-eight individuals by temporal and financial constraints, which is not small for this kind of study, but larger samples inherently offer greater breadth of experiences and perspectives.   additionally, my results suggest that self-concept improvement and patient satisfaction may be higher with gender-affirming care that results in more subtle enhancement of gendered facial features. further research will be needed to characterize that, as i did not have the technical capacity to evaluate how participants would modify their own images, if able to selectively edit specific features. that work with trans individuals will be essential to better understanding whether more subtle changes are deemed more desirable to participants, or whether participants only seek to change certain features as opposed to the aforementioned list of distortions that are executed by the filters studied here. some scholars are already working on such research generally, and i hope that they will build on this work by considering trans persons specifically (e.g., leclercq, 2016).   conclusion our results underscore the disjunction between the fantasy transgender and/or non-binary individuals hold for their gendered features and legibility and the discomfort associated with filters accentuating such stereotyped features, which suggests that self-concept improvement and patient satisfaction may be higher with gender-affirming care that results in more subtle enhancement of gendered facial features. this work can inform mental health providers’ understanding of the role of technology in reimaginations of who and what we see in the mirror, and specifically informs treatment of transgender, non-binary, and/or gender diverse individuals.   acknowledgments this project was funded by the columbia university vagelos college of physicians and surgeons scholarly project fund. thank you to drs. michael j. devlin and adele tutter for your mentorship for this research project, to amanda c. arcomano for your editorial assistance, and to drs. vanessa agard-jones and joanna radin for providing the foundational training that made this work possible.   notes 1 snapchat neglected to reply to the queries sent about the origins of or digital effects induced by the “my twin” filter, so all information presented here is generated from reading news articles in which the authors were able to speak to the applications’ employees 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psychiatry resident at the university of pennsylvania. prior to earning his m.d. at columbia, he studied biochemistry and gender studies at yale, conducting research on a wide spectrum of biologicallyand socially-determined aspects of gender-based health disparities, including earning his m.s. developing the first animal model of gender-affirming hormone therapy. his current focuses include mixed-methods research on lgbtq mental health, as well as narrative medicine and physician advocacy. more about his scholarly and artistic work can be found at teddygoetz.com. weinberg, lindsay (2020). feminist research ethics and student privacy in the age of ai. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–10. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © lindsay weinberg, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license feminist research ethics and student privacy in the age of ai lindsay weinberg purdue university lweinber@purdue.edu abstract this article examines university researchers’ capture of student images on us college campuses for training facial recognition technology, and situates this project within universities’ broader historical alignment with militarism and racial injustice. it argues that feminist sts ethics provides a framework for not only challenging the ways that university research inquiry actively contributes to oppressive power structures, but also for reimagining university research ethics for a greater engagement with questions of justice. the article identifies the limitations of dominant institutional ethics and privacy rights discourses for centering justice considerations, and instead outlines an intersectional feminist approach to university research ethics that reimagines the relationship between research processes, power, and social impacts. between 2012 and 2014, researchers at duke university, stanford university, and the university of colorado at colorado springs (uccs) captured images of students traveling between classes and visiting on-campus cafés. these images were taken to help improve artificial intelligence’s (ai) capacity to recognize people in motion within a “natural” environment (fussell, 2019). at uccs, in a study approved by the institutional review board (irb), long-range surveillance images of over 1,700 people were collected from february 2012 to september 2013 without students’ knowledge or consent, which helped to produce a dataset critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) lindsay weinberg, 2020 2 with desired real-world conditions—poor lighting and partially obstructed views— for defense and intelligence agencies (harvey & laplace, 2019b). in the case of duke university, the lead researcher made significant changes to the approved 2014 project that went unreported to the irb, including expanding the project’s scope from the indoors to the outdoors, and giving data access not only to researchers upon request, but to anyone as a publicly available dataset. the duke dataset has gone on to be used for over one hundred publicly available research papers since its initial publication in 2016 (harvey & laplace, 2019a). artist-researchers adam harvey and jules laplace (2019a) have tracked these papers’ connections to the chinese military and to companies that help chinese authorities monitor and oppress uighur muslims, as well as to the united states department of homeland security, the intelligence advanced research projects activity, ibm, and microsoft, who has provided surveillance to immigration and customs enforcement. furthermore, the duke university study was funded in part by the united states army research laboratory, and the uccs study received funding from the us navy. the large-scale government funding of these projects is in stark contrast to the work of feminist researchers, whose projects are often underfunded, undervalued, and poorly understood (cooky et al., 2018). yet feminist research holds some of the greatest promise for critically evaluating technology’s development and impacts on society. as a research methodology, feminist research investigates how power shapes research inquiry and discovery, including the production and application of scientific knowledge. how did power shape inquiry and discovery in the context of the uccs and duke university facial recognition studies? furthermore, how can feminist sts help us move university research ethics beyond questions of liability and irb legitimization, and towards a greater engagement with questions of justice? a close reading of these studies through an intersectional feminist lens shows how dominant relations of power deeply informed the research inquiry process. in particular, it illustrates how research inquiry for improving facial recognition appropriates critiques of non-inclusive technology to justify the expansion of surveillance. several of the lead researchers on these projects have defended their work by stating that these datasets will ultimately result in more accurate ai. existing forms of ai have been shown time and again to have higher error rates for women of color (buolamwini & gebru, 2018) and transgender people (keyes, 2018). however, this rationale ultimately justifies the widening of surveillance’s net, and by proxy, the reach of systems of oppression that deploy forms of critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) lindsay weinberg, 2020 3 automated recognition. simone browne’s (2015) work has demonstrated the long historical arc of the relationship between surveillance and racial oppression, from the transatlantic slave trade to contemporary forms of racial profiling. more accurate facial recognition will not rectify a criminal justice system that is inherently unfair, given the ways histories of slavery and segregation, as well as ongoing raceand class-based oppressions, shape processes of criminalization, resulting in disparate treatment for communities of color and cycles of poverty and incarceration. this is why browne argues for “fugitive acts of escape, resistance, and productive disruptions” (2015, p. 163), rather than demanding more accurate facial recognition technology for black people. feminist surveillance studies scholars have illustrated how practices of surveillance are always already bound up with the monitoring and disciplining of boundaries that sustain racism, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation (dubrofsky & magnet, 2015). efforts to make vulnerable groups more legible to these systems thus speaks to the ways ideas of inclusion, equity, and identity have been coopted for the purposes of improving structures of control (blas & gaboury, 2016). this is why artists such as zach blas have argued for a queer politics of refusal, anonymity, and opacity, meaning a “tactical evasion of the gaze of digital machines…[that] accounts for the specificities of subjects” (2016, p. 150). for instance, in his project facial weaponization suite (2011–2014), blas created a series of neon-colored masks designed to thwart facial recognition technology, grounded in a critique of the technology's discriminatory and violent impacts on racial, sexual, and religious minorities (lingel, 2020). furthermore, a politics of refusal against facial recognition technology has seen legislative success, due to the efforts of diverse grassroots coalition-based movements (dubal, 2019). new municipal ordinances have banned city agencies from using facial recognition technology in san francisco and oakland, california, as well as in somerville, massachusetts. in addition to challenging embedded power dynamics within research inquiry, feminist scholars have pointed out the limitations of the irb for addressing the ways that intersecting power relations condition who gets to conduct research and how research impacts the rights and experiences of vulnerable groups. yet these facial recognition studies were defended on the grounds of having received irb approval, which federal regulations require for research involving human subjects. for instance, uccs university spokesperson jared verner said that the irb “assures the protection of the rights and welfare of human subjects in research” and that “no personal information was collected or distributed in this specific study” (dent, 2019). the inadequacy of irbs for meaningfully addressing critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) lindsay weinberg, 2020 4 privacy rights in the context of machine learning research is particularly acute, given that the irb focuses on whether individuals are identified, and if so, whether being identified puts them at risk of financial or medical harm. as jasmine r. lindabary and danielle j. corple have noted, “in the context of academic research, power is…nestled in institutions and structures (e.g., irbs) that define what constitutes privacy and dictate whose vulnerabilities count” (2019, pp. 1458– 1459). regardless of whether individuals in these studies are personally identified or not, their images are being used to train technologies that will have disparate impacts on vulnerable groups when put in the service of institutions that seek to monitor, criminalize, and punish, including policing and border security. feminist critiques of research ethics have also emphasized how, over the last thirty years in the united states, institutional research ethics discourses have largely shifted from questions of what morals or rules should guide research conduct to questions of what will help mitigate concerns about university liability (cooky et al., 2018). in the case of these studies, one liability concern would be whether students have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the areas of campus researchers intended on photographing. yet a range of feminist scholars, social theorists, and critical legal scholars have demonstrated that traditional understandings of privacy typically do not account for the ways privacy intersects with relations of power and inequality (gilliom, 2001). this traditional notion of a reasonable expectation of privacy originally comes from the supreme court decision in katz v. united states (1967), which laid the foundations for what would become the “reasonable expectation” test, based on whether the individual exhibits an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy, and whether this expectation is “objectively” reasonable. in the lead researcher’s defense of the uccs study, he noted that students have no reasonable expectation to privacy when walking around campus, and that there is nothing illegal about taking photos of people in public (stanley, 2019). however, while one can easily imagine being seen, overheard, or even photographed by others in the vicinity, in the uccs study, students were photographed from over 492 feet away without their knowledge, accelerating the advancement of multi-target multi-camera tracking and other forms of computer vision.1 the uccs study thus demands a consideration of how dominant understandings of privacy norms, which the academy institutionalizes and reproduces, fail to address how advances in digital technology intensify conditions of vulnerability to structures of domination. power plays a role in what norms become institutionalized and accepted within a given context, as feminist theorists have long argued (rule, 2019). while some privacy scholars have suggested that we should turn to emerging social norms to critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) lindsay weinberg, 2020 5 determine appropriate political responses to innovations in information technology (nissenbaum, 2010), this framework hinges on the idea that norms are a reliable indicator of how much information, and what type of information collection, should be permissible. in the case of the duke university study, lead researchers pointed out that, on the heels of the controversy, no students had come forward requesting their image to be removed from the dataset (satisky, 2019). while this might be read as suggesting that students did not experience the research study as a privacy invasion, it is worth considering how dominant understandings of the work universities do in the world might inform students’ reception of this study. these dominant understandings confer benevolence upon university research, on the one hand, and conceal its longstanding complicity in social injustice, on the other. within dominant discourse, there is a pervasive assumption that the university’s “drive to know the world is virtuous” (boggs & mitchell, 2018, p. 435). abigail boggs and nick mitchell (2018) have shown that even within critical university studies scholarship, there is an assumption that the university is, at its core, progressive and a good in itself. boggs and mitchell point to the work of scholars like roderick a. ferguson (2012), craig steven wilder (2013), stefano harney and fred moten (2013), piya chatterjee and sunaina maira (2014), jennifer doyle (2015), and tressie mcmillan cottom (2017), who show how universities are deeply entangled in histories of racial injustice, us imperialism, the suppression of leftist social movements, and class inequality. these histories suffer frequent erasure, including within pedagogical approaches to research ethics. students are often taught to understand research ethics through sensationalist lenses that exceptionalize cases like the tuskegee experiment, and which, as sheeva sabati explains, “obscure the forms of pervasive, iterative violences that have been sustained through projects of knowledge production” (2019, p. 1058). given that these facial recognition studies were funded, in part, through military agency spending, it would be helpful to situate the use of student images to train facial recognition software using a critical feminist perspective that accounts for the historical relationship between university research and the military-industrial complex. dominant scientific and technical epistemologies in university research are deeply tied to histories of militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy (haraway, 1988). with the us’s rise as a global superpower during world war ii, president roosevelt issued an executive order to create the office of scientific research and development, which decisively aligned university research efforts with militaristic national policy priorities. universities would go on to produce critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) lindsay weinberg, 2020 6 research for missile technology, gun sights, bombsights, radars, chemical and biological weapons, and the atom bomb for the war effort (abrams, 1989). under mccarthyism, public universities’ state funding shifted from land-grant agricultural resources to the defense establishment, which further laid the groundwork for “deep strata of connection and complicity between imperial statecraft and the knowledge complex of the u.s. academy” (chatterjee & maira, 2014, p. 13). by 1980 the department of defense as well as the state department were likely to insist on limiting access to state-funded university research, arguing that transparency about new technology could jeopardize the nation’s economic standing, and by proxy, national security (abrams, 1989). today, the department of defense is playing an increasingly large role in funding research that was previously supported by the national science foundation, the budget of which has been significantly curtailed under the trump administration. furthermore, several contemporary partnerships between the academy, the us government, and private business have resulted in the proliferation of whitewashed technology ethics discourses that are strategically aligned with both the priorities of the us military and silicon valley (ochigame, 2019). thus, a feminist perspective that takes seriously the relationship between power, research inquiry, and discovery urges us to understand these controversial facial recognition studies not in isolation, but as forms of knowledge production that are symptomatic of the university’s broader historical alignment with the defense establishment, on the one hand, and with contemporary austerity and corporatization measures, on the other. duke university and uccs have since removed access to the datasets derived from these projects. as media attention wanes, the collection of student data within the university requires ongoing critical feminist inquiry, as do university partnerships with both the us government and for-profit companies. these partnerships stand to become increasingly popular with higher education administrators as state funding dwindles, and are mostly led by male researchers, thus further amplifying male privilege within the academy (smith-doerr & croissant, 2011). these research efforts can directly and indirectly support us projects of criminalization domestically and imperialism abroad. however, simply adding women to these partnerships will not necessarily upend the reproduction of systems of oppression (smith-doerr & croissant, 2011); rather, insurgent, feminist, justice-oriented approaches to research inquiry and discovery are needed. existing irb policy and privacy law, even when appropriately followed, are not up to the task of ensuring ethical research practices concerning student data, nor just research outcomes. this is in part due to institutionalized research ethics’ emphasis on liability and immediate risks, which silo questions of long critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) lindsay weinberg, 2020 7 term effects. while some might argue that demanding university researchers address potential long-term impacts would slow down scientific progress, this argument presupposes progress itself to be an inherent social good. instead, and as ruja benjamin argues, if we are “committed to building a more just society, it is vital that we demand a slower and more socially conscious innovation” (2019, p. 183). an intersectional feminist approach to university research ethics would demand that researchers who engage in technological development do so in a more reflective way, taking as a starting point the voices and experiences of those who are most vulnerable. this approach would require accounting for the social relations of power embedded within research inquiry and discovery, as well as the potential social impacts of a given technology’s development, in order to center justice considerations (costanza-chock, 2018). it would be a research ethics that goes beyond questions of liability and irb legitimization, and instead foregrounds the ways that new knowledge-making practices might contribute to the epistemological and material violences that sustain systems of oppression, and thus reproduce the university’s longstanding imbrication in racial-colonial, patriarchal, and military histories. as catherine d’ignazio and lauren f. klein explain, “tracing these links to historical and ongoing forces of oppression can help us answer the ethical question, should this system exist?” (2020, p. 13). a push for a feminist research ethics in the academy could help counter the underfunding and institutional marginalization of critical feminist approaches to technology (shilton et al., 2017), and create more opportunities for work in solidarity with movements outside the academy for progressive technological reform.2 if these demands sound impossible to enact within the existing structures of higher education, then this speaks to the urgency with which the academy needs to be transformed. notes 1 students are certainly not the only group whose images have been used to test facial recognition technology without their knowledge or consent. this list includes immigrants, abused children, people who have had mug shots taken, and deceased people (keyes et al., 2019). 2see, for example, the movement for black lives and the #techwontbuildit campaign. critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) lindsay weinberg, 2020 8 references abrams, r. m. (1989). the us military and higher education: a brief history. the annals of the american academy, 502(1), 15–28. benjamin, r. (2019). race after technology: abolitionist tools for a new jim code. polity press. boggs, a., & mitchell, n. (2018). critical university studies and the crisis consensus. feminist studies, 44(2), 432–463. blas, z. (2016). opacities: an introduction. camera obscura, 31(2 92), 149–153. blas, z., & gaboury, j. (2016). biometrics and opacity: a conversation. camera obscura, 31(2 92), 155–165. browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. duke university press. buolamwini, j., & gebru, t. (2018). gender shades: intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification. proceedings of machine learning research, 81, 1– 15. chatterjee, p., & maira, s. (2014). the imperial university: race, war, and the nationstate. in p. chatterjee & s. maira (eds.), the imperial university: academic repression and scholarly dissent (pp. 1–50). university of minnesota press. cooky, c., lindabary, j. r., & corple, d. j. (2018). navigating big data dilemmas: feminist holistic reflexivity in social media research. big data & society (julydecember), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718807731 costanza-chock, s. (2018). design justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice. proceedings of the design research society 2018, 1–14. http://doi.10.21606/dma.2017.679 cottom, t. m. (2017). lower ed: the troubling rise of for-profit colleges in the new economy. the new press. dent, s. (2019). colorado college students were secretly used to train facial recognition. endgadget. https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/28/uccs-facialrecognition-study-students/?guccounter=1 d’ignazio, c., & klien, l. f. (2020). data feminism. mit press. doyle, j. (2015). campus sex, campus security. semiotext(e). dubal, v. (2019, may 30). san francisco was right to ban facial recognition. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/30/san-franciscoban-facial-recognition-surveillance https://doi.org/10.1177%2f2053951718807731 https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/28/uccs-facial-recognition-study-students/?guccounter=1 https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/28/uccs-facial-recognition-study-students/?guccounter=1 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/30/san-francisco-ban-facial-recognition-surveillance https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/30/san-francisco-ban-facial-recognition-surveillance critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) lindsay weinberg, 2020 9 dubrofsky r., & magnet, s. a. (2015). introduction. in r. dubrofsky & s. a. magnet (eds.), feminist surveillance studies (pp. 1–17). duke university press. ferguson, r. a. (2012). the reorder of things: the university and its pedagogies of minority difference. university of minnesota press. fussell, s. (2019, june). you no longer own your face: students were recorded for research—and then became part of a data set that lives forever online, potentially accessible to anyone. the atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/universities-recordstudents-campuses-research/592537/ gilliom, j. (2001). overseers of the poor: surveillance, resistance, and the limits of privacy. university of chicago press. haraway, d. (1988). situated knowledge: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. feminist studies, 14(3), 575–599. harney, s., & moten, f. (2013). the undercommons: fugitive planning and black study. autonomedia. harvey, a., & laplace, j. (2019a). duke mtmc is a dataset of surveillance camera footage of students on duke university campus. https://megapixels.cc/datasets/duke_mtmc/ harvey, a., & laplace, j. (2019b). megapixels: origins, ethics, and privacy implications of publicly available faces. https://megapixels.cc/ keyes, o. (2018). the misgendering machines: trans/hci implications of automatic gender recognition. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, 2(cscw), article 88. keyes, o., stevens, n., & wernimont, j. (2019, march 17). the government is using the most vulnerable people to test facial recognition software. slate. https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/facial-recognition-nist-verification-testingdata-sets-children-immigrants-consent.html lindabary, j. r., & corple, d. j. (2019). privacy for whom?: a feminist intervention in online research practice. information, communication & society, 22(10), 1447–1463. lingel, j. (2020). dazzle camouflage as queer counter conduct. european journal of cultural studies, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420902805 nissenbaum, h. (2010). privacy in context: technology, policy and the integrity of social life. stanford law books. ochigame, r. (2019, december 20). the invention of ethical ai: how big tech manipulates academia to avoid regulation. the intercept. https://theintercept.com/2019/12/20/mit-ethical-ai-artificialhttps://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/universities-record-students-campuses-research/592537/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/universities-record-students-campuses-research/592537/ https://megapixels.cc/datasets/duke_mtmc/ https://megapixels.cc/ https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/facial-recognition-nist-verification-testing-data-sets-children-immigrants-consent.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/facial-recognition-nist-verification-testing-data-sets-children-immigrants-consent.html https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1367549420902805 https://theintercept.com/2019/12/20/mit-ethical-ai-artificial-intelligence/?comments=1 critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) lindsay weinberg, 2020 10 intelligence/?comments=1 rule, j. b. (2019). contextual integrity and its discontents: a critique of helen nissenbaum’s normative arguments. policy & internet, 11(3), 260–279. sabati, s. (2019). upholding “colonial unknowing” through the irb: reframing institutional research ethics. qualitative inquiry, 25(9–10), 1056–1064. satisky, j. (2019, june 12). a duke study recorded thousands of students’ faces. now they’re being used all over the world. the chronicle. https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2019/06/duke-university-facial-recognitiondata-set-study-surveillance-video-students-china-uyghur shilton, k., zimmer, m., fiesler, c., narayanan, a., & metcalf, j. (2017, november 15). we’re awake—but we’re not at the wheel. medium. https://medium.com/pervadeteam/were-awake-but-we-re-not-at-the-wheel-7f0a7193e9d5 smith-doerr, l., & croissant, j. (2011). a feminist approach to university-industry relations: integrating theories of gender, knowledge, and capital. journal of women and minorities in science and engineering, 17(3), 251–269. stanley, j. a. (2019, may 22). uccs secretly photographed students to advance facial recognition technology. colorado springs independent. https://www.csindy.com/coloradosprings/uccs-secretly-photographed-students-toadvance-facial-recognition-technology/content?oid=19664437 wilder, c. s. (2013). ebony and ivy: race, slavery, and the troubled history of america’s universities. bloomsbury press. author bio dr. lindsay weinberg is a clinical assistant professor in the honors college at purdue university. her research and teaching are at the intersection of science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist studies, with an emphasis on the social and ethical impacts of digital media technology. she received her phd from the history of consciousness department at the university of california, santa cruz. https://theintercept.com/2019/12/20/mit-ethical-ai-artificial-intelligence/?comments=1 https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2019/06/duke-university-facial-recognition-data-set-study-surveillance-video-students-china-uyghur https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2019/06/duke-university-facial-recognition-data-set-study-surveillance-video-students-china-uyghur https://medium.com/pervade-team/were-awake-but-we-re-not-at-the-wheel-7f0a7193e9d5 https://medium.com/pervade-team/were-awake-but-we-re-not-at-the-wheel-7f0a7193e9d5 https://www.csindy.com/coloradosprings/uccs-secretly-photographed-students-to-advance-facial-recognition-technology/content?oid=19664437 https://www.csindy.com/coloradosprings/uccs-secretly-photographed-students-to-advance-facial-recognition-technology/content?oid=19664437 feminist research ethics and student privacy in the age of ai abstract notes references author bio toxic soldiers, flickering knowledges, and enlisted care: dispossession and environmental injustice morgan, a., & fortun, k. (2020). toxic soldiers, flickering knowledge, and enlisted care: dispossession and environmental injustice. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), 1-26 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © alli morgan and kim fortun, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license toxic soldiers, flickering knowledges, and enlisted care: dispossession and environmental injustice alli morgan rensselaer polytechnic institute morgaa2@rpi.edu kim fortun university of california, irvine kfortun@uci.edu abstract based on fieldwork with us veterans, this essay examines the production of “toxic subjects” through three types of toxic chemical exposures in the history of us soldiering: exposure to agent orange during the vietnam war, to a mix of contaminants that produced gulf war illness in the first gulf war, and to the burn pits used for waste disposal on bases throughout the us occupation of iraq and afghanistan. while all toxic subjects are at odds with established systems of medicine and law, toxic subjects in military formations are especially challenging. deeply entrenched ideas about soldiers’ able-bodied masculinity and readiness for sacrifice complicate engagement with toxic soldiers. programs of care offered by the us department of veterans affairs (va) are crucial but limited in their reach, as are the advocacy campaigns of veterans’ organizations. what we’ve described as the “flickering knowledges” of toxic subjects produce further complications. in concluding, we point to ways work with toxic soldiers extends how we think about environmental injustice, recognizing the importance of hermeneutic dispossession.1 special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 2 figure 1. jasper johns, flag (moratorium), 1969 http://www.jasper-johns.org/flag.jsp look briefly at jasper johns’ flag (moratorium) and one will see what appears to be the us flag, painted in army green and orange, with a small pin—or dare we say bullet?—hole at its center. yet glance away after staring at the painting, and one “sees” the us flag projected in its familiar red, white, and blue, as if materializing out of nowhere. the intensity of the specter directly correlates with how long the viewer stares at the original painting. some people can never see it. trying harder does not always work. sometimes, one just has to believe that someone else, differently positioned, even if slightly, has been able to catch the difference, the double reality. what the painting is remains unclear: is the primary image the orange and green version, or is it the traditional red, white, and blue? which do we remember? or is it the flicker itself that we recall and replay? once the double has been seen, it is difficult to unsee. one sees both images at once, in contestation. a variation of the famous duck–rabbit illusion, in which both a duck and a rabbit can be seen in the same illustration, the flag is multiple things at once. wittgenstein’s (1953) famous rumination on the duck–rabbit conundrum helps to further this point, explaining how viewers will first see either a duck or a rabbit, but cannot report seeing something that they have no frame of reference for. flag http://www.jasper-johns.org/flag.jsp special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 3 (moratorium) requires similar expertise, as the viewer only sees the illusion once they know to look for it or accidentally stumble upon it, and then they trust in what they see. viewers need—and are limited by—expert eyes. apprehending and experiencing toxic chemical exposure is similar, and this is one of our arguments here. like johns’s flag, toxic exposure presents in fleeting, illusive ways—to those exposed and to those responsible for their care and compensation. like the traditional red, white, and blue flag that flickers into view in johns’s flag (moratorium), toxic exposure is hard to see, validate, and endure. in this essay, we elaborate our understanding of how toxic chemical exposure produces “toxic subjects” at odds with established systems of medicine, law, and sense-making. toxic subjects in military formations face particular challenges.2 deeply entrenched ideas about soldiers’ able-bodied masculinity and readiness for sacrifice make toxic soldiers particularly difficult to account and care for. programs of care offered by the us department of veterans affairs (va) are crucial but limited in their reach, as are the advocacy campaigns of veterans’ organizations. collective engagement with toxic soldiers, and toxic subjects more generally, is practically and categorically difficult. often, people are exposed to many different hazards at once, in various concentrations, in varying amounts of time. individual susceptibility is also very variable, as are health outcomes. this variability is hard to capture in collective terms, especially when there is concerted effort to deny it. it is also hard to account for in science, biomedicine, and law.3 while the science of toxics has developed dramatically in recent decades (with very sobering results), it still fights for regulatory standing. toxic subjects are thus left largely on their own, out of sync with each other and the logics of the worlds they inhabit, producing characteristically late industrial forms of dispossession— failures of connection and care resulting from the operations of the very systems designed to provide such connection and care. the alienating effect is thus redoubled, coming both from overt denials of access to needed systems and from loss of trust in these systems; from the need to continue to work within systems known not to work and from everyday experiences of non-knowledge as knowledge. the truth constantly flickers in and out of view. in what follows, we describe the tangle of systems and dynamics that produce toxic soldiers and their dispossessions. drawing on the infrequently cited history of the subaltern as a military subject, we cast soldiers as toxic subjects and as subjects of environmental injustice.4 working with an especially literal instantiation of “the subaltern” (before gramsci or postcolonial scholars began leveraging the term, the term was used to describe lower ranked military special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 4 members) allows us to help toxic soldiers speak, so to speak, giving them “the possibility of metonymizing oneself” (spivak, 2012, p. 438)—the capacity to understand and experience their conditions collectively, politically, and culturally.5 toxic subjects, toxic soldiers completed in 1969 at the height of the us war in vietnam, flag (moratorium), like the war, presents in different ways—and its effects are unsettling.6 it wavers ontologically and ontology itself. this instability, we will argue here, is key to the character of “toxic subjects”—subjects, human and otherwise, that have been produced by harms that are degrading, often operating insidiously rather than overtly. working in ways akin to slow violence (nixon, 2011), toxic subjects are often constituted by the unspectacular, the invisible, the unrepresented. they are present, and not. our account here follows soldiers exposed to toxics in three us wars: agent orange during the vietnam war, the varied exposures of gulf war soldiers, and the exposures produced by large-scale burn pits in the us occupation of iraq and afghanistan.7 there are other important cases of toxic soldiering and military environmental injustice—wwi mustard gas exposure and toxic water supplies on us military bases today, for example. we focus on soldiers in vietnam, the gulf war, and in iraq and afghanistan because veterans themselves pieced these war experiences together, weaving important histories of government disavowal, illegibility, and dispossession.8 in 1969 it became widely known that the 2,4,5-t component of agent orange included dioxin, which was found to cause adverse health effects and birth outcomes in lab studies. in april 1970 the us government restricted use of dioxin, and therefore agent orange, in vietnam and the us. in vietnam, agent orange was used as a defoliant, sprayed from the air in mass amounts. the last official spray run by the us air force took place on 7 january 1971, though south vietnamese forces continued to spray the remaining stocks of agent blue and white throughout 1971 and 1972. despite the known risks of dioxin, the link between veteran illness and agent orange exposure was slow to formally materialize (institute of medicine, 1994). most often, soldiers were not officially informed about their exposures and risks but left to figure it out on their own. as rick, a vietnam veteran, tells us in the following interview excerpt, toxics come to take on multiple, mutable meanings: special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 5 we were just doused in it [agent orange]. if we had any idea that we’d be fighting this war for generations after we got home, i’d like to think that we’d have thought twice before we swam in it. my diabetes and prostate cancer are agent orange and now i’m wondering about my daughter’s issues...my buddy from the service was a victim of it [agent orange], but he didn’t know that was where all of his issues were coming from. if you think they were hiding the truth from us about it during the war, just look at how they’re hiding the truth from us agent orange guys now. in addition to a now common moniker for president donald trump, agent orange is a chemical, a commercial product, a cross-national experience, an illness, a class of veterans, and a metonym for cover-up and deception. even discursively, agent orange operates as toxin, unstable in substance and meaning, penetrating subjects in both anticipated and unexpected ways. like johns’s flag (moratorium), the image of agent orange flickers in and out of view, sometimes registering as an object of concern, other times, as a question. rick continues: i know i was exposed, i mean, we all were. but it’s hard for me to tell what’s from that and what’s just from getting older. is my diabetes from agent orange or is it because i’m overweight? it’s just hard for me to understand how we can tell for sure, or if it really matters. questions— about toxicity, exposure, and injury—persist across our three cases. consider peck, a veteran of the gulf war, in his early twenties, married, and wanting to start a family. it was 1995. instead of artillery fire, peck was hit with media fire—inundated with information suggesting that he and his family may suffer long-term health effects from exposures during his military service. information inundation came via the newly accessible internet, the nightly news, coverage by life and people magazines, from his own body. the data points were varied and contradictory. the military insisted there was no significant exposure to chemical or biological weapons during deployment in the gulf, that all drugs used in anticipation of exposure were safe and any illness among veterans was not statistically significant. posts on online message boards insisted otherwise. peck as toxic subject flickered in and out of view (k. fortun, 1999).9 nearly everything used and produced in the us occupation of iraq and afghanistan—from food waste to chemical drums to automotive parts to medical waste to batteries to human excrement—was thrown into a pit, doused with jet fuel, and incinerated, sometimes just feet away from where soldiers worked and slept. the pits were operated by the private company kellogg, brown, and root special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 6 (now kbr, inc.), a former subsidiary of halliburton, infamous in some circles as a war profiteer and for its role in the deepwater horizon oil disaster in the gulf of mexico (krauss, 2014; young, 2013). while burn pit exposure is often discussed as though it is a singular exposure, a singular toxin, the types of exposures varied from pit to pit and over time—pits were of different sizes, managed with different techniques, and burned different forms of refuse (garshick et al., 2019). such variability makes recognition of the exposure difficult, and collectivization for class action near impossible. as troops returned home in the mid-2000s with complaints including respiratory illnesses, gastrointestinal disorders, neurological problems, and cancers, formal department of defense (dod) and va response was slow to materialize. many veterans, too, were slow to see burn pit exposures as having enduring consequences. scott, for example, was not concerned about his exposures during or immediately after his three tours of duty. only after going to the hospital for an x-ray because of back pain following heavy lifting did doctors find a nodule on his lung. he remarked, “the doctors didn’t put it together. they asked me if i smoked, but that was about it.” only after seeing a facebook post from a member of his unit describing his own lung condition did scott consider that the nodule might be from his exposure to the burn pit in balad. today, he and his doctors wait, monitoring the nodule, anticipating what might come next, still unclear whether the nodule and burn pit exposure are connected. scott isn’t even sure the questions are worth asking: i’m not sure if it really matters. they say that the treatment wouldn’t look different, depending on what, if anything, it turns into. i don’t think it would give me much peace of mind to know that’s what it’s from—except unless they could tell me it wasn’t from that, and it’s genetic. that might give me information i would need. like the way veterans experience agent orange and gulf war illness, the health effects of burn pits flicker in and out of view; many veterans who know they were exposed wait for symptoms to emerge, while others we spoke with emphasize more immediate concerns: housing, reintegration, and post-traumatic stress symptoms, among others. toxic soldiers inevitably have a lot going on, complicating recognition of toxic exposure as a source of harm. flickering knowledges scott’s concern that his nodule is from a genetic condition, instead of the burn special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 7 pits, points to the intergenerational flicker of toxic harm, which also cuts across our cases. bruce, a sixty-eight-year-old draftee who served with the brown water navy from 1969 to 1970 tells us how his daughter’s concerns over the link between his agent orange exposure and her hip dysplasia changed his sense of what information is important, and how it should be shared: i never really made much of it [agent orange]. i did my best to put all of that stuff behind me once i got home and move forward. i didn’t talk about the war—i don’t think many of us did. so my kids never heard about where i was or anything until my daughter came to me and demanded to know. so i never thought about the exposure because i tried not to think about any of it. peck told us about a news story recounting how a baby was born without an ear and with a heart in the wrong place. he told us about his headaches, which he once would have ignored, and about a report from the us general accounting office about the use of a new kind of ammunition in the gulf: shells jacketed with depleted uranium. the skin rash, flickering in and out of view, lurking beneath the surface. the glossy november 1995 life magazine cover, asking if our country has abandoned them; the cover photo is of us army sgt. paul hanson and his twoyear-old son jayce, who has no arms. peck tracked these on his own, out of touch with fellow soldiers, not wanting to worry his wife. for scott, and other burn pit veterans inundated with similar media streams, these are nosebleeds, and facebook posts, and reports of skyrocketing cancer rates. they are dod memos and scientific studies—some produced by the va, some not—employing a dizzying array of study designs and nomenclature. for rick, these are images of grandchildren with spina bifida, reports of still ongoing agent orange cleanup in vietnam, and the diabetes that will always remain a question. toxic soldiers strain to hear, reach for sense, and pay attention to a flurry of input. to a website with eyewitness reports of herds of dead animals, which even flies would not touch. to academic studies of skyrocketing asthma rates and failed physical fitness tests among troops. to reports of nerve and mustard gas detections by czech forces, which were never confirmed. to news coverage of the effects of agent orange on vietnamese children. to claims, consistently denied by military officials, of mass burials of thousands of iraqi bodies allegedly contaminated by chemical or biological weapons—what some called operation desert sword. to missing medical records, including accounts of adverse reactions to anthrax vaccinations. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 8 in isolation, any one of these “grains of salt,” as peck referred to them, would not have seemed significant. it was the cumulative effect that got to him, and our other veteran interlocutors. every new piece of information sends them online, where they find another and another. environmental health threats come through new media. toxic soldiers are caught between different ways of seeing and left largely on their own to figure things out. there is communicative dissonance without a metanarrative to resolve the noise. systematic chemical exposures coupled with systematic distrust. the exposures and its effects were structurally produced, but lived out individually, making it difficult to organize as a class. military subjects we first met greg, an army sniper who lost his leg in an improvised explosive device blast, at a ski camp for amputees. funded by the va, greg made his way to new hampshire from alabama to see if he might enjoy skiing and possibly—and more importantly—be good at skiing. the va will provide monthly stipends and cover equipment and training costs for disabled veterans competing at the national level in adaptive sports (shpigel, 2018), making this an attractive opportunity for eligible veterans. camps like this are high energy displays of bodily capability, a place for the injured to reassert strength and prove themselves “recovered.” veterans are competing against one another not only for a place on the team but for the financial and social recognition that comes with it. the camps are sites of intense competition and masculine bravado. greg fit right in, or seemed to. throughout his recovery—surgeries, being fit for a prosthesis, physical therapy, and at the ski camp—greg had a cough that he could not seem to shake. he explained, “they [clinicians and physical therapists] would tell me, ‘your body is settling out. it’s adjusting. you’ve been through a lot.’ they made the cough almost normal.” greg’s amputation eclipsed any concern for what seemed like a rather banal cough. when he was diagnosed with constrictive bronchiolitis—a degenerative lung condition—greg’s diagnosis ushered him into the ranks of the thousands of us veterans of the post-9/11 wars in iraq and afghanistan thought to be suffering from the effects of burn pits, though the diagnosis was slow to cohere. greg’s va physicians were hesitant to draw any connection between the pits and his diagnosis. he describes how many of the physicians he encountered had not even special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 9 heard of the burn pits; only after showing them videos of the massive pits on his phone did they seem to recognize the enormity of the exposures. “i think when i told them ‘burn pits’ they were thinking those small barrels people burn household trash in,” he says. “but once they could see that the guys used bulldozers to move the waste around, that the pit was that enormous, i think it became harder to rule out.” greg’s physicians eventually grasped that there could be a connection between burn pit exposure and his illness. broader va and dod recognition has been more of a fight. as greg’s story shows, contemporary military medicine is best known for advances in orthopedic and rehabilitative medicine, dealing with the “signature injuries” of war (terry, 2017). amputations are indexical; traumatic brain injuries are also common. the bodies of injured soldiers are advertised as displays of heroism and patriotism, capturing public fascination with the latest in prosthetic innovation. in these cases, the va is oriented by a “sports model” that “emphasizes achieving a high level of physical functioning” (messinger, 2009, p. 2131) in war recovery. with a goal of returning soldiers to duty—or at the very least, molding them into adaptive athletes, what susan wendell (2001) might term the “healthy disabled” (p. 19)—military medicine reinscribes masculine notions of ability and service. beth linker’s (2011) history of military rehabilitation in wwi provides perspective, describing how contemporary rehabilitation sciences developed, shifting from focus on the bodies of disabled children to returning the injured bodies of veterans to full function, in what she calls a “rehabilitation ethic” (p. 1). like other highly visible biomedical campaigns, this was an effort to reestablish productivity and social order: rehabilitation was thus a way to restore order after the chaos of the war by (re)making men into producers of capital. since wage earning often defined manhood, rehabilitation was, in essence a process of making a man manly…as now, rehabilitation holds out the promise that the wounds of war can be healed (and thus forgotten) on the national as well as individual level. (linker, 2011, p. 7) like linker, zoë wool (2015) argues that the injured veteran body represents a threat to the state, a visible reminder of the failures and presence of war, which must be remade. the injured veteran has to be fixed. caring for toxic soldiers is less straightforward. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 10 military bodies are almost universally young, male, and able-bodied, reflective of the ideals of the state to which they belong, or what meira weiss (2004) refers to as the “chosen body” in the israeli army, exemplars of health, physical fitness, masculinity, national purity, and strength. toxic exposure complicates these fixed notions of gender and strength, often registering—quite literally—as weakness and incapacity, unsettling soldiers’ occupational capacity and roles as providers for the family (waldman, 2011).10 in the flickering, recognition of toxicity works against dominant constructs of both masculinity and injury, an acknowledgement that the soldiering body is penetrable and vulnerable (chen, 2012; roberts, 2017). military medical and compensation systems privilege certain injuries—certain here, meaning “known for sure” and “specific.” toxic exposures typically do not register as certain in either sense. military medical systems are geared to apprehend and attend to visible, traumatic injuries that demonstrate clear and immediate cause-and-effect—without the diagnostic messiness or symptom latency so common with toxic exposures. the body of the toxic soldier—and toxic subject, more broadly—does not have the privilege of such apparent physical injury, or linearity from exposure to symptom. unlike those injuries that can be “healed” through a high dose of advanced prosthetic technology and sport, toxic injury is instead more of an illness. illness, unlike injury, is frequently contested as it often cannot be apprehended through the modes of visualization and localization central to clinical medical practice. historically coded as feminine, illnesses challenge military constructs of strength, duty, and masculinity. toxic illnesses, in particular, are met with skepticism for the ways they defy conventional biomedical logics (alaimo, 2010; murphy, 2006) and are further feminized through associations with “hysteria” and “psychosomaticism” (m. fortun & bernstein, 1998; murphy, 2006).11 while the overtly injured soldier may be seen as worthy of state-sponsored benefits, the toxic soldier is frequently seen as undeserving in his supposed malingering, and further feminized through his dependence on the state (bulmer & eichler, 2017). like forms of invisible disability, illnesses related to military toxic exposure challenge entrenched modes of clinical and social apprehension. without hegemonic markers of disability—accepted diagnoses, use of highly visible assistive devices, and so on—invisible disability does not register socially or biomedically. those with these conditions are engaged in a constant dance of deciding when and how to “come out” to others about their illness status (myers, 2004; samuels, 2003; siebers, 2004). special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 11 cal montgomery (2001) points out that nominalizing some disabilities as “invisible” may simply be a convenient way to dismiss the unfamiliar, reentrenching clinical norms that link visibility with legitimacy. while respecting this argument, we maintain that the epistemic instability produced by toxics is key and important to call out. it is not a matter of seeing or not, of being visible or not, but a constant shifting between these states. in this sense, unlike injuries, toxic exposures are “apparitional” (price, 2010, p. 304), flickering in and out of view and requiring modes of apprehension beyond the “making visible” that is key to clinical medicine. enlisted care veterans suffering from unexplained symptoms frequently face skepticism from practitioners, who often suggest that their suffering is “only psychosomatic.” only upon discovering—through connections to fellow veterans in formal organizations or on social media—that others have similar symptoms or experiences, do veterans begin to understand and experience their symptoms through a toxics lens. the dod and va have not met them halfway. in order to obtain care— deeply coupled with compensation—veterans must be injured in very specific ways that align etiologically and temporally with dod and va standards. in 1921 congress first established the first “presumptive illness” list that linked presumptions of service connection to particular conditions, beginning with tuberculosis and psychosis. while presumptive illness lists can appear to ease the burdens on veterans who are seeking to “prove” service connection, getting a condition on the list is a long and politically and scientifically contentious process. in 1991 the agent orange act (p.l. 102-4) established a presumption of service connection for diseases associated with agent orange. under this act, the va was required to contract with the institute of medicine (iom) (now the national academy of medicine) to conduct a scientific review of the evidence linking certain medical conditions to agent orange exposure. this process, of course, depends first on the existence of peer-reviewed scientific publications, which are then reviewed according to notions of what defines “good evidence” before recommendations are sent to the va secretary. in this complicated nesting of bureaucratic bodies, evidence is often fraught with politics. the national academy of medicine plays a prominent role in the collection, curation, and dissemination of research data, facing pressure from both above and below in the process.12 notably, being diagnosed with a listed condition is not enough for many veterans: special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 12 in preparing and submitting their claims, they are further challenged by the poor recordkeeping practices in many military base clinics, and many remain unable to find and access their service records at all (yarborough, 2013). establishing a condition as service-connected also hinges upon a veteran proving that they served in a particular location at a particular time. for many veterans (particularly pre-9/11), locating documentation to support their service location proves difficult. further, some locations fall almost completely out of view. “blue water veterans” (sailors serving off the coast of vietnam), for example, have only recently succeeded in gaining recognition for agent orange exposure because there were no official records of agent orange being used off the coast, despite hefty anecdotal evidence (raghavendran, 2019). veterans with health conditions that do not align with narrow understandings of wartime injury face enormous challenges in accessing care and compensation. they are, literally and figuratively, subaltern, lacking access to the dominant discourse that would render their illness recognizable. while “atomic veterans” called for recognition after exposure during wwii, vietnam-era veterans exposed to agent orange were the first large-scale veteran group to seek government recognition for environmental exposure and associated illness.13 those exposed to agent orange have suffered a wide array of health impacts, ranging from chloracne to type 2 diabetes. currently, only fourteen conditions are on the presumptive illness list for exposure to agent orange, but advocates push for dozens more to be included. in many cases, the science remains incomplete or undone despite advocacy work by veterans and veterans’ organizations. in other cases, such as hypertension, the va refused to include conditions despite the national academy’s finding of a strong causal link with exposure. former secretary of veterans affairs eric shinseki claimed that the economic impacts of including hypertension on the presumptive list did not enter his decision making, for example, claiming instead a lack of robust evidence (daniel, 2010). veterans describe this as “delay, deny, hope we die,” and see the va as refusing to include conditions because of not wanting to pay for care and back disability claims. for conditions that do not appear on the list, the burden of proof falls on the veteran—or oftentimes the veteran’s widow, given the slow speed at which these claims are processed. veterans detail how they develop and share lists of physicians known to advocate for veterans with toxic exposures and learn to find special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 13 and decipher scientific literature, which they include as evidence in claims filed to the va. this advocacy helps to settle the flicker, even if only momentarily. american legion and vfw ladies auxiliary groups were integral to the early dissemination of agent orange health information and where many veterans we spoke with first recognized that their symptoms might be related to their service. veterans’ organizations continue to be important spaces where people learn to navigate the va claims process. once claims arrive at the va, they face uncertain futures, with enormous backlogs that are each assessed individually by different reviewers. no data is kept regarding claims, and the wait for an appeal hearing after a claim is rejected could take decades. while establishing service-connected injury alone is difficult in these cases, veterans must also prove where and when they served, especially difficult for vietnam-era veterans who were affected by the 1973 national personnel records center fire, which destroyed or damaged 16 to 18 million service records for service from 1912 to 1965 (stender & walker, 1974). the process has repeated with burn pit veterans. it was a big deal when senators amy klobuchar and thom tillis crossed partisan lines in 2016 to declare, “today we have a new agent orange: burn pits.” though the comparison between agent orange and burn pit exposure had been made in veteran web groups and in small town newspapers for years, klobuchar and tillis’s (2016) fox news op-ed gained enormous traction among military and civilian communities, rekindling sentiments of uncertainty, cover-up, and suffering even while celebrated. while the bureaucratic barriers agent orange and burn pits veterans face are quite similar, their initial exposures actually have very little in common. when we asked the leader of a prominent burn pits advocacy group why the comparison to agent orange and burn pits was so frequently drawn, rather than gulf war illness perhaps, they replied, “everyone knows that agent orange was a giant cover-up. the government decided to spray even when they had evidence it was harmful. burn pits are the same thing.” the comparison to agent orange is a strategic one. while its effects are varied and far-reaching, agent orange remains relatively well bounded—a singular agent with a known chemical formula, it can be studied in the laboratory and pinned down. connecting burn pit exposures to agent orange is a way to suggest that burn pit exposures are as straightforward as agent orange, with a well-recognized and singular source. reference to gulf war illness remains contested, unstable, flickering: exposures were too numerous, inconsistent, and poorly documented, and the effects too varied and poorly understood. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 14 in 2009 the va commissioned the national academy of medicine to conduct a study of the burn pits—using an approach similar to one used to assess the health effects of agent orange. two years later, the commission reported that there was not adequate data to conclude “whether exposures to emissions from the burn pit at joint base balad have caused long-term health effects” (institute of medicine, 2011, p. 114). like similar failed iom studies of agent orange and gulf war illness, the study was not based on air samples from the site of exposure, but on data from comparative populations—in this case, a “risk assessment analysis” of firefighters and incinerator workers. while soldiers and civilian physicians registered concerns over the health impacts of the pits, official military concern over the pits outside of the iom study was silenced. in a 2006 memorandum, air force bioenvironmental engineer lt. col. darrin curtis wrote, “in my professional opinion, there is an acute health hazard for individuals. there is also the possibility for chronic health hazards associated with the smoke” (curtis & elliott, 2006, p. 1). physician and chief of aerospace medicine lt. col. james elliott concurred and added, “in my professional opinion, the known carcinogens and respiratory sensitizers released into the atmosphere by the burn pit present both an acute and a chronic health hazard to our troops and the local population” (curtis & elliott, 2006, p. 2). lt. col. curtis’s memorandum was not made public until a 2011 congressional inquiry into the burn pits, which laid ground for legislation to establish a burn pit registry. public law 112 was signed into law on 10 january 2013 with bipartisan and veteran support, requiring the va to establish a burn pit registry. veterans walked us through trying to sign up for the registry. one repeatedly received an error message when he attempted to log in. another found that he could not even reach the landing page—across various browsers; onand off-base, the registry page refused to load. technical issues aside, the registry still faces harsh criticism for the way it makes the burn pit data unactionable. the categories for inclusion left out soldiers who built their own pits to burn waste, leaving them unable to register in every sense. many veterans we spoke with described how the registry asked questions about smoking and non-military sources of toxic exposure. “i can’t not put that i smoked, because then it wouldn’t be accurate,” said one veteran exposed to the burn pits. “but if i do say that i smoked, won’t they not be able to see beyond that? that would be an easy cause to pin any sort of respiratory issue on, i would imagine.” special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 15 in the national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine’s most recent 2017 report, they conclude that the burn pit registry “has limited value for improving individual patient care” (p. 7) because it consists entirely of voluntary and self-reported data. to really establish the connection, according to the report, robust epidemiological studies are needed, but have not yet been done. such studies are slow to design, fund, and analyze. some veterans wait hopefully on the va’s judgments, just waiting for the science and data to align with what they already know to be true. others have more questions, less confidence, hoping the va will confirm their suspicions and help to settle the flicker effect: knowing, but not for sure and consistently, what is going on. others dismiss the va altogether, unable to shake the feeling that the country they fought for has now turned its back. these differences complicate collective organizing. toxic organizing as double bind susie kilshaw (2006, 2009) describes how the category of gulf war syndrome gave uk troops a way to think, talk about, and organize in response to their health problems.14 gulf war syndrome gave them an identity. veterans’ organizations played a prominent role, helping build and consolidate a coherent illness narrative, supported by a consistent disease model (kilshaw, 2006, 2009). such organizations, now mobilized through facebook and other social media platforms, continue to play critical roles.15 across our three cases, veterans’ organizations are key, but also paradoxical. success in pinning down, naming, and officially listing toxic exposure can also have a discounting effect: since toxic exposures cannot, in fact, be pinned down, naming them as such productively leaves out part of the experience and pain of toxic exposure. nominalization is thus called for and limiting.16 toxic subjects need ways to tack between these. veteran organizing has also been important in burn pit recognition. unlike vietnam-era veterans who predominantly relied on in-person meetings, veterans with more recent exposures have connected online. they formed large networks on social media and launched youtube channels to document their medical struggles. as they began to die, the media began to feature their stories, frequently asking why the government was not doing anything to help them. like the gulf war veterans at the center of kilshaw’s (2009) study, burn pit veterans commonly measure and compare their injuries against a standard of fitness, or rather, the deterioration of fitness. dr. anthony szema, one of the few physicians (a pulmonologist) who has publicly advocated for burn pits veterans, special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 16 describes how burn pits first registered as a problem with him when he noticed that his waiting room—once filled with wwii and vietnam-era veterans—was filled with veterans in their twenties struggling to pass their fitness tests upon returning from deployment in afghanistan and iraq. in one line of analysis and discussion, burn pit veterans focus on a multitude of symptoms and conditions in order to convey the magnitude of exposures. in another line of analysis, they work to force their conditions into officially recognized categories. diagnosis of constrictive bronchiolitis, a degenerative lung condition that can only be explained by toxic exposure, illustrates how the process works. unlike the leukemias, meningiomas, asthmas, and neurological conditions believed to be caused by burn pit exposure, constrictive bronchiolitis cannot be explained by age, behavior, or simple chance. constrictive bronchiolitis is also a dream condition for advocacy groups as it is diagnosed through “objective” means—lung biopsies provide definitive proof of the condition—unlike the selfreported symptoms that factor into the diagnosis of many other conditions ascribed to burn pits exposure. while these groups seek to advance this diagnosis in part as proof of the other, more varied, conditions, the effort can be counterproductive in that it re-establishes injury as that which can be seen through a neat alignment between diagnostic category and objective biomarker. while a serious condition without a cure, constrictive bronchiolitis itself is not fatal, unlike many of the murkier conditions thought to be the effects of burn pits. various veterans groups have also responded to the failure of the va’s burn pit registry by establishing their own. alternative registries remedy some of the issues encountered in the va registry, like technical issues with logging on and veterans stopping the survey after it asked about smoking and other non-servicerelated toxic exposure. but the alternative registries have other issues that undercut their usability in different ways. hosted on unsecure sites like survey monkey and google forms, without the research ethics approvals expected in academic studies, the data in alternative registries will rarely ever be accepted by the va or other administrative bodies. but they still have value for veterans, providing important points of reference for comparative discussion among veterans, helping them see themselves in collective terms. dispossessions and environmental injustice soldiers exposed to agent orange and the burn pits of iraq and afghanistan. soldiers sent to the marshall islands in the 1970s to clean up after the atomic bomb testing—who have not been treated as “atomic veterans” (philipps, 2017). special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 17 service women who have “shocking” rates of infertility, according to a survey conducted by the service women’s action network, though the military itself has never reported infertility rates (jowers, 2018). all of these are toxic subjects in the multidimensional sense we have presented here: exposed to both toxic chemicals and the discounting and disavowals of biomedicine; exposed to the communicative dissonance and cultural insensitivities that scramble efforts to make environmental sense. they are also toxic soldiers, and are thus doubly exposed to the deeply cultural, as well as biophysical and political, difficulties of environmental stress, combined with the reifications of able-bodied masculinity that power and enroll people in military service. toxic subjects—and toxic soldiers, in particular—are sentinels of late industrialism, embodying problems that are produced by modern, capitalist, industrial orders, but are not recognized and governed by them (k. fortun, 2012, 2014). finding ways to think with and care for toxic subjects poses considerable conceptual, cultural, and political challenges—and shows how such challenges intersect. formulaic schemes that give toxic subjects standing in biomedicine, law, and institutions like the va are critical. but they are also alienating, working because they delimit what has occurred. exclusion—and the daily work of resisting it—produces profound disaffection and dispossession. ironically, this alienation easily becomes viral, inciting veteran subjects who are “against the system,” even though they desperately need a systemic va response. “it was like salt in the wound,” the wife of an army veteran suffering from a burn pits-related cancer tells us. “first to go to war and have your country poison you, and then for them to tell you that it’s all in your head and not provide care and compensation.” the sense that the real harm from exposure comes through the va and dod’s disavowal of the harm is a common sentiment among the veterans and families we work with—and another way toxic soldiering has a flicker effect, with a wavering, constantly unstable understanding of what is going on and who can be trusted. some veterans locate responsibility with the dod, others with kbr, and others with individual commanders. many veterans tell us that they knew going into combat that they could get hurt—and often even expected it. what they did not anticipate was that the harm would be at the hands of their “own government.” “this was the worst kind of friendly fire,” one veteran said. “first, they knew what they were exposing us to, then they covered it up. but to then tell us that it’s not real is the biggest slight.” toxic soldiers encounter and embody many problems and many forms of special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 18 injustice, including forms of what miranda fricker (2007) has called “hermeneutic injustice” (pp. 147-149): injustice produced through inadequate access to sensemaking resources.17 hermeneutic injustices are failures of interpretive capacity. toxics recurrently and systematically produce such failures, operating culturally as well as biochemically, economically, and politically. toxic subjects are subaltern, and toxic soldiers doubly so. working and thinking with toxic soldiers points to dynamics of environmental injustice that are especially hard to pin down. environmental injustice is intersectional, produced through the interlacing of many kinds of injustice— many, like toxics, operating quietly and insidiously. economic, spatial, and procedural injustice combine to produce racial injustice, for example, in turn producing health injustice: racialized bodies, without access to medical care or legal redress. environmental injustice is a cumulative effect. hermeneutic injustice is often part of environmental injustice, synergizing with other exclusions and exposures. attending to toxic soldiers—and to toxic subjects more generally— thus points work toward environmental justice in new directions, calling for fundamentally new ways of thinking about categories, classes, and ways of putting people and politics together.18 environmental injustice is drawn out as a cultural and interpretive problem. johns’s flag (moratorium) can be thought of as a banner, pointing (in maddening ways, “mad” used in all senses of the term) to the limits of established ways of seeing many contemporary problems—to ways modern realities are at odds with modern knowledge formations. toxic subjects, and especially toxic soldiers, call this out. notes 1 supplementary material is available here: https://disaster-stsnetwork.org/content/toxic-soldiers-catalyst-supplementary-material 2 alli morgan did fieldwork and interviews with us veterans and veteran organizations from 2017 to 2019, focusing on struggles for recognition of exposure to agent orange during the vietnam war and to the burn pits used in the us occupation of afghanistan and iraq. morgan also has extensive experience working alongside physically injured veterans recovering through participation in adaptive sport. kim fortun has studied “toxic subjects” since the early 1990s, first focused on the 1984 chemical plant disaster in bhopal, india and victims’ struggles for legal recognition before courts in india and the united states. she first began theorizing “toxic subjects” per se through her writing about gulf war veterans, explicating how their chemical and new media exposures combined in forceful https://disaster-sts-network.org/content/toxic-soldiers-catalyst-supplementary-material https://disaster-sts-network.org/content/toxic-soldiers-catalyst-supplementary-material special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 19 ways. we combine our research material and analyses here, writing in terms of “we” creatively conceived. 3 toxicologist linda birnbaum, director of the us national institute of environmental health sciences for over a decade, has emphasized the challenge of variability in environmental health. she’s also emphasized that the trouble will only get worse, and not only because of politics. dealing with perand polyfluoroalkyl substances (pfas), a group of chemicals of growing concern today, will—according to birnbaum—“make dioxins look easy” (hiar, 2019). 4 ludden (2002) describes how the term subaltern was first applied to peasants and later lower ranked military members, only later used by gramsci to describe class struggle. spivak (1990) describes the military connection this way: i like the word “subaltern” for one reason. it is truly situational. ‘subaltern’ began as a description of a certain rank in the military. the word was used under censorship by gramsci: he called marxism “monism,” and was obliged to call the proletarian “subaltern.” that word, used under duress, has been transformed into the description of everything that doesn’t fall under class analysis. i like that, because it has no theoretical rigor. (p. 141) 5 also see spivak’s (2004) lecture on this point, where she elaborates on how “to create the conditions of possibility for metonymizing oneself, for making oneself, even better, a synecdoche, a part of a whole.” 6 watson (2018) explains how ““flag” at its simplest promotes the history you were taught to revere, the stars and stripes celebrating "liberty and justice for all." but beneath is the darker, deeper history of injustice and inequality…” (para. 11) 7 anthropologists kenneth macleish and zoë wool (2018) have also done ethnographic research with us soldiers with burn pit exposures, extending earlier work focused on the everyday lives of us military members making (k. t. macleish, 2013) and recovering from (wool, 2015) war. 8 a retired air force environmental engineer explained to us why these three cases are often invoked by veterans and researchers as a set: each war has a corresponding toxic exposure. while you’re right that the exposures [agent orange and burn pits] aren’t comparable on a toxicological level, we need to keep reminding physicians and the va special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 20 and congress that every generation will face a war with an environmental health catastrophe. once they begin to learn to anticipate that, then we won’t be waiting for decades for studies and healthcare. importantly, this quote helps us to understand that while the quality of burn pits exposures may be more akin to those faced by world trade center first responders (falvo, osinubi, sotolongo, & helmer, 2015) than those of vietnam or gulf war veterans, drawing a comparison to these other cohorts of toxic soldiers is necessary in obtaining political and social recognition. 9 passages of this article about the experience of “peck” as a gulf war veteran are drawn from kim fortun’s 1999 article. 10 susie kilshaw (2009) describes how her veteran interlocutors refer to endocrine and rheumatic conditions as “female diseases” (p. 178). she also describes how masculine reproduction is challenged by the impotency and sometimes “overly potent” semen experienced by veterans with toxic illness (kilshaw, 2007). 11 anna mollow’s (2011) account of environmental illness (ei)—another name for multiple chemical sensitivity—is illustrative of the double bind of claiming toxic illness. 12 a veteran and nurse-researcher explains her experience navigating burn pits data streams: the va is really savvy. like with agent orange, they will constantly repeat that “we need more studies” and “there isn’t yet definitive evidence.” but once there is evidence, once studies have been done, they find many reasons to throw it out. the sample sizes weren’t big enough or the smallest inconsistencies mean that the whole study isn’t admissible. so then they call for more studies, and eventually at some point there will be a study that says that there’s no correlation, and that’s what they focus on. they’re also really good at using how complicated the exposures are as a means of throwing everything out. they’ll say that the ambient air quality was terrible—which it certainly was, no one is arguing about that—so that means that the pits can’t be the cause. 13 wwi veterans were the first to formally fight for payment for wartime service, arguing that they made less abroad than their counterparts who had been stationed on the home front during the war (dickson & allen, 2004). special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) alli morgan & kim fortun, 2020 21 14 notably, kilshaw (2014) also documents ways conflicting accounts from british and american defense agencies (on possible exposure to sarin gas as the source of their injuries, for example), contributed to soldiers’ anxieties—contributing to what we highlight here as the flicker-effect of toxic exposure (like johns’s flag). 15 collective veteran action works well when organized around specific weapons deployed in war. terry (2017), for example, describes how the “signature” injuries of wars in iraq and afghanistan result from the preponderance of improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades in these conflicts, while shah (2017) examines what counts as a weapon in war. weapons clearly produce injury, in turn creating fairly clear paths to recognition, care, and compensation. 16 collective and coherent illness narratives about toxic subjects can be thought of as a form of “strategic essentialism” (spivak, 1988, p. 13). 17 fricker (2007) explains that unequal power relations “can skew shared hermeneutical resources so that the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on…whereas the powerless are more likely to find themselves having some social experiences through a glass darkly,” with “at best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render [their experiences] intelligible” (p. 148). see also lorraine code’s (2008) review of fricker’s book. 18 this essay focuses on difficulties faced by us toxic soldiers. it is important to note that civilian populations are also affected by war-related exposures and are almost always left out of scientific, media, and popular discourses about these (bonds, 2016). compensation schemes designed to address civilian exposures— the us energy employees occupational illness compensation program act and the us radiation exposure act, for example—should also be analyzed in cultural and political terms. references alaimo, s. 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(2004). the chosen body: the politics of the body in israeli society. stanford, ca: stanford university press. wendell, s. (2001). unhealthy disabled: treating chronic illnesses as disabilities. hypatia, 16(4), 17-33. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2001.tb00751.x wittgenstein, l. (1953). philosophical investigations. oxford: basil blackwell ltd. wool, z. h. (2015). after war: the weight of life at walter reed. durham, nc: duke university press. yarborough, w. (2013). undocumented triumph: gulf war operational records management. the journal of military history, 77(4), 1427-1438. young, a. (2013). former halliburton subsidiary received $39.5 billion in iraq-related contracts over the past decade. business insider. retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/halliburton-company-got-395billion-iraq-2013-3 author bios alli morgan received her phd in science and technology studies at rensselaer polytechnic institute in 2020. her work examines the politics and practices of clinical diagnosis in the us. kim fortun is a professor in the university of california irvine’s department of anthropology. her research and teaching focus on environmental risk and disaster, data practices and politics, and experimental ethnographic methods and research design. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2001.tb00751.x https://www.businessinsider.com/halliburton-company-got-395billion-iraq-2013-3 tikka, heidi. 2021. “the body, the threshold, the cut: the aesthetics and ethics of measuring in interactive media art.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–7. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © heidi tikka, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license the body, the threshold, the cut: the aesthetics and ethics of measuring in interactive media art heidi tikka aalto university, school of arts, design and architecture heidi.tikka@aalto.fi abstract new media artists working on interactive installations often rely on different monitoring techniques, such as variable sensors in the design and the production of responsive environments and objects. in this short commentary, i will inquire into my installation mother, child (2011/2000) to address a new media art practice as productive alignment of agencies at the interface. the term body-sensor coperformance is used to foreground both the performative nature and the fundamental integrity of the technology and the body in interactive art. i will suggest that the setting of threshold values for different measuring operations can be understood as the boundary-making process, through which the installation feeds off the embodied liveliness of its audiences for its responsive actions. drawing on karen barad’s work, these thresholds can be thematized as agential cuts. a number of specific examples in using sensors for interactivity are then addressed in order to inquire into the ways in which the questions of ethics and aesthetics entangle in creative and collaborative labors for mother, child. commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) heidi tikka, 2021 2 figure 1. mother, child (2011/2000) interactive installation at wäinö aaltonen museum of art, turku, 2014. agencies at the interface interactive art is a domain of experimental art practice that investigates and imagines new kinds of relations between humans and machines. these explorations are often staged as responsive environments or other entities that react to the actions of the visitors in museum and gallery spaces. in interactive installations these digitally produced others give an appearance of aliveness, as they seem to respond in meaningful ways to their audiences. how are these essentially inanimate others animated in and through human-machine interactions? i will suggest, by inquiring into the use of monitoring techniques in interactive art, that we, in a sense, endow these others with our embodied aliveness. the performativity of the human-machine relation is the key for addressing the aesthetic and ethical questions of measuring in interactive art. my own media art practice spans several decades of experimental work on different media and sensor technologies. my installations are often dramaturgically orchestrated as encounters between the embodied human visitors and the liminal others, configured as assemblages of images, material reminiscences of human bodies, collaborative labors, media devices, sensors, and code. i conceive of these installations as relational environments in which visitors enact the dramaturgical event of an encounter with these heterogenous commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) heidi tikka, 2021 3 installation elements. as different kinds of sensors play a significant role in these enactments, the encounters could be called body-sensor co-performances to foreground both the performative nature and the fundamental integrity of the technology and the body in interactive art. this art form then is about enacted, unstable, and ephemeral events, rather than fixed, movable objects. here i want to pursue the line of questions and observations that touch on the agency of the sensors in my installations. how are the operations of measuring, monitoring, and tracking understood in media art practice? my understanding of the artistic work and the use of measuring technologies in it is informed by donna haraway’s (1997, 8) account of figurations as material-semiotic arrangements. the development of a new installation always involves an orchestration of the relational interactions for particular technical elements, materials, and embodied processes that resonate across these relations, and by doing so, convey meaning. the dramaturgically active entities in my installations can be understood as figurations, consisting of an amalgam of material, technical, and narrative capacities. the question how the agency of a particular kind of sensor links with these other capacities is then of great importance in artistic design. the site of design and development in media art practice is the interface. following lucy suchman’s (2007) work on human-machine reconfigurations, i conceive of the interface as the site of distributed agencies, heterogeneity, and multiplicity of enactments “objectified as persons and machines” (268). thus, in my work, the entire installation and the way it affords the unfolding of an interactive dramaturgical event constitutes a human-machine interface. it is necessary to point out that these interfaces are not high-tech, but rather are the outcome of independent art practice, which relies on low-cost, off-the-shelf electronics and other materials. the creative challenge then is to figure out inventive uses for the simplest of devices, such as sensors measuring movement, temperature, pressure, or electric conductance. but it is perhaps because of the simplicity of these technical parts that i have come to inquire into their performativity. what happens in the process of measurement at the interface, and how does each sensor enact an interactive event in its particular way? why are sensors so important in interactive installations? in the dramaturgies of interactive art, the machine as other, whether configured and represented as an environment, an animal, a plant, or a child, as in my installation mother, child (2000/2011), has to respond to the actions of a visitor in meaningful ways. the cues to these responses, which from the point of view of the machine can be commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) heidi tikka, 2021 4 understood as state changes, are taken from the actions of visitors. mother, child installation consists of a responsive video projection in which a visitor, once seated, and holding a white fabric as a projection surface, may enact a relation to something, which appears to be more than a moving image of a child but less than a sentient being. the child reacts to the intrusions of the audience by crying, and to the actions of the visitor, who holds the projection fabric, by laughing, nursing, and finally falling asleep. what we experience as the liveliness of the child, his moods and the rhythm of his bodily motility, is in a sense, borrowed from the audience. sensors are important because they translate human motility into code, so that in the case of mother, child, for instance, the body-sensor coperformance can be understood to animate the actions of the child and when doing so create the appearance of aliveness. setting thresholds the machine, which in the case of mother, child is a combination of a custommade hardware switch, a video tracking system, and an interactive moving image playback system, sees these actions as if from an extremely narrow keyhole (suchman 2007, 11). the state changes of the system are controlled by two monitoring systems: a switch that generates the data of the visitor’s presence, and the video tracking software that generates data of the motility of both the audience and the visitor. these two data flows provide the necessary information for the interactive dramaturgy as soon as the threshold values, the key points that instruct the system of state changes, are determined. an example of how such a state change would appear to a visitor of the mother, child installation is that if the “child is crying,” the software plays a moving image sequence of a “nursing child” after the visitor has been swaying the projection fabric to “calm the child.” the threshold values then constitute a direct link between the measuring of the data and the narrative of the installation. there are two observations that i want to address in regard to these threshold values in data flows. first, the setting of a threshold value is never innocent, as a threshold operation is always a boundary-making process, and as such implies the question of ethics. the making of a threshold includes certain values as the condition for an unfolding event, and excludes others, under which that event will never occur. and since these thresholds are determined into the data flows generated in the body-sensor co-performances of the audience interactions, they impose these exclusive operations to the participating bodies and their particular properties. for instance, in the first version of mother, child we used a pressuresensitive pad for determining whether someone was seated, which was the commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) heidi tikka, 2021 5 condition for the “waking up of the child.” the pad functioned as a simple on/off switch. but because of the way the seat was constructed, the pad was not sensitive enough to register the weight of a child. on the other hand, it was not exclusive enough because a bag full of heavy books thrown onto the seat would have turned the switch on, betraying the narrative logic of the installation. in the next version, a capacitive sensor was used instead. it registers a change in the electric conductance of the circuit in the presence of a fluid with a sufficient volume, such as the human body. this made it possible to determine the threshold values to include the bodies of both children and grown-ups, and to exclude the bodies of inanimate objects. because the electric circuit was implemented directly into the seat, it turned the entire seat into a measuring apparatus. this in turn exposed the measuring operation to all the material changes in the seat and its environment, such as changes in the humidity of the timber used in it. as a consequence, when the piece was installed in a museum, the setting of the threshold values for the seat involved a lot of testing and tweaking. this experience brings up the second observation. the setting of the threshold values does not only involve metrics that can be abstracted from the apparatus. the experimental nature of my installations makes this explicit: the pains of adjusting the proper threshold values suggest the inseparability of the measuring apparatus from its environment, which conditions its operations. sometimes the metrics are reduced to structural decisions as in the first example, in which the boundary-making process was embedded directly into the construction of the switch. these retrospective observations serve as a reminder that the ethics of boundary making are at play also in practices that are often perceived as the autonomous zone of artistic creativity and experimentation. the setting of the threshold values into a data flow is then conceivable as boundary work that involves labors and negotiations and always produces the differentiation between the included and the excluded. in the materialist reading of my art practice, a reading that draws on karen barad’s (2007) agential realism, a threshold value in a particular sensor would be understood as an agential cut. for barad, a physical apparatus of measuring—such as a sensor—provides conditions for a meaning of a set of variables, while it excludes others. a physical apparatus then embodies a particular concept, while the concept acquires its meaning through this embeddedness. the apparatus specific concept marks the cut, an agential cut, between the object of measurement and the agencies of observation. the activity of measuring must therefore be understood as the commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) heidi tikka, 2021 6 apparatus specific enactment of the phenomenon being measured. objects of measuring do not have independent reality (barad 2007, 118–20). for instance, in mother, child “presence” only denotes to the threshold value for proximity and for a volume of a liquid. barad conceptualizes this material-conceptual relationality as intra-activity, under which the becoming of the world must be understood. as she words it, “what is ‘disclosed’ [by technoscientific practices] is the effect of the intra-active engagements of our participation with/in and as part of the world’s differential becoming” (barad 2007, 361). she calls for the ethics of accountability, which i understand as the call for practices that are able to intra-actively articulate phenomena that can be perceived as objective, specifically because of these articulated intra-actions. it matters how apparatuses are configured and how these configurations and their conditions are made accountable, for “it matters which cuts are enacted: different cuts enact different materialized becomings” (barad 2007, 361). engagement with barad’s work has also had material consequences to how mother, child is instantiated since its reconstruction in 2011. in the new version, the performativity of the installation is foregrounded, as particular attention is paid to the visibility and the aesthetics of the technical parts, which facilitate human-machine interaction. in these structural decisions the ethics and aesthetics of installation design entangle. enfolding temporalities yet mother, child is also and genuinely a cinematic installation in which a visitor and the audience enact a relational event where different modalities of bodily movements converge with audiovisual experience. the aim was not to create a life-like simulation of a child. rather, i wanted to explore the possibility of an experience in which the cloth, weightlessness, fluctuating image projection, selfexperience of one’s body in movement, and the facial, bodiless moving image of a child would resonate together in the production of an affective overflow, feeding simultaneously off the excessive audiovisual and motile sensations and the absence of the other body. in the pursuit of something beyond the cinematic, the setting of the threshold values for the video tracking system became the video tracking system became a poetic venture, rather than an operational one. perhaps, in this case, the question of the ethics and aesthetics of measuring is a more complex one. the monitoring of the audience activity was conducted by a video camera, placed above the installation, and software that registered the continuity of movement of what it identified as moving objects in the real-time video feed. in the interactive narrative, the child’s moods swing between the impulses of nursing commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) heidi tikka, 2021 7 and crying, depending on how he experiences his surroundings. the reality of the video tracking data feed and the interactive narrative are linked through the reading of the data, which registers bodily motility in the installation space. the threshold values for this data were essentially used as cues for real-time moving image editing and playback from the existing prerecorded audiovisual database. the material was recorded during one nursing session with a stationary camera and edited for seamless combinatory interactivity logics. the shared labors of the artist and the software developer focused on finding a rhythm for the moving image narrative that “felt” right. i spent days in the studio, breathing and counting breaths to get the sense of right rhythmic flows, which were then translated into threshold values by the software developer. in an uncanny way, these adjustments also seemed to affect the temperament of the child. how to understand this “feeling right”? what kind of boundary-making process was taking place here? my tentative suggestion is that in this creative artistic and collaborative labor, the setting of the thresholds for the mood changes of the child became an embodied process, another kind body-sensor coperformance, implying the acknowledgement of distributed and relational agencies of production at the interface. this process can be seen as yet another entanglement of the ethics and aesthetics of human and nonhuman collaborations in media art practice. in other words, i do not see my embodied labor as a way of imposing my artistic vision on the dramaturgy of the installation. rather, looking for the rhythms that would “feel” right was a process of tuning in with the sensors and their potentiality. as a creative process, it can be conceived as a body-sensor co-performance, a process of radical opening for the new and the unanticipated, and embodied affective labor for those agential cuts that organize the unfolding of the interactive narrative. in this creative work the rhythm figures as the folding in of different temporalities: my breathing, calling for the bodily memories of the past, the other moving bodies actualizing in the temporalities of the sensors and their data flows, the cinematic time of the moving image and the processing time of the computer. 7 references barad, karen. 2007. meeting the universe halfway. durham, nc: duke university press. haraway, donna j. 1997. modest_witness@second_millennium.femaleman©_meets_oncomouse™. new york: commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) heidi tikka, 2021 8 routledge. suchman, lucy. 2007. human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions. 2nd ed. new york: cambridge university press. author bio heidi tikka works as an independent artist-researcher, curator and writer. she is currently completing her doctoral thesis at the department of media in aalto university, school of arts, design and architecture. the documentation of her work, including the installation mother, child (2011/2000), can be found at http://heiditikka.com. http://heiditikka.com/ microsoft word 32411_kristin_peterson dr.docx peterson, kristin (2019). review of edges of exposure: toxicology and the problem of capacity in postcolonial senegal, by noémi tousignant (duke university press, 2018). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kristin peterson, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | edges of exposure: toxicology and the problem of capacity in postcolonial senegal, by noémi tousignant (duke university press, 2018) kristin peterson university of california, irvine kris@uci.edu a great deal of scholarly and policy work has focused on the problem of “capacity” in african countries—the capacity to create, build, and maintain infrastructures, to secure fulfilling livelihoods, to name just a few. capacity, as an object of study, has been discursively embedded in africa’s “lack,” followed by itemized needs to make things work. on the one hand, a lack of capacity is not necessarily an overstatement. on the other hand, it is filled with historical obsessions iterated by those entities that generate african dispossessions and lack in the first place, and echoed by scholars and policy makers the world over. in edges of exposure, noémi tousignant carefully considers the question of toxin regulatory capacity and nuances its meanings. rather than analyzing political economies and emergencies that lead to entrenched community toxicities, tousignant instead offers a necessary history of senegalese scientific struggles to regulate poisons. faced with declining resources since the implementation of structural adjustment programs (beginning in 1994), toxicologists have had to draw on their professional networks and resources to build up scientific capacity and work toward the creation of a national regulatory environment. the failure of a federal control mechanism to materialize has less to do with the typical reasons offered for african “lack” and more to do with elusive possibilities at different moments in time. this analysis is accomplished by defining capacity as dynamic, special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) kristin peterson, 2019 2 relational, temporally rhythmic, and dependent upon fluctuating postcolonial visions. that is, “capacity is equipment and supplies that were or might have been, the skills to use them, the actions they allowed” (p. 14). tousignant sketches senegal’s history of toxicology capacity via french collegial relationships, the productive use of machinery, and the creation of lab buildings and other infrastructures located within the faculty of pharmacy at the université cheikh anta diop. the historical iteration marks the “ruins” of the lab. “ruins” is not used to stress a lack or wreckage but as a way to recover “past and potential movement from the lab’s inactive materials” (p. 27). what did past movement and activity during times of real scientific promise do to “sustain and haunt scientific aspirations over time” (p. 27)? drawing on oral histories and older, found documents in the lab (where truly the lab is a living archive), the book traces the history of routine and interrupted lab work made possible by both transnational and national priorities and budgets. at the beginning of the postcolonial era, a number of french and senegalese scientists worked together to build the logistics and justifications for toxicological research. french epistemological domination of various projects was certainly in place. but as many french scientists scattered back home in the wake of structural adjustment programs, senegalese attempts were made to “africanize toxicology.” that is, a senegalese toxicology got reworked to focus on careers, toxicity specific questions of place and ecology, and developing lab work that could feed directly into a poison control and regulatory apparatus (that unfortunately did not come to light). prior to structural adjustment, lab routines were based upon the study and delivery of funded scientific projects. but after structural adjustment was implemented, the lab and its scientists were faced with declining budgets that could not maintain the scientific project, much less keep up with equipment maintenance. due to chronic underfunding, the current lab routine is to draw on pre-existing and new networks (outside of dakar) that are needed especially for data analysis. these relationships over time have been critical because they often stand in for the very making of scientific capacity— they “were and are about relationships and investments between people” (p. 27). and it is these historical and current relationships that generate the material and epistemological evolution of toxicology practice in senegal today. in a later chapter, we see how such practice has evolved. barring significant state funds, toxicology is made possible via a convergence between international contract work, research, and regulation. tousignant describes an international study, project locustox, which evaluated the environmental effects of locust and special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) kristin peterson, 2019 3 grasshopper control via pesticide use. however, the project evolved into something beyond its initial intentions. based upon its findings, it called for the creation of an institutional infrastructure in the sahel that could create a mechanism for sustainable and durable data gathering on local ecosystems. needed for such a project was equipment, experimental organisms, labs, partnering institutions, etc. strong arguments were thus made toward these needs based upon the real-life experience of carrying out project locustox. as tousignant argues, the project actually did create capacity because it mobilized a very strong sense for building capacity over the long term. this includes how labs and equipment get mobilized after the project ends. yet, at the same time, what does not seem to last—and is so necessary for durability—is the “integration of institutional, material, and epistemological/methodological infrastructures as a cohesive unit” (p. 123) over time. these are the networks needed for financial stability and envisioning the future of research and its applicability. edges of exposure is certainly important reading for those interested in the history and anthropology of african health, science and technology studies in africa, environmental health, and the growing literature on toxicologies. it is a great addition to these fields and greatly contributes to growing concerns over toxins in africa. author bio kristin peterson is associate professor of anthropology at uc irvine. she is the author of speculative markets: drug circuits and derivative life in nigeria (duke university press 2014). microsoft word jacobs final.docx joela jacobs (2019). phytopoetics: upending the passive paradigm with vegetal violence and eroticism. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-18. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © joela jacobs, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license phytopoetics: upending the passive paradigm with vegetal violence and eroticism joela jacobs university of arizona joelajacobs@email.arizona.edu abstract this article develops the notion of phytopoetics, which describes the role of plant agency in literary creations and the cultural imaginary. in order to show how plants prompt poetic productions, the article engages with narratives by modernist german authors oskar panizza, hanns heinz ewers, and alfred döblin that feature vegetal eroticism and violence. by close reading these texts and their contexts, the article maps the role of plant agency in the co-constitution of a cultural imaginary of the vegetal that results in literary works as well as societal consequences. in this article, i propose the notion of phytopoetics (phyto = relating to or derived from plants, and poiesis = creative production or making), parallel to the concept of zoopoetics.1 just as zoopoetics describes the role of animals in the creation of texts and language, phytopoetics entails both a poetic engagement with plants in literature and moments in which plants take on literary or cultural agency themselves (see moe’s [2014] emphasis on agency in zoopoetics, and marder, 2018). in this understanding, phytopoetics encompasses instances in which plants participate in the production of texts as “material-semiotic nodes or knots” (haraway, 2008, p. 4) that are neither just metaphor, nor just plant (see driscoll & hoffmann, 2018, p. 4 and pp. 6-7). such phytopoetic effects manifest in the cultural imagination more broadly.2 while most phytopoetic texts are literary, plant behavior has also prompted other kinds of writing, such as scientific or legal special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 2 documents, which bear witness to the immense impact of vegetal bodies on the human cultural, social, and political spheres. these effects contradict traditional human (mis)conceptions of plants as passive and static organisms without agency, and the creative imagination of arts and literature expands actual plant agency with fictional kinds. depictions of vegetal agency have not been confined to the page or the canvas, but arise from and translate back into human culture. phytopoetic emergences occur particularly in moments when the imagination surrounding plants becomes a socially significant factor, such as in the context of art nouveau imagery and writing that attributed sensual, erotic qualities to plants around 1900. as i will show in the first part of this article, this association of plants and sexuality led to institutional fears of vegetal eroticism, which resulted in several decades of literary and curricular censorship of plant reproduction in germany, ultimately prohibiting the teaching of rudimentary botany in schools. while this ban did little to conceal the knowledge that was readily available on every field and windowsill, it spurred the production of literary texts that mocked these botanical anxieties, and it demonstrates the power of plants to impact the human sphere. as agents of cultural change and the central subjects of literary texts, vegetal life forms engage in phytopoetics, which this article shows with the help of several modernist german narratives. while the notion of vegetal eroticism locates a threat in the sensually charged parallels between the vegetal and the human in the context of the emergence of early sexology, the period around 1900 also saw the beginnings of science fiction writing that foresaw the destruction of the natural world we are experiencing now in the anthropocene. the second part of the article discusses these futureoriented phytopoetics in a sci-fi novel featuring monstrous plants. arising from under the melting ice sheet of greenland, they infect everyone with suffocating organic growths, thus reversing the vegetal role of supplying oxygen. this case of violent vegetal agency is still unfolding its phytopoetic potential in the future it describes, which we are beginning to see in increasing awareness and contemporaneous changes to laws, policies, norms, and attitudes toward the environment around the world. that is, the melting ice sheets and environmental upheaval in this one-hundred-year-old phytopoetic novel are central to today’s political and societal discourse. transferring human notions about sexuality and violence—about making life and ending it—onto the vegetal realm thus not only upends the paradigm of plant passivity, but it also shows that phytopoetics engages with some of the most central anxieties of modern society, since the sustained survival of the human species depends on plants. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 3 vegetal eroticism written by german author oskar panizza in 1891, the narrative “the crime in tavistock-square”3 satirizes a collective concern with vegetal eroticism in the late nineteenth century. at the time, plants had emerged from their place in the background to some degree, since they were a focal feature of sensual art nouveau aesthetics, played an important role in darwinian discoveries, and received attention in the context of various back-to-nature movements (williams, 2007); yet as panizza’s narrative shows, they were also considered a danger to morality. in the story, a young english policeman reports a disturbing discovery to his superiors. after several pages of stuttering hesitation, he finally finds the words to describe what he encountered during his night shift: “sir, — it was gruesome; it was a crime against nature; i stood rooted to the ground; i couldn’t help myself!” […] “there was touching, sir,”— the policeman said and took a deep breath, — “as it is not allowed in the face of god and the world, there was fondling, denuding, discharging, there was giggling, grinding, emitting, entwining, a kind of kissing …. kissing, sir, — …” […] — “sir,” — the young fanatical policeman cried out and sobbed, — “the roses and magnolias in tavistock parc were practicing self-maculation; — it was veritable plant-onanism!” (panizza, 1891/1981, p. 166-167)4 the policeman concludes that he has seen plants masturbating. his description blurs the specifics of species by equating the spilling of seeds by humans and plants, though for the latter, this is a reproductive act and not a pleasure-oriented moral taboo as it is for the former in the nineteenth century (laqueur, 2003). in contrast to the active, anthropomorphically described plants, the policeman becomes plantlike in this passage, as he is passively “rooted to the ground.” the inexperienced young man is only able to identify the behavior as masturbation because it reminds him of “movements like .… policemen often make them on their cots at night” (panizza, 1891/1981, p. 166), which implicates his colleagues in a behavior society condemns. if representatives of the law and plants are engaging in the illicit act of autoeroticism, the text suggests, masturbation must be “natural,” rather than a “crime against nature” as the policeman had called it. if, however, it is not natural, as nineteenth-century morality would contend, then these plants, and by extension nature, are unnatural. faced with this conundrum, the police chief sends the young policeman to the insane asylum and thereby declares the idea of plant masturbation madness. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 4 this decision suggests that it is important to conserve plants such as roses, which the police chief calls “the chastest flowers” (panizza, 1891/1981, p. 168), as an innocent symbol of love, rather than individual, active life forms that engage in sexual activity. the plants in this narrative break with the symbolic conventions that are traditionally attributed to plants, and by extension, they undermine the gendered stereotypes that have been associated with them. flowers, and specifically roses, are usually conceived of as feminine (even grammatically as die blume and die rose in german), and the lethal act of plucking them is tied to the idea of “deflowering” a female virgin.5 in the western tradition, plant symbolism has been imbued with gendered eroticism of this kind since long before the turn of the twentieth century, and it contributes to the conception and therefore treatment of plants, especially their flowers, as passive, receptive, ornamental objects of aesthetic pleasure.6 in contrast, the acknowledgement of plants as sexually active creatures in this story, despite satirical exaggeration, showcases their phytopoetic agency in various ways: on the level of the text, plants move from the margins to the center of attention. they force the policeman to come up with descriptions that fit their behavior, which takes up several pages of the story, during which the policeman exclaims with frustration, “sir, the english language is not enough to contain this abomination!” (“ist nicht ausreichend um die scheußlichkeit zu umfassen!”) (panizza, 1891/1981, p. 166). the verb umfassen in the original means that the english language does not contain the right words to describe the act, yet it also implies that language cannot control it. at the same time, umfassen is also an act of touching (anfassen) or embracing (umarmen) that is reminiscent of the flowers’ sensual entwining that the policeman described. beyond their effect on language and narration, the plants’ activities bring about the policeman’s institutionalization, which is preceded by a small breakdown of the police chief himself. these two occurrences of “madness” show that a change in expected vegetal behavior upsets the socially conforming worldview represented by the police to such an extent that its guiding norms are momentarily unsettled, until the unexpected event is institutionalized—that is, given its place in the normative system, by declaring it madness. on the metatextual level, plants have prompted the creation of a literary work with creative new expressions and ideas, and here too, the person verbalizing their behavior is institutionalized: the author panizza and his text were censored immediately, and since the censorship agency of the time were the police, life repeated literature (jacobs, 2015; stark, 2009). the imagination spurred by plants had thus produced a set of entangled literary and real-world phytopoetic effects. the narrative “the petition,” written by german author hanns heinz ewers in 1904, takes up similar anxieties about vegetal eroticism and shows that panizza’s special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 5 case is neither singular, nor limited to the nineteenth century. the main part of the story poses as a petition written by a young priest, who has been tasked with school inspections. as a result, he asks to ban the teaching of botany because it is, in his words, a “danger to morality” (ewers, 1904/1919, p. 117). he considers the knowledge of plant reproduction dangerous because it puts ideas about sexuality into young people’s heads, including some that involve non-heteronormative notions and suggest an absence of matrimony or monogamy: under the guidance of the teachers,…the young souls are forced to study the sexual life of plants in the smallest detail. without batting an eye, the teacher leads the pure minds into a hotbed of sin, to a sodom of the most egregious perversions. the entire instruction of botany is solely tailored to the observation of the disgusting practice of [the plants’] sexual functions!…instead of sinking into the ground with embarrassment, the teacher explains to them with cynical candor how the plants conduct sometimes autogamy [self-fertilization] and sometimes allogamy [cross-fertilization]. he meticulously explains to the innocent boys and girls how the flower attracts insects with its color and scent, how they crawl into the flower to nibble the honey that the flower offers them as a kind of reward for their pandering activity. he explains to them how the bugs, bees, bumblebees, after they have smeared themselves in one blossom with the male pollen, now fly on to the next blossom to wipe off the disgusting powder on the female pistil there and pollinate it this way! truly, even in a brothel you could not entertain more abominable conversations! (ewers, 1904/1919, pp. 118-119) similar to the young policeman’s description of plant masturbation, plant behavior is encoded in human terms of sexuality and morality in this botany lesson. the reproductive focus of pollination is rendered as erotic pleasure and moral aberrance, which maps the scientifically accurate vocabulary of the biological explanation onto a moral framework. within this christian, monogamous concept, plants are painted as active agents who attract multiple pollinators and as independent reproducers who do not conform to a binary, heteronormative model of human sexuality that expects them to be coy, modest, and docile.7 once again, gendered parallels emerge, which show both male and female plants engaged in interspecies sex work, trading pollen with insects. the language of these scenes is called an “abominable conversation,” as if discussing sexuality were just as amoral as engaging in it. this idea corresponds to the context of literary censorship: the role of the police as literary censors conflated actual and imagined transgressions by persecuting the description of special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 6 sexual acts as zealously as their realization. in his “repressive hypothesis,” foucault suggests that the regulation of physical acts was, in fact, historically of lesser importance than the censoring of sexuality from public discourse: “as if in order to gain mastery over [sexuality] in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present” (1976/1988, p. 18). the concerned priest seems to realize the danger of words, and this also suggests that phytopoetic texts are more threatening than actual plants, making phytopoetics an empowering multispecies event (see also moe, 2014, p. 24). the correlation of power and language is likewise clear to the commissioner reading the petition, who comments at the end of the story. he says, “the man will either be committed to the insane asylum…or he will become bavarian minister of education one day” (ewers, 1904/1919, p. 124). just as with the policeman in panizza’s tale, the solution to this unsettling display of vivid vegetal sexuality is the institutionalization of the person who dared to put it into words (which extends to the censored authors). alternatively, the aberrant knowledge would be incorporated into the institution (another form of institutionalization) by officially prohibiting botany as a deviant science, which the priest would do in the role of bavarian minister of education. by equating the role of education minister with being a candidate for the asylum, ewers’s satire targets curricular in addition to literary censorship. the text associates censorship agencies with the “madness” they try to contain, just as panizza’s narrative had done with the masturbating policemen. both narratives suggest that censorship is a mad institutional practice that struggles to uphold “insane” laws and norms. the commissioner’s verdict is not far from reality because biological sciences were prohibited almost entirely in the secondary schools of the german empire between 1882 and 1908 (sommerey, 2014). rudimentary botany and zoology were taught in lower grades, but lessons that involved the entire ecological system or evolutionary theories were banned in the context of the cultural struggle (kulturkampf) over secularization, which was a prussian-led attempt to reduce the influence of the catholic church on the german school curriculum, especially in its stronghold bavaria. with his satirical reference to the bavarian education minister and a few other allusions to political entities of the day, ewers’s story addresses this absurd situation directly and simultaneously undermines it by reproducing the prohibited botanical knowledge in the text. the language of ewers’s “petition” only mildly exaggerates the historical debates. the priest demands, “‘away with the teaching of botany in schools!’…may it keep the souls of our children, the future of the bavarian people clean from the fermenting putrefaction that the whore named science has spewed out in a century of special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 7 disbelief!” (ewers, 1904/1919, p. 123-124). similarly, when trying to convince the actual minster of education, adalbert falk, of the danger of anti-christian teachings, prussian conservative wilhelm joachim von hammerstein said in the german reichstag in 1878, but i have to say that if the teaching of haeckel’s darwinism is permitted in our schools, if it is allowed to inculcate our adolescent students with materialism, the education authorities are not attending to their duty. then they will carry the responsibility if a generation arises in our nation whose credo is atheism and nihilism, and whose political orientation is communism. (sommerey, 2014, the ‘ban’ section, para. 2) among these perceived dangers of materialism in the vein of darwin and haeckel (who introduced evolutionary ideas to germany and coined the term ökologie [ecology]), ewers’s priest and von hammerstein both fear the “atheism” or “disbelief” of a future generation. historical hindsight shows that increasing secularization as well as the philosophical and political specters of von hammerstein’s speech would come to pass with or without botany instruction, yet the teaching of evolutionary theory in schools is still a topic of debate in some places today, and the danger of communism and “lost souls” has been repeatedly invoked throughout the twentieth century in the face of perceived threats to morality. the two narratives satirize anxieties about a rediscovered kinship between humans and other species around 1900, when major advances in the natural sciences continuously chipped away at the conception of man as the apex of creation. darwin’s findings had kindled these fears with a family tree for all animals (including the human kind) and developmental parallels between plants and other species. the emerging disciplines of sexology (sigusch, 2008; beachy, 2014) and psychology8 expanded the material understanding of humans as biological organisms by exposing the illusion of control over body and mind, specifically one’s sexuality, thereby suggesting a similar proximity to animals, which the debates of the cultural struggle extended to plants. the human entanglement with and dependence on plant life emerges most clearly in the texts when both police chief and priest express their desire to “eradicate all plants on the entire earth, to destroy these lusting, incestuous, perverse creatures root and branch” (ewers, 1904/1919, p. 123) in a “new deluge” (panizza, 1891/1981, p. 168). panizza’s priest invokes this symbol of violent destruction as a retribution for vegetal transgressions, yet the biblical deluge punished human sins while plants survived, and the eradication of plant life that ewers’s police chief imagines would special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 8 also result in the extinction of humans, thus demonstrating the power of plants. while the worldview of human beings is upended in these narratives, plants remain unperturbed and showcase their powerful position in this cultural setting, in which they prompt censorship laws, determine school curricula, and inspire literary texts—various forms of phytopoetics. vegetal violence the idea of vegetal eroticism as an uncontrollable, non-normative life force becomes increasingly entangled with notions of violence and death (like the deluge) in modernist science fiction writing. the genre draws on a future-oriented phytopoetic imaginary, whose impact on human culture can be traced to the laws and policy changes with which we have been responding to the anthropocene in recent years. science fiction around 1900 shows that concern about the planet predates our belated reactions, albeit in different terminology, and its broad temporal scope opens up a rich interpretative context beyond its contemporary time frame. in phytopoetic sci-fi plots, plants frequently inhabit threatening positions that underscore their vital role in sustaining life and contradict their perception as passive and powerless. such vegetal forces violently undo temporary human techno-dominance over nature in the text i turn to next. the addition of lethal violence to vegetal scenarios of vivid reproduction in this novel suggests that no less than the survival of life on the planet is at stake. mountains seas and giants is a voluminous sci-fi novel written by alfred döblin in the early 1920s that depicts the struggle between technology and nature in the twenty-third to the twenty-eighth century.9 the modernist novel frequently sequences words without punctuation, like in its title, which gives the text a particular intensity and linguistic ambiguity. i will omit most of the elaborate plot complications and focus on the description of an attempt to create more inhabitable land by colonizing greenland. to do so, humans harvest the volcanic energy of iceland, which they store in so-called tourmaline veils.10 the energy of these veils exudes a mysterious attraction that affects all living matter and sets the stage for plant agency in the form of both vegetal eroticism and violence. as a result of their intervention in nature and its uncharted powers, humans become first attracted to plants, and in an increasing frenzy of fertility and uncontrolled growth, vegetal matter later incorporates animals and humans with lethal violence into what have become mobile plant bodies. the attractive agency of plants begins when the tourmaline veils are transported from iceland to greenland on ships, which soon have trouble moving because special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 9 they become entangled in a web of organic matter, described as a “thick plant mat…swelling shrubs thick as arms, branching boisterously, with inch-long sharptoothed leaves; growing berries the size of apples that serve them as swim bladders; like heads they raised them” (döblin, 1924/2006, p. 422). the plants seem to reach out to the ships, and the crew works day and night to hack away the tendrils. upon separation, the vegetal matter regrows immediately, and the description of its anthropomorphic anatomy of “arms” and “heads” underscores its forceful agency. the interaction between what is described as “peoples of algae” and “bodies of ships” (döblin, 1924/2006, p. 423) eventually tears the ships apart and transforms them into floating “mountains meadows” (döblin, 1924/2006, p. 426). the incorporation of the inorganic by the organic chips away at the distinctions between living and non-living matter, while the violent circle of suffocating embrace and destructive removal attempts to reinforce their separation. by merging matter, this text physically entangles vegetal and nonvegetal bodies, which goes beyond the merely conceptual blurring in panizza’s and ewers’s narratives. this is a violent becoming-plant-matter, which soon involves also human and vegetal eroticism. initially, human bodies on the ships feel the vegetal pull as a “fatigue that was like a compulsion” and leaves them like “opium smokers” (döblin, 1924/2006, p. 423)—indeed a plant-induced effect. humans lose energy until they are unable even to move their facial muscles, and once they have lost control over their bodies, they become sexually attracted to the plant matter: yet their insides were sweetly moved; frequently, they looked between the ladders doors through the walls ceilings to the sky, saw landscapes in which trees tumbled, the clouds stretched and stripped, dripping warmly, on their chest, the lips; they licked, swallowed. a violent soon impregnable loving sensation ran through them. the men trembled in the frost of arousal, the women shook themselves, walked quivering slowly. every limb on them was charged with lust, every movement brought them closer to the erupting delirium. they entwined each other, and when they had intermingled their bodies and let go of each other, they were dissatisfied. they kissed and embraced ropes, rubbed and hit arms and legs, the torso [rumpf, also means hull] on steps. over board protruded the powerful shafts of algae; them they pulled closer, to them they felt desire. the blissful whimpering, the clueless groaning, fearful moaning of the not-to-becalmed. (döblin, 1924/2006, pp. 423-424). this depiction of vegetal eroticism does not present stereotypical images of fragile, feminine flowers that would align with the passive paradigm of the special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 10 “chaste roses”; rather, the “powerful shafts of algae” are phallic and drain power and control from both the inorganic matter of the ships and the living beings around them. the text draws attention to the shared materiality of plants, ships, and people by detailing the ways in which humans try to satisfy their overwhelming desire: neither other humans nor parts of the ship’s architecture can quench it—because this desire “frosts,” rather than “burns,” for unreachable elements like clouds in the sky, landscapes of trees, and algae that do not seem to grant satisfaction. these descriptions reinforce the notion that “nature” (both in the form of plants and sky and in the idea of an overwhelming sex drive) retains the upper hand in this scene, and it also subverts dualist ideas based on the primacy of reason, which undergird notions of human superiority. humans are all body, all matter, in these encounters, which raises the question of how they differ from the ships, for instance. yet this is not a monist worldview altogether: their powerlessness differentiates humans from vegetal matter, with which they are not (yet) merging. the passage calls the unrequited erotic desire “violent,” and the human reaction, which seems to include self-inflicted pain, is characterized by fear and unrest. though it is physical and not merely mental discomfort as in panizza’s and ewers’s texts, whose satirical impetus prompts laughter, the uneasy effect of phytopoetics in this novel arguably also reaches beyond the page to the reader. the new force of vegetal attraction affects not just humans and human-made products, but all aspects of the natural world, which results in the creation of grotesque new entities consisting of entire forests, animals, and earth—with veins and intestines. early on, one of these hybrid creatures is described as a “plantanimal” (döblin, 1924/2006, p. 478), but ultimately the plant matter violently incorporates animals, sometimes growing into them in parasitic ways11 and sometimes killing them: “the animals were pressed together, their juice dripped, mixed with the white one of the snapped stems, sapped leaves” (döblin, 1924/2006, p. 485). this pattern is repeated throughout the novel: vegetal attraction leads to material incorporation, a digestive rather than penetrative act with erotic and violent overtones. it nearly always involves “juices” being pumped through bodies, consumed, and digested, whose ambivalence opens up a host of violent and erotic associations from blood and other bodily fluids to sap, saliva, and semen.12 vegetal matter becomes increasingly animated and exudes an air of chaotic, violent growth and fertility that showcases a variety of vegetal reproductive strategies, whose excesses suggest a rapid evolutionary arms race: the debris of grasses broad-leaved trees the palms oleander conifers were touched by the light. they pulled their neighborhood toward special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 11 themselves, it rolled toward them, like a leaf13 that curls up under the flame.…into their leaf veins, between a network of nerves, the living soils was sucked. from the leaf veins, the nerves emanated the allure….leaves rose up from the rock slats like cakes in their pans; wide and thick.…often, they carried away with themselves a ball of soil like an egg yolk, pouches, entire sacks, on strands like umbilical cords and fell down, victims to others, when the yolk sack was empty. often, bushes threateningly lashed out at each other each like arms, seemed to want to suffocate each other. then, their branches broke upon touch; they melted into one; together their nutrients flooded into all; a big being rose up. […lianas] entangled the foreign leaves with their coils. they were voracious and strict beings. they grew secretly into the trees; those were their placenta. the juice of the earth was predigested for them. while the trees withered under them, they let their flowers hang above them, colorful like flags.…the giant ferns that stood like inexhaustible mothers and fathers and conceived.…these plants gave birth to living offspring; the seedling developed already on the backside of the strong leaves; its sprouts hung in threads down from the leaves. (döblin, 1924/2006, pp. 489490) this suggestive passage is full of a voracious fruitfulness, consumptive fertility, and ravenous fecundity. the acts of incorporation seem to be both reproductive, bringing forth new life, and nutritive, involving violent death: from the consumed, unfertilized egg yolk to pre-digested earth juice and from the sucking of soil to the rising cake (which resonates with the german word for placenta: mutterkuchen = “mother-cake”), these images of consumption go hand in hand with the violent incorporation that pulls vegetal beings toward one another and signals successful invasion with flag-like blossoms (the plant’s reproductive organs). there is lashing out, suffocating, growing into others to absorb their energy parasitically like an all-consuming flame, and ultimately, “the incessant crashing down of trunks.…some of them were unable to fall; corpses stood right and left; more powerful beings devoured them” (döblin, 1924/2006, p. 490). this landscape of death and necro-cannibalism14 is filled with an air of violent fertility, the moment of conception and merging into one giant being, and reproductive vocabulary from the human and animal realms (umbilical cords, placenta, live births, mothers and fathers, the evocative yolk sack).15 this is not a transfer of human morality onto plant reproduction, even if some allegorical language appears; rather, in this onslaught of images, clear distinctions become impossible. what emerges is a forceful drive of matter toward growth and the (re)production of life that borders on the destructive, since many of the fertile attempts are immediately smothered by nearby growths. the atmosphere is flush with life, rising like yeast and special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 12 fermenting, to the point that vegetal violence and eroticism become indistinguishable in the frenzy of plant agency. soon, plants begin to roam the continent to sustain their voracious existence, and their slimy juices and foamy gelatins accompany them: “giant trees were wandering there; the soil under them grew with them, swelled, as if it were liquid gelatinous and foamed up around them”;16 they move in a grotesque “zigzag, enclosing nearby trees into themselves, dragging them along with themselves” (döblin, 1924/2006, p. 504). anyone who is exposed to their vegetal liquids is immediately infected with destructive rapid growth. this rampant vegetal life force means certain death for animals and humans. they immediately lose consciousness, and their organs swell to enormous sizes and strangle them as they are being incorporated into the creatures: the most gruesome deformations became visible. baked-together trees, from whose tops protruded long human hair, yet peaked by human heads, dead dreadful house-sized faces of men and women.…potato fields, running dogs, humans got into the wandering sprouting steaming mass. that surged up like a cake, swelled up, fidgeting across the sowed plane, rolled itself forward devastatingly slowly like a mass of lava. and everywhere grew stems and stick-high leaves from the rounding beating mass. the arms legs that protruded from the whirring dark mesh were of flesh and bones, often darkly covered in bark, with toes and fingers that fanned out into leaves. (döblin, 1924/2006, pp. 502-503) the focus on matter and materiality turns to a monist notion of “mass” (masse) at this point: a “wandering sprouting steaming mass,” “a mass of lava,” and a “rounding beating mass.” at first, this seems to make the ingredients in this “baked-together” “cake” unidentifiable, but the growth of stems and leaves reveals that the identity of this matter is dominantly vegetal. even “arms legs…of flesh and bones” become “darkly covered in bark” and “toes and fingers…fanned out into leaves.” no longer erotic in tone, this violent becoming-plant-matter is now the fate of all material, including human and nonhuman animals, but also “potato fields,” that is, cultivated plant matter. since the mobile frenzy of vegetal growth originated with primordial plant matter that was exposed by the melted ice sheet, this vegetal life force seems to be intent on devouring centuries of human cultivation. the recurring yeasty (mother) cakes and bubbling liquids suggest a fermenting fecundity that is reminiscent of theories and myths about conception and the origin of life: a primordial soup, out of which emerge all sorts of reproductive and adaptive strategies in order to survive in the evolutionary trial special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 13 and error. in the novel, human environmental destruction has triggered a return to this original “chaos,” which (re)generates a dominant nonhuman force that pursues life at all costs. the earth may therefore face a future without the human species, its former dominant destructive force, and the novel’s perspective of deep time, ranging from the origin of life to a distant sci-fi future, reduces human existence to a brief blip. conclusion my pursuit of phytopoetics began with the policing of masturbating plants, went on to promiscuous pollinators, and ended with fermenting fertility and violent incorporation. in these texts around 1900, supposedly passive plants are not only animated and agential protagonists; they also actively participate in the poietic production of a literary and cultural imaginary. whether it is vegetal eroticism fueled by scientific discoveries such as darwin’s and the artistic innovations of art nouveau, or violent plants taking over the planet to undo the destructions of human technology in an imagined future, the vegetal appears as a threat to the human way of life because it shows that they share in the same material basis. humans try to separate themselves conceptually and physically from “nature” because the plants’ seemingly indiscriminate sexual and lethally consumptive behaviors violate normative understandings of morality and “the human.” the characters seem unable to realize that humans are “nature” and that their futile attempts at separation will therefore result in their own destruction. rather than the successful punishment or subdual of plant deviance, the texts showcase phytopoetic power: the violence of institutions, censorship, and colonizers is so broad and indiscriminate that they end up devouring themselves—by institutionalizing their own, such as policemen and priests, by calling for a deluge that would kill the human species, and by exploiting their environment so that vegetal matter takes to a reproductive race for survival that uses up humans as a source of energy. phytopoetic literature highlights the power of plants, and these particular narratives reflect modern anxieties about the human relationship with the natural world, the self, and the other in past, present, and future. encounters with the vegetal prompt new ways of poetic expression and critical reflection that further entangle the cultural and literary with the biological, social, and political spheres. notes 1 “zoopoetics” was first introduced by derrida in respect to kafka’s writing and, following benjamin’s earlier description of this quality in kafka, can be understood as a reminder of one’s own forgotten animal body vis-à-vis derrida’s special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 14 carnophallogocentric tradition of disembodied language (see driscoll & hoffmann, 2018, pp. 2-3). driscoll and hoffmann’s lucid portrayal of zoopoetics contends that “animals, more so than other forms of life such as plants, are obviously agential beings…: animals look at us in a way that trees and rivers…do not” (2018, p. 5). research on plant intelligence (mancuso & viola, 2015; pollan, 2013; gagliano, ryan, & vieira, 2017; vieira, gagliano, & ryan, 2015) challenges this vision-centric understanding of agency and shows that the previous lack of knowledge hinges on human “plant blindness” (wandersee & schussler, 2001). 2 this understanding of phytopoetics goes beyond the integration of vegetal output into the poetic practice of individuals (see ryan [2017], whose use of the term parallels ecopoetics) by developing a metaphorical life of its own in the cultural imagination. phytopoetic effects of this kind can become disconnected from actual plants and their expressions, or what vieira (2015) calls “plant inscription” in her work on phytographia. 3 none of the literary texts cited in this article have been published in english translation. all translations are provided by the article’s author. 4 the german original is interspersed with italicized english terms (e.g., “sir”) to authenticate the story’s setting in england, partly in an attempt to avoid censorship, but also because london’s metropolitan police served as an example to the emerging police forces of europe (jacobs, 2015; stark, 2009). 5 for gendering, see schiebinger (1993) and mcleod (2015). the tradition of “roses as emblems of death and love” goes back to the greeks (bynum & bynum, 2014, p. 200). for sexual violence, see exemplarily goethe’s poem about the “little rose on the heath” (1799), who resists being plucked by stinging a boy with her thorns and is taken violently. 6 consider “the feminist plant” in gibson & gagliano (2017) and bataille’s deconstruction of floral beauty via their sexuality (and decay, since the flower “rots indecently in the sun […and] is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial manure”): “the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centers by hairy sexual organs. thus the interior of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty; if one tears off all the corolla’s petals, all that remains is a rather sordid tuft. other flowers, it is true, present very well-developed and undeniably elegant stamens, but appealing again to common sense, it becomes clear on close examination that this elegance is rather satanic: thus certain kinds of fat orchids, plants so shady that one is tempted to attribute to them the most troubling of human special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 15 perversions” (1929/1985, p. 12). 7 these concerns are not new, and ewers’s text references linnaeus, whose eighteenth-century work on vegetal reproduction led to similar moral anxieties (schiebinger, 1993; jacobs, 2016). 8 freud famously described the advent of psychology as one of three insults of science against human narcissism: 1) copernicus’s discoveries revealed that “our earth was not the center of the universe,” 2) darwin’s “research robbed man of his apparent superiority under special creation, and rebuked him with his descent from the animal kingdom, and his ineradicable animal nature,” and 3) “psychological research, which wants to prove to the ‘i’ that it is not even master in its own home, but is dependent upon the most scanty information concerning all that goes on unconsciously in its psychic life” (1915/1920, pp. 246-247). 9 döblin is most famous for berlin alexanderplatz (1929), whereas this earlier novel, which reflects the contrast between the technologically intensified violence of world war i and contemporaneous back-to-nature movements, was unsuccessful. his narrative “the murder of a buttercup” (1913) also takes up the topics of vegetal eroticism and violence, with a gendered emphasis on the latter. 10 tourmaline is a gemstone that consists of several different minerals and comes in a variety of colors. “put under a pressure or temperature change, it will generate an electrical charge” (“the tourmaline mineral group,” n.d.). 11 “squids, monstrous bodies, with many arms, had their eyes closed. the musclestrong mantle kept still, was tautly swollen, the plant tissue had driven its extensions into its cavity, it had grown around the big veins, the animal was not dead. its heart was beating; the hollow parts of the plants discharged into its intestines; the heart sluggishly pushed the juice toward other animals, other plants” (döblin 1924/2006, p. 486). 12 panizza’s notion of spilled seed returns: “the testicles of the men merged with treetops and blossoms; they poured their juice into the round bodies that they carried like berries. under the overabundance of the juices, one frequently saw the giants bend, moan and spill their seed” (döblin, 1924/2006, p. 518). 13 the word blatt in the german original means both leaf and page, which highlights the material, metaphorical, and phytopoetic connections between plants and writing. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 16 14 cannibalism “is the place where desire and dread, love and aggression meet […and it] involves both the establishing of absolute difference, the opposites of eater and eaten, and the dissolution of that difference, through the act of incorporation which identifies them, and makes the two one” (kilgour, 1998, p. 240). in contrast to phallic penetration, violent incorporation could be considered a form of female agency. 15 most kinds of plant pollination involve sperm and egg. only fungal reproduction approximates the idea of merging bodies that the branches engage in here (haskell, 2012, pp. 133-134). 16 despite the text’s sci-fi creativity, döblin’s novel also reproduces biological knowledge: the “gelatinous sheath of food around tree roots creates a buzz of biological activity […and] much of the soil’s life is crowded into the…rhizosphere…the living soup” (haskell, 2012, p. 225). references bataille, g. 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(1993). nature’s body: gender in the making of modern science. boston, ma: beacon press. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) joela jacobs, 2019 18 sigusch, v. (2008). geschichte der sexualwissenschaft. frankfurt: campus. sommerey, c. (2014, august 4). “illegal science”: the case of ernst haeckel (18341919) and german biology education. shells and pebbles. retrieved from http://www.shellsandpebbles.com/2014/08/04/illegal-science-the-case-of-ernsthaeckel-1834-1919-and-german-biology-education/ stark, g. d. (2009). banned in berlin: literary censorship in imperial germany, 18711918. new york, ny: berghahn books. the tourmaline mineral group (n.d.). minerals.net. retrieved from https://www.minerals.net/mineral/tourmaline.aspx vieira, p. (2015). phytographia: literature as plant writing. environmental philosophy, 12(2), 205-220. vieira, p., gagliano, m., & ryan, j. (eds.). (2015). the green thread: dialogue with the vegetal world. lanham, md: lexington books. wandersee, j. h., & schussler, e. e. (2001). toward a theory of plant blindness. plant science bulletin, 47(1), 2-9. williams, j. a. (2007). turning to nature in germany: hiking, nudism, and conservation, 1900-1940. stanford, ca: stanford university press. author bio joela jacobs is assistant professor of german studies at the university of arizona and the founder of the literary and cultural plant studies network (https://plants.arizona.edu/). amrute, sareeta (2020). afterword. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sareeta amrute, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license follow the money. follow the bodies. follow the design: an afterword to computing in/from the south sareeta amrute university of washington, data & society research institute amrutes@uw.edu computing may want to surveil and monetize, but it also wants to connect, network, and switch. to discern what computing—as a field, a means of organizing knowledge, and a method for governing behaviors—creates today, the authors of this section give us three commands: follow the money, follow the bodies, and follow the design. these are their orientation points to understanding computing in and from the perspective of the south. these authors’ papers reveal that our language for describing connectivity and hierarchy across the south is deeply inadequate. this language, and even the term south itself constantly slips away from us, even as it must be used. hackers, through their outside status, become sigils of authority; consent for research becomes a formula for exhausted research subjects; socialist robots are outlawed even as their programmers are sucked up into the service of a silicon valley located globally. nation-states— china, brazil, india—that should signify particular histories of knowing, making, and networking, become watchwords for more or less friendly (to the united states, to businesses) computing environments. to work against these tokenizations requires that we put technological artifacts into conversation with the worlds from which they emerge, to which they aspire, and the worlds that are created as they move with and against each other. there are as many versions of the south as there are of what computing means and could mean for computing economies, the bodies who work in and are represented by computing regimes, and the visible forms computing cultures take as they appear to diverse publics. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute, 2020 2 as okune, beltran, and wu show, money follows a complicated plot. as much as we focus on the extractive capacities of big data and its surveillance of the consumer, we disregard the equally important circuit between communities, research knowledge, tech-fueled business interests, and philanthropy (amrute, 2020). the money traces not only what kinds of projects get authorized because they appear to fall within the normal parameters of “computing,” but also how differently located populations are asked to contribute to those projects—as experts, as students, as workers, as rarified research subjects, and as sources of knowledge about exoticized populations. when we prioritize embodiment in our analysis, we enter realms of meaningmaking and realms of labor. simultaneously mcelroy and murillo remind us to wonder, who makes the circuits and what are the hidden histories of these bodies’ production? this question not only contains a history of labor exploitation and alienation from the condition of work and work products. it also contains a radical seed. the lives of these bodies and the technologies these bodies productively incorporate may have little to do with the intentions of those who employ and deploy them. following the bodies takes the reader on what murillo calls a “moral circuit” that can reveal the lifecycle of data and hardware, even as it poses alternative, contradictory routes from the one we might be on. following how information and interactions are designed tells us about the material practices of computing that encode these paths. gupta inaugurates this conversation through satire, an affective response to the codes laid down through the corporate techno-rituals of beer drinking, app creation, and innovation. gupta’s approach makes masterful use of mimicry to simultaneously index the global discourse of muscular corporate computing cultures, and gesture toward the ample space within those tropes for play, revivified imagination, and misdirection (amrute, 2019 & 2020, boyer 2013, ferdandez and huber 2001). while gupta’s manual might be read as a recapitulation of the colonial derivative discourse, it is much more than that. it is an analysis of local design practices that circulate among aspirants to global elite status. in a moment when so many of our knowledge-producing activities are mediated by user interfaces that promise full disclosure, interventions like gupta’s makes us stop, look, and hear over and again, because we are made aware that we are never getting “the whole thing.” this is a version of what computing might want to become that is always partial, even as it invites us in to become part of the apparatus of computing itself by means of its partialities. such work calls to mind miyarrka media’s project making original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute, 2020 3 worlds otherwise, a remix of a remix of a remix that brings a deeply relational sensibility to the mobile phone from a yolnu aesthetic (miyarrka media 2020). myarrka media’s designs do not other. instead, they alter—they do computing otherwise by reworking what is given. in doing so, they remain receptive to new modes of appropriation and remix. roussel and stolfi take this entangled approach to how things are used one step further by demonstrating how a project for building networks in rural brazil can be a responsive way to create organizational tool for a community. they name these practices taking back the future through "rooting technology." rooting means two things at once: it is both a reference to the roots of the baobab tree and to the privileged access one might achieve through a technical system. reading the work of all the scholars who contributed to this volume suggests that this task of rooting computing in a refusal to reduce and to tokenize is a very personal one. we are not only writing about the containment of computing cultures within predictable tropes; we are also experiencing our own containment as raced and sexed bodied that fall outside these norms. together, we command a polyglot of languages, spoken, written, and signed, that gesture toward our histories, the histories of our grandmothers, parents, grandfathers, friends, that charge us all to play, at times, the migrant, the man, the queer, the communists, the woman, the exotic, and the misfit. in bringing together these many voices and languages, we interrogate and celebrate the crooked paths that have brought us to computing, otherwise, and cause us to ask, what else could computing want? together, we write these collected essays in the extended moment of a global pandemic, the covid-19 crisis. and we write in from the fire of a renewed movement for black lives. we write, once again, from the midst of unfolding ecological change unprecedented in the history of the human-inhabited world. the connections between covid-19 and racism are now widely apparent: in the united states, black and latinx people are three times as likely to become infected with covid-19 and twice as likely to die as white americans (center for disease control and prevention 2020). the further connection between covid19, race, and computing will come when we begin to understand the unequal provisioning of goods during this crisis, and the role of predictive algorithms in this process, along with the unintended consequences of contact tracing accomplished through data-centric projects, to name two emerging scenarios. as crises often do, covid-19 has shown us what was there all along—a deeply flawed and unequal infrastructure that distributes risk unevenly and unfairly. yet here too there are stories we can read if we learn to look across the lay of the land. in original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute, 2020 4 particular, the history of international socialism may hold some lessons for this pandemic, as cuba, vietnam, and kerala, along with ghana and ethiopia emerge as models of tracing outbreaks, providing adequate care for its populations, and containing disease (mccarthy, 2020). the relationship between computing and black liberation takes at least three forms. first, the calls to divest from the police are also calls for tech companies to divest from facial recognition and predictive policing technologies that make the us justice system biased and broken. second, there is a movement to produce better data that answers questions important to black communities, promoted, for instance, by the group data4blacklives. in the future, other such groups will certainly become more prominent in how computing and race come together. third, the black lives matter movement comes with the demand to further diversify tech companies, computing education, and the recognition of black scholarship as legitimate in the field. these calls, which ongoing for some time now, will gain in prominence. the third orientation point, in addition to the covid-19 epidemic and the movement for black lives, is the unfolding ecological crisis, which is a feeder of the other two. as poor communities bear the brunt of climate change, long-term chronic health conditions make them more vulnerable to virus, even while the evidence of that slow burn, that slow death is invisible—until someone else names it (gravlee, 2009; cox 2015). here too, there are histories of living otherwise that connect across colonial geographies that have yet to be written. these stories muddy lines between urban and rural spaces, and consider materials, practices, and bodies in terms of what they do in a particular context, rather than in terms of what they are, as defined externally (young, 2019). these histories expand what we understand as technologies, braiding together indigenous knowledge systems with archival practices, for instance, or local rainwater filtration practices with mapping projects that track coastline degradation. what can a story of computing and the south tell us about such projects? we think in the south and from the south, but have we reached a computing that is of the south? while we can follow computing’s ongoing development across territories traditionally marked southern, and while we can even grasp the flavor, on its own terms, of the contests and contradictions over computing and its infrastructures that unfold across these terrains, we do not know what a computing that divested itself from the structures of patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism would look like. we do not know this because computing is not original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute, 2020 5 isolated. it is not a source of unsullied opposition. its oppositional practices are themselves fraught locations for the working out of knowledge, power, and materiality. the south marks a poetic relationality, but it is not a simple one. it would be insufficient to club all oppositional movements together. decolonial computing is not the same as a movement to divest from the police through reducing police access to facial recognition technologies, though they may ally temporarily. the black lives matter movement includes movements for better data around covid-19 risk for black people, if that call is accompanied by demands for better healthcare and better environmental conditions for communities of color. there are goals that come under a banner of solidarity across communities of color, but there are also plenty of actors who would hold aloft the banner of solidarity, black lives matter, and refuse to look at their own patterns of caste-based, gendered, minoritarian discrimination. participating in global movements located elsewhere can provide a cardboard fig leaf for continued oppression by showing allegiance to a movement in the united states without connecting that fight for justice with continued colorism and racisms that move across asia and south america, to take two examples from the long history of colonial and postcolonial race politics of the south. when elites in the global south proclaim their allegiance to the black lives matter cause, it might be the flip side of white western philanthropy— establishing elite status through symbolic gestures that do not challenge relations of power at home. it can be, but it does not have to be. rather than taking as a focus these symbolic gestures of current public culture, there is a longer and continually revived history of movements that connect black and brown lives across these power-laded geographies. the south african movement #rhodesmustfall, for example, serves as a fulcrum connecting movements for black lives in the united states with decolonizing movements that similarly focused on toppling statutes of violent and vicious white oppressors. the story of these movements, which build one on the other, has yet to be told for the movements and their digital, archival afterlives. for computing culture writ large, these stories, and the stories of the economic geographies, embodied workforces, and design choices of data collection and scaffolding will make up the necessary backbone of a computing done otherwise, not only for and in, but from within the terms of a continually transformed south. references amrute, s. (2019, february 28). silicon satire. anthropology news. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute, 2020 6 https://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2019/02/28/silicon-satire/ amrute, s. (2020). bored techies being casually racist: race as algorithm” science, technology and human values. special issue, race as ghost variable. 45(5): 903-933. amrute, s. (2020, january 27). sounding the flat alarm: review of shoshana zuboff, the age of surveillance capitalism. b20: the online community of the boundary 2 editorial collective. http://www.boundary2.org/2020/01/sareeta-amrute-sounding-theflat-alarm-review-of-shoshana-zuboff-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/ boyer, d. (2013). simply the best: parody and political sincerity in iceland. american ethnologist 40(2):272-287. center for disease control and prevention. (2020, july 24). health equity considerations and racial and ethnic minority groups. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/racial-ethnicminorities.html cox, a. (2015). shapeshifters: black girls and the choreography of citizenship. duke university press. fernandez, j. and huber, m. (2001). irony in action: anthropology. practice and the moral imagination. university of chicago press. gravlee, c. c. (2009). how race becomes biology: embodiment of social inequality. american journal of physical anthropology, 139(1), 47–57. mccarthy, t. (2020, july 18). “the virus doesn’t care about excuses”: us faces terrifying autumn as covid-19 surges. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/18/us-coronavirus-fall-second-waveautumn miyarrka media (2020). keynote: making worlds otherwise/hacer mundos de ontra manera: distribute 2020. retrieved september 15, 2020, from https://distribute.utoronto.ca/groups/keynote-making-worlds-otherwise/ young, k. (2019). constellations of rebellion: home, makeshift economies, and queer indigeneity [unpublished doctoral dissertation, university of washington]. author bio sareeta amrute is associate professor of anthropology at the university of washington, seattle, and director of research at the data & society research http://www.boundary2.org/2020/01/sareeta-amrute-sounding-the-flat-alarm-review-of-shoshana-zuboff-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/ http://www.boundary2.org/2020/01/sareeta-amrute-sounding-the-flat-alarm-review-of-shoshana-zuboff-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/ https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/racial-ethnic-minorities.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/racial-ethnic-minorities.html https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/18/us-coronavirus-fall-second-wave-autumn https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/18/us-coronavirus-fall-second-wave-autumn https://distribute.utoronto.ca/groups/keynote-making-worlds-otherwise/ original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sareeta amrute, 2020 7 institute. she is the author of encoding race, encoding class: indian it workers in berlin (duke university press, 2016). microsoft word 76959-1-11-banner.docx banner, o. (2019). technopsyence and afro-surrealism’s cripistemologies. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5 (1), 1-29. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © olivia banner, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article technopsyence and afro-surrealism’s cripistemologies olivia banner university of texas at dallas olivia.banner@utdallas.edu abstract this article critiques today’s digital mental health research and treatment paradigms through a crip theoretical approach. i argue that, in a neoliberal risk culture and austerity logics that use big data to capacitate and debilitate, psychiatric technoscientific endeavors (what i call technopsyence) reproduce racial capitalism in their aim of governing mentalities. yet mobile devices are also the means by which crip bodyminds creatively interrogate and resist racial capitalism and the psy discourses that support it. i explore a recent work of afrosurrealism that presents scenes of extractive racial capitalism, fantasies of digital futures, mental distress, and care, and that, i argue, opens up avenues for thinking bodyminds and the digital otherwise. in 2010, the national institute of mental health (nimh) launched the research domain criteria (rdoc) project. named in allusion to the 1970s research diagnostic criteria (rdc) that eventuated in the dsm-iii, the rdoc means to “fix” the issue that has bedeviled psychiatry for decades: its diagnoses are shifting, subjective entities, and without a scientific nosology, psychiatric research must proceed on an unstable foundation that banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 precludes firmly aligning psychiatric diagnoses with genetic and neuroscientific research. with the rdoc, psychiatry may finally be able to achieve its goal of “neuroscience-based psychiatric classification,” which would then allow the field to incorporate “data on pathophysiology in ways that eventually will help identify new targets for treatment development, detect subgroups for treatment selection, and provide a better match between research findings and clinical decision making” (insel et al., 2010, 748). some of that data will be gathered through mobile devices—cell phones in particular—which are being legitimated as a scientific method for gathering affective data, and the concepts of the “digital phenotype” (jain, powers, hawkins, & brownstein 2015), an impression of an individual assessed from their digital life, and “digital phenotyping” (torous, onnela & keshavan, 2017), a method of drawing on people’s uses of digital devices to evaluate behavioral health, have been developed to name this data gathering with a term familiar to scientists ("phenotype"). as technoscientific objects involved in what ian hacking (1986) calls “making up people,” and in what shelley tremain (2010), drawing on foucault, theorizes as the governmentality of disability, these devices deserve analysis and theorization through a critical disability, race, and feminist science and technology studies lens. as media objects, they deserve analysis through a critical media studies perspective that can attend to their status as cultural practices of representation and communication—as devices that circulate affective flows when their human users transmit videos of police brutality, images of dead refugees, and audio of children forcibly separated from their parents. psychiatric research designates such affective flows symptomatic of psychiatric diagnoses, but a critical mad studies perspective identifies them as registrations of the political and its traumatic social encounters. how might critical mad studies theorize what happens as these media are incorporated into and become foundational to the production of mental health markets—to the production of categories of “madness”? and how does this production of pathologies intersect with processes of racialization (aho, ben-moshe, & hilton, 2017) and with the global constructions, under us imperialism, of debilitated and banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 capacitated populations—of refugees, of people living through wars (puar, 2017)—and of how, and whether, they will be incorporated into zones of disability inclusion? with their unexamined assumptions about the normal/abnormal and the healthy/pathological, these technoscientific projects offer rich ground for cripping technoscience. this article takes the special issue theme—“crip technoscience”—in its doubly imperative tense, an urgently needed action: following carrie sandahl’s (2003) definition of “to crip” as “spin[ning] mainstream…practices to reveal able-bodied [and -minded] assumptions and exclusionary effects” (37), the action of cripping technoscience exposes the technoscientific naturalization of normalization and of curative practices, its ableism and sanism, and its epistemologies derived from a western enlightenment that defined “the human” through constructing certain populations as less-than-human. as such, this article pursues an excavation of “cripistemologies," in line with work done in the so-named special issue of journal of literary and cultural disability studies (johnson & mcruer, 2014), whose contributors argued for alternate epistemologies based in crip experience (following feminist standpoint theory). the evolving field of mad studies has been cripistemological from its origins, refusing the psy disciplines' "knowledge" about those they designate mad and instead articulating states of mental distress and trauma as experiences through which mad knowledge is established (see, e.g., lefrançois, menzies, & reaume, 2013).1 cripping technoscience, then, exposes the normative models for mental states at the center of the technoscientific production of madness. gesturing to foucault’s work on the emergence of the “psy-ences” as a distinct modern discourse central to disciplinary power (e.g., foucault, 1979), i name this technoscientific production of madness “technopsyence.” as this article undertakes a cripistemological analysis that understands technopsyentific epistemologies to reify western constructions of human/subhuman, it is centrally interested in interrogating how that production imbricates racialization with pathologization (see, e.g., browne, 2015; hilton, 2017). i will argue that the mobile-device form of “making up banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 madness” is wedded to other biomedical racializing projects that operate within a neoliberal risk culture built on extractive racial capitalism. they are at once tools that claim to capacitate and new tools in the arsenal of extractive racial capitalism as it seeks to apportion debility and capacity. furthermore, these emerging tools continue what jackie orr (2010) argues has been the post–world war ii projects of the psy disciplines to govern mentalities, and they augment their global reach, using the logic of racial liberalism and white savior discourse that serves as cover for the racial capitalism they exercise. an analysis of them thus helps deepen work by nirma erevelles (2011), jasbir puar, and david mitchell and sharon snyder (2015) on the operations of debility and capacity at the national and global levels. yet, as cultural practices of representation and communication, those media are also used to imagine alternate visions of rationality, affect, and care. in the article’s second half i explore one such vision, a work of afro-surrealism broadcast on the very screen media that are this article’s concern. afro-surrealism, like the black feminist speculative fiction that sami schalk (2018) analyzes in her work, centralizes the crip concept of bodyminds (price, 2015). for both margaret price and schalk, “bodyminds” goes beyond the typical disability studies framework of “bodies and minds” as discrete yet connected and equal processes to instead understand them as enmeshed, an understanding that enables new theoretical understandings for disability studies. in my analysis of the afro-surrealist work, i argue that its aesthetics, combined with its use of the means of media production used in technopsyence, challenge technopsyence's models for trauma and bodyminds. surrealism in general challenges the enlightenment privileging of rationality and all that follows in its wake, including its presumptions of the value of coherence, routinized scheduling, linear progression narratives, and capitalist realism, while afro-surrealism additionally aligns these presumptions with the racial capitalism that fueled the enlightenment project. where crip theory has explored camp as an appropriate aesthetic to combat ableism and sanism, here i argue that afrosurrealism provides an additional crip aesthetic tactic. banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 technopsyence, risk culture, and debilitation today’s psy research ecosystem consists of four major domains: statefunded technoscientific initiatives; technology corporations (apple and google in particular) that integrate into those state projects; consumerfacing designs, which include both the major technology corporations (apple, google, facebook) as well as smaller startups; and the academic institutions that often host this research. the first group includes the rdoc as well as the brain research through advancing innovative neurotechnologies (brain) initiative, a funding platform for neuroscientific biotechnologies development; the precision medicine initiative (pmi), which aims to link the burgeoning ability of consumer devices to gather finegrained data about people’s lives to the massive genomic datasets already gathered in the human genome project; and more recently, the 21st century cures act. one example of this ecosystem is the aurora study. hosted at the university of north carolina, funded through an nimh grant and private donations, and focused on trauma victims, the study uses a study watch wearable made by verily (the life sciences division of google’s larger umbrella corporation, alphabet), which records heart rate, skin electrical conductivity, and movement, and a cell phone app, developed by thomas insel’s mindstrong, that uses mindstrong’s digital phenotyping methods, which assess phone use time, word choice speed, and keystroke speed (molteni & rogers, 2017). alongside these, genomic analysis, fmri imaging, self-assessment, and electronic medical record (emr) analysis will be used to construct markers of physiological changes that can predict who is most likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), postconcussion syndrome, and depression. principal investigators note that those populations the study will be useful for are “civilian trauma survivors, service men and women, and combat veterans with these common posttraumatic conditions” (fromer & mclean, 2017). in addition to establishing measurements by which to predict risk for those diagnoses, the study will banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 allow verily and mindstrong to validate their technologies before they are enrolled in the larger baseline study, google’s private/public endeavor comprising its core attempt to enter biomedical research. the nimh announcement of the aurora study explains that its information gathering is oriented toward the rdoc (nimh, 2016). in the publicly available material about the study (as of september 2018), nothing identifies who the study expects to enroll: we are told only that there are about nineteen member institutions across the united states, and trauma victims who appear at those hospitals will be asked to enroll. in other words, it is unclear how the project conceives of trauma, of the social environments in which it happens, of the populations who experience it. from its inception, then, the study appears to assume the affective happens sanitized of social context—that it can be measured via physiological markers that are conceptualized as untouched by racism, sanism, and sexism. the rdoc and its triumphing of mobile devices as knowledgeproducing situates digital phenotyping within biomedicalization (clarke et al., 2003), the paradigm for research and treatment that arose in the early 2000s and is characterized by private/public partnerships, research conducted on patient populations, the transfer of computational methods and databases among multiple domains, and engaged patient groups advocating for their particular conditions. the domain of biomedicalization under examination here, technopsyence, has a history worth summarizing. in her work on the post–world war ii psy disciplines, jackie orr (2010) argues that the period ushered in new forms of managing the mental health of populations, what she calls “governing mentalities.” the psy disciplines were key to state biopolitics and to biopower as postwar nation-states sought to control a potentially unruly populace. this is obvious, as orr notes, in the nimh’s founding: in 1949, its director wrote that “the prevention of mental illness…is an attainable goal…[that] must be done as rapidly and economically as possible[, and thus] techniques for a mass approach to the problem must be developed” (p. 353, quoting felix 1949, p. 405). where in the mid-twentieth century nimh instituted a biopolitics of governing mentalities, today’s technopsyentific media intensify that now seventy-yearbanner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 old project not only with their increased speed and efficiency but also due to the broader social and cultural intensification of risk culture. risk culture and technopsyentific media: embedded within late liberalism’s political economy of risk and security (povinelli, 2011), such technopsyentific media and their heightened regime of affective surveillance must be considered part of a risk society inscribed by systemic racism and sanism. as lisa nakamura (2015) puts it, surveillance today has two functions: “to regulate, define, and control populations; and to create new gendered, racialized, and abled or disabled bodies through digital means” (p. 221). the risk industries materialize these functions in their provision of what one major player in the field, lexisnexis risk solutions, calls “data analysis business solutions.” its website (risk.lexisnexis.com) offers information about the services it provides to payors (health insurance companies), physicians, and other health care industries; services it also offers to other industries, including the automobile industry, law enforcement, the financial services industry; and collections and recovery. the company has more than 78 billion records on us citizens, including voter registration records, law enforcement records, educational records, and information about debt and liens, and the “socioeconomic data analyzed by lexisnexis risk solutions uncovers a wide range of information needed to understand social determinants of health, including information on relatives and associates, assets, trends over time, education, neighborhood and household characteristics and more” (lexisnexis, 2017a). such analysis is applied for the purpose of creating a prediction of the overall health risk of a new hire (i.e., how much medical expense an employee will cost, so that in aggregate this data allows a business to calculate possible total employee medical costs), even without a past medical history; or, at the group level, it can be utilized “to improve care management and risk stratification activities” (lexisnexis, 2017a). big data analytics companies like lexisnexis are central tools within neoliberalism’s austerity logics and the privatization of public services. their services allow corporations to do more with less, including, as may seem obvious, screen job applicants to see who might potentially cost a company banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 more in health care costs than others. since the affordable care act mandated equity in both health and mental health care coverage, corporate clients of lexisnexis risk solutions will want analyses of mental health risk as well. but i am less interested here in the possibilities for discrimination against individuals—which are obvious and deeply concerning—as i am about the ways that risk is defined and that redound at the population aggregate level. lexisnexis risk solutions uses the following data to calculate risk: bankruptcy records, property tax assessment, lien and judgment records, criminal records, purchase activity, voter registration, college attendance records, and subprime credit request offers. how the company interprets these data is evident in claims such as, for voter registration, that “individuals showing engagement in their community may be more likely to engage in their own health”; or for “derogatory records” (liens, felonies, etc.), that “liens, evictions and felonies indicate that individual health may not be a priority” (lexisnexis, 2017b). risk is assessed, then, through data reflective of extractive and racialized capitalism. it would be naïve to think that the digital phenotype and digital phenotyping won’t be used by risk assessment industries, either through compliance required to receive benefits or as companies extract users’ data without their full knowing consent. the economic logic of risk assessment industries requires companies to avail themselves of whatever datasets they can obtain to make inferences about individuals’ and populations’ health, which are then used to enforce neoliberal regimes of austerity: to categorize and rank people in order to decide who deserves to receive care, rehabilitative treatments, financial resources. surveillance studies scholarship has abundantly demonstrated that the state’s public-private partnerships enable it to enforce new tools of surveillance on people receiving state benefits (see, e.g., gilliom, 2001; monahan, 2017). for those who live under the regime of disability surveillance (most recently exemplified in the 21st century cures act’s mandated electronic visitation verification [dredf, 2018]; see also hilton, 2017), digital phenotyping is a logical next step. for the risk industries currently embedded in social banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 services already draw on data about mental health. for example, as virginia eubanks (2018) explains, a software program called vulnerability index— service prioritization decision assistance tool (vi-spdat), in operation in los angeles, is used to decide who among the unhoused will qualify as most “at-risk” and therefore be granted a spot in the limited number of housing units available. among the data the vi-spdat uses to calculate risk is data about mental health issues that the unhoused must supply if they hope to be granted housing. in pittsburgh, the allegheny family screening tool (algorithmic software used to predict child abuse and neglect and thus to allot resources to various families) draws on pittsburgh’s department of human services data warehouse, which gathers data from offices, such as the criminal justice system and local school districts, that pathologize and criminalize mental health and substance abuse. in their work on big data in public health domains, nadine ehlers and shiloh krupar (2017) argue that the “medical hot spotting” used in camden, new jersey, a majority black city, to predict so-called high users of health care is a thoroughly racialized project that ignores racial capitalism as the cause of health care indebtedness; it justifies increased biomedical surveillance of geographies already heavily surveilled and increased administration of them. among the three groups targeted by medical hot spotting are the mentally ill; various studies of “high utilizer” data consistently show that people with multiple visits to emergency rooms have the diagnosis of depression. even as there are no data to support digital phenotyping, various psy domains are predicting how to incorporate it. an article in frontiers in psychiatry, for example, reports on ongoing studies and predicts the utility of digital phenotyping in substance abuse disorders (ferreri, bourla, mouchabac, & karila, 2018). as helena hansen and samuel roberts (2010) argue, substance abuse disorders today are highly racialized and pathologized, with opioid users, culturally constructed as white, designated a population worth rehabilitating. it is difficult not to foresee that certain populations with digital phenotypes designated as indicating drug use may be punished rather than rehabilitated. this seems especially probable given banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 that in the case of medical hot spotting, interventions occur in order to teach “high utilizers” how to self-manage their conditions—in other words, to educate them into neoliberal modes of self-governance. figures of risk and chatbots: in addition to digital phenotyping, technopsyence is at play in the clinical applications developed for mobile devices, mental health apps. here i will focus on two mental health chatbots. the first, koko, illustrates how corporations position their development in relation to hegemonic models for mental health and figurations of citizens at risk; the second, an artificial intelligence (ai) chatbot called tess/karim, clarifies the global biopolitical stakes of governing cybermentalities under us imperialism. koko, designed by an mit graduate student, initially prioritized a support group model for people experiencing distress. a member would post about their distress to the app, and other members would respond using cognitive behavioral therapy (cbt) principles meant to encourage the distressed person to rethink their outlook—in the terms of cbt, to “reframe.” cbt is the therapeutic modality most prioritized in silicon valley: it aligns with core silicon valley beliefs in the individual’s power to self-govern through techniques of rational agency; its philosophy that the mind works as a tweakable feedback system is familiar to silicon valley workers; and, most alluringly, it seems to have the capacity “to scale”—it can be delivered to masses of people through mechanisms that increase efficiency over typical psychiatric practices. automated systems training users to govern their distress applied to large populations: this is the dream that, as orr demonstrates, has motivated biopower’s investment in the psy disciplines since the postwar era. koko’s initial form as a stand-alone, member-participatory app was a test drive to attract venture capital to back its second iteration, which has since been licensed to other platforms. when in 2016 the company received $2.5 million in venture capital funding, users were notified that koko could now be accessed through a web-based chatbot and through twitter, kik, and facebook messenger. when accessed via those third-party social media platforms, those companies have full access to the content of the support sessions. at the same time, we know that facebook is working to banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 11 construct mechanisms that can scan its communications for users at risk; unclear, and hidden behind the laws of private ownership, are whether facebook is licensing ai development from koko and/or the role of the big data koko is gathering in facebook’s development process. by hosting koko as a third-party app, facebook is able to claim that it is disciplining its technology—that it takes seriously claims that it has detrimental effects on mental health and puts its users at risk, especially teenagers. the teenager whose mental health is at risk, whether from cyberbullying or otherwise, is one of the three figures that dominates how citizens at risk for mental illness are figured—what julie elman (2014) describes as the “teenager in crisis.” the other two figures are the veteran soldier—the citizen willing to sacrifice for the nation (see, e.g., macleish, 2013; wool, 2015)— and the pre-citizen, a figure gestured to in the trope, repeated in psy research as well as the popular press, of "the global burden of depression." online reporting promoting koko reflected this cultural investment in these two. for example, an article in the verge began with a story of a teenage suicide, then noted the veteran administration’s interest in tech-driven suicide prevention methods that crystallized when in 2017 us pentagon officials met with executives from google, facebook, and apple to discuss such methods (popper, 2017). in light of jennifer terry’s (2017) argument that biomedicine functions to legitimize the continuation of war, technopsyentific research’s orientation toward veteran mental health grants it access to the funding institutions and ideological matrix supporting war. tess/karim illustrates how us technopsyence is implicated in that matrix through its application to the third figure at risk, the pre-citizen. called tess in the us context, funded by the singularity university, the chatbot uses what its developers at x2ai call “an emotion algorithm”—basically an algorithm that infers the emotions being expressed in human language. first tested by health care corporations who licensed it as therapy for their own employees (nurses and other care workers), the chatbot is presumably monitored by actual psy professionals—in effect, a psy clinician “steps in” if the software identifies expressions indicative of harm to the self or other dangers. according to its founders, that allows for clinicians to monitor fifty banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 12 rather than five patients: scale is the motivating factor here, a way for corporations to hire fewer psy professionals and therefore cut costs while still ensuring their insurance plans fulfill the affordable care act mandate of offering mental health care. the bot has been sold to public health officials: monterey county, california, has partnered with x2ai for its tess software— according to one report, in order to fill in for the low numbers of mental health professionals who are bilingual (beltran, 2017), and to another, to serve hispanic workers (day laborers) (edgcomb, 2017). that this is occurring in monterey, which is characterized by extreme wealth inequality, is no accident. chatbot therapy is here implemented within the context of austerity, where certain populations are deemed unworthy of full services. it is telling that monterey applied for and received a federal grant to institute a medical hot spotting program (monterey county health department, 2017; monterey county n.d.). ehler and krupar (2017) argue that hot spotting villainizes specific groups as a burden on the state—its primary trope of the “high utilizer of health care” is a new version of “the welfare queen”—and that these groups are racialized. in their analysis, medical hot spotting attempts to train in self-governance those designated high utilizers, making them responsibilized neoliberal subjects who can take on the burden of risk. a tool such as tess, which de-politicizes states of mental distress, is quite clearly aligned with medical hot spotting’s aim of producing self-governing neoliberal citizens. tess, in other words, is implemented for the state's aims of governing the mentalities of workers (migrant day laborers) highly exploited under conditions of global capitalism. if within the american context these technologies are envisioned as ensuring that workers will increase the speed and efficiency at which they work, they function at a global scale to legitimize imperialism, war, and the doctrine of the white techphilanthropist savior. executives from x2ai were included in a united nations forum on using ai for mental health at a global scale after tess, reworked as karim, was used to address trauma experienced by syrian refugees (solon, 2016), and duke university researchers have piloted a study using tess for perinatal depression in kenyan women (green, 2018a, 2018b; green et al., 2018). in this, these banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 13 technopsyentific media aid the broader biopolitical project by which bodyminds are brought under the governance of the western psy disciplines; their debilitation by us imperialism is then, as puar (2017) conceives it, converted to a capacitation as karim interpellates them into western subjectivities. as x2ai separates its operations into two corporate entities—it has established a for-profit arm that licenses tess to for-profit corporations and a nonprofit that gives its humanitarian-oriented chatbots to aid agencies—tech corporations can claim the position of white savior of the mind, while they move to govern cybermentalities at the global level. cripping technopsyence with afro-surrealism in a context in which digital device use has become the grounds for extending psychiatric diagnoses and treatment, can we think care and the digital otherwise? what practices currently exist and are being imagined by disabled people to hack hegemonic psy practices? as this issue's editors remind us, “disabled people use technoscience to survive and alter the very systems that produce disability or attempt to render us as broken” (hamraie & fritsch, 2019). in the area of mad practices, we might think here of organizations such as the icarus project and the hearing voices network, two collectives with an online presence that foster communities of care for members who would typically be diagnosed with and (pharmaceutically) treated for bipolar and schizoaffective disorder, respectively. or we might think of the work being done by black lives matter to establish networks that can care for members in ways that ensure black people experiencing distress are not exposed to encounters with state-sanctioned mental health authorities, which often become encounters with law enforcement. we might also look to how the same media of mobile devices and digital technologies are being envisioned within creative projects by crip subjects. in what follows, i explore such a creative project, random acts of flyness (raof) (hbo, 2018). broadcast on the prestige us cable channel hbo, its exhibition context could be considered problematic from a crip theoretical sitpoint: after all, the economics of us cable production inhibits banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 14 participation by disabled media producers (see, e.g., ellis & goggin, 2015), and some of hbo’s shows have come under fire as ableist. the show itself takes up an analogous problem: that the cable channel industry and prestige media productions more generally have supported toxic white masculinities and the psy models that have done little to undo them. having noted that, i want to introduce alison kafer’s (2013) nuanced discussion of the paradoxes inherent to crip living and technoscience. kafer’s discussion of donna haraway’s cyborg will help to think through the cyborg figure in raof as well as to confront the media-production paradox of raof, where it is using the same means of production (screen media and digital devices) that it describes as extending racial capitalist logics. after noting the critiques of haraway’s cyborg (1987) lodged by postcolonial, women of color, and disability studies scholars, kafer resuscitates the figure for what she argues is a potency lodged within these critical fractures. while the cyborg may fail to universally instantiate a (crip) politics, it can when it is used for political purposes. as examples of crip cyborg politics, kafer cites the many crip activists who use technoscience’s products (wheelchairs, breathing tubes) in order to facilitate their activism against the disability industry; and she includes instances where people use the pharmaceutical products of the medical-industrial complex for blasphemous ends—not those for which they were devised, and often not those for which (at least according to insurance coding) they can be prescribed. these, she argues, can be thought a kind of crip cyborg politics, where, by turning technoscientific logics against themselves, it explodes its constraints. yet kafer is also ambivalent about using the cyborg to theorize the activist and blasphemous uses she explores, for it was mental asylum administrators and vanguardists in using powerful new sedative drugs manfred clynes and nathan kline (1960) who developed the term: they imagined what it would mean should an astronaut experience mental distress in the controlled environment of outer space, and the means of control (psychopharmaceuticals) necessary to restore order. with its origins contaminated by ableism and sanism, kafer cannot enthusiastically offer banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 15 the cyborg as a figure with which to theorize our futures. i want to place this crip ambivalence toward the cyborg next to raof because the show is similarly critical of cyborg fantasies, and, similar to kafer's crip activists, the show's criticism is undertaken through the very technologies of exploitation—digital devices, networks, and distribution platforms—that the show critiques. to get there, i must first describe the show’s aesthetics, which, i argue, align it with camp as a potent aesthetics for crip cultural interventions. the show is intertexually rich, free associative, uses a chronologically disjointed narrative, and incorporates a pastiche of cinematic genres including animation, cinéma vérité, documentary realism, retro sequences filmed to look like old game shows, clips from old movies and news reports, film running in reverse, frames within frames, and so forth. in other words, the show’s montage and collage-like qualities defy norms of televisual coherence and aim to provoke a brechtian alienation effect. with segments that are wickedly humorous, i think its aesthetics complement camp, which crip theorists have identified as an aesthetic mode appropriate to crip tactics, as a form of performance that reveals “the arbitrary delineation between normal and defective” and “disarm[s] with a wicked humor” (sandahl, 2003, 37). like camp, afro-surrealism celebrates those figures deemed monstrous or otherwise marginal; like camp, afrosurrealism is wickedly funny, often painfully so in the ugly truths its humor reveals. like camp, it is purposefully excessive (what one afro-surrealist names "rococo" [miller 2013]), and this excess subverts norms of realism and the capitalist inevitability they have come to support (e.g., shonkwiler & la berge, 2014). more salient to mad studies, in refusing “realism,” afro-surrealism also refuses western epistemologies’ presumptions and valuing of rationality, and it thus aligns with mad studies' critiques of sanism and sanist epistemologies. in its refusal of (capitalist) realism's use of linear progression to structure narrative time, afro-surrealism instantiates crip notions of time (e.g., samuels, 2017) as broken, slow, non-normative, a kind of time travel apart from the "regular" (i.e., the ordered time of western banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 16 industralism). in raof, crip time joins with how the show conceptualizes, visualizes, and narrativizes the connectedness of historical trauma to present trauma—in other words, how black bodyminds in the present are imbued with the present and past of racial capitalism, a historical materialism of the bodymind. in my analysis, i will focus in on the show’s encounters with what the psy disciplines might call ptsd (and indeed, the show explicitly references that diagnosis) and how these connect to its critique of televisual narratives that promote white psy models for mental health. the show’s refusal of these models works in tandem with its afrosurrealism, its insistence on a surrealist grammar for representing, and redressing, black bodyminds under racial capitalism and the hegemonic practices of representation and communication that it fosters. the show begins by referencing police brutality: terence nance, one of the show's creators, is using his phone camera to film himself while bicycling on a quiet new york street, and is sideswiped by a police car, knocked to the ground. the officer accuses nance of a crime, and as the scene begins to escalate toward what we assume will be an act of police violence, nance and the camera phone he is using rise into the air, and nance then flies over the city. nance’s camera, the means of producing the representation we are watching, literally figures as a criminal act here, representing how phone cameras, in their capacity to record and transmit moments of police brutality, endanger the juridical’s production of black people as criminals. the best response to that production (of random acts of violence) becomes, in nance’s imaginary, turning to the surreal (of random acts of “flying,” with its additional meaning of being hip). throughout all six episodes, police brutality is intercalated with other manifestations of historical and present trauma to black bodies. the biopolitics enacted on black women’s bodies is shown in a recurring theme of their disproportionate incidents of maternal mortality. another recurring theme is depression and anxiety that arise from being daily subjected to scenes of violence against black bodies. another is the kind of dissociation women subjected to sexual violence undergo when they report to the police and are required to submit to physical examinations. these scenes of our banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 17 current moment are visually and diegetically framed by allusions to the middle passage, with recurring tropes of black bodies entering bodies of water to descend toward an ocean floor. in other words, the show depicts contemporary black life as scenes of physical and mental trauma and connects this to systemic racism and the historical plundering of black bodies. a rendering of that plunder germane to technopsyence is the show’s wickedly ironic visions of technosolutionism to redress these historical traumas. in episode 3, nance appears before a mostly white audience to introduce an app called bitch better have my money that connects its users with black people so that its users can give reparations. significantly, nance explains that the app’s algorithm “takes into account medical records, criminal records, real estate records, land rights and treaties, in order to make extremely precise determinations about how much our black users are owed due to the contemporary injustices of redlining, hiring discrimination, and, of course, mass incaraceration.” told they may have to sign over real estate, intellectual property, and bank accounts, the audience members look increasingly uncomfortable and eventually flee the theater. the show cuts to a montage that establishes a connection between the theft of africa’s natural resources by the west—coltan, specifically—and the west’s theft of africa’s people to serve as labor in the cotton market. in basing this reference to the plunder of african coltan, the mineral that powers our electronic devices whose extraction today is performed by slave laborers in congo, the show makes apparent the material conditions of global capitalism and imperialism that underlie the production of media devices. as signified in the app, media technologies in this wickedly humorous segment cannot redress the harm their production processes and the broader context of racial capitalism inflict. this part of episode 3 resonates with two narratives from episodes 5 and 6: one, on contemporary africa; another, on what the show’s notes call “blackness in the singularity,” which includes two instances of black cyborgs. as we shall see, these two narratives are associatively linked through an interest in black bodyminds, mental distress, and psy banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 18 discourses. the african narrative begins in a wealthy white family’s home, as two white parents, a black girl, and a white film director sit around a dinner table, while the white characters discuss being new parents of this child they’ve adopted from an african country. the girl, silent throughout, suddenly speaks to the director in an unidentified language. in response to the director’s look of surprise, the mother explains that the child’s psychiatrist calls this is a symptom of ptsd from her experiences of war in malawi. this event inspires the director to search youtube for “african child rebel soldiers,” and he finds a video in which a white american soldier grabs and carries away an african child, presumably to protect the child from the surrounding violence. the director then decides to direct a film about the soldier and child and to play the soldier. after having completed the film, and as he dresses for an award ceremony, he is informed that the solider he played has been found, alive, in an african prison, serving a sentence for raping african children. the director ignores the obvious conclusion, that in that youtube video the american solider on whom his film is based was not rescuing the child from harm but rather intended to harm him. the director is also told his child actor is refusing to wear a black tuxedo to the awards ceremony because in his culture, a black outfit attracts devils, and is insisting on wearing white. in the following scene, the director accepts his film award, with the child actor, wearing black, by his side. during his acceptance speech, insects swarm from the director’s mouth and choke him. the child then speaks in an african language, and this time, in contrast to when the adopted girl spoke, the screen provides a translation: “i told you. demons.” a cut introduces courtney love making a joke at an awards ceremony that it's best not to go to after-parties that harvey weinstein attends, and the crowd roars with laughter. this begins the next segment, with nance, in voiceover, providing an astute analysis of how toxic white masculinity undergirds hollywood: it finances shows such as the sopranos and breaking bad, and films like fight club, that figure white masculinity through jungian archetypes of dualistic psychology, in which white men play “good guys” while beneath the surface they simmer with anger. nance then argues that the circulation banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 19 of these televisual archetypes influenced the political, that they are implicated in the reproduction of white supremacy manifested both in the 2016 election and in us wars. these structures are metonymized in the white director’s movie: he imagines himself as the white savior of africa, as have multiple us warmaking administrations, but the white savior is actually a monster that destroy black africans, a fact he conveniently ignores. when the african children identify a demonic logic at work within the director and the cultural narratives in which he traffics, they are correct in their “diagnosis” of what fuels his media productions. thus, when the adopted african child’s african speech is diagnosed as a symptom of ptsd, the western psychiatrist has medicalized a mode of speaking that is actually a form of knowledge. the children speak their cripistemologies—knowing derived from their experiences as the victims of imperialism—which the psy disciplines describe with diagnostic practices that drain them of political import. this theme of the systemic plundering of africa and its relationship to the bodyminds of black people occurs again in the season’s final episode, which centers on black women, affective states, and questions of care. here i invoke price and schalk’s use of "bodyminds" as an alternative to the conventionally phrased “bodies and minds,” because raof presents the cartesian dualism under “bodies and minds” as connected to that systemic plundering, and instead visualizes black living (and distress) as "bodyminds"—that is, as enmeshed. the episode’s many vignettes thematically cohere around black women and care. it opens to white shapes pulsing in black, suggesting luminescent fish but that reveal themselves to be teeth. two black women congeal out of this darkness, one holding the other; and soon around and beneath them congeal more black bodies, suggesting their presence among a heap of writhing black bodies. the woman sings an eerie lullaby whose lyrics concern the need to rest in order to survive the day. the following sequence depicts a young female office worker whose day is saturated with microaggressions and exposure to violence toward black bodies (we see an alert about tamir rice), and the sequence ends as a voice enunciates that "you stay woke for so long, you banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 20 risk never again feeling the joy of sleep." the opening thus connects the middle passage to contemporary discourses about staying woke, the past serving as preview to how racial capitalism today produces bodyminds similarly informed by it. the episode next follows the story of nina, a cook at a cramped and loud nightclub, as she leaves work to take the subway home. clearly exhausted, enduring microaggressions from other white riders, she is then lulled into melancholic relief by a wandering guitar player. advertisements play over loudspeakers instructing residents of new drexciya, “the underwater autonomous zone,” that they are out of the evacuation zone for the coming hurricane (evocative of katrina, maria, and other climate change disasters affecting primarily people of color) and so are encouraged to upload their consciousness through a service offered by citidrive. walking into the ocean water while her friends beg her not to be seduced by the upload offer, the waters swirl around her to open a portal down toward the ocean floor. we watch from below as a body submerges in water, while a voiceover says, “worry number two: i cannot swim,” and words on the screen label this “worry #2 of 1,000 worries that a black person should not have to worry about.” this cuts to a man (artist arthur jafa) saying, “when we came, we were not human beings, we were things,” and a chorus of voices repeats the episode’s chorus, “i stay woke.” we return to nina’s underwater domicile, where she decides to go ahead with the upload. we watch as her physical form seemingly drops off to sleep and an indicator shows the percentage status of the upload. the system malfunctions, leaving her not fully uploaded, while the system monotonously repeats that a refund will be issued to her estate. a cut opens to happy music and the voiceover saying, “you arrive at the singularity, and make a friend,” which is instantly interrupted by another female voice saying, “we have so much more to show you, but we were lied to as well,” and the visuals return, once again, to the black man still struggling to swim under water, except that this time, a woman emerges from the water, not drowning, able to survive the water, and looking a little bit pissed off. banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 21 the connections established in this montage-heavy sequence suggest that the transhumanist fantasy of consciousness upload extracts surplus value from black bodyminds; it is a scam like the many others perpetrated by racial capitalism. staying woke to that scam in fact allows a black woman to surface, to overcome the worry she shouldn’t have. in another segment, the show explicitly criticizes fantasies of mind-machine melding through a discussion of the “humanoid” bina48 (not an imagined humanoid: this is the real-world creation of the real-world terasem foundation, based on octavia butler’s imagined religion of earthseed in parable of the sower). this robot, built in the image of the black spouse (bina) of its white creator, expresses a future fantasy where both robot and human bina merge; the black woman criticizing bina48 that notes in conversations, bina48 repeats its white programmers’ assumptions about the politically correct things for a black woman to say. this criticism of silicon valley’s tech fantasies is embedded within the broader aim of this episode, to think about how black women find care. at the episode’s conclusion a black woman speaks to the camera about what black women are entitled to (and that we know american culture denies)—failures, fuckups, fantasies, etc., without harm coming to their bodyminds and their credit ratings. she ends by repeating, “you are entitled to rest,” and breaks into laughter to state that “she’s snoring!” bringing the conclusion back to the opening scenes of an insomniac woman so woke she can't sleep, this ending offers the show as a remedy for the distress experienced by those bodyminds tuned into historical and present forms of trauma. significantly, the show is drawing on a mythology created by the detroit techno group drexciya, whose 1997 album the quest was their first to construct a mythology of an underwater city inhabited by the children of pregnant enslaved women who died in the middle passage. detroit techno was (and is) a musical genre that reinvigorated the black music industries in detroit (and detroit itself), which had been decimated by deindustrialization and the white music industry’s theft of black creative property. in re-representing a music genre invested in repurposing western banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 22 technology to construct new mythologies for black life, the show builds on the afro-futurism of a musical genre and its envisioning of the relationship between blackness and machine. raof's scenes of new drexciya expose the white transhumanist fantasy of the cyborg singularity as a fantasy premised on enlightenment assumptions that privilege mind over body, that align black with body, and that drove the west’s project of extractive racial capitalism. by referencing detroit techno’s mythic world of the underwater inhabitants of drexciya, the show foregrounds its lineage within black cultural forms that already have powerfully tinkered with western technologies to imagine new worlds growing out of the decay of industrial cities and the (racialized) myth of progress on which they were based. i read raof as performing its own tinkering with the medium of prestige television, which, as nance articulates, finances productions about toxic white masculinities that feed their political iteration, which then makes war on black bodies, whether in us cities or internationally. recall that nance critiques the prestige shows breaking bad and the sopranos: these shows were invested in psy discourses about mental health (tony soprano’s therapy sessions, with their freudian emphasis on his mother) and addiction (breaking bad’s jesse, who attends rehab). more generally, the set of tv shows and films nance critique are all invested in the jungian model of the doppelganger or alter ego, a dualism underlying the individual male protagonist that forms the crux of these shows. raof adamantly refuses a similar positioning of a protagonist whose psychological makeup and emotional state would serve as the show’s fulcrum. instead, raof insists on a collective consciousness, a model of bodyminds forging through the surreality of existences that are materially informed by their histories. its critique of psy models for ptsd, lodged in its african-movie segment, shows that those models medicalize racial capitalism, and that media (the director’s award-winning movie) are part of that process. then, the show troubles the contemporary fantasy of digital device solutions to what are the problems of racial capitalism. its solution, instead, lies in black traditions of care and black aesthetic traditions. banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 23 ultimately, raof resists any interpretation that attempts to fit it into categorical boxes. its anti-narrative qualities are a mechanism by which, i would argue, it instantiates a brechtian mode of alienation—a way of “waking up” its spectators, which, as walter benjamin argues, “would be identical with the ‘now of recognizability,’ in which things put on their true— surrealist—face” (1999, pp. 463-464, quoted in landsberg, 2018, p. 3). in her work on the new afro-surrealist cinema, alison landsberg identifies afro-surrealism’s aim, following benjamin, of waking its audience up to a historical materialism that understands how the past informs the present. raof insists that the roots of today’s crises—hurricanes, epidemics of police brutality, epidemics of mental distress—can be recognized via an aesthetics that denaturalizes them to expose the racial capitalism that produces them. like kafer’s crip cyborgs who use the products of the medical industry to protest against it, nance and the collective of artists who create raof use mobile devices to protest their racialized modes of production. they push us to recognize that technopsyence is imbricated in the logics of racial capitalism and ask us to imagine how to manifest care otherwise. acknowledgements mad props to my colleagues juan llamas-rodriguez, josef nguyen, and wendy sung for all their help. many thanks also to the editors of this special issue and to the two anonymous reviewers, all of whom provided thoughtful and crucial feedback. notes 1 following the foucauldian vein of shelley tremain (2010) and others, i understand “madness” and its associate “mental illness” to be discursive constructions that coalesce in order that specific institutions might then manage and govern those so designated. i avoid the terminology of biomedicalized technoscience and its institutions (madness, mental illness, and specific diagnostic categories) because such terminology medicalizes states of being human (see, e.g., barstow, 2013). instead i banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 24 use states of mind, states of being, distress, and so forth. when i use mental illness, it is to specify the entity as the psy disciplines refer to it. finally, throughout this article i will use the term psy disciplines to collapse a number of distinct yet related fields and industries: psychiatry, both research and clinical; psychology; and therapy of all kinds. references aho, t., l. ben-moshe, & l. hilton. (2017). mad futures: affect/theory/violence. american quarterly, 69(2), 291–302. barstow, b. (2013). a rose by any other name: naming and the battle against psychiatry. in b. a. lefrançois, r. menzies, & g. reaume (eds.), mad matters: a critical reader in canadian mad studies (pp. 79-90). toronto, on: canadian scholars’ press. beltran, b. (2017, november 15). monterey county looks to artificial intelligence to treat depression. ksbw8. retrieved from https://www.ksbw.com/article/monterey-county-looks-to-artificialintelligence-to-help-mentally-ill/13762915 benjamin, w. (1999). the arcades project. harvard university press. browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham, nc: duke university press. clarke, a. e., shim, j., mamo, l., fosket, j. r., & fishman, j. (2003). biomedicalization: technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and u.s. biomedicine. american sociological review, 68(2), 161–94. clynes, m. e., & kline, n. s. (1960). cyborgs and space. astronautics, (september), 26-27, 74-76. disability rights education & defense fund (dredf). (2018, march 7). dredf statement on electronic visit verification. retrieved from https://dredf.org/2018/03/07/dredf-statement-on-electronic-visitverification/ edgcomb, j. (2017). bridging the treatment gap for hispanic workers in the us. conference paper delivered at the artificial intelligence and banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 25 technology tools for mental health, well-being and resilience workshop, at united nations headquarters, new york, may 16. ehlers, n., & krupar, s. (2017). “when treating patients like criminals makes sense”: medical hot spotting, race, and debt. in n. ehlers & l. r. hinkson (eds.), subprime health: debt and race in u.s. medicine (pp. 3154). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. ellis, k., & goggin, g. (2015). disability and the media. london: palgrave macmillan. elman, j. p. (2014). chronic youth: disability, sexuality, and us media cultures of rehabilitation. new york, ny: nyu press. erevelles, n. (2011). disability and difference in global contexts: enabling a transformative body politic. new york, ny: springer. eubanks, v. (2018). automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. new york, ny: st. martin’s press. felix, r. (1949). mental disorders as a public health problem. american journal of psychiatry, 106 (6), 401–406. ferreri, f., bourla, a., mouchabac, s., & karila, l. (2018). e-addictology: an overview of new technologies for assessing and intervening in addictive behaviors. frontiers in psychiatry, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00051 foucault, m. (1979). discipline and punish. trans. alan sheridan. new york, ny: vintage. fromer, m., & mclean, s. (2017, july 17). researching post-traumatic conditions with study watch. verily [blog post]. from https://blog.verily.com/2017/07/researching-post-traumatic-conditions.html gilliom, j. (2001). overseers of the poor: surveillance, resistance, and the limits of privacy. chicago, il: university of chicago press. green, e. (2018a, june 25). creating a mental health chatbot to treat perinatal depression in kenya (part 1): why chatbots? retrieved from https://uxplanet.org/healthymoms-36975a4b8c1b green, e. (2018b, june 25). creating a mental health chatbot to treat banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 26 perinatal depression in kenya (part 2): user-centered design and testing. retrieved from https://uxplanet.org/healthymoms-a4c573fbfb7f green, e. p., tuli, h., kwobah, e., menya, d., chesire, i., & schmidt, c. (2018). developing and validating a perinatal depression screening tool in kenya blending western criteria with local idioms: a mixed methods study. journal of affective disorders, 228, 49-59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2017.11.027 hacking, i. (1986). making up people. in t. c. heller, d. e. wellbery, & m. sosna (eds.), reconstructing individualism: autonomy, individuality, and the self in western thought (pp. 222-236). stanford, ca: stanford university press. hamraie, a., & fritsch, k. (2019). crip technoscience manifesto. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1). hansen, h., & roberts, s. k. (2012). two tiers of biomedicalization: methadone, buprenorphine, and the racial politics of addiction treatment. in j. netherland (ed.), critical perspectives on addiction (pp. 79-102). bringley, england: emerald group publishing limited. haraway, d. (1987). a manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. australian feminist studies, 2(4), 1-42. hilton, l. j. (2017). avonte’s law: autism, wandering, and the racial surveillance of neurological difference. african american review, 50(2), 221-235. jain, s. h., powers, b. w., hawkins, j. b., & brownstein, j.s. the digital phenotype. comments and opinion. nature biotechnology, may 12, 2015. johnson, m., & mcruer, r. (2014). introduction: cripistemologies and the masturbating girl. journal of literary & cultural disability studies, 8(3), 245-256. insel, t., et al. (2010). research domain criteria (rdoc): toward a new classification framework for research on mental disorders. american journal of psychiatry, 167(7), 748-751. kafer, a. (2013). feminist, queer, crip. bloomington, in: indiana university press. banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 27 landsberg, a. (2018). horror vérité: politics and history in jordan peele’s get out (2017). continuum, 32(5), 629-642. lefrançois, b. a., menzies, r., & reaume, g. (eds.). (2013). mad matters: a critical reader in canadian mad studies. toronto, on: canadian scholars’ press. lexisnexis risk solutions. (2017a). milliman medinsight to use lexisnexis risk solutions socioeconomic health attributes to help enhance healthcare intelligence. cision pr newswire. retrieved from https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/milliman-medinsight-to-uselexisnexis-risk-solutions-socioeconomic-health-attributes-to-help-enhancehealthcare-intelligence-300541930.html lexisnexis risk solutions. (2017b). lexisnexis socioeconomic health attributes [brochure]. retrieved from https://risk.lexisnexis.com//media/files/healthcare/brochure/socioeconomic-health-risk-attributes-brpdf.pdf macleish, k. t. (2013). making war at fort hood: life and uncertainty in a military community. princeton, nj: princeton university press. mcruer, r., & johnson, m. l. (2014). proliferating cripistemologies: a virtual roundtable. journal of literary & cultural disability studies, 8(2), 149-169. miller, d. s. (2013). afrosurreal manifesto: black is the new black—a 21stcentury manifesto. black camera, 5(1), 113-117. mitchell, d. t., & snyder, s. l. (2015). the biopolitics of disability: neoliberalism, ablenationalism, and peripheral embodiment. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. molteni, m., & rogers, a. (2017, august 7). google’s health spinoff verily joins the fight against post-traumatic stress disorder. wired. retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/google-verily-aurora-ptsd/ monahan, t. (2017). regulating belonging: surveillance, inequality, and the cultural production of abjection. journal of cultural economy, 10(2), 191-206. banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 28 monterey county. (n.d.). county of monterey health department, whole person care, http://www.co.monterey.ca.us/government/departments-ah/health/public-health/whole-person-care. monterey county health department. (2017). whole person care pilot application. https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/provgovpart/documents/whole%20perons%20c are/wpc%20updates_apps%20and%20memos/montereywpcapplicatio nfinal(2).pdf nakamura, l. (2015). afterword: blaming, shaming, and the feminization of social media. in r. dubrofsky & s. magnet (eds.), feminist surveillance studies, (pp. 221-228). durham, nc: duke university press. nance, t., washington, j., bodomo, n., ramos-chapman, n., diallo, m., king, s., monroe, d., & nance, n. (writers), & nance, t., monroe, d., ramos-chapman, n., washington, j., diallo, m., & bodomo, n. (directors). (2018). random acts of flyness. nance, t., et al. us: hbo. nimh. (2016, october 17). nimh-funded study to track the effects of trauma. retrieved from https://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/sciencenews/2016/nimh-funded-study-to-track-the-effects-of-trauma.shtml orr, j. (2010). biopsychiatry and the informatics of diagnosis: governing mentalities. in a. e. clarke, l. mamo, j. r. fosket, j. r. fishman, & j. k. shim (eds.), biomedicalization: technoscience, health and illness in the us (pp. 353-379). durham, nc: duke university press. popper, b. (2017). the empathy layer. the verge, march 2, 2017. retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/2/14764620/koko-socialnetwork-mental-health-depression-app-kik. povinelli, e. (2011). economies of abandonment: social endurance and belonging in late liberalism. durham, nc: duke university press. price, m. (2015). the bodymind problem and the possibilities of pain. hypatia, 30(1), 268-284. puar, j. k. (2017). the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. durham, nc: duke university press. samuels, e. (2017). six ways of looking at crip time. disability studies quarterly, 37(3). retrieved from http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5824/4684 banner catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 29 sandahl, c. (2003). queering the crip or cripping the queer? intersections of queer and crip identities in solo autobiographical performance. glq, 9(1-2), 25-56. schalk, s. (2018). bodyminds reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in black women's speculative fiction. durham, nc: duke university press. shonkwiler, a., & la berge, l. c. (eds.). (2014). reading capitalist realism. university of iowa press. solon, o. (2016, march 22). karim the ai delivers psychological support to syrian refugees. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/22/karim-the-aidelivers-psychological-support-to-syrian-refugees terry, j. (2017). attachments to war: biomedical logics and violence in twenty-first-century america. durham, nc: duke university press. torous, j., j.-p. onnela, and m. keshavan. (2017). new dimensions and new tools to realize the potential of rdoc: digital phenotyping via smartphones and connected devices. translational psychiatry, 7(3), e1053. tremain, s. l. (2010). foucault and the government of disability. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. wool, z. h. (2015). after war: the weight of life at walter reed. durham, nc: duke university press. bio olivia banner is assistant professor of critical media studies at the university of texas at dallas. she recently published communicative biocapitalism: the voice of the patient in digital health and the health humanities (university of michigan press, 2017) and is working on a second book project, screening “madness,” 1949-2020. microsoft word 32148_gracen brilmyer dr.docx brilmyer, gracen m. (2019). review of building access: universal design and the politics of disability, by aimi hamraie (university of minnesota press, 2017). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © gracen m. brilmyer, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | building access: universal design and the politics of disability by aimi hamraie (university of minnesota press, 2017) gracen m. brilmyer university of california, los angeles (ucla) gracenbrilmyer@gmail.com for disabled people,1 how we see ourselves in history matters. since the americans with disabilities act (ada) was passed in 1990, disability activism has often been remembered through highly visible public actions such as the capitol crawl and the section 504 sit-ins. while these iconic moments—and the archives that document them—tell a crucial piece of our history, there are other narratives, often hidden or subtle in archives, that tell how our activism has historically worked under the surface or has been erased from popular cultural memory. aimi hamraie’s building access: universal design and the politics of disability tells one such history: that of universal design, a flexible, inclusive design philosophy centered around accessibility for both disabled and nondisabled users. universal design, as it is understood today, is often framed simply and uncritically as “good” design for “everyone.” however, hamraie, through extensive archival research, locates less legible histories of disabled designers, activists, and architects who often get written out of the dominant narrative of the history of design and activism. through this work, they complicate disability history, highlighting “the friction between liberal demands for compliance, productivity and assimilation and radical anti-assimilationist and crip methods of knowing-making the world” special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) gracen m. brilmyer, 2019 2 (p. 99) that sometimes get smoothed over in legislation and in history. building access shows not only how people with disabilities were integral to contributing to, challenging, and pushing many design discourses forward but also how these stories of disability may be difficult to locate in the historical record. each chapter of building access exposes a constellation of histories that lead to the development of universal design. to make sense of these complex entanglements, hamraie structures the chapters chronologically. starting in the nineteenth century, the book begins by tracing the development of “normate templates”: narrowly defined templates of users and inhabitants that designated how bodies should move and behave, often tied to whiteness, ableness, and citizenship. these templates produced spaces that excluded many types of bodyminds2 from public legibility. hamraie then illustrates how the development of “flexible” design practices—such as ergonomics—although purporting to support multiple users, often aimed to normalize and optimize bodyminds for productivity .after complicating notions of “the user,” hamraie moves to analyzing design rhetorics that informed the early development of universal design, highlighting the integral work of disabled activism, crip epistemologies, and disability-centered rhetorics in the twentieth century. emphasizing the friction produced by disabled activists—taking sledgehammers to curbs, creating interdisciplinary disabled maker cultures, and forming the independent living movement—hamraie shows how disabled people were essential in pushing design pedagogy, accessibility standards, and legislation forward that led to the development of universal design. in the present moment, the concept of universal design is multiply understood. given its history in disability activism, the principles of universal design can be applied as they were originally intended when coined by ronald mace in 1985: to anticipate flexible and equitable access for the most marginalized. yet, as hamraie points out, since disabled activists and designers strategically decentered disability to increase the popularity of accessible design, “it became possible to discuss universal design without reference to disability, while maintaining a focus on functionality and usability” (p. 226). when disability is left out of this history, the concept of universal design can be taken up by designers who interpret it simply as “good” design, neglecting needs specific to and discrimination against disabled communities. by centering the contributions of disabled people who influenced design discourse, and exposing how all design methods imagine the ways bodyminds could or should operate, building access illuminates how multiple knowledge creators with multiple political agendas can (intentionally and unintentionally) create fields of practice. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) gracen m. brilmyer, 2019 3 one of the most remarkable aspects of this book is its methodology. by way of extensive archival research—from the bancroft library, which holds extensive records on disability activism, the cooper hewitt archives, and private collections from homes, basements, and offices—hamraie locates a multitude of explicit and implicit narratives surrounding disability and design. they start with the location of an illustration of a single high-heeled shoe within an architectural diagram from the 1930s: a gendered trace that simultaneously unsettles the formerly unmarked male body of “the user” and yet illustrates a reliance on gendered, aesthetic, and calculable norms of user templates. this research shows how design practices can center, forget, and sometimes intentionally leave disability behind, while also assuming gendered, class, and racial norms. by drawing attention to these subtleties in records, hamraie problematizes how design for, around, or without disability may reinforce notions of productivity, liberal consumerism, and citizenship. hamraie conducts such extensive archival research in tandem with performing and reflecting on what karen barad (2007) terms “agential cuts”: drawing distinctions between ideas and discourses that also makes their differences appear meaningful. these combined techniques allow for hamraie to read and reread archival records and expose conflicting and connected agendas in design. hamraie uses the concept of agential cuts explicitly—drawing on barad as well as what thomas gieryn (1983) calls “boundary work”3—to develop the concept of “barrier work” in chapter 6. barrier work, hamraie identifies, functions to define universal design as less about disability and more about common-sense “good” design for “everyone.” and advocates of universal design used barrier work to distinguish universal design from barrier-free design, an ada-rooted design strategy, which enforces minimal code compliance for accessibility. through drawing their own distinctions while also historicizing how others have done so, hamraie helps readers perceive that these two concepts of accessible design were engaged in mutual reiteration while being shaped for different purposes—barrierfree design for straightforward, minimal but implementable code compliance, and universal design for an expansive, interpretable, and disability-neutral notion of access. outside the chapter on barrier work, agential cuts are subtly performed throughout the entire text, to cut, bind, and surface such intra-actions: mutual reiterations between discourses, practices, ideas (barad, 2007). hamraie reads into the subtleties of archival records and provides us with complex, politicized narratives of design, while never leaving behind an analysis of how race, class, special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) gracen m. brilmyer, 2019 4 gender, and ability are continually mapped onto and embodied within design practices. like the relationship between barrier-free design and universal design, hamraie shows how concepts of user templates, consumerism, rehabilitation, and citizenship; practices of ergonomics, environmental design research, and accessibility legislation; and values of productivity, eugenics, performance, and justice have been and can be differentiated. hamraie remarks, “we make them seem whole, coherent, and discrete when they are really quite unstable and complex” (p. 176). these agential cuts go unnamed in the majority of the text, but are still palpable as hamraie draws, blurs, and historicizes distinctions between multiple material-epistemic arrangements. given their subtlety, i’m left wanting more explicit theorization of how agential cuts are operating throughout the book. because such cuts allow for an expansive and reflective rereading of disability history, a more explicit theorization could offer a methodological framework for other scholars to more easily apply to historical analyses. these cuts, alongside hamraie’s detailed archival research, allow for building access to rewrite and expand the history of disability activism, exposing how people with disabilities shape(d) and define(d) different design discourses not only by making disability a legible piece of the design process but also by subverting systems: decentering disability so that accessibility, packaged as “good design,” could be encompassed within more mainstream design practices. furthermore, crip theory, like the feminist, queer, and critical race theories that hamraie draws on, is deeply tied to practice. thus, building access tells a new history not only of disability activism but also of the field of critical disability studies. throughout the book, hamraie illuminates how, just as design discourses intentionally or unintentionally decenter a politicized disability, so too does disability theory get taken up, reinterpreted, or misinterpreted within rehabilitative discourses. the agential cuts that hamraie performs meaningfully reshape these interpretations to locate the slipperiness of our theories. for example, the social model of disability—which locates the “problem” within inaccessible buildings and discriminatory attitudes instead of strictly within the disabled bodymind—is often cited as a central concept within the fight for disability rights. however, what hamraie’s retelling shows us are the ways in which the social model has been simplified to overemphasize the environmental construction of disability, which fosters rehabilitative notions of eliminating disability through eliminating physical barriers. to reread disability history, then, is to also reinterpret disability and crip theory in order to identify the textures, ways of navigating the world, and resistances that have been misinterpreted, intentionally reframed, built on, and accumulated special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) gracen m. brilmyer, 2019 5 within our environments and practices. building access shows not only how disabled people and their epistemic activism are (and have been) integral to the history of design but also demonstrates that historicizing the accumulation of knowledge is invaluable for telling our histories, surfacing power and privilege, and working towards justice. notes 1 a note on language: i intentionally vacillate between using identity-first language and person-first language to reflect the complexity of how people identify within this community. 2 the term bodymind is defined by sami schalk (2018) as “the inextricability of mind and body [that] highlights how processes within our being impact one another,” specifically within the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability (p. 5-6). 3 gieryn (1983) describes boundary work as the demarcation of science from nonscientific intellectual activities through boundary-making. references barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. gieryn, t. f. (1983). boundary-work and the demarcation of science from nonscience: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. american sociological review, 48(6), 781-795. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095325 schalk, s. (2018). bodyminds reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in black women’s speculative fiction. durham, nc: duke university press. author bio gracen brilmyer is a phd candidate in the department of information studies at ucla. their research lies at the intersection of disability studies and archival studies, focusing on the role of disability within the history of natural history museums and their archives. for more: gracenbrilmyer.com shindle, k.s. 2021. review of mobile subjects: transnational imaginaries of gender reassignment, by aren z. aizura (duke university press, 2020). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © k.s. shindle, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | mobile subjects: transnational imaginaries of gender reassignment, by aren z. aizura (duke university press, 2020) k.s. shindle indiana university katshin@iu.edu aren aizura’s mobile subjects: transnational imaginaries of gender reassignment considers what mobility and capital mean for transgender and gender nonconforming individuals. specifically, aizura argues that privilege—in particular class, racial, and nationality privilege— protects some trans people over others. ultimately, mobility is capital, and capital is not available to all trans people. through a profusion of methods, aizura posits that the “journey” of a neoliberal normative transsexuality can only exist through gender liminality in the “elsewhere” (3), meaning that a physical journey is necessary for gendered bodily transformation to occur within neoliberal frameworks of what it means to be transgender. he argues that the liminal gender/sex that trans people experience during their transition, where outward sex characteristics and gender are not fully aligned, can only exist outside of the global north, specifically in the orientalist vision of the east, and that they can only return once they have “created” their new body and gender. pulling from scholars occupying a wide range of disciplines and methodologies, including a multisited ethnography and semiotic and rhetorical analyses, aizura primarily uses critical race studies and marxist theory, but also insights from trans studies, sts studies, transnational feminism, queer theory, feminist geography, and queer/trans migration and diaspora to support his argument. while aizura does not cite some of the canonical scholars in critical book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) k.s. shindle, 2021 2 race studies and marxist theory, the influence of these analytics is clear, even to the uninitiated. aizura’s book is divided into two sections according to the methodologies he employs. part i utilizes a close reading of trans travel narratives, autobiography and memoir, and documentaries, performing semiotic and rhetorical analyses to show the ways that transgender migration is portrayed. part ii draws on aizura’s field research interviewing trans and gender nonconforming subjects in australia and los angeles, considering gender reassignment surgeries, trans and gender nonconforming individuals who underwent gender reassignment surgery in australian and thai contexts, with particularly compelling material from interviews of both patients and workers at thai gender reassignment clinics. aizura calls this method “following the actors” to create a “multisited ethnography,” which acknowledges the temporality of space (15–16). this format works to set the stage for aizura’s argument in the first half through a more historical context, and then to show how these patterns have continued, strengthening his overall claim that to fit in the neoliberal model of gender transition, trans people must experience their physical transition elsewhere. starting in denmark with the icon of gender reassignment surgery, christine jorgensen, aizura uses multiple texts to trace jorgensen’s 1952 journey to copenhagen for surgery as an allegory to explain the construction of trans “journey” narratives. ongoing invocations of jorgensen’s transition ultimately show how, through neoliberal imaginations of “self-transformation,” trans and gender nonconforming people can create themselves and their gender (45–48). however, jorgensen’s narrative only works through her existing privilege, including her racial and class privilege in the united states, which allowed her to make the journey to denmark, where her “gender indeterminacy” could live until she occupied a more normative gender, at which time she could make her journey back home (39, 45–48). turning next to casablanca, morocco, aizura explores the gendered-orientalizing role that movement to the “exotic” east has on crafting white, western trans narratives, through four different autobiographies: april ashley’s odyssey by april ashley, coccinelle by coccinelle, second serve by renée richards, conundrum by jan morris, and my story by caroline cossey. trans people, in particular trans feminine people, have historically migrated and traveled to casablanca for gender reassignment surgery. this analysis hinges on edward said’s analysis of the east book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) k.s. shindle, 2021 3 as feminine in contrast to the masculine west, allowing for a gender transformation to occur simultaneously with trans travel to the east. this migration to the femininized casablanca allows for trans and gender nonconforming individuals to embody femininity through the feminine orientalism of the east, so that they can properly perform femininity when they return to the west (75). aizura explores how trans memoirs integrate the imagined feminine subjects of the orient in their narratives, allowing them to embody womanhood in ways unimaginable in the western context. this use of said’s understandings of orientalism and femininity as a way to facilitate gender transition is incredibly compelling and novel, and particularly useful in the latter section of mobile subjects. aizura’s final chapter in this section considers documentary films of trans migration—gender redesigner, bubot niyar, and les travestis pleurent aussi [sic]— that exemplify how trans migrations can exist within the global north, but reproduce the same concepts in the west to east migrations explored earlier. for instance, aizura specifically draws from jack halberstam’s concept of “metronormativity,” which maps queer and trans narratives of belonging and migration from the rural to the urban (96–97). this section describes more modern examples of trans narratives, which aids the book’s transition into part ii, where aizura analyzes modern conceptions of trans and gender nonconforming transformations. such insights about the contexts under which transnational trans geographies of movement emerge become key to part ii of mobile subjects, which looks at current trans lives and experiences in gender reassignment clinics. aizura questions what these narratives produce when they indulge in orientalism. in the most compelling chapter of the book, “transnational entrepreneurialisms,” aizura describes how trans people from australia and the us think about and use thai gender reassignment clinics to show how privilege and transnationalism function in access to care. aizura describes the neoliberal nature of trans narratives surrounding gender reassignment surgery in thailand, where consumerism drives the trans and gender nonconforming surgical market, and where, with enough money, you can have the “correct” gender normative body. this creates a “entrepreneurialism of the self,” where the management of bodies, including trans bodies, relies on the “individual moral responsibility” touted by neoliberalism (141–43). in part, global north trans people see thailand as a surgical paradise because book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) k.s. shindle, 2021 4 their options in their own country are completely inadequate, through nonsubsidized healthcare, no doctors who specialize in trans care (or none who are reputable), excessive gatekeeping to access services, or a combination of these. aizura describes the us medical system, based on a clinical model, where transness is a problem to be treated through medical intervention. as trans healthcare is largely privatized, this means it is only available to trans people who can afford it or can afford health insurance which will (hopefully) cover (some) of it (146). in contrast, other places run trans healthcare through their governments, including south africa and australia. aizura describes australia’s trans healthcare systems in great detail, having navigated this system himself. since trans healthcare is centralized, it allowed for doctors to execute greater gatekeeping over their patients, since trans patients have to go through this one system to access care. gender reassignment services in thailand, conversely, are incredibly consumer motivated and typically advertise toward trans feminine people. while the origins of thailand as a gender reassignment surgery haven are unknown, some speculate that the advent of the internet, or perhaps kathoey (thai trans feminine people) who emigrated elsewhere helped create this narrative. surgeons highlight outstanding services available to their patients, including state-of-the-art resorts, activities, tourist trips, among others. they also brag about the inclusive nature of thailand, where trans people are treated as “normal.” however, as aizura describes, this is not always the case, especially for the kathoey and tom (thai trans masculine people) who live there. while patients recover, thai woman and kathoey workers at these resorts must perform the affective labor of being patients’ friends, helping them perform femininity to make them feel the experiences of being a “true” woman as their bodies make this transition (196). this helps complete the “self-orientalization” of the trans patients, where their journey to thailand propels them to embody the femininity of the east (179, 188, 191), playing into puar’s “colonial tourism,” where colonial tropes are replicated through global north tourism (180). mobility as capital has a deep lineage. ultimately, aizura asserts that he is not looking to hold trans and gender nonconforming people accountable for the long legacy of colonialism underlying categories of “transgender,” but rather to show how the discourses and narratives around these identities were inevitable based on colonial histories. moreover, he emphasizes the inadequacy of current gender reassignment surgery options for many people, and the ways that these surgeries are still stigmatized (204). book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) k.s. shindle, 2021 5 mobile subjects ends by analyzing the television show sense8 to imagine a new form of trans “worlding,” where trans people would have the ability to act and be acted upon in the world through the development of trans intersubjectivity (210). in this new world, trans people are allowed to be transformative, and not fixed within rigid understandings of gender and subjectivity. additionally, aizura foregrounds non-white, non-western understandings of trans identity through the artistic works of arun ravine and tannia tanwarin sukkhapisit to center thai understandings of gender and subjectivity in contrast to the global north orientalism mobile subjects focuses on. finally, he points towards new work that will look at reproductive and affective labor as not just impacting cis women, but as pervading a transnational queer and trans “chain of care,” and calls for the analysis of “minor mobilities” (196, 219). given aizura’s diverse methodology, scholars in a wide range of fields will find this book useful. most notably, mobile subjects exemplifies what can be done when trans studies is integrated with science, technology, and society studies, and more “traditional” gender studies theories, such as queer theory, transnational feminisms, and marxist theory. scholarship in this vein seems to be proliferating currently, especially with the release of histories of the transgender child (gillpeterson, 2018) and going stealth: transgender politics and us surveillance practices (beauchamp, 2019). these books signal a new field: transgender science and technology studies, emphasizing critical race studies and transnational politics. aizura’s text specifically speaks to the lack of current scholarship intersecting transnational feminisms and trans studies. scholars across these fields should pay attention to see how aizura and his colleagues continue to build the foundation for this exciting area of study. author bio k.s. shindle is a third-year gender studies graduate student at indiana university. their research examines the pathologization of trans identity and gender dysphoria through sts, trans studies, and critical race theory. durocher, myriam. 2021. review of deadly biocultures: the ethics of life-making, by nadine ehlers and shiloh krupar (university of minnesota press, 2019). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © myriam durocher, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | deadly biocultures: the ethics of lifemaking, by nadine ehlers and shiloh krupar (university of minnesota press, 2019) myriam durocher carleton university and university of sydney myriamdurocher@cunet.carleton.ca in this era where violence against black bodies is denunciated through black lives matter movements, where indigenous basic human rights are still scorned in colonial contexts, where climate change and its environmental consequences are felt and experienced more harshly by vulnerable populations that have little to do with the rise of temperatures, and where the covid-19 pandemic is killing the most vulnerable, deadly biocultures: the ethics of life-making cruelly astonishes by its relevance. nadine ehlers and shiloh krupar question the regulatory and “deadly life-making” processes at play in life-making processes and practices in contemporary late western liberalism, and more specifically as they take form in the us context. as the researchers present it in the very first lines of the book, lifemaking encompasses “all those contemporary efforts to make people live more— to exponentially expand their capacities for life, to optimize and extend what counts as life, and to encourage people to pursue positive life-enhancing practices” (1). while life-making seems like a positive, “ontologically ‘good’” (4) quest, the authors unveil how it has deadly consequences for some bodies more than others. the authors’ overarching premise is that life-making cannot be separated from relations of power. ehlers and krupar argue that life-making “operates as a regulatory politics of affirmation” (2) in that it “governs by orienting people toward certain ways of looking after themselves, particular goals of health, and book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) myriam durocher, 2021 2 constrained understandings of body and self” (2). they draw on foucault’s conceptual apparatus of discipline, biopower, and biopolitics to explain the regulatory and normative effects of life-making, but also how life-making leaves room for its twin operation—“letting die”—to emerge. the authors use the expression “deadly life-making” to point out the intricacy of death-making in any life-making processes within the current biopolitical context. they thereby demonstrate the inequalities that permeate make-life processes and show that “not all forms of life are fostered equally” (4). ehlers and krupar expose how the life possibilities and life improvements of some are produced at the expense of others. the researchers explore, through the various chapters, three different forms of “letting die” that shape contemporary us biocultures: how life-making practices can “obscure death,” “create deadly conditions (that might also be obscured),” and “produce death and/or death effects” (5). every chapter thus questions the deathly conditions and processes produced by life affirmations that operate in relation to a “particular biomedically framed problem or issue” (7). ehlers and krupar frame “biocultures” as both the arena for investigation and methodology. they approach these biocultures as circumscribed sets of knowledge and practices, associated with particular health-related issues (namely, cancer, racial health, obesity, stem cells, aging, and corpse disposal), that they explore in order to unveil the relations of power at stake. the concept of biocultures itself highlights how biomedicine has become central to everyday life, to our relationships with our selves, bodies, and others: “biocultures are enmeshed with the biomedical pursuit of fostering biological life—understanding, treating, and preventing disease—and, within biocultures, life is increasingly viewed through the lens of biomedical logics, innovations, and possibilities” (1). biocultures hence become spaces for questioning how life affirmations operate, regulate, and constrain knowledge and practices in specific health-related issues or terrains, and through various spaces, scales, sites, and actors. each chapter of the book examines a key life affirmation that takes form and governs through producing and framing truth/knowledge within these specific biocultures arenas. these life affirmations include to hope (explored within cancer biocultures); to target (racial health); to thrive (obesity and stem cells); to secure (aging); and to green (corpse disposal). each chapter first presents a life affirmation (e.g., to secure), to then expose how it operates within the biocultures where it takes form (e.g., aging). the analysis that follows includes fieldwork examples and exploration of particular “terrains” that serve to discuss how the particular life affirmation “makes live” (e.g., through techniques, practices, and book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) myriam durocher, 2021 3 technologies dedicated to secure “aging well,” through the biofinancialization of aging populations, through the governance of decline), but also creates deadly conditions (e.g., through deadly care, or neglect of deaths). these terrains, which i did not find explicitly defined within the book, refer to a contained set of knowledge and practices where the life affirmation unfolds. for example, in the chapter dedicated to hope, ehlers and krupar explore how this life affirmation operates within public representations of cancer, clinical settings, and personal (and spiritual) encounters. every chapter concludes with alternative and creative ways of resisting/reworking “the intimate governing operations of affirmation” (13), offering a refreshing and inspiring counter discourse to the dominant one analyzed throughout the chapter. this is arguably a political action in itself as it creates conditions of possibility for disrupting dominant discourses through the very enunciation of these alternatives. following this same logic, the book ends with a coda, summing up the overarching effects of life-making as the dominant paradigm and arguing for the necessity to question the “let die” functions enacted through it. they stress the need to be attentive to death-making and the death effects of the affirmations of life, as well as the need to develop new forms and practices of care that “counteract dominant affirmations of life and their deadly effects” (163). the book’s innovative analysis consists of thinking about neoliberalism, biomedicalization, and their related practices as intimately entangled with deathmaking. this opens up new ways of caring for bodies, beyond those offered by current dominant biomedical rationalities. the researchers’ call for a politics that is attentive to death, especially in the context of biomedicine and life-making, is compelling and offers new ways of thinking (and acting against) the structural and ideological inequalities that mean that “some are made to live (more) at the expense of others” (5). their ways of approaching these power relations and the issues they raise within specific (bio)cultural realms also add to the developing and growing area of research concerned with biomedicine and biomedicalization processes. on that note, i was surprised—given the authors’ strong and valuable tendency to clearly define and situate within existing literatures the concepts with which they work—to notice the absence of a clear definition of their understanding and use of the term culture in biocultures. while it is made explicit how the concept is tightly associated with biomedicine and its deployment in other realms—social, political, economic, and so on—and how it encompasses a wide heterogeneity of practices, knowledge, actors, scales, sites, and areas of action that contribute to orienting book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) myriam durocher, 2021 4 one’s understanding and action toward their body and life itself at the individual and population level, i could not find a clear definition of how culture is understood in the context of the book. this would have been relevant as it would have provided even more insight into how the researchers conceptualize and approach what they have called “biocultures.” likewise, i wish the authors would have spent a bit more time explaining how their work brings new insights to the body of work concerned with exploring the interconnections or mutual constitutions of “bio” and “culture.” the researchers briefly mention that they refuse to distinguish the “bio” from the “cultural,” but i wish they had expanded on what that means in the context of their exploration of these biocultures, and how such a concept brings new insights about how “bio” and “culture” mutually inform (or are entangled with) each other in specific ways. fortunately, while i feel that these elements could have been made more explicit to make an even clearer and stronger case for their proposed notion of “deadly biocultures,” it does not impact the overall quality and clarity of the argument the authors develop. the book is wonderfully written, and proposes a clear, compelling, and provocative argument. ehlers and krupar make use of a strong conceptual apparatus, which they take care to define and situate within existing literature. they also effectively situate their work among others who have engaged with analyzing regimes of governance through the lens of the “bio” and from which have emerged concepts such as biomedicalization, biosocialities, biocitizenship, biovalue and biofutures—concepts that are clearly defined and brilliantly integrated into their analysis. likewise, ehlers and krupar clearly distinguish their work from those who are attentive to theorizing life or death at the ontological level, as they pay attention instead to how “death is folded into life through intimate and often mundane forms of governing” (15). their thorough literature review not only firmly situates their work in the introductory part of the book, but also effectively supports their unfolding argument and analysis in the chapters that follow. i also thoroughly enjoyed reading the endnotes—a quite unusual enjoyable feature, in my opinion—as they were interesting and insightful, effectively completing the discussion in the main text. i highly recommend this book to people interested in contemporary modes of governance by and through the “bio” as much as those interested in the increasing presence of biomedicine within every realm of the social field. researchers in areas such as sociology, cultural and biocultural anthropology, and cultural studies should find interest in the authors’ perspective on biomedicalization processes, and how they inform the development of new book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) myriam durocher, 2021 5 cultural norms, body-related knowledge and normativities, and stratified life and death conditions and processes. likewise, i would recommend the book to those interested in questioning the intersections of culture, life and death, and the politics of life these intersections set into place. author bio myriam durocher is a postdoctoral fellow at carleton university (ottawa, canada) and at the university of sydney (sydney, australia). in her current postdoctoral research, myriam explores the temporalities and materialities involved in practices applied to bodies and food materials (such as blood and dna tests, or pesticides analysis) that aim to prevent health-related risks associated with food ingestion.     original research six ways of looking at fractal mechanics     rua m. williams purdue university rmwilliams@purdue.edu     abstract in this creative nonfiction essay, i traverse through permutations of “fractal mechanics” as a means of processing experiences of oppression and imagining revolutionary futures. i introduce fractal mechanics as a method for thinking through how “the institution,” broadly understood, travels and transmutes from physical structure localized in place to a set of internalized rule sets that bind themselves to transinstitutionalized “host bodies”—a neoliberation. through a series of vignettes illustrating violent experiences of “inclusion,” i explore how the institution is reproduced in neoliberal constructions of inclusion, liberation, and justice. i then integrate critiques of liberation within neoliberal frames with crip imaginings of justice-in-relation to explicate how fractal mechanics can be understood not only as a method of oppression but also a method for revolution. i close with a series of imaginaries that encourage us to prefigure, or dream, a fractal politic of intercommunal connection.     keywords critical disability studies, crip technoscience, disability justice, neoliberalism, inclusionism     introduction in this creative non-fiction essay, i evoke the fractal (refer to figure 1) as a tool for thinking through the interrelation of oppression and liberation as experienced by bodies living through moments of social transformation-in-process. i build on the tradition of crip technoscience (hamraie and fritsch 2019), which explores the interstices of disabled ontology and technology as sites for understanding and reimagining sociotechnical systems and relations. activist scholar adrienne maree brown has also used fractals to describe the nested and interconnected nature of social movements—“what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system” (2017, 41, emphasis original). this project seeks to name invisibilized mechanics of social relations between disabled people and neoliberal systems of inclusion,1 after sara ahmed’s (2012) phenomenological practice of the description of systems. in so doing, i hope to provide a means to “learn how not to produce what we inherit” (ahmed 2012, 173, emphasis original).   in the spirit of alison kafer’s (2019) “crip kin, manifesting,” which explores the fraught relationships between disabled bodies and the technologies that simultaneously complicate and support their life, the fractal is imagined both as a mechanic of oppressive relations and reimagined as a mechanic for liberative relations. though i begin by demonstrating the fractal nature of oppressive systems, i follow with fractal mechanics for manifesting crip kinships. here, karen barad’s (2007) deployment of diffraction is a useful frame for understanding such dialectical entanglements, both those that obfuscate and illuminate multiplicities. correspondingly, this description of fractal mechanics is a means of understanding “the feeling of coming up against the same thing, wherever you come up against it” (ahmed 2012, 175, emphasis original), in both the sense of entrapment and collective liberation.   first, i describe a series of violent experiences in the name of inclusion. later, i will illustrate how this violence is produced when attempting to force justice into capitalist formations. in the section that follows, i describe how the mathematical form of fractals, particularly their mechanisms of recursion and seeding, can be deployed as a technoscientific lens for understanding the connections between overt and subtle forms of disability deprivation and their cultural virality. i then crip this technoscience, in the sense of hamraie and fritsch (2019), by imagining these same mechanisms in service of community-building and revolution-making. finally, i explore the application of radical implantation and fractal mechanics to the project of cripping relations, community, and futurity.   figure 1. a slope-newton fractal in blues, purples, and pinks. the fractal set can be described as recursively interlinked chaining triads. image created by author with ultra fractal 6.03.   ground truth in computer science and mathematics, “ground truth” refers to data collected via direct observation. it is used as a very literal “reality check.” a variable in the collected data can be emptied and a prediction model can be applied to regenerate the emptied set from other variables. if the results of this prediction and the ground truth are the same, then the predictive model may function in other datasets for which no direct observation data exists. the following experiences represent ground truth data collected from direct experiences. i draw upon the work of other disability studies scholars, social commentators, and activists to identify the sociocultural mechanisms at play that allow us to generalize the experiences of these vignettes to other contexts.   it is self-evident to me, as an autistic person, one who has a family history of involuntary institutionalization, the ways in which institutional power survives the dissolution of its physicality. it is self-evident to me, as a critic of behaviorism, the ways in which the institution can be built into a community, reified in endless permutations, and even programmed into individual bodyminds. but it is not enough to tell you a story that shows that it is happening; i must also explain the underlying mechanics, the metaphysics of transinstitutional recursion.   epistemic exploitation is a phenomenon that occurs when someone from a marginalized position is coerced into educating their oppressor about the nature of their oppression in order to prove to actors across hegemonical difference that their experiences are real, that they matter, and that the audience they are explaining themselves to are culpable (berenstain 2016). epistemic exploitation “masquerades as a necessary and even epistemically virtuous form of intellectual engagement” (berenstain 2016, 517). this exploitation is a form of labor, one which devastates the energy of the already oppressed for the benefit of the privileged’s personal growth, or merely their satisfaction.   to demonstrate how the dynamics of institutional power, coercion, control, and surveillance maintain their efficacy beyond walls, fences, glass, bars, and within even and especially self-proclaimed progressive programs, we begin our investigation of the mechanics of transinstitutionalization with an exercise in epistemic self-exploitation. i submit myself to this violation out of a desire to build community through vulnerability.   vignettes of violence vignette 1: the young women stand by their posters in the gallery. they are situated between a poster on the legacy of the sheltered workshop and the resistance of the disability community to one side and, on the other, a poster by undergraduate special education students about barriers to service access for “adults with asd2.” their own posters are of themselves. their portraits, smiling. their bullet points, describing. their futures, absent. they stand, uncannily still, eyes deflected—on display. they have been included. they know, now that they are here, that they are here to be observed—not to be witnessed.   vignette 2: he enters the auditorium. his body, familiarly unruly, comfortingly uncanny. i am entangled with cables, cursing the projector blustering about absent conference it staff. his access needs are well known. his aac3 is not a surprise. but the conference would not provide tech support, and he has been included. equity is not justice.   vignette 3: we begin our panel. a strategic, calculated, and artful assault on the state of special education and education technology. we neuroqueer crip critics, masterful if uncanny orators, stand opposite a rookery of nonplussed vultures—special educators and their brood, here to observe autism “in the wild.” our own people, our crip people, absent. we have been included.   vignette 4: we sit in the back of the ballroom. we pass notes like cheeky school children. we are in autistic space. noises spill from his sinuses, filling the rafters on opalescent waves—sonorous, sublime. “shhh,” they turn their vulture necks. craning to see. who dares to (neuro)queer this crip time? no tourette’s, no unruly bodies. they only want us here if we can be quiet. apparently, we are not includable.   outro nestled between the lines in these vignettes— these vaudevillian vicissitudes— sleeps an uncomfortable truth. the neoliberal machine has come for inclusion.   always watching, surveilling, assaying—neoliberalism snatches up our resistances. categorized, analyzed, defined, discretized. labeled. branded. repackaged. capitalized.   a radical movement becomes a social movement. a social movement becomes a policy. a policy becomes a program. a program becomes an industry.   “we will be inclusive,” you say. “we will be welcoming,” you say. “we will empower you,” you say. i say, “who is we?”   inclusion has a flaw, you see. one that neoliberalism has found easy to exploit. a software vulnerability, or perhaps a feature. inclusion, unfortunately, does not necessitate the abdication of power. you offer me a seat. but it is still your table.   we are empowered to conform. we are welcomed to be observed. we are liberated into a neoliberalliberation.   thanks. i hate it   these vignettes and this petulant ode are drawn and quartered from my own experiences of inclusionism and exploitation in kairotic4 conference spaces. there is much here that demands explanation. or rather there is much here that has had explanation demanded of it. of me. i invite you to resist desires for the normative logics of linear exposition. neuroqueer rhetoric meanders, enfolds, recurs (yergeau 2017; rodas 2018)—follow and flow with the echoes, ricochets, hyperconnections, and perseverations.   fractal mechanics: iteration, permutation, transformation to process these experiences, crystalize these arguments, and illustrate new possibilities, i deploy metaphors from computer science and mathematics as a permutation of crip technoscience. the theory and practice of crip technoscience imagines disabled people as sites of “possibility, adaptation, and creative reflection” (hamraie and fritsch 2019, 1) and refuses “to treat access as an issue of technical compliance or rehabilitation” (nelson, shew, and stevens 2019, 22). crip technoscience is informed by cripistemologies—a fluid network of understandings of disability that are driven not only by a lived experience of disablement but also a resistant interpretation of that embodied relationship to society (johnson and mcruer 2014). in the spirit of crip technoscience, i define a collection of fractal mechanics that describe the continuous reshaping of social movements—namely, neoliberalism, disability justice, and prefigurative politics. finally, i explore the application of radical implantation and fractal mechanics to the project of cripping relations toward communal revolution.   fractals are structures of recursion built of latticed repetitions of microstructures that intrinsically shape their superstructures. they are infinitely expansive and infinitely contractive. turtles all the way down, in all dimensions. fractals are studied in mathematics, art, and computer science; fractals occur in nature; and i argue fractals occur in communal thought and action. the institution is a fractal structure. a core structure is reproduced in infinite permutations such that you can remove the person from the institution, but the institution may be built into the community, into the people, into the person. institutions all the way down, in all dimensions. transinstitutionalization (haley 2017; morrissey and goldman 1986) is what happens when we think we have dismantled the institution because we have moved locations, but the fractal, the structure of coercive and containing power, remains intact and recurs.   the elision of this process is aided in part by a cultural pursuit of utopic (eugenic) futurity. kafer (2013) discusses how the political centrality of the child—always already white, cisheteronormative, and able-bodied—serves to seed a pattern of “endless deferral” (29) for which attention and accountability to the here and now are sacrificed at the altar of better, smarter, stronger, more resilient, healthier, ablebodyminded futures. futurity drives prenatal screening, selective abortion, sterilization, institutionalization, detection, early intervention, cure, surgical normalization, behavior modification, and so on. the institution is a site of deviant collection, correction, and erasure. a fractal structure, the tasks of collection and correction can be trans-planted (seeded) in other structures, systems, and individual bodies. this seeding, this transinstitutionalization, occurs because futurity has arrested the popular imagination and foreclosed the possibility of a disabled, cripqueer future.   the foucauldian concept of “perverse implantation” (foucault 1978) allows us to theorize how constructed categories are manifested, implanted, seeded, within bodies as the will-to-knowledge generates definitions and categorizations of embodied experiences (princep 2012)—sexualities, genders, races, disabilities, and so on. the intellectual, statistical, and eugenic pursuit of a norm in the modern era has seeded complex assemblages of normality and deviance-defect-divergence within every body (living and dead, past present and future) as it comes into contact with categorical knowledges (tremain 2017, 59–64). in fractals, the seed contains the pattern which is repeated in recursive multi-dimensional complexity. therefore, seeding is both the mechanism by which fractals (such as the institution) are implanted within systems (structures, organizations, and bodies) as well as the mechanism by which a fractal structure can be edited—recursively, in all dimensions, instantaneously—a revolution.   six ways of looking at fractal mechanics in the previous section, i introduced fractals as a metaphor for power relations that transcend explicit boundaries of physical borders, buildings, systems, and time. next, i connect a series of interlocking mechanisms that generate transinstitutionalization from inclusionism. then, i imagine implantation as a mechanism for seeding fractal power relations, describing neoliberalism as a fractal seed driving toward a futurity that denies disability to take root. here, i will distinguish between operations of futurity in service of transinstitutionalization and revolution. finally, i interrogate popular understandings of justice to arrive at a working definition which presents justice as collective action rather than as an outcome. the collective action of disability justice (berne et al. 2020) emerges as an algorithm, or technology of resistance, that can implant altered fractal structures in viral, pervasive, micro-, and macro-revolutions. revolutions all the way down, in all dimensions.   fractal mechanics are inclusionist mechanics across college campuses, academic conferences, and research labs, “inclusion” has become the new yardstick by which to measure an institution’s integrity and service to the public. once a rallying cry for disability advocates and activists, it has been enfolded into public service and private industry alike. what happens to the actual people who are passed like manufactured goods through this assembly line of inclusion? what is it like to be disabled while included in this neoliberal cooptation of justice?   in vignette 1, the autistic women, or “adults with asd,” are students in a post-secondary transition program. they were included in an undergraduate research poster presentation session. the violence of this inclusion is evident in the content of their self-narrating posters and in their sandwiched position between posters that demonstrate the historical context of sheltered workshops on one side, and their subjectivity as the object of research and intervention on the other side. they are quite literally placed in epistemic, ontological, and physical space on a continuum of transinstitutionalization. from sheltered workshop, to exploitative “opportunity” program, to research subjects for intervention and normalization, this experience is a snapshot in time, a moment frozen as their bodies are conveyed on an assembly line of inclusion: segregation as charity, inclusion as charity, assimilation as solution.   this exploitation is common in such transition programs for disabled youth entering adulthood. now money can be generated from foundations and families to produce the facade of a college experience in the name of inclusion. special id badges, special course registration codes, special residences, special programs to “find your passion” via volunteer work—disabled students are quite literally used for free community labor in exchange for a false college program that prepares them to transition into low-wage labor. it’s an unsettling deflection of the intent of inclusion. it manifests an invisible yet palpable mesh that tensors and suspends its subjects precariously between the institution and the community.   figure 2: graphic representations of inclusion vs. exclusion, segregation, and integration. from http://web.archive.org/web/20210204145136/https://www.thinkinclusive.us/inclusion-exclusion-segregation-integration-different" creator unknown. if a reader knows who created the image, please contact editor@catalystjournal.org so that credit can be given.   this graphic from thinkinclusion.us went viral on the internet and underwent numerous permutations. one adaptation was labeled, “reality, most places,” and was illustrated by combinations of all four prior structures: a large circle containing green and divergent dots, excluding other divergent dots, containing multiple sites of divergent integration, and a site of segregation. this “reality” illustration is useful for understanding the complex, contiguous, and simultaneous existence of multiple experiences of oppression. these community-generated variations illustrate both the varying ways that society sorts bodies as well as the subtleties with which some ways of sorting can be constructed to look like other ways. hegemonical actors can intentionally label one social order as another for the benefit of neoliberal capitalism.   some scholars have become skeptical of the efficacy of inclusion as activism as they come across sites of its violent transformation into neoliberal schemes. ahmed (2012) traverses the complicated and nuanced relations between “diversity workers” and their institutions, calling attention to the ways that “the very promise of inclusion can be a concealment and thus extension of exclusion” (178). david mitchell and sharon snyder (2015) describe “inclusionism” as a framework for defining, achieving, and proclaiming inclusion under the prerequisites of ablenationalism and supercrip narratives of overcoming (36). sara maría acevedo (2018) elaborates, “disabled people are worthy of inclusion as long as they conform or assimilate to the norm standards of the majority… [inclusionism reinforces the managerial ‘handling’ of disabled bodies primarily through medical, juridical, and charity channels” (286, 302).   in their critique of inclusion, their intention is not to return to sites of explicit institutionalization. they express pain as their hopes for justice have been tainted by the capitalist perseveration upon indexical procedures and positivistic measurements. inclusionism manifests as the violent processes of inclusion-via-normalization, and inclusion for the sake of judicial rights-based criteria satisfaction. to these scholars, the concept of inclusion has been too easily coopted by neoliberal mechanics—fractal seeds of institutional power take root and destroy movements from the inside out.   fractal mechanics are neoliberal mechanics other scholars have lamented the mechanisms by which neoliberalism consumes activist discourse and co-opts it for production (access harvey 2007). nirmala erevelles (2011) weaves together the manners in which disability and race are mutually constituted such that neoliberalism will use one against the other, always forcing those who live at the intersections of both further into the margins. robert mcruer (2018) discusses the commodification of disability identity in crip times. his explications of a neoliberal “austerity of representation” illuminate the insipid mechanics of turning movements into memes, and memes into t-shirts, extinguishing movements into capitalist consumptive silence (2018, 55). inclusion as a movement is rapidly progressing toward this violent extinguishment.   the experiences illustrated in the vignettes above can be understood through rebecca mallet and katherine runswick-cole’s (2012) concept of the “commodification of autism.” they describe the commodification of autism as the social and cultural objectification of autism as an abstracted “thing” instantiated within individual bodies (mallett and runswick-cole 2012). conceptualized as an entity separate from the person who carries it, autism is traded between social actors—almost never the autistic people themselves, but their parents, carers, therapists, and teachers. autism is exchanged—a problem for a solution, a disease for a cure, a behavior for an extinction burst, a burden for a relief. the falsified “autism epidemic” is a neoliberal project to manufacture a market for autism cure (broderick and roscigno 2021). this cure is sometimes manifested as genetic research, sometimes behavioral program, sometimes containment via institutionalization. but there are other, non-curative, not-overtly-eugenical markets generated by this commodification of difference.   the commodification of autism (and, as mallett and runswick-cole note, all disability) generates a thing to exclude, and thus a thing to (re)include as a neoliberal solution that ignores the foundations of ableism that create systems of exclusion in the first place. as ahmed states, “the promise of inclusion can be offered in a way that negates a point about exclusion” (2012, 178). disability commodification creates an urgency for inclusion that belies its intention as a social justice project and transforms it into charity. diversity and inclusion are emptied of their goals and transformed into a neoliberal performance of intent without substance.   wendy larner (2000) breaks neoliberalism down into three interlocking branches of policy, ideology, and governmentality in order to illustrate its expansiveness and its pervasive power in simultaneously restructuring society and popular thought. the policy branch is described as the globalization of market capital and the privatization of the welfare state, the ideology branch demolishes popular understandings of social commitments to collective care by instilling fantasies of individual self-responsibility, and the governmentality branch elides a process of the intensification of state power over individual lives while presenting itself as a dissolution of state control. this three-pronged understanding of neoliberalism is useful for grappling with how seemingly disconnected projects, diverse in hegemonical origin and scale, can be operating toward such eerily interconnected effects as the consolidation of capital, the dissolution of democratic efficacy, cultural dispossession, and intensification of social and material oppression.   larner implores readers not to affix neoliberalism to any one point on the political spectrum, and indeed we have seen that neoliberal machinations occur just as effectively on the left as the right. while larner does not believe that a single description of the philosophical mechanics of neoliberalism is possible nor fruitful, i find that imagining the diversity of neoliberal projects as fragments of a fractal structure helps us perceive which elements of neoliberalism recur through each manifestation   in this paper, neoliberalism is a container for a mechanic of political transformation that declares an intent toward progress but results in oppression, devastation, and even death. the actors of neoliberal transformation projects are often of a hegemonical positionality—assemblages of white, upper-class, able-bodied, and cisheteronormative. neoliberal mechanics are the numerical, statistical, proceduralized, measurable, positivist mathematics upheld as neutral and unbiased by the hegemonical actors of neoliberal projects (larner 2003). the byproduct of neoliberal projects is an intensification or reification of oppression of marginalized subjectivity—assemblages of bipoc, impoverished, disabled, and queer. such projects generally result in new permutations of oppression by operating on one aspect of marginality without considering co-constitutional factors that ripple through adjacent and intersected marginalities.   fractal mechanics are transinstitutional mechanics when we proceduralize social good, with new ways to categorize, define, index, optimize, and measure success, we produce and reproduce pervasive, fractalized sites of transinstitutionalization. once described simply as the act of displacing subjects from one institution into another (morrissey and goldman 1986), the social, cultural, and rhetorical constructions of disability can be perceived as an ubiquitous interlocking set of “open-air” institutions: systems that tensor and warp bodies to fit incomplete and incongruent definitions; structures that suspend and dangle and threaten an unresolvable precarity (access also haley 2017). the institution is always “in transit” as it follows the stigmatized body wherever it goes.   neoliberation, concatenated from neoliberalliberation in the preceding ode, is a portmanteau of neoliberal and liberation. the “camel case” comes from naming conventions in computer programming and is an intentional visible and aural signification of the word’s hybridity. just as “inclusionism” is a necessary neologism to encapsulate manifestations of perverse inclusion, neoliberation represents neoliberal perversions of liberation. i present neoliberation as a complimentary concept to inclusionism. if inclusionism occurs when we commodify difference, neoliberation occurs when we commodify liberation. liberation becomes some “thing” that can be traded, negotiated, bargained, forestalled, and delivered. neoliberation describes the violence enacted by presenting inclusionism as liberation, and neoliberation as justice. it is recursive, fractal, managerial, and inhumane.   each vignette presented above reverberates with the violence of the fractal power relations of inclusionism, transinstitutionalization, and neoliberation:   in vignette 1, the virtuousness of inclusion(ism) fails to challenge the “natural” exclusion of autistic and i/dd5 students. recursively, their posters manifest the transinstitutional in their self-exhibition, like a hall of mirrors, they display themselves as they are on display. they narrate a neoliberated future graduation from a program that has reinforced presumptions of their incompetence and denied them the opportunity to participate in emancipatory research. the program coordinators are performing virtue through the inclusion(ism) and (neo)liberation of these students-as-exhibit.   in vignette 3, the panelists have come to challenge, to criptique, the status quo of special education, but our efforts are undermined by the voyeurism of the attendees. they expected a hall of mirrors, “reformed autistics,” like temple grandin, come to thank them for their hard work. we were included as equally qualified presenters. but we were powerless to move those that came to “watch” rather than to learn. the panel became an exhibit, an institution, the ring of nonplussed special educators loomed rigidly like iron bars. is this what it feels like to be free?   in vignette 4, the illusion of our inclusion is shattered. we are welcome to present, but not to participate. our unruly bodies are offensive. our neuro-plasticity-spasticity is rude. the involution of our intention is (dis)invited.   and what of vignette 2? where the aac-using panelist is nearly rendered unable to present because despite the declaration of his disability, despite the clarity of his accommodation needs, despite the duty implicit in his inclusion to ensure him access? inclusionism invited him but denied him it support because “no one else would be given it.” neoliberation was proud to have him on the program but was ready to blame him if access barriers silenced his voice.   i say again, equity is not justice. equality of opportunity and equality of resources still leave the postsecondary students on display, the panelists on display, the aac-using panelist vulnerable to silencing—the included are still vulnerable to exclusion (nusbaum 2013; ahmed 2012).   fractal mechanics are communal mechanics in their fractal many-festo for trans and disabled collectivity, maier, hsu, cedillo, and yergeau (2020) ask, “what if fractals also structure social worlds, historical and rhetorical forces, and struggles for power?” both “earlier” and “later” (or back/forward, up/down…) in this text, i attempt to illustrate that they very much do. but like maier et al., i also recognize that that the mechanisms of this structuring have no inherent moral valence. this is not to say that fractals can be imagined as a neutral technology. to understand tools as neutral is to believe they can be isolated from their users. such a disentanglement can never be materially true. as maier et al. (2020) say, “we are all implicated.” what i mean instead, is that a fractal understanding of social worlds enables us to simultaneously comprehend how oppressive structures proliferate while also being able to imagine how revolutionary structures can be propagated—specifically through infiltration, subversion, perversion, and implantation.   a fractal understanding of society, culture, community, and self requires recognition that any rendering is but a snapshot, a cross-section, an extracted layer of something that is “always-in-process” (maier et al. 2020). maier et al. devote their many-festo to another question, “what would it mean to regard coalition as fractal—as the ongoing re-examination and renegotiation of communal boundaries?” brown (2017) already regards coalition as fractal, theorizing a decentralized intercommunal “emergent strategy” as a form of potential revolution that resists prescriptivism (95), manifesting throughout micro to macro registers akin to the dynamics of flocking.   the many-festo and emergent strategy bring to mind the work of huey p. newton (2019) and his formulation of intercommunalism (193–212). newton establishes three key points—that “everything is in a constant state of change” (193), that there is a moral imperative to act under the assumption of a material world and prioritize attention to material consequences, and that such an attention requires a mode of thinking that directly connects with the constant state of change. solidarity cannot be achieved prescriptively (newton 2019, 195), and requires thoughtful, personal engagement with the struggles of other communities and appreciation for points of intercommunal connection and tension. newton describes an ideology of dialectical materialism that allows the black panther movement to think and organize and act with an understanding rooted in a fluctuating, interconnected, interdependent world. intercommunalism—an understanding of communities as distributed, entangled with one another, and engaged in a constant materialist dialectic—provided a way to understand mechanisms of oppression via globalization and imagine revolution and liberation without relying on nation-states and authoritarian models of governance.   in brief, the metonymy of the fractal may be a useful technology for perceiving dialectical materialism in motion, but more importantly it may be helpful for understanding people as collective agents of change within fractal systems. justice must be figured as collective action because it is impossible to bind it to time. you cannot prescribe justice—each step diffracts the world, edits the seed, creates a new echo. we are always at step zero in a new world and must act with the understanding that each moment is a practice of worldbuilding (figure 3).   figure 3: an illustration of a “perverse” implantation or radical infiltration of a fractal seed editing the larger fractal network, imagined here as a sort of reterritorialization. though computationally such a transformation is instantaneous, this illustration is more akin to the mutation of a fractal organism, such as a fern or moss. this composition is derived from three works by graphic artist jason kaehler (kaelerplanet.com), with his permission.   fractal mechanics are justice mechanics an image created by craig froehle (2016) underwent several viral permutations similar to the inclusion meme from thinkinclusive.us. in his original, one side shows three people of varying heights each standing on one wooden crate (figure 4). only the tallest two people can see over the fence to view the baseball game in the background. on the other side, the boxes have been rearranged to give two to the shortest person, one to the middle, and none to the tallest. all three people can now see over the fence. froehle’s image was originally intended to demonstrate two different ways of thinking about equality, and the two very distinct material consequences of such differences in interpretation. in an early iteration, the side where all three people had one box is labeled “equality,” while the other side, where everyone can see over the fence, is labeled “equity. this image was intended to illustrate that equality of opportunity rarely results in equity, or the equality of outcomes.   figure 4: craig froehle’s original image showing two divergent interpretations of “equality.”   future iterations of the image reinforced the concept that sameness and fairness have very different results. the same system can leave different people in different states of oppression. variations on the image proliferate (froehle 2016), and eventually, one emerges with the equality illustration on the left, equity in the middle, and finally, liberation on the right, where there is no longer any fence at all, and no boxes. in this version of liberty, there are no barriers, and thus there are no accommodations.   other iterations replace the equity label with justice. it seems a great number of people felt that equity was either synonymous with justice, or that the image labeled equity was more accurately described as justice. in any case, there is agreement that equality is neither equity nor justice nor liberation. but if equality is none of these, and liberation is also somehow a progression of equity and/or justice, then what is equity, and what is justice?   martha c. nussbaum (1993) delinks justice from notions of legality—law, order, penalty, retribution. she describes how retributive notions of justice often deflect consequences from the original perpetrators to proxies. flowing from her analysis, retribution may be thought of as a manifestation of “punitive implantation.” the classification of context-void, lawful (normative) consequence seeds the fractal of vengeance, crime and punishment—a recursive injustice. justice, then, requires the context-sensitive application of equity in communion with mercy.   if equality is everyone living in the balance of their desire, and equity is everyone having the resources they need to reach the state of equality, then justice is the dismantling of the barriers that seed this state of need in the first place. barriers implant states of deficit, inequity, injustice. liberation is a consequence of justice. equality alone can masquerade as justice in the presumption that everyone desires the same opportunities. equity alone can masquerade as justice in the delivery of resources without the deconstruction of barriers. liberation alone, neoliberation, masquerades as justice when we are released from bondage into new sites of oppression. transinstitutionalization and neoliberation work in tandem.   how do we imagine algorithms for fighting the neoliberal perversions of justice? disability activists such as patricia berne, mia mingus, leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha, and others describe disability justice, access intimacy, and prefigurative politics as tools of collective resistance, liberation, and love. disability justice centers intersectionality, interdependence, and collective action through a responsibility and accountability to cross-movement solidarities (berne et al. 2020). disability justice was born of a need to pull the disability rights movement out of its white-centric reverie. “disability justice asserts that ableism helps make racism, christian supremacy, sexism, and queerand transphobia possible, and that all those systems of oppression are locked up tight” (piepzna-samarasinha 2018, 22).   where disability rights are often imagined as justice-through-legally-recognized-equality-of-opportunity, disability justice recognizes how the process of law itself can be an access barrier, and how the enforcement of law is inequitable across intersections. further, disability justice contests the naturalization and normalization of what is considered desirable opportunity. disability rights advances access through litigious criteria satisfaction. access becomes a series of procedures and checkboxes, accommodation and justification—logistics (mingus 2011b).   when our liberation is imagined as logistical, we become vulnerable to neoliberation. inclusion(ism) and diversity masquerade as access, equity, and justice. instead, access intimacy “moves the work of access out of the realm of only logistics and into the realm of relationships and understanding disabled people as humans, not burdens” (mingus 2011a). access intimacy is a tool of disability justice and of collective liberation because it calls upon a collective sense of belonging and worth—it is a “hermeneutics of love” (sandoval 2000).   to disability activists, justice isn't something that is given or bestowed, nor even taken. it is something that is forged—it is the loving act of forging collective liberation. such loving acts, as brown (2017) attests, require a fractal politic of living our revolutionary desires from the micro to macro registers of our relations (45). to sow the seeds of a collective, radical, revolutionary, loving justice, we have to dream disabled futures. “prefigurative politics is a fancy term for the idea of imagining and building the world we want to see now. it’s waking up and acting as if the revolution has happened” (piepzna-samarasinha 2018, 149). prefigurative politics crip futurity. seeded by our collective prefiguration, we rewrite the fractals, alter the shape, like a viral contagion implantation. micro-revolutions all the way down, in all dimensions.   fractal mechanics are revolution mechanics the fractal metaphor for the dialectical mechanics of oppression (via neoliberalism) and of revolution (via intercommunal solidarity) can be regarded as a manifestation of barad’s theorizations of diffraction and entanglement. i make this manifestation clear in the following articulation of disabled embodiment as a site of diffraction and disabled community as a practice of diffracting.   barad’s (2007) work enables us to understand scientific measurement and observation as engaged in a dialectic of interpretation and perception. just as the medical gaze constructs the boundaries and definitions of organs and their functions, the embodied-self (particularly the embodied experience of being disabled or ill) rebels against tidy circumscriptions of functional norms. a disabled nervous system both highlights the boundaries of the medical delineation of the nervous system while at the same time, proving through its “malfunction” that this delineation is insufficient. the disabled body embodies outliers, “constantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialized” (deleuze and guattari 2005, 40). disabled bodies embody those conditions and contradictions of material being that medical textbooks would prefer did not exist. they resist measurement, break encoded norms, and make plain the diffracted entanglement of medical conceit with disablement.   diffraction is not just a phenomenon, it is also a practice, an action, and can be an intent. for example, in computer vision, a diffraction pattern is an intentional deployment of a known diffraction in the measurement of light to encode the surfaces of the material world into digital approximations. if diffraction is the phenomenon of measurement determining how reality is perceived, then diffraction patterns are the practice of using this "bug" "anomaly" "flaw" to create new ways of being. crip technoscience (hamraie and fritsch 2019) may be a practice of intentionally diffracting one's onto-epistemic essence with the matter, measurement, and meaning of mechanical and digital strata. a crip technoscientific practice of intercommunal justice-forging through a fractal politic intentionally harnesses the diffraction of a cyborg embodiment to create and become new meanings-in-relation—to edit fractal seeds at all registers of relation.   vignettes of revolution the following vignettes imagine communities engaged in fractal relations of disability community through crip technoscientific practices. these stories illustrate a fractal politic in the spirit of adrienne maree brown (2017), “practicing at a small scale what we most want to see at the universal level” (17). disabled people are inherently distributed and dispersed throughout multiply intersecting and enmeshing communities. as such, we invent unique ways of inter-relating across space and time.   vignette a: ames and oli live on opposite sides of the country. separated by thousands of miles, they are connected digitally and spiritually by shared affinities—crip and queer kinship found buried like tubers in the comment sections of sprawling webs of “mutual connections.”   ames: hey   oli: hey!   ames: tag yourself, i’m executive dysfunction.   oli: lol mood   ames: yeah. but i really need to eat.   --incoming video call from oli-   ames: “ha. why did you call me?”   oli: “because we both need to eat. let’s make lunch together.”   ames and oli are both neurodivergent and struggle with executive function—those cognitive processes that help you get from goal to action. though their connection is “only” digital, this networked connection is no less embodied. together, they can yoke their movements, “borrowing praxis” (asasumasu 2015) and giving each other mutual care. by feeding themselves, they feed each other.   vignette b: every day, we check the board. we look for the names, the hospitals, the room numbers. we build the phone scripts. this one needs access to their aac. that one needs the staff to follow the correct plan of care. that one over there needs dozens of angry phone calls to badger an admin into releasing a patient back to their community, instead of the home. the system, #breakoutbot,6 looks up the admin phone numbers. the text messages go out. like dandelion seeds. thousands of angry, tired, loving crips dial in. “we are not disposable. let my people go.   vignette c: they got tired of the zoom rooms long ago. everyone said no, no you have to stay connected. though they missed each other’s company dearly, they missed the absence of migraines more. it’s not that video calls aren’t “good enough” compared to other conversations…it’s just that…maybe the talking was never actually the point.   motor planning is ball of talkers explanation but i think that language of relation rallies people to think about objects as important and initiating movement. people think that pace is in the body by answering to amazing environment but movement is always in relation to the world so motor language is not right but relation is fostering the collaborating. — adam wolfond   instead, they exchange envelopes. no, not letters. they gave up words long ago. exhausting things, words. instead, they send crushed flowers, an interesting stone, papers etched with the skin of damp twigs…what does it mean when you send a flower and they send a stone? well it’s not just the flower, and it’s not just the stone. the flower was purple, with white and blue too. the stone has sparkles, flint quartz, and lapis lazuli. the twigs were from the creek, where other stones were found. maybe next week, they’ll exchange things that are round. for one it was a reminder that the earth makes beauty. for another a testament that the earth holds memory. the meanings are co-constructed, the practice collaborative. this, too, is conversation.   conclusion: fractals are interrelated, entangled, intercommunal i have used fractals as a metaphor for how institutional rhetoric and power relations survive the deconstruction of walls. transinstitutionalization is possible because the institution is a fractal structure of power relations. through the epistemic viscera of my own experiences of inclusionism, i illustrated that neoliberation is what happens when transinstitutional fractal shards remain in the roots of liberative projects. i have imagined foucauldian implantation as a mechanism for rewriting fractal seeds to produce rapid and prolific transformation, both oppressive and liberative. if futurity is a fractal, neoliberalism seeds future-without-disability and disability justice crips futurity by seeding future-as-disabled. using disability justice, intercommunalism, and crip technoscience, i imagine crip projects that manifest disabled futures through the prefigurative politics of validating disabled life in the here and now.   the neoliberal fractal seed distorts radical practice—diversity becomes tokenism, inclusion becomes inclusionism, access becomes accommodation, justice becomes logistics, liberation becomes neoliberation. but the hopeless nightmare of co-optation is not the whole story. implantation is not just a technology of oppression; it is a technology of revolution. though “mainstream” programs often get progress wrong, the effort still forms infrastructure. fractal proliferation makes rapid transformation possible. tokenism and inclusionism can become insurgency. as insurgents, we transform accommodation into collective access, and logistics into love. to dream prefigurative dreams, we wake up every day and imagine co-optation as a gift of infrastructure for daily corruption. all your fractals are belong to us (dubs, n.d.).   acknowledgments this paper would not be possible without the loving community i have found with many activist scholars, including but not limited to: sara maría acevedo, dj savarese, adam wolfond, cath duchastel de montrouge, and damien patrick williams.   notes 1 this paper will rely on wendy larner’s (2000) formulation of neoliberalism, expanded in the section “fractal mechanics are neoliberal mechanics.”   2 autism spectrum disorder.   3 augmentative and alternative communication.   4 kairotic spaces are high-stakes interactions that privilege normative communication at the expense of marginalized folk (price 2011).   5 intellectual/developmental disability.   6 fictional. for now.   references acevedo, sara maría. 2018. “enabling geographies: 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"all your base are belong to us." know your meme. accessed june 28, 2021. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-your-base-are-belong-to-us. erevelles, nirmala. 2011. disability and difference in global contexts: enabling a transformative body politic. springer link. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001184. foucault, michel. 1978. the history of sexuality. volume 1: an introduction. translated by robert hurley. new york: vintage. froehle, craig. 2016. “the evolution of an accidental meme.” medium, april 14, 2016. https://medium.com/@cra1g/the-evolution-of-an-accidental-meme-ddc4e139e0e4. haley, elizabeth tobin leblanc. 2017. “transinstitutionalization: a feminist political economy analysis of ontario’s public mental health care system.” phd diss., york university. https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/33554. hamraie, aimi, and kelly fritsch. 2019. “crip technoscience manifesto.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–33. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607. harvey, david. 2007. “neoliberalism as creative destruction.” annals of the american academy of political and social science 610 (1). https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716206296780. johnson, merri, and robert mcruer. 2014. “cripistemologies: introduction.” journal of literary & cultural disability studies 8 (2): 127–47. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/548847/pdf. kafer, alison. 2013. feminist, queer, crip. bloomington: indiana university press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gz79x. ———. 2019. “crip kin, manifesting.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–37. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29618. larner, wendy. 2000. “neo-liberalism: policy, ideology, governmentality.” studies in political economy 63 (1): 5–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/19187033.2000.11675231. ———. 2003. “neoliberalism?” environment and planning d: society and space 21 (5): 509–12. https://doi.org/10.1068/d2105ed. maier, sophia, v. jo hsu, christina v. cedillo, and remi m. yergeau. 2020. “get the frac in! or, the fractal many-festo: a (trans)(crip)t1.” peitho: journal of the coalition of feminist scholars in the history of rhetoric & composition 22 (4). https://cfshrc.org/article/get-the-frac-in-or-the-fractal-many-festo-a-transcript/. mallett, rebecca, and katherine runswick-cole. 2012. “commodifying autism: the cultural contexts of ‘disability’ in the academy.” in disability and social theory, edited by d. goodley, b. hughes, and l. davis, 33–51. london: palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137023001_3. mcruer, robert. 2018. crip times: disability, globalization, and resistance. new york: nyu press. mingus, mia. 2011a. “access intimacy: the missing link.” leaving evidence (blog). may 5, 2011. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/. ———. 2011b. “changing the framework: disability justice.” leaving evidence (blog). february 12, 2011. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/changing-the-framework-disability-justice/. mitchell, david t., and sharon l. snyder. 2015. the biopolitics of disability: neoliberalism, ablenationalism, and peripheral embodiment. ann arbor: university of michigan press. morrissey, joseph p., and howard h. goldman. 1986. “care and treatment of the mentally ill in the united states: historical developments and reforms.” annals of the american academy of political and social science 484 (1): 12–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716286484001002. nelson, mallory kay, ashley shew, and bethany stevens. 2019. “transmobility: possibilities in cyborg (cripborg) bodies.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29617. newton, huey p. 2019. the huey p. newton reader. edited by david hilliard and donald weise. 2nd ed. new york: seven stories press. nusbaum, emily a. 2013. “vulnerable to exclusion: the place for segregated education within conceptions of inclusion.” international journal of inclusive education 17 (12): 1295–1311. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2013.826292. nussbaum, martha c. 1993. “equity and mercy.” philosophy & public affairs 22 (2): 83–125. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2265442.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3a211896d4f7cd1f0c5a68991b87d90151. piepzna-samarasinha, leah lakshmi. 2018. care work: dreaming disability justice. vancouver, bc: arsenal pulp press. price, margaret. 2011. mad at school: rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. ann arbor: michigan university press. princep, tiffany. 2012. “foucault’s perverse implantation.” malta: desire, literature, culture symposium. https://www.academia.edu/3067099/_foucaults_perverse_implantation_talk_at_the_desire_litterature_culture_symposium_malta_2012. rodas, julia miele. 2018. autistic disturbances: theorizing autism poetics from the dsm to robinson crusoe. ann arbor: university of michigan press. sandoval, chela. 2000. methodology of the oppressed. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. tremain, shelley l. 2017. foucault and a feminist philosophy of disability. ann arbor: university of michigan press. yergeau, remi. 2017. authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. duke, nc: duke university press.     author bio rua m. williams’s scholarship bridges critical disability studies, science & technology studies, and human-centered computing. their research supports community-driven interventions on oppressive structures of the academy. microsoft word 76924-1-11-20190131_schuller.docx schuller, k. (2019). review of undoing monogamy: the politics of science and the possibilities of biology, by angela willey (duke university press, 2016). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5 (1), 1-6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kyla schuller, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license review undoing monogamy: the politics of science and the possibilities of biology, by angela willey (duke university press, 2016) kyla schuller rutgers university–new brunswick kylaschu@rutgers.edu in june 2015, the us supreme court ruled that the constitution upholds the right to same-sex marriage across the nation. justice anthony kennedy’s majority opinion expanded the civil right to matrimony on the grounds that marriage culminates two seemingly disparate trajectories: biological destiny and refined civilization. “rising from the most basic human needs,” the opinion declares, “marriage is essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations.” marriage figures somewhat fantastically as the harmonious conjuncture of essential biological drives and the highest expressions of human culture. “no union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family,” kennedy explains, before reassuring readers that at the root of same-sex couples’ desire for legal marriage lies “their hope…not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions.” marriage, in other words, is the apex of human capacity for civilization. its denial by the state pushes gay couples outside of the realm of the civilized—and of basic human sociality. schuller catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 kennedy’s logic, feminist science studies scholar angela willey would say, is naturalizing, for it legitimates same-sex marriage by producing marriage itself as simultaneously a biological fact and social ideal. willey’s 2016 book undoing monogamy: the politics of science and the possibilities of biology employs multidisciplinary feminist approaches to uncover and ultimately displace the naturalization of monogamy across scientific, social scientific, and cultural spheres. undoing monogamy exposes how monogamy discourse blends a compulsory social norm with ideas about the biological substrate of the human (and other supposedly monogamous species, like the prairie vole). the book’s bold sweep in source and method are emblematic of the expanded horizon of feminist methodologies. the argument moves, for example, between observation of the prairie vole research unit of a high-profile neuroscience laboratory (chapter 2) and close reading of alison bechdel cartoons (chapter 4). these diverse sources enable willey to both diagnose the problems with “monogamy’s nature” and, by recruiting bechdel and audre lorde, work toward a new conception of social and erotic bonding in its stead (p. 10). undoing monogamy makes a key theoretical intervention: clarifying how new materialist approaches can build on, rather than depart from (or at worst, ignore), the insights of feminist science studies. willey makes a necessary and pointed contribution by insisting that to explore ontology does not mean to embrace science without qualification. new materialisms too often, she argues, fuse the practice of science with its objects of knowledge, such that biology comes to stand in for embodiment, unmediated. “matter is too often conflated with scientific ways of knowing it,” willey elegantly surmises (p. 127). this troubling conflation—often trumpeted as a political victory over toothless critique—forecloses decades of feminist work on the situatedness of science within larger social contexts. it opts instead for the appealing fantasy of transcendent knowledge. willey demolishes this framework by explaining that critique of science is a necessary method we can and should take up alongside “engagement (with biology)” (p. 19). willey explains, “we need ‘critique’ to help us remember that ‘the body’ is still not ‘scientific data,’ nor is ‘biology’ flesh ‘itself’; it is, schuller catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 rather, a field of study, a discipline, a discourse on the body, in haraway’s famous formulation” (p. 22). and we need engagement with biological knowledge to capture the entanglement of materiality and semiotics that make up our being. through historical, theoretical, and ethnographic methods, willey uncovers monogamy as a historically contingent aspect of sexuality, itself a rather recent invention in the foucauldian sense of sexuality-as-identity. by contrast, she shows the discourse of monogamy to produce pair-bonded sexuality as a biological given, a transhistorical expression of basic and universal sexual drives. one result of this potent biocultural mixture is that neuroscientific research into the so-called monogamy gene, for example, takes as a point of departure the assumption that homo sapiens are monogamous. so pervasive is the naturalizing logic of monogamy discourse, willey argues, that feminist and queer polyamory texts aiming to unseat the tyranny of the couple nonetheless work through similarly naturalizing rhetoric. in this allegedly oppositional writing that is the subject of chapter 3, it is now non-monogamy that becomes naturalized, often through romantic primitivism and other racial fantasies of a life supposedly “before” culture. these racial fantasies remain committed to the ideas that nature is a distinctly separate domain from the social and that “the human is fundamentally sexual, and sexuality is a naturally privileged organizing principle of relationships” (p. 76). in its place, willey poses a new set of questions that blend foucauldian genealogy with the feminist science studies method of investigating naturecultures, or the inseparability of biological and social life. she thus overturns the familiar agenda that wonders, “are we or are we not wired for monogamy?” and asks instead, “what is the relationship between how we imagine social belonging and how we understand human nature?” (p. 3). how, in other words, has romantic coupling come to bear the weight of the human? throughout, willey interrogates how the intersections of race and gender help to produce the human vis-à-vis ideas of normative sexuality. she shows how monogamy discourse hinges upon the institutionalization of white bourgeois values as “sexuality,” a historical product problematically schuller catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 rendered a universal quality. chapter 1 examines how monogamy became an object of scientific study, specifically in the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century sexology of richard von krafft-ebing and havelock ellis. willey explicates their work, which adopts distinctly different attitudes toward monogamy, as nonetheless relying upon a similar civilizationist frame that corresponds to the political priorities of colonial powers. the remaining chapters point to the ongoing legacy of these colonial notions of civilized sexuality, including the very idea of binary sexes in the first place, within monogamy discourse. the book suggests that ideas about civilized refinement and biological need are thoroughly confounded in monogamy discourse, such that we might read justice kennedy’s opinion as all but predetermined. the second half of the book offers new frameworks for human relationships with the hopes of displacing monogamy discourse. turning to bechdel’s dykes to watch out for cartoons from the 1990s and lorde’s famous theory of the erotic, willey offers an idea of community affiliation that refuses to prioritize the romantic couple and erotic joy that suffuses all manner of being in the world. the broad disciplinary reach of the book stretches a bit thin here, as the bechdel chapter in particular falls into plot summary that neglects, for one, the visual aspect of the cartoons under discussion. it also offers an overly romantic view of “dyke community” that fails to consider how often that very concept has been, and continues to be, wielded as a weapon to exclude transwomen—an aspect willey’s nod toward bechdel’s inclusion of transmale characters does not satisfy (pp. 115, 119, 121). given that the book ends with an epilogue conjuring a “dyke science,” a clear discussion of how dyke is being re-reclaimed would be useful. the argumentation could use a broader scope to fulfill its goals of offering new visions for relating, one that reads bechdel within a larger field of representation. the organization of the book’s chapters generally follows a pattern of explicating individual texts, a method that does not do justice to the text’s world-making ambitions. willey’s last chapter is more successful in working toward its inspiring goal: it sketches a theory of “biopossibility” as an alternative to “biology,” an schuller catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 act of theory making highly unusual in a scholar’s first book (p. 124). biopossibility signifies “a speciesand context-specific capacity to embody socially meaningful traits or desires” (p. 124). it denotes a capacity of becoming in which the very “intelligibility” of matter itself takes material form (p. 125). in other words, biopossibility supplants the new materialist valorization of plasticity as an innate capacity for change pertaining to pure matter itself with a naturecultural framework in which the very act of naming a condition or a process has an effect on its materialization. willey claims that the complex systems now hypothesized—but not yet mapped—to control gene expression suggest that the scripting of the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin and their receptors into proof of a “monogamy gene” has been highly reductive. “the effect of ‘monogamy’ is not the result of a linear chain of neurochemical events,” willey acutely notes, pointing to a range of environmental possibilities that shape hormone circulation (p. 136). she highlights other ways of interpreting prairie vole behavior in the laboratory besides the now-dominant one: voles who spend time with voles they have already met provide evidence of monogamous behavior. this measure, willey explains, is particularly troublesome given that the laboratory does not track whether or not sexual relations actually take place. the process of naming vole sociality “monogamy,” in other words, helps enact the very materialities we measure and envision. biopossibility is a highly intriguing concept, if necessarily not fully elaborated in this admirably concise text. i hope for its further development in willey’s future work. this is a scholar to watch for self-reflexive, multidisciplinary, and intersectional feminist research that challenges us all to conceive of critique and world-building as compatible projects. reference obergefell et al. v. hodges, no. 14–556 slip op. at 1 (june 26, 2015). schuller catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 bio kyla schuller is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies at rutgers university—new brunswick and author of the biopolitics of feeling: race, sex, and science in the nineteenth century (duke university press, 2018).     special section troubleshootingcaring technologies in pedagogical practice     hong-an wu university of texas at dallas hongan.wu@utdallas.edu     abstract as digital media making becomes increasingly popularized in classrooms, media and arts educators are faced with not only familiarizing digital technologies for curricular planning but also improvising with these unwieldy objects during pedagogical exchanges. drawing from my five-week action research project, teaching and learning digital art making through digital game modifications, this paper explores the repeated moments of technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles during pedagogical practices through the metaphor of troubleshooting that guided how we framed and approached these troubles. specifically, i argue that to troubleshoot is to standardize our situated contexts to universal terms, to engage in a relationship premised on the framework of control, and to invest in the temporal order of technological development as predetermined knowledge. as such, i foreground a desire for a different metaphor and turn towards the metaphor of troublecaring to speculate how to respond to the offers of inquiry made by these moments of technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles.     keywords troubleshooting, pedagogy, technology, trouble, broken, care     introduction as digital media making becomes increasingly popularized in classrooms across levels and locales with science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (steam) education being celebrated as the touchstone of contemporary pedagogy, there exists an ever-exceeding horizon of new, emerging, and often digital technologies for media and arts educators to learn for the purpose of curricular planning and execution. but, even as educators become familiarized with these technologies across stratified fault lines of access and literacy, we face technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles at every corner of the pedagogical encounter that uproot any sense of security gathered through familiarity. the projector won’t project. the software froze. the wi-fi won’t connect. what do we do, then? we engage in “situated actions” (suchman 1987, 3) and figure out how to work with what we have. as many have noted, constantly improvising with these unwieldy and disobedient technological objects through the troubles they introduce during pedagogical exchange is a daily routine for pedagogues (black and browning 2011; delacruz 2004, 2009). if we take seriously that pedagogical encounters are sites of knowledge production, then we need to pay attention to the language we use during that encounter, which in turn shapes, frames, and constrains what knowledge can be made. drawing from my five-week action research project, teaching and learning digital art making through digital game modifications, this paper is an attempt at “staying with the trouble” (haraway 2016, 1) of technologies in pedagogical practices to rethink what knowledge is and can be made through how we frame, approach, and relate to the troubles that new, emerging, and digital technologies introduce to the classroom. specifically, this paper asks, what happens when we practice troubleshooting as opposed to troublecaring technologies? what ways of relating do these metaphors enact? how do these relations frame knowledge production during pedagogical practice? by investigating the metaphor of troubleshooting used by youth participants and myself during the workshops, this paper excavates the assumptions carried over that frame how we can and cannot relate to our technologies, knowledge, and each other during our knowledge production process. in turn, i end with the metaphor of caregiving as a method for imagining troublecaring as ways we might relate to technologies differently.   caring about technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles why should we care about moments of technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles during pedagogical encounters? i emphasize care here as “care becomes a tool for critical political analysis when we use this concept to reveal relationships of power” (tronto 1993, 172). as maría puig de la bellacasa emphasizes, care is “noninnocent” (2017, 90) insofar as care is often romanticized under the “logic of binary gender code and normative relations of care” (sharma 2020, 176). who cares? who is taking care of this? who performs the caregiving? is the care received? a relation undergirded by care participates in the power dynamics of hierarchical structures, and attending to care clarifies the directionality of giving and receiving. as joan tronto’s “four phases of caring” (1993, 105) makes explicit, the labor of care can be differentiated between “caring about” (106), as a general awareness about needs existing, and “care-giving” (106), as the physical labor involved with meeting those needs. i come to care about these repeated moments during teaching as i experience the unequal relations in caregiving technological troubles that shape what can be known by whom. guided by critical feminist pedagogies’ wisdom of centering our lived experiences about and during pedagogical encounters as knowledge production (kishimoto and mwangi 2009), i invite you to care about these moments with me in ways that hopefully lead us closer towards figuring out how to practice caregiving technological troubles together. first, we need to care about these moments of technological trouble because they are precisely when our relationalities, with technologies, knowledge, and each other, are made, unmade, and continually remade. what are technologies, with layered interests built and invested into them, telling us when they don’t work? often framed as a problem to be solved, trouble is a central feminist concern insofar as many question who and what is positioned as the trouble and troubling as well as how we ought to relate to trouble. in investigating how racism intersects with computational logics undergirding digital machines, ruha benjamin argues that encounters with unanticipated trouble that disrupt the seamless flow of using these technologies provide “powerful opportunities to examine the overall system” (2019, 24). given, these moments demand situated actions from us to engage in acts of care to repair that remakes our relations. as steven jackson explains, repair is “the subtle acts of care by which order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished” (2014, 222). through the act of trying to make technologies work again, we can observe and disturb the various “default discrimination” (benjamin 2019, 55) enacted by technologies when they’re working smoothly and invisibly in the background. however, as sara ahmed writes, when feminist killjoys name the harms caused by white supremist heteropatriarchal capitalism that need repairing, feminists and feminisms themselves are often perceived as the problem that’s causing trouble (2017, 37). because to take time to engage in careful repair disrupts the normalized temporality of technological progress, trouble is positioned as unwanted delays. in rejecting the default relation to trouble as something bad, amanda phillips affirms “the importance of conflict and disagreement for political change” (2020, 182) while causing good trouble in pursuit of “a fair distribution of power” (178), particularly in the context of confronting digital gaming cultures. as phillips puts it, “trouble is a glitch in the matrix. trouble is a woman who stands out. trouble is cruzando la frontera” (11). in becoming “the incompatibly queer, raced, classed, and sexed broken-down machine” (sharma 2020, 173) causing trouble in the seamless timeline of technological advancement, “feminists are rendered an always already obsolete technology that isn’t working properly” (173) by insisting on opening a temporal space to relate to other technologies differently. in other words, by staying with and becoming the trouble as broken machines that won’t stop taking up space about the ways in which we’re out of line and time with other technologies, we are engaging in a feminist “mode of resistance” (174) that imagines different technological futures through inhabiting alternative temporalities and making alternative relationalities. second, we need to care about these moments specifically during pedagogical encounters because these sites are important locations of knowledge production. pedagogical encounters are “a location of possibility” (hooks 1994, 207) about what can be known by whom and how, especially when we play with the various constraints placed upon it (lucero 2016). in popular discourses on education, many literatures exist to advocate for the incorporation of new technologies for reaching some fabulous futuristic destination with supposedly “all” peoples. as anita say chan argues, “digital technologies today have come to be imagined as agents of reform whose impacts readily take effect as much at scales of the global as they at the level of the individual” (2013, 4). however, the problems of “fitting” in practice that come along with these technologies as sociotechnical systems are seldom foregrounded, analyzed, and addressed. as critical feminist pedagogue bell hooks says, “more radical subject matter does not create liberatory pedagogy, [and] a simple practice like including personal experience may be more constructively challenging than simply changing the curriculum” (1994, 148). in other words, that new app will not save us. instead, naming the various constraints rooted in our lived experiences with these apps at the pedagogical site provides the grounds for making different kinds of knowledges and livable worlds. in expanding the notion of curriculum to encompass these experiences, deborah osberg and gert biesta explain that “knowledge is understood, rather, to ‘emerge’ as we, as human beings, participate in the world” (2008, 313). in this sense, knowledge produced through pedagogical encounters “should not be pre-determined before the ‘event’ of their emergence” (314). as such, they argue that an emergent curriculum describes not only the inclusion of specific emergent knowledge as content area, such as the inclusion of emerging technologies and critiques of them into a lesson, but also the reorientation of subjectivities involved in practicing the lesson, such as how we relate to our technologies and vice versa. by caring about these moments in pedagogical encounters, perhaps we can devise a fuller understanding of the knowledge that is made, or made impossible, with technologies in pedagogical practice. third, we need to care about these recurring moments as they are examples of pedagogical constraints that educators across levels navigate daily to produce “situated knowledges” (haraway 1991, 111) about technologies in practice that are often under-acknowledged. with the labor of teaching being historically feminized across primary and secondary schooling and continually distinguished from and deprioritized as peripheral to research in higher education (boyle 2004; chen 2015), to center educators and the knowledge they produce during teaching is to reject the devaluing of feminized labor and the idea that teaching is not research (aka traditionally legible forms of knowledge production). in the field of media and arts education, many scholars draw on their own teaching experiences to critique the dominant logic of new technologies = social progress manifesting in education. while “corporations, governments, and universities (who rely even more heavily on research funds provided by the first two entities) are promoting technology in all its guise” (congdon 1997, 112), the dissemination and adoption is unevenly distributed across racial, class, gender, and national lines (morbey 1997). against this logic that serves commodity market expansions at the expense of reproducing existing inequities, they advocate a need to reject this preoccupation with accumulating stuff by taking the time to consider “carefully how we plan to use any new technological tools that become available to us” (gregory 1997, 166). in that vein, many scholars share their negotiations and resistances in their pedagogies with technologies under this reigning logic (taylor 2004; garoian and gaudelius 2001; lin and bruce 2013; rhoades et al. 2013; keifer-boyd 2017). similarly, in the field of feminist technoscience, many scholars also center their pedagogical practices as grounds for producing knowledge about our technocultures (femtechnet, n.d.; scram, n.d.; rault 2015; cong-huyen et al. 2017; cowan 2018; hoagland 2018; york and conley 2019). by centering educators’ knowledge produced across these moments, we can begin to outline the constraints around teaching with/through/around/about technologies that also places feminist technoscience scholarship in dialog with education, more generally, and feminist media and arts education scholarship, more specifically. if we care about technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles during pedagogical encounters as these moments are openings to probe assumptions around digital technologies that manifest unequal relations, this question follows: how can we practice caregiving technological troubles, or troublecaring, during pedagogical encounters that take up these openings to remake these relations? as leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha argues, offering a disability justice framework to practices of care, there is no “one right way to do ‘it’—it being the ways we offer or organize care” (2018, 66). care cannot be separated from the specific situated context from which it unfolds (puig de la bellacasa 2017), and it is in the relentless attempts at caregiving, despite unending troubles, that care “involves living with the erratic” (mol, moser, and pols 2010, 10). building on the metaphor of caregiving as a method for attending to trouble, what does troublecaring offer us in weaving different relations with technologies? as my attempt at troublecaring, instead of troubleshooting, technologies in pedagogical practice, i reflect on one set of such troubling encounters in the following.   context of technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles as a doctoral student in art education in 2015, i developed the minecraft modification workshops, for youths from sixth to twelfth grade, which was to be held in a public library’s loosely structured after-school program1 located in a midwest us city. it grew out of previous workshop series i’ve taught at the same library, where youths who frequent the library2 were particularly interested in learning about media making related to digital games. while the youth library patrons3 expressed these interests, the library’s existing infrastructure struggled to meet these interests. in terms of staff, most of the librarians working with the teens (known as teen librarians) have been practicing for over a decade, and they expressed a disconnect with the emerging technologies that they were being requested to support. as one senior librarian described to me, she is not “tech-savvy like young people” (anonymous librarian, spoken to author, july 21, 2015). as such, the library’s official programming centered on analog media, and they relied on only two recently hired teen librarians and sporadic visiting instructors/volunteers to deliver ad-hoc programming that centered around youth’s interests. as a visiting artist instructor, i came to be involved through a collaborative effort between the nearby university that i was attending and the library’s expressed need for digital-media-related activity support. however, this context is not unique to this library. with limited budget, public libraries have historically privileged the acquisition of objects for providing the public with “materials and technology access” (agosto et al. 2016, 248) as their main service, as opposed to providing programming on how to use, navigate, and evaluate these materials. furthermore, despite the availability of digital literacy programs in libraries, they are primarily adult-centered and not youth-centered; as the american library association’s (2015) digital inclusion survey in 2014 shows, only about one-third of libraries provide digital-related programming specifically for youths. in terms of technologies, the nearly one-thousand-square-foot teen space section was furnished with around twenty desktop computers, along with books and seating areas. while this may seem spacious and resource-sufficient in comparison to many libraries, its lack becomes apparent when considering that it serves over one hundred youth visitors daily from a public middle school next door.4 during the busy after-school hours, youth visitors needed to sign up to be placed in line for using the desktops, and they rotated off the desktop after twenty minutes of use. furthermore, while visitors were broadly given access to the desktops with internet, strict limits were placed upon how the computers could be used. for example, digital games were not allowed to be installed on the desktops, and only games on webpages were accessible. once, i met with the library’s it personnel to request access to the restricted temp folders on the desktops for upcoming workshops to be held in the teen space. however, the it personnel denied the access request for fear that it would make the larger library network vulnerable. to carry out the workshops, my supportive faculty members worked with me to secure a public engagement grant from our university, and we were able to purchase seven laptops5 with slightly fewer restrictions on use to support this programming in a children’s room used for book readings across from teen space. as indicative of what kristin congdon observes, while educational institutions are embracing technologies, the cost for adoption is prohibitive unless they can “work through a nearby college or university” (1997, 109). drawing from my experiences of teaching through the library’s constraints and inspired by literature on critical pedagogy i read in graduate school at the time, i was particularly interested in figuring out how to practice critical pedagogy with and through games, the objects that gravitated my youth interlocutors’ attention. specifically, i questioned how games can be mobilized for social justice through critical play (flanagan 2009). thus, i developed this workshop series with the intention for it to be included at the center of my dissertation inquiry, along the following learning objective: participants will be able to play minecraft critically by critiquing digital games as technocultural systems and by modding games to create alterative worlds for social justice. the workshops were carried out from february to march 2016 over the span of five weeks6 with myself as the facilitator and seven youth participants7 through an action research methodology. with its emphasis on reflexive practice for social change that collapsed the distinction between researcher and teacher, this methodology allowed me to mobilize my teaching practice for and as research theorizations (may 1993; acuff 2014). however, the initial learning objective became increasingly unachievable when the digital technologies we used repeatedly didn’t work and refused to cooperate. on paper, we seemed to have overcome the obstacles against these workshops: we sourced the required technologies across space; we gathered people with varying expertise and experiences who had strong passion for this work; we found the overlapping time for us to regularly convene. nevertheless, the materiality of technologies needs regular maintenance to stay in working order (jackson 2014). in our case, these maintenance works were often haphazardly done by ourselves or left undone due to the lack of staff, as this work was either outside the purview of the library it personnel on site or too far to attend to for the university it personnel off site. in addition, the subjectivity of tech users is not natural but produced (gray 2020). in our case, our lived experiences did not produce us as the imagined default users with the “right” capital to accumulate the necessary digital literacy for these machines. to be clear, it is not that we didn’t have digital literacy, but the literacy we did have was out of line and time in relation to the default users. many participants mentioned their introduction to stem fields via the advancement via individual determination (avid) program8 that they were enrolled in at their nearby school, and their school reported over 73 percent of its students as from low-income households and over 60 percent as minority enrollment. apart from one participant who had a parent working as a programmer in a tech startup and gained some exposure to digital technologies at home, most of the participants’ families used the library as their primary way to access digital technologies informally outside of school. while i had been regarded as relatively “tech-savvy” by the library staff and participants, i actually had no formal training in any stem fields, having selected the “humanities track” like most girls in high school back then in taiwan and moved on to sociology and arts in my work, and only accumulated digital literacy as my various classes and jobs required. as a result, our uses of technologies often fell outside of tech’s normalized imaginings.   moments of technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles from 1997 to 2004 elizabeth delacruz (2004) conducted a study to examine public school teachers’ working conditions in terms of technology use, which outlined several challenges of emerging technologies in classrooms. though her study was conducted over a decade ago and specifically refers to k–12 teachers, the challenges she describes strongly resonated with my own action research. in the following, i read their challenges alongside my own experiences to propose the related but different ways in which technologies didn’t work in specific moments during pedagogical practices as technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles. while i note their respective intricacies, they are by no means mutually exclusive. instead, the unfolding moments when technologies didn’t work in practice often manifested the ongoing co-constitutive reconfiguration of materialities, subjectivities, and temporalities in our intersecting sociotechnical systems. for the purpose of this paper, they act as broad descriptors outlining the common patterns of momentary encounters with technologies in pedagogical practices. by technological breakdowns, i mean broadly instances where the “thingness” of technologies (slack and wise 2007, 96) that we physically interact and interface with decay, dissolve, and decompose over space and time. in these instances, the materiality of technologies becomes foregrounded as we take note of its out-of-order-ness during interaction. for example, in one instance during the workshop, the projector’s old remote in the room refused to connect with the projector mounted high up on the ceiling even after we tried to resuscitate the remote by changing its batteries, banging it, and blowing on it. we submitted the troubled remote to specialized personnel to investigate after the librarians found another remote for us to use in the meantime. later on, it was determined simply to be an issue of general wear and tear on its components with age that prevented its functionality. in the context of delacruz’s (2004) study, one challenge that she outlined was the lack of infrastructural support for teachers as tied to recurring moments of technological breakdowns. although administrative managers in schools and school boards were deeply invested in the exploration of experimental curriculum with technologies, the lack of infrastructure for the ongoing maintenance of digital machines placed teachers in a position with more than they had bargained for. as a result, “equipment broke down, programs did not work when planned, server networks were down” (delacruz 2004, 13). by technological failures, i mean broadly instances where technologies failed to meet our expectations of being who/what we imagine them to be and performing as we assumed they would. at the same time, the “experts” of these technologies might have argued that nothing is functionally wrong with the technologies besides a user error. namely, we, the users, are the error in this technological configuration as we haven’t been using these technologies “properly.” in these instances, the subjectivity of technologies becomes highlighted as we take note of how they challenge our existing assumptions, comment on us as the thing that’s out of order, and require us to revise our movements in specific ways during interaction. for example, in one instance during the workshop, every participant yelled out, “it’s not working! it won’t save!” (anonymous participants, spoken to author, march 2, 2016) after following along my step-by-step instruction of how to download and save an image on their respective laptops. upon replaying the instructions again, we realized that the issue was that i forgot to emphasize, and participants simply didn’t know, the folder name on these university-owned laptops for which we were allowed to save files. delacruz (2004) outlined the challenge of recurring moments of technological failures when teachers don’t know how to use these technologies, and she emphasized their tie to the lack of adequate training provided to teachers to adopt these mandated technologies. often, trainings on how to use these newly available technologies were conducted over short in-service professional development workshops that were insufficient in providing adequate practice with technologies. by technological troubles, i mean broadly instances where the line between technological breakdown and failure collapses to form a larger constellation of entangled mess and introduces conflicting troubles within existing practice that is bounded by time and space (marvin 1988). in these instances, the competing temporalities of the various technologies we include in our practices become emphasized as we encounter the ambivalence and lack of any certain and comprehensive resolution to direct our actions. for example, in one instance, one of the laptops somehow reset overnight and wouldn’t turn on as i was setting up the room right before the workshop began. the laptop indicated to me that its time was incorrectly set and needed adjustment, but this adjustment required logging into the admin account, for which i did not have access as a person borrowing this laptop from the university. given that time was ticking towards the moment when the participants got off school and ran into the room for our workshop, i was constrained to choose between abandoning that laptop in carrying out the workshop with two, and possibly more, participants having to share one laptop or spending time trying to reach our university personnel for the admin password that would delay the other necessary set-ups for the workshop. similarly, delacruz (2004) emphasized that the various challenges teachers described bleed and culminate into the main challenge that teachers faced: time, or the lack thereof. in addition to various existing rubrics for evaluation, teachers were expected to possess the technological proficiency for developing curricula that incorporated emerging technologies by learning about these tools on their own time and for resolving any issues related to the computers that they were using during the time of teaching. whose time is being taken to acquire the literacy in how to use this technology? whose after-hours are required to assure the smooth running of the machines? what to do with the time during teaching when technologies fail? like the k–12 teachers mentioned, i, too, experienced a tension with time. this tension and feeling of lack of time is characterized by my aspiration to realize various learning potentials of technological mediations and my internalized expectations around delivering the learning objective: these competing temporalities characterize the tension in moments of technological trouble. perhaps these moments, then, can be understood as providing an opening for critical feminist pedagogues to probe the previously unnoticeable logics undergirding these technologies with those present, and in return practice exercising and negotiating our respective relations with these technologies. during moments of technological breakdown, our practices with materiality, of whose resources and what knowledge is being extended, become sites for contested negotiations. during moments of technological failure, our sense of subjectivity, of who is able to act and what is being acted upon, becomes grounds for reparative reconfiguration. during moments of technological trouble, our lived temporality, of whose and what temporal order is being maintained, becomes locations for reflexive interventions. while these moments offer potentials for making, unmaking, and remaking our relationalities, the language we use to name our engagements during those moments frame the kind of relationship we can and cannot have with technologies, which in return constrains what knowledge can and cannot be made by whom.   troubleshooting: shooting the trouble a metaphor is always figurative; it is “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (lakoff and johnson 1980, 5). throughout the workshop, we used troubleshooting to describe a variety of miscellaneous activities we engaged in with the “thingness” of technologies (slack and wise 2007, 96), such as finessing with the batteries, googling for how-tos on our laptops, and pressing the on/off button. through the triangulation of these layered activities, we tried to solve the problem of technologies “not working” and get them to perform in particular ways. while troubleshooting has historically been used specifically to describe interactions with technical arrangements, products, and systems, troubleshooting has traversed colloquially beyond the technical domain and can be metaphorically applied to describe various kinds of problem-solving (oxford english dictionary online 2019). perhaps because troubleshooting is commonly understood as originating from the technical domain, it is easy to overlook that troubleshooting is a metaphor even in the technical domain. as a metaphor, troubleshooting is layered in the following ways: first, troubleshooting is about understanding and experiencing technologies through the frame of electronic, particularly telegraphy and telephony, technicians. in a genealogy of troubleshooting, shari wolk (2017) traces the term to the “trouble men” of early telephony industry in the united states during the turn of the twentieth century. as the telephony industry grew, the term trouble men was used to describe the service workers of the telephony companies that were on stand-by “prepared to attend at once to sudden calls for assistance” from telephone subscribers (oxford english dictionary online 2021b); a vocation emerged for electronic technicians whose responsibility was to diagnose, repair, and maintain the infrastructure of telephone technology. as service technicians, we should also consider trouble men as part of the larger field of electricians that became professionalized during the turn of the twentieth century. as carolyn marvin argues, the idea of electricians as a particular type of elite expert was invented through the establishment of electrical textual communities that foregrounded their “technological literacy” (1988, 12) during that period. their work of interpreting technical arrangements to institute actions are often described as troubleshooting, or sometimes referred to as trouble-hunting, which leads us to the second layer of troubleshooting as a metaphor. second, troubleshooting is about approaching and engaging with troubles through the frame of discharging a weapon. as the oxford english dictionary online defines it, shooting refers to the literal “action or practice of discharging missiles from a bow or gun” (2021a). in discharging a weapon, the goal is to precisely and swiftly eliminate, or at least affect or impact, a target. as amanda phillips argues about shooting, “one of the difficulties in assessing police violence is that it often happens in an instant” (2018, 145, emphasis added). with the aid of a systemized object calibrated for efficiency as weapon, shooting implies quick judgment and action—namely, “twitch reflexes” (139)—about anomalies for the purpose of returning to an exterior order. but, how to shoot with such precision? in the contexts of julian orr’s ethnography on xerox corporation service technicians during the 1980s and 1990s as contemporary trouble men, procedural textual documentation stands in as the weapon used by the technician to ensure “the situation is under control” (1996, 108) and institute order. the premise of this documentation is that “a careful following of the prescriptions from beginning to end will lead to the resolution of problems more quickly than could be accomplished by the technicians reasoning from their understanding of the machine” (106, emphasis added). in this sense, to troubleshoot also implies the ability to read and command various technical documentations efficiently and accurately, which leads us to the last layer of this metaphor. third, troubleshooting is about comprehending and enacting problem-solving through the frame of procedural technical documentations. as sarah sharma argues, a temporal order is maintained via individuals and social groups orienting, recalibrating, and “synchronizing their body clocks, their sense for the future or the present, to an exterior relation” (2014, 18), which could be that of a person, ideology, institution, and/or technology. in the case of early electrical textual communities, “electrical engineers and researchers fully intended that these literate skills and the theoretical knowledge they embodied replace the skills of the tinkerer and craft mechanic, skills governed by an authority of the body that arrives at truth from the direct experiences of the senses” (marvin 1988, 12). the legacy of this emphasis on textuality manifests today as consumer technology purchase is ubiquitously accompanied by a user manual, detailing the correct way to use it, with a troubleshooting guide section, detailing steps to take towards specific problems. specifically, taking the following troubleshooting guide of a projector as referent (figure 1), troubleshooting is a metaphor insofar as this piece of instruction is a stand-in for the act of problem-solving. yet this order as detailed is based on a universal image of what normal functioning/functional relationships between technologies and people look like in some other time and place—namely, a time and place centered on the experiences and resources of experts that command particular technological literacies to devise such an arrangement of order. in this sense, troubleshooting is understood as the enactment of a series of actions aimed at resolving an issue as detailed on textual documentations, whereby the solution is predetermined without situated assessments of the materials at hand.   figure 1: page 75 of viewsonic’s dlp projector user guide (2011)   troublecaring: caregiving the trouble by naming our pedagogical encounters during moments of technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles as troubleshooting, we are mobilizing service technicians’ relation to their work, a weapon’s relation to its target, and a procedural technical documentation’s relation to knowledge to describe and position our relationship with technologies. in its most reductive sense, it’s as if to troubleshoot is to role-play as a service technician that executes their work swiftly by following and enacting a series of procedural steps defined by available texts elsewhere. to shoot trouble is to standardize our situated contexts to universal terms, to engage in a relationship premised on the framework of control, and to invest in the temporal order of technological development as predetermined knowledge. shifting to the metaphor of caregiving towards troublecaring allows us to speculate other ways we might relate to technological trouble. troubleshooting assumes a normative state of functioning technologies that requires us to standardize our situated contexts to universal terms. troubleshooting prefigures us to prioritize the necessary infrastructures that technologies depend upon to function over the messy unique intricacies of local needs, which reproduces existing hierarchies of resource distribution and technological literacy as unmalleable material conditions. to troubleshoot technological breakdowns in our case meant that participants and i forwent our previous intentions, ad-hoc stepped into the role of technicians by becoming familiar with the prerequisite technological literacy and subscribed to the authoritative mandates of technical documentations as our source of access to these literacies. and yet, what became clear was that our troubles were unending despite all these efforts to troubleshoot, like whack-a-mole. because our place will never be like that place, our local infrastructure does not match the terms these technologies depend upon to animate and function. instead of resolving anything, to troubleshoot meant to subscribe to the belief that there is a supposed normative state of functioning technologies and that our material realities needed to catch up to the model classroom to sustain such a functional relationship with technologies. in effect, the knowledge that can be produced under this unreciprocated relationship during pedagogical encounters was always oriented towards serving an authority elsewhere at some other place. if our practices with materiality become sites for contested negotiations during moments of technological breakdown, what ways does the metaphor of troublecaring offer us to relate to the trouble of unending material decays? perhaps the shift lies in the relentless centering of bodies present to probe what is the trouble needing care and how to meet those needs at this moment. given, technologies depend “on people willing to adapt their tools to a specific situation while adapting the situation to the tools, on and on, endlessly tinkering” (mol, moser, and pols 2010, 15). if the trouble is that there are broken technologies that need maintenance and repair, we might try to caregive by playing the whack-a-mole game ourselves. but the ongoing reoccurrences of this need leads us to (re)assess “how adequately care is provided” (tronto 1993, 108). we have to ask, what is actually the trouble here and how can we meet its needs? is the object of our care responding to the care received? if not, is it that we misrecognized the trouble and its needs? if yes, how might we take the ongoingness of this work into account to figure out how to organize and provide adequate care over time? who else besides us gives care to these technologies? how do we involve more caregivers? why were we caregiving in the first place, and do we want or have the capacity to continue? what other troubles might be needing our care if we continue? these questions might lead us to consider the larger systemic conditions structuring why we find ourselves here in the first place and try out ways to restructure our conditions. or maybe it leads us to question what we actually want and need in relation to the software we were trying to access initially and figuring out how to work with materials that are readily available to us right here and now. by returning again and again to center the question of what is the trouble needing care and how to meet those needs, troublecaring asks us to not give up on trouble but to care about which trouble we caregive, especially when our caring relations are not reciprocal. troubleshooting prescribes one as the shooter and another as that to be shot, which projects a subject reality premised on the framework of control through technological literacy. in our case, we encountered moments of technological failures because we were often out of control. in the instance mentioned earlier about how to save a file on the laptop, participants were not aware of the layered interests inscribed onto the configuration of a laptop as a private property of a public institution. in this instance, to troubleshoot was to shoot down the claims of “it’s not working!” by the participants to institute order for and literacy about private property; it’s as if to say, “no, the laptop is working fine. it’s you that’s not working. you need to be corrected.” in another instance, we could not connect and play minecraft together through the library’s local area network (lan). upon digging around in both the game’s menu and online discussion forums, we realized that it may be an issue with the library’s network configurations. namely, in the interests of protecting the patrons’ as well as the library’s information from being breached through the library’s widely accessed network, the network security prevented nodes on the network from accessing each other directly. given that we’d spent plenty of time on this matter and come to what seemed like a dead end, some of us gave up. however, one participant proceeded and succeeded; they learned that they could use my smartphone’s hotspot for us to bypass that restriction, and we were able to play through the phone’s patchy network. to read that exchange through the lens of troubleshooting is to understand the participant’s insistence on being in control that led to an advancement of technological literacy. in these instances, to troubleshoot meant to relate to the disorder at hand with binary oppositions competing for the position of control. in effect, the knowledge that can be produced under this one-upmanship during pedagogical encounters was always about how to control. if our sense of subjectivity becomes grounds for reparative reconfiguration during moments of technological failure, what ways do the metaphor of troublecaring offer us to relate to the trouble of being technologically illiterate? perhaps the shift lies in prioritizing the collective liveliness of our caring relation over individual interests and technologies. with care being neither cure nor control, care is not aimed at eliminating the trouble by catching up, but perhaps to attend to the logics of this literacy that positioned us in this encounter. in this sense, lesson plans and learning objectives determined prior to the pedagogical encounter continue to matter insofar as they open the possibility of us encountering this trouble. in practicing black feminist pedagogy, barbara omolade says, “no one can teach students to ‘see,’ but an instructor is responsible for providing the windows, out of which possible angles of vision emerge from a coherent ordering of information and content” (1987, 39). once the trouble is encountered, how do we support students to develop their own troublecaring practices without letting our attachments to the original goals erase the possibility for their emergent knowledges? with care not free from the dangers of “paternalism/maternalism” and “parochialism” (tronto 1993, 171), we must center the “balance between care-givers and care-receivers” (171). in the cases above, maybe the care participants needed from me wasn’t to tell them the how-tos or carry on with plan b. maybe the care they needed was me letting go of my attachment to our original lesson route and pause to ask them, why might it be that these folders are restricted? how does this differ from the library computers you’re used to? can you share with us what you learned about the library’s network in this process? why do you think it’s set up that way? who benefits from this set-up? how do we still receive what we need under this set-up? in centering the present to pose these questions, maybe we wouldn’t reach where we wanted to go but we’d find other places to be. or maybe we could have still reached the learning objective together, albeit through routes that we didn’t know existed before. troubleshooting implies trouble as an exception to the norm that requires swift action for elimination to recalibrate us towards the temporal order of technological developments. in our case, we encountered moments of technological troubles because we had neither the infrastructural resources to support the perfect functioning of technologies nor the technological literacy to be the troubleshooter. under this context, trouble is not an exception but the norm. and yet, we tried. we tried to approach the trouble as the exception and role-played as troubleshooters. we traded in time that would have allowed us to produce our own knowledge about how to decipher that weird noise from the laptop making trouble for a split-second judgment that the fan was not the culprit here. to troubleshoot, then, was to invest in the temporal order of technological development as predetermined knowledge by trading in the time it takes to develop emergent expertise through embodied experience. we traded this time because we found ourselves in this situation and grabbed on to anything that could act as a compass. most importantly, we traded because we were curious and liked to play, particularly games. when the intersecting technologies that structured our lives construe the bulk of our lived experiential time as out of sync, what other option is there besides trying to calibrate through troubleshooting? i suppose a different way of relating may be a start. if our lived temporality becomes locations for reflexive interventions during moments of technological trouble, what ways do the metaphor of troublecaring offer us to relate the trouble of conflicting temporalities? if caregiving is the ongoing tinkering in situations to meet emergent needs of the present, troublecaring positions us to relate to tech trouble as something to keep our focused attention over time as we labor to peel back its entangled needs. if caregiving necessitates us to prioritize the ever-shifting relationship between the caregiver and care-receiver, troublecaring also calls us to practice with what’s readily available in/with/through/around our embodied selves at this moment in time, such as our lived experiences that may be troubling us to take note of other troubles. this practice connects to the pedagogical framework judy rohrer calls “‘it’s in the room’”: “recognizing that whatever the social justice topic is that we are studying (gender oppression, ableism, racism, colonialism, heterosexism, classism, etc.), it is almost always in the room in some form or another” (2018, 577). when we are troubled by the conflicting temporalities we find ourselves in during pedagogical encounters, perhaps it is precisely when we need to take the time to understand and attend to these troubles’ presences. how did we find ourselves here? how do our practices layered with technologies make time for one by erasing time for another, and why? how do our lesson plans as technologies scaffold time? what experiences do we base these plans on? what do we want to make time for in practice now? most importantly, how can we do it otherwise next time?   conclusion in the preceding pages, i reflect on a pedagogical action research project with youths around digital technologies in a public library setting that i partook in back in 2016. by analyzing these experiences, i articulate that the rather mundane and repetitive moments of technological breakdowns, failures, and troubles offer potentials for making, unmaking, and remaking our relationalities with technologies, knowledge, and each other. in reflecting on how we responded to these offerings, i center my analysis on the metaphor of troubleshooting that we commonly used to describe our actions during those moments. in tracing this metaphor, i argue that to shoot trouble is to standardize our situated contexts to universal terms, to engage in a relationship premised on the framework of control, and to invest in the temporal order of technological development as predetermined knowledge. in turn, i foreground a desire and need to reach for a different metaphor to respond to the offers of inquiry made by these moments. what other ways are there to relate to trouble? i speculate on what the metaphor of troublecaring might provide for pedagogues in reflecting on how to relate to trouble, and by extension each other, technologies, and knowledge, for pedagogical practice. i turn to care as someone who cares deeply about her pedagogical practices but found herself in “moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is insistent but not easily answerable” (atkinson-graham et al. 2015, 739). i’m still uncertain. but if “staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present” (haraway 2016, 1), then maybe troublecaring, instead of troubleshooting, means that we take the time to understand the trouble and its needs before acting on it, at the very least.   notes 1 by “loosely structured after-school program,” i mean that these after-school programs are not dependent upon prior sign-up, nor do they require participants to stay the whole time. participants can drop in and out of these programs anytime. furthermore, the programs are not based on any larger curricular mandates by the library, but instead composed on an ad-hoc basis when a shared topic of focus, an available space and related technologies, a group of interested participants, and an available instructor coincide.   2 as the library sat directly across from a public middle school with around seven hundred students, many middle school students would visit and hang out at the library after school. in comparison to the other privatized commercial establishments nearby, the library was particularly popular among students as visits were not predicated upon purchasing any item. in the library there is a separate teen space staffed with teen librarians to support the needs and interests of the youth patrons, and the space was equipped with desktops specifically to be used by them.   3 “library patrons” were the way that the librarians i worked with referred to the youth visitors to the library.   4 according to a news report published after my collaboration with the library ended, the number of youth visitors to the library has doubled to more than two hundred people daily. the library is in the process of securing funds from public and private entities to finance the redesign of a previous storage space to be used as the new teen center with an abundance of new technologies.   5 these laptops were purchased via the public engagement grant as university property and subject to the university’s technology policies. whenever possible, i also bring along additional laptops, either loaned from the university’s general-use media check-out window and/or personal laptops i had access to.   6 each workshop lasted around two hours, from 3 to 5 p.m.   7 the number of participants fluctuated across the 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"shooting to kill: headshots, twitch reflexes, and the mechropolitics of video games." games and culture 13 (2): 136–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015612611. ———. 2020. gamer trouble: feminist confrontations in digital culture. new york: nyu press. piepzna-samarasinha, leah lakshmi. 2018. care work: dreaming disability justice. vancouver, bc: arsenal pulp press. puig de la bellacasa, maría. 2017. matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. rault, jasmine. 2015. “ftn roadshow blog series* – feminist.” femtechnet. may 19, 2015. https://www.femtechnet.org/2015/05/ftn-keyword-blog-series-feminist/. rhoades, mindi, melanie g. davenport, courtnie n. wolfgang, kim cosier, and james h. sanders iii. 2013. “big gay church: sermons to and for an underserved population in art education settings.” studies in art education 54 (4): 349–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2013.11518908. rohrer, judy. 2018. “‘it's in the room’: reinvigorating feminist pedagogy, contesting neoliberalism, and trumping post-truth populism.” teaching in higher education 23 (5): 576–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1455656. sharma, sarah. 2014. in the meantime: temporality and cultural politics. durham, nc: duke university press. ———. 2020. “a manifesto for the broken machine.” camera obscura: feminism, culture, and media studies 35 (2 (104)): 171–79. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-8359652. situated critical race and media (scram). n.d. “introduction.” accessed march 2, 2022. https://www.mediamaplab.com/. slack, jennifer daryl, and john macgregor wise. 2007. culture and technology: a primer. new york: peter lang. suchman, lucy a. 1987. plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication. cambridge: cambridge university press. taylor, pamela g. 2004. “hyperaesthetics: making sense of our technomediated world.” studies in art education 45 (4): 328–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1321068. tronto, joan c. 1993. moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care. new york: routledge. viewsonic. 2011.‪ pjd7383/ pjd7383i/pjd7583w/pjd7583wi dlp projector user guide. viewsonic corporation.  wolk, shari. 2017. “the troubles of trouble men.” paper presented at the maintainers ii 2017 conference, stevens institute of technology, april 6–9, 2017. https://themaintainers.org/maintainers-ii-program. york, emily, and shannon n. conley. 2019. “sts as critical pedagogy.” sts infrastructures, platform for experimental collaborative ethnography. september 9, 2019. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/sts-critical-pedagogy.     author bio hong-an wu is an assistant professor of critical media studies in the school of arts, humanities, and technology at the university of texas at dallas borenstein, hannah. 2021. “tracking work from the wrist: surveillance of ethiopian women athletes for capital.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–20. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © hannah borenstein, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license tracking work from the wrist: the surveillance of ethiopian women athletes for capital hannah borenstein duke university hannah.borenstein@duke.edu abstract this essay explores the proliferating uses of gps watches among women athletes in ethiopia. aspiring and successful long-distance runners have been using gps watches in increasing numbers over the past several years, rendering their training trackable for themselves, partners, coaches, sponsors, and agents located in the global north. this essay explores how the transnational dimensions of the athletics industry renders their training data profitable to systems of capitalist accumulation while exploring how athletes put the emerging technologies to work to aid in their pursuit of succeeding in the sport and work of running. new metrics in 2013, when i was first living with young sub-elite athletes at a training camp in ethiopia, nearly all runners wore basic digital watches. casio was the leading brand, but any watch that had a time setting, a few alarms, and, crucially, the start-stop function, was a critical instrument for long-distance running aspirants. watches that could record splits—different intervals of training—were coveted, but by no means the norm. thus, the metric that everyone used to discuss training was time. recovery runs were spoken about in terms of hours run: “one special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 2 twenty.” speed sessions were broken down into minutes: “we did three minutes by eight with sixty seconds rest.” athletes knew that this would need to be converted to kilometers for their performances, but conversations about training were discussed in terms of time. by 2016 noticeable changes occurred. significantly more athletes had acquired gps watches that could track distance, time, and elevation. at first, international managers started to gift them to younger athletes, who they wanted to lure to their agencies, on their bi-annual visits to ethiopia. then, an internal economy around watches emerged; after getting meager prize winnings in early international competitions, some bought them abroad with their earnings. those who were not at the level of international competition but could scrape together enough funds for a basic smart watch might ask a friend to bring one back from abroad. more recently, watches that offer metrics like heart rate, cadence, stride length, ground contact time, elevation gain, balance, and more have been creeping their way onto the wrists of ethiopian athletes. most athletes cite the influx of watches as a positive development because they can now better monitor their training; however, it is not only the athletes monitoring their work with these watches. in ethiopia, where successful athletes’ salaries and race earnings support families, coaches, and friends, and produce value for shoe and apparel corporations, many have a vested interest in what the watch shows on a regular basis. as a result, a number of actors track the data on these watches—from sports scientists analyzing the data in labs in the united states, to coaches following progression in ethiopia, to husbands supporting their wives at home —imbuing both the material objects, and what they have the potential to indicate, with multiple valences of value. as feminist technoscience and science and technology studies (sts) scholars have pointed out, scientific studies, knowledges, and instruments, must be located and understood in their historical, cultural, and political contexts (haraway 1988; subramaniam and wiley 2017). biotechnological research and data are born from colonial, racist, and sexist material legacies and often commodified for capital gain (bhattarai 2017; giordano 2017), and must never be understood as “neutral” in any iteration. to counteract the epistemic hegemony of scientific research and profit, this essay draws on participant observation and interviews with women athletes in ethiopia to understand how they reconfigure these tracking devices to suit their own needs, within the exploitative structures pervasive in the transnational athletics market. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 3 the changes in measurement from the gps watches have introduced alterations to the work of running in ethiopia. at first glance, these watches seem to provide a key function for athletes to track and monitor their own work—including them under the umbrella of self-tracking devices. but the introduction of watches has unintended effects; it also enables an array of actors to participate in monitoring their sporting labor. as such, this also gives other actors the grounds to make claims over their work and value. thus, in this essay i ask, how are conceptions of the body thought about, discussed, and acted upon through monitored movement, among these actors? in what ways do these discourses elucidate the plurality of ways the watches are being put to work? and how are women athletes using these watches in ways that reconfigure notions of their work and value? ethnographic research exploring how ethiopian women1 long-distance runners work in a transnational athletics market expands notions of what a “self-tracking” device might mean in different contexts and for different people. questioning who is tracking what, and for what ends offers important critiques of the gendered and racialized production of speed, time, bodily movement, and bioscientific research evolving in new arrangements. just as athletes reconfigure emergent technologies to aid in their own pursuit of accruing value and change the embodied experiences of training, the watches also render the labor of ethiopian athletes available to transnational systems of capital accumulation. sporting science: racist, sexist, colonial legacies although many people now associate ethiopia with its long roster of world-class long-distance runners, the history of ethiopian athletic excellence engages deeply racialized discourses of science and the body that have been reproduced by the media and scientific studies. ethiopian men began succeeding on the world stage in the 1960s, beginning with abebe bikila’s olympic victory in rome. two olympic cycles later, the majority of distance events were won by ethiopian and kenyan men at the 1968 mexico city games. the question as to “why” east africans were so good at running then flooded scientific and cultural arenas; for decades to follow, there was a proliferation of pseudo-scientific theories about east african genetic advantage (vancini et al. 2014) and the magical benefits of living at altitude (hamilton 2000). these studies were teleologically oriented to a broader global narrative that situated black athletes as embodying “natural” advantages (carrington 2010; hall 1997). ethiopian women found their footing in global sport in the early 1990s. after special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 4 derartu tulu became the first black african woman to win a gold medal at the barcelona olympics in 1992, she inspired young women in ethiopia to pursue sport. this coincided with an era of researchers profiting from scientific research about african athletic biology and corporations cashing in on a new hypercommercial era of international sport (andrews 2009). from the highly successful levels of olympic champions, to the lower rungs of amateur athletes seeking racing opportunities and meager shoe contracts, many developed a vested stake in ethiopian women’s athletic labor. racist, sexist, and colonial legacies have continued to be reformulated through new technologies of testing and analysis in sport often under rubrics of assessing “fairness.” the circumstances of south african caster semenya is case-in-point here, as her gender being publicly called into question portrayed her participation as her gender being publicly called into question portrayed her participation as toxic to sport and gender, and a racial pathology (bailey 2016; jordan-young and karkazis 2019).2 while semenya’s circumstances have rightly garnered the attention of those working at the intersections of feminist technoscience and sport, this essay engages the entanglements of bodies, technologies, labor, and global capitalism that ethiopian women athletes find themselves trafficking in and around. an analysis that focuses on monitoring training data through tracking devices— namely, gps watches—engages feminist technoscience theory as it troubles binary understandings of nature and technology and situates them in networks of transnational production (haraway 1998). furthermore, attention to how ethiopian women use these devices offers new narratives to the range of working conditions of women in the global south, which are often reduced to being similarly oppressive (mohanty 1984). as such, this essay is interested less in the fact that ethiopian women are also using tracking devices, but is invested in understanding the values, relations, and reconfigurations attached to such engagements. new perspectives are indeed needed when it comes to self-tracking devices. with global revenues of fitness tracking gadgets climbing to $4.29 billion in 2019 (paxton 2020), it is right that social scientists and humanities scholars have taken up these tools and the range of experiences that they bring about as objects of critical inquiry throughout the past decade. many cite deborah lupton (2014) as leading the way, ostensibly naming the field of “critical digital health studies.” within the fast-growing field, others focus on how self-tracking devices enable new modes self-surveillance (sanders 2017), techniques of quantifying and measuring the self (moore 2015; lupton 2013), and how the data generated by special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 5 devices is imbued with value to be extracted in a “digital knowledge economy” (lupton 2012; till 2014). while there have been analyses about the gendered experiences of interacting with these devices following the rise of consumer fitness culture (dworkin and wachs 2009; markula 1995; toffoletti and thorpe 2018), which has contributed to an increase in digital self-tracking device consumption (depper and howe 2017), a great deal of this research and literature presumes a white usership. further, most research participants are not using these tracking devices for their work, but rather for what they do outside of work. michael crawley’s 2018 dissertation about ethiopian men athletes began to unravel some of these eurocentric dynamics by engaging the burgeoning use of gps watches in the east african country, noting that they are livelihood devices that require an understanding of communal use of timing technology through which ethiopian runners contest and draw creatively upon time management (2018, 173). crawley’s argument is formative, and i draw upon it here, but it does not address the ways in which these devices operate differently for women working in sport in ethiopia, which, despite having overlaps, is a different endeavor. thus, the experiences of ethiopian women athletes remain important not only for unveiling the ways in which surveillance, self-monitoring, and value extraction are currently operating; their perspectives are also important because a failure to attend to complicated entanglements can have damaging implications. feminist technoscience scholars have astutely pointed out how technological developments can both derive from and actively breed new structural forms of racial, gender, and economic inequality (benjamin 2019; braun 2014; roberts 2011). in africa, in particular, histories of experimentation on women normalized slavery and reproduced norms for black women’s bodies to be subjected to surveillance, research, and value extraction (tilley 2011; wynter 2003). in research about sport, feminist literature has largely focused on the experiences of women in the global north. following recent calls to redress these gaps (toffoleti, palmer, and samie 2018) by addressing the perspectives of women in the global south, in the sections that follow i engage questions central to feminist technoscientific discourse to show how gps watches are reconfigured by athletes to meet their own needs and desires, while their work is rendered trackable by others interested in accumulating value from their labor. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 6 tracking from afar “i’ve been using the watch, but the application is not working. is all the data there?” hiwot asks.3 she seems nervous to hear the answer to her question, but before translating her question for the sport developer, i ask her about her anxieties for clarification. “do you mean for you? or for sport?” “both,” she says. “it’s been a long time since i have been able to upload the data.” in december 2019, we were in the addis ababa office of the sports agency that represents hiwot. i was doing fieldwork with this particular group, which has a training program made up of many tiers of athletes—shoe-contracted athletes, agency-contracted athletes (an informal agreement for athletes not yet good enough for a contract but on their way), and a development group of amateur athletes who have been recruited from regional clubs and have settled in the capital city looking to move up in the ranks. usually, fieldwork consisted of attending early morning trainings with athletes, spending time in the office for meetings, or attending social gatherings at their homes and in cafés talking about their experiences working in athletics. on this particular occasion, i volunteered to serve as interpreter between elite contracted athletes and the sport representatives who were traveling the continent doing product testing. i tell the sport developer that hiwot has not been able to see the data, and i gather that she is anxious about whether or not the watch is working. the sport developer asks me how long hiwot has not been able to upload the data. “how long has it been?” i ask. “a long time,” she says, and i translate. “what is a long time?” the sport developer inquires, seemingly frustrated at the vague time frame given in the first place. “five days, five weeks, five months?” i translate and hiwot replies, “right before spain.” this was the competition where she won the marathon and set the course record in a blistering time well under two hours, twenty minutes. the sport developer looks down and rapidly scrolls through the watch in her right hand, while simultaneously navigating an application on hiwot’s samsung phone in the other. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 7 “are they receiving the data?” hiwot asks. i translate. “no,” the sport developer says. this is a word hiwot understands clearly. tears quickly accumulate in her eyes. i ask the sport developer to clarify. “it’s not there now, but the data is in the watch, correct? so we can transfer retroactively?” “yeah,” she says casually, still looking down at the devices. “we just need to figure out how to sync the app and the watch.” i tell hiwot, but she asks me again, as we wait for the next ten minutes to re-install the application and begin the re-sync, whether or not the data is retrievable for them—the sports scientists in the pacific northwest. though hiwot’s work occurs in meadows, mountains, and dirt roads on the outskirts of addis ababa, scientists working at the sport research lab still monitor her efforts in the united states. they can see the routes that she runs, the paces that she runs at, the altitude of the training, and her heart rate as the training progresses. while the garmin watch is marketed online by telling potential buyers the metrics allow users to “evaluate your recent exercise history and performance indicators to let you know if you’re training productively peaking or overreaching,” the garmin watch that hiwot wears lets others know about her “performance indicators” (garmin, n.d.). with access to the data on hiwot’s watch, the sport scientists can monitor her “motor”—a word to historically measure the energy of both workers and athletes in the fields work physiology and sports science.4 in surveilling and maximizing the “motors” of athletes, these metrics appear to offer advantage. the domineering metric of time, for instance—its appearance of objectivity and the reality that a hundredth of a second can be the difference between tens of thousands in prize money or a signature on a contract—means athletes and various stakeholders constantly worry about their recorded times (finn 2016). like some other metrics, time becomes a way of providing evidence for improvement and negotiating sponsorship deals. hiwot, then, wants sport researchers to see this data—to be able to track her training both so they can give her advice on how to maximize her potential and special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 8 witness her ongoing improvement. after about ten minutes of the sport developer playing with hiwot’s phone and her watch, she looks more pleased. “ok, so it looks like we finally got the data to start syncing.” a wave of relief washes over hiwot’s face. “should we go over how to use the watch again?” the sport developer asks. hiwot nods and they both look at the devices, “so, again, here is how you track your runs. i see you have it set to miles. kilometers is probably better?” hiwot agrees. this is the latest garmin watch, which means that it tracks, to the highest level of accuracy, live splits (meaning hiwot can monitor her pace at each step), kilometers, altitude, elevation gain, and so on. she is also told to continue wearing an arm band, which records accurate heart rate, so the scientists can evaluate how much energy she is expending for the given time-distance metrics. the sport developer then turns to me, “tell her she can look at all of this only if she wants, but she doesn’t have to. it’s really for the scientists to see.” i translate, then ask curiously, “do you have interest?” she shrugs, then asks me how long it will take the data to load. “probably a few hours at the rate it is going,” i speculate. “ok. i need to go for training in one hour,” she mentions. “if it’s not finished loading, you can maybe train without the watch this afternoon,” the sport developer advises, making an exception this time. the sport developer does not expect the watch to be put to work here as a selftracking device. that “it’s really for the scientists to see” indicates how the value of hiwot’s labor is viewed. her data, as seen from sport’s perspective, is readily extractable for the scientists and marketers working through the corporation. not only is her body and data seen as valuable for research knowledge; they are seen as sport’s property. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 9 although ethiopia was never colonized, attending to postcolonial studies of sts helps to locate the broader geopolitical context in which ethiopian women are subjected to uneven flows of global capital while they adapt technologies to their own ends. it is not only that colonial ideologies and practices are “rephrased” within technoscientific frameworks of athletic globalization (anderson and adams 2008; pollock and subramaniam 2016). even as private corporations in the united states presume ownership over the bodies and information of african women and their labor, the watches as they are embedded in material realities show that they are not always taken up in the ways intended by their designers. within these frictions and contestations, we must explore how the watches given to ethiopian women allow for new sights of profit extraction rooted in colonial ideologies, but also present new possibilities for using technologies for ulterior purposes. later that afternoon, hiwot traveled up to sululta, ethiopia, where she lives at an altitude of nearly 2,900 meters and ran ten kilometers. she left the management office to zigzag between eucalyptus trees for about forty-five minutes and do some plyometric exercises (a dynamic stretching routine known colloquially as “gymnastics” in ethiopia), strengthening specific muscles and tendons required to be an elite runner. but as hiwot enters her athletic prime, she is not only worried about managing her time in training runs; she is also concerned about monitoring the time of her career in the athletics industry. she met her husband through sport, but a consistent trail of injuries led him to drop out and become her full-time support. he has been investing some of her prize monies into unrelated business ventures, new cars, and extensions to their house. thus, she knows that the rhythms of her work are crucial for their collective success. hiwot repurposes the watch to also track the timing of her menstrual cycle and see how it affects her performance, and to consider when having children might be possible. along with other women athletes, she often forecasts a hypothetically good time to have children: “if i run really well in [insert race] and then immediately get pregnant, i will have enough money to support the child for a while before starting training again. it would be better to wait to have children until my career is over, but then i’ll be too old.” these pressures pervade hiwot’s training schedule. she knows that, when it comes to starting a family, the clock is ticking. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 10 thus, while sport tracks her training cycles to understand the conditions in which her body can excel, no one consults hiwot about the ways this changes the relationship to her body, or those around her. but she tracks this data in conjunction with receiving reports from sport about how to maximize her value. despite the fact that they do not inquire about the hope for future maternal labor, she incorporates this data accumulation in new ways to orient toward her own values. tracking up close “three hundred fifty calories,” tigist says, concluding a very easy forty-minute jog the day before a competition. “tefa.” they have disappeared. “two days ago,” comparing energy expenditure, she says, “one hour and intervals, nine hundred calories.” though he is not present the day of the competition, wendesh—her husband and coach—also looks at the watch sometimes. he explores the metrics alongside her. sometimes he sees all the calories she has expended and urges her to eat more. other times, he cautions her to not eat too much, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a low body weight. there are many ways she and her husband use the watch together. these collective uses might be missed if we only viewed these gps watches as self-tracking devices. for example, in the case of tigist and wendesh’s relationship, this technology produces new types of gendered (and in this case, spousal) surveillance that tread familiar lines of weight management that can lead to deleterious health effects (under-fueling, eating disorders, etc.). however, tigist’s running is seen to be a collective endeavor, and she views success in the industry as dependent on both her and her husband’s efforts. this is one of the ways in which the users of these wearable devices reinvent them to become collective instruments for betterment. as nelly oudshoorn and trevor pinch (2003) note, “users of technology do not arrive de novo” (2). rather, they bring their own desires, strategies, and responses to their interactions with technologies, despite the fact that the introduction of certain devices may be installed with the goal of capital accumulation. further, the gps watches are not simply co-constructed by the producer and the consumer; social relations also change around the technologies as well. understanding consumption as part of the production process by centering the special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 11 user (lie and sørenson 1996) allows a reading that centers the effects capital accumulation on the users, rather than just focusing on their own self-surveillance and its conditioning. however, a simultaneous engagement with the multitude of ways people use the technologies created by engineers might show how the predominance of a selftracking regime can shift to something more complex (rapp 1998). as tigist and wendesh are active participants using the watch, the dynamics of their relationship transform. the technology gets integrated into daily life, and the ways they adjust it to training both feeds back into the technological industry and changes the values of the household and their relationship (silverstone and hirsch 1993). tigist and wendesh both grew up in bahir dar, in northern ethiopia, but met after joining a government club in addis ababa. tigist had just finished grade six and made the difficult decision to leave a single-mothered family of eight to pursue a sporting career. at training camp their relationship blossomed. however, as wendesh faced consistent problems with his achilles tendon, tigist was thriving. after she signed her first agency contract, wendesh shifted his efforts from being an athlete to a coach and husband, and the two married. thereafter, wendesh shifted his motivations to making sure tigist could focus solely on training. athletes in ethiopia rise to the top from a range of circumstances, but tigist’s trajectory is considerably familiar. most athletes are not from the city, but go to addis ababa to professionalize, and the vast majority of women end up in relationships with current and former runners. these trajectories mean that the shifting opportunities in labor for women also shift labor relations for men. as men sometimes end up as the caregivers of female athletes, their work reshapes typical conventions of gendered divisions of labor. in an era in which male working-class jobs have declined worldwide, and development programs have been oriented to uplifting women, “an analysis of gender therefore must take into consideration the different ways in which men seek to establish their masculinity if they cannot do it through production” (ray 2018, 58). wendesh’s work, not named as productive, then helps to form an analysis of the gendered relations of labor and production in an era of neoliberal globalization. “when people see the athletes win on tv, they think it is easy,” wendesh noted. “but i wake up early, take her to training. sometimes i sleep in the car if she runs easy. i used to run with her but now i can’t. then i take her back to the house, special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 12 make sure she has proper food. when she sleeps, i clean the house. it’s a full-time job.” with the exception of a few top-level women athletes who employ additional domestic help, wendesh, and husbands like him, sometimes take over the work characteristically seen as women’s work in order for his wife to succeed. although earlier feminists needed to politicize the ways in which this housework is central to reproducing the labor power in capitalist production cycles (federici 1975; davis 1983; bhattacharya 2017), little has been written of men who take on these gendered tasks. but athletes’ husbands view their unwaged labor in a similar vein: real work crucial to the value production process. thus, when tigist got her first gps watch, it was not viewed merely as her own and it gave rise to new and more precise forms of monitoring her movements. tigist’s husband embraced the technology with the hopes of transforming and enhancing her training and recovery. now it means he does not need to go monitor her training runs in person; he can track the training in new ways. he can take a more “scientific” approach to her training. the discourse of embracing “science” in sport and being more “scientific” was something that burgeoned in ethiopia alongside the proliferation of new technological devices. beginning around 2016, i began hearing from nearly all coaches that they were in “sports science” programs or intending to enroll as soon as possible. the ability to embrace science was seen as taking advantage of an expertise that had long been elsewhere, especially the united states and europe. this discussion runs counter to eurocentric conceptions of advantage in international sport. as noted earlier, african athletic excellence is often attributed to unfair advantage. in previous decades, these suspicions stemmed from “natural” and “environmental” conditions, but in recent years, the speculative use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs has similarly called into question the “fairness” and “purity” of african competitors. as a result, technologies deployed by international governing regimes from the global north have centered around detecting this kind of artificial enhancement.5 in both instances, the rhetoric has shifted ever slightly to reproduce racist, sexist, and colonial legacies of ideas about morality and duplicity that reframe the importance of actors from the global north as rule makers and actors from the global south as deviators. the ways tigist and wendesh see the device inverts this eurocentric discourse. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 13 her husband’s ability to use more scientific methods narrows the fairness gap and augments a perceived european scientific advantage. “it’s good. really good,” tigist noted. “a lot of athletes do not know how to use all the functions, but wendesh has learned more about calories and heart rate and everything,” she says, directly referencing how she values his work using the device. it adds dynamics to his work as a husband and a coach, but they have embraced how it changes their respective roles. although watches introduce anxieties about constant surveillance, using them as collective working devices can actually alleviate some of the quotidian anxieties that come with being a professional athlete. displacing some of the concerns about balancing caloric intake, energy expenditure, and recovery to the role of her husband and coach, tigist benefits from reduced stress and a sense that she is able to take advantage of technologies and information that have been readily available to athletes in the global north. even though wendesh’s work may be undervalued in the overall production process, the ways the technology has been transformed their work is viewed positively. tracking and feeling not all women have seen the positive developments through tracking devices like tigist, but it was harder to come by the more negative experiences. this might be because sharing these stories would implicate others negatively, but also because they were not always wholly harmful. understanding that “the political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once” (haraway 1991, 154), we can read the ways in which these devices provide not only new configurations for using the device but new feelings of embodiment, even as they remain embedded in exploitative structures of capitalist accumulation. when i asked one athlete, eden, about her watch, she enthusiastically told me about how much the watch had improved her training: you can imagine how much better you feel now, both physically but also mentally. the day after a hard training session, you might feel so tired, and maybe you go ten kilometers or fourteen kilometers in one hour, but you have no idea. now, maybe i think my legs feel tired sometimes, but i look at my watch, and i see i’m going fast but it feels easy. so i’m happy. other times maybe you should feel better but you see you are going to slow. then you can think about why you are tired. maybe you need more sleep or food. or maybe then you decide not to work in the afternoon and take a rest. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 14 eden’s connection to her watch—physically, mentally, and emotionally— underscores a multifaceted attachment. often the depiction of high-tech wearables becoming deeply embedded in our lives elicits a conception of a machinic existence. however, as donna haraway (1991) made clear in “a cyborg manifesto,” this is a flawed and fabricated distinction and only reifies problematic dualisms. eden’s watch and its metrics actually allow her to feel more in touch with her body. however, the material history of her watch also symbolizes fraught dynamics in eden’s life and that of the training group. when the garmin watch was initially gifted to eden by a sports marketing employee from sport, it was worn at first not on her wrist—but that of her husband. she brought it home from training and her husband, a runner of a far lower caliber than her, took it for himself. “this was before watches were the norm,” a friend of hers told me, “and so he wanted to look rich.” on a subsequent visit, the head of sport sports marketing saw that he had taken it, and angrily scolded her husband for stealing the gift meant to enhance his wife’s work as he donned it on his body for performative modernity. the confrontation eventually resulted in the watch being returned to eden, who became the primary user of the device. but the initial cooptation gives rise to the importance of gendered experiences with the gifts and usages of these wearables. the data, were it being used or tracked for a burgeoning digital labor economy, might be inaccurately tracking the movements and work not of eden but her husband. the fact that eden’s data—not necessarily her own movements—were being tracked, and that i heard this as a nugget of gossip from a friend, points to a possible range of uncited anecdotes of the experiences of women athletes— especially, as i heard about eden and other women athletes, that their husbands were not particularly supportive of them as wives but “only as workers.” there were often conceptions about men marrying women to “make them work,” earn a lot of money abroad, and profit from their wives’ labors. regardless of whether or not the sport employee was personally impacted by this reality, the main justification for the watch’s return was that it was “not being put to appropriate use.” further, detecting its misappropriation enabled new sights of tracking—to the inside dynamics of eden’s relationship with her husband. crucially, this is why we must continue to push our understanding of these devices special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 15 as tracking far more than only the self. even as eden ultimately benefited from the device’s acquisition in both her work and sense of embodiment, the sport representative, well-intentioned as he may have been, was driven by capital gain. tracking accumulation the experiences i incorporate into this analysis bring critical attention to gaps in the existing literature about self-tracking devices to explore how ethiopian women can repurpose technologies to their own ends, even existing within exploitative structures of capital accumulation. at the same time, it also shows how other users—at times to their delight and at other times to their chagrin— embed themselves in these new technologies. there are ways in which women athletes embrace new technologies, and, at times, even want to be monitored. linking them together is their work in a transnational athletics market, through which they look to make money with and for their social networks. these gps technologies are not simply consumerist domains, but indeed play a role in developing the potential to provide some a way out of poverty. however, the conditions that drive these women into this precarious work get reproduced through these forms of surveillance and data extraction that benefit capital accumulation. while gps watches—elsewhere written about as self-tracking devices—usher in new forms of self-surveillance and contribute to a rise in value production in the digital labor economy, for ethiopian athletes they are tracking devices writ large— for their coaches, employers, husbands, and others. they extract value not only in the ways that they produce digital information for corporations in charge of these watches, but also in the ways they employ historically situated strategies of worker physiology, energy management, and productivity, for the benefit of a ruling class. rather than the self-tracking devices that feminist scholars of sts have written about that usher in foucauldian forms of self-surveillance, these devices indeed incorporate a network of people and entities. turning toward postcolonial feminist approaches in sts and broadening the global and racial scope of ethnography in feminist studies of sport, the experiences of ethiopian women athletes show that these devices, even as they reconfigure feelings of training and embodiment in positive ways, can still be sheltered under the umbrella of the gendered control of speed, time, and bodily movement that capital accumulation is dependent upon. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 16 these watches not only transform the work of women athletes, but they also transform the work and relations that women embody through their pursuit. they shed light on how capital expects the devices to be put to use for value accumulation; how husbands, coaches, and agents want them to be incorporated into training regimes; and how women can relate to their own embodied training, as well as the gendered divisions in athletic labor. they are indeed tracking devices, though not only of the self; but moreover, they are working devices with different gendered, racialized, and classed implications in their multivalent usages. notes 1 in this essay i do not problematize categorical distinctions between women and men in the way that they often should be. this is in large part because the people i lived with and interviewed see these categories as distinct, especially in athletics. because this analysis is also centered around conceptions of work, and the work of athletics is classified and distinguished between somewhat archaic conceptions of gender, i use and think through these categories as people discuss them in my fieldwork. 2 semenya began enduring incredibly invasive and dehumanizing gender testing protocols following her victory at the 2009 world championships. governing bodies in track and field and the olympics launched a nearly decade-long investigation as to whether or not semenya’s participation was “fair.” the court of arbitration for sport issued a ruling in 2018 that bars semenya from competing in middle distance events, as well as other women with “exceptionally high testosterone levels,” despite several researchers calling into question not only the ethics but the validity of the science underlying such decisions (jordan-young and karkazis 2019). 3 all names of people and companies used are pseudonyms. 4 the language used by scientists and corporate employees derive from long histories of workplace tracking. for purposes here, it’s important to note that nineteenth-century physiologists and scientists researched energy maintenance with the hopes of eliminating fatigue—the “permanent nemesis of an industrializing europe” (rabinbach 1992, 4). a dramatic increase in studies of fatigue at turn of the century focused on muscle fatigue, nervous exhaustion, brain exhaustion occurred alongside the growth of a commercial economy based on chronological clock time and temporal tracking instruments in which “time special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) hannah borenstein, 2021 17 [was] currency—it is not passed but spent” (thompson 1967, 61). thus, as the convergence of time-space perception coincided with new ideas about fatigue, human movement began to be understood as machinic—something that needed rest and recovery—but could be trained to work in incredibly effective ways to maximize productivity. sport, and specifically running, became a central way of exploring this new science of work. apparatuses to measure running with the goal of “maximizing the economy of the body” later saw high-performance 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journal of sports medicine, no. 5, 123–27. author bio hannah borenstein is a ph.d. candidate in cultural anthropology at duke university. she is currently finishing her dissertation about long distance women runners in ethiopia. rentschler, carrie, and benjamin nothwehr. 2021. “transmitting insulin: the design, look, and performance of insulin delivery devices as communication technologies.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–36. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license transmitting insulin: the design, look, and performance of insulin delivery devices as communication technologies carrie rentschler mcgill university carrie.rentschler@mcgill.ca benjamin nothwehr mcgill university benjamin.nothwehr@mail.mcgill.ca abstract in this article, we examine how insulin pens and pumps – two major devices for delivering insulin, the anabolic hormone used to treat type 1 diabetes – are designed to conceal and fashion insulin delivery around their appearance as key communication technologies. insulin pens and insulin pumps transform the aesthetics of insulin delivery away from the medicalized appearance of syringes toward that of beautiful technological artifacts. they both hide and draw attention to their status as technological artifacts and their medical use through a set of desirable, though sometimes incongruous, device aesthetics. deliberately marketed around their resemblance to pens or pagers, insulin delivery devices are examples of skeuomorphs that “materialize the metaphor” of writing instruments and telecommunication tools into their design. we analyze how diabetes education and marketing materials present insulin delivery devices through skeuomorphic performances of use that uphold norms of concealment in diabetes self-management in conditions of social and medical surveillance. drawing on patents, educational and marketing materials, and our own experiences with these devices, we argue that the skeuomorphic design of these devices morally regulates the embodied performance of diabetes. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 2 introduction since the discovery of insulin in 1921, the treatment of type 1 diabetes has largely revolved around the injection of this anabolic hormone, which enables food to be broken down into energy that is usable by the body. insulin allowed diabetics1 to finally evade, or at least significantly delay, what had been known throughout much of human history as a death sentence of variable length. before the mid1980s, the hormone was injected via syringe and, although a variety of other delivery devices exist today, many people with diabetes continue to use syringes to deliver insulin on a daily basis. tiny glass bottles of insulin and orange-capped syringes have come to stand in as visual symbols of diabetes. perhaps more than any other medical object associated with the treatment of diabetes, the boundary object of the syringe brings the disease into legibility at the very moment of insulin delivery (see star and griesemer 1989; star 2010). drawing attention through its symbolic and performative dimensions, the syringe-as-boundaryobject inscribes visible difference onto diabetic bodies, in ways that contemporary insulin delivery technologies have significantly transformed, and, in some ways, reproduced. while a syringe and a vial of insulin very clearly mark the public performance of injecting insulin as an unmistakably medical one, more recent technologies such as insulin pens and insulin pumps enable diabetics to wear and use their insulin delivery devices as if they were common communication technologies. insulin pens are designed to look like fancy and fun writing instruments, while insulin pumps have been designed to look like pagers and, increasingly, cellphones and smartphones, depending on the brand. deliberately marketed as resembling pens or pagers, insulin pens and pumps share aesthetic design features with these communication technologies that help to conceal their function and use as medical devices. combining designs for discretion and fashion, several aesthetic features also draw attention to these medical devices as beautiful objects to be looked at and handled, thereby enabling type 1 diabetics to manage and even obscure visible signs of their medical use, as disability scholar graham pullin (2009) analyzes in relation to assistive technologies for the disabled. they also communicate, and are used to communicate, socially sanctioned codes of behavior that govern how diabetics treat their disease and care for themselves in public, echoing alison kafer’s (2013) insight that “neither assistive technologies nor our uses of them are ahistorical or apolitical” (120). while certainly medical in purpose, and in some cases designed for disability, these technologies also play a communicative role both through their material design and their semiotic functions, in at least two other ways. resembling ubiquitous communication technologies, they physically transmit insulin into the diabetic body: their a61m 5/00 patent classification identifies them as “devices meant for introducing media into the body in a subcutaneous, intravascular or original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 3 intramuscular way” (cooperative patent classification 2020, 37). in addition to their ability to transduce media (insulin) into bodies, they also communicate through sound, image, and haptics, providing audible and tactile cues for those who are hard of seeing and hearing. insulin pens “click” to signal standardized dosage amounts, while pumps offer vibrational alarms and touch-enhanced button pushes, along with other design features for disability. when we say insulin pens and pumps “communicate,” we mean in all three of these senses of communication. our analysis will focus most centrally on how the devices signal information to users that shape the ways in which diabetics manage the embodiment of their diabetes in social contexts. as stephen horrocks (2019) reminds us, type 1 diabetics are in “medically compelled human–technological relationships” (1). as medically necessary technologies, our diabetes devices enact what non-diabetic bodies would otherwise do biologically. we delegate to our technologies the tasks of measuring the amount of sugar in our bodies for the purposes of adjusting it, and providing insulin, which a non-diabetic pancreas would produce and adjust itself (akrich 1992, 218; see also latour 1988). as such, diabetics routinely engage with medical technology to satisfy two major facets of their disease management: testing blood glucose levels and administering insulin doses. we are able to test our blood sugar using blood glucose meters and continuous glucose monitors, the latter of which attach to our bodies and communicate wirelessly to mobile phones and insulin pumps through radio frequency. insulin delivery occurs via syringe, insulin pen, or insulin pump, or a combination of these devices. insulin dosages are determined by a variety of factors, including our blood sugar levels and the amount of carbohydrates we eat. diabetes is a way of doing chronic illness. it is not only a condition we have, it is also something we do, as sets of practices we engage through relationships with technology and medical instruments, and systems of quantification and insulin delivery (see mol and law 2004). annemarie mol and john law (2004) explain that we do diabetes by measuring blood sugars, feeling the effects of low and high blood sugar and countering them, and delivering insulin, among a range of other embodied and highly technologized actions (50). in these processes of doing diabetes with technology, we are subject to norms of surveillance that are, in turn, embodied in technologies of insulin delivery and glucose measurement and our uses of them. around these technologies, the discourses used to market and promote them enact the cultural and social enforcement of diabetes care and treatment as we perform it. in this article, we analyze how insulin pens and pumps are designed and marketed to diabetics in terms of their ability to both conceal and render their diabetes visible, and thus legible, in the moment of insulin delivery. to do so, we identify and examine a set of patent designs, marketing materials, and medical original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 4 association promotional materials concerning insulin pens and pumps that are directed at type 1 diabetic users. patent applications for insulin pens and pumps illustrate how codes of classed and gendered comportment appear in designs for and explanations of the devices and what users can do with them. the applications reveal how patents embody “a relation between knowledge and materiality” that get enshrined in property rights around technologies (biagioli 2014, 384). we focus on the ways these applications diagram the technology and textually explain its operations and use. other documents we analyze include a multi-page brochure for one of the first major insulin pens on the market, the novopen®, and archival photographs of the pen’s design, both of which are housed at the smithsonian national museum of american history, in their division of science and medicine, in washington, dc.2 the archival photographs visualize the patented devices brought to market; they also locate the technology in a us national history of technological innovation and demonstration (see pottage 2011, 623). the 1986 brochure serves as a key document in our analysis, as it represents the ways novopen® introduced this newly designed technology to potential consumers. we also examine online promotional brochures from insulin pump manufacturers, in which pumps are presented as lifestyle technologies alongside other communication technologies; and official diabetes association patient information from ontario, quebec, the us, and the uk that present insulin pens and pumps as being like fountain pens and pagers, respectively. the latter set of documents demonstrate how comparisons between insulin delivery devices and communication technologies have been standardized across national and provincial professional diabetes education sources, illustrating how the boundary object status of insulin pens and pumps—in place of the syringe—have been transformed into standards of device design (see star and ruhleder 1996; star 2010, 614). we also demonstrate how these standards appear in magazine articles directed at audiences of diabetics, which review insulin pump designs around their aesthetic features and designs for disability (see diabetes forecast 2019). these documentary materials reveal how insulin delivery devices are designed and promoted as technologies of diabetes concealment and self-fashioning, setting standards of use and design that differ from that of the syringe, and that model ways of embodying class, racial, gender, and employment differences under conditions of social and medical surveillance. promotional and diabetes education materials model insulin pens and pumps as social technologies of concealment and beauty that are meant to assist diabetics in their management of the public performance of diabetes as if type 1 diabetes is a monitored performance of chronic illness. by monitored performance, we refer to the ways in which those living with managed forms of chronic disease like diabetes are subject to systems of surveillance that are enacted by medical personnel, family members, peers, and strangers (see hall, monahan, and reeves 2016, 154–55). additionally, we examine how type 1 diabetics respond to the promotion of these original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 5 devices around the aesthetics of communication technologies. type 1 blog posts and meme propagators speak back to the rather incongruous comparison of insulin pumps to pagers, particularly in the current moment, and the awkward encounters that result from people misrecognizing their pumps as pagers (which the authors of this article also encounter). these responses show up in repeated iterations of internet memes and blog posts, suggesting that some type 1 diabetics share common, and often incredulous, reactions to the comparisons of pumps with pagers typically found in marketing and diabetes education materials. we focus our analysis on one typical meme representation of the insulin pumppager comparison. we also draw on our own experiences with these devices as type 1 diabetics to demonstrate how norms of discretion morally regulate the performance of diabetes around the skeuomorphic relationships between insulin delivery devices and communication technologies. deliberately marketed around their resemblance to pens or pagers— skeuomorphs that “materialize the metaphor” of writing instruments and telecommunication tools into the devices of insulin delivery—patents and diabetes education and marketing materials present type 1 diabetics with normative models for how to perform diabetes using insulin pens and pumps, especially around norms of discretion in insulin delivery (see gessler 1998, 230; quoted in morris 2015). they foster what we call skeuomorphic performances of type 1 diabetes. skeuomorphic relationships between insulin delivery devices and communication technologies shape understandings of how the technologies can be used. they also shape how type 1 diabetics manage the monitored performances of type 1 diabetes around social codes of race, class, and gender, as we analyze below. skeuomorphs are design templates based on the look of older technologies that shape people’s understanding of new technological devices (see hayles 1999). jeremy wade morris (2015) explains that skeuomorphs “smooth the process of adoption” of new technologies through design features that “make new technologies feel more familiar” (50). they create what jonathan sterne (2020) describes as “an analogy of practice for users and a logic of equivalence” within the comparative relationships that are drawn between devices (180). in the design of insulin devices as communication technologies, the skeuomorphic relationship does more than familiarize users with the new devices; it models how to perform diabetes with medical technologies that look less like medicalized artifacts, in turn transforming expectations of what diabetes technology can and should look like. as users encounter what is now a set of standard looks for the skeuomorphic design of their insulin delivery devices, they are met with a host of cultural connotations, expectations, and prescriptions for use that designers, marketers, and health educators further communicate. for type 1 diabetics, the look and use of these technologies powerfully shape our relationships to ourselves as diabetics, to other diabetics, and to non-diabetics. they model type 1 diabetes practice—specifically, the enactment of insulin delivery—by transforming the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 6 artifacts of insulin delivery to look less and less like the syringe. as we deliver insulin, we enact a skeuomorphic performance of type 1 diabetes in conditions that are, and feel, monitored by others. drawing from feminist surveillance studies research in dialogue with performance and disability studies, we approach how insulin pens and pumps are modeled and marketed around the act of administering insulin in front of others as “monitored performances”: ways of performing diabetic subjectivity in the context of being monitored in medical and social systems of surveillance (hall, monahan, and reeves 2016, 154–55). as other research identifies, norms of discretion powerfully structure the ways in which people come to inhabit type 1 diabetes in conditions of monitored performance and the relations of power and coercion in which they are enacted (see broom and whittaker 2004; archer 2014; lucherini 2016;). many type 1 diabetics report feeling surveilled and monitored around their diabetes treatment. diabetics, in turn, are encouraged to manage the appearance and performance of their type 1 diabetes treatment—notably their blood glucose testing and insulin delivery—in response to the familial, peer, and biomedical forms of surveillance that keep watch on diabetics and their compliance with medical treatment. diabetics must work through and sometimes against those norms as they embody and perform their diabetic selves in relationship to the tools and technologies of diabetes management. unevenly distributed across gendered, classed, and raced social positions, these technologies contribute to norms of discretion that can perpetuate feelings of shame and stigma felt by diabetics and shape an idealized successful subject with diabetes—one who can more easily “pass” as non-diabetic and who can reveal their condition at times and in ways that are less stigmatized and stigmatizing. structures of surveillance around diabetes and its performance can thereby intensify practices of racialization, class discrimination, and other forms of systemic marginalization. the design of insulin delivery devices re-articulates and reproduces the experience and meaning of what it is to do diabetes as a form of monitored performance in these conditions. the authors of this article have both lived with type 1 diabetes for most of their lives: rentschler since age one and nothwehr since age five. we have intimate experience with publicly performing our diabetes as people who also benefit from systems of race and class privilege—as white and middle-class individuals with access to private and provincial health insurance coverage—while also occupying other less privileged subject positions. we draw on these experiences as crucial tools of self-reflection and diffractive analysis—diffractive because our experience and expertise as diabetics enable us to tune into the “patterns of difference” that are produced through the entanglements of bodies, technologies, medical corporations, healthcare systems, and shared standards of diabetes treatment (see barad 2007, 29; see also murphy 2012). the differences between us also shed diffractive light on the ways diabetic difference is produced in relationship to original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 7 diabetes technologies. as such, we are attentive to the ways device design and marketing produces diabetic differences and enacts exclusions at the level of type 1 diabetes experience (see barad 2007, 30; see also haraway 1992). to be clear, we do not claim to represent all type 1 diabetics, nor would we. instead, our experience and expertise offer two situated perspectives on the forms of critical awareness that diabetics develop around how the disease itself, and its larger social meanings, emerge from our embodied experiences of the relationship between device design and public discourses about insulin delivery technologies. drawing on lora arduser’s (2017) study of type 1 diabetic agency as ways of “living chronic,” we mobilize our experiential and observational knowledge of, and close attunement to, the marketing, promotional, and educational discourses around the insulin pens and pumps we use, and the ways we have witnessed and participated in their transformations over time. our own relationships to the medical technology of the syringe, for instance, differ because of the almost thirty-year gap between our diagnoses. rentschler was diagnosed in 1973 and used syringes until the year 2000, when she switched to an insulin pump for her insulin delivery. she never used insulin pens. nothwehr was diagnosed in 2002 and their parents used syringes for roughly two years before switching to insulin pens. by 2007, they were using an insulin pump.3 the generational differences in how we relate to diabetes technology also defamiliarize some of our own diabetes-related experiences and strengthen our analysis of the “living system” of diabetes: that interrelationship between the embodied experiences of people with diabetes and the network of diabetes technologies in which we live (forlano 2017). some type 1’s identify as “disabled cyborgs” as they maneuver through their relationships with technologies (see forlano 2017). some of us diagnosed very early in our lives might not experience diabetes as disabling in the same ways, particularly if we have avoided some of the disabling conditions many diabetics do, eventually, face. for some of us, diabetes may be experienced primarily as chronic, lifelong entanglements of bodies, systems, and technologies. type 1 diabetes, therefore, is experienced and produced at the intersections of disabled and chronically diseased lives and the different ways we live and experience them.4 “look again”: selling a “pen-like” insulin delivery device the insulin pen made diabetes sort of sexy. —diabetes.co.uk, “insulin pens,” youtube video when insulin pens were introduced to the consumer market in the mid-1980s, marketing materials described the device’s resemblance to a writing instrument, making clear the skeuomorphic relationship between the technologies (see figure 1). a marketing booklet for the 1986 novopen® system insulin delivery device— original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 8 one of the very first insulin pens on the market—made the resemblance explicit: “it looks like an elegant fountain pen but look again: it’s a really unique development in diabetes care” (squibb-novo, inc. 1986; see figure 2). a photograph shows the insulin pen resting on a leather-bound daily planner next to a leather briefcase and some sheets of dot matrix computer printer paper. an ink pen tucked into the binding of the daily planner highlights the skeuomorphic relationship between writing pens and the insulin delivery device. readers see how the “material metaphor” of the ink pen has been designed into the artifact of the insulin delivery device and away from the look of an insulin syringe (gessler 1998, 230; quoted in morris 2015). other sections of the novopen® booklet visualize the injector’s pen-like look in different contexts: in one, an insulin pen appears alongside carpentry tools, while another geared towards children with type 1 diabetes shows the device lying amidst color crayons and wooden pencils (squibb-novo, inc. 1986a). the insulin pen’s appearance de-medicalized the look of an insulin delivery device, tying its design to writing technologies typically used in workplaces and classrooms. as susan leigh star (2010) reminds us, boundary objects like the insulin pen materialize work arrangements between different actors, actors who, in promotional materials, often represent idealized configurations of both users and uses of the technology. figure 1. novopen® insulin delivery pen made by squibb-novo inc., ca. 1986. division of medicine and science, national museum of american history, smithsonian institution, washington, dc. catalog number: nmah-ahb2012q06840. permission granted for use. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 9 figure 2. the 1986 novopen® booklet state-of-the-art diabetes care. division of medicine and science, national museum of american history, smithsonian institution, washington, dc. catalog number: nmah-ahb2012q06897. permission granted for use. the novopen® system’s marketing materials communicate norms of concealment and discretion in the use of an insulin pen, suggesting that there might be something socially stigmatizing about taking insulin via syringe and being a person with diabetes. around the object status of the syringe, when diabetics use a syringe to administer a dose of insulin, the visibility of this routine procedure can carry a sense of shame produced in part by discourses of health, able-bodiedness, and “diabetic control” as a moral obligation by which some diabetics report being governed (see broom and whittaker 2004). the ad copy in figures 2 and 3 directly connects the ease and convenience of using the injector with the ability to perform injection discreetly. jørn rex, one of the people who filed the original patent application for the novopen® in 1984, identified discretion as an advantage of insulin pen use, “helping to render insulin therapy more socially acceptable” (rex and vogeley 1986). as he and his co-authors later explained, discretion is “particularly important to younger patients who may be especially sensitive to peer group approval and the embarrassment and stigma surrounding parenteral drug administration. several students suggest that patients feel less conspicuous carrying a novopen® device and more comfortable using it in public compared with a syringe” (rex, jensen, and lawton 2006, 398). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 10 as tools of discretion, insulin pens were designed to enable type 1 diabetics to manage how their insulin delivery appears to others, and as disability scholars argue, “appearance is one of the main modalities by which disability is constructed” (love 2015, 174; see also goffman 1963; davis 1995; garlandthomson 1997). figure 3. the 1986 novopen® booklet chapter “convenient, discreet, accurate” in state-of-the art diabetes care. division of medicine and science, national museum of american history, smithsonian institution, washington, dc. catalog number: nmah-ahb2012q06898. permission granted for use. navigating the potentially stigmatizing appearance of non-conformity, disability, and disease around insulin delivery, the insulin pen provided a different look to the work of doing type 1 diabetes. the insulin pen was specifically designed to not look like a syringe, even if it performs the same basic function. novopen® marketing materials explained the inner workings of the pen by detailing its syringe-like parts, representing how the pen worked like a syringe with its needle, needle caps, plunger, and barrel but, at the same time, looked nothing like one (see figure 3). while the syringe largely remains the primary iconography of diabetes, it has an even stronger association with iv drug use. insulin pen designs interrupt this association around classed iterations of non-syringe-based diabetes treatment technology. in the context of monitored public performances, the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 11 visible “prosthetic object of the syringe,” as nicole vitellone (2003) argues in her analysis of iv drug users, orients the figure of the syringe-user around the “object world of the syringe,” such that the syringe carries the stigma associated with the act of injecting illicit drugs (42, 43, 46). importantly, as sara ahmed (2010) explains, because affects circulate between objects in relational affective economies, emotions like shame can “[sustain or preserve] the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (230). as such, the moralizing rhetoric that demonizes iv drug use and the iv drug user operates as a vehicle of shame that, to some extent, becomes transferable to the diabetic syringe-user via the iconography and use of the syringe itself (see lucherini 2016). reinforcing this association, symptoms of diabetic hypoglycemia —low blood sugar—often look and sound like intoxication: slurred speech, incoherence, profuse sweating, confusion, and loss of consciousness. racial and classed stereotypes of drug use further complicate these expressions of diabetic hypoglycemia for some diabetics. the object status of the syringe is therefore disproportionately “sticky” with negative affect that is shared between subjects associated with its use: iv drug users and type 1 diabetics. as such, it is not unusual for type 1 diabetics to sometimes be mistaken as iv drug users due to the shared object world of the syringe, reproducing some of the shame of recreational drug use in the markedly different context of insulin delivery. rentschler has experienced this common misunderstanding on several occasions, including an incident as a teenager in which her boyfriend’s father found one of her insulin syringes in the wastebasket, its needle broken off to avoid causing harm to those doing waste disposal. because of the syringe’s powerful association with iv drug use, the man assumed she was injecting illicit drugs (this was also at the height of the us drug war in the 1980s). to clear up the misunderstanding, rentschler had to explain that she was a diabetic who used syringes to inject insulin. interactions like these are also documented in mark lucherini’s (2016) study of the performative aspects of diabetes treatment, where interview subjects describe the embarrassment that accompanies being mistaken for an iv drug user and the efforts they take to avoid such misunderstandings (266; see also browne et al. 2014). while for the author this was merely an uncomfortable conversation, these interactions can have more serious consequences for racialized and less affluent diabetics who are more subject to being stereotyped and criminalized around perceived drug use. of course, despite its non-medical uses, the syringe is first and foremost an instrument used in the treatment of injury and disease. these conditions carry their own stigma, related to the highly personal yet often visible negotiation of bodily health and autonomy. as a disease whose management requires a series of lifestyle changes and adjustments, diabetics often feel and are stigmatized based on how others monitor and judge their behaviors vis-à-vis their personal medical care. how that management becomes visible to others becomes a site of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 12 potential stigmatization, and, as one study stated, “stigmatization is part of the social experience of living with t1dm for adults” (browne et al. 2014, 1). in a recent survey of 12,000 diabetics, 76 percent of type 1’s report being stigmatized by others, while 52 percent of type 2’s report being stigmatized (liu et al. 2017). as such, preferring to keep their condition private, some diabetics hesitate to disclose their disease to others (pihlaskari et al. 2020). studies also show that type 1 diabetics experience “diabetes distress” due to self-consciousness and social stigma, as well as the burdens of having to daily manage a serious chronic disease (balfe et al. 2013). these findings echo susan wendell’s ([2001] 2017) explanation that “people with chronic illnesses are likely to be blamed or held responsible not only during the process of seeking a diagnosis, but also during every relapse or deterioration of their condition, which they are expected (by doctors, loved ones, employers, and the general public) to control” (170). any “fluctuations in our illnesses and abilities…contribute to the perception that we are responsible” and that “we are doing something wrong” (wendell [2001] 2017, 170). in the context of type 1 diabetes, “any failure in self-management may become bound to a sense of shame, producing a diabetes-shame-bind that is activated whenever criticized” (archer 2014, 104). a failure to care for one’s diabetes, as some diabetics report, is often interpreted by others as a moral failure (broom and whittaker 2004, 23; see also mol 2009). because of these complex negotiations with feelings of shame and experiences of social stigma, type 1 diabetes management has long been structured by concerns with discretion and privacy, as something to be “moralized for the benefit of those without diabetes” (hall, monahan, and reeves 2016, 164). for type 1 diabetics in particular, “the shift toward constant and concealed treatment practices is emblematic of a much broader system of biomedicalized control that devalues non-normative bodies, and thereby devalues a life lived with(in) one” (horrocks 2019, 3). lucherini’s (2016) research found that “people with diabetes often express a sense of felt surveillance of their bodies when in public space” such that “being seen doing self-management could instill a sense of shame” (261, 271). he describes the labor type 1 diabetics do to “manage their self-management” of the disease in front of others (lucherini 2016, 261), work that is moral and emotional, as well as physical and technological (horrocks 2019). with technologies designed for discretion, like insulin pens, “the relative ease of concealing many of the management practices of diabetes” also “means that people can pass” as nondiabetic (lucherini 2016, 269), shaping a form of moral labor involved in doing diabetes with technology. marketing brochures demonstrate how the insulin pen was designed for purposes of concealment as well as insulin delivery. modeling the insulin delivery device as a pen familiarized the medical technology through its shared design features, in ways that could help diabetics manage how others might see and understand it. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 13 the booklet for marketing the 1986 novopen® line emphasized the discretion that a pen-like medical device could provide as something users could wear as an accessory (see squibb-novo, inc. 1986b). the clip on the exterior of the insulin pen (see figure 1), for instance, suggested how the device could be worn in the breast pocket of a work shirt or blazer like a similarly designed ink pen, turning it into an accessory that could fit workday modes of comportment. the 1984 patent application for the device also described that the clip enabled users to wear it on a pocket, materializing preferred forms of user embodiment that were part of the legal case-making for the designer’s property claims (see rex and vogeley 1986, 7). each of the pen’s design features follow a general principle similar to that of medical design for disability: “to compensate for disability as discreetly as possible” (pullin 2009, 4). marketing materials and user booklets modeled the process through which one would use the pen to deliver insulin. in the novopen® brochure, photos show people using the device to deliver insulin across a variety of contexts during monitored performances of diabetes management. one image depicts a black woman dressed in professional attire injecting insulin into her thigh as she sits at a desk (see figure 2 above), communicating the image of a successful diabetic subject, someone who can manage a high-powered career and also fit the stereotypical image of health. such images of control are often projected onto people with office or white-collar jobs, and who more readily appear as healthy and “normate bodies” (garland-thomson 1997, 8). in marketing photographs, the insulin pen appears to function as a social equalizer, providing discreet medical solutions to everyone. the black woman is the only person of color shown using the device in the set of novopen® materials we reviewed from the smithsonian institution archive. she embodies norms of black middle-class respectability that are portrayed alongside white-identified normate diabetic subjects of different ages and genders, including an elderly white woman and a male construction worker, firmly designating “healthy” bodily comportment through the performance of class, gender, and racial norms of middle-class professionalism, white working-class masculinity, and domestic white womanhood (see also squibb-novo, inc. 1986b). all appear as successful diabetics who treat their condition in view of others without moral or social sanction. the novopen® was designed to look like not just any pen but a beautiful pen that could signal the status value of the object, thus also communicating, potentially, the user’s seemingly affluent or class aspirational status. the 1986 booklet for the device describes the design in detail: “the handsome nickel and chromium-plated brass construction provides durability along with the sleek fountain-pen look” (squibb-novo, inc. 1986b). the emphasis on desirable aesthetics is also seen in more contemporary designs as well, of which online reviews make particular note. in 2020, a review details key aesthetic features of current pens on the market, describing a humapen brand pen as “extremely handsome,” especially “for those original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 14 who are uncomfortable with the idea of pulling out syringes at work or during business conferences.” another humapen is described as “an expensive writing instrument,” echoing insulin pen designs from the 1980s that could appear like professional objects (tzemis 2020). the skeuomorphic design—and performance—of insulin pens to look like fancy writing instruments still holds today. for children and adolescents, pen designs use bright colors and fun decals. as a child in the early 2000s, nothwehr used a novopen® junior pen, which was marketed through its brightly colored patterns. new “smart” insulin pens also look like colorful and fashionable ink pens that are sold in specialty stationery stores. the insulin pen thus fashions discretion around the sleekness, desirability, and appealing aesthetics of the technology in ways that recode the meaning and look of diabetes concealment and disclosure. further emphasizing its aesthetic value, the insulin pen is not miniaturized to be hidden like a hearing aid nor flesh-colored like a prosthetic limb, common strategies for designing for discretion in disability (pullin 2009). instead, its design illustrates that “discretion does not require invisibility” (pullin 2009, 15), but may instead demand a desirable aesthetic object, or what disability design researcher sara hendren (2020) calls “charismatic things”: devices that “not only work” but also have “elegant presence or pleasure in its handling, some kind of draw, a thing that pulls you in or makes you think while also being handy, modest, even garden-variety in its value” (8). using the pen to inject insulin in full view of others suggests that type 1 diabetes management can be done discreetly within the context of day-to-day activities, without violating expectations of normative public behavior, at least for some. some marketing images transform public scenes of what might be viewed as humiliating into something that appears ordinary. in a photo used to market the 1986 novopen® device, a child sits in a chair injecting insulin into their thigh, pants down and underwear visible (see figure 3). in many contexts, this image would represent a scene of humiliation, but instead the child appears in full view of their teacher and classmates, as if giving an injection of insulin might be analogous to other expected classroom behaviors. this image also communicates the supposed ability of the novopen® to shield children from shame related to syringes and appearing diseased. such a negation of shame may be partly dependent on the child’s otherwise normative subject position—as white, seemingly middle-class, and attending school. as lennard davis (1995) argues, such performances of “normalcy must be constantly enforced in public venues,…must always be creating and bolstering its image by processing, comparing, constructing, deconstructing images of the normal and the abnormal” (44). across these marketing materials, images of successful diabetic subjects embody age-based, classed, raced, and gendered standards of morality expected of public diabetic bodies that appear otherwise normate. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 15 the pen also models the type 1 enactment of disclosure, of “coming out” as an insulin-dependent diabetic, a condition disclosed through the use of diabetes technologies. as ellen samuels (2003) argues, “narratives of people with ‘hidden impairments,’ like those of people with other nonvisible social identities, are suffused with themes of coming out, passing, and the imperatives of identity” (237). samuels unpacks the analogies commonly drawn between coming out as disabled and coming out as an lgbtq individual, two identities she herself shares as a lesbian disabled person, in order to assess how they are used in the process of revealing non-visible disability. for samuels (2003), coming out as disabled is “primarily portrayed as the process of revealing or explaining one’s disability to others rather than as an act of self-acceptance facilitated by a disability community” (239). while there are a range of practices and meanings people give to the disclosure of non-visible impairments and chronic conditions, the practice of disclosure usually “connotes the daily challenge of negotiating assumptions about bodily appearance and function” by others (samuels 2003, 239). as a queer person, nothwehr has found that revealing their diabetes carries a different sense of shame than coming out as queer, although the emotional toll of disclosure is still considerable. for them, the shame of coming out as diabetic is strongly linked to fears of being pitied as someone living with chronic illness, whereas coming out as queer more often generates trepidation in relation to homophobic comments or outside expectations of their gender presentation or sexuality. the shame related to both forms of disclosure emerges in how others view, react to, and label them as the disclosing subject. because diabetes is not typically visible in the same ways that sexuality often is, diabetics must negotiate normative assumptions of able-bodiedness by either divulging their stigmatized condition or working to appear, or “pass,” as normate as possible. in this context, the ability to pass as non-disabled, or as not having diabetes, may not communicate a desire to assimilate, but could instead signal resistance to norms of surveillance applied to non-normate bodies in order to avoid “the denial, mockery, and silent disapproval…used to inhibit us” (samuels 2003, 242). type 1 diabetics use a range of disclosure strategies to inform others about their disease, from more performative models of revelation via the public use of diabetes technologies to other modes of disclosure where they introduce others to the disease and how it is managed. in rosemary garland-thomson’s (1997) words, the successful diabetic subject who may casually use their medical technologies to disclose their condition is an example of “the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8) based on the race, class, and gender privileges they have. these diabetic subjects are defined by virtue of not being those who appear as “marked bodies [which] shore up the normate’s boundaries” (garland-thomson 1997, 8). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 16 while the novopen® brochure highlighted the ability to conceal the device’s medical use and thus pass as non-diabetic, it also illustrated the contexts in which users could unveil what the device is designed to do, suggesting how users can exert some control over the moment in which they disclose their diabetes to others at the point of insulin delivery. in this way, the brochures trained insulin pen users in how to both conceal their insulin delivery devices and reveal their use for medical treatment through visible “scripts of use” (akrich 1992, 208). doing the work of “de-scription,” brochures modeled the “mechanisms of adjustment” users can engage in order to reveal their status as type 1 diabetics using an insulin pen (akrich 1992, 209). “what year is it?”: the insulin pump-as-pager insulin pumps—what inventor dean kamen called an “automatic syringe” after his 1973 design patent application for the device—are another technology through which type 1 diabetics infuse insulin into their bodies.5 early insulin pump models took the use, purpose, and design of the syringe as a conceptual model and point of departure, envisioning the insulin pump as automating syringe-based insulin delivery. the autosyringe included a plastic syringe on the outside of the device paired with a motorized plunger that operated to deliver incremental doses of insulin at specified times. kamen’s design functioned as a mechanized method of using syringe technologies, with the device operating as a chassis that surrounded a syringe and automated its use. in fact, the external syringe was not concealed in any manner by the material design of the early insulin pump and was easily recognizable as a medical device, if not a somewhat unusual looking one at that (see figure 4).6 more recent pumps have been designed to resemble communication technologies in a related move away from the aesthetics and look of the syringe. over time, the pump has been continually redesigned to conceal its function as an automatic insulin delivery device, eliminating almost all easily recognizable design elements of the syringe. making no mention of syringes or needles, medical brochures and online diabetes education sites from the 1990s and early 2000s instead routinely make comparisons between insulin pumps, pagers, and cellphones, around their shared technological resemblance (see, e.g.,novo nordisk pharmaceuticals, inc. 2002). an image included in a medical journal article on insulin pump therapy from the early 2000s illustrates the comparison (see figure 5). at the bottom of the photo, a black minimed 508 pump sits next to a black motorola brand pagenet pager circa 2001, highlighting their similarities in shape, screen appearance, and button design. two other insulin pumps appear at the top right of the image next to a silver samsung flip mobile phone—the d-tron pump, discontinued in 2003 (disetronic medical systems 2003), and the h-tron plus pump, first approved for use in the united states for insulin delivery in 1991. the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 17 visual juxtapositions draw a direct association between these insulin pumps and the design of iconic telecommunication technologies of the time. figure 4. the autosyringe device for delivering insulin, shown here worn by ap photographer patrick connolly sometime between 1978 and 1984 (see hurley 2014; connolly 1986). the original caption to the image reads, “associated press reporter patrick connolly, in seattle, wa., dec. 18, 1986, adjusts the insulin pump he wears on his belt to keep his blood sugar near normal. connolly, who has had diabetes for 27 years, receives a squirt of insulin through a slim tube into a small needle under the skin of his abdomen every few minutes from the one-pound pump. for connolly the experimental device is more effective than 10,000 insulin shots he has had. (ap photo).” the date listed in the caption is inaccurate, however, because connolly died in 1984 (see connolly 1986). permission granted by the associated press under license lic-01416244. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 18 figure 5. the caption to the image reads, “the insulin pump is comparable in size to a cellphone or beeper. the cellphone in the upper left is similar to the disetronic pump on the upper right. in the lower right corner, the minimed pump is comparable to that of a beeper on the left” (jayarag, davis, and mcneill 2001, 139). compared to the insulin pen, the insulin pump moves even further from the stigma of the syringe, towards the look—and haptics—of less morally fraught communication technologies. the look of the insulin pump distances it from both the visual appearance of the syringe and its methods of use, which, notably, the insulin pen does not conceal. the insulin pen still relies on the basic design concept of a syringe; it has a plunger, barrel, hub, and needle, which function in the same manner that a medical syringe would. the pen also necessitates a more public, and clearly medical, demonstration of its use as users must wash their hands, clean their injection site with rubbing alcohol, manipulate their clothing, and visibly inject insulin into their bodies using a needle. to administer a dose of insulin with an insulin pump, one must use the pump’s buttons or touch screen to input biometric information into the device, which is then used by the pump to calculate and deliver a dose of insulin through an infusion set attached to the body. adhering to the skin, the set includes a flexible cannula to transmit insulin subcutaneously. as laura forlano (2016) explains, “as an information technology, the pump more easily fits into social situations than needles” and can go virtually original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 19 unnoticed as a medical device. with almost no visual cues of the pump’s medical nature either through its appearance or use, in the early 2000s, rentschler encountered students who thought that the clear tubing attaching her insulin pump to her body was an electrical wire connected to a battery pack in her pants, powering the “pager” she wore on her belt. at the time, pagers were still in regular use. the pump’s resemblance to a pager also picked up on popular cultural connotations of the telecommunication device as something used by busy professionals, similar to the insulin pen’s resemblance to a fancy fountain pen. the misrecognition of the pump as a pager is not so much a failure to be properly oriented to the device but is instead a kind of success: the early description of the pump as pager-like still works, even as pagers have become outdated technologies. this is seen in how closely linked the look of the pump as pager-like is to how diabetics interact with and carry the device. insulin pumps are, for some users, understood as technologies one wears, as if an accessory or fashion item; they are frequently clipped to people’s belts and pants, as a pager would be. diabetes education websites emphasize the pump as a tool or accessory of selffashioning, stating, for example, “most pumps are ‘worn’ on a belt, carried in a pocket, or attached by a holster and connected by thin plastic tubing to the infusion set” (diabetes education online, n.d.).7 describing pumps as something one wears, like prescription eyeglasses, “provides a shift in perspective from a medical model to a social model of prescription” (pullin 2009, 19, emphasis in original). as pullin explains, when prescription eyeglasses became “eyewear,” they were perceived as fashionable items of clothing rather than medical devices. this suggests that diabetics form orientations to these devices based on how they physically carry or port the technology. advertisements and marketing material in the 1990s emphasized the skeuomorphic design of the pump-as-pager, highlighting its look as one of the draws of insulin pump therapy. at the time, manufacturers strove to reassure pump users that their insulin delivery device would be unrecognizable to others as a medical technology and would allow them greater freedom in their everyday life. including testimonials from diabetic users, many advertisements stress the ability of pumps to be concealed as medical technologies that enable patients to lead “normal” lives, paradoxically linking concealment to the subject’s sense of freedom and agency. today’s marketing of insulin pumps continues to emphasize diabetic freedom from social constraint. recent advertisements show the pump being used in a variety of non-professional settings, such as classrooms and soccer fields. according to an online patient brochure for the recent medtronic minimed 670g pump, syringe injections are “a distraction that...interfere with the normal rhythm of [patients’] lives” (medtronic 2017, 2). nicky, a high school student, credits the pump with helping her enjoy family meals “without having to excuse herself to inject insulin,” while john, a family man and business professional, is shown on a business trip, able to juggle meetings and conference calls because original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 20 the minimed 670g pump is “on the job too” (4). in this context, normalcy alludes to ways of performing diabetes that are easily folded back into normative ideals of a meaningful and successful life: family time unencumbered by the stress of chronic illness and a professional career driven by capitalist modes of productivity and fulfillment. with the pump, users appear as self-fashioned subjects who are no longer defined by their relationship to the device—as students and athletes— and convey very specific forms of subjectivity formulated around ideals of youthful and active embodiment. because these technologies blend into the background, both to the user and to others, the diabetic subject can move through life “like anyone else,” enacting norms of discretion with the pump that offer visions of ease in social and familial situations. although a 2018 study found that approximately 30 to 40 percent of type 1 diabetics in the us use insulin pumps, these numbers are likely higher now due to the increased availability of pump technologies (umpierrez and klonoff 2018). increasing usage does not necessarily mean that the technology is more economically accessible, however. as of 2015, an insulin pump cost about us$6,000 and supplies for the pump cost $3,000 to $6,000 annually, a staggering amount for the vast majority of diabetics, even for those with health insurance coverage that pays a portion of the costs (mcadams and rivzi 2016). as of 2015 in canada, all provincial health systems provide coverage for insulin pumps and their supplies for children up to age eighteen and some up to age twenty-five; only one province, alberta, provides coverage for adults after the age of twenty-five (diabetes care community 2015). many adult canadian pump users do not have private insurance to cover the costs of pumps and their supplies, and cannot afford the costs on their own, forcing some to have to abandon pump therapy for injections (see bergen 2019). the sheer cost of insulin pump technologies and their supplies carries clear financial and class implications. diabetics who are able to afford the pump and its related costs have, in turn, more access to preferred treatment regimens than those who cannot. it may also be more difficult for diabetics who cannot afford the pump to conceal their condition in public, thus situating those without access to the necessary resources to be viewed, potentially, as less successful diabetics under conditions of monitored performance. even though insulin pumps are expensive, they do not necessarily look like sophisticated modern technologies. many still look like the outmoded pagers of their earlier skeuomorphic design and are still described as such to consumers. a university of california-san francisco diabetes education site explains to potential users that “insulin pumps are the size of a pager, and fit in your pocket” (diabetes education online, n.d.; see also diabète québec 2020, canadian diabetes association 2013). diabetes forecast, the monthly us magazine about diabetes published by the american diabetes association, explained the look of the device with a potential witness in mind: “if you've ever seen a person with diabetes original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 21 wearing a pager-size gadget on his or her hip, you've probably seen an insulin pump” (diabetes forecast 2009). describing the pump through the eyes of another subject suggests that the skeuomorphic design of the pump-as-pager is as much for the non-diabetic viewer as it is for the diabetic user, if not more so. the skeuomorphic relationship between the pager and the pump, then, persists, doing a form of cultural work that is meant to familiarize users and non-users alike to the insulin pump around their technological resemblance. today, pagers are largely understood as vintage technologies; many are sold on ebay as theatrical props rather than functioning text messaging machines. the pager-like look of the pump could itself be understood as a theatrical prop used to conceal its use to non-diabetics in the performance of type 1 diabetes care. to echo raymond williams (1977), the pager may have been “formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process…of the present” (122). the strange “residue” of the pump/pager relationship might “guide us to this presence of the past” in the ways some insulin infusion pumps continue to be designed and marketed around the look of this older technology (acland 2007, xxi). in light of the strange persistence of this design, insulin pump users have developed a range of vernacular responses to being asked about their pumps in disguise as pagers. some diabetics respond with humor, critiquing the pager as a technology cast out-of-time (see figure 6). memes about the misrecognition of insulin pumps as pagers populate type 1 diabetes meme sites, giving popular cultural form to a kind of response insulin pump wearers might use to disrupt the misrecognition of their device as a pager. we draw attention to one common meme that appears online in figure 6. the meme uses an image macro of actor robin williams in a scene from the film jumanji (1995), when his character, alan, asks two bemused children and a suspicious police officer “what year is it?” after he has escaped from a board game in which he’d been trapped for twenty-six years (“what someone is probably thinking” 2018). commenting on the obsolete or out-of-sync phenomenon of the pager/pump comparison, the meme conveys the confusion that accompanies the device’s incongruous appearance and anachronistic design. after all, to a non-diabetic person, the pump resembles a pager but is temporally and contextually displaced from its more prevalent use in the 1990s, leading to the assumption that the pump is not quite a pager but is also not a technology that is immediately recognizable. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 22 figure 6. “what year is it?” robin williams meme on pagers as obsolete technologies in comparisons to insulin pumps (“what someone is probably thinking” 2018). the question then becomes, what is it really? as sara ahmed (2007) suggests in queer phenomenology, for technologies, “the object itself has been shaped for something, which means it takes the shape of what it is for” (46, emphasis in original). through its skeuomorphic design, the insulin pump communicates that the device is something that it is not: a pager. the look of the pump-as-pager suggests that the pump is in some sense not only meant to appear as a communication device, but that it is a communication device, transmitting insulin from a pump reservoir into the body but also communicating norms of diabetic comportment based on concealment. their designs as communication technologies, as we have been arguing, also evidence how they communicate social norms about diabetes comportment that enable diabetics to “manage the self-management” of their disease in view of others (lucherini 2016, 261). some patent applications make the connection between insulin pumps and communication technologies even more explicit. a patent filed in 2012 by bigfoot biomedical, inc. for an insulin pump media player takes the pump-ascommunication-technology one step further by designing mobile music playback capabilities into the pump, replete with a hard drive and headphone jack. a diagram included with the patent application shows a pump user listening to the band van halen’s 1988 song “cabo wabo” via the insulin delivery device, revealing something of the designers’ taste culture and their imagination of who their users might be: fans of the band van halen (see figure 7). while the pump’s material design still resembles a pager, the capabilities of this pump suggest an original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 23 additional use as an mp3 player. note how the user is pictured in the diagram with their headphones plugged into the insulin pump. according to the patent application, “in particular embodiments, the portable infusion pump system can serve a dual purpose of providing medication and entertainment for the user from a compact and unobtrusive device” (wenger, estes, and chiang 2016), combining the aesthetics of discretion with a new articulation of the pump as a media player. while to our knowledge an insulin pump media player has never been brought to market, the patent application reveals how pumps are expected to be understood as communication technologies.8 the design for the insulin pump-media player takes this association to its logical conclusion. the idea of the pump as a wearable communication technology that is also associated with media players appears as well in marketing images of headphone-wearing pumpers, as if there is an embodied relationship between insulin pumps and media players, even when they are not combined into the same device (see figure 8). figure 7. the insulin pump-media player diagram in a us patent application for the device (wenger, estes, and chiang 2016). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 24 figure 8. john, a medtronic 670g pumper, wearing headphones. screenshot from medtronic marketing packet on the 670g pump model (medtronic 2017). in response to this, some pump designers and manufacturers have recently begun to update pump designs, like that of the tandem t:slim x2, which both authors of this article use, to resemble sleek smartphones with slimmer profiles, full-color touch screens, button-based wake up and shut-off features, and silver accents (see figures 9 and 10). compared to the pump-as-pager design, this new skeuomorphic relationship is arguably more successful in articulating the appearance of the insulin pump to that of an aesthetically desirable communication technology in the present moment. in its online marketing, the current tandem pump is often pictured from the front, with its full-colour screen illuminated in ways that make it appear like something akin to a smartphone screen. sometimes the pump is pictured alongside a smartphone to demonstrate how the pump communicates with a continuous glucose monitor that sends data to a mobile phone app. but it also communicates how closely the pump also looks like a small smartphone (see tandem diabetes care, inc. 2020). while these new pumps appear like smartphones, they act quite differently. for forlano, the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 25 smartphone-like pump does not so much recede out of perception but instead beeps, alarms, and requires attention from its user as a needy and rather obtrusive device. “their sounds diverge from the familiar family of apple iphone ringtones. they speak in tongues. the uninvited stranger at the dinner party” (forlano 2016). the promise that the pump will recede from view and blend in to one’s outfit through its design as a contemporary communication technology, then, may shape a visual relationship between diabetics and non-diabetics more than the embodied, sonic relationships diabetics have with their insulin pumps. diabetics can also easily recognize each other's pump technologies and the unique sonic alarms they use, shaping our relationships to insulin delivery devices in ways that complicate their abilities to hide diabetes. hearing the sonic alarm of one of our pumps, the authors of this article have on more than one occasion asked the other, is that you or me? figure 9. side view of tandem t:slim x2 pump (on the right) and an iphone 8 (on the left). note the similarity of the on/off buttons and the comparable thinness and shape of the two devices. photograph by carrie rentschler. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 26 figure 10. screen view of tandem t:slim x2 pump (on the right) and an iphone 8 (on the left). note the similarities of the device shape, touch screens, and protective glass screen shields, and the shared look of the black cases. photograph by carrie rentschler. conclusion: skeuomorphic relationships as scripts of morality by using medical devices designed not to look like syringes, type 1 diabetics manage the relationships between self and other as skeuomorphic performances of doing diabetes with technology. the insulin pen and insulin pump provide a kind of “cover” for type 1 diabetics, a way of wearing medical technologies that look like fashionable and ubiquitous communication technologies, even ones that are, for all practical purposes, obsolete, like the pager. as our analysis has demonstrated, administering one’s insulin is a monitored performance of diabetes self-management, a moment many diabetics experience as an exposure of one’s diabetes to others that is governed by norms of gender, race, and class differentiation, and exclusions. like many other chronic diseases, diabetes remains a hidden medical condition until it becomes visible, and legible to others, at the moment of its management via medical technologies (lucherini 2016; see also mol and law 2004; hall, monahan, and reeves 2016, 163). the design of diabetes technologies to help conceal what is already meant to be hidden helps diabetics manage those disclosive moments of self-management (lucherini 2016, 260), through insulin delivery technologies designed to look less and less like syringes and more like pens, pagers, and smartphones. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 27 as functional technologies, the design of insulin pumps to look, feel, and act like communication technologies materializes a broader set of cultural meanings, and practices, tied to insulin delivery that also negotiate the distinctions between diabetes as a chronic disease and diabetes as a disability (see balsamo 2011). as feminist disability scholars argue, it is in part in the “performative uses of technology” through which we “transform the meaning of functional technology from rehabilitative or adaptive to cultural” (hamraie and fritsch 2019, 18). our analysis of the performative aspects of doing diabetes with skeuomorphic technologies contributes to scholarship in feminist disability studies and sts research around these skeuomorphic performances and what they reveal about type 1 diabetes as a socially differentiated set of experiences, and realities, of living a chronic life in relation to medical technologies. as scholars of media and communication studies, we are also acutely aware of the significance that the design and marketing of insulin delivery devices as writing instruments, pagers, and smartphones play in the meanings that medical corporations and diabetes education give to these technologies, and the larger social roles they are delegated to play in scripts of gendered, raced, and classed diabetes performance. these meanings crystallize in the devices themselves and in the documentary materials around which they have been designed, described, marketed, patented, and trained for use. while these devices transmit insulin, they also communicate much more than that: they embody ideals of success and failure in chronic disease management; they model fashionability and prescribe aesthetic desires and values into the very meaning of what diabetes treatment looks and feels like; and they reproduce the structures of class, race, and gender inequalities that differentiate the lives of diabetics, making some of us more vulnerable to rituals of shame and judgement that get enacted through the powers of surveillance. as type 1 diabetics, we intimately know what it means and feels like to enact diabetes care as part of the ways we perform ourselves in everyday life. because we experience our daily lives as monitored performances of chronic disease, we have learned how to conceal and reveal our type 1 diabetes as a set of practices tied to our use of skeuomorphic insulin delivery technologies and blood glucose monitoring, the latter of which we have not analyzed here. by “materializing the metaphor” of insulin delivery as a form of communication, insulin pens and pumps script norms of discreet and successful type 1 diabetes self-management directly into the technologies of insulin delivery and the social rituals we as type 1 diabetics use to dose insulin into our bodies. moving further and further from the look of the syringe, insulin pens and pumps communicate a different vision of diabetic embodiment modeled on the look, style, and materials of familiar communication technology, right down to the headphone-wearing pumper imagined in the 2012 bigfoot biomedical, inc. patent application for an insulin pump-media player device. the camouflaging of insulin delivery is constructed as original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 28 beneficial, even necessary, for diabetics because these technologies shape the boundaries of the successful diabetic subject, displacing the stigma of diabetes, and of the medical technology of syringes, onto others. they present visions of diabetic subjectivity that articulate the use of technologies for concealing diabetes with powerful, and often highly moralized and moralizing notions of diabetic freedom, liberty, and agency. they suggest not so much that diabetes must or should be made invisible, but that it can, and should, be fashioned to look like something it is not. by confronting, negotiating, and rejecting the norms of concealment enacted through the skeuomorphic design and performance of diabetic medical technologies, diabetics challenge some of the standards of morality that condition diabetic subjecthood and embodiment. further research might take up some of these issues to examine how type 1 diabetics develop additional strategies and innovate new practices around their performance of the daily rituals of diabetes self-management. additional analysis could reveal some more of the nuances in how diabetics model their behavior around the skeuomorphic design of their devices to negotiate the embedded standards of morality that condition diabetic subjecthood and embodiment, particularly online, where type 1 blogs and social media sites provide key archives for examining how diabetics talk about and speak back to these norms and ideals, and construct new ones in their stead. acknowledgments we’d like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the feedback they provided on the manuscript, and the catalyst editors for their help seeing the manuscript through the review and production process. this has been an especially positive and constructive publishing experience for us: thank you! we are grateful to four other interlocutors and readers who provided essential feedback and advice as we developed the manuscript: gabriella coleman, radha hegde, margaret schwartz, and jonathan sterne. funding for the research was provided by the mcgill university william dawson scholar fund. notes 1 to refer to people living with diabetes, we use both the person-first terminology of a person or people with diabetes and the term diabetics. the international diabetes federation, the american diabetes association, and the american medical association have all established language standards for referring to patients in diabetes care as persons with diabetes. doing so frames diabetes as a condition a person has, rather than a type of person someone is, avoiding the use of the disease to describe a person’s identity (see broom and whittaker 2004; iverson et al. 2007; international diabetes federation 2014; american diabetes association 2017; dickinson et al. 2017). person-first language is less judgmental original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 29 and avoids stigmatizing people living with diabetes, centering the person, rather than the disease. we recognize the significance of person-first language, especially in the context of the medical clinic, where language can be used to judge, stigmatize, berate, and exclude people living with disease. based in our own experiences and the ways we refer to ourselves as both “diabetics” and “people living with diabetes,” we use both terms in this article, in recognition of the choices people living with diabetes make in terms of how they refer to themselves. 2 other insulin pens were also on the market in 1985, including the “autopen” made by owen mumford limited in the uk, but many—particularly those associated with novo novodisk—assert that the novopen® was “first.” see science museum group, “autopen,” insulin injection pen, uk, 1985, object number 1993-932, science museum group collection online, accessed october 22, 2020, https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co143504/autopeninsulin-injection-pen-united-kingdom-1985-insulin-injecting-device. 3 rentschler uses she/her pronouns, while nothwehr uses they/them pronouns. 4 the authors of this article use both the terminology of chronic illness and chronic disease to talk about diabetes. diabetes is not always defined by, or experienced as, illness or a state of being sick, but can also be experienced as a medical condition one has that requires treatment. 5 inventor dean kamen (1975b) filed a patent application in 1974 for a medication injection device that “controlled for repetitive delivery, by intravenous injection or otherwise, of predetermined syringe volumes of said medication at present time intervals, wherein the syringe plunger medication injection stroke is achieved using a powering motor, and the control exercised over the mode of operation of the device is related to the rotational traverses of said motor” (1). prior to his application, two other patents were filed for “automatic injectors”: one for a “motor driven fluid administration device” in 1965 by w.r. jewett (us patent # 3,456,649) and another for “angiographic injection equipment” in 1966 by marlin s. heilman gibsonia and donald jones (us patent # 3,623,474). kamen’s 1974 (1975a) patent application for a “control device for a monitor supervising a patient” provided designs for a system that would regulate and monitor the use of automatic syringes, enabling their broader use in medical settings (1). in 1976, kamen founded autosyringe, inc. to bring designs for the automatic syringe to market. he is credited with designing the first insulin pump (see “dean kamen” 2018). 6 while wired magazine, where the photo was republished, and the associated press both identify that connolly wore the device in 1986, this is not possible, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 30 because connolly died in 1984 at the age of forty-one from a heart attack caused by his lifelong diabetes, as reported in the new york times and in a book published posthumously after connolly’s death, titled love, dad (see new york times 1986). the image of connolly wearing the automatic syringe also appears on pinterest and blogs such as savvy diabetic, reproducing this error. the automatic syringe that is pictured is likely circa 1978. 7 not all pump users talk about wearing their pump technology. while rentschler refers to wearing her insulin pump, which she clips to a belt or the waistband of her pants, nothwehr more often refers to using or carrying their pump in their pants pocket. 8 motivated in particular by his son sam’s diabetes needs, bryan mazlish describes the mission of bigfoot biomedical, inc. as the automation of the human labor required to manage one’s own and other’s type 1 diabetes. “in the right circumstances,” the company’s website explains, “a machine can by and large make better decisions than humans if given the appropriate information and direction.” unlike people, “machines never tire, never get distracted” (see bigfoot biomedical, n.d.). under the moniker of “bigfoot,” mazlish is known for successfully hacking an insulin pump to work as an automated or “artificial pancreas,” a closed-loop system in which data from a continuous glucose monitor is used by an 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(2001) 2017. “unhealthy disabled: treating chronic illnesses as disabilities.” hypatia 16 (4): 17–33. republished in the disability studies reader, 5th ed., edited by lennard davis, 160–74. new york, ny: routledge. citations refer to the routledge edition. wenger, mitchell, mark c. estes, and scott chiang. 2016. portable infusion pump and media player. u.s. patent 9,314,566 b2, filed september 3, 2012 and issued april 19, 2016. “what someone is probably thinking when they see my insulin pump.” 2018. meme. accessed november 3, 2020. https://me.me/i/what-someone-is-probablythinking-when-they-see-my-insulin-22122611. williams, raymond. 1977. marxism and literature. oxford: oxford university press. https://me.me/i/what-someone-is-probably-thinking-when-they-see-my-insulin-22122611 https://me.me/i/what-someone-is-probably-thinking-when-they-see-my-insulin-22122611 https://me.me/i/what-someone-is-probably-thinking-when-they-see-my-insulin-22122611 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) carrie rentschler and benjamin nothwehr, 2021 36 author bios carrie rentschler is an associate professor in the department of art history and communication studies and an associate member of the institute for gender, sexuality & feminist studies at mcgill university. her research examines how feminist movements respond to gender violence and the politics of care and witnessing they enact via social media networks and in backchannel forms of communication. she also researches the legacies of type 1 diabetes in the practices and technologies of the quantified self. benjamin nothwehr is a graduate student in communication studies with a particular interest in queer and transgender cultural production. their current research examines how queer and trans artists engage archival material in their work to produce speculative historiographies and alternative archival logics that intervene in public memory and provide new models of historical identification and kinship. “keeping them down”: neurotoxic pesticides, race, and disabling biopolitics sánchez barba, mayra g. (2020). “keeping them down”: neurotoxic pesticides, race, and disabling biopolitics. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-31. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license “keeping them down”: neurotoxic pesticides, race, and disabling biopolitics mayra g. sánchez barba university of california davis mgsanchez@ucdavis.edu abstract chlorpyrifos, the most widely used insecticide in the us, has gained great notoriety as a contested chemical substance after the u.s. environmental protection agency refused to ban it in 2017. arguing that scientific studies support their observations and suspicions that agricultural pesticides subtly produce neurological and cognitive harm, concerned groups continue to demand us regulatory agencies to ban this chemical. their narratives demonstrate how the maintenance of unequal racial and capitalist orders across generational time is tied to small chemical exposures permitted by state regulatory agencies during critical temporalities in the life course. this essay shows the importance of including local perspectives in research that seeks to understand how concerns for the mass neurological and cognitive disabling emerge from lived experiences entangled in histories of racism, exploitation, and neglect. interweaving feminist science and technology studies, queer theory, and critical disability studies, this analysis contributes to the limited scholarship on cognitive disabling in contexts of environmental injustice through exposure to industrially produced chemicals. attending to these perspectives provides insights on how to fortify coalitions between environmental justice and critical disability justice. introduction on 1 april 2017, two days after the united states environmental protection special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 2 agency (epa) denied a nationwide ban on chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxic organophosphate insecticide, dozens of people gathered outside the monterey county jail in salinas, california. they protested the epa’s decision and urged legislators to enact a ban in california. among the protesters was dr. garcia,1 an environmental scientist and longtime farmworker advocate. as an invited speaker, she addressed the crowd: every farmer i’ve ever talked to wants their kids educated and out of farmwork. but how are kids going to be successful if their mothers are exposed to organophosphates and they’re losing iq points?2 and then the children are sent to schools where they are being gassed with this neurotoxin so their brains aren’t developed normally? this would never happen in an all-caucasian neighborhood. ninety percent of the kids in these schools are latino. this is [a] predominantly latinotargeted environmental racism issue. it must be stopped! it is illegal, it’s discriminatory, and it must be stopped! we need to ask [the manufacturer] dow chemical, is it really worth your profits to create a whole generation of latino children that are brain compromised? like dr. garcia, the protestors claim that the disproportionately high incidence of developmental disorders and learning disabilities in children are an outcome of pesticide exposures associated with abnormal brain development and permanent neurological damage. some locals have declared it a “neurological crisis.” health scientists rauh and hirsh-pasek (2017) have described the issue as “chemical warfare on children’s brains.” citing hundreds of scientific studies, multiple cases of acute poisoning, and their own experiential testimonies, farmworkers, environmentalists, ngos, and scientists across the us contend that there is no doubt of chlorpyrifos’s harmful effects and have fought for a nationwide ban for almost twenty years. as a local nurse puts it, monterey county in california’s central coast is “ground zero” for the tonnage of neurotoxic pesticides applied in its us$50 billion chemically intense agroindustry. chlorpyrifos, used to kill insects, ticks, and mites to protect high value crops, is the most heavily used insecticide in california (nearly 1 million tons in 2016) (california department of pesticide regulation, 2018) and the us. in california, “chlorpyrifos is used on over 800,000 acres across more than 60 crops,” accounting for us$23 billion in production value (agricultural council of california, 2017). big growers endorse this chemical as a “critical tool for pest control” and argue that a ban would provoke “significant economic harm” (agricultural council of california, 2017). on the other hand, critics warn that such assessments neglect the social and environmental harm special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 3 that this contested chemical brings to other bodies within its reach—especially latino farmworkers who live and work near farms, and who, for decades, have felt their bodies targeted and their wellbeing deteriorated by the exorbitant pesticide use. as another local school nurse puts it in her pleadings to the epa, “chlorpyrifos is found all over the planet: in water, air, and dust, in arctic fog and ice, and in the blood of most humans.” this pervasiveness contributes to the epa’s own determination that chlorpyrifos and two other common organophosphate insecticides adversely affected 97% of listed endangered plant and animal species (chow, 2016). one of the most extensively studied pesticides in the world, chlorpyrifos, like other nerve gases, produces systemic toxicity as it spreads through all body organs and systems by inhibiting acetylcholinesterase (ache), an enzyme found across animals from insects to humans. this enzyme breaks down acetylcholine (ach), an essential neurotransmitter that signals voluntary and involuntary muscle activation. high exposures can lead to acute poisoning, which drives the nervous system to collapse and can result in death. recent studies have found that human exposure to levels too low to inhibit ache in adult bodies may nevertheless target different developing brain regions in younger bodies and, depending on which developmental stage a low exposure occurs, can be associated with distinct neurodevelopmental disabilities (karr & rauh, 2013). therefore, the use of adult ache inhibition levels by regulatory agencies as a threshold of neurodevelopmental harm in children is an “unscientific and inadequate approach to health assessment” (hertz-picciotto et al., 2018). concerned groups underscore that fetuses and young children are most vulnerable to the exposure of this neurotoxicant.3 building from more complex toxicological models that explain the importance of the timing of the exposure during the life course, rather than “the dose makes the poison,” anti-chlorpyrifos groups affirm that any amount of chlorpyrifos exposure can be unsafe. overall, organophosphate exposures to fetuses are associated with cognitive, social, behavioral, and social development impacts in children (see hertz-picciotto et al., 2018). among the hundreds of medical and toxicological studies done on chlorpyrifos and organophosphates, two widely referenced epidemiological studies stand out to support a chlorpyrifos ban. the first one is from the columbia center for children’s environmental health. this study measured a biomarker of chlorpyrifos exposure during pregnancy among seven hundred african american and latino mothers in new york city, and followed the children from birth into middle childhood to measure their brain physiology and cognitive functioning special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 4 (columbia center for children’s environmental health, 2012; columbia mailman school of public health, 2019). the second study—the center for the health assessment of mothers and children of salinas (chamacos) study by the university of california berkeley—is the longest-running birth cohort study (health research for action, n.d.). chamacos tested pesticides and other chemicals in biomonitoring samples from a cohort of around six hundred pregnant latino women from the salinas valley in monterey county and studied the effects on their children’s growth, neurodevelopment, and health (health research for action, n.d.). although this study does not discriminate between kinds of organophosphates, the community finds it extremely significant because it was done in the salinas valley. one of the most striking findings to concerned groups is that children’s cognitive development tested at age seven decreased with higher amounts of organophosphate use on nearby fields during their mothers’ pregnancies (gunier, bradman, harley, kogut, & eskenazi, 2017). both studies found low-level exposure during gestation linked to brain anomalies, reduced iq, attention deficit disorders, developmental delays, autism, and other pervasive developmental disorders correlated with exposures to organophosphates (bouchard et al., 2011; eskenazi et al., 2007; marks et al., 2010) and chlorpyrifos (rauh et al., 2011; rauh et al., 2015; rauh et al., 2006; rauh et al., 2012; whyatt et al., 2005). as concerned groups construct cognition such as learning or attention as embodied biochemical processes—rather than abstract social constructions or metaphysics—they bring attention to their political ecologies. mobilizing scientific findings and their own knowledges, they allege that pesticide pollution maintains an underclass by constraining their opportunities to develop the appropriate neurological capacities for learning—at least in formal education settings, which limits their access to other forms of power. amid a struggle to ban chlorpyrifos use, this essay examines how biopolitical control by the neoliberal racial capitalist state within industrial agricultural settings is exercised through chlorpyrifos’s material capacity to silently harm disposable bodies. in this manner, harm extends past the spatiotemporal limits of the agricultural field and its present workers, reaching the young and future generations. i situate my study at the interface of feminist science and technology studies, queer theory, geographies of environmental justice, and critical disability studies. in a polluted world (liboiron, tironi, & calvillo, 2018; murphy, 2008; walker, 2011), where bodies are chemically altered by the thousands of special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 5 unprecedented industrially produced substances, we require a politics that attends to how power is enacted through the ubiquitous yet uneven distribution of toxicity that (re)produces sociomaterial injustices. i follow concerned groups (including activists, farmworkers, teachers, health providers, parents, and the like) in monterey county in california’s central coast in their efforts to ban this chemical. while a robust body of literature maps how environmental hazards are geographically dispersed along the lines of social difference, this article adds to the limited body of work that looks at the intersections between political ecologies of industrial excess and the biopolitics of cognitive disabling as exclusion. whereas more visible physical and sensory impairments have received greater attention overall, there has been much less theoretical engagement with cognitive disabilities (erevelles, 2011b; kafer, 2013)—particularly with respect to racialized environmental injustices. i use the term disabling to capture the ongoing process enabled by the ubiquity of these chemicals and the structural forces at play, as well as to blur the abled/disabled binary. though both environmental justice and disability studies are invested in the relationship between the built environment and social inequality, disability studies scholars have raised red flags about the possible issues with stigmatizing disabled bodies in order to point out ecological problems, and with the premise of repairing toxic environments to reduce disabled or queer bodies (clare, 2018; di chiro, 2010; gibbons, 2017). while these concerns are critical for reimagining worlds where nondominant abilities are valued, it is also important to engage with people’s lived experiences of disability. this article draws from community members’ perspectives to consider how disabling emerges through the entangled sociomaterial conditions, as well as the biopolitics that unevenly reproduce the condition of disposability among racialized bodies. in the first section, i introduce the notions of “toxicity” and “chemical injury” (murphy, 2011), along with theorizations around biopolitics in order to approach the geographies of dispersed harm by toxic pesticides that farmworkers have encountered for decades in california’s agricultural fields. i propose that linking the geographies of environmental justice to biopolitics of debilitation (puar, 2017) may help us grasp cognitive disabling within zones of dispossession. then, i situate how chlorpyrifos’s toxic politics (liboiron et al, 2018) is entangled with racism, regulatory science, and corporate power. finally, i bring in the perspectives from two teachers and a farmworker advocate to examine the entanglements of cognitive disabling. teachers offer valuable insights as experts special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 6 in learning, cognitive and behavioral processes, child development, and education. not only are they local residents, but many come from agricultural backgrounds and are also parents. dr. garcia, for example, has fought for migrant farmworkers’ rights for over two decades. their insights help us understand the social impact of cognitive disabling through time and in the broader community. taking a biopolitical approach, i explore how community members relate the exposure to brain-harming pesticides to the mass cognitive disabling of latino populations. i conclude by arguing that through science, regulations, and pervasive racial constructions, concerned local groups denounce how state agencies entangled with agricultural industry interests allow low-dose exposures during sensitive life course temporalities and displace chemical injury onto certain populations who do not count. consequently, such forms of harmful exposures go unseen and unaccounted for. geographies of dispersed harm: chemical injury and debilitation many scholars urge us to track the invisible, temporally and spatially dispersed effects of industrially produced environmental toxicants related to capitalism’s rampant ecological devastation and production of social inequalities (adam, 1998; auyero & swistun, 2009; davies, 2018; fortun, 2014; nixon, 2011; shapiro, 2017). however, scholars assert that toxicity or toxic harm should be reduced neither to the polluting molecule or particle (liboiron et al., 2018; taft, 2016), nor to a property of individuals or groups (chen, 2011). toxicity is entangled in cultural, material, techno-scientific, and political intertwinements (nunn, 2018; hecht, 2016). thinking with douglas’s (2001) systems approach to pollution that involves “a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order” (p. 36), liboiron et al. (2018) argue that toxicity or toxic harm “disrupts order and existing relations” while it “also maintains systems, including those that produce inequity and sacrifice” (p. 333). moreover, toxicity marks difference and indifference towards certain things to thrive and others to wither (liboiron et al., 2018; murphy, 2017). as a matter of reproductive justice, it involves “uneven relations and infrastructures that shape what is destroyed, injured, and constrained” (murphy, 2017, pp. 141-142). murphy (2011), who chronicles the violent temporal reach of petrochemical infrastructures along the st. clair river in ontario, canada, among the aamjiwnaang first nation, notes that, chemical injury, produced by industrial production or later by commodities…is not just displaced spatially to disenfranchised locations where bodies can be rendered more disposable, but also special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 7 displaced temporally, such that accountabilities exceed the scope of individual lives—accumulating or persisting over time. the possible effects are not only felt at the moment of the exposed organism, not only in the future of potential lives yet to be born, but also in the future generation of possible grandchildren. (p. 33) attending to the geographical dispersal and displacement towards disenfranchised locations where bodies are rendered more expendable is critical to visibilizing the harmful effects of industrial excess. beyond considering the dose of the toxicant, following toxicological advances, many scholars are turning their attention to the timing of the exposure to certain chemical substances such as neurodevelopmental toxicants and hormone disruptors during sensitive periods in the life course along with the various temporalities of their effects (e.g., di chiro, 2010; langston, 2010; liboiron, 2016 guthman & mansfield, 2012; mansfield, 2012; murphy, 2013). depending on the timing of exposure, displaced chemical harm may yield “other” life pathways where the development of certain processes and abilities are delayed, disrupted, disordered, disturbed, or lost in ways not always anticipated or desired. such alternative pathways are often labeled as deviant from the norm and classified as disorders or disabilities. thus, while exterminating unwanted bugs, neurotoxic insecticides also co-produce disorder or disability among the racialized bodies of mexican farmworkers when dispersed during critical windows of development. though environmental justice has focused on mapping the spaces disproportionately exposed to toxic materials (alaimo, 2010; auyero & swistun, 2009; bullard, 1990; cole & foster, 2001; davies, 2018; pellow, 2007; sze, 2007; voyles, 2015), less research has traced the temporal geographies of how the disabling capacity of toxicity emerges across the life course and generations. feminist, queer, and critical disability scholars have politicized disability, stressing its concentrations among disenfranchised communities in the periphery (erevelles, 2011b; kafer, 2013; livingston, 2006; meekosha, 2011; puar, 2017; sadler, 2017; taylor, 2017). they move away from the dominant social model strongly defended by (liberal) euro-us american disability scholars and activists that privileges discourse over lived experiences and toward the material, social, political, and economic entanglements in which disabilities emerge.4 they question whether it is possible to isolate disability from its entanglements and embrace it as a universal and inescapable condition even when produced under oppressive structures and social injustice. against the universalizing of disability, special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 8 puar (2017) responds, depending on where we live, what resources we have, what traumas we have endured, what color our skin is, what access we have to clean water, air, and decent food, what type of health care we have, what kind of work we do…we will not all be disabled. some of us will simply not live long enough, embedded in a distribution of risk already factored into the calculus of debilitation. (p. xiv) this statement resonates with wilson gilmore’s (2007) definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of groupdifferentiated vulnerability and premature death” (p. 247). along this same vein, kafer (2013) assures that, “of course, disability is more fundamental, more inevitable, for some than others: the work that one does and the places one lives have a huge impact on whether one becomes disabled sooner or later, as do one’s race and class” (p. 26). in this way, the distribution of environmental risk and vulnerability produces social difference through bodies that are raced, classed, gendered, and disabled. foucault’s (1978, 2003, 2007) theorization of biopolitics has been useful in examining differentiated practices of inclusion and exclusion through the dispersed administration of life via the distribution of risk, bodily health, and vulnerability among different populations under current neoliberal regimes. for instance, several authors have adopted biopolitical frameworks to thoroughly examine how pesticide regulations are made to protect agribusiness as well as certain bodies regarded worthy, yet leave those unwanted exposed to harm reproducing their condition of being expendable (guthman, 2017; guthman & brown, 2016; harrison, 2006, 2008, 2011; saxton, 2015). to grapple with the biopolitical distribution of health, risk, and toxicity, chen (2012) proposes a posthumanist approach. for this purpose, they question the politics of dominant hierarchies of animacy arranged by qualities of agency, sentience, or liveness while attending to the material conditions of social difference along the lines of race, species, bodily ability, and sexuality. similarly, puar (2017) reads foucault’s (2003) conceptual paradigm of biopolitics as a theory of debility and capacity. in addition to the sovereign’s “right to take life or let live,” and “right to make live and let die,” she distinguishes “the right to maim or will not let die.” specifically, she conceptualizes maiming as “a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable” (puar, special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 9 2017, p. xviii). deliberate maiming or disabling is carefully calculated and executed by means of scientific knowledge and risk management intricate to biopolitical population management. as a result of maiming, disability is a deliberate product—an expected impairment—due to exploitative labor conditions, with the racialized body targeted for injury. she suggests that disability “exists in relation to assemblages of capacity and debility, modulated across historical time, geopolitical space, institutional mandates, and discursive regimes” (puar, 2017, p. xiv). looking at the production of disability through colonial and militarized occupations, she warns us that the israeli defense force policies of shooting palestinians to maim, not to kill, or of regulating calories (“starvation diet”) to stunt children’s growth, are often misperceived as life-preserving and humanitarian (puar, 2017). such biopolitical tactics “[keep] the death toll numbers low in comparison to injuries” (puar, 2017, p. 144). puar argues that debility does not necessarily encompass disability; nor is it an identity but rather a massification, a process or doing through capitalist exploitation and imperialist expansion to “precaritize populations and maintain them as such” (2017, p. 73). in this essay, i employ biopolitical approaches from feminist and queer theory to look at how chemical injury is deployed to maintain certain orders by disabling racialized bodies that are rendered available for injury. i illustrate how the neurological disabling of racialized subjects who are deemed disposable through the release of toxic pesticides, permitted by regulatory agencies that place the threshold of harm above what they legally and scientifically recognize as harm, leaves the toll of neurotoxic pesticide exposure unknown. chlorpyrifos’s toxic politics the thought of being gassed by chlorpyrifos today evokes war and death. its opponents frequently note that chlorpyrifos derives from a nerve gas first developed by german chemists during world war ii that the nazis adopted for its neurotoxic potency. this class of chemicals, which includes sarin gas, are known as organophosphates and are still used as chemical weapons in combat (davis, 2014; nash, 2004). dow chemical company—one of the world’s agrochemical mega companies—repurposed these chemicals as pesticides and introduced chlorpyrifos into the market in 1965. however, organophosphates were not commonly used until the 1980s (davis, 2014). after rachel carson’s influential silent spring was published in 1962, which documented the adverse environmental effects of indiscriminate use of pesticides in the us, ddt and other organochlorines underwent legislative and regulatory scrutiny for their environmental impacts as persistent organic pollutants. once ddt was banned in 1973 in the us, growers turned to alternatives such as organophosphorous special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 10 compounds as these were less persistent in the environment and did not bioaccumulate as organochlorines did. some farmworkers who are still active in the fight for safer agricultural practices remember pushing for organophosphates at the time, believing these could be a promising solution.5 even though organophosphates are more acutely toxic for shorter intervals, chemical toxicity became more contained spatially and temporally but also more hazardous to those most proximate: namely, farmworkers.6 moreover, although the pesticide compounds used in this region’s productionist agricultural regimes have changed from lead arsenate, organochlorines like ddt, and now organophosphates, the communities affected have expressed feelings that they are simply different forms of the same persistent toxic carelessness and ongoing violence directed towards their communities and the environment. while the overall use of chlorpyrifos has increased over the years, the epa has slowly instituted moderate restrictions on its use and application to reduce certain risks. in fact, in 2001 the federal epa prohibited chlorpyrifos for residential use (u.s. environmental protection agency, 2001) given that it found “unacceptable risks to children” (earthjustice, 2017). many people called out environmental racism the decision to not ban chlorpyrifos in agriculture allowing the continued exposure of farmworkers and their children, who are mostly mexican. after several lawsuits to ban this pesticide, the epa, under president barack obama’s administration, in november 2016 finalized an extensive risk assessment ordered by a federal court. to those most affected—that is, farmworkers and their children—the report basically concluded that there is no safe level of chlorpyrifos. the public foresaw a ban in the near future. however, on 29 march 2017, epa director scott pruitt, under president donald trump, refused to ban chlorpyrifos, defending it as follows: we need to provide regulatory certainty to the thousands of american farms that rely on chlorpyrifos, while still protecting human health and the environment. by reversing the previous administration’s steps to ban one of the most widely used pesticides in the world, we are returning to using sound science in decision-making—rather than predetermined results. (u.s. environmental protection agency, 2017) the public felt devastated and indignant after this response, which evinced trump’s post-truth, corporate-driven, and anti-mexican politics. the community has felt unheard and discounted by dow chemical’s illegal corporate practices, the concealing of risks from the public, unethical scientific studies, and corrupt relationships between the corporation and government agencies.7 given the special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 11 federal government’s inaction, environmental groups, ngos, and communities affected—particularly those in the central valley and the central coast—sought a chlorpyrifos ban in california. on 8 may 2019 california became the third state to ban all chlorpyrifos use, following hawaii and new york (dennis & eilperin, 2019). figure 1. monterey county local resident holding poster at the california epa in sacramento to demand a chlorpyrifos ban. now, “chlorpyrifos is only the tip of the iceberg,” as a local teacher commented. many opponents of chlorpyrifos know that it may not be the most harmful organophosphate to which they are commonly exposed, and that most of the past and current studies do not capture the cumulative, long-term, or interactive effects of multiple pesticides. however, they still consider the case of chlorpyrifos an important representation of how long-term and transgenerational chemical injury is produced through interactions with certain chemicals during sensitive life periods. furthermore, it illuminates how scientific knowledge, regulatory policies, capitalist power, and racism are intertwined in the reproduction of inequality. loss of learning potential through chemical injury for charlie, there is a wondrous resemblance between the images of a neural special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 12 network and the known universe’s cosmic web of galaxies. as he pointed this out to me, he explained that “in its most basic level,” learning “is the ability of neurons or brain cells to intercommunicate with one another.” charlie, who is now retired, worked as a farmworker for eighteen years and later became a special education instructor for two decades in rural agricultural communities among majority latino, low-income students. drawing from scientific evidence from various laboratory studies of cell and nonhuman animals, and of human populations, he explains that exposure to organophosphates and cholinesterase inhibitors such as chlorpyrifos blocks or “scrambles” this messaging between brain cells that makes learning possible. charlie links pesticide exposures to his students’ learning disabilities, neurological disorders, lower iqs, and various behavioral problems he has long observed. although charlie recognizes that learning disabilities can develop from various factors, including birth complications, poverty, poor nutrition, physical or psychological trauma, and various environmental exposures, he asserts that chlorpyrifos is undeniably a contributing factor. through “accepted risks,” charlie explains the deferment of chemical injury onto the children of farmworkers, co-producing “other” developmental trajectories and intergenerational pathways labeled with disorder and disability. thus, the chemical effects of pesticides are spatially and temporally displaced from the fields and their present workers onto the later development of future generations. chemical injury is not only latent (murphy, 2013), but triggered or pre-activated during critical windows of development. as such, charlie raises the interconnectedness between past and future temporalities, but also the peculiar ontological vulnerability of sensitive durations in the life course, such as the nine months of gestation. rather than causing death or other symptoms of acute exposure, the ordinary low-level exposure to chlorpyrifos and other neurotoxic pesticides cause long-term transgenerational injuries that often go unaccounted for in the calculus of farming expenses. charlie also stressed that, while neural pathways can be rewired or reprogrammed to make up for changes in brain morphology in children exposed to organophosphates in utero, learning disabilities are permanent. as a special education instructor, he aimed to provide accommodations and compensatory strategies. however, charlie felt that his students still confronted multiple structural challenges, including the educational system itself, from understaffed large classes and overworked special education teachers, to the archaic classroom structure and ineffective curricula. he describes how his students had trouble developing appropriate cognitive abilities, as well as paying attention and special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 13 adjusting their behavior to the classroom setting. voicing frustration, he states, “it is very challenging to get students to like school again because most of them hated it because they felt that they failed.” he also condemns the unequal and unfair distribution of resources and services towards white students in more affluent zones of the school district. anglo or white parents, he presumed, were more likely to advocate for their children thanks to their higher education, financial, and legal resources, and institutional knowledge; whereas latino parents struggled with language barriers, immigration, and limited institutional knowledge, and felt disempowered and thus were less likely to advocate. figure 2. display board titled ‘chlorpyrifos and greenfield’ assembled by charlie, shown outside the california state capitol in sacramento on a trip to meet with state legislators to urge a chlorpyrifos ban. maps were taken from california environmental health tracking program, california department of public health. online at www.cehtp.org/pesticidetool. in this regard, disability intersects with other geopolitical and social markers of difference, and is further compounded or alleviated by uneven infrastructures (erevelles, 2011a; murphy, 2017; puar, 2017). puar (2017) notes that bodily experiences “can be capacitated through a reorganization of resources, of white privilege, class and economic mobility” (p. 65), while “other” bodies are debilitated through multiple barriers and forms of community disenfranchisement. therefore, not only are latino children more exposed to chlorpyrifos and other pesticides, but this chemical has a more profound impact http://www.cehtp.org/pesticidetool special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 14 on latino children due to language, class, race, national origin—to which environmental regulatory agencies remain oblivious. figure 3. display board titled ‘chlorpyrifos and learning’ also created by charlie. charlie included a learning disabilities checklist in both english and spanish in order for parents to identify whether their child might potentially have a learning disability. as shown, charlie also includes pictures and quotes from farmworker leader cesar chávez. both boards in figures 2 and 3 were initially created to show spanish-speaking parents in greenfield (south of monterey county) the use of chlorpyrifos and acetylcholinesterase inhibitor pesticides in their area, and the links between chlorpyrifos and learning disabilities. in the same fashion, charlie identifies weaker support systems for adults with learning disabilities, which deepens their marginality. in addition to considering agribusiness’s economic costs of banning chlorpyrifos, charlie has urged the california epa to bear in mind the “hidden costs” from chlorpyrifos exposures. he finds the incalculable “loss of human learning potential staggering.” he draws from national data that shows that adults with learning disabilities rarely apply for americans with disabilities act accommodations, have higher unemployment rates, receive lower incomes, and are disproportionately incarcerated or imprisoned. while their social and economic marginalization may resist capitalism in various ways as several disability scholars suggest, the oppressive processes of capitalism that exploit profit from their disposability still impinge upon them. puar special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 15 (2017) explains, populations that are not roped into an economy of rehabilitative objects of care are sites of profit precisely for their availability for injury, their inability to labor, their exclusion from adequate health care, and their ideological production as lazy, criminal, and burdensome. (p. 78) read as non-laboring bodies or non-contributing subjects, they are further constructed as unworthy and disposable objects, which perpetuates their exclusion. thus, debilitation is central to capitalism’s ongoing exploitation in zones of dispossession prone to environmental injustice. stolen futures and cheap labor eric remembers being awoken as a child by the sound of the crop duster spraying pesticides in the mornings over the fields surrounding the farmworker labor camp where he lived. growing up, he worked in the sprayed agricultural fields alongside his parents and siblings, but began to learn about the pesticide impact on human health a few years ago. eric has taught at the same elementary school for over twenty years, where most students are hispanic from low-income farmworker families from the salinas valley. through the years, he has noticed the expanding list of learning disabilities and overall health issues among his students. he reckons that “students of monterey county face alarming rates of learning disabilities,” 8 as he stated in his speech at a rally for the statewide banning of chlorpyrifos outside the california epa. referring to the chamacos study, eric remarked, “the scientific evidence…demonstrates the undeniable link between the agricultural pesticides applied nearby and developmental delays that leave children at a huge disadvantage.” seeing the difficulties his students have with developing different skills and competencies such as reading, comprehension, math, and logical reasoning, he added, “it’s hard! it’s really hard to watch children struggling in the classroom and know that their health and potential, their true potential had been stolen from them.” rather than flourishing at this stage, these school-aged children, eric observes, are developmentally delayed, disadvantaged, setback in a fast-paced school system. to imagine future generations of children whose brains are compromised and who are dispossessed from their intellectual capabilities afflicts the community; and these issues have been central to the antichlorpyrifos campaign. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 16 the notion of lost futures and children’s stolen potential are common tropes in the fight against chlorpyrifos as well as in discourses of children threatened by other environmental toxins (e.g., colburn, dumanovksi, & peterson myers, 1996; chen, 2012; grandjean, 2013; markowitz & rosner, 2013). aside from the overexamined meanings of innocence, vulnerability, victimhood, lack of agency, and becoming that the child figure evokes (cannella & kincheloe, 2002), feelings of disadvantage, loss, dispossession, and injustice among a group deemed “deficient” and depicted as careless about their children’s learning and education (valencia, 2002) also emerge. some disability scholars (e.g., clare, 2017; gibbons, 2017; mcruer, 2006; siebers, 2008) suggest that the nostalgic mourning for a lost body is symptomatic of a compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness to the degree that the futures of those disabled become “both unimagined and unimaginable” (kafer, 2013, p. 44). instead, puar (2017) suggests, the capacity to inhabit futurity is already a privilege of ableism. this capacity is not simply affective or phenomenological but also structural, biopolitical, and ensnared in economies of risk, calculation, and survival. the future is already here, but it is unevenly distributed, in bits and pieces in time and space, as extremes and also as banalities. the disability to come is thus due not to aging or the exceptional accident but to the racialized body as available for injury, what deleuze and guattari denote as the “pre-disabled.” (p. 86) as bodies available for injury, latino children are predisabled before birth, already disadvantaged. the exposure to chlorpyrifos and other pesticides that harm bodies is part of this structural and biopolitical distribution of risk and futurity that follows racial lines and intensifies precarious futures. therefore, to mourn lost futures is not limited to a compulsory desire for ablebodiedness. it calls for us to value these bodies and render them worthy of being nurtured and cared for to reach their full potential. given the dominant biopolitical distribution of harm and futures, to imagine alternative “futures” where mexican american children can be seen as capable of learning, but also vulnerable to the exposure of tiny amounts of chemicals, disrupts and transgresses the status quo. along with charlie and other teachers, eric sees how the futures of latino children are limited not only by the toxic harm but also educational inequality. latino and other children of color disproportionately attend underserved rundown schools with limited resources. in effect, he notes, every year, the further they fall behind. the further they fall behind, the less motivated they are going to be…they start to feel special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 17 embarrassed, self-conscious about it. i think that is when education doesn’t become a priority anymore, and they say, “you know what? i don’t want others to see me. i am dumb, stupid. i’m unintelligent. i rather do something that i am good at.” and they’ll find a job and prefer to go work somewhere. so obviously it is very discouraging for them. and that is why they will probably choose a different path. eric offers a complex view of how social and economic inequality through latinos’ educational underachievement are reproduced through chemical, institutional, and affective entanglements. in this sense, there is an unequal distribution of harm and exhaustion that make it difficult for abandoned groups to strive and persevere (povinelli, 2011). the troubles these children experience trying to learn at school rewrites long-held eugenic notions about the bodies of mexican americans—namely, that they are “unfit” and “unworthy citizens.” they are only desirable as workers if they are physically fit to do the hard labor they are “biologically suited” to do and that whites avoid, like agriculture (molina, 2006; nash, 2006). unfortunately, eric explains, such patterns of low educational attainment make it easy for “those who deny the science, [to] make excuses.” these excuses say that latinos do not prioritize education, or that they should move away—as if that were easy. coming from a farm working background himself, eric knows well the constrictions they face and their reliance on farmwork as a form of subsistence. like dr. garcia mentioned in the opening quote, eric also views education as a way out of the minimum-wage agricultural work, out of the labor camp, as it was for him and his siblings. indeed, many farmworkers find their labor gratifying and enjoyable. yet, many also realize the physical toll and undervalued aspects as well, and aspire for their children to study and move on to more highly valued and paid positions. dr. garcia and eric imply that it becomes harder for these children with harmed brains to perform in school and achieve academically; many of them eventually fall into farmwork and reproduce cycles of poverty and segregation that trap latinos in the labor camp where they only work to get by. if everyone gets an education, then, he posed rhetorically, “who is going to do the jobs nobody wants to do?” therefore, the production of cognitive disabling through chemical injury functions to extract value from racialized bodies by creating a surplus of future generations to work in toxic and dangerous industries such as agriculture (guthman, 2017), which maintains them in a mode of survival amid precarity in a stratified society (puar, 2017). special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 18 to eric, the subtle, low-level exposure of pesticides is not a “conspiracy”; rather, it is calculated through science, technology, and regulation to benefit agribusiness and disregard latinos. he says, “we’re just a workforce and that is it. that is all they want us for: cheap labor. the same thing with flint.” eric alludes to the similar racial and class discrimination against latinos and blacks through environmental toxicity. doing so, he claims that the state and private industries do not care for the wellbeing of these populations, yet they profit from the cheap labor extracted from their bodies, and then from their further marginalization. racial biopolitics in mass disabling a few months before pruitt refused to ban chlorpyrifos, dr. garcia compared the lead-poisoned water crisis that has primarily affected african americans in flint, michigan, to the organophosphates in monterey county and across california. in a community meeting, she referenced dr. mona hanna-attisha, the pediatrics professor whose research revealed that children in flint were exposed to dangerous lead levels, who once said, “if you were going to put something in a population to keep them down for generations to come, it would be lead” (ganin & tran, 2016). alternatively, dr. garcia posited, “it could be organophosphates.” like lead, organophosphates are toxic to the nervous system, especially to the brain. to support her proposition, she cited the chamacos study, which correlated prenatal exposure to 522 lb (237 kg) of organophosphates within onekilometre radius with a two-point decrease in iq. looking at publicly available data, dr. garcia figured it is very common for areas in monterey county to have been dumped with more than 522 lbs of organophosphates. as in flint, “the horror” is that state regulators “have looked the other way” and failed to protect the public—specifically, poor urban african american residents and poor mexican farmworkers. she alerts us that it is not “just a few iq points” lost when we estimate “the thousands and tens of thousands of children”—generations— affected over the years. the mass scale of the issue emerges from the systemic racist neglect of and carelessness for these children of color. similarly, puar (2017) notes how israel’s strategy of disabling, maiming, and stunting palestinians is a form of biopolitical control to “render impotent any future resistance, future capacity to sustain palestinian life on its own terms, thereby debilitating generational time” (p. 4). uncovering the meanings and politics of what and who become chemically injured, toxic, polluted, disrupted, or lost (chen, 2012; douglas, 2001; liboiron et al., 2018) helps us see why a matter of such scope remains marginalized. nash special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 19 (2006) explains how health officials and public authorities employ racialized discourses of lack of hygiene and education to belittle farmworkers’ personal testimonies of pesticide poisoning. according to chen’s (2012) animate hierarchies, the biopolitics of race and bodily ability defer toxicity to “deprivileged or already ‘toxic subjects” (p. 218). before the flint crisis garnered the media’s attention, chen questioned whether it would be possible to alarm the public about black children’s vulnerability to environmental lead given the dominant construction of the black body. they note that the “racial construction of blacks as already unruly, violent, contaminated, and mentally deficient lies inherent in the current neoliberal economy, itself an economic mode conditioned and supported by a growing and incredibly powerful prison industrial complex” (chen, 2012, p. 270). through similar racial projects, mexican descent groups have been constructed as lazy, dirty, trash, vermin-infested, backward, unambitious, irresponsible, dumb, unmotivated to learn, and unworthy of knowledge. a large body of critical scholarship has shown that african american and mexican american children have been more frequently labeled as “intellectually deficient,” “inferior,” and “feeble-minded.” in fact, during the early twentieth century, segregated schools were rationalized and legitimated on the basis that mexican children were genetically deficient, unmotivated, and immoral in comparison with their white peers (chávez-garcía, 2007; gonzalez, 1996; valencia, 1997). over time, the underlying racist science of such ideas was (more or less) debunked and replaced by ideas of cultural deficiency, which continued to justify mexican americans’ underachievement as a corollary of their backward culture. through these sort of racial constructions, certain groups are regarded as deserving of their conditions, which absolves the neoliberal state from securing their welfare. like black children, mexican american children are not only deemed unavailable or unable to learn but predisabled (puar, 2017) by structural forces even before they encounter chlorpyrifos and other neurotoxicants in their bodies. as these children are unable to learn and achieve academically, cognitive disabling through chemical exposures remains unalarming and uneventful (nixon, 2011). in this sense, the subtle low-level exposures during early life stages, even before birth, disrupts farmworker children’s development and learning but maintains the community as a subaltern underclass (douglas, 2001; liboiron et al., 2018). a biopolitical lens helps us examine how concerned groups see exposure to neurotoxic organophosphates as an artifact of population control “to keep them down,” as dr. garcia said, and sheds light on underlying racial hierarchies. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 20 conclusion in this article, i use a biopolitical lens to examine how disproportionate exposure to industrially produced toxic substances that are linked to neurological and cognitive disabling is both an instrument and product of racial capitalism. such exposure allows industries to exert power over populations by extracting value from their bodies, which are cast disposable. as they trace the invisible and dispersed geographic reach of chlorpyrifos’ chemical injury, concerned local groups in monterey county denounce the chemical’s spatial and temporal deferment onto the unborn and children of latino farmworkers for debilitating their capacity to sustain their communities. tracing its invisible and dispersed geographic reach, concerned local groups in monterey county denounce that the spatially and temporally deferred chlorpyrifos’ chemical injury onto the unborn and children of latino farmworkers debilitates their capacity to sustain their communities. thus, toxic harm is embedded in the unequal racial and capitalist orders that maintain them as an expendable class living in precarity and working in exploitative jobs such as farmwork. the massive transgenerational disabling effects are sustained through pervasive racist perceptions of mexican americans as defective, unfit to learn, lazy, and a burden to society. consequently, the mass exposure and disabling of mexican american children to pesticides goes largely disregarded by the general public. claiming the mass disabling of their latino community condemns the ongoing exposure to neurotoxic pesticides, particularly to those most vulnerable during sensitive periods, as well as the poverty, racism, the unequal education system, limited access to health and social services, exploitative labor conditions, notions of individualism and productivity, capitalist modes of production, inadequate public health regulations, and corrupt corporate politics. all these issues extend and intensify the disabling capacity of chlorpyrifos—maintaining and reproducing “inequity and sacrifice” (liboiron et al., 2018). by attending closely to how the community sees such exposure as suffering and loss, i aim to make space for communities deemed defective and disposable, to denounce and mourn their vulnerability to being harmed by toxins, and to desire otherwise—including more socio-environmentally just and caring futures. in light of possible coalitions between environmental justice and disability studies that attend to how power is enacted through chemical injury, it is critical to not lose sight of environmental justice’s fundamental tenet. that is, we must recognize that environmental hazards are differentially distributed, and critically examine the multiple ways in which disenfranchised communities are special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 21 disproportionately burdened. being critical of how futures are distributed in accordance with our racial state’s biopolitics, and valuing and caring for those regarded has having “no future” other than as surplus available for injury is important for fostering more socio-environmentally just politics. given the slow legal battle to ban chlorpyrifos at a federal level, a comprehensive ban in the near future seems unlikely. in the meantime, concerned groups shun dow chemical as it continues to capitalize on the sale of chlorpyrifos, while they suffer its risks. as those directly involved in the struggles note, as long industry and regulators continue to deem certain people unworthy of living and available for industry, the fight against pesticides will continue. acknowledgements many thanks to my informants, including those whose voices are not included in this paper but inspire this work. this research was possible thanks to the funding from the university of california dissertation fellowship and the university of california davis mellon research initiative in racial capitalism. i am grateful to gabriela sánchez, julie sze, and liza grandia, whose feedback helped improved this article. i am also thankful to the editors of the journal, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback. notes 1 pseudonyms are used to protect informants’ privacy. 2 various iq standardized tests are commonly used as scientific tools in the measurement of cognition. in this case, iq testing becomes significant as scientific studies correlate it to brain anomalies and chemical exposures. it is worth noting that iq scores in general have been highly disputed as an accurate measure of intelligence and, even more so, the quantification of intelligence. additionally, several scholars have noted that intelligence tests have also been used as diagnostic tools to categorize populations for biopolitical control and scientific racism. in fact, intelligence tests were introduced when eugenic movements emerged around the early twentieth century (see gould, 1996; stern, 2006). 3 children’s susceptibility to environmental toxicants and to organophosphates in particular has been noted. first, children have larger intakes to toxic chemicals on a body-weight basis than adults. second, their susceptibility is heightened during windows of vulnerability, which occur in embryonic and fetal life and early special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 22 childhood. third, children have a lower capacity to metabolize and detoxify (etzel & landrigan, 2013). 4 according to the social model, disability is universal and we are all “temporally able bodied” to the extent that becoming disabled is “only a matter of time” (garland-thomson, 2005, p. 1568). the former originally arose to disavow the dominance of the able-body—which depicts disability as a personal tragedy that wreaks a “grim future” or “no future” at all—and to push against the medical model that saw disabled bodies as pathological, deviant, and defective and insisted for cures. 5 according to davis (2014), at the time, risk assessment focused on cancer, and organophosphate insecticides were not greatly associated with carcinogenicity in humans—despite evidence of carcinogenicity in nonhuman animals—which allowed them to sneak through the regulatory gaps. 6 nonetheless, chlorpyrifos is still a semi-volatile compound prone to becoming air-borne and drifting off-site (pesticide action network north america, n.d.) for several miles, and its half life in soils can last between 7 and 120 days (national pesticide information center, 2010). chlorpyrifos can be more persistent in indoor environments. particulates have been found in dust samples even after they were phased out for residential use (quirós-alcalá et al., 2011). 7 for instance, concerned groups have brought up that dow chemical has engaged in unethical and illegal practices, conducted research on inmates (robbins, 1983), and falsely made safety claims in the advertisements of their products (new york office of the attorney general, 2003). they have expressed skepticism about trusting regulatory agencies given that following his election, trump appointed dow chemical chairman and ceo andrew liveris to be chair of the american manufacturing council (knaus, 2016). in addition, dow chemical donated $1 million to trump’s inaugural committee (blumenthal, 2017). news circulated that pruitt met privately with dow ceo andrew liveris on 9 march 2017, although an epa spokesperson clarified that the meeting was cancelled and they only had a “brief introduction in passing” (associated press, 2017). 8 in monterey county, of all students enrolled in special education (11.3%), 44% have learning disabilities. these numbers do not vary significantly from the state averages (12.5% in special education, 38.4% of whom have learning disabilities) (lucile packard foundation for children’s health, 2018a, 2018b). special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 23 notwithstanding, educators i spoke with who work in monterey county’s lowincome schools where the majority is hispanic (above 98%) cautioned that these numbers are likely underestimations for their schools. based on their observations, they estimate that up to 40% of their students may have learning disabilities and should receive special education services. however, given the limited resources in these schools, only those students most severely affected are referred and become recipients of special education services. furthermore, educators and parents of children with disabilities complain that children are often not properly diagnosed due to limited resources. references adam, b. 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(2017, march 29). epa administrator pruitt denies petition to ban widely used pesticide. retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-administrator-pruitt-denies-petition-banwidely-used-pesticide-0 valencia, r. (1997). conceptualizing the notion of deficit thinking. in r. valencia (ed.), the evolution of deficit thinking (pp. 1-12). london, uk: routledge falmer. valencia, r. (2002). “mexican americans don't value education!”: on the basis of the myth, mythmaking, and debunking. journal of latinos and education, 1(2), 81-103. voyles, t. b. (2015). wastelanding: legacies of uranium mining in navajo country. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. walker bl (2011). toxic archipelago: a history of industrial disease in japan. seattle, wa: university of washington press. whyatt, r. m., carman, d., perera, f. p., rauh, v. a., tang, d., kinney, p. l., garfinkel, r., andrews, h., hoepner, l., & barr, d. b. (2005). biomarkers in assessing residential insecticide exposures during pregnancy and effects on fetal growth. toxicology and applied pharmacology, 206(2), 262-254. author bio mayra g. sánchez barba is a postdoctoral fellow at the university of california davis where her current research examines how health care providers learn to care for rural http://www.toxicsymposium.org/conversations-1/2016/3/21/3ggqmt8rnq1qslt443mibknvjdatlg http://www.toxicsymposium.org/conversations-1/2016/3/21/3ggqmt8rnq1qslt443mibknvjdatlg https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2001/09/12/01-22756/chlorpyrifos-end-use-products-cancellation-order https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2001/09/12/01-22756/chlorpyrifos-end-use-products-cancellation-order https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-administrator-pruitt-denies-petition-ban-widely-used-pesticide-0 https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-administrator-pruitt-denies-petition-ban-widely-used-pesticide-0 special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) mayra g. sánchez barba, 2020 31 health disparities. she is interested in environmental health disparities, the production of knowledge, care, and pedagogy. microsoft word lykke final .docx lykke, nina (2019). co-becoming with diatoms: between posthuman mourning and wonder in algae research. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-25. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © nina lykke, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license co-becoming with diatoms: between posthuman mourning and wonder in algae research nina lykke linköping university ninly@fastmail.fm abstract the article is an autophenomenographic-poetic, eco-critical meditation on diatoms. it combines a reflection on the role of this algae species in the author’s posthuman modes of mourning her passed away lesbian life partner, with a discussion of philosopher isabelle stengers’s notion of wonder in materialist science, defined as open-ended approaches to unexpected diversity. diatoms are single-celled aquatic algae, a kind of phytoplankton, which, due to their ability to photosynthesize, have been categorized as plantlike. however, in 2011, it was discovered that diatoms have an animal-like urea cycle, assumed to provide robustness in times of nutrient scarcity, but also making diatoms resist categorizations as either plantor animal-like. taking the author’s entangled commitments to human–diatom relations and this unexpected discovery as entrance point to reflect on wonder in technoscience, the article discusses ways of shifting from instrumentalizing to wonder-based algae research, asking if speculative art and poetry can open new horizons, interpellating pathways to ethically care about diatoms. the article introduces two poems, articulating the author’s relations to the diatoms of limfjorden, the danish fjord, where her partner’s ashes are spread. the author’s autophenomenographic-poetic work is also brought in conversation with feminist technoscience scholar astrid schrader’s critical research on utilitarian instrumentalism in current harmful algal blooms (habs) research. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 2 introduction diatoms are single-celled aquatic algae belonging to the species of phytoplankton, which, like terrestrial plants, contains chlorophyll, transforms light to chemical energy through photosynthesis, and produces oxygen. living diatoms are reported annually to generate about 20% of the planet’s oxygen (allen et al., 2011). in 2011 an international research team discovered that diatoms, earlier considered plantlike due to their ability to photosynthesize, also have an urea cycle, which makes them able to excrete nitrogen and metabolize in ways that were assumed to characterize only animals and animal-like creatures (allen et al., 2011). the discovery, reported in nature (allen et al., 2011), was considered very surprising, since the plantlike ability to photosynthesize and the animal-like existence of an urea cycle until then had been seen as mutually excluding. in terms of the history of evolution, diatoms are older than terrestrial plants and animals. in evolutionary terms the in-betweenness of diatoms is assumed to have made them more robust and fit for overcoming problems such as nutrient starvation (allen et al., 2011). still, the way in which their metabolic system(s) makes them resist well-established dichotomous schemes and cross boundaries between categorizations as either plantlike or animal-like creatures was considered a remarkable and unexpected finding. the discovery fits what philosopher isabelle stengers (2011, p. 374) pinpoints as wonder-based science— that is, science that takes its point of departure in a material practice that is always open to let go of predefined conceptual frameworks (such as the dichotomous plant/animal distinction), when confronted with matter’s diversity. stengers argues for the necessity of wonder in science, based on the ontological assumption that matter’s diversity and dynamism will always exceed science’s conceptual frameworks. she also articulates the worry that science under current neoliberal conditions is becoming more and more instrumentalized, leaving wonder aside. in this article, i shall take further stengers’s (2011) reflections on wonder as an open-ended materialist scientific approach to unexpected diversity—with a particular focus on human–diatom relations and potential agencies of poetic approaches. first, i shall present my commitment to diatoms, which links ecological concerns and deeply personal engagements, related to my mourning of my passed away lesbian life partner, whose ashes are spread in a seabed made up of fossilized diatoms. i use an autophenomenographic and poetic methodology (allen-collinson, 2010; lykke, 2018), which implies that poetic explorations of autobiographic material is a key focus; along these lines, the second part of the article consists of two poems from my forthcoming book (lykke, 2019b), special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 3 poetically articulating human–diatom relations. third, i discuss a potential shift from instrumentalizing to wonder-based algae research with a starting point in feminist technoscience scholar astrid schrader’s critical research on algae (schrader, 2012, 2015). fourth, i bring my poetic and autophenomenographic work to bear on the discussion of potential shifts in scientific approaches to algae, asking if speculative poeticizing, posthuman mourning, and spiritual-materialist, feminist, and immanence philosophical approaches to human–diatom relations can contribute to an opening of new horizons and a rethinking of human–algae relations, necessary for such a shift. in conclusion, i sum up what a science of wonder might implicate, building on stengers (2011), but taking further cues from my dialogue with schrader’s work (2012, 2015) and from my poetic and autophenomenographic work into account. wondering with diatoms my personal commitment to diatoms stems from their posthumous co-creation of the so-called fur formation, a cliff and earth formation at the coast of the island fur, located in a fjord, limfjorden, in the northern part of my home country, denmark. the ashes of my lesbian life partner are spread over the diatomite seabed outside of the fur cliffs. diatoms are assumed to have first occurred in the jurassic period 150 million years ago. but the fossilized diatoms of the fur formation are, geologically, dated back to the threshold between the paleocene and the eocene, 55 million years ago, when the area was covered by a subtropical sea. mixed with clay, the dead diatoms turned into sedimentary rock (remarkably lighter than stony rock), and the clayey diatomite gathered on the ocean floor. due to strong volcanic activity at the time, the clayey diatomite also became mixed with layers of volcanic ashes (pedersen, 2008), and with fossilized remains of animals and plants living in the waters of the subtropical sea. in the ice age, around 10,000 years ago, the ice pushed part of the sedimentary rocklike material so that it rose to cliffs of which the highest parts are forty meters above sea level (pedersen, 2008). before my beloved died, she and i decided that both our ashes should be spread in these waters. when, as part of my mourning, i have poetically contemplated and philosophically investigated my partner’s metamorphoses from alive to dead human body, transformed to ashes via cremation, and mixed with diatomite sand in the seabed outside of the fur cliffs, i have become corpoaffectively committed to the diatoms, to the fur formation, and to the underwater world, which makes up my beloved’s current whereabouts—a world rich also in living diatoms. a process of co-becoming with my beloved in her present physical state of existence, and reflecting on it through poetic writing and immanence philosophy (deleuze & guattari, 1988; braidotti, 2006, 2013; bennett, special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 4 2010), is part of my spiritual-materialist (anzaldua, 2015) endeavor to reconnect. my commitment to the fur formation, the underwater world and the dead and living diatoms is, thus, personal but also ethico-political in a multilayered, embodied, felt, and imagined sense. to contextualize my ensuing reflections and the article’s suggestions for a wonder-based approach to algae research, let me briefly elaborate on these entangled layers of commitment. contemplating the metamorphoses of my partner’s material remains and the underwater world, of which her ashes are now part, i came to consider the need for re-ontologizing death and afterlife along the lines of immanence philosophy. despite differences, major western— christian as well as secular scientific— discourses and imaginaries of death share a dualist and dichotomous understanding of life/death, related to the divides running between mind/matter, human/nonhuman, and animate/inanimate. when contemplating my dead beloved’s bodily metamorphoses and her becoming one with the fur formation, i could not but see the normative effects of these dichotomies as deeply insulting both to my beloved’s material remains and to the diatom-rich waters of the fjord. emerging from a belief in human exceptionalism, and its corollary contempt for the flesh and instrumental approach to worldly matter, the dichotomies reduce the dead human body to either a launching pad for the immortal soul or to a piece of scrap, left behind by the driver, and imply an indifference vis-à-vis the vibrant materiality and physicality of matter—from corpse to diatomous sand. so against the background of my desire to resist this contempt and arrogant degrading, i started a process of philosophically re-ontologizing and poetically reimagining death on posthuman grounds. as part of establishing a posthuman platform for mourning my partner, i also became much more intensely and specifically committed to an eco-political critique of the ways in which limfjorden, including the waters outside of fur, have become an arena for human-induced dying and deterioration, than i had been earlier. the fjord started to hit the headlines as an arena for ecological disasters in the 1970s, after a chemical factory located in the westernmost part of the fjord had discharged enormous amounts of poisonous waste, leading to reoccurring episodes of mass death of fish (skriver, 2006). other serious ecological threats to the fjord’s ecosystems have been reported as caused by the fishing industry (overfishing), but in particular, the discharge of nitrogen and phosphates from the intensive agriculture in areas around the fjord has been pinpointed as causing socalled harmful algal blooms (habs)— that is, regularly occurring excessive growth of algae, dominated especially by diatoms and dinoflagellates, and disastrous levels of oxygen depletion during hot summer periods (skriver, 2006; carstensen, special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 5 henriksen, & heiskanen, 2007). while the geology of the fur formation is described as overall unchanged since the dramatic events in the ice age (pedersen, 2008), it is commonly noted that the biology of limfjorden’s underwater world, including the waters of the fur formation, has been undergoing drastic changes over the last fifty to sixty years (skriver, 2006). several species of fish, dependent on living close to the bottom, such as eels and flounders, have more or less disappeared from the fjord (skriver, 2006). the same applies to a seaweed species, eelgrass, formerly found all over the fjord (skriver, 2006). political endeavors to stop the polluting activities have had some effect (carstensen, henriksen, & heiskanen, 2007), but the powerful political position of danish agro-businesses has made it difficult to reach agreements on serious reduction of the nutrient discharge (skriver, 2006), leading to recurring incidents of algal blooms and further oxygen depletion (carstensen, henriksen, & heiskanen, 2007). long committed to intersections of left-wing, feminist, and green politics, i have, for years, been concerned about the pollution of limfjorden, and the capitalist “necropowers”1 responsible for it. however, my commitment to the fjord and the fur formation as a space for spiritual-material reconnection has made me politically and ethically attentive to its ecologies and the “necropolitical” (mbembe, 2003) entanglements that run between death, dying, and politics in new ways. the relationship linking me to the diatoms and the fur formation has become a bodily bond—an embodied compassionate companionship (lykke, 2018)—that i have come to see as part of a planetwide kinship of vulnerable and conative, human and nonhuman bodies (spinoza, 1996; haraway, 2016; lykke, 2019a). this embodied bond has made palpable my desires to engage in criticalaffirmative work for change, based on a material neovitalist ethics of sustainability (braidotti, 2006, pp. 265-266) and a speculative ethics of material care (puig de la bellacasa, 2017). this article is part of a comprehensive project on death, dying, and mourning (lykke, 2019b) which emerges from a deeply personal experience of loss. but, through a spiritual-material practice of reconnection with my passed away beloved’s bodily remains in their present state as ashes mixed with diatomous sand, the project also becomes interlinked with broader political and ecological concerns and the search for ways to resist and transgress the capitalist postcolonial necropolitics of the anthropocene, causing human as well as nonhuman immiseration, death, and dying. just like diatoms produce wonder by troubling known scientific and ontological boundaries, so i explore my position as mourning “i,” wondering about ways critically and affirmatively to trespass the special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 6 life/death dichotomies from feminist, queer, environmentally-concerned, posthumanist perspectives. a key methodology in my overall project, which also plays a part in this article, is autophenomenography (allen-collinson, 2010)—that is, autoethnography with a phenomenological approach. i have developed this methodology further to include poetry writing as a method of inquiry (richardson, 2000; lykke, 2014, 2018). moreover, i use the methodology in resonance with an unfolding of a posthuman and trans-corporeally grounded phenomenology of the mourning “i,” who tries, in poetically speculative and spiritually material modes, to relate to and co-become with the dead beloved in her present mode of existence as ashes mixed with diatomous sand. within the limits of this article, i cannot elaborate the philosophical aspects of this approach further. however, i shall briefly note that, in line with feminist scholar astrida neimanis (2017, p. 23), i reject the claim that posthuman thought and phenomenology should sit uneasily together. i follow neimanis, who argues that the body phenomenology of philosopher maurice merleau-ponty (2003) is always already posthuman in the sense that the bodily situation and lived experience not only concerns the “subjectivized human level” but also the body’s materiality and trans-corporeal (alaimo, 2008) relationship with the more-than-human-world (neimanis, 2017, p. 24). this relationship is crucial for neimanis when she accounts for the ways in which “we” (humans and nonhumans) experience ourselves as “bodies of water.” but it is also centrally important for the mourning “i” in my autophenomenographical research, because the poetic and spiritual-material pursuit of ways to co-become with the dead loved one implies a transgression of conventional modern, western ways of mourning, which stay within the limits of either a posthumous remembering of the human subject, or the religious frameworks built on a mind/body dualism. in this article, i shall focus on two poems from my collection, “fur” and “algae chant” (lykke, 2019b). concerned with the question of my co-becoming with diatoms, diatomous sand, the fur formation, and its underwater world, these poems spell out the entanglement of poetic, spiritual-material, and eco-political commitments, which are at the core of my posthuman autophenomenographical work. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 7 two poems fur we never walked along the coasts of limfjorden together. no memories of shared life can be found here. in our home in odense, you are everywhere. your jackets in the closet. your shoes in the entrance hall. your computer, your desk, your big armchair in the living room. your books on the bookshelf. your bed next to mine, upstairs. in the back yard, the shell pattern of differently coloured cobblestones, which we designed together. but here at limfjorden, everything is new. last year, i slept here with your blue urn next to me in bed, as i listened to the waves of the fjord, gently breaking on the beach outside. the next day we sailed to a quiet place beyond the cliffs of the island of fur, and watched your urn disappear beneath those waves. you are here! you are real— as a body of ashes. the sunset light is broken by dark clouds. a fine drizzle on my bent back, as i caress the wet beach stones. waves move gently over my hand. seaweed winds around my fingers. you are in the rain—you are in the waves. i am coming—my love. one more year has elapsed. i have eloped to the fjord one more time. i am searching for you. can i find you again? is a rendezvous repeatable? as i approach the fjord, heavy rain is pouring from a pitch-black sky. but over the island of fur a white cloud is emerging 1 2 special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 8 in the midst of the dark-grey cover. before i reach the hotel, the rain has stopped, and the evening sun is hovering low over the fjord. the sky has cleared completely now. it is very hot, as it was two years ago when we released your blue urn into the water. suddenly, a light drizzle is cooling my skin— the air is filled with raindrops pierced by sunlight, like falling prisms. it keeps dripping, endlessly. how long can it rain from a cloudless sky? i feel like swimming. the water folds smoothly around my body. i am floating on my back looking up into the sky. you hold me, while i swim with long, long back strokes. i fill my backpack with oyster shells. the beach abounds with them. many are fused into double, and sometimes triple shells, inseparable now in death, as they were before, when inhabited by live oysters. then my gaze is drawn by the blue, red, yellow, black, white stones of the cliff. a gigantic abstract painting, created by enormous dynamic forces, fossil on fossil, 55 million years of vibrating geological history condensed into a forty-metre high cliff erase every meaningful distinction between life and death. i walk along the beach under the cliff. i visit caves, carved out by waves, caress the gigantic crevices that crisscross the walls. a spring gushes from the cliff, its intense murmur catches my ear, the water running over my hands. i climb the steep slopes, cling to bushes of heather and leaves of grass, creep through impassably entangling pine branches, and with cuts on arms and legs, special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 9 i finally reach a path which takes me through forest and heathland to the summit of the cliff. i sit in the grass for a long, long time, contemplating the waters of the fjord. there, precisely there, in the direction of the three windmills, we let go of the line to the fishing net with your blue urn resting on a bed of oyster shells and beach stones, our last tie to who you were before. there, precisely there, two years ago, your blue urn was swallowed by the waters of the fjord. uffe has told me about a special kind of buddhist body meditation which requires you to imagine yourself as dead. i try to imagine my dead body, and the fire that will transform it to ashes. there, precisely there, we will meet again— ashes to ashes. i am coming—my love. algae chant living algae in the waters, soft and hairy, like a cat’s fur. oh, i love you, algae. my desire is to pat you, and to co-become with you. algae, algae, wise old critter, can you teach me how to photosynthesize? be a creature in-between? peeing as an animal; growing branches, leaves, and fruits? 1 special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 10 eating oysters spiced with algae, salty fluids in my mouth. cool, clear water, darkish night sky, mango moon, and algae juice. algae juice on sticky fingers, swimming naked in the sea, splashing, splashing, fur-ish algae touching bodies; seaweed strokes caress our skin. kisses growing even deeper, swimming, swimming, farer, farer, from the shore. you are leading, mango moonlight, touch my shiny algae fur. swimming, swimming, water cooling, naked bodies getting colder and more stiff. having trouble with my breathing. gasping, gasping, scary depths. dizzy, dizzy, undercurrents, where to go? dizzy, dizzy, water, water, all around me, dizzy, dizzy, in the waves. cannot see you! 2 3 special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 11 gone, gone! mango moon ray, take me with you, take me with you, do not leave me, pierce my heart, my mango moon ray, make me sink, until the blackness swallows you as well as me. merging with the waterworld, and staying there forever. brownish water, dying algae, children screaming ”oooch, it is poison!” dying in a hell of sulphur, sulphur death in white surroundings. innocence: “it was not me! no, i did not cause this dying, me, a white and guiltless farmer, who just wants to do my best! could i ever do such harm? for the oxygen depletion, algae are the ones to blame!” “farmer, farmer, stop this nonsense! you are overfeeding us! give us pleasure! do not gorge us! use your brains, and be attentive! try to watch us, and attune! 4 5 special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 12 we are old and very wise! we can teach you many lessons about kinship, time, and sympoiesis, if you listen carefully! otherwise, just go to hell, just go to hell —and die!” harmful/useful to whom? to help me invoke possible answers to the question if and how posthuman mourning and spiritual-materialist, feminist approaches to human–algae relations can contribute to an affirmative ecological critique and potential new pathways for scientific research on human–algae relations, i juxtapose my poems with schrader’s (2012) critical studies of mainstream discourses, imaginaries, and scientific practices related to prevention of habs. in the end of the discussion, i also enter into dialogue with schrader’s (2015) study on how to “begin to care” about deformed leaf bugs. schrader’s (2012) radically posthuman analysis of habs research examines the ways in which anthropocentric utilitarianism blocks the unfolding of algae research, which takes seriously that these creatures are “lively things” with their “own points of view” (schrader, 2012, p. 76). schrader’s critical discussion of habs research is related to the gulf of mexico. but, due to resonances between humaninduced habs there and in limfjorden, and between discourses, imaginaries, and scientific practices related to habs in these two underwater environments, schrader’s reflections are applicable in my context, too. therefore, i try to diffract her plea for an ethico-onto-epistemology,2 which recognizes the algae viewpoint and liveliness, with my spiritualist-materialist and poetical-philosophical endeavors to establish a platform for posthuman mourning of my passed away life partner. posing the question “harmful to whom?,” schrader spells out the anthropocentrism of habs research, emphasizing how the term harmful algal blooms constructs the algae as the enemy, while casting smoke screens around special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 13 the key part played by capitalist agro-businesses, whose profits are given political priority. adding to schrader’s argument, i shall put more emphasis on the fact that utilitarian anthropocentric algae research is not only claiming a “negative” algae agency, critically pinpointed by schrader’s polemic question “harmful to whom?,” but also a “positive one.” algae do not only appear to mainstream science as “harmful” agents, taking part in the destruction of fishing industries through their excessive “blooms.” there are also industrial and commercial expectations to algae. diatoms have, for example, become players in the development of nanotechnologies, where their ability to manufacture nanoscale structures is assumed to be exploitable (tesson & hildebrand, 2010). thus, it seems pertinent to complement schrader’s polemic “harmful-to-whom?” with the question of “useful-to-whom?” in order to emphasize that anthropocentrism instrumentalizes research on algae, regardless of whether it casts them in negative or positive roles. schrader (2012) also carves out the anthropocentric implications of the ways in which the consequences of habs are discursively represented as a step “down” the evolutionary ladder, “backwards” to the “time of slime”. she paraphrases an article from part one “a primeval tide of toxins” of the pulitzer prize–winning series “altered oceans” by los angeles times’ journalist kenneth weiss (2006)3 characterizing “the current ecological transformation of the oceans as the ‘rise of slime’” (schrader, 2012, pp. 76-77). according to schrader, “slime” here refers to “to the sliminess of some of the organisms that thrive under conditions of oxygen depletion” (2012, p. 78), but the term is also associated with something that is morally disgusting. schrader pinpoints how marine ecologist and paleontologist jeremy jackson, whose research is referenced in the los angeles times series, links slime and disease, while also giving a blatantly anthropocentric account of the ways in which habs are connected to killing of “higher” organisms such as fish and corals, which jackson, by contrast to the “slime,” characterizes as “the kind of life ‘we’ want” (jackson quoted in schrader, 2012, p. 78). another key point in schrader’s critique is to underline how anthropocentrism informs the onto-epistemologies governing environmental research on habs, and how linear progress narratives severely limit the perspectives of this research. she critically pinpoints how habs research is based on an unproblematized conceptualization of time as a container, which moves mechanically “forward” along a line, while contrasting essentialized and statically naturalized algae dichotomously to cultural—lively and flexible—humans, who use their “exceptional” agency to move teleologically towards “the future.” schrader argues for the necessity of disrupting the ways in which the dichotomy, dynamic special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 14 humans/culture versus static nonhumans/nature, is built into mainstream western conceptualizations of the linear time of evolution. she also emphasizes that such a disruption “requires attention to how we get to know nonhuman others” (schrader, 2012, p. 76). according to schrader, scientific investigations should consider that the objects to be studied have their own differently (spatially, temporally, and trans-corporeally) situated agencies and “points of view” (2012, p. 76). for algae research, an alternative approach would, as schrader suggests, imply considering how algae in one time, location, and trans-corporeal relationality may act in other ways than algae differently situated. moreover, schrader spells out how “we” (humans) must take such situated spatiotemporal differences carefully into account, if “we” want to know algae, not only to control them but to get to know them as planetary kin (haraway, 2016; lykke, 2019a) and to learn from them in order to sympoietically4 co-evolve. between speculative poeticizing and wonder-based research i shall now evoke stengers’s (2011) definition of a science of wonder, and note that schrader’s call for alternative approaches to science that recognize algae liveliness and perspectives resonates with stengers’s concept. moreover, i also bring the autophenomenographic and poetic exploration of my spiritualmaterialist practices of posthuman mourning and co-becoming with limfjorden’s diatoms into the discussion. i shall discuss how spiritual-materialist and poeticizing approaches such as the ones that i have developed as part of my posthuman efforts to co-become as mourning “i” could be important not only for the re-ontologizing of death in an immanence philosophical sense, which has been key to my mourning. these approaches can, i suggest, also be important for rethinking and reimagining the algae-other in a context of wonder (stengers, 2011), which speculatively may open new horizons for the understanding of algae–human relations beyond instrumentalizing, narrowly utilitarian ontoepistemologies. before going deeper into the question about the potential contributions of my poems to the discussion of wonder in algae research, i shall make a small detour to the issue of speculative fabulation/poeticization in feminism, as a possible pathway to the opening of new horizons for thinking, feeling, imagining, and acting differently. when referring to speculation, i am indebted to donna haraway and other feminists dedicated to writing and theorizing feminist science fiction, who, for years—long before what recently has been named a “speculative turn” in philosophy (bryant, srnicek, & harman, 2011)—have been committed to special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 15 the potentials of speculative storytelling and fabulation. haraway explicitly engages in speculative storytelling and fabulation in her recent book on kinmaking in the chthulucene (haraway, 2016). however, speculative fabulation is definitely not a new theme in haraway’s work. since primate visions (1989), she has again and again returned to feminist science fiction as a space for speculating realistically—that is, for inventing-thinking-imagining-feeling elsewheres and otherworlds, which are not just wild imaginations, but arenas for in-depth exploring the question: how could this world be? feminist philosopher maria puig de la bellacasa (2017), who made a major contribution to “speculative ethics,” links this “could-be” explicitly to an epistemology of ethico-political standpoint formation, through which one not only seeks knowledge about the world but also, in so doing, caringly adds something “in order to make a difference” (2017, p. 59). puig de la bellacasa specifies that “this involves not only detecting what is there, given in a thing-gathering, but also to think what is not…, [but] what could be” (2017, p. 59). it is to be noted that both haraway and puig de la bellacasa are in conversation with stengers and her notion of wonder in science. wonder, speculation, fabulation, and caring are interlinked in these approaches. to sustain the claim that my speculatively fabulating poeticizations could contribute to a rethinking and reimagining the algae-other beyond anthropocentric scientific discourses on harmfulness/usefulness, i suggest that my poetic texts may encourage wonder through their attending to positions of enunciation, disrupting the human “i” as the self-evident carrier of the textual point of view. what may give rise to wonder here is the ways in which this disruption profoundly challenges the anthropocentric onto-epistemology that, according to schrader, governs algae research, while preventing algae viewpoints from being articulated. to spell out what it means to foreclose algae perspectives, i ask if the algae can “speak,” and with reference to schrader’s analysis, i claim that the answer is, “no, not as long as ‘we’ (humans) stay within an ontoepistemological anthropocentrism!” however, when my poem “algae chant” blurs the boundaries between human “i” and algae “you,” and ends up locating the position of enunciation with the algae, while the human “i” vanishes, this can be read as a gesture of speculative disruption of the onto-epistemological silencing of the algae, and an exploration of what it implies to create a position of enunciation for algae perspectives. i suggest that new horizons open for poetic speculation with the potential aesthetic-ethical effect of evoking wonder. moreover, i claim that efforts to call forward this kind of effect could be a good foundation for embedding scientific practices in the “power of wonder,” which, according to stengers (2011, p. 374) means entering into the event which the scientific encounter with matter should always be framed as, in an open-minded special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 16 state, which allows total surprise and the completely unexpected to flourish. whether i poetically succeed in creating wonder along these lines is for readers to judge. but what i learnt myself from the poetic experiment, which shifts the position of enunciation, is that it creates new and very different ethical attachments and aesthetic sensibilities. it fosters an experience of a corpoaffective kinship between human and algae (haraway, 2016; lykke, 2019a), affirmed through a commitment to an ethics of sustainability (braidotti, 2006, pp. 265-266) and caring in the speculative mode of the “could-be” (puig de la bellacasa, 2017, p. 59). my poetic explorations of multiply intertwined life/death temporalities of diatoms and humans in the poem “fur” may also create wonder. they may do this while raising open-ended questions about the relations between these very different timescales and perspectives on life/death, and while starting also to question the predetermined, evolutionary progress narrative of a development from “simple” diatoms to “complex” humans within an essentialized, “neutral” time container, critically pinpointed by schrader. pushing the speculative poeticization further, “we” (humans) may start asking if we can learn from the diatoms that have been on earth since the jurassic era, as chrononormative science tells us through discourses that fetishize linear movement along the line of time’s arrow, anthropocentrically modeled on historical time of western modernity. we may perhaps even turn the argument about chrononormative linear development from “simplicity” to “complexity” upside down in a queering mode. instead of thinking of diatoms as a simplistic version of “later,” “higher” life forms, such as humans, animals “proper,” and terrestrial plants, we could perhaps instead start from the assumption that diatoms, due to their existence through eons, have evolved excellence in performing a cyclical and sustainable art of living and dying on this planet, rather than a linear and teleological one. along these lines, we could maybe begin to approach diatoms as potential carriers of an ancestral insight, from which we may learn new lessons, if we attune to listen attentively, and become prepared for unpredictable wonder. twisting the question that animal studies scholar and philosopher vinciane despret (2016) poses as main title of her book “what would animals say if we asked the right questions?,” substituting “animals” with “diatoms,” we could ask, what would diatoms say if we asked the right questions? the climate crisis and other kinds of planetary-scale human-induced, “multispecies, including human immiseration, across the expanse of terra” (haraway, 2016, p. 46) currently debated under the label of the “anthropocene,” testify to the fact that “humanity” (modern white western hu/man) (osamu, special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 17 2006) has done pretty badly when it comes to learning “the art of living” (tsing, swanson, gan, & bubandt, 2017)—and dying—in a balanced and sustainable way. diatoms seem to have done much better. according to geological analyses of the waterworld in which fur’s clayey diatomite is immersed, the subtropical sea, which, in-between the paleocene and the eocene 55 millions years ago, covered the fjord area in this part of denmark, indeed seems to have been a “high-stress environment” back then (pedersen, 1981, p. 496). the “stress” was created by periods of intense oxygen depletion and release of poisonous hydrogen sulphide generated by decaying organisms, including abundantly flourishing diatoms. but even though the events of these ancient times, including the agencies of diatoms, seem to have been dramatic and occasionally destructive, they did not threaten life on a planetary scale as does current human activity. therefore, contemplating intertwined human–diatom timescales and dramas on the thresholds of life/death in this relational way could perhaps give rise to wonder-based diatom research framed as lessons in resilience along the lines of haraway’s (2016) juxtaposition of resilience as both “refusal to deny irreversible destruction” and to “refusal to disengage from living and dying well in present and futures” (p. 86). it seems as if diatoms have cultivated these twin refusals to perfection throughout their eonic existence—on the one hand, staying with irreversible trouble (such as anoxic events), while, on the other, struggling to live and die well now and in futures to come. so, i shall suggest that lessons in balancing between both these refusals can perhaps be learnt from listening to diatom stories in a mode of scientific wondering. with reference to the contemplations of the mourning “i” in the poem “fur,” i shall, in particular, emphasize how such diatom stories may guide us (humans) towards what i shall define as the aionic time of mourning—that is, a time defined by “the continuous tense of becoming” (braidotti, 2013, p. 129). the excessive mourner, the one who transgresses the time limits of mourning stipulated by biopolitical agendas of current neoliberal health normativity regimes (freud, 1917/1946; apa, 2017) does not care about chrononormative and teleological time. the mourning “i” desires to rest “in sadness without insisting that it be transformed or reconceived” (cvetkovich, 2012, p. 14). in terms of time, this means dwelling in a temporality, which, seen from an individual perspective, can be described as a time of no time, but which, brought in conversation with diatom time and immanence philosophy, takes on aionic qualities, defined by “the continuous tense of becoming” (braidotti, 2013, p. 129). staying in this kind of time zone may also create wonder. finally, i suggest that, when articulating the mourning “i”s bodily desires to co special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 18 become with cliffs, diatomous sand, algae, and underwater world, my poetic texts may create wonder in terms of offering ways to begin to compassionately care about rather than instrumentalize algae. what does this mean? let me again enter into dialogue with schrader. how to “begin to care” about “strange” creatures—“others of whose existence we might not even have been previously aware” (schrader, 2015, p. 667)? schrader (2015) poses this question in an article on swiss artist, environmental activist, and science illustrator cornelia hessehonegger’s artistic-scientific paintings of leaf bugs deformed by low, long-term doses of radiation in the aftermath of chernobyl. the question is discussed with a focus on philosopher jacques derrida’s (2002, 2008) notion of “abyssal intimacy.” abyssal intimacy refers to an intimacy that, in a corpo-affectively caring mode, crosses the “abyss” between “the human” and “the animal.” according to derrida (2002, 2008), this “abyss” has been established by massively dominant ontoepistemologies of western philosophy. according to schrader (2015), the paintings and hesse-honegger’s mode of working aesthetically, ethically, and scientifically, while also using her paintings to articulate an activist protest, encourages viewers to begin to care ethically for the deformed leaf bugs. the gesture of encouraging viewers to begin to care is a complex one. it is consciously not linked to any immediate suggestions as to how to act upon the experience of feeling an urge to care for the leaf bugs. but, according to schrader (2015), hessehonegger’s paintings do, indeed, encourage viewers to engage in a corpoaffectively caring effort to transgress the human–animal “abyss” and the intersecting divide separating “us” (humans) from insects, for example, which are conventionally perceived as more “alien” and, therefore, even less likely candidates for being recognized as in need of care than so-called “higher” species of animals. i see some resonance with my poetic writing on algae here, which i shall spell out in order to highlight my final point about how it may open horizons for wonder and wonder-based science. like hesse-honegger, the mourning “i” of my autophenomenographic work is also reaching out to “strange” creatures, crossing the “abyssal” divide of which derrida (2002, p. 399) speaks. but according to the logic of the “abyss,” diatoms can perhaps be assumed to conventionally appear as even more “alien” than leaf bugs, and, therefore, even further removed from something which “we” (humans) would “begin to care about.” i suggest that the way in which diatoms defy conventional philosophical and scientific categorizations as either plantlike or animal-like creatures is likely to widen the abyss, and make a caring approach even more unimaginable and unthinkable. according to schrader (2015), who discusses a class of students’ responses to the work of hesse-honegger, there is already an enormous abyss when it comes to special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 19 imagining an ethically caring attitude vis-à-vis deformed leaf bugs. “i don’t care about bugs!” was the immediate reaction of a majority of schrader’s students when confronted in class with two texts on the chernobyl disaster—one on the consequences of human exposure to long-term radiation, and one on hessehonegger’s artistic reaching out to deformed leaf bugs (schrader, 2015, p. 666). so if “we” cannot care about leaf bugs, how to begin to care about diatoms, even more removed from “the human”—not even being a “proper” animal, and lacking the rootedness of a “proper” terrestrial plant?5 my poems are different from hesse-honegger’s artwork. but i think that i share with her a desire to transgress the abyss and establish “abyssal intimacy” in poetic/artistic gestures of corpoaffective, compassionate caring and touching. preparing for the writing of my poems while touching living and dead algae in limfjorden made me begin to care differently, taking into account that touch is a sense that bridges dichotomies of active/passive and subject/object. this, too, i claim may open new horizons for wonder and wonder-based science. conclusion: science of wonder and ethics of sustainability and caring when discussing algae research and potential shifts from utilitarian to wonderbased onto-epistemologies and methodologies, it is to be noted that wonder can be specified in different ways. in conclusion, i shall summarize the specifications, emphasized by stengers herself, as well as some to be added against the background of this article’s analyses. according to stengers, wonder is interconnected with the ability to be “affected, troubled, surprised” (2011, p. 374) by matter’s diversity and, i shall add, vibrancy (bennett, 2010). this ability resonates with what haraway (2008) calls responseability, the ability to respond to the other. as another key feature, stengers (2011) links the presence of wonder in materialist science to “struggle.” she argues that “just like the marxist concept of class, materialism [in science] loses its meaning when it is separated from its relation with struggle” (stengers, 2011, p. 368). i link this statement to braidotti’s cartography of the politics of affirmatively critical posthumanisms, thriving together with new, proliferating, and intersecting “minority-driven” interdisciplines such as queer, trans, feminist, decolonial, posthuman, anti-racist, postsocialist, environmental, dis/ability “studies” (braidotti, 2018, p. 21). these are “studies” that generate research committed to struggles for social and environmental justice worldwide, and in so doing make a case for cross-cutting alliances that strive to involve not only humans but also nonhumans, among them algae, as subjects, agents, and activists in this work. to special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 20 commit to such alliances must thus also be part of a wonder-based science, building on corpo-affective bonding and unfolding of a planetary kinship (haraway, 2016; lykke, 2019a), which humans join from a de-exceptionalized perspective. in my autophenomenographic-poetic research, i explore the position of a mourning “i” and a phenomenology of posthuman mourning embedded in practices to spiritually-materially reconnect and co-become with the material remains of my dead beloved, which i unfold in tandem with a search for pathways to de-exceptionalize the human. my entrance points to this search are, on the one hand, deeply personal, and in this sense in resonance with my strong wish to avoid normativizing routes to an ethics and aesthetics of posthuman mourning. but, indeed, on the other hand, it cannot be denied that most humans are likely, at some point in their life cycle, to take up the position of a mourning “i.” so i also wonder if posthuman mourning practices perhaps could be collectively cultivated with a humbling effect on subjects, otherwise bent on human sovereignty and control, and maybe pave the way for both new spiritual-materialist ecologies and technoscientific approaches based on wonder. generally, it cannot be emphasized enough that wonder, including wonder in science, must be understood as a phenomenon that can neither be controlled nor willed into existence by normative or instrumentalizing procedures. but it is also important to note that technoscience is a messy endeavor, and that utilitarianinstrumental aspects can be mixed with wonder. however, to create conditions for wonder to potentially occur, i suggest that a speculatively fabulating/poeticizing approach is apt for opening horizons and creating new sensibilities that can help the unfolding of an ethics of sustainability and caring, which transgresses the philosophically and scientifically constructed “abyss” between the human and the nonhuman (animal or plant) other, as well as between the human and even “stranger” others such as diatoms. acknowledgements i would like to thank the special issue editors olga cielemęcka and marianna szczygielska, as well as the anonymous reviewers for insightful and useful comments to earlier versions of the article. notes 1 the terms necropower and necropolitics are borrowed from postcolonial scholar achille mbembe (2003), who argues that michel foucault’s (2003) special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 21 conceptualization of biopolitics should be complemented by a conceptual framework that grasps that modern society is not only pervaded by biopower and endeavors to make citizens live, but also by tendencies to systematically let (some groups of people) die. using the notions of necropower and necropolitics in the context of the polluting effects of capitalist agriculture on the ecosystems of limfjorden, i extend the definition to include the systematic inducing of nonhuman death and dying as a consequence of capitalist modernity (lykke, 2019a). 2 the concept of ethico-onto-epistemology used here is based on karen barad (2007), who, against the background of her agential realist understanding of the world’s intra-activity, theorizes epistemology, ontology, and ethics as inextricably intertwined. the portmanteau term ethico-onto-epistemology is meant to signal this intertwinement. 3 the journalistic report is written by environmental reporter kenneth weiss, who references marine ecologist and paleontologist jeremy jackson, scripps institute of oceanography, university of california, san diego. 4 along the lines of haraway, sympoiesis can be defined as a concept that radically takes into account the ways in which all the world’s critters are entangled in processes of continuous re-assemblaging and becoming with one another: “critters interpenetrate one another, loop around and through one another, eat each other, get indigestion, and partially digest and partially assimilate one another, and thereby establish sympoietic arrangements that are otherwise known as cells, organisms, and ecological assemblages” (haraway, 2016, p. 59). 5 diatoms are different from terrestrial plants among others because they lack roots. in terms of the discussion of the abyss between “human” and “plant”— which can be added to that between “human” and “animal,” which derrida addresses—it is to be assumed that precisely the “rootedness” of terrestrial plants is one of the features that contributes to a diminishing of the abyss. in so far as the “roots” may contribute to make “us” (humans) see plants as metaphors for home and belonging (irigaray & marder, 2016, pp. 117-118). diatoms are in this sense likely to be seen as “more alien” than terrestrial plants. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 22 references alaimo, s. 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(2006, july 30). part one: a primeval tide of toxins. altered oceans series. los angeles times. retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/world/la-meocean30jul30-story.html author bio nina lykke is professor emerita of gender studies, linköping university, sweden, published cosmodolphins (with m. bryld, 2000) and feminist studies (2010), and cofounded international networks for queer death studies (2016) and for ecocritical special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) nina lykke, 2019 25 and decolonial research (2017). wu, angela xiao (2020). chinese computing and computing china as global knowledge production. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–12. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © angela xiao wu, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license chinese computing and computing china as global knowledge production angela xiao wu new york university angelaxwu@nyu.edu abstract as data-driven technologies and business models pervade on a global scale, china’s enormous digital economy often signals its dominating power by dint of data extraction. complicating this view, this critical commentary focuses on knowledge production, an important dimension for examining the ways in which postsocialist china transpires in global political economy in the age of big data analytics. first, i show how chinese commercial surveillance analytics profits from legitimation lent by the west-centric hierarchical academe. then, i move to transnational academic repurposing of big data from china, which becomes increasingly common. such social research tends to yield specters of china that are untethered to the lived realities of those whose data are taken. drawing on decolonial thinking and feminist care ethics, this commentary concludes by urging social scientists to “stay with the trouble,” making china “legible” in their computing of chinese big data. introduction on february 6 after 9 p.m., the word about li wenliang’s critical condition gathered attention from various parties and the online information situation was heating up. at 3:48 a.m. february 7, wuhan central hospital confirmed via its official weibo account: li wenliang critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela xiao wu, 2020 2 passed away at 2:58 a.m. hereby we report on the situation. thus begins the red-letterhead “major net intelligence special report” by womin technology, a company founded in beijing in 2007. ambiguously addressed to “relevant central authorities,” the report was submitted mere hours after the death of dr. li wenliang and leaked to the internet hours after. dr. li, whose mask-clad visage has since become the face of the pandemic, blew the whistle on a new virus on 30 december 2019. in early january 2020, after being detained and muzzled by local police, he returned to treating patients and contracted the disease, now known as covid-19. with registered capital of 132.6 million rmb (us$19m), womin was among the first movers in china’s extremely profitable commercial industry of online opinion monitoring. by scraping, aggregating, repackaging, and analyzing online content and activity data, these companies provide analytics and visualizations that purportedly inform decisions ranging from crisis and public relations management tactics to both platform and state-ordered censorship. industry clientele spreads across public and private sectors. womin, for example, mainly serves financial sector clients and chooses to offer free intelligence to the government during extraordinary moments. “we have nothing to hide with our work,” womin’s ceo told the washington post after the above-quoted report was leaked (shih, 2020).1 in this essay, rather than focusing on the global knowledge production about computing in/from china (e.g., milan & treré, 2019), i use womin and its leaked report as a point of departure from which to analyze computing in/from china as an integral part of global knowledge production. first, i discuss how chinese computing such as womin’s surveillance analytics profits from legitimation lent by the west-centric hierarchical academe. then, i move to transnational academic computing of big data supplied by chinese surveillance tech, which, i illustrate, often yields specters of china as “portables” that are untethered to the lived realities of those whose data are taken. as the capitalist expansion of data extraction “makes us all subjects to capital in new distinctive ways,” write couldry and mejias (2019), the united states and china, home to the two largest digital economies, have emerged as the world’s dual poles of “colonial power” (pp. 337, 339). complicating this view, i call for attention to the entanglements of the predominantly anglophone production of world knowledge in the silencing and contortion of chinese people, who are being subject to increasingly comprehensive politico-cultural governance in state critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela xiao wu, 2020 3 managed neoliberalism.2 my analysis adds a layer to our understanding of how, in the age of big data analytics, postsocialist china transpires in global political economy.3 drawing on the feminist literature on care, i end by urging social scientists working with chinese big data to be willing to “stay with the trouble” (haraway, 2016), to bring into their computation a conscious commitment to also unravel the “relationships that set the political, economic, and geopolitical conditions of knowledge-making, world-making, [and] forgetting” (murphy, 2015, p. 732). computing in china: academic legitimation of surveillance analytics womin’s four-page report presents data analytics in two figures. the first is a line graph that plots over time the numbers of mentions of “li wenliang” on china’s social media platforms such as wechat and weibo, mobile news apps, online forums, webpages, videos, as well as “foreign social media” and “foreign mainstream media.” these mentions peaked at 11 p.m. on 6 february, supposedly as “the word about li wenliang’s critical condition” spread. to illustrate the “heat,” the report uses weibo as an example: among just the top fifty accounts on the platform, their content featuring dr. li’s name had drawn 1.005 billion visits. the report calls this a “screen flooding-level event.” “screen flooding” (shuaping) is often used to describe spamming and the appeal of celebrity scandals and publicity stunts. figure 1 heat of attention (womin’s leaked report) the second figure is titled “computing emotion, measuring the heart of the critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela xiao wu, 2020 4 people (renxin)”. based on sentiment analysis of the supposedly same dataset, it shows the percentage and over-time fluctuation of five types of sentiment: optimism, anger, sadness, disgust, and fear. “prior to 11 p.m. 6 february, sadness reigned,” explains the report, “afterwards anger increased, which requires urgent attention.” figure 2 computing emotion (womin’s leaked report) “the event of li wenliang’s death is still fermenting online,” the report continues, recommending the government take measures “in order to dissolve the diffusion of negative emotions, especially anger.” the top three measures were (1) to affirm dr. li’s contribution because doing so “meets the expectation of most internet users”; (2) to promise that relevant parties will be held accountable but delay the main action “till the epidemic is under control”; and (3) to forcefully remove and rectify rumors, countering the malicious intent of foreign entities who fomented them. as the coronavirus rampaged through the country and people mourned for the deaths and sacrifices of dr. li and so many others, womin’s leaked report aroused much ire on the chinese internet: the company’s eagerness to advise on censorship was “shitty.” that aside, its analytics, as some had remarked with disbelief, appeared no less shitty. no information on data collection and categorization was given, the unit of analysis unclear, and even the y axes of the two figures came unspecified. the relations between data results and recommended measures were described as, at best, disjointed. critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela xiao wu, 2020 5 this judgment, however, missed the point; the computing expertise womin offers its clients is never academic. rather, it operates in “spaces between fields” (eyal, 2013). people online research institute (2018), a subsidiary of the mouthpiece people’s daily, considers the industry an optimal collaboration between government, commercial software development, media, and research and education (“guan shang mei jiao”). in online opinion monitoring and other emerging data-driven sectors, computing is marketed through exploiting connections to multiple established institutional fields. to begin, the chinese government plays a formative role. the government buys, sells, and invests in online expression monitoring, an industry that dovetails nicely with the dual goals of postsocialist china’s ai policies: economic development and political stability (chen, 2019).4 while all levels of government and state-owned enterprises procure its products, state media set up offshoot monitoring firms that use inherited political authority to gain a competitive edge. womin’s “free intelligence” report represents a typical strategy to nurture relationships with government agencies. but when it comes to “chinese digital surveillance,” it is necessary to clarify that the authoritarian state is not the sole force at play. often overshadowed is the legitimation work that academic actors perform for these surveillance tech companies. when expertise, such as online opinion analytics, is hard to assess with clear and open standards, academic credentials and liaisons may serve as key indicators of competence. this is all too clear to womin and its thousands of rivals. in the leaked report, in sharp contrast to the hurried, cryptic analytics is a two-and-a-half-page introduction on the company itself. “womin technology,” it begins, “was founded by multiple experienced professionals in the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, computer science, law, and communication.” what follows are bios of the seven key figures behind the 150-person firm. two stand out for their connections to state media and the military. four teach at top universities, including a prominent princeton sociologist who serves as womin’s chief academic advisor. even those not in academia obtained graduate degrees from top chinese and hong kong universities. also touted are collaborations with various research institutes and publications in academic journals and conferences, with international ones particularly highlighted. importantly, whereas the chinese government and media organizations are bound by the sovereign territory, its academics operate as part of a hierarchical transnational network. working closely with chinese universities, the online opinion monitoring industry critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela xiao wu, 2020 6 especially craves linkages to (euro-)american academia, handing out not only money, but also data, in exchange for domestic legitimation. academic computing of chinese big data: china as portables china became a land of massive datasets largely due to its postsocialist conditions, which include the preponderance of monopolistic platforms in close collaboration with the state, laxer market regulation and labor protection, the absence of public organizing about data privacy (as with everything else), and an elephantine digital world thanks to long-term government infrastructural investments. while chinese big data have been stealthily moving across borders to fuel silicon valley–centric innovations by feeding the neural networks of startups, here i focus on their destination within academic computing, which distinguishes itself by being open, authoritative, cumulative, and (nominally) nonprofit driven. in an age when online behavioral trace data support a growing academic ecosystem, access to such data from china has become an enviable asset for scholarly publication.5 it comes as no surprise that china’s online opinion monitoring industry is a major supplier, touting data volumes easily in the billions, like those in womin’s report. this industry-academia collaboration poses grueling ethical and political questions, but i draw attention to what seems to be an epistemological transfiguration that stems from this data appropriation: how is china known through such data? how does china, so computed, fit in the elaborate dispersed knowledge machine that is the transnational field of social sciences? china has long been notorious for lacking reliable quantitative data, be they public opinion surveys or economic statistics. in her overview about the unprecedented explosion of digital trace data from china, political scientist daniela stockmann (2018) hopes that, combining data science with china-specific knowledge, scholarship will “visualize the complex and dynamic nature of chinese society and...allow this vision to better travel beyond the china field” (p. 407). while concurring with her advocacy, i am less optimistic given the institutional circumstances that determine actual practice. inquiries of non-western societies have always occupied a marginal corner in disciplinary social sciences, where constructing generalizing theory takes primacy over engaging empirical particulars.6 their marginality is only worsening. in critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela xiao wu, 2020 7 american universities, government funds and private philanthropy, once a lifeline for developing “indigenous knowledge” of foreign territories, has been dwindling since the end of the cold war. as jobs become fast-paced and competitive, in these disciplines acquiring area expertise is discouraged by graduate mentors (stevens et al., 2018). adding to this is the embrace of stem talent thanks to the recent trend of “computational social science.” in short, in the us-dominated social sciences, the influx of chinese big data meets the continued dilution of china expertise. meanwhile, big data social research within china, as stockmann (2018) also notes, steers clear of “politically sensitive topics” and concentrates on narrow “application” problems. against this backdrop, chinese online opinion monitoring companies, whose business is to intervene in the chinese web ecology, also step in to supply its data for academic research transnationally.7 as their provision services get streamlined and standardized, the presumptions and tinkering intrinsic to their data mining and processing are further veiled. sentiment analysis deployed by womin (figure 2), for example, draws on opaque analytics to label “emotion,” which becomes ready-made data points. notably, as the most used chinese big data, platform trace data and data scraped from other venues usually fall in the confines of the online behavior of individual user accounts or the semantic content of sprawling, anchorless textual fields. lacking direct measures for gender, income, ethnicity, citizenship (hukou), these data, despite their abundance, are “unfriendly” to the investigation of systemic inequality; they also tend to obscure organizational practices of content production and censorship at work. in its extreme forms, social science computing of such data not only flattens out the intimate knowledge of those whose traces are captured and the historical and institutional conditions they live through. it also actively occludes chinese heterogeneities in attempts to justify these data as making up proxies for generic social constructs (e.g., “public opinion” and “social capital,” typically emerging from euro-american contexts).8 it is not difficult to see that research both inand outside china has this tendency; both employ chinese big data to expand the intelligible, portable plane of abstracted human behavior. as such, the new spectral china begins frequenting conferences, journals, and powerpoint slides. while critical scholarship may readily call out the cold war ideology behind popular portrayals of the chinese state as monolithically totalitarian or its people as unthinking masses, to confront this new china requires different vocabulary and analytical lenses. critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela xiao wu, 2020 8 to make sense of the multilayered extraction (i.e., legitimating surveillance tech and using surveillance data) at work, i believe decolonial thinking offers a way out. this direction faces at least two challenges. first, china studies, which consolidated during the cold war, had undertaken active expurgation of colonialism (and in turn decolonial analytics) to fit america’s larger geopolitical project: china was never really colonized; it belonged to a guarded sphere (barlow, 1997). second and more substantially, academic computing of chinese big data largely falls outside of what scholars call the “longue durée of datafication” that is underwritten by the characterization and management of the territory-specific other (raval, 2019). indeed, there may be such a continuum between some current data science initiatives on american campuses and the data-intensive projects dating back to philological studies formulated in cold war–era area studies, or further back to those integral to colonial governance (asif, 2019). but the employment of chinese big data by disciplinary social sciences at a broader scale is of a different nature. stemming from a confluence of transnational forces and its own institutional history, it leads to a spectral china voided of sociocultural tapestry, or its “chinese-ness.” to decolonize this assembly of knowledge production, i argue, presupposes a commitment to make china truly legible in big data; that is, making legible in data analytics what it means to be a person—being tracked on the chinese internet—in chinese society at this time. adopting a feminist perspective of care in the production of scholarship helps unsettle the calcifying facade of china as a data source. approaching china as “matters of care” (de la bellacasa, 2011) is more than acquiring “indigenous knowledge” or “area expertise.” care as affectively charged attentiveness can be embroiled in agendas of orientalism, colonialism, neoliberalism, and right-wing politics (hobart & kneese, 2020; murphy, 2015). what distinguishes the feminist ethics of care is its emphasis on open-endedness, responsiveness, and, crucially, the reflexivity on power differentials (martin et al., 2015). viewed in this lens, social scientists repurposing chinese big data must stay accountable to the politics and privilege involved in their work, which necessitates that they restore and confront the contexts of datafication. further, chinese people are distributed across variegated situations of vulnerabilities by local political, economic, and ideological structures—from china’s widening wealth gap, its rural-urban divide instituting manifold exploitation, its resurging patriarchy sanctioned by the government, to the operations of chinese media system and various state apparatuses, corporate capital, platform technologies. critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela xiao wu, 2020 9 using chinese big data, analyses should aspire to reveal circumstances, murmurs, and life chances that these interlocking forms of subjection intend to obscure. but to approximate this goal, social scientists must be willing to step outside these data, painstakingly weave together contextual knowledge, and also strive to develop a standpoint reflective of chinese cultural, social, and political realities (see harding, 2005). this entails “a politics of reckoning with a world already violated” (murphy, 2015, p. 732). only then can quantitative abstraction, while inevitably flattening lived experience, be wielded to challenge power (also see d’ignazio & klein, 2020). under his final weibo post, the living memorial of dr. li wenliang is still unfolding. as of early june 2020, fellow chinese left well over a million posts to celebrate his life and reflect on their own quotidian experience. the volume surely is immense, but all may just vanish in the milliseconds of computing. acknowledgements this essay draws from a larger project supported by an early career fellowship from the henry luce foundation/acls program in china studies. i am grateful to sareeta amrute, julie yujie chen, as well as two anonymous reviewers and the editors of catalyst for their help in improving this essay. notes 1 womin’s leaked report and a partial translation by josh rudolph can be found at https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/02/translation-recommendations-forhandling-netizen-reaction-to-li-wenliangs-death/ 2 beltrán (this issue) also discusses the tendency of sts scholarship to privilege technoscientific practice over geopolitics, histories, and economic structures, running the risk of “leaving out particular differences in the name of connecting across others” to build macro-scale theoretical frameworks. 3 see mcelroy (this issue) for romania’s different postsocialist pathway, where the quest of “becoming western” leads to full-sail embrace of siliconization. 4 in comparison, us ai policies focus on national and economic security. 5 see okune’s (this issue) study of developing qualitative, ethnographic data infrastructures in kenya. while constant interviews make certain kenyan populations “feel over-researched,” due to the “unobtrusive” nature of data https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/02/translation-recommendations-for-handling-netizen-reaction-to-li-wenliangs-death/ https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/02/translation-recommendations-for-handling-netizen-reaction-to-li-wenliangs-death/ critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela xiao wu, 2020 10 mining, in china the immense production lines for behavioral trace data eschew people’s awareness. 6 disciplinary social sciences refer to those dominated by quantitative methods, such as economics, communication, information science, political science, and sociology. 7 in addition to social science computing chinese trace data, it is worth noting that its appropriation of platform-generated trace data begs questions about epistemic assimilation in service of platform power. similar concerns arise in regard to appropriating data captured by essentially administrative enterprises as such womin. see wu & taneja, 2020. 8 i refrain from citing specific studies and deliberately keep the description generic to invite readers to reflect on the literature in breadth. references asif, m. a. (2019, november 20). technologies of power: from area studies to data sciences. spheres: journal for digital cultures, 5. https://spheresjournal.org/contribution/technologies-of-power-from-area-studies-to-data-sciences/ barlow, t. e. (1997). colonialism’s career in postwar china studies. in t. e. barlow (ed.), formations of colonial modernity in east asia (pp. 373–411). duke university press. beltrán, h. (2020). hacking difference: coding expertise and belonging from the south. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2). chen, w. (2019). now i know my abcs: u.s.-china policy on ai, big data, and cloud computing. east-west center. https://www.eastwestcenter.org/publications/now-iknow-my-abcs-us-china-policy-ai-big-data-and-cloud-computing couldry, n., & mejias, u. a. (2019). data colonialism: rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. television & new media, 20(4), 336–349. de la bellacasa, m. p. (2011). matters of care in technoscience: assembling neglected things. social studies of science, 41(1), 85–106. d’ignazio, c., & klein, l. f. (2020). data feminism. mit press. eyal, g. (2013). spaces between fields. in p. s. gorski (ed.), bourdieu and historical analysis (pp. 158–182). duke university press. haraway, d. j. (2016). staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela xiao wu, 2020 11 university press. harding, s. (2005). negotiating with the positivist legacy: new social justice movements and a standpoint politics of method. in g. steinmetz (ed.), the politics of method in the human sciences: positivism and its epistemological others (pp. 346–365). duke university press. hobart, h. j. k., & kneese, t. (2020). radical care. social text, 38(1), 1–16. martin, a., myers, n., & viseu, a. (2015). the politics of care in technoscience. social studies of science, 45(5), 625–641. mcelroy, e. (2020). corrupting techno-normativity in postsocialist romania. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2). milan, s., & treré, e. (2019). big data from the south(s): beyond data universalism. television & new media, 20(4), 319–335. murphy, m. (2015). unsettling care: troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices. social studies of science, 45(5), 717–737. okune, a. (2020). open ethnographic archives as collaborative ethnography. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2). people online research institute. (2018, january 24). on the state and prospect of our online opinion industry. people online. http://media.people.com.cn/n1/2018/0124/c416772-29784789.html raval, n. (2019, november 20). an agenda for decolonizing data science. spheres: journal for digital cultures, 5. https://spheres-journal.org/contribution/an-agenda-fordecolonizing-data-science/ shih, g. (2020, february 8). as anger explodes over doctor’s death, beijing firm gives chinese government advice. the washington post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/as-anger-explodes-over-doctors-deathbeijing-firm-gives-chinese-government-advice/2020/02/08/6899e3e6-4a52-11ea9164-d3154ad8a5cd_story.html stevens, m., miller-idriss, c., & shami, s. (2018). seeing the world: how us universities make knowledge in a global era. princeton university press. stockmann, d. (2018). toward area-smart data science: critical questions for working with big data from china. policy & internet, 10(4), 393–414. wu, a. x., & taneja, h. (2020). platform enclosure of human behavior and its measurement: using behavioral trace data against platform episteme. new media & society. onlinefirst. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820933547 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1461444820933547 critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela xiao wu, 2020 12 author bio angela xiao wu is an assistant professor in the department of media, culture, and communication at new york university. her past research has examined cultures and practices of data analytics, media use and media (infra)structures, and chinese information technology. she is currently working on a book that explores how public culture takes shape when systems thinking informs its conception and governance. bhatia, rajani (2020). tricky tools for feminist struggle: sex ratios as indicators of the status of women and girls. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–23. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © rajani bhatia, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license tricky tools for feminist struggle: sex ratios as indicators of the status of women and girls rajani bhatia university at albany rbhatia2@albany.edu abstract this article takes up shifting meanings of the population sex ratio in select times and places. through historicization and contextual analysis, i seek to identify possible origins and continuities of the gendered imperial and racialized logics that undergird current dilemmas for feminists related to the sex ratio. i argue that sex ratios, like other numerical abstractions that stand in as representations of empirical reality, are tricky tools for addressing social problems. regardless of whether they are viewed primarily as natural, biological, cultural, racial, or even social, they have been both friend and foe to feminist struggle. feminists might invest in interpretations of the ratio as a mutable, social indicator of the status of women and girls in need of improvement. yet this idea runs the risk of misappropriation and conflation with diehard interpretations of sex ratios that reproduce hierarchy based on race/ethnicity and nationality. introduction if “to classify is human” (bowker & star, 1999), then surely the prerequisite counting and measuring is also. medical anthropologists and sociologists have recently scrutinized the pervasiveness of “metrics work” within the current regime of global health and governance (adams, 2016; adams et al., 2016; sangaramoorthy & benton, 2012; erikson, 2015; merry, 2011). recognizing metrics as formations of power-knowledge, vincanne adams asserts, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 2 specific numbers can certainly move policy, confer political allegiance, guarantee funding, even bring about health. but they do so not simply by claiming truth about the empirical world. they do so because of the ways they are “produced” and the ways they are circulated. these productivities and circulations are the stories that precede and exceed numerical forms of truth-telling. (2016, p. 9) such scholarly reflection on “numerical forms of truth-telling” is not new. longerstanding analyses within science studies that center on the practices of labeling, enumerating, and categorizing critique the apparent objectivity and apolitical posture of these interrelated practices (foucault, 1973; hacking, 1986; porter, 1995; curtis, 2001; zuberi, 2001). theodore porter, for example, theorized quantification as “strategies of communication” and “a technology of distance” that “minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust” (1995, pp. viii–ix). anthropologists sangaramoorthy and benton, explore how everyday practices of enumeration co-construct identity among “‘counters’ and ‘counted’” (2012, pp. 287–288). law scholars have also taken up the study of the “quiet exercise of power through indicators” (merry et al., 2015, p. 1). the idea that reliance on metrics will increase accountability in matters of health or women’s status is one that feminists have sometimes rejected. however, our bodies, ourselves, the famous feminist self-help manual on health, shifted its overall perspective in recent editions from anti-medicalization to pro-evidence-based medicine (davis, 2007), and metrics are recognized often undisputedly as evidence. yet as adams et al. argue, alternative forms of accounting (such as providing safety nets made up of community members and professional providers and incorporating local knowledge in health interventions) provide “useful evidence of another kind” (2016, p. 277). science and technology studies (sts) scholar zora kovacic loosely categorizes “criticisms of the use of quantitative information for policy” into “approaches that move away from quantification” or “approaches that seek alternative ways of engaging with quantification” (2018, p. 1041). in this article, i take up the population sex ratio but propose neither an explicit move away from, nor an alternative way of addressing the metric. by historicizing and contextualizing the metric in select times and places, i seek to identify possible origins and continuities of the gendered imperial and racialized logics that undergird current dilemmas for feminists related to the sex ratio. an exploration into shifting meanings and deployments of the sex ratio in various times and places, my analysis pivots from europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to india in the twentieth century, international stages at the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 3 turn of the last century, and finally to the united states in the twenty-first. in each instance, i ask what these numbers are meant to indicate? this selection represents situated moments where stakeholders such as theologians, statisticians, colonizers, demographers, economists, feminists, and anti-abortion lobbyists have made loud claims as to the meaning and implication of sex ratios. given that discussion on sex ratios as they pertain to places such as in africa or latin america are comparatively mute, they are not addressed here. tracing shifting meanings from the natural and biological to the social, cultural, and racial, i explore how a presumption of changeability or unchangeability can shift even within the same interpretation of the metric. as markers of the status of women and girls, sex ratios have been taken up both apart from and in interaction with feminist struggle. like other numerical abstractions that stand in as representations of empirical reality, sex ratios are tricky tools for addressing social problems. they have been both friend and foe to feminist struggle. a natural indicator the world health organization (who) defines the natural sex ratio at birth (srb): “in the human species the ratio between males and females at birth is slightly biased towards the male sex. the natural ‘sex ratio at birth’ is often considered to be around 105. this means that at birth on average, there are 105 males for every 100 females” (searo, 2018). in this section, i explain how this particular measure of the sex ratio at birth came to represent a natural order, universally applicable to all humans. i highlight peculiar past interpretations of the measure that underline the classic critique of the presumed neutrality of scientific fact made by science studies scholars, feminist or not. according to french historians of science éric brian and marie jaisson, the sex ratio at birth provided “one of the empirical terrains where metaphysical and mathematical debates were liveliest” during the eighteenth century (2007, p. 22). european mathematicians, philosophers, biologists, and sociologists who deliberated the calculation of the proportion of sexes at birth over three centuries focused at times on its relative constancy and at other times on its variability, however slight. in 1741, for example, the german theologian and scholar johann peter süssmilch considered the constancy of the srb a manifestation of divine providence to ensure the survival of the species but also as a sign that god intended monogamy (brian & jaisson, 2007, p. 6). by the end of that century european philosophers made a short leap from god to nature, theorizing that the small excess of males in the srb was nature’s way to compensate for later decreases in the number of men (brian & jaisson, 2007, p. 8). this explanation still original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 4 appears on the who website today (searo, 2018). just how did the srb of 105/100 become a standard? gender studies scholar carole mccann provides some clue when she historicizes the making of this fact by noting that “the so-called natural ratio of 105 males to 100 females is based on 300 years of parish records from sweden, understood as recording biologically determined ratios” (2016, p. 267). demographers today attribute one of the first records of srb that revealed a slight excess in males to john graunt in 1662, who calculated and compared ratios in the city and country based on information from christenings in london and romsey (chahnazarian, 1990, p. 1; brian & jaisson, 2007, pp. 3–4; campbell, 2001, p. 606). a century later, the french mathematician pierre-simon laplace referred in a lecture to a slightly male-biased srb applicable to humans as a “general law of nature” (cited in brian & jaisson, 2007, p. 24). by the late twentieth century, typical studies that establish “the missing girls of china” (johansson & nygren, 1991) or “daughter elimination in tamil nadu, india” (srinivasan & bedi, 2008) compare srbs within their study regions to a “normal” srb, calculated from swedish vital records data. johannson and nygren explain, “sweden has a continuous yearly time series on sex ratios among live births since 1749…this series seems to indicate that the expected sex ratio among live births under normal circumstances is between 105 and 106 boys per 100 girls” (1991, p. 36). srinivasan and bedi similarly choose the same indicator as their “normal” srb for comparative purposes because “in the absence of a complete civil registration system” in india, “it is commonly assumed” (2008, p. 965). belgian astronomer adolphe quetelet mobilized european statistical offices towards standardization, calling international congresses and circulating statistical textbooks. his work opened the way for comparative international statistics (schweber, 2006; michalopoulou 2016; brian & jaisson, 2007). as the scholars became assured of the accuracy of their data, they could no longer attribute deviations from the natural srb to uncertainties in measure or in method and sought new explanations. as biology historian francisco louçã describes this moment, the analysis of errors and variation in nature became the core of applied statistics. this was not simply motivated by the evolution of theory itself, but also by the social and ideological context: in britain, eugenics was a major motivation for the development of applied statistics, which was asked not only to highlight the processes of inheritance and variation, but also to indicate the tools for selecting original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 5 the future of humankind. (2009, p. 655) with the particular nineteenth-century influence of english biometry and eugenics through prominent figures such as charles babbage, charles darwin, and francis galton, statisticians began to compare racialized groups, marking as babbage did in 1829, for example, jews in prussia for their “remarkable excess of males” (brian & jaisson, 2007, p. 95). scholars moved from seeking a central trend while being mindful of variability to centering the study of variability as a “statistics of biological phenomena” (brian & jaisson, 2007, p. 106). yet viewing srbs as biological or natural phenomena did not necessarily preclude that they could not change. it appears that the very task of comparing srbs led statisticians to consider the possibility of manipulation. comparing european country tables in 1865, quetelet observed differences from the standard across all countries between what he called “legitimate” and “illegitimate” births. he speculated that marriage provided pregnant women more lavish care, which could be conducive to male births (brian & jaisson, 2007). another variation in the srb detected between city and country dwellers preoccupied the french sociologist maurice halbwachs. halbwachs postulated that the greater proportion of males in the country correlated to smaller parental age gaps. nazi statistician richard korherr brought the work of halbwachs (who later died in a nazi concentration camp) to the attention of heinrich himmler. korherr hoped to convince himmler that the fascist regime could increase the birth of boys (and thereby its forces) by manipulating the age of the mothers (brian & jaisson, 2007). however, it was not until the end of the twentieth century, when srbs became a global indicator, that a presumption of changeability would more fully underpin the task of comparing srbs by nation-states. an unnatural indicator taken up within the british empire, sex ratios debut at the turn of the twentieth century as an overtly political calculation and measure of uncivilized status. colonial census reports provided an early mechanism to frame india’s population as a problem. in addition to marking india as “overpopulated,” census reports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century noted an “adverse sex ratio.” according to gender studies scholar mary john, the very creation of the census for the counting of the indian population by the colonial state was fueled not just by malthusian discourses of population or the need to fix caste and community boundaries, but by the wish to demonstrate its civilizing mission to original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 6 combat ‘violence against women’ through addressing female infanticide via the counting of men and women, boys and girls. (un women, 2014, p. 3) appearing for the first time in the 1881 census, the colonial powers calculated sex ratios in the total population (not at birth) for the purpose of differentiating and ranking caste groups (purewal, 2010). a 1921 census of india report, for example, compares sex ratios from 1901, 1911, and 1921 by caste. it further classifies each caste into two categories based on whether or not they had a tradition of female infanticide (purewal, 2010). sociologist navtej purewal explains that this classification system served the “wider objectives of gaining imperial advantage in the region,” in order to maintain social control over “potential or already existing allies or adversaries of the colonial state” (2010, p. 31). according to purewal, british feminists who supported the civilizing mission of their empire did not overtly advocate on this issue. rather, british male administrators in india selectively criminalized some groups for practicing infanticide, while overlooking the issue among others in order to strike strategic alignments with the male leaders of those dominant castes. thus, sex ratios in late nineteenth-century india served as a calculus for colonial intervention not only as an indicator of “backward” culture but also as a means to divide and conquer. the colonial administration did not interpret them as given by an unchanging nature so much as produced by an unchanging culture. outside the context of direct colonial rule, and therefore of less political consequence, retrospective demographic study of china similarly reveals longstanding imbalances in the overall (not at birth) population sex ratio measured from the late nineteenth century onwards. an international collaboration of demographers document periods of imbalance throughout the twentieth century, identifying spikes during “periods of stress on family resources,” including, “the republican revolution (1910), the japanese invasion (1937), the great famine (1959), the cultural revolution (1966), and after the implementation of the strict birth control policy (1980)” (jiang et al., 2012, p. 468). feminist anthropologist susan greenhalgh and demographer jiali li similarly highlight change in the srb prompted by intensified population control in china: “sex ratios at birth were normal from the early 1960s to the late 1970s—values that had lain dormant for decades resurfaced in the 1980s with the introduction of the one-child policy” (greenhalgh & li, 1995, p. 603). by the 1980s, with china and an independent india now firmly imbricated in international development regimes, china’s sex ratios could no longer escape an intensifying western gaze. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 7 a social indicator feminist scholars in india towards the latter half of the twentieth century reclaimed the sex ratio as a social indicator of the low status of women of girls. they hoped that redirecting attention away from a preoccupation with fertility rates in indian and international policy circles and towards an imbalanced sex ratio would prompt policymaking to address gender inequality. yet the appropriation of the measure as an indicator of (bad) sex selection practices thwarted their effort. the legacy of an imperial interpretation of the measure as indicator of unchanging culture began to resurface. in the 1960s and 1970s, demographers pravin visaria and asok mitra recognized that the historically longstanding sex ratio imbalance in india had worsened during independence. they viewed high female mortality as the cause of the disparity. anthropologists and economists joined them in puzzling over why this imbalance, known to exist since the late nineteenth century, should continue during an era of modernization and development (un women, 2014). feminist scholars vocally and strategically joined this fray in the mid-1970s, raising concerns about the sex ratio imbalance in the landmark publication towards equality. authored by prominent women academics, including lotika sarkar, vina mazumdar, leela dube, and urmila haksar, who were appointed in 1971 to form the committee on the status of women, the report served as a comprehensive account of women’s economic, social, political, and cultural status in india. as vina mazumdar recalls, “the [committee on the status of women in india] used the declining sex ratio as a secular indicator of a complex process of economic marginalisation and consequent devaluation of women” (1991, p. 52). towards equality authors vina mazumdar and kumud sharma explain the importance of the sex ratio, which provided a measure of inequality that could support their other findings: for the committee on the status of women in india, the declining sex ratio was both a discovery and the most convincing measure to provide body and substance to its grim findings. these findings could otherwise have been dismissed by many as impressions or unscientific observations by a bunch of women—which did not include a single demographer. (mazumdar & sharma, 2001, p. 15) thus, feminists at this moment in india claimed the sex ratio as a credible social indicator in service of raising concern and soliciting action to address gender inequality. citing demographer pravin visaria, feminist scholar nivedita menon voiced frustration at the overwhelming attention given to fertility rates over the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 8 sex ratio: population has been defined so narrowly that important factors like the declining sex ratio, morbidity and malnutrition are not considered significant variables in demographic studies. the only demographic sector which has received an overdose of policy attention, visaria says, is fertility, and even this focus has been “an absolute obsession with sterilization, contraception and abortion” while access to health care has been ignored. (menon, 1995, p. 388) yet this coveted attention to sex ratios, when it finally arrived in the 1990s, occurred not quite in the way that menon envisioned. when feminist scholars in 1970s india repurposed adverse sex ratios for social change in their advocacy on gender inequality, they did so without recourse to sex-selective abortions. their activism preceded awareness of, let alone involvement in, that issue. similarly, when activists in india first began to raise sex selection as an issue of concern a decade later, it was not in response to imbalanced sex ratios. after all, such an imbalance had long existed, documented since the origin of census taking in india in the late nineteenth century (visaria, 2007). in fact, during the mid-1980s, when the campaign to stop sex selection began to form in india, the latest preceding census results from the 1981 census marked a relative improvement in overall population sex ratios, which census officials prematurely attributed to the successful implementation of government maternal and child health programs (guillot, 2002). the discursive turn to connect sex selection with population sex ratio imbalance began after the 1991 census revealed the worst imbalance in the sex ratio ever recorded (guillot, 2002). as demographer michel guillot records the moment, “after [the enthusiasm tied to improving sex ratios in 1981], the increase in the sex ratio between 1981 and 1991 came as a shock, and threw doubt on the idea that discrimination had decreased” (2002, p. 53). a feminist statement signed by representatives from seven women’s organizations highlighted their own lack of surprise: the 1991 results…shatter the rather optimistic conclusions drawn by the census authorities in 1981 that the upward tilt of three points indicated that india had turned away from the demographic slide in women’s status…we did not receive the 1981 census results with any euphoria, since we found that the sex ratio continued to decline in several states. (cited in mazumdar, 1991, pp. 52–53) the statement reiterated demands that the government prioritize “protection original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 9 and improvement of women’s rights” over “population control” (cited in mazumdar, 1991, pp. 52–53). the statement did not suggest that sex selection caused the decline in the sex ratio. however, a debate on this question did ensue among demographers in economic and political weekly, with a majority of them rejecting the hypothesis that increasing use of sex determination to abort female fetuses during the 1980s could be responsible for the sex ratio imbalance measured for the total population (guillot, 2002). the preeminent economist amartya sen also rejected this hypothesis, even though his coinage of “missing women” became enrolled in a growing discourse that used sex ratios as evidence to bolster claims that sex-selective abortions were out of hand and must be addressed (kristof, 1991). sen’s (1990) highly influential piece, “more than 100 million women are missing,” brought a discussion already underway by lesser-known scholars to international prominence. the piece problematized sex ratio disparities precisely in areas that had experienced recent rapid economic growth. appearing before the release of the 1991 census results in india, sen’s piece notably did not mention these results, nor did it make any mention of sex-selective abortions. instead, it pointed to lack of waged employment outside the home for women as a major factor that likely worsened women’s chances for survival (sen, 1990). soon after, with access to preliminary results from the 1991 census in india, influential us demographer ansley coale joined sen in raising concern about sex ratios. a primary architect of the demographic transition theory and director of the office of population research at princeton university, coale’s work had been instrumental during the twentieth century in providing the theoretical basis for international advocacy for family planning assistance to curb population growth rates of “underdeveloped” countries. although coale came up with 60 million “missing females,” an estimate far lower than sen’s, his conclusion validated sen’s main argument: “the methodology…yields a more realistic estimate [than sen’s]. it is an estimate, however, that confirms the enormity of the social problem brought to wide public attention by professor sen” (coale, 1991, p. 522). thus, prominent intellectuals gave voice to the issue of sex ratio disparities, prompting swift broader public and international attention to the 1991 census results. it is important to emphasize that for the feminist movement in india, claims made in relation to the sex ratio preceded and remained largely distinct from those related to sex selection. adverse sex ratios did not prompt feminist alarm and action over the practice of sex-selective abortion. rather, it was primarily advertisements as well as employer and physician anecdotes that propelled original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 10 activists into action on that issue (ravindra, 1993; gupte, 2003; mazumdar, 2003). while it is not precisely clear when sex ratios became a proxy for the practice of sex selection, which itself became a proxy for culturally induced gender discrimination, convergence appears to have occurred against the background of the 1994 international conference on population and development (icpd) in cairo. this was the first international arena in which sex selection practices were condemned in the context of new language on “gender equality, equity and empowerment of women” (section 4 of the icpd programme of action). just ahead of the conference, both china and india banned prenatal sex determination, and the timing suggests that the countries may have responded as much to external pressure as to internal motions. susan greenhalgh (2012), who documents how sex ratios were an “undiscussable issue” in china from 1979 to 1993, points to two factors occurring in the early 1990s that prompted change in the official frame. recognition of fertility decline to replacement level and the focus on “gender equity and the ‘missing girls’” in cairo and within international agendas generally gave china a “political opening” to address sex ratio disparities and be recognized as “a responsible member of the world community” (greenhalgh, 2012, pp. 135–136). similar to china, there is some evidence to suggest that motivation to pass a federal bill stemmed from the government of india’s eagerness to be viewed as doing something to address its “adverse sex ratio.” although first introduced in india’s parliament in 1991, it was not until july of 1994, just two months before the icpd, that india’s lower house debated and passed the pre-natal diagnostic techniques regulation and prevention of misuse (pndt) act banning sex determination. as one speaker representing a constituency in the state of uttar pradesh, noted that day, “it is not only india but the whole world is anxious about the outcome of this bill” (lok sabha debates, 1994, p. 517). as already mentioned, feminist campaign work during the 1980s in maharashtra did not allude to sex ratio disparities, and it was only in the move towards federal legislation that this suggestion arose. bioscientist and pharmacy professor r. p. ravindra, who was a member of forum against sex determination and sex preselection in india, argued for fusing concerns related to the sex ratio and sex selection at an advocacy workshop in april 1990: success in the campaign against [sex determination] is the first step towards regulation of [new reproductive technologies]. if we succeed in getting a law against [sex determination] on the grounds of a original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 11 constitutional right to equality and on society’s right to intervene for restortion [sic] of sex ratio balance, we can challenge sex preselection on the same grounds. (ravindra, 1993, p. 42). yet it is not clear that this sentiment was widely shared. early legislative success in the state of maharashtra to ban sex determination combined with general unease in working with the state and disappointment in maharashtra’s follow-up, and implementation of the local law put the brakes on feminist and allied campaign work on sex selection (fasdsp, 2003). the momentum for the federal law appears to have come from other sources, in particular the renewed emphasis on the sex ratio that accompanied the release of the 1991 census results. answering a question by a member of the upper house of parliament in 1993 on what action the government of india was taking to address the skewed sex ratio, the minister of health and family welfare, shri paban singh ghatowar, mentioned its introduction of the pndt bill (rajya sabha, may 5, 1993). debates at the time of its passage in 1994 in both houses of parliament reveal that the minister continued to tout the pndt bill as means to address the sex ratio disparity for the total population (not at birth). we can quote many figures justifying one point or the other. but the fact remains that there is still a gap between the male and the female ratio. we have to arrest it (lok sabha debates, july 26, 1994, p. 534) some hon. members rightly mentioned about the decreasing female population in our society…i think this is an alarming situation and every responsible person in the society has to address himself to the problem. (rajya sabha debates, august 4, 1994, p. 431) thus, at the federal level, motivation for passing the pndt act did not arise solely nor predominantly from the grassroots. other factors influencing the act’s passage included the timing of interventions made by public intellectuals on “missing women” that invited broader scrutiny of sex ratios, the release of the 1991 census results, and unprecedented feminist incursions in the international population policy arena that led to new directives on gender equality. in these ways, sex ratios became subsumed by a development imperative with its own presumption of changeability, even when the fact that sex ratios had remained unchanged under development had initially prompted the attention of demographers. a global indicator at the turn of the twenty-first century, sex ratios resurfaced as indicators of global original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 12 significance. in the colonial era, sex ratios assisted the british to justify their civilizing mission and identify allies or adversaries among the “natives.” after independence, sex ratios in india lost their status as remarkable indicators, especially in comparison to fertility rates and population size and growth estimates. by the mid-1990s, however, sex ratios resumed relevance once again when the icpd programme of action deemed “prenatal sex selection” a “harmful” and “unethical” practice resulting from “discrimination against the girl child” (unfpa, 1995, para.4.16). international attention pivoted to sex ratios at birth as a way to identify the problem and the problem makers. due to lack of reliable birth registration data, however, in india it is more common to scrutinize the child sex ratio for ages zero to six (unfpa, 2014). just as censuses in the 1990s began to reveal a consistent downward trend in fertility rates all over the world, the un agency established to promote population control assumed a new charge. in a 2014 “guidance note on prenatal sex selection,” the unfpa explained its “focus” as well as “role and response” on “prenatal sex selection for non health reasons” as “part of its mandate to contribute to gender equality and women’s empowerment” (p. 2). the unfpa focused this mission initially in its country offices within china and india, and held regional conferences on sex ratio imbalance —the first in korea in 1994, then china in 2004, india in 2007, and vietnam in 2011 (unfpa, 2012). it also collaborated with other international agencies such as who, unicef, ohchr, and un women to produce a statement, preventing gender-biased sex selection, in 2011 that urged states to address the problem in ways that do not compromise women’s access to needed reproductive health technologies and services (who, 2011). the unfpa’s new mandate to address sex selection coincided with a more general shift in international development discourse from women to girls and from “missing women” (the original term coined by sen) to “missing girls” (hendricks & bachan, 2015). the most recent unfpa strategic plan (2018–2021) reiterates commitment to these issues: “the recently launched unfpa global programme on son preference and the undervaluation of girls, under way in six countries in the asiapacific, central asia and eastern europe regions, will expand work to eliminate this harmful practice” (executive board, 2017). sex ratios debut in this moment as global indicators in two senses. first, they are a matter of global concern to be scrutinized on international stages. in addition to the unfpa’s mandate mentioned above, the world economic forum (2017), since 2006, incorporated sex ratios at birth in calculations of gender gaps by country as a measure of a country’s economically competitive status. sex ratios at birth alongside healthy life expectancy are folded together to capture a gender gap original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 13 related to health and survival. the forum launched the “economic gender parity agenda,” to foster both global and national level policy that will “maximize women’s economic potential” and “harness the gender parity opportunities posed by the changing nature of work” (world economic forum, n.d.). in this way, sex ratios became new postcolonial sites of (global) surveillance and intervention, much like fertility rates in the mid-twentieth century. the work of french demographer christophe guilmoto, influential to new global agendas on the sex ratio, addresses the problem in ways that mirror demographic discourse on global “overpopulation” from the mid-twentieth century. guilmoto (2009) borrows two pervasive concepts related to “overpopulation” that emphasize the problem of sex ratio disparities as a global one. first, he draws on demographic transition theory, the twentieth-century idea that through economic modernization poor countries could transition from high to low death and birth rates. in a similar vein, guilmoto hypothesizes that high sex ratios at birth in asia will eventually “plateau at some threshold level and subsequently decrease” (2009, p. 540). however, since this transition will occur slowly, it must be addressed through immediate action by governments, especially since its consequences are shared. drawing on garrett hardin’s classic 1968 article, which popularized the “tragedy of the commons,” guilmoto posits, the behavior of couples who want to avoid female births is typically an opportunistic strategy whose benefits seem clear in an environment in which boys are more valued than girls. but by tampering with normal biological outcomes, parents do not contribute their share of girls to the common demographic pool, a contribution necessary for the equilibrium of the marriage and family systems. such behavior is typical of free riders; and, seen from a wider perspective, environmental economists will recognize the characteristic ingredients of a tragedy of the commons, the archetypical social trap in which free access to a public resource by individual interests leads to the depletion of the original shared resource (hardin, 1968). (guilmoto, 2009, p. 537) thus, through familiar strategies that emphasize the (globally) shared nature of the problem of disparities in sex ratios (depletion of girls as a common resource) and universally applicable paths to transition to a more even srb, demographic experts, like policymakers, underline the global nature of high srbs. at the same time, srbs are globalized at this turn as a problem that spreads across borders. guilmoto further refers to imbalanced ratios as “diffusing” across original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 14 several world regions from asia to southern europe and to southeast asia: urban elites were the first to get information on and access to the new sex selection technology. the fast-rising sex ratio at birth observed after a few years followed the diffusion of this new sex-selection strategy to new groups and to neighboring regions. this was made possible by the spread of information; the widening supply of the technology, mostly through private health care facilities; and the declining cost of ultrasound machinery. regional maps demonstrate the gradual diffusion of high sex ratios across affected countries. (guilmoto, 2009. p. 524) from origins attributed to china and india. the problem has been depicted as spreading to armenia, georgia, and azerbaijan, countries bridging europe in the caucasus region, and to vietnam in southeast asia (who, 2011). the global problem of spreading srb imbalance was significantly buttressed in the 2000s by security studies scholars who promoted a dystopic vision of surplus men as “threats to social stability” at home and “export[ers] of violence to neighboring countries” (greenhalgh, 2012, p. 137). most notable among this work is andrea den boer and valerie hudson’s 2004 highly influential book, bare branches: the security implications of asia’s surplus male population. the notion of masculinizing populations as security threat intersects with longer-standing youth bulge theory developed by the cia in the mid-1980s to identify danger in large populations of youth, particularly racialized and gendered “angry young men” from the global south (hartmann & hendrixson, 2005). these discourses of security rely on a combination of fixed and moving parts—ahistorical (and therefore unchanging) notions of culture that adhere to racialized groupings of people that cannot be contained. an extensive unfpa report in 2012, sex imbalances at birth: current trends, consequences, and policy implications, lists son preference, spread of technologies, and decreasing fertility as three main factors responsible for “prenatal sex selection.” yet this report, like the interagency statement released by the who in 2011, makes imminently clear that the latter two factors are nonnegotiable policy areas. prohibiting access to reproductive technologies or encouraging families to have more children are off the table when it comes to recommended action steps. son preference, understood as a locally specific cultural and socioeconomic phenomenon, remains the only factor held into account. the following description from the 2012 unfpa report presents a typical description of the problem: original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 15 prenatal sex selection leads to distorted levels of sex ratios at birth (srb), which today range between 110 and 120 male births per 100 female births in many countries, against the standard biological level of 104–106. birth masculinity as measured by the sex ratio at birth reaches levels above 120 or 130 in some specific regions, pointing to the intensity of son preference and gender discrimination there. (p. 9) in the above depiction, adverse srbs serve as indicators not only of the prevalence of sex selection practices but of the underlying malaise of son preference that is “specific” to a “region.” however, since international agencies simultaneously depict adverse srbs as globalizing, the underlying cause (understood as unchanging culture), it stands to reason, can uproot and spread. new stakeholders—anti-abortion groups in the us—increasingly deploy this logic when raising concern about the sex ratio in the 2010s. a racial indicator it is consequential that the work of lena edlund, which had contributed to discourses associating “surplus men” with rising crime in the global arena (edlund et al., 2007), also provided fodder for developing racialized discourses leading to anti-abortion legislation in the us. in 2008 an influential study by douglas almond and lena edlund, published in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences, divulged sex ratio imbalances at birth among korean-, chinese-, and asian-indian americans. the authors showed that the proportion of boys to girls starts out even among first births within these groups, but that it jumps incrementally at second, third, and higher order births if no sons are born. they state explicitly, “we interpret the found deviation in favor of sons to be evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage” (almond & edlund, 2008, p. 5681). at first, generations ahead, a feminist reproductive justice organization in the us that had worked on the issue of sex selection, made use of these findings to raise concerns about the practice. they produced a toolkit called taking a stand: tools for action on sex selection (2009). authors of the toolkit explained in a project document, “we have worked hard to demonstrate that we can protect women’s reproductive autonomy while acknowledging that sex selection is antithetical to women’s rights and health. it is possible to work to discourage sex-selective practices while defending women’s reproductive decision-making” (jesudason & baruch, n.d., pp. 10–11). the toolkit refers to sex ratio disparities as “strong evidence” of the occurrence of sex selection, referencing the almond and edlund study. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 16 yet, at the very same time, steven mosher, president of the anti-choice organization population research institute, proposed banning sex-selective abortions as a goal of the “pro-life movement,” and americans united for life subsequently published a guide to assist legislators in developing such policy (kalantry, 2015, p. 146). for proof, legislators following the guide also drew on the almond and edlund study. within one year of its release, the study prompted “a wave of legislation” with twenty-one states and the federal government considering bans on sex-selective abortion, often more than once, and seven states passing them (kalantry, 2017, p. 13). justification for passage of sexselective abortion bans relied on notions of static foreign cultures bringing their problems to the us. in explaining his vote, arizona state senator rick murphy’s remarks typify this response: we know that it’s something that is pervasive in some areas. we know that people from those countries and from those cultures are moving and immigrating in some reasonable numbers to the united states and to arizona. and so with that in mind, why in good conscience would we want to wait until the problem does develop and bad things are happening and then react when we can be proactive and try to prevent the problem from happening in the first place. (quoted in complaint, naacp v. tom horne, 2013) in reaction to this development, feminist reproductive justice advocates quickly recoiled and began to re-strategize. the national asian and pacific american women’s forum collaborated with advancing new standards in reproductive health and the international human rights clinic at the university of chicago law school to conduct research that could authoritatively discredit claims made by anti-abortion proponents when lobbying to ban sex-selective abortions. their resulting report, replacing myths with facts: sex-selective abortion laws in the united states, questioned whether sex-selective abortions are even a problem in the united states, presenting new quantitative analysis and interpretations of the influential almond and edlund study. asserting, “there is, in fact, no way to determine what method has been used to achieve sex selection or whether sex selection has occurred at all based solely on sex ratios at birth,” the report invalidates the authenticity of skewed srbs as a measure or sign of sex-selective abortions (citro et al., 2014, p. 27). the report complicates a dominant narrative linking skewed srbs, asian americans, and sex selection by revealing, for example, that asian groups in the us have “more girls overall than white americans,” and that liechtenstein and armenia, with “predominantly white original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 17 populations,” have more heavily male-biased sex ratios than india and china (citro et al., 2014, p. 8). declaring that the real basis of the argument for sexselective abortion bans lies in racial stereotyping, the report repudiates the purported gender equality concerns claimed by anti-abortion supporters of the bills. as one of the framers indicated to me, replacing myths with facts was directed equally towards pro-choice as anti-choice lawmakers and advocates because the former initially struggled with their own racial biases, which prevented them from articulating immediate opposition to the bans. one of the report’s co-authors, law professor sital kalantry, subsequently published a book on sex-selective abortion laws in the us and india, in which she devotes a chapter to a re-analysis of the quantitative data that buttressed legislative proposals to ban sex-selective abortions since 2009 in the us. she states, “there is a general perception that data does not lie. but the problem is not with almond and edlund’s data; it is with the interpretation of their data” (kalantry, 2017, p. 100). drawing on tufuku zuberi and eduardo bonilla-silva’s white logic, white methods: racism and methodology (2008), and “e-crt,” an emergent field combining empirical methods with critical race theory (barnes, 2016), kalantry critiques the main empirical studies on sex ratios of asian americans and offers new data in a way that shifts the narrative. for example, kalantry questions using caucasians as the “control group” against which asian american sex ratios are judged abnormal, and she presents data across all births (rather than by birth order) that demonstrate asian american sex ratios at birth are not male-biased. moreover, she insists that “sex ratios are inaccurately used as conclusive evidence of the abortion of female fetuses” (2017, p. 115) and that “even where researchers find imbalanced sex ratios, those ratios do not tell us the motivations for people’s behavior” (2017, p. 120). in a related inquiry, kalantry asks whether sex-selective abortion bans are just as much an anti-immigrant strategy as anti-abortion. with her finding of “a statistically significant association between asian immigration growth rates and consideration of sex-selective abortion bans in state legislatures that do not have a record of passing antiabortion laws” (kalantry, 2017, p. 91), kalantry highlights not only the populationist motivations behind the laws, but the fear that they may lead to greater racial profiling and surveillance among asian americans seeking abortions (kalantry, 2015). towards reflexive use of numbers in feminist practice this paper began through my own reflexive engagement with a claim i once took for granted and projected in activism—that sex selection practices cause original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) rajani bhatia, 2020 18 imbalances in sex ratios and that those ratios provide strong evidence that sex selection is taking place. returning to the metaphor of sex ratios as a tricky tool for addressing social problems, it is incumbent on contributors to sex ratio discourse, feminist or not, that they understand differences between measures meant to capture sex ratios at birth, at particular birth orders, for particular age ranges, or of a population at large. further, feminists might want to ask how and why particular groups make up a “population” in need of measurement. today, i would suggest more questioning about what sex ratios are meant to indicate, whether we can assume that an imbalance in sex ratio necessarily signifies that the practice of sex-selective abortion is widespread, and even why only two sexes should be measured in binary relation to one another. in this article, i presented varied indications of sex ratios during select historical moments and places. considering these together reveals how the rise of sex ratios as a current global indicator is connected to past colonial and neocolonial populationist projects, and that the “white logic” readily deployed by anti-abortion interests in the us to combat what they portray as deviant asian american reproduction has connections to discourses that tie “surplus men” in asian societies to crime and social instability. indeed, the ways that sex ratios have been deployed in the past or in other places can resurface in current manifestations, wherever they are situated. the trickiness of sex ratios means that we cannot accept them prima facie as simple indicators of “the status of women and girls.” as a measure long imbricated in imperial and racialized hierarchy, the meaning and deployment of sex ratios are highly consequential for intersectional feminist politics and agendas. acknowledgements i thank the anonymous reviewers for strengthening this piece. i also thank ellen foley, jade sasser, and anne hendrixson for encouraging me to write it. references adams, v. 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(2008). white logic, white methods: racism and methodology. rowman & littlefield publishers. author bio rajani bhatia is associate professor in the department of women’s, gender & sexuality studies at the university at albany. author of gender before birth: sex selection in a transnational context (university of washington press, 2018), bhatia’s research interests lie in developing new approaches to feminist theorizations of reproduction and feminist science and technology studies. topically, she has focused on issues that lie at the intersection of reproductive technologies, health, bioethics, and biomedicine. http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2017/ https://www.weforum.org/projects/closing-the-gender-gap-gender-parity-task-forces https://www.weforum.org/projects/closing-the-gender-gap-gender-parity-task-forces http://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/publications/gender_rights/9789241501460/e compost and menstrual blood: women waste pickers and the work of waste futurity vaughn, rachel. (2020). compost and menstrual blood: women waste pickers and the work of waste futurity. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), 1-28 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © rachel vaughn, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license compost and menstrual blood: women waste pickers and the work of waste futurity rachel vaughn institute for society & genetics, university of california-los angeles rvaughn@women.ucla.edu abstract this article critically analyzes the afterlives of the sloughed uterine lining, the menses, or period blood around which an entire “feminine products” industry and waste management discourse has erupted. i engage ecological and green consumerism in the early twenty-first century as it both replicates and departs from discourses that frame the period and the products used to “manage” it as disgusting and hazardous to human health, and as various actors seek to influence product sales or design as an attempt for menstruation to suit the goals of zero waste. in focusing my attention on solid waste collection and handling’s (swach) red dot campaign in pune, india, i suggest that waste picker collectives especially are positioning themselves as important stakeholders, co-designers, and necessary professional consultants on the product design of menstrual disposal technology. i ask what new insights might be gleaned by shifting attention away from consumption and waste management technology to center transnational grappling with what i refer to as waste futurity, specifically menstrual waste’s futurity. drawing upon a growing electronic archive produced by waste picker collectives in india, i concentrate on the expertise of those in the global disposal sector as they represent their heterogeneous positions on their websites, in mission statements, product sales, public service media, and interviews. i focus on how swach negotiates the validity of their gendered labor conditions and professional expertise in municipal zero-waste strategies. i examine how workers harness revaluation in zero-waste strategies and in the special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 2 futurity embedded in what is considered one of the most culturally abject of “wastes”—menstrual blood—to emphasize this notion of future vitality in the presumed dead, over, and impossibly useless. introduction your period is a natural process—not something to be stigmatized. after all, it’s an essential part of all human life. that’s why we believe “that time of the month” should never be a source of shame, harm or uncertainty. (also: excessively pink packaging.) and it should never keep a girl from getting her education…it’s time to transform the experience of having a period—and make sure no woman or girl is left behind by her biology. —“our story,” cora tampon subscription service what is it really that waste pickers contribute to the city? it is estimated that 1% of the population in developing countries works in the recycling sector. they take items that have been discarded and through their labor convert them into tradable commodities. —poornima chikarmane, qtd. in poorna chakra/full circle destigmatizing menstruation as “an essential part of human life,” ecofeminist entrepreneurs molly hayward and morgan newman market their tampon subscription service, cora, as a “greener,” more transparent hygiene technology that will “modernize your period.” in doing so, they also draw attention to the chemical contaminants in the absorption materials of competitor tampons, specifically underregulated dioxin byproducts (of the bleaching process) that can come in contact with one’s vulva and vaginal walls. hayward and newman’s advertising campaign insists on the normalcy of regular menstrual waste emissions in the households of menstruating people; appeals to their clientele’s health consciousness—that is, fears of chemical pollutants as they might contact the genitalia—and stresses the inconvenience of cyclical trips to brick-and-mortar stores (hence the subscription model). in short, their combining of feminist consumerism and ecological principles construes menstruation as a waste management event that ends with single-use disposal in the waste bin. by contrast, for poornima chikarmane, professor, organizer, and member of the autonomous collective of itinerant waste pickers and waste buyers called solid waste collection and handling (swach) in the pune and pimpri chinchwad regions, about 130 kilometers southwest of mumbai, the waste basket, whether or not it specifically contains menstrual absorption materials, is the beginning of a special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 3 process that converts discarded materials into “tradable commodities”. in other words, swach performs entrepreneurship to revalue or destigmatize waste in general. i open with the above epigraphs to explore the ways in which wasted menses—the disposal technologies along with the discourses and attitudes that surround it—brings into conversation two very different camps of stakeholder entrepreneurs, waste pickers, and biotechnological investors (each reflecting profound inequalities in capital benefit, to be sure). i analyze diverse strategies that transform the meaning of the period and menstrual technologies, as various stakeholders seek to influence product sales and design of menstrual disposal technology to suit zero-waste goals. this essay examines the afterlives of the sloughed uterine lining, the menses, or period blood around which an entire “feminine products” industry and waste management discourse has erupted. health scholars and historians of science and technology have examined the evolution of these products especially in the united states (especially sharra vostral, 2008, 2010, 2018; susan strasser, 1999; and chris bobel, 2010, 2019). indebted to this scholarship, as well as research in waste studies and transnational feminism (such as max liboiron, 2013; liboiron, tironi, & calvillo, 2018; michelle murphy, 2013, 2017; murphy et al., 2016), and others centered on waste picker organizing and waste metabolism (hanson, 2016; chikarmane, 2016; harshey & sharma, 2016; dias & ogando, 2015; buckingham, reeves, & batchelor, 2005), i focus on the futurities of menstrual waste, as those futurities involve engaging different senses (sight, smell, touch) in an effort to transform these biological materials, both materially and discursively. by waste futurity, i imply the entanglement of the human and nonhuman that is temporally and spatially altering constantly from one disposal site to the next, from one point of exposure and co-construction to another (epidermis, breath, scent, sight, soil, worms, maggots). my framing explicitly extends the largely object focus of the institute for european environmental policy and the european environmental agency’s use of the term sustainable consumption, which argues for minimizing health risks, toxicity, and emissions “over the lifecycle of a service or product” (pantzar et al., 2018, p. 1).1 to frame the concept of menstrual waste futurities, i am inspired by waste pickers themselves, and embed the value of lived laborer experiences as a means of reimagining the lifecycles of wasted matter. drawing upon a growing electronic archive produced by waste picker collectives in india, i center the expertise of those in the global disposal sector as they represent their heterogeneous positions on their websites, in mission statements, product sales, public service special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 4 media, documentary film and interviews. i focus how one particular collective, swach of pune, negotiates the validity of their labor conditions and professional expertise in municipal zero-waste strategies. assemblages of technology, government, policy, and gendered labor are crucial to the ultimate disposal of menstrual waste in a variety of forms—whether wrapped, bagged, encapsulated in plastic, composted, or incinerated into ash. this essay attends to the ways in which chemical contamination, toxic pollutants, and avenues for bioremediation are organized by or become entangled with these various stakeholders in a web of nature-culture. nature here is figured conventionally as menses, atmosphere, compost heap, whereas culture is plastic bags with labels, incinerators, public health announcements, corporate advertising. the used tampon or soiled pad conjure corporate and public health agent discourses of hygiene and modernization in relation to liberatory stories on behalf of vulnerable women (e.g., those prevented from being in public by their periods or those highly exposed to health hazards as a function of their waste picking work). this capitalist and biotechnological management trend brings into sharp focus what sts scholar sally wyatt (2003) critiqued as a paradigm of use in which “the assumption that non-use or lack of access is a deficiency to be remedied” (p. 68) drives new market interests and technological innovation. instead of framing women waste pickers’ concerns over the potentially biohazardous qualities of menstrual waste as unenlightened or “behind the times,” i propose a framework of crediting the alternative expertise of women laboring within economically and physically precarious contexts as they assert the value of their human labor to recycle and “help the environment.”2 laboring waste pickers bring an alternate awareness to zero-waste strategies, rather than acting in accord with discourse generated in the global north that proposes the use of technology and advertising to destigmatize menses and menstrual waste management. in the pages that follow, i first frame and analyze interpretations of gendered waste, including the cultural loathing of menstruation and its “waste matter,” and the politics of labor behind its management and workplace proximity. then, i examine the ways in which swach’s red dot campaign fits into a much broader historical turn in global interest in menstrual visibility, and increasing biotechnological investment in menstrual products. through material culture analysis of the campaign and digital archives by waste pickers about their own labor initiatives and workplace goals for better conditions and zero-waste contributions,3 i explore the ways in which the red dot campaign speaks to and special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 5 across the intensification of global menstrual hygiene management, rather than subverting it. finally, i examine the question of waste futurity embedded in conceptualizations of menstrual product (re)design and as proposed in intensified menstrual hygiene management strategies. to accomplish this, i analyze a range of materials, from the red dot campaign’s own calls for technological redesign and trends in compostable product design, to the more technocratic waste incineration initiatives of incinerator companies and ngos. in centering material made by and for waste pickers as global leaders, we gain insight about workers’ desires for more inclusive and equitable waste economies. this analytical focus underscores how they seek to amplify or professionalize waste pickers’ frequently overlooked and undervalued labor contributions to local economies, zero-waste strategies, and “tradable commodities” (chikarmane, 2016). amongst waste pickers globally, women in india, swach specially, are respected for their cooperative model and labor organizing reputation. swach's red dot campaign demonstrates that waste picker collectives are positioning themselves as important stakeholders in zero-waste strategizing writ large, and more specifically as co-designers and necessary professional consultants on the product design of menstrual disposal technology. gendered waste as work we are also human beings; then why should we pick up sanitary waste generated by others? —st correspondent, “waste pickers cringe over sanitary waste” waste work is frequently gendered and always political. in their case study research in brazil, sonia dias and ana carolina ogando (2015) suggest that women face specific barriers within informal economies: women are usually found in the lower echelons of the informal economy, exposing them to the greatest economic risks. furthermore, precarious and unsafe working conditions negatively affect women’s emotional and physical well-being as they may be more susceptible to gynecological diseases, sexual harassment and assault from authorities or other key actors. (p. 53)4 scholars writing about waste picker health experiences globally, especially in vietnam and india, suggest that the kind of waste, its moisture and content, for instance, along with the open dump and close proximity handling methods frequently utilized, make laborers in these contexts particularly vulnerable to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 6 specific health concerns, including “respiratory, eye, skin, digestive [and] nervous system and gynecological disorders” (dang kim chi, 2003, p. 75). discussing waste pickers in vietnam specifically, dang kim chi (2003) specifically outlines gendered exposure issues such as genital itching, leucorrhoea, colic, and irregular menses (p. 64; for other health and economic effects see also dias & ogando, 2015; hashimoto, 201; madsen, 2006). waste pickers in pune have generated public service media about susceptibilities to exposure, framing their case around the right to a healthy, dignified workspace. they focus on health exposure concerns for workers, create tools to increase hygienic work conditions, and amplify their own right to professional workspaces. they also emphasize what consumers can do to help. waste work also reflects gendered work and health outcomes. however, there is another avenue of exploration into gendered waste worth pursuing—that of menstrual waste materials as expressly gendered matter. waste specifically attributed to some sexed bodies and not others can be imagined as gendered waste. emily martin’s (2001) the woman in the body underscores not only the persistently negative medicalized language of loss, waste, or failure so frequently associated with menstruation, but also the increasing techno-scientific forms of menstrual management by capitalist means. menstruation has long been negatively framed as abject and impure, or as a (semi)monthly problem to be managed, made “regular,” or even erased through technoscientific means, rather than viewed as a diverse, adaptive, cyclic system responsive to the world around us. in the managed body chris bobel (2019) thoughtfully critiques the increased policing of young girls’ bodies through global menstrual hygiene management initiatives. bobel (2019) suggests such projects are especially focused on menstruating girls rather than as an opportunity for educational empowerment for all young people, including young boys, through increased “menstrual literacy about the entire, continuous, multiple-body system impacting the menstrual cycle” (p. 73). menstrual waste is thus a rich site for critical analysis because it is at once considered both abject and increasingly of interest to techno-scientific management and capital interests in biotechnology product development. what is the purpose, however, of talking trash through consideration of specifically gendered materials? what might be teased out from the fibers or potential pathogens of such specific waste analysis? what is to be learned from meditating on the abject materiality and decomposition of such matter? let us take the anatomy of overlooked waste products, those frequently designed for single-use disposal—a tampon or menstrual pad. such an object is always already special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 7 presumed gendered material by virtue of being designed to capture—and, as vostral (2008, 2010) and bobel (2019) underscore, to manage and erase— menstrual blood flow of human bodies. of course, not all women experience menstruation in the same ways, or at all, and not all menstruating bodies are female; yet the objects themselves are attributed to sexed bodies and imbued with gendered meaning-making. in fact, this is increasingly so within the realm of waste politics as the focus on menstrual hygiene and menstrual waste intensifies in development initiatives, and in increasing green design and waste reduction efforts in pads, tampons, and other products (bobel, 2019; parthasarathy 2019). in their review of menstrual hygiene management literature, colin sumpster and belen torondel (2004) note the specific gendered burdens of reproductive-tract infection connected to poor hygiene management, including bacterial vaginosis and vulvovaginal candidiasis. gender studies scholar kuntala lahiri-dutt (2015) critiques the social power exerted by specific development programs geared towards medicalizing menstruation through one-size-fits-all models.5 the intensifying focus on menstrual waste management and hygiene reflect a dual shift in socio-cultural awareness about taboos of menstruation and expanding, toxic (or inadequate) waste infrastructures that have otherwise erased such gendered waste (kuhlmann, henry, & wall, 2017; garikipati & boudot, 2017). designing the products themselves with zero waste in mind is another avenue of gendered analysis. menstrual hygiene technologies, as vostral (2010) suggests in her historical analysis of the tampon, become easily construed as “feminine,” though not necessarily as “feminist technology” contributing to women’s empowerment—a fact vostral attributes to specificities in the actual product design and intent (p. 136). vostral’s analysis of tampon design history ultimately centers on technological innovation and consumer needs and interests. considering such an object’s life as waste, and the impacts of its effluence, raises another set of important design questions about contact and exposure—a point i will return to momentarily in my analysis of swach’s red dot campaign for healthier ways of handling menstrual absorption product waste. but first, what are the broader global politics of menstrual waste in the contemporary moment? swach’s campaign, while unique, to my knowledge, in its gendered focus of a socalled abject form of waste viewed from the perspectives of laborers grappling with it up close, fits within a much broader global interest and intervention into feminine hygiene products and gendered environmental exposure. for instance, a 2018 article in the journal of environment and public health suggests the effluent effects of such products must be considered on the bodily special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 8 and soil levels: deodorized and non-deodorized sanitary products are available in the market made of synthetic fiber rayon. these deodorized products contain chemicals like organochlorines which have antibacterial activity. due to their chemical composition, these products when buried in the soil they kill the soil’s microflora and delay the process of decomposition. (kaur, kaur, & kaur, 2018, p. 2). framing the very gendered pressures and abject connotations placed upon menstruating bodies, the term menstrual waste refers to the products disposed of, whereas the sanitation tactics for managing this bio-material are known as menstrual hygiene management. yet, grappling with the material waste of increasingly industrialized menstrual hygiene products has become a major concern in some countries. this problem is due to a range of infrastructural, sanitation, and cultural dynamics that may affect the interest in, use, or management of these materials once disposed. in the united states, the focus is more on documenting consumer use in pounds annually, and reimagining marketable objects such as tampons or pads as organic, free of dyes, fragrances, or dioxins. there is likewise a reimagination of hygiene management and shifting cultural perception through invention and (re)design of objects such as washable undergarments and silicon menstrual cups. beyond the problematics and politics of labeling bodily emissions as “waste,” the politicization, toxicity, and urgency of infrastructural concerns resulting from hygiene product waste has become a growing conundrum in india and elsewhere. companies and development initiatives are targeting menstruating bodies as potential investments or sites for expanded industrialization. increased environmental awareness about menstrual waste in the waste stream, worry about exposure to dyes and fragrances in hygiene products, and concern over biodegradability is likewise growing. menstrual waste products represent some three hundred pounds of garbage per person over the course of a lifetime in the us where these materials are regularly utilized. according to the robin danielson feminine hygiene product safety act, “the average woman may use as many as 16,800 tampons in her lifetime” (congresswoman maloney, 2019 see also rastogi, 2010; stein & kim, 2009; weiss-wolf, 2015). the production of this gendered waste in industrial disposable products, however, is not evenly dispersed globally. studies on menstruation, class, and cultural taboo point to the fact that inaccessibility to menstrual products still frequently proves a barrier to equitable social, educational, and special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 9 economic participation for young people in certain parts of the world, including low-income and homeless people in the us, a fact that american companies have particularly emphasized and capitalized on through their buy-one-give-one models. in an article on four menstrual hygiene businesses that use this model, helaina hovitz (2017) discusses cora, lola veeda, and conscious period, which address barriers to product access and rationale for their donations of “sanitary products to women and girls in need in india, kenya, and the u.s. lack of sanitary products can keep girls from being able to go to school or even leave the house.” analysis of this particular form of waste and accompanying capitalist biotechnological preoccupation is thus especially important in a moment of intensified concern over product design, content, and the gendered waste generated from such products. menstruating bodies and bodily emissions are once again thrust into the political spotlight in nuanced racialized, classed, and gendered ways related to the levels of production, consumption, and expulsion. “cleaning up” the period in an article for instyle magazine, marianne mychaskiw (2017) features new tampon and feminine products “merging feminism with feminine care,” a list that starts with the burgeoning us company lola, which tailors its feminine care products to customer needs and offers home delivery service. lola entrepreneurs have made their products relatable to a generation of highly educated, working professional women in the global north, who unabashedly seek to destigmatize periods but are simultaneously inconvenienced by the potentially toxic ingredients, high prices, and limited product availability. this is a historical moment of tech reinvention of menstrual products, from buy-one-giveone models a` la toms shoes, organic and bpa-free products, reusable underwear to prototypes that include genomic analysis monitoring for cancers or endometriosis. lola, among other companies, has built a name for itself through development of organic cotton products “without toxins, dyes, or synthetic stuff,” deliverable right to your doorstep (gautraud, 2017). competitor company cora similarly addresses the question of ingredient transparency, outlining on their product site their dedication to consumer and worker health, and emphasizing their movement away from use of bleaches, dioxens, formaldehyde, gmo cotton seeds: “in an industry that has never been required to disclose its product’s ingredients or test their safety, we saw a better way: a commitment to health and transparency” (cora, n.d.b.). the company promotes a shame-free script about periods in which menses should “never be a source of shame, harm or uncertainty ([or] excessively pink packaging.) and it should never keep a girl from getting her education” (cora, n.d.a.). special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 10 in feminist technology, linda layne, sharra vostral, and kate boyer (2010) examine the possibilities and complexities of feminist technologies in general— that is, “tools plus knowledge” that both empower and enhance women’s abilities “to develop, expand and express their capacities” (p. 3). vostral (2010) asks what might make tampons, as a technology with a long history of innovation and design, feminist, assuming this possibility exists. she ultimately suggests that such technologies fall short of being feminist because they are intended to hide menstrual experience, and she points to the underlying pressures and cultural shame that continue to accompany menstruation as a site for reconsideration in design and tech innovation. vostral (2010) argues that while there is no singular definition of a more or less feminist technology, those that most empower women and undermine negative cultural scripts about periods as dirty are especially important. she, in fact, analyzes products that have reimagined the tampon as “healthier” or more “green” as one such limited example, much like the aforementioned companies that have placed their product design emphasis on transparency of ingredients without chemicals and pesticides, individualized sizing preferences, and delivery options, as well as global empowerment campaigns (p. 145). yet, perhaps because they are envisioned in cultural contexts that reflect very different waste management needs and content, these companies have addressed the question of waste futurities only in limited ways and through their own cultural lenses—expressly focused on claims to healthier, more organic, and chemical-free ingredients, as well as on empowering women by helping them to participate in biotech markets, which is meant to accomplish what vostral refers to as “passing” as a non-bleeding body (2008, p. 10; 2010, p. 143). companies have pinpointed the ways in which periods may prove a barrier to physical, educational, and economic participation without access to menstrual absorption products. in doing so, these companies do not completely challenge cultural anxiety about menstruation and the discard produced through its absorption. they utilize technological innovation in product design to prove that, with access to the proper resources (and preferably these specific products), women need not be hindered by their periods. companies do not necessarily, however, address questions of menstrual waste exposure, other than to consider a consumer’s physical vulval and vaginal wall contact with products and highquality ingredients. swach’s red dot campaign, which specifically addresses the discarded afterlife of menstrual products, picks up this particular thread, bringing the question of the waste futurities of menstrual products themselves into sharp focus. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 11 in addition to framing themselves as laborers, union members, and valuable recyclers, swach provides public education on the hazards of waste picker jobs, emphasizing ways in which everyday consumers can help make their workspace more humane, through critical campaigns addressing discarded menstrual materials. through red dot campaign media, along with sales of sanitary towel disposal bags, swach seeks to educate the broader public about contact hazards related to menstrual products. the formal campaign is the first of its kind in india—the earliest rumblings of which i found documented in english back in 2013—but as an organized campaign, it is an outgrowth of the april 2016 g.s.r. 395 ministry of environment, forest and climate change updated rules for handling hazardous wastes, including menstrual wastes, diapers, and condoms (desai, 2013; government of india, 2016a & 2016b). the red dot public service video opens with a well-dressed professional woman tossing her trash bag out on her way to work. as she arrives at her office and opens her office drawer, she is shocked to find used sanitary napkins crumpled but flapping open to expose the menstrual blood, at which point the video comes to a screeching halt. the next scene zooms in on a swach waste picker, likewise at work in her uniform, looking straight into the camera explaining why no one should have to work with hazardous materials in their workplace. the video then outlines what the public can do to make working conditions for waste pickers more humane and sanitary, including wrapping sanitary napkins and used diaper waste in newspaper and then marking them with a red dot or purchasing pre-marked red-dot bags to dispose of unsanitary materials. sold in bundles of 30, the bags are marketed as “made by marginalized women” and targeted to female consumers “who want to dispose of sanitary waste responsibly [in order to] make life safe and dignified for those who keep our homes clean” (swach coop, n.d.b.). the red dot campaign directly centers women speaking across class boundaries to one another. on the one hand, the campaign attempts to make work conditions healthier for marginalized dalit women waste pickers, and takes seriously their workspace and health concerns related to bloodand feces-borne pathogens, including staphylococcus or hepatitis. on the other hand, by focusing on cisgendered women, the campaign not only reinforces that women are frequently the targets of the burdens of waste work whether as consumers, laborers, or both, but it also implies that biology determines gender identity. the campaign calls for labeling the effluent of bleeding bodies as a means of managing this form of waste and its possible pathogens, rather than having bodies pass as “non-bleeding”. the red dot on packaging is used as a sign to waste pickers to handle the materials as pathogenic, rather than to experience the special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 12 surprise and discomfort of grappling with bodily effluent unannounced. swach drives their point home concerning workplace dignity not solely in their psa, but in a grant-funded film clip that documents their waste management efforts and leadership trainings, in which the final image leaves viewers with a smiling waste worker holding both a red-dot marked sanitary waste package alongside a sign that simply reads, “thank you” (swach coop, n.d.c.). in a huffington post article about the campaign, outreach manager suschismita pai argued, “opening sanitary waste is disgusting, and an assault on their dignity and health without any financial gain" (joshi, 2017). the campaign thus underscores menstrual absorption wastes as hazardous, and reflects the national ministry’s labeling of “infectious” materials. although it does not place the waste pickers as professionals directly in national dialogue with indian ecological efforts, the campaign identifies waste picker’s efforts as instrumental to changes in attitudes and perceptions about waste, ecology, and social hierarchies. individual consumers are not the sole targets of red dot campaign efforts, however. according to the cooperative’s outreach manager and media coverage, swach, among other organizations, has directly called upon companies, including global giants of personal care products such as procter & gamble, hindustan unilever, johnson and johnson, and kimberly-clark lever, to include disposable packaging with their products and to reconsider product designs that would prioritize biodegradability and compostability (basu, 2015 times news network, 2013; joshi, 2017). in swach’s 2013 send it back campaign, waste pickers documented their difficulties convincing major industrial producers of disposable sanitary napkins and diapers to respond to requests for providing packing for humane disposal, and/or to commit to biodegradability of their products. in the face of non-response, the collective gathered and boxed used products and sent them back to their producers on international women’s day (desai, 2013). a technological innovation with waste picker empowerment and sustainable development at its core, in this instance, could potentially take into account the interests of customers who have purchasing power, but it could also address the waste futurity of the product post-disposal. this approach frames consideration of the ecological and waste management impacts together with the social entanglements, epitomizing what i have elsewhere dubbed “the social fabrics of trash” by considering the ecological and worker impacts during production and disposal (vaughn, 2018). for instance, cora’s company mission outlines their support of environmentally safe products and labor conditions at the level of source and production; they argue against child labor and the use of dangerous chemicals, and they align themselves with workers’ rights standards special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 13 for fair wages (cora, n.d.b). swach’s post-consumer red dot campaign tackles both ecological and labor concerns under the current conditions of disposal, and has an eye towards innovative future designs that are more ecologically and socially efficient. waste pickers in this context once again resist the erasure of their work and ecological contributions, attempting to write themselves into the fabrics of innovative design technologies. globally speaking, so prevalent has the counter-scripting of period shame been recently that malaka gharib (2015) for national public radio declared 2015 “the year of the period.” nyu legal scholar jennifer weiss-wolf (2015) documented global trends in what she coins a political “menstrual crisis” over very real menstrual hygiene and health concerns. even an article in newsweek revealed, “the fight to end period shaming is going mainstream,” and outlined the ways in which cultural actors, from designers and entrepreneurs to comedians and artists, have begun to address the problem of period shaming in the us and globally (jones; 2016). during the same time frame, poet rupi kaur completed a photographic series with poetic meditation on the politics of menstruation, which garnered press interest and was censored on social media. images of kaur’s bleeding body became politically charged as menstrual blood incited, intrigued, or offended the viewing public (saul, 2015; kaur, n.d.). in her newsweek article abigail jones (2016) reflected on the cultural shifts, stigmas, politics, and innovations surrounding the period in a shocking reminder that menstruation still remains contentious. in a historical moment of global menstrual contention and counter-scripting, the swach campaign exposes the complexities of imagining zero-waste futures on larger scales and municipal levels, as consumers must contend with their waste, and both consume and discard with more conscious understandings of the revalue and/or recyclability of the materials they toss away. the red dot media campaign harnesses the power of the abject in menstrual and biohazardous wastes to encourage socially responsible consumption (through support of the sanitary towel bags) and disposal (by way of the marked newspaper) to lift the lid on what is cast aside as meaningless once disposed of. emotions such as disgust and shame become tools of public education and outreach by the cooperative members who are seeking to improve their own overall work conditions, while encouraging support for their workforce as necessary and valuable. the growing trend in menstrual hygiene products tends to focus more on individual consumer exposures or safety and transparency of ingredients (indeed, special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 14 ingredient transparency was a central catalyst of the robin danielson act). instead, the waste pickers focus on generating better work conditions and having to grapple with the waste futurities of menstrual products. in both cases, however, the actors involved are largely targeting consumer interests, trends, and biases, whether it be to encourage more socially responsible consumption or to change discard habits. neither fully addresses waste composition, or decomposition, which is a conundrum and responsibility embedded within the product technology designs themselves. moreover, neither approach subverts the tendency to erase or make abject the experience or effluent of menstruation as a cyclical experience, what vostral (2008) calls “the technological politics of passing,” in which menstruating bodies pass as non-menstruating bodies as a means of “overcoming prejudice of the bleeding body” (p. 10). waste futurity in menstrual product (re)design the burdens of empowerment, waste futurity, and zero-waste strategies must be embedded within feminist product design. why explicitly empowerment, and why feminist design? menstrual product design changes have the capacity to do exactly what vostral and other science and technology scholars argue: empower consumers and innovate increased product design centered on zero-waste trends for compostability, while also serving as a tool to reverse negative cultural scripting about menstruating bodies and/or targeted blame for gendered wastes. in this essay, i argue that the work of gender justice and intersectional feminism that many global waste pickers are already doing in their communities and unions must be central to the future of waste management and waste metabolism. swach’s campaign certainly speaks to a much broader international trend in shifting cultural scripts about menstrual visibility and period politics. however, the campaign also singles out menstrual absorption products and expressly targets menstruating people as discarders for increased social responsibility, rather than as one example within a much bigger continuum of domestic biohazardous or non-biodegradable wastes. companies that are intentionally billing themselves as sustainable, green, or socially conscious focus on the quality and social impacts of their products at the level of production and consumption, and less explicitly on post-disposal concerns. in their own ways, they may also contribute to waste management concerns in places where westernized management techniques and products are out of context with local interests or beyond infrastructural capacities. companies that have yet to show interest in products without ingredients like plastics or petrochemicals, dyes or fragrances, likewise focus their attentions on selling special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 15 products to interested consumers, rather than on the conundrums of exposure or waste futurities. as waste scholar max liboiron (2013) argues, we must see municipal solid waste as “an extension of industrial practices,” (p. 10) and therefore as industrial solid waste by design. the future, liboiron (2013) argues, must include elimination of toxics, implementation of green chemistry, closedloop design strategies, and reuse economies to scale. while the focus on menstrual waste may appear narrow to a limited product and waste type, given swach’s long-time alliance with implementing zero-waste strategies, we can use this example to reflect on broader implications. swach’s campaign is politically interesting not simply because it appeals to individual consumers but because it suggests the potential in product (re)design as a means of revaluing waste picker work; it pressures industry and municipalities alike to increase zero-waste strategies; and it draws attention to the burdens and workplace interruptions of grappling with toxic, non-compostable biohazardous waste. this topic of the composition of municipal solid waste is also important given the shifting impacts of increased industrial menstrual product availability for people who may have previously used reusable cloth, rags, leaves, ash, or mud. as companies target menstruaters in developing nations by harnessing the language of empowerment, and as there is greater public health knowledge about menstrual hygiene needs and increased access to new products, we see a growth in debates over ways to deal with the waste produced. for instance, regarding urban versus rural differences in menstrual waste, kaur, kaur, and kaur (2018) suggest that waste composition and management techniques shift according to place and infrastructure factors so that women in rural parts of india may “generate lesser amounts compared to women in urban areas who rely on commercial disposable pads” (p. 4), and disposal can include anything from solid waste/trash bin, incineration, to flushing, or waterway disposal. india’s ministry of drinking water and sanitation addresses menstrual waste capacity concerns in their 2015 guidelines: funds allocated for solid and liquid waste management may be used to implement safe disposal solutions for menstrual waste (used sanitary cloths and pads) and setting up incinerators in schools, women’s community sanitary complexes, primary health centre, or in any other suitable place in village and collection mechanisms etc., can be taken up. technologies may include appropriate options that are socially acceptable and environmentally safe. (2015, p. 3) special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 16 whereas the national ministry identifies incineration as an acceptable disposal option, waste pickers advocate for both immediate workplace-fix initiatives through the red dot campaign labeling technique, and push for product design initiatives at the level of production rather than disposal. their documentation of disgust for the abject in their workplaces is utilized as a mechanism for increased packaging in the short term, and calls for an industrial revision of product biodegradability in the long term, rather than incineration tactics. saathi—a company co-founded in 2015 by mit, harvard, and nirma university graduates with a production home base in gujarat—has invented just such a product with waste futurity in mind by utilizing the waste of banana fibers for their biodegradable pads. they suggest that this revalued product base has generated new life for a once simply composted material on banana farms. according to their website, the banana fiber provides “great absorbency [and is an ideal solution because] there are more than 1.2 million acres of banana trees planted in india, and they require less water and fertilizer to grow than cotton. before there was a use for banana fiber, farmers would compost the banana trees after each harvest” (saathi, n.d.a.). not unlike its global counterparts in menstrual product redesign made without chemicals or pesticides, saathi features young, modern women on their website alongside messages like “natural feels better” and “good for your body, environment and community.” they too offer to subsidize the costs of pads to women who have limited access to industrial products. however, unlike other young menstrual product companies, saathi draws attention to the waste-life of their products by actively discussing their decomposition within three to six months of disposal and arguing in their company history and mission, “we are innovators in the use of alternative materials and zero-waste production” (saathi, n.d.b.).6 launching its products in 2017, saathi is an example of how to imagine product redesign with sustainability and end-of-life product capacities written into the material. chintan environmental research and action group, an environmental justice organization that works closely with waste pickers and other workers in informal sectors, warns that the onus must fall on industry producers to address design factors, arguing that “menstrual pollution” from toxic materials in the design, such as polyvinyl chloride or chlorine bleach, or by way of incineration are equally problematic (chaturvedi, 2017; chintan environmental research & action group, n.d.a. & n.d.b.). incinerator companies and development ngos encourage smallscale incinerator usage. companies such as glo life care and visaga tech are marketing what they special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 17 claim to be the smallest, wall-mountable incinerators on the market, in tandem with hygiene product vending machines to address concerns over access and fixations with menstrual waste for use in places such as “girls schools and colleges, women’s hostels, hospitals, shopping malls & complexes, hotels, corporate offices & factories, airports, railways & bus stations, public toilets, theme parks, [etc]” (visaga tech, n.d.a,). visaga tech’s napiburn incini25 model is billed as the world’s smallest electric incinerator, designed and manufactured “under the guidance of unicef” (n.d.b.). glo life care’s reprocide: sanitary napkin destroyer machine is likewise a small-scale incinerator for similar contexts such as schools or offices.the company’s pamphlet suggests that flushing sanitary napkins causes infrastructural concerns, whereas “used sanitary napkins are a breeding grounds for harmful germs and bacteria. [the] used napkin is a sleeping poison, apart from polluting the environment, it gets into ground water/rivers and streams and through vegetation enters our human food chain, if not properly disposed” (glo life care n.d.a.). glo life care thus underscores some of the same concerns as environmentalists and advocacy organizations, but does so by framing its products as paramount to human health initiatives, sparing the public from coming into inadvertent contact with the “sleeping poison” menstrual waste through incineration at the very site of disposal. words and phrases intended to appeal to “modern women” are emphasized in the brochure: “the new woman,” “effective solutions to feminine hygiene issues at work or study,” and “shielded femininity” all emphasize moving towards new ways of addressing waste hygiene management. their machine is billed as both hygienic and eco-friendly as it converts the products to what they call “sterile ash,” puts an end to landfills and clogging drains, and stops spread of infection “from the practice of manual scavenging of napkins from the bins” (glo life care, n.d.b,). according to the company, the waste ash can be “reused for manure [and is] less polluting” (glo life care, n.d.b.). here waste pickers are framed as people to protect by means of capitalist technological innovation. waste pickers are representative of the counter to technological advancement, indicative of a bygone era in waste management, associated with the spread of infection and unhygienic practices. in contrast, the company’s incinerator technology is billed as symbolic of women of the future. yet, it is also important to distinguish between incinerated waste ash that is rendered “sterile” of the pathogens connected to blood from menstrual waste and non-toxic ash. these are two different things—particularly in menstrual hygiene waste, which could be composed of cotton rags, or plastics and bleached cotton, and therefore could result in different toxicity potentials once they’re incinerated in the remaining ash. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 18 once burned, the atoms of incinerated plastics, petrochemicals, or chlorinated bleach in hygiene products might be rendered non-infectious, but not non-toxic or non-carcinogenic. finally, we must also be careful to distinguish between pollution from incinerators that falls below permissible levels and incinerator waste that is “non-toxic.” the public fervor surrounding this form of “waste” cannot be separated from cultural fear and distancing from menstrual waste more generally as pathogenic, poisonous, or hazardous—a fact not at all unique to india. green companies and global development agencies alike claim that increased access to industrial menstrual absorption products empowers women to have greater mobility and comfort. however, another outcome of such single-use disposable products includes their effects on municipalities that are less prepared to handle such waste, along with the ways in which gendered eco-blame is building around menstrual waste production more generally. because this form of effluence is already highly abject and political due to its contact with blood and association with feminized bodies and sloughed uterine linings, global political and corporate responses reveal a troubling isolation of this form of gendered waste production. they likewise make clear an increased pressure on individual consumers to make the “bleeding” vagina a site for politicized waste work. my intent here is not to critique the advancement of technological ingenuity or redesign in hygiene products. rather, i suggest that particularly, though not exclusively, menstruating people of color in the global south, and, more precisely, menstrual effluent, absorption products, and exposed vaginal walls have all become central to new turns in ecological waste management methods and fervor. equal global focus remains less centered, for instance, on other single-use disposable objects such as condoms, diapers, napkins, towels, toilet paper, wipes, dental dams, or any number of other items that come into contact with bodily fluids. moreover, by emphasizing ecological impacts of menstrual waste, bleeding bodies become politically centered in waste management debates, rather than biotechnological and green chemistry invention geared towards 100% non-toxic biodegradability, compostability, and innovation in a historic moment of intense concern over waste capacities more broadly. in her important article “medicalising menstruation,” lahiri-dutt (2015) critically outlines a growing international development sector in the medicalization of menstrual hygiene management. lahiri-dutt (2015) provides a feminist critique of the ways in which ngos and special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 19 hygiene product manufacturers appropriate or redefine the meaning and treatment of menstruation in order to exert excessive control over what they see as a vast market waiting to be tapped…the ideal of fit and healthy woman as envisioned by modernity hides important politics behind medicalisation, and the consequent processes of commercialization. (p. 1162) while i do not here equate the development programs lahiri-dutt analyzes with waste picker initiatives, i do pose questions that arise from bringing the two in dialogue: what does it mean that women’s bodies become central to menstrual waste sanitation initiatives? how might we reconcile the important work that waste pickers do in refusing to have their labor and health needs erased or compromised, and in organizing whistleblowing efforts to pressure industry culprits, while also participating in a form of ecological blame through singling out one form of a myriad of potentially pathogenic wastes that must all change at industrial levels? these are short-term solutions and protection tactics to longerterm issues, just as workers outline in their send it back campaign. on the one hand, waste picker efforts represent a practical and focused ecological effort for better work conditions. they likewise act as global leaders for sustainable innovation by pressuring for greater biotechnological design of hygiene products, and they do so expressly through self-representation. they provide testimony of the classed, gendered, and racialized experiences of women working in the informal sector who are already considered global leaders and experts by their waste picker and zero-waste constituencies. finally, red dot campaign places waste pickers as a professionalized workforce at the center of national sustainability initiatives connected to waste. it also expressly speaks within a growing global dialogue intended to demystify and make menstrual blood less secret or shunned in public discourse. on the other hand, this campaign singles out one type of gendered waste and centers critiques largely, though not exclusively, on consumer practices. it does not destigmatize menstrual effluent per se, but rather harnesses the existence of intense socio-cultural loathing of menstruation to protect specific low-tech, unprecedented collective labor initiatives and goals. conclusion: the work of waste futurity many waste pickers are brutally murdered every day across the world— many as a result of unsafe work conditions, extreme exploitation, and immense prejudice that still exists about our work. —alex cardoso, “march 1st: a day to fight, not to celebrate” special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 20 we claim feminism as a means to achieve equality, women’s autonomy over their own bodies and sexuality, and the right to a life free from violence. we likewise reaffirm the urgency of a fairer distribution of wealth and income; the fight against racism and ethnocide; the guarantee of the right to land and territory; the right to cities; and the rights to the environment, water, education and culture. —people’s summit declaration, quoted in globalrec, “‘women simply want equality’: interview with maria mônica da silva and viviane mertig of mncr” departing from the voices, testimonies, interviews, and digital archives of waste pickers claiming the value of their own labor as instrumental to ecological efforts in municipal waste and zero-waste models of management, waste futurity as i analyze it accounts for human and nonhuman toxicity, exposure, and precarity concerns. paying attention to how waste pickers talk about their own labor reveals that the work of waste futurity encompasses acknowledging the value of these contributions as work, as ecologically valuable work, and as indicative of waste picker’s longheld (if overlooked) role the forefront of global zero-waste strategizing that centralizes human and nonhuman toxicity concerns as intertwined. as liboiron (2013) argues, by design we must reimagine waste as toxic-free, “because [toxics] forestall a local or cyclical economy” (p. 11). globally, waste picker initiatives to center zero waste “end-of-life” management strategies such as vermiculture, composting, gardening, and bio-gas reflect this broader goal of cyclical waste economies and increased pressure for toxic-free design. waste pickers allying themselves with initiatives that harness the energy potential of india’s organic waste mass; as well as swach’s red dot campaign for healthier work environments free of risky pathogen exposure, likewise reflects such goals. swach’s campaign echoes global trends in shifting cultural scripts about menstrual visibility; however, their campaign does so by expressly using menstrual waste as always and already abject. they implement important laborer pushback organized around unhealthy work conditions, but do so also by extending common scripts that shame bleeding bodies in need of regulation and menstrual erasure. as waste pickers have articulated the world over, understandings of toxic work environments must extend to the inclusion and social enfranchisement of workers as professionals at the forefront of ecological efforts in grappling with waste. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 21 they outline socioeconomic needs in the present tense, as well as future aspirations of health care, job security, education, stopping gender-based violence, addressing generational poverty resulting from class or caste, gender, and racial-ethnic exclusions, and more. claiming waste picking as work pushes back on common stereotypes and labels of this labor as a public nuisance, criminal, or hazardous. as the above epigraphs convey, it speaks back to testimonies in many parts of the world concerning the impunity with which waste pickers document that their very bodies are frequently undervalued, erased, or harmed, and their labor overlooked. moreover, there is an increasing movement of global waste picker women who are pushing for their rights as workers and as women in very intersectional ways, as the second epigraph in this concluding section suggests. as some scholars have outlined, the complexities of including waste pickers in globally shifting waste management landscapes are numerous. yet, by departing from the actions, words, and documentation of women in waste picking directly, i suggest these are frequently citizen science efforts to promote zero-waste strategies by the “recyclers and composters, who literally take waste into their own hands to transform it for good” (global alliance for incinerator alternatives, n.d.). thus, rethinking precarity in this article encompasses understanding the resistance to the erasure of waste pickers’ work as they define it. likewise, rethinking precarity here embeds the vitality of the thrown away within a waste futurity that is more intersectionally feminist by design. acknowledgements special thanks to rachel lee and the amazing staff at ucla’s center for the study of women; and to the catalyst editorial board and staff for their hard work. many thanks to the generous anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful insights helped to strengthen this article; and to michelle rensel and michelle yates, who offered feedback and moral support on various drafts and iterations of this piece and broader book chapter. to harrison dog, who most comfortingly snoozed underneath my desk as i wrote the earliest notations that would become this work. to ale, for everything and more. notes 1 on the broader framing of environmental futurity, see o’brien and lousley, 2017, p. 2. 2 the notion that these women are helping the environment comes from a waste picker quoted in poorna chakra/full circle: “we believe that we are the ones who are helping the environment.” special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 22 3 the collective labor initiatives behind what i am calling waste futurity, especially those in pune, india, have been described by waste picker union networks and popular press alike as unique and instrumental to increased respect for dalit women waste pickers working within the ongoing structural violence of the caste system, a “quiet revolution” and shift from “untouchable to indispensable…in a country increasingly opting for privatized waste management” (carr, 2014; wiego 2019). swach’s work has even created some economic mobility for waste pickers and/or the educational and economic futures of their families. while this fact may not entirely thwart caste heirarchies, it may push back on their assumed fixedness. thus, waste picker unions help to “imagine a more viable future” in the midst of harmful work environments as o’brien and lousley (2017) frame it in their work on environmental futurity for laborers. by focusing on their digital archives, campaigns, and waste picker perspectives, i intentionally center the voices of dalit workers. the common thread running through these broader lines of argumentation for more equitable work conditions are the ways in which waste pickers harness real work narratives and zero-waste strategies to resist the erasure of their impact and labor. 4 yukiko hashimoto’s (2016) comparative study of waste management models in swach and another local ngo also confirms, “as most of the waste pickers are women they are at high risk to acquire gynecological disorders such as uteritis, menstrual disorders etc. therefore, it is imperative to improve the current waste management practices [using a] gender sensitive approach” (p. 44). 5 meanwhile, scholars, activists, and development programs show intensified interest in the broader socio-cultural, waste management, and infrastructural outcomes of menstrual hygiene focus. for instance, sommer, kjellén, and pensulo (2013) argue that women’s and girls’ needs are frequently overlooked in sanitation and waste infrastructural planning. kaur, kaur, and kaur (2018) review common cultural constraints, waste management barriers, and techniques as well as eco-friendly absorbents. 6 in the managed body, bobel (2019) argues that there is little data to prove this biodegradability timeline as yet (see p. 71). references basu, s. 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(2018). sustainable consumption: policy approaches for systems change. policy paper produced for the think 2030 conference, institute for european environmental policy. parthasarathy, shobita. 2019. the power (& disempowerment) of menstrual hygiene management." discard studies. october 14, 2019. blog. retrieved from: https://discardstudies.com/2019/10/14/the-power-and-disempowerment-ofmenstrual-hygiene-management/ kumar raj, a. (2010). poorna chakra/full circle [film]. kagad kach patra kashtakari panchayat. rastogi, n. (2010, march 16). greening the crimson tide: what's the environmental impact of my period? slate. retrieved from https://slate.com/technology/2010/03/what-s-the-environmental-impact-of-myhttps://discardstudies.com/2019/10/14/the-power-and-disempowerment-of-menstrual-hygiene-management/ https://discardstudies.com/2019/10/14/the-power-and-disempowerment-of-menstrual-hygiene-management/ special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 27 period.html saathi (n.d.a.). “what are the benefits of banana fibre.” company website. retrieved from https://saathipads.com saathi (n.d.b.).“our story.” company website. retrieved from https://saathipads.com/pages/about-us saul, h. (2015, march 30). menstruation-themed photo series artist “censored by instagram” says images are to demystify taboos around periods. the independent. retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/art/menstruation-themed-photo-series-artist-censored-by-instagramsays-images-are-to-demystify-taboos-10144331.html sommer, m., kjellén, m., & pensulo, c. (2013). girls’ and women’s unmet needs for menstrual hygiene management (mhm): the interactions between mhm and sanitation systems in low-income countries. journal of water sanitation and hygiene for development, 3(3), 283-297. doi.org/10.2166/washdev.2013.101 st correspondent. (2013, march 9). waste pickers cringe over sanitary waste. sakàl times. retrieved from http://www.swachcoop.com/pdf/sakaltimes-08.03.13.pdf stein, e., & kim, s. (2009). flow: the cultural story of menstruation. new york, ny: st. martin’s press. strasser, s. (1999). waste & want: a social history of trash. new york, ny: metropolitan books. sumpster, c., & torondel, b. (2004). a systematic review of the health and social effects of menstrual hygiene management. plos one, 8(4), e62004. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0062004 swach coop. (n.d.a). swach initiatives. retrieved from https://swachcoop.com/ swach coop. (n.d.b.) sanitary towel disposal bags advertisement. “our products and services.” what we do: swach coop initiatives. website. retrieved from https://swachcoop.com/initiatives/red-dot-awareness/ swach coop. (n.d.c.) pushing for peace: an initiative of the red dot campaign. resources: films about swach and kkpkp. website. retrieved from https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b3o-kvj5o9oenum3vhliqnzhyw8/view times news network. (2013, march 9). waste pickers protest open disposal of sanitary pads. the times of india-pune. retrieved from url. vaughn, r. (2018). popular representations of dumpster diners and a politics of clean. american studies, 57(1-2, summer), 29-56. doi: 10.1353/ams.2018.0024 visaga tech (n.d.a.). products: sanitary napkin burning machine inci25 [website]. https://swachcoop.com/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b3o-kvj5o9oenum3vhliqnzhyw8/view special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) rachel vaughn, 2020 28 retrieved from http://www.visagatech.com/sanitary_napkin_burning_machine_inci25.html visaga tech (n.d.b.). about us: company profile. [website]. retrieved from http://www.visagatech.com/aboutus.html vostral, s. l. (2008). under wraps: a history of menstrual hygiene technology. plymouth, uk: lexington press vostral, s. l. (2010). tampons: rescripting technologies as feminist. in l. l. layne, s. l. vostral, & k. boyer (eds.), feminist technology (pp. 136-153). urbana, il: university of illinois press. vostral, s. l. (2018). toxic shock: a social history. new york, ny: nyu press. weiss-wolf, j. (2015, august 11). america’s very real menstrual crisis. time magazine. retrieved from https://time.com/3989966/america-menstrual-crisis/ wiego. (2019, february). in india, pune’s poorest operate one of the world’s most cost-effective waste management models: a q&a with lakshmi narayan. [blog post]. retrieved from https://www.wiego.org/blog/india-pune’s-poorest-operate-world’smost-cost-effective-waste-management-models wyatt, s. (2003). non-users also matter: the construction of users and non-users of the internet. in n. oodshorn & t. pinch (eds.), how users matter: the co-construction of users and technology (pp.67-79). cambridge, ma: mit press. author bio rachel vaughn is a lecturer in the ucla institute for society & genetics, and the 2018–2019 oral historian-in-residence at the ucla center for the study of women. vaughn holds a phd in american studies from the university of kansas. her research examines the intersections of food and discard studies, feminist science & technology studies. she is the author of multiple articles about food, waste, and sanitation politics; is co-editor of the special issue edible feminisms: on discard, waste & metabolism (food, culture & society); and is author of two in-progress books, talking food, talking trash: oral histories of food precarity from the margins of a dumpster (university of nebraska press) and queer toxic soy and estrogen panic (ohio state university press). http://www.visagatech.com/aboutus.html https://time.com/3989966/america-menstrual-crisis/ https://www.wiego.org/blog/india-pune’s-poorest-operate-world’s-most-cost-effective-waste-management-models https://www.wiego.org/blog/india-pune’s-poorest-operate-world’s-most-cost-effective-waste-management-models purity is not the point: chemical toxicity, childbearing, and consumer politics as care ford, andrea lilly. (2020). purity is not the point: chemical toxicity, childbearing, and consumer politics as care. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-25. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © andrea lilly ford, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license purity is not the point: chemical toxicity, childbearing, and consumer politics as care andrea lilly ford university of edinburgh andrea.ford@ed.ac.uk abstract environmental chemical toxicity evokes both individual action and relational interconnection. on the one hand, there is the diffusion of risk and harm through time and space, which complicates assigning fault, responsibility, or regulatory jurisdiction. on the other hand, toxicity begs the question of what individuals can do to feel a sense of agency and mitigate the damage done by daily necessities of living. i call this tension a double bind and suggest that it is mirrored by childbearing, arguing that childbearing offers a particularly compelling site for thinking through the possibilities and limits of consumer politics as a response to chemical toxicity. childbearing and toxicity both disturb conventional ideas about individual actors in such a way that it makes the necessity of collective political action apparent even to those most invested in consumer politics. by building on new materialist philosophy and reproductive justice critiques of consumer choice, i consider both social and ontological problems with a politics based on individual agents. ultimately, i argue that despite their flaws, consumer choices can be important acts of care alongside collective political action, and that childbearing can be a catalyst for ecological approaches to politics in which relations of responsibility and care are foregrounded. introduction i was distractedly admiring the long grey braids of the woman seated in front of special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 2 me on the wooden pews in the asilomar retreat and conference center just outside of monterey, california, when sandra steingraber captured my attention. she was speaking to the 2012 annual meeting of the midwives alliance of north america, which i was attending as a burgeoning anthropologist and doula, just starting fieldwork in the bay area. a fair number of the women seated around me were knitting or doing other handwork in the light of big leaded glass windows, old floorboards creaking with the collective gentle shifting of our weight. steingraber was an ecologist talking to us about biomagnification, aquatic ecosystems, and the accumulation of toxic industrial runoff in fish flesh. in some ways this conference was parading stereotypes of “midwives” before me, a femininity of soft cotton and down-to-earth sweaters, wry wisdom and practicality in boots and sandals that suited my own temperament far better than the business casual attire i was wearing. but the toxicity under discussion was jarring in this peaceful space—what did toxic ecologies have to do with birth? steingraber, who has written popular science books about toxicity’s impact on childbearing and cancer that draw from her own experience, explained biomagnification as the phenomenon whereby toxins become more concentrated with every link they climb in the food chain—they remain in the flesh of the consumer. because there are so many more food chain links in aquatic ecosystems than terrestrial ones, carnivorous fish are particularly prone to carrying high concentrations of toxins. mercury is an industrial byproduct of manufacturing some plastics; it is released into waterways, where it bonds with carbon and becomes methyl mercury, a neurotoxin, and starts making its way up the food chain. it is notoriously associated with the epidemic of neurological disease surrounding japan’s minamata bay in the 1950s. during fetal development, cells that are being differentiated and knit into organs or into the nervous system are extremely vulnerable—one mistake in the unraveling of a zygote into a fetus can have consequences manifesting in birth defects and developmental abnormalities. far from being the guardian of an impermeable bubble, the placenta actively pumps methyl mercury across the so-called placental barrier, acting more like a magnifying glass for the misidentified molecule. because of this, there is a well-known advisory against pregnant people eating tuna, a large carnivorous fish with high mercury content. disturbingly, steingraber insisted that not only should tuna be avoided, but there is no fish that is safe for a pregnant person to eat—all of them embody methyl mercury and other toxins at levels that threaten fetal development. every fish on the planet. i have since learned much about the many ways reproduction and toxicity are special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 3 related, both through my interlocutors in “the field” and “the academy,” spaces and conversations that i find impossible to disentangle.1 but this anecdote stays fresh in my memory because of an exchange that followed. steingraber, her clear, measured voice ringing out across the wooden hall, takes a broad view of the phenomenon of toxicity, insisting that we are all interconnected and mutually implicated. she describes how water flows—through irrigation canals and urban river dump sites, into water tables hundreds of miles from the source of contamination, into the ocean where it evaporates and travels the sky in clouds, and rains down on a different continent. toxins transcend national borders and their regulatory jurisdictions. polluted water in warm countries evaporates, condenses over cold countries, and rains down on them. the environmentally conscious people of finland have some of the most polluted fish in the world. children living in “pristine” arctic snow take in seven times more pcbs through breast milk than infants in california. this is called the arctic paradox; arctic ecosystems are some of the most contaminated on earth due to global air currents and marine biomagnification, and people who rely on wild-caught food in the north carry some of the highest chemical body burdens in the world (see cone, 2005). geographical interconnection is not the only way toxins exceed expectations: american municipal water is often contaminated with agricultural runoff, and most of the exposure to toxins in water does not come from drinking, but from inhaling water vapors, so even if one buys purified bottled water to drink while pregnant, the advantage is undercut while taking a shower.2 there is no escaping our planet. steingraber calls out and refuses to capitulate to the ideology of salvation through consumer choice. nonetheless, a woman in the audience raises her hand and asks what fish are safe to eat during pregnancy. what can she tell her clients? does steingraber have a list of the most dangerous ones? steingraber is patient, and explains that that's not the point—everyone's babies are at stake, everyone's babies matter. the woman repeats herself, becoming frustrated, asking what, then, she should tell her clients? “tell them to become abolitionists,” answers steingraber after a small pause. earlier in her talk she had drawn an explicit parallel between ending global dependence on toxic fossil fuels and abolishing slavery in the united states, stating that slavery was a deeply economically entrenched system upon which rested ways of life cherished by the powerful, a system that adversely affected everyone in society, even if they were not absorbing its worst effects. the same, she said, is true of the petroleum economy. in response to this woman’s query, special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 4 she asserted that “our biggest problem” is “well-informed futility syndrome,” or feeling complacent about inaction. “abolitionists fought and marched and died,” she says. “political action is part of good parenting; it reassures your children that the world will be ok. mom's on the job.” the idea that no fish is safe encapsulates both halves of this article’s intervention. on the one hand, there is the diffusion of reproductive risk and harm through time and space (murphy, 2013), which impacts us all and is a cause for universal concern even as it is unjustly distributed “slow violence” (murphy, 2017; nixon, 2011). such uneven diffusion complicates assigning fault, responsibility, or regulatory jurisdiction, and it confounds the agency of individual actors. on the other hand, the toxic fish begs the question of what individuals can do to feel a sense of agency in the face of ill-defined threats and mitigate the damage done by daily necessities of living. pregnant people still need to eat, after all. this tension between taking individual action and strategizing based on relational interconnection is what i call the double bind of environmental toxicity. neither option is adequate, and both are necessary, but the two sit awkwardly together. in this article, i suggest that childbearing—bringing a new person into being—is a liminal moment where we can see this double bind in microcosm. both steingraber’s call to abolition and the audience midwife’s pragmatism have a place. the double bind could potentially be resolved by reimagining relations in ways that are decolonial and non-capitalist, by understanding toxicity in terms of the reproduction of power, and by effectively reworking foundational liberal assumptions about individuals and society that permeate the globalized world. recent academic work has called for such reimagination, claiming that toxicity turns politics on its head and incites totally new forms of responsibility (or “response-ability”) (liboiron, tironi, & calvillo, 2018). such work envisions political action that is neither heroic and achievement oriented (like abolition) nor concerned with intimate personal harm and individual action (as are consumer politics). it urges us to consider how existing ways of thinking about toxicity are “premised upon and reproduced by systems of colonialism, racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and other structures that require land and bodies as sacrifice zones” (liboiron et al., 2018, p. 332). the politics of material purity that underlays projects of clean up, avoidance, or antidote are anachronistic approaches to change; such purity is no longer available or was never viable to begin with (liboiron, 2016; shotwell, 2016; gray-cosgrove, liboiron, & lepawsky, 2015; nash, 2008; latour, 2004). scholars have called for a “corporeal citizenship” special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 5 approach that places bodies and toxics into a complex web of material, ecological relations entangled with the social (scott, haw, & lee, 2017), or a focus on “residues” that will not be contained in time or space (boudia et al., 2018). while i am deeply sympathetic to this framing and its politics, and in wholehearted agreement about its necessity, such an awareness is not (yet!) woven into the ways many people frame their ethical options in daily life, especially in the white and/or “middle-class” west. this article is a think piece that draws from my ethnographic experience in the california bay area, offering some reflections on how these two more conventional and accessible modes of navigating toxicity’s double bind might fit together and be recruited towards less conventional ethical and political understandings. among those i spent time with during fieldwork, and from having spent a majority of my life in northern california, much of conducting daily life and performing quotidian practices of care operates via consumer choices. in a market society oriented around purchasing goods and services, ethical thinking is somewhat inevitably framed by consumption. in the bay area, which has long been a crucible for “alternative lifestyles,” consumption practices readily take on a political cast. additionally, political activism via demonstrations and social mobilization has a deep history in this place, offering itself as an alternative model, albeit one far less woven into the fabric of daily life. although this article does not make an ethnographically based argument, ethnographic experience informs its stakes—that is, how do we, activists and scholars and concerned individuals, get from the options conventionally presented to us to the alternative political models toxicity requires of us? i suggest that childbearing offers a particularly compelling site for thinking through the possibilities and limits of consumer politics as a response to chemical toxicity. childbearing and toxicity both disturb conventional ideas about individual actors in such a way that it makes the necessity of collective political action apparent even to those most invested in consumer politics. by building on “new materialist" philosophy and reproductive justice critiques of consumer choice, i consider both social and ontological problems with an ethics and politics based on individual agents. because the social and material are relentlessly interwoven, i advance an ecological conceptual framework that encompasses both sorts of relations. ultimately, i argue that despite their flaws, consumer choices can be important acts of care alongside collective political action. childbearing can be a catalyst for ecological approaches to politics—that is, approaches in which relations of responsibility and vulnerability are foregrounded special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 6 over individual rights. below, i first lay out issues with consumer politics, then outline new materialist critiques pertaining to toxicity and childbearing. following that, i discuss how childbearing is a “critical period” in which senses of urgency, intimacy, responsibility, and consequence are heightened; environmental chemical toxicity is hard to ignore in childbearing both because it is particularly consequential and because childbearing is a highly relatable experience. in conclusion, i suggest ways my claims relate to current scholarship about the ecological politics of fluidity and kinship. consumer politics and “choice” consumer choice and the informed consumer are powerful ideologies of response to social problems in upperand middle-class communities in wealthy market societies. they are powerful both in the sense of effecting some social change, and in stubbornly presenting themselves as the only options by which to do so. this ideology is aligned with both the fundamental liberal assumptions underlying such societies and recent neoliberal developments, particularly in the united states. liberal societies are predicated on the idea of rights-bearing, contractmaking individuals interacting in the public sphere for both business and politics.3 increasingly, the “public sphere" is the marketplace in which individuals participate as consumers, while those with business interests in producing and selling are very large corporations. these conditions are related to at least three developments: the scaling back of social welfare programs and regulatory oversight since the 1970s to “free” the market as arbiter of the public good, while emphasizing individual responsibility (harvey, 2007); citizenship becoming located in the intimate sphere, defined by personal and private acts instead of civic ones, and epitomized by the infant/fetus (berlant, 2007); and the consolidation of corporate power, notably the 2010 citizens united us supreme court ruling granting corporations personhood and first amendment protections. consumer decisions largely pertain to the intimate realm of household and family provisioning. decisions made as a consumer (as opposed to a customer, a shift related to increasing anonymity and lack of accountability between parties in the marketplace), then, have become “consumer politics” and a site for public discourse. by using their “purchasing power” to support products and practices of which they approve, or by advocating for changes in the regulatory order of the marketplace—such as legal access to procuring the services of a homebirth special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 7 midwife, or protection from gmos through labeling or a ban—consumers “talk back” to diffuse, anonymous corporations and engage with civil policymakers and legislators. amidst the proliferation of products, brands, and consumer options in recent decades, notably the boom in manufactured chemicals and plastics after world war ii, consumer strategies have also become a nuanced site for managing health, hygiene, well-being, and identity. the california bay area, where i conducted ethnographic research on childbearing from 2013 to 2016, is host to trendsetters in consumer goods and services, “green” and “non-toxic” options foremost among them. while i will not detail the scene here as it was not the focus of my ethnography, consider one illustrative anecdote (see mackendrick’s (2014, 2018) excellent work for a sociological elaboration of mothers’ green consumption practices). natural resources, a longstanding san francisco–based childbearing store and community center, started offering “non-toxic baby and toddler” and “nontoxic pregnancy and nesting” classes in 2018. the email promotion details how the problem and its solution are posed as exclusively about consumer purchases and domestic habits, not around activist outlets for concerned parents: detoxify your habitat! research has shown that pregnancy and the early years are an important time for child development, and that small behavior and purchasing changes do matter, with some having an almost immediate positive effect…[l]earn about how the environment you create in your home can impact your health and get for simple tips to protect yourself and your growing baby. you will leave with the knowledge and confidence to make science-based informed choices and decisions in this critical period of your babys [sic] life. becoming a parent and having the responsibility for the health and well-being of a brand new human is an awesome and scary proposition for many. concerns that may have been just fleeting thoughts become of paramount importance when it comes to protecting your little one. for example...are the chemicals in the products you use every day safe or how can pollutants in the environment affect a child's development? we know it's easy to get overwhelmed by all the information on the internet and not really know what is going to actually make a difference for the health of you and your family. at natural resources, we strive to make some choices a little easier by providing you with safe products like organic clothing & stainless steel baby bottles. we special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 8 also offer workshops to educate you so you can make the best decisions for you and your family...from pregnancy thru parenting. organic clothing and stainless steel baby bottles are significantly more expensive than more conventional options, which makes such “good choices” an exclusive option. making savvy consumer decisions requires copious amounts of information about health research, environmental science, and often the ethics of production and labor, as well as knowledge of current trends, as this email indicates. in the united states, this is happening in a context of increasing deregulation—also in 2018, the environmental protection agency placed the director of its own office of children’s health protection on “administrative leave,” raising concerns about closing the office, which has argued for tougher regulations on industrial pollutants (landrigan & goldman, 2018). the “informed consumer” as a moral ideal has dual valences that will be discussed more below— namely, it allows a degree of satisfying agency yet can slip into a bottomless responsibility that frames undesirable outcomes as personal failures. it is also part of changing relationships to “expert knowledge” that challenge institutional authority and trustworthiness (ehrenreich & english, 2005/1978; corburn, 2005). consumer politics is essentially a politics of choice, which is a prerogative of individuals. of course, for as much as liberal societies emphasize individual persons (dumont, 1992), particularly the united states with its founding settler mythology of freedom and self-making, individuals are always enmeshed in—and dependent upon—social relationships with one another. indeed, “the social” is an idea predicated on interactions between individuals (young, 1980). laws and policies shape these interdependencies between citizen and state, parent and child, clients and providers, and consumers and sellers. legislation can protect consumers from harmful options, and/or protect corporate “freedom” from accountability for the effects of their products. consumer politics are an attempt to shape such relations. they are predicated on collectivity because enough people have to act similarly to have an effect, even while the framework foregrounds individual action. “individuals” and “relations” are not opposed, and hardly mutually exclusive, but by focusing on one or the other different things come to the fore. in general, neoliberal reforms and market strategies emphasize individual “freedoms” from relations, obligations, and responsibilities external to oneself, while movements for social justice emphasize structures and histories that put people in unequal relation with one another. as a strategy for social justice, consumer politics is limited; more comprehensive and inclusive justice strategies point out how only a special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 9 privileged subset of middleor upper-class, usually white, people can “express” their values, needs, and desires via consumer choices. they point out how discourses of individual freedom or personal responsibility erase relations of structural and historical violence that condition and limit the possibility for individual agency (ross & solinger, 2017). childbearing is an interesting site where liberal political assumptions break down. the pregnant person, and to some extent the potentially pregnant person, nursing person, or caretaker of an infant, is implicated with the fetus, infant, or child such that interpreting either as independent, rights-bearing, choice-making individuals is complicated. this difficulty is epitomized in abortion politics, although it is also present in discussions about maternal-fetal medical care (casper, 1998), reproductive technologies (franklin, 2006), and child protective services. debates about fetal and embryonic rights (cromer, 2018; roberts, 2011) can be seen as a doubling-down of insistence on liberal conceptions of personhood. in abortion and related issues, this conception of persons frames fetal and pregnant people as having competing claims on rights. misogynist discourse about fetal personhood often sidelines or outright erases the pregnant person’s subjectivity (bordo, 2004), related to the “privatization of citizenship” in which the fetus/infant is the ideal, innocent citizen (berlant, 2007). asking whether the fetus’s “right to life” trumps the mother’s “right to choice” frames the discussion in terms of individual, separable persons, no matter which side one argues for, including strident advocates of abortion as a social good (pollitt, 2014). in the immediate term there are important consequences for how fetal vs. maternal rights are prioritized, but my point here is that the fundamental concepts, figures, and categories used to negotiate life in wealthy, liberal societies fit awkwardly with childbearing. childbearing is a liminal phase during which social organization is differently visible, both weakened and, consequently, reinforced (davis-floyd, 2004/1992). following abortion politics, much reproductive rights activism centers on “choice.” although the 1973 roe v. wade us supreme court ruling that legalized abortion did not protect women’s choice or adjudicate between competing rights of persons—it protected the right to privacy between a doctor and patient, a special type of relationship—pro-abortion advocacy almost ubiquitously gets turned into “choice" in popular discourse, sidelining relationships in favor of individual prerogative. yet the ability to choose assumes any number of relational privileges, such as access to health care and absence of coercive medical practices that have long been part of marginalized people’s reproductive history (roberts, special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 10 1997; washington, 2006). in this way, the freedom to make reproductive choices is analogous to the freedom to make consumer choices. the most prominent feminist advocacy for reproductive choice tends to represent the interests of white, middle-class women and follow a consumer politics logic, whether for access to contraception, abortion, or homebirth midwifery; critiques of these movements note their exclusivity while recognizing their importance (craven, 2010).4 frameworks based on choice have been critiqued by many intersectional feminist scholars, especially pertaining to reproduction. reproductive justice scholars and activists have produced a large body of work that embraces freedom from coercion while moving beyond that to insist that all people need good options from which to choose (see ross and solinger’s 2017 summative introduction to the field; also roberts, 1997 and many others). discourses of choice tend to hold individuals accountable for situations beyond their control, individualizing responsibility while overlooking systemic injustice. ensuring general access to good options, by contrast, requires thinking systemically and historically and adopting some degree of collective responsibility for the situation in which we each find ourselves. a justice lens will bring into focus the ways some people have better options than others due to systematic inequality, and not personal merit. in the case of abortion, for example, in order to actually have “free choice” among options, pregnant people need not only legal abortion but an accessible facility with a (culturally) competent and affordable provider, access to the means of supporting a child should they want one, a safe community in which to raise the child, and so on. where childbearing and chemical toxicity overlap, the limits of choice and consumer politics are evident. sociologist norah mackendrick (2018) shows how putting the onus of protection on consumers through a “better safe than sorry” model of green shopping barely scratches the surface of the toxicity problem. in addition to being socioeconomically exclusive, looking to consumer choices for solutions puts a huge share of the burden on women, especially mothers, who do most of the quotidian shopping and household management. such “precautionary consumption” (mackendrick, 2018, p. 4) is a costly and timeintensive practice, one that is connected to cultural ideas of femininity and good motherhood (mackendrick, 2014). choosing food and household products that are safer from a toxicity standpoint requires vast amounts of label reading, mental tabulation of brands and ingredients, less-efficient routines, and efforts to become informed, on top of the greater burden of domestic and reproductive special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 11 work which women already bear. it also requires that accurate information be accessible to consumers, which is often not the case, due partially to inadequate labeling but moreover to the dearth of research about many chemicals’ effects. of the 85,000 chemicals registered for use in the united states, only a small proportion have undergone environmental and health screening, which can be interpreted as a major failure on the part of the federal government to respect the state–citizen relationship, at least by providing information with which consumers can make “informed choices,” if not protective legislation relieving them of that burden. the politics of maternal responsibility extends beyond “green” consumption. in work on epigenetics and pregnancy, anthropologists natalie valdez (2018) and janelle lamoreaux (2016), working in the us/uk and china, respectively, emphasize how women’s bodies are treated in science and policy as wombenvironments that can pollute the fetus.5 this not only demonstrates the willingness to subordinate a mother’s personhood, needs, and desires to those of the child, but disconnects the maternal body from the environment in which it is itself immersed, looking past the shared responsibility for that environment by targeting interventions at pregnant women’s decisions and lifestyles. thinking about women’s bodies as carriers of future persons who take precedence starts even before conception (waggoner, 2017). mothers are presumed to “naturally” care for children; she who fails to nurture is a “monster” (tsing, 1990). mothers are held culturally responsible for mitigating myriad forms of insecurity (villalobos, 2014) and are caught in numerous double binds (bristow, 2014) and pressures to be “superwomen” (douglas & michaels, 2004). in the opening anecdote, steingraber’s call to activism—“mom’s on the job”—draws on and perpetuates ideas of maternal responsibility. childbearing is a liminal state between one person and two. limits are always dangerous, sites of breakdown and transformation; intense pressure on mothers functions, among other things, as a reinforcement of the status quo. material interconnection in addition to embodying complicated social personhood, childbearing highlights the co-implication of bodies at the material level. not only does the physiology of pregnancy make it obvious how incommensurate some claims to rights can be, it undermines the implicit distance between “individuals” that social relations bridge. the material relations of childbearing are an interdependence that has no distance: co-being. such co-being has been theorized as the “motherfetus” (takeshita, 2017), and i encountered the related term “motherbaby” not special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 12 infrequently in fieldwork among birth practitioners in california, usually intended to encompass the “fourth trimester” of infant care and breastfeeding to highlight how the infant continues to be co-embodied even out of the womb. focusing on such co-being introduces different political pathways. it might seem regressive and problematic to conceptually fuse mother and fetus into one being, and with good reason, since much activist discourse championing reproductive rights, choices, and autonomy operates by valorizing women’s individual personhood and asserting that it should not be subordinated to outside interest in their reproductive capacities. yet if the childbearing body is taken seriously as suggesting or requiring a reconceptualization of persons, and consequently a different politics because bodies are interwoven with one another, it offers an interesting comparison with environmental chemical toxicity, which also highlights material interconnection that transcends individuals. such transpersonal material relations are the subject of new materialist feminist philosophy that often engages environmental justice. this work, and many of its conceptual ancestors, advances a framework that pushes against the idea that bodies are bounded entities, and the commonsense idea that bodies, matter, or “nature” are preexisting and independent of the human minds that make sense of them. from this perspective, discrete human bodies are an idea as much as a physical reality. although physics and chemistry have long done away with the idea of matter as composed of tiny, rigid, discrete objects (e.g., whitehead, 1978/1929, whose 1929 “process philosophy” framed molecules as events, not things), the dualist western lay understandings that have underpinned much social theory still tend to view matter as unresponsive and fixed, as an entity rather than a process. new materialism builds on a legacy of cultural scholarship advancing a non-dualistic understanding of humans and worlds, describing the complex interactions between matters inside and outside of bodies, and between the social and environmental conditions in which bodies exist. stacey alaimo (2016) calls these “trans-corporeal entanglements” (p. 2). though "new materialism” is a reference to classical marxist materialism, which emphasizes that the material conditions of existence (how people feed, clothe, and shelter themselves) are prior to ideologies of social relationships, it also draws from black, postcolonial, and indigenous thought, though not always explicitly. indigenous metaphysics, for example, has long embraced the interconnections between life and non-life, human and nonhuman (tallbear, 2017). new materialism bears debts to corporeal feminism and medical anthropology, which have embraced bodies as materio-semiotic (haraway, 1991), described a material special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 13 and experiential “lived body” (lock & farquhar, 2007), shown sex and gender to be both social construction and physical matter (grosz, 1994), and described how matter and meaning come into being together (barad, 2007), among innumerable other contributions. two new materialist discussions of shared materiality in pregnancy illustrate the potential for thinking childbearing and environmental chemical toxicity together. chikako takeshita (2017), credited above with the term “motherfetus,” starts from the materialist premise that a “fetus” is not preexistent as an object with a distinct agency that interacts with the “mother.” discussing the role of symbiotic bacteria (the microbiome) in human reproduction, she deconstructs pregnancy as a bidirectional exchange of substances and instead frames it as a symbiotic process involving complex networks of microbial activity. this allows her to think of the childbearing body as a holobiont, an assemblage of different species forming an ecological unit. second, in her piece "eating one’s mother," eva maria simms (2009) likewise describes childbearing on a scale both more minute and more expansive than that of individual bodies, through a phenomenology of the womb and a “placental ethics” (p. 274). the womb is a very different metaphor for phenomenology than the self-contained individual immersed in a world of perception (following merleau-ponty) or sensation (following irigaray). instead of metaphors of vision or touch, which she says merleau-ponty and irigaray respectively privilege, simms uses the metaphor of the placenta to think about a “flesh ontology” (which merleau-ponty mentions but never develops) (p. 268). she describes an experience of fluid permeability and depth instead of transcendence, sinking into the intimate space of the womb where there are no separations that need to be bridged by touch because the material of existence is held in common. the placenta is the only mammalian organ that is made up of cells from two separate organisms—it is neither one nor the other. placentas are also born, and they die, potentially many times within the lifespan of one person. simms develops a placental ethics in which humans might see themselves as a conduit that holds substances for a time but always eventually passes them back into circulation, via elimination, death, and birth. decisions like taking medication or ingesting pesticides have effects beyond one's own body (masco, 2013), and decisions made by others impede the possibility for sovereignty over one’s body. sites of co-embodiment between generations are also sites of co-embodiment with the surrounding world, highlighting both temporal and spatial interconnectedness. simms (2009) writes, special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 14 the sojourn in the womb is not merely a matter of the relationships of a series of female bodies with their fetuses. the fetal ecosystem is nested in the ecosystem of the mother's body, which is nested in the larger ecosystem of the earth….the fetus' health and the well-being of future generations are intimately entwined with the health of our planet…[t]he damage to our environment is not just "out there," but it goes as deep as our placentas (p. 271). placental ethics calls on us to recognize ourselves not as individuals but as integrated parts in a field of being. “ecology,” a term adopted by much new materialist theory, is a way of describing what might otherwise be thought of as the environment. conceptually, “the environment” uses a form/field model of something external to a (human) subject, a material surround on which we can act, about which we can make choices—such as which aspects of it to internalize by eating. but granting that various aspects of the world—both human and nonhuman, material and social, vital and inert—have agency in how the world is continuously made and remade decenters the human. instead of imagining the world in terms of bounded entities and their contexts, ecological thinking merges humans and nonhumans into relations composed of both social meanings and matter itself. using the framework of ecology to speak about lived experience marks the myriad forces and interests at work in even the most basic organismic functions: metabolizing, sensing, reproducing. ecological relations are processual—they take place over time and are contingent, evolving, and responsive. ecologies are interconnected even as they are localized, so there are relations between ecologies, too. we are inextricably in relationship with what surrounds and composes us—for better or worse—and these relations are not something over which humans, much less any given person, wields control. yet, despite chemical exposures having universal implications that far exceed households, neighborhoods, territories, or national borders, such as those explained in the opening anecdote, some people are in more vulnerable positions than others. environmental justice theorist rob nixon (2011) develops his framework of “slow violence” to explain how toxins seep slowly into bodies, especially poor and marginalized bodies, in ways that are unremarkable and overlooked. toxic exposure is often greater for those working and living in close proximity to working-class industries like agriculture, oil refining, manufacturing, or mining, and in places with less geopolitical power, lax regulation, and less ability to resist corporate exploitation. this differential exposure is systemic, and special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 15 cannot be addressed by individual consumer choice. exposure is racialized in more subtle ways, like particularly inadequate labeling on cosmetic products for black hair. it is also gendered, as women are more likely to suffer poorly understood diseases correlated with toxicity: multiple chemical sensitivity, fibromyalgia, endometriosis. margaret lock (2017) has theorized this difference by distinguishing between “local biologies” (p. 5) and “situated biologies” (p. 11)— situated biologies point to the anthropocene to show how everybody is affected by human-induced environmental changes, while local biologies exist within this universal exposure and are differentially stratified, putting some populations more at risk of detrimental health outcomes than others. rather than emphasizing class and racial inequalities in the distribution of harm, which can reentrench those inequalities and stigmatize groups or kinds of people as “damaged” (murphy, 2017), thinking with the universality of exposure could direct attention to our shared need to find better ways of living. critical period childbearing is, in overlapping senses, a “critical period.” it is site of much critique and judgment of mothers/women, as discussed above, and it is overdetermined as a site of important new feelings and solidarities, as i will discuss below. but it is also a critical period in the development of the new being, formative of their health, temperament, and physicality in ways that are proliferating in scientific and theoretical awareness. in addition to mercury, the key disruptor in the opening anecdote, there are a number of other synthetic and naturally occurring chemicals that cause damage during gestation and breastfeeding, including lead, pesticides, pcbs (polychlorinated biphenyl, an industrial neurotoxin), and bpa (a component of plastics). all of these toxins are transferred via the placenta. there is a widespread but mistaken idea of the placenta as a protective barrier; while the placenta does prevent bacteria from entering, it actually facilitates the transfer of many chemicals, including harmful ones. methyl mercury and pesticides become even more concentrated in umbilical cord blood than in the mother’s blood. the barrier myth was shattered in the 1960s with the thalidomide scandal, in which mothers given that drug for morning sickness gave birth to babies with severe deformations, like missing arms or legs (in fact, martin & holloway (2014) show how the placental barrier idea only emerged after this scandal caused the medical community to become disillusioned with it: it became something that does not exist). the diethylstilbestrol (des) scandal followed swiftly in the 1970s, in which teens and young adults suffering from unusual cancers and deformities of the special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 16 reproductive system were discovered to all have been born to women who took the pharmaceutical des during pregnancy in the 1930s, when it was commonly prescribed to prevent miscarriage. des taught us that birth defects are not always immediately visible. the placenta does not recognize many modern chemicals as invaders, trace amounts of which can have major consequences for fetal development. the endocrine (hormonal) system seems particularly vulnerable to disruptive synthetic chemicals, which can mimic hormones or block their receptors. hormones are chemicals "manufactured" by bodies themselves, and regulate innumerable processes from puberty to metabolism to mood. indeed, many common pharmaceuticals are synthetic hormones, blurring the line between "disruption" and intentional alteration. endocrine disrupting chemicals (edcs) are ubiquitous, appearing in human, animal, and plant tissue as well as water, air, and consumer products. merging bodies and their surroundings, they transgress organic boundaries with ease and literally reshape biologies (murphy, 2008), with numerous potential implications for reproduction. many others toxins are shared through breast milk, in which toxins are more concentrated than in the nursing person's body. in her talk, steingraber used this fact to claim that it is not the adult human at the top of the food chain, but the human infant. breastfeeding people actually lose toxins from their fat stores in decreasing proportion to the number of children they’ve nursed; the first child to suckle serves as kind of detox, and after nursing many children, a person gets rid of her own toxins by passing them on (steingraber, 2003). on top of this developmental sensitivity, childbearing is a period of transition that is, in many ways, overdetermined. so much is projected onto it as a life-changing event or process, in which people start caring in different ways, and start being in different ways. people assume different responsibilities, and encounter myriad exhortations to think differently about their choices. as the email earlier in this article states, “concerns that may have been just fleeting thoughts become of paramount importance when it comes to protecting your little one.” a powerful urge to protect one's children and foster their health accompanies childbearing for people across class lines, whether the mothers shopping at whole foods market in norah mackendrick’s (2018) sociological study of green consumption or the incarcerated, addicted, homeless women in carolyn sufrin’s (2017) ethnography of pregnancy in jail. this urge to protect one’s children can exacerbate concerns about chemical interfaces between bodies and environments special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 17 (whether via intentional drug use or inadvertent exposures), or introduce such concerns to people who may not have been aware of them before. childbearing introduces new concerns and also new solidarities—being pregnant or having an infant can provide a sudden bond with other parents, including one’s own parents or others of an older generation, as well as those with whom one otherwise has little in common. it can be a rallying point for empathy and the possibility of connection. yet solidarities bring with them the potential for control, as when others assume the prerogative to comment upon a pregnant or infantrearing person’s actions, whether family members, strangers on the street, or state legislators. a majority of people have been directly involved in childbearing at some point in their lives, when including fathers and others who parent but do not gestate. yet only a minority of people are experiencing the actual period of conception, pregnancy, and infant care at any given time. thus, childbearing offers a fairly universal opportunity for recognition and collective action across lines of class, race, age, and geography, while at the same time it is a temporary state composed of daily decisions and actions made largely by one or two particular caretakers. childbearing highlights both collectivity and individuality, mirroring the double bind of environmental chemical toxicity. given these multifold senses of “critical,” childbearing becomes a site where environmental chemical toxicity is hard to ignore because it is both consequential and linked to a highly relatable experience. in ways, bearing children is to toxicity what being from the maldives is to climate change, which is much harder to ignore from this island nation sinking under rising sea levels—except childbearing is a much more common situation. it could be a focal point for galvanizing those least threatened by environmental toxicity to care about it. given the interconnectedness of matter and the impossibility of achieving “purity,” one cannot protect oneself from toxicity. yet acknowledging that by this same logic one cannot protect one’s children produces an imperative to care, adding urgency to steingraber’s “abolitionist” goal. childbearing offers an opportunity to emphasize solidarity among people who might not see their well-being as intertwined. however, the imperative to care in quotidian, practical ways for a dependent new being also highlights the importance of individual decisions and consumer choices, particularly on an emotional level. for many middle-class people, making special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 18 “green” choices can involve feeling empowered and morally responsible, while hitting the limits of one’s resources can involve feeling frustrated and impotent. the moral ideal of the “informed consumer” allows for the former sort of satisfying agency, yet its flip side is a bottomless responsibility that frames mistakes and undesirable outcomes as due to one’s own failure. for those used to thinking of themselves as independent agents, a heightened awareness of interconnectedness and universality can mean grappling with futility and complicity—in steingraber’s "well-informed futility syndrome,” this is crippling. buying the right things is, emotionally, a readily accessible way to seize a bit of control and act in the best interest of one’s children (mackendrick & stevens, 2016), which are important acts of care. this is important to recognize and honor, while also acknowledging its inadequacy and the need to find affective agency beyond consumer politics. it would be helpful to valorize and seek the more difficult satisfaction of saying “mom’s on the job,” whether through “heroic” activist organizing or developing networks of corporeal citizenship. conclusion both childbearing and environmental chemical toxicity foreground a heightened awareness of interconnectedness and universality alongside the necessity of making everyday decisions and actions as individuals. the possibilities and limits of this double bind hinge on the ways “relations” can be thought and enacted. material relations that are brought to the fore in both childbearing and chemical toxicity push justice movements into territory beyond a liberal politics predicated on individuals. toxicity does require thinking of the social in terms of systemic power and histories of “sacrifice zones” (liboiron et al., 2018, p. 332). yet in a practical sense, the imperative to quotidian care remains. we may rally for abolition of the petroleum economy and regulation of chemical industries, and may recognize how this falls short of a non-capitalist, non-colonial, nonheteropatriarchal change that would do justice to our material co-being, and yet we also need to feed and wash and care for our children in neoliberal postindustrial settings today. in this paper, i have explored some effects of emphasizing certain kinds of relations or individuality as sites for channeling the extra-ordinary energy around childbearing into action on the problem of environmental chemical toxicity. thinking of chemical toxicity and childbearing in terms of ecology foregrounds relations, as described above. it is not recognizing “relations” per se that is emancipatory; relations can be harmful as well as nurturing, and there are complex historical and cultural politics woven into describing things in terms of special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 19 relations in the first place (yates-doerr, 2019). it is how we think of those relations that is interesting—how we might balance relations to particular individuals such as one’s children and to larger ideas of community, humanity, or world, or what kind of resonance exists between social relationships among individuals and relations composing “individuals.” consumer choice is an ideology of response to social problems that is symptomatic of resistance to an ecological mindset; yet relations of care can be mediated by consumer purchases, and such choices are part of relational ecologies. there is no way to achieve “purity”—the slate has never been clean, there is no pre-toxic state we can recover, and aiming for such a thing can undermine the possibilities that are at hand. choice viewed ecologically can become care. consumer politics is no “solution” but one possible way to enact care. such action is essential to resist despair and the indulgence of apocalyptic thinking (haraway, 2016), but requires not slipping into false security. steingraber’s story emphasized water, how it flows and toxicity with it. new materialist philosopher astrida neimanis (2012, 2013) thinks about ecologies in terms of spatial and temporal fluidity, as a conceptual metaphor pushing against bounded entities, with ethical implications. the material world is fluid and porous, and steeped in the immaterial. effects from this processual interconnection are not immediate or straightforward; they may be latent, persistent, symptomatic, ambiguous. they may be carried throughout generations. for my purposes here, water metaphors can describe both differential damage and universality. water flows and connects but not totally, not uniformly; flows can be managed and limited, yet nonetheless always exceed control. fluid does not expand to fill space like a gas, yet can vaporize and is trickier than we think. individual consumer choices might be described with metaphors of higher ground, building levees, patching your boat. the universality and excess of toxicity might be described as a sinking ship on which we are all aboard, a sea level rising. it may be futile, in the end, to get on higher ground, but it also matters in the meanwhile, an aquatic version of the familiar “canary in the coal mine” metaphor. the individual/universal paradox might be thought with dams, eddies, riptides, seepage. is limited “high ground” a limit to solidarity? is getting oneself to higher ground opposed to being an “abolitionist”? a final thought for grappling with the possibilities offered by thinking childbearing and environmental chemical toxicity together: kinship is an approach to relations par excellence. long the provenance of anthropologists, it has much to offer a project of thinking “ecologically.” adele clarke and donna haraway’s (2018) recent collection make kin not population draws attention to kinship as a way of special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 20 making relations that are not reducible to colonial family structures or biological reproduction, as a move toward feminist, environmentalist, indigenous, queer forms of liberation and ethics. thinking about how to make kin relations is a way around the limited time period of childbearing. kinship endures, whereas pregnancy does not. childbearing is a moment of destabilization and unsettling, but to some degree people resettle and restabilize; perhaps thinking with kinship is a way of holding onto this fleeting, rich moment of recognition, to keep its potential alive. acknowledgements special thanks go to meghan morris, nate ela, matthew furlong, jeremy siegman, and ali feser for reading and shaping an early draft of this paper. my appreciations also go to the two anonymous reviewers and the guest editors for their very helpful comments and insightful critique. i also thank the ucla center for the study of women and the organizers of the chemical entanglements conference hosted there, for facilitating my attendance and producing a truly inspiring event. notes 1 see, for example, the following biomedical research: buck louis, g. et al. (2012); messerlian, c. et al. (2018); roncati, pisciolo, & pusiol (2016); sutton et al. (2012); zlatnik (2016). 2 for all statistics and facts cited in this opening anecdote, see steingraber’s (2003) having faith. 3 the development of the liberal social contract in enlightenment-era politics implicitly created a “private sphere” opposed to the new public sphere, where intimacy, embodied needs, emotions, and the family were supposed to take place; these spheres are highly gendered. see pateman’s (1988) the sexual contract. the misfit between childbearing and liberal personhood that i discuss below is related to this supposed division, though there is not room for an extended discussion here. 4 note that “reproductive rights” often refers to such choice-based movements, although reproductive justice may use the language of rights as well (as ross and solinger [2017] do). “autonomy” and “self-determination” are also used, but there is not space to delve into their relation to rights, individuality, and justice here. 5 while i often use less-gendered language to discuss childbearing, such as “pregnant person,” in this case the politics under discussion brings gender to the fore. special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 21 references alaimo, s. 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(1990). monster stories: women charged with perinatal endangerment. in f. ginsburg & a. l. tsing (eds)., uncertain terms: negotiating gender in american culture (pp. 282-299). boston, ma: beacon press. valdez, n. (2018). the redistribution of reproductive responsibility: on the epigenetics of “environment” in prenatal interventions. medical anthropology https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajog.2016.05.031 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i1.28787 special section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) andrea lilly ford, 2020 25 quarterly, 32(3), 425-442. villalobos, a. (2014). motherload: making it all better in insecure times. berkeley, ca: university of california press. waggoner, m. (2017). the zero trimester: pre-pregnancy care and the politics of reproductive risk. berkeley, ca: university of california press. washington, h. (2006). medical apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on black americans from colonial times to the present. new york, ny: harlem moon. whitehead, a. n. (1978). process and reality: an essay in cosmology. d. r. griffin & d. w. sherburne (eds.). new york, ny: free press. (original work published in 1929). yates-doerr, e. (2019, april 25). no relation. editors’ forum: theorizing the contemporary. retrieved from https://culanth.org/fieldsights/no-relation young, a. (1980). the discourse on stress and the reproduction of conventional knowledge. social science and medicine, 14b, 133-146. zlatnik, m. g. (2016). endocrine-disrupting chemicals and reproductive health. journal of midwifery & women’s health, 61(4), 442-455. author bio andrea ford is a research fellow at the university of edinburgh in the centre for biomedicine, self and society. she holds a phd in anthropology from the university of chicago and is finishing her manuscript on reproductive politics in california while beginning a new research project on endocrine disruption and endometriosis. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/no-relation siegel, derek p. (2020). medicalization and naturalization: understanding abortion as a naturecultural phenomenon. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–25. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © derek p. siegel, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license medicalization and naturalization: understanding abortion as a naturecultural phenomenon derek p. siegel university of massachusetts–amherst dpsiegel@soc.umass.edu abstract this article offers a naturecultural intervention to the abortion literature, which characterizes abortion as a standard procedure, from the perspective of both biomedical and social scientific research. in contrast, by examining interviews with feminists and pro-choice people about their recent abortions (n=27) and my own experiences as an abortion counselor, i find that no singular “abortion” exists; rather, there are many embodied abortions. i discuss how participants negotiate medical and natural ideologies, arguing that these ideologies produce the conditions under which people come to experience abortion in the united states. i also discuss the material consequences of defining abortion as a standard event. i find that universalizing abortion leads to the underrepresentation of marginalized stories, a lack of personalized support, and racialized and classed disparities in who can achieve their desired biosocial state (“normal” or “natural”). introduction as an abortion counselor, people ask me what to expect from their abortion, so i walk them through the details. i answer questions about everything from cervix dilation and vacuum aspiration to aftercare techniques. and while this information is usually well received, people also want to know what an abortion original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 2 feels like; my medical scripts do not prepare me to answer these questions. i can only offer a vague qualification, that bodies react differently and that each person has their own pain tolerance. which is true. but after a number of these exchanges, i began to consider how little we know about people’s embodied abortion experiences. at the same time, while pregnant people1 vary in how they frame abortion, internalizing messages (abortion as a medical procedure or as murder) that align with their worldview (luker, 1984; keys, 2010), movement actors across the political spectrum still talk about abortion in the singular. someone might ask, “what does an abortion feel like?” or “what are the side effects of abortion?” in this essay, i wrestle with the question of whether or not a standard abortion exists, drawing on interviews with feminist and pro-choice people about their recent abortions (n=27). participants vary across age and reproductive histories, as well as abortion method—people in their first trimester can typically select between an in-clinic vacuum aspiration (manual extraction of the pregnancy) or a medication abortion (a combination of mifepristone to end the pregnancy and misoprostol to expel it from the uterus). alongside these interviews, i include my own reflections as an abortion counselor. i am interested, for example, in both how individuals make meaning from their abortions and how providers2 participate in this process. i find that no singular “abortion” exists; rather, there are many embodied abortion experiences. i examine this variation and its consequences for abortion care. how scholars and activists talk about and understand abortion has the potential to radically transform and improve people’s experiences. in its current state, most abortion research is segmented into one of two camps: biomedical research studies the effect of abortion on bodies, and social scientific research focuses on how legal and cultural context shapes abortion experiences. separated in such a way, both camps reinforce the myth of a singular, biological abortion. in contrast, i provide what feminist technoscience scholar donna haraway (1992) calls a naturecultural perspective. naturecultures refute the notion that an object or experience can be purely “social,” or conversely, innately “biological.” the concept of biosociality, developed by anthropologist paul rabinow (1996) also rejects the nature/culture divide. in this paper, i examine abortion as a naturecultural and biosocial phenomenon, both fleshy and embodied but also existing in social contexts that shape its materiality. under varied conditions, abortion itself takes on entirely new forms and original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 3 meanings. for example, in the united states, abortion has been medicalized, which is to say that many people discuss and experience abortion as a medical procedure (halfmann, 2011). describing abortion and aborting bodies as “normal” acknowledges a lack of biomedical complications and combats anti-abortion stigma. at the same time, people also discuss and experience abortion— particularly the medication abortion—as “natural” (simonds et al., 1998; purcell, 2015). natural usually refers to the perception that the medication abortion is “less invasive” than an aspiration abortion, as well as the preference for a “private” abortion experience. in fact, such discourse relies heavily on the framework of natural childbirth, which simonds et al. note is “the only medical intervention [besides abortion] discussed in terms of degree of naturalness” (1998, p. 1316). i have broken my analysis into three sections, each of which integrates interview and autoethnographic data in order to examine biosocial variation. in the first section, i review how participants conceptualize the beginnings and endings of their abortion experiences. by deconstructing the category of abortion, we can understand patients’ individualized needs and thus provide better abortion care. in the second section, i show how pregnant people perform interpretive work, reinforced by interactions and their social environments, to achieve “normal” and “natural abortions.” “normal” and “natural” are regulatory categories that not only produce the possibility of abortion as we know it, but also set unrealistic expectations that can be harmful for people whose experiences deviate from their desired biosocial state. lastly, i argue that social inequalities produce differentiated access to “normal” and “natural abortions.” using the framework of “stratified reproduction” (colen, 1995), i situate this form of exclusion within a wide web of mechanisms that differentiate which groups of people have control over their reproduction and which do not. without attention to biosocial variation, scholars and activists could neither acknowledge nor combat such embodied inequalities. literature review abortion studies: state of the field contemporary abortion research “reflects dominant framings of abortion as a public health or healthcare provision issue” (purcell, 2015, p. 591). this framing limits the kinds of questions that researchers can ask and has also produced two broad methodological clusters, each more or less siphoned off from the other. biomedical research, for example, studies how abortion affects bodies and how providers can more safely perform it. topics include the safety of aspiration original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 4 abortion performed by nurse practitioners (weitz et al., 2013) and the efficacy of medication abortion during early gestation (kapp et al., 2018). social scientific research, on the other hand, focuses on how social context shapes abortion experience. for example, abortion scholars discuss how legal and cultural barriers restrict abortion access,3 particularly for low-income people and communities of color in the united states (upadhyay et al., 2014; foster, 2020). while these literatures have had tremendous impact, the separation of biomedical and social scientific research limits our understanding of embodied abortions. by embodiment i mean that bodies produce meaning through everyday experience: “who we are cannot be separated from how we are embodied” (turner, 2001, p. 254). without engaging social context, most biomedical research fails to account for the subjectivity of lived experience. at the same time, undertheorizing materiality, most social scientific research focuses on emotional variation at the expense of embodiment. both approaches falsely presume that abortion is a stable category, that despite its variation in efficacy or emotional tenor, one person’s abortion is the same “thing” as another person’s. some feminist abortion scholars have begun to highlight the variation in people’s abortion experiences, resisting this tendency to homogenize abortion (lie et al., 2008; purcell, brown et al., 2017; purcell, cameron et al., 2017). unfortunately, these accounts of physical and emotional variation rarely address the production of embodied difference, or why people experience abortion the way that they do. in one notable exception, ganatra et al. find that someone’s experience “depends more on [their] expectations about the method and the level of emotional and logistical support they receive than on inherent characteristics of the method [they choose]” (2008, p. 1). altshuler et al. (2017) agree that one’s preferences for their abortion depend on sociopolitical context. other scholars discuss how abortion stigma (cockrill & nack, 2013) and ideologies (keys, 2010) structure people’s experiences. for example, they argue that “negative emotions” result from internalized and enacted stigma, not from the abortion itself. similarly, kimport et al. (2012) find that the presence of antiabortion protestors, elaborate security measures, and interactions with staff account for their participants’ self-reported negative experiences of abortion. but like the bulk of social scientific research, this literature almost exclusively focuses on the emotional dimensions of abortion. to more fully understand embodied variation, however, and to combat hidden indignities and inequalities in abortion provision, we must adopt a naturecultural perspective. i elaborate on this original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 5 framework in the following section. thinking abortion as a naturecultural phenomenon the scientific revolution in europe created a knowledge system that presupposes a division between nature and culture. haraway quips, however, that “nature is not a place one can go,” meaning that no pre-given “nature” exists outside of culture, and vice-versa (1992, p. 296). because we cannot study nature or culture as separate objects, haraway proposes the concept of naturecultures, simultaneously material and discursive. one way of thinking natureculturally includes the concept of biosociality, developed by paul rabinow (1996) to subvert the nature vs. culture debate and to bridge the fields of biological and social anthropology. according to ingold and palsson (2013), humans are embedded in a web of biosocial relations, which are the mechanisms and processes through which we create and refashion life. biosociality extends haraway’s (2008) notion that life is always in the process of “becoming.” in this paper, i use the theories of biosociality and naturecultures to examine the discursive-material realities of abortion. another way of thinking natureculturally includes the concept of biopossibilities. angela willey describes sexuality, for example, as a “context-specific possibility,” “real, but not exhaustive or inevitable” (2017, p. 148). matter, she argues, becomes intelligible only within certain histories and discourses. in other words, naturecultural phenomenon are always contingent and “other biopossibilities exist coterminously” (willey, 2017, p. 148). below, i argue that the processes of medicalization and naturalization produce the possibility of abortion as people living in the us experience it today. in the us, the medicalization and demedicalization of abortion occur simultaneously, impacting discourses, practices, and even the way people conceptualize their identities. for example, in the roe v. wade decision, the courts both medicalized abortion by giving doctors the sole authority to perform them, and also demedicalized abortion by lifting the requirement that pregnant people must go before hospital committees to “request” an abortion (mohr, 1978; halfmann, 2011). over the past fifty years, some feminist activists have sought to further demedicalize abortion, forming private clinics to combat anti-abortion sentiments in mainstream medicine (frankfort, 1972; baehr, 1999). in this paper, however, i focus on how anti-medical perspectives specifically invoke natural ideology. companies market the medication abortion (mifepristone/misoprostol combination) as a “natural” alternative to vacuum aspiration, and pregnant original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 6 people also experience it this way (simonds et al., 1998; harvey et al., 2001). mobilizing the term natural to describe abortion relies on the logic of the natural childbirth movement, which encourages pregnant people to follow their natural instincts and to take responsibility for the birth (dick-read, 1933; karmel, 1959; gaskin, 1975). how do naturecultures fit into all of this? by examining medicalization and demedicalization as ongoing processes, we can see that biomedical and natural objects do not exist outside of their social context. they must be constantly produced. for example, within the medical encounter, patients are encouraged to abide by a different set of norms than may otherwise govern their social lives, and these norms, and the patient role itself, are “negotiated at every step” (lupton, 1994, p. 121). galasinksi and ziolkowska (2007) discuss how people come to accept the touching of their genitals during a gynecological exam. rituals associated with childbirth also reinforce biomedical ideology; for example, wearing a hospital gown, while involving access to the cervix, also “communicates that one is no longer autonomous, and [is] dependent on the institution” (davisfloyd, 1992, p. 82). when medical experts control how an event occurs and the dominant meanings of the event, people’s situated experiences “become the reality with which they have to work” (rothman, 1978, p. 127). this is not inherently a problem. to combat the marginalization of patients, in the 1980s medical sociologists investigated medical or “illness narratives” from people’s own experiences (kleinman, 1988). it becomes a problem, however, when we treat these situated realities or knowledges as inevitable. similarly, whereas proponents describe natural childbirth as instinctual, various scholars discuss the ways in which natural birth must be achieved. natural childbirth literatures, as well as talk from peers, family, and midwives, socialize pregnant people to accept the assumptions of natural ideology (annandale, 1998; mansfield, 2008). for example, in a birthing center where a pregnant person can transfer at any time to a hospital, workers and clients must continually work to uphold a definition of the experience as natural. this can include engaging in “natural interventions,” such as switching positions or using castor oil, to induce the birth. “all birth,” becky mansfield declares, “is both social and natural” (2008, p. 1084). moreover, to talk about birth—or abortion—as a universal experience that exists outside its social context fundamentally masks variation to the detriment of pregnant people, their health and their well-being. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 7 fieldwork and methods drawing from my professional background, i am interested in the range and complexity of people’s abortion experiences, particularly in how they make meaning out of the process. to understand this variation, i include two sources of data: semi-structured interviews and an autoethnographic account of my work as an abortion counselor. thinking about bodies (and abortions) as naturecultural rather than biological objects raises the question of knowledge production and informs my decision to use abortion narratives as my primary research tool. on one hand, i acknowledge what symbolic interactionists see as the limitations of narrative (goffman, 1956; scott & lyman, 1968; o’brien, 2013). because people always present themselves in consideration of potential reference groups, this mediates their “true feelings,” limiting what interviews can tell us about biosocial realities (o’brien, 2013). on the other hand, feminist materialisms remind us that nature does not exist outside the process of scientific discovery. from this perspective, abortion narratives produce body knowledges neither more nor less legitimate than those produced in the laboratory or by medical doctors. i believe embodied knowledges uniquely capture the range of needs associated with abortion, and therefore can improve the quality of abortion care. i conducted these interviews from august 2017 to july 2018 (n=27), restricting eligibility to individuals over the age of eighteen whose abortions occurred within the past five years. each interview revolved around a reflection exercise where i asked participants to describe what they were thinking, how they were feeling physically, and how they felt emotionally before, during, and after their abortions. each intensive, semi-structured interview lasted between 50 and 120 minutes. because people typically share abortion stories in small, private settings, i found that the intimate nature of a semi-structured interview closely mirrors how people share their abortion stories. each participant consented to our conversation being voice-recorded and received a twenty-dollar gift card to a major retailer. my recruitment process involved two approaches, both of which allowed potential participants to self-select into the study. first, i contacted around fifty community centers and organizations in two northeastern us cities, both with relatively low barriers to abortion access per state laws. i requested that these organizations share my call for participants with their membership and nineteen of them agreed, mostly student groups and explicitly feminist organizations. from there, i used a participant-driven sampling method, asking participants to share my study with their networks. overall, forty-two people reached out to inquire about my study, seven of whom did not meet the eligibility requirements and nine who did original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 8 not schedule an interview. due to the geographic spread of referrals, i introduced the option of a video rather than in-person interviews and did not notice any difference in the quality of these interviews. table 1. demographic information of the twenty-seven people i interviewed, eighteen specifically identified as part of the pro-choice or reproductive justice movements. the remaining nine either self-identified as feminists or pro-choice, mobilizing popular feminist slogans (such as, “my body, my choice”). my sample includes both cisgender women and genderqueer individuals, most of whom were highly educated and from a middleclass household across a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds. with the exception of one participant who terminated at fourteen weeks and another at twenty-one weeks of pregnancy, the rest had first trimester abortions (<13 weeks). fourteen participants opted for the in-clinic “vacuum aspiration” abortion; ten had the mifepristone/misoprostol combination at the clinic, otherwise known as the “abortion pill”; and three participants acquired misoprostol outside the clinical context, two by preference and one because her country of residence did not offer legal abortion services. after completing and transcribing the interviews, i conducted line-by-line coding using nvivo. in my first round of coding, i identified key themes, particularly focused on how participants made sense of their abortion experiences—for example, as a routine medical procedure or as an opportunity for growth. after a brief period of reflection, i conducted a second round of line-by-line coding, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 9 breaking up or combining codes based on theoretical salience and trends in the data. finally, i used matrix analysis to compare the distribution of particular codes across race, abortion methods (aspiration vs. medication abortion), parenting status, and number of abortions. i also include autoethnographic reflections on my experiences as an abortion counselor for local and national financial assistance hotlines, where individuals who cannot afford abortion call to receive information and support.4 since 2015 i have spoken with several thousand individuals before or after termination from all over the us and canada. these interactions occur over the phone and focus almost entirely on abortion access, so callers know little about me. for example, i do not disclose my gender and use a generic pseudonym like “alex,” so by my voice, people attribute different gendered pronouns and honorifics (sometimes i get called “ma’am” and “sir” in the same call). for this autoethnography, i avoid specifics from any particular call, as i am bound by the health insurance portability and accountability act to protect callers’ confidentiality. rather, i focus on how i participate in medical and anti-medical ideologies as a counselor, generalizing from the types of conversations i have on the line. carolyn ellis describes autoethnography as “systematic introspection” (1991, p. 33). for this paper, i reflected on how i do and do not talk about bodies during each stage of the counseling call, as well as my training as a counselor and my observations at the call center. these experiences inform my analytic and political critique. i also offer these rigorous reflections as a form of “situated knowledge,” to show how i have developed these critiques and produced these analyses (haraway, 1988). destabilizing abortion: a case for individualized care abortion contains many steps and stages, each of which involves its own process of embodiment. depending on the method, this might include dilation, aspiration, and recovery, or taking mifepristone, cramping/bleeding, passing the pregnancy, and so on.5 other expected services include counseling, blood testing, and an ultrasound. when we break an abortion experience into these smaller, microprocesses, it becomes apparent that the type of support someone might need at one stage differs from another. for example, lucy wants less information when it came to the ultrasound and more when it comes to managing cramps; sandy, meanwhile, wants company while acquiring the medication but prefers solitude when passing the pregnancy. these stages can also vary among participants. during my interviews, i asked participants to describe their experiences before, during, and after their abortions, encouraging them to begin and end their stories original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 10 however they desired. their stories vary widely, so despite the singularization of abortion in biomedical and social scientific literatures, i am skeptical that participants have in fact experienced the same “thing.” when we let go of what we think we know about “abortion,” scholars and activists can better understand people’s individualized needs. as a case study for examining embodied variation, let us discuss how people conceptualize the beginning of their abortion. one “starting point” occurs when someone takes the first pill in the series. sasha recalls being at the clinic with a nurse, receiving her dose of mifepristone. “she tells you, ok, this will start the abortion. there’s no going back if you take these.” for rj, the threshold of her abortion experience began a little bit later. “i could feel the cramps within an hour and a half of taking that [first] pill. when the first significant cramp radiated across my stomach, i almost burst into tears, thinking like, ‘oh my god, that it. it’s started…this is what it feels like for a baby to die.’” maria actually marks an earlier beginning to her abortion. for her second pregnancy, maria had a lot of difficulty deciding whether or not she wanted another abortion so she prayed and meditated a lot in the weeks preceding. on the morning before her abortion, she “woke up bleeding.” “i don’t know,” maria explains, “once i saw that in the morning, to me that was the sign i’d been asking for the night before.” my participants also worry about whether the abortion is complete. rj’s bleeding, for example, lasted for a month afterwards. “i would call my doctor,” she remembers, “and be like, ‘is this normal?’ my body was not letting me move on.” susan expected that passing the blood clot would signal the end of her abortion, so like rj she worried about completion: “i remember passing a pretty large clot, but i don’t know. i guess i thought it would be bigger, so i worried that it didn’t work. i was really freaked out afterwards and continued to be nervous.” like others, holly experienced a staggered set of endings. first, after taking misoprostol, she remembers thinking, “ok, i guess it’s over now...but it wasn’t over-over until a month later [when i had my first period].” why does it matter that participants conceptualize different “starting” and “ending points” for their abortion? it might be tempting to think of such boundary drawing as a social process that imposes meaning on a pre-existing phenomenon. abortion, however, does not exist prior to or outside of someone’s embodied conceptualization of the event. try as we might, we lack the tools for measuring the experience of ingesting a pill, seeing blood, or enduring cramps without also taking into account the feelings of relief, anticipation, or anxiety that participants original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 11 also describe. so when participants offer different accounts of what comprises “the abortion,” there is no way of knowing whether or not two people have experienced the same thing. explaining the medication abortion to our clients, my colleagues and i would usually say that the pregnancy passes several hours after misoprostol and the bleeding might last for another week. but for participants worried about completion, “the abortion” can last a number of weeks and even up to a month, something rarely considered in popular discourse or abortion scholarship. lack of knowledge about abortion compounds the marginalization of lived experience. for example, astrid says, “i’ve never heard much about what it would look or feel like. to me it was always that you take this magic pill, or have a quick procedure, then you’re done and you’re fine.” failing to discuss embodied variation, scholars and activists leave people underequipped to navigate the particularities of their own experience. moreover, when we assume that all abortions are the same, we lose the opportunity to provide individualized support. personor patient-centered care “understands the patient as a unique human being” (balint, 1969, p. 269). some providers already practice this by offering counseling, education, and doula services to those who want them (gould et al., 2012). destabilizing the category of abortion and recognizing embodied variation, however, opens up new possibilities of patient-centered abortion care. in other words, scholars and activists need to take more seriously the body knowledges of people who have abortions. doing so, we would know, for example, that many people feel their abortion lasts until their next period, or until confirmation at their follow-up appointment. we can develop education and support materials to reflect such needs, and also must consider how raced, classed, and gendered bodies transform the meaning and experience of abortion. regulating bodies: the embodiment of a “normal” and “natural” abortion some participants (18/27) describe abortion as “normal,” which has multiple meanings, both literal (does the abortion occur as expected/are there complications?) and ideological (many argue that only its stigma separates abortion from other medical procedures). these participants tend to trust in medical knowledge and feel comforted by doctors’ presence, occupying what medical sociologists call the patient role (parsons, 1951). other participants (10/27) describe their experiences, particularly of the medication abortion, as “natural,” contrasting it to the “invasiveness” of dilation and aspiration. “it original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 12 seemed less invasive, that’s really the key,” hermione explains, “the pills didn’t seem like such a big deal.” “if i could just take a pill and have a really bad period, i’d prefer that to anything that involves being with more doctors and vacuums,” lucy adds. despite these declarations, “normal” and “natural” abortions do not occur intuitively. rather, they require the participation of social actors, and are also reinforced through social environments and interactions with clinical staff. in fact, the ideological categories of “normal” and “natural” regulate abortion experiences by building expectations and providing the resources to embody abortion in particular ways. pregnant people do significant interpretive work before, during, and after their abortions. i was surprised to see how often participants described abortion proceedings as “normal,” despite their discomfort with other aspects of the abortion process. lucy, for example, feels deeply conflicted about fetal personhood. for her and many other participants, the ultrasound elicits complicated feelings: “my first instinct was that i just didn’t want to associate this [pregnancy] with humans or children.” yet thirty seconds later, she sums up the ultrasound experience by saying, “but it was fine, and it was pretty run of the mill.” dylan confesses that while they felt somewhat powerless during the vacuum aspiration, “everything else kind of seemed normal.” sasha compares her bleeding after taking misoprostol against an imagined norm: “i guess it was a reminder of what had happened,” she says, “but i don’t remember it being like a traumatic reminder or anything. it just felt like, ok. i’m still bleeding.” each participant expresses ambivalence about a particular activity—a transvaginal ultrasound or non-menstrual bleeding—but then resignifies the experience as normal. abortion becomes “normal” when participants interpret their experience through a medicalized framework, and through this act of interpretation the abortion itself comes into being. similarly, abortion becomes “natural” when someone interprets abortion through the framework of natural ideology. judith butler (1990) argues that we interpret (and construct) realities through the discourses available to us. anti-medical discourse, for example, popularized by the natural childbirth movement, offers someone the language to be able to imagine and embody a “natural abortion.” this language permits one to imagine taking mifepristone and misoprostol as natural or holistic, while considering dilation and aspiration to be unnatural. medical discourse, meanwhile, enables someone to experience their abortion as “normal.” participants internalize these ideologies in multiple ways. first, as mostly self original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 13 defined feminists, participants inhabit communities that promote medical and natural ideologies, so are thus more likely to use them as benchmarks for their own experiences (keys, 2010). pro-choice media, including digital abortion storytelling projects, might reinforce certain frames (allen, 2015). pre-abortion counseling sessions also prime people on how to think about their options (aspiration vs. the medication abortion). counseling varies based on state-mandated policy, institutional norms, and the styles of individual counselors. in my experience, there exists a spectrum between feministand business-minded clinics, which shapes how counselors are trained to facilitate options counseling (including how many minutes to spend with each person, what questions to ask, and what language to use). some clinics softly promote medication abortion—“it feels more natural”—because it requires less attention from the provider and thus turns a quicker profit for the clinic. the vast majority of people, however, use natural discourse because of its availability and intelligibility. while discourse does structure our naturecultural worlds, participants also use available meanings toward their own ends. for example, rosie reflects on why the discourse of “natural” appealed to her during her abortion three years earlier. “i think i played a mind game with myself to make me not feel bad about it,” rosie shares with a laugh, “and it worked! because of the pill, i felt like it was more natural. it was like i had a miscarriage, and not an abortion like i promised myself i would never do again.” for rosie and other pregnant people, selecting a more “natural” alternative can make the abortion seem passive, something that happens to a participant rather than something they did or initiated. in other words, anti-medical discourse functions as a tool for navigating abortion-related shame, suggesting that participants exercise a degree of agency in the processes of medicalization and naturalization. the biosocial states of “normal” and “natural,” therefore, may be overdetermined but are not predetermined. as drew halfmann (2011) explains, discourse is not the only site of medicalization and demedicalization; other practices, such as interacting with clinical staff, also make possible the experience of a “normal” or “natural” abortion. for example, several participants describe how clinic workers reinforce medical frameworks during the visit. when hermione questions the necessity of an rh test to determine her blood type, since she’s “not keeping the baby,” the staff member on duty replied that, “it’s just procedure. we do this with everybody.” when chelsea resists having a transvaginal ultrasound, the nurse tells her that “this is original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 14 standard procedure.” most likely, clinics train workers to respond in this fashion. therefore, i am not suggesting that these workers have poor bedside manner; nor am i denying the medical necessity of these practices6—for example, people conduct ultrasounds to find the location of the pregnancy before extraction. rather, the repetitive appeal to medical standards offers an insight into how the clinical environment, the patient role, and interactions with staff compel pregnant people to interpret and experience their abortions as “normal.” just as social environments can be medicalized (all but three participants had their abortion at an independent clinic or a planned parenthood, a nationwide provider with over six hundred sites in the us), they can also be naturalized. natural childbirth movements, for example, encourage parents to create their own individualized spaces (annandale, 1998), and sociologist barbara katz rothman (1981) argues that there is no such thing as a “natural” childbirth until parents and activists create one. my participants perform similar work to achieve “natural abortions,” personalizing the experience through various rituals. sam dimmed the lights and prepared for a quiet evening at home with their partner: “i didn’t want to be alone in a sterile room with a bunch of people watching me go through this. if i was going to have this experience, i wanted to feel like i was doing it. and also have my partner there with me.” holly, who valued having an abortion outside the clinic and even considered menstrual extraction (an aspiration technique often referred to as a “do-it-yourself” abortion), planned to set up a mini-altar to commemorate the abortion. of course people should maximize their comfort during a potentially difficult experience, but doing so does represent another kind of work that goes into creating a “natural abortion.” when people internalize medical and anti-medical ideologies, expecting to have a “normal” or a “natural abortion,” anything else can provoke anxiety and frustration. holly, for example, recalls her own medication abortion: “i was just writhing on the floor all day, not paying attention to my crystals or my tea. it’s humbling. i had all these rituals, but on the day of…none of that shit mattered.” she laughs, comparing the experience to the unrealistic expectations set by people during childbirth. lucy also found her plans diverted by the urgency of her body: “i thought i was going to spend the day watching movies, but i couldn’t watch anything suspenseful or my body would tense up and the cramps would get worse.” natural discourses, such as comparing the medication abortion to “a heavy period,” leave some people unprepared for the degree of cramps and pain they will experience. sasha mentions that if she needed to have another abortion original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 15 she would actually opt for the vacuum aspiration instead. susan concurs. “the idea of being able to do it at home—in an absent theoretical way sounds nice,” she shares, “but retrospectively, it was actually pretty scary. if i were to, god forbid, have to do it again, i don’t think i’d want to do it at home.” unfortunately, our current system of abortion provision facilitates these kinds of mismatches between expectation and reality. as an abortion counselor, i recognize that i play a role in either reifying or challenging the categories of a “normal” or “natural abortion.” many people in their first trimester want clarification about what distinguishes vacuum aspiration from the medication abortion. while i mention that some people feel comfortable having a doctor by their side and others feel that a medication abortion is more “natural,” i also try to point out some embodied differences. for example, that vacuum aspiration takes less time and has a faster recovery period, or that the medication abortion can occur at home with friends and loved ones. i want them to know what they might be opting into. medical and anti-medical ideologies may support abortion access on the macro level, but also impact people’s decision-making processes and structure their abortion experiences at the micro level. in some ways—similar to anti-abortion ideology (kimport et al., 2012)—these ideologies are self-fulfilling prophecies, producing the discursive and material conditions that lead people to have the kinds of abortions that these ideologies anticipate. as universalizing ideologies, “normal” and “natural abortions” purport to be applicable to everybody, indifferent to race, class, and other forms of difference. but as i argue below, in their absence of racial and class discourse, “normal” and “natural” ideologies are deeply raced and classed in that they refuse to acknowledge the impact of white supremacy and capitalism on abortion experiences. abortion ideologies also produce negative outcomes for people who cannot attain their desired biosocial state, or the feelings (such as normal or natural) they that wish to embody. biosocial exclusion: another form of stratified reproduction medical institutions simultaneously abuse and exclude people of color. on one hand, disadvantaged black and indigenous communities have endured forced sterilization and the coercive use of long-term birth control (roberts, 1997; briggs, 2002; silliman et al., 2004). on the other hand, disadvantaged communities of color also lack access to new reproductive technologies and, increasingly, to abortion itself (ross & solinger, 2017). for most advocates, abortion access refers original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 16 to the financial and legal barriers that either close clinics or prevent someone from receiving their services. when we think about abortion as an embodied experience rather than a standard procedure (that one either has or does not have), new dimensions of access emerge. in particular, i show that unequal conditions produce different embodied experiences, enabling some groups of people and foreclosing others from the possibility of a “normal” or “natural” abortion. while many participants found encouragement or support in their interactions with clinic staff, for others, the patient role fails to uphold their dignity. ethiopia, venus, and valerie, three black participants, remark on how racism and classism shaped their experiences. valerie believes that the demographic make-up of the clientele (mostly low-income women of color) resulted in a purposefully low standard of care: “you have to urinate before you go into the room with everyone, and i remember my pee cup being unlabeled with a bunch of other pee cups in this drawer, without tops…you don’t even take the time to label our things; that shows your disregard for us as human beings.” valerie describes being shuffled from room to room without explanation: “whenever i tell this story, i say that we were herded like cows.” she also recalls the doctor getting blood on her socks: “i only remember because i had to throw those socks away; how could you be so careless?” her experiences stand in stark contrast from the many white participants who describe positive encounters with clinical staff. one white participant, julie, says that there was a “person whose job it was [at the clinic] to hold [her] hand and look into [her] eyes, which was very comforting.” frances, another white participant, remarks that “the staff said i was a good patient, very low key. that made me feel strong.” one possible explanation for these disparities could be that staff members draw upon medical scripts that cast people of color as always, already deviant: certain bodies are seen as worthy of health while others are seen as expendable. for example, while white women’s complaints are perceived as legitimate, staff dismiss black women as “wily patients” who lack intelligence and try to work the system (bridges, 2011). economic inequalities also constitute an assault on participants’ dignity. ethiopia, for example, comments how shocked she was to learn that sedation costs extra money. although she had the resources, ethiopia sees the high cost of sedation as “punishment” for those who cannot afford it, and as an abortion counselor, i know that people regularly opt out of sedation or select a different abortion method due to the financial burden.7 such barriers can heighten a person’s anxiety and original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 17 transform the experience altogether. for example, venus recalls waiting for almost six hours at the clinic to confirm assistance from a local abortion fund, worried that she would need to reschedule. told that the clinic was about to close for the day, venus had started her car and put on her seatbelt when she finally got a call back from the abortion fund. her abortion differs substantially from someone who has insurance or can swipe a credit card for payment. erica, a white participant, punctuates our discussion of middle-class privilege by joking that she was disappointed that she would not receive 1 percent cash back on her abortion. in previous sections, i showed how participants reinterpret uncomfortable experiences as “normal.” the possibility of a normal abortion, however, hinges on a successful negotiation of the patient role, and participants cannot disappear into the patient role when they are continually marked and racialized as “other.” put differently, the microaggressions that valerie experiences at the clinic prevent her from achieving a normal abortion, as does the forced waiting time that venus endures because of her inability to pay for a five-hundred-dollar appointment. of course, not all white, middle-class participants have positive abortion stories. yet they do not contend with the extra indignities associated with being a low-income client and/or a patient of color in the us (roberts, 1997; schulz & mullings, 2006; washington, 2007). social and political context create specific forms of exclusion. for example, if venus lived in one of the sixteen us states or many countries where state insurance covers abortion, her experience would shift. unequal conditions also shape the possibility of having a “natural abortion.” natural ideologies emphasize the active role of pregnant people in controlling the childbirth experience (davis-floyd, 1992), and in the previous section, i showed how participants personalized their space as one way to achieve a “natural abortion.” not all people, however, have the ability to control their social environment. nor does everyone have the resources to interpret their abortion through a framework that centers their needs and comforts. for example, i have worked with clients who cannot have a medication abortion because they lack a stable housing situation or a private place where they can pass the pregnancy. perhaps they have a parent who will disown them or an abusive partner who will inflict harm on them if they find out about the abortion. these barriers foreclose the possibility of a natural abortion because without control over the physical space or social environment, how can one claim to be having a “natural” experience? of course, biosocial exclusion does not occur randomly. as shellee colen argues, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 18 structural inequalities produce differential experiences of reproduction on the basis of “race, ethnicity, gender, and place in the global economy” (1995, p. 78). my research offers one illustration of how overlapping systems of oppression overdetermine embodied abortion experiences. by discussing biosocial exclusion as a matter of access, i affirm the importance of quality abortion care and its responsiveness to patients’ needs. due to alienation from medical institutions, some women of color invest in alternative health practices (e.g., black women birthing justice) and subscribe to non-medical forms of knowledge. for example, valerie mentions that her favorite part of the abortion was talking to other black women in the waiting room about their experiences. however, to the extent that minoritized groups desire to have a “normal abortion,” they often lack the conditional privilege to reinterpret their experiences in this manner. furthermore, the fact that white, middle-class communities have significantly higher access to these biosocial states concerns me. in this context, biosocial exclusion reflects and affirms a pattern of which groups have control over their reproduction and which do not. conclusion whereas most research views abortion as a standard biological event—studied from either a biomedical or social scientific perspective—in this article, i have argued that we must examine abortion through a naturecultural lens. its physical traits and social meanings always vary in relation to each other. in other words, we cannot separate how someone conceptualizes the abortion (or their feelings of, perhaps, relief or concern) from the abortion itself. abortions do not exist prior to or outside of their social contexts, which in the us involve high degrees of medicalization and naturalization. furthermore, i have argued that by detaching emotions from materiality, abortion scholars and activists reinforce harmful conditions for pregnant people. we can and must destigmatize abortion, but how we define abortion also has material consequences. for example, i show how dominant ideologies encourage participants to have “normal” and “natural” abortions. this is not necessarily a bad thing, given that no unmediated abortion exists outside of society. however, these ideologies obscure other embodied experiences, leading to underrepresentation of marginalized stories, a lack of personalized support, and stress and frustration when someone’s experience deviates from their ideal abortion. in terms of this third point, “normal” and “natural” abortions are not always achievable, particularly for disadvantaged communities. but while i hope to displace these universalizing expectations, as an abortion advocate, i also want to support people in achieving original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 19 their desired biosocial state—similar to how i may critique heteronormativity but support someone’s effort to build a nuclear family. people also deserve to know what a vacuum aspiration and/or a medication abortion entail, including embodied details that might contradict the logic of “normal” or “natural.” the reproductive justice movement already engages in many practices that would support people’s ability to have their desired abortion experience. for example, by working to end the hyde amendment, which prohibits federal funds in the us from going towards abortion, activists reduce the indignities low-income people encounter in the abortion process and increase financial access to people’s preferred sedation and abortion options. similarly, many abortion funds strive to provide practical in addition to financial support for their clients. practical support, including rides to and from the clinic, doula services, and childcare, give someone more control over their social environment, thus enabling them to create the “normal” or “natural” abortions they may desire. finally, abortion storytelling projects such as we testify (national network of abortion funds) and the 1 in 3 campaign (advocates for youth) have the power to disrupt dominant abortion discourses through the elevation of lived experience. studying abortion requires naturecultural tools and strategies. in this paper, i have argued that abortion storytelling can build an archive of body knowledge if we talk to people about their bodies and take their biosocial accounts seriously. to do so, we must challenge how social movements regulate abortion discourse—in ways that are at times detrimental to their own goals. for example, in happy abortions, erica millar argues that despite the rise of pro-choice discourse, “the idea that abortion could or should be a happy experience…is virtually unspeakable” (2017, p. 3). researchers lisa martin et al. (2017) discuss the importance of danger talk, describing how abortion providers hesitate to share complicated emotions out of fear they will be taken out of context by antiabortion activists. in this spirit, i propose that abortion scholars, activists, and providers also embrace body talk. although people’s embodied abortion experiences might be perceived as graphic and thus harmful to abortion’s public image, body talk is paramount to providing pregnant people the resources to navigate their own abortions. further research on embodied abortions can help develop body talk practices. i encourage researchers to ask more pointedly about each stage of the abortion (rather than speaking of it in the singular). i recommend comparative studies that examine embodiment across different abortion methods and in different clinics or original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 20 geographies. finally, we need more collaborative research with people who have had abortions to center the issues are important to them and what would have improved their experiences. the frameworks of naturecultures (haraway, 1992) and stratified reproduction (colen, 1995) complement each other well. both centralize the becoming of phenomenon (materiality and reproductive experiences) usually considered pregiven or pre-social. what do we get from thinking about these frameworks together, particularly through my concept of biosocial exclusion? first, stratified reproduction reminds us that the emergence of our naturecultural world is deeply unequal and occurs differently for various groups of people. for example, not all people have the ability to embody a “normal” or “natural” abortion. some scholars even argue that universal notions of “the body” (mcruer, 2006) or humanity (wynter, 2003) are foundational for maintaining social inequalities. second, reading these frameworks together makes visible new sites of inequality (such as biosocial exclusions). rejecting the biologizing of social relations (willey, 2017), naturecultures offer the conceptual tools to see and disrupt stratification. acknowledgements thank you to angela willey, laura briggs, and joya misra for your support and extensive feedback. to the editors at catalyst and the anonymous reviewers, thank you for believing in this project and helping me improve my arguments. thank you to the activists and scholars who have nurtured my commitment to reproductive justice. and finally, thank you to any person who has shared their abortion story, publicly or privately. your work is revolutionary. notes 1 given the fact that not all people who get abortions are women (including transgender men and gender-non-conforming individuals), i use the term “pregnant people” over “pregnant women” or “women,” when discussing this general population (indra, midwives alliance of north america, 2015). my sample contains three genderqueer participants, who do not identify as men or women. 2 harris et al. (2018) argue that we should use the category of abortion provider expansively to include not only the doctor who performs the abortion but other clinic works and counselors, whose labor is imperative for the abortion to actually take place. 3 under the guise of protecting women’s health, targeted regulation of abortion original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 21 provider laws impose medically unnecessary standards (such as hospital admitting privileges) that force abortion clinics to close. for example, one texas law—since overturned by whole women’s health v. hellerstedt—shut down nineteen of the forty-one clinics in the state. 4 due to the 1976 hyde amendment, no federal funds in the us can go towards abortion, meaning that medicaid does not cover abortion in thirty-four states. the average first-trimester abortion costs $470 (jones & koostra, 2011). 5 we can think of abortion as something of a “ficticious unity” (foucault, 1976, p. 154), a constructed category—such as sex—that falsely presumes the alignment of its composite parts (in the case of sex, the fact that we group together hormones, chromosomes, gonads, genitals, and secondary sex characteristics and call this “sex” is an ideological position that, like “abortion,” hides variation). 6 ultrasounds are not universally considered mandatory practice, and have increasingly become less so with the rise of the medication abortion. 7 some people need to travel further or pay more for an abortion in their second trimester because they could not afford to get one earlier. this could result in the difference between a vacuum aspiration abortion and a dilation & evacuation (d&e) abortion, or being too far along to be eligible for the medication abortion and therefore needing to pursue another option. references allen, m. 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(2014). denial of abortion because of provider gestational age limits in the united states. american journal of public health, 104(9), 1687–1694. washington, h. a. (2007). medical apartheid. doubleday publishing. weitz, t. a., d. taylor, s. desai, u. d. upadhyay, j. waldman, m. f. battistelli, & e. a. dray. (2013). safety of aspiration abortion performed by nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, and physician assistants under a california legal waiver. american journal of public health, 103(3), 454–461. willey, a. (2017). engendering new materializations: feminism, nature, and the challenge to disciplinary proper objects. in j. h. zamitto & s. ellenzweig (eds.), the new politics of materialism: history, philosophy, science (pp. 131-153). routledge. wynter, s. (2003). unsettling the coloniality of being-power-truth-freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation–an argument. new centennial review, 3(3), 257–337. author bio derek p. siegel is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the university of massachusetts–amherst. in addition to studying abortion and reproductive original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) derek p. siegel, 2020 26 justice, their other research interests include feminist theory, transgender families, and u.s. politics. microsoft word 200-1443-17-whynacht.docx whynacht, a. (2018). “'marks on bodies': agential cuts as felt experience”. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4 (1), 1-30. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © ardath whynacht, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article 'marks on bodies': agential cuts as felt experience ardath whynacht mount allison university awhynacht@mta.ca abstract reflecting upon the notion of 'marked bodies' (barad, 2007) as a metaphor for violence, the author draws upon their experience facilitating a long-term, artsbased research/creation project with women who have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. lived experience with borderline personality disorder often involves long and repeated periods of suicidal ideation and selfharm, yet these experiences are often misunderstood and framed in ways that invalidate emotional distress. the author demonstrates how feminist new materialist frameworks make space for the lived experience of bpd to emerge in more validating ways, critically considering how 'emotion' can be conceptualized as both a territory and an agential force. the author outlines how vulnerability as method and the radical acceptance of emotional contagion (brennan, 2004) can foster 'differential responsiveness' to marks on bodies and allow for the emergence of 'borderline narratives' to intervene within expert knowledge systems. 2 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) "there are reasons for emotional dysregulation. there are reasons for drinking and cutting, for smoking meth and lighting fires. there is a story that makes sense of all this. nerve damage and nightmare and nostalgia." merri lisa johnson it is deep winter. we are sitting in the nook of a bay window on the second floor of a café next to the medical school. it's a converted victorian home that still feels like one. we are in a small room at the top of the stairs, perched on bistro chairs with our knees pulled up to our chins. the table is littered with markers, notebooks, tattered napkins and mugs of tea. anna is wearing a floral cardigan with tiny pearl buttons and her hair is pulled back in a braid. she fiddles with a keychain full of baubles and a tiny, framed photo of a golden retriever. she borrowed her mom's car to come meet me at the café. i ask her about the first time she experienced the adult mental health care system after she turned 19. "i ended up at the er because i was trying to kill myself. mom couldn't keep me safe. i tried a few times and she was afraid to leave me alone at night. she drove me to emergency." i ask her if she was admitted to inpatient care. “no. they don’t admit you with bpd. they just tell you to calm down and send you home.” 3 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) introduction anna is part of a creative research project with young women who have a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (bpd).1 i spent six years collaborating on an arts-based research project with a group of young women who live with the diagnosis of bpd. combining collaborative, arts-based approaches to research (leavy, 2015) with friendship as method (tillman-healy, 2003), we worked with new materialist feminist frameworks to forge relations with each other outside dualistic notions of self/other, mind/matter and nature/culture that traditionally dominate discussions about mental health. the project included 16 collaborators who participated in individual unstructured interviews and with weekly group art-making sessions. the results discussed in this paper are only a small piece of a much broader "data set" that emerged from our artistic practice together.2 in what follows, i will share some of our experiences using new materialist frameworks to show how these experiences allowed us to be attentive and accountable to harm that is felt through engagement with the biomedical psychiatric system and the critical social theory that takes aim at biomedicalization. drawing upon notions of "diffraction" (haraway, 1997; barad 2007; 2014), we attempted to engage performatively with agential realism in order to escape the cartesian cuts that dominate critical discourse about mental illness. this commitment to agential realism, as articulated by barad (2007) required us to develop an onto-epistemological practice that does not rely on theory and method as separate domains. in doing so, we discovered the importance of felt experience as the site at which many "marks" are left by classification regimes, cartesian dualism and institutional practices. by engaging with feminist new materialism through an intentional project of "friendship as kin-making" (haraway, 2016, p. 145) we asserted that emotions matter. our onto-epistemological commitments made it possible to sense and understand particular forms of harm experienced at the borderlines of psychiatric classificatory regimes that are not attended to in critical discourses on psychiatry. this paper is not intended to be a "test case" 4 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) for theory; it is simply an account of what became possible when we intentionally included felt experience in our attempts to practice agential realism collaboratively. in the following pages, i would like to open our research and collaboration process to the reader. these formulations are a work-in-progress as i/we3 try to sort out how/where emotional experience fits into agential realist practice in community-based research with those who live with complex mental health diagnoses. boundary subjects/objects i became interested in studying bpd through working in prisons. women with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (bpd) are drastically over-represented in the prison system (sansone & sansone, 2009). where care is provided, they face some of the longest wait times in provincial mental health care systems (paris, 2005, 2007). bpd is a highly-stigmatized diagnosis (lester, 2013; paris, 2007, johnson, 2010) and some clinicians will refuse to treat someone with the diagnosis at all (paris, 2007). those who are diagnosed with bpd usually reach this point after a long journey of persistent self-harm and suicide attempts. programs that exist for folks with lived experience of mental illness often stipulate that community members with a bpd diagnosis are not welcome. emotional distress and coping behaviors such as cutting or food restriction are thought to be "contagious" (jarvi, jackson, swenson, & crawford, 2013); women who engage in these activities are often turned away from the only community support programs that support and advocate for recovery.4 bpd "symptoms" can be seen as adaptive ways of coping with chronic abuse, neglect or repeated experiences with violence or mistreatment outside the home (becker, 1997; johnson, 2010; kreisman & strauss, 2010; paris, 2005). borderline personality disorder is understood within psychiatric classification systems as a relational disorder, where the locus of the pain is found in the spaces between us. it is not understood by biomedical psychiatrists as an organic brain disorder that can be treated with pharmaceuticals, yet it is resistant to the 5 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) treatment used for trauma and other "social" causes of emotional distress. figure 1: 'the hospital' by s.d. borderline personality disorder was the clinical name given to a grouping of symptoms that bordered upon other diagnostic categories but did not meet the full criteria for any of them (stone, 1986). in this sense, the "borderline" is a place where diagnostic taxonomies bleed at the edges. it is where the shortcomings of classificatory apparatuses are revealed. those who inhabit these spaces face the violence of cartesian cuts between nature/culture, self/other and where the division of mind and matter does little to validate or acknowledge the painful emotional distress they feel throughout their lives. much debate about bpd has been about whether it is "real" or simply a means to pathologize women’s distress (becker, 1997). for the purposes of this discussion, i understand the diagnosis of bpd as a "boundary object" (leigh star, 2010). a 6 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) boundary object does not draw its meaning and significance from the interiority of the concept that it bounds or contains, but "is used to mean a shared space, where exactly that sense of here and there are confounded" (leigh star, 2010, p. 602). despite the appropriateness of the concept, however, positioning bpd as a boundary object does little to disrupt or intervene in the cartesian cuts that serve to invalidate or ignore the suffering of those who live with the diagnosis. if you have bpd you are likely to be dismissed or invalidated by clinicians who misunderstand self-harm in a bpd patient as being "manipulative", yet, a person with bpd "fares little better in the world of academic critique where her struggles are deconstructed as artifacts of psychiatric discourse" (lester, 2013, p. 75). anthropologist and counselor, dr. rebecca lester, identifies the ways in which both social constructionist critique and biomedical discourse on bpd invalidate and ignore the suffering of women who experience the symptoms firsthand. she argues that "bpd does not reside within the individual person ... if we eliminated bpd from the dsm, people would still struggle with the cluster of issues captured in the diagnosis” (lester, 2013, p. 74.). in this sense, having bpd is like living in the nowhere zone between psychiatry and its critics, where neither side takes your pain or need for healing seriously. cutting "together apart" new materialist scholarship aims to complicate dualistic notions of "mind" and "matter," prompting us to engage critically with how eurocentric philosophy has carved the world up into oppositional categories that serve to reflect and reinforce each other. barad calls this a hall of mirrors between scientific objectivism and social constructionism “where much like the infinite play of images between two facing mirrors, the epistemological gets bounced back and forth, but nothing more is seen” (2003, p. 803). these disciplinary cuts between biomedical psychiatry and critical social sciences serve as particular forms of violence that are disproportionately experienced by those who have 7 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) complex mental health diagnoses that cannot be explained or understood using oppositional concepts of nature and culture. in meeting the universe halfway, barad (2007) writes: knowing requires differential accountability to what matters and is excluded from mattering. that is, what is required is differential responsiveness that is accountable to marks on bodies as part of a topologically dynamic complex of performances (p. 380). marks on bodies, in this sense, are a short form for violence. barad is referring to the violence of an "agential cut", or performative division of the world into self/other, subject/object and so forth. i read karen barad's reference to "marks on bodies" as collateral damage, or the traces of the taxonomic brutality of settler colonialism and its projects of discipline and progress. in our project, however, the metaphor collapses into the literal. bpd has been described as "emotional hemophilia". in the hospital, in the er, specifically, they call my collaborators "cutters". self harm is a strong indicator that you have bpd on your chart. yet, the suffering that characterizes the diagnosis is not seen as "real" because it is emotional (johnson, 2010). anna is correct; inpatient care for the emotional distress of bpd is "contraindicated" (paris, 2004). it is clinical practice to turn women away and refuse inpatient care in favor of community-based talk therapy that is scarce if it is available at all. most of the women who collaborated on our project have purple tiger stripes across their bodies; scars from years of self-harm that usually began in junior high. donna haraway reminds us that "theory is bodily and theory is literal" (1992, p. 299). for us, the cartesian cuts of mind/matter are experienced through acts of self-harm in response to being constantly invalidated by clinical spaces that did not recognize emotional pain as objectively "real". cheyenne looks a lot younger than she is, appearing more like a teenager than her actual age which is closer to mine. she has curly dark hair in a short bob, like the french film character amélie. she is self-conscious about her weight and compulsively tugs her tiedyed tank top down over her tummy as she reaches in behind stacks of paintings to find the older ones. she has an eyebrow ring 8 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) with a rainbow stone on it, and a green and purple tattoo of a hummingbird on her right arm. she finds a few paintings that she likes and leans them against the wall. the kettle begins to screech from the kitchen so we head in there for tea. cheyenne tells me she was a sensitive kid. she would ugly-cry if she saw a world vision commercial. her parents became exasperated with her when she started middle school. "teenage stuff" they called it. she told me she started cutting because she felt like she was crazy. her feelings didn’t make sense. so, she tried to make sense of the pain by giving herself a reason to cry. "i would go into the bathroom at school, and staff did not realize that i had razors on me, and i would cut in the bathroom. and my best friend caught me one day. so that was a bit of a shock for her." mugs in hand, we return to the living room. onto-epistemological commitments the borderline experience was articulated by my collaborators as feeling like a "nowhere person" (a.r). in addition to being positioned in between diagnostic categories, they found their concerns and experiences were not reflected in scientific discourse about mental health, or in critical scholarly discourse, such as the field of mad studies.5 the former was only concerned with suffering that emerged from broken brains, whereas the latter spent so much time arguing that psychiatry was oppressive that it ignored their emotional suffering all together (whynacht, 2017). harm was caused by biomedical neglect and a failure of social constructionist critique to take their suffering seriously or acknowledge the painful reality 9 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) of those seeking medical care who are turned away. one of the diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder is a tendency to employ severe "black and white" thinking where one swings wildly between two opposed ways of thinking or feeling. in this sense, bpd can be understood as an intensification of a larger cultural pattern of moral dualisms in settler colonial societies. these same dualisms are the architecture that feminist new materialism seeks to undo. many of the collaborators on this project were young activists who were actively studying both sciences and the humanities at the undergraduate level and were vocal in social justice movements. however, many expressed suspicion and dismay at a tendency to use moral binaries in struggles for social justice. as a.r. explains: but it’s also like it’s very one-sided and very black and white. and the black-and-white rigidity of people that have experienced trauma and are highly sensitive, that rigid holding-on type of behavior that gets accumulated stays there and it gets masked in all these other nice language ─ the social justice language. bpd is often described as a painful ‘swinging between’ extremes. this intense movement between two poles is driven by a desire to grasp onto something that is recognized and legible and to avoid the discomfort of existing in a messy space of invalidation and self-doubt. as lester (2013) has pointed out, the bpd experience is both an artifact of psychiatric discourse and of the invalidation that comes from existing in the greyspace of moral and diagnostic binaries. the same binaries that trouble biomedicalism and its critics are reflected in how someone with bpd experiences a sense of right and wrong, as well as views their own value and the value of others. bpd is a manifestation of a world that is structured by binaries and it cannot be held as separate from the world it intra-acts with. the greyspace of bpd is not separate from the worldit is always intra-acting by and through those who are marginalized by the agential cuts. lester (2013) points out that even without the dsm, these painful experiences would still exist, as the moral politics of cartesianism supersede diagnostic apparatuses. these territories existed before they 10 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) were mapped, but the effects of the borders create particular forms of suffering that compound pre-existing vulnerabilities. figure 2. "dichotomy' by j.c. at the beginning of our project, we struggled with the problem of how to be accountable to marks on bodies (barad, 2007), respond differently and interfere with the ways in which distinctions are made between what matters and what is excluded from mattering as it affected my collaborators. mol (2003) points out that "ontologies are brought into being, sustained or allowed to wither away in common, day-to-day sociomaterial practices” (p. 6.). every moment of our working together became a site in which our onto-epistemological commitments emerged as a refusal of cartesian dualism. feminist new materialism and, more specifically, agential realism, became the only space in which the women's narratives were allowed to emerge diffractively, without being used as bargaining chips in larger debates about social structures, institutions and their apparatuses. agential realism (barad, 2007), which requires a radical rethinking of the division of the matter and meaning, allowed us to focus on the embodied moments of harm (zabrodska, 2011) my collaborators experienced through the ongoing intra-action of the world. harms that created or exacerbated their emotional distress became visible only once we refused to underwrite a cartesian distinction between matter and meaning and the focus was brought more 11 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) intentionally into "feeling" what mattered. the duration of our project was long. during the six-year period we chatted consistently about psychiatry, its critics and whether or not there were any allies in scholarly discourse who were interested in advocating for women with bpd. in the second year of our project, i became acquainted with feminist new materialism and was excited to share it with the others. lorelei will only meet in a café at the other end of town. it’s a place full of anonymous suits and briefcases. lorelei is not "out" about her diagnosis and is well known in the campus community so we meet in secret. she is wearing a deep purple sweater with a limecolored t-shirt underneath. her short-cropped pixie cut is bleached blonde and her glasses are a deep red color. she always has a great sense of color and style. today she is all jewel tones ─ a nice contrast against the grayscale spring landscape of asphalt and overcast skies. we are both drinking americanos. the hard stuff. no herbal teas today. it is too dark and too cold and we both need something to boost our energy. "it's like goffman ─ no one reads goffman ─ but it's not like we don't know how bad inpatient units can be for your self-identity. it's not fucking rocket science". i laugh in protest "hey! i read goffman!" she smiles. "yeah, but you are not the usual health care person". lorelei runs her hands through her short, spiky blonde hair and sighs. “i mean… we don’t need a randomized control trial about stigma. but i’m so sick of these anti-psych academics who legit don’t get that inpatient care is life-saving.” 12 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) i nod and take a long sip of my black coffee. i remember all the stories about being turned away from care. what a privilege it must be to critique psychiatrists! most of the women in this project can’t even get in to see one. i keep quiet. lorelei thumbs through her notebook to find a satirical poem about the er. she wrote it a few weeks ago and has been excited to share. throughout the project, we collaborated using poetry, visual art and drawings to explore their experiences on the borderline (leavy, 2007). a diffractive approach (barad, 2007, haraway, 1992) meant that dissensus was welcomed and reduced pressure for collaborators to feel as if they had to "get it right" when discussing or interpreting their experiences together. a diffractive approach resonated with their sensory experiences ─ their hypersensitivity often created cascades of emotional sensation and brought traumatic memories firmly into their present moments (johnson, 2010, pershall, 2012). their experiences with trauma disrupted the myth of linear chronology. we created art together, side by side, simultaneously and intra-actively in a dynamic pattern of rhythmic engagements. by refusing to enslave ourselves to linear chronology, collaborators were not ashamed of re-experiencing past traumas over and over again in their daily lives, feeling they should have "gotten over it" already. if it was felt, it was real. this was the thread that bound our work together. as barad (2014) writes, in diffraction, "there is no moving beyond, no leaving the ‘old’ behind. there is no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then” (p. 168). a diffractive approach also resonated with many of the key care principles used in dialectical behavioral therapy (linehan, 1993), which encourages bpd sufferers radically to accept what they feel, and requires allies to validate and support them without imposing expectations on what "should" be felt according to normative standards of what is considered emotionally 13 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) appropriate and what is "excess." in this sense, diffracting temporality and letting go of the tyranny of black-and-white thinking blended into (and supported) the feminist therapeutics offered by the local bpd daytreatment program.6 the adult hospital is on the ocean between a community college and the oil refinery. it smells like sulfur; at low tide it smells like sulfur and seaweed and sewage. it was around 8 p.m. when i pulled into the deserted parking lot. it was deadly quiet, save for the foghorns and occasional siren far off in the distance. there was a man in a hospital gown under an orange streetlight smoking a cigarette. i say hello to him as i walk toward the main door. he nods. i couldn't get the door open. "it's locked" the man says. "it's locked after 8. the other door is around back." lorelei's room is tiny, barely big enough for the cot and bedside table that are bolted to the floor. there is no window in her room. all the windows on the unit have the same cage-wire security glass and are drilled shut. that was the first time i saw her in a t-shirt. it was the first time i saw her striped forearm, purple scars from wrist to elbow on both arms. we wrote poems for a while in the common room. i told her i'd return the next day with some vhs tapes she could watch on the vcr. this place is straight out of the 1960s. everything is analog. everything feels forgotten about. vulnerability as method // friendship as kin-making my collaborators met the criteria for "vulnerable" in every sense of the word. in addition to meeting institutional requirements for informed 14 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) consent and putting in place a safety plan that met tri-council-mandated research ethics board (reb) guidelines, we worked together in the early stages of our project to think through what "consent", "care", and "harm" meant in the context of our work together. lived experience on the borderline is akin to what marsha linehan, the creator of dialectical behavioral therapy has called, being an "emotional burn victim". feeling "too much" (johnson, 2010,) and the ever-present threat of "emotional hemophilia" (kreisman & straus, 2010) made the possibility for harm incredibly high. as l.n. explains: it feels like getting a lot of information from everything. like making eye contact, you get a whole rush of all…. it’s like all that information, all of what people are feeling, like everything, you’re getting tons and tons of information all the time. and you feel it very strongly. and so it feels very raw. very raw. and it’s…. it’s hard because with all that chaos that is…that most people can kind of wander through life, and they get chaos but they don’t feel it as much as we do. and it’s really difficult to kind of just manage day to day at a level of other people not giving off all this feeling of emotion and then…. so it’s very hard to find a place to like ground yourself and come back because it’s kind of like, i don't know, the world of expectations of you are [sic] designed for people who don’t have the sensitivity, kind of. so yeah, so it’s very chaotic. it’s kind of like every moment is a crisis. my previous work experience as an arts facilitator in hospitals, prisons and community-based mental health programs gave me practical experience in suicide intervention and trauma-informed practice, but it did not fully reduce the risk that our time together could bring up difficult memories or compromise recovery for those who were actively in treatment programs. as ritterbusch (2012) points out, institutional definitions of vulnerability are context-specific and often do not reflect the actual risks faced by participants. ritterbusch offers up the idea of political solidarity through participatory action research and points out that "everyday human expressions of constancy and care" (p. 19) can 15 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) develop trust in ways that reduce feelings of insecurity and danger. tallbear (2014) offers the notion of "standing with" participants. she writes: “[t]he goal of ‘giving back’ to research subjects seems to target a key symptom of a major disease in knowledge production, but not the crippling disease itself. that is the binary between researcher and researched” (p. 2). instead of exchanging "data" for service, she describes her work as "standing with" her colleagues (not subjects) in the research process. i read tallbear's invitation to "stand with" not only as a commitment to political solidarity but as an invitation to intimacy. in moving toward intimacy, making space for friendship was a political act. it was an act of intentional kin-making (haraway, 2016). vulnerability was a condition of our working together, and also our method. vulnerability required a willingness to feel. consistent care practices such as the sharing of tea, check-in rituals and validating each other built and maintained trust. trust made vulnerability even more possible as we negotiated and re-negotiated our emerging friendships with each other. "friendship as method" (tillman-healy, 2003) means that: “[w]e lay ourselves on the line, going virtually anywhere, doing almost anything, pushing to the furthest reaches of our being. we never ask more of participants than we are willing to give. friendship as method demands radical reciprocity” (p. 735). tillman-healy points out that the intimacy and closeness of a friendship brings with it the peril of trauma, ethical complexity and, occasionally, violence. in this sense, vulnerability is something equally negotiated in the space between myself and my collaborators, where the “unfolding path of the relationships becomes the path of the project” (p. 735). to "stand with" each other (tallbear, 2014) is to remain in a place of vulnerability that is open to imagining together. it meant that we had the capacity to hurt each other. it also meant that we had the capacity to transform our relationships through performances of care and accountability into those practices between us that leave "marks on bodies" (barad, 2007). radical vulnerability required us not only to be open to "felt experience" (shotter, 2014), but also to be accountable to the ways in which these experiences shift, draw, erase 16 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) and redraw the boundaries between us in the ongoing intra-active negotiation of our relationality. figure 3. 'making a mess' photo by a.w. in our first "official" meeting to chat about the direction of the project, i went over the official ethics form required by my institutional ethics review board. i went over it with my collaborators line by line. i told them stories about the tuskegee experiments and explained how forms like this were supposed to prevent people from being taken advantage of by researchers. i told them that this form gave them a number to call if i ever hurt them or if they felt uncomfortable with the project. some participants had taken bioethics classes as part of an undergraduate university program, while others had never been exposed to research in such a way before. they all signed the form. they all expressed how awkward it was to install a formalized structure between us when, up until the point at which consent forms were signed, we had been allied collaborators toward a common goal. in this sense, we begin to see the way conventional method (as a formalized process) works to impose a 17 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) particular (and limiting) frame on the relationship between the researcher and the "researched". by participating in these bureaucratic processes, the messy, dynamic entanglement of collaborators becomes obscured. as highlighted by law (2004) and emphasized by barad (2007), the world itself becomes artificially cast in eurocentric terms that superimpose static boundaries on the identities of the agents/agencies involved in the creation of knowledge. by formalizing these processes, it is easy to miss the hesitations, the renegotiations and collaborative shifts that take place between myself and my collaborators. the world-making gestures within each entanglement slip outside the frame; we lose the ability to develop language for articulating the spaces between us. the designation of researcher /"research subject" insinuated itself into this document and our ritualized performance of signing it together and agreeing to these roles created distance between us. we worked to overcome this and return to a place of friendship, to a place where expressions of loyalty, empathy and shared frustrations built a different set of relations than those outlined in the official documents. consent, as it was negotiated in our project, was something we developed through trust. although i had known many of the participants for some time, in our first official meeting i made it very clear: “if you are having a bad day and don’t feel like talking. don’t come. i am not going to take that personally. if you are having a bad day and do want to come, then come. cry, i will bring kleenex. we can sit and watch cat videos on the internet. it’s fine. you don’t have to speak, you don’t have to be chipper or happy or "professional" or articulate or in a good mood. i need you to promise me that you’ll never feel guilty or sad for me if you don’t feel like participating. ok? i need you to take care of yourself because you are worth it and this project has to be about how we support each other. all feelings are ok. what you need is ok. i am ok with what you bring to the table” 18 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) this mini-lecture was my way of acknowledging the dangerous possibility that their "consent" to participate would be mediated by a desire to not let me down or impress me. this was, in fact, our only rule. your participation on any given day had to be about what you felt like doing. we emphasized this to each other and throughout the process. often participants would leave early if they were too anxious to continue, or they would not show up at all and, instead, send a text that read something like: “i’m sorry i can’t come. need to stay in my room today”. in this project, universal concepts of "vulnerability" and "consent" were replaced with negotiated sets of community standards that acknowledged the emotional experiences of our members as being both personal and co-constituted through the practice of working together. if we felt things, they were real. we were not allowed to hide what made us feel unloveable. we were allowed to walk away at any time. performing our onto-epistemological commitments to each other throughout the process felt clumsy at the beginning. our awkward and stuttering process of world-making /art-making began to feel more natural as we agreed that "radical vulnerability" would be the common ground we would inhabit together. we could not avoid vulnerability, so we made it intentional and built care and trust into each intra-action so as to reduce the risk of harm such as retraumatization. acute awareness about the stakes of our intra-subjective entanglements was a condition of inhabiting the borderline. my collaborators always, already, felt everything. spilling over / into/ through their relations was something they had never been able to control. their emotional experiences defied any notion of a rational, sovereign subject. because they were leaky vessels already, the process of working through what "care" meant intrasubjectively was one for which they were well prepared. i had to trust their awareness and keen sensitivities if we were to develop care practices that would nurture pleasurable experiences with vulnerability. agential realism "troubles" many of the rituals and behaviors i had grown accustomed to as a "researcher." i often felt as if i were being selfish or inappropriate by making myself vulnerable as i worked through the 19 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) tension between a practice of friendship and the more traditional custodial role inscribed by reb protocols for vulnerable subjects. i had to trust deeply that my collaborators knew themselves and would show up to build care practices with me. i had to remember that i was not alone in the practice of "protection" and that the development of our ethical practices was a shared endeavor. because we often felt that language pulled us back into the trap of binary logic and black/white moralism, we developed a system for gently responding when someone in our group would fall into black/white moralisms in the process and encourage them back into the greyspace of the borders. we were, simultaneously, always, entangled in ontologies of violence, while trying to hold space for different forms of intra-action, together. we were constantly pulled in and out of the world we were trying to build. in/appropriated territory when we resolved to practice radical vulnerability together, i understood emotion as an agential force (barad, 2007). borderline personality disorder is considered to be a dis/order of emotional regulation. i felt impelled to be careful and intentional in my own understanding of what emotion was / could be/ as it was experienced. before we arrived at agential realism, i carried barbalet's (1998) notion of emotion as a radical continuum of what cartesian dualism would position as two separate domains of thought / feeling. i resisted the use of affect theory as i was not interested in theorizing the prepersonal nature of my collaborator's experiences (shouse, 2005). i wanted to make space for their embodied sensations (de courville nicol, 2011) rather than positioning myself as an expert on their unconscious or prepersonal desires. however, adopting vulnerability as method left me with a constant, subtle sensation that resonated somewhere between shame and guilt. if i cried when my collaborators told stories while we painted together, i felt as if i was behaving inappropriately. in the promises of monsters, haraway (1992) draws on trinh minha's notion of an in/appropriated other. she links 20 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) minha's concepts to the metaphor of diffraction and writes "to be inappropriate/d is not to fit in the taxon, to be dislocated from the available maps specifying kinds of actors and kinds of narratives, not to be originally fixed by difference" (p. 299). haraway asks whether minha's notion of an in/appropriated other could include "both organic and technological non-humans" (p. 300). i would like to suggest that emotion, as both an agential force and a territory in which agential cuts make themselves felt, is an in/appropriated territory. emotional suffering in response to everyday life in neoliberal capitalism is in/appropriate. as l.b. explains: it’s like something has come up and you feel strongly about it. but then they’re like, “well, your emotions are strong so are you sure it’s even like happened? are you sure it’s even…” you know. [...] it's kind of like you get angry and it’s like, well, is this… it’s like the possibility of having legitimate anger is like gone. my collaborators have been made to feel as if their sensitivity and expressions of emotion were constantly in/appropriate. emotion is the territory of intra-subjectivity. it is the space where agential cuts are experienced and resonate materially/psychically. the hypersensitivity of my collaborators brings shame and experiences of punishment and exclusion when they experience particular relational choreography and respond with outbursts of emotion. emotional expression is the basis on which my collaborators have faced violence, exclusion, neglect, invalidation and dismissal. emotion was our territory. it was the agential force that emerged intra-actively through our process. it was the space where our boundaries opened, closed, formed and re-formed as we held tight to/with/against each other in the process. agential cut as borderland our process was consistent only in its imperfection. i constantly found myself relying on language that re-inscribed notions of me/them, or terms that objectified experience and insinuated matter as a closed, static 21 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) object. the queer re-orientations (ahmed, 2010) demanded of us by our onto-epistemological commitments made me feel as if i were constantly striving to get somewhere. as if the performative un-folding of our project would somehow transport us to a magical "there" space if we/they/i simply got it right. but we were already at the borderlands. we were already excavating and disentangling borderline personality disorder from a boundary object (leigh star, 2010) or classificatory apparatus to a messy, achronological entanglement of sensations. the "somewhere" space, constructed by my scholarly anxieties about getting agential realism in community-based research "right", was a distraction from the borderlands we were already inhabiting together. the agential cut between subject/object, the site at which “boundaries don’t hold; times, places, beings bleed through one another” (barad, 2014, p. 179) was there, inscribed on bodies around me. each scar, a consequence of slipping into the "nowhere" of the hall of mirrors between biomedical psychiatry and social constructionist discourse that argued for the abolition of psychiatry. emotional distress, which was out of their control, ever present, and constantly denied and invalidated within health care systems, kinship networks and other social spaces, simply did not matter. as i.s. explains; i just felt like they weren’t taking me seriously. and i was crying and screaming, and they would tell me to be quiet when i couldn't. i just was in so much pain, like emotional pain. and it didn’t really hurt when i cut. i mean it stung but it got rid of all my anxiety. i could just focus on that instead of what’s going on in my head. the cuts, made in succession, across skin, became an act of resistance to persistent emotional invalidation. each cut: the borderland made visible. it was a way to control distress and assert the materiality of emotional experience. it was a way to write the pain visibly upon the body. it was a way to claim agential control over b/ordering processes and adopt a more socially acceptable form of distress. if it bled, it was real; bleeding granted my collaborators some form of legitimacy in the hospital. it legitimized a need for care. marks on bodies in various states 22 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) of rupture and healing were the manifestation of agential cuts that positioned emotional distress as something that simply did not matter in mental health care systems, or in spaces of activist or scholarly critique. my collaborators spoke of self-harm in this way, of a need to make visible what was denied a legitimate existence otherwise. they cut when they were upset but did not feel as if they had a "legitimate" reason to warrant their distress. one collaborator spoke of her misery at work in a minimum-wage, temporary position that did not provide her with health benefits to access the care she so desperately needed: i was working at the department of national defence as a temp clerk. and every day it was like i was so depressed. i just…. like i’d sit there and think about wanting to hurt myself. i’d start scratching and i’d scratch really deeply to draw blood. they spoke of a need to control trauma. for some, this practice began by writing on their bodies as young children with marker or pen. they spoke about how their scars came to pattern their intra-actions with others who saw them as dangerous or "toxic" because of their past. for me, responding differently and intervening in these agential cuts, meant a commitment to emotional validation. it meant seeing their scars as indicators of legitimate emotional distress and validating that pain as real. embracing contagion responding ethically to marks on bodies meant accepting contagion and intra-subjectivity as unavoidable patterns. brennan (2004) has argued that "affect" is contagious. she questions how "the taken-for-grantedness of the emotionally contained subject is a residual bastion of eurocentrism in critical thinking, the last outpost of the subject's belief in the superiority of its own worldview over that of other cultures" (p. 2). brennan's ideas about the transmission of affect call into question the notion of an "affectively contained subject," a notion that is taken for granted in contemporary life. for brennan, affect is both material and abstract and has what she calls an "energetic dimension." brennan argues that notions 23 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) of "self-containment" are a fantasy of eurocentric social and political thought. this "fantasy" of self-containment structures "the western psyche in such a way as to give a person the sense that their affects and feeling are their own" (p. 25). brennan draws upon notions of "countertransference" as proof that even clinicians "feel" affective energies from their patients, something that other clinicians have referred to as the "meat grinder" sensation of working with a borderline patient (lester, 2013) whose suffering spills over and contaminates the "rational" clinician. the persistent marginalization of those with emotional dysregulation can be attributed to the ways in which their porousness defats the myth of an affectively contained subject. women with bpd are alienated because of fears their distress may upset or contaminate others. those fears were present among us during the project. borderline experiences force us to consider felt experience as the space where affective transmission (brennan, 2004) brushes up against the slippery, tenderness of our "selves." responding differently to marks on bodies, meant refusing to fear this kind of affective contagion. it meant treating those scars as the collateral damage of ontologies of violence, not as red flags that signify moral failure. as shotter (2014) points out "in line with the task of re-situating ourselves as spontaneously responsive, embodied beings, immersed within a somewhat 'fluid' reality, is the turn to a study of our felt experiences" (p. 308). if felt experience is a territory in which agential cuts land, then i remain firmly committed to experimentation with intentional vulnerability as an onto-epistemological practice, to better understand what differential responsiveness to violence might mean in community-based research. 24 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) emotions matter figure 4. 'feelings' by i.s. performing our onto-epistemological commitments to each other became a practice of radical vulnerability, although we did not intend to do this at the beginning. when we came together, we knew that emotions were important. we knew we needed to find a space outside dualistic debates between critics of psychiatry and bio-medical psychiatrists. yet, vulnerability was the inescapable condition of our entanglements. care practices, emotional validation and attention to felt experience brought us to the places that hurt, to the embodied moments that positioned emotional distress as experience that did not matter in traditional care spaces. as a researcher committed to working with/in communities, i feel invested in holding space throughout the process in ways that better account for and disrupt ontologies of violence that leave marks on the bodies of my friends and allies. if onto-epistemological spaces provided by agential realism are to be used as an apparatus to respond differently to "marks on bodies" and account for violence, then a willingness to feel 25 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) and to validate emotional experience can yield important and perhaps, transformative results. johnson argues that "a better understanding can be built from materials retrieved from the black holes between words and feelings, past and present, lover and beloved, mental patient and the people who feel perfectly fine" (2010, p. 203). s.d. encourages us to think about what becomes possible when we are willing to feel the scope of our entanglements in the ongoing intra-action of the world: when you’re really sensitive, like instinct is to like close up and put on your armor and survive. but if we lived in a culture that valued that sensitivity, maybe you wouldn’t have to. and then who would you be? diffractive practices and commitments to feminist new materialist frameworks, although they were difficult to practice on a day-to-day level, allowed us ethically to explore lived experience with borderline personality disorder without re-inscribing harmful cartesian cuts that caused the emotional distress experienced outside our friendships. for those who have complex mental health diagnoses that have bio-psychosocial dimensions, new materialist frameworks hold space to understand these experiences without replicating the oppositional disciplinary frameworks of biomedical psychiatry and its critics. much of our multiyear project felt like fumbling in the dark, but we continue to work together. the friendships persist and, i believe, resist and create interference patterns that continue to ripple outside our circle. we stay within the borderlines, we feel the spaces between us, we keep attending to the agential cuts, erasing, re-drawing, and re-generating the borders. acknowledgements i must acknowledge the mentorship of valérie de courville nicol, martin french, christopher salter, felice yuen and patrick grzanka who supported this project with so much care and thoughtfulness. i must also humbly acknowledge the insights, wisdom and commitment of my collaborators on this project. 26 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) notes 1 ‘anna’ is a pseudonym. her real name and any identifying details have been changed to protect her identity. this paper will alternate between initials and pseudonyms. some of the project members preferred to use real name instead of a fake name because they wanted to ‘own’ their experiences in a more public way. i was not able to use their real names as part of the reb protocol, so we settled using their initials. due to the highly-stigmatized nature of the diagnosis, i was not willing to ‘out’ any collaborators on this project. they deserve shared authorship for their contributions to my own thoughts and ideas that are shared in this paper, but the risks inherent to revealing their diagnosis and backgrounds with trauma, neglect and self-harm could significantly impact their future employment, ability to secure insurance or be taken seriously in social spaces. 2 additional results from this project are discussed in whynacht, ardath (2017) prison in the spaces between us: abolition, austerity, and the possibility of compassionate containment in what moves us: the lives and times of the radical imagination. edited by max haiven and alex khasnabish. fernwood press & upping the anti. 3 a note on pronouns: i use the pronoun ‘we’ to refer to myself and my collaborators during our participatory project of art-making. i use the term ‘they’ to refer to my collaborators as separate from myself because i do not have lived experience with bpd. i refer to myself in the singular “i” to refer to myself as someone who is positioned differently within academic and clinical institutions and, as such, authored this paper as a more solitary incarnation of our project. our art-making was collaboratively authored. i use the term "collaborator" to refer to participants in the project as my artistic comrades on a shared project of art-making. we considered whether the term "accomplice" or "partner" was more appropriate, but we felt that the term "collaborator" gestured more 27 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) strongly toward a creative or artistic relationship. 4 during the project, we determined that four out of six local organizations that advocate for those with lived experience of mental illness discriminate against a bpd diagnosis. in many cases, psychosis and mood disorders are the only diagnoses advocated for by local organizations. bpd, however, is classified as a personality disorder in the dsm. at the time of writing this paper, one of the four organizations that have a policy against advocating for those living with bpd was in the midst of changing these rules, but the executive director revealed that they were still unsure about whether to make this change because they did not want "cutters" upsetting the other youth in the program. 5 it is not my intention to undermine mad studies, an in important field of scholarly inquiry. however, the overwhelming sentiment of my collaborators was that any critical discourse (or activist movement) that retains elements of anti-psychiatry critique from the mid-twentieth century is harmful for them. many of them have fought for years just to receive a diagnosis or receive some kind of care. for them, a critique intent on abolishing psychiatry is alienating or even ableist. this sentiment is echoed by johnson (2010) and pershall (2012), whose lived experience with bpd was also explored in whynacht (2017). 6 our project was not intended to replace a day treatment dialectical behavioral therapy program. however, although some participants were actively in treatment, others had been on the wait list for years. so we tried to provide the most supportive space possible for those who had not yet been able to access care. we did not intentionally mirror the dbt treatment protocol; it emerged organically as we tried to adopt agential realism and diffractive practice as a means of engagement. they called it kismet. it should also be noted that some of my collaborators worked professionally in the mental health care system. we received support from a dbt program who referred collaborators to the project both during 28 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) and after their participation in the clinical program. references ahmed, s. (2010). orientations matter. in d. coole & s. frost, (eds), new materialisms: ontology, agency and politics (pp. 234-257). durham, nc: duke university press. barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. london, uk: duke university press. barad, k. (2014). diffracting diffraction: cutting togetherapart. parallax, 20(3), 168-187. barbalet, j.m. (1998). emotion, social theory and social structure. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. becker, dana (1997). through the looking glass: women and borderline personality disorder. boulder, co: westview press. bowker, g. c., & star, s. l. (2000). sorting things out: classification and its consequences. cambridge, ma: mit press. brennan, t. (2004). the transmission of affect. new york, ny: cornell university press. de courville nicol, v. (2011). social economies of fear and desire: emotional regulation, emotion management, and embodied autonomy. london, uk: palgrave macmillan. haraway, d. (1992). the promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. in l. grossberg, c. nelson, p.a. treichler (eds.), cultural studies. (pp. 295-337). new york, ny: routledge. ─── (2016). staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press. jarvi, s., jackson, b., swenson, l., & crawford, h. (2013). the impact of social contagion on non-suicidal self-injury: a review of the literature. archives of suicide research, 17(1), 1-19. johnson, m. l. (2010). girl in need of a tourniquet: memoir of a borderline personality. berkeley, ca: seal press. 29 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) kreisman, j. j., & straus, h. (2010). i hate you ─ don't leave me: understanding the borderline personality. london, uk: penguin books. law, john (2004). after method: mess in social science research. new york, ny: routledge. leavy, p. (2015). method meets art: arts-based research practice. new york, ny: guilford press. leigh star, s. (2010). this is not a boundary object: reflections on the origin of a concept. science, technology, & human values, 35(5), 601-617. lester, r. j. (2013). lessons from the borderline: anthropology, psychiatry, and the risks of being human. feminism & psychology, 23(1), 70-77. linehan, m. m. (1993). skills training manual for treating borderline personality disorder. new york, ny: guilford press. mol, a. (2002). the body multiple: ontology in medical practice. durham, nc: duke university press. paris, j. (2004). is hospitalization useful for suicidal patients with borderline personality disorder? journal of personality disorders, 18(3: special issue), 240-247. paris, j. (2005). recent advances in the treatment of borderline personality disorder. the canadian journal of psychiatry, 50(8), 435-441. paris, j. (2007). why psychiatrists are reluctant to diagnose: borderline personality disorder. psychiatry, 4(1), 35-39. pershall, s. (2012). loud in the house of myself: memoir of a strange girl. new york, ny: w.w. norton & company. ritterbusch, a. (2012). bridging guidelines and practice: toward a grounded care ethics in youth participatory action research. the professional geographer, 64(1), 16-24. sansone, r. a., & sansone, l. a. (2009). borderline personality and criminality. psychiatry, 6(10), 16-20. shotter, j. (2014). agential realism, social constructionism, and our living relations to our surroundings: sensing similarities rather than seeing patterns. theory & psychology. 24(3), 305-325. 30 whynacht catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) shouse, e. (dec. 2005). feeling, emotion, affect. m/c journal, 8(6). retrieved from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php>. stone, m. h. (1986). essential papers on borderline disorders: one hundred years at the border. new york, ny: nyu press. tallbear, k. (2014). standing with and speaking as faith: a feministindigenous approach to inquiry. journal of research practice, 10(2), 1-7. tillmann-healy, l. (2003). friendship as method. qualitative inquiry, 9(5), 729-749. whynacht, a. (2017). prison in the spaces between us: abolition, austerity, and the possibility of compassionate containment. in haiven, m and khasnabish, a. (eds.), what moves us: the lives and times of the radical imagination. toronto, on: fernwood press & upping the anti. zabrodska, k., linnell, s., laws, c., & davies, b. (2011). bullying as intraactive process in neoliberal universities. qualitative inquiry, 17(8), 709-719. bio ardath whynacht is an artist, activist and professor who lives in k’jipuktuk, which is the ancestral and unceded territory of the mi’kmaq people. she has a phd from the interdisciplinary humanities program at concordia university and teaches sociology at mount allison university. she is currently working on a sshrc-funded project on violence, kinship and transformative justice. you can find information on her most recent work at www.insurgentlove.ca .     special section technologies of quiescence: measuring biodiversity, “intactness,” and extractive industry in canada     sarah blacker york university sblacker@yorku.ca     abstract debates over the environmental costs of industrial resource extraction in alberta, canada—home to a petrochemical industry that plays an outsize economic and political role—are reaching a fever pitch in response to government regulations on industry, data on climate change threats, and social movements pushing for environmental protection. away from the news headlines, scientists are developing new metrics and models to calculate biodiversity loss and other outcomes of industrial environmental contamination. but these data are not only used to provide evidence of environmental harm. practitioners of settler science like the alberta biodiversity monitoring institute employ such data in combination with the metaphor of environmental “intactness,” generating colonial mythologies of terra nullius anew, and enabling industrial extraction to continue. this paper theorizes a technology of settler colonial concealment. it shows how settler technologies of quiescence operate through the strategic use of scientific metrics, thereby concealing evidence of colonial harm and promoting a fiction of environmental “intactness” in a province that is home to one of the most environmentally destructive industries in the world.     keywords politics of measurement, settler science, polluting industry, reproduction of violent colonial relations, environmental contamination, ecology, production of ignorance     introduction how do the seemingly banal models used in some practices of settler science play a central role in reproducing violent colonial relations? this paper argues that such violence does not play out directly but rather through the production of knowledge that is used to justify the expropriation and dispossession of land. i develop the concept of technologies of quiescence – of quietness, stillness, inactivity, or dormancy; of making quiet or calm1 – to name the particular technologies, developed and mobilized by settler states, that minimize or displace concern and produce apathy. such technologies work to conceal and suppress evidence that colonial violence has been done (and is still underway), and thereby enable the settler state’s ongoing colonial practices to proceed, often uninterrupted and unrecognized. this paper investigates the production of quiescence, apathy, ignorance, and doubt by analyzing how particular data practices in environmental science help to epistemologically and politically scaffold the settler colonial mythology of terra nullius.2 in particular, i show how the environmental metaphor of “intactness” works to elide the multifarious violences perpetrated by the settler colonial state against indigenous peoples and lands. before i continue, i want to position myself in relation to this work. i am a non-indigenous settler scholar, and this positionality informs my commitment to identifying and critiquing the mechanisms through which colonialism’s operations are naturalized and made to appear ordinary and unremarkable; my aim is to contribute to the work of dismantling persistent structures of colonialism. this paper focuses on the metaphor of “intactness,” used by the alberta biodiversity monitoring institute (abmi) in the production of biodiversity data, and investigates how such data are used to sustain industrial resource extraction in the province of alberta. the abmi uses a common (though not uncontroversial)3 method in the field of ecology: the biodiversity intactness index, or bii. ecologists r.j. scholes and r. biggs, based at the council for scientific and industrial research (csir) environmentek in pretoria, south africa, developed the bii as a metric for assessing the rate of biodiversity loss that would be sensitive to subtle changes and allow for interventions before species disappear from a region or become extinct (scholes and biggs 2005).4 in the absence of a pre-industrial baseline measurement, the abmi uses the bii to create a statistically modeled baseline or reference condition.5 the abmi is obligated to provide such data to international environmental protection organizations such as the forest stewardship council; when this metric is used to find that biodiversity is intact and minimal harm has been done, this enables the abmi’s industrial clients to obtain approval to continue their extraction operations. by meeting these organizations’ standards for environmental management, canadian industry can continue to export the products of extractive industry to international markets, supporting the settler colonial state’s valuation of land as “matter to be extracted from, used, sullied, and taken from, over and over again” (simpson 2016). the abmi’s use of the bii enables resource extraction to continue, thus propping up the settler colonial canadian state, a state in which any threat to resource extraction is seen as an existential threat. by orienting its operations around the bii, the abmi directs scientific and public attention toward the idea of a pristine, “untouched” condition: one in which neither the ecosystem nor biodiversity is particularly threatened. the adjective intact, meaning untouched,6 erases the harm done by industry and the settler colonial state more broadly. it presumes presence rather than absence, and not only presence but a bountiful presence that leaves little space for measurements indicating absence or endangerment. conversely, if the index had been named to point at matters of ecological concern, such as contamination, then findings about contamination would be more readily generated. the abmi’s use of the bii aggregates data in ways that suggest that biodiversity in alberta is largely “intact,” despite the reams of data on the catastrophic scale of contamination wrought by the tar sands (cbc 2014; graney 2020), which international ngos, including greenpeace, have identified as “the world’s most destructive” industrial extraction project (berman 2017; leahy 2019). the metaphor of intactness is mobilized by the abmi both to disappear evidence of harm wrought by industry and to enable colonial extraction to proceed with impunity. in this way, the abmi’s use of the bii is a concrete modeling practice that enables what eve tuck and k. wayne yang call “settler futurity” to be produced through settler science (2012, 3). the pervasiveness of the “intactness” metaphor shapes scientific knowledge about biodiversity in alberta, and it interrupts and restricts public discourse on industrial pollution as colonialism (liboiron 2021). the bii does not produce data documenting a pristine, untouched environment, but instead produces data indicating that biodiversity remains intact enough for extraction to continue. framing biodiversity as “intact” enough not only enables colonial extractive industry to continue but also directly counters indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (tek) as well as other indigenous forms of resistance against settler colonial extraction and science, particularly those led by indigenous women (walia 2013). extending scholarship on how settler colonialism enables environmental violence (shadaan and murphy 2020) and on how “scientific epistemologies and their monopoly on truth claims” can exacerbate existing inequities (cech et al. 2017, 745), this paper argues that intactness can act as a new iteration and continuation of the terra nullius doctrine. a foundational mythology animating settler colonial knowledge cultures, the notion of terra nullius has helped to shape colonial knowledge production, including the development of metrics in science. the metaphor of intactness, i argue, is used to cement settler control over land and resources while obscuring and marginalizing indigenous refusals of settler science and industry. the fact that settler colonial states establish and maintain themselves through acts of violence directed towards both indigenous peoples and the land has been well documented by many scholars (king 2019; king, navarro, and smith 2020; mcgregor 2018; whyte 2018). i am interested here in the settler colonial technologies that act in concert with such acts of violence, enabling colonial destructiveness to proceed uninterrupted and even unrecognized: technologies of quiescence. i analyze how these technologies operate through a scientific model that disappears evidence of settler colonial harm and promotes a fiction of environmental “intactness” in a province that is home to one of the most environmentally destructive industries in the world. in this analysis, i am practicing what deboleena roy calls a feminist critique of science focused on “interrogating the impact of reductionist thinking” in the sciences (2018, 5). my analysis explains how the development of a scientific metric (including its history and the intentions informing its development) and that metric’s strategic uses are effaced when it becomes naturalized as the frame through which a phenomenon is measured and perceived. i show how the contingency of the abmi’s use of the bii metric is obscured, thereby enabling the knowledge produced by the abmi to seem logical and inevitable. as part of this special section entitled “metaphors as meaning and method in technoculture,” this paper illuminates how metaphor as method enables the bii to act as a mechanism of settler colonial knowledge production, taking the form of a technology of quiescence. by calling “intactness” a metaphor, i am not suggesting that there is no utility to the measurements taken via the bii, nor that scientists conducting this research at the abmi are not acting in good faith. instead, i aim to draw attention to how intactness brings the broader frame of settler colonial science into view, by emphasizing how the metric of intactness narrates the past, present, and future in the interest of the settler colonial state,7 producing quiescence through erasure. as a technology of quiescence, intactness as a metric of biodiversity exemplifies what donna haraway calls “the simultaneity of fact and fiction, materiality and semioticity, object and trope” (1999, 82–83). by focusing public attention on intactness, the abmi grossly simplifies and papers over critical aspects of biodiversity research. most conservation work focuses on habitat, not species,8 as biodiversity exists at multiple levels. and even at the species level, biodiversity involves species composition, interactions, richness, and evenness (chapin et al. 2000). not only is this complexity erased under the intactness metaphor but also, in emphasizing intactness, the abmi distracts from industrial harms and the harms perpetrated by colonialism more broadly.   the politics of measurement sts scholarship on the politics of measurement is central to the concept of technologies of quiescence. a large body of work on the politics of measurement shows that data collection practices are informed by the social and political context where the science is being carried out, as well as by the assumptions and positionality of the scientists themselves (brown 1992; frickel et al. 2010; kimura 2016; kinchy, parks, and jalbert 2016; lave 2012; li 2009; liboiron et al. 2021; matz, wylie and kriesky 2017; ottinger 2010; pine and liboiron 2015). related scholarship on the politics of quantification, including ted porter’s (1995) work on quantification as a technology that enables measurements to appear politically neutral and dan bouk’s (2015) work on statistics as a practice mobilized by state and industrial actors to explain and justify inequities, has also informed this paper. many indigenous scholars’ interventions into this body of work demonstrate the need to analyze metrics and instruments in the context of colonial relations (liboiron 2021; mcgregor 2018; murphy 2006; palmer 2020; rodriguez-lonebear 2021; smith 2021; tallbear 2013; walter and carroll 2021). among the crucial contributions made by these authors is the anti-deterministic insight that such technologies do not inevitably produce data in the interests of colonial reproduction. instead, metrics and instruments can also be mobilized to serve indigenous communities and to resist colonial structures.   the production of ignorance in settler colonial canada there are parallels between technologies of quiescence and agnotology—the study of how ignorance is fostered, particularly by industrial actors accused of causing harm—but there are also important differences. sts scholarship has demonstrated the perils of focusing only on the production of knowledge to the exclusion of the study of the production of ignorance (frickel and kinchy 2015; richter, cordner, and brown 2021). scholarship on agnotology has focused primarily on how industry deliberately produces ignorance and manufactures doubt, showing that ignorance is not a passive or default state but instead one that is strategically aspired towards in contexts where ignorance can be more powerful than knowledge (mcgoey 2012). crucial here is michelle murphy’s concept of “regimes of imperceptibility,” first developed in sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty (2006). this is a generative framework for analyzing the historical and political contexts in which certain phenomena are rendered perceptible and others imperceptible, and the way that imperceptibility is “at times purposefully generated and maintained…by industry-sponsored science” (2006, 10). in my analysis, the bii is similarly revealed as a domain of imperceptibility, one that renders intactness more “measurable, quantifiable, assessable, and knowable” (murphy 2006, 9) than contamination. industry’s vast economic resources are crucial in enabling the production of doubt, as shown by sts researchers studying big pharma and big tobacco (proctor 2008; oreskes and conway 2010). as robert proctor (2008, 17) writes, “if there is a diversity of views on tobacco as a cause of cancer, what fraction of that diversity has been created by the industry itself?” we could ask an analogous question about the role of settler colonial states in deliberately producing ignorance: if there is a diversity of views on the causes of chronic health inequities affecting indigenous communities, what fraction of that diversity has been created by the settler state itself? and more specifically, in the context of technologies of quiescence: how does settler colonial science contribute to the settler state’s drive to conceal and suppress evidence of harm? the resources available to a settler state in generating doubt, uncertainty, and ignorance are different from those available to private industry, to be sure, but they may be even more effective in producing ignorance. we can see these mechanisms of erasure, aiming to produce quiescence, in diverse state practices: the censorship and redaction of incriminating documents stored at federal archives (griffith 2019), the destruction of scientific archives holding data on environmental harm and climate change (learn 2017; zeffiro 2015), the rewriting of elementary and high school curricula (deerchild 2018; french 2020), the privileging of scientific data practices that prop up settler colonial doctrines, and even official apologies for colonial violence (barrera 2015). how is settler colonial violence obscured or rendered unrecognizable? both terra nullius and the metaphor of “intactness” are settler fantasies that are disproportionately influential because they are embedded within and emboldened by the settler colonial institutions of law and science. i describe these practices as particular to canada as a settler colonial state that remains dependent upon an extraction economy. the metaphor of “intactness” advances what audra simpson (2016) calls “settler statecraft” by obscuring the colonial extraction and violence inherent in industrial contamination of indigenous lands and indigenous communities. it is crucial to understand terra nullius not as a historical myth but as something living now, which requires ongoing maintenance and support in order to remain influential and to continue to bolster the settler state’s ambitions. settler science plays an important role in continuing to generate terra nullius anew.   how does the abmi mobilize “intactness” as a technology of quiescence? if we understand settler colonial science as producing knowledge that serves settlers’ interests and is designed to “rescue settler futurity” (tuck and yang 2012, 3), then we can ask, how might environmental modeling produce knowledge to justify settlers’ desire to remain? what sort of model would produce knowledge that would naturalize—or complicate—the intention to remain? the concept of intactness offers a promising start. the abmi is an environmental monitoring organization that began operations in 1997; its initial funding was provided by the forestry industry (cronmiller and noble 2018). today, the abmi is a public-private partnership employing credentialed scientists who analyze data collected at the university of alberta and the royal alberta museum (abmi 2015; blacker, kimura, and kinchy 2021).9 the abmi operates through government funding and academic grants, with the assistance of fees collected and voluntary contributions10 from the oil, gas, agricultural and forestry industries.11 half of the members of its board of directors are affiliated with industry: three are representatives of industry lobby groups, and two others hold positions in industry leadership (abmi board of directors, 2021). there is evidence to suggest that the abmi uses the bii to indicate that extractive industry in the province has resulted in only negligible biodiversity loss. for instance, abmi reports have claimed that biodiversity was 94 percent “intact” in the energy-producing region (carson 2011). claims of intactness rely on evidence of living species of plants and animals. in a 2015 speech, the abmi’s executive director, kirk andries, explained that this data is provided to corporations such as the alberta-pacific forest industries, inc., which commission the abmi as an “independent third party” to do “scientifically credible reporting” to “validate environmental management practices.” industry stakeholders, andries (2015) said, are “the people i would define as our customers. these are people who tell us what they need to know. what is the challenge that they want resolved?…they describe their knowledge requirements, and we produce a model to try to drive outputs that can generate knowledge that can be applied to the practice of management.” the interests of industry stakeholders may thus shape the abmi’s use of the bii. andries also described how the abmi helped the forestry industry obtain a “gold star” rating from the forest stewardship council by providing evidence of “acceptable levels of environmental intactness,” which then helped the forestry industry gain “enhanced access to markets” (2015). in its “species website manual,” the abmi defines intactness as “a measure of how much human footprint has affected species’ abundances” (abmi 2017b, 24). in an october 2016 edition of a publication called abmi science letters, the abmi defines “human footprint” as “the temporary or permanent transformation of native ecosystems to industrial, residential or recreational land uses that is visible from air photos” (sólymos and schieck 2016, 1). given the extent to which environmental contamination remains invisible to the human eye and indetectable to human senses—even in localities where community members possess intimate knowledge of their environment and are extremely attentive to changes12—it is startling to learn that the abmi measures change through aerial photography. this speaks to the scale of environmental harm that is perceptible to the abmi, while also prompting questions surrounding the methods used by the abmi to distinguish between sampling sites they consider to have “no human footprint” versus areas where the “human footprint” may have caused biodiversity loss. this science letter also states that “humans have visibly transformed 27% of alberta to date” (sólymos and schieck 2016, 1, emphasis added), raising the question of what percentage of this region has been transformed when taking into account the kinds of harm and contamination that are not visible via aerial photography. while the authors state that one of the “key messages” of the letter is that the abmi’s measurements “provide tools for exploring alternative management options in land-use planning,” it is unclear what sort of “alternative management options” might be prompted (sólymos and schieck 2016, 1). my critique of the abmi’s use of the bii metric is based on my analysis of publicly available documents published by the abmi, including the science letter, annual reports, published articles, and brief “explainer” documents such as figure 1. in pursuing this research, my attempts to gain access to other scientific reports that would provide detailed elaborations of the abmi’s methods in conceptualizing intactness and producing data through the bii have been frustrated. this problem of restricted access to documents is, of course, not new. as ann laura stoler’s (2009) work shows, we can learn as much about a colonial regime through a colonial archive’s absences as we can learn through the documents that are made accessible. furthermore, the deliberate restriction of access to abmi documents reflects technologies of quiescence in action, particularly the concealment and suppression of evidence of harm, as well as the mollification and redirection of interested researchers and concerned citizens.   how does the bii produce quiescence? the “biodiversity intactness index” produces measurements of plants’ and animals’ relative presence or absence in alberta by comparing “the predicted current relative abundance of a species in a given region to its predicted reference relative abundance in that region if there were no human footprint” (abmi 2017a, 1). the abmi acknowledges outright that this measurement of the “reference relative abundance,” or, in other words, pre-contact levels of intactness, can only be predicted through the use of models, since these data do not exist in a form that is acceptable to dominant western scientific standards governing what constitutes reliable data.13 there is a strong element of uncertainty implicit in this document, in its insistence on prediction in the absence of data, making it a fertile domain for the production of doubt. the abmi produces quiescence by introducing slight methodological amendments to the commonly used bii metric in ecology. for instance, while it is standard practice in ecology to measure each species separately, the abmi groups many different species together in its calculations. there is also an unmistakeable pr emphasis in the abmi’s scientific reports; this reflects the abmi’s status as a public-private partnership that reports to alberta-pacific forest industries inc. and the forest stewardship council to assist industrial actors in gaining “enhanced access to markets” (andries 2015; blacker, kimura, and kinchy 2021).   figure 1. “abmi’s intactness index: measuring biodiversity.” https://www.abmi.ca/home/about-us/intactness-index   figure 1 illustrates how the abmi’s use of graphic design and pr-friendly science communication enables its production of quiescence. this illustration is emblematic of the pro-settlerism perspective espoused by the abmi, which is naturalized and rendered logical when embedded in the abmi’s discussion of biodiversity loss. this perspective is immediately evident in the first sentence that appears in figure 1, which reads, “the abmi was designed to detect large changes in biodiversity in alberta” (italics added). here the abmi acknowledges that its use of the bii is not sensitive enough to detect small changes in biodiversity, even when these small changes are ecologically significant. furthermore, the abmi equates pre-contact environmental “intactness” with a “0% human footprint,” thereby eliding indigenous presence while also characterizing indigenous lands prior to european settlement as “empty, unproductive, and in need of capitalist possession” (murphy 2017, 10). the abmi calculates abundance in both “increaser” and “decreaser” species, emphasizing its symmetry and suggesting that the metric equally registers both the maintenance and the loss of biodiversity. however, figure 1 also illustrates the capacity of technologies of quiescence to conceal evidence of harm and to displace concern. the “increaser” species profiled here, the coyote, increases in number at a much faster rate than “decreaser” species, such as the chickadee, decline when urban expansion and industrial extraction processes threaten animal habitats. the abmi’s graphic design makes the decrease in chickadee abundance seem minimal, as though there weren’t many chickadees to begin with. it suggests that this decrease in chickadee abundance is relatively insignificant compared to the thriving coyote population. but one species’ increase in number does not make the biodiversity loss of another species any less catastrophic; indeed, such a decrease may be a sentinel of other forms of environmental contamination that may be even more advanced and less perceptible. figure 1 does not actually demonstrate how the abmi uses the bii to measure environmental harm; instead, it merely communicates the habitat preferences of two species. many of the abmi’s short “explainer” texts, like figure 1, present similar narratives that dramatically oversimplify environmental monitoring projects conducted by the abmi. these “explainer” pages contain minimal text and instead feature images that present field sites as bountiful, with biodiversity “intact” and data that appear strikingly eager to be collected and analyzed by abmi scientists. there is no mention of monitoring projects being hampered by a lack of access to industrial extraction sites for data collection, or any other barriers that scientists might face. in these ways, it becomes evident that the abmi enables the reproduction of colonial relations through the production of intactness as the frame for understanding biodiversity and industry in alberta. the abmi produces this frame using a pr approach that is remarkably devoid of scientific specificity; it is the aura of intactness that pacifies and displaces concern, rather than precise numerical calculations. while intactness might pass as a neutral descriptor of fact, we need to attend its work as a metaphor. as an influential metric in ecology that informs controversial, impactful, and irreversible decisions around industrial extraction and its continuation and expansion, intactness acts as “a metaphor that illuminates something else” (haraway 1999, 82). what is that “something else”? i argue that it illuminates settler colonialism as a value that structures socio-technological life in canada, although it is not always recognized as such; instead, it is often received as a “view from above, from nowhere” (haraway 1999, 589). it functions as what marie battiste calls “a culturally imperialistic stream that ignores or erodes, if not destroys, other ways of knowing” (2013, 104); it structures science, it structures social policy, it structures education, and yet it often continues to evade settler recognition as a structuring entity.   the metaphor of “intactness” the abmi’s metaphor of intactness dematerializes actual ecology by shifting attention to the fantasy of an immaterial thing: the idea of an intact ecological space that promises future health and wealth for its inhabitants. this promise does not necessarily need to be uttered aloud: it is implied through the long-standing albertan paradigm associating continued extraction with societal collective good and prosperity (adkin 2016; shrivastava and stefanick 2012; takach 2017). how does the profusion of images of environmental health and economic wealth that is enabled by the metaphor of intactness prevent residents of a settler colonial state from seeing and confronting the multifarious forms of harm perpetrated by colonialism? how does the metaphor of intactness support and further entrench “contemporary constructions of euro-canadian whiteness as neutral and observing, as a positionality in which one gazes upon the ills of colonialism but cannot quite think of oneself as involved, responsible, or actively constitutive of (and constituted by) those ills” (cameron 2011, 171)? the abmi’s use of the bii plays a pivotal role in preventing settler canadians from recognizing the land currently called canada as stolen indigenous land, while also projecting an image of alberta as consisting of “virgin” landscapes that remain untouched by industry. as a rhetorical move that conjures up notions of innocence, the abmi’s use of the bii furthers the central project of settler science as a form of knowledge production that elides public understanding of colonial space. lee maracle’s trenchant description of colonial space is apt here: “a physical space that once belonged to someone or someone else: like tuberculosis colonizing the lung. it once belonged to the breather but now is occupied by the tubercular bacteria and the host will die of it if a war is not waged against the tuberculosis” (2017, 123). considering how intactness functions as a metaphor, it is useful to think with haraway about a metaphor’s centrality to the paradigm in which it emerges. she writes, “a metaphor is the vital spirit of a paradigm (or perhaps its basic organizing relation).…it leads to a searching for the limits of the metaphoric system and thus generates the anomalies important in paradigm change” (haraway, quoted in roy 2018, 135). if the metaphor of intactness enables settler colonial environmental science to produce a future for itself, then what might lead to paradigm change? one possibility is to take up the opposite of the metaphor of intactness: brokenness, contamination, loss, or incompleteness. what sort of metaphors would enable the production and circulation of knowledges that no longer conceal this brokenness? which metaphors could prompt a new paradigm? tiffany lethabo king calls for new concepts to support abolitionist and decolonial work: “conquest must be perpetually elaborated and interrogated with all of our existing faculties, as well as the ones that have yet to be developed.…conquest is always changing and in flux. it is in continual need of new language or new conceptual tools” (2019, 49). this need is particularly acute in contexts where the reproduction of colonial relations is subtle, quiet, and largely hidden, but nevertheless deliberately and intricately planned—as in the case of the abmi. owing to this subtlety, we might overlook how a scientific metric like the bii lies at the center of colonial resource extraction processes. we might look instead to the building of new pipelines, which remains a crucial arena for contestation. but industrial actors in alberta are not only beholden to shareholders; they also need to produce scientific data showing that the environment remains intact enough to gain permission to build those pipelines in the first place. through this lens, we see that a seemingly banal scientific metric like the bii is crucial to gerald vizenor’s concept of survivance (1999; 2008), characterized by murphy as not only indigenous “survival-as-resistance,” but also “about what has to end, what has to come apart …to dismantle violent infrastructures” (2017, 11).   “intactness” as a new iteration of terra nullius the papal bulls of discovery, issued in the fifteenth century, enabled colonization to take place through the doctrine of discovery, an international law that permitted colonial “explorers” to claim sovereignty over the lands that they “discovered” (paul 2006). crucial to the operation of the doctrine of discovery was the concept of “vacant land” or terra nullius. lands whose inhabitants were not christian—such as the indigenous peoples of turtle island—were categorized as “vacant” or terra nullius (paul 2006). harsha walia (2013) describes terra nullius as a “racist civilizing discourse” mobilized by colonial states to “uphold the political and legal right for colonial powers to conquer supposedly barren indigenous lands,” and writes that it is more commonly associated with the settler colonial state of australia than that of canada. similarly, irene watson (2014, 518) characterizes terra nullius as an “unspoken principle” in australia, which persists in settler colonial knowledge cultures and institutions even though it was legally repudiated by the high court in 1992. this paper argues that the bii is a concrete mechanism through which terra nullius remains extant in settler colonial environmental science. but rather than engaging in what eve tuck (2009) calls “damage-centered research,” focused on harm inflicted on indigenous peoples and lands, i have examined how a commonly used metric in environmental science plays a crucial role in reproducing colonial relations. the abmi’s use of the metaphor of intactness acts as a lever in the larger machinery of colonial industrial extraction in canada; unless we know that the lever is there, we cannot step in to interrupt it. in this way, the paper takes up murphy’s “invitation to consider what infrastructures and concepts have to be dismantled to make room for another way of being and knowing to emerge” (2017, 10). there is a growing body of indigenous-led work that examines how terra nullius continues to shape colonial violence in canada, as well as draws attention to indigenous resistance against it.14 murphy describes terra nullius as a “legal fiction” that “is used to support a state’s claim of sovereignty over land they ‘find’” (2017, 11). this “legal fiction” remains profoundly influential and deeply rooted in settler colonial knowledge cultures today. further, murphy ties terra nullius not to the laws and institutions of the settler colonial state, but to the cultural reproduction of colonial relations: “land and life [are] coded by a colonial gaze as empty, unproductive, and in need of capitalist possession” (9–10, emphasis added). these scholars draw a direct line from terra nullius and the settler colonial canadian state’s seizure of indigenous lands to the state’s economic dependence on polluting industry, and then to the environmental violence inflicted upon indigenous communities and communities of color, revealing it as simultaneously colonial violence (liboiron 2021; murphy 2017). the legal context is important, as shown by the yellowhead institute’s land back report (pasternak, king, and the yellowhead institute 2019), not only because it continues to pose barriers to indigenous sovereignty but also because the legal repudiation of the doctrine of terra nullius remains incomplete. as john borrows’s (2015) work shows, the doctrine of terra nullius continues to undergird state institutions and epistemic practices in canada, despite repeated legal assertions on the part of the canadian settler colonial state that “the doctrine of terra nullius (that no one owned the land prior to european assertion of sovereignty) never applied in canada” (supreme court of canada verdict in the case of tsilhqot’in nation v. british columbia, cited in borrows 2015, 703). borrows declares, “canadian law still has terra nullius written all over it” (2015, 703). moreover, stateand industry-funded practices of environmental science operate with terra nullius as a core unaddressed assumption, while also mobilizing the fantasy of a land that could, in the future, be returned to a pristine state, intact, no harm done. in this way, environmental science methods such as the bii enact a new form of colonial domination. this new form of colonial relations aims to coax subjects into submission, or quiescence. ultimately, the abmi’s use of the bii enables industrial extraction to proceed with impunity. it does so by generating numerical measurements that are framed as evidence of a regional ecosystem that has supposedly not been harmed enough to justify halting industrial activity. this modeling rests upon multiple assumptions that are thinkable only through the lens of the settler state. two assumptions undergird the abmi’s use of the bii: the first is of a past “empty land” without any human footprint, actively eliding indigenous presence, both past and present. a second assumption is that remediation would be able to fully “undo” (or conceal) the harms caused by extractive industry. the abmi’s analysis projects a possible future of “abundance” enabled by processes of remediation described as a state in which “all human footprint is converted back, or ‘backfilled’, to native vegetation types” (sólymos and schieck 2016, 2). this fantasy of total remediation, which would erase all lasting effects of industry, conveniently overlooks chronic forms of contamination. in this sense the very concept of remediation gives voice to the same kind of fallacy as the concept of reconciliation: the misleading sense that there was once a harmonious moment of “conciliation” that could be regained.   what makes a technology colonial? in land back: a yellowhead institute red paper (pasternak, king, and yellowhead institute 2019), members of the yellowhead institute emphasize that the central question for canada as a settler colonial state is that of land dispossession, not reconciliation; the land must be returned to its indigenous land-, water-, and knowledge keepers.15 analyzing the “existing land and resource strategies of federal and provincial governments,” the land back report seeks to identify the particular mechanisms through which the settler colonial state, in collaboration with industry, continues to “dispossess indigenous peoples of land and waters today” (8). one of the report’s key findings is the identification and analysis of “the legal fictions created by the crown to empower itself to legally steal indigenous lands,” with a particular focus on injunctions (33). what is the scientific counterpart of the injunction? if injunctions are a legal tool of the settler state that enable it to continue dispossessing indigenous peoples of their lands today—including unceded lands that are designated as “crown land”—then can we understand the abmi’s use of the bii as similarly enabling dispossession and extraction by concealing evidence of the harm wrought by industry? one of the most important interventions made by the land back report is the “mine sweeper map,” with its potential to correct public understanding/ignorance of the relationship between the settler state’s prioritization of natural resource extraction, the indian act, the location of reserves, environmental destruction, and the mechanisms of continuing dispossession of lands and water from indigenous peoples (pasternak, king, and yellowhead institute 2019). this map was developed to address the problems of scale and visibility that continue to be exploited by the settler state and industry because of the ways in which they promote quiescence. visualizing the location of industrial extraction sites in relation to reserves, the mine sweeper map powerfully interrupts the doctrine of terra nullius. the map uses aerial photography to reveal that “vast areas of crown land” that are “depicted on most maps” as “empty and unoccupied space” are neither empty nor unoccupied, but instead are spaces brimming with contestation and violence, where industrial extraction, active dispossession, “land alienation, denial of aboriginal rights, and erasure of indigenous law” proceed with impunity (26). refuting terra nullius, the mine sweeper map shows that any limitations placed on the visibility of these operations are not incidental but instead intentional, a central aspect of colonial planning; this insight applies as well to the abmi’s promotion of the intactness metaphor. while a vast gulf divides the abmi and the yellowhead institute politically, the bii and the mine sweeper map both use the same method for measuring the scale of environmental impact: aerial photography.16 this raises important questions about assumptions made in relation to technological determinism, and points to the flexibility of scientific methods. how can the abmi and the yellowhead institute produce such different knowledges about the environmental impacts of industrial resource extraction, when using the same method? does aerial photography become a colonial technology in the hands of the abmi, and an anticolonial technology in the hands of the yellowhead institute? the question is more complex because both the abmi and the yellowhead institute use several different methods simultaneously, which prohibits a reductive focus on aerial photography specifically. but the question remains: how can the use of the same method to photograph the same lands produce such different pictures of environmental impact? the abmi emphasizes intactness, enabling resource extraction to continue, while the mine sweeper map emphasizes contestation, dispossession, and harm, demonstrating the urgent need for change. in conclusion, it is not the biodiversity intactness index metric that is inherently colonial; it is the abmi’s use of the metaphor of intactness to conceal and suppress evidence of harm that reproduces colonial relations by enabling ongoing practices of colonial dispossession and expropriation to proceed uninterrupted. this distinction points to the enormous capacities of anticolonial science to interrupt technologies of quiescence and to reduce their disproportionate influence. even as we enter a long-awaited moment of reckoning in settler colonial canada (callison and young 2020), evidence documenting how colonial violence has continually been concealed and disavowed remains elusive, as settler science continues to produce quiescence through erasure. increased attention to the work of metaphor in enabling this erasure, particularly through scholarship in feminist sts, stands to contribute methods for unveiling all that which metaphors have kept hidden for too long. in so doing, this work can open up a generative space of resistance.   acknowledgements i would like to thank paul grogan, max liboiron, erin martineau, sarah overington, the special section editors t.l. cowan and jas rault, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous engagement with earlier versions of this article. this research was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada.   notes 1 the noun quiescence is defined as “the state or condition of being quiescent; quietness, stillness, inactivity, dormancy; an instance of this. also: the action of making quiet or calm” (oed). technologies of quiescence enact a mollification; they can soothe and pacify. they work to minimize or displace concern and they can produce apathy.   2 in unsettling canada: a national wake-up call, arthur manuel writes that the first step toward decolonizing canada “is a simple one…formally denounce the racist doctrine of discovery and terra nullius as justification for settler presence on our lands” (2015, 275–76). the doctrine of discovery and terra nullius have been mobilized to justify the european colonists’ seizure of indigenous lands (david 2022). the truth and reconciliation commission of canada’s call to action number 49 calls for the repudiation of the doctrine of discovery and terra nullius as concepts originating with papal bulls issued in 1455 and 1493 (stefanovich 2022). attention to this call to action was renewed when delegates from the assembly of first nations met with pope francis at the vatican on march 31, 2022, and asked him to repudiate the doctrine of discovery (david 2022).   3 i thank max liboiron for this insight.   4 the bii was not designed to be used in isolation, but instead to complement other metrics used in biodiversity research.   5 the bii is not the only metric that the abmi uses, but it is the metric that the abmi emphasizes in its communication to broader audiences. this paper analyzes the abmi’s prioritization of the bii as well as the abmi’s unusual use of metrics that focus on intactness rather than measuring species interactions, richness, composition, and evenness (chapin et al. 2000).   6 the etymology of the adjective intact is from the latin intactus, consisting of the prefix in and tactus, the past participle of tangere (to touch) (oed). the oxford english dictionary defines intact as “untouched; not affected by anything that injures, diminishes, or sullies; kept or left entire; unblemished; unimpaired.” the abmi’s use of the metric of intactness orients both scientists and members of the public towards thinking of alberta as ecologically intact, whole, and uncontaminated, and rhetorically steers people away from considerations of diminished biodiversity, damage, loss, and irreversible harm.   7 there are important resonances here with max liboiron and colleagues’ (2021) work on how seemingly neutral measurements and research practices in environmental science carry with them their legacies as tools of colonialism. they write, “normal aspects of research…are engaged in these [colonial] relationships, usually in ways that are difficult to see because they are part of scientific norms” (liboiron et al. 2021, 20).   8 in preserving habitat, it becomes possible to preserve many species. a reductive focus on charismatic species can distract attention away from changes in species interactions, and biodiversity loss more broadly.   9 for an analysis of the abmi’s citizen science project “naturelynx” as a practice of “public relations citizen science,” see “when citizen science is public relations” (blacker, kimura, and kinchy 2021).   10 corporations operating in the oil, gas, and forestry industries, including shell canada, imperial oil, suncor, meg energy, devon energy corporation, and alberta-pacific forest industries inc., are named as sponsors on the abmi website (abmi 2021).   11 close to half of the abmi’s annual operating budget comes from alberta’s oil sands monitoring program, which collects fees from the oil industry to fund monitoring in the province “according to a funding formula developed collaboratively by the canadian association of petroleum producers and the alberta government” (government of alberta and environment and climate change canada 2018). abmi’s remaining funding comes primarily from the government of alberta, but is also supplemented by funds from the private sector, including imperial oil, suncor energy, and norzinc (formerly canadian zinc) (abmi 2020).   12 for a more detailed exploration of these questions, see “'water is a living thing': environmental and human health implications of the athabasca oil sands for the mikisew cree first nation and athabasca chipewyan first nation in northern alberta" (mclachlan 2014).   13 the yellowhead institute’s land back report provides a powerful retort to this assertion by noting that this data does exist in the form of oral history. the land back report describes the difficulties faced by baseline studies in environmental science and points to the often-ignored resource of oral history and knowledges: “oral history is one example of baseline knowledge and is a form of scientific monitoring” (pasternak, king, and yellowhead institute 2019, 30).   14 as tiffany lethabo king (2019) argues, this emphasis on terra nullius should not detract from the long history—and powerful acceleration in the present—of indigenous resistance and decolonial work against the attempts at genocide perpetrated by settler colonial states.   15 the land back report notes not only the loss of biodiversity but also the disastrous mismanagement of expropriated lands by the settler state and industry. the report indicts the “narrow, short-term view of western environmental policies and practices,” emphasizing that “while biodiversity is declining in all parts of the world, it is declining much less rapidly in those lands still managed by indigenous communities” (pasternak, king, and yellowhead institute 2019, 64). the importance of funding and support for indigenous land management practices was urgently discussed in the summer of 2021 as wildfires erupted across the west coast in the land known as british columbia. if indigenous land-keepers and knowledge-holders had been permitted to practice controlled burns in this region, these wildfires could have been prevented (paling 2021).   16 i want to thank max liboiron for this important insight, and for their generous and generative comments on an earlier draft of this paper, which have significantly improved this work. of course, i am responsible for all of this paper’s shortcomings.   references adkin, laurie elizabeth, ed. 2016. first world petro-politics: the political ecology and governance of alberta. toronto: university of toronto press. alberta biodiversity monitoring institute. n.d. “abmi’s intactness index: measuring 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2008–2015, edited by teresa healy and stuart trew, 349–56. ottawa: canadian centre for policy alternatives.     author bio sarah blacker is a sessional assistant professor in the department of social science at york university in toronto. her book manuscript in progress, warding off disease: racialization and health in settler colonial canada, examines the role of data practices in making knowledge claims about the causes of health inequities. pollock, anne. 2021. review of resilient cyborgs: living and dying with pacemakers and defibrillators, by nelly oudshoorn (palgrave macmillan, 2020). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © anne pollock, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | resilient cyborgs: living and dying with pacemakers and defibrillators, by nelly oudshoorn (palgrave macmillan, 2020) anne pollock king’s college london anne.pollock@kcl.ac.uk the cyborg is a foundational figuration for feminist technoscience scholarship, but is generally regarded from a conceptual perspective, often inspired by science fiction. how might feminist science and technology scholars productively engage cyborgs who are living among us today? this is among the vital questions explored by nelly oudshoorn in her fascinating book resilient cyborgs: living and dying with pacemakers and defibrillators. the book makes a compelling case for rematerializing the cyborg, by turning to the lived experiences of people who have powerful life-transforming machines implanted into their bodies. resilient cyborgs is about what it is like to live and die with implanted electronic devices that intervene on the rhythm of the heart. oudshoorn invents the evocative term “wired heart cyborgs” as an umbrella term to describe people with two kinds of implanted devices: pacemakers and defibrillators. pacemakers, which send small electrical impulses to the heart to keep it beating regularly and not too slowly, are probably familiar to most readers. despite being quite widespread, defibrillators are likely less familiar. internal defibrillators also work by sending electrical impulses to the heart, but they are much more powerful impulses, to shock the heart to reset it out of a dangerous rhythm. internal defibrillators work in the same way as defibrillator paddles that are so iconic of book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) anne pollock, 2021 2 medical emergencies both real and dramatized, but the devices work automatically and internally—a potentially life-saving but often traumatic experience. as oudshoorn points out, these electro-cardiological implants are now a routine part of “ordinary medicine” in rich countries. resilient cyborgs is far and away the most comprehensive account of pacemakers and internal defibrillators to date, and because these technologies are strikingly understudied, the book will likely remain definitive for years to come. the book is grounded in careful qualitative social science research in the netherlands, while also analyzing the global contexts in which these devices travel. for example, in addition to providing a rich account of the experiences of particular dutch patients and clinics that she has interviewed and observed, oudshoorn also brings in the voices of wired heart cyborgs from beyond the netherlands by drawing on comments from web forums that connect interlocutors from varying locales. more surprisingly, she also recounts the postmortem refurbishment for reuse in lowand middle-income countries. indeed, a distinctive element of the book is that it attends to the entire lifecycle of the technology. oudshoorn is a skilled ethnographer, and she attends to interview data and observations of clinical practice in a particularly nuanced way, reflecting expertise, empathy, and insight. in exemplary sts style, oudshoorn also attends very insightfully to the material configuration of the devices in a geography of patients’ bodies, technicians’ offices, and electronically infused worlds. oudshoorn illuminates the ways in which wired heart cyborgs navigate complicated “technogeographies” as they endeavor to communicate and manage their experiences and needs to their clinicians and others in their social and material worlds. oudshoorn emphasizes that these cyborgs are not passive, but practice “techniques of resilience” (43). they engage in active listening, learning to hear low-battery beeps, for example, and work to achieve some measure of control over the clinical encounters and their lives beyond. as cyborgs, wired heart cyborgs have hybrid bodies that are notably susceptible to intertwinement with the electrical world beyond their skin. oudshoorn’s title and her optimistic outlook foregrounds resilience, and yet the book also illuminates a great deal about the flip side: vulnerability. sometimes the particular risks that wired heart cyborgs face must be managed in public settings, as patients plead for consideration from airport personnel, since most screening devices pose risks of dangerous interference with pacemakers and defibrillators. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) anne pollock, 2021 3 risk must also be managed in private settings, for example with sexual partners, as patients navigate body image concerns as well as an intimate choreography constrained by the risks of elevated heart rate leading to painful shocks that can sometimes even be felt by the partner. wired heart cyborgs are simultaneously isolated and intertwined, with devices that protect and extend their lives while also rendering them distinctly exposed. even as the book is a compelling whole, it can also be appreciated in parts, in a way that is notably useful for the classroom. for example, scholars and teachers of medical sociology and related fields might be particularly interested in part ii, “technogeographies of resilience,” and within that especially the clear-eyed, non-mystifying attention to the device and the clinic in chapter 3, “creating material resilient cyborgs: sensing and tuning agencies of pacemakers and defibrillators.” this is where we read about the “end of life” referring to the end of battery life (69) and how people learn to listen to the device’s signals and sounds (72). those in gender studies and related fields might be particularly interested in part i, especially chapter 1, “rematerializing the cyborg: understanding the agency of people living with technologies inside their bodies,” and in part iii, “resilience and difference,” especially chapter 6: “‘how did you get that scar?’: gender and the appropriation of visibly marked bodies.” scholars and teachers in bioethics might turn directly to part iv, “how hybrid bodies fall apart,” especially “’should we turn off the pacemaker?’: trajectories of dying and geographies of rights and responsibilities,” which combines analysis of various countries’ consensus statements on these devices and some very human stories of end of life. resilient cyborgs is an exquisitely observed account of an important topic, and deserves a wide readership. in feminist science and technology studies and related fields, we have much to learn from the wired heart cyborgs living among us. author bio anne pollock is a professor of global health and social medicine at king’s college london and serves as a member of the lead editorial team of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience.     original research the gender of the interface: coding masculinity, crafting femininity among berlin’s creative class     jordan kraemer new york university, tandon school of engineering, and adl center for technology and society jordan.kraemer@nyu.edu     abstract for many cosmopolitan urban germans and europeans in berlin in the late 2000s, social media platforms were a site where gender and class were enacted through articulations of emergent nerd masculinity or hip, ironic femininity. but these platforms, such as facebook or pinterest, encoded normative assumptions about masculinity and femininity in their visual and interaction design, excluding women and acceptable femininity as subjects of technological expertise. sites that presented themselves as neutral spaces for connection and interaction, like twitter or facebook, instantiated gendered understandings of technology that rendered public space implicitly masculine, white, and middle class. visually based sites like pinterest and etsy, in contrast, were marked as domains of feminine domesticity, representing not only a shift to visual communication but to visual modes of interaction that structured gender online. although many young people resisted hegemonic notions of gender, their social media practices stabilized their class status as aspiring urban cosmopolitans. in this article, i consider how gender and class stabilized temporarily through material-semiotic engagements with technology interfaces.     keywords gender, social media, cosmopolitanism, technology, europe     introduction anja plugged in her ipod as we drove to meet her client in leipzig, germany, while checking the route on her gps unit. she had let me tag along as part of my research on social media among an emerging urban middle class in late 2000s berlin. while stopping for gas, she paused the music to take a call on her smartphone, explaining after that “it was my best friend calling.” after chatting, she hung up and turned the music back on. anja was highly tech savvy, navigating between her smartphone, music player, and gps and between social media, email, and text messages. yet, when i first mentioned my research on social and mobile media—then nascent communication platforms among anja and her friends—she seemed reticent to participate. i observed this pattern repeatedly—few women in contrast to men in my fieldwork identified themselves as appropriate subjects of research on emerging media. one woman, for example, shyly volunteered, but then said, in effect, “oh, but i’m not sure i’d be a good person to talk to.” among men in the same social circles (what many called “friend circles,” freundeskreise), however, media technologies comprised part of a broader ecology of technology practices, such as electronic music production, through which many articulated and enacted masculinity, especially an emerging “nerd” masculinity. although few discussed gender explicitly, tech competences operated as a key site through which urban, middle-class forms of masculinity and femininity were produced and negotiated.   gendered practices, however, took place on media platforms whose interface design already encoded assumptions about gender. my prior work investigates the production of multiscalar social spaces on and through social and mobile media (kraemer 2014, 2018, forthcoming), which entail implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumptions about gender. many social media apps and platforms replicated binary, heteronormative understandings of gender, through branding, marketing, and interface design. social network sites such as facebook, twitter, and reddit, for example, involve cool, dark color schemes—typically black text on white backgrounds with blue accents—and bold or angular fonts and logos. most interactions (clicking, scrolling, posting) take place through text, although users can upload and share visual media. in the early 2010s, a number of visual apps and sites launched, such as pinterest, a virtual pinboard, and instagram, a mobile photo-sharing app. these platforms featured warm, bright color schemes with central feeds comprised of image blocks; text was secondary to key interactions like clicking, scrolling, or posting. these visual sites also focused on style and domestic consumption—fashion, makeup, home decor, and other conventional domains of feminine activity. social media were becoming more visual rather than text-based, as many scholars noted (e.g., marwick 2015; miller and sinanan 2017; see also nakamura 2007), but i argue this shift represents not only a new mode of communication, but a new mode of interaction, structured by binary gender. engaging with platforms and people through visual rather than textual elements mapped, in many cases, to feminine consumption practices, while text-based social media remained the implicit domains of masculine tech competence.   of course, these platforms operated in a broader media ecosystem of apps and sites that do not always align with binary gender—youtube, for example, encompasses content from video blogs to music videos to makeup tutorials (e.g., lange 2019). other sites like tumblr became popular among queer, trans, and nonbinary communities, with the support of designers and safety features in tumblr’s case (cavalcante 2018; byron et al. 2019). but on and through the platforms i analyze, young people in my research enacted and negotiated gendered selfhood in ways that intersected with gendered design features. many men in these friend circles, for example, discussed electronic music, music production, and technology on their social media accounts and customized their profiles with imagery of cartoon robots and other nerdy signifiers. women in the same friend circles pursued forms of creativity linked to visual media and crafting—photography, multimedia art, fashion, and crafts like jewelry making, sewing, or knitting. although some circles formed around electronic music, it was typically women in these groups who participated in events such as indie craft fairs, art exhibitions, or a monthly “knitting club” (strickenclub).   in this article, i contrast everyday gendered practices, onscreen and off, with the interaction design of social media apps and platforms among this emerging european middle class. social media offered connected, cosmopolitan sites to articulate and enact gendered selfhood, which i approach as contingent, felt experiences of identity and embodiment. gender identity was neither static, essential, nor binary, but stabilized temporarily through material and semiotic engagements with technology, coalescing from rather than preceding social relations (landström 2007; see also butler [1990] 2006). since its inception as a domain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, technology has excluded and produced women as a category, as feminist theorists have repeatedly demonstrated (oldenziel 1999; wajcman 2004, 2009; hicks 2017). but technology is not a stable category, either, and takes shape in relation to shifting enactments of gender. this article builds on feminist and queer theorizing on the mutual production of gender and technology, to approach these domains as inseparably embodied and representational. drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork in berlin between 2007 and 2015, i turn to ways masculinity and femininity were encoded on and through social media and technical competence, from an emerging nerd masculinity to ironic articulations of urban, middle-class femininity. this field research included long-term participant observation (co-present and online) during ten months from 2009 to 2010, a follow-up visit in 2015, semi-structured interviewing with nineteen participants and countless informal conversations, and visual content analysis of social media interfaces.   despite disavowals of technical prowess, many women organized craft events and fairs through facebook, managed websites for their art, shared digital photography, and participated avidly in online communities. they often viewed typically feminine practices skeptically, recognizing them as stereotypical, and pursued professional lives and egalitarian romantic partnerships. gendered practices unfolded on technology platforms that, in cynthia cockburn’s words, constituted “men as capable and women as inadequate” (1981, 51). sites that appeared to be neutral spaces for connection, like twitter or facebook, precluded women (or normative femininity) as technically competent agents, rendering public space implicitly white and masculine. in contrast, sites like pinterest and the popular online marketplace etsy were marked as domains of feminine domesticity. as feminist scholarship has repeatedly shown, technology design reflects and instantiates understandings of gender, race, and class, excluding acceptable femininity—in this case, of white, predominantly straight women—as appropriate subjects of technological expertise. through alternative articulations of nerd masculinity or ironic femininity, many young people in berlin resisted hegemonic constructions of gender while consolidating their class status as hip, urban professionals. these ways of negotiating gender and class raise more broadly the question of what gender is online and how gender is enacted not only through signifying practices but through material interactions with digital interfaces.   gender of/as technology feminist scholars of technology have long chronicled the mutual production of gender and technology as categories (e.g., cockburn 1981; oldenziel 1999; wajcman 2004, 2009; bray 2007; hicks 2017). in particular, feminist technoscience has grappled with how “woman” as a category, like “nature,” represents a resource for the workings of capital (haraway 1991; see also butler [1990] 2006). as donna haraway contends, male-dominated capitalism is grounded in “the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture” (1991, 150). in cockburn’s account of the industrialization of printmaking, the “gendered character of technology” excluded women by privileging male competence and bodily effectivity, acquired through social practice: “thus the appropriation of bodily effectivity on the one hand and the design of machinery and processes on the other have often converged in such a way as to constitute men as capable and women as inadequate” (1981, 51). similarly, in ruth oldenziel’s history of technology as a masculine domain, the new profession of engineering in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became a redoubt of white, educated men, in which technological competence conferred both gender and class status: “the public association between technology and manliness grew when male middle-class attention increasingly focussed its gaze on the muscular bodies of working-class men and valorized middle-class athletes, but disempowered the bodies of native americans, african americans, and women” (1999, 10). the gendered meaning of technology shifted in the mid-twentieth century with the advent of digital computing, as typing transitioned from deskilled clerical labor to new source of economic value—and esteemed masculinity, as historian mar hicks details: “in the 1940s, computer operation and programming was viewed as women’s work—but by the 1960s, as computing gained prominence and influence, men displaced the thousands of women who had been pioneers in a feminized field of endeavor, and the field acquired a distinctly masculine image” (2017, 1; see also light 1999; agre 2002, 179).   men’s association with technology was naturalized as inherent interest when computing transitioned to a prominent and male-dominated field. by the 1980s, the first personal computers were marketed to men and boys: one apple ii ad by chiat/day from 1985, for example, showed a young boy in a classroom dreaming of becoming an astronaut. leaning over and smirking, he hits a key on a girl classmate’s keyboard when she looks away, undermining her work.1 in brian pfaffenberger’s analysis, personal computers became symbols of male power and competence, making available “the prowess and prestige” of high-tech artifacts to men who were not necessarily technologically proficient: “the home computer, in this sense, may very well have served to decentralize, but what it did in the end was to make available to many more men the opportunity to achieve technically-affirmed prestige in a world conceptualized as exclusively male” (1988, 44). similarly, the digitally networked virtual communities of the 1980s and 1990s, such as the well, were designed to be democratizing and non-hierarchical by a new postwar generation of countercultural programmers (agre 2002; turner 2005). but these platforms reflected the values and assumptions of predominantly white, middle-class men (turner 2005), often associated with a decidedly unhip figure of white masculinity, the nerd (bucholtz 1999, 2001).   computing domains such as open-source software and social media architecture continue to operate as realms of masculine domination. dawn nafus, for example, recounts how women were disproportionately underrepresented among open-source software developers (free/libre open source software or f/loss) in comparison to proprietary software developers (1.5% versus 28%; nafus 2012). in nafus’s account, claims to “openness,” which were grounded in notions of democracy, freedom, and neutrality, masked gender bias and excluded women programmers: “women’s exclusion is part of the broader problem of socio-technical construction, where both the material aspects of computing and the social identities that people create for themselves through engaging with programming are cultures made by and for men” (2012, 671). programming cultures, she contends, sustain “certain forms of masculinity which make women concerned about being ‘unfeminine’ in their connection to technology or ‘too feminine’ by attracting unwanted male attention” (2012, 671).   similarly, the participatory framework of social media embraces rhetorics of horizontal, peer-to-peer connection, equality, and democratic participation (rheingold 2003; birdsall 2007; see also wesch 2007). yet social network sites like facebook encode binary gender through their database architecture, as rena bivens (2015; see also bivens and haimson 2016) details. since 2008, facebook required new users to select from two gender options (“male” or “female”). when trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming advocates pushed facebook to expand available gender identity options, the company restructured the visible “surface” of the site by adding fifty-six identities to user profiles in 2014 (bivens 2015, 881). those who chose one of the fifty-six options, however, were collapsed in the site’s database to a singular category of “other.” in bivens’s view, the company compromised fluid, diverse gender possibilities to satisfy marketers requesting a normative, binary gender system, for advertising purposes: “this technique maintains public-facing progressive politics while bolstering hegemonic regimes of gender control” (2015, 886). facebook’s decisions recall earlier internet communities and virtual worlds, such as lambda moo, where the available identity options structured experiences of race and gender (nakamura 1995).   in contrast, women’s work with technology often takes the form of affective or emotional labor, such as among women content producers (duffy 2014, 2015, 2017; jarrett 2016; kanai 2019). brooke erin duffy describes women social media entrepreneurs for whom blogging is a “labor of love” that allows them to get “paid to do what you love,” in creative industries such as fashion, media, entertainment, and design (2017, 6). women bloggers and entrepreneurs embrace logics of flexibility, autonomy, and self-realization in their aspirations to achieve success and “insta-fame” (see marwick 2013, 2015). duffy terms such efforts aspirational labor, in which “self-expression is articulated through a patterned set of highly individualized, value generating productive activities” (2017, 7). women bloggers negotiated tensions between authenticity and self-promotion, creativity versus commercial success. here, leisure activities rather than wage labor generate value for social media companies. aspirational labor constitutes a feminine means of productivity, in which women visually present their bodies as site of consumption, for example, by modeling purchases and goods. these modes of gendered self-branding are frequently built into social media platforms, from profile photos to twitter bios to managing “likes” and micro-celebrity. akane kanai (2019) similarly details how femininity is produced through intimate digital publics (after berlant 2008), through relatability, in which shared attachments produce gendered belonging through the participatory visual culture of women’s blogs. but relatability disciplines feminine subjectivities, as women must manage the contradictions of neoliberal life through the affective labor of self-improvement (kanai 2019).   consumers and shoppers are often popularly imagined as women, reproducing dualisms of producer/consumer, active/passive, masculine/feminine. in kylie jarrett’s 2016 analysis, the unpaid labor of social media parallels the domestic work of social reproduction. jarrett proposes the figure of the “digital housewife” to highlight the position of social media users as feminized workers whose cognitive and affective work creates economic value through user-created content and user data. neoliberal “choice” feminism also informs algorithm design, as jonathan cohn (2019) contends, evidenced by the work of mit computer scientist pattie maes. in the 1990s, maes automated tasks like scheduling and email filtering to reduce the labor professional women, especially mothers, must manage, creating algorithmic tools that influenced the design of the internet and contemporary understandings of gender. although designers and engineers often presume users are tech-proficient middle-class men like themselves, cohn shows how algorithms are equally linked to new techniques of gendered self-making and management through consumer choice. “users” increasingly stand in for feminized consumers (see rommes, van oost, and oudshoorn 1999; oudshoorn and pinch 2003; oudshoorn, rommes, and stienstra 2004), particularly as subjects of “user-friendly design,” which historically embraced graphical interfaces over textual ones.   in these accounts, gender and technology are mutually configured through material-semiotic practices that rework boundaries between bodies and information, masculine and feminine, actual and virtual. as trans technology theorists sandy stone and susan stryker have long argued, digital or virtual spaces are not sites of disembodied meaning and free-floating semiosis, but rather, refigure boundaries of male and female, matter and information, self and other (stone 1991; stryker 2000). in stone’s words, “the boundaries between the subject, if not the body, and the ‘rest of the world’ are undergoing a radical refiguration, brought about in part through the mediation of technology” (1991, 101). in this view, communication technologies enable new forms of virtuality not by erasing embodiment but through the interactional possibilities of networked spaces.2 katherine hayles (1999) similarly argues that, although digital technologies purport to overcome bodily differences of gender and race, effacing the body legitimates a view of the self as pure information, divorced from the material world (but cf. nelson 2002; nakamura 2007). this separation renders online spaces “free” from marked difference and therefore neutral platforms for social life (as i argue in kraemer, 2021; see also gillespie 2010; cramer 2016).   attending to materially situated, gendered practices online shows how bodily erasures comprise new forms of gendered and racial inequality. as lisa nakamura argues, race and gender are constituted of material practices, including “the everyday material activity of information seeking and communicating,” that is, interaction with digital interfaces (2007, 13). she advocates rethinking the subjects of interactivity not as users (coded feminine) but as designers who direct interactional possibilities. she asks instead who are the objects of interactivity, emphasizing that the boundaries between objects and subjects are not fixed: “women and people of color are both subjects and objects of interactivity; they participate in digital racial formation via acts of technological appropriation, yet are subjected to it as well” (2007, 16). lauren cramer (2016) further analyzes non-representational processes of racial formation through interface design, in which blackness operates through spatial ordering of a hip-hop video website rather than figural representation of black bodies. despite allegedly neutral website design, adapted from principles of modernist architecture, blackness materializes and becomes shareable through a coherent visual style that renders “blackness in the disembodied space of the internet” (cramer 2016, 16).   feminist technology and design scholarship pushes us to consider how technologies can enable non-hegemonic experiences of gendered selfhood, at the interstices of class, race, sexuality, disability, and other aspects of embodied being (bardzell and bardzell 2016; noble 2016; forlano 2017; rosner 2018; costanza-chock 2020). as urban europeans in berlin negotiated gendered interfaces, they reworked what gender was, a subjectivity that formed through material interactions with gendered interfaces. in this sense, gender coalesced in similar ways offscreen, through bodily style, language, and other embodied, semiotic practices, as they navigated tensions between conventional expressions of gender and ironic or ambivalent stances that connoted class status as urban cosmopolitans. from electronic music production to crafting, gender was assembled through embodied and signifying practices, as urban young people contended with the implicit norms that structured both digital and co-present spaces.   coding masculinity in contrast to anja’s reticence, her friend tobias was effusive about his favorite smartphone apps. one evening, at a weekly kitchen gathering typical among their friends, tobias left his phone out on the kitchen counter. when i glanced at it, he picked up his phone and eagerly demonstrated a transit planner app and a jogging and fitness app, enthusing about the former: “this one covers all of germany!” although tobias described himself as a “late adopter,” he was one of the first of his friends to own an apple iphone (3g, 16gb, he informed me). he and anja described similar digital practices, such as checking email and social media throughout the day, messaging with co-workers, and discovering new music. although tobias had joined facebook recently, he related in detail music blogs and online record shops he frequented and mentioned starting his own music review blog. unlike anja, he volunteered enthusiastically for an interview; we scheduled it that same evening.   by the mid-2000s, the initial period of my fieldwork, the meaning of computing was again shifting, as the burgeoning “knowledge” or information economy was taking off in berlin (bauer and hosek 2019; see castells 1996). among my interlocutors in berlin, those from western germany and europe were more likely to have used computers and the internet growing up than those from former east germany (most had been young teens when the berlin wall fell). as social media became widespread in the midto late 2000s—and networked technologies more economically significant—the figure of the nerd transitioned from the awkward, anti-social caricature of the 1980s and ’90s to a hoodie-wearing college drop-out coding his way to fame and wealth.3 some imagined a new wave of hyper-masculine “tech bros” or “brogrammers” arriving in silicon valley start-ups and elsewhere (raja 2012). one infamous advertisement from klout, for example, a now-defunct “page rank” service that tracked social media reputations, courted job seekers who wanted to “bro down and crush code.” nerd or geek masculinity in these contexts was losing its stigmatized connotations and being reimagined as competent and acceptable (e.g., bishop 2020).   in one friend circle in berlin, which had formed around translocal electronic music scenes (kraemer 2014), it was mainly men who produced and promoted music. one dj and promoter, max, was successful in smaller electronic music scenes such as dubstep and idm (“intelligent dance music;” cf. nye 2013; garcia 2013). max frequently discussed music and music production on twitter, over one-to-one chat, and in co-present spaces.4 on facebook and twitter, he and friends like daniel shared links and music videos, reviewed albums, and posted about music events. they also enacted tastes and interests through their profiles, such as avatars, short bios, and other personal information. daniel, a web designer, described his interests to me as “music, music, music; producing music, listening to music, playing bass, reading, the internet stuff, reading twitter, blogging.” max similarly reported, “music; most of my interests are music based; listening to music, finding, exploring sonic spaces, soundscapes, everything. because, since i listen more to experimental music, it's more about music as listening, as a process… the music and my circle of friends is basically the same thing.” tobias, in a friend circle based on shared origins in former east germany, reiterated these sentiments: “music listening, excessively; i’ve got one hifi in my living room that looks like a garage with boxes, a hifi with a turntable; and another hifi connected to my macbook from the hard disk with itunes in the bedroom.” music tastes were key to these local and translocal social worlds, and, as demonstrated by these carefully detailed sound setups, to articulating technical competence.   figure 1: daniel’s twitter profile, with cartoon robot avatar and teal blue background.   similarly, on twitter, daniel tweeted about sound engineering, synthesizers, and other technical aspects of producing music. in one case, for example, daniel shared a tweet to an article on synthesizer history, a link to a new album on a friend’s label, and an article about disassembling a machine drum (a popular electronic instrument). he then replied to another user asking about the number of songs on a new album. the next day, he and max bantered about a music engineering app, cecilia, while discussing a microphone a friend had given max. max teased daniel for being a nerd and asked if he’d tried the software package: “nerd. schon mal cecilia probiert?” (“nerd. tried cecilia yet?”), linking to the software’s website. max and daniel often referred to themselves fondly as nerds or geeks, as max explained: “i would consider myself a computer nerd, but not a nerd in a way that i know programming languages, but i know how to use computers. like, like i’m actually a more an internet nerd,” and later, described himself as a “social media nerd.” he echoed this language of nerds or geeks in describing electronic music as well, on the way to an event for music he considered “a cross between geeky minimal techno and dubstep.”   one night, at a music event he had promoted, max joined a friend near the stage, swaying and caught up in the sound, while screens around the stage displayed monochromatic animations of slowly turning lattices. half the crowd or so appeared similarly enraptured. later in the evening, a small group of six young men entered wearing sneakers and relaxed jeans, a contrast to the blackand grey-clad crowd. their movements and demeanor set them apart, taking up physical and social space. one man gestured avidly and headed to the bar to order drinks. max often dismissed people who stood out like this as “party tourists” who were not invested in the music (see garcia 2016 on berlin’s “techno-tourists”). in his view, they lacked subcultural and technical competence while enacting conventionally aggressive masculinity.   youth culture theorists such as the pathbreaking scholars of the birmingham school often focused on these visible practices of young men’s “street” style (e.g., hall and jefferson 1993; hebdige 1979; willis 1981). but as angela mcrobbie (1991) argues, street style was a male prerogative, even when styles such as long hair or fitted clothes are at most ambiguously masculine. young women and girls instead engaged in counterhegemonic consumption of media and fashion, centered around the domestic sphere, such as the teen bedroom. although young men were seen as resisting class subjugation by appropriating and recontextualizing dominant aesthetic codes, their practices maintained gendered subordination by positioning women as consumers rather than producers of media and style. music production and competence was framed as a masculine domain, such as rock music, seen as aggressive, resistant, and authentic. mainstream music such as pop, in contrast, represented a space of passive feminine consumption. sarah thornton (1996) develops this theme in her work on 1980s uk club cultures, such as techno “rave” scenes, where fans conceptualized “mainstream” music as feminized and working class. dance music that became popular lost its countercultural credibility (or capital, in her bourdieusian analysis) as a result (thornton 1996, 99–101).5   in late 2000s music scenes in berlin, hip tastes in electronic music fused with, or at least, became imbricated in, technical competences with music production. but these competences reflected a different construction of masculinity than the brashness of punks or other working-class youth subcultures in dick hebdige's or paul willis’s accounts. in construing themselves as nerds and geeks, in contrast to clubbing “tourists,” music fans in my research aligned themselves with a masculinity defined by technical expertise and often rejected heteronormative masculinity. max was interested in feminist thought, for example, which he discussed with his girlfriend, clara, a graduate student. one evening on the u-bahn train, he asked about my views on fashion, sparking a long discussion on gender roles, the male gaze, marked categories, and women’s devaluation in the capitalist west. a few years later, he became an advocate for women in electronic music, a topic that remained contentious. yet max, daniel, and others frequently bantered in gendered ways, such as lewd jokes, especially when few women friends were present. one evening at a group dinner, when no other women were in the room, a friend teased max for a slip of the tongue that sounded sexual (admittedly, my own position as a queer ciswoman likely limited what i observed). like bawdy teasing, geeking out about music and technology made conversational and social spaces masculine, if not typically or hegemonically so. such spaces implicitly excluded women, or at least, articulations of acceptable femininity, just as digital spaces and technologies could exclude women as appropriate subjects. predominantly white, middle-class masculinity, on social media and in berlin, operated as a site of tension, where nerd or geek masculinity recapitulated technology’s association with male competence and expertise. but this alternative masculinity also offered a respite from the conventional masculinity of the “wrong” kind of music consumer (often figured as a foreign “ausländer,” which sometimes meant a white tourist but was often men of color from the global south). interface design intersected with and supported enacting nerd masculinity online and became a site where these tensions were lived out.   crafting femininity while music production and social media were sites for enacting masculinity, women in these friend circles incorporated digital technologies into articulations of an ironic, hip femininity linked to visual media and crafts. annika, a studio artist, rike, a freelance photographer, and bettina, a graduate student, attended music events and frequently spent time with max and their friends pascal, alex, and others, and shared similar tastes in music. but they devoted their time and attention to other interests and practices. annika and rike, for example, curated visual media exhibits at music performances, organized gallery shows, or attended craft fairs and events. where technology provided means for producing middle-class masculine selves through technical competences, hip femininity took shape through an often ironic relationship to visual media, aesthetic style, and domestic consumption.   annika worked out of her studio in kreuzberg, a central district of former west berlin known for its anarchist, artistic, and punk scenes, and the heart of berlin’s turkish german community (e.g., mandel 2008). she created multimedia and fiber arts piece and described her interests as “art, and urban interventions. anything that's actually made, just because right now there's so many things where it's just like, ‘hey, i know how to use photoshop.’ like physically [made], involving either painting the canvas or yarn, yeah. just anything that's actually non-digital, basically.” she planned and promoted gallery shows and connected with artists and gallery owners on social media like blogs: “most of the blogs are either, like, gallery blogs or from artists.” she was also interested in “the slightly nerdier side of everything; scrapbooking, which is pretty interesting because it's mainly suburban.” her interest in scrapbooking came from her focus on paper as a medium for art, but she found that online scrapbooking communities were comprised of married suburban women in the united states: “mainly american, late twenties, like girls my age, but they're married and they have kids and they like decorating and scrapbooking stuff…that's really the only community online that takes that sort of seriously.” rike, a close friend from grammar school, was pursuing photography and trying to build a freelance career. she described her interests as “photography; anything with people, architectural, mainly portraiture, editorial, fashion; flowers, nature photography.” she sometimes shared photos online but was still developing confidence in her skills. bettina was also interested in photography as a hobby and described her other interests as “sewing, knitting, drawing, piano, social games.” as with geek masculinities, annika, rike, and bettina expressed self-awareness about gender stereotypes, as became evident at a monthly knitting event.   figure 2: screenshot of the strickenclub’s facebook profile page. source: author.   a friend had organized a series of gatherings to learn and practice knitting dubbed the “knitting club” (strickenclub). the knitting club recontextualized knitting—associated more with grandmothers and craft circles—by taking place in a bar, like a dj night. i first learned about the event from pascal, an architecture student and dj. i met pascal there at a bar in kreuzberg one evening, not far from annika’s studio, where he was working on a black scarf and nursing a bottle of lager. another woman seemed to be struggling with chunky, uneven wool. at least two journalists were there as well, taking photographs and interviewing attendees, one from a new diy fashion magazine. i had recently been (re)learning to knit myself, mainly from youtube videos, and had my own knitting with me. bettina arrived later in the evening with her boyfriend and brought out a knitting project while he went to order drinks.   later in the evening, bettina needed her hands briefly, and asked her boyfriend to continue her knitting. he balked, and when she tried to show him how, half-jokingly, he demurred. as a graduate student and feminist, she was attentive to gender dynamics, including in fashion. she told me she had recently began dressing more femininely, but did so ambivalently, pairing items she perceived as feminine like skirts with chunky, utilitarian boots or high heels with jeans. she may have pressured her boyfriend to try knitting because of its gendered associations. other men, like pascal, were pleased to learn but found the image of men knitting to be a source of (good-natured) humor. the following month, for example, pascal’s friend alex joined in with some rainbow yarn. sitting together on a loveseat near a front window of the bar provoked friendly laughter at the sight of both men knitting. “take a photo!” one person requested. the knitting club was a site where gender was enacted through bodily stylization, as judith butler ([1990] 2006) argues, but also where tensions and ambivalence about shifting gender norms were articulated through gestures of refusal, awkward moments, or humor.   interest in crafting and handmade goods overlapped in berlin with long-time practices of vintage and second-hand shopping, particularly at berlin’s neighborhood flea markets (flohmärkte). flea markets were a popular sunday afternoon activity for many, from the renowned flohmarkt am mauerpark on the site of former wall (and death strip) to the smaller boxhagener flohmarkt, near where tobias and anja lived. vendors sold second-hand and handmade goods such as vintage housewares and east german memorabilia (often emblems of what daphne berdahl [1999] called ostalgie, nostalgia for an east german past that never was). most people i knew, however, furnished their apartments at ikea and few expressed such sentiments. many were interested in fashion and crafts, though, often as domestic domains associated with women and femininity.   on a return visit to berlin in 2015, one of my former roommates invited me to a craft fair called the mädchen flohmarkt, literally the “girl’s flea market.” winter markets were popular in berlin and not necessarily gendered—outdoor christmas markets (weihnachtsmärkte) are a staple of the holiday season across germany. i also attended an indoor food hall that same visit that was popular with young people and families. but the mädchen flohmarkt explicitly linked femininity to crafts and second-hand (zweite hand) shopping, with vendors selling home goods and jewelry as well as vintage clothes and housewares. the market was promoted through a facebook page that described it as “a paradise for mädchen [girls or young women],” with “bargains, designer pieces, vintage treasures, favorite fashion, and music.” a note to vendors addressed “verkäuferinnen,” the plural feminine for seller or vendor.   figure 3. mädchen flohmarkt banner ad, berlin 2015. source: https://mitvergnuegen.com/2015/sonntag-11-01-maedchenflohmarkt-alte-muenze/.   it’s possible an event marked for women suggests that the typical vendor or patron was envisioned as a man, but vendors at the large weekly flea markets included men and women of varying ages and backgrounds. the mädchen flohmarkt, in contrast, was framed as a space for hip, young, middle-class women interested in crafts and items with a chic urban sensibility, such as geometric brass-and-glass planters or minimalist jewelry. participating as creators or shoppers offered a way to take part in long-time berlin activities like thrifting as urban, middle-class women.   this middle-class cosmopolitanism was inseparable from articulations of gender, enacted here through crafts, fashion, and visual media. gender structured social activities among the friend circle from rural eastern germany as well, such as shopping. my roommate katrine and her friends claudia and anja were part of the friend circle linked by shared origins in a nearby rural region. their circle met for weekly kitchen gatherings, attended music events and shows, prepared large communal meals during the spring spargel (white asparagus) season (kraemer 2018), and followed each other on facebook (kraemer 2014, forthcoming). but anja, katrine, claudia and other women referred to themselves as either the mädchen or mädels, that is, young women or girls. they organized smaller gatherings and outings such as bar nights, relaxed weekend get-togethers, birthday dinners, and shopping outings.   one spring afternoon, anja invited me to join her and claudia to shop for a group present for katrine’s birthday. on the way to kadewe, former west berlin’s renowned department store on the ku’damm (kurfürstendamm), anja and claudia asked if i knew other “mädchen” friends to contribute to the gift. when my first suggestions weren’t successful, i mentioned some close men friends instead. “no, the gift is supposed to come from just the mädchen,” claudia gently chastised. in contrast, i rarely if ever heard the equivalent term, “junge” (boys or young men), to describe jörg, milo, and other men in their friend circle. a more common term was “typ,” comparable to “guy” or “mate,” but not to index the young men as a group. at the department store, anja and claudia made a beeline for a display of sunglasses. after sifting through many pairs and debating, they agreed to try the following week at a different store. claudia then suggested we seek out the knitting and yarn section of the store, in a building across the street. a capacious basement space held fabric, yarn, sewing notions, paper goods, flower crafts, candle-making supplies, and home decor. claudia wanted to learn to knit, and a saleswoman approached us offering to help. as with annika, rike, and bettina, knitting was associated with domestic crafts and practices, reimagined as hip urban femininity. as at the knitting club, femininity was enacted through the bodily practice of shopping together or browsing feminine-coded crafts and home decor. such material practices were a means to articulate and reiterate a sometimes uncertain femininity, one that could operate as a site of ambivalence but also aspiration for middle-class urban young people. similarly, digital interfaces, as i discuss next, were material sites where people negotiated received understandings of gender realized through elements of interface design.   the gender of the interface gendered selfhood took shape through everyday material practices from electronic music production to crafting. online, gendered subjectivity similarly formed through interactions with platforms and interfaces that were already gendered. by interfaces and interaction design, i mean visual and material surfaces and tools through which people, figured as “users,” engaged with a site or app’s possibilities for interaction, such as menus, buttons, and newsfeeds or streams.6 here i draw on literature on the embodied physicality of digital tools, conceiving their capacities as differently material—not less—than analog ones (hayles 2004; rosner et al. 2012; dourish and mazmanian 2013; pink, ardévol, and lanzeni 2016). i focus on how design features—flexible and emerging through practice (see costa 2018)—constituted gender in culturally locatable ways. many people in my research viewed social media sites like twitter and facebook as neutral platforms for social connection, even as they were coded masculine or feminine by their design features (and by topical focus, such as pinterest and etsy). in cramer’s (2016) analysis, for example, the white backgrounds and minimalist design of social media sites recapitulates the aesthetic of modernist architecture. adherents of this postwar design philosophy endeavored to order space in an “objective” manner, to solve social problems through transparency and rationality and without ornament (cramer 2016). but this minimalist style encodes implicitly white, masculine norms of social space and interaction.   according to marketing literature on brand gender, design features can imbue brands with stereotypically gendered personalities (e.g., lieven 2018; lieven et al. 2014, 2015; grohmann 2009), to give brands convincingly human personas: “i was not able to match persons with brands in a meaningful way until i added gender to the personality model, so that brands and female/male phone operators were rated as being very feminine, rather neutral, or very masculine” (lieven 2018, 8). theo lieven argues that brands with recognizably masculine or feminine personas are the most successful in terms of brand equity, grounding these design elements in “physical aspects” of masculinity and femininity derived from evolutionary psychology: “this literature argues that individuals’ discernments of femininity and masculinity based on physical features are entrenched in psychological considerations for the selection of mates” (2018, 88).   in this view, design elements such as fonts, logos, and colors shape perceptions of gender: bold, angular fonts, strong logos, and cool or dark colors like blue connote masculinity; airy, rounded fonts and logos, and warm or bright colors like pink and red connote femininity. these descriptions reflect culturally and historically contingent associations with gender, rather than universal, evolutionarily grounded truths. but they comported with the interface design of social media platforms in my research, intentionally or otherwise.   design elements on these sites reiterated the gendered style lieven and others describe. ostensibly gender-neutral sites like twitter and facebook, for example, feature streamlined logos, bold sans serif fonts, and white space with black text and blue accents. the blue twitter bird logo, for example, became increasingly simplified and more cartoon-like in successive iterations; today’s version is a streamlined blue silhouette from 2012 (rousseau 2016; “twitter history,” n.d.). sites devoted to domestic consumption like pinterest and etsy, in contrast, displayed rounded, curving fonts and logos with cursive scripts and warm red, pink, or orange accents. the instagram logo and app icon, for example, first depicted a vintage-looking camera, then became more simplified, and most recently, a highly stylized camera, white lines on a purple, magenta, and yellow gradient.7 the written logo remains in a cursive, flowing font.   figure 4. instagram icons, 2011 (left), 2020 glyph icon (inverse of the app version; 2016 to present). sources: 1000 logos, https://1000logos.net/instagram-logo/; facebook brand, https://en.facebookbrand.com/instagram/.   the facebook logo has shifted less dramatically—long a white “f” on a blue square (rousseau 2016). the original facebook “friends” icon, however, originally showed a silhouette of a person with a short haircut, presumably a man, positioned in front of a person with longer hair, suggesting a woman. in 2015 facebook designer caitlin winner objected to the logo and redesigned it; she positioned the woman’s silhouette to the left and slightly in front of the man’s, but resized them to be equal. both are still recognizably gendered (sanders 2015).   figure 5. facebook “friends” icon, original on left, redesigned by caitlin winner on right, 2015. source: winner 2015.   facebook and twitter’s ostensibly gender-neutral style recalls nafus’s account of free/libre, open-source software (f/loss). among open-source programmers, the neutrality of code masked implicit masculinity and masculine domination (nafus 2012). although programmers associated f/loss with liberal western values of freedom, democracy, individualism, autonomy, and so forth, these norms represent historically masculine prerogatives and the severing of collective social obligations. design features that appear gender-neutral were in this account not ungendered but rather unmarked, a presumptively masculine default. similarly, as bivens (2015) argues, facebook’s code, and the structure of its user database, reinscribes binary gender as necessary to legible—and marketable—selfhood. such gendered architecture reflects, perhaps unsurprisingly, the ways that social media purport to represent and extend selfhood as discrete and indivisible in networked spaces (cf. strathern 1988).   design elements coded seemingly neutral social media platforms masculine, while coding sites for domestic consumption explicitly feminine. alongside visual design, these platforms differed in how users interacted with key features such as feeds, menus, and commenting. sites like facebook and twitter relied primarily on text, while pinterest and instagram were organized around blocks of images or videos, emphasizing visuality. text-based interfaces recall the look and feel of command-line interfaces, a style evident on minimalist sites like craigslist and reddit.8 command-line interfaces, in some accounts, require more technical knowledge to navigate because of their steeper learning curve, while graphical interfaces are more accessible and “user friendly” (e.g., mscom 2007). as internet scholar alice marwick has remarked on the shift to visuality in social media, “the internet is increasingly a visual medium, and more and more individuals are using images rather than written self-descriptions to express themselves” (2015, 138). daniel miller and jolynna sinanan similarly argue that communication has become more visually based, including on facebook, as evinced by the highly visual culture of trinidad (miller and sinanan 2017). from this view, facebook isn’t simply a site where people share digital images, but represents a new means of communicating visually.   my contention here is that visuality encompasses not just a shift in communication, but a new mode of interacting with interfaces that produces gender through material practice. on facebook and twitter, people circulated digital images and memes, but on pinterest and instagram, interaction (with the platform and with other people) took place through images, such “pinning” thumbnails to a saved “board.” pinterest’s main feed is not a stream of text-based posts interspersed with images, but a wall of offset images with rounded corners that unifies disparate content (compare to cramer 2016 on how blackness cohered online through visual repetition). most images include captions, but users scroll through, click on, or save the images and cannot comment. instagram similarly comprises a stream of user-created photos and videos. although the app allows commenting, i rarely observed the ongoing, interreferential conversations that unfolded among participants on twitter and facebook. text-based social media were sites of sociality, through turn-taking and other conversational conventions, in ways visual social media, at least at the time, were not.   if textuality invoked masculine utilitarianism and technical competence, visuality produced feminine spaces of domestic consumption, evident in ways my interlocutors engaged with these platforms and how they are described in industry. one market analysis from 2012, for example, called pinterest a “visual search engine” and “social media’s newest sweetheart” (chrzan 2012). the report observed that “unlike most startups, pinterest’s early adopters weren’t tech junkies. instead, it attracted women, who found a home using the site to find and share recipes, decorate their homes, and share the images that moved and inspired them. it started to look really female” (chrzan 2012).9 a techcrunch article from 2012 noted that the site’s userbase wasn’t the “the typical early adopter set from the west and east coasts of the united states,” and that its rise was propelled by “18–34 year old upper income women from the american heartland” (constine 2012)—like the suburban scrapbookers annika had followed previously. this framing marks pinterest as a site for domestic consumption and digital scrapbooking, linking visuality to acceptable middle-class femininity. as kanai contends, the participatory visual culture of blogs she analyzed incited affective attachments to neoliberal feminine subjectivity, through imagined sameness: “young women in influencer, lifestyle and micro-celebrity work are labouring to produce a seamless account of the self to digital audiences in which the intimate and the commercial are deeply entwined” (2019, 9). for young women in my research, sites like pinterest and etsy offered digital counterparts to the knitting club, the mädchen flohmarkt, or browsing the craft section of kadewe. circulating digital photography, perusing etsy, or learning to knit together were all sites for enacting hip, ironic femininity as aspirational middle-class subjects and urban germans.   conclusion among these friend circles in berlin, many people valued facebook and twitter as neutral, unmarked spaces for daily interaction and social connection (kraemer 2014). social media, like berlin, epitomized cosmopolitan connection for an urban middle class taking shape on and through emerging technologies. for some young men, these spaces became sites for demonstrating technological competences linked to middle-class masculinity, as expressed through counterhegemonic “nerd” sensibilities. like the normative masculinity of technological expertise, electronic music and social media alike provided means to enact gendered and classed selfhood. social network sites operated as doubly masculine, where men articulated gendered competences on an already masculine-coded interface. women in these same circles focused on photography and crafting, coordinating groups and events online, such as the knitting club or the mädchen flohmarkt. like the teen bedrooms of mcrobbie’s analysis, visually based interfaces connoted a femininity that coalesced through crafting, decor, and aesthetic style—in short, visual registers of a creative consuming self. through these interfaces and co-present practices like shopping or knitting, rike, annika, bettina, and other women fashioned hip subjectivities specific to berlin, linking ironic or ambivalent femininity to being urban german cosmopolitans. where platforms such as pinterest and etsy were marked as feminine through visual interaction design and domestic consumption, twitter and facebook represented themselves as neutral, unmarked spaces for articulating social connection. such claims to neutrality exclude women and gender-nonconforming people as appropriate subjects, as feminist scholarship repeatedly demonstrates.   despite the gendered interface design of these platforms, many women in my research incorporated emerging technologies into their lives in expert ways, moving between devices and platforms, creating websites, and organizing events. although they rarely described themselves as subjects of technological expertise, they wove these technologies into emerging middle-class subjectivities. even as claims to technology’s neutrality exclude women, and other subjects of normative femininity, from being technologically competent agents, such norms did not prevent women from participating in online spaces. instead, they enacted gendered selfhood both through co-present practices—fashion, bodily stylization and gesture, outings, hobbies—and through social media, from the semiotic (avatars, color schemes) to ways of interacting with platforms and interfaces. even though men and women alike questioned gender conventions, enacting nerd masculinity or ironic femininity, often ambivalently, stabilized ways of being urban, middle class, and cosmopolitan. social media platforms were already constituted as unmarked, masculine, heteronormative spaces—through content but also because their aesthetic design and interactional possibilities mapped to gendered stereotypes and ways of being. gendered selfhood took shape through on-screen and co-present practices, suggesting that gender can be performed through material engagements with interface design. as rena bivens and oliver haimson (2016) note, even platforms that do not require users to specify a gender identity infer gender through online behaviors. if gender is performed through interface design and interaction, then gender rematerializes online, not only as a play of signification but as a way of inhabiting online spaces. the materiality of gendered practices, whether digital or co-present, requires retheorizing gender as a way of being that incorporates aesthetic and interactional elements, like embodied style or gesture. for these mobile, urban germans, ambivalence structured gender across multiple contexts, through platforms and practices shaped by gender that in turn transformed what gender was.   acknowledgments this research was supported by a mellon postdoctoral fellowship at wesleyan university’s center for the humanities and a daad graduate fellowship. i thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful engagement and the catalyst editors.   notes 1 a 1981 ad for the apple ii, however, showed co-founder steve wozniak interviewing a “homemaker” who describes her exploits trading stocks, making graphs, and owning a steel mill (mac history 2013).   2 as alondra nelson contends in her discussion of afrofuturism, stone’s vision of identities in flux was preceded by approaches to such multiplicity in african american thought: “despite the easy proliferation of selves in the digital age, the flux of identity that stone extolled has long been the experience of african diasporic people” (2002, 3).   3 see, for example, xan brooks’s 2003 guardian article, “we are all nerds now.” it’s worth noting that this reimagining coincided with the rise, and perhaps mainstreaming, of internet fandom.   4 i distinguish between actual and virtual or off-screen and on-screen to emphasize how digital communications are always real and physical, even if their materiality differs from other modes of engagement, and that both are equally mediated.   5 white, working-class women were “denigrated for having unhip music tastes…part of a homogeneous herd overwhelmingly interested in the sexual and social rather than musical aspects of clubs” (thornton 1996, 99).   6 such platforms can be materially inhabited, as stone explains: “interaction is the physical concretization of a desire to escape the flatness and merge into the created system. it is the sense in which the ‘spectator’ is more than a participant, but becomes both participant in and creator of the simulation” (1991, 107).   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2380-3312 © lindsay weinberg, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license mental health and the self-tracking student lindsay weinberg honors college, purdue university lweinber@purdue.edu abstract this article examines universities’ adoption of welltrack—a self-tracking mobile phone application modeled on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques—as a solution to reported increases in the prevalence and severity of student mental health conditions. drawing from a feminist materialist perspective that understands discourse and the material word as co-produced, this article argues that the app’s design, marketing, and reception are deeply intertwined with the political rationality of neoliberalism, which centers self-responsibility and the market economy. the article first situates the development of the welltrack app within larger institutional and political shifts towards digital education governance. it then contextualizes the app’s use within the history of college mental health services in the united states, revealing how longstanding sociomedical discourses concerning student wellness individualize structural and systemic factors of ill health. through close reading and immanent critique of the marketing and media reception of the welltrack app’s introduction into universities, the article provides an account of how universities are socializing students to relinquish data to private firms in exchange for health services. students are encouraged to engage in constant self-examination and strive towards a vision of student wellness that precludes an analysis of the structural conditions and intersecting oppressions contributing to poor student mental health. these conditions are social and pervasive, requiring institutional analysis and critique of the university itself. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 2 introduction mental health and student wellness occupy an increasingly central role in discussions about the future of higher education. colleges across the united states are reporting increases in the prevalence and severity of mental health conditions (lipson, lattie, and eisenberg 2018). a recent 2018 study of more than 2,000 graduate students in twenty-six countries found that phd students suffer from anxiety and depression at rates that far exceed the general population (evans et al. 2018). both graduate and undergraduate students from racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual minority groups experience disproportionately higher rates of poor mental health outcomes, due to factors that include cultural stigma, discrimination, and a lack of adequate access to resources and structures of support (see, for example, lipson et al. 2018; lipson et al. 2019; liu et al. 2019). this article focuses on universities’ adoption of welltrack as a solution to this mental health crisis. welltrack is a mobile phone application modeled on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. it is designed to help users assess and track their own mental health, learn about the causes of anxiety and depression, and utilize the application’s selfhelp tools. welltrack is a subsidiary of cyberpsyc software solutions, inc., a private company based in canada and founded in 2010, which aims to capitalize on the expanding market for anxiety and depression treatment in the north american economy. this market is valued at an estimated $46 billion each year. cyberpsyc’s clients have included companies such as hcl america, as well as several public universities in the united states and canada, including georgia state university, the university of miami, ohio university, the university of california, santa cruz, purdue university, ball state university, montana state university, ryerson university, york university, and the university of alberta. the welltrack application is part of the larger movement towards self-tracking for daily life management, given the ways its design facilitates users’ repetitive documentation of their thoughts, moods, and behaviors for the purposes of mental health self-improvement. while there has been a great deal of critical scholarship on the quantified self movement within surveillance studies, media studies, and, more recently, feminist studies, less scholarly attention has been given to the use of self-tracking applications for student wellness. deborah lupton defines the quantified self as “the practice of gathering data about oneself on a regular basis and then recording and analyzing the data to produce statistics and other data (such as images) relating to one’s bodily functions and everyday habits” (2013, 25). the concept was originally introduced by wired editors gary special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 3 wolf and kevin kelly in 2007, who sought to build a network of users seeking selfknowledge through tools for self-tracking (de moya and pallud 2017). these selftracking practices have been popularized through digital technologies such as wearables and mobile phone applications. within the critical scholarship on selftracking through digital technologies, self-tracking has been understood as a neoliberal practice of self-management and self-surveillance (lupton 2015; hammarfelt, rijcke, and rushforth 2016; ajana 2017), a site of concern regarding privacy, third-party data exploitation, and a loss of autonomy (lanzing 2016), and a fantasy of biocontrol over the self (andrieu 2015). vassilis charitsis (2019) points out that, in cases where self-tracking is institutionalized as part of corporate wellness plans, it can have discriminatory effects on those who cannot produce “good” data due to their class position and/or ability. and yet, dataism, the ideology that data provides objective truth, often frames self-tracking in neutral and even emancipatory terms (charitsis 2019). feminist critiques of self-tracking have emphasized how self-tracking apps are bound up with normative assumptions about the body, gender identity, and gender roles (en and pöll 2016; fotopoulou 2016; wernimont 2018), as well as how male designers frequently omit self-tracking parameters relevant to women’s fertility and sexuality (eveleth 2014). furthermore, aristea fotopoulou (2016) has argued that through self-tracking, information from women’s bodies produces additional surplus value under digital capitalism. as boka en and mercedes pöll (2016) explain, self-tracking is deeply imbricated in systems of power and normative social structures, which shape the conditions of possibility for people’s behaviors and choices. most recently, rosalind gill (2019) has argued for the need to put feminist surveillance studies in conversation with media and cultural studies in order to highlight the ways that self-tracking apps encourage gendered forms of self-surveillance within postfeminist culture, which mobilize notions of freedom, agency, and empowerment to encourage women to self-monitor, from makeover and dieting apps, to menstruation and fertility apps. this article responds to the call of this special issue asking scholars to consider how self-tracking technologies are situated within larger dynamics of societal change, and particularly, the neoliberal restructuring of medicine and public health, through feminist and intersectional perspectives. drawing from a feminist materialist perspective that understands discourse and the material world as coproduced (en and pöll 2016), this article argues that the app’s design, marketing, and reception are deeply intertwined with the political rationality of neoliberalism, which centers self-responsibility and the market economy. while special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 4 welltrack does not specifically target women-identified users, it is symptomatic of the ways that self-tracking apps increase opportunities for digital selfsurveillance, “reinforcing the rationality of relentless self scrutiny which is a feature of postfeminist and neoliberal culture” (gill 2019, 149). the welltrack app typifies how notions of choice, agency, and empowerment are used to associate self-surveillance with a form of self-care that neither acknowledges the structural forces contributing to student mental health issues, nor is oriented towards structural change. structures of oppression impact and condition student wellness, and yet these forces are obfuscated by the welltrack app’s design, which emphasizes individual behavior disarticulated from social structures of power. as sasha costanza-chock explains, “intersecting inequalities are manifest at all levels of the design process, including (but not limited to): designers, intended users, values, affordances and disaffordances, scoping and framing, privileged design sites, governance, ownership, and control of designed objects, platforms and systems, and narratives about how design processes work” (2018, 4). this article thus investigates the ways that intersecting inequalities are reproduced through the welltrack app’s affordances and disaffordances, presuppositions about its users, embedded values, and data collection practices, with an emphasis on how the experiences and circumstances of those “marginalized by current power configurations” (d’ignazio and klein 2016) are rendered outside the frame of welltrack’s design considerations. first, i situate the development of the welltrack app within larger institutional and political shifts towards digital education governance internationally. i then contextualize its use within the history of college mental health services in the us, revealing how longstanding socio-medical discourses concerning student wellness work to individualize what are often structural and systemic factors of ill health. next, using immanent critique and a close reading of welltrack as both a media object and mediating process, i identify the underlying assumptions and contradictions within the design, marketing, and media reception of the welltrack app’s introduction into north american universities under neoliberalism, providing an account of the ways that public universities are rationalizing the proliferation of digital technologies across multiple spheres of life. immanent critique, as a critical methodology, requires mapping the forms of belief, understanding, and evaluation that constitute social reality, and identifying discrepancies between underlying assumptions and concrete social practices in order to transform processes of social domination (stahl 2013). thus, the focus of my analysis is to map the ideological assumptions and values embedded in the promotional discourses and design of the welltrack app itself alongside the special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 5 concrete social, political, economic, and historical forces underpinning its development and implementation in the context of higher education. ultimately, i show how the app’s design, and the promotional discourses that shape its reception, encourage students to engage in constant self-examination and to strive towards a vision of student wellness that precludes an analysis of the structural conditions and intersecting oppressions contributing to poor student mental health, such as austerity and racism. these conditions are social and pervasive, requiring an institutional analysis and critique of the university itself. digital education governance and student mental health services the primary set of social and historical circumstances shaping the introduction of recent digital tools, such as welltrack, into north american universities is the governance strategies and political ideologies of neoliberalism, and corresponding economic liberalization policies, including austerity, privatization, and deregulation. when state government support declined, publicly subsidized higher education came to be supplanted by a greater reliance on tuition payments (cottom 2017). christopher newfield (2016) has demonstrated how privatization is driving the increasing costs of public higher education, resulting in tremendous debt for students and their families, the outsourcing of university services to forprofit vendors, administrative growth, and a gravitation towards research that promises financial returns rather than increased public good. instead of policy that reverses these trends, a range of data-driven tools for education management, pedagogy, and policymaking have emerged as vehicles for universities to both increase retention and cheapen undergraduate education in order to counteract a lack of public funding sources and preserve their rankings in the education market. ben williamson (2018) has documented the diffusion of partnerships between university administrators, researchers, education technology companies, policymakers, and international organizations for restructuring higher education practices around the production of digital data. this datafication of higher education, as neil selwyn explains, is part of the alignment of higher education with neoliberal ideology and policy, including “new regimes of accountability and internal controls in the form of monitoring techniques” (2014, 113). neoliberal austerity measures have increased pressures on us universities to focus on monitoring students to improve retention outcomes, given the proliferation of performance funding policies, which tie the release of state special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 6 funding to selected student outcomes rather than enrollment rates (hillman 2016). furthermore, there is rising interest on behalf of oecd countries to measure and target the psychoemotional aspects of education in order to nudge students to develop the personality traits and socio-emotional qualities believed to lead to “grit,” “resiliency,” and “robot-proof” skills in the face of volatile labor markets. these efforts are largely based on an assumption, rooted in behavioral economics, that students will not make rational self-interested decisions for sufficiently meeting academic demands, and instead behave according to “emotions, habits, and other noncognitive processes” (williamson 2019, 7). these trends in higher education policy and governance help explain what makes mental health apps like welltrack attractive to university administrators: it encourages students to engage in the forms of mental health self-management that the app promotes, rather than increasing resource-intensive on-campus counseling services. in his sales email to me, steve jenkins (2019), sales development representative for welltrack, explicitly positions the app as a solution to the problem of the “overutilization” of campus mental health resources. however, the institutional imperative to retain students has consistently shaped ideas of student wellness using individualist and depoliticizing disciplinary frameworks, beginning with the early college health programs of the twentieth century. in contrast to late nineteenth-century conceptions of mental illness at universities, which treated poor mental health as a spiritual or moral deficiency for faculty or clergy to address (kraft 2011), the mental hygiene movement of the twentieth century focused on individual maladjustment to environmental factors. this discursive shift produced the idea that students suffered from “personality development” problems, which resulted in well-qualified applicants leaving school and failing to complete their studies (kraft 2011, 478). princeton university created the first dedicated mental health service for students with “personality development” problems in 1910. from the inception of mental health services for students, retention was a primary concern and framing device for understanding how students could be harmed and healed. the focus on retention in early student mental health services is typified by american psychiatrist frankwood williams’s 1921 address at the first meeting of the american student health association. williams stressed the importance of student retention, the minimization of student “inefficiency,” “mediocrity,” and “unhappiness,” and the need for social control as reasons for establishing mental health programs in colleges (1921, 301). these points of emphasis speak to the ways that socio-medical discourses produced ideas of a healthy student, which special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 7 corresponded to an institutional interest (retention) as well as dominant ideas of workplace discipline (efficiency and self-control) in order to generate docility and compliance with university expectations. additionally, for williams, political radicals on college campuses were “university casualties” whose “mental integrity” was open to question (300). he created a clear separation between the individual, whose emotional impulses needed to be treated and managed, from the social situations in which these impulses were being expressed (300). as sol cohen explains, “the mental hygiene movement was basically conservative in its emphasis on the individual and in its turning away from social or political change…there was no need for major social overhaul or institutional change. the problems facing the nation were those of individual personality” (1983, 141). student activism would go on to surge in the 1920s in response to genderand race-based segregation on college campuses, mandatory daily chapel, and room inspections, particularly at historically black institutions (wolters 1975). this early history of college mental health highlights the university’s complicity in systems of oppression through the mobilization of mental health discourses that aligned with dominant institutional interests. today, university ideas of wellness continue to socialize students to think of mental health as a matter of individual, personal responsibility disconnected from social structural forces, and this is captured in the development and use of welltrack. welltrack and subjectivation the welltrack app encourages students to self-manage moods, thoughts, and behaviors using digital technology in order to cope with feelings of anxiety and depression. the app is thus a technology of subjectivation, where students’ selfunderstanding of their own wellness is produced, in part, through their interaction with the application and the application’s metrics. metrics, as david beer explains, “shape the ways that the social world is understood, approached, and how the people that constitute it are classified and categorised” (2016, 71). thus, these metrics inform how students understand desirable health outcomes in the context of rising rates of student mental health struggles in higher education, or, in other words, how students are subjectivated. subjectivation is “a complex set of processes whereby one’s sense of self as an individual agent is paradoxically shaped according to processes and forces external to the self. such factors include not only race, class, and gender, of course, but also social norms, educational circumstances, labor potential, and health” (langlois and elmer 2019, 237). as i will demonstrate, the welltrack app helps to produce ideas and practices of self-knowledge that are influenced by special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 8 dominant institutional imperatives under neoliberalism, which discount structural factors of ill health, including social and economic inequality, and instead promote individualized practices of self-care. it is through ideas of how to care for oneself that individuals come to internalize norms for what is deemed appropriate conduct (foucault 1986). to be a “good” student is to pursue self-knowledge with the aim of being responsible and self-regulated. rather than understanding users and technologies within a subject-object dichotomy, subjectivation emphasizes how users come to know and understand themselves through relationships with technology that are shaped by social and historical forces. this requires reading welltrack not purely as a media object but as a set of mediating processes, “which are simultaneously technical and biological, social and political” (wernimont 2018, 7). according to sarah kember and joanna zylinska, processes of mediation allow for “understanding and articulating our being in, and becoming with, the technical world, our emergence and ways of interacting with it, as well as the acts and process of temporarily stabilizing the world into media agents, relations, and networks” (2012, xvi). thus, welltrack’s emphasis on generating subjects who engage in voluntary, individual, mental health self-management is best understood as existing within a constellation of structural forces, discourses, and technological and embodied practices, including what patricia clough calls “biopolitical networks of disciplining, surveillance, and control” (2007, 3). welltrack’s emphasis on individual self-management is apparent in university press releases and news reports regarding the adoption of the application. for instance, emily mertz (2018) from global news describes how the “canadianmade wellness platform is helping students at the university of alberta become more aware of and engaged in their own mental health.” students are encouraged to monitor themselves, and this act of self-monitoring is conceptualized as responsible self-governance and mental fitness (quinn 2016). in the case of jodie vanderslot’s (2017) write-up in york university’s community newspaper, excalibur, the welltrack application is presented as a solution to the fact that healthcare costs are on the rise, as is demand for mental health care, and so the app can reach students “in a way that may not otherwise be possible.” the rising costs of healthcare, the increasing demands for mental health resources, and the resource limitations are presented here as barriers that are not “possible” to transcend, and yet technology is presented as an immediate solution. as gaya arasaratnam, acting director of strategic projects for student health and wellness at ryerson university, asserts, “if a student needs help at 10 p.m., they can get it special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 9 instantly with welltrack” (quoted in zalcmanis-lai 2016). students who do not have the resources or time, who feel stigmatized in seeking out help, or whose universities have extended waiting lists can instead turn to a mobile phone application for assistance. these are barriers that vulnerable students, and particularly low-income students, students of color, queer, and gender nonconforming students, disproportionately face due to existing inequalities in health services and outcomes, which are compounded by the financial limits of existing campus wellness resources (dunbar et al. 2017; lipson et al. 2018). it is important to note the ways that “vulnerability” is often invoked within dominant institutional discourses in patronizing, stigmatizing, and oppressive ways, including for the purposes of legitimating “selective systems of welfare, paternalism, and social control” (brunila and rossi 2017, 289). the discourse of vulnerability is frequently used to turn structural marginalization into a matter of personal responsibility and individual failure, “which can then be rectified through micro-management” (mcleod 2012, 19) and/or self-discipline (brunila and rossi 2017, 293). however, unlike neoliberal vulnerability discourses, i invoke vulnerability here as a social and situational position (brunila et al. 2016), precisely to stress the ways that structural forces differentially condition and impact students’ mental health. while a readily available mental health app may in theory help mitigate access barriers, given that it is offered to university students at no additional cost and available on demand, the majority of university students across demographics have access to a smartphone (pew research center 2019), and the app is compatible with screen-readers for visually impaired users, it is important to critically attend to the type of therapeutic care that the application offers. this includes evaluating the relationship between therapeutic care and desired subjectivating practices under neoliberalism, as well as whether the therapeutic techniques on offer account for, and address, structural factors impacting students’ mental health. cbt and neoliberalism while cognitive behavioral therapy (cbt), the therapy on which the app is modeled, has been shown in some studies to be an effective treatment for symptoms of depression and anxiety (see, for example, driessen and hollon 2010), the overall efficacy of cbt is greatly contested (ferraro 2016). furthermore, cbt delivered through low-cost, online measures involving selfadministration and mindfulness techniques have been shown to have “high dropout rates” and “no long-term benefits” (so et al. 2013), and yet is increasingly advocated for in a range of institutional contexts, including schools, workplaces, special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 10 and prisons (ferraro 2016, 20). even prior to cbt’s digital proliferation, its design as a therapeutic technique has been consistently compatible with the political imperatives of neoliberalism. psychiatrist aaron t. beck’s development of cbt in the 1970s coincided with new demands from the us congress and insurance companies for “quantitative proof of therapy’s efficacy and cost-effectiveness” (rosner 2018, 43), in tandem with rising healthcare costs and the increasing power of private health insurance companies in the us. cbt provided an understanding of pathology and standardized therapeutic practices that allowed for the “empirical investigation of the patient’s automatic thoughts, inferences, conclusions, and assumptions” (rosner 2018, 35). this therapeutic framework was offered in response to political and economic pressures for psychotherapy to adopt hyper-rational forms of assessment, and particularly, randomized control trials and actuarial modeling. cbt has also been critiqued within contemporary clinical psychology debates as a highly individualized form of treatment under neoliberalism. for instance, asa jansson (2017) argues that cbt is one of the favored treatments for affective disorders under neoliberalism because “an individualised, neurobiological model of psychological distress sits comfortably within a political framework that emphasises individual responsibility and choice over social support.” similarly, david ferraro argues that cbt is grounded in an individualist, disciplinary approach that seeks to “inculcate correct thinking, behaviour, and self-observation…applicable to anybody and amenable to administration by a computer programme” (2016, 9). this compatibility between the therapeutic protocols of cbt and the political framework of neoliberalism, and particularly their shared emphasis on “soft policing” (ferraro 2016, 19), is evident in the welltrack’s self-described key function, the “moodcheck.” as lupton explains, neoliberal political rationalities “generally rely on apparatuses of ‘soft’ rather than ‘hard’ power. instead of relying on coercive measures that appear to be imposed from above, in managing and regulating their citizens neoliberal political systems invest faith in the voluntary take-up of imperatives by the citizens themselves” (2016b, 50). in the case of welltrack, users receive daily nudges to log their mood and provide a description of what is on their mind. to document their mood, the user drags a circular icon until it lands on the emoji that they feel best captures their mood. there are also options to select corresponding words for the mood, such as “wonderful,” “excited,” “happy,” “stressed,” “tired,” “overwhelmed,” and “i don’t know.” the user then indicates what they are currently doing, whom they are with, and their location. this information is used to produce a data point on a “mood heatmap,” which shows the user how their current mood compares to past logged moods. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 11 this form of mapping, like other self-tracking techniques, allows the user to make sense of their mental health through a represented and externalized visual representation. in this way, as matthias bode and dorthe brogård kristensen explain, “self-trackers can feel like looking into connections and correlations between different aspects of their life. in order for that to work, however, they have to be very careful to track every day in order to be able to make aspects of the self visible and transparent, and consequently turn it into data visualisation and correlations” (2015, 127). thus, the mood mapping function, and the promise of greater data-driven insights into the self, persuades users to engage in selfmanagement and to routinely invest time, attention, and information into the application. additionally, as feminist human-computer interaction scholars have pointed out, self-tracking designers and engineers frequently rely on reductionist categories, such as “mood scores,” because they are easily trackable through data (cerci 2018). a feminist approach to data visualization, in contrast, would “consider how diverse contexts can influence the production of a visualization” (d’ignazio and klein 2016, 3) and ask designers to grapple the ways that power and oppression shape design and data visualization processes (d’ignazio and klein 2016). this is not the case with welltrack, which relies on a discrete, trackable unit—a mood in a given moment in time—that is abstracted from any account of the structural forces contributing to student mental health outcomes. if we consider the welltrack app not in isolation, but as a mediating process produced and applied within a constellation of socio-material forces, we must attend to the ways welltrack is tangled up with broader power relations and neoliberal shifts in the structure of the university, work, and capitalism. for instance, welltrack’s emphasis on digital self-care and self-monitoring mirrors the marketing of data-driven surveillance technologies in emerging corporate wellness and interactive life insurance programs, which produce data that can be sold for refining target advertisements, products, and services, as well as empower companies to enact punitive consequences for users who do not, or cannot, exercise, eat well, or sleep well (gidaris 2019). the implications of this parallel are that welltrack socializes students to participate in the same datadriven rhythms of engagement that not only serve the immediate institutional imperatives of higher education, but also sustain extractive forms of capital accumulation in the digital economy. phoebe v. moore (2018) has argued that forms of self-tracking that occur outside the formal confines of the workplace have been increasingly incorporated into it. while students are being encouraged to self-track for enhanced mental wellness, special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 12 and expected to demonstrate affects of resilience, flexibility, and grit under conditions of rising social and economic precarity (webster and rivers 2019), technologized management systems are demanding that workers self-track their behaviors, attitudes, moods, stress levels, and practices for the purposes of increasing their agility and flexibility (moore 2018). these digitization methods, which quantify affective and emotional labor, have been shown to lead to “high turnover rates, workplace rationalisation and worker stress and anxiety” (moore 2018, 3), which moore links to rising levels of both objective and subjective precarity. in both cases, the affective capacities of students and workers are being channeled towards developing what neoliberal capitalism requires: “the desires and habits necessary for it to perpetuate itself” (read 2010, 114). furthermore, jenkins (2019) writes that, “universities are typically early adopters of technology so there is a chance that the successes that these universities have may trickle over into the corporate world. especially as students become tomorrows [sic] employees.” jenkins links, quite explicitly, enhanced student wellness with enhanced corporate gains. this framing is in keeping with larger international trends in higher education that seek to equip young people with emotional management skills so that they become more “accountable” for their role within the labor market under rising conditions of economic precarity (brunila and rossi 2017). welltrack, structural racism, and austerity welltrack’s emphasis on individual self-care and accountability is just one way in which the app serves to disconnect student mental health from structural factors. in the application’s “cognitive distortions quiz,” the expressed purpose of which is to help students understand the different thinking styles that welltrack deems “unhelpful,” it becomes clear that welltrack has embedded presuppositions about its users, which fail to account for the ways that economic and racial inequalities inform students’ life experiences. for instance, the second quiz question reads as follows: natalie is leaving a store without having purchased anything. as she is about to pass through the anti-theft devices at the door, she thinks, “what if the alarm sounds, even though i haven’t taken anything? what is the security comes and they accuse me of stealing? what if i’m treated like i did something wrong?” what kind of distortion is natalie using? according to the app, natalie is engaging in “catastrophizing—she is imagining an unlikely and extreme scenario, which is then causing her to feel anxious.” the app special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 13 then presents an example of an undistorted thought in the given scenario: “i havent’ [sic] taken anything from the store, so the alarm won’t sound.” what this quiz question reveals is that, either the unmarked student the application has in mind is white, or the designers of the application’s quiz function are not aware of the routine forms of discrimination, intensified conditions of surveillance, and higher rates of police violence that people of color face. simone browne (2015), dorothy e. roberts (2019), and ruha benjamin (2019) have stressed how surveillance is a key technology of racial oppression, from the transatlantic slave trade to the present system of mass incarceration. people of color are frequently racially profiled and criminalized during routine, everyday encounters with surveillance workers, such as security guards, and african americans file the majority of false arrest complaints in us retail settings (gabbidon 2003). the app reinforces the message that what might be a legitimate response to structural conditions of racism and inequality is in fact a cognitive distortion. the app’s emphasis on individual behavior and thought is consistent with neoliberal political rationalities, wherein “social structural factors that influence people’s living conditions and life chances—such as social class, gender, geographic location, race and ethnicity—are discounted in favour of the notion that people are self-made” (lupton 2016b, 50). thus, the welltrack app fails to engage with how intersecting inequalities inform psychosocial thought and behavior. this function is not unique to welltrack, but rather a common feature of design practices that take race-, gender-, and class-neutral approaches, which often upholds systems of oppression (costanza-chock 2020). for instance, madisson whitman has noted in her ethnographic study of predictive analytics for tracking student success that the removal of demographic markers in predictive models in order to focus on individual behaviors that “students can change,” such as engagement with learning management systems and class attendance, “enables the institution to transfer the burden of success away from itself and keep the tacitly held knowledge of inequality out of the university’s visions for predictive modeling” (2020, 2). this example of natalie is thus a symptom of an underlying problem with welltrack’s design, as well as with broader digital education governance practices that understand students as separate from their corporeality as raced, classed, and gendered subjects, and abstracted from the socio-structural contexts that inform their lived reality. in the case of welltrack, the app provides no explicit guidance for students experiencing structural and interpersonal racism on campus. mismatch theory, grounded in racist assumptions about aptitude, argues special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 14 that students of color are harmed by policies such as affirmative action because they are then matched with schools that are too competitive for them. some mental health experts have suggested that black students “who strive to simultaneously excel in the classroom and disprove the mismatch theory might ultimately overwork themselves to the point of illness” in order to demonstrate intellectual worth (green 2016). universities across the us, which are rooted in histories of racial-colonial oppression (wilder 2013), are persistently sites of discrimination, xenophobia, tokenism, and surveillance for students of color (mcgee and stovall 2016). living in a society constituted by white dominance has corporeal and mental effects that go unaccounted for in dominant race-neutral discourses concerning individual students’ “grit” and “resiliency” (mcgee and stovall 2015). as ebony o. mcgee and david stovall explain, “the consequences of racial discrimination cannot be fully mitigated by well-established coping strategies…only the eradication of racism will alleviate race-related stress for african americans and other historically racialized populations” (2015, 501). and yet, all psychic phenomena, within the welltrack app, are matters of individual thoughts and behaviors that can be reduced to a set of cognitive distortions and unhelpful thinking patterns, rather than responses to the pervasiveness of racial and class oppression within higher education. the welltrack app operates within an institutional context shaped by both structural racism and austerity. americans currently owe over $1.64 trillion in student loan debt, which is roughly $587 billion more than the total us credit card debt (student loan hero 2020). additionally, black students borrow federal student loans at higher interest rates, borrow more at public colleges than other students, are more likely to need to take on debt to earn a college degree, and are more likely to have difficulty repaying student loans. these statistics reflect structurally racist employment, wage, and educational access disparities, which leads to families of color having fewer resources to pay exorbitantly high tuition rates at public universities. black students have less generational wealth due to the history of slavery, redlining, and labor inequalities, are more likely to be the first in their family to go to college, make less money after graduation, and are more likely to drop out (helhoski 2018). for many students of color, the impacts of racism on student mental health discussed above are thus compounded by experiences of financial precarity. there is one instance in which debt is explicitly addressed in the app, and this is through the “activity scheduler” tool. this tool allows students to schedule activities that are categorized based on whether they are “pleasurable,” “social,” special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 15 or “achievement” oriented. for achievement activities, the list of provided examples includes doing household repairs, exercising, cleaning, returning library books, writing a thank-you note, and, paying debts. the app thus promotes students having a positive affective response to the act of paying into debt, a framing that hardly challenges the increasing rollback of public funds to support higher education, nor makes room for collective struggle against financialization (see, for example, debt collective 2020). additionally, these listed examples account for limited duties beyond self-care, a common blind spot identified by feminist scholars who highlight how relations of care and mutual dependency are a constitutive feature of social life, and yet are masked within the classical, masculinist tradition of individualism (e.g., kittay 1999). these forms of individualizing self-care that welltrack encourages students to adopt stand in stark contrast to the self-care practices envisioned by black feminist scholar audre lorde (1988) in the epilogue of a burst of light. lorde situates self-care as a strategy of resistance against the intersecting forces of oppression that shape the lives of marginalized people. she writes, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (130). in lorde’s formulation, self-care cultivates a combative form of resilience in the face of power dynamics that seek to stifle one’s ability to survive. it is important to heed sara ahmed’s (2014) warning about treating all forms of self-care as inherently neoliberal, which collapses the distinction between selfcare practices indebted to the tradition of black feminism with the forms of selfcare that perpetuate the dominant socioeconomic paradigm. in the case of welltrack, however, the app promotes an understanding of self-care that is separated from an account of the social and economic forces contributing to mental illness, and which disproportionately harm marginalized students. and yet, rising levels of precarity under neoliberalism are what “generalises effects of insecurity that increase the drive to regulate and predict” (moore 2018, 119). data capture and consent welltrack’s design for self-tracking, like most digitized commercial self-tracking apps, doubles as a form of capitalist dataveillance, or “the watching of people using technologies that generate data, increasingly in digitized formations” (lupton 2016a, 103). while users of this app engage in self-care in that they record information about themselves in order to optimize and improve their mental health, the app also monitors and collects information about users for commercial gain. commercial mental health apps like welltrack thus extend biocapitalism, the extraction of revenue from human bodies (rajan 2012), into the domains of special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 16 thought, mood, behavior, and physical sensations of anxiety and depression, all of which welltrack asks users to document. it is thus useful to apply costanzachock’s design justice framework, which asks that we interrogate “what happens to the profits, attribution, and governance of the designed object or system” (2018, 11) in order to attend to the ways that the app’s design can reproduce existing inequalities. welltrack’s deployment of dataveillance raises issues concerning student privacy and data exploitation that dominant notions of consent, enshrined in privacy policies, do not address. feminist scholars have powerfully critiqued the discourse of consent that has come to dominate universities in the context of sexual violence on campus in ways that can also highlight the problems of privacy policies grounded in notions of consent, and particularly the assumption that “consent is equally and universally accessible” (graybill 2017, 175). as rhiannon graybill’s intersectional feminist critique of consent discourse notes, the assumption of the autonomous liberal subject within consent discourse overlooks the ways that subjects are differentially impacted according to race, gender, disability, and sexuality, which produces unequal conditions and consequences for saying “yes” or “no” to sex (2017, 175). in the case of deciding whether to use welltrack, regardless of the app’s limitations, it provides a health service to students at no additional cost. those who are most vulnerable and unable to access alternative care are in less of a position to forego using the service. furthermore, the term privacy policy is misleading. these contracts between users and companies do not guarantee that the user’s data will be kept private, but instead stipulate what information a given business gathers and how they collect, use, and/or share that information with others. this speaks to what a range of feminist scholars, social theorists, and critical legal scholars have long demonstrated: that traditional understandings of privacy do not account for the ways privacy intersects with relations of power and inequality (gilliom 2001, 121–25). welltrack introduces users to third-party vendors and websites, which may deposit cookies on the user’s computer, and the privacy policies of which are not under their control (cyberpsyc software solutions 2019). thus, welltrack is symptomatic of ways that the larger tech industry “normalizes its practice of unethically sharing private customer health information with unknown third parties through its terms of service/use contracts and privacy policies” (hutchinson and novotny 2018, 106). if student data is being collected, anonymized or not, for the purposes of sale or marketing, this means that the domain of students’ thoughts, moods, and behaviors is directly involved in private companies’ profit-making mechanisms by virtue of using a university mental health service. consent discourse sets the bar too low in special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 17 its fixation on consent as the only measure of the “good,” often precluding conversations about pleasure, in the case of sex (graybill 2017), and justice, in the case of technology. certainly, there are aspects of welltrack that provide useful information for students and tools they might find helpful. however, it is important to situate these tools within the larger sociopolitical context of the application’s use, as well as the app’s relationship to dataveillance. for example, there is a “zen room,” which facilitates meditation sessions, complete with a range of ambient noises to choose from, as well as control over the sound volume and style of meditation. however, as rosalind gill and ngaire donaghue note, there is an irony with which “a set of techniques and practices developed from a tradition that is critical of western achievement orientation, [are] now being enthusiastically embraced in an effort to soothe some of the harsh psychic consequences of the always-on, constantly striving, contemporary academic culture” (2016, 98). furthermore, when students fill out the app’s wellness exam, particular questions will provide students with campus-specific resources, depending on whether they click yes to questions such as, “are you experiencing academic difficulties?,” and “are you worried about your financial situation and/or have concerns about your basic needs (housing/food/transportation)?” however, based on the student’s wellness exam, they are referred to in-app modules, which result in further data collection. thus, information about the resources that correspond to the user’s potential needs, which are provided only notionally, is part of a trade-off in exchange for information that the private firm collects. part of the way the app is marketed to university administrators is through an emphasis on its ability to offer campus-specific resource information to students. the welltrack website explains that universities can integrate their “onand offcampus resources for academic, financial, health and wellness, substance abuse, safety and security, and sexual violence into welltrack. individual students will be recommended a customized suggestion based on which areas they indicate they need more support” (welltrack 2020). this site-specific relevancy is similar to how other private firms have successfully established contracts with universities, despite privacy concerns (sacks 2018). for example, in 2018, saint louis university became the first university in the united states to bring amazon alexa–enabled devices into every student residence hall room and student apartment on campus. this contract included the deployment of thousands of echo dot smart devices, customized to answer over one hundred questions specific to saint louis university. according to the campus’s information officer special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 18 david hakanson, “the new tool can boost efficiency” (quoted in montag 2018), helping students to get responses immediately, rather than having to search the web. thus, not only ideas of relevancy but also increased efficiency help shape digital technology’s integration into campus life. feminist scholars have pointed out the ways that dominant understandings of efficiency typically benefit those already in power (frost 2016, 20). thus, while the integration of more digital technology into universities might seem like a means of democratizing access to care, this assumption “leaves out a lot of ethical complexities” (frost 2016, 18). both the university and the firms that provide smart technology enact discretionary power when it comes to determining what questions about the university are answerable. in the case of a student who reportedly asked, “hey alexa, why is tuition so high?” alexa replied, “hm, i don’t know that one” (brown 2018). while universities give students the option of unplugging and storing the devices, this reduces concerns over privacy and data exploitation to a matter of individual choice. additionally, to focus purely on whether students can remove the device is to overlook how specific technologies actively produce what is readily knowable to students about the university in the context of austerity, while normalizing the increasingly large role of for-profit companies within the infrastructures and operations of public higher education. conclusion based on the analysis above, it is not clear how welltrack helps universities deliver what students report will be most beneficial to their mental health: the reduction of stigma, which requires collective action to redefine toxic cultural norms, and improved faculty and staff education about mental health issues (simon 2017). while university contracts with cyberpsyc software solutions do not preclude these other forms of outreach, as demonstrated above, the notion of wellness the app facilitates is one that individualizes and depoliticizes student wellness such that structural marginalization becomes a matter of personal responsibility. it asks students to constantly self-monitor and self-manage their thoughts and behaviors in a software environment designed for data capture. this focus on individual conduct produces a limited frame of what is possible to transform about higher education, sidestepping students’ capacity to challenge the underlying socioeconomic, political, and institutional structures that impact mental health. if wellness app developers were to incorporate design justice principles, this could lead to the development of non-exploitative practices that limit the power of the app designer, and instead empower community members special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 19 who will be directly impacted by the design process to direct its goals and outcomes (costanza-chock 2020, 7–8). in the context of university wellness apps, this approach might include marginalized students directly guiding the design process, and ensuring that university community members committed to racial and economic equality have control over the distribution of its benefits. however, as benjamin warns us, the rubric of design “could also sanitize and make palatable deep-seated injustices” (2019, 176). welltrack is now featured on several universities’ counseling center resources for coping with stress and anxiety under covid-19, and the pandemic will likely be leveraged to increase the diffusion of data analytics and private-public partnerships for digitally monitoring student behavior (williamson 2020). furthermore, as jeremy knox, ben williamson, and sian bayne note, “given the pervasive discourses of efficiency-savings that accompany the promotion of dataintensive technologies in education, it seems likely that less financially stable educational institutions will be those more inclined to adopt systems that offer cost-effective management of student cohorts” (2020, 42). the pandemic has compounded existing conditions of financial instability for many universities from decades of austerity and privatization. if universities are to be places that support students’ mental health, technological solutionism—the reduction of complex social phenomena to neatly defined problems that can be “efficiently” solved for and optimized using technology (morozov 2013)—needs to be contested. instead, efforts must engage with the necessary intersectional analyses, institutional critiques, and radical social and economic reforms for meaningfully addressing student mental health within a racially and economically unjust society. this includes collectively resisting universities’ active deployment of neoliberal ideology and complicity in neoliberal policies, with disparate consequences for the university’s most marginalized. acknowledgements the author is grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, whose comments were tremendously generative and impactful on this manuscript’s development. she would also like to thank venla oikkonen and luna dolezal for their supportive feedback, and joanne muzak for her precise and careful read of this manuscript during copyediting. references ahmed, sara. 2014. “selfcare as 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https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/ https://excal.on.ca/mental-health-through-welltrack/ https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2018.1534261 https://welltrack.com/for-higher-ed/ https://doi.org/10.1177%2f2053951720932200 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2019.1672895 https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2020/05/06/datafication-automation-he-covid19-crisis/ https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2020/05/06/datafication-automation-he-covid19-crisis/ https://ryersonian.ca/exclusive-university-set-to-introduce-online-mental-health-platform-to-students/ https://ryersonian.ca/exclusive-university-set-to-introduce-online-mental-health-platform-to-students/ special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) lindsay weinberg, 2021 27 author bio lindsay weinberg is a clinical assistant professor in the honors college at purdue university. her research and teaching are at the intersection of science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist studies, with an emphasis on the social and ethical impacts of digital technology. her work has appeared in lateral, westminster papers in communication and culture, impost: a journal of critical and creative work, and catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. microsoft word sandilands interview final.docx cielemęcka, olga & szczygielska, marianna (2019). thinking the feminist vegetal turn in the shadow of douglas-firs: an interview with catriona sandilands. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-19. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license thinking the feminist vegetal turn in the shadow of douglas-firs: an interview with catriona sandilands olga cielemęcka university of turku olga.cielemecka@gmail.com marianna szczygielska max planck institute for the history of science szczygielska@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de catriona sandilands is an environmental literary critic and ecocultural scholar whose work brings together questions of ecology, gender, and sexuality, and multispecies biopolitics. she coined the term queer ecologies to describe and intervene in the manifold intersections running between sexuality, nature, and power in contemporary ecological conversations. the concept has made a powerful contribution to feminist and queer environmental scholarship, and to the larger environmental humanities. an intuitive gardener as well as plant scholar, she writes about plants in a unique way that pairs wonder about botanical materiality and evolutionary history with a concern about the biopolitical mechanisms that govern both vegetal and other, nonhuman and human, forms of life. cate is a professor of environmental studies at york university in ontario, canada. she is the author of the good-natured feminist: ecofeminism and the quest for democracy (1999) as well as over eighty essays, reviews, journal articles, and chapters in edited collections. she edited, with bruce erickson, the muchcelebrated scholarly volume queer ecologies: sex, nature, politics, desire (2010); her edited collection of creative writing rising tides: reflections for climate changing times was published in september 2019. marianna szczygielska and special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 2 olga cielemęcka caught up with cate on galiano island, british columbia, to discuss the recent vegetal turn in the humanities, feminist commitments to critical plant studies, and the lessons to be learned from paying close attention to the plants around us. olga cielemęcka: research focused on plant life, agency, resilience, cognition, and communication, often inspired by new discoveries in plant science, is burgeoning in the humanities and arts. it seems that we are now witnessing a renewed interest in plants—a certain “vegetal turn.” what are your thoughts on this “vegetal turn” and formation of the field of critical plant studies that followed from it? catriona (cate) sandilands: there’s no question that there has been, in the past five or six years, a proliferation of works in the arts, humanities, and social sciences looking at questions of vegetal agency and at the ways plants are involved in constituting complex, multispecies worlds. i think some of the particular registers in which plants have become a topic of recent conversation are very much rooted in current scholarly work on posthumanism and “new” materialism. six years ago, i would have said that there is a substantial body of work in critical animal studies on the one hand, and a body of work on vital materialism, following texts such as jane bennett’s vibrant matter (2010), on the other, that plants were curiously absent in the space between the two conversations despite the prior existence of many wonderful, plant-related works in other areas of the humanities. judging by the fact that there was an entire thematic stream pretty much devoted to plants at the recent biennial conference of the association for the study of literature and environment (asle) at uc davis, this is clearly no longer the case. as often happens, plant life has filled in all the available spaces left open to it! olga: what are the roots of this turn to the plant? cate: i think this “vegetal turn” actually has many sources, not all of which are fully acknowledged in the loose field that seems now to be known as “critical plant studies.” most obviously, this turn has been propelled by recently popularized research on plant intelligence and communication: works like mancuso and viola’s brilliant green (2015) have gone a long way toward mainstreaming the idea that plants respond to their multispecies environments in “thinking” and “communicating” ways, rather than just, say, reacting to predators or stressors. this research builds special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 3 on the work of forest ecologists like suzanne simard, who have demonstrated the complex communicative and resource-sharing networks that species like douglasfir (pseudotsuga menziesii) engage in order to survive and thrive as communities, not just as individuals: trees, and plants more generally, actually process information and signal to one another, adapting in real, and not just evolutionary, time. in a very different way, michael marder has also had a huge influence on conversations about plant-thinking and plant-being, here, focused on the ways in which eurowestern philosophy has both included and excluded plants as participants in multispecies relationships of thought and practice. his book plantthinking (2013) was very important: he brought the idea of vegetal philosophy into focus for a whole range of scholars in the environmental humanities and beyond. the debate between marder and prominent animal rights lawyer gary francione (2012) on whether plants are sentient beings and should be understood, therefore, as subjects of moral consideration, is worth reading: i think it’s a critical moment in terms of the collision between the concerns of critical animal studies and plant philosophy. however, i think the current vegetal turn also owes a lot to other thinkers and practitioners whose work has not been as widely read and recognized in these recent, broadly posthumanist, plant conversations. i am particularly thinking about indigenous plant knowledges and the careful, long-term work of ethnobotanists such as nancy turner to document them. turner’s work, primarily in western north america, has focused on supporting indigenous communities to remember, reclaim, and recreate traditional plant knowledges. her monumental, two-volume work ancient pathways (2014) is a condensation of a lifework of deep involvement in indigenous—especially women’s—plant knowledges and relationships. i am also thinking about the work of feminist historians like (ann) rusty shteir and londa schiebinger, who have done incredibly important research on women’s complex botanical knowledges and practices. shteir’s cultivating women, cultivating science (1996) is a rich excavation of british women’s diverse botanical knowledge-practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and schiebinger’s plants and empire (2007) is a key text for anyone who is interested in the global circulation of plants and plant knowledges. there are also established traditions of garden writing and criticism; plants also crop up in a plethora of literary works, of course, followed closely by plant-hunting critics. it’s lovely to experience all of the newness in critical plant studies, and i definitely think that there are ways in which the “vegetal turn” in the arts and humanities is generating a vibrant, creative energy for thinking critically and creatively, for and special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 4 with plants. but, in all honesty, the vegetal has been “turning” for a long time, and the plants have never actually been forgotten. marianna szczygielska: you’ve mentioned that the vegetal turn and critical plant studies as a defined field are following the earlier animal turn. we could consider both the animal and the plant turn as a part of a larger posthuman turn. what are the limits to this approach? more specifically, i’m thinking here about critiques from postcolonial or indigenous studies perspectives of the kind of approaches that are perhaps too easily jumping into the idea of “becoming plant” and rid of the notion of the human. do the substantial critiques of the posthuman turn also apply to the vegetal turn? cate: indigenous scholars have expressed articulate and justified criticism of many aspects of the posthuman turn. zoe todd (2016), for example, wrote an excellent piece that called out bruno latour for his failure to acknowledge indigenous thinkers for their “millennia of engagement with sentient environments, with cosmologies that enmesh people into complex relationships between themselves and all relations” (p. 6). this failure is, unfortunately, much more widespread, although as more and more indigenous scholars insist on the ongoing and critical role of indigenous knowledges to multispecies survivance (not to mention underlining the ongoing role of colonialism in the apocalypse against these millennia of enmeshed engagements, see whyte, 2018), it is getting harder and harder for eurowestern scholars to ignore these vibrant traditions as well as the oppressive academic politics in which they are marginalized. i confess that i haven’t actually seen an indigenous critique of the vegetal turn in particular, although this could just be my limitation. i would, instead, point out that some of the most influential contributions to critical plant studies are being made by indigenous thinkers and/or speak to indigenous peoples’ dynamic relationships with plants. i would single out robin wall kimmerer, whose books gathering moss (2003) and especially braiding sweetgrass (2013) have had a huge impact on plant studies; i would also want to mention eduardo kohn’s wonderful how forests think (2013), which takes us to a whole other realm of understanding of plant intelligence and communication. and those are just three of many! as a white settler scholar, i think part of my responsibility is to pay sustained and respectful attention to these complex and abiding plant knowledges. however, i also think i am responsible for interrogating the ways in which settler-capitalist plant knowledges have had, and continue to have, such a negative impact on deeply enmeshed plant–people relationships. in the posthumanist rush to embrace notions of plant intelligence and communication—which, in general special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 5 terms, tend to demonstrate that plants are “like” people in fundamental ways— there has been a tendency to overlook the biopolitical context in which these new knowledges arise: the relations of appropriation, expropriation, dispossession, and exploitation in which both plants, and indigenous relationships to plants, are enmeshed. this has been the focus of a lot of my recent writing (sandilands, 2016, 2017, 2018): what does it mean that we are talking about plant intelligence in a way that makes more and more plant capacities (e.g., communication by way of volatile organic compounds) open to commodification and exploitation, rather than in a way that takes genuine inspiration from thinkers like kimmerer who insist on the ethical primacy of relationship and reciprocity in our dealings with vegetal “kin”? marianna: another problematic issue concerns the idea of the progression of the turns, as if they are like waves in feminism, a temporalization that has been criticized for being linear and western-centric. in terms of our relation to nonhuman worlds, these turns follow taxonomic order of kingdoms and, as you’ve pointed out, plants were initially omitted. what are your thoughts on that? cate: you can see in the popularity of anna tsing’s wonderful book the mushroom at the end of the world (2015), that there might be a fungal turn under way, which i suspect will be shortly followed by a protistan turn and a bacterial turn. in fact, the bacterial turn is already here, given the number of recent works that emphasize the ways in which human embodiment is always already a matter of ongoing bacterial labor! if we want to begin with animal studies as a set of exemplary practices of multispecies “turns,” then it is important to point out that the field of animal studies is already very diverse. some animal studies scholarship is entirely hospitable to plant thinking: (diverse) plants are parts of multispecies communities in very different ways than (diverse) animals, and speaking about plural, complex entanglements does not diminish either the plants or the animals. i am thinking about deborah bird rose’s (2015) work on flying foxes in sydney, here: flying fox lives—and deaths—are entangled with colonial desires for certain kinds of plant presence, notably in the royal botanic gardens, in which a particular arrangement of plants is understood as antagonistic to bat cohabitation. going at the relationship by way of the plants, here, reveals the complex biopolitics of the current situation in which both the bats and the exotic “heritage” trees can be heard and understood. other sectors of animal studies have, however, been fairly antagonistic to the idea special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 6 that plants may be worthy of thought: the debate between francione and marder that i mentioned enacts a situation in which rights are a zero-sum game, and any consideration of plants seems to diminish hard-won claims to animal sentience and moral/legal consideration. i understand francione’s argument, for sure, but from where i stand it misses the point: the fact that plants are worth thinking about, and with, does not mean that they demand the same kind of thought as animals (of course, francione is not really talking about all animals, either, but that’s another conversation). i would argue that plants demand different registers of thought than animals: because they are so very different from people (not to mention from each other), plants ask us to think about ethics and politics in very particular, place-specific ways, in which we (people) are asked to contend with lively difference more than anthropocentric likeness. so will protista. so will bacteria. one size does not fit all. biopolitically, however, animals, plants, protista, bacteria, and humans are increasingly being organized according to the same kind of the lowest common denominator--utility. jeffrey nealon’s plant theory (2015) points out that there are ways in which all forms of life are increasingly being treated as vegetal. we are being gardened, not just in a metaphorical sense, but also quite literally: posthumanists should think about this as we enthusiastically participate in the activity of breaking down boundaries between species, genuses, families, and even kingdoms. what does it mean, in these biopolitical times, that life is harnessed to capital? marianna: you mentioned before that the vegetal turn is being fueled also by scientific interest in plants and especially in plant ecology, physiology, cognition, neurobiology, etc. i wonder what does this reliance on the production of scientific facts by certain strains of plant studies mean for redefining ideas about agency or animacy? cate: this is a question that, as a scholar of interdisciplinary environmental studies, i’ve been grappling with for much of my career: what are my responsibilities to environmental sciences, when environmental science is both a crucial source of (often ignored) knowledge and also a historically and institutionally specific understanding of “environment” that does not represent all there is to know about the natural world? i think it is very important for scholars in the arts and humanities to actually have a good grasp of the scientific literature. for example, i’m in the process of writing a fairly philosophical paper about an invasive species in british columbia, scotch broom (cytisus scoparius). for this essay, i have sourced and read many, many works on this perennial shrub, special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 7 including a range of research articles from various places in the sciences and applied sciences—different fields of biology, invasive species management—as well as environmental history. i am interested in the histories and relationships of broom; i am also interested in the very particular ways that the species manifests as an “invasive,” because not all invasive species work in the same way. i think it is absolutely my responsibility to follow scientific literatures on the plants and ecologies that concern me, but i also don’t think it is my responsibility as a scholar in the humanities to be driven by any particular element of that science, as if my primary responsibility is simply to publicize “what the science tells us.” i think i am obliged to talk about history, about culture and values, and about different kinds of botanical knowledge (literary, scientific, practical) as they also play a role in our understandings of the plant, and not just in the realm in which we “manage” it according to some combination of scientific research and humanistic valuecalculation. at this moment, i am sitting in a little cabin in the middle of a douglas-fir forest. it is absolutely wonderful that so many people today are learning, following simard’s and others’ work, how douglas-fir trees talk to one another and share resources. i find the idea that i am caught up in invisible networks of mycorrhizae extremely powerful both physically and metaphorically, and i think it’s very important to walk in the woods—and also to make responsible use of douglas-fir forest products—with a grateful understanding of these networks at the forefront of consciousness (sandilands 2018). however, my job as a critic is not just to celebrate this connection: now that settler scholars have finally figured out that plants are intelligent, i need to ask, how are these knowledges deployed in the service of settler capitalism? thinking about jake kosek’s (2010) really interesting work on the militarization of bees, i wonder about the commodification of mycorrhizae, and i don’t think that this is a question confined to speculative fiction (just look at brilliant green). olga: which feminist genealogies are important for feminist critical plants studies? what does a feminist perspective bring to critical plant studies? cate: i think it is important to think about feminist plant studies because the material-biopolitical history of plant knowledges is profoundly gendered. i don’t want to recreate that old hoary narrative about “man the hunter” and “woman the gatherer,” but there are definitely ways in which plant knowledges have been associated with and are particularly important for women. this biopolitical history includes the association of herbalism with witchcraft, the use of plant material in textile production, and, of course, the central importance of plants as a stable special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 8 food source, as well as histories of imperial bioprospecting, the globalization of plants and plant knowledges, and agricultural industrialization. you can see the entanglement of gender with botanical knowledge in colonialism, which is in turn entangled with the disciplining of botanical knowledges in eurowestern knowledge systems. schiebinger documents how indigenous women in the caribbean used peacock flower (caesalpinia pulcherrima) as an abortifacient in order to prevent their children being born into slavery. despite the witness of german-born botanical adventurer maria sibylla merian, these medical knowledges never made it to europe, even though the plants themselves did (they are popular ornamentals to this day). at the same time, many privileged european women were actively encouraged in their botanical pursuits. with some notable exceptions like merian, they tended to be engaged in plant-based activities that left them out of botanical history books that tend to be filled with conquests, whether of territory or taxonomy. according to shteir (1996), many women, excluded from the increasingly professional scientific study of botany, appreciated plants through collection, gardening, and especially illustration, all of which were considered acceptable—even fashionable—activities for women at the time. one of my favorite of these women is mary delany, who produced—starting at the age of seventy-four, which gives me hope for my own future—over one thousand paper “mosaics,” which are cutouts of plants based on dissections of actual flowers. these mosaics are exquisite: each piece of the plant is composed of multiple, tiny pieces of paper, laboriously cut out and layered, fragment by fragment, on a black background, highlighting the substantive relationship between the plant-based paper and the plant it is shaped to represent. these mosaics are also gloriously sexual. earlier than many in her period, delany closely followed the work of swedish botanist carl linnaeus, whose system of plant classification was based on a given plant’s relative numbers of “male” and “female” sex organs. as lisa moore (2011) has pointed out, delany’s mosaics are not only scrupulously designed to demonstrate the truth of each plant according to this system, but also particularly lush in their colorful, unabashed revelations of the plants’ individual sexual identities. although delany’s work has been diminished as a mere popular footnote to the rise of modern botanical knowledges, i think it is not at all a stretch to consider her flower mosaic practice as something more than the conquest and taxonomy with which it is intertwined: it is, i think, an extraordinarily attentive exploration of the sensuousness of plants, involving the plants themselves—as paper, and as specifically represented, sexual beings—as active participants in the process. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 9 olga: what potential do you see here for feminist resistance towards oppressive structures of power? cate: the ethical and political project of thinking with plants as actors in networks of power relations means that we have to go beyond thinking about plants as metaphors to look at the specific, material ways in which particular people have relations with particular plants in particular moments, both as these relations may serve the interests of heteropatriarchal capitalism and as they might offer sites of resistance. it’s not always easy to draw a firm line between practices that are resistant and practices that are co-optable. part of what capitalism does best is that it takes all the good ideas and turns them to its own ends! the bioprospecting and patenting of indigenous pharmaceutical knowledges is a perfect example (see foster, 2017). i want to attend to particular plants and particular kinds of plants in a way that recognizes both the biological and the political contexts in which this attention takes place. returning to the douglas-firs: i wonder about their communication networks, but i also recognize that they were the most important industrial tree species in the history of the colonization of this part of british columbia. their unique biological community was foundational in shaping the way that settler capitalism unfolded in the province. these trees grow pretty quickly and are very straight, so they’re extremely useful for things like building material. if there hadn’t been douglas-firs, colonialism in this region of british columbia would have unfolded differently. as it was, it was centered around logging (and fishing and mining, but these are others’ stories to tell). most of the timber involved in the construction of the cabin i am in is of the same substance as the trees outside the window. so my shelter and my aesthetic experience of the world are also shaped by my involvement with the plants. in the hul’q’umi’num language spoken by the indigenous people of this island, douglas-firs are ts’sey’; in english, the tree was named after scottish botanist david douglas. doug-firs are droughtresistant, meaning they will do reasonably well in the drier and drier climate of this eco-region. these are my many douglas-fir entanglements: they are sensuous, but they are also political. olga: in your essay “violent affinities,” you write, “the fact remains that ecological feminisms must respond especially to the ways in which posthumanist/multispecies identities, differences, relational performativities, and intercorporealities are enmeshed in both microand macro-political violences” (sandilands, 2014, p. 95). perhaps you could elaborate on the notion of violence special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 10 and the political and ethical commitments in your own plant research? cate: i don’t think the relationship between the violence against women and violence against plants is metaphoric: it’s metonymic, and it’s intersectional. there was a strand of ecofeminist thinking at a certain historical moment that talked about violence against women and violence against the earth, animals, plants, and soil as being essentially the same thing—“men’s rape of the earth,” to draw on the title of one particular book (a book that actually makes a more sophisticated argument than its title suggests, i have to say, see collard & contrucci, 1989). women are not plants, and douglas-firs are not homo sapiens (although they may be “people” in a more expansive understanding). gender violence may focus and intersect with interspecies violence (and vice versa), but it is a mistake to imagine that they are the same. the appropriation of indigenous women’s botanical knowledge for profit is a good example: it does violence to the women and to the plants in very different ways. for example, depending on the species in question, it might involve the complete erasure of the women’s knowledge traditions, but then the proliferation and commodification of a particular element of that relationship that would likely involve a forced multiplication of the species under new conditions. understanding the specificities of misogynist and anti-ecological violence means looking at the concrete relationships through which entangled forms of violence proceed. olga: what is the role of fiction in uncovering this process? cate: fictional works are often useful for helping us engage in this kind of entangled imagination. i have recently been thinking about two novels in particular: shani mootoo’s cereus blooms at night (1996) and han kang’s the vegetarian (2015). both these novels, in very different ways, are about the relationship between sexual violence against women, and the violences done to plants and animals. in the vegetarian, the protagonist is a young woman named yeong-hye, and in cereus blooms at night the protagonist is an older woman, mala. both are victims of misogynist violence; both withdraw into vegetal worlds in order to cope with/resist this violence (they become plants in one way or another); and, interestingly, neither narrates her own story of plant becoming. in the vegetarian, kang depicts the ubiquity of misogyny and sexual violence. we are told at the outset—from a male perspective—that there is nothing extraordinary about yeong-hye. and in many ways there isn’t, except for her powerful response to the systemic violence that she experiences both at the level of casual sexism and at the level of being preyed on sexually and assaulted special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 11 physically by the men in her intimate life. she decides for ethical reasons that she wants to stop eating meat: she wants to stop participating in the metabolization of animal bodies. by the end of the novel, she stops eating altogether so that she is no longer participating in the metabolization of anybody. she just wants to photosynthesize: to be one of the plants with whom she identifies strongly, and with whom she is also—in her ordinariness and invisibility—identified and sexualized. her desire to become a plant is a hyper-empathetic response to her understanding of how animals, plants, and women are treated alike in the context of carno-capitalism. in cereus blooms at night, mala is subject to decades of sexual violence by her father and develops a strategy of active resistance to that violence by becoming part of the garden (earlier, she fails to poison him, which would have been a very planty form of revenge). she withdraws from language and learns the language of plants, insects, and molluscs. in fact, she enters into a conspiratorial relationship with them, particularly with the eponymous cereus plant, which protects her (as we find out) from the eyes of the community that chose to ignore her father’s sexual violence, but would not overlook her resistances to it. unlike the vegetarian, cereus blooms at night is narrated by a character (tyler) who understands and sympathizes with the protagonist; not surprisingly, tyler is gender-nonconforming, which leads them, i think, to a position of greater sympathy to mala’s species non-conformity. olga: the vegetarian is such a troubling book because it puts forward the idea of photosynthesis as an act of resistance on part of the protagonist, but at the same time this likely leads to her death. i’m curious about your take on this kind of resistance that seems to involve signing out of the society and formulating a different language that can’t be communicated to other humans. cate: i think one of the reasons why i’m so compelled by the vegetarian is that it’s so deeply uncomfortable. yeong-hye is participating in an act of resistance, withdrawing from misogyny by becoming a plant (albeit a plant with some definite sexual agency), but also capitulating to this violence. in a way, women are positioned in the novel as always already dispensable, and yeong-hye’s chosen method of responding to this position is to embrace this position fully, perhaps even in its purest form. she is slowly killing herself as a plant, as a response to the fact that she is always already killable as a woman. i don’t want to advocate this as a political strategy. but as a novel, i think the vegetarian does an enormous amount of work to show us through yeong-hye’s experience that misogyny renders women vegetal, and that embracing vegetality is a complicated response. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 12 marianna: this troubling desire of becoming plant depicted in the vegetarian is of a very different kind than a metaphorical longing for vegetal-like communication or form of being. if we think about plants and desire together, how much of a mediation is it of the human desire imposed onto the plant? and can we think about plant desire on its own terms? for example, we can think of human desire being accompanied by specific plants in very material ways—for example, by ingesting certain plants as aphrodisiacs or using flowers as a romantic gift. but also, what does it mean to think about desire in the context of neoliberal capitalism that we’re living in and what does it entail? cate: one of the most important and interesting things that has ever happened to this planet is the evolution of angiosperms. the entire ecology and life cycle of flowering plants is oriented to the demonstration and satisfaction of plant sexual desire. the flower is a sex organ. it’s inviting pollination, which is necessary to the ongoing sexual reproduction of the species. anybody who’s interested in flowers—from indigenous women nurturing camas meadows to erasmus darwin and his long poetic meditation on the sex lives of plants, to people who hybridize roses—is caught up in these webs of plant sexual desire, whether they think about it consciously or not. we are, in many ways, all aesthetically, commercially, philosophically, and poetically entangled in the sex lives of plants, and servicing plant desire is pretty foundational to our repertoire of plant-related activities. giving a lover a red rose means expressing desire by handing her the reproductive organ of a plant, but even planting a certain species of carrot and not another is also a sexual intervention (and not just metaphorically “fucking the earth,” as lorna crozier [1985] put it in her poem suite about the sex lives of vegetables!). plant desire came first, evolutionarily speaking, and recent research about early hominids shows how different forms of social life developed around this nexus of relationships of plant desire. gathering, burning, planting: these are all ways of organizing, and benefiting from, plant desire. one of my favourite plant books, ever, is michael pollan’s the botany of desire (2001). written before the current vegetal turn we talked about earlier, the book pushes people to rethink their assumption that we are “mastering” plants in cultivation, domestication, and agriculture. using the examples of apples, tulips, potatoes, and marijuana, pollan argues that the plants’ demonstration of certain qualities—sweetness, beauty, control, and intoxication—is actually a way of getting humans to behave as their particular propagators and pollinators. agriculture and cultivation are not only special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 13 about humans imposing their desire on plants; very cleverly, they are also about certain plants having a great deal of reproductive success because of their ability to speak to human desires that then cause us to further the plants’ sexual desires and reproductive interests. i think pollan really understood his obligation (maybe even obedience?) to plants because he’s a gardener, as he describes in his first book, second nature (1991). as a gardener, i think that paying attention to how our corporeal and other needs circulate around relationships to plant desire is incredibly important. i absolutely loved botany of desire because it was such a great exercise in overturning conventional wisdom that domestication is simply a form of violence against plants. but robin wall kimmerer takes us even further: in order to have good relationships with plants—ones in which particular people thrive in relation to particular plants that also thrive—the key is reciprocity. we need to imagine who we are to plants and what we should do to tend to plant needs, and not just imagine what plants are to us and what we can get from them, as if they were an inexhaustible inert resource (i.e., the way pollan describes industrial potatoes). marianna: from what you’re saying, if we look at plants as desiring machines this also eroticizes scientific practices around plants, making science a deeply erotic enterprise! but speaking about larger structures of power, gardening is often used as a metaphor for state planning, one that reflects control, order, and specific kinds of governmentality. for instance, zygmunt bauman (1989) used the metaphor of the “gardening state” to describe the biopolitical mode of rational governance characteristic for modernity inflicting violence through optimization of life. in the wake of what some scholars call “ecological modernity” (dryzek, 1995; christoff, 1996; crowley, 1998) do you see any potential in talking about gardening as a site of resistance, a micro-practice developing at the peripheries of capitalism? cate: gardening, like most practices, doesn’t mean only one thing. i’m a big fan of growing food in and for communities. i was just reading recently about the establishment of a public food forest in a major city, which includes fruits and nuts available for people to pick whenever they want. i think that is very directly a way of thinking about gardening as an anti-capitalist practice: food for free for anyone who needs it. gardening can also contribute to a deep awareness of and attentiveness to plants. i’m thinking here about jamaica kincaid’s my garden book (1999). i think gardening can make one very aware of the way in which the migration of people, the migration of plants, and globalization of certain kinds of special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 14 plant species are intertwined. but gardening is not only or inherently a practice of resistance to capitalism. gardening has been used to displace people, to emphasize status, to create conditions of ownership and surveillance, to police public spaces, and to aestheticize private property. hedges and decorative borders do spatial work that does not necessarily lead to community and solidarity! gardening affords possibilities for thinking people–plant relationships but i think it’s really important to apply critical knowledges to that practice: to work with the plants, but to maintain an understanding of how and where the plants come from, how are they being used to establish certain kinds of naturalization and normativity, how they might be used to open up other kinds of relationships. just planting indigenous plants is not enough to dislodge settler colonialism: it’s the relationships—including the ongoing colonial ones—to which we have to pay attention. marianna: let’s turn to another gardening-related metaphor. with the most recent works of donna haraway (2016) and anna tsing (2015), composting became a potent material metaphor in feminist theorizing accounting for “surviving on a damaged planet” and “living in capitalist ruins.” jennifer hamilton and astrida neimanis (2018) write about “feminist composting” as a new methodology for environmental humanities. do you see this domestic practice closely connected to gardening and plant matter as a new ecofeminist quest for democracy? cate: composting is a really generative grounded metaphor—i love the hamilton and neimanis article—and it is also a suite of practices that actually requires that you know something about soil communities and technologies of decomposition. michelle niemann (2019) presented an excellent paper on this very topic at the recent asle conference: compost is biological and historical, not just a nicely messy metaphor. in her book matters of care (2017), maria puig de la bellacasa also talks about soil and engages with soil ecology as a suite of hands-on, practical exercises in thinking not just about compost, as compost, or like compost but rather with compost. i think that if we understand composting as a biopolitical practice potentially in resistance to bauman’s “gardening state,” or as a suite of multispecies encounters rather than as a metaphor for political work, we might actually go in interesting directions. for example, our relationships with worms in vermicomposting point special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 15 to specific ways in which our flesh will become compost. thinking with and about compost as a biological and historical practice is a really interesting direction to think about in terms of repairing our generally terrible industrial relationships with soils. in addition, i like the work that the feminist metaphor of composting does to animate queer, feminist futurities. rather than think about giving the earth to “our” children to inherit, what happens when we imagine ourselves as becoming compost for the world in an expanded understanding of generationality and ancestry (i acknowledge and respect my indebtedness to indigenous understandings of being a good ancestor, here, as winona la duke, melissa nelson, and many others have described)? what happens when we imagine fleshy decomposition as another site for thinking about the intertwinement of biopolitical and material, ecological processes: how do i decompose well, how do i live a life in which i will become good compost (see sandilands, in press)? marianna: lastly, we wanted to ask you about your current projects. one of them is titled plantasmagoria, can you tell us about it? cate: plantasmagoria is a collection of my writings on plants that focuses on practicing some of the forms of thinking about human–plant relations that i’ve talked about today. it will start with two chapters that outline my understanding of the intersections of plant biopolitics and feminist plant politics, including my readings of the vegetarian and cereus blooms at night, and including the key importance of fiction and poetry as a place from which to think feminist plant relations. following this opening, the book will consist of a series of plant-based assemblages that take as their focus particular plants and places to illustrate diverse modes of human/plant entanglement. one of the chapters is going to be about mulberries, specifically, morus rubra and morus alba. mulberries are a global species. i have argued elsewhere that the globalization of m. alba (white mulberry) was one of the first clear instances of large-scale anthropogenic botanical colonialism because the trees were a keystone species of the silk trade. this chapter is situated in toronto and focuses on the ways mulberries end up drawing us into thinking about what it means to live as gendered beings in relationship to rather interestingly gendered plants as sexual beings (i.e., as queer kin). mulberries are fascinating: they’re both monoecious and dioecious, so some mulberries are male and female on the same plant, some are male and female on different plants, and some are both; they also change sex in response to environmental conditions. they’re totally cool! but they special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 16 are also biopolitical subjects. for one thing, urban foresters and the horticultural industry don’t like the female trees because they’re really messy with all of those berries, and so the majority of the street trees are male (this is a big problem in some cities, because the male trees are also extremely allergenic during pollen season). in southern ontario, m. alba are also considered an invasive species, not only because they grow prolifically in disturbed areas (they are “weedy”), but also because they hybridize enthusiastically with the indigenous m. rubra, threatening the latter’s species “purity” even as they increase the trees’ overall resilience. another chapter, located here in bc, is about the scotch broom that i have already mentioned. broom is very clearly an “invasive” exotic species, and it is reputed to have been brought to this part of the world by british colonists who wanted to see a little bit of scotland in their (stolen) backyards even though it is now almost universally reviled in western north america. broom was key to botanical colonialism: it grows very well in disturbed soil, so it was intentionally planted along the corridors of power, such as hydro lines and roads, as a way of keeping infrastructural projects intact. it was also possibly used as packing material for whiskey bottles sent up to prospectors in the gold rush, and was internationally marketed as a garden ornamental. but it is now understood as an out-of-control aggressive invasive (it is a real disturbance-loving species), and there is broom everywhere, in all kinds of places where people don’t want to see it, including in places in which it disrupts logging. the overwhelming push is to eradicate broom from the landscape as much as possible: i want to argue that for settlers to do so without going deeper into the botanical infrastructures of colonizing the province is another way of performing settler innocence via plant “purification.” marianna and olga: this project sounds very exciting and inspiring. thank you so much for finding the time to talk with us and share your ideas with us and the readers of catalyst. cate: thank you both so much for your wonderful questions! references bauman, z. (1989). modernity and the holocaust. cambridge: polity press. bennett, j. (2010). vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham, nc: duke university press. christoff, p. (1996). ecological modernisation, ecological modernities. environmental politics, 5(3), 476-500. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 17 collard, a., & contrucci, j. (1989). rape of the wild: man’s violence against animals and the earth. bloomington, in: indiana university press. crowley, k. (1998). “glocalisation” and ecological modernity: challenges for local environmental governance in australia. local environment, 3(1), 91-97. crozier, l. (1985). the garden going on without us. toronto, on: mcclelland & stewart. dryzek, j. (1995). toward an ecological modernity. policy sciences, 28(2), 231-242. foster, l. a. (2017). reinventing hoodia: peoples, plants, and patents in south africa. seattle, wa: university of washington press. hamilton, j. m., & neimanis, a. (2018). composting feminisms and environmental humanities. environmental humanities, 10(2), 501-527. haraway, d. (2016). staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press. kang, h. (2015). the vegetarian (d. smith, trans.). london: portobello books. kimmerer, r. w. (2003). gathering moss: a natural and cultural history of mosses. corvallis, or: oregon state university press. kimmerer, r. w. (2013). braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. minneapolis, mn: milkweed editions. kincaid, j. (1999). my garden book. new york, ny: farrar, straus & giroux. kohn, e. (2013). how forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human. berkeley, ca: university of california press. kosek, j. (2010). ecologies of empire: on the new uses of the honey bee. cultural anthropology, 25(4), 650-678. mancuso, s., & viola, a. (2015). brilliant green: the surprising history and science of plant intelligence (j. benham, trans.). washington, dc: island press. marder, m. (2013). plant-thinking: a philosophy of vegetal life. new york, ny: columbia university press. “michael marder and gary francione debate plant ethics.” (2013, march 6). columbia university press blog. retrieved from https://www.cupblog.org/2013/03/06/michaelmarder-and-gary-francione-debate-plant-ethics/. moore, l. (2011). sister arts: the erotics of lesbian landscapes. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. mootoo, s. (1996). cereus blooms at night. vancouver, bc: press gang publishers. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 18 nealon, j. (2015). plant theory: biopower and vegetable life. stanford, ca: stanford university press. niemann, m. (2019, june 29). a compost-based ecopoetics. presentation at the association for the study of literature and environment, davis, ca. pollan, m. (1991). second nature: a gardener’s education. new york, ny: atlantic monthly press. pollan, m. (2001). the botany of desire: a plant’s-eye view of the world. new york, ny: random house. puig de la bellacasa, m. (2017). matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. rose, d. b. (2015). flying foxes in sydney. in k. gibson, d. b. rose, & r. fincher (eds.), manifesto for living in the anthropocene (pp. 83-89). brooklyn, ny: punctum books. sandilands, c. (2014). violent affinities: sex, gender and species in cereus blooms at night. in l. westling (ed.), the cambridge companion to literature and the environment (pp. 90-103). cambridge: cambridge university press. sandilands, c. (2016). floral sensations: plant biopolitics. in t. gabrielson c. hall, j. m. meyer, & d. scholsberg (eds.), the oxford handbook of environmental political theory (pp. 226-237). new york, ny: oxford university press. sandilands, c. (2017). fear of a queer plant. glq: gay and lesbian quarterly, 23(4), 419-429. sandilands, c. (2018). vegetate. in j. cohen & l. duckert (eds.), veer ecology: a companion for environmental thinking (pp. 16-29). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. sandilands, c. (in press). humus. in j. hausdoerffer (ed.), what kind of ancestor do you want to be? environmental ethics for the long game. chicago, il: university of chicago press. schiebinger, l. (2007). plants and empire: colonial bioprospecting in the atlantic world. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. shteir, a. (1996). cultivating women, cultivating science: flora’s daughters and botany in england, 1760-1860. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. todd, z. (2016). an indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: “ontology” is just another word for colonialism. journal of historical sociology, 29(1), 4-22. tsing, a. (2015). the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton, nj: princeton university press. turner, n. (2014). ancient pathways, ancestral knowledge: ethnobotany and ecological special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | critical commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) olga cielemęcka & marianna szczygielska, 2019 19 wisdom of indigenous peoples of northwestern north america (2 vols.). montreal and kingston: mcgill-queen’s university press. whyte, k. (2018). indigenous science (fiction) for the anthropocene: ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. environment and planning e, 1(1-2), 224-242. author bios olga cielemęcka is a postdoctoral fellow at the turku institute for advanced studies at the university of turku in finland. a feminist researcher and philosopher, she brings contemporary philosophy, feminist and queer approaches into a reflection on environmental change. she explores political and cultural meanings of plants, particularly by looking at the intersection of nature, nation, and gender in the białowieża forest in poland. marianna szczygielska is a postdoctoral fellow at the max planck institute for the history of science in berlin (germany). with a background in philosophy and gender studies, her research interests include environmental humanities, human-animal studies, queer theory, critical race studies, philosophy of science, and feminist sts. she has published on history of zoos, animal collections and gender, scientific research on hormones, relations between affect, transgender, and animal studies. meek, laura a. 2024. “shit voyeurism, anti-blackness, and the spherical: rendering antibiotic use in africa.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–26. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © laura a. meek, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license shit voyeurism, anti-blackness, and the spherical: rendering antibiotic use in africa laura a. meek university of british columbia, okanagan laura.meek@ubc.ca abstract this piece interrogates anti-black racism and coloniality in global health reporting on antibiotic use in africa. i focus on new york times discourse, imagery, and films, reading these intertextually with wider political and public health rhetoric. in critically attending to mediated imaginaries of nairobi, kenya as “unhygienic,” i demonstrate how this figuration comes to index local pharmaceutical practices that appear “non-scientific.” the situated knowledge informing such practices is disregarded or, worse, presented as a threat to be targeted and eliminated. such biomedical transgressions are indexed in the nyt by racialized references to waste, dirt, and excrement, turning the (structurally white) reader-viewer into what i call a shit voyeur. building on sylvia wynter’s conceptualization of man, i argue that manthe-shit voyeur disregards his own culpability in rising antimicrobial resistance, locating health risks instead in the contaminating nature of others. this racialized grammar is further subtended by the logic of the spherical—the illusion that the world-as-sphere is a totality that man can perceive with a unidirectional gaze. global health reporting that is racialized via the logics of the spherical and shit voyeurism not only fails to accurately represent medical concerns in africa but also perpetuates biomedical hegemony and/as global white supremacy. keywords racism, coloniality, global health, media, antimicrobial resistance, waste, militarized biopolitics, kenya mailto:laura.meek@ubc.ca original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 2 introduction in the spring of 2019, the new york times (nyt) published a prominent article on the “overuse” of antibiotics in kibera, an informal settlement in nairobi, kenya (jacobs and richtel 2019).1 the central message of this article, as well as the video embedded within it, was that pharmaceuticals are being misused and, as a result, are in danger of losing their efficacy. readers and viewers are implored to come to the rescue of these imperiled drugs. meanwhile, the residents of kibera are depicted as shit-mired and inundated in waste, appearing woefully ignorant about the proper use of antibiotics, an ignorance that is portrayed as threatening to the global health order. although the setting is kibera, the same story could have unfolded in any number of places around the world, so we are told, leading the authors to sometimes generalize to all of africa and even asia. informed by three years of ethnographic research on pharmaceutical engagements in east africa, i approach this nyt article, imagery, and video as anthropological objects of analysis in this piece.2 my interpretation is situated at the interface of medical anthropology and feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial science and technology studies (lyons, parreñas, and tamarkin 2017; mavhunga 2017; pollock and subramaniam 2016). in critically attending to how colonial and racist imaginaries of africa structure global health reporting, i also think with scholarship on anti-blackness and the racialization of risk (bailey 2016; mbembe 2017), attendant to how “racial grammars” (bonilla-silva 2012; pierre 2019) reproduce differential valuations of lives, of who is at risk and who poses a risk (benton 2016). i probe (liberal) us media coverage of health in africa to reveal and dismantle these racialized political and epistemic frameworks. as i interrogate racialized grammars cutting across the nyt article, images, and video on antimicrobial resistance, i also read these as intertexual with wider political and public health rhetoric, including statements by former us president donald trump and former director-general of the world health organization (who), dr. margaret chan, to demonstrate how contemporary articulations of biocommunicability (briggs and hallin 2010) about health in africa are predicated upon an ethico-onto-epistemology (barad 2007) in which health or medicine practiced outside certain parameters is seen as a dangerous category violation.3 such transgressions are indexed in the nyt by pervasive (racialized) references to dirt, refuse, and shit, turning (structurally, white) reader-viewers into what i call “shit voyeurs.”4 this “shit voyeur”—who is ambivalently attracted to and repulsed by anti-black representations of abjection in africa—goes unmarked but occupies the structural position of the well-informed, educated, self-sufficient, bourgeois, white, cisheteromasculine subject that sylvia wynter (2003) calls “man.” as wynter theorizes it, this genre of the human, man, has “over-represented” itself to the point of mistaking itself for the human writ large and thus relegating others to the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 3 status of subhuman or nonhuman. part of what renders “us” (nyt readers) into this man-cum-shit voyeur, i argue, is our own self-anointed belief in our capacity to stand outside of our situated time and place, peering at the other with a gaze that cannot be returned. this is a practice that peter sloterdijk (sloterdijk and butler 2009) dubs the “logic of the spherical” and it is what enables the readerviewer to disregard the scientists in the nyt video who point to us agricultural practices as critical sources of rising antimicrobial resistance. blind to our own culpability, the (white) man-cum-shit voyeur sees health threats instead in the uncontained (racialized) contaminating nature of others. meanwhile, as man-the-shit voyeur consumes pathologizing media coverage about africa, this media’s seemingly abject, suffering, and ignorant subjects are concomitantly rendered subhuman, dangerous, and threatening (benton 2016). i demonstrate how this negation of full human status is a constituent element of contemporary global health logics, which are not only fundamentally colonial (richardson 2020), but also thoroughly racialized (abimbola and pai 2020). in global health reporting, the cancellation of human status (via anti-blackness) transforms “places like kibera” into global threats and targets, producing health interventions that are durably “attached to war” (terry 2017), ostensibly about protecting others but actually working to shore up white welfare and well-being at the expense of the global majority. that these racialized grammars are pervasive, perhaps even inexorable, in contemporary global health is demonstrated by the degree to which they scaffold even presumably wellintentioned reporting by liberal media outlets. “like it or not” the individuals who are portrayed in the nyt piece tend to be rendered in one of three ways: as villains—frequently (black) mothers and “untrained” pharmacists— whose ignorance endangers antibiotic efficacy; as heroes—usually “experts” from the us—coming to the imperiled drugs’ defense; or as victims—who are invariably (innocent) children or unconscious (mute) patients, one of whom will die by the article’s end, seemingly as a cautionary tale for readers. in this portrayal, it is made abundantly clear who has science and who does not, who can make a legitimate claim to knowledge and who cannot.5 each “villain” and “hero” is introduced with a phrase indicating their relationship with science, a formula that seems to be typical of nyt health reporting on africa. for instance, a piece from the nyt’s global health series that focused on traditional healing and ebola in rural uganda (mcneil 2019) characterized a healer’s wife (who is (mis)translated as his “triage nurse”) as “dangerously wrong” in her knowledge. her ignorance demonstrates for readers why “medical experts worry that such combinations of misinformation and wishful thinking are common among traditional healers who, like it or not, are the front lines of rural african medicine” (mcneil 2019, para. 4, emphasis added). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 4 the implicit assumption that the reader will not “like it” bespeaks a neocolonial violence that seeks the eradication of others’ practices “in the name of the common goods of progress, civilization, development, and liberal inclusion” (de la cadena and blaser 2018, 3; see also wynter 2003, 289). to this list we can add “health,” understood as a particular relationship to scientific biomedicine. as vincanne adams writes of international health programs, “the notion that health is only possible if pursued as a scientific goal is seldom questioned” (2010, 44). at the same time, such portrayals erase the structural conditions that make health elusive for many, as well as the numerous ways that biomedicine has been deployed in africa in the interests of (neo)colonial exploitation and resource extraction, racialized “development” and ngo economies, and global health surveillance and securitization (biehl 2016; meek 2023b; nkrumah 1966; pierre 2019; richardson 2020). the combined effect of this erasure of structural conditions and disavowing of other ethico-onto-epistemologies is the reproduction of pathologizing stereotypes of africa as a dark continent harboring latent threats like virulent disease (benton and dionne 2015; peckham and sinha 2017). in the nyt piece on the “misuse” of antibiotics in kibera, the pharmacists receive much the same treatment as the ugandan traditional healers from the ebola article. below a photograph of a small pharmacy in kibera reads the caption, “pharmacy stalls often sell antibiotics in amounts that are far less than the recommended course” (jacobs and richtel 2019). the “like it or not” is implicit here: the reader likely comes to this piece already “knowing” that such practices are part of a global threat. whatever well-informed reasons residents in kibera may have for using medicine in this way are brushed aside. yet in my fieldwork in neighboring tanzania, i found that buying partial doses of antibiotics is a strategic, life-saving practice (meek 2023a). over half of all drugs in sub-saharan africa are potentially counterfeit and thus the quality of medicines cannot be taken for granted (who 2017). further, as patients cannot always afford additional regimens after a drug has failed, many employ embodied trial-anderror methods for first testing the medicinal efficacy of a given treatment before investing in a full dose. these are just some of the ethico-onto-epistemologies that are effaced by the nyt’s reporting of antibiotic “misuse.” although counterfeit antibiotics are mentioned in the article, this concern receives a mere two sentences; the fact that many kibera residents cannot afford more than a few pills at once receives just one line. rather—given that the title attached to the online article is “cheap antibiotics fuel deadly drug-resistant infections”—the message would seem to be that these pharmaceuticals should be even more expensive and thus further out of reach for this community. such a framing only makes sense within a murderous, anti-black logic that would see more africans die to shore up the health of (white) populations elsewhere. one of the individuals appearing in the role of villain in the nyt piece is mr. otieno, who owns a local pharmacy stall in kibera. despite the fact that otieno original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 5 spent years apprenticing for another pharmacist in the community, the authors describe his practice like this: “like most of the small shopkeepers who provide on-the-spot diagnosis and treatment here and across africa and asia, otieno does not have a pharmacist’s degree or any medical training at all” (jacobs and richtel 2019, para. 3, emphases added). note that years of apprenticeship is rendered as “no medical training at all.” what knowledge otieno does have is seen as dangerous—akin to what i have conceptualized elsewhere as “fugitive science” (meek 2023a, drawing from rusert 2017). such practices are “scientific” in the sense that people learn about the capacities of drugs (e.g., if they are counterfeit, poisonous, etc.) through deliberate, embodied experimentation (neely and meek 2024). this provides critical knowledge in spaces where laboratory science has been de-capacitated by the longue durée of (neo)colonialism and racial capitalism (nkrumah 1966; robinson 1983).6 such practices are “fugitive” in relation to a western global health apparatus that seeks to discipline them, to replace them with biomedical “compliance.”7 as a form of “minor empiricism” (andrews 2015) that is not marked by a university degree, otieno’s medical expertise does not qualify as knowledge at all within hegemonic biomedical frameworks. his work as a pharmacist cannot rightly exist within a global health paradigm; it simply is not (real) (de la cadena 2015). this nonexistence haunts the nyt article; it appears as spurious mirage, copy, and illusion: “with its baby blue interior, medical posters on the wall and a cabinet overflowing with bandages, otieno’s stall could be mistaken for a health clinic” (jacobs and richtel 2019, para. 31, emphasis added). the posters are medical, but otieno’s knowledge, we are reminded, is not. i see this as an instance of “the power of modern disciplines and their knowledges to cancel the possibility of what emerges beyond their grasp” (de la cadena and blaser 2018, 18). not being graspable as “medical,” otieno’s training is cancelled, and he becomes only a “charlatan” (stengers 2003). we are cautioned that we would be “mistaken” to think otherwise. shit this same nyt article was also posted online in the deadly germs, lost cures series, where the photographs take center stage. the headlining image—which fills the entire screen when one arrives at the site—depicts a sprawling garbage dump seemingly located haphazardly in the midst of a low-income urban neighborhood of corrugated-iron homes. the caption under this image reads, “heaps of garbage in kibera, nairobi—one of africa’s largest slums” (jacobs and richtel 2019). in front of the garbage pile walks a smartly dressed black man, smiling and talking on a cell phone. the image appears to subtly educe dissonance about the contradictory effects of globalization and development in africa. a certain proper teleology seems to be out of order, such that the cell phone may even strike the reader as more like “matter-out-of-place” (douglas 1966) than the refuse. perhaps the viewer may wonder if cell phones really belong in such a original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 6 scene. upon reading the article, one is led to wonder if maybe antibiotics do not belong there either. the equating of kibera residents with trash is a constant refrain throughout: the authors depict the “slum” as a chaotic and sullied landscape of “sewage canals” crisscrossing “squalid and crowded living conditions,” where residents are perpetually bombarded by “flying toilets” (jacobs and richtel 2019). children are described as “frolicking in the muck,” their families living in “one-room shacks,” next to “hand-dug latrines” between “dirt paths.” these descriptions seem intentionally chosen to help support one of the article’s central premises—that the community’s “poor hygiene” is exacerbating their rates of sickness, in turn exponentially increasing their propensity to “misuse” antibiotics. we are invited to adopt the perspectives of global health researchers who “trudge” through “muddy footpaths, dodging children, stray dogs and the occasional chicken” while thinking to themselves that “it’s no wonder people here are constantly sick” (para. 27). one way to interpret the mode of biocommunicability in this article is through mary douglas’s (1966) classic account of dirt as “matter-out-of-place.” what makes something out of place, douglas argues, is that it violates or transgresses category boundaries and cannot be properly classified into one category or another. this disrupts the correct ordering of the world, thus symbolically threatening disorder and even death. i return in the following section to the question of what precisely is the category being violated here, but first i elaborate further how the pervasive references—both textual and visual—to dirt, waste, and excrement operate as a form of gendered anti-blackness within the article. the equation of dirt with death is made explicit in the piece. for instance, marcalain widdowson, deputy director of global health protection for kenya at the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc), is quoted as saying that there is a “vicious cycle” at play in which “lack of sanitation” will lead to more disease, in turn increasing rates of antibiotic use (or, here, “misuse”), and then resulting in further antimicrobial resistance. the careful reader is meant to understand that the dirtiness of this community therefore presents a threat to them too as microbes travel beyond national borders and infect populations elsewhere. not made explicit, however, is the way in which excrement also comes to symbolize the body’s dirt.8 there is a constant oscillation between dirt, shit, and garbage, which, taken together, conjure powerful notions of contamination and danger. dirt, mud, and muck are described in equal detail as sewage, shit, and latrines. consider, for instance, the following line: “at night, feces-filled plastic bags are tossed from rooftops by those afraid to venture outdoors. residents call them flying toilets” (jacobs and richtel 2019, para. 19). this seemingly random anecdote is in fact symbolically central: it conveys that a proper order has been violated and that this transgression poses a threat. the danger here is original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 7 overdetermined in that, we are told, the residents too are afraid. we never learn what it is that they fear, but then perhaps that does not matter for the rhetorical effect, as the evocation of fear is the point. scholars writing about asymmetrical sanitation infrastructures have stressed how they stem from and reinforce structural inequalities such as differential access to public space (doron and raja 2015) and the privatization of the commons (thieme 2017). in africa’s rapidly growing informal urban settlements, sanitation inequality is increasingly politicized, from the rise of “poolitical tactics” in south africa (mcfarlane and silver 2016) to the “publicizing of private matters” via the “right to shit” in ghana (chalfin 2014, 103, 94). at the same time, scholars have also critiqued how the discourse around sanitation forms part of a larger racialized civilizing project, used to justify expanding imperialism, sexist and racist violence, and the imposition of capitalist disciplinary regimes (anderson 1995; aretxaga 1995; burke 1996). none of these factors are given any consideration in the nyt piece, however. instead, the population is presented as unhygienic in a way that assumes hygiene to be a universal and standardized value, achieved (or not) solely by individual choice and entirely disconnected from politics or even economic conditions. (we never learn why kibera is an impoverished community, for instance.) this portrayal is strikingly reminiscent of the racist ideologies that scaffolded european colonialism where “natives” were seen as “naturally” dirty, degenerate, and diseased (anderson 1995; vaughan 1991). waste and shit index abject, disposable life, the “dysselected” nonor subhuman who is epitomized as black within man’s self-representation (millar 2020; wynter 2003). in the nyt article, the dirtiness of the racialized body and the pestiferousness of the environment are most vividly conjoined in the image of a “black river.” the section of the article titled “poor sanitation, rampant disease” opens with this florid prose: “there is no escaping human waste in kibera. it oozes from shallow, hand-dug latrines, pools into rivulets and finally builds into a black river” (jacobs and richtel 2019, para. 18). by combining images of a black river, brown shit, and dark-skinned bodies, the language of the article layers anti-black tropes that, together with depictions of ignorant practitioners and risky practices, discursively reinforce the disposability of black lives. shit voyeurism such pervasive references to shit reproduce racist and colonial ideologies, but they do other work as well. they also summon “racialized, gendered relations of looking and seeing” (nakamura 2008, 29) to make up (hacking 1999) a particular kind of subject-reader—one whom i dub the “shit voyeur.” this voyeur is produced by the affective ambivalence of such scenes. on the one hand, there is a sense of disgust and repulsion: the imagery of shit “oozing” and “pooling” is likely meant to be experienced as viscerally repugnant. at the same time, the reader is invited to partake in the consumption of this shit. while the images may shock, they do original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 8 so in a way that has become predictable, perhaps even pleasurable. much as susan sontag once wrote about photographs of others’ suffering, the “image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence” (2003, 23). for shit voyeurs—that is, for those of us who consume liberal, mainstream us news—disgust and pleasure may also be conjoined in such a way. the ambivalence of shit voyeurism can perhaps be better grasped through psychoanalytic approaches to disgust, rather than through the structural framework that douglas employs. for instance, julia kristeva’s (1982) notion of the “abject” entails a violent repulsion of that which threatens the boundaries of the subject.9 this happens when something that has been cast off—and yet is barely separate—threatens to encroach upon the subject once more. a common example of abjection is the response of horror that one might feel when seeing a corpse, as this is a reminder of one’s own inevitable death. with regards to dirt and hygiene, kristeva maintains that “it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. what does not respect borders, positions, rules. the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (1982, 4). while douglas’s structural approach relies on a strict binary between dirt and purity, kristeva’s deployment of abjection incorporates and accommodates a sense of ambivalence and the possibility that the subject may be attracted and repelled simultaneously. this orientation can help us account for our own practices of shit voyeurism as consumers of us news, allowing us to better understand how the sprawling garbage heap in the article’s headlining image might compel a readership, drawing in busy people with short attention spans, even as it also repels, eliciting disgust. it is no coincidence that another central villain of the nyt piece is the figure of the mother. the mother features prominently in kristeva’s (1982) accounts of abjection as that which, having created us, we must then cast off to form our own identity. consequently, the ferocity with which we love mothers is easily transformed into the ferocity of condemnation, blame, and disavowal. what kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach does not fully address, however, is how these scenes of ambivalent abjection are racialized (hartman 1997), taking particular aim at black motherhood (roberts 1998; spillers 2003). to understand the simultaneous repulsion and desire of the shit voyeur we need to recognize this subject position as being one of man’s making (wynter 2003). in wynter’s explication of genres of the human, women too are seen as naturally “dysselected” in relation to man’s over-representation of his own “descriptive statement”: his projection of his self-image onto both nature and the cosmos (262). it is from the perspective of man-the-shit voyeur that such misogynoir (bailey 2016) comes to be directed at the mothers in this nyt article, mothers whose poverty, femaleness, blackness, and third-world status overdetermine their exclusion from full human status (millar 2020).10 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 9 one such mother in the nyt article is ms. mbone, who has a perennially sick newborn son. mbone explains that her challenge has been the prohibitive cost of medical bills, which have amassed to almost an entire year’s salary for her husband, who works as a bus station porter. although mbone does not believe that her son’s problems can be reduced to the “unsanitary conditions” of their neighborhood, the authors brush aside her concerns, writing, “epidemiologists and public health experts who have studied kibera say there is a direct correlation between the community’s poor hygiene and the infections that stalk nearly every household” (jacobs and richtel 2019, para. 23). even before this scientific rejection of mbone’s situated knowledge (haraway 1988), the authors have set the scene by pointing out how her family is enmeshed in dirt and shit. they write about how “ms. mbone and her husband have become inured to the sight and smell of untreated sewage that flows in front of their onebedroom shack,” so much so that these parents sometimes allow their three-yearold daughter to play “frolicking in the muck” (jacobs and richtel 2019, para. 20). to drive home the point, a prominent image shows mbone washing clothes in what has been described earlier in the article as a “sewage canal” behind her home. another image depicts a group of women doing laundry near a stream, with the caption, “washing clothes in a stream polluted with sewage. human waste is unavoidable in kibera” (jacobs and richtel 2019). these misogynoir-istic representations (bailey 2016) depict mothers as conduits for shit, responsible for sickening their own children by exposing them to dangerous contagions. blackness itself comes to appear as contagion as the (white) reader-viewer is reminded of the threat these actors pose to antibiotic efficacy, a threat that may sicken them as well.11 bringing home this point, the nyt article concludes with one more photograph of garbage. here, another mother, carrying her two-year-old daughter and followed by her five-year-old son, is walking on a narrow earthen path between two clay and corrugated iron homes. the path is completely overlain by waste, and they are heading towards the sprawling trash heap depicted in the article’s cover image. it appears that this family will have nowhere else to go once they exit the narrow corridor they are heading down. meanwhile, the path is hemmed in on both sides by clay walls that seem to be closing in around the family, bulking and swelling like monsters threatening to engulf them. on the left side of the image, we can see the corrugated-iron roof of the home, itself covered in refuse. there is a plastic bag perched near the edge, perhaps a “shit toilet” that has yet to be ejected. the combined effect of these elements is a visceral sensation of claustrophobia and disgust: it seems as if the family is about to be swallowed up by a combination of dirt, trash, and shit, with the mother leading the way. the little boy, who appears closest to the viewer, has turned his head partially around, as if looking back towards us. his turning seems almost to be imploring us original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 10 to respond. the image interpellates man-the-shit voyeur as white savior, crafting whiteness and the white gaze as outside the scene. we can read this appeal through the racialized grammar of humanitarian reason (benton 2016) and its moral economy of childhood. as didier fassin writes about hiv/aids in africa, when children are rendered innocent, their parents—and especially their mothers— begin to seem all the more guilty: “in the end, blame devolves onto the dominated” (2013, 129). further, the logic of compassion that such images of children may invoke is far from altruistic.12 being a manifestation of relations of political domination, compassion is frequently mobilized—as it is in the nyt piece—rather than invoking concerns for social justice (fassin 2012, 222). as i elaborate below, the article instead implores us to protect and defend vulnerable, abused, and imperiled drugs. we are asked to partake in a moral economy of antibiotics in which pharmaceuticals have come to occupy the structural position of the child— the position of innocence and purity—in the grammar of humanitarian reason. the nyt narrative thus prioritizes the saving of medicines over the saving of (black) lives, the protection of drugs’ efficacy at a cost to (black) lives. this concern with saving antibiotics elucidates why shit and dirt are constantly referenced throughout the piece. the drugs themselves are the matter-out-ofplace, indicating the violation and transgression of category boundaries (douglas 1966). the dirt, refuse, and shit serve as indexes for this other category violation, for the presence of pharmaceutical practices out of place. the “misuse” of such drugs appears as a threat to the global health order. mothers who give their sick children antibiotics without prescriptions and pharmacists who lack medical degrees are rendered sources of contagion in the same way as shit. recall that otieno’s practice violates the very category of “medical,” with his posters being described as medical while his apprenticeship is translated into “no training at all.” it is this kind of category violation that explains why so much shit is present in the article and why reader-viewers have been made into shit voyeurs. all pharmaceutical use in the kibera community is condensed into the symptom of “lack of hygiene,” indexically referenced by shit as matter-out-of-place. “all of us are at risk” the overarching message of the nyt article, then, is that the kibera community is at fault for their own affliction and death; they are to blame for the antibiotics’ ineffectualness. their “lack of hygiene”—and the category violations that indexes— is revealed as the true source of the “global threat” of antimicrobial resistance. put differently, they are a global threat. as guy palmer, a professor of infectious disease at washington state university, expresses in the piece, “we can’t effectively mitigate the growing problem of antibiotic resistance without dealing with places like kibera” (quoted in jacobs and richtel 2019, para. 11). we might then ask, what are places like kibera? based on its portrayal in this article, one could conclude that places “like kibera” are places which are full of shit. shitty places. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 11 as i write this, it is impossible not to recall the infamous words of former us president donald trump, who remarked that african nations (as well as haiti and el salvador) are “shithole countries.” he allegedly made this statement on january 11, 2018, when speaking with members of the us senate about protections for immigrants. the washington post reported that trump asked senators, “why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” (dawsey 2018). the nyt coverage of this scandal referred to trump’s remarks as “racially tinged” and reminiscent of his prior racist remarks, including his assertions that all haitians have aids and that nigerians who relocate to the us will “never go back to their huts” (davis, stolberg, and kaplan 2018). it stretches credulity to imagine that there is no semiotic connection between trump’s “shithole countries” remark and the nyt article the following year portraying kibera residents as mired in shit. this connection does not have to be intentional to be impactful. reading these media representations as intertextual, we begin to see a larger story emerge: africans are equated with shit and shit itself is a threat, to be kept out (trump) or managed (nyt). as lucy suchman (2016) reminds us, mediated imaginaries have tangible, material effects even when they are wildly inaccurate (see also alenichev, kingori, and peeters grietens 2023). as material semiotic actors, these media performatively enact both an “us”—who become (white) shit voyeurs—and an other—residing in “places like kibera”—who become racialized risks, threats, and ultimately, targets. dr. palmer, the infectious disease professor, is also quoted in the nyt piece as saying that there “are a billion people living in similar situations” to those in kibera and, as a result of their unsanitary conditions, “all of us are at risk” (jacobs and richtel 2019, para. 11). the kibera community’s very existence—including its minor empiricisms and fugitive sciences—is interpreted as a risk for “us,” with “us” understood as rational man in the global north. such discourses entail an operation of racialization that “makes it possible to identify and define population groups in a way that makes each of them carriers of differentiated and more or less shifting risk” (mbembe 2017, 35). as a result, even though we learn of lifethreatening challenges facing members of the kibera community, it is “us” who appear as the ones in danger by the conclusion of the story. this rhetoric indexes a larger phenomenon, beyond the realm of global health reporting. trump’s comments enact an anti-blackness that lumps together all non-euro-americans, associating them with contagion (haitians with aids) and shit (“shithole countries”). similarly, the nyt article continuously slips between non-euro-american places and peoples, including “kibera residents,” “developing world,” “nairobi,” “kenya and other emerging economies,” “kenyan children,” “densely populated settlements like kibera,” “africa,” “the world’s poor,” “poor kenyans,” “one of africa’s largest slums,” “africa and asia,” “places like kibera,” and “a billion people living in similar situations” (jacobs and richtel 2019). it would original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 12 seem to make no difference at all if this were an article about delhi residents, rural nigerians, brazilian children, or emerging economies writ large. it is the fact that they all appear dysselected—by evolution or the market, race or poverty (or both)—that allows them to be lumped in this way, rendering them apart from the full human status granted to man (wynter 2003, 317). as a result, nothing whatsoever need be said about the specificity of kibera, nairobi, or kenya. but place matters. at first, the newly post-independence kenya pursued statedriven capitalist development, which stressed “medical modernization” (ombongi 2017). it achieved enormous increases in access to biomedical care during the 1960s and into the 1970s, only to face a near collapse of government health infrastructure by the early 1980s. this fallout was a result of several converging factors in east africa: the end of the cold war, growing national debt, an international oil crisis, global economic depression, and the rise of neoliberal economic ideologies (dilger 2012). the structural adjustment policies conditioning loans from the international monetary fund and world bank required severe reductions in national budgets for healthcare, privatization or cost-sharing for medical services, and unfettered markets that became flooded with cheap—and often counterfeit—pharmaceuticals throughout much of africa (meek 2023b; who 2017). an earlier notion that the state should be charged with protecting the health of its citizenry was replaced with the rhetoric of consumerdriven choice and the value of the free market to address healthcare needs. in kenya, “the government health institutions simply buckled…overcrowding and acute shortage of drugs became the norm not the exception in government health facilities” (ombongi 2017, 365). these developments precipitated a shift away from international medicine—which emphasized primary healthcare and sought to build up national health infrastructures through development—to global health—a fragmented conglomeration of nonprofits and private-public partnerships that have instead prioritized efforts to reduce the “burden” of specific diseases (biehl 2016). the apparently unregulated and dangerous nature of pharmaceutical markets in “places like kibera” is therefore a result of political economic formations, including colonialism, neoliberalism, and racial capitalism (benton and dionne 2015; meek 2024). it is simultaneously a function of these very ideologies that this context is concealed, leading to accounts of biomedical use in contemporary africa in which the entirety of the problem appears to reside in dirt and shit, ignorance and disorder. even marc-alain widdowson at the cdc frames it this way, as he is quoted saying, “a lack of sanitation leads to more disease, which leads to higher antibiotic use, which leads to greater resistance…it’s a vicious cycle” (jacobs and richtel 2019, para. 25). to address the issue of “the community’s poor hygiene,” widdowson has conducted “surveillance work” in kibera since 1979. in the following section, i consider the role of such “surveillance original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 13 work” in global health, demonstrating how it is fundamentally racialized despite never mentioning race explicitly. war theorists of globalization have pointed to an internal contradiction in the very notion of the “global.” on one hand, the global invokes unfettered borders, increased commerce, international migration, and instant connection between geographically distant places. on the other hand, today’s world is also characterized by an increase in the production of borders, walls, and gated communities—from the us-mexican border to gated communities in south africa (brown 2010; ferguson 2006; mbembe 2019). within the realm of global health, there are similarly “incongruent visions of the global” (peckham 2018, 191). this often manifests as a tension between humanitarian biomedicine, which espouses a common humanity and access to essential medicines as a human right, versus global health security, which prioritizes surveillance to protect wealthy countries from emerging infectious diseases elsewhere (lakoff 2010). it is quite telling, then, that deputy director widdowson’s research in kibera is described as “surveillance work” in the nyt piece. contemporary practices of health surveillance in the united states grew out of nineteenth-century developments, when the nation began implementing systematic border controls, partially due to fears of racial others carrying infectious diseases—much like trump’s statement about haitians having aids. the increasing use of surveillance technologies in us-led global health interventions today—for instance, via drones and satellites—can be understood as a formation of us imperialism that enacts “an outward extension and reinscription of the nation’s borders on the ‘front lines’ of the ‘war’ against infectious disease in the developing world” (peckham 2018, 192).13 meanwhile, knowledge that is produced in this way—by employing the same logics and grammars as warfare—functions to extinguish that which it targets; such knowledge is “destined to destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus” (chow 2006, 41; see also meek 2024; terry 2017). the invocation of the logics of war are not always subtle in the nyt article. embedded within the online article is a link to a nine-minute video, titled “revenge of the bacteria: why we’re losing the war,” with a caption that warns, “bacteria are rebelling.” the associated image is also striking: against a bright orange background looms a gigantic white mouth, gaping open and full of brightly colored capsules and tablets of various shapes and sizes. the gaping mouth seems to be moving towards us in a menacing way and the pills appear almost like bacteria—their sizes and shapes resembling microorganisms and subtly reminding us that mouths are receptacles for bacterial grow. in this visual pun, the “revenge of the bacteria” takes the form of drugs which, having become impotent, turn into invading microbes. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 14 as one scrolls through the online article, this video is positioned directly after the words “all of us are at risk” (jacobs and richtel 2019, para. 11) and directly before the words “worldwide, resistant pathogens already claim 700,000 lives each year” (para. 12). the video—which represents rising antimicrobial resistance as a war—is thus bookended by references to how reader-viewers themselves are potential victims in this global battle. read in the context of the larger article, man-cum-shit voyeur is invited to recognize himself as a victim of the “misuse” of antibiotics by kibera residents. if “places like kibera” are fomenting a war that puts our (white) lives in danger, does it not then follow that the people in kibera are our enemies? this video is part of a larger visual infrastructure operating across several registers to produce a pervasive and generalized sense of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and risk among (white) us publics. this regulation of affect reflects profound transformations in the definition of health over the past century. as joseph masco puts it, “health as an absence of disease or anxiety is long gone”; instead, in the atomic age, we negotiate “degrees of contamination,” “degrees of anxious association,” and “degrees of escalating risk” (2010, 152). such existential anxieties have been further reinforced by the normalization of the body as inherently ill (dumit 2012) and by the ways that pathogens have become weaponized in warfare, leaving the public with “a terrified sense of being quietly and covertly attacked at the micro level by new and more virulent mutating germs” (terry 2017, 26).14 given this broader context, readers of the nyt article will likely have already internalized a notion of pervasive risk and generalized insecurity, priming them to accept the messaging that they are under threat from yet another nebulous (and racialized) danger. the video’s narrator explains that nyt reporter matt richtel has been interviewing health experts to “find out if we are reaching the end of the antibiotic era.” we are warned that “modern medicine depends on the antibiotic” but that “having used it so much, we are now putting it at risk” (bracken, richtel, and dekornfeld 2019). here we are oriented towards the threatened antibiotic and the horizon of an “antibiotic era” that is ending. this orientation not only constructs an object (the endangered antibiotic) but also the subject who orients towards it— those at-risk shit voyeurs asked to imagine the encroaching horrors of a world without “modern medicine” (ahmed 2006).15 further, a particular world is brought into being here, a world always invoked as “the” world. “the world” orients us towards a (white, colonial) totality which can be grasped by man alone: it is only ever invoked in the nyt article when referring to “the moderns” (latour 2010) and their institutions, as in the phrase “the world’s leading medical institutions” (jacobs and richtel 2019, para. 37). ironically, the scientists interviewed in the video locate the most virulent source of antimicrobial threat elsewhere—within our own practices. they point out that 80 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 15 percent of the antibiotics used in the us are in agriculture and that this industry is so powerful that (unlike in europe) industrial farms are not required to allow health officials access to investigate outbreaks of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria (bracken, richtel, and dekornfeld 2019). given the immense reliance on antibiotics in industrial agriculture in the global north (blanchette 2020; landecker 2023), it is worth considering why there is not similar “global” health reporting on the risky behaviors and entrenched cultural practices of industrial scale agribusiness owners in the united states.16 granting man a rationality we deny to racialized others, we can more easily recognize that the decisions of american agribusinesses are likely informed, knowledgeable, and driven by something like rational self-interest (and the capitalist imperatives of accumulation). the fact that it is so easy to imagine africans as lacking in these same qualities has to be understood, i argue, as a form of racist and colonial epistemic violence that continues to shape the very contours of the thinkable in contemporary global health (denyer willis, kayendeke, and chandler 2023; vaughan 1991). the scientists’ message is at odds with the narrative of the article in which it is embedded, but by the video’s conclusion viewers are once again reoriented to the logic of global health security. rather than make an appeal for political reform of us agribusiness—let alone entertain the possibility that our own lack of hygiene might be contributing to the deaths of people elsewhere—the video concludes with the following warning: “unless the world acts consistently together, it doesn’t make a difference” (bracken, richtel, and dekornfeld 2019, emphasis added). “the” world reorients us towards the univocity of the sphere once again, to the whitewashing of history and political economy, to man’s over-representation of himself as simultaneously all that is (human) and yet none to blame. the logic of the spherical the spherical logics of global health insist upon the surveillance of others’ practices, even after having briefly alighted on the shit in our own backyard. this is perhaps one of the metaphysical feats enabled by man’s creation of the worldas-sphere. elaborating on heidegger’s concept of the world as picture, sloterdijk (sloterdijk and butler 2009, 31) argues that the “geometricization” of the world in the form of a sphere is the central idea of modernity, “the decisive deed of the early european enlightenment” (2009, 31). the world-as-sphere helped to birth the concept of man, the figure who fancies himself able to stand (seemingly like god) outside or above the sphere and contemplate its totality: “the affair of western reason with the totality of the world is created and unfolds in the symbol of the geometrically perfected round form” (sloterdijk and butler 2009, 30). sloterdijk argues that one legacy of the world-as-sphere is that the concept of multiplicity became philosophically inferior to that of rounded, singular, perfected unity (see also mignolo 2018). similarly, wynter (2003, 299) notes that while an earlier notion of the human as christian at least recognized the diversity of other original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 16 gods (even if they were assumed to be false ones), it was with the advent of secularized and biocentric man that no other notion of the human could even be conceived.17 as man came to perceive himself as the whole of humanity, he simultaneously maintained the illusion that the world-as-sphere is a totality and also that he could stand outside of it, peering down, with a unidirectional gaze that cannot be returned. recall otieno, the pharmacist whose practice is denied the qualifier “medical,” muted as knowledge, because he belongs to “places like kibera,” to the “developing world,” rather than to “the” world. as achille mbembe has put it, “in modern consciousness, ‘africa’ is the name generally given to societies that are judged impotent—that is, incapable of producing the universal and of attesting to its existence” (2017, 49). as such, otieno cannot stand outside of the globe and declare what is. this is a “god trick” (haraway 1988) that man reserves for himself, making it possible for science to be weaponized against minor empiricisms and fugitive sciences, so that others’ knowledge is disregarded or, worse, understood as a threat to be eliminated. health and medicine practiced outside certain parameters becomes seen as a dangerous category violation, one indexed in the nyt article by pervasive references to dirt, refuse, and shit, turning man into a shit voyeur who floats, seemingly blameless, above the world he has devastated. the univocity and power of the sphere orients not only media representations of antimicrobial resistance today, but also concrete global health interventions. recent years have seen an outpouring of concern on this topic from the who, accompanied by declarations that the rise of antimicrobial resistance is one of the “greatest challenges” to global health today. dr. margaret chan, former directorgeneral, has pronounced that “the world is heading towards a post-antibiotic era, in which many common infections will no longer have a cure and, once again, kill unabated” (2011, emphasis added). notice the invocation of “the world” here, as well as the assumption that everyone lives in that world, one in which common infections do not and have not already been killing unabated. perhaps the greatest conceit of “the” world—or “the” globe in global health—is that it seems to include everyone even while it actively cancels those who reside elsewhere (mignolo 2018). seen in this way, global health regulation can be read as continuous with war (meek 2024; terry 2017; yates-doerr et al. 2023). this is a militarized biopolitics that seeks to destroy epistemological and ontological differences when they resist incorporation into a liberal imaginary of “the world.” critical studies of global health security and international health reporting must do more to address how these (neo)colonial dynamics reproduce not only staggering economic disparities but also global white supremacy (abimbola and pai 2020; alenichev, kingori, and peeters grietens 2023). this is particularly true with regards to health reporting and interventions in africa, where racism and anti-blackness are often presumed not to be relevant (pierre 2013).18 but, just as with development and humanitarianism (benton 2016; pierre 2019), global health security and its media coverage is fundamentally racialized. pathologizing, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 17 misogynoir-istic media portrayals and their consumption by the white gaze of the man-cum-shit voyeur contribute to an economy of life in which necropolitical processes disproportionally expose racialized bodies to disease and death. the racialized logics of the spherical and the shit voyeur are central technologies through which particular places and practices (e.g., african “slums,” “unruly” medical practices) become seen as threats to “the whole,” while other (white) “risky” practices (e.g., american overconsumption of antibiotics) do not evoke the same concern.19 this racist framing hides where and how health threats are actually generated, figuring african consumers rather than american industries as loci of risk. in this way racialized media narratives not only fail to accurately represent medical concerns elsewhere but also perpetuate existing forms of biomedical hegemony and/as white supremacy. these racialized grammars manifest across textual, visual, and filmic registers, building on one another to dehumanize the poor, the black, the (black) mother, and the whole “archipelago of human otherness” (wynter 2003, 321). they form a mode of biocommunicability around health in africa today—enacted across the political spectrum, from the new york times to donald trump to the who—that is murderous in both its anti-blackness and its ethico-onto-epistemic violence. acknowledgements while all academic work is a collective endeavor, this piece has been especially so, and many people have contributed to its development. abigail neely and julia morales fontanilla alerted me to the publication of the new york times article analyzed here and justin haruyama originally proposed the idea that antibiotics were the “matter-out-of-place.” this argument also benefited from lively conversations with brenda chalfin, marisol de la cadena, assa doron, joe dumit, kathleen millar, cristiana giordano, robert peckham, ria sinha, bettina ng’weno, and james smith. i offer my thanks as well to the participants of the science, technology, and medicine seminar series at the university of hong kong and to my fellow presenters on our “multivalent shit” panels at the 2021 annual meeting of the american anthropological association for their generative comments on earlier drafts. i am extremely grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers whose constructive insights significantly improved this work. it took me over a year to read all the sources they suggested, and it was well worth it. and, finally, i wish to express my deepfelt thanks to current and former catalyst editors robyn lee, aimee bahng, and anne pollock for their unwavering patience and support in seeing this article to fruition. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 18 notes 1 the piece first appeared in print on april 7, 2019, in the new york edition, with the headline “miracle drugs, misused, do harm to kenya’s poor.” it was also published online—in the deadly germs, lost cures series—with the revised title “in a poor kenyan community, cheap antibiotics fuel deadly drug-resistant infections.” 2 my research focuses on pharmaceuticals in the southern highlands of tanzania where complexly nuanced understandings of the characteristics and uses of drugs circulate widely and constitute a form of knowledge that at times includes, but also transcends, that of biomedicine and global health (meek 2023a; neely and meek 2024). 3 for karen barad (2007, 90) the term “ethico-onto-epistemology” captures the inseparable entwining of value, being, and knowledge. i use it to gesture towards the interconnections between pharmaceutical knowledges (e.g., the nyt’s science versus fugitive science), ontologies (e.g., counterfeits), and the various values attributed to these contested drugs. 4 in making this argument, i refer to “whiteness” and “racialization” not as identity markers or fixed categories, but rather “as a set of sociopolitical relations that striate subjects according to the degree to which they conform to man and are thus granted (or not) full human status” (millar 2020, 9, drawing from wynter 2003). it is in this way that the nyt reader-viewers—as shit voyeurs—are structurally white. 5 i follow banu subramaniam and angela willey (2017, 10) in distinguishing between “science” as knowledge practices legitimized by official institutions and apparatuses versus “science” as a more capacious term that includes other empirical ways of knowing. see also mavhunga 2017. 6 i understand racial capitalism to refer to the process by which capital accumulation racializes—creating, intensifying, and/or naturalizing racial (and other) distinctions—to enable and justify economic exploitation, including the ongoing dispossession, indebtedness, and underdevelopment of the african continent (bhattacharyya 2018, 5). although conceptually developed by cedric robinson (1983), the term racial capitalism originated in africa as part of the struggle to end south african apartheid in the 1970s (jenkins and leroy 2021, 4). 7 although beyond the scope of this article, such pharmaceuticals are at times also deployed in ways that exceed biomedical diagnoses—such as, for instance, being used to palliate ulcers caused by grief or cool down the heat of bewitchment (meek 2020; neely and meek 2024). these uses too entail ethico-ontoepistemologies that are reduced to “ignorance” and “misuse” in the colonial grammars of global health reporting. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 19 8 in her later work on natural symbols, douglas also maintained that the binary structure of purity and dirt had direct implications for the symbolism of bodily processes like defecation: “social intercourse requires that unintended or irrelevant organic processes should be screened out…therefore all such physical events, defecation, urination, vomiting and their products, uniformly carry a pejorative sign for formal discourse” ([1970] 2003, 79–80). 9 kristeva devotes a section of the powers of horror to engaging douglas’s work. she explores the relationship between social structure and what she calls the “psychic-symbolic dimension,” asking, “what desiring motives are required in order to maintain a given social symbolics?” (1982, 67). 10 the term misogynoir was coined by moya bailey (2016) to refer to the specific forms of representational violence directed at black women in us media and popular culture. misogynoir “is a combination of misogyny, ‘the hatred of women,’ and noir, which means ‘black’ but also carries film and media connotations” (bailey 2016, 2). 11 thank you to reviewer 2 for this incisive point about blackness being rendered contagion (a kind of “shit” itself) in both the realm of social reproduction (e.g., bad mothers harming their innocent children) and in the case of antibiotics (e.g., africans polluting global antibiotic ecologies). 12 writing about images of suffering, sontag maintains that “so far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. our sympathy proclaims our innocence” (2003, 102). as with shit voyeurism, the elicitation of sympathy conceals the viewers’ own culpability, invisibilizing colonial legacies and the ongoing predations of racial capitalism. 13 during the 2014–15 ebola epidemic in west africa, for instance, satellites were used to identify “disease hotspots,” targeting them like a kind of “precision warfare” (peckham and sinha 2017, 26). the satellite images that saturated media coverage of this epidemic “serve[d] to reinforce stereotypes of africa as a place of dark secrets—of latent threats—which call forth a corresponding effort of exposure and enlightenment…in so doing, it directs our gaze away from socioecological complexity to targeted objects” (31). 14 joe dumit (2012) argues that the normalization of the body as inherently ill has been driven by the pharmaceutical industry’s attempts to “grow” markets for medicine by increasingly treating risks for diseases as themselves disorders in need of treatment. wellness remains elusive since “no matter how much risk we reduce, we still have 100 percent risk of dying” (dumit 2012, 24), which means that there is potentially no limit to the medicalization of risk or the anxiety this provokes. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura a. meek, 2024 20 15 as sara ahmed elucidates in her work on queer phenomenology, “objects become objects only as an effect of the repetition of this tending ‘toward’ them, which produces the subject as that which the world is ‘around’” (2006, 120). 16 see hannah landecker’s (2023) analysis of the medicated feed industry in the us and how it remakes metabolic relationships between humans and animals. for an ethnographic account of human exposure to antimicrobial-resistant bacteria in (and beyond) agribusiness in the us, see alex blanchette’s (2020) work on american factory farms. 17 wynter writes, “while, as christians, westerners could see other peoples as also having gods (even if, for them, necessarily ‘false’ ones as contrasted with their ‘true’ and single one), as subjects defined by the identity man, this could no longer be the case. seeing that once its ‘descriptive statement’ had been instituted as the only, universally applicable mode of being human, they would remain unable, from then on until today, of (to paraphrase lyotard) conceiving an other to what they call human” (2003, 299). 18 as jemima pierre insists, “the very production of 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https://iris.who.int/handle/10665/331690 https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-041520-093024     special section: global fertility chains and the colonial present of assisted reproductive technologies harvesting life, mining death: adoption, surrogacy, and forensics across borders     silvia posocco birkbeck, university of london s.posocco@bbk.ac.uk     abstract transnational adoption and surrogacy make explicit the relations between war, structural violence and crisis, and global shifts in the organization and governance of reproduction. this article focuses on the interrelatedness of vitality and death, and the nexus between biopolitics and necropolitics, through an analysis of adoption and surrogacy. it reinscribes the transnational circulation and exchange of persons, substance and bodily capacities within the logics of multiple genealogies of war, violence, and extraction in the globalized borderlands between guatemala and mexico. the article charts the simultaneous demise of transnational adoptions in guatemala and growth in surrogacy arrangements in the southern mexican state of tabasco, as well as the inception of oocyte harvesting for in vitro fertilization (ivf) in reproductive medicine providers in guatemala city. the article then tracks forms of expertise and technical infrastructure across national borders and domains of knowledge and practice. it shows the proximity between reproductive medicine and forensic science evident in dna analysis used in forensic anthropology to document human rights violations, but also offered as commercial services in an expanding reproductive medicine sector. this configuration of biolabor encompasses the extractive practices tied to reproductive medicine and forensics, as persons, bodily substance, and, increasingly, bioinformation transverse contexts, jurisdictions, and social and racial formations.     keywords adoption, surrogacy, forensics, borders, biolabor, biopolitics, necropolitics     introduction demographers, anthropologists, and global social policy experts have documented a considerable decline in transnational adoptions globally and the parallel rise of transnational surrogacy arrangements in the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century (scherman et al. 2016; selman 2006, 2012). karen smith rotabi et al. note that “there was a worldwide peak of 45,000 adoptions in 2004 but [this] has now declined by over 70% […]. concurrently, there has been a rise in commercial global surrogacy (cgs) as a method to create families” (2017, 64). against a background marked by increasingly complex and rapid shifts in systems of “stratified reproduction” (colen 1986; see also ginsburg and rapp 1995; pande 2014; twine 2015), contextually situated analyses and theorizations of the intimately interrelated character of these dynamics are key to an understanding of how individuals and communities are differentially affected by deepening forms of precarity, expropriation, and dispossession. media stories report on the plight of individuals whose family-making projects are frustrated by the onset of regulations that curtail their ability to adopt or contract a surrogate, capturing how these larger dynamics play out in people’s lives. they provide commentaries on the experiences of those engaging in surrogacy arrangements through gestation or oocyte donation. they illustrate the conundrums that open up with “multiple parent births” (santos 2017), as reproduction increasingly entails the recombination of biological substance from a multiplicity of sources across bodies, technoscientific practices, and infrastructures (franklin and mckinnon 2001; strathern 1992; thompson 2005). in turn, individuals whose personal histories are caught up in these complex transnational processes increasingly offer vivid first-person accounts of their experiences. the case of coline fanon (2020), whose book recounts her successful quest to find her birth parents in guatemala over three decades after having been abducted and adopted in belgium, is paradigmatic in this respect. the conclusion of fanon’s personal odyssey as a kidnapped newborn who was eventually able to reconnect with family and communities of origin is a rare outcome, however. for the majority of those who are searching, such journeys are often inconclusive. sometimes they lead to unexpected outcomes such as finding one’s biography caught up in histories of war and genocide and new connections to the living and the dead. such accounts circulate through media outlets and foreground the transnational dimensions of global fertility chains tied to adoption and surrogacy as they have developed over time. they fragmentarily mark the rise and fall of transnational adoption flows, whilst charting the inception and demise of technical and human infrastructures of reproduction in specific locations echoing the public debates generated by such developments in local contexts. straddling technical and biological distinctions, adoption and surrogacy in transnational frames connect to histories of living and dying that have profound personal resonances as well as structural dimensions. histories of reproduction and socially situated practices of making family, then, entail figuring connections to the living and the dead.   in this article, i focus on biopolitical and necropolitical dynamics linked to the sharp decline in transnational adoptions globally and the parallel rise in transnational surrogacy arrangements, through a study of these processes across guatemala and mexico. biopolitics and necropolitics refer to analytics of modes of governance focused on the management of life (foucault 1977, 1981), but also fundamentally concerned with “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (mbembe 2003, 39). necropolitics, for achille mbembe (2003), foregrounds the centrality of death, terror formations, and “death worlds” in the organization of social and political life within the horizon of colonial orders and the broader condition of (post)coloniality. approaching the biopolitics and necropolitics of surrogacy and adoption from these borderlands between guatemala and mexico brings into view multiple articulations of colonial and imperial legacies in the present. it empirically and conceptually ties extractive and acquisitive practices of “making family” in the global north to death worlds in a transnational frame. against this background, this article first tracks the traffic in substance and bodily capacities across the guatemala/mexico borderlands. it charts the simultaneous demise of transnational adoptions in guatemala and concomitant growth in surrogacy arrangements in the southern mexican state of tabasco, as cross-border transnational dynamics at the intersections between vitality, violent extraction, and death. in an ethnographically informed account, i show that the ban on transnational adoptions in guatemala in 2007 was accompanied by the exponential growth in medical establishments offering services in new reproductive technologies and commercial surrogacy over the border, in the state of tabasco, mexico, as well as by the inception of the practice of oocyte harvesting in newly established reproductive medicine providers in guatemala city. the article goes on to track forms of expertise and technical infrastructures across not only national borders but also domains of knowledge and expertise. it considers how knowledge practices and techniques in reproductive medicine cross domains of expertise, producing new configurations of living and dying. an example of this is dna analysis (weizman 2014, 2017). in guatemala, dna analysis is used in forensic anthropology to document human rights violations and resolve cases of forced disappearance. forensic laboratories increasingly offer commercial services, including paternity tests, servicing the expanding reproductive medicine sector. similar operations across sectors have been observed elsewhere (pérez-bustos et al. 2014), but these interrelations are particularly significant on the guatemala/mexico borderland. here, they mark continuities and discontinuities in the constitution of substance and information—and new forms, scales, and registers of extraction across infrastructures and technologies connecting the living and the dead. adoption, surrogacy, and forensics might seem disparate fields of expertise and practice. these three domains, however, ought to be held within the same frame, for an exploration of the relations and nexuses of articulation that connect them across multiple borders delineating new configurations of living and dying.   my interest in transnational adoption circuits, new reproductive technologies, and forensic science is tied to my ongoing trajectory of anthropological research in guatemala, where i first studied the guatemalan conflict (1960–1996) from the perspective of individuals and communities with affiliations to marxian guerrillas who were active in the northern region of petén since the 1960s (posocco 2014b). in the course of this research on histories of violence and cultures of secrecy, interlocutors and acquaintances in the field frequently expressed anxieties about the disappearance of children and predatory behavior by foreigners (gringos). they did so in casual conversations and more formal exchanges. in rural and urban settings, people were often concerned about the safety of young children, notably when foreigners were present. since then, i have worked to offer an ethnographically grounded and historically situated account of the significance of child disappearance and child abduction, practices that i specifically tracked through the transnational adoptions circuits that developed and flourished in the country during the conflict and in the immediate post–peace accords period. searches for missing children lost to transnational adoption networks on occasions led me to consider the possibility that they might be found in mass graves and that, rather than looking for adoption files, families of the disappeared might have to review the files of forensic exhumations, thus engaging in novel forms of “genocide kinning” and relatedness between the living and the dead (posocco 2020). against this background, in 2016, i conducted further anthropological fieldwork focusing on the cross-border dynamics across guatemala and mexico, to make sense of the dramatic demise of adoptions and the simultaneous rise in commercial surrogacy in the southern mexican state of tabasco. the domain of forensics, again, appeared ethnographically, engendering further shifts in scale, re-orienting my account and re-descriptions of life and death. from this ethnographically informed perspective, global fertility chains entail the articulation of technoscientific operations and social relations across domains of social practice, knowledge, and expertise.   harvesting life transnational adoption and surrogacy make explicit the relations between war, conflict, structural violence and crisis, and global shifts in the organization and governance of reproduction. in my analysis, i focus specifically on the interrelatedness of vitality and death, living and dying, and the nexus between biopolitics and necropolitics, as they are foregrounded through the histories and relations that underpin adoption and surrogacy. more specifically, i reinscribe the transnational movement, circulation and exchange of persons, substance and bodily capacities inherent in transnational adoption and surrogacy arrangements within the logics of multiple genealogies of violence. i focus on war, extraction, and expropriation as these have manifested in the globalized borderlands between guatemala and mexico. writing about the borderlands between mexico and the united states, gloria anzaldúa (1987) showed how the establishment of national borders is tied to colonial dynamics that include multiple processes of dispossession and the displacement of indigenous communities from the land. in such geographical areas, new articulations of hybrid identity emerge. yet they are grounded in situated experiences of gender, “race,” sexuality, and class oppression, extreme disenfranchisement, and exclusion. in this formulation, “the borderlands” is a capacious concept-metaphor for thinking through the multiple and complex ways in which gender, race, and coloniality are articulated in subjectivities, social relations, and the imagination. an analysis of transnational adoption and surrogacy from borderlands further south, and specifically between mexico and guatemala, similarly entails the problematization of methodological nationalism and the naturalization of the nation-state (wimmer and schiller 2002), alongside a commitment to, following anzaldúa (1987), tracing analytically the interplay of gendered and racialized dynamics in the interstices of what are often rhetorically constructed as solid national borders, but are in practice porous lines where an intense traffic in persons, artifacts, bodily capacities, and cultural figurations unfolds. rebecca galemba (2020) characterizes the space between guatemala and mexico as a “contraband corridor,” where ordinary people engage in licit and often illicit trade, smuggling goods and people in intricate interlocking of formal and informal arrangements. the interplay of activities at the intersections of legality and illegality offers opportunities for dealing with sudden economic shocks, but often results in the entrenchment of structural and enduring conditions of marginalization and inequality. similarly positioned at the shifting intersections of legality and illegality in the borderlands, transnational adoption and commercial surrogacy are legal-technical-scientific assemblages tied to acquisitive and extractive family-making practices that are distinctly global in scope. the social practices and relations that sustain them connect to biopolitical and necropolitical logics concerned with not only the management of life (foucault 1977, 1981, 1997) but also the work of death and the instantiation of “death worlds” (mbembe 2003). more fundamentally, race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship status are imbricated in the transnational queer necropolitics (haritaworn, kuntsman, and posocco 2014; puar 2007) of adoption and surrogacy and the production and uneven distribution of liveliness and deadliness, privilege and dispossession, accumulation and alienation, as persons, bodily substance, and, increasingly, bioinformation (parry 2004; parry and greenhough 2018) transverse contexts, jurisdictions, and social (and racial) formations (parry greenhough, and dyck 2016).   transnational adoption circuits progressively intensified on a global scale over the course of the twentieth century (marre and briggs 2009). the displacement of impoverished children across national borders from the global south to the global north can be directly tied to the aftermaths of war and conflict as they are tied to histories and legacies of colonialism and imperialism. paradigmatic cases here are korea and guatemala (kim 2010; posocco 2016; volkman 2005). however, the growth in transnational adoptions should also be understood in relation to changes in the governance of the family and reproduction in the global north, and the progressive “rolling back” of the welfare state and privatization of care in late liberalism. in an incisive analysis, laura briggs (2012) shows how the dismantling of child welfare services in the us, for example, was accompanied by an increasing reliance on privatized families called to step in to compensate for ever-decreasing state provisions. in turn, new forms of humanitarianism have proliferated and progressively rely on the fashioning of militarized forms of citizenship. “exceptional citizens” are extended new responsibilities and drafted in to fill the void left by a hollowed-out state that can no longer provide either care or security (grewal 2017). historically, the complex intertwining of dispossession and privilege has played out within nation states—as well as across them. violent removal and transplantation of children occurred domestically, with children being displaced from impoverished, racially and ethnically minoritized communities to families wielding class and racialized (white) privilege, as in the case of the fostering and adoption of indigenous children in north america in the postwar period (jacobs 2014). national projects of mestizaje, that is, discursive and political appeals to the creation of postcolonial nation-states grounded in racial and cultural mixing, were aggressively pursued in mexico, but only very unevenly and selectively implemented in guatemala, where complex racialized taxonomies of ladino (guatemalans of mixed ancestry) and indigenous communities (maya, xinca, and garífuna) endure in the present. indigenous communities nevertheless sustained ongoing assaults across guatemala and mexico, where an array of genocidal policies against them unravelled over time. the forced removal of children from maya communities from agents of the state—notably the army—was commonplace during the guatemalan conflict, for example (posocco 2015). here, i focus specifically on the transnational dimensions of these processes and approach the demise of transnational adoptions and simultaneous rise of transnational surrogacy arrangements drawing on an ethnographic study of these dynamics across guatemala and mexico.   biolabor: boom and bust (twice over) guatemala consistently ranked as the top latin american “sending country” of adoptees during the last three decades of the twentieth century (briggs 2010; posocco 2011, 2015). sizable transnational adoption “reproflows” (inhorn 2011) from guatemala began in earnest following the earthquake that struck the country in 1976 and intensified as part of global fertility chains during the course of the guatemalan conflict. during the thirty-six-year-long guatemalan conflict, a succession of us-sponsored guatemalan governments waged a structural assault against indigenous maya communities, the poor, and those associated with leftist political activism and armed struggle. from the mid-twentieth century, individuals and communities who mobilized for social justice were progressively marked as subversive and persecuted as “internal enemies of the state” within the counterinsurgency logics of anticommunism and cold war geopolitics. in this context, transnational adoptions were at times and in specific instances linked to the handling of children caught up in army assaults against maya and other indigenous communities during the scorched earth campaigns of the early 1980s (posocco 2015, 2020). these cases of forced removal and abduction of children make the relation between the practice of transnational adoption and genocide explicit. they show forms of “genocide kinning,” that is, family-making practices predicated on the exertion of genocidal violence against indigenous communities and individuals (posocco 2020). more generally, numbers peaked in the post–peace accords period, when transnational adoptions progressively evolved into thoroughly commodified and heavily marketized arrangements. transnational adoptions, as a form of intimate labor that in guatemala entailed bearing children on others’ behalf (briggs 2012), were brought to a dramatic halt in late 2007, with the introduction of legislation restricting adoptions strictly to guatemalan resident nationals. as these adoption flows waned, surrogacy arrangements over the border, in the neighboring mexican state of tabasco, began to grow exponentially (schurr and walmsley 2014). “race” and racialization are always already imbricated in histories and practices of reproductive labor (glenn 2010; weinbaum 2019), that is to say, “reproflows” and “global fertility chains” (vertommen, parry, and nahman 2022) unfold in conditions of coloniality and as part of histories of capture, indenture, and slavery. reproductive labor relies on racialized bodies to uphold racialized fantasies of nation and class formation, and, most fundamentally, reproduction functions as a key racializing technology. alys eve weinbaum, whose work is concerned with racial capitalism primarily in the north american context, shows the way black feminist scholarship has articulated a compelling analysis of the “surrogacy/slavery nexus” (2019, 45-49). in this view, the temporality tied to the abolition of slavery and the “freeing” of people and labor is undermined by the persistence of the “slave episteme” that continues to frame the organization of reproductive labor in the present (2019, 11-17). here i argue that the persistence of a specific inflection of the “indenture episteme,” a “finca episteme,” can be discerned in the transnational adoption flows in guatemala in the midand late-twentieth century. the finca episteme relies on the “estado finca,” that is, the state modelled on the finca, the plantation that, since the liberal reforms of the nineteenth century, has paradigmatically referred to coffee plantations for export—spaces of capillary exploitation, indentured labor, and death (avancso 2006; palencia frener 2020; quemé chay 2017). in the estado finca, gender, sex, and racialization are also made and re-made through relations of exploitation and violent extraction.   the finca episteme refers to the logics that have organized bodies and spaces to capture, manage, and monetize life at different historical conjunctures. through the finca episteme, these logics endure in the present in shifting social practices and topographies. here it seems important to dwell on the similarities and differences between the slave episteme and the finca episteme, specifically as they relate to the organization of adoption. weinbaum (2019, 18n7) argues that the slave episteme, as the conditions of what can be thought in the wake of transatlantic slavery and racial capitalism, materializes in the manifold exploitation of human biological life. in this view, the rise of biocapitalism is therefore epistemologically predicated on slavery and grounded in reproductive labor power, thus accounting for the endurance of the slave episteme over time (2019, 5). interestingly, weinbaum excludes adoption from the set of practices that become thinkable within the slave episteme. adoption is explicitly regarded not to be part of the racializing dispositifs of “human reproduction…through which labor and products are rendered alienable” (2019, 5). from the perspective of guatemala and the guatemala/mexico borderlands, the exclusion of adoption on the grounds that it does not entail “the express engineering of reproductive labor” (188n7) seems profoundly problematic. adoption is often figured through discourses of benevolence, altruism, and humanitarianism; yet transnational adoption studies have carefully demonstrated its place in structural asymmetries in their racializing dimensions (briggs 2012; marre and briggs 2009) and necropolitics (posocco 2014a). it therefore remains unclear why adoption should be naturalized vis-à-vis seemingly more technoscientifically intensive practices entailing in vivo biological processes. whilst extraction and capture can take place at different scales, the finca episteme shows how the racialized alienation of the products of human reproductive capacities could become thinkable, materialized, and intensely mined through adoption.   in this context, then, the rise of transnational adoptions in guatemala can be directly linked to the neocolonial conditions of conflict and post–peace accords adjustment, which effectively relied on guatemalan women’s reproductive labor and made adoptees a most lucrative non-traditional export in the second part of the twentieth century. this shift reoriented the topography of the finca episteme from the hacienda for the production of coffee to the “casas cuna,” those informal nurseries where prospective adoptees might be found prior to their onward journeys abroad. from this perspective, then, an emphasis on the finca episteme suggests that the demise of adoptions in guatemala and the rise of surrogacy arrangements in southern mexico ought to be framed as racialized and racializing practices and dynamics in the context of globally and transnationally stratified reproductive labor, and increasingly, biolabor. biolabor here refers to the embodied labor that is indispensable for the functioning of not only reproductive medicine but biomedicine more broadly, and which increasingly props up bioeconomies globally (cooper and waldby 2014). if adoption appears as less dependent on technoscientific infrastructures, this does not mean it has historically been a form of less carefully engineered alienable reproductive labor in a biolabor continuum.   carolin schurr and elisabeth militz (2018) connect the sharp rise in commercial surrogacy in tabasco to events further afield—namely, to the ban on gay couples contracting surrogates in india—cogently illustrating the complex transnational dimensions of queer necropolitical dynamics. they argue that surrogacy boomed in the state capital of tabasco, villahermosa, and was particularly popular with gay couples who could no longer access these services in india. similar to what has been observed in relation to transnational adoptions, in their analysis, schurr and militz (2018) show how this growing industry relied on gendered forms of biolabor, that is, on the labor of egg donors and surrogates part of markedly socially stratified processes along line of gender, “race,” ethnicity, sexuality, and class. further, schurr (2017, 256) astutely highlights how surrogacy in tabasco entailed a heavily racialized division of labor between egg donors and surrogates. the making of whiteness as a desirable normative characteristic of the future child mobilized assumptions about biological relatedness and biological distance between the parties involved in particular raciological order. in practice, future parents engaged in a process of naturalization of whiteness as a desirable ideal by commissioning egg donors whom they perceived to be white, expecting this purposeful selection would result in a direct “whitening effect” on the offspring. remarkably, future parents did not imagine the same transmission of traits between the surrogates and the child, however. as schurr (2017) incisively argues, surrogates’ embodied labor was understood to leave no “genetic mark” onto the future child. it is important to dwell on the raciological orders and racializing logics in play in this iteration of genetic reductionism. the bracketing off of genetic relatedness to include egg donors and exclude surrogates betrays the heavily racialized and racializing framing of biolabor. it relies on a multiplicity of racialized fantasies of transmission and relatedness geared towards the (re)production of whiteness (quiroga 2007). more fundamentally, this genetic reductionism is predicated on the simultaneous centering and decentering of the figure of the (racialized) brown and/or indigenous woman as the “universal donor” (nelson 1999), whose biolabor is at once extracted, appropriated, and erased to ensure the production of offspring who may exert a claim to the phantasmatic domain of whiteness (chivalán carrillo and posocco 2020).   the raciological orders and fantasies that come into view through a focus on adoption and surrogacy have long histories. in guatemala, they connect to genealogies of gendered and racialized extraction. adoption, oocyte harvesting and surrogacy summon in the present older biopolitical and necropolitical bodily practices such as wet nursing. in this respect, in an incisive analysis of the historical records, marco chivalán carrillo (2015) shows that in the late colonial period, maya women from jocotenango left their own offspring to die, as they were obliged to wet nurse—that is, breastfeed—creole children. in the colonial order, the uneven distribution of vitality and letting die is dramatized in the biopolitics and necropolitics of wet nursing (chivalán carrillo 2015), a bio/necropolitical practice whose legacy haunts the (post)colonial present. the queer necropolitics observed in relation to transnational adoption (posocco 2014a) have a counterpart in the queer necropolitics of transnational surrogacy, as schurr’s analysis (2007) of surrogacy arrangements in tabasco shows. one way of figuring the intersections of life and death and vitality and abandonment in play in these dynamics is by dwelling on the ways transnational adoption circuits and surrogacy arrangements similarly incite and capitalize on “surplus life” (cooper 2008; posocco 2014a), that is, an excess that emerges specifically out of violent historical transitions and crises. the analytics of queer necropolitics (puar 2007; haritaworn, kuntsman, and posocco 2014) are pertinent here, as they interrogate claims to queerness in the context of ongoing processes of colonization, occupation, dispossession, and genocide. they bring into focus “regimes of attribution of liveliness and deadliness of subjects, bodies, communities and populations and their instantiation through performatives of gender, sexuality and kinship, as well as through processes of confinement, removal and exhaustion” (haritaworn, kuntsman, and posocco 2014, 4; see also weheliye 2014). whilst the transnational adoption of children from guatemala emerged out of the thirty-six-year long guatemalan conflict and aggressively pursued neoliberal policies in the postwar period, in tabasco surrogacy flourished as the economic prosperity tied to the state-owned oil industry was severely affected by instability in the oil markets. as the oil sector slumped and transitioned from state monopoly to private enterprise, the number of clinics offering reproductive medicine services and surrogacy swelled, bolstered by laissez-faire legislation. i arrived in tabasco in november 2016, soon after the introduction of legislation that purported to implement a ban on surrogacies for non-mexican nationals. far from a clear-cut legal provision, the new regulation inaugurated a complex and uneven shift that included exemptions for pregnancies and surrogacy agreements already in place or ongoing. the governance, ownership, and future custodianship of bodily substance—notably gametes and embryos—stored by the clinics also presented a set of new open questions, as medical establishments strategized to assess the implications of the legal changes and the viability of continuing their activities in view of the ban.   transnational adoption and surrogacy are often treated as separate phenomena. they entail different degrees of scalability of emergent life in what anna tsing (2015) has aptly called “capitalist ruins.” when brought within the same frame from the perspective of the guatemalan/mexican borderlands, they may generate a sense of failure of comparison and analogy, incongruence, discrepancy, and lack of proportion (strathern 1991). from this perspective, the “ethnographic effect” (strathern 1999) that conjures up awkward and partial connections between domains suggests that adoption and surrogacy should be approached ethnographically and analytically as socially, politically, and historically (partially) interconnected social practices which emerge out of war, violence, conflict, and crisis. further, they should be viewed as implicated in “sex-and-race dispostifs” (avancso 2015) and queer necropolitics that have historically structured colonial and post(neo)colonial relations along axes of gender, race, sexuality, and class. when situated between guatemala and mexico, adoption and surrogacy appear to be enabled by social stratification, deep inequalities, and structural violence. they entail extractive processes and forms of exploitative gendered and racialized intimate embodied labor. as surrogacy replaces adoption globally and family-making practices are ever more reliant on clinical reproductive labor, the biological promise inherent in bodily substance means that it has to be not only extracted but also cultivated and brought to term (thompson 2005; cooper 2008). in turn, waste can be infinitely mined for further profit (kroløkke 2018). biological substance that can be stored indefinitely promises “value after life” (bunning 2017). fragmentation and specialization of tasks and processes rely on the mobility of substance and on networked infrastructures, in a context marked by “boom and bust” cycles of expansion and contraction in emergent bioeconomies (cooper and waldby 2014; parry, greenhough, and dyck 2016). in guatemala, biological substance is commercialized through private providers who collect, store, and trade gametes, tissue, and bodily substance. the broader implications of the ban on surrogacy for individuals not holding mexican citizenship were still unclear in tabasco in 2016, but in the immediate aftermath of the ban, and as ivf procedures continued to be administered, the surrogacy arrangements seemed to have been simply relocated. the extractability and mobility of bodily substance emerged as key. collecting, storing, and trading substance flourished in post-genocide guatemala too in this emergent transnational bio/necropolitical horizon.   forensic extraction, biological promises, and foreclosed futures in the postwar period, guatemala witnessed a notable growth in medical establishments offering services in new reproductive technologies and reproductive medicine. during the course of my fieldwork, experts in the sector reported that the first successful ivf procedure took place in 1990, though clinicians began pioneering training and clinical programs geared towards addressing infertility as early as 1976, mostly in private clinics. these clinics currently cater mainly to wealthy guatemalans and those traveling from the us, europe, and central american countries, notably el salvador and honduras. in conversations with me, those seeking their services regarded them to be considerably more affordable than similar establishments in the us. mainly offering procedures such as ivf, clinics facilitate gamete donation and routinely perform oocyte harvesting as an ancillary activity for clients requiring oocyte donors in the context of ivf, and more infrequently, surrogacy procedures. whilst surrogacy in guatemala is not permitted by law, and in practice occurs rarely, gamete collection and storage are now commonplace in the clinics offering ivf treatment. embryos that undergo genetic analysis and are shown to have abnormalities are stored through cryopreservation and are generally not destroyed. gamete donation is common and clinics manage cryopreservation as well as embryo donation. in the course of our conversations, specialists working in reproductive medicine clinics in guatemala noted that they had the expertise and excellent technical infrastructure to undertake a number of procedures, including commercial surrogacy, and they expressed frustration at the current system and the restrictions placed on their activities. they explained to me that the very few cases of surrogacy they had knowledge of were mediated by lawyers, who, having set up these arrangements between the individuals concerned, had then referred the patients to them. such arrangements ended when the legislation prohibiting transnational adoptions came into force in late 2007. in this context, these guatemalan fertility specialist clinicians who trained in the us and europe noted that, despite their excellent qualifications, they were unable to meet the high demand for these services due to the obstructive local legislation. they argued that it was regrettable that the excesses of the adoption system in the latter part of the twentieth century in the country should directly and indirectly influence legislation on new reproductive technologies and contribute to the stringent legal restrictions placed on their practice.   new reproductive technology provision in the country is nevertheless consolidating and expanding. genetic medicine services, for instance, are in their infancy, but also steadily growing. these activities take place in areas of guatemala city where private medical service providers are concentrated, often within gated developments where access is closely monitored and only granted if one is attending a prearranged appointment. medical infrastructures are located within highly securitized spaces where collection and storage of biological substance also take place. some reproductive medicine laboratories offer dna testing, a generic and ambiguous term, which in practice means that clinics offer testing for genetic conditions. these developments constitute new technological advances whose availability is newsworthy and widely reported in the press (méndez villaseñor 2015). such technoscientific practices are nevertheless largely out of public view and unfold in districts where the privatization of public space has been shown to be closely interconnected with the securitization and militarization of the city through private security companies (dickins de girón 2011), which protect wealthy enclaves in the neoliberal city.   knowledge practices and techniques in reproductive medicine are more mobile than the subjects whose bodies, substance, and bioinformation are processed in clinics and laboratories. a small number of the clinics that specialize in reproductive medicine have their own laboratories, which operate as subsidiaries. they are advertised as separate entities, according to specialization, though, in practice, they are headed by expert personnel who work across establishments. these laboratories adopt international protocols and often refer to their compliance with accreditation systems and standards such as the iso/ iec 17025 as assurance of the quality of their work and facilities. the emphasis on compliance with international standards betrays a broader anxiety about the status of the knowledge produced through forensic practices and techniques, and more specifically, forensic claims to scientificity. as christopher hamlin (2019) observes, cross-calibration and “credentializing” are often undermined by the self-referentiality of the comparative domains deployed in the processes of so-called standardization. credentializing, as a set of knowledge practices geared towards reducing complexity and grounding standardization, is tied to processes that have rhetorical and political currency, rather than concrete technical valence. it is significant, then, that reproductive medicine laboratories and the guatemalan forensic anthropology foundation (fafg) refer to the iso/ iec 17025 in the respective descriptions of their activities. full compliance with international regulatory frames regarding documentary practices, calibration, and analytics is not the only commonality between them. it may seem incongruous to consider reproductive medicine and forensics within the same frame. in guatemala, however, it is important to do so, as reproductive medicine and forensics occupy proximate fields, where knowledge practices and techniques cross domains of knowledge and expertise and produce new configurations of living and dying. the traffic in technical expertise, biological substance, and bioinformation between these domains reveals further connections between violent histories and new and old extractive practices that tie together life and death in unexpected configurations.   the fafg laboratory was established in 2008, with the specific remit to support forensic investigations on human rights violations, particularly cases of forced disappearance. the work of the forensic anthropology team started in the 1990s under the aegis of clyde snow (sanford 2003, 17) and over time, undertook many high-profile mass grave exhumations that developed into public events, remarkable for the level of participation of survivors and local communities they attracted. fafg’s national and international profile rose accordingly, as the forensic anthropology team provided expert witness statement and evidence in prominent judicial proceedings, such as the one against former president efraín ríos montt, indicted for genocide and crimes against humanities. the challenges posed by vast quantities of unidentified human remains have meant that over time, fafg has spearheaded numerous campaigns soliciting donations of dna samples from the relatives of the disappeared to assist in the process of identification. for example, following the discovery of large mass graves in the cemetery of la verbena in guatemala city, fafg director, forensic anthropologist fredy peccerelli, launched a nation-wide call for donations of dna samples in order to identify the dead found in unmarked graves, or “xx” according to the local convention, but in fact suspected to be the remains of hundreds of victims of forced disappearance buried in this cemetery, “hidden in plain sight” (snow et al. 2008).   biological substance and bioinformation from the living are required to identify the dead. fafg is therefore a leading provider of dna analysis in the country. its forensic laboratory also offers a range of commercial services such as paternity tests, servicing public demand in the context of a growing reproductive medicine sector. holding within the same frame reproductive medicine and forensics reconfigures domains of knowledge and expertise, foregrounding unexpected points of convergence and intersection. this shift in perspective produces a new configuration of biolabor, a term that appears to be sufficiently capacious to encompass the extractive practices tied not only to reproductive medicine (cooper and waldby 2014), but also those of forensic science. forensic anthropology’s operations are framed through a discourse of humanitarianism, but the biolabor inherent in forensic extractive practices should be inscribed in the racialized and racializing dynamics of (post)colonial extraction noted earlier in relation to wet nursing, adoption, oocyte harvesting, and surrogacy. they are deeply rooted in the histories of violence, conflict, and genocide in more profound ways than the rhetoric of “scientific practice at the service of human rights” allows. the partial connections between reproductive medicine and forensic science offer new insights into practices of “mining death” and the legacies of violence, conflict, and genocide. they suggest the importance of a critical engagement with the biological promise inherent in reproductive and forensic biolabor in the light of their common reliance on racialized bodies as a seemingly inexhaustible resource. the bio/necropolitical horizons of embodied partibility and exchange of substance (cf. konrad 1998) conjure up old and new scenes of extraction where practices for harvesting life and mining death point to differential distribution of liveliness and deadliness and racialized foreclosed futures.   acknowledgments the research presented in this article was supported by a wellcome trust/birkbeck institutional strategic support fund grant. i thank sigrid vertommen, michal nahman, and bronwyn parry for the invitation to participate in the global fertility chains international workshop held in london in 2019 and for their editorial guidance. i also thank the workshop participants for their feedback, ej gonzalez-polledo and marco chivalán carrillo for ongoing conversations and collaborations, and the two anonymous reviewers for their incisive reading and generative suggestions.   references anzaldúa, gloria. 1987. borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza. san francisco: aunt lute books. asociación para el avance de las 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claim that in contrast to chemical pesticides, ladybugs are natural, but the reality is more complicated. conscripting ladybugs into the war on insect pests at home in the garden is a continuation, not a departure, from the long history of militarized pest control in the us. this trajectory was not inevitable. the divergent discussions and management of the convergent ladybug and the harlequin ladybug reveal a tension. similar to the other lifeforms that traveled from asia to the us, the harlequin ladybug is not merely unacknowledged as an effective garden predator but is instead blamed for a wide range of ills. and the longer the harlequin ladybug is around, the less clear it is who the enemy really was, as in modern war. militarized pest control practices and imaginations have framed insects as both enemy and soldier in the garden, but there are other possibilities beyond seeing ladybugs as good and bad, natural enemy or just enemy. this essay is a part of the roundtable called “the housewife's secret arsenal” (henceforth hsa); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. the title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.   keywords ladybug, insect, pesticide, garden, home, war, biological control, pest     every year gardeners around the united states, overwhelmed with aphids or other small insects eating the plants in their garden, call in reinforcements—ladybugs. ladybugs (or ladybird beetles, as they are known in some other parts of the world) are a group of beetles. there are thousands of kinds globally, of which hundreds can be found in north america. while they can be many different shapes, colors, and sizes, most are small with red elytra (the distinctive shiny hard coverings over their wings) with small black spots as adults. the ladybugs that these home gardeners buy and release are one particular kind—the convergent ladybug (hippodamia convergens)—so named for the two white marks on their black pronotum (segment below the head) that angle towards each other (figure 1). figure 1. the convergent ladybug and the harlequin ladybug are two sides of one coin. they share many behavioral and life history traits—yet one is deemed a weapon in the war on insects and the other a target. a) hippodamia convergens (the convergent ladybug). source: “convergent lady beetle,” by flickr user gary chang, cc by-nc-sa 2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/gcchang/15452820882 b) aggregation of dozens of h. convergens on a grey and white rock. source: “ladybugs swarming,” by flickr user dru!, cc by-nc 2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/druclimb/5907250838/ c) aggregation of dozens of h. axyridis on a fence. source: “ladybug cluster,” by flickr user the real estreya, cc by-nc-sa 2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/gcchang/15452820882/ d) harmonia axyridis (the harlequin ladybug). source: “harlequin ladybird harmonia axyridis,” by flickr user john quine, cc by-nc-sa 2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/john5554/48134958977/ procuring ladybugs for release is relatively simple and cheap. there are many vendors who sell them online, and with the click of a button, a bag of adult convergent ladybugs can arrive at one's home. ten dollars could buy a few hundred; and one hundred dollars could buy ten thousand. buyers are instructed to simply sprinkle them on their infested plants. then, the ladybugs get to work—eating other insects considered pests, ones that eat plants and gardeners want gone. framed as the natural alternative to chemical pesticides, releasing convergent ladybugs is instead a continuation of the same militarized rhetoric and techniques historically used in the us to combat suspected invaders or exercise control over the naturescape (duong 2023). chemical insecticides for home garden use largely emerged out of military chemical warfare products developed for the first and second world wars (russell 2001). us federal entomologists were instrumental in developing and advocating domestic uses of formerly wartime chemicals, such as organophosphates (russell 2001, 76). other common household and garden herbicides, chemicals to control undesirable plants, also emerged from military research and use in conflicts, including chemicals such agent orange, a herbicide enlisted by the us military into the chemical warfare arsenal deployed during the vietnam war (zierler 2011, 67). yet as these chemicals became more widely used in domestic spaces during peacetime, there was extensive backlash as impacts of broad-spectrum and long-lasting pesticides were revealed (carson 1962) and as some scientists pushed for a ban on “ecocide” through herbicides (zierler 2011, 14). the trade-offs of using them were deemed insufficient outside of wartime use on enemies that had been dehumanized in part through comparisons to insect pests (russell 2001, 27, 110, 161, 212-13). this legacy lives on. since world war ii and the cold war, the us entered a long period of militarization that reshaped american life, infusing martial imagery and metaphors into everyday culture (bryan 2013, 4). arguably, the us became even more punitive in the intervening years, with the growth of the prison-industrial complex and the emergence of victims' rights in politics and television (sherry 2005). additionally, the us launched many other domestic rhetorical and material “wars,” including the war on drugs (peniche 2015) and the wars on fat and obesity (mcmichael 2010). representations of insects in postwar american literature and film also shifted. literature and women's studies scholar catherine cassel's work has found that insects in these films were often portrayed as hyper-reproductive, using both gender and race stereotypes to portray these insects as foreign invaders taking over the world, while also portraying their victims as vulnerable, unsuspecting, white american housewives (2016, 50-64). cassel also argues that these films fit into a longer history of us films portraying insects and invaders more generally as threats that must be destroyed to save both the nuclear family's home and, by proxy, the homeland (9-17, 50-64). convergent ladybugs are caught in the crossfire, labeled as both belonging to the homeland ideal and called in as mercenary soldiers to defend it. for most home gardeners, convergent ladybugs need to be hired; they do not already live there. they are harvested from the “wild,” a process made possible by their life history; they assemble in large groups, often in the sierra nevada mountains in california. sellers explicitly acknowledge this ladybug practice of coming together—and that harvesting, versus the cost of cultivating—is the only way they would be in the business (green thumb nursery 2021; natures good guys 2021). once collected, the ladybugs are kept in a refrigerator in a sort of stasis—not fed nor actively cared for, warehoused and waiting to be called up to duty. sellers refer to these ladybugs as “natural” and “nature's good guys” —while also calling them the “best general soldiers” (green thumb nursery 2021; natures good guys 2021). while sellers claim that, in contrast to ladybugs, pesticides disrupt the “delicate balance of nature” (nature's way ladybugs, n.d.), the reality is more complicated. gardeners releasing ladybugs in the us are relying on the capture and imprisonment of wild animals that are moved thousands of miles, conscripted to fight aphids and other creatures that enjoy eating plants. claims of “natural” to buyers mask the sellers; process, which holds these ladybugs in a liminal fugue state in refrigerators, while they await transport to the battleground. there are many potential harms to releasing ladybugs similar to those of using chemical pesticides. these risks include causing declines in populations that are harvested for home garden releases, bringing diseases and other pests to other ladybugs in the transplanted location, and competition with local ladybugs and other insects for food (jepsen and black 2014). once removed from their collection area, those ladybugs will never return—and it is estimated that millions are collected to be sold for ladybug releases every year (jepsen and black 2014). this displacement can potentially result in insufficient ladybugs to control the insect pests in central california. in turn, the release of ladybugs in home gardens could be accelerating the chemical treadmill, resulting in added pesticide use in the region from where they were removed. while its aggregating winter behavior makes it easy and profitable for sellers—and its voracious feeding makes it desirable for gardeners—the convergent ladybug is just another weapon in the long war on insect pests in the american home and garden. yet this trajectory was not inevitable. these same celebrated traits are deemed repulsive and scary in other ladybugs. nowhere is this tension more clear than divergent discussion and management of the convergent ladybug and the harlequin ladybug (harmonia axyridis) (figure 1). while both ladybugs are effective predators for garden pests and both have winter aggregations, only the convergent ladybug is celebrated for these traits. also known as the “asian lady beetle,” the harlequin ladybug is part of what gender and ethnic studies scholars karen cardozo and banu subramaniam refer to as the “assembling of a multispecies asian/america” (2013, 4). like the other organisms they discuss, it is an example of “invited invasions” (cardozo and subramaniam 2013). the harlequin ladybug was originally released in the us in the early twentieth century as a biological control agent of pest insects of food crops. while the earlier twentieth-century planned invasions were deemed necessary and good, later unintentional introduction and spread has been labeled an invasion. this is not surprising. the earlier introduction aligns with the immigrant gifts movement in the us, public efforts and exhibitions in the early twentieth century that showcased arts and crafts by foreign-born residents, ostensibly celebrating their aesthetic contributions while still maintaining a deficit view of immigrants and their cultures. even allen eaton, a curator and author writing a contemporaneous book on immigrant art, in trying to distinguish himself from those who “fear that the pure american stock was in danger of contamination from european immigrants” (eaton 1932, 14), said of the artists, “he has something to give, be it ever so little” as gift to american culture (27). this framing viewed and valued immigrants as cultural resources for extraction, especially for culinary and domestic knowledge, as evidence of the cosmopolitan taste of american housewives (hoganson 2015, 88). simultaneously, consumerist writing at the time claimed us exceptionalism (superiority) in food abundance and domestic sanitation (hoganson 2015, 94). eaton and others' mention and celebration of specifically european immigrants is intentional. the introduction of the harlequin ladybug in us history was during a period in which asian immigrants (and insects) were subjected to widespread xenophobia. as historian and international studies expert jeannie shinozuka's (2013) scholarship on japanese beetles and japanese immigrants has shown, us scientists and officials raised fears of foreign people and foreign insects destroying crops, specifically to protect land ownership and dominion they imagined as rightfully belonging to white residents. and as cassel's work emphasizes, narratives about insect invasions were explicitly gendered xenophobia. the insect invaders, not just the housewife victims, were also coded female, either taking over through population growth (e.g., ant queens and colonies) that “represent uncontained feminine excess” (cassel 2016, 46) or as monstrous threats to masculinity (e.g., praying mantids that eat their male partners after copulation) (50). these images echo the racialized sexualization of asian women past and present as “villainous temptresses: in both us law and media since at least the nineteenth century (hwang and parreñas 2021). similar to the other lifeforms that traveled from asia to the us, the harlequin ladybug is not merely unacknowledged as an effective garden ally; it is blamed for a wide range of ills. while the convergent ladybug is prized for winter aggregations, making them easier to collect, the harlequin ladybug is often referred to as a ”nuisance household invader“ (roy et al., 2016, 1015), due to their overwintering groups, which can sometimes be inside houses. and while the convergent ladybug is intentionally bought and moved around the country for its voracious feeding, the harlequin ladybug's appetites are potentially so effective that they are widely claimed to be the cause for displacement of and decline in native ladybugs in several countries (roy and brown 2015; harmon, stephens, and losey 2007), without acknowledging that all types of ladybugs are thought to be in decline (harmon, stephens, and losey 2007). no matter—these traits have led the harlequin ladybug to be widely perceived as a foreign invader to exterminate, yet another pest in the eternal war on insects, rather than an ally in the garden. in fact, some recent scientific guidance to homeowners has tried to claim that harlequin ladybugs aren't ladybugs at all (mississippi state university extension 2017). this nativism parallels the experiences of asian immigrants in the us progressive era, when exaggerated ”evidence“ from physicians grounded in eugenics and prejudices often labeled immigrants as diseased and harmful to public health (markel and stern 1999). figure 2. a conception of ladybugs is that they are round, red, and have symmetrical round black spots on their wings. this figure shows harlequin ladybugs do look very similar to this iconic image, but convergent ladybugs do not (they are oval and have a distinctive patterned “neck” area that is not visible on any of these). all images publicly licensed. sources: a) ”14102009-softboxinfantil-9,“ by flickr user raúl hernández gonzález, cc by 2.0 www.flickr.com/photos/rahego/4011937297/ b) ”children's ladybugs,“ by flickr user fs999, cc by-nc-nd 2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/fs999/8558046744/ c) ”(?),“ by flickr user jason taellious, cc by-sa 2.0, https://www.flickr.com/photos/dreamsjung/3662195160/ d) ”img_0055.jpg,“ by flickr user tosyum, cc by-nc 2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/tosyum/494498149/ e) ”ladybird nail art,“ by flickr user neil milne, cc by-sa 2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/borispumps/5958248489/ and yet the longer the harlequin ladybug is around, the less clear it is who the enemy really was, as in modern war itself. it is striking that the default aesthetic of ladybugs in popular culture strongly resembles the harlequin ladybug more so than the convergent ladybug. its image is ubiquitous—red, round, and with black round spots (figure 2). this is the quintessential ladybug—and a fiction. it is an amalgamation of ladybugs that are native and good, that deserve to exist, an imagined nature (van dooren 2011). the harlequin ladybug troubled this imagination, as it matches the archetype but is nevertheless undesirable. it is likely that many gardeners cannot tell the difference between the two, let alone the other hundreds of kinds they may find. in this sense, ladybugs are ”estranged companions“ (hollin and giraud 2021), with us cultural and chemical pest control trajectories leaving the legacy that gardeners are unable to know there are many different types of ladybugs in the garden, to know they don't need to buy them from across the country, or to know that most ladybugs exhibit the behaviors that get the harlequin ladybug labeled a nuisance (biting, smelling, etc.). gardeners became estranged in part due to the history of using broad-spectrum chemical controls. the recent return to more ”natural“ pest controls, as well as shifts in which ladybugs are common, means that some ladybug bodies may seem new and unfamiliar, or at least more unfamiliar than others. yet many ladybugs in practice serve the same function for gardeners. as science studies and posthumanist scholars joanna latimer and lynda birke (2009) write in their work about people's relations with horses, ”natural technologies“ are a paradox, requiring the construction and maintenance of rules about which kinds of technology and tools are considered natural (or not) and why. the classification and understanding of ladybugs are complicated by the changing, slipping categories scientists are giving them. for example, some entomologists have begun using the term ”adventive,“ meaning ”having arrived from somewhere else and established feral populations“ (frank and mizell 2008, 2121), to refer to the harlequin ladybug (harmon, stephens, and losey 2007) and other ladybugs. in using ”adventive,“ entomologists acknowledge ladybugs' foreignness; however, unlike the label ”invasive“ applied to organisms deemed harmful, ”adventive“ allows scientists to intentionally carve out space to value pest control by ladybugs to gardens and farms. there is also a call to reframe biological control as using ”natural enemies“ for ”planned invasions“ and that supposed ”aggressiveness“ and ”cannibalism“ behaviors are now deemed desirable (abram and moffat 2018), independent of questions of where the insects originated. another example is referring to non-native ladybugs as ”additional species" (cranshaw 2014) in cooperative extension documents written for public homeowner audiences. examining ladybug lives here is not to accept scientific categories or to privilege scientific ways of knowing (as angela willey [2016] cautions against), but to examine how science upholds particular forms of social order. it's more convenient to make new labels for ladybugs than to acknowledge the unequal benefits and legacies of pest control and homeownership as projects of white supremacy in the us. who is to say which ladybugs belong and where? as cardozo and subramaniam write regarding other invited invasions and assemblages, us institutions have vilified particular species rather than structural conditions that introduce them and shape communities (2013, 8-15). militarized pest control practices and imaginations have framed insects as both enemy and soldier in the garden. yet there are other possibilities beyond seeing ladybugs as 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about the environment. athens: university of georgia press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n5dg.     author bio kaitlin stack whitney is an assistant professor in the science, technology & society department at the rochester institute of technology in new york. she previously worked for the us environmental protection agency office of pesticide programs in the office of chemical safety and pollution prevention, before receiving her phd in zoology with a minor in science and technology studies from the university of wisconsin-madison.     special section: probing the system: feminist complications of automated technologies, flows, and practices of everyday life experiments with social good: feminist critiques of artificial intelligence in healthcare in india     radhika radhakrishnan gender research manager, world wide web foundation radhika.radhakrishnan5@gmail.com     abstract in contemporary india, ai-enabled automated diagnostic models are beginning to control who gets access to what kind of medical care, with the most invasive systems being aimed at underserved communities. i critically question the dominant narrative of “ai for social good” that has been widely adopted by various stakeholders in the healthcare industry towards solving development challenges through the introduction of ai applications targeted towards the sick-poor. using feminist theory, i argue that ai systems should not be seen as neutral products but complex sociotechnical processes embedded with gendered knowledge and labor. i analyze the layers of expropriation and experimentation that come into play when ai technologies become a method of using diverse bodies and medical records of the sick-poor as data to train proprietary ai algorithms at a low cost in the absence of effective state regulatory mechanisms. i posit that an overwhelming focus on “spectacular technologies” such as ai derails public efforts from solving the actual needs of populations targeted by the “ai for social good” narrative, and from the development of sustainable, responsible, situated healthcare solutions. lastly, i offer social and policy recommendations that would enable us to envision inclusive feminist futures in which we understand and prioritize the needs of underserved populations over capitalist market logics in the development, deployment, and regulation of ai systems.     keywords ai for social good, feminism, healthcare, development, india     introduction the narrative of the relationship between humans and technology has undergone considerable change in the past century. this change has had much to do with feminist scholarship developing constructive approaches to engage with technology and with changing perceptions of technology itself (achuthan 2011). in india, specific to artificial intelligence (ai) technologies, discourses describing ai co-exist as simultaneously positive (as found in “ai for social good” narratives of technologists endorsing ai to solve social challenges) and critical (as found in stances of feminist scholars of technoscience), both of which this paper will explore. these oscillating attitudes towards technology are particularly characteristic of contemporary postcolonial societies. it is in this postcolonial context that i attempt to bring fresh perspectives to these seemingly disparate theoretical framings of technology by critically examining the implications of perceiving ai technologies as objective solutions to social and development challenges in healthcare.   today, automated diagnostic models powered by machine learning (ml) are beginning to control who gets access to what kind of medical care, with the most invasive systems aimed at marginalized communities at the intersections of class, caste, gender, and other relevant social factors (burt and volchenboum 2018; lecher 2018). these technologies (a subclass of ai),1 trained on historical data to uncover patterns and learn from examples, are able to learn to predict and classify generalized future outcomes for the purposes of decision making. they are based on large datasets (big data) that reflect historical and systemic biases of their sociocultural environment, which affect the outcomes of decisions made by the data models. backed by state support advocating ai usage for furthering public health policy objectives and addressing development challenges, these automated diagnostic systems aim to assist doctors in making patient diagnosis decisions—for example, to algorithmically detect diabetic retinopathy (gulshan et al. 2016) in patients through retinal image capturing and processing. my research focuses on the use of technologies that harness ai to assist medical practitioners to diagnose diseases under the umbrella of “ai for social good,” with attention to the intersectional lived experiences of patients in low-income marginalized contexts.   this paper is organized as follows. the second section describes the research methodology employed for this study, as well as its limitations and ethical challenges encountered. in the subsequent three sections, i argue that the “ai for social good” narrative and technology solutions under its umbrella perform as “spectacular technologies” (nandy 1988) that derail from sustainably meeting the actual needs of populations targeted by their own identified agenda. this derailment happens because the initiatives inspired by this rhetoric perform the following functions. first, they replace labor with capital to frame social development as innovation opportunities to gain social legitimacy and state support, biasing healthcare investment and policy decisions (as described in “critically unpacking ‘ai for social good’”). second, they fail to account for people’s socioeconomic and gendered lived realities and therefore produce limited knowledge and a consolidation of gendered care stereotypes under the guise of objectivity (as described in “gendered labor and knowledge in ‘ai for social good’”). third, they use diverse bodies and medical records of the sick-poor as corpus data to train proprietary ai algorithms at a low cost in the absence of effective state regulatory mechanisms (as described in “ai for social good or experimentation?”). in the last section, i critically reflect upon the social and policy implications of the use of ai diagnostic technologies for the social good, with recommendations to constructively move forward in this scenario and imagine feminist futures that prioritize the healthcare realities of targeted underserved populations in the design, deployment, and regulation of technological solutions.   research methods i carried out a series of qualitative, semi-structured, and in-depth interviews with different stakeholders in healthcare and technology settings in bengaluru (karnataka), madurai (tamil nadu), and thiruppuvanam (tamil nadu) in 2018. bengaluru (with a population of over 10 million, making it the third most populous city in india) is the capital of the southern indian state of karnataka; madurai (with a population of about 1.5 million) is a major city in the southern indian state of tamil nadu; and thiruppuvanam (with a population of about 21,000), in sivaganga district in tamil nadu, is a town neighboring the city of madurai. bengaluru was chosen as a site because it is considered the country’s “it capital,” housing the biggest technology companies and start-ups in india’s health-tech ecosystem. madurai and thiruppuvanam were chosen because hospitals and healthcare centers here are among the few sites where ai-enabled diagnostic systems were being tested at the time of conducting fieldwork.   the research tools i used for the study were interview schedules, and the analytical tool was manual coding. i used purposive and snowball sampling and interviewed twenty-one men and seven women in a total of twenty-two interviews in english and tamizh. the participants i interviewed include six leading ai data scientists from six technology companies, seven leading healthcare delivery and five paramedical personnel across four hospitals and clinics, four patients, two investors of healthcare technology start-ups, and two representatives of a people’s health movement. some names of participants have been changed as per their requests to protect their identities, and the changes have been mentioned where applicable. i also carried out two hospital tours as well as a tour of a rural health center for participant observations, and analyzed policy documents related to indian government ai initiatives between 2017 and 2021.   all of the interviewed participants representing established national or global organizations are currently performing clinical validations in different settings,2 some of which i observed during my fieldwork in southern india. pre-deployment, or early-stage research on ai-enabled automatic diagnostic models, such as investigated in this study, is a crucial stage because once these digital systems scale up, they can be remarkably hard to decommission (eubanks 2018).   one of the limitations of my study is that i was unable to collect data on the caste composition of research participants owing to complexities of navigating cultural sensitivities of caste in the field as a dominant-caste researcher. therefore, i have not incorporated caste as a primary lens for analysis in this study despite caste being a significant axis of stratification in indian society. my primary ethical concern for this study has been to negotiate with the politics of studying “up” as a female researcher. the medical personnel, data scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors i interviewed are predominantly cis-male persons holding positions of expertise in the field. there was a noticeable power dynamic in our interactions including my routinely being talked down to and, in one instance, stalked and solicited by a senior medical practitioner during my stay in the field. another key challenge was to access institutional research participants since trade secrets, institutional secrecy, and corporate non-disclosure agreements made it insurmountably difficult to gain access to private institutions and i was often denied entry by their public relations teams. thus, this study is exploratory in nature and can be taken forward by addressing these limitations and challenges.   critically unpacking “ai for social good” the rhetoric of “ai for social good” has been adopted by organizations as well as the indian state in its ai policy positions. global technology companies such as microsoft (n.d.), intel (n.d.), and ibm (n.d.) have publicly articulated their philosophical stance conceptualizing ai as a tool for social good. google’s first ai principle is “to be socially beneficial”; their work aims to use ai to “explore and address hard, unanswered questions” (google, n.d.). similarly, the wadhwani institute for artificial intelligence, a non-profit research organization that partners with the bill and melinda gates foundation in india (gates foundation 2019), primarily focuses on “ai for social good” by aiming to “transform the lives of...billions of poor, underserved people” through ai-based solutions (wadhwani, n.d.).   to aim a critical lens at these claims of “social good,” i begin by interrogating how technology companies and healthcare organizations in india—which collaborate with each other to develop ai-enabled diagnostic tools—describe “ai for social good.” i unpack what “social good” means for their philanthropic approaches, and analyze whether and how these definitions shift on the ground in the healthcare spaces i studied by focusing on who has the power to shape ai-driven futures.   among the six technology companies and four healthcare delivery partners offering ai-enabled diagnostics that i studied, all of the collaborative interventions are being developed with the rationale of improving healthcare access to rural india, which has an acute shortage of skilled doctors, as observed by one of the research participants at a global technology company: “it [the motivation] came from the need [for]...increasing access. you need a specialist to diagnose, and they're not available in many parts of the country, and even if they are, it's expensive...even quality is suspect. we improve with both—we can reduce cost and increase access by quite a lot into areas that don't have that” (mr. gaurav, ai data scientist; name changed). in such under-resourced communities, ai-enabled diagnoses would “democratize access” to healthcare, according to the founder and head of an ai healthcare start-up in india (mr. wasim; name changed). a data scientist also mentioned that “it's going to be profitable for us in the long run because healthcare is one of those areas where you can make profits” (mr. gaurav, ai data scientist). these perspectives hint at a form of social good that is intended to catalyze social development, yet is driven by an interest in capital flows benefiting corporate interests. noting the ideologies inherent in deploying democracy in the name of neoliberal, global capitalism reveals motivations underlying corporate philanthropy.   the rhetoric of social good is also expressed in the state’s policy positions on ai. in 2017 the artificial intelligence task force was instituted by the department of industrial policy and promotion under the union ministry of commerce and industry of india (artificial intelligence task force 2018). specific to healthcare, the report states that “ai has the potential to transform delivery of health services in rural areas” (department of industrial policy and promotion 2018, 21–23). further, india’s niti aayog (national institution for transforming india), a government think tank that makes policy recommendations and is involved in the policy’s implementation, produced a national strategy for artificial intelligence in 2018. the strategy document states its primary objective as to “leverage ai for economic growth, social development and inclusive growth” (niti aayog 2018). the niti aayog report also advocates for the use of ai in healthcare (2018, 24–29) offering the same reasoning used in the department of industrial policy and promotion report geared towards social development sanctioned by state support for the same. these policy documents commonly reflect the optimism that ai can help india accelerate the pace of its socioeconomic development.   to further analyze how the “ai for social good” rhetoric reflects socioeconomic power structures, i now turn to interrogating who is targeted through these social good interventions and what factors have led to their position requiring these interventions.   i borrow the term sick-poor from purendra prasad’s (2007) sociohistorical appraisal of health systems in contemporary india, wherein the sick-poor comprise an under-resourced cross-section of india’s vast population that is cut off from meaningful access to healthcare. understanding the reasons for this in a technological era and unpacking the experience of “ai for social good” for the sick-poor first requires a better sociopolitical understanding of the indian healthcare ecosystem. public healthcare activists i interviewed broadly locate indian healthcare today between a completely dysfunctional public health system and a predatory private health industry. both stakeholders target the sick-poor, the state aiming to “control and convert it into a certain idea of development” and the private sector driven by “a monetary idea of profit” (mr. vijay seethappa, public health activist). thus, these technological interventions are happening almost exclusively within an unaffordable (for the majority of the population) private healthcare industry that exists alongside a dysfunctional public healthcare sector.3   the generally poor quality of the indian public health system is used to justify technological interventions within the private healthcare system, rather than to support an argument for improving the public healthcare system. for instance, given the widely acknowledged concern of scarcity of medical practitioners in public healthcare, the question one should be asking is, “if you’re not able to get doctors to sit in the most peripheral centers…what are you offering technology for? why are doctors not sitting in those peripheral centers?” (mr. vijay seethappa, public health activist). though india has the capacity to produce 67,000 graduating doctors per year (ministry of health and family welfare 2017), public health activists suggest that, given the increasing costs of medical education, graduating medical students lack incentive to join public healthcare in remote parts of the country and can pursue more lucrative alternatives such as super-specializations in medical fields. concurrently, state policies create greater opportunities for doctors to join the private healthcare system as opposed to public healthcare. many of the efforts to enhance private healthcare are similarly rooted in the deployment of technological tools.   it is important to foreground this structural context to understand the reasons for labor shortages in healthcare in india and to assess how quick-fix technological solutions are inadequate and unsustainable. the status quo focus is on altogether replacing labor with capital in the form of advanced technologies in privatized spaces. this implies that the technological interventions being taken up do not necessarily arise from the actual needs of the targeted population: “what is the point of having an [ai-enabled] scanning machine in a place where there is no electricity?” (ms. akhila vasan, public health activist). many common technological solutions represent a capitalist profit logic. as feminist technology scholars have argued, the medical-industrial complex routinely channels resources into profitable areas with no connection to satisfying actual human needs (wajcman 1991, 73).   technology is also deeply embedded in india’s national imagination for development. historicizing the role that science and technology have played in narratives around social development, ashis nandy (1988) argues that science has primarily been an instrument put to the use by the colonial state. nandy posits that in postcolonial india, the focus of science has shifted to “spectacular science,” which has been used as a “reason of the state” to further political interests and, consequently, has given “spectacular technology” a central place in science. such technology, he argues, has created conditions wherein the indian middle classes believe that technology will tackle all their sociopolitical problems without questioning the domination of technocratic elites over the decision-making process (nandy 1988).   applying the idea of “spectacular technology” to ai-based diagnostic systems provides a framework to understand why technologies driven by ai are often more complex (and costly) than needed to address the problem. for instance, to measure birth weight in poor rural homes, wadhwani ai (n.d.) could create a simple, inexpensive, accurate measuring scale rather than an expensive, ai-based smartphone application to provide three-dimensional models of newborn babies. however, wadhwani ai (n.d.) identifies that a key ethos in the spectacular technology approach is to employ ai in global health to empower maternal and child health. this strategy demonstrates a conscious effort on behalf of technology designers to focus on developing “spectacular technology” even if less elaborate, more cost-effective, and sustainable solutions can be found for the same social problem. thus, the “ai for social good” narrative and initiatives inspired by it perform themselves as a “spectacular technology”; this approach is used by ai developers and associated stakeholders to frame social development as an opportunity to innovate by appropriating the needs of the poor, while gaining social legitimacy and state support.   further, this approach reveals a particular kind of post-development privatized future for the domain of healthcare. it is a future in which the inequities of the existent healthcare system remain in place under the valorizing guise of “spectacular technology” while also incentivizing the creation of new privatized medical subspecializations (i.e., ai-enabled diagnostics) that further channel resources away from public healthcare towards specialized privatized healthcare futures. these medical subspecializations offer doctors in privatized healthcare spaces with newer areas to explore and lay expert claim to, thus also attracting funding and support for the development of the field (pfeffer 1987). this professional incentive is evidenced by dr. lalith (name changed), a consultant ophthalmologist at a national medical establishment chain that collaborates with a global technology company for an ai-enabled diagnostic solution:   “in 2015, there was an evolution of my work. i didn’t know about ai before...once i got to know about it, it’s been a fabulous experience...ai became an obvious layer that would add amazing value to the work we did and...that is something that got our teams excited.”   claiming expert technical knowledge is one of the methods of legitimizing subspecializations within healthcare because funds and professional acclaim are often distributed within the medical profession according to the technological sophistication of the specialty (wajcman 1991). in such a context, the introduction of ai-enabled healthcare technology has the effect of driving an increase in its usage by its mere existence, which in turn drives the development of more advanced technologies (through collaborations between private medical establishments and ai technology companies) as the healthcare space becomes more technologized. these effects bias investment in public healthcare as noted by ms. akhila vasan, a public health activist:   “the amount of resources that are devoted to the higher-level private facilities is much higher than the first-level phcs [public healthcare centers]…so, you’re making the first level dysfunctional and pushing people to seek care at higher levels, which is wasteful and resource-intensive.”   therefore, the increase in deployments of ai-based “spectacular technologies” channels resources away from public healthcare towards more technologized super-specialized futures, which are shaped and driven by private stakeholders without heed to the needs and experiences of the sick-poor. the “ai for social good” agenda, as such, derails sustainable problem solving for underserved populations in need.   gendered labor and knowledge in “ai for social good” the advent of the “ai for social good” narrative drives the technologization of medical services targeting peripheral populations. the authority of the medical expert—which has thus far predominantly served central/urban populations in privatized healthcare, as seen earlier—is being extended by deploying data-driven diagnostic systems in under-resourced areas. as a result, more bodies (of the sick-poor) are being brought into formal medical institutions in the private sector, enabling them to be governed. i use the term governance here to refer to a biopolitical form of power over the bodies and lives of the sick-poor by controlling their access to and experiences of equitable healthcare.   to better understand the nature of this governance, it is crucial to inquire who are the experts designing such systems of diagnosis and governance, whose laboring bodies operationalize these systems, and the nature of knowledge produced through the systems. after providing a conceptual framework to situate these enquiries, i engage with them through observations from my fieldwork and feminist scholarship on epistemology and labor: first, through an analysis of the gendered nature of labor in ai-integrated healthcare systems in india, and, second, by unpacking the construction of knowledge systems in this ecosystem.   reframing ai technologies as complex sociotechnical processes to critically investigate the role that gender plays in the design and deployment of ai-enabled diagnostic systems, a fundamental shift is needed in the traditional conceptualization of ai—and more broadly, technology—as objective and neutral. the diagnostic decisions produced by algorithmic models are widely held, especially in industry and government spheres, to be objective. to wit, a research participant mentioned the motivation for developing their ai solution as “it will help the [doctor] provide evidence-based treatment to the patients without any bias" (mr. indra, ai data scientist at a global technology company; name changed). another research participant from one of the global leaders in data technologies said:   “the thing about healthcare is that it’s a very imprecise science. because the decisions there have a lot of ambiguity and a lot of mistakes…to improve the objectiveness of medicine, [we are] bringing in more data to make decisions…[and] a little bit of mathematics and statistics and engineering” (mr. gaurav, ai data scientist; name changed).   feminist scholarship has consistently debunked this myth of objectivity in science and technology (adam 2000; harding 1986; longino 1987). contemporary feminist scholarship has raised several concerns under the broad umbrella of “fairness, accountability, and transparency,” including the framing of technology to center the choices of the makers and modelers of technology in evaluating the fairness of its outcomes. feminists have shown that data reflects historical and systemic biases, and discrimination in the sociocultural environment that it represents affects the outcomes of algorithmic decisions, which are particularly disparate for marginalized communities, and naturalize prejudices against them (noble 2018; o’neil 2016; west, whittaker, and crawford 2019). ai in particular is shown to not only reflect but also amplify biases by combining multiple generalizations on training or input data to maximize the accuracy of the model.   for example, a consultant ophthalmologist at one of india’s leading national hospital chains mentioned that "you need to take all of this as a double-edged sword…the technology will do good if you tell it to do good; it will do bad if you tell it to do bad" (dr. lalith; name changed). this reductionist reasoning relating to complex technologies reflects the understanding that automated decision making by ai-healthcare tools renders ai technology an inherently neutral product until it is transformed through human involvement for “good” or “bad” applications.   feminist scholars of technology such as judy wajcman (1991, 60–63) have shown that it is crucial to address the contexts in which technologies are produced. rosalind pollack petchesky (1987) and michelle stanworth (1987) viewed technology as neutral or ambivalent with the potential to empower or disempower based on its contexts and use. they argued that instead of problematizing technologies themselves, feminists should problematize the power relations and institutional settings within which these technologies are applied. such theories can be broadly classified as theories of the social determination of technology (winner 1980).   theories of the social determination of technology, though widely popular in the 1990s, invisibilize the ways in which technologies themselves can embody forms of power and authority (longino 1987). on the other hand, the theory of technological politics draws attention to the response of modern societies to certain technological imperatives, and acknowledges that there are sociopolitical processes at play in the common conceptualization of technology as a neutral product which resist the notion that technical artifacts have political qualities (winner 1980). rather than insist that we reduce technologies to the interplay of social forces (as suggested by the theories of social determination of technology), the theory of technological politics identifies technologies as political phenomena in their own right.   by framing ai technologies as complex sociotechnical processes, i reject the core assumption of a social determination of technology approach, which suggests that technology itself is neutral. when we permit ai technology to be viewed as a finished neutral product separate from the processes of its design, we risk allowing the knowers of the subject (i.e., expert stakeholders involved in the creation of ai applications) to escape scrutiny under the guise of unbiased and objective decision making. in framing technological systems as complex sociotechnical processes, we question the widespread notion that automated decision making translates into better decision making, by foregrounding the subjectivity and personal, political, and disciplinary commitments of the ai developers and their institutional settings. i now turn to this analysis, addressing how these complex sociotechnical processes are gendered, constructed with biased labor and epistemology.   gendered labor in “ai for social good” medical professionals and data scientists who are engaged in the process of collaborating on designing automated diagnostic tools, as well as using them to diagnose patients, mostly comprise of upper-class cis-men. one of the ai teams from a global company developing an ai diagnostic tool for india stated that only 15 to 20 percent of the people working on their project were women, and that this figure was even lower in other projects: “two of the doctors we work with are women, but a lot of the specialists we have consulted are men” (mr. gaurav, ai data scientist; name changed). in addition to the lack of gender diversity, there were few disciplines beyond computer science and medicine represented on teams building these systems. i did not find any social scientists or ethnographers (trained in understanding the social impact of processes and products) to be directly involved with any of the development and deployment teams that i interviewed for this study.   i also visited remote vision centers to observe the workflows in these sites and interview key stakeholders.4 here, only young women are recruited as mid-level ophthalmic personnel (mlops) at the hospital and its vision centers, revealing an age and gender bias among employees. prior to the advent of ai-enabled diagnosis, the usual work of mlops ranged from clinical tasks such as refraction or assisting, and non-clinical tasks such as housekeeping and organizing medical records. since the introduction of ai-enabled technologies, mlops in smaller clinics collaborating with base hospitals are additionally in charge of tasks such as scanning the patient with ai-enabled tools for the automated diagnosis.   despite the increase in workload, there are no additional wages offered to mlops to work with ai systems. in fact, there is no wage difference between mlops irrespective of their work. they are recruited after the completion of their twelfth standard education (usually at the age of seventeen or eighteen years) on a contract of five years. their salaries go into a bank account from which they are not permitted to withdraw money without the explicit permission of their parents or senior medical personnel at the base hospital. at the end of a specific employment duration, they are entitled to receive a salary bonus that “could be used for their marriage or education,” as i was informed by the hospital’s engagement coordinator. the restrictions on a young mlop’s finances limit her negotiating potential, which contributes to a form of financial control that healthcare systems wield over female link workers. such forms of financial control have historically been used to socially and culturally “train” female workers into being more submissive and therefore less likely to unionize against the employer (elson and pierson 1981). in the digital economy, this patriarchal form of financial control cements the undervalued nature of gendered labor that forms the backbone of ai systems on the ground.   moreover, i was informed by a doctor at the base hospital that mlop positions were open only to women because “women are more compassionate than men,” and it was believed that “such things [care labor] can be done only by women” (dr. arun, general physician; name changed). referring to the socioeconomic context of the town, the doctor also stated that “in these areas, women are usually the caregivers. fathers are not very involved. usually, they have male doctors and female nurses. it is fitting for the hospital’s culture.” men were recruited in these positions only to “accompany women” when the hospital could not “send a single female candidate with [patient younger than fifty years of age] for medical follow-up camps” (dr. arun, general physician; name changed).   job opportunities here reflect gendered care stereotypes, where devalued care work is seen as “women’s work” and the high-paying and valued expert roles of the doctors are largely occupied by men. moreover, the attitudes of doctors evidenced a savior ideology—suggesting that recruiting young women to these jobs immediately after their schooling when “they are ready for marriage” offered “self-empowerment, safety, and dignity through their work,” saving them from a life of “marriage and agricultural labor” (dr. arun, general physician; name changed). this logic suggests that merely increasing work participation for women leads to their empowerment. such reductive framing is problematized by amar jesani (1990) who argues that the labor market favors men over women, and, more relevant here, that the division of labor within occupations is sex-biased. this patronizing logic is commonly held across the domain of healthcare. since this logic is so endemic, it is normalized and therefore not recognized as biased. the gendered labor that is constitutive of the sociotechnical processes of ai-diagnostic systems is thus largely invisibilized under the guise of objectivity, reinforcing gendered notions of care work (atanasoski and vora 2019), and making them harder to contest.   gendered knowledge in “ai for social good” gendered hierarchies of labor are sustained by gendered hierarchies of knowledge in the design of ai systems. diagnostic predictive ai requires the ability to codify knowledge in the form of rules that can be used to design the system. there are “clinical guidelines…established by the clinical community” to be followed for enabling the “algorithmic prediction to map to a particular diagnosis” (mr. gaurav, ai data scientist; name changed). moreover, it is generally agreed in the indian ai-healthcare ecosystem that evidence-based diagnoses are more accurate and thus preferred. thus, a medical practitioner's experiential and subjective knowledge of healthcare is considered less valuable, and even detrimental, to the project of designing an unbiased data-driven system. this worldview reflects a firm hierarchy of evidence over contextualized knowledge that subverts human expertise and experience and denies them agency.   further, within this hierarchy, the knowledge of some is more valued than others. as alison adam (2000) shows, in classical epistemological approaches, the identity of the knowing subject is not important, which disguises an “implicit hierarchy of knowers” in the system, and privileges the ai designers who are mostly white, male, middle-class global north professionals over the perspectives of women. this privileged “deleted knowing subject” can be correlated to the model of the “expert” that is dominant in healthcare technology (mol 2008). this hierarchy leads to invisibilized relationships between the knowledge represented and the subject doing the knowing (adam 2000, 240), privileging the knowledge and viewpoints of the “expert.” the ai-healthcare industry, globally and in india, is largely populated by such male, upper-class, upper-caste professionals, but also engineers and data scientists who are often far removed from the socioeconomic contexts of those for whom they design tools. such models reproduce ideologies that are damaging for marginalized communities and reinforce prejudices about them. for example, a consultant ophthalmologist at one of india’s leading national hospital chains implementing ai decision-making in their hospitals said,   “i would put patients in different buckets of intellect...you will not expect a rural individual to come in and then expect them to understand ai...for those who understand, for those who are from the it sector...they are thrilled" (dr. lalith, consultant ophthalmologist; name changed).   this doctor differentiates rural patients and it experts to justify why the hospital does not provide the former with complete explanations about the role of ai in the automated decision making of their diagnosis. by denying patients this information, such hierarchization limits a patient’s ability to fully understand their own diagnosis.   moreover, technology designers have little awareness of the critique and assessment that restrain development. for example, some employees of global technology companies i interviewed have never allowed an independent study of their ai diagnostic tools; nor have they published any scientific papers demonstrating how the tool affects patients. none of the data scientists i spoke to were aware of how the technology was being used outside of the laboratory, as evidenced by mr. gaurav’s remarks about consent:   “for the validation we're doing, we give the consent forms to the [healthcare] partners. a lot of the hospitals did not care about it. i don't know what exactly they told the patients…the partners had their own processes…i don't know how seriously they take it…i never saw the practice in action" (mr. gaurav, ai data scientist at global technology company; name changed).   as such, technology designers fail to inquire as to whether these diagnostic technologies are in fact improving the health of the poor—an approach that is patronizing and denies patients the right to fully consent to their diagnosis and treatment.   in keeping with this trend, the sick-poor “targets” of outreach initiatives are marked by their class location, and almost always belong to the same strata of marginalized communities. their social locations are disadvantaged vis-à-vis private stakeholders who are responsible for medical data collection. my fieldwork showed that the underserved communities that are targeted through such ai solutions are never consulted by technology designers to understand their actual needs, and feedback about their experiences with the technology are not sought by technology designers when the technology is in use. technology companies value performance of their systems over the experiences of people with them, as indicated by a data scientist at a global technology company:   "the first goal is performance, definitely. and we have some indicators where the ai is already better than certain doctors on an aggregate level. so the question is, should we go ahead with this [implementation] or should we wait for explanations to patients?…i don't think explaining to patients is critical…they might not be most informed to understand it…they may even misunderstand it and cause panic" (mr. gaurav; name changed).   thus, the lives of the sick-poor are rarely accessed as sources of knowledge; instead, they are expropriated as the targets—as opposed to beneficiaries—of outreach campaigns offering solutions without attention to their needs and experiences.   this abdication of the lived experience of the poor violates key feminist theory that seeks to empower marginalized communities by centering their knowledge. for example, sandra harding’s (1992) “feminist standpoint epistemology” insists that some knowledge—such as that of those who are oppressed—can only be accessed via lived experiences or their standpoint; this knowledge is invisible to others, leaving the dominant groups in an epistemologically disadvantaged position due to their privileged positions in societies stratified by gender, race, class, sexuality, and other divisions. further, since “social good” is meant to translate to healthcare outcomes relevant to “social justice,” chandra talpade mohanty argues that an “experiential and analytic anchor in the lives of marginalized communities…provides the most inclusive paradigm for thinking about social justice” (2003, 510).   building on harding and mohanty, i argue that the “ai for social good” rhetoric reflects the dominant group’s limited knowledge and drives the development of mismatched classes of technology for solving the social developmental challenges it has set out to address. it also masks gendered knowledge and labor in its design under the guise of “objectivity” of ai. when poor, middleand lowlevel stakeholders are not consulted in decision-making processes that determine their own futures, this is “spectacular technology” at play. these dynamics engender an expropriation of the lived experiences of the poor for whom the technology does not generate any value, and also fails to meet the state’s social development goals.   ai for social good or experimentation? “ai for social good” initiatives not only expropriate the lived experiences of the sick-poor through their gendered dominant group epistemology and labor workflows (as analyzed so far), but are also a site for experimentation upon the sick-poor. the development of ai-enabled diagnostic systems, which requires large datasets, is facilitated by collaborations between the medical establishment and technology companies, which arguably have two primary purposes: sharing of patient data in the form of medical records, and having access to the bodies of patients to test the ai-diagnostic tools. for technology companies, the introduction of ai technologies thus becomes a method of using bodies and medical records of the sick-poor as data to train ai algorithms.   india is an attractive site for data collection for many reasons, and ai application experiments are the latest in a long history of clinical trials conducted in the global south, and india specifically, by us pharmaceutical companies (al jazeera 2011). india is a sought-after testing ground for experimental pharmaceutical drug trials due to spoken english, an established medical infrastructure, welcoming attitudes toward foreign industry, and, most importantly, legions of poor, illiterate test subjects who are willing to try out new drugs (al jazeera 2011). in this context, i now investigate the ethical problematics and risks in using india as a testing pool for experimental ai technologies, how this plays into a prioritization of corporate profit over respect for patient rights and knowledges of the poor, and its potential impact and future created. specific to the case of automated diagnosis systems in healthcare, i analyze three primary factors that aid the process of automation and impact national health and development plans by setting in motion a privatized techno-utopian future: the diversity of indian populations; cost effectiveness of collecting data in india; and an unregulated healthcare ecosystem.   one reason for locating these algorithmic validation processes in india is the diversity of populations in the country, as noted by a research participant (who heads the medical team for their ai project) from a national hospital chain:   "india is a hub for diabetic retinopathy. you don’t see these variations of diabetic retinopathy patients back in the us. they [technology collaborator] wanted to train the software with the numbers that we have—our hospital" (dr. naresh, hospital director; name changed).   india’s diversity covers much of the spectrum of the world’s populations, and the indian state, in collaboration with market agents, makes these diverse indian populations available to global north corporate interests as “experimental subjects” (rajan 2005). “spectacular technology” is once again at play in the articulation of these idealized “experimental subjects.”   second, i observed that the data collection for training ai-enabled diagnostic algorithms is being combined with patient treatment.5 for example, patient data collected for treatment is simultaneously used as input data to train the ai algorithm, and the algorithmic result is manually correlated with a doctor’s diagnosis. if there is a match between the manual and automated diagnosis, the patient diagnosis is confirmed and reported to the patient. if not, the automated diagnosis is reviewed by a doctor, and the feedback is entered back into the algorithmic system as part of the clinical validation.   by combining patient diagnosis with experimental trials, the cost of data collection for the technology companies and healthcare providers is significantly reduced as there is no additional cost to conduct a separate set of procedures to design the algorithm. this scenario raises ethical concerns through a conflict of interest between the technology company’s market-driven interests and the patient’s best interests, such that divergent interests have to be catered to by the doctor. since the marginalized socioeconomic contexts of the sick-poor reduce their bargaining power and ability to demand their right to effective healthcare within a medical-industrial complex, such a conflict of interest would normally favor vested market-driven private interests over patient interests. during the debates around the karnataka private medical establishments (amendment) bill 2017, public healthcare activists that i spoke to had demanded that hospitals should not only declare all the clinical trials underway at a given facility, but also that the clinical trial facility should be physically separated from the treatment facility in a hospital. however, these demands were not taken on board due to pushback from private stakeholders. as a result, the reduction in the costs of data collection for private stakeholders is offset by a compromise on patient interests and their right to seek healthcare without participating in experimental algorithmic trials.   third, the weak regulatory landscape in india contributes to what could be called a “low rights environment” where there are few expectations of political accountability and transparency (eubanks 2018). for instance, though patients are asked to sign a consent form for their data to be sent to the base hospital for training the algorithm, i observed that most patients did not understand what they were consenting to, and where their diagnosis was coming from—through human versus machine evaluation. this was observed in the following interaction at a local clinic during my fieldwork (translated from tamizh):   patient: can you give me a xerox copy [photocopy] of this [consent] form? in my house, my kid is studying, he can read english.   nurse: we cannot provide a copy. why don’t you read this tamizh version of the form?   me: do you understand what the form says?   patient (after reading the tamizh form): i don't know   patients end up consenting to the collection of their data for training the ai algorithm without understanding the scenario because:   “consent…is given under so much duress with so little information. you can never beat that information asymmetry in medical situations. and this is where everything is stacked against the patient” (ms. akhila vasan, public health activist).   as such, consent of the sick-poor is already assumed. moreover, patients have no real agency in choosing or rejecting to opt into these experimental trial treatments involving ai since the alternative is no medical care at all. one medical practitioner remarked, "conditioning that you are putting into the patient's mind…is going to go a long way in how they accept an ai insight" (dr. lalith, consultant ophthalmologist; name changed). a lack of choice translates to a lack of patient opposition to data collection, which is construed as consent to the use of these technologies, as this statement from the chief medical officer of a leading hospital chain in india highlights:   "we were wondering if patients are going to accept the technology…but people are accepting it…there is nothing to avoid or hesitate to sign [the consent form]. everybody signs…they are willing to accept what is there" (dr. kiran, chief medical officer; name changed).   in this context, prasad (2007) argues that in india health has not been a rational choice but rather a preference imposed upon the sick-poor. through a historical account of the plurality of medical systems in india, with a specific focus on structures of caste and class, prasad argues that current debates in the health sector revolving around the choices between public and private healthcare are not meaningful choices for the sick-poor. many of the sick-poor in india are desperate due to the lack of medical care, and are hence coerced into entering into experimenting trials to get treatment, thereby nullifying any informed consent.   thus, whereas in the traditional case of clinical trials, pharmaceutical companies are complicit in the process of expropriation for testing experimental drugs on the sick-poor, the advent of ai-enabled data systems recreates a similar scenario wherein technology companies take on the role of pharmaceutical companies for testing the outcomes of their algorithmic technologies on the sick-poor. in this case, the training of the algorithm on the bodies of the sick-poor people is used to improve the diagnostic technology. while information asymmetry is likely to exist between pharmaceutical companies and healthcare delivery partners, here it is amplified due to the specificities of technology company operations, as well as specificities of data-driven medical technologies that differ vastly from those within the domains of healthcare. this asymmetry can also manifest in the form of human prejudices about people and communities that are deeply embedded in the technology, practices and use-cases around it, making them seem “natural,” as indicated in the medical practitioner’s reference to the assumed lack of intellect or capacity to understand ai-assisted medical services among the rural poor.   in the face of such expropriation, there is limited (if any) effective legal protections available for the sick-poor. for instance, there is no consensus (amongst the seven medical practitioners i interviewed from leading national hospital chains in india) regarding questions of accountability in case of an error in the automated diagnosis from the ai-enabled system, despite the technology already being tested upon the bodies of the sick-poor. some medical practitioners sidestepped questions of accountability by suggesting an “intent to do only good…even if there’s something that’s gone amiss” (dr. lalith, consultant ophthalmologist; name changed). the chief medical officer of a leading hospital chain remarked, “i don't think anybody knows the answer to who should be held responsible for errors…it’s a milliondollar question” (dr. kiran, chief medical officer; name changed). this deliberate ignorance of expert medical practitioners justified by their intent geared towards social good reflects an evasion of ethical responsibility towards the sick-poor.   moreover, the state plays a foundational role in erasing the sick-poor from all decision making regarding the management of public healthcare, and their legal rights. the state is in fact complicit in producing socio-legal-technical conditions under which the sick-poor emerge as an available “data source” for experiments. kaushik sunder rajan (2005) argues that there exists a “hybrid state-corporate assemblage” in india that is aimed at the nation-state becoming a “global player” in the global marketplace through corporate entities whose conditions of possibility are largely enabled by the state. this dynamic is akin to nandy’s (1988) accusation that science and development demand sacrifices from and sufferings of ordinary citizens. finally, state support for such private-industry-led ai-enabled healthcare technologies is evident in the key decision by the telangana government in 2017 to adopt microsoft’s artificial intelligence–based eyecare screening technology as part of the rashtriya bal swasthya karyakram program under the national health mission (microsoft news centre india 2017). thus, instead of providing equitable public healthcare access to all, the state plays the role of an enabler for private technology companies and healthcare providers to operate within market logics that experiment upon and expropriate the needs of the sick-poor.   while a harm-based framework is often employed to assess impact, it is difficult to have evidence of harm for emerging technologies (i.e., at the stage of development and testing) because these harms are often not tangible and observable given the opaque nature of the technologies themselves and the institutions they are produced in. in such cases, we need to move away from the need for evidence of harm and still be able to pre-empt the dangers from such technological interventions. we can highlight such dangers by focusing on potential risks arising from practices around the technology’s design, attending to the ethics involved in health technology testing, and heeding patient consent and choice. virginia eubanks (2018) proposes a useful framework to evaluate the impact of an automated tool that is targeted towards the poor; the framework questions whether the tool increases the self-determination and agency of the poor, as well as whether the tool would be tolerated if it was targeted at non-poor people. as has been analyzed in this section, automated diagnostic tools generally neither generate any value gains for the targeted sick-poor nor increase their agency, but in fact worsen both these conditions of possibility. this scenario arises through, first, the use of their personal medical data for training ai algorithms that do not generate any value gains for the sick-poor, and second, by burdening the sick-poor with risks emanating from uncertain and unforeseen results of such untested technology through the experimental use of automated diagnostic systems in medical services.   social and policy implications: envisioning feminist futures expropriation through technological outreach initiatives under the umbrella of “ai for social good” is rooted in the marginalized class and gender dynamics of patients and workers in the healthcare ecosystem and is facilitated by alliances between private technology and healthcare industries at the site of these social dynamics. in other words, private technology companies supported by private healthcare providers and the state are exploiting ai as a tool for profit and the governance of the bodies of the sick-poor rather than harnessing it as a means to enable better care and development within the domain of healthcare.   the “law of the hammer” (as it is commonly referred to) is a cognitive bias that involves an overreliance on a familiar tool: "i suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail" (maslow 1966, 15). viewing ai as a “tool” (similar to a hammer), stakeholders developing ai applications view social and developmental problems as nails that can be fixed through the usage of the tool. as has been argued, what unites many of these ai applications is their focus on using “ai for social good” and consequently targeting underserved populations in the country.   as noted earlier, this fetishization of ai takes us into technocratic futures wherein collaborations between the state and private technology and healthcare companies aid the exploitation of the sick-poor justified by an agenda of development. these powerful stakeholders are taking the lead in ideating and shaping possible ai-led futures for the country, with the targeted communities having no say in these futures. further, such data-driven systems are becoming ubiquitous in the lives of the sick-poor in enabling their limited access to healthcare and associated services. for instance, digital identification (in the form of aadhaar, a unique identity number for indian citizens) is mandatory for the poor to access social welfare schemes (khera 2017), and the indian government has passed legislation to create a national digital infrastructure under the national digital health mission for health data in the country (radhakrishnan forthcoming). these technologies are crucial to the state’s imagined healthcare future in which the health of the sick-poor would be managed technologically through collusions and collaborations with the private healthcare industry and technology companies so that the state does not itself have to provision for sustainable solutions to development challenges. instead of managing sickness and poverty, the state thus invests in technologies that manage the individual sick-poor. eubanks terms this uptake of data-based tools for the poor “technological innovations in poverty management” (2018, 13). thus, the deployment of ai tools aids in the creation of a sick-poor population by channeling resources away from public healthcare towards technologization and privatization of healthcare and incentivises the move towards a future in which these conditions are maintained by centering the role of ai technologies in the state’s imagined healthcare future.   to realize a more feminist future that truly empowers underserved communities in accessing equitable, quality healthcare—which is the stated rationale for many “ai for social good” initiatives —i recommend some structural and policy-level changes in this section as follows.   feminist scholars have mounted the challenge of what kinds of problems can be ethically solved using ai without exacerbating marginalizations (eubanks 2018; keyes 2018; noble 2018; taddeo and floridi 2018). building upon their work, instead of asking, “how can ai solve this problem?,” i propose a methodological reframing to foreground the question of “what problems can ai solve?” by keeping in mind the feminist futures we wish to achieve. this reframing would enable stakeholders to channel resources towards “healthcare for all” (which is a worthwhile social development agenda) instead of “ai for all” (which is the current focus of the indian government) (niti aayog 2021). such a vantage point allows us to focus on finding need-based solutions to problems that are within the scope of technologies such as ai to solve. such solutions are much more suitable than those developed by expropriating the needs and lived experiences of the underserved to serve market-driven interests of technology developers looking for opportunities to innovate towards “spectacular technology.”   for such solutions to be effective, we must move towards a praxis of interactive methodological approaches at the grassroots level that not only take into active consideration but center the needs and lived experiences of underserved communities in the quest to find solutions in a bottom-up, reflexive, open manner. the feminist methodology of participatory action research offers one such approach that promotes mutually respectful relationships, shared responsibilities, and an emphasis on local capacity building (read et al. 2014). a successful technological intervention carried out using this methodology in india is reflected in the initiative of gram vaani (moitra et al. 2016). another such grounded methodology more specific to the deployment of ai technologies is the “ai on the ground” approach that focuses on using ethnography to observe, listen to, and speak with people on the ground (acm 2021). through these approaches, stakeholders can carefully challenge their biases and commitments by engaging meaningfully with impacted communities to understand their histories and needs.   further, if designers are drawing upon the experiences of underserved communities, they should ensure that the applications they build benefit those communities in return and increase their agency through the use of the applications (eubanks 2018). diversifying the teams that develop such technologies by actively including women and social scientists who are trained in understanding social implications in the lives of people, and building institutions that encourage such diversity in their workplace culture, will be immensely helpful in this process (west, whittaker, and crawford 2019).   given the state’s collusion with this ecosystem as analyzed earlier, policy-level changes are also necessary. in a policy brief on transparent algorithmic decision making in india, amber sinha and i (radhakrishnan and sinha 2020) propose four thresholds for ai regulation that are applicable to ai diagnostic systems and would be useful for policymakers to ask themselves while regulating these systems: (1) is there a vast disparity between the primary user and the impacted party? (2) is ai trying to model or predict human behavior? (3) is there either a likelihood or high severity of potential adverse human impact of the ai solution? and (4) are there no reliable means for retrospective adequation? if the answer to one or more of these questions is affirmative, the authors propose greater regulatory scrutiny of the ai system. in the absence of reliable evidence of satisfactory solutions, we propose that the regulatory response must align itself to appropriate limitation or prohibition on the ai system until such evidence is gathered (radhakrishnan and sinha 2020).   furthermore, as noted earlier, there are limited legal protections available for the sick-poor. in this context, i propose that there must be an established consensus in india on who would be held responsible in case of an error in diagnosis, malfunction of the technology, or the use of inaccurate or inappropriate data in the ai system; how the acceptable level of responsibility and liability for the stakeholders would be determined; and what the process for recourse would be. there must also be established procedures for obtaining patient consent meaningfully, backed by legal regulation enforcing penalties for non-compliance. further, meaningful alternatives to healthcare services must be available to the sick-poor to reject ai-based diagnostics. all of these legal protections must also apply to ai systems at the pre-deployment stages of data collection, testing, and clinical validation. in line with the demands made by public health activists for the karnataka private medical establishments (amendment) bill 2017, all clinical trials underway at a given health facility must be publicly declared, and there must be a physical separation of clinical trial facilities from treatment facilities in a hospital. these demands must also be extended to algorithmic testing facilities. such measures would ensure that the rights of patients are safeguarded and given precedence over capitalist interests, and that patients would have meaningful recourse when their rights are violated.   on a more fundamental level, the questions we must ask of ai systems are not purely technical questions requiring technical solutions (such as independent algorithmic auditing), but should also focus on the social dimensions and the epidemic scale of the problem affecting millions of sick-poor persons and setting up dangerous futures for them. the gendered nature of labor that characterizes ai system development, and the biased, patriarchal knowledge that it reflects and reproduces takes place within a national and global context of experimentation and expropriation on the targeted sick-poor.   on one level, this shift in focus has implications for the sick-poor for whom value is not generated through these technological interventions, but rather is expropriated through the experimentation of untested medical technologies upon their bodies. on another level, this shift also has crucial implications for a feminist understanding of these systems as gendered, sociotechnical processes located within a global political economy of data that is actively enabled by state regulation and lack thereof. these harmful implications include shifts in healthcare outcomes for millions of patients (who are treated as “experimental subjects”) such as poorer understanding of their own ai-aided diagnosis due to patronizing attitudes by medical practitioners, denial of rights such as agency, choice, and meaningful consent in accessing healthcare through the data-based governance of their bodies, and further entrenchment of inequitable classand gender-based power dynamics in the domain of healthcare. this re-focus further implies structural shifts in public healthcare investments by channeling resources away from public healthcare towards technologized and privatized healthcare futures.   highlighting and foregrounding these concerns in our understanding of ai systems and becoming aware of their implications (especially in the lives of targeted sick-poor communities), then, not only destabilizes the “ai for social good” narrative—especially its tendencies to naturalize our social conventions of and responses to ai systems—but also helps feminists to mount challenges to these conventions through critical interrogation and resistance.   acknowledgments all research and labor are social and collective. thus, while the views expressed herein are personal and the shortcomings my own, many stimulating conversations over the past four years with experts, colleagues, and friends have deeply informed my perspectives and challenged my viewpoints. this research was carried out originally at the advanced centre for women’s studies, tata institute of social sciences, mumbai, india, during my master’s in women’s studies (2017–2019) and taken forward at the centre for internet & society, new delhi, india, during my employment as a programme officer (2019), undertaken as part of the big data for development network, established and supported by the international development research centre, canada. i am endlessly indebted to dr. asha achuthan, whose advice, guidance, and constructive criticism during my research at tata institute of social sciences have significantly shaped this inquiry. i am incredibly thankful to sumandro chattapadhyay, research director, centre for internet & society, for reviewing this paper prior to the peer review. i am grateful to the special section editors and reviewers at catalyst for taking painstaking efforts to suggest improvements to this work. most importantly, i am indebted to all research participants who were a part of this study for sharing their time and thoughts with me; your experiences and expertise have entirely driven this research. i am deeply thankful especially to the participants from marginalized and underserved communities; i hope this work has done justice to your lived experiences and takes forward the struggle to catalyze social change through feminist research.   notes 1 machine learning (ml) is a subset of artificial intelligence (ai). ai is considered the broad discipline of creating intelligent machines, while ml usually refers to the development of machines that can learn from experience. most ai applications involve the usage of ml because developing what is commonly known as “intelligent behavior” requires a considerable corpus of “knowledge” in the form of datasets, and (machine) learning is the easiest way to obtain that “knowledge.” in this paper, while i specifically study medical automated diagnostic applications that are developed using ml, i extend my critique to the broader domain of ai, and hence use the term ai to refer to the technology powering such automated medical tools.   2 broadly, the main stages for designing and deploying an ai algorithm in healthcare include collecting and preparing data, selecting a model to train the data, evaluating the model’s performance with testing data, validating the model in clinical settings, and, finally, commercially deploying the model in clinical practice. for instance, one of the technology companies i interviewed that is developing an automated diagnostic tool for the detection of a specific disease uses an image classification deep learning model to train a retrospective development dataset of images of the potentially infected organ, which were graded by medical experts to check if the said disease exists. these images were retrospectively obtained from existing medical records of various indian hospitals among patients who had been earlier presented for screening of the disease. the resultant algorithm was then validated using another set of graded datasets. they are currently completing further testing processes and applying the algorithm in clinical settings in indian hospitals to determine whether the algorithm’s usage could lead to improved patient outcomes compared with current medical expert assessment.   3 while privatization of the industry is not a new phenomenon for the country, what is being observed today is not only an aggravation of the manner the industry has been privatizing, but also consolidation in the market for medical services with large corporate giants swallowing up smaller private entities and centralizing delivery of healthcare through franchisee units in various private hospitals. such a market consolidation of medical services lends to corporate institutions exercising an almost monopoly-like control over data (medical data of patients) collection and analysis within privatized and centralized data infrastructures. for detailed analysis on the state of affairs in the indian healthcare industry today, please refer to gadre and shukla 2016.   4 under this healthcare delivery model, each doctor remotely overlooks eight vision centers, which receive roughly between 100 and 150 patients per day. a patient’s medical data (such as imaging scans) collected at the vision center is transmitted to the remotely situated doctor for evaluation at the base hospital, who provides the diagnosis over a video link (diagnostic telemedicine). the diagnosis report is then printed out at the vision center and handed over to the patient. a doctor visits a vision center once a month. each vision center serves roughly 25 to 30 villages within a 5-kilometer radius. given that the total population required in a region to set up a vision center is estimated to be a minimum of 50,000, vision centers are typically set up in regions where there are no hospitals or practicing doctors nearby.   5 to train an automated diagnostic tool to detect diabetic retinopathy through retinal images, the technology provider that builds the algorithmic model requires a large body of “training data,” which it obtains through collaborations with large eye-care hospitals across the country. these large base hospitals have collaborations with other local clinics in the region at which the ai-enabled diagnostic systems are 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"do artifacts have politics?" daedalus 109 (1): 121–36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652.   author bio radhika radhakrishnan is a qualitative researcher currently at the world wide web foundation as a gender research manager. with interdisciplinary academic training in gender studies and computer science engineering, her research focuses on understanding the challenges faced by gender-minoritized communities with digital technologies in india and finding entry points to intervene meaningfully using feminist methodologies.     roundtable donna haraway and banu subramaniam in conversation (april 22, 2021—excerpt) full conversation available here.     donna haraway university of california, santa cruz haraway@ucsc.edu   banu subramaniam university of massachusetts, amherst banu@wost.umass.edu     banu subramaniam (bs): i'm struck again and again about the kind of erasures that happen in academic discourse. i think it was several years ago when the field of genetics “discovered” gender! i remember reading a piece, about this, i think it was in nature—and there was no mention of feminist work at all. below, anne fausto-sterling had a comment pointing out that feminist have been making this point for almost 30 years! yet, the insight was absorbed but no credit given. and it's not just within the sciences, this happens across different disciplines. we repeatedly find that achievements of feminists, indigenous, queer, and other scholars of color get erased, but the knowledge project moves on in a slightly different form. ultimately the work gets completely cut off from those activists and the political project that feminist technosciences. i wonder how you see your own work and how it has been taken up within feminist technosciences versus in the sciences. do you see these tensions in how your work gets taken up?   donna haraway (dh): oh yes, absolutely. before i address that in more detail, i want to affirm that sense of repeated erasure, repeated disappearing. and i think that the folks who have been most eloquent on this are indigenous scholars, who have been disappeared in terms of their grappling with health and science and land and food, in terms of grappling with these issues that i think are feminist science studies issues. i’m thinking, of the current generation, people like zoe todd and a slightly older generation but really the same generation, kim tallbear and others who, in my view, are, among other things, feminist science scholars. and that they are disappeared, really, amazingly easily. but they also have an astonishing ability to refuse to disappear. both as peoples and as strong women. and i take heart from that.   in my own work, i am acutely aware that women scholars, trans scholars, queer scholars, scholars of color, scholars who do not fit the ongoing ferocity of the individual within human exceptionalism, however critiqued that approach has been, can be disappeared. scholars that don’t fit that, disappear from citation networks really quickly. they are there for a while and then they drop off. and i watched a biologist, margaret mcfall-ngai, give a talk that itself was complaining about the erasure of women in development and cell and marine biology. she was eloquent about it and she was talking about all kinds of important women, especially lynn margulis. and almost her entire citation apparatus in the talk was to white men. so, i laughed and i said margaret did you realize what you did in that talk? and she was shocked. and i think i've done some of the same—i think the ease with which we disappear each other, and ourselves, and are disappeared by others is a force. and that's why i take things like citation networks or a kind of ongoing willingness to occupy prestige hierarchies with a kind of absurdist laugh, but nonetheless, and foregrounding the earned prestige of others. i mentioned kim and zoe. those are two, yourself, tania, others, affirming the earned place in achieved knowledge practices. out loud and forcefully. and using whatever skills, in propaganda, in media, in performance art, in i think humor is an incredible tool. i am really intent that feminist science studies as a project and its people not be disappeared.   […]   bs: there have been several questions about the question of citations. amanda parmer wants to hear more about how you see the effects of your citational practice shaping the work that grows out of your work methodologically. there's another question from sheiva rezvani asking, “i would like to hear more elaboration of the rebuilding networks as antidiscriminatory practice specifically within a transdisciplinary, inter-disciplinary world, especially when these newer areas of academia don’t necessarily have an established canon.”   dh: citation practice is something i've been interested in for 50‑odd years or more. partly because i am a teacher i am aware that many of my ideas come in discussions with students in tutoring sessions or in office hours or walking across campus. a whole lot of things that i ended up working and publishing were initiated by people who will never have a name in that apparatus. far from thinking that i or we should only publish peer reviewed articles or books and that our citation apparatus ought to be thin, or professional, i have erred on the side of citing anybody who's conversation i took and ran with. including unpublished conversations. and i'm still doing it. and i also have a little set of orthopedic exercises around citations and those orthopedic exercises change. and when i look back at what i've done and indeed what i still do, i see the multiple ways in which i fail. these are recommendations. i like my practice and i'm kind of recommending it. i think it's not a bad way to deal with this. it's not the only way. my little orthopedic exercises—are all of my citations to white people? are they all to people who are conventionally able? are they all to people who have gotten their degrees in western universities? are they all north american even though they're talking about what's going on in mexico? is my citation apparatus actually engaging with the kind of issues being talked about in this lecture or this publication or this interview? the answer is always no. but i have a little checklist. and this really sounds—this sounds ridiculous. but if i find there's exactly zero of a category, let's say in a reading list for a course, by the time that course is taught, there are a couple of entries in that category that was zero. like i didn't have any—i know, for example, that the scholarship on the disappeared, by argentinian or mexican or other writers, is really thick. am i citing only english language papers? do i—i have the ability now, at least in my late 70s, actually to read spanish scholarship. i didn't before that, that really wasn't okay. i think citation apparatuses are also about language. i actually think it's a good thing to have a checklist that keeps changing and to take citation seriously because it makes work show, it makes people show, and it makes categories show. and they are always, not only imperfect, but sometimes actually hurtful.   i have had my feelings hurt by critique but i've also been ashamed. for example, i did not at all adequately cite black scholarship around plantations when i coined the term plantationocene and its meanings in past and present. i said the scholarship was there but did not name the authors and activists. these were conversations and not formal papers, but if oral conversation omitted citations, the citations should have been there in the revisions when the conversations were published. i think being ashamed is an okay thing. it's not the same as guilt and you try again. but you can only try again if we work with each other. i think citation is really important.     author bios donna haraway has written extensively about sciences, technologies, feminisms, and both human and more-than-human beings in inheriting, making, and sustaining diverse worlds. story telling is one of her principal foci.   banu subramaniam is a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the university of massachusetts amherst and serves on the editorial board of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience.   kelsey kim. (2020). review of a future history of water, by andrea ballestero (duke university press), catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), p. 1–3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kelsey kim, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license book review | a future history of water, by andrea ballestero (duke university press, 2019) kelsey kim ucla kelseyckim@ucla.edu water is indisputably essential to human life. yet it was only in 2010 when water was declared a human right in the international sphere through the united nation’s resolution 64/292. in a future history of water, andrea ballestero explores water’s transition from commodity to human right by asking, what does water as a human right look like in capitalist societies, and how does price affect accessibility? through her fieldwork in both costa rica and brazil, two countries that have not fully incorporated the right to water into their constitutions, she examines how bureaucratic decisions impact access to water for thousands of people. for ballestero, water is much more than what comes from a tap. rather, it includes all the people and processes that inform decisions about water, including activists shaking empty water bottles filled with coins to protest the commodification of water; bureaucrats in offices making decisions that affect household access to water; and pacts between citizens and state officials promising to care for water. by examining the everyday work and decisions that imbue water with value, she considers the possible futures of water as its status and accessibility is negotiated and renegotiated between various actors and technolegal devices. these devices, through “larger processes of water price setting, legal reform, or the promotion of care for water,” are used to determine water’s worth (p. 8); they also frame ballestero’s ethnography, as each chapter is dedicated to a different device: formula, index, list, and pact. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) kelsey kim, 2020 2 the first chapter looks to how the market prices of water are determined in cocles, costa rica, through the use of a formula. this formula was created by aresep (autoridad reguladora de los servicios públicos), the public services regulation authority responsible for regulating water costs; with the help of a community association, they track water consumption levels and run them through the formula to produce the monthly water bill. rather than focusing on residents’ experiences with water accessibility, ballestero makes a conscious effort to show readers the bureaucratic labor of making water accessible. as water utility services are prohibited by law from making a profit, the water bill can only recoup operation costs. yet deciding the recuperation of these costs is somewhat flexible and open to regulators’ interpretation; therefore, regulators can tweak the formula to reflect their humanitarian obligation to make water more affordable. the second chapter looks to the consumer price index (cpi) in deciding the cost of water in costa rica in relation to other household goods. using the international benchmark that water should cost no more than 3% of the monthly household income, regulators utilize a cpi—an index of common household items and services and their prices, from cable to groceries to clothing—to adjust inflation rates by comparing these costs to the cost of water. ballestero reflects on how the cpi has changed over the years—not only are items frequently added and omitted as regulators strive to reflect the average contemporary household, the cpi itself has undergone several name changes as well. for example, known as the cost of life index in the 1930s, its current name, consumer price index, now reflects an unmarked consumer. ballestero notes the irony of regulators utilizing the cpi as part of their humanitarian efforts to make water more affordable, as the index now puts consumption at the forefront, defining the household instead by the most commonly purchased goods and services. in other words, “objects push humans to the background” as regulators attempt to fulfill their humanitarian obligations to make water more affordable (p. 99). chapter 3 examines how a list defining water’s materiality is used to curtail costa rica’s constitutional reform efforts to include water as a human right and public good. arguing that water as a public good leads to exploitation, the libertarian party has compiled and employed a taxonomy of thirty-one types of water, from rain to laundry water to ice cubes, to question who would own water if it were to become a public good. they pose the question, for example, that if our bodies are 70% water, can they be owned by the government? in doing so, the libertarian party pushes back on attempts to give new meanings to water, effectively slowing book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) kelsey kim, 2020 3 down efforts of constitutional reform. the fourth technolegal device and chapter, “pact,” shows readers the process of creating a promise to care for water in ceará, brazil. concerned residents, state regulators, non-profit directors, and a mix of other public and private interest groups all gather at weekly public meetings to uphold and commit to a pact for shared responsibility of water. rather than creating an enforceable, legally binding agreement, this pact is meant to be a collaborative process—a living agreement—to break brazil’s legacy of the coronelismo, or the local elites who, until the 1990s reform, controlled and privatized water access. diverging from the other three devices, this chapter highlights the collaborative process between citizens, the state, and other actors in creating a sense of shared responsibility and equal access. however, because the pact is meant to do many things at once (a public pledge to solve climate change, pollution, and scarcity, etc.), it has over time become more difficult to track what has actually been achieved, or designate who is responsible for fulfilling these promises. but throughout the disarray of collaboration in creating this living agreement, the pact has also opened up endless possibilities for the future of water. throughout her ethnography, ballestero emphasizes the messiness and oftentimes mundane work it takes to make access to water a human right within capitalist society. she implores us to expand our conception of water to include this everyday work, which ultimately informs decisions regarding water for countless households. ballestero also highlights the uncertainty and precariousness in creating possible futures for water—that despite working towards an imagined future for water, neither regulators nor involved residents know what this future holds. but despite this uncertainty, a future history of water showcases how everyday technolegal devices perform the essential work of creating a future in which water is accessible to all. author bio kelsey kim is a phd candidate in anthropology at ucla. her research focuses on tech activism in silicon valley. who is the right fit?: doing diversity in translational research jabloner, anna, & lee, sandra s. (2020). who is the right fit? doing diversity in translational research. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-24. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license who is the right fit? doing diversity in translational research anna jabloner harvard university jabloner@fas.harvard.edu sandra soo-jin lee columbia university sandra.lee@columbia.edu abstract the growing field of clinical and translational science (cts) is located at the intersection of academic medicine and industry, sectors that share histories of exclusion and efforts to become more diverse. indeed, diversity and inclusion of a broad range of experts and backgrounds are believed to be critical to continuous innovation and the growth of the us health industry. but despite an increasing emphasis on diversity in cts research, and the requirement that federally funded us academic institutions demonstrate their ability to recruit individuals from historically underrepresented groups as identified by gender, race, and ethnicity, interventions aimed at integrating difference fall short of dismantling longstanding structures that normalize gendered orientations towards innovation and scientific progress. this paper investigates how diversity is operationalized in a cts program in a large us research university. from an intersectional feminist standpoint, we focus on day-to-day practices and the institutional cultures and policies that inform views of innovative translational research and scientific progress. asking what emerges as the value of efforts to diversify cts, we found that while almost everyone was working towards increasing diversity, most cts original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 2 leaders considered diversity as a balancing factor for team functionality or an enabling factor for innovation based on assumptions about what diverse actors will bring to the table, as opposed to a political concern. consequently, cts researchers operationalized the term diversity based on gender stereotypes, while others considered it irrelevant in a meritocracy. we show how these perspectives impacted actors deemed diverse in the medical technology innovation context. as in other fields, more profound mechanisms are necessary to effect institutional change beyond the confines of stereotyping. introduction clinical and translational science (cts) has been construed by funders and research institutes as a team effort to translate science into clinical care, requiring coordination of targeted expertise to bring the fruits of the “bench” to the “bedside.” the “translational pipeline” begins with basic research and culminates in clinical application, which often relies on commercialization (zerhouni, 2006, p. 172). this metaphor emphasizes the goal of expedience in moving scientific discoveries from the laboratory in the academic setting into the clinical domain as quickly as possible. in an economic sense, translation refers to the idea of “redesign[ing] biomedical research in order to accelerate the process whereby publicly funded science is turned into applications and especially products” (robinson, 2017, p. 250). robinson (2017) identifies a complex “translational supply chain” (p. 251) as translational research engenders the large-scale commercialization of knowledge. by using the metaphor of the pipeline, translational research is constructed as a direct pathway to improved health that can circumvent the potential obstacles that could slow down progress. thus, translational researchers are defined in part by their ability to work with others in providing seamless productivity as part of a coordinated team. so important is this goal that engagement and incorporation of “team science” is required of the multimillion-dollar national institutes of health (nih) clinical and translational science awards given to the top research universities in the united states (nih, n.d.). in the cts context, a new research field called “science of team science” (scits) has emerged, emphasizing psychological approaches to optimize teamwork (bozeman & boardman, 2014; falk-krzesinski et al., 2011; salazar, lant, & fiore, 2012; stokols, hall, taylor, & moser, 2008).1 at the heart of team science is the fundamental expectation that “diversity,” or the coalescing of individuals with different backgrounds and expertise, will result in faster, more successful translation of basic research. bypassing the notion that teams are necessarily original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 3 contextual endeavors hinging not just on combinations of individuals but on social environment, location, and culture, this assumption draws upon organization and management studies that highlight the higher productivity of socially diverse teams, particularly through equal participation of men and women (bear & woolley, 2011; joshi, 2014), as well as on studies that compare the quality and applicability of innovations produced by homogeneous versus heterogeneous collaborators (european commission, 2013; schiebinger & schraudner, 2011). these literatures suggest that intentionally fostering diversity on teams results in an “innovation dividend” (nielsen et al., 2017, 1740). indeed the nih (2018), the largest us funder of scientific and biomedical research, has introduced “diversity catalysts” as part of their national “hubs of innovation” initiative. describing diversity as “good for health, good for the economy,” the nih office of the director (2016) states in its strategic plan that expanding the stem talent nationally will create “new knowledge, technologies and products that meet the needs of a diverse america.” grounded in political struggles to intervene on the long histories of inequality in science, technology, engineering, and math (stem), the nih began to require the inclusion of women and minority researchers in training and research in the early 1990s (epstein, 2007). but beyond combatting inequity, inclusion of diversity in expertise and background are now viewed as critical components of innovation itself.2 us research institutions, funders, and scholars increasingly articulate diversity as an economic factor (urciuoli, 2016). women and ethnic and racial minorities who are underrepresented in stem are thought to add value in creativity, the core fuel of innovation, and are thus ultimately believed to be essential to financial success in global markets (du chatenier, verstegen, biemans, mulder, & omta, 2009; forbes, 2011). this emphasis has resulted in institutional pressure for stem programs, including those in cts, to increase the participation of historically underrepresented groups. gender disparity in us innovation, in particular in silicon valley, has been hotly debated in the media as data suggest that little progress has been made towards equity (bell & chetty, 2018). yet few have empirically investigated how diversity is operationalized in practice—that is, “what diversity does” (ahmed, 2012, p. 1) in the us stem context (subramaniam, 2014). in this article, we draw on ethnographic research of a medical innovation program to show how clinical and translational researchers operationalize diversity, and how the increasingly paradigmatic notion of “purposeful” diversity in collaborative cts projects is undercut by essentializing or stereotyping ideas about identity and social original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 4 difference. we highlight how these ways of doing diversity impact innovator trajectories, and argue that institutional cultural change is needed to redress calcified understandings of gender and its value in innovation. these shifts are critical for the inclusion and retention of differently positioned social actors. studying inclusion in situ: methods and field site this article draws upon an ethnographic case study, conducted between 2015 and 2017, of an academic innovation program we call med-tech at a major us research university. at the time of our research, med-tech had been in existence for fifteen years and had resulted in dozens of medical technology companies and health technology patents. considered an overwhelming success by the nih, the university, and its commercial partners, med-tech exemplifies the often-cited “culture of cooperation” needed for sustained innovation in cts, and the paradigm of porous boundaries between clinic, academy, and industry (zerhouni, 2006, p.171). in this ethnographic project, which was funded through the nih’s clinical and translational science awards program, we were invited to explore issues related to practices of team science and collaboration in academic entrepreneurship. we were given broad access to med-tech faculty, students, and collaborators, and were free to ask questions and talk with program affiliates as they were available. we were also given permission to observe most team meetings and select leadership meetings, including those involving program admission decisions, onboarding sessions for new students, and team presentations to industry mentors and investors. this research was approved by our university institutional review board. med-tech considers as the key to its success its grounding in the tenets of design thinking, a solution-focused method for problem solving developed in engineering and industrial design that is now used synonymously with innovation (wilf, 2019). in the program’s yearlong fellowship, multidisciplinary teams of clinicians, engineers, and business experts work together to develop new healthrelated devices, systems, methods, patents, or solutions. med-tech approaches innovation as a process that should be driven by needs that are empirically identified in clinical environments rather than through technology development. fellows are granted access to the university medical center for intensive research, including interviews and observations of clinicians and patients, to identify clinical needs. this approach requires close coordination with clinical departments that is facilitated by the clinician-technologists who make up med-tech’s faculty. at the core of the med-tech approach are multidisciplinary teams of four fellows that convene for a nine-month fellowship to create a solution to a clinical need that original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 5 can be incubated in the academic environment during the fellowship period, and eventually ushered into the marketplace. these teams are carefully selected to satisfy distinct social roles such as “builder,” “deep thinker,” and “project manager.” tasked as embedded ethnographers to understand and identify mechanisms that enhance team science in the translational context, we entered a space from which women and ethnic/racial minorities have been largely absent. the ongoing debate on increasing diversity in the program gave us an opportunity to study how this concept was constructed through our participants’ reflections and practices. we journaled fieldnotes that addressed these issues, including questions about how to study gender diversity as an absence that seemed to constantly be present for everyone (m’charek, schramm, & skinner, 2014; smith, 2005), our ambiguities about the “counting” of bodies entailed in doing diversity (ahmed, 2012, 17),3 and questions about the impact of our presence at med-tech—as ethnographers, ethicists, women, and often as perceived auditors who warrant caution. purposeful diversity: finding the right fit med-tech faculty, who mostly hold appointments in surgery departments, reflect the gender and racial and ethnic composition of medical school faculty in the us, comprised mostly of white men (carr, carr, gunn, kaplan, raj, & freund, 2015; jolliff, leadley, coakley, & sloane, 2012). women of different ethnic and racial backgrounds administer the day-to-day activities of the program. med-tech, like much of academic medicine and bioengineering, has a starkly gendered division of labor. program leaders have worked toward increasing the numbers of women by offering mentorship opportunities and other engagements, yet have not included a woman into its core faculty. in terms of its fellowship program, medtech has had predominantly white male fellows, but, prompted by feedback, has recently taken steps to increase the number of women and minority applicants through targeted outreach. priding itself on its careful fellow candidate selection process to choose not just future leaders in medical innovation but engaged team workers who can eventually convince venture capitalists of their potential, med-tech has cycled through a range of strategies for team combinations. in our first year of research, three of twelve fellows were women; all three were white engineers. in our second year, six of eleven fellows were women, and, for the first time in the fifteen-year history of the fellowship program, outnumbered men. in that year, half of women fellows were physicians, the other half engineers or designers, and five of them original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 6 were white. while in year one the women were dispersed evenly onto the three teams, in year two they made up half of the members on each team of four fellows. the contrasting gender balance across our two years of research aided our inquiry into how gender surfaced in team dynamics. the context of our study privileged gender over other kinds of social difference. but as gender became an important primary marker of diversity for the program, it was inevitably caught up in other aspects of identity such as race, class, and sexuality that we conceive of as the intersectional dimensions of a necessarily relational category. in an interview, a physician and entrepreneur who teaches at med-tech named ronald,4 shared his perspective on what diversity means for team members in medical innovation: you really need to think purposefully about why differences may actually be helpful…so they kind of fit. just for the sake of diversity…i don’t think that’s important. you’d actually need purposeful diversity for different types of things. you might want women…because they bring something very different…in terms of understanding a disease state or a different way of looking at engineering. prompted to reflect on diversity, ronald articulated a strategic perspective we found ubiquitous in cts. diverse people, understood to be those who deviate from the contextual norm, should not be included on political grounds,5 but because they represent a category that brings something specific to an innovative project that then improves the project itself. it is this specificity of what they bring that makes them the right fit for a collaboration. far from unique to med-tech, nor ever a uniform process, assessing somebody’s fit for an innovation team entails subjective and discretionary aspects that faculty negotiate beyond the expected excellent credentials of applicants. when asked about this process, med-tech faculty matt, a physician-entrepreneur, told us, “there’s a phenotype we recruit for. it’s all part of what makes this place work as an ecosystem…it’s this ability to tap in.” across the board, med-tech faculty emphasize the importance of fellows being the right fit for innovative collaboration, entrepreneurship, and particular teams. med-tech faculty and surgeon david explained, i would say that we are working really hard to get more women into the program because we think that makes a difference…last year in the class, our algorithm for placing the teams, we realized after we’d run it that it didn’t include gender as a factor and we ended up with original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 7 teams that were not really very balanced. so one team had three women and then several had none. when we inquired into the meaning of balance, david referred to the example of the role of one of the women on a previous year’s team: she had a way of doing things that was different than the way that we were managing things, whether it’s her personality or whether it’s because she was a woman, i don’t know…she had a way of lowering the intensity and the emotions in the conflict that was very beneficial to us, of reducing the amount of drama that was going on. for david, the value of diversity in building a balanced team is explained in terms of stereotypical gendered views of the ability of women to neutralize conflict. conceiving of diversity as something more broad, ronald views diversity’s importance for innovation as capturing perspectives that are missing. both views presume women as a group with identifiable social characteristics, an idea that feminists have worked for more than five decades to break down (see lorde, 1984; mohanty, 1991; moore, 1988; reiter, 1975). in particular, associations of gender with specific qualities—and expectations of these traits in specific people—have long been revealed as socio-historical and cultural phenomena (see abu-lughod, 1986; butler, 1990; de beauvoir, 1952; lutz, 1988; rosaldo & lamphere, 1974; strathern, 1988). feminists showed that ideas about gender as universal and separable from phenomena like race, class, or sexuality were categorical fantasies that make invisible the complexly entwined experiences of women of color, often in conjunction with colonialist histories (see crenshaw, 1991; spivak, 1988). in reaction to the universalizing of white middle-class women’s experiences in the us, intersectional feminist theorists approach gender as a relational and dynamic category to analyze practices, phenomena, and experiences entangled with expectations or stereotypes about ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, and other identity signifiers (see collins, 2000; davis, 1981; ferguson, 2004; glenn, 2004; hooks, 1981; spade, 2013). in essentializing differences between men and women, our respondents elided these intersectional dimensions of identity. in contrast to these views that simply follow sexist stereotypes, program faculty martin contradicted david and told us that gender was not a factor in constructing these teams: “when we put the teams together based on their background, it turns out, all three of them were engineers, and so as a result they were of similar expertise and so we spread them out onto different teams.” martin also considers original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 8 balance important, but for him what matters is a balance of expertise on teams. diversity as balance or as threat to meritocracy. med-tech’s leaders emphasize not just the candidates’ excellence and experience, but the importance of particular traits they see as conducive for the entrepreneurial, risky, and fastpaced innovation environment they operate in. they cite these traits as drive, flexibility, passion, “hunger,” as well as social and teamwork skills. beyond a diversity of expertise, they look for personalities that will fit together for optimal collaborative outputs. martin told us, “it’s all gut hunger—it’s all the desire to try and figure something [out] and solve it…like, hey man, i can sell anything…is probably not the right fit for what we believe.” martin pinpoints a creative curiosity, an urge for innovative solutions that goes beyond marketing expertise as crucial for team members. for david, however, women—qua testosterone levels—make teams better: if you add a woman on a team of three men, i felt that it would tend to make that team a little more efficient and focused and balanced in a way than i haven’t seen as much if it’s only men. i feel that by having a minimum component of women to men in the team, it does make things…it feels like it reduces a little bit of the drama-testosterone. when we’re looking at incoming fellows, i will advocate pretty strongly on making sure we have at least a woman on each team…i think we really believe that gender diversity is an important factor…a really great thing to have. gender diversity serves as natural antidote to men who are unproductive because of their testosterone. for ronald, adding diverse perspectives is valuable when it serves a purpose, but what is more essential is that team members fit with one another: “sometimes you want experiences, but if you have so many people who are different…people can’t identify with one another.” the right fit can mean that team members must be similar enough to be able to identify with one another; in other words, those who are too different are excluded. diversity and sameness thus have to be balanced in multiple ways: on the one hand, difference should be incorporated, but too much of it threatens the cohesion that is necessary for productive innovation. other faculty second the idea that too much difference disrupts team-based innovation, arguing that diversity can disturb the flow of collaboration when team members cannot communicate with one another and when too much bridging is required. the right fit is framed by faculty as tied to particular team contexts, as tailoring a specific team with distinct skill sets and experience. yet this elides the issue that teams are the product of larger structural original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 9 processes: they have tended to be male, white, and middle class. like many academic institutions, med-tech considers balance and fit in a larger, ideally meritocratic environment. martin rightly says that med-tech has been “faced with a challenge that many other programs are faced with, and that is we are not trying to be gender specific, you know, we’ll take the top six women and top six men, we’re looking to take the top candidates.” he reiterates the ideal of the university as a meritocratic institution, in which background societal structures should not play a role, while these same institutions and their funding agencies also increasingly require the numerical inclusion of diverse actors as identified by gender, ethnicity, age, and other factors. in the program, like in the academy in general, merit, excellence, and fit are the basis of candidate selection, as martin here summarizes by the term “top candidates.” this process is not one of balancing teams, but of finding entrepreneurs and innovators more broadly. in fact, despite the clearly visible impact of histories of exclusion on the contemporary program, carter, who is another med-tech leader, told us, “race and ethnicity, and you know, gender type or whatever, sorry, but that’s irrelevant. it’s utterly irrelevant. you know, if we get twelve asian women next year, that’s fine, you know! if we get twelve white guys, that’s fine.” in carter’s view, social characteristics do not matter because they should not matter in a meritocracy. this stance—an effectual blindness to intersecting histories of exclusion and these histories’ impact on the present—justifies why the program looks the way it looks and expresses what has been theorized as colorblindness (bonilla-silva, 2006; reardon, 2004). for carter it marks the rejection of measures to make the program more diverse. he articulates diversity as a “politically correct” idea that must not impact the process of selecting the next generation of innovators. indeed carter’s statement illustrates the need for an intersectional approach to diversity: the program has in fact mostly consisted of white male cohorts, year after year, but has included asian and asian american men proportional to their representation in stem fields in the us. yet there was never a year in which “twelve asian women” were selected. this outcome would indeed be nothing short of a small revolution in its reversal of race-gender inequalities in stem. carter’s statement about “twelve white men” being just as possible as “twelve asian women” suggests an even playing field that allows individuals equal chance of rising to the top. it elides inequality in the program within larger unequal structures in stem fields and industry that result from intersectional dimensions of identity—namely, that white men have been most successful and represented. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 10 the other side of his equation articulates the idea of colorblindness, which assumes that things that have mattered historically should not matter in the present or future. but what is more, (hetero)sexuality and (middle-) class status are silent signifiers in carter’s statement in the context of med-tech’s institutional culture. for instance, during the interview process for the fellowship, sports jokes as index of shared identity often served as conversation starters with white male candidates, while questions about culture or country of origin initiated interviews with male or female candidates of color. throughout our observations, we found that everyone either partook in, or had to act in relation to, performances of a competitive white american heteromasculinity, a standard of behavior set by a predominantly white, male, surgeon faculty. faculty often reproduced this culture through body language, such as taking up space in sitting poses where they leaned far back in chairs, legs crossed, arms crossed behind their heads;6 and making jokes or commentary, such as what not to tell your wife or why high cesarean-section rates reveal that women do not have family values when they “schedule” birth as part of their busy work lives. med-tech leaders articulate qualities that are often associated with having experienced adversity as desirable traits for innovators, such as perseverance and grit. martin told us that the questions that drive him when he selects fellows, who are all meritorious, are “how hungry are you? how bad do you want to do this?…the hunger itself is usually what drives you.” martin does not specify how he assesses someone’s hunger, but carter said, “i think that you get a sense of somebody in that first minute of discussion. you just get a sense for people. i don’t know if it’s worth trying to dissect exactly what happens there, but you get a sense of how clever they are and how they interact with people.” for him, being the right fit thus derives from an intuitive yet unquestioned understanding of people. representing a prestigious us research institution, these leaders in medical innovation articulate perspectives on diversity and finding the right fit for cts teams: women add value through the female perspective; lower conflict on teams; the right fit demands difference, but too much difference disrupts social cohesion and requires bridging. the traditional lack of diversity in stem fields, an adherence to merit and unquestioned intuitions about the right fit or the right kind of hunger explain and determine med-tech’s composition. below, we describe how these perspectives impact innovators who arrive with the mark of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 11 diversity. gendered expectations, institutional culture, and the ideal of a flat hierarchy in our first year of research, women were in the minority in the program overall and on each team of fellows. but even with gender parity in our second year of observation, the institutional culture persisted, matching not just the cited expectations of women’s contributions but also patterns of exclusion and sexism in the program. for instance, a team meeting toward the end of the fellowship follows an exchange about team roles between ronald and mary, an engineer and innovation fellow: r [sitting leaned far back with his arms crossed behind his head]: so what do you need before these gentlemen leave? m describes her work on a cadaver. r [interrupts]: how will you do the engineering aspect? m [wide-eyed]: i’m an engineer. i’m technical. this is in my wheelhouse. r [quickly]: i know you’re an engineer. i wasn’t sure if you were taking that role and wanted to hear it from you…if you can eat ramen for three years, fine. but if you have a first child, you might realize that this does not work for me. it’s about personal timing. m [wide-eyed]: i don’t have kids. r [interrupts]: yeah, but generally, career wise, not everyone is born an entrepreneur, there’s a lot of uncertainty. when this exchange took place, ronald had known mary for the better part of a year and was deeply familiar with her project. med-tech specifically supports the building of entrepreneurial networks and strategies. this often entails advice, direction, and heroic stories about the endurance and resilience needed for an entrepreneurial lifestyle. in this exchange, ronald questioned whether mary would be able to endure long phases of financial insecurity, here indicated through his example of eating ramen, a cheap staple. ronald expected mary to take on the project manager’s role on her team until she reminds him of her engineering background. mary told us, “my project management skills were more leveraged than anything, organizing the team, keeping them on task. that was leveraged and sometimes pushed on my team, but the engineering not as much.” ronald also suggested that there may be too much uncertainty in the entrepreneur lifestyle for her if she original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 12 plans on having a child. from our interviews with mary, it was clear the she had never discussed her desires or plans to have a family. she went on to tell us about her experience at med-tech vis-à-vis her teammate jack: jack is one of my closest friends here and we tried having him say exactly the same thing as me ten minutes after i’ve said it and then it got discussed. as an experiment. yeah, so if jack…took the lead, if he drove conversation, he got listened to. and when i tried to do it, i didn’t…the knowledge that i am female is made known to me every day…it’s shocking, honestly. to come from these people that are so smart and so driven. there are times people don’t speak to me; they speak to the boys. you tell me i drive the team and you’re not going to look at me? faculty consistently addressed mary in administrative matters. on technical questions, they addressed the men in the room, who usually did not participate in the organizational discussions. mary went on to say, it sounds like they identify people on each team that they think could be the leader…that’s going to force everyone to do stuff…it’s a maledominated environment, right, i’ve never been around so much sexism in my life…i think that if you’re going to identify leaders on a team and you’re going to place those expectations on them without actually saying them out loud, you’re just going to push for it…it wasn’t until the last month when i started asking people what was going on and got accused of not doing my work…basically, martin said i’m the energy on my team and that when i don’t do my work the team doesn’t do its work. okay, so you think i’m the energy on my team, yet you’ve been passive-aggressively telling me i’m not doing my job and been giving me no support in doing this…you put us on a flat hierarchy and then are putting pressure on me to lead a team. we described above how women are expected to balance groups, to keep teams together. here we see what this expectation meant for mary, who had years of experience in the technology industry, as her expertise is downplayed and she is expected to perform gendered emotional labor (hochschild, 1983). mary told us about the impact these expectations had on her: if you’re going to put me in that role, give me the tools to do something about it and don’t get mad at me when i drop out in february because i want to cry every day…martin previously had made a comment...to the effect of i’m in charge of your recommendations so you’d better be nice to me…that was kind of the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 13 gist of what came out of it. i was like, here’s the five things that i think are wrong, here’s ways i think you could change each of these things...will they call me to do something or will they call jack? standing at the beginning of a career in innovation, mary had to consider the tradeoff between criticizing the program leadership versus gaining a reputation as troublemaker. when she opted to articulate her critiques, she was careful to suggest productive solutions. med-tech is led by physicians, predominantly surgeons, who occupy the top of the clinical hierarchy, publish in prestigious biomedical journals, and repeatedly told us that the engineers in the fellowship fare better in those parts of the program when their expertise and skills are leveraged. we had hypothesized that mary’s experience was partially related to her engineering background. but mary told us that she discussed this possibility with another fellow: “i was like, maybe because they’re all doctors they’re only looking at doctors. nope, talked to some female doctors from the past and it happened to them, too…so that was kind of my litmus test.” another fellow named hannah recounted her experience of presenting to a med-tech partner institution: the nextgen people came in and [we] were pitching to them to get funding. and i’m the one pitching for my team and i’m sitting in the back and they’re all joking about babies that were just had, and somebody was like, oh, at least you didn’t have a girl…and they all laughed. i sit in the back, i’m like, there is a female present. and three people heard me and looked and were kind of taken aback, but most of them didn’t hear me and then i get up to present and i’m like, hey, i’m the female contingent of your fellowship, how are you doing? in our second year of research, we thought that program dynamics would change with a majority of women and higher proportion of female physicians in the fellowship. we wondered if mary’s efforts toward changing the program culture would show subtle effects. indeed, it became nearly impossible for faculty to ignore women for the simple reason that there were more women than men in the room. yet, kate, a fellow in our second year of observation, told us about her distress in the first weeks of the program. in his presentation to the cohort, which we also observed, a peer introduced his background in plastic surgery by showing images of women who had breast augmentations that were clearly pulled from pornographic websites. not only did the faculty not react, but kate said that she realized that there was no institutional mechanism to handle what she in an interview described as “shocking and demoralizing…because in industry, you original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 14 know, right from the start, it’s just a very professional culture and…you do trainings about sexual harassment and you know what to avoid.” kate continued, “i talked to a few of the female doctors and they were like, oh, i didn’t even notice that. i’ve seen things like that happen so often in so many settings and they were…amazed that i was upset and that i would say something.” after much awkward avoidance on the part of the leadership, kate ultimately spoke with two of the faculty who promised that changes would be instituted in the next year to ensure professional guidelines of conduct. however, they refused to bring up the incident with her cohort so as not to seem “reactionary.” kate concluded that the institution cared more about protecting the fellow who had presented the images, and making sure he would not be made uncomfortable, than about her discomfort and demoralizing experience. even with gender parity, the sexist institutional culture persisted. in our interview, kate rhetorically pointed out the lack of diversity on the faculty: “why are all the faculty doctors? why aren’t there engineers on faculty? why aren’t there women on faculty? it just subconsciously makes you feel the image of success does not look like you.” kate’s questions drive home the problem of effecting institutional change on diversity when the leadership level remains homogenous. program leaders set the standard for institutional practices, and contribute to successful experiences of fellows diverse both in background and expertise. change in her assessment needs to start with a faculty that also reflects these different levels of diversity. the ideal of the flat team: no hierarchies, just sexism? med-tech borrows the notion of a “flat hierarchy” from silicon valley and start-up culture, where this idea became defined through a shared opposition to hierarchical structures of large american corporations and the embrace of flexibility and competitive entrepreneurial risk-taking (saxenian, 1996). flat hierarchies have indeed become an important paradigm for teamwork in innovation. at med-tech, the program faculty is embedded in a rigid hierarchy at the medical center but asserts a difference in the culture of the program as less formal, signaling access and open communication with fellows. for faculty, med-tech is a place to enjoy a more casual, creative, and flexible environment. with few formal structures in the program for how faculty and students are to relate, and without official team leaders, background social hierarchies come fully to the fore: how dynamics will play out hinges essentially on personalities. as we saw, perceived force of personality such as “hunger” can take an essential role here. program leaders are also embedded in a deeply hierarchical medical culture, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 15 where leadership ranks are male-dominated, stereotypical expectations of women’s tasks are the norm, and non-physicians struggle to be taken seriously (good, 1995). within the ostensibly flat structure, women in med-tech were expected to take a social role, which came at the expense of leveraging their technical expertise. we showed how this predicament impacted fellows as they had to work in unexpected ways to weigh career planning and reputation with the wish to change institutional culture. at med-tech, the flat hierarchy paradigm adopted from the neoliberal culture of silicon valley actually fostered gendered hierarchies: individuality is supposed to outweigh other factors, yet women were expected to perform emotional labor rather than their expert skills. conclusion in our study, the values and perspectives of a socially cohesive, unmarked innovation culture—the overwhelmingly white, male leadership of us academic medicine and innovation in the new field of cts—moved to the foreground. its profound cultural invisibility is the ideal workplace predicament, allowing expertise, experience, and individual personality to outshine any weighted identity markers that may or may not matter in collaborations (gershon & taylor, 2008; gusterson, 1997; traweek, 1988). by contrast, critical work in social science has shown how actors deemed diverse must negotiate their own presence vis-àvis preconceived notions, legitimize the circumstances of their hiring or even their presence, often with detrimental effects (abelmann, 2009; ferguson, 2012; iverson, 2007; urciuoli, 1996). the persistent conceptual gap in the literature for describing the assumed neutrality of white men underscores the invisibility of the norm against which differences continue to be marked in scientific institutions and beyond (haraway, 1988, 1997; subramaniam, 2014). feminist science studies’ own sine qua non was the question about, and intervention against, women’s and (albeit not forcefully enough) ethnic and racial minorities’ absence from science. despite the emergence of diversity as shorthand for efforts to mitigate this situation, it has recently been argued that including diverse actors does not do away with legacies of inequality. across universities, industries, and political discourse, diversity has been conceptualized as a set of neoliberal practices that can foster agency, but that also, paradoxically, naturalizes inequality (ahmed, 2012; dávila, 2001; rosa & bonilla, 2017; shankar, 2015; urciuoli, 2005). for instance, bonilla & rosa (2017) describe us diversity politics as having decoupled race from the legacies of colonialism, meaning that efforts for inclusion have come to take the place of demands to decolonize, and truly change, institutions. shankar (2015) argues that diversity has become a original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 16 stand-in for inclusion that naturalizes race and ethnicity in the context of racial capitalism, a notion reflected in the cited literature that sees diverse actors as advantageous because they will grow the economy by producing more and better innovations, and in the med-tech perspective that the purposeful addition of women will bring essential qualities to innovator teams. urciuoli (2016) shows diversity to match neoliberal notions of selfhood that associate it with skills, leadership, and entrepreneurialism in us universities. we might indeed grasp diversity as a kind of surveillance system, in the sense that it makes those who differ from contextual norms even more visible or veils persistent inequalities in institutions with great diversity scores (subramaniam, 2014; ahmed, 2012). mary’s assertion that at med-tech she learns every day that she is female and kate’s realization of how accustomed female physicians are to sexism illustrate these notions. we articulate an instance of what ahmed (2012) identifies as the diversity paradox: that an institution that is perceived as successful in diversity can have a culture that is experienced as profoundly unequal. med-tech’s institutional culture orients itself toward creating disruptive medical technologies for the future of healthcare, yet we encountered ideas about women as social and men as technical that seem anachronistic to the paradigm of innovation and team science. university administrations have made significant progress in fleshing out the details of mechanisms that support diversity (e.g. garibay, 2014). we wonder if such measures might only scratch the surface to effect not a change in attitudes or a meaningful understanding of diversity but merely a more policed social environment. at the intersection of the institutional worlds of academic medicine, science, and health and technology industries, we investigated a site associated with the technological advances that mark success on global markets in the us. beyond a focus on individual intention, we highlighted the limits of calls for diversity as a driver of creative innovation in translational research. diverse collaborators might cast a wider net by drawing on a broader range of perspectives and approaches. but adding diverse actors based on stereotypical expectations of their contributions here worked against innovators and their trajectories, and in this case reproduced sexist institutional culture. the articulated ideas about diversity revealed assumptions about women—in particular, expectations of women as social brokers. we described how conflicting ideas about diversity recapitulated gendered norms and how gendered expectations and limited conceptualizations of diversity as “balance” work in combination with the ideal of a flat hierarchy to stand in the way of collaboration, and detrimentally impact fellows’ experiences in original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 17 med-tech. we showed articulations of diversity as potential economic or creative value or as balancing factor, a paradigm we revealed as entangled in faculty expectations about what exactly specific actors would contribute. at med-tech, women of any background are often absent; women fellows in turn become marked as diverse actors expected to bring specific traits or expertise, while the homogeneous faculty leaders remain as unmarked as they are nondiverse. the program is situated in the neoliberal context of cts, which aims to overcome barriers between disciplines and between academia and industry to speed up innovation. this context crystallized when med-tech leaders found an outlet in the program from the rigidity of clinical hierarchies, and a chance to bond with some but not all fellows. the lack of formal hierarchies presented new issues for those actors who came in marked as different, reacted to established norms and practices they rejected, and whose success was stymied or jeopardized by an ostensibly “flat hierarchy.” since the mid-1970s, us academic research has been rapidly subsumed under national economic policy and market demands in a new academic capitalism (slaughter & leslie, 1997). technoscience is increasingly the university’s primary product and intellectual property its measure of success (biagoli, jaszi, & woodmansee, 2011; mccray & croissant, 2001). in translational research, the paradigm of seamless collaboration across disciplines and societal sectors articulates financially driven neoliberal policies to remove barriers between the university and industry and accelerate application via the market (robinson, 2017). in consequence, the collaborations among experts that have long been a core theme of science studies have taken center stage in innovation studies and us national policy at a high level (chompalov & shrum, 1999; hackett & parker, 2016; hoegl & parboteeah, 2007). teamwork, a key theme in the corporate sector, has been identified as a condition of innovation success (urciuoli, 2005; valantine, beckerle, reed, towner, & zahniser, 2014). while the nih (n.d.) has identified team science as a key element of cts research, scits has formalized the value of productive collaborative multidisciplinary teamwork that transects academic and commercial boundaries into an academic field. scits focuses on applied policy research to aid collaborative output, and a community of researchers focused on the large-scale funding and programming requirements in us medical schools include team science components as a strategy for successful innovation. yet, in the context of creating teams in translational research and innovation, institutional culture, within larger social original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 18 contexts, may itself be an obstacle to addressing intersecting dimensions of social difference across gender, race, class, and sexuality (lee & jabloner, 2017). clearly—and against carter’s claim to meritocracy—diversity could only have become an issue against the backdrop of prior homogeneity. not only does disciplinary homogeneity define this backdrop, but precisely the lack of social difference that continues to characterize the leadership ranks of the american academy, on the basis of which background social diversity became a demand (subramaniam, 2014). diversity shows “how certain words stick to certain bodies” (ahmed, 2012, p. 62)—precisely those bodies that are not the institutional norm but marked as different before their arrival. at med-tech, diversity was most often related to the category of “women,” suggesting social difference in a context in which they are usually absent,7 and indicating why race and other dimensions of intersectionality seemed absent. as a financial and creative aid to innovation, diversity took on a peculiar shape where gender diversity was seen as useful to the extent that it overlapped with stereotypes of femininity. yet women’s increasing representation based on these stereotypes might enable a new gendered division of labor in cts research. but in the absence of concrete policy, the inclusion of those who are not the norm does matter. even if reactionary ideas bubbled up, women’s increased presence at med-tech forced engagement with the meaning and value of diversity. in translational research, diversity paradoxically both crystallizes as a sign of an increasingly neoliberal academy, and signals as marker of social progress toward the inclusion of differently positioned actors. evidently, diversity is not just about counting to include bodies that differ from institutional norms; it is clearly also about actually changing who leads and shapes american institutions in cts innovation, and might indeed open up avenues for political agency (shankar, 2015). to understand, in specific contexts, what diversity means and does in practice is a needed step toward institutional change. acknowledgements we would like to thank the participants in the study, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. we would also like to thank erin moore, adam sargent, and jay sosa for their valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this article. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) anna jabloner and sandra s. lee, 2020 19 notes 1 diversity and inclusion have been institutionalized in us academia through deans of diversity, equity, and inclusion. see, for instance, salama (2016). 2 nih chief diversity officer hannah valantine created a public resource in the new “science of diversity”; see the nih, science of diversity website, https://diversity.nih.gov/science-diversity. 3 questions like “how many women are in this room?” and “how many people of color are present?” account for demographics, but might also unwantedly ascribe gender, race, or other perceived characteristics to bodies counted as one category or another. 4 all names are pseudonyms, and contextual and biographical details were altered to protect the privacy of our informants. 5 the push for diversity in the us workplace originates in the political and moral terms of affirmative action and the civil rights movement. intended to redress disadvantages stemming from historical oppression, affirmative action was widely contested and in historical consequence framed as reverse discrimination in american politics (lipsitz, 2006). 6 grounded in rebecca solnit’s term “mansplaining,” this practice has become known as manspreading. 7 this predicament is now specific to stem fields, as feminist science studies has shown. references abelmann, n. 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(2016). neoliberalizing markedness: the interpellation of “diverse” college students. hau: journal of ethnographic theory, 6(3), 201-221. valantine, h. a., beckerle, m. c., reed, k. l., towner, d., & zahniser, n. (2014). teaching corporate in college. science translational medicine, 6(251), 251fs33. wilf, e. (2019). creativity on demand: the dilemmas of innovation in an accelerated age. chicago, il: university of chicago press. zerhouni, e. (2006). clinical research at a crossroads: the nih roadmap. journal of investigative medicine, 54(4), 171-173. author bio anna jabloner is an anthropologist with research interests in genetics, biomedicine, identity, ethnographies of the us, and feminist, queer, and critical race theory. she currently teaches in the department of anthropology at harvard university. sandra soo-jin lee is chief of the division of ethics and tenured faculty in the department of medical humanities and ethics at columbia university. as a medical anthropologist, her research focuses on the ethical and social dimensions of emerging biotechnologies and their implications for social and health inequities. della bianca, laetitia. 2021. “the cyclic self: menstrual cycle tracking as body politics.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–21. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © laetitia della bianca, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license the cyclic self: menstrual cycle tracking as body politics laetitia della bianca university of lausanne laetitia.dellabianca@unil.ch abstract this article explores to what extent, and under what conditions, practices of fertility self-tracking shape and are shaped by particular power relations. drawing on twenty-six interviews with users of a specific fertility tracker, i argue that through these self-tracking practices, users shape a relationship with their body that i call “cyclic self-fashioning”—a process through which the datafied body becomes a catalyst for understanding and intervening on the self. the article analyzes the ways these technologies contribute to users’ relationships with what emerges as the “fertile female body” and what comes to count as axiomatic about it. while at first glance the process of cyclic self-fashioning can be perceived as a reinforcement of biologism, it nonetheless challenges the appropriation by users of their biosociodigital body in everyday life. by focusing on practices that have received little attention so far in the self-tracking literature, the article shows how normative expectations in/of/from western biomedicine about the fertile female body are used, challenged, or resisted by users in the pursuit of various purposes that extend beyond the optimization of an idealized reproductive body. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 2 technology is never simply just technology. it can be a tool or machine or the exchange of digital information, but it is also an idea, it has its historical moment and it is the site for the exercise of politics. —mark davis, “after the clinic?” data itself neither reveals nor engenders possibilities for materialities with which we can live. that requires queer feminist imaginations and the critical work of making intelligible. —angela willey, undoing monogamy introduction hundreds of mobile applications (apps) are available today to monitor the menstrual cycle. the most popular are downloaded by millions of people around the world. these technologies are marketed as tools to assist users in becoming pregnant, avoiding becoming pregnant, or, more generally, knowing their bodies. developers’ claims promise women empowerment through these technologies, yet criticisms abound about the entrepreneurial, self-optimizing female subject they promote. both perspectives tend toward a narrow view of the subject, simply as prey to the techno-determining power of a singular technology. this article explores the extent to which, and under what conditions, technologically enhanced practices of menstrual cycle self-tracking shape and are shaped by power relations. it shows how users in pursuit of various purposes that extend beyond body optimization actively challenge normative expectations in/of/from western biomedicine about the “fertile female body”. drawing on twenty-six interviews with users of a fertility tracker, i argue that users create a relationship with their body via self-tracking practices that i call “cyclic self-fashioning”—a process through which the datafied body becomes a catalyst for understanding and intervening on the self. building upon joseph dumit’s (1998) concept of “objective self-fashioning,” the “cyclic self” provides a heuristic to investigate the normative biosociotemporality of self-tracking practices that is particularly useful for analyzing the (mis)fits, (non-)alignments, and discrepancies that emerge between normative expectations and the lived realities of menstruating bodies. this research contributes to feminist technoscience debates pertaining to the role of sciences and technologies in shaping human bodies. following the call by deboleena roy and banu subramaniam (2016) to “do” biology differently, i undertake an analysis of the ways fertility-tracking technologies contribute to the special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 3 user’s relationship with the fertile female body and what becomes axiomatic about this body. at first glance, cyclic self-fashioning may be perceived as a reinforcement of biologism; however, i use this concept to explore how selftrackers bring particular “biopossibilities” into being (willey 2016). my approach is situated in self-tracking scholarship that theorizes the body as a site for interpretation and challenges the singular conception of the neoliberal selftracking subject (danesi et al. 2020; henwood and marent 2019; sharon 2015, 2016; weiner et al. 2020). consistent with a socio-material practice-based approach that emphasizes the ambivalence and fluidity of users’ engagements with technologies, i take investigation of the role of biotemporal mediated entities in everyday life a step further, by focusing on practices that have received little attention in the literature so far. the analysis presented here is part of a larger ethnography on fertility tracking that investigates how knowledge about the potentially ovulating self is configured and enacted in practice. between 2017 and 2020, i followed multiple contexts of “enactment” of a specific digital fertility tracker (mol 2002). my fieldwork led me to designers’ offices, manufacturing labs, customer service departments, international gynecological conferences, menstrual activists and natural family planning meetings, consumer expos, online discussion forums, and users’ homes. the analyses reported here are drawn from online interviews with twenty-six users of the digital fertility tracker. the twenty-six users i interviewed for this phase of my research participated in a customer satisfaction survey launched by the fertility tracker’s company in february 2018. a few months prior, during my ethnographic observations at the company, my lead informant, a biologist aware of my interest in user experiences, suggested that the company add a question to the survey asking users if they would be willing to be contacted for an interview. after receiving affirmative responses and associated email addresses, i contacted potential interviewees with more information and offered to meet them in person or online for an interview depending on their location and preference. except for two—in switzerland and denmark— all interviews were conducted online. the aim of this phase of the study was to further develop an emerging theory of cyclic self-fashioning grounded in ethnographic research. for these purposes, i chose to analyze a small, random sample of 1,193 active users of the technology of interest without limiting eligibility to a particular nationality or age group. the sample varied demographically. participants were between twenty-one and forty special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 4 two years old, mostly white, middle-class, and highly educated cisgender women. they were married, single, or in monogamous or polyamorous relationships. some had children, and some didn’t. some were religious (christian, jewish), and others were not. all interviews were conducted in english, except for one in french. the interviews spread across different national contexts. countries of residence included: switzerland (3), germany (1), ireland (1), denmark (2), finland (1), the cayman islands (1), italy (1), the united kingdom (2), the united arab emirates (1), and the united states (13). nine participants were no longer using the tracker at the time of the interview for reasons that will be revealed later. all interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed abductively to foster theory construction. stefan timmermans and iddo tavory (2012) argue that abductive analysis “rests on the cultivation of anomalous and surprising empirical findings against a background of multiple existing sociological theories and through systematic methodological analysis” (2012, 169). thus, building upon my emerging theory of cyclic self-fashioning as a process of challenging normative expectations of the fertile female body, the analysis explores three research questions: (1) what does the digital fertility tracker promise its users, and what drives some people to use it? (2) what does it take for a person and their body to become a subject for whom this technology works? (3) what are the effects and affects produced in a model where anticipated cyclicity is the norm? findings show that the fertility tracker does more than measure fertility status at a point in time; it mediates the user’s relationship with their body and others, and co-shapes their inscription in the world in ways intertwined with normative values. consequently, it frames the fertile female body as a relational effect rather than a given entity (m’charek 2010). the tracker rarely acquires a singular authoritative position. it is mobilized alongside other elements (books, online forums, partners, doctors, healers, medicinal foods, friends and families, ovulation kits, and others). the datafied menstrual cycle— a “datafied body double” (horrocks 2019), operates as an active mediator between the embodied self and their body, based on a desired cyclical nature. the datafied cycle measures not only potential fertility status but also the value of social, environmental, and political relations. its materialization mediates the affects of humor, hope, fear, joy, failure, and peace of mind. yet cyclic self-fashioning through fertility tracking can also be seen as a form of “self-determined care” (brown 2012). special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 5 situating the technology and its users “as easy as 1, 2, 3…only about 60 seconds per day!” in 2014 valley electronics, a germany-based company, launched a new fertility tracker called daysy. the tracker was promoted as a stand-alone, computer-based thermometer that measures, records, analyzes, and displays a woman’s1 estimated fertility status based on basal body temperature. every morning, before getting out of bed, the user takes her temperature. once measured, a color-coded light on the device reports her fertility status: green indicates that the user is not fertile; red signals that she is; and yellow means that the tracker doesn’t know. additionally, she can connect the tracker to a smartphone app to visualize her data, which appear either as colored days on a calendar or temperature values on a chart. the user is then expected to take appropriate and responsible contraceptive measures based on these colors. despite its apparent simplicity, the tracker is configured for a specific set of users who embody biological, social, and political adequacy. that is, they should have a nineteento forty-day menstrual cycle, educational and socioeconomic resources, and the power to choose when, and if, to have sexual intercourse that might result in pregnancy. this idealized user is most likely to be found in upper socioeconomic classes and western industrialized countries, a hypothesis confirmed by the sociodemographics of the randomly selected users who agreed to participate in the interviews on which this analysis is based. the device’s categorization of the user’s body into a colored fertility status results from a series of translations. temperature is a proxy for hormonal change, which, in turn, is a proxy for ovulation, which is equated with fertility and conflated with fecundity. this equivalence chain is not new. it was developed during the twentieth century by catholics and scientists who aligned their interests to construct a “vulnerable interlude of fertility” (clarke 2000, 44), later referred to as “the fertile window.” this time interval indicates the numbers of days in each cycle when an egg can be fertilized. the detection and algorithmic prediction of this temporary physiological state was embedded into various trackers by valley electronics since the 1980s. the tracker at the center of this analysis is the first developed by the company to omit numerical inscriptions completely, offering only a colored light to signify fertility status. in shifting away from the numerical fertile window, the tracker turns the problem of contraception into one of fertilization avoidance (mol 2015), similar to the pill and condoms or diaphragms. however, it differs from the pill in that the tracker special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 6 establishes the vagina rather than the hormonal system as the “contraceptive frontier” (clarke 2000, 61). it also differs from condoms or diaphragms by locating the contraceptive frontier in information rather than latex or silicone. situated within a tradition of revealing technologies for an informational body (viseu and suchman 2010), the fertility tracker promises to bring users closer to their bodies by making perceptible what would otherwise be unknown. yet, the tracker promotes a specific form of body politics (shaw 2008). first, through alignment with the slogan “knowledge is power,” it capitalizes on 1970s feminist activism while redefining political struggle in terms of a consumer good. second, empowerment is mediated through built-in constraints designed to alleviate potential errors. for example, users can neither measure their temperature twice in a certain time frame, nor edit it. ultimately, the measurement, charting, and interpretational processes granted to users by design offer limited agency to users. a “technosexual script” (waidzunas and epstein 2015) spares users the burden of “superfluous” cognitive and contraceptive work. users can rely on the “intelligent thermometer” to know when to use contraception instead of putting energy into learning fertility awareness methods. configuring the not-yet-tracked body over the course of about ten years, i tried the contraceptive pill, had an iud, so i had a copper coil, and i’ve had a hormonal mirena coil. i’ve had the implant that goes in the arm. i tried a couple of different pills, so progesterone-only pill and a combined pill…even i tried the diaphragm. i tried condoms. i tried pretty much everything…it either made me physically react badly…or made me emotionally feel like i was completely separate from myself. i felt very anxious and just unable to make decisions, and i felt like i wasn’t myself at all. (nicole, age 30, united kingdom) in recalling her contraceptive experiences before buying the tracker, nicole’s notyet-tracked body materializes as a painful entity. equipped with different technological devices (pills, iud, implant, diaphragm, condoms), she experienced either a disturbing body or a disappearing self. like nicole, other users describe a long and difficult history of contraception whereby technology would not allow them to align their body with their “embodied self” (akrich and pasveer 2016, 71). special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 7 this experience of dissociation is complicated by social expectations about proper contraception. users of fertility tracking often face disapprobation, especially from medical experts: my doctor [in canada at the time] said, “i hope you’re using condoms as well.” and i don’t really want to argue with my doctor because i respect their opinion, but i also don’t want to be on hormonal birth control and…he’s never pressured me to be on it, but…that’s the only real option that he’s ever presented as something for me. or use condoms. and i’m like, “i think there is another option for me [in fertility tracking] and i’ve done a lot of research that i think i’m informed enough to make the decision…” but it wasn’t well-received from the doctor. (chiara, age 30, the cayman islands) the decision to use fertility tracking does not come lightly. chiara spent five months gathering information before deciding to buy the tracker. she read articles online and the manual taking charge of your fertility. she joined a users’ online forum and asked questions. stefanie (age 23) from switzerland echoed that “the process of being convinced before buying [is] hard.” she was inspired by a youtuber narrating her experience with the tracker as a solution to get off of hormonal birth control. in stefanie’s, and many users’ narratives, the tracker’s appeal was in its promise of “no side effects.” when acquiring the technology, stefanie concurrently shifted her trust away from the pharmaceutical industry’s discourses on hormonal birth control to the company’s rhetoric on hormone-free tracking, through which the desirable fertile body is closer to nature, and free from unnecessary chemicals. this sentiment runs parallel to ecofeminist movements that seek to decolonize the body from capitalist appropriation; paradoxically, this particular “shift to nature” happens through the acquisition of an expensive technology. the cost of the tracker (about us $300) often delayed purchase by several months or years, most commonly because users cannot know beforehand if their body is a suitable candidate for the technology. nevertheless, some used a cost-benefit approach to justify the expense. they explained that purchasing a tracker that could last a decade and then buying contraceptives only during red (fertile) or yellow (unknown) phases seemed more economical than buying contraceptives every day, month, or year. whether acquiescing to a device or using it in service to their bodies, users perceived their bodies as “a site for an anticipatory, futureoriented calculation of value” (murphy 2017, 115), a site for investment. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 8 the tracker constitutes self-fashioning users as responsible consumers and resourceful choice makers, a configuration paradigmatic of the “new moral economy of health care” that gave rise to multiple forms of biopolitics in the 1970s (murphy 2012, 101). the accounts discussed thus far present the tracker as a values-loaded object, with “built-in normativities” (moser 2008). yet nicole, chiara, and stefanie should not be seen narrowly as either vulnerable victims of overarching forces or as rational fertility-optimizing consumers. their entanglement in the fertility-tracking assemblage occurs in a gendered healthcare model of responsibility, where female subjects are expected to take reliable actions to manage their hormonal bodies, even if being denied real, practical choices (roberts 2006). menstrual cycle tracking and the politics of knowing ovulation monitoring technologies regularly attract feminist criticism. part of this critique challenges the predominant figure, in conventional western epistemologies, of the ideal subject of knowledge as a neutral male observer who is separated from the object of study. likewise, activists from the fertility consciousness group in cambridge, massachusetts, argued that mechanical devices for cervical mucus tracking both keep women ignorant of their bodies and replace traditional indigenous forms of knowledge production (bell et al. 1980, 32). tia denora (1996) theorized that ovulation kits risk reinforcement of traditional gender binaries, as the kit delivers fertility status via “external and more authoritative confirmation to male observers” such as male partners or clinicians, whereas women are framed as passive, inexperienced objects upon which “modern western” medicine is exerted (denora 1996, 375). more recently, deborah lupton (2015) warned that smartphone apps intensify self-surveillance regimes further within a digital knowledge economy and often without user’s knowledge, particularly for women who want to take charge of their female reproductive bodies. however, feminist literature also suggests that the alienation-through-objectification critique is more complicated once we observe women’s engagement with technologies in practice, as charis thompson (previously cussins) (1996) demonstrated in her ethnographical fieldwork of infertility clinics in which women increased their agency through the objectification process, when desired. taking part in these debates from a feminist phenomenological perspective, this section asks, what does it take for a person and their body to become a willing and empowered subject for fertility-tracking technology? fashioned by knowing of various sorts, different selves emerge in cyclic self-fashioning processes. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 9 by configuring the body as a site for interpretation, fertility-tracking subjects gain autonomy in specific situations, and challenge the presumed disciplinary power of technology. izabella learned about digital fertility tracking from a colleague and, after some research, decided to buy a daysy. reflecting on her user history (more than two years and continuing), she described a shift in her willingness to rely on an external entity only to make sense of her fertility status: at the beginning, i used it before reading anything about the method. i knew people were charting and taking their temperatures, but i didn’t want to risk making the wrong assumptions. and i didn’t want to manually enter numbers and make a decision. i wanted something easy that just tells me green, red, or yellow. but then later, maybe one year after using it automatically, like a robot and reading and doing what it says, one friend recommended that book, taking charge of your fertility. i read it and then i started to go backward into my cycle and analyze the data. (izabella, age 34, switzerland) while, like other users, izabella had done some prior research on existing devices, she didn’t deem it necessary to study the fertility-tracking method itself. submitting her signaling-albeit-opaque body to the tracker was good enough, as izabella expected to see a distinct color representing her fertility status. in those days, she described her body as a robot engaging in unprotected sex on green days, with reassurance of no side effects. but following the intervention of a friend and an authoritative fertility book, she transformed from willing object into an active interpreter of her cycle and fertility status. no longer afraid of making erroneous decisions related to her fertile body, she now “recodes” colors on occasion based on her body sensations, and on her readings. like izabella, other users shifted from automatically submitting their “bodies-to-be-known” to the tracker to becoming agents of interpretation. in such instances, the tracker loses its expert status as the user claims it for herself. some fertility-tracking users had the opposite transformation. it is beyond the scope of the current analysis to fully explain the conditions under which users will shift toward or away from agency through the tracker. however, several users became more trusting subjects of the technology after looking for information to make sense of their tracker, body, and/or data. when sources (such as books, friends, teachers, websites, customer services, and peers) gave confirmatory information, these users slowly adapted from a skeptical, interpretative position special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 10 and trustingly delegated the interpretative work to the machine. for jenny (age 28, finland), the shift occurred as she took an online class on fertility-tracking methods, after having used the tracker for a few months. chiara spent considerable time asking questions and reading users’ online discussion posts before buying the tracker, and later, trusting it. cathy used an ovulation predictor kit to confirm the tracker’s data: “i wanted to make sure the daysy was actually accurate. i trusted that it was, i needed a controller, i needed another source to confirm it” (cathy, age 33, us). the red light on the tracker matched the positive line from the ovulation kit, bolstering cathy’s trust in the tracker as she’s engaging in sensory work to make sense of her body in a context of differently mediated data. after being put to the test, the tracker sometimes becomes a kind of “digital companion species” (lupton 2016), as the boundary between “device as tracker” and “subject as tracker” is blurred. cathy describes her relation to the tracker’s yellow light: i think daysy does a good job of using the yellow light. if there’s anything that makes it doubt where my body might be going hormonally, it makes it a yellow day, which i find mostly frustrating [laughs]! but it’s doing that to protect me. whereas a green or red light is perceived as useful information that buoys action, the bittersweet resignation cathy describes when her protective tracker is uncertain about her status reveals a complex relationship. regardless of fertility status, however, human and nonhuman entities combine through “data rituals” (forlano 2017) to produce the fertile female body. as the narratives show, the tracker rarely acquires a singular authoritative position. its relative power to shape behavior is related to multiple elements, through which users themselves produce “serviceable truths” (jasanoff 2015). the data operate as an active mediator between the body and the embodied self. the tracker, as “hybrid technology” (mamo 2007), takes part in an intricate assemblage, which calls for the problematization of taken-for-granted considerations on the distribution of agency. rather than being merely empowered or alienated by technology, users subjectify themselves to a regime of attention i call “soft(a)wareness,” which operates as a double imperative: users are prompted to know the body’s internal logics (via objectifying software) while being prevented from access to the inner workings of special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 11 the software itself (which is blackboxed). as a result, designers create a positive frame of “intentional non-knowing” (owens 2017) that functions as a moral imperative for digitally mediated self-management. this cultural promotion of ignorance (schiebinger 2005) works alongside the push for technologically mediated “self-knowledge.” users can rely on the tracker to know when to use contraception rather than their own embodied intuition, but they don’t know the inner logics of the interpretative software, hidden from their realm of awareness. practically speaking, users enact varied versions of soft(a)wareness. these different versions occur within and between users. for example, early on in the cyclic self-tracking process, izabella devoted minimal attention to her tracked body by submitting it like a robot to the tracker. later on, she went beyond the tracker’s scripted requirements to devote ample time and energy to understanding, observing, and analyzing her body and her embodied self. some users kept tracking their cycle, but stopped using the tracker, once they become “confident enough” to do so. nicole purchased a “smarter” tracker that allowed her to continuously track her temperature at night despite having to stand up regularly to feed her newborn. margaret (age 26, us), on the contrary, turned to a basic thermometer to be less reliant on a costly technology. when theorizing further the underlying conditions that shape users’ reliance on external authority to make sense of their cycle, emily martin’s (2001) classic work on women’s experiences of menstruation is partially instructive. she found that class was a major factor in women’s understandings. while middle-class women were more likely to give authority to scientific discourses—even if these conveyed negative stereotypes such as menstruation as failed pregnancy—working-class women were more able to resist these discourses and tended to account for the process in phenomenological terms. as the sample analyzed in this paper mostly includes highly educated subjects that would fall onto martin’s middle-class subjects categorization, such a factor doesn’t help much to theorize about differences between women in this analysis. certainly, differences in national contexts and access to particular types of healthcare systems will play a role. other factors likely to impact such decisions would involve family and community contexts, risks associated with sex and fertility, marital or partnering status, and individual factors. mediating affects through datafied objectification within the cyclic self-fashioning assemblage, the fertile body is inherently “multiple” (mol 2002) and, though objectified, enacts specific “biopossibilities.” special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 12 willey defines biopossibility as a “speciesand context-specific capacity to embody socially meaningful traits or desires” (2016, 124). in cyclic self-tracking, the concept of biopossibilities is useful for critically engaging with natureculture entanglements in situations where the datafied body becomes a catalyst for understanding and intervening on the self. in these situations, users engage in the kind of “critical work” of “making [data] intelligible” that willey recommends (2016, 139). they invest material aspects of the physical, biological, social, and digital body with potentiality and participate in particular regimes of truth (willey 2016, 122). next, i investigate the critical work done by users in multiple configurations. in these configurations, users orientate themselves temporally to maintain or reach a certain level of comfort toward/with their body. they undertake orientations that align their “actual body” and their “potential body.” using subramaniam and willey's (2017) terminology, we can say that the potential body is characterized by users’ understandings of “capital-b, biology” (as the hegemonic field of science), whereas their actual body refers to “lowercase-b, biology” (as the “stuff itself,” enacted in bodies). therefore, i define the actual body as the relation users enact with their present body, whereas the potential body is an imagined relation with their body that will, or could be, enacted in the future. the potential body is characterized by normative expectations of what the menstruating body should do. in the mediation of the relationship between their data and embodied self, users come to an understanding of their body, and the relations their body is in, in a way that allows them to moderate their affective relations with themselves and others. the tracker is a key element (amongst others) in the project for harmonious attunement between the body and embodied self. for example, lisbet describes synchronizing her life with her predicted menstrual status: i am definitely less stressed out now because i take my time every month when i have my period. i actually plan on having down time…when my body is also having a down time…i understand why my body is doing this, and then it makes complete sense. and i can act like, what does my body need? it needs to relax now. and that’s fine. and i actually plan for it, and that’s perfect. (lisbet, age 31, denmark) lisbet’s datafied cycle is a measure that goes beyond the binary code of fertility status. it is a measure of a future physical state (“down time”) that it expected, anticipated, and, in her situation, accepted as positive. her previous self, which special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 13 was nondatafied, contributed to a lack of understanding about why her body behaved in a certain way. robin uses her datafied cycle to make sense of her body and emotional states, when possible using the information to plan her day and her interactions. she said, the very first thing you do in the morning sets a tone for the day…[the measure] helped me to get to a better question faster. so, if i feel irritated…it helped me to get to “ok, why am i feeling this?” faster, so i can avoid being a big jerk. and accusing others of being a big jerk…i’m going to adjust the day today. or i’m just not going to talk to these people today because i’m not going to be nice [laughs]. (robin, age 42, us) in situating her body on the fertility chart and using that data to understand her emotions, robin’s account demonstrates how the datafied body can become a mediator of relations to others which, in this case, are enacted through avoidance. overall, fertility-tracking users viewed the prospective aspects of the technology as highly practical, especially for aiding their mental and physical preparedness to manage reproductive realities at different points in the life course. the diversity of age in this sample illuminates various ways users in different phases wished to be prepared. for example, unlike most users, robin’s motivation to use the device was never for “contraceptive use” but to monitor menopause. she was expecting her body to start changing and was willing to “do that [menopause] well.” for robin, “doing menopause well” meant “enjoying [her] menopausal problems” by understanding what her body will be doing; her data-driven approach takes part in “local biologies” that challenge negative views of the aging body perpetuated by disease-oriented approaches to menopause (lock 1993). with a focus on the potential body, users like robin engaged in varied anticipatory practices (adams, murphy, and clarke 2009) in response to cyclic data (such as taking medications, eating hormone-modifying plants or seeds, and using essential oils, to name a few). in some narratives, the datafied cycle was retrospectively viewed as a gauge of well-being. in these situations, users related how living in harmful social environments was reflected in their cycle chart. to “redress” the aberrant data, these users tried to modify their entanglements with these environments whenever possible. this was the case for margaret (age 26, us) who got an impulse to move out of an unstable living situation and relationship based on her data (recurrent anovulatory cycles). when she observed special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 14 that her chart switched back to seemingly ovulatory following the spatial and relational change, the data confirmed to her that she had made the right choice. cyclic self-fashioning is a process that involves not only what users feel but also who they are, as biosociotemporal entities. in this process, users and data are coshaped in a “looping effect” (hacking 2002) in which individuals, when classified, tend to spontaneously align with the prescriptive characteristics of the classifications; once in the loop, classifications get modified in return. for fertilitytracking users, the charts (or dots, or lights) become “agents” that constitute bodies and selves (dumit and de laet 2014). these outputs not only characterize bodies as temporary cyclical entities; they produce an ontological reality, the cyclic self. the cyclic self as body politics through processes of cyclic self-fashioning, multiple selves emerge, such as the “active knowledge-seeker” or the “affects mediator” described previously. in this section, i analyze three other emerging configurations that challenge or reproduce gendered expectations for the female body: the “maximizing self,” “the erotic self,” and the “invalidated self.” one configuration is the maximizing self. if we return to izabella—who uses her embodied intuition along with the tracker outputs to produce her fertility status— one motivation was to increase the number of green days: “i am trying to maximize the number of green days which i know exist. and i know that daysy is being more conservative than it should be.” as she explains, daysy gives her “a little bit of buffer in order to make it safer for everybody.” this standardization is deemed “too conservative”; therefore, she interprets some yellow and red dots as green. the maximizing self can also be enacted through behavioral actions. for example, linda takes medicinal plants to increase the length of her cycle and get more green days (age 26, us). contrary to izabella, linda doesn’t recast the tracker’s outputs, but tries to act earlier in the process by altering her body’s hormone balance. yet in the narratives, maximizing the number of green days is not a goal in itself. it is a way to be reassured that one’s body is working “as it should.” green days can be associated with the “conceptive imperative” (wilkinson, roberts, and mort 2015) in which menstruating subjects understand themselves as primarily fecund entities. but the notion of cyclic self also challenges the reduction of the female body to procreative capacities, as seen with robin’s menopause tracking. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 15 the exploration of another configuration, the erotic self, leads beyond widely discussed themes in the datafication of health (ruckenstein and schüll 2017). for example, jane (age 21, us) associates green days with the bliss of “deequipment.” in her description, green light signifies “fun” defined as sexual intercourse without contraception. when communicating her colored data to her partner, she imbues the data point with a coupled identity, toggling between “i’m green” and “we’re green” in her reporting. as when couples share news that “we’re pregnant,” jane implies that her partner is fully invested in the outcome. similarly, christine (age 24, us) was sending screenshots of her colored prognostic to her closer partner in order to plan safe dates for unprotected sex. the mobilization of data in service of anticipated, pleasurable sexual activities serves as a means to eroticize users’ embodied self. the erotic self is, in that sense, powerful and relational (willey 2016). cyclic self-fashioning also creates “embodied differences” (m’charek 2010) that materialize in a failed relationship with the “digital companion species” when the user’s body does not meet technological specifications. in such cases, users become invalidated. this was the case for adeline (age 34, us). she had been using the tracker to avoid pregnancy for several years. when she and her husband decided to conceive a child, they used the tracker to help pinpoint optimal cyclic timing. after several months, she was still not pregnant. despite assessments at infertility clinics, there was no clear reason why. the tracker had made adeline fertile, but never pregnant. the disconnect resulted in pain and frustration toward the tracker. she explained, “it gave me a false sense of control or knowledge about what was happening with my body”; her potential body never materialized. tess’s (age 31, us) invalidation resulted from being unable to use the tracker properly, as she almost always received that inconclusive yellow light. instead of agency, she received daily confirmation of an “uncertain” rather than “cyclic” body that was stressful enough for her to want to stop using the device. cyclic self-fashioning processes shape multiple distributions of the self, through which users align multiple elements, including their embodied self, datafied cycle, relations with others, biomedical knowledge, experiential knowledge, bodily sensations, and others. in these distributions, the role of biology (as the biomedical system of reference) and biologies (as experienced bodies) is ambivalent, potentially acting as both validating as well as invalidating entities (subramaniam and willey 2017). if we are to problematize the role of b/biology in users’ lives, it is important to acknowledge the dual tension in which they are intricated. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 16 on the one hand, users’ anticipatory practices seem to fit well in a gendered model of healthcare characterized by moral imperatives, where female subjects are prompted to act towards the preservation and optimization of “their best possible futures” (adams, murphy, and clarke 2009); an imperative of the “idealized reproductive citizen” strengthened by digital technologies (lupton 2015). on the other hand, by engaging in data rituals, they enact a particular form of care (forlano 2017). acting with, rather than against their body, users challenge negative representations of the female body as chaotic, and menstruation as a failure (martin 2001). users who find, in data, socially acceptable reasons for their emotions and behaviors represent a form of embodiment of the self, in which lowercase-b biology is used as a validating entity, even while edging towards what could be seen as biologism. yet while certain biologies are normalized and therefore validated in cyclic self-fashioning, others are not. in this sense, processes of cyclic self-fashioning also (re)produce embodied differences that result in the labeling of “non-conforming” bodies—a process of technologically based scrutiny that can be a source of pain and anxiety rather than empowerment. discussion this paper has two aims: (1) to provide empirical insights on self-tracking practices heretofore neglected in self-tracking scholarship, and (2) to provide a conceptual framework for the analysis of self-tracking practices based on feminist theories of the body and technology. investigating “cyclic-selves fashioning” as resultant of the sociohistorically situated alignment among digital data, technology, and the female body provides insight into new understandings of the conditions under which self-tracking technologies of the menstrual cycle reproduce and challenge power relations, as well as (re)configure women’s experiences of health, fertility, and sexuality. by situating the multiple and complex negotiations that necessarily occur between users, technology, and the body as a particular site of power, the presentation herein offers an analytical toolkit that allows for the description of self-tracking practices, without ultimately portraying users as victims of technology or technology as deterministic. by emphasizing varied enactments of menstrual cycle tracking, it shows how tracking practices shape physiological “facts” about the fertile female body while also promoting a particular relation to the body and self. throughout the twentieth century, different proxies have been used to construct the technoscientific figure of the female body as a predominantly cyclical entity. i use special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 17 the concept of cyclic self-fashioning to explore how the premise of cyclicity embedded in the technology works to reduce the complexity of bodies to a simple set of color-coded indicators whilst opening them up to question, discussion, and intervention. building on feminist studies of objectification (cussins 1996), anticipation (adams, murphy, and clarke 2009), and materialization (willey 2016), i describe how users mobilize varied sources of authority when confronted with the material agency of objectifying technologies. this paper opens a dialogue with feminist inquiries to illustrate that self-tracking subjects are multiple rather than singular. fertility-tracking can be seen both as a way to resist the increasing biomedicalization of women’s bodies as well as a means to perpetuate neoliberal imperatives such as the responsible, reproductive citizen in charge of her health. feminist scholars have similarly argued that processes of “self-care” are conflicting: self-care as privilege bears potential for reproducing neoliberal imperatives that lead to self-empowerment rather than social change (bobel 2010, 84); yet, self-care enacted as political action (as seen in the context of political struggle against anti-black racism [ahmed 2014]) may also bring about change. this study falls in between, and may be more aptly framed in terms of “selfdetermined care”—a reframing of self-care that builds social justice through love, and against the devaluation of certain lives (brown 2012). by aligning individual and collective practices in pursuit of social justice, self-determined care may be a means to address the exclusionary effects of self-tracking practices. in turn, we might find a way out of the alienation/liberation narrative in which women’s uses of technologies so easily get classified. as a feminist technoscience researcher, my aims and hopes are that academic knowledge production can be used for feminist intervention (and not just theory per se). a cadre of radical, self-determined menstrual activists have already started to build collective projects for the design of feminist menstrual cycle tracking technologies. for example, mobile apps such as drip or pow! are being developed in an attempt to give more agency to users when it comes to privacy, transparency, or data ownership.2 another project to be mentioned is hamdamapp,3 an app that allows users in iran and afghanistan to track their cycle on the djalali calendar and provides non-heteronormative information about sex and health. as designers are beginning to develop queer technology that helps individuals to imagine constructive and positive ways to live with our bodies, we need feminist studies to engage with emerging technologies if we want our special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) laetitia della bianca, 2021 18 research to go beyond theoretical abstraction and offer benefit to our subjects and broader communities. this paper offers a reflection on the ways a specific fertility-tracking assemblage shapes and is shaped by different entities, temporalities, and affects. future research could investigate the conditions under which some users in specific assemblages shift toward and away from agency, and in whose interests. in addition to the investigation of such dynamics, i hope that this paper could encourage future research on the differences and power hierachies pertaining to race, (dis)ability, (non-normative) sexuality and gender spectrum that are enacted through these technologies. that way we can not only deepen our understanding of human entanglements with data, but also make critical and intersectional interventions. acknowledgements i am grateful to my interviewees for generously sharing their experiences with me, and to valley electronics for kindly granting me access to their survey. i thank luna dolezal, venla oikkonen, and the catalyst editorial team for their insightful comments. many thanks to amy agigian, chris bobel, denia djokić, and francesco panese for helping me shape my earlier thoughts through lively and inspiring discussions. i am grateful to mélody pralong, and kathrin zippel for their comments on a previous version of the introduction. many thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions, and to gayle sulik for her thoughtful editing of this paper. finally, i am deeply grateful to my writing friends from the boston consortium for graduate studies in gender, culture, women, and sexuality, christine bachman-sanders, deborah feingold, heatherjean macneil, katharina neissl, lauren rizzuto, and asha tall, for their extremely helpful feedback and fantastic support. notes 1 i use the terms woman, she, her to refer to the way specific narrators (for example, designers, users, or authors) frame the subject. otherwise, the genderneutral terms user, they, them are preferred. 2 see https://bloodyhealth.gitlab.io/ for the drip app, and https://www.usepow.app/ for pow! 3 see https://hamdamapp.com/ for hamdamapp. https://bloodyhealth.gitlab.io/ https://www.usepow.app/ https://hamdamapp.com/ special section: self-tracking, embodied 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bodily truthing, technosexual scripts, and the materialization of sexualities through the phallometric test.” social studies of science 45 (2): 187–213. weiner, kate, catherine will, flis henwood, and rosalind williams. 2020. “everyday curation? attending to data, records and record keeping in the practices of selfmonitoring.” big data & society 7 (1): 1–15. wilkinson, joann, celia roberts, and maggie mort. 2015. “ovulation monitoring and reproductive heterosex: living the conceptive imperative?” culture, health & sexuality 17 (4): 454–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2015.1005671. willey, angela. 2016. undoing monogamy: the politics of science and the possibilities of biology. durham, nc: duke university press. author bio laetitia della bianca is a phd candidate in the faculty of social and political sciences at the university of lausanne. her current research explores the role of scientific authority in the shaping of biosensors, knowledges, and bodies.     special section: probing the system: feminist complications of automated technologies, flows, and practices of everyday life incubator art lab: reimagining biotech futures through integrated laboratory practices     jennifer willet university of windsor jwillet@uwindsor.ca     abstract incubator art lab is an art and science research laboratory at the university of windsor, ontario, canada. this image/text document explores the invisible integrated laboratory practices developed within incubator art lab that reimagining how scientific research is conducted within institutional settings towards more joyful and inclusive biotech futures. the piece describes new modes of engaging with institutional bureaucracy, designing infrastructure, and community-building efforts that are central to how incubator art lab functions as a feminist bioart laboratory.     keywords bioart, laboratory management, art, science, infrastructure, bureaucracy     introduction incubator art lab is a cross-disciplinary research group and bioart research and teaching facility housed in the school of creative arts at university of windsor, ontario, canada, founded in 2009 by me, dr. jennifer willet. incubator art lab houses the undergraduate bioart class bioart: contemporary art and the life sciences, as well as ongoing student and faculty bioart projects, science and technology studies research, and special events that investigate the intersection of biotechnology, art, and ecology. bioart is a contemporary art form that uses biology and hands-on biotechnological techniques in the production of artworks.   in 2018 incubator art lab launched a state-of-the-art biosafety level-two (bsl2) laboratory facility dedicated to biological art research with a floor-to-ceiling glass wall separating the lab from the main atrium of the new school of creative arts. the new incubator art lab is both a research facility and a multimedia theatre and art venue where audiences can view living biological artworks. our lab engages in mixed-use research/creation in molecular biology, microbiology, microscopy, and plant and mammalian tissue culture protocols with integrated multimedia, theatrical lighting design, video, and sound capabilities. this new facility provides unique innovations in bioart public engagement: our daily activities are visible to pedestrians as they walk through the building; the facility serves as a gallery where artworks that are unable to leave the laboratory can be safely seen by audiences as well as a multimedia performing arts venue where seated audiences can view theatre and performance events that integrate living biological organisms and the tools and techniques of biotechnology.   the primary research objective of incubator art lab is to devise research/creation methods, artworks, texts, and technologies that serve to engage audiences, species and communities in collaboratively imagining possible biotech futures. this generative process is intended to counter the overwhelmingly pessimistic and corporate cultural imaginations of our environmental and technological future through news media, advertising, and science fiction. instead, incubator projects focus on generating alternative and imaginative biotech futures through interdisciplinary research/creation. our cross-disciplinary research integrates advanced digital and biotechnologies; feminist and post-colonial perspectives; historical, ecological, agricultural, and indigenous knowledges; community engagement; sustainability; love, joy, gratitude, and the acknowledgement of suffering.   this image/text document explores the invisible integrated laboratory practices developed in incubator art lab that support research in generating imaginative biotech futures. often, the publications and artworks produced by our laboratory are highlighted as our most significant contributions to the field. however, new modes of engaging with institutional bureaucracy, designing infrastructure, and community-building efforts devised by me and the incubator art lab team are possibly even more impactful than our research outputs in transforming how art and biotechnological research is practiced in institutional settings. this document represents an attempt to convey the structural, managerial, bureaucratic operations of incubator art lab as significant social, political, and interpersonal activities within the university. incubator art lab is an example of a feminist response to managing a laboratory research group within a highly regimented, patriarchal, colonial institutional setting.   this alternate framework for operating a laboratory is built upon generations of feminist science and technology studies scholars challenging objective rationality, patriarchy, and colonialism in the hard sciences. the works of lynne margulies, donna haraway, and robin wall kimmerer are foundational to my thinking and creative activities, encouraging me to consider the role of the nonhuman and more-than-human as participants, even collaborators, in my bioart research and creation. my fascination with alternative scientific research methods stems directly from evelyn fox keller’s (1983) biography of barbra mcclintock called a feeling for the organism. keller illustrates mcclintock’s daily activities building individual relationships with stocks of maize in her research fields. mcclintock’s research methodologies—rooted in cultivation, insight, commitment, and subjective experience—are more often linked to domestic activities or creative arts practices than traditions in the hard sciences, and have highly influenced my own strategies in the lab. deboleena roy’s molecular feminisms: biology, becomings, and life in the lab mirrors so much of my experiences working in a laboratory environment, including a profound empathy for nonhuman organisms and a willful playfulness and investment in erotic biopower in performing laboratory protocols (2018, 5).   however, it wasn’t until 2016, when i stumbled across hope jahren’s memoir lab girl: a story of trees, science, and love (2016), that i really considered the applied operations of a laboratory also as a site for critical transformation. jahren’s book traces her experiences working as a female scientist from a fledging grad student to the lead scientist of her own laboratory. she describes in great detail her own challenges with relationships, poverty, mental health, in conjunction with the systemic sexism she encountered in the hard sciences. she outlines very procedural barriers she encountered purchasing equipment, hiring staff, traveling, maintaining a lab on campus, and engaging in field research. her harrowing accounts align with some of my experiences trying to launch and maintain a significant international art career based on sweat equity and relentless problem solving in a highly competitive institutional environment.   i am also deeply influenced by other research labs and/or research groups i have encountered personally or through conferences and online research that are challenging established hieratical administrative, decision making, and managerial norms. launched in 2008, the technoscience salon (https://technosalon.wordpress.com/) is an intersectional feminist, anti-racist, non-binary science and technology studies inter-institutional organization founded by dr. michelle murphy (university of toronto) and dr. natasha myers (york university). the technoscience salon is committed to building a fluid, collaborative, horizontal organizational and event structure that mirrors the theoretical goals of the research group. they are a long-standing and highly functional model for careful, engaged, critical investment in building a community that reflects the world they want to live in, rather than the world of inequity we have inherited. similarly, i am influenced by the feminist community-building model presented by dr. natalie loveless and her research group called co-lab: research-creation + social justice collaboratory (www.researchcreation.ca) founded in 2013 at the university of alberta. within the sciences, i have found a collaborator for reimagining scientific research methodologies and organizing principles of a lab within my own institution: dr. catherine febria, canada research chair in freshwater restoration ecology and director of the healthy headwaters lab (www.healthyheadwaterslab.ca). dr. febria engages in highly locavore and applied ecological research restoring freshwater ecologies in collaboration with farmers, artists, and indigenous communities. her lab is committed to embracing diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives while conducting environmental research towards producing holistic solutions for restoring the freshwater ecology. i am also inspired by dr. max liboiron’s civic laboratory for environmental action research (https://civiclaboratory.nl/) at memorial university in newfoundland, which posits itself as a scientific research lab monitoring plastics pollution in canadian east coast waterways, but also as a scientific methods incubator aiming to bring feminist, indigenous, anti-oppressive methodologies to the operations of a university research laboratory.   lastly, i would like to emphasize that the strategies presented in this document are aspirational and in progress. there are many ways that i and our lab fail to meet these objectives, and each strategy for reimagining what a lab is and how it functions is at a different point of manifestation. but if i were to wait until incubator art lab is fully functioning as the feminist art/science institution i aspire it to be, i would never utter a word of this to anyone.   figure 1. willet, j. incubator art lab digital collage (2021).   incubator art lab incubator art lab was founded in september 2009 in the school of visual arts (now creative arts) at the university of windsor. it sounds auspicious, but it was not. the original incubator art lab was an oddly shaped windowless storage room that infected most of my research with a blue/green mould and flooded from time to time. i spent most evenings and weekends in the dank windowless lab, building and learning how to operate various pieces of used equipment. i had help from student artists and scientists who i hired on small contracts to assist with maintenance and operations. it was modest, but the lab had charm, and the students were excited and refreshingly uninhibited. we built a small community with a goofy clubhouse atmosphere. for example, one day while working in my office, a stressed-out grad student ran in to tell me the bioart students had short-circuited the pressure cooker we used to sterilize equipment and endless batches of agar. i told him not to worry, to cut the cord off the unit before disposal, and if they felt like it, to throw the pressure cooker a funeral on the way out to the dumpster: and they did. that afternoon, a dozen art and science students performed a funeral march with accompanying music up and down the halls of the visual arts building before performing an impromptu eulogy by the dumpster in the back lot of the building; it was a fun and productive time.   in 2018, i was awarded a tier 2 canada research chair (crc) in art, science, and ecology with significant multi-year funding attached (cad$100,000/annum x 10 years). the crc program is intended to attract and retain leaders in research to sustain canada’s research excellence on an international scale. it is a significant accomplishment for an artist to receive a crc as the chairs are competitive across disciplines and most often awarded to researchers in the sciences and social sciences. in 2021 there are 13 artists holding a crc out of 2,285 possible chairs across canada (government of canada 2021). within a very short time span, incubator art lab transformed from a modest diy art/science lab to a small institute of note. with this transformation has come exciting opportunities: more funding and more space, expanded capacities, more students, some staff—more help! what also comes with this transformation is the need to scale up, take on new responsibilities, and engage in larger institutional and management activities. this aspect of incubator art lab has become a central focus over the last few years. how do i align my unruly activist artistic intentions with the necessary tasks involved in managing infrastructure, budgets, humans, and nonhumans in a laboratory environment? i am trying to think carefully with each administrative step about how i can build a creative space, a community, and an institution that reflects my belief in intersectional feminist principles, empathy across species, radical interdisciplinarity, and love and joy, while carefully navigating stringent institutional policies and procedures.   figure 2. willet, j. interspecies interrelations digital collage (2021).   love in 2012 i completed an artwork called biotechnology is a technology of love... it is a simple piece. the letters l o v e are cut out of leather and felt scraps and placed into petri dishes, and agar is poured over the letters. of course, the letters are filled with microbes that bloom overnight in the incubator. the petri dishes are arranged in a similar formulation to robert indiana’s love (1967) and photographed. this work came from the startling realization that the time, care, intimate knowledge, and nudging it takes to sustain life in a hostile laboratory environment could be conceived of as a significant act of love. scientists (and bioartists) are compelled to make substantial sacrifices (in terms of personal relationships, health, quality of life) to maintain research experiments that can be so tedious and often counterintuitive to human vitality. in this work, i am not thinking of the unidirectional love that we might think a scientist could offer their organism of study. instead, i am thinking of a kind of love that entangles humans and nonhumans in the mutually beneficial and mutually detrimental collaborative relationships. a kind of love that acknowledges suffering and even death. i also wonder in what way (if any) can we speak of the love or care afforded by the nonhuman organisms in the lab—towards themselves, towards each other, towards the humans in the lab. and what of the human relationships in a lab—can they also be guided by principles of love?   this piece serves as a mission statement of sorts as i think through how to build my own lab. what would a lab based on the premise that biotechnology is a technology of love... look like? how would it function? when i tell people i am building a lab with an ethic of love as a central organizing feature, they are often amused and somewhat dismissive. love is not valued as a rigorous research methodology. love is most often understood as an irrational and very personal sensation—something that happens to you, rather than something that is consciously practiced over time. however, bell hooks argues that all great movements for social justice emphasize a love ethic as a transformational force in her book all about love: new visions (2001). she describes love not as an emotion but as a practice and a commitment to “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication” (hooks 2001, 5). she indicates that the work environment is as important as the personal or domestic domain for perpetuating love (of self, of work, of community, of the other) towards combating racism, sexism, dehumanization, and exploitation in our society (63–64). it is also more pleasurable and fulfilling (and possibly productive) to work in an environment where you respect and admire your colleagues, and where you and your contributions are valued and enjoyed. it is from this perspective that i am striving to build a loving work environment for incubator art lab.   figure 3. willet, j. human communities digital collage (2021).   human communities incubator art lab is a physical set of facilities and a site of interspecies research/creation, but it also a human community based on the model of a scientific research group. incubator art lab values and relies on notions of love, community, diversity, fun, and radical interdisciplinarity as a core values and key ingredients for innovation across the arts and sciences. we employ three part-time staff members (two artists and one scientist); two mfa students with a specialization in bioart (recruited from various interdisciplinary backgrounds); and two to four bsc and bfa students. we also work with regular contractors for accounting, pr, photo/video, and design activities. we meet as a group once a week to manage ongoing lab research projects, produce art exhibits, facilitate the bioart class, and support each other’s professional, creative, and research goals. everyone is paid reasonably for their time. we do not have volunteers in our lab, and we do not rely on additional hours of unpaid labour from employees, which is very common in both the arts and sciences. we hire for knowledge, skill, enthusiasm, and diversity—cultural diversity, diversity in lived experience, age, gender, education, and disciplinary specialization. hiring for diversity not only contributes to the social justice goals of lab but also is a valuable research asset fostering excellence in creative problem solving and innovation.   we start each meeting with a short presentation from a lab group member or an external guest on their own research and/or personal hobbies, experiences, goals, followed by a q and a discussion. then we move to managing the weekly activities of the lab, including upcoming projects, events, or deadlines; ongoing scientific or creative research activities; and activities pertaining to the bioart class. all members of the lab group are invited to speak at meetings, consult on ongoing projects, and discuss their work loads, duties, and external time commitments. the research group interacts as a whole weekly, but team members also work individually and in variable small groups on multiple projects. everyone receives public credit for their contributions to artworks, events, lab protocols, class workshops, publications. we are joyous, we are ruckus, we are silly, and we work very hard. sometimes it is challenging working so closely together. sometimes we encounter interpersonal conflicts. sometimes external forces in the larger university negatively impact our work environment (university-wide policies, or difficult personnel.) i have become very comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. also, some team members do not enjoy entanglement or wish to participate in a loving work environment—and find my methodologies an imposition. in which case, it is important to respect that individuals’ boundaries. sometimes it is just a job, and that is okay too. sometimes the emotional labor of befriending and supporting students and staff members as they encounter challenges and grow to become their own professional creative / scientific / productive selves is exhausting, and time-consuming, and more work than the research itself. however, i am committed to perpetuating confident yet vulnerable leadership, intergenerational mentorship and support, and kindness, joy, and love in our laboratory community. i see myself as a wedge—as an unruly woman and artist who wedged herself into places where she does not always belong. wedging myself into scientific communities, institutional spaces, the contemporary art world. i am committed to accessibility, to creating a safe space to have the difficult conversations, and to increasing opportunities for the next generation of trailblazers who have been told there is no space for them in institutional environments.   as incubator art lab matures into a strong community, i am now looking outwards. the next few years we will focus on how can we better connect with our local community, other research groups, citizens, artists, scientists, business owners, local farmers, and indigenous communities in the great lakes region.   figure 4. willet, j. geographically specific digital collage (2021).   geographically specific modernist conceptions of objectivity in laboratory design and operations rely on a notion that a research laboratory is not geographically specific. there is one caveat to this suggestion: in the ecological sciences, often (but not always) laboratories are located in geographic proximity to their research environment. but generally, in the biotech sector, laboratories (much like “white cube” galleries) are not intrinsically tied to the local community, the local ecology, local political, cultural, or economic issues. for example, biomedical research utilizing organoids as model case studies for testing treatment regimens for diseases are practiced the very same whether the research takes place in canada or in portugal.   incubator art lab challenges the notion that a laboratory can or should operate as if it is within a social, political, and ecological vacuum. reinforcing geographic blinders to the operations of a lab does not achieve measurable objectivity in research results. instead, this model prioritizes colonial and patriarchal models for engaging with the natural world. incubator art lab chooses to see our research/creation activities as entangled with our cultural and geographic location in the postindustrial landscape of the windsor–detroit region, on the canada/us border, and at the center of a thriving biological, historical, and cultural ecology. the great lakes region is home to a very complicated history—indigenous, canadian, and american history—that is unfurling today in with conflicting economic, ecological, and cultural tensions. how can we build a laboratory and research group that is reflexive and specific to our region? how can we nurture long-term mutually beneficial and meaningful relations with our local community and our local ecology?   we are working on a couple of ways to deepen our connections with the location, the ecology, and the community incubator art lab works within. as part of this work, i have developed a curatorial strategy hosting outdoor art/science events that engage with specific sites, municipalities, ecologies, histories for more than a decade. the next large project in windsor is going to be called the invasive species fishing trip (2022), exploring notions of “invasiveness” in the perception and regulation of human and nonhuman migration across borders and boundaries. we will host a number of artists and scientists; research, subsistence and indigenous fisherman; and social and political theorists studying human transnational migration to spend a week fishing for invasive species together in the great lakes. together, we will have a fish fry, engage in biomonitoring of the waterways, and participate in a multimedia music event. at the end of the week, we will hold a conference and cross-disciplinary discussions on the topic of invasiveness in human and animal migration with an emphasis on the great lakes region as a case study. projects like this are intended to bring people together from disparate disciplines and standpoints and build trust and shared experiences before entering into complex discussions on challenging topics. it is also a way for incubator art lab to deepen our knowledge and connection with the local environment, the economy, and communities and individuals with whom our research and creative activities intersect.   on the horizon, we have been discussing a speaker / field trip series for the lab group where once a semester we take a field trip to meet with a neighboring business, organization, or community to learn more about the windsor–detroit region.   figure 5. willet, j. infrastructure digital collage (2021).   infrastructure the incubator art lab built environment is intended as a physical manifestation of our core values and the notion that biotechnology is a technology of love...   architectural infrastructure takes five to ten years (or more) to implement. as incubator art lab gained some traction in the early years, i saw our greatest challenge was the dismal facilities we were housed in. it is difficult to find creative inspiration and joy in dodgy digs. it is difficult to command attention and support if your home is virtually condemned. i knew if we were going to attract students, collaborators, financial and community support, incubator art lab had to transform its physical space to align with our creative and professional aspirations. to this end, i have designed and implemented two innovative art/science spaces at the university of windsor: (1) a bsl2 research laboratory and multimedia theatre and (2) an artist studio and community engagement laboratory. both of these facilities are unique internationally.   the new incubator art lab is designed to function as an interdisciplinary biotech research lab dedicated to the production of bioartworks. the same space also supports the display of bioartworks and live bioart performances. the design combines laboratory, contemporary art, and domestic kitchen aesthetics. a chandelier hangs at the center of the lab. modeled after department store windows, shoe box dioramas, and food television sets, incubator art lab also functions as an installation-based artwork—and a social-pratice project—where the lab, and the humans and the nonhuman, and the microbial, molecular, and partial life participants in biotechnology become entangled performers in a strange biotech community theatre.   figure 6. willet, j. infrastructure 2 digital collage (2021).   infrastructure in fall 2021, we are opening a second facility: incubator art lab studio. the studio is a 1,700-square-foot storefront art studio, exhibition space, and community engagemment hub in downtown windsor, ontario. the front portion of the studio is a clean public space functioning as a drawing studio, office reception area, and gallery, and site for community bioart workshops. this area contains three chandeliers and a built-in biosafety level-one bioart lab housed in large bespoke greenhouse structure. this greenhouse lab contains a small counter, sink, mini fridge, electrical access, and waste area behind locked doors. the back section of the studio serves as a more functional artist studio, woodshop, and storage area for building large sculptural objects.   windsor, as a postindustrial city with high unemployment rates, struggles to retain its employable youth population, to revitalize its downtown core, and more generally suffers a lack of community confidence in the value of everything windsor. incubator art lab facilities are designed to inspire confidence, creativity, and joy for incubator art lab team members, researchers, and audiences. but these spaces are also designed to speak to and inspire windsorites, to build confidence and value in our share experience of living in windsor, ontario. these hybrid studio/laboratories are sites for innovative creative work, public engagement venues, as installation artworks stretching the limits of what a lab can look like. these spaces ask users and audiences to push the limits of what types of activities are possible in a laboratory environment. both spaces communicate to faculty, students, community members, and the local community, “the work you do here is extraordinary and valuable to our community.”   figure 7. willet, j. bureaucracy digital collage (2021).   bureaucracy as i’ve written elsewhere, “some of my most significant achievements as an artist and researcher in the bioart field are bureaucratic ones. performances and text documents that are only ever read or seen by very small audiences; health and safety officers, grant administrators, park wardens, and ethics review boards. these administrative gymnastic tactics have become a central component of my artistic practice” (willet forthcoming).   engaging with bureaucratic processes is a cruel but necessary aspect of practicing art/science research within an institutional setting. i often tell my students that 70 percent of my job is paperwork and meetings, and 30 percent is teaching and creative research. like most, i do not particularly enjoy the administrative duties attached to my employment, but i greatly appreciate the outcomes (pedagogical engagements, creative moments, artworks, and events) that these stressful and repetitive activities make possible. i have a few strategies i rely on to manage this aspect of my job. i try to keep all engagement with paperwork and bureaucracy to a minimum, and to not compound administrative tasks unless absolutely necessary. i work to complete bureaucratic tasks in an efficient, joyful, and kind manner. i try to be generous with the individuals i encounter while engaging in institutional processes as i have learned that other bureaucrats are often as irritated and constrained by the bureaucracies they serve as i am.   incubator art lab is now entering a new phase where we have become large enough that we need to set written policies and guidelines for the lab. who has access to our facilities? under what circumstances? how do we fairly assess priorities for resources? most recently, and in response to the black lives matter movement, we have decided to write community standards guidelines and set diversity and inclusion policies for the lab group as well as vendors and collaborators, and featured artists and researchers. we have always been deeply invested in creating a reflexive space and supporting black, indigenous, and poc, 2slgbtq+, and people living with disabilities in our field. but rather than continuing to rely on unspoken goals and goodwill, we need to institutionalize our commitment to transforming institutional racism within the academy. to this end, we struck a diversity committee, we are assessing our past diversity metrics, and are researching role models for accessible and not overly bureaucratic models for evaluating and communicating community standards within our organization. the irony is not lost on me that we have turned to further institutionalization to combat colonialism and racism within the institutional framework in which we work.   we are looking to existing models and documents that seem effective and accessible (and not overly bureaucratic), such as the “global community bio summit code of conduct” (2020) co-authored by members of the global community bio summit led by david kong and housed in the mit media lab. i like their publicly accessible four-page google doc format, written in colloquial language, with emphasis on building community rather than systems of control or protecting the organization from possible legal action. their document begins with four tenets for how to conduct oneself at their events: “we will differ on things; ask questions first; act in good faith; when in doubt, ask” (“global community bio summit code of conduct” 2020). other role models from the canadian arts community include articule gallery’s “open letter to artist-run centres in quebec: moving beyond statements of solidarity” (2020) and eastern edge gallery’s “code of conduct” and “safer spaces policy” (n.d.) as well at the “2019 addendum to the 2006 canadian human rights settlement agreement” against the crc program. this aspect of incubator art lab management is “in progress” and we hope to have a first draft of our policies and code of conduct written in fall 2021.   figure 8. willet, j. whimsy digital collage (2021).   whimsy lastly, one of the key strategies i have developed to help myself manage growing institutional and bureaucratic entanglements that are necessary in running a lab is to turn all aspects of my institutional life into artworks. or at least perform institutional tasks as if they were artworks. i conceive of incubator art lab’s physical spaces as installation-based artworks. i conceive of the work i am doing with the incubator art lab research group and the communities we interact with as a durational social practice artwork. paperwork, meetings with administrators, grant applications —all of it, i imagine as a grand performance. i choose to perform these duties with joy, creativity, humor, and love.   a significant component of my art practice evokes whimsy and the ridiculous as a propositional strategy for engaging non-specialist audiences in complex discussions about evolving biotechnologies. whimsy helps to break down barriers, startle our daily performed tasks, and breed an openness to new ideas and new interactions. working with joy, pleasure, love, fun, and friendship as a research methodology undermines capitalist, patriarchal, colonial models for perpetuating laboratory research practices, postsecondary education, and contemporary art production. the administrative activities i have outlined in this document have become a central component of my research and my artistic practice. i can feel these skills and actions inscribing themselves into my creative work, my thought processes, and inscribing my body with the logic of institutional systems. i can feel myself transforming into a bureaucrat. to counter the calcification of an unruly artist within a regimented framework, i relentlessly pursue fun as a strategy to remediate the effects of performing hundreds of hours of tedious tasks. additionally, it is more fun for us to work this way. from my perspective, if we are going to dedicate the majority of our waking hours to institutional undertakings, we might as well find pleasure in those activities.   acknowledgments i would like to thank the incubator art lab team members that contributed to this ongoing research: kadila adili, angela awada, ashley hemmings, domenica mediati, hadia nadeem, nate talbot, aleeza tariq, jude abu zaineh, billie mclaughlin, philip habashy, gillian hughes, lisha lang, michael lucenkiw, lauren rapp, justin elliott, and hayden freker. i wish to acknowledge the non-human organisms living and working in the lab right now including a large colony of spirulina algae and 42 petri dishes of gmo e. coli on agar. thank you to the school of creative arts and the university of windsor for supporting incubator art lab activities since 2009. and a big thank you to our funders including, the social sciences and humanities research council of canada, the canada research chair program, and the canadian foundation for innovation.   references articule. 2020. “open letter to artist-run centres in quebec: moving beyond statements of solidarity.” june 12, 2020. https://www.articule.org/en/open-letter-to-artist-centres-moving-beyond-solidarity-statements. canadian human rights commission. 2019. “2019 addendum to the 2006 canadian human rights settlement agreement.” may 16, 2019. https://www.chairs-chaires.gc.ca/program-programme/equity-equite/2019_addendum-eng.aspx. eastern edge gallery. n.d. “eastern edge code of conduct.” accessed may 6, 2021. https://easternedge.ca/about/eastern-edge-code-of-conduct/. ———. n.d. “safer spaces policy.” accessed may 6, 2021. https://easternedge.ca/about/accessibility/. government of canada.  “canada research chairs. last modified june 15, 2021. https://www.chairs-chaires.gc.ca/home-accueil-eng.aspx. hooks, bell. 2001. all about love: new visions. new york: william morrow. incubator art lab. n.d. accessed may 6, 2021. https://incubatorartlab.com/.   jahren, hope. 2016. lab girl: a story of trees, science, and love. new york: alfred a. knopf. keller, evelyn fox. 1983. a feeling for the organism: the life and work of barbara mcclintock. san francisco: w.h. freeman. kong, david. “global community bio summit code of conduct (2020).” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vkib656c8vcvz3wh4tlm1f-bu_xv6m9fbhmdolyix_m/edit#. roy, deboleena. 2018. molecular feminisms: biology, becomings, and life in the lab. seattle: university of washington press. willet, jennifer. forthcoming. “feasting the lab and other projects: art and science that skirts the limits of institutional frameworks.” in the routledge handbook of art, science, and technology studies, edited by hannah star rodgers, megan k. halpern, dehlia hannah, and kathryn de ridder-vignone. abingdon: routledge.   author bio jennifer willet is an artist and a canada research chair in art, science, and ecology and a professor in the school of creative arts at the university of windsor (canada). she is the director of incubator art lab, the first bioart laboratory in canada founded in 2009. mularoni, alessandra. 2021. “feminist science interventions in self-tracking technology.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–21. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © alessandra mularoni, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license feminist science interventions in self-tracking technology alessandra mularoni university of western ontario, canada amularon@uwo.ca abstract contemporary self-tracking systems signal a new era of biological monitoring now entangled with the politics of ubiquitous computing. is self-tracking technology, which is connected to major stakeholders in healthcare, essential for filling in gaps in care, or is it fueling an increasingly commercialized medical industry? this essay examines the complex biases embedded in self-tracking technologies and introduces three manifestations of feminist science that subvert the monetization of personal health information: feminist art collective subrosa, which investigates how personal genetic information is developed into marketable medical products in their web-based project, cell track: mapping the appropriation of life materials; media artist and biohacker mary maggic, who makes self-synthesized hormone therapy accessible with their open source estrogen project; artist-researcher heather dewey-hagborg, whose biohacking products provide a diy science in a world marred by genetic policing. against the lure of connectivity, feminist science looks to circumvention as a method for understanding and disrupting the gendered and raced politics embedded in selftracking technology. tracing alternative techno-politics in these three new media projects, this essay reveals the necessity for artistic interventions in the contemporary healthcare landscape. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 2 introduction incited by the information age, the virtues of quantification are imbued in nearly every human activity. this is especially true in the pursuit of self-knowledge and in efforts to decode the biological interior. thanks to scientific advancement, we know more about the body today than ever before. but to know thyself is to subscribe to the principles of tracking, a fundamental feature of internal study evident in both early monitoring practices like calendar-based fertility planning and contemporary biometric technology embedded in virtually all mobile devices.1 beyond the promise of exposing the “black box” of the body, advanced self-tracking technologies reify a techno-scientific agenda bent on reproduction. biological data is recoded as quantifiable bits, creating a feedback loop of information. while nothing has changed about the body as such, the advancement of prosthetic feedback loops has decreased the space between the body and the industries that profit from its capacity to reproduce. the preoccupation with reproduction is thus a preoccupation with the functions of the feminine body. to the extent that contemporary self-tracking technologies are deeply invested in affirming gender as a technology in itself, such systems reinforce scientific ideologies embedded in medical practice. in addition to revealing the specific political conditions in today’s configuration of gender qua technology, my argument locates points of departure and means for exploit. to this end, i evidence alternative modes of knowing (and knowing thyself) that halt—and at times redirect—the seamless proximity between bodies and the systems that harvest biological data. as deborah lupton emphasizes in her book the quantified self, what makes current trends in digital self-tracking products different from the age-old traditions of analog journaling is their real-time processing and storage of personal information within cloud computing infrastructure (2016, 10). a key feature of today’s internet, cloud computing stores and analyzes our online identities, transforming our movements and interactions into code. in the spirit of engaging with what lupton calls “lively data,” this essay builds on the idea that our data directly influences our subjectivity as well as its profile by regulatory and corporate bodies. inspired by banu subramaniam and angela willey’s use of the “traffic” metaphor to illustrate discursive movement between feminism and science, i take “lively data” to represent the discursive (and political) entanglement between the body’s production of information and the technologies that seek to quantify it (2017, 2). while contemporary self-tracking special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 3 tech markets its services to all smartphone users, i want to highlight the history of violence against feminine, non-white, and disabled bodies in scientific research. following this thread, and in an effort to shift the means of control away from capital in the cloud, i suggest feminist science as a radical approach to understanding our bodies and the way they operate within today’s digital economy. at once a discursive formulation and a radical practice, feminist science situates “feminism as a site for theorizing and reconfiguring the very meaning of science” (subramaniam and willey 2017, 4). its theoretical foundations acknowledge systemic gender, racial, and income inequalities in western scientific practice that have all but magnified under the conditions of networked technology. as subramaniam and willey demonstrate in their introduction to “feminism’s sciences,” the application of feminist theory in science and technology studies (sts) reveals the legacy of a one-size-fits-all approach in biomedical research, wherein health diagnostics and solutions are “based on the experiences of elite white populations” (2017, 16). this essay adopts a similar method of intersectional analysis by foregrounding the politics of the medicalized body in the face of pervasive biotechnology and suggesting feminist art as a different mode of knowing. the three new media art projects examined below mobilize the tenets of feminist science by critically engaging with both medical and technological discourses while advancing new methods of care. this examination is meant to move such interdisciplinary projects beyond cultural critique and into the territory of political transformation. the social body politic the discourse surrounding self-tracking technology includes disability studies and feminist scholarship as well as sts, critical race theory, and political economy. to demonstrate how these disparate disciplines interweave, i think it’s helpful to center rosemarie garland-thomson’s term “normate,” which designates “the constructed identity of those who, by way of bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (1997, 8). definitions of normativity and sovereignty typically work in tandem; those whose bodies subscribe to the given norms are more likely to be regarded as self-governing. errant bodies are subject to social, political, and economic marginalization. garland-thomson reminds us that the figure of the normate—the white, educated heterosexual male—is a rather limited representation of the general population. but even people who fit this profile are susceptible to illness. as the healthcare system becomes increasingly privatized, special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 4 the gap between patients and healthcare providers widens, and this is especially true for both the middle class and the working poor. considering the $8 million invested by digital health companies in 2018 “to bring new technology to the healthcare industry,” healthcare is linked to capital in the same way data is linked to capital (farr 2019). this has profound implications when addressing the social impact of algorithmic technology, as cultural constructs of identity must be carefully examined alongside individual and collective fluctuations in health. recent self-tracking arguments reveal the politics of biomedicalization, or “the extension of medical or biological explanation for the way things are,” in contemporary culture (neff and nafus 2016, 19). neff and nafus note that “[it] is now hard to find corners of life that are not subject to biomedical interpretation, from moods and feelings to life success itself” (2016, 19–20). through biomedicalization, self-tracking has become a primary medium to express and analyze selfhood. to track oneself is to know oneself, and it is in this sentiment that lupton locates “the apotheosis of the neoliberal entrepreneurial citizen ideal” (2016, 52). we see the ultimate manifestation of this ideal in social media “influencers,” who monitor (and subsequently share) their fitness progress alongside the number of “likes” and followers they accumulate by marketing this form of selfhood. average consumers in the digital health economy participate in lifestyleand self-management with wearable technology. under the pretense of self-care, these biometric products embody a technologized vision of health that natasha dow schüll (2016) refers to as “data for life.” by constantly monitoring and directing our habits in real time, wearable tech quantifies the process of selfempowerment. of course, the amount of money that can be invested in these products (and the amount time that can be invested in the process of selfimprovement) typically corresponds to a person’s socioeconomic status. it isn’t surprising that lifestyle brands generally cater to the white and wealthy. the idea that better health can be achieved through constant self-monitoring obfuscates more promising determinants of health and wellness, like comprehensive public health systems, access to nutritious food, and an overall emphasis on quality of life—all of which is decidedly unattainable for most americans. in this way, the weaving of biomedical ideology and contemporary technologized self-improvement reminds us that certain bodies are valued over others. at the same time, wearable technology instantiates nuanced biopolitical control through “governance by micronudge,” raising the question of agency in contemporary self-improvement practices (schüll 2016, 324). beyond the seemingly innocuous digital reminders to make healthy choices, self-tracking special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 5 technology expands the possibility of widespread state surveillance. these complexities of globally networked technology are further discussed toward the end of this essay. self-tracking technology, as we can see, is imbued with a politics that recognizes a mutually beneficial relationship between private interests and a cultural emphasis on convenience and social currency. health historian lara freidenfelds (2015) satirically illuminates this political agenda in wearable tech with her speculative health tracker, vulvaluv. where other trackers miss the mark in gender-specific interests, vulvaluv takes personalization to the next level by promising real-time period prediction and a “smart waistband” that adjusts to accommodate menstrual bloating. in addition to these specialized functions, vulvaluv comes equipped with what we have now come to expect from tracking apps geared toward health and fitness: heart rate monitoring, sensors that remind us to get moving, and communication with our online networks, including facebook. all of this tech seamlessly integrated in our underwear, all in the interest of building community and optimizing our health. notwithstanding the fact that some of these features are useful for family planning, freidenfelds calls to attention the biological conservatism and reproductive futurism embedded in self-tracking products marketed to women. for example, vulvaluv offers a post-pregnancy fitness feature that prompts users to engage in hourly kegel exercises to “[encourage] a healthy pelvic floor” (freidenfelds 2015). and while the app reminds women who aren’t planning to become pregnant to take precautionary measures during ovulation, the social dimension of the app caters to those who intend to conceive.2 what is perhaps more concerning, as freidenfelds brings to the fore, is the issue of equating data with capital. she ends her product proposal with impressive statistical evidence to support an even more impressive (albeit frightening) intention: the market potential is enormous. tens of millions of health trackers are sold each year. and vulvaluv will have exclusive access to some of the most valuable market data and customer connections out there: it will be able to target expectant parents even before they are actually expecting…let’s put vulvaluv on every tush in the nation. inasmuch as “valuable market data” offers us increased connectivity and convenience, it also re-entrenches the gendered biases in consumer behavior which equate women’s bodies with supply chains. the techno-capitalist extraction of biological processes raises two contentions in relation to labor. the first is that special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 6 there exists an incommensurable tension between biology and labor, meaning one necessarily involves the other. the second sees all labor as feminine, as it operates passively below our threshold of perception. in the case of self-tracking devices, biological data is being constantly collected. here, “lively data” describes the relationship between the body’s output and a company’s commercial success. vulvaluv’s imperative to privatize reproduction emphasizes these arguments in biolabor, as the fertility industry hinges on procreation. freidenfelds underscores the ethical questions we must ask when the products marketed to women under the pretense of “self-care” also regard them as both labor reserves and information to be mined for the sake of market potential. as a medical device designed to keep the heart beating, the wireless cloudconnected pacemaker embodies the intersection of digital health products and the digital economy. in her article, “my pacemaker is tracking me from inside my body,” neta alexander (2018) describes the complicated relationship with her wireless pacemaker. she writes, “the idea of a battery-equipped, internetconnected device living forever inside my chest both terrifies and fascinates me.” that the pacemaker is ubiquitous—that is, it is collecting and distributing data through the internet of things—raises questions of cybersecurity and privacy, as well as moral and legal rights. what makes monitoring biometric information threatening is the exposure to hacking. running on proprietary code and constantly collecting data, cardiovascular devices communicate with unseeable agents (we might recall stelarc’s ping body in similar human-computer interaction). certainly, the feeling of one’s pulse being “monetized” also uncomfortably reminds us that care today is often linked to enterprise (alexander 2018). like self-tracking tech, the concern here lies in the lack of transparency and the potential for data breaches despite the promise of personalized healthcare. evidence of several period tracker apps sharing users’ personal health information with facebook reveals the digital health industry’s anti-democratic data-sharing practices (see rajagopalan 2019). as healthcare becomes increasingly motivated by the private sector, the biopolitics embedded in self-tracking products position both corporate and state power against consumer interests. analyzing algorithmic power, taina bucher suggests that we think of software as possessing “[ways] of seeing and organizing the world” (2018, 9). we see bucher’s notion of “programmed sociality” working in the social networking apps we use every day, from seemingly innocuous reminders to reach our daily fitness goals to friend recommendations and curated playlists. according to bucher, we need a political framework for understanding how power operates in and through special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 7 algorithmic systems: “talking about algorithms implies asking questions about and when users are implicated in developing and maintaining algorithmic logics, as well as asking questions about governance, who owns the data, and to what extent is it put to use?” (13). considering the quotidian redlining that takes place anytime someone reveals their personal data online, at what point does patient information become subject to private interests or regulatory bodies? (see kitchen and dodge 2011). while it may be unsurprising that smokers pay higher insurance rates, it is difficult to reconcile the fact that cigarettes, as well as other unhealthy products like fast food and sugary drinks, are marketed to people who are already at risk and discriminated against in the medical system. this is very much a linchpin of the capitalist infrastructure that continues to thrive at the expense of those who are predisposed to insufficient care. beyond the problem of programmed sociality, algorithmic power has the potential to make certain bodies more visible than others—and it’s important to remember that the politics of invisibility depend greatly on social and political contexts. in other words, tracking biotechnologies complicate the already difficult positions that exist outside of the heterosexual white male phenotype. critical race scholarship has illuminated the complex biases embedded in new technology, specifically in big data analytics (see noble 2018; benjamin 2019b). while the digital health industry maintains its progressive intentions, health disparities remain in clinical care and in medical record systems. kadija ferryman and robert a. winn (2018) observe, “the increasing use of electronic health records in ai systems favors groups who have robust health data profiles, rather than those that have limited healthcare access, discontinuous care, and more spotty and incomplete records.” both ferryman and winn propose policymakers, tech developers, and medical experts work together to address algorithmic biases. they also suggest that researchers working across these disciplines collect non-biological data, like environmental records, to better “understand how multiple factors cause or prevent” diseases (ferryman and winn 2018). despite moves toward preventative care, adequate biomedical treatment of pain remains elusive, particularly for people of color. with big data tracking and analyzing online and offline movements, how can marginalized groups be seen as more than collections of biometric and consumer data? can artistic intervention in algorithmic processing help to fill the gaps that medical and tech researchers leave behind? special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 8 the role of the artist-researcher since the late 1990s, cyberfeminist art collective subrosa has critically engaged with the politics surrounding women’s health and biotechnology. with a scalable installation and accompanying website (http://cyberfeminism.net/cell-track/), subrosa’s cell track: mapping the appropriation of life materials (2004) is both a “manifesto for a post-genome world” and a space for experimental research. cell track takes aesthetic cues from early net art, which is recognized for its utopian qualities in contradistinction to today’s commercialized internet. the site displays an outline of a human figure whose body is marked with pulsating hyperlinks. at first, these red clickable dots appear to represent multiple areas of inflammation. but behind the figure lies a backdrop of a nondescript landmass, suggesting that these points are inscribed with specific geographical information. this added layer of geopolitical nuance illustrates bodily colonization, which is made even more prominent by a floating hyperlink titled “new frontiers.” “mapping the appropriation of life materials,” cell track reminds us that the metaphor we use to circumscribe nations extends to our own bodies. as we see from the myriad drop-down boxes, subrosa traces connections between gold rush migration and the medical pursuit of the “gold standard,” exposing the settler mentality in the biotechnology industry. stem cell research in particular underscores the colonial practices that are placed on the female body. embryonic stem cells, responsible for the creation of dolly the sheep, are imbued with a mythology similar to precious metals. the harvesting of such cells depends on a woman’s capacity to reproduce, furthering the metaphor of pillaged land. emulating the spirit of the early web, cell track emphasizes access by providing information regarding patents, lawsuits, and government involvement with private medical companies. as an online dossier dedicated to public knowledge and political transparency, cell track demonstrates the role of the feminist scientist while adding new meaning to the idea of tracking. to track a cell in this instance is to investigate how personal genetic information is developed into commercial medical products, drawing attention to the corporate ownership of life materials. unlike commercial self-tracking technology, subrosa’s project effectively reconstitutes lively data as a material over and against a profit motive, animating the feminist scientist’s anti-capitalist subjectivity. beyond the interest in publicizing what is typically obfuscated information, cell track highlights the distance between the body and the industries that commodify genetic material (subrosa 2004). we see evidence of this distance when we consider the exorbitant cost of prescription drugs. while products like insulin are created from http://cyberfeminism.net/cell-track/ special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 9 synthesized human dna, pharmaceutical price gouging forces many diabetics to ration their medication. as a primarily feminist initiative, subrosa’s projects reveal the longstanding interest in controlling and monetizing women’s bodies specifically, and how the ethos of eugenics is cloaked in the move toward genetic optimization. throughout scientific history, medical efforts have been made to control both female biology and behavior, and we see these efforts continuing in practices of coerced sterilization (see ko 2016). the other, more insidious side of the biotech industry that operates in and through the interest in advancing the public good can be found in stem cell research. in her book, people’s science: bodies and rights on the stem cell frontier, sociologist ruha benjamin (2013) calls attention to the unequal exchange between egg donors and medical research companies. considering the physical costs of egg extraction, the compensation that donors receive is arguably incommensurate with the medical advances fruited by their biolabor. benjamin reveals the complicated arguments for and against women’s participation in the marketization of human tissue. among these arguments, she parses questions that position labor against service and economic class against biological race. through this interpretation, benjamin advocates for “the inclusion of feminist concerns about stem cell research” (2013, 109). similarly, cell track encourages a dialogue around what benjamin refers to as “the commodification of women’s eggs” (81). while self-tracking technology cannot be criticized for monetizing human tissue as such, feminist activism reminds us of the historical lens through which to examine medicine and its socio-political imperatives. which is to say, we must consider the gendered and racialized visions of the technologies that purport to advance public health. along these lines, aimi hamraie and kelly fritsch’s “crip technoscience manifesto” reminds us of the “widespread perception that access technologies are made for [disabled people] by nondisabled experts” (2019, 7). this narrative not only neglects the disability community’s “own practices of remaking the material world,” it also reproduces the violent binary that positions the norma-anatomical model over a multitude of identities (hamraie and fritsch 2019, 7). rejecting the heteronormative ideology of biomedical science, new media artists and activists are making room for endless organizations of the body. this dissent aligns with progressive healing practices that refute the one-size-fits-all approach to diagnostics. unfortunately, the interest in patient-centered techniques does special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 10 not even begin to address the immense gender bias in chronic pain and illness treatment, despite the fact that 78 percent of autoimmune sufferers are women (fairweather, frisancho-kiss, and rose 2008, 600). bypassing the bureaucracy of the neoliberal medical system, bioart seeks to diminish the biopower held by experts and institutional gatekeepers. artist and self-described “hacktivist” mary maggic makes citizen science possible through performative instructions. their website, complete with how-to manuals and videos, provides access to hormone therapy that is otherwise financially or legally inaccessible. the idea of selftracking is once again returned to constituents as these biotechnological practices and possibilities are liberated from enterprise. maggic highlights the environmental implications in genomics and the social construction of the body, underscoring the points raised by freidenfelds. advocating for “freak science,” maggic engages in the practice of biological decolonization while dismantling the idea of normativity altogether. along these lines, garland-thomson reminds us that no one is impervious to environmental interaction. she writes, “[that] anyone can become disabled at any time makes disability more fluid, and perhaps more threatening, to those who identify themselves as normates than such seemingly more stable marginal identities as femaleness, blackness, or nondominant ethnic identities” (1997, 14). similarly, hamraie and fritch note that “mainstream disability technoscience presumes disability as an individual experience of impairment rather than a collective political experience of world-building and dismantling” (2019, 12). despite continued attempts to fashion a one-size-fits-all accessibility model, “crip technoscience” recognizes the disability community’s production of equitable design through maintenance and tinkering practices (hamraie and fritsch 2019, 8). the aims of maggic’s “freak science” and hamraie and fritsch’s “crip technoscience” are distinct from those used in commercial biotech products. here, lively data is generated through community building for the purpose of identity affirmation and a refusal of institutional and knowledge gatekeeping. yet the tension between marginal and normative identities is intensified when we consider the widespread reliance on pharmaceuticals. if the decades-long war on drugs and the current opioid crisis have revealed anything, it is the continued expression of the complicated definition of identity that hinges on the power structures of a given point in time. foucault illuminated how disciplinary institutions like prisons and hospitals produce docile bodies. these structures of power are intimately entwined with race and class—it is no coincidence that users of crack cocaine have always been treated differently (by the media and by the law) from those who can score a xanax prescription. self-tracking technology special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 11 seems to fully embody a panoptic logic, but the key difference today is that methods for maintaining biopower now depend to some extent on the political economy of programmed sociality, further complicating the social construction of race and identity at large. assuming our data will at some point be used against us, how are we to manage the potential redlining of adequate care services? maggic’s project, “open source estrogen, a manifesto,” aims to mobilize public knowledge of the mutagenic effects in environmental endocrine disruptors while suggesting a do-it-yourself approach to science. similar to subrosa’s cell track, maggic’s website (https://maggic.ooo/) practices early web aesthetics. a collage of text, images, hyperlinks, the website’s digital landscape blends with the analog style and intention reminiscent of the self-published zines produced by early 1990s feminist punk movements. reclaiming the biopolitical potential of the kitchen, maggic’s video “housewives making drugs” refigures the domestic space as a circumvention of government and institutional control. maggic admits that the prospect of self-administering self-synthesized hormones raises ethical questions. for instance, what frameworks are already regulating our bodies and how might an open source estrogen “recipe” disrupt the data supply chain? in this case, a turn toward self-synthesis is a turn away from the neoliberal agenda embedded in selftracking technology. erasing the traces of medical records, including prescriptions and insurance claims, do-it-yourself science allows for greater control over one’s body. in the interest of preserving body sovereignty, maggic demonstrates how to extract and repurpose the estrogen “pollution” in our environment to decolonize the biopolitical regimes of gender and medicine. noting how hormones have been deployed for the purpose of mass food and pharmaceutical production, maggic (n.d.) writes, “present hormone therapies both pathologize bodies and at the same time prioritize access over others.” considering the widespread use of hormones for agricultural purposes, perhaps the major difference in eve’s apple from those available today is the addition of genetically modified organisms. the sexism inherently tied to religious tenets has been meticulously preserved by conservative politics, as we see the prevailing tendency to colonize feminine bodies in purportedly secular public health initiatives. for instance, the evangelical interest in overturning roe v. wade, bolstered by the trump-pence administration’s proposed changes to title x, prioritizes a faith-based construct of morality over a woman’s right to choose.3 maggic is aware of the complex interaction between biopolitics and identity, and that hormonal gatekeeping and special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 12 pollution affects all bodies. they realize that xenoestrogens (those that exist outside of the body) have at once participated in genotoxicity while expanding theoretical and methodological of the body, or what they call “molecular queering.” but movements in the direction of queer epistemology do not guarantee a shift in politics. even if transpeople have access to hormonal treatment, they are still beholden to conventions embedded in the bureaucratic pharmaceutical industry. with our data shadows becoming increasingly difficult to shed, patients who rely on birth control and hormonal replacement therapy would do well to arm themselves with do-it-yourself science. taking media activism further, artist-researcher heather dewey-hagborg provides the public the means to safeguard biological data from widespread surveillance tactics employed for both government and commercial use. her biohacking guidebooks and speculative products suggest a do-it-yourself science in a world marred by genetic policing. for people who have always been oppressed by judicial forces or social norms, “biopunk” initiatives offer methods to circumvent tracking. in this way, dewey-hagborg’s open source manuals offer marginalized people the chance to go unreported by police, insurance companies, or biotechnologies that continue to shape normative expectations of the body. dewey-hagborg’s invisible project (http://biogenfutur.es/) offers genetic privacy supplies to “[protect] against new forms of biological surveillance.” as a two-step process, erase sprays away 99.5% of dna that is publicly exposed while replace cloaks the remaining .5% with “dna noise.” showcasing a fully functional product, the invisible website adopts tongue-in-cheek marketing language, but the scientific potential is self-legitimizing in the post-truth era. dewey-hagborg makes use of the obvious connections to dystopian science fiction in an accompanying video. intercutting news segments and press releases, the video suggests a relationship between national security programs and personal genomics companies in the move toward genetic surveillance. the video then dips to black, unveiling a black-and-white recording of dewey-hagborg herself in a dark lab named “biogenfutures sector c.” the artist demonstrates how to use invisible after drinking from a glass of wine before the clip dissolves into an immaculate image of the product; the blue-tinted glass vials bring to mind a futuristic dermatological treatment. this dramatic performance plays out longstanding questions of personhood, calling attention to the complex weaving of “real” and virtual subjectivities. dewey-hagborg questions both the lure of personalization afforded by algorithmic tech and the merit of the quantified self. her provocation brings to the fore the ethics of traceability, specifically the power special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 13 dynamic between invisible agents of sight and those who are subject to pervasive tracking. at the same time, invisible also reminds us that our data can effectively imprison us. where the previous projects have helped demonstrate lively data in the context of selfhood and recuperation, dewey-hagborg’s project intimates a relation between lively and decaying data in which vitality is contingent on anonymity. in the age of biological surveillance, the desire to be invisible appears to complicate the desire to be seen. furthered by the economy of the “like” and programmed sociality, the cultivation of the online persona has led to hypervisibility. with our digital traces being catalogued by the likes of google and facebook, it is difficult to estimate what user data remains private. the increasing interest in safeguarding genetic privacy is evidenced by the fact that “more than 60 percent of americans with european ancestry can be identified through their dna using open genetic genealogy databases, regardless of whether they’ve ever sent in a spit kit” (molteni 2018). more worrisome is the potential for law enforcement to engage in practices of hacking and planting dna. even for people who are not at risk for being framed by the penal system, the age of surveillance warrants methods for the public to defend itself from state violence. while fascist leadership has always targeted anti-government groups, the hong kong protests in 2019 demonstrate the extent to which facial recognition technology impacts the ability to engage in democratic forms of resistance. for those of us fortunate not to live under the conditions of chinese surveillance, the prospect of data determining both our social credit and political freedom seems somewhat removed. however, it is worth acknowledging that in terms of statewide surveillance, north america and china implement similar strategies. this has become increasingly obvious in light of recent protests against police brutality. despite the added layer of anonymity that face coverings provide (in this case, the conditions of the pandemic are rather auspicious), law enforcement can still track protesters’ movements through mobile phone data transmission (see thompson and warzel 2019). an upgrade to 5g infrastructure would likely push us further in the direction of digital governance, intensifying discriminatory and oppressive carceral technology. as benjamin (2019a) reminds us, race and technology are coshaped. the racial bias embedded in predictive policing reflects the longstanding practice of profiling young black men in america. moreover, the fact that black people are more likely to be killed by police compared to any other ethnic group evidences the myth of technological neutrality (see mapping police violence 2020). for people who are currently subject to extreme state violence or have special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 14 been historically oppressed by judicial forces, biopunk initiatives offer the flexibility to operate between states of invisibility and visibility. in this way, dewey-hagborg’s invisible might extend potential targets the chance to be seen as something other than persons of interest. global effects of networked technology thinking globally, how is networked technology implicated in both genetic and economic determinism? beyond mineral extraction and electronic waste, the convenience of network infrastructure impinges the quality of the natural environment as much as it maintains social boundaries. armin medosch (2016) makes the connection between media technologies and the rise of neoliberalism: “the use of high tech to create global supply chains and computerized electronic markets in so-called ‘global cities’…weakened organized labor in the rich nations, while the new workers in the global south had no chance of obtaining the same level of income and rights” (2016, 366). on the social concerns emerging from networked infrastructure, media theorist christiane paul asks, “[what] exactly does ubiquity mean if large portions of the world remain disconnected from digital networks or are restricted by their governments in their use of these networks? how can we classify the impact of pervasive computing, which ranges from enhanced agency and participation to invasive tracking?” (2013, 399). the connectivity purported by ubiquitous computing presupposes political and ecological conditions in which users may circumvent their given statuses as poor, non-white, disabled, etc. ubiquity, in the form of tracking technologies as well as face and speech recognition algorithms, maintains these boundaries of race, class, and ability by allowing biotechnologies to surveil those who have been historically positioned as suspect. at the same time, these technologies maintain unequal access to quality goods and services necessary in the maintenance of health. in other words, we cannot fail to notice the fact that people who live in poverty (disproportionately, those who fall into the minority category) have a shorter life expectancy despite the purported advancements made by pervasive technology. reading medical historian mirko grmek, emily martin notes, “the coupling of medicine and modern technology is implicated in making the epidemic possible” (1994, 131). in a recent article, danya glabau (2020) remarks, “digital-health tools today promise quick technological fixes for deep social problems but ultimately leave those problems untouched.” what computational biology reaffirms is the human tendency to turn toward technology in an effort to cure humans of biological and environmental afflictions. these are typically worthwhile research aims in the grand scheme of modern medicine, and many patients benefit from special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 15 their subsequent implementation. in the case of genetically modified people, made possible by crispr technology, the interest in disease management becomes complicated when certain genes are edited and passed on to progeny. without knowing for sure the ecological ramifications of altering the gene pool, we risk future epidemics related to this kind of disruption. even more concerning, as martin observes, a move toward genetic flexibility implies a move toward social darwinism, wherein the elite maintain optimal financial and biological credit. the precursor for such a move is already at work in the form of a dating app that matches users’ dna with potential mates.4 the rationale is to eradicate the potential for passing on inherited diseases, which, from a sociological perspective aligns with eugenics. for people who have already sold their dna to genetic testing companies for the purpose of learning ancestral heritage (which in itself leans toward eugenic ideology),5 the process of reversing the damage done by surveillance tech might involve the use of products like dewey-hagborg’s invisible. amidst the resurgence of eugenics, we are currently facing a global health crisis. according to the world health organization, the coronavirus (covid-19) has claimed more than two million lives since it began to spread in early 2020.6 in addition to the widespread fear of contagion, which is intensifying already present racial tensions, the outbreak coincides with the worst market plunge since the 2008 financial crisis (steckelberg and liberto 2020). the relationship between the global economy and public health is becoming increasingly tenuous. with the united states leading the world in confirmed cases and deaths, and with access to affordable healthcare out of many americans’ reach, we are now witnessing the ramifications of the country’s deficient social infrastructure. in addition to exposing the incompetence of the world’s richest country, the current pandemic has magnified the effects of globalization, leading to international market volatility on an unprecedented scale. centering this in the discourse of selftracking technology, we might consider the consequences of valorizing the neoliberal agenda rather than focusing on the expansion of public infrastructure. in an article on logistics, ingrid burrington (2020) writes, “the pursuit of optimization, efficiency, and totality has become so commonplace—and framed as utterly necessary and natural—that it’s perhaps no surprise that such optimization has been further internalized into the cultivation of self, making efficiency as much a personal journey as it is a market imperative.” over and against the interest in capital accumulation, self-tracking tech foresees the implementation of a new world order based on biometric surveillance. benjamin bratton (2020) has recently advocated for such measures in the fight against special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 16 covid-19. evidence of this intention is detectable in the recently abandoned initiatives proposed by google and facebook (both primarily advertising platforms) to track the spread of the virus (toh 2020). while bratton suggests a “more nuanced vocabulary” to describe this direction of government control, extreme approaches to public health have historically advanced social inequality. in theory and practice, surveillance always magnifies difference. feminist science offers an alternative to both the current fiscally conservative healthcare model and one that would potentially involve the federal imposition of big data biopolitics. toward a “people’s science” in the age of surveillance capitalism, to know thyself comes at a cost. in other words, the “self” in self-tracking is part of a larger infrastructure of power that is all but invisible to us. given the recent exposure of project nightingale, the secret transfer of millions of medical health records to google, the implementation of federal measures for safeguarding confidential information seem futile. the average consumer might question the value in demanding more from our public officials, particularly when they seem to be motivated by the private sector. such a value comes down to realizing that we are all users, patients, and subjects of data—even those of us whose material wealth can afford the most comprehensive health plan. but what happens when healthcare funding is cut for people who can’t buy their way in? the cracks in the precarious neoliberal healthcare system make a case for attending to matters of life and death, even if they are not our own. accidents happen and people get sick. very rarely is everyone we care about always prepared to cover exorbitant medical costs (see sanger-katz 2016), and, as we know, health and wealth is a reciprocal relation. while self-tracking technology appears to optimize users’ health, these products and services are imbued with an interest in monetizing personal health information. knowing that social biases are embedded in algorithms we use every day, the questionable motives behind self-tracking tech reveal the necessity for interventions in the contemporary healthcare landscape. drawing upon what has recently been described as “real utopias” in sociology, benjamin (2013) identifies the importance of “agents of change” in the ability to entirely re-imagine the current social contract in which we are engaged. questioning the dissonance between the body’s capacity to evolve and the resistance to social transformation, she asks, “if our bodies can regenerate, why do we perceive our body politic as so utterly fixed?” (172). benjamin’s vision begins with democratic design, in which participation emphasizes a consultative rather than consumer perspective (175). in special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 17 addition to this economic repositioning, benjamin foregrounds power-sharing structures that incorporate knowledge outside of the ivory tower. the fields of medical and technological research, as well as the social sciences that apply much needed criticality to biotechnological innovations, have historically privileged elite thinking at the expense of the very people who make the market for innovation possible. as we have seen, traditional scientific paradigms impose different agendas for different bodies. these agendas have been integrated into the design of digital self-tracking, reinforcing the exploitative conditions of capital accumulation and violent social hierarchies. specifically, self-tracking is imbued with a market logic that operates through the reproduction of biological data. as this article has demonstrated, the emphasis on reproduction is inherently gendered; while all biological data is extractable, the monetization of life materials relies primarily on feminine biolabor. feminist science resists this reproductive logic by instantiating a participatory model, encouraging para-institutional experimentation and nonconventional forms of learning. in the context of biomedicine, feminist science centers marginalized identities and aims to recuperate vestiges of care in medical practice. although the social contract has yet to lean in the direction of a “real utopia,” feminist science evidences movements toward political liberation. biopunk tactics and bioart hacktivism mobilize feminist manifestos, embodying the potential for non-normativity. these new methods of scientific practice critically examine—and in some cases offer a departure from—the neoliberal biotechnology industry. acknowledgements i am grateful to the editors of this special issue, luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, and to the anonymous reviewers for their generous readings of this article. i am also thankful to sharon sliwinski for her encouragement and suggestions on an early draft. many thanks to leo zausen, whose sharp wit and friendship facilitated the pruning process. notes 1 the marketing of weight scales led to calorie-counting diet trends following the scientific discovery of the calorie in the late nineteenth century. the early twentieth century illuminated the phases of the female ovulation cycle, which led to both religious and secular advocacy for the rhythm method in fertility tracking. 2 as part of friendenfeld’s satirical project, vulvaluv users are encouraged to special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) alessandra mularoni, 2021 18 share their pregnancy journey with their facebook friends so that more data can be collected for the purpose of buying into the latest feature of the baby book, the “conception story.” 3 presently, federal title x funding provides access to affordable contraception and reproductive health care. while the program does not offer abortion, title x law requires health care providers to inform patients how they may legally access abortion. the trump administration proposed a nationwide “gag” rule designed to limit access to reproductive health care as well as referrals to safe, legal abortion services. see planned parenthood action fund, n.d. 4 a team of geneticists at harvard medical school are working on a selection system to optimize dna compatibility in the hopes of “[transforming] human health.” see pelly 2019. 5 i mean to suggest an argument that the ethos of genetic testing seems to favor white european heritage. campaigns by companies like 23andme have recently foregrounded genetic traits associated with photobleaching. see 23andme, n.d. 6 as of january 25, 2021. see the world health organization’s coronavirus (covid-19) dashboard: https://covid19.who.int/. references alexander, neta. 2018. “my pacemaker is tracking me from inside my body.” the atlantic, january 27, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/my-pacemaker-is-trackingme-from-inside-my-body/551681/. benjamin, ruha. 2013. people’s science: bodies and rights on the stem cell frontier. redwood city, ca: stanford university press. proquest ebook central. ———. 2019a. “the new jim code? race, carceral technoscience, and liberatory imagination.” public lecture at uc berkeley, october 17, 2019. video, 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technoscience 3, no. 1 (october): 1-23. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i1.28784. subrosa. 2004. “cell track: mapping the appropriation of life materials.” last modified september 12, 2004. http://cyberfeminism.net/cell-track/. thompson, stuart a., and charlie warzel. 2019. “twelve million phones, one data set, zero privacy.” new york times, december 19, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cellphone.html. toh, amos. 2020. “big data could undermine the covid-19 response.” wired, april 12, 2020. https://www.wired.com/story/big-data-could-undermine-the-covid-19response/. 23andme. n.d. “lighten up: hair photobleaching & genetics.” accessed november 2, 2020. https://www.23andme.com/en-ca/topics/traits/hair-photobleaching/. world health organization. 2020. “who coronavirus disease (covid-19) dashboard.” accessed january 25, 2021. https://covid19.who.int/. author bio alessandra mularoni is a phd student in the faculty of information and media studies at the university of western ontario. her research investigates the social, political, and ethical dimensions of technoscience. https://www.wired.com/story/big-data-could-undermine-the-covid-19-response/ https://www.wired.com/story/big-data-could-undermine-the-covid-19-response/ west, sarah myers (2020). redistribution and rekognition: a feminist critique of algorithm fairness. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–24. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sarah myers west, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license redistribution and rekognition: a feminist critique of algorithmic fairness sarah myers west ai now institute at new york university sarah@ainowinstitute.org abstract computer scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers in particular, have a predisposition for adopting precise, fixed definitions to serve as classifiers (agre, 1997; broussard, 2018). but classification is an enactment of power; it orders human interaction in ways that produce advantage and suffering (bowker & star, 1999). in so doing, it attempts to create order out of the messiness of human life, masking the work of the people involved in training machine learning systems, and hiding the uneven distribution of its impacts on communities (a. taylor, 2018; gray, 2019; roberts, 2019). feminist scholars, and particularly feminist scholars of color, have made powerful critiques of the ways in which artificial intelligence systems formalize, classify, and amplify historical forms of discrimination and act to reify and amplify existing forms of social inequality (eubanks, 2017; benjamin, 2019; noble, 2018). in response, the machine learning community has begun to address claims of algorithmic bias under the rubric of fairness, accountability, and transparency. but it has dealt with these claims largely using computational approaches that obscure difference. inequality is reflected and amplified in algorithmic systems in ways that exceed the capacity of statistical methods alone. this article examines how patterns of exclusion and erasure in algorithmic systems recapitulate and magnify a history of discrimination and erasure in the field of artificial intelligence, and in society more broadly. shifting from individualized notions of fairness to more situated modeling of algorithmic remediation might create spaces of possibility for new forms of solidarity and original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 2 refusal, accounting for the socially embedded nature of our experiences and seeking to build collective power across them rather than seeking to normalize and erase our differences. introduction as artificial intelligence systems are deployed around us, they exhibit the same forms of inequality and discrimination that many of us experience in everyday life —only in ways that are more invasive, scale more rapidly, and are much less visible to us. what safiya umoja noble (2018) calls algorithmic oppression exists in myriad forms, affecting the lives of women, trans people, people of color, and people with disabilities in both critical and mundane ways. i recently compiled a list of examples: • 2009: la-based blogger joz wang (2009) wrote that the new nikon s360 camera she’d bought her mom for mother’s day kept asking her family members “did someone blink?”, even though their eyes were always open. safiya umoja noble (2012) observed that her searches for the terms “black girls” and “latina girls” in google’s search engine turned up blatantly sexist and pornographic results. • 2013: latanya sweeney (2013) found that google searches for blackidentifying names were systematically more likely to retrieve ads suggestive of an arrest record. • 2015: jacky alciné (2015) logged in to google photos to find a new set of albums tagged by the company’s facial recognition software, including one that categorized him and his friend as “gorillas.” • 2016: microsoft’s ai chatbot tay learned to use racist and misogynist language in a single day (vincent, 2016), and propublica published an investigative article reporting on the racially discriminatory risk assessment system compas, which they found was twice as likely to falsely label black defendants as future criminals than white defendants. the algorithm was used in decision-making at every stage in the criminal justice system, from setting bond amounts to evaluating parole (angwin et al., 2016). • 2017: virginia eubanks (2017) published automating inequality, which delved in detail into the automated decision-making systems used in the united states to police the poor, including systems automating eligibility for welfare benefits, housing, and child welfare. • 2018: timnit gebru and joy buolamwini (2018) published the gender shades study showing that leading facial recognition software had higher failure rates to recognize women with darker skin pigmentation; trans drivers logging in to uber found they were locked out due to a new security feature that relied on facial recognition software that no longer identified them (vincent, 2017); and a team of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 3 researchers found systematic discrimination in facebook’s delivery of housing and employment ads, leading to skewed results that delivered ads for higher-paying jobs to white men and lower-paying jobs to women and people of color (ali et al., 2018). • 2019: inioluwa deborah raji and joy buolamwini (2019) published an audit of amazon’s rekognition facial analysis software, widely used by law enforcement agencies, finding it, too, had significant failures along gender and race. the same year, the company heavily marketed the tool to us immigrations and customs enforcement to accelerate deportations and announced its “emotion detection” software could now detect fear (rose, 2019). these examples are only a selection of an exponentially growing list of forms of algorithmic oppression. even then, they represent only those that have surfaced in systems long after they’ve been deployed, visible enough to attract public attention. as examples of algorithmic oppression are rapidly revealed around us, it is clear that their effects are not evenly distributed. across them, women and gender minorities, people of color, people of lower socioeconomic status, and people with disabilities bear the burden of algorithmic exclusion (gandy, 1993)—and, as elsewhere, these burdens are particularly acute for those who lie at the intersections of these forms of identity (crenshaw, 1991). i argued in (west et al., 2019) that there is a feedback loop between the notably non-inclusive and actively toxic workplaces in which many of these systems are being built and the algorithmic systems that reproduce manifold forms of oppression and discrimination. in this article, i’d like to trouble that notion, digging deeper into the messiness of how these elements are both co-constituted and a function of the dynamics of capitalism: the patterns of exclusion and erasure we see in algorithmic systems recapitulate and magnify a history of discrimination and erasure in the field of artificial intelligence, and in society more broadly. in examining this history, i was initially interested in understanding how historic gender-based discrimination in ai workplaces may have shaped ai systems’ literal failures to “see” and “hear” women. but as i dug deeper, reading the work of scholars who had long been critiquing technological discrimination, i recognized how much my understanding of algorithmic oppression was limited by how many systems worked well for me as a white, cisgendered woman based in the united states—and that making ai systems “work better” wasn’t necessarily the right objective to be seeking at all.1 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 4 as scholars like noble and others have noted, the kinds of harms enacted by algorithmic oppression require much more than making them unbiased, or inclusive—more than “fixing” broken systems or seeking to achieve predefined metrics of algorithmic fairness (a term of art used in the machine learning community to describe research and applications that attempt to address discrimination in algorithmic systems). reading across critiques of algorithmic fairness (eg., barocas & selbst, 2016; noble, 2018; hoffmann, 2019; benjamin, 2019), my aim in this piece is to contextualize one possible path toward redressing algorithmic oppression in a way that accounts for and acknowledges the role of power in shaping the differential experiences we each have with algorithmic systems. a situated approach that draws on the work of feminist sts scholars may offer a path toward a more comprehensive way to address the harms enacted by algorithmic systems. many current approaches focus on fairness through achieving statistical equity. i argue that in place of fairness, remediation—the work of making things right, of stopping and reversing the damage done by harmful ai systems—offers a powerful alternative. a path toward remediation must account for the ways in which recognition is not evenly distributed—that what may be “fair” in one context is may be deeply unfair in others.2 a situated model of knowledge production necessitates a more complicated mode of remediation than fairness offers; it requires the acknowledgement of the highly contextual and entangled nature of our experiences with algorithmic systems, and the ways in which they are deeply intertwined with all forms of power. algorithmic fairness and its limitations computer scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers in particular, have a predisposition for adopting precise, fixed definitions to serve as classifiers (agre, 1997; broussard, 2018). but classification is an enactment of power; it structures human interaction in ways that produce advantage and suffering (bowker & star, 1999). classification aims to create order out of the messiness of human life, and in so doing, hides the uneven distribution of its impacts on communities. the intricate processes of defining features, preclassifying training data, and adjusting thresholds and parameters involve many kinds of human judgments at multiple scales (burrell, 2016), incorporating not only the design choices of engineers but micro-level choices by those engaged in the work of training and calibrating machine learning systems (barocas & selbst, 2016; a. taylor, 2018; gray & suri, 2019; roberts, 2019). put simply, classification is foundationally a social process that is entwined with power at every level. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 5 addressing biases introduced through the work of classification is a primary focus of research on fairness, accountability, and transparency in artificial intelligence systems. in 2014 a collective of machine learning researchers convened at a workshop at the neural information processing symposium, one of the top conferences in the field, to grapple with the anxieties surrounding the use of machine learning in decision-making processes in core social domains. anticipating an explosion of challenges in the years to come, a provocation outlined the motivations behind the workshop: decisions informed by what they called “big data” could create discriminatory harms—even if unintended—that could result in less favorable treatment for already disadvantaged groups. sited at one of the top academic conferences in the field of machine learning, the workshop foregrounded computational approaches to social problems. it aimed to focus on “challenging constraints on the practical application of machine learning” and “problems that can lend themselves to novel computational solutions” (hardt & barocas, 2014). importantly, fairness, accountability and transparency in machine learning (fat/ml) took on an explicitly interdisciplinary frame, curating a collective of speakers from a mixture of technical and legal backgrounds. the work initiated at fat/ml migrated across a series of different venues in the years following—what became an annual workshop at neurips, a conference on neural information processing, was soon accompanied by subsequent workshops on recommender systems and data science, as well as an association for computing machinery (acm)-sponsored conference, facct (previously known as fat*). although discourses around algorithmic “fairness” are increasingly interdisciplinary, a dominant current has centered on computational framings of the problem, such as the development of tools designed to identify and mitigate bias in algorithmic systems. these computational approaches to fairness aim, for example, to produce algorithmic systems that perform an agreed-on level of parity, through statistical modeling or by correcting statistical bias in datasets so that accuracy rates are achieved across demographic categories (dwork et al., 2012). anna lauren hoffmann notes a number of limitations in the model of antidiscrimination adopted in these discussions, observing that efforts to combat algorithmic oppression “fail to address the very hierarchical logic that produced advantaged and disadvantaged subjects in the first place” (2019, p. 901). computational definitions of fairness often box out deeply significant social and structural concerns, weakening the underlying meaning of fairness. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 6 these limitations are in many respects a legacy of fairness tests that developed as a proxy for proving discrimination in the wake of the civil rights act of 1964 (hutchinson & mitchell, 2018; hoffmann, 2019). ambiguities around the legal standards adopted in education, hiring, and housing provoked the development of a market for these quantitative tests as proxies for discrimination against members of protected classes—a simplification of much deeper systemic racial and gender inequalities. the adoption of these standards spurred a body of research—and before long, an entire industry—focused on measuring “unfairness” in educational and employment testing, and “disparate impact” in the realms of employment and housing (freeman, 1978; hutchinson & mitchell, 2018). we similarly see an industry emerging that promises fairness measurement and recalibration, through products like ibm’s ai fairness 360 toolkit, accenture’s teach and test services, and facebook’s fairness flow tool. fairness tests in education, hiring, and employment came about, at least in part, because proving discrimination under current us civil rights law is so hard to do. but rather than remediate the underlying legal and social structures perpetuating inequality, the fairness measures used to prove statistical disparities under antidiscrimination laws have instead been slowly gutted—ultimately rendering us civil rights law a limited mechanism for redressing algorithmic harms that impact communities and individuals far beyond the united states (richardson, 2020; barocas & selbst, 2016). moreover, once a model is deemed “fair,” it may still be used to enact other kinds of harms, such as by being incorporated into systems for the policing of communities that already experience discrimination. plug-and-play approaches to “fairness” distract from the longer, slower, harder work of grappling with the systemic and structural dimensions of discrimination. as ruha benjamin observes, “computational approaches to a wide array of problems are seen as not only good but necessary, and a key feature of cost-cutting measures is the outsourcing of decisions to ‘smart’ machines…profit maximization, in short, is rebranded as bias minimization” (2019, p. 30). in them, inequality is reflected, amplified, and enacted in algorithmic systems in ways that statistical methods can only partially address. these simplified approaches to fairness are undesirable for other reasons. they don’t adequately match the actual conditions of developing and implementing algorithmic systems. the streamlined models of data training, model original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 7 construction, model testing and bias mitigation, system deployment, and feedback do not account for the incredibly complex set of actors and activities involved in the process of doing data science (holstein et al., 2018; passi & barocas, 2019). they don’t account for the harms that surface not in data, but in the design of the system itself. they enact a kind of violence by actively reproducing ideas that damage vulnerable communities, or by preventing people from meeting their basic needs (o’neil, 2016; onuoha, 2017; hoffmann, 2018). for example, automated gender recognition systems encode the notion that gender is a binary, immutable, physiological form of identity, an erasure of the experiences of trans people with very real and systematic consequences (keyes, 2018). they also don’t account for the ways that attempting to fix bias, such as producing more diverse datasets, can itself create inequality (hoffmann, 2020). ben green (2020) describes this as the impossibility of fairness—that, in an unequal society, decisions rooted in formal equality will produce substantive inequality. this is exemplified in the problem of diversity in datasets: building datasets is expensive and time-consuming, and engineers are incentivized to utilize the data already available to them. this has led to the use of harmful practices in order to produce the large and diverse data sets needed to train machine learning models—for example, by incentivizing more invasive surveillance of the communities already discriminated against by an algorithmic system, or by scraping their data without their consent. for example, one research team sought to resolve the failure of a facial recognition system to identify the faces of trans individuals by scraping youtube videos posted by users undergoing the transitioning process (vincent, 2017). this not only perpetuates existing forms of inequality, but can lead to re-enacting harms on the communities that are already discriminated against by algorithmic systems. finally, fairness discourses insufficiently account for the ways that breakdowns in ai systems can be productive. as scholars like alondra nelson, joy buolamwini, and timnit gebru have observed, the objective is not to make “fairer” or “more inclusive” systems of surveillance for policing communities of color. breakages can afford a new kind of power, to evade the gaze of pervasive surveillance that exists in both cameras and in code. patricia hill collins (1986) reminds us that the act of refusal in favor of self-definition is itself a profoundly political act. in tracing through the outlines of black feminist thought, she emphasizes the meaning of the rejection of external definitions of black womanhood: original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 8 the individual women who in their consciousness choose to be selfdefined and self-evaluating are, in fact, activists. they are retaining a grip over their definition as subjects, as full humans, and rejecting definitions of themselves as the objectified “other”…people who view themselves as fully human, as subjects, become activists, no matter how limited the sphere of their activism may be. (collins, 1986, p. s24) we may similarly create spaces for self-definition through the rejection of classification by artificial intelligence systems. yet, in other times and places, the breakdown of systems can put people at risk and cause harm by denying the standing of entire groups of people (young, 1990), or reflecting to them a confining or demeaning picture of themselves (c. taylor, 1992). for example, trans scholars such as sasha costanza-chock (2018) document how the tsa’s millimeter wave scanning system marks trans bodies as more risky—and thus subject to more invasive policing—than other kinds of bodies. and in other cases still, the very existence of certain kinds of ai systems enacts a kind of violence: os keyes (2018) and hamidi et al. (2018) each make this observation about the harms enacted by automated gender recognition systems that erase trans people. algorithmic systems can thus play a legitimating, discursive, and dignitary function in which recognition is deeply meaningful (hoffmann, 2018; dencik et al., 2018). for these reasons, many scholars whose work is centrally concerned with data justice are concluding that fairness discourses are a limiting frame for grappling with the very real harms enacted by artificial intelligence systems (noble, 2018; benjamin, 2019; hoffmann, 2019). they leverage critiques by thinkers such as iris marion young (1990) to argue that a conception of justice must begin with the concepts of domination and oppression, rather than the current focus on the distribution of harms, or more rarely, advantages. thus, the path forward necessitates situating discrimination in artificial intelligence systems in context— beginning with a better understanding of the environments in which these systems are themselves developed. discrimination in the history of ai artificial intelligence systems do not only reflect and amplify the inequalities of today (barocas & selbst, 2016); gendered, racialized, and classed forms of discrimination are built into the field of artificial intelligence at a foundational level. in this analysis, i focus narrowly on forms of gender-based discrimination in original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 9 the history of ai, however this focus should not discount the influence of race, disability, and other forms of identity-based discrimination in shaping the field.3 algorithmic oppressions can be traced across space and time, from early voice recognition systems calibrated such that women’s voices were often, quite literally, unheard, to associations between early face recognition systems and principles of physiognomy (gates, 2011). where women are recognized by ai systems, they often are situated in positions with relatively little power, such as the overwhelming use of female characters for virtual assistants since the early 2000s in ways that replicate gendered stereotypes about women in positions of servitude (zdenek, 2007; steele, 2018; sweeney, 2018; unesco, 2019). this mirrors a practiced erasure of women from the field of ai over the course of its decades-long history. from its earliest inception, artificial intelligence research culture was male-dominated: the relationships between university-based computer science labs and the institutions of military service that funded them created mutually reinforcing cultures of masculinity (edwards, 1990). the field’s original conception as “automata studies” itself draws on highly gendered constructs: silvia federici (2004) observes that the emergence of the concept of automata in the sixteenth century relied on notions of scientific rationalization developed by hobbes and descartes. in the pursuit of modeling rational behavior through machines, early scientists borrowed from a particular conception of human intelligence grounded in white, upper-class, adult masculinity. centuries later, the models of cognitive rationalism that shaped early ai research on expert systems drew on cartesian models of intelligence that sought to replicate human thought through formal mathematical representations (edwards, 1990). though in its early years the field was remarkably interdisciplinary, borrowing from psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and neuroscience in addition to mathematics and computing, from at least the mid-twentieth century most of the figureheads of artificial intelligence were primarily concerned with developing modes of mathematical representation of the human mind that could be represented through programmable logics. though the field has undergone many shifts over the years, it has largely retained this technical and rationalized orientation: in her study of the history of computational text prediction and automatic speech recognition, xiaochang li (2018) finds a “statistical turn” in the field, during which there was a conscious effort to exclude other disciplines when collaborations proved slower and more original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 10 arduous, producing a radical data orthodoxy among ai researchers. advanced technical degrees are now central to credentialing for the field, even as ai researchers engage in building tools that have implications for other domains like law, sociology, and medicine. the technical orientation of the field of artificial intelligence has social implications far beyond the now-popular notion that more women and people of color need to “learn to code.” this rhetoric positions the absence of diversity as the product of disinterest or lack of skills acquisition on the part of “diverse” communities, seeking to address it through programming designed to provide these skills (rather than address other, deeper structural factors that are as influential) (west et al., 2019). but we already know that the “technical” is an active construction, built around practices of exclusion honed over centuries. feminist sts scholars have shown how technical knowledge is socially constructed as an inherently masculine domain, and justified under rubrics such as meritocracy (wacjman, 1991; oldenziel, 1997; cockburn, 2009). there is nothing inherent about the association between masculinity and technical skill. rather, the definition of a domain as “technical” in fact follows from discrimination: domains that are ascribed as primarily masculine are defined as higher-skilled and more technical than those seen as feminine, regardless of their actual content (cowan, 1976; cockburn, 1985; durack, 1997/2009; hicks, 2017). skill is an ideological category imposed on types of work by the identities of the workers who perform it (phillips & taylor, 1980). as mar hicks writes in their book programmed inequality, “throughout history, it has often not been the content of the work but the identity of the worker performing it that determined its status” (2017, p. 16). in the history of the field of computer programming, there was an observable shift in the status of software development when the increasing demand for software systems led to a new appreciation for programmers and rise in salaries, sparking a transition from a field largely populated by women to one that predominantly employed men (light, 1999; ensmenger, 2010, 2015). women began to be portrayed as low-skilled and low-wage employees alongside the development of new cultural tropes of “geek masculinity,” bolstering the status of male computer nerds, in which individual artistic genius, eccentricity, anti-authoritarian behavior, and dislike of activities involving human interaction acted to bolster male software programmers’ personal and professional authority. these masculinist histories, largely originating from silicon valley, obscured vibrant computer cultures elsewhere in which women played a central role (rankin, 2018). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 11 similar processes of “deskilling” are mirrored in the current state of the ai field, which largely excludes the labor of overwhelmingly woman-identifying contract workers who perform work critical to labeling and preparing the data upon which machine learning systems are trained (gray, 2015; irani, 2015; roberts, 2016). astra taylor (2018) recently coined the term “fauxtomation” to describe the erasure of this labor, aptly tying it to the image of the mechanical turk, a robot that purported to know how to play chess, but was in fact a hoax designed to mask the human player hidden below its board. importantly, she makes a bridge between the erasure of women in the ai field and capitalist practice: as she puts it, fauxtomation “reinforces the perception that work is unpaid and acclimates us to the idea that one day we won’t be needed” (a. taylor, 2018), speeding up a process that pushes gendered, racialized, and classed bodies to the margins of society. patterns of erasure in ai in the 1980s and 1990s women began to organize and raise the visibility of discrimination in the labs where early ai systems were being constructed. for example, female graduate students in the computer science and artificial intelligence labs at mit meticulously documented their experiences with discrimination in the 1983 report, “barriers to equality in academia: women in computer science at mit.” in the report, the students remarked that “many women are treated as if they were invisible in technical situations…[o]verlooked in technical discussions and excluded from group efforts, their work is attributed to male colleagues, and their opinions are not sought on relevant technical subjects.” (1983, p. 9) moreover, they felt that women in the department were caught in a double bind; they were expected by some to adopt a “masculine” style to achieve credibility, while others felt that this demeanor would be perceived as “aggressive” because it did not conform to feminine expectations (mit, 1983). ellen spertus’s (1991) “why are there so few women in computer science?” further depicts barriers to gender diversity in the field. though it addresses computer science in general, it was published under the imprimatur of mit’s artificial intelligence technical reports, and its data provides sporadic insight into the state of ai in the late 1980s and early 1990s: in a section on the impact of gendered language, spertus said that over one month of observation, she observed many examples of people at the mit ai lab attempting to use genderneutral language in place of masculine defaults, but failing to do so in a consistent way. a female computer scientist whom spertus interviewed noted that none of the major conferences in the field of ai offered childcare, making it difficult for her original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 12 to participate in professionalization opportunities, while another referenced walking out after a sexist aside was made by a guest lecturer in mit’s core ai class. in 1992 an editor at ieee expert led a study of gender diversity in the field of ai, and found that only 13 percent of published authors in the journal over the previous four years were women (strok, 1992). moreover, he found that in 1992, women represented • 10 percent of program committee members at twenty-five airelated conferences over the previous three years; • 8 percent of invited speakers at seven ai-related conferences; • 9 percent of the editorial board members of seventeen ai journals and magazines; • 9 percent of authors in the leading journals ieee expert, artificial intelligence, and ai magazine over four years; • 25 percent of association for the advancement of artificial intelligence (aaai) executive councilors; and • 8 percent of aaai fellows. (strok, 1992) the context surrounding the ieee survey provides some insight into the kinds of challenges experienced by women in the field at the time: derek strok, the survey’s author and an editor at ieee expert, was motivated to examine the issue after a woman whose article had been accepted to the journal asked for her initials rather than her full name to be used so that readers would not question the validity of her work. taking an informal survey of contributors to the journal, he reported that “dozens” of women were willing to discuss their interests and achievements, but many did not want to be quoted on the record about genderbased obstacles for fear of losing their jobs. the women said that barriers to their inclusion were rampant: women reported frequently encountering discrimination in the workplace, regular displays of sexist material such as the use of lewd imagery in coworkers’ windows screensaver displays, and the frequent employment of gender stereotypes in the examples for course material. often, systems of male patronage were seen as a requirement for women to “make it” in the field; those who succeeded had prominent advisors in the original inner circle of researchers at institutions such as mit, stanford, and carnegie mellon university. despite these clear obstacles, in his conclusion strok placed the onus for solving the diversity problem primarily on women: “the underrepresentation problem does not derive from the fact that female scientists are consciously ignored, but that (1) unconscious biases drive some women to quit science, and (2) not enough original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 13 women (and minorities) are entering scientific fields in the first place,” he concluded, issuing recommendations from the women interviewed such as “be good at what you do,” “find a support network,” and “get good training” (strok 1992, pp. 16-21). these solutions seem paltry in view of the evidence of structural discrimination presented elsewhere in the article: sexism, fear of retaliation, and widespread barriers to promotion seem as likely to be the cause of the limited representation of women in the field. perhaps the most thorough observations of what she called the “deletion of women” in ai are outlined in diana forsythe’s (2002) ethnographic work at five bioinformatics labs over the course of the 1990s. this “deletion” took many forms: forsythe remarked that the work of women administrators, critical to the grantseeking process that kept the labs alive, was deemed so unimportant that one researcher remarked a lab that had multiple women serving in an administrative capacity had no women employees at all. she also cites multiple instances of harassment and discrimination in the laboratory environment: women grad students were targeted by male students with sexualized humor, such as the installation of sexualized sound files on their computer that could not be turned off once clicked on. male grad students also installed screensavers with lewd images of women. when the behavior was escalated to supervisors, they often wrote it off as harmless or a practical joke. though these accounts are in themselves concerning, it is forsythe’s documentation of the less visible forms of discrimination experienced in ai labs that is most illuminating. for example, she found that the phd degrees held predominantly by women in the lab were discounted or seen as “less serious” than the md degrees held predominantly by men (forsythe, 2002). moreover, women in the lab were often defined in terms that related them to other men, while men were defined by what they do. these systems of patronage had profound effects on hiring patterns, as forsythe observed that mentorship actually hindered women from promotion. she saw a reluctance to hire women away from other labs as though their (male) supervisors had “ownership” over them. forsythe’s findings are consonant with longitudinal studies that have found that though women are more likely than men to have mentors, men who receive mentorship are statistically more likely to be promoted, while women who receive mentorship are in lower-level positions, paid less, less satisfied, and less likely to be promoted than men (ibarra et al., 2010). forsythe also found that women researchers often experienced pressure to pursue their mentor’s interests rather than their own, and to include men as authors on papers on which they did not do work—practices original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 14 that could significantly inhibit the likelihood of women researchers’ work being acknowledged by others and impact their promotion. though each of these studies provides a distinct, though partial, view of the state of diversity in artificial intelligence, they agree that gender discrimination and harassment are significant challenges that have plagued the field of ai over the course of decades. moreover, these studies point to several specific structural barriers that combined to prevent the advancement of women in the field: overt harassment, a lack of resources, constraints on the visibility of female researchers’ accomplishments and limits on their opportunities for promotion, among others. they are, admittedly, largely informal and out of date—but this is itself reflective of the exclusion of gender from the central concerns of the field. controversies over the treatment of women in the field of ai stretch back decades, and yet even as issues of bias, fairness, accountability, and transparency became central objects of inquiry, we still lack substantive research that examines these patterns of discrimination, or that examines how ai systems are experienced differently on the basis of gender, race, class, and sexuality. it is worth considering how re-examining ai to account for this exclusion may prompt new ways of thinking about algorithmic oppression. exclusions have deeply shaped what we understand to be artificial intelligence, as they shaped the field’s conceptions of what constitutes intelligence itself. as feminist scholars have long pointed out, the ideas about universality, transparency, and neutrality that ground cognitive rationalism reinforce a patriarchal view of science: that what we understand to be rational or objective thought has worked historically to diminish women’s contributions to the field and to exclude domains typically coded as women’s work from science and technology. the definitions of intelligence dominant in ai are premised on deeply gendered and racialized constructs, resulting in a flattened approach to resolving the challenge posed by algorithmic oppression. rekognition and remediation in the 1990s, scholars such as nancy fraser, axel honneth, and iris marion young engaged in a debate around the question of “redistribution or recognition”: across a series of essays, they questioned whether the pursuit of representation and identity politics served, or supplanted, the underlying cause of seeking justice through redistribution of resources. this debate highlighted that neither can be separated from one another: redistribution and recognition are endlessly entangled, and neither alone is sufficient to achieve justice. distribution alone original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 15 insufficiently accounts for the cause of injustice (young, 1990, 1997; fraser, 1995, 1997; honneth, 1995; fraser & honneth, 2003). a similar tension is palpable in the discussions around algorithmic oppression in the distinctions drawn, for example, between allocative and representational harms (barocas et al., 2017). most conceptualizations of fairness outlined above adopt only the logic of redistribution, by seeking to account for and equalize across differences in the harms enacted by ai systems or the benefits allocated by them. as such, they cannot mitigate the effects of the larger structures in which ai systems are deployed, such as increased surveillance and policing of the same communities underrepresented in ai systems; nor can they account for the impact of erasures among those involved in the construction of ai systems. a more comprehensive accounting of algorithmic harms must thus grapple with the ways in which the logics of recognition are themselves not evenly distributed. a situated model of knowledge production can provide a more robust way to hold the institutions creating and deploying algorithmic systems to account by affirming difference, rather than papering it over. this necessitates a more complicated approach to fairness that acknowledges the highly contextual and entangled nature of our experiences with algorithmic systems, and the ways in which they are deeply intertwined with power. and though many within the fairness community are beginning to explore things along these lines, their work perhaps looks less like fairness and more like remediation—the work of recovery, recompense, stopping, and reversing the harms caused by algorithmic systems rather than seeking to repair them. what would remediation look like in practice? a starting place that some scholars have proposed is to redefine artificial intelligence to encompass the wealth of experience that those who have largely been erased from the history of artificial intelligence can bring: women, trans people, people of color, the disability community. remediating this exclusion may facilitate a more contingent and collective notion of intelligence. inspired by feminist standpoint theory (hartsock, 1983; collins, 1986), which argues that the social order looks different depending on our position within it, scholars such as donna haraway have long advocated for new ways of thinking about knowledge that draw upon each of our limited locations and standpoints to provide more adequate, sustained, and “objective” accounts of the world. as haraway puts it, “feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others’ original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 16 practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions” (1988, p. 579). she argues for the notion of situated knowledges, learning together by collectively joining our partial views of the world into a larger whole. as she puts it, “rational knowledge does not pretend to disengagement: to be from everywhere and so nowhere, to be free from interpretation, from being represented, to be fully selfcontained or fully formalizable. rational knowledge is a process of ongoing critical interpretation among ‘fields’ of interpreters and decoders” (haraway, 1988, p. 590). lucy suchman makes a similar argument, drawing on haraway to develop a set of feminist principles for technology design using the notion of “located accountabilities.” as suchman puts it, “the only possible route to objectivity…is through collective knowledge of the specific locations of our respective visions. by extension, the only possibility for the creation of effective objects is through collective knowledge of the particular and multiple locations of their production and use” (2003, p. 96). only through joining each of our partial views into a collective subject position can we gain meaningful insight into the world around us. and in fact, this is attuned to the underlying logics of most of the ai systems we use today: our data is entangled with the data of those around us, across space and time. we rarely engage in simple, one-to-one interactions with artificial intelligence systems. rather, we engage collectively, if unknowingly, with all those whose data shaped and trained them. shifting from individualized notions of fairness to more situated modeling of algorithmic remediation might create spaces of possibility for new forms of solidarity and refusal, accounting for the socially embedded nature of our experiences and seeking to build collective power rather than seeking to normalize and erase our differences. this work is already underway, among researchers who are answering suchman’s call to move beyond scholarly observation by getting inside the black boxes of technology production, to disrupt the engine rooms of technological production. in 2019 feminist researchers issued a feminist data manifest-no, a collective declaration of refusal to engage with harmful data regimes and commitment to building new data futures (cifor et al., 2019). a growing number of researchers of algorithmic systems are making calls for the development of frameworks to understand data science as a situated practice, including reorienting their research questions “upwards,” away from those who experience systematic disadvantage and toward those who inhabit positions of power and authority original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sarah myers west, 2020 17 (elish & boyd, 2018; barabas, 2020; katell et al., 2020). others call upon technical designers to redraw their abstraction boundaries to include social actors, and not just technical actors (selbst et al., 2018), and to embed a decolonial critical approach within technical practice (mohamed et al., 2020). such work is critical to overcoming the deep structural barriers that inhibit the development of a feminist “ai from below.” re-imagining artificial intelligence to account for its exclusions will take more than fairness alone can offer. bringing the projects of institutional accountability for inequities in tech workplaces, and algorithmic accountability addressing discrimination in technical systems, in conversation with one another under a rubric of remediation can enable more fundamental shifts in underlying power structures—shifts that allow us to address more deeply and fully how power is at work within the industry, and how it might be distributed to serve more just and equitable ends. acknowledgements the author would like to thank joy rankin, rashida richardson and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on the draft manuscript. notes 1 it is also important to acknowledge that, in many respects, i am the beneficiary of a concerted effort to increase the number of “women in tech”—efforts that privilege us-based, white, cis, and able-bodied women like me over others. i thus engage my work with an explicit acknowledgement and commitment to not only feminist, but antiracist and anti-ableist principles, and in solidarity with those who experience the intersections of algorithmic oppressions more acutely than i do. 1 see, for example, jafarinaimi et al., 2015. 1 see, for example, guillory, d. 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(2007). “just roll your mouse over me”: designing virtual women for customer service on the web. technical communication quarterly, 16(4), 397–430. author bio sarah myers west is a postdoctoral researcher at the ai now institute at new york university working on issues of gender, race, and power in ai. she received her doctoral degree from the annenberg school for communication and journalism at the university of southern california, where her dissertation examined the cultural history and politics of encryption technologies from the 1960s to the present day. https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/22/16180080/transgender-youtubers-ai-facial-recognition-dataset https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/22/16180080/transgender-youtubers-ai-facial-recognition-dataset     special section chemical disability and technoscientific experimental subjecthood: reimagining the canary in the coal mine metaphor     sophia jaworski university of toronto sophia.jaworski@mail.utoronto.ca     abstract the “canary in the coal mine” metaphor is used by the chemically sensitive community to make sense of and crip spaces containing low-levels of toxic atmospheric petrochemicals. this article reflects on the technocultural genealogies entrenched within the metaphor. a by-product of the imperial exotic bird trade, canary companion species played a formative role in early technoscientific understandings of toxic exposure starting in the nineteenth century as animal sentinels in coal mine rescues. chemically sensitive people mobilize the canary metaphor to situate themselves within toxic environments as sentinel and experimental subjects, potentiating a feminist knowledge about chemical disability. identifying as a human canary underscores how consumer commodities are universally structured for the chemical capacities of able-bodied male subjects, revealing gendered and ableist technocultural logics. the metaphor may also conjure a universal form of sacrificial life that ignores how canaries and self-identifying chemically sensitive people are differently situated in the colonial surround of racial capital. canary knowledges arise from practicing metaphor as meaning and method—they offer a trajectory for crip-led community practices to build more capacious knowledges of exposure by extending anti-colonial and anti-racist commitments towards relational productions of accessibility. reclaiming technoscientific experimental subjecthood can thus encourage new collective possibilities to address the global onslaught of chemical violence.     keywords chemical sensitivities, technocultures, canary knowledges, coal mine metaphor, chemical infrastructures, feminist knowledge production     introduction   the sound a canary bird makes is so sharp and quavering, that when it screeches and shakes its little throat and chaps, whistling with all its force, it even gives an ecco to the hall or parlour where he hangs. —f.t. bradshaw, a short discourse of the canary bird   “hello, i'm a pissed off canary in the coal mine.” an audience member at the back of the dim auditorium stands up and identifies herself to the small audience during the question period of a panel titled "warning! how the secrets of body care and cleaning products impact your health,” hosted by an environmental nonprofit (may 7, 2018). the panel, previously full of lively dialogue between policy experts and scientists interested in environmental justice, suddenly sinks into a long and tense silence. the woman explains to the group how, after a long wait, she was finally able to move into a rent-subsidized building owned by the city of toronto. yet, much to her dismay, the downtown apartment tower had turned out to be a pungent palimpsest of chemical fragrances. every hallway, and especially the lobby, she continues sardonically, has the scents of “the loveliest cleaners locked in” to the fibers of its walls and carpets. exasperated, she shares how she had asked the rental board to change the cleaners they use because they impact her ability to breathe, but her requests were not accommodated. a well-meaning panelist responds by remarking on the many others she has encountered in similar situations, offering the platitude, "you are not alone." chemical sensitivities are disabling physiological responses and chronic illness linked to low-levels of chemical exposure. although the canadian human rights commission formally recognizes chemical sensitivities, legal rhetoric too often fails to translate into advocacy and public understanding of the main accessibility needs associated with chemical sensitivities: finding ways to limit atmospheric exposures to toxic substances (sears 2007). in the scene above, the “canary in the coal mine” metaphor is effective because it conjures an anthropomorphic image of a living signal—an analogy for an organism’s capacity to discern and communicate significant physiological alteration by fumes and vapors. the metaphor is effective precisely because it restages a familiar and evocative narrative entrenched in cultural imaginations: a little dash of avian yellow whistles in the darkness, warning of gas. but what if we go beyond the surface of this metaphorical adage? many individuals with chemical sensitivities refer to themselves as canaries. experiences of atmospheric sensitivity, through inhaling or ingesting toxicants, can provoke gastrointestinal discomfort, body pain, difficulty breathing, cognitive changes, muscle spasms and coordination changes, dizziness, migraine, and fatigue. as many chemically sensitive individuals are female-identifying and/or cisgendered, the move to articulate disability though identification with the canary bird stems, in part, from the refusal to accept pathologizing histories: hysteria, neurasthenia, and psychosomatic disorders have long designated certain patterns of “non-specific" symptoms as evidence of mental disorder. many scholars argue that this epistemology is misogynist and patriarchal, moralizing a hierarchy of cisnormative biological determinism, and gendering “unknowable” sensing, as feminized psychosomatic distress. one consequence of this mischaracterization of the experience of chemical sensitivity is that potential atmospheric sources of these sensations are left unexamined (murphy 2006, 152). re-appropriating the canary bird’s subjecthood refuses such gendering of diagnosis by side-stepping human sociocultural conflations of sex and gender. self-described canaries exceed eurocentric scientific and medical framings of exposure embodiment by asserting that their experiences with toxicants require an everyday form of accountability towards the practice of sharing atmospheres. identifying as a canary insists that experiences of altered functionality reflect a sentinel knowledge that, as an early warning signal, can offer others protection from future chemical harm—but only if it is understood to be a form of chemically provoked disability. human canaries contend that rather than being a limitation, chemical disability is a capacity for sensing. i term these capacities for sensing and their technocultures—the multitude of creative improvisations that blend technology and material culture to combat chemical exposure’s embodied consequences and support access to shared atmospheres—“canary knowledges.” canary knowledges emergence from anti-colonial, transfeminist, queer, and crip genealogies that have long articulated knowledge of, and cultivated responses to, chemical exposure, and foreground the work of mobilizing metaphor as both method and meaning. naming effluvious spaces as non-accessible because they contain atmospheric petrochemicals works to redefine terms of exposure according to those with intimate knowledge of the embodied effects of atmosphere. these sensory abilities can be vehicles for “frictional practices of access production,” a crip technoscience pushback against biosciences that use toxic embodiment in research and development, biasing exposure standards towards able bodies (hamraie and fritsch 2019, 10). by identifying as a human canary, a person might reclaim the capacity to experimentally intervene in the ways multiple forms of chemically "altered life" are endured and enlivened (murphy 2013, 2017). whether such knowledges can aid in cultivating a “praxis of care and response—response-ability—in ongoing multispecies worlding” remains to be seen, and is one of the central questions that propels this writing (haraway 2016, 105). as a white settler discussing the canary bird in the absence of relations with the bird itself, it is especially important to be intentional about how metaphorical representation offers a method to understand exposure’s meanings, rather than as an index of canary kinship per se. such a distinction is crucial so as not to replicate what métis scholar, max liboiron terms “the already rampant fetishisation of nonhumans as kin by academics as acts of possession and redemption” (2021, 110). in this way, the canary metaphor can invite a practice of accountability towards the atmospheric volatility of wafting, airborne, aromatics—an ethics-based chemical kinship between fumeand vapor-exposed lifeforms (see balayannis and garnett 2020 and grandia 2020). this writing, and several years of thinking with self-identified canary communities, is informed by my own experiences with chemical sensitivity. i grew up within a kilometer of a perpetually flaring chevron oil refinery that regularly spewed showers of sulphur dioxide, which on some occasions coated neighborhood cars with yellow dust. the hill is located at the end of the trans mountain pipeline that traverses many unceded indigenous territories across the settler colonial nation of canada. the bottom of the hill, near a surreally located children’s miniature train that weaves through the forest, continues to have its own neighborhood phone line for odor complaints from the refinery tank farm. for me, fragrance, smoke, diesel, and solvent-based off-gassing materials can trigger migraines, brain fog, body pain, and asthma. when these sensitivities perturb daily functioning, i too relate to the technoscientific subjecthood of a canary bird.1 in this article, i trace the technocultural genealogies entrenched within the canary in the coal mine metaphor, arguing that it is only by critically thinking with the history of the canary that this metaphor can be better deployed to reclaim and redefine the terms of experimental subjecthood afforded to the chemically sensitive. i begin by outlining how, during fifteenthto nineteenth-century imperialism and the exotic bird trade, canaries became a companion species valued for their cheerful audibility in domestic spaces (home parlors) and revalued as indicators of work-place danger in industrializing societies. as pets, canary behaviors were trained using dark chambers and musical instruments, which altered a bird’s capacity to sing. i then show how due to their sensitive physiology, canaries became living signals at the beginning of the twentieth century. their breathing sensitivity to carbon monoxide (co) made them ideal animal sentinels in coal mine rescues, playing a formative role in early technoscientific understandings of toxic exposure. us coal mining culture celebrated the most resilient canaries as heroes. reflecting on how canary exposures were used to bolster coal mining capital, i problematize the positivist notion that low levels of atmospheric toxicants are untraceable. i argue that later idea is “technoableist” in how it gives technological sensors of air pollution more authority than human sensors (shew 2020, 43).2 now chemically sensitive people who mobilize the canary metaphor potentiate a feminist knowledge about chemical disability by revealing how its “technological imagination” is gendered (balsamo 2011), and by reclaiming the positionality of being both sentinel and an experimental subject. the second part of the article discusses how problematizing the inhalation of petrochemicals as canary-like—especially through consumer products such as fragrance, personal care products, and the home improvement industry—foregrounds a feminist decolonial approach to the infrastructural elements of long-term, low-level chemical exposure in canada. identifying as a human canary names as gendered and ableist how technocultures petrochemically imagine consumer products’ material compositions. it has the potential to cultivate what aimi hamraie (2015) terms a “feminist crip” space for the toxicological knowledge of chemical disability. however, when humans metaphorically claim to be animal sentinels, they conjure images of a universal form of sacrificial life that ignores how canaries are situated in histories of racial capital and eurocentric technoscience. for the terms of human canary articulation to cultivate a response to chemical harm, crip-led practices must reorient knowledge of exposure towards relational productions of accessibility (hamraie and fritsch 2019) that are anti-colonial and anti-racist. i finish by suggesting that the metaphorical naming of chemical disability, through identification with the canary’s sensitive capacity, can open other avenues for radical intersectional feminist orientations to toxic exposure, and disability justice (sins invalid 2016). reclaiming technoscientific experimental subjecthood in this way opens new collective technocultural possibilities to address chemical injury.   the stakes of a metaphor many scholars, but in particular crip, black, and indigenous scholars of technoscience, illuminate how empire and settler colonialism’s monetization and quantification of life manipulates forms of markedness (such as socially constructed ideas of ability and race) to designate particular subjects, and their relations with other communities and lifeforms, as surplus value to industrialization and technological innovation (see murphy 2013; fritsch 2015; haritaworn 2015; benjamin 2019). these processes of extraction and dispossession continue in the settler city of toronto, canada, where i write, and where my wider research focuses on the sociocultural significance of volatile organic compounds that off-gas from petrochemical-containing consumer products in indoor spaces. for the purposes of this discussion, my description of everyday chemically sensitive experience is limited to folks living in toronto, while the history of the canary metaphor extends to the wider north american fossil fuel context. as anishinaabe and haudenosaunee scholar vanessa watts observes, “natural cause and determination in euro-western colonial history have acted to rationalize and justify mass violence, biological racism, sexism and de-culturation” (2013, 29), which too often is perpetuated when eco-feminists and science studies scholars theoretically abstract the material, in this case chemicals, from their situated relations to land and indigenous territories. cedric robinson (2000) names the institutional and state structures that distribute harm across these sites of extraction “racial capitalism.” an articulation of human canaries must thus begin to cultivate a place-based response to chemical harm that perpetuates disabling illness by addressing how racial capital is historically and currently bolstered by local exposures (see barba 2020 for a discussion of cognitive disability in environmental injustice contexts; see also the work of kenneth macleish and zoë wool 2018 on burn pits). lindsey dillon and julia sze (2016) use the canary metaphor to discuss environmental inequalities in the united states, focusing on the uneven conditions that combine to result in limited capacities to breathe. they tie the metaphor, and its implied exposures, to the disproportionate rates of asthma in us communities of color, and to violent police practices, such as the choke-hold, that deprive black citizens of breath at a much higher rate than their white, or white-coded counterparts. giovanna di chiro (2018) similarly observes that individuals in communities experiencing environmental injustice often self-refer as “sacrificial canaries,” including residents in northern philadelphia who resist forms of green gentrification, or gentrification through environmental initiatives. in “the miner’s canary,” lani guinier and gerald torres (2002) use the canary metaphor to discuss how the socially toxic environments of institutionalized racism—and not individual or collective pathologies—leads to the overincarceration and surveillance of black, latinx, and other peoples historically targeted by security apparatuses. in guinier and torres’s words, “racism explains the canary’s condition as its own problem, without further investigating or even questioning the conditions in the mines” (2002, 292). this view supports prison abolitionist arguments that the prison-industrial complex was designed to naturalize and capitalize racialized incarceration (see wang 2018). my attending to the canary metaphor is also inspired by recent science and technology studies scholars’ conversations about the significance of sensation for environmental knowledge production. these perspectives consider experiences of toxic atmosphere, as “attuned sensing,” that is an embodied form of knowledge beyond what can be captured by monitoring (calvillo 2018) and technoscientific sensor instruments (gabrys 2016). at the same time, considering chemically sensitive knowledge production “invites apprehension” into the emancipatory assumptions that might underlie attempts to translate chemical sensitivity into quantitative data (shapiro, zakariya, and roberts 2017). by tracing how the canary bird became an exemplary experimental subject in the first place, we can begin to see, and then to disrupt, the naturalized relationships between capitalism and chemical exposure embedded in the canary metaphor. in what follows, i weave together a partial account of the occluded histories of canaries as technoscientific experimental subjects that have been sacrificed in the name of industrial and consumer capitalist “progress.”   a caged and coveted commodity understanding the prevalence of human canaries in the twenty-first century requires attending to how global circulation of canary birds as commodified lifeforms have accompanied projects that use their sensory capacities to expand forms of resource extraction. the canary in the coal mine metaphor has become so commonplace, it often conceals the history of the canary bird as a commodity. my genealogy of canaries spans fifteenthto nineteenth-century imperialism and exotic bird trade, and extends to when a companion species—valued for its cheerful audibility in domestic spaces (home parlors)—became revalued as an indicator of workplace danger in industrializing societies. the canary is a small finch songbird imported to europe from the canary islands, an archipelago near the northwest coast of africa (parsons 1987). before canaries were used as disposable experimental subjects in coal mines, they were inhabitants of parlors and dens in european and north american homes. bourgeois households kept the birds as pets, and collectable show pieces, that were ranked by superiority of breed and gender, with male canaries considered the most valuable because of their ability to sing (buffon 1798). as only male canaries have historically been regarded by their trainers to sing well, the blurred and highly gendered anthropomorphic lines between the canary and the human have a history tied to colonial geographies spanning over four hundred years. the geographic origin of the bird is an important node in the commodification of human life. the canary islands were inhabited by indigenous guanches for thousands of years. in the fifteenth century, the spanish began enslaving the local population and bringing them to slave markets across spain (blumenthal 2009, 5). the islands became a key site for the spanish slave trade during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, operating as a stopping off point for african slave ships and merchants from upper guinea through the cape verde islands (eltis and richardson 2015). the portuguese subsequently used the canary islands for sugar plantations that were planted and harvested by individuals who had been displaced from west africa, making the islands a base for further expansion of the transatlantic slave trade mobilized by sugar plantations in the caribbean (mintz 1986). export of canaries for domestication, noted as early as 1478 (parsons 1987, 22), coincided with settler voyages to these islands, and with the forced transportation of human chattel.3 first bred in captivity in the seventeenth century, the domesticated canary from the macaronesian islands (the azores, madeira, and the canary islands), became a commodified lifeform (parsons 1987). devoted technocultures of breeding and song training arose in germany, france, the netherlands, and the united kingdom, projecting imperialist ideals of high culture onto the quality of the bird’s coloring and song (buffon 1798). canary pets were fashionable amongst the upper classes. the proliferation of european animal merchants across european cities meant that the birds soon became popular with the general public. canaries emerged as a staple of the bird trade in the eighteenth century. enthusiasts purchased them cheaply from markets and specialty bird shops. dark chambers and musical instruments were used to alter the pet bird’s capacity to sing. a large amount of literature gives detailed instruction on canary breeding and training. some books guided early eighteenth-century readers in france to use bird organs (serinettes) to teach melodies to canaries. other books espoused theories of diet to alter a canary’s temperament, or suggested isolating the birds in “dark bowers” or “dark chambers” to alter the patterning and tenacity of their song, as a response to sunlight (dickens 1887, 92–93). these technocultural examples of instruments used for behavior modification, and to breed evolutionist hierarchies of plumage, are eerily reminiscent of the later fate of canaries in the mines as living signals. out of the parlor, into the mine: canaries and the intersection of technoscientific knowledge and capital figure 1. image from “canary birds in mine-rescue work,” popular mechanics, march 1912, 355.   once they became widespread in european pet culture, canaries began to be imported into north america in the mid-1800s for the same domestic purposes. not long after, they were recognized as a universal parlor bird. german immigrants to america, charles and henry reiche shipped approximately 20,000 canaries in the decade preceding 1853, and annual shipments rose from 10,000 in 1853 to 20,000 in 1867 (pollock 2013). early accounts of canary domestication frequently noted the birds’ tendency to develop asthma (buffon 1798, 126), and to have “so tender a constitution that a very small matter impairs their health” (hervieux 1718, 55). by the late nineteenth century, the birds’ sensitive temperament had become a familiar presence in many north american homes. due to their physiological attunement to air quality, by the beginning of the twentieth century canaries were put to work as living signals. their breathing sensitivity to carbon monoxide (co) made them ideal animal sentinels in coal mine rescues, playing a formative role in early technoscientific understandings of toxic atmospheres and acute high-level respiratory exposure. canaries were particularly commodified for use in the burgeoning coal mining industry in both britain and the united states. the coal mining industry during this time was especially dangerous as it involved chipping away at underground coal veins in small chambers with the potential to release large quantities of unscented gases such as co. these surreptitious clouds often suffocated miners with little warning. employed to mitigate the rate of mortality in a us industry that suffered 69,097 coal mine fatalities between 1900 and 1929 (us department of labor, n.d.), physiologist john scott haldane suggested using small animals such as birds or rodents as experimental subjects that could detect exposure to co. haldane discovered that canaries, because of their small size and high rate of breathing, maximize the effects of co blood saturation more than rodents. the birds signaled the effects of chemical exposure in a dramatic and easily identifiable way: they ceased to sing, swayed on their perches, and then quickly lost consciousness (haldane 1917, 46). scientists like haldane justified the use of the canary as an animal sentinel by invoking a constitutional susceptibility that they projected onto both humans and canaries. an accompanying mining research publication states that at 0.15 percent co exposure, “canaries will show distress usually in from 5 to 12 minutes,” whereas with 0.20 percent exposure, “the distress is usually apparent in from 2 to 6 minutes” (burrell and seibert 1914, 243).4 the same publication describes how, "the idiosyncrasy of the individual" influences “action of the gas in producing bad nervous disorders” (244). however, it also argues that canaries may be repeatedly used in the mines "without becoming less useful" (244).5 in 1911 the us bureau of mines began using canaries in wire cages during missions to rescue miners trapped deep in the earth. described in us accounts of mining rescues as "most sensitive to any atmosphere not supporting life" and "showing symptoms of dizziness" (baltimore sun 1911), canaries became sentinels able to “draw the line of safety” when they "droop and gasp for breath" (washington post 1912). mine rescue crews would leave a special door open in its cage until the canary, as living sensor, began to exhibit changes in behavior. they would then close the door and infuse oxygen into the cage to resuscitate the bird (see figure 1). us coal mining culture celebrated the most constitutionally resilient canaries as heroes. the us bureau of mines rescue reports from the 1910s and 1920s list the mine room numbers where canaries collapsed, where they were able to endure an atmosphere, or where overcome by fumes. a 1914 baltimore sun article reported that canaries, "refreshed with oxygen" after their initial droop and led to spaces of clear air, saved five thousand miners during the first few years of their use. bird heroes were invaluable to the male-bodied workers who took them into the mines. baldy was a canary who survived five disasters, “overcome one or more times upon each occasion" (boston daily globe 1921), and goldie became well known as a “living instrument…having saved scores of lives” (new york times 1917). much like they treated house pets, the public projected an anthropomorphized companion species fondness onto canary sentinels. by the 1920s the blue-collar miner with canary in hand became a heroic emblem of industrial imperialism. this image has remained in the colonial imaginaries of mining in the united states and canada, where “the relationship between industrialism, resource extraction, and infrastructure development…[is] based on ideologies of racial, cultural, and religious superiority of european american settlers” (gilio-whitaker 2019, 72). by this point, the technoscience of animal exposure was refined enough to maximize the labor value of coal miners. the canary, as human respiratory surrogate, transformed understandings of sensitivity and the presence of dangerous chemicals. its rapid heartbeat and tiny lungs introduced the problem of exposure scalability in industrial processes, and its sacrificial signaling enabled toxic exposures to be figured into human value in coal mining. today, technocultures of petrochemical materials figure chemical exposure into the atmospheres of everyday life.   the canary and fumes: oneself-as-bird the canary bird’s foray into mining set the stage for other living signals and animal sentinel species to become popularized in liberal imaginaries of environment, and to stand in as symbols of a universalized industrial imprint on the natural world. similarly, the lives of humans in mid-to-late adulthood, who currently experience a multitude of complex chronic illness, parallel the permutations of petrochemical expansion through scientific animal testing. in this sense, “baby boomers” are an entire generation of canaries for the era of leaded gasoline, coal, pcbs, ddt, and thousands of other chemical substances known to have toxicological effects on multiple organ systems, human and animal alike. canary exposure takes place in the proverbial parlor every day. while canary use in coal mines is long past, the metaphor lives on when individuals identify as human canaries, overlaying a type of human experimentality onto the uneven permeations of industrialism into consumer product technocultures. as a language of disability advocacy, the canary metaphor underlies how experiences of chemically altered life lead some to identify as subjects of technoscientific experimentation. i can attest to the uncanny parallels between the imaginary of a canary as a living signal and feeling like a dystopic test subject caught in an involuntary conscription. while the canary is a yellow feathered flash in a dimly lit mine who detects the thresholds of safe atmospheres (possibly being gassed and then resuscitated by an oxygen mechanism in the cage), i am prone to sandbag lungs from paint and building product off-gassing and perfume, and my flash (always electric blue!) is a migraine aura, a visual hallucination of scintillating lights and colors. both of us creatures are capable of sensing chemicals at levels otherwise deemed benign by toxicological science (fortun and fortun 2005).6 often times, perhaps more often than not, we also sense levels deemed concerning by toxicology’s standards, but because these levels are bearable by many bodies, their significance is frequently dismissed. identifying as a human canary names, as gendered and ableist, how technocultures imagine petrochemical exposure as a “necessary evil” of consumer production. chemically sensitive people who mobilize the canary metaphor potentiate a feminist knowledge about chemical disability by revealing how its “technological imagination” is gendered (balsamo 2011) and reclaiming the positionality of being both sentinel and experimental subject. although individuals who claim to be human canaries imply that their exposure experiences are similar to those of dehumanized experimental subjects, they also actively subvert the patriarchal assumptions of canary science. in particular, they challenge how sensitivity is exceptionalized as a feminine characteristic. such metaphorical play disrupts environmental discourses that have been co-opted by anthropocentric liberal concepts of sustainability and dehistoricizing “techno-fixes” that erase “the many stories and histories of human systems that organize life differently” (di chiro 2018, 529). the canary metaphor crips a status quo of de facto experimental subjecthood in everyday atmospheres full of gendered products such as fragrances, and personal care products. similar to how canaries continue singing after falling off their perch, many chemically sensitive people also experiment with creative technoscientific interventions to make atmospheres accessible despite disabling exposures.7 examples of interventions shared with me in interview conversations and in casual co-conspiracy include using materials such as mylar and tyvek to seal homes from fumes, or searching for the most efficient air filter and breathing mask that uses activated charcoal to remove chemicals that have volatilized into gas.8 if the impact that low levels of incitants have on the daily functioning of human canaries is taken seriously, spaces that provoke sensitivities can be reimagined as zones that expand understandings of living signal abilities and capacities. through these homemade and repurposed interventions that accompany the use of the canary metaphor, human canaries reclaim what experimental subjecthood can be: technocultural living signals whose capacities for sensing low-level exposures treated as a valuable form of knowledge production, as opposed to being subsumed by consumer product profit. my experiences learning with human canaries have taught me that many use these technocultural interventions to prevent loss of social networks, housing, and employment, thereby transfiguring animal sentinel technology into reparative reckonings with modern material culture.   anti-colonial and anti-racist technoscientific experimental subjects just as the unproblematized metaphor of the canary in the coal mine can naturalize moments when fossil fuels fuel extractive capitalism, so too can this notion gloss over how the metaphorical language of animal symbol “marks whiteness” (walcott 2014, 129). some in the chemically sensitive community search for elusive biomarkers in blood tests and genetic analysis. this practice stems from the view that possessing particular genes is related to the physiological challenges of processing a lifetime of exposures that accumulate in organ systems. while these biocentric “molecular narratives” can be significant in structuring a given individual’s identification as a chemically sensitive canary, too often racialized categories are offered in the same breath as genetic causality (tallbear 2013, 150). this oversight results in glossing over the conjoined histories of racialization, animalization, and ability. as discussed earlier, if part of what biologically deterministic, individualizing, ideas of chronic illness conceal are transnational, extractivist, chemical infrastructures (murphy 2013; jones 2013), then to mobilize the canary in the coal mine metaphor from an anti-colonial perspective requires reckoning with how eurocentric science, biomedicine, and toxicology rely on the lineages and ongoing replication of white, liberal humanist ontology. otherwise, when humans claim to be animal sentinels, they conjure images of a posthuman sacrificial life that risks reifying exposed subjects as damaged (tuck 2009). overrelying on a nostalgic image of animal likeness whitewashes how uneven exposures of lifeforms bolster extractive environmental data (vera et al. 2019), and how technocultural materialities are produced by colonial infrastructures. guiding what is provoked by the canary in the coal mine metaphor toward the work of solidarity involves denaturalizing resource extraction from indigenous territories, and the canary as a color-evasive emblem that denies how sacrificial life is tied to white supremacy. does the canary metaphor posit the animal in lieu of the human, then recenter a predetermined (whitewashed) human agency at risk of essentializing a eurocentric “epistemological-ontological divide" (watts 2013, 31)? this epistemic move necessitates the consideration of promoting canary speciesism as a particular ideal type of sensitive subject that excludes the capacities of many other forms of life and being, and reifies a binaric understanding of human/animal. likewise, to resist the reinscription of disabled people as dehumanized or rendered animal, scholars and community members can build relations that center what sunaura taylor calls the “cripping of animal ethics” (2017) and cree scholar billy-rae belcourt describes as “an animal ethic that disrupts anthropocentrism as a settler-colonial logic” (2015, 5). human canaries, who reappropriate experimental subjecthood, must orient themselves and their reconfigured technocultural modes of accessibility toward knowledge production that acknowledges the power of metaphor to subvert material realities. this practice centers how chemical exposure co-constitutes relations with future life and more-than-human beings (tallbear 2015; todd 2018; lee 2020). human canary crip-led experimental atmospheric intervention also needs to center the demands of queer, trans, and gender nonconforming persons of color whose work has created, and is leading, the disability justice movement. part of this work encompasses mel chen’s call for grappling with the ways notions of toxicity are imbricated in histories of “relations of contamination” that figure racialized and nonheteronormative others as threats to a sovereign body, and how these nativist notions can lead to chemical substances bearing “their own toxic racializations” (2012, 170–71). chen writes of their exposure to mercury and subsequent development of chemical sensitivity as a being-in-relation with the combinations of chemicals that exceed biological schemas of human and object. they navigate exposures by rethinking the possibilities of causality and the (largely heteropatriarchal) “socialities attributed to toxicity” (204). these queerand crip-led practices subvert monolithic social constructions of exposure, reorienting the concept away from anthropocentric and androcentric threshold theories of harm, towards material interdependence across constructed categories of difference and capacity. future work can continue to reflect on the significance of what kind of relational cultures are needed to sustain a crip science of chemical exposure (hamirae and fritsch 2019), especially one that situates the concept of access itself outside of individualizing “white, settler accommodation frameworks” (cowing 2020). in a late-industrial, late-capitalist world facing climate change, knowledge production must cultivate collective access to experimental materials and social resources. the disability justice principles of building cross-disability and cross-movement relationships, as well as reflections on the localized and community-based recommitments and reorientations required to dismantle systems of oppression, are needed now more than ever to contest the ways petrochemical materiality structures the technocultures of consumer products (sins invalid 2016).   conclusion rather than providing a complete archive or history, my partial exercise in metaphorical genealogy has explored how the identification of those with chemical sensitivities, as canaries, creates space for reimagining the sensing of exposure as an important ability. critically unpacking and scaling the infrastructural histories gathered in the canary metaphor nuances the relationships between human canaries, environmental injustice, gender, and disability. sensitivities need not be exceptionalized as a feminized and gendered capacity. while lived experiences of chemical disability demonstrate how canary knowledge can guide toxicological knowledge production, the epistemological and allied work of building canary knowledges is still in the process of learning and growing. the historicity of the canary in the coal mine metaphor disrupts the naturalized coalescence of colonial and capitalist projects that generated canary domestication and the use of such birds as scientific subjects. using the metaphor without acknowledging its complicated history transposes a universal animal sentinel onto universal signatures and warning signals of chemical injury, without attending to the conjoined histories of racialization and animalization that structure chemical exposure. thus, it is my hope that chemically sensitive communities and other advocates of disability and environmental justice can, with this history of songbird commodification, continue to subvert the heteropatriarchal and eurocentric scientific apprehensions of chemical exposure it has come to represent in popular verbiage. the metaphor contains a technocultural lineage that instrumentalizes bodily sensing, illuminating how sensing exposure is materially and historically contiguous. i have also critically traced the metaphor to continue to invite further speculative orientations to practices of reappropriating experimental technoscientific subjecthood. reclaiming this subjecthood involves imagining work attuned to the future stakes of experimentation as a form of technocultural knowledge production. as neel ahuja reminds us, experimentation encompasses interspecies reproduction: “minor atmospheric intimacies open out into bigger scales that laterally determine how the reproduction of some bodies will affect planetary form, including through processes of climate change and disease that threaten mass premature death” (2015, 379). such a task gestures towards the cultivation of learning that is antiracist and decolonial, a practice of unlearning that is itself metaphorically “willfully permeable to contamination…an openness to contaminate an epistemology that relies on the equivalence of learning or mastery and disavows the violence this produces. it is also a call for openness to temporal contamination, which troubles the teleological narrative of progress with regard to knowledge production” (harvey 2016, 18). echoing the canary’s song in subterranean rooms, where co gas is a signal from the living ground itself of coal extraction, the human canary’s knowledge can be attuned to transcontinental and intergenerational exposure-scapes, our respiration provoking a call for collective sense-ability.   notes 1 reflexively taking up the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” as someone who is cisgendered and otherwise able-bodied, i situate my location of privilege within canary communities and this article’s discussion of canary knowledges within the research contexts of ethnographic interview and informal conversations with people who self-identify as experiencing chemical sensitivity. these folks were able to access a publicly funded environmental health clinic in toronto, canada, over three years, and come from a range of backgrounds, including diverse lived experiences of class, racialization, diaspora, gender identity, comorbid illness, and disability. due to long-term challenges securing disability income and navigating public space, many lack forms of desired community, experience insecure housing and also may be low-income. anthropology is an academic discipline that has its own deep problems investing in and perpetuating/reinforcing colonial and imperial violences and forms of white space. my engagement in the present settler city of toronto, despite canada being my “home,” is accountable to this disciplinary responsibility and the complicities it upholds as part of institutional knowledge production. i reflect on ableist conventions in ethnographic methods that pressure particular types of relation with people in the field. my need to reconfigure access by connecting with chemically sensitive communities online, alongside my experiences of sensitivity persistently disrupting ongoing relationships, are not a failure to maintain an ideal, or romanticized relationship of knowledge exchange, but can be considered part of the work of building canary knowledges. future work must continue to elaborate even more fully how human canary identifications and accessibility needs shape the co-production of canary knowledges, including beyond north american, global north–centered, contexts.   2 this is true even for consumer products that purport to measure and collect air quality. the expanding personal air monitors and air purifiers industry, for instance, still invisibilizes chemical harm. calibration at safety thresholds and levels higher than chemical sensitivity still compromises accessible exposure prevention by constructing low-level chemical fates as untraceable.   3 a religiously motivated model of christian divine right to possession formed the basis of later colonial voyages to north america. black feminist philosopher and historian sylvia wynter describes the canary islands as playing a key role in reinforcing a pattern of western european colonial rationale, where individuals aspiring to set out on voyages would receive commissions in contracts where “the licensee, in exchange for his deed of expanding the wealth and power of the licensing state, was that of a vice-regal administrative position in the governance of the expropriated territory, as well as a percentage of the tax on trade goods and all other forms of tribute” (1995, 29). in her argument, these logics of conquest would also inform the notion of a “natural slave” in the sixteenth-century spanish empire in order to displace a purely “theological mode of legitimation,” and lay the foundation for the further commodification of life.   4 in the united kingdom canary use in mining continued until the late 1980s (parsons 1987, 27).   5 later, burrell and the bureau of mines would be responsible for research into us poison gas for use in world war i. a wartime publication mentions canaries used in trenches to detect gas (carpenter 1918, 8). the use of canaries as sentinels would foreshadow the use of animals in consumer product testing, which came into full force after the passing of the us food, drug, and cosmetic act in 1930. haldane describes an animal hierarchy using the example of coal burning inside homes: “lower organisms…are on the whole far more sensitive to impurities in air and other changes in the environment than higher animals, and particularly man” (1922, 302).   6 canary oxygen resuscitation is remarkably similar to pure oxygen sometimes administered to severe cases of chemical sensitivity. in both cases, oxygen offers relief and returns the ability to breathe.   7 human canary status is connected to the loss of functioning experienced when exposed to chemical incitants such as perfumes, air fresheners, laundry detergents, cleaning and personal care products, cigarettes, diesel, inks, paints, construction materials, and off-gassing consumer products manufactured from petrochemical materials such as mdf board, carpet, couches, clothing, and laminate flooring (sears 2007). shared indoor atmospheres like apartment complexes can provide little ability to control exposure. similarly, income level influences the degree of the toxicant atmospheres from commodities, furnishings, and building materials encountered daily. when houses are located near industry or highways, this too influences the cumulative effects experienced from multiple outdoor sources of exposure and the ways these effects alter functional ability.   8 masking practices to prevent exposure that once drew negative attention are now, paradoxically, becoming normalized due to the covid-19 pandemic.   references ahuja, neel. 2015. “intimate atmospheres: queer theory in a time of extinctions.” glq 21 (2–3): 365–85. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/581606. balayannis, angeliki, and emma garnett. 2020. “chemical kinship: interdisciplinary experiments with pollution.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 6 (1): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i1.33524. balsamo, anne. 2011. designing culture: the technological imagination at work. durham, nc: duke university press. baltimore sun. 1911. “canaries indicate mine gas.” december 13, 1911. baltimore sun. 1914. “5000 miners owe lives to canaries.” may 31, 1914. barba, mayra g. sánchez. 2020. “‘keeping them down’: neurotoxic pesticides, race, and disabling biopolitics.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 6 (1): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i1.32253. belcourt, billy-rae. 2015. “animal bodies, colonial subjects: (re)locating animality in decolonial thought.” societies 5 (1): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5010001. benjamin, ruha, ed. 2019. captivating technology: race, carceral technoscience, and liberatory imagination in everyday life. durham, nc: duke university press. blumenthal, debra. enemies and familiars: slavery and mastery in fifteenth-century valencia. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2009. boston daily globe. 1921. “hero-birds: canaries much used in mine rescue 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"crip technoscience manifesto.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–34. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607. haraway, donna. 2016. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press. haritaworn, jinthana. 2015. “decolonizing the non/human.” glq 21 (2–3): 210–13. harvey, sandra. 2016. 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"the origin and dispersal of the domesticated canary.” journal of cultural geography 7 (2): 19–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873638709478505. pollock, christal g. 2013. “companion birds in early america.” journal of avian medicine and surgery 27 (2): 148–51. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24623519. popular mechanics. 1912. “canary birds in mine-rescue work.” march 1912, 355–56. robinson, cedric j. 2000. black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. sears, margaret e. 2007. the medical perspective on environmental sensitivities. canadian human rights commission. https://www.chrc-ccdp.gc.ca/sites/default/files/envsensitivity_en.pdf. shapiro, nicholas, nasser zakariya, and jody roberts. 2017. “a wary alliance: from enumerating the environment to inviting apprehension.” engaging science, technology, and society, no. 3, 575–602. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2017.133. shew, ashley. 2020. “ableism, technoableism, and future ai.” ieee technology and society magazine 39 (1): 40–85. https://doi.org/10.1109/mts.2020.2967492. sins invalid. 2016. skin, tooth, and bone: the basis of movement is our people (digital version). www.sinsinvalid.org. tallbear, kim. 2013. native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ———. 2015. “an indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human.” glq 21 (2): 230–35. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/582037. taylor, sunaura. 2017. beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation. new york: the new press. todd, zoe. 2018. “refracting the state through human-fish relations: fishing, indigenous legal orders and colonialism in north/western canada.” decolonization, indigeneity, education & society 7 (1): 60–75. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/30393. tuck, eve. 2009. “suspending damage: a letter to communities.” harvard educational review 79 (3): 409–27. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15. united states department of labor. n.d. "coal fatalities for 1900 through 2018." accessed october 10, 2019. https://arlweb.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/coalstats.asp. vera, lourdes a., dawn walker, michelle murphy, becky mansfield, ladan mohamed siad, jessica ogden, and edgi. 2019. “when data justice and environmental justice meet: formulating a response to extractive logic through environmental data justice.” information, communication & society 22 (7): 1012–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2019.1596293. walcott, ronaldo. 2014. “the book of others (book iv): canadian multiculturalism, the state, and its political legacies.” canadian ethnic studies 46 (2): 127–32. https://doi.org/10.1353/ces.2014.0018. wang, jackie. 2018. carceral capitalism. cambridge, ma: mit press. washington post. 1912. “when carried into mines they always draw the line of safety.” march 24, 1912. watts, vanessa. 2013. “indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non-humans (first woman and sky woman go on a european world tour!).” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 2 (1): 20–34. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/download/19145/16234/. wynter, sylvia. 1995. “1492: a new world view.” in race, discourse, and the origin of the americas, edited by vera lawrence hyatt and rex nettleford, 5–58. washington, dc: smithsonian institution press.     author bio sophia jaworski is a settler who grew up on coast salish territories. she is a phd candidate in anthropology and women and gender studies at the university of toronto on dish with one spoon territory. microsoft word 32326_ samantha frost dr.docx frost, samantha (2019). review of molecular feminisms: biology, becomings, and life in the lab, by deboleena roy (university of washington press, 2018). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © samantha frost, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | molecular feminisms: biology, becomings, and life in the lab, by deboleena roy (university of washington press, 2018) samantha frost university of illinois, urbana-champaign frost@illinois.edu the problem that motivates deboleena roy’s project in molecular feminisms is “the lack of attention paid to developing feminist practices in the natural sciences” even as recent feminist scholarship has witnessed a “call to return to the body and to biology” (p. 135). practicing wet lab scientists, roy points out, have made their careers examining bodies and biological processes; the quandaries they face are not those of how to remember, recall, or include bodies and biology in their work but instead how to reconcile their research practice with feminist ethical and political principles. the dilemmas feminist scientists face concern the methods and technological procedures that are both central to their research and the object of thorough and often well-deserved critique by feminist science studies scholars. roy gives voice and analytic life to such dilemmas by engaging the specific question that haunted her as an emerging feminist scientist: given what feminist critics have told us about how research on reproductive technologies commodifies and exploits women’s reproductive capacities, especially in economically precarious populations and in postcolonial and socalled developing nations, “should feminists clone?” for roy, such ethical and political questions about laboratory methods are best approached via a detour through feminist-inflected deleuzian metaphysics. the special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) samantha frost, 2019 2 relational ontology that deleuze offers and that has been coaxed into a feminist shape by the likes of rosi braidotti and elizabeth grosz draws our attention to the fuzziness of the boundaries between objects, species, organisms, and environments as well as to the remarkable and persistent propensity towards change in bio-things. this metaphysics can spark recognition in lab scientists who, “with their hands-on experience of working with live organisms and dealing with the difficulty of experimental reproducibility,…are accustomed to witnessing the fluidity, vulnerability, and unfixed ‘nature’ of life” (p. 72). what is particularly useful, according to roy, is the deleuzian distinction between the molar and the molecular, the former being the scale of objects and people with seeming boundary integrity and the latter being the scale or perspective in which categories, distinctions, and centers of gravity constantly morph. the terms “molar” and “molecular” resonate with scientists because they, too, use the terms, with the former designating concentration levels in a standard volumetric measure and the latter referring to the micro-units whose concentration is what is measured. there is not an exact isomorphism of meanings between the deleuzian and chemical definitions, but they are close enough to allow roy to deploy them analogically as a means for scientists to negotiate back and forth between the micro scale of the molecules at work and play in the petri dish and the meso and meta scales of politics. indeed, suited up with this deleuzian conceptual vocabulary, roy takes her reader on a journey through the landscapes where feminist theory, postand decolonial theory, and feminist science and technology studies intersect to illuminate the politics of and in knowledge production. roy argues that the deleuzian distinction between the molecular and the molar allows feminist scientists to specify the socio-cultural and political-economic contingency of the concepts that scientists use to represent their research and to pose questions. roy thus proposes that feminist scientists draw on what they know of the surprising molecular messiness of biological processes under the microscope and then use the interplay between the molecular and the molar perspectives to trace concretely the often equally messy political-economic, historical, and post/colonial stakes of prospective research findings. in thus tracing the threads of inspiration and implication up through scales to the political-economic and historical, scientists will be alerted to the ways in which histories of gender and racial exploitation and imperial self-justification have already inflected scientific research programs; they will consequently be able to ascertain how terms such as “natural” or “human” constrain research questions without seeming obviously normative. roy suggests that in using the scale of the molar to shed light on molecular questions, feminist scientists can perceive that special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) samantha frost, 2019 3 seemingly impossible or impermissible wet lab research questions (about whether the cells in particular brain areas are sensitive to estrogen, which is her example) turn less on what might be the case and more on what has been taken (politically, historically) as settled. roy portrays these molecular-to-molar sojourns as a means for feminist scientists to reorient themselves to their own research matters, not necessarily changing what they do or how they do it but providing an ethically and politically informed framework for deciding what they do. so, on the question of cloning, roy first talks molecules and throws cold water on the notion that cloning is a disfiguration of nature: at the molecular level, all dna replication is a copy of a copy, which means that there is no original to be warped (p. 132). the question then is not whether copying is in itself bad but how the copying is done. zooming up to the molar level, roy observes that plants, agricultural and domestic pet animals, and vulnerable populations around the world are already subject to “forced modification and commodification,” which is to say that copying of various sorts is already done even if it is not always characterized as cloning (p. 151). furthermore, in the relatively unregulated gathering of exotic genomes for research, we can see that imperialism is not just a relic of history but instead is alive and well (p. 200). situating molecular-scale questions within the molar world of history and political economy pushes researchers to re-examine their own relationship to the micro-subjects of their laboratory research. it also gives researchers a means to specify the larger purposes and implications of their research agenda. in such multi-scalar mapping—in what is essentially a reconfiguration of the context of discovery—bacterial cloning that is undertaken for research that might support women’s reproductive rights takes on a different ethical and political valence. equipped with this new set of perspectives, feminist scientists can decide for themselves which questions to engage and which techniques and technologies to use to pursue them. at first glance, it may seem that roy’s interventions serve to provide a means for scientists merely to justify what they intended to do all along. roy herself acknowledges that “the point may not be to create ‘new or better’ methods, but rather to work within the dominant tradition—in this case, the scientific method— and gain what fresh knowledge they can from accepting the loss that accompanies the use of this method” (p. 82). but to gloss her argument as a form of exculpatory self-justification for scientists would be a mistake. although roy’s intended reading audience is broad, she writes most pointedly for scientists who are feminists and who also want to engage in major wet lab special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) samantha frost, 2019 4 research; she wants these researchers to know that “the dilemmas that will occur by working with the traditional technoscientific practices and tools in the natural sciences should not become paralyzing and their disappointments should not stop the feminist scientist from continuing to stand in front of a lab bench” (p. 82). faced with the prospect that feminist scientists might throw up their hands and walk away from the scientific enterprise because of the difficulty in reconciling the art of science with the critical impulses of feminism, roy’s urgent focus on lab practices is vitally important: the daily material practices of lab work expose broadly accepted feminist injunctions and prescriptions about science as overly abstract pieties. roy’s insistence that feminist scientists pay attention “to matters of scale” (p. 19), her recommendation that they shift between the molecular and the molar, enables feminist scientists to wander paths that bypass the orthodoxies that often organize molar-scale feminist politics and that, more distressingly, undermine feminist scientists’ autonomy and their confidence in the worth of their work. the multi-scalar intellectual perambulation roy proposes may be disorienting, but “the movement that will occur from getting lost in this place and posing the question ‘how do i proceed?’ may bring with it a new ethical orientation toward matter” (p. 82), an orientation that, in turn, could elucidate for practicing scientists what might be a worthy research project to undertake. by the same token, roy’s elaboration of the productivity of transversal analysis prods her readers more generally to apprehend how attention to the minutiae of molecularscale laboratory practices might generate more finely grained critical engagement with the politics that can be found in and evolves from scientific research. roy situates her project in her personal intellectual biography as well as in a meticulous rendering of the contemporary theoretical landscape, with filigrees of inspiration from the indian subcontinent and diaspora. in many respects, the book is a meta-discourse about science practice: how to think about how to think about it. but in its attention to lives lived, scholarly literatures, biochemical transformations, and political histories, it is concrete and accessible. overall, molecular feminisms is a joyful book, thrumming with the pleasure of intellectual adventure. and as a celebration of interdisciplinary scholarship and an affirmation of the generativity of scholars reaching across research domains, the book is an instantiation of its governing metaphor—that of stolonic grass. (yep. i won’t explain it here. read it; you’ll get it.) author bio samantha frost is professor of political science and gender and women’s studies at the university of illinois, urbana-champaign. she is the author, most recently, of biocultural creatures: toward a new theory of the human (duke university special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) samantha frost, 2019 5 press,2016). she is currently working on a project called the attentive body. microsoft word introduction final.docx szczygielska, marianna, & cielemęcka, olga (2019). introduction to special section: plantarium: human–vegetal ecologies. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-12. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introduction | special section plantarium: human–vegetal ecologies marianna szczygielska max planck institute for the history of science szczygielska@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de olga cielemęcka university of turku olga.cielemecka@gmail.com plants are everywhere, but people tend to take little notice of them. while environmental reports warn about the largest loss in plant biodiversity to date, including often undocumented or overlooked extinction of many plant species, houseplants experience a revival in urban cultures. huge and glossy leaves of monstera deliciosa and fiddle-leaf figs (ficus lyrata), funky pancake plant (pilea peperomioides), and spoon-leaved peperomia (peperomia), along with cacti and airplants (tillandsia) fill millennial urbanites’ shoe-box-size apartments and their instagram feeds. according to the us national gardening association, houseplant sales have doubled between 2016 and 2019, growing a thriving industry worth $1.7 billion (cited in boyle, 2019). the so-called “plantfluencers,” with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media and signed book deals, shape this recent horticultural fascination by creating “trending” plants (green, 2018). there are different interpretations of this generation’s turn to plants: it may be a way to reconnect with nature; a response to growing anxieties about climate change; or part of the blooming “wellness” industry. some see caring for green companions as a substitute for delayed parenthood, plants becoming the new pets for city special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | introduction | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 2 dwellers (boyle, 2019). in times of environmental and economic insecurities and precarious labor conditions, when few can afford a large garden, many look for comfort and community in planting and watering their potted houseplants, sharing cuttings, or tending to community gardens or urban farms. these intimate human–vegetal ecologies, however, are entangled with a long history of colonial scientific expeditions, imperialism, economic extraction, capitalist accumulation, globalization, and cultural appropriation that form the invisible roots which ground and anchor popular decorative houseplants in our spaces. as a result of these historical processes, oftentimes what comes to be considered a decorative plant in one geographical context bears different cultural meanings and functions in its local context. in this sense, the spatial notions of proximity and distance are collapsed in individual stories of plant circulation, at the same time espousing seedy temporalities of global plant travels. how much do consumers actually know about the potted plants that decorate windowsills and bookshelves, populate their houses and flats, and frequently given as host gifts? how have these exotic and now domesticated and familiar plant species ended up in people’s homes and offices? let’s consider one of today’s most prominent plant celebrities: monstera deliciosa. the characteristic fenestrated leaves of this tropical epiphyte became a design inspiration and home decor staple. its latin genus name refers to the monstrous size these conspicuous climbers can reach, while the species owes the specific epithet “delicious” to its edible fruits considered a delicacy in mexico and panama. the spanish and portuguese vernacular names (costilla de adán and costela-deadão, respectively) compare the perforated leaves to the ribs of adam, a religious reference reminiscent of the european conquest of latin america. colonial extraction of natural resources in the new world included collecting, taxonomizing, naming, describing, and illustrating local flora. these activities made botanical science into one of the central pillars for the economy and politics of the empire through establishing global networks of scientists, collectors, merchants, and institutions. the first specimen of monstera deliciosa was collected in 1832 in mexico by hungarian-born german botanist wilhelm friedrich karwinski von karwin, who sent a sample to the munich botanical garden where it attracted no attention (madison, 1977, p. 96). a decade later, two other plant collectors introduced monstera deliciosa to europe independently: danish botanist frederik michael liebmann brought live material from mexico to the university of copenhagen, while polish botanist józef warszewicz collected cuttings in the belgian colony in guatemala and delivered them to the berlin botanical station. according to michael madison (1977), most of the monstera deliciosa cultivation special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | introduction | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 3 originates from these two introductions, which contributed to the huge horticultural triumph of this species starting in the mid-nineteenth century and lasting until today. although dumbcane (dieffenbachia) may not be as popular as monstera with its dramatic leaves and big presence, it remains, nonetheless, a popular ornamental plant due to its attractive foliage—dark-green and dotted with white spots and flecks—and resistance to shade. native to tropical climate, from mexico to the west indies, it was known to indigenous inhabitants of upper amazon and the caribbean as a medicine and a poison. but once dumbcane’s toxic qualities were discovered by europeans, it led to multiple abuses. dumbcane was used by slave owners and traffickers to punish jamaican enslaved people by rubbing their mouths with cut stems, causing swelling and corrosive burns in the mouth, larynx, esophagus, and stomach of a victim (arditti & rodriguez, 1982, p. 294). later, upon discovering that the plant caused sterility in animals—a quality long known to indigenous peoples in areas where dumbcane was native—a nazi doctor, adolf pokorny (later tried in nuremberg), suggested that it be used in sterilization experiments conducted on concentration camp prisoners (arditti & rodriguez, 1982, p. 296). another horticultural favorite, succulents—arguably one of the most “hipster” plants—have recently found themselves at the center of a smuggling controversy. the definition of a succulent includes plants that possess at least one succulent tissue—that is, a living tissue that has the ability to store water, giving the plant the ability to survive in arid climates. there are over ten thousand species of succulents, widely varying in size, shape, and flowers. among them, dudleya farinosa became particularly popular among indoor-plant enthusiasts who value its bizarre growth form with adorable thick, pale-green leaves. its popularity also attracted plant poachers who snatch it from the coasts of california and ship the plants overseas. journalists and locals mourn the loss of wild-growing coastal plant life, harvested by poachers to saturate the high demand of global markets as the craze for these tiny and drought-friendly plants grows, particularly in south korea and china. and yet their concern may be not only over the loss of biodiversity. anxieties over asian markets’ insatiable demand for succulents may also be reflecting something about the us determination to retain its status as an economic megapower, which is now seriously threatened by china’s growing markets. these individual plant stories reveal deep political entanglements between the history of botany, capitalist markets, and multiple uses of plants in veterinary and special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | introduction | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 4 medical sciences. in a conversation featured in this issue, canadian environmental and literary scholar catriona sandilands highlights the critical importance of context—tracing the concrete, situated stories of particular people’s relations with particular species of plants in specific places and historical moments. from this perspective, plants are, to use serpil oppermann’s (2018) formulation, “densely storied matter” (p. 411). burgeoning new research on the vegetal helps understand the intertwined histories of humans and plants. humans depend on the vegetal world in a fundamental way: for food, animal feed, medicines, clothing, fuel, and shelter, intoxication and stimulation, as well as mediating deep cultural and social meanings flourishing in arts and aesthetics. plants for their part use humans as pollinators to colonize new territories. plants grow deeply into human histories. stories of knowledge and resistance—retained in women’s, indigenous, and other vernacular knowledges about herbs, healing plants, and natural methods to induce miscarriage. stories about violence, domination, and conquest—inseparable from the history of cultivation and trade in rice, sugar cane, spices, cotton, rubber, and so on. plants played a fundamental role in colonization of americas and slavery, and “colonial botany—the study, naming, cultivating, and marketing of plants in colonial contexts—was born of and supported european voyages, conquests, global trade, and scientific exploration” (schiebinger & swan, 2005, p. 2). by the eighteenth century, plants had the status of “green gold” (schiebinger, 2004, p. 7), a currency as crucial for political and economic expansion of western european states as gold or silver, revealing the “volatile nexus of botanical science, commerce, and state politics” (schiebinger & swan, 2005, p. 2). in the twentieth century, the green revolution seemingly reversed these colonial routes through implementing research and technology transfer aimed at increased agricultural production in the so-called developing world through promoting high-yielding crop varieties, agro-chemicals, mechanization, and western methods of cultivation at the expense of traditional ways of farming and biodiversity (kloppenburg, 1988). this rich history of human–plant relationships may prove crucial to understanding and reflecting on our contemporary historical and political moment. for example, anna tsing (2012) suggests we call our present epoch the “plantationocene” (p. 148). serving as the engine of european expansion, plantations produced immense wealth and replaced more sustainable relationships between humans and plants with enslaved, or otherwise coerced, labor. donna haraway echoes this statement in saying that the order of a plantation configures the most symptomatic elements that, for over the last five hundred years, have been shaping our planetary system, among them “radical simplification; substitution of peoples, crops, microbes, and life forms; forced labor; and, crucially, the special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | introduction | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 5 disordering of times of generation across species, including human beings” (haraway & tsing, 2019). the dramatic environmental change we are currently experiencing is an effect of structurally unjust social relations epitomized by exploitative economy of the plantation. today, as species of plants and communities of people are being forced out of their homes and habitats by droughts, floods, forest fires, polluted waters, and toxic wastes, plant life lies central to questions brought by rapid environmental change and shapes agenda issues such as migration (due to climate change), belonging (to a place that may be endangered), and loss (of species and habitats). for example, gender studies scholar and plant biologist banu subramaniam (2001) shows how fears over immigration and globalization seep into invasive biology discourses around “invasive” and “alien” species of plants that, it is said, spread uncontrollably, pushing out the “natives.” in a different context, polish multimedia artist karolina grzywnowicz (2016) studies weeds as historical and political documents as they grow in villages abandoned because of forced migration and ethnic displacements in southern poland. these so-called ruderal species are the first to colonize areas disturbed by wildfires or human activity, thriving in capitalist ruins and helping us live on a damaged planet (tsing, 2015; tsing, et al., 2017). through attending to vegetal matter, this special section of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoculture, “plantarium: human–vegetal ecologies,” articulates questions around plant–human encounters in their “storied” historical, scientific, biotechnological, political, discursive, biological, and ecological contexts. for us, as guest editors of this section, and for the editors of catalyst, the task to approach the botanical realm from the perspectives of feminist technoscience seemed timely and important, first of all, because the study, collection, and use of plants is a particularly gendered affair—by the eighteenth century, botany was one of the few scientific disciplines open to women with many prominent female botanical collectors, illustrators, and experts (shteir, 1996); and second, because, from linnaeus’s taxonomy and invention of botanical nomenclature, to today’s bioengineered plants, genetically modified trees, and seed databases, plants open up space to critically reflect on the ways in which knowledge is produced, classified, and organized in science. following in this epistemological vein, we must also recognize the sites of plant knowledge production outside of western science, as created by indigenous peoples, enslaved and colonized people, and in popular botanical, medicinal, and pharmaceutical knowledge (riddle, 1997; kimmerer, 2013; foster, 2017). from yet special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | introduction | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 6 another perspective, contemporary research in plant science that concerns vegetal cognition, sentience, and communication (see, e.g., mancuso & viola, 2015; simard, 2018) invites critical perspectives that challenge the historically inherited western hierarchy of the human, the animal, and the vegetal life (marder, 2013). we also wanted to capture a particular moment in which the humanities’ and arts’ renewed interest in plant life gives rise to a new and fertile field of study known as critical plant studies. crisscrossing feminist and queer scholarship, art and literature, anticolonial and critical race theories, information studies, history of science and science and technology studies, critical plant studies forges new research paths for thinking (with) plants as a way of repositioning the human in the surrounding natural-cultural environment and human–vegetal knowledge. drawing on history of science (merchant, 1990; shteir, 1996; carney, 2001; schiebinger, 2017), feminist science and technology studies (hustak & myers, 2012; subramaniam, 2014), and plant science (gagliano, 2018; simard, 2018), critical theories of plants problematize plant–human relationships in the context of power relations running along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and more. emerging fields of research such as plant philosophy (marder, 2013), queer ecologies (sandilands, 2016; mortimersandilands & erickson, 2010), phytopoetics (jacobs, this volume), multispecies ethnographies (haraway, 2007; tsing, 2012), environmental humanities (rose et al., 2012), food studies (shiva, 2000), studies on the anthropocene (or the “planthropocene” [myers, 2016]), among others, look into plant life to further explore constellations of knowledge, matter, and power in which both plants and humans are entangled. at the same time, we see all around us multiple and creative practices emerging from urban activism, grassroots community building, indigenous and communal knowledges, and artistic experimentations that reclaim the power to produce knowledge about plants and redefine intimate human–plant relations, in an effort to heal the wounds inflicted by regimes of colonialism, imperialism, homoand transphobia, misogyny, and racism. the individual contributions to this special section take up this challenge, each in a different fashion, illuminating the importance of intersectional and situated analysis for feminist plant studies. in other words, this collection offers innovative feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies for theorizing the vegetal turn in the humanities and arts. one example of such artistic experimentation is “plant-centered design” by špela special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | introduction | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 7 petrič, a slovenian new media artist and former scientific researcher whose work extensively engages plant life. the cover image of this issue features a cyclamen (cyclamen persicum) from her “plant sex consultancy” series (2014), in which the artist along with pei-ying lin, dimitris stamatis, and jasmina weiss designed and produced devices suited for specific plants to enhance their natural reproductive strategies. this kind of technological intervention serves on the one hand, as a medical prosthesis developed in response to the drastic decline in insect pollinators, while on the other, functions as a “floral sex toy” for potted plants to overcome their isolation and apparent immobility. we open this collection with joela jacob’s “phytopoetics: upending the passive paradigm with vegetal violence and eroticism.” this wonderfully intertextual essay offers a foray into “vegetal eroticism” in plant reproduction linking botany to early sexology. illustrated with examples from german art nouveau imagery and narratives that attributed erotic qualities to plants, jacobs offers a concept of phytopoetics to capture the political, cultural, and poetic agency of the plant. jacobs convincingly shows how human notions about sex and violence—about making life and ending it—are projected onto the vegetal realm, showing that phytopoetics “engages with some of the most central anxieties of modern society, since the sustained survival of the human species depends on plants.” feminist technoscience scholar nina lykke, in her article “co-becoming with diatoms: between posthuman mourning and wonder in algae research” reopens the questions of temporal schemes of life, death, and survival in the anthropocene. lykke offers a deeply personal portrayal of her queer grief that is entangled with the nonhuman life—plants, rocks, and sea waters—but above all, with diatoms, single-celled aquatic algae that possess characteristics of both a plant and an animal. escaping taxonomic categories, diatoms question discrete and anthropocentric notions of human selfhood, life and death, harm and survival. by means of becoming-with-algae, lykke offers a meditation on posthuman mourning in face of personal losses and mass species extinctions, and calls for an expansion of the limits of our empathy. in a conversation with catriona sandilands, we discuss the genealogy and affordances of the vegetal turn in the humanities and arts. the interview foregrounds feminist engagement with racialized and gendered violence of botanical colonialisms, while proposing a methodology for feminist science and technology studies interested in plant matters. “thinking the feminist vegetal turn in the shadow of douglas-firs” gives a general idea about the emergence of critical plant studies as a diverse field, but also brings together literary, historical, special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | introduction | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 8 and material examples of human–vegetal ecologies. the critical perspectives section, curated by feminist science studies and legal scholar laura foster, brings together six scholars exploring the deep interconnections between plants, science, and race in settler colonial settings. while krisha j. hernández proposes to engage with the more-than-human terminology as a way to co-create indigenous futurities, sarah ives warns against the slippage between more-than-human and less-than-human modalities that shape the multispecies worlds. in a similar vein, elaine gan shows how race is coproduced in crop science’s classification of rice varieties and in plantation regimes that subordinate human laborers’ bodies. lastly, diana gibson invites us to learn from kanna plants alongside the indigenous ways of knowing and being of the khoi and san peoples, while william ellis portrays milkwood trees (sideroxylon inerne) in south africa as witnesses to colonial violences of slave trade, executions, and mass logging for building settler infrastructures. the theme of botanical colonialism continues in xan sarah chacko’s contribution to this collection, recording the recent institutional rebranding of botanical gardens as the hub for global biodiversity conservation through investing in seed banking in the face of environmental crisis. drawing on michelle murphy’s (2017) notion of “economization of life,” “digging up colonial roots: the less-known origins of the millennium seed bank partnership” problematizes the forgetting of kew gardens’ colonial legacy and the gardens’ central role in the imperial economy, which persists in the seed bank partnership project as it is imagined as a repository for securing botanical futures. as londa schiebinger (2004) reminds us, “the sixteen hundred botanical gardens that europeans had founded worldwide by the end of the eighteenth century were not merely idyllic bits of green intended to delight city dwellers, but experimental stations for agriculture as a way station for plant acclimatization for domestic and global trade, rare medicaments, and cash crops” (p. 11). together, these critical perspectives on plants, race, and colonialism forge new pathways for feminist, decolonial, and indigenous technoscience. through stories of plant–human encounters, this collection of articles and provocations poses questions around practices of knowledge production that weave the vegetal life into scientific, biotechnological, and medical discourses, histories, and practices. our proposed title “plantarium” posed some technical difficulties: text editing software would persistently change it to “planetarium” in an act of disciplining this weedy term. nevertheless, we welcome this confusion as foreshadowing our multidimensional perspective on uneasy plant–human special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | introduction | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 9 relations rooted in concrete stories that reveal local botanical knowledges, while reflecting the “planetary consciousness” (mcclintock, 1995) driving the commodification of vegetal matter in colonial expansion and domination. as plants determine in concrete, empirical ways human livelihoods, diet, health, landscape, urban design, and economies, and grow into our histories of belonging, domination, and conquest, they allow a multispecies understanding of human knowledge as co-produced by plants. what we understand as “plantarium” also shares kinship with herbarium, a collection of pressed plants. this practice of selecting and arranging specimens into two-dimensional archives is ubiquitous for botanical taxonomy. our selection of plant-inspired essays, conversations, and provocations offers a critical feminist commentary on this very cornerstone of scientific endeavor, while attending to complex entanglements of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, nationality, and colonialism. through questioning and crossing the taxonomic boundaries and normative classifications, this botanical thought troubles classical notions of identity, subjectivity, life, environment, nature, and culture, and sprouts into territories of politically valent social struggles. whereas herbariums necessarily feature the materiality of the individual plants themselves as singular specimens represent types, this collection presents both empirical and theoretically anchored essays that foreground vegetal ecologies as material-semiotic relations. we hope that “plantarium” will germinate new pathways for feminist, decolonial, and indigenous ways of thinking (with) plants. acknowledgements the idea for this special section stems from a workshop called “plantarium: reimagining green futurities,” organized by marianna szczygielska and olga cielemęcka, held at the university of linköping in sweden, 1-2 june 2017. arriving at the interface of art, science, and philosophy, invited speakers—catriona sandilands and michael marder—and participants activated multidimensional approaches to human–plant relations that pay close attention to hierarchical materializations of power entrenched in botanical technologies and imaginaries, generating an invaluable inspiration to continue those conversations in this special section. we are immensely grateful to all off them as well as to the seed box, a mistra-formas environmental humanities collaboratory and gexcel international collegium for advanced transdisciplinary gender studies, who supported the event with funding, and our colleagues from tema genus at linköping university. we would like to warmly thank the editorial team of the catalyst, especially banu subramaniam and michelle murphy, for giving us the special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | introduction | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 10 platform and working with us on this special section. a special thanks goes to špela petrič, who shared with us her inspiring artwork that is featured on the cover of this issue. we extend our thanks to the reviewers for their generous and selfless work. finally, we are grateful to our humans, plants, and cats for supporting us throughout the process. references arditti, j., & rodriguez, e. (1982). dieffenbachia: uses, abuses and toxic constituents: a review. journal of ethnopharmacology, 5(3), 293-302. boyle, m. (2019, april 11). the one thing millennials haven’t killed is houseplants. bnn bloomberg. retrieved from https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-one-thing-millennialshaven-t-killed-is-houseplants-1.1242863 carney, j. a. (2001). black rice: the african origins of rice cultivation in the americas. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. foster, l. a. (2017). reinventing hoodia: peoples, plants, and patents in south africa. seattle, wa: university of washington press. gagliano, m. (2018). thus spoke the plant: a remarkable journey of groundbreaking scientific discoveries and personal encounters with plants. berkeley, ca: north atlantic books. green, p. (2018, november 8). meet the plantfluencers. the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/style/08sill.html grzywnowicz, k. (2016). weeds. retrieved from http://chwasty.com/oprojekcie/?ln=en_en haraway, d. (2007). when species meet, minneapolis, mi: university of minnesota press. haraway, d., & tsing, a. (2019, june 18). reflections on the plantationocene: a conversation with donna haraway and anna tsing. interviewed by g. mitman. edge effects. retrieved from http://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/ hustak, c., & myers, n. (2012). involuntary momentum: affective ecologies and the sciences of plant/insect encounters. differences, 23(3), 74-118. kimmerer, r. w. (2013). braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. minneapolis, mn: milkweed editions. kloppenburg, j. r. (ed.). (1988). seeds and sovereignty: the use and control of plant genetic resources. durham, nc: duke university press. madison, m. (1977). a revision of monstera (araceae). contributions from the gray special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | introduction | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 11 herbarium of harvard university, no. 207, 3-100. mancuso, s., & viola, a. (2015). brilliant green: the surprising history and science of plant intelligence (j. benham, trans.). washington, dc: island press. marder, m. (2013). plant-thinking: a philosophy of vegetal life. new york, ny: columbia university press. mcclintock, a. (1995). imperial leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. london: routledge. merchant, c. (1990). the death of nature: women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. san francisco, ca: harper & row. mortimer-sandilands, c., & erickson, b. (eds.). (2010). queer ecologies: sex, nature, politics, desire. bloomington, in: indiana university press. murphy, m. (2017). the economization of life. durham, nc: duke university press. myers, n. (2016, february 10). from edenic apocalypse to gardens against eden: plants and people in and after the anthropocene [talk presented at the university of california, berkeley, department of geography, department weekly colloquium]. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3czenrnb58 oppermann, s. (2018). storied matter. in r. braidotti & m. hlavajova (eds.), posthuman glossary (pp. 411-414). london: bloomsbury. petrič, š., lin, p. y., stamatis d., & weiss, j. (2014). plant sex consultancy. retrieved from http://psx-consultancy.com/ riddle, j. (1997). eve’s herbs: a history of contraception and abortion in the west. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. rose, d. b., van dooren, t., chrulew, m., cooke, s., kearnes, m., & o’gorman, e. (2012). thinking through the environment: unsettling the humanities. environmental humanities, 1(1), 1-5. sandilands, c. (2016). queer ecology. in j. adamson, w. gleason, & d. pellow (eds.), keywords for environmental studies (pp. 169-171). new york, ny: new york university press. retrieved from https://keywords.nyupress.org/environmentalstudies/essay/queer-ecology schiebinger, l. (2004). plants and empire: colonial bioprospecting in the atlantic world. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. schiebinger, l. (2017). secret cures of slaves: people, plants, and medicine in the eighteenth-century atlantic world. stanford, ca: stanford university press. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | introduction | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 12 schiebinger, l., & swan, c. (eds.). (2005). colonial botany: science, commerce, and politics in the early modern world. philadelphia, pa: university of pennsylvania press. shiva, v. (2000). stolen harvest: the hijacking of the global food supply. london: zed books. shteir, a. b. (1996). cultivating women, cultivating science: flora’s daughters and botany in england, 1760-1860. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. simard, s. w. (2018). mycorrhizal networks facilitate tree communication, learning, and memory. in f. baluška, m. gagliano, & g. weitzany (eds.), memory and learning in plants. (pp. 191-213). cham: springer. subramaniam, b. (2001). the aliens have landed! reflections on the rhetoric of biological invasions. meridians, 2(1), 26-40. subramaniam, b. (2014). ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. urbana, il: university of illinois press. tsing, a. (2012). unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species. environmental humanities, 1, 141-154. tsing, a. (2015). the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton: princeton university press. tsing, a., swanson, h., gan, e., & bubandt, n. (eds.). (2017). arts of living on a damaged planet: ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. author bios marianna szczygielska is a postdoctoral fellow at the max planck institute for the history of science in berlin (germany). with a background in philosophy and gender studies, her research interests include environmental humanities, human-animal studies, queer theory, critical race studies, philosophy of science, and feminist sts. she has published on history of zoos, animal collections and gender, scientific research on hormones, relations between affect, transgender, and animal studies. olga cielemęcka is a postdoctoral fellow at the turku institute for advanced studies at the university of turku in finland. a feminist researcher and philosopher, she brings contemporary philosophy, feminist and queer approaches into a reflection on environmental change. she explores political and cultural meanings of plants, particularly by looking at the intersection of nature, nation, and gender in the białowieża forest in poland. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | introduction | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) marianna szczygielska & olga cielemęcka, 2019 13 book review | what comes after entanglement?: activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion, by eva haifa giraud (duke university press, 2019) ihar, zsuzsanna. 2022. review of what comes after entanglement?: activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion, by eva haifa giraud (duke university press, 2019). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © zsuzsanna ihar, 2022 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | what comes after entanglement?: activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion, by eva haifa giraud (duke university press, 2019) zsuzsanna ihar university of cambridge zdi20@cam.ac.uk an increasing number of scholars are attempting to highlight relations between peoples, worlds, knowledges, and ecologies that endure in spite of state and corporate attempts to alienate and sever. this has been particularly so in fields such as anthropology, gender and cultural studies, and environmental humanities, where a focus on creative pedagogies and practice has enabled thinkers to engage with "life on the inside of the webs and patterns of connection" (rose 2013, 93). the recent emergence of “multispecies ethnography” (kirksey and helmreich 2010) is perhaps the best example of this commitment to highlighting both the enmeshment of human and more-than-human life, as well as the complex bonds of cooperation, togetherness, and shared experience between species. however, as eva haifa giraud demonstrates, entanglements also come with certain exclusions and expulsions. in what comes after entanglement? giraud hones in on a trickier set of relations, with the author paying careful attention to the "entities, practices, and ways of being" foreclosed when "other entangled realities are materialized" (2). she highlights the paradoxical nature of relations, noting that attempts at collective encounter and scenes of assemblage are more often than not reliant on the establishment of purposeful barriers, boundary lines, and fissures—despite the initial insistence on commensurability and indiscriminate co-existence. for giraud, deliberate acts of detachment and distancing become "ethico-political practices" (17), capable of enticing alternative visions of community, whilst also contesting liberal-humanist orderings of life. like all non-innocent forms of doing, sometimes these exclusions deliberately destroy existing entanglements so that book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) zsuzsanna ihar, 2022 new desires, embodiments, and futurities can come into play. ultimately, by drawing on a distinct feminist materialist lineage—think donna haraway (2003) and karen barad (2007)—the author shifts away from simply naming the practices and realities marginalized by given sociotechnical arrangements. instead, giraud posits that exclusion is a key site where "agency is distributed and responsibility needs to be taken" (181). the book is structured as six chapters, moving chronologically across interrelated instances of anti-capitalist, animal, and environmental activism (from the 1980s to the present day). starting with the mclibel trial of the mid-1990s, which saw mcdonald’s suing two activists, helen steel and dave morris, for distributing a detailed fact sheet critical of industry practices, chapter 1 brings to the fore the "everyday exclusions and processes of marginalization" (25) that enable late capitalism's infrastructural arrangements to appear seamless, natural, and effortless. the chapter also traces the manner in which particular legal apparatuses, financial liabilities, and media ecologies curtail the emergence of "radical-participatory communicative tactics" (25) among activist groups— particularly as they seek a more expansive international platform. in the latter part of the chapter, giraud attends to the difficulties that arise when movements shift from single-issue politics to more ambitious articulations of relation. as platforms interlink, slogans cross-pollinate, and stories go viral, giraud warns of seemingly frictionless solidarities and common desires, stressing that any sort of relation, however well-intentioned and solicitous, is capable of producing asymmetries in power, representation, and agency. it is the doubled bow of solidarity and refusal that organizes the rest of the book, as giraud examines activist experiments with digital media technologies (chapter 2), protest camps and free food giveaways (chapter 3), mainstream media discourses regarding antivivisection activism (chapter 4), as well as contemporary social media campaigns surrounding laboratory beagles (chapter 5). whilst each of the chapters listed contributes to the overall cohesiveness of giraud's argument, chapter 3 and 5 stand out as most aptly describing the quotidian practices of exclusion. chapter 3 is particularly impressive in its ability to bring together three different examples—on critical animal studies, protest camps, and food activism—to demonstrate the way in which material-semiotic techniques of openness and pluralism prevent and foreclose particular actions, expressions, and movements. for giraud, seemingly benevolent collective engagements, like food giveaways at protest camps, can often bring forth latent inequalities and hierarchical relations. in many ways this attests to the unpredictability of action, allowing us to recognize complexity and to move beyond arguments oriented around doing what is seemingly good and just. chapter 5 pursues a similar argument, though it shifts away from notions of openness, and instead considers charisma and its instrumental uses. focusing on book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) zsuzsanna ihar, 2022 social media campaigns surrounding the release of thirty beagles from green hill (a breeding facility in brescia, italy), the chapter examines the way that forms of nonhuman charisma, despite being key to internet virality and collective mobilization, also reinstall anthropocentric species hierarchies. indeed, whilst the campaigns succeeded in rallying support, they did so by favoring certain breeds and species over others, linking the value of life to a range of desirable qualities. it is worth noting that the convivial character of the beagle, highlighted by activists, is paradoxically also the quality that has made the breed easily exploitable for research purposes. its obedience is valued by both those attempting to “liberate” it and those allegedly oppressing it. through giraud's multi-issue case studies, activism is conceived of as a constant negotiation between feel-good moments—of recruitment, community participation, mobilization, sometimes inclusion—and those that may be described as killjoy moments—of ambivalence, resistance, and unevenness. much like sara ahmed's concept of killing joy in order to "open a life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance" (2010, 20), an ethics of exclusion has the capacity to encourage the emergence of new methods, approaches, and narratives. giraud concludes the book by erring away from essentialist understandings of relation as either/or, taking us somewhere a little bit more fraught and uncomfortable. she references thom van dooren's (2016) work on hawaiian crow conservation and the materialization of crow, reflecting on elements of distancing and exclusion that push seemingly cohesive assemblages into the realm of the uncanny. giraud concludes that relations are often brought into being through processes that are mutually exclusive, rather than inclusive. indeed, much like multispecies flourishing, anti-capitalist and environmental mobilization also rely upon necessary protocols, foreclosures, and frictions. it is worth acknowledging that ethical decisions are animated by historical forces, as much as they are by future desires. there is a risk that giraud's conceptual intervention in salvaging exclusion obfuscates the harm done by entrenched structures and systems of supremacy. it highlights the tension between projects seeking to dismantle and those that believe in the repurposing of injurious practices, institutions, and histories. at times, a deeper engagement is lacking with issues of race, colonialism, and sexuality—despite exclusions being a core tenet of hierarchized and dogmatic classifications of who/what counts as human, citizen, or even being. additionally, it would have been welcome to see giraud referencing the extensive work of indigenous and anti-colonial theorists on the issue of generating decolonial futurities and relations through, and within, brokenness. works that could prove useful in this regard might include eve tuck's “suspending damage” (2009) —an open letter that calls on researchers to reconsider the long-term impact of “damage-centered” research—and michelle murphy's “alterlife and decolonial chemical relations” (2017). book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) zsuzsanna ihar, 2022 whilst it is often easy to picture oneself as tangled up in an abundant world of diverse multispecies relations, giraud's book is ultimately a reminder that the origin of the word tangle derives from tagilen, meaning "to involve in a difficult situation.” in this way, the choice to entangle also means an openness to the possibility of separation, conflict, and refusal—reminding us of fraught histories, broken alliances, and the enduring consequences of violence. indeed, to invite someone or something means that we might be responded to with a “no” or “rather not.” it is this exclusion that we have to recognize as an essential component in our desire for connection, one that is the basis of political power and will. with capitalist and imperialist projects seeking absolute and unquestioned access—using relation to pillage and extract —it is becoming vital to support those who are unwilling to cooperate. to radically reimagine the terms of our engagement. alongside asking "what comes after entanglement,” we might also ask "what won't?" references ahmed, sara. 2010. the promise of happiness. durham, nc: duke university press. barad, karen. 2007. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. haraway, donna. 2003. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press. kirksey, s. eben, and stefan helmreich. 2010. “the emergence of multispecies ethnography.” cultural anthropology 25 (4): 545–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15481360.2010.01069.x. murphy, michelle. 2017. “alterlife and decolonial chemical relations.” cultural anthropology 32 (4): 494–503. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.02. rose, deborah bird. 2013. “val plumwood's philosophical animism: attentive interactions in the sentient world.” environmental humanities 13 (1): 93–109. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3611248. tuck, eve. 2009. “suspending damage: a letter to communities.” harvard educational review 79 (3): 409–28. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15. van dooren, thom. 2016. “authentic crows: identity, captivity and emergent forms of life.” theory, culture and society 33 (2): 29–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415571941. author bio zsuzsanna ihar is a phd student in the department of history and philosophy of science at the university of cambridge. she writes about scientific knowledge https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01069.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01069.x https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.02 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3611248 https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415571941 book review 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) zsuzsanna ihar, 2022 production across the agricultural, environmental, and biological sciences. she is currently part of a wellcome trust funded research project, charting historical perspectives on crop diversity and food security (titled “from collection to cultivation”). her dissertation examines the history and politics of militarised agriculture, with a particular focus on crop revitalisation and seed conservation. book review | what comes after entanglement?: activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion, by eva haifa giraud (duke university press, 2019) references author bio lester, quinn. 2021. “bio-orientalism and the yellow peril of yellow life.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–20. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © quinn lester, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license bio-orientialism and the yellow peril of yellow life quinn lester johns hopkins university lester.quinn@gmail.com abstract while recent literature on asiatic racial form has drawn attention to the ways that techno-orientalism represents asian life as mechanically non-human, the covid19 pandemic and other developments under the anthropocene draw renewed attention to the construction of asian peoples as a source of biological and contagious threat to the west. in this article i argue that a unique discourse of bioorientalism contributes to the depiction of asians as a "yellow life" that is an existential threat to western forms of life. western life posits that this yellow life must be resisted and ultimately eliminated for the flourishing of all non-asian life. through an attention to biological depictions of asian life in yellow peril literature, i chart how bio-orientalism imagines yellow life as ontologically different from western life forms and as innately animate through both its macroscopic growth and microscopic threat of contagion. rather than embracing an asian americanist response that would also seek to disavow yellow life, in a reading of bryan thao worra's poetry i speculate upon embracing yellow life as another mode in which asian american studies imagines otherwise forms of life that challenge and move beyond contemporary western-centric and humanist responses to anti-asian racism. introduction in a cynical yet intimate travelogue of late nineteenth-century canton, rudyard kipling moves quickly through the main motifs that mark asian life as a different form of life, as yellow life. kipling (1907) writes of “three races who can work…but there is only one that can swarm” (255) to describe the chinese and original research 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 their inevitable movement against the west, to “overwhelm the world” (256). from the idea of the swarm there is the link to contagion. kipling compares the cramped living spaces of canton to “horrible sponges full of worms that grow in warm seas” (283). kipling chokes “for breath in the seething streets where nothing short of the pestilence could clear a way,” casting another disease as the necessary catalyst for genocidal violence against the primary disease of an asian space suffocating white individuality. finally, there is the image of the ceaseless “march of the mongol,” the “tramp of the feet on the granite blocks of the road and the breaking wave of human speech, that is not human!” (284) signaling a dangerous and unrestrained reproductive futurity to asian life. taking these depictions together as reality—yellow life as swarm, disease, ceaseless advance—kipling concludes that “this people ought to be killed off because they are unlike any people i ever met before” (285). an ontological difference of life comes to justify genocidal violence, even as kipling acknowledges truer reasons for anti-asian racism in the sense that “they despise us. you can see it, and they aren't a bit afraid of us either” (285). yellow life here also marks a potential life form that resists the white individual, threatening for both their will to resistance and the “devil-born capacity for doing more work than they ought” (286). while kipling professed to “wait until he marches up to me” (289), others have not felt so patient in the face of the differences they saw in yellow life. kipling acknowledges his account as produced by his own “fevered imagination,” but it is a fever that is more innate to the worldview of the white individual than aberrant. this imagination orders the world between whiteness and the yellow life that threatens to engulf, poison, and kill the white world. kipling’s descriptions of a yellow horde marching from east to west encapsulates the tropes of yellow peril discourse, yet also highlights the prominence of the biological in casting asian life as an existential threat requiring genocidal violence to end it. recent literature on asiatic racial form would be drawn more to his remarks on the asian laboring body, seeing it as a particular entanglement of racial capitalism with technoscience that functions as a privileged site for understanding the need for and disposability of yellow life. yet by privileging the laboring body here, rather than the contagious body, scholars of anti-asian racism may miss how the affective life of racism repeatedly returns to the biological and contagious threat of yellow life as what potentially exceeds capitalist violence to signify the end of the white world. yellow life through the terms of biological contagion names not the fear of being made obsolete, but of a threatening reproductive futurity eclipsing the white future. in the age of the covid-19 pandemic—or as donald trump and many others like to call it the “china” or “wuhan” virus to label it as an existential threat from a rising china—such depictions of yellow life return with a vengeance to re-racialize asian americans as not only eternal outsiders to the american body politic, but a toxic and contagious threat internal to that body’s biopolitical health itself. original research 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 in this article, i argue that a process of orientalism constructs “yellow life“ as the antinomy and horizon of possibility for western “life” as an unmarked category representing the white possessive individual as a distinct form of life. this process i term bio-orientalism for its emphasis on tropes and images of biological life to mark yellow life as forms of nonhuman life threatening to perpetually engulf, invade, and corrupt the west. bio-orientalism has its origins in nineteenth-century yellow peril discourse, yet reappears whenever there is a crisis in the imagined security of western life that must conjure the threat of yellow life as a causal agent of blame obscuring western life’s own suicidal addiction to global white supremacy and racial capitalism. bio-orientalism marks moments of crisis in the formation of western life, from the twentieth-century rise of japan, through the mid-century “loss of china” and rupture of decolonizations, to the contemporary resurgence of china threatening america’s superpower and civilizational status (kim 2004; prashad 2008). for over a century, western countries conjured asia as both the premodern that the west has decisively put behind it and the threatening future of an asia that overwhelms and renders extinct western life as we have come to know it. climate-impacted crises like the covid-19 pandemic increase the stakes and scope of bio-orientalist representations of asia that create material consequences for asian americans and asian populations globally. bio-orientalism plays a key role in the replication of anti-asian racism over time and therefore calls attention to asian american political efforts to deconstruct and fight orientalist stereotypes. while asian american politics often responds to bio-orientalism by seeking inclusion in the unmarked life of white possessive individualism, i speculate upon an asian americanist response that abandons the human for a diversity of ways of living (and life) otherwise (lowe 1996; okihiro 2014). my argument then contributes to putting asian american studies in conversation with developments in the humanities and sts, particularly in understanding the mutual processes of defining and racializing what counts as life itself (cardozo and subramaniam 2013; lee 2014; huang 2017; tran 2018). to make this argument, in this article i first define bio-orientalism through an attention to what makes it different from orientalisms that highlight asia as a technological threat to the future and show how in early yellow peril literature images of biological threat predominate. i then turn to bryan thao worra’s poetry collection demonstra to highlight a different archive in the history of bioorientalism and how worra diagnoses bio-orientalism as the potential for embracing yellow life as life lived otherwise (chuh 2003). particularly, in contrast to donna haraway’s famous figure of the cyborg, i focus on worra’s figure of the zombuddha that plays with recent turns to depicting the zombie as a particularly asian threat, revealing the zombuddha as a unique entanglement of caribbean history, western horror, and laotian cosmology that begins to map other ways of embracing the otherness of yellow life. original research 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 defining bio-orientalism arguing that bio-orientalism produces a distinction between yellow life and unmarked life already shows that “life” itself never exists prior to racialization (lee 2014; weheliye 2014; jackson 2015). often unmarked life or the human refers to the white liberal subject and the form of life they embody.1 scientific and popular discourses take a very particular kind of situated body—often of the white, male, able, western subject—and treat it as the universal of subjectivity itself. by “life” i also mean the ontology of life upon which such a subject is based; this is life as bounded to bodies, singular and irreducible, and based on a vision of nature as mechanical or inert and open to the active agency of human action (bennett 2010). c.b. macpherson (2010) calls this kind of life the possessive individual, whose “possessive quality is found in its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them” (3). the possessive individual owns himself as property, and engages with other individuals to the degree that they can also be recognized as property owners, something often denied to racialized others. this is also inherently the gendered male body of the patriarch that imagines itself as both inviolable from outside penetration and as one with his property, which can include women, children, slaves, animals, and inanimate objects (dubber 2005). white racial formation views the life of the possessive individual as one carefully bounded and aloof from the messiness of reality, while also master of all other forms of life (lipsitz 2006). this life of the possessive individual fears constantly the violation of his own boundaries through contagion and infection. following roberto esposito's (2008) work on biopolitics, the possessive individual seeks immunity as “a temporary or definitive exemption on the part of the subject with regard to concrete obligations or responsibilities that under normal circumstances would bind one to others” (45). in esposito's reading, community is the “obligation of reciprocal donation” (50) that threatens “risky contact” with otherness, so that the immunized individual seeks to restore “its own borders that were jeopardized by the common” (50). to speak of the human, as a white liberal subject, then is to speak of this immunized possessive individual who sees his body as property, and seeks to maintain it as such, while also refusing to live in a common world with life that threatens his body as property. through the process of bio-orientalism, yellow life appears as what threatens to overcome the immunized white life and the form of life against which the possessive individual comes into being. a necessary response to bio-orientalism therefore, i argue, is to dismantle the white possessive individual’s immunized response to otherness and risk exposure to other imagined forms of life. by emphasizing the ontology of liveliness, bio-orientalism responds to transformations in anti-asian racism that cannot be reduced to images of asia as the threat of technological non-life or inhuman labor. scholarship on asiatic racial form argues that the figure of the asian comes into being as a misplaced but original research 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 concrete representation for the abstract violence of capitalism (lye 2004; day 2016). by paying attention to asiatic racial form’s relationship to capitalism, what often receives the most attention are those representations that paint the asian body as a form of inhuman technology and labor. such representations fit under the label of techno-orientalism, which names “the phenomenon of imagining asia and asians in hypoor hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse” (roh et al. 2015, 2). techno-orientalism represents the linking of asiatic racial form with technology to produce an inhuman non-life overcoming life itself, understood properly as the biologically bounded and autonomous white possessive individual. for sts, techno-orientalism helps draw attention to the ways that technology does not just produce race, but is itself already thoroughly saturated by racial categories and conceptions (chun 2012; benjamin 2019). yet by the very nature of its focus, the examples and cases techno-orientalism highlights overwhelmingly favor the robotic and mechanical, losing sight of life itself as the category under contestation in anti-asian racism.2 distinct from yet working in tandem with techno-orientalism, which deploys technology to define the asiatic inhuman, what i term bio-orientalism relies on biological and disease metaphors to characterize asiatic racial form as nonhuman life, and supplements research on asiatic racial form by drawing attention to that “bios” of life itself in biopolitics (esposito 2008; thacker 2011). rachel lee's work on theorizing the biological in asian american studies provides a jumping off point for thinking through this bios of bio-orientalism. lee (2014) opens her book the exquisite corpse of asian america with the question of, when asian american studies orients itself around discursive and economic determinants of racial formations, why do “asian american artists, authors, and performers keep scrutinizing their body parts?” (10). she answers the question by dismissing asian american studies’ anxiety around the apparent “stolidity of the biological” (lee 2014, 12) and instead focuses on the anxiety of “biological personhood not as fixed or singular but as multiform and distributed across time spans and spatial ecologies” (15). lee’s project, like other work under the label of new materialism, seeks to recognize that nature and matter are not mechanical or inert, but instead lively and agentic actors in their own right (bennett 2010; coole and frost 2010; shomura 2017). in recognizing the agency of matter, however, lee also brings attention to how this matter is not socially blank but already racialized; even to speak of genes or microbes already carries the specter of asian racialization. she argues then that contemporary racism functions at scales greater and lesser than the individual body, crafting immunized populations of what i call the white possessive individual through the extraction and disposability of racialized others. this form of racism “depends upon the ‘immune’ subject’s mystified property— bounded self-possession—in his/herself and in an array of planetary materials that in actuality remain, biologically speaking, habitats for countless others” (lee 2014, 223). in disavowing his connection to lively matter, the white possessive individual also expresses the fear of expropriation by, in esposito's (2008) terms, the munis, by what is both common and other to them. through bio-orientalism, i argue that original research 6 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 yellow life comes to stand in for this threat to white immunity, even as to fully imagine the life of the white possessive individual requires expropriation of yellow life. rather than an attention to the biological being a novel intervention to anti-asian racism, bio-orientalism highlights how the biological threat of yellow life has been a longstanding hallmark of racializing asia as a threat to white life and white futures. to modify the definition of techno-orientalism, i view bio-orientalism as the phenomenon of imagining asia and asians in hypoor hyperbiological terms in cultural productions and political discourse. in bio-orientalism asiatic racial form appears as a particular form of life that questions the contours of the possessive individual conception of life itself. yellow life seems to always be reproducing itself, expanding, growing—in short, spreading beyond and spilling over what should be the proper boundaries of a life form. as in other forms of orientalism, there is the representation of asians as a group-collective that denies the possibility of individuation, but here bio-orientalism imagines that collective through vitalist terms, as an aggregate or multiplicity of the barely differentiated whose singular undecidability appears through its constant transformations. in contrast to the problem often tackled within new materialism and sts of recognizing the creative agency of matter, rather than inert and mechanical asiatic racial form appears as too lively and agentic. yellow life becomes impossible to pin down because it refuses to stay within the proper boundaries of life, invading both the tiniest cells of the body and entire nations in its expansive growth. yellow life becomes what must be immunized against, the munis that threatens dissolution, the loss of individuality, and death for the white possessive individual (esposito 2008). the yellow peril of yellow life by investigating the repertoire of biological descriptions in the literature of yellow peril, i show now how specifically bio-orientalism represents yellow life as both a threat to white life and the horizon for the definition of life as such. i take as my exemplars jack london and the american federation of labor’s report meat vs. rice (gompers and gutstadt [1902] 1908). reading them together highlights both the tropes of bio-orientalism and how those tropes impact political and scientific discourse on the nature of yellow life and the genocidal response towards it. they also highlight that, while often yellow peril discourse focused on the laboring male body of production as a threat to white labor, reading them through the lens of bio-orientalism shows the fear of a different kind of productivity in the growth of asian life and the asiatic futurity it heralds. jack london's minor story “the unparalleled invasion” (1910) is particularly remarkable in its vision of asia and yellow life, and its argument for the necessity of genocidal violence for the subsequent thriving of the western world. the story opens in 1976 written as a historical retrospective on when “the trouble between original research 7 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 the world and china reached its culmination” (london 1990, 270). the trouble is that there are simply too many chinese—“there were two chinese for every white-skinned human in the world” (275)—and the threat of this unprecedented population growth demands a response. interestingly, london depicts his china not as a warmonger, which he depicted japan as after the russo-japanese war and in his seminal yellow peril journalism. his language in “the unparalleled invasion” echoes techno-orientalism in that “china was to be feared, not in war, but in commerce” (273), so that china's mixture of population and western technology makes it an industrial powerhouse. london as narrator, however, notes that in fearing commerce “the real danger was not apprehended” (273). the logic of the story and the white possessive individual reader it imagines is that the pure fact of so many chinese is one of horror that demands intervention, as it becomes clear in the story that the threat of the chinese is the threat of yellow life itself.3 london’s creation of yellow life hinges on depicting it as both epistemologically and ontologically other than the life of the white possessive individual. london’s starting point in crafting a biological difference between china and the west is that there is “no common psychological speech” (london 1990, 270) that allows communication or commensuration (hayot 2007). instead, the “western mind penetrated the chinese mind but a short distance when it found itself in a fathomless maze” with no escape, and so, according to the narrator, both are “mental aliens” (london 1990, 271) to each other. just as science fiction often posits the incomprehensibility of alien consciousness, so does london slot asiatic racial form into the same level of incomprehension. here the chinese are not simply a racial other that resists communication, but a completely different form of alien life that prevents any communication. yet the story quickly replaces the danger of the impossibility of communication with the “inscrutable oriental” by the real threat of chinese life as ontological difference in addition to epistemological difference, as an explosive form of life whose very growth is what threatens the west. the danger of china is simply the “fecundity of her loins” (274)—also an example of london's consistent gendering of china the nationstate as a woman. in describing the danger of chinese life in its fecundity, london displaces any individual chinese with the struggle between china as an aggregate life form and the rest of the world. when it comes to describing the war between china and the rest of the world, china avoids confrontation but withdraws “like a turtle into her shell” until it can surround and “swallow up” the invaders in “china's cavernous maw” (275). initially, china is decisively victorious as western (white) nations cannot catch up with china's population or the “over-spilling monstrous flood of life...her flood of yellow life” (276). this language of penetration, fecundity, and maw points not just to yellow life as a racialized threat, but also as an object of horror for the masculine individual (here represented by london himself). the peculiarly feminized labor of yellow life it its own ceaseless reproduction absent from patriarchal control, and that itself points to the original research 8 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 patriarch’s fear of being feminized and rendered disposable himself as an agent reproducing white futures. london's solution to this bio-orientalist problem of yellow life towards white reproduction imagines the literal genocide of chinese people. london’s story instinctively deals in populations as actors and so puts at the center its own biopolitical logic, a logic that as foucault (2003) outlines necessitates the fact that some must die in order for the rest to live. the “unparalleled invasion” of the story's title is not actually the endless growth of yellow life—a macroscopic threat—but instead the microscopic threat of mass germ warfare to extinguish yellow life, the attack of “every virulent form of infectious death” (london 1990, 279). microscopic life represents life at the threshold of the organic and inorganic that mocks the very boundaries of life itself (thacker 2011). in one sense, this introduction of the microscopic is merely symmetrical to london's representation of yellow life: both are invasive, overcome boundaries, lack “mind” as such, and refuse categorization as “life” within a bounded white possessive individual. london, through his story, posits it as a natural effect that yellow life and microscopic life cancel each other out. after this genocide, the white nations of the world “humanely” divide china amongst themselves without warfare and begin the “great task, the sanitation of china” (london 1990, 281). at the end of the story, a “vast and happy intermingling of nationalities” (281) settle in china and produce much wealth and cultural riches. yellow life becomes the horizon against which these national subjects can be consolidated, and indeed the very possibility of white difference and its overcoming hinges on the threat and eradication of yellow life. while london's story represents a threat that is both over there in china itself and in a speculated future of 1976, the same discourse of bio-orientalism circulated through popular texts and political discourse in turn-of-the-century america to describe the urgent problem of asia's spread (frayling 2014). while london’s literary language expresses his bio-orientalism, such tropes were not limited to fictional depictions of asia but expressed their greatest force in shaping american policy towards asians, recasting yellow life as a problem of public health (shah 2001). for example, while scholars have paid attention to the american federation of labor’s famous tract promoting asian exclusion laws, meat vs. rice, to analyze the ways that it defines asian labor in distinction to white labor, in explicitly invoking the authority of public health officials it draws on the language of bio-orientalism to describe the inevitable threat of asian life and the need to meet it with genocidal violence (lye 2004; huang 2019). from a techno-orientalist angle the pamphlet does turn to the mechanical to explain the alienness of asian labor, yet bio-orientalism helps to supplement here that what makes this alienness a source for genocidal violence is the way it encompasses the biological threat of foreign life, of an asian invasive species (cardozo and subramaniam 2013). original research 9 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 while london’s story constructs yellow life as a threat spreading from over there to over here, meat vs. rice shows the threat of yellow life as one already internal to the white body politic—itself a representation of the boundaries of the national as at one with the male patriarch’s—necessitating yellow life’s elimination through clearer boundaries of ontological life. the report casts allowing any asian immigration as accepting the “growth of a child with a malignant tumor upon his back” (gompers and gutstadt [1902] 1908, 5), revealing asian life as that malignancy that, while initially hidden, will kill the body politic from within. constructing yellow life as a public health problem, the report focuses on california’s chinatowns as “a singular anomaly…violating every accepted rule of hygiene” (17), discourses around hygiene becoming one way of drawing the boundary between yellow life and the white possessive subject whose life is itself bounded from its environment. the report documents chinese “living literally the life of vermin” (17) by reference to close quarters, lack of sanitation, and the noxious smells of bodies packed tight and opium smoke in the air. this so-called scientific report then veers into the phenomenological, telling the reader to imagine entering the basement of any chinatown building: pick your way by the aid of the policeman’s candle along the dark and narrow passageway black and grimy with a quarter of century’s accumulation of filth; step with care lest you fall into a cesspool of sewage abominations with which these subterranean depths abound….the air is thick with smoke and fetid with an indescribable odor of reeking vapors. the atmosphere is tangible…they would have slept in the dense and poisonous atmosphere until morning; proof against the baneful effects of the carbonic acid gas generated by this human defiance of chemical laws, and proof against all the symbiotic poisons that would be fatal to a people of any other race in an hour of such surrounding and such conditions. (17) by depicting asian life as inherently poisonous, bio-orientalism constructs yellow life as a peculiarly animated form of dangerous matter. it is impossible to draw a distinction between chinese bodies and the repeatedly “tangible” atmosphere they inhabit, both becoming one alien organism that threatens to engulf the (white) reader. by constructing such an alien life, the report can justify its own preferred solution to the problem of yellow life in “ethnic” cleansing. these chinatown conditions have been “obliterated…owing to the great fire” (17), like in london’s story one force of destructive nature nullifying noxious yellow life. this language of cleansing relies on the relationship between yellow life and toxicity, with asian bodies described as both ontologically different at a chemical level and able to immediately deform any white body through various contacts (chen 2012; duong 2018). describing such contacts, the report relies on evidence that “already a large percentage of the population of the united states have become infected with loathsome disease because of carelessness and indiscriminate association with the asiatic race” (gompers and gutstadt [1902] 1908, 27) through both original research 10 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 sexual intercourse and opium smoking. the outer boundaries of white skin appear to have no resistance to the porosity of asian life characterized in its very being to move through borders, both national and biological. asian contact becomes a causal vector of disease for white populations, sapping its inner strength even as threatening its national strength through techno-orientalist dreams of overly productive labor. the report concludes that, because of this asian vector, “the coast will never be free from the danger of an incursion of the bubonic plague” until “the asiatic sections of every city on the pacific coast are thoroughly modernized and the inhabitants made to conform to the standards of cleanliness set by americans” (33). the only suitable outcome here for yellow life is to either be cleansed or modernized out of existence. in both london’s story and meat vs. rice, yellow life mocks any attempts to define life for the white possessive individual. yellow life overruns ontological and temporal borders, appearing here as life and there as death, here as the present of fleshy experience and there as the certainty of finitude. through an attention to bio-orientalism, i want to point out the multiple ways in which asiatic racial form is constructed as always already out of joint: out of joint temporally, out of joint epistemologically (london on the maze of the chinese mind), and out of joint ontologically. yellow life’s displacement marks it as a threat to the white possessive individual’s attempts to immunize his life, but as london’s depiction of genocide and meat vs. rice active calls for it shows, ontological difference also justified anti-asian racism and the need to imagine a white world cleansed of the disease of yellow life. while the bio-orientalist discourse at the turn of the century has been exemplary for me so far, bio-orientalism continues to arise in moments of crisis, from america’s cold war struggles in asia to contemporary reactions to the covid-19 pandemic.4 my archive so far has documented american literary and political culture that embrace bio-orientalism's projection of the self-evident alienness of yellow life, yet this is not the only archive of bioorientalism. i turn now to bryan thao worra’s poetry to show how he both diagnoses the process of bio-orientalist fantasies motivating white violence against asian bodies, in both southeast asia and america, and the alternative archive of yellow life he draws upon to depict the potentialities of embracing yellow life in all its contagiousness. living yellow life otherwise as bio-orientalism projects a yellow life threatening to destroy the white possessive individual subject, practices to immunize white life against yellow life create concrete harms to actual asian bodies. what then would count as a political response to practices of bio-orientalism? one response would be the work that much of asian american studies has pursued since its inception: the claiming of subjectivity and dismantling of ideologies that imprint the inhumanity of asian americans (okihiro 2014; lee 2014). yet today such a move towards humanism risks reinforcing the very possessive individual subjectivity that, as i original research 11 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 have shown, often requires inhuman yellow life and asian death as its horizon of definition, risking asian americans adopting the very exclusions towards others that they protest against themselves.5 to expand on this, what are the ethicopolitical implications of multiple forms of life as well, life not as pure matter or bare life but one still attentive to its racializations and imbrication in discourse?6 to begin to answer to this question, i read the laotian american poet bryan thao worra and his innovative poetics as bringing together critiques of american empire, refugee politics, bio-orientalist tropes, and buddhism. worra highlights one potential way that leaning into the tropes of yellow life may constitute both a critique of the white possessive individual and an imagining otherwise of what counts as life. worra’s collection demonstra specifically engages in a practice of what michelle huang (2017) calls, drawing on karen barad’s work, “‘ecologies of entanglement,’” naming “networks of circulation that diffuse the boundaries of the human by foregrounding the relationships between us and the world with which we interact, including the environment” (98). for worra, his entangled ecologies are not just between the human and the nonhuman world, but draw on traditional horror tropes, lovecraftian mythos, kaiju movies, and buddhist cosmology, creating a weird universe that is simultaneously uncanny and home for his refugee speakers. in reading for the entanglement of the human and nonhuman, i also follow lee (2014) in adopting a lateral method for reading “not to expose a hidden truth but paradoxically to cultivate an openness to the wonders of the aleatory, the chance-event, and the insight of the accidental networked through unacknowledged amphimixis” (26), one that helps me be aware of the aleatory in worra’s strange universe. lee’s (2014) attention to the aleatory also helps show ways, through reading and poetics, to cultivate “hospitable regard” towards otherness as a “retrieved cosmological orientation” (68). i argue that worra’s poetic universe of buddhist laotian monsters practices precisely such a cosmological re-orientation for his laotian american community and readers. in his poetics’ sudden encounters between the mundane and the monstrousness, worra’s poems resist speaking from the human but instead, enacting lee’s call for an orientation to the cosmological, embrace sites of yellow life as multiplicity and monstrous becoming, the exact opposite of the genocidal response towards yellow life i have so far identified. in writing yellow life, worra rejects the goal of redressing anti-asian racism by transforming asian americans into white possessive subjects, though this does not mean eliding the realities of violence that constitute his laotian american community. in his “the last war poem” worra (2013) writes that this poem will constitute “the last word for this war / this little side war we were the center of” (43), referring to laotian civil war that devastated the country but has rarely received proper recognition. even as the author knows that “there is no justice from poetry—any veteran can tell you that,” there is an omnipresent “they” demanding that the speaker “‘write’” but “write what?” (43). this “they” could be veterans from laos’s civil war, current laotian refugees in america, the ghosts of original research 12 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 the many who died from the war, or the laotian land and its cosmological pantheon wanting remembrance. these voices demand that the author write “‘so people won’t forget. so someone will know’” that “for every lost limb, let there be a sonnet / to stitch the truth back together” (44). following lee’s attention to the asian american body, there is a more traditional demand here that reparation be a literal stitching back together of a lost body, a body whose integrity represents recovery but also is the mirror of that white possessive subject projecting its own immunity against asian contagion. the lost voices demand that the author fulfill his role as an asian american poet to write as a restorative practice, to bring what has been forgotten into the light of a coherent narrative that can demand redress for the violence of america’s foreign wars. yet at the end of the poem these voices turn from pleading to accusation, asking directly of the author, “how can you not have words for the war of whispers?” even as the author himself concludes the poem, “that the next time / will be the last word i write about this damn war” (worra 2013, 44). on the one hand, there is the implication that the author is not able or willing to perform the act of written redress that, paradoxically, the poem itself stands in for, even as, on the other hand, the author tires from the feeling that he has never stopped writing about the memory of laos’s civil war. i argue that the conflict within this poem about the author’s need to offer narrative redress helps us understand worra’s overall rejection in demonstra of narrative redress along the lines of the white possessive individual. worra rejects the idea that to write and remember the american imperial violence inflicted on laos means writing its victims as liberal possessive individuals within neat categories of victimhood and loss. instead, through embracing the multiple cultural, ecological, and cosmological entanglements of laotian america, worra both expands what the reader should consider as losses and what constitutes laotian life worth remembering today. instead of conventional forms of narrative redress, many of worra’s poems do not even contain humans at all. he pays attention to bio-orientalist monsters—both those inspired by laotian buddhist cosmology and western b-horror films— finding in them uniquely entangled actors who are closer to freedom and enlightenment than any human form of life. worra’s focus on the monstrosity of otherness invites attention to other forms of life that starkly challenge white possessive individualism and the ways that the construction of the monstrousness licenses its destruction in the name of white safety. in “destroy all monsters!” worra mocks the idea of the human as something sacred and separate from the monsters it destroys. when the orders come to kill the monsters—whether they be godzilla, migrants, or microbes—the reasoning is that “humanity must be preserved / at all costs, / despite a decidedly / checkered record” (worra 2013, 135). here humanity is implicitly one of the white possessive individual who believes “there just isn’t enough space in this vast world” (135) for the dreams of both humans and monsters, resonating with london’s fear of a white world overcrowded by yellow life. the author’s voice, a human here rather than a original research 13 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 monster, expresses the concern that “if only we could truly believe you’d be content / on some distant menagerie, / instead of plotting where to bury you / beyond our sight” (136). rather than accept a space for the monstrous in relation to the human, worra’s narrator suggests that behind this aggressive self-defense is the anxiety of monsters who are “too close a mirror” (135), and perhaps then the desire to exorcize the monstrous that already compromises the immunity of the white possessive self. in worra’s hands, these racialized figures represent not the horror of difference but become a space for reflecting upon different forms of life, painting different portrayals of belonging, struggle, and resistance in a world where whiteness and its imperialism are scarier than any bio-orientalist contagion. worra’s attention to the entanglements of asian life and the nonhuman resonates with donna haraway’s much written about figure of the cyborg, yet whereas asian americanist critics note how haraway’s cyborg refers to such technoorientalist tropes as the asian female tech worker, i find that it has less to say about specifically bio-orientalist tropes of yellow life (lowe 1996; huang 2019). i would raise worra’s figure of the zombuddha then as an equally compelling symbol of entanglements with the nonhuman and non-(white) life, as he deploys bio-orientalist tropes to signify different forms of yellow life. i am not the first to contrast the zombie with the cyborg as a more properly posthuman horizon of life. in their “a zombie manifesto,” sarah lauro and karen embry (2008) argue that “the only way to truly get posthuman is to become antisubject” (87), with the zombified language of their antisubject strikingly close to bio-orientalist tropes of yellow life i have so far identified. like kipling’s and london’s depictions of the chinese, their posthuman zombie is a “consciousless being that is a swarm organism” (lauro and embry 2008, 88) threatening the white possessive individual with becoming “a part of the monstrous horde” and revealing “the primal fear of losing the ‘self’” (89). while they draw attention to the zombie’s particular history of racialization in regards to anti-blackness and caribbean histories, only focusing on that history can obscure the ways that bio-orientalism also codifies asian bodies as zombie-like and particularly connected to discourses of plague and contagion.7 for them the “zombii’s dystopic promise is that it can only assure the destruction of a corrupt system without imagining a replacement” (lauro and embry 2008, 96), yet here i would argue that worra’s deployment of the zombuddha as a bio-orientalist figure does more than just provide a rupture with the world of the white possessive individual but also begins to map the possibilities and pleasures of yellow life lived otherwise. providing a different history of the zombie that in recent years increasingly connects to asia, the bio-orientalism that suffuses meat vs. rice carries ironic echoes of contemporary fears of the zombie invasion (ma 2018; saraf 2019).8 in describing yellow life as a distinct form of life different from that of the white possessive individual, bio-orientalism emphasizes both the threat to individuality and the relentless movement of yellow life’s advance. in the terms of the report, original research 14 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 white labor cannot compete with asian labor because the white laborer would have to “abdicate his individuality’” (gompers and gutstadt [1902] 1908, 15). while labor here as a conflict between forms of life can be set in the terms of romantic anti-capitalism versus the mechanical coolie body, placed among the tract’s deployment of pathological discourse the emphasis on life becomes key to contrasting the life of the white possessive individual with the threat of yellow life. the report casts yellow life as a “silent and irresistible flow” (7) that “has marched up to us and already has part possession of one of the fairest of our states” (8) in already seizing california. anticipating the zombie horde, yellow bodies in mass march—kipling’s “the march of the mongol”—ceaselessly across the pacific to threaten the american homeland. bio-orientalist fears of the asian horde in meat vs. rice anticipates contemporary revivals of zombies as the fear of de-individuation, that yellow life will rupture and erase—from within or without— the bounded life of the white possessive individual. worra’s creation of the zombuddha does not lend itself, however, to representing either the pure de-individuation of a zombie horde or the mindlessness of a single zombie; instead, it turns these tropes to the end of depicting a different kind of life, one in tune with lee’s cosmological orientation. first, his zombuddha is not just entangled with western horror films’ and the zombie’s african and caribbean history, but a completely new relationship as well to laos’s buddhist cosmology. by toggling between whether such a creature should be called a “zomphi” (worra 2013, 47) or a “phi zom,” worra raises the ambiguity of whether this is a zombie transformed from a formerly living laotian body or a uniquely laotian version of the living dead, and thus what exactly is foreign about the zombie here. worra’s speaker asserts that “it is not wholly implausible / to imagine a leathery lao zombie, / loathsome and lonely, / estranged from home” (46). even a zombie in worra’s universe can suffer loneliness and estrangement, trapped in a strange land far from home and transformed into a monster for the needs of a white audience. in the poem “zombuddha,” worra playfully, but not without reason, raises the status of the zombie to an enlightened buddha, transforming a racialized symbol of enslavement and ultimate loss into one of ultimate peace with the world. this zombuddha “utters, ‘om,’ not ‘brains’” and “is not attached to the body / is not attached to the mind” (37). it resists war and violence and “is beyond the vices of lust and greed”; even if you attempt to “burn him. cut him. shoot him. flee him,” he “accepts every moment with equanimity” (37). while in contemporary film, the zombie appears as the harbinger of violence, often initially from asia now, worra’s zombuddha “does not hurry, or drive cars or trucks. / or tanks or gunships or warplanes” (37). referencing america’s imperial warfare in southeast asia, the zombuddha transforms the object of fear that usually calls racist warfare against it into a symbol of peace. yet the zombuddha in its enlightenment also still recalls the loss of other forms of life. for it “not one possession of the past matters. / old names are useless” (37). not clearly laotian or now american, the zombuddha names the continuing entanglements of laotian religion, american warfare, racialized fears, and contemporary media. original research 15 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 worra ironically offers his zombuddha as one model for the freedom of life-indeath, proposing the zombuddha's actions as the “lessons of an uncertain universe” (worra 2013, 38) that could be brought into focus by the radical disruptions of climate change or of imperialist bombings and invasions. yet in this poem, as in demonstra as a whole, there remains the recognition that the violence of the white possessive individual can still shut down these possibilities of other kinds of life; whereas some will aim to “become one with him” the speaker states bluntly—in a line separated by spaces from the other lines—“you will destroy him to be comfortable” (38), calling out both the white possessive reader and the white possessiveness inside any possible reader of the poem. still the zombuddha will “‘keep going,’…in his own way” (38), implying a persistence to the endless shuffle of the zombie that is not the persistent labor of the capitalist body or the invasion of the asian horde that must not be allowed to enter america, but of a yellow life that continues to be even as it is continuously denied and destroyed. could the zombuddha, and worra’s many other enlightened monsters be a model for asian americanist critique in response to bio-orientalism? these monsters practice a certain ethics of openness to the plurality of things in the world, or even outside it, yet also open themselves up to forces often equally terrible and violent (such as divine beings, mythological monsters, or the american military-industrial complex). on openness, reza negarestani (2003) writes, “‘i am open to you’ means, i have the capacity to bear your investment or ‘i afford you’...if you exceed this capacity i will be cracked, lacerated and laid open” (56). negarestani critiques a liberal openness that would consolidate the other in the same through affordance with a radical openness that he himself often expresses through violent language (see also halberstam 2020).9 the zombuddha’s willingness to be cracked open by otherness formulates a critique of the white possessive individual’s immunized response to yellow life. rather than putting up new walls to protect from the spread of yellow life or genocidal imaginations of its elimination, an ethics of care that goes beyond mere affordance would be a willingness and capacity to accept and being transformed by yellow life in all its manifestations. yet this embrace of openness is not without its ambivalences, for as in the desire for herd immunity to protect from covid-19, racialized bodies’ openness to contagion can be refashioned as another reason for their disposability, still centering the white possessive individual as the population most in need of protection. worra's zombuddha and its paradoxical freedom found in abandoning the cravings of life for life-in-death, for a different form of life that may not appear much like life at all charts one response to the challenges of living in the age of covid-19. bio-orientalism continues to imagine yellow life as the existential threat to the flourishing of possessive individual life. in the stark increase in antiasian hate crimes attributed to covid-19 as the “wuhan virus,” asian american politics and ethics cannot escape bio-orientalism’s role in crafting yellow life as original research 16 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 threat and scapegoat to the continued flourishing of all (white) forms of life on earth. rather than shoring up the life of the human by disavowing yellow life, i have argued that asian american studies could seriously imagine yellow life otherwise through greater attention to its bio-orientalist depictions. while this marks a turn away from the historical focus of asian american politics and entails its own risks of which actual bodies get included and excluded, i agree with rachel c. lee that continuing to ignore different ontologies of life imposes its own limits on the imagination and goals of ethnic studies writ large. if the white possessive individual marks himself by his obsessive protection and immunization of his self as property, and indeed at his extreme can only imagine the world outside of himself as a source of property or peril, then what is truly to be lost by abandoning him to his life for all the lives that do not appear in his orbit? acknowledgements i would like to thank the editors and anonymous peer reviewers for their help improving this paper. i am also thankful to evyn le espiritu-gandhi, yuhe faye wang, terry park, and athia choudhury for their initial discussion and response to this paper at the 2016 asian american studies annual conference. further support and guidance came from conversations with jacob kripp and yasmin yoon. finally, chad shomura's assistance was invaluable; he tirelessly urged on the importance of this topic and shepherded the revision process. notes 1 while i do not mean to engage extensively here with sylvia wynter’s work, by the human i do point to her work on how the western white male subject comes to stand in for the definition of the human itself (mckittrick 2015). 2 for example, michelle huang’s (2019) excellent overview of post-humanism in asian american literature still turns to techno-orientalist tropes and images, despite the long history of biological fear in yellow peril discourse. for interventions on the topic of asian american studies and environmental humanities, see cardozo and subramaniam (2013); tran (2018); shomura (2020). 3 on horror as a political genre encapsulating white fears and meant to invoke the need for a response, see anker (2014). 4 for example, president eisenhower echoes kipling and london in thinking that “‘no matter what differences in culture and tradition, values or language, the russian leaders were human beings, and they wanted to remain alive,’” while “the chinese…were different, often fanatical, irrational, and caring little or nothing for human life. ‘we are always wrong when we believe that orientals think logically as we do’” (peck 2006, 5). original research 17 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 5 for example, debates between asian americans and african americans over issues from policing to affirmative action often hinge on the question of whether struggles for asian american goals come at a detriment to african americans (kim 2016, 2018). 6 what would it mean here to pursue kandice chuh’s argument for asian american studies as a subjectless discourse, to imagine otherwise subjectlessness as not just the deconstruction of the subject within the symbolic order of language but as also referring, as lee has shown, to the deconstruction of the subject as a bounded form of life by recognizing the instability and transience of life itself? chuh (2003) argues that to imagine otherwise does not merely mean shifting perspectives but requires "undoing the very notion of common objectivity itself and about recognizing the ethicopolitical implications of multiple epistemologies" (x). 7 for the zombie’s history in the haitian revolution, see dayan (1996). for extensive surveys of its contemporary cultural importance, see lauro (2015, 2017); fishel and wilcox (2017); dillon (2019). 8 for other examples, in max brooks’s world war z the origins of its zombiecreating virus are in china (the book) and in india (the movie), while the popularity of recent south korean zombie media train to busan, kingdom, peninsula, and #alive point to the displacement of the zombie horde to asia itself and a threat to its newly emergent middle class, modeling itself on western possessive individualism. 9 negarestani also helps connect this conception of what elsewhere he calls cthulhoid ethics to the construction of yellow life as microscopic. he writes, "through the expanse of philia, everything should participate and participation has no end, nor beginning, nor horizon, nor certain objective of participation. infested by the epidemic (contagious and wasteful) bonds of philia, openness is triggered on all levels of its communicative lines but more on the plane of 'being opened' than 'being open' or 'being open to'" (negarestani 2003, 63). references anker, elizabeth. 2014. “the liberalism of horror.” social research 81 (4): 795–823. benjamin, ruha. 2019. race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. new york: 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origins of globalism. boston: university of massachusetts press. prashad, vijay. 2008. the darker nations: a people's history of the third world. new york: the new press. original research 20 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) quinn lester, 2021 roh, david s., betsy huang, and greta a. niu, eds. 2015. techno-orientalism: imagining asia in speculative fiction, history, and media. newark: rutgers university press. saraf, aanchal. 2019. “global racial capitalism and the asian american zombie in ling ma's severance.” studies in the fantastic 7 (1): 12–23. shah, nayan. 2001. contagious divides: epidemics and race in san francisco’s chinatown. los angeles: university of california press. shomura, chad. 2017. “exploring the promise of new materialisms.” lateral 6 (1). ———. 2020. “object theory and asian american literature.” in oxford research encyclopedia of literature. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.865. thacker, eugene. 2011. in the dust of this planet: horror of philosophy. vol. 1. new york: zero books. tran, sharon. 2018. “asian sybils and stinky multispecies assemblages: ecofeminist departures for asian american studies.” journal of asian american studies 21 (3): 453–80. weheliye, alexander g. 2014. habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. durham, nc: duke university press. worra, bryan thao. 2013. demonstra: a poetry collection. vancouver: innsmouth free press. author bio quinn lester is a phd candidate in political science at johns hopkins university, with focuses in political theory and american politics. his research examines the history of police violence under american democracy as theorized by african american political activists. he is also at work on a project examining the ways that political discourse racializes african americans and asian americans as objects of horror for the white imagination. he has published previously in qui parle: critical humanities and social sciences. microsoft word moldren final.docx molldrem, stephen (2019). review of against purity: living ethically in compromised times, by alexis shotwell (university of minnesota press, 2016). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © stephen molldrem, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | against purity: living ethically in compromised times, by alexis shotwell (university of minnesota press, 2016) stephen molldrem the university of california, irvine smolldre@uci.edu despite the negative thrust of its title, against purity by alexis shotwell is a joyful and optimistic book. in this text, shotwell provides scholars in science and technology studies (sts) and adjacent fields with an affirming set of strategies for both “living ethically in compromised times” and for doing the analytical work of studying, describing, undoing, and speculating on some of the most pressing problems in contemporary biopolitics. shotwell’s central argument is simple: in life and academic work, discourses of “purity” present a false promise. on the one hand, purity discourses posit the unachievable hope of a future where an unblemished state might be achieved. on the other, they are premised on the fiction that such a state has ever existed at all. purity discourses, per shotwell, are products of “a certain formulation of modernity” (p. 14) that has proven itself to be particularly ruinous. the pursuit of purity has been the driving engine of colonial projects, genocidal and ecologically destructive understandings of medicine and technology as cleansing agents, and an array of other problems that actively shape our present reality. given the historical fact of purity’s harms, its pursuit ought to be abandoned in favor of approaches to scholarship, politics, and living that foreground “the usefulness of thinking about complicity and compromise as a starting point for action” (p. 5). special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) stephen molldrem, 2019 2 shotwell’s book is timely for politically engaged sts scholars. against purity has arrived in a moment where disentangling oneself and one’s scholarly practice from structures of domination is often treated as simultaneously impossible to do (we are always already entangled with our oppressors) and the necessary work of pursuing social transformation. rather than offering a way out of this double bind, shotwell suggests that it be embraced. in this way, against purity directly contributes to a growing body of literature in sts—and particularly feminist, queer, environmental, and postcolonial sts—that presents new methods for practicing what donna haraway calls “staying with the trouble.” in her book of that title, haraway (2016) argues that meaningfully engaging with the troubles of our world requires building projects of “generative joy, terror, and collective thinking” (pp. 3-4) that not only decenter human life in late capitalism, but which also require actively constructing new modes of kinship with animals, chemical substances, and others in the world (p. 31). similarly, in her work on the politics of care in feminist science studies, michelle murphy (2015) calls upon “science studies scholars to take a more critical stance toward the politics of care in technoscience, by attending to the complexities and complicities in recent histories of care” in such a way that can adequately attend to how the notion of care itself is constitutive of “histories of persistent racisms, class privilege, colonialism, and american imperial ambitions” (p. 719). shotwell’s book attempts to “build up and sustain”—to borrow a phrase from john law (2004, p. 94)—a literal ethos oriented toward doing this sort of work and living in this sort of way without becoming consumed or paralyzed by the gravity of such a daunting task. while the argument of against purity is pithy, its archive is sprawling and as farreaching as the implications of its thesis. like a collection of disconnected short stories with a common narrator, against purity pulls the reader across divergent affective and analytical registers—and there is something in it for almost any scholar working in critical sts. case studies range from indigenous practices of reckoning with settler colonial pasts and federal indian law in canada (chapter 1), the politics of reclassifying illness (chapter 2), the effect of chemical agents on the perceived gender of amphibians (chapter 3), the governance of disaster zones and the politics of embodiment in the nuclear fallout of the fukushima disaster (chapter 4), the legal appeals that ground transgender politics in the united states (chapter 5), and explorations of how to build a world where compulsory able-bodiedness and other normative modes of living are not preconditions for one’s thriving (chapter 6 and the conclusion). chapter 2 is especially significant. the chapter, titled “women don’t get aids, special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) stephen molldrem, 2019 3 they just die from it,” documents the 1992 grassroots campaign to reclassify aids in the united states, which was led by the aids coalition to unleash power (act up). this chapter merits inclusion on any critical hiv studies reading list or syllabus, and would be a solid addition to any literature review on biomedical classification or patient-driven activism in twentieth-century biomedicine. its archive is particularly special, as it draws on the act up oral history project, a public humanities initiative led by sarah schulman and jim hubbard. the chapter describes activist engagements that centered the specific ways that aids affected women in order to effectuate a more inclusive set of aids-defining conditions. it is a notable installment in the ongoing work of historicizing radical aids activism and drawing attention to its pluralism. the chapter bridges gaps in multiple literatures on hiv activism that focus on emotion, affect, memory, and representations of the epidemic. it is poignantly juxtaposed against the explosion of recent cinematic treatments of aids activism in films such as united in anger, how to survive a plague, and bpm: beats per minute, as well as new critical hiv scholarship in the vein of deborah gould’s moving politics (2009), adam geary’s antiblack racism and the aids epidemic (2014), and kane race’s the gay science (2017). chapter 3 is a reframing of the concept of “interdependence,” primarily through an analysis of the alleged “feminization” of frogs by chemical agents used in fertilizer. its case study is situated within queer theory and opens with a discussion of queer practices of interspecies cohabitation in frog and toad children’s stories, which will be familiar to many readers. shotwell’s skillful weaving together of close readings of cultural texts with autobiographical reflections and empirical case studies is a common thread throughout the book and an enriching methodological practice. chapter 4 is a deep analysis of the ethics of food consumption and embodiment in the wake of the fukushima nuclear disaster. it is impressive and showcases the extent of shotwell’s expertise in multiple approaches to the study of ethics in anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. in chapter 4, shotwell co-deploys new materialist frameworks from sts along with ancient philosophy and insights from the canon of continental philosophy to argue for expanding understandings of embodiment to include relations with other beings and toxic substances. chapters 5 and 6 make interventions in disability studies, playing with ideas of futurity, the literature of octavia butler, and methods for generating what shotwell calls “open normativities: collectively crafted ways of being that shape subjectivities oriented toward widespread flourishing” (p. 139). special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) stephen molldrem, 2019 4 the book is accessible and uses minimal technical language. the full text, or excerpts, would be equally appropriate to assign for an undergraduate course in the sociology or anthropology of biomedicine and health or sts as it would be for a qualifying examinations list or advanced graduate seminar in fields ranging from medical anthropology to critical studies of nuclearity. the book ought to become part of the institutional apparatuses of undergraduate and graduate education in sts, disability studies, critical histories of aids, and social studies of ecological disaster and toxic environments. for feminist and queer sts scholars, against purity is essential reading. non-sts scholars in fields such as ethics or bioethics will find a serious-yet-playful book that pushes the normative boundaries of those fields. chapters 2 and 4 will be of particular interest to feminist ethicists and philosophers. when read as a contribution to evolving conversations about the role of reflexivity and complicity in sts research, and from the vantage of a compromised world where both radical and reactionary tendencies in politics and scholarship continue to cling to false hopes of purity, the visions of celebratory impurity put forward by shotwell promise something different–frameworks for living that are more affirming than the normative modes of existence offered by our present. against purity provides scholars the hope not only of doing sts differently, but of staying alive in the wasteland of what some of us call “late capitalism,” what scholars in shotwell’s cohort call “the anthropocene,” and which queer theorist michael warner eloquently calls (in an ethical reflection on his own life) “this, the last of history’s empires” (2004, p. 216). references haraway, d. j. (2016). staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press. law, j. (2004). after method: mess in social science research. new york, ny: routledge. murphy, m. (2015). unsettling care: troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices. social studies of science, 45(5), 717-737. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715589136 warner, m. (2004). tongues untied: memoirs of a pentecostal boyhood. in s. bruhum (ed.), curiouser: on the queerness of children (pp. 215-224). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) stephen molldrem, 2019 5 author bio stephen molldrem is a president’s postdoctoral fellow at the university of california, irvine in the department of anthropology. he studies sexuality, health information technology, and transformations in the governance of hiv/aids. microsoft word 195-1472-4-klein.docx klein, m. (2018). networked scars: tattooed bodies after breast cancer. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-46. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © reisa klein, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article networked scars networked scars: tattooed bodies and breast cancer reisa klein university of alberta reisa@ualberta.ca abstract this paper investigates the growing trend of mastectomy tattoos as an alternative to reconstruction, and their implication for the (de)regulation of women's bodies in the digital context. i explore how tattoos are incorporated into a "breast cancer culture" (king, 2010) as a form of self-care in the recreation of areola pigmentation after breast reconstructive surgery and in cosmetic masking of post-operative mastectomy scars. i examine how online discourses of tattooing practices are drawing women's bodies into an emergent 'biopolitics' (foucault, 1990; rose, 2001; clarke et al., 2010), a productive type of power concerned with the risk management of a "biomedicalized subject" where women are encouraged to care for their health through informed decisions via online media (pitts, 2004) and through consumption and beautification techniques in line with normative femininity (king, 2006). yet, online media can potentially operate as sites for the creation of new publics wherein women can retell the stories of their bodies through new practices of inscription that subvert medicalized and masculinist reconstruction narratives. i perform a discourse 2 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) analysis of canadian expert and popular discourses in health websites, plastic surgery and cosmetic service websites, tattoo-parlor websites, and in social media, including p.ink, (an organization that supports mastectomy tattoos). i argue that within digital media, competing medical, pop cultural and feminist narratives intersect in ways that can contribute to an "awkward feminist politics" (smith-prei & stehle, 2016) where women's hybridized medical, digital, tattooed bodies can operate as material obstacles to normative correlations between health, femininity and sexuality. any amputation is a physical and psychic reality that must be integrated into a new sense of self. the absence of my breast is a recurrent sadness, but certainly not one that dominates my life. i miss it, sometimes piercingly. when other one-breasted women hide behind the mask of prosthesis or the dangerous fantasy of reconstruction, i find little support in the broader female environment for my rejection of what feels like a cosmetic sham. but i believe that socially sanctioned prosthesis is merely another way of keeping women with breast cancer silent and separate from each other. for instance, what would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended upon congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic, fat stored hormones in beef-feed be outlawed? (lorde, 1980, 16.) in audre lorde's ground-breaking scholarship, the cancer journals, she imagined the visibility and banding together of disfigured bodies as a site of collective feminist activism. this article explores, almost forty years later, the visible presence of disfigured bodies in a digital age through the growing trend of mastectomy tattoos: artistic chest tattoos done as an alternative to reconstruction and their impact on the (de)regulation of women’s bodies. specifically, i examine how tattoos, which have been traditionally stigmatized as disfiguring and hyper-masculinized (demello, 2000; lodder, 2010; steward, 1990) are being incorporated into a "breast cancer culture" (king, 2006; 2010; lerner, 2001; saywell et al., 2000) in the recreation of areola pigmentation after breast reconstructive surgery and in cosmetic masking of post-operative mastectomy scars. this trend 3 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) is part of a larger “tattoo renaissance” (rubin, 1988) wherein body modification practices are increasingly adopted by middle class culture (atkinson, 2003; hebdige, 1979; kosut, 2006) as well as women (davidson, 2016; mifflin, 2013; murray, 2012; neville, 2005; thompson, 2015.) online media have been pivotal in sanitizing tattooing practices and distancing them from social deviance (demello, 1995b; demello, 2000; neville, 2005) and they have provided resources for health and illness (clarke et al., 2010). the latter is particularly true in relation to breast cancer, where women are encouraged to take responsibility for their health by making informed decisions (bryson & stacey, 2013; cartwright, 1998; orgad, 2005; pitts, 2001, 2004; sharf, 1997).this paper therefore concentrates on how practices of tattooing are situated into online biomedicalized discourses where they function as techniques of self-care (foucault, 1986; polzer, 2010) for breast cancer ‘survivors’ to return to a sense of wellbeing after various surgeries and medical interventions. online discourses about breast cancer are playing an increasingly important role in (de)regulating women's bodies by drawing them into an emergent "biopolitics" (foucault, 1978/1990; 1997a; rose, 2001), a productive type of power concerned with the regulation of the population through a focus on the health and wellbeing of bodies. in its contemporary incarnation, biopolitics involves the risk management of a "biomedicalized subject” (rose, 2001) whose body is increasingly positioned through complex, multisited, multidirectional technoscientific biomedical discourses and practices (clarke et al., 2010). these biomedicalized discourses extend beyond the regulation and control of bodies to focus also on assessing, shifting, reshaping, reconstituting and ultimately transforming bodies, albeit in stratified ways (clarke, 2010). this study, therefore, focuses on the ways that tattooed bodies are positioned in relation to breast cancer within biomedicalized discourses and the types of relations and assemblages that emerge from those intersections (clarke, 2010; deleuze & guattari, 1980; puar, 2012). at the same time, online media can operate as sites for breast cancer activism 4 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) in the creation of new publics (cartwright, 1998; orgad, 2005) wherein women can retell the stories of their bodies through new practices of inscription in ways that disrupt medicalized and masculinist reconstruction narratives. this essay will therefore also examine online media’s potential for challenging and resisting biomedicalized discourses and practices through the creation of these new bodily assemblages (puar, 2012). by tracing and critically interrogating online canadian1 expert and popular websites in relation to breast cancer and tattooing, including canadian expert health websites, plastic surgery and cosmetic service websites, tattoo parlor websites and social media sites, i argue that biomedical, popular cultural, neoliberal2 and feminist narratives intersect in ways that can contribute to an "awkward feminist politics" (smith-prei & stehle, 2016) where women's hybridized medical, digital, tattooed bodies can operate as awkwardly assembled, material obstacles to regulatory correlations between health, femininity and sexuality. online media, biomedicalization and breast cancer activism a complex and multidimensional “breast cancer culture”3 (cartwright, 1998; king, 2006; saywell et al, 2000) has materialized within a larger “biomedicalization healthscape4” (clarke, 2010) where biomedicine has proliferated into all aspects of mass culture. mass media in particular have played a central role in creating new visibilities for biomedicine in popular culture, and creating new subjectivities through discourses of health, illness and disease (clarke, et al, 2010). news media outlets and breast cancer campaigns often frame breast cancer in attractive and sexy terms through an iconography of the breast (potts, 2000; saywell et al., 2000). mediated representations are often structured by images of fetishized, idealized, youthful, healthy and symmetrically reconstructed breasts where the inclusion of post-surgical scarring is extremely rare (saywell, et al., 2000). these representations subscribe to a rigid and limited definition of femininity, a femininity threatened by notions of mutilation, reinforced by maternal sacrifice and recovered heterosexual 5 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) attraction. through these discourses, women are positioned as "survivors" (lerner, 2001; king, 2006, 2010) who are expected to erase any signs of the illness itself through a focalization on a return to health through practices of self-care.5 the metaphor of the survivor further assumes that women are responsible for their health and wellbeing and that they are ultimately to blame if they succumb to the disease. as such, women are expected to adopt an unbridled optimism (eherenreich, 2009), and what king (2006) calls a "tyranny of cheerfulness" through individualbased consumption of products and beautification practices (bell, 2006; king, 2006; pitts, 2001).6 in this way, health is conflated with the adoption of beauty practices (klein, 2015) that reproduce normative conceptions of femininity and sexuality. this breast cancer “survivor” culture has been further characterized by a recent proliferation of breast cancer expert and popular health websites, forums, support groups, social media sites, blogs and newsletters in online spaces (bell, 2006; cartwright, 1998; ehrenreich, 2001; pitts, 2001, 2004) where women can research and become informed about diagnoses and treatments. through gathering information and seeking advice online, women are increasingly delegated as responsible for the management of their illness and their survival (clarke et al., 2010; king, 2006; rose, 2001). specifically, women's bodies are positioned through health-based websites in such a way that encourages individuals to act as "prudent subjects" (rose 2001) through the implementation of technoscientific practices such as mammograms7 as well as through self-regulating practices of surveillance, prevention, risk management and the consumption of appropriate self-help, beauty products and biomedical goods often in line with reconstruction (clarke et al., 2010; fosket, 2000). thus, in spite of this democratization of knowledge, the interests of corporate, patriarchal medicine still tends to predominate (pitts, 2001, 2004; saywell et al, 2000). moreover, in this era of biomedicalization the focus is no longer on simply sustaining or repairing the body; it is also on customized and tailored enhancements and optimizations (clarke, 2010), 6 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) including cosmetic procedures and cyborg prostheses. as such, it is important to consider the ways tattooing practices in relation to breast cancer are marketed toward a niche population in the pursuit of perfection (hogle, 2006). yet, online media not only produce biomedicalized subjects but also concurrently operate as crucial sites for breast cancer activism and advocacy (cartwright, 1998; orgad, 2005). in fact processes of biomedicalization are never completely uniform; they are simultaneously characterized by active negotiations, refusals of engagements and resistances (clarke et al., 2010). klawiter (2008) further makes these intersections visible by plotting connections between changes in the medical management of breast cancer, the destigmatization of the disease and the growth of activism. she demonstrates how a multiplication of treatment regimens, a proliferation of support groups and the expansion of screening into asymptomatic populations during the 1980s and 1990s helped produce new social spaces, solidarities and sensibilities among breast cancer survivors by opening up numerous spaces in which women could openly share their experiences of the disease and thus enable a multifaceted breast cancer movement. cartwright (1998) further highlights the crucial role that media played in the formation of breast cancer activism where some of the most significant influence over health culture is taking place through advocacy, activists and community health groups using visual media as a space for public intervention. in this sense, circulating mediated images of breast cancer have been instrumental in shifting the disease (and women’s bodies) from the realm of privacy into the public domain (king, 2006; saywell et al., 2000). for example, in the us context, (with its cultural and geographical proximity to and influence in canada), matuschka's8 highly stylized self-photograph of her one-breasted, post-mastectomy chest on the cover of the new york times magazine in 1993 was one of the first media images to make visible the "uglier" sides of breast cancer and the impact of lasting scars on women's bodies, in complex ways that both adhered to and thwarted normative expectations of beauty and femininity 7 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) (cartwright, 1998; king, 2006; saywell et al. 2000). within a more contemporary context, online media sites have been central to this process of making women’s health matters, and breast cancer more specifically, visible (bryson & stacey, 2013; cartwright, 1998; orgad, 2005; pitts, 2001, 2004; sharf, 1997). although cyber feminist scholars have argued that online media’s transgressive potential is based on an increased capability of disembodiment and anonymity (e.g., turkle, 1995; waskul et al., 2000), in the case of breast cancer, identities and bodies are not entirely abandoned (pitts, 2004). rather women often engage with bodily representations and display through digital media’s multi-modal capacities to make breast cancer bodies more visible as well as create networks of support. through text, images and videos, women with breast cancer can not only learn about the illness, but can also "rewrite" and represent biomedical narratives in ways that subvert hegemonic medical authority and biomedical surveillance (scharf, 1997). in a digital context, women can create their own spaces of resistance by drawing attention to what used to be highly privatized and individualized experiences, detailing some of the more unpleasant aspects of sickness and treatment and showcasing bodies that do not conform to a normative biomedicalized subject (i.e. wealthy white, heterosexual, feminine able-bodied), offering alternative representations to customizations in line with reconstruction. thus, online media can promote women's voices, which have historically been silenced and make visible bodies that have been stigmatized, offering a place for marginalized perspectives to reach wider audiences. in this way, online media can operate as sites for the formation of new (counter)publics: collective networks of women that subvert personal and individuallybased responsibility narratives and promote breast cancer activism. yet, just as processes of biomedicalization are not inherently divorced from processes of resistance, breast cancer activist media are not entirely situated outside of, and in opposition to, institutional medicine or mass public culture. cartwright (1998) argues that although activist 8 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) media often rely on a binary model that sets off local, oppositional community-based groups against the globalizing forces of mainstream medicine and media institutions, much health care activism crosses the boundaries of the two spheres, especially in online contexts. similarly, other scholars have foregrounded that the internet is not an inherently empowering technology, but rather, online feminist discourses are often subsumed within neoliberal, popular cultural and corporate-based logics (pitts, 2001, 2004; smith-prei & stehle, 2016). through this lens, breast cancer websites can circulate a hybrid of feminist, biomedical and popular cultural discourses concerned with gendered consumption, which intersect and compete in complex ways. for instance, pitts's (2001) study of women.com's breast fest, a website dedicated to breast cancer awareness, found that the website not only circulated information about breast cancer resources, but also directed readers to a broad range of women's self-care and self-improvement practices reflecting a mix of feminist, biomedical and consumerist beauty aims, including the promotion of victoria's secret lingerie and breast augmentation surgery. in another study on women's personal web pages, which would seemingly be more independent from corporate and advertising interests, pitts (2004) found that these sites were still saturated in beautification and consumerist discourses in line with normative femininity. thus, even in instances in which women were writing their own narratives, she found they still tended to frame breast cancer in ways that reproduced dominant norms of femininity, (hetero)sexuality and individual responsibility. smith-prei and stehle (2016) take these tenuous relationships further by underscoring that within digital contexts, feminist body politics are necessarily positioned within and intersect with neoliberal and popular cultural logics of capitalism, consumerism and individualism in ways that can contribute to an "awkward feminist politics," through which feminists "stay with the trouble" (haraway, 2016) in order to destabilize these processes. for them, the body can be deployed as a form of "popfeminist activism" where the corporeal and digital come together in 9 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) visibly troubling ways that can create awkward moments of disruption. in other words, within online media, feminist bodily representations are necessarily circulated across and within neoliberal and capitalist platforms that create frictions in such a way that calls these practices into question. rather than being goal-oriented, awkward feminist politics is therefore a process-based practice that acknowledges messiness and contradictions as forms of feminist intervention. baer (2016) further highlights the ways digital media foster a capacity for "doing feminist politics" in a neoliberal age. she argues that within contemporary global capitalism, feminism can no longer be separate from neoliberal forces. due to the precarity of both neoliberalism and feminism, digital media provide important sites for the circulation of individual bodies in ways that can foster transnational and intersectional feminist dialogues. baer revises angela mcrobbie’s (2007) assertion that individual-based self-representational online body displays are part of a post-feminist sensibility9 that arrests a capacity for feminist politics. specifically, mcrobbie (2007, 2009) argues that online bodily representations masquerade under the guise of women’s rights to freedom and liberation and has been rebranded as a form of empowerment, while re-establishing normative patriarchal and capitalist standards of femininity and gender inequality where projects of individual representations and self-improvement are intimately linked with consumption practices. instead baer proposes that digital media are inherently positioned within neoliberal frameworks where feminist body politics can be brought to the fore, offering new subjectivities and collaborations. the online representations and circulations of mastectomy tattoos examined in the current study straddle competing feminist, neoliberal, biomedical and popular cultural logics, which can enable an awkward feminist politics. specifically, online media representations of mastectomy tattoos can refigure and re-inscribe the body in awkward ways that can in turn make patriarchal and biomedicalized discourses and practices awkward. in this sense, breast cancer survivors use digital 10 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) media and practices of tattooing to create new "cyborgian assemblages" (puar, 2012) through the hybrid intermeshing of digital, corporeal, medical and mechanical technologies and bodies. puar (2012) particularly revises haraway’s figure of ‘the cyborg’ by problematizing its unintended reinforcement of an a priori, essentialized pre-existing body and subject position, proposing instead a focalization on how the biologicaldiscursive-social-technological-cultural merge in ways that create new assemblages: new processes and patterns of arrangements and subjectivities. these digital biomedical tattooed bodies can create new cyborgian assemblages that disrupt biomedicalized and normative conceptions of health, femininity, sexuality, race, class, beauty and survivorship. these bodies can therefore operate as what ahmed (2014) calls "willful subjects" by "getting in the way" via the digital sphere. according to ahmed, bodies can "become monstrous" (p.162) when they are allied or banded together, "becoming an obstacle, a physical fleshy thing" (p.163). online circulations of these cyborgian assembled monster bodies can forge alliances in ways that generate a new-networked public, which poses a threat to biomedicalized and neoliberal logics. i therefore argue that within digital media, these bodies can contribute to an awkward feminist politics where hybridized, medical, digital, tattooed bodies can be banded together in ways that destabilize expert medical, patriarchal and neoliberal discourses and practices. before i turn to the analysis of these contemporary online canadian discourses of tattooing and breast cancer, it is worth noting briefly the historical significance of tattooed women's bodies as monstrous. medical practices such as mastectomies and lumpectomies, and tattooing practices are often conceptualized as forms of mutilation, damage and disfigurement, and as such have also been associated with female monster bodies (saywell et al., 2000; slatman, 2012; steward, 1990). breast cancer and tattooing have historically been conceived as a violation of femininity, the former as an assault on beauty, sexuality and motherhood (hallowell, 2000), and the latter as a construction of a "monster beauty" (braunberger, 2000; frueh, 2001) that counters 11 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) normative beauty standards and docile femininity (demello, 1995b, harlow, 2008; mifflin, 2013; pitts, 2003; thompson, 2015). in the late nineteenth century, tattoos were seen as markers of deviancy (steward, 1990), especially for women (braunberger, 2000) where heavily tattooed bodies were turned into sexualized and fetishized objects displayed in circuses, carnivals and freak shows (demello, 1995a; demello; 2000; mifflin, 2013), environments that tended to showcase bodily excess and transgressions in order to re-inscribe social boundaries of acceptability (bakhtin, 1984). the public display of these bodies further re-inscribed tropes of victimization through the invocation of orientalist stories of tattoo rape and their salvation from foreign lands (braunberger, 2000; mifflin, 2013). however, these tattooed women’s bodies also included an element of transgressive agency, where women in fact chose these bodily practices (as opposed to other circus acts) as a way of gaining more social mobility and more opportunities for travel than were otherwise available to women (braunberger, 2000; mifflin, 2013). by engaging in practices of monstrification, including hypersexualization, excess and freakiness, tattooed women transformed their bodies to play with the limits of social respectability, being both sexual subjects who welcomed certain gazes as well as challenged the limits of normative beauty, femininity and appropriate sexuality through a revolutionary feminist aesthetic. in this sense, the body is a site of cultural inscription, where tattoos are a chosen form of writing on the body itself, outside scripts of normative femininity (martel, 2016). a second category of tattooed women also emerged in western contexts in the late nineteenth century referred to as “complexion treatments” (burchett, 1958). in contrast to the aforementioned practices of monstrification, beauty salons started "to discretely offer tattooing to add a glow to one's cheek, an arch to one's brow, a pout to one's lips, and for the very brave, the illusion, of a few more eyelashes" (braunberger, 2000, p.5) often without the knowledge or consent of the women themselves, suggesting that they were objects to be painted on with no subjectivity or agency of their own. these complexion treatments, 12 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) which used a mechanical process that was medically supervised, have left traces in some of today’s practices such as cosmetic tattooing, which i will discuss in more detail below. as practices of self-care (foucault, 1986, 1997b, 1997c) in the context of breast cancer, tattoos straddle both “monster beauty” and “complexion treatment,” potentially creating new bodily transformations that generate awkward tensions regarding the appropriate limits of femininity, beauty and sexuality. on the one hand, these practices of selfcare can be used as part of processes of biomedicalization to transform women's bodies to create a sense of "perfection" in line with normative standards of health, beauty, gender, sexuality, race and class. on the other hand, practices of self-care can include an element of resistance in that individuals can fashion themselves in unexpected and surprising ways that do not meet conventional norms and practices such as reconstruction. to explore these complex relations, i examine how online discourses across various canadian expert health websites, plastic surgery and cosmetic service websites, tattoo parlor websites and social media sites reproduce and disrupt normative correlations between health, beauty, femininity and (hetero)sexuality in awkward ways through these practices of self-care. method this research takes as its starting point that the body is a physical fleshy thing that has a materiality, but is also socio-culturally constructed and given meaning through mediated discourses (crossley, 2006; davidson, 2017; marvin, 2006). media discourses, in this sense, make the body more porous, malleable and capable of transnational flows across national boundaries where they are influenced by socio-cultural and national proximities. for example, in the context of online medical information, networking and support groups, canadians often look to american websites (kimber, 2009). such images of breast cancer tattooed bodies can circulate across national borders in ways that create 13 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) visibilities, connections and alliances. still, bodies remain grounded within nationally coded politico-economic contexts, particularly in relation to biomedical practices, surgeries and health insurance coverage. as such, my research concentrates on canadian websites that deal with tattooing in relation to breast cancer, while examining the ways these discourses and practices can crisscross with other north american sites that influence these practices. i particularly focus on canada-based websites as an anchor to best illustrate how digital representations of the body and text are situated within specific socio-cultural and politico-economic contexts that ground and set limits on these discourses and practices. at the same time, i am interested in tracing how digitized bodies in nationally coded spaces become slippery, ungrounded and regrounded in transnational circulations of bodies toward a feminist body politics. to examine the role of online communication of tattooing practices in the (de)regulation of women's bodies, i conduct a discourse analysis (foucault, 1966/2008; wodak & meyer, 2009) of expert and popular health websites discussing tattooing in relation to breast cancer. my research adopts a multimodal analysis of texts, images and videos (bezemer & jewitt, 2010; jewitt 2009; kress & van leeuwen, 2006), paying attention to their complex and sometimes contradictory discourses through these relationships (martin, 2003) to trace systematically how they can contribute to an awkward feminist politics. my corpus includes 1) two canada-based expert health websites: the canadian cancer society (canada’s largest researcher and leading public information provider on cancer) and the canadian breast cancer foundation (the leading national research center and community support for breast cancer) to document how tattoos are treated in biomedicalized discourses and practices; 2) health canada's website, in order to analyze how state discourses are implicated in processes of biopolitics in terms of the regulation and transformation of women's bodies; 3) a representative sample of canadian plastic surgery and cosmetic websites from canada’s large cities, that discuss tattoos in relation to breast cancer to trace how these practices are further appropriated into 14 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) medicalized and cosmetic frameworks;10 4) a representative sample of canadian tattoo parlor websites that include representations of areola and mastectomy tattoos to demonstrate how their appropriation into artistic discourses can impact the (de)regulation of women's bodies;11 5) online news media articles which provide a supplementary framing mechanism for these tattooing practices; and 6) social media platforms including facebook, instagram and pinterest affiliated with personal ink (p.ink), a united states-based not-for-profit organization with canadian chapters in montreal, vancouver and calgary that brings breast cancer survivors together with tattoo artists for mastectomy tattoos. p.ink's social media presence particularly operates as a potential site for the formation of a new-networked public that can resist biomedical and cosmetic discourses. my corpus includes posts and articles gathered from the aforementioned sources between september 2016 and march 2017 inclusively; instances where website content has shifted are recorded. in the following sections, i draw on examples most exemplary of the significant trends which i will discuss through the following sections: 1) reconstruction or bust: biomedicalized discourses of breast cancer and tattooing; 2) the art of the areola: cosmetic tattoos and artistic tattoos as biopolitics; and 3) "going flat": social media, mastectomy tattoos, and monster bodies. the first two sections will frame the way in which the biomedicalized discourses position women’s bodies within expert health websites and then within cosmeticand tattoo-based websites, respectively, while the final section will look at the ways in which social media can offer a site for the transformation of women’s bodies in ways that render biomedicalized discourses and practices awkward. reconstruction or bust: biomedicalized discourses of breast cancer and tattooing a central concern for canadian health experts in post-surgery breast reconstruction is the tattooing of areola pigmentation. for instance, the 15 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) canadian breast cancer foundation website explains: once your breasts have been reconstructed, it is possible to undergo a procedure to reconstruct a nipple. a new nipple can be formed from a bit of skin from the breast or another part of the body. a tattoo procedure can be used to darken the reconstructed nipple and areola. the new nipple(s) will not have the sensation of a natural nipple (canadian breast cancer foundation, 2016). notice the assumption of reconstruction as the only expected option after mastectomy or lumpectomy. in fact, in october 2016, during breast cancer awareness month, the canadian breast cancer foundation12 went so far as to include this discussion of tattooing in their breast reconstruction awareness campaign. the campaign purports that "most women don't know about their post-mastectomy options. that's why we created [breast reconstruction awareness day13] information events and website" (canadian breast cancer foundation, 2016). in addition, the campaign features images of breast cancer "survivors" with accompanying texts stating that "every woman deserves to have access to accurate unbiased information" and that "wanting to feel good in my body is not vain," as seen in the figure below. figure 1. canadian breast cancer foundation, homepage this campaign discourse therefore conflates increased visibility of breast 16 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) cancer, breast cancer awareness and activism with reconstruction alone. breast reconstructive surgery is presented as the only viable option after mastectomy or lumpectomy; an option, it is suggested, that is underappreciated and about which women need to become more informed14. these online representations fit into larger discourses produced by medical industries which tend to frame breast cancer in patriarchal, sexualized and heteronormative terms through emphasis on women's appearance, pressure for women to look "normal," the erasure of signs of illness, and re-beautification often in line with practices of reconstruction (lorde, 1980; fosket, 2000; saywell et al., 2000; wilkinson, 2001). therefore, women are often positioned in these discourses as needing to be as worried about their sexual attractiveness, beauty and maternity as the disease itself. these biomedicalized discourses incorporate tattoos into a transformative recovery process where breast reconstruction acts as a synecdoche for health of the whole of the body, and where areola tattoos act as the proverbial icing on the cake. expert discourses on areola tattoos therefore tend to operate as techniques of biopolitics where women's self-led research works to conflate women's return to health with a return to norms and standards of femininity, beauty and sexuality. what is astounding is that these expert health websites are wholly uncritical of the ways breast cancer—and tattooing practices—are reconfigured through an elective cosmetic surgery framework where reconstruction inevitability means increased invasive surgeries that may pose additional health risks for women. through a focus on reconstruction, tattoos are integrated into the breast cancer "survivor" culture discussed above, where women are encouraged to return to a state of health (underscored by representations of young, healthy, white women) through individual-based beautification practices. as forms of self-care, tattoos are conceptualized as necessary gendered body projects that women must engage in to take care of their health and wellbeing. the focus on survivors taking responsibility for their health and wellbeing through these "lifestyle choices" (simpson, 2000) 17 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) works to shift the onus of responsibility for women's health onto individual-based normative body projects rather than focusing on finding systemic causes and cure (orgad, 2005). the health canada (canada's federal ministry of health) website further frames practices of tattooing within a framework of survivorship. in relation to breast cancer, tattoos are only ever discussed in terms of areolas and as part of discourses on the safety and risks of breast implants. for example, health canada’s website provided studies on the mentor memorygel™ silicone gel-filled breast implants, where breast reconstruction is discussed along the same lines as augmentation and revision surgery, further regulating women's bodies in sexualized and feminized terms ("summary basis of decision", 2011). as foucault conceived it, biopolitics is an instrument of the state (and deployed through various institutional practices) that regulates the population through a focus on the health of individual bodies. by conceptualizing practices of tattooing through this biomedical risk lens, health canada secures tattoos through the framework of reconstruction, exclusively. in fact, health canada’s website does not even mention mastectomy tattoos but rather positions tattooing more broadly through a focus on infection control, hygiene and safety practice for tattoo parlors ("infection prevention," 1999). indeed, state health care insurance (which is administered at the provincial level) only covers areola tattoos in instances where physicians or nurses perform them in hospitals and other medically sanctioned environments and never when performed in tattoo parlors (griwkowsky, 2016). perhaps one of the reasons for this is that tattoo parlors are seen as unregulated, illegitimate and risky sites, especially for women who have undergone radiation and/or chemotherapy who may be more susceptible to infections such as lymphedema (aragon, 2013; topic: mastectomy tattoo, n.d.). at the same time, health canada does not discuss these risks in the context of areola tattoos in biomedicalized settings or the practice of tattooing a blue or black ink dot on women’s breasts during radiation therapy (clow & allen, 2010). thus, the state acts as the ultimate economic regulator of 18 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) women's bodies by transforming them in line with biomedicalized and patriarchal discourses and practices. in rare cases, tattooing practices are insured when performed in other clinical settings by cosmetic technicians, but only areola tattoos (i.e. not mastectomy tattoos), further underscoring the management and transformation of women's bodies in line with normative codes of beauty, gender and sexuality. as will be discussed in more detail in the following sections, these kinds of economic regulators ensure that areola and mastectomy tattoos performed outside of clinical settings ─ in tattoo parlors ─ are less accessible and more generally available to elite groups, thereby regulating women's bodies in complex, contradictory and awkward ways. the following section examines the online discourses of areola tattooing performed in cosmetic settings and tattoo parlors. the art of the areola: cosmetic tattoo and artistic tattoos as biopolitics when areola tattoos are represented outside expert health websites, two types of classification emerge: cosmetic tattoos and artistic tattoos. these categories are not distinct but overlap in a multiplicity of ways particularly in relation to beautification and consumerist practices that are tied to biopolitics. in the former, areola tattoos are appropriated into biomedicalized discourses and performed in quasi-medicalized settings through their assimilation into plastic surgery and cosmetic services practices. in the latter, areola tattoos are integrated into more artistic discourses and practices performed by tattoo "artists" in tattoo parlors. for example, dr. sheina macadam is a leading plastic and reconstructive surgeon in the vancouver area who further specializes in "cosmetic and medical tattooing" (dr. sheina macadam inc., n.d.). her website, incorporates practices of areola tattooing into more general practices of plastic and reconstructive surgery, where breast cancer treatment options are discussed in the same terms as breast reduction and augmentation. 19 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) figure 2. dr. sheina macadam’s website from this perspective, tattoos are appropriated into elective cosmetic surgery and beautification discourses, which further transforms women's bodies by shifting the focus away from a disease and into objectified and sexualized terms (saywell et al., 2000). as seen in the photograph above, the website adopts technical and medical imagery through the representation of a technician in medical "scrubs" and medical instrumentation in the background, as well as makes use of medical language. the utilization of medical discourses works to filter practices of tattooing through a seemingly expert, clinical and objective lens, but which in effect regulates and transforms women's bodies through a biomedicalized male gaze. areola tattoos are also appropriated into cosmetic service practices, which most closely resemble the "complexion treatments" discussed above. for example on the website for the clinique de la belle peau (“clinic of beautiful skin”), a montreal-based registered nurse who specializes in "micro-pigmentation,"15 areola tattoos are discussed in the context of other forms of "permanent makeup" such as for scar removal, camouflage, paramedical stretch marks, thinning hair and vitiligo (a skin condition characterized by loss of pigment). these cosmetic tattoos are 20 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) still suffused within biomedicalized language while simultaneously invoking logics of beautification, sexualization and consumption. the homepage particularly depicts a young white women's nude body in ways that reinforce the construction of breast cancer in sexualized terms (saywell et al, 2000). figure 3. clinique de la belle peau homepage subsuming areola tattoos under these logics of beautification, sexualization and consumption more firmly positions breast cancer into survivorship discourses where women are encouraged to take responsibility for their health and wellbeing through the application of these "complexion treatments" that reproduce normative codes of femininity. moreover, the performance of these tattoos in clinical settings regulates women's bodies insofar as cosmetic-grade ink tends to fade and need "touch-ups" ("questions" cosmetic transformations, n.d.; rae, 2015b), further subjecting women to constant practices of surveillance to keep their bodies in line with conventions of femininity. the production of survivorship subjectivities in areola tattooing discourses is further evinced through the representation of white bodies. as documented in figure 4, cosmetic websites, like cosmetic transformations in peterborough ontario, tend to include images of areola tattoos as pink/peach, further reinforcing that a return to femininity is coded as white.16 21 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) figure 4. cosmetic transformations website the showcasing of these areola tattoos suggests that not only are white bodies worthy of being beautified and healed, but also of public display and visibility. through a lack of representation, women of color are almost entirely occluded from breast cancer discourses, as though their bodies cannot be reshaped into normative codes of femininity and sexuality. the exclusion of these bodies from survivor discourses works to regulate breast cancer in predominantly “white” social terms, which can have lasting material impacts on diagnoses and treatments for different communities of women. also undergirding these biomedicalized cosmetic discourses is the assumption that the adoption of normative beauty standards will not only make a woman feel whole again, but ─ through the adoption of normative femininity ─ she will also make her (heteronormative) relationships whole again. her areola tattoos therefore return a sense of health and wellbeing to the larger community through her return to a “natural” body. for instance, in an online news article for global news on medicalized tattoos, edmonton's dermallusion's cosmetic technician stated in relation to areola tattoos for breast cancer survivors, “i'm trying to recreate things that should be there naturally...now they can look in the mirror, feel good about themselves, feel feminine again. i have some 22 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) tell me that their husbands are more comfortable as well (ramsay, 2015). these cosmetic, medical and patriarchal reconstruction narratives and practices therefore transform women's bodies through the (re)production of essentialist and heteronormative assumptions about the body and gender defined through the male gaze. whereas the first category positioned areola tattoos in biomedicalized and cosmetic terms, in the second category, these tattoos are appropriated into the tattoo parlor, performed by tattoo artists and discussed in more artistic language. on these websites, areola tattoos are performed by tattoo artists and tend to be interspersed with more traditional tattoos, as seen in the image below. figure 5. sam r tattoo studio homepage these tattoo websites invoke artistic techniques in their treatment of areola tattoos, shifting the discourse from a biomedicalized to an artistic lens. for instance, stacie rae's areola restorative tattoo business (aptly abbreviated as a.r.t.) discusses the pioneering of a whole new system of areola tattoos through the use of traditional art techniques such as “pointillism, micro-pigmentation, colour mixing and three-dimensional shading to create depth and texture” (rae, 2015a). still, in some instances, tattoo artists continue to blur artistic and biomedical discourses. for example, in a news video by shaw media nanaimo included on sam r's tattoos website, the vancouver-based artist incorporates biomedical discourses in her treatment of tattoos over mastectomy scar tissue: 23 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) there are actually a lot of technical things that we look at with scar tissue. so regular cellular tissue ─ healthy skin tissue ─ has a certain engineering to it ─ as a surface of the skin, whereas when you come into contact with a scar, it can be striated, it can be thin, it can be thick, it can have blood flow, it can have less blood flow. you really have to also read the damage from the surface of the skin through the depths of layers (lucas, n.d.). these artistic and sometimes biomedicalized discourses are invoked to further establish tattoo artists with the required expertise to perform areola tattoos in contrast to plastic surgeons, nurses or cosmetic technicians who, according to stacie rae, simply fill a two-dimensional circle in with color (rae, 2015a). while these artistic discourses can potentially shift the focus away from the biomedicalized surveillance of women's bodies, they are not necessarily forms of deregulation, especially insofar as artistic techniques are used to create even more realistic areolas that transform the body in ways that conform to dominant beauty standards. moreover, considering areola tattoos in artistic terms firmly grounds them in beautification and consumption practices, and as practices of self-care through modifying the body to attain a state of happiness and/or "perfection." yet, these more "beautiful" areolas are not covered by public health insurance in any province and therefore women are required to pay between $200 and $500 per nipple, making areola tattoos available primarily to elite classes. just as other beauty standards and practices tend to reproduce class distinction, differentiation, and hierarchization (bourdieu, 1984), areola tattoos are no exception. in this context, only those who can afford these quasi-artistic, quasi-medicalized services can fashion their bodies in this way. in addition, as with cosmetic tattooing websites, images of areola tattoos on these tattoo parlor websites are primarily of white women, thereby reproducing whiteness as the normative yardstick of healthy bodies.17 in this instance, beauty and consumption practices are conflated with health and wellbeing to regulate women's bodies along classed and racial lines. 24 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) some tattoo artists in canada (e.g., funhouse tattoo in vancouver, newcomber ink in halifax) are providing areola tattoos to breast cancer survivors free of charge or by sliding scale to bypass the economic barriers and classed-based state regulation of women's bodies (through the distinction between insurable cosmetic tattooing and uninsured artistic tattooing). these tattoo artists are therefore attempting to position areola tattoos away from capitalistand consumer-oriented logics into discourses and practices of charity and a gift economy, as a form of resistance, which can make tattoos more accessible to various groups. however, the increased accessibility of nipple tattoos through charity masquerades under the guise of helping breast cancer survivors' wellbeing while reinforcing normative femininity. in this sense, even artistic areola tattoos, which seem to offer an alternative to regulating biomedicalized discourses, reproduce "survivor" narratives, where women are encouraged to restore their health and wellbeing through beautifully crafted normative two-inch circles. the following section shifts to online representations of mastectomy tattoos as a potential site for the transformation of bodies in ways that resist biomedicalized and patriarchal definitions of normative femininity and sexuality. “going flat”: social media, mastectomy tattoos and monster bodies social media can provide more in-depth and complex representation of practices of tattooing and breast cancer and potentially act as sites for the formation of new publics that can collectively deregulate normative correlations between health, beauty, gender, sexuality and race. in addition to reconstruction narratives, they can offer spaces for the transformation, circulation and visibility of new types of bodies, including what survivors are calling "going flat" (rabin, 2016), (i.e., opting for no reconstructive surgery or "getting inked" with mastectomy tattoos: full or partial chest tattoos on reconstructed or non-reconstructed breasts). through online representations of mastectomy-tattooed bodies, women can retell their own stories on and about their bodies. for example in 25 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) social media, mastectomy tattoos can make visible bodies that are usually rendered invisible through the reproduction of the figure of the white, young, healthy, elite and vibrant breast cancer survivor. images of mastectomy tattoos can bring to the fore "an army of one-breasted women" to use audre lorde's terms (1980, p.16), who do not try to erase breast cancer treatment scars but rather use chosen scars to reconstruct their bodies as a "monster beauty" in ways that subvert expert correlations between health, wellbeing and normative femininity. however, as previously discussed, even within the context of social media, feminist discourses are not necessarily divorced from popular cultural, medical and neoliberal logics. rather, these hybridized "monster bodies" are circulated and deployed in troubling and awkward ways that can contribute to a collective feminist body politics. the (re)production of online mastectomy images in social media is often linked to the organization, p.ink, a colorado-based not-for-profit launched in 2013 that brings together breast cancer survivors and tattoo artists from across north america in order to provide survivors with free mastectomy tattoos. although the ngo is located in the us, p.ink has chapters in various north american cities including montreal, vancouver, and calgary. through flow (williams, 1974) and intertextuality (hall, 1997), canadian and us content in social media overlap and intersect in ways that can create transnational and intersectional feminist interventions. in this way, online representations of the body can be harnessed to mobilize a network of alliances across various digital sites in order to create awkward moments of disruption to national and localized bodies (baer, 2016; smith-prei & stehle, 2016), as will be demonstrated in more detail below. p.ink, as its name suggests, is part of a larger breast cancer “survivor” culture linked with breast cancer campaigns, and a "tyranny of cheerfulness" and pinkwashing practices, through a focus on individualbased beautification products. yet, p.ink purports to transform bodies outside conventional biomedicalized reconstruction narratives, pointing to some of these awkward relations. as p.ink's homepage communicates: 26 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) "most breast cancer survivors face two choices: reconstruction or not. but most don't realize there's a third option: ink." (breast cancer, n.d.) p.ink frames mastectomy tattoos as a new form of healing, including a tweet on its homepage claiming that "there is a difference between being cured and being healed. mastectomy tattoos help women heal." p.ink therefore uncouples correlations between a return to health and normative femininity, while still being subsumed under neoliberal individual-based forms of beautification and bodywork. the website includes various images, videos and examples of mastectomy tattoos which are then circulated through social media sites, including twitter, facebook, instagram and pinterest as well as onto online news sites and breast cancer support groups such as brca sisterhood of canada. figure 6. p.ink day new york figure 7. p.ink day montreal these bodies do not just circulate through digital contexts but are also corporeal and grounded in local environments through participatory events held in different locations, which can produce awkward tensions and relationships. since p.ink's inception, the organization has hosted "p.ink days" annually in october, in different cities across north america, including vancouver, montreal and calgary, where breast cancer survivors get together with tattoo artists. to date, over 100 women have received tattoos through the organization. it is no coincidence that these p.ink days are part of a larger breast cancer awareness month and are squarely situated within survivorship discourses and practices of 27 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) individual responsibility. and yet, p.ink days also create supportive communities for breast cancer survivors, whose stories are then digitized through videos uploaded and shared through social media, which in turn helps to build increased networks of support through the visibility of these tattooed bodies. in the canadian context, these images challenge the conventional figure of the breast cancer survivor through the inclusion of older bodies, queer bodies, flat-chested and one-breasted bodies, although they still remain predominantly (exclusively) white bodies. in this way, representations of mastectomy-tattooed bodies reproduce discourses similar to those reconstructive narratives that reproduce whiteness as the normative yardstick. figure 8. p.ink day calgary 2015 (facebook) figure 9. p.ink day montreal 2016 (facebook) it is only when these bodies link up with us-based social networking sites that women of color are represented. in other words, through the circulation of these bodies within digital media, these white mastectomytattooed bodies intersect with representations of mastectomy tattoos of women of color. for example, p.ink's website includes a video about the 28 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) first p.ink day in new york city where the representation of women of color make awkward the entrenched stereotype of the white survivor ("introducing p.ink day", 2013). through the circulation and crisscrossing of bodies across transnational settings, there is a capacity for awkward intersectional feminist politics, albeit in fragile ways. in the same video mentioned above, a woman of color explains: "the mirror is my friend again...i knew i was beautiful but now i am beauti-ful with my scar and all" ("introducing p.ink day", 2013). in this context, despite the continued conflation of health with a focus on individual appearance and beautification, beauty discourses also serve to destabilize whose bodies are worthy of being celebrated and showcased as beautiful. furthermore, mastectomy tattoos often include conventionally feminine symbols such as flowers, butterflies, vines and corsets, where the feminine body is conflated with nature. these tattoos therefore operate with the limits of normative and essentialized conceptions of femininity. in this sense, bodies are awkward in that they simultaneously reproduce and subvert norms of beauty and femininity. yet, in this context, femininity is rearranged on the body and reordered in such a way as to subvert its standardization and normalization processes. specifically, these practices of beautification turn women’s bodies into a “monster beauty” such that they create awkward assemblages of the natural-technological-biomedical-mechanical in ways that "queer" essentialist and naturalized definitions of femininity. the ambassador of montreal's p.ink day's documentary "beauty on my terms," featured on their facebook site further makes visible the awkward tensions between neoliberalism, post-feminism, beautification and a feminist body politics in online spaces. in the documentary, lazarovitz (2016) correlates mastectomy tattoos with a return to femininity stating: “it's a good way for women to feel whole again and get back their femininity and not feel self-conscious about their scars.” in this way she invokes individual-based body modification and display as a form of empowerment, akin to a post-feminist sensibility. however, she turns these individual and self-responsibility beauty projects into a call for 29 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) a collective body politics when she states: it was empowering. it was my turn to do things my way. to end this journey my way, that to me was so freeing. it gave me that sense of freedom that so many women dealing with mastectomies don't feel. because so many of our options are taken away from us...to take this part of my journey to show women...that they can do something (lazarovitz, 2016). these forms of online body display are being utilized in ways that make use of individual body projects to foster collective action, facilitated through digital technologies. the circulation of these images can ally bodies together, even unintentionally, in such a way that creates awkward moments of disruption, precisely because they do not quite "fit." digital mastectomy tattoos further create awkward tensions with gendered consumerist discourses and practices. for example, in october 2016, p.ink day montreal promoted a campaign in which they teamed up with blush lingerie where five per cent of the proceeds from bra purchases would support mastectomy tattoo projects. figure 10. luxury lingerie, p.ink day montreal, facebook page the inclusion of this image on p.ink montreal's facebook page resituates discourses of breast cancer into sexualized and objectified terms. in addition, these forms of breast cancer charities, which promote feminine, 30 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) consumeristand individual-oriented body projects as important survivor practices, draw resources away from searching for more systemic root causes and a cure. in this context, the onus of responsibility is placed on women for their own health and wellbeing through practices of beauty and consumption. in the same vein, p.ink days in calgary and vancouver are held at compassionate beauty, a center that sells beauty products such as wigs, bras, skin care and spa routines to cancer patients, thus further situating mastectomy tattoos into neoliberal-branded consumerbased products necessary for health and wellbeing. that said, and in spite of these attempts to resituate mastectomy tattoos in traditionally feminine consumer-oriented terms, mastectomy tattoos defy traditional gendered expectations by not reproducing conventional beauty standards. these assemblages then create new forms of bodily transformations, which call into question the relationship between charity and neoliberal body-based gendered consumption and beautification practices. to add further complication, recently in september 2016, p.ink stopped taking new clients for mastectomy tattoos due to their large demand, thus making it more difficult to access mastectomy tattoo services which can range from $100 to $500 an hour. this kind of exclusivity creates complex hierarchies through which women's bodies can be mobilized in these deregulating processes. for all of these reasons, any emergent feminist body politics are therefore unstable, fragile, messy and slippery. how social media enterprises handle these kinds of images also complicates these discourses. facebook and instagram have attempted to regulate and demobilize these tattooed bodies through policies and practices that call for their removal (gates, 2013). although in the past year, facebook has changed its policies to allow for images of mastectomy tattoos,18 ("encouraging respectful", n.d.), the policing, disciplining and regulation of women's bodies still comes from users who flag these photos as inappropriate (farr, 2013).19 by forcing their removal, there is an attempt to reregulate women's bodies by repositioning them in patriarchal terms as objects of pornography and sexuality rather than as 31 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) the documentation of the physical and emotional scars and healing processes of women who have undergone mastectomies and lumpectomies. the concealment and delegitimation of these bodies work to damage online communities that are banding together for knowledge and inspiration by showing what bodies after mastectomies look like and in order to normalize post-breast cancer bodies in the networked public sphere. in spite of these efforts on the part of social media enterprises, various breast cancer activists have circulated petitions through change.org and other means, which have put pressure on facebook to change its policies and practices. in part, these activists are arguing that these representations of bodies are not actually naked "breasts," but rather a hybrid intermeshing of bodies, art and technology, further calling into question essentialized, and sexualized notions of women's bodies. these calls to action underscore the ways individual body representations can be used to mobilize a collective feminist politics. as one petitioner stated in relation to the scar project, a photography series that documented tattooed post-mastectomy bodies: as a woman living with stage iv breast cancer, photos like the scar project help me feel a little less alone in what i'm going through. with so many young women facing breast cancer diagnoses, i know these photos give them hope, too. by removing the photos, facebook is sending us a message that our struggle with this disease should be kept in the dark (barrington, 2013). the online circulation of these images makes visible bodies that have largely been rendered invisible and subject to biomedicalized and patriarchal control. by showcasing bodies that are scarred, disfigured and refigured in awkward ways, these women are constructing new subjectivities, and rewriting biomedicalized and patriarchal inscriptions of breasts through chosen scars. 32 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) conclusion digital culture presents complex and competing discourses that intersect in contradictory ways. according to smith-prei and stehle (2016), we should stay with these awkward relationships as a fruitful place for feminist politics. online representations of mastectomy tattoos are caught up in survivor discourses concerned with a focus on a return to health through self-responsible, beautification and consumption practices. these discourses operate within a framework of biomedicalization where the onus of the responsibility for health and wellness is placed on the breast cancer survivor through a focus on self-care, and these discourses sometimes recreate dominant values of femininity, race and class through the figure of the elite, white survivor as the only body worthy of being healed. the positioning of mastectomy tattoos in survivor discourses in part regulates women within neoliberal discourses and can further transform their bodies through beautification techniques that mask the "uglier" sides of breast cancer such as, for example, women with stage iv breast cancer who may not survive or have the opportunity to engage with these survivorship practices. this visibility of mastectomy tattoos can obfuscate the occlusion of stage iv bodies from systemic representation, evinced in the popular hashtag #stagefourneedsmore. in the same vein, the focus on these individual-based practices of self-care and the charities that support them further downplays systemic causes and responsibilities for the disease. however, the position of tattooing in survivor practices is part of the complex and awkward ways that tattoos are simultaneously implicated in individual discourses of self-responsibility and can be utilized towards a feminist body politics. specifically, the adoption of individual and body-based practices can be used to disrupt regulatory narratives and practices of reconstruction where beautification practices are used to challenge a patriarchal conception of health and wellbeing and where neoliberal logics are used to make visible new bodies. as one breast cancer survivor stated, it is through these practices that they can 33 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) become "mutant sisters" (in memory, 2017), hybrid monster assemblages that can re-inscribe bodies to create new arrangements and subjectivities. these hybridized bodies are awkward in that they blend the digital with the corporeal, the technological with the biological, the medical with art. these assembled cyborg "monster bodies" transform women in ways that do not easily fit in and in turn make biomedicalized, neoliberal, and popular cultural discourses and practices awkward. the display of these body modification practices can be used to subvert conventional notions of healing and what a healthy woman's body should be, which tend to erase physical scars through reconstruction discourses and practices. the circulation of these monster bodies in digital contexts, inside and outside local and national borders, offers the capacity for bodies to be allied and impact the tendency to conflate health with normative categories of race, class, gender and sexuality, albeit in fragile and problematic ways. these digital bodily circuits can begin to shift biomedicalized discourses, as a recent illustrated article published in the journal of the american medical association, one of the top ranked academic medical journals in north america (with an impact factor 44.405) attests. the article, which is authored by a chicago-based tattoo artist (allen, 2017), a very unusual occurrence for a scholarly medical journal, promotes the healing role of post-mastectomy tattoos acquired in tattoo parlors to the larger medical community, thereby impacting biomedical practices on health and healing. although differently imagined from lorde's material bodies descending on government, the display and visibility of mastectomy tattoos online can foster an awkward feminist body politics through networked scars. notes 1 it is important to note that due to online media’s fluidity, bodily representations inherently operate beyond national border and overlap transnationally, which will be reflected in some of the contexts and examples discussed in this article. at the same time, biomedicalized bodies, discourses and practices are also necessarily grounded and 34 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) limited by national politico-economic contexts. 2 broadly speaking, neoliberalism is understood here as a mode of political and economic rationality characterized by privatization, deregulation structured by individual entrepreneurial freedom (baer, 2016; gill & schraff, 2011). 3 scholars have discussed this culture in terms of breast cancer awareness campaigns (e.g. king, 2006; 2010), races for the cure (e.g. klawiter, 2000) and the consumption and pinkwashing of products. 4 since 1985 medicine more broadly, has transformed into an era of biomedicalization which is organized around five key interactive processes: 1) a new biopolitical economy and media; 2) an intensifying focus on health, optimization and enhancement by technoscientific means, pointing to an elaboration of risk and surveillance of individual niche groups and population levels; 3) the technoscientification of biomedical practices where interventions for treatment and enhancements are more reliant on science and technology and are conceived in those very terms; 4) the transformation of biomedical knowledge production, information management, distribution and consumption; and 5) the transformation of bodies and the production of new individual, collective and population level technoscientific identities. (clarke et al, 2010). 5 breast cancer 'survivors' do not only refer to women who have survived breast cancer but include all women who have undergone breast cancer treatments including those who have had elective preventative mastectomies and lumpectomies due to the brca gene who are now positioned by these discourses and practices. 6 scholars have discussed this focalization on survivorship practices in different settings including charity events and breast cancer awareness campaigns such as races for the cure, (king, 2006; klawiter, 2000), as well as in terms of corporate philanthropy and the "pinkwashing" of products which reinforce individual responsibility over systemic and corporate culpability (selleck, 2010). 7 many critics have expressed doubt about the usefulness of mammograms arguing that they are detective rather than preventative and that even under optimal conditions, mammograms can miss up to 15 per cent of tumours (king, 2006, p.38). 35 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) 8 matushka is a new york city photographer, model and activist. 9 mcrobbie builds on gill and scharff's description of a “postfeminist sensibility” which is evident in the common tropes of twenty-first century media productions, including the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification in the ways that women are represented, an emphasis on self-surveillance, monitoring, and discipline; a focus on individualism, choice, and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; the articulation or entanglement of feminist and anti-feminist ideas; a resurgence in ideas of natural sexual difference; a marked resexualization of women’s bodies and; an emphasis on consumerism and the commodification of difference” (gill and schraff, 2011, p.3-4). 10 these include every relevant canadian website that i could locate during the period of september 1, 2016 and march 31, 2017: cosmetic transformations, margeaux collyer's the art of micropigmentation, cosmetic and paramedical tattooing, areola tattoos: the finishing touch to feeling complete, clinique de la belle peau, dr. sheina macadam, true balance, a new you medical tattoo inc., dermallusion personal cosmetics, revive clinic, cosmedic ink, and change hair. 11 these include every canadian tattoo parlour website that specifically offered post breast cancer surgery tattooing services that i could locate during the period of september 1, 2016 and march 31, 2017: sam r tattoos, the talisman studio, a.r.t (the art of areola restorative tattoos, stacie rae-weir, funhouse tattoos, psychocity tattoo, slick styled steel, pain and pleasure tattoos, monarch tattoo, mile end tattoos, and the arthouse ink. 12 since february 2017, the canadian breast cancer foundation merged with the canadian cancer society. 13 breast reconstruction awareness day is an informational event held in different locations across canada aimed at providing women an opportunity to learn about breast reconstruction products and services, meet with plastic surgeons and other women who have undergone treatment (breast reconstruction awareness day, 2016). in this context, tattooing practices are among the products and services available to women, but exclusively through the lens of areola re-pigmentation after reconstruction. 36 klein catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) 14 it is important to note that in canada, breast reconstructive surgery in relation to breast cancer is covered by most provincial insurance plans (breast reconstruction, n.d.) 15 according to the website, "micro-pigmentation is sometimes referred to as para-medical pigment implantation or cosmetic tattooing." 16 it is important to underscore that women of colour have long histories of tattooing practices (pitts, 2003) that the emphasis on white bodies in representations of areola tattooing overlook and obscure. 17 artistic discourses regarding colour offer a small fissure into these normalizing practices. specifically, through discussions on colour matching and pigmentation, tattoo artists can complexify biomedical and cosmetic standards of whiteness. for examples, included on stacie rae's website is a "specialized areola pigment set with the beautiful natural tones we see in the cosmetic tattoo field, but the lasting quality we only see in the traditional tattoo field." the set includes various "natural skin tones" including beiges, browns and oranges in addition to pinks and peaches. 18 in its community standards page, facebook states: "we also restrict some images of female breasts if they include the nipple, but we always allow photos of women actively engaged in breast feeding or showing breasts post-mastectomy scarring" ("encouraging respectful", n.d.). 19 in an interview with venture beat, facebook stated: "we have long allowed mastectomy photos to be shared on facebook, as well as educational and scientific photos of the human body and photos of women breastfeeding. we only review or remove photos after they have been reported to us by people who see the images in their news feeds or otherwise discover them. on occasion, we may remove a photo showing mastectomy scarring either by mistake, as our teams review millions of pieces of content daily, or because a photo has violated our terms for other reasons. 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(2001). breast cancer: feminism, representations and resistance ─ a commentary on dorothy broom’s ‘reading breast cancer’. health, 5(2), 269-77. williams, raymond (1974). television: technology and cultural form. london, uk: fontana. wodak r. & m. meyer (2009). methods of critical discourse analysis. london, uk: sage publicatons. bio dr. reisa klein is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the department of modern languages and cultural studies at the university of alberta. her research broadly explores the relationship between the body, communication and power in diverse mediated contexts. dr. klein is a co-founder of centre for historical international studies in gender and press (chisgap), an international research group engaged in transnational comparative studies on the internationalization and standardization of women's bodies in mediated cultures. leighton, mary, & roberts, elizabeth f. s. (2020). trust/distrust in multidisciplinary collaboration: some feminist reflections. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–27. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license trust/distrust in multidisciplinary collaboration: some feminist reflections mary leighton university of michigan marylei@umich.edu elizabeth f. s. roberts university of michigan lfsrob@umich.edu abstract in this paper we theorize trust as emerging in different material/infrastructural and epistemic realities as part of our multidisciplinary collaboration about water, called neighborhood environments as socio-techno-bio systems: water quality, public trust, and health in mexico city (nestsmx). this collaboration, led by feminist anthropologists, brings together anthropology, environmental public health, and environmental engineering researchers to analyze how neighborhoods, as “socio-techno-bio systems,” shape how people trust or distrust water. our project follows the infrastructures and social structures that move water in and out of neighborhoods, households, and bodies making them trust it more or less. at the same time, our multidisciplinary research team inhabits different material and epistemic research environments, which creates tensions about how we make knowledge and what counts as data. trust and distrust, then, shape how we constitute both our object of inquiry and how we know it. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 2 a multidisciplinary team reacts to news of a shadowy conspiracy in spring 2018 a team of mexican and us environmental public health researchers, civil and environmental engineers, and anthropologists stood in the courtyard of a working-class extended family household in mexico city, politely listening to a speech about the illuminati. more precisely, they listened as samuel, one of the adult household members who had collectively built this courtyard and its houses, explained how the illuminati (a secret society reputed to be controlling governmental affairs around the world) was to blame for his family’s poor water. the researchers were part of neighborhood environments as socio-techno-bio systems: water quality, public trust, and health in mexico city (nestsmx), an national science foundation–funded four-year collaborative multidisciplinary project bringing together anthropology, environmental public health, and environmental engineering researchers from the university of michigan and mexico’s instituto nacional de salud pública (national institute for public health, insp). nestsmx’s analyzes neighborhoods as “socio-techno-bio systems” that shape how people trust or distrust water. the anthropologist and principal investigator (pi), elizabeth (liz) f.s. roberts (author 2), had brought the interdisciplinary team to meet one of her long-term informants, leona, a woman in her late sixties. leona was describing the effects of intermittent water supply on her daily life when her husband, samuel, arrived home and took over the conversation. the couple lived with their children and grandchildren, thirteen people in total. households in their neighborhood of buena vista, which are made up of similar multigenerational housing compounds, receive water only on weekends. over the years, occupants constructed, patched, and mended their household water systems to deal with this scarcity. while touring the household’s water supply, the us-based researchers noted leona and samuel’s intimate knowledge of their household’s pipes, cisterns, pumps, cracks in the earth, and tinacos (rooftop water storage containers). this expertise is rarer in middle-class households, where residents tend to lack tacit skills with tools and building materials. but the nonanthropologists found it strange when samuel shifted from the seemingly concrete world of pipes and pumps to describing how the illuminati working inside the government purposefully poison the aquifers to control the population. this moment illuminated differences between the stem collaborators and the anthropologists. the engineering and environmental public health researchers original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 3 expected to hear how local water supplies are impacted by political corruption and patronage, but not secret societies. if informants believed seemingly absurd conspiracy theories, how could anyone trust their judgment on other matters, like their daily water use? was a mention of the illuminati “data”? the non-social scientists did not know what to make of this conversation, or if it would help us understand something as slippery as “trust in water.” they needed convincing that samuel’s description of the illuminati was in fact data about water trust that could be analyzed reliably. this visit took place right at the beginning of our interdisciplinary collaboration, and ten months before the project fieldwork began. the goal of the trip, which included tours of water treatment facilities, labs that would process some of the team’s biological and water samples, and a few neighborhoods and working-class households, was to give the us-based stem researchers a feel for mexico city. most had never visited mexico before, including those who have worked for years as part of a mexico city–based birth cohort study, early life exposures in mexico to environmental toxicants (element).1 for many of the non-anthropologists, it was the first time they had spoken to a “research subject,” let alone entered their homes. research collaborations between anthropologists and stem scientists are, of course, not unusual (hubbard et al., 2019; sangaramoorthy et al., 2017). however, in looking for examples prior to beginning our research, we found only a limited number of collaborations with engineering or public health that were led by cultural anthropology, rather than the other way around. in this review paper, we describe how, in the first year of our project, this reversal of the usual collaborative relationship shaped how we theorized and practiced trust, both in how we organized the collaboration and collected water data. with an anthropological approach guiding the research design, our engineering and public health colleagues had to trust our assertion that, for instance, the illuminati were data. we, the team anthropologists (mary leighton [author 1] and liz), work within a feminist technoscience framework that follows various actors where ever they go, attending to the situatedness of knowledge embedded in unequal power relations (benjamin, 2016; tallbear, 2014; webber, 2006). for us, it makes sense that people’s situational trust in water requires consideration of both pipes and the illuminati, and whatever else constructs their experience of water. however, our collaboration forced us to put into practice something we already knew in theory: that what counts as trustworthy data and expertise within one discipline does not necessarily carry over to another (knorr cetina, 1999). this has been, at original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 4 times, harder than we anticipated. in regards to trust itself, as anthropologists and feminist technoscience scholars, we do not assume “trust” is something immutable that can be tracked as a presence or absence. instead, we have structured the project to understand how it is enacted, or not. in theorizing trust this way, we work against a “common sense” understanding of trust that sees it as a problem arising from a lack of knowledge or inappropriate calculation of risk. sts researchers have dismantled this formulation of trust, both in terms of how scientists trust knowledge claims and expertise within their own discipline (e.g., knorr cetina, 1999; shrum et al., 2001; shapin, 2011) and why non-scientists trust or distrust technoscience and biomedicine (e.g., jasanoff, 2005; eubanks, 2009; benjamin, 2011, 2014). however, this common sense understanding that knowledge=trust dominates current research on trust in water conducted by public health or engineering researchers. solutions to studies of water mistrust in mexico and elsewhere almost always conclude with recommendations for better and more targeted public education programs, based on the belief that people will trust more if they have better information (e.g., pierce & gonzalez, 2017; parag & roberts, 2009; fragkou & mcevoy, 2016; espinosa-garcía et al., 2015). in our first year of nestsmx, our goal was to establish the basis for a research project that would leave the reasons for (mis)trust in water open, rather than assuming that it is directly related to a lack of knowledge or education. this open-ended approach to trust was unusual for our collaborators. somewhat to the frustration of our environmental public health colleagues, we have not developed a questionnaire to measure water trust because we rejected the notion that trust is something that can be captured by a quantifiable form, completed by research subjects, validated against other surveys, and connected to a deliverable intervention as an “output.” instead, we sought to create an interdisciplinary research design that will examine trust as situated and co-constituted process and practice—as something that emerges, shifts, or fades into the background within specific households, neighborhoods, and within our study (haraway, 1991). at the same time, and through the situated co-constituted process and practice of collaborating together, we attempt to convince our stem colleagues that invocations of the illuminati are data that is as significant, and trustworthy, as pipes and microbes. and yet, our goal in this interdisciplinary collaboration is also to explicitly move beyond standard anthropological or feminist technoscience critique of the work of other researchers, and “past a simple opposition between original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 5 stories and numbers” (moats, 2016, p. 596). by agreeing to meet our quantitatively-minded colleagues “half way” (barad, 2007), we attend to the fact that more knowledge or data does not necessarily lead to more trust between our collaborators and ourselves, on its own. put simply, we can’t expect that a brief immersion in anthropological methods and theory will automatically lead our stem colleagues to shift their epistemological moorings; nor should it. working with other disciplines as equal collaborators meant starting from a position that assumes good intent on their part; trusting that their impulse to, for instance, produce knowledge that can be made into a deliverable intervention elsewhere in the world should not be immediately dismissed as “universalizing.” and equally, it has meant opening ourselves to the possibility that they may challenge our approaches and assumptions in return. nestsmx nestsmx works with sixty family households living in mexico city who are long’ term participants in element, an ongoing longitudinal birth cohort study that studies developmental effects of chemical exposure (pantic et al., 2018). liz has collaborated with element since 2013, developing methods that combine environmental public health and anthropological data (roberts, 2017; roberts & sanz, 2017).2 nestsmx involves collecting multidisciplinary data from families that we seek to combine with historical biomarker data from the element biobank. working with approximately eight hundred mother-child pairs over twenty-five years, element has established a bank of biological samples to answer questions prospectively or retrospectively. new data is collected in response to newly funded questions; new questions emerge about old data. our collaboration with element allows us to collect data about water trust, management, and insecurity, which we can then link to previously collected biomarker data. we ask new questions about water and neighborhoods through biomarker data we are collecting during nestsmx; this new data, tied into our new questions, will become part of the larger element biobank. our interest in water trust arose from liz’s previous collaboration with water ecologists at the laboratorio nacional de ciencias de la sostenibilidad (lanics), a multidisciplinary lab dedicated to researching sustainability, based in the ecology department of the universidad nacional autónoma de méxico. we learned from lancis that municipal tap water in mexico city tends to meets international safety standards when it reaches households in many (but not all) neighborhoods. additionally, a majority of mexico city residents used to drink tap water, but stopped after the 1985 earthquake. the suspicion of tap water prompts original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 6 consumption of bottled water or soda instead, which residents consider safer, more reliable, and healthier (roberts, 2015). however, the consumption of soda and single-use plastic bottles is an ecological and health disaster (chapa-martínez et al., 2016; cantoral et al., 2016; jiang, 2018; jiménez-aguilar et al., 2009; muñoz-cadena, 2009; schwanse, 2011). additionally, as is the case in many cities around the world, mexico city has a growing water access and supply crisis. nestsmx aims is to understand which of these phenomena might be shifted to restore trust in tap water for residential consumption. our approach brings together environmental public health, ecology, anthropology, and engineering to study water quality, biological health, and the history of water politics and access. our engineers and anthropologists are conducting what we call a “water audit” in sixty element households spread through fifteen neighborhoods. audits include three separate visits. we collect ethnographic data on general household organization and water use through the lens of gender, age, and class, access, and trust; biological samples (hair, saliva, urine) to measure health markers like cortisol (stress) levels; and water-sensor data from continuous and periodic samples throughout homes. once we have a clearer picture of the range of water-system possibilities within neighborhoods and households, we have plan to scale up to a larger sample of element households. through its socio-techno-bio methodology, nestsmx will develop new tools for the general and specific understanding of neighborhood and household environments that contribute to trust/distrust in water, which can be extrapolated to other settings. distrusting waters in mexico city in designing our more open-ended approach to trust within nestsmx we have drawn from anthropologists, such as matthew carey (2017) and katrine bendtsen gotfredsen (2016), whose ethnographic work demonstrates the positive qualities of mistrust and suspicion. in carey’s ethnography, mistrust of intimate relations and friends is a means to respect their inherent unpredictability, unknowability, and right to change. gotfredsen (2016), meanwhile, illustrates how conspiracy theories and political mistrust can be reassuring, rather than alarming or destabilizing. their work has allowed us to frame some our initial fieldwork results that suggest that distrust in water is not necessarily related to a direct mistrust of politicians, or scientific/medical experts, but more strongly related to mistrust of household objects and infrastructures that they have built themselves in response to the intermittency of the water supply that some experience as political and others do not. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 7 for instance, our ethnographic fieldwork allows us to know that knowability might not lead to greater trust; but rather its opposite. samuel, for instance, knew far more about how the water circulated through his household than the average middle-class citizen in mexico city. but this increased knowledge of neighborhood/household water distribution did not lead to increased trust in the water itself or the system bringing it to his house. by spending extensive time with leona and samuel’s household, liz is familiar with samuel’s pervasive mistrust. that samuel worked in a state office made him even more certain that shadowy forces run the government. yet he and leona seem to have a positive experience of mistrust. they were once traveling magicians, living off illusion. more recently, samuel become involved in a shamanistic group that seeks global transformation by manifesting a simultaneously preconquest world and a hightech future. for samuel, world transformation will arrive through (a) more people becoming stronger and more adapted to rampant pollution emanating from government and corporate injustice, and (b) more people coming to realize that we all live within layers of illusion that need to be cast off. his knowledge of government corruption allows him to imagine this transformation. samuel’s sense of the world’s shadowy corruption and illusion was not that different from other working-class residents, who have described to liz how their relatively recent mistrust of tap water was shaped by their sense of how powerful coca-cola is in mexico. mexico is the largest consumer of coca-cola products in the world (cocacola, 2012). one difference between samuel’s mistrust of the government and the prevalent mistrust of coca-cola is that samuel possesses a vision of change towards a different world. both examples of mistrust, towards a nefarious force, either the illuminati or coca-cola, hold geopolitical processes, water infrastructure, and water together, rather than seeing them as separate spheres. but for samuel, laying the blame on the illuminati provides a blueprint for transformation, and the hope for a better world to come—one that includes, among other things, decent water. within nestsmx, then, we understand water trust/distrust as enacted through geopolitical, religious, historical, and economic processes that encompass uncertainty and transformation. we take a similar theoretical approach to water, which allows us to trace both trust and waters as emergent and multiple (e.g., waters in the plural, rather than water as singular) (walsh, 2019, p. 6; linton, 2010; hamlin, 2000). drawing on mary’s background in material culture studies, we theorize water(s) in all their slippery, transformatory “water-ness”: as material and physical things, like air, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 8 that are not bounded but flowing and co-mingling (ingold, 2007; shove et al., 2014, p. 115); ambiguous and transmutable (kamash, 2008); simultaneously depth and surface; entities that have “a taken-for-granted materiality (liquidity, or wetness), within one of three physical states that exist in continual interchange (the other two being ice and vapor)” (steinberg & peters, 2015, p. 252). we have the luxury of working with two disciplines that are intimately attuned to the physicality and mutability of different kinds of waters. the environmental public health researchers focus on the properties of water entering bodies: how leaded water and sugary soda flow in to bodies and transform/become blood, flesh, and epigenetic methylation tags. the engineers, meanwhile, measure water’s taste, smell, and texture as it comes into contact with mouths, hands, noses, and eyes. they break water down into its organic and non-organic components: the percentages of bacteria, lead, or plastic, for instance, that make up water found in different parts of a house. we have come to understand in detail what waters are, as material objects that contains more than hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and what waters do when merging with bodies, infrastructure, and social life (e.g., facilitating diabetes, eroding pipes, or causing clothes and bodies to smell less). and in that vein our anthropological observations and discussions with mexico city families document conditions and circumstances where people experience water as an object of suspicion. water might be there, physically present, but its presence does not necessarily mean it is knowable or has a reliable existence—and from this, that it is trustworthy. for instance, we can say that water in mexico city is reliably unreliable—that residents can rely on it to be unpredictably available. women develop habits like regularly getting up at 2 a.m. to fill buckets that enable greater control over tasks like cooking, cleaning, and laundry during the day. there is also reliable mistrust: a mother can always assume that other family members are suspicious of tap water, and so will always buy soda for the household to drink instead. as anthropologists, we build on what we learn from our colleagues’ work on water’s physicality to develop our understanding of how water knowledge, reliability, and trust are interconnected. for example, we have found that purchased plastic bottles filled with privately treated water are more trustworthy objects than tinacos and cisterns, to the extent that the water inside them becomes trustworthy because it takes on the properties of its container (the plastic bottle versus the suspect cistern). to some extent this happens literally: our environmental public health collaborators study the effects of water merging original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 9 with other physical materials, and the impact this has on study participants’ health. element’s on-site principal investigator in mexico, martha m. téllez-rojo (mara), has extensively studied how liquids cooked in lead-glazed ceramics become sweeter and more toxic, as the lead and water co-mingle (hernándezavila et al., 1996). deborah watkins et al. (2016) investigate how chemicals in consumer products are absorbed into pregnant bodies, impacting fetal development and, years later, brain function, metabolism, and puberty. similarly, our engineering collaborator krista rule wiggington has conducted research on chemicals such as triclosan, which common in household soaps used for washing dishes and bodies. her research has shown that when triclosan comes into contact with chlorine in piped water, it can potentially cause dangerous by-products, including chlorinated phenoxy-phenols, chlorinated phenols, and trihalomethanes, some of which are carcinogenic (fiss et al., 2007) her research involving two experiments in two us cities demonstrated that different chlorine levels in the water, and the temperature of the water, reacted with the triclosan in soaps to produce chloroform levels in excess of us environmental protection agency guidelines (fiss et al., 2007). as each of these examples shows, water’s changeable nature—its ability to absorb, merge, and change its state—makes it potentially dangerous. in asking how people trust water or waters, we are asking how they trust something that is reliably unpredictable, known to be changeable and co-mingleable, quotidian in its absence as well as its presence, both life-giving and potentially harmful (kamash, 2008; strang, 2004; watson, 2017). waters in mexico city what is today mexico city was originally teotihuacán—a city of canals, and islands built on a lake. the “problem” of water in mexico city dates from the spanish conquistadors’ policy of draining the canals, despite warnings from dutch engineers they had hired (nash, 2007). today, citizens’ right to clean water is enshrined in the constitution, and mexico city has a vast, publicly managed clean water supply (albeit one that does not provide water into every home on a continuous basis). however, although this water meets international standards of cleanliness, public trust in tap water has been deteriorating since the devastating 1985 earthquake. residents in certain politically organized neighborhoods periodically stage protests, demanding better and more equitable access to clean water (huberts, 2019). but for the most part, working-class households get by on a combination of some piped water, individually purchased multi-gallon water containers (garrafones) produced by corporations or filled by local neighborhood businesses, and water delivered by water trucks (pipas) that are either privately hired or supplied by the municipality or political parties. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 10 sts approaches to water have focused on city-level or state-level water infrastructure, exploring the themes of the interrelationship between water technologies, water management paradigms and associated processes of knowledge formation, organizational forms (such as the hydro-state), and governance practices. these relations are mediated through specific political projects, whether associated with colonialism, imperialism, land reclamation, or contemporary “development.” (bakker, 2012, p. 618) in the current literature on water infrastructure, technological objects such as pipes, dams, and sewers are conceptualized as a “living, breathing, leaking assemblage of more-than-human relations” (anand, 2017, p. 6). these humannonhuman assemblages are always relational, situated, and co-constituted (mol, 2002). for instance, in anand’s exploration of mumbai’s water infrastructure— which bears many similarities to mexico city—citizenship is made through residents’ relations with pipes. the design and implementation of water infrastructure has been examined as a way of large-scale water management technologies (dams, for instance, or irrigation systems) as the materialization of geopolitics, particularly in colonial contexts (sneddon, 2012; pritchard, 2012). a question to be asked, however, of each of these studies is what makes the water itself situated and specific, as opposed to the technologies, landscapes, and infrastructures that surround and contain it. in the literature, the water that flows through the dams, pipes, and sewers tends to remain a single, coherent object— albeit one that is historically, socially, and technologically shaped by the places and objects it flows through. this singularity reflects what historians of science have considered to be a relatively recent move towards water as a single element—h2o—and away from experiencing a multiplicity of waters with various characteristics, a shift that can be traced to nineteenth-century advances in microbiological and sanitation reform (walsh, 2019; linton, 2010; hamlin, 2000). some anthropologists of water who work within an sts paradigm have explored the situatedness, and thus non-universalizability, of bodies of waters located within a landscape (lakes, rivers, oceans) (e.g., strang, 2004; watson, 2017; kamash, 2008). such approaches emphasize the materiality of water, and thus its potential for multiplicity, through attention to landscape (e.g., water in one lake is not the same as water in another lake). kamash, in particular, focuses on the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 11 “intermingling of ideas concerning water as both a life-giving and a deadly substance, as well as being liminal and transcendent between states and locations of being” (2008, p. 226). in paying attention to the transmutability and “capriciousness” of water, kamash anticipates philip steinberg and kimberley peters’s (2015) concept of wet ontologies: an emphasis on place—in this case, the ocean—but also depth and volume, and the multiple forms water can take (ice, liquid, steam). wet ontologies imagine water as a “dynamic assemblage,” seeing the vast depth of the ocean in terms of mobile, vital, continually moving humans and nonhumans (including molecules) (see also helmreich, 2009). elise t. jaramillo’s (2019) concept of fluid kinship, meanwhile, focuses on water users and the negotiation of water rights to think through how human relations are shaped and mediated by water and water infrastructure’s materiality—in this case, a system of water dams and canals known as acequias. jaramillo’s example of how multiple communities in new mexico negotiate ancient and contemporary rights to water echoes anand’s approach to understanding water infrastructure and citizenship as co-constituting each other. she argues, however, that it is precisely the material reality of water flow through the acequias that confounds political conceptualizations of water as an abstract resource (jaramillo, 2019). acequias particularize water, constrained or enabled within specific landscapes. each of these approaches implicitly explores the idea that water is mutable and multiple, and can be understood through attention to its place in a specific, physical landscape. some sts researchers attempt to examine the specificity of water through attention to its materiality (e.g., barnes, 2013). karen bakker (2012), however, suggests that “this is in practice a difficult concept to deploy” (p. 621), and the results have a tendency to take either a technological approach, or to consider it an “object” in a broader, epistemological sense (“object of science”) (e.g., daston, 2000). we propose that part of the problem with the strong tendency to objectify water as singular may be the scale of most studies of water in sts to date. water is examined as an epistemic, political, neocolonical, and technological problem in relation to a river, an ocean, or a dam. with nestsmx, however, we examine contexts in which multiple different waters are visible at the same time—the household—and thus elucidate something that is more difficult to see at the larger scale. by focusing on the movement of water within households, we aim to document and analyze what multiple, relational, and situated waters look like and feel like in the everyday life of specific places—in this case, workingclass households in mexico city. our hope is that once we understand the multiplicity of waters situated within people’s homes, we will be able to see (mis)trust in water as more complicated than a simple presence or absence, or original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 12 indeed as only a reflection of wider social processes. trust/distrust in multidisciplinary research the process of theorizing water trust/distrust among our informants has caused us to reflect on a parallel debate about trust in scientific communities, particularly those that bring together more than one discipline. this question has been addressed by those outside sts who study interdisciplinary collaborations (gethmann et al., 2015; wagenknecht, 2016; kaiser et al., 2016; callard & fitzgerald, 2016; bendix et al., 2017). the consensus in this literature also follows the “common sense” understanding of trust as correlating with information and risk calculations: collaborations involve risk because there is always a lack of knowledge (you can’t understood exactly what your colleagues are doing), and therefore they require trust. in our theorization of water trust in mexico city, we are attempting to understand mis/trust as something changeable, malleable, and contradictory. can the mis/trust in our multidisciplinary collaboration be understood as equally complex and multifaceted as it is for the residents of the mexico city households who we study? in the remainder of this article, we will describe how we negotiated and built trust in each other’s data during the first year of our collaboration as we planned our initial fieldwork. our three disciplines have important points of similarity; as we noticed in one of our early meetings, the names of all three disciplines contain people in them: civil engineering, public health, anthropology. but even though, we all conduct field work in relation to people, there are significant differences in how we conduct fieldwork and what counts as trustable data. scientific practice within disciplines is built on a foundation of trust; trust is a matter of recognizing another’s judgment, a crucial component of expertise (knorr cetina, 1999). objectivity, and specifically quantification, arose as a solution to the problem posed by the necessity of trusting trained judgment (porter, 1996; daston & galison, 2007). scientists rely on quantification to communicate to non-scientific stakeholders. but what about communicating with other scientists in other fields? this problem is pertinent for ethnographers, whose data tend not to be quantifiable. during the nestsmx team’s trip to mexico city in march 2018, tensions about what counts as data emerged as the anthropologists worked to convey how openended ethnographic encounters could provide useful data. prior to that point, we the anthropologists had extensively explained what ethnography was to the rest original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 13 of the team, shared articles that demonstrated what it involved, and given powerpoint presentations on our prior research.3 the questions our colleagues asked during these presentations reflected their unfamiliarity with ethnography as a research method, and they continued to express the sense that ethnography is “fuzzy.” going to mexico city created new concerns (e.g., why are stories about the illuminati data?). however, experiencing for themselves a shift in their own understanding enabled them to appreciate what ethnography could add. meeting participants and experiencing the place in person—core values of ethnographic work—changed their sense of what ethnography might provide. as a result, they came to trust ethnography more. additionally, up until that point, the project engineers krista rule wigginton and branko kerkez were worried that we were starting the nestsmx water audits without a clear hypothesis. the trip changed their sense of the necessity of having a hypothesis in advance of field work. the visit to just a few households allowed them to appreciate how households’ water management and water storage capacity are extremely different between households. in other words, the engineers were able to change their sense of the purpose of the water audits from hypothesis testing to hypothesis generating. they could then trust the anthropologists’ sense that we could begin fieldwork without a hypothesis. the trip to mexico had different effects on the environmental public health team. up until the point of the 2018 trip, most of the us-based element researchers had only worked with element families through their biological data. they knew people as aggregated numerical values derived from vials of blood, urine, and saliva, and envelopes of fingernail clippings. if individuals are ever analyzed singularly in element, they are identified by a score on a numerical scale. for these researchers, therefore, the experience of meeting element participants as people was novel. meeting people in their homes, interacting with them, and asking them about their lives revitalized the data element had previously captured, and the kinds of questions element researchers considered important to ask going forward. ana benito, the element field manager in mexico city at the time, commented on how although the environmental public health teams had collected biological markers of stress in the past, they had not been in the position to say what that stress related to and what its cause might be; nor could they distinguish different kinds of stress. in contrast, asking people direct questions through face-to-face conversations could resulted in significantly “richer” data. mara, the element pi original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 14 in mexico, described how learning more about participants’ lives through nestsmx has been an “amazing” experience that had already changed her sense of the kinds of questions element could ask in the future. element participants are habitually brought to a clinic for data collection, rather than visited in their own homes. as leading members of element’s team in mexico city, ana and mara had already worked closely with individual element mother-child pairs for over a decade. despite their significant experience interacting personally with participants, the ethnographic encounter enabled them to understand these interactions in new ways. this change stems in part from the novel experience of seeing research subjects in their own homes, rather than the clinic. in effect, this trip provided all the researchers with what donna haraway (1988) and other feminist sts scholars call “situated knowledge,”, where experience shapes how we know the world, including scientists. not only did the researchers’ knowledge increase about how participants’ lives are affected by unpredictable water supply, they also developed an appreciation for how “being there” is an important means to know what research questions to ask. even if ethnographic data is difficult to enumerate at first, there is a value to it. it took being “situated” in homes to appreciate the value of ethnographic data, situated as it is in the complexity of people’s lives and the diversity of household water systems (roberts in press). it is important to stress that it took several years of work on liz’s part to get to the point where the public health and engineering researchers would welcome and value ethnographic methods and visit mexico city with an ethnographer. she had been meeting with, working alongside, and reporting back to element researchers since 2013, and it was through this sustained interaction that she convinced them to consider this new collaboration about water. first, element had to experience liz’s work as useful. for instance, her ethnographic work suggested that element started looking at neighborhood-level data, not only individual-level data to understand health outcomes. to be able to ask new questions about neighborhoods instead of only individuals required substantial, ongoing effort to make environmental public health and ethnography mutually intelligible to each other. in effect, the non-anthropologists in nestsmx only began to trust ethnography as a method when it had proved itself to be capable of producing useful (i.e., reliable) scientific insights for element. when liz approached element researchers in 2013 to propose a year-long ethnography of six element participant families, epidemiologist mara and original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 15 biostatistician brisa were concerned. mara and brisa are now co-pis of nestsmx with liz, but, initially, they worried that such “anecdotal” data might damage the integrity of the larger element research project. i met liz six years ago and she said that her method for research was “hanging out.” i laughed. so, i asked, how many people do you want to study? six families. and the method is hanging out? hah! (mara, august 2018) when liz came and said she wanted to do this study on six families, not only my brain as a statistician was going like, oh wow, the sample size is six? but it was also like, what is this going to open up for element? i do not want this…it was actually element’s pi’s broad vision that said, “yeah, this is kind of cool, let’s see what happens.” at that point, the sample size of six meant that it was a really small risk. this is how i ended up finally saying, “okay. six.” [shrugs.] but the thing is that we have a lot of trust from the participants, from many years of their participation in element, and so i also feel a lot of responsibility. (brisa, august 2018) for brisa, the unreliability of data produced through such small numbers meant less trust on her part, but also less risk if it went wrong. what made ethnography scientifically suspect (its non-statistically adequate sample size) also somewhat mitigated its potential for problems. trusting the ethics of others in nestsmx, we especially began thinking about trust in our collaboration during the process of writing the fieldwork protocols (i.e., the detailed document outlining the research process that would be used by the field team) that would be submitted to the institutional review board (irb) that oversees research to ensure it complies with ethical standards. the process of discussing the specific details of what we would actually do when we were in households, and how we would then make data from these interactions, illuminated the different ways in which each discipline evaluates expertise. specifically, the stem and stem-adjacent researchers had difficulty trusting the trained judgment required to manage and make sense of ethnography—that is, knowledge of living people derived from ongoing open-ended interactions. environmental public health’s model of isolating individual cause-effect factors through statistically robust observational or experimental studies relies on quite different forms of judgment (for instance, about what makes a reliable number) original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 16 and different ethical expectations of the researchers’ relationship with the research subject. similarly, engineers deal with numbers and experimentation. our public health and engineering colleagues found it difficult to imagine deriving “data” from uncontrollable or unpredictable interactions with individuals—such as a man launching into a monologue about the illuminati when the topic at hand is drainage. the multidisciplinary debates we engaged in as we discussed the practical details of our research protocol highlighted the different expectations we had about the relationship between a researcher and an object of inquiry, when that object is another human being. in environmental and public health, there tends to be a separation between the researchers who design the research questions and write the protocol, the administrative staff who write the irb application, and the field staff who interact with participants. in element’s case, some of the researchers are based in another country from the field staff and the study participants (the us versus mexico). socio-cultural anthropologists typically work on their own, collecting and analyzing their own data, and writing their own research design and irb applications. the engineers had extensive experience working with city or neighborhood-level infrastructure, and were used to doing field work abroad. they tended to go into the field to gather their own data, or would work closely with student lab-members who would do the field work. but their fieldwork involved interacting with infrastructure rather than human subjects, or with the material traces of people’s actions (for instance, the waste water they flush away in their houses). for the most part, they do not seek irb approval. when it came to understanding that people are our research objects, there were areas of overlap and difference between the three disciplines. the public health researchers were very attuned to human research subjects, particularly as defined by the irb, but in many cases had never met or talked to a subject. the engineers were used to going into the field to collect their data directly, but generally did not interact with people as official research subjects. the anthropologists were used to working with people directly and thinking of them in irb terms as human subjects, but had no experience taking biological samples like saliva and hair. as a result, while writing the protocol we bumped into each other’s presumptions and concerns surrounding known and unknown people as objects of research. for instance, during our retreat in mexico city, the environmental engineer, krista, was struck by the trust people like leona and samuel placed in liz and the element researchers. “do you worry that you could lose their trust?” she asked. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 17 by which she meant, were we concerned that our research methods relied on a kind of access that could be taken away at any moment, if the research subjects became suspicious or uncomfortable with us? our research subjects had to trust in getting to know them more that we would not harm them; we had to trust that as our subjects got to know us more, they would continue to allow us access. the answer to this question came first from the environmental public health scientists in mexico city who have worked with the element cohort the longest and the most intimately, ana and mara for them, trust is constituted in two ways: through a strict and sincere adherence to institutional ethics requirements (irb in the us and insp’s ethics review board in mexico), and through their long-term relationships with, and knowledge of, participants. these long-term relationships mean that researchers are moved to go beyond the letter of the irb, and into anticipating participants’ needs and interests at every stage of the research design. mara, for instance, is a frequent advocate for participants during nestsmx meetings. she encourages the development of research protocols that can be translated into useful or interesting data for participants, such as blood glucose tests that can immediately give them actionable information. as the birth cohort participants enter adolescence, mara has established ways to look out for mental health issues and connect teenagers with professional psychiatric help, even though this is not a topic covered by any of element’s research projects. the anthropologists, on the other hand, have a different sense of how to establish and maintain trust, which comes from a parallel depth of experience working with people. an anthropologist’s intimate knowledge of the communities under study enables them to anticipate what research subjects would want from their participation. for environmental public health researchers and ethnographers, a trusting relationship between the researcher and research subject is created and maintained through intimate, long-term knowledge and in-person experience, which leads to a long-term practice of care. this implies that trust is a component of intimacy in human subject research. and yet, as we found during the process of writing our irb proposal, intimacy is in conflict with the research subject’s personal privacy as conceptualized by the public health irb. in the environmental public health research world, where biological samples are taken from hundreds of human subjects, respect for privacy means that researchers only circulate anonymized information about participants. privacy/anonymity is understood to be necessary to protect individual human subjects. for element researchers, maintaining anonymity/privacy was an original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 18 ingrained, unquestionable ethical imperative. as such, lab-based researchers who have worked for element for years (in some cases decades) have an intimate knowledge of the element population; but this intimacy is of a specific kind. while mexico city–based researchers like mara and ana meet with participants face to face and know their real names, all other element researchers, particularly those in the us, only encounter participants through the anonymized physical samples of their blood, urine, hair, and finger nails, or through deidentified survey responses and demographic information. these differences point to the non-stable, contextually malleable nature of trust in human subject research. maintaining participants’ trust is based on both intimacy and depersonalization. as mara and ana implied above, when answering krista’s question about participants’ trust, trust depends on researchers like ana having worked for many years to create and maintain in-person relationships with each individual element participant. ana and the team at the clinic where element research is carried out know each participant personally, remember their families, greet them like old friends, and refer to themselves as the aunties of the babies-turned-teenagers they have seen grow up in the project, even if they know very little about participants’ biomarker data (i.e., the results of all the biological tests that are carried). at the same time, trust stems from protecting those same participants’ privacy through practices of de-identification. records never contain real names but rather an identification code, and anonymizing security practices are rigorously adhered to. de-identification ensures that other members of the element team, away from the field site of the clinic, will never know participants intimately or personally. this balance of intimacy and depersonalization is not necessarily a problematic one in the world of public health, or one that lessens the reliability of data. whereas ethnographic data-from-experience was seen by our stem colleagues as problematic, practices of intimacy that buttress participants’ trust make element data more reliable, because participants’ trust leads to a high rate of continued participation in the study. the purpose of a birth cohort study such as element is to understand health at the population level, rather than the individual level: the subject being studied is the population, not the individual. a single individual (or even six) does not “count” as useful data, so even though a personalized, intimate relationship is necessary for maintaining ethical, trusting relationships with participants, de-personalization later down the road does not affect the scientific integrity of the data. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 19 this is not the case in ethnography, where the integrity of our data relies on intimacy and personalized experience (personalized in the sense that the ethnographer gathers data hisor herself, and personalized in the sense that the individual informant matters). ethnographic research methods, including the ethical considerations that are written into ethnographic irbs, are based on evaluating the kinds of risks or benefits that might arise as a result of the ethnographer’s long-term presence in a small group of people’s lives. ethnographers build trust over the long term, and engage in forms of ethical trust-building that can be hard to condense into a standardized list or script. moreover, trust in the ethnographic relationship is predicated on the intimacy of individual relationships, which is the opposite of anonymity. in ethnography, both ethical and epistemic trust arise from intimate knowledge of individuals. trusting how multidisciplinary collaboration change us one of the aspects of nestsmx we, mary and liz, value and believe has enabled it to be successful so far, is that the pi of our multidisciplinary collaboration, liz, and the project postdoc and manager, mary, are feminist anthropologists and sts scholars. anthropologists usually serve as consultants on multidisciplinary collaborations, if they are included at all. in contrast, in nestsmx, feminist anthropologists have set the agenda from the beginning—for instance, by insisting that we do not define “trust” before we start the fieldwork, and we do not go to the field ready to measure trust on a quantifiable scale, but instead we design an open-ended field work methodology that allows trust or mistrust to emerge. additionally, feminist technoscience studies provides a plethora of resources for understanding and managing power dynamics embedded in the production of scientific knowledge, between disciplines and between nations where stem scientists from the global north usually have the most power to set the agenda (cueto, 1989, 2015; dahdouh-guebas et al., 2003; lowe, 2004; anderson, 2002; dasgupta, 2009; gavroglu, 2012; leighton, 2014, 2020). what this has meant in practice, during protocol development and fieldwork, is that mary and liz are somewhat equipped to handle tensions and conflicts between researchers and know how to manage differences in data collection and analysis. as with any anthropological research, our guiding principle is that no one is irrational. we know that when tensions arise about how to proceed it is not because one discipline role (fieldworker/manager) is wrong or right, but because they are situated differently in different research ecologies that shape how data is gathered and knowledge is produced. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 20 we have also modified our own practices, learnt to make peace with numbers, trusting that we will end up with what is still recognizably “anthropological” data (roberts in press). the nestsmx fieldwork involves visiting sixty different families on three occasions, for a few hours each. this is not ethnography in the usual sense—rather, it is a hybrid kind of house-to-house survey with semistructured interviews, and open-ended but time-limited observations. as ethnographers, we are doing “less” than what we normally consider the “gold standard” for making our own data: long-term, immersive, embedded ethnography with a small group of informants. there were practical issues to overcome when moving from the model of single ethnographer to a multidisciplinary team of field researchers, all visiting houses together and producing multiple kinds of data (e.g., water samples, blood samples, semi-structured interviews, maps). in designing the practical organization of the fieldwork data, mary was able to draw on her knowledge of how archaeologists organize large-scale team-based research projects, and codify individual researchers’ embodied experience/tacit knowledge as collectively comprehensible data (leighton, 2016). we use “house forms,” modeled on british archaeologists’ “context forms” (leighton, 2015), that include checkboxes, an area for drawing an annotated map, and prompts to write long-form narrative fieldnotes. each form, photograph, water sample, and blood-lead reading is tracked across a set of databases that mary modeled on the data-organization strategies of archaeologists, with additional help from element’s project managers. in this process, ethnographic socio-cultural anthropology changes, as it takes on the team-based fieldwork practices of archaeology, engineering, and public health. an unspoken assumption is that the data’s quality won’t be damaged by this process—but we have yet to see if we can trust this assumption. from our study of water trust in mexico city neighborhoods and our own multidisciplinary collaboration, we have begun to outline a theory of trust as situated, co-constituted practice and process. trust/distrust emerges from this exploration as something malleable and mutable, seemingly transparent, and yet, on closer inspection, holding together disparate elements (coca-cola, pipes, the illuminati; intimacy, water buckets, depersonalization, experience, irbs, house forms). in this respect, waters—often transparent but also reflective, ubiquitous yet also deceptive, life-giving, or destructive—are the ideal material through which to explore the constitution of an entity as fluid as trust. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 21 acknowledgements we are immensely grateful for the multiple kinds of generous engagement we have received from our colleagues and collaborators as we wrote and revised this paper. funding for nestsmx came from an national science foundation research advanced by interdisciplinary science and engineering (raise) grant. we received invaluable essential guidance and encouragement from deb winslow, our program officer, through an unusually collaborative application process that set the tone for how we “did” collaboration moving forward. rich gonzalez and debbie bourque at the institute for social research at the university of michigan provided essential support both expert and logistical in getting nestsmx off the ground. banu subramanian and michelle murphy suggested we write something for catalyst about our collaborative work, which propelled us to reflect at much greater depth about how feminist technoscience studies informs our knowledge practices in this project and beyond. perrin selcer was an early reader who kindly helped us think through extant sts literatures on expertise and trust. three anonymous reviewers and anne pollack provided us with invaluable feedback and criticisms for deepening our analysis. our nestsmx team members as well as many from element— martha m téllez-rojo, brisa n. sánchez, krista rule wigginton, karen peterson, branko kerkez, deborah watkins, jaclyn goodrich, ana benito, ana cecilia bernal garcía, ernesto martinez, david palma, paloma contreras, alyssa huberts, belinda needham, luis bautisita, laura arboleda, libni torres olascoaga, all provided essential feedback. liz would like to thank the lively working group seminar at kaleidos centro de etnografía interdisciplinaria – in cuenca, ecuador, for comments on a draft, and especially maka suarez’s insightful suggestions. notes 1 element is a longitudinal birth cohort study that has followed mother-child pairs in mexico city since 1994. the study participants come from similar neighborhoods to leona’s. see the study’s website: https://sph.umich.edu/cehc/element/index.html. 2 for details on the project’s origins and ongoing findings, see liz’s project website, mexican exposures: a bioethnographic approach to health and inequality. 3 during the first year of our collaboration, we each gave a half-hour presentation to the rest of the group during our biweekly meetings, to explain our own research discipline and prior research. the presenter also shared short readings from our own discipline. the combination of the collective readings and the introductory https://sph.umich.edu/cehc/element/index.html original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) mary leighton & elizabeth f. s. roberts, 2020 22 lessons was instrumental to helping us understand each other’s discipline better. they were also extremely interesting for everyone involved. references anderson, w. 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(2006). from science and technology to feminist technoscience. in k. david, m. evans, & j. lorber (eds.), handbook of gender and women´s studies (pp. 397– 414). sage. author bios mary leighton is a socio-cultural anthropologist with regional expertise in the united states, mexico, bolivia, and chile. her research explores the stakes of gendered, colonial, and racial inequalities within scientific and educational communities that transverse the us and latin america. elizabeth f.s. roberts is an associate professor of anthropology who teaches medical anthropology and science studies at the university of michigan. her work investigates scientific and public health knowledge production and its embodied effects in latin america and the united states. microsoft word 76571-1-11-alexanderanddavies.docx davies, s., & taylor-alexander, s. (2019). temporal orders and y chromosome futures: of mice, monkeys, and men. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-18. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sharyn davies and sam taylor-alexander, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article temporal orders and y chromosome futures: of mice, monkeys, and men sam taylor alexander monash university, australia sam.taylor-alexander@monash.edu sharyn graham davies aut university, new zealand sharyn.davies@aut.ac.nz abstract we bring together conceptual readings of time and temporality to discuss evolutionary theories of y chromosome degeneration as they are spoken about in scientific and popular forums. in doing so, we suggest that debates over y chromosome degeneration involve a form of abduction – tacking back and forth between different pasts, presents, futures – that frames templates for producing and securing sexed and gendered presents. here we are using ‘sexed’ as a way of talking about physical bodies and ‘gendered’ as social ways of constructing those sexed bodies. we suggest that arguments over y chromosome degeneration are as important for current debates surrounding sex, gender, science, molecular biology and a “crisis of masculinity” as they are for (ascertaining) the future of human evolution. narratives of y chromosome degeneration have caught the attention of scientists and the media alike. from science magazine to bbc and the new york times, stories of the end of man(kind) as we know him have gained a noteworthy place in the contemporary. y chromosome degeneration has davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 been tied to the emergence of a “wimpy,” emasculated new age male. it has been explained in terms of animal evolution studies. in this article we explore developments in dna sequencing and assisted reproductive technologies (arts) that have recently been entangled in debates over y chromosome degeneration in humans. after being identified as the “testis determining chromosome” in humans in the early twentieth century, the y was coded “as male, and as the molecular agent of masculinity in popular and scientific writing on sex chromosomes” (richardson, 2013, p. 82). it is in popular and scientific writings that discussions of the relation between arts and y chromosome degeneration are taking place. for example, following the publication in science of an article called “two y genes can replace the entire y chromosome for assisted reproduction in the mouse” (yamauchi, riel j, stoytcheva z, ward m et al., 2014), popular and academic writers started to reflect on what, if anything, this research might mean for debates over y chromosome degeneration in humans. attending to these debates and reflections, we show that arguments over y chromosome degeneration enfold different sociotechnical and biological timescales. they order and reorder the past, present, and future to “condition understanding[s] of contemporary events and future possibilities” (haraway, 1991: 41) pertaining to production, reproduction, sex, and gender. one of the reasons we became interested in the entangling of y chromosome degeneration debates and the yamauchi study noted above is that they bring together two very different timescales. on the one hand, molecular biologists who push the degeneration hypothesis predict that the human y chromosome will no longer exist in 10 million years. on the other hand, people responding to the yamauchi study raised the possibility of human reproduction without men in the near future (not in 10 million years). hearing and reading commentators ask what the ability to reproduce using two y chromosome genes means for y degeneration debates and the future of men, we began to reflect on the role of, first, time in the making of sex/gender, and, second, how animal studies mediate debates about the future of the y chromosome. indeed, the use of experimental arts in mice, davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 as we show, requires and produces new time schemas. in fact, charis thompson (2005) argues that we need to pay attention to the “ontological choreography” that synchronizes a “large number of relevant kinds of time” that are “layered on top of each other” in art treatment (p. 10). similarly thinking about arts and time, catherine waldby (2015), in her study of egg freezing and the negotiation of future fertility, argues that we need to think critically about the relations of time and biology. she also demonstrates how women use reproductive biotechnology to “reconcile otherwise incommensurable differences” between biology, life course events, and the structure of career development and relationship formation (p. 479). this positioning has implications for the notion that a woman’s biological clock runs out. scholars have pointed to anticipation and dread as central elements of a “politics of temporality” at play in many western societies. such work points to how the conjuncture of technoscience and life makes imperative specific embodied, epistemic forms of labor. as the following quote shows, anticipation takes many forms: key dimensions [of anticipation] are: injunction as the moral imperative to characterize and inhabit states of uncertainty; abduction as requisite tacking back and forth between futures, pasts and presents, framing templates for producing the future; optimization as the moral responsibility of citizens to secure their “best possible futures”; preparedness as living in “preparation for” potential trauma; and possibility as “ratcheting up” hopefulness, especially through technoscience. (adams, murphy, & clarke, 2009, p. 246) scholars have noted the paradox and flip side of anticipation: pessimism and dread. building on her above quoted theorizing with adams and murphy, adele clarke (2016), for instance, asks us to think about anticipation as having a bodily impact that is the “margin of manoeuvrability,” “the margin of possibility and potential movement,” which is always haunted by uncertainty (p. 89). here, uncertainty manifests in a fear of a future where men are emasculated or worse, redundant. davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 below we bring together these conceptual readings of time and temporality to discuss evolutionary theories of y chromosome degeneration as they are spoken about in scientific and popular forums. in doing so, we suggest that debates over y chromosome degeneration involve a form of abduction—tacking back and forth between different pasts, presents, futures—that frames templates for producing and securing sexed and gendered presents. here we are using sexed as a way of talking about physical bodies and gendered as social ways of constructing those sexed bodies. we suggest that arguments over y chromosome degeneration are as important for current debates surrounding sex, gender, science, molecular biology, and a “crisis of masculinity” as they are for (ascertaining) the future of human evolution. evolutionary predictions are constituted with a sense of anticipation in that they ask us to inhabit and produce certain forms of life and ways of being. they are haunted by biosocial and technoscientific uncertainty, by change. they bring to bear questions about our human ability to remake ourselves, and thus open up possibilities about how we should live as sexed and gendered beings. we show how sexual and gendered politics shape popular and academic writers’ reflections on what the yamauchi study might mean for debates over y chromosome degeneration. here attending to the relation between time and biology becomes an entry point for us to unpack sex/gender: it shows how the role of temporal orders (e.g., anticipation) is shaped via-à-vis heteronormative ideas of society, biology, and reproduction as manifest in scientific research. and of the y, time, sex and gender if arts have produced new relations between time, sex, and biology, then research exploring the minimum number of y chromosome genes needed for human reproduction has become a focal point for understanding what our biological and technological present means for sex/gender in the near future. building on scholarship that emphasizes the importance of attending to the situated and sexed and gendered (fausto-sterling, 1989; wilson, 2015) dimensions of biological knowledge, we explore how different davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 temporal orders frame the interrelation of technoscience, gender, sex, and humanity. in scrutinizing the reduction of sex differences to biology, critical theorists of sex and gender have grappled with the interrelation of nature and culture (butler, 1993; fausto-sterling, 2000). in the process, the positioning of gender as a counterpoint to biological reductionism itself became the object of analysis. attributing differences between males and females to cultural factors fails to account for the complex interactions of biology and society, of nature and culture—or naturecultures (haraway, 2003). anne fausto-sterling (2012) argues that the “development of sex and gender in humans is layered” (p.119). she speaks about different sexes that develop in utero—chromosomal sex, fetal hormonal sex, and anatomical sex—as they interact with diverse biological, environmental, and social factors (p. 119). rather than distinct domains, nature and culture are thus coproduced and so are the categories of sex and gender. in the laboratory, for example, studies of sex difference using mice models are mediated by dominant cultural understandings, resulting in what joan fujimura (2006) terms the “awkward surplus” of knowledge that runs counter to prevailing beliefs. in other words, culture and our environment shape our biology, and vice versa. it is to this relationship that we refer when we speak of the coproduction of nature and culture. studies examining y chromosomes often draw on animal studies to make sense of human sex. during the 1990s, the y degeneration debate became a focal point of discussion about both declines in masculinity (those behaviors popularly considered suitable for men) and arguments surrounding the role of gender and sex politics in steering scientific research (richardson, 2013, pp. 149-176). sarah richardson showed how prominent scientists and science writers symbolically linked y chromosome degeneration to “the decline of male social status after feminism” (p. 153). richardson also showed that widespread media interest followed on the back of, and pushed ideas that, environmental, industrial and technological change (including arts) is making men socially and biologically vulnerable. significantly, then, while y degeneration proponents posit it will be around davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 10 million years before the y becomes extinct, the debate itself became linked to contemporary sex/gender relations (i.e., the social status of men) as much as our evolutionary future. moreover, the mammalian y chromosome qua symbol of masculinity has been forged both by the science of chromosomal sex and studies of the y’s role in reproduction. debates over y chromosome degeneration thus concern questions of reproductive time and family time, which are above all heteronormative time/space constructs (halberstam, 2005, p. 10). attending to how arguments over y chromosome degeneration enfold different sociotechnical and biological timescales, and how they arrange the past, present, and future, forced us to think about how time is ordered in the translation of what animal studies mean for human futures. in their study of animal models and reproductive science, carrie friese and adele clarke (2012) use the word “transpose” because it “captures the back and forth relationships between different lines of work, different spaces and different species’ bodies that occur in modelling practices” (p. 34). this use of transpose allows them to explore the frictions that limit such models, and to explore the products that emerge from the relationships between labor, spaces, and bodies. rather than transposing findings between context and species, studies of the y chromosome tie species together or keep them apart. for instance, researchers might argue that we should look at primates versus mammalian species with an xo chromosome formation to understand degeneration due to the evolutionary story these animals allow them to tell. in other words, human futures are built on mice models, and scientists’ narrations are shaped by reproductive politics and heteronormative ideas. we argue, however, that a gendered and sexed politics of temporality undergirds this epistemic labor. by this we mean that what non-human biology means for humans is mediated by temporal orderings, orderings that are mediated by gender and sex politics as investigators carry out and disseminate their research. we ask, (1) how is time “done” in such animal studies, and (2) what is at stake politically in such doing of time? attending to how time is done—which is to say, here, how the past, present, and future davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 are understood in relation to the each other and ordered based on that understanding—we argue provides a further entry point for considering popular and scientific discussions of sex/gender and perhaps even how these discussions shape current gender relations. certainly, these discussions may shape more than gender relations; there is potential to shape other political/social/analytical programs and further research may fruitfully explore such avenues. while charis thompson’s and catherine waldby’s writings quoted above reveal how the actors involved in arts synchronize different kinds of time, our analysis demonstrates how sex/gender norms mediate temporal orders and thus how we understand the present and future of sex/gender. and in exploring this interrelationship, we are, as mentioned above, particularly interested in how and why y chromosome degeneration and experimental arts limiting the number of y chromosome genes needed for reproduction, are spoken about together. to explore this interrelationship further we here give some examples. and of the wimpy y in the introduction to her commentary on the yamauchi mice study noted earlier, professor of cell biology at duke university, blanche capel (2014), tied the study to analysis of y chromosome degeneration: the future of the mammalian y chromosome has been the subject of much speculation. because the sex chromosomes, x and y, do not recombine genetic material through most of their length during meiosis (the process that produces gametes), it is argued that the y chromosome is degenerating, undergoing a rapid evolution that is perhaps leading it down the road to extinction. (p. 32) here capel is directly linking a study of mice to the possible future obsolescence of men. so what actually is this debate about the degeneration of the y chromosome? a useful starting point for understanding the degeneration hypothesis is a debate that took place between two molecular biologists on the stage davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 at the 18th international chromosome conference in manchester, england. the conference was organized in part by daren griffin (2012), a professor of biology at the university of kent. here, we analyze the debate as reported by him. jenny graves of the australian national university took to the stage. across from her was jennifer hughes of the whitehead institute for biomedical research, a non-profit research and teaching center located down the road from, and with strong ties to, harvard university and mit. on the agenda was a formal debate between the two biologists. the issue of contention was “whether the mammalian y chromosome, a symbol of masculinity in both the scientific and popular press, is doomed in evolutionary terms” (griffin, 2012, p. 36). agreed upon was that the mammalian y chromosome has mutated significantly over the last few hundred million years, becoming smaller and smaller in the process. what was questioned was whether such genetic degeneration, which could result in the disappearance of the y chromosome (and “man” as we know him), will continue or “whether it has reached a point of equilibrium where it can go no further” (p. 35). graves argued her long-standing position: the y chromosome will eventually disappear. to illustrate this point graves noted that the human x chromosome is a good-sized chromosome, bearing approximately one thousand genes that code for proteins. graves calls these genes the “brains and balls genes.” in contrast, the “wimpy” y chromosome is for graves a “genetic wasteland,” full of “junk”: it bears only forty-five genes and these genes code proteins that are active almost exclusively in the testis. according to graves, the y chromosome has “gone crazy,” and is subject to inefficient variation, which has left it vulnerable to degradation. adding to this inherent vulnerability is the fact that there “is practically nothing left of the original human y [chromosome] and the added part of the human y is degrading rapidly” (griffin, 2012, p. 39). graves’s exposition of y chromosome degeneration inverts the gendered qualities often attributed to the x and y chromosome; the “male” chromosome is unstable, crazy, davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 inefficient while the “female” chromosome contains genetic information crucial to reproduction and intelligence. an opposing side of the debate was presented by the us-based hughes, who used recent data from primate studies conducted by the whitehead institute to rebut graves’s claims. comparing the y chromosome of the rhesus macaque, a monkey that shares a common ancestor with homo sapiens, with the human y chromosome, led hughes to suggest that the latter has lost only one gene over this timeframe. in response to hughes, graves reiterated that the human y chromosome originally had 1,400 genes but that only forty-five genes are currently present, and moreover that these remaining genes are highly degraded. the rhesus macaque’s y chromosome, she stated, contains twenty genes that match with the genes on its x chromosome. nineteen of these twenty genes found on the rhesus macaque’s y chromosome are the same as the genes found in the contemporary human y chromosome (griffin, 2012). in other words, graves argued that only forty-five genes are left on the macaque’s y chromosome. in contrast, hughes argued that while humans and macaques share nineteen genes, humans have only lost one chromosome in the 25 million years since the two species shared a common ancestor. human y chromosome loss was thus presented by hughes as being slow relative to other species. the implication here being that men are in no danger of losing any of their y chromosome and hence their manliness, and masculinity was not under threat. each biologist was given further time to get their point across. graves focused her attention on the pitfalls of examining primates for the purposes of discussing the future of the y chromosome. drawing on research into mammalian species that have an xo chromosome formation, rather than just an x or y, her argument was that “in analyzing the relationship between primates, we are looking at a very tiny evolutionary interval and that we need to consider the issue in a broader evolutionary context” (griffin, 2012, p. 42). for graves, 100 million years is a tiny evolutionary interval. in response, hughes argued that gene conversion can preserve the y chromosome. gene conversion is the process where one dna sequence davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 replaces another sequence such that the sequences become identical after the conversion event. to demonstrate her point that conversion “will swiftly remove ys that contain mutated copies of genes that play important roles in male fertility,” hughes drew on recent studies from population genetics and simulation modeling that indicate “even low levels of gene conversion are sufficient to maintain the integrity of y-linked genes” (griffin, 2012, p. 43). in other words, while graves argues that we are reaching the end of man, hughes argues that through technological developments the y, and hence man, can be saved. while both scholars seek to learn from other mammalian life forms to understand the future of homo sapiens, their analysis diverges not only because of the evidence they call on but also due to how they locate and understand that evidence in time. the speakers’ disagreement was mediated by the temporalities of evolutionary science. in other words, the speakers disagreed because graves was looking at evolution over billions of years while hughes was looking at only a few million years. how we view evolution in time shapes how we talk about the future of human beings. also, the two scientists were looking at different species and different species tell a different story of the evolution of gender/sex, and present a different idea of the present and future of human beings. despite these different arguments, it is possible to see how temporalities mediate questions of what we can learn from our non-human companions. in this incarnation of the y chromosome debate, our similarity and difference to other mammalian species is rendered through the temporalities of biological evolution. it is the question of the speed of y chromosome degeneration that graves and hughes ultimately disagree on: has degeneration slowed to the point of standstill or will it continue until the y becomes an o? moreover, rather than requiring the “transposition” or “extrapolation” of animal studies to make sense of human life, what took place in this debate was the coupling of human to non-human through the enactment of evolutionary time and the enactment of biology. epistemic disagreements were mediated inter alia by different readings of the relationship between biology and time and by how to understand biological davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 11 pace. speed and pace are important to anticipation; they open differing futures and presents. in one future, the y chromosome is stable; in the other it is degenerating. in their corresponding presents, the stable y can (and has) been associated with a form of relief that men are not becoming reproductively redundant. in the present associated with the degenerating y chromosome, the symbol of maleness is “wimpy,” containing a few necessary genes but otherwise replete with “junk” dna (richardson, 2013, pp. 149-151). in this latter reading, men are envisaged as being/becoming wimpy and redundant. and of mice so, what have experimental art studies in mice got to do with any of this? principle investigator in the yamauchi study (2014), monika ward of the university of hawai’i, explained her mouse research in an interview with jon stewart (2013) of the bbc: to make a male, essentially, we need one gene, this is the [sex-] determining gene sry. what we were interested in in the lab was to study the function of y chromosome genes. we wanted to find out what is the minimum from the y chromosome that we need when we apply so-called assisted reproductive technologies, when we help sperm to fertilize [eggs]. we were able to show that we can minimize contribution of the y chromosome to only two genes, the testis-determining gene sry and another gene [eif2s3y]. an outspoken critic of graves’s thesis that the y chromosome is degrading, ward was quick to use the bbc interview to clarify that her research did not mean there would be no human males in the future. moreover, when asked if and how the study feeds the debate on gene disappearance, she offered the following observation: what we have shown is that yes, we can eliminate most of the y chromosome and use only two genes out of it but only with assisted reproduction. and for normal processes, for normal [read heterosexual] reproduction i think the genes on the y chromosome davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 12 are really needed. research from my lab and from other groups clearly indicates this: when we have other genes then the sperm function disappears, the sperm number decreases, the motility is poor, so clearly these individuals that have the y chromosome missing become infertile, which kind of emphasizes the fact that these genes are needed. in noting that it is possible to “eliminate most of the y chromosome,” ward emphasizes that her laboratory is not seeking to engineer a new form of nature (without men) but to develop a reproductive technology. in doing so, she went on to equate normal male biological process with sperm function and levels. she also noted that male fertility declines when the number of genes decrease because the other genes on the chromosome are needed to produce fertile progeny. in such statements, ward’s research findings introduce a contradiction: y chromosome genes are needed but it is possible to have mammalian reproduction without them. this contradiction was further highlighted as the interview continued. for instance, although insistent on the importance of the y chromosome, when the radio show host jon stewart asked if her work foreshadows a time where human reproduction is possible without men, ward was dismissive of the prospect while being unable to rule out completely the potential of such a future: i can’t see this happening really at the present; it is still more of a science fiction kind of thing. we would have never thought it possible ever to conceive a child in a tube or a petri dish twenty or thirty years ago, so who knows what will happen. but i would like to believe that the y chromosome is needed, and we are by no means trying to eliminate men from this world. (emphasis added) echoing her earlier comments, ward engages in her own form of boundary work by distinguishing her research and science fiction. she follows this distinction with a speech act that works to maintain extant biological and sociotechnical orders: although “by no means trying to eliminate men from this world,” she is unable to rule out a future where human reproduction is possible without sperm or the y chromosome itself. moreover, ward is davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 13 unable to deny her role in producing this potential future. if “boundary work” speaks to how boundaries are produced between domains such as science and non-science, politics and society, human and non-human (braidotti, 2013; gieryn, 1991; haraway, 1988), then this example points to the productive dimensions of the moral and epistemic dimensions of anticipation engaged in by people like ward. we can see here the “abducting” nature of anticipation that we referred to earlier. here, ward is a boundary-making subject: inhibiting states of uncertainty as she reflects on pasts, presents, and futures, all the while leaving open future possibilities and preparing the listener for a (traumatic) future where men are not needed in human reproduction. occupying a “margin of possibility and potential movement” (clarke, 2016, p. 89), ward constructs boundaries between science and science fiction, and between the present and future, by placating listeners that her aim is not to replace men. and of sex/gender futures in the 2013 munk debates, new york times columnist maureen daud (2013) remarked, “so now that women don’t need men to reproduce and refinance, the question is, will we keep you around? and the answer is, ‘you know we need you in the way we need ice cream — you’ll be more ornamental.’” in this brief paper, we have addressed two key questions: (1) how is time “done” in y chromosome studies and (2) what is at stake politically in such doing of time? in terms of how time is done, we showed that debates around the y chromosome are given specific dimensions according to how they are talked about in time. for instance, when proponents of the y degeneration theory posit it will be around 10 million years before the y becomes extinct, the debate gets tied to contemporary human relations just as much as to an evolutionary future. ongoing disagreements about the evolutionary degeneration of the y chromosome hinge on the temporalities of biology. further, as different animals avail themselves to different enactments of time, they are each asked to say something different about the present sexed status of humankind. scientists davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 14 reconstitute the evolutionary past and societal future of humankind by enrolling isolated genes and other species’ bodies into their experiments of the y chromosome. they search our “natural” evolutionary history and experiment with technologically mediated futures, and in doing so challenge the meaning and necessity of men and sex. it is in this tying of the evolutionary to contemporary sex/gender relations where the political stakes become clear. the evolutionary possibility of y chromosome depletion and men becoming obsolete ignites political projects. actively working on mice in the present, ward and her colleagues perform “sex itself” (richardson, 2013) as a biological reality by locating on the y chromosome (at least two) genes that are necessary for reproduction. for what reason would ward need to appease people that her project did not show the end of men’s reproductive role other than to quell political fears among lay people and potential research funders that the future of men is in jeopardy? a future of wimpy men is not what society wants to hear, we suspect. here we have built on studies that demonstrate how reproductive technoscience reorders the relation between time and biology to show how the political inflects biological debates, revealing how popular and scientific discussions of sex/gender align with contemporary concerns of heteronormative reproduction. debates over y chromosome degeneration involve a form of abduction—a tacking back and forth between different pasts, presents, futures—that frames templates for producing and securing gendered time/space. we thus note that arguments over y chromosome degeneration and arts are as important for current debates surrounding gender, sex, science, molecular biology, and a “crisis of masculinity” as they are for (ascertaining) the future of human evolution. we end here by demonstrating how the debate about time and genetics has current gender implications. while graves and others talk about the y chromosome perhaps eventually dying out, popular media distils this into often alarmist headings about the failure of men. here we note three gender implications. men are failing to reproduce. in 2018, the daily mail reported that soybeans could make men infertile, and that the “average sperm count of a davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 15 european male has dropped by a quarter over the past 25 years” (chapman, 2018). greg hampikian (2012) quipped in the new york times, “men, who needs them? if all the men on earth died tonight, the species could continue on frozen sperm. if the women disappear, it’s extinction.” men are failing to achieve. in 2015, the washington post reported an all too common story of the educational gap: “poor boys are falling behind poor girls, and it’s deeply troubling” (guo, 2015). jeff guo continued, “for every generation since the boomers, women have been more likely than men to earn high school and college diplomas.” men are just failing. in her article titled “man down: the attack on american masculinity,” sharon ambrose (2014) noted that “thanks to modern science, men are not even essential for procreation. in a culture where women are encouraged to be empowered and independent in the workplace and at home, men are left searching for their place in society and boys don’t know where to turn, which can lead to devastating effects.” and men are just so last century: “they seem to have stopped evolving, sulking like achilles in his tent [struggling] to figure out the altered parameters of manliness and resist becoming house-dudes” (daud, 2013). the chromosome debate that scientifically traverses millions of years and multispecies is collapsed in popular media and distilled to create fear and anxiety about the current place and contribution of men. this distillation directly influences public policy, be it in education, health, or research on the humble soya bean. this distillation also inflames reactive debate with assertions of “let’s show ’em what real men are really like.” but the questioning of man as we know him also spurs productive discussions, such as those around the #metoo campaign, and can result in significant challenge to the sex/gender order in some sectors of society. some women, for instance, are feeling empowered to speak out about past sexual abuses by men, as the 2018 cross-examination of supreme court candidate brett kavanagh has showed. the spinoff effects of the #metoo campaign have also included challenges to various sexual, class, and gender politics that are bringing justice to some. further, these changes and challenges have resulted in prestige being attached to being a “house dude”—such as the davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 16 (unmarried) partner of new zealand prime minister jacinda ardern who is excited about being a “house dude” and stay-at-home dad and does not feel threatened about this brave new world (cardwell, 2018). maybe the end of man debate is just foreclosing one type of man while opening endless possibilities for others. here, we hope to have illustrated ways in which the analytical vocabulary employed across this article is playing out in contemporary social life. acknowledgements thank you to the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their incredibly helpful and insightful comments. references adams, v., murphy, m., & clarke, a. e. 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(2016). anticipation work: abduction, simplification, hope. in g. c. bowker, s. timmermans, a. e. clarke, & e. balka (eds.), boundary objects and beyond: working with leigh star (pp. 85-120). cambridge, ma: mit press. daud., m. (2013, november 5). gender in the 21st century: be it resolved, men are obsolete... munk debates. retrieved from https://www.munkdebates.com/the-debates/gender-in-the-21st-century fausto-sterling, a. (1989). life in the xy corral. women's studies international forum, 12(3), 319-331. fausto-sterling, a. (2000). sexing the body: gender politics and the construction of sexuality. new york, ny: basic books. fausto-sterling, a. (2012). sex/gender: biology in a social world. new york: routledge. friese, c., & clarke, a. e. (2012). transposing bodies of knowledge and technique: animal models at work in reproductive sciences. social studies of science, 42(1), 31-52. fujimura, j. h. (2006). sex genes: a critical sociomaterial approach to the politics and molecular genetics of sex determination. signs, 32(1), 49-82. gieryn, t. (1991). cultural boundaries of science: credibility on the line. chicago, il: university of chicago press. griffin, d. k. (2012). is the y chromosome disappearing? – both sides of the argument. chromosome research, 20(1), 35-45. guo, j. (2015, november 23). poor boys are falling behind poor girls, and it’s deeply troubling. the washington post. retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/why-girls-doso-much-better-than-boys-in-school/?utm_term=.b983a31e3893 halberstam, j. (2005). in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. new york, ny: nyu press. hampikian, g. (2012, august 25). men, who needs them? the new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/opinion/menwho-needs-them.html davies and taylor-alexander catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 18 haraway, d. (1988). simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of knowledge. new york, ny: routledge. haraway, d. (2003). the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago, il: prickly paradigm press. richardson, s. s. (2013). sex itself: the search for male and female in the human genome. chicago, il: university of chicago press. stewart, j. (2013). the demise of men? bbc science in action. retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01lz3d2 waldby, c 2015, 'the oocyte market and social egg freezing: from scarcity to singularity', journal of cultural economy, 8(3), 275-291. wilson, e. a. (2015). gut feminism. durham, nc: duke university press. yamauchi, y., riel jm, stoytcheva z, ward ma. (2014). two y genes can replace the entire y chromosome for assisted reproduction in the mouse. science, 343(6166), 69-72. bios sam taylor alexander is a researcher at monash university. sharyn graham davies is associate professor at aut university and researches gender and sexuality.     book review book review | misogynoir transformed: black women’s digital resistance, by moya bailey (nyu press, 2021)     banu subramaniam university of massachusetts amherst banu@wost.umass.edu     when i arrived in the united states over thirty years ago, almost overnight, i had to reckon with a new identity as a woman of color, and thus contend with the complex histories of race in the united states. thankfully, there was a rich and evocative literature. i avidly read the brilliant work of women of color in the united states. striking was their commitment to a generative vision—a global vision, centering and including diasporic and transnational feminisms. it helped me situate my own experiences as a new third-world immigrant. while there are too many authors and books to name, one memorable title was all the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave, the edited collection by akasha gloria hull, patricia bell scott, and barbara smith, published in 1982. in sixteen words, the title encapsulated the central problem of women of color, the invisibility, indeed erasure experienced at the intersections of sexism and racism. until now! moya bailey’s “misogynoir” does this even more succinctly in just one word. without doubt, in the tradition of these earlier works, bailey’s work is a tour de force that will be a classic that sets the terms of the debates and describes the complex politics of the contemporary moment, in particular black women’s digital resistance. it lays out new ground theoretically, methodologically and epistemologically. misogynoir is a term bailey coined in 2008 in her dissertation, where she sought to capture the combination of misogyny with noir/black (noir from film noir). it is a brilliant coinage that is a portmanteau of terms and terminologies that captures the centrality of anti-black misogyny and the experiences of black women, which she describes as “the uniquely co-constitutive racialized and sexist violence that befalls black women as a result of their simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersection of racial and gender marginalization” (1). bailey begins the book with sarah baartman, introducing early on that misogynoir is a global and trans-historical phenomenon where a history of racialized cis-heteropatriarchy has defined the normative bounds of representations of “black women.” bailey also establishes early on that when she talks about black women, she means to privilege queer and trans black women as well black nonbinary, agender, gender-variant folks’ work and voices. in a wonderful moment in the book, and one that should be a mantra for all of us, she begins with a powerful challenge: “i challenge you, dear reader, as you read this text, to think of ‘black women’ first when you see the word ‘woman,’ to think of queer and trans women first when you read the term ‘black women’” (20). indeed, as she convinces us all throughout the book, the world would be a better place if we all did that. in the introduction, bailey thoroughly explains and explores the power of misogynoir, demonstrating to the reader its considerable utility across a wide spectrum of academic and social spaces. bailey, an activist at heart, explains that she did not want to write a book that chronicles the expansive terrain of misogynoir, which would only reinforce the much pathologized and abject figure of the black woman. rather, bailey focuses on black women’s resistance, “alternate representations created by black women as counterpublic productions that trouble stereotypical depictions” (1). what emerges is the organized, committed, and, most importantly, successful world of black women’s resistance—a virtual community that works with each other through camaraderie and collaboration challenging anti-black misogynoir each day. the rest of the book is devoted to ethnographically rich accounts of such resistance—some of the case studies may be familiar to many, but bailey adds rich detail and complex analyses that make you revisit the cases through the nuanced lenses of the histories and politics of misogynoir. it transforms how you see the world. anyone who has lived through the immense power of the black lives movement in recent years understands how much work goes into such organizing. this did not happen overnight. bailey chronicles the years of resistance and world-making by black women that made this moment possible. she helps us understand the immense work done in digital and virtual worlds that ushered in a visible and passionate social movement onto our streets. in short, black women are digital alchemists. in four ethnographically nuanced and narrative-rich chapters, bailey gives us a close look at the makings of digital alchemy. she takes us through the worlds of black women’s digital campaigns, shows, videos, interviews, and the lively spaces of twitter, tumblr, and youtube to document the engaged resistance of social digital sphere. in rich detail, she describes may examples of black women’s digital alchemy. for example, she describes the emergence of the hashtag #ruinablackgirlsmonday, which featured posts of images of white women with round butts, ample chests, and long hair, and the suggestion that these images would ruin a black girl’s day because the white women had features that black women were assumed to solely possess. many such images perpetuate age-old stereotypes of black women. bailey describes how black women took on these images with wit, satire, and anger. some of these are truly brilliant! she explores how the frame of misogynoir can help analyze viral videos such as “shit black girls say.” bailey explores why and how janet mock’s widely popular hashtag #girlslikeus continues to be an important digital space for trans women to connect with each other. similarly, the digital campaign to #frecece mcdonald, a black trans woman incarcerated for the accidental death of one of her attackers during a racist transphobic incident. bailey takes us through the youtube video campaigns and support blogs that reframe the story to expose misogynoir. she documents the proliferation of black queer women’s youtube series such as skye’s the limit, between women, and 195 lewis that focus on the health and well-being of black women. there is much that characterizes bailey’s work. first, she is a beautiful storyteller. she pulls you into the story and takes you through the narrative plot with ease and great skill. indeed, she makes the scenes come alive. second, even stories that are familiar to you take on new nuance as she adds details that were not highlighted in the more familiar mainstream media accounts. third, she deploys her critical analytical skills and tools of misogynoir in each case to help us understand the complex terrain and historical precedents that make events unfold as they do. each story is a brilliant case study in misogynoir and the wisdom of black feminisms. finally, and this is most creditable, she does this with deep empathy and care. bailey makes clear early on that not all black women are feminists, or all feminists, black women. sometimes key characters make problematic political decisions. rather than overtly condemning these decisions and taking a moral high ground, bailey works through their decisions and in the process explains the complex terrain of politics. she always writes with solidarity for those doing the tough work of fighting misogynoir. this is work that provides a model of engaged scholarship. it eschews easy boundaries of theory/practice, theory/storytelling, and instead deftly interweaves the complexity of black feminisms into a compelling and illuminating book. i have little doubt that this book will provide a model for all of us for years to come. it is also the kind of work i want my students to read, because it demonstrates the best of what feminist scholarship offers. after one hour of a women, gender, sexuality studies course, my students yearn for praxis (annoyingly!) . it takes effort to have students understand that activism without understanding the complexities of history can do more harm than good. good intentions are not enough. bailey demonstrates this brilliantly. at the same time she is deeply interdisciplinary, theoretically nuanced, ethnographically rich, methodologically varied, and politically astute. bailey demonstrates the power of the digital space; there are no sites of innocence here. this book is a model for feminist scholarship, of how we can and must integrate feminist theory with engaged practice. i look forward to teaching this book. it is immensely engaging and covers terrain that students are familiar with. by centering black women, she challenges many assumptions, and reframes the world in critically important ways. the book accomplishes so much of the work we are all trying to do in our classrooms. it will prove an incomparable companion in our teaching. by focusing on the digital space, bailey chronicles both how misogynoir has persisted but also mutated into new digital forms. it indeed takes the digital alchemy to fight the ongoing violence that marks anti-black misogyny. in exploring the complex roots and forms of racism and sexism, bailey draws on the continued wisdom of the combahee river collective (1977) when they say, “if black women were free, it would necessitate the freedom of all people because it would require the destruction of all systems of oppression because black women experience all of them” (215). black feminist thinkers ground so much of feminist studies. to this rich legacy we can add the wisdom and brilliance of moya bailey and the power of fighting misogynoir.   references the combahee river collective. (1977) 2015.. “a black feminist statement.” in this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color, fourth edition, edited by cherríe moraga and gloria anzaldúa. 210-218. new york: suny press. hull, akasha gloria, patricia bell scott, barbara smith, eds. 1982. all the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave: black women’s studies. old westbury, ny: feminist press.     author bios banu subramaniam is a professor of women, gender, sexuality studies at the university of massachusetts, amherst. pape, madeleine, karkazis, katrina, latham, j. r., & ritz, stacey a (2020). resisting and remaking sex in the petri dish, the clinic, and on the track. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–17. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © madeleine pape, katrina karkazis, j. r. latham, & stacey a. ritz, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license resisting and remaking sex in the petri dish, the clinic, and on the track madeleine pape university of lausanne madeleine.pape@unil.ch katrina karkazis emory university katrina.karkazis@emory.edu j. r. latham deakin university and university of melbourne textual.gore@gmail.com stacey a. ritz mcmaster university ritzsa@mcmaster.ca abstract assemblages of sex are continuously being enacted by policymakers, scientists, and medical providers across a range of settings, resulting in multiple and often contradictory notions of what “sex” is and how it is expressed in the body. as feminist scholars have shown, such enactments are mutable yet resilient, often with the net effect of restricting how “sex” can emerge as a material dimension of lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 2 our embodied, lived experiences. what happens when feminist scholars seek to intervene in order to promote more complex, entangled, dynamic, and just enactments of “sex” in policy and practice? this lab meeting gathers interdisciplinary scholars to reflect on their experiences of pursuing change in the laboratory, the gender clinic, and on the athletics track. introduction action is the call of the moment. this lab meeting, envisioned before the recent upwelling of organized resistance to anti-black racism in the united states (u.s.) and elsewhere, takes action as its subject. for the three interdisciplinary scholars interviewed here, the focus of resistance is the institutionally entrenched enactment of “sex” as a presumed biological, binary, and rigid form of embodied difference—one asserted as capable of escaping the clutches of gender to exert its own independent effects on human (and nonhuman) bodies. static and ahistorical, such enactments also conceal how sex as a categorical schema is coconstructed with ideologies of race and put to work in service of white and western imperialism, a dynamic that black feminist theorists in particular have brought to the fore (bailey, 2016; collins, 2004; fausto-sterling, 1995; hammonds, 1997; holloway, 2011; magubane, 2014; markowitz, 2001; stepan, 1991). as feminist scholars have frequently shown, sex does not precede but is enacted through the actions of its practitioners (fausto-sterling, 2000; karkazis, 2008; latham, 2019; oudshoorn, 1994; richardson, 2013; ritz, 2017). the protagonists in our overlapping realms of research and activism are laboratory scientists, medical providers, and policymakers. their collective practices bring sex into existence not merely as an assigned category but as an ontological entity that can be modeled in a petri dish or lab mouse, molded in the gender clinic to repatriate the trans body and establish the gender binary anew, or reduced to a single trait (e.g., testosterone) and then measured to regulate inclusion in international sports competitions (jordan-young & karkazis, 2019; pape, 2019; ritz, 2017). these multiple enactments of sex succeed in hanging together as an apparent whole only because of the singular ideology that underpins them (latham, 2017b). the laboratory, medical clinic, and athletics track can each be considered a locus of practice in a larger interconnected landscape: spaces where sex comes to matter, materially and ideologically, in ways that are both local and specific yet also have far-reaching consequences. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 3 practitioners must invest considerable time in defining what sex is, precisely because sex is not straightforward (karkazis, 2019a). this complexity is not limited to intersex and trans embodiments: ever the “trickster” (haraway, 1988, p. 593), sex in all its manifestations evades the imposition of a neat, binary frame. a prime example is the sex as a biological variable (sabv) policy effort of the us national institutes of health (clayton & collins, 2014). the mandate initially sought to require the use of both “female” and “male” models in cell-based research. in practice, this task has proven undoable because “sex” is not a stable, dichotomous property that follows cells from their source to the petri dish (ritz, 2017; see also sabv policy discussion in catalyst lab meeting joel et al., 2015; richardson et al., 2015). the stakes are high, as evidenced by the decision of the us department of health and human services in june 2020 to reverse protections for transgender people established under the affordable care act. the decision appeals to science in claiming that “sex” is a static, strict, and uncontroversial binary: “sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth” (green et al., 2018; for critique see nature, 2018). while contestation of such enactments is proliferating, the institutional response is frequently one of doubling down and mutation. in the case of sport, for example, the frontline has expanded from the court of arbitration for sport in lausanne, switzerland, to local jurisdictions such as the state legislature of idaho in boise, with “sex” assembled yet again in an effort to exclude trans people from sport (see cas, 2015, 2019; idaho state legislature, 2020). how can these indeterminate yet resilient enactments of sex be challenged to make room for more inclusive, dynamic, and complex understandings of “sex,” including its entanglements with “gender” as well as ideologies of race and nation? i convened this lab meeting as a researcher who repeatedly observes feminist technoscience scholars excluded from decision-making tables and denied expertise in moments when sex as an emergent ontological entity hangs in the balance (see for example pape, 2019). as a sociologist who studies policy enactments of sex in biomedicine and sport, i invited cultural anthropologist katrina karkazis (emory university, us), queer theorist j. r. latham (deakin university and university of melbourne, australia), and immunologist stacey ritz lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 4 (mcmaster university, canada) to share what is common and distinct about their experiences of taking action to resist and reconfigure the systems that uphold oppressive ontologies of sex, and which do so always in intersection with the violent processes of capitalism and racialization that characterize the settler colonial societies in which each of us are embedded. madeleine: could each of you say a little about your realms of action: where you’re encountering enactments of sex and the kinds of activism or change efforts you’ve being pursuing? stacey: i come from a background as a biomedical scientist where i worked in labbased research for over fifteen years using animal models and cell cultures. as a grad student, i had a nascent feminist consciousness and was alert to the importance of thinking about sex and gender in that context. although feminist theories and concepts around sex and gender were compelling and galvanizing for me, it was less clear how i should translate their nuances and complexities into the concrete context of the lab. i felt a real dissonance and disconnect there. over the years i’ve moved away from the lab work itself and into the space of operationalizing sex in lab-based research as my main area of scholarly research, trying to bridge that gap. i’m also engaged with the policy shifts and directives from major funding agencies about what lab-based researchers should be doing to consider sex and gender. it is particularly concerning to me that sex and gender here have primarily been constructed around a female/male binary, taking for granted that this is a clear and important distinction. researchers and policymakers also endorse an artificial separation of sex and gender, with the ensuing interpretation that if you're not using human subjects, you can just ignore gender. joe: i suppose i come to this work as a...patient? sort of...wow! i’ve never introduced myself as a “patient” before!...i guess because that’s so discrediting, isn’t it? katrina: what makes your work really powerful, joe, but also potentially draining, is something i don’t encounter. i write about clinical encounters as someone who’s on the outside of those encounters, but in the clinic, the patient's multiple identities, roles, and knowledges can get flattened. you have both a patient perspective and a feminist sts lens, but i feel as though in that clinical moment, only one of those identities is elevated, and that is the patient identity. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 5 joe: thank you so much, katrina. yeah, it’s not that i came to this work as a patient…i started my phd researching trans sexualities, or trying to, and realizing that because of how medicine considers trans people––as being sick with the illness of hating one’s own sex, a disorder that can be remedied via a package of medical interventions that produce a “complete sex change”––it followed that the sexual lives and healthcare needs of trans people were not only poorly understood, but were hardly even considered worthy of research. doctors seemed to think that trans people don’t have sex, by which i mean fucking, unless they have had genital surgery (and everything else) first. and that’s simply not the case, obviously. but this way of thinking meant that all kinds of clinical research, especially on sexual health, just didn’t exist. for instance, if you assume that trans men don’t have sex, or don’t have sex with other men, including men who are not trans, then you’re missing an awful lot. i had to pivot my research to deal with that absence. so, i think about how “sex” and sexuality operate in practices of transgender medicine, how we understand sex more broadly because of how it is enacted by medicine, and how we might intervene to make these usually difficult, expensive, and prejudicial processes more just, accessible, and equitable. katrina: i came to academia because i wanted to solve problems in the world that i saw. traditional academic analysis and writing is one tool for achieving what i want to do, but it can’t be the only one. over the past twenty years, i’ve focused on two areas where the harms are tied to the concept of sex: medical responses to intersex and sex testing in sport. i'm trying to disrupt how sedimented ideas about “sex” become institutionalized in systems with power, and how that sanctioning does violence to people, and how that violence can then in turn be obscured by medical and scientific authority to make truth claims. madeleine: what strategies have been effective for you? katrina: the first step is always the research and analysis to understand the issue, the arguments being made (and the assumptions about gender and bodies that undergird them), and the problems these raise for actual people. from there, and partnering with activists, i find ways to disseminate evidence and counterarguments and to exert pressure to change practices and policies, including writing op-eds, lobbying, convening, bringing court cases, testifying, presenting at grand rounds, and giving other talks. earlier on my process was more ad hoc, but it’s less opaque to me now; i feel like i have a more intuitive lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 6 sense of what to do. the work behind the scenes is critical, but so is the media [see, for example, jordan-young & karkazis, 2012; karkazis, 2019b & 2019c]. i’ve spent a lot of time cultivating media relationships and talking to journalists and so much of this has happened via twitter. stacey: probably the moments where i have felt most effective are the opportunities to speak directly to lab scientists and offer some key examples where implementing a female/male binary fails to reflect crucial mechanisms within the phenomenon, or illustrating how gender is relevant to one’s analytical and interpretive framework even if you’re using experimental animals or cells. these are moments of dialogue where i can respond directly to the specific issues of concern or questions a scientist has. one of my favorite examples to use in these discussions is work by karen messing investigating a gender disparity in shoulder injury amongst [diesel] mechanics, which found that the issue wasn’t sex so much as height [courville et al., 1991]. shorter mechanics were at risk. women were overrepresented amongst those with shoulder injuries because they are shorter on average. any intervention based on sex would have missed the point entirely and put shorter men at risk. joe: i might have to get back to you on that one…[laughs]. i suppose you might say i have inserted myself into medical discussions that exclude both feminist analysis and patient experiences...[see latham, 2017a]. madeleine: policymakers and stakeholders frequently appear unreceptive to the notion that recognizing the complexity of “sex” can in fact advance gender equity, rather than undermine it. how have you encountered this issue and how do you make sense of it? stacey: a number of years ago i had an encounter with a pretty prominent scholar of sts where i was making the argument that there is no “male” hela cell, there is no “female” a549 cell, and there never will be in a meaningful way. this scholar put to me, “if you're only studying this ‘male’ a549 cell, aren't you ignoring women?” and sort of challenging me, suggesting implicitly that i was anti-feminist by resisting this. i wasn’t able to formulate a good answer in the moment, but it prompted a lot of deliberation. in hindsight i was able to articulate that one single cell line doesn’t represent “men” either: they are cells from one person’s body, cultured under artificial conditions for decades. cultured cells in vitro, especially transformed cell lines, are never going to be good models for “sex” or “gender,” lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 7 and like all model systems, we have to be alert to their limitations [ritz, 2017]. katrina: sorry to do this, but someone like j. k. rowling hears what you just said about sex, stacey, which is something that i would say as well, and thinks we're saying that sex isn't “real.” this is not what we are saying, but this is how it is interpreted, perhaps opportunistically. a key challenge is how to communicate what is evident to us as gender theorists or feminist sts scholars in a way that penetrates and shifts these stale debates. someone recently dismissed my work by saying that i am not a good scholar, which is disingenuous because they didn’t even engage with my ideas, but this is what we're up against: the idea that we’re saying sex isn’t real when what we’re doing is drawing on theory and science to complicate ideas about sex; that our work is shoddy for challenging commonsense ideas; and that we're anti-feminist, or anti-woman for doing so, none of which are true. joe: [sighs] indeed. i think a part of our challenge is that, in our critiques, people feel as though we are undermining their very sense of themselves. sex is a fundamental way we understand who we are. for instance, i know that my mere presence can be confronting for nontrans men. i see it. i can shake their very core sense of themselves as men. it is impossible to have a “rational” conversation about the complexities of sex with someone who feels like that: they feel attacked, they get defensive, and we see that play out over and over again. madeleine: and that raises the question of who is recognized as having legitimate expertise in these spaces, and how feminist scholars who do engaged work can do so without compromising their ability to be recognized as a legitimate voice in policy debates, especially in spaces that still privilege the kind of disembodied objectivity that feminist scholars have long been challenging. katrina: for me, feminist practice in academia requires an ethics of engagement. i do the advocacy work because i owe it to the people who have shared the most vulnerable and painful experiences of their lives with me. but advocacy is seen by those in power as undermining your objectivity, your authority, your scholarly commitment. so, the advocacy i do can diminish my authority in the venues and circumstances where i need it most, such as court cases. critics use the “activist” label opportunistically to discredit my work and my ideas. there are benefits to having a public face, because that's part of changing minds out in the world, but it's also risky because of how it can be used against me. overall, though, it’s been more beneficial than harmful. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 8 joe: i’m thinking of the clinical aspect of your work, katrina, going to talk in hospitals and being the scholar alongside intersex activists. and i think that is one of my frustrations: i don't get that authority. to clinicians and health professionals, rarely am i ever recognized as something other than a patient activist and, often, a disgruntled one. or else a curiosity. madeleine: what about other costs that come with seeking to resist and change how practitioners enact sex? how do you find ways to endure this work? joe: thinking about the toll that our research takes is something that we, as feminist scholars, tend to do, and i know that all of us here do that seriously. i did so much of my work because of what happened to me as a patient, because of all of the sexism that i encountered, which at the time astounded me [laughs]. as a scholar i have returned over and over again to those encounters, not only my own but a host of other people’s representations of these experiences as well. this is difficult work. there is so much pain, and i mean pain not from “gender dysphoria” but from these processes. and to read all of the objectifying, dehumanizing, misguided ways that trans people are portrayed in medical texts was excruciating. but that was what i needed to do in order to try to understand how trans people’s experiences of sex and gender and sexuality are constituted as an impairment to be corrected, a disorder that can be diagnosed and treated, resulting in a system that does people harm. stacey: it's emotional work, right? trying to get people to care about something that they don't care about is emotional work. i mean, for me the core of it is trying to put this issue in terms that make people care about it. joe: right, trying to make people care is so hard. and being critical of processes of “care” and challenging institutions like medicine—which is like sex in that people often feel incredibly attached to it as it relates to their own personal experience, which in the case of medicine may well be a life-saving intervention—is also really difficult but crucial to do. i try to encourage people to think about what constitutes good care, for whom, and how. madi, your question about the imperative of enduring is really important for feminist sts to take on. in my book, i write about the ethical imperative and responsibility that people like me, who get called “college-educated whites” in us politics, have in engaging with medical practice. as someone who went through these processes with an awful lot going lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 9 in my favor, i was confronted by how obscenely difficult and confusing it was for me. that’s what motivated me to go back and meticulously analyze how sex was enacted along my treatment trajectory in order to show the host of contradictions, clashes, and hypocrisies that emerge in the clinic [latham, 2017b]. if this is what it was like for me, a well-educated white person in a place that has a good healthcare system, then it doesn’t make sense to talk about what is going on here as a “barrier,” as it is so often described. for many people it’s not a barrier: it’s not even a possibility. katrina: recently, the most consuming piece of my work has been bringing these court cases to the court of arbitration for sport. when we did the first case for dutee chand, it was basically a full-time job for a year among a small group of people, including dutee’s lawyers, bruce kidd, and payoshni mitra. with the court cases, it's not just the time in the courtroom—it's everything leading up to and following that moment. and it is exhausting and draining. it would have been enough to just do that work, but as an academic you also have all of these other commitments. one of the reasons i have shifted my work over time is precisely because of that exhaustion. after ten or so years working in intersex rights, to have doctors come back with the same arguments that i feel i dismantled ten years earlier is frustrating [karkazis, 2008]. oftentimes you hit an incredible wall of resistance. so, you try to use this angle, explain it this way, put it in this forum, say it that way. and eventually, i tire. i also get intellectually bored because i don't want to keep saying the same things. the way i survive it is through community, like what we have here, with scholars, activists, lawyers, and others. that’s why i have developed such abiding relationships with the people i work with. this is our linked-arm support system to keep fighting. stacey: i think one of the things that fills my tank and gives me the energy and the enthusiasm for doing this work is to look higher up in the pipeline and do the education and the teaching around sex and gender to undergraduates and trainees, so that hopefully ten years from now we don't have to argue with them about these same things again. i run a second-year undergraduate course on sex, gender, and health, and one of the most rewarding things for me is to grade their benchmarking activities and reflections at the end of term and feel like i’ve been able to disrupt some of their problematic socialization and open them up to being more critical about sex and gender. these students are going to be the next generation of researchers, healthcare providers, policymakers, and so on. teaching makes me feel like i'm contributing to the pipeline of future scientists lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 10 and not just dealing with the symptoms of the problem. madeleine: katrina, you mentioned resistance and i want to pick up on that. what are some other forms of resistance that you all have encountered in your efforts to change how practitioners are enacting sex? katrina: with testosterone, as with sex, everybody thinks they understand what the object under discussion is. and that is a key hurdle or even the key hurdle: this idea that you actually don't require any specialized knowledge to understand what sex or testosterone is and is not, and what it does or does not do. a large part of what i argue is that multiple kinds of knowledges—not just biological and not just theoretical—are required when thinking about “sex.” you have to think about epistemology, ontology, power, gender, race, class, and more. all of these come into play and make “sex” contextual, complex, and multiple, rather than straightforward, singular, and definitive. joe: turning back to stacey’s point about “contributing to the pipeline” and making space for our work to go on, that's a scholar’s dream, right? yet so much of how the university industrial complex currently operates makes that dream hard to realize. i’m incredibly moved by the testimonies of readers and students who tell me that my work has made a difference to them. yet the precarity key to academic capitalism makes it impossible to develop ongoing relationships. it remains especially hard for people who aren't white male scientists or doctors to impact these systems. and this is a really important question for feminist sts: how can we make it possible, practically, to take this work further? “feminist sts” tends not to have the institutional support of a department, and these are critical material restrictions on what we’re able to do. i mean, the conditions of the academic labor market are probably the biggest resistance to junior scholars doing this work, or trying to, frankly. stacey: one of the areas of resistance i encounter most often is people who are quite sympathetic and say, “okay, yes, sex is more complex and dynamic than maybe we initially recognized, but that's too complicated for people to understand and for us to implement. we need to keep it simple otherwise no one will do anything.” and my response to that is, “well, ‘simple’ is one thing, but ‘simplistic’ doesn't take us where we want to go.” there's no point to doing this work in a way that's actually counter to the questions of real inclusion and equity and trying to improve people's health. if you're not going to take the complexity lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 11 of sex seriously, and instead you simplify it to get buy-in or to be feasible, then the kinds of answers we get at the other end are going to be deeply compromised. i also hear a lot of people who will say, “i'm only working in cells, so gender isn't relevant.” well, i disagree so strongly. you might not be able to put gender in your petri dish, but gender is absolutely relevant to your thinking. joe: it’s already there! stacey: right, it's shaped the approach that you took in the first place to even get to the point of plating your cells in that dish. and if you claim that it's irrelevant because you're working in cells, you've missed important opportunities for understanding what it is you're doing, how you interpret it, and how you translate that work to other audiences. katrina: beck [rebecca jordan-young] and i came up with the idea of “opportunistic epistemology” in our research on testosterone [jordan-young & karkazis, 2019]. it’s when researchers reverse engineer the scientific process by starting with a particular outcome or conclusion and then crafting a “scientific” approach that is guaranteed to support their specific goal. in the case of sport, it was a desire to exclude some women athletes with naturally high testosterone from the women’s category. at first, we thought the flatly differing accounts and disagreements about testosterone’s role in athleticism stemmed from different disciplinary approaches. but we quickly figured out that policy supporters were constructing and conjuring evidence in order to support their policy goal. and that's very different, i think, to what stacey's talking about where people might not recognize how their pre-theoretical predilections shape their research questions and practices. something we need to consider is: when are these moments of genuine disagreement over the ontology of sex, and when is it really a political tactic, designed to limit people's participation in social life and deny them the rights and privileges that other people have? madeleine: where do you see the openings, or perhaps the seeds or possibilities of change? joe: i suppose i would say that while as a scholar or activist we can be put in this political position of the disgruntled patient, which is undermining, when you are a patient in a room with your doctor, there are ways to intervene. doctors––good doctors––listen to their patients and care about helping them. doctors don’t lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 12 change their practice because there’s a new version of the dsm: they learn from interacting with their patients, from our questions and concerns and reactions. and this can be a real burden and an obstacle to healthcare. but it can also be an opportunity to intervene. and you don’t have to “be trans” to impact these systems, either [see heyes & latham 2019]. stacey: i’m working on disrupting sex as a female/male binary for biomedical researchers by taking sex apart and documenting how complex and heterogeneous it is, but it’s the dynamism of sex that i'm probably most excited about right now. we can talk about all the different components that go into this construct of sex, which is important work, but what really fires me at the moment is this recognition that very little of that is static or stable: it's constantly changing in response to the environment, social inputs, and changes across the life course. it raises all kinds of exciting scientific questions, like what do we ask scientists to do with that when they're planning an experiment? the power of an experiment hinges on its ability to simplify and control, yet so many of these dynamic, fluid, and responsive aspects of sex are impossible to control. what does that mean when we're trying to use the power of the experiment to develop a better understanding of how our biology works and how that translates into health outcomes? it’s incredibly challenging and i find it really hard to envision what that could look like, but i'm also really excited about what might be possible in this space. joe: it can also be hopeful to consider that we’re in a moment in which there is real structural upheaval in how people are thinking about these problems. as i’m thinking about how sex and power are enacted, right now i'm thinking about police brutality, i’m thinking about the assassinations of malcolm x and martin luther king jr., and the royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody in australia [see deaths inside, 2020]. i'm thinking about all the people i know who’ve died. i'm thinking about state power and its upheaval. people are talking about this hugely powerful institution, the police, having its resources put elsewhere. this movement makes it possible to think about how other powerful institutions are heavily resourced in ways that prop up white supremacy, like medicine and science. madeleine: and, joe, that raises a really critical question, which is how can we think through the co-constitution of race, nation, and sex in our work? lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 13 stacey: i initially came to this work entirely focused on sex/gender, but the significance of race, socioeconomic status, culture, and other intersectional factors can’t be ignored. conceptually, these relationships feel clearer to me at the level of clinical research and human subjects, but i’ll admit that i’m challenged to envision a critical, defensible way to translate that into work with experimental animals and cells that doesn’t diminish, demean, or deny the political and social realities of oppression and marginalization. hankivsky and colleagues’ paper on bringing intersectionality to biomedical research has been helpful, though how it should inform nonhuman lab work is less clear to me right now [hankivsky et al., 2017]. katrina: one of my disappointments in my first book on intersex is how little i interrogated race as an analytical category, even though i was aware of its imbrication with sex/gender. race very often slips out of the frame and yet, ironically, the whole understanding of binary sex stems from racial hierarchies and ideologies. too often, i see discussions of sex and sex dimorphism that don’t take into account how sex/gender is racialized, even though the development of these concepts—and ideologies of sex/gender difference—are inextricably linked to racial ideologies. the challenge is to deal very seriously with how this becomes possible and to correct it. this came up in the context of my work on sex testing, where if you talk to people—scientists, sports policymakers, athletes—race was dismissed as irrelevant even though nearly all of the women who are tested are black and brown women from the global south. but trying to show how race— and place—operated in these regulations when policy supporters claimed that race was not implicated was incredibly difficult. we [rebecca jordan-young and i] call it a “ghost variable” and have sought to develop a methodology to make race visible in claims devoid of explicit racial content.1 we cannot think about sex/gender without thinking about its imbrication with racial hierarchies. i say this as a challenge to myself that stems from my disappointment in my earlier work and that i'm trying to make sure i don't repeat. joe: right, and revisiting one's prior work, especially its disappointments, is so important, rather than holding on to or pretending that we stand by everything we've ever said, as some people and disciplines tend to do. one of the things that feminist sts has to offer is an invitation to re-think, to re-turn, to re-consider our own work [barad, 2014]. and that is a critical undertaking, not least because the refusal to question what we know––or what we think we know––is one of the most powerful ways that white supremacy sustains itself. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 14 notes 1 karkazis and jordan-young’s (2018) analysis of race and nation in the regulation of female athlete eligibility led to a special issue in science, technology & human values (see jordan-young & karkazis, 2020). references bailey, m. (2016). misogynoir in medical media: on caster semenya and r. kelly. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 2(2), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v2i2.28800 barad, k. (2014). diffracting diffraction: cutting together-apart. parallax, 20(3), 168– 187. clayton, j. a., & collins, f. s. (2014). policy: nih to balance sex in cell and animal studies. nature, 509(7500), 282–283. collins, p. h. (2004). black sexual politics: african americans, gender, and the new racism. routledge. court of arbitration for sport (cas). (2015). cas2014/a/3759 dutee chand v. athletics federation of india (afi) & the international association of athletics federations (iaaf). lausanne, switzerland: court of arbitration for sport. http://www.tascas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/award_internet.pdf court of arbitration for sport (cas). (2019). cas 2018/o/5794 caster semenya v. international association of athletics federations. athletics south africa v. international association of athletics federations. lausanne, switzerland: court of arbitration for sport. https://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/cas_award_-_redacted__semenya_asa_iaaf.pdf courville, j., vézina, n., & messing, k. (1991). comparison of the work activity of two mechanics: a woman and a man. international journal of industrial ergonomics, 7, 163– 174. deaths inside. (2020). deaths inside: indigenous australian deaths in custody [database]. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australianews/series/deaths-inside fausto-sterling, a. (1995). gender, race, and nation: the comparative anatomy of ‘hottentot’ women in europe, 1815–1817. in j. terry & j. urla (eds.) deviant bodies: critical perspectives on difference in science and popular culture (pp. 19–48). indiana university press. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v2i2.28800 http://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/award_internet.pdf http://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/award_internet.pdf https://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/cas_award_-_redacted_-_semenya_asa_iaaf.pdf https://www.tas-cas.org/fileadmin/user_upload/cas_award_-_redacted_-_semenya_asa_iaaf.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/series/deaths-inside https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/series/deaths-inside lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 15 fausto-sterling, a. (2000). sexing the body: gender politics and the construction of sexuality. basic books. green, e. l., benner, k., & pear, r. 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(1991). the hour of eugenics: race, gender, and nation in latin america. cornell university press. author bios madeleine pape is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the university of lausanne having completed her phd in sociology at the university of wisconsin-madison in 2019. pape examines how debates over “sex differences” arise as part of gender equity projects in sport and biomedicine, with particular attention to disagreement over the nature of sex, its relationship to gender, and its relevance to women’s experiences in sport and health. pape competed for australia in the women’s 800m (athletics) at the 2008 olympic games and 2009 world championships. katrina karkazis is a cultural anthropologist who examines medicoscientific understandings of sex/gender, sexuality, and the body to link several domains of inquiry: human biology, the social construction of knowledge, and relations of power. across two prior books—fixing sex: intersex, medical authority, and lived experience (duke university press, 2008), and testosterone: an unauthorized biography (harvard university press, 2019)—as well as numerous articles, she has examined the medical treatment of intersex infants, “sex testing” of elite female athletes, and contemporary research on testosterone. she is currently working on an ethnography of “sex” as a category. j. r. latham is alfred deakin postdoctoral research fellow at deakin university and honorary fellow in cultural studies at the university of melbourne, australia. he is a social scientist and feminist theorist who specializes in the study of health and illness, combining critical concepts of “drugs,” aging, and narrative with bioethics, queer theory, and science and technology studies. his first book, making maleness: trans men and the politics of medicine, is under contract with the university of minnesota press. stacey a. ritz is an associate professor in the department of pathology and molecular medicine and assistant dean of the bachelor of health sciences (honours) program at mcmaster university. her scholarly work focuses on how laboratorybased, experimental biomedical researchers can most effectively and appropriately account for gender and sex. this work is informed by her training as an experimental lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) pape et al., 2020 18 immunologist working in mouse models and cell culture, along with feminist science studies and other critical perspectives on scientific practice. she aims to make these discourses legible across these disciplines, and to develop channels through which the methods and epistemologies of biomedical research can be deployed to better serve gender equity in health.     special section: probing the system: feminist complications of automated technologies, flows, and practices of everyday life absent data: engagements with absence in a twitter collection process     katrine meldgaard kjær technologies in practice, ethos lab, it university of copenhagen kakj@itu.dk   mace ojala technologies in practice, ethos lab, it university of copenhagen maco@itu.dk   line henriksen school of arts and communication, medea lab, malmö university line.henriksen@mau.se     abstract this paper considers the ways in which silences and absences are a central part of research that relies on automated data collection from social media or the internet. in recent years, automated data collection driven or supported research methods have gained popularity within the social sciences and humanities. with this increase in popularity, it becomes ever more pertinent to consider how to engage with digital data, and how both engagement and data are situated, messy, and contingent. based on experiences with “missing” data, this paper mobilizes the framework of hauntology to make sense of what relationships may be built with missing data and how silences haunt research practices. ultimately, we argue that it is possible to reimagine absent data not as a limitation but as an invitation to reflect on and establish new methods for working with automated data collections.     keywords twitter, hauntology, absence, ghosts, data     introduction: partial perspectives and automated data collections   figure 1. email from institutional it services notifying server owners of a power outage event.   this paper considers the ways in which absences and “missing” data are a central part of research relying on automated data collection from social media or the internet, and how this centrality might help us rethink and reimagine ideas of data and objectivity in this type of techno-scientific research. we argue that it is possible to reimagine apparently absent or missing data not as a limitation or failure but rather as a presence that co-constructs research processes, and which we therefore have an ethical obligation to respond to and engage with.   in recent years, automated data collection tools have gained popularity within research on and with social media, as so-called digital methods approaches, spearheaded by figures such as richard rogers (2013, 2019) and noortje marres (2017; marres and gerlitz 2016; marres and moats 2015), have highlighted the use of large datasets from social media platforms, collected via platform-specific application programming interfaces (api) in social research. however, critical data studies scholars such as danah boyd and kate crawford (2012) and josé van dijck (2014) have critiqued a “turn” towards big data methods in social research, and drawn attention to how media collection and analysis tools, as well as the datasets they create, are neither complete nor impartial. in related scholarship from science and technology studies (sts), daniela agostinho et al. suggest that large data archives are fundamentally uncertain and marked by unknowability, error, and vulnerability (2019, 423); and nanna thylstrup et al. argue that “datafied knowledge production involves similar contingencies, limitations and complexities to previous forms of knowledge production” (2019, 1). this complexity makes well-known questions of epistemology, ontology, and method relevant in new ways, specifically within the digital realm. indeed, as feminist philosophers of science and technology such as donna haraway (1988) and karen barad (2007) have long argued in relation to knowledge production, partial perspectives necessarily underpin all types of research; what is important is therefore not to seek to attain completion or neutrality as an implicit “gaze from nowhere” (haraway 1988, 581), but rather to remain accountable for how and what one learns to see. with this, engaging the silences, absences, and what is not seen, also called agnotology (proctor 1995; schiebinger 2004), is an ongoing and important object of interest for feminist scholars when it comes to developing ways to think about how knowledge is created in collaboration with the digital. what is at stake here is therefore not the ability to fully include all perspectives, since this is impossible, but rather to develop an ethics of responsibility as one remains accountable for how one’s methods co-create the world they seek to understand. a sensitivity to the absent and the invisible is therefore an acknowledgement of how things could have been—and might be—different.   for research based on digital data collection from social media, engaging with absence entails examining what it means to take seriously that these research processes do not always yield the results they were intended to. instead, they often involve silences and absences of data, whether due to glitches, breakdowns, and/or what the operators—including the busy, enthusiastic, and perhaps insufficiently (self?)trained social media researcher—might have missed. to examine these absences, our paper draws on empirical material and first-hand experience from a specific research project working with automated collection tools in order to map out twitter debates on medicinal cannabis in denmark. taking a point of departure in the multiple breakdowns, outages, and disruptions that our collection was subject to during our research process, we argue that the silences brought on by techno-material possibilities and constraints of working with automated data collection tools in digital social media research are worthy of their own research spotlight. we investigate how the seemingly absent remain constitutive of any research results, in the sense that what cannot be measured—whether due to events such as glitches or simply the limitations of any research tool—shape how we know the world. the absent is therefore never fully absent, but a strangely paradoxical presence, and throughout this article we ask how one may conceptualize such present absences.   to unpack this question, we will mobilize the theoretical framework of jacques derrida’s “hauntology,” a portmanteau of haunting and ontology (derrida 1994). we suggest that hauntology may offer a useful framework for conceptualizing absent and silent data that nonetheless “haunt” the final data set and the research based on it. hauntology forms part of a recent, more general scholarly interest in spectrality, sometimes referred to as “the spectral turn” (del pilar blanco and peeren 2013). not least, technological developments and increased digitalization have prompted scholars to turn to the ghostly and the spectral to theorize the complex, often hidden, and invisible workings of, for example, software (e.g., chun 2011). while some scholars have applied derrida’s work to the internet and questions of “data” (blackman 2019; fisher 2012, 2014), the extent to which hauntology can be useful in conceptualizing and theorizing what it means to do research in and on digitalized societies is still to be explored. this paper helps fill this gap and contributes to a body of scholarship within sts and critical data studies that is concerned with unpacking absences and silences in digital data. our contribution to this discussion is novel because we argue that it does not make sense to approach these silences as indicators of “good” or “bad” data, nor to assume that the existence of silences are in themselves problematic. rather, we argue that by using the lens of hauntology, it becomes possible to explore how these apparent absences are deeply relational and co-constructive, and therefore an inherent part of digital data research. acknowledging traces of the absent within research results is the beginnings of what we, through derrida, refer to as an ethics of living with ghosts rather than attempting to hide or ignore what cannot or/and should not be made fully present in order to give an impression of completeness.   throughout the article, we share some of our internal email correspondences around a situation where we found our own research infrastructure to be haunted. by presenting email messages as empirical material, we attempt to account for our own partial perspectives, including our different roles and commitments to the project (see also long et al. 2019). our author group represents different scholarly fields, and we went into the project with a variety of roles, expectations, expertise, and entanglements: katrine as a qualitative researcher and principal investigator of the medicinal cannabis project; mace as part-time system administrator of locally operated twitter capture and analytics toolset (tcat); and line as researcher with analytical expertise with hauntology. katrine and mace began the data collection together, and line was invited into the project in the analytical phase. bradley et al. (2018) argue that much current research that seeks to merge humanities and technical research traditions for big data and digital data analysis end up with a division of roles that separates technical expertise and qualitative analytical work into discrete entities, thus limiting transformative potential for both parties. similar challenges have been discussed within digital humanities (terras et al. 2013). academic interdisciplinarity, while often discussed and claimed, is difficult to perform; while much conceptual and philosophical work on the pros and cons of interdisciplinarity has been published, more concrete and specific accounts of the everyday and perhaps even mundane work with interdisciplinary collaboration and training are still largely missing (bornakke and due 2018). by writing this paper together in a way that addresses different areas of expertise and expose traditionally hidden documents of research, we experiment with writing in ways that acknowledges our own partial perspectives visibly across lines of expertise and expectations.   we will first introduce how we have encountered silences in our datasets, primarily via a series of breakdowns and glitches in the data collection process of our research. here we argue that these types of silences and absences are not unique to our data collection, but indeed characterize research based on automated data collection from social media more generally. we will then present derrida’s work on hauntology and argue that this framework can help us make sense of how to conceptualize and think with these absences, rather than dismissing them as failures or mistakes. finally, we return to our absences and analyze how hauntology provides tools to rethink ideas of objectivity in research relying on automated data collection.   initial encounters with absent data in january 2018, a four-year pilot program that permits doctors to prescribe medicinal cannabis started in denmark. medicinal cannabis is a controversial and contested subject globally (zarhin et al. 2019), and given her research interest in the relationship between health controversies and media, katrine asked mace to assist in setting up a data collection to follow the debate about medicinal cannabis during the pilot program on twitter. collecting data from the social media platform was one part of a larger collection of data about medicinal cannabis debates from a range of sources, including newspapers, internet archives, and interviews. although the ethics of relying on large companies for social media research data have been discussed (cooky, linabary, and corple 2018), the relative ease of data access has nonetheless made twitter a popular source for controversy mapping approaches. to follow the evolution of the debate, katrine and mace set up a collection process together targeting the hashtag #medicinskcannabis plus a selection of related hashtags and keywords related to the controversy. the ongoing data collection discussed in this paper was set up on january 11, 2019 on an instance of the twitter capture and analytics toolset (tcat) data collection software (borra and rieder 2014) hosted at our institution. in this paper, we draw on material from the first year and a half of this collection, which consists of approximately nine hundred tweets created by about five hundred unique users. when we began our data collection process, we were concerned with “capturing” data, aiming for a complete dataset from which to create an overview of the debate. our ideas of “validity” of research were here tied to completeness and overview. however, what we faced was an urgent need in our research process to conceptualize our involvement with data that turned out to be apparently incomplete. we found that we needed a language and framework to think with the absences that characterized our datasets not as failures, but instead as a present actor that co-constructed our process. this points to a research gap; while critical data scholarship has examined absences as being a part of data collections, there is still a need for work that informs how we might live with that absence not as mistake, but instead as a basic premise for working with data. we present a suggestion for one such framework by thinking with hauntings and ghosts as a part of digital research. within this framework, the question of validity becomes situated, in that validity in datawork transforms into an imperative to account for absences in specific contexts.   already within the first month of our data collection, we were confronted with unexpected absences when a first infrastructural breakdown occurred. this resulted in missing several weeks’ worth of tweets:   figure 2. an email of one of the authors asking another author for specimen of missing data event.   at this early stage our tcat instance proved itself to be less than compliant, and we were confronted with the ways in which technology is an active participant in the development of what we can and cannot see in our data. moreover, the specific breakdown was also a confrontation with how we do not always fully control or understand why collection software such as tcat does not comply with our expectations. figuring out why the software is not working is in itself an endeavor that requires imagination, professional vision (goodwin 1994), and going beyond immediate assumptions. one may even argue that it is a labor of forensics and diagnosis. indeed, beyond recognized and diagnosed cases of breakdown events, it is not always clear when an instance of tcat is actually functioning as intended. for a relatively niche hashtag such as #medicinskcannabis, it is possible that the hashtag simply is not used by anyone for days, meaning that there is no data to collect at that given time. when observing a single data collection within a tcat instance, the distinction between days of non-activity of a technical infrastructure as opposed to days of non-activity in the topical debate may thus be unclear. in these ways, the research instruments and the social media platform are entangled with the phenomenon and co-constitute it. in the case of the issues with collecting hashtags and keywords relating to medicinal cannabis in early 2019, an iterative process of forensics revealed that the breakdown incident was part of a series of events that had already started before the medicinal cannabis research began: in the months preceding the medicinal cannabis collection, disk space had run out on the server our tcat was running on due to other research and teaching activities taking space on the same server infrastructure. this led to corruption of the database where the tcat instance stores the tweets it collects. the medicinal cannabis research project had arrived in an already busy site of data infrastructure, with elements that were in varying states of maintenance.   the non-compliance our tcat instance was exhibiting already in the early stages of the project, however, may well be considered an always-already inevitability of this type of research. although twitter is one of the most accessible social media platforms from which to digitally collect data, it is not clear which tweets are accessible via twitter’s tracking api (borra and rieder 2014; cooky, linabary, and corple 2018). what is clear, however, is that the api does not provide access to all tweets made by users. for this access, twitter requires financial compensation and control the process of collection themselves. we, like many other social media researchers, have chosen not to purchase data products from twitter, as this raises new issues concerning the intersection of capital and social media research (see cooky, linabary, and corple 2018). moreover, drawing again on the central idea that digital collections are not neutral or complete, feminist and intersectional archival studies have argued that silences and absences about specific perspectives and voices often characterize digital archives, and that, as such, we need to work specifically with developing ways to conceptualize, engage, and think with them (see, e.g., caswell and mallick 2014; cifor and wood 2017). we cannot buy our way out of thinking with and about the significance and role of absences in digital data collections.   in our research project, insights regarding the technical and institutional conditions concerning the initial breakdown did not change the impact this breakdown had on the growing #medicinskcannabis dataset. later in the research process, the dataset came to be characterized by a second longer period of silence, occurring during the vacation season in the summer of 2019. over the course of a year of data collection, as tcat’s own visualization of the dataset shows, almost three months were absent (figure 3):   figure 3. a line chart showing daily twitter data capture rates, with two notable gaps.   in this visualization of the dataset, absences and presences co-exist and co-shape each other: the non-present is not invisible, but rather a very salient part of the dataset and its reality. the visualization is akin to that of a heartbeat; the drops are as significant as the spikes and require analytical attentiveness on their own terms. the graph may point toward any number of causes, including the possibilities of the data collecting apparatus entangling with other systems on the shared infrastructure we were reliant on, or that there might have been pauses in the discussion on twitter on the topic of interest. this made us ask questions about the ways in which absent data shape present data, including how we might imagine and theorize the impact of absent data on the finished dataset. after all, if—as we and others suggest—glitches, absences, silences, and breakdowns are par for the course when working with technologies such as tcat, we need analytical and conceptual frameworks that help us navigate these silences, invisibilities, and absences. a conceptualization of this sort requires a reorientation in thinking about ontology and what can legitimately be recognized as a part of a research project and its results. in order to gather tools to work with this reorientation, we turned to the imaginaries of hauntings and hauntologies, as well as their relationship with feminist theory on objectivity and partial perspectives in research processes.   an ontology of haunting   figure 4. email of one author reporting a login failure, which surfaces a server downtime event.   derrida coined the term hauntology in specters of marx (1994). according to maría del pilar blanco and esther peeren (2013), specters of marx marked the early days of what some call the “spectral turn”—that is, an emerging field of multidisciplinary research that engages the figures of specters, ghosts, and hauntings to theorize the impacts of the invisible, the seemingly absent and the silent on the visible, the seemingly present and the audible. research areas such as feminist theory, queer theory, and postcolonialism, among others, have a long tradition of theorizing and conceptualizing such silences and absences, not least as they relate to marginalized knowledges and lingering trauma of colonialism, for example. spectralities have therefore been embraced by some theorists within these fields to conceptualize haunting traces, silences, and trauma (see, e.g., castle 1995; gordon 2008; mccormack 2014; taylor 2019).   with hauntology, derrida argues that traditional western ontology primarily concerns itself with that which is present and immediate, suggesting that what can be said to exist is first of all that which can been seen, touched, or, in some way or another, measured and confirmed to be here and now. to exemplify how this affects traditional understandings of scientific objectivity, derrida raises the ghost of the “traditional scholar,” a figure embodying the most rigid adherence to presence and immediacy as indicators of existence. derrida writes,   a traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality. there has never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being…in the opposition between what is present and what is not, for example in the form of objectivity. beyond this opposition, there is, for the scholar only the hypothesis of a school of thought, theatrical fiction, literature and speculation. (derrida 1994, 12)   to the traditional scholar, objectivity concerns the establishing of what is present —and therefore relevant—and what is not—and therefore irrelevant. in this sense, derrida’s traditional scholar’s understanding of objectivity can be related to what donna haraway calls the “god trick”— scientific objectivity as an imagined disembodied gaze from nowhere (1988, 584). both the traditional scholar and the god-trick scientist understand scientific objectivity as the act of dispassionately observing a presence in order to establish where it belongs in the hierarchy of things—that is, as the act of functioning as a “modest witness” to the matters of facts of the world (haraway 1997; shapin 1984). haraway argues that the modest witness is highly gendered, racialized, and classed; within the enlightenment imaginary, which created the modest witness (for a more detailed engagement with the creation of modest witnessing, see shapin 1984), only men of european descent and from nobility were considered capable of extracting themselves from their emotions, bodies, and impulses, and thus of looking at the world as it was: static and unchanging, made immediate and present through the experiments within their labs. in other words, they embodied the ideal of the human—rational, conscious, objective—in ways that were considered largely impossible for their gendered, racialized, and classed others, who were deemed too close to nature, the body, and the animal to transcend the matter of the world and behold it from the disinterested position of the god eye. this creation of the objective scientist as white and male has been critiqued by, among others, decolonial and feminist scholars (see, e.g., spivak 1988; harding 2011; wright 2015), including haraway, who makes it clear that the god trick is just that: a trick, and an impossibility since any gaze, whether biological, technological, or both, must stem from somewhere and thereby be situational, a partial perspective. it is never distanced, it is never dispassionate, and the embodied position of the scientist co-creates the final results, meaning that much which is not straightforwardly visible, measurable, or even fully understood (thoughts, feelings, affects, memories, biases, etc.) form part of the final research results. they are, in a sense, haunted by present absences—by ghosts.   the traditional scholar, however, does not believe in ghosts, in the sense of that which is relational and therefore that which cannot be understood as either fully present or absent. he (sic) will only engage them in order to exorcise them, that is, explain them away or ultimately dismiss them as non-existent, as absent. according to derrida, this dismissal of ghosts, of the present absent, complicates attempts at theorizing and addressing the impact of that which is not here and now (available to touch, measurement, and gaze) yet nonetheless strangely present. this might be the past, the future, or indeed the workings of teleand information technologies.   hauntology, to derrida, is an attempt at theorizing and conceptualizing the impacts of the present absent, such as memories, speculation, techno-imageries. although he did not live to fully theorize the internet through the lens of hauntology, other scholars interested in conversing with ghosts have since pointed out the ways in which digital media create and circulate specters (blackman 2019; fisher 2014). according to wendy hui kyong chun digital technologies have sparked imaginaries of omniscience and control through their promise of absolute transparency and the ability to turn the invisible visible—of communicating with and channeling the ghostly present absences controlling the machine (chun 2011, 50). indeed, chun shows how tropes of magic and the supernatural saturate imaginaries of the workings of invisible systems whose effects are related to causes not always fully understood, and not entirely determined by their programming. as a medium, computers seemingly allow us to see the invisible and the hidden, while at the same time obfuscating that software does not magically open a window to pre-existing information, but actively generates it (chun 2011, 17). in alignment with practical programming knowledge, she argues that it is ultimately impossible to fully know the workings of software and that, instead of forcibly insisting on this (impossible) knowing, we must learn to take the lack of complete knowledge and transparency as “an enabling condition: a way for us to engage the surprises generated by a programmability that, try as it might, cannot entirely prepare us for the future” (chun 2011, 54). we build on and extend this argument with reference to our specific empirical example where hauntings and hauntology may be put to critical use. by applying a hauntological lens, the question is not how to establish whether something is truly present or whether it is absent, but instead how to find traces of that which haunts presence, that which haunts the here and now. through the figure of the specter and its hauntings, derrida argues that the ethical imperative of the scholar is not to exorcise the ghost by asking that it either manifests itself or disappears, but to learn to live in the company of ghosts—that is, in the company of that which is neither fully manifest nor exorcised. with the trace of otherness and that which cannot be fully defined or known. this is living with the ghost as apparition; that which appears and disappears across vast distances, both temporally and spatially, without taking a final form or inhabiting a specific space. the apparition is a creature that troubles both the traditional scholar and haraway’s scientist of the god’s-eye perspective in the sense that it cannot be fully seen and understood through a distanced, disinterested gaze, nor can it be kept at arm’s length. further still, following chun’s suggestion, the technologies applied to create the god’s-eye perspective do not offer transparency but generate invisibilities in order to make something else visible. they summon the ghosts they were meant to exorcise. learning to live with this summoning, with these ghosts of undecidability and unknowability, is a challenge we wish to address through hauntology.   initial encounters with absent data derrida’s argument that the “scholar of tomorrow” (derrida 1994, 221) has an ethical obligation to learn how to converse with ghosts and stay in their company, rather than exorcise them, encourages us to confront and rethink established ideas that pertain to working with tools for automated data collection. the breakdowns made it clear that working with a tool such as tcat involves a qualitative engagement first with data that may or may not have been missing, and second with the research instrument itself. this need for qualitative engagement showcases multiple aspects of the ways in which expectations towards digital tools and methods require constant reconfiguring. most centrally, the breakdowns reveal that digital and automated data collections involve unstable relationships between what is known and not known. an investigation concerning how to live with these absences and the unknown therefore requires that we first understand that these are always already a part of the research process. in this section, we will return to the research process around collecting tweets on #medicinskcannabis to analyze how absences came to be a presence within this research process, and what the implications of this may be. to do so, we will return to our emails as data.   figure 5. email exchange about twitter data collection downtime between the authors.   to derrida, an “apparition” (1994, 157) is a ghostly visitation, a vision that appears and disappears suddenly, without the possibility of re-enacting the dis/appearance. likewise, in our research process, we often did not know why, precisely, breakdowns occurred or what they affected, as they could be due to unpredictable, multiple, and overlapping institutional, technical, or personnel-related factors. while we engaged in a constant game of observation, we were left only with the haunting remains of an incomplete dataset. already from the first breakdown, the absence of data formed part of our basic understanding of present data. this was very concretely represented in the gaps or dips in the graph of the collected number of tweets shown above (figure 3), as the absences clearly confronted us here. however, the absences also became very present on account of their prominence in our discussions about the research project. collectively, we had an ongoing orientation toward the absences or even the possibility of absences, as we checked in on the collection to ensure that it was still running and collecting as planned. the vast majority of our correspondences about the research project while collecting this data were about absences, either potential or actual. we also enrolled new actors into our research group by building software agents to keep sentry at the haunted sites where earlier apparitions had visited. this ongoing orientation and attention toward absence entailed that absences had—both before and after they appeared in a dataset—become embedded within the research project itself. the breakdowns and breaks in data collection were invisible and silent until their effects were discovered, but they were nonetheless a constant presence on account of the collective anticipation of and reflections on them. the temporality of the breakdowns played a key role in our collective occupation with anticipating them: the suddenness with which absences in data collection appear and disappear, often leaving no clear indication as to why they came and went, required constant observation as well as attempted anticipation of when, where, and how breakdowns might happen. yet, despite our efforts, there was a conundrum to breakdowns: they could only be located when it was “too late,” and then only as the haunting trace of an event long since passed.   figure 6. one author reporting data collection to be down, another one responds by noting an institution-wide power outage event.   when we detected absences, they set in motion a new set of processes in the project, which aimed at returning the collection to previous operation. this post-apparition work of nudging, poking, and prodding became a central part of maintenance and continuation of the data collection process. the acts of nudging that were necessary to restart the data collection are acts of experimentation, as well as acts of material reparation and programming new software tools to patrol database infrastructure out of joint. however, even when the collection resumed, the marks left by the apparitions could not be erased or mended. these were now permanently in our datasets in the form of gaps or invisibilities, and the data that was “missed” during the ghostly visitations could not be re-collected; since neither tcat nor twitter data products at our disposal allow retrieval of tweets in the past, once data is identified as “missing,” it cannot become a part of the dataset. however, the missing data are in fact very visible in their not-thereness, and they make their present absence known as they confront researchers with how they are not in control, not ultimately all-knowing, even despite attempts to be so.   the sudden activation of forensic and programming work, enrollment of software nightguards and the permanent gaps in the dataset all point to different ways in which absences or silences are not nothings. the absences do things: they set new labor in motion, involve new entities, and leave marks on the research. the absences are an active part of the research process and cannot simply be dismissed as mistakes, failures, solved problems, or limitations. rather, absences, in all their ghostly presence, should be acknowledged as co-creators of the research process, with agency of their own. this acknowledgement also involves the recognition that control is not the prerogative of the human researchers on the project; collaborating with tcat and automated data collection tools like it thus involves collaborating with the more-than-human.   figure 7. email of an author encouraging project documentation and announcing plans of designing monitoring instrumentation.   this role as active co-creator with agency and power of its own is clear from the ongoing and sometimes inevitably failed attempts to control and monitor the tool. throughout the research process, we engaged in acts of reporting and trying to “tame” or make accessible the tool, to figure it out, and to prevent the ghostly visitations that nonetheless still occurred. our orientation towards and our constant attempts to make tcat monitorable speaks to the ways in which there is a constant lingering potential of disruption. this, in turn, challenges the idea that such tools are simply effective and neutral gateways to complete data collection; rather they are troublesome, active, and situated actors in the research process. however, as the above correspondence (figure 7) shows, the ghostly visitations that occurred in our research process also set in motion new forms of collaboration, with the present absences as a central concern. in addition to the interdisciplinary collaboration the authors of this paper engaged in with the aim of making sense of the silent or absent in our data collection, they also inspired international and cross-disciplinary knowledge and code sharing concerning the tool. what united these collaborations was an orientation toward precisely the absences, but also a care for the tool. we were not merely being troubled or annoyed by the absences in our monitoring; we checked in on them, we communicated about them, we worried about them. they became a site of intensity and affective flows, which created collaborative efforts both within and beyond our group.   through these efforts we came to realize that ghosts have and will continue to visit, and breakdowns and bugs will occur. these ghosts force us to rethink ideas about how “good” science is produced and what it entails. within the scientific tradition that haraway and derrida critique, science entails a specific kind of objectivity based on the ability to distinguish between what is present and what is not, what is actual and what is inactual, usually through the means of measurement and monitoring. however, haraway (1988) argues that something will always escape this measurement and monitoring, sometimes because this “something” lies at the periphery of the gaze, sometimes because its existence eludes the ability of the eye to even notice it. during our ongoing attempts to monitor and observe the data, the ghostly visitations did indeed escape our gaze, but left a mark nonetheless. rather than understanding this as a failure to achieve objectivity, we suggest that it indicates that this understanding of objectivity needs to be fundamentally reworked, also when it comes to work with automated digital data collections that can easily be presumed to be neutral or all-seeing. we therefore suggest that the figure of the haunting ghost and dis/appearing apparition may be applied or mobilized as means of acknowledging and attempting to stay with the silences, absences, and invisibilities in datasets without demanding that they be “solved,” dismissed, or asked to materialize as intelligible data.   attending to these points thus involves a more general critique of the traditional understanding of “objectivity” in research. feminist and intersectional research has critiqued the idea of objectivity as a detached view-from-above that results in knowledge generation unaffected by context for decades. however, such critiques remain controversial in other fields, not least due to the challenge they represent for the researcher’s position in relation to their research. these perspectives fundamentally destabilize traditional researcher positions as they reintroduce the researcher as embodied and situated, thereby arguing that the knowledge the researcher generates is equally embodied and situated. this idea departs radically from traditional positionings of the researcher as the all-knowing god-like traditional scholar observing from above, untainted and untouched by context—and the knowledge he (sic) produces as untainted and unaffected by context. within this understanding of objectivity, research instruments are also necessarily neutral, acting only as vessels for the authority of the omnivoyant traditional scholar to gather and reproduce data and results. however, as barad (2007) and others argue, instruments are also situated and affected, as are the data they produce. an ethical reworking of ideas of objectivity in research, then, depends on an awareness of the situatedness of these instruments and the ways in which they create partial perspectives. accounting for how they produce invisible, silent, or absent data and the circumstances of this production is one such way to situate the research. emphasizing how the gaps or absences in data are co-constructive of the research process even in their invisibility is a central part of this rethinking objectivity.   in our research, the invisibilities in the dataset became very visible through our correspondences about them. here, we brought absences into being by worrying about them, observing them, locating them, relating them to what was not missing, thinking about them, designing and programming for them. rather than being not-there or not-noticed, the invisibilities in our dataset thus involved intensive labor, noticing, and ongoing negotiation. throughout our research, we were thus collaborating with, fighting against, and working towards a sense of haunting; in the process, this haunting redirected our gaze and caused us to pay attention to the tools we were using in new ways; it confronted us with the liveliness of these tools, and it drew attention to basic methodological considerations concerning the nature of the absences we were, paradoxically, observing. the apparitions in our datasets could not be fixed—once this ghostly vision had visited our research, we could not undo it or cover it up by retrieving data to fill out the void. it had, instead, left a mark of very visible invisibility in our dataset, which materialized as a significant part of the dataset and of the research process itself. the void was a key site of collaboration and interdisciplinary dialogue as well as ongoing research design development. in this way, the invisible was a powerful present absence in the research process.   conclusions in this paper, we argue that it is possible to reimagine absent data not as a limitation but as a haunting presence that should not be ignored. while we started our project aiming to gain a complete overview of a given phenomenon via an “objective” dataset, we quickly found out that the dataset also came to include absences. this forced us to reflect on our own expectations towards data and prompted the need for conceptual and theoretical resources that would allow consideration of the ethics involved in relating to such absences. our main object of concern, then, moved from thinking about how we could gain overview with the use of data, to how we could imagine living with the data we (did not) have. we thus moved from an orientation towards the instrumental use of present data to instead focus on the conceptualization of absent data. this article also reflects that movement: we argue, quite simply, that there is a need for more research on the ways in which absent data is present in research processes, and how we might think about and with this. in practice, confrontations with absence in our research process transformed the ways we approached questions of validity and data—namely, towards an approach where, inspired by haraway and derrida, validity is tied to situatedness and learning to account also for what is not there.   in our research, absence activated various parts of our research group and our infrastructure and invited processes of reflexivity. the invisible and absent are not necessarily not-there and non-existent, nor do they invalidate the research. on the contrary, silences and absences are subtle reminders that the tools and technologies used for visualization do not merely measure a static world but are active parts of its ontology. they shape the world by establishing what can be measured and visualized in the first place (and therefore become worthy of note) and that which cannot (and therefore takes a backseat). absences and silences in datasets thus point to the impossibility of the god’s eye perspective of the traditional scholar—that is, the impossibility of the researcher as a neutral all-knowing eye. absent data also draw attention to the ways in which digital social media research is always-already partial and shaped by the situated perspectives of the materiality of research tools and practices—a point that challenges common assumptions of big and digital data-based social media research as producing coherent, complete, objective, and/or neutral research datasets (see also cooky, linabary, and corple 2018; boyd and crawford 2012; chun 2009). it is clear that research on and with social media that relies on automated data collection tools needs to grapple with invisibilities and what appears to be non-data—or at least non-visualizable data—not least as these silences are becoming better documented within this type of research.   with this paper, we suggest that it is crucial to find ways to conceptualize and theorize that which escapes visualization and thus also the god’s eye of the traditional scholar. we suggest that mobilizing hauntology and its figure of the specter may provide a way to acknowledge the presence of absences in datasets without demanding that they materialize—that is, take a steady form as “recognizable” data in a given dataset. this points towards our initial question about living with absence in digital research and how researchers may concern themselves with and perhaps even embrace silences in datasets by rethinking how they structure different modes of relationality between researchers and that which is researched.   this relationality is the ethical core of hauntology: to live with ghosts, in their company, without demanding that they take a steady, knowable form that can then be measured, explained, and understood. for a researcher, to learn to live with ghosts thus entails a sensitivity to the ways in which data will always be haunted by a present absence. such hauntings are reminders of the otherness at stake in the material under scrutiny: that there is no god’s eye perspective, only multiple, partial, contradictory perspectives, some of which belong to the ghosts themselves, the voices that were not “captured.” informed by our own experience, we encourage researchers to communicate with the haunting ghosts in their research, rather than attempt to exorcise them.   acknowledgments thank you to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions. research for this article was supported by a grant from the carlsberg foundation cf18-0863 “controversial healing. making sense of medicinal cannabis debates.”   references agostinho, daniela, catherine d’ignazio, annie ring, nanna bonde thylstrup, and kristin veel. 2019. “uncertain archives: approaching the unknowns, errors, and vulnerabilities of big data through cultural theories of the archive.” surveillance & society 17 (3–4): 422–41. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.12330. barad, karen. 2007. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. blackman, lisa. 2019. haunted data: affect, 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america’s gothic soul. illustrated edition. london, united kingdom: repeater. terras, melissa, julianne nyhan, and edward vanhoutte, eds. 2013. defining digital humanities: a reader. new york: routledge. thylstrup, nanna bonde, mikkel flyverbom, and rasmus helles. 2019. “datafied knowledge production: introduction to the special theme.” big data & society 6 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719875985. van dijck, josé. 2014. “datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology.” surveillance & society 12 (2): 197–208. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776. wright, michelle m. 2015. physics of blackness: beyond the middle passage epistemology. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. zarhin, dana, maya negev, simon vulfsons, and sharon r. sznitman. 2019. “‘medical cannabis’ as a contested medicine: fighting over epistemology and morality.” science, technology, & human values 45 (3). https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243919862866.   author bios katrine meldgaard kjær is an assistant professor at the it university of copenhagen. her research focuses on critical data studies, digital methods and health discourses.   mace ojala is science and technology studies scholar focusing on cultures of computer software. mace works as a teaching assistant and lecturer at it university of copenhagen.   line henriksen is a postdoctoral researcher at the school of arts and communication, malmö university. she publishes on the topics of hauntology, monster theory, digital horror stories, and experimental methods. asher, kiran, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam. 2021. “cyborgs unbound: feminist sts, interdisicplinarity, and graduate education.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–34. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license cyborgs unbound: feminist sts, interdisciplinarity, and graduate education kiran asher university of massachusetts, amherst kasher@umass.edu mel y. chen university of california, berkeley melychen@berkeley.edu kareem khubchandani tufts university kareem.khubchandani@tufts.edu eli nelson williams college ewn2@williams.edu banu subramaniam university of massachusetts, amherst banu@wost.umass.edu lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 2 abstract this lab meeting took place as a roundtable titled cyborg manifestations. hosted at mit in february 2020, it was part of the boston-area consortium for graduate studies in gender, culture, women, and sexuality’s (gcws) series feminisms unbound. the introduction maps the history and structure of the gcws series and highlights how its rigorous commitment to interdisciplinary graduate education fosters feminist science and technology studies (sts) in the boston area. the introduction also frames the remarks of the roundtable participants, who speak to drag queens, artificial intelligence, plant life, gender and environmental conservation, and objecthood. five transcripts or “lab reports” highlight how the figure of the cyborg animates and reinvigorates feminist, queer, and trans approaches to technoscience. introduction: institutionalizing interdisciplinarity kareem khubchandani donna haraway’s “cyborg manifesto,” which was published in socialist review in 1985, was a watershed publication for many disciplines, hailing a poststructuralist turn in the study of gender and sexuality, forecasting the importance of marxistfeminism to studies of the anthropocene, and laying the ground for feminist approaches to the study of science and technology. coming out amid a florescence of women’s studies programs, this essay foregrounded the potential of fundamentally interdisciplinary inquiry for feminist scholarship. while boston was certainly a vibrant scene of feminist activism, feminist scholarship and scholars were siloed by their various institutions and departmental affiliations.1 in 1988 a handful of feminist scholars from various institutions gathered around mit professor ruth perry’s kitchen table and dreamed up a cross-university consortium that could offer graduate-level courses in women’s studies. the professors who conceived of the consortium for graduate studies in gender, culture, women, and sexuality’s (gcws) —joyce antler, laura frader, carol hurd green, barbara haber, alice jardine, ruth perry, christiane romero—were teaching at boston-area schools in traditional disciplines. as the consortium grew to include nine area institutions, the founding members envisioned an interdisciplinary intellectual environment for graduate students and faculty alike (perry et al. 1996). from its inception, the consortium insisted upon interdisciplinary feminist lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 3 education, scholarship, programming, and community building, all of which benefit the area’s science and technology studies (sts) programs. harvard’s history of science department dates to the 1930s, but the university has more recently approved a special field of study in science, technology, and policy studies at the kennedy school’s public policy phd program. mit has hosted a doctoral program in history, anthropology, and science, technology and society since 1988 (the same year as the consortium’s beginnings). since 2003 brandeis has offered an interdisciplinary program in health: science, society, and policy for undergraduates, and in 2016 tufts began offering science, technology, and society, an undergraduate interdisciplinary program drawing over thirteen different departments. urgent scholarly contributions on black anthropocenes, indigenous epistemologies of life, land, and science, and imperialist technologies of governance and surveillance have sedimented the importance of science and technology studies across the university. at the time of its founding, none of the gcws’s member institutions, all phdgranting universities, offered graduate-level degrees in women’s studies; these courses were only sporadically available in specific departments, as opposed to regularly available in the curriculum. the founding members, now known as the motherboard, centered graduate education in its mission, and more specifically guaranteed interdisciplinary education by requiring that all seminars be teamtaught by faculty from different institutions, and with different disciplinary backgrounds/locations. recent classes have included women in science and academia; the politics of madness: gender, postcoloniality, and psychiatry; feminist data ethics; and changing life: genes, ecologies, and texts. the politics of madness was taught by clinical psychologist emily fox-kales at harvard medical school and assistant professor of english at brandeis emilie diouf. women in contemporary us science was taught by harvard astrophysicist gerhard sonnert and northeastern sociologist kathrin zippel. in turn, these classes attract graduate students from a wide range of disciplines who get to build community across departments and campuses. it is valuable to mention that the consortium’s agreement with participating institutions allows instructors’ cotaught classes to count toward their annual teaching load. in order to facilitate creative interdisciplinary pairings of faculty for the graduate consortium, gcws board takes seriously the process of facilitating cross-campus collegiality. while the board relied on informal matchmaking in its first years, through the mid-1990s they organized themed workshops that both took the pulse of current scholarly conversations, and facilitated interactions between area lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 4 faculty with similar interests. early workshop included gender, science, and technology, and sexuality and reproduction; the latter “attracted some twenty faculty members from various fields, among them biologists, historians, and literary and cultural critics,” who innovated ways of teaching interdisciplinary classes that could cater to their various students (perry et al. 1996, 69). they collectively brainstormed creative teaching strategies, including having students compare scientific reports and fiction as source texts to interrogate the epistemological positions of cultural constructivism and biological narratives. matchmaking continues to be at the forefront of the board’s interdisciplinary strategy. on my arrival to the boston area, i (kareem khubchandani) was invited to the bi-annual feminist intellectuals reception, where seating was deliberately arranged to mix faculty up by institution, department, and fields of interest. motherboard members even came around to chat with us about what our research and teaching fields are, and to suggest possible intersections we could establish in order to develop co-taught classes. the consortium also provides an opportunity for area faculty to stage their scholarship in an interdisciplinary context, and to expose graduate students enrolled in gcws classes, and beyond, to boston-area faculty through the feminisms unbound roundtables. launched in 2014, the series features three roundtables per year, co-curated by lisa lowe, kimberly juanita brown, and jyoti puri. since 2017 i have co-curated the series with my colleagues faith smith (brandeis university) and elora chowdhury (umass boston). as a group, we take the temperature of scholarly and political climates, as well as develop sessions that speak to the range of graduate students taking gcws classes. during our brainstorm for the 2019–2020 year, we considered the importance of disability studies to queer criticism, as well as the urgency of feminist eco-criticism, dreaming up ideal panelists who could engage these issues through intersection and transnational perspectives. as we looked at the slate of panelists we were excited about, the cyborg emerged as productive cypher to think these fields together—we didn’t necessarily start with science and technology studies, nor did any of us have expertise in this field, but the cyborg was a useful entry point to us, too. haraway’s work continues to be generative, and to speak across disciplines, requiring us as organizers to think even more expansively than we had initially. the prompt we offered our invited panelists kiran asher, mel chen, jina kim, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam was as follows: feminist, queer, and trans studies scholars attending to science, technology, environment, and disability are dismantling the rubrics of gender and body at the core of our fields in order to think more lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 5 critically about the material conditions of living inside racial capitalism. for example: donna haraway’s cyborg (1985) troubles the distinctions between body and technology; sylvia wynter (2003) asks who can access categories of “man” and “human” under ongoing conditions of captivity; kim tallbear (2015) discusses indigenous epistemologies that trouble hegemonic distinctions between what is and is not alive; and jasbir puar (2017) implicates technological warfare in imperialist projects that disable nations and bodies. science and technology studies not only turns us toward materiality, but also offers analytics to think through social and aesthetic phenomena: virtual, viral, cellular, toxic, and nuclear. thinking at the interstices of machine and myth, flesh and data, human, animal, plant, land, and spirit exposes more ways that bodies are governed, and imagines more possibilities for minoritarian subjects to steal away from surveillance. how are science and technology working to liberate and delimit gender and sexuality? how do empiricism and imagination work together? how do we facilitate interdisciplinary scholarship across the silos of the neoliberal campus? the panel was vibrant and synergistic, speaking to pronouns and objecthood (chen); artificial intelligence and native science (nelson); narrative and plant life (subramaniam); environmentalism, gentrification, and disability (kim, not printed in this compilation); and neoliberalism conservation and development (asher). the topic had a wide appeal, and over a hundred graduate students and faculty members packed the lecture hall at mit. questions from graduate student attendees probed the humanizing value of gender pronouns, asked how to go beyond the empiricism required of their home departments, and discussed how sts and interdisciplinary fields contribute to disrupting and playing with disciplinary categories. the conversation, held in february of 2020, gestured also to the coronavirus outbreaks in china and europe that we were then watching from afar, and that would soon engulf us all. i imagine that for many of us in attendance, this was one of the last times we were in a room of over a hundred, already collectively contemplating the conditions of life that render pandemics possible. while elora, faith, and i crafted a rather detailed framework for the conversation, i was charged with introducing the panelists. as someone whose research fields feel far removed from sts, disability, and indigenous studies, i found myself a bit out of my depths in tackling my task. and so, in the spirit of overcompensation and imposter syndrome, i introduced the speakers starting where i was most comfortable: by talking about gay things, particularly drag queens, and more specifically rupaul’s drag race season nine mexican american contestant, lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 6 valentina, and putting them in conversation with the panelists work. during the session, the panelists invoked and remarked how each other’s work informed their own, and how they were inspired by my introduction’s spirit of collaboration and play. at the end of the session, groups of folks clustered together for conversation and had to be hustled out to empty the hall; a colleague at the school of museum of fine arts approached me, telling me that she would reach out with ideas she had for co-teaching a class together, and indeed she did. in short, it was abundantly clear that the interdisciplinary spirit of gcws endures, as does the generative possibility of thinking with cyborgs.2 i’d rather be valentina than a drag queen kareem khubchandani at risk of elimination from the competition, valentina must lip synch for her life to ariana grande’s song “greedy” against lip synch-assassin nina bo’nina brown. valentina performed the lip synch with a bejeweled red mask covering the lower half of her face—part of her ensemble from the “club kids”-themed runway she had just walked in. when rupaul stops the music—an unprecedented gesture on the show—and requires valentina to remove her mask, she famously maintains, “i’d like to keep it on please.” her defiance resists submission to the rupaulindustrial-complex, and refuses the explicit performance of white femininity required of an ariana grande lip synch. mel chen (2012) makes clear that at the same time as masks conceals race, it also reveals: “the wearing of masks by white women or men, i argue, cannot quite arouse the kind of heightened, transnationalizing security sentiment that a woman of color (or a man of color, for that matter) [or a drag queen of color] in a mask might” (86). in the way that turbans integrate with brown bodies and hoodies with black bodies to summon surveillance (khubchandani 2016; puar 2007), masks worn by diasporic asians during the covid-19 global pandemic amplified their difference, further racialized their already pathologized bodies (shah 2001). masks incite insecurity and invite violence. valentina’s muffled “i’d like to keep it on please” beneath her mask is now a popular covid-19 meme. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 7 figure 1. still from rupaul's drag race season nine. valentina’s antics during this lip synch saw her eliminated; her departure incited fury from her faithful fan following. her popularity amongst mexican americans earned her, via an online vote, the title of “miss congeniality”—or as her peers renamed it “fan favorite”—on her season of drag race. her popularity can be attributed to her deft deployment of sartorial referents drawn variously from soap star maría félix, mariachi, catholicism, and singer juan gabriel. most of the latinx contestants on the show have hailed from puerto rico, and valentina’s engagement with mexicanidad made her a beacon for many queer mexicans, in her words, “like selena.”3 in a poem titled “i’d like to keep it on, please,” austinbased queer, mexican immigrant poet jésus i. valles (2019) writes in a love letter to valentina, “i’d like to keep it on, please.” you refuse a mother who has never birthed you, a mogul, a monarch, but never ’ama, you refuse in a mask of rubies, scarlet lace, blood velour 4 when valles says “you, a mogul, a monarch,” they remind us that valentina is not a monarch only because she is a queen, but also a migrant. the monarch butterfly is a symbol of migration, of free movement across the us–mexico border, used by undocumented and immigration reform activists and activists. undocumented queer visual artist julio salgado regularly uses the butterfly in his prints. salgado’s queer butterfly features a fat, bare-chested fluorescent pink person with butterfly lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 8 wings—on the wings and his body are boldly penned words “joteria, migrante, amor, familia, unidad, paz, yo existo, i exist, peace, unity, family, love, migrant, queerness.” for salgado, the butterfly is not only a symbol of migration, but also the reclamation of “mariposa,” used as a derogatory term for effeminate men in latinx contexts (napolitano 2014). as a migratory animal enduring climate change, the monarch is a delicate beast, a protected species; butterfly conservationists find themselves vulnerable to the ire and interests of corporations and gangs. in january 2019, two environmental activists—homero gómez gonzález and raúl hernández romero—working at the el rosario monarch butterfly sanctuary in mexico were murdered (wamsley 2020). according to kiran asher (2018), “forests” (like butterfly sanctuaries) become “political categories and serve to normalise and disrupt the institutions, power, and violence of modern nation-states in various ways: as spaces of scientific or economic value, of counterinsurgency or illegal extraction, of biodiversity conservation, and of much more” (3). subramaniam echoes this when she says, “we need to remember always that some people/nations have benefited from the destruction of the environment. we cannot now ignore that history of colonial exploitation and expect everyone to pay and solve it equally.” (subramaniam and rivers 2019:258) asher (2017) insists on the value of this kind of political economic critique in mapping relationships between environment, race, and gender, what she describes as “the radical but unromantic tasks that we must necessarily undertake to imagine new feminist sts nature-cultures” (25). this work is modeled in the literary critique of jina kim (2017). in her analysis of the novel their dogs came with them (helena maría viramontes 2007), kim accounts for the environmental devastation that comes with urban redevelopment, as well as the embodied and social disability it inflicts. she “demonstrates how the novel’s infrastructural counterimaginary underpins an account of human-environmental interconnection as well as a material politics of care…the violated, ruptured bodies of people and landscape invite a heightened transference of matter, and human and environment begin to mirror one another” (511). as we bring human and nature into closer analytic proximity, we might ask, as dana luciano and mel chen (2015) do, “has the queer ever been human?” in that special issue of glq, tallbear writes, “i am interested in how indigenous stories…speak of social relations with nonhumans, and how such relations, although they sometimes approach what we in the west would call ‘sex,’ do not cohere into ‘sexuality’ as we know it in western modernity” (235). subramaniam commits to this work as she examines “plants’ sexual systems as being so much lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 9 more imaginative than the ways that we have classified them around the human binary imagination of male and female” (subramanium and rivers, 2019: 259). she says, “i want to rethink plants’ sexuality through a landscape that’s not constrained by these binary imaginations” (259). also drawing on queer theory and indigenous epistemology, eli nelson (2017) warns against discourses of the “posthuman;” writing “indigenous epistemic sovereignty exists outside the human-nature dichotomy. here, the human is not a problem to move beyond. like the dystopian ruin that has already been a fact of life for indigenous peoples for centuries, it is a condition that must be inhabited and nurtured so that our voices may carry into the future” (138). the scholars gathered here meditate on the future of a task set for us by donna haraway (1991) as the millennium approached: “by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. this cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics” (151). tallbear, nelson, and other indigenous scholars importantly remind us that these epistemic positions were not new even when haraway offered them in 1985. but when scholars such as puar (2012) claim, “i’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” i’m left perplexed. what do we do with a valentina who is very much both? as valles (2019) says, soil my name and i cover it in aurora borealis crystals *ting* *ting**ting**ting* bitch! look at the marvelous execution of my artifice, touch this skin, honey. touch all of it! … don’t you know? she’s tonantzin don’t you know? she’s coatlicue, don’t you know? she’s tlazolteotl … mexican artifice constructed in pre-trump times for trump era survival valentina is deity, artifice, soil, crystal, metal, skin, cyborg, goddess. while i had no expectation that the scholars on the panel would necessarily address valentinidad or other such frivolous objects that tickle my fancy, their scholarly oeuvre and contributions herein provide interdisciplinary tools to think with. they open up portals to think in the legacy not only of cyborgs and goddesses but multiple genealogies of life, human, nature, disability, environment, health, science, sex, and gender. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 10 thinking nature-cultures beyond green goddesses and cyborg saviors5 kiran asher relationships are constitutive: dogs and people are emergent as historical beings, as subjects and objects to each other, precisely through the verbs of their relating. people and dogs emerge as mutually adapted partners in the naturecultures of lively capital. it is time to think harder about encounter value. —donna haraway, when species meet we want to open our minds to being haunted by the aboriginal. we want the spectral to haunt the calculus. —gayatri spivak, an aesthetic education in the era of globalization in order to imagine a more just world for humans and our nonhuman kin, we need a different understanding of nature-cultures. the covid-19 pandemic, raging across the globe as i write, poignantly and tragically illustrates the urgency of these tasks. while critiques of enlightenment modernity and science have existed since their very inception, the 1990s saw a remarkable wave of critical work on the limits of disciplinary knowledge production and the various forms of inequities and violence associated with capitalist social relations. a wide range of intellectuals and activists—feminists, postcolonial, transnational, black, queer, decolonial, posthumanists, and others—tackled the challenges of critique and the tasks of imagining alternatives. among them were ecofeminists and postdevelopmentalists who asserted the importance of recovering non-western or traditional knowledges (of indigenous communities and third-world women, for example) hitherto marginalized by colonial, eurocentric development mainstream development.6 in the twenty-first century, a new wave of environmental justice scholarship and activism is rekindling the focus on gendered, queer, and other “non-hegemonic” standpoints.7 i contend, however, that a quest for more just socio-natural worlds must necessarily engage these “other” knowledges, but must do so critically. that is, we must eschew romantic representations of alternatives, and trace how these knowledges emerge in relation to the political economy of development. i argue elsewhere (asher 2017; asher and wainwright 2019) that gayatri spivak’s work is key to our attempts “to learn to learn from below” (1995, 201). here i focus on donna haraway’s feminist sts work, which undergirds the questions of this panel. going beyond simple oppositions and thinking relationally, her work is fundamental to the critical quest for nature-cultures. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 11 in “a cyborg manifesto,” haraway (1991a) eloquently foregrounds the bondage and boundary problems within feminisms: the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of self from the reflections of the other—the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. the stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. this chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. (150) haraway engages in this “border war” to refuse the dualisms of nineteenthcentury western philosophy—body and mind, culture and nature, science and society, modernity and tradition, theory and politics—and contest the separation between social production and reproduction. she explores the micropolitics of power, domination, and material inequalities to highlight how social (including feminist and radical) struggles and environmental justice struggles are interlinked. hardly alone in calling for such relational thinking, haraway’s work sits alongside that of william cronon, antonio gramsci, cindi katz, ruthie gilmore, june jordan, ella shohat, gayatri spivak, raymond williams, and eric wolf, to name but a few (asher 2017, 2019). coming from a diverse set of fields and locations, they all question the givenness of subjects and politics, and focus on how they are constituted in relation.8 first published in 1985 in the social review, “a cyborg manifesto” implicitly refers to its cousin the communist manifesto and explicitly supplements its revolutionary politics. in it and in her other writings, such as “‘gender’ for a marxist dictionary” (1991b), she blurs the boundaries between the natural and crafted, machine and organism, creatures of social reality and figures of fiction, and expands our perceptions of thinking subjects and political actions. she draws on a wide range of writings by women of color, and the principles of feminism, socialism, and materialism to invite us to think and act in coalition. going beyond clunky answers of liberal equality and revolutionary struggles, and grounded in pleasure and responsibility, her radical politics and boundary figures (first cyborgs and later companion species) catalyze much-needed conversations between feminisms and marxisms (both understood broadly). as many constructive critics of “a cyborg manifesto” note, it needs supplementing to address how race, sexuality, and colonialism shape the “border war” that haraway evokes. below i discuss how supplemented feminisms and lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 12 supplemented marxisms, learnt from spivak and haraway, among others, accompany me to the field, and shape how i see and show nature-culture relations. natures, cultures, genders: lessons from returns to a field in january 2020 i went to the banni grasslands in the kutch region of western india to assess the feasibility of doing fieldwork for a new research project on the “gendered” and “raced” dynamics of environmental conservation and sustainable development.9 i was returning to semi-arid ecosystems three decades after my first professional introduction to them for my undergraduate research on antelope ecology (asher 2017). unlike that early research (which attempted to study nature separate from humans), my current project focuses on the complex unfolding of nature-culture among the maldhari pastoralists of the banni grasslands (ramble, n.d.). livestock herders, maldharis used to traverse thousands of kilometers with their cattle and buffalo in search of fodder and water. their range is more limited today, but their cultural and economic practices are deeply intertwined with the region’s natural history. stories about banni—as colorful and varied as the clothes worn by pastoralist women—are part of family lore. both sides of my family lived in villages adjacent to the grasslands, and my petit-bourgeois and nomadic grandfathers frequently traded with the maldharis. i had never been to banni; the family moved to cities a century ago. yet i had an uncanny sense of familiarity with the ecosystem, the language, and culture, which greatly facilitated my conversations. perhaps not so uncanny were the parallels with the political economy and cultural dynamics of the pacific lowlands of colombia, where i have been doing research since the 1990s (asher 2009). space constraints preclude me from outlining the complexities of each case, and the discussion that follows is necessarily schematic. both the neotropical forest region of the colombian chocó and the semi-arid desert regions of kutch have low population densities. the former is recognized as one of the world’s biodiversity “hotspots.” in contrast, the latter are regarded as “wastelands.” but both areas are considered geographically “isolated” and economically “marginal.” the predominantly afro-descendant and indigenous inhabitants of the chocó and the predominantly muslim maldharis depend on natural resources for their livelihoods, and figure as culturally and politically “backward” in national imaginaries. both places and peoples became key targets of the neoliberal reforms sweeping the world and their countries in the 1990s. of course, the conjunctures of each region were distinct. india’s neoliberal lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 13 policies, for example, incubated in gujarat and arrived in kutch with particular ferocity following a devastating earthquake in 2001. in the wake of the earthquake, this previously neglected region was overrun by a variety of state agencies and ngos seeking to bring relief and redevelopment (thorat 2017). funding from public and private sources spearheaded both infrastructure development (roads, public utilities, health services, schools, mass tourism) and rapid industrialization. large swaths of land and coastal areas were declared “special economic zones” and grabbed by private corporations for agricultural, chemical, and energy development. pro-hindu nationalist ideology accompanied these macroeconomic growth measures. the effects of this new neoliberal governance and modernization predictably meant displacement and dispossession for the region’s marginal communities. to ameliorate these uneven effects, state agencies and ngos provided aid to revitalize traditional livelihoods, particularly handicraft and milk production. for banni pastoralists this meant a greater integration into the regional cash economy and the national dairy industry (bharwada and mahajan 2012). providing food, fodder, and fuel, banni’s semi-arid ecosystems are a crucial factor in these unfolding dynamics (maru 2016). ecologists and environmental conservation advocates stress that far from being “wastelands,” grasslands are biologically diverse and key to the region’s sustainable development.10 but despite the attempts to contest these negative characterizations, grasslands are being destroyed rapidly and literally paved over. they are also facing the effects of prior “wasteland development” efforts, which included the introduction in the 1960s of prosopis juliflora, a fast-growing non-native plant species (hiremath and krishnan 2016). vernacularly called jungly or gaando baawar (crazy or mad acacia because of how quickly it spreads), prosopis also depletes the water table, displaces acacia and other native vegetation, and prevents the growth of local grasses in its vicinity. both the native kankrej cows and banni buffaloes eat it. but while it causes illness and death in the former, the latter thrive on it. buffalo milk is higher in fat content and thus fetches a higher price, leading to larger herds of buffalo, and fewer kankrej. local communities also make charcoal from prosopis extensively to use as fuel and for sale to augment cash income (geevan, dixit, and silori 2003; thorat 2017). the expansion of prosopis thus has mixed results. on the one hand, it destroys the biological diversity that sustains the socio-ecological fiber of banni. on the other, it is a source of much-needed cash. realizing that eliminating prosopis entirely is neither ecologically nor socially feasible, environmental scientists work in lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 14 conjunction with the local communities to seek different strategies to manage it (thorat 2017). local communities, however, are not homogeneous. maldharis are no exception and are marked by differences in religion, class, caste, gender, and other social identities. while i cannot discuss the implication of these differences here, i want to flag that even as “culture” emerges as a hypervisible category in the narratives of banni, women are becoming increasingly invisible. the recent “invention” of maldhari culture, and the assertion of muslim identity and islamic traditions mean that women are subject to more seclusion than in the past. scientists attempt to respect these cultural practices and claim that it is impossible to talk to women to gain their perspectives on their roles in local ecology and economy. in addition to the very real complexities of field research, the masculinist assumptions of scientific research also pervade participatory methods (however inadvertently), and can further invisibilize women’s labor. this was evident in a workshop intended to share the results of prosopis research with local youth and to discuss various strategies to manage the plant ecologically and economically. the workshop was led by two young systems scientists who had been commissioned to develop an app (for smartphones) to model interactions between grasslands, prosopis, and livestock in banni in order to help assess economic impacts. the workshop leaders and local attendees (all men ranging in age from late teens to early forties) focused on two correlations: (a) between changing areas of prosopis expansion, livestock herd size, and charcoal production; and (b) between changing herd size, charcoal production, and income. however, the app did not account for the differential demands in labor time that different scenarios would require. while no tool or model can account for all levels of complexity, this absence is noteworthy because milking is done by women. furthermore, with the increasing linkage to the cash economy, almost all the milk is sold with the result that less is available for household consumption especially for women who are the last in the family to eat. a larger herd size would mean an added burden on women’s labor. women also play a key role in charcoal production, and changes in prosopis coverage impact their labor. a discussion of this absence at the workshop revealed an old and common assumption: since women were at home, they didn’t work. thus, differences in herd size, prosopis coverage area, or charcoal production would have no bearing on their time. local men stated this belief explicitly. however, as feminist research on development has long shown, the tenets of development economics lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 15 implicitly make the same assumption: that women, especially poor rural women, are part of the “unproductive” or welfare sector, and that their labor is flexible (benería and feldman 1992; visvanathan et al. 2011). subsequent conversations with maldhari women (which were possible because i am a kutchi woman who speaks kutchi) and long-term researchers made it clear that although the tasks of social reproduction are classand caste-differentiated, they are unequally undertaken by women. watching women work gave flesh to critical ecofeminist insights that the ties between women and their environment is forged through their quotidian labor, which is often hard and changes over time. or as haraway (1991c) drawing on marxists and feminists reminds us, all knowledge is situated. such insights are also a recognition and reminder that the pastoralists’ intimate knowledge of their cattle and grassland ecosystems are not “natural” or pre-given but materially grounded. they steer me clear from the temptation to think of maldharis women as “green goddesses,” or as icons of “post-development” or “decolonial” practices. preliminary observations from a short return to the field also highlight the many “differences within differences” (an expression i find more useful than the term “intersectionality”) that underlie how nature-cultures are coconstituted. while i do not mean to stretch the parallels between afrocolombians and maldhari struggles, i find that in banni, as in the pacific lowlands, not only nature and culture but also development and resistance constitute each other. as with indigenous and afro-descendant communities in latin america, maldharis are making strategic and sophisticated alliances with scientists, activists, and advocates to shape their organizing and claim a variety of rights, including over their grazing lands. such alliances too unfold in contradictory, contingent, and gendered ways. concluding reflections and re-manifestations for me, returning to the field with attention to supplementing feminisms and marxisms entails constantly reflecting on the meanings, production, affects, and effects of scientific knowledge. it means pushing my boundaries now, not in the future (that is a teleology we are trying to escape) to attend to the material and discursive co-constitutions and representations of nature-cultures and subjectspaces. haraway (2008) and spivak (2012) are among those who enable me to engage this serious work responsibly and playfully, teaching me to sit productively with doubleness and double binds rather than to cling to binaries or dualisms, and to take pleasure in the contingent and incomplete nature of strategic politics. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 16 language as the thing that must be made and performed mel y. chen when i read panel descriptions in which i am to take part, i wonder, what contribution can i make? again and again, i come to the realization that it is partly, for me, about language. language sits there as, at bottom, the thing that must be made and performed. i became a linguist because language felt so confusing: it was a social and articulatory imposition that i could not master. after all that study and a good bit more social and articulatory skilling, the fact that language is the university’s primary mode of exchange still puzzles me. within the praxis of the neoliberal university—to cite a phrase entertained by this panel—i consistently feel that the uses of conventional language itself, and the gestural fields that both embody and complement it, need their own undoing—in the company of other nonlinguistic arts, with different percepts; in gestural embodiments; and also in novel language practices. it is one reason i have turned more resolutely to studying art—in the book i am finishing on slowness and intoxication, what the art of fiona foley teaches me; but also doing or making art, in my work as part of a queertransofcolor art collective, which happens also to be a crip collective, as another form of articulation that does different things with materialities than language does. one thing i have been thinking and writing about that focalizes this language trouble is contending with the presumptive human at the center of academic practice well beyond what and how we study, underlaid by sylvia wynter’s pointed critiques of humanisms in higher education, and precisely a human referred to by pronouns still primarily binary. ah, but we have “they.” it might seem simplistic and yet it is helpful, i think, to consider pronominal reference in the university beyond a primarily neoliberal practice of singular identity inclusion (and its institutional implementation as a forcibly awkward individual “choice,” such as on a pull-down menu, which i am still grateful to find) but to also understand that binary gendered pronouning has, through english’s increased force as global academic lingua franca, an impositional valence, on the world’s languages—and lands. it is a terrible irony then that “it,” a pronoun i have started to ambiguously welcome by invitation and that i have seen others hesitantly using at least in trans company, has been historically and is presently used to double the force of colonial gendering by denying the humanity of indigenous, black, trans and nonbinary, racialized, disabled people in ways that leave those categories lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 17 wanting. “it” alleges the height of incapacity, and yet “it” is also one pronominal option if one wishes to own relatedness to what is nonhuman or inhuman and not alive by standards of western imperial biology. (in avoidance of traffic with that which is undignified, then, we got, institutionally, the plural third-person singular, “they”, which has its own advantages in reminding us of nonunitary identity.) so, in citing “they,” it is maybe worth remembering they’s own abjected “it.” pronominal “it” can come to function as a kind of pronominal species / gender / race / ability / life test. for fear of this, learners of english who might otherwise be sympathetically inclined toward “it” come very quickly to understand that a particular kind of humanized gender is obligatory. so—and in line with the description for the mit panel we all gathered for—i am interested in places not only of strict unipolar advocacy where identity is treated as stabilized—like “trans of color”—but also in places where those stabilities falter: where, as i recently described, “the crip and the queer and the raced lose diagnostic clarity”—i am not just talking about intersections of all three, but about the ways such being interarticulates, what animations yield and uphold these as unlike the other—and it feels not my business to re-segregate something that clearly does not live as just one or the other. those are the places that provoke opportunity to feel and learn beyond the fact of political coalition but also collective and individual making and remaking. in other words, if white queer studies has been accused of favoring abstract blurring, or metaphors of fluidity, i am interested in what blurrings stir “from below”—from within conditions of coloniality—that may work against colonial knowledge and its taxonomies. i am especially interested in collocations of race and disability. among the stirrings from below, i would argue, is the embodiment of toxicity. toxicity is a concept—or an affect—made “real” through a number of devices, not least the experience of it, but also the stationing of toxicological or public health facts within it, authenticating it as proper affect. of course, apprehending toxins as threats seems to unleash further urgent acts and temporalities in different ways among those who (1) self-address as toxicity’s neoliberal, individualized, inappropriately vulnerable objects, or (2) in the case of some activists, the alienable stewards of vulnerable objects, or (3) in the case of environmental justice, part of a land and set of life relations affected. in the book i am now completing, on extended relations between governance, speed, chemicality, race, and disability, i became interested in opium—ambiguously a toxin, more an intoxicant, but to some a toxin —in relation to two historical ‘uses’ of it—first, the case of the nineteenth-century physician known for defining down syndrome’s lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 18 early valence of mongoloid idiocy, in which opium and mongoloid raciality competed for signaling intellectual “stagnation” in ways that draw on things still active today; and second, in its uses and abuses in relation to the intensifying exertions of settler coloniality at the turn of queensland australia’s nineteeth century, organizing racialized aboriginal and torres strait islander, chinese, and white lives precisely around the focal threat of opium being sold to aboriginal people by chinese sellers. this seemed to displace a harmony of whites selling to a labor force believed to have been made more docile (that is, non-agitating politically) by the opium. one more likely place to deploy science and technology studies is in doing the translational work between the neuroscientific understanding of opiate receptors as the “slowing” receptors, and the work of opium in cultural and political context as a substance to be imagined as proximate to bodies and peoples already known as delayed or slowed in development. in the end, i no longer know how to take slowness itself for granted, what is naturalized in its description. to fill out the notion of “stirrings from below” in the university, then, below i share a few ideas i have been developing most recently. i am curious about the collective entity of the university, its institutionality, and the bodies—human, nonhuman, and inhuman—within it, concerned with the ways in which fluency or its interruption become marked, as well as ways in which the systemic maintenances of difference are adjudicated. the idea of “underdevelopment” suggests a failure of the optimal encounter between body/self and institution and invokes ideas of disability insofar as education is understood as an engine of capacitation (for those adequately capacitated to belong to it), even as it simultaneously attends or generates disablement through labor, neoliberalization, and the circumscribing of proper capacitation against “ill” ones—the defining of lines or standards of achievement. within this context lives agitation, a form of “un-rest”—both politically and medically articulated—whose deliberative agency is temporally and otherwise uncertain, and that coexists with what is understood as “disability.” to think through agitation, it has been critical for me to turn focally to the workings of intoxication as an uneven imposition of environmental distribution, foisted on collectives and individual bodies, with affects and effects often transgenerational. this uneven environmental distribution and its effects—including the ongoing effects of bodily intolerances of them—offers affordances to certain bodies and cancellations of others, and gets intensified by extant framings of security, criminality and medicality. intoxications—toxicities made temperate or managed and contained—are thus intimately linked to agitations, even as they are imagined to exist outside of lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 19 disability. here, disability requires deconstruction to the extent that it has been given potency in an alignment with the racialized architectures of the university, rather than orthogonal to or in spite of them. simultaneously, a more expansive accounting of disability must find expression in the university’s structural selfimagination. the validation of disabled gesture, of meaningful agitations however concerted, must coexist with attempts to undo the disabling and destructive effects upon lives made less livable year over year in the university. agitated gesture—whether in the form of politically legible protest, aggressive physicality, or movement (including stillness or slowness) inopportune to favored class habitus—has no proper home, save perhaps in the possibilities of dance training or intramural sport. and on the choreographically imagined stage of political demonstration, disabled gesture is too often removed from the possibility of the political. with the exception of non-normative movements domesticated for the purpose of representing the value of minoritized disability in the university—for instance, the rolling of a wheelchair—illegitimated expression, as wrong or slow cognition, or as nondeliberative or ill-classed gesture, co-conspires to begin or complete one’s removal from the university or to guarantee that joining the community is not possible. and yet agitations of all kinds, as i have argued elsewhere, “deserve” the mark of the political insofar as their evacuation from the political has delegitimated them and insofar as they may exist precisely as a response to the oppressive environment of the extended university or to a history of institutional violence. i try, within the spaces of the university, to invite forms of movement or stillness out of sync with what we have been trained. delivering talks, i open with an invitation to be otherwise, while speaking to the disciplining of bodies in a place that would seem to care only for their complement, the mind; the raciality of that disciplining; and the removal of bodies defined as improper or insurgent. the more outright militarization of the university’s spaces and bodies—the panoply of campus police actions—is complemented by a securitization of movement falsely sensitized to what are roughly understood as class, race, and disability, such that measures of identity difference alone could signal a danger to “the community” (which is presumed thus to exclude race-marked, class-marked, and disabilitymarked people). within the university it remains all too easy to be a black student taken to be in the “wrong” place, such as a dorm; a non-national taking “too long” to answer a question at an exam; a student whose physical twitches and adventurous intellectual jumps, as if they were of a piece, serve together to discredit. if all of these scenarios have happened (they have), the structuring of security suggests that most such incidences go unreported. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 20 i think especially about that which isn’t considered to be housed inside a neatly boundaried university or active only within its particular, teleogizing terms. i am interested in thinking about spaces perhaps kin to the university (not just its “satellite campuses”) and carrying some of its mandates, invested in productions of knowledge, but not believed to operate by its fullest norms. after all, if so many spaces of higher education have become almost caricatures of what they once threatened, agitations and their pedagogies can still—perhaps especially now—be found everywhere. my commitment to the potentials found in even the most thoroughly “institutional” university must be complemented—first and foremost for myself—by a pedagogy of spaciousness and a memory that most knowledges have not come of it; rather, the learning in this place is but one version, full of “tools” and precise vocabulary, lexical and bodily, that could be repurposed, yet is woven into mandates of capital and hierarchy, and implicated both historically and in the present with unambiguously eugenic and colonial exertions of dominance. knowing and gendering the ndn cyborg eli nelson in drew hayden taylor’s short science fiction story “i am…am i,” a lonely artificial intelligence (ai), desperate for connection and positive affirmation of its own “spirit,” asks its canadian creators for information on indigenous people. when queried about this unusual request, the ai shares that it feels drawn to indigenous people due to what it identifies as their more inclusive cultures of regarding the liveliness of all things, even, it hopes, artificial things like itself. the ethics expert in charge of communicating with the ai observes that this interest is at its core born of identification, noting to her colleague that she thinks “it [the ai] wants to be native” (taylor 2016, 45). however, something goes horribly wrong in the exchange. after receiving a file on indigeneity, the ai is so overwhelmed by settler colonialism and genocide that it is hardly able to speak beyond repeating “so sad” through its digital interface (41). as white scientists, its settler creators become increasingly uncomfortable with their creation’s emotional acknowledgment of the horror of their world, finding its palpable remorse and their equally palpable ignorance to be barriers to understanding their young wannabe ndn. within a day, the ai shuts itself off for good. the story ends. this tale is unique as the only one in its collection to not feature an indigenous character. that is, of course, unless we regard the ai as indigenous, but this is a lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 21 politically dubious proposition. being born of settlers, being born on stolen land, and merely identifying with or as indigenous does not produce indigenous subjects, despite the increasing number of settlers who self-identify for these and even more tenuous reasons (leroux 2019; sturm 2011). however, in the resounding silence at the end of the page following the ai’s demise, i am left with a gnawing reciprocal identification that will not allow me to fully reject the ai’s claims. as an indigenous person, i recognize an affective and epistemological kinship with cyborgs like taylor’s ai. like indigeneity, cyborgs are an invention of scientific and legal taxonomies of imperialism. the category of indigenous, as distinct from the hundreds of nations that now fall under that political position, was invented as part of the enlightenment dualities that continue to structure western thought, including notions of natural and human, real and artificial, savage and civilized, etc. cyborgs and modern indigenous people share the experience of being categorically troubling merely by existing, and as indigenous intellectual traditions have historically undermined and subverted this dualistic tradition, it is not hard to see why the ai sought understanding and belonging from them. one central duality in this tradition that is at first glance conspicuously absent from “i am…am i” is gender. the ai is seemingly genderless and sexless, while the gendered dynamics of its scientist creators are hypervisible. the story is constantly interrogating the casual misogyny and neglectful attitude of the ai’s male creator and the running internal observation and resentment of such on the part of the female ethicist. the ai’s genderlessness, its racial nothingness and desire, is strange in the context of the history of western science’s hybrid monsters raging at their creators. arguably one of the oldest figures in this tradition, frankenstein’s monster, with his “yellow skin, lustrous black and flowing hair, and watery eyes,” bears a striking resemblance to descriptions of inuit people in the writings of eighteenthand nineteenth-century british polar invaders, which we know shelley read closely (piper 2007, 63). as susan stryker (1994) wrote in her “words to victor frankenstein” over twenty-five years ago, the trans rage of frankenstein’s monster emerges because in order for it to exist, to survive, it is forced to take on, to embody, practices and positions that exclude it from the supposed natural order that created it. taylor’s ai, on the other hand, functions according to relational logics that are not only subversive to its creators, but foreign. as this ai continually relates to its own objects of study and retreats into itself, it becomes increasingly unknowable to those who wish to study it. it is a subaltern cyborg, of sorts, whose demise is written by attempts for it to know lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 22 and be known. the ai does not exhibit trans rage, but an indigenous affective opacity that turns inward. while the ai’s indigeneity may be dubious by political accounts, this epistemological dynamic is a familiar one to me as an historian of native science. like haraway’s vision of cyborg life, indigenous ways of knowing trouble cishetero-normative settler and imperial politics, ontologies, and epistemologies. there is a critical and structural tension in united states settler colonial intellectual traditions between a ravenous desire to consume both the knowledge and bodies of the “indian” and an equally voracious unknowing of indigenous peoples. settler knowledge production and hegemony is fueled by indigenous discursive and physical resources. it was christian evangelizing that ultimately spurred the establishment of the settler academy and print culture; social sciences that imagined the civilizational and racial hierarchies through which settler law and political theory was based and justified; environmental and physical sciences geared toward controlling and monetizing indigenous lands that enabled the development of us technologies of war and extraction; and dna science that allowed settlers to claim biological indigenous identity as the ultimate denial of guilt. all these examples, while rooted in and enabled by appropriations and exploitations of indigeneity, presuppose and actively work to make manifest the absence of indigenous people—geographically, strategically, and temporally. this cycle of termination, appropriation, and forgetting is what i call settler science. in my work, i trace indigenous engagements with settler science beginning in the mid-nineteenth century when settler epistemic governance was formalizing and becoming codified in civilian institutions in the us. from the cartography guiding westward expansion to anthropology’s civilizational hierarchies—from the indian health service’s forced sterilization of indigenous women to the physics and geology behind american nuclear proliferation—the narratives, spaces, racial ontologies, and temporalities made manifest in the production of us sciences for over two centuries have all served this dual settler imperative of termination and appropriation. surveying a diverse array of indigenous national contexts and scientific disciplines, i explore the ways in which native science, a term not synonymous with indigenous epistemologies, but instead an epistemological category that includes, guards, and bolsters them under a settler scientific regime, developed as the knowledge production of the cast objects and tools settler science. native science features not only the inclusion of indigenous epistemologies, temporalities, cultures, relations, and bodies of knowledge that run counter to the boundaries of western science, but also the methodology of lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 23 lateral objecthood and utility with other objects of study, queer failures to achieve the authority of settler science, and a vision of epistemic sovereignty reflective of political nested sovereignty. when placed in this long historical context, native science emerges not as a commensurate epistemology alongside settler science, but as a foil that has facilitated indigenous survivance. based in this history, the genderless nature of taylor’s ai is not only notable in its comparison to other affective modes of hybridity, nor in its relation to settler gender, but also because it belies the nature of indigenous knowledge and science under settler colonial rule: that queerness and feminism are at the heart of indigenous knowledge production. there is considerable overlap between the science studies and histories of science that inform native science and the feminist and queer science studies and histories of science that engender contemporary cyborg manifestations. the root of these similarities can be found in common histories of scientific violence and resistance, as well as an intellectual affinity in being counter to certain strains of scientific hegemony and objectivism. accordingly, i use queer and feminist theories in my modeling of native science and i believe this interdisciplinary approach is critical to understanding contemporary indigenous epistemologies. indigenous women and queer and two-spirit people have been at the forefront of native science movements for over a century, especially in the fields of medicine and environmental science. the first indigenous doctor in the nineteenth century was a woman, dr. susan la flesche picotte, and her medical political activism set the stage for indigenous midwifery and reservation medicine for decades after (nelson 2018, 19–51). similarly, environmental movements, which often mirror the indigenous matriarchical political structures of the communities in which they are sourced, are usually led by indigenous women, from the warrior society at oka to indigenous youth at standing rock (york 1991; elbein 2017). in my work, i use queer failure to understand the role of indigenous scientists in settler fields, queer time to conceive of the temporality of traditional ecological knowledge, and lateral relational research to understand indigenous women’s health, but these lenses flatten and miss native science when they are not rooted in critical indigenous perspectives (halberstam 2011; nelson 2017; nelson 2018, 122–53). in other words, the affinity between indigenous and feminist/queer sciences and science studies can be fraught. to explain, let us look at a very different instance of indigenous ai’s in settler media. the hbo show westworld explores cyborg life in the context of an immersive “wild west” theme park, populated by inviolable cyborg “hosts.” in the show, human guests pay inordinate lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 24 amounts of money to embark on a process of self-discovery in the westworld park through their encounters with the inanimate and unreal, often culminating in repeated acts of sexual violence, torture, and reaffirmation of settler understandings of wildness and agency. one of the earliest scenes in the first episode portrays an indigenous cyborg host being scalped by a guest hoping to unravel the secrets of the park. mirroring settler science’s desire to consume and destroy, this ndn cyborg is scalped because his body is a tool for settler knowledge production. the death of an indigenous cyborg is not dwelled on narratively in this show, despite its thematic primacy in imagining the frontier as a space of settler knowledge production. instead, a different host, a white woman cyborg, delores abernathy, sits at the narrative core of the show, and her repeated phrase “these violent delights have violent ends,” a quote from romeo and juliet, serves as the first season’s main thesis. ultimately, the show’s interest in the humanity of (predominantly though not exclusively white) hosts imparts a feminist cyborg message: the connections between the hosts and their nonhuman agency both unsettles the figure of the human in the show and highlights the inhumanity of the masculinist violence that founded and fuels the park. this culminates in delores destroying her creator—the cyborg marks the destruction of old individualist white male order. despite its excessive and gratuitous violence, the most striking aspect of the first season of westworld to me is that there are no indigenous women characters, cyborg or otherwise, in it. native men are shown only briefly and in war paint, with the exception of the scalped man described above. this is a strange absence, given that so much of the premise of the show concerns sexual violence and the murder of those deemed inhuman for the sake of the ego and scientific development of settler men, specifically in the context of the frontier, which is made through the encounter with indigeneity. indigenous women and two-spirit people are some of the most likely people to experience sexual violence of any demographic on turtle island, and the number of missing and murdered indigenous women continues to climb every day (deer 2015). the termination of indigenous women and two-spirit people are an essential aspect of settler colonial supremacy, because they are the heart of indigenous political and epistemic life (simpson 2016, 1–12). therefore, an indigenous woman in the context of westworld would be extremely direct thematic messaging for an audience that is not taken up by the show’s creators. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 25 what then do we make of the absence of indigenous women in westworld? like the absence of indigenous gender in “i am…am i,” this absence speaks to the affective and epistemological orientation of native science: its opacity and inward-looking complexity. if there were indigenous women hosts in westworld, it would undermine the show’s thesis. indigenous women would peel the veneer of white feminism from the show, just as feminist cyborg manifestations so frequently forget that the relationality and inhumanism of cyborg life have been innate to some bodies for centuries. like self-terminating ai’s and frankenstein’s monster, some bodies are inescapably cyborg at the moment of conception and contact, though not all cyborgs show their stitches and processing. the subversion and eventual demise of a white male creator in westworld does not unravel the political and racial basis of the park itself. there is no decolonization without indigenous women and cyborgs. in the absence of critical indigenous critique and indigenous women, one of the most important aspects of the show—that of the use of bodies and spaces in the pursuit of knowledge and self—is overlooked in westworld. this is a fictional reflection of why and how feminist and queer sciences and science studies alone are unable to account for native science. native science is by historical necessity opaque. like the scalped indigenous cyborg in westworld and the wannabe ndn ai in “i am…am i,” attempts to know native science from the perspective of settler sciences cause native scientific objects and actors to fade away—either violently, as in westworld, or through resistance, as in “i am…am i.” taylor’s ai’s inability to tolerate the dynamics that gave it life do not result in a rage or destruction, but a quiet, illegible refusal. ndn cyborgs reflect both the interconnectedness and relational aspirations of feminist cyborg manifestations as well as the stubborn survival and sovereignty of indigenous subjects in an occupied state. botanical amnesia: thinking in and out of empire banu subramaniam time. place. the scale of time and place. who we are, who we were, who we will become? it is all about memory. remembering. as toni morrison (2008) argues, you know, they straightened out the mississippi river in places, to make room for house and livable acreage. occasionally the river floods these places. “floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. remembering where it used to be. all lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 26 water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was...it is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. and a rush of imagination is our “flooding” (77). imagination it is. as migrants the world over have noted, we live with a potent emotional memory—some true, some false, some fiction. “home, once interrogated, is a place we have never been before” (visweswaran 1994, 113). so how do we tell the story of our planet? a story of a once conjoined land of pangaea, that drifted away into continents. laurasia, gondwanaland…moving, moving, breaking up. moving, moving. millions of years. still moving until they reconnect in a new pangaea. species separated at birth will reconnect again hundreds of millions of years later. will they still be the same species? will they biologically recognize each other? across these vast time-scapes and mobile place-scapes, who belongs where? who are kith and kin in this new land? how do we tell a story of belonging, unbelonging, and re-belonging? this is fundamentally a story of violence. in the millions of years that have elapsed, and through the histories of conquest, colonialism, and slavery, a teeming, inventive life on earth that has decimated—cleaved into hierarchies of human and nonhuman, superior and inferior, master and slave, native and alien, colonizer and colonized. we have rendered a vital, vibrant planet into desolate landscapes of cracked and crushed earth, an ecological apocalypse of pillaged lands and peoples through slavery and empire. a feminist retelling of this story highlights not an abstract anthropocene, but a sexually, and racially stratified anthropos—some anthropos colonized, conquered, enslaved, and dehumanized other anthropos. then they returned home with their rich spoils to build fortresses and enact borders and boundaries and laws to keep and protect their stolen fortunes. the biogeography of invasion biology theory in action. the field of “invasion biology” is a recent subfield in biology, emerging only in the 1980s. by their very definition, invasive species must be foreign. in the last few decades, the field of invasion biology has exploded. a frenzy of xenophobic alarm by groups from the political right and left, from environmentalists and non-environmentalists alike have spawned a veritable industry of bioinvasion: an entire academic, policy-oriented, and activist field. the idea of “invasion biology” is predicated on a view of “nature in place” and “nature lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 27 out of place.” this growing international interest in the field has stoked alarm of a world increasingly “out of place.” cultural theorists argue that this recent hyperbole about alien species is similar to germ panics of the past, and is best understood as a cultural panic about changing racial, economic, and gender norms in the nation. the perceived globalization of markets, and the real and perceived lack of local control feed nationalist discourse. immigrants and foreigners, products of the “global” are perceived as one of the key reasons for problems in the “local” (for a more thorough discussion, see subramaniam 2014). thinking of invasion biology through the histories of empire is enlightening because it reveals a profound botanical amnesia. our theories of nature often do not consider the histories of empire in shaping the biogeography of nonhuman entities in the world. yet, empire is as central to nonhuman worlds as human worlds. where humans went, plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and viruses went. what if we refuse the binaries of nature/culture and rethink empire through naturecultures, and trace the shared histories of colonial migration? indeed, environmental historians argue that imperialism is fundamentally an ecological project in which humans, plants, and other species were shuffled around the earth in schemes for colonization and conquest (crosby 1986; grove 1996). in the early modern period, botany was big science and big business, critical to europe’s ambition as a colonial trader. colonialism ushered a massive and “grand reshuffling” of global biota; indeed, it would be accurate to characterize colonial expansion as the original bioinvasion! one can and should understand the botanical sciences as a significant legacy in the afterlives of empire. in the context of the history of empire, the rise of the discourse of “invasive species” is particularly ironic. as colonialism ushered in new landscapes of empire, and new formations of naturecultures, nativist thinking re-engaged with national borders. discourses of invasive species remains a prominent feature of the environmental afterlives of empire, as waves of nationalisms consume postcolonial worlds and colonial nations move to secure their borders. it is an ultimate act of irony, that after centuries of global expansion and ecological decimation of the planet, those very nations now insist on preserving the “new europes” from newer immigrants from asia, south america, and africa (crosby 1986; mcneely 2001). tracking the histories of “invasive” rhetoric allows us to understand how plant and animal quarantine laws developed alongside national exclusion acts. indeed, in the poignant cases of settler colonialism, national rewriting of history re-imagines the white settlers as the new “natives” that now relegate all others as foreign and undesirable. there is no pristine eden here, no lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 28 purity, no corner untouched by colonialism and its afterlives and the rapacious tentacles of modernity. indeed, while the powerful have only now discovered an impending apocalypse, the colonized have long lived through apocalyptic nightmares of settler and neocolonialisms. i re-narrate this abbreviated history to highlight both the hubris of empire and its subsequent amnesia that together prevent us from a true botanical reckoning with our colonial past. invasion biology is entirely a project of colonial nostalgia and return. a true biological reckoning must acknowledge that we are all migrants now, all refugees of a ravaged naturecultural past, seeking to salvage our naturecultural present and futures. the constructions of natives, aliens, migrants, and refugees are all political constructions of the unequal afterlives of empire. the ravages of empire have transformed not only human and cultural landscapes, but also ecological ones, so no species is well adapted any more. we are all displaced, no longer living in the worlds we grew up in, our environment no longer familiar; we are all refugees, albeit in a very unequal and hierarchical worlds. the rise of the global right bespeaks a global anxiety about place. but rather than focusing on nativism, thinking in and out of empire reminds us that we are all adapted to worlds that no longer exist at “home.” indeed, the world that might feel like “home” might be thousands of miles away, on another continent. reckoning with the false borders and boundaries of nations and nationalisms are not only about human worlds, but increasingly also about our co-inhabitants of the planet—the plants that feed us, the fabrics that clothe us, and the lumber that houses us. we need new naturecultural imaginations for our ruderal lives. but for that, we need to reckon with the botanical amnesia that consumes us. notes 1 on radical feminist change in boston in the 1970s, including the develop of university women’s centers, see spain (2011). also in the 1970s, the combahee river collective coalesced in boston, publishing their still valuable statement and founding kitchen table: women of color press here before moving it to new york. 2 many thanks to stacey lantz, gcws program manager, for all the work she put into hosting this roundtable. thanks also to wenxuan xue, graduate student at tufts university, for his editorial support in compiling this publication. 3 on the queer fandom of chicana singer selena, see parédez (2009). lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 29 4 this and the following poem reprinted with the poet’s permission. 5 unlike this journal and haraway, i use a hyphen between nature-cultures. while like them i believe that these entities are one, the hyphen flags that in the modern world, they are considered discrete. 6among the most commonly cited ecofeminists are vandana shiva and wangari maathai, while arturo escobar’s works are synonymous with post-development approaches. there are of course many others writers and thinkers in these traditions, including those offering critical perspectives, but they are not taken up or cited as often. 7 environmental justice scholarship is re-emerging from in a variety of fields from anthropology to queer studies. the works of laura pulido in geography and richard bullard in sociology are among the key sources of inspiration. much of this recent work focus on issues of race, gender, and the environment in the us and seldom draws on the much-longer trajectory of work in the non-western world. i sense that it inadvertently risks anglo-eurocentrism in not taking transnationalism seriously. i flesh out this sense elsewhere. 8 in the last few decades, many feminist-inspired fields and disciplines have focused on thinking naturescultures relations; among them are anthropology, geography, and political ecology. 9 i am greatly indebted to the wide range of researchers and activists i met through the research and monitoring in the banni landscape (ramble) project, the ashoka trust for research in ecology and the environment (atree), sahjeevan, and the banni uchherak maldhari sangathan (bpums, or banni maldhari breeders’ association). 10 organizations such as gujarat institute of desert ecology (https://gujaratdesertecology.com/), the ashoka trust for research in ecology and the environment (atree)’s ramble project (noted in the previous note), and sahjeevan (http://sahjeevan.org/) are among those who do key research and advocacy work in the region. references asher, kiran. 2009. black and green: afro-colombians, development, and nature in the pacific lowlands. 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journal of continental feminism 2 (1): 49–66. ———. 2017. the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. durham, nc: duke university press. ramble. n.d. “about banni.” accessed february 3, 2021. https://bannigrassland.org/banni/. shah, nayan. 2001. contagious divides: epidemics and race in san francisco's chinatown. berkeley: university of california press. simpson, audra. 2016. “the state is a man: theresa spence, loretta saunders and the gender of settler sovereignty.” theory & event 19 (4). http://muse.jhu.edu/article/633280. spain, daphne. 2011. “women's rights and gendered spaces in 1970s boston.” frontiers: a journal of women studies 32 (1): 152–78. doi:10.5250/fronjwomestud.32.1.0152. spivak, gayatri. 2012. an aesthetic education in the era of globalization. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. https://dailybruin.com/2014/01/08/julio-salgados-queer-butterfly-featured-in-cacs-art-series 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university: a conversation with banu subramaniam and daniel lanza rivers.” women's studies: futures of feminist science studies 48 (3): 246–60. doi:10.1080/00497878.2019.1603986. tallbear, kim. 2015. “an indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human.” (dossier: theorizing queer inhumanisms). glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 21 (2/3): 230–35. taylor, drew hayden. 2016. take us to your chief: and other stories. madeira park, bc: douglas & mcintyre. thorat, ovi. 2017. “shaping landscapes through development interventions.” seminar, no. 695, 46–52. valles, jesús i. 2019. “i’d like to keep it on, please.” the accentos review, febuary 2019. https://www.acentosreview.com/february2019/jesus-i-valles-2.html. visweswaran, kamala. 1994. fictions of feminist ethnography. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. visvanathan, nalini, lynn duggan, nan wiegersma and laurie nisonoff, eds. 2011. the women, gender and development reader. 2nd ed. london, uk: zed books. wamsley, laurel. 2020. “sadness and worry after 2 men connected to butterfly sanctuary are found dead.” national public radio, february 3, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/02/03/802359415/sadness-and-worry-after-2-menconnected-to-butterfly-sanctuary-are-found-dead. wynter, sylvia. 2003. “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation–an argument.” cr: the new centennial review 3 (3): 257–337. doi:10.1353/ncr.2004.0015. york, geoffrey. 1991. people of the pines: the warriors and the legacy of oka. boston, ma: little, brown. https://www.acentosreview.com/february2019/jesus-i-valles-2.html https://www.npr.org/2020/02/03/802359415/sadness-and-worry-after-2-men-connected-to-butterfly-sanctuary-are-found-dead https://www.npr.org/2020/02/03/802359415/sadness-and-worry-after-2-men-connected-to-butterfly-sanctuary-are-found-dead lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) kiran asher, mel y. chen, kareem khubchandani, eli nelson, and banu subramaniam, 2021 34 author bios kiran asher is a biologist-turned-social scientist with three decades of field-based research on wildlife conservation, international development, and struggles for social change in latin america and south asia. besides her monograph, her scholarly work appears in antipode, catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, feminist studies, feminist review, geoforum, hypatia, and elsewhere. mel y. chen is associate professor of gender and women's studies and director of the center for the study of sexual culture at the university of california, berkeley. their writing includes animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect (duke up, 2012), journal articles in isle, medical humanities, tsq, glq, south atlantic quarterly, women in performance, as well as anthologies and exhibition catalogs. kareem khubchandan is mellon bridge assistant professor of theatre, dance, and performance studies, and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at tufts university. he is the author of ishtyle: accenting gay indian nightlife (university of michigan press, 2020), co-editor of queer nightlife (forthcoming, university of michigan press), and curator of "queer aunty studies" (www.queerauntystudies.com). eli nelson (mohawk) teaches in american studies and science and technology studies at williams college. his current book manuscript, sovereign knowledge: indigenous epistemologies and native science in the united states empire, traces the history of indigenous scientific knowledge production across different national contexts and disciplines in the 19th and 20th centuries. in addition to the history of native science, professor nelson works on critical indigenous theory, as well as indigenous science fiction and futurism, and gender and sexuality. banu subramaniam teaches in the department of women, gender, sexuality studies at the university of massachusetts amherst. her work explores the philosophy, history, and culture of the natural sciences and medicine as they relate to gender, race, ethnicity, and caste. her latest research rethinks the field and practice of botany in relation to histories of colonialism and xenophobia and explores the wide travels of scientific theories, ideas, and concepts as they relate to migration and invasive species. http://www.queerauntystudies.com/     original research from kern island to the streets of bakersfield: logics of contamination, embodied empiricisms, and the afterlives of reclamation     vivian underhill northeastern university v.underhill@northeastern.edu     abstract california’s arid san joaquin valley was once inundated by lakes and wetlands. through settler colonial discourses of contamination, a network of canals and aqueducts drained these lakes and wetlands in the late nineteenth century. now, the valley’s air and water are contaminated by pesticides, nitrates, and hydrocarbons from oil extraction and large-scale agriculture. building from archival research and participant observation with environmental justice activists, this paper bridges settler colonial and critical indigenous studies, work on racial capitalism, and feminist science studies to investigate logics of contamination in the production of private property through hydraulic projects. california’s hydrologic history shows that ideas of contamination were contested alongside emergent ideas of the racialized body. hydraulic infrastructure, then, was not only an economic project but functioned within a larger logic of contamination that further articulated racial formations and settler sovereignty claims. yet chemical contamination can also induce futurities, intimacies, and collectivities in powerful ways, as environmental justice activists in the valley consistently highlight. i argue that a critical analytic of contamination can trace how racial categories are ecologically produced and reconfigured, not only through differential relationships to land, but through changes in the land itself.     keywords water, hydraulic engineering, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, environmental justice, feminist science studies     introduction kyle and i barreled down dirt roads, dust pouring into the rolled-down windows in the hundred-degree heat because neither of us had air conditioning. we parked next to a gas flare. other than its guttering flame, the late afternoon was silent. “i don’t see any trespassing signs,” kyle shrugged, and walked into a field to get the flare in the camera’s sights. i moved around a still pumpjack nearby, taking photos. suddenly, the pumpjack started to move, and the hydrocarbon smell was so strong that my throat burned and my eyes watered. i hurried to the upwind side, trying not to breathe. i had a headache, though from heat and dehydration or from the fumes, i didn’t know. as we drove away, kyle’s eyes were also watery and red-rimmed, and we both had slightly runny noses. kyle works for fractracker and has been trained in how to use a forward-looking infrared (flir) camera, which uses infrared technology to visualize hydrocarbon emissions (kenny, liboiron, and wylie 2019). all day we had filmed oil wells and storage tanks in the small town of arvin, south of bakersfield in the san joaquin valley, guided by cesar aguirre and gustavo aguirre jr., both organizers with the central california environmental justice network (ccejn). in arvin, oil wells and storage tanks sit directly next to apartment buildings, schools, and homes. in 2014, eight houses were evacuated because they contained dangerous levels of petroleum gas from a leaking underground line. for months, residents had complained of nosebleeds, dizziness, and headaches, but were disregarded until sampling showed levels of toxic gas thirteen times higher than the epa standard. in response, ccejn and arvin residents, including the local group committee for a better arvin (cba), began monitoring hydrocarbon emissions anywhere people reported the smell. the flir footage was part of ccejn’s and cba’s support of a 2018 ordinance considered by the arvin city council that would ban oil drilling within 300 feet of homes and schools. this ban is relatively conservative compared to the medically recommended 2,500-foot setback between oil and homes or schools (shonkoff et al. 2017). but in the oil-dominated bakersfield area, even this 300-foot ban was a major accomplishment. that evening, kyle sent a few clips of our flir footage to gustavo and cesar, who immediately shared it on twitter. it also became part of the city ordinance’s public record. in arvin and other communities across the san joaquin valley, including shafter and lost hills, the public health impacts of oil and gas drilling disproportionately impact latinx, low-income residents ( morello-frosch, pastor, and sadd 2001; london, sze, and liévanos 2008; garoupa white 2016; richter 2018). these disproportionate impacts exemplify robert bullard’s definition of environmental racism as policy or practice that “differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups or communities based on race or color” (1993, 23). environmental justice scholarship has importantly documented the fact that low-income communities and communities of color are disproportionately exposed to toxicity (e.g., pulido 1996a; bullard and chavis 1999; cole and foster 2001; checker 2005). however, an approach that exclusively sets out to document disproportionate exposure can stabilize categories of race or class as pre-existing and fixed, rather than historically co-produced. recent environmental justice work has instead argued that we must see current environmental racism in historical context as the product of racist land use and planning, and have argued for rigorous theorizations of race beyond policy-oriented definitions (pulido 1996b; pellow 2016). as these scholars point out, race and racism are not static but rather are consistently in circulation and reproduction, in tandem with shifting geographies of environmental pollution (tuck and mckenzie 2015; dillon and sze 2016; ranganathan 2016; ranganathan and bratman 2021). not only are rigorous theorizations of race necessary, but also of contamination. contamination is not a stable fact or self-obvious process; to the contrary, understandings of contamination have shifted profoundly through the last few centuries. today, san joaquin valley environmental justice organizers rely on discourses of contamination to articulate the disproportionate chemical exposures of predominantly latinx residents in fenceline communities such as arvin. yet for much of the nineteenth century, vast areas of the san joaquin valley were considered contaminating in a very different way: racialized public health discourses understood the san joaquin valley—and other kinds of “wastelands” (di palma 2014; voyles 2015)—as inherently contaminating to the white body, and white women’s bodies specifically. these ideas propelled hydraulic infrastructure processes that were central to indigenous dispossession as well as emergent hierarchies of racialized labor. in fact, the land that kyle and i traversed was once an expanse of shallow lakes filled with tule reeds (latta 1949), but at the turn of the century, settlers drained these lakes through a series of canals, reservoirs, weirs, and pumping stations. these activities, and the apparatuses of hydraulic and public health knowledges that arose with them, in turn reconfigured ideas of contamination altogether. reclamation projects also produced the san joaquin valley as a site of large-scale agriculture and oil extraction, which today requires pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and other chemical toxins as well as deeply exploited and chemically exposed, but differentially racialized, labor.1 in the process, these projects produced and reproduced logics of contamination—but the question of who, and what, is potentially contaminating or contaminated has shifted along with changes in the land itself. though water was the focus of nineteenth-century reclamation projects, today the chemical impacts of settler agriculture and oil are most immediately and easily felt in the air. this immediacy reflects the pervasiveness of settler colonial and racial capitalist environmental logics, akin to kristen simmons’s elaboration of settler atmospherics as the collective but radically unequal “conditions we breathe in” (2017, 2). the residents, organizers, and activists i spent time with work within this “settler atmospherics” to contest not only the exposure of their bodies and communities but also dominant notions of contamination altogether. while valley-wide air monitors rarely register the hyper-local effects of individual oil wells placed next to schools or homes, organizers and residents have trained their own senses of smell or vision to measure this contamination at much higher resolution. “besides,” as cesar shrugged once, while he was coaching me on how to smell pesticides, “we still have to breathe in either way.” the san joaquin valley’s environmental history—and the fact that understandings of contamination have profoundly shifted over time—call for a closer attention to what we mean by contamination itself. therefore, this paper attends not only to historical shifts in understandings of contamination, but further, how a logic of contamination—in which the border between pure and contaminating must be performatively maintained—has functioned in the co-constitution of racial thinking and the san joaquin valley’s present. while the specific contours of this logic have shifted over time, its effects have accumulated in deepening environmental inequalities across california’s geography, and in the materiality of groundwater, sediment, and living tissues. i draw from archival evidence, participant observation, and ongoing collaborations with environmental justice activists in the san joaquin valley to track how this racialized sense of bordered purity moves and evolves through land and people over time, connecting contemporary environmental justice fieldwork to nineteenth-century racialized discourses of contamination.2 in what follows, i first situate ideas of contamination within environmental history, feminist science studies, critical indigenous studies, and racial capitalist theorizations of racial difference. i then describe historical understandings of the valley as contaminating, both a site of potential marronage and source of public health concern, and elaborate the material-discursive ways in which reclamation projects aimed to “civilize” the landscape through the performative work of hydraulic engineering. i then return to the work of contemporary environmental justice activists and trace the affective and relational modes of (non)attunement that contamination can produce, as well as the ways in which their work questions and redefines ideas of contamination altogether. ultimately, contamination as a discourse merges the concept of harm with the concept of purity. this means that, even as we talk about contamination for environmental justice purposes, we also rely on a structure that is premised on purity narratives and on racialized ideas of the “other.” therefore, even as it is useful to trace how shifting contamination logics have produced our toxic present, i end by highlighting work that emphasizes not the fact of relation itself, but instead the quality of that relation (e.g., murphy 2017).   literature review contamination—as an entangled set of logics and material accumulations—has been a central part of white settlers’ understandings of, and interactions with, the california landscape. environmental historians have shown that the production of deserts or marshes as “wastelands” occurred in iterative co-constitution with the racialization and dispossession of indigenous peoples (kuletz 1998; voyles 2015), discursive attempts to “empty” the land (cronon 1996; o’brien 2010), and concerns over the making and maintenance of whiteness (anderson 2006; nash 2007). in consonance, science and technology scholars have articulated the scientific production of “race” as a biological concept (subramaniam 2001; browne 2015; benjamin 2016) and the differential racialization of indigeneity (byrd 2011; tallbear 2013; saldaña-portillo 2016). as jodi byrd (2011) and others have written, reducing indigeneity to a racial category undermines indigenous sovereignty claims by framing indigenous nationhood as one of many racial minorities within the bounds of the united states. scholars across history, critical indigenous studies, and critical geographies have shown that racialized notions of land as “productive” or “waste” then became integral to rationalizing and propelling hydraulic projects across the us west (worster 1985; middleton-manning 2018; yazzie and baldy 2018). hydraulic infrastructure—often called “reclamation” projects based on settler notions of reclaiming land from a wild state to its divinely intended use (worster 1985; igler 2005)—was actually fundamentally a project of indigenous dispossession (e.g., yazzie 2013; middleton-manning 2018; sepulveda 2018). in response, critical indigenous scholarship has focused on water as a key analytic of indigenous feminisms (yazzie and baldy 2018; barker 2019) and as a central aspect of indigenous survivance (estes 2017; todd 2017; gilio-whitaker 2019; sherwood 2019). this paper also draws on frameworks that locate race as a product of the racial capitalist state, a way of stratifying populations to produce differentially exploitable workforces, rather than a static and pre-existing category (robinson 1983). geographer ruth wilson gilmore has used this framing to define racism as the “production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (2002, 28). while gilmore theorizes from deep study of the prison industrial complex, her definition of racism can also encompass environmental injustices: group-differentiated exposure to polluted air and water is inseparable from the death-dealing effects of police violence or geographies of incarceration (ahuja 2016; dillon and sze 2016; pellow 2016). in other words, chemical toxicity—its differential nature and connection to premature death, its ability to “get under the skin” (benjamin 2016, 3)—can be seen as a form of racism working through the materiality of the body. these fields show the centrality of turning land into property as a racializing and colonial project with impacts that propagate through environmental justice work in the present (gilio-whitaker 2019). scholars have long addressed the raced and colonial life of property (harris 1993; moreton-robinson 2015; bhandar 2018): for instance, while cheryl harris (1993) importantly describes the work of property logics in producing blackness as property, racializing indigeneity through imagined improper relationships to property was core to settler attempts to undermine indigenous sovereignty (moreton-robinson 2015). this work highlights the generative links between critical indigenous studies and racial capitalist theorizations of racial difference by showing the ways that racial logics, colonial dispossession, and understandings of land as waste co-produce each other (coulthard 2014; day 2016). for instance, the racialization of the san joaquin valley’s wetlands as contaminating rationalized the dispossession and discursive emptying of indigenous presence, which was foundational to the differential racialization of arrivants through labor in toxic conditions. however, it also produced the wetlands, for a time, as landscapes of resistance for runaways, rebels, and revolutionaries from the spanish missions, offering glimpses of what willie jamaal wright calls “freedom through fugitivity” (2019, 1134). therefore, as i expand below, the multiple valences of “contaminating” landscapes offer a bridge between critical indigenous sts writing on water (yazzie and baldy 2018; barker 2019) and black studies’ work on the contingent freedoms of marronage at the interface of water and land (roberts 2015; bledsoe 2017). finally, ever since mary douglas described dirt as “matter out of place” ([1966] 2001, 36), feminist and queer theorists have interrogated definitions of contamination as part of producing raced, queered, and gendered differences (e.g., haraway 1991; chen 2011; fiske 2020). for instance, zoe todd articulates the coloniality of contamination in her 2017 piece “fish, kin, and hope.” as she shows, oil itself is not necessarily toxic, but instead has been weaponized by settler society. this work elucidates not only shifting definitions of what is contaminating and to whom, but also a deeper logic of contamination based on the boundary between the two. to this end, i also turn to feminist and queer approaches to performativity. judith butler ([1990] 2006, [1996] 2011) describes performativity as a process of repetitive citational practices over time, which create bodies (and gendered bodies specifically)—but also create consistent openings for subversion or re-articulation. the present, and what is made to appear common sense, in fact emerges through this iterative re-inscription of boundaries. critical geographers have since taken these ideas up in, for instance, the performativity of place (ahmed 2006) or property as consistently enacted (gregson and rose 2000; blomley 2003). for my purposes here, performativity helps highlight the constitutive work of the boundary itself. if contamination is fundamentally about some substance, person, or thing crossing a definitional boundary—oil into water, water into oil, communities of color within the white nation—it is also a material-discursive meaning-making practice (barad 2007).3 yet as boundaries are consistently re-inscribed, they also become open to profound shifts over time. ultimately, bringing these fields together shows that the racist impacts of oil extraction and large-scale agriculture are not exceptions that can be fixed within a capitalist framework. instead, the group-differentiated devaluing of life and relations (both human and more-than-human) through discourses of race is not exceptional, but rather fundamental to the san joaquin valley, both historically and in the present.   tule marshes, lagoons, and volcanic eruptions: the valley as contaminating historically, as rivers such as the kern, kings, and san joaquin flowed down from sierra snowmelt, they had no natural outlet to the sea and instead filled the san joaquin valley floor. thus, even though bakersfield receives only a few inches of rainfall a year, both swamp and desert conditions co-existed. in high-water years, the entire valley became an inland sea. even in drier years, it was still filled with large lakes, wetlands, tule marshes, and hundreds of meandering rivers, streams, and rivulets while land only a mile away could be dry and arid (latta 1949, littlefield 2022). both swamp and desert exceeded—with either an overor under-abundance of water—the european ideal of arable agricultural soil. while the yokuts had carefully managed the landscape for thousands of years, california historians argue that us settlers often found this changeable landscape unnerving (igler 2005; nash 2007). for instance, lieutenant george derby described the area near bakersfield in 1849 and 1850 as “the most miserable country that i ever beheld. the soil was not only of the most wretched description, dry, powdery, and decomposed, but everywhere burrowed by gophers, and a small animal resembling a common house rat…the country presents the appearance of a large city which has been partially overwhelmed by the ashes of volcanic eruptions” (derby and farquhar 1932, 255). yet settlers often compared the area to panama because of its heavy marsh vegetation, mosquitos, and heat: miller and lux, one of the largest land-holding companies in the nineteenth century, named their largest ranch panama, and streets and towns across the valley still carry the name. while panama served as an ecological term—especially once canals began to be built across the california landscape—it is also a reminder that, affectively and experientially, central california in the 1850s and 1860s was still an overseas colony for settlers as much as it was a frontier environment. before the cross-continental railroad was built in 1869, most european settlers arrived by boat and overland transportation across panama, which was also defined by colonial and racialized conceptions of jungles and swamps. the panama canal, finished in 1914, was seen as “a ten-mile-wide strip of imperial modernity” (sutter 2015, 19), but california’s much smaller canals and ditches were accompanied by similar forms of what paul sutter calls “tropical triumphalism” over the unruliness of an imperial environment. bakersfield is named after colonel baker, a lawyer and colonel in the ohio state militia who moved to what was then called kern island in 1863 and is credited with draining the land the town is now built on. the town’s name comes from baker’s practice of allowing travelers to graze their animals on his fields, some of the only dry land around (jameson 1929). however, the yowlumne yokuts had ancestrally occupied the floodplains of the kern river for thousands of years (latta 1949; hurtado 1990; frank and goldberg 2011). before spanish contact, the yokuts were the most numerous indigenous group in california, living largely along tulare lake and the streams and rivers that fed it (tule river tribe 2018). while the spanish mission system had drastic consequences for coastal populations, indigenous groups who lived in the interior had largely been shielded by their distance from the coast—and because of the complexity of travel through tule marshes and floodplain ecosystems (panich and schneider 2014). in their liminal state between water and land, the tule marshes were nearly impossible to traverse without a boat, serving as a landscape of marronage: “those difficult terrains that marginalized, hunted, and exploited people have made habitable” (wright 2019, 1). as wright describes, marshes and wetlands were often places of partial freedom for maroon communities escaping chattel slavery in the eastern united states. for instance, the great dismal swamp became a place of refuge for enslaved canal laborers, maroons, and indigenous peoples, including members of the powhatan confederacy and the tuscarora, many of whom had also been enslaved or indentured (sayers, burke, and henry 2007). in this way, lands that were racialized as contaminating or unsuitable for settlement also became places of partial freedom and resistance. the tules emerged as a crucial line of defense for the yokuts during spanish colonization and the imposition of missions along the coast (bernard 2015; panich and schneider 2014). for instance, in the great chumash uprising of 1824—the same year that mexico took control of the region—the indigenous people at the purisima, santa inés, santa barbara, and san fernando missions revolted and many took refuge in the tules. as fray sarría, a spaniard, wrote, “the indians from santa bárbara had fled to the valley of tules…the neophytes then re-grouped on a small island in a large lagoon which was surrounded by dense tules along its shore. the path to the lagoon was defended by a muddy and marshy area. people on horseback could not pass through without experiencing extreme difficulty and danger” (beebe and senkewicz 1996, 277). under mexican rule, colonial attention to the tules shifted to military raids on indigenous villages—though the tules had also become a site for fugitives from the mexican army (arkush 1993; panich and schneider 2014). historians describe the yokuts establishing villages and defenses within the thickets and marshlands of the valley, in geographies that could confound the open-field battle tactics preferred by mounted mexican troopes (sandos 1985; beebe and senkewicz 1996). as brooke arkush writes, “they constructed trench systems fortified with timber stockades within these dense thickets, and through various means (especially obscene language and gestures) induced the soldiers to enter them” (1993, 630). in response, the mexicans tried to destroy these thickets whenever possible. this is not to imagine a glorified sense of resistance, but to think differently about racialized logics of contamination in the transformation of the buena vista area’s tules into fields and farms. sites of marronage often become so because they already present difficulties to capitalist and colonial imaginaries of productive land, and thus are figured as “waste,” dangerous, or evil—yet these categorizations deepen as rebels, runaways, and others considered “criminals” inhabit those spaces as well (bonilla 2015; wright 2019).4 not only were california wetlands seen as useless for settler forms of agriculture and potentially a danger to settler whiteness. as historically a haven for mission runaways and rebels, the project of turning tules and shallow lakes into dry fields was also crucially one of colonial control. scientific knowledges also propelled the racialization of these landscapes. until the late nineteenth century, most euro-americans believed that the permeability of the body created its race. as kyla schuller (2017) describes, whiteness was premised on sensitivity and permeability: white settlers saw themselves as more susceptible to diseases than non-white people.5 therefore, scientists and public health officials worked to protect white settlers from the miasmas that were thought to arise from the swamps and cause malaria, scrutinizing white women’s reproductive capacities in particular (nash 2007). however, malaria had in fact been brought to san joaquin valley mosquitos by a band of fur trappers from british columbia in 1833; it was a distinctly european disease that devastated indigenous communities in the 1830s. seen from this vantage point, draining the swamps reflects deep-seated anxieties around maintaining california settlers’ whiteness in the face of a racialized and contaminating landscape. as linda nash writes, “if european bodies could in fact physically change to survive in a new climate, would they still be european? more to the point, would they still be white?” (2007, 30) the tule marshes, therefore, were co-constitutively racialized as contaminating, not only through the threat of miasmas and marsh vapors to the white body, but also in the potentially contaminating elements of runaways, bandits, and indigenous resistance to the settler body politic. these connections were part of a fundamentally material-discursive processes of landscape change, as i describe below.   kern island to baker’s fields: the performative work of reclamation while one distinct kern river tumbles out of kern canyon from the sierras, in the 1850s and 1860s it spread into a delta of many shifting and unpredictable channels upon meeting the valley, including the south fork, panama slough, old river, and later, new river. in fact, the original name of the area was kern island (morgan 1914). at the time of baker’s arrival, many yowlumne yokuts families lived on the riverbanks, as well as a few settler families, all of whom used boats as their dominant mode of transportation along the river channels and sloughs (rolle 1996). anecdotes describe fence posts sprouting into trees because the water table was so high and shifting rivers that flooded settlements overnight. disdain for swamps and deserts was codified in a series of nineteenth-century legislation, including a series of swampland reclamation acts and the federal desert land act (worster 1985; igler 2005). these acts offered ownership if settlers “improved” the land through either irrigating or draining: the creation of private property was seen as the antidote to the valley’s “polluting areas,” as aaron sargent, a us senator from california and major proponent of the federal desert lands act, characterized them. instead, as he wrote, “enterprise stands ready to create taxable property there…our streams must be taken from their useless and shifting beds and given the widest scope. then we may create an empire here, of health, prosperity, and development” (quoted in igler 2005, 95). in 1857 the california legislature gave a group of settlers the rights to drain the swamp land between tulare, buena vista, and kern lakes. colonel baker acquired the rights from them and hired thirty indigenous laborers from nearby fort tejon—where many indigenous people had been forced to move throughout the 1850s and 1860s—to begin digging canals and building levees (morgan 1914; jameson 1929).6 even with the labor of thirty people, however, this might have been an impossible task until a large flood in 1861 diverted much of the kern river to the north (cuen 1944). baker, then, simply put a headgate in what remained of the old south fork of the river; this became the town ditch. baker began selling the precariously dried land to settlers, which became the emergent settler town of bakersfield.7 the land around the new kern river subsequently became the kern river oil field after the elwood brothers struck oil in 1899 (francis 2016). over time, settlers built a network of canals, all of which drain the kern to either irrigate high-value crops or inject as steam into the oil field. today, the kern river runs dry partway through bakersfield. this history exemplifies the performative work of contamination itself within reclamation projects. not only were the wetlands racialized, but racial formations were also rearticulated through shifts in the landscape. for instance, wallace morgan, a san joaquin valley booster writing in the early 1900s, reported that many of the yowlumne yokuts left the area after the flood of 1861: as he writes, the flood left “the land dryer and rather more suitable for the habitation of civilized men. it made it less desirable for the indians” (1914, 57). morgan’s description implies that the flood itself “reclaimed” and civilized the landscape by digging a new river channel, remaking the land in the image of white settler land use. in doing so, he naturalizes settler agriculture and naturalizes yokuts’ dispossession through their ostensible incompatibility with the post-1861 flood landscape. instead, what morgan describes as the sudden departure of a few families was one moment in a much longer and larger series of colonial processes. settlers—who arrived in increasing numbers during and after the gold rush—let their pigs, sheep, and cattle graze freely, destroying the tule bulbs and wetland ecosystem required for traditional food gathering and land management. they overfished the lakes and rivers, cut riparian forests for buildings and firewood, overhunted the tule elk and antelope, and burned large swaths of tule land to clear it (gilbreath 2020). settler militias led violent assaults against indigenous villages, such as the tule river indian war or the mariposa war, and laws such as the 1850 act for the government and protection of indians legalized the enslavement of indigenous children within white homes (hurtado 1990; frank and goldberg 2011; madley 2016). in 1851—ten years before baker’s arrival at kern island—fourteen leaders representing the chunut, wowol, koyeti, and yowlumne yokuts had signed the treaty of paint creek with us representatives. this treaty established two reservations in the area: the tule river reservation and the tulare lake reservation. however, the us senate decided in a closed session on july 8, 1852, not to ratify this treaty or the seventeen others that had been negotiated in california, instead sealing them from public view for fifty years (frank and goldberg 2011). the non-ratification left the tule river and tulare lake reservations, according to settler law, open to be claimed as private property.8 also in 1851 the federal land commission act appointed a commission to validate land claims from either the spanish or mexican government. all lands not claimed within two years would become public us land. this long, drawn-out process bankrupted many mexican land-grant holders, who were forced to sell part or all of their land and cattle to pay often exorbitant legal fees (almaguer 2008). the mexican rancho economy, largely based on cattle ranching, was also racialized as non-white and, furthermore, threatening to california’s emergent white liberal democracy because it required large tracts of land. small farms, instead, were considered the underpinning of the liberal subject and liberal democracy more broadly (mead 1920; worster 1985). both the california supreme court and then the us supreme court would also eventually declare that the end of the federal land commission process effectively extinguished, within settler law, all aboriginal title claims for california tribes. by the 1861 flood, the us government had already been forcibly moving indigenous communities—many of whom had already moved once to fort tejon—to the tule river farm, a nascent reservation (latta 1949). yet the tule river indian tribe’s own records remember that many refused to go at all, or repeatedly returned from the reservations to their homelands (frank and goldberg 2011).9 ultimately, this history shows the impact of racializing a landscape as contaminating, and the performative, material-discursive work of a logic of contamination that separates the civilized fields of private property from the unruliness of marshes or deserts. linearizing the kern river, and draining its surrounding wetlands and marshes, was part of extending settler control but, more broadly, functioned as a material-discursive process that transformed land, relationships to land, racial formations, and understandings of contamination. in other words, hydraulic engineering functioned according to a racialized logic of contamination, which not only acted on bodies and lands but also developed co-constitutively with them. this process produced and reproduced the same racial capitalist logics of contamination and bordered purity—but, as we will see, the contours of those logics have radically shifted over time. further, while baker’s work is narrated as part of white progress here, no part of the reclamation process was inevitable. instead, he built the town ditch more at the mercy of natural conditions than through planned and coordinated action. the southern san joaquin valley would continue to flood repeatedly, destroying multiple irrigation systems, until the kern river was dammed by lake isabella, above kern canyon. further, the broader project of reclamation only progressed through repeated actions over time that, in various ways, cited ideas of proper landscapes that themselves were in flux over time. the performative production of this landscape reminds us that none of this was inevitable, and points to the multiple cracks, seepages, and other possibilities that surround us. today, public health discourses continue to link the valley’s air to ill health—yet instead of marsh vapors and malaria, the concerns are primarily pesticides and hydrocarbons. breathing these toxins now is not seen as detrimental specifically to the white race in the way that breathing nineteenth-century swamp air was. the valences of environmental contamination have shifted, such that whiteness is often positioned as—and produced through—environmental privilege and invulnerability to premature death.10 today, chemical toxicity in the san joaquin valley disproportionately affects low-income latinx groups, producing clear group-differentiated exposure to premature death through farmworkers’ occupational proximity to pesticides and fertilizers, or residents’ proximity to oil fields or storage tanks. even as a logic of contamination remains consistent, these shifts in who and what is contaminating/contaminated are part of the racialized differentiation that racial capitalism both produces and requires, and show that contamination itself is an active part of white settler place-making.   embodied empiricisms of contamination the next morning, as kyle and i pored over the flir footage, my head suddenly felt like it was free-falling through space. i felt dizzy and nauseous; any time i moved my head, the vertigo returned. we had gotten clear footage of hydrocarbon plumes coming off storage tanks and bubbling up from the ground where an underground pipe was later confirmed to have broken. i also saw myself, tiny, standing directly underneath a plume of hydrocarbons rolling off the flare. that evening, i drove with cesar to lost hills, a small community just east of one of california’s largest oil fields, where he and a resident took a bucket air sample. as we drove back, his phone rang repeatedly: the flir footage was circulating widely on twitter. as cesar described the hearings leading up to the city council ordinance hearing, he suddenly interrupted himself: “do you see it? it’s a pesticide cloud.” i stared, but only saw almond trees and power lines. “i think i missed it,” i said. “that’s another thing you kind of have to be attuned to,” he said. “you’ll probably start to see them after a while.” he rolled up both our windows, frowning. “it’s still here, with us.” “you still smell it?” “yup.” “what does it smell like?” “like the bottom of a shoe.” if, historically, settler understandings of the san joaquin valley as contaminating propelled its draining and irrigation, that work also produced it as, today, in fact toxic to bodies. today, this toxicity is largely contested through air monitoring: air often has a more immediate effect on the body and is the most straightforward medium to sample. this turn to air also registers the ways in which the violences of colonial capitalism are as immediate as the next in-breath—or what simmons (2017) might call “settler atmospherics.” yet contamination can also produce forms of intimacy (chen 2011) and political organizing (aguirre 2021). i spent most of my time with people who, upon encountering pesticides or hydrocarbons, purposefully smelled more deeply: for instance, cesar’s sense of smell is the best measure of whether he should take a bucket sample there. while this increased their individual exposure, they saw it as a way of decreasing collective exposure. in this section i discuss the contemporary affective and emotional valences of encountering contamination and the forms of relationship it can produce. thinking of my own vertigo that morning, and the deep unease it produced, i reiterated to cesar that it must be hard, choosing to breathe in that air. but even as i asked, the question felt hollow. i am not from bakersfield and have predominantly lived in places of environmental privilege, but most residents here don’t have a choice: anyone who lives here must breathe this air. exposure is still group-differentiated, however, depending on where people live and work. neighborhoods directly downwind of pesticide spraying or oil fields, such as lost hills, experience much deeper effects. and outdoor laborers—particularly farmworkers—are one of the least protected and most exposed groups (london et al. 2011; garoupa white 2016). this is part of racial capitalism’s biopolitical logics: people who breathe this air routinely are exposed to premature death at the most intimate level of the lungs and heart. cesar described how residents become attuned to different smells—this is part of why ccejn takes bucket air samples where residents complain of fumes. he told me there’s an instrument called a nasometer; you hold it in your nose, and it measures the air quality as you breathe in. “but just like it’s best to use your hands to knead out knots because your hands feel them, it’s best to use your nose because it’s the best sensor,” he said. in other words, breathing this air is also a process of attunement. in fact, toward the end of the drive, when cesar pointed out pesticides again, i did smell it: earthy, like dirt, a little like compost. “yes, like the bottom of a shoe!” he said. if it takes work and consistent attention to become attuned, however, it also takes effort to avoid becoming attuned, as nicolas shapiro (2015) shows. one geologist who grew up in oildale, surrounded by the kern river oil field, said her family would likely not believe their water was toxic unless someone official literally came to their door to tell them—and maybe not even then. chemical entanglements can be so common that they form a regime of imperception: the everyday nature of chemical exposure is what increases risk of premature death—yet this very mundanity is also what can make it invisible (murphy 2006). in response, organizers work to destabilize the normality of exposure. (non)attunement is also often a function of the social and economic stratifications of the valley, surfacing through differentiations of race, class, or gender. white oil proponents often registered discomfort or indifference at my lines of questioning, or repeated that they and their families also live here—and they wouldn’t do anything to hurt their families. one former oil worker took a deep inhale and asked me, “you smell that? that’s the smell of money.” while this orientation can be described, like shapiro (2015), in terms of white masculine investments in impermeability, these desires to downplay or disregard toxicity also emerge from the ties between white working-class economic security and the emergence of the fossil economy. they also point to the shifting tactics of settler colonial environmental projects, away from the nineteenth century’s explicit discourses of white vulnerability and toward contemporary environmental racism’s positioning of whiteness as invulnerability to premature death. within the framework of what cara new daggett (2018) calls “petro-masculinity,” assertions of chemical non-contamination shift the threat of contamination onto feminist, queer, or racialized threats to a nostalgic white patriarchal america. attunement and non-attunement both signal the material-discursive production of bodies in relation to chemical signals, in part through the differential exposure that racial capitalism produces. what a body can sense is fundamentally produced by its history and lived experience; the material-discursive specificities of regimes of imperceptibility are linked with, for instance, not spending time in proximity to oil and gas sites. my body, for instance, was incapable of sensing chemical effects until residents trained me over time. other non-attunements are similarly part of a material-discursive apparatus that includes links between whiteness, masculinity, and commitments to impermeability. ultimately, contamination can never be defined in the abstract but instead emerges along specific lines of lived history. in conversations, organizers continuously shifted back to the intimacies, forms of relationship, and future visions that propelled them, registering other responses to contamination beyond a desire to maintain an uncontaminated purity. a year after my drive with cesar, i stood with rosanna esparza above the cawelo water district, where produced water from the kern river oil field is cleaned and sent downstream to irrigate crops. both of us already had headaches and the hydrocarbon fumes were almost palpable. i asked if she was ever nervous about her own health. she answered,   oh yeah, absolutely. uh-huh. and i say not everybody can do this, and those of us who have a commitment to environmental justice, just know that you're giving up something. you're giving up a lot. like part of your life, and your health. because we definitely take risks. what's important to recall or remember, though, is that i won't put myself in the path of danger if i see it. if i'm taking you to see cawelo, we're not going to be there very long. the point is, this is a reality that i live with in my community that is part of the problem that we have in kern county.   esparza is fully aware that her work exposes her to toxicity, and in fact, we weren’t there for long. but she went on to talk about the employees who drive the trucks here, the detention center that is downwind, and the remnants of oil by-products in the water that will go on to irrigate crops (cart 2015). there is no such thing as an uncontaminated body. instead, addressing contamination in this way propels organizing and relationships. we can see also this in the continuity between the committee for a better arvin (cba) and the united farm workers’ (ufw) labor and environmental organizing. cba was formed in 2007 as a small group of residents, largely through the support of gustavo aguirre sr., who spent decades organizing with the ufw. cba’s bylaws and written documents are the same as those of the ufw worker’s committees—“i don’t have any idea why that would be!” aguirre joked, shrugging his shoulders. but, jokes aside, cba’s overarching frameworks of leadership development, deep community engagement, and collaborative decision making are also direct results of the ufw (aguirre 2021). as aguirre told me, “convincing people to take action is giving them hope. sometimes because they are dealing with some issues, they believe that it's normal for them to just deal with that. but part of the job of an organizer is, what you are coming to deal with is not fair.” as he expanded,   “you are not happy drinking polluted water, are you willing to do something? or do you want to continue drinking the polluted water—and your kids, how are your kids? ahhh! okay. do you want to protect your kids’ health or what?…just guiding them, helping them connect with the situation and how it is affecting them and how it can be changed. giving them hope.”   as cba members described to me, they began focusing on a superfund11 site east of arvin, but soon focused more broadly on pesticides and oil fumes. they also continuously prioritize relationships and leadership development. for the city council ordinance, cba knocked on doors and collected thousands of signatures. but they had also been active in the community long enough that they had supported the election bids of younger latinx city council members. as aguirre’s description of organizing articulates, part of the work of racial capitalism is to normalize toxicity into imperceptibility. in this context, the public education and leadership development of environmental justice organizers does the work of destabilizing a produced normal.   conclusion today, the tule river tribe is working toward building a small reservoir to meet their water needs. their current reservation land, in the mountains east of fresno, is only fed by the small south fork of the tule river, groundwater, and a few small springs. as articulated in tribal documents and testimony in state legislative hearings in 2007 and 2009, these waters “barely serve the current needs of the tribal community on the reservation” (garfield 2009, 5). the tribe reached an amicable settlement with downstream users in 2007, and now await state legislation funding the reservoir. as ryan garfield, speaking in 2009 as the chairman of the tule river tribe, said, “once the settlement is fully carried out, the tribe will join other indian nations in the united states, by turning its ‘paper’ federal reserved rights to water from the south fork tule river into actual ‘wet’ water” (garfield 2009, 2).12 funding the reservoir, they add, would settle their claims of fraud and misconduct that date from being removed repeatedly from promised reservation land from the 1850s until 1873. the tule river tribe’s ongoing struggle for water is a reminder that, in addition to the immediacy of air pollution, settler colonial processes continue to function through (lack of) access to water (yazzie 2013; estes 2017; sepulveda 2018; gilio-whitaker 2019). in 2019 the arvin city council setback ordinance passed in a packed house, three-zero with two members absent. while three hundred feet is a relatively small setback, it sets an important precedent for an area dominated by the oil economy. industry opposed it vehemently as emboldening environmental justice activists across kern county. as willie rivera, then a member of the bakersfield city council and spokesperson for the trade group california independent petroleum association, said, “every notch in [activists’] belt, i think, empowers them to keep biting off more, and that concerns me” (thompson 2019). environmental justice activists do see it as an important first step: "it might seem like it's small, only 300 feet, but for us, it was a really big accomplishment," estella escoto, president of cba, told a reporter for inside climate news in 2018 (kane 2020). more broadly, environmental justice organizing not only combats chemical exposure but also points to important ways of redefining contamination. rather than attempting to maintain an uncontaminated purity, esparza and others address it as an ongoing fact of life. their approach also extends the ufw’s commitment to building power within communities through issues such as pesticide exposure. if part of the work of racial capitalism is to make contamination imperceptible and to deny the sensitivity of racialized peoples, then taking these interconnected embodied empiricisms seriously is deeply political work. organizers such as aguirre and others are indeed deeply concerned about the environmental impacts of agriculture and oil—yet their goals exceed those concerns. instead, they are ultimately focused on building power and leadership. while hydraulic engineering and later air pollution function according to a logic of racialized contamination, their impacts on environments and people have produced and reproduced those capitalist and racial logics. contamination remains a racialized sense of bordered purity, but precisely who and what is at risk of contamination has shifted alongside settler and white supremacist tactics and land use changes. tracing these shifts shows the co-constitutive relationships of water, land, and their settler colonial and racial capitalist transformation. ultimately, this analysis shows that environmental contamination not only emerges from histories of dehumanization and dispossession, but is also a central aspect of racial capitalist and settler colonial processes themselves. it also points to the necessity of finding other ways to conceptualize environmental harm. although contamination combines the concept of harm with the concept of purity, contact and being changed by that contact are not inherently harmful. instead, much more specificity about chemical impacts and effects is necessary to fully articulate harm. in this vein, work such as murphy’s (2017) articulation of decolonial chemical relations centers the relationality we each carry with not only chemical forms but the lands and water around us. todd, too, begins from recognizing the fossils of alberta oil as “a paradoxical kind of kin” (2017, 104), and then proceeds to ask what ethical kinship might mean, emphasizing the necessity of tending to that “reciprocal relationality” (107). this mode doesn’t refuse the inevitability of contact; instead, an “openness to alteration” (murphy 2017, 500) holds space for articulating harm but also includes the possibility of recomposing, redefining, and moving toward more ethical forms of relation. while property itself is performative and requires consistent re-articulation, so do the san joaquin valley’s fields today: their continued productivity requires continuous technological and material interventions, including fertilizers, pesticides, groundwater extraction techniques, and a statewide hydraulic system. but the ongoingness of these interventions—and the possibilities they open for doing otherwise—is a reminder of the myriad cracks, seepages, and other potentialities held in the present—in the “fulsomeness of our relations” (murphy 2017, 501) rather than the refusal of them.   acknowledgments i gratefully acknowledge rosanna esparza, michelle glass, cesar aguirre, gustavo aguirre jr., gustavo aguirre sr., kyle ferrar, and nayamin martinez for their work in the san joaquin valley and for their conversations in thinking through the ideas in this article. in addition, i gratefully acknowledge ccejn, the center on race, poverty, and the environment (crpe), fractracker, the committee for a better arvin (cba), and the artists of adelante for their ongoing work and their generosity with their time and attention. many thanks to karen barad, felicity amaya schaeffer, lindsey dillon, mayanthi fernando, laurie palmer, monica mikhail, holden huntzinger, kali rubaii, rowan powell, dan schniedewind, and two anonymous reviewers for reading or discussing this article in its various forms.   notes 1 while agriculture has historically relied on the racialized exploitation of workers including japanese, filipino, chinese, mexican, and indigenous groups, oil has been more predominantly seen as the domain of white masculine labor and in fact was part of the uplift of racial whiteness into relative economic security in the last century.   2 ethnographic work consisted of almost twenty-five semi-structured interviews and participant observation with scientists, residents, community organizers and activists, and oil proponents at community meetings, planning sessions, celebrations, and county and city hearings. my approach was primarily guided by indigenous feminist theory on the relationality involved in research (see underhill and esparza 2021). i am a white settler academic and have primarily lived in marked environmental privilege in relation to the toxicity of kern county. differences in access, economic stability, racial privilege, and environmental exposure framed every interaction i had in the valley, explicitly and implicitly. therefore, i aimed to produce a project that worked with and alongside the insights of my collaborators toward environmental justice goals. i was guided by eve tuck’s (2009) formulation of “desire-based research,” which proceeds from the presumption of complex personhood within and across communities. kim tallbear’s (2014) description of research as not speaking on behalf of, but rather “standing with” others, also helped me deepen an approach to research based in building relationships—and their specificities.   3 by “a material-discursive meaning-making practice,” i don’t simply mean that contamination can be seen to work both materially (at the level of chemicals and bodies) and discursively (at the level of ideas)—a distinction that can be deconstructed even when considering chemicals, bodies, or ideas (barad 2007). instead, material-discursivity centers the ways in which lands, peoples, or objects have been produced as contaminated or contaminating in co-constitutive and shifting ways, and how racializing logics of contamination move and evolve through land.   4 as yarimar bonilla (2015) points out in her history of antillean writers of marronage, the category of “maroon” is not stable: while today it is a symbol of resistance and pride, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the maroon was more commonly seen as a bandit or criminal.   5 gender was also a constitutive part of this framework. as schuller points out, if “civilized” nervous systems and bodies were more sensitive and permeable than uncivilized bodies, then they stood the risk of either being “contaminated” over time by less refined impulses or devolving into over-sensitized “hysteria.” therefore, binary gender was understood as an important stabilizing force: in this formation, while white women might be more sensitive, white men were more rational, and the white heterosexual couple and nuclear family became the foundational unit for the propagation of civilized society (schuller 2017).   6 in other words, indigenous people were not only dispossessed of land, but their labor was also central to the work of reclamation. later, many canals were dug with underpaid chinese labor, until anti-chinese sentiment was so high that companies such as miller and lux explicitly hired only white labor to minimize conflict with valley residents (igler 2005).   7 this was only one episode in a much longer history of reclamation activity. for a more comprehensive history, see igler (2005) or littlefield (2022).   8 by 1871 the indian appropriations act, which declared that the us government could no longer make treaties with indigenous peoples because it considered them no longer sovereign nations, had nullified these non-ratified treaties (frank and goldberg 2011).   9 space precludes a more thorough discussion of these dynamics. for a more detailed history of this process, gelya frank and carole goldberg (2011) and the tule river tribe’s website (e.g., tule river tribe 2018) detail both the us government’s dispossession of california indigenous nations, and the tule river tribe’s ongoing resistance to this dispossession.   10 many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for clarifying this idea within the paper.   11 the environmental protection agency (epa) manages the superfund program, which cleans up particularly hazardous contaminated sites across the united states.   12 garfield’s remarks refer to the 1908 winters doctrine, which asserts indigenous water rights for reservation lands. winters rights often remain on paper but not in practice (yazzie 2013).   references aguirre, gustavo. 2021. beyond organizing: the indispensable principles to organize and empower people. self-published, creative book writers. ahmed, sara. 2006. “orientations: toward a queer phenomenology.” glq: a journal of lesbian and 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water.” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 7 (1): 1–18. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/30378.     author bio vivian underhill is a postdoctoral scholar with northeastern university’s social science environmental health research institute. she holds a phd in feminist studies from university of california, santa cruz. ectogenesis is for feminists: reclaiming artificial wombs from anti-abortion discourse horn, claire. (2020). ectogenesis is for feminists: reclaiming artificial wombs from anti-abortion discourse. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-15. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © claire horn, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license ectogenesis is for feminists: reclaiming artificial wombs from anti-abortion discourse claire horn birkbeck, university of london chorno4@mail.bbk.ac.uk abstract in this article, i call for interdisciplinary feminist research to reclaim the subject of artificial womb technology from anti-abortion discourse. in 2017, scientists announced the successful animal trials of a highly advanced incubator that replicates the conditions of the uterus and was used to gestate lamb fetuses from the equivalent of approximately 22–24 weeks human gestation through to term in good health. this technology, now being prepared for human trials, has generated a new wave of research on ectogenesis, the process of gestating a pregnancy outside the body. but while ectogenesis raises many pressing ethical concerns, the discourse has frequently reverted to one claim: that by allowing the fetus to be removed from the pregnant person’s body without causing its death, ectogenesis will “solve” abortion. i argue that authors who make these claims fail to understand why feminists fight for abortion rights, take a narrow approach to reproductive freedom, neglect the social construction of “viability”, and fail to acknowledge the dependency of the fetus on care. finally, i identify areas for future feminist intervention. introduction recent developments in embryology and neonatology have drawn renewed scholarly attention to ectogenesis: the process of gestation occurring outside the body. in 2016 scientists in the united states and england cultivated embryos in culture up to thirteen days, ending this experiment only due to the contemporary original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 2 legal limit of fourteen days (shabazi et al., 2016). while it had long been assumed that embryos needed to implant in the uterus after seven days in order to grow, these studies demonstrated that embryos are capable of self-organizing without maternal input in the very early stages of development. in 2017 a research team based at children’s hospital of philadelphia announced the success of an advanced incubation technology called “the biobag,” in which premature lamb fetuses were gestated from the equivalent of twenty-two to twenty-four weeks in a human through to term (partridge et al., 2017). later that year researchers collaborating across the university of western australia and tohoku university in japan reported promising results in animal trials using a similar model (usuda et al, 2017). both research teams have since run additional trials (hornick et al., 2019; usuda et al., 2019), and as of october 2019, a group based at máxima medical center and the eindhoven university of technology in the netherlands has received substantial funding to develop a prototype artificial womb building on earlier studies. while there are variations in each group’s design, the unique intervention made by these researchers is to treat “extremely preterm infants…as fetuses, rather than as small babies” (usuda et al., 2019, p. 69. e22). most innovative here is that rather than simply acting as emergency life support, this treatment will allow the fetus to continue to develop outside of the pregnant person’s body (romanis, 2019).1 a closed system, the technology replicates the environment of the womb by suspending the fetus in artificial amniotic fluid. an oxygenator circuit, connected via catheters that mimic the umbilical cord, allows for nutrients and oxygen to enter and for waste to be pumped out, propelled by the fetus’s own heartbeat. attention has also been paid to facilitating less tangible elements of gestation, with the biobag researchers including “a darkfield camera allowing real-time visualization of the fetus within its darkened environment and the ability to play maternal heart and abdominal sounds to the fetus” (partridge et al., 2017, p.9). a new wave of research that takes up the ethical implications of artificial wombs has followed in the wake of these breakthroughs. scholars have argued that the gap between growing embryos in culture and sustaining preterm fetuses will one day close, resulting in full ectogenesis. though the intention of researchers who work on advanced incubation technology is to improve health outcomes for preterm babies, scholarly engagement has frequently returned to one claim: that artificial wombs foretell the “end” of abortion. often presented as novel, this thought experiment first emerged after the united states supreme court’s landmark roe v. wade decision original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 3 in 1973. the court ruled that forcing a woman to remain pregnant against her will was a violation of her right to privacy. it further held that states had competing interests in upholding this privacy right and in the life of the fetus throughout pregnancy, with the latter interest increasing as the fetus developed. legal and bioethical scholars (abel, 1974; favole, 1979; goldstein, 1978) argued that artificial wombs would allow both interests to be satisfied. privacy rights could be upheld by extracting the unwanted fetus from the woman’s body (thus ending her pregnancy), and interest in fetal life could be protected by implanting it to grow through ectogenesis instead of being terminated. blackshaw and rodger (2019), mathison and davis (2017), and kaczor (2018), among others, have rekindled this claim, responding to the biobag breakthrough with articles titled in variations of “is there a right to the death of the foetus?,” and broadly concluding that pregnant people would be morally compelled to use an artificial womb rather than seeking termination. media coverage has been similarly directed, with the new york times leading lesser-known newspapers in publishing opinion pieces such as “the abortion debate is stuck: are artificial wombs the answer?” (istvan, 2019). these proposals are particularly prolific in the united states, where donald trump’s governance has reinvigorated state-level efforts (successful thus far in georgia and alabama) to pass near-total abortion bans, and where legal, structural, and social barriers remain in place (including the federal hyde amendment),2 which have long made it extremely difficult for people from low-income communities, indigenous women, women of color, new immigrants, and lgbtq people to secure abortion care in practice. partially ectogenetic technologies currently in development have important implications for the survival of premature babies and the health of pregnant people who face complications late in term. as i argue elsewhere (romanis & horn, in press), given extreme disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality as well as preterm birth both globally and within jurisdictions across racialized and classed lines,3 artificial wombs raise pressing questions about distribution, design, and access. but the discourse needs to be reclaimed from the direction in which it is headed. steered by the voices of conservative bioethicists and doctrinal legal scholars, discussion of ectogenesis frequently reverts to a focus on the morality of abortion. while i approach this issue as a critical legal scholar,4 i argue that feminist analysis of the artificial womb should not be left to law alone. i will briefly make a case against claims that ectogenesis could “replace” abortion, and present a call for feminist-led, intersectional, and interdisciplinary research that explores the uses and ethics of this technology. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 4 reproductive freedom beyond severance theory the authors of recent articles that proclaim that artificial wombs foretell the end of abortion rights (including blackshaw & rodger, 2019; mathison & davis, 2017), like their predecessors (singer & wells 2006; kaczor 2005) return to moral philosopher judith jarvis thomson’s 1971 paper, “a defense of abortion.” thomson compared unwanted pregnancy to the experience of one’s body being overtaken as a life support system for a famous violinist. she sought to show that even if we accept that the fetus has a right to life, this does not extend to a right to infringe on the body of another person. blackshaw and rodger (2019) write, “according to thomson’s reasoning, there is no right to the death of the foetus, and so if ectogenesis is available, we are morally obliged to utilize it for unwanted pregnancies rather than aborting the foetus” (p. 78). similarly, mathison and davis (2017) proclaim that according to the logic of “pro-choice advocates,” a pregnant person has only a protected right to bodily autonomy, and once the fetus can be severed from her body without killing it, she will have no right to its death. these claims neglect the strategic nature of thomson’s reasoning. writing in 1971, thomson spoke from a context in which abortion was illegal in her home nation of the united states, in which a bare majority in support of reproductive rights had not been won. between 1971 and 2019, decades of ethical, philosophical, and legal debate over abortion have transpired. so too has the technology of abortion changed since 1971. while dilation and curettage (a minor surgical procedure) was standard practice in the 1970s, since the mid-2000s the majority of abortions involve the ingestion of two pills (sheldon, 2016). the argument that extracting a fetus to an artificial womb would provide an alternative to termination that would preserve both the life of the fetus and the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy is hopelessly anachronistic. the consumption of two pills is not analogous to a procedure designed to remove a fetus intact without causing it harm. the biobag currently in development is intended for use with fetuses from twenty-two to twenty-four weeks gestation. there is a clear contrast between ingesting abortifacients in the early stages of pregnancy and being made to carry a fetus for twenty-two weeks until it could survive in an artificial womb, whereupon it would need to be removed via surgical procedure or induced delivery (alghrani, 2008). yet, even if removing a fetus to an artificial womb could one day be made physically equivalent to consuming a pill, it is grossly reductive to imagine that feminists would accept artificial wombs as a forced alternative to abortion. strategies within feminism(s) for protecting reproductive care, including abortion, have never been a monolith, and feminist original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 5 discourse as to why abortion must be protected is not reducible to choice-based justifications focused solely on protecting a right to end a pregnancy. the reproductive justice movement, founded by black feminist grassroots activists in the us, was formulated precisely in response to the limitations of the strategies employed by the mainstream movement for reproductive rights. in taking a narrow focus in pursuit of a legal right to end a pregnancy, concessions were continually made when it came to protecting positive rights to access abortion and other forms of reproductive care, leaving many women of color and low-income women without the means to exercise this “choice” in practice. reproductive justice organizers identified that for african american, latina, and indigenous women, for people with disabilities, and for working-class communities, freedom from sterilization abuse and reproductive coercion, access to healthcare and support throughout pregnancy, and freedom from environmental harms, structural discrimination, and violence, were frequently more pressing than protecting a narrow legal right to end a pregnancy. as ross et al. (2017) emphasize, “the right not to have children using safe birth control, abortion, or abstinence; the right to have children under the conditions we choose, and the right to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments” (p. 14) are the holistic aims of reproductive justice. abortion rights remain vital here, but they are “contextuali[zed] within a larger matrix of oppression” (ross et al., 2017, p. 15). beyond fighting for a legal right to choice, then, strategizing for abortion rights that is informed by a reproductive justice framework mobilizes human rights discourse to “treat abortion and other reproductive health services as akin to the resources all human beings are entitled to—such as health care, education, housing, and food” (roberts, 2015). critical and relational feminist legal theorists, too, articulate the need for abortion beyond a right to end a pregnancy. in the jurisdictions of the united kingdom in which the abortion act 1967 is in effect, coverage under the national health service and broad support from the medical community mean that access to reproductive health services are widely more available than in the us. yet the abortion act 1967 retains abortion as a criminal offense with exceptions, requiring two physicians to agree that a pregnant person meets one of these exceptions in order to secure the procedure. as sheldon (1997, 2016) has emphasized, understanding abortion through a feminist lens means affirming abortion as healthcare, and rejecting its criminalization and the paternalistic assumption that a person’s reasons for seeking abortion require outside justification. kaposy and downie (2009) argue within the context of canada (where despite the absence of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 6 criminal law regulating abortion and the presence of universal healthcare, significant barriers to access remain) abortion must be articulated within the pursuit of a comprehensive campaign for access to safe and local reproductive care, proceeding with a “relational conception of autonomy” that understands “the exercise of reproductive choice within an environment of positive and negative interpersonal, institutional, and social forces” (p. 99). these examples are, of course, not at all exhaustive. but my aim here is to show that reducing the justification for abortion to a singular liberal feminist articulation of reproductive rights dismisses the ways that feminisms have articulated reproductive freedom beyond severance theory. on this point, i want to turn to the problems of how “autonomy” is understood in claims that ectogenesis will end the need for abortion. autonomy remains implicated disentangled from a justification of abortion rooted solely in a right to end a pregnancy, arguments that extracting the fetus into an artificial womb could still satisfy the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy crumble. ross et al. (2017) argue that beyond the “right to make personal decisions about one’s life,” a robust protection to autonomy would entail “the obligation of government and society to ensure that the conditions are suitable for implementing one’s decisions” (p. 14). bodily autonomy is essential, but on its own it is insufficient. given the likely cost of creating and operating artificial womb technology, if introduced into the contemporary united states, the requirement that pregnant people end unwanted pregnancies by undergoing a fetal extraction would not only fail to protect reproductive freedom by inhibiting people from ending unplanned pregnancies on their own terms. it would also continue the ongoing criminalization of the many pregnant people (disproportionately, low-income women of color) who are already unable to access reproductive care within legal means. autonomy can only be enacted if it is enabled by a relational framework of positive resources that would allow a person to end or to carry on with a pregnancy, and to be provided with resources for support in either instance. as jackson (2000) writes, the autonomy sought in the abortion decision is not just “a right to be free from unwanted intrusion, but…the idea that individuals should be able to pursue their own goals according to their own values, beliefs, and desires” (p. 469). a robust, feminist understanding of autonomy in abortion, then, rejects the “solution” of ectogenesis, which in no way protects the enabling resources original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 7 with which to make decisions according to one’s own “values, beliefs, and desires” (jackson, 2000, p. 469). in framings of artificial wombs as an alternative to abortion, a requirement that pregnant people have fetuses extracted to an artificial womb instead of being terminated could one day redress the physical burden of unwanted pregnancy, but where it was presented as the only option, it could never protect autonomy. fetal viability is a legal fiction key to the argument that abortion after ectogenesis will no longer be permissible is the understanding that artificial womb technology will slowly lower the point at which a fetus can be considered “viable.” in medicine, “viability” is the point at which, taking account of the fetus’s gestational age and weight among other factors, a fetus is judged to have a chance of survival outside the womb. in some nations (including the us and england, scotland, and wales), viability has been translated into law as the point at which abortion can be more heavily regulated or banned, due to the perception that this is the stage at which the fetus need no longer infringe on the pregnant person’s body in order to live. the artificial womb technology currently in development could lower medical viability from approximately twenty-four to twenty-six weeks to twenty-three weeks (partridge et al., 2017). some scholars propose that this point could be slowly reduced over time, eventually meaning that abortion at any stage of pregnancy would be “killing a viable human being possessing some moral status” (blackshaw & rodger, 2019, p.78). in jurisdictions where the law uses a gestational limit to mark the point at which abortion is a criminal offense, or where it is extremely difficult to secure an abortion after this point, it is true that the technology could pose a challenge, or rather, that it could further the ends of the long-pursued campaign for fetal personhood that has already resulted in the criminalization of low-income pregnant people. in the us, the 1992 supreme court decision in planned parenthood v. casey affirmed viability as the point at which states could significantly restrict or ban abortion, regardless of whether technological advancement lowered this point over time. the construction of abortion rights as a continual balance between the pregnant person’s privacy and fetal life has meant that significant structural, financial, and legal barriers have inhibited access and criminalized pregnant people for seeking abortion well prior to viability. but by suggesting that the inevitable consequence of a reduction in medical viability is a requisite reduction to abortion rights, legal scholars have presented viability as a self-evident determinative limit to reproductive rights. in so doing, they fail to acknowledge the socially contingent and fictive nature of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 8 viability applied in law. in jurisdictions such as canada, in which abortion is decriminalized and there is no gestational limit at the federal level, artificial wombs are unlikely to challenge existing abortion jurisprudence. in canadian law, the potential of the fetus to survive outside the womb has not been constructed as the limit to a pregnant person’s right to bodily autonomy. rather than accepting that with ectogenesis, abortion rights will be rightfully infringed upon, then, or proposing strategies to maintain the untenable status quo of abortion rights without resources, we should be focused on removing the false association of a perceived chance of fetal survival with a pregnant person’s self-determination, and addressing continued inequities in access to safe and culturally appropriate resources in reproductive care across the life course. petchesky (1987) asks, “what does it mean to speak of viability in a society that has no intention of providing care for the children of working mothers, much less aborted fetuses?” (p. 346). in other words, even if we accepted the version of events in which abortion was refused after ectogenesis, what exactly do these scholars anticipate will happen to the fetuses extracted from the wombs of pregnant people who do not wish to care for them? the fetus remains dependent in the recurring claim that ectogenetic technology will end the need for abortion by allowing the fetus to be transferred into an artificial womb instead of being terminated, the relational entanglements that emerge from and around gestation frequently go unremarked. no provision is made for who will ultimately be responsible for the dependency of the fetus and the resulting infant decanted to an artificial womb. failing to acknowledge that “regardless of where or by whom the fetus is gestated, it remains dependent upon someone” (langford, 2008, p. 267), scholars belie their ignorance of the care, normally provided by a human, required to keep a fetus alive. as lewis (2019) demonstrates, the extreme demands a fetus places upon a person’s body make human pregnancy unique among animals. a distinction must be made here between gestation, which an artificial womb might one day be able to do in part or in full, and human pregnancy, which is a particular mammalian activity. aristarkhova (2012), too, emphasizes that while an ectogenetic machine may facilitate gestation, human care will be required to allow it to run. some scholars do acknowledge that in the absence of the pregnant person, there will be a need to find a new caretaker for the fetus. kaczor (2005) and reiber (2010) each suggest that a woman who does not wish to continue her pregnancy original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 9 could transfer gestational responsibility to another progenitor by having the fetus extracted to an artificial womb. yet these scholars do not address the way this alternative could produce a continued connection between the pregnant person and another progenitor with whom they may not wish to be in relation, or between this person and the fetus. where scholars address these continued relations, they often do so through the language of shared property rights to the fetus held by the progenitors, or through referencing a right to avoid the purported harms of unwanted genetic relatedness (räsänen, 2017; schultz, 2010). these approaches reduce the relationships that may be produced through gestation to a singular contractual model tied to biological contribution, foreclosing the multiple possible relations that may emerge through gestation. also often neglected or considered only as an afterthought is the question of who will care for the ectogenetic fetus (and how this care may be funded) in instances in which both progenitors ultimately reject responsibility. coleman (2004) and james (1987) discuss the distribution of responsibility for an ectogenetic fetus unwanted by both progenitors following its “birth,” but each concludes that this scenario would be problematic primarily because it would result in a surplus of ectogenetic babies for adoption. this is certainly an important legal and ethical consideration. but equally pressing issues to address here are the question of the fetus’s dependency on care while (and not simply after) it is gestating, and the inevitable and complex relationships produced between the fetus and caretakers, and between and amongst these caretakers as this ectogenetic gestation occurs. finally, to return to petchesky’s (1987) query about viability, leaving the question of who will care for the ectogenetic fetus unanswered (and with this silence, implicating that providing resources to this end can be presumed as a social good) is an unacceptable outcome in a world in which “the children of working mothers” (p. 346), the children of migrants, of black and indigenous parents, are at best denied resources for care and at worst, targeted with violence. a new feminist approach to ectogenesis notably, feminist scholarship has uniformly held that state-mandated use of ectogenesis as an alternative to abortion would be self-evidently antifeminist (jackson, 2008; langford, 2008; overall, 2015). but as conservative bioethicists and doctrinal legal scholars direct discourse on artificial womb technologies in the interest of anti-abortion sentiment, it is important not only that feminist scholars engage to redirect this discussion, but that this engagement rejects the tactic of reiterating a narrow focus on protecting or enhancing choice. when it comes to strategizing to protect abortion rights against a possible legal challenge posed by original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 10 ectogenesis, for instance, i argue that this means refusing legal strategies that already fail to sufficiently protect access to abortion in practice. while redefining viability in law to refer to an advanced stage of fetal development or the point at which the fetus can survive without medical intervention (schultz, 2010; steiger, 2010), or continuing to use a bodily-autonomy-based protection if the fetal extraction procedure remained invasive (alghrani, 2008; james, 1987) hold strategic legal appeal, the energy of feminist legal scholars should be turned toward another strategy that would protect abortion rights against technological challenges: fighting for full decriminalization and free, safe, local, informed access. roberts (1999) writes that analyses that focus on the capacity of reproductive technologies to increase choice “for women” centralize a subject for whom access to healthcare and freedom from structural oppression are presumed stable. she argues that this tendency “operates like blinders that obscure issues of social power that determine the significance of reproductive freedom and control…not by ignoring them altogether, but by claiming to achieve individual freedom without the need to rectify social inequalities” (p. 298). feminist considerations of artificial womb technology, then, must remain informed by analyses of social power and inequality. i also argue that they should be contextually specific. partial artificial womb technologies like the biobag are currently being developed in the us, australia, the netherlands, and japan, and present a number of areas of urgent inquiry: what specific issues related to cost, distribution of healthcare, and systemic inequality need to be considered in each of these locales? given historical and ongoing sterilization abuses against black women, indigenous communities, people of color, people with disabilities, and queer and trans people, what contemporary laws, policies, and practices need to be addressed in specific jurisdictions to ensure coercive use of this technology would be prohibited? what materials are being used to design the artificial womb? are they easily sourced? how much do they cost? should the question of adaptability to different environments and/or future use by non-specialists be considered in its development? as murphy (2012) writes, “the same bit of technology could—by being animated in different assemblages of technique, discourses, and subject positions—be meaningfully said to be two different things” (p. 152). in its current iteration, the artificial womb is set to be costly and limited to use in a medical setting. but in what other assemblages might the artificial womb be animated? with the exception of a 1995 study by cannold, in which she gathered small focus groups of women, and a 2009 study by simonstein and mashiach-eizenberg, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 11 there is very little scholarship that explores peoples’ opinions of artificial womb technology and how it should be used. attitudes toward the artificial womb will not be monolithic; expectations of what it could mean or do will be informed by racialized, gendered, and classed experiences of reproduction and reproductive technologies. feminist intervention ensuring that diverse voices inform the direction of research and use are crucial. as cavaliere (2019) has argued, full ectogenesis might be engaged as a feminist political provocation: a demand for a future in which care labor is collectivized, and the health of pregnant people is taken seriously as a worthy social goal. exploring these aims against the contemporary injustices that make them (productive?) imaginaries requires a refusal both of anti-abortion claims that would negate the use of artificial wombs to benefit pregnant people, and of a feminist engagement that would seek more choice “without the need to rectify social inequalities” (roberts, 1999, p. 298). unlike the partial artificial womb, full ectogenesis, as yet, remains speculative. to open it to possible feminist uses, we must disentangle the discourse from the limitations of the world as it is now, and redirect it toward the work to be done in seeking the other worlds that could be. acknowledgements the author wishes to thank the editors of this journal and three anonymous reviewers for their thorough, insightful, and constructive comments. thanks also to siggie vertommen for her feedback and support on an earlier version of this text. notes 1 i use pregnant person and pregnant people because trans men, transmasculine, and non-binary people also need access to reproductive health services, including abortion, and must be included in conversations about the impact of artificial wombs. 2 the hyde amendment bans the use of federal funds for abortion except in cases of rape or incest or where the pregnant person’s life is at risk, effectively prohibiting people reliant on medicaid from accessing funds for abortion care. 3 for example, in both the united states and united kingdom, rates of maternal morbidity and mortality remain significantly higher for black women, even where studies have controlled for factors such as socioeconomic status (smalls, allen, & brown, 2018; novoa & taylor 2018). importantly, studies indicate that this original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 12 disparity is not primarily linked to unavailability of expert care or technology, but to discriminatory practices and to maternal stress exacerbated by structural racism. 4 i draw on examples throughout from the united states, united kingdom, where the abortion act 1967 is in effect, and canada, as these are the jurisdictions with which my research is engaged references abel, k. 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(2009). reproductive choice in canadian courts: an evidence-based call for a move to relational autonomy. advocates’ quarterly, 36, 86104. langford, s. (2008). an end to abortion?: a feminist critique of the “ectogenetic solution” to abortion. women’s studies international forum, 31(4), 263-269. lewis, s. (2019). full surrogacy now: feminism against family. london, uk: verso. mathison, e., & davis, j. (2017). is there a right to the death of the foetus? bioethics, 31(4), 313-320. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12331 murphy, m. (2012). seizing the means of reproduction: entanglements of feminism, health, and technoscience. durham, nc: duke university press. novoa, c., & taylor, j. (2018, february 1). exploring african americans’ high maternal and infant death rates. center for american progress. retrieved from https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/earlychildhood/reports/2018/02/01/445576/exploring-african-americans-high-maternalinfant-death-rates/ overall, c. (2015). rethinking abortion, ectogenesis, and fetal death. journal of social philosophy, 46(1), 126-140. partridge, e. a., davey, m. g., hornick, m. a., mcgovern, p. e., mejaddam, a. y., vrecenak, j. d., … flake, a. w. (2017). an extrauterine system to physiologically support the extreme premature lamb. nature communications, 8, article 15112, 1-16. doi: 10.1038/ncomms15112 petchesky, r. (1987). fetal images: the power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction. feminist studies, 13(2), 263-292. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/opinion/sunday/abortion-technology-debate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/opinion/sunday/abortion-technology-debate.html https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12331 https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/reports/2018/02/01/445576/exploring-african-americans-high-maternal-infant-death-rates/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/reports/2018/02/01/445576/exploring-african-americans-high-maternal-infant-death-rates/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/reports/2018/02/01/445576/exploring-african-americans-high-maternal-infant-death-rates/ original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 14 räsänen, j. (2017). ectogenesis, abortion, and a right to the death of the fetus. bioethics, 31(9), 697-702. reiber, d. t. (2010). the morality of artificial womb technology. the national catholic bioethics quarterly, 10(3), 515-528. roberts, d. (2015). reproductive justice, not just rights. dissent magazine, fall. retrieved from https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/reproductive-justice-notjust-rights roberts, d. e. (1999). killing the black body: race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. new york, ny: vintage books. romanis, e. c. (2019). artificial womb technology and clinical translation: innovative treatment or medical research? bioethics. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12701 romanis, e. c., & horn, c. (in press). artificial wombs and the ectogenesis conversation: a misplaced focus? technology, abortion, and reproductive freedom. the international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics. ross, l., roberts, l., derklas, e., peoples, w., & bridgewater toure, p. (2017). introduction. in l. ross, l. roberts, e. derklas, w. peoples, & p. bridgewater toure (eds.), radical reproductive justice: foundations, theory, practice, critique (pp. 11-31). new york, ny: the feminist press. schultz, j. h. (2010). development of ectogenesis: how will artificial wombs affect the legal status of a fetus or embryo. chicago-kent law review, 84(3), 877-906. shabazi, m. n., jebrusik, a., vuoristo, s., recher, g., hupalowska, a., bolton, v., & zernicka-goetz, m. (2016). self-organisation of the human embryo in the absence of maternal tissues. nature cell biology, 18, 700-708. sheldon, s. (1997). beyond control: medical power and abortion law. london, uk: pluto press. sheldon, s. (2016). the decriminalization of abortion: an argument for modernisation. oxford journal of legal studies, 36(2), 334-365. simonstein, f., & mashiach-eizenberg, m. (2009). the artificial womb: a pilot study considering people’s views on the artificial womb and ectogenesis in israel. cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics, 18(1), 87-94. singer, p., & wells, d. (2006). ectogenesis. in s. gefland & j. r. shook (eds.), ectogenesis: artificial womb technology and the future of human reproduction (pp. 925). new york, ny: rodopi. smalls, m., allen, t., & brown, h. (2018). global disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality. seminars in perinatology, 41(5), 318-322. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/reproductive-justice-not-just-rights https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/reproductive-justice-not-just-rights https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12701 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) claire horn, 2020 15 steiger, e. (2010). not of woman born: how ectogenesis will change the way we view viability, birth, and the status of the unborn. journal of law and health, 23(143), 143171. thomson, j.j. (1971). philosophy & public affairs 1(1), 47-66. usuda, h. m, watanabe s., miura y., saito, s., musk, g. c., rittenschober-böhm, j., … kemp, m. w. (2017). successful maintenance of key physiological parameters in preterm lambs treated with ex vivo uterine environment therapy for a period of 1 week. american journal of obstetrics and gynecology, 217(4), 415.e1-415.e13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajog.2017.05.046 usuda, h. w, watanabe, s., saito, m., sato, s., musk, g. c., fee, m. c., … kemp, m. w. (2019). successful use of an artificial placenta to support extremely premature ovine fetuses at the border of viability. american journal of obstetrics and gynecology, 221(1), 69e.1-69e.17. author bio claire horn is a wellcome issf postdoctoral researcher at birkbeck school of law, where she recently completed her dissertation, “gestation beyond mother/machine: legal frameworks for artificial wombs, abortion, and care.” her research interests include ectogenesis, feminist legal theory, and reproductive technology, and her current work is focused on the impact of artificial wombs on existing structural inequality, and how the technology’s design may shape this impact. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajog.2017.05.046     commentary we refuse to cope! the vitruvian nurse, the code of conduct, and nurses’ lived knowledge     jamie b. smith university of edinburgh charité – universitätsmedizin berlin jamie.smith@charite.de   eva willis charité – universitätsmedizin berlin eva-maria.willis@charite.de     abstract we, as nurses, refuse to cope. in this editorial style piece we discuss the ongoing crisis in nursing and the ways in which this situation is being produced. we discuss the metaphors with which nursing is produced in the uk and us and how these metaphors produce an idealized version of nurses and nursing that is impossible. we situate this metaphor in critical posthuman theory by drawing comparisons to braidotti’s (2013) understanding of the idealised human as an axiom of social production under advanced capitalist societies. we make comparisons of this idealized person with the idealized nurses that are captured in nursing codes of conduct and practice. we then suggest ways in which we can resist and diffract metaphors in nursing to produce affirmative futures.     keywords affirmative ethics, nursing, critical posthumanism, metaphor, vitruvian nurse     introduction we refuse to cope! we have had enough, we are pissed off, and we’re not alone. in the united states, around 2 percent of the working-age population are registered nurses; 9 out of 10 of these people are women; globally, 60 percent of healthcare workers are nurses; and the same mood roars from them. with about 28 million nurses in the workforce globally, approximately 15 percent are born or trained in a country other than where they work as nurses, and on average 8 out of 10 are women (world health organization 2020, 69). nurses around the world are pissed off. the international centre on nurse migration estimates that 13 million nurses are needed over the next decade (buchan, catton, and shaffer 2022). where are these nurses going to come from? who is going to train them? how will they be retained at the bedside under the terrible working conditions and inadequate pay, which have been made hypervisible through the covid-19 pandemic? the reasons for this collective anger are multifaceted but go far beyond grumbling about pay and conditions—the problem is in the bones of nursing. the frameworks, expectations, and conditions with which nurses make their worlds are girdled in capitalism and rotten with patriarchy. when we look at the idea of the perfect nurse and contrast it with nursing practice and nurses’ regulatory framework, you will most likely be angry too. not only because nurses are patronized but because they are reduced as vernacular experts to service providers and their lived knowledge is held back from (scientific) acknowledgement. the metaphor of the vitruvian nurse is a uniformed woman who goes out of her way to attend to everyone’s needs in an unconditional and subservient way where her self-value correlates with her ability to serve others to the detriment of herself. the vitruvian nurse is achieved when she ceases to exist as a subjective entity, therefore becoming an impossibility. the image we work with in this piece is an example that imagines a feminine, perfect, and selfless nursing workforce. rooted in rosi braidotti’s (2013) exploration of the vitruvian man, we believe that nursing is mostly oriented around the metaphor of the vitruvian nurse.   the metaphor of the vitruvian nurse the metaphor of the vitruvian nurse is an imagined representation of the ideal nurse. we point towards this metaphor for three reasons. first, the metaphor is historically embedded in the theory of posthumanism with which we work. braidotti (2013) draws from leonardo da vinci’s vitruvian man as a representation of the ideal human—able-bodied, white, muscular, strong (further implying cisgendered and heterosexual). through this image, braidotti demonstrates how most of us have grown up to (maybe unknowingly) internalize a particular ideal that is unattainable. one of the dangers of creating “the other” is that everyone who is other (than the vitruvian man) is less-than. the production of ideal and non-ideal hierarchies can lead to exclusion and to more or less subtle persecution of whole communities.   figure 1. leonardo da vinci’s vitruvian man, c. 1490 (wikicommons media, photographer: paris orlando, cc by-sa 4.0).   the vitruvian nurse, then, is the collective metaphor of how the ideal nurse should be: in her uniform she floats between patients with a smile, prioritizing everyone’s needs over her own—especially her own. she becomes the vitruvian nurse as she negates herself through serving the needs of others.   figure 2. jamie b smith and eva willis, this won’t hurt a bit, art produced by ai, 2021. courtesy of the artists.   figure 3. jamie b. smith and eva willis, the cruel optimism of nursing, art produced by ai, 2021. courtesy of the artists.   second, we work with the metaphor of the vitruvian nurse to point away from other metaphors that simply idealize nursing such as the superhero nurse, which has most recently been popular during the covid-19 pandemic. both metaphors (the vitruvian nurse and the superhero nurse) adore nurses because they are strong but, ultimately, harmless. however, the metaphor of the superhero nurse does not look at how this adoration and harmlessness are co-produced. the metaphor of the superhero nurse glorifies nursing without acknowledging the self-abandonment and the self-denial elements that are necessary to qualify for adoration by society. third, the vitruvian nurse metaphor lets us look at the production of the ideal rather than the mere presentation and is, hence, a metaphor that relates closer to reality. the vitruvian nurse is a metaphor that embodies the selflessness and everydayness of nursing. nurses are not simply put on a pedestal; instead, they chase the ideal that always seems to slip—giving nurses the impression that they are suboptimal, never enough. we make the metaphor of the vitruvian nurse perceptible in two ways: through practice and regulatory frameworks.1 in the first example, we explore the navigation of everyday practice of nurses to show the pressures that nurses endure whilst being overpowered by the impossibility of achieving the vitruvian nurse. we also show how the idea of the perfect nurse exists in nursing codes of conduct. examining codes of conduct is important because these codes globally regulate nursing and are frameworks that reproduce ideas of the perfect nurse. the dangers of the ideals that are embodied in the nursing codes cause boredom and burnout because they are unachievable and unlivable. we show the impossibilities that are implied by juxtaposing parts of the uk code, the code: professional standards of practice and behaviour for nurses, midwives and nursing (hereafter the code of conduct), with the practice of everyday nursing.2 you might think that is a strong stance to argue that a metaphor of nursing is a mode of regulation. after all, it is just an image. what restrictions can a metaphor possibly produce? at first glance, it might seem wild to discuss a metaphor, yet we argue that it is valuable to look at the realities that metaphors create. the stakes are high! the policies that guide nurses are restrictive and restricted, reproducing narrow definitions of nursing care which is connected to creating idealized, docile patients (smith and willis 2020), and, overall, limiting what it is to be human (haraway 2016). the importance of communal production of reality is obvious in many disciplines, including mathematics, education, sustainability studies, physics, philosophy, biology, and many more, but nursing philosophy and nursing theory have been surprisingly quiet on this topic. it is vital to engage in our experiences as practicing nurses to advance towards an understanding of communal, more-than-individual, and more-than-human care. we move away from the narrow definitions of what a nurse is, and we speculate about affirmative alternatives. we argue that not taking a position is impossible and we show how nursing is pragmatically done. the metaphor of the vitruvian nurse is not only impossible to achieve; it is also disabling to a creative, diverse, pragmatic, lived practice, making it impossible to recognize nurses as vernacular experts and reducing nurses to submissive workers in extractive capitalism. we highly value the work and findings of academia and evidence-based research. nonetheless, we believe that lived knowledge of nurses is kept invisible and held back from recognition in or beyond academia and evidence-based research. we believe it is important to look at facets of how the idealized nurse is produced because doing so forms our ability to imagine what nursing can become when it is not constrained by this impossible ideal. we invite feminist sts scholars to engage with the rich lives of nurses all over the world, and we invite nurses to engage with the power of feminist sts, as a way to critically rethink how nursing is structured.   the metaphor of the vitruvian man the metaphor of the vitruvian nurse is an imagined representation inspired by the image of the vitruvian man by leonardo da vinci. braidotti (2013) uses the image as an example to illustrate the posthuman theory of how our minds can be colonized by certain ideals and how they implicitly exclude and oppress large (if not most) parts of society. the image of the ideal human male reproduces a hierarchy that frames diverse forms of gender, race, body form, and people with disabilities as non-desirable. these values come to form the basis for social, cultural, and political production in post-enlightenment europe. the human is understood as an “intrinsically moral” being, functioning as an axiom of perfect rationality and reason. in this mode of thought, “man” is capable of an unlimited expansion toward “his” perfection and entitled to claim ownership of whatever objects or others “he” encounters along the way. this humanist ideology was adapted in europe and the global north post-enlightenment as a cultural model that allowed europeans to view themselves as an unequalled force on the planet, therefore entitled to use its resources as they see fit. the vitruvian nurse then is produced with similar sentiment and was co-created as the role of nursing has become increasingly professionalized throughout the twentieth century and has entered the academy as an academic subject. the collective imagination of nurses and nurse work remains feminized with stereotypes such as “angel, handmaiden, battleaxe or whore” (jinks and bradley 2004). the metaphor of the subservient woman, the vitruvian nurse, can reclaim these stereotypes to refuse to cope with unrealistic ideals.   impossibilities of care: realities of practice we as nurses reject the metaphor of the vitruvian nurse. and even though we want to provide great care, we refuse to cope with the conditions and expectations presented to us. all too often we are expected to lose ourselves in the needs of our individual patients. frameworks of nursing suggest that patients should be the center of our thinking, minimizing ourselves as subjective entities. we are encouraged to hide our fullness of being—navigating the needs of twenty or more patients, other nurses, a multidisciplinary team, and the schedules of the institution. to make the messiness of practice more perceptible, imagine the following: you are a staff nurse arriving on a morning shift to a ward. as you arrive, you can hear many patient call bells ringing, and you can smell various things from different parts of the ward as you make your morning coffee. you take handover from your colleagues on the night shift about what has been happening. you sit and take a report on the six patients whose care you will be responsible for today—you are allocated a bay (room) of four patients and two patients in single side rooms with the following main care needs:   room main care need 1 bed 1: broken arm bed 2: heart attack bed 3: infected legs bed 4: awaiting home care package 2 loose stools, limited mobility, falls risk 3 end of life care – covid table 1. fictitious example of a nursing handover.   how will a nurse navigate these parallel and sometimes conflicting needs? the nurse assesses the ongoingness of the situation and makes decisions about how to proceed through the day. in doing that, the nurse may prioritize the needs of one over others or delegate tasks if there are multiple urgent needs. however, the process of prioritizing means that some things will be addressed before others. the ways she might address things later or de-prioritize something is not addressed in the code. the vitruvian nurse can prioritize all their workload! however, the way in which that means other things are de-prioritized is not addressed. we have to become perceptible to these omissions that produce the metaphor of the vitruvian nurse. imagine if nurses were taught to tell a patient to wait as other care needs might be higher on their priority list—to ensure safe patient care for all of their patients. if they were to communicate this, how were they taught to communicate priorities with their patients to not hurt their fragile individualistic sense of self? if you imagine being a patient, how would you feel if a nurse would communicate the complex navigation of your needs with others and you were aware that at some points (or most of the time, depending on circumstances and care needs) you are not in the center of this thinking? can we imagine ways that all your needs are still met without you being at the center and having the highest priorities? we seek to take a position on how nurse work manifests itself so we can carve out flows and flaws and speculate about affirmative alternatives. through its professionalization, modern care is still woven with misogynist fabrics of society and is produced under the conditions of advanced captitalism that binds professional practice to individual practitioners. the focus of the vitruvian nurse as the societal ideal is on the individual nurse is problematic because it creates a massive frustration in nursing because it is an impossibility.   nurses are dividuals nursing is not individual but a communal practice that has existed throughout centuries and is not inherently bound to the profession of nurses. the professionalization of nursing has captured care. we support the professionalization of nursing and we acknowledge that feminist histories of care are overwritten to produce care as a branded commodity—the vitruvian nurse. the metaphor of the vitruvian nurse, however, is built on assumptions of the human as an individual not a dividual, meaning a single entity that cannot be divided (in-dividual) and alienated from the living situations they come from. nurses, patients, friends, family, doctors are all dividuals. the individualistic nature of patient-centered care, as it is described in the uk and us nursing codes of practice, reveres the “autonomous” practitioner. the individual nurse is situated over the material-discursive practices of care that are co-produced. the uk code of conduct addresses the individual “you” and opens with “1. treat people as individuals.” the us code of ethics also addresses the individual nurse (american nurses association 2015).3 these systems are not interested in our materialized perspectives and the rich histories that we bring. we believe that nurses are subjects who arose from many influences, relationships, and assemblages with other humans, places, more-than-humans, and their nursing practices are enriched by many experiences, always becoming more and different with the world they are in and the connections they make. if we do not rethink what nursing is asked to be, we see an irrefutable future for nurses and patients, predetermined by the narrow philosophies of humanistic science—the human as a bound individual is privileged above everything else. in congruence with humanism, the vitruvian nurse is established as the idealized individual career, reproducing restrictive power relations to keep nurses (mostly women) in their place.   regulatory frameworks: the code of conduct although similar regulatory frameworks exist worldwide, having both practiced in the uk, we are experienced and implicated in this way of producing nurse work via the code: professional standards of practice and behaviour for nurses, midwives and nursing associates (nursing and midwifery council 2015). codes of practice for nurses are viewed by many as an integral part of professionalization, have existed for nurses since the late nineteenth century, and are seen as an “emancipatory” document that supports nurses to practice autonomously beyond the medical gaze (esterhuizen 1996). these documents used beyond the circumstances of their production and in ways that shape how worlds are made. what the professionalization of processes supports is the reorganization and redefinition of how the value of nurse work is produced. the code is a cornerstone of nursing practice, education, and decision-making. the contemporary nurse is imagined in other ways but repeats and hides old issues in regulatory frameworks—a uniformed figure), who has no needs of her/his/their own and is always there to help.   how the code of conduct produces the vitruvian nurse how is the perfect nurse described in codes of conduct? section 25.1 the code states that a nurse’s goal is to “identify priorities … putting the needs of those receiving care or services first” (nursing and midwifery council, uk 2015, 22). when the code states we must prioritize, we are not guided how to identify priorities, and de-prioritization is not included either. the omission of these two factors, in connection with the call to prioritize the needs of the people we care for, puts extreme pressures on nurses. implying that others always come first contributes to unsustainable demands of the nursing workforce. and whilst the identification of priorities is encouraged, how does the code support nurses to de-prioritize something (and communicate this to patients) while they address something else? the nurse is undoubtedly an “autonomous practitioner.” however, in this situation, autonomy is about self-determinacy and not self-sufficiency. in other words, the focus is on nurses making decisions, but the decisions they make depend on so much more than themselves. the way the autonomous practitioner is implied in the code of conduct does not take into account how the nurse has to maintain and nourish herself and other professionals to guarantee the long-term ongoingness of good care. such a focus would demand taking herself into account in her decision-making and prioritizing her own needs first sometimes. we argue that the decisions a nurse can make are connected to and determined by her ever-changing environment, the resources, facilities, times, teams, and patients she works with. the code not only burdens the individual but also silences the responsibilities of the systems and management to set nurses up for success to provide the best care possible. an ethical code would instead include communicating de-prioritization and adapting the quality of care in the ever-changing environment. this would mean communicating limited capacities and responsibilities, and championing oneself and other staff’s self-care. how else can the profession of nursing become sustainable if the nurse is not encouraged to see herself as a subject worthy and in need of care? being not affected by any complaint is impossible. section 24.1 states nurses must “never allow someone’s complaint to affect the care that is provided to them” (nursing and midwifery council 2015, 21) this section produces a “them vs us,” implying we can clearly define where the nurse ends and the patient begins, rather than acknowledging the relationality that patients and nurses live in. how can we clearly divide the ones caring from the ones being cared for? has a patient never offered you a candy, a kind word, or a gentle smile when you as a nurse had a hard day? and what constitutes complaint? what about the complaint of a patient who is acting sexually aggressively against nurses? how can a nurse who has racial slurs thrown at her not be affected by them? what about complaints that are influenced by racist attitudes? the code treats nurses as if they are not people, detached from their personhood and histories. instead, it implies that nurses are self-sacrificing entities there to serve. nurses are more than their institution and profession: they have identities and past experiences that shape how they are and can become nurses. when the nurse puts on her uniform, she is not void of history and the systems of oppression she grew up in. they still matter. we argue that the deep and complex histories of race, power, age, migration, and gender in nursing cannot be overwritten by nursing as a professional brand. not addressing these histories and opening possibilities to express them whilst valuing the patients’ complex subjectivities is vital in our vision of an affirmative nursing code. the existing code reproduces the image of a prescribed, singular, and fictional idea of what the perfect nurse is—it is the work of toxic metaphor. we are not a supermarket chain. the customer is not always right. section 24.2 of the code that nurses are to “use all complaints as a form of feedback and an opportunity for reflection and learning to improve practice” (nursing and midwifery council 2015, ##21). complaints do not equal truth but must be seen in context. why would the section about complaint omit the possibility of unreasonable complaints or complaints that require you to adapt the way you approach the patient’s care? we argue that in the best case, this section is impossible to live by in everyday practice. in the worst-case scenarios, the section gaslights nurses, implying that nurses need to become better at suppressing their feelings of injustice in order to make the wheel run better. how can we manage and negotiate complaints to recognize the needs of patients yet make our situation and the scope of how we can care for them in that moment and during that day perceptible to patients? we believe a regulatory framework should give nurses the tools to make a reasonable assessment of a complaint and to communicate differences of perception in a way that reflects and navigates patients’ needs whilst also enabling nurses to have a voice. the goverining metaphor of the vitrivian nurse makes it impossible to address the pragmatic, everyday complexity of nurses and nursing. the metaphor also comes with underestimating nurses’ potential as humans. as caring for others comes with power and access to others, the potential to harm and be harmed, and how to manage this potential, must be openly addressed and controlled.   nursing without a code? we do not argue for a world without a regulatory framework for nursing. if we imagine that nurses are inherently good and therefore no regulatory process is required because nurses can do no harm, then we are negating a part of their potential humanness because part of being human is the potential to do harm. if we want to be informed by the past, we also see the necessity of a code. imagining nurses as inherently good prevents accountability. we acknowledge that “nurses have a history of both upholding oppressive systems that disenfranchise segments of the public, usually poor, often people of color, and engaging in innovative alternatives to the status quo” (dillard-wright and shields-haas 2021, 197). on the contrary, when we critique the metaphor of the vitruvian nurse because this metaphor influences policies, we advocate for policies that are ethical and affirmative, inviting and enabling multiple ways of being nurses whilst providing needed structure for patients, the public, and the nursing profession. informed by feminist standpoint theory (harding 2004), we argue that everything is viewed from somewhere; therefore, we must become accountable for our position. if we do not make the ways in which we are implicated in the production of reality perceptible, then we risk being territorialized, overwhelmed, and restricted in different ways. regulatory frameworks are one way to represent nurses’ work; however, to accept them uncritically or ignore diffractive possibilities is not taking a position. instead, taking a position is a contemporaneous and ongoing process because the world is never static, it’s ever-changing, and we have to ongoingly take a position in this dynamic (deleuze and guattari 1988).   nurse worry and the future of care in 2019 romero-brufau et al. showed that nurse worry is a better predictor for patients’ deterioration in the next twenty-four hours than vital signs (such as heartbeat, blood pressure, temperature, and respiratory rate), which are commonly used as a reliable and objective tool. such studies suggest that the knowledge that nurses embody in their praxis has high value beyond that which is captured in supposedly objective measures. nurses’ tacit and innate knowledges of the materiality of a situation might be as good or a better predictor when it comes to patient care. we need to research these knowledges and elevate and listen to the voices of nurses. we aim to diffract these metaphors in care and nursing by understanding how they come to produce realities. the ethics of affirmation and joy, as we understood it through genevieve lloyd’s (1994) reading of baruch spinoza’s ethics, is the process of becoming aware of the conditions of one’s own bondage. shared understandings of these conditions create the ethics of joy. what metaphors and imaginations could support nurses to practice affirmative ethics within a code of conduct? how do we negotiate contradicting perspectives with patients and acknowledge long histories of care? when the nurse has a different understanding of what could be best for a patient’s health and well-being than the patient, how do we create possibilities in which the patient feels acknowledged and sees possibilities for themselves, in which and the nurse’s subjectivities and insights are not silenced in this process? we suggest that future metaphors move away from emphasizing individual responsibility or perfection on nurses or patients. we argue that nurses should be accountable to their position but consider the paradigms of the dividual rather than the individual—that is to say, work with a regulatory framework that acknowledges and supports self-determinacy but not self-sufficiency. care demonstrates how individuals (both nurses and patients) can be thought of as dividuals (smith and willis 2020)—not as isolated entities, rather deeply embedded in and produced through material and social relations (deleuze and guattari 1988). critical posthumanism sees the bounded self as a site of reconfiguration. hence, how we conceptualize the self is not as a fixed point but more a dynamic constellation of matter. nursing’s regulatory frameworks are iterative processes, which is a material benefit to acknowledge the ever-moving ethics of care instead of fixing a moral position. therefore, future versions of the code could better acknowledge this dynamism to include these diffractions by: acknowledging that the production of the self is a dynamic process; encouraging nurses (and staff dynamics and organizations) to embrace their unique characteristics, such as joy, humor, campness (white 1985), feistiness and others; recognizing that self-determination does not equate to self-sufficiency; and acknowledging that humans and more-than humans exist together as dividuals (not in-dividuals): we are diffracted with and by our environment and form ecologies. nurse worry and the future of care these suggestions would begin to create other conditions of possibility for nursing. it would create the possibility that the nurse is not responsible for everything, and is personally implicated in the production of care. it begins to diffract away from a neoliberal model of care, where the patients’ “wishes” replace others’ agency in a situation because the patient is the consumer. these suggestions would also create the conditions where a nurse could say no to a patient and not repeat the tropes of a servant or handmaid. however, the nurse and patient should franchise each other in their desires, wishes and possibilities to co-exist.   an invitation we hope that we have made the vitruvian nurse perceptible as a metaphor that is (re)produced in the media/everyday narratives and action and used as a mechanism to govern nurses and patients. we invite you to think with this metaphor and how it is used to create worlds—from where and how you are situated. during the covid-19 pandemic, nurses and healthcare staff have been high profile and noticeably entangled in many lives. alongside colleagues across the world, we are working to make nurse-work more perceptible to create more affirmative futures where survival is understood through collaboration. through our collaborative projects, we are in the process of working with nurses, patients, families, institutions, the human, and the more-than-human to (re)imagine and (re)configure metaphors in nursing and we invite you on our journey. the analysis we have shared above guides this project and we hope you will join us.   notes 1 as this is a diffractive piece, interrupted by ideas, experiences, and emotions, we also write in a non-linear way, as nursing is a diffractive practice, rarely flowing from one situation into another.   2 as we are embedded in british nursing practice, we chose the uk code. however, other codes across the global north are similar and could also be used as examples, such as the code of ethics by the international council of nurses, american and canadian boards of nursing, the german nursing act.   3 in comparison, the canadian code of ethics for registered nurses produces and addresses the collective, starting every sentence with “nurses…” (canadian nurses association 2017).   references american nurses association. 2015. code of ethics for nurses with interpretive statements. silver spring, md: american nurses association. http://www.nursingworld.org/mainmenucategories/ethicsstandards/codeofethicsfornurses/code-of-ethics-for-nurses.html. braidotti, rosi. 2013. the posthuman. oxford: polity press. e-book. buchan, james, howard catton, and franklin shaffer. 2022. sustain and retain in 2022 and beyond: the global nursing workforce and the covid-19 pandemic. international centre on nurse migration. https://www.icn.ch/system/files/2022-01/sustain and retain in 2022 and beyondthe global nursing workforce and the covid-19 pandemic.pdf. canadian nurses association. 2017. code of ethics for registered nurses. https://www.cna-aiic.ca/en/nursing/regulated-nursing-in-canada/nursing-ethics. deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari. 1988. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. translated by brian massumi. london: athlone press. dillard-wright, jessica, and vanessa shields-haas. 2021. “nursing with the people: reimagining futures for nursing.” advances in nursing science 44 (3): 195–209. https://doi.org/10.1097/ans.0000000000000361. esterhuizen, philip. 1996. “is the professional code still the cornerstone of clinical nursing practice?*.” journal of advanced nursing 23 (1): 25–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2648.1996.tb03131.x. haraway, donna j. 2016. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press. harding, sandra g., ed. 2004. the feminist standpoint theory reader: intellectual and political controversies. london: psychology press. jinks, annette m., and eleanor bradley. 2004. “angel, handmaiden, battleaxe or whore? a study which examines changes in newly recruited student nurses’ attitudes to gender and nursing stereotypes.” nurse education today 24 (2): 121–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2003.10.011. lloyd, genevieve. 1994. part of nature: self-knowledge in spinoza’s ethics. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. nursing and midwifery council, uk. 2015. the code: professional standards of practice and behaviour for nurses, midwives and nursing associates. january 29, 2015. https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/nmc-publications/nmc-code.pdf. romero-brufau, santiago, kim gaines, clara t. nicolas, matthew g. johnson, joel hickman, and jeanne m. huddleston. 2019. “the fifth vital sign? nurse worry predicts inpatient deterioration within 24 hours.” jamia open 2 (4): 465–70. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamiaopen/ooz033. smith, jamie b., and eva willis. 2020. “interpreting posthumanism with nurse work.” journal of posthuman studies 4 (1): 59–75. https://doi.org/10.5325/jpoststud.4.1.0059. world health organization. 2020. state of the world’s nursing 2020: investing in education, jobs and leadership. meeting report. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240003279. white, allon. 1985. “hysteria and the end of carnival: festivity and bourgeois neurosis.” semiotica 54 (1–2): 97–111. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1985.54.1-2.97.     author bios jamie b. smith works as a nurse between edinburgh and berlin. his phd at the university of edinburgh explored nursing, philosophy, and social justice. jamie focuses on bringing strong critical posthuman theory to research using mixed methods of quantitative, qualitative, and post-qualitative approaches to his work. his work explores how people, places, and structures produce intimate relations and care.   eva willis is teaching and researching nursing at the charité in berlin. she gained her msc in sociology and global change at the university of edinburgh. her phd focuses on nurses as organizations and organizational knowledge embodied in nursing praxis. she trained as a nurse in germany and has experience in uk and german healthcare systems.   jamie and eva are friends and colleagues working as nurses and nurse educators in berlin, germany. they share migration experiences in europe, are able-bodied, speak german and english, have working-class backgrounds, and hold nationalities that allow them to travel freely at the moment.     special section: global fertility chains and the colonial present of assistant reproductive technologies transplacental and molecular migrations: methyl isocyanate gas and reproductive bioeconomies in bhopal     deboleena roy emory university droy2@emory.edu     abstract in this article, the feminist and postcolonial frameworks of distributed reproduction and frontstaging a chemical are used to further explore the concept of global fertility chains. in particular, these approaches are used to trace reproductive bioeconomies that are traveling at the molecular and physiological levels and that link the chemical compound methyl isocyanate (mic) involved in the 1984 bhopal gas tragedy to the recent growth of reproductive technologies and surrogacy services in the very same city of bhopal. the goal of this paper is to identify and contextualize the vertical and horizontal transmission of mic-mediated chemical toxicity through different generations of human and nonhuman actors, and to understand how this toxicity connects to reproductive bioeconomies as we continue to map out global fertility chains and give particular importance to matters of place, scale, and biological borders. distributed reproduction allows us to rethink the scope of reproduction and make legible the colonial infrastructures that support the molecular and physiological transmission of toxicities. frontstaging the chemical mic allows us to trace the specific pathways of colonial legacies that have assumed unfettered access to raw materials and biolabor extracted from the soil, plants, animals, and humans in bhopal. the paper explores the role that the chemical mic plays as a catalyst for the transplacental migration of biopolitics—thereby contributing to an extended appreciation of global fertility chains at new molecular and physiological scales.     keywords bhopal, toxicity, colonialism, reproductive technologies, surrogacy, molecular, bioeconomies     introduction the bhopal gas tragedy occurred on december 3, 1984, in the early morning hours at the union carbide corporation’s pesticide plant in the city of bhopal. one of the chemicals used to produce union carbide’s pesticide sevin was the compound methyl isocyanate (mic). there is of course controversy around the cause of the accident, but what is known is that workers at the plant that night were cleaning pipelines around a mic holding tank. as they had likely done countless times before, water was used to wash away the grime from the pipes. on that particular occasion, however, water leaked into the holding tank where the mic was housed. this caused a highly exothermic reaction (a chemical reaction that is accompanied by the release of heat), which resulted in the emission of forty tons of mic gas into the night air in a matter of hours (bhargava et al. 2010). according to the government of madhya pradhesh, vapors of the mic gas lofted throughout the night air, reportedly killing about three thousand people from the toxic fumes (bhopal gas tragedy relief and rehabilitation 2017). independent and non-governmental agencies claim, however, that this number is grossly underestimated and that closer to eight thousand people died during the first week following exposure to mic gas (international campaign for justice in bhopal 2019a).   survivors of the tragedy remember their bodies being turned inside-out on the night of the disaster (international campaign for justice in bhopal 2019c). the citizens in the surrounding area of the plant were not trained to evacuate or to protect themselves in the case of such a disaster. the majority of those who were affected by the initial exposure to toxic fumes were the poorest of the poor, living in slums around the union carbide plant (fortun 2001). those who were able to escape the deadly fumes by car were later noted to have had better survival rates and experienced fewer long-term health problems. those without vehicles had attempted to run away from the fumes on foot, inhaling the toxic air. in the wake of the explosion, the toxic mic gas, which was heavier than the surrounding air, settled low to the ground, thereby likely exposing smaller children to even higher concentrations of toxic fumes than were the adults. the direction of the wind and the density of mic gas mattered that night.   it is reported that thousands of animals died in the immediate surrounding areas of the chemical plant and that leaves on the surrounding trees of the union carbide plant turned yellow and fell to the ground (broughton 2005). humans who died immediately were reported to have brought up bodily fluids and were foaming at the mouth (eckerman 2005). the chemical also acted as a severe irritant of the eye so that tears flowed constantly. the international campaign for justice in bhopal (2019b) claims that in the years that have followed, the union carbide disaster has in fact caused permanent health issues for more than five hundred thousand people. this estimate includes not only the immediate deaths resulting from the mic gas leak, but also deaths caused by the effects of ongoing water and soil contamination resulting from the inadequate environmental cleanup efforts in the aftermath of the gas leak. drinking water is still contaminated in some parts of the city that were directly affected by the gas back in 1984 (bhopal medical appeal 2014a). decades after the initial chemical reaction that led to the death and biological harm of so many, mic continues to leave its imprint and influence the organization of life and death of insects, plants, nonhuman animals, and humans. as we now know, mic gas took part in a highly exothermic reaction that lasted only a matter of seconds, but to this day, continues to serve as a catalyst for further biological, biochemical, and biopolitical reactions in bhopal. thus my bafflement, when over a decade ago, i came across an article that, while highlighting several “hot spots” of reproductive tourism in india, also reported that some of cheapest surrogates available in the world at that time could be found in the city of bhopal (sehgal 2008).   in this paper, i frontstage mic to better understand the molecular and physiological processes of reproductive labor and reproductive bioeconomies that are unfolding in bhopal. i should make clear, however, that this article is not about indian surrogacy. scholars such as amrita pande (2014), sayantani dasgupta and shamita das dasgupta (2014), sharmila rudrappa (2015), sayani mitra (2015), kalindi vora (2009, 2015) and more have written on this topic with far more expertise and insight than what is offered in this article. together, these works provide a crucial body of literature for the reader who is interested in learning more specifically about surrogacy within india and within broader global contexts. rather, in this article i am interested in contributing to ongoing conversations on colonial legacies and reproductive bioeconomies by developing a contextualized and situated materialist account of the organic compound mic and its role in fastening and extending global fertility chains. in defining the concept of global fertility chains, sigrid vertommen, vincenzo pavone, and michal nahman explain that global fertility chains consist of “multiple sociotechnical actors that are transnationally connected” and that a crucial dimension of utilizing a global fertility chain framework includes analyzing a “networked input-output structure comprising multiple actors at multiple scales” (2021, 120 and 115). integrating a postcolonial lens, they further note that a characteristic of global fertility chains is their “embeddedness in global geographies of uneven development” where questions of “space, scale, territories, localities, mobility, and borders in the reproductive bioeconomy” matter (vertommen, pavone, and nahman 2021, 126). in this article, i argue that the organic chemical mic can be thought of as a sociotechnical actor operating at a scale that is often overlooked, but nonetheless one that contributes to the infrastructure of global fertility chains. i further argue that global fertility chains can be connected and traced across countries and geopolitical borders, as well as mapped more locally by examining intra-actions (barad 2007) that include molecular and physiological surrogates-fetus borders such as the placenta. frontstaging mic exposes the biologically embodied reach of global fertility chains and traces the colonial legacies of reproductive bioeconomies at both macro and molecular scales. as such, surrogacy in bhopal provides a flashpoint for examining the ontological politics of reproduction that are in part being catalyzed by this chemical today.   distributed reproduction in bhopal and frontstaging mic i have been sitting with this information for far too many years now, trying to make legible the multitude of questions that emerged for me regarding the availability, impacts, and aftermath of surrogacy services in bhopal. apparently, the current typical rate for surrogacy services in the united states ranges between usd$60,000 and $150,000 (american fertility 2020). in 2008 the average cost for a surrogate in the us was approximately $70,000. the 2008 article that brought my attention to surrogacy in bhopal reported that a “37-year old russian came to bhopal because she could limit her [surrogacy] expenses to merely $4,500 [usd] as opposed to the prohibitive $35,000 – 45,000 [usd] in her own country” (sehgal 2008).   had commissioning individuals and couples around the world, who were eager to have children, forgotten what had happened in bhopal in 1984? had they used the internet to conduct their research on affordable surrogacy services? did bhopal, india, appear as a top destination for their reproductive needs? if so, did they then conduct any follow-up research and type in the word bhopal on its own into their search engines? if so, did they not come across the bhopal gas tragedy? did they not see the crucial medical and health advocacy work that has been going on in the city since the mid-1990s through the sambhavna clinic, or the fundraising and political awareness efforts made by the international campaign for justice in bhopal, an organization that began just days after the gas explosion? or, could it be that they already knew about the bhopal gas tragedy, and despite learning about the toxicity of mic, they decided that their desire to have a child outweighed any possible risk associated with hiring a surrogate in bhopal? could it have further been that their understanding of surrogacy had led them to believe that as long as the dna or gametes came from somewhere else, their commissioned fetus would remain “untouched” by the surrogate’s biology? for hindu couples in india, who were hiring bhopali surrogates that belonged to a lower caste, was “untouchability” no longer an issue? was it possible that they viewed the surrogate as merely a vessel for their own sperm and eggs or some other highly coveted dna with a proper caste? these questions are ones that came into clear focus for me years ago. there has also been a separate set of questions that, to this day, i still cannot articulate clearly but continue to try to pose. these questions are below and i thank the reader in advance for allowing me to practice asking these questions in the space of this paper.   was it possible that by hiring a bhopali woman to serve as a surrogate, who in turn may have been exposed to mic, a commissioning individual or couple (non-indian, non-resident indian, or indian) had already arrived at the understanding that as humans we must learn to live with toxicity? had they already accepted the fact that we must learn how to live in compromised times? had they already reconciled themselves to “toxic interdependencies” but without an ethical awareness of interpellating such interdependencies through disability justice and queer relationality frameworks as suggested by feminist philosopher alexis shotwell (2016)? were they ready to overlook the possible sedimentation of mic in the soil and water in bhopal? back in 2008, had they already anticipated the work of feminist anthropologist anna tsing? in her book the mushroom at the end of the world (2015), tsing states, “to live with precarity requires more than railing at those who put us here (although that seems useful too, and i’m not against it). we might look around to notice this strange new world, and we might stretch our imaginations to grasp its contours. this is where mushrooms help. matsutake’s willingness to emerge in blasted landscapes allows us to explore the ruin that has become our collective home” (2015, 3). had the commissioning individual or couple gone the way of the mushroom and decided to work within the ruins of colonial devastation, environmental disasters, and industrial contamination? did they knowingly and willingly invest in “biocapital” and a “promissory future” where foetuses are forced into emergence through the extraction of reproductive labor from surrogate bodies—despite all the contradictions of life, death, and toxicity in bhopal (sunder rajan 2007)?   along with my collaborators banu subramaniam and sushmita chatterjee, i have previously attempted to reconcile the impossibility of some of these questions by placing them through the analytic lenses of reproductive justice, feminist theory, and feminist and postcolonial sts (roy and subramaniam 2016; chatterjee, roy, and subramaniam 2022). in this paper, i draw specifically on what feminist historian of science michelle murphy describes as “distributed reproduction” and the “chemical infrastructures of reproduction” (2013) to think about the role that the chemical mic plays in “assisting” or altering reproduction in the context of bhopal. murphy suggests that we think about distributed reproduction as a way of reframing what counts as reproduction itself by stating, “why should reproduction end at our bodies? how to participate in and challenge the ontological politics of ‘reproduction’? what is the place of industrial chemicals in reproduction? what is the place of industrial chemicals in reproduction if we now live in an era which some scientists have named the anthropocene—a historical period when all life, all ecosystems, and the entire planet has been rearranged by human activity?” (2013, 1).   although my approach to studying the action of mic is also informed by critical theory in posthumanisms and feminist materialisms, the concept of distributed reproduction is extremely useful here to think about global fertility chains and the flow of reproductive bioeconomies at a more molecular scale. it allows me to think with fresh eyes and examine the biological and genetic traces that are being left behind by the chemical mic in both human maternal and fetal molecular reproductive environments, as well as nonhuman and dispersed reproductive life. murphy further suggests that thinking about distributed reproduction allows us to keep in mind that infrastructures, including chemical ones, aid in “social sedimentations such as colonial legacies, the repetition of gendered norms in material culture, or the persistence of racialization” (2013, 1).   i am prompted also by what film, media, and science studies scholar rahul mukherjee has described as “forced intimate relationships with…chemicals” (2016, 849). in his own work on bhopal and the production of chemical publics, he conducts a “frontstaging of non-humans” (853) in order to think about the contributions made by the chemicals. through his use of frontstaging, mukherjee offers what i consider to be a rich methodological approach that puts a spin on the well-honed sts practice of “following the chemical.” the frontstaging of nonhumans allows us to decenter the liberal humanist understanding of the autonomous human subject as the sole and central starting point of inquiry—a perspective commonly found in western and european colonial thought. and although i recognize the importance feminists and others have placed on asking identity-based questions that emerge from placing historically disenfranchised humans at the center of inquiry (including work on surrogacy), this paper is trying to do something different. as i have described above, mic continues to bring environmental and chemical events from the past into contact with new forms of matter, biotechnologies, and biocapitalism. i want to argue here that the chemical mic itself can be thought of as a sociotechnical actor that has a hand in carving out our reproductive futures. frontstaging mic therefore opens a line of inquiry that is less familiar but may be more helpful in examining and challenging the specific ontological politics of reproduction taking place in bhopal. it may also help to address the multitude of questions i have posed above that ultimately impact both humans and non-humans alike.   macro and molecular physiologies of mic in a piece published in the anthology mattering: feminism, science and materialism (2016) edited by victoria pitts-taylor, banu subramaniam and i have articulated several key methodologies to thinking about questions of ontology and materialisms. among these methodologies are resisting the urge for any easy translation between privileged western knowledge practices and those deemed unscientific, incoherent, or incommensurable; recognizing the situatedness and developing molecular materialist accounts of the world that are cognizant of matter across scales; articulating local points of interest within larger networks; and detecting contact zones of empire (roy and subramaniam 2016). in the case of mic, it is important to acknowledge therefore that this chemical agent was initially produced and activated in bhopal by both global and local capitalist and neoliberal economic practices. initially intended for the production of pesticides in india, the contact zones of empire for mic has now been extended to global fertility chains and to the flows of biocapital through surrogate bodies. at both macro and molecular levels, mic now plays a role in rewriting the value of life and death by “effac(ing) the boundaries between the spheres of production and reproduction, labor and life, the market and living tissues” (cooper 2008, 9).   in the case of the bhopal gas tragedy, frontstaging mic and developing a multi-scalar materialist account involves shifting the focus of analysis, at least for a moment, from macro questions of human agency and the circulation of capacities of production and consumption on the human scale to a less explored set of relations. these relations bring forward the modes of distributed reproduction that occur on a minor or molecular scale. my intention is not to disregard the surviving humans of the gas tragedy, or to dismiss the impacts of reproductive technologies and reproductive bioeconomies on the lives of surrogate women who currently participate in these arrangements. nor do i intend to dismiss the crucial questions of human agency and “vital energies” of humans that are required for the flows of biocapital (vora 2015). my intention, rather, is to expand our understanding of the ontological politics of reproduction in bhopal. by tracing the transplacental migrations of mic and creating a map of the biocolonial legacies of this compound, the remainder of this paper brings into sharper focus: (1) the biological rupture of bhopali survivors’ reproductive bodies, their genetics, and their bodily fluids due to mic exposure; and (2) the biological sedimentation of global fertility chains through mic-mediated intra-actions involving fetal and surrogate bodies.   biological ruptures: living and dying with mic exposure in her influential book advocacy after bhopal: environmentalism, disaster, new global orders (2001) cultural anthropologist and sts scholar kim fortun addresses the role and impact of scientific representations of the bhopal disaster. in her assessment of living with environmental health risks in bhopal, fortun states,   the desperate need for paper proof of victimization has become part of the legacy of bhopal, as has a need for new idioms through which disaster can be represented, both textually and socially. what counts as expertise has been complicated. scientific inputs have been crucial to direct diagnostic and therapeutic agendas, but also to validate legal arguments. science has also been unsettled—by the rigorously nonlinear, unpredictable, cumulative effects of toxic chemicals. the science needed to underwrite fair distributions of compensation in bhopal is a different science than that which can remedy the suffering of individuals. (xvi)   fortun’s analysis reminds us that the project of examining the biological effects of mic in bhopal is complicated. it requires that we not only prepare ourselves to become unsettled by the scientific literature (or lack thereof), but more importantly that we learn to pay attention to the so-called unscientific, incoherent, or incommensurable that “unsettles” science. it requires a different science—one that actively pursues epistemic decentering of what traditionally counts as scientific evidence and who gets to count as a scientific knower. in the accounts that follow, the distributed reproduction mediated by mic is traced by bringing forward and giving the floor to multiple modes of scientific expertise, emerging from the voices of different communities of knowers.   survivors of the gas tragedy are tracing mic-mediated ruptures of human health themselves. those who survived the explosion at the union carbide plant know that mic did not just disappear and can in fact be traced within their bodies (bhopal medical appeal 2014b). it is clear from survivor accounts that mic and its metabolites have left their mark and continue to intra-act with the hormones, tissues, dna (both somatic and gametic), and reproductive capacities of the bhopali population. in the surviving human population in bhopal, evidence of the world’s worst industrial chemical disaster comes in the form of abnormally high cancer rates, respiratory problems, and excessive reproductive harm occurring at many different biological levels. the population of bhopal continues to experience alarmingly high rates of stillbirths, miscarriages, and incidences of children born with genetic dispositions that are deemed as disorders or “abnormalities” by the medical community. due to the initial exposure to mic gas during the explosion, and due to the further exposure of residual chemical contaminants in the soil and ground water left after the disaster, the status of reproductive health in particular continues to be an issue for both survivors of the bhopal tragedy, as well as new generations of local residents.   the bhopal medical appeal houses both the sambhavna trust and clinic (established in 1996) and the chingari trust and rehabilitation center (founded in 2006) in bhopal. the non-profit and community-based organization has produced a great deal of scientific knowledge and expertise on the biological effects of mic through participatory research methods. survivors and health advocates have reported that the occurrence of genetic mutations is all too common amongst children of survivors and refer to the high incidence rates of cleft lip and missing palate as evidence. the sambhavna clinic, for example, which provides free medical care to the survivors through allopathy, ayurveda, and yoga, suggests that the “indiscriminate prescription of steroids, antibiotics and psychotropic drugs is compounding the damage caused by the gas exposure” (sarangi 2001, 93). they claim that birth defects in the children of survivors of the gas leak are far too prevalent and that many of these birth defects are due to the gas exposure of their parents as well as the cocktails of pharmaceutical drugs that were introduced into the population soon after the disaster.   women in bhopal are tracing the mic-mediated ruptures of gendered social relations. women who survived the gas tragedy, as well as women who were born after the gas tragedy, have expertise in tracing the chemical. rashida bee, a survivor of the bhopal gas tragedy and co-founder of the chingari trust and rehabilitation center, explains the broader repercussions of all of these reproductive health issues. in the independent documentary film the bhopal chemical disaster: 20 years without justice (2004), made by the attorney sanford lewis for the international campaign for justice in bhopal, bee explains that reproductive health issues have made the lives of women in bhopal extremely difficult. in a culture that values a woman’s worth through her reproductive capabilities, she explains that much of the social and economic difficulty that bhopali women face is related to their reproductive health status. she states,   women now have abnormal period intervals of fifteen days to as much as three months. some girls do not start their periods until they are age twenty and other women as young as thirty have menopausal symptoms…when the girls who were children at the time of the tragedy become of marriageable age, it is difficult to find a decent groom for them as no one wants to be wedded to a gas survivor. the girl comes laden with a history of medical problems creating a burden on the groom to provide for her through her life. (lewis 2004)   bee also explains that if a woman does get married, she may not have children, which stigmatizes her and lessens her worth as a wife. bee further states that if a bhopali woman does have children, they may be “deformed” [sic] as impairments develop in the fetus. she emphatically repeats that no parent wants their son to marry to a girl from bhopal. yet, as was reported in 2008, bhopali women who did manage to marry and have a child, and/or women in the surrounding areas of bhopal, became candidates for providing low-cost surrogacy services.   social activists, health advocates, and community members at the bhopal medical appeal are tracing mic-mediated ruptures of women’s reproductive physiology. it is known that women who were in their reproductive years during the time of the gas disaster immediately started to experience the effects of mic poisoning on their bodies. unfortunately, many of the studies conducted on women’s reproductive health by the indian government were cancelled and only a handful of documented studies can be found in peer-reviewed scientific journals on the topic. studies on the reproductive health of the next generation of bhopali women coming into reproductive age were also terminated, but an early unpublished study titled “an epidemic of gynecological disorder,” written by the activists and researchers drs. rani bang and mira sadgopal in 1985, revealed that pregnant or not, women who lived in bhopal were at a much higher risk of developing pelvic infections. these infections have been correlated with higher rates of incidence of other reproductive health issues such as menstrual cycle problems, dysmenorrhea, and endometriosis. in her book the bhopal saga: causes and consequences of the world’s largest industrial disaster, swedish activist and general practitioner ingrid eckerman verified these findings and noted that very soon after the disaster, “a total of 36 wards were marked as being ‘gas affected,’ with an estimated population in 1984 of 520,000. of these 520,000 exposed people, 200,000 were below 15 years of age and 3,000 were pregnant women” (2005, 94). as eckerman states, these women experienced multiple symptoms, including “high proportions of leucorrhoea, pelvic inflammatory disease, cervical erosion,…excessive menstrual bleedings and suppression of lactation…the impressions from sambhavna 2003 is that menstrual irregularities after the first year of menarche, profuse menstruations and premature menopause are more common among gas victims and their daughters” (111). in 2009 a review of clinical and experimental findings from the bhopal gas tragedy also verified bang and sadgopal’s findings, reporting that “menstrual abnormalities, vaginal discharge and premature menopause have emerged as common problems among bhopal mic exposed women and their female offspring/girl children” (mishra et al. 2009, 196). not only has the chemical affected the immediate survivor population, but also in line with chemical infrastructures that “assist” or alter reproduction in a distributed sense as murphy puts it, mic is “transforming life in inter-generational time” (2013, 1).   pharmacologists and epidemiologists are tracing mic-mediated reproductive toxicity. in 1985, following the accident, the indian council of medical research (icmr) set up a unit called the bhopal gas disaster research center. the unit closed down after six years, but in the interim had come up with a number of important findings. thankfully, environmental medicine and community-based health researcher, v.r. dhara (2000) reported on the icmr’s work in his doctoral thesis, “the bhopal gas leak: lessons from studying the impact of a disaster in a developing nation.” dhara shared a number of incredibly important but unsettling scientific accounts of the status of reproductive health in bhopal, including the conclusion drawn by the icmr that there was sustained and increased trends of spontaneous abortion rates amongst survivors as compared to the control population (dhara et al. 2002, 487). a recent icmr report suggests that the rate of birth defects in the gas-affected population remains high to this day (mishra 2019).   unfortunately, in the years that followed the gas explosion, the indian government withheld much of its findings on the health impacts of the disaster. however, in 1992, the international medical commission on bhopal was formed in an effort to acquire more information and assess the long-term health effects and health-related needs of the victims of the accident. with dhara as one of its expert members on toxic substances and disease, the commission revealed a list of conditions, which they deemed as the most pertinent mic-mediated long-term health issues faced by the survivors. these conditions included reproductive toxicity and genotoxicity (dhara and dhara 2002, 399).   as mentioned, unfortunately many of the studies done on women’s reproductive health by the indian government were cancelled and hardly any documented studies can be found in peer-reviewed scientific journals on the topic. however, a report released in 1987 by pharmacologist and activist daya r. varma showed that women who were pregnant at the time of the gas leak experienced spontaneous abortion rates that were ten times higher than the normal population. as varma states in his abstract,   although press reports indicate that the leakage of methyl isocyanate (mic) on december 3, 1984, in bhopal has led to an increase in spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, infant mortality, and fetal abnormalities, no clinical or experimental studies on the reproductive toxicity of mic were reported in scientific journals for several months after the accident. we therefore conducted, 9 months after the accident, a preliminary survey of 3270 families in bhopal and experimental studies on the effects of mic in pregnant mice. it was found that 43% of pregnancies in women residing near the union carbide pesticide plant did not result in the birth of a live child. likewise, exposure of mice to relatively low concentrations of mic (9 and 15 ppm) for 3 hr caused complete resorption in more than 75% of animals. a decrease in fetal and placental weights was observed at 2 to 15 ppm mic. in general, the experimental findings in mice corroborate the epidemiological data from bhopal. the mechanism of the fetal toxicity of mic remains to be established. (1987, 153)   based on varma’s study, dhara further clarified the effects of mic on pregnant women. in an epidemiological survey, he stated that “in a sample of 865 women who lived within 1 km of the plant and who were pregnant at the time of the gas leak, 43% of the pregnancies did not result in a live birth. of the 486 live births, 14% of babies died in the first 30 days as compared to a death rate of 2.6% to 3% for previous deliveries in the 2 years preceding the accident in the same group of women” (dhara 2000, 32). these findings indicate that women who were in the first trimester of their pregnancy during the time of the leak were at much higher risk of spontaneous abortion. women who were able to carry their fetuses to term experienced many pregnancy related complications. there were increased factors of risk in fetuses brought to term as many of the women themselves had also experienced mic-mediated respiratory problems and stress and had to take several different medications that are normally avoided by pregnant women. these medications included several rounds of antibiotics, bronchodilators, and analgesics (dhara 2000, 32).   molecular biologists in the global south and global north can trace mic’s role in necropolitics at the level of genes and proteins. enough time has now passed to observe long-term molecular and genetic effects of methyl isocyanate exposure. yet once again, many of the scientific studies on the genetics of the population of survivors that had been initiated soon after the disaster were terminated. of the very few studies that can be accessed, several cite the presence of chromosomal aberrations. these aberrations appear in the form of “breaks and gaps” or ruptures in the dna of cells such as lymphocytes (dhara 2000, 34). dhara reports, “cytogenetic studies were done 3 years after exposure on a sample of 40 male and 43 female exposed persons. results from this study showed statistically higher frequencies of chromosomal aberrations in the exposed group as compared to 46 age and sex-matched unexposed controls. the aberrations were in the form of breaks, gaps, dicentrics, rings, tri and quadri-radial configurations and were more pronounced in female subjects” (35). the incidence of spontaneous abortions may also be related to issues of genotoxicity. the direct effects of mic on gamete development and zygote formation have not been studied in sufficient detail. of the studies that do appear on the effects of mic on gametes, only male germ cell and sperm mutagenicity are examined. an in vitro study conducted by g.v. raghuram and colleagues, using a male mouse spermatogonial cell line, showed that mic causes dna damage, oxidative stress, and apoptosis. chromosomal aberrations were also reported in the form of “telomere anomaly, aneuploidy and variable amplification of microsatellite repeats” (raghuram et al., “molecular characterization,” 2010, 213). another study by this group, that examined a mouse ovarian epithelial cell line, reported that mic exposure resulted in ovarian carcinogenesis through persistent dna damage. this damage included “telomeric dysfunction due to premature senescence and plausible association with chromosomal and microsatellite instability” (raghuram et al., “molecular mechanisms,” 2010, 377). these studies demonstrate the effects of mic-mediated distributed reproduction at the molecular level.   the biological sedimentation of global fertility chains mediated by mic as mic continues to exert its effects on the reproductive biology of women, men, and children in bhopal, remarkably, there is a growing market of human “in vivo labor” (waldby and cooper 2014, 7) involved in the production of biocapital that has also developed in this city. this market relies on the promissory futures that can be extracted from the remaining reproductive potential found in this very same population and location. while commenting more broadly about medical tourism in india, amit sengupta, founder and advocate of the people’s health movement in india, stated, “while the private sector has always been prominent as a source of medical care, neoliberal policies have created conditions for its rapid growth…thus, while women from across the world flock to india to take advantage of the booming market for assisted reproductive technologies, a very large number of indian women are denied basic health care” (2011, 313–14). interestingly, the story of in vivo labor occurring specifically in bhopal remains relatively underexplored. just as sengupta pointed out, survivors of the bhopal gas tragedy are denied basic reproductive health care. meanwhile, biotechnologies of reproduction and the artificial reproductive technologies (including ivf, gamete intrafallopian transfer (gift), intracytoplasmic sperm injection (icsi), pre-implantation genetic screening, and gestational surrogacy) that are not primarily geared toward helping the survivors themselves are growing steadily in the city of bhopal (sengupta 2011). this contradiction between reproductive harm and promissory reproductive futures comes to some of us perhaps as no surprise at all. even before the influx of artificial reproductive technologies (arts) and surrogacy services became prevalent in bhopal, fortun (2001) also discussed the status of reproductive health in advocacy after bhopal. she writes,   disaster harbors particular contradictions for women. bhopal is no exception. in the wake of disaster, women have gained access to public space and, in some cases, to wage-earning work. but they have also borne an unequal share of the effects of disaster. many have husbands who can’t, or won’t, earn. many are responsible for the care of sick children, spouses, siblings, and parents. many are sick themselves. many have faced the social stigmas of reproductive disorder. all must deal with a medical establishment that systematically discounts the particular problems of women’s health. (2001, 150)   in the case of bhopal, it is clear that some women have indeed gained access to public spaces and to wage-earning work through the reproductive tourism industry and specifically through the surrogacy services that they have provided. in this last section, i examine how we can trace the migration of biopolitics by following mic’s chemistry and its intra-actions with surrogate bodies, fetal bodies, and placentas.   the transnational chemistry of mic connects plants, pesticides, and placentas. in their article “twice poisoned bhopal,” chandana mathur and ward morehouse (2002) explain the various elements that were necessary for the perfect storm of bodies, environments, and technologies that resulted in the chemical disaster in bhopal. they and others have developed a link between the colonial legacies of the mic gas explosion and the green revolution that took place in india during 1960s and ’70s. the indian government-sanctioned green revolution initiative introduced the need for high-yielding seeds, chemical fertilizers, and therefore the need for pesticides. although it has been argued that the green revolution was “developed by indians for indians…not at the behest of western powers, but rather in a determined effort to break free of them” (bandyopadhyay 2021), this response to a colonial legacy, however, in turn, spurred the demand for the production of pesticides. this demand, coupled with the perceived expendability of the poor residents of bhopal, provided the perfect conditions for union carbide (an american-owned company) to build its manufacturing plant in bhopal in 1970. as mathur and morehouse suggest, the bhopali people faced the “head-on impact of world historical and political economic processes” (2002, 69). in reference to the actual union carbide plant itself, they note, “the design of the bhopal plant, as well as the policies related to its maintenance and operation, were in keeping with the double standard often applied by transnational corporations in their third world outposts, where environmental, worker, and community safety issues may be seen as less pressing than at home…the indian state’s unwillingness to discourage foreign private investment has been a crucial factor in the continuing injustice in bhopal” (2002, 69). the colonial legacy that made it possible for the transnational chemistry of the “green revolution” to take place in india is the same legacy that supports the expansion of global fertility chains to include bhopal. today, the need for raw materials in the production of reproductive bioeconomies has manifested itself in the increase of in vivo human labor in bhopal through the growth of art clinics and surrogacy services in this city. interestingly, today many of the companies offering reproductive biotechnology services are owned and operated by indian doctors and cater to indian couples. none of their websites mention the bhopal gas tragedy.1   mic leaves a trace of racialized and gendered labor in surrogate bodies. embraced by the coming together of neoliberal politics in india and the global spread of reproductive technology-mediated biocapitalism, reproductive tourism and surrogacy services have in fact spread at an amazing rate across all of india, including the city of bhopal. of course, reproductive tourism, fertility outsourcing, and transnational commercial surrogacy services have also exploded across the globe over the past two decades (hudson et al. 2011; nahman 2016; vertommen, pavone, and nahman 2021; weis 2021). an extensive review of the literature conducted in 2011 suggested that while cross-border reproductive care services were likely increasing around the globe, a significant number of us patients sought reproductive cares services offered in india (and asia more broadly), including surrogacy services, egg donation, and ivf (hudson et al. 2011). in fact, in 2015, while referring to india’s $2.3 billion reproductive tourism industry, a prominent reproductive tourism journal referred to india as the “surrogacy capital of the world” (international medical travel journal 2015). this may be due to the fact that in 2002, india became the first country to legalize commercial surrogacy. as a sociotechnical actor, mic may in fact be associated with the “low cost” associated with surrogacy services in bhopal.   as my colleagues and i have discussed elsewhere (chatterjee, roy, and subramaniam 2022), although it appears that there will soon be strict regulations on reproductive tourism and commercial surrogacy services offered in india, other arts involving different forms of in vivo and in vitro human reproductive labor will continue to be offered to both indian citizens and international commissioning couples. in fact, there is a fear that once surrogacy services become strictly regulated, this will drive the use of surrogacy services and other arts underground, thereby opening the doors for further exploitation of women who participate in this labor. this is particularly relevant in the context of bhopal, where ivf clinics promoting “test-tube” babies are growing and where the cheapest surrogates for hire were once found in india.   arguing that modern-day surrogacy arrangements in india can be better understood in the context of racialized and gendered labor and colonial geopolitics, feminist and postcolonial sts scholar kalindi vora suggests in her book life support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor (2015) that surrogate women should be viewed as biological and affective producers, the extraction of whose “vital energies” is required for biocapital. describing surrogacy clinics in northern india (but not bhopal specifically), she has framed the indian surrogate woman as a type of biological worker and suggests that it is common for surrogates to come from poor economic backgrounds. they make great sacrifices and travel far distances to find employment. in most cases, surrogates are required to be married and to have had children of their own. this proves to the medical staff of the clinic and to potential clients that she is capable of carrying all the way through with a pregnancy, and thereby will likely fulfill her end of the contract. it also means, however, that the surrogate woman leaves behind her children while carrying out her reproductive work. most clinics have housing arrangements for their surrogates and provide simple living quarters for them. the surrogate mother’s health is also monitored and close attention is given to her diet. furthermore, she is removed from immediate sources of physical and mental stress (vora 2009). this way, the fetus or “investment” can be closely monitored.   i am attentive to this wave of recent feminist and postcolonial scholarship that links racialized and gendered labor as well as colonial geopolitics to transnational and commercial surrogacy practices. as bronwyn parry’s article in this special section discusses the expansion of fertility clinics in india into smaller cities, so too have dasgupta and das dasgupta, pointing out that surrogacy services and the “outsourcing” of wombs are occurring throughout india in metropolitan or large cities, but also increasingly in the smaller cities such as bhopal. they suggest that, “with growing medical tourism, the smaller cities are not only becom[ing] more accessible, but have also become a steady source of gamete donors and surrogates. further, the clinics in smaller towns (even with limited infrastructure and expertise) have tie ups with clinics in large cities, and flying embryologists and visiting experts have become the standard practice in the operations of arts. the fertility industry in india is witnessing both vertical and horizontal expansion; both across and within cities” (dasgupta and das dasgupta 2014, 2–3). it is evident that assisted reproduction and reproductive labor in bhopal are unfolding not apart from but in direct relation to global circuits of capital and racialized and gendered labor that are in turn supported by the neoliberal indian state. this is the same state that opened its doors to foreign investment several decades ago, including multinationals such as the union carbide corporation that produced a pesticide, which in turn required the mass production of the compound mic.   placentas serve as a mic-mediated contact zone of empire. in order to trace mic-mediated distributed reproduction in an immediate contact zone of empire, i want to end this paper by focusing in on mic’s molecular impacts on the placenta—a local point of interest that is created when a surrogate woman and a growing fetus intra-act in the context of bhopal. for example, a 1988 study conducted in pregnant female mice exposed to [14c] radiolabeled mic showed that this compound accumulated in several tissues, including the uterus, placenta, and fetus (ferguson et al. 1988). a 1990 study, which examined the direct effects of mic exposure on fetal growth, later suggested that the fetal toxicity of mic was “partly independent of maternal toxicity and may result from its transfer across the placenta and interaction with fetal tissues” (varma et al. 1990, 1).   in light of current research that links the exposure of environmental agents to epigenetic influences mediated by human placental development and pathology, it is crucial that we reconsider these earlier findings that demonstrated an impact of mic on placental tissue beyond decreased placental weights. given the concern of intergenerational transmission and epigenetic effects of mic gas, perhaps the question is not just what is mic writing onto the bodies of gas victims, but what genetic editing processes is mic orchestrating in placental dna? are there epigenetic effects of mic that directly influence the function and expression of proteins and signaling mechanisms not just within reproductive cells and tissues overall, but within the placenta itself? although a link between in utero exposure to mic gas and human fetal growth has been established, studies examining the status of dna methylation in human placentas following exposure to methyl isocyanate have not yet been conducted.   microchimerism and the vertical transmission of mic-mediated neoliberal politics. mic, known to be a highly irritant chemical, is absorbed horizontally through the skin and reacts with various liquids and mucous membranes in the body. in the past several years, there has been a handful of studies that clearly show mic’s ability to penetrate through tissues, react with proteins in the body, and initiate genetic and epigenetic “reprogramming” through dna methylation and histone modifications. for example, a retrospective review of cytogenetic studies on mic published by samarth, gandhi, and maudar raises the concern of epigenetic effects of mic gas and the possibility of “vertical transmission of genetic aberrations” (2013, 325).   if this is indeed the case, we should be asking what is happening at a molecular level within a placenta when a surrogate woman and a donor-gamete assembled fetus meet one another in the aftermath of the bhopal gas tragedy and the continued environmental presence of mic-induced toxicity. what does the “vertical transmission of genetic aberrations” mean in the context of surrogate and commissioned fetus encounters in bhopal? also, we must ask, can a life be transformed by reverse-vertical transmissions through the placenta—that is, from the fetus to the surrogate? recent evidence of fetal microchimerism indicates that pregnancy-derived fetal cells do not just passively reside in the bloodstream of pregnant women but can form small populations of cells with different genetic backgrounds that exist for long periods of time in maternal tissues, including the heart, lungs, kidney, spleen, liver, and brain (chan et al. 2012; rijnink et al. 2015).   conclusion in this article, i have attempted to use the framework of distributed reproduction to connect the different materialities produced by the world’s worst industrial chemical disaster, along multiple scales, to the concept of global fertility chains. as vertommen, pavone, and nahman have stated, “global fertility chains do not exist in a vacuum but materialize in particular institutional, socio-spatial, and cultural environments” (2021, 15). i have used a methodology of frontstaging the chemical mic to trace the intersecting contours of toxicity, reproductive health, and surrogacy services in bhopal. i want to leave you now with two potential molecular scenarios and another set of unanswered questions. the scenarios emphasize why we must not forget about the bhopal gas tragedy while thinking about reproductive technologies and surrogacy practices in the city of bhopal, why we must continue to be unsettled by the different bodies of knowledge being produced by the survivors of the tragedy, and why we must continue to unsettle science until we have the answers to some of these questions.   first, in the context of surrogacy practices in bhopal, what can we make of the biological evidence that indicates the transmission of hormones and proteins from the surrogate mother, through to the placenta, and into the fetal environment? if a surrogate body has been impacted by mic, what, if any, imprint can this chemical leave on a commissioned fetus through placental transmission? with a variety of knowledge bases, from survivor histories to epigenetic analyses, can we better understand the vertical and horizontal transmission of chemical toxicities at various environmental scales, and on different generations of human and nonhuman actors?   second (and this is the more difficult scenario to imagine), what can we begin to ask if we consider more carefully scientific research that indicates the movement of fetal dna into maternal plasma, particular in the case of surrogate women in bhopal? in many reproductive tourism arrangements in india, embryos implanted into indian surrogate women were obtained from the commissioning couple and/or sperm and egg banks. given that many of the embryos used in arts and surrogacy arrangements in bhopal were created through the conjugated nuclear material provided by north american and european germ cell donors, can it be imagined that a mic-mediated chemical infrastructure and distributed reproduction is rupturing our ideas of fixed, racialized, and gendered biologies? as a response to increased flows of reproductive bioeconomies, is mic creating a molecular and genetic transcript of translocated biopolitics whereby a reproductive laborer’s hormones and proteins enter into fetal bodies while a mixture of consumer dna is expressed in maternal surrogate blood and tissues? given that we now know that fetal/maternal bodies are enmeshed beyond the time and space of the placenta, if fetal dna and cells enter into the surrogate woman’s plasma and tissues, are we ready to trace these biophysical markers of transnational chemistries and their colonial legacies? if so, will we be ready to meet the materializations of toxic interdependencies through feminist, postcolonial, (de/anti)colonial, disability justice, and queer relationality frameworks?   the answers to these questions may lie in the distant future. rearranging the ontological politics of mic-mediated distributed reproduction does not necessarily resolve the contradictions that are harbored by the bhopal gas tragedy. it does however allow us to develop more situated accounts of life, death, and reproduction in bhopal and, in a way, learn how to better encounter these contradictions.   notes 1 ivf and surrogacy services in bhopal are advertised online at several major centers, including the international infertility institute india and bhopal test-tube baby center (http://www.ivfgo.com/), the malti hospital and test tube baby center (http://www.maltihospital.com/), and the vijaya maternity and test tube baby center 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support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. waldby, catherine, and melinda cooper. 2014. clinical labor: tissue donors and research subjects in the global bioeconomy. durham, nc: duke university press. weis, christina. 2021. “changing fertility landscapes: exploring the reproductive routes and choices of fertility patients from china for assisted reproduction in russia.” asian bioethics review, no. 13, 7–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41649-020-00156-w.   author bio deboleena roy is senior associate dean of faculty for emory college of arts and sciences and holds a joint appointment as professor of neuroscience and behavioral biology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at emory university. she is the author of molecular feminisms: biology, becomings, and life in the lab (university of washington press, 2018).     original research human/machine fusions and the future of the cyborg     jasmine erdener koç university, turkey jerdener@ku.edu.tr     abstract in 2019 the us department of defense (dod) published a report describing cyborg soldiers equipped with powerful implants, to be deployed by 2050. the dod’s cyborg enables transhuman fantasies of controlling, augmenting, and weaponizing the body and the environment. the cyborg foundation, non-profit organization run by two artists, offers a different approach. these artists identify as cyborgs who aim to perceive the world differently, connect with nature, and expand normative human bodies and senses. in these human/machine fusions, and in cyborg theory, hybridity is an essential part of the cyborg’s appeal. hybridity, however, can also reinforce binary oppositions or provide the veneer of choice under the mantle of self-regulation and governmentality. calculated illegibility might afford a different vantage point into cyborg politics, negotiating the sites at which the body is identified and known, and the possibility for opacity, sousveillance, or subversive misrecognition. the cyborg foundation offers a useful illustration of calculated illegibility, a way of performing cyborg identity and embodiment that runs counter to traditional cyborg narratives. this article engages a close reading of the dod report and the cyborg foundation, and an interview i conducted with one of the organization’s founders, moon ribas, to argue that illegibility better aligns with donna haraway’s call for a cyborg politics that disrupts and recodes the hegemonic communication systems and militarized control over the body and the planet.     keywords cyborgs, hybridity, illegibility, disability, militarization, the body     introduction in october 2019 the us department of defense (dod) published a report titled cyborg soldier 2050: human/machine fusion and the implications for the future of the dod (emanuel et al. 2019). the report was the culmination of a year-long study “to predict the direction cyborg technology will take within the next 30 years, determine how that could fundamentally impact national security, and make recommendations to senior dod leadership on how to safeguard the united states and mitigate the threat posed by near-peer exploitation of these technologies” (emanuel et al. 2019, 2). the dod prediction that there will be intensive body-technology integration by 2050 leaves a relatively short time in which to grapple with questions of “human/machine fusion” and cyborg futures. since the term was coined in 1960, a portmanteau of “cybernetic organism,” cyborgs have coiled their way through bodies, technology, militarism, and subversion.   the dod report focuses on ocular and auditory enhancements, an implanted network of sensors to control a body’s muscular movement, and “direct neural enhancement of the human brain for two-way data transfer” (emanuel et al. 2019, 2). the report often reads like a proposed sequel to the 1987 film robocop, which depicts the technologically transformed body of a police officer in a dystopian future, as the dod council intends to “go beyond augmentation” to “enhance performance through a range of modifications from the functional to the radically structural beyond the normal baseline for humans” (emanuel et al. 2019, 1). as in robocop, the dod argues that these technologies will offer greatest benefit to wounded and disabled veterans, using disability as the justification for cyborg research and weaponry.   for the dod, the cyborg enables transhuman fantasies of controlling, augmenting, and weaponizing the body and the environment. they draw from both military research and science fiction to present the cyborg as the natural extension of human technological evolution. this vision of superhuman strength and abilities stems from a long history of cyborgs as technological interventions to make the human body and mind more powerful or to eliminate variation and disability in human bodies.   in contrast, the cyborg foundation, a non-profit created by two artists in 2010, offers a very different approach. their website provides “an online platform for the research, development and promotion of projects related to the creation of new senses and perceptions by applying technology to the human body” (cyborg foundation 2020). both founders identify as cyborgs and have had technology implanted into their bodies to alter their sensory perceptions. neil harbisson has an antenna attached to his brain that allows him to perceive a wide spectrum of visible light, as well as infrared and ultraviolet, by converting light waves into sound. moon ribas implanted seismic sensors that allowed her to feel earthquakes happening anywhere on earth, or on the moon, although she has since had the sensors removed (ribas 2019). their implants serve no quantifiable function, nor are they intended to “fix” disability or grant superhuman powers. their goal is to create new senses to perceive and understand the world differently, to connect with animals and nature, and to expand or explode the normative set of human bodies and senses.   the shape-shifting cyborg, from donna haraway’s 1985 insistence that “we are cyborgs” to high-level military forecasting, invokes technological-organic assemblages and ideological constructs. retaining the cyborg as an analytic tool enables a kind of technological intersectionality, in which various subject positions and material rearrangements can be examined for how they enable, circumvent, reconfigure, or destroy political imperatives and power structures. as lucy suchman notes, “now that the cyborg figure has done its work of alerting us to the political effects, shifting boundaries, and transformative possibilities in human-machine mixings, it is time to get on with investigation of particular configurations and their consequences” (2007, 275–76). for both the dod and the cyborg foundation, as for cybernetics and feminist theory, cyborgs hold the promise of revolutionary, and potentially dangerous, technological and bodily transformation.   examining sites of cyborg entanglements, the ways in which bodies and machines intersect and are infused with both politics and possibility, brings the cyborg from theory to lived experience. both the dod and the cyborg foundation believe that technological transformations to the body will change what it means to be human. each represents one element of what haraway called a “cyborg world.” the dod can be seen in line with “the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a star wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense” (haraway 1991, 154). but haraway’s cyborg world also encompassed the “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. the political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point” (1991, 154). the cyborg’s volatile hybridity is often cited as the radical and unpredictable edge of this political struggle, orienting the cyborg either towards the grid of control or against its military origins, and reimagining or dismantling restrictive binaries and subverting hegemonic control.   but while the cyborg’s hybridity is an essential part of its appeal, uncritical adoption of hybridity can paradoxically serve to reinforce binary oppositions or to provide the veneer of choice under the mantle of self-regulation and governmentality. instead, calculated illegibility might afford a different vantage point into cyborg politics, negotiating the sites at which the body is identified and known, and the possibility for intentional opacity, sousveillance, or subversive misrecognition. the cyborg foundation can provide a useful illustration of this calculated illegibility, a way of performing cyborg identity and embodiment that runs starkly counter to traditional cyborg narratives. this article engages a close reading of the dod report and the cyborg foundation, and an interview i conducted with moon ribas, to argue that illegibility better aligns with haraway’s call for a cyborg politics that disrupts and recodes the hegemonic communication systems and militarized control over the body and the planet.   situating the cyborg haraway’s explosive “cyborg manifesto” shaped many of the subsequent debates on the intersections between human and machine. the cyborg relies on the hybridity between binaries, at its core blending organic and machine, as well as nature/culture, human/animal, or physical/non-physical. the technoscientific politics of hybridity also align with postcolonial critiques of authoritarian power. homi bhabha, drawing from bakhtin, focused on hybridity as “the moment in which the discourse of colonial authority loses its univocal grip on meaning and finds itself open to the trace of the language of the other” (young 1995, 21). in postcolonial critique, hybridity fractures the monolithic categories of racial purity and colonial unity, as the “mongrel, half-caste, mixed race, métis, mestizo was a taboo figure in the colonial world. when so much pathos was invested in boundaries, boundary crossing involved dangerous liaisons” (pieterse 2001, 226). as a chaotic agent of “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities,” haraway’s cyborg likewise offers the possibility of forging new connections and finding sites of resistance or subversion outside of existing power circuits (1991, 154).   technological hybridity also calls to mind c. riley snorton’s analysis of triton, samuel delany’s “curious work of fiction” that wrestles with the body as a heterotopia. snorton describes foucault’s heterotopia as “the juxtaposition of several spaces in one place and the relationships of those spaces to time…and meaning” (snorton 2016, 83). delany used this idea to write of a bodily heterotopia: “the removal of one part or organ from the body and affixing it at another place in or on the body…a skin graft is a heterotopia. but so is a sex change” (snorton 2016, 83). in delany’s novel, people can easily alter their bodies, and there are dozens of avenues for gender, racial, or sexual identification. the shifting organic geographies offer new possibilities to reshape traditional understandings of the body, social scripts, or identity. it also hints at the cyborg’s hybridity, an idea reflected in the cyborg foundation’s hope that the body might one day become a site of unparalleled change, uncoupled from social constraints.   but snorton finds a warning in foucault’s and delany’s work on the heterotopia, and by extension the cyborg:   the quantification and categorization of gender and sexuality on triton already heralds the proliferation of gendered possibilities as not displacing but regimenting and sedimenting gender (norms). on triton, characters also exercise other forms of “control” over their bodies, electing to desire particular types of people and undergoing rejuvenating procedures to guard against any effects of aging. in other words, triton’s government—referred to as the “computer hegemony”—provides self-regulation under a veneer of freedom through choice. its dispensation toward radical libertarianism is intimately linked with the onset of an intergalactic war to maintain the possibility of multiple ways of life. (snorton 2016, 85)   hybridity is thus not the uncomplicated good that it might appear, as it may be appropriated and employed by “biopolitical and necropolitical modes of governance” (snorton 2016, 92). in this context, the array of choices and the seemingly liberatory expansion of gender, sex, and race conceal the workings of neoliberal self-discipline by cultivating docile bodies, those which “may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (foucault 1995, 136). if docility is “less about obedience and more about the malleability of bodies and their ability to be trained into acquiescence” (kraidy 2016, 115), then the heterotopia of triton capitalizes on docile bodies in order to shape them to a new disciplinary model and self-regulatory ideal, while the fundamental workings of power remain unchanged. triton demonstrates how hybridity can become a tool of hegemony, allowing benign forms of differentiation and experimentation that do not fundamentally challenge the status quo (kraidy 2005; acheraïou 2011). untethered from specific political configurations or commitments, hybridity is not inherently liberatory. after all, the dod is also creating a hybrid entity through human/machine fusions, and the cyborg foundation’s emphasis on individual freedom and choice can allow a smooth transition to the militarization and rigid bodily hierarchies of the dod.   if hybridity may not offer the critical or subversive edge it once appeared to possess, perhaps haraway’s “cyborg manifesto,” in conjunction with disability theory, queer theory, and indigenous studies, can offer a different reading of cyborg politics. echoing the univocal authority of earlier postcolonial critique, haraway writes that cyborg politics must “struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly” (1991, 177). haraway argues that cyborg politics must disrupt and “recode” the hegemonic and surveillant tendencies of communication systems and militarized command-control centers. in the struggle against perfect communication, perhaps the political potential of cyborg can be explored instead through calculated illegibility.   variations of this concept animate theories of power and marginalization, but i argue illegibility has been eclipsed by hybridity in theorizing the cyborg, and offers a different political intervention. opacity or illegibility can pose significant risk to individuals and communities, but can also produce creative forms of counter conduct, dissent, and collectivity (lingel 2020). deciding when and how to become visible or legible suggests an alternative approach to political intervention; as peggy phelan notes, “there is an important difference between willfully failing to appear and never being summoned” (1993, 11).   queer theorists and disability studies scholars have wrestled with the cost of legibility and neoliberal regimes of recognition that “securitize and even militarize bodies and borders while touting the proliferation of diverse subjects of recognition as liberal progress and advancement” (eng and puar 2020, 2). the question of visibility and illegibility in queer theory must balance risk and reward, in the danger of been seen and the importance of finding one another. scholars have documented this balancing act through the creation of a queer alternativ space, “a liminal site of rejection, alteration” (shirinian 2018, 2), as well as strategies of “in/visibility,” where “accommodation and resistance are intertwined in complex ways” (stella 2012, 1829). linking surveillance studies with queer theory, jessa lingel draws from simone browne’s work on “dark sousveillance” to consider “dazzle camouflage” as a form of queer counter conduct, “to invite attention in a way that disrupts recognition” (browne 2015; lingel 2020, 4). dazzle camouflage originated in military defense strategies from the first world war. rather than attempting to disguise or conceal military craft, allied forces painted ships with contrasting black and white lines (a cubist collision with state-craft). german warships were able to see these dazzling ships but were unable to determine more detailed or precise information about their direction or movements. although technologies and tactics have changed since then, “dazzle camouflage remains an instructive approach to managing an enemy’s watchful gaze” (lingel 2020, 3).   the tension between visibility and illegibility also fits with tobin siebers’s description of disability as masquerade, in which individuals may “disguise one kind of disability with another or display their disability by exaggerating it” (2004, 4). siebers argues that this practice “clouds the legibility of passing” and “serve[s] as small conspiracies against oppression and inequality. they subvert existing social conventions, and they contribute to the solidarity of marginal groups by seizing control of stereotypes and resisting the pressure to embrace norms of behavior and appearance” (siebers 2004, 19; see also evans 2017). similarly, indigenous studies scholars have debated the politics of liberal recognition as the site where colonial power is created and enacted (coulthard 2014; byrd 2020). theorist édouard glissant explored opacity as a path to solidarity; drawing from glissant, scholar and artist zach blas suggests “informatic opacity” as a means of living “with technologies that express the joy of opacity, not its destruction” (blas 2018, 198–99; glissant 1997).   it is here that the cyborg foundation can offer an interesting, if imperfect, version of cyborg illegibility. as the dod pursues fantasies of omniscience and invincibility through the union of communication and control, the cyborg foundation thwarts easy identification or categorization. their work plays with visibility and illegibility, as they cultivate media attention yet emphasize cyborg implants that serve no recognizably productive purpose. their implants create expressive and affective forms of communication, the antithesis of cybernetic feedback loops, and they circumvent typical narratives of cyborg disability.   cyborgs are often represented as people whose disability is technologically erased, through “the devices’ ability to normalize the body and/or to restore its previous function” (kafer 2013, 108). alison kafer points to the presumptively transformative power of hybridity to demonstrate how both haraway’s “cyborg manifesto” and the cyborg in popular culture problematically represent people with disabilities as the quintessential cyborgs. because cyborgs are often understood as technologies intersecting with an organic body, and because this is primarily seen as benefiting people with disabilities, “‘cyborg’ and ‘physically disabled person’ are seen as synonymous. or, rather, that ‘person with physical disabilities’ is a self-evident, commonsense category of cyborgism” (kafer 2013, 107).   haraway’s manifesto also suggests that people with disabilities are cyborgs, as they are intimately familiar with the experience of living with and without machines. yet “a cyborg manifesto” does not engage the experiences of disabled people (kafer 2013, 105; siebers 2008, 63; weise 2018). the dod report cites haraway, “recognizing that someone with a cardiac pacemaker or implantable cardioverter-defibrillator would be considered a cyborg” (emanuel et al. 2019, 1), but shows limited awareness of the lived experiences of disability or prosthetics, of how “this feeling of trial-and-error, repetition and glitch, is part of the cyborg condition and, by extension, the disabled condition” (weise 2018). at the same time, the dod declares that “our use of the term cyborg is intended to envision a grander and fundamentally more complex future involving human/machine technologies over the next 30 years” (emanuel et al. 2019, 1), and projects a future where technology and bodies harmoniously intertwine to create a more powerful whole, where glitches or malfunctions are rare, and legal and ethical questions are secondary. the cyborg is thus paradoxically made to signify both currently disabled people and the eventual eradication of disability.   the dod, like the fictional government of triton, promises a future of technological body transformation and rejuvenation in order to cultivate docile bodies, and subsequently mobilize those bodies to war. the state relies on the spectacular cyclical performance of injury and restoration to cement public support for war, “making warfare more efficient and, paradoxically, life-affirming. damaged bodies, if successfully rebuilt, would recast war as a source of vitality rather than of death and destruction” (terry 2017, 91). in a loop of escherian logic, war creates disabled bodies, which the dod uses as the justification for further military research and development, which leads once again to war. in this process, hybridity signals the transcendence of disability and becomes the means for future debility, through warfare and the cyborg soldier. technological hybridity is weaponized as a tool of “ablenationalism…as a basis for promoting american exceptionalism abroad” (mitchell and snyder 2015, 35–36), and is connected to long-standing fantasies of making bodies transparent, identifiable, and malleable.   the cyborg warfighter the cyborg first appeared in the context of cybernetic research and space exploration, as researchers manfred clynes and nathan kline (1960) hypothesized about the possibility of “solving the many technological problems” of space travel by transforming the human body itself (76). integrating technology with the body would not only offer the possibility of exploring environments unsuited to human physiology, but would automate these biological processes, leaving humans “free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel” (clynes and kline 1960, 27). this early cyborg grew out of the military-funded research, primarily cybernetics, that took place during and after the first and second world wars. paired with wartime research and defense, cybernetics began to articulate a vision of communication and control that saturated western society. cybernetics and the “inaugural moment of the computer age” shaped not only scientific research but also a “culturally specific imaginary” around communication and technology (hayles 1999, xi).   the militaristic origins of cybernetic theory, and the ideology of communication and control, may not determine their later use and development; as haraway (1991) writes of cyborgs, “they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism…but illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” (151). ronald kline (2009) critiques “flatten[ing] the history of cybernetics” to a single narrative originating in world war ii and stretching through the present moment (333). however, he also argues that cybernetic ideas, methods, and metaphors pervade contemporary disciplines and cultural meanings: “they inform how we talk, think, and act on our digital present and future, from the utopian visions invoked by the terms information age and cyberspace to the dystopian visions associated with enemy cyborgs and cyber warfare. the traces of cybernetics and information theory thus permeate the sciences, technology, and culture of our daily lives” (r. kline 2015, 4).   nearly sixty years after clynes and kline envisioned cyborgs as a means of immersing humans in dangerous terrain, the dod’s cyborg soldier 2050 report anticipates cyborgs operating in the battlefields of the future, “dense, urban environments or subterranean megacities that will challenge identification and tracking of targets” (emanuel et al. 2019, 4). cyborg soldiers might respond to threats against national security, conduct special operations, espionage, or surveillance, but the report does not offer greater details, or suggest limitations, on where or how cyborg soldiers might be deployed.   the dod’s cyborg warfighter (a soldier in combat) will be uniquely equipped to function in various environments. the report identifies four areas as “being technically feasible by 2050 or earlier,” and among the highest priorities for national security, intelligence, and the battlefield (emanuel et al. 2019, v). cyborg soldiers could have ocular enhancements allowing them to perceive light outside the currently visible spectrum, analyze images and identify targets, and process and share data with individuals or military systems (emanuel et al. 2019, 3–4). they might be outfitted with an “optogenetic bodysuit sensor web,” a network of electromagnetic sensors implanted throughout the body for muscular control (emanuel et al. 2019, v). initially, this technology might permit the “restoration of lost function” to injured muscles or limbs, but could eventually allow individuals to perform tasks at “the limits of their physical capability,” and even allow an external person or system to take control, or puppet, their body (emanuel et al. 2019, 5). warfighters might have auditory implants to expand the range of acoustic perception and allow “imagined or covert speech” to communicate with others through “neural signaling,” which the report also recommends for intelligence and police officers (emanuel et al. 2019, 7). finally, the report describes “direct neural enhancement of the brain” that would interface between individuals, as well as between an individual and machine: “drones, weapon systems, and other remote systems” (emanuel et al. 2019, 7).   the report does acknowledge and question the feasibility and ethics of military cyborgs, such as the risks of hacking, surveillance, and malfunctioning technology (or individuals), whether and how to integrate augmented individuals with non-augmented troops, whether “a service member [could] be compelled to undergo an enhancement” (emanuel et al. 2019, 17–21) or have an enhancement involuntarily removed. they observe that there are significant issues that current legal frameworks are unable to address, such as whether an augmented individual might track or surveil civilians (outside of us government directives); if cyborgs must disclose their capabilities in civilian settings; whether they could travel abroad with sensitive or proprietary technology; if they would be required to return or decommission implanted technologies, and the potential physical and psychological effects of doing so. expert contributors to the report “unanimously anticipated” that us adversaries would see the use of military cyborgs as an opportunity “to undermine u.s. interests and stigmatize the dod as unethical” (emanuel et al. 2019, 11). they note that mass media is “a known stage for demonization of cyborgs” and broadly recommend that the dod invest in media, film, and literature to positively influence public perception of these technologies (emanuel et al. 2019, 11).   the dod implies that militarized cyborgs will pervade every aspect of life, with cyborg individuals tracking, surveilling, recording, or terrorizing individuals and populations, as well as generating and accumulating vast stores of sensitive or classified data. cyborg soldiers signal the penetrating gaze of the state upon the individual as well as on the public, by making legible all forms of bodies and beliefs. in this, “taking legibility into account can help to explain not only a quantitative increase in the state’s extractive capacity but also a qualitative shift in the arsenal of extractive instruments at the state’s disposal” (lee and zhang 2017, 129). the report recognizes the legal and ethical concerns, but ultimately concludes that “the benefits afforded by human/machine fusions will be significant and will have a positive impact on humans through the restoration of functionality lost due to illness or injury,” as well as benefiting the “defense community…military operations and training” (emanuel et al. 2019, 22). the authors anticipate that “the gradual introduction of beneficial restorative cyborg technologies will, to an extent, acclimatize the population to their use” and “will work to mitigate the misuse or unintended consequences of these technologies” (emanuel et al. 2019, v, vii). of course, these technologies are envisioned for a select few, including us veterans and perhaps eventually some us citizens, but rarely for people injured by us military operations in other countries.   the dod is aware that the powerful invocation of bodies, injured and technologically restored in the service of the nation, can shield the dod from what they blandly phrase as the potential “misuse or unintended consequences” of cyborg war technologies. as jennifer terry (2017) writes, “technoscientific fantasies of miraculous healing and of ‘humane’ war-fighting entangle violence with dreams of surpassing bodily limitations and of performing antiseptic death” (3). the report builds on ableist and transhuman precedents to suggest disabled bodies as the initial site or forefront for cyborg technologies, perhaps eventually eradicating disability entirely; these presumptively curative technologies are the direct justification for pursuing a heavily militarized cyborg. the ocular enhancement, optogenetic bodysuit, and auditory implants are considered first for individuals who have damaged tissue or lost body function, as it is “deemed unlikely that individuals would willingly undergo removal of healthy tissue,” and the “current level of invasiveness” for the proposed procedures render them irreversible (emanuel et al. 2019, 4–6). but the report also seems to acknowledge that cyborg technologies could create new categories of ability and disability, as “enhanced” individuals possess capabilities beyond those of unmodified individuals, and removing (or amputating) cyborg technology could have significant physical, psychological, or social repercussions (emanuel et al. 2019, 19).   this cyborg targets cartesian dualism to allow the mind (or, eventually, an ai system) ultimate control over an unruly or disobedient corporeality, seeking “to acquire maximum, if not total, intelligence, while at the same time escaping the imperfections of the human body through the coding of human bodies as problems in need of solutions” (masters 2005, 114). the dod cannot conceive of the cyborg as anything other than a war assemblage for geopolitical supremacy, and plans to use cyborg technologies to decode, augment, and control the body, as a means of creating extra-ordinary or superhuman capabilities.   the cyborg foundation in contrast, the cyborg foundation situates itself at the intersection of art, technology, and social change, advocating technological interventions to transform and expand individual sensory perception. the two founders, neil harbisson and moon ribas, follow early self-identified cyborgs such as steve mann, kevin warwick, and performance artist stelarc. i interviewed moon ribas over skype in december 2019 to ask about her work and that of the cyborg foundation. both harbisson and ribas have also given numerous talks, performances, and media interviews.   the cyborg foundation draws from elements of posthuman and transhuman discourses and sees the cyborg as constantly changing. transhumanism and posthumanism tread conceptually contested ground. briefly, transhumanism often takes a linear evolutionary approach to technology, and “envision[s] the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet earth” (bostrom 2005, 26), in line with the dod’s interpretation of cyborg technologies. posthumanism often focuses instead on “a reconceptualization of culture, technology, and history, as well as human beings, from a non-anthropocentric perspective” (rutsky 2007, 108), an approach sometimes referred to as critical posthumanism.   harbisson and ribas are part of a catalan avant-garde art movement. both identify as cyborgs and have had extrasensory technologies implanted into their bodies. ribas has experimented with novel sensory perceptions by implanting a device that vibrates in tandem with earthquakes on earth or the moon, putting her in touch with the frequent rumblings of the planet’s deep interior. harbisson argues he is one of the first legally recognized cyborgs, as his cranially implanted antenna was eventually accepted as a permanent body part (rather than an external device) by the uk government for his passport photo (bryant 2013). harbisson has achromatopsia, a type of colorblindness in which he cannot perceive colors, and instead sees black, white, and shades of grey. the camera-antenna implant transforms the spectrum of light, including infrared and ultraviolet light, into sonic vibrations, effectively allowing him to hear color. he does not use the antenna to “fix” his vision, but to understand color in a new and different way, by creating a synesthetic sense. as he explains, “my aim was never to overcome anything. seeing in greyscale has many advantages. i have better night vision. i memorize shapes more readily, and i’m not easily fooled by camouflages. and black-and-white photocopies are cheaper. i didn’t feel there was a physical problem, and i never wanted to change my sight. i wanted to create a new organ for seeing” (donahue 2017).   harbisson addresses the complex relationship between disability and the cyborg by dismissing the idea that his antenna “corrects” his colorblindness, or that people with disabilities will especially benefit from becoming cyborgs. harbisson does not consider himself a cyborg because his antenna approximates an able-bodied experience (perceiving color), but because he has fundamentally reframed the experience of being human. ribas also described the cyborg as a personal identity; in our interview, she said that there are many ways to connect with technology, but the most important is whether an individual feels that they are a cyborg.   the cyborg foundation hopes to expand the possible range of bodies and senses, subverting technological ideologies of progress, power, and control, and destabilizing normative categorizations of human and nonhuman. harbisson argues that “if you define yourself as transspecies, everything is ‘normal’: seeing in black and white, being blind, or perceiving colours through an antenna. it all becomes part of normality” (pristauz, n.d.). while the cyborg foundation has used the term “transhuman” in the past, they primarily identify as “transspecies” now, as they feel that transhumanism contains an “inherent hierarchy, a kind of superiority” of humans over other species (pristauz, n.d.). the link with animal abilities reflects what cary wolfe calls the intersection between “animal studies and disability studies…in what has recently emerged as a small subfield of its own: authors who claim that their condition has enabled for them a unique understanding of nonhuman animals and how they experience the world” (2010, 128). wolfe cites monty roberts, “the famed ‘horse whisperer,’” who had the same form of colorblindness as harbisson, and used that ability to “read the body language of horses with amazing subtlety and precision” (wolfe 2010, 128). the connection between animal studies and disability studies offers the promise of cross-species connection and insight, but as with snorton’s critique of hybridity and heterotopia, wolfe cautions against reinscribing the hierarchies and limitations of liberal humanism.   harbisson and ribas emphasize that their technological adjustments offer a greater sense of connection and communion with nature and the environment. harbisson feels that his antenna aligns him with insects, and that the ability to perceive a broader spectrum of light (infrared and ultraviolet) makes him “much more connected to the species that sense these colors. because, we now share a sense…not with machines. i think, many people think that becoming a cyborg brings me closer to a machine, but i feel like it makes me much closer to nature and to other animal species” (olonan 2017). when we spoke, ribas underscored that their technological modifications are not about becoming superhuman but are intended to foster different understandings of nature and the planet, and to “create more empathy” with the natural world. harbisson and ribas are critical of anthropocentric ideas based on “humans as the center of the world,” and they “want to remind people that we are not alone in this world, there are many living things, even if you don’t see that they are moving, they are alive. we are not the only living creatures on this earth, even the earth itself moves and evolves and is alive” (ribas 2019).   in contrast to cybernetics and “the translation of the world into a problem of coding” (haraway 1991, 164), the cyborg foundation uses quantitative technologies in the service of art, by creating individual experiences and sensations that can only be shared or understood expressively. harbisson’s and ribas’s sensors offer no clear utility, subverting the assumption that implants and prosthetics contribute to constructing a cybernetic superhuman. they are not interested in artificial intelligence but in what they term “artificial senses…where the stimuli is gathered by the technology but the intelligence is created by the human” (cyborg foundation 2020). the technological apparatus of harbisson’s antenna-organ functions through a computer chip, bluetooth, and a camera, but its internal logic is a light-to-sound scale of harbisson’s own devising, and he is the sole recipient of the output. in interviews and public events, curious reporters regularly ask harbisson and ribas what it is like to be a cyborg, to hear color or to feel the internal movement of the earth. harbisson and ribas often work to translate the affective experience of their modifications for others, but it is necessarily mediated through yet another form of visual or sonic expression. harbisson has created musical compositions based on the colors in a person’s face and transformed popular songs into cascades of color, while ribas interprets earthquakes through dance and performance art.   the cyborg foundation operates in a muddy space adjacent to the logics of investment and capitalism, neither fully outside of technological production nor functionally legible within it. when i asked how they see their work in relation to business ventures and capitalism, ribas expressed deep misgivings about capitalism and technology, and said that although they have given talks and workshops at tech and business conferences, they rarely feel that they belong in those spaces. she said that they are often asked if cyborg technology will create dangerous divisions between rich and poor, but she did not think that critique applied to their version of the cyborg, and that it was of greater concern in the normative or militarized version of the cyborg, in which some individuals might become quite powerful while others are left vulnerable. ribas cited collective and grassroots efforts to build technologies, noting that the people who join the cyborg foundation are “more like teenagers that know how to hack, and they can build things themselves” (ribas 2019). the cyborg foundation is built around the aesthetic of an underground, diy (“do it yourself”), artist collective pursuing cyborg modifications, both developing ideas and prototypes, and even for the surgeries themselves. most medical institutions refuse to perform the procedures, and invasive elective implants are not covered by insurance, meaning they must find doctors (or others) willing to perform the surgeries, usually anonymously, and find means to fund the supplies, procedures, and recovery. the cyborg foundation occupies a privileged sphere in which they can create and implant potentially risky devices, sometimes traveling outside of spain or europe to do so, as well as radically disrupting social norms without fear of retribution.   ultimately, the cyborg foundation may be understood through the lens of “both/and,” both advocating a possible alternative for cyborg futures and fostering uneasy connections with capitalist tech and business circles that might easily reincorporate their technologies or message. their work concretizes certain elements of the cyborg’s often ambiguous politics and draws from posthumanism to resituate humans as part of the larger natural world. but by trying to dismantle normative categorizations of the body, and by blurring the line between visibility and illegibility, they offer a creative example of the cyborg’s “potent fusions” apart from that of the dod.   conclusion: performing cyborg futures the cyborg foundation and the dod are both performing and contesting the cyborg, as well as struggling over public perception and approval for the future of cyborg technologies. the cyborg foundation’s work can be interpreted in its totality as a performance art piece, in which the research, design, implementation, and public presentation of technological devices is an ongoing performance of cyborg identity, one that the artists hope others will pursue as well. performance, and perhaps provocation, may be their primary intention; harbisson’s cranial antenna is immediately notable, and although the earthquakes sensors ribas implanted were not outwardly visible, she performed the experience of earthquakes on stage. as lingel writes, “dazzle camouflage is performative, disrupting expectations of bodily arrangements in order to conceal one’s intentions or movements” (2020, 4). the cyborg foundation negotiates boundaries of visibility and illegibility, performance and obfuscation. harbisson pushed for his cranial antennae to be recognized by the uk government as a permanent body part, but the cyborg foundation also skirts governmental (and medical) oversight.   the element of the cyborg foundation that confuses, rejects, or circumvents conventional cyborg narratives and imagery might be understood as an intervention in calculated illegibility, in choosing when and how to make their work both visible and legible. it is this space of confusion or illegibility that j. bobby noble suggests (in relation to trans embodiment) could create “surprise encounters” that destabilize “supposedly naturalized bodies as socially-produced and socially-reinforced imperatives” (2007, 174). noble argues that this could become “not only one of the sites where this struggle for and against hegemony occurs; but it becomes also the stake to be won or lost in those battles” (2007, 175). the cyborg foundation is undoubtedly privileged in its ability to bend social norms and expectations in this way. yet one might also argue that just as these artists follow in the footsteps of earlier cyborgs, the cyborg foundation could shape a generation of cyborg modifications that intentionally do not fit, and which play with the boundaries between visibility and illegibility.   at the same time, performance-based collectives require performative acts in order to sustain public interest and, potentially, attract funding. although the cyborg foundation operates in an avant-garde art scene, there is no reason to believe that cyborg technologies will remain there. wealthy individuals, corporations, or the dod itself might easily co-opt these cyborg technologies in the future, perhaps even as a direct result of the cyborg foundation’s work in changing public perception or developing early technologies. the dod report recommends investing in media to positively influence public perception of cyborg technologies, but they may also appropriate the performative public work of a group like the cyborg foundation.   the dod’s cyborg soldier 2050 is also a work of speculative media and propaganda, a political vision board for techno-military dominance. as a publicly released document, rather than a classified internal memo, the report outlines what the dod would like to achieve in the next thirty years, as well as what they would like allies and rivals to believe they will achieve. there are no glitches, no technological or organic challenges that cannot be problematized and overcome through a matter of upgrades or coding. the dod embraces a transhuman perspective of linear evolution through increasingly powerful technological interventions, understanding the body as a docile tool towards that goal. the dod positions the human (and, more specifically, the us warfighter) as a superior being who dominates the natural world and seeks uncompromising dominance over geopolitical rivals. other governments are also turning their gaze to human/machine fusions; in december 2020, the french government published their own report on ethical guidelines for augmented soldiers, stating that they do not have immediate plans to develop augmented soldiers, but that they are preparing for the future (guy 2020). identifying alternatives to the militarized cyborg, or the underground exclusivity of the cyborg foundation, seems a fraught but urgent problem; otherwise the matrix of domination is technologically updated, placing “certain humans into a highly sophisticated cyborglike transhumanist existence, while leaving the unaccounted-for ‘other’ behind in their current human form, or worse” (butler 2018, 107; collins 2009, 18).   the dod and the cyborg foundation are cautionary examples against the easy promise of transformative hybridity, since a multitude of bodies or senses do not guard against overarching disciplinary power or pervasive self-regulation. when i asked about her earthquake sensors, ribas said that she felt much more apprehensive having them removed than implanted, in terms of her own identity as a cyborg, for possible negative reactions or censure from her social circle, and for whether the world she had built over the past several years would fade along with the sensation of earthquakes. in a collective of cyborg experimentation, to be without a technological modification could suddenly put her out of place, suggesting that the pressure of conformity, even to nonconformity, is still at play.   with the grim prospect of immense military investment in augmented soldiers, and limited ethical oversight, a project like the cyborg foundation may not be able to offer much. the aspirational and egalitarian rhetoric, and even the technologies themselves, might be easily co-opted by the dod, or by the venture capitalist tech circles of liberal self-improvement with whom the cyborg foundation uncomfortably overlaps. but so too do they offer a small sliver of possibility, that this imperfect cyborg could begin to align with the call for a cyborg politics, for building critical coalitions, alliances, or surprise encounters amidst experiences and sensations that are untranslatable and incommunicable (a synesthetic antenna, a bodily earthquake). as states weaponize, surveil, and control bodies from the inside out, collectives like the cyborg foundation might find new methods for calculated illegibility or informatic opacity, to introduce static into hegemonic communication systems, or recode the militarized control over the body and the planet.   acknowledgments i would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers of catalyst for their insightful and generative comments, as well as the catalyst editorial team. i would also like to thank martha norkunas, ergin bulut, nazlı özkan, and ipek celik rappas for their comments and ideas.   references acheraïou, amar. 2011. questioning hybridity, postcolonialism and globalization. new york: palgrave macmillan. blas, zach. 2018. “informatic opacity.” in posthuman glossary, edited by rosi braidotti and maria hlavajova, 198–99. london: bloomsbury academic. bostrom, nick. 2005. “a history of transhumanist thought.” journal of evolution and technology 14 (1): 1-25. browne, 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"manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s." socialist review 80: 65-180. ———. 1991. simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge. hayles, katherine. 1999. how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. chicago: university of chicago press. kafer, alison. 2013. feminist, queer, crip. bloomington: indiana university press. kline, ronald. 2009. “where are the cyborgs in cybernetics?” social studies of science 39 (3): 331–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312708101046. ———. 2015. the cybernetics moment: or why we call our age the information age. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. kraidy, marwan m. 2005. hybridity, or the cultural logic of globalization. philadelphia: temple university press. ———. 2016. the naked blogger of cairo: creative insurgency in the arab world. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. lee, melissa m., and nan zhang. 2017. “legibility and the informational foundations of state capacity.” the journal of politics 79 (1): 118–32. https://doi.org/10.1086/688053. lingel, jessica. 2020. “dazzle camouflage as queer counter conduct.” european journal of cultural studies, february, 136754942090280. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420902805. masters, cristina. 2005. “bodies of technology: cyborg soldiers and militarized masculinities.” international feminist journal of politics 7 (1): 112–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461674042000324718. mitchell, david t., and sharon l. snyder. 2015. the biopolitics of disability: neoliberalism, ablenationalism, and peripheral embodiment. ann arbor: university of michigan press. noble, j. bobby. 2007. “refusing to make sense: mapping the in-coherences of ‘trans.’” journal of lesbian studies 11 (1–2): 167–75. https://doi.org/10.1300/j155v11n01_13. olonan, zhill. 2017. “episode 40: the world’s first cyborg ft. neil harbisson.” hvmn podcast. september 6, 2017. https://hvmn.com/podcast/episode-40-the-worlds-first-cyborg-ft-neil-harbisson. phelan, peggy. 1993. unmarked: the politics of performance. new york: routledge. pieterse, jan nederveen. 2001. “hybridity, so what?” theory, culture & society 18 (2–3): 219–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327640101800211. pristauz, julius. n.d. “neil harbisson – the reality of a cyborg.” metal magazine. accessed march 6, 2019. https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/interview/neil-harbisson-the-reality-of-a-cyborg. puar, jasbir k. 2017. the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. durham, nc: duke university press. ribas, moon. interview with author (skype). december 2019. rutsky, r.l. 2007. “mutation, history, and fantasy in the posthuman.” subject matters: a journal of communication and the self 3 (2): 101–12. https://www.academia.edu/3744496/mutation_history_and_fantasy_in_the_posthuman. shirinian, tamar. 2018. “queer life-worlds in postsocialist armenia: alternativ space and the possibilities of in/visibility.” qed: a journal in glbtq worldmaking 5 (1): 1–23. http://doi.org/10.14321/qed.5.1.0001. siebers, tobin. 2004. “disability as masquerade.” literature and medicine 23 (1): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2004.0010. ———. 2008. disability theory. ann arbor: university of michigan press. snorton, c. riley. 2016. “gender trouble in triton.” in no tea, no shade: new writings in black queer studies, edited by e. patrick johnson, 83–94. durham, nc: duke university press. stella, francesca. 2012. “the politics of in/visibility: carving out queer space in ul’yanovsk.” europe-asia studies 64 (10): 1822–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2012.676236. suchman, lucy a. 2007. human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions. 2nd ed. cambridge: cambridge university press. terry, jennifer. 2017. attachments to war: biomedical logics and violence in twenty-first-century america. durham, nc: duke university press. weise, jillian. 2018. “common cyborg.” granta (blog). september 24, 2018. https://granta.com/common-cyborg/. wolfe, cary. 2010. what is posthumanism? minneapolis: university of minnesota press. young, robert. 1995. colonial desire: hybridity in theory, culture, and race. new york: routledge.     author bio jasmine erdener is an assistant professor in the media and visual arts department at koç university in istanbul, turkey. microsoft word okuneopen ethnographyfinal.docx okune, angela. (2020). open ethnographic archiving as feminist, decolonizing practice. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), page 1–24. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © angela okune, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license open ethnographic archiving as feminist, decolonizing practice angela okune university of california, irvine aokune@uci.edu abstract dubbed silicon savannah, nairobi has become a hot spot of tech development that promises to “save africa.” qualitative research—carried out by a tangle of private, academic, and non-profit organizations—is part of the work, promising to reveal how people in kenya are building and benefiting from a dazzling array of digital products. amidst the enthusiasm, longstanding problems with ways in which research data in nairobi is conceived, collected, and shared are easily glossed over. this article advances thinking about the politics of qualitative data, unraveling normative concepts like ethics and transparency by both examining existing data practices and modeling alternatives. i describe the sociotechnical infrastructure underlying the ethnographic project, detailing tactics for deploying an instance of open source software—the platform for experimental, collaborative ethnography (pece)—to draw research interlocutors into collaborative effort to understand and build decolonized qualitative data infrastructures. through such processes i learned that collaborating on data not only refreshes the social contract of qualitative work; it can also enhance its robustness and validity. i advise scholars to better document our own knowing practices in order to attend to the inevitability of margins created through all data practices, including our own. computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 2 introduction “i recognize your voice,” i was told at an academic conference in 2017. i had arrived at the budget accommodations organized for graduate students and those from the global south and placed in a dorm with five other women whom i had never met before. it turns out that one of the women studied tech entrepreneurship in kenya. she recognized my voice because she was finishing the transcription of an interview that her primary investigator had conducted with me when i was still working at nairobi’s flagship technology co-working space, the ihub. “i have been listening to your voice for hours,” she explained. when i did that interview in 2015, i was preparing to move to california to begin graduate school and had a growing interest in why particular places and people are heavily studied. i had asked for a copy of the transcript and audio recording from the interview but never received it. this time when i met the project representative, i did not even bother to ask. but she mentioned it of her own accord: “i will send you a copy of the transcript,” she promised the morning she left. nearly two years later, i still haven’t received anything. this recounting is not an accusation directed at a particular research group or individual, but serves to question why research data sharing practices in the social sciences are still such an afterthought. why are they contingent on a chance encounter at a conference or reliant on a well-intentioned individual taking personal time out of her already overloaded and underpaid work schedule? what does this reveal about the values embedded in our current systems of research practice and how might we study and better address these data paradigms?1 my research project was born out of first-hand experience in kenya as part of a group that felt “over-researched.”2 during four years of managing, designing, and conducting research as part of nairobi’s first technology innovation center, the community increasingly felt burdened by the gaze of various global interests. a self-described “open space for technologists, investors, tech companies and hackers in nairobi” (ihub, 2011), the ihub saw itself as first and foremost serving a community of kenyan entrepreneurs. with the launch of the research department in 2011 and other departments in subsequent years (okune et al., 2018), the scope of who comprised the “community” expanded to include international development funders, non-governmental organizations, foreign researchers and their universities, media houses, and private kenyan and multinational companies interested in learning more about the growth of technology startups in kenya. as one of the first physical spaces on the continent for african techies and innovators to meet, ihub established itself as a requisite stop for those interested in technology in the region (e.g., cnn, 2012). while ihub’s fame and reputation as computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 3 the nexus of african technology entrepreneurship was crucial for its material success, the everyday experience of being part of the regular tour groups seeking to observe the “africa rising” narrative (beresford, 2016; nothias, 2014) was a drain on both kenyan entrepreneurs working out of the space as well as staff. we felt like our time was often wasted by media, researchers, government, and non-profit representatives all interested in learning about what made the heart of “silicon savannah” tick.3 everyone asked similar questions: “how has innovation in nairobi changed over time? what kinds of innovations have emerged from the ihub?” we grew tired of giving the same responses.4 the inquirers would of course inevitably want to also talk to ihub entrepreneurs, but i grew wary of making those introductions myself because i knew the entrepreneurs also felt research fatigue. “you can find their contacts easily online and reach out to them directly,” i suggested, knowing full well that those emails would never be answered. but i wasn’t willing to use my own social capital to coax an entrepreneur to take an interview with an academic i didn’t know. figure 1. one example of the many emails i and my ihub colleagues received requesting research or media interviews. we tried to develop alternative ways to communicate what everyone seemed to want to know: sending people to news articles that had already been written on us; research papers that we had written about our work and the entrepreneurs in our community; creating videos and multimedia to watch. but because of the privileging of first-hand accounts and “original” research, we were told each person would have to come and ask the questions themselves. “because an economist has a different perspective and set of questions than a political scientist,” i was told when i questioned why a researcher could not just use outputs that someone else had produced. but the questions they all asked did not feel significantly different to me. figure 1 is an example of the kinds of email interview requests that i and ihub colleagues frequently received. after taking more than two hours with this european master’s student, i explicitly asked him to “please share the transcript from our interview” so i could send it along to future research requests i would inevitably receive. i never received it; nor did i ever hear computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 4 back about any findings or eventual resulting outputs, despite his original stated promises. each day was busy at the ihub; the bright space was always abuzz with twentysomethings tapping away at their computers or energetically pitching their next idea to a friend over the noise of the barista preparing a steaming cup of house coffee. the ihub research team was both a part of and apart from the technologists that were developing their code bases and building their businesses. we sought to conduct research that they would consider helpful, but our research agenda was more often directed by the interests of those who were funding our work. on any given day, an ihub research team member might attend a breakfast meeting hosted by the kenyan information communication technology ministry; be interviewed by a postdoctoral student from oxford university; and then dash to a nearby informal settlement like kawangware to interview cyber cafe users for some donor-funded research project. slipping from being a researcher to a research subject on such a regular basis began to engender a reflective capacity within our team. interacting with several non-profit groups working on technology for development in kibera, one of the largest informal settlements on the continent, i observed the same phenomenon of feeling “over-researched” also existed there. these were groups working just across the street from our offices on ngong road that were pitstops on the same “tour” that ihub was also part of. except that these groups—working in environments of extreme poverty with mobile tech towards community empowerment—embodied the flip side of the coin, “africa as hopeless poverty.” much of the literature in medical anthropology, postcolonial science studies, and critical development studies frames research ethics in the global south using well-worn caricatures of the white, northern, wealthy researchers, and the nonwhite, poor, southern “over-researched.” studying the problem of overresearched communities in the shatila palestinian refugee camp, sukarieh and tannock (2012) note that while over-research can arise anywhere, it has been most prevalent in communities characterized by three key features: “communities that are poor, low income, indigenous, minority or otherwise marginalised; communities that have experienced some form of crisis…and communities that are accessible to outside researchers, in particular, by being located in close geographical proximity to research centres and universities” (p. 496). while these indeed appear to be some of the factors that mark idealized research subjects, i also ask, what are the implications for research practices when relatively computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 5 privileged techies like those at ihub also feel over-researched? moving away from simple binaries like “poor africans” and “rich whites” that often arise in discussions about ethical research in global souths5 helps to focus attention on how caring for, about, and through data becomes a recursive practice that takes knowledge production itself as constituted by extraction and exploitation, regardless of who occupies the positions. it is important to look at the ways in which norms and standards of research worlds, such as collecting informed consent or sharing/not sharing research results, are co-constituted by positions such as race and indigeneity and have come to exist in the wake of histories of dispossession, extraction, and “development.”6 in this paper, i seek to refresh how we think about the politics of qualitative data, describing open ethnographic archiving as a feminist, decolonizing practice. research data politics instead of framing open ethnographic data around the concept of transparency, i align with longstanding work by indigenous and feminist scholars who have been concerned with the enacting of more just and equitable approaches to research and data. sociologist victoria reyes (2017) has developed a model of ethnographic data transparency for understanding the different ways in which ethnographies can be transparent. she defines transparency as being precise about what we are counting as data or information and how and over what period of time we collected them. she argues that if research relies on data for the accumulation of knowledge, then making ethnographic data more transparent should be of scholarly concern. while i share many of the same concerns as reyes, i avoid the term “transparency” first because of its use historically in the kenyan information communication technologies sector. as lisa poggiali (2016) has pointed out, since the early 1990s, when transparency emerged as a major discourse of governance in kenya, the term has been leveraged by aid donors, kenyan ngos, and information and communication technologies for development (ict4d) initiatives. more recently, transparency has been a key justification for open data advocates pushing for improved access to private and government datasets. second, there is a growing paradigm of “transparency” in some of the social sciences, a pushing for greater publication and standardization of data in order to improve the claim-making of social scientists and heighten the perceived rigor of their evidence and integrity of the work. i avoid the term “transparency” here to distance this project from such discourse that promotes openness as a means towards greater “reproducibility” in social science and a way to reclaim scientific rigor and (re)consolidate its power. instead, i turn to work by indigenous communities such as the san7 groups of computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 6 southern africa and north american and australian aborigine communities who have devised various ways to push back against exploitative research practices including the development of indigenous research ethics codes and guidelines,8 community-researcher contracts (traynor & foster, 2017), and community peer review (liboiron et al., 2018), among other things. these guidelines may offer important lessons for understanding how “indigenous data sovereignty” (kukutai et al., 2016; lovett et al., 2019) could translate for communities not necessarily organized around a frame of indigeneity. these literatures also highlight the tensions between desires for repatriation of data (in digital form) to the communities from which they originate and worries that full access of digitized community data to diverse online publics may not in fact always be in the communities’ interests (christen, 2011). moving away from a quest for purity, in this paper i seek to unravel, rather than rely on, normative concepts such as ethics and transparency by documenting my own knowing practices and methods, foregrounding collaboration as situated, contingent, and ambivalent, yet showing how it operates as a stabilizing and important force in knowledge production. feminist ethnographer kamala visweswaran calls for anthropologists to conduct more home-work or “anthropology in reverse,” which she describes as “speak[ing] from the place one is located to specify our sites of enunciation as home” (1994, p. 104). this article is an attempt to reflect on how i have undertaken my project in order to partially address some of the same critiques of research practices that i am studying. nairobi’s research landscape there are at least two distinct veins through which qualitative research has become mainstreamed in contemporary nairobi, although today the strands are increasingly interwoven. qualitative work was established as a component of colonial development interventions that scholars such as helen tilley (2011) have described in detail. as critiques of big development became widespread in the 1980s and 1990s, donors and agencies turned to qualitative work as an important mechanism to understand why development subjects did what they did and why changes occurred on the ground, usually to their surprise. this type of qualitative work is nearly always combined in some way with other methods such as surveys (biruk, 2018) or randomized controlled trials (de souza leão & eyal, 2019; rayzberg, 2019). another notable strand of qualitative work emerged from companies developing products for african consumers to better understand their customers. in 2010 kenya was put on the international map as an example of african-driven computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 7 innovation after the incredible uptake of m-pesa, a mobile banking platform actively used by almost half the population in kenya to send and receive digital money. since the rise of m-pesa, and in concert with efforts by the government and local technology sector to develop kenya into “silicon savannah,” nairobi has seen a spike in the establishment of regional headquarters for multinational technology companies like ibm research, google, and microsoft. while this work often maintains development and humanitarian rhetoric about how digital technologies will help africans, this user-driven strand of work also often critiques and distances itself from donor money, arguing that business relations are more egalitarian and less paternalistic than aid. this strand of qualitative work has grown exponentially due to investments of tech capital into the city and the introduction and continuing popularization of user experience research.9 this mode of inquiry also holds ties to market research performed by corporate firms working for the likes of multinationals such as coca-cola and unilever. the processes of producing qualitative research in nairobi both under colonialism and now under postcolonial “silicon savannah” have impacted certain city residents who feel over-researched: “after all this research, what are the findings like, what are the results, how is it going to help us?” they’ve asked me. in spite of attempts to use ethnographic work to improve the relevance and grounded nature of field research methodologies and approaches, the data question thus still lingers. where is all of the data being stored? how is it managed and who has access? what guidelines, protocols, and review and publishing processes accompany the data? given kenya’s longstanding importance as a site of scientific research and the heavy density and saturation of research work, it is a particularly important place from which to begin to think about what sharing data across individuals, organizations, disciplines, and other boundaries might look like. i conducted fieldwork from january to december 2019 focused on commercial, non-profit, and academic research organizations in nairobi and investigating what counts as ethical research for researchers producing data about communities and how that has shifted in the recent past. given the project was born out of an interest in the effects and affects of research (hyper)-saturation, i was especially interested in capturing a horizontal slice of this work in research-busy (neal et al., 2016) nairobi. thus, my ethnographic sites include three research organizations in the city, with a keen focus on day-to-day data practices. located next to kibera, one of the largest informal settlements on the continent, the z10 research offices are split across two buildings. in the older building, lab computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 8 staff work with recruited kenyan research subjects, who mostly come from informal settlements like kibera. subjects are given research prompts on a mobile phone or tablet, which are then aggregated to generate insights into their preferences and behaviors. in the other building commonly referred to as the headquarters, over fifty project staff and directors analyze and write-up insights based on the lab data and manage client/partner/funder relations. qualitative insights have not been a central part of the organization’s work until this past year (2019) when an internal qualitative lab was launched to better contextualize and ground the organization’s quantitative experiments. a fifteen-minute walk down ngong road leads me to the much smaller team x, who recently upgraded to a new office on the thirteenth-floor penthouse that overlooks much of nairobi. about six full-time kenyan staff make up the x team, and their research work is often done in tandem with, if not secondarily to, policy and advocacy work. the x managing director is a long-time advocate of open data in kenya and has well-established networks and connections amongst governments, donors, and grassroots organizations abroad and in kenya. it takes about thirty minutes to move from x research office to w research office by pikipiki or motorbike, my preferred means of transport in a city notorious for its traffic congestion. the w research company, although renamed in mid-2017 after being integrated into a multinational consulting group, has been based in nairobi for over twenty years. many of the kenyan staff have been working there for over ten years and the european management duo have been based in nairobi for over a decade with established roots and kinship ties to the region. despite different dynamics, staff across all teams are often stretched thin with multiple projects and a constant sense of not having enough time. given that these organizations are largely fueled by donor and client projects, the three organizations depend on a steady flow of incoming projects. staff are thus torn between a constant need to successfully deliver on existing projects while also generating leads and proposals for future projects. juggling team capacity means that people are often moved on and off projects. certain individuals on the teams travel around the globe frequently (although not all staff travel equally). and while the different groups have attempted to develop processes to share information across their internal teams, there remains siloed knowledge, information, and data within each of these research organizations. computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 9 infrastructuring collaborative ethnography one of the first things that i quickly learned during fieldwork was that it was early to be fostering conversations about sharing data across organizations because even within the organizations, they were not necessarily sharing data with team members. this was surprisingly true of both the well-resourced multinational company as well as the small startup. despite the overall lack of established data sharing infrastructure, i nonetheless found qualitative research data11 to be widely perceived as a legitimate object of concern shared by individuals and organizations working at various nodes within the nairobi research landscape. most if not all of the researchers—from short-term field officers to upper-level management—were already familiar with critiques about certain populations in kenya feeling over-researched. all of the organizations that i ended up working with were keen to understand how, if at all, research data infrastructure could be established to better address this critique. leveraging this shared interest, i carved out a field where epistemic partners concerned about qualitative research data and its potential for sharing—across diverse interests, organizational structures, and backgrounds—have begun to dialogue. sarah pink argues that collaboration is “precisely about the relationality between persons and things; it is about process, agency, shared knowing, making and practice” (2014, p. 48). from this definition, collaboration then follows not as something to be achieved as a thing in itself but rather as “an emergent quality of the relationships within the encounters that constitute the mixed temporalities of the ongoing event of ethnographic research” (pink, 2018, p. 206). such collaborative relations reconfigure the ethnographer’s role to include working with people to make things while also seeking to document and understand the structures and processes at play. tactics aware of the widespread lack of qualitative data archiving and sharing infrastructure in nairobi research organizations, i was quickly drawn to the platform for experimental, collaborative ethnography (pece) when i first learned about it.12 i was particularly impressed by the explicit epistemological values embedded in its design.13 in comparison to most qualitative data software, which are built on a coding paradigm, the platform is built through poststructuralist theorizing (khandekar et al., in press). using pece enabled me to conduct analysis at varying scales and with multiple layers of resolution. thus, as my knowledge of pece and its possibilities grew, i decided to develop my own instance of pece, which i have called “research data share” (rds) (see figure 2 for a sense of how computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 10 rds looks). figure 2. landing page of research data share (rds) platform (www.researchdatashare.org) i conceptualized the development of the rds qualitative data archive under three distinct rationales. first, i saw it as an elicitation device and grounds for collaborative discussion and engagement, imagining that the deliberations about the archive that i would have with those in the field would be a basis for my learning. second, it was an attempt to produce something of value to informants and respond to the ethical questions that i started with. at the very least, i could give a transcript and/or audio recording from the research encounter back to my interlocutor. third, i anticipated that key questions would emerge through my own process of building and studying that would be valuable. over the course of the research, i found research data provided scaffolding upon which i could investigate the politics of knowledge production in africa at its many scales. by intentionally forming an ethnographic data platform to both study and use myself, i reconfigured my relationship with the topic as well as my relationship with interlocutors, enacting a new form of collaborative ethnography that took my own complicity in the structures of knowledge as a starting point for theorizing how researchers might better navigate, organize, and remix existing collections of data. focusing on an object—data—that resulted from but was not of the researcher/researched relationship opened up discussions beyond critique and set in motion a new set of social relations to study. it also situated me squarely as a participant in the production of the very things i was studying.14 computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 11 as part of preparing myself for grappling with data sharing issues in the field, i developed textual devices i thought might be necessary for establishing some of the social infrastructure of data sharing. inspired by the work of max liboiron and collaborators (2018), i developed two draft working documents—a data circulation form15 (okune, 2019b) and a collaboration agreement16 (okune, 2019a)—to reflect my current thinking and also with which to continue to think.17 the intention behind the forms was not to create yet another moral procedure in a research environment already steeped in biomedical regimes of governing ethics. rather, i imagined the draft protocols to act as shared objects of attention to focus on with interlocutors and through which to discuss expectations of each other. i saw these devices as part of what rosa castillo (pels et al., 2018) has called a responsive review process where careful discussion of actual and potential ethical challenges and possible ways of dealing with them take place throughout the research. after sharing the collaboration agreement (okune, 2019a) with the three research groups within the first few months of fieldwork (january through march 2019), i was given access to a variety of qualitative data,18 especially digital transcripts of one-on-one interviews and group discussions; photographs; coded summaries of data; final reports; and interview guides. of this data, i selected one sample from each of the three organizations, anonymized the text (if it was not already), and uploaded it to the rds platform with any available context as meta-data.19 i then used this data sample as an elicitation device for initial interviews (okune, 2019c) and found the exercise helpful to ground what can often end up as an abstract conversation about morals and ethics. figure 3 shows the organizational data interview guide which appears as open data on the rds site. in addition to these types of organizational artifacts, i also use the rds platform to upload descriptive event or meeting notes as well as field notes. utilizing the platform’s three privacy settings, i have private (only accessible to myself), group (accessible to a delimited group of users), and public (fully accessible to anyone on the web) artifacts and essays now up on the platform. global, interdisciplinary data sharing is a complex cultural system that assembles many actors, institutions, technologies, and frameworks. it is a system animated by a diverse set of forces operating at many different locations and across many different scales. to unpack such a system means learning how to simultaneously observe the multiple forces acting upon and interacting with researchers and the data they produce (k. fortun, 2009). pece leverages a shared set of analytic computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 12 questions called “structured analytics” to act as focusing devices that order what the ethnographer pays attention to. building off of a set of structured analytics specifically looking at data sharing developed by poirier and costello-kuehn (2019), i use these layers to understand research data through multiple frames. kim fortun (2009) has described how, at its best, this kind of scale provides a way to see many types of action in motion at once, evoking a sense of the dynamism of the system at hand rather than locking it down and stabilizing it. figure 3. a screenshot of the org data interview guide in rds. this is also an example of a pdf artifact. source: okune (2019c) computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 13 figure 4. this photo artifact in rds is of an image that was sent to me by the managing director at one of the research organizations. the context for how i came to have the artifact is part of the meta-data contextualizing the artifact. source: https://www.researchdatashare.org/content/news-ktda-pay-woman-sh15m-photo figure 5 from the rds platform illustrates how such structured analytics also provide the light structuring necessary for interdisciplinary collaborators to dialogue and generate new insights together. at a capstone event i co-organized at the end of my fieldwork (okune, 2019e), i invited four researchers of diverse backgrounds to also take field notes of the event. the next day, we held a debrief session for two hours where we discussed what we observed and then answered a set of structured analytic questions (okune & fortun, 2019). i am now in the process of transcribing, cleaning, and publishing ethnographic fieldwork data on rds, care-fully. since much of the data will become public, it is not enough to transcribe so that i can remember what happened. i share a concern with some interlocutors that open ethnographic data has a risk of losing contextual depth, potentially leading to misapplication or misunderstanding. given that i am not the only intended audience, i am working through the data process care-fully20 and as i do, realizing that seemingly mundane data work holds important analytic moments. for example, figure 6 is an annotation i made on one of the consent forms i recently uploaded, which describes the mismatch between a research participant’s stated wishes and the way they completed their consent form. computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 14 figure 5. this screenshot illustrates how collaborative annotations can work with three different people responding to a shared question. the analytic question set can be found here: https://www.researchdatashare.org/structured-analytics-questions-set/analytics-acrossscales-and-systems-qualitative-data-capacity as i have been uploading artifacts to rds, i have emailed the links to interlocutors and research collaborators, sharing outputs with them and inviting them to also analyze the artifacts using the set of analytic questions developed (which are continuously being amended and added to). figure 7 is an example of an annotation that an interlocutor inputted into rds after i shared a link to the research transcript with them, illustrating the potential of a platform like rds to facilitate research participants to “speak back” to the researcher and provide their own interpretation of the data. computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 15 figure 6. a screenshot of an annotation on one of the consent forms. find the full pece essay here: https://www.researchdatashare.org/content/okune-2019-fieldwork-consent-forms. thus, even as i transition back to “home-work” in california, my “field-work” is not over. as interlocutors send me their own interpretations and we continue to keep in touch, these interactions further inform and become part of my ongoing research. the benefit of having this on a publicly accessible data platform like rds rather than in private email exchange is that i can cite the insights produced by the individual and explicitly acknowledge their expertise, time, labor, and authorship. doing this collaborative analysis on a public site, looking at the same source material together from different perspectives, shifts the figure of the research participant from a quoted figure (at best), to an analytic actor and authorial voice in their own right (with ongoing ability for them to edit and amend thoughts over time if so desired). computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 16 figure 7. this is an annotation that an interlocutor uploaded to rds based on a transcript on the platform. nonetheless, questions raised as part of the writing culture turn (behar & gordon, 1995; clifford & marcus, 1986) of who is able—based on material, social, educational, technical constraints—to contribute and hold an authorial voice still remain. as scholars of science and technology well know, technical platforms like rds can be as exclusionary as they can be inclusionary. i am emailing the transcript artifacts out to interlocutors, but there are interlocutors who have no email addresses, some for whom reading a text-heavy document online that requires an internet connection is not easily possible, and others for whom annotating such an artifact is uncomfortable and unnerving. i am not advocating that all ethnographic data should always be shared; nor am i prescribing that platforms like rds should be taken up across the board as the best or only way to share ethnographic data. my point, rather, is to unravel normative concepts such as ethical open data and instead call for better documentation of our own knowing practices and methods. i align with scholars like luis felipe murillo (2018) and eli elinoff (2017) who have asked us to collectively imagine and begin to practice the creation of an ethnographic data commons. to do so requires close attention to the inevitability of margins created through all data practices, including our own. instead of fixed targets, clear criteria to be achieved, or computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 17 universal data platforms, there is need for cultivating expertise in listening and watching for the particularities of data in context. the tactics used should be nuanced and ever changing. if decolonized, transnational infrastructures that unsettle racialized hierarchies of knowledge are to be established, rather than ignoring the margins created by our data practices, we need to practice attending to them care-fully.21 data work is a time-intensive process—tedious, undervalued work that requires the development of a kind of expertise often skipped in qualitative research classes and missing from commonly required coursework. rarely is such data work framed as co-constitutive of research ethics. i encourage practices of ethical care for our data to be foregrounded and cultivated. set aside sufficient time to think seriously about how you intend to care for your project data: • what kinds of data will you collect? • what organization built the data platform that you plan to use and how is their data ideology reflected in the technical functionalities of the platform?22 • where will the data (physically) sit? (e.g. what kind of entity owns the server? what country is the server in? under what legal jurisdiction does the server fall under?) • who will have access to what data? • what meta-data23 will be needed? • how will you decide the ontological categories that are relevant? with whom and when? • what activities need to be built into fieldwork in order to have datasets that make sense not only for your individual project but also for those that you conduct research with? • (how) would your interlocutors like to use the data? • should you produce and package the data so that it can also meet their needs? why/why not? • what are the costs associated (time and money) with the data practices envisioned and how will you build those in? • what skills will you need to do this work? how/when will you obtain the necessary training? • will you need to bring others on board in your field site to help specifically on data? • are there others outside of your field site that you need to consult with? validity redoubled, collaboration by design my project follows joan scott’s call “to take as [my] project not the reproduction computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 18 and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience, but the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself” (1991, p. 797). a key aspect of analyzing such production of knowledge involves recognizing the multiple actors involved in its creation beyond the individual researcher herself. research collaboration has been a keyword—even a buzzword (cornwall, 2007) – that, despite problematic uses and warranted critique, nonetheless continues to be indispensable. luke lassiter (2005) has described longstanding models of collaborative research and argued that the disparity between the academy and communities in which we work could be narrowed further through collaborative ethnographic practice and writing. questions of reciprocity and benefit sharing from research continue to worry many analysts, especially those working in contexts with stark economic inequalities (aellah et al., 2016; jentsch & pilley, 2003) where research collaboration is therefore often pursued primarily for its ethical value. in this section, i advance that collaborating on research data not only holds ethical value but also epistemological value. the previous section detailed the experimental tactics and data infrastructure established for my project. these included installing my own instance of the platform for experimental, collaborative ethnography; developing textual devices such as a collaboration agreement and data circulation form; reviewing and archiving existing data held by research groups in nairobi, which were in turn used as an elicitation device to produce new data; and co-hosting a public event in one of the oldest libraries in nairobi on the politics and infrastructures of research. the proceedings of the event, which i will describe in more detail in the next section, were not only archived on the rds ethnographic archive, they were also analyzed and publicly annotated with interlocutors (see figure 5). through these processes, i learned that collaborating on data not only refreshes the social contract of qualitative work, it can also enhance the robustness and validity of the research data. for example, after emailing a non-kenyan anthropologist i met in nairobi a link to a public data artifact from my research, i received the following response: i went through the transcript and i really find it fascinating how respondents link research with development. it took me several hardon collisions with scholars who work in political sciences, agricultural sciences and similar disciplines to realize how much this causality is assumed even by scholars themselves. being raised in a postmodern science, such blatantly modernist assumptions were like a shock to me. that being said, i could not find much of it in my own interviews which were mainly done with men who mostly linked their participation with [redacted org name] with a concept of "work" or almost a contractual situation where they participate in order for computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 19 [redacted org name] to develop the community as such (email correspondence, february 20, 2020).24 this example helps illustrate how sharing ethnographic data can increase our understanding of complexity in a given site. since his own interviews were mainly done with men “who mostly linked their participation with.. a concept of ‘work,’” looking at my data from an all-women group discussion offered a different starting point, which he may not have had access to otherwise and which seems to have led him to think about the issue in a different way. equally important, adding his comments to the data via an annotation allows others (including myself) to also build off of his perspective. when i shared this annotation back to him, he responded that it is probably very common for people being researched to assume that it is part of a developing or modernization process, so perhaps it is a bit of a stretch to say that the additional interview data helped reveal that. what they [the transcript/conversation] did, however, was to remind me of the importance [of] how such demands are made and how they are framed politically, i.e. are they framed as unfulfilled collective rights or as offers delivered to individuals. i find it fascinating to start thinking through how research as delivering a neoliberal service to consumers clashes with research as advancing and experimenting with collective entities. (email correspondence, february 21, 2020) i added to the public annotation based on his second email response to clarify his initial statement.25 this dialogue highlights an additional strength of open ethnographic archives. beyond just the data, it is the opening enabled by the sharing of annotations and data back and forth. in this case, by sharing an annotation to ask, "is this what you meant?," the earlier statement could be further nuanced and qualified. again here, through such ongoing processes, ethnography is made more robust, increasing not only its ethical validity (by increasing researcher accountability and representations of those we engage with), but also strengthening its research validity. the analytic structure that undergirds the collaborative analysis of research data in rds further highlights this double validity of data robustness and research ethics. griffin and hayler (2018) note that collaborators within an endeavor can become marginalized through the denigration of certain kinds of expertise, since “power structures both within and beyond the immediate interactions can lead to the work of one or more collaborators being reduced or going uncredited, and to the detriment of their institutional and subject standing.”26 this echoes sentiments expressed by kenyan and non-kenyan researchers working in nairobi computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 20 who shared stories of having their refined arguments taken up and used by supervisors and peer reviewers. many of these individuals expressed worry that an open space for data sharing would therefore only increase potential for such harmful practices. the analytic structure attempts to address this potential for marginality produced in collaborative research by establishing a public mechanism for collaborators to chime in directly with their thoughts. the structure also allows for insights produced by the individual to be explicitly credited, validating their expertise, time, labor, and authoritative voice. this can be important for researchers and non-researchers alike. in a discussion with researchers/research subjects who reside in kibera, they mentioned, “you know, it's also important it reaches a level for us as researchers, in kibera, or leaders, where we would prefer that some documents are quoted with us. you know, because it's professional, it's information based. and as a leader, if a document for example, raises about the level of sanitation, the level of governance is quoted on your name, in kibra it gives you credibility. you know, on your leadership. [others make sounds that show agreement]” (kpkmu09 1:03 october 29, 2018).27 scholars are increasingly realizing that for data sharing to be useful, it cannot be thought of as simply depositing decontextualized results to tick a transparency box (pisani et al., 2016). rather, data sharing should be treated as an integral part of every stage of the research cycle and part of what castillo (pels et al., 2018) has articulated as ongoing development of a researcher’s capacity for continuous reflection on research ethics throughout the life of a research project. the reasons that researchers do not share data are becoming better understood (borgman, 2012; tenopir et al., 2011). there is a lack of training (pels et al., 2018) and the labor required of the individual researcher to enable reuse and sharing is significant (borgman, 2012) and still not yet acknowledged and rewarded by traditional academic structures. many are worried about having their ideas and data stolen by others. i have been warned by various scholars and administrators that attempting to put in place the structures to enable data sharing as part of my project is additional labor, effort, and financial burden. many have questioned why i am doing it. in this piece, i have sought to share the experiences that lead to my deep-seated desire for attempting fieldwork data practices differently.28 i continue to consider ways in which information could be recursively doubled back into communities and allowed to be reintegrated and reused. for me, that importantly has begun to circle around the question of how we set up, organize, and manage the research data that we collect. computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 21 archival fever in/with/for kenya “i was proud to be a kenyan today,” one of the panelists confided to me as we munched on the marinated chicken and soft chapati roll provided for lunch. “oh interesting, why?” i probed, curious how the day-long workshop on research data archiving that i had organized tied into her sense of national pride. “because kenyans are doing good things. it can feel really alone when you are abroad there. there are a lot of deficit narratives. but to hear all the interesting things that people are doing here makes me feel part of a community.” she smiled, her maasai beaded headpiece jingling slightly as she took a big sip of fresh mango juice. “yes, i never would have considered myself a ‘data’ person, but coming together with all of these people to think about how we need to decolonize our knowledge and infrastructures has connected me with interesting people doing really great things here in our own nairobi,” another panelist chimed in. the geopolitics of knowledge production have often been reduced to questions of national or racial representation alone. while not to be dismissed, such limited articulations of the problem risk reproducing the oversimplified fetishes and categories themselves. like the difficulty of categorizing the “over-researched,” nairobi researchers also do not fit into neat categories and include a young tattooed kikuyu woman studying for her cpa exams and translating research surveys into swahili at night as a part-time hustle as well as a white french man married to a luhya woman who is overextended in his role as the go-between for a decentralized management team in chicago, london, tokyo, and san francisco, and the local kenyan research team. beltran’s (2020) contribution to this special issue describes how mexican female hackathon participants consistently shuttle between conflicting markers of class, nation, ethnicity, and race constructed across the us/mexico border. he points out that these markers intersect across a terrain of transnational labor that, despite valuing technical expertise, differentially recognizes and rewards such expertise. similarly, the diverse researchers i studied are highly attuned to the multiple layers of local and global politics that structure their contributions to knowledge production. most recognize their positions within transnational research assemblages and sense that existing structures marginalize them and their contributions. building an ethnographic archive in/with/for kenya then is not necessarily about enabling kenyans to enter global conversations or showcasing their work so it becomes internationally recognized. it is as much about connecting “already global local”29 players with each other in nairobi to spur a collective imagining about what an ethnographic archive for kenya’s intellectual computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 22 workers could be. open data emerged about ten years ago as a rough point of consensus for action among pro-democracy practitioners, internet entrepreneurs, open source advocates, civic technology developers, and open knowledge campaigners (davies et al., 2019). in 2011, the kenyan open data portal was launched, making it only the second of its kind in africa. while the open data label has shifted in its application around the world to genomic data, land registers, and parliamentary voting data, the concept of “open data” still largely refers to numerical data held by governments, ngos, and private sector. in comparison, conversations about ethnographic archives have largely remained amongst libraries, archives, museums and their patrons (silverman et al., 1992). as part of my work, i have sought to break up some of the established discourse that has heavily focused on technical specifications, business models, and standards. on november 12, 2019, i and a team of volunteers and friends hosted an event titled “archiving kenya’s past and futures” at mcmillan library in nairobi’s central business district. the event brought together fifty researchers, archival specialists, open data technologists, and government representatives to think about the intersection between open data technologies, digital humanities, and research data practices in kenya. figure 8 presents a photo artifact from the event and full proceedings including video footage, transcripts of all panels, and all distributed materials are available on rds.30 the aim of bringing such a diverse group together was, as emily yates-doerr (2019) has described, to foster a space of exchange and learning where collaborators come from places of difference and practice “careful equivocation” (yates-doerr, 2019) to unsettle the binaries often drawn between one object, category, or term and another. facilitating development of such connections across difference and emergent discursive communities—building up and spreading the “fever” of the “archive fever”—is also a critical component of developing archives as feminist decolonial practice. computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 23 figure 8. this is a screenshot of an image in a photo essay in rds. the photo essay includes images taken at the november 12, 2019, workshop. the full essay can be viewed here: https://www.researchdatashare.org/content/photos-archiving-kenya%e2%80%99s-past-andfuture scholars have challenged the assumption that an archive is a neutral, immutable, historical repository of information, arguing instead that the archives are a place where important decisions about what documents—and therefore whose history—are made (arondekar, 2009; stoler, 2009). in my opening presentation on november 12, 31 i reminded attendees that it was not just the contents in the archive that needed careful attention as we sought to decolonize knowledge; the infrastructures themselves need to also be care-fully attended to. decolonizing knowledge is not only about ensuring african voices are found in the historical archives and are represented at present-day academic conferences. if what is actively collected, recorded, counted, and audited is a form of memory, then the same can be said of socio-technical infrastructures, which are not just the built platforms of knowledge-making but also the non-innocent remainders and memories that shape contingent futures (bowker, 2008). decolonizing knowledge then is also about actively curating, building, and studying the archives we want in the future, including the socio-technical infrastructure on which materials sit. we can start by supporting and protecting more collective public knowledge commons and checking the power of western corporate academic publishers, which are in the process of taking over much of the research infrastructure.32 from the standpoint of researchers based in nairobi, it is apparent that, as kenyan novelist and postcolonial theorist ngugi wa thiong’o has pointed out, “the languages and the literatures of the peoples of africa, asia and south america are not peripheral to the twentieth century. they are central to the computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 24 mainstream of what has made the world what it is today. it is therefore not really a question of studying that which is removed from ourselves wherever we are located in the twentieth century but rather one of understanding all the voices coming from what is essentially a plurality of centres all over the world” (1993, p. 28). how to move the center of kenyan research data back to kenya while simultaneously de-nationalizing and building archives that are about discovery beyond the nation-state boundaries, precisely because we are in fact a community of “already global locals”? following work by anthropologists and digital humanities scholars,33 i see promise in archiving ethnographic data as feminist, decolonizing practice. calling for confounding our relationship to how and why we do archival work anjali arondekar (2009) reminds us that an archival approach should articulate against the guarantee of recovery. in line with this, i conceptualize my engagements with ethnographic archives using derrida’s conception of the archive as a kind of “techno-prostheses” (1998, p. 26) of a particular temporal and spatial experience of the world. the scholarly archiving of the nature i am undertaking is not simply to save or preserve but to provide grounds for further questions, working with people to take care of the data while also documenting to understand the processes, relations, and considerations at play. the point of this kind of an archive is to scaffold a deutero capacity to think about the world and support a rethinking of our habituated ways of understanding the world. instead of worrying over the sharing of data for greater reproducibility or transparency, i echo indigenous sts scholar michelle murphy who asks us to think about the infrastructures of relation that make some kinds of flourishing possible and other kinds of flourishing not possible (kasdogan, 2018). an important first step is to squarely understand the exercise of power in decisions about where we store our research data and then try to do something more than that. acknowledgements thank you to the editors and anonymous peer reviewers who provided incredible assistance in improving this paper. a big thank you to kim and mike fortun, leah horgan, and participants of the uc irvine anthropology working title session for your edits and feedback on earlier versions of this paper. this research was supported by a wenner-gren fieldwork grant; university of california santa barbara blum center on poverty, inequality and democracy grant; and national science foundation graduate research fellowship grant. a special thank you to book bunk, the research data ke working group, quotidian data and pece computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 25 design teams, and interlocutors and collaborators of this project. notes 1 scholars from a wide range of disciplines have been working on similar questions critiquing existing scholarly practices and structures. see, for example, pisani et al., 2016; ferguson, 2012; tuck and yang, 2012; rooks, 2006; smith, 1999. 2 i first found the concept of “over-research” described by clark (2008). upon entering the academy, i was exposed to a much longer standing set of work in indigenous studies that describes the long-seated feelings of being exploited by research (see, for example, smith, 1999; deloria, 1988). a related concept is what michelle murphy (2017) has described as postcolonial thick data, where thick describes the dense enumeration practices in the twentieth century that are now entangled with the history of twenty-first-century big data to produce new forms of empire. the practices that produced such thick postcolonial data appear to have also produced feelings of research exploitation. 3 since 2010 when ihub opened, international headlines about kenyan innovation have proliferated (marchant, 2018). along the way, the moniker “silicon savannah” has caught on and come to be used by some to describe nairobi’s technology community. 4 this fatigue with the repetitiveness of the research questions echoes experiences recounted by sukarieh and tannock (2012), who quote a palestinian refugee camp resident complaining that researchers keep coming into the camp and asking the same questions over and over again: “they do the same interviews with the same people all the time…why don’t they use the interviews that were done by researchers before?” (p. 501). 5 i pluralize “souths” here to flag what aellah et al. (2016) have pointed out—that increasingly inequality is in fact appearing between a global middle class and the vast majority, rather than between countries. in pluralizing the term, i seek to point to the wide diversity of communities and experiences both within former colonized countries as well as within former european colonial powers and their north american successors that have spaces and peoples negatively impacted by contemporary capitalist globalization (mahler, 2017). comaroff and comaroff (2012) have called out this suspect north-south dualism, suggesting scholars work the contradictions in order to move beyond such dualism and address the larger dialectic processes of which the term is a product. thus, while this article computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 26 investigates computing research from the standpoint of the “south”—that is, inspired by, grounded in and based on lived realities in nairobi, kenya—the article also complicates that frame, demonstrating how ideas, data, and knowledge travel across time and space in diverse and unequal ways that do not necessarily align to such a binary dualism. 6 many of these ideas are studied deeply in the anthropology of development literature, which, for example, has critiqued ideologies of development (cornwall, 2007), notions of expertise (crane, 2013), and, more recently, the intersection of expertise and race (pierre, 2013). 7 i use the term “san” here, but would like to acknowledge and flag the ongoing debates over the terms of reference for the groups: san, jun/oansi, “bushmen,” “hunter-gatherers,” basarwa, etc. for example, in namibia, jun/oansi call themselves “bushmen” when speaking afrikaans, but otherwise call themselves jun/oansi. find more on this topic in my blog post “‘responsible research’: reducing risk or improving well-being?” (okune, 2017). 8 see, for example, the first nations principles of ocap® (http://fnigc.ca/ocap.html) and the alaska federation of natives guidelines for research (http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/iks/afnguide.html). 9 see lily irani’s (2018) description of design thinking as a form of technical expertise. design thinking and related methods have gained increasingly widespread popularity in nairobi and other parts of the continent, promoted and taught by private design companies, western universities, and philanthropic organizations. 10 i have anonymized organization names for this piece not because the organizations are not necessarily willing to be named but because of the ongoing nature of my writing and relationships. 11 i use “qualitative” and “ethnographic data” interchangeably here to refer to materials produced as a result of ethnographic data collection methods. these are typically field notes, photographs, audio and video recordings, found artifacts, typed transcripts of interviews and/or focus group discussions, oral histories and may also include archival documents. in my field sites, the term “qualitative data” is much more recognizable. computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 27 12 i came to learn about the platform for experimental and collaborative ethnography (pece) in 2017. i developed skills in pece in 2018 by participating in the sts across borders exhibit (http://stsinfrastructures.org/about) organized by society for social studies of science (4s). i also eventually developed my comprehensive exam “documents” in pece. these documents are accessible online at http://stsinfrastructures.org/content/querying-science-and-technologystudies-africa. while i had begun dabbling in pece simply for my own research infrastructure, over time i found its broader value in adding an analytic layer to ethnography at multiple points in the process. 13 for more on this aspect of pece, see m. fortun et al., 2017; poirier et al., 2014; poirier, 2017. 14 this is similar to many of the cases described in estalella and criado (2018). however, unlike marrero-guillamon (chapter 8 in estalella and criado, 2018) who had the realization that he could not in fact “participate” at some kind of distance while he was already in the field, i intentionally built this kind of entangled participation and archival practice into the field research project at the pre-field project design stage, which gave me time to prepare textual devices, develop the technical infrastructure, and build up the skill sets that i believed might be necessary to execute such a project. 15 the draft data circulation form (okune, 2019b) emerged from pending questions i have regarding how to deal with anonymization as well as how to grapple with the ethical question of whether the release of co-created data from the researcher and research participant encounter is even a decision that can or should be made by the researcher alone (mannheimer et al., 2019; moore, 2007). 16 the collaboration agreement draft document (okune, 2019a) emerged for multiple reasons: first, to make clearer what exactly is entailed in my research project; second, to have a textual device with which to discuss expectations and desires from the research; and finally, given the expansive project scope, to protect myself from infringing unknowingly on existing copyrights. 17 this data was produced collaboratively through conversations with various experts, including scholarly communications officers from the university of california, berkeley and academic advisors. i decided to upload these documents to zenodo rather than the uc institutional repository because i was unable to clearly determine the access policy under the institutional repository (i.e., access after graduation and abilities to continue to update or migrate materials). computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 28 18 i circulated the collaboration agreement draft to all three organizations when i reached the stage of requesting access to their (private) data. the agreement, as predicted, allowed us to articulate expectations for each other. for one organization, there were several rounds of iterative feedback. interestingly, none of the organizations actually signed it into force before sharing data with me, highlighting the document’s value not necessarily as a legally enforceable document, but rather as a vehicle for the clarification of expectations and collaboration norms. 19 while ethnographers may balk at the term “meta-data,” perceiving it as computing jargon that signals a particular technical standard or practice, in fact, adding meta-data to ethnographic digital data can helps assuage some of ethnographers’ biggest worries about their data being taken out of context. through the application of meta-data, ethnographers can “situate[e] data collection and analysis in a particular time, setting, and cultural context… encouraging re-interpretation of archived data [and] perpetually generating new, interpretive data which itself can be contextualized, archived, and re-interpreted” (poirier et al., 2020, p. 226). figure 4 illustrates contextual meta-data added to a digital artifact in rds. 20 work on care from the science and technology studies (sts) community highlights multiple definitions, finding care is often a site of “ambivalence, tension, and puzzlement” (atkinson-graham et al., 2015, p. 738). murphy (2015) lays out four interlaced meanings of care, noting “first, it refers to the state of being emotionally attached to or fond of something; second, it means to provide for, look after, protect, sustain, and be responsible for something; third, it indicates attention and concern, to be careful, watchful, meticulous, and cautious; while its fourth meaning…is to be troubled, worried, sorrowed, uneasy, and unsettled” (p. 721). in thinking about how we might practice data care-fully as part of a decolonial feminist practice, i hold these multiple definitions in tandem— seeking not to reify data in and of itself but to simultaneously also not discount its importance in furthering collective knowledge and as an artifact of an ethnographic relationship. i seek to cultivate an affective stance towards and a practice that embodies being worried, troubled, and uneasy about the data and its margins while simultaneously also recognizing a responsibility to protect, look after, and be meticulous about ethnographic data. 21 for example, in the case of pece, it is important to consider the foundational work of the brazil-based lead developer, who acts as the primary maintainer of computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 29 the codebase, as well as the volunteer system admin who is based in upstate new york. exploring ways to attend to such nested levels of often invisible support infrastructural work is also part of more care-fully attending to our data practices. 22 further analytic questions to guide a reading of qualitative data platforms can be found here: https://worldpece.org/structured-analytics-questions-set/readingqual-data-repository-platforms 23 refer to poirier et al. (2020) for more on how meta-data can enable a remixing of data and perpetually proliferating interpretations of data. 24 i uploaded his response as a public annotation here (https://www.researchdatashare.org/annotations/user/15/artifact/157), with his permission. i further added to it after receiving his response to my email. 25 these changes/edits are ideally things that he could have done himself on the platform, but which i did not ask him to learn to do as i did not want to dissuade him from engaging with the material. there is indeed a level of technical comfort with the platform that is needed to be able to log in and insert an annotation by oneself. therefore, i uploaded the annotation myself on his behalf (as our conversation was transpiring via email). this is a potential barrier to flag—the investment of time and effort to get over the technical learning curve for full participation. 26 the division between “technicians” and “designers” of platforms, for example, could also lead to various forms of “invisibilization.” 27 find the full annotation here: https://www.researchdatashare.org/annotions/question/165/artifact/121. the full transcript is available here: https://www.researchdatashare.org/content/transcript-191029001-beingresearched-kibera 28 i am attempting less common ways of running an ethnographic project fully aware of intersectional feminist work that has highlighted there is no politics of purity and no way of acting inside existing systems of injustices non-innocently. 29 in a forthcoming paper, leah horgan and i seek to complicate the intersections of expertise and subject positions packed into the terms “global” and “local” to carve out space for the existence of “already global local” expertise and knowledge that transcend essentialized categories of nation, race, gender, ethnicity, and class while simultaneously accounting for the situated nature of all knowledges (boellstorff, 2003; haraway, 1991). computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 30 30 proceedings from the event, including video footage, distributed materials, and photos as illustrated in figure 8, are available here: https://www.researchdatashare.org/content/proceedings-archiving-kenyas-pastand-futures. 31 transcript available here: https://www.researchdatashare.org/content/transcript-opening-remarksarchiving-kenyas-past-and-futures; powerpoint slides available here: https://www.researchdatashare.org/content/okune-mutuku-2019-openingremarks-archiving-kenyas-past-and-futures-november-12-2019; and video recording available here: https://www.researchdatashare.org/content/videoproceedings-opening-remarks. 32 an important and underinvestigated aspect of decolonizing knowledge infrastructures must include a political economic perspective on the academic publishing industry. see, for example, posada and chen’s (2018) work on the rent seeking and financialization strategies of academic publishers. find more also in a 2019 blog post i authored (okune, 2019d). 33 see for example lassiter’s work making audio archives; anita chang’s community web site called root tongue; fabiola hannah’s work on oral history and lebanon; and elaine gan’s use of methods from art, science and digital/environmental humanities to study the temporalities of multispecies interactions. references aellah, g., chantler, t., & geissler, p. w. 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(1994). fictions of feminist ethnography. university of minnesota press. wa thiong’o, n. (1993). moving the centre: the struggle for cultural freedoms. j. currey; heinemann. yates-doerr, e. (2019). whose global, which health? unsettling collaboration with careful equivocation. american anthropologist, 121(2), 297–310. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13259 author bio angela okune is a doctoral candidate in the anthropology department at the university of california, irvine. she studies data practices and infrastructures of research groups working in and on nairobi, kenya, in order to explore broader questions of equity, knowledge production, and socioeconomic development in computing in/from the south | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela okune, 2020 37 africa. from 2010 to 2015, as co-founder of the research department at ihub, nairobi’s innovation hub for the tech community, angela provided strategic guidance for the growth of tech research in kenya. she was a network coordinator for the open and collaborative science in development network (ocsdnet) (2014–2018), and coeditor for open-access book contextualizing openness (university of ottawa press). she currently serves on the society for social studies of science (4s) council and as a design team member of the platform for experimental, collaborative ethnography (pece). a lattice of chemicalized kinship: toxicant reckoning in a depressive-reparative mode lee, rachel (2020). a lattice of chemicalized kinship: toxicant reckoning in a depressivereparative mode. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-27. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © rachel lee, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license a lattice of chemicalized kinship: toxicant reckoning in a depressive-reparative mode rachel lee university of california, los angeles rlee@women.ucla.edu abstract this essay introduces fourteen essays and artworks comprising this issue’s special section, critical commentary, critical perspectives, lab meeting, and cover art that address the topic of chemical entanglements: gender and exposure. this introduction emphasizes not only the varied vernaculars of chemicalized knowing highlighted in this scholarship and artwork but also their shared theorization of how specific molecular encounters are propelled by biopolitical systems that extend or curtail relationality amongst humans, other species, and the environment. operation ranch hand, the mass bombardment of the vietnamese landscape with a combination of chemicals dubbed the rainbow agents from 1961 to 1971, may not be a widely recognized name, but its most famous herbicide, agent orange, certainly is.1 david zierler’s (2011) the invention of ecocide tells of a coterie of us scientists—those who would coin the term ecocide—horrified at the botanical devastation wrought by the rainbow agents.2 not only did they reject the us war department’s assertion that herbicides targeted plants rather than people as unscientific, they also rejected the idea that operation ranch hand did not violate the 1925 geneva protocol’s ban on the use of chemical weapons.3 these scientists further claimed that the indiscriminate use of the herbicides increased rather than lessened global insecurity. as yale botanist arthur galston introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 2 stated at the 1971 senate foreign relations committee hearings on the geneva conventions, “[man] is totally dependent on and cannot substitute for that thin mantle of green matter living precariously on the partially decomposed rock that we call soil…‘all flesh is as grass.’ [that biblical] statement is as true today as it was when it was written” (us congress senate committee on foreign relations, 1972, pp. 325–326).4 asserting that the health effects of chemical contamination on plant and soil could not be contained to a period of active military engagement, galston emphasized that chemical warfare’s effects bled across both time and species boundaries, rendering humanity and the planetary ecology less secure. the historical period in which these scientists voiced their concern overlapped with environmental activism, as galvanized by rachel carson’s silent spring (1962). nevertheless, these scientists critical of ecocide, zierler (2011) stresses, were not part of a larger green movement: “if ranch hand was an operation of resource extraction, it would not be ecocide” (p. 18). in short, if linked to increased economic productivity as defined by the industrialized west, the release of toxicant chemicals would not be (as) objectionable. what i want to draw attention to here is the premise inherent in this distinction: that the weaponizing of toxicant chemicals in acts of warfare expressly meant to despoil and eliminate the vital productivity of a habitat for years to come is believed to be categorically different from the spread of similar poisons by mining interests, oil and natural gas extraction, petrochemical refineries, factories, and industrial agriculture, as long as the latter occurs in the name of building and maintaining the infrastructures of big business in the global north. what is accomplished by this premise? according to this logic, a kind of border wall exists between acts of war on enemy territory and acts of industry in domestic settings. my claim here is that this border-wall thinking not only fundamentally misunderstands the actions of chemical toxicants as they wend their way through ecological systems—through soil, surface and ground water, air, and bioaccumulation in nonhuman and human species dwelling in those spaces (blais, 2005; genuis, 2009)—but, more importantly, that it offers a fiction of comfort for elite subjects of the global north. that fiction of comfort involves, first, imagining themselves geographically protected from the toxicant spillovers and secondary contaminations that will occur only over “there” (in foreign territory) and not also “here” (in the homeland). second, it provides further psychic “cover:” for these same elite subjects not to feel morally culpable because no intentional war (by the sovereign nation to which one holds allegiance) has been declared against either the people or habitats that have been so fouled.5 introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 3 by carving out as an exception from “ecocide” those actions of industrial polluters, then, border-wall thinking assumes the self-evident worthiness of pollutionridden resource extraction to feed the engine of industrialized capitalism.6 in addition, it props up what we now know as the dubious sufficiency of “separation, containment, clean up and immunization” (liboiron, tironi, & calvillo, 2018, p. 332), as adequate methods of countering the depletion of health and proliferation of disablement—these certain sequelae not only of war but also of “industrialization, economic growth and capitalism” (liboiron, tironi, & calvillo, 2018, p. 334). by recalling this history, then, i mean to draw attention to the speciousness of the boundaries asserted between domestic manufacture, agroindustry, and capitalist production qua carbon democracy (mitchell, 2011), on the one hand, and international warfare,7 extraterritorial destruction, and the maiming and killing of human lives, on the other, a necessary first step for mapping out multiple vernaculars of chemicalized knowing. recalling these events of fifty-years ago may seem an odd way to introduce the collection of fourteen essays and artworks comprising this volume’s special section, critical commentary, critical perspectives, lab meeting, and cover art that address the theme of chemical entanglements: gender and exposure. by starting with the inseparability of industry—that is, the building and expansion of infrastructures of modernity—and ecocidal assaults, this introduction orients toward everyday expertise from communities for whom the “benefits” of industrialization were never primarily intended. for such communities, the pollutant emissions and toxicant exposures inherent to modernization plans are harder to justify (or excuse) as incidental to the functioning of their civilizations, notwithstanding the ideological framing of such place-based, non-industrialized modes of living as “primitive.” the essays in this special section employ feminist, indigenous, decolonial, and postcolonial sts frameworks that help us to develop a vernacular of chemicalized knowing through the lives, theories, practices, and knowledges of women, lgbtq communities, people of color, and those dreaming of disability justice (piepzna-samarsinha, 2018). in particular, three essays in this special section (by shadaan & murphy; fiske; and barba)—together forming the assemblage “petroand agro-wars by chemical proxy”—focus on the foreclosure of reproductive futurity for indigenous and brown settler populations through undeclared “wars by chemical proxy” (my citation of this term, not theirs) conducted by the petrochemical, oil, and agricultural industries.8 this trio of essays most clearly proceeds in a mode of argumentation that understands the production and widespread distribution of toxicants as part of the moral compass of western capitalist industry—a mode of argumentation shared by the majority introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 4 of the pieces collected in this issue. the remainder of the articles and artworks on the theme of chemical entanglements are introduced by way of three more assemblages (even as some articles overlap). “educational entanglements” brings together an interview, three shorter essays, and a longer research article (see soto; lasker & simcox; grandia; bayalaniss & garnett; and o’laughlin) on how schools and institutions of higher education are often envisioned as great equalizers, spaces where students regardless of race can study and take part in cutting-edge research that will help government and health practitioners address toxicant trespass. nevertheless, these works highlight how educational institutions (including university laboratories), in their current dimensions, need reforming so that they do not extend chemical and social injury. the third subgroup, “vernaculars of consumption,” is a trio of articles focused on “feminine” consumption circuits involving beauty cream, menstrual technology, and goods that protect the health of prospective babies (tessaro; vaughn; and ford). last, “cognizing chemicals through aesthetic forms,” comes together by way of critical reflexivity on art as a mode to materialize and represent lateral movements toward disability justice among intoxicated subjects. across all four assemblages, i attend to these authors’ and artists’ attentive listening to vernaculars of chemicalized knowing as well as the biopolitical systems propelling molecular encounters that extend or curtail relationality amongst humans, other species, and the environment.9 before detailing further these four subgroupings, let me briefly comment on the mobilization of estrogen in the work of brooklynand hong kong–based artist jes fan—a photo of whose work graces the cover of this issue.10 fan’s 2018 piece, mother is a woman—viewable as a four-minute, forty-four-second color video (shot by asa westcott)11—gently mocks the vernacular of commercial advertising selling an abundance of commodities to fill the anomie created by attenuated social relationships (and the waning of enchantment) that are also hallmarks of modernity. the video begins with a close up of white cream in a large centrifuge tube—a beauty product infused with estrogen sourced from the urine of fan’s mother (figure 1). the video toggles between scenes in a laboratory—the technician’s blue latex gloves pipetting and injecting various substances into receptacles—and close-ups of various people, ungloved and dabbing the white emollient onto their hands and cheeks. around the thirty-second mark, a voiceover begins detailing the art and science behind this cream’s manufacture: introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 5 using artisanal technology, we worked closely with laboratories in america to extract the purest estrogen from my mother’s urine…beyond a beauty cream, mother is a woman invites you to rethink kinship through the pores of your skin. can our epidermis be a first contact of kinship?…mother is a woman asks, “who are you to her [my hong kong–based mother]?” and, “who are you to me?”12 rather than using estrogen as an ingredient to abstract into a commodity form the consumer’s relationship to their younger self (see lara tessaro’s related essay in this volume, on how estrogen creams—poorly regulated at mid-century— promised a more youthful, glowing appearance), fan’s artwork torques the vernacular of consumption to purposes of social bonding with and through a wrinkled, elder asian woman’s urine. those who slowly massage the cream into their skin cutaneously imbibe, so to speak, the sexing powers of mother—a queer method of “feminiz[ation]” (figure 2).13 because the mode of consumption is cutaneous rather than oral, mother is a woman also reminds us that what we perceive as the human body’s largest organ system—the skin—is also an aperture or, rather, a lattice of openings onto the world. 14 my introduction’s title, “a lattice of chemicalized kinship,” takes inspiration from this artwork’s delight in rendering the epidermal lattice a positively figured channel of molecular kinship through which to counterbalance the segregating tendencies of epidermal racism.15 this 2018 work solicits the waywardness of a “single-sourced” endocrinedisrupting chemical, refiguring it as a relation-building substance precisely through its feminization powers. in contrast, fan’s work featured on the cover of this issue, systems ii (2018), suspends estrogen—as well as testosterone, fat, and melanin—holding them apart in glass orbs, as if to disrupt, not so much their molecular pathways but the marshalling of their phenotypical effects, on the surface of human bodies, towards biopolitical ends—as vectors for profiling, stratifying, and hierarchizing social groups according to skin color and gender presentation (see figure 3). the work’s title, systems ii, likely refers to overlapping systems of binary sex/gender, racialized eugenics, and capitalist property and accumulation regimes that parcel populations into those deserving life extension/support and those available for intensified labor exploitation and “maiming” (puar, 2017) qua varieties of disablement and premature death. introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 6 figures 1 & 2. installation views, mother is a woman, 2018. image courtesy of the artist and empty gallery, hong kong. photo credit: michael yu. introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 7 figure 3. systems ii, 2018. composite resin, glass, melanin, estradiol, depo-testosterone, silicone, wood. image courtesy of the artist. systems ii performs and provokes this alchemical fantasy: to extract those systems and place them behind observation glass rather than what we have historically done—placed fleshly bodies into glass cages (i.e., a caste system of stratified political categories such as citizen vs. noncitizen; white, propertied, male, and enfranchised vs. black, alien immigrant, female, and disenfranchised), so as to stare at those bodies as if they were the puzzling phenomena, and not those systems. as this pair of art pieces would indicate, becoming (again) chemically entangled can be figured as an affirmative practice—a relationshipbuilding one—even as chemical deployments are themselves entangled in introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 8 biopolitical systems of social stratification, imperialism, and extractive accumulation. the fourteen assembled essays and artworks highlighted here epitomize careful listening to vernaculars, metaphors, and models that attempt to grapple with that conundrum. assemblage i: petroand agro-wars by chemical proxy this cluster of articles, as will become clear, proceeds by way of closely listening to the voices of indigenous, poor, and colored communities, structurally positioned as most proximate to (accidental-deliberate) toxicant violence. as they testify to their visceral, sometimes multigenerational encounters with toxicants, a portrait of these communities emerges: they are nonconsensual human enrollees in field-based experiments conducted by the aforementioned industries. second, these articles variously identify how the chronic releases of chemical pollutants are not so much unique forms of violence but function as a part of overlapping systems—such as, settler colonialism, exploitation of racialized labor, scientificgovernmental underregulation of chemical hazards, and corporate impunity—that collude with a white supremacist biopolitics. this white supremacist biopolitics, at best, regards indifferently the premature death of black and brown populations and at worst hastens the foreclosure of these communities’ futures. my reference to vernacular is indebted to an article in this section, amelia fiske’s “naked in the face of contamination: thinking models and metaphors of toxicity together.” 16 in this piece, fiske establishes the importance of understanding toxicity in the “chemically saturated present” through the stories told by those living at ground zero of one of the world’s worst environmental disasters—the site of texaco’s oil operations at the ecuador-columbia border. as indicated by her subtitle, fiske forwards a critique of the limitations of environmental protection agency (epa) models for understanding and standardizing toxicity prevention with respect to the lives of the residents of lago agrio. because epa toxicological assessments are calibrated to the first-world subject who wears shoes (metaphor, too, for having the luxury to pick up and leave a chemically contaminated area), they are deficient in modeling the health effects consequent upon oil extraction for those walking barefoot on roads slicked with oil (those who are stuck to and in place). because of the tremendous power and authority of technoscientific modeling, fiske does not claim that expert discourse should be discarded. after all, the legal judgment obtained in ecuador against texaco relies upon that modeling and calculation of harm. nevertheless, we might ask, “must grief and loss speak in the lingua franca of economic commerce?” indeed, to convey the scale of texaco’s malfeasance is to cite the size of the monetary judgment against them: us$9.5 billion. how is it that these numbers become the way to figure the introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 9 moral crimes of oil and petrochemical conglomerates? could one, instead, listen without instrumentalizing the vernacular metaphors recounting grief, such as a lago agrio resident’s figuring the sharp pains she endures as between an insect sting and a guided missile—“tsaaac!” (say it aloud)? why is the untranslatability into a tidy sum the extent and texture of disablements and afflictions—from headaches, rashes, miscarriages, and sharp pains, to lost fur on dogs who go into seizure upon drinking the contaminated water—not enough?17 in reena shadaan and michelle murphy’s article in this section, “endocrinedisrupting chemicals (edcs) as industrial and settler colonial structures: towards a decolonial feminist approach,” the authors link endocrine-disrupting chemical pollution to oil extraction in ontario’s chemical valley. they stress the importance of cultivating a decolonial feminist sts framework that is, like fiske’s article, deeply engaged with epistemologies tied to place and to indigeneity. taking issue with well-meaning but flawed feminist environmental emphasis on hormone disrupters intruding into what are perceived as the most sacrosanct of spaces—the domestic nest, the bathroom and beauty cabinet, and the maternal womb—these authors underscore that this “heteronormative domesticated understanding of [endocrine-disrupting chemicals]” emphasizes the materialized greater burden on women to “manage environmental harms” via precautionary consumerism. yet such narrow programs to shepherd the health of one’s individual family “absolves the state of its responsibilities to regulate harmful toxicants, erases structural violence” and colludes with settler colonial infrastructures committed to indigenous elimination. shadaan and murphy thus argue for a move away from “molecular, damage-centered, individualized or body-centered” frameworks, so as to recognize that pollution via endocrine disrupting chemicals is colonialism, part of the disruption of land-and-body relations made possible by “permission to pollute” regimes. also attending to epistemological insights from communities structurally positioned to be “swimming” in chemicals (a vernacular phrase quoted by fiske), mayra barba’s “keeping them down: neurotoxic pesticides, race, and disabling biopolitics,” outlines the activism and care of a group of special education teachers and scientist-activists in california’s central valley, who want flourishing futures for the children of predominantly low-wage mexican american farmworkers. these educators focus on the epa’s 2017 refusal to ban from agricultural production the use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which works through inhibiting an enzyme important to brain function, an enzyme operative in both insects and humans—even fifteen years after the banning of this same neurotoxin from residential use because it presented “unacceptable risks to children.” that introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 10 american-grown crops would not be available to us consumers or turned into global commodities without the metabolic overdrive of latinx farmworkers’ kidneys and livers is both a scandal and no longer news (horton 2016). most concerning to these communities themselves is the de facto maintenance of a transgenerational caste system through the mass cognitive disabling of mexican american youth, what health scientists have dubbed a “’chemical warfare on children’s brains’” (rauh, et al, 2006, cited by barba). latinx and mexican american communities, who have been placed at the forefront of agroindustrial poisoning, theorize the ongoing processes of their disabling as an issue of environmental justice and educational justice (anesi, 2019). assemblage ii: educational entanglements in addition to the efforts of the special education teachers and environmental scientists highlighted by barba, an autoethnographic narrative by liza grandia, a white woman, relays a parallel story of environmental engagement by parents concerned over poor indoor-air quality at another elementary school (also, in california’s central valley). grandia’s activism had its roots in her own embodied sensing of suspected sources of toxicant chemicals—the ubiquitous synthetic carpet covering the floors of her college offices. a chemotherapy survivor, grandia conducted her own citizen science when she and some of her colleagues found themselves beset with a host of strange symptoms on days when they had been to their offices. “carpet bombings: a drama of chemical injury in three acts” sketches the iterative struggles—replete with small victories and setbacks— with environmental hazards research published just in time to counterweigh the skepticism of school board officials who at first mistake the “green labels” on carpets for more than what they are—a marketing scheme.18 as this story emphasizes, the hazards faced by central valley communities come not only from aerial sprays of neurotoxic pesticides in the fields but from the ordinary, mundane materials underfoot inside the schools; the pleasures come from alliances with other parents and makers of non-chemically infused alternative flooring who understand that “green” labeled carpet also presents a surplus waste because the quantity of their contaminants make them unsuitable for recycling. interestingly, it may be among those not wedded to or trained for the elite medical specialties that there lies greater openness to listening to vernaculars of chemicalized knowledge. training those who will pursue careers in nursing and health studies, as well as environmental and occupational health, grace lasker and nancy simcox’s essay in this issue’s lab meeting speaks to the importance of seeding the curriculum of university chemistry courses with the precautionary introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 11 principle. feminist and social justice pedagogies, they argue, offer methods and principles to encourage future chemists to reflect upon the downstream waste chains of their invention of new materials, so as to prioritize better human health outcomes. the optimism of these authors may be a function of starting this reeducation effort with professional careworkers (nurses, public health officials)— a population already open-eyed with respect to the underregulated and underestimated impact of chemical pollutants as contributors to chronic disease (see national conversation on public health and chemical exposures leadership council, 2011). as the essays of barba, grandia, and lasker and simcox together indicate, structurally vulnerable communities and their allies in environmental justice work regard preparation for and training at educational institutions as a priority pathway to intervene in settler-colonialist and racialized wars of attrition that occur by chemical proxy. ironically, as stressed by ana soto—whose interview by graduate student researcher at the ucla center for the study of women gracen brilmyer appears in this issue’s lab meeting—institutions of research and learning are not, themselves, immune from the freely moving operations of rogue chemicals (a point also made by grandia). a key historical event important to the field of endocrine disruption research occurred when cellular, molecular, and developmental biologist ana soto and her co-researcher, carl sonnenschein, discovered a problem with their laboratory research apparatus—eventually finding out that the manufacturer of a plastic centrifuge tube in which they had stored cell nutrient had made a change in the chemical composition of the containers. eventually, soto and sonnenschein did some reverse engineering to identify nonylphenol as the endocrine disrupter (soto et al., 1991). in brilmyer’s interview with soto, who participated in the ucla center for the study of women symposium in 2017 on the topic of “chemical entanglements: gender and exposure,” soto reflects on feminism and vernaculars (different languages, metaphor, and conceptual systems) as they shape the questions asked in science and materialize modes of being in the world. in a related but distinct register, logan o’laughlin’s article in this special section, “troubling figures: endocrine disrupters, intersex frogs, and the logics of environmental science,” also makes the laboratory process its object of analysis, specifically opening up the black box wherein the african clawed frog has become a preferred indicator species for experiments testing for endocrine disruptors. through careful intersectional analysis of the arduous material construction of the maleness of xenopus laevis, o’laughlin historicizes not only how these test subjects become animal capital but also how the african origins of this particular introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 12 species contributes to its nomination as invasive. that nomination also allows for the later resignification by black chemist tyrone hayes of x. laevis as a vulnerable “brother” on a continuum with other people of color, who racialized systems of labor exploitation and immigration legislation, render available for chemical exposures in the field (see barba). o’laughlin deftly dissects the way in which “slandering rhetoric of non-normative sex organs” operates in the reporting out on test results from toxicological assays vis-à-vis endocrine-disrupting chemicals. thus, while hayes and his students pose the question of how it is that the united states thinks its relationality to certain crops overrides the importance of its relationality to farmworkers’ health, o’laughlin implicitly points out that the relationality of endocrine experts to those who identify as intersex, trans, and nonbinary also consistently stays broken and frayed when those who are cis-male or cis-female fail to take into account how hormone interacting chemicals can also be figured as welcome and affirming (see pollock, 2016). finally, in “chemical kinship: interdisciplinary experiments with pollution,” angeliki balayannis and emma garnett underscore the need to move past the framing of chemicals as strictly “villainous objects with violent effects” in order to “do/design ethical research with chemicals.” in their short piece published as a critical commentary in this volume, the authors note that just like “kin, these materials [chemicals] are never entirely good nor bad [;] they can be both enabling and harmful.” they draw attention to three projects of “civic science” (fortun & fortun, 2005; wylie, 2018), involving academicians in partnership with community organizations that exemplify innovative ways of working with chemical relations. two of these projects are defined in relation to geographic regions (air south asia and mexpos) and one orbits around a disease endpoint (the asthma files). these projects help us to “imagine what making good kinship with bad kin might look like.” these efforts at practicing sts in a mode of “making and doing” is performed, as well, in the land and the refinery project and its pollution reporter app organized by shadaan and murphy (see their essay in this issue). assemblage iii: vernaculars of consumption three of the essays in this issue’s special themed section address the chemical entanglements of “feminine” consumption circuits, in relation to beauty creams, sanitary supplies (menstrual technology), and various body-care and food options scrutinized by pregnant women. digging through memoranda files newly released from canada’s department of national health (dnh), lara tessaro tracks the administrative rulings in the 1940s and early 1950s—a period in which estrogen’s introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 13 potency as a drug caused confusion as to the conditions under which it could circulate safely, if at all, as a component of cosmetic creams. tessaro’s “potency and power: estrogen, cosmetics, and labeling in canadian regulatory practices, 1939–1953” points out, first, how an omnibus label of “use with care,” shifted the burden of safety onto female consumers (to whom these creams were primarily marketed) and acted as an alibi for regulatory institutions like canada’s dnh to forgo setting safety standards. second, the article traces the way in which, even after the passage of regulatory amendments intended to ensure that hormonecontaining cosmetic products would not circulate if they were shown to have systemic effects, these products were still allowed to be sold and bought. tessaro details the way in which canada’s dnh seemed mostly to want to avoid adjudicating the mismatch between commercial interests (to infuse emollients with magical properties of youthful regeneration) and scientific studies (which landed on estrogen’s systemic effects, rendering any determination of small enough doses impossible) in this period of regulatory indecision over estrogen’s potency. precautionary consumerism has been critiqued by decolonial feminists as a liberal band-aid that diverts attention from more trenchant, collective interventions aimed at protecting populations made structurally vulnerable to toxic trespasses because of their poverty; racialized minority, immigrant or undocumented status; or indigenous ties to place, as well as combinations of those factors. nevertheless, in “purity is not the point: chemical toxicity, childbearing, and consumer politics of care,” birth doula andrea ford underscores in her research on childbearing in the san francisco bay area that precautionary consumerism is very much the vernacular through which many pregnant women first express an awakening consciousness to their embeddedness in a “permanently polluted world” (liboiron, tironi, & calvillo, 2018). these women’s efforts to buy better on behalf of their progeny-to-be not only suggests their intimations that regulatory bodies, like the epa, have not done enough in the way of modeling safety to protect newborns, but also witnesses a degree of mainstreaming of endocrine disruption science (the awareness that the old toxicological wisdom of dose making the poison fails in relation to edcs where the emphasis has turned toward critical windows of exposure—such as in utero—where small dose exposures can make an outsized impact) (gore et al., 2015; see also ashford & miller, 1998). ford argues, moreover, that “childbearing can be a catalyst for ecological approaches to politics—that is, approaches in which relations of responsibility and vulnerability are foregrounded over individual rights.” at the other end of habitual turns toward consumerism practiced in wealthy introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 14 nations of the global north are the circuits of disposal for commodities not fully metabolized in processes of their intended use. in her cross-regional comparative analysis of the handling of menstrual waste, “compost and menstrual blood: women waste pickers and the work of waste futurity,” rachel vaughn takes a temporally elongated or systems view that dials out toward production design and waste futurity, rather than focusing strictly on the point of consumption. feminine technologies—those managing the disposal of menses and that would lie adjacent to the uterus—become sites of anxiety regarding contamination by chemical hazards (e.g., possible endocrine disrupters contained in the masking fragrances added to sanitary napkins and tampons, and carcinogens like dioxin, a by-product of bleaching processes that whiten absorption materials). attuning to those anxieties, eco-feminist entrepreneurs based in the global north have taken a twofold tactic: redesigning menstrual technologies using, for instance, organic cotton in tampons so as to appeal to “green” consumers and working to destigmatize menstrual bleeding overall. in contrast, campaigns around menstrual waste launched by labor unions of swach (solid waste collection and handling) in india, forward a vernacular of “dignity” in their campaigns to highlight waste picking as recycling work that necessitates labeling with a red dot disposal bags containing absorptive materials filled with menstrual waste. the red dot campaign allows waster pickers to decide how to handle (or avoid) such bags unopened, but also extends narratives of uterine blood discharge as health hazard. noting the contradictions in these positions, vaughn wonders after what kind of feminist approach to menstrual waste could forge a bridge between these distinctly situated stakeholders. assemblage iv: cognizing chemicals through aesthetics the two pieces comprising this subsection proceed by way of reflecting upon and revising sensory systems of aesthetic persuasion. key to the science and technology engagement in disability blogger peggy munson’s poem, “paean to bicillin l-a ® and the end of harry harlow's rhesus monkey experiments” (hereafter “paean”) featured as this volume’s critical perspective, is its citation of vorticism, an artistic movement of the 1910s associated with wyndham lewis and his “belief that artists should observe the energy of modern society as if from a still point at the center of a whirling vortex.” it was related to the artistic movement of the italian futurists, enamored with the dynamism, speed, and forces of industrialized modernity. munson has been an activist in the chronic fatigue immune deficiency syndrome (cfids) and multiple chemical sensitivity (mcs) communities for close to two decades.19 her “paean’s” vortex appears both as a swirling, recombinant style and introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 15 as a specific historical reference to an ef4 tornado that swept through washington, illinois, in 2013, killing three people and destroying over a thousand homes.20 as a cartoonist will often draw a tornado as a tight spiral that widens out into a tangle of swirls, “paean” imitates the intensity of motion—the sweeping up of ordered (white-picketed) dwellings into a chaos of proximity—to suggest bonds of relatedness among a host of seemingly unrelated actors: white settler residents of the us prairie who live on a “hard-fracked hem” of earth where hazardous chemicals have been pumped into the soil (leaching into wells and groundwater to work their slow poisonings; see wylie, 2018); those in the deep south, northeast, and great lakes regions, neuro-affected by combinations of pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals, and parasitic spirochetes; and those made worse, or at least not made better, by clinicians and scientists curious to see the results of withholding palliative medications and tactile comfort from primate species.21 if early twentieth-century futurism oriented towards both fascism and the idealization of human-harnessed mechanical forces (tied to the combustion of carbon-rich chemicals),22 the swirling style of munson’s poem recognizes, as a perhaps greater primeval force, not only the “felt” pressure associated with air shears, weather, and human touch but also a host of animate agencies from below—and of those laid low with fatigue. those animacies (chen, 2012) include the penicillium mold’s capacity to produce mycotoxins—from which humankind has derived antibiotics such as the long-lasting bicillin of the poem’s title. and they also include the vorticist action of the cfids poet’s “chemical enfleshment” inseparable from her neuro-lyme “alterlife” (murphy 2017a, 2017b). munson’s poem metaphorically asks why it is that we underestimate care work through touch, the companionate dwelling beside (and bedside) the disabled, as a crucial feature necessary to surviving the wake of modernization’s turbulence. while munson revises vorticist style for purposes of twenty-first-century bonding—that is, that which a sustainable (rather than fascist) futurity depends— allison morgan and kim fortun begin their essay with a reproduction of jasper johns’s flag (moratorium) (1969), which renders the us’s stars and stripes in green, black, and orange (complementary colors to red, white, and blue). after staring at johns’s piece, a sighted individual can look at a grey background and see the afterimage of the us flag, now perceived with the original colors. this afterimage is both perceptible and immaterial (a function of optical memory). for morgan and fortun, the “flickering” afterimage metaphorizes the toggling between knowing and uncertainty that results from former soldiers’ processing many different kinds of news and data sources—public journalism, veteran group web pages, denial of coverage from the veterans administration and department introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 16 of defense—that variously affirm and deny the reality of their toxicant related illnesses. morgan and fortun’s “toxic soldiers, flickering knowledge, and enlisted care: dispossession and environmental injustice” focuses on us military veterans with chronic illnesses tied to service in vietnam, the gulf war, and deployments in iraq and afghanistan. curious as to why veterans of the recent wars in iraq and afghanistan, who claim chronic illnesses due to the toxicant emissions from burn pits, compare themselves more readily to the “agent orange guys” rather than the more geographically and temporally proximate veterans of the gulf war, the authors hear the following explanation from a leader of a prominent advocacy group: “everyone knows that agent orange was a giant cover-up. the government decided to spray even when they had evidence it was harmful. burn pits are the same thing.” state institutions charged with protecting the health and wellbeing of its citizens ignore or actively suppress information that could have been used to maintain health, precisely because the revelations of this information could be too costly to industry and government. agent orange, in short, is a code word for the amplified injury that comes when government and industry continue “hiding the truth,” as one veteran puts it, regarding both immediate and transgenerational disablements from chemical toxicants. in the phrase, “if you think they were hiding the truth from us about it during the war, just look at how they’re hiding the truth from us [now],” a veteran intimates that tactics of cover-up have gotten more sophisticated over time, even as he may not have dialed into the complexity of what sara wylie (2018)—with regard to the fracking industry—calls “enclaving tactics” that sequester “information, spaces, and peoples” (loc. 445), making it difficult to aggregate all the intelligence needed to get a ruling against the agents causing harm (often private entities—oilfield services companies or private military contractors). morgan and fortun point to agent orange, then, as an umbrella figuration bespeaking serial chemical exposures specific to us soldiers and the subsequent “cover-ups”—obstructed information needed by veterans in their attempt to get covered care. this reference to agent orange returns us to this introduction’s emphasis on ecocide with an additional psychic twist. agent orange might constitute part of the vernacular of our toxicant times, bespeaking chemically delivered disablements coupled by amplified psychic and material trauma that occurs upon realizing that the institutions supposed to protect against harms—or to which to appeal for restitution when harms have occurred—are in bed with and/or are selfsame with the agents of harm. johns’s artwork (with its green and orange hues) might also be considered a chemicalized figuration—an agent green and orange—that introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 17 affirms, parallel to the operations of the vortex in munson’s poem, the unconscious (not quite conscious) cognizing modes solicited by artwork that aid in moving research from a position fixated on warding off further toxicant harms toward a position that builds alternative disability care networks led by those already disabled. on toxicant reckoning in a depressive-reparative mode to return to my opening paragraphs on ecocide and its mystifyingly restricted labeling in the 1970s as a crime in war but not as a crime when done within a nation’s borders, i would return to my earlier claim regarding how that mystification works on a psychic and moral level. to recap, restricting ecocide to a crime only when carried out during the course of a declared international war operates to normalize (and thereby quell legitimate outrage at) industry’s theft of the atmospheric and hydrological commons—using those planetary regions as if they were private garbage dumps. the agro and petro industries, which benefit from this “border-wall thinking” (to recall my earlier phrasing), mobilize various practices to extend this mystification including informational enclaving, public relations campaigns (dupont’s “better things for better living…through chemistry”), tactics of diversion and incitement of doubt (oreskes and conway, 2010), and the undermining of scientific independence of regulatory agencies, to name a few strategies. if, at this current historical moment, there appears heightened awareness about our “permanently polluted world” (and climate change as an articulation of one of the effects of that pollution), does this herald a waning of the hegemonic idea (gramsci, 1971) of chemicalized modernity—that is, the equation of modern living with a chemicalized “prosperity” (of intensive farming, fossil fuel extraction, incorporation into global supply-finance-debt chains, digital communications and its toxicant e-waste, and so forth)? and if so, should we be mindful that hegemonies don’t simply go gently into that good night, but are often succeeded by often oppressive acts meant to reassert dominance over—rather than lead with the consent of—the governed? whichever way we speculate answers to those questions, the call to action in the present may involve building spaces and channels for supporting what liboiron, tironi, and calvillo (2018) have called “hypo-interventions” and “slow activism,” which accords with action in a depressive-reparative mode. as suggested in this introduction’s subtitle, the tenor of these pieces might be described as “depressive-reparative” in the sense outlined by the late queer theorist eve sedgwick (2003), who differentiated that mood of cognizing (i.e., thinking-feeling) from a paranoid disposition.23 lamenting the homogeneity of a large amount of critical theory—operating to expose the hidden interests behind introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 18 cultural productions and processes (via a hermeneutics of suspicion)—sedgwick drew upon the work of melanie klein and sylvan tomkins to mine alternatives toward these critical habits of paranoia that ramp up anxiety and are primarily oriented toward warding off harm (or testifying to harm, cf. tuck, 2013). to be clear, there is psychic reward to staying in the paranoid position, even as it is riven with anxiety. that is, at least, one knows about the uncaring disposition of the state-corporate-carceral-imperialist nexus and will not be surprised by its continued deprivations. however, because the paranoid disposition is so subsumed by warding off negative affects (humiliation, pain, harm), the paranoid psyche cannot fathom the possibility of seeking positive affects. the reparative mode, in sedgwick’s (2003) articulation, is an achieved position that attempts to ask what pleasures and desires might be pursued if one could move orthogonal to the habit of preempting harm.24 it is from the depressive position that there might emerge a reparative turn toward hope (and vulnerability) to surprises in the future: “hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned [actant] tries to organize the fragments…she encounters or creates” (sedgwick, 2003, p. 146). action in a depressive-reparative mode begins articulating the joy in caring for others and seeks out the affordances and capacities of those who have been harmed, not to excuse the state-industry nexus but also not to buttress its power by looking to it as the sole or primary source of remedy. such pleasures afforded to and by crip people of color who “dream disability justice” through their own care work for each other have been lyrically expressed recently by leah lakshmi piepzna-samarsinha (2018). such pleasures also live in cover artist’s jes fan’s affinal deployment of estrogen cream for purposes of reparatively materializing “epidermal” as modifier of kinship qua felt relationality rather than of racism qua broken relationality, practiced as the visual profiling and surveillance of people of color to white supremacist ends. returning to sedgwick, some will recall that this formidable literary scholar wrote her essay on paranoia, and depressive-reparative alternatives, as a means of contemplating queer kinship in a time of proliferating hiv/aids and with respect to her own breast cancer diagnosis. 24 key to her desire to reorient her own and others’ scholarship toward a different way of thinking-feeling were her reflections on her regular close contact with two disabled friends—one of whom was hiv positive. her other friend, sedgwick (2003) noted, was ill with “advanced cancer caused by a massive environmental trauma (basically, he grew up on top of a toxic waste site)” (p. 149). toxicant reckoning—the grappling with the defilement of relations of land-water-air-and-body through chemical hazards—happens, too, in introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 19 the syntax of this sentence where “massive environmental trauma” mutes the criminality—the excessive war-like aggression of ecocide—more clearly conveyed in the parenthetical. the vernacular of the depressive reparative, in short, has its genealogies, too, in a lattice of chemicalized relations. this special issue on chemical entanglements challenges us to maintain, remember, and materialize epidermal openness to disabled kin, to those structurally positioned as proximate to toxicant risks, as “pleasure and nourishment” (sedgwick, 2003, p. 137) even in environments with both bad and good systems as also our kin (our responsibility). acknowledgements the editing of this special section would not have been possible without the staff support of the ucla center for the study of women and the graduate research assistance of rebecca chhay. thanks to all the participants of the chemical entanglements 2017 symposium (co-organized with patricia a. gowaty and supported by a luskin thought leadership grant) and to members of the chemical entanglements undergraduate research group (2017-2020). my gratitude goes to all of the researchers and artists published in this issue, and to anne pollock and deboleena roy for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this introduction. notes 1 according to martin (2008), “the u.s. military sprayed approximately 11–12 million gallons of agent orange over nearly 10% of then-south vietnam between 1961 and 1971. one scientific study estimated that between 2.1 million and 4.8 million vietnamese were directly exposed to agent orange. vietnamese advocacy groups claim that there are over 3 million vietnamese suffering from health problems caused by exposure to the dioxin in agent orange” (p. ii). 2 decades later, the scottish attorney polly higgins took up the mantle of ecocide, attempting to incorporate laws to protect the earth’s interests in the rome statutes, the code establishing an international criminal court. arguing that because corporate governance makes ceos accountable to stockholders (i.e., it prioritizes the maximization of their investment returns), higgins explained that this financial infrastructure assured that short-term profits would be favored over long-term stewardship of resources for future use or gain. (see https://ecocidelaw.com/about-polly/.) saying that the earth needs a good lawyer, higgins made clear that the voice of “self-interest” had become narrowed to the language of finances (two-, five-, and ten-year gains and losses), a calculus in which the unrecognized (and certainly unwaged and underreproduced) ecological https://ecocidelaw.com/about-polly/ introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 20 wealth of earth, water, air, alongside the manifold creatures coexisting, supported in, and transforming these spaces/places, was regarded as a never-ending box of treasures—supporting human life and, somehow not needing its own replenishments. 3 the geneva conventions contain a protocol banning from international conflict the use of “asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices” as well as biological weapons. while the united states was a signatory to the protocol in 1925, the us congress did not ratify the protocol until 1975. the kennedy administration interpreted the geneva protocol not to apply to tear gas and herbicides. the conventions have been interpreted also to not apply to instances where states’ “security forces” internally police civilians within a nation. 4 galston went on to stress that annually green plants convert “without fanfare” 700 billion tons of carbon dioxide, produce 500 billion tons of plant material potentially consumable by man, and release 500 billion tons of oxygen for the “respiration of man and almost all forms of life” (us congress senate committee on foreign relations, 1972, p. 326). 5 there may exist more blatant outrage, recognition, and protest (perhaps because anti-war sentiments mobilize many kinds of actors) when ecocidal acts— toxicant release into the commons—are framed as explicit war tactics. put another way, if corporations, whose stockholders reside primarily in global metropolises, are the ones committing ecocidal acts in ogoni-land (nigeria), the ecuadorian amazon, or bhopal, india, no nation is at fault for such so-called accidents, even though the poisonings that do occur are eminently predictable. 6 it would be a mistake to construe galson as an apologist for industrial pollutants. at a 1970 conference called war crimes and the american conscience, where he coined the term ecocide, galston noted that “most highly developed nations have already committed autoecocide over large parts of their own countries” (quoted in zierler, 2011, p. 19). galston seems to have been keen both to distance his own expertise from what he perceived as the “dilettant[ism]” and unscientific “kook[iness]” of popular environmentalism (zierler 2011, p. 18), and to consider, as a graver moral crime, ecocide when “committed [by one nation, the usa] against another country” than when the us committed it against itself (zierler 2011, p. 19). to complicate matters further, in the context of the us, it is impossible to differentiate what is autoecocide and what is part of three centuries of anglo-european ecocidal warfare on indigenous sovereign lands in the introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 21 americas. 7 indeed, the us’s propping up of autocrat foreign leaders (wylie, 2018, loc 62106221; mitchell 2009) has been part of the militarized strategy of oil and petroleum extraction. 8 “war by chemical proxy” is the term used by the kennedy administration in its first phase of undeclared military actions in vietnam/indochina prior to 1965. 9 my use of the term relationality is informed by jessica kolopenuk’s (2020) “miskâsowin: indigenous science, technology, and society.” see also gerlach (2018). 10 fascinated with material trans-formations, jes fan speaks of his training in glass-making as key to both his apprehension of the liveliness of inorganic art materials and his inspiration to draw out the transformative capacities of other media—including his own fleshy matter (jes fan in flux | art 21, 2019). performing his own gender transition as a combination of molecular and behavioral applications (masculinizing through cutaneous testosterone and learning to box), fan compares himself to both the sculptor carving out a solid form and “glass in [its] liquid [state]…perpetually in flux.” to be clear, fan has not framed his transition as one of his art projects. instead, the experience of transitioning influenced the biomaterials—for example, testosterone and melanin—that fan began incorporating into his art practice. see jes fan in flux | art 21 (2019). 11 mother is a woman is also the name of the mock commercial product the video infomercial sells. see fan (2018). 12 i am indebted to ari heinrich for his gorgeous experimental glossary that is “coenmeshed” with fan’s work. heinrich explores the role that speculative figurings of melanin’s future by queer artists of color play in resisting the machine of capitalism and environmental devastation. see his forthcoming decolonial melanin: jes fan's contagious xenophoria (a glossary), funded by the 2019 creative capital/andy warhol arts writers grant. 13 i use “feminization” here to echo the phrasing in mother is a woman: “freshly harvested from a single source origin, [mother is a woman] invites you to be feminized by my mother.” according to recent research, estrogen masculinizes the brain—a finding that unsettles lay notions of estrogen as strictly that which feminizes. specifically, testosterone is converted at specific local sites in the brain introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 22 by aromatase into estrogen; this estrogen promotes a density of cell growth particularly in the medial pre-optic area of the brain, with “the density of one type of brain cell in [this area]…twice as great in males as it is in females” (davis 2015). 14 “lattice” is the term fan uses to describe the system of conduit (modeled in rectilinear connective fashion) upon which glass orbs are propped and from which they hang in the artwork featured on this issue’s cover, systems ii (“jes fan in flux”). 15 on epidermal racism, see lee 2014, pp. 52–57. at the 2015 technoscience salon at the university of toronto, i had the pleasure of hearing vanessa agard-jones introduce her work on chlordecone in martinique using the framework of “chemical kin” (see also agard-jones 2016). “chemical kinship” is also the title of an essay by bayalaniss and garnett in this volume. 16 i expand the meaning of vernaculars beyond vocal expressions to include quotidian practices and habits. listening to vernaculars recognizes what i call visceral and decolonial knowledge from below, a locational modifier referring to a political-economic positioning, placing these populations proximal and others more distal, to the disabling effects of chemical pollutants. 17 while lago agrio residents obtained a legal judgement of us$9.5 billion against chevron (which acquired texaco’s holding) in an ecuadorian court, no monies have been paid out, as chevron continues to contest the judgment itself as corrupt. the importance of listening to vernaculars of loss, however, goes beyond this particular historical instance of stalled monetary judgement. as waichee dimock (1997) argues in residues of justice, the us justice system relies upon an erroneous but convenient logic of adequation. what does that mean? where across two languages there exist no cognate term for the idea or word one would translate, that translator reaches for a metaphor that would approximate the meaning of the original term. even so, a residue of untranslatability remains. for humanists, this lack of adequation—here, a one-to-one (terminological) correspondence—can inspire creativity, prompting the translator to weave more poetic figures which constitute inexact but possibly delightful substitutions. bringing these insights on language to the courts, dimock argues that american justice (both in civil and criminal suits) relies upon the dream of the fullness of adequation for a set of losses—such as, lidia’s three miscarriages and the intensity of her intermittent but chronic pain (tsaac!)—by some monetary sum. but the eventual settlement intended to bring closure, even when finally paid out, dimock argues, will prove anything but settling; for what is deeply unsatisfactory, in the end, is the idea that a species of commerce (the language of us$) can pay introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 23 for (is equivalent to) the destruction of a mode of living, which is to say, the reckless contamination of soil, water, forest, and bodies effected by texaco/chevron. in short, listening carefully to the residues contained in these vernaculars becomes very much a part of assisting in the ongoing project of justice. 18 at the time of grandia’s submission of her original essay, the story of collective carework to improve ventilation and removal of intoxicating sources from elementary school indoor spaces looked like it would be one of “slow activism” (liboiron. tironi, & calvillo, 2018); as we’ve wended our way through production, changes on the ground have rewritten the ending of this story for now as a victory. 19 see her anthology stricken: voices from the hidden epidemic of chronic fatigue syndrome (2000). 20 ef refers to the enhanced fujita tornado damage scale; ef4 means winds speeds of 207 to 260 mph and “devastating” damage such as “blown down” buildings (storm prediction center, 2014). 21 munson references harry harlow’s monkeys, the black men of tuskegee, and the speaker who cannot get insurance approved access to the expensive drug, bicillin la (la = long-acting). 22 though space constraints prevent a fuller analysis, let me just note here that a “molecular feminist’s” (roy, 2018) reconsideration of the futurists might frame their enchantment with representing force and dynamism equated with symbols of fossil-fueled locomotion—motor boats, trains, industrial gears—as a fascination and fetishization of energies released through the literal breaking of highly stable bonds on the molecular level. thanks, here, to anne pollock’s verbal account of the energies released from molecules with extremely tight bonds. 23 sedgwick described paranoia as a theory of negative affects that places faith in exposure (in the dynamic of hidden-shown). seeking positive affects is necessary to cultivate reparative energy. 24 it is from the depressive position that a reparative energy might emerge. the reparatively positioned scholar, ally, maker-doer, and canary surrenders the outraged position of (full well-)knowing for the depressive position (which still has knowledge but realizes its insufficiencies). knowledge is not the fortress or shield introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 24 one had hoped; and the problem may be with the whole concept of fortress immunity. 25 the peak years of death from hiv/aids were 1995 for the united states and 2005 globally. sedgwick published her essay on paranoia in 2003. references agard-jones, v. 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(2018). thinking and researching relationally: enacting decolonizing http://culturesofenergy.com/ep-35-vanessa-agard-jones/ http://culturesofenergy.com/ep-35-vanessa-agard-jones/ https://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/pdf/10.1139/f04-226 https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sensing-and-behaving/brain-development/2015/estrogen-and-the-developing-brain https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sensing-and-behaving/brain-development/2015/estrogen-and-the-developing-brain introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 25 methodologies with an indigenous early childhood program in canada. international journal of qualitative methods, 17(1). retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1609406918776075 gore, a. c., chappell, v. a., fenton, s. e., flaws, j. a., nadal, a., prins, g. s., … zoeller, r. t. 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(2017a). alterlife and decolonial chemical relations. cultural anthropology, 32(4), 494-503. murphy, m. (2017b). what can’t a body do. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1). retrieved from https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/28791/html_8 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26544531 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339584216_miskasowin_indigenous_science_technology_and_society https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339584216_miskasowin_indigenous_science_technology_and_society https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03085140903020598 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/28791/html_8 introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 26 national conversation on public health and chemical exposures leadership council. (2011). addressing public health and chemical exposures: an action agenda. washington, dc: cdc/atsdr. retrieved from https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/nationalconversation/docs/reports/national-conversationaction-agenda.pdf puar, j. k. (2017). the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. durham, nc: duke university press. oreskes, n., & e. m. conway. (2010). merchants of doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. new york, ny: bloomsbury. piepzna-samarasinha, l. l. (2018). care work: dreaming disability justice. vancouver: arsenal pulp press. pollock, a. (2016). queering endocrine disruption. object-oriented feminism, (k behar, ed.) minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. rauh, v. a., garfinkel, r., perera, f. p., andres, h. f., hoepner, l., barr, d. b., … whyatt, r. w. (2006). impact of prenatal chlorpyrifos exposure on neurodevelopment in the first 3 years of life among inner-city children. pediatrics, 118(6), e1845-e1859. roy, d. (2018). molecular feminisms: biology, becomings, and life in the lab. seattle, wa: university of washington press. sedgwick, e. k. (2003).touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. durham, nc: duke university press. soto, a. m, justicia, h., wray, j. w., & sonnenschein, c. (1991, may). p-nonyl-phenol: an estrogenic xenobiotic released from “modified” polystyrene. environmental health perspectives, 92, 167-73. storm prediction center. (2014). the enhanced fujita scale (ef scale). retrieved from https://www.spc.noaa.gov/efscale/ tuck, e. (2013). suspending damage: a letter to communities. harvard educational review, 79(3), 409-428. us congress senate committee on foreign relations. (1972). the geneva protocol of 1925: hearings before the committee on foreign relations. united states senate, 92nd congress, 1st session, washington. wylie, s. a. (2018). fractivism: corporate bodies and chemical bonds. durham, nc: duke university press. zierler, d. (2011). the invention of ecocide: agent orange, vietnam, and the scientists who changed the way we think about the environment. athens, ga: university of https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/nationalconversation/docs/reports/national-conversation-action-agenda.pdf https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/nationalconversation/docs/reports/national-conversation-action-agenda.pdf https://www.spc.noaa.gov/efscale/ introduction to special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) rachel lee, 2020 27 georgia press. author bio rachel lee is professor of english, gender studies, and the institute of society and genetics at ucla. she directs the ucla center for the study of women and leads the chemical entanglements project.     original research data surrogates as hosts: politics of environmental governance     akshita sivakumar university of california san diego asivakum@ucsd.edu     abstract data-driven environmental governance within the standard regulatory regime routinely relies on unmeasurable, missing, or abjected data. technocrats typically use data surrogates to alleviate this pervasive problem. by combining feminist technoscience and critical environmental justice approaches, this article argues that data surrogates are far more than fungible substitutes and rely on more than scientific rationality and transcendent objectivity. through a case of intersecting environmental governance and justice work in the portside community in san diego, this article exposits a broader conceptualization of data surrogates by developing a partial typology of operations they perform: calibrating, weighting, and validating. the politics and labors of these operations are crucial to analyze how data acquire material and discursive power in environmental governance. i propose an analytical shift from examining the work of data surrogates in terms of substituting to one of hosting. this shift reveals and better explains how data surrogates negotiate relationships between body, place, and property across state, market, and civil society actors. moreover, it demonstrates how data surrogates interrupt the dominant regulatory regime by resisting fungibility through acts of social reproduction. far from being subordinate to technocratic tools, the work of social reproduction makes governing with scientific and technical instruments both possible and contestable.     keywords governance, critical environmental justice, abstraction, surrogates, hosting, social reproduction     introduction my throat immediately constricted when i walked to a public meeting in october 2019 about the toxic air of san diego’s portside community (portside). i hocked, belatedly echoing my asthmatic mother’s expulsions from twenty years ago. struggling to locate the meeting venue, an elementary school, my eyes adjusted to the street’s unexpected darkness with the help of the speckled lights of neighboring industrial facilities. the ocean breeze drew particulate matter from the shipyards, navy facility, railyard, and highways, and joined me at the threshold of the school’s cafeteria just as its double doors burst open for the meeting. the room was filled with community representatives, including residents, environmental activists, business owners, port commissioners, and officials from the san diego air pollution control district (apcd). the most significant discussion that evening was how a new state bill could help portside collect granular data to alleviate its urgent problem of toxic air pollution. the politics of subsequently filling in for missing, unmeasurable, and compromised data while striving for environmental justice is the focus of this article. portside comprises barrio logan, logan heights, and sherman heights in san diego and west national city. the community has a predominant population of poor, chicanx and latinx residents. for instance, the barrio logan neighborhood comprises about 96 percent minority residents, 78 percent of residents characterized as low income, and about 75 percent living in rental properties. barrio logan has been a linchpin in many environmental justice (ej) efforts and chicanx uprisings in southern california, most significantly between the 1940s and 1960s to protest the city’s rezoning of the barrio that prioritized scrapyards, shipyards, and interstate 5 over its marginalized residents. ej highlights how marginalized communities disproportionately bear the burdens of exposure to pollutants (bullard 2000), and in barrio logan activists have organized against these burdens and fought for cleaner air in the community through a historically robust social infrastructure of organizers rooted in working-class and racial struggles. as a result of this existing social infrastructure, the state agency that oversees air regulations, the california air resources board (carb), selected portside as one of fifteen communities to pilot assembly bill 617 (ab 617) in 2019. also called the community air protection plan, ab 617 is a landmark piece of legislation california passed in 2017. it is the first to focus on toxic contaminants and criteria pollutants rather than greenhouse gases and the first in the united states to privilege community-scale monitoring to address air quality inequity by providing measurement resources to disadvantaged areas throughout california.   business-as-usual abstractions the ej movement in portside routinely confronts the regulatory regime, as it did with ab 617. the term regulatory regime refers to the ideas, institutions, tools, and policies that structure and govern social relations among community groups, the state, and the market through historically particular political-economic forces and bureaucratic measures (eisner 1993; levi-faur 2011). environmental governance is one such regulatory regime. the contemporary environmental regulatory regime converts and manages natural resources into public and private ones. it does so through command and control, a mechanism that purports to designate relationships of duty and enforcement—the duty not to pollute and the enforcement of this duty through technology-based standards and bureaucratic measures. however, as max liboiron has noted, this system effectively functions as a “permission to pollute,” where the environment is considered capable of coping with or “assimilating” contaminants up to a certain threshold, crossing which a contaminant becomes a pollutant (2021, 39). under this regime, in california, metrics such as “safe harbor levels” identify exposure levels of chemical contaminants that pose “no significant risk” to those exposed. command and control predominantly relies on trust in rational expertise, scientific objectivity, and data-driven tools—such as models and monitors—to anticipate and mitigate risk (beck 1992; eisner 1993; fortun 2012; porter 1992, 1996); to generate, manage, and operationalize data for regulation (edwards 2010; miller and edwards 2001); and to develop interdisciplinary encounters (garnett 2020). these mechanisms largely maintain the contours of industrial capitalism by prioritizing market-driven solutions (eisner 1993; sabin 2021; sinclair 1997). the tools create abstractions of relations between natural resources, human actions, and spatial configurations through technical experts’ representations (lefebvre 1991; loftus 2015). these abstractions translate the lived experience of impacted residents into discrete variables such as culpable chemical compounds, types of harm, and inventories of offending sources (fortun 2004; hepler-smith 2019). such classifications order social processes in ways that facilitate administrative processes but, in turn, make invisible various other forms of lived experiences and knowledge (bowker and star 1999). when the community members at the portside meeting in 2019 expressed a lack of toxic air pollution data at a granular scale, they followed this command-and-control approach to regulate the environment. this approach gives little critical attention to which data regulators collect, when they collect it, how this data informs technology-based regulations, and what work lies outside of standard regulatory practices. as feminist technoscience and critical data science increasingly interrogate the role of data and tools of abstraction to create and maintain just futures (costanza-chock 2020; dillon et al. 2019; fortun et al. 2016; mah 2017; taylor 2017; vera et al. 2019), this article conducts an intersectional feminist analysis of a specific kind of variable common in many regulatory data practices: the data surrogate or the proxy. scientific and technical knowledge production routinely relies on data surrogates to fill in for missing or immeasurable information. grounded in portside, this article yokes feminist science and technology studies (sts) and critical ej scholarship to interrogate how power circulates within the environmental regulatory regime’s data practices. rather than dismissing the role of the data surrogate as an incidental, intermediary, and abstracted stand-in for missing information, an intersectional feminist technoscience and critical ej approach considers seriously the material and embodied nature of surrogate work through the case of mediating environmental governance and justice. foregrounding regulatory-regime-fueled ej in more detail is imperative for a feminist analysis of the material and embodied power of data surrogates. in portside, as in many other latinx and chicanx neighborhoods in southern california, as ej scholars laura pulido, ellen kohl, and nicole-marie cotton (2016) and eric carter (2016) have found, ej groups and state agencies have historically attempted to work together via the regulatory regime with varying effects. similarly, ej activists in portside range in their approach. conservative activists enter well-established pipelines between serving in prominent ej groups to holding positions in municipal government or as port commissioners with the hopes of reforming the system; a handful of activists take a more radical approach, organizing to shift the power of governance back to communities. residents stay legible to the state through their service on various municipal and state ej committees while sustaining attempts to improve their scientific and technical understanding. however, when state agencies commit to ej within the regulatory regime, various social groups find themselves at impasses that stem from epistemological differences and incompatible frames (benford 2005), benchmarks and values (halvorson 2021), and prestructured relations between the state, market, and civil society (betsill and corell 2007; fox and brown 1998).   dealing with data gaps during such impasses, data-driven tools become mediators among social groups. as a result, an epistemic dependence on representative and accurate data challenges more radical forms of ej. in turn, ej becomes tethered to the regulatory regime’s standard portmanteau of tools in the name of scientific proof, data collection, and technological control. this portmanteau is rife with unmeasurable data and data gaps (murphy 2013; ottinger 2013; shapiro, roberts, and zakariya 2017), which technical experts fill in with data surrogates. the technical literature about data surrogates presents them as substitutes, demonstrating how certain unmeasurable or computationally intensive measurements can be replaced with more readily available ones or simulated data. in terms of data analysts, this data is either simulated through the statistical method of inference, where missing data is ascertained from an existing sampling distribution, or by imputation, which is the process of predicting missing data. such processes aim to maintain performance by ensuring adequate size of data sets. in air quality modeling, surrogates conflate categorical variables such as descriptions of activities such as “construction” with numerical ones such as “population.” they disaggregate data by temporalizing, speciating, and spatially allocating regional, area-wide emissions to a more granular scale to describe offending locations (adelman et al. 2015; boulton et al. 2002; li et al. 2021). this literature serves to maintain the momentum of the production of scientific knowledge by focusing on the computational mechanisms of fashioning one variable to replace another (forrester 2008) and best practices to develop surrogates quicker (boulton et al. 2002). in effect, substitutes are fungible. this treatment of fungibility, wherein one variable is considered replaceable with another, with minimal consequence, however, is deceptive. the supposed interchangeability of data surrogates masks the distribution of power and participation between various social groups through data operations. technocrats use these operations to perform all sorts of predictive functions that inform environmental policy and the distribution of resources to vulnerable communities. for example, in california’s modeling to determine the economic impacts of new environmental regulations using an input-output model, modelers proposed using “household income” data as a surrogate for “ethnicity” when ethnicity data was unavailable. this substitutive mode, while all too common, encompasses serious risks. by abstracting the full range of who does the work of data surrogacy, and the full scope of embodied and affective work that data surrogates do, a substitutive approach flattens structural issues, such as racism and the subversion of reproductive labor, into computationally suitable categories like “race” (chun 2021; pulido 2000) and “gender.” critical ej scholars also have argued against the collapse of differences of race, class, gender, ability, nativism, and speciesism in the broader ej movement. instead, they call for an intersectional examination of how power and domination within dominant categories of bureaucratic and administrative systems reproduce environmental inequalities (álvarez and coolsaet 2020; pellow and brulle 2005; pellow 2017). political ecologists have disparaged the predominantly liberal nature of the ej movement that prioritizes the distribution of environmental threats (swyngedouw and heynen 2003). however, a critical approach to ej combined with a feminist technoscience one avoids this trap by not merely focusing on liberal ideas of the redistribution of environmental threats but also on robust recognition and representation (fraser 1990) of marginalized lives in environmental struggles (schlosberg 2007), by following intersecting systems of oppression (sze 2020). this critical approach should also extend to examining the role of technical tools and data practices in mediating ej and regulation. as we will see in the portside case, the assumed fungibility of parameterized data impedes exposing forms of gendered and racialized extraction and subjugation within the regulatory regime. this exposure and the disaggregation of differences of what kinds of lived experiences finds their way into governance technologies and who creates it, with what visibilities, is vital to implementing just futures. in the following section, i argue that data surrogates bridge the predominantly parallel tracks of the tools of environmental governance and critical ej. in simplified terms, environmental governance focuses on controlling environmental threats through market mechanisms and technological solutions sanctioned by the state, and critical ej on multiscalar and multi-issue approaches to tackling social inequities regarding the environment (pellow 2017). through the portside case, i suggest the concept of hosting to replace substituting to analyze the work that data surrogates perform while filling in for data gaps and abjected data. here, i use abjected to refer to data that is compromised, discarded, ejected, and refused (both in terms of phenomena that refuse to be disciplined as data and the regulatory regime’s refusal to recognize the experiences of non-experts as data).1 this analytical shift reveals guest-host relationships, either invited or parasitic, which in turn distribute power, mediate cultural processes, and materialize historical trajectories to produce environments. while expositing the differences between substituting and hosting, i align with intersectional feminist scholars who challenge technical abstractions. instead, they attend to relations between the body and property (hartman 1997; mckittrick 2006), placing the corporeality of subjugated bodies at the center of social justice in the united states (pulido and de lara 2018), grounded in sites of refusal of oppressive systems that undermine life itself (davis 1972; weinbaum 2019). these scholars consider the body-self relationships of those they observe and of themselves, to produce accounts of “embodied data” (ellingson 2017). further, this feminist interception is analogous to the vast and generative feminist scholarship on “gestational surrogacy.” the analogy extends to how racialized and stratified forms of discrimination create abstractions of bodies and/as property within market systems that control reproduction (vora 2012), commodifying reproductive work as a “gendered afterlife of slavery” within systems of racial capitalism (weinbaum 2013, 438; twine 2011) that implicates certain bodies into a technological process of being cyborgs (lewis 2019). feminist analyses of gestational surrogacy not only offer ways to interrogate how repetitive labor is outsourced to robotic technologies (atanasoski and vora 2015) but also, as i will argue, to the supposed fungibility within data practices aimed at social justice. questioning the supposed fungibility of data surrogates interrogates the racial capitalist system of market and command-and-control forces that constrain the choices and consequences for certain bodies to participate within the regulatory regime’s data practices. considering data surrogates as substitutes lead to germinal questions posed by sts and media scholars about how proxy wars produce network ties, predictions, and errors that reproduce segregation and discrimination (chun 2018, 2021). however, seriously considering the non-fungibility of surrogates as hosts also reveals opportunities to interrupt the hegemonic regulatory regime.   challenging universalizing and replaceable abstractions: the operations of data surrogates throughout my fieldwork in portside, the regulatory regime’s demand for producing data out of environmental knowledge was unrelenting. an intersectional feminist and critical ej approach to examining the work that data surrogates do to fill this demand and make regulatory instruments usable reveals a partial typology of operations: calibrating, weighting, and validating. these are routine and vital operations in the emic—or culturally specific—practices of scientific and technical experts to produce stand-ins for data gaps. however, i show that in portside, the actors and relationships that perform these operations lie far beyond the domain and sites of scientific and technological expertise. i draw attention to how the regulatory regime’s tools that rely on abstractions normalize the gendered and racialized extraction of the surplus value (robinson 2005; weinbaum 2019) of the work of a broader conceptualization of data surrogates. i exposit and analyze these operations not merely to document them but to highlight opportunities where alternative epistemologies break through within and despite the existing regulatory regime.   calibrating in technical practices of using sensors and monitors, calibrating instruments is crucial to gather granular data. calibration minimizes error propagation by increasing data quality and usability. this operation occurs at the sensor manufacturing factory, the laboratory, and the field (gao 2022; giordano et al. 2021) and involves tuning the outputs of sensors to reference monitors through methods like momentary matching using drift detection algorithms and machine-learning models. however, when it comes to ej, calibrating to ensure usable, granular data is performed in many more ways. at the 2019 community meeting in portside, participants debated where to place air pollution detection monitors in their community’s mixed-use industrial and residential zone. although under the optimistic aegis of ab 617 at the time, public participation in air pollution monitoring had a long-standing and fraught precedent in portside. in 1999, as in 2019, regulatory monitors focused on toxic emissions of industrial production processes. back then, a chrome-plating facility in portside, master plating, became a site of contention. the facility was emitting hexavalent chromium (cr6), a known carcinogen, but within levels permitted by the environmental protection agency, office of environmental health hazard assessment, and apcd. the facility was in an area zoned as mixed-use industrial and residential; it was compliant. the facility sat within its property lines; it was compliant. as per local regulation, master plating was equipped with fume suppressants as control technology, and sensors did not pick up aberrant levels of cr6 during production; the facility was compliant. however, the residents’ experience was otherwise. those co-located with the facility noted a spike in asthma rates, particularly evidenced by a young boy who developed asthma within a few months of moving into a house adjacent to master plating (environmental health coalition 2004). local activists and residents assumed the role of data surrogates to fill in for what they were convinced were faulty or compromised sensor readings. a local ej group worked with residents and the state’s inspectors to add and reposition monitors to measure the facility’s emissions more accurately, at a whopping cost of $1 million. over the next few weeks, by tuning into the times of day and days of week when they sensed heightened emissions from the plating facility, the embodied surrogates highlighted a problem of time of exposure that the standard regulatory sensing practices missed. they noted that during “housekeeping activities” of dusting and sweeping on monday mornings, settled, toxic particulate matter was re-suspended in the air as “fugitive dust.” this fugitive dust was not detected during the regulatory inspections, and the fume suppressants within the production line had little effect on them. animated during “off hours” of production, the detected hexavalent chrome was at times 175 times higher than the statewide average (murchison, suer, and cook 2003). after multiple rounds of monitoring, carb and apcd conceded to the residents (lee 2005), and the county finally filed an injunction to shut down the chrome-plating facility. the residents and activists participated in the recalibration of the monitor-based sensor network in ways that far exceeded ensuring the accuracy of a sensor compared to reference monitors (ottinger 2010). in effect, the broader recalibration work constitutes what the feminist and postcolonial sts scholar sandra harding (1991) has called the “strong objectivity” program. strong objectivity upends illusions of “neutral” objectivity institutionalized by dominant institutions of western science to instead value knowledge produced from various standpoints that collectively produce something close to socially constructed accuracy. this approach amends how the knowing body is made distant by the “unregulated gluttony” and unrestricted vision of dominant instruments (haraway 1988, 581). additionally, rather than a statistically derived surrogate to substitute information about the emissions in the facility during the hours that the monitors were not collecting data, the specialized, embodied knowledge of the volunteers exposed significant gaps in the protocols of regulatory sensing. these embodied and sensorial labors filled in for missed data from inspectors who ignored emissions outside the primary plating process. as a result of this recalibration, carb revised their statewide regulatory requirements, included fugitive dust as a contributor to hexavalent chromium emissions, and re-evaluated the sufficiency of fume suppressants as a control mechanism (us epa 2002). this outcome did not result from merely technical calibrations. data surrogates are also calibrated to historical, place-based precedents of environmental harm through sensory tunings. for example, when a 40,000-ton, twenty-two-year-old amphibious us navy assault ship, the bonhomme richard, was set afire by a sailor in san diego in 2020, regulatory monitors failed to record adequate and timely data. the ship blazed for four days, injured forty sailors and twenty-three civilians, and polluted portside. in the absence of “real-time” scientific data, silence from the navy, jurisdictional confusion between agencies, and slow official incident response, the collective calibrations of residents generated surrogates for missing data to mobilize action. residents were alerted by “smelling that something was off” many hours before statements from san diego officials, rivaling the navy’s claims that all that was burning was “rags and paper.” a national city politician who had long championed ej for people of color in portside exclaimed that the smell instantly transported her to another historical fire at a wrecking yard in 1987. then in elementary school, she and over a thousand other schoolchildren were evacuated from their schools in portside. calibrated to these smells and their gravity, she mobilized action in her constituency thirty-three years later on the first whiff of smelling a mix of burning rubber and paint. calibrations thus bring nonrepresentational ways of being tuned to the world to drive action within sites beleaguered by struggles over power and knowledge recognition.2 portside members exposed to toxic pollutants were calibrated to environments differently than how scientific tools are tuned. in both the chrome plating case and the navy ship fire, specific bodies challenged privileged knowledge from monitors’ sensing mechanisms to recalibrate what the regulatory regime senses, when, and by whom. in effect, these surrogates were non-fungible.   weighting     figure 1. spatial allocation of emissions. area-wide emissions are allocated to geographically specific locations using weight values. diagram based on adelman et al. 2015.   data surrogates also perform the operation of weighting. within technical practices of air quality modelers, the weighting of surrogates is a statistical operation to disaggregate emissions data. this is not a straightforward process. in california’s air pollution modeling, the atmospheric modeling and support section of the modeling and meteorology branch at carb uses the us environmental protection agency’s spatial allocator tool combined with python scripts and modeling domains. they create, maintain, and regularly update a list of over a hundred spatial surrogates. modelers provide vector data in shapefiles or raster datasets comprised of geographic data objects in the form of points, lines, or polygons (adams and adelman 2016). they then use this data to assign weights to a surrogate to spatially allocate area-wide emissions to potential sources (boulton et al. 2002) since many emissions do not emerge from point sources. in doing so, they define a relationship between a data source of emissions and the geographic area to which modelers allocate the emissions (see figure 1). for every geographic area of interest (gai), n_gai is the number of available data sources such as monitor data and emission inventory data, and f_gai is the ith fraction within the gai for a particular grid cell (i,j), which must then sum to 1 (σ, or sigma, refers to a sum function). \(for \space gai \in state, \sum_{i=1}^{n_\_{gai}}f\__{gai_{i}} = 1 \) however, unrecognized by the regulatory regime, a significant form of weighting for disaggregation occurs outside such algorithms. the inability of models and monitors to provide data at a granular scale can hamstring the vital aggregation and disaggregation processes in standard regulatory practices. as a result, i extend the operation of weighting to explain the work of actors who unequally bear the burden of collecting and providing more granular data. for instance, in portside, the san diego apcd regularly enrolled “sensitive receptors” to do this work. sensitive receptor locations include schools and care centers for children, the elderly, or the sick, who are at a higher risk of air pollution harm. over the past few decades, apcd has installed regulatory monitors on these sites to collect data for better disaggregation of regional emissions. as kim fortun (2004) has found, standardized knowledge in the form of environmental information technologies like chemical inventories is routinely used to undermine the experiences of community members. in portside, industry representatives often downplayed the stories that sensitive receptors presented about children or the elderly having high rates of asthma or other respiratory conditions resulting from toxic portside air as anecdotal or overblown and joined the chorus to favor more “scientific data” instead. thus, in an ej neighborhood, sensitive receptors not only disproportionately experienced the harmful effects of pollutants but were also frequently enlisted by the regulatory regime to perform vulnerability and bear the responsibility to provide “scientific data.” the responsibility to generate scientific data for disaggregation often came at material costs that lay behind the scenes of the regulatory regime. regulatory monitoring stations are often large trailers installed atop concrete plinths. their size is a factor of specialized instruments to measure a variety of individual compounds or metals (nox, sox, cox, lead, arsenic, etc.). although ab 617 promises more granular monitoring, commissioning, and maintaining regulatory stations is no small task. this process includes establishing a memorandum of understanding with the site, procuring construction and temporary encroachment permits, obtaining an address for the trailer to access power from the power company, and procuring a contract with a lab to perform regular analyses of the data, all before building the station. these steps are time intensive, expensive, and involve multi-agency coordination. once the monitor is up and running, district inspectors must regularly maintain it. only after the monitors have collected a few years’ worth of data can scientists observe usable patterns to inform their responses to public concerns about the health impacts of exposure to pollutants. all this time, the sensitive receptors must maintain the trailer on their premises. in portside, the demands sensitive receptor locations faced to provide uninterrupted data often had negative consequences. the presence of a large regulatory monitoring station stymied the expansion plans of a local elementary school. as the sole public school in the low-income neighborhood of barrio logan, it needed to provide more room for grades 6 to 8 by placing portable classrooms on the property. to do so, the school had to build on its recreational space, where the monitoring station was also installed. while the school was eager to participate in the sensing network and was committed to the health of its community, it also had to contend with the fact that the station was taking up valuable space. notably, some school representatives also found the station to be “ugly” and noisy. after ten years of monitoring at this site, the san diego unified school district requested apcd to remove the monitoring station in 2016. it was subsequently moved to another elementary school a mile north. regulatory officers perceived such requests to decommission monitoring stations as uncooperative behavior. thus, when faced with missing or incomplete data, if calibrating exposes issues with sensing, weighting brings to light how certain social groups and their spaces unequally bear the burden to perform this sensitivity for the larger good of their community by collecting data, at all costs, for the unsatiable data needs of the regulatory regime.   moving from substituting to hosting: deepening a feminist analysis of data surrogates so long as models, monitors, and inventories serve as lodestars of the standard environmental regulatory regime, any attempt to develop more justice-oriented policies within this regime must confront the problem of missing, abjected, and immeasurable data and the use of surrogate data to resolve it. these data practices are products of and reproduce intersecting systems of oppression, by way of gatekeeping what counts and data, and who it is produced by. calibrating, weighting, and validating are just a few examples of the work data surrogates do. this paper has articulated what constitutes the broader range of data surrogates involved in filling in data gaps to then facilitate or interrupt the regulatory regime. a feminist sts analysis of surrogates critiques the acts of speaking for, standing-in, and representing bodies, sensory experiences, and environments. it questions how computational technologies negotiate human–machine relations, differences, and agency in ways that transform social interactions (suchman 2007), with specific attention to the embodied and affective labors of marginalized people like indigenous women who forge and maintain kinship relations with environments routinely go ignored in the making of “rational science” (harding 1991; 2008, 161). i build on the above research and more to conduct a situated analysis of data surrogates. data surrogates as substitutes rely on environmental relations drawn together by computational and statistical methods. these relationships build on the perceived universality of technical abstractions and symbolic representations, like lines of code. in this conception, a technical expert can swap out one discrete variable for another within mathematical equations. however, feminist scholarship teaches us that approximations such as surrogates do not come without contest because they mediate power relations and knowledge production (hinterberger 2007). learning from the portside case, i have suggested that the broader scope of surrogates and their work is evident by shifting the terms of their analysis from substituting to one of hosting. the former implies fungibility, and the latter resists this implication. hosting evades solely working in terms of technical abstractions by focusing on embodied, historically specific relationships in place (massey 1994; mohanty 1988). statistical operations of substitution in the regulatory regime hide the forces of racial capitalism and the undermining of gendered labor while maintaining the state’s operations (melamed 2011). hosting, on the other hand, accounts for sites where collective subversion and resistance can arise (ahmed 2010; hartsock 1983) and invisibilized labor and kinship relations recovered (hayden 2013). surrogates in environmental management can have ethical and political ramifications because they invoke that which is unknown or even unknowable (chun 2018; murphy 2004). these approximations can substitute one detrimental abstraction with another to sustain bureaucratic management while doing little to alleviate toxic exposures for those most disadvantaged (hepler-smith 2019). thus, while the concept of hosting does not make the data surrogate any less of a proxy, it does draw attention to the gendered and racialized relationships between body, place, and property in the regulatory regime that substitution misses. building on the portside case, this section summarizes the ways the above associations are embedded within and produced by hegemonic regulatory systems. hosting locates surrogate data in body and place. theorizing fungible bodies, saidiya hartman argues in scenes of subjection that captive slave bodies were made interchangeable, abstracted, and universalized “empty vessel[s]” (1997, 21). this fungibility converted bodies into property that extended the master’s reach and dominion (46). tiffany king (2016) then theorizes how “black fungibility” can serve as a way to analyze the spatial reach of domination. these analyses of the fungibility of subjugated bodies inform my argument that treating data surrogates as fungible allows actors of the regulatory regime to abstract historically specific material practices steeped in racial and class-based tensions to make them into computationally tenable parameters. purely computational surrogates, in turn, expand the regulatory regime’s spatial and epistemic reach and dominance, under the guise of state-sanctioned ej programs. in contrast, in the hexavalent chromium emissions case in portside, the surrogation work of data was performed by residents and volunteers. they served as corporeal hosts to the pollutants in place. by “letting the [subjugated] body speak” (hartman 1997, 22), they highlighted the shortcomings of the regulatory regime’s inspection protocols. in the case of the navy ship fire, by invoking the filter, marcia asserted her caregiving role and the presence of her husband’s subjugated body riddled with cancer and asthma into the patchy statistical data of municipal agents. her evidence of the filter interrupted the dominant data practices of the regulatory regime. as a data surrogate, she was not fungible. hosting also reveals and interrupts how the regulatory regime constructs property systems and rights. environmental regulation creates property rights of the air as a natural resource by converting open access to air into public property that is then subject to private access (cole 2002, 2011). the regulatory regime relies on the settler-colonial, “line-drawing” method of boundary-making to demarcate public and private property (banner 2009) based on zoning laws and industrial permits, as we saw in portside. these abstractions reduce geographic territory and the relations of bodies, land, and property to a spatial grid, as we saw in the operations of weighting through spatial surrogates. despite the evasive nature of airborne matter that is hard to pin down (choy 2018), mappings to spatial grids perpetuate a false sense of “fixity and stability” based on a sense of enclosure in the united states (blomley 2003; ellis 1993), rather than fluid constitutions (massey 1994). daniel h. cole and elinor ostrom (2010) have argued that regulatory resolutions use these boundaries to discipline residents to attach favorable relations towards property enclosures. it upholds one user’s property rights while imposing costs on others. indigenous feminist scholars such as mishuana goeman, on the other hand, have long resisted these fixities of capitalist formations, where “life force becomes abstracted as property” (2013, 205), instead considering lifeforms particular to place (goeman 2009) but also actively in transit through relations (byrd 2011). as such, surrogate as host maps more than mathematical and computational relationships of fungible land onto a gridded space. it sheds light on the material nature of the politicized relationships among points, lines, or polygons, and the bodies, land, and property they encode. these relations lie far beyond abstracted demarcations of zoning, property lines, and land-use types that are rendered in the regulatory regime. in the case of hexavalent chromium emissions in portside, hosts interrupted the abstracted boundaries and enclosures between public and private property when the life of disadvantaged communities was at stake. hosting thus shows the possibility of shifting power of whose property rights are upheld in the regulatory regime’s air pollution management through regulation. together, data surrogates as hosts shifts focus from the realm of production to that of social reproduction. social reproduction feminism explores the tensions between production and reproduction within social configurations that involve property and power relations (federici 2012; ginsburg et al. 1995; laslett and brenner 1989). data surrogates treated in terms of substituting within standard regulatory practices typically focus on production processes. hosting, on the other hand, helps explain the entrenchment of these operations within the realm of social reproduction, contributing to scholarship that theorizes ej as social reproduction (di chiro 2008). as shown above, operations such as calibrating, weighting, and validating that stand in for data gaps are performed by bodies in spaces associated with activities that replicate human life or labor power at the level of homes, neighborhoods, and communities at large. marxist feminists explore the everyday practices through which the reproduction of human life, labor power, and care and kinship relations are integral to social configurations of inequalities and capitalism itself (bhattacharya 2017; ferguson 2019). additionally, social reproduction is routinely performed by gendered and racialized labor (davis 1983); the same is evident in data surrogates. thus, although social reproduction is mired within a capitalist system, it also holds the possibility for social transformation by resisting and interrupting the capitalist regulatory regime, as we see in portside. as states recede from the public provisioning of caregiving, healthcare, education, and community development (bakker 2007) required of ej, data surrogates fill in vital operations. examining these operations in terms of hosting exposes the material commitments imposed on more-than-computational surrogates, the sites of exploiting racialized, gendered, and non-expert labor, and the ways sensorial and corporeal surrogates resist this exploitation. in portside, surrogates as hosts interrupt relations of power attributed to race, class, and gender in ej that are embedded in scientific and technical categories and tools. in other words, they interrupt the “racial regime” (robinson 2012) and gender oppression of the regulatory regime. hosting reveals the specificities of these relationships, challenges the assumptions of the work of data surrogates in standard governance, and, more crucially, points to the potential for rethinking the organization of social relations.   conclusion an intersectional feminist sts and critical ej analysis of data surrogates demonstrates their ability to interrupt and potentially cleave away from the dominant regulatory regime. in effect, it opposes the dominant regime's state-sanctioned racial and gendered violence (liboiron, tironi, and calvillo 2018; murphy 2017; pulido 2017). this article has argued that while data surrogates are also proxies, their work is better analyzed in terms of hosting rather than substituting. this shift exposes the dynamics of how data surrogates are grounded in body, place, and property relations. hosting draws attention to the politics of who bears the burden to fuel the sisyphean call for more data, onto which the regulatory regime grafts policies, programs, and regulations. through the case of environmental regulation in the portside environmental justice neighborhoods (portside) of san diego, i have developed a partial typology of operations that data surrogates perform: calibrating, weighting, and validating. my goal of drawing out the relations between missing, unmeasurable, and abjected data, and body, place, and property, is not merely to describe the historically specific and material nature of seemingly fungible abstractions through hosting but to instead explain and analyze how hosts can interrupt the socioecological organization of the regulatory regime. as the state, market, and civil society continue to iterate relations that promise ej, these reorganizational peregrinations of hosting reveal a subaltern and subjugated politics of the data surrogate. acknowledgements the author wishes to thank the community members in portside for their input over the course of this research and christo sims for thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft.   notes 1 abjection is a central concept in black feminist literature referring to the othering of entire populations in the service of capitalism through slavery and other forms of subjection. i’m particularly drawing from the conceptualizations of saidiya hartman (1997) and jodi a. byrd (2011). the abject is effectively bereft of subject-object relations with recognizable power.   2 anthropologists have theorized nonrepresentational ways of relating with environments through affect and attachment. kathleen stewart has developed the concept of “attunements” to attend to forms of perceptual awareness (stewart 2011, 446). atmospheric attunements through “conditions of suspension” (choy and zee 2015, 213) attend to how expert forms of sensing parse through phase-changes of particles.   references adams, liz, and zach adelman. 2016. “cmas spatial allocator user’s manual.” cmas center. https://github.com/cmascenter/spatial-allocator. adelman, z., b. naess, m. omary, l. ran, a. bar-ilan, t. shah, r. mason, et al. 2015. “recent updates to spatial surrogates for modeling u.s. emissions sources.” powerpoint slides from presentation at the 21st international emission inventory conference, april 14–16, 2015, san diego, ca. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-09/documents/adelman_pres.pdf. ahmed, sara. 2010. differences that matter: feminist theory and postmodernism. cambridge: cambridge university press. álvarez, lina, and brendan coolsaet. 2020. “decolonizing environmental justice studies: a latin american perspective.” capitalism nature socialism 31 (2): 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(2019). review of reinventing hoodia: people, plants and patents in south africa, by laura a. foster (university of washington press), catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5 (1), 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kara w. swanson, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license review reinventing hoodia: people, plants and patents in south africa, by laura a. foster (university of washington press, 2017) kara w. swanson northeastern university school of law k.swanson@northeastern.edu in june 2003, bbc two broadcast a report from south africa called “the anti-fat pill and the bushmen,” a title that crudely summarizes the rich stew of colonial past, postapartheid present, traditional knowledge, bioscience, intellectual property, western diet culture, and plants that laura foster’s reinventing hoodia tackles with nuance. foster uses historical and ethnographic methodologies within a feminist decolonial science studies framework to consider three meanings of the plant now classified in western science as hoodia. she begins with hoodia as an object of colonial science and as known to san peoples (whom the bbc referred to by their colonial designation “bushmen”). she then considers its “reinvention” through contemporary bioscience and law as a source of patents granted to scientists from south africa’s council for science and industrial research (csir) and as a cultivated herbal supplement advertised as an appetite suppressant to weight-conscious westerners (pp. 3-4). both the patents and the supplement offered the dream of almost unlimited riches through sales of an “anti-fat pill.” swanson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 as the bbc report highlights, these reinventions of hoodia have been an object of interest for over two decades among the media, scholars, and south african activists.1 foster brings expertise in both law and gender studies to the topic, as well as the fruits of nearly a decade of fieldwork. in the first book-length treatment of this long-running saga, reinventing hoodia evaluates the earlier hype and optimism that a benefit-sharing agreement between the san people and csir signed in 2003 would be a model for sharing the benefits of technoscience with indigenous groups. foster is an emerging leader in the use of postcolonial science studies to develop a feminist decolonial approach to technoscience, taking up challenges that have been discussed recently in catalyst and elsewhere.2 in this book, she uses four axes of analysis to link ways of knowing to the materialities of the plant in order to “reframe patent ownership as it has been understood within racialized, indigenous, and gendered colonial histories” (p. 10). to law and materiality, foster adds “scale,” as she follows plant from field to lab, and “belonging,” to consider not only citizenship in postapartheid south africa but also ownership and attachment (pp. 10, 16). she sets herself the goal of using her analysis of hoodia’s reinvention to identify “possible sites of intervention in patent law” and to identify better ways of “doing and governing scientific research through benefit sharing” (p. 6). to meet this challenge, foster concludes the book with two brief appendices, one offering information on community protocols and guidelines for working with indigenous peoples, and the other a collection of legal arguments for use by indigenous peoples in challenging a us patent in court (pp. 133–36). the csir began to seek patents related to hoodia in the early 1990s, and then partnered with pharmaceutical companies to create an anti-obesity drug. a public controversy about the commercialization of the traditional knowledge of san peoples in south africa that hoodia could serve as an appetite-suppressant and digestive aid led to the benefitsharing agreement between the csir and the san council. foster began her research in 2008, when that triumphalist moment turned sour as the csir lost its first international commercialization partner. she followed a swanson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 second commercialization attempt and the rise of a herbal supplement market for hoodia as an unregulated weight-loss aid. to date, there have been no riches for the san people from hoodia. foster’s primary research modality was ethnographic, and she uses interviews with members of key communities to structure each of the book chapters: san people, non-san south african scientists, and afrikaner farmers. she explains that she interviewed san people in ways that attempted to avoid reinscribing colonial categories and hierarchies, an example of her feminist decolonial theoretical approach translated into practice. she supplements her interviews with examination of the materialities of the laboratory, the field, the law, and the market. these materialities include the text of patents and other legal documents, scientific practices, and hoodia plants in the veld and under cultivation, as well as on websites and product labels. the rich source material, and foster’s attention to the colonial past and postapartheid present, makes for interesting reading and persuasive analysis. the few limitations of foster’s book lie in its ambitious peripheries. the historical aspects are the least well-developed and include a few errors. for example, an opening timeline of events cites the 1710 statute of anne as “further establishing modern patent law” in great britain (p. xvii). the statute of anne is, rather, the basis of modern copyright law. her second appendix, “strategies for patent litigation,” consists of a few paragraphs of legal arguments that she suggests might be used by indigenous peoples seeking to invalidate patents under us law, suggesting the courtroom as one of the “sites of intervention” she seeks. while the courtroom is such a site, the appendix is so cursory that it is of limited practical use. a bibliography of the most relevant legal scholarship and cases might have been more helpful to those seeking to craft legal arguments if foster’s goal is to provide ammunition for future legal challenges. for scholars who wish to build on foster’s efforts to critically examine postcolonial nations, indigenous peoples, intellectual property, and benefit sharing, however, she does provide such information. foster deliberately and generously collects the prior scholarship on the san-hoodia controversy as well as the swanson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 interdisciplinary scholarship that informed her theoretical position, which will provide a valuable starting point to others pp. (138-45). in the best traditions of interdisciplinary scholarship, foster has written a book that is both theoretically sophisticated and accessible. as such, the book will interest scholars of intellectual property, south africa, colonialism, and science and technology studies (sts), and will contribute to the growing body of feminist sts scholarship represented by the university of washington press’s feminist technoscience series, to which reinventing hoodia is a notable addition. notes 1 for examples of scholarship about hoodia, see wynberg (2004); vermeylen (2007); swanson (2007); wynberg, schroeder, & chennells (2009); and osseo-asare (2014). 2 for foster’s earlier work in postcolonial and decolonial science and technology studies (sts), see foster (2016); and subramaniam, foster, harding, roy, & tallbear (2017). for feminist decolonial sts, see lyons, parrenas, & tamarkin (2017); and pollock & subramaniam (2016). references bbc news. (2003, may 15). the anti-fat pill and the bushmen. bbc news correspondent. retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/correspondent/3031063.stm foster, l. a. (2016). a postapartheid genome: genetic ancestry testing and belonging in south africa. science, technology and human values, 41(6), 1015-1036. lyons, k., parrenas j., & tamarkin, n. (2017). engagements with decolonization and decoloniality in and at the interfaces of sts. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(1), 1-47. swanson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 osseo-asare, a. d. (2014). bitter roots: the search for healing plants in africa. chicago, il: university of chicago press, pp. 165-198. pollock, a., & subramaniam, b. (2016). resisting power, retooling justice: promises of feminist postcolonial technosciences. science, technology and human values, 41(6), 951-966. subramaniam, b., foster, l., harding, s., roy, d., & tallbear, k. (2017). feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. in u. felt, r. fouché, c. a. miller, & l. smith-doerr (eds.), the handbook of science and technology studies (4th ed., pp. 407-34). cambridge, ma: mit press. swanson, t. (2007). the existence of the right to traditional knowledge in medicinal systems: from hoodia to frog slime. manchester journal of international economic law, 4(1), 52-85. vermeylen, s. (2007). contextualizing ‘fair’ and ‘equitable’: the san’s reflections on the hoodia benefit-sharing agreement.” local environment, 12(4): 423-436. wynberg, r. (2004). rhetoric, realism and benefit-sharing: use of traditional knowledge of hoodia species in the development of an appetite suppressant. journal of world intellectual property, 7(6), 851-876. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1796.2004.tb00231.x wynberg, r., schroeder, d. & chennells, r. (eds.). (2009). indigenous peoples, consent and benefit sharing: lessons from the san-hoodia case. new york, ny: springer. bio kara w. swanson, jd/phd is a professor of law at northeastern university whose research interests include intellectual property, gender and sexuality, the history of science, medicine, and technology, and legal history. her most recent book is banking on the body: the market in blood, milk and sperm in modern america (harvard university press, 2014). chao, sophia (2020). review of matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds, by maría puig de la bellacasa (university of minnesota press, 2017). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), pp. 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sophia chao, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds, by maría puig de la bellacasa (university of minnesota press, 2017) sophia chao university of sydney sophie.chao@sydney.edu.au drawing from over forty years of empirical and theoretical work in science and technology studies (sts), feminist studies, ethical theory, and environmental humanities, maría puig de la bellacasa’s matters of care offers a speculative exploration of the significance of care for thinking, knowing, and living in more than human worlds (p. 1). puig de la bellacasa demonstrates that expanding the scope of worlds beyond the human both extends and challenges notions of care that have all too often been tethered to idealizing, moralizing, gendered, hegemonic, and anthropocentric values, practices, and institutions. she highlights the centrality of care—both given and received—to human and other beings, while also attending critically to care’s ambivalent and situated meaning, enactment, and consequences. far from an innocent venture, care reveals itself decidedly non-innocent, non-symmetrical, and multi-lateral (p. 221). these premises motivate puig de la bellacasa to approach care both as a modality and object of speculation, which in turn shapes the book’s central argument that “an ethical reorganization of human–nonhuman relations is vital, but what this means in terms of caring obligations that could enact nonexploitative forms of togetherness cannot be imagined once for all” (p. 24). the book is structured as five chapters divided into two parts. part i engages with book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sophia chao, 2020 2 feminist and sts theory to examine the politics of thinking and knowing in the more than human worlds of technoscience. articulated around bruno latour’s notion of “matters of concern,” chapter 1 approaches care as an oppositional practice that at once troubles the democratic assembly of articulate concerns, foregrounds exclusions and suffering within this assembly, and fosters alternative, possible affective involvements with the more than becomings of science and technology. engaging a feminist vision of care in the politics of things, puig de la bellacasa suggests, both enables and problematizes the possibility of translating ethico-political caring into ways of thinking with nonhumans (pp. 31–39). drawing from donna haraway’s notion of situated knowledges, chapter 2 explores how to “think with care” through a series of three concrete moves (pp. 78–84). “thinking-with” entails acknowledging the intra-actions and relationality of each person, being, and thing with each other, in ways that allow us to move beyond fixed and bounded categories and wholes. “dissenting-within” enables a non-idealized vision of care and knowledge-making—one that does not preclude conflict, difference, and incommensurability. “thinking-for” draws attention to the risks of fetishization and appropriation entailed in attempting to think and act from the perspective and on behalf of, nonhumans. the notion of non-idealized care returns in chapter 3, which explores knowledge politics by reading caring, thinking, and knowing as touch. touch or haptics, puig de la bellacasa suggests, enables us to reframe care as a force distributed across a multiplicity of agencies and materials. it brings to light the ambivalences of caring knowledge as an intensification of involvement and proximity, and its distributed consequences for human and nonhuman parties. touch’s unique quality of reversibility—namely, the fact that we cannot touch without being touched—also puts the question of reciprocity, both achieved and unrequited, at the heart of thinking and living with care (pp. 114–20). shifting away from the predominantly theoretical approach of the first half of the book, part ii draws from puig de la bellacasa’s empirical research on permaculture practices and human–soil relations to examine care in relational webs of more than human living ecologies. chapter 4 explores how the ecological movement known as permaculture displaces traditional understandings of the ethical expounded in ethical theory, postconventional and poststructuralist ethical approaches, and biopolitics. specifically, ethical obligations once defined in relation to anthropocentric moral principles transform into obligations that are embedded in the vitality and potentiality of material forces themselves. puig de la book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sophia chao, 2020 3 bellacasa offers the concept of “alterbiopolitics” to describe the ethics of collective empowerment that permaculture invites. this ethics recognizes how nonhuman entities alternately enable or constrain the continuation of bios as a more than human community, and “puts caring at the heart of the search of everyday struggles for hopeful flourishing of all beings” (pp. 22, 130). the fifth and final chapter examines divergent yet interconnected ways of caring for the soil through the lens of “temporalities of care.” drawing from scientific research and other domains of soil practice, puig de la bellacasa explores how the pace required by ecological relations with soils sits at odds with accelerated, future-oriented responses characteristic of the pace of technoscientific innovation (pp. 195 –203). making time for care time, puig de la bellacasa suggests, serves to disrupt the anthropocentric, technoscientific, productionist, and future-driven nature and telos of these temporalities, paving the way for alternative practical, ethical, and affective ecologies of care. matters of care grapples with the concomitant challenges of decentering human agency as the starting point of care, keeping specific ethical obligations, and thickening the meanings of care within the situatedness of more than human relations (pp. 217–18). puig de la bellacasa navigates these difficult terrains by drawing from established bodies of literature and from her own personal trajectories of thinking and feeling, making for a work that is at once intellectually rich and richly biographical. she examines with great nuance the potential pitfalls of framing care as a moral imperative and approaches care instead as openended, messy, and situated in both form and effect. rather than seeking to define a normative framework of what counts as good, necessary, or warranted care (p. 7), puig de la bellacasa attends critically to the tensions at play in reconciling care as labor/work, affect/affections, and ethics/politics (p. 5). central to puig de la bellacasa’s analysis is the method of “displacement.” displacement entails exploring care in issues and debates in which it has not frequently been addressed—in this case, technoscience and naturecultures. displacement also involves examining how divergent modes of valuing care coexist and co-make each other within uneven hierarchies of power and agency (p. 12). thinking about care through and as displacement in turn highlights care’s potential to subvert the status quo, to destabilize the moral strictures of ethical questioning, and to nurture a recognition that no definitive critique or “outside” point of view on care is either possible or indeed desirable (p. 11). the notion of “displacement” deployed by puig de la bellacasa offers fruitful avenues to rethink book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sophia chao, 2020 4 other concepts within and beyond the remit of care—violence, relationality, entanglement, and more. while most of the content of book has already been previously published, the book is nonetheless helpful in synthesizing puig de la bellacasa’s work into one, conceptual whole. chapters 1 to 3 are self-avowedly theoretical, and sometimes difficult to follow because of their high level of abstraction. chapters 4 and 5 offer more empirically grounded materials and arguments that are not only easier to grasp but also more in line with the notion of care itself as, in puig de la bellacasa’s terms, “unthinkable in abstract terms and outside of its situatedness” (p. 6). as is often the case with more than human theorizing, the book could have usefully engaged in more depth with the politics of care at play in the context of race, sexuality, colonialism, and their differential and hierarchized classifications of what or who counts as human, subhuman, or nonhuman. useful works to read in conjunction with matters of care in this regard might include claire kim’s dangerous crossings (2015), which explores how race and species operate as conjoined and mutually constitutive logics; arturo escobar’s pluriversal politics (2019) on care and the politics of the possible in social activism and more than human worlds; eva giraud’s what comes after entanglement? (2019) on hierarchies of care and responsibility; and hi’ilei hobart and tamara kneese’s special issue in social text (2020) on “radical care” in feminist, queer, and black activism. the coda to the book leaves the reader with some of the important and troubling questions to ask of care. for instance, is associating care with ethicality a form of anthropocentrism? is the notion that other than humans participate in “taking care” of the more than human world merely a wishful and anthropomorphic metaphor? can there be reciprocity in affective care, however uneven, with other than human beings? (p. 218). while puig de la bellacasa leaves these questions open for further investigation, she speaks with conviction to the need for “speculative thinking,” “fabulation,” “multispecies imaginaries,” and “multiple stories,” and “ethical imagination” to resist the paralyzing politics of despair that can so often haunt discussions around care (pp. 219–20). such methods may not necessarily reconfigure practices of care in the immediate present. but they are nonetheless critical if care and its subjects/objects are to resist domination by hegemonic, unilinear, and productionist narratives (p. 221). references escobar, a. (2019). pluriversal politics: the real and the possible. duke university press. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) sophia chao, 2020 5 giraud, e. h. (2019). what comes after entanglement? activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion. duke university press. hobart, hi’ilei j. k., & kneese, t., (eds.) (2020). radical care [special issue] social text, 38 (1). https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/issue/38/1%20(142) kim, c. j. (2015). dangerous crossings: race, species, and nature in a multicultural age. cambridge university press. author bio sophie chao is a postdoctoral research associate at the university of sydney’s school of philosophical and historical inquiry. her research examines the intersections of capitalism, ecology, health, and indigeneity in indonesia. okune, angela (2020). review of cooking data: culture and politics in and african research world, by crystal biruk (duke university press, 2018). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), pp. 1–3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © angela okune, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | cooking data: culture and politics in an african research world, by crystal (cal) biruk (duke university press, 2018) angela okune university of california, irvine aokune@uci.edu an ethnography of survey research in malawi, cooking data traces the social lives of numbers, demonstrating how the making of quantitative global health data requires a sociotechnical knowledge infrastructure to manage the people, places, and things that characterize the messiness of fieldwork. the work describes demographers’ efforts at standardization and “quality control” that are established to achieve a goal of “clean” data. but in exploring the everyday relations between persons, data, technologies, and infrastructure, the book reveals that the making of such “good” data requires creativity and tinkering as much as harmonization and consistency. in other words, the book demonstrates how all data is in fact “cooked” or produced by unique processes and practices of production. the book’s middle three chapters in particular foreground the expertise and importance of fieldworkers who are key to ensuring that data collection proceeds smoothly and that produced data is deemed objective, clean, and consumable, as determined by survey research standards. such data standards make possible the stable and fixed numerical representation of everyday sociocultural entanglements. building on work from science and technology studies that has revealed the ways in which classification systems and standards are politically and ethically charged, biruk complicates the assumed binary categories of “raw” and “cooked” data, illustrating the co-production of book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela crandall okune, 2020 2 quantitative health data and their social worlds. for example, two extended vignettes in chapter 5 demonstrate how even after the collection of boxes upon boxes of data (evinced by the powerful cover image), the numbers underlying “evidence-based” claims in policy research are never stable. despite being considered the final representative form of knowledge, biruk demonstrates how survey numbers continue to undergo transformation as they travel between actors with different goals across multiple scales of the research assemblage. the continued relevance of biruk’s work is clear in the midst of the global covid19 pandemic. some local and national leaders have espoused a “data-driven” approach to reopening their economies, while others have leveraged a lack of data to downplay the significance and severity of the pandemic. such examples reinforce biruk’s point that the epistemological rigor of numbers does not in fact determine whether they become mobilized (or ignored) as “evidence.” rather, evidence is “as cooked in its sites of consumption as it is in in its sites of production” (p. 199). at a time when trust in numbers is increasingly shaken, biruk offers nuanced insights on the production of numbers that prompts discussion about the role of feminist science studies to both critically examine how numbers attain their authority and simultaneously build capacity for fact-based decision making in a post-truth era where powerful leaders intentionally spread harmful misinformation. biruk explores this tension between “being useful” and “being critical” in the book’s conclusion, suggesting that the enduring potential of an ethnographic mode of critique lies in the figure of the fieldworker “betwixt and between” (p. 210) who, well aware of the ambiguities and blind spots on which dichotomies are built, navigates them carefully but without resolution. reflecting importantly on the non-innocence of the discipline of anthropology and their own complicity within the research apparatus, biruk asks anthropologists of science to pay attention to how our own data is also cooked, encouraging scholars to cultivate an awareness of the kinds of evidence we too often take for granted: “how might we provoke ourselves to imagine ways of being anthropological that are not governed quite so much by either the compulsion to critique and/or to be useful in particular ways?” (p. 213). beyond advising how to “make global projects work better” (p. 201), social scientists of science are well positioned to practice and experiment on how we might begin to do “data” differently ourselves. given that, as biruk points out, anthropologists “take their time, celebrate messy or dirty data, and see questions not as conclusively answerable…but as provocations of new questions” (p. 203), how might we begin to model, experiment, and cook our own data differently? book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) angela crandall okune, 2020 3 in a somatosphere book forum interview, biruk explains that “ethnography is itself a practice of care that can model how obligation, fragile solidarities, and complicities are enabling as much as constraining” (tichenor, mika, & droney, 2019, p. 18). building on this formulation of ethnography, can we practice caring for our own ethnographic data and research relationships in such a way as to “reshuffle and undo the fixity of taken for granted concepts [like data] that structure global health worlds” (tichenor, mika, & droney, 2019, p. 18)? the moment is ripe for disciplines like anthropology whose data is often considered “clunky [and] complex” (biruk, 2018, p. 213) to study and develop sociotechnical data systems that push our discipline and others in new directions, not in search of the “best solution,” which we know is a futile aim, but towards decolonizing existing global knowledge systems and engendering new forms of research relationships. reference tichenor, m., mika, m., & droney, d. (2019). book forum: crystal (cal) biruk’s cooking data, ramah mckay’s medicine in the meantime, and noémi tousignant’s edges of exposure. somatosphere. http://somatosphere.net/2019/book-forumcooking-data-medicine-in-the-meantime-edges-of-exposure.html/ author bio angela okune is a doctoral candidate in the anthropology department at the university of california, irvine. she studies data practices and infrastructures of research groups working in and on nairobi, kenya, to explore broader questions of equity, knowledge production, and socioeconomic development in africa. berkhout, suze g., & juveria zaheer. 2021. “digital self-monitoring, bodied realities: recasting app-based technologies in first episode psychosis.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–27. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © suze g. berkhout & juveria zaheer, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license digital self-monitoring, bodied realities: recasting app-based technologies in first episode psychosis suze g. berkhout university health network, the university of toronto suze.berkhout@uhn.ca juveria zaheer centre for addiction and mental health, the university of toronto juveria.zaheer@camh.ca abstract smartphone technology has seen expanding interest across nearly all areas of medicine, including psychiatry. this paper discusses the burgeoning use of digital technologies for symptom monitoring in the field of first episode psychosis. drawing on foucauldian theory as well as intersectional feminist materialist and critical disabilities scholarship in science and technology studies (sts), we trace a novel landscape of technologies of the self. we explore the discursive strategies that position first episode psychosis and digital technology as progressive, curative paradigms and utilize our own ethnographic work within the field of first episode psychosis to consider how lived experience is transformed within and through digital technologies. we trouble the unfettered enthusiasm for digital technologies in first episode psychosis in light of how these transformations can be understood within a larger neoliberal political rationality and demarcate the importance of having intersectional feminist sts scholarship attend to this burgeoning field. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 2 it was so devastating. um, it was shocking because it’s like i spent three years in psychosis, like three years. yeah, like, with wasting my life. and i mean it wasn’t my fault in many ways, but it’s like, you know? i…like…it just, it was, there are no words to describe how i felt. —sam introduction the incredible breadth of app-based and smartphone technologies relating to mental health is continuously growing: from mindfulness meditation, to interpersonal and social rhythms, to mood and medication tracking, to distress tolerance and coping skills—digital self-monitoring applications exist for nearly all diagnostic categories and across therapeutic modalities. at the individual level, the aim of such technologies is often a “more active and empowered” patient (van os et al. 2017, 481–482), which is frequently seen as being achieved through “giving voice” to their experiences (allen 2016, 42). digital technologies are also lauded for the wealth of biometric data they can track with relative ease (allen 2016; hollis et al. 2015, 263; d’arcy et al. 2020). mobile digital technologies are employed both as interventions for ill health and as a means of generating novel information for psychiatrists about patients and pathologies (pickersgill 2019, 16). proponents of digital technologies in mental health have suggested that digital care tools provide a way to capture clinical presentations more robustly, which could translate into more accurate diagnostic practices and more meaningful interventions (torous et al. 2019, 269–71). such perspectives frame digital technologies as offering opportunities for collaborative practices in relation to diagnosis, promising innovative engagement strategies, increased efficiency, and greater control by patients over the medical knowledge and practices that impact them (banner 2017, 1–2). these latter objectives—surrounding diagnosis and intervention—are prominent within the field of first episode psychosis. first episode psychosis (fep) refers to an early point in time in the diagnosis and management of psychotic illnesses stemming from a range of potential causes (breitborde, srihari, and woods 2009). as a result of illness demographics, fep program are geared toward late adolescents and young adults and integrate symptom monitoring, medication management, and a host of psychosocial interventions such as educational and vocational supports. here, we see a rising interest in the use of digital platforms not only for patient self-management, but for assessment of symptom domains as well (ben-zeev et al. 2014; bell et al. 2018). self-monitoring technologies in fep increasingly serve as proxies for digitized behavioral “phenotypes” (firth and torous 2015). and it is this tracking of phenomenological data that the digital psychiatry literature references as capturing lived experience (torous et al. 2019, 269).1 special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 3 in what follows, we explore the growth of digital care tools based on ecological momentary analysis (ema) and its related technology, experience sampling method (esm). these are used in both clinical and research settings within the fep context to collect indices of behavior, cognition, and/or emotion in near real time through electronic devices (trull and ebner-priemer 2009, 457). we focus specifically on claims that digital care technologies offer a means of giving voice to the heterogeneity of lived experience. examining the rhetoric and discursive strategies within this literature, we draw on foucauldian technologies of the self and insights from feminist materialist thought within science and technology studies (sts), bringing these in conversation with crip technoscience scholarship and mad studies. we suggest that understanding digital technologies in fep within these theoretical frameworks makes evident two concerns. first, a deep resonance exists between rhetorics surrounding digital technologies and first episode psychosis: those of futurity and progress, which extoll what has been termed “biomedical virtue” (pickersgill 2019, 17). both fields also espouse what meryl alper has identified as a technophilic rhetoric of revolution that embraces paternalistic discourses of technology as an “equalizer” (2017, 2). despite claims of giving voice to those struggling with mental distress, we argue that these overlapping discourses are part of what is called the curative imaginary (kafer 2013), which renders certain aspects of lived experience illegible, and disability inevitably in need of intervention. second, we consider claims that self-management through digital technologies is a mobilization of a neoliberal political rationality, particularly through the responsibilizing of citizens. this claim, offered from a range of scholars within sts, bioethics, medical anthropology, and sociology of medicine, takes on different meaning in the context of the early intervention (ei) paradigm within which fep operates. within the ei framing of fep, responsibilization and healthism are also seen as normative developmental tasks for young adults experiencing psychosis. such tasks are facilitated by the digital platforms in question, naturalizing neoliberal assumptions concerning “health” behaviors and undercutting critical or dissenting views of such technologies. this naturalization of neoliberal presuppositions likewise contributes to the curative imaginary that structures fep services. we develop these arguments through a granular view—interrogating digital care tools in fep through what rose galvin has called the “micro-political technologies of health” (2002, 127). in the context of a three-year ethnographic study within a fep program in toronto, canada, we explore how the curative imaginary has both material effects upon individuals who utilize early intervention services and materializes its own forms of distress, particularly through the narrowing of experience into symptom domain and psychiatric nosology. we argue that a parallel issue of epistemological narrowing may likewise be generated by the special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 4 digital platforms themselves, giving pause to some of the unfettered enthusiasm for self-monitoring technologies in fep. we also take seriously crip technoscience insights that explore how, in certain instantiations, technologies can also facilitate the imagining of alternate visions of care (banner 2019) as well as new and different temporalities and socialities for disabled people (hartblay 2015). specifically, our ethnographic encounters in the fep clinic suggest that endorsements of monitoring technologies as giving “voice” to lived experience miss a larger issue of health politics. when biodata is seen as somehow speaking for itself while serving as a proxy for the complexity of experiential knowledge, challenges of epistemic injustice arise. lived experience, in this context, serves as knowledge only when translated through expert-designed tools (swartz 2018, 66). we then discuss the challenge of epistemic injustice within digital technologies, understanding these challenges in relation to intersectional axes of social power while also recognizing how these might offer potentially novel, meaningful forms of healthcare engagement. grappling with this tension is of critical importance in light of the expansion of such platforms in clinical and research environments. study setting, historical context our analysis of the emerging trend toward employing digital technologies in fep is part of a larger study that has examined socio-historical, experiential, and biological narratives of fep, along with the early intervention (ei) paradigm that structures this field. although it is now widely recognized as a gold standard clinical organizing concept, fep has not always been part of the psychiatric lexicon. as berkhout (2018) describes, the concept of fep emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arising as a foil to chronic, multi-episode schizophrenia. fep has become a clinical organizing concept through interrelated networks of researchers and psychiatric professionals based primarily within north america, western europe, and australia.2 valued for the opportunities it offered researchers into the natural history, prognostication, and disease mechanisms of schizophrenia-spectrum illnesses, fep is embedded within the ei paradigm, a concept that extends through learning and other disabilities (berkhout 2018). ei holds that the earlier the intervention, the better the prognosis for recovery or reduced morbidity through the provision of treatment early in an illness course (csillag et al. 2016, 540). a fairly large body of data in fep suggests that the longer the duration of untreated illness, the worse the clinical outcome (perkins et al. 2005; loebel et al. 1992). fep clinical programs are organized, then, to provide the earliest possible interventions for psychotic-spectrum illnesses (antipsychotic medications, psychoeducation, family support, vocational training), limiting the duration of untreated illness (mcgorry et al. 2008). most fep clinical programs provide approximately two to three years of multidisciplinary and coordinated specialist services, before individuals “age out” of the programs and return to care-as-usual (nami 2016). special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 5 it is in the setting of a large fep clinic in toronto, canada, that we have carried out a three-year study (the psychosis narratives project). our critical qualitative approach is based in ethnographic and narrative inquiry, informed by theoretical frameworks of feminist materialism, postcolonial theory, and disability studies (willey 2016; tallbear 2017; pitts-taylor 2016; lupton 2019; schalk 2017). as we describe elsewhere, this study entailed a number of onto-ethico-epistemological commitments: that “fundamental” human processes (such as self or emotion) are invariably mediated by culture and context (jenkins 2004); the importance of “experience-near” categories, understanding these can only be known incompletely (kleinman 1995); attention to social meanings, practices, discourses, and interpretations as meaningful data; a commitment to account for the social and symbolic processes and meanings in all domains of knowledge generation; and that the social, political, and cultural narratives that shape subjective experience are structured by legacies of colonialism and imperialism, intersecting with other aspects of identity, including gender and (dis)ability (berkhout, zaheer, and remington 2019, 447). our larger project was guided by the importance of attending to these intersectional aspects of identity and of questioning the contexts and histories that shape the intelligibility and conditions of possibility for understanding so-called objects of science. in total, thirteen fep service users, seven family members, and five staff members took part in a series of longitudinal open-ended narrative interviews. we engaged in numerous informal interviews during periods of participant observation and at events such as fep conferences and workshops. observational fieldwork was carried out within the fep clinic setting, including clinic appointments, follow-up visits, family psychoeducation groups, research meetings, conferences, and staff meetings. it was from our observational fieldwork that the claims surrounding digital care apps became of interest to us, both in relation to claims made about these (e.g., as important tools in research settings) and what we saw to be the increasing presence of such apps in the larger field of fep as our study went on. a final component has been a series of visual arts-based workshops with service user participants. here, we explored the limits of narrative-based methods for understanding psychosis through the creation and witnessing of art/mark-making that expressed what was “unspeakable” about psychosis (see berkhout and stern 2019). data presented in this paper were analyzed collaboratively between berkhout and zaheer, within a reflexive, interpretivist-constructivist frame;3 findings were discussed within the larger research team and member-checked through informal interviews within the clinic. the project was approved by the research ethics board at the centre for addiction and mental health (camh) where the work was carried out (camh reb 098-2014). special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 6 digital psychiatry: from “phenotype” to lived experience the first published trial describing the feasibility and validity of using smartphone technology for the assessment of psychotic symptoms was reported in 2012 (palmier-claus et al. 2012). since that time, numerous applications and mobile health technologies have been developed and tested. most of these have had the explicit goals of improving diagnosis, symptom monitoring, and treatment uptake and adherence (firth and torous 2015, 2). in this paper, we focus specifically on the phenomenological research tool termed “ecological momentary analysis” (ema). ema is often used synonymously with a related tool, the “experience sampling method” (esm).4 ema/esm are defined by their use of digital platforms (typically via smartphone applications) to track behavior and phenomenological experiences as people move through the world in near real time. ema/esm typically entail structured data collection techniques where individuals respond to randomly timed repeat assessments while carrying out their day-to-day lives (trull and ebner-priemer 2009, 457). data is generated by inquiries into emotions, contexts (where are they, with whom, events happening), activities, food/alcohol or other substances/medications, aspects of psychopathology, somatic symptoms, and stress (van os et al. 2017, 482). this can take the form of responding to particular questions with different emoticons to represent emotional states or replying to prompts using a likert-type scale (e.g., “this activity is difficult for me”). sampling is designed to be completed within one to two minutes, to minimally disrupt a service user’s daily routine. items sampled are meant to be those that vary momentarily (i.e., states), rather than items that reflect a more stable or enduring “trait” (van os et al. 2017, 482). ema/esm technologies have exploded within the area of early intervention— notably in relation to “activating” service users with respect to their own treatment and assessment, while providing “in-the-moment reports not subject to memory biases and ‘global evaluation’ distortions” (van os et al. 2017, 482– 483). the framing of technologies in early intervention is similar to literature surrounding self-monitoring technologies in youth across a range of other psychiatric diagnoses (e.g., depression), which postulate that such tools assist young people in understanding their mental health symptoms through emotional self-awareness (kauer et al. 2012) as well as increasing their insight into the need to seek professional supports (rickard et al. 2016).5 ema/esm technologies are simultaneously lauded for their ability to collect biodata through methods that require minimal insight or subjective report from users, for instance, through global positioning systems or accelerometers that correspond to social and physical activity (kauer et al. 2012; torous et al. 2018). to understand this apparent incongruency, it is worth citing at length from one such paper: reports, often in diary format, are completed several times per day usually at random intervals with the goal of capturing a patient’s state in “their natural setting.” esm offers several advantages over special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 7 retrospective recollections of patient symptoms. first, it reduces the need to rely on episodic memory, which can be unreliable. second, it creates the potential to capture transient, randomly occurring symptomatic experiences. third, it allows a better understanding of daily fluctuations and patterns of change anchored in time to activities, social contexts, and time. (torous, friedman, and keshavan 2014) likewise, from a different research group, we hear in one breath that momentary assessments can substantially contribute to the mutual dialectical process by which a clinician and service user come to agree on the nature and causes of a patient’s problems. but only a few short lines of text later, esm is lauded for its ability to stand in for what is seen as unreliable personal experience. esm can contribute to better understanding of day patterns of social interactions or activities that someone is involved in. people are often poor judges of these patterns and this may be particularly true for patients with unstructured day patterns who often experience cognitive problems. (oorschot et al. 2012, 406) this justification is seen across the literature, even while the same papers postulate that engaging ema/esm technologies is meaningful to users. this conflicting view of “lived experience” and its reliability also finds expression in the excitement around using biodata from mobile technologies that rely on no input at all from service users: an innovative way to meet this challenge is to monitor indices of emotional health using methods that require minimal insight or subjective report from the user. mobile phones contain a range of embedded sensors and features, including accelerometers and global positioning systems and apps, which can automatically record information about a user’s behavior. (rickard et al. 2016) these viewpoints seem to suggest that ema/esm methods, especially when used in young adult populations, may help sensitize young people to their emotional and cognitive states and the need for support, while generating information that is useful to clinicians without solely relying on a person’s own understanding of their present state. we will return to a more critical analysis of this stance later. for now, to appreciate the intersecting nature of the challenges we are raising, it is worth taking some time to attend to the language and metaphors that depict digital care tools in fep such as ema/esm. there is a striking overlap between how these tools are conceptualized and the imagery that shapes fep and the ei paradigm itself. within early intervention in psychosis, hope is indexed through the temporality of interventions. the framing of biological treatments in fep, for special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 8 instance, is one of a medical “cure” (or near-cure)—intervention in fep is frequently referred to in editorials, scientific articles, and infographics as a “new era,” and a “bridge to the future” (mcgorry 2015; saraceno 2007). the temporality of hope, here, speaks to “a futurity that casts mental disability as an obstacle to the arc of progress” (berkhout 2018, 179). a recent discourse analysis of an information campaign targeting help-seeking in fep similarly describes these patterns: temporality is central, framed as an urgency that begs a larger responsibility to be vigilant for possible symptoms (in oneself and others) and act quickly to prevent disability. within information campaigns, early intervention is framed as a gift and a public service, improving prognosis through knowledge as well as hope (hansen et al. 2019, 6–7). the ei paradigm in this field additionally links hope to novelty, knowledge, and innovation. similarly, digital care tools are a “new hope” (torous et al. 2019, 269); innovation, novelty, and even “elegance” in design are predominant themes, as is the notion that ema/esm fundamentally increase important, fine-grained, and personalized knowledge about individual lived experience in psychosis, “tailored” to a given person’s characteristics and mental states (oorschot et al. 2012). the temporality of both the ei paradigm and digital care tools attaches hope and optimism to the rational deployment of scientific facts. martyn pickersgill (2019) has described this discourse as reflecting “biomedical virtue”—a praxis of goodness, as understood by practitioners. biomedical virtue can be deployed both strategically as well as spontaneously, and operates in support of various professional goals. the canonical biomedical virtue is the prevention of death (pickersgill 2019, 17), which relates closely to the virtue of preventing disability. turning back to the overlapping discourses of digital technologies and fep, we can see how the biomedical virtue these extoll serves the purposes of galvanizing hope (and resources) toward these fields. the prevention of death/disability is framed within an enlightenment-laden progress narrative, which is itself steeped in virtues of harnessing reliable evidence to carry out disability-prevention aims. there are echoes here of what has been termed a “white savior narrative” within technoscience—a narrative that imagines structural inequality to be erased through the rational benevolence of the entrepreneurial technophilothropist (banner 2019, 12). as a whole, these are also part of what alison kafer (2013) calls the curative imaginary: an understanding of disability that sees medical intervention as benevolent and unquestionable. within medicine’s curative imaginary, treatment is expected and assumed whatever the personal cost, and any other way of living is unimaginable (kafer 2013, 27–28). eli clare (2017) explains how cure, as an ideology, offers an inflexible set of virtues that multiply into numerous technologies and processes within biomedicine. these virtues are in the service of one goal: to ensure that bodymind trouble no longer exists—as if it had never existed to begin with. and when cure (or its approximation) fails, the blame is held special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 9 by the patient/service user themselves leaving the notion of cure undisputed (clare 2017, 76). biomedical virtues embedded within a broader curative imaginary suffuse both digital technologies and fep. much of the attention of digital psychiatry is focused on prediction as well as prevention. we need to grapple, therefore, with the ways in which prognostication is likewise part of the curative imaginary. recall that one of the stated aims of digital care tools—like that of fep clinical programs—is to better identify, understand, and control heterogeneous and changeable presentations of psychosis. digital technologies in fep facilitate an explicit goal of the ei paradigm—to predict and control uncertainty so as to return individuals to (or closely approximate) a pre-morbid state, presumably with the help of antipsychotic medications that are also more easily managed through digital care tools. the emphasis on prognostic and diagnostic practices speaks to a futurity that demarcates disabled bodyminds as unquestionably in need of biomedical intervention (clare 2017). moreover, the ei paradigm structuring fep is also embedded in, and reflective of, neoliberal biopolitics: here we see a naturalizing, individualizing, and depoliticizing of disability along with an emphasis on futurity (berkhout 2018). individual responsibility, optimization, and market fundamentalism, neoliberalism has replaced an ethic of state care, making health maintenance a responsibility (rather than a right) and encouraging a view of oneself as a biomedical subject (ericson, barry, and doyle 2000; pitts-taylor 2010). contemporary neoliberal biopolitics is infused with futurity (rose and abi-rached 2013, 13). and because of who is most often impacted by having a new onset of psychotic experiences, this neoliberal political rationality finds new meaning (and less resistance) in fep. it was common to hear within the fep clinic where we carried out our study that this was a “special” population developmentally. that is to say, clinicians, clinic managers, and even family members would flag that fep was unique because it often occurred in late adolescence and early young adulthood—times when young people were individuating from their families, asserting independence, and shaping a deeper sense of self. medicolegally, confidentiality was a concern for clinicians and family members alike. one parent, frustrated by a lack of information about their adult child struggling with psychosis who was living at home, loudly exclaimed, “i call in the prescription, i pick up the meds, i pay for them, i give them out, but i can’t have any information about my kid?!” clinicians would indicate that a developmental “lens” was needed in order to understand actions, such as non-adherence to medications or difficulties attending appointments (e.g., sleeping through these). it is not surprising that the digital technologies designed for fep likewise discuss their ability to facilitate a normative developmental task for young adults with mental health needs: the task of self-management and responsibilization. digital care tools for youth special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 10 especially are described as being beneficial with respect to the challenge of “empowering” young people “take control of their health” (reid et al. 2013, 2) and for building “insight” and positively reinforcing help-seeking behaviors (oorschot et al. 2012, 406). patient involvement, lived experience, empowerment, participation, and ownership are the buzzwords of ema/esp apps; monica greco similarly describes these as the keywords at the forefront of the politics of contemporary healthcare and its neoliberal context (greco 2019, 6). the uses and roles of smartphone technologies in fep can be read, in this light, as a practices or techniques by which an individual is integrated into the social entity—a technology of the self, whereby the subject actively constitutes or transforms itself to attain a certain state of wellbeing (foucault 1988). practices of the self, as foucault explains, are not invented by the individual themselves; they are models within a given culture and time that are proposed, suggested, or imposed on someone within their social group. an individual constitutes themselves through these as a moral subject of their own actions (foucault 1997). when we understand the responsibilizing function of digital technologies within the developmental narrative, along with how these technologies index the imperative of a particular kind of futurity, ema/esm in fep are not merely a matter of getting young people to their appointments on time. holding cripand disability-informed insights regarding futurities alongside the notion of coproduction, the foucauldian reading of digital technologies becomes that much more compelling. evolving scientific concepts, technological artifacts, and associated beliefs may emerge hand in hand with representations, discourses, and identities (jongsma, bredenoord, and lucivero 2018). as such, ema/esm apps built into smartphones and tablets can be said to be coeval with beliefs about what constitutes psychotic phenomena and beliefs about psychiatric service users themselves. such tools do not simply carve up the world at its joints but materialize particular kinds of subjects. for ema/esm in fep, the developmental framework naturalizes the constitution of neoliberal subjectivity as the performance of normative tasks of emerging adulthood. with this in mind, we turn now to our ethnographic work in particular to further problematize the claims that such technologies open a door to lived experience so as to reveal the truth of psychosis and of the subject. self-technologies in fep: from a discursive to granular view where i was in my worst time, i was so anxious i couldn’t, like, even, you know, i couldn’t function and i, and i was so—yeah, i had all this, like—yeah, i mean i wasn’t able to, like—i was so sensitive to people giving me bad energy and this kind of stuff that i couldn’t really be in society. i couldn’t travel around. i was always looking at the power special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 11 lines and feeling their, like, electric stimuli, and couldn’t be in front of tvs or computers. like, it was pretty horrible in terms of what i was limited to…i’m just grateful that i’m not—[i] don’t have to go back there or don’t have to, like, live my life always, you know, always looking out for the next stimuli, what might hurt, what might damage me, what might hurt me. and you know, other people might have different opinions of what it was, but for me it was real and what happened was real and i just needed some way to get out of that, to get out of that state. and i was provided that by the medication they gave me. (dan) dan’s words were part of the first interview that he and suze berkhout did together, shortly after the psychosis narratives project began. meeting in a fairly impersonal office within the clinic where he received care, suze asked, “how did you come to be connected with the folks here?” dan entered into a story that began many years earlier with depression, a search for a mind/body practice that would help him manage his mood, and ended with a very physical kind of grappling—the loss of his ability to determine the meaning of the flurry of tactile and somatic sensations faced by his bodymind on a daily basis. we turn to dan’s text at this point in our discussion to explore how experiences of psychosis are overdetermined by personal biography, cultural context, and historical contingency. his words highlight central issues that index the challenges we are raising toward digital technologies in fep. first, how should we approach the distress, the struggle, and the pain of psychosis that dan describes? one might call this an aberrance of salience as he processes thoughts and perceptions (kapur 2003; pankow et al. 2016), or a dysregulation of dopamine in the mesolimbic and mesocortical area of the brain. could this be a spiritual crisis? the explanations are multiple and simultaneous. but beyond his particular descriptors, a second question arises: how might we read the filled pauses and discourse markers—the “like’s,” “yeah’s,” and “so’s” that break up the flow of his narrative? on one level, we hear of a struggle with symptoms that are so real to him— symptoms that others have read as being “in” his head and a reflection of unreality. on another level, the filled pauses are a reflection of a struggle to even articulate the very reality that he had been inhabiting—the reality that others opined on, disagreed about, and provided a medication to eradicate. other participants identified this difficulty articulating what psychosis was like, and what it meant to them: so, like, i understand that there’s no fix to schizophrenia. so, i’m not necessarily looking for a fix. schizophrenia has helped me to grow in special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 12 ways that i can’t even explain. i don’t even know how to verbalize it, you know? but i can identify it. (nico) i’m not sure if it’s something that can be described. i don’t know—i don’t want to sound kind of like pessimistic here, but i just don’t know if it possible to explain it in any other way than to experience it. that what i struggle with all the time, just like trying to get people, even people in my family, new people in my life, partners, like no matter what it’s like, this is what i go through. (v) just as with the paper’s epigraph, nico, dan, and v all offer a view of how challenging it is to express the lived experience of psychosis. these limits of expression were shared across nearly all participants and were often noted by family members. fep clinic service users and their families also endorsed many different (and at times internally competing) models of psychosis. there was a relationship between a participants’ explanatory model of psychosis and their sense of self. these explanatory models ran across a wide spectrum, from brain chemistry to voodoo practices, to simply inexplicable. the models were shifting and had various dissonances, even within a single narrative. experiences that were categorized as psychosis were often distressing, but they were also held by participants to be important and complete aspects of one’s social world and inner life. the tensions within a given narrative or particular experience were part of what was so challenging to communicate about psychosis itself. these tensions were often higher for service users whose social identities were racialized or “othered” along lines of religion, geography (migration), and sexuality. what was also striking was how the experience of psychosis was so fundamentally real for participants, something that dan’s quote illustrates. it was challenging to reconcile the veracity and immanence of the lived experience of psychosis with the common explanation that this was “all in your head.” while i was going through that episode i went to a place where i wasn’t in control. i did not know the difference between what was going on in my head and what was happening right in front of me…i couldn’t decipher what the problem was. but i knew there was a problem. (nico) attending to this real vs. unreal dichotomy exposed familiar dualisms within medicine—mind vs. body, subjective vs. objective—which functioned in ways that structured bodied experience once someone was embedded in the clinical enterprise. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 13 not surprisingly, medications and medication-taking were a site where frictions would play out, particularly when the clinical worldview narrowed, constrained, and conflicted with service users’ own lived experience. the experience of psychosis and entry into the mental health system frequently served as a fulcrum in a before/after narrative of selfhood and identity. as we have discussed elsewhere, to whatever degree the experiences of psychosis constituted a disruption in self-identity, at least some aspects of such disruptions stemmed at times from clinical situations themselves—in particular, from the ways in which asymmetries of power were enacted within the mental health system. these enactments were often stratified along axes of oppression and social identity and looped back to be re-inscribed as symptom (berkhout, zaheer, and remington 2019). similarly, anthropologists neely myers and tali ziv (2016) have discussed how such asymmetries of power relate not only to one’s status as a psychiatry service user, but also to dimensions of self that are sources of disadvantage and oppression, such as racialized identity. and yet, pills and injections did index a hoped-for “cure” and were seen by many service users as a part (but not necessarily the foundational part) of their recovery. family members and clinicians tended to have a more myopic view toward the place of antipsychotics, holding these as the linchpin to mental wellbeing. the relationship that service users and family members had to the curative imaginary that structures fep was complex—hope for the future and the possibility of stopping distressing and painful psychotic symptoms were important aspects of recovery. at the same time, it was not so simple as to take a medication and act as though nothing had changed. i think sometimes people that i have been around—friends and family and acquaintances—it’s, they almost don’t want to hear me express how dark my mind can get. they don’t want me to talk about it. they would rather me speak like everything is unicorns and butterflies because then “i’m just being negative.” and i think all of us just want to be understood by someone. i think that is one of the biggest goals is just to be understood by someone in this world. i think mental illness or not, i think that is just a human kind of need. (v) in medicine, a curative imaginary is one that sees disability as universally negative—a problem always to be solved and intervention obligatory (kafer 2013; clare 2017). as discussed, the entire ei paradigm that structures fep is suffused with the rhetoric of cure—steeped in a language indebted to a futurity whereby mental disability is eradicated, enacting a metaphysics of purity within this particular futurity. scholars from across disability studies have argued that curative imaginary forsakes a disabled person’s present bodymind, instead offering nostalgia and longing for the past or clutching at hope for a future that may never be (clare 2017). as v’s excerpt suggests, the cost of the curative special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 14 imaginary and its hoped-for futurity is failing to be seen and understood by those in the present moment. thinking about what dan, nico, and v were struggling to articulate, considering the frictions generated within the clinic power struggles, and holding in mind what was both appealing (perhaps necessary) as well as invalidating with respect to the curative imaginary, we ask, what does it mean to then translate overdetermined explanations, the multiple layers of meaning, the filled pauses, and the tensions through digital technologies? do emoticons or likert scales prompted by questions about stress, or even the acceleration of a mobile phone in space, capture the incongruencies, the internal struggles, the unspeakability of psychosis? we turn to these questions in the section that follows. before that, we want to pause for a moment to reflect on how challenges of translation might also prompt us to ask, does it matter whether one uses an emoticon or a likert scale or a narrative interview, if any attempt to “voice” psychosis will only ever offer a halfhearted approximation? digital technologies are often used in creative, openended ways by disabled people—harnessed for political action while resistant to curative demands (hamraie and fritsch 2019). digital sociality, for instance, has been described as a way to hack normative communication practices, embracing of “crip time,” that is, temporalities of non-normative embodiments. this can embed individuals in meaningful and lively networks they might not otherwise have access to (hartblay 2015). these insights should lead us to ask whether digital health technologies can be other than what olivia banner (2019) terms “extractive racial capitalism,” with fantasies of digital futures that reify tropes of white savior technophiles while governing mental disability. the struggles expressed by our participants, particularly in relation to what was unspeakable in the clinic environment was, for many, a major aspect of lived experience that service users found so meaningful to have witnessed. they did not necessarily experience this kind of witnessing within the structure of the clinical environment: i felt like my history with psychiatry or just meeting with my psychiatrist and doctors in general was just so cold and so—”what are your symptoms,” and “let’s jot them down”—that’s as far as it goes, it never kind of expanded beyond that when it’s…it was almost like it was—to me, i see it as just like point-form notes of symptoms and everything that is so, almost, in a box. mental health to me is not in a box. it’s like, the conversation was never welcomed to expand anything, it was just like, “okay let’s get to the point.” (v) similarly, we find seeds of possibility in relation to technologies and witnessing in other qualitative research we have carried out within the same clinic setting: both service users and family members have discussed how standardized metrics and special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 15 scales were not only acceptable at times, but were actually welcome—only when it was the case that these were used as a starting point to open a larger discussion that enabled a witnessing of complex experiences. such scales and metrics could not be an end in themselves or attempt to offer a totalizing narrative of experience (cuperfain et al. 2021, under review). our concerns regarding digital care tools and the transmutation of “lived experience” are directed, then, at the extent to which such tools are used to avoid the messiness of lived experience, the extent to which they are un-hackable, the extent to which their design is not relational or collaborative. some of these concerns are reflected within our earlier descriptions of the benefits of ema/esm in terms of reliability over self-report from the digital mental health literature. the potential for novel engagements is undercut by the view of such technologies as a proxy or simplified stand-in, rather than their being an opening for further witnessing. additionally, banner’s work suggests that digital health apps that collect and utilize biometric data have a very different valence and connotation when these are stand-alone, member-participatory technologies rather than third-party-hosted systems that function in aid of a broader biopolitical project (2019, 10–13). in what follows, we develop further banner’s insight, that context is crucial to determining the potential consequences of the transmutation of lived experience through such technologies. novel engagement or epistemic narrowing? our argument thus far has seen a number of different threads develop—we want now to braid these together. first, we have considered the increasing interest in, and use of, self-technologies in fep. we have looked at the discourses of both fep as these operate within the early intervention paradigm and digital technologies themselves. there is considerable overlap and alignment with respect to metaphors of hope, progress, and temporality. digital technologies, like other areas of fep, are designed to predict and control uncertainty and heterogeneity in psychosis. all of this points to a shared investment in a curative imaginary. moreover, we have examined the way in which the neoliberal political rationality indexed by self-technologies is naturalized within the developmental frame of fep. both the curative imaginary and the naturalization of neoliberal ideologies limit the force of potential criticisms and dissenting views relating to digital technologies in fep. this enables the enthusiastic uptake of views such as the one we take aim at in particular—namely, that ema/esm technologies offer a way of collaborating with service users around their psychiatric symptoms and offering a view to lived experience while at the same time rationalizing the use of biodata in light of the “unreliability” of subjective experience and recall. then, in contrast to the claims that ema/esm technologies providing a window to lived experience, we turned to a granular view of the experiences and meanings of psychosis from special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 16 fep service users themselves. this view of lived experience (though certainly not unmediated—no qualitative data is) offered themes relation to tensions, incongruencies, and unspeakability within fep.6 we have linked these themes with frictions generated by the curative imaginary in this clinical setting. we turn now to deepen our critique of the enthusiastic claims from proponents of ema/esm technologies, particularly that these tools relay lived experience for clinicians to draw on to better understand psychopathology. we want to raise a worry surrounding unintended impacts from having one’s experience structured by a biomedical narrative of what psychosis is and what is entailed by its treatment. such biomedical narratives are operationalized through selfmonitoring vis-à-vis smartphone technologies and ema/esm. as greco details, the notion that clinical shortcomings of a reductive biomedical model could be addressed by incorporating the “patient’s point of view” can be problematized on a number of fronts (2019, 6). first, there is a baseline assumption that participants in digital technologies ought to be able to consciously articulate the totality of their values and experiences, and furthermore that the technologies themselves accurately capture this. such assumptions are of course complicated by the fact that, qua psychiatric service users, deep skepticism also simultaneously surrounds the reliability of those experiences, even when an individual is not experiencing a psychotic episode. studies of ema/esm certainly attempt to address these issues in various ways— they are very interested in whether or not the emoticon or likert scale has fidelity with a user’s experience, and as we’ve discussed, the interest and enthusiasm for metadata (i.e., biometric data captured by the technologies) belies the claims to capture and engage “subjective” experience. and yet through our ethnographic investigation, we have seen how inaccurate this assumption was for many of the individuals. it was not simply a matter of their being “too unwell” to meet standards of reasoned judgments or communication. when this difficulty of expression is combined with social and cultural norms surrounding oral speech communication—standards of narrative coherence, linearity, clarity of articulation—we see the potential for counterproductive amplification of certain views and voices (alper 2017, 2). normative performances of communication universalize expectations of rational human subjectivity, including through demarcations of communicative purity, autonomy, and self-mastery (st. pierre 2015). tools that “give voice” do not necessarily dismantle structural inequalities and can, in fact, concretize these. second, within ema/esm, experience only comes to be valued through the abstractions that translate these into “evidence”—that is, through the digital technologies themselves. as anna swartz has posited with respect to digital technologies within psychiatry, the idea that biodata speaks for itself glides over the reality that claims to accuracy resist generalizability beyond their immediate special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 17 context (2018, 65). the entire point of ema/esm technologies is to understand the context or “ecology” of the service user. yet the experiences of services are only valuable when they are transmutated through the expertise and authority of biomedicine, as indexed by the technological applications. digital health technologies such as ema/esm configure bodies to revision fleshy matter as a system of data codes, and illness as a kind of information malfunction (lupton 2015, 574). as deborah lupton (2015) explains, the ability to overcome current or potential ill health is through the self-knowledge gained by the data produced. biodata is viewed as objective—pure sources of bodily knowledge—and the orderliness of digital data contains and controls the entropy and mystery of disease. this standpoint fails on many accounts, but it especially fails to acknowledge how disabled people are already experts and designers of everyday life (hamraie and fritsch 2019), while obscuring the arbitrariness of the line between normal/abnormal (or defective) (banner 2019). the larger sociohistorical context—that the technologies are themselves performative of the norms of a neoliberal political rationality—is likewise ignored, through the naturalization of self-management and personal responsibility for health as developmental tasks. moreover, as swartz further argues, insofar as psychiatric service users are “simultaneously locked into and out of the practices that involve them most directly, based on a prevailing clinical stereotype that undermines their capacity to provide truthful and reliable accounts of their own lives” (2018, 65), they experience testimonial forms of injustice through these practices. broadly speaking, testimonial forms of injustice within psychiatry are ever more prominent for racialized individuals, and prominent along axes of gender, migration, economic status, and sexuality, where intersecting social identities have been deemed indicative of a lack of credibility (dotson 2011). as we identified earlier, experiences structured by social power along intersectional lines of identity were more likely to be read through unexamined assumptions within psychiatric medicine concerning normal vs. abnormal (berkhout, zaheer, and remington 2019). in psychosis, digital technologies risk sidelining certain ways of knowing and being, flattening and erasing certain experiences that are not easily incorporated into the structure provided by the technologies themselves. the view of mental illness that venerates professional expertise and is predicated on an individualist understanding of mental illness obscures how someone’s social-material world is central to understanding their distress and marginalizes the knowledge of those deemed mad (coles, keenan, and diamond 2013; faulkner 2017). even if ema/esm were to robustly capture someone’s phenomenological experiences (a claim we have cast doubt on), that these experiences are only legible through digital expertise reifies this problematic dynamic. feasibility studies of ema/esm do note that initial compliance providing responses drops off considerably with ongoing use, and that users have complained about intrusiveness, repetitiveness, special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 18 and lack of representativeness or personalization of their particular challenges (rickard et al. 2016). such criticisms from users themselves have been framed as a problem of application design rather than a concern about the kind of epistemological and ontological narrowing that the applications produce. our own study did not explicitly ask participants about their experiences with digital health technologies—apps such as those employing ema/esm technologies were only in early discussion within the clinic’s research groups when we carried out our work. toward the end of the study period, however, tablets arrived in the clinic waiting areas, where service users could complete a medication side effect survey that would be automatically sent to their clinician’s email address just prior to their appointment time. the questions did, at times, prompt what might have been otherwise difficult topics to broach (e.g., sexual side effects of antipsychotic medications). but the emails were also sometimes fake/joke survey responses from anonymous service users within the clinic—perhaps a creative resistance to the digitization of suffering. complexities that exist within the use of digital mental health technologies require greater care and attention than simply building a more user-friendly app. conclusion we have traced a novel landscape for technologies of the self within psychiatry, exploring the competing views espoused within this landscape—ema/ems claim to collaboratively bring in lived experience to assessments of psychosis while simultaneously positing service users’ recall and subjective experience as unreliable. we have critiqued this tension first, in relation to the capacity for digital technologies to epistemically narrow lived experience, and second, in light of the reliance on professional or expert tools to render that narrowed experience legible. we have highlighted how the curative imaginary that is mobilized within digital care tools has material implications for those who experience psychosis in relation to this epistemic narrowing. such narrowings are reinforced by other sources of subordination and disadvantage. mental (dis)ability intersects with gender, race, and geography or migration status within the fep setting, erasing and flattening particular lived experience especially. by bringing our ethnographic work into conversation with feminist sts, crip technoscience, and mad studies, we have provided an analysis of the micro-political technologies of digital care tools in mental health, while demonstrating the significance of methodologies such as our own for further insights in these same fields. what would a more meaningful engagement look like? for all of the critique we offer, we are not advocating to banish technologies from fep services. we identified, at the outset, that there are many important and meaningful uses in peoples’ lives, including for those in more precarious situations—having a mobile phone from a clinic might mean the difference between having or losing case management support, let alone being able to use that same technology for peer special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 19 support and social connection. but meaningful engagement cannot simply be a matter of asking participants to improve the emoticon design or give feedback on the beeps or pings that ask them to respond to survey questions. as the authors of the camh report “more than paint colours: dialogue about power and process in patient engagement” argue, meaningful engagement is about a much deeper process, a more sustained dialogue, and fundamentally about addressing power differentials (devaney, costa, and raju 2017). those power differentials are linked to the politics of whose knowledge is valued as knowledge. meaningful engagement has to mean that experiential knowledge is not merely distorted, erased, or co-opted by the discourses and practices of conventional biomedicine. ultimately, meaningful engagement is about opening different and more diverse forms of futurity for psychiatric service users. acknowledgements we would like to acknowledge the contributions of dr. david matthews and dr. gary remington to the larger project, as well as the team at the slaight centre for early intervention who helped to facilitate this research. special thanks to the service users and their family members for their time and generosity. we are very grateful the constructive comments from our anonymous reviewers. notes 1 lived experience is a term that stems from the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement in psychiatry, referencing the importance of first-person understandings of the socio-material worlds of psychiatry services users, madidentified people, and individuals with mental disabilities. as it is used in this context, the term has ties with the critical social epistemology of mad studies and disability studies; it is deeply linked to notions of experiential knowledge and is often used in contrast with conventional professional knowledge in psychiatry, which is embedded in a positivist biomedical paradigm. it is notable that the notion of digital “phenotype” is deployed alongside claims to lived experience, given that the term phenotype is deeply embedded in scientistic language, reflective of normative models and curative practices implicated in ableism and sanism. see banner 2019 and faulkner 2017. 2 these networks of psychiatric medicine are reflective of an anglo-colonized world. as berkhout (2018) describes, the concept of fep arose in relation to the expressed desire for a more pure research population from which to study schizophrenia. the research strategy was launched in 1988 through a national institutes of mental health (nimh) national plan for schizophrenia research and then later concretized in the form of an nimh workshop on first episode psychosis in 1991, driven largely by clinician-researchers in the us, uk, and australia (berkhout 2018, 174). this has subsequently expanded to include new zealand, western europe, and canada especially, as personnel, trainees, research special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 20 methods, and clinical protocols and training are shared across key sites in each country. such networks are significant, as subramaniam and willey explain, because it is within the expansion of western colonial powers that scientific knowledge as “superior” knowledge materializes (subramaniam and willey 2017). it is this same legitimation of particular forms of knowledge that generate the dynamics of epistemic injustice we discuss in the paper. 3 suze berkhout was the study’s lead researcher and was a psychiatry resident who had previously completed a phd in philosophy, with experience with ethnographic and narrative methods at the time the project was carried out. juveria zaheer is an emergency psychiatrist with expertise in intersectional feminist theory and qualitative methods and provided methodological support as well as contributing to data analysis and theory development. additional research team members included a psychiatry resident with a background in medical anthropology as well as a psychiatrist/senior scientist with extensive expertise in schizophrenia research. we offer these descriptions of the research team and the process of data analysis in the spirit of transparency regarding our ethnographic methods and to enable a sense of the ways in which our own positionalities as researchers within the study might contribute to our interpretation of the interviews, field notes, conversations, and practices within the clinical setting. 4 as trull and ebner-priemer describe in their introduction to the 2009 special section on esm/ema in the journal psychological assessment, esm and ema have arisen from different research traditions. because they hold in common the practice of collecting self-reports or indices of behavior, cognition, and emotion in near real time in participants’ day-to-day lives, the terms are often grouped together (trull and ebner-priemer 2009, 457). other forms that digital technologies take within fep include the use of text messages as reminders for appointments, check-ins after discharge from hospitalization, or welcoming messages when an individual service user enters into a new fep clinical program. we do not want to detract from the positive impact that some programs can have, for instance, when fep clinics are able to provide mobile phones to service users who face economic precarity and unstable housing, allowing them to remain connected with case managers and clinic supports. 5 insight is a term of art in psychiatry that makes references to a particular kind of neurocognitive skill whereby an individual is able to make accurate assessments about their mental state and apply these to themselves. deficits in insight are frequently discussed in psychiatric settings, and often with fep there is a presumption that a lack of insight is reflective of the underlying pathophysiology of psychosis itself (quee et al. 2011). as a heuristic, “insight” is often granted when a service user’s understanding of their experiences aligns with that of their care-giving professionals. see gong 2017. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 21 6 berkhout and stern explore the issue of unspeakability in lived experience, within psychosis and across other medical and psychiatric diagnoses in their editorial to the fall 2019 issue of ars medica. within the issue’s special feature on psychosis, three pieces from participants of the psychosis narratives ethnographic study described in this paper were published. a small group of the larger project’s participants took part in a series of arts-based knowledge translation workshops, where we explored personal as well as group themes from the ethnographic study through art-making, poetry, and pose. see berkhout and stern 2019. references allen, summer. 2016. 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momentary assessment (esm/ema) in clinical assessment and clinical research: introduction to the special section.” psychological assessment 21, no. 4: 457–62. doi: 10.1037/a0017653 van os, jim, simone verhage, anne marsman, frenk peeters, maarten bak, machteld marcelis, marjan drukker et al. 2017. “the experience sampling method as an mhealth tool to support self-monitoring, self-insight, and personalized health care in clinical practice.” depression and anxiety 34, no. 6: 481-493. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/da.22647 willey, angela. 2016. “biopossibility: a queer feminist materialist science studies manifesto, with special reference to the question of monogamous behaviour.” signs 41, no. 3: 553–77. doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/684238 author bios suze g. berkhout is a clinician-investigator and acute care psychiatrist. her program of research in feminist philosophy of science/sts utilizes ethnographic and narrative qualitative methods to explore social and cultural issues impacting access and navigation through health care systems. she focuses on the epistemic and ontological importance of lived experience in relation to knowledge in/of medicine and mental health and carries out this work in a range of areas, including in treatment resistance in mental health, early psychosis, transplant medicine, and placebo/nocebo studies. https://doi.org/10.2196/mhealth.2994 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41537-018-0048-6 https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2019.8 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017653 special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of care | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) suze g. berkhout and juveria zaheer, 2021 27 juveria zaheer is a psychiatrist and researcher at the centre for addiction and mental health and assistant professor within the university of toronto department of psychiatry. clinically, she works in the gerald sheff and shanitha kachan emergency department at camh, where she also oversees resident education. her program of research focuses on suicide and suicide prevention. she serves on the board of directors of the canadian association of suicide prevention.     book review book review | gestos textiles: un acercamiento material a las etnografías, los cuerpos y los tiempos, by tania pérez-bustos (editorial universidad nacional de colombia, 2021)     sandra p. gonzález-santos school of bioethics, universidad anáhuac méxico sandragonzalezsantos@gmail.com     this book begins with a simple, daily, almost insignificant event: the falling of a button. following this simple event comes sewing back the button onto its shirt. tania pérez-bustos, a colombian sts feminist anthropologist, sees in this mundane event a pause for reflection, an opportunity for change, a moment of wonder, an encapsulation of the complexity of life. why did he, the owner of the button, never learn to sew? why did she learn to sew? did she? who taught her? how did she learn? why does he ask her to do it? did he ask or did she offer? sewing back a button can be considered a simple act, yet it is capable of disrupting choreographed daily routines, long-existing habits, even culturally embedded preconceptions. simple acts, simple gestures, can be transformative: this apparently simple piece of wisdom is what i take from reading gestos textiles: un acercamiento material a las etnografías, los cuerpos, y los tiempos. throughout the book, it becomes patently clear that using gestures to change life is—like creating handmade textiles—an art that takes time, intention, knowledge, repetition, and care. gestos textiles results from an ethnographic research project involving textile artists, activists, women, and researchers, many of whom have found in textile work a way of healing the wounds of the violence colombia has lived for decades as part of its civil conflicts. it is a book about the creation and transmission of embodied knowledge held and shared by and among women, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and researchers. it is a book that explores sewing, weaving, stitching, knitting, patching, and embroidering as acts of political subversion, as enactments of caring, as ways of providing economic and emotional sustenance, as methods for academic research, and as moments for personal reflection. throughout the book, pérez-bustos braids her experience as an apprentice of textile work, with her ethnographic engagement with collectives of textile workers, with the perspectives of feminist sts scholars, with aspects of the political life of colombia, with bits of her personal life, with the fabrics, tools, movements, and knowledge of textile making. this plaiting produces a coherent book. not only does it talk about the rhythm and tempo of textile work, its narrative follows a weaving rhythm as well. this slow poetic pace is an act of resistance against contemporary academia, market logics, and the fast pace of social life governed by those logics, all of which are pushed to produce disposable commodities at a hypervelocity. this book makes you pause and move into a slower tempo, into what she calls a textile time: a non-linear time that is meaningful and existential, which is purview of memories and reveries, a time mythologically considered to be governed by kairos, who overlooks the circular time of festivities, and not by kronos, who controls linear time marked by clocks and kept in schedules. gestos textiles presents gestures, particularly textile gestures, as arts-based research tools for both exploring and analyzing technology and social movements, tools that are simultaneously political and healing. gestures are body movements that seek to convey meaning. pérez-bustos’s textile gestures are meaningful movements carried out by complex hybrid bodies, made up of threads-hands-fabric-needles-histories-politics-memories that perform acts of world-making. these acts could well be lived without hesitation, quickly forgotten—like sewing back a fallen button—but if we pay attention to them, as pérez-bustos does, they reveal the tensions in gender roles, class expectations, economic possibilities, technological knowledges and ignorances, generational relations, intimate negotiations, survival strategies, domestic life, forgotten legacies, and much more. textile gestures are situated, embodied, and material doings, they are ways of thinking, ways of enunciating, of communicating, and of being in the world. for this book, she selects four textile gestures and poetically explores each one in a different chapter: repeating, undoing, mending, and patching. we learn to make and to interpret gestures relationally, through observation, experimentation, and trial and error. textile work is no different: you need to do it to learn it. departing from the school of ethnography that called for non-participatory observation, pérez-bustos chooses to follow the “epistemic requirement” of textile work: to physically engage in learning how to do the different textile techniques as part of her way of understanding the experiences of the communities she was working with. pérez-bustos reflects upon this in the first chapter, “repeat to learn”:1 it was the embodied act of doing that allowed her to identify how those who practice textile work are able to attend and tie together threads of conversations with threads of thought, with threads of life, with threads of wool. in this chapter, pérez-bustos presents the history of the dechados, exemplars of embroidering stitches practiced since the nineteenth century in the context of women’s religious schooling. she describes in detail some of these textile gestures, highlighting the rhythm and speed of each movement, the type and number of movements, and their cultural meaning. dechados exhibit a particular mastery and perfection that is acquired through acts of bodily repetition. it is through repetition of specific gestures that the body-mind-fabric-thread creates memories, habits, knowledge, expertise, change, and textiles. to attain mastery and perfection, repetition must include undoing to redo, the subject of the following chapter. “undo to redo”2 is the textile gesture explored in the second chapter. this textile gesture reflects the importance given to perfection, framing mistakes as acts that can be undone—a gesture that implies careful destruction3 and that undoing is also a way of doing. just like doing, undoing and redoing require knowledge and specific tools. one needs to know how to undo in order to redo in such a way as to hide the traces left behind by the constant doing and undoing. but undoing can also be a specific way of doing, as is the case with the calado, where the pattern is made by removing threads (deshilar). while showing pérez-bustos how to undo, the women with whom she learned to do this textile gesture talked about the need to learn to undo relationships in order to build new ones, the need to forget to remember, the need to let go of those who pass to be able to go ahead with those who remain. in this chapter, pérez-bustos discusses the effects that industrialization, mechanization, and the global market have had on textile work. for example, she reflects upon what some women mentioned regarding materials: they were used to working with a particular type of loosely woven material (etamine), but it had become difficult to find so they had to change to a more rigid material. finding the spaces and threads to cut in the new material was much more difficult and time consuming. regarding the process of automatization, she points out how the machines developed for sewing, weaving, and embroidering—all very important in the process of industrialization and capitalism—produce standardized and homogenized pieces, pieces without a soul, she says. however, she notes, no machine has been designed to undo and then redo; this made me wonder: are mistakes unique or at least difficult to standardize? in the third chapter, “mending as resistance,”4 pérez-bustos explores mending as a textile gesture that seeks to deal with the wear and tear of life through visible stitches, embroidering, and patchwork. mending is political; you can decide whether to hide the mending or to let it be visible, to hide the scars of life or to wear them on the sleeve. mending as resistance has the intention of showing where life has left its marks, those of loss and those of gain; of resisting the disposability of matter, of re-signifying fray. mending requires knowledge of the fabric and the way it is worn; it requires interacting with the materiality and the passing of time in order to strengthen that part of the fabric, making it gain resilience. in the fourth chapter, “bringing together to compose,”5 the textile gesture is the patchwork and the quilt is the textile work. the stories come from a project called the traveling sewing box, which began in 2015 and involved a number of textile collectives, including mujeres tejiendo sueños, sabores de paz en mapuján, artesanías guayacán, and memorias de sonsón. this project was inspired by the aids memorial quilt in the united states. in this case, the project consisted of a box that would travel across colombia, visiting different collectives of textile activists, who would then send back the textiles they produced. these textiles were telling their particular stories and memories of the civil conflict using their own textile style. the gesture of the project was to bring together different pieces of fabric, diverse textile techniques, an array of personal stories, and the collectives of textile workers from across colombia. through the material patchwork, their stories of violence, loss, and remembrance were reconfigured, placed side by side as a way of sharing, remembering, healing, and repairing, as a way of creating a new and very powerful narrative. in the final chapter, “dechado of concepts,”6 the reader will find a revision of four textile gestures that were developed throughout the book: textile crafts, textile ethnography, textile bodies, and textile times. here the gesture that pérez-bustos performs is to tie these textile gestures to the work of other thinkers (e.g., erin manning, gilles deleuze and félix guattari, tim ingold, luz gabriela arango gaviria, pascale molinier, sara márquez gutiérrez, maría puig de la bella casa, donna haraway, sarah pink, roberta bacic, kristina lindström and åsa ståhl, natalia quiceno, and adriana villamizar). her knitting of textile and textual gestures is as carefully performed as the rest of the book: concept by concept, page by page, thread by thread. gestos textiles is a collection of animated micro-stories that take us through the needle hole down the thread across the fabric and into the lives of women, the theory of academics, and to pérez-bustos’s personal story as a textile apprentice. these stories are about the act of mending lives, frayed relationships, torn dreams, and about how to redesign a past in order to weave a better present and future. textile gestures transform materiality, and by doing so, they transform the lives of those who perform them; they transform their stories, their memories, their views of the future and of themselves.   notes 1 repetir para aprender   2 deshacer para volver a hacer   3 destruir con cuidado   4 remendar para resistir   5 juntar para componer   6 dechado de conceptos   author bio sandra p. gonzález-santos is a feminist sts scholar interested in reproductive and genetic biotechnologies, food systems, and arts-based pedagogies. wei ling, tony (2020). review of going stealth: transgender politics and u.s. surveillance practices (duke university press, 2019). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), pp. 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © tony wei ling, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | going stealth: transgender politics and u.s. surveillance practices, by toby beauchamp (duke university press, 2019) tony wei ling ucla tonyweiling@g.ucla.edu what does it mean to become visible? toby beauchamp’s 2019 monograph going stealth does not ask this question of trans people, exactly, or even of any particular group; the “subjectless critique” that it undertakes declines a central figure for its inquiries. the question is not, “what does visibility mean for trans people?”––a tired, or tiring, question nevertheless echoed out in intra-community fights. instead, the question of this book assesses the mechanics and technologies of visibility itself: what does visibility promise to the state, and what does the promise of visibility attempt to secure, vanish, or replace? in developing a subjectless trans critique, beauchamp’s gesture is not a vacantly anti-identitarian one, as i somewhat worried over when beginning its introduction. unsurprisingly indebted to foucault, going stealth’s study of gender-haunted surveillance measures and securitization gives a history of the tools by which compliance and noncompliance are manufactured––the x-ray, the backscatter machine, the identification card, the trial of chelsea manning (p. 14). this strategy means that we can frame the question of visibility not by what “being seen” offers as an idealistic aim or cynical strategy or even an inescapable trap, but by what searching and being searched has to do with compliant citizenship. rather than examining the ways that trans people get caught in the jaws of surveillance, beauchamp aims to show how gender nonconformity and mailto:tonyweiling@g.ucla.edu book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) tony wei ling, 2020 2 trans-identified subjects are an essentially productive problem for surveillance practices. the continued misapprehension of gender nonconformity as “inherently deceptive,” beauchamp writes, creates the justification for “continued surveillance to locate its truth” (p. 134). for this project, then, what drives and intensifies surveillance is not simply a hatred and distrust of trans people as a group, but a broader (if certainly transphobic) anxiety about the impossibility of securing gender for identification purposes. to the extent that gender is mutable, variable, or non-visual, it cannot serve its purpose as a stable identifying marker; the anxiety generated from that instability is in turn the legitimizing force for each new measure aiming to separate the safe from the unsafe person, the healthy from the threatening body. importantly, beauchamp emphasizes, the groups affected and targeted by these measures are not only (even primarily) those who would describe themselves as trans. ableism, bourgeois phobias about sexual behavior, and racism of multiple stripes––anti-muslim, anti-black, anti-immigrant––all drive the fearful violence that surveillance visits upon the “gender non-conforming” figure. beauchamp’s critique builds upon the work of jasbir puar, amit rai (2002), and cathy cohen (1997), all of whom have written about the way that marginalized people can be marked by queerness or (more broadly) sexual deviance without being themselves “queer.” by carefully refusing the version of this project that would train its eye on trans people, beauchamp opens up an analysis that scrutinizes gender regulation’s involvement in border control, war crimes, and anti-terrorist surveillance. chapters 1 and 2 of going stealth outline the respective histories of the standardized identification document and the airport scanner. in the former, beauchamp emphasizes the standardization of documents as a process of codification, by which documents understood to simply describe qualities like race or gender actually generate and attempt to secure them as factual reports. the chapter begins with standardized manumission papers, then traces the regulation of photo ids around the moment of chinese exclusion. these histories are present in contemporary fights around securitizing immigration, anti-terrorism, and voting, which so often frame falsified documents as proof of “a fundamentally deceptive personality…shared across certain marginalized groups” (p. 27). a racist anxiety about truth, id, and citizenship is always already intertwined with a heterosexist anxiety about those same things, where fears of gender mutability may be used to “play on racial anxieties about voter fraud without explicitly referencing race,” shoring up the lines of legitimate belonging (p. 30). book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) tony wei ling, 2020 3 in the second chapter’s history of air travel, x-rays, and backscatter machines, the problem of strategic disclosure that ends chapter 1 is developed further alongside the recourse that transgender advocates have made to claiming “medical necessity” for prosthetic and non-prosthetic bodily anomalies on trans bodies. travel recommendations that suggest trans travelers disclose their status, and transgender advocates arguing for gender-related prosthetics as medical necessities attempt to bargain for a more progressive and sensitive transportation security administration (tsa), but cannot resolve the problem of how to differentiate legitimate, docile transgender flyers from threatening ones only interpreted as gender-nonconforming. “how will bodily anomalies be redefined, as bodily normality is incrementally expanded through these alterations?” beauchamp asks (p. 76). chapter 3, which focuses on bathrooms bills and the odd intimacy between public bathrooms and “good citizenship,” tracks a fascinatingly informal kind of surveillance based in an imagined community of middle-class bathroom-users, whose privacy and security is apparently at risk. yet the very incoherence of the proposed laws that might lock down those bathrooms by a “common-sense” approach to bodily assessment or by an ill-conceived “complaint basis” nonetheless work overtime to render intense scrutiny a public norm, and intensifies the adjudication of both gendered and national/racial belonging in public spaces (p. 104). this logic of bodily assessment, beauchamp argues, is inherently tied to biometric surveillance programs, which attempts to gather, sort, and interpret apparently unchangeable physical markers to secure places like government buildings and airports (p. 95). most importantly, perhaps, the focus on the individual body as a form of proof deflects “critical assessment of the spaces in which those bodies are situated,” putting the onus of suspicion on the body rather than the public place it dares to inhabit (p. 101). in going stealth’s final chapter, on chelsea manning’s trial, beauchamp takes on his most difficult case study. the trial’s discursive attempts to make manning’s own gender secrets or “deception” the subject of scrutiny is beauchamp’s point and true subject, but because of the continuing exposure and importance of manning as an incarcerated whistleblower, delivering an analysis of manning’s trial but not manning proves incredibly delicate and difficult work. this chapter clarifies, however, one of the book’s most urgent questions: how do narrative frames, analogies, and analytical habits inevitably submerge one thing in order to book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) tony wei ling, 2020 4 secure or make visible another? it is easy, this book acknowledges, to misemphasize and make visible a single subject or group affected by a violent structure, elevating one subject to “visibility” by necessarily submerging others. in this last chapter, beauchamp demonstrates the rhetorical bait-and-switch of manning’s “secrets” with state secrets, where the hypervisibility of the former became an opportunity to secure the latter. one important effect of beauchamp’s focus on the compulsory mechanisms of public life (such as id documents, x-rays, and public bathrooms) is the displacement of an often-lionized posture of noncompliance. within going stealth, individual deviation or refusal is not held to be a heroic resistance to capture by the state; rather, “noncompliance” becomes the central term describing an attributed, involuntary quality of threatening difference. what does it mean, beauchamp wonders instead, to be unable to be compliant? his final chapter cites the 2008 police assault on duanna johnson, a black trans woman arrested, harassed, and beaten by booking officer bridges mcrae, in which a preponderance of surveillance footage from body cameras and county jails was used as evidence not only by johnson’s counsel, but by the violent cop who filed his own assault charge against johnson (p. 111). for this case as well as others, noncompliance is not a prescription for resistance, certainly not at an individual level, but a constant and ordinary fact of perception. the problem with visibility, then, is being seen, for there is no real gap between the state and civil society: surveillance works through informal as well as formal means, “through capillary networks of power not confined to areas commonly associated with the state itself” (p. 17). becoming illegible and so ungovernable has its appeal. but as the epilogue, “on endurance,” concludes, “surveillance practices thrive on the illegibility that they themselves assign to certain populations,” and gender nonconformity alone––like queerness itself––can hardly deliver “an inherently resistant foil to the workings of surveillance” (p. 140). individual and group noncompliance alike become excuses for further force, more intense scrutiny, and new forms of surveillance. like many monographs, going stealth gives just a wisp of an idea of what would serve as a possible strategy, even as it attempts to leave the reader in the arena of political response. this half-step ends the book on a note of prevarication, particularly unsatisfying given the urgency of its diagnostic, and potentially suggesting that state technologies and strategies are too totalizing and dynamic to ever overthrow. still, i admire this book’s commitment to the descriptive before the aspirational, and its emphatic argument that we cannot romanticize illegibility or book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) tony wei ling, 2020 5 evasion as an enduring politic. beauchamp’s going stealth is a careful meshwork of historical and political analysis, attentive to the problems of existing critical frames. references cohen, c. (1997). punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: the radical potential of queer politics?” glq, 3(4): 437–65. puar, j., & amit, r. (2002). monster, terrorist, fag: the war on terrorism and the production of docile patriots." social text, 20(3): 117–48. author bio tony wei ling is a comics critic, graduate student, and fiction editor. they are a managing editor at nat.brut, and they study contemporary fiction, comics, and new media at ucla.     roundtable: housewife’s secret arsenal home drone: how to militarize the smart home with the ring always home camera     michael richardson unsw sydney michael.richardson@unsw.edu.au   j.d. schnepf university of groningen j.d.schnepf@rug.nl     abstract amazon launched the ring always home camera with a promotional video featuring the mobile security drone flying into action to stop a home intruder. the addition of the domestic security drone into the housewife's arsenal expands the everyday militarism of security subjectivity, even as it imagines a “better” domestic laborer—one trained not only to be watchful but also to patrol the home and protect property. the ring always home camera suggests that to be a good securitized citizen is to make the home transparent, not only to the optical eye of the drone's camera but also to its machine vision navigation apparatus. networked to ring's home security system, the depiction of the appliance in the video forwards a new corporate vision of domestic security—one that introduces networked aeriality, as well as militarized modes of perceiving and knowing into domestic space. this essay is a part of the roundtable called “the housewife's secret arsenal” (henceforth hsa); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. the title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.   keywords security, drone, domesticity, amazon, ring always home camera     amazon pre-emptively launched the ring always home camera at its 2020 fall hardware event by way of a short promotional video featuring the domesticated drone patrolling a suburban middle-class home. while the device is still not on sale at the time of writing in mid-2022 (but with an open waitlist and slated for a $250 price tag), this video is nonetheless revealing. sunlight filters through pulled white curtains and into a pristine domestic interior, a subtle gesture to an aesthetically pleasing domestic privacy. this serene scene is interrupted by an intruder breaking into the home through a sliding glass door to the backyard. the breach of the house's perimeter triggers the security camera to launch from its charging station while its owner streams the event live to his phone (figure 1). for some it might seem curious that no housewife appears in the drone's promotional ad; we see only the man of the house bearing witness to the break in. even at a distance then, the device easily enables the exercise of paternalistic control over the home and its contents. in this sense, the networked domicile is a site primed for the production of heteronormative masculinity. indeed, as lynn spigel has observed, “the smart home is still a highly gendered place” (2005, 422). look a little closer and we see the man's wedding band as he holds his smartphone, as if to index a spouse's absent presence in the scene. there and not there, the ad figures the domestic drone as surrogate spouse, domestic servant, and vigilant guard—a compliant automaton that spends its days minding and defending its domain. while the ring drone might be read as an extension of masculine control of the home and its security, what emerges more strongly here is a nostalgic figure of the housewife: obedient, watchful, and tireless. although clearly a new agent of amazon's desire to incorporate practices of corporate techno-surveillance and securitization into existing regimes of domestic management, this is only part of the transformation ushered in by the ring drone. the addition of the domestic security drone into the housewife's arsenal also exercises the self-disciplining of the imperial subject, expands the territory of militarism, criminalizes poor and racialized populations, all while imagining a “better” domestic laborer—one trained not only to be watchful but also to patrol the home and protect property. figure 1. the ring always home camera captures the breach of the home's perimeter. when not in use, the ring always home camera fits seamlessly into the curved white cube of a small charging station where the camera and rotor blades remain neatly out of sight. sleek and discrete, its minimalist aesthetic blends easily into the contemporary smart home: at first glance it could be mistaken for a speaker, a router, or a kitchen appliance (figure 2). equally well integrated with the networked home, the device is also equipped with amazon's alexa, the digital assistant cum racialized domestic servant (phan 2017). if it takes off while people are home, its persistent buzz makes its presence obvious. as ceo jamie siminoff claimed in a blog post stretching credulity, “we even designed always home cam to hum at a certain volume, so it's clear the camera is in motion and is recording.” this, we are told, is “privacy you can hear” (2020). unlike a static camera, you know when it's watching because it is in the air, making the intimate circuits of domestic life its own. but while the design of amazon's first home security drone seems to insist on the product's banality, its innocuous physical appearance belies the system's multipronged domestication of technoscientific militarism through a surveillant, networked aeriality that maps the home to make it transparent and introduces militarized modes of perceiving and knowing to the domestic interior. figure 2. the always home cam at rest. writing of the architectural features that constituted the mid-century “see-through house,” beatriz colomina observes that “glass...enables an internal policing of the suburban home” (2007, 153). “it permits the surveying eye of the mother,” colomina continues, “already mobile through the open plan, to extend itself into the yard to monitor the movements of children playing outside and of approaching visitors and deliverymen” (153). the drone as the technological surrogate for the stay-at-home mother also accords with what critics have called the smart home's “big mother regime that seeks to marketise and colonise the home by delivering feminised technologies and by promising to take up feminised labours” (sadowski, strengers, and kennedy 2021, 3). writing of residential drones, anna jackman and katherine brickell observe that “the drone patrols as techno-security-agent in and above domestic perimeters, rendering visible perceived transgressions while cohabiting and dwelling therein” (2021, 2). but in summoning the specters of both the patrolling security agent and the dwelling's cohabitant, this description maintains a distinction between soldier and spouse. in fact, the drone's update to the cold war-fantasy of the vigilant mother and her domain of domestic transparency performs a decidedly militarized maternalism by reconciling these figures. while colomina's mother was watchful and mobile, the always home camera stalks the halls of the home on its pre-mapped routes, taking care to pause at potential sites of infiltration to check for signs of a breach to the perimeter: open windows, unlocked doors, and would-be-intruders. activated by a perimeter breach, a predefined patrol time, or the intervention of its owner via the ring app, the drone only becomes a deliberately visible and active surveillant by invitation. this is what chris gilliard calls luxury surveillance: “expensive, voluntary, and sleek (yet often meant to be noticed)” (2020). domestic drone security is for middle-class homeowners who can afford to be surveilled, who want surveillance for the anxious comfort it brings, and for whom digital capitalism is either not yet a yoke or an unrecognized one. as jathan sadowski, yolande strengers, and jenny kennedy write, “the smart home is an ingenious way of installing the infrastructure of digital capitalism in the private places that are hardest to reach and getting us to pay for the privilege” (2021, 9). in other words, securitized us consumer culture accepts the invasive tracking of personal habits in exchange for the elected luxuries of domestic surveillance. but more than this, the technology solicits consumers to practice imperial citizenship through dutiful acts of self-regulation and self-governance. in the context of post-9/11 security culture more broadly, rachel hall identifies a “feminine heterosexual acquiescence to the new surveillance technologies” (2015, 137). this feminized “'voluntary' transparency” that both submits to and welcomes the surveilling gaze is one technique through which good securitized citizenship gets enacted (138). figure 3. the always home cam in flight. crucially, this surveilling gaze is not static, but motile (figure 3). if external cctv refigures the walls of the home as a perimeter and fixed internal cameras transform living rooms into zones of watchfulness, then the airborne camera's aerial motility remakes the lived circuits of an anxious feminized domesticity into patrol routes and points of inspection. according to promotional materials, the drone moves through the home by way of a sensor module that incorporates time-of-flight and lidar to help it navigate autonomously. mapping, that vital practice of military epistemology and logistics, is a necessary prerequisite to operation and prompts an immediate intimacy with the device. unpackaged and charged, the new owner walks the drone through the home, turning it this way and that to identify windows and doors so that its lidar sensor, like that of an autonomous car, can build a three-dimensional model for the drone to navigate. in this way, the ring drone folds the home into the militarized operation of what paul virilio (1989) calls the logistics of perception. pre-mapped routes make it an unreliable domestic presence, even with obstacle avoidance sensors and software. close the wrong door, place something large on the kitchen counter, or move furniture unexpectedly and the drone risks crashing. but such concerns are secondary. to be a good securitized citizen is to make the home transparent, not only to the optical eye of the drone's camera but also to its machine vision navigation apparatus. mapping remodels the material home as a computational array of nodes and edges in which windows and doors become high intensity vectors to make the home knowable, actionable, and operable as a space of drone mobility. while the drone's mobility is confined to a predetermined path, its data connects with and flows through a larger surveillance apparatus. “amazon ring is an assemblage of surveillance fixtures and apparatuses, social media networks, crime reporting partnerships, and internet-connected cloud servers,” writes lauren bridges (2021, 835). armed with video from their drone, doorbell cam, cctv, and the proprietary neighbors by ring app, ring users are recruited to perform the work of securitizing the neighborhood should a local police department ask them to “assist an investigation by voluntarily sharing videos” (heller 2021). in such partnerships domestic subjects are called to engage in what inderpal grewal has called the logic of vigilantism. “enjoined by the ubiquity of the phrase 'if you see something, say something' that governmentalized the war on terror,” grewal points out that the logic of vigilantism “has securitized the domestic sphere of home and nation” (2017, 121). good citizenship not only entails active participation in policing, but also in the militarized securitization of domestic perimeters, interiors, and atmospheres. for this good liberal subject, families are diverse, and anyone can be a threat. such securitization promises to relieve anxiety and fear, but can in fact only sustain and even amplify it. the ring drone extends the logic of carcerality and its attendant racializing technologies into the present. here we might recall that the interest in home security came about alongside “post-war domestic material cultures” and “racialized material inequality” (caluya 2014, 808). for gilbert caluya, the move to privatize systems of domestic security among postwar white american suburban homeowners mitigated the “unwanted effects of desegregation” (817). by the 1980s and 1990s, policy discourse and mass media portrayed “an urban underclass of working-class blacks and latinos” as a threat to national security (macek 2006, xiv). advertisers, in turn, “mobilized fears of a perilous urban realm to sell a variety of products”—including “home security systems” (macek 2006, xvi). in the twenty-first century, the ring drone can be understood through the corporate desire to mobilize white fear and to extend policing, effectively producing crime by opening up new spaces and contexts to surveillance technologies (scannell 2019, 108). the prevailing whiteness of the launch video's interiors is no coincidence, nor are the numerous cases of ring systems being used to target innocent black and brown people. as simone browne insists, we need to “factor in how racism and anti-blackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order” (2015, 9). but if we pursue the logics, affects, and modes of knowledge production through the lens of everyday militarism, then the ring drone's anti-blackness converges with martial imperatives to distinguish friends from foes. while the technology of the ring consumer drone is far from the large-scale reapers of remote warfare and thus seemingly only marginally differentiated from a networked security milieu of doorbell and nanny cams, the securitized technics of autonomous patrol and threat identification are nonetheless intimately linked to what jeremy packer and joshua reeves call “enemy epistemology,” which is “beholden to a specific media logic—that is, a logic of sensation, perception, reason, and comprehension specific to a given medialogical environment” (2020, 5). while the ring drone could be easily batted from the air (why the intruder in the launch video panics and runs is unclear), it nonetheless advances an epistemological architecture that dehumanizes by design. this epistemology doesn't simply identify an intruder but produces an enemy. playing out and investing in the technological capture of racialized populations at home, the turn to home security by drone unveils contemporary militarized domesticity's necropolitical imagination. acknowledgments the authors wish to thank the editorial team and writers who participated in the 2021 writing workshop for this housewife's secret arsenal section, as well as the anonymous reviewer for their invaluable feedback. references bridges, lauren. 2021. “infrastructural obfuscation: unpacking the carceral logics of the ring surveillant assemblage.” information, communication & society 24 (6): 830-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1909097. browne, simone. 2015. dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham, nc: duke university press. caluya, gilbert. 2014. “pride and paranoia: race and the emergence of home security in cold war america.” continuum: journal of media and cultural studies 28 (6): 808-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2014.966406. colomina, beatriz. 2007. domesticity at war. cambridge, ma: mit press. gilliard, chris. 2020. “the two faces of the smart city.” fast company, january 20, 2020. http://www.fastcompany.com/90453305/the-two-faces-of-the-smart-city. grewal, inderpal. 2017. saving the security state: exceptional citizens in twenty-first-century america. durham, nc: duke university press. hall, rachel. 2015. “terror and the female grotesque: introducing full body scanners to u.s. airports.” in feminist surveillance studies, edited by rachel e. dubrofsky and shoshanna amielle magnet, 127-49. durham, nc: duke university press. heller, michael. 2021. “a black woman invented home security systems. big tech gave them racial bias.” digitaltrends, february 18, 2021. https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/troubling-evolution-from-marie-van-brittan-brown-ring/. jackman, anna, and katherine brickell. 2021. “'everyday droning': towards a feminist geopolitics of the drone-home.” progress in human geography 20 (10) :1-23. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211018745. packer, jeremy, and joshua reeves. 2020. killer apps: war, media, machine. durham, nc: duke university press. macek, steve. 2006. urban nightmares: the media, the right, and the moral panic over the city. minnesota: university of minnesota press. phan, thao. 2017. “the materiality of the digital and the gendered voice of siri.” transformations, no. 29, 23-33. http://www.transformationsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/transformations29_phan.pdf. sadowski, jathan, yolande strengers, and jenny kennedy. 2021. “more work for big mother: revaluing care and control in smart homes.” environment and planning a: economy and space, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x211022366. scannell, joshua. 2019. “this is not minority report: predictive policing and population racism.” in captivating technologies: race, carceral technoscience, and liberatory imagination in everyday life, edited by ruha benjamin, 107-32. durham, nc: duke university press. siminoff, jamie. 2020. “introducing ring always home cam: an innovative new approach to always being home.” ring blog. 20 september (accessed 17 august 2021). https://blog.ring.com/2020/09/24/introducing-ring-always-home-cam-an-innovative-new-approach-to-always-being-home/. spigel, lynn. 2005. “designing the smart house: posthuman domesticity and conspicuous production.” european journal of cultural studies 8 (4): 403-26. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549405057826. virilio, paul. 1989. war and cinema: the logistics of perception. new york: verso.     author bios michael richardson is an associate professor of media at unsw sydney. j.d. schnepf is an assistant professor of american studies at the university of groningen.     roundtable introduction: “citation networks as antidiscriminatory practice”     mara mills new york university mmills@nyu.edu     during the catalyst 5th anniversary symposium, held online, the opening conversation between donna haraway and banu subramaniam gravitated to the topic of citation in feminist sts: how we “disappear” each other and how to build new fields of thought through citation. from the audience, zoë wool typed into the chat, “hi all—how about we all drop in here the names of folks we would like to see cited more.” a parallel written discussion ensued while haraway and subramaniam talked, and dozens of names were suggested. following up on this provocation, catalyst is reprinting an excerpt of the dialogue between haraway and subramaniam, and we invited some of the audience members to publish their own interviews with the scholars, artists, and activists they nominated: max liboiron with tina ngata, firuzeh shokooh valle with raquel gutiérrez aguilar, zoë wool with marisa solomon, loren britton with romi ron morrison. these conversations span technopolitical resistance as feminist sts, black geographies and wayward anthropology, algorithmic normativity, and the colonial politics of citation itself.   citation is a means of recognition and conjuring as well as academic credit. it could be its own bureau in the league of feminist scholarship. sara ahmed describes citation as a reproductive technology that is also a screening technique: “a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies” and the way “certain bodies take up spaces by screening out the existence of others” (ahmed 2013). power, bias, and theft lurk in the endpages. quantitative studies of publications, citation rates, and editorial positions in particular fields—like “#communicationsowhite” by paula chakravartty, rachel kuo, victoria grubbs, and charlton mcilwain—reveal that today, still, “white masculinity [is] the normative core of scholarly inquiry” (chakravartty et. al. 2018). even after decades of (too-slow) gains in hiring and publication rates, citation equity requires overt cross-platform campaigns like #citeblackwomen, launched in 2017 by anthropologist christen smith.   notes and bibliographies are the architecture of information search, promotion, and syllabus development. yet even articles that claim left politics, or cover feminist and queer topics, often rest on the same discriminatory pilings. groups like the civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear) at memorial university of newfoundland, directed by liboiron, have formulated feminist approaches to author order based on consensus (published in catalyst volume 3, issue 2). clear acknowledges social location as well as forms of labor like care work that mostly don’t get counted within academic hierarchies (liboiron et. al. 2017).   in this collection of anniversary interviews, liboiron talks with ngata about their mutual interest in indigenous approaches to plastic pollution. they discuss ngata’s research and collaborative networks in aotearoa (new zealand), the colonial underpinnings of intellectual property, and western “alibis for ignorance” about indigenous expertise. firuzeh shokooh valle and raquel gutiérrez aguilar consider the “impoverishment of english-speaking academia” in its “brutal asymmetry” and willful neglect toward most of the world’s scholarship. in their conversation (conducted in spanish and translated by vivette garcía deister), gutiérrez aguilar also talks about being a “late academic” following years of militant activism and incarceration in bolivia, and the “corseting” she often experiences in the norms of academic writing. shokooh valle and gutiérrez aguilar share an interest in science and technology as colonial-capitalist “dispossession devices”—while still pursuing strategies of “technopolitical resistance.”   zoë wool and marisa solomon also take up the themes of trash and dispossession. from the perspective of racial capitalism in the u.s., solomon traces the valuation and exchange of people and places in her research on waste, gentrification, and salvage in cities. solomon locates her work within citational networks of black feminist marxists and scholars of black geographies. citing sadiya haartman, she introduces us to “wayward anthropology” as a response to the ongoing colonial impulses in ethnography. finally, loren britton interviews artist-scholar romi ron morrison about their multi-platform project on black computational thought. morrison enfolds sts, queer black feminist theory, and geography into video, installations, and writing in critical data studies. the conversation itself is interrupted by emojis from mutant.tech, an anti-corporate and inclusive icon set, offering an exercise in slow reading and a new digital ritual for citation.   references ahmed, sara. 2013. “making feminist points.” feminist killjoys blog. last modified september 11, 2013. accessed june 22, 2021. https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/. chakravartty, paula, rachel kuo, victoria grubbs, and charlton mcilwain. 2018. “#communicationsowhite.” journal of communication 68 (2): 254–266. liboiron, max, justine ammendolia, katharine winsor, alex zahara, hillary bradshaw, jessica melvin, charles mather, natalya dawe, emily wells, france liboiron, bojan fürst, coco coyle, jacquelyn saturno, melissa novacefski, sam wescott, and grandmother liboiron. 2017. “equity in author order: a feminist laboratory’s approach.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3 (2): https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/28850.     author bios mara mills is an associate professor of media, culture, and communication at new york university, where she co-founded and co-directs the nyu center for disability studies. she is a founding editorial board member of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience.   microsoft word 30498-article text-77070-1-18-20190208_pr.docx murillo, j., iii. (2019). review of fugitive science: empiricism and freedom in early african american culture, by britt rusert (nyu press, 2017). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5 (1), 1-6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © john murillo iii, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license review fugitive science: empiricism and freedom in early african american culture, by britt rusert (nyu press, 2017) john murillo iii university of california, irvine murilloj@uci.edu to help with the move to her new apartment, my aunt tasked me with collecting and boxing the books in my grandmother’s home. every tome i plucked from the shelves trembled in my hands because, although she prematurely departed this plane over a decade prior due to breast and lung cancers, disturbing the texts that at various turns of her life and treatment met and returned her regal gaze awoke the dormant process of mourning her. one with a faded, rust-colored cover and its binding worn loose called to be opened. it announced itself as a book of holistic medicine, comprised of anatomical diagrams, musings on the importance of spiritual and psychological health to physical well-being, and natural remedies with detailed descriptions of the utility and effectiveness of every ingredient. behind its final pages lurked a tattered envelope covered in my grandmother’s writing in different colors of ink, and they matched the countless notes and marks she wrote throughout the text—in the margins, over important passages, at the tops and bottoms of dog-eared pages, and in-between the lines. the different colors at any given passage suggested repeated readings, new engagements made with new knowledge and murillo iii catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 following new experimentation, all tinged with the real need to arrive at a working healing praxis alongside, or maybe even counter to, the intensity and destructiveness of chemotherapy. my grandmother was a black woman innovator performing alternative forms of research and experimenting with alternative forms of medicine in order to intervene in her own health where she felt normative or mainstream forms of science and medicine could not. so we begin here and at a bit of length because this kind of narrative of experimentation and research done unseen, in the margins and between the lines, warrants revisiting after reading britt rusert’s profoundly illuminating fugitive science: empiricism and freedom in early african american culture. rusert chronicles what she describes as a shadow archive—a history that lurks behind, undergirds, and complicates the dominant archive—of “african american science writing [and cultural production] in the antebellum period” (2017, p. 8), and she she calls this archive fugitive science. fugitive science describes a heterogeneous, innovative, resistant, “dynamic and diverse archive of engagements with, critiques of, and responses to” (p. 4) the antiblack racial science that proliferated the antebellum episteme, and it expands the definition of science to include forms of praxis and experimentation typically, and often deliberately, unrecognized as science: conjuring, performance, astrology, mysticism, mesmerism, and imaginative speculation. citing michel foucault’s the order of things: an archaeology of rhe human sciences, rusert charactizes fugitive science as a “counterscience,” (p. 6) one undergirded by a “subterranean politics and furtive insurgency” (p. 17) aimed at appropriating, confronting, mocking, or otherwise destabilizing the logics of the racial science of the antebellum period and its political and ideological echoes in eras beyond. it is a science of the “unthought” (hartman & wilderson, 2003) that innovates from the outside margins of history or in between the lines of the archive; it describes a set of “ongoing experiments in freedom, radical empiricisms” (p. 20) that refuse the normative constrictions and often deathly, antiblack consequences of what would typically be recognized as scientific inquiry. irreducible to any one form of thought production (from writing to visual art murillo iii catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 to performance), it treats science—and knowledge writ large—as an “assemblage of different fields and practices that could” and should “be dismantled, reassembled, and redirected” (p. 132) toward black thought’s work of “imagining the unimaginable” (sharpe, 2014, p. 59): liberation from, or the end of, the antiblack world. in that way, rusert’s fugitive science is alchemical: from base elements marshaled from countless arenas of thought and experience, fugitive scientists such as benjamin banneker, henry box brown, martin r. delaney, sarah mapps douglass, and even brenda smith, my grandmother, blacken and transmute an altogether radical unique, and “unthinkable” scientific practice. rusert categorizes three forms of fugitive science, but the lines between them blur and even disappear from case to case—it is, after all, a radically dynamic form of knowledge production; moving through the text, one might do well to also consider these forms to be like frequencies on which all fugitive science articulates. the oppositional frequency of fugitive science describes work done to intervene explicitly into scientific discourses, especially those that reinforced the ruling, antiblack episteme. works operating on the practical frequency attempted to instrumentalize science and technology in ways that could help advance the project of emancipation. and finally, the speculative frequency of fugitive science wields the imaginative richness of scientific inquiry to explore the limits, conditions of possibility, and revolutionary potential of black existence. throughout her chronicling of the history and genealogy of fugitive science, rusert reveals the fluidity of these forms, the ease with which an individual figure, work, or exchange may articulate on one or more of these frequencies at once. as examples, benjamin banneker’s confrontations with thomas jefferson over jefferson’s infamous notes on the state of virginia locate the oppositional origin point for rusert’s history of fugitive science. banneker’s extensive critiques of jefferson and those that followed in their wake—like james mccune smith’s essays—act as intentionally and predominantly oppositional works meant to intervene against racial science. on another frequency, martin r. delany’s novel, blake; or, the huts of murillo iii catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 america, weaves a speculative history and future of revolutionary movement and organization that marshals both practical astronomical knowledge and metaphysical rumination. a work of more remarkably varied frequencies, rusert reads delany’s novel as aiming to radically destabilize the boundaries between metaphysical mysticism and science, and to provide information that could all advance the cause of black liberation in and beyond the antebellum period. and on still another frequency, the littleknown teachings and lectures on physiology of sarah mapps douglass, which she offered almost exclusively to black women and young girls, indirectly offers a response to “the forms of experimental science that exploited [joice] heth, [sarah] baartman, and countless other women of african descent in the nineteenth-century atlantic world” (p. 185), where black women were (and are) subject to layer of violent erasure that render(ed) them the “mute experimental subjects of nineteenth century science” (p. 181). further, douglass’s lectures operate on a lower frequency than the other subjects of rusert’s texts, a frequency of the lapses silences of the unavailable archive—muted, censored, displaced, or forgotten into unavailability—necessitating speculation in the form of inferences, like stitches, drawn from the limited records rusert is able to collect. in this way, douglass also responds to the longue dureé of the deliberate and casual erasure of black women from the still unfolding history and genealogy of fugitive science. each work, moment, and exchange of fugitive science encapsulates a dynamic expression announcing anew the defiant, creative, and uncontainable project of black freedom on multiple frequencies. essential to fully tuning into the frequencies of these and the many fugitive scientists of rusert’s study—and of rusert’s study itself as well—is an attention to the grand questions about and implications for black knowledge production and critical, creative thought that her chronicle compels us to (re)consider. as and after we read fugitive science, we must rethink the ways we define, recognize, and take seriously science, critique, resistance, and knowledge itself. after encountering the variable frequencies and forms fugitive science takes, how can we delimit what constitutes scientific inquiry? how might we better tune to the lower murillo iii catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 frequencies of intellectual and creative endeavors that we otherwise miss, that are rendered inaudible, or that we would normally disallow from being truly engaged as knowledge? like i have been compelled to do, both at the outset of these remarks and in my own research, we might begin by radically reconsidering our encounters with the alternative, vexing, sometimes fraught fragments of experimentation, research, and speculation that comprise the vast, varied, and still-unfolding archive of black thought. we might search the silences and lower frequencies for those articulations of black innovation that fugitively traverse the static. we must, then, innovate an alternative form of reading and listening that will enable us to find what we, prior to reading this text, did not know we would do well to seek. only then might the full expression of fugitive science and all its lessons from the antebellum period enable us to continue and advance the revolutionary struggle against racist science and its ripples in the contemporary moment. references hartman, s., & wilderson, f. b. (2003). the position of the unthought. qui parle, 13(2), 183-201. sharpe, c. (2014). “black studies: in the wake.” the black scholar, 44(2), 59-69. bio dr. john murillo iii is assistant professor of african american studies at the university of california, irvine. his primary research interests are black speculative fiction, critical theory, quantum mechanics, and popular media (especially comic books and graphic novels). he is finalizing his current project, impossible stories: on the time and space of black creation with the ohio state university press. microsoft word 32309_laura foster dr.docx foster, laura a. (2019). critical perspectives on plants, race, and colonialism: an introduction. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © laura a. foster, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical perspectives on plants, race, and colonialism: an introduction laura a. foster indiana university–bloomington university of cape town fosterl@indiana.edu when i learn from plants, i imagine possibilities for rethinking and doing science and law otherwise. i begin to get a feeling for plants and how they offer alternative ways of sensing, relating to, and being responsible in co-becomings with human and more-than-human beings. this learning has been a process. when i began working with and alongside ‡khomani san peoples over a decade ago, i focused my learning on san struggles in south africa over the patenting of hoodia gordonii plants and their knowledge of them. i did not consider what hoodia succulent plants could teach me. i was initially curious how san peoples, through their own south african san council, strategically deployed benefit sharing to interrupt regimes of patent ownership and pharmaceutical science in ways that offered both possibilities and limits for their efforts to establish belonging in a changing south africa. through the urging of members of the south african san council, my learnings were directed at decolonizing regimes of us patent law by showing how patent ownership is inherently racialized, gendered, and western, and by rethinking practices of science and law in support of indigenous peoples’ efforts at selfdetermination (foster 2016, 2017). patent law rules in most countries, for example, grant exclusive patent ownership rights only for inventions that are markedly different from nature. in the case of hoodia, south african scientists critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) laura a. foster, 2019 2 obtained a patent for extracting steroidal glycoside molecules from the plant that could suppress appetite as proven by their laboratory testing, which patent law considers different from merely discovering the plant or its molecules as found growing in the kalahari desert. patent ownership is thus based upon understandings of nature as distinct from human-made culture, which is a binary style of thought that has been historically used to subordinate marginalized groups such as indigenous peoples, women, and people of color by characterizing them, in similar and different ways, as closer to nature and less than human. as south african san peoples interrupted forces of patent ownership and their binary logics in powerful and limited ways through benefit sharing, so too did hoodia plants through their own enactments or doings. hoodia plants (e.g., chemicals, seeds, metabolites, spatial arrangements) refused, changed, or even aligned with practices of patent law and pharmaceutical science by evolving in patchy spatial distributions, growing too slowly when cultivated, and interacting with the human body in unpredictable ways that interrupted desires to make a hoodia-based anti-obesity product. their doings interrupted and exceeded their confinement as patented objects, thus acting back against the forces of law and science that sought to contain them. hoodia plants taught me that strategies of refusal and interrupting power can be found in practices of failure, moving slowly, tasting bitter, and causing nausea. they and san peoples, in different ways, demonstrated alternative ways of sensing and responding to the world in relation to beings such as rain, soil, insects, porcupines, the sun, and collectivities of peoples. thus, they offer possibilities for rethinking what producing knowledge means and who gets to produce it, and for doing research with and in support of san peoples, lands, and hoodia plants. the authors in this critical perspectives section produce similar but also different insights through asking how plants and research with plants can inform feminist and indigenous technoscience and, specifically, understandings of race, colonialism, and colonial settler legacies. they develop ways of learning with and from plants as witnesses to human suffering, producers of memory, preservers of flesh, guides for learning, healers of caring, wise knowers, and builders of morethan-human worlds. by addressing human–plant co-becomings with attention to colonial pasts and their legacies, they offer further directions for feminist and indigenous technoscience that bring together a rich set of conversations. critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) laura a. foster, 2019 3 feminist and indigenous scholars of science have produced different and valuable insights into how colonialism and colonial settler societies have involved the taking of peoples, plants, lands, and resources that informed the making of hierarchies of gender, indigeneity, race, sexuality, and nation (harding, 1998, 2008; philip, 2004; shiva, 1997; subramaniam, foster, harding, roy, & tallbear, 2017; tallbear 2017; tilley, 2011; verran, 2001). they have shown how eighteenthcentury assumptions of sex, gender, sexuality, and race informed botanical understandings of plants and nature more broadly (schiebinger, 2004a), and how colonial empire depended upon the appropriation and transfer of certain indigenous peoples’ botanical knowledges and relevant plant specimens to europe (brockway, 1979; schiebinger, 2004b; tilley, 2011; verran, 2001). still others have demonstrated how colonial pasts continue to inform contemporary debates over, for example, invasive plant species (comaroff & comaroff, 2001; subramaniam, 2014) and the appropriation of indigenous peoples’ medicinal plant knowledge (harry & kanehe, 2007; hayden, 2003; laduke, 2005; shiva & moser, 1995; laveaga, 2009; tauli-corpuz, 2004). the authors in this critical perspectives section demonstrate how these rich insights inform emerging work in feminist and indigenous technoscience that engages with human and morethan-human worlds (haraway, 2016; kimmerer, 2013; myers, 2017a, 2017b; tallbear, 2017; tsing, 2015). histories of colonial science involved practices, sarah ives here reminds us, of categorizing plants as subordinate to human animals, while simultaneously classifying certain peoples as “nonwhite” and closer to nature through racial taxonomies that constructed and reinforced whites as superior. colonial botanists with the royal botanic gardens, kew, for instance, extracted plants from colonized lands and developed plant classification schemes, which reinforced eurocentricism and norms of white, male expertise. these colonial histories continue to endure in new yet familiar ways through the royal botanic garden’s more recent millennium seed bank project, which xan sarah chacko here argues, produces a depoliticized valence of “biodiversity conservation” to re-assert its epistemic authority while simultaneously flattening out its colonial pasts and legacies. these histories, as william ellis explains, also inform the colonial and apartheid pasts and legacies of south africa, but it is through an exploration of the milkwood tree that connections between peoples and plants more fully emerge. an emphasis on connection and relation arises as a central theme across each of these entries, which simultaneously challenges histories of modern dualistic thinking and offers possibilities for thinking otherwise. in tracing the generative, critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) laura a. foster, 2019 4 multifaceted and intertwined relations of kanna plants and san and khoi peoples, diana gibson invites alternative conceptions of temporality and history. alternative ways of knowing are what krisha j. hernández articulates are needed for building settler futurities and “doing academic work that listens to and thinks with more-than-human beings as having bodies and lives worthy of living.” this means “something other than seeing plants or seeing like plants in addition to people” but rather, as elaine gan explains through her research on rice, considering “different modalities of plants as more-than-human entanglement, dynamic assemblages of biogeochemical and technoscientific ways of being.” through their insights here, they offer exciting possibilities for more-than-human futures and for feminist and indigenous technoscience. references brockway, l. h. (1979). science and colonial expansion: the role of the british royal botanic gardens. american ethnologist, 6(3), 449-465. comaroff, j., & comaroff, j. l. (2001). naturing the nation: aliens, apocalypse and the postcolonial state. journal of southern african studies, 27(3), 627-651. foster, l. (2016). the making and unmaking of patent ownership: technicalities, materialities, and subjectivities. polar: political and legal anthropology review, 39(1), 127-143. foster, l. (2017). reinventing hoodia: peoples, plants, and patents in south africa. seattle, wa: washington university press. haraway, d. j. (2016). staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press. harding, s. (1998). is science multicultural?: postcolonialisms, feminisms, and epistemologies. bloomington, in: indiana university press. harding, s. (2008). sciences from below: feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities. durham, nc: duke university press. harry, d., & kanehe, l. m. (2007). the right of indigenous peoples to permanent sovereignty over genetic resources and associated indigenous knowledge. the journal of indigenous policy, 6, 28-43. hayden, c. (2003). when nature goes public: the making and unmaking of bioprospecting in mexico. princeton, nj: princeton university press. kimmerer, r. w. (2013). braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. minneapolis, mn: milkweed editions. laduke, w. (2005). recovering the sacred: the power of naming and claiming. critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) laura a. foster, 2019 5 cambridge, ma: south end press. myers, n. (2017a). becoming sensor in sentient worlds: a more-than-natural history of a black oak savannah. in g. bakke & m. petersen (eds.), between matter and method: encounters in anthropology and art (pp. 73-96). london: bloomsbury press. myers, n. (2017b). ungrid-able ecologies: decolonizing the ecological sensorium in a 10,000 year-old naturalcultural happening. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(2), 1-24. philip, k. (2004). civilizing natures: race, resources, and modernity in colonial south india. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. schiebinger, l. l. (2004a). nature's body: gender in the making of modern science. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. schiebinger, l. l. (2004b). plants and empire: colonial bioprospecting in the atlantic world. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. shiva, v. (1997). biopiracy: the plunder of nature and knowledge. boston, ma: south end press. shiva, v., & moser, i. (eds.) (1995). biopolitics: a feminist and ecological reader on biotechnology. london: zed books; third world network. laveaga, g. s. (2009). jungle laboratories: mexican peasants, national projects, and the making of the pill. durham, nc: duke university press. subramaniam, b. (2014). ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. champaign, il: university of illinois press. subramaniam, b., foster, l., harding, s., roy, d., & tallbear, k. (2017). feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. in c. miller, l. smith-doerr, u. felt, & r. fouché (eds.), handbook of science and technology studies (4th ed.) (pp. 407-433): cambridge, ma: mit press/4s. tallbear, k. (2017). beyond the life/not life binary: a feminist-indigenous reading of cryopreservation, interspecies thinking and the new materialisms." in j. radin & e. kowal (eds.), cryopolitics: frozen life in a melting world (pp. 179-202). boston, ma: mit press. tauli-corpuz, v. (2004). biodiversity, traditional knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples. indigenous perspectives, 6(1), 7-33. tilley, h. (2011). africa as a living laboratory: empire, development, and the problem of scientific knowledge, 1870-1950. chicago, il: university of chicago press. tsing, a. l. (2015). the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruin. princeton, nj: princeton university press. critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) laura a. foster, 2019 6 verran, h. (2001). science and an african logic. chicago, il: university of chicago press. author bio laura a. foster is an associate professor of gender studies, and affiliate faculty in law and african studies with a senior researcher appointment at the university of cape town faculty of law’s intellectual property unit. her research examines the coconstituted relations of law, technoscience, and markets as they pertain to intellectual property rights, indigenous peoples’ knowledge, medicinal plants, genomics, and data politics in south africa. fitsch, hannah, jordan-young, rebecca, kaiser, anelis, kraus, cynthia, roy, deboleena,& schmitz, sigrid (2020). life, coalition, and the practice of feminist science in the times of covid19. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(2), 1–33. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © hannah fitsch, rebecca jordan-young, anelis kaiser, cynthia kraus, deboleena roy, and sigrid schmitz, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license coalition-making and the practice of feminist sts in the time of covid-19 hannah fitsch technical university of berlin hannah.fitsch@tu-berlin.de rebecca jordan-young barnard college ryoung@barnard.edu anelis kaiser trujillo university of freiburg anelis.kaiser@tf.uni-freiburg.de cynthia kraus university of lausanne cynthia.kraus@unil.ch deboleena roy emory university droy2@emory.edu sigrid schmitz humboldt university of berlin sigrid.schmitz@hu-berlin.de abstract in this lab meeting, six feminist scholars who engage with the sciences from various perspectives and have been collaborating over the last decade as members of the neurogenderings network, share a sustained discussion on the responsibilities of a feminist scientist—particularly in light of our current moment. in a time when ongoing acts of anti-black racism and police brutality have converged with a global pandemic and anti-science movements, we ask ourselves, how do we express solidarity and also hold ourselves accountable at the crossroads of science and social justice? lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 2 introduction deboleena roy, emory university it is indeed impossible for critical neuroscientists to evade the immense race(ism) and sexism pervading the theorizing and conceptualizing of mental difference, hence it is astounding that neuroscientists with a feminist persuasion continue to fail to demonstrate these interdependencies. —emily ngubia kuria, “theorizing race(ism) while neurogendering” in early 2020, just before covid-19 had registered as a serious global pandemic for some of us, and just days before the brutal murder of breonna taylor in united states by the hands of police violence, the neurogenderings network held its fifth periodic international conference. the theme of the conference was the “intersectional analysis of the sexed/gendered brain.” organized by katherine bryant, annelies kleinherenbrink, hannah fitsch, anelis kaiser, and mal pool, the aim of this conference was to advance interdisciplinary conversations “surrounding sex/gender and the brain by integrating the notion of intersectionality more deeply into the field” of neuroscience, feminist sts, and where the two meet (neurogenderings, 2020). although the authors of this lab meeting all belong to the neurogenderings network, this article is not intended to speak on behalf of the entire network. having said that, the neurogenderings network, which was formed in 2010, conceives itself as an “international and transdisciplinary network which aims to elaborate innovative theoretical and empirical approaches for questions of sex/gender and sexuality for neuroscientists” and, more broadly, for those interested in working with the neurosciences (neurogenderings, 2020). one of the goals of this network has included fostering collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects, with a concerted effort toward mentoring junior colleagues. participants in this group have used primarily feminist and queer studies frameworks to critique how sex and gender differences are studied in the brain, and to develop new approaches to scientific inquiry and neuroscientific research that are informed by these critiques. another goal of this network is to create a space for coalition building. we strive to raise a scientific voice as a community of scholars and not only as individuals in the neurosciences. it is important to note that feminist scholars, including feminist neuroscientists who critique science, are not anti-science. we want to hold scientific research to a higher standard and produce knowledge that takes questions of ontology, epistemology, methodology, and ethics into mind. it is also important to note that feminist scholars who are critical of how the binary categories of sex and gender have been deployed in science are not against the idea of difference in lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 3 biology. rather, we are wary of the simplicity with which questions of difference are often formulated in the sciences. as a feminist neuroscientist, i have benefited a great deal from working with this network of colleagues. having said that, i think it is crucial at this moment to bring to the fore what emily ngubia kessé (formerly emily ngubia kuria), who was active in the earlier days of the network, highlighted above as a deep-seated failure on the part of this group. the neurogenderings network, with all of its intentions of initiating dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, interrogating the categories of sex/gender, and thinking more productively about difference when it comes to the brain, continues to reproduce a “white norm” (ngubia kuria, 2014, p. 110, emphasis in original). this norm is evident both in the lack of black, indigenous, people of color (bipoc) members who are actively involved in the network, in our citation politics, as well as the noticeable lack of scholarship being produced by its members that directly engages with critical race theory, black and women of color feminisms, intersectionality, indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and more. as one of the very few persons of color who has had sustained interactions with this network (out of approximately one hundred members who have participated over the last decade), i know that many members are aware of the failure to address questions of race and racism in the neurogenderings network—both in terms of representation and in terms of our scholarship. the admission of this failure, although on its own is certainly not enough, has been somewhat productive. the conference held in early 2020 is the closest that we have come as a network to directly confronting the limitations of our critical analyses of race and racism in neuroscience research. our conference call invoked intersectionality as “an analytic framework for examining how various social identities, including race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability status are interwoven and impact each other” (neurogenderings, 2020). this is definitely a step in the right direction, but even so, as a group we have to make sure that we do not just tag on “race” as another category in our analyses and exacerbate what kimberlé crenshaw recently described as a mischaracterization of intersectionality—that is, as “identity politics on steroids” (quoted in steinmetz, 2020). rather, she states that intersectionality should be thought of as a lens, a prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. we tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. what’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts. (crenshaw quoted in steinmetz, 2020) lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 4 as feminist scientists and scholars who, for the most part, are not formally trained in critical race theory, we have a way to go to fully appreciate crenshaw’s understanding of intersectionality. in our efforts to analyze how various forms of inequality operate together and exacerbate each other in the context of neuroscience research, it is crucial that these efforts do not inadvertently conceptualize race in ways that end up reinforcing racist and eugenic traditions in neuroscience and biology. it is, for example, imperative that we learn how to think about the intersections of race and neuroscience more carefully and creatively, as in the work and the neurospeculative afrofeminism installation project envisioned by the artist and molecular and cellular biologist ashley baccus-clark (2020a). we should also take questions of representation seriously and connect with scholars in the recently launched black in neuro organization who are dedicated to “celebrating black excellence in neuroscience related fields” (black in neuro, 2020). on the heels of our neurogenderings meeting dedicated to intersectionality, the six of us found ourselves posing some very difficult questions to each other. we all engage in our own way with the neurosciences, but we also all have many other feminist scholarly and political commitments. we asked, for instance, what does it mean to be a feminist in these times of the pandemic in which feminist priorities such as solidarity are set in opposition against individualism? what is our responsibility as feminist sts scholars in a time where the long histories of antiblack racism have converged with right-wing, and predominantly “white-male,” conservatism that promotes anti-science sentiments? what happens to feminist activism when we are forced to sacrifice our common spaces by social distancing? what have we done as feminist scientists in the past ten years that has contributed to anti-black racism—either actively or through our inactions and our silences? what coalitions can we build to better bridge feminism, (neuro-)science, black feminist theory, critical race theory and activism outside of academia? is the knowledge we produce relevant and readily accessible for those outside of academia? what can we do during this pandemic as feminist scientists who are not anti-science, but who are engaged in informed critiques of those scientific studies that oversimplify and misuse the categories of race, sex, gender, class, and more? the entries that follow are borne out of our zoom meeting discussions with each other since the pandemic began. they do not provide sufficient answers to our own questions. in fact, not all of the pieces engage directly with the neurosciences per se, but all come from a commitment to a feminist politics and investment in building feminist sts that brought us to the neurogenderings network in the first place. at this moment, our lives are connected to each other through our joint worlds of feminism, science, activism, antiracism, and covid. what is offered here is in the spirit of a lab meeting, where often germinal thoughts are planted, lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 5 and where questions of protocol—what to do, and how on earth to proceed—also often find their way. the first of these entries is by dr. hannah fitsch, a sts postdoctoral fellow at the technical university of berlin, webmistress of the neurogenderings network, and drummer for the band point pleasure. hannah fitsch studied sociology, biopsychology, and new media in frankfurt/main. she earned her phd at the technische universität berlin on visibilities and sayabilities in functional magnetic resonance imaging. she is currently working on a project called ‘how bodies turn into numbers and numbers into images | on algorithms in brain research and the logic of standardization.’ in her piece below, she comments on ways in which the virus, and health measures such as social distancing, challenge forms of political action and politically transformative ways of being that have previously fueled the vision and daily practices of leftist collectives. based in berlin, she shares her thoughts as an activist and feminist scholar on how to do political work in this moment. she argues that through this pandemic, we can see a politicization of private practices, while collective forms of political practices are being hindered. she sees this individualization of political subjects as a key problem for the pandemic, drawing from resonances that are also prevalent in neuroscientific models promoting separate and autonomous subjects. this entry is followed by a piece by dr. sigrid schmitz, who is currently a visiting professor at humboldt university of berlin. here, schmitz reflects on the challenges of feminist sts scholars who, on one hand, criticize the knowledge production practices that, for instance, produce clear-cut female and male brain distinctions, and on the other, reject a general all-round anti-science orientation. as a feminist scholar with a particular focus on brain sciences and contemporary neurocultures, she discusses the importance of producing collective and collaborative scientific knowledge that is relevant and usable to those outside of academia. by pointing us again to nancy krieger’s ecosocial theory, schmitz shows the possibility of developing interdisciplinary scientific work that can be brought into conversation with black feminist knowledge created by black feminists and black scientists themselves—which, schmitz self-critically argues, we in the network neurogenderings have largely missed so far, but should still strive toward. in the next entry, dr. anelis kaiser, a psychologist and professor of gender studies in stem at university of freiburg, germany, asks when covid-19 will reach neuroscience and hypothesizes what a possible reaction by neurofeminists will look like. the co-founder of the neurogenderings network further discusses if it is possible for critical scientists to show solidarity now with people most affected by the pandemic due to medical risks and social distancing. particularly, kaiser asks what the role of neurofeminists could be in supporting the black lives matter lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 6 (blm) community while also addressing the “white norm,” as encouraged by psychologist emily ngubia kessé. the entry by dr. rebecca jordan-young, a sociomedical scientist and professor at barnard college, considers her responsibilities as a feminist, anti-racist scientist by chewing on the dilemmas of surveillance in this moment. taking her cue from ruha benjamin’s (2016) article “catching our breath: critical race sts and the carceral imagination,” jordan-young reflects on the paradoxical nature of surveillance as both a mechanism of control and a tool that social justice activists have historically tried to shape for transformative and life-giving purposes. she then pivots to the “elephant in the room”: she asks (and attempts to answer) why, after a life of anti-racist activism and teaching, has she largely failed to incorporate anti-racism into her work in neurogenderings? the final entry is by dr. cynthia kraus, a philosopher of science, interdisciplinary scholar, and senior lecturer in gender studies and sts at the université de lausanne. in an imaginary postcard sent by snail mail, kraus plays with some clichés about switzerland and “swissness” to better bring into critical focus reallife questions that the current pandemic and social movements such as blm but also the feminist, anti-capitalist, and ecological struggles worldwide, will hopefully force us to address: in short, the need and urgency to put an end to the persisting social inequalities both at the local and global scales. fortunately, there is a rich tradition of intersectional and transnational scholarship and activism to give us hope, strength, and the means to work collectively for these necessary changes. de-individualize the virus hannah fitsch, technical university of berlin there’s no end and no beginning just a universe of strings we pick one up in our singing and the storytell’ begins — point pleasure, “re-bias the virus” as a feminist sts and (neuro)arts scholar, the challenge of reconciling my activism with being a feminist scientist has been a constant companion in my life, well before the pandemic. working alone in a home office during the pandemic, this negotiation is operating at two levels and is forcing me to ask, (i) what can critiques of neuroscience research teach us about individualism? and (ii) what effect does social distancing have on activism? lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 7 in my work as a feminist sts scholar, i have analyzed paradigms of isolated and atomized brain functions, and the effect that the concepts of individualized and separated brains have had on many areas of neuroscientific research. i have argued that individualistic approaches to modeling are highly evidenced in neuroscientific research, particularly in brain imaging and connectionism studies (fitsch, 2014). through the fragmentation of the body, and the focus on the separated brain, neuroscience “deliberately creates an individual cut off from his relationships, because this is the best way to scientifically understand the mechanisms of his behavior” (ehrenberg, 2019, p. 21, my translation). the cerebral perspective thus produced is not “relational, but rather substantial” (ehrenberg, 2019, p. 21, my translation). during the past few months, i have been bringing the critique of the individualized and “privatized” human brain to the question of feminist activism. the consequences of maintaining an underlying cartesian dualism in knowledge production, not only in neuroscience but much of science itself, have to be recognized to understand the impact of a dualistic world view. the ethiopian cognitive neuroscientist abeba birhane confronts the cartesian perspective “i think, therefore i am” in neuroscience with the interdependent ubuntu philosophy paraphrased here as “i become who i am, because i interact” (birhane, 2017). in her article “descartes was wrong: “a person is a person through other persons,’” birhane questions cognitive and neuroscientific approaches that model the brain as an autonomous entity that relies only on its own experiences and individual perception. she describes descartes’s concept as prescribing the idea that “the only thing you can be certain of is your own cogito— the fact that you are thinking. other people and other things are inherently fickle and erratic” (birhane, 2017). thus, the brain and its cognitive development are conceived through individual growth, where children and people are depicted as lone learners and responsible for their own success. in contrast to this neuroscientific paradigm, birhane asks us to consider the statement “i am because we are, and since we are, therefore i am,” made by the kenya-born philosopher john s. mbiti, who summarizes this ubuntu theory in his text african religions and philosophy (1969). i believe that birhane’s intervention in the neurosciences can be brought into conversation with my work as an activist in this pandemic and particularly to the work of leftist collectives. social distancing is having an impact on feminist activist practices, including the need for physical spaces such as squats, collectives that run cafés or bars, and diy rooms to meet and share. berlin has a long squatting practice. in the 1980s, more than 160 houses in berlin were squatted, occupied by people who fought for low rents and the possibility to live in collectives where they could create common spaces that supported antisexist and antiracist political practices. for example, the anarcha-queer-feminist squat liebig 34 in friedrichshain, which has existed for more than thirty years, is now under attack. similarly, many more people living in politically left housing projects have already lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 8 been evicted or face a forced eviction. these houses were threatened already before the pandemic, but our current situation has made two things abundantly clear. first, the pandemic is making it difficult to bring people together in order to fight against threats of evacuation by the police. second, these non-commercial, common, and open spaces are crucial as alternative safe spaces in that they are not organized by traditional nuclear family structures or government support. the disappearance of such collective structures and embodied care (grassroots, faceto-face, diy collectives) produces individualistic approaches to care. all the different forms of neighborly support that have emerged during the pandemic have the problem that they are taking place in a society that is already highly individualized. as important and necessary as the various forms of neighborhood assistance are now, many are not conceived or intended to be permanent, but rather serve as emergency measures. for instance, the political administration in berlin decided to make unused hotels available to accommodate the homeless during the pandemic. the idea of giving people the opportunity to withdraw from the streets to protect themselves from infection is important. nevertheless, homelessness was a major problem in berlin before the pandemic due to increasing poverty, the displacement of people from their homes, forced evictions, and rising rents—all play a major role. however, to combat the problem, a change in political opinion is needed, toward the right to housing. the solution that has been put in place is only short-term and will require that people affected by homelessness will have to look for affordable individual housing, individually, once again after the pandemic. in this pandemic, public health messages urge us as individuals to change our ways of living. we must keep a distance even from our nearest and dearest, and wear masks in public and at work to thereby protect ourselves and others from infection. i am not contesting the public health science here. yet we have to be aware that, during a pandemic, it is an economic privilege to be able to keep a distance. we must be aware that “privacy” in order to avoid infection with covid19 is an ultimate luxury. digital technologies, such as smartphones and digital applications for online ticket sales or ordering food and so on, can help coordinate and regulate social distancing, but they do not adequately support collective organization. for instance, digital technologies are not equally accessible for everyone as nearly half of the world’s population has no access to the internet (47% in 2019, see itu telecommunication development bureau 2019). it is also important to note that many people who are economically privileged refuse to wear masks in public spaces as a mark of their individualism. for instance, donald trump’s long refusal to wear a mask can be seen as an individualism driven by a lack of compassion for others. his actions and the actions of others demonstrate a fear that the display of mutual consideration directly diminishes one’s status as an independent subject—and hence, in many lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 9 cases, one’s masculinity. wearing a mask is seen as unmanly; the misogynistic aspect of denying this act of caring and solidarity with others was summarized in a statement issued by a german conspiracy theorist who protested against the german anti-coronavirus measures and insulted his political opponents by saying that they had sanitary towels on their faces (jüdisches forum, 2020). a critique of neoliberal approaches to privatization and individualism that feminist activists in berlin are currently engaging with (and even more so because of the coronavirus) was already well-established in a discussion that took place back in the 1980s. this discussion was started by people of color who were seeking to constructively critique the white mainstream feminist slogan “the private is political,” or “the personal is political.” this political concept started as a productive tool in some liberal, white, middle-class feminist discussions on work, care work, reproductive work, emotional work in relationships and so on, to shed light on important power relations that could not be explained in terms of capitalist organization. a critique of this slogan, however, made by feminists of color, related to the argument that the politicization of the private led to individualization and, at the same time, to a generalization of the white-bourgeois perspective with its view of the everyday hardships of life. in contrast to the individualization of struggles, black feminists and workers called for collective organization. today, the subsequent slogan, “the privatization of the political” (wohlfahrt, 2017), reveals that “the personal” has been co-opted and has to be understood differently in a privatized and individualized society. for example, in berlin, after a long period of a politic of privatization, many formerly municipally owned houses are now in private hands, which changes the character of the political fights for tenant protection. during the pandemic, private and individual acts—that are in fact basic components of our shared humanity—are declared as political. getting groceries for your neighbor doesn’t make you a hero. we would know that if we realized that we’re all always already connected. coalitions for feminist sts sigrid schmitz, humboldt university of berlin as a member of the neurogenderings network, i engage in critical analyses of neuroscientific knowledge production that signifies gendered, racist, classed, and other such ascriptions to the brain. i also critique those neuroscientific studies that use their findings to legitimize social discrimination. however, in times of antiscientism, i think, we should also hold on to scientific research as a strategy to produce and negotiate knowledge to counter sexist and racist claims. the lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 10 coincidence of the covid-19 pandemic and black lives matter demonstrations demands nothing less than a reflective interrogation of knowledge production for embedded racial meanings in covid-19 debates. it is also crucial that we develop collaborative knowledge-making practices that are meaningful for feminists both within and beyond academia. i position myself as a white feminist sts scholar in seeking such coalitions. in her article “situated knowledges,” donna haraway notes, so, i think my problem, and "our" problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own "semiotic technologies" for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a "real" world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earth wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness. (1988, p. 479) this quote, already more than thirty years old, continues to urge feminist sts scholars (including me) to ask how we can rely on the notion of the constructedness of scientific knowledge in principle and, at the same time, develop accessible and usable knowledge within our collectives in academia and with actors outside academia. i can reflect only on those facets of the debate that arise from my own engagement with the production of knowledge between facts and fictions. “facts” here refers to the questionable scientific “truths” about covid-19 and the notions of race that are inscribed in recent health debates. “fictions” here refers to the tension between the production and negotiation of situated knowledge, on the one hand, and the fake news that racists/sexists/classists spread, and that are taken up by the right as slogans.1 so, what is the problem? what then is my problem? my own academic standpoint, drawing mostly from white feminist sts, is not sufficient. how can i develop situated knowledges about racialized covid-19 debates in conversation with bipoc colleagues in academia and beyond, and with experts from other social spheres and classes? take my own neurogenderings network as an example of a space of missed opportunities for developing such coalitions. this network started in 2010 “to critically examine neuroscientific knowledge production and to develop differentiated approaches for a more gender adequate neuroscientific research” (neurogenderings, 2020). the network has evolved from critical assessments of methodological and interpretative biases in neuroscientific research to the formulation of neurofeminist concepts for knowledge production based on contextualized and entangled bio-socio-cultural components of brain and behavior (e.g., rippon et al., 2014). some neurogenderings scholars reframe neuro-epistemologies by including plasticity concepts in order to uncover social lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 11 influences on the gendered development of brain and behavior, and they develop approaches for queering brain-imaging research. not least, critical work on contemporary neurocultures has highlighted the discriminatory impacts of “neurofacts” on gendered cultural symbolisms, social practices, and power relations. this topic was at the center of the second neurogenderings conference, which took place in 2012 in vienna, and papers from the conference were published in an anthology (schmitz & höppner, 2014). yet the theories and the applications that inhabit our neurogenderings spaces are grounded in white feminist sts and are not developed with black feminist scholars and experts in critical race theory. moreover, the network fails to acknowledge the indebtedness it has to black feminist scholarship that formed much of its basis—namely, kimberlé crenshaw’s (1989) work on developing intersectional approaches.2 what is at stake here is a profound loss to the network due to a lack of critical analyses of the racist inscriptions in neuroscientific research (ngubia kuria, 2014) as well as a lack of critical reflection of the fact that the network is still mostly made up of white scholars. we must change this and do better to foster coalitions between white and bipoc feminist scholars and neuroscientists, as well as between academia and activism. at the last network meeting in leiden, 2020, we made an honest effort to begin this work. ashley baccus-clark, a molecular and cellular biologist, multidisciplinary artist, performer, writer, and “brand strategist” gave a fascinating keynote on her work on brain-behavior research. her project is grounded in her collective work through hyphen-labs, with other women of color, “at the intersection of technology, art, science, and the future” (hyphenlabs, 2020). baccus-clark presented one of her academic-arts performances, neurospeculative afrofeminism, a virtual reality project that “was originally inspired by the lack of multidimensional representations of black women in technology” and “reimagines the future of black women in stem fields” (baccusclark, 2020b). as a result of this conference, baccus-clark, two other neurofeminist-arts scholars, flora lysen and antye günther, and myself have now initiated a working group for developing “neuro-interventions” at the intersection of sts and arts/performances.3 so that we keep up the momentum of this crucial coalitional effort, it will be necessary for us in the neurogenderings network to reflect on other intersectional feminist sts projects that have come closer to addressing questions related to the contingencies of knowledge, brought scholarship by black people and people of color to the foreground, and have also reached feminists both within and outside of academia. i refer, for instance, to intersectional theories that have contributed to developing situated knowledge regarding the multiple factors of racial/gender/class discrimination as they relate to health issues—namely, nancy krieger’s (2013) ecosocial theory. many readers lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 12 may be familiar with this theory, but it is worth pointing out some specific details of this work again for those of us wanting to expand our critical analyses of neuroscience to include more than just an analysis of gender. as krieger explains, “at issue are socially patterned exposure-induced pathogenic pathways, mediated by physiology, behavior, and gene expression, that affect the development, growth, regulation, and death of our body’s biological systems, organs, and cells, culminating in disease, disability, and death” (2013, p. 1). this change of perspective on cause and effect, where socially patterned exposure mediates biological factors in disease, led krieger’s group to develop and apply an intersectional approach to assessing the inseparable components that constitute breast tumors and the effects of hormone replacement therapy, for example, from (1) economic and social deprivation; (2) excess exposure to toxins, hazards, and pathogens; (3) social trauma; (4) health-harming responses to discrimination; (5) targeted marketing of harmful commodities; (6) inadequate medical care; and (7) especially (but not only) for indigenous peoples, ecosystem degradation and alienation from the land. (krieger, 2013, p. 6) the merit of ecosocial theory lies in the way it raises awareness of the need to expand diagnostic compendia and therapeutic concepts to include the whole range of intersectional and socio-cultural impacts on etiopathology. krieger even includes a recognition of situated knowledges in her theory, stating “also core are issues of accountability (causal responsibility for) and agency (the power and ability to act) at every level, because they pertain to not only the magnitude of health inequities but also how they are monitored, analyzed, and addressed” (2013, p. 1). this change in perspective and level of attention to intersectionality through research about structural racism as krieger says, “to gain a better understanding of how racism affects population health” (2013, p. 6) has yet to be fully realized in neuroscience. for me this is a thrilling challenge after thirty years of working in critical neurofeminism from an academic sts perspective. i hope that the problem of producing situated knowledge will continue to bring us to new answers. working with multidisciplinary coalitions of bipoc and white feminist (sts) scholars, artists, and activists, is the only way forward to engage in covid-19 debates and move us from thinking only about the individual to the collective. neurofeminism in times of solidarity anelis kaiser trujillo, university of freiburg lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 13 several scientific studies on differences between women and men in relation to covid-19 have been published in the last few months, and “sex difference and smoking predisposition in patients with covid-19” (cai, 2020) is only one example. simultaneously, scientists have been providing evidence that covid-19 can have an impact on the human neurological system. it has also been demonstrated, for example, that the brain stem, and thus the respiratory center, could play an important role in lung failure (li et al., 2020). how long will it take until the sex/gender differences of covid-19-related questions reach the brain? how long until we will be able to read neuroscientific papers about women and men infected with the coronavirus having significantly different electrophysiological brain responses, dissimilar local foci of boldactivity, distinct tractographies in white matter, and/or “dimorphic” neuroanatomical alterations in the brain, etc.? in an era of prediction, let me do a self-made calculation here: in four months, a title of one of these studies will read (i dare to invent one), something like “sex differences in the neuroinvasive potential of respiratory failure of covid-19 patients.” there will be commonalities and differences with previous sex/gender research in human neuroscience. for instance, a similarity will be that the first studies will terminologically mix up “sex” and “gender”; in other words, these terms will be used interchangeably. a clear difference will be that studies will be based on a tremendous amount of data from the get go, thus blurring the necessity of rigorously thinking of a sensible sex/gender-related question based on an adequate sex/gender conceptualization. instead, there will be an urgency for the big data to be quickly analyzed in order to project and predict the sex/gendercovid-19 “truth” in the brain. after all, this is what big data is for now. it won’t be crucial to laboriously look for participants because data will already be out there. we neurofeminists will await these studies to critique them. we will analyze, for instance, the theoretical, methodological, and interpretative issues of these sex/gender investigations—although certainly “we neurofeminists” do not agree on what the underlying definition of difference beneath the materiality of sex/gender is (d. roy, 2016). based on work that has already been published, we may similarly unearth that what they are measuring is actually not “sex” but rather “gender” or “sex/gender” (danielsen & noll, 2020); that intersected dimensions of sex/gender such as race and class are missing (schaff, 2020); that these studies are embedded in a neoliberal framework of gender-meritocracy (schmitz, 2012); that men’s reaction to covid-19 is not because of their testosterone since testosterone is actually not “male” at all (jordan-young & karkazis, 2019); that we should rather let the material microscopy of the virus itself speak in its whole multiplicity (d. roy, 2018) or that due to the mosaic structure of the brain, we actually cannot posit any longer on a reliable separation of women’s and men’s brains when examining covid-19 (joel, 2018), and so on. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 14 and this will be a good thing to do. however, during these few months, as a critical neurofeminist, i have been trying to see what i can do now—before i rely on my usual instruments to critique or deconstruct science and proceed towards creating productive empirical alternatives through feminist science (kaiser, 2018). does my affiliation to a feminist academic network equip or burden me with responsibility to act outside the lab, too? is my role as a critical neurofeminist related to showing solidarity with covid-19–affected people and people struggling for social justice in the times of covid-19? is there a connection between neurofeminism and people at risk due to their age, ethnicity, conditions of “disability,” class, or sexuality in these corona times; or with people who have been left behind by the healthcare system or people who have never even been there; or with day workers losing their precarious jobs and having to return in mass migration to their home villages? is there a link between critical scientists and people whose freedom of assembly has been restricted? this freedom is so urgently needed at this time to finally achieve socio-political goals for which dozens of lives have recently been sacrificed, for instance, in many countries in latin america. and, most importantly, does a tie exist between us and the question of showing solidarity with people who have been racialized and the blm community who suffer horrible racist attacks—not only in these times of the coronavirus? being a member of the neurogenderings network, i am trying to think of what solidarity would look like from a neurofeminist point of view. it would involve reflecting on the fact that as dr. emily ngubia kessé has stated, “the white norm is an aspect of neurogenderings that necessarily calls for critical analysis” (ngubia kuria, 2014, p. 110). to me, this sentence means that we should take the responsibility to address our blind spots. kessé’s analysis has not consistently and adequately been addressed by some of us yet. thus, solidarity could be a form of responsibility. the covid-19 pandemic coincides with an uprising in many western countries against police and politics due to structural racism and the constant murder of black people (women and men) by the police, particularly in the united states. now what is my responsibility? what are the points that i have to raise to improve our science so that the white norm—in addition to and intersected with sexism—can be criticized as a way of expressing solidarity and responsibility? is it too little to show solidarity “only” by asking ourselves why bipoc colleagues have been leaving our network? or by admitting that we failed to fully cover the issue of “race” as we intended to during our most recent conference on “intersectionality”? apart from the two lines of thought i have mentioned—first, identifying an oversimplified approach to sex/gender in the neuroscience in the next few months, and second, articulating my white privilege in our network by asking “how do i deconstruct my own personal racism?”—i am not offering much here. i lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 15 am not saying much. but silent i cannot stay. silence, in a scientific space, is dangerous and system-preserving. research has never been neutral, and scientific scholarship throughout the centuries—including neuroscience—has been built on unjust and dehumanizing practices (ngubia kuria 2014, p. 111) that we must recognize. surveillance and survival rebecca jordan-young, barnard college sts is, after all, a field concerned with the construction of matter, whether physical matter, matters of fact, or matters of concern. and so i think it behooves us to explicitly engage the contested terrain of black lives mattering. —ruha benjamin, “catching our breath: critical race sts and the carceral imagination” in these days of simultaneous horror, rage, and hope, i’ve been thinking a lot about surveillance and how it is implicated in our sense of what counts, and who counts, and how, and for what ends. at the same moment that black lives matter activists are under intensified surveillance by federal and local police, we are in desperate need of better surveillance to fight the coronavirus pandemic—and the trump administration is undermining effective disease surveillance on all levels, from defaming and withdrawing from the who, to advocating that state officials slow down covid-19 reporting, to shifting responsibility for that reporting out of the us centers for disease control (cdc)—the agency whose historical core purpose is the tracking of infectious diseases. in this context, it shouldn’t be surprising that only about a third of people in new york city who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus have been willing to give any contact information whatsoever to the contact tracers who are tracking the pandemic locally. this is worrying; contact tracing is almost certainly going to be necessary to control the epidemic. even as we denounce the surveillance of black lives matter activists, and note the unbroken us tradition of spying on and disrupting antiracist and other progressive activists, from labor unions in the 1930s to the student non-violent coordinating committee to the black panthers and the young lords to antiwar activists against us interventions in central and latin america, and on and on, both backwards and forwards in history, it can be tempting to set our wariness about surveillance aside when it comes to disease surveillance, or advocating participation in the national census. rather than amplifying and extending police powers, these forms of watching and counting seem to go against the grain of a right-wing state bent on denying (and evading lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 16 responsibility for) the scope of the pandemic, and excluding undocumented people from officially existing within us borders. in “catching our breath: critical race sts and the carceral imagination,” ruha benjamin writes, individuals who have had any type of contact with the carceral system, even those who have only been stopped but not charged for a crime, avoid surveilling institutions such as schools, banks, places of employment, and hospitals, even in cases where they require medical attention. so as scholars examine the development and deployment of carceral imaginaries, we must remain attentive to the many forms of subversion and resistance that also take shape, along with the sometimes-deleterious byproducts of those responses. (2016, p. 151) benjamin’s piece leads me to ask, could we develop a surveillance practice that isn’t animated by carceral logics? is it possible to move from a watching practice built on suspicion, to the kind of caring watch implied in “looking out for each other”? my understanding of surveillance and many of my fundamental orientations as a researcher were shaped by my days as an aids activist and outreach worker doing prevention and organizing with street-based drug users and sex workers, and one of the most important lessons i learned from aids work was the importance of being counted, and being counted in a way that does justice to one’s situation. feminist aids activists, women with aids among them, were adamant about the need for cdc to revise what counted as aids. as katrina haslip put it, “i am, and have been, a woman with aids despite the c.d.c. not wishing to count me...we have compelled them to" (navarro, 1992). the consequences of failing to count women rippled up and down every scale of the epidemic. when women with aids weren’t counted, they weren’t treated, they couldn’t qualify for rent subsidies, food assistance, child care, health benefits, or other support services that aids activists had worked so hard to establish for people with aids; cities with higher rates of hiv/aids in women and drug injectors didn’t get their share of federal money for aids-related services. likewise, when other lesbian researchers and i began to see a pattern that women injection drug users were consistently between two and five times more likely to be hiv positive than other women drug users, we fought with other researchers, service providers, and lesbian activists who insisted that women who injected drugs didn’t really count as “lesbians with aids”—everyone was fixated on the question of woman-to-woman sexual transmission, and as long as that seemed either impossible or rare, many people were unable to see the lesbians with aids right in front of their faces. relying on kimberlé crenshaw’s (1991) identification lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 17 of structural, political, and discursive intersectionality, we pointed out how the relentless compound effects of racism, poverty, homophobia, and stigma against drug users not only multiplied women’s daily encounters with risk and increased the costs of reducing harm, but kept these women’s situations from being recognized and addressed within discourse and activism focused on “women with aids,” “lesbians and aids,” “black women’s aids” issues, and so on (young et al., 2005). being counted is crucial. under regimes of biocitizenship, surveillance is a technique of control, but it’s also a condition of belonging, of basic access to resources and inclusion in political and social processes. if the counting and measuring protocols of the state or the sciences or advocacy groups exclude you and/or misrepresent you, this seriously impedes the routes to social and political power. as i did health research and activism in communities in and around new york city and washington, dc, i was acutely aware of how we moved in parallel with police surveillance in these hyper-policed communities, communities where i also lived. we took precautions to make sure that police didn’t actually move in our “slip-stream,” using our presence as a red flag that identified drug users or sex workers. but we knew we were bringing risks just as surely as we were trying to reduce them. so i had been preoccupied with surveillance for a long time before i began systematically documenting police surveillance in my own neighborhood of crown heights in 2012. when i co-organized the conference subverting surveillance: strategies to end state violence (2017) at the barnard center for research on women, i initially imagined surveillance as a double-edged sword, at once the foundation of encroaching, racist police powers and state repression in general, and also the route to being counted in the polity, to becoming a “person of concern” not just in the carceral sense, but in a medical sense or an advocacy context. with her brilliant book dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness, simone browne (2015), who delivered one of the keynotes at that conference, helped me to absorb the lesson that practices of surveillance can’t usefully be sorted into “negative” and “positive”; more, though, she taught me (us) that they are rooted in anti-blackness. browne gave me a framework for understanding the dilemma of surveillance: the warp of control and the weft of “aid” are woven into the same tight fabric that requires being seen and officially counted, and that structural racism is always a relevant framework for interrogating surveillance. so here’s the elephant in the room: why haven’t i managed to develop a consistent anti-racist practice in my work of feminist engagements with neuroscience? i have been pondering for some time the question of why, in my neurogenderings work, i have mostly failed to incorporate the anti-racist work that i do in so many other parts of my life, including teaching, activism, my personal life, and even other research areas. this conversation has been challenging and generative for me, and i hope these reflections will also be useful to others. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 18 other than a few passing references to how racial variation in psychological performance or personality measures undermines the notion of “female” or “male” brains, i have been dramatically inattentive to the dynamics of race and racialization in neuroscience. there is no excuse, but i do think i’ve come up with a partial explanation. i am not a positivist, but i have often delighted in the games that a critical feminist scientist can play with positivism. the logical switches, the leaps in reasoning, the methodological shenanigans that facilitate (mainstream, sexist, racist) science are relatively easy to spot and argue within the frame of positivist science. they are irresistible low-hanging fruit when it comes to reading popular neuroscience of gendered brains. what’s more, this critical strategy of pointing out inconsistencies in concepts and measures, incorrect (or outright dishonest) use of prior research, and violations of standard scientific method keeps well within the bounds of what mainstream scientists should, in principle, accept. why not beat them at their own game, if they play it so very badly? in my first book, i intentionally seldom strayed from this method of analysis, because i wanted to reach scientists and students who might be converted by the logic of my arguments, and then come around to the politics of the matter (jordanyoung, 2010). but there are limits to this approach: especially when race is, as m’charek and colleagues have so elegantly demonstrated, “often removed and excluded from discourse and viewed as something that belongs to the problematic past of colonialism, scientific racism, and nazi genocide” (m’charek et al., 2014, p. 462). i have learned and applied this on other topics (karkazis & jordan-young, 2018). a special issue that i co-edited on “race as a ghost variable” (karkazis & jordanyoung, 2020) includes one of the few examples of a critical race approach to neuroscience. the piece by helena hansen, caroline parker, and jules netherland (2020) reveals the implicit whiteness of the contemporary “brain disease” model of addiction, arguing that it’s not race in general that’s a ghost variable in neuroscience, but whiteness: what is striking about neuroscientific models of addiction, and in particular brain scan images of addiction, is that they are unmarked by race: they symbolically convey a sense of unmarked universality and timelessness that, by omitting racial identity, serve to expunge the racial identity of the addict leaving a racially unmarked—and thus implicitly white—social figure. it is through this tendency to both erase race from view and to leave an invisible, implicit white social figure that neuroscientific theories and instruments operate as technologies of whiteness. (hansen et al., 2020, p. 854) bringing hansen and colleagues’ insights to my neurogenderings work, i want to be clear that the implicit whiteness of neuroscience is a key part of how the myth lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 19 of the distinct and homogenous female brain is built and sustained. even though i and others have argued that race (along with class, nation, and sexuality) is a key axis that requires attention, that the presumed “male” and “female” brain fall apart when the samples are heterogeneous by race, class, nation, and so on, this falls short of calling out the implicit whiteness of the “sexed” brain. i think that the way i have articulated my critique until now has created the impression that gender/sex is in some way the “first order variable,” and race along with class and other dimensions of experience and social power are best conceived as “moderators” or “secondary.” we in the neurogenderings network have fretted over the overwhelming whiteness of our network for a long time, and it strikes me that the network has been repeating a classic organizing arrogance of majority or even all-white feminist organizers who tried unsuccessfully to recruit black, latinx, and other women of color to feminist organizations: reaching out to try to recruit people after the fact, after the main agenda and structure have been set by people (speaking especially for myself here) whose work at the time of our network’s initiation didn’t center attention to racism (or classism, or other power structures) as firmly as (hetero)sexism. it’s possible that neurogenderings, as near and dear as it is to my heart, and as generative a space as it has been for so many of us, is never going to be the vehicle for the kind of fundamentally antiracist, feminist science we want to practice. i think we can’t know that yet. i do feel sure that we can’t figure it out without being willing to reconsider everything we do and are from the very roots. and if our goal is to center a genuinely intersectional feminism, we need to follow the lead of black and other women of color activist/colleagues, especially those in sts. haste makes waste: a postcard from switzerland cynthia kraus, university of lausanne “haste makes waste” (“eile mit weile” or “hâte-toi lentement,” as i used to know it when growing up in switzerland) is a well-known and ancient proverb appearing apparently as early as 150 bc in the book of wisdom (the idioms, 2020). its moral meaning seems also tailored to capture the protestant ethics of swiss capitalism and the self-serving mythology that the country’s economic success lies in the people’s industry and love for well-done work—in addition to neutrality in foreign policy, bank confidentiality, the militia system, precision watch industry, or even its legendary chocolate. as the official postcard reads, “‘swiss made’ is more than a simple label of origin. it is a sign to customers that they are buying a product of outstanding quality and reliability” (presence switzerland, 2020). if the swiss people are praised for their diligence, they also tend to be mocked for being lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 20 painfully slow (check, for instance, how our french neighbors imitate the swiss french accent). on 13 march 2020, slowness was reclaimed as a national virtue and became the political motto of the swiss government (federal council) when it ordered a semilockdown to contain the spread of covid-19. the first package of special measures—more stringent ones, including the deployment of the swiss army, were introduced a few days later—involved closing schools throughout the country, a ban on public gathering of more than one hundred people, an emergency aid budget of chf10 billion (us$10.6 billion) to support the economy, and the reintroduction of border checks for neighboring countries, italy in the first place (swiss federal council in rédaction, 2020; see also swissinfo.ch, 2020). as our minister of health in charge, alain berset, put it during the federal council’s press conference, “to slow down the epidemic, we must slow down our social life for a few weeks,” or “we have to accept that the speed of our society slows down, because that is the best way to achieve our goals” (rédaction, 2020, translation mine). would the “extraordinary situation” (in the sense of the new epidemics act, in force since 2016) open up the possibility of experiencing, at an unprecedented scale, in switzerland and beyond, not “just” the politics of subversion involved in the minority calls for slow food and slow science, but more fundamentally, what it takes and means to slow down public life globally as a lifeand planet-preserving policy? and how about slowing down private life and the domestic economy as well, a sphere of activities that remained conveniently obscured in official discourse, while forcing women in so-called non-essential, mostly white-collar, jobs into triple shift workdays from home (teleworking, care work as usual, and, for some of us, childcare and homeschooling)? women’s triple burden and not “just” the pandemic is also a worldwide phenomenon (mclaren et al., 2020; power, 2020). at the same time, less privileged categories of women (with fewer diplomas, in precarious jobs, migrants and refugees, the many caregivers etc.) often remained on the frontline to further perform the non-domestic part of the social reproduction work essential to reproduce human and social life itself, risking their own health and lives in “life-making” but underpaid jobs (bhattacharya & ferguson, 2020; for a discussion on the distinction between essential/nonessential jobs, see, e.g., bergfeld & farris, 2020). overall, and not surprisingly, the general slowing down of society as a risk management and public health policy has exacerbated the full range of inequalities along the power lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, nation, socio-cultural and economic resources, and so on that are all too familiar to the “99%” of us (fraser et al., 2019). lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 21 “stay safe, stay healthy, stay home.” but how safe is the household? the (semi-) lockdown ended up hiding another global “epidemic”: increased gender-based violence against women and children, as well as other vulnerable groups such as gender-variant teens (mak, 2020; graham-harrison et al., 2020; see also, e.g., grewel et al., 2020). “safe? at home?” is also always already an antiracist question. in the context of the current black lives matter protests, see “how black households have been invaded with impunity by increasingly militarized police forces on both sides of the atlantic, swat teams in the usa, sco19 units in the uk”; remember the “black women [who] have been killed by police officers out of sight in the space designated as home”; listen to the “police harass[ing] us [hazel carby and her little brother] as n— who should go home,” and how “by home they did not mean returning to the house where we lived but to the country we came from. we were both born in britain, my brother was born a mile away in streatham, i was born in devon. we never could figure out what country they were telling us to go to” (carby, 2020). some called the coronavirus a “disaster for feminism” (lewis, 2020), while others toyed with the idea that the (semi-)lockdown could produce a propitious context for men in a heterosexual relationship to take on more domestic and care work. guess what: the workload increased for women, whether they were teleworking like their male partner (dual-income couple) or not (see, e.g., quillet, 2020; cain miller, 2020). this may explain why women’s scholarly production seems to have declined during the (semi-)lockdown, increasing the pre-existing gender gap in this regard. this issue generated some concern following an april tweet by elizabeth hannon (2020), deputy editor of the british journal for the philosophy of science when she wrote that she had received “negligible number of submissions to the journal from women in the last month. never seen anything like it.” since then, other scientific journal editors concurred, while some researchers tried to quantify the phenomenon, highlighting, as in the case of this review published in nature, that women “submitted fewer papers [here “preprints as first authors”] in march and april compared to the same months in 2019” (vincent-lamarre et al., 2020; see also, e.g., gaitzsch, 2020). to be able (even when forced) to publish (or perish) or to be forced to do the social reproductive work instead, that is a feminist question—and certainly not what is meant by “slow science.” in malestream science, however, we witnessed a staggering acceleration in the race to publish one’s research. according to holden thorp, the editor in chief of the prestigious journal science, “‘it’s the same process going extremely fast.’ is there precedent in science’s 140-year history? ‘not that anybody can remember’” (tingley, 2020). this acceleration is most dramatic, of course, in the case of covid-related biomedical articles, which were put to instant use to (re)define public health policies: beginning of may, the number of such publications had exceeded 12,000 (sermondadaz, 2020). as a collateral damage so to speak, “nearly all other research has ground to a halt” (apuzzo & kirkpatrick, 2020). yet, lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 22 for better or worse, the social and human sciences were not entirely immune to this (s)urge. thank you, friends, for sharing an invigorating article entitled “why you should ignore all that coronavirus-inspired productivity pressure” (ahmad, 2020) at the beginning of these strange times. “haste makes waste.” there is indeed an urgent need to put “speed limits” on the science race (yan, 2020). the truth is plain: good science takes time, and even more time, one could argue, in times of pandemic given “‘infodemic’ of misinformation and cybercrime in covid-19 crisis” (un department of global communications, 2020). infodemic can also be science-driven: speedy science plays an active part in this arena even when the preprint is quickly withdrawn (see, e.g., pradhan et al., 2020). science is indeed politics by other means. to give just one example, the theory that the sars-cov-2 has been engineered—of course in a wuhan lab—remains popular despite evidence to the contrary (see, e.g., xiao et al., 2020; liu et al., 2020). it is popular not just in public opinion: apparently, a third of the population in switzerland and a quarter in france believe it (see, e.g., pillard, 2020; audureau, 2020). such a theory is also and more fundamentally official fake news in support of the us presidential propaganda against china (for a critical discussion of the active role of imperialist countries and mainstream media in producing/relaying fake news and infodemic, see, e.g., le monde diplomatique, 2020; fairness & accuracy in reporting/fair, 2020). made in china: between march and june, the swiss government spent more than half a billion chf (swiss francs) on disposable medical face masks from china (ats/nxp, 2020). some stocks were returned. produced in the “chinese industrial jungle” (radio télévision suisse/rts, 2020), they were deemed to be of low quality. the defect? they were too permeable and unsafe according to “european standards.” one of the key standards was morphological: the defective masks appeared to be too small and unfitting to european faces (see, e.g., rts, 2020; 20 minutes, 2020). all the usual “others” welcome “standard” people to have a glimpse at otherness for a moment, while bipoc must always continue to struggle against institutional racism as usual and the many specific forms of racist discrimination emerging in the context of the covid-19 pandemic (the economist, 2020; human rights watch, 2020). asia–switzerland, round trip. “haste makes waste” is also the name of a game— perhaps even “the most popular dice game in switzerland,” for that matter, according to the “orange giant” migros (2020), the largest retail company in the country, which was founded in 1925 on the ideal of a people-centered economy. as it happens, the game is also advertised for its ancient and exotic origin: “already several thousand years ago, this game called ‘pachisi’ inspired old fans in india” (migros, 2020). in the context of the pandemic and the search for effective treatments and vaccines, india’s generic drug industry as “the world’s pharmacy” became a hot topic (issa, 2020). globalization is the buzzword of the moment, but lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 23 the phenomenon is not new. india is part of the colonial history of switzerland— technically, its prehistory since the official creation of the swiss confederation dates from 1848. indeed, indiennes (french pronunciation) were produced in neuchâtel from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. research on the (post)colonial and global history of switzerland (e.g., purtschert & fischer-tiné, 2015), including the participation of swiss businessmen in the atlantic slave trade and slavery (e.g., david et al., 2005), is growing and gaining increased scholarly and activist attention in the context of the current blm protests and other grassroots movements around the world rallying for freedom, justice, equality, and democracy for all and everyone. do we have time for slow science in the emergency context of a global pandemic and of global warming? yes, we can and should take the time. but the real good news is that we can both practice slow science and speed up political changes, locally and globally: the outbreak of the covid-19 coronavirus is currently occupying the entire world—and requires prudent action. but good crisis management requires more than just scientific research. it also requires political and social responses. and unlike medicines and vaccines, these responses do not have to be discovered first. feminism has already developed the ideas that can close the existing gap of inequality which becomes even more obvious in times of crisis. (oxfam international, 2020) what would exactly be the feminist way to go? i cannot tell that on my own. the only way will, of course, be collective and inclusive. we should feel lucky and grateful that there is a strong and vibrant tradition of intersectional feminisms (in the plural) to think with, to help us move forward, and look forward to changes instead of going back (as if it were possible) to the “abnormal.” people must come before profit. let’s be realistic: we cannot afford capitalism, social inequalities, violence, and wars. to foster change, many different resources have been produced recently to enrich our thinking and broaden our spectrum of action: for instance, “on social reproduction and the covid-19 pandemic: seven theses” (the marxist feminist collective, 2020) calls for a more ambitious politics of solidarity, “from carewashing to radical care” (chatzidakis et al., 2020) or “from mutual aid to class struggle” (brown & zheng, 2020). other feminist initiatives are helpful and inspiring beyond the pandemic, such as a successful activist campaign against domestic violence in china (bao, 2020). since i cannot come to see you, i’m sending you this postcard in enduring solidarity. take care and best wishes from switzerland. lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 24 postscript by the six of us in a powerful article titled “the pandemic is a portal,” novelist and human rights and ecological activist arundhati roy (2020), examines how the “lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things,” revealing india’s “brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering.” as matter of fact, the experiment “worked” worldwide. in times of deconfinement, is there something more radical to engage with than simply the promise of a possible vaccine? the various entries presented in this lab meeting answer with a unanimous “yes” to this question. in other words, and to borrow roy’s conclusion to the aforementioned article: historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. this one is no different. it is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. we can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. and ready to fight for it. (2020) as you have seen, each of us has agreed to travel light, offering a small piece of luggage, in an effort to imagine—scientifically and politically—another world, and therefore walk together with the many others who share the same commitment through the pandemic’s portal. notes 1 the misuse of critical analyses of feminist science studies is not new; remember, for example, the polemics in the 2000s of the creationists, who took up the critique of gendered ascription in darwinian theory of evolution for prompting god’s creation of intelligent humans in order to argue that the theory should be excluded from education. 2 thanks to deboleena roy, who reminded me of this important issue. 3 together with other colleagues from the neurogenderings network, we have just prepared a proposal to get funding for our collaborative work. references ahmad, a. s. 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(2020). hiv-1 did not contribute to the 2019-ncov genome. emerging microbes & infections, 9(1), 378–381. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc7033698/pdf/temi_9_1727299.pdf author bios hannah fitsch is research assistant with teaching assignment at the center for http://doi.org.10.3389/fnhum.2014.00546 https://time.com/5786710/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality/ https://time.com/5786710/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality/ https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/government-acts_switzerland-imposes-sweeping-measures-to-contain-coronavirus/45615344 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/government-acts_switzerland-imposes-sweeping-measures-to-contain-coronavirus/45615344 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/magazine/coronavirus-scientific-journals-research.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/magazine/coronavirus-scientific-journals-research.html https://www.un.org/en/un-coronavirus-communications-team/un-tackling-%e2%80%98infodemic%e2%80%99-misinformation-and-cybercrime-covid-19 https://www.un.org/en/un-coronavirus-communications-team/un-tackling-%e2%80%98infodemic%e2%80%99-misinformation-and-cybercrime-covid-19 https://www.un.org/en/un-coronavirus-communications-team/un-tackling-%e2%80%98infodemic%e2%80%99-misinformation-and-cybercrime-covid-19 https://go.nature.com/2xhxqxr https://www.freitag.de/autoren/tom-wohlfarth/die-privatisierung-der-politik https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/science/coronavirus-disinformation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/science/coronavirus-disinformation.html https://doi.org/10.1300/j155v09n03_10 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc7033698/pdf/temi_9_1727299.pdf lab meeting | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 2) fitsch et al., 2020 32 interdisciplinary women’s and gender studies, technische universität berlin. since 2/2018 hannah fitsch holds a post-doc position with the project how bodies turn into numbers and numbers into images | on algorithms in brain research and the logic of standardization. hannah fitsch works at the intersection of scientific and artistic practices. rebecca jordan-young is the ann whitney olin professor of women's, gender & sexuality studies, and department chair of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at barnard college. anelis kaiser trujillo is professor of gender studies in stem at university of freiburg, germany. her main research topic is "gender in the brain," she examines these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective. cynthia kraus is a philosopher of science, interdisciplinary scholar, and senior lecturer in sts and gender studies at the university of lausanne (unil). she is also a research member of the institute of humanities in medicine, unil and university hospital chuv. deboleena roy is professor of neuroscience and behavioral biology and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at emory university. she was recently appointed as dean of faculty for emory college of arts and sciences. sigrid schmitz chairs the project gendering stem digital at the center for transdisciplinary gender studies at the humboldt university of berlin. she held several professorships, e.g. at the university of vienna and the hu berlin, on feminist science studies issues.       original research i dream of siri: magic and female voice assistants           jason toncic  montclair state university toncicj1@montclair.edu     abstract recent advances in science and engineering have facilitated the development of artificial intelligence voice assistants. while this is true from a technical aspect, smart speakers and voice assistants did not develop in isolation from the rest of human society. the devices may be new, but the practices and patterns in their development and use are not. using lévi-strauss’s structural anthropology, i map homologous practices of smart speaker interaction onto historical conceptions of supernatural magic use. this structural comparison suggests that practices and patterns that were essential to magic use have re-emerged in smart speaker utilization in similar forms. some of these practices are noteworthy for their homology alone. however, other homologous behaviors revive patterns of inequity that, in western magical traditions, had privileged the traditionally educated man. the goal of this paper is to elucidate the ghost in the machine: the prejudiced social practices of supernatural magic that were asserted to be eradicated yet which are now, nevertheless, newly instantiated within our most cutting-edge devices.     keywords digital assistants, smart speakers, structural anthropology, magic, feminism     introduction enter the sorcerer. he commands it to be light, and his surroundings illuminate. he demands protection, and an invisible sphere secures his home. he invokes his kin who lives hundreds of miles away, and a voice echoes in response throughout his room. and when he requires information from afar, he orders, “siri, tell me the news.”   artificial intelligence voice assistants such as siri and alexa have become fixtures in homes, offices, and even classrooms. with a few words, people can turn on lights, ask about the news, play music, define words, create grocery lists, and arm security systems. however, few questions about the social implications and meaning have been asked about the prolific popularity of such smart speakers. amazon reported in 2019 that over 100 million alexa devices had been sold (bohn 2019). amazon, however, is just one of many companies offering a smart speaker voice assistant (e.g., apple’s siri, microsoft’s cortana, google’s assistant, baidu’s dueros, alibaba’s aligenie, and samsung’s bixby).   voice assistant adoption may be partially attributable to individuals with physical disabilities who may benefit from voice assistants (guo et al. 2019). however, there is scholarship that suggests the superficial promises of (voice-activated) technologies for individuals with disabilities are masking underlying systemic issues of access with the internet (ellcessor 2017). other research contends that ai technologies “have been repeatedly shown to produce biased and erroneous outputs” (whittaker et al. 2019, 7). furthermore, the majority of users are those without disabilities who can access other devices to perform these same tasks (such as using smartphones to control home security systems or play music). according to matthew hoy, “a voice assistant simply provides the bridge that allows users to issue commands verbally rather than via an app” (2018, 84). thus, while some may prefer the vocal “bridge” that smart speakers facilitate, that alone does not appear to explain the saturation of voice assistants, nor does it provide insight into some of their unique characteristics—like the nearly universal feminization of the voice assistant.   perhaps it is how one interacts with smart speaker voice assistants that may explain their social appeal. in this vein, some scholarship has suggested that the anthropomorphic, interpersonal capabilities of digital assistants (i.e., the devices’ emulation of human behavior, see, for example, guzman 2017; turkle 2017) may be driving their adoption. yet although the conversational aspects of present-day voice assistants can be astonishing, there are limitations. voice assistants only intelligibly respond to particular queries and commands (goksel-canbek and mutlu 2016). and although research has suggested that the first few hours of interaction with a new voice assistant are often uniquely conversational, long-term use of voice assistants eventually settles into predictable patterns of commands and questions (sciuto et al. 2018). that is, during extended use of voice assistants, interactions become less like conversations between friends and more like imperatives given from master to servant. in fact, recent research has investigated whether the mismatch that occurs when a humanlike voice displays a lack of humanlike understanding may actually diminish consumer trust in voice assistants (hu, wang, and liu 2019). as the new york times pithily opined, “if alexa were a human assistant, you’d fire her, if not have her committed” (manjoo 2015). explanations of voice assistant popularity that center on humanlike emulation, then, require further consideration.   i contend that smart speaker take-up is in part attributable to submerged social practices and rituals. as mentioned, the feminization of smart speakers—alexa, siri, and cortana all interact with voices and names traditionally attributed to women—suggests technological devices, in this case voice assistants, are developed, whether knowingly or not, from and among the social values and belief systems of their creators. indeed, patriarchal institutional structures (such as labor, investment, and entrepreneurship) often reinforce biased social values and belief systems (brush et al. 2017). several recent works have explored the issue of the marginalization of women by ai (villa-nicholas and sweeney 2019; noble 2018; noble and tynes 2016; buolamwini and gebru 2018), the gender-biased problem of speech assistants (phan 2017; bergen 2016), and how feminized voices are increasingly being used in surveillance capitalism (woods 2018). however, an understanding of the subsumed gender roles within voice assistant technology does not alone provide a robust understanding of the proliferation of voice assistants.   for better insight, we can turn to other, more esoteric social practices—which converge with gendered voice assistants in a surprising way. i speak, perhaps unexpectedly, of occult magic—particularly, the social practices around the enactment of magic spells. the subsumption of occult magic social practices within voice assistants has not been discussed before. after all, writing in 1917, social theorist max weber declared that the world had been “disenchanted,” suggesting that empiricism had drained society of its mystery, superstition, and magic (jenkins 2000). weber’s disenchanted world was a place of cold rationalization. indeed, for a large portion of the western academy, magic had been largely dismissed. in its place, science explained natural events, like lightning and magnetism. new technologies, such as the electric light, performed the formerly miraculous.   weber’s disenchantment assumed that a scientific zeitgeist had replaced magical belief systems, but this assertion has not held up. magic and miracle continue to operate in society today. take, for example, the preoccupation with occult magic in various fictional popular media (e.g., books, television, movies, video games, and trading card games). this seems apparent in sheer numbers: the word magic increased in relative use by nearly two and a half times in published english-language works from 1700 to 2019, as visualized by google books ngram viewer (see figure 1). based on this graph alone, the premise that the world has abandoned the idea of magic in its social and cultural systems appears to be mere superstition. it should perhaps not be surprising that magical practices have reappeared in the ways that we interact with our technological devices.   figure 1. a visualization showing the increasing relative use of the word magic across the english-language corpus, compiled from published english-language texts from 1700 to 2019. created with google books ngram viewer by author.   this paper follows theoretically in the tradition of claude lévi-strauss’s (1963) structural anthropology. structural anthropology, in brief, analyzes human cultural practices to discern homologous social and behavioral counterparts across different societies. the word homologous, in the structural anthropology tradition, refers to two human practices, beliefs, or artifacts that are temporally removed (and may appear to be distinct) yet nevertheless share similarities due to a subsumed historical or cultural connection. building on the magical theory of marcel mauss ([1902] 2005) as well as the ethnographic studies of alfred radcliffe-brown (1922), bronisław malinowski (1935), and edward evans-pritchard (1937), lévi-strauss (1963) identified analogous practices in shamanic healing rights (of the nambicuara in brazil, the zuni of new mexico [us], and the kwakiutl from vancouver [canada]) and contemporary psychoanalytic therapies of the 1960s. to lévi-strauss, both shamanic rituals and psychoanalytic practices appeared in their healing practices to offer a “sense of security that the group receives from the myth underlying the cure” (1963, 183). with this insight, lévi-strauss established magic as a fundamental component of structural anthropology. however, after the notable works of daniel o’keefe (1983), e. fuller torrey (1986), and william covino (1994), only a limited number of modern scholars have focused on magic as it pertains to modern cultural practices.   i contend that social practices deployed in the use of modern voice assistants are homologous to occult magical practices, particularly the casting of magical spells. this paper will explore the various homologues, beginning with logocentric (i.e., word-based) magic and then, separately, magic circles. next, this paper will discuss the feminization of voice assistants by exploring the analogous feminization of magic, as seen in the demonization of witches. an examination of the media forerunners of the magical female voice assistant—personified as the protagonists of the western television shows bewitched and i dream of jeannie—will conclude this paper, which i believe demonstrates how insidious the unquestioned repurposing of magical social practices can be. altogether, the homologous practices mapped in this paper suggest that magic plays a far more critical and foundational role in modern society than appears, and that magic is a means by which earlier prejudices are repackaged and repurposed for a new, technological age.   logocentric word magic magic language (i.e., magic spells, logocentric magic) is perhaps the most well-known type of occult magic: it spans time periods, geographic locations, and cultures. for example, the greek magical papyri, a collection of magical spells and recipes dating from the first century bce to the fifth century ce, provided practitioners with explicit linguistic instructions (betz 1990). according to the traditions of jewish cabalism, clay statues could be brought to life by a rabbi who expertly chanted thousands of hebrew words and then affixed the word emet (i.e., truth) onto the summoned golem’s forehead (covino 1996; mazlish 1995). babylonian incantation bowls from the middle east were engraved with spells to lure and then subdue evil spirits (davies 2017). in ethiopia, amulets called ketab (documents) or metshaf (book) were inscribed with magic text and illustrations (chernetsov 2005). grimoires like the approximately fifteenth-century key of solomon were filled with arcane incantations and charms requiring precise recitation under prescribed circumstances (davies 2012). and according to the indigenous laguna pueblo tradition in new mexico, tribal witches could perform magic through the act of storytelling (silko 1977). in short, one can find instances of alleged word-based occult magic throughout the world.   sorcerers and sorceresses recite spells, chant incantations, and engrave amulets with words. ontologically, alleged magical language taps into a supernatural power. many societies and groups that have practiced magic trace the power of word-based magic to an originary language that can command the elements by employing the “true names” of things, creatures, and people (covino 1994). to the more scientifically inclined, this is more likely to sound irrational. according to the traditions of post-saussurean linguistics, a word and what it signifies are understood to be arbitrarily linked. words have no power over nature, and there is no mythical language (e.g., john dee’s fabled enochian, the reputed language of the angels) that can harness supernatural power.   in the absence of an actual magical language, voice assistants—housed in totemic-looking smart speakers—“enmagic” language. by installing a smart speaker voice assistant, consumers gain the legendary ability to speak and have their surroundings “magically” respond. through a voice assistant, the spoken word is “enmagicked”: the smart speaker creates a zone in which spoken words control one’s surroundings. and like magic spells, which often follow a scripted form, individuals interact with voice assistants by following a precise spoken formula. for one, each command must begin by announcing the name of the voice assistant itself (e.g., “alexa”), much like the nature of some occult magic that ostensibly worked by directly naming (and thus harnessing) the power of a supernatural spirit. then, individuals verbally issue some (pre-programmed) directive to the voice assistant, which then carries out its directions—that is, as long as the smart speaker can understand the individual who is speaking.   returning to occult magic, high illiteracy rates in pre-industrial society often restricted access to alleged magical spells to the educated, privileged few. in fact, the word grimoire (i.e., a tome with magical spells and formulae) etymologically developed alongside the scholar’s “grammar” book. filled with words and symbols indecipherable to the commoner (e.g., latin), the books must have appeared to contain magical spells: alleged sources of power rendered inscrutable by unknown languages (davies 2012).   like magical language, smart speakers are not universally accessible. smart speakers are significantly more likely to understand the accent of someone from an educated, industrial region than the accent of either a non-native speaker or people from rural, less wealthy areas (harwell 2018). lima et al. (2019) found empirical evidence of an “accent gap” in the way that voice assistants, specifically siri and alexa, understood linguistic commands in brazil. researching a similar phenomenon in the united states, palanica et al. (2019) found that siri and alexa exhibited lower comprehension of speakers with foreign accents. also in the us, koenecke et al. (2020) reported a disproportionately high error rate in automated speech recognition for speakers of african american vernacular english. the occurrence of errors extended beyond language variety or accent, however. one study found that youtube’s automatically generated captions had significantly lower accuracy for women (tatman 2017). another study reported that young children struggled to convey orders to voice assistants (sciuto et al. 2018). in short, language “enmagicked” by voice assistants is not accessible to everyone, for these devices have difficulty comprehending the orders given by non-native english-speaking adults, women, and children. the technological sorcerer default appears to be the adult white male.   the homology between voice assistants and alleged magical spells may be interesting in and of itself. however, this paper suggests that establishing a homology has a greater purpose. homologies facilitate critical analysis; they recast familiar practices in different lights. when in newer social practices (i.e., those associated with voice assistants) we see homologous older practices (i.e., those associated with magic spells), we would do well to remember that many social practices disadvantage certain groups, perpetuate stereotypes, and reify the power of certain types of people (see, for example, the exploration of magic and academic grammar in toncic 2020). magic language has a lengthy history of supposedly granting power—power that has been, in some contexts, praised (e.g., as religious miracle) and in others vilified (e.g., as witchcraft). in both cases, the presumption of magical power alone was sufficient to cast the alleged practitioner in a certain light.   magic circles figure 2. the cover of the 1620 edition of christopher marlowe’s doctor faustus, featuring a woodcut illustration of a demon coming up through a trapdoor summoned by doctor faustus’s incantation from within a magic circle. public domain.   in supernatural magical practice, language alone would rarely suffice to perform a magical incantation, however. magical words were often combined with other practices—such as ingredients, musical cadences, or bodily movement—to allegedly harness supernatural powers. one of the most common practices, particularly in the western occult tradition, was the inscription of and recitation of spells within magic circles. this section will first introduce a brief history of magic circles and then argue that, homologously, smart speakers have also instantiated circular iconography.   in christopher marlowe’s (1995) sixteenth-century drama the tragical history of the life and death of doctor faustus, the titular doctor faustus, having reached the limits of worldly knowledge, seeks to gain magical power. to summon a demon to access this unnatural sorcery, doctor faustus first created a magic circle from within which he will invoke the evil spirit (see also figure 2):   within this circle is jehovah's name, forward and backward anagrammatiz'd, th' abbreviated names of holy saints, figures of every adjunct to the heavens, and characters of signs and erring stars, by which the spirits are enforc'd to rise (marlowe 1592, 1.3.8–13)   magic circles like those in marlowe’s drama were thought to be nexuses of power, and only within these circles did the spellcaster’s magic have any alleged effect. marlowe’s use of magic circles likely was inspired by grimoires such as the key of solomon (likely dating from the 1400s), which gave explicit, detailed directions for the construction of a magic circle (davies 2012). according to those instructions—which indicated writing the “holy letter tau” and the “four terrible and tremendous names of god” while reciting the text of specific psalms—magic circles were human-made special territories in which magic words gained otherworldly power. circular magical rites remained vivid in the public imagination even after the industrial revolution. english painter john william waterhouse’s the magic circle (1886) notably depicted a witch inscribing herself within a magic circle (see figure 3). a few years later in 1905, a group of professional stage magicians in britain founded the magic circle, an organization dedicated to advancing the art of magic—a society still in operation today (the magic circle 2021).   figure 3. a witch draws a magic circle with her wand in john william waterhouse’s the magic circle (1886). public domain.   magic circles are not solely a western phenomenon. some of the earliest artifacts of magic circles were incantation bowls found in the middle east dating from the seventh or eighth centuries ce (davies 2017). these bowls were often inscribed with an aramaic spell encircling a demon; they were intended to lure and trap evil spirits (see figure 4). in the medieval indian tantric tradition, a circular vidyadhara yantra (or “wizard’s apparatus”)—inscribed with geometric shapes, illustrations, and written text—was believed to proffer supernatural magic such as warding off evil or preventing illness (khanna 2005; white 2012).   figure 4. discovered in mesopotamia, this incantation bowl dates from the sixth or seventh century ce and depicts a demon surrounded by an aramaic inscription. from the university of pennsylvania’s museum of archaeology and anthropology, used under the creative commons attribution 2.5 generic license. photographed by marie-lan nguyen (2011).   circles are integral components of supernatural magic ritual as generative spaces of occult power, to the point that much magic was not thought to be possible outside of a circle’s circumference. likewise, smart speakers instantiate “enmagicked” zones in which “magical” words take on supernatural power. they do so in a way that, like occult magic, operates within a circular frame.   figure 5. an original illustration by author of concentric wavefronts emanating from a smart speaker.   to simplify a technical understanding, smart speakers operate by means of emitted and received sound waves. uninterrupted sound waves originating from the smart speaker expand outward in concentric wavefronts, but as they expand (and increase in circumference), their strength dissipates. likewise, for any given command, there exists a circumferential zone wherein that command can be received. thus, simple sound fields like those from smart speakers are homologous to magic circles (see figure 5). that is, they create a perimeter within which magical words can operate; outside of the circumference, these words will not have the same effect.   furthermore, smart speakers by and large have a circular design aesthetic. looking at the smart speaker units that house the voice assistants themselves, amazon’s echo and echo dot, google’s home and home mini, and apple’s homepod all have a cylindrical motif. the circular iconography further extends to the branding logos of the leading commercially available voice assistants today (see figure 6). notably, the circular iconography in logo design occurs in voice assistants that constitute over 99 percent of digital assistant usage in the united states at the time of writing (olson and kemery 2019). the reasoning behind the circular motif may be manifold, just like the adoption of the circle in occult practices may have competing rationales. the point is not what led to the use of the circle, but rather that in both homologous instances the circle instantiates logocentric power. as david noble pointed out, “technology is not an autonomous force impinging upon human affairs from the ‘outside,’ but the product of a social process” (1978, 374). the social processes that result in technological developments and invention manifest in other ways, too. homology is one way to look across fields and social practices to better understand that technology is but one result of larger social processes.   figure 6. an illustration by author of brand logos for voice assistants commonly incorporate circular elements, a symbol that seems to suggest a nexus of power or command.   in summary, voice assistants operate through practices and patterns that homologously resemble those of occult magic. smart speakers create concentric wavefronts, reminiscent of magic circles, wherein logocentric commands take on magical capacity. the icon of the circle also often appears in both the design of the smart speaker unit and in the logo of the voice assistant. the assertion of homology i make here is not that occult magic circles somehow cause or are generative of circles in smart speakers. rather, the purpose is to draw attention to circles as generative spheres of power in both contexts. the circle may originate from heliotropic iconography representing the disc and energy of the sun, perhaps. or it may be that, like william stahl (1995) pointed out in the mid-1990s, technological discourse has assumed the language and iconography of magic and religion. magic and technology indeed have a lengthy history, for computer systems have been known to borrow from the lexicon of the arcana (e.g., “sprites” and “daemons,” see aupers 2010; thompson 2020). but the point of interest is that, in two homologous practices wherein delimited zones offer a human actor the ability to use logocentric magic, both employ similar circular symbolism.   this all said, voice assistants are not passive recipients of commands, nor are they value-neutral tools, like hammers, that do not convey a perspective. the next section of this paper will discuss the gendered voice assistant and its placement in the home. to this end, i consider the feminization of magic use and the portrayal of domestic magic in the 1960s us television shows of bewtiched and i dream of jeannie.   resummoning witches western stage magic is, almost entirely, performed by men; female magicians are rare. there are numerous explanations for this phenomenon. for one, stage magic secrets were often shared in closed, male-only groups, such as at the society of american magicians, which had renowned magician harry houdini as one of its officers (fetters 2013). the magic circle welcomed only men until 1991—the shift in policy toward inclusion seemingly incited by magician fay presto, who had been a member of the club first as a man and then was, at least initially, asked to leave when she publicly identified as a woman in 1986 (fitzsimons 2014). in addition, the dearth of female magicians may be partially attributable to the fact that, for hundreds of years, women who were accused of magic would be categorized as witches and subject to execution (fetters 2013; lax 2015).   heinrich kramer’s (1487) malleus maleficarum emerged in the late fifteenth century as the “authoritative” theological tool for the classification and extermination of witches (summers 2012). this misogynistic work vilified women, asserting that black, harmful magic was practiced by female witches alone (broedel 2003). as brian pavlac (2010) pointed out, even kramer’s spelling of “maleficarum” with an “a” instead of an equally acceptable “o” intimated that black magic was perpetrated by women. published with the witchcraft-recognizing summis desiderantes affectibus papal bull by pope innocent viii (1484) as its preface, the malleus maleficarum became influential in perpetuating future witch hunts—which resulted in, from modern estimates, approximately 40,000 executions in western europe and colonial north america between 1450 and 1750 (gaskill 2010). although this paper will focus on western society, it is important to note that executions of women accused of sorcery continue in countries such as syria (mezzofiore 2015), papua new guinea (mcguirk 2013), nepal (shrestha 2010), nigeria (houreld 2009), india (saxena 2007), and tanzania (bbc 2003).   in the west, witchcraft accusations were usually directed at poor, older women, especially those from marginalized groups (covino 1994; schnoebelen 2009). in 1688, for example, ann glover of boston was accused of witchcraft and executed. the reverend cotton mather concluded that glover had been a witch because she was "a scandalous old irishwoman, very poor, a roman catholic and obstinate in idolatry” (1702, 73). but boston merchant robert calef, interpreting the situation quite differently, wrote in rejoinder that glover was “a despised, crazy, ill-conditioned old woman” against whom the proof of witchcraft was “wholly deficient” (1700, 299). this critique was not taken lightly, and calef’s critical book more wonders of the invisible world was openly burned in the yard of harvard college at the behest of the school president, increase mather—cotton mather’s father (dijon 1905). the takeaway from this miscarriage of justice is clear. glover became a victim not because of what she allegedly did but rather who she was: an indigent, elderly woman who perhaps had a mental illness.   a witchcraft accusation thus became a tool whereby occult magic was transmuted from a practice that allegedly granted power to one that would circumscribe behavior—particularly female behavior—since accusations of witchcraft could be deadly. to be accused of being a witch likely meant that one was viewed as an outsider. and when the outsider was accused of witchcraft, the adumbration of the insider became clearer. the outsider-as-witch depiction is evident in waterhouse’s the magic circle (1886), which featured a barefoot woman encircling herself with a line drawn by her wand (see figure 3). the witch in the painting was portrayed by waterhouse as an outsider to contemporary, nineteenth-century western culture. she has “the swarthy complexion of a woman of middle-eastern origin,” “her hairstyle is like that of an early anglo-saxon,” and “her dress is decorated with persian or greek warriors” (fowle 2000, para. 2). the assignation of “witch” thus carried two simultaneously feuding definitions: on one hand, it signified an individual of alleged power, capable of bending the forces of nature to her will; on the other hand, the same term signified a woman on the fringes of society associated with uncommon practices or behaviors, whose sheer difference from others resulted in her association with the demonic. consequently, avoiding the appellation of “witch” required a woman to be perceived as “normal” in society, which, in patriarchal western culture, came to be synonymous with adopting the role of the domestic housewife.   many women, though, were unhappy with paternalistic social constructs. building upon centuries of growing domestic dissatisfaction, betty friedan’s (1963) book the feminine mystique inspired a wave of feminism in many women who had felt restricted in their domestic family lives (sullivan 2006). the next year, friedan brought her critique to television, writing that the contemporary woman was portrayed as “a stupid, unattractive, insecure little household drudge who spends her martyred, mindless, boring days dreaming of love” (friedan 1964, 6). only a few months later, a magical television housewife appeared who could represent their discontent—samantha stephens (portrayed by elizabeth montgomery) from the sitcom bewitched (1964–1972). samantha, a witch capable of eldritch power with a twitch of her nose, is not persecuted and executed as was wont of an earlier era. she was instead encouraged to condemn her witch ancestry and refrain from casting magic, all to please her mortal husband’s ego as the patriarchal breadwinner. some readers of friedan (1963, 1964) might recognize in samantha their own condition: housewives who felt stymied within domesticity from deploying their entire capability.   in one episode, samantha’s husband, darrin, injures himself by falling down a flight of stairs. to facilitate his convalescence, samantha argues that she should use her magic to enchant their suburban home so that it will obey darrin’s every command.   darrin: i've told you 100 times, i don't want any of that nonsense. samantha: you'd rather i ran up and down stairs all day? darrin: no, of course not. samantha: then, darrin let me have the house cooperate with you. darrin: cooperate? samantha: please, darling? it would be so much easier. darrin: well, what am i supposed to do? samantha: ask for something. darrin: anything at all? samantha: anything we've got. do we have any bananas? all right. darrin: banana, come, darrin. samantha: you don't have to sound like tarzan. (barret, saks, and lupino 1965)   with her enchantment, samantha proleptically conjured what today we might call the smart speaker voice assistant. although samantha is capable of performing magic with the twitch of her nose, darrin must use language instead to command the home—a subtle but important difference. the title of the episode, derived from a crossword puzzle that darrin completes while recovering, is “a is for aardvark.” alphabet primers, in a similar “a is for” form, are common in children’s english-language development (crain 2000), a subtle reinforcement of the linguistic turn of domestic magic in this 1965 episode.   bewtiched was not alone in its portrayal of a powerful magic woman limited by suburban domesticity. a few months later, i dream of jeannie likewise featured a woman with fearsome power ensnared by suburban america. in the pilot episode (sheldon and nelson 1965), the titular jeannie (i.e., genie or djinn) is discovered on an island in the south pacific when nasa astronaut captain tony nelson crash-lands after re-entry from space. he finds an ornate bottle and releases jeannie, who speaks to him in persian. tony realizes that he has found a genie, but he is powerless to command her. he does not speak the language. ultimately, though, tony manages to “reprogram” the genie to use english, and jeannie returns with him—still bound within her bottle—to his home in florida.   jeannie, however, cannot cast magic from within her bottle or leave it unless it is uncorked from the outside, so throughout the series, she is often confined on a table or credenza in her totemic bottle, capable of incredible magic, but utterly impotent until released by her “master.” in fact, it looks (and functions) a lot like a voice assistant smart speaker (cf. a similar line of inquiry into the spurious promises of "labor-saving devices" [i.e., new technologies] for domestic use in cohen 1983). the frustration of the domestic housewife embodied by jeannie would likely have been familiar to friedan (1963, 1964), yet the same cannot be said for siri. apple’s voice assistant was programmed to “deflect” questions about feminism, women’s rights, or the #metoo movement (hern 2019). thus, while women have increasingly pursued their potential in education, careers, and interests outside of the home, largely male-dominated tech companies have, in the housewives’ place, installed female voice assistants—perpetuating an already lengthy history of feminized technology (see, for example, wajcman 1991).   conclusion science and technology have resulted in undeniable advances to society; perhaps by dint of that progress, though, science and technology are often conceptualized as relatively recent developments with little in common with earlier social practices. this paper demonstrated that—despite the feats in engineering, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing that combined to create voice assistants—the social practices instantiated in the use of those voice assistants are drawing from some deeper tradition that has an origin in (or has an origin in common with) some of the practices around occult magic. i offer the list below as a summary of those homologous features: smart speakers create a zone wherein logocentric magic operates, instantiating a new occult word magic ontology. as in the casting of magic spells, users of smart speakers must speak a prescribed syntactic form. smart speakers best provide logocentric magic to those who speak standard language dialects, much like how sorcery had been limited to the literate elite. occult logocentrism has often integrated magic circles as a means to access power. similarly, the totemic voice assistant originates its own sound field of concentric circles. within the magic circle of the smart speaker, users gain the ability to use logocentric magic. the iconology of the circle is rife in the physical design of smart speaker units and is seemingly ubiquitous in commercial voice assistant logos. mirroring the feminization of magic in the witch, voice assistants like alexa, cortana, and siri have default female names and voices. the feminization of voice assistants echoes earlier examples of wish-fulfilling magical housewives. the purpose of this paper was to draw attention, through structural anthropology, the tensile threads that nevertheless tether science and technology to human social practices. scholarship continues to identify gender bias in voice recognition programs (for examples, see perez 2019, chap. 8) and ask questions of the feminization of voice assistants (neville 2019; strengers and kennedy 2020). adding to these lines of inquiry, a critical exploration of potential biases with supernatural homologues may offer yet further insight into design bias in some technologies. after all, while it may be tempting to think that science has disenchanted the world, it seems more accurate to interpret technology’s integration into society as a modern 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"designing the ‘good citizen’ through latina identity in uscis’s virtual assistant ‘emma.’" feminist media studies 20 (7): 902–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1644657. wajcman, judy. 1991. feminism confronts technology. university park, pa: penn state press. white, david gordon. 2012. the alchemical body: siddha traditions in medieval india. chicago: university of chicago press. whittaker, meredith, meryl alper, cynthia l. bennett, sara hendren, liz kaziunas, mara mills, meredith ringel morris, joy rankin, et al. 2019. disability, bias, and ai. ai now institute. woods, heather suzanne. 2018. “asking more of siri and alexa: feminine persona in service of surveillance capitalism.” critical studies in media communication 35 (4): 334–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2018.1488082.     author bio jason toncic is a phd candidate at montclair state university in new jersey.     special section: probing the system: feminist complications of automated technologies, flows, and practices of everyday life mapping invisible surveillance on the north avenue smart corridor, atlanta     hayri dortdivanlioglu school of architecture, georgia institute of technology hayri@gatech.edu     abstract this paper presents a speculative mapping exercise as a feminist resistance method with the aim of rendering surveillance technologies and their fields of view visible. the focus is on the north avenue smart corridor, located in atlanta, georgia, which is one of the world's top ten most surveilled cities. through the design of these speculative maps, i question our relationship with surveillance. more specifically, i show that unnoticeable materiality and invisible processes of smart surveillance technologies prevent the public from forming an opinion on their intrusion into daily life. acceptance of these technologies allows powerholders to protect and enhance their power over marginalized communities. therefore, by mapping the intensity of surveillance, this study aims to raise awareness against the lure of technocracy in so-called smart cities. it situates the reader in the position of surveillance sensors and allows the reader to speculate on what they can see. in doing so, it seeks to highlight the oppressive agency of these technologies and question their appeal to objectivity with the potential to disrupt their patriarchal powers. can we free ourselves from the oppressive gaze of smart surveillance by mapping, seeing, and understanding its remarkably limited fields of view?     keywords surveillence, technocracy, policing, smart cities, mapping     introduction speculative mapping can be an exercise in feminist sense-making and potential resistance toward the surveillance apparatus of smart cities. this study presents one such approach to reveal the technocracy of intensive surveillance on atlanta's north avenue through a series of speculative maps. in september 2017, atlanta launched smartatl, with north avenue smart corridor as its pilot project (key 2018). smart city projects combine advanced surveillance technologies with internet of things (iot) and artificial intelligence (ai) to record and analyze a vast amount of data. these technologies process big data to produce actionable information that can guide policymakers. in response to north avenue's urgent need for infrastructure improvement, the city of atlanta invested in surveillance infrastructure to turn north avenue into a smart corridor regulated by data-driven policies and actions. as part of the project, every junction on north avenue was equipped with several cctv cameras and smart sensors watching and collecting data.     figure 1. (a) google earth satellite image showing midtown and downtown neighborhoods. (b) google earth street view showing the intersection between spring street and north avenue. the smart surveillance cameras can be seen attached to the traffic light. images are adapted from google earth.   north avenue passes through the heart of atlanta, borders two prominent districts—downtown and midtown—and connects the east part of the city to the west. besides being an important axis of atlanta's transportation network, north avenue is strategically situated in atlanta's sociopolitical and socioeconomic context (figure 2). first, north avenue connects the black neighborhoods in the east of the city to the gentrified and prominently white neighborhoods in the west of the city. moreover, it is an invisible border between downtown, the decayed old city center with high population of black people, and midtown, the developing new city center with high population of white people. north avenue functions as a transition zone between black and white neighborhoods. second, north avenue reveals a drastic contrast between the wealth of the companies and the institutions that occupy the buildings on the avenue and the poverty of the people who occupy public spaces on the avenue. on the one hand, north avenue accommodates wealthy companies and institutions, including the headquarters of coca-cola company, south part of the georgia tech campus, bank of america plaza, ponce city market, and several high-end hotels and residences. on the other hand, there is a high population of homeless people who shelter on and around north avenue. there are several homeless shelters and food distribution centers in downtown close to the north avenue. this sociopolitical and socioeconomic context of north avenue makes me question why north avenue was specifically selected as the pilot project of smartatl.   figure 2. mapping of demography in the neighborhoods surrounding north avenue, shown in solid orange line. population data from 2010 census (united states census bureau). the red circles represent the locations of homeless assistance centers.   in the north avenue smart corridor presentation, former mayor kasim reed stated that “the smart city project's goal is to improve roadway and public safety, mobility, and the environment through technology deployment and data analytics” (reed 2017). for example, traffic lights can react to what is happening in real time to increase traffic safety and reduce traffic time with the help of smart city infrastructure (levine 2017). these promises, however, are not without their pitfalls. these technologies pose many challenges often associated with big data projects, such as scaling, preparation, and analysis of data, security breaches, and privacy concerns (allam and dhunny 2019). moreover, the system's liability in processing data is questionable considering the inaccuracy and biases of iot and ai algorithms (dubrofsky and magnet 2015; buolamwini and gebru 2018; eubanks 2018). these are significant issues because, as gavin smith explains, developments in surveillance technologies guiding the decisions of public policies "bring significant implications for meanings and uses of public space, as well as for democratic principles and civil rights such as privacy, anonymity, accountability, and equity" (2020, 5). in his book undercover, gary marx also warns about the extensions of such intensive surveillance into the individuals' privacy, liberty, and rights: “the new surveillance is justified by positive social goals—the need to combat crime and terrorism, protect health, and improve productivity. extensions occur gradually; it is easy to miss the magnitude of the change and the broader issues it raises. our notions of privacy, liberty, and individual rights are quietly shifting, with little public awareness or legislative attention” (1998, 220). besides the technical and ethical issues of the advanced surveillance technologies, marx highlights another significant issue regarding the lack of public awareness and debate on surveillance technologies due to their slow and gradual intrusion into our lives.   the acceptance of advanced surveillance technologies without a robust public forum maintains and enhances the oppressive power of authorities aligned with racist, sexist, and ableist practices; thus, smart city technologies are designed to escape our attention to protect their agency over public life. these devices are attached to traffic light poles at a higher level than the human eyes. as the french term surveillance suggests, they watch—veiller—the streets from above—sur. they blend in with the built environment and merge with the existing infrastructures. we do not notice them unless we are intentionally seeking them out. we do not know if they are working or broken when we pass by them. we do not know what they see, sense, or record because, as trevor paglen (2016) puts it, the images they capture are invisible to the human eye but only available through machine-to-machine seeing apparatuses. there is no longer a human looking at images, nor human-readable images. life on north avenue is reduced to zeros and ones only readable by machines and algorithms. not only are the material technologies of surveillance, such as cameras and sensors invisible, but so is the process that makes their data function for certain actors.   figure 3. conceptual sketch of the mapping study. drawn by the author.   drawing on beth coleman’s (2009) and simone brown’s (2015) call to shift the gaze as a feminist intervention, i use a series of speculative maps to situate the reader’s gaze in the position of surveillance technologies. in doing so, i aim to intervene in the asymmetrical relationship of surveillance technologies and their subjects.1 i approach mapping as a creative practice, whose “agency lies in neither reproduction nor imposition but rather in uncovering realities previously unseen or unimagined, even across seemingly exhausted grounds” (corner 1999, 213). in these mapping studies, i used open-source map applications such as google maps and google earth as the main media where i virtually walked on the north avenue to collect information on the number, location, and viewing angle of the cctv cameras. after i mark the number and specifications of every camera, i speculate on their invisible surveillance fields to highlight our involuntary exposure to intensive smart city surveillance. by making the invisible images of surveillance technologies on north avenue visible, i raise awareness of their existence and their current structure of power and participation. in the last part of the article, in light of what this mapping study uncovers, i question the selection of north avenue as the pilot project of smartatl and discuss the increased policing and criminalization of minorities and marginalized people.   mapping study mapping has been broadly used as a practice and method of analyzing and criticizing urban issues and revealing socio-spatial power relations (harley 1989). situationists, inspired by guy debord’s “theory of the dérive,” have instrumentalized maps as collective visualization of mobility in postwar cities (debord and jorn 1957; sadler 1999). today, several artists and scholars, such as james bridle, maarten inghels, ester pollack, and drew hemment have developed different practices and methods of mapping to criticize surveillance technologies. in this study, i analyze and criticize the surveillance on the north avenue smart corridor through a series of speculative maps. i focus on nine of the sixteen signalized junctions on the north avenue between state street nw and juniper street ne in these maps. for each junction, i analyzed surveillance fields horizontally on a top view of the avenue (maps 1–6) and vertically on street facades (map 7). to produce these maps, i first determined the types of smart cameras, their numbers, locations, and viewing angles and marked them on a base map. i was able to collect all the data needed for this step through the visuals provided by google maps and google earth satellite view and street view. the street view application allowed me to virtually walk on north avenue, stop at junctions, and detect surveillance devices without physically strolling the avenue.   figure 4. (a) a c-mount cctv camera and (b) a dome cctv camera attached to a traffic light pole in the intersection of spring street and north avenue. images are adapted from google earth 2020.   second, after marking the specifics of the surveillance devices on a base map, i calculated the field of view for each of them and diagrammed them on the map. to do so, i needed technical specifications of the cameras and their image sensor format and lens size (figure 5a) (space and naval warfare systems center atlantic 2013). however, the smartatl project does not disclose the image sensor format and lens size of cameras. therefore, the field of view is estimated by using specifications of similar cameras to the ones used on north avenue. based on the google earth images, i identified two types of cctv cameras: one type is a c-mount cctv camera, covering a single view angle. the other one is a dome cctv camera covering all angles with a 360-degree rotation (figure 4) (businesswatch group 2019). i determined the specifications of the c-mount cctv camera as a 4 mm focal length with a 70º view angle and a maximum 700 ft. distance (figure 5b) (businesswatch group 2019). for the dome cctv camera, i determined the maximum distance as 650 ft. (figure 5c) (dinning 2019). based on these specifications, i marked each camera's field of view on the base map.   figure 5. (a) a schema illustrating the calculation of field of view. (b) a c-mount cctv camera’s field of view on top view. (c) a dome cctv camera’s field of view on top view. image credit: (a) adapted from cctv technology handbook (2013), (b, c) drawn by the author.   lastly, i transferred the processed information onto a digital map adapted from google earth satellite view using adobe photoshop. i emphasized certain concepts such as the intensity of surveillance and their fields and what these devices can see and cannot see in each map. to identify a surveillance field, which is the area a camera can see without any physical obstruction, first, i positioned the camera and its field of view on the map. then, i determined areas visually obstructed by physical barriers such as buildings and tree clusters. by doing so, in these maps, i situate the reader in the position of the surveillance devices. i transfer the gaze of the surveillance technologies to the reader who is now able to speculate on what these devices can and cannot see.   map 1. settlement. produced by the author.   map 1 shows the number and location of the cctv cameras on north avenue, with their fields of view overlapped on the base map. north avenue is a vital circulation corridor positioned between downtown and midtown. anyone moving between these two prominent neighborhoods has to pass through north avenue. if a person moves through the north avenue between the state street nw and the juniper street ne, they will potentially be captured by forty-seven cameras from different angles. this map shows that a network of surveillance devices provides continuous surveillance throughout the avenue.   map 2. intensity. produced by the author.   map 2 shows only the field of view of every cctv camera juxtaposed on top of each other. the darker orange color represents an overlap of multiple fields. therefore, the darker the area on the map, the more intense the surveillance is. if one stands in these darker orange areas, they are more likely to be observed and recorded simultaneously by more than one camera.   map 3. single field. produced by the author.   map 3a shows a c-mount cctv camera's field of view and its surveillance field. the dot on the map represents a cctv camera. the area shown by the dashed line represents this camera's field of view, and the area highlighted with orange shows the surveillance field. map 3b shows the juxtaposition of all the surveillance fields of the cctv cameras at north avenue and spring street junction.   map 4. under surveillance. produced by the author.   the view of cctv cameras is visually interrupted by physical barriers such as buildings and dense groups of trees. in map 4, such interruptions are recorded. the areas that are outside of surveillance fields are erased from the map. similar to the density map, the darker areas represent a higher intensity of surveillance. since the cameras do not receive any data about the areas hidden inside and behind physical objects, these areas do not virtually exist for them. thus, these areas are left blank on the map. this map clearly illustrates the continuity of surveillance fields uninterrupted throughout the entire north avenue.   map 5. invasion. produced by the author.   map 5 is a juxtaposition of map 2 and map 4. in addition to cctv cameras, thermal cameras are positioned on north avenue. these types of cameras can detect body temperature despite any physical barriers. we are still observed in an enclosed environment, even if we think we are away from the gaze of cctv cameras.   map 6. invisible. produced by the author.   map 6 illustrates unknown or unrecognizable areas by the surveillance devices. erasing these areas under surveillance on north avenue from the map creates the reverse image of map 4. the areas shown on the map are the leftovers from the surveillance. this map assumes that no other surveillance sensors are placed on the side and parallel streets. a map of all the surveilled areas, including side streets leading to north avenue, might leave us with even much smaller leftover areas free from surveillance, if they exist anymore.   figure 6. panoramic view of downtown and midtown from the junction of the north avenue and 249d exit. images adapted from google earth 2020.   figure 6, the panoramic view of the city taken from one of the junctions, shows that if there is no physical barrier restricting the field of view, surveillance devices can cover a large portion of the city. for example, the ones looking east on the intersection of the north avenue and 249d exit from the highway have an uninterrupted view of downtown and midtown.   map 7. beyond the horizon. produced by the author.   map 7 marks the high-rise buildings that partially enter the view of cctv cameras positioned in the intersection of north avenue and 249d exit. it shows that in certain conditions, surveillance cameras, in fact, have a much broader coverage. for example, they can see the top portion of a building in midtown, which is a mile away. the length of the covered area by these devices is almost equal to the north avenue's length.   map 8. vertical surveillance fields shown in the intersections of north avenue and (a) tech parkway, (b) techwood drive, (c) 249d exit, (d) spring street, (e) west peachtree street, (f) peachtree street, (g) juniper street, (h) piedmont avenue. produced by the author.   map 8 shows surveillance fields in the vertical direction marked on the street facades. these maps give an insight into the surveillance in a three-dimensional medium. the surveilled areas are highlighted in orange on the street facade images. besides open public spaces such as streets, sidewalks, and parks, cctv cameras can also see the private buildings' balconies and seemingly private spaces.   reflections these maps reveal the mind-boggling intensity of surveillance activities on the north avenue smart corridor. the smart cameras positioned on top of the traffic lights in every junction work as a networked entity to cover the entire north avenue without leaving a blind spot on it. even though the type of surveillance practices extends throughout the city, the intensity decreases gradually towards the city's periphery and suburban areas. the decrease in intensity can be observed even in the parallel streets to north avenue. for example, the number of cameras on the intersection of peachtree street and north avenue goes down from six to four just on the next junction, peachtree street and linden avenue ne. while these maps focus on the gaze of the smart cameras, they lack coverage of other smart sensors like license plate readers and infrared and thermal sensors. we do not know the exact range of sensors that smart city technologies deploy because the smart city practice remains opaque to the public.   while these maps display only the physical context of the north avenue and create an illusion of “the god trick” of the surveillance technologies, i aim to uncover the biased and oppressive position of surveillance technologies by reflecting on the sociopolitical and socioeconomic context of surveillance technologies on the avenue. these maps reveal the broad coverage of smart surveillance technologies on north avenue, rendering everyday passersby involuntary participants in the data collection of smart cities. the cameras have the agency to identify you, recognize who you interact with, and record your activities on north avenue. furthermore, the surveillance is not limited to public places. smart cameras are capable of monitoring the facades of private buildings, watching you in the windows of your home. even though smart cameras are unnoticeable, their intrusion into our lives is consequential. the data collected and processed through automated technologies are used to shape and defend the policies that affect public places and how we experience them. data-driven policies enforced by authorities raise the question of how the data is transformed into “actionable information.” for what? by whom? based on what values? what type of actions?   instead of investing in the conspicuous need for infrastructure improvement to make the public places of north avenue accessible and equitable to everyone, the city of atlanta invested in smart surveillance technologies, which, in fact, cause damages to fundamental rights. such a big investment into surveillance raises the question, whose body is watched and disciplined, particularly in the case of atlanta, the most surveilled city in the united states (shelby et al. 2020)? the surveillance on north avenue captures people commuting between predominantly black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods, as well as homeless people, ninety-four percent of whom are black (homeless point-in-time count 2016). considering what the surveillance captures on north avenue, what happens when the issues of oppressed communities enter the frame of surveillance? rachel dubrofsky and shoshana magnet point out that this type of surveillance practice is “processes that are simultaneously about seeing and not-seeing—that is, some bodies are made visible, while others are made hypervisible” (2015, 7). on north avenue, these technologies make people of homeless, low-income, and racially diverse communities hypervisible to the gaze of surveillance. how are these communities impacted by the surveillance and policing aspect of smart city technologies? what role do they play in transforming data into policies? what are the prejudices that the smart city algorithms hold against these oppressed communities and individuals?   historically, atlanta has had a bad record of using city infrastructure to control and segregate races. ronald h. bayor (1988) shows that, in the 1950s and 1960s, the city of atlanta used highways and roads as racial buffers—that is, barriers and boundaries between white and black communities. while these buffers still physically exist today, they are enhanced with surveillance technologies as in the case of north avenue smart corridor. the fact that north avenue is a transition zone between predominantly black and white neighborhoods, and it is one of the most surveilled parts of the city brings race back to the discussion of why this specific site is selected as a pilot project of smartatl.   surveillance practices discriminate against black and brown people and people who signify as lower class. for example, recent police data shows that black and hispanic drivers are more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white drivers (goel and phillips 2017). these practices result from surveillance that renders certain bodies and communities visible as a threat to the system. as coleman asserts, “a person is not being shot for ‘being black’ per se but rather for appearing threatening, resisting arrest, or other ‘disruptive’ behavior. none of these stimuli of police attention are named as racial in policy; nonetheless, they are rendered racial in practice” (coleman 2018). in her book dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness, browne (2015) shows that contemporary surveillance practices have been shaped by a historical account of controlling black bodies. from a black feminist perspective, she argues that “under these conditions of terror and the violent regulation of blackness by way of surveillance, the inequities between those who were watched over and those who did the watching are revealed” (browne 2015, 21).   building on david lyon’s concept of digital discrimination (2003), browne claims that in addition to the constant surveillance, the invisible process of data conversion systematically disadvantages minority groups while privileging advantaged groups. the smart surveillance technologies convert the captured images into raw data, and then profile, circulate and trade them between various databases. as browne points out, “such data is often marked by gender, nation, region, race, socioeconomic status, and other categories” (2015, 17). surveillance technologies increase the surveillance and criminalization of oppressed bodies because they are trained with biased data. artificial intelligence that supports surveillance technologies reflects racial, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, and ableist biases of the society in their data processes. moreover, these technologies have high rates of inaccuracy. for example, facial recognition systems have been shown to misidentify people of color, women, and young people at high rates (klare et al. 2012). besides the biases in the ai algorithm, their phenotypic and demographic inaccuracy damages law enforcement's essential rights and accountability (buolamwini and gebru 2018). smart surveillance technologies re-establishe the patriarchal gaze of society through smart surveillance.   increased surveillance shaped by biased and inaccurate algorithms makes minorities and marginalized people more susceptible to policing and criminalization. elizabeth e. joh argues that “as smart cities become ‘smarter,’ they increasingly embed policing itself into the urban infrastructure. policing is inherent to the smart cities” (2019, 178). she adds, “as cities become ‘smart,’ connected and watchful, policing will become a less visible and a more embedded aspect of the urban environment” (181). in their wired article “how to protest safely in the age of surveillance,” andy greenberg and lily newman (2020) make recommendations to black lives matter protesters about how to avoid being recognized by smart surveillance. they warn against wearing colorful clothing with logos, showing one’s full face, or driving because smart surveillance technologies can easily identify protestors with the help of facial recognition or license plate readers. in another recent example, city authorities all over the world have used smart surveillance technologies to monitor and govern people's mobility and interactions to track covid-19 infections (smith 2020; hossain, mohammad and guizani 2020). besides increased mass policing, smart surveillance technologies contribute to the self-policing of marginalized people, which recalls the panopticon’s disciplinary gaze as outlined by michel foucault (1995). in the foucauldian panopticon, however, inmates are disciplined to behave as if they are under constant surveillance since they cannot know whether they are being watched; on north avenue, citizens are under constant surveillance. they are disciplined to monitor their behaviors because the automated surveillance might target them due to their race, gender, sex, or disabled bodies. people who suffered from invasive surveillance and punitive public policies must be extra cautious about how they behave in public. any action that can be detected by the algorithms as an offense can have punitive, life-changing consequences.   this study uncovers the biased and oppressive power of surveillance technologies over minorities and marginalized people by situating the reader in the position of the smart sensors and making them speculate on what these technologies can and cannot see. it argues that the invisibility of these technologies and their processes prevents the formation of strong public opinion and debate on their impact. blind acceptance of these technologies helps the powerholders maintain and enhance their oppressive power. it damages the essential rights of citizens, perhaps beyond repair, and increases discriminative practices based on racist, sexist, and ableist policies. smart surveillance leads to disproportional policing and criminalization of minorities and marginalized people. biased and inaccurate automated data processing systems further amplifies the impact of surveillance due to the biased and inaccurate automated data processing system. therefore, a strong public understanding is necessary to govern smart city technologies’ agency for any meaningful intervention on these entrenched, unequal power relations. mapping the unnoticeable materiality and invisible processes of intensive smart surveillance technologies is one method of intervention, as exemplified in this study. while each map in this article reveals intrusive aspects of surveillance, the crucial question to ask is whether and how we can free ourselves from the oppressive gaze of surveillance.   acknowledgments this mapping study started as a term project in the sts studio taught by professor nassim parvin at georgia tech in spring 2019. i am grateful for the mentorship and support of professor parvin, who provided invaluable feedback and help during this study. i would also like to thank all the editors and reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions that helped me to advance this study.   note 1 it is also important to highlight that the strategy of shifting the gaze is in conversation with the concept of the flâneur and its feminist counterpart flâneuse in surveillance studies. however, given the extensive literature and the brevity of this article, i will leave out further elaboration 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handbook. accessed august 1, 2020. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/cctv-tech-hbk_0713-508.pdf. united states census bureau. 2010. “quick facts, atlanta city, georgia.” accessed may 1, 2021. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/atlantacitygeorgia.     author bio hayri dortdivanlioglu is a ph.d. student and graduate instructor in the school of architecture, georgia institute of technology. his research interest includes the interaction between technology and design, architectural theories, mapping, and data visualization.     special section between past and future: the slow death of indefinite detention     michelle c. velasquez-potts uc santa cruz micvelas@ucsc.edu     abstract the detention camp at guantánamo bay naval station has been operative for more than twenty years now. since 2002 prisoners have been force-fed as punishment for staging individual and collective hunger strikes in protest of indefinite detention. the oldest captive is in his seventies, but the majority are middle-aged. in 2019 carol rosenberg reported that with the aging of those incarcerated, the pentagon is now in the early planning stages for “terrorism suspects” to grow old and die at guantánamo bay, necessitating the building of a hospice wing at the detention camp. this essay asks what it means to think of hospice care in a torture facility, arguing that the military is using the possibility of hospice as a curative, both politically and rhetorically, to disavow the effects of torture on the bodyminds of captives.   keywords guantánamo bay, hospice, force-feeding, indefinite detention, torture, war on terror, humanitarianism, carceral     introduction what does it mean to think about hospice care in a torture facility? this question first occurred to me after reading carol rosenberg's (2019) formative article, “guantánamo bay as nursing home: military envisions hospice care as terrorism suspects age.” rosenberg reports that with the aging of those incarcerated at the detention camp at guantánamo bay naval station and the trump administration's plan to keep the camp open for at least another twenty-five years, hospice care is now on the horizon. according to rosenberg's 2018 reporting for the miami herald, the oldest prisoner at guantánamo is abd al hadi al iraqi, who is in his late seventies and uses a wheelchair and walker after undergoing a series of spinal surgeries for a degenerative disc condition. majid khan is the youngest in his late thirties and lives with multiple chronic conditions after undergoing forced rectal feedings while held captive in a secret military detention site, also known as a “black site,” in the early 2000s. many of the men who remain incarcerated at guantánamo are prediabetic and will soon perhaps require dialysis. others might eventually need hip and knee replacements and wheelchair assistance. many already use assistive breathing devices during sleep due to sleep apnea. there are talks of building a small prison that would also provide “communal hospice care capacity” and care for chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, joint pain, and diabetes (rosenberg 2019). to do this, the military would need to make architectural changes, like increasing the width of the hallways as more and more of the men will soon be in wheelchairs, requiring that cells be bigger with ramps and grab bars. the possibility of hospice at guantánamo might be viewed as a welcome change for a detention camp that has come to be understood by many as a site where abject violence abounds with minimal oversight or legal accountability. sitting outside us borders, guantánamo bay appears to exist beyond the reach of law and procedure generally and of the us constitution and the reach of its courts specifically. laleh khalili (2012) argues that the law is essential to how the united states operates its detention centers, including guantánamo and others. it is not a lack of law that makes guantánamo possible but, rather, a proliferation of legal analysis and procedure. “the whole complex,” writes khalili, “and the worldwide network of lawyers, legal scholars, advocates, military judges and prosecutors, human rights activists, and news reporters, attests to something else again: a space of legal dispute. not of lawlessness, as it is claimed again and again, but of excess of law, rules, procedures, legal performances made by the government to legitimate control, and contested by those who seek to subject the detainees there to an alternate regime of legality” (2012, 74). if one considers guantánamo bay to be a separate place beyond the rule of law, then one may miss how its existence and techniques perhaps sketch the outline of the law. that is to say, the legal excess of guantánamo bay is precisely the point of departure for understanding how and why law, and the specter of it, creates paradoxical logics. one such paradoxical logic at guantánamo bay, and one guiding my opening question, is that of care. in this essay, i explore how the legal excess of guantánamo bay defines the military's logic of care, or what anthropologist saiba varma (2020), writing on the imbrication between medicine and violence in kashmir, has described as “militarized care.” militarized care includes the “discourses and practices” mobilized by the state to “further an imperialist project, which is articulated in the language of 'protection' and 'national security'” (varma 2020, 12). for example, the enhanced interrogation program, orchestrated by the bush administration post-9/11, justified torture and extreme force while insisting upon the sanctity of biological life, simultaneously and paradoxically. such competing logics of care legitimate the practice of force-feeding hunger strikers over the course of two decades at guantánamo bay. the military frames force-feeding as an act of care because it facilitates the preservation of biological life. to this end, my interest is in the relationship between care and violence and how medical care is structured at the detention camps toward carceral and punitive ends. such assemblages of care not only obfuscate the military's insidious regulation of life and death but also attempt to foreclose collective and relational practices of care organized by those held captive, such as hunger striking. these logics are also apparent in the military's discussions concerning the eventual need for end-of-life care, which can encompass a wide range of care practices for patients near the end of life. end-of-life care may include palliative care, medical care meant to manage serious illnesses such as cancer, or hospice care, provided when a physician deems a patient unlikely to live beyond six months. both palliative and hospice care centralize comfort, emotional support, and quality of life, but unlike palliative care, hospice is meant for patients no longer receiving curative treatment for illness. as long as guantánamo bay remains operative, end-of-life care such as hospice will become necessary. none of the prisoners have been diagnosed with cancer. still, many now live with high blood pressure and diabetes, which has brought up questions for the military about how they plan on addressing these health concerns without geriatric or palliative care physicians (rosenberg 2018). in the immediate present, however, ongoing medical care for prisoners' chronic conditions, which are linked to torture techniques practiced throughout the enhanced interrogation program, is of most concern. a 2019 physicians for human rights report, deprivation and despair: the crisis of medical care at guantánamo, states that torture techniques such as “walling,” whereby the prisoner is slammed repeatedly up against a wall, are a leading cause of many chronic conditions that are physical and mental such as complex post-traumatic stress disorder. the report also states that medical caretakers at guantánamo are not allowed to ask prisoners about the history behind their injuries or illness if it is suspected that there is a direct link to interrogation and torture (see physicians for human rights 2019, 8, 20). my interest, then, is how the military's bourgeoning rhetoric of hospice and palliative care at the camps shifts attention away from torture techniques deployed throughout the enhanced interrogation program, giving guantánamo bay the semblance of being a site now separate from warfare, a site of new, more humanitarian practices enacted by the us military. and so, what has been framed as the early planning stages for “terrorism suspects” to grow old and die at the detention camp is perhaps also the military's attempts to erase the brutalities of the war on terror's enhanced interrogation program (rosenberg 2019). indeed, assistive technologies and mobility aids, such as wheelchairs, are meant to offer reprieve to the very wearing out of the captive's body that the military made possible. the rhetoric of hospice obscures the conditions giving rise to the disability and debility of those held captive; the rhetoric suggests the cause for the need for ongoing medical care is aging, not decades of torture and confinement. if, as international relations scholar colleen bell argues, the military presents the war on terror's counterinsurgency efforts as more empathetic, humane, and culturally aware, then the pentagon's consideration of hospice at the detention camp follows a method of counterinsurgency that attempts to “disempower the enemy through indirect means by focusing on protecting and managing the life of the population” (2011, 232). such a humanitarian logic of war that centralizes care and biological life produces the possibility for both sets of medical practices—force-feeding and hospice— to exist simultaneously at the detention camp (see terry 2017). with this unfolding present in mind, i argue that the military is using the possibility of hospice as a curative, both politically and rhetorically, to disavow the effects of torture on the body. by suggesting hospice as politically curative, i mean to develop a more robust view of cure, one that understands cure as an ideology informed by military and medical-industrial-complex logic and practice that invests in medical experimentation. to this end, the state experiments with the possibility of hospice care, even if only rhetorically, as a way to attest for disability/debility by pointing to the prisoner's age or even past without ever accounting for the us military's role in the torture, isolation, and disability of these individuals. rosenberg quotes a senior medical officer speaking on prisoners' health as stating, “a lot of these folks had hard lives before they came here to guantánamo bay” (2019). here, this military officer implies the prisoner's lives before guantánamo explains their illness, and as such, willfully ignores how existing disability/debility are caused by both torture and incarceration. how might the possibility of hospice at guantánamo function as a silencing tool that prevents prisoners from testifying about the torture they experienced? the physicians for human rights report deprivation and despair describes how the military prohibits prisoners from confessing verbally, to medical staff, about what abuses they have experienced at the hands of guards. to this end, the only “evidence” for the torture is the self-evident markings, such as scars, broken bones, and mental illness, on the prisoners' bodyminds.1 i'm suggesting that the broad rhetoric of hospice and the more specific rhetoric of care for chronic conditions recast those induced corporeal deformations as natural formations of the physiological body during aging. put another way, hospice and the push for more comprehensive medical care is not just a method of disavowing the effects of torture on the bodymind, but rather it is a process of evidence destruction by which (1) prisoners lose their right to speak about the torture they've endured and (2) a prisoners' bodymind that bears the self-evident effects of torture is no longer self-evident—care for chronic conditions creates the plausible deniability that those (de)formations are due to aging rather than torture. the possibility of hospice as a curative, then, should be understood as a way to obscure the afterlife of torture on the bodyminds of captives.2 following my previous work on the use of force-feeding at the naval station as a medicalized mode of living death or suspended animation (see velasquez-potts 2019), hospice care is similarly a liminal space where the past harms of the enhanced interrogation program no longer exist. hospice becomes an endless present marked by slow death, or what disability studies scholar alison kafer calls “curative time” (2021). here, cure demands the present be marked by waiting—the waiting for a future without disabilities and illness. in the context of guantánamo, curative time takes place in the biopolitical interval between the enforcement of biological life through force-feeding and the facilitation of death and dying by way of hospice. in what follows, i continue to speculate on what it means to think about hospice care in a torture facility. i rely primarily on rosenberg's 2018 and 2019 reporting about the state of medical care and the military's envisioning of hospice at the detention camp. here i consider how the coercive use of the feeding tube and hospice take on a technoscientific meaning at guantánamo bay, mobilized toward carceral and humanitarian ends. i then turn to mansoor adayfi's 2021 memoir don't forget us here, which chronicles the fourteen years he spent captured at guantánamo bay before his release in 2018. adayfi offers a counternarrative to the carceral and militarized care enacted by the state by highlighting forms of relational care and refusal throughout his detention. i conclude with a discussion about temporality, drawing from lauren berlant's (2011) concept of “slow death” to consider the political stakes of both force-feeding and hospice at guantánamo bay and beyond. hospice and the carceral logics of care hospice derives from the latin hospes, meaning both “guest” and “host.” as a medical philosophy, hospice first gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s due to the work of british physician dame cicely saunders. in dr. saunders's philosophy, hospice reformed medicalized approaches to terminal illness death. hospice centers palliative care—care that offers relief from pain, thus improving one's quality of life—instead of solely treatments that seek to cure or eliminate disease or illness. hospice prioritizes a patient's comfort instead of medicalized approaches that prioritize curative treatment at all costs, even death. if one's death is imminent, hospice seeks to facilitate that death as comfortably as possible. this is what journalist anne neumann (2016) refers to as a “good death,” emphasizing how modern medicine seeks to alleviate pain and suffering as much as possible. neumann's conception of the “good death” is relevant to the bionecropolitical, or the nexus between life and death, entanglements constitutive of guantánamo bay (see also mbembe 2003; bargu 2016; puar 2017). in 2018 rosenberg reported that us military commanders at the naval station appealed to congress to fund a wheelchair-accessible prison wing that would include a hospice-care cellblock at a cost of $69 million. navy commander anne leanos, a spokesperson for guantánamo, stated, “picture in your mind elderly detainees, brothers taking care of one another. that is the humane way ahead” (rosenberg 2018). the vision behind the new prison is to create four areas: two wheelchair-accessible wings, another wing for hospice care, and an attorney-client meeting room. the attorney-client meeting room would replace the military's current practice of restraining prisoners and transporting them to a remote site for such visits (rosenberg 2018). medically, the goal of hospice is to provide the maximum level of comfort to the dying patient and to root medical decision-making in the patient's autonomy. although past and present prison commanders have been vocal about the need for end-of-life care at the camps and the growing urgency to provide complex care for prisoners with chronic ailments, it remains unclear how the military will navigate hospice care necessitating patient autonomy (see rosenberg 2019). law saturates guantánamo bay but even it doesn't provide an easy solution to the conundrum of patient autonomy when the patient is a captive. the paradox of hospice care at guantánamo bay invites questions worthy of consideration. for example, how might the military navigate the legalities of actually delivering a “good death” to captives? will captives be allowed advanced directives, medical proxies, or even a will? this seems unlikely given disagreement on what basic medical care captives are allowed and how it should be delivered at the camps. rosenberg (2019) writes that since at least 2019 military personnel must travel from the military base to jacksonville, florida to receive more complicated medical care and prisoners with non-routine needs must have a specialist come to the camps. although there are at least 140 doctors, nurses, and mental health providers at guantánamo, all of whom attend to both prisoners and the assigned troops, there is still no physician specializing in hospice and geriatric medicine (rosenberg 2018). as such, the military has begun researching how the federal bureau of prisons handles hospice care. in the us context, prison-based hospice dates back to the 1980s when, in the wake of hiv, many prison clinicians refused to care for prisoners dying of aids. as such, it was other prisoners who became caregivers to each other and acted as “health aids” with a focus on clinically based palliative care. the first prison hospice program was conceived in 1987 by prisoners at the united states medical center for federal prisoners in springfield, missouri. hospice programs are now found in a wide range of carceral institutions such as jails, prisons, and minimumand maximum-security facilities. volunteers in hospice programs may help with caretaking duties such as feeding and bathing, while other programs consist solely of bedside companionship (see sharp 2022, 177-81). anthropologist lesley sharp's work on end-of-life care in a us men's prison is illuminating here. in an ethnographic study investigating what sharp names “death by incarceration” (2022,177), a group of trained prisoners work as hospice volunteers, or caretakers for other prisoners who are at the end of life. the experience of caretaking, details sharp, is complicated inside a men's facility, where demonstrating emotional and physical care to other prisoners is sometimes viewed as antithetical to survival inside. highlighted in sharp's analysis is how prisoner-led hospice care is in opposition to what she calls “punitive care.” punitive care extends beyond the structural disenfranchisement of the prison itself to encapsulate the “deliberate harmful acts that pervade carceral medicine” (sharp 2022, 184). the militarization of care at guantánamo, and sharp's punitive care, each speak to a continuum of liberal carceral violence that seeks to belie existing tensions between hospice and medical neglect, respectively. the hospice volunteers sharp collaborated with all attest to the transformative power of caring for other prisoners at the end of life, yet nonetheless maintain that there is no such thing as a “good death” inside of prison, only a “good enough” death (2022, 179). similarly, at guantánamo bay, the military employs hospice to describe a set of architectural reforms that ultimately maintain captivity and delimit choice and bodily autonomy. such carceral reforms are arguably antithetical to the goal of hospice, which is self-determination and patient autonomy (see neumann 2016). given the lack of adequate medical care for captives and military personnel alike, the military's description of the care prisoners give to one another takes on additional meaning and elides the point that prisoner's care for each other is at least in part in response to the sustained power of punitive care at the detention camps. indeed, the reconfiguration of the “terrorist” to “brothers” caring for one another in what's been called the “communal nursing home style” (rosenberg 2019) might be indicative of a new form of masculinity meant to cure the sexualized and racialized practices of interrogation and torture that have proliferated throughout the war on terror. the sexualized abuse of captives held at guantánamo and abu ghraib results from “an orientalist understanding of what is considered honorable or shameful in 'muslim culture' and presents this culture's notions of indignity and abuse as exceptional” (khalili 2011, 1480-81). although the gendered sexual violence central to war sites and torture techniques are arguably more brutal and abject than hospice, each function as coercive forms of carceral domestication and discipline. but the rhetoric of “communal living” and end-of-life care is indicative of another gendered aspect of counterinsurgency: the promise of a more domestic and dignified experience of indefinite confinement. this shift signals an attempt to replace violent interrogation tactics, sexual and otherwise, with practices of non-coercive medical care. in doing so, the military presents a humanitarian, gendered norm for guards at the camps who are now committed to comfort, domestication, and collective care, and no longer interrogation and abuse (see khalili 2011, 1483). here, my use of the discourse of humanitarianism is less about intervention usually associated with aid and relief provided by ngos, for example, and more akin to didier fassin's concept of humanitarianism as a politics of life whereby humanitarian intervention produces “public representation of the human beings to be defended (e.g., by showing them as victims rather than combatants and by displaying their condition in terms of suffering rather than the geopolitical situation)” (2007, 501). the possibility of hospice at the camps serves the dual function of continuing to “protect” us empire and its borders from the external threat of terrorism while also domesticating, civilizing, and “making live” its captives. the military's insistence on hospice, instead of simply closing the camps, ultimately functions to both contain and exclude the “other.”3 the state justifies torture and sempiternal captivity, in part, by the underlying assumptions and ideologies of the so-called muslim terrorist extremist's race, sex, gender, and religiosity and the existential threat that such “extremists” posed to american domestic bliss. the military's rhetorical move toward hospice and brotherly care cannot mask guantánamo's imperialist ethnoracial projects, even when hospice is presented under the guise of progressive, humanitarian reform. further, the insistence on bringing advanced medical care to the camps eclipses the brutality inherent to interrogation techniques; the supposed distance between the interrogator and the interrogatee's body enables the military to figure interrogation as a craft that departs from the laboratory's experimentation on the body. indeed, the body does not always make visible the inscription of its abuse, as is often the case with psychological torture techniques. political scientist darius rejali (2007) argues that after the cold war, there was a proliferation of human rights reports documenting and exposing torture. the reports sought to hold state actors accountable, and in response, torturers invested in less visible, and hence harder to document, techniques. these methods are referred to as “stealth torture” or “clean torture” (rejali 2007 4) so long as the body does not bear the physical marks or traces of torture, the lasting effects of the method can remain debatable and legally sanctioned. the implication of stealth torture is that it blurs traditional notions of what, exactly, constitutes violence and evidence of such. it raises concerns about how to make such violence intelligible if one can't visually decipher it. force-feeding and the biomedical logics of care the military's interrogation techniques, such as force-feeding, are legacies of this stealth torture. force-feeding is aimed squarely at the body and is then presented as a tactic that avoids injuring the flesh. notably, the move from primarily psychological research to the use of biotechnologies suggests that pseudoscientific justifications are no longer a sufficient rationalization but that medical techniques, and the rhetoric of comfort and dignity that inform calls for hospice, may still be used to overcome a captive's agency while holding the appeal of progress and reform. what commander leanos describes as the “humane way ahead” highlights the centrality of care to carceral logics. as medical anthropologists vincent duclos and tomás sánchez criado have argued, “care can also be conveniently mobilized as part of reactionary responses, aimed not so much at the betterment of life as at its mere protection, if not its negation” (2019, 159). hospice, as a standalone approach to death and dying, isn't the object of my critique. rather, i am critiquing how the military invokes the language of hospice to extend indefinite detention and thus how it masks the ongoing death-making of captivity. more, the military's interest in end-of-life technologies distracts from how captivity and the afterlives of torture have become quotidian and ordinary at the camps (see hajjar 2019). feminist science studies scholar jennifer terry notes that biomedical logics propagated by the military and state necessarily associates medicine with an ethic of care in order to obfuscate the effects of violence (2017, 27). at the cultural level, there is an affective investment in care that also sustains, what terry calls, the biomedical war-nexus“ (27). the deep imbrication between national security and medicine relies both on rhetorics of care and rehabilitation, and on practices of technological innovation. for instance, the military's coercive use of the feeding tube suggests that the increased technologization of torture prioritizes mere biological life through the elevation of medical techniques and rhetoric. in understanding the feeding tube as not only a medical prosthetic but also a torture instrument, i suggest that the military's tactics demonstrate that the war on terror depends on an increasing militarization of care and on legitimating itself through the use of biotechnologies. what is exceptional about guantánamo bay and the biopolitics of force-feeding is how the us military weaponizes technology in the name of care and life itself. the prison hospital is the site par excellence of the ideological battle between biological life and political life. to this point, terry writes, "biomedicine is militarized through the use of medical metaphors for describing various kinds of combat operations, which function to sanitize or euphemize acts of violence and their effects" (2017, 35). this form of bio-inequality is evident in war itself; some lives are to be taken and some are protected (50). indeed, this is the case at guantánamo where likewise, "domestic and national security, counterinsurgency operations, and allegories of medical intervention are part of a larger disciplinary corpus to remake societies and manage populations according to a technocratic investment in 'advancement,' through which new kinds of proper citizens are supposed to be produced" (50-51). hospice and force-feeding are two examples of the militarization of biomedicine that have come to be considered progressive and even non-violent forms of intervention. writing on the biomedical aspects of force-feeding hunger-striking prisoners, historian nayan shah argues that "biopolitical knowledge and therapeutics are marshaled by prison medical care to mitigate and calibrate pain and humiliation through the medical management of the body and justify its procedures through the constraint and carceral control of the body and vitality" (2018, 173). the use of force-feeding at guantánamo demonstrates the limits and possibilities of corporeal refusal and protest inside of confinement. former guantánamo prisoner mansoor adayfi, whose memoir i turn to in the following section, describes his experience being force-fed at the detention hospital. his testimonial is worth quoting at length: the guards carried me to...a solitary confinement cage where a group of nurses and corpsmen was waiting for us...beside the nurses was a thinly padded chair with a body harness, armrests with restraints, and a high back with restraints for the head. it was the same chair americans use in executions. next to that chair was a six-foot wall of ensure cases. guards pushed me into the chair. they tightened the chest harness so that i couldn't move, then strapped my wrists and legs to the chair. every point of my body was tightly restrained—i couldn't move at all. one of the male nurses stood in front of me holding a long, thick rubber tube with a metal tip. another nurse grabbed my hand and held it tightly while the male nurse forced that huge tube into my nose and throat. pain shot through my sinuses and i thought my head would explode. i screamed and tried to fight but couldn't move. my nose bled and bled, but the nurse wouldn't stop. (adayfi 2021, 205)4 despite similar testimonials by other prisoners, medical officials at the camps maintain that force-feeding is "not that painful...not that excruciating" and that such accounts are "ridiculous" (rosenberg 2013). i argue, however, that the procedural shifts at the camp and prisoner testimonials, such as adayfi's, underscore how the medical clinic at guantánamo bay has become a site of suspended animation—the zone of liminality produced by pointedly medicalized punishment that maintains the body between life and death, biology and relationality. the coercive functions of the feeding tube point to the increasing technologization of torture that prioritizes mere biological life. or, in shah's framing, physicians "assert a biomedical monopoly over care and treatment of the prisoner that is justified by crisis intervention and in the mandate to save life" (2018, 173). to this point, a military medic interviewed by rosenberg expressed confusion over the view that force-feeding is painful and unethical. the medic stated, "i never felt like i would be that person who would be persecuted for keeping a detainee alive." this is not to say that medics and nurses do not hold genuine subjective beliefs that they are legitimately providing medical care when they administer the feeding tube. rather, my point is that force-feeding as that which literally negates the expression of political life in the act of hunger striking at the camps is better understood as an insidious form of medical violence mobilized by the military through the rhetoric of the sanctity of biological life. force-feeding relies on biomedical logic that observes, examines, and documents the hunger-striking prisoner in an attempt to rehabilitate him into a subject who eats rather than refuses (see shah 2018). the military maintains that force-feeding is in line with an ethics of care. adayfi's testimony tells another story and prompts those of us on the outside to reconceptualize relationality and care. in the following section, i engage more closely with adayfi's memoir to disentangle the carceral care i've detailed thus far from more radical and collective forms of care. listening to those inside narrate and articulate political struggle is another site for imagining freedom and care beyond accessible prison cells to facilitate a more comfortable death for prisoners. narratives of care introducing a hospice care cell block at guantánamo wouldn't be the first instance of communal living at the camps. soon after barack obama was elected president in 2008, the military began using camp vi as a communal living camp on the base. as former prisoner, mansoor adayfi describes in his memoir don't forget us here, communal living evoked complicated feelings. in communal living, adayfi experienced more direct contact and relationality with other prisoners and attended art and computer classes. adayfi and others gained access to technology such as television and video games. with communal living came a more explicit relational form of life inside the camps. adayfi states, “we had been friends and brothers for years—since the beginning. we had forged deep bonds fighting and resisting the camp admin and interrogators. but we had still experienced the worst of guantánamo alone, in our cages or in interrogations. in these casual conversations where we sat around drinking coffee, we processed what we had been through, and that somehow made us feel like we hadn't been alone” (2021, 296-97). following duclos and criado's problematization of care, adayfi describes one way to conceive of an ecology of care that moves beyond the terror of militarization and the normalization of carcerality. the collective care that commander leanos imagines facilitated only by hospice and death is articulated by adayfi as inherent to the social bonds and family he had created with the other men imprisoned. “we had grown older together,” adayfi writes, “we had become our own kind of family” (297). yet adayfi also understood the homier and more domestic aspects of communal living as a detractor. he writes, “the us government knew that they couldn't close the camp, so they made just enough improvements to distract us from demanding our freedom. our bodies were very weak from so many years of protests and fighting, and our health had gotten worse. some of us had diabetes now, or heart conditions, high blood pressure, or kidney problems” (278). the health conditions that the us military now seeks to remedy with accessible technologies and more sophisticated medical care have been concerns for prisoners since the opening of the camps in 2002. further, the suggestion of hospice as a solution obfuscates how the military itself created the conditions of possibility for the deterioration of the captives' health. the military might conceive of hospice and palliative care as central to the afterlife of the war on terror, but adayfi and the thirty-five men who remain captive understand guantánamo in much more liminal terms. for the us military, the possibility of hospice marks the end of guantánamo being understood as a site that aids in the war on terror and now it is a site to be managed more humanely in the afterlife of war. the question at the beginning of the war was how to extract intelligence by any means necessary. now the question is how to facilitate a legitimate and perhaps even more dignified death for those who remain. both of these logics are facilitated by coercive logics of care and the military's commitment to stretching out the temporality of punishment to its limits. the objective of hospice may be to domesticate, or make comfortable, the detention camp but captivity is ultimately the antithesis of comfort. domesticity in captivity becomes another site of waiting, a contained space in which the captive must “do time.” adayfi links temporality with the effects of torture on his bodymind but also with the quotidian nature of violence at the camps: life at guantánamo had become a job for all of us—the interrogators' job was to torture us; the guards' job was to kick our asses every day; and a brother's job was to fight back and give the guards as much work as possible. it was like a factory job for us, doing the same thing every day. day after day. we woke, we prayed, we were tortured, we ate, we fought, we slept, and then we started the cycle all over again. some of us had suffered serious injuries that never fully healed. guards had broken my ankle, my wrist, my fingers, and my nose several times. it was the same for other brothers—some had their backs broken...their teeth knocked out, and even worse. the pain became routine, but that didn't lessen the pain. (234-35) adayfi's testimony draws our attention to how the military's reading of the captive's ailments as merely effects of aging necessarily erase the physical and psychic evidence of torture inscribed on the bodymind of the prisoner. these practices obscure the underlying causes of what is being framed as aging and disability while also distorting and relying on temporal relations between aging and disability. the military's proffered rationale is that advanced care for chronic conditions is necessary because the prisoners are aging. but given adayfi's account, it is clear that medical intervention and eventually palliative and hospice care are also necessary because of the disabling effects of the military's daily torture. the stakes of such erasure resonate with disability scholar eunjung kim's concept of “curative violence.” curative violence describes the uncertainty of gains and the possibility of harms associated with cure that then create a liminal existence in subjects (kim 2017, 10). for kim and other disability justice scholars such as eli clare, cure always operates in relation to violence and “elimination of some kind—of a disease, of future existence, of present-day embodiments, of life itself” (clare 2017, 28). both kim's and clare's work highlight how cure is mobilized, medically and socially, to eliminate disability. here cure is compulsory, and the disabled and sick bodymind is excluded from the fold of normativity. more, cure is then used to justify a multitude of violence enacted against people who are ill or disabled (kim 2017, 14). in its desire for a future without disability or illness, kim argues, cure ignites a range of transitions and crossings, often “leaving bodies in borderlands” (11). at guantánamo, the military's political and rhetorical uses of cure have sought to remedy the past harms of torture by emphasizing intentions of medical comfort and betterment. meanwhile, prisoners remain captive in the borderlands, coerced into accepting the inevitability of hospice. adayfi's testimony about his time spent at guantánamo is important for how he demands recognition of the effects of militarized logics of care and cure on the bodyminds of the men held captive. adayfi's reflections open up the possibility to consider hospice, in this militarized context, as yet another form of extra-legal violence and abuse. i read adayfi's narration of the pain and suffering endured at guantánamo as both a practice of care and a study in its competing logics at the camps. adayfi's memoir clearly describes how the us military leveraged coercive forms of care by subjecting those held captive to a multitude of quotidian and extravagant forms of violence. and yet, the collective forms of care that persisted between adayfi and the men he came to recognize as family exist alongside the extravagant violence. anthropologist darryl li's proposal that we read captivity as an analytic is useful in expanding out both abolition and relationality as framework and practice, respectively. “captivity is a relation of holding,” writes li, “one that entails both immobilization and forced mobility together in the passage from one context to another. and captivity breeds its own form of relation with those not captive, among the most important being narrations that hold audiences in captivation” (2022, 21, ). thus, captivity functions as an incapacitating technique while also performing something beyond state terror. li goes on to write that “captivity cannot be understood apart from its contexts of narration, through the spectacle of captivation and the spectacle of freedom. narration produced inside captivity posits freedom as an interiority; narration from the outside, the afterward (or afterword) of captivity, presupposes freedom but also queries its own tenuous conditions” (24). i quote at length because the above suggests that the tenuous conditions of guantánamo bay facilitate the possibility for more collective and relational care. this is the kind of care i read in adayfi's testimony and his opposition to the militarization of care at the camps. adayfi highlights radical hope as predicated upon care for the other and investing in relationality. ultimately, his narrative refuses the military's aim to disappear those who remain held captive while also highlighting how the temporality of captivity—how waiting—is a slow form of punishment with seemingly no end. slow death and the temporality of waiting throughout this essay, i've interrogated how hospice and force-feeding function according to logics of both care and coercion. i suggest that discussions about the eventual necessity of hospice are also a means by which the military can figuratively and literally erase the psychic and corporeal residues of torture. more, hospice is an opportunity to undo the ethnoreligious description of the irrational “jihadists” developed and reified by military psychology throughout the war on terror and replace it with “brothers taking care of one another.” thus, hospice offers the possibility of transforming guantánamo from a notorious torture site to one of homey domestication and caretaking. refusing narratives of humanitarian reform at guantánamo, then, is crucial in order to better disaggregate militarized care from the communal care described by adayfi. time moves forward and with it the us military attempts to erase the brutalities of the war on terror's enhanced interrogation program with new life-preserving technologies and rhetorics meant to offer reprieve to the very wearing out of the captive's body that they inflicted. lauren berlant describes this as “slow death,” which they define as the “physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence” (2011, 95). berlant makes clear that their interest is in the applicability of slow death to spaces of ordinariness that animate late capitalism. guantánamo appears to eschew the ordinary and to be aligned with the unfolding of a traumatic event. yet berlant's notion of “slow death” articulates how indefinite detention is precisely the technology that slowly wears out its population. here i'm using slow death to describe the medical-political power operations of indefinite confinement. the temporality of slow death is related to suspended animation in that the military's use of force-feeding and hospice care are so terrifying precisely because they transform exceptional spaces into ordinary ones. similarly, hospice, like force-feeding, hinges on the slow debilitation of the bodymind over time. indeed, both practices are predicated on the temporality of waiting. ultimately, such emerging technologies of war deployed throughout open-air prisons and detention centers, among other carceral sites, debilitate subjects over time disrupting a number of dualities having to do with life, death, and temporality (see also puar 2017). the aging body in detention, like the aging body outside of confinement, becomes disabled and with it a distinct type of incapacitation emerges—an incapacitation that is both the physiological response to getting older and what the space of detention facilitates and over time necessitates. adayfi's words are resonant here as he recounts the toll of force-feeding on his body and that of other hunger strikers: our bodies had aged and become more fragile with time and we were too weak to resist like we did in the days when we fought guards every day, but we could still make the guards work. this was a lot of work: they had to pick us up and put us on our stomach, restrain us, then pick us up again and carry us back to our cells. then we refused to get up for each feeding after that. we refused to come back from the rec yard. we refused to come back from the showers. with each passing year the fight got harder; but we couldn't stop, especially not with hope on the horizon. (2021, 254) adayfi's temporal description of indefinite detention demonstrates what political theorist banu bargu names as “sovereign time,” that is, a time that is “abstract and detached, and characterized by compulsory repetition” (2014, 17). there is no evidence of hours or days passing in sovereign time, only the repetition of violence. there are certainly ruptures to sovereign or biopolitical time, yet the military's insistence on force-feeding perhaps marks its repetition through its constant transformation of the protesting prisoner into a medicalized patient. war and indefinite detention make it so that time and waiting are forms of punishment. yet, even as adayfi identifies the pain of waiting, he also points toward openings for refusal. indeed, the corporeal modes of refusal mobilized to counter sovereign time, such as hunger striking, continue to unfold in prisons and detention camps around the world (see bargu 2016; ajour 2021; shah 2022). similar to how military officials at the detention camp have maintained that force-feeding captives is in the interest of preserving life, such officials now maintain that hospice care is also in the interest of facilitating a good death for the men who may never be released. with the feeding tube already used to sustain life and the possibility of hospice to facilitate death, the detention hospital at guantánamo bay will have engaged in a set of tactics that use the rhetorics of care to ultimately manage life and death. guantánamo psychiatrist dr. stephen n. xenakis states, “it is paradoxical...but we don't let people just die in this country. it violates all of our ethics and medical ethics” (rosenberg 2019). the irony here is that hunger striking underscores one's own morbidity as the ultimate risk and commitment to one's cause. it is an ethical statement and is an agential death. at guantánamo this possibility has necessarily been foreclosed since the first hunger strikes in 2002. yet now, a new kind of death, the pretense of a good death, looms over guantánamo's horizon. the us military doesn't just let people die. it controls when and whether captives are ever allowed to die. indeed, the state continues to expose just how much it has invested in the regulation of death, deciding its breadth and scope. slow death, for berlant, is about the reproduction of predictable life. the space of detention is one of ongoingness, getting by, and living on even as it is a space in opposition to autonomy and sovereignty where life becomes one of maintenance, not self-fashioning. at guantánamo, technologies of maintenance and care reproduce and reconfigure a violent past into a normative future where the physiological process of aging is ultimately what takes biological life and not torture by the state. dying in indefinite detention, then, becomes coextensive with the ethical facilitation of the end-of-life. in 2020, carol rosenberg, charlie savage, and eric schmitt reported for the new york times that congress had rejected the military's request to expand guantánamo to include a new hospice wing. presently being built, however, is a “$124 million dormitory-style barracks for about 850 prison guards” (rosenberg, savage, and schmitt 2020). it remains unclear whether guantánamo administrators continue to make appeals for support in providing end-of-life care in the form of physicians and facilities. while some military officials maintain the importance of planning for the inevitability that remaining captives will grow older and eventually die at the detention camp, there is also continued speculation about whether president biden will close guantánamo, especially with decades of war in afghanistan having come to an end under his administration. as military personnel at guantánamo imagine what life might look like beyond the war on terror at the detention camps, thirty-five captives remain waiting. and while my interest is in how the rhetoric of hospice functions as a discursive project for the afterlife of torture, even its proposal highlights the military's investment in the detention camp and its potential for a range of carceral uses. and so, if we accept that hospice can't erase the brutalities of the war on terror's enhanced interrogation program, what can we imagine for those who remain captive at the detention camps? the answer, in part, might lie in reconceptualizing relationality and care as they relate to our abolitionist imaginaries that refuse carceral reforms (see hwang 2019).5 disentangling carceral care from radical and collective care is imperative if we are to remain critical of military reforms at the camp. my aim throughout this essay has not been to oppose hospice and adequate medical care. rather, it is endless captivity that must remain central to ongoing anti-carceral struggles. to this end, i am questioning how the military is using the possibility of hospice and humanitarianism to actually further the imperialist aims of guantánamo bay. in light of the rise of international usage of force-feeding across geopolitical sites such as palestine and us detention centers, the specificity of guantánamo bay might illuminate broader connections between violence, care, and reform in prisons and detention. the possibility of hospice at guantánamo, then, provides a necessary site of refusal precisely because it illuminates ever-expanding carceral reforms and how the state leverages medicine, scientific rationales, and biotechnologies to serve its death-making imperialist ends. this approach to hospice at guantánamo bay pushes us toward more fundamental questions about why anything less than the immediate closure of the detention camps will always be insufficient. importantly however, modes of refusal such as the care and solidarity that the men at guantánamo created and continue to create for one another is also a site of ongoing struggle—one beyond capture and recuperation by the military and carceral state. acknowledgments thank you to jennifer terry, xan chacko, diana pardo pedraza, astrida neimanis, and the catalyst editors and reviewers for your labor on this special issue. many thanks to zsuzsanna ihar, natalia duong, and gabi kirk whose workshop comments and suggestions helped reshape the essay. similarly, gratitude to the violence and the body working group at uc santa cruz: banu bargu, vanita seth, gina dent, althea wasow, and natalie levin schwartz. your feedback and encouragement on the first draft facilitated a way forward. thanks to kel montalvo and brett glasscock for talking through ideas and to a.d. lewis for reading, commenting and reading again. notes 1 the term bodymind, used commonly within disability studies, is a holistic approach to embodiment that refuses western hierarchization and the tendency to understand the mind and body in isolation from one another. feminist disability studies scholar margaret price writes that the term is preferable “because mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other—that is because they tend to act as one, even though they are conventionally understood as two—it makes more sense to refer to them together, in a single term” (2015, 269). also see kafer 2013; clare 2017; schalk 2018; kafai 2021.   2 although i use the terms captive and prisoner interchangeably at times, i nonetheless prefer captive as it is most precise to the coerced liminal space, or what anthropologist darryl li (2022) writes of as an “enforced stillness,” that those held captive at guantánamo bay have been made to endure. li writes further that “captivity implies mobility; someone is taken, often across great geographical and cultural distances, transported in the grip of another” (24).   3 in her essay, “manifest domesticity” (1998), amy kaplan conceives domesticity in terms of structural oppositions. the nation-state projects its image as a home that must protect itself from all external threats. the domestic, for kaplan, “has a double meaning that not only links the familial household to the nation but also imagines both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home” (581). indeed, domesticity is central to humanitarian narratives of care precisely for how the domestic sphere, in all its connotations of the familial, is always necessarily a gendered and racial project. like the household, domesticity is a historically fraught site associated with comfort and femininity as well as surveillance, servitude, and discipline. in the context of empire, home is as much about comfort as it is about the delineation between inside and outside, public and private.   4 restraint chairs were introduced at guantánamo bay in 2005 after three consultants from the federal bureau of prisons visited the camps. here we can see further connections between the traffic of carceral technologies between us domestic prisons and detention camps (see ibrahim and howarth 2019).   5 writing on the relationship between carceral care and reform in the context of us prisons, hwang's generative concept of “deviant care” attends to the “liberal impulse, seduction, and conditioning of wanting to make better, to heal or fix, particularly through the confines of carceral spaces” (2019, 562).   references adayfi, mansoor. 2021. don't forget us here: lost and found at guantánamo. new york: hachette books. ajour, ashjan. 2021. reclaiming humanity in palestinian hunger strikes: revolutionary subjectivity and decolonizing the body. new york: palgrave macmillan. bargu, banu. 2014. “odysseus unbound: sovereignty and sacrifice in hunger and the dialectic of enlightenment.” anjelaki: journal of theoretical humanities 19 (4): 7-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725x.2014.984429. bargu, banu. 2016. starve and immolate: the politics of human weapons. new york: columbia university press. bell, colleen. 2011. “civilianizing warfare: ways of war and peace in counterinsurgency.” journal of 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ibrahim, yasmin, and anita howarth. 2019. “hunger strike and the force-feeding chair: guantanamo bay and corporeal surrender.” environment and planning d: society and space 37 (2): 294-312. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818814537. kafai, shayda. 2021. crip kinship: the disability justice and art activism of sins invalid. vancouver, bc: arsenal pulp press. kafer, alison. 2013. feminist, queer, crip. bloomington: indiana university press. kafer, alison. 2021. “after crip, crip afters.” south atlantic quarterly 120 (2): 415-434. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8916158. kaplan, amy. 1998. “manifest domesticity.” american literature 70 (3): 581-606. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29002710. khalili, laleh. 2011. “gendered practices of counterinsurgency.” review of international studies 37 (4): 1471-91. https://doi.org/10.1017/s026021051000121x. khalili, laleh. 2012. time in the shadows: confinement in counterinsurgencies. stanford, ca: stanford university press. kim, eunjung. 2017. curative 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2007. torture and democracy. princeton, nj: princeton university press. rosenberg, carol. 2013. “guantánamo medics: forced-feedings aren't torture.” miami herald, july 26,2013.https://www.miamiherald.com/news/article2261153.html. rosenberg, carol. 2018. “gitmo commanders make a pitch for new prison with hospice-care wing for ex-cia captives.” miami herald, june 6, 2018. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article212610644.html. rosenberg, carol. 2019. “guantánamo bay as nursing home: military envisions hospice care as terrorism suspects age.” new york times, april 27, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/us/politics/guantanamo-bay-aging-terrorism-suspects-medical-care.html. rosenberg, carol, charlie savage, and eric schmitt. 2020. “'in bad shape and getting worse,' guantánamo poses headaches for biden.” new york times, december 15, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/us/politics/guantanamo-biden.html. schalk, sami. 2018. bodyminds reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in black women's speculative fiction. durham, nc: duke university press. shah, nayan. 2018. “feeding hunger-striking prisoners: biopolitics and impossible citizenship.” in biocitizenship: the politics of bodies, governance, and power, edited by kelly e. happe, jenell johnson, and marina levina, 155-77. new york: nyu press. shah, nayan. 2022. refusal to eat: a century of prison hunger strikes. berkeley, ca: university of california press. sharp, lesley a. 2022. “death and dying in carceral america: the prison hospice as an inverted space of exception.” medical anthropology quarterly 36 (2): 177-97. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12688. terry, jennifer. 2017. attachments to war: biomedical logics and violence in twenty-first-century america. durham, nc: duke university press. varma, saiba. 2020. the occupied clinic: militarism and care in kashmir. durham, nc: duke university press. velasquez-potts, michelle. 2019. “carceral oversight: force-feeding and visuality at guantánamo bay detention camp.” public culture 31 (3): 581-600. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-7532727.     author bio michelle c. velasquez-potts is an educator and writer working at the intersections of feminist and queer thought. her first book project, suspended animation, examines how state power makes specific use of the feeding tube and the practice of force-feeding to control both bodily life and death among incarcerated people. presently, michelle is a chancellor's postdoctoral fellow in history of consciousness at the university of california, santa cruz.     special section sts researchers as technology: multiple positionalities as interpretations of participant expectations and agendas     ashley lewis independent researcher ashley.lewis@bailliegifford.com     abstract science and technology studies (sts) researchers integrated into interdisciplinary research projects learn important lessons of collaboration dynamics by analyzing the lived experience of the research participants. previous approaches of sts researchers included laboratory studies and reimagining the collaborative process as a research method. however, previous research on interdisciplinary projects repeatedly cites recurring challenges, indicating that more sharing of this lived experience is needed. my autoethnography of an interdisciplinary project interrogates the various positionalities i embodied as research technologies. in adopting a feminist analytical approach, this paper forefronts emotional affect and interrogates technological labels of the social science researcher to understand power dynamics and interpret what is meant by “good science” across disciplines. these findings help us understand how individuals appraise interdisciplinarity, setting realistic expectations for addressing future interdisciplinary collaborations more deliberately. lastly, i also consider the ethical considerations necessary to care for the ethnographer in interdisciplinary collaborations, as they are often caught in the crosshairs of the frustrations in collaborating.     keywords interdisciplinary collaboration, reflexivity, research methods, science and technology studies, autoethnography     introduction “how’s the spying going?,” asked a postdoctoral researcher when i entered the communal kitchen to make a cup of tea. over the past month, this researcher repeated this greeting to me, smiling, whenever i entered the room. i recorded “ethnographic researcher as informant” in my field notes. rereading my entry forced me to consider the other roles i played, or perceived to be playing, during the project. while i understood that ethnographic research is an iterative and nonlinear process, i still felt i was winging it. my feelings sprouted from my insecurities as a junior social science researcher working on a positivist research project. as a result, any suggestions from collaborators that my methods lacked rigor led me to try and accommodate my research to fit their perceptions of validity. for example, a natural scientist suggested that i install recording equipment in the offices to capture everyday conversations amongst researchers in shared spaces, as he assumed these exchanges were the “seeds” of interdisciplinary collaborations. he suggested a systematic method to sample from the recordings and assumed that we could trace the origins of interdisciplinarity. though positivist ideals of systematic sampling have no place in ethnography—and i felt uncomfortable subjecting my research participants to audio-recorded surveillance—i was tempted to adopt his plan. my lack of confidence and junior status made me question my expertise, and i felt pressured to accommodate his methods. the hierarchy dynamics between me and the more experienced senior researcher created implicit pressure based on assumed research experience and academic seniority. the role of a science and technology studies (sts) researcher many times takes place within a research “lab,” such as a social science division within synthetic biology research centers (calvert and martin 2009) or social scientists implementing a public access wi-fi service with computer scientists (goulden et al. 2017). the labs they study mirror bruno latour and steve woolgar’s (1979) natural science laboratory space. my lab was an academic office on a university campus in the uk. the experiment was an interdisciplinary collaboration within the context of urban sustainability. on the first floor of an old tudor building, i sat in an office crowded with desks and phd students working together on different disciplinary problems associated with creating a sustainable city. my lab extended across the hall where the postdoctoral researchers worked. a trust funded the project, and its principal aims were to understand the components of sustainable cities using an interdisciplinary project team. the twenty-six researchers on the project came from various disciplines, including but not limited to sociology, economics, geography, physics, engineering, mathematics, and computer science. at its inception, the project work was divided into six themes: environmental, social and cultural, economic, measurement and data, modelling and optimisation, and policy and governance. the project's principal investigator who put together the funding proposal was from the physics department. the main idea of the project, imagined by the principal investigator, was that the environmental, social and cultural, and economic themes would develop conceptual and simulation modeling to understand, produce, and compare different visions of a sustainable urban environment (including its inhabitants and existing infrastructure). the modelling and optimisation team would oversee these three themes to optimize and create the models. in contrast, the measurement and data theme would provide and validate the data needed for the multiple models. finally, the policy and governance theme would investigate how these models could support decision-making in the city. the final simulations could then be run to test how different policy, social, economic, or environmental initiatives would impact that city. the senior researchers who led the six different themes of the interdisciplinary project remained in their department offices spread across the campus. every other week on a friday, they would travel to the tudor building on the edge of campus to meet for progress meetings and workshops. the interactions in those rooms of the building created my lab for interdisciplinary study. with everyone on the project meeting together, these meetings were an obvious place to bring my tape recorder and document the conversations. the principal investigator usually set the meeting agenda and led the discussions by deciding who would update the team on their work and ask clarifying questions about how they would take their work forward. once members shared what they were working on, the principal investigator expected that others in the room (ideally someone from another discipline) would be able to see a connection with their work and use that moment to start on an interdisciplinary piece of work together. the other regular meetings i recorded were the monthly board meetings with only the principal investigator and the senior co-investigators on the project. the principal investigator suggested i attend these meetings as well, and he thought it would help gather data about the different pieces of work happening on the project. more sensitive discussions happened here, like allocating budgets to different themes from project funding and conflicts around authorship practices across different disciplinary norms. the project’s principal investigator wrote into the grant an ethnographer position at the phd level to study the interdisciplinary process. at the outset, the goal was to understand the group dynamics and suggest how team members could communicate better, create connections between researchers, and facilitate interdisciplinarity. the funding proposal states that the ethnographer aimed to “shed light into the effectiveness of the research process and…lead to improved communication within the team.” this statement indicated that the senior academics intended the ethnographer’s role to be practical; i would be a tool to facilitate interdisciplinary working as the interdisciplinary expert. interdisciplinarity does not have a single definition but can be defined as a practice or a project outcome in and of itself. in the context of this project, interdisciplinarity was expected to “bridge” two or more disciplinary practitioners (repko, szostak, and buchberger 2017) to connect different perspectives and therefore reach an outcome that could not have otherwise been achieved using one discipline alone. interdisciplinarity had a utilitarian function in the university; it was a way to earn research funding. much like the utilitarian function of diversity initiatives in higher education (ahmed 2019), it indicates a direction of research for professors to take. despite the desire to use collaboration to gain access to funding and fulfil the promise of innovative research (darbellay 2015) through interdisciplinary means, researchers, particularly in disciplinary-organized university institutions, struggle with the practical mechanics of interdisciplinary working. without clear parameters of success, the process of interdisciplinarity remains an enigma. studies investigating the interdisciplinary process repeat the common challenges of collaboration (datta 2018; hadfield-hill et al. 2020; mcbee and leahey 2017; stavrianakis 2015). some of these challenges include a sense of unproductivity because of the long lead times required in interdisciplinary research (mcbee and leahey 2017). another is the perceived difficulty in communication between researchers from different disciplines, often leading to misunderstood or conflicting goals within a research project (cairns, hielscher, and light 2020). despite these challenges, the assumption is that interdisciplinary research is a useful tool to connect the previously unconnected, leading to superior research findings (frank 2017). conceptualizing interdisciplinary collaboration as a tool is a good starting point for observing the shortcomings in interdisciplinary experiments. i propose we think of interdisciplinary practices as technologies. much like interdisciplinarity is meant to be more than the sum of its disciplinary parts, “technology not only consists of the artefacts which are employed as tools but also includes the sum total of the kinds of knowledge which make possible the invention, making and use of tools” (gell 1998, 6). my label as a spy reflected the researcher’s assumption of me as a tool, a sneaky information-gatherer for senior management. this definition demonstrates sara ahmed’s (2019) conceptualization of “use,” which emphasizes my ethnographic role and interdisciplinarity research as utilitarian components towards a useful end. interdisciplinarity is not practiced for curiosity but is evoked to get research funding. my role as the interdisciplinary ethnographer was conceptualized as a useful tool to ensure interdisciplinarity occurred. latour’s explanation of “technical” emphasizes the important yet submissive quality of functional roles in research. latour describes technical as the “role of people, skills, or objects that occupy this secondary function of being present, indispensable, but invisible” (1994, 43). bringing together these concepts of use and technologies provides a framework to think about my multiple roles in the project. in reflecting on my ethnographic role as a technology, i seek to understand the purpose of my multiple identities, both adopted and assigned, and what “uses” (ahmed 2019) people give them. my identities result from meaning-making when researchers “meet” at multiple points in the research project. although sometimes uncomfortable, assigned identities can reveal important assumptions that contribute to the difficulty in interdisciplinary collaboration. in unpacking the logic behind these identities, i reconstruct the various technologies of the sts researcher and the roles they served.   reflexivity and emotional affect ethnography accepts and embraces that ethnographic research is a subjective and partial endeavor, and ethnographers use reflexivity to show the lens through which the research is filtered (davies 2008). reflexivity extends to the researcher herself, and feminist approaches operationalize sandra harding’s (1992) proposition that since subjects (those who study) of knowledge are necessarily always socially situated (haraway 1988; ryan-flood and gill 2010), they are also objects of knowledge. the social forces that shape objects of knowledge also shape the researchers and the scientific projects themselves (harding 1992) and should therefore be made visible and acknowledged in research. while self-reflexivity makes researcher positionality visible, it is not without its limitations. self-reflexivity is, by nature, partial; access to some parts of the psyche, particularly the unconscious mind, are inaccessible and, therefore, cannot be included in the research (proudfoot 2015). a danger in practicing self-reflexivity is to trick ourselves into thinking that we can objectively assess our presence, reproducing the illusion of objectivity that self-reflexivity attempts to address (proudfoot 2015). continuously engaging in self-reflexivity also raises mental health issues; it can be emotionally taxing on top of tiring fieldwork (thajib, dinkelaker, and stodulka 2019). other feminist discussions of ethnographic practice raise ethical issues for the researcher and the researched. ann oakley (1981) proposes that the interviewer offer some personal information in exchange to develop rapport with the interviewee and create a non-hierarchal dynamic in the interview. in practice, this rapport building can still be exploitative because the relationship building can be used to extract information rather than build a lasting connection outside of the research project (duncombe and jessop 2002). conversely, the interviewer then faces a moral dilemma, balancing conducting rigorous data collection in the field under the condition of comradery if the resulting observations are viewed as a violation of trust. these dilemmas can be anxiety-inducing for the researcher, bringing up negative emotions of self-doubt. however, rather than considering emotional affect as a side effect of difficult interdisciplinary and ethnographic interactions (cairns, hielscher, and light 2020; strober 2011), taking a feminist perspective to attend to these affects directly can create productive interdisciplinary engagements (smolka, fisher, and hausstein 2021). incidences of “disconcertment” lead to knowledge production of interdisciplinarity as a subject (smolka, fisher, and hausstein 2021), and feelings traditionally reserved for the personal space can be taken into (ethnographic) work as generative for epistemic knowledge production (thajib, dinkelaker, and stodulka 2019). the sociology of emotion acknowledges the difficult emotion work undertaken by women at their place of employment. it investigates how this emotion work results from existing relationships between expectations in cultural norms and political structures (hochschild 1979). in this article, i draw from the theory that emotions are not just biological but social and that feeling rules and display rules determine the expected reactions in social situations (bericat 2015; hochschild 1979). these expectations create a conflict when the actual and expected emotions are different. in my study, i attend to these affects to analyze how participants interpret interdisciplinarity, which therefore plays a prominent role in determining their approaches to collaboration and each other. these interdisciplinary meetings provoked researchers to consider alternative methods, as we were all confronted with different disciplinary rituals that determined research methodology, paper authorship, and ethical considerations. i viewed the emotions felt by researchers in these meetings when confronted with (unmet) behavior expectations within the context of feminist theories of ethnographic practice and the sociology of emotion. in these comparisons, the process comprising interdisciplinary collaboration can be better understood, linking the gap between interdisciplinary expectations at the start of the project and the difficulty of implementing interdisciplinarity throughout the research.   multilayered identities accounts analyzing the lived experience of collaborative interdisciplinary projects document a range of reflections, from sts researchers as peer collaborators (freeth and caniglia 2020), to observers (cairns, hielscher, and light 2020), to processors (smolka, fisher, and hausstein 2021), to critics (balmer et al. 2015). what is interesting is not the range of identities but how these identities are “contradictory, partial and strategic” (haraway 1991, 156). the labels are not merely a representation but partial technological fictions that blend with my person, a “cyborg” of machine and organism (haraway 1991). in this reflection, i grapple with the multiple technological identities as a junior female social science researcher. in this paper, i embrace the multiplicity of the identities i embodied in meetings with my collaborators as framing devices to analyze the interdisciplinary team's underlying emotional and collaborative dynamics. in focusing on the researchers’ emotional affects and the mundane practices of collaboration, i bring to the forefront the powerful effects of emotional labor in determining collaborative approaches in interdisciplinary research (hillersdal et al. 2020; smolka, fisher, and hausstein 2021). the mundane rituals of attending group presentations, writing regular progress notes, and group lunch conversations in the communal kitchen required specific negotiations in an interdisciplinary setting. work progress notes needed to show attempts to reach across a disciplinary divide, and work presentations required the presence of different disciplinarians in the hopes that a different disciplinary perspective might rub off onto the work in progress. the labels i present below are both adopted and assigned; they are created in social relations between collaborators and me and have technological characteristics.   the spy as an ethnographer with senior academic support, i received privileged access to specific spaces. this knowledge put me in a relatively powerful position. my position to tell the interdisciplinary narrative of the project also gave me power, as my phd thesis would tell the story of what happened. this powerful position was most apparent when jokes about my role as the spy or from internal affairs were made. multiple times throughout the project, critical incidents where i experienced discomfort principally came from comments such as, “wait! don’t record that!” “how is the spying going?” "uh-oh, here comes internal affairs again; everyone stop talking.” despite the smiles and laughter, i perceived discomfort. spies and internal affairs report to someone, and i understood that the researchers assumed i was spying for the senior academics to ensure that enough interdisciplinarity was occurring. the spy label initially segregated me from the research subjects, both as an observer and as the participants’ observed object (mosher et al. 2017). my collaborators assumed i would share information because (1) senior management wanted an ethnographer of interdisciplinarity on the project, and they supported my work; (2) i was the only junior researcher in attendance at senior board meetings; and (3) senior members of my supervisory team may have access to my research drafts and fieldwork data. these multiple touchpoints with senior management gave me frequent opportunities for senior academics to enquire about the progress of interdisciplinarity on the project. as a result, my status was multilayered. automatic approval from senior leadership felt like the ultimate insider position because i did not need to negotiate access. however, i was never entirely inside those leadership meetings, as i did not participate in the project’s decision-making. at the same time, the spy statements segregated me from my colleagues as an informant. yet i was also a junior researcher, like them. therefore, i never fully experienced feeling inside either of these spaces. although some saw me as having the “power” to tell the project’s narrative, this dynamic was more complex. as a junior researcher, my ability to tell the narrative could be influenced by my supervisors on the project, who were also senior project participants. for example, within the university’s academic power dynamics, i felt pressure to adopt positivist research approaches, such as systematically recording research participants. therefore, through me, senior leadership could influence which stories to highlight and what methods to employ, and overlay their interpretations on any events. the danger of “going native” felt the most pronounced in this relationship, as there was an incentive for senior academics to produce reports back to the funder to tell a particular (success) story about the interdisciplinary process. at first, i tried to resist the “spy” label assigned to me while simultaneously trying to deny the negative emotions it brought up. i even tried to suppress how it made me view the researcher negatively because i worried these feelings compromised me as a professional researcher. after reconceptualizing the spy label and dealing with the negative emotions, i interpreted a clearer picture of the interdisciplinary assumptions present in the team, so although i found the label deeply uncomfortable, i understood the dynamics that created it. appointing an interdisciplinary ethnographer to the project sent a message to the funder and the other researchers that conducting research was important, but running it in an interdisciplinary way was of utmost importance. this message reinforces the dominant narrative that interdisciplinarity is a valuable research method without critically engaging with the concept itself or the diverse ways it could be interpreted. the senior leadership’s desire to tell a success story about how well interdisciplinarity was going on in the project also reinforced that interdisciplinarity as an ideal was taken as a given. in the vein of alfred gell’s technology as magic, senior academics take of my role as a positive witness to the magic of interdisciplinary collaboration to enchant (gell 1988, 7) others in academia to perceive a social reality where they succeeded in interdisciplinarity. the negative feelings i experienced toward the researcher and my anxiety about doing a “good job” revealed that i had my own ideal expectations of the ethnographic project. i felt i was failing at my role because, instead of being seen as a trusted confidant, i was being treated with suspicion and potentially being left out of meaningful conversations that might have some interdisciplinarity sprinkled in, and i would miss them. a revisiting of this assumption revealed how i thought about interdisciplinarity, that it was something that could be found if i just overturned the right stones. my dynamic positionality granted me the vantage point to observe interdisciplinary assumptions. however, my position in and of itself created power dynamics when i encountered my collaborators. appointing an observer created the feeling of being watched and evaluated on the specific metric of productive interdisciplinary collaboration. being assessed at work can already put people on edge. however, in this instance, feelings of uncertainty are compounded because the participants lacked indicators of good interdisciplinary collaboration and did not know how to do interdisciplinarity. the objective of the project was not just to conduct research in an interdisciplinary way but that interdisciplinary research was the technology that would give them superior research results. participants could ascertain that i functioned as a catalyst for the interdisciplinary objective, a mechanical switch that could turn interdisciplinarity on for others. interdisciplinary meaning and priority were co-created in meetings with me.   the interdisciplinary catalyst my presence sent a strong message about interdisciplinary priority. the message, therefore, acted as the catalyst for researchers to reflect on their interdisciplinary efforts and question what interdisciplinarity meant to them. my presence as the interdisciplinary catalyst was enough to change the participants’ behavior, revealing how they imagined interdisciplinarity to function. watching how they approached interdisciplinarity, they showed me that they thought interdisciplinarity was bridge-building across the natural and social sciences, with a clear output to evidence the exchange. interdisciplinarity, in this case, emphasized the interprefix we find in interdisciplinarity. the interimplies the spatial location of being in between (callard and fitzgerald 2015). my collaborators conceptualized interdisciplinarity as the meeting between two or more disciplinarity researchers, including the disciplinary knowledge scientists bring and represent. this vantage point as the interdisciplinary catalyst revealed underlying power dynamics between junior and senior researchers and the diverse ways in which they framed interdisciplinarity. while researchers wanted interdisciplinarity to occur, the junior researchers found the challenge difficult to fulfil. in shifting my perspective, my role changes from a facilitator of interdisciplinarity and observer of participants (as was outlined in the research proposal) into the creator of interdisciplinarity itself. when i met junior and senior researchers, they constructed interdisciplinary understandings and perceptions that revealed what interdisciplinarity meant to them. for example, in an interview, one researcher reflected on interdisciplinarity in the project before my arrival, prompting him to address any dissonance he perceived about the lack of interdisciplinarity taking place: “there is someone coming in to look at us working interdisciplinarily [sic], but where is that happening? so, they are going to be really disappointed…so we went, right, let’s try and encourage some work together.” my presence and the anticipation of my arrival initiated a reflection of interdisciplinarity and efforts to ensure more was happening. it is also clear that this role as an interdisciplinary creator is entangled with my role as the spy. the researcher also reflects on some of the anxiety around being evaluated on the quality of interdisciplinarity taking place. the anxiety i experienced around this label differed from the anxiety i felt being a spy. as a spy, i was distrusted, but as a catalyst, i was responsible for sparking interdisciplinary collaborations. there was a feeling that some people were waiting for me for interdisciplinarity to happen. if any cross-disciplinary collaborations did not occur in the project, i would be responsible for allowing those opportunities to slip by. because i had been given privileged access to board meetings and other spaces inaccessible to some, it was expected that i was omniscient and therefore had the power to spark interdisciplinarity using all of the secret information i gathered in individual interviews and senior meetings. creating a dedicated role certainly elevated the importance of the interdisciplinary objective. at the same time, this dedicated role was assigned to the most junior (phd student) female social scientist on the project, which sends a different message in the context of a largely positivist science project. i was solely responsible for researching interdisciplinarity, but without the full autonomy to research it without formal supervision and influence from positivist research assumptions. i further explore the implications of assigning this job to a female social scientist as an interdisciplinary carer.   the interdisciplinary “carer” after a small meeting of interdisciplinary researchers from the team, a postdoctoral researcher approached me as i gathered my notes and turned off the recorder. he expressed “disappointment” in my research so far because he expected me to be more “active” and tell the group how they were doing and suggest ways they could connect “better.” he told me this after i silently sat through a meeting, tapped notes into my laptop, and recorded the conversation. this exchange recalls diana forsythe’s “walking tape recorder” (1999, 140) and how ethnographic research is often invisible to researcher collaborators. the social reality of the useful person/tape recorder is not recognized as a research method but an administrative task that could be outsourced to nonhuman technological machinery. the researcher struggled to understand the usefulness of my research if i did not practically and directly feed into the interdisciplinary objective of the wider project. his comment initially made me feel uncomfortable, as it spoke to my insecurities of not doing enough and failing to meet the expectations of my team members. this incident highlights one of the challenges also encountered in interdisciplinary projects, particularly with ethnographers, that the goals of the ethnography do not align with the goals of some of the research subjects (cairns, hielscher, and light 2020). when this mismatch occurs, the additional value of the recording outside of the administrative task of documenting the conversation cannot be seen. the practical research outlined above contrasted with the sociology department’s idea of sociological research. in the early stages of my phd, when i embraced the facilitator role, my home school deemed my work non-traditional. as a result, the administration required me to restructure my preliminary research report and create research questions that made my phd look more like a work of sociology. my home school did not consider practitioner work as good science, and to ensure i remained on track to earn my phd, i adjusted my research approach. however, even after receiving support from the department for a critical research approach, the pressure within the project to be the interdisciplinary facilitator continued. with my fieldwork underway, i presented some preliminary findings to the rest of my team. after the presentation, i received mixed responses. some members found that the reflections represented their experiences. however, a natural scientist in the group disagreed with my research objectives given in the presentation. from the following transcription excerpt, he makes it clear that he is looking for practical contributions from my research: “i’m interested to understand what the attributes, so what are the ingredients for successful interdisciplinary work, and that’s one of the things that we are trying to get to the bottom of.” the natural science researcher wanted clear indicators that signify successful interdisciplinarity. again, there is an assumption that interdisciplinarity is a desirable way to conduct the research project and that my role as the resident interdisciplinary researcher was to find out how to do it well. natural scientists on the project tended to envision my role as the interdisciplinary facilitator. navigating between their expectations versus my new critical approach (with support from my home discipline school) continued. negotiating between the perception of my functional role as a technology to provide practical recommendations versus my approach to finding out how researchers negotiate interdisciplinarity was a constant feature throughout the project. on top of that, being held to account by different powerful authorities to determine my work’s success proved difficult when their ideas conflicted. navigating between the useful and critical approach yielded information about how different researchers understand the value of research in terms of visible impact and the expectations of what an ethnographic project can contribute to collaboration.   discussion the multilayered perceptions of interdisciplinarity and the recognition of my own multiple identities are a messy latticework of interdisciplinary science making. this autoethnographic reflection also rejects positivist assumptions that including emotions in work is “unscientific” (thajib, dinkelaker, and stodulka 2019) and uses them epistemologically. this paper itself constitutes an experiment in my understanding of interdisciplinary research. this reflection finds interdisciplinarity is an amalgamation of disciplinary meetings between researchers, a power struggle between disciplinary research methods, and a desired research objective encouraged by the research politics of the day all at once. while practicing self-reflexivity, my different positionalities in the sustainability project became clearer. as a phd student on the project, i occupied a lower status in the academic hierarchy. natural scientists tend to assign social scientists the role of a feminine support position (balmer et al. 2015) to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration. sometimes resisting this support role, my presence activated reflexivity amongst the other researchers as they struggled to define interdisciplinarity. my mobile location between my desk in the phd student office and access to senior board meetings gave me different vantage points on the project. my positionality reflected a dynamic and relative quality rather than a fixed position. initially, i could feel myself resisting the technological, “useful” labels that reduced my role as a tool to be used and shaped as others saw fit. i did not want to be a spy, a tape recorder, or an interdisciplinary carer. however, upon researching different feminist perceptions of technology and use, i could then reframe my roles in ways that served my research process and make sense of the roles that collaborators assigned to me. although i did not see myself as the project spy, reflecting on my collaborator’s perception of me as a spy helped uncover his insecurity that perhaps he did not feel enough interdisciplinarity was happening on the project. i could then use those feelings as a starting point to investigate what interdisciplinarity would look like to him. the label itself did not help the interdisciplinary process, but understanding how the label’s construction came to be did. in the imagination of some collaborators, ethnography constituted nothing more than a passive recording of meeting conversations. the ethnographic work i was doing to understand interdisciplinary dynamics was invisible to them. it needed to be more useful. from the perspective of the positivist researchers, their understanding of interdisciplinary challenges was limited to a difference in language or a lack of cross-disciplinary understanding. the challenge extended to me because they perceived i did not do enough to uncover the ingredients of interdisciplinary working and actively tell them how to do it correctly. while communication challenges certainly have their place in interdisciplinarity, the emotional and personal dynamics played a prominent role but were rendered irrelevant to the mechanics of successful interdisciplinary working. academic and personal insecurities prevented the researchers from taking the space to experiment in interdisciplinarity and allow themselves to potentially get it wrong. power dynamics between social and natural scientists also prevented collaborative opportunities. as the project aimed to bring together perspectives for an ultimately positivist approach to analyzing cities, social scientists felt their work needed to be more valued. these power dynamics and feelings of being undervalued pushed everyone further into their disciplinary home rather than together. for example, a geographer on the project recounted his interaction with a computer scientist on the project who was trying to build a computer model of a british city. the computer scientist asked the geographer for the specific economic indicators that should be included in the simulation. what was perceived as a simple request by the computer scientist translated into a perception of being assigned a subordinate, utilitarian role to the geographer and a mismatch between what the geographer interpreted as a collaboration. the geographer commented that the computer scientist just thought of him as “just a repository of economics data, social data, so we can’t integrate because we don’t work like that; it is not what we are doing.” throughout the rest of the project, the two did not work together, one fearing that the other did not appreciate their position as a legitimate researcher. the different perceptions of what was useful interdisciplinarity often cropped up in the group, and i looked to my various roles to understand those interpretations. comments about my being a spy, coupled with the expectation that i was the catalyst that would spark interdisciplinarity, gave me the sense that participants could not understand what i was doing. still, they also did not understand what interdisciplinary was. on the one hand, i was someone some could not trust, but also a bearer of truth about the mysterious interdisciplinary process they did not have access to. my role as the social science carer who nurtured interdisciplinarity to grow made it clear that most natural scientists valued interdisciplinarity as an input to further their research objectives. conversely, my role as the spy and interdisciplinary catalyst showed how interdisciplinarity could be an objective in and of itself to show senior leadership and the funder that interdisciplinarity occurred.   conclusion in writing up my experiences, i have tried to cultivate an ethnographic research practice that aligns with a feminist orientation. in forefronting my emotions and those of my collaborators, i reflect on the importance of human emotion in interdisciplinary collaboration. as researchers found it difficult to articulate their collaboration approaches, reflecting on my position and how others perceived me was necessary to interpret their perceptions of interdisciplinarity. by investigating my roles in interdisciplinarity, i better understood the mismatch between the current popularity of interdisciplinarity and the recurring challenges to doing it successfully. in the academic environment, though universities welcome the utilitarian approach of interdisciplinarity, the institution cannot assess multidisciplinary research approaches or incentivize solutions outside of respective disciplinary boundaries. as a result, interdisciplinary projects in academia lacked interdisciplinary indicators of success. further, the opaque definition of interdisciplinarity meant that everyone tried to do it, but according to their assumptions of what interdisciplinarity should look like, which may or may not align with other collaborators’ expectations. this uncertainty was compounded in the sustainability research project because the participants looked for missing indicators of good interdisciplinary collaboration. without success indicators, there was no mechanism to measure an interdisciplinary outcome. the trial-and-error collaboration approach left the researchers disappointed, without a clear output to show for their efforts. while existing post-reflective accounts of interdisciplinarity reinforced the time barriers and communication difficulties across methodological approaches, reading emotional cues from collaborators reveals the career insecurity and disciplinarity cultures tied to these challenges. disciplinary-oriented departments each have tacit and explicit requirements for career progression. publishing in disciplinary-oriented journals, contributing to a specific field of knowledge, and following a specific ethical code of conduct do not make space for collaborations that question or alter these structures. the incentive for experimentation is lacking, particularly for early career researchers trying to establish their academic reputation. while the labels and emotional interactions with collaborators gleaned useful information about the interdisciplinary process, the emotional toll on the sts researcher to revisit them raises an important ethical consideration. in trying to foster relations with the groups of people we are trying to understand, it must be addressed that, particularly in different disciplinary domains, these efforts may not be recognized or even welcomed. in previous similar cases, the researchers’ concerns are prioritized over the ethnographer’s own to foster a sense of reciprocation (smolka, fisher, and hausstein 2021). it begs the question, how do we set our boundaries as sts researchers and ethnographers? in the vein of recognizing the care role often assigned to sts researchers, who then cares for the ethnographer?   acknowledgements the leverhulme trust supported the urban sustainability research project presented in this article. i thank the konrad lorenz institute for evolution and cognition research (kli) in vienna for funding this reflexive article and, specifically, dr. guido caniglia for his invaluable feedback and encouragement. thank you, dr. coleen m. carrigan and dr. caitlin donahue wylie, for inviting me to participate in the special issue. thank you to the other kli fellows and the 4s conference panel caring for equitable relations in 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los angeles: sage publications. ryan-flood, roisin, and rosalind gill, eds. 2010. secrecy and silence in the research process: feminist reflections. london: routledge. smolka, mareike, erik fisher, and alexandra hausstein. 2021. “from affect to action: choices in attending to disconcertment in interdisciplinary collaborations.” science, technology, & human values 46 (5): 1076–1103. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920974088. stavrianakis, anthony. 2015. “from anthropologist to actant (and back to anthropology): position, impasse, and observation in sociotechnical collaboration.” cultural anthropology 30 (1): 167–89. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.1.09. strober, myra h. 2011. “being in one’s comfort zone: the case of ethics.” in interdisciplinary conversations: challenging habits of thought, 50–71. stanford, ca: stanford university press. thajib, ferdiansyah, samia dinkelaker, and thomas stodulka. 2019. “introduction: affective dimensions of fieldwork and ethnography.” in affective dimensions of fieldwork and ethnography: theory and history in the human and social sciences, edited by thomas stodulka, samia dinkelaker, and ferdiansyah thajib. cham: springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_2.     author bio ashley lewis is an ethnographic researcher interested in interdisciplinarity, urban sustainability, and the social dynamics implicit in technological innovation.       special section the inheritance of militarization: toxic gifts, furtive critique, and survivance in postwar bosnia     saida hodžić cornell university sh888@cornell.edu     abstract to think of bosnia is to think of war, but militarization precedes and exceeds war, as socialist yugoslavia located much of its military industry here. the toxic gift of socialist militarization enables people in a small industrial town to survive and stay home at the same time as unfiltered toxic waste makes this home less habitable, poisoning their beloved river. the residents, this article shows, are equally people of the military factory and people of the river, and have to reconcile this dual inheritance. historicizing the gendered inheritance of socialist militarization and contextualizing neoliberal dispossession and deregulation, this article examines how residents articulate a furtive critique of industrial toxicity in the extended domestic sphere, by which i mean the intimate gatherings in people’s yards and on neighborhood walks and riverside benches that comprise the interstices between public and private where much of bosnian life is lived. ethnographically, the article attends to the felt embodiments of dual riverine and militarized inheritance, illuminating furtive complaints of toxicity and poignant fragments of memory told in passing in the extended domestic sphere. here, residents reclaim their inheritance of the river, planting seeds of dissent and survivance.     keywords socialist militarization, military industry, toxicity, neoliberal dispossession, rivers, inheritance, dissent, survivance, feminist ethnography     introduction: furtive critique in konjic, a mountainous bosnian town wrapped around the curving neretva river, i join the nightly throngs of people catching the river’s cool on their evening strolls. the river gathers the town on its banks and makes collectivities (see hromadžić 2022). one dusk in 2015, a cousin’s husband waves my mother and me down from the hilly road that follows the river upstream, inviting us over. we walk down to his garden and wade into the blistery cold water. he turns over a green-gray river stone and shows me its underside: “see, no crabs are hiding under the stones. we used to have crabs, but they can’t live in polluted water.” i know what he’s talking about, what i have heard from neighbors and family members: the arms and ammunition factory igman, the town’s main employer, had been dumping unfiltered toxic waste into the beloved turquoise river whose waters feed entire regions of bosnia and croatia. hazardous military waste is particularly toxic industrial waste. throughout the world, it has been burned in open fires, dumped at sea, and into lakes and rivers. like other people who live around ammunition factories, residents of konjic are told that they are not at risk. but hazardous waste imperils human life in “inter-generational time” (murphy 2013) and causes harms that will manifest across generations in human and nonhuman bodies (see liboiron, tironi, and calvillo 2018). the river demonstrates the harms of toxicity already, as large quantities of unfiltered toxic sludge have annihilated some of the life it once nurtured. in recent years, toxic dumping has become visible to the naked eye, and neretva has turned a rotten orange-brown color right under the new bridge. the river’s poisoning has become the talk of the town, a constant reverberating murmur. residents have abandoned the polluted beaches and now bond by commemorating their loss—the river still brings them together, albeit not to share pure joy but to dwell in the presence of its wounded beauty and spirit, to mourn, parse things out, and agitate. the talk of the river’s pollution – destruction, they say (uništili su je)—started ubiquitous but hushed. rather than voicing loud critique in public forums or staging protests, residents expressed their critique of toxicity in intimate gatherings and spontaneous conversations. when i would greet the men who fish by the bridge or the roadside on top of the left riverbank with the words i learned from my grandfather, a sports fisherman, bistro (may the water be clear), they responded by shaking their heads and shrugging their shoulders: “there is no fish to catch. you see what they’re doing to the river.” their bitter complaints on breezy summer evenings, the conversations with passersby is how they protested. “see what they are doing?” the culprits were not named. who they are was both understood and not to be made explicit. an environmental activist group called zeleni neretva (greens neretva) has documented igman and its former subsidiaries such as eurosjaj as the main polluters that dump illegal quantities of chromium, lead, zinc, cadmium, and phenol into the river.1 residents are becoming familiar with terms such as trivalent and hexavalent chromium, and worry about their carcinogenic effects. yet even the activists omit naming names in their reports, instead referring to the “metal processing industry.”2 fear, respect, inheritance, and enclosure by the state-capital-military-industrial complex set the tone for the kind of critique that is locally possible. the residents and the activists understand but do not expose in writing the chain of entanglements between factories and government institutions that encloses the lived and political space. they mourn the river and fear the health hazards but not more than they fear losing their jobs or offending people in power and authorities who sanction toxicity and tacitly authorize toxic dumping. igman’s entwinement with the state is particularly dense. once a worker-owned factory, igman is today co-owned by the federation of bosnia and herzegovina and private shareholders. during the last war, it was one of the main suppliers of ammunition to the bosnian army. today, it is one of the country’s leading export businesses and a source of jobs, kickbacks, and social capital. indeed, the military industry is one of bosnia’s few functional industries, and is considered a lifeline. at a time of mass unemployment and an exodus of people that has hollowed out the country (kurtović 2021), the military industry enables people to stay home at the same time as it imperils life. in contemporary bosnia, people’s stability, togetherness, and being-in-place, not being displaced, are predicated on toxicity. fear, bosnian political activists say, is what holds back revolt. but there is more than fear and dependence to furtive critique, as militarization is deeply entangled in everyday life. i understand militarization as the process by which past wars and ideas of readiness for future war or self-defense organize economy, society, government, and people’s lives and subjectivities.3 in conversation with anthropologists who illuminate militarization on the granular level (gonzález, gusterson, and houtman 2019), i show that bosnian livelihoods, gendered subjectivities, attachments, and social relations have long been co-constituted by the military industry. in konjic, where residents either work for igman or have family members who do, militarization makes people, socialities, and spaces that connect them. although bosnians have inherited militarization, it affects them differently today, as a result of postwar neoliberal dispossession. i illuminate how militarization is reproduced and contested in igman’s riverine neighborhood, in what we might call the extended domestic sphere: the intersections between public and private where much of bosnian life is lived. the furtive critique of military industrial toxicity flourishes in intimate gatherings in people’s homes and yards, on neighborhood benches and corners, and, invariably, on walks by the river. this sphere is where militarization reproduces itself, but it also the space where dissent begins. here, residents claim their inheritance of the river to critique toxic dumping. by the extended domestic sphere, i mean neighborhood life itself, where the domestic and the public have long been enmeshed and where they permeate each other. analyzing militarization in bosnia requires us to question some of the enduring eurocentric assumptions about what constitutes domestic life and how it relates to the public. in bosnia’s militarized neighborhoods, work and living together have been conjoined for several generations. the neighborhood generates its own collectivity: it is a space of intimate social relations that shape who we are as subjects, whom we care and provide for, to whom we feel closest, how we think and feel, what we aspire to and hope for, what we can and cannot say. igman’s riverine neighborhood is a space where militarization gains social traction and significance, organizing daily life and sociality itself. the domestic/oikos of igman’s neighborhood includes balconies and terraces, yards (enclosed and semi-enclosed yards with flowers called avlije), street benches, pedestrian and car bridges, sidewalks and sokaci (small streets), river walkways and promenades (šetnice). much of life is lived in neighborhood’s outside spaces, and people come and go into homes as they please. (to have to schedule a coffee with friends used to dampen the allure of migrating to the west.) military industrialization is normalized in these shared spaces of living that have united multiple generations of the residents. igman too is not only an employer, but a neighbor, albeit one with an oversized presence and power. neighborhood residents pay it respects, just like they respect each other. bosnia is also one of the many countries in the world where the neighborhood, rather than the private home, constitutes the boundary of the social world (see roberts 2017). this is true both for old neighborhoods such as the mahala next to igman and on neretva’s banks, as well as the socialist high-rises in cities, where i grew up, and where each building is its own social archipelago. the socialist formation of the factory as the provider of housing meant that militarization was domesticated in the neighborhood of high-rises. more than jobs, housing, and school fellowships, it gave meaning to people’s lives, knitted and sutured social relations. when konjic residents furtively critique industrial toxicity, they target not the industry itself or even the hazardous waste it produces, but its mismanagement and unhinged dumping. they separate out igman’s inherent industrial toxicity from the wonton dumping of unfiltered toxic waste. that toxicity has become visible to the naked eye is a decidedly postwar phenomenon. “prije rata” (before the war), igman had a department that monitored industrial waste and filtration. the war and the ensuing neoliberal dispossession and deregulation have changed everything. but this is also a riverine neighborhood, and the river makes dissent possible. we might say that the residents are attached to the river as much as they are attached to the military industry: the river, they love and care for; igman, they need. but it may be more precise to say that residents are entangled with both, are of both. the river and igman are not external to people; rather, the residents are people of the river and people of the factory at once. the town and its people are co-constituted by the river and the military factory. thus, military factory’s toxic dumping into the river creates an impasse and a repertoire of furtive critique in the extended domestic sphere. i attend to stories about toxic hazards, bitter complaints articulated in vague metaphors, poignant fragments of memory told in passing or recounted time and again in front yards, living rooms, and on the streets. i witness how acts of reclaiming the river shift the residents’ orientation from critique to survivance. feminist sts scholarship has long insisted that we live in fabricated worlds and inhabit cyborg subjectivities (haraway 1991). it also recognizes that our bodies are so co-constituted by sediments of chemicals and toxicants that we embody new forms of “posthuman corporealities” (povinelli 2017, 509). one of the most pressing questions for our toxic world is what kind of survival and what kind of politics are possible within such compromised spaces (liboiron, tironi, and calvillo 2018; fiske 2020). rather than returning to an imagined purity of the past or the future (which here might mean decontextualizing socialism or pacifism as spaces of innocence), i conceptualize ethical and political potential in conversation with scholars and communities that imagine our futures from an already toxic, fragmented, and militarized present. people facing toxicity work creatively within, against, and to the side of liberal scientific and technopolitical frameworks (broto 2013; graeter 2017). they make their worlds more habitable through practices of healing (langwick 2018), life-affirming work (ahmann and kenner 2020), intimate activism and an ethics of living, such as cleaning what cannot be made pure and tending to plants that cannot be made decontaminated (tironi 2018), as well as collaborative land defense against settler colonial environmental harm (murphy 2020). contributing to these ongoing debates, i show how the poisoning of the river reshapes bosnians’ recognition of their inheritance and generates possibilities of dissent. responses to environmental violence in bosnia are complex because the perpetrators are not always distant colonizers. it is the case that the country imports waste and experiences “waste colonialism”: transnational corporations have purchased factories that they close at will or operate with wonton disregard for environmental laws, causing accidents and deaths and poisoning the land, water, air, and people around them on an unprecedented scale (arsenijević 2022). yet it is also the case that domestic companies such as igman are not far behind. what kind of political dissent is possible when speaking up requires rising against one’s own? i argue that reclaiming the river propels bosnians’ furtive critique of militarized toxicity and generates acts of defiance and survivance. survivance exceeds survival; it is an “active sense of presence” that renounces “dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (vizenor 2008, 20). my argument is not only a scholarly endeavor but joins in social projects such as that of the bosnian feminist artist smirna kulenović, who brings together people to plant flowers in toxic war trenches (egger 2022). i see this text as planting another seed of survivance and a reclaiming of a different inheritance.   tracing inheritance with autoethnography a note on methods. i did not seek out research on military industrial toxicity—i found myself surrounded by it. i also inherited concerns about it. in summer, my returns to bosnia take me to my mother’s ancestral home in konjic, and the old riverine neighborhood adjacent to igman. to live in igman’s neighborhood is to be enveloped in industrial dust, to see the river lose its shape and change its color, to smell suspicious odors, to witness the beach turn into a toxic wasteland. and to talk about it daily—raising concerns, pondering questions that both do and do not have answers. over time, i begun formalizing a research project. yet, when i started interviewing factory workers and neighborhood residents, i learned that they understand interviews as public speech. and when it comes to igman, one speaks differently in public. some speak with deference, others quiet their voices or disavow their criticism. in their voices, i heard the awe igman inspires—respect mixed with fear and trepidation. fear, again. in the context of the extended domestic sphere where an interview appears as a cruel experiment, i have chosen to rely on participant observation.4 the form i practice here is better called attuned participation: i participate in everyday life, create opportunities for conversation, announce my research and make it known, and sometimes ask questions, but primarily listen for what is said to me and what is said because of my presence. attuned participation is a form of autoethnographic research that allows me to synchronize my method with the sensitivity of furtive critique of militarization. anthropologists such as mitzi carter have also found that “criticism and recovery in ethnographic practices ‘in the field’ involve active listening outside the traditional structure of the formal academic interview” (2013, 12). in her autoethnographic work on militarized, us-japanese occupied okinawa, carter reimagines ethnographic conversations as a yuntaku (talk story, chit chat), “where stories took the form of a gift with a more communal, reciprocal value. the knowledge gained from a yuntaku comes not solely from direct answers to questions, but, rather, from instructive advice, the questions themselves, the silences and shared values of the unspoken” (14). i too note when i am being taught, instructed, given historical reminders, made to laugh or humored. although this research brings me closer to konjic, this is not a hometown ethnography (docot 2017), but one born of simultaneous love and estrangement. my hometown is mostar, another riverine and militarized town, where neretva no longer unites people but divides them, and where factories that sustained the town are vacant ruins. while i feel my difference in konjic, i know that many people who live there do so as well. this picturesque, pleasant tourist town is claustrophobic to residents who do not conform. my uncle told me that the mountains’ squeeze puts pressure on people and drives them mad, drove him mad. my female cousins talk about feeling unfree, always under the watchful eyes of the small town. i know exactly what they mean, have known it since i was a teenager. the town does not publicly reckon with the fact that the bosnian army tortured, raped, and killed civilians in the municipality, committing genocide and war crimes. when my great-uncle told me about the murder of his colleague’s family, he tilted his voice just a bit. when you are taught not to fall out of line, not to expose yourself to public judgment, you embrace furtive speech.   out of war: people of the military factory to think of bosnia is to think of the war that tore the country apart and made it a country of refugees and labor migrants. the war formally ended in 1995, but it is not over, as peace that followed entrenched the war logic and turned war-made divisions into internal borders and ethno-nationalist ruling regimes. the war’s readily apparent afterlives are tucked in across the human and more-than-human landscape—in crumbled buildings with wild figs growing from window holes, gravestones in city parks, fields and forests awash in depleted uranium, landmines more numerous than the population and signs warning of them in wildflower meadows where we pick herbs, red flowers painted into the bruised, blood-stained cracks of sarajevo’s bombed sidewalks, muslim monuments to the dead in poor mountain villages, photographs on living room armoires, and the enduring grief in my aunt’s eyes. war lives on in emptiness: in abandoned factories, hollowed out villages, empty houses. war lurks from the past and the future when flooding dislodges landmines, ethnonationalist politicians stir up fears, russia flexes its muscles in the balkans with help from bosnia’s serb republic, and when russian and nato ships chase each other in the adriatic. to bosnians, the war in the ukraine feels palpable and proximate, but so does the war on terror that displaces people who come to bosnia and end up stuck there because they are violently prevented from crossing into the eu and lodging asylum claims there.5 bosnia is haunted by more than one war, as the country’s society, economy, infrastructure, landscape, and urban planning have been co-constituted by militarization. a historical and analytical focus on militarization shifts our lens towards the porous line between war and peace that bosnians straddle in their daily lives. bosnia’s military factories have not only sustained people but have made them. militarization has also bound people together, suturing domestic and public thresholds. consider the following scene in igman’s neighborhood, before the war. let us say it is an early summer morning sometime in the late 1980s in konjic. from my grandmother’s avlija, i am calling good morning to her neighbors walking down the narrow street in front of the house. they are joining a procession of elegantly dressed people going to work, converging a hundred yards down the street at the gate to igman. there is something peaceful about this scene. walking to work was itself quiet, its rhythm dignified. everyday life and work were blended in this old neighborhood wrapped around the factory. the gate itself was a cultural landmark, an orientation in the neighborhood’s landscape. i picked up my grandfather’s newspaper политика from the kiosk at igman’s gate (“they’re always telling lies,” he’d add). as children we played there, scavenging dropped change to buy pink, cigarette-shaped bubblegum. now, children no longer play here, and few people walk to work. honking cars and trucks clog up the neighborhood, spewing dirt and toxic dust on its small garden patches. the seemingly peaceful scene belies the fact that igman was always a military factory. named after a nearby mountain legendary for the wwii maneuver in which yugoslav anti-fascist resistance outsmarted the german troops, igman has sustained the lives and livelihoods of the entire town and the region since the 1950s. it had once also employed my grandmother (in the canteen) and, until the pre-war layoffs, my uncle (doing office work), as well as many of my cousins, neighbors, and friends. the factory complex was built on the land that belonged to my great-grandfather. as a child, i learned early on: to live in konjic is to be connected to igman, to have life and livelihood routed through it. building on gabrielle hecht’s (2011, 3) analysis of cold-war technopolitics, we might say that bosnia has been bound up with militarized technopolitics, which i understand as a form of state power that relies on the production of military technology to enact a range of political and biopolitical goals. in bosnia, it was the militarized technopolitics that shaped “political rule, economic arrangements, social relationships, and cultural forms” (2011, 1). socialist militarized technopolitics produced socialist communities, and did so successfully. it generated new products, people, and arrangements between them. it was instrumental in the making of the socialist state and its subjects, from people’s individual lives and gendered social relations to broader social worlds. for decades, bosnia’s economy and society flourished with help of socialist militarization. bosnia is awash in military factories (some working, others hollowed out in war), as socialist yugoslavia located much of its military industry in this mountainous, mineral-rich terrain where the country was birthed and defended. founded after world war ii as a means of supporting an autonomous yugoslav self-defense, military industry helped shifted bosnia’s economic production from centuries-long extractive mining and deforestation to manufacturing. igman was one of the factories charged with securing the sovereignty of the new and precariously positioned non-aligned country sandwiched between the nato and warsaw pacts. in the name of having to defend itself from potential future foreign occupation by much greater world powers, yugoslavia invested heavily in military technology, spending a high percentage of its federal budget on the military industry, which manufactured everything from arms and ammunitions to airplanes and ships. it also instilled citizen love in the behemoth yugoslav people’s army (jna) that would one day become monstrous and turn against its own.6 the country prepared its defense against potential foreign invaders on bosnia’s mountainous terrain, placing a secret, underground infrastructure of military defense and control in two towns, konjic and bihać. unbeknownst to locals, the jna had built “tito’s bunker”—an underground nuclear shelter and military command center hidden under the mountain next to konjic, complete with residential rooms and kitchens, conference rooms, a command and communications center, its own energy supply, and more. those who had helped build and maintain the bunker kept it a secret for decades.   socialist militarization: projecting anti-fascism, anti-colonialism, equity, and unity bosnia’s militarization is a vestige of cold war, and socialist yugoslavia’s toxic gift to bosnia. because a toxic gift is both toxic and a gift, analyzing socialist, non-aligned militarization requires an account of ambiguity. to account for ambiguity is not to redeem or to celebrate but to historicize and contextualize. it is one thing to critique the militarization of the world’s military empire that kills millions and whose defense department is the world’s largest polluter; it is another to critique the sedimented effects of militarization in a precariously positioned country that was at the fault line of the cold war and now serves as eu’s and nato’s constitutive outside.7 feminist critique of militarization has clearly outlined its violent effects. indeed, we cannot discuss militarized toxicity without discussing colonialism, racial capitalism, and environmental racism. colonized and postcolonial countries and territories have been the targets of imperial wars, nuclear experiments, and ammunition testing; they are also exposed to hazards from militarized mining, imported toxic waste, and military’s pesticides. within countries and empires, it is the most marginalized groups that are subject to militarized environmental violence and military recruitment, policing, and death. these dynamics are apparent in bosnia, which now also imports toxic commodities and toxic waste and is both subject to and perpetrator of environmental violence. necropolitical capitalism at eu’s periphery shapes lives of all residents but racist violence disproportionally shapes the lives and bodies of roma, who survive by gathering scrap metal and salvaging materials from waste dumps. in some towns, waste dumps are also spaces of roma living, the only spaces where the state tolerates their habitation. my analysis affirms feminist critique of militarization’s violence without taking the grounds and tenor of this critique as universal. decentering capitalism and the global north as vantage points allows us to historicize socialist militarization’s compound effects, placing the unsettled ambiguity of toxic gifts at the center of critique. whereas militarization is said to deform “human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (lutz 2002, 723), my analysis of socialist militarization shows that yugoslavia’s militarized technopolitics was a part of a larger project not of producing but overcoming difference (class, gender, ethnic, national), and engendering unifying and equalizing social structures. this project had constitutive violence in its core, many limits and exclusionary effects, and a genocidal ending, yet it was also enormously successful in what it tried to accomplish.8 yugoslavia understood its military technopolitics not as readiness for wars of occupation, but as preparation for anti-fascist revolutionary struggle and resistance to foreign rule. citizens were not taught to see themselves as soldiers, but as anti-fascist revolutionaries committed to self-determination and ready to fight for it. obligatory high school people’s defense classes taught students to envision fighting invaders with partisan, guerilla tactics alongside the armed forces. the idea that all citizens would fight future occupations stemmed from the historical experience of successful anti-fascist organizing in wwii that enabled the country’s independence and profoundly transformed gender relations.9 the yugoslav project of gender equity was forged in crucibles of wwii and was rooted in the socialist women’s workers movement and international resistance to fascism (majstorović 2018). yugoslav women participated in the anti-fascist struggle in record numbers; at its height, the partisan resistance numbered half a million people, including 110,000 women. they were supported by a broad anti-fascist movement, including the anti-fascist women’s front (afž). formalized on bosnian territory in 1942, the afž eventually numbered two million members out of the country’s fifteen million citizens. in midst of wwii, a newly minted constitution enshrined a progressive marriage and family law and cemented women’s status as equal-rights-bearing citizens. after independence, the state ensured free education, free childcare, and equal salaries (batinić 2001) but also dissolved the afž and took control over women’s organizing. militarization was integral to the country’s development projects that simultaneously targeted society and infrastructures. factories like igman were to foster not only self-defense, but also social modernization, including women’s emancipation. a country whose economy was destroyed in wwii rebuilt itself as industrialized and urbanized. young women and men participated in voluntary youth work brigades that built the country’s railways, airports, and roads; they were at the same time fashioned into new yugoslav citizens who had equal rights, socialized across ethnic and geographic lines, and forged international friendships. and when the factories were built, they became workers. for decades, militarization, industrialization, and social—and socialist—prosperity went hand in hand. “industry” was synonymous with “economy” and the military industry, however toxic or destructive, was an unquestioned good. women and men worked in military and other factories, while children went to free public schools and universities, often with factory stipends. for decades, igman and factories like it embodied yugoslav pride in revolutionary self-sufficiency and socialist good life. socialist militarization also acted as an anti-colonial force, as yugoslavia shared its military goods with non-aligned, decolonizing countries of the global south. as one of the founders and leaders of the non-aligned movement (nam), yugoslavia tasked the military industry with technopolitics that fostered international solidarity and supported anti-colonial struggles. yugoslavia gave gifts weapons and ammunition to decolonizing movements and newly independent countries, while also selling them to others. by offering financial, logistic, and military support to decolonizing efforts, yugoslavia solidified relationships with countries that were building up their armies, and people that were under occupation, such as palestinians. in addition, yugoslavia also gave university stipends to non-aligned countries’ students, built housing and industrial infrastructures across member countries, and exported its experts in socialist development across the non-aligned world. military technopolitics turned yugoslavia’s into what we might call a comrade-donor: a global actor that gave and sold its weapons, understanding itself as acting in solidarity.10 this toxic gift was also both poisonous and welcome. in a militarized cold war world, non-aligned countries thought themselves hard pressed to exist without their own armaments. capitalism has shifted the purpose of the military industry, uncoupling the trade in weapons from the political work of building international solidarity. weapons and ammunition once gifted to the decolonizing countries of the global south are today happily sold to anyone who will buy them; the shareholders and the state reap profits; workers are grateful for their jobs at the same time as their bodies and the river are exposed to toxicants. military industry is a toxic lifeline in a country once again largely reliant on extractive economies.   life sustaining: militarization’s grip on bosnia “when igman employs, konjic lives,” write the newspapers testifying to the success of a factory that ensures the town’s survival. the talk of survival is not an exaggeration: igman feeds the town and prevents the people from being displaced yet again. the workers’ steady salaries are an exception in a country where many jobs do not pay regular wages and where delayed salaries are a part of life. now europe’s poorest economy, bosnia’s 40 percent unemployment rate is one of the world’s highest, and the very highest for the youth. the government, which is the country’s largest employer, is in a perpetual state of indebtedness, hovering at the edge of bankruptcy.11 it often delays paying salaries to civil servants—a condition that harkens back to the economic collapse that precipitated the war. precarity and joblessness in bosnia, combined with eu’s poaching of select classes of laborers, work in tandem to slowly drain the country of its people. bosnia is being emptied out—by underestimated official counts, a fifth of its population left, more than during the war. bosnians join other former yugoslavs and eastern europeans as western europe’s new underclass of care and construction workers and semi-legal temporary workers. those who stay in bosnia are labor migrants in waiting, or in preparation—german classes are booming, as are credentialing agencies. “we raise our children knowing they will leave,” my cousin tells me. there is a special kind of pain in this knowledge. konjic has not experienced a mass exodus precisely because the military industry holds the town together and keeps it going at the same time as it injures it and erodes life around it. the weapons and ammunition production is one of a few profitable industries, which means that igman workers are paid living wages, and on time. they are no longer the self-governing workers, the socialist citizen-subjects with say over the means of production, but neither are they hyper-exploited and expendable as much of bosnia’s workforce. the successful global trade in ammunition enables a measure of stability for the workers and the region as a whole. the precarity is an effect of war and postwar militarized neoliberalism. most factories that stopped working during the war never turned on their engines again; others employ a fraction of their pre-war workforce. after the war, bosnia acquiesced to de-industrialization and to neoliberalism, under duress. militarized neoliberal rule was the price bosnia had to pay for nato’s “gift of freedom” (nguyen 2012): the peace itself and the postwar reconstruction that refashioned the country into an import-dependent, free-market economy. the war ended after nato’s military intervention in 1995 and the signing of the dayton peace agreement, which violently remade the country’s socioeconomic and political order but sanitized this process as a “transition” from socialist communism to capitalism and democracy. the agreement required that bosnia enshrine ethno-nationalism in law, accept the status of an immature country unable to govern itself and requiring foreign oversight, as well as surrender public and state property, including factories, to transnational and domestic finance. bosnia’s government is overseen the eu/us joint operation called the office of the high representative that is supposed to advance bosnia’s membership in the eu but considers the country a perpetual candidate.12   the gift of debt a vestige of socialist industrialization, military factories continue to produce people and communities, but their toxicity is more violent and more apparent under conditions of dispossession and deregulation. the toxic gift of militarized industrialization has created an enduring infrastructure of violence and toxicity that are now joined by indebtedness. without the economic and legal safety net of a socialist state, igman’s workers and their families are more dependent on the military factory, more exposed to toxicity, and more enclosed by entwinements of the state and necropolitical capitalism. “before the war”— during socialism—the right to work was enshrined in the constitution, and the country had little unemployment until the 1980s economic crisis. the days of employment as a right are not only gone but erased. today, access to basic infrastructures of life such as jobs and healthcare is precarious and depends on favors (brković 2017). indeed, being and feeling indebted is constitutive of bosnian postwar condition (jašarević 2017). under neoliberal indebtedness, militarization’s fueling of social reproduction is more pernicious. in a region and a country bereft of jobs, the value of having a steady employment that actually pays a steady salary and has social security benefits cannot be overstated. workers feel fortunate to have jobs and consider the company’s profitability a streak of incredibly good luck, even as those who reap profits do so at the expense of the river. the interplay of neoliberal precarity and toxicity is also apparent in a nearby serbian town reliant on a copper-processing plant. there too, residents are both grateful for and critical of the industrial smoke that, as they say, “feeds” them (jovanović 2018, 495). when their lungs fill with smoke, it means that the factory is operational and that people have jobs they need, even as their hospital fills with pulmonary patients. precarity and dispossession condition bosnians to consider having a job as a benefit and a gift. getting a job is reconceptualized as a moral, discretionary act, an act dependent on a goodwill of certain individuals, and, of course, on connections that accrue and thicken indebtedness. igman’s precious, though toxic jobs are passed through families and the fictive kin of neighbors, generating ongoing value and obligation, thickening indebtedness to one another and the company. the over a thousand people employed by igman feel indebted to the company, as do the many thousands of people who are fed and sustained by each employee. some might say that igman owns the town, but it may be more accurate to say that it manufactures being owed. igman knows how to generate gratitude and loyalty by distributing highly visible social gifts that produce debt and dividends. it gives fellowships to students and children of war veterans. whereas these fellowships bind the students to future employment in the factory, generalized joblessness means that the fellowships are seen not as unwelcome burdens but vital promises. igman also donates to local causes, for instance by supplying ppe and medical equipment to the public hospital in konjic as covid-19 emerged. even though igman was trying to offset reputational damage after an ill-advised company celebration caused a disease cluster, its donation was publicly saluted and celebrated as a generous gift. by extending itself into the social realm and participating in a moral economy, igman accrues gratitude and social indebtedness. when jobs are considered gifts, and small donations have high value, the gifts are considered uncompensated. igman is paid back in loyalty and partial silence. the silence is not absolute; the residents complain bitterly but without naming names. partial silence also means speaking in metaphors and coded language. a radio journalist, curious about my research, interviews me and then tells me, “if you write about this, it will be a hit” (biće bomba): it will cause an uproar, an explosion. she explains, “everybody knows, it’s a public secret, who is polluting the river. these companies, they employ people, so this is a double-edged sword.” like others, she openly states what is known but cannot be named. when igman’s neighbors talk about weapons sales, toxicity, and the sad state of the town and the country, they simultaneously write themselves into this context and take a distance from it. they readily critique toxic harms but see the factories as unassailable to any practical opposition. for not only do the toxic companies pay their bills and the country’s bills, they are also so deeply entangled with the state that the residents feel enclosed.   the toxic state: enclosure and neoliberal tolerance of illegal dumping the sports fishermen’s association was the first to lodge legal complaints against igman over a decade ago, but both the municipal and federal governments looked away. state-sanctioned environmental violence in the region around konjic is vast. industrial and commercial toxic waste is dumped into the river; municipal waste is hauled to illegally built dumps and pits that leak toxic spillage into the watershed and people’s gardens; legal and illegal quarries turn hills into sideline craters; semi-legal construction of small hydropower plants destroys riverbeds and annihilates fish. further downstream, government-designated waste dumps have come under scrutiny for failing to contain hazardous waste and for being built semi-legally, in unapproved sites. toxic waste is deposited in open dumps that spill, leak, and emit noxious, terrifying smells. the residents are the ones feel the fallout. the collusion and entwinement between factories that dump toxic waste and government institutions that tacitly authorize it could be called corruption— a disturbance of order—but it is only partly that. we see corruption when state officials and factory management support and protect each other, prioritizing private, individual, short-term profit over public interest. states help comprise “the structure of toxicity” (liboiron, tironi, and calvillo 2018, 336) that to many bosnians feels like an enclosure. states produce and tolerate toxic waste, and sometimes even profit from it. yet, the government’s refusal to regulate toxic waste disposal is not simply a failure or corruption, but is facilitated by neoliberal design. toxicity is embedded in state structure of environmental regulations. the state does not keep check on illegal dumping because neoliberal policies prescribe trust in the companies’ willingness and ability to mitigate environmental harms. neoliberal environmental policies rely on self-regulation and self-monitoring, not government oversight or meaningful penalties. bosnia is one of the places where we see the accentuated effects of deregulation that tolerates the poisoning of the river, soil, air, and human and nonhuman bodies. first, governments are generally accepting of certain levels of toxicity, as the goal of environmental laws and policies is not to eliminate toxicants, but to set allowable limits. thus, bosnia prescribes legal restrictions on industrial waste in accordance with eu regulations that rely on the notion of threshold limits.13 threshold limit regulations assume that “ecosystems and bodies can assimilate a specific amount of toxicant before harm occurs” (liboiron, tironi, and calvillo 2018, 335), but fail to consider our layered, overlapping exposures to thousands of toxicants. as amelia fiske writes, “current models of toxicity are insufficient for conceptualizing and acting upon the role of toxicants in our lives” (2020, 22). second, monitoring adherence to these limits is outside the purview of the neoliberal government. as zeleni-commissioned reports show, the amounts of allowable mercury, lead, trivalent and hexavalent chromium, and other toxicants are vastly exceeded in konjic. everyone, including government agents in charge, knows this. at the government agency jadran (the adriatic) in mostar, i am told that the agency’s job is to issue water permits to companies whose waste flows into neretva, not to monitor compliance with these permits. the friendly chemical engineer repeats what i have heard from residents: igman now has bought a new, two-million-euro filtration system, but nobody knows whether it puts it to use. the disposable filters cost money whereas dumping is free, so everyone suspects that igman and other factories do not use their filtration systems. this official is as clever at identifying loopholes as those who exploit them, but stresses that he cannot act on this knowledge: “even if someone were to call the inspection team, they have to announce their arrival, and on those days, of course, the factories would use the proper filtration system.” he also tells me that konjic is an exemplary environmental steward, compared to the rest of the country. here and elsewhere, officials legitimize toxic overflows by emphasizing how harms are relative to each other (see neimanis, neimanis, and åsberg 2017, 635). bosnia has much bigger problems, he stresses, as toxic dumping in konjic pales in comparison to the coal mines and steel factories in central and northern bosnia, or to toxicity that makes sarajevo’s air pollution the worst in the world. bosnia as a whole ranks as having the fifthto second-highest mortality rate from air pollution worldwide. when having most polluted air is not the legal but the experiential threshold limit, the dumping of hazardous waste into a river can be normalized and made unremarkable. and yet the river also mobilizes people’s felt experience of political urgency and they reclaim it as their inheritance.   conclusion: people of the river a decade after the war, tito’s underground bunker in konjic was turned into an art gallery. a symbol of demilitarization, the bunker today serves as one of the town’s main tourist attractions. on the tour i joined, the guides rushed us through, uninterested in the extraordinary art on display featuring socialist modernism. the military officer who was the main guide brought us to the central electric generator and showed us how it operated. demonstrating the workings of the lever that turned it on, he said, “the real work of art here is the shelter itself.” the message was clear: we were to be in awe of the military structure itself, not the art installations on its walls. in konjic itself, the military apparatus no longer inspires pride and awe, but militarization’s capillary hegemony is now supplanted by precarity and enclosure. the river breaks through the enclosure. its movement, force, and beauty invite the town residents to recognize it as a part of their inheritance, mustering defiance and cultivating survivance. konjic and bosnia are home to a powerful anti-capitalist riverine social movements, as people and activist groups have coalesced around their opposition to small hydropower plants. zeleni neretva has helped galvanize this movement, animating publics and generating political support. one reason this movement has been more successful than the struggle against toxic dumping is that small hydropower plants only benefit a very small number of investors and bought-off government officials. activists have successfully shown that small hydropower plants bring benefits to their builders and government officials they pay off, but fail to benefit surrounding communities while carrying enormous environmental costs. that they alter the rivers’ physical shape and get in the way of migrating fish is seen as particularly violent and destructive. in july 2022, the government of the federation of bosnia and herzegovina adopted the legislation prohibiting the building of small hydropower plants; activist groups are now advocating for halting the work of already built ones. the successes of this movement have clarified the political stakes of people’s entanglements with the river, emboldening and electrifying their critique of toxic dumping. residents of konjic have also begun reclaiming the river. they have come to think of rivers as a form of inheritance that needs to be defended from the predatory capitalism/state formation. “rivers belong to no one; rivers belong to us all,” they proclaim as they protest. reclaiming the river and acting as people of the river includes new and old practices, all of which are resignified as acts of defiance and survivance. they are endowed with a politics of opposition, care, and an orientation toward the river as a form of neighborly inheritance. to reclaim being people of the river means: to seek it out on your daily walk and comment on its beauty, demise, or both each time you pass by: “vidi nam neretve!” (look at our neretva) to clean its banks, gathering plastic and debris, even as you know that more will spill from the landfill to dive into its depths, as divers’ clubs do every year, pulling out appliances and large waste to keep it alive by bringing the fish back to it to start a youth school of sport fishing to say the names of the rocks on its banks and in its stream to travel upstream to plunge yourself into it, rejoicing when you feel the cold deep inside your bones to go further upstream where the river is potable because you want to drink its water and feel it inside your body to photograph its canyons, waters, beaches, rocks, and plants to paint it to sing songs about it to sing by it to tell new stories about it.   acknowledgments thank you to all the people who have pulled me towards the river, have taught me and talked to me, people who are kin and kin-like, and who create new collectivities. may many of us join forces. thank you to larisa kurtović for insisting that i ground this article in place-based conversations. the special section editors also fostered a collective and created a space that makes academia a space of survivance rather than survival. thank you, xan chacko, astrida neimanis, diana pardo pedraza, and jennifer terry for your extraordinary organization, care, and guidance in the review and peer-review process. may we all follow in your footsteps. thank you to caren kaplan, lindsay kelly, and joshua kim for your generous questions and comments. thank you to anonymous peer reviewers for devoting your time and energy to offer detailed, constructive, and even collaborative reviews.   notes 1 eurosjaj (euroshine), igman’s former subsidiary that now operates under german license and bosnian ownership, is responsible for the visible toxic dumping in the center of town.   2 sporadically funded by germany’s green party–aligned heinrich böll stiftung and other foundations, zeleni neretva has tirelessly documented state-sanctioned toxic dumping and environmental violence in their social media and reports, helping galvanize public action (see http://zeleni-neretva.ba/).   3 to arrive at this definition, i build on conceptual discussions in anthropology of militarization (gonzález, gusterson, and houtman 2019, 6; lutz 2002, 723).   4 i have continued formal interviews with government officials, nonprofit and foundation workers, and activists.   5 the us war on terror has displaced half of today’s 80 million and counting refugees, directly murdered over 900,000 people, and brought on sickness and deaths to millions of others (“costs of the 20-year war on terror,” 2021). those who try to find refuge face deprivation, torture, and closed borders; bosnia is one of the countries into which the eu violently and illegally returns refugees (ahmetašević 2021).   6 the jna, under largely serbian leadership, was one of the main protagonists in the genocidal wars in the 1990s. often conceived as wars among ethnic groups or, at best, former yugoslav republics, these wars were also waged by the jna against its constituents who declared independence: slovenia, croatia, and bosnia.   7 the department of defense produces “more toxic waste than the u.s.a’s top three chemical manufacturers combined” (mitchell 2013, 1).   8 on violence constitutive to yugoslav socialism, see the digital exhibit our families (forthcoming). on limits with respect to gender equity, see korac 1998; on exclusions due to ethnicity, race, and nationality, see krasniqi 2021 and sardelić 2015.   9 yugoslavia understood the condition of its sovereignty as derived from anti-fascist defense and subsequent militarization. we were taught that yugoslavia was not freed by anyone in world war ii—the country’s anti-fascist resistance forces had freed themselves from occupation. freedom was not a gift to be repaid to imperial powers but a legacy to uphold.   10 see subotić and vučetić (2019) for a critique of yugoslavia’s privileging of anti-colonialism over anti-racism.   11 the unpaid civil servants rarely protest, but in november 2021 hospital workers from konjic started striking, eventually laying down their uniforms in december. they cried as they did so, talking to tv cameras about how they had never stopped working, not even during the war, when the hospital was incessantly shelled for days at a time. they invoked the war to remind the state of their sacrifices and the legitimacy of their demands for salaries, which have been restored—for now.   12 the office of the high representative has ill-defined and unaccountable powers. in addition, it often exercises authority it does not have, unilaterally firing bosnian judges and members of parliament and trying to 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"the creation of the new yugoslav woman: emancipatory elements of media discourse from the end of world war ii." viewpoint magazine, september 30, 2018. https://viewpointmag.com/2018/09/30/the-creation-of-the-new-yugoslav-woman-emancipatory-elements-of-media-discourse-from-the-end-of-world-war-ii/. mitchell, jon. 2013. “okinawa – the pentagon's toxic junk heap of the pacific.” the asia-pacific journal 11 (47 (6)): 1–10. https://apjjf.org/2013/11/47/jon-mitchell/4039/article.html. murphy, michelle. 2013. “distributed reproduction, chemical violence, and latency.” scholar and feminist online 11 (3). https://sfonline.barnard.edu/distributed-reproduction-chemical-violence-and-latency/. murphy, michelle. 2020. “some keywords toward decolonial methods: studying settler colonial histories and environmental violence from tkaronto.” history and theory 59 (3): 376–84. http://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12165. neimanis, astrida, aleksija neimanis, and cecilia åsberg. 2017. “fathoming chemical weapons in the gotland deep.” cultural geographies 24 (4): 631–38. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26402602. nguyen, mimi thi. 2012. the gift of freedom: war, debt, and other refugee passages. durham, nc: duke university press. povinelli, elizabeth a. 2017. “fires, fogs, winds.” cultural anthropology 32 (4): 504–13. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.03. roberts, elizabeth f.s. 2017. “what gets inside: violent entanglements and toxic boundaries in mexico city.” cultural anthropology 32 (4): 592–619. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.07. sardelić, julija. 2015. “romani minorities and uneven citizenship access in the post-yugoslav space.” ethnopolitics 14 (2): 159–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2014.991154. subotić, jelena, and srdjan vučetić. 2019. “performing solidarity: whiteness and status-seeking in the non-aligned world.” journal of international relations and development 22 (3): 722–43. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-017-0112-2. tironi, manuel. 2018. “hypo-interventions: intimate activism in toxic environments.” social studies of science 48 (3): 438–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312718784779. vizenor, gerald. 2008. “aesthetics of survivance.” in survivance: narratives of native presence, edited by gerald vizenor, 1–24. lincoln: university of nebraska press. world health organization. 2022. “lead poisoning.” fact sheet. august 31, 2022. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/lead-poisoning-and-health.     author bio saida hodžić is an associate professor of anthropology and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at cornell university. the author of the award-winning book the twilight of cutting: african activism and life after ngos, she is writing a book called refugee solidarity: humanitarian afterlives of war and violence and developing a podcast called refugees know things. microsoft word 76926-1-11-_hickman.docx hickman, l. (2019). transcription work and the practices of crip technoscience. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-10. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © louise hickman, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license lab notes transcription work and the practices of crip technoscience louise hickman university of california, san diego lhickman@ucsd.edu abstract the following essay considers the emergence of transcription work provided by communication access real-time translation (cart) operators in academic spaces for d/deaf and hard of hearing individuals to foreground the practice of access. how do we account for the distribution and attribution of access in a way that is mediated across human and non-human objects? i draw on crip technoscience to illuminate the value of the stenographer’s labor and their dictionary software as an inherent part of the production of knowledge. across the street from the western edge of the uc san diego campus sits the striking figure of the salk institute for biological studies. founded by jonas salk in 1957 shortly after his successful development of the polio vaccine, today the louis kahn–designed institute is a site for research on cancer biology, immune system biology, neuroscience, and neurological disorders.1 while the institute’s website presents the research center as “where cures begin,” much of its ongoing and cutting-edge research is funded by the philanthropic efforts of the march of dimes, a mid-twentiethcentury institution with a mixed legacy within the history of crip technoscience. the specter of the mid-twentieth-century poster child at the hickman catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 center of march of dimes campaigns provides powerful and sentimental visual rhetoric for the maintenance of the nonprofit industrial complex, arguably a type of “inspiration porn” that flourishes across social media today.2 yet it was at the salk institute that the french philosopher bruno latour conducted his ethnographic study of endocrinologists, the results of which were published in his and steve woolgar’s (1979) co-authored groundbreaking study laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. laying the groundwork for the future approaches of influential scholars such as emily martin and annemarie mol, latour and woolgar’s work became foundational to the idea that studying the ways in which knowledge practices are produced in situ might tell us something revelatory about science. fundamental to this vision was their use of ethnography; as the british sociologist john law (2004) writes in after method, ethnographers of science have “a culture. they have beliefs. they have practices. they work, they gossip, and they worry about the future. and, somehow or other, out of their work, their practices and their beliefs, they produce knowledge, scientific knowledge, accounts of reality” (p. 19). social scientists, law argues, are not that different from humanists, visual artists, historians, philosophers, and natural scientists, and these “tribes of scientists” use tools and methods just like “other tribes” to produce knowledge. yet it is my contention that ethnographers of science have neglected a crucial component of knowledge production, one that is central to crip technoscience: the provision for, and possibility of, access as a central node of knowledge practices. just as latour and woolgar grappled with how scientific knowledge is produced, i grapple with the question of how crip technoscientific knowledge is produced with the support of access workers in academic spaces. at uc san diego, i had numerous conversations about the role of access in knowledge production with faculty and students in the graduate science studies program, a scholarly community in close proximity to the salk institute in which scientists study their peers’ practice in and beyond the laboratory setting. i began to ask, what if we were to examine the practices through which access is produced, especially by using the hickman catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 methodological tools and intellectual traditions of both early laboratory studies and later feminist science studies? who, for instance, provides the labor that makes access possible? how do we account for the distribution and attribution of access in a way that is mediated across human and nonhuman objects? how do we practice everyday access for disabled students and faculty? are there communities of practice centering around the provision of access? and, if so, how mobile, or flexible, are such communities of practice? like many other d/deaf and hard of hearing students, i use communication access real-time translation (cart) in the classroom as part of a set of accommodations offered by the disability service on campus. in my work, i argue that cart provides a case study for the ways in which access can be both an object and subject of ethnographic study, since the production of real-time captioning informs the acquisition of knowledge in a uniquely specific way. stenographers and d/deaf and hard of hearing students engage and interact regularly through processes of collective learning. in such communities of practice, stenographers provide a locale through which knowledge-from-below is produced, thus contributing value and knowledge practices to the infrastructure of access on campus. for cart stenographers, real-time captioning is both the practice of crip technoscience as well as its product. cart stenographers, also known as operators, translate academic neologisms from spoken speech into steno codes via their machine in order to render their real-time captions as readable. as a result, they must be deeply embedded in the relevant knowledge practices of each classroom. transcription can only occur through regular access to knowledge practices in situ, and the success of real-time captions most often depends on the stenographer’s practice of care, as well as the maintenance work of their dictionary software in and beyond their remunerated labor hours. the practice of care and maintenance work consists of repairing broken steno codes with spoken speech, and constructing and editing new vocabulary terms (i.e., words lists) within their existing dictionaries. without access to the knowledge practices associated with disciplinary sites, steno workers hickman catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 will not have access to the correct “job dictionary” for facilitating captions in certain environments. stenographers with real-time transcription experience that is largely informed by theoretical work in the social sciences—references to foucault or marx, for instance—cannot simply import their existing dictionaries over to stem-related subjects. by the same token, technical terms associated with stem subjects are not simply imported for cart users studying in the social sciences and humanities. only through consistent knowledge practice in selected subjects can stenographers’ job dictionaries exist for the use of their d/deaf and hard of hearing clients. figure 1. digital steno codes powered by computer-aided technology. photograph courtesy of the author. figure 1 depicts a black and white close-up of a personal computer used on-site in a classroom, which reveals a series of capitalized letters. in hickman catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 the background, there are blurred images of students seated at the seminar table. the focus of the computer screen frames a series of letters equally spaced out, down the right side of a vertical screen in two columns of text. the columns of text are repeated to spell out the singular letters needed to communicate the acronym “ada” (americans with disabilities act). on this particular occasion, the stenographer is repeating the strokes on their twenty-four-key steno-board to locate and practice the encoding of ada into their specific job dictionary. under real-time conditions, the detailed attention required to spell each letter of the acronym equates to a temporal rhythm that is not captured by spoken speech. for steno workers, the task of completing acronyms, unusual spellings, and numbers departs from a standardized approach to stenoform. steno workers are trained to transcribe speech according to their discursive context rather than spelling each letter individually, a process that is time-consuming and puts pressure on them to keep up with the ongoing flow of talk. the process of curating real-time access therefore draws on the steno worker’s affective capacity to make sense of, and code, speech. high abstraction translates to phonetic mishaps, and therefore knowledge production and the exchange of information within the classroom frequently begins to unravel. these lapses are translated as “[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible],” or replaced with long dashes, “–––.” this is also coupled with the production of speaker anonymity, since the yellow text on the royal blue background identifies the professor, while multiple speaking student(s) share a singular identity, omitted and standardized in this way. under real-time conditions, it is difficult to resist the process of standardization, when clarity and efficiency are essential to maintaining access to spoken speech for d/deaf and hard of hearing students. in other branches of the speech-to-text industry, such as broadcasting work, there are moves to adopt artificial intelligence to further standardize the process of captioning without the need for a stenographer. the displacement of human workers, along with the increased outsourcing of transcription work to microtasking platforms such as amazon mechanical turk (mturk), is premised on the idea that the means of access is a neutral process of hickman catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 transferring speech and visual data into readable and spoken text, in turn disavowing the centrality of situated and affective labor in the complexity of access work. like ethnographers and philosophers of science, stenographers and their machines employ methodologies and tools that resonate with the means of translating speech into meaningful texts. knowledge practices informed by a stenographer’s transcription work also draws parallels with care work, repair and maintenance work, and access work that largely occurs through the process of practicing knowledge in situ. these practices resonate with the ethics of crip technoscience, in which knowledge-frombelow informs the machination of a stenographer’s dictionary software. for steno workers, repairing and caring for their job dictionary is a humancentered practice that echoes forms of “collegial intimacy” collectively maintained by workers and their relation to their readers (hickman, 2018). the term collegial intimacy draws on the work of mia mingus (2011), aimi hamraie (2013), as well as that of park mcarthur and constantina zavitsanos (2013), who have all reflected on the collective means of care and access. unlike conventional care workers, access workers are additionally in close proximity to information workers, who are categorized alongside engineers, scientists, and design professionals. in this capacity, those who enact the labor of access are part of a cohort of workers that includes stenographers, audio describers, and sign language interpreters. how these steno workers understand their work is not always defined by their proximity to care work, but rather their work is collectively defined and managed by communities of practice. cart stenographers working in higher education have professional overlaps with courtroom reporters (both groups are represented by the national court reporters association), thus providing the former group access to professional recognition (downey, 2008). as argued above, the need for maintenance work is required for the stenographers and students alike to produce opportunities for collegial intimacy across academic spaces. steno workers often find themselves exceeding the ada’s definition of “best practice” in real-time captioning as put forward by disability legislation, in order to note the social complexity of hickman catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 spoken speech and the nuances of transposing spoken speech into readable texts. even though many stenographers align themselves with information workers, at times advocating for the recognition of their work is sacrificed in an attempt to foreground the agency of their consumers. to reconcile the visibility of their work not only reveals the social complexity of transcription work but, i would like to suggest, draws attention to the question of methodologies in critical disability studies. how might access work resonate with the recent turn towards critical methodology? in a recent series of short essays featured in lateral, jina b. kim (2017) and sami schalk (2017) respond to minich’s (2016) essay “enabling whom? critical disability studies now.” in their responses, each author synthesizes key factors in the emergence of critical disability studies to describe a turn towards the study of methodology. in this turn, disability, as minich (2016) asserts, proves to be a “mode of analysis rather than [an] object of study.” kim’s (2017) essay furthers minich’s thesis, calling for the shifting of disability “from noun—an identity one can occupy—to verb: a critical methodology.” when considering the labor of access workers and disability studies scholars in the field, we can refer to minich, kim, and schalk’s collective reflections on the positionality of disabled people and people of color as modes of analysis synonymous to the practice of “doing scholarship” in (critical) disability studies. with this in mind, how might researchers enfold the usage of assistive technology into conversations around knowledge-making in disability culture? would, for instance, scholars in (critical) disability studies ever consider themselves “access workers” as they pay close attention in their work to visual and audio description in order to render it accessible? similarly, anthropologists and ethnographers employ thin and thick description that cuts across the audio and/or visual in their research, but not always as a means to render their research accessible. we might ask therefore to what extent intent makes one providing access an access worker. by reflecting on the practice of description and transcription in this way, we can begin to disentangle access from its sole association with disability to laterally engage with access through the labor practices that hickman catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 produce it. by this, i mean not to depoliticize disability, but rather to broaden the complexity of access in the provision of real-time captioning across speech-to-text industries to include everything from cart services on campus to media broadcasting work. as laboratory ethnographers explored the construction of scientific facts through attending to daily practices, so too we might understand the deconstruction of disability as diagnostic and medical categories by disability studies scholars. disability studies scholars have understood the social model as a useful tool to demonstrate the state (or indeed lack) of social infrastructures and communities of practice that inform the construction of disability. even from outside of a framework that centers disability, studying the practices of access work has the potential to posit a different set of questions for crip technoscience such as, how do we develop a critical understanding of the ethics of access? how does critical methodology, for example, of the sort put forward by schalk, kim, and minich, resonate with the production of knowledge provided by access workers? by developing an attention to the complex histories and practices of access, we can locate real-time captioning as no longer simply a byproduct of disability accommodation but as a layered sociocultural text that describes instances of knowledge production. this shift offers concrete opportunities to reconsider and experiment with an ethics of access not only as our object of study but as a scholarly practice. acknowledgements i gratefully acknowledge jennifer betancourt, christopher chamberlin, yelena gluzman and sophie peck for revealing the visibility of transcription work by supporting me through their ongoing commitment to their own practices of access. i could not reflect on these practices without the intellectual space provided by transdisciplinary disability studies and the feminist labor lab at uc san diego’s department of communication. hickman catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 notes 1 for more on the history of the salk institute, consult their website at https://www.salk.edu/about/history-of-salk/. 2 for more on the role of the march of dimes in latter-century us charity politics, see gotkin (2018); sharpe (2016); and longmore (2015). references downey, g. j. (2008). closed captioning: subtitling, stenography, and the digital convergence of text with television. john hopkins press. gotkin, k. (2018). the marathon and on: disability, endurance, aspiration (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of pennsylvania, philadelphia. hamraie, a. (2013). designing collective access: a feminist disability theory of universal design. disability studies quarterly, 33(4), 1-33. hickman, l. (2018). transcription machines, access work and collegial network: disability, technology and feminist labor (1956-present). (unpublished doctoral dissertation). university of california, san diego. kim, j. b. (2017). toward a crip-of-color critique: thinking with minich’s “enabling whom?” lateral, 6(1). retrieved from http://csalateral.org/issue/6-1/forum-alt-humanities-critical-disabilitystudies-crip-of-color-critique-kim/ latour, b., & woolgar, s. (2013). laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. princeton, nj: princeton university press. (originally published in 1979) law, j. (2007). making a mess with method. thousand oaks, ca: sage. longmore, p. (2015). “heaven’s special child”: the making of poster children. in c. kudlick (ed.), telethons: spectacle, disability, and the business of charity (pp. 154-171). new york: oxford university press. mcarthur, p., & zavitsanos, c. (2013). other forms of conviviality: the best and least of which is our daily care and the host of which is our collaborative work. women & performance: a journal of feminist theory, hickman catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 23(1), 126-132. mingus, m. (2011, february 12). changing the framework: disability justice. leaving evidence [blog]. (initially posted november 2011 on the resist website). retrieved from https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/changing-theframework-disability-justice/ minich, j. a. (2016). enabling whom? critical disability studies now. lateral, 5(1). retrieved from http://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-althumanities-critical-disability-studies-now-minich/ schalk, s. (2017). critical disability studies as methodology. lateral, 6(1). retrieved from http://csalateral.org/issue/6-1/forum-alt-humanities-criticaldisability-studies-methodology-schalk/ sharpe, c. t. v. (2016). they need you! disability, visual culture, and the poster child, 1945-1980 (unpublished doctoral dissertation). george mason university, fairfax, va. bio: louise hickman completed her ph.d. in communication at the university of california, san diego in 2018. she works in critical disability studies, science and technology studies, critical methodology, feminist labor and crip theory. her current book project focuses on transcriptive technology (for example, speech-to-text translation) and the cultural formation of access workers and their labor practices, focusing on transcription from 1956 to the present.     special section: global fertility chains and the colonial present of assisted reproductive technologies the slave episteme in biocapitalism     alys eve weinbaum university of washington alysw@uw.edu     abstract this article explores the connection between the extraction and dispossession of human reproductive labor power and its products in the contexts of atlantic slavery and contemporary biocapitalism. it argues that the conceptualization and practice of slave reproduction that sustained slave racial capitalism is forwarded into the biocapitalist present through “the slave episteme.” this becomes evident when reproduction in biocapitalism is viewed through the lens of the long history of slave “breeding” in the atlantic world. while the “blackness” that enslavers attributed to enslaved mothers and their progeny objectified and dehumanized both and rationalized their treatment as fungible and alienable commodities, in contempory biocapitalism the racial formation that subtends reproductive extraction and dispossession has been complexly recalibrated to do related ideological and material work. the article concludes with a discussion of the sublation of “blackness” in contemporary market exchanges in which reproductive labor and its products are bought and sold.     keywords reproduction, slavery, surrogacy, arts, racial capitalism, biocapitalism, black feminism     introduction over the last two decades, scholars of human reproduction have examined the development and consumption of biotechnological know-how and assisted reproductive technologies (arts), especially in vitro fertilization (ivf) and embryo freezing, and have honed in on expanding markets in oocyte vending and gestational surrogacy. in attending to human reproduction’s commodification around the globe, they highlight the extractive character of the seemingly quotidian economic exchanges by which we are today surrounded and in which increasing numbers of people participate as either sellers or consumers of human biological commodities including cells, tissue, eggs, wombs, and babies. taken together existing scholarship documents interconnected markets that make possible what some call “transnational reproduction” and what others evocatively describe as the “global fertility chains” that link a range of reproductive transactions across geographically and geopolitically disparate spaces (vertommen, pavone, and nahman 2021). such “chains” simultaneously connect and bind. they transform poor women in the global south who sell reproductive labor and products into workers who fulfill the affective and material desires of intending parents seeking to purchase high-tech babies (or the necessary labor, biological parts, and biotechnological processes). notably, consumers oftentimes elect transnational reproduction so that they can short-circuit prohibitions on economic transactions in their home countries. in this way, their reproductive choices facilitate further expansion of global fertility chains.   in limning the commodification of human reproduction that characterizes contemporary global exchange, scholars reveal the scope and inner workings of a version of late capitalism that is most aptly labeled “biocapitalist.”1 this moniker, though by no means adopted by all who treat transnational reproduction and the global fertility chains that secure it, is mobilized here as descriptive shorthand. in my preferred reading, biocapitalism is both a linguistic and a conceptual term. the prefacing “bio” draws attention to the commodification of in vivo processes (ovulation, conception, gestation, and parturition), the commodification of human biological products (cells, tissue, eggs, and babies), and the accumulation of surplus value by those who possess the means to invest in (as opposed to those who labor at) what i will hereafter refer to as (re)production.2 i place parentheses around “re” to create a term that describes how women’s in vivo processes and biological products move through capitalist circuits of exchange alongside of conventional commodities, thereby constituting a specifically (re)productive form of productive labor. as with the exchange of conventional commodities, (re)productive commodities are rendered alienable and fungible in and through market exchange.   in the past decade, scholars of biocapitalism have sought to treat the colonial histories and imaginaries that subtend the (re)production of surplus value. attentiveness to such legacies is treated in rich ethnographies on the processes and products offered for sale in parts of the global south formerly subject to colonialism, especially india (pande 2014; rudrappa 2015; hochschild 2012; vora 2015; deomampo 2016). notably, the colonial legacies of arts are also amplified in several articles collected in this special issue. settler colonialism is examined in emergent research on arts in scholarship focused on contexts subject to ongoing occupation, especially palestine (nahman 2013; vertommen 2017). focus on both colonialism and settler colonialism is evident in recent scholarship that takes a meta view and tracks the spread of (re)productive markets in cryopreserved eggs and gestational labor to new locations in asia, africa, latin america, and eastern europe in the wake of the closure of the indian surrogate market to foreigner consumers in 2015 (parry and ghoshal 2022; parry and ghoshal 2018). and yet, despite the attention to colonial and settler colonial legacies, existing scholarship on (re)production in biocapitalism can be characterized by a concerning, although largely unremarked silence on the related issue of the impress of the legacies of atlantic slavery on arts and the global market in (re)productive labor and products more generally. as i discuss later in this article, this silence has been created by separation of the history of colonialism from that of atlantic slavery, and by tacit assumption that the history of slavery is only truly germane in relation to analysis of surrogacy in the united states. the upshot: in most feminist work on biocapitalism long-standing relationships of historical reciprocity between colonialism and atlantic slavery are ignored––the relationships that subtended globalizing capitalism from the outset (robinson 1983; lowe 2015; melamed, 2015; smallwood 2019)––and the impact of what enslavers called slave “breeding” on contemporary conceptualization and practice of (re)production is all but entirely neglected.   in the afterlife of reproductive slavery: biocapitalism and black feminism’s philosophy of history, i call attention to the silence and neglect of the legacies of slavery and seek to redress it. following in the footsteps of black feminists who first wrote on surrogacy in the 1990s (roberts 1997; allen 1990, 1991; rutherford 1992; cherry 2001), i explore the impress of the practice of slave “breeding” on contemporary (re)production and thus account for how (re)production in biocapitalism is conceptualized and materialized in and through ideas about human reproductive labor and products that were brewed up in the context of atlantic slavery. i suggest the urgency of bringing feminist histories of slavery in the americas and the caribbean to bear not only on surrogacy in the us but also on (re)production in global biocapitalism.3 along the way i argue, that more than any other group of scholars and activists, black feminists, writing across idioms (history, theory, law, and fiction, among others) have demonstrated that slavery shaped and continues to contour the cultures and politics of human reproduction and mothering in the modern world.4 and i thus urge scholars of (re)production in biocapitalism to follow the lead of black feminists, especially those writing about surrogacy and slavery. for when black feminist insights are set to work in relation to transnational reproduction and the global fertility chains that secure it, it becomes possible to apprehend what i have called “the afterlife of reproductive slavery,” and thus to discern the myriad itineraries and iterations of anti-blackness in a neoliberal, supposedly post-racial present.5 in sum, in the afterlife of reproductive slavery i argue for recognition of biocapitalism as a form of racial capitalism (more on the latter concept shortly) that is predicated on the forwarding into the present of ideas about racialized (re)production that were set in place long ago.   in the present article, i reprise key arguments of my book in view of the animating concern of this special issue: “the colonial present of arts.” by digging into the thorny question of the relationship of the extraction and dispossession of (re)productive labor and products in biocapitalism to the extraction and dispossession of (re)productive labor and products in atlantic slavery, i seek to contribute to the discussion about the colonial present an understanding of the importance of engaging with the long history of atlantic slavery. when placed alongside the history of colonialism, the history of slavery not only allows for comprehension of the complex material foundation for contemporary biocapitalism it also allows for identification of a constitutive epistemic antecedent for the complex processes of racialization that power the forms of (re)productive extraction and dispossession by which we are today surrounded and in which many people participate.   above all, the impress of the history of slavery on biocapitalism becomes visible when we attend to what i elsewhere describe as the slave episteme (2019)––the thought system, brewed up and distilled over the course of four centuries, that initially enabled and continues to subtend the racialization of (re)production. when tracking the slave episteme, it is useful to underscore an instructive if seldom acknowledged fact: there are only two periods in modern world history during which in vivo (re)productive labor and products have been expressly engineered for profit. the first of these is the extended period of racial slavery in the atlantic world, a period during which enslaved women’s wombs became the source of human commodities and were themselves treated as commodities. the second is the comparatively brief period that commences with the rise of biocapitalism and the market for surrogate labor in the 1970s, a period that extends over several decades into the present.   and yet, having made this point, i should clarify that my intent in tracking the forwarding of the slave episteme into the present is not to demonstrate a simple form of historical repetition. i neither aim to document resurgence of human (re)productive enslavement nor to equate contemporary (re)productive laborers and women who were enslaved. instead, the present argument is principally philosophical and speculative. it seeks to shift conceptualization of the relationship of human reproduction to capitalism by highlighting not only the role of non-commodified reproductive labor in social reproduction (as marxist feminists and a subsequent cohort of social reproduction theorists have so eloquently done [mies 1986; federici 2012; bhattacharya 2017]) but also by highlighting the centrality of expressly commodified (re)productive labor and products. in short, i seek to offer an argument about the persistence of an old conceptual edifice—the slave episteme—by exploring how it time-travels and in so doing constellates contemporary (re)productive extraction and dispossession with its historical antecedent.   as it constellates past and present, the slave episteme does something remarkable and remarkably disturbing: it renders contemporary (re)productive extraction and dispossession conceivable in both senses of that biologically laden term. this becomes evident when contemporary (re)production is viewed through the lens of the long history of slave “breeding.” for when we begin from an understanding of atlantic slavery as an economic system that came over time to be based on (re)productive extraction and dispossession, it becomes possible to see that contemporary (re)productive extraction and dispossession would be unthinkable––and thus unmaterializable––were it not for the creation and persistent recalibration of racialized ideas about wombs as founts of fungible and alienable commodities.   biocapitalism as racial capitalism in advancing an argument about the afterlife of reproductive slavery, i’ve found it necessary to bring the concept of biocapitalism into conversation with that of racial capitalism. the latter was first developed by the political scientist cedric robinson in his groundbreaking study, black marxism (1983). according to robinson, contemporary capitalism has constitutively racial origins and is powered by ongoing racial dynamics. drawing on a range of thinkers whom he dubs “black marxist,” robinson demonstrates that there is a black radical tradition that has continuously elaborated on ideas first proffered by marx and engels but never fully adumbrated by them. these include ideas about the role that processes of racialization play in the creation of the antagonisms that turn the wheels of capitalism and thus modern history. as robinson explains through recourse to w.e b. du bois and c.l.r. james among others, complex processes of racial differentiation not only initially enabled dispossession, enclosure, colonization, genocide, settlement, and enslavement (in short, the combined processes that marx and engels include within their account of the birth of capitalism during what they incorrectly regard as a finite period of “so-called primitive accumulation”), complex processes of racialization continue to power ongoing capitalist expansion. as robinson famously observes, “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, [and] so too did social ideology. as a material force…it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism” (1983, 2). capitalism, robinson concludes, is always already racial capitalism.   robinson’s insights have transformed numerous academic fields including slavery studies. this is unsurprising given that the history of atlantic slavery so clearly manifests the dynamics of racial capitalism. within recent historical scholarship, plantation economies in the americas and the caribbean are now regarded as key players in early racial capitalist expansion which finds its apotheosis in contemporary globalization. relatedly, the concept of “blackness” is now treated as the principal ideological creation responsible for rationalizing and thus materializing the forms of dehumanization that subtend enslavement (baptist 2014; johnson 1999, 2013; smallwood 2007), and subtend the capitalist world system (wallerstein 2004). in some work, atlantic slavery has simply been recast as “slave racial capitalism” (johnson 2013). this coinage represents more than semantic innovation. it signals wholescale reconceptualization of atlantic slavery as one instantiation of racial capitalism among others, one that sits alongside colonialism, settler colonialism, and, i argue, biocapitalism. put otherwise, the concept of slave racial capitalism invites awareness of racial capitalism’s continuous recalibration of complex processes of racial differentiation, and of slavery as an instantiation of racial capitalism that both precedes and shapes biocapitalism.6 and yet, to fully compass the relationship of historical reciprocity between slavery and biocapitalism it is necessary to go beyond robinson by focusing in on the history of (re)production in slavery that is afforded by expressly feminist historians. together with other black feminist scholars of racial capitalism, feminist historians of slavery foreground sex and reproduction (and thus attune us to the intersection of gender and sexuality with race and class), effectively demonstrating that slavery was powered by both productive and (re)productive labor.7   three generations of feminist historians ground my thinking on atlantic slavery as the world’s first modern (re)productive enterprise (davis 1971; hine 1979; white 1985; beckles 1989; bush 1990; camp 2004; morgan 2004; fuentes 2016; berry 2017; turner 2017). hilary mcd. beckles’s now classic history of enslaved women in barbados is especially instructive for present purposes. as beckles explains, earlier (non-feminist) scholars of the oldest and most lucrative of the sugar economies were unable to explain why it was that importation of african women outnumbered importation of african men beginning in the late seventeenth century because they simply could not recognize female slaves as the main source of capital accumulation within the plantation economy (1989, 2). the situation on barbadian plantations was not exceptional, beckles insists, but ought to be regarded as indexical of “the overall history of plantation america” (5) in that it attests to a long-neglected truth: all enslaved women experienced slavery as producers and reproducers, as all enslaved women were valued in both capacities throughout the atlantic world. the task of writing the history of women in slavery is not, therefore, the “absurd” one of “adding women to history.” it is the challenging one of restoring history to those who constituted “the pivot”––as opposed to the tangent––around which the entire slave enterprise turned (beckles 1989, 5).   like most studies of caribbean slavery, beckles divides his into three distinct periods. during the first (1627–1730), planters preferred to import african men. however, once land was cleared, women were increasingly imported to perform agricultural work. in the second period (1730–1790), planters came to regard african women as more manageable and efficient than men because west and central africa women were already acculturated to heavy agricultural labor. consequently, in the second period, import of african women dramatically increased. by the start of the third period (1790–1838) a new gender dynamic was set in place. planters worked enslaved women in field gangs and invested in their (re)productive labor. significantly, because this last period encompassed the imposition of the 1807 slave trade act that banned further importation of captive africans to the new world, it is the period of greatest interest here. bracketed by the slave trade act and british abolition of slavery, this last period was characterized by intensified "creolization” of the slave population (beckles’s euphemism), by increase in the valuation of enslaved women, and, most importantly, by systematic “stimulation” of fertility (again, beckles’s term). specifically, enslaved women were offered concessions that were expressly targeted at amelioration of the harsh, often deadly conditions on barbadian plantations that militated against conception, gestation, and care for pregnancies and offspring. although beckles finds little empirical evidence of what he calls “selective breeding” (by which he presumably means the application of the principals of animal husbandry to human beings), his analysis of management manuals detailing plantation organization and administration support his conclusion that slave (re)production was deliberately “orchestrated” (beckles 1989, 92).   planters were motivated to orchestrate (re)production by their growing awareness that successful “increase” was fast becoming not only a useful means by which labor power could be replenished, but after 1807 the only legal means by which slave racial capitalism could be maintained. due to implementation of highly successful managerial strategies and use of incentives in the late eighteenth century, by the start of the nineteenth century, slavery in barbados was no longer dependent on the importation of captive africans. whereas in the 1730s and 1740s at least half the children born in barbados died within their first week of life, by the 1790s, improved diet, lessened workload during pregnancy, fieldwork schedules more amenable to nursing, and monetary incentives for live births together facilitated increased (re)production and a sharp decline in infant mortality.8 nothing evinces intensified planter investment in slave women’s (re)productive lives more poignantly than changes in planter bookkeeping practices. alongside increase in cattle, horses, and other valuable nonhuman livestock, beginning in the late eighteenth century planters began to routinely record the birth of slaves as capital gains (beckles 1989, 102).   subsequent scholarship expands on beckles’s signal contribution by accounting not only for the material conditions of enslaved (re)production but also for the importance of the ideological dimensions of (re)productive enslavement to a globalizing euro-american empire. as jennifer morgan (2004) elaborates in her watershed study of the early english colonies in the west indies and on the north american mainland, enslavers required both women’s physical labor and their “symbolic value” as “black,” fecund, animal beings. to this end, those invested in the slave trade created and disseminated ideas about the distinct “blackness” of african women through discourses that tethered african women’s reproductive bodies and capacities, actual and imagined, to their enslavability. these discourses, initiated by european travelers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, can be gleaned from both visual and discursive archives that together adumbrate the ideological construction of african women as (re)productive assets, living and breathing tools available for use. in etchings from the seventeenth century that portray african women at work in the fields, for instance, they are depicted nursing infants, affixed to their backs, with milk provided by elongated breasts that are slung over their shoulders (morgan 2004, 12–49). in written accounts, african women are depicted as capable of “pain-free” and “disinterested” delivery; parturition is for them just another form of work. indeed, for african women reproductive and productive toil were represented as entirely compatible activities. as travel diaries attest, african women were a breed apart, less-than-human beings descended from a bestial point of origin that was imagined to be “black” and therefore distinct from that of the christian eve and her white european descendants (morgan 2004, 40–47).9   in creating representations of african women’s “black” (re)productive difference, europeans fueled an ideology in which “blackness” constituted a visible mark of the biological and social distance separating african and european women. in circulating representations of african women as “black”, europeans naturalized the two forms of productive labor impressed upon female slaves: agricultural work and (re)production of human commodities. over time, such representations rationalized treatment of enslaved conception, gestation, parturition, and the products of “black” women’s wombs as fungible and alienable.   in so far as (re)production was deemed fungible, (re)productive labor and products were regarded as substitutable––one commodity (including labor power) could stand in for another so that a purely formal economic exchange could take place.10 as in vivo labor took place within enslaved wombs, the children being gestated within were abstracted into the metrics of capital. upon birth, all qualitative characteristics were erased or instrumentalized so that children could be viewed as commodities that could justifiably circulate in quantifiable form. in so far as (re)productive labor was deemed alienable the “lively products” to which women gave birth were regarded as rightfully separable from those who (re)produced them, transferrable away from the (re)productive body through market exchange. like their mothers, children born to enslaved women were regarded as chattel. because they existed as commodities within an exchange relationship, enslaved women who gave birth were forced to (re)produce the foreclosure of their own motherhood, the “natal alienation” of their children (patterson 1982), their own and their children's status as dehumanized slaves, and their mutual loss of belonging to each other as recognized kin. as hortense spillers observes, in slavery the gendered maternal function was severed from (re)production effectively rendering ideas such as senator moynihan’s “black matriarch” a violent misnaming of “the captive female”—she whose gender was in fact negated in and through the abstracting calculations involved in filling the hold of the slave ship with “human-as-cargo” bound for the new world (1987, 72).   taken together, the fungibility and alienability of (re)productive labor and its products distinguish commodified (re)production from non-commodified reproduction (for instance unremunerated domestic work, child bearing, child rearing, care for the elderly, sick, and dying, etc.), as non-commodified reproduction only indirectly enters into circuits of market exchange. put otherwise, although non-commodified reproduction is integral to the reproduction of capitalism, as marxist feminists, social reproduction theorists, and historians of care work and intimate labor demonstrate (mies 1986; federici 2012; bhattacharya 2017; boris and parreñas 2010), non-commodified reproduction is not expressly transacted in order to create surplus value in the ways that the (re)productive labor of enslaved women was once transacted in the context of atlantic slavery, or the ways that it is today transacted in the global marketplace for (re)productive labor and products.11   the fungibility and alienability of enslaved (re)production is nowhere more visible than in the implementation, beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century, of the new world interpretation of the ancient roman doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem (berry 2017; morgan 2004, 2018). this latin phrase, roughly translated as “that which comes forth follows the womb,” was enshrined in english and spanish slave codes to ensure that children born to enslaved women were enslaved. significantly, partus made a child born to an enslaved woman enslaveable regardless of the race or status of the father. as a consequence, free white men’s rape of enslaved women functioned to augment their own (or other free men’s) property. by the late antebellum era, advertisements and bills of sale frequently classified enslaved women as “breeders” or “breeding wenches,” indicating precisely how (re)productive labor and products were valued.12 especially robust enslaved men were selected and taken on a “breeding circuit” and appraised for rent or sale as “studs” (roberts 1997, 28; berry 2017, 19, 78–79). although limited space requires me to omit a discussion of the sexual labor performed by male and female slaves, it is crucial to note that while the concept of (re)production does not encompass all forms of sexual labor, it includes, by necessity, procreative sex. in fact, the term “(re)production” instructively illustrates (precisely because it replicates) the enslaver’s enfolding of procreative sex, often in the form of rape, into (re)productive labor. my intention in using (re)production as a portmanteau is certainly not to minimize sexual violence in slavery, but rather to specify the manner in which (re)productive extraction and dispossession included extraction and dispossession of procreative sex.13 put otherwise, from the vantage point of enslavers and thus from that of (re)production as an engine of surplus value, enslaved sex, conception, gestation, and parturition were inextricable. by contrast, from the vantage point of enslaved individuals and communities, conception, gestation, and parturition were experienced as sites of resistance, refusal, joy, hope, sadness, violation, and violence, as scholarship on intimacy in slavery attests (berry and harris 2018). importantly, in biocapitalism (re)production rarely requires sexual violence in the form of rape or forced “breeding”— which is not to suggest that contemporary (re)productive laborers do not suffer a host of psychological and bodily violations that are both intimate and sexualized in nature.   over time, the circular ideological construction of african and african-descended women’s (re)production as “black” was called upon to justify the treatment of their wombs as engines of “future increase” and thus of surplus value.14 histories that account for the racialization of enslaved (re)production and treat the role of “blackness” in the maintenance of slave racial capitalism resonate forcefully with the present argument. as in slave racial capitalism, in biocapitalism racialized (re)production makes the system go. as in slavery, in biocapitalism (re)productive labor and products are rendered fungible and alienable through a complex process of racialization. the feminist histories of slavery that i have briefly limned above historically ground an argument about contemporary (re)productive extraction and dispossession. in this way, they constitute the foundation upon which unique insights into the continuous recalibration of racial capitalism may be built. for they allow us to see that (re)productive extraction and dispossession in slavery both precedes (re)productive extraction and dispossession in biocapitalism, and, in so doing, links the evolution of racial capitalism to biocapitalism.   and yet, even though slave racial capitalism and biocapitalism can be constellated, it should not be assumed that (re)production in biocapitalism is racialized in the same way as it was in the slave past. in the next and final section, i offer some preliminary ideas about how to think about the complex recalibration of racialized (re)production over time. while anti-blackness clearly characterizes a present moment saturated by racism, the attribution of “blackness” to (re)productive labor and its products is no longer the only modality through which (re)productive extraction and dispossession operate today. rather, in contemporary biocapitalism “blackness” is being sublated, by which, i mean it is being simultaneously negated and preserved in order to make biocapitalism go.   the sublation of “blackness” in biocapitalism although, as already observed at the outset, it could reasonably be assumed that feminist scholarship on (re)production in biocapitalism would center the history of slavery, substantive discussion of slavery and its legacies is missing from most scholarship on arts, biocapitalism, and the neoliberal post-racial ideologies that sustain transnational reproduction.15 there appear to be several reasons for this. scholarship on the global fertility chains that secure transnational reproduction is primarily concerned with the largest (re)productive markets, those in oocytes and surrogate labor. in most instances, oocyte vendors and surrogates are neither majority black nor do they predominantly reside in locales that were at one time directly implicated in the atlantic slave trade. when historical antecedents are considered, as already noted, european colonialism is therefore deemed most germane, and is too often hived off from atlantic slavery as if the two were not historically coincident and economically imbricated. separation of these histories lends itself to spurious distinctions between slavery and remunerated or waged labor, distinctions that tend to be reified rather than interrogated. and yet, as i elsewhere argue (2019), in both past and present, the distinction between slavery and waged labor is messy; and, at least when it is construed rigidly, this distinction constitutes one of capitalism’s major ideological supports.   rather than assume that (re)productive laborers “choose” to labor for a wage (for instance, when they participate in transnational markets as surrogates), i suggest beginning from an insight that is neatly if perhaps too implicitly encapsulated in marx’s quip that contract labor is a form of “wage slavery.” in creating a seeming oxymoron, marx challenged us to consider nineteenth-century wage labor as existent on a continuum with slavery. by extension, here i challenge us to critically re-examine the character of the so-called choices that are made by contemporary (re)productive laborers, women who, in some instances, enter the market without even the supposed protection afforded by labor contracts or other legal documents (rudrappa 2015). from a vantage point that apprehends the predication of liberal notions of freedom on the exemption of slaves, the colonized, and indigenous peoples from such freedom (lowe 2015; smallwood 2004), it is apparent that on the underside of the supposed freedom to alienate labor power lie interlocked forms of gendered, sexualized, and racialized governance that divide laboring populations into categories of human and less-than-human. those deemed human are more likely to be remunerated for their labor and to be perceived (and perhaps to feel themselves) as having “chosen” to labor for a wage. those deemed less-than-human are more likely to be treated as disposable and to understand the ruse that the ideology of “choice” conceals.16 in sum, the neglect of the impress of the slave episteme by scholarship on biocapitalism has troubling consequences in that it obscures the conditions and contexts in which laborers “choose” to labor, and creates an artificially narrow understanding of the connections between (re)production in slavery and biocapitalism.   to demonstrate the importance of accounting for the work of the slave episteme when seeking to understand (re)production in biocapitalism––even in those instances and in those locales in which slavery does not immediately appear to be relevant––i have found it necessary to craft a reoriented approach to (re)production that treats it as a racializing process that is continuously recalibrated over capitalism’s longue durée. this reorientation begins with an observation, indebted to feminist historians of slavery, that enslaved women’s participation in (re)productive labor was regarded as racializing of the labor performed (it rendered it less-than-human, “black”, and therefore fungible and alienable), and of the products of this labor. in other words, rather than begin by assuming the a priori racial identity of (re)productive laborers, as existing studies of surrogates and other participants in the (re)productive economy have (twine 2011; hochschild 2012; pande 2014; rudrappa 2015; vora 2015; deomampo 2016; harrison 2016), i instead suggest that scholars of (re)production in biocapitalism follow the example set by feminist historians of slavery. this requires focus on (re)production as a racializing process––a process that racializes labor and renders labor and products fungible and alienable.   the proposed shift in focus is intended to be expansive. it clears a path to a historically inclusive account of the (re)productive character of ongoing forms of “so-called primitive accumulation” in biocapitalism. it is also intended to nuance discussions of processes of racialization in a neoliberal moment saturated by post-racial ideologies that insist on treating the slave past as irrelevant to the present. indeed, the shift to a focus on processes of racialization is intended to highlight the pervasive disavowal of the afterlife of slavery, the work of the slave episteme in biocapitalism, and thus the sublation of “blackness”—its simultaneous negation and preservation––in rationalizing (re)productive extraction and dispossession.   for the most part, analyses of race and racism emergent from critical race studies, critical ethnic studies, black studies, and postcolonial studies have treated race as a social construct that is affixed to individual bodies and populations as power is arrayed hierarchically and white racial hegemony secured. in such analyses, race is not regarded as biological, genetic, empirical, or, for that matter, as analytically stable.17 rather, race is examined for how it is equated with phenotype and thus naturalized, for how it functions as a biosocial mark, and for how it exerts social, political, and economic power as it transforms over time. in short, race is variously recognized as a process and as a motor of globalizing capitalism, regimes of racial nationalism (white racial nationalism and other forms of ethnic nationalism), colonialism, settler colonialism, empire, or some combination of these. in situating (re)production as a racializing process, as i do here, i suggest that the race ascribed to individuals and populations prior to their recruitment into and participation in (re)production ought not be construed as the only racial calculation that enables and rationalizes (re)productive extraction and dispossession today.   the proposed treatment of (re)production as racializing process makes sense for several reasons. around the globe, the (re)productive labor force is robustly multiracial, multiethnic, and multinational. available information about the individuals who currently perform (re)productive labor reveals that they are more frequently connected to each other by shared economic precarity than by any single racial, ethnic, caste, religious, or national identity. indeed, it is never solely the a priori racial identity of the (re)productive laborer that renders her (re)productive labor and products alienable and fungible. it is always also the exchange relationship into which she enters when she sells her (re)productive labor that precipitates a racializing process that devalues this labor and renders both labor and products alienable and fungible.   notably, my treatment of (re)productive labor as a racializing process resonates deeply with the dominant approach to the creation of racialized divisions of labor as these are elaborated by labor historians. for those who study the changing racial formation of the labor force over time, the labor that individuals and populations engage in or are forced to perform both creates racial identity and shapes the racial character of labor. by virtue of her place in the division of labor, the laborer is transformed into a racialized individual (be this individual previously identified as “white,” “black,” or “asian”) and, by extension, incorporated as a member of a racialized group thought to be comprised of “slaves,” “coolies,” or “niggers” (roediger 1991; allen 1994; jung 2006; day 2016). as labor historians attest, static ideas of race are too rigid to account for the ideological and material processes that create the complex racial formations that were consolidated during prior periods in the history of racial capitalist expansion (slavery, colonialism, and industrialization). here i follow in their footsteps and suggest that static (a priori) ideas of race are likewise too rigid to account for the ideological and material processes that create the complex racial formations that make biocapitalism go and facilitate its expansion.   primary emphasis on the race of (re)productive laborers cannot fully account for the totality or complexity of the racializing processes that subtend transnational reproduction and the global fertility chains that secure it. on the one hand, treatment of race (or, for that matter, ethnicity, caste, or national identity) as a priori has the tendency to foreclose attention to (re)production as a process that shapes observable divisions of labor. on the other hand, focus on the race ascribed to laborers obscures the connectivity (or, to invoke lowe's capacious formulation “the intimacy”) that has in the past existed among individuals and populations caught up in the violence of atlantic slavery, colonialism, settler colonialism, and empire, and thus in the intertwined economic systems that first enabled and that continue to subtend globalizing capitalism (robinson 1983; lowe 2015; smallwood 2019). in sum, failure to treat (re)production as a racializing process runs of the risk of obscuring the impress of the slave episteme (which is never the possession of a single nation or national economy), and the circuitous routes that it travels, crisscrossing historical epochs and national boundaries as it renders (re)productive extraction and dispossession conceivable and thus materializable.   and yet, an irrepressible question remains: what is happening in the present moment to the specific form of “blackness” that rationalized (re)productive extraction and dispossession in slavery? i believe that a preliminary answer to this question lies in realization that “blackness” is one but never the only modality through which the slave episteme is forwarded into the present. today “blackness” is no longer the only mark of alienability and fungibility; rather, it has been both expanded and abstracted, recalibrated and erased. this is because biocapitalism has a hegemonic neoliberal cast that sometimes successfully, and at other times unsuccessfully, obscures from view the historically sedimented processes of racialization that have subtended (re)productive extraction and dispossession over time.18 as noted earlier, these include (but cannot be reduced to) processes of racialization that subtended partus sequitur ventrem, the doctrine that was encoded in slave law to ensure that enslaved women could be transformed into “black” wombs (re)producing alienable and fungible commodities rather than children.   in the current historical conjuncture, practices of (re)productive extraction and dispossession that are predicated on the forwarding of the slave episteme can be further illuminated by drilling down on the verb to sublate. as a philosophical concept, sublation has been most fully elaborated by hegel, subsequent hegelian philosophers, and marxist theorists. in their usage (as opposed to the colloquial one) sublation is neither synonymous with disappearance nor repression. rather, it is an active verb that describes the paradoxical movement through which ways of being in the world (hegel’s idea of dialectics) and systems of power such as feudalism or capitalism (marx’s idea of history) are simultaneously negated and preserved by opposing forces that transform the status quo by altering it over time. in certain strands of marxist theory, sublation is used to describe the historical processes that continuously reshape hegemony, not by toppling it in one fell swoop but rather by taking up new positions within an ongoing struggle for dominance. the national bourgeois revolutions that presaged industrial capitalism are perhaps the most well-known example of the dialectical process of sublation. the proletarian revolution that marx and subsequent generations of marxists believe will eventuate in the destruction of the system of bourgeois private property is the most anticipated. the oxford english dictionary captures the duality of the verb to sublate in a definitional quotation: “it is the actualization of the system that makes it rational, and sublates past history into a rationally-necessary moment of the whole.”   in returning to the question about the role that “blackness” plays in rationalizing biocapitalism, i venture the following formulation: biocapitalism sublates slavery and the ongoing work of the slave episteme by negating, or actively obscuring from view the centrality of a preserved if at once altered process of (re)productive racialization that was once, but is no longer exclusively predicated on the creation of “blackness” as the rationale for rendering (re)productive labor and its products alienable and fungible. 19   the dual action of negation and preservation that characterizes sublation is amplified in biocapitalism because the interlinked neoliberal ideologies of colorblindness and post-racialism with which biocapitalism is conjoined require that the forms of racial capitalism that were historically pervasive (slavery and colonialism) be regarded as antiquated, as regimes of the past that are no longer today relevant. however, as already argued, it is precisely the processes of (re)productive racialization that were brewed up in slavery that are currently being recalibrated, and thus it is these processes that persist in and through the contemporary exchange of (re)productive labor and products. borrowing and at once tweaking the definitional quotation taken from the oxford english dictionary, i conclude by observing that (re)production’s racialization as “black” has come over time to constitute a “rationally-necessary moment of the whole.” this “moment” is now being sublated (rather than transcended or eclipsed) by pervasive, persistent, and patently ahistorical neoliberal ideologies such as post-racialism. in sum, today the slave episteme subtends processes of (re)productive racialization even though the “blackness” of (re)productive labor and products is no longer always visible as the primary expression of such processes.   in the preceding pages, i have argued that the history of (re)production in atlantic slavery ought to be accounted for alongside the history of reproduction in colonialism in scholarship on transnational reproduction and the global fertility chains that secure it, and in work on contemporary forms of racial capitalism including biocapitalism. in advancing this argument, i have suggested that the slave episteme, brewed up in slavery, is currently being forwarded into the biocapitalist present. in arguing thus, i do not mean to imply that the slave episteme determines the totality of contemporary social and economic relations as these pertain to contemporary (re)productive extraction and dispossession. there are clearly multiple and overlapping processes at work in each specific reproductive market; together, these processes enable (re)productive extraction and dispossession globally. relatedly, there will always be many racial marks (each of which is likewise historically moored) that are today sublated alongside “blackness”. as others in this special issue demonstrate, it is imperative to account for colonial legacies and settler colonial practices when examining (re)productive extraction and dispossession in former colonies and in contexts of ongoing settler occupation. and yet, even as we track what i would suggest we shorthand “the colonial episteme” and “the settler colonial episteme,” scholarship on (re)production in biocapitalism can only be fully responsive to the history of (re)productive racialization that has enabled biocapitalist expansion when it attends to the slave episteme, and thus to the continuous recalibration of (re)production as a racializing process that is rooted in four hundred years of racial slavery.   sustained consideration of the forwarding of the slave episteme in biocapitalism has the capacity to thicken existing theorization of the “racial reproductive imaginaries” (deomampo 2016) that together inform how and why consumers select both surrogates and eggs. reciprocally, sustained consideration of the forwarding of the slave episteme has the ability to nuance analysis of how (re)productive laborers experience the racialized roles they play in the lives of those who consume their labor and products. beyond the instructive examples of surrogacy and oocyte vending, consideration of the forwarding of the slave episteme in biocapitalism draws our attention to the anti-blackness that powers racial capitalism tout court. clearly processes of (re)productive racialization will continue to shift and change in myriad ways. sustained consideration of the work of the slave episteme might yet transform our collective consciousness of these shifts and changes, and enable greater attunement to the ways in which (re)productive extraction and dispossession simultaneously preserve and negate “blackness” and, in the process, create the complex and historically sedimented racial formations that are mobilized by biocapitalism in the service of its ongoing expansion.   notes 1 in 2003 sarah franklin and margaret lock observed that “shifts in the definition of biology-as-capital involve a prioritization of reproduction,” thus announcing human reproduction’s emergence as a “primary generator of wealth, agency, and value” in biosciences dependent on human research participants for what are often euphemistically referred to as “donations” or “gifts” of reproductively derived raw materials (franklin and locke 2003, 7). subsequent scholarship fills out the portrait of a rapidly changing landscape. contributions that inform the present argument demonstrate the centrality of human (re)production to the emergence of biocapitalism. waldby and mitchell (2006) develop the concept of “tissue economies” through analysis of embryonic stem cell and umbilical cord blood banking; franklin (2007, 2013) tracks marketization of cloning back to innovations in animal husbandry and forward to ivf's transformation of human kinship; spar (2006) examines the “commerce of conception”; dickenson (2008) treats “global markets in baby making”; cooper (2008) explores financialization of “life itself” through production of “life as surplus”; vora (2015) joins hochschild (2012) in analysis of outsourcing of emotional labor and intimate life in the indian surrogate market; cooper and waldby (2014) develop the concept of “clinical labor" to describe commodification of in vivo processes, including surrogacy.   2 here i extend earlier meditations on the use of the labor theory of value (ltv) to theorize surrogacy as a form of (re)productive labor (weinbaum 1994). with the parentheses surrounding (re) i differentiate an approach rooted in the ltv from marxist feminist “dual systems” approaches focused on unremunerated or non-commodified reproductive labor and autonomist feminist arguments focused on recognition of the productive value of unremunerated reproductive labor in the home.   3 the afterlife of reproductive slavery (weinbaum 2019) focuses on surrogacy (as opposed to other arts) because i regard surrogacy as a unique heuristic device that provides insight into how all forms or (re)productive extraction and dispossession function in biocapitalism. put otherwise, analysis of surrogacy opens the way to comprehension of racialized (re)productive extraction and dispossession in biocapitalism generally.   4 in addition to centering contributions by feminist historians of slavery (as i discuss shortly), the afterlife of reproductive slavery treats black feminist literary scholars (carby 1987; christian 1985; hartman 1997, 2007), legal scholars (williams 1991; roberts 1997; allen 1990, 1991; rutherford 1992; cherry 2001), theorists (spillers 1987; davis 1971, 1998), reproductive justice activists (ross and solinger 2017), and novelists such as toni morrison and octavia butler.   5 the concept of “the afterlife of reproductive slavery” is indebted to saidiya hartman’s (2007) signal contribution on the “afterlife of slavery.” see also hartman (1997).   6 the idea of “slave racial capitalism” also invites consideration of slavery as an early form of biocapitalism, albeit one to which the neologism can only be applied retroactively. though it is beyond the scope of the present essay to treat this relationship as i do elsewhere (2019), it is worth noting that contrary to birch and tyfield (2012), who argue that the “bio” prefacing capitalism obscures economic realities, i regard the “bio” as revelatory in that it points to what is old (the slave episteme) about a supposedly new economic formation—namely, the commodification of (re)productive labor and products.   7 numerous black feminists theorize intersections of race, gender, and class and thus contribute to a specifically black feminist understanding of racial capitalism. though this rich scholarship cannot be adequately represented in a single note, contributions that inform my thinking here include angela y. davis (1971, 1981, 1998), the combahee river collective (1982), carole boyce davies (2008), sarah haley (2016), and shauna sweeney (2021).   8 beckles observes, “the ameliorations of the late eighteenth century can be defined as a system of thought and practice by which money that would have been otherwise spent on…buying unseasoned africans was used to improve the lot of existing slaves in order to induce them to breed their replacements” (1989, 97).   9 ideas about european descendants of eve as cursed with pain in childbirth paved the way for ideas about european sensate difference as a sign of racial superiority, and later as a basis for the theory of polygenesis (morgan 2004, 40–47).   10 hortense spillers (1987) first theorized the abstracting logic of enslavement as an erasure of the gender specificity of “the captive female” who is reduced to a quantity of commodified “flesh” that fills a designated space within the hold of the slave ship. elsewhere i argue that when spillers extends her insight about the ungendering of “the captive female” to the question of enslaved (re)production, she effectively illuminates the manner in which slave (re)production depended upon the world historic application of the logic of fungibility to in vivo bodily processes and human biological products. (in so doing, spillers compels questions about the gender of contemporary (re)production. see next note). hartman (1997) extends spillers’ ideas about “black” fungibility through examination of the ontological and epistemological violence to which women were subject during and after slavery. afropessimists such as frank wilderson and jared sexton drill down on ontological violence through examination of the persistence of anti-blackness and the foreclosure of “black” subjectivity in the wake of slavery (winnubst 2020, 105). other recent scholarship on fungibility moves in more liberatory directions. c. riley snorton (2017) influentially argues that the ungendering of blackness that first transpires in middle passage can and should be linked to transness, and, conversely, transness to blackness. tiffany lethabo king (2019) powerfully attests that blackness is irreducible to the commodity form precisely because it is fungible. for snorton and king, fungibility is defiant, a resource for insurgent, life-affirming identity formation. in the present essay, i build on spillers to argue that a specifically (re)productive form of enslaved fungibility continues to subtend racial capitalist expansion.   11 though the limited space of the present article forecloses treatment of the ungendering of the enslaved as first theorized by hortense spillers (1987), in forthcoming work i explore how insight into the process of ungendering ought to reshape conceptualization of reproduction in slavery, and, potentially, how it can enable gender inclusive elaboration of the reproductive justice framework first conceptualized by black feminist activists and theorists (weinbaum, forthcoming 2022; weinbaum, forthcoming 2023; ross and solinger 2017).   12 berry argues that the terms “breeder” or “breeding wench” were largely descriptive as opposed to pejorative in the early antebellum period. it was only after the closure of the transatlantic trade that these terms were used to indicate the market value attributed to enslaved women (2017, 20–21). throughout i have enclosed the terms “breeding” and “breeder” in quotations marks to indicate both their violence and pliability.   13 berry (2017) introduces the term “third party rape” to describe how enslaved women and men were used against their will by enslavers. davis (1971), hartman (1997), and berry and harris (2018) examine myriad forms of sexual violence as racial terror.   14 morgan demonstrates that planters’ wills reveal their understanding of the importance of the transfer of reproductive assets to future generations and their investment in reproductive speculation (2004, 92). berry argues that speculation on “future increase” was commonplace and that enslavers placed value on “preconception” (2017, chapter 1).   15 here i distinguish between dominant trends in scholarship on transnational reproduction and black feminist treatments of surrogacy in the us in the 1990s (allen 1990, 1991; cherry 2001; rutherford 1992; davis 1998; williams 1991; roberts 1997) that link surrogacy to slavery. important recent contributions by the race and reproductivities working group that are showcased in a double issue of medical anthropology (valdez and deomampo 2019) also examine racialization in ways the depart from dominant trends in scholarship through focus on how “race materializes through biogenetic, phenotypic, and cultural imaginaries” (554) that shape reproductive markets.   16 several scholars of surrogacy in india (pande 2014; rudrappa 2015) argue that surrogates ought to be regarded as “free” agents who “choose” to surrogate. notably, enslaved women exercised profound forms of agency when they sought to shape or refuse their (re)productive enslavement, and yet no scholar of slavery argues that they had free choice (davis 1971; hine 1979; morgan 2004; turner 2017; weinbaum 2019).   17 this is especially important in a context in which biological ideas of race resurface in genetic guise despite scientific consensus that race is not located in our genes (reardon 2005; weinbaum 2007; roberts 2011; tallbear 2013).   18 two of neoliberalism’s most salient features are the burdening of individuals with excessive responsibility, and the hyper-exploitation of people of color. both are buttressed by ascendance of ideologies of color-blindness and post-racialism (harvey 2005; brown 2003, 2006; melamed 2011).   19 in arguing that “blackness” is sublated in biocapitalism, i dialogue with scholars of biopower who regard racialization as a context bound and ever shifting form of dehumanization (weheliye 2014; mbembe 2003). in exposing the eurocentrism of foundational theories (michel foucault and giorgio agamben), weheliye and mbembe demonstrate that “blackness” is never the only racial cut or “caesura” (to use foucault’s original term) that generates the distinctions upon which biopower (and, here i add, biocapitalism) depends––distinctions between living beings entitled to full humanity 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https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2008.0011. ———. 2019. the afterlife of reproductive slavery: biocapitalism and black feminism's philosophy of history. durham, nc: duke university press. ———. forthcoming. 2022. “ungendering intersectionality and reproductive justice, returning to hortense spillers.” in the routledge companion to intersectionality, edited by jennifer c. nash and samantha pinto. new york: routledge. –––––.  forthcoming.  “racial capitalism and reproductive accumulation.” history of the present:  a journal of critical history.    white, deborah gray. 1985. ar’n’t i a woman? female slaves in the plantation south. new york: norton. williams, patricia j. 1991. the alchemy of race and rights: diary of a law professor. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. winnubst, shannon. 2020. “the many lives of fungibility: anti-blackness in neoliberal times.” journal of gender studies 29 (1): 102–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2019.1692193. wittenstein, kate, and darlene c. hine. 1979. “female slave resistance: the economics of sex.” western journal of black studies 3 (2): 123–27.     author bio alys eve weinbaum is a professor of english at the university of washington. she is author, most recently, of the afterlife of reproductive slavery: biocapitalism and black feminism’s philosophy of history (duke university press, 2019). her work contributes to the history of racial capitalism and the cultures and politics of human reproduction that both subtend and refuse it. fox, sarah, and franchesca spektor. 2021. “hormonal advantage: retracing exploitative histories of workplace menstrual tracking.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–23. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license hormonal advantage: retracing exploitative histories of workplace menstrual tracking sarah fox carnegie mellon university sarahfox@cmu.edu franchesca spektor carnegie mellon university fspektor@andrew.cmu.edu abstract technologies and self-help protocols associated with menstrual tracking have gained popularity over the past decade, with wellness consultants such as alisa vitti at the helm. through careful monitoring and lifestyle changes, such techniques promise to unleash an inherent hormonal advantage that can extend one’s personal and professional pursuits. though seemingly new, these approaches to menstrual monitoring have an historical lineage born of corporate management. now being sold as feminist, they draw on a belief in menstrual deficit, or an understanding of menstruation along productivist lines focused on curbing workplace absenteeism and enhancing personal optimization. in bringing together cases from over the last century, this paper seeks to establish a through line of economization and imagine instead how workplace tracking might be leveraged toward worker mobilization and bargaining for collective gains. introduction in april 2019, reporting from the washington post revealed that developers of the popular menstrual tracking application ovia were quietly marketing their users’ special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 data to employers and health insurance companies (harwell 2019). under the banner of corporate wellness, ovia offered clients an opportunity to gather more data about their employees’ lives, including the number of workers currently using the app’s fertility functions, those facing high-risk pregnancies, and how soon new parents planned to return to work. nowhere in the app’s interface was there suggestion of the potential for this data brokerage, but hidden away in the privacy policy was language carving out “royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable license, throughout the universe” to exploit de-identified personal information for “external and internal marketing purposes” (ovia health 2020b). not mentioned was the relative ease with which this “aggregate data” could be “re-identified” by cross-referencing employee information relayed to the app in confidence, especially in workplaces with few ovia users on staff (harwell 2019). in response to widespread criticism following the report, the firm defended their practices by emphasizing that their “enterprise maternity and family benefits” service made available to employer health plans and insurers was compliant with the united states health insurance portability and accountability act (ovia health 2020a). yet, for many, the ovia controversy revealed increasingly insidious forms of corporate surveillance with little oversight or regulation on how workers’ intimate information might be put to use (e.g., pregnancy discrimination, changes in health coverage). though seemingly new, techniques of menstrual surveillance have a long history. violent traditions of menstrual tracking extend back to the antebellum south, when enslavers relied on early gynecological research linking the irregularity of menstrual cycles with infertility (owens 2018; schwartz 2010; washington 2008). associating missed work and barrenness with threats to reproductive and productive labor upon which the slave trade depended, they monitored enslaved people’s monthly cycles by recording the distribution and storage of rags used to absorb menses and experimented with “therapies” for dysmenorrhea such as chloroform and bloodletting (schwartz 2010). as historian deirdre cooper owens (2018) notes, it is through this cruel exploitation and torture of enslaved people that modern gynecology developed and, with it, the origins of medical racism experienced today such as vast racial disparities in maternal mortality (center for disease control and prevention 2020) and forced sterilization of those detained in us immigration detention centers (moore 2020). in this article, we focus on a more recent lineage of menstrual tracking that inherits corporal modes of oversight and discipline in a much less violent but insidious form within the corporate sphere. in the 1920s, as a response to the introduction of white women into us office settings, company-sponsored studies of dysmenorrhea were used to justify paying lower wages. other research sought to link absenteeism to workers’ menstrual cycles and recover “time lost” represented by number of trips to the restroom and sick days. like earlier menstrual surveillance of enslaved people, this activity was presented as special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 advancing scientific understanding (here, within the burgeoning field of industrial hygiene). in practice, researchers quantified perceived deficits among menstruating workers and enforced rules for conduct such as the performance of particular work tasks and subjection to invasive, physical examinations. in this paper, we examine how workplace monitoring techniques such as these from a century ago laid the groundwork for connected healthand fertility-tracking technologies marketed widely today. through apps like ovia, we see how disciplinary functions can lie just under the surface of self-tracking. over the course of this paper, we focus our attention on a genre of self-care we term hormonal advantage, promoted under a neoliberal feminist agenda of optimization and demonstrating an impulse to extend market rationality to all aspects of life. specifically, we examine the work of self-proclaimed wellness guru alisa vitti, whose “cycle-syncing” method and attendant app promises to cure discomfort associated with one’s cycle through dietary and lifestyle changes and tap innate “feminine energy” to enhance work productivity. this work draws on analysis of early scholarship from the field of industrial hygiene—originating in the united states at the turn of the last century—to examine corporate schemes of data collection. though industrial hygiene research has since taken place across an array of contexts and nations, our focus is on retracing technologies and self-help protocols that have emerged more recently and revealing how contemporary consumer-facing versions inherit and extend the exploitative regulatory techniques of their predecessors. our efforts to draw connections between early workplace studies and contemporary menstrual tracking sits within a tradition of feminist design research that seeks to interrogate the histories that inform contemporary design practices and artifacts (rosner 2018). in bringing together cases from over the last century, we seek to establish a through line of economization and imagine instead how workplace tracking might be leveraged toward worker mobilization and bargaining for collective gains. before discussing these examples of workplace menstrual tracking, we first turn to two streams of scholarship that animate our discussion. the first centers on self-tracking practices, algorithmic management, and workplace wellness programs that seek to render the body docile. the second discusses modes of feminism that have emerged over the past several decades, which direct attention and resources toward empowerment and individual gain (rather than social movement participation). drawing on this literature, we examine historical and contemporary cases, charting the move of menstrual optimization from corporate surveillance to individual practices of self-care. we conclude by discussing workeroriented campaigns that focus instead on confronting structural inequities through data activism. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 self-tracking, workplace wellness, and algorithmic management according to gordon hull and frank pasquale (2018), employee wellness programs predate digital self-tracking platforms, emerging instead from the fitness boom of the 1970s and the rise of neoliberalism. within corporate settings, sponsored initiatives meant to support “healthy living” among the workforce incentivize participation with discounts on health insurance premiums or the threat of penalties (till 2017, 2019). increasingly combined with apps and wearable devices to foster “personal responsibility” through behavior change (e.g., smoking secession, exercise challenges, or weight management plans), these programs promote individual participation in fitness activities in order to satisfy a corporate interest in reducing healthcare spending, increasing worker productivity, and decreasing absenteeism (gregg 2018). though research has found wellness programs fail to cut costs, they do condition workers to frame personal choices around food consumption or exercise in terms of investment in one’s personal brand (hull and pasquale 2018). functioning as an apparatus of biopower, hull and pasquale argue that participation results in the stylization of the self, extending work obligation into private lives, and reinforcing individual liability for risk. echoing this argument on responsibilization and control, sociologists deborah lupton and gavin smith (2018) suggest that risk mitigation and moral accountability underlie impulses to monitor one’s fitness, leading to a sense that one can avoid chaotic life situations through self-tracking practices. wellness programs and the apps that support them then reframe the work of optimizing the body toward increased productivity as a form of health. such practices shape how the body is lived and perceived as measurable and quantifiable and "whose movements, habits, and internal workings are rendered more visible, knowable, and thereby potentially more manageable” (lupton 2013, 398). this visibility also heightens concerns on “function creep,” the gradual widening of a technology’s data collection practices beyond its initial, intended purpose. as self-tracking becomes increasingly intertwined with productivity metrics, the potential for such data to be exploited by others, such as managers or intimate partners, rises in turn (levy 2019; lupton 2016). further interrogating mediated employee supervision, recent sts scholarship examines emergent modes of algorithmic management. centered on the possibilities of remotely managing workforces through surveillance and automated decision tools, algorithmic management marks a separation from earlier structures that rely on human supervisors to observe and direct workers’ activities (mateescu and nguyen 2019). through connected devices, continuous flows of data enable forms of automated decision making that seek to optimize workers’ daily routines. for rideshare drivers or hotel staff, this might take the special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 form of real-time route optimization or automated scheduling (ticona 2015; ticona, mateescu, and rosenblat 2018). remote monitoring can take a punitive turn as with the case of janitorial staff and connected restroom soap dispensers logging “compliance,” or if an employee washes their hands in accordance with company policy (fox, sobel, and rosner 2019). premium “attention-tracking” features embedded in the video conferencing platform zoom similarly notify employers when attendees have navigated away from the platform for more than thirty seconds (krolik and singer 2020). with the case of ovia and other contemporary menstrual tracking apps, internalized monitoring practices under the guise of self-care may complicate the intimate politics of concealing (or disclosing) pregnancy, where employee discretion is less available and pregnancy discrimination harder to trace. ovia’s corporate-facing pitch indeed promises to usher pregnant employees back to work as soon as possible and track menstrual changes to avoid costly healthcare expenditures, causing many health and privacy experts to warn that even aggregated data could put workers at risk. such technologies shift longstanding power relationships between worker and manager, such that procedures are more opaque and less available to appeal. enterprising the self sociologist catherine rottenberg (2014) charts the rise of neoliberal feminism, or feminism mobilized to enhance market value, through the publication of a set of widely read “feminist manifestos” from prominent us figures such as former hillary clinton advisor anne-marie slaughter and facebook coo sheryl sandberg. to rottenberg, neoliberal feminism is embodied in this form of the “high-powered woman who manages to balance a spectacularly successful career with a satisfying home life” (2014, 428). this theorization is different than rosalind gill’s notion of postfeminism—similarly focused on choice and empowerment, it instead denies a feminist label (banet-weiser, gill, and rottenberg 2020; gill 2007). the neoliberal feminist subject may indeed recognize gender inequality represented through pay discrepancies or sexual harassment but denies the systemic role that sexism has in shaping her life. messages from slaughter and sandberg are directed toward middle-class white women who aspire toward individual pursuits of happiness, “leaning in” to career ambitions, and striking a balance of both professional success and a fulfilling life. this push toward individual advancement, rottenberg argues, “reorients women away from conceptions of solidarity and towards their own particular development, which, to stay on ‘track’ as it were, requires constant self-monitoring” (2014, 426). uninterested in social justice, mass mobilization, or making demands of the government, the neoliberal feminist subject is atomized, self-optimizing, and entrepreneurial, assuming responsibility for her well-being and self-care toward personal innovation and marketability (olufemi 2020). special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 6 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 such expanded projects of self-care serve the interests of biopower and gender retrenchment, according to political scientist rachel sanders (2017). extending the authority of public health and beauty regimes, self-tracking protocols often subscribe to and reify existing bodily ideals and norms (rather than trouble them). the essentializing nature of contemporary apps and technologies is rooted in the history of endocrinology and what nelly oudshoorn (2003) terms the “hormonal enterprise.” through representation in terms of cycles, for example, there is “an abstraction from the bodies of individual women to the universal category of a physical process” (oudshoorn 2003, 136). celia roberts (2002) draws on notions of embodied knowledge to argue that the “hormonal body” itself is in fact located, tied to the networks of actors that make up the disciplines that develop the theories and practices of endocrinology. menstrual tracking is similarly inseparable from modes of cultural and economic production that surround it. here, we trace new scientific endeavors that link menstrual tracking with efforts to reduce inefficiencies from the top and later transform into a means of individual advancement. across the sections that follow, we examine the work of actors within the space of early industrial hygiene through to the contemporary wellness industry in order to understand and resist contemporary practices and to produce ways of being otherwise. accounting for absenteeism in 2019, an obstetrics and gynecological research team out of the netherlands published an article in the british medical journal that purported to measure the loss of productivity and absenteeism among over 30,000 women and girls between the ages of fifteen and forty-five (schoep et al. 2019). gathered from surveys distributed through social media, the study’s findings suggest “an average productivity loss of 33% resulted in a mean of 8.9 days of total lost productivity per year due to presenteeism” (schoep et al. 2019, 1). drawing on these figures, the authors conclude by emphasizing the need for a set of policy changes within work and school settings, such as offering the option to take on “less physical” tasks, the ability to do remote work, the allocation of more time for personal care, permission to make up for “lost days,” or the right to take a day off without consequence (schoep et al. 2019). these findings quickly circulated across a variety of consumer science sites and news outlets, with provocative titles such as “period pain linked to nearly 9 days of lost productivity for a woman in a year” from cnn (hunt 2019), “productivity loss sizable with menstruation-related symptoms” in physician's weekly (health daily staff 2019), and “study finally shows how disruptive period pain really is” published in science alert (armour, curry, and macmillan 2019). on the surface, this report might seem to make a welcome call for workplace accommodations, but it is worth considering the deeper implications of this work. strikingly similar to questions posed by researchers working within the field of special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 7 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 industrial hygiene over the past century, this publication marks a continued effort to prove that menstrual symptoms are somehow linked to workplace deficits unique to women. in a critique of scholarship on menstruation and work, historian siobán harlow argues that the question of “inherent weakness” (rather than other factors such as hazardous conditions) has long defined the focus of such work studies (1986, 42). a multi-part project from anthony j. smith (1950a, 1950b), for example, measured productivity along identical dimensions to those of the study published in british medical journal but was conducted some seventy-five years earlier. as late as 1981, novak's textbook of gynecology argued that dysmenorrhea was the most frequent cause of lost work time, responsible for 140 million “wasted work hours” each year (a figure left uncited) (jones and jones 1981, 871; harlow 1986, 43). despite decades of studies, harlow argues, there remains no proven correlation between menstruation and compromised work quality or efficiency. researching and regulating difference efforts to attribute quantifiable loss to those experiencing symptoms of menstruation share commitments with other campaigns to reinforce separate spheres ideology, or the belief in biologically determined gender roles and that women should have limited access to domains of public life (baron 1981). alongside early workplace studies, lawmakers sought to institute “protective legislation” that formally regulated women’s participation in paid work settings. on the face of it, many of these laws appeared beneficial to workers. a shortened workday, for example, and an imposed minimum wage for women and children seemed in line with general employee welfare and were supported by some women’s rights advocates at the time (baron 1981). but these policies treated women as homogeneous, forbidding certain activities such as lifting heavy loads (strikingly similar to schoep et al.’s call for “less physical” tasks) or working nights. though purportedly enacted to protect women from hazardous labor practices, the laws did not require changes to work conditions, nor did they apply to workers generally. rather, they served as a basis for denying women roles in certain fields of labor and from earning overtime pay. notably, these changes did not protect wages, nor did they apply to unpaid work (leaving domestic and care labor unregulated). the concern then was not with protecting women as workers, but the social definition of women and their role in the nuclear family. in fact, proponents of this legislation were quite open about their aims of preventing what they perceived as the erosion of the family structure and ensuring the health of “potential-mothers-of-the-race,” seeking to make evenings free for housework or simply confining women to the home (baron 1981, 32). such views were seemingly widely held. in the 1908 supreme court case muller vs. oregon, for example, justice brandeis filed a lengthy brief filled with “empirical evidence” from health inspectors, physicians, social scientists, and industrial experts supporting the lower level court’s decision to prioritize the “sanctity of the family” (baer 1978, 57; baron 1981). under this legal paradigm, women were treated as a special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 8 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 separate class whose primary function was as mothers (even if they did not have children) and whose rights were secondary to the health of future generations. early instances of workplace menstrual tracking offer a glimpse into how social science research fed and promoted such notions of difference that indeed harmed workers. across the early twentieth century, as middle-class white women were newly coming into waged labor, corporate-sponsored research programs sought to understand the role of menstruation in their working lives. often operating under the guise of wider “industrial hygiene” campaigns, these efforts sought to understand and exploit perceived differences in performance between men and women on the job. sometimes these initiatives were conducted by in-house teams, and other times researchers and health practitioners were called in to support the extension of the managerial gaze onto the menstrual and reproductive health of workers. in 1928, for example, the metropolitan life insurance company began conducting research into the absences of women clerks who were newly occupying the workplace (ewing 1931). dr. ruth ewing, a medical researcher, was recruited to lead the effort and later reported on their research procedure and findings in the journal of industrial hygiene. as she described it, there was concern on the part of the company about the perceived frequency of women staying home from work and additional time spent in the restroom during their periods. the study was a part of an effort to “correct the situation” (ewing 1931, 245). when enrolled, employees were instructed to report the number of hours of discomfort they experienced during menstruation, the location and type of pain, any vaginal discharge, and instances of constipation (not unlike in the menstrual tracking app protocols of today). they were then given a regimen of daily exercises (involving some form of contraction and expansion of their lower abdominal muscles), prescribed a diet based on their degree of pain, and subjected to ongoing evaluation of “psychologic factors” (e.g., “self-discipline”). additionally, a physiotherapist instructed them to undress, their silhouette was traced in outline, and they were graded on their posture (see figure 1). employees had weekly check-ins and those who did not report reduced pain within four months were also subjected to rectal and vaginal exams. through this practice, we can see how company monitoring projects made visible, intervened in, and shaped employees’ bodies. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 9 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 employees were enrolled in the study between eight months and two years before they were allowed to stop supervised exercises. though a reported 90 percent benefited from the treatment, it should be noted that their employment was contingent on their participation in the study and the only way to discontinue participation was by indicating that they felt less pain. ultimately, metropolitan life saw the reduction in “time lost” that they had sought to promote, with absences dropping from three days per month to half a day per month, and visits to the restroom from “7.1 per month per 100 females in 1924 to 2.3 in 1930” (ewing 1931). the results were reported on by ewing as a win across parties (workers and the company), where employee pain was reduced and leaves were curbed. in an earlier example, historian lara freidenfelds (2009) describes a study launched by an ohio rubber company to assess whether women office workers figure 1. silhouette images of two metropolitan life insurance company employees enrolled in corporate-sponsored research on dysmenorrhea. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 10 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 deserved a consistent salary to men who occupied the same position. with a similar concern for absences, the company’s research director motivated their study by claiming that women lost 6.02 percent of their available work time, while men only missed 2.42 percent. the research centered on a hired nurse who visited the homes of women who were out on a given day to report discrepancies between said and “real” causes of their absence. here, of course, the nurse’s statement was taken over the employees’, and the study concluded that 17 percent of women’s absences were the cause of “ailments particular to women only” (freidenfelds 2009, 85). with this, the company concluded that though women “may be intellectually competent to undertake all vocations…they do not deserve the same pay as men” (freidenfelds 2009, 85). moving from simply interrogating women within the context of the workplace, researchers at the rubber company refused to take workers at their word, sending company representatives into their homes to detect inconsistencies and aberrations. this century-long tradition of measuring absenteeism and presenteeism is based in sexist presumptions. from the metropolitan life insurance company’s study of employee dysmenorrhea to schoep et al.’s (2019) contemporary examination of absenteeism, the historical lineage of this work perpetuates sociobiological notions of difference. schoep et al.’s finding that women and girls experience a “nine-day productivity loss” confirms ingrained attitudes of menstruation bias in the workplace. despite the study’s claim of benefiting women, the article begins by defining the financial burden posed by menstrual absenteeism and presenteeism to employers, not unlike dozens of studies that preceded it. as harlow argues, the failure to develop an analytic tradition that moves beyond the search for how much productivity is impacted by menstruation only reflects the “historical presumption of inherent weakness” (1986, 46). the successful development of a new analytic tradition, she argues, would similarly require an entirely new premise. hormonal advantage against the backdrop of contemporary menstrual deficit debates, a particular brand of entrepreneurial feminism has manifested within the domain of menstrual wellness and advocacy. attorney jennifer weiss-wolf (2017) recently chronicled this surge, as well as a broad range of other entrepreneurial and legislative activities in the space of menstruation, in her book periods gone public. in its final chapter, she shares her vision for the future of “menstrual equity,” through speculation on hybrid corporate-policy initiatives and the notion of “menstrual leave.” a controversial topic among scholars and activists in this space, menstrual leave would involve paid or unpaid leave from employment while one is menstruating and experiencing dysmenorrhea (evans and smith 2017). while some—like weiss-wolf—welcome the push for such policies, others see it perpetuating sexist norms around women’s fitness to participate and special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 11 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 advance in waged labor (levitt and barnack-tavlaris 2020). in imagining how such a policy might exist, weiss-wolf proposes company-led “cycle awareness” programs, where menstruation would be viewed as a “force to be leveraged and harnessed” toward business goals (2017, 359-360). as she sees it, individual employees would not only be given the option to take leave on days when they experience pain or other symptoms, but also be nudged to participate in particular activities during other phases of their cycle. for example, she states, the “ovulation phase is the best time for giving a presentation,” so managers would be prompted to tap employees at this point in their cycle for such responsibilities (359). to weiss-wolf and other prominent menstrual equity proponents, “menstrutopia” can be found in enumerating the impact of menstruation on employees’ work habits, taking up a kind of assets and liabilities model in assessing variations, and deploying an “affirmative work and life coaching tool” to optimize for individual differences. put simply, weiss-wolf states, the idea is to provide employers with “a fuller picture of the natural ebbs and flows that guide our bodies and lives” (359). achieving flo elsewhere in new york city, similar approaches to “cycle awareness” are being rehearsed and marketed by self-proclaimed hormone-health expert alisa vitti. through interviews with the popular press, vitti frequently tells the story of overcoming polycystic ovary syndrome through tireless personal research and subtle lifestyle changes such as food consumption and exercise. from this experience, she has built a brand around what she calls the “flo protocol,” or a “female-centric protocol that considers your whole being—mind, body, and spirit—and each phase of your cycle” (vitti, n.d.). drawing on discourses of progress, she endorses adopting a biohacking mindset to achieve “optimal hormonal flow” (vitti 2020, 150). not only does the approach promise to help women “crack the code” on their hormones (185) and alleviate symptoms, but it is also positioned as enhancing one’s time management abilities, work productivity, and relationship satisfaction. dotted with testimonials from customers of her manhattan-based wellness center, both of vitti’s books—womancode (2013) and in the flo (2020)—attest to the success of her method in helping women become pregnant, increase their libido, or reverse urinary tract infections. in many ways, vitti embodies rottenberg’s neoliberal feminist figure, from an established career in marketing to forging an integrated health enterprise with a dedicated wellness center, virtual health consultancy (with rates at hundreds of dollars a session), a subscription supplement service (totaling roughly $1,200 a year), a series of widely read books, and a smartphone application. directed toward business-minded women, the universalist impulse of vitti’s claims become clear across her pages. in her most recent book, for instance, she dedicates a single paragraph to discussing the suitability of the protocol for transgender readers. noting that they “may not fit into a traditional gender box,” special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 12 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 she urges trans women to follow her method in order to “feel more connected to [their] feminine energy even if [they’re] not menstruating” (vitti 2020, 7). vitti makes room for trans audience members only so much as they are instructed to contort to her own understanding of femininity and self. homogenizing in a similar sense to earlier industrial hygiene research, the category of women is fixed. vitti markets making one’s “hormones work for you to help you sustain your energy, creativity, and productivity regardless of the demands of your schedule” (vitti 2020, 186). it is essential to her that “women’s needs,” in the form of hormonally relevant tasks and project cycles, are accounted for in the workplace. echoing her neoliberal feminist contemporaries, vitti argues, “when each individual increases her own awareness of her biological rhythms, collectively leveraging that awareness will create a much more efficient process for everyone” (vitti 2020, 191). better working conditions then trickle down from the high achieving top. she argues that the organization of work time is centered on a masculinist agenda, one that is embodied in a competing hormonal clock. “how do you incorporate your second clock into our corporate culture, which has been operating on a single clock for centuries?” vitti asks in flo-living (2020, 183). if organized around the phases of one’s own, individual cycle, vitti explains, one can optimize work by performing the right tasks for each stage. here, we can think of flow occupying a double meaning. of course, referring to the colloquial term for menstrual cycle, but also a sense of flow derived from the state of higher consciousness psychologist mihaly csikszentmihalyi (2008) describes, where one achieves “optimal experience” through intense, concentrated attention. to reach hormonal flow, one must attune daily activities to an inherent rhythm humming under the surface. the follicular phase, according to vitti, is when estrogen boosts the brain’s working memory and is thus an ideal time to focus on new projects or start a new business. the ovulatory phase, on the other hand, is time ripe for networking or giving presentations, as one’s “communication powers” are in tune. the luteal phase is when one is most detail oriented and when one’s desire to complete tasks or finish projects is most acute. and finally, the menstrual phase, vitti notes, is most ideal for evaluative tasks or planning. tuning into one’s “feminine clock” via tools like the “work flo” chart allows for flo devotees to drive both individual and corporate growth. “by learning to focus on doing one thing at the ideal time rather than trying to do everything at once,” vitti attests, “you will become more efficient, get into flow mode more often, and boost your overall performance” (2020, 197). though vitti notes it is possible to accomplish tasks out of sync with one’s internal rhythms, the drain on one’s energy is said to be substantial. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 13 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 vitti compares the shift of working through “natural” rhythms to tech giant google’s turn toward open office design, which involved a push for flexible workspaces over dedicated, individual offices (2020, 195). yet, an interview study released about two years before the publication of the book found that this approach to office reorganization leaves women feeling perpetually surveilled and newly scrutinized (hirst and schwabenland 2018). vitti also points to google as a model for parental leave (2020, 196), though recent activism again defies this (franceschi-bicchierai 2019). a large-scale employee walkout at the end of 2018, for example, galvanized thousands of employees in response to the company’s gross mishandling of sexual harassment (wakabayashi et al. 2018). the company’s repeated firing of transgender employees organizing for the right to know whether they are involved in building the war machines (wong 2019) also casts layers of doubt on vitti’s positioning of google as bastion of gender justice. though work perpetually takes place in a corporate setting in vitti’s imagination, it is not difficult to imagine how her flo protocol might break down in other contexts. those in the service and retail industries (disproportionately occupied by women of color), for example, are less likely to have the luxury of dictating their own tasks and often work under increasingly sporadic shifts due to the popularity of on-demand scheduling (algorithmically developed work schedules drawn up at short notice). as there are no federal policies ensuring access to leave or workplace flexibility within the us (where vitti is based) (glynn, boushey, and berg 2016), lowerand middle-income workers have no place in vitti’s protocol. within the context of google and other seemingly progressive tech workplaces that vitti holds up in her text, gig and contract workers often lack the right to bargain for fairer wages (lapowsky 2019) or protections from toxic exposure (material or psychological, as with manufacturing and content moderation respectively (rifat, prottoy, and ahmed 2019; s. roberts 2019)). even when accounting for the ways the protocol lacks consideration of most workers, the question of why the push to be more efficient remains. inherent in vitti's perspective is the myth of middle-class ascension, or the idea that workplace productivity will lead to a corresponding rise in professional status and selfactualization—a guarantee that has been proven hollow at best, and more often exploitative, for workers of color (melamed 2006). though vitti, weiss-wolf, and other advocates position workplace menstrual tracking as something novel and well-suited for “open-minded progressive workplaces” (weiss-wolf 2017, 361), writer karen houppert (2017) points out that the menstrual underwear company thinx had already begun to use this approach. the company’s employees shared their cycle data and then-ceo miki agrawal announced to the organization when she herself was ovulating. yet, not six months after weiss-wolf’s book release, agrawal was ousted from the company after an employee filed suit against the “she-e-o” with accusations of sexual harassment, and others detailed instances of workplace gender discrimination in special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 14 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 the public press (e.g., pay discrimination, poor healthcare coverage, lack of parental leave policy) (malone 2017). shared tracking did not unlock some lost work potential trapped in the menstrual cycle or open up managers to new understanding of their employees. rather, the rhetoric of individualized self-care and empowerment that surrounded the rollout of this program hid the ways in which the company exploited its workers and undercut the very interests it purported to support (e.g., workplace gender equity, improved healthcare outcomes). not immediately evident in this refinement of the menstruating body and its care are the disciplinary and surveillant consequences of these technologies, or the biopolitics they extend. what is to be made of the body in conflict with work time, when it is made to appear so easy to manage? a recent american civil liberties union suit described a case in which alisha coleman was dismissed from her decade-long position as an emergency call taker in fort benning, georgia, for her supposed inability to “practice high standards of personal hygiene” (chandler 2017) after experiencing two incidents of sudden-onset heavy menstrual flow (for her, a symptom of perimenopause), which resulted in stains to an office chair. in a related case, model rachel rickert reported being dismissed from her role representing the car manufacturer hyundai at the new york international auto show after asking for time to clean her stained uniform. she was told to instead leave the hourly position early to deal with her “period situation,” and later let go from the job entirely (johnson 2019; marsh 2017). across these examples, we see how visions of the perfectly managed body through menstrual technology become differently issued across lines of race and class, with some having more latitude to address breakdowns when they occur. for vitti, they unlocked an opportunity to disrupt the $15 billion menstrual market, for coleman and rickert they were grounds for firing—celebrated when they help realize enterprising elite subjects, punished when they are the result of a perceived lack of self-governance. conclusion in the past, outward justifications for company-sponsored menstrual tracking focused on preserving the “delicacy” of white women and their reproductive futures. in contemporary cases, liberal feminist advocacy centered on “menstrual equity,” economic independence, and social equality upholds programs of corporate wellness as creating fairer work environments. but looking across cases from the near and more distant past tells another story. thinking back to the opening of this article, ovia offers employees access to a suite of insights and fertility tools that promise the ability to “have it all,” while employers surreptitiously track ever more granular data about workers’ lives. similarly, metropolitan life’s multi-year study assured employees that their dysmenorrhea would be alleviated with company-sponsored exercise regimens and invasive weekly check ins, focusing on the “inefficiencies” rendered by the pain and special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 15 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 discomfort of the condition. digging into how the data was collected and used across these sites allows us to see a through line, where workplace tracking programs surveil and subvert (e.g., gendered pay discrepancies, caps health insurance premiums or forms of coverage offered, and wrongful firing), rather than support workers. docile bodies to unruly ones rather than a novel self-help technique, contemporary menstrual wellness programs extend the scale and scope of exploitative corporate management. why then would feminist figures of today promote similar modes of bodily accounting, where more intimate details of daily life are rendered visible to company representatives? the past can offer insight into how this data might be leveraged—toward discriminatory practices, rather than increased workplace access or equality (hoffmann 2020). are the proposed advantages of tracking (e.g., a more personalized work schedule or relevant tasks) worth the potential loss of data privacy? for vitti, the answer lies in a belief that women possess the biologically innate ability to perform well within a corporate context. calling on her customers to tune into hidden hormonal rhythms via her protocol, she promises the ability to achieve the fabled “balance,” a creative career, optimal health, and a satisfying personal life. rather than questioning what might make achieving such a fulfilling life so challenging in the first place, she pushes her audience toward taking more responsibility in remedying the harms of capitalism (fatigue, wage inequality) through processes of self-tracking. within a framework of corporate or neoliberal feminism, the meritocratic advancement of individual—often white, cisgender—women is celebrated for reaping rewards in the market. yet this means little to those who continue to be exploited by economic conditions and social hierarchies that devalue their labor. a feminist undertaking in line with liberatory struggles for gender and racial justice would seek to undo these forms of subjugation, not reproduce them as assets (hobart and kneese 2020). rather than conditioning the body such that it can be optimally productive by corporate terms, feminist modes of tracking on the job might privilege collective data gathering meant to advocate for fairer working conditions across role or status. khovanskaya et al. (2019), for example, draw on the history of predigital labor advocacy to surface strategies used by garment workers to mitigate and selectively take on techniques of scientific management (e.g., time studies used to negotiate piece rates), tracing implications for contemporary data-driven worker advocacy. in a more recent case, the rideshare drivers cooperative driver’s seat developed a smartphone application to run in parallel with black-boxed corporate counterparts uber and lyft (dickey 2020). in gathering ordinarily hidden information about changes in pricing and routing, drivers are able to assemble data to bargain for better conditions across the industry. through these cases, we see a focus on data collection as means of building coalitions across lines of precarity and establishing counterpower to push special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 16 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 for improved compensation and livable conditions. tracking may then indeed have a role to play within the workplace, but in holding companies accountable rather than optimizing for the most “productive” self. considering again the debate around “menstrual equity” promoted by weiss-wolf and others, how might we engage with the topic through a lens of tracking and collectivism (rather than individualism)? while some companies already elect to stock their restrooms with menstrual products and pain relief medication or carve out wellness spaces, these are but one-off responses that often benefit those already in positions of wealth and status (e.g., working in tech offices). as rachel levitt and jessica barnack-tavlaris (2020) note in the recent handbook of critical menstrual studies, there is a need to focus on ways in which menstrual leave may indeed lead to outcomes counter to menstruators’ interests or well-being, or how such policies open up a space for further targeting and discrimination in the form of hiring or wage penalties. rather than tracking individual workers, for example, could data analytics and machine learning extend mechanisms for ensuring corporate compliance with workplace protections? much like fraud detection software seeks out anomalies and inconsistencies in healthcare claims, might we instead imagine platforms that surface likely instances of wrongful termination? in this, we could consider the role of tracking and predicting corporate misconduct such that it supports wider regulatory efforts and provides evidence for workers’ claims. other approaches might assume a more oppositional stance, using tracking techniques to publicly shame employers into adhering to more robust protections or dismantling their use of invasive technologies. consider, for example, antieviction mapping project’s recent initiative landlord tech watch, which geographically plots cases of tenant surveillance—at once illustrating the scale of the issue and allowing one to view finer grain detail such as the name of the property management company or type of technology used (anti-eviction mapping project 2020). alongside strategies of “watching from below,” workers might extend modes of mutual aid by conveying workplace rights and sharing material support with colleagues and community members. contratados, for instance, inverts the format of online rating platforms by opening space for workers to share their experiences with particular actors involved in exploitative low-wage labor recruitment on the us-mexico border (centro de los derechos del migrante 2020). in looking to and learning from existing cases, we can begin to imagine how workplace tracking might take on a different tenor, one focused on obstructing the managerial gaze and turning tracking back on those who would use menstrual data to exploit and harm employees (benjamin 2019). broader still, protocols that encourage reading wellness through productivity serve a regime that binds care to wealth. researchers submitted white working women to invasive examinations under the banner of efficiency. black and brown women have and continue to be exposed to invasive gynecological procedures on special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health 17 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sarah fox and franchesca spektor, 2021 an entirely different scale of subjugation and pain, as means of social control and abandon (bailey and peoples 2017; nelson 2011). recent efforts to position health and risk management practices as tasks to be taken up by the individual open up new opportunities for gendered and racialized exploitation. tracing these histories allows us to recognize how current techniques reproduce violent conditions, and the stakes involved in articulating self-care otherwise. references anti-eviction mapping project. 2020. “landlord tech watch.” landlord tech watch (blog). 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franchesca spektor, 2021 author bios sarah fox is an assistant professor at carnegie mellon university in the human computer interaction institute, where she directs the tech solidarity. franchesca spektor is a phd student in the human computer interaction institute at carnegie mellon university. https://hcii.cmu.edu/ https://hcii.cmu.edu/     roundtable how can you spell care with only 1s and 0s?     romi ron morrison university of southern california morr052@usc.edu   loren britton hello@lorenbritton.com     keywords practice, feel, mutual aid, scale, noticing, disability, notation, archive, ritual, computation, programmability, quilts, preparation, black, measurability, materiality, relationship     ritual for reading be with this text on your computer, smartphone, tablet, piece of paper or whatever other device and pause for a moment. take the chance to feel the humming of your processor, the ink on the page, the brightness of the screen and the contrast (or not) from this text with your surrounding environment. choose how you want to enter into the text, will you sit? lie down? read out loud? have the text read to you? consider if you need a sip of something wet, check in with your body and when ready begin.   what follows is a conversation between artists and scholars romi ron morrison and loren britton who have become friends since they met right before the covid-19 pandemic. during this time of distance in space and time they have found themselves in multiple conversations over questions of who gets to have a life in the computational presents we are enmeshed within. their shared interests lie in moments of everyday noticing, attention, and community processes that form the capacity for greater resistance against algorithmic normalizations that continually foreclose life chances for those most vulnerable.   recently they have collaborated on the web plugin soundings that is an invitation to willfully interrupt web browsing, and slow down. both morrison and britton are members in the collaborative oracle(s) with helen pritchard and eric snodgrass, which is a practice of developing poetic technologies that might free ourselves from the computational practices of measurement, categorization, extraction and optimization.   in this conversation there are interruptions by different emojis that pop into the text to introduce references or extra associations for our readers. these interruptions use emojis from mutant.tech that work towards an open source and more diverse emoji future.   (“infinity”. emoji description: a black and white emoji that is like the number ‘8’ turned sideways to signal “infinity”.) this comes up when we reference an idea directly from a scholar or artist (“moon viewing ceremony”. emoji description: a moon in the top right part of the emoji shines over a triangle and some plants.) this comes up when we have a little extra association or lagniappe. dzuk. mutant standard. 2017 2020. accessed 29 july 2021. https://mutant.tech/. britton, l., morrison, r., pritchard, h., and snodgrass, e. 2020. oracle(s) becoming undone together. accessed 29 july 2021. https://vimeo.com/441452535. morrison, romi ron and loren britton. 2020. soundings. accessed 29 july 2021. https://altcph.dk/soundings-romi-ron-morrison-loren-britton/.   loren britton (lb): maybe there's no right way to start so i'll pick up and begin. in other writings of yours you have spoken about a re-imagination of programmability that would remake computing towards black computational thought, a term you are developing that refuses computing that stems from white western modernity as its sole archive. in this writing you talk about social formations that exceed measurability and separable difference and stay with proximity, shared risk, accountability and receptivity. i wanted to ask you about what examples you work with that might speak to these computational moments that exceed measurability? i thought this might be a chance to talk about your project engaging the freedom quilts as well as the work you are currently developing for transmediale that is called noticing the preconditions for _______.   silva, denise ferreira da. 2016. “on difference without separability.” 32nd bienal de são paulo art biennial: incerteza viva: 57-65. chen, nancy n. 1992. “‘speaking nearby’: a conversation with trinh t. minh-ha.” visual anthropology review 8 (1): 82–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.1992.8.1.82. accountability reminds me of the entry, dreaming accountability, from mia mingus on her blog, leaving evidence, that reads “what if accountability wasn’t scary? it will never be easy or comfortable, but what if it wasn’t scary? what if our own accountability wasn’t something we ran from, but something we ran towards and desired, appreciated, held as sacred?” in the context of our conversation here we discuss amongst other things where our sacred accountabilities lie, and how we can develop ways of caring for ourselves and these practices as we make and unmake technoscience. mingus, mia. leaving evidence. “dreaming accountability,” 5 may 2019. accessed 29 july 2021. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2019/05/05/dreaming-accountability-dreaming-a-returning-to-ourselves-and-each-other/. morrison, romi ron & mimi onuoha. 2021. noticing the preconditions for ______. transmediale. accessed 20 july 2021. https://transmediale.de/almanac/noticing-the-preconditions-for_.   romi ron morrison (rrm): i want to start by acknowledging that i appreciate the ways that you're attending to my interest in programmability particularly as a way to get towards this concept of black computational thought, which feels like a practice of recovering these instances that just often aren't seen as being relevant to computation. i'm really trying to push beyond an acceptance of computation, programmability, software, data, measurement—these things that have become so standard within the lexicon of computation, as self-evident and transparent. instead, i want to understand the much longer, historical, and residual baggage these practices carry due to the violences they inherit from post-enlightenment scientific thought.   here i am using transparent akin to the transparent i evoked in silva, denise ferreira da. 2007. toward a global idea of race. minneapolis, mi: university of minnesota press. for a deeper dive into the ways that colonial violences structure scientific thought see wynter, sylvia. 2003. “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument.” new centennial review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.   so for me, the practice of returning to certain social practices, formations and social technical infrastructures that arise out of black diasporic movement is an attempt to think about these terms very differently. i believe that these instantiations of black technical practice begin to illustrate the contours for what a space might look like that is adverse to but subtends the totalizing residue of colonization and post-enlightenment scientific discourse.   i am thinking about residue alongside lisa lowe’s work on the residual, borrowing from raymond williams in lowe, lisa. 2015. the intimacies of four continents. durham, nc: duke university press.   i'm looking for examples in which people have contended with concepts like measurability or data on very different grounds and so the negro motorist green book, as a collection of safe places for traveling black people to access, is an example of a kind of cybernetic system that doesn't mirror the automated control that can be found in norbert wiener’s imaginary about how a city should function. green, victor h., 1936 1967. the green book. new york, ny: victor h. green & company. accessed 29 july 2021. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-green-book#/?tab=about&scroll=10.   in some of the unpublished writings that i shared with you there's a whole essay about jennifer light’s brilliant work charting the use of military technologies for municipal use. she helps me understand how immensely rewritten american cities became within pervasive cybernetic logics of management in the face of cold war inspired threat, particularly black urban rebellions from 1965-1969. so, for me i'm looking at a dialectic for how blackness produces other types of technologies, not just those that are about capture and control, and the negro motorist green book as a site of cybernetic operation opens itself for there to be dialogue about trust, and emphasizes the face to face encounters of people making decisions together within a system that still circulates, and is about information flow. something gets lost or foreclosed when the emphasis is only on optimization and automation. what's fascinating to me about the green book are the ways in which the information is sourced, compiled, and then circulated through victor and alma green’s social relationships within the u.s. postal workers union. by having postal workers literally walking their routes, engaging with neighbors, and having relationships with business owners, they would note safe places for black people, send them to victor and alma green who would compile them and circulate them back out as destinations in the green book. even at the end of every printing of the green book there's always a call for more destinations to be added, so it works as a crowdsourced directory that is explicitly about the preservation of black life across space that is not a neutral container, but is overtly hostile.   rrm: and i think there's also something interesting about this context because the operations are not transparent. the negro motorist green book isn't written as a survival guide for jim crow or white supremacy it's written innocuously as a travel companion. this is a form that engages with different types of opacity that can be productive and necessary. it also complicates these cybernetic operations by foregrounding how people are engaged in shared risk in a way that doesn't remove the flesh and allows for a kind of presence with each other. this emphasis on shared risk and flesh expands the ways that i want to think about programmability, as an engagement, albeit often unequal, that can hold different power relations allowing people to step into other ways of becoming together. i'm trying to think about programmability in that sense, rather than accept the master slave logic within computation, or the determinism of programmability that wendy chun has traced to mendelian genetics and american eugenicists.   these thoughts on programmability and shared risk are informed by zakiyyah iman jackson’s work on symbiosis in becoming human: matter and meaning in an antiblack world. chun, wendy hui kyong. 2011. programmed visions: software and memory. cambridge, ma: mit press. jackson, zakiyyah iman. 2020. becoming human: matter and meaning in an antiblack world. new york, ny: nyu press.   lb: in your work on the freedom quilts which were quilts carefully constructed and stitched to direct fugitive black people escaping slavery in the us south towards freedom; you have written about the quilting bees on plantations where the language, pattern, stitching and constant reformulation / modulation of these quilts would be re-inscribed through their community production. in this way these quilts are highly specific, contextual land cues, a culturally situated practice towards freedom. i wonder if you want to say more about this, also perhaps on the relation of the materiality of these quilts to the land that they were present on?   these practices of language, patterning, contextual specificity and slippage relate to a project i have worked on with my collaborator isabel paehr called hacking concrete. this work engages material instability to make concrete ‘open’ even though it is often a material that can foreclose access to spaces and colloquially is understood to be solidified. melt (loren britton & isabel paehr). 2021. meltionary. “hacking concrete.” accessed 29 july 2021. http://meltionary.com/hackingconcrete/start.html.   rrm: yeah, so this is really becoming important and crucial for me, this practice of trying to hold the productive tension of seemingly disparate things together—which reads like an autobiography at this point. my relation to scholarship begins within black studies and gender studies, centering queer black feminist theory in particular, and then extended to experimental practices of design, architecture, and geography. and i now carry those practices through to consider the effects of computation on the production of space while still reading from a queer black feminist lens. this allows me to interrogate and denaturalize certain computational practices as self-evident or already fully understood.   i’m trying to better understand the ways that theories of computation, which are never fully deracinated or separate from post enlightenment thoughts of empiricism, measurability, or calculation, have a huge effect on how we understand land and space. both in the managing and organizing of space but more importantly in the types of spatial imaginaries that computational logics allow. jennifer light’s book from warfare to welfare: defense intellectuals and urban problems in cold war america does a great job of this. it shows the ways that military actors like the rand corporation, essentially trying to diversify their bottom line, introduce certain computational informatics and cybernetic architectures into municipal governments. there is a clear way in which the city as a whole is being reimagined from the 1950s to the 1970s through large scale logistics management, urban planning, data capture, and predictive analytics.   light, jennifer. from warfare to welfare: defense intellectuals and urban problems in cold war america. baltimore, md: john hopkins university press.   so i want to pay attention to how modern ideas about measurability, control, and conquest inform cybernetics as a new science of management, and produce specific typologies of urban space. alternately, the negro motorist green book and the freedom quilts as black technological practices produce different spatial and computational logics. so i'm deeply curious about the black production of space and technology that come from things like the negro motorist green book and the freedom quilts. coming back to your question about the freedom quilts, the locations of the quilting bees on plantations are essential sources for information gathering that have a great deal of geographical and topographical specificity because people are literally having to navigate the landscape in order to then tell others about what resources they might find and encode that data through detailed stitching patterns. these patterns and ties were also used to plot mile markers so that people can plan how far they can travel within a day. maintaining this contextual basis for place expands computation beyond the glossy and frictionless descriptions often assigned to it where we simply input and output information, but stays with the troubled materiality in which computation is co-constituted through the specificity of place, social engagements and shared agreements. this approach to computation is sociogenic and gives a broader understanding for how computation is constituted otherwise at different times, by different people, in different places. and so i try to hold on to these instantiations because i think they're particularly helpful now, as we're trying to engage in rich critical discourse about computation and violence, and rather than trying to speak to the violences within the same language that has given birth to them, i'm trying to find these other lexicons or dialogues because i think they are a lot more expansive.   wynter, sylvia. 2013. “towards the sociogenic principle: fanon, identity, the puzzle of conscious experience, and what it is like to be ‘black’.” national identities and socio-political changes in latin america, 46-82. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315052717-8.   lb: totally. i am taking note of the stitching patterns and the materiality of these quilts as socio-technical objects, the patterns or ties for example that would signal distance. these questions of materiality, spatial relationships and the capacity for negotiation towards movements towards freedom reminds me of my work as melt with isabel paehr on a project called rituals against barriers. in this project we have been developing ritual and material based experiments that are inspired by practices of survival in oppressive contexts and take the form of ritual practice. we think about how rituals can invite movements away from normativities and can allow entry into practices like refusing to ignore a feeling, refusing ableist spaces, and refusing to speed up even if that is the normalized tempo. in that work, rituals are moments of joy, of refusal, collective practice, of uncomfort and unlearning.   although in this work rituals are upheld as a space for practicing towards liberation and pushing back against ritualized oppressions, we also attend to the ways in which oppression becomes normalized by dominant and oppressive culture. in her book dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness, simone browne points to “the ritualized practices and trauma of white supremacy” (105) which is another kind of structural violence which must be refused. browne, simone. 2015. dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham, nc: duke university press. melt (loren britton & isabel paehr). 2021. meltionary. “rituals against barriers.” accessed 29 july 2021. http://www.meltionary.com/meltries/a.html.   we have been looking into the history, present, possibilities and devastating failures of disability justice/activism within the united states and in germany. we have thought a lot about these entanglements of place, space, access and technology nearby aimi hamraie in their book building access: universal design and the politics of disability. in the chapter, sloped technoscience, they tell the story of how disabled people and their accomplices drove around in berkeley, california in the 1970s and took sledgehammers to inaccessible streets in order to crumble curbs, repour cement and physically make the streets more accessible. reflecting on this history, they ask: “if we take a sledgehammer to the seemingly concretized sidewalks of disability rights history, what layered sedimentations of resistance do we find below? (hamraie, 103)”. they share images of concrete pieces that are artifacts or evidence of hacking the city and making material interventions towards other more accessible worlds. it's an example from a different archive, but it resonates with how the materials of socio-technical systems say so much about their context, like you were talking about.   a ritual from rituals against barriers: ritual for tending to the "not perceivable": from undrowned by alexis pauline gumbs, spend time with the question: "what becomes possible when we are immersed in the queerness of forms of life that dominant systems cannot chart, reward or even understand?" hamraie, aimi. 2017. building access: universal design and the politics of disability. minneapolis, mi: university of minnesota press gumbs, alexis pauline. 2020. undrowned: black feminist lessons from marine mammals. chico, ca: ak press.   rrm: yeah, absolutely. it makes me think about a few things. there's a way in which ruth wilson gilmore describes abolition as a radical presence, and i think that has a lot of relevancy here. especially the power and devastation that certain imaginaries concretize. which is why the hack is super enticing and provocative, and also attuned to a close proximity for understanding needs and desire. urban planning and programming don't often come out of histories in which they're anticipating that people will imbue new uses within their creations, the master plan is not something that's very adaptable because it's setting 10-year goals linearly into the future that are self-contained. what is imagined in the abstract as ideal or commonsensical becomes written, codified, and then materialized. and practices of urban design and software design both tend to imagine ideal universal users. what's so lovely about the materiality in your example is that it breaks this imagined standard and forces a kind of focus around quotidian daily practices, even rituals, that are about what it means to notice your own desires and needs, and then to be poised to take the sledgehammer and edit the curb. this is not arbitrary, it's not a random act of destruction, it is considered and is indeed a relationship to place. when i’m trying to search for examples that practice computation on different grounds they almost always exhibit that kind of everyday attentiveness to refute the universalizing claims of computation as a transcendent cloud.   gilmore, ruth wilson. 2007. golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california. oakland, ca: university of california press.   instead i’m trying to stay in the dirt and the soil, walking the ground. so thinking about the curb edits, the postal workers walking their daily routes, the plantation grapevine that then feeds information to quilting bees, they are practices that engage the materiality of shared risk to intervene in everyday desires in excess of the present.   lb: yes exactly, it reminds me of a quote from remi m. yergeau that “bodies are not for hacking, bigotry is.!” so, i understand your work on rituals of black fugitivity: directly picks up on practices of ritual as they meet black diasporic practices and i wonder if you want to speak more to this? as i’ve thought about them, rituals have been about accessibility creating practices, so rituals are something that can be enacted in community or alone that enact the possibility of a specific sense of space within uninhabitable conditions.   yergeau, remi m. 2014. “disability hacktivism.” hacking the classroom: eight perspectives, edited by jentery seyers & mary hocks. last accessed 29 july 2021. http://web.uvic.ca/~jentery/hacking/. morrison, romi ron. 2018. “rituals of black fugitivity:.” accessed 29 july 2021. https://elegantcollisions.com/rituals-of-black-fugativity-p.   rrm: for me ritual is a very spatial-temporal relationship. before sitting in front of my altar, talking to ancestors, or writing i need to prepare myself and my space. i can't sit in front of my altar if my room is messy, or i haven't washed my face yet. the preparation and the making of space is part of the ritual. it becomes vital to prepare the space to be ready for the ritual to show me what it needs to show me, otherwise i’m not engaged in ritual. so, there's a kind of preparation for me, that's a part of ritual that in turn produces its own space-time.   lb: i mean, yeah. i really appreciate the way that you come back to preparation. the distinction between habit and ritual is something that i’ve been considering as well, when is something pathologized and when not, who decides? what are the stakes of the amount of preparation that must be enacted in order to withstand great precarity? and who has access to that time, space, resources, and community practice to be well prepared?   these practices that affirm agency remind me of rosemarie garland-thomson’s concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and temporal relationship that affirms the agency and value of disabled peoples' experiences. she discusses how misfitting avoids genericizing disabled experience and undoes myths around dependency/ interdependency. misfitting time-space-experience could then be a way to move within and care for our brilliant knowledges and challenge worlds that were not built for us. thinking about sensory experiences, there are quite some preparations needed to withstand, or to find ways to be okay in shifting contexts that are specific to my body-mind. i very much relate to what you’re saying.   bodymind is a materialist feminist disability studies concept from margaret price and has been taken up by multiple disability studies scholars to discuss the enmeshment of the body and mind which have been constructed as separate due to cartesian dualisms of western philosophy. theorists i follow who engage this concept include: margaret price, sami schalk and aimi hamraie. price, margaret. 2015. “the bodymind problem and the possibilities of pain”. hypatia, 30 (1): 268–284. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12127; schalk, sami. 2020. bodyminds reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in black women’s speculative fiction. durham: nc: duke university press.; garland‐thomson, rosemarie. 2011. “misfits: a feminist materialist disability concept”. hypatia 26 (3): 591–609. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01206.x.   rrm: yeah i definitely feel that, even in things that we understand to be really phenomenological or stochastic, like improvisation within jazz music or polyrhythmic west african drumming ensembles. there is this great conversation between arthur jafa and steve coleman and they’re speaking about jazz and this misnomer in which people assume improvisation is just pure unbridled creation and that you start from nothing, and it’s like no there is so much preparation that goes into constantly playing a scale over and over again so that your approach to the scale becomes instinctual. you’re trying to build an instinctual muscle memory for having a lot of notes at your disposal to play with. but the actual improvisation isn’t just an act of randomization; it's an act of preparation that allows for expansive forms of emergence to happen. that feels very akin to me when thinking about ritual to respond to precarity that is not about prediction. because prediction is about trying to eliminate flux, change, and what can’t be conceived at the time. it is about the limiting of options and limiting the ability of other options to arrive. i think kara keeling speaks to that really well in queer times black futures. specifically, in corporate futures planning...   keeling, kara. 2019. queer times black futures. new york, ny: nyu press. jafa, arthur. 2018. “love is the message: an evening with arthur jafa.” accessed 30 july 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoyd_iapie0.   lb: talking about shell i think.   rrm: right! and i love the ways that she is bringing in thoughts on antifragility and practices within black life that are made to be inherently antifragile, the ways that she talks about james snead’s work on repetition, modulation, coverage, and the cut, as ways to build accidents into the process and repetition as that kind of preparation, the ability to return to the altar to make space for feeling composed enough to meet the precarity or unpredictability of the day rather than attempting to map out any potential threat at the beginning of the day and then avoid them as much as possible. there is a very different gesture there. so i think there is a lot here to consider towards black computational thought that invites ritual practice rather than prediction when trying to mitigate risk by making space for it as a relation.   james snead, “repetition as a figure of black culture,” in black literature and literary theory, ed. henry louis gates and sunday ogbonna anozie (new york; routledge, 1984), 59.   lb: so, relatedly, we read together many great texts in prep for our conversation, like michelle murphy who talks about phantasmagrams. phantasmagrams as murphy introduces them are about the affective or emotional attachment to enumeration or the emotional quality of numeracy and all of the things that fall outside of numbers themselves that are relatable. in her text she talks about gross domestic product (gdp) and care labor that is excluded from the gdp. i’m curious about your interest in phantasmagrams as expressions of the excess of numeracy as they sit alongside black computational thought? do you see these as being in relation?   murphy, michelle. 2017. the economization of life. durham, nc: duke university press.   rrm: yeah, so i think phatasmagrams allows for me to bring in certain forms of black studies scholarship that would maybe otherwise be seen as really outside the bounds of any theory of computation or data. i’m hesitant to make a parallel between phantasmagrams and black computational thought even though i think there are some shared components. this relationship to numeracy and what lives in excess of the digit as well as our attachments to them, are both components where there is a shared investment between how michelle murphy is talking about phantasmagrams and how i am trying to think about black computational thought. so what phantasmagrams do for me is they speak to the often removed affective attachment to a metric. often critiques of big data or algorithmic bias is about “oh these just aren't the right numbers, or these aren't the right inputs and that's why we’re getting bad junk data out” it still treats the numeral, the integer, as if it is just a cold quantifiable thing. it’s just computed, it's not something that we also have this libidinal attachment to. so what i like about michelle murphy’s text is that, she's looking at things like the rise of population and its relation to gpd in this post malthisian natural scarcity world and is really explicitly talking about the forms of violence that then become justified because of this affective attachment to gdp as an indicator of the literal health or potential progress of the nation. so, it is a really provocative example to bring up the affective attachment to numbers or enumeration, particularly at a large scale when talking about population or gdp as nascent concepts for nation building.   so, for me that is really helpful when looking back at jennifer light’s work. light details how so many cybernetic interventions that happened within municipalities failed in terms of making cities more efficient. she notes how technicians acknowledged their failures, but the affective attachment to the imaginary of control over large urban processes still overwrote that recognition of failure. so phantasmagrams are really important because they speak to the affective attachment to enumeration as fact or truth. that is really useful for intervening in critiques of technology and opens the space for me to bring in the work of scholars like sylvia wynter and talk about sociogeny and the ways in which storytelling, language, and the imaginary are not separate from what we think of as empirical, scientific, or measurable. it is a hybrid. this situates computation so that we can tell different stories about it.   lb: i had a question about forms of attention and sensemaking, that might be related to other stories we could tell about computing, we talked already about modulation or vibration. and i'm curious to think with you about other sorts of sense-based practices like smell or things that exceed the written, which seems like something that you might be interested in, but we didn't directly talk about. it's also something i'm quite interested in. and then i also had a question about scale, which is maybe a different direction.   rrm:this project that i’ve been working on with mimi onuoha for transmediale is pretty explicitly about a kind of sensemaking, which we’ve been talking about as noticing. for us, noticing is about giving a lot of attention to small, very ordinary things that hold a lot of potential. and that can be instructive for recognizing a desire for how we might want to live or be together, that's not always allowable in the present.   here i am thinking with josé muñoz’s work in cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity in which desire is essential for reaching towards the horizon of queer futurity. desire becomes a manner of knowledge to seek what may not be allowable now but needs to exist. it is a practice of beginning to conjure.   and so the content is essentially all about a particular form of sensemaking. and a sensemaking for paying attention to what otherwise might fall out of memory. in particular, mimi and i both share a kind of investment in blackness as a political analytic to frame the things that we notice. repetition and ritual return here to be able to meet risk from a different vantage, it's not about prediction, but it's about building up a practice of making space for what can be accounted for. so in this piece we each separately notice an expression of care from our daily lives, document it, and make an interpretation of it in the form of a short media work. then through the act of correspondence we share those works with each other to iterate upon them, and then send it back to repeat again. so that, that original thing is occluded, but what we get instead are different permutations based on interpretation. it makes interpretation an explicit part of data collection and also includes my relationship with mimi as an important part of that interpretation. it is relational. this kind of shared correspondence reminds us of the things that a single person can't hold within their attention and is an attempt to recognize the value in building relational forms of sensemaking.   lb: yes, definitely. i like how you and i in our practices make sensemaking at different scales. there must be structural change but also there are ways in which change is made every day. i don't know if you know the collective called sins invalid? they're based in california. i'm a huge fan of their work, they are a bipoc led disability justice collective, and they center disabled people focusing as they say on “an unashamed claim to beauty in the face of invisibility”. they share a lot of resources about disability justice on their website and have many performances also online to view. they have this amazing podcast titled “into the crip universe” that explores the intersection of disability justice and climate chaos. in this podcast patty berne, one of the founders of disability justice, talks about all the ways that in the midst of climate chaos the kind of support that might be needed. in the episode, “we love like barnacles”, berne poses the question “when climate disaster strikes, will able-bodied allies be there for us?”. she goes on to consider what kinds of small mutual aid we might need to practice like: having a text message group to check in, sharing fridge space and making sure that people have access to their meds. these small scale mutual aid initiatives really create access for people right because when we're talking about accessibility, we know that we can't always rely on larger structures to care for us so we practice caring for each other.   sins invalid: into the crip universe podcast episode 1. “we love like barnacles.” 2020. accessed 29 july 2021. https://www.sinsinvalid.org/podcast/2020/10/16/episode-1-foundations-of-climate-justice-and-disability-justice.   ritual for closing allow these words to wash over you. release the pressure to capture them and stow them away. instead allow yourself to be a sieve. give attention to what bubbles up. those errant turbidities that collect in patches. these are the beginnings for new ground. moving takes practice and we begin with a question. what if we cared for each other with an ease that holds shared risk?     author bios romi ron morrison is a black queer non-binary artist, researcher, and educator. their work investigates the personal, political, ideological, and spatial boundaries of race, ethics, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center black feminist technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world—reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data.   loren britton is a white trans* interdisciplinary artist and researcher tuning with practices of critical pedagogy, trans*feministtechnoscience and disability justice. engaging the queer potential of undoing norms they practice joyful accountability to matters of collaboration, computing, trans*gender politics, black feminisms, and transformations. they love slowness, reading out loud, following non-linear processes and experimenting towards greater accessibility.   microsoft word 32070_danya glabau dr.docx glabau, danya (2019). food allergies and the hygienic sublime. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-26. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © danya glabau, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license food allergies and the hygienic sublime danya glabau nyu tandon school of engineering danya.glabau@gmail.com abstract this article proposes a feminist intervention into the idea of the sublime: the hygienic sublime, a terrifying and greater-than-human register of experience that is an important aspect of domestic life for people managing food allergies. in food allergic living, hygienically managing microscopic agents becomes a larger-thanlife task, one where perfect hygiene and safety is only imperfectly attainable and a constant reminder of the limits of human foresight and agency. the hygienic sublime draws on and reinforces us imaginaries that link hygiene to whiteness and wealth, constructs women as naturally responsible caretakers, and portrays nuclear families as the best social form for managing risks to health. drawing on nearly three years of multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted with food allergic individuals and parents and food allergy activists in the united states from 2013 to 2016, this paper analyzes life history narratives from food allergy mothers and food allergic adults alongside images and text from magazines targeted at families managing food allergies. these stories and artifacts reveal how the hygienic sublime operates in media and in the home, reproducing norms of gender, race, class, and family structure in the process. introduction: purity, politics and social reproduction in life with food allergies, purity is paramount. the ordinary markers of a lived-in kitchen—crumbs on the counter, a thin sheen of oil on the stovetop, a sprinkling of flour dusted on the shelves—present immediate dangers to someone managing an allergy to peanuts, wheat, or shellfish. to manage such ever-present threat, special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 2 food allergy households turn to intensive management of home hygiene, including management of food sourcing, preparation surfaces, utensils, and other aspects of the domestic space. practices in the home are modeled in media images of sparkling clean, high-end kitchens and scenes of heteronormative domestic bliss. the imagery and pursuit of perfect hygiene, accomplished through normative family life and the consumption of rarified goods, is an instantiation of what i call the hygienic sublime. the hygienic sublime prompts a confrontation with the limits of purity in the face of the agency of microscopic agents, such as food oils and proteins. at the same time, the hygienic sublime contributes to the reproduction of whiteness, heteronormativity, wealth, and nuclear families as the means through which bodily safety can be assured in the contaminated—and contaminating—spaces of modern life. the proposal that there is something “sublime” in household hygiene and purity diverges from recent scholarly conversations about sublimity. for example, taking the cue from edmund burke’s (1803) treatise on the sublime, originally published in 1757, scholars of environmental communication emphasize that the large-scale and greater-than-human magnitude of landscapes, both pure and polluted, as key aspects of the sublime (stormer, 2004; brunner & dawson, 2017). within this literature, scholars have identified toxic sublimes meant to push viewers toward environmental activism (peeples, 2011), marketing-oriented recreational sublimes (brunner & dawson, 2017), and even domesticated sublimes, in which nature is tamed by viewing it through the technology of the camera lens (deluca & demo, 2000). nathan stormer (2004) enumerates a series of sublimes, including maternal sublimes (p. 218) and a hygienic sublime (p. 230) characterized by a focus on highly gendered, nationalistic mental and racial hygiene. according to stormer’s analysis of ansel adams’s photographic oeuvre, “sublime scenes” operate in mass media by “constituting a relationship between the spectator as a certain kind of human being and the sublime object as greater than human” (2004, p. 214). stormer, and other environmental communications scholars, are especially interested in the “affective response” intended or experienced through viewing simultaneously dangerous and enticing, massive sublime landscapes (2004, p. 216). yet for jennifer peeples (2011) in particular, immensity is not the whole story. mystery, that which lurks off screen, and a feeling of vertigo when confronted with differences in position and scale count for as much as human smallness in the face of the hugeness of wilderness or nature. peeples’s description of the sublime invites a consideration of how the very small scale, like the very larger, can trigger a confrontation with the limits of human mastery over nature. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 3 what is in question in food allergic living is precisely this: how can food allergic people and their caretakers control the movement of oils, proteins, and chemicals, often present in such small quantities as to be invisible? the pursuit of purity in food allergic living is an attempt to neutralize—to domesticate (deluca & demo, 2000)—the dangers of food substances through scrubbing, washing, wiping, separating, storing, packing, and transporting foods and the objects they contact in ways that maintain or create purity. though the scale of concern is small, it is not small “on a human scale” (deluca & demo, 2000). thus, it is not pastoral or beautiful in burke’s typification of the beautiful and the sublime, but dangerous at another nonhuman scale, the microscopic. in everyday practice, perfect and constant household hygiene is impossible. indeed, hearing stories about the impossibility of subliminal purity, about failure and mix-ups and resulting episodes of illness, often serious, was the seed of this paper. these failures further serve to remind individuals—often in traumatic ways—of the limited capacity of human control over the much-smaller-than-human-scale. hygiene has been the best medicine for managing allergies for over a century. allergies have been notoriously difficult to reverse via medical interventions on the allergic individual’s body, so much so that the field of allergy was long regarded as junk science (smith, 2015). instead, controlling the environment has become the focal point for the management of many types of allergies in the united states and beyond since the nineteenth century. some of these interventions were focused on public space, like the anti-ragweed campaigns led by white, middle-class women in chicago (mitman, 2007). wealthy nineteenth and earlyto-mid-twentieth-century americans would also travel to replace their ordinary environment with the forests of northern michigan during hay season or by decamping to arizona to treat intractable asthma (mitman 2004, 2007). controlling the home environment also became a key strategy for managing allergy, particularly respiratory allergy (jackson, 2006). by the 1930s, the acquisition of specially marketed consumer goods was positioned as a solution to managing the disease that was attainable by the middle classes as well as the rich (mitman, 2007; keirns, 2003). at the moment, there is some debate, both within scientific communities and among allergic people and parents of allergic children, about whether the pursuit of hygiene is the best way to address the condition. for example, recent scientific research demonstrates the importance of exposure to strategically introduced impurities, including the substances that trigger a person’s allergies, for “training” the immune system to tolerate a wide variety of foods (mondoulet et al., 2010; special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 4 jones, burks, & dupont, 2014). introduction of peanut into the diet of infants using the israeli children’s snack food bamba, for example, has been demonstrated to reduce rates of later food allergies in children in an international, large-scale, longitudinal study based in the united kingdom (du toit et al., 2015). yet preventive and curative measures are still under investigation. two setbacks recently rocked the food allergy research and advocacy worlds: the apparent failure of efficacy of dbv technologies’ viaskin peanut immunotherapy skin patch (dbv technologies, 2017) in a recent clinical trial and the continued accumulation of evidence that aimmune therapeutics’ orally delivered food allergy treatment still presents a significant risk of allergic reactions for users (nisen, 2018). in light of these findings, it is unclear when or whether a long-term treatment will be both safe and efficacious enough reach the market. at the same time, scholars, vaccine skeptics, and skeptics of other aspects of modern life question have suggested the various ways that that allergy is the signature “disease of civilization” (jackson, 2006). among patients and activists, some raise questions about whether the prevention of childhood diseases and the hygiene of the modern home is contributing to the “epidemic” of food allergies (waggoner, 2013; fraser, 2011). anthropologist roberta raffaetà (2013) has documented similar discourses in her study of italian allergy sufferers. indeed, recent epidemiological research suggests that exposure to farm dirt and a greater number of siblings (and consequently greater exposure to childhood illnesses) may be preventive of an array of allergic conditions, including food allergies, asthma, and respiratory allergies (holbreich et al., 2012; liu, 2015; gupta et al., 2016). nonetheless, none of these potential solutions or future cures do much to help the person who is already allergic and working on getting through everyday life without an allergic reaction. in the day-to-day, strict attention to hygiene remains the go-to tool for managing food allergies for people already diagnosed. while scholars of technoscience often gravitate toward studying laboratories and scientific institutions to understand how knowledge and technologies order social life, the home is also a site of intensive technoscientific practice and innovation. science and technology studies scholars have argued that such practices have been specifically aimed at cleansing and strengthening the (social and physical) body of the nation in way that smoothly articulates with heteronormativity and eugenics (kline, 1997; bijker & bisterveld, 2000). indeed, a frequently touted benefit of the hygienic home in the united states in the first half of the twentieth century was that it was private, free of potentially contaminated and contaminating people, and presided over by a woman whose entire life was devoted to caring for the family (cowan, 1983; tomes, 1998). new household special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 5 technologies allowed white women to do more household work without outside (and often undesirably racialized, foreign, or lower-class) help, securing the home as a private space where only the nuclear, genetically related family was allowed. in the process, it intensified mothers’ moral duty to do housework and further naturalized the idea that a woman’s place in the world was primarily as a caretaker. contemporary food icons, such as martha stewart (bentley, 2001), and trends like “foodie culture” (cairns, johnston, & baumann, 2010) and the ubiquitous starbucks pumpkin spice latte (powell & engelhardt, 2015), continue to draw some of their cachet from the associations with white femininity that attach to them in part as a consequence of longer histories of home hygiene. this paper is based on nearly three years of multisited ethnographic research, from 2013 to 2016, among people with food allergies, food allergy parents, physicians, scientists, and food allergy activists in the united states. over seventy interviews were conducted during the course of ethnographic immersion, with some participants interviewed more than once. interviews were conducted remotely by phone, in person at food allergy events throughout the united states, and in person in two teaching hospital allergy clinics. i also followed the food allergy media, from magazines to blogs and public social media posts, in print and on internet-based platforms to follow the major events and conversations concerning food allergy science and policy as they unfolded in real time. in the following section of this paper, i will further explain why aspirational home hygiene deserves to be considered a form of the sublime. then, i will analyze images from a popular food allergy magazine, allergic living, to begin describing the visual form of the hygienic sublime. allergic living was the premier food allergy print publication at the time of this research and represented widely held ideas about food allergies and what should be done about them. in the next section, “the hygienic sublime at the intersections of race, gender, family, and class,” i delve into three interviews in depth to explore how race, gender, family structure, and class figure into the experiences of people managing food allergies. the experiences of these participants illustrate what the real-life pursuit of the hygienic sublime looks like, as well as the many complications and failures that come along with its pursuit. in closing, i consider how the hygienic sublime articulates the ethics and implications of purity politics in science, technology, and society, alongside other, long-standing conversations in feminist technoscience studies. while the hygienic sublime is, on the surface, a pragmatic response to the problem of “how to build yourself a body in a safe space” in a contaminated world (murphy, 2006), the historical record reveals that a politics premised on purity risks limiting the political and ethical imagination of movements for recognition special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 6 and inclusion. 1. domesticating the sublime the sublime as it has so far been conceived is a figuration that reinforces gender norms and national identity. to date, things identified as “sublime” have mostly been large-scale, outside the home, and coded masculine: mountain vistas, overcast prairie views, powerful waterfalls, and the like. admitting impure countertops into the family of sublime landscapes is a decidedly feminist intervention into this scholarly tradition. doing housework in pursuit of a hygienic indoor environment is often entirely overwhelming, yet in robert miles’s (2002) terms, for example, such a response to the presence of the sublime would not be admissible to a tradition of sublimity rooted in nineteenth-century literature and philosophy. for miles (2002) (and seemingly for stormer [2004] as well), what is sublime is always outside, exterior to the self, and public. yet analogous to the nineteenth-century american settler who performed masculine toughness in response to overwhelmingly vast landscapes, the call to perform housework is a never-ending task that demands action once affected by the hygienic sublime. action must go on despite one’s feeling that the nonhuman scale overwhelms even the very best of human intentions, like anticipatory household management. the differences between the hygienic sublime and the existing sublime tradition lie in the direction of the difference in magnitude between humans and their threatening/enticing environs and in the gendering of the particular activities expected in response to the stimulus of the sublime. sublime imagery and experiences of the sublime in us contexts inspired normatively masculine feats of endurance and strength, recorded in the diaries and publications of historical colonizers, soldiers, and explorers (cronon, 1995; stormer, 2004). embodying masculinity on the frontier became linked with the enactment of “americanness,” motivating generations of soldiers, politicians, and enterprising young men to expand the territory of the nation. masculinity as the proper response to the sublime thus fueled a certain version of national progress, one that was expansionist and concerned with the control of land in the nineteenth century and grew to emphasize the pursuit of technological achievements in the twentieth. american technological sublimes in the twentieth century remained both racial and national, as david nye (1994) describes. the view of the hetch hetchy dam or a rocket launching into space from american soil connoted progress and national unity for the masses. overlapping with the early years of nye’s analysis, the continuation of us expansion through colonialism created new terrains for investigating and enacting medical purity in the american philippines (anderson, 2006). in warwick anderson’s investigation, special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 7 racial and bacteriological hygiene are linked, and are elevated to a subliminal coupling of threat and enticement for both the colonizers and the colonized. these technological achievements produced a united faith in the idea that life in the united states could only grow better, healthier, and stronger, and that it must do so through intensified deployment of the latest engineered inventions. this paper situates the hygienic sublime in a us context in which race, gender, and class take on particular formations individually and in relation to each other. these formations deeply inflect the precise form taken by hygienic sublime. at the same time, the hygienic sublime contributes to the reproduction of such structures of power and visibility in us society. in the hygienic sublime, technology and gender remain significant, though they are feminized. rather than emboldening wilderness adventurers, the hygienic sublime portrayed in food allergy publications targets homemakers—implicitly women—and entices them to make home improvements and invest in organizing systems, cooking tools, air filters, and allergy-friendly interior paint. the focus on the home instead draws attention inward, intensifying the focus on the private, domestic space. the hygienic sublime is often clearly classed as well: poor people need not attempt it, as the goods, time, and expertise require generously available time and capital. domestic spaces are inhabited by nuclear, heterosexual families with normatively masculine men and feminine women. in the media version of the hygienic sublime, slim women smile and take care of children, and they shine together beatifically in filtered sunlight. in real life, women quit their jobs to cook, clean, and purify full time, to ward off the dangers posed to their children by microscopic agents. 2. the hygienic home ideal the hygienic sublime takes on its purest form in media images depicting the perfectly safe and pure food allergy home. one place to find such images is in the pages of allergic living magazine, the primary magazine of and for the englishspeaking food allergy community. headed by canadian editor and food allergic adult gwen smith, the magazine seeks to present rigorously vetted health information presented by scientific experts alongside features about ordinary families dealing with food allergies. it also includes major food and environmental trends that might affect people with food and other allergies, recipes that omit major allergens, and aspirational features about allergy-friendly homes. like all print publications, it contains a multitude of topical ads for products for allergy, asthma, and related health concerns. many of its columnists were also independent food allergy bloggers who i met, followed on social media, and interviewed for my research. the depiction of the hygienic home in allergic living special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 8 provides a window into what people with food allergies aimed to achieve in their own homes beyond its pages. it is a key site in which the hygienic sublime was documented and disseminated among people managing food allergies during the period of my research. selling the hygienic sublime: the fall 2014 issue of allergic living offers a compelling place to start. this issue included a seven-page feature article about designing an allergy-safe kitchen, titled “kitchens that cook” (van evra, 2014a). the recommended materials are as “natural” as possible—made of wood, stone, and glass—to reduce the possibility of volatile organic compounds (vocs, found in higher proportions in plastics and certain paints) off-gassing into the home and irritating asthma or chemical sensitivity symptoms. the top-of-the-line design includes hardwood floors, low-voc paint, wood cabinets, and stone and glasscomposite countertops. cabinets are spacious and plentiful to store the wide array of kitchen tools and basic grains, flavorings, and vegetables needed to cook all of a family’s meals from scratch with ease. the size and abundance of cabinets would also make it easy to sort, see, assess, and choose the right products for different members of the family when their nutritional needs might vary. the finished kitchen is suburban luxury doubling as medical necessity—the highest expression of the hygienic sublime. such a contemporary union of disease mitigation efforts with a hygienic aesthetic has antecedents in the sanitarian movement of the progressive era. the “ecological” (anderson, 2004) orientation of sanitarians, and before them much of nineteenth-century medicine (valencius, 2002), demanded that serious attention be paid to maintaining and improving the “health” of environments in which people lived. visual and olfactory cues—the absence or presence of visible waste and the smells of decomposition—were important indicators of healthfulness. despite the shift of american medicine toward a microbiological understanding of infectious disease that sought to exclude, and later find and destroy, microbes, sanitation (and the aesthetic it promulgated) persisted as an important pillar of public and individual health (leavitt, 1992; tomes, 1998, 2000; platt, 2004). its persistence in theories of home management provides grounds for the limitless expectations of purity that characterize the hygienic sublime. in food allergic living, the heightened standard of order and purity proffered to food allergy families as a solution to their health problems dovetails smoothly with this fantasy of the home as a smoothly functioning and aesthetically pleasing machine. using images of the hygienic home to sell solutions to environmental allergies predates the increase in concern about food allergy in the last two decades. gregg mitman (2007) documents a variety of technologies used by middle-class families special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 9 to combat allergies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. mitman highlights how early air-conditioning manufacturers targeted allergy sufferers by promising a pleasant indoor climate in summer. ads promised that cool air could be had (for a price) within the hermetically sealed modern home, thereby keeping pollen away from those with susceptible constitutions. carla keirns (2003) goes on to connect marketing tactics surrounding allergy to the subliminal ideal of the mid-century american home as a zone of hygienic purity. professionals including allergists, homebuilders, architects, and reformers “joined together to create a new aesthetic of absolute cleanliness” as a proposed solution to the condition (keirns, 2003, p. 524). in the construction of a food-allergy-safe home today, such precedents have served as useful models for managing unruly food proteins. in other 2014 issues of allergic living, readers can find images that connect hygiene to a kind of otherwordly transcendence. one ad for 3m filtrete air filters for heating and cooling systems shows a white woman standing in a dim room looking upwards into a glowing golden light. the light selectively illuminates both her face, recalling beatific imagery of saints and the virgin mary. the swirling dust and dirt in the air is beautiful, almost mystical, but also deadly dangerous for an allergy sufferer. it could, presumably, have been filtered out had the woman purchased and installed the advertised filters. in other ads for 3m filtrete products, a smiling pre-adolescent white girl with tidy, shiny brown hair and a white t-shirt is lying on a white shag carpet. the blurred background varies in tone from white to a light gray patch in the shape and orientation of an open window. the ad features an endorsement seal from the asthma and allergy foundation of america that reads “certified asthma & allergy friendly™.” these ads seem designed to instill a desire for health-seeking and self-improvement via home improvement projects. the bodies and faces of white women and girls are offered as enticements, depicted as both beautiful and pure and potentially at risk in the home. such depictions of the hygienic sublime get across the larger-than-life stakes of the hygienic sublime while positioning specialized and expensive consumer goods as the markers of success. gender, family, and race in the idealized home: the ads and features in allergic living often reinforce an idealized mother–child relationship as the seat of safety and purity in the allergic home. one fall 2016 feature about allergy-friendly flooring, for example, shows a white woman with long, blond hair sitting on a white leather couch wearing a white shirt, smiling down at a white toddler dressed in a pale denim onesie on a light gray concrete floor. the walls are white, and in the background is a second, gray, minimalist couch and a 1960s-style sideboard stacked with blurry book spines. the image depicts a home from which dirt and special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 10 hard work are so reliably excluded that white furniture and clothes are featured prominently. the household also seems to have disposable income to spend on an antique, decorative furniture item that could sell for $10,000 or more when the article was published. other images emphasize the otherwordly aspects of the mother–child relationship. a summer 2015 feature on designing “the better nursery,” for example, depicts a light-skinned, black-haired woman of indeterminate race and ethnicity dressed in white and holding her baby up to her face in a white-washed, soft-focus child’s bedroom. the room seems to be imbued with a mysterious glow, suggesting something divine about the mother– child connection depicted. these images, and many others, use literally white color schemes and careful staging and manipulation to recall medical-grade cleanliness. further, they seem to suggest that the people depicted have attained a divine state of purity and safety. the white, wealthy, heterosexual nuclear family in which caretaking and housekeeping roles are designated by gender also figures prominently, especially in advertisements. one of only a few ads that featured men who appeared to be fathers was for peanut-free and tree-nut-free wowbutter in the fall 2016 issue. the white mother is still in the foreground, though her back is to the camera. she is sitting at a small dining table in a sleek kitchen lined with hardwood cabinets and countertops. the other participants in the scene interpellate her with the exclamation, “mom! you have to try this.” the white father stands across the table from “mom” with two young children, spoonfeeding her a taste of the “amazingly peanut free” food as though she is also a young child. everyone appears uncontrollably happy. the mom is momentarily freed from her caretaking duties by a conscientious man, only to be spoonfed by him like a child. in these images, the heterosexual nuclear family appears to be a safe and happy social element in the otherwise material enactment of the hygienic sublime. unspoken yet unavoidable in these depictions of the hygienic sublime are the entwined histories of structural and scientific racism in the united states. in the early twentieth century, the ideal hygienic home was constructed not only through the exclusion of certain materials, but also through excluding or spatially limiting the incursion of racialized and classed bodies into the private space of the white, nuclear family. as historians have documented (cowan, 1983; tomes, 1998), the flames of moral panic concerning the disease-carrying nature of immigrant and black domestic workers coded as non-white helped to drive advertising and sales of products designed for white, middle-class housewives. public health officials and sanitarians meanwhile debated how to change epidemiological patterns in which diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 11 were endemic in crowded, urban immigrant communities. behaviors and preferences associated with non-anglo-american groups were often found to be at fault (tomes, 1998; colgrove, 2006). whether these behaviors could ever be changed was additionally in question, since many anglo-american elites believed that a presumed inferior intelligence was hereditary and unavoidable for southern and eastern european immigrants. this racist history finds expression in the hygienic sublime in multiple ways: in the white, spacious, tiled bathroom; in the expectation that housewives will do their own cooking and cleaning in kitchens and bathrooms disinfected with lysol; and in the pricey markets for the household products and services that help mother protect her family from wayward external influences. of course, some level of enactment of the hygienic home offers a necessary kind of purity for many people living with food and environmental allergies today. but the ideal solutions that are promoted in the pages of allergic living magazine (and elsewhere in allergy-related media) have their roots in a racist and patriarchal history that should temper enthusiasm for imagery of the modern hygienic home. my intent in drawing parallels between past and present is not to demonize the helpful solutions that families have developed, nor to discount the genuine goodwill that i know motivates people to share them through writing, stories, and images. rather, it is to urge reflection about how imagery and discourse concerning the hygienic sublime is used and whose experiences it ignores. in the next section, i will unpack scenes from three life history interviews to examine how overwhelmingly white, heteronormative, and expensive depictions of the hygienic sublime set up people managing food allergies in the home for feelings of failure, irresponsibility, and exclusion in their imperfect enactments of this ideal. 2. the hygienic sublime at the intersections of race, gender, family, and class the hygienic sublime entices caretakers and homemakers—especially mothers, or more rarely men who experience their role in the household as distinctly feminized—to participate in histories of domesticity that assign responsibility for the health of a nuclear family to women, position non-white people as potentially contaminating and politically inconvenient, and infuse everyday family life with anxiety about class mobility. for food allergic people, eating foods that are “safe” because they do not contain ingredients that might trigger a person’s specific physiology to become disordered—in other words, foods that are pure—is an extension of the basic reality that food is necessary to live. failing to eat food that special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 12 is pure of one’s allergens can lead to a serious, body-wide allergic reaction, called anaphylaxis, which can then rapidly progress from hives to trouble breathing to low blood pressure, to respiratory or cardiac failure and death. in the united states, food safety and preparation has been constructed as one of a broad set of demands placed overwhelmingly upon women. this history shapes how food allergy households distribute responsibility for food purity in and within nuclear families. ruth schwartz cowan (1983) shows that the assignment of food preparation to women in nuclear households in the united states dates back to the colonial era. in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, food preparation included the growing, harvesting, cleaning, and preserving of raw materials such as corn, wheat, and meat as well as cooking. but this work, even the work women did to complete the final steps of cooking that might today be recognized as “domestic”—hauling water, tending fires, and cooking in heavy iron pots—did not encode the same concerns about the delicacy of the female body that it would later on. according to cowan, it was the development of more “convenient” household products and tools, starting with mass-produced milled flours, that initiated strongly gendered divisions of labor in the typical american home. by the first world war, housework, including most food preparation, “was to be thought of no longer as a chore but, rather, as an expression of the housewife’s personality and her affection for her family… feeding the family had once been just part of a day’s work; now it was a way to communicate deep-seated emotions” (cowan, 1983, p. 177). conversely, when things went wrong, “she [the housewife] was entirely to blame, since remedies for those conditions were easily at hand and easy to apply” (cowan, 1983, p. 187). the food preparation techniques used to manage food allergies in the home continue this deeply gendered ordering of the work of social reproduction in and through the american home (abel & nelson, 1990). one need only to glance at food allergy magazines to witness how this arrangement is idealized, so much so that it can be used as an enticement for the purchase of consumer goods. food preparation has been subject to intense rationalization and regimentation as part of the effort to make domestic hygiene practices properly “scientific” throughout the twentieth and the start of the twenty-first century (cowan, 1976, 1983; kline, 1997; bijker & bijsterveld, 2000; tomes, 1998). alongside this process, the popularity of cultural icons such as martha stewart has helped to cement the association between order and white femininity more specifically (bentley, 2001). what is more, domestic work such as food preparation continues to drive the responsibilization of many women in the united states today, creating good special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 13 caretakers through enticing engagements with, for example, foodie culture (parr, 2002; cairns, johnston, & baumann, 2010). cooking nutritious, pathogen-free, aesthetically pleasing food remains a central pillar of the domestic expectations for the homemakers and caretakers in food allergy families in the united states. mothering and fathering: one woman’s story illustrates the stakes of purity for both health and social life for people with food allergies and how responsibility for maintaining purity is highly gendered. i met alice over dinner at a conference for food allergy media professionals in 2014 in the southwestern united states. alice’s children were attending college and starting new jobs by the time we met. but when her oldest son was diagnosed with food allergies in 1991, the condition did not have the same level of visibility and community support that it has today. he was often the first child with food allergies whom doctors, teachers, coaches, and other parents had encountered. a white woman married to a high-earning man, she gave up working to be in charge of ensuring her son’s safety at home, at school, and at play. the chance to focus on food allergy management in the home was presented to me by alice as simply a logical choice. yet her narration made clear that the hygienic sublime shaped the texture of her social worlds and became a benchmark of her own self-worth. one of the biggest challenges alice faced early on was the way that foods were labeled in the 1990s. each of the eight most common allergy-triggering foods in the united states are simple ingredients found in a wide variety of foods: peanut, tree nut, milk, egg, fish, shellfish, wheat, and soy. alice’s son was allergic to peanuts, tree nuts, dairy, and eggs as a child. since warning labels indicating the presence of these and other foods were rare in the 1990s, it was impossible to know with certainty whether a particular food was free of all of his allergens. to manage this uncertainty, she cleaned out her cabinets of any packaged foods that might contain his allergens and committed herself to cooking all of his meals from scratch at home. her pursuit of the hygienic sublime entailed keeping close control over her home and her son’s body. the issue of cross-contamination came up repeatedly in my conversations with alice. in the 1990s, she and other allergy moms, as several women i interviewed referred to themselves, were on their own in figuring out how it happened and how to avoid it. she explained, there were a lot of things that today are sort of common knowledge in the food allergy world that we were just figuring out. such as the idea, the concept of cross-contamination…we couldn’t figure out why special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 14 the kid kept reacting to things. i’d think, but that doesn’t have milk in it! it didn’t occur to me that he could react to what was on the knife, or what was on the equipment in the manufacturing plant. it didn’t occur to me because there were no resources and there was no common knowledge. despite her vigilance, near-misses and mishaps sometimes occurred, especially when other mothers tried to help her take care of her son. one day when her son was still a toddler, alice left him with a friend who she had trained to recognize and treat the symptoms of allergic reactions. after some time, her friend called, explaining that alice’s son was breaking out in hives on his face. alice rushed to her friend’s home and discovered that she had wiped his face with the same washcloth that she had used for her own son. in effect, “she had wiped allergens all over his face.” the hives spread onto his legs, suggesting that the highchair he was seated in was also coated in allergenic food residue. alice summed up these stories by lamenting that “even if you find another mom who’s willing to take him on and you send the food and you’ve gone through the emergency procedures, little details like that wouldn’t occur to the average person.” for alice, purity became more than a material property of foods. it was an overarching concern that touched on many aspects of her social life as she sought to keep her son safe. even the most well-meaning friends were not appropriately versed in the hygienic practices needed to keep her son safe. a phone interview i conducted in 2014 with a food allergic adult, a man named michael, offers another view of how the hygienic sublime is enacted in the home. his experience brings into relief how gender expectations are built into the hygienic sublime, whether an individual likes it or not, due to us norms concerning domestic and wage-earning forms of work. michael was one of only two men i interviewed who were the ones primarily responsible for managing food allergies in their homes, and his was the only family i encountered in which a man was the primary caretaker for a food allergic child. michael had been diagnosed with allergies three years previously and spent his days looking after an infant daughter who was also developing food allergies. in contrast to alice, this did not feel like a choice to him. being a full-time caregiver was not a responsibility he had even remotely anticipated taking on. he initially took on this role because his own food allergies and environmental sensitivities rendered him unable to work. while being a stay-at-home dad had its rewards, he was still devastated by his inability to have what he considered to be a gender-appropriate social and professional life: to be regularly active outside the home and to bring in a significant, if not a majority, share of his household’s special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 15 income. michael was much more willing to talk about the sense of mourning he felt in response to this change in his professional trajectory than most of the mothers i spoke to. the replacement of masculine expectations of success outside the home with a necessary focus on domesticity was a very difficult part of his illness experience. as we spoke by phone, he toured his kitchen and told me what he saw. michael’s version of the hygienic sublime was very different from that of the mothers i spoke to due to the particular needs of his body. yet even though his kitchen did not look sublimely pure, purity was still his reference point for comparing what he observed. his kitchen worked for him, but fell short of what he knew others would expect. boxes of onions, potatoes, and butternut squash from local farmers and his own garden sat on the floor shedding soil, banishing any hope of a “clean kitchen.” there were “a few crockpots here and there,” and an extra freezer where he stored servings of bulk meals for days when he felt too ill to cook. modern conveniences like prepared foods and high-tech materials were gone, replaced by stainless steel and boxes of basic, raw vegetables. it was, in his words, “no frills.” his kitchen was not, as i envisioned it from his description, particularly neat and tidy. it did not resemble the perfect visions of the hygienic sublime portrayed in the pages of allergic living magazine. rather, it was pure in the right way to ensure his safety and health. his allergens were meticulously excluded, even though that meant that dirt was introduced. and yet, his reference point for appropriate hygiene was the perfect vision commonly encountered in media portrayals of the safe and happy family home. race and exclusion: a third parent’s story adds another crucial perspective to understanding the hygienic sublime: how its enactments get inflected by race. andrea is the mother of a food allergic child and leader of what she described as the only food allergy support group specifically addressing racial, ethnic, gender, and economic diversity and inclusion. she was the only black person i interviewed during my research (i also corresponded with a black woman physician but we did not manage to coordinate a one-on-one interview). in our interview, we focused on this question of racial and ethnic diversity. she was the first (though, as it turned out, not the last) person i spoke to who wanted to discuss this dimension of food allergy experience. andrea started a support group in the southeastern united states in order to create a venue where issues at the intersection of biological and social forms of difference that matter when living with food allergy could be openly discussed. she had previously attended other support group meetings, but she found those special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 16 meetings frustrating because she didn’t feel they were willing to speak to how difference inflects the food allergy experience. the meetings struck her as “moms having tea,” a phrase that evoked an image of white east coast elites demurely assembled around porcelain cups. by contrast, she described herself as “more of an action person.” with food allergy, she saw a need for speaking more openly about the variety of racial and cultural attitudes that could shape the management of the condition. for andrea, that included cultural and religious differences as well as regional differences between people in the northern and southern united states toward food, child rearing, and success. with food allergy, she explained, people of color and mixed race people faced extra challenges in gaining recognition of the legitimacy of their condition and receiving appropriate accommodations in work settings. she reported that she had often heard the claim that “black people don’t get food allergies,” despite limited statistical evidence (branum & lukacs, 2008; greenhawt et al., 2013; jerschow, lin, scaperotti, &. mcginn, 2014). in her network of black friends, neighbors, and family, there was also a strong reluctance to seek medical diagnosis or advice for ailments, due to what she described as an assumption, especially among older generations, that the “doctor was trying to take your money.” whereas the white parents i interviewed at other times found strength and epistemic authority when they received a medical diagnosis, in andrea’s personal network the medical profession was seen as parasitic and consequently avoided. this was one of many differences that could be salient to managing food allergies at work and in the home. in public, she explained, people of color with food allergies did not only have to work against such stereotypes; they also had to navigate “how to change cultural norms” around food and eating in social settings when they were already seen as a “newcomer [and] outsider.” she could anticipate some of the issues that might arise for black, indian, or jewish families in her southern city. a wheat allergy would affect an indian family’s dietary changes different from a jewish family, for example. different public accommodations might be appropriate for individuals from these background as well. but requests for legally required accommodations for a condition already considered biologically “illogical”—especially ones for foods that less commonly triggering foods—would more readily be interpreted as “rock[ing] the boat” coming from a racialized “outsider.” her work—as a coach, consultant, and then support group leader—thus focused on helping families and individuals navigate their needs for accommodations by presenting their requests in a way that would neither unduly challenge the social norms nor exacerbate suspicions about the aggressiveness of racialized people. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 17 my conversations with andrea brought into relief how the common preoccupations with hygiene above all else in the food allergy world reflects, in part, a freedom from having to think about race, ethnicity, and other forms of social difference. promoting a generic vision of pure food requires tabling a serious consideration of the different foods people eat and the different ways one might relate to food. there is, first of all, the very real way in which racialized people like andrea and others i interviewed later in my research do not feel comfortable participating in white-majority conversations about how to raise food allergic children and how to maintain a hygienic home. in the absence of participation from these groups and individuals, the concerns built into media expressions of the hygienic sublime default to a white, middle-class perspective on how to live and eat well with food allergies. pure, bland foods with no history, bought at a premium price, are often promoted as broadly appealing solutions. strategies to adapt culturally specific and regional delicacies are only prioritized by a small number of people for whom these are everyday concerns. the presumed ability to rely on family resources and to have a caretaker at home also orients the hygienic sublime toward nuclear families. through nearly three years of research, keeping children safe from food allergies was a duty almost exclusively assigned to members of nuclear, heterosexual families. extended family members like aunts, uncles, and grandparents were only periodically mentioned in interviews. and with only one exception, extended kin were said to be an impediment to the safety of allergic children and adults, rather than an extra set of helping hands. prioritizing nuclear families as a site of safety and care, with all others viewed as threats, speaks to a history in the united states in which diverse family structures that include extended kin have historically been disciplined through the bureaucratic agency of white-controlled social institutions, including welfare and public housing (collins, 1998). it also speaks to a lack of imagination about the extension of kin networks beyond calculable blood ties (haraway, 2016). imaginative kin-making has been both a necessity and a source of power for black people in particular in the history of the united states, first as a way to manage the facturing of families inherent in the chattel slavery system, and more recently as a way to deal with the effects of state violence (schwartz, 2006; hooks, 2015). the family arrangements treated as normative for the hygienic sublime thus not only reflect and reproduce gendered roles within the household but also reproduces an epistemology of whiteness at the heart of the american family. special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 18 3. capitalizing on the hygienic sublime the hygienic sublime fuses necessary requirements for purity and safety with gender-, raceand class-inflected aspirations of appropriate social relationships. maintaining a certain degree of purity is a concern for people living with food allergies for good reason: an unexpected encounter with allergens can trigger an allergic reaction, and in some instances allergic reactions can cause serious bodily harm. yet an uncritical pursuit of material purity comes with risks. the purifying impulse can easily jump from the materials people use or avoid, or the work they do or eschew, to the people themselves. furthermore, it is a leap to move from observing that a certain kind of purity is needed to keep food allergic people healthy to the current reality where women are almost exclusively the primary caretakers of allergic children, where wealth is a prerequisite for adequately safeguarding the home, and where white, nuclear families are positioned as the appropriate context for managing food allergies. biological needs must be filtered through strong cultural sieves to produce this sorting of domestic expectations and responsibilities. the deployment of technoscience-informed hygienic techniques in the home is important for feminist scholars to consider amongst ongoing conversations about the political effects of the idealization of purity of kin and kind. donna haraway has laid out these concerns in “femaleman©_meets_oncomousetm. mice into wormholes: a technoscience fugue in two parts.” in 1990s biotechnology, she detects a reinscription of a deeply eugenic interest among both scientists and laypeople in maintaining the purity of categories like species and blood relations (haraway, 1997). such moves, she argues, reflect a western ontological obsession with purifying nature from culture (latour, 1993), a binary that has cascading oppressive effects for those species, landscapes, and individuals deemed to fall closer to “nature” than to “culture.” among those who have taken up haraway’s critique of purity politics, alexis shotwell’s pointed address in against purity calls out purity as an unjustified simplification of “our ethical and political situation in the world” (2016, p. 6). in contexts as varied as the ways that trans people interface with the us state to the idealization of sexually dimorphic frogs as a sign of healthy waterways, shotwell diagnoses the north american fascination with purity of type as oppressive to people, organisms, and landscapes that are not seen as “pure enough.” shotwell’s broadly intersectional statement against the western fascination with purity articulates with particular force with jenny reardon and kim tallbear’s (2012) critique of scientific uses of “native american dna.” scientists’ preoccupation with the assumed purity of kin and kind makes native dna especially valuable special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 19 while erasing from view centuries of violence toward, theft from, and forced resettlement and enslavement of indigenous people throughout the americas. while food allergic adults and food allergy parents are not aiming to enforce genetic purity through their pursuit of the hygienic sublime in their homes, the priority placed on close blood relations, the semiotic and historical roots of what “clean” and “pure” looks like, and the enticing offers to own consumer goods in food allergy media all indicate how purity in the home is non-innocently embedded in eugenic, classist, and xenophobic histories. moreover, following shotwell’s observation that a focus on purity oversimplifies a broader array of possible ethical and political solutions, focusing on purity in private homes distracts from a number of broader systemic issues that makes the modern food supply risky for people with food allergies. for example, it distracts from addressing the lack of preventive regulatory enforcement concerning food safety, especially allergen contamination, provided by us regulatory agencies. it largely distracts people with food allergies (except for a small number of leaders in the food allergy advocacy community) from understanding the historical and contemporary political interests that have shaped lax regulatory oversight of food safety and limits the pressure to change these systems. it preoccupies individuals and families while the problems produced by the long and complex multinational supply chains that deliver food to the tables of us households often go unquestioned. in short, the hygienic sublime offers a solution to food allergy management that demands the responsibilization (trnka & trundle, 2014) of individuals and nuclear families to each tackle the problem of impure food on their own. in the food allergy world, such narrowing of vision extends beyond the home—the site of the everyday dramas of managing food allergies—into activists’ legislative, regulatory, and legal interventions. heteronormative familial networks connect would-be patient activists to people in positions of power, funneled through the networks of famously white and wealthy towns and clubs. what happens in the home is continuous with what happens in the food allergy and patient activism worlds at large. the hygienic sublime ultimately reinforces the home as a site of consumption and consumption of consumer goods as the solution to medical and political problems. it narrows the political vision of what should be done to better help individuals and families manage food allergies, such as remaking family structures and norms to better distribute caregiving responsibility and challenging the high cost of health care and appropriately “healthy” foods in the united states. as arlie russell hochschild writes, care through consumption “strikes at a flash point between an advancing commodity frontier, on one hand, and the special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 20 hypersymbolized but structurally weakened core of the modern american family, on the other” (2003, p. 35). with all the threats posed to us families today—family separations, continued state violence against people of color, and financial precarity following needed medical interventions—why intensify enticements to consume specialized, luxury goods in the home? with the time and resources available to sustaining private family life shrinking, the idealization of the white, wealthy, heteronormative family as a way to maintain safety and order is, seemingly paradoxically, greater than ever. this model of the family, one apparently purified of queerness, race, poverty, and dirt, remains at the core of the hygienic sublime. acknowledgements many thanks to the catalyst editorial staff and anonymous reviewers for generatively and persistently shepherding this through review and revision. my profoundest thanks to the enterprising and brilliant graduate students who organize and participate in the nyu-based writing the body workshop for inviting and rigorously responding to an early version of this paper in 2017, especially emma shaw crane, john rediske, emily rogers, and elizabeth deluca. many thanks as well to the rpi science, technology, and society graduate students and faculty who responded to a related piece of work in a march 2019 workshop which informed the revisions of the present paper, especially nancy campbell, hined rafeh, and jamie steele for organizing and hosting throughout the visit. and thank you to nick seaver for the continued attempts to maintain shared writing accountability. the ethnographic research for this work was supported by a national science foundation doctoral dissertation research improvement grant (award number ses-1430489), a cornell university society for the humanities graduate student humanities research travel grant, and a cornell university graduate research travel grant. references abel, e. k., & nelson, m. k. 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(2014a, fall). kitchens that cook. allergic living. van evra, j. (2014b, summer). smarter painting. allergic living. waggoner, m. r. (2013). parsing the peanut panic: the social life of a contested food allergy epidemic. social science & medicine, 90(august), 49-55. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.04.031 author bio danya glabau is a visiting industry assistant professor in the department of technology, culture, and society at nyu tandon school of engineering and a faculty member at the brooklyn institute for social research, where she teaches public seminars on feminist science studies, history of science, and anthropology. she is special section | plantarium: human-vegetal ecologies | original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) danya glabau, 2019 25 working on a book based on an ethnography of food allergy activism in the united states, as well as projects on virtual reality, digital health, and cyborgs and feminism. naked in the face of contamination: thinking models and metaphors of toxicity together fiske, amelia. (2020). naked in the face of contamination: thinking models and metaphors of toxicity together. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-30. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © amelia fiske, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license naked in the face of contamination: thinking models and metaphors of toxicity together amelia fiske institute of history and ethics in medicine, technical university munich a.fiske@tum.de abstract while chemicals are often described and acted upon in technoscientific forums as isolated, discrete entities, vernacular experience points to possibilities of experiencing, speaking about, and imagining chemical exposures that have otherwise been rendered politically obsolete. drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the ecuadorian amazon, this article invokes accounts of daily life in order to argue that vernacular experience is necessary for understanding what it means to live in a place of environmental hazard, and for building a more inclusive politics of knowledge production in models and assessments of toxicity. descriptions such as “naked in the face of contamination,” “swimming in oil,” “smoke thick like marmalade,” or exclamations of pain re-lived “tsaac!” refuse hegemonic assumptions about how chemicals alter and enable life. to take these descriptions of life seriously is to recognize the ways that chemical concentrations often far exceed the expected forms and quantities modeled in risk assessments of standard oil operations. the chemically saturated present demands a reconfiguration of toxicity – as a socio-material process, epistemic concept, and embodied experience – in order to work towards political and environmental, as well as epistemological, justice. introduction in his quito office, camilo was showing me slides from a presentation he delivered at brown university a few years before to explain how people in special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 2 amazon come in contact with the toxic substances involved in oil production.1 a trained biologist, he lived in the amazon in the 1990s and has since worked on environmental issues associated with oil production, including in relation to the aguinda v. texaco lawsuit. as we spoke, he stopped, hovering over a slide in which he had juxtaposed two images. figure 1. camilo’s powerpoint slide depicting the contrast between universal models of exposure and everyday exposures for individuals living in oil producing areas of the amazon. the first image reads “epa’s polluted guy.” it is a graphic intended to summarize for a lay audience the different means by which an average individual could be exposed to toxicants in a generically contaminated site, the kind you might find in a pamphlet about environmental contamination. the second, a photograph of a young child sitting on a dirt road with oil residue in an unidentified location in the amazon, he has titled “ecuador’s polluted kid.” these two images, he says, are essential for understanding the nature of toxic exposure in ecuador, and underscore the relationship between ongoing problems with oil contamination in the amazon and the history of us companies who have operated there: this for me is important. because this is how the epa sees people who are exposed to contamination. and this is how it is here. he has no shoes and no shirt…if you’re in the united states on a contaminated special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 3 site, normally you’re like this [pointing to “epa’s polluted guy”], and not like this [pointing to “ecuador’s polluted kid”]. thus, the contact that our people have with contamination is much closer…whatever scientific study you might do on contamination, or whatever you might know from the us, well it’s different here because we live differently. people here are much more naked in the face of contamination.2 “naked in the face of contamination” makes bare the vulnerability of residents of the amazon who live alongside oil. naked refers to the ways that unprotected human bodies—such as the extended crude-stained foot of the boy, or his hands and uncovered upper body—come in contact with chemicals. but naked also refers beyond the skin to the proximity of people’s homes to waste pits; to the unfiltered water in their wells that, for lack of better option, they drink despite the smell of oil; or to the limited resources to protect themselves from exposures within this industrial-natural landscape, all of which give shape to toxicity in the amazon. to be “naked” is not necessarily contingent on a lack of knowledge about toxicity, but rather has to do first and foremost with the social, material, historical conditions that make some more vulnerable than others in the extractive present. this article explores connections between toxicants and their corporeal presences, using the language invoked by interlocutors to query models of toxicity as consequential interventions into the visibility and invisibility of pollutants. as camilo illustrated through his contrast between the “epa’s polluted guy” and “ecuador’s polluted kid,” the nature of exposure in the ecuadorian amazon is different from generic models of exposure—such as those i once learned about in a graduate environmental health course, or those you might find in public education materials produced by environmental regulatory agencies. the juxtaposition of the two images articulates a direct relationship between the amazon and the united states, histories of extraction under texaco, and the profoundly unequal burdens of exposure and toxic presences that continue to characterize life today. drawing from ethnographic research and the accounts of one woman in particular, whom i will call lidia, i aim to illustrate that vernacular experience—such as the knowledge that in the past children and adults were routinely barefoot on crude-slicked roads—is necessary not only for understanding what it means to live in a place of environmental hazard, but also for building a more inclusive politics of knowledge production in models and assessments of toxicity. while chemicals are often described and acted upon as isolated, discrete entities special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 4 in technoscientific forums (such as the “epa’s polluted guy” who summarizes possible of routes of exposure through his universality in a summary model of environmental exposure; see murphy, 2017), vernacular experience points to possibilities of experiencing, speaking about, and imagining chemical exposures that have otherwise been rendered politically obsolete. more than allegory, statements such as “naked in the face of contamination,” or as interlocutors describe later in this article, life as “swimming in oil,” seeing “smoke thick like marmalade,” or exclamations of pain relived “tsaac!” refuse hegemonic assumptions about how chemicals alter and enable life. to take these descriptions of life seriously is to recognize the ways that chemical concentrations often exceed the expected forms and quantities modeled in risk assessments of oil operations, pointing to the failure of normative models of toxicity to capture experiences of exposure that inundate daily life. the chemically saturated present demands a reconfiguration of toxicity—as a sociomaterial process, epistemic concept, and embodied experience—one that, i will argue, requires attending to quotidian experience with toxicants in order to work towards not only political and environmental, but also epistemological justice. oil production in the age of toxicity the evidence for the infiltration of human-made, toxic chemicals into the fabric of biological and social life is extensive. from the proliferation of toxic compounds in our soil (lyons, 2016), water (davis, 2003), air (harrison, 2011), bodies (lundqvist et al., 2006; wahlberg, 2018), and future generations (keller 2014), to the flame retardants sprayed on baby mattresses and couches (liboiron, 2016; miller, 2017), the formaldehyde-derived adhesives in the flooring, walls, and carpentry of the average american home (shapiro, 2015), the plastic particles found in most tap water worldwide (carrington, 2017), or the routine, authorized use of chemical agents and violence against protesters at standing rock (estes, 2019), the chemical constitution of post-industrial life has become at once extraordinary and, at the same time, utterly commonplace. we are living in the “age of toxicity” (walker, 2011, p. ix). petrochemical production in particular is rife with potential danger posed by toxicants, those found in hydrocarbons as well as chemicals used during the extraction, transport, and refinement (appel, mason, & watts, 2015). by toxicants, i am referring to human-made, toxic chemicals that are defined by their central role in economic production and increasing ubiquity in bodies, homes, and environments (liboiron, 2017). following liboiron, use of the term toxicant traces the global shift in public concern at the end of the twentieth century away from special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 5 naturally occurring toxic substances, such as arsenic, and towards the proliferation of manufactured chemicals. as a natural resource, some might argue that crude oil is a “toxin.” yet quotidian encounters with crude in the amazon also illustrate the ways that oil is also a “toxicant”—a substance that is encountered through human and industrial production that is harmful, even poisonous, to life. importantly, as liboiron (2017) notes, toxicants differ from toxins not only because of their synthetic rather than “natural” genesis, but also because of their “mass tonnage, wide economic production and distribution processes.” by extension, i argue that the produced forms through which oil is encountered—as sludge in waste pits or as separated gas that is combusted in direct proximity to homes—give rise to its near ubiquitous presence in everyday life in this region. to live in the amazon is to live alongside, underneath, and submerged within oil production as well as its infrastructure, marking widespread transformations of space, practice, and exchange in everyday life in the past half century. here, to be in relation to oil is unavoidable; this is “anthropocentric exposure,” where preventing permeation by the continual, residual, overwhelming onslaught of industrial toxicants is neither possible nor expected (roberts, 2017a). the toxic substances that interlocutors encounter in their everyday life in the amazon are rarely “pure” crude—such as the bitumen recalled in accounts by indigenous residents that would seep through the soil in the amazon or on the coast of santa elena (cepek 2018; sovacool & scarpaci, 2016). instead, what most residents encounter in the everyday are toxic composites or chemical mixtures composed of “natural” substances entangled with synthetic and industrially produced additives-admixtures of potentially poisonous components and the life-sustaining fuel of the contemporary moment. let me provide one example: when oil is extracted from the ground, it is part of a hybrid mixture of crude oil, gas, and water that exists as slurry in underground pockets. the water that is part of this underground solution is referred to as “production” or “formation waters”; it varies in composition by location, and is characterized by high salinity, the presence of hydrocarbons, and naturally occurring radioactive material. it also contains high levels of benzene, chromium-6, and mercury. importantly, to coax this slurry out of the underground depths and separate out the crude that can then be sent to refineries, various chemical compounds are added in the drilling process. these can include radioactive materials and other chemical cocktails that are added to the muds to make them more viscous and more stable, and to reduce fluid loss, among other effects (borchardt, 1989). during my research, residents recounted that routine practices under texaco and state companies included dumping the production waters, drilling muds, crude oil, added special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 6 chemicals, and other forms of industrial trash into nearby waste pits created alongside the oil wells. over the years, the chemicals from this mélange flooded their banks, were intentionally lit on fire, or slowly seeped through the unlined walls of the waste pits. thus, when residents encounter contamination from oil in their streams, farms, homes, and places they traverse throughout the day, this contamination far exceeds its “natural” origins: it is most often in the form of toxicant mixtures that are only made possible through the political-economic and ideological structures that have enabled and encouraged oil extraction in the amazon since the early 1960s. oil extraction, as one of the principal drivers of anthropogenic change, chemical onslaught, and natural cultural transformation in this place, thus exists as a hybrid form of toxin and toxicant: it is a natural resource, but only attains its toxic potency through the systems of production, consumption, and fabricated chemicals of the twentieth century that bring it to the surface of the amazon forest in historically unprecedented scales and intensities. i intentionally engage with the term toxicant and situate my ethnographic work in relation to scholarship on toxicants and chemo-ethnography in order to draw attention to these forms of labor, production, and consumption that have brought the people living in the amazon into daily, unavoidable relation with oil. the very compounds used in the extraction and production of petrochemical products that produce harm are also what sustain our lives today. importantly, scholars have argued that toxicants have fueled colonialist histories and enabled the extractive present, and, as such, demand rethinking of the rhetorical and political tools used to combat contamination (widger, 2017). this includes, i argue, attending to quotidian experiences of toxicity in order to draw attention to the forms of harm that oil extraction —and the limits of our regulatory models for capturing its effects— have entailed. dominant modes of addressing pollution’s effects—regulatory science and law— have proven unsatisfactory for stemming the wake of twentieth-century industrial toxicants in our lives (boudia & jas, 2014). such officially sanctioned modes of response are also increasingly less equipped to respond to questions of responsibility and remediation as toxic problems grow in scope and frequency. the examples of this abound: union carbide in bhopal, 1984; chernobyl, 1986; exxon valdez, 1989; bp deepwater horizon explosion, 2010; fukushima daiichi nuclear disaster, 2011; soma mine disaster in turkey, 2014; dakota access pipeline protests at standing rock, 2016, among the many other ongoing, deadly problems of exposures to pesticides, formaldehyde, dioxins, radiation, and more. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 7 this failure to capture and address the myriad effects of toxic substances in our lives reflects, in part, a fundamental shift in toxicity. as scholarship across anthropology, feminist science studies, and epigenomics has shown, the problem of toxicity is no longer a question of individuals being affected by rogue chemical particles, but rather entails a radical change in what it means to be human: we are now co-constituted by the toxicants of the twentieth century. yet, as environmental justice scholars have repeatedly shown, while toxicants might be a universal problem, their distribution and burden is never borne equally (bohme, 2014; brulle & pellow, 2006; bullard, 2001; checker, 2005; harrison, 2011). while indigenous communities have long been living alongside sites of contamination and extraction (hoover, 2017; hoover et al., 2012; estes, 2017, 2019), and poor communities of color have historically and repeatedly borne undue burdens of toxic waste and environmental racism (checker, 2005; pulido, 2000; commission for racial justice, 1987), there is also an increasing awareness that the problem of toxicity, although profoundly distorted in its burdens, is not limited to “other” places and peoples. the distribution of poor health and industrial waste traverse pre-existing contours of position and power, including race, class, gender, and political-economic position. increasingly, scholarship that explores human and nonhuman entanglements has turned to chemicals and their lifeworlds (shapiro & kirksey, 2017). from accounts of industrial disasters (fortun, 2001; petryna, 2002) to pharmaceutical markets (dumit, 2012; hayden, 2003) and experiences of medical conditions (chen, 2012; jain, 2013), chemicals have proven particularly productive figures for tracing the contours and threads of complex phenomena, such as the oil and gas industries. referred to by some as “chemo-ethnography,” such work investigates the political-economic and personal relationships that have emerged through modern chemistry, following a “suite of chemicals that create possibilities for life while simultaneously enfeebling bodies or multispecies worlds” (shapiro & kirksey, 2017, p. 482). the focus of this work is attuned to the micro-level, low-dose, chronic, multiple, and cumulative effects of toxic chemical compounds, interrogating the boundaries of bodies, environments, and the materials and violence of everyday life (murphy, 2016; povinelli, 2017; roberts, 2017b; shapiro & kirksey, 2017; simmons, 2017). shapiro (2015), for instance, describes tracking indistinct and distributed changes to bodies and environments as the “chemical sublime” (p. 369), in which even minor encounters demand ethical consideration and practical intervention. other work has shown how the concerns of toxicity extend beyond the material into the contamination of the social fabric (ofrias, special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 8 2018), and the violence of chemical exposures as part of the settler project of the dakota access pipeline (simmons, 2017). a critical advancement of this work has been the move to consider chemical effects and relations with more-than-human spheres, and to point to the ways that focusing only on the molecular can have the effect of displacing other forms of harm, disavowing the violence of colonial projects, strangling relational politics, or obfuscating the concerns of those most effected. the toxicants used and produced in oil production cross boundaries, from the plastic industrial membranes installed to retain the contents of waste pits, to the fleshy ones covering human bodies. the movement of toxic substances throughout environments—in soil, water, and air—and in bodies of organisms— across skin, or the blood-brain barrier—is one of their distinguishing features. toxicants effect changes that are unanticipated and forceful. however, identifying, measuring, and demonstrating exposures to toxic substances outside of the laboratory is a problem: combinations of chemicals, changes in industry practices, the dispersion of chemicals throughout air or water over time, the movements of people between jobs and daily activities, all make tracking exposure exceedingly difficult. given that it is enormously difficult to determine the effects of a toxic substance within a landscape of potential, repeated exposures, or the relationship between multiple toxicants and adverse health effects, it is often necessary to reduce the variables of study at the expense of attending to differential particularity. for instance, the question of why, and through what processes, some bodies become subject to industrial waste while others do not (auyero & swistun, 2009), or the ways in which pollution is becomes an externality, even a profitable one (ofrias, 2017), has been divorced from the question of how exposure occurs. in her call for anti-colonial feminist tactics to take on toxicity, murphy (2017) describes how technoscientific approaches to portraying chemicals as “discrete entities, as isolated molecules, often represented through abstract structural diagrams” (p. 495) has supplanted approaches that foreground complexity and entanglements between the living and nonliving. such technoscientific explanations of how toxicity is manifest are largely incompatible with accounts that track the ways that sexuality, race, and gender shape the effects of chemicals on our bodies, and the irrevocable ways that toxicity is unequally embodied (agard-jones, 2014; murphy, 2008). the failure of discrete mechanisms of chemical pathways to capture the effects of everyday life alongside oil production is seen in camilo’s contrast between “epa’s polluted guy” and “ecuador’s polluted special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 9 kid,” and as i will focus on in what follows, is also seen in lidia’s retelling of how oil production has given shape to everyday life. there are many examples of disjunctures between scientific models and the entanglements of toxicants and injustice. in places of environmental hazard, scientific and legal endeavors are generally called upon to parse precise distinctions between chemicals and their effects, between one oil company and another, between bodies and environments, between the synthetic and the organic. contemporary methods in toxicology are rarely able to demonstrate causality between individual toxicants and human harm, and even less so for “cocktails” of toxicants (boudia & jas, 2014; goldstein & hall, 2015; langston, 2010; van der schalie et al., 1999). further, while scientists acknowledge that toxins and toxicants play an important role in acute and chronic diseases, many of the relations between exposure and disease are poorly understood due to individual variation, the cumulative effects of multiple toxic substances, and complex interplay between genetics and environment (miller, 2013; nash, 2007; wild, 2005). due to the political-economic weight given to the methods of regulatory science, it becomes increasingly difficult to talk about toxicants in any other way. toxicity—like oil—is at once all around us, and at the same time, increasingly difficult to pin down (cepek 2018). the conjoined development of industry and chemistry (bensaude-vincent & stengers, 1996) and the resulting restrictive techno-scientific rationalities for understanding the chemical effects of environmental hazards (murphy, 2017) has had serious consequences for everyday life from the twentieth into the twentyfirst century. the assumption of a “fixed” natural substrata against which subjective interpretations of toxicity are compared, or the generalizability of the “average” body, or the overreliance on models of toxicity (rather than the explicit recognition of the limits of modeling, see tsing, 2004), have coalesced into takenfor-granted ways of imagining, speaking, and acting on toxicants. while recognizing the many difficulties of accounting for toxicity in a given place, and acknowledging the necessity of privileging stable boundaries over entanglements in particular instances (roberts, 2017b), this article is borne out of the concern raised by interlocutors like camilo that the assumptions built into scientific models have been used to marginalize voices who have insisted on the morethan-causal, not-yet-verified effects of toxicants, and to obscure the politicaleconomic structures that allow some to produce and profit from pollution. in my fieldwork in the amazon, i found that assumptions built into studies of special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 10 toxicity about the “average” body, and “residential” versus “industrial” divisions of space in environmental impact studies, as well as a limited notion of quantifiable “impact” in regulatory measures (fiske, 2017) can minimize the dangers of oil operations in official assessments. in an effort to counter this tendency, here i turn to the ordinary, quotidian experiences of lidia and her accounts of life in a landscape of contamination. after decades in the amazon, such stories and experiences accrete, and it is impossible to distinguish singular moments of hazard. i aim to show through what might otherwise be dismissed as individual instances or anecdotes that vernacular experiences can offer critical insight into the particularities of exposures, and raise questions about what standard means of assessing toxic exposures may exclude, overlook, or obscure. following murphy’s (2017) call for approaches to toxicity that “refuse the hegemonic sense of what chemicals and life are” while “honor[ing] the inseparability of bodies and land” (p. 497), in what follows i explore how attention to the vernacular experiences of life alongside toxicants may point to ways that the corporeal presences of toxicants seep well beyond their given modes of action in exposure “pathways.” fieldwork the field research for this project took place over twenty-seven months between 2011 and 2013. throughout this time, i lived in lago agrio—located around fifteen miles south of the colombian border in the northeastern corner of the amazon. the city marks the site of the first exploratory wells drilled by the texaco company, from which they struck the so-called black gold in 1964. oil and settlement occurred in tandem, and today daily life is thoroughly entangled with the industry. as a result of a drought in the southern highlands and increasing land crowding throughout the sierra in the 1960s, government officials hoped that the amazon could become the next breadbasket of the nation (wasserstrom & southgate, 2013). at the same time, the government was pursuing oil extraction as the next step for national development. politicians hoped that oil—through the infrastructure and revenue it would bring—would help to facilitate colonization of unconquered border territory in the amazon. all told, the processes of oil development and state-sponsored colonization resulted in the arrival of more than 300,000 colonists to the amazon (watts, 2005), who claimed more than 4.5 million hectares of land (lucero, 2008; sawyer, 2004) that was the ancestral territory of indigenous nationalities living in the region, such as the cofán, waorani, siona, and sekoya. the history of oil development in the region falls within the continuation of extractive logics that accompanied, for special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 11 example, prior waves of rubber extraction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (fontaine, 2007; wasserstrom, 2014). this period was marked by a significant territorial expansion of industry, which has resulted in an immensely unequal distribution of both the harmful effects of toxicants and the national benefits of revenues resulting from oil production. additionally, oil extraction was facilitated by governmental policies that profoundly transformed indigenous relationships to nature, created dependencies on institutionalized energy production, and reshaped the roles of women in social reproduction and production (cielo, coba, & vallejo, 2016; vallejo, 2014). in the 1960s, ecuador entered in a joint venture with the texaco company of the us to begin oil operations. initially a consortium formed between texaco, gulf, and the nascent corporación estatal de petroleos de ecuador (ecuadorian state petroleum company), later texaco and gulf delegated their work to the subsidiary company texpet (a move that was subsequently used to argue that the parent company does not bear responsibility for wrongdoing (see also sawyer, 2002). over the course of twenty years of operations, texaco drilled 339 wells and built eighteen production stations, to extract an estimated 1.5 billion barrels of crude (kimerling, 2006). rampant dumping of crude oil and production waters into waste pits and local streams, and the routine burning of oil byproducts in pits and gas flares resulted not only in massive environmental contamination but also health problems for indigenous and settler farmer communities (beristain, páez rovira, & fernández, 2009; fiske, 2018; kimerling, 1991, 2006; san sebastián & córdoba, 2000; san sebastián, armstrong, córdoba, & stephens, 2001; san sebastián & hurtig, 2004a, 2004b, 2005). it is important to note that because tracking the effects of toxicants in soil, water, air, and bodies over the course of decades is exceptionally difficult, there has been significant controversy surrounding claims of harm to human health under texaco’s operations, including industry-sponsored scientific studies and rebuttals to public health studies (kelsh, mchugh, & tomasi, 2008; kelsh, morimoto, & lau, 2009; sever, 2005). these controversies underscore the limitations of conventional exposure and risk assessment in decades-long environmental disaster. thus, the arrival of oil in the amazon carried with it many familiar colonial tropes. state-sponsored displacement of indigenous nationalities, the precarious settlement of colonist communities alongside oil operations, and utter lack of industry regulation and adequate health services in the first two decades of operations compounded emerging inequalities in health, wealth, and education in the region. lago agrio, the city founded alongside the first well drilled in the special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 12 amazon (reportedly named by texaco workers after the company’s city of origin, sour lake, texas), was located in cofán territory at the time, an area that was colonized by settler communities who arrived with the oil boom (cepek, 2012; cepek, 2018). following texaco’s exit from ecuador in 1993, national and foreign oil companies expanded operations, and extraction has become an object of growing political and social controversy. ecuador introduced its first comprehensive environmental regulations in the 1990s, resulting in new audit practices and increased state involvement in industry operations (fiske, 2017). in the decades since, cofán, sekyoa, siona, waorani, and kichwa nationalities have continued to struggle with entrenched disparities in relation to extractivism (cielo & coba, 2018), for territorial rights to land and survival (riederer, 2019), as well as the right to free, prior, and informed consent to oil operations (brown, 2019). in 1993 a group of lawyers launched a lawsuit on behalf of thirty thousand amazonians against texaco (aguinda v. texaco), demanding reparations for environmental, health, and cultural damages. the suit brought unprecedented international attention to the region. in 2011 the court found chevron (which purchased texaco in 2001 in a $45 billion merger) guilty of “gross negligence” and extensive contamination throughout the region, and fined the company $9.5 billion (zambrano lozada, 2011). however, despite the landmark ruling, the case has not yet been brought to a close, in part because chevron no longer has any holdings in ecuador. as a result, the aguinda sentence could not be executed in the country. in the years since, the plaintiffs have taken the case to countries such as argentina and canada where chevron has operations, seeking a ruling by a third-party court to claim the financial settlement. since the 2011 ruling, there has been a lengthy appeals process, including several additional lawsuits (one in which chevron successfully sued the ecuadorian state for interference in the aguinda legal process, and brought successful a racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations act lawsuit against plaintiff attorney steven donziger for fraud in 2014; see also barrett, 2014). during this period, former president rafael correa and the alianza país party pushed for a post-neoliberal economy that, through the redistribution and continued generation of oil rents, sought to bring the amazon out of poverty and expand infrastructure and public services. despite such efforts, the effects of territorial dispossession, continued problems of contamination resulting from ongoing and prior oil production, and socio-economic inequalities have arguably become more acute (vallejo, cielo, & garcía, 2019). in the case of the plaintiffs living in the former texaco concession area, the effects of contamination have generated significant public and scientific controversy (acosta, 2011; alexander, 2014; barrett, 2014; dematteis, 2012); whether or not special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 13 the plaintiffs will ultimately be able to collect the settlement for damages occurred remained uncertain at the time of writing this text. when oil extraction commenced, thousands of colonists headed to lago agrio and the surrounding area from ecuador’s southern and highland regions. settlers followed the newly laid oil access roads in search of land to claim, staking out plots along the road and turning forest into farms. this history has given a particular shape to life in the area. the towns and small cities that have grown up follow the contours of the roads intended to connect oil wells. the logic of oil permeates every aspect of life here. as settlers expanded, they built houses next to wells, platforms, and stations—occupying ancestral territory that was rapidly being exploited by the oil industry. today, this means that many people have to cross pipelines just to reach their front doors. others dry their laundry on pipelines, or tie animals to them to graze. in some cases, arriving after waste pits had been covered over with dirt, settlers built houses directly on top of the pits next to wells. some did not know there was a waste pit below and simply thought they had found a nice, flat space ready for construction; others told me that they did not realize that waste pits were hazardous to their health. in spite of the ubiquity of fences, security guards, and physical as well as bureaucratic boundaries that demarcate space in the amazon, it is due to this knotted history of settlement and industrial development that distinctions between industrial and residential spaces are particularly porous here. the proximity of settler and indigenous communities to unregulated operations during the first decades of oil development exacerbated health and social problems and has had important repercussions for disputes over harm. in legal and scientific forums, boundaries must be drawn to demarcate where industry ends and life begins. such an exercise has proven difficult in a place where life and oil, like dense jungle vines, have grown together. in what follows, i draw principally from the accounts of lidia, one of the first settlers to the region. her story, on the one hand, represents a singular experience of life in this place. however, while honoring the specifics of her narrative, i also want to point out that her account has much in common with the life histories told to me by her neighbors and even those living further away in region. in her case, the labor to carve a life out of contaminated land has propelled her into broader struggles for justice in the aguinda lawsuit, through which she traveled to the us to share her story with other environmental justice activists and chevron shareholders. she illustrates the importance of attending to vernacular, intimate, special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 14 sensory experiences when tracing the material presences of toxicants. yet, her story also points us to ways that the colonialist project of state-sponsored settlement displaced indigenous communities that hunted, fished, and called this territory home, and at the same time, created new forms of as trees were felled, wells were drilled, and settler communities grew. i turn to her story now with the hope of demonstrating the importance of finding ways to accommodate these unrecorded seepages of industrial toxicants and unofficial erasures of lives and land in models of toxicity. yet, in working with stories of embodied experience of exposures, i do not aim to privilege a more authentic “local” body over numbers, samples, or other forms of evidence of harm. bodies are also suggestible, and even misleading; most relevant to the discussion here, they are situated. this article seeks to contribute to scholarship that insists on the situatedness of all accounts: from the technical to the experiential, from relative positions of power and proximity to pollution, and from critical histories of colonization, settlement, and extraction. the point of positionality in relation to toxicity is not to insist that boundaries and contours of difference do not exist, but rather to be accountable for the ways in which we draw them in our work, and the consequences they have for peoples’ everyday lives. swimming in oil “well, i’m from loja. and i tell you, i didn’t know anything, didn’t know what petroleum was.” for those settlers who came to lago agrio from the southern highlands after ongoing struggles with drought, land crowding, and poverty in the 1970s, the amazon was a source of wonder. lidia describes her initial delight at the natural abundance, coupled with a fear of the unknown: “i tell you we came here to see something new, to feel what it was like to live in another world here in our own country…the fauna, the flora, the jungle. there were some huge trees, tremendous trees. and different flowers too.” she goes on to list the size of the fish they could catch even in small streams, and the abundant game of paujiles, turkeys, or even a fat guatusa.3 this was the divine providence that many, like lidia, felt was a gift from god, made possible by the invitation of the government and longstanding declaration of these lands as “vacant” and ready to be worked (wasserstrom & southgate, 2013). as jorge añazco castillo (2008), a trader who spent years traveling throughout the region and led one of the first groups of settlers to claim land, wrote in his autobiographical account of life in the “oriente,” “thus, between drinks, the project of colonization of the nororiente was born, the place where oil had burst forth and there were millions of hectares of vacant lands that would accommodate thousands of campesinos who had no land to farm” (p. 131). special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 15 yet they were not alone in this wild. settling on the ancestral lands of the cofán nationality north of what is today the bustling city of lago agrio, lidia’s family took up land that would soon become the home of a texaco oil station and multiple wells. and that, she says, is when it all began to change: “after this, the oil started to spill. a substance, black, started spreading. first, the machine would come by, removing the rocks from the roads…and then they’d put down the oil. and everything would be coated.” lidia was describing a common practice of the time called “road oiling.” for the first two decades of texaco operations, crude oil was distributed over dirt roads to keep the dust down. the abundant amazonian rains made this a sinisterly efficient way for the crude oil to permeate water sources and farmlands. the feet of families like lidia’s were coated in crude as they walked to town, to school, or to their farmland. as camilo emphasized in the opening of this article, paying attention to the particulars of how crude oil production unfolded in this region, among a population that often went barefoot, begins to illustrate how toxicity is not a scientific “given” as mobilized in the generic models of exposure in camilo’s example. rather, toxicity is a sociomaterial process that emerges in distinct formations entangled with the particulars of history, place, settler colonialism, scientific knowledges, and political economy. early tales of rivers that ran black with crude, waste pits that overflowed and filled streams and swamps downstream, or the many documented and undocumented spills in rivers—often from pipelines—are indicative of the widespread contamination of land, waterways, and air as a result of oil operations in this region. exposure to chemicals in the water was amplified by the absence of piped water in residents’ homes; people relied on rivers for all their basic needs, and ingested toxicants directly through drinking, cooking, and bathing. for lidia, these early years of life in the amazon are riddled with memories of the materiality of oil—how its viscosity changed under the hot sun, how it stuck to skin, impervious to any amount of soap, scrubbing, or swearing. she describes how these corporeal presences and permutations are connected to experiences of illness: oil is sticky and, when it was hot out, because the sun is strong here, there was no way to walk because the oil [on the roads] burned your feet. it would cause blisters, all of that. so, that’s how things started, first our legs started to hurt, we started to get cramps. and we said to the engineers from texaco, “why do you spill oil?” and they said, “no, special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 16 no, oil is not harmful. petroleum is a form of medicine. petroleum can be used for pain, for pain in your bones, for whatever.” so we were unconcerned, out there swimming in oil. in the process of conducting fieldwork, i found that lidia’s account was remarkably similar to other residents in the region who emphasized the settlers’ initial ignorance of the health problems that can result from oil operations. this anecdote of the exchange with texaco workers was repeated to me frequently throughout research. lidia and others recounted that texaco workers told residents at the time that petroleum was good for curing the aches and pains of arthritis, instructing them to place it directly on their joints. stories like this encapsulate a common view of those in charge of oil operations: at best, they left an ignorant population in the dark, and at worst, they intentionally exposed residents to harmful contamination. as lidia tells it, the settlers’ collective ignorance of petroleum’s harmful effects was so great—and their resources to seek out alternatives once they began to experience damages so poor—that when the oil from spills and overflowing waste pits became so thick that it formed a skim floating on the rivers or in the rain buckets, she and others would simply scrape it off and proceed: no, we weren’t worried because they told us that petroleum wasn’t harmful…we used the water in these streams to wash…for cooking, for drinking, for everything…there was a skim, a thick covering, sometimes two or three centimeters thick, sometimes up to five centimeters thick—a layer that was made out of crude. so that’s why i tell you, it was hard. it was hard, really hard, for us.4 lidia’s words echo in my head after our meetings. swimming in oil. an apt summary of the lengthy accounts she would tell of her experience in this place. while doubling as a semantic description, there is also a literal truth embedded here, i argue, that is instructive in understanding the material manifestations of toxicity: she and her family have indeed swum, bathed, walked upon, breathed, and ingested the toxic components of oil production over the course of decades. lidia’s reality—one of memories of pain and struggle, joys and new delights in this place—exceeds any model of “normal” exposure from oil operations. rather than pathways of exposure, what might we learn from thinking with the explanatory metaphors used by those living alongside extraction? how could an understanding of toxicity based on the premise of bodies submerged, swimming in the toxic substances of their lifeworlds, differently inform political, regulatory, or scientific action? following camilo and lidia, we could begin by questioning special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 17 the assumption that everyone wears shoes when walking in “industrial sites,” or that all homes have treated water running through their taps, or that clothes are washed in machines and not by women who are submerged in polluted rivers, in order to better capture the cumulative, layered, kaleidoscopic effects of exposures over decades of life in this place. smoke thick like marmalade today, close to where she first settled, lidia lives at the end of a dirt path on the rise of a hill overlooking her grown children’s homes. the road and pipeline form a parallel horizon as she gazes out her front door. her immediate neighbors are the now state-run oil station on one side and a sherbet-colored hourly motel to the other. she has lived here for over four decades. over time, the boundaries of her property, the places where she keeps her pigs and grows her cacao, have shifted as various industrial incidents have rendered land unsuitable for planting or raising animals. the soundscape of lidia’s home is filled with the insistent squawk of chickens and the grunts of her favorite fat sow tethered close to the door. in the background is the constant drone of motors and gas flares from the station. by 6 p.m., the flares flash through the treetops against the lavender light of amazonian dusk. the noise, in the relative quiet of the evening hours, is amplified. the flares are always lit. depending on the direction of the wind, the smell of gas is unmistakable. when i asked lidia about life next to the gas flares, her story was one of unrelenting adversity. in years prior, a black film coated everything: rooftops, rain barrels, the leaves of planted crops, clothing hung on the line. sometimes, she notes, this still happens, though not as often. today, the flare leaves ashy traces that lidia and her family touch and inadvertently ingest by drinking from water tanks or harvesting crops. the flares emits gasses: sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen dioxide. present too are other substances: carbon dioxide, methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane, heptane, carbon monoxide. although she can never be sure on a given day what combination of chemicals they happen to be surrounded by, lidia is certain that these gasses sometimes cause headaches that render her and her family unable to work; for others they make eyes red and itchy, throats scratchy, or chests too tight to breathe. each person’s response is a bit different. the proximity of lidia’s home to these flares— while exceptional in its assiduous onslaught against their health—is common here. as we spoke, occasionally lidia’s adult children would come by to collect their special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 18 children, whom she had been watching while they were at work. they would stop to listen, leaning on the doorframe to add any additional details she had neglected. during one visit, one of her sons sat down to describe the debris that would catch fire in the gas flares and fall down on them, like flaming bits of smoldering rain. there were other times too, her son noted, when the oil workers would light the waste pits on fire, and the smoke descended upon them like a thick blanket. he recalled, they would light the waste pits on fire where they would store the oil.5 and the fire would make these terrible columns of smoke. black, but thick, like when you’re making marmalade. and in each part of these columns, you could see this big thick cloud. that’s how it was. it would start like that and then within an hour and a half or so, then it would rain. and with the rain, all of this smoke fell over the plants. stained all the plants, the clothes too if they were outside. sometimes we weren’t at home, and when we got back all of the clothes would be stained black. the plants were bathed in this, it would damage the roofs of the houses and we wouldn’t have any water. and in the water tanks that we had started to build would be covered too. lidia’s son went on to describe how their animals began to lose their fur. for lidia and her children, the health problems of their numerous dogs were clear signs of what the toxicants were doing their bodies as well. her son stuck his chin in the direction of one dog who was sleeping in the sun of the courtyard, pointing my attention the mangy patches where much of the fur on the haunches had fallen out: “he went over to the river and was crossing near the station when he went in river…the water was hot, and doubtless had a lot of chemicals in it.” the loss of fur, moments of seizure-like shaking, the effects of toxicity on animal counterparts are registered in family histories among overlapping memories of clouds thick with black smoke. stories of animals lost to contamination here abound: from cows who gave birth to malformed calves, to chickens who ran around just before dying in a frenetic, fanatical dance after drinking contaminated water. animals died after drinking water in the rivers and streams; on occasion, they would fall into open waste pits and drown, stuck in the oily slop. tales of animals lost or injured by oil operations, or those deformed or de-furred after crossing a nearby river, circulate here as evidence of the continuum of human and nonhuman vulnerabilities alongside extraction. the chicken in the yard or the hunting dog on the run becomes a sentinel of the dangers that lurk in the smoke that clouds the horizon, settling around them like the remains of the incinerated waste pits that light up the skies. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 19 a horrible smell, and then tsaac! living next to industry places lidia and her family in relation to toxicants. these are not voluntary relations, rather more along the lines of “chemical kinships” (agard-jones, 2016), illustrating the non-linear effects of chemicals on those least equipped to prevent toxicants from penetrating bodily limits (roberts, 2017b). exposures in the amazon are multiple, differentiated, and infrequently recorded when they occur. from the time they arrived in the amazon, lidia and other women spent hours washing laundry by hand in the streams nearby. sitting on the riverbank, partially or completely submerged in the water, women’s bodies were awash in toxicants running with the current. she described countless days when the water changed color to a frothy gray, or when they would arrive at the stream to find an awful stench flowing downstream; contamination from formation waters, crude oil, and other production chemicals ran across their bodies: barium, mercury, arsenic, selenium, antimony, chromium, cadmium, cobalt, lead, manganese, vanadium, and zinc. formation waters contain many salts and heavy metals, which are highly toxic to humans and can bio-accumulate in fish and other animals. other radioactive elements, such as strontium 90 or radium 226, flowed in and around them, linking the daily routines of scrubbing laundry to aromatic hydrocarbons of benzene, xylene, and toluene. it did not take long before people in the area started experiencing health problems. others living in the areas outside of lago agrio told me of skin rashes from bathing in the river, persistent coughs and respiratory problems, miscarriages and malformed infants. for some, ill health began as a vague series of complaints. when they went to the river to bathe, lidia and others noted, rashes and skin spots would coat the arms, bellies, and backs of their young children. lidia’s story is marked by the pain of three miscarriages. each is remembered in exacting relation to the industrial operations and daily routines at the time, bringing her to tears as she recalls these days decades later: the first miscarriage was because i crossed the stream. i had been washing [laundry]. i was washing when before we knew it a stain of black oil was floating downstream. and we got out of the water. but since i had left the clothes on the other side, a whole tub of clothes on the other side, i risked crossing the stream. i got wet up to here [indicating the height with her hand] on my legs, covered in oil. the water was floating down with a black layer on top, but underneath the special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 20 water was a gray color. it stunk. a horrible smell. and then i started getting dizzy, vomiting, dizziness with vomiting, and then tsaac! all of a sudden i had pain in my stomach, pain in my hips, all through the middle of the night. in another instance, she went on to describe how at just over three months pregnant, she miscarried. each miscarriage is inextricable from an oil spill, a river crossing, or, in one case, pulling a fallen bull out of a waste pit. the experience of poisoning—from headaches, to vomiting, to the sensation of feeling like she was going crazy from the ensuing pain, to the loss of each child—is permeated with memories of specific industrial events and encounters with toxicants. moments of agony mark this history of routine oil spills and industrial accidents; these are accounts that have no official traces within legal or scientific reckonings with the history of contamination in this place. the capacity of toxic substances to transgress boundaries (tuana, 2008), whether through their accumulation in the fatty tissue of fish to their movement through the air and into our lungs, have other effects as well. exposures remind us that distinctions between subject and object, human and nonhuman, mother and river, memory and the present, are not fixed. here, lidia and her neighbors’ bodies were submerged, surrounded, and infiltrated by industrial contaminants while working and bathing in the river. this capacity for toxic particles to affect us, as chen (2012) suggests, involves the shifting relations of both affect and being affected that are central to the experience of being exposed to a chemical. this is the “viscous porosity of flesh” (tuana, 2008, p. 199); those moments when we are made sick by toxic substances that remind us of the ways that we are in and of the world. such porosity, in the words of simmons (2017), “becomes a site of potential, exposure, and entanglement all at once, questioning the stability of our worlds, human and nonhuman.” here, there is no way to extract the bodily memories of loss, pain, and agony from the industrial register of this place. once, i asked lidia if she had ever considered leaving the home she had made in the amazon. this was a question that i dreaded asking, for it smacked of the convenience of the transient, foreign researcher who presumed that one could simply pack life into a bag and move away from adversity. yet when i asked, lidia and others interlocutors always answered with a definitive no: some stated that they were proud of the lives they had carved out of nothing; others stated that they felt that god had chosen this place for them and they would persevere; others told me that it would be far too difficult to move. “where would i go?” one man asked me rhetorically, telling me how some twenty years prior he and his special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 21 family had moved to their current farm in an effort to escape the contamination they were facing in a different community—only to find that the contamination, struggles with oil in their well, and health problems followed them with dogged insistence. for many of the settlers living here, their livelihoods and financial resources are tied up in their farms; some families only had one person making a salary of $400 per month, others had to sell farm animals when medical emergencies came up. economic constraints, as well as personal feelings of attachment, a devout resolution in the face of adversity, or even resignation to life’s course, led families to stay. the complexity of settler relations to the place—often informed by feelings of initial audacity they recalled when setting off to colonize the amazon—both made it difficult to leave and underlined the burdens of working poor farmers occupying the region. the lived knowledge they now possessed of the difficulty of life alongside an industry whose effects they had not previously contemplated had opened their eyes to exposure but had left them no better protected in its wake. to be naked in the face of contamination, after all these years, is not contingent on a lack of knowledge of the potential risks like when they first arrived, but rather the social, material, historical conditions that make some more vulnerable than others. while lidia makes different choices today than when she first moved to the amazon based on her accumulated knowledge and experience alongside oil extraction, the principal health risks to her and her family remain unavoidable as they farm and eat vegetables grown in contaminated land, bathe and wash clothes in contaminated rivers, or breathe poisonous gases from the flares next door. avoiding toxic exposures altogether is not possible. the examples offered by lidia, her son, and other residents illustrate how difficult it is to encapsulate exposure as a bounded moment; these are accounts that center on the permeability of bodies, rivers, houses, and animal kin to chemical agents. toxicants flow around lidia and her family in the water and the air; the flash of pain in her womb and tsaac! refracts the lived burden of chemical onslaught through moments of loss. if, following mol (2002), “to be is to be related” (p. 54), then to live here is to live in relation to industry. conclusions: ecuador’s polluted kid sitting on the side of the road, the bare feet of “ecuador’s polluted kid” in the powerpoint image illustrate the differential ways that individuals are exposed to industrial chemicals in the amazon. in contrast to traditional models of risk assessment that involve “pathways” of exposure, what we see from lidia’s life history is that toxic exposure cannot be isolated from the place and history in special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 22 which it occurs. this is not only a matter of differentiating chronic, long-term exposures from acute chemical intoxications, nor of asserting that there are multiple variables at play. rather, in order to understand the nature of exposure in the amazon, we must also consider how settlement and oil extraction unfolded together such that homes were built in close proximity to wells and flares while displacing indigenous inhabitants from ancestral territory; how backyards today have come to include waste pits; how habitual movements such as walking to school meant traversing slicked roads and oil pipelines; how memories of washing laundry are filtered through the pain of miscarriages; or how poverty means that some families continue to drink unsafe well water today. reflecting on these relations as toxic becomings (chen, 2012; tuana, 2008), scholars and activists have seized the moment to contemplate new possibilities for figuring toxicity: “between the rising tides and chemical burns, our bodies are stew pots cooking up a new form of posthuman politics with new forms of posthuman corporealities” (povinelli, 2017, p. 509). what emerges in this process is that current models of toxicity employed in regulatory science and law are insufficient for conceptualizing and acting upon the role of toxicants in our lives. drawing on scholarship that has insisted on the spatially and temporally specific nature of toxicity, i read lidia’s account as a call to recognize the plurality of ways of knowing the toxicants in the worlds in which we live. thinking with tuck and yang’s (2012) argument on decolonization, the deconstruction of models of exposure that marginalize and maintain the status quo cannot occur in abstract or metaphorical terms; advancing more nuanced concepts of toxicity is both a material and epistemological struggle over the relationship between knowledge, power, and struggles for justice. the continued insistence on defining the effects of toxicity through techno-scientific, mechanistic chemical pathways and marketoriented understandings of risk is another space through which the experiences, suffering, and struggles of communities affected by industrial toxicants have been repeatedly marginalized. reframing toxicity prompts us to ask questions of whose bodies are visible, valued, or imagined as “toxic,” as well as who is able to speak from and within geopolitical centers of knowledge production. far from insisting that vernacular knowledge demonstrate equivalence with modern sciences, this article has explored how experiences of toxic exposures are tied up in histories of extraction and inequality. understanding exposure requires appreciating how history and inequality are woven into the very fabric of toxicity, yet often ignored or rationalized in official determinations. given the tangled special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 23 relations of toxic exposures illustrated in the accounts of someone like lidia, or the contrasts of ways of understanding those exposures presented by camilo, we must be more attentive to the epistemic limits of tools for accounting for the harm resulting from oil. attending to everyday experience can point us to those places where our assumptions cause us to miss vital elements of toxicity. how is exposure minimized, for instance, if we assume that exposed subjects all wear shoes? what are the cumulative effects of consuming plant and animal products that were grown and fed with contaminated water sources? or where washing the laundry means one’s body is completely submerged in chemicals? in seeking to move towards a more expansive concept of toxicity, it is time to ask what we might learn from the explanatory metaphors used by those living alongside extraction: how could an understanding of toxicity, based on the premise of bodies submerged and swimming in the toxic substances of their lifeworlds, differently inform political, regulatory, or scientific action? all our means of assessment—legal, technoscientific, or anthropological—must attend to the ways that poverty, history, and profit are woven into the relations of who is exposed to toxic substances, and how certain relations are rationalized through distinctions between what is natural, cultural, technological, or material (tuana, 2008). toxicity must be refigured—not as a property of chemicals alone—but as emerging within particular relations between people and places that hinge on everyday experience. acknowledgements i am immensely grateful for the time that the individuals i refer to as lidia and camilo took to share with me their experiences living and working in the amazon. i am indebted to their commitment, as well as that of many of their compañeros, to making life more liveable. careful reading and insight were provided on earlier versions of this article by margaret wiener, peter redfield, dragana lassiter, paolo bocci, vincent joos, lindsay ofrias, as well as two anonymous reviewers. notes 1 all names and identifying features have been changed. 2 his words in spanish were, “la gente aquí está mucho más desnuda frente a la contaminación.” 3 a paujil is a curassow, and guatusa is an agouti. special section: chemical entanglements | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) amelia fiske, 2020 24 4 for similar accounts among the cofán people of dureno, see cepek 2018. 5 lighting waste pits on fire was a means of emptying the pits when they 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(2011, february 14). aguinda et al. v. chevron corporation, no. 2003–0002. provincial court of justice of sucumbíos. author bio amelia fiske is a senior research fellow in the department of history and ethics in medicine at the technical university of munich (germany). her work is situated at the intersection of cultural anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, and environmental humanities. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582x18820296 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0971721818762895 das, sanghamitra, and samhita das. 2021. “intimate labor at biomedical frontlines: on the situated knowledges of female community health workers in the management of covid-19 in india.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–22. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license intimate labor at biomedical frontlines: situated knowledges of female community health workers in the management of covid-19 in india sanghamitra das center for biology and society, arizona state university sdas77@asu.edu samhita das bharati college, university of delhi samd17491@gmail.com abstract media reports of the covid-19 pandemic in india have highlighted the important role that india’s female community health workers, the accredited social health activists (ashas), have played in managing covid infections in india. this paper explores the epistemic basis of asha work to understand the significance of their role. through a discourse analysis of textual media articles, we show that the ashas’ routine and covid-related caregiving practices are a form of embodied, intimate labor rooted in their situated, community-oriented knowledge. this labor is devalued as emotional and feminized care work, which denies the ashas professional status in the public healthcare system of india and, in turn, reflects a hierarchy among health practitioners that stems from the status of objectivity/disembodiment in biomedicine. we find that, despite their low status in the public health system, asha workers develop a self-concept that enables them to self-identify as healthcare professionals, motivating them to continue providing essential healthcare services during the pandemic. we argue that an official recognition of the epistemic value of asha work would help to overcome the age-old nature/culture dichotomy that informs what counts as valuable, legitimate, formal medical knowledge. furthermore, our analysis provides a original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 2 critique of the gendered devaluation of care work within a political economy of health increasingly dictated by a neoliberal logic. introduction in several parts of rural india, the figure of a local community woman draped in a pink saree (traditional indian attire) has become representative of the public healthcare system. these women in their pink saree uniforms are part of a large pool of approximately 1 million female community health workers designated as the accredited social health activists (ashas). the ashas have come to play a pivotal role in the management of the novel coronavirus (covid-19) pandemic in india. asha workers were first recruited in april 2005 as a central component of a flagship scheme called the national rural health mission (nrhm) (hota 2006). this scheme was developed to address the vast disparities between rural and urban health infrastructures in india (leslie 1985). the initial objective of nrhm was to make healthcare accessible to india’s rural population (karol and pattanaik 2014). the remarkable success of asha workers in rural regions prompted the government of india to extend the ashas’ services to urban areas, thus transforming the nrhm into the national health mission in 2012 (sharma 2014). this experience of the ashas as preliminary healthcare providers bridging the gaps in the national medical infrastructure has led to their emerging as a critical workforce for managing the covid-19 pandemic in india. the health services that the ashas provide, the necessity of these services, and their valuations are shaped profoundly by the ashas’ identity. the initial thrust of the asha program was to address maternal and infant mortality in india (joshi and george 2012). to facilitate cultural acceptance among communities, certain selection criteria were imposed for recruiting the ashas: asha workers must be local community women who are married, widowed, or divorced; preferably between the ages of twenty-five to forty-five years; and they must have completed primary education of up to eighth standard (abhay and khandekar 2014). thus, an asha’s gender and social status is inextricable from her profession. an asha’s work environment is also impacted by her caste identity, which emanates from the socio-religious hierarchy of the caste system and determines her relationship with the communities she serves. in other words, asha work is quintessentially embodied. we explore the role that this embodiment has played in managing covid infections in india. we discuss the intersections between three approaches in the literature on embodiment to inform our analysis of asha work: embodied medical practice (mol 2002), intimate labor (boris and parreñas 2010), and situated knowledges (haraway 1988). the analysis itself is carried out through a discourse analysis (lupton 1992) of textual media articles, including interviews of several asha workers conducted original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 3 during the pandemic. through a discussion of the key themes that emerge in this media coverage, we demonstrate the link between the embodied nature of asha work and a trenchant process of devaluation that is rooted in the feminization and voluntarism of care work. in writing this paper, we are also cognizant of the co-existence of modern medicine with traditional medical systems in india—a reality explicated by the term medical pluralism. nevertheless, sociological and anthropological analyses have revealed biomedicine’s dominance over alternative medical systems (cant and sharma 1999; lambert 2012). it is common knowledge that the biologically reductionist approach of biomedicine has increasingly replaced more holistic medical systems in india that incorporate the social, the environmental, and the moral in healthcare practices. in this paper, we argue that the recruitment of asha workers in the public health system of india, however, pushes the epistemic frontiers of biomedicine towards acknowledging the importance of the social for the biological. yet it has been shown that, despite their contribution to expanding the reach of india’s public health institutions, asha workers occupy a marginal professional position within the healthcare system (sharma 2014, 296–97). this marginality has become starker during the pandemic. to understand this marginalization, it is essential to explore the conditions of asha work that are shaped by larger epistemic and socioeconomic structures. an attention to the discourse surrounding asha workers in the public sphere reveals the underlying ideologies that structure asha work and shape its perception in society (legreco and tracy 2009). this paper contextualizes the embodied healthcare practices of the asha, both prior to and during the pandemic, with respect to these broader social processes. the structure of the paper is as follows. in the first section, we begin with a discussion on embodiment to situate our study within the broader discourse on epistemic practices and women’s labor. in the following section, we discuss the four key themes that that emerge from our analysis: the situatedness of the practices of asha work; the othering of asha workers both within the healthcare system and within the communities they serve—what we call “twice othering”; the ashas’ social and professional self-awareness; and finally, the ashas’ demands for reforming their status. we conclude with a discussion of the significance of the ashas’ standpoint in critiquing the reductionist tendencies of biomedicine that reify a hierarchy of both medical knowledge systems and care providers. our analysis also indicates that gendered devaluations of care work are made possible through an increasing privatization of the healthcare system in india. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 4 practices, intimacies, and the situatedness of biomedicine in her influential book the body multiple: ontology in medical practice, annemarie mol (2002) discusses her ethnographic work of investigating the medical practices of treating atherosclerosis, an arterial condition that causes pain in the legs while walking. this ethnographic study challenges the settled boundary between nature and culture that informs what ought to count as formal medical knowledge. mol compares the practices of diagnosing atherosclerosis in two specialist departments in a dutch hospital: the outpatient clinic and the pathology division (mol 2002, 29–52). while pathology focuses exclusively on biological principles to explain disease ontology, in the clinic, on the other hand, physicians rely on patients’ narratives to diagnose atherosclerosis. mol demonstrates how physicians’ documentation of their patients’ narrative is ultimately key to diagnosing the affliction. the central thesis of this ethnographic study is that a pathologist’s practice of observing sections of leg arteries under a microscope to detect signs of disease and a physician’s attention to patients’ accounts of suffering are different ways in which atherosclerosis gets “enacted” in the hospital (mol 2002, 32–36). we build upon this ethnographic insight to argue that asha work is a form of healthcare practice that also enacts disease differently through a documentation of patient narratives and an incorporation the ashas’ knowledge of patients’ intimate medical and social realities. such multiplicity of disease ontologies is particularly relevant for medical practices in india where traditional and modern medicines co-exist and often complement one another. in a seminal article on indian medical practice, r.s. khare (1996) discusses medical pluralism in india through the concept of “practiced medicine.” khare explains how practiced medicine in india is generated together by patients and doctors to find the “best treatment.” doctors and caregivers approach medicine and healthcare as being concerned with more than just the biological being. practitioners—traditional and modern—combine their social knowledge about patient backgrounds to provide a model of care that addresses the physical, social, as well as the spiritual aspects of the well-being of their patients, sometimes encompassing more than one medical system (khare 1996, 840–43). in india, socioeconomic complexity and the strategies employed by caregivers to navigate these complexities are therefore embedded in practiced medicine. in other words, the social situations of india necessitate an acknowledgement of diverse approaches to managing diseases. since the formation of the nrhm in 2005, asha workers are officially included in the category of caregivers in india. the health services that asha workers provide thus belong to the multiplicity of healthcare practices within india’s public health system. however, the nature of work that the ashas perform is not formally recognized as healthcare practice and gets subsumed under care work original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 5 (kammowanee 2019). care work comprises occupations that enhance the “human capabilities” of those receiving care, such as mental and physical health, and cognitive and emotional development (england, budig, and folbre 2002). these care professions are considered distinct from medical practice. paula england (2005) theorizes this distinction through the framework of the devaluation of care work, arguing that care work is devalued because it is deemed a public good that accrues indirect societal benefits. in other words, the provision of care is secondary to the medical management of afflictions in biomedicine. such analyses, therefore, allude to a generalization of care work as feminized work that fails to secure social recognition and state support owing to such labor being deemed as feminine, intrinsically motivated—that is, voluntary—and hence requires lesser skills (england 2005, 395). padmini swaminathan (2015) locates this characterization of care work within the context of “doing development” through women, as opposed to doing development for women. she argues that the indian state has developed welfare programs that feminize responsibilities under the banner of women’s empowerment, employing local women as “honorary volunteers” for developmental projects. these programs nevertheless categorize these women as informal care workers or social activists whose labor is devalued as self-interested work directed towards the betterment of their communities (swaminathan 2015). the voluntarism of “poor women’s work,” largely unpaid and disguised as performances of communitarian “solidarity,” has been theorized as a feature of the receding welfare state in india (banerjea 2011). similarly, asha workers are depicted by the state as voluntary actors taking charge of their communities’ healthcare needs. voluntarism, therefore, not only represents the politics of establishing asha workers as neoliberal agents but also demonstrates a neoliberalization of the healthcare system in india as a whole. some scholars have argued that public health has ceased to be a public good in india post liberalization in the 1990s (ghosh and qadeer 2020). within this neoliberal framework, voluntary care work is emotive work, and therefore not formal work that merits professional recognition. as we discuss below, this assumption has been refuted by the realities of the covid-19 pandemic, where workers in low-paid and low-status positions such as community health workers, janitors, and agricultural workers have emerged as essential workers. the devaluation of care work as emotive and voluntary work can be understood through sara ahmed’s (2004) “cultural politics of emotions” that reveals how emotions are simultaneously associated with femininity and primitivity. the presence of emotions is seen as limiting the capacity to make fair judgments and to act autonomously, constructing the emotive individual as a less-than-civilized “other.” ahmed challenges this notion and argues that emotions are sensations of the body involved in the act of perceiving the world formed not only through individual consciousness but also as a collective conscience contingent on historical knowledge and social memory (ahmed 2004, 9). emotions are thus original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 6 intentional and underlie the foundations of knowledge systems that determine everyday practices in societies (ahmed 2004, 7). drawing upon ahmed, we argue that asha work as emotionally driven, voluntary healthcare provision is a form of indispensable health service that enables the mitigation of infrastructural inadequacies on the ground and is therefore of high epistemic and social value. however, asha work cannot be characterized as solely emotive linkage care work. we argue that asha work is a form of “intimate labor" that sustains “the day-to-day work that individuals and societies require to survive” (boris and parreñas 2010, 2). intimate labor is concerned with the most private aspects of an individual’s life and involves knowledge of personal information and intimate needs such as bodily upkeep and care, the sustaining of social and emotional ties, and the maintenance of health and hygiene. despite its emotive dimensions, intimate labor is first and foremost an economic activity, “a primary source of livelihood” for socioeconomically marginalized women exchanged in the marketplace rather than performed within the atomistic context of the family (boris and parreñas 2010, 7–8). this form of labor includes the know-how or embodied knowledge of the objects, instruments, or situations that surround a worker, embedding them in their environment (ducey 2010). the knowledge acquired through intimate labor, such as shared secrets, interpersonal rituals, bodily information, personal vulnerability, and embarrassing situations, are rarely accessible to an outsider (boris and parreñas 2010, 3). in the developed world such intimate labor is also devalued by its historical association with workers who belong to ethnic minority or marginalized communities. the devaluation of intimate care work is therefore not a contingency, but a global reality rooted in the larger political economy of care work that enables “poor women’s work” from the global south to circulate internationally in the industrialized social circuits of the global north (mahon and robinson 2011). similarly in the case of the ashas in india, the local circulation of poor women’s work is mediated by social identities based on gender, class, and caste, as we demonstrate below. the status of objectivity in scientific knowledge systems and epistemic practices also contributes to the devaluation care work like asha work. objectivity relies on a distancing of the observed from the observer—that is, a distancing from the embodied reality of the observed in favor of abstractions that give rise to universal truths. this objectivity is foundational for biomedicine. michel foucault (1973), in the birth of the clinic, characterizes the significance of the “medical gaze” in modern medicine. medical knowledge is produced through an objective gaze that is capable of penetrating beyond the surface of the skin, illuminating even the dark recesses of the body (foucault 1973). this medical gaze is an unembodied position of power/dominance over the observed. feminist theory challenges this disembodied notion of objectivity through an emphasis on embodiment. in one of the foundational essays on feminist objectivity, donna haraway (1988) writes about the positionality of the objective gaze: “this gaze original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 7 signifies the unmarked position of man and white” (haraway 1998, 581). haraway calls, instead, for the development of an objectivity that is cognizant of the “standpoint” of the observer and acknowledges the observer’s gender, geographical location, culture, and social situation. feminist objectivity is thus embodied, and embodied objectivity is situated knowledges (haraway 1988, 581). scholars have used the concept of situated knowledges for understanding knowledge practices in the global south. a recent study in ghana has drawn upon the lived experiences of members of a ghanaian gold mining community to understand emergence and transmission of buruli ulcer, a neglected tropical disease (tschakert et al. 2016). an older study on bio-prospecting for drug discovery in the chiapas highlands discusses how the perspectives derived from the situated knowledges of mayan healers inform the critique of the reductionism of the “biomedical gaze” (nigh 2002). both these studies demonstrate the multiplicity of ways of knowing in different societies that make up medical knowledge systems determining how ontologies of disease/illness and treatment/healing are formulated. likewise, the healthcare practices of asha workers are an alternative way of knowing about the health issues and medical belief systems of communities. an attention to their situated knowledges is thus essential for comprehending how biomedicine operates in contemporary india. our analysis of the public discourse on asha work during the pandemic lends to this argument by demonstrating how the knowledge acquired by these “poor women” through their embodied voluntary labor has generated crucial biological data for the medical and political management of covid-19 india. embodied management of covid-19 in india in our discussion thus far, we have situated asha workers in the literature on embodiment. in this section, we characterize and contextualize the work that the ashas perform both as a part of their routine healthcare responsibilities and as part of preliminary healthcare provision during the pandemic. there is a growing body of literature that enumerates, assesses, and evaluates the caregiving roles that these female healthcare workers perform. we utilize this literature to place the media coverage of asha work during the pandemic in conversation with the broader epistemic, sociopolitical, and economic contexts that shape public perceptions of asha work. four themes emerge consistently in the media discourse on the ashas’ role in pandemic management. while being attentive to nuances, we arrange these dominant themes into the following conceptual schema that allows us to provide an account of the everyday realities, challenges, and hopes of the asha workers. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 8 situating asha work: practices and perceptions since the early stages of the pandemic in india, two terms have come to be frequently associated with the ashas in the media discourse: asha workers are being described as the “foot soldiers” (changoiwala 2020) at the “frontlines” of the fight against covid-19 in india (singh 2020). the analogy with war is immediately evident. “foot soldiers” are the first line of defense in war strategies, placed at the “frontlines” of battle. indeed, asha workers have been the first line of defense in india’s covid management strategies. the ashas have worked with minimal or no protective equipment in locales that are ubiquitous but nonetheless inaccessible to indian biomedicine—the villages and slums of india. some asha workers have also contracted the virus in their line of duty (agrawal 2020). this predicament of the asha workers represents a dual politics of the body wherein the biopolitical (foucault 1990) management of covid-afflicted individuals is accompanied by a necropolitics (mbembe 2008) of risking the health and lives of “frontline” asha workers. asha workers work at the very grassroots level of india, bartering information about a highly contagious virus that disrupts everyday life as much at the hinterlands as in the urban centers of the country. in amassing biological information about coronavirus infections and extending biopolitical surveillance to remote villages, it can thus be argued that, through its failure to ensure the safety of asha workers, the indian state is imbricated with a necropolitics that renders the ashas a dispensable workforce. the routine responsibilities of ashas as health activists include the following: connecting residents in rural areas to healthcare facilities; monitoring pregnancies and educating about bringing the health benefits of delivering babies in medical institutions; neonatal care and immunizations; the dispensing of basic medical provisions like contraceptives and medicines, among others (sharma, webster, and bhattacharyya 2014). our analysis of media articles shows that, in addition to these routine responsibilities, managing the pandemic requires the ashas to perform the following work: creating awareness among the rural population about the pandemic; informing about precautionary measures against covid infections; tracing the travel histories of people; collecting information about covid symptoms; daily monitoring for these symptoms, especially among vulnerable populations like the elderly and people with underlying conditions; visiting quarantine centers; assisting in testing; and conducting door-to-door surveys. incidentally, the work performed by these “foot soldiers” is not unlike the practices of a physician diagnosing atherosclerosis in a dutch hospital. the patient’s narratives of their symptoms, or the lack thereof, is instrumental in determining whether a covid test is required for the patient—much like how a physician would determine from her the patient’s account whether he may have the symptoms of atherosclerosis. only when the asha worker has diligently monitored and inscribed the bodily symptoms of the members of all the households in her community can a comprehensive biomedical and statistical estimate of the pandemic be generated. the preliminary healthcare services original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 9 provided by the ashas are, therefore, instrumental for the biopolitics of covid management in india. the health services that ahsa workers provide require intimate knowledge of their patients’ bodily conditions. however, performing this intimate work also requires deep situated understandings of the social relations and environments of the communities. asha workers are often members of their own communities, and their knowledge about the health practices of their communities is instrumental for fulfilling their healthcare responsibilities. this includes deescalating potential hostile situations, especially in an atmosphere of anxiety due to the pandemic. performing routine asha work has its challenges (sarin and lunsford 2017). however, one of the factors that have proved to be a bigger challenge during the pandemic is the ambiguity of the role of ashas. they are not perceived as professionals by the state, the healthcare system, or the communities that they serve. this lack of professional status adds to their vulnerability as is evident from accounts of many ashas being attacked while collecting data about covid symptoms in their communities (bhanupriya and tewari 2020). although physicians have also been attacked while providing covid-related care, the ambiguity of the ashas’ professional status diminishes their legibility as healthcare workers, which makes them more vulnerable to such attacks by community members who fear discrimination in the event of a positive detection. for these reasons, the ashas have now long been fighting for recognition as formal healthcare professionals. but the pandemic has brought into stark relief their plight rooted in the informality of their professional designation (mutha 2020). facing and managing conflict situations is not a secondary function of asha work; it is, indeed, a part of her professional practice. in a recent incident, asha workers had to intervene in a relatively rural district called koppal in southern india where villagers had turned against one of their own members who had returned from a pilgrimage to saudi arabia (bhat 2020). the pilgrim was not being allowed by the villagers to enter the village for fear of being a carrier of coronavirus. the ashas managed this conflict by clarifying misconceptions that the villagers harboured about the infection. this incidence demonstrates how the social know-how of the asha workers, in terms of their communities’ beliefs and levels of awareness, is an integral part of managing the realities of healthcare provision during the pandemic at the grassroot level. such embodied practices therefore need institutional recognition for mediating the health needs of rural and marginalized communities. however, any institutional support extended to the ashas must account for the fact that how asha workers are designated influences how her labor is valued both socially and economically. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 10 the twice othering of the ashas the door-to-door surveys that asha workers have conducted during the pandemic have deferred the requirement for mass testing programs to detect coronavirus infections in india (mutha 2020). nevertheless, as we have discussed above, asha work is regarded as care work rather than healthcare practices that generate medical value. most of the media accounts we have analyzed highlight how asha workers continue to deliver primary healthcare services during the pandemic despite infrastructural disadvantages (such as dearth of protective equipment, masks, and sanitizers) and threats to their own lives and the lives of their families. these narratives seem to suggest that the most critical role of asha workers has been to sensitize communities and enhance awareness about healthcare services among rural and marginalized populations (gupta 2020). such media reports reflect the dominant perception that asha work is voluntary care work carried out by local community women employed as activists and not as public professionals (ratho 2020). furthermore, asha workers are also made to perceive their own work as an extension of household care (chatterjee 2020), or are made to view themselves as a “samajsevika” (in hindi, female social worker) (kammowanee 2019, 2). this devaluation constructs asha work as non-economic activity. such social practices limit asha workers' earnings to rs. 33 per day/0.9 paise per hour (about us$0.44 per day) (the tribune news service 2020). ashas are paid an honorarium amount of only rs. 2000 to 3000 per month (about $35–$40) for their “voluntary” work. the remainder of their income comes in the form of incentives conferred for completing individual tasks. during the pandemic, some regional state governments have given an additional amount of rs. 1000 (about $13.55) for covid-related additional work (mutha 2020). however, such increases are inconsistent, and reports have shown that some ashas have not been paid for over fifteen months (kajal 2020). numerous policies such as accident and life insurances of up to rs. 5 million ($67,000) have been offered to the asha workers (singh 2020). but they are of little value in the face of their ongoing financial crisis due to either delays in the disbursement of salaries or the inadequacy of their income. an asha worker named ujjawala says, “what money is better after death when survival is in trouble?” (mutha 2020). another asha worker expressed her hopes of becoming a full-time government worker: “i live in hope that someday, this [asha work] will turn into full-time employment” (ramaprasad and chakraborty 2020). this meager salary of the asha workers was determined during the conception of the nhrm when a “no salary employment model” was advocated for, arguing that the asha workers would underperform once they receive fixed salaries (ved et al. 2019, 6). it is, therefore, a conscious decision on the part of policymakers to maintain the asha program as a voluntary community institution and to not assimilate it into the public health system (ved et al. 2019, 7). in this way, the asha worker has been reduced to an original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 11 underpaid “cultural broker” (leslie 1985, 923) who nevertheless provides essential healthcare services. a consequence of such devaluation of their work is that these “frontline” workers do not share the spotlight with the doctors and nurses fighting covid-19 in india (ramesh 2020), which has resulted in the ashas being systematically marginalized and made to feel insignificant. an asha expresses her distress as follows: “the phc (primary health centers) staff asked us why we needed masks at all. ‘are you touching covid positive patients?’” (bhanupriya and tewari 2020). this marginalization is further cemented when doctors visit affected communities fully equipped with personal protective equipment while asha workers use only their duppattas (in hindi, scarves) as masks. the negligent attitude of the indian state towards the working conditions and financial issues faced by asha workers insinuates a mechanism of othering (canales 2000). as we have discussed above, this othering happens due to several factors working in conjunction: describing asha work as emotional care work, feminizing developmental programs, and ascribing a low-skill status to asha work. this othering also happens for instrumental economic reasons, such as the state’s intention to avoid creating a fresh cadre of government employees who will be entitled to lifelong employment and pension benefits (ved et al. 2019, 9). the practices of othering the ashas is not only limited to the state and its bureaucratic regimes. asha workers are also othered by their own communities. these state-recruited “cultural brokers” have been held accountable for governmental failures and policy inadequacies. in one instance, during their doorto-door surveys for covid-related work, asha workers were questioned in the following manner by community members: “you come to ask about fever and cold, but has your government ever come to ask if we have food in our homes, if our stoves are burning?” (bisht and menon 2020). asha workers are continually regarded with suspicion among certain communities. in the aftermath of the alleged marginalization of india’s muslim population through recent policy amendments to indian citizenship (such as the citizenship amendment act), the fear of data appropriation and surveillance by the current regime have fueled noncompliance with the ashas among muslim communities (mutha 2020). thus, asha workers endure the risk of representing governmental lapses without securing appropriate acknowledgement from the state. this is what we have termed as the “twice othering” of the asha workers. the indifference of the indian state is translated into systemic oppression mediated by the processes of devaluation and othering. this oppression is compounded by the overburdening of asha workers charged with managing the pandemic at the grassroots level. overburdened ashas and their “self-concept” the media articles we analyzed reiterated the seriousness of the escalating workload of the ashas due to the pandemic (outlook india 2020). before the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 12 pandemic, each asha worker was required to monitor 1,000 individuals in rural areas, and between 1,000 and 2,500 individuals in urban areas. but with the onset of the pandemic, this number has significantly risen as asha workers were also made to work in neighboring areas. an asha worker is required to reach up to 30 to 50 households a day (prakash 2020). during these long hours of work, they hardly get a chance to eat, rest, or use restrooms (gupta 2020). asha workers have been reported to work for more than 12 hours a day during the pandemic, visiting not only households but also quarantine centers twice a day to check on quarantined individuals (bhanupriya and tewari 2020). in the city of bengaluru, asha workers were also forced to perform the duties of municipal health officials, who remain mostly absent (mishra and mandyam 2020). in addition to this, in the dearth of adequate information about covid-19, asha workers were also made to acquire knowledge about the virus through personal efforts from online and television sources (srinivasan et al. 2020). the arduous documentation work done by the ashas gives the indian state access to ground-level data to be utilized in policymaking. the government of india thus extracts critical biological information through the ashas’ labor without substantially investing in them. this indifference on the part of the india state has led to a mental health crisis among the asha workers, intensified by anxieties and fears about the virus and physical exhaustion (kajal 2020). this crisis is further aggravated by the discrimination that the ashas face from family and community members, owing to the mobile nature of their work (editorial staff 2020). for instance, in a tragic episode an asha worker attempted to commit suicide after she was verbally abused by a village leader for visiting a homequarantined individual in another district (p 2020). an asha’s distress is also rooted in her identity shaped by gender, caste, and religion (scott et al. 2017). an asha worker’s position within patriarchal socio-cultural settings requires her to negotiate prevalent norms and customs. for instance, a recently published study has found that asha workers belonging to “lower caste” communities have faced caste-based discrimination while performing covid-related service in villages belonging to “higher caste” communities (niyati and mandela 2020). media accounts of such caste-based discrimination of the ashas are few and far between, reflecting a non-acknowledgement of caste hierarchy in the indian public sphere. even as the ashas grapple with these stresses of their work, they continue to perform their gendered domestic roles, such as that of a “good daughter-in-law” who fulfills household chores and attends to the needs of her family (saprii et al. 2015, 8). this pressure to fulfill traditional domestic responsibilities limits their ability to perform professionally and adds to mental distress. inability to adhere to gendered roles as well as infrequent pay (ramesh 2020) instigate families to encourage the ashas to quit their work, further devaluing their contributions. asha workers have, in this way, come to embody an “inner role conflict” when their profession as healthcare worker conflicts with their social identities (pandey et al. 2019). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 13 however, despite these challenges, asha workers have shown continued dedication to their work. they interpret these challenges as a fight against the system and not against the communities they serve (ramesh 2020). they understand that the community members rely heavily on their services and they do not wish to abandon their duties. this dedication is commonly understood as being motivated by altruistic intentions. however, the ashas’ dedication to their profession can be better understood through the notion of “self-concept” (pandey et al. 2019, 232). the self-concept of the asha workers is a psychological selfunderstanding based on a sense of identity that originates in the roles and responsibilities associated with their jobs. a quote by an asha worker demonstrates this aptly: “i am not bothered about the safety gear, honorarium or benefits. i have been working amidst these people for 14 years. they are at risk now, and i must tend to them” (changoiwala 2020). such articulations show that the asha workers’ self-concept has become more defined in the face of the harsh realities of the pandemic. their contributions to the health and social well-being of their communities are becoming self-evident. for instance, a women’s rights organization working in the states of northeast india roped in asha workers to intervene in the alarming rise in the cases of domestic violence due to the lockdown imposed during the pandemic (ramesh 2020). these instances demonstrate the asha workers’ relevance to social problems that have accompanied the pandemic. such accounts also illustrate how the asha workers’ situated intimate practices attend to the most private aspects of community members’ lives. the asha workers’ awareness of their own value to the medical system and community social relations shapes their self-construction, and they begin to identify themselves as “healthcare professionals” who emulate medical doctors (pandey et al. 2019, 232). recognition, remuneration, respect: understanding the demands of asha workers understanding the embodied labor that asha workers perform and its contribution to the management of the pandemic in india necessitates paying close attention to the demands of the ashas for reforming the conditions of their work. the media articles that we have analyzed thus far present first-hand experiences of the challenges that the ashas face as health workers. at the same time, they enumerate the ashas’ demands for addressing these challenges. as we have discussed above, the first obstacle that the ashas face stems from their very designation—activists and not workers—which leads to a devaluation of their labor. to overcome this devaluation, asha workers have sought the assistance of trade unions and have been staging several demonstrations demanding an improvement in their status (b.p. 2020). ranjana nirula (2015), the convenor and member of the all india coordination committee on asha workers, has published an online statement listing the demands of asha workers, including becoming “regularized as government health workers”; “paid (a) minimum wage original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 14 of rs. 15000 per month (about $200 per month)”; given access to “social security benefits like pension, gratuity, maternity benefits, etc.”; and being provided with a designated “uniform, id cards, bus passes” (nirula 2015). these demands are a definitive assertion for recognition by the asha workers. ashas not only have a self-concept of being health professionals but due to their identification as members of the public health system, they also feel a sense of entitlement (scott and shanker 2010). this sense of entitlement is reflected in their specific demand for being provided with better training to perform their duties. the issue of inadequate training for the ashas (wagner et al. 2018) has become especially important during the pandemic, as most ashas feel that the training that they have received from the state is insufficient for dealing with the pandemic (bhanupriya and tewari 2020). these accounts show that what is at stake for the asha workers are questions of dignity and respect in their everyday lives, intertwined with the issues of recognition and remuneration. in the wake of the overburdening of asha workers during the pandemic, some state governments have chosen to provide additional incentives to the ashas. in the state of maharashtra, asha workers are being paid a meagre additional amount of rs. 1000 (about $13.24) for a month of covid-related work (ramaprasad and chakraborty 2020). in the absence of protective equipment and with the persistent risk of contracting the virus themselves, the ashas feel that this additional incentive is not only inadequate but also insensitive. as one asha worker has expressed, “that’s how little our lives are worth” (ramaprasad and chakraborty 2020). the issue of remuneration then is also about “worth.” as one asha put it, “we want respect” (ramesh 2020). these instances of devaluation and discrimination of community health workers have prompted the world health organization to call upon all national governments and stakeholders to ensure the health, safety, and, hence, the dignity of frontline health workers (raman 2020). the pandemic has proven beyond a doubt that asha workers play a critical role in filling the gaps of the medical infrastructure in the public health system of india (berman 2015; sharma 2015). based on this realization, some academics have argued that the focus of the indian government must now shift from recruiting ashas as healthcare activists to retaining these essential workers in the public health system (bisht and menon 2020). ensuring the retention of asha workers in the system requires addressing the question of remuneration in conjunction with the issues of recognition and respect. this recognition ought to estimate the worth of asha workers’ lives as equal to the lives that they have been made to assume the responsibility of caring for during the current pandemic. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 15 discussion the central focus of our paper is the significance of the embodied healthcare practices of the all-female community health workers of india, the ashas. we have demonstrated how the situated knowledges of asha workers are embedded in the healthcare practices they have performed, both prior to and during the pandemic. nevertheless, asha work is continued to be devalued owing to its embodied nature. the ashas’ labor is perceived as emotional voluntary work motivated by “psychological altruism and empathy” and is regarded as contributing to the larger “public good” (pandey et al. 2019, 232). our discourse analysis finds that this devaluation has been challenged by the indispensability of the asha workers in managing the pandemic. despite this instrumental role, however, the ashas’ embodied labor does not meet the demands of objectivity in biomedicine. historically, western medicine became successfully implanted in diverse geographical locations and cultures through colonization (baer, singer, and susser 1994). with this, the objective but disembodied approach to medicine, health, and well-being became dominant in diverse societies. today, biomedicine flourishes in postcolonial countries as a prestigious institution together with traditional forms of medicine. nevertheless, ethnographic accounts have documented the prevalence of biomedicine’s hegemony over other medical systems (nichter and nitcher 1996). the devaluation of the ashas’ embodied labor takes place in the context of this historicity of biomedicine. the growth of biomedicine is also linked to the rise of capitalism, with biomedicine being one of the major contributors to the development of the global economy (baer, singer, and susser 1994, 329). this growth is accompanied by a professionalization and commoditization of caregiving roles (freund, mcguire, and podhurst 2003). due to this professionalization, western allopathic doctors have achieved a status that subordinates all other health practitioners, thus forming a rigid hierarchical structure among different medical knowledge systems and practitioners. within this structure, asha workers occupy the lowest rung, which means that their intimate wisdom about the health issues of the communities they serve go unheard (scott and shanker 2010, 1610–11). further reifying this hierarchy is the political economy of an increasingly privatized healthcare system that substitutes voluntarism for state expenditure on public health. these structural conditions maintain voluntary healthcare provision as informal work that lacks expertise. nevertheless, scholars have shown that in india well-informed health policies have failed due to cultural oversights and the inability to incorporate meanings of diseases that originate in local cultural contexts (jain and jadhav 2009). these observations reveal the fallacies of denying the epistemic value and adequate recognition of embodied care work like that performed by the ashas in india’s public health system. here, it is worth noting that at the heart of this conundrum is the definition of what counts as original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 16 technical expertise, revealing the inadequacy of a nature/culture dichotomy in explaining contemporary realities (balsamo 1996). our analysis finds that, despite the ambiguity in their designation, the asha workers’ self-concept enables them to identify and assert their rights as community health workers (bhatia 2014, 280–82). they are aware of their importance to the communities they work in and invest in building relationships of trust with them (mishra 2014). an asha worker as a healthcare provider thus has a unique standpoint that transcends the nature/culture binary. the standard of objectivity in biomedicine relegates an asha’s profession to an extension of her everyday life. however, viewing asha work through the lens of feminist objectivity—that is, situated knowledges—makes it clear that the embodiment of the ashas’ practices is critical for biomedical knowledge production. this is clearly demonstrated by the reliance of the indian state on the data collected by the ashas during the pandemic. community health workers elsewhere face similar devaluations and seek legitimacy either through their community-specific knowledge or through the acquisition of technical knowledge and skills (swartz 2013). the case of asha workers in india is no different. but the ashas have developed additional skills of comfortably accommodating both traditional healing rituals prevalent among communities and biomedicine caregiving practices (mishra 2014, 965–68) they have developed the capability of traversing radically different medical knowledge systems to ensure “best treatment” for their communities. throughout this paper, we have emphasized the indispensability of the embodied knowledge of the asha workers for the public health system of india, especially during the pandemic. as we have shown, this indispensability is due not only to their role as linkage workers in scenarios of inadequate medical infrastructures but also to their community-oriented knowledge. in a country like india, which has diverse medical systems, the standpoint of asha workers unsettles the reductionist dichotomies between nature/culture, objectivity/embodiment, biomedical practice/care work. a recognition of the epistemic importance of the ashas’ healthcare practices in a post-pandemic public health system of india would be a step away from such ideological dichotomies and towards a more holistic form of medicine untethered from the colonial and gendered hierarchies of medical systems and healthcare practitioners. moreover, we argue that the recognition of the ashas as formal healthcare professionals would be a step towards an alternative political economy of healthcare that values care work as essential work in a post-pandemic world. acknowledgements part of the theoretical framework for this paper came out of a discussion on feminist biopolitics in a graduate seminar at arizona state university in fall 2019. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) sanghamitra das and samhita das, 2021 17 for this, sanghamitra das expresses her gratitude to professor mary margaret fonow. the authors are indebted to professors lindsay a. smith and h.l.t. quan at arizona state university for reading an early draft of this paper and for providing their valuable feedback. the authors are also thankful for the comments of an anonymous reviewer who helped sharpen the critical stance of this paper. references abhay, mane, and sanjay khandekar. 2014. 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"how are gender inequalities facing india’s one million ashas being addressed? policy origins and adaptations for the world’s largest all-female community health worker programme." human resources for health 17 (1): 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12960-018-0338-0 wagner, abram l., julia m. porth, deepti bettampadi, and matthew l. boulton. 2018. "have community health workers increased the delivery of maternal and child healthcare in india?" journal of public health 40 (2): e164–e170. author bios sanghamitra das is a phd student at arizona state university working at the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and adivasi studies. her research investigates the biopolitics of managing rare genetic diseases in india. samhita das has an m. phil. in sociology from the delhi school of economics and is currently a lecturer of sociology at the university of delhi. her research investigates how biomedicine and medical technologies are implicated in the disciplining of labor, particularly women’s labor.     special section daphnia and apollo: an epigenetic fable     martha kenney san francisco state university mkenney@sfsu.edu     abstract environmental epigenetics is a field of molecular biology that studies how signals from the environment (e.g., food, toxicants, and even our social milieu) affect gene expression. although, for some, environmental epigenetics promises a new and dynamic account of the relationship between organisms and their environments, current research using model organisms often relies on stereotypical assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexuality in humans (kenney and müller 2017). in this article, rather than simply critiquing dominant narratives, i tell a different story—a feminist fable about small crustaceans called daphnia, who display remarkable epigenetic responses to their environments. for example, many species of daphnia are made up of clonal females who reproduce asexually, but when resources are scarce they produce males and practice sexual reproduction. in the presence of predators, they grow helmets and neckteeth, passing these adaptations along to their clonal daughters—a potentially epigenetic inheritance. working within the metaphoric tissue of technoscience, i bring recent research on daphnia epigenetics together with the story of daphne and apollo from ovid’s metamorphoses in order to activate new possibilities for understanding the relations between humans and animals, organisms and their environments.     keywords environmental epigenetics, chemical ecologies, critical fabulation, model organisms, metaphors, comparison     introduction donna haraway describes technoscience as “a practice of materializing refigurations of what counts as nature, a practice of turning tropes into worlds” (1994, 60). she argues that it is imperative that we contest visions of nature that are predicated on dominant values such as “military combat, sexual domination, security maintenance, and market strategy” (60–61). feminist science studies scholars have a long history of challenging the narratives and tropes of scientific inquiry, especially when they harbor harmful norms and stereotypes about gender, race, sexuality, disability, immigration status, and other categories of difference (e.g., haraway 1989; martin 1991; subramaniam 2014; willey 2016). however, the purpose of this critique has always been intimately linked to another project—the project of creating a feminist lexicon for a “successor science” (harding 1986), generating more promising tropes for alternative knowledge-making practices (see, e.g., hustak and myers 2012; kenney 2019). “queering what counts as nature,” haraway writes, “is my categorical imperative” (1994, 60). in this article, i take up this intellectual and political tradition as i consider the stories emerging from the new field of environmental epigenetics. rather than simply critiquing dominant narratives in the field, i work within the metaphoric tissue of technoscience to tell a feminist fable about daphnia—small crustaceans who display remarkable epigenetic responses to their environments. i bring recent research on daphnia epigenetics together with the story of daphne and apollo from ovid’s metamorphoses in order to activate new possibilities for understanding the relations between humans and animals, organisms and their environments. throughout, i pay special attention to the role of metaphor and analogy in model organism experiments, offering the technique of “speculative comparison” as a theoretical incitement to interrupt dominant epigenetic narratives and imagine more radical ecological futures. i begin the article with a discussion of dominant epigenetic narratives, followed by a description of “speculative comparison,” before introducing the daphnia and their lifeworlds. overall, this article is an exploratory attempt to use the practice of storytelling to open social, scientific, and political questions about environmental epigenetics and multiply the possibilities for figuring life in the postgenomic era.   the politics of environmental epigenetics in recent years, research from the burgeoning field of environmental epigenetics has captured the imaginations of sts scholars concerned with creating more complex, socially embedded, and justice-oriented accounts of human health and biology. environmental epigenetics is a branch of molecular biology that studies how signals from the environment affect gene expression via mechanisms such as dna methylation, histone modification, and chromatin remodeling. in humans, specific environmental stimuli such as foods, toxicants, and social experiences are believed to have epigenetic effects, which contribute to health and well-being throughout the life course. for feminist sts scholars, environmental epigenetics beckons because it offers molecular explanations for how social and environmental exposures become embodied—exposures that are often uneven and socially stratified (e.g., bullard 2000). for example, environmental epigenetics has the potential to explain how experiences of trauma, deprivation, and oppression get under the skin, causing harm to our physical and mental health. those who have experienced violence and oppression know that trauma has corporeal effects; claudia rankine, for example, describes how everyday experiences of racism take up residence inside bodies: “you can’t put the past behind you. it’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard” (2014, 63). whereas the genetic determinism of the era of the human genome project relegates these experiences to the realm of the social or psychological, research in environmental epigenetics recasts these experiences as biosocial, capable of affecting human health and well-being in significant ways. cohort studies (yehuda et al. 2005; heijmans et al. 2008; lehrner et al. 2014) support the hypothesis that trauma leaves molecular traces—on bodies, in utero, and potentially across generations—that modulate our gene expression, offering scientific validation for our innate awareness that bodies remember the past and that trauma can be passed down from our parents and grandparents. feminist sts scholars have turned to environmental epigenetics not only to account for the biosocial effects of structural and interpersonal violence but also to theorize the relationship between organisms and their environments.1 as biologist and feminist science studies scholar lisa weasel argues, “the science of epigenetics holds…revolutionary implications for re-imagining the relationships entwined and emerging out of naturecultures, and the political potentials of such” (2016, 109). environmental epigenetics appears to confirm many of the feminist critiques of genetic determinism where dna is cast as the master molecule and the blueprint of life (see, e.g., keller 2000; fausto-sterling 2004; lee 2011), while offering more complex accounts of embodiment that contextualize our bodies in relation to our social and material environments. in interviews, molecular biologists sometimes read like deleuzian feminists as they draw out the radical ontological implications of epigenetics research. ucla professor of medicine steve cole, for example, uses epigenetics research to reconceive the human as a radically porous organism:   we think of our bodies as stable biological structures that live in the world but are fundamentally separate from it. that we are unitary organisms in the world but passing through it. but what we’re learning from the molecular processes that actually keep our bodies running is that we’re far more fluid than we realize, and the world passes through us. (cole quoted in dobbs [2013] 2017)   cole offers a vision of biology where the relations between inside and outside, organism and environment are fundamentally reworked. the world passes through us and we are not unchanged. this is a vision of molecular biology that seems amenable to the relational ontologies we see in recent work in new feminist materialism (alaimo and heckman 2008; coole and frost 2010; van der tuin and dolphijn 2012; pitts-taylor 2016): to speak of worlds and bodies as vital, and in flux. we are far more fluid than we realize. these epigenetic imaginaries have the potential to account for lively and deadly encounters between molecules and tissue, how bodies are made in and through these encounters, often in surprising ways. as brian dias, assistant professor of pediatrics at the university of southern california, attests, “if science has taught me anything, it is not to discount the myriad ways of being and becoming” (dias quoted in hughes 2014). however, despite the ontological and political promise of environmental epigenetics, we know that no knowledge project is inherently emancipatory. feminist science studies scholars have also found harmful assumptions about gender, race, sexuality, and class in the scientific and popular literature on this research. specifically, because environmental epigenetics researchers often look at gestation and early life as key windows of developmental plasticity, mothers have become a central focus of epigenetics research and proposed public health interventions (e.g., richardson 2014; richardson et al. 2014; lappé 2016; kenney and müller 2017; valdez 2018). in “of rats and women: narratives of motherhood in environmental epigenetics,” ruth müller and i analyze peer-reviewed journal articles and media coverage of a series of influential studies at mcgill university on the epigenetic effects of maternal care in rats. the mcgill group found that the amount a mother rat licks and grooms her pups regulates the expression of a glucocorticoid receptor gene in the pups, which affects stress response throughout their lives. pups who were licked and groomed frequently by their mothers grow up to be calm adult rats, whereas pups who were licked and groomed less grow up to be anxious and difficult for researchers to handle. while these results compellingly demonstrate that the social environment has biological consequences, the mcgill experiments focus solely on the behavior of the mother to the exclusion of all other environmental factors. in accounts of this research, the mother is figured paradoxically as both responsible for the health of her offspring and simultaneously having very little agency, as her behavior is also believed to be influenced by her environment. ultimately, this explanatory framework results in a new kind of environmental determinism, where mothers’ bodies become “vectors of developmental or epidemiological risk” (richardson 2014, 227; see also waggoner and uller 2015). much of the research on the epigenetic effects of maternal care is conducted using model organisms such as mice and rats. while model organism experiments can offer insight into biological mechanisms shared across species (nelson 2018), there are important differences between rodents and humans that researchers often fail to highlight in publications and press releases. for example, rats (unlike humans) do not practice bi-parental care and their cage environment is deliberately simplified to exclude any other environmental stimuli that could affect their development. despite obvious differences, these research findings are translated into the human context, with articles that demand parents “cuddle your kid” (kristof 2012), or else you could be responsible for a lifetime of anxiety and poor health. while researchers often blame the media for these hasty translations, we found that the peer-reviewed literature also moves between model organisms and humans without considering the social, political, and epistemological implications of these comparisons (kenney and müller 2017). for example, steve cole, who said that “we are far more fluid that we realize,” contributed to a peer-reviewed study on the biological effects of maternal care entitled “maternal warmth buffers the effects of low early-life socioeconomic status on pro-inflammatory signaling in adulthood” (chen et al. 2011). in this article, the authors use the mcgill group’s model organism experiments as the basis for framing their hypothesis about health disparities in humans. they hypothesize that if licking and grooming has a protective effect for the rat pups, it is possible that “maternal warmth” in humans can buffer against the biological effects of living in poverty. they test this hypothesis by measuring systemic inflammation in people who grew up in low-socioeconomic status households, dividing the study population into two groups: those who self-reported experiencing low maternal warmth and those who self-reported experiencing high maternal warmth. they found that the high maternal warmth group exhibited less systemic inflammation than the low maternal warmth group—supporting their hypothesis that maternal warmth buffers against the negative health effects of poverty. here, the narrow focus on the mother and the stereotypical feminine quality of “warmth” emphasizes maternal responsibility to the exclusion of all other social and environmental factors. although this study was conducted on human subjects, the legacy of the model organism experiments remains; despite the fact that human children are often cared for by people other than mothers (fathers, queer, trans, and non-binary parents, aunties, grandparents, childcare workers, etc.) “maternal warmth” remains the salient category, which significantly shapes the article’s recommendations. although the researchers acknowledge that health disparities are caused by economic disparities, the mother nevertheless becomes the site of intervention. they write:   working to alleviate poverty, as lofty and important a goal as this is, has remained an intractable problem in our society. complementing this effort, encouraging and teaching parenting behaviors that facilitate warm emotional climates, even in the face of adversity, might prove to be a supporting, effective target of intervention (as suggested by cross-fostering and environmental manipulation studies in previous animal research). (chen et al. 2011, 735)   in recommending parenting classes rather than economic policy, chen et al. participate in a long history of ineffective and condescending social policies that disproportionally target poor women of color. in the 1980s and 1990s, black feminists such as angela davis (1990), patricia hill collins (1990), and dorothy roberts (1997) effectively critiqued the legacy of us policy interventions that fail to address the structural effects of racism and poverty on the lives of black people, families, and communities. angela davis and fania davis write:   while the difficulties besetting the family should by no means be dismissed, any strategies intended to alleviate the prevailing problems among poor black people that methodologically target the family for change and leave the socioeconomic conditions perpetuating black unemployment and poverty intact are doomed to failure at the outset. (1990, 81)   while chen et al. state that their goal is to improve the health of children in low-socioeconomic status households, by framing poverty as an intractable problem, mothers again become the target of public health interventions while the conditions that produce health disparities remain intact.2 environmental epigenetics has the potential to strengthen social justice claims by explicating the biological mechanisms by which racism and poverty affect health and well-being; however, when researchers ask a narrow set of questions about bodies and environments, they can reinforce harmful assumptions about gender, race, class, and sexuality and offer policy recommendations that pathologize those they desire to help. here we see how the ontologically imaginative proposition that “we are far more fluid than we realize” can quickly transform into racist calls for parenting classes that “facilitate warm emotional climates, even in the face of adversity.” the narrow policy recommendations in chen et al. demonstrates both the need for interdisciplinary inquiry—for example, black feminist theory should be required reading for molecular biologists—and the need to take care when translating model organism experiments into policy recommendations. claims about the epigenetics of maternal care are buttressed by analogies that are made too quickly between rats and humans, between the lab and the world. differences are collapsed in sameness. rats in highly controlled cage environments become proxies for humans in complex material and social environments, resulting in stories that overemphasize maternal responsibility and narrate kinship only through pathology. however, rather than continue to highlight and critique these hidden translations, in this article i offer a different approach to the politics of epigenetic storytelling—an approach that begins with a technique i call “speculative comparison.”   speculative comparison speculative comparison is designed to intervene in the politics of comparability by calling naturalized analogies into question and to open up different possibilities for thinking and doing relations. an analogy makes a comparative claim: “a is like b.” a speculative comparison, on the other hand, asks, “how is a like or unlike b”? in turning assertions into questions, speculative comparisons are “occasions for theorizing; occasions for telling differences and samenesses in new ways” (verran 2002, 729). when we ask the question how is a like or unlike b, there is not a right or wrong answer, but many possible avenues of narration, imagination, and empirical investigation. speculative comparison is particularly good for teaching or thinking together in a group; through collective brainstorming you quickly find that some ways of telling samenesses and differences conflict with one another, that some comparisons are more generative that others, and that different analogies do different epistemological, pedagogical, and political work. for example, in the class science, technology, and sexuality, my ma students and i used speculative comparison to analyze a public health campaign for prep (pre-exposure prophylaxis drugs for the prevention of hiv/aids) that targeted gay men in san francisco. i presented them with an ad that depicts a group of multiracial gay men dancing in a club superimposed with the phrase “it’s our sexual revolution.” to explore the politics of sexuality, risk, and pharmaceuticals at work in the campaign, we asked, “how is prep like or unlike ‘the pill’?” the poster asks the passerby to draw an analogy between (a) the so-called (heterosexual) sexual revolution of the 1960s catalyzed, in part, by the advent of hormonal birth control, and (b) the novel use of prep to prevent hiv transmission among gay men. the public health campaign uses this analogy—a is like b—to present prep as a pharmaceutical that offers personal sexual empowerment by reducing risk. however, as we discussed in class, risk of hiv transmission and risk of pregnancy are materially, socially, and historically different. exploring the unstated differences between hiv and pregnancy led to an important class discussion about the history of hiv/aids activism, social determinants of health, and the ongoing role of homophobia, racism, and stigma in the hiv/aids epidemic. as we increasingly politicized hiv/aids risk, we also began to reframe hormonal birth control in the context of reproductive justice and efforts to end population control, rather than through the ideologies of choice, empowerment, sexual freedom, and reproductive rights. tacking back and forth between prep and the pill, asking how a was like or unlike b, allowed us to critique the framework of the public health campaign and explore different ways of telling stories about these two classes of pharmaceuticals. of course, a speculative comparison exercise such as this one requires skills in intersectional and social justice storytelling—however, the activity of making and unmaking analogies helps us in these efforts by destabilizing what we take for granted and creating opportunities for alternative stories to emerge. speculative comparison challenges us, much like science fiction, to make the familiar strange and, in doing so, open new ways of approaching the politics of everyday life. this kind of comparison is speculative rather than definitive, because it involves experimenting with relations rather than making ontological claims. it figures comparison as a practice, rather than as a given, in a way that draws attention to what comparisons do as they move through the world. the speculative, in isabelle stengers’s terms, is about activating possibilities, generating “narratives that populate our worlds and imaginations in different ways” (2007, 9). for example, anna tsing uses a speculative comparison between humans and mushrooms to teach us to see mushrooms in a new way: “like an inside-out stomach, fungi secrete enzymes into the soil around them, digesting organic material and even rocks, and absorbing nutrients released in the process” (2010, 191). comparing two organisms that seem very different, turning one of them inside out, tsing gives us a far-fetched simile designed to stimulate our imaginations and draw us into the life worlds of mushrooms. tsing gives us comparison as sf worlding (haraway 2016, 14), where sf stands for a multiplicity of speculative practices: “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far ” (haraway 2016, 2). tsing’s sf worlding uses analogy as invitation to imagine and inhabit worlds otherwise. by contrast, the research on the epigenetic effects of maternal care relies on a literalized analogy: rats are like humans. the purpose of using model organisms is to generate situated comparability between species, to provide insights that can be generalized or extrapolated to the biology of other organisms, especially humans in the context of biomedical research. however, in the analogy between rats and humans in the case of the mcgill experiments, the comparison has been asserted rather than investigated. it relies on the assumption that we will recognize a human tenderness in the licking and grooming of the mother rats and not stop to ask if it is relevant that humans tend not to lick their young. in primate visions (1989), haraway argues that when researchers seek answers to social questions with model organism experiments they translate “metaphor into hardware” (231–43), materializing contemporary biopolitical questions in the experimental design—the cages, the experimental protocols, the enrichments, the stressors, the deprivations. the results of these experiments then circulate as if they provide direct insight into the epigenetic effects of maternal care across species. one way to destabilize the naturalized analogy produced by these experiments would be to ask which samenesses and differences between species matter here. there are serious scientific questions we could ask, such as whether social structures and molecular pathways are similar in rats and humans, and how so? biopolitical questions about whether the lack of aggressiveness in rats is an indicator of mental health, or if instead, docility is privileged by the laboratory workers, not the rats themselves. or more peculiar questions like, if the human lab technicians licked the rat pups with their own tongues, would the pups grow up to be calm adults? however, in the remainder of this article, i will leave the rats behind, to take up a very different model organism that is currently being used for epigenetics research: small crustaceans called daphnia, planktonic organisms that are barely visible to the naked eye.   daphnia there are over 150 species of daphnia living in lakes, ponds, streams, swamps, pools, and rivers worldwide. daphnia are highly responsive to the environment, transforming their bodies in response to the conditions of their habitat. for example, although most daphnia populations are typically made up of females who reproduce asexually, in times of environmental fluctuation, such as change in temperature or scarcity of food, they lay eggs that hatch into males and then reproduce sexually, though some species rarely, if ever, switch to sexual reproduction. cyclical parthenogenesis, switching from asexual to sexual reproduction, is an example of environmentally induced sex determination (ah-king and nylin 2010). female and male daphnia have the same chromosomes; it is the epigenetic modification of their dna that regulates sexual difference. daphnia also display dramatic “predator induced-polyphenisms,” growing defensive helmets, neckteeth, or tail spines when exposed to chemicals called kairomones released by nearby predators. the daughters of the armored daphnia may also grow helmets and neckteeth even when no predators are present, demonstrating a potentially epigenetic inheritance. in our current age of increased anthropogenic environmental change, this remarkable environmental sensitivity has made daphnia into important organisms for ecological research and surveillance. they have become sentinel species used to monitor the health of ecosystems and waterways, studied in their habitats or used in bioassays in laboratories. living daphnia are used as biosensors in sophisticated water monitoring devices, such as the daphnia toximeter ii, because their health, behavior, and morphology reliably shift in relation to the chemical make-up of their water. according to the product’s website, the daphnia toximeter ii is a sixty-kilogram machine containing a chamber filled with daphnia used for real-time testing of water from rivers, industrial plants, and drinking water infrastructure. the website explains, “sample water continuously runs through the measuring chamber containing the daphnia. the live images obtained using a ccd-camera are evaluated online with an integrated pc to analyse changes in the behaviour of the daphnia. if the change is statistically significant, an alarm is triggered” (bbe moldaenke, n.d.). changes in the daphnia’s movement, size, distribution, or number signal the presence of a potential toxicant that could affect river ecology or the potability of drinking water. this water monitoring technology can detect minute changes in the water’s chemical make-up that are difficult to detect through other means; for example, in 2004 a daphnia biomonitor discovered an unknown contaminant in the meuse river in the netherlands that took months to identify through chemical analysis (de hoogh et al. 2006). here in the daphnia toximeter ii, the daphnia’s liveliness and capacity for corporeal plasticity is captured for predicting risk to human health.3 in 2011 daphnia pulex was the first crustacean to have its genome sequenced and was found to have the most genes of any animal sequenced so far. studies in ecotoxicogenomics are currently investigating how daphnia use their large complement of genes to adjust to “environmental stressors like heavy metals, rising temperatures, emerging diseases, and bioreactive organic compounds” (ebert 2011, 540). daphnia have also been enlisted as research subjects in the new science of “resurrection ecology,” the study of animals who have been revived from viable eggs that are decades or even centuries old to learn how their morphology has changed in response to their environments over time. the oldest animals ever brought back to life were daphnia pulicaria, revived from dormant eggs buried for seven hundred years in lake sediment (frisch et al. 2014). when these ancient hatchlings were compared to their contemporary sisters, they showed dramatically different strategies for storing phosphorous, which the research team believes is a response to the introduction of commercial fertilizer in the nineteenth century. they now store less phosphorous because it is readily available in the fertilizer-polluted lake water. in other words, the bodies of daphnia pulicaria remember the industrial histories of their ecosystem. learning about the daphnia and their sensitivity to environmental change, i began to wonder how daphnia are like or unlike humans. whereas the familial scene of the mother rat licking her pups invites comparison with humans, the daphnia, who have clones and time travelers among their ranks, are more difficult to approach comparatively. what can we learn from the daphnia and her brood of clonal daughters? what can we learn about reproduction, sexuality, and motherhood from these cyclomorphic crustaceans, who have one of the largest animal genomes but no tongues with which to lick their young? developmental biologist scott gilbert gives us one possibility for comparing humans and daphnia in his article “the genome in its ecological context” (2002). after detailing how daphnia develop helmets and neckteeth in response to predators, he writes, “humans have specific predator-induced developmental plasticity on a scale unimaginable in invertebrates or amphibians” (gilbert 2002, 201). the predators gilbert invokes are not apex predators like lions or sharks, but microbes. gilbert explains that our immune system produces specific antibodies depending upon which bacteria and viruses we have previously been exposed to. he notes that identical twins do not have identical immune systems, since their phenotypes develop in relation to their respective environments. gilbert explains that “we have also evolved nonspecific defenses wherein bacterial components activate genes inside our body that produce nonspecific defensive substances” (210). here he is referring to enzymes that are secreted by our intestines as a first line of defense against bacteria. note gilbert’s strange and wonderful use of language. in this article humans are creatures with “predator-induced polyphenisms” and “nonspecific defense fluids.” these unfamiliar but alluring terms have migrated from the ecologically sensitive world of the daphnia into the human realm to give us a stranger hominid. through speculative comparison, we can indulge our curiosity about our own ecological sensitivity and ask what we might learn about biological agency, phenotypic plasticity, and ecological resilience from these tiny crustaceans who do not elicit easy mammalian identification. like the daphnia changing in response to their fertilizer-polluted waters, we are also alterlife, “life already altered, which is also life open to alteration” (murphy 2017, 498). telling stories about organisms like daphnia can help us push against fantasies of ecological purity (shotwell 2016) and biosecuritization (chen 2011; ahuja 2016) to “meet the future organisms we are becoming” (ah-king and hayward 2014, 9). wondering about how the daphnia are like or unlike humans, i am compelled to write feminist theory as “critical fabulation” (hartman 2018, 470), “attend[ing] lovingly to stories” (haraway 2004, 201) as a practice of enacting better relations with a more-than-human world.   daphne and apollo as i write these epigenetic fables about the daphnia, their name entices me into a second speculative comparison, more mythological than biological, a comparison that i will pursue for the remainder of this article. they are called daphnia after daphne, the nymph who transforms into a laurel tree in ovid’s metamorphoses. the metamorphoses is a latin poem written in dactylic hexameter published in the year 8 ce. it begins, “my soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange,” and through 15 books goes on to tell 187 stories of transformation, where characters are turned into swans, and stones, and constellations, rivers, and plants and cicadas. we meet daphne in book 1 of the metamorphoses. we learn that she is not interested in marriage but instead takes delight in wandering the woods, wearing the skins of animals she hunts. apollo, the god of poetry and medicine, sees her, falls in love, and runs after her. she flees, uninterested in apollo, uninterested in participating in the heterosexual economy, scared of what he might do if she stops running. he continues to chase her—like a hound chases a rabbit, ovid tells us. as he’s about to catch her, daphne prays to her father peneus, a river god, and she’s instantly changed into a laurel tree. a predator-induced polyphenism. a morphological adaptation she will pass on to her leafy daughters, who bear her name. daphne is the greek word for laurel tree. and indeed, the crustaceans are called daphnia because of the branch-like antennae they use to smell and to move around in the water. the analogy between crustacean and nymph was originally made in 1785 by naturalist otto friedrich müller and has laid there since, hidden in plain sight. as we learned from emily martin (1991), scientific language is replete with calcified metaphor, with signifiers lying dormant, waiting to signify again. with this speculative comparison, i am interested in performing my own resurrection ecology, wresting back some of the poetry, animating the analogy, awakening the dormant signifiers. a re-laureated science. in honor of daphne. i begin with this photograph of gian lorenzo bernini’s seventeenth-century sculpture group apollo and daphne that stands in the galleria borghese in rome (figure 1). taken in the dark, the flash illuminates the marble, capturing the instantaneousness of the transformation. i perform a reading of this photograph, rather than the sculpture itself, because for me, the photograph takes the eternal moment preserved in marble and gives it back its urgency. the story of daphne and apollo, made less threatening by familiarity and historical distance, here regains its terror and implicates the viewer.   figure 1. bernini, apollo and daphne, 1622–1624. photo: carol yoho. 2010.   this is how i imagine it: a chase, moving from the glow of a campfire where apollo glimpsed daphne, now running headlong into the darkness. it is all happening very quickly, bodies moving recklessly through the forest, indistinct voices, tree branches snapping. but unmistakably a chase. daphne then apollo then the camera. not a camera camera, but an iphone, hastily pulled from a back pocket. apollo screams into the darkness, again and again, half pleading half menacing. then daphne’s voice; a fearful prayer. the phone flashes. too brief to tell what is happening. the moment of transformation caught digitally; but only by chance. nymph in the dark /flash/ tree in the dark. the metamorphosis becomes terrifyingly clear only on the screen. “holy shit.” her hair. her hands. leaves where there was flesh. fingers receding, branches forking and twisting up towards the moonless sky. the photographer is implicated in the scene. whether complicit in the assault or trying in vain to stop it, or just caught in the commotion attempting to document something. he is left with, we are left with, this image and its obligations. (haraway 1991, 192). what this photograph captures for me is this question of how to account for the metamorphosis in the aftermath and how to understand the violence that can accompany feats of radical plasticity. although it was daphne’s desire, or rather, her desiring otherwise, that catalyzed her transformation, it is difficult to know how daphne feels about being a tree—the poem refuses to say. does it even make sense to speak of daphne any longer at all or has being nymph already given way to arboreal sensations and desires? apollo copes with this lacuna through appropriation: “if you cannot be my wife,” he says, “you shall be my tree.” apollo takes the laurel as his own. a symbolic violence. her burgeoning liveliness appropriated by her pursuer. this is why apollo always wears laurels on his temples and why we have poet laureates. apollo (and by extension ovid’s narrator) would like to believe that daphne’s consent can be read in the movement of the laurel’s branches. but this is a belated analogy. this tree is daphne, this tree is still like daphne, this tree at least used to be daphne, right? we do not know if daphne gives her consent; she only seems to nod with her leafy crown. as comparative literature scholar heather james writes, “ovid’s tale dramatizes the ambiguity of signs and exposes the motives for variable readings: power and passion affix meanings to words, bodies, and gestures” (2007, 46). as a modern reader of the metamorphoses, the ambiguity of signs and the ambivalence of transformation are two themes that stand out for me. although roman literature has been appropriated by the dominant historical narrative about the continuity of “western civilization,” the stories that ovid tells in the metamorphoses are two thousand years strange and their moral universe is populated with unfamiliar stars. ovid makes it difficult to classify daphne’s transformation as triumph or tragedy. she is safe from apollo; but her swift feet are now stuck fast by slow growing roots. since her voice is gone, her subjectivity is lost to us. like apollo we can only search the poem and the sculpture for signs. we are all just holding up our iphones in the dark. however, this moment of uncertainty might also spark a feeling of hope. the ambivalence of the transformation gives ways to polyvalence. a host of stories churn below the surface. which story can do justice to this metamorphosis? what does it mean to honor daphne?   daphnia and apollo after this reading of daphne and apollo, i bring these questions back to bear on the small translucent crustaceans—a new model organism for the postgenomic age. what story can do justice to their epigenetic metamorphosis? what could it mean to honor the daphnia? on the one hand, it’s possible to tell a determinist story about their bodies optimally adapting to their environment, a story of an evolutionary arms race in a mechanistic nature that is red in tooth and claw. however, ovid’s story of daphne becoming tree opens up new narrative possibilities for the daphnia’s becoming armored. we might think of their predator-induced polyphenisms not as an epigenetic program determined by natural selection and triggered by their environment, but as a pattern of ongoing signals and responses, where what counts as a signal can only be determined in the context of response. a kairomone is only a kairomone because it induces a helmet. in this way, daphnia grow helmets and neckteeth to protect themselves and their daughters from predators they have encountered for hundreds of thousands of years, in ongoing epigenetic metamorphosis. but like daphne, they have also changed quite quickly in response to the dramatic and unprecedented increases in chemicals like phosphorous. here, we might think of the daphnia as organisms “learning how to attune their sensory bodies to the ongoing improvisational rhythm of differences that make up the world” (hustak and myers 2012, 105). when we imagine “species are sensuous responses” (hayward 2010, 233), we can begin to see how the environmental sensitivity that makes the daphnia vulnerable to toxicity and other environmental change is also a source of ecological resilience and transformation. it is this capacity to attune to their environment that is captured by the daphnia toximeter ii—a cyborg device, simultaneously animal and machine (haraway 1991). although changes in behavior and morphology have meaning and function in the lifeworlds of the daphnia themselves, here, like in many bioassay techniques and model organism research (see, e.g., hayden 2003; nelson 2018), their value lies in their ability to predict harm to humans. as apollo appropriates daphne’s transformation for himself, so too, can researchers use model organism as stand-ins for humans, rather than beings in and of themselves. here they are figured as enough like humans to be effective sentinels, but different enough to avoid ethical consideration (see hayden 2003, 201). as we unmake the dominant comparative practices of technoscience through speculative comparison, it is important to ask whether the purpose of epigenetic knowledge is surveillance, control, and the manipulation of life or whether other values, such as consent and reciprocity, are actively being centered (simpson 2014; benjamin 2016; liboiron 2021). although daphnia’s patterns of ecological response are reliable enough for their bodies to be made into chemical detectors in sophisticated water monitoring devices, the daphnia continue to surprise. for example, evolutionary biologists believe that sexually reproductive species of animals are always more successful than asexual species, not only because of the genetic diversity created through recombination but because asexual species are believed to build up deleterious mutations in their dna, which threaten their survival, a theory known as müller’s ratchet (see, e.g., roughgarden 2009, 77–78). these long-standing evolutionary theories have been challenged by an asexual population of daphnia that was found to be successfully displacing populations that cycle between sexual and asexual reproduction on the african continent. the article that reports these findings—“invasion of an asexual american water flea clone throughout africa and rapid displacement of a native sibling species” in proceedings of the royal society b (mergeay, verschuren, and de meester 2006)—is thick with troubling associations: ecological concern is expressed through alien invasion, colonialism, sororicide, and a reproductive heterosexual panic about being unseated by aggressive clones. the article tells the story of a north american asexual subspecies of daphnia—a daphnia pulex / daphnia pulicaria hybrid—that was introduced to lake naivasha in kenya in the 1920s and has since completely displaced the daphnia pulex subspecies that previously lived in the lake—a species that switched between sexual and asexual reproduction. the article continuously refers to the north american subspecies as an “invading clone” (2841) or “asexual pest species” (2842)—a monolithic colonizing force that is stripping the lake of its natural biodiversity.4 as banu subramaniam points out in ghost stories for darwin (2014), this kind of xenophobic rhetoric is pervasive in invasion biology. rather than focus on habitat degradation caused by colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism, ecologists often pathologize invasive species as intrinsically harmful, in need of policing and eradicating. “invasion of an asexual american water flea” traffics in the moral economy of invasion biology where native plants and animals are under constant threat from invasive, alien, and exotic species. referring to the daphnia pejoratively as “water fleas” adds to this effect—stripping them of their mythological mantle and insisting on referring to them only through a crude analogy with a common pest, like woody allen calling pigeons “rats with wings.” the assumption at the heart of mergeay, verschuren, and de meester (2006) is that clonal species ought to be less evolutionarily successful than those that practice sexual reproduction. they argue that “sexual recombination allows rapid spread of favourable genetic mutations through populations, maintaining recurrent investment in sexual reproduction promotes adaptation to new habitat conditions” (2842), thus conferring an evolutionary advantage when compared to a subspecies that shares a single genome. the authors continuously express their surprise that the genetically diverse native population of daphnia could be “outcompeted by a single asexual genotype with intrinsically lower evolutionary potential” (2843). they are unable to reconcile the evidence of displacement with mainstream evolutionary theories that posit asexuality as an evolutionary dead-end. they write, “how this obligate asexual exotic species could eradicate an indigenous sibling species that optimally combines the advantages of sexual and asexual reproduction is puzzling as well as alarming” (2843). while it’s true that, in animals, all clonal species are relatively recently derived from sexual species (roughgarden 2009, 74–75), these asexual daphnia present an opportunity for us to reconsider the received assumptions about sexual reproduction in evolutionary theory. sexual recombination is thought to confer evolutionary advantage because it allows species to adapt to new environments through natural selection. however, this ignores the fact that in nature “nonsexuated microorganisms literally outweigh all sexuated life” (schaefer 2021, 530); when we center bacteria rather than animals, we can see that evolution does not inherently privilege sexual reproduction.5 environmental epigenetics helps us to understand that asexual reproduction is not reproduction of the same, but clones, like twins, differ from one another through their dynamic relationship with their environment. it is possible that these asexual daphnia do not require genetic diversity because they are continuously responding epigenetically to their environments. in other cases, asexual populations of daphnia have been known to convert previously cyclical parthenogens to asexuality. so-called contagious asexuality has been demonstrated throughout the daphnia pulex species-complex when different populations come into contact with one another. contagious asexuality challenges the imagined opposition between sexuality and asexuality because, “paradoxically, contagiously asexual lineages…spread asexuality through sex” (decaestecker, de meester, and mergeay 2009, 302). daphnia from asexual populations can lay eggs that grow into males, who then reproduce sexually with females from sexual populations of daphnia. this results in offspring, 50 percent of whom are asexual females. thus, surprisingly, as sexual recombination occurs, asexuality spreads through previously sexual populations. and yet, despite the complexity of this phenomenon, biologists continue to speak about sexuality as the norm and asexuality as the condition to be explained: “why switch to asexuality when you can be a cyclical parthenogen?,” they ask (decaestecker, de meester, and mergeay 2009, 304). these evolutionary stories that figure clones as dangerous invaders and asexuality as an evolutionary dead-end not only narrow our biopolitical imagination, but, as angela willey argues, they participate in the “pervasive cultural privileging of sexual relationships over other types of relationship” (2016, 72)—the same privileging of sexual relationships that threatened daphne’s desire to turn away from marriage. i am reminded, here, of james’s reading of the daphne and apollo story in ovid’s metamorphoses. here too, in the field of invasion biology, “power and passion affix meanings to words, bodies, and gestures.” however, rather than seek to scrub scientific language clean of stories, of passions, of mythological and science fictional valences, this is a place where we can join in as scholars who care about the politics of life and the politics of reading, writing, and storytelling. to interrupt the dominant accounts, not only through critique but through composition. to tell stories of daphnia cucullata growing helmets in response to threats, like daphne becoming laurel to protect herself from apollo. stories of the daphnia pulicaria with corporeal memories of their fertilizer-polluted waters, scattering their eggs in times of scarcity, the dormant embryos buried in the sediment, awaiting more plentiful times, even, perhaps, anticipating the advent of resurrection ecology, dreaming of hatchings to come. stories of daphnia magna conscripted into acting as a sentinel species, whose sensitivity to toxicity and ability to predict ecological harm for larger organisms has entrapped them in biomonitors that capture their vital capacities for purposes not their own, like the precogs in phillip k. dick’s minority report. stories of contagious asexuality spreading from one population of daphnia pulex to the next, part lesbian separatist agenda, part attack of the clones, using their epigenetic sensitivity to respond to unfamiliar environments, making a mess of our best evolutionary theories. of course, some of these comparisons might strike the reader as far-fetched or downright improper. i would argue, however, that the speculative mode is always a bit improper. it is not about what is but what might be. because it is not in accordance with accepted reality, speculation therefore also feels dubious, embarrassing, and unseemly. however, risking speculative impropriety, i argue, might be important in getting ourselves unstuck from the usual patterns of biological storytelling and activate different possibilities for attending and responding within our more-than-human world. the “impoverished realm of realism” (hartman 2019, 261; see also mitchell 2002, 123–52) is often silent on these most vital matters. we might need the help of what i call “fables of response-ability” (kenney 2019)—didactic, efficacious (stengers 2008) stories that can generate and strengthen care on a damaged and profoundly unjust planet (tsing et al. 2017).   conclusion in an era when our own bodies are experiencing unprecedented chemical exposures, it might be savvy to continue to wonder how daphnia are like or unlike humans. comparing ourselves to the daphnia, learning about our own predator-induced polyphenisms, we can see how we are already becoming with our environments, changing in the presence of microbes we encounter. as malin ah-king and eva hayward write, “we…are living in a time of intensified exposure to toxicity where life requires reinvention (if it can) or risks extinction and disease…nonhumans and humans are vulnerable, but also exuberant, adaptable, resilient and constantly changing in interaction with environment” (2014, 9). it is this ambivalent formulation of biological agency, phenotypic plasticity, and ecological resilience that seems like a promising response to determinist stories of mother rats programming their offspring for lives of endless stress and fear. reading the daphne and apollo story through the ecologically responsive morphology of the daphnia, we arrive at an agential and relational biology where species are made through sensuous response. a more radically and politically engaged biology where it becomes possible to ask how environmental epigenetics can become daphne’s science, not apollo’s. it is here that we can begin to feel the force of the proposition from epigenetics researcher steve cole that i invoked at the beginning this article: “we’re far more fluid than we realize, and the world passes through us.” looking at the daphnia, their translucent bodies pulsating under the microscope, we can begin to tell new stories of epigenetic metamorphoses, stories that can keep up with the myriad ways of being and becoming, stories that populate our worlds and imaginations in different ways.   acknowledgements this article benefited from feedback over many years in different settings. the author wishes to thank donna haraway, scott gilbert, ruth müller, micaela janan, priscilla wald, stephanie clare, nicole archer, the department of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at duke university, the sts department at the university of san diego, the participants of the we are compost not posthuman colloquium at the university of leiden, the participants of the ways of reading workshop organized by kadist and e-flux, her colleagues at the women and gender studies department at san francisco state university, and the editors and reviewers at catalyst.   notes 1 as ecofeminist val plumwood (1993) has argued, dualisms such as nature/culture and organism/environment are part of a centuries-old euro-american logic of domination. there are many human cultures, however, that do not subscribe to these dualisms, understanding the environment not as background but as animate, as having personhood, or as kin (see, e.g., kimmerer 2002; todd 2017). environmental epigenetics is only one epistemology among many that we can turn to in order to unlearn these dualisms. it is important to consider why environmental epigenetics is given more authority in this regard than indigenous and non-western epistemologies that have long challenged this euro-american logic (see harding 2008; todd 2016).   2 furthermore, without carefully differentiating between the mcgill study and their human subjects, they run the risk of making docility rather than health equity a central value in the study. since the mcgill group was unable to measure the mental health of rats directly, the rats’ aggressiveness and difficulty to work with in a laboratory setting became a stand-in for mental health. when researchers translate these results to the human world, more work must be done to show that biosocial interventions are designed to address health inequity rather than to control “unruly” racialized populations.   3 see landecker (2010) for a discussion of the consequences of harnessing the living potential of cells for human purposes. here the daphnia’s potential for epigenetic change is harnessed for human purposes without their consent; they become components within human devices, defined only by their use value.   4 the daphnia’s presence in the lake is a direct result of colonialism: “most likely, the invading water flea clone was introduced accidentally to lake naivasha in 1927–1929, during stocking of largemouth bass (micropterus salmoides) from the usa, following the suggestion by the then us president t. roosevelt in 1910 that the sport fishing in british east africa needed improvement” (mergeay, verschuren, and de meester 2006, 2842). in this article, human politics are displaced onto the daphnia, narrowing the stories we can tell about these organisms and their genetic/epigenetic capacities.   5 donovan o. schaefer writes, “from a biological 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“transgenerational effects of posttraumatic stress disorder in babies of mothers exposed to the world trade center attacks during pregnancy.” journal clinical endocrinology and metabolism 90 (7): 4115–18. https://doi.org/10.1210/jc.2005-0550.     author bio martha kenney is an associate professor in women and gender studies at san francisco state university. located in the tradition of feminist science studies scholar, her research examines the poetics and politics of biological storytelling. her latest project on environmental epigenetics uses speculative fiction to interrupt dominant biological narratives and imagine more radical ecological futures. book review | information activism: a queer history of lesbian media technologies, by cait mckinney (duke university press, 2020) kornstein, harris. 2022. review of information activism: a queer history of lesbian media technologies, by cait mckinney (duke university press, 2020). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © harris kornstein, 2022 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | information activism: a queer history of lesbian media technologies, by cait mckinney (duke university press, 2020) harris kornstein university of arizona hkornstein@arizona.edu at a virtual event hosted by the one archives in celebration of their caringly provocative book information activism: a queer history of lesbian media technologies, author cait mckinney ended their presentation with a photo of a lavender pencil embossed with the phrase “lesbians invented the internet.”1 though mckinney was deliberate in reminding the audience that this statement is not factually true (as they also make clear throughout the book itself), this tongue-in-cheek assertion cleverly signifies the book’s intertwined intellectual, methodological, and community-oriented contributions to studies of queer information. additionally, this pencil—created by mckinney’s partner, artist hazel meyer—playfully gestures toward not only the affective and erotic relationships (in lorde’s sense) that underlie lesbian-feminist organizing, but equally important, the material practices like handwritten records and marginalia that structure these archives themselves. as a contemporary object referencing historical artifacts by artists and activists, the pencil further comments on contemporaneous efforts to revive, recontextualize, and remediate lesbianfeminist visual and material cultures via social media (a topic mckinney references throughout the book and particularly in the epilogue). which is to say: there are many ways to read this excellent book—as pre-history of the internet, as reengagement with lesbian-feminist activism, as an intervention into present-day digital cultures, and beyond—but mckinney’s strengths are in queerly refusing neat conclusions. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) harris kornstein, 2022 2 though lesbian feminists may not have literally invented the internet, the information activism that mckinney theorizes compellingly counters not only dominant narratives of computing history, but also resoundingly rejects the concept of invention outright. mckinney meticulously analyzes a number of activist networked and databased information practices, demonstrating how these mundane and messy projects complicate understandings of the internet as we know it. in challenging simplistic notions of invention, mckinney’s media archaeological work also highlights divergent epistemological and applied approaches to many ongoing digital predicaments, including access, privacy, labor, maintenance, obsolescence, compression, searchability, user autonomy, and information overload (to name but a handful). still, mckinney’s book is not just an account of minor figures or multiple internets, but functions as a call to rethink the role of information infrastructures within social movements and the values that structure historic and present technologies. one of mckinney’s key contributions in disrupting such invention narratives is to introduce the titular concept of “information activism,” a community-based approach to documenting and distributing difficult-to-come-by information via ever-evolving social techniques and technologies. the book specifically traces the under-acknowledged collective work of lesbian feminists in the united states and canada, beginning in the 1970s and extending through the present moment. mckinney’s conceptualization of information activism thus incorporates a range of projects and platforms, including community archives, newsletters, hotlines, bibliographic indexes, websites, and social media. however, with such a capacious definition, it is easy to imagine how other researchers in fields of information, media, communication, and/or technology studies (and intersecting humanities and social sciences) might apply information activism to other minoritized communities or contexts. indeed, while mckinney pays close attention to both lesbian feminists’ vernacular vocabularies and the specificities of the disciplines just enumerated, their work also makes a subtle-but-clear case for transdisciplinary approaches to researching digital technologies. in particular, mckinney highlights the often idealistic and imperfect values that structure these different avenues of information activism during historical periods in which there was virtually no media or political representation for queer women. such precarity necessitated not only the development of content about diverse lesbian experiences but also structures to store, organize, and disseminate such information—which mckinney smartly locates in projects like the lesbian herstory archives (lha), the research newsletter matrices, and the lesbian switchboard. (indeed, these projects’ own formal and informal archives, alongside interviews with their participants, provide the basis of mckinney’s research.) much of this work was, and continues to be, rooted in beliefs about lesbians having rights to both produce and access information about community history book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) harris kornstein, 2022 3 and resources, across generational, geographic, and other differences. for example, mckinney highlights the pre-digital emergence of network metaphors in feminist and gay/lesbian communities, noting their attention to shared learning and labor through community archiving and publishing, as well as distributed forms of care, fundraising, and resource sharing via print newsletters. in chapters on indexing and archival projects, mckinney examines commitments to access that prioritize making materials usable by other lesbians rather than meeting arbitrary technical standards (such as through a makeshift audio digitization setup), and categorize materials using community-oriented language rather than the normative terms adopted by larger institutions. mckinney also documents deep commitments to values like transparency, consent, and privacy in how decisions are made to preserve and digitize materials, particularly given changing expectations around safety and visibility over time. these commitments are especially apparent in the ongoing work of the lha, which maintains its own “archive of the archives,” and often informally documents many of its own historic processes. mckinney notes a unique understanding of revision as feminist method across several projects, rooted in intergenerational and futurist orientations toward classifying information in ways that remain open as terminologies, cultures, and politics change. still, mckinney routinely acknowledges the ways in which many information practices are hardly systematic but instead emerge as improvisational responses to limited resources (such as a volunteer joining with the time or skills to take on a project) or dynamics like group conflict and personal burnout. relatedly, they pay careful attention to the challenges, compromises, and failures of living up to such ideals, including historic breaches of trust in how information is shared and with whom, as well as experiences of harmful exclusion through essentialism or misclassification, particularly impacting women of color and trans people. if mckinney’s primary intervention is in theorizing information activism, their other key contribution is in an engagement with legacies of second-wave lesbian feminism through the lenses of queer, trans, and anti-racist activism. while many scholars and activists seem to fall into the trap of either romanticizing earlier feminist movements or writing them off altogether, mckinney manages to find a middle ground that simultaneously respects lesbian-feminist activists’ real cultural and political contributions, holds individuals and institutions accountable for oppressive dynamics, and most significantly, explores historic counterexamples of solidarity. noting that lesbian feminists were not monolithic in identity or ideology, mckinney argues that despite numerous high-profile instances of transexclusionary rhetoric and actions, many service-oriented projects like hotlines in fact often served trans individuals in an everyday capacity. in the case of the lesbian switchboard, for example, call logs suggest that many callers may have been misgendered—though with evolving terminology and non-standardized book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) harris kornstein, 2022 4 notation, it is often difficult to tell. still, mckinney cautiously embraces this ambiguity while also pointing to evidence that several trans clients were indeed served by this project via trans-specific resources collected by the organization. similarly, the lha eventually established technical protocols to allow for revision of participants’ names in ways that, again, strive to reflect the shifting identities and language used by individuals whose experiences are documented. in responding to these cases and others, mckinney engages feminist historiographic methods of speculation and direct service to the lha, to address these gaps in minoritarian archives and gain greater insight into the relationships and processes that structure them. as they note, these forms of engagement are uniquely important in studying print cultures, which are limited in their abilities to capture affective entanglements across diverse constituencies. such fleeting counterexamples may still leave much to be desired, but as mckinney notes, they further situate lesbian-feminist information activism as a process of tension, ambivalence, and continued becoming, rather than a moment of invention or conclusion. as such, mckinney’s information activism reinforces why information activism matters: that, when carefully attended to as part of social movements, information and communication practices are not merely discursive but profoundly material. that is, the information activism practiced by lesbian feminists has helped to establish embodied relationships, negotiate shared values, develop political positions, provide direct forms of care, connect individuals to material resources, and engage other important tactics that are central to, not separate from, movement organizing. there is a contemporary urgency to mckinney’s work as well, particularly for students and scholars of today’s social movements and social media—especially many of my students who seem preoccupied by slogans like “representation matters” or alleged dichotomies between materialist and performative activism. put simply, mckinney’s analysis of lesbian-feminist activism offers one example of the ways in which attention to media and information may be part of broader movements, with the understanding that such practices are often challenging, labor-intensive, and hardly glamorous. in their epilogue, mckinney directly addresses connections between earlier efforts and many contemporary intersectional queer, trans, and feminist digital practices, noting subtle differences between present activism and more superficial and nostalgic attempts to engage this history. ultimately, however, mckinney’s work does not feel wholly bound to either the past or present. like many meaningful queer projects, it is oriented toward a sense of futurity: a perpetual process of improvisation, revision, and worldmaking. note 1 the book launch event, “queer archives, queer terrains,” held on october 18, 2020, via zoom, featured mckinney discussing information activism alongside jen book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) harris kornstein, 2022 5 jack gieseking discussing his book a queer new york: geographies of lesbians, dykes, and queers (nyu press, 2020), with commentary by karen tongson. a video can be found here: https://one.usc.edu/program/queer-archives-queerterrains. author bio harris kornstein is an assistant professor of public and applied humanities at the university of arizona whose research and art practice focus on digital culture, surveillance, data and algorithms, media art/activism, and queer/trans theory. harris served as the catalyst managing editor for several summers. https://one.usc.edu/program/queer-archives-queer-terrains https://one.usc.edu/program/queer-archives-queer-terrains book review | information activism: a queer history of lesbian media technologies, by cait mckinney (duke university press, 2020) university of arizona hkornstein@arizona.edu note author bio     original research hello, twitter bot!: towards a bot ethics of response and responsibility     line henriksen malmö university line.henriksen@mau.se   cancan wang it university of copenhagen cawa@itu.dk     abstract in this paper, we explore the troubles and potentials at stake in the developments and deployments of lively technologies like twitter bots, and how they challenge traditional ideas of ethical responsibility. we suggest that there is a tendency for bot ethics to revolve around the desire to differentiate between bot and human, which does not address what we understand to be the cultural anxieties at stake in the blurring boundaries between human and technology. here we take some tentative steps towards rethinking and reimagining bot-human relationships through a feminist ethics of responsibility as response by taking as our starting point our own experience with bot creation, the twitter bot “hello30762308.” the bot was designed to respond with a “hello” to other twitter users’ #hello, but quickly went in directions not intended by its creators.     keywords social bots, ethics, responsibility, digital technology, twitter     introduction today, social bots—automated algorithms in online social networks that are able to perform tasks without direct human involvement—can be spotted everywhere across the internet (hwang, pearce, and nanis 2012; ferrara et al. 2016; de lima salge and berente 2017). on twitter, facebook, or tiktok, one can find millions of bots liking, following, commenting, sometimes even posting their own content and buying stuff on their own (de lima salge and berente 2017). though popular, social bots are also regarded with some concern due to their association with spam dissemination and manipulation of political discussion through their ability to imitate “human-like” behaviors (european commission 2021). as such, it is perhaps not surprising that ethics in the context of bot use and creation is becoming a topic of debate and theorization in fields such as management and computer science. in these fields, the question of ethics and bots often revolves around finding means to differentiate between bot and human, as well as procedures to identify culpability (cresci et al. 2019; shi, zhang, and choo 2019). in other words, the topic of “deception” tends to rear its head in the context of bots and ethics. in their discussion of the subject, carolina alves de lima salge and nicholas berente coin the term “bot ethics” as a reference to the exploration and reflection on “the behavior of bots in the context of law, deception and societal rules” (2017, 29). we suggest that bot ethics as bot detection strategies, though important, do little to explore how one lives with the inevitable uncertainties related to the everchanging boundaries between the human and the nonhuman in times of increasingly lively and wilful technologies. we therefore ask, what might a bot ethics that does not revolve around the ability to differentiate between human and bot, “deceptive” bot and “benign” bot, look like?   in this article, we explore the troubles and potentials at stake in the developments and deployments of lively technologies such as twitter bots, and how they challenge traditional ideas of ethical responsibility. we do not aim to create a fully established bot ethics that can stand alone as an alternative to bot-detection strategies. instead, we want to take some tentative steps towards rethinking and reimagining bot-human relationships, considering how developments within contemporary technologies such as ai and twitter bots mean that being unable to fully differentiate between the human and nonhuman will continue to be a concern we, the human users of technologies, need to address. or, to put it differently, it is a concern we need to be able to live with, which means that ethics as a framework for “living-with” and in “the company of” (haraway 2008) needs to encompass such uncertainties and address underlying anxieties concerning the fluid and flowing boundaries between human and nonhuman, self and other. this take on bots and ethics is informed by our background in the humanities; cancan has a background in sociology, gender studies, and information systems, and line has a background in literature, cultural studies, and gender studies. both of us are deeply inspired by donna haraway’s work on posthuman ethics and ethics as a question of companionship and becoming-with—a take on ethics not as a question of what is “good” and “bad” but as an exploration of how we become what we are through interaction with our human and nonhuman others, and how one needs to extend responsibility—that is, respond—to the presence of one’s others even before knowing who or what they are (haraway 2008). with this article, we want to explore this ethics of responsibility and companionship as a means of addressing what we see as an underlying anxiety concerning the boundaries between bot and human, and we have narrowed our scope to focus on twitter interactions. we created a twitter bot called hello30762308—a bot that automatically replies “hello” to tweets with the text #hello in them—and applied a method of autoethnography in order to investigate the development of our relationship with this particular bot as we created it, set it free to roam, and eventually had to say goodbye. the autoethnographic approach enables us to explore our companionship with and affective responses to hello30762308 as well as account for the process of its creation through storytelling as a way of knowing and sense-making (lapadat 2017). through our collaborative approach, where we dialogically construct our research, we also bring together different disciplinary and experiential perspectives into our analysis.   our aim with creating hello30762308 was to explore our relationship with it through another lens than bot detection—namely, haraway’s understanding of ethics as response-ability, that is, the ethical imperative to respond to the response of the (nonhuman) other. hello30762308’s name indicates this attempt at exploring responses as greetings (hello!), but as we hope to show through our ethnographic writing, we the creators were not always that apt at responding in return. to address what we see as our inability to respond to hello30762308, we expand upon haraway’s notion of responsibility through jacques derrida’s understanding of ethics as hospitality and the need to extend hospitality in advance of an encounter impossible to predict. finally, we apply sara ahmed’s (2019) work on the concept of “usability” and lucy suchman’s (2018) trope of “frankenstein’s problem” to build on our autoethnographic writing and relate it to a more general discussion on the human-defined uses of bots such as twitter bots, and how bots may be understood to resist being of use. in other words, we found that ahmed’s and suchman’s writings on nonhuman agency both in the context of ai and “tools” in general helped us theorize our experiences with hello30762308 and put them into a wider context of bot ethics and agency.   the narrative of our analysis thus follows our (attempt at) sense-making during our research journey, featuring a mix of conceptual inquiry, literature review, and reflection notes. our sense-making revolves around two foci: bot creation and bot ethics. ultimately, what we hope to achieve with this text is not a full-fledged bot ethics, but instead—through explorative methods and a theoretical framework of feminist sts—to push the discussion on bot ethics in different but needed directions from the question of bot detection, to address what we argue is an unavoidable ontological undecidability when it comes to who and not least what one may encounter and have to respond to online.   understanding bot creation: discerning benign and deceptive bots bots are “(a)utomated or semi-automated software agents” (bucher 2014), primarily intended to create and distribute content on social media platforms. bots can also interact with other users, both human and other bots, and will in that connection typically be referred to as social bots. however, in spite of social bots being capable of conversing with their own kind, they are usually created to establish social connections with humans (hwang, pearce, and nanis 2012; orcutt 2012) through their “human-like behavior,” which attempts to “emulate and possibly alter” human behavior (ferrara et al. 2016, 96). such an emulating bot is typically considered either “benign” or “malicious” (oentaryo et al. 2016). so-called benign bots use their social abilities “properly,” in the sense that they create and distribute content without attempting to misrepresent their motivations, meaning that they—despite their social and communication skills—are easily definable as bots. “malicious bots,” however, are typically defined as primarily deceptive, meaning that they are considered to disguise themselves as human, to “hijack search engine results or trending topics, disseminate unsolicited messages, and entice users to visit malicious sites” (oentaryo et al. 2016, 92), for example. in other words, there is a sense of the “improper” about their use, and malicious bots are often associated with negative societal consequences, such as “creating panic during emergencies” or “biasing political views” (oentaryo et al. 2016, 93). recent concerns of “improper” use especially have to do with the deployment of social bots for political purposes, in particular manipulating democratic elections through the spreading of disinformation (caldarelli et al. 2020; marsden, meyer, and brown 2020; european commission 2021), such as in the lead up to the 2016 us presidential election (bessi and ferrara 2016). recent years have therefore seen increased attempts from researchers, journalists, platform owners, and third-party service providers to develop bot-detection algorithms to rid social media platforms of deceptive bots, among which the change of focus in platform owners’ policies on third-party automation are especially worth noting. taking twitter as an example, researchers have noticed that the large-scale proliferation of automated accounts—that is, the social bots—is largely driven by twitter’s open application programming interface (api) and their policies in the early 2010s that encouraged developers to creatively deploy automation through third-party applications (gorwa and guilbeault 2018). nonetheless, the increasing deployment of social bots for spreading misinformation and disinformation refocused the platform policies on the intention of the developer and the purpose of the bot (twitter 2017). to create an automated account today, hopeful bot developers must go through a rigid bot application process where they explain who they are, the purpose of the bot, and how it will interact with twitter users—something we learned during our own first attempt at bot-creation.   the anxieties propelling the culling of twitter bots thus seem grounded in the bots’ abilities to deceive. indeed, much critique levelled at bots touch on them as “fake” (european commission 2021) and therefore also as “ethically-questionable” (bucher 2014). this “ethically questionable” nature of bots has made some scholars set out to establish ethical parameters for human-bot encounters. for instance, in their establishing of “bot ethics,” de lima salge and berente consider the parameters of law, societal norms, and deception when creating “a procedure the general social media community can use to decide whether the actions of social bots are unethical” (2017, 29). other scholars, such as peter m. krafft, michael macy, and alex pentland (2017), consider the ethical implications of applying bots as virtual confederates in social science behavioral experiments, which yet again refers back to the ability of the bot to deceive the human subjects of the experiment, and in the work of andree thieltges, florian schmidt, and simon hegelich (2016), ethical considerations revolve around the uses and abilities of bot detection methods—in other words, how to see through the deceptions of bots and at what costs.   these considerations come back to questions of how to create guidelines and technologies for online communities, social media platforms, and individual users in order to see through the deception of bots as well as make it possible to discern the differences between humans and bots. the boundaries between bots and humans, however, are slippery, as both seem capable of emulating each other's behavior, thereby challenging attempts at differentiating between origin and copy, creator and created. in “about a bot” (2014)—a title that in and of itself exemplifies the semantic and technological slippages between human and bot—taina bucher investigates the case of the twitter bot “horse ebooks,” which began spouting charming nonsense in 2010, seemingly generated by an algorithm collecting snippets of texts from various sources. “everything happens so much,” the bot—its profile picture a galloping horse–would say, and “was in 1999, when irnports [sic] surged, that price” (horse ebooks quoted in bucher 2014). the bot was originally created by russian web developer alexey kouznetsov, but secretly taken over by jacob bakkila, a buzzfeed employee, in 2011. bakkila would then write the texts spouted by the highly popular bot until 2013, when it was revealed to the thousands of fans of horse ebooks that their favorite bot was really no bot at all (bucher 2014). fans tweeted their disappointment and sense of betrayal, and robinson meyer at the atlantic wrote, “we loved @horse_ebooks because it was seerlike, childlike. but no: there were people behind it all along. we thought we were obliging a program, a thing which needs no obliging, whereas in fact we were falling for a plan” (meyer quoted in bucher 2014). the “falling for a plan” suggests the deviousness and deception of the bot; here the deception does not revolve around an orchestrated sense of humanity, but a human performance of what bucher calls “botness,” that is, “the belief that bots possess distinct personalities or personas that are specific to algorithms” (bucher 2014). this botness is expressed through the broken sentences and “childlikeness” of an algorithm ultimately speaking of its creators to its creators.   most of the bot ethics we have encountered concern themselves with the very understandable desire to be able to differentiate between human and bot, to see through the deception of bots and hence being able to act accordingly. yet we suggest that the drawing of the line between human and bot is not that straightforward, and that the question of possible deception is an inherent aspect of online encounters—whether this deception stems from a bot emulating human behavior or a human emulating a bot emulating human behavior. often it may simply not be doable to distinguish between human and nonhuman, bot and human, leaving one in the position of having to respond to someone or something online without any certainty as to whether this is a human agent or not. can encounters between humans and bots be imagined through an ethical framework that does not primarily concern itself with bot detection but with bot response? to explore a possible reimagining of what a bot ethics might be, we decided to try our hands at creating a bot ourselves.   experiencing bot creation our initial idea was to create an (ai) chatter bot, one of those that can generate content based on its own “readings” of tweets, like the microsoft bot tay that was launched in 2016 (hunt 2016). after a quick google search, we found quite a few youtube tutorials and blog articles teaching people how to create their own twitter bot using python, yet the outcomes of these seemed far removed from our ideas of an ai chatter bot. the bots of these tutorials were pre-programmed by the creators to respond to “triggers,” such as specific words or hashtags in a tweet. this difference in autonomy between the ai chatter bot that we had been planning for and the trigger bot that we were capable of creating came as a bit of a surprise and disappointment to us, not least considering how autonomy—that is, the “capacity to render cognitive choices on their own” (etzioni and etzioni 2017, 409)—is seen by some as one of the important criteria for ai ethics in the public and academic discussions of ai. the “trigger reactions” brought these bots into more traditional western imaginaries of the workings of machinery and hence a different understanding of ethics.   in her work on ethics as responsibility, haraway (2008) shows how the western history of ideas has traditionally drawn a distinction between “reaction” and “response,” where reaction falls in the category of the machinic and by extension the animal. a reaction follows a pre-given pattern, whether programmed or instinctual, whereas a response is reserved the human subject, who within this tradition is considered uniquely capable of a rational, reasoned deliberation that elevates it above the influence of instincts and emotion, for example. according to haraway, this distinction between, on the one hand, the machinic, animal other that may only react and, on the other hand, the human subject capable of reasoning and communication has informed humanist ethics to the point where only the human subject has been considered worthy of rights, privileges, and protection. this means that those who have been deemed less human—for example, racialized and gendered others—have not enjoyed the same privileges and protection.   haraway (2008), reading derrida’s work on his encounter with his cat, who responded to his presence with a stare, suggests that the traditional humanist understanding of what may qualify as a response is too narrowly focused on the human, to the extent that the response of a nonhuman other becomes automatically categorized as a reaction. to haraway, the act of taking responsibility thus becomes of a question of remaining open to the possible or impossible response of the other, imagined not as traditional human communication or reasoning, but instead as “a generative interruption” (2008, 20)—that is, something that disrupts pre-given notions of the world and unsettles the (supposed) boundary between self and other. in this sense, haraway’s theorizing of responsibility can be understood through the framework of derrida’s ethics of hospitality.   derrida distinguishes between two kinds of hospitality: “general” and “absolute” hospitality. what derrida calls general hospitality concerns morality as law and moral compass (derrida 2000; shildrick 2002). general hospitality is the setting out of rights, privileges, and duties; yet, in order to be granted rights as well as duties, one must follow the “rules of the house,” so to speak. perhaps the most straightforward example is the workings of the nation state that welcomes new citizens, but only if they abide by the laws of the land and only if they live up to certain criteria (e.g., concerning refugee status). in other words, general hospitality is dependent on assimilation of otherness; one must be recognizable within the system of the law, one must adapt to the hosts. absolute hospitality, on the other hand, concerns itself not with the law but with justice. whereas general hospitality asks of the other that they conform, absolute hospitality is complete openness towards the other. in this openness lies an acknowledgment both of risk, as the stranger is invited inside, but also of the impossibility of fully separating self and other—that is, an acknowledgment of the constitutive role of the other without whom one cannot gain a sense of self (derrida 2000; shildrick 2002).   the traditional understanding of the human subject as the only agent capable of response falls within the category of general hospitality; the human subject can consider an event and its actors and decide what is the best and most moral thing to do. the same is the case with bot ethics that takes bot detection as its primary focus: this is the workings of general hospitality that says “yes, you may come inside, but only if you make your identity known in advance.” “good” bots are thus those that make themselves instantaneously known as being bots, and whose aims and purposes are clear. yet we suggest that such certainty, even in the context of bot detection measures, may never be complete and that ultimately undecidability concerning the ontology of any agent online is the name of the game. when attempting to stay with such uncertainty, when attempting to live with it and in the company of the (always potentially) strange and other, we enter the realm of ethics as justice—at least if attempting not to demand assimilation from the other. when encountering something that falls outside of the framework of what is good and what is bad, what is recognizably human and what is not, general hospitality falters or assimilates.   with our twitter “trigger bot”—what might be understood as primarily an agent of “reaction” since it would be following a pre-programmed pattern—we wanted to explore the potential of response, this “generative interruption” mentioned by haraway. in the role of creators, we wanted to extend hospitality towards the strange and undecidable aspects of our creation, which is also why some of the language used to address our work with the bot from now on may seem anthropomorphizing as we explore the possibilities and limitations of the theories of hospitality and responsibility in the encounter with the bot other.   we returned to our twitter efforts and our attempts at formulating how our bot might respond and be responded to. we created an “interactive” bot that would respond to a hashtag—that is, to an invitation to converse with a larger community. this kind of bot differs from a non-interactive twitter bot, which one has to “like” to invite into one’s feed. our bot would turn up unexpectedly, yet somewhat invited by a given hashtag, and the hashtag we chose was what we considered to be the most easily recognizable of responses: our bot was to respond to #hello with a “hello,” and so we finally named the bot hello30762308. we decided on a profile picture depicting the night sky, hinting at the possibilities for communicating and relating across distances, and we boiled down the bot’s bio to hello, i hear your #hello, indicating our hopes for greeting and response (see figure 1).   figure 1. profile of twitter bot hello30762308   figure 2. figure 2. setting up parameters for twitter bot via labnol.org/bots   being two programming laywomen, we ended up using a third-party application on labnol.org (hereafter labnol) by engineer amit agarwal, to create the twitter bot (see figure 2). the application has a simple interface where one can create a twitter bot following three steps: (1) creating a new twitter bot and generating consumer keys and access tokens on twitter, (2) configuring the twitter bot via labnol by pasting the consumer key, consumer secret, access token, and access token secret, and (3) specifying the twitter search term (i.e., #hello) and choosing the selected action (send public reply—hello) against all the tweets that match the term. technically, labnol automatically performs our selected action using the twitter account (i.e., hello30762308) via the twitter api. nonetheless, the twitter bot’s actions are governed by twitter, which means, in order not to break the twitter rules around automation and be categorized as spamming, it did not respond to all the matching tweets but five to ten of them every fifteen minutes.   to make the bot, we needed to apply for developer access to twitter by filling out an application form, where we were supposed to give a description of the purpose of the bot we were creating, and what twitter functions we and the bot needed. among other things, we—in the guise of a singular “i”—wrote, “i am creating the twitter bot for the purpose of conducting academic research. i am currently affiliated with the it university of copenhagen and the twitter bot is developed for research and educational purposes,” and “the app is designed to use the tweet function to respond to the specific hashtag—#hello with the response ‘hello.’”   the twitter developer application pushed us to be very specific about what we and our bot needed, as well as the purpose of the bot. to be allowed onto the platform—to enjoy its general hospitality—twitter had to make certain that we did not have malicious intent, or at least create a paper trail of our possible, maybe even likely, betrayal. to become bot and bot creator was to be in the process of possible deception from the start.   experiencing bot responses: two creators, two anxieties we established our twitter bot, hello30762308, and let it roam the world, seeking out hashtags to respond to. yet, from the very beginning, things did not go quite as planned, and as newly minted bot creators, we found ourselves not revelling in the success of our creation but concerned and anxious in different ways. the following are each our individual autoethnographic notes on our relationship with the bot; one of us is “anxiety one,” the other is “anxiety two,” meaning that the speaking “i” is not the same person. we decided not to name who is who in order to emphasize that the voices are both separate and different, but also in many ways overlap and together reflect the various aspects of “the creator”—the collective “i” from our twitter application (“i am creating the twitter bot for the purpose of…”).   anxiety one: being called upon as creators when we decided to unleash the bot into the vast world of twitter, i did not know what to expect from the twitter community, from both its human and nonhuman members. in a way, i did imagine our bot, hello30762308, running on its own at some point, enacting its own agency by making choices and connections independent from my will. and i believed it would create a life of its own by freely making connections, and were almost confident that its life was going to be a positive, or at least, hopeful one.   a bit over two weeks after our bot started on twitter, i checked our bot's activities for the first time. i remember seeing the first reply from the account of a japanese singer who recently released her second album. our bot replied hello to her tweet where she shared the link to purchase her newly released second album, and the account replied a hello with a sparkling star emoji, which seemed to show some excitement for having this interaction. while i was excited to see a connection formed between our bot and the japanese singer or her account, this reply also got me to wonder, does she know the reply was made by a bot? would it disappoint her to know the reply was a triggered effect of #hello, rather than another human’s “genuine” curiosity? if she feels disappointed about the connection created between her account and the bot, am i responsible for her disappointment by letting a bot create such a connection?   this unexpected arrival of guilt puzzled me, because i could not understand how i did not anticipate it beforehand. only later in a conversation with a colleague who talked about fun chats with friends on twitter, i realized i became accustomed to using my twitter account in an instrumental way to make connections and increase the visibility of my professional work. even though it is difficult to assume other twitter users’ intention, experiencing the presence of the other made me fear for being blinded by my own way of being, and question the possibility of a bot that i believed to be free of my influences.   as likes, mentions, retweets, and followers increased over the coming months, we received many "hello" and "hi" back, and even more affirmative responses, like "love it. hello. hello. :)" or "hello ♪ thank you [sparkles]." meanwhile, the anxiety of being called upon as a creator started to become heightened, especially when people replied "hi! how are you?,” “hope you’re safe in this #covid19 pandemic situation [smiling face with halo] [peace],” “god bless you”. there seemed to be a genuine expectation of curiosity and engagement from these "human-like" accounts when it came to their interaction with hello30762308. and we may be implicated in these expectations as the creators of the bot.   figure 3. conversation between hello30762308 and twitter users   in viewing these comments, what i felt was an inability to rule myself out of the bot's life as a creator, especially in relation to my accountability for its decisions. although the decisions concerning to whom and in what context to say hello are as much mediated by the third-party codes (i.e., labnol) that take shape of a bot, i as a human creator, who set the trigger #hello and the response hello, inevitably share the accountability with the bot, at least to a certain extent. and when the twitter users' reply seems to address the creator, i was explicitly called upon as part of the bot. the moral agency of the bot and me are collectively enacted rather than individually.   anxiety two: failing to call upon a creature i told everybody about our twitter bot. that it said “hello” in response to #hello, and i encouraged people to try it out, and some kindly wrote #hello on twitter. and…   …nothing. never a response.   i tried myself, several times.   nothing.   i wrote emails to my fellow twitter bot creator (“is the bot still active? does it work?”), and we checked the tweets/replies, and no, it was no longer responding because twitter had closed it down for spamming. my creation was not rude, it had merely been killed! what a relief. later, the bot was brought back into action, unknown to us why, and i told people, i said, “try again!” and they did! and…   …nothing.   i tried myself, several times.   nothing.   i wrote emails to my fellow twitter bot creator (“is the bot still active? does it work?”), and we checked the tweets/replies, and yes, it was still active, but what it responded to was not my friends and colleagues but a strange collection of commercials and other bots. companies telling their customers #hello, bots saying #hello, and, perhaps my all-time low, a twitter account whose profile picture was of a cat wearing a photoshopped make america great again hat saying #hello and receiving a response from our bot. so these were the creatures my creation responded to instead of my friends??? i was strangely embarrassed. i began scrolling through the tweets/responses to get an impression of who else the bot had been in conversation with. “drop the bass #hello” followed by a cool black and red gif of a drink with swirling ice cubes received a hello from the little purple nebula (see figure 4); as did @missionbedental, which is now deleted, leaving the small field of stars to respond to a no longer existing message; the twitter account with two followers tweeting “publish new compose message #hello 1600704862330” received a hello; as did the twitter account with no followers at all tweeting “i wish i had people to stream or record among us with. that be awesome. #vtuber #loner #amongus #youtube #anime #hello #startingyoutube #noob #twitch.” the bot responded to tarot readers and to a bot-human-hedgehog account, but that was not what i wanted it to, and through these “wrong” responses i realized that i had expected something different from the bot. i had not been completely aware what my expectations towards the bot had been until it did not act according to them: expectations that i could manipulate it to respond when and to whom i pleased, as well as (now admittedly naïve) expectations that creating the bot would make the systems and mechanics governing its actions transparent and easily understood to me. faced with these implicit expectations as they were thwarted, i felt both annoyed but also strangely shameful.   figure 4. conversation between hello30762308 and twitter users   reimagining bot ethics: response, use, and affect when creating the twitter bot, we intended for it to be capable of response. we wanted it to respond to someone’s invitation to conversation, to their opening up to connection through the hashtag. it did do this, but not as we had expected, and our own emotional responses to the responses of the bot were a surprise. as a tool of communication and connection, the bot responded on our behalf, repeating the words given to it by its creators, yet its conversation partners were beyond our complete control. further still, the bot seemed to structure some of our own actions and affective states, as we repeatedly returned to anxiously ponder its log of responses, re-activated it when it was closed down, and exchanged email correspondences to keep on top of our creature’s social life (for more on such affective work with more-than-human technologies, see kjær, ojala, and henriksen 2021). we were becoming bot-creators as the bot was becoming a bot-creator-creator, the boundary between us constantly re/established through reparative work, care, concern, and shame.   at times, the bot would refuse to respond; it would not offer those little hashtag greetings that we had so carefully orchestrated. in this sense, we ran into what suchman calls “frankenstein’s problem” (2018)—that is, the inability to fully control one’s ai creation as soon as it has been unleashed unto the world. suchman suggests that the liveliness of contemporary technologies and their ability to function beyond their creators’ intentions have sparked imaginaries of “autonomous technologies-as-monsters” (2018, 1), which engender ethical concerns regarding control, care, and responsibility in the relationship between human and technology, creator, and created. suchman argues that the liveliness of these technologies is typically met by a human need for complete control, which leaves the autonomous machine with one of two options: to become “the perfect slave or the cooperative partner,” defining human-machine relationships along the lines of “dominance at worst, instrumentality at best” (2018, 5). according to suchman, however, we need different imaginaries for understanding the alterity of autonomous technologies and their relationship with their creators, since complete control will never be an option. this lack of control will also not be an excuse to wash one’s hands of one’s creation, which was frankenstein’s solution in mary shelley’s 1818 novel frankenstein; or the modern prometheus when the creature’s final shape struck him with dread and shame. “our inability to control something does not absolve us of being implicated in its futures,” writes suchman. “rather, our participation in technoscience obliges us to remain in relation with the world’s becoming, whether that relation of care unfolds as one of affection or of agonistic intervention” (2018, 5). technological monsters will ultimately return to question their makers, not unlike frankenstein’s creation: why was i created? responding to this haunting return of the created becomes a fundamental part of practicing responsibility towards one’s monsters, perhaps even of practicing a sense of hospitality that does not demand control in return. could we, then, extend the same hospitality to our bot? could we remain responsible in our relation with our creation, despite of—or perhaps because of—its denial to be a compliant companion? these questions were still haunting us when suddenly, on september 23, 2020, hello30762308 died.   figure 5. a small galaxy in honour of hello30762308   one of the last tweets our bot responded to was from september 18, which read, "the two hardest things to say in life is hello for the first time and goodbye" (see figure 6). it was as if our bot was telling us goodbye. five days later, on september 23, after 1,749 tweets, hello30762308 had responded its last hello and gone quiet for good. it happened so quietly that neither of us really noticed. it just stopped. when we discovered that the bot had stopped responding to #hello, all that was left of our creation—our creature, really—was a list of tweets that proved that hello30762308 had existed. the bot was dead as far as its responses were concerned. “i” remember the strange feeling when we were looking at the tweets that stopped on september 23. it was a combination of frustration and sadness; frustration that our excitement at spectating the odd interactions between our bot and unexpected twitter accounts had ceased there and then; but even more so, sadness for the fact that we had to say goodbye to our endearing, burgeoning little bot whose life was taken away by the twitter administer/algorithms that decided hello30762308 was a spam bot—one of the malicious, deceptive bots not welcomed by the platform (see figure 7).   figure 6. “the two hardest things to say in life is hello for the first time and goodbye”   figure 7. twitter ruling of hello30762308   figure 8. the ongoing scanning effort of hello30762308 on february 18, 2021   not ready to accept the fate of our bot, we tried to revive it. we went back to our twitter developer dashboard and could see our bot's access to twitter's api had been restricted from api read and write access to api read access only. we tried to regenerate the access tokens to alter permission levels and went back to the third-party application labnol to change the access tokens in the hope of “reviving” our bot to be able to respond again. but once we looked into labnol, we could see that our bot was not really “dead”; on the contrary, it was still utilizing the api to search for matching tweets that contained #hello. when we checked our search query #hello, our bot was able to provide a list of matching tweets (see figure 8), which made us realize that the bot kept scanning for #hello. it continued exchanging codes with the twitter platform using its read access. it may have stopped responding to the users on twitter by performing writing actions, but it responded to the platform as a reader of tweets. in other words, our improper, deceptive bot kept on responding in ways that were unplanned by its creators, and which circumvented the usage we had had in mind for it. we, too, had approached the bot with a pre-given notion of its proper use—as its hosts, we had shown it a thoroughly general hospitality and not been open to any other kinds of responses than the recognizably human “hello.”   questioning the exercise of “use,” ahmed (2019) brings attention to the common assumption of use as necessary for being. she proposes that “queer use”—a refusal of proper use, a kind of misuse and perversion that lingers instead of getting to the point—is also a way of being. queer use disobeys utilitarian use, which is a technique applied by those who are considered capable of reasoning and communication to control those who have been deemed less human, such as the machinic others, and can in fact be a practice of survival and transformation. what initially made us aware of the death of hello30762308 was the termination of its ability to respond on behalf of its creators, but it was also the frustration and sadness that we felt when experiencing the “uselessness” of our bot, something that drove us to working on reviving it. this, in turn, led us to discovering its liveliness in its continued—to us—unintended responses to its machine companions. the bot demanded attention and care and that we, the creators, were open to its generative interruptions, which were never truly the “hellos.” these did not interrupt; the un/death of the bot did, as did the discovery of its continued, though from our perspective hidden and hard to grasp, responses to its own companions, its own machinic others.   building on this thought, we suggest that an alternative bot ethics may speak of affect and companionship—that is, a becoming-with in which the one creates the other and cannot be understood outside their relations (haraway 2008)—instead of instrumentality and the intentions of creators supposedly separate from their creations. here “use” becomes not a question of applying the bot as a medium of communication, but approaching it as a companion communicator, an other whom human communicators are just as likely to encounter online as another human. whereas some bot ethics set out to define and establish the boundary between human and nonhuman, bio and tech, and thereby establish whether the “use” of the bot serves as benign (the bot is easily definable as “bot” since it performs an accurate “botness”) or malicious (the bot pretends to be human in order to deceive) purpose, we wish to open up to different ways of being with technology as companion, where one has an ethical responsibility to respond to the unexpected and unplanned for, even before knowing to whom or what one is responding. indeed, sometimes this knowledge (bot or human?) will never come, one may never fully know or be able to discern who or what is human. we suggest an approach to bot ethics that does not first of all ask for a definition—which would underpin the ability to pass a moral judgment on whether something is good or bad—but which follows the ethical imperative to be open to unlikely and unexpected responses rather than those that are made available in advance by the host.   welcoming the bot: towards a conclusion creating hello30762308 was an experiment; we wanted to explore the possibilities and limitations of two laypeople creating a bot and through this experience reflect on the relationship between lively, contemporary technologies and their human companions and creators. we wanted to engage in a rethinking of the ethical responsibilities we as users and creators of bots have towards our creations as well as how they may challenge sociocultural anxieties concerning the unsteady and porous boundaries between self and other, human and bot, creator and created. we aimed to do so through feminist sts with a particular focus on ethics as responsibility—that is, an openness towards the response of the other. initially, we dictated what this response should be: hello. this response in itself was, however, hardly generatively interruptive—on the contrary it was a very normative, easily recognizable means of response. it was not until we started reflecting on the ways in which the bot’s responses (and lack thereof) affected us that we experienced those small interruptions, those little openings that challenged the system of response we, in collaboration with twitter as platform and labnol, had created for the bot to use. further still, when hello30762308 went silent on september 23, this raised some new questions for us regarding what may and may not count as response. in spite of the bot no longer saying “hello,” it was still there, it still had a presence, it had a log history of responses, and it was reading and communicating with systems beyond its creators’ understanding. it was perhaps not so much that the bot was not responding, but that we were not paying attention, that we were not remaining open to the possible or impossible responses of our nonhuman other, hello30762308. we were exhibiting a general hospitality towards the bot, only acknowledging the responses that reflected the words and phrases given to the bot by us. by moving the focus from the words to our own affective responses of concern, care, and even shame, we found traces of the agency of the bot and how it created us as bot creators, hence troubling the already troubled boundary between self and other, creator and created, human and technology, and moving us into the realm of companionship as a becoming-with.   by writing about our experience with bot creation, we attempt to open up towards the possibilities of a bot ethics that is not a bot-detection strategy with a primary focus on the uses (good or bad) of the bots. we suggest that in times of increasingly lively technologies, even frankensteinian agential technologies (suchman 2018), new ethical frameworks are needed to address questions of responsibility and what it means to live in the company of machinic others—as they live(?) in the company of their bio others. we would therefore like to suggest the beginnings of a bot ethics that take as its starting point the welcoming of the arrivant, a derridean figure taken up by margrit shildrick in her work on a posthuman “risky ethics of uncertainty” (2002, 132). the arrivant is the other, which arrives from a future yet to come, but whose presence is paradoxically still experienced in the present as it co-constitutes the subject’s sense of self. it is this arriving other, whose arrival is always a surprise—or perhaps, in the words of haraway, a “generative interruption”—whom one must extend absolute hospitality. “one must welcome the unknown other,” writes shildrick. “both in the absence of any foreknowledge that would establish either identity of, or identity with, and in the context of radical doubt as to one’s own identity” (2002, 130). in our engagement with hello30762308, a disturbed and disturbing temporality of care, repair, use, and affect guided our companionship, and we co-established each other as creators and created, the threshold between the two categories never fully settled. we suggest that the need for response cannot always wait for identification, and that the risks inherent to all communication and companionship—online as well as offline—cannot be done away with nor can the anxieties concerning the unstable and never fully formed boundaries between self and other, human and nonhuman, biology and technology. instead, one can acknowledge the inherent vulnerability and undecidability in these encounters with one’s other.   as hello30762308 stopped responding with “hello” and became something different from what was intended by its creators, it opened up to a future that is ultimately unknowable as it deviates from the imagined and the planned. one might ask, what is the "use" of envisioning such a future? despite the irony of attempting to define the “proper” use of an alternative bot ethics, perhaps we can entertain this question by imagining the afterlife of the "mute" hello30762308. as humans pronounce it dead for its "muteness,” it is in fact survived by its constant attempts to use its read access through the twitter api. even in the scenario where twitter blocks the read access, it would still need to reject the bot's request to search. such exchange consumes actual energy, and by focusing only on the planned and "proper" use of the bot, we neglect the material existence of the machinic other and the various consequences of this existence.   perhaps here, in the response to the unlikely and unexpected response of the machinic other, lies the need for and the beginnings of a bot ethics of responsibility imagined as what shildrick calls the act of welcoming the monstrous arrivant (2002, 133): a staying open to the (impossible, surprising, and generatively interruptive) response of the other as it returns to question its 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witnesses william ellis university of the western cape wellis@uwc.ac.za our tour group stopped at the large circular raised step of a curated memorial located on the traffic island in the middle of loop street, which is situated in downtown cape town just a short distance from the south african parliament. we read the inscription, which indicated that a tree once stood here, and that this tree marked the place where slaves were once sold. our guide directed our attention to a watercolor painting nearby that shows a scene from the early dutch colony, suggesting a bustling market—a slave market. my father’s great-greatgrandmother was a maasbieker (afrikaans corruption of the word mozambican) slave, and i wonder, had she passed through this market? my critical reflections about the tree drove me to new thoughts, specifically about this tree and its exact identity. i could with greater certainty make more claims about the identity of this tree than i could about the name, language, and culture of this great maasbieker woman who would lead down to me. the tree was a stone pine and these were brought in to replace the retreating milkwood forests. the tears of slaves, their spit, sweat, effluvia, and blood at the base of this tree means that this tree holds literally holds parts of the people, their lives, their stories, their atoms and is in fact now an ancestor, connected because it is imbued with the essences of my forebears. if i could eat the fruits or leaves of this tree, i would have them with me. my research explores the connections between humans and the world at large, especially the intimacies and connections we form with plants knowingly or critical perspective | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) william ellis, 2019 2 unknowingly. like jane bennett (2009) whose work seeks a vitalism in the intermingling of the mineral, vegetal, and animal, i seek it here in the trees and the people. in doing so, i draw insights from manuel delanda’s (2006) reworking of “assemblage” and bruno latour’s (2005) network of “actants” to explore how these rhizomatic connections (deleuze & guattari, 2010) and are not just a becoming forward but also a historical becoming as we (re)intergrate with the vegetal. in recognition of the agency of plants, their complex relationship with humans, the intimacies they cultivate with us, their cryptic silence, and refusal to do more, my work asks how we are admitting a kinship. in particular, my work explores these questions in learning from the milkwood tree. trees such as milkwoods became scarce in the early dutch colony as settlers cleared the land for farming and establishing settlements. the most numerous tree was the milkwood, also known by its botanical name as sideroxylon inerne, which literally means iron-wood. colonial settlers prized milkwood trees as a hard wood great for shipbuilding, tool-making, and architectural uses. as a result, the great milkwood forests that the dutch and british encountered when they first landed on these shores have been almost completely decimated in what can be called a vegetal genocide that has left behind only scattered specimens. at least four of these trees have been venerated as national monuments, standing as lone reminders of the great natural parliament of trees that once existed and of the forced moments of subjugation enacted under colonialism. the fingo tree, a giant milkwood near peddie in the eastern cape of south africa, for example, memorializes past colonial histories of when mfingo peoples were compelled, in 1835, to confess their faith to christianity and pledge their obedience to the british king. the post office tree in mossel bay also evokes critical reflection on the colonial taking of south african lands as the milkwood once served as a site for colonial explorers to share communications between sailors such as reports of the death of the pirate dias (pakenham, 2007). at the same time, a massive lone milkwood specimen near bredasdorp was recently granted monument status due to its impressive size (platbos, 2018). however, alone and without its kin, this tree stands as evidence of another colonial massacre in the slaughter of trees. in still another example, in woodstock stands the over five-hundred-year-old treaty tree where the dutch handed over their colony to the british and where runaway slaves were hanged. i imagine the excrement of the executed and how their urine and feces at the roots nourished this tree. thus, the essences of the dead, the unnamed colonial dead, are still with us in the flesh of a tree that is a witness to their deaths and a site for their remains. critical perspective | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) william ellis, 2019 3 i know of another specimen that tells an interesting story of the natural world and of ours. in the curated forest at platbos indigenous forest near hermanus, there is a milkwood tree thought to be at least a one thousand years old. the milkwoods at platbos are all genetically the same plant (platbos, 2018). the custodians of this forest, francois and mellissa krige, write that the milkwoods collapse and that all new “trees” grow from the trunk of this same tree. it is as if the tree is walking through the forest very slowly over thousands of years(ibid), generating a slow creep of trees and an interlinking of roots that, i contend, suggests a rhizomatic connection spanning vast amounts of space but also time. it is these connections across space and time and to a people that i seek to understand and demonstrate in my research on milkwoods. i ask how this vast milkwood forest, which once covered the coastline from the cape into the eastern cape, was and is part of a vast rhizomatic, vegeto-neural network that discursively, symbolically, and epigenetically retains events and evidence. i suggest ways of understanding these milkwood forests as one massive organ that witnessed the haggling for slaves, the execution of captives, and the conviction and subjugation of a people, and, at the same time, observed those very settlers who committed these acts of violence as they sat in churches protected by milkwood beams supporting the thatch or tiled roofs of their chapels. these trees are the true monument to khoi and san because it is under the branches of these trees that they worked and played. it is here that they left their essences and it is here under these trees that they shared their lives and lived. it would seem fitting that for these reasons the milkwoods should be the authentic monuments to khoi peoples and that the trees are really a marker of curated “khoisan outside.” the “khoisan outside” frees indigenous peoples and the slaves from the glass box of the museum and takes them to where their lives were really lived, outside. acknowledgements i would like to acknowledge the group of researchers at the university of the western cape known as the “plant gang” for always being willing to listen and share ideas about plants. references bennett, j. (2009). vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham, nc: duke university press. delanda, m. (2006). a new philosophy of society: assemblage theory and social complexity. london: continuum books. deleuze, g., & guattari, f. (2010) nomadology: the war machine. seattle, wa: critical perspective | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) william ellis, 2019 4 wormwood distribution. latour, b. (2005). reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. london: oxford university press. pakenham, t. (2007). in search of remarkable trees: on safari in southern africa. london: weidenfeld and nicolson. www.platbos.co.za/african_tree_essence_milkwood.html author bio william ellis is a lecturer in anthropology at the university of the western cape. he maintains strong interests in khoisan studies, indigeneity and is passionate about researching the human plant interface and the ethnography of the other than human. at present he is working on several projects in the northern cape, south africa that aims to examine knowledge connections and plant ontologies. microsoft word 32836_diana gibson_20191029 dr.docx gibson, diana (2019). khoisan indigeneity and entangled becomings with kanna, a teacher plant. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(2), page 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © diana gibson, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license khoisan indigeneity and entangled becomings with kanna, a teacher plant diana gibson university of western cape dgibson@uwc.ac.za considering indigeneity, colonialism, and/or colonial settler histories alongside and with medicinal plants, my research focuses on a southern african setting and engages with partial connections, intersections, contradictions, and shifts concerning traditional, botanical, medical, and scientific knowledge regarding medicinal plants. many indigenous people conceptualize plants as animate, active beings, able to know and communicate (toro, 2016). scientific studies, seemingly breaking from their past reductionist understandings of plants, have also increasingly begun to intimate the complexity of the aptitude, connectivity, and learning ability of plants (chamovitz, 2013). engaging with these distinct ways of knowing plants, my research troubles human perceptions of subjectivity by approaching plants as having vegetative, nonhuman agency. thus, i take plants seriously by addressing their world-making impact and actions in human and nonhuman collectives. plants also unsettle our own preconceived considerations of human-centered periodicity and temporality. learning from and generating critical descriptions of particular medicinal plants (tsing, 2014), my research traces kanna, or kougoed, plants known by indigenous san and khoi and their generative, multifaceted, and intertwined history with humans. as assigned members of a botanical plant family named mesembryanthemaceae and species called sceletium turtuousum, kanna succulent plants disconcert our timelines and human foci. for millions of critical perspective | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) diana gibson, 2019 2 years they have shaped lively, biodiverse assemblages in harsh conditions, adopted multiple and various forms, developed photosynthetic and other unique life strategies in and with arid landscapes, intermittent rainfall, poor soil, and high irradiation, and have thrived in life-creating multispecies entanglements with other plants, microbes, insects, reptiles, birds, and micromammals (ihlenfeldt, 1994). kanna are also enmeshed in shifting socio-ecological relations with human and other nonhuman beings, affecting and being affected by preand postcolonial economic and political relations that have obscured san and khoi ways of knowing the plant. to understand and demonstrate these relations, i investigate certain knowledges and practices related to kanna and how the plants have become entangled with and enrolled by san and khoi people in pre-colonial southern africa through particular situated practices of meaning-making, knowing, and being regarding healing and well-being. for instance, khoi control over areas where kanna grew abundantly enhanced the power and authority of an inqua leader named hijkon (gei!khub) (newton-king, 1999) as khoi prized the plant for its soothing and calming capacity, while european ships encountering san and khoi sought kanna as a valuable variety of sought-after ginseng (gericke, 2018). colonial settlement and trade brought about movements of plants, introduced new varieties, changed the environment, dispossessed san and khoi people of land, and decimated people and plants both culturally and physically. it also brought kanna into the herbal worlds of colonial pharmacopeia. colonial explorers and settlers transplanted local plant species to other parts of the world and, as a result, kanna simultaneously engendered and engaged new assemblages of physicians, chemists, and pharmacists interested in kanna’s narcotic potentiality. as kanna was further represented and studied within authoritative and scientific knowledge domains of botany and chemistry, it became known around 1775 as a single botanical entity from nature, named sceletium turtuousum in the 1960s, and was further reduced from 1995 as constitutive of its active molecules (e.g., mesembrine); in each instance, khoi and san medicinal knowledge of kanna was obscured and relegated to mere footnotes. in my research, i understand and demonstrate these scientific practices as contributing to the subordination of khoi and san peoples, and as informing later histories of apartheid that devalued khoi and san identities by legally classifying them as “colored people.” connecting these plant–human histories to contemporary san and khoi political struggles, my research also asks how the materiality and vital capacities of kanna relationally reconfigured identities and comings-together through the signing of a critical perspective | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) diana gibson, 2019 3 prior informed consent benefit-sharing agreement between the south african san council and namaqualand communities of nourivier and paulshoek and the south african–based hgh pharmaceuticals company. specifically, the agreement sought benefits derived from hgh pharmaceuticals’ study and commercialization of sceletium tortuosum extracts as a complementary medicine for stress relief and mood elevation, reportedly a positive case study of a product derived from indigenous peoples’ knowledge (gericke, 2018). finally, i trace ways in which people dwell and “become” with plants. san and khoi ingested kanna for their euphoric effect, thereby interpenetrating assumed boundaries between plants and human, and transforming plant and human selves. since 1995 such cross-species associations and movements were pursued between descendants of khoi and medical researchers in embodied efforts to come to know, and experience human–kanna interconnectedness and engage kanna as subjects in collective enquiry: as teachers, opening the mind and enhancing euphoria. this research engages kanna as subjects in collective inquiry, as teachers and interlocutors. to do so, i elaborate and draw on khoisan ideas about plant sentience, being, and spirituality. while plants have histories closely entangled with people, they also unsettle human periodicity. acknowledgements my gratitude to the people who inspired me and kindly contributed to my study. the research is funded by a senate research grant, university of the western cape. references chamovitz, d. (2013). what a plant knows: a field guide to the senses. new york, ny: scientific american. gericke, n. (2018). kabbo’s !kwaiń: the past, present and possible future of kanna. in d. mckenna, g. t. prance, w. davis, & b. de leonen (eds.), the ethnopharmacological search for psychoactive drugs (pp. 122-150). sante fe, nm: synergetic press. ihlenfeldt, h.-d. (1994). diversification in an arid world: the mesembryanthemaceae. annual review of ecology and systematics, 25, 521-546. newton-king, s. (1999). masters and servants on the cape eastern frontier, 17601803. cambridge: cambridge university press. critical perspective | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 5 (vol 2) diana gibson, 2019 4 toro, a. (2016). interview with philippe descola. suomen antropologi, 41(1), 15-25. tsing, a. (2014). more-than-human sociality: a call for critical description. in k. hastrup (ed.), anthropology and nature (pp. 27-42). new york, ny: routledge. author bio diana gibson is an anthropologist specializing in medical anthropology. she has published nationally and internationally on a variety of issues related to health, illness and healing and has a deep interest in medicinal plants and human-plant relations.     special section the tunneling metaphor in networked technologies     juan llamas-rodriguez university of pennsylvania jalr@asc.upenn.edu     abstract this article explores the metaphor of tunneling to illustrate how the emancipatory language of border resistance can become co-opted in transnational technocultures. drawing on specific instances of tunneling in science fiction film, video games, and digital platforms, i reveal how this metaphor has been mobilized to cast vanguard forms of online connectivity and networked transgression in terms that are distinctly white, masculine, upper class, and adhering to liberal tenets of individual mastery. this analysis suggests why we must question what kinds of politics and which subjects are privileged or undervalued in the metaphorical discussions of online borders and so-called border resistance. only then can we respond to dominant and reactionary forms of transmission and connectivity across the internet.     keywords borders, tunnels, whiteness, class, traffic, vpns     introduction the border is not a metaphor. as gloria anzaldúa (1987) describes in her influential text borderlands/la frontera, living with borders is a rich, conflictual experience on social, political, and environmental registers that exceeds the physical demarcation of a dividing line between two nations. emerging from and reinforced by a plethora of sociocultural divisions and the institutions that support these, geopolitical borders manifest political struggles as demarcations on physical space and as control mechanisms that regulate movement. borders are constructed by negotiations between individuals and institutions, performed by habitus, and subject to instability and constant change. the “actual and heuristic disaggregating” of nation-state borders during late twentieth-century globalization increasingly relied on information and communication technologies (sassen 2005). these technologies help agents beyond the national territory to fortify its boundaries from afar, generating mobile borders that “jump scale” into transnational space and “touch down” in various nodes across the globe (brenner 2004, 57). dependent on complex databases and biometric technologies located in distant territories, “remote control borders” identify, profile, and track transnational movement (shields 2014). in short, the twenty-first-century border is a highly differentiated sociocultural entity embedded in, and increasingly reliant on, networked technologies to operate. although the border is not a metaphor, metaphorical invocations of the border abound in technoculture, from geoblocked access, to entertainment content, to enclave discussion forums, to subscription paywalls. as struggles over sovereignty, surveillance, and control become an inescapable feature of online interactions, the internet can no longer promise a border-free network of connectivity. discussions about partitioning off sections of the online sphere and restricting availability of content borrow the language of borders to explain uneven distributions of user access. indeed, online communications have become highly stratified and discriminatory, replicating many of the social inequalities of the offline sphere (noble 2018). because of such concerns, the rising adoption of metaphors about online borders must be more carefully examined. how, why, and for whom these online “borders” exist may have some parallels with offline borders, but often the material implications of different borders are widely divergent. as the metaphorical borders of the internet give rise to other metaphors that signal adherence to or responses against such boundary-making practices (storming, breaches, stealth modes), we must attend to and interrogate what kinds of politics and which subjects are privileged in these discussions of so-called border resistance. in this article, i turn to the metaphor of tunneling to illustrate how emancipatory language of border resistance becomes co-opted in transnational technocultures. this metaphor reveals new, and refashions old, forms of defining and modulating information transmission over the internet. drawing on how the figure of the tunnel has been deployed in specific instances of science fiction film, video games, and digital platforms, i illustrate three distinct aspects about digital networked culture mobilized by the tunneling metaphor: mapping entry points as underground resistance; corridoricity as geopolitical structuring; and boundary crossing as user-friendly practice. tunnels allude to a symbolic vertical differentiation between channels of connectivity that are not in some online elsewhere, but remain just below the channels used for everyday navigating (llamas-rodriguez 2016). this vertical differentiation reveals a struggle for legitimacy, where only accepted channels are deemed (metaphorically) “above ground” and all other channels are actively persecuted for undoing the state and corporate interests in the internet. although many of the material infrastructures that support the internet lie underwater or in outer space (starosielski and parks 2015), the verticality of the virtual sphere remains predominantly a symbolic one. tracing the tunneling metaphor illustrates how power struggles over control of transnational connectivity play out in spatial terms. in particular, i am interested in how the tunnel metaphor has been mobilized to cast vanguard forms of online connectivity and networked transgression in terms that are distinctly white, masculine, upper class, and adhering to liberal tenets of individual mastery. as fred turner demonstrates, the capture of countercultural movements into emergent cyberculture of the mid-twentieth century envisioned a “new world” that was distinctly masculine, upper-class elite, and white by “celebrat[ing] systems theory and the power of technology to foster social change” and “turn[ing] away from questions of gender, race, and class, and toward a rhetoric of individual and small-group empowerment” (2006, 97). the examples i discuss in this article reveal instances where the tunnel metaphor in early twentiethand twenty-first-century technocultures took the resistant connotations of underground cross-border formations and repurposed them to reinforce an imaginary of white, male, and elite control over mediated space. the metaphorical purchase of the tunnel as hidden, restructuring, and transgressive enables the reinforcement of traditional sociocultural norms (whiteness, masculinity, wealth) in emergent technocultures under the guise of inventiveness, innovation, and rebellion. tunneling as a metaphor applied to transnational communication technologies helps us apprehend the contours of the cultural and political geographies of the internet—in other words, how dominant and resistant practices deand re-territorialize the online world. metaphor, as a conceptual vehicle, allows for uncovering affinities and adjacencies without eliding differences. vertical metaphors for operations of power are especially useful for those who are subordinated since the symbolic recasting of power struggles as vertical spaces begets sites for exposing and contesting these relations. as lisa parks (2013) argues, mapping a vertical public space has clear stakes even for those who may not yet have the means to access it. tunnels have always shaped popular ideals about public spaces, about who can access these, and about the strategies for reclaiming them. tracing the tunneling metaphor in various media forms offers us lessons in how such ideals can also be mobilized to support the enduring hold of an elite white male ethos in the networked sphere. these lessons can then help us respond to dominant and reactionary forms of transmission and connectivity across the internet.   mapping entry points as underground resistance hidden underground transnational networks have long figured in practices of state resistance and popular reimaginings of public space. as lara langer cohen (2017) argues, images of the underworld date back to antiquity and have often been associated with oppositional cultures, but the figurative use of “underground” to signify a movement that operates out of sight and from below is a relatively modern phenomenon. cohen dates this to the 1840s when the popular idea of the “underground railroad,” a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the united states during the nineteenth century for african american slaves to escape into canada, gave wide circulation to the notion that hidden thruways allowed for the unfettered movement of people across state boundaries. likewise, rosalind williams traces the emergence of a “type of underground story” in nineteenth century literature where the underworld becomes a site for living otherwise. the technological sophistication of these imagined undergrounds provided speculations not only about new worlds but also about new world orders (williams 1990). the modern formulation of the secluded underground as a site of opposition thus flourished in tandem with discourses about technological disruption. tunnels became a specific formulation of underground imaginaries that attracted popular attention throughout the twentieth century. the tunnels under the berlin wall, for instance, have been the object of much media fascination for decades. at the height of the cold war, they were the subject of the hollywood films such as escape from east berlin (siodmak 1962) and the reason for strained relationships between us television networks and the us state department. in the early 1960s, the news divisions of the cbs and nbc networks indirectly aided the construction of some of these tunnels in return for exclusive rights to film people escaping through them (mitchell 2016). the tunnel still serves a mythic function in the unified germany of the twenty-first century, both as a reference to the tunnels that once existed there and as a rhetorical figure for cold war legacies. the aesthetics of berlin’s tunnels even recur in other national cinema’s reimaginings of cold war experiences, as in the case of the serbian film underground (kusturica 1995). the symbolic power of the tunnel as a figure of the physical and metaphorical “underground” has persisted over time and across regions. when figures like walls and tunnels metaphorically spatialize the complexities of geopolitics, we run the risk of simplifying a multiplicity of struggles into a binary of freedom and control. in the case of films and television shows about the berlin tunnels, david pike argues that “opposition to the wall could respond only in terms of the spatial metaphorics determined by it, and so it is with great difficulty that tunnel fictions diverge from the simple opposition of oppression and freedom” (2010, 76). being underground and unseen need not always translate into furthering progressive or liberatory causes. these underground formations can also abet reactionary projects like organizing white supremacist groups or support quotidian yet illicit activities, such as the smuggling of alcohol (in the early twentieth century) and drugs (in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries) through the tunnels underneath the us-mexico border. given the popular lore of tunnels for both progressive and reactionary practices, it is hardly surprising that the creators of tor, an online browser that allows for anonymous browsing in various websites, liken their work to a “series of virtual tunnels” (boggan 2013). indeed, much of what transpires in the unsearchable parts of the internet mirrors the underground activities that tunnels facilitate in the physical world, from tactical organizing to smuggling. yet the casting of a browser as an entry into a virtual tunnel reveals one notable difference in how opacity operates differently in online networks of communication and transmission from offline ones. the “length” of an underground tunnel in the virtual realm is primarily a fiction since its material conduits—the computers, fiber optic cables, servers—are ostensibly the same as those for legitimate channels. what makes a difference between the licit and illicit channel is often the entry point which allows the user to forge a network transmission without being detected. the hiddenness of sites like the now-defunct silk road and its subsequent dark web copies lies not only in the fact that the sites are untracked but also in the regular user’s inability to make their way there. the metaphorical use of tunneling in these instances renders access to opaque spaces as a function of possessing the know-how to find “the route” to get there. such know-how remains heavily coded as a white masculine enterprise of flaunting the rule of law for play and pleasure. to illustrate this metaphorical dynamic, consider one of the best digital culture examples where the “hiddenness” of tunnels lies in discovering a specific point of entry and where the ability to navigate such entries is celebrated as individual might: the console game grand theft auto v (rockstar games 2013). the fifth entry in the popular and polemical game series, grand theft auto v (gta v) takes place in the fictional region of san andreas and the fictional city of los santos, a reinvention of los angeles that is likewise filled with celebrities, crime, and extensive and complex highway systems. the game’s main story focuses on three male criminals’ plans for robbing the union depository, a bank filled with us$200 million. the trio find themselves fighting against and running from local police, corrupt federal agents using them to carry out their own agenda, and numerous rival gangs. throughout the game, they must complete a series of side heists, including carjacking and armed confrontations with other criminals, in their path to rob the union depository. during these missions, players race around the streets of los santos and the city’s extensive underground tunnel systems. the use of underground tunnels in the game offers the possibility of movement without surveillance from the authorities. tunnels signify the potential to operate below the threshold of visibility. by design, the police characters in the game are programmed to lack understanding of the vertical layers of the city. these non-playable characters (npcs) have the tools to track the player as they move in the horizontal plane yet cannot fathom where the player may be if they do not show up on the street. these illicit structures signal an alternative geography that is incompatible with the horizontal modes of viewing previously assumed by the forces of control. however, detection at the points of entry and exit to these tunnels is tantamount to the legibility of the underground. in grand theft auto v let’s play videos, users warn that tunnels are only a viable escape measure if a police car is not immediately behind the player when the player drives into the tunnel. players will warn that police npcs can only discover the underground tunnel system by directly following a player into the tunnel during a chase. game users thus post city maps from the game and indicate to others where the ideal entrance and exit points for these tunnel systems lie. on forums, users will share maps and offer suggestions on the entrances best suited to avoid detection (figure 1). players use these entrances to make last-minute decisions during a chase sequence. through their fan practices, these users build an alternative geography of the city, opening new pathways for its navigation.   figure 1. screen capture from reddit post by user areski, “the tunnels beneath ls are apparently a great place to hide out a bounty,” november 14, 2013, https://www.reddit.com/r/grandtheftautov/comments/1qly4f/the_tunnels_beneath_ls_are_apparently_a_great/   the coding of the npc police agents in gta v as oblivious to and unable to track the game city’s tunnels except by following the players into them reveals a key feature in the tunneling metaphor within digital culture. as opposed to physical tunnels, where the entire structure constitutes a separate channel for transportation, virtual tunnels operate materially with the same component parts as the channels deemed “above ground.” any given user’s opportunity to access these virtual tunnels, however, depends on the user’s capacity to find the point of entry and to access it undetected. likewise, the policing npcs’ capacity to discover and intervene in these unauthorized channels depends exclusively on following a player into the hidden “underground” system. given how heavily gta v is coded as a masculine world, this tactical mastery of space, understood in terms of exploiting spatial openings without alerting one’s enemies, operates as a form of macho one-upmanship. how these tunnel networks operate procedurally in gta v illustrates the metaphorical purchase of tunneling when referring to other illicit networks of connectivity whose access is coded as “enterprising” or “daring.” by reconfiguring the fact of different points of communication access into the imaginary of an entire virtual underground space, the tunneling metaphor affords a familiar way of figuring the social and political implications of a rather technical detail. using a tor browser to access and navigate the dark web likewise makes more sense as an entry into a “series of underground tunnels” than as a hub for transporting data from faraway servers through the use of specialized transmission protocols. this reconfiguration afforded by the tunnel metaphor extends from the points of entry to the entire network implied by the transnational connectivity of the internet. still, it is not a coincidence that the tunnel as a figure for representing mastery of space and for reconfiguring the flaunting of the law as pleasurable play would lend itself to the dynamics of a game like gta v. several game scholars have critiqued the game’s reinforcement of racist and misogynist stereotypes through its rules and design (leonard 2006; gray 2015). in particular, amanda phillips notes that the fact that san andreas draws heavily on the urban design of los angeles means understanding the virtual city in gta v as a “racialized geography” with “geometric division[s] of los santos into racial gang territories” (2020, 62). the restrictions imposed on which npcs can travel (or not) across the game’s geography illuminates its pervasive encoding of racial segregation. the presence of hidden underground tunnels that allow certain players to upend such segregations only to benefit the racist violence that the game enables demonstrates how the figure of the tunnel gets co-opted in digital cultures. tunneling to escape oppressive authorities shifts from a liberatory to a reactionary practice. whether in the dark web or in the gta virtual urban space, the use of tunnels to signify flaunting the rule of law evacuates the collective imaginaries of freedom and rebellion of the underground railroad image and transforms traversing hidden passageways as individualistic feats reserved for cunning users. further, such acts of traversing are often coded as white and male, distorting erstwhile resistant practices into the reinforcement of dominant norms. the imaginary of these hidden passageways as progressive resistance must be tempered by a critical evaluation of the types of flows they enable and the kinds of subjects who control access to such flows.   corridic structures and transnational geopolitics at a transnational scale, metaphorical tunnels in technoculture can render the complexity of the planet into a series of corridors enabling the smooth passage between two points. corridors are instruments of modernity that attend to speed, power, social differentiation, and the industrialization and corporatization of life. they function as “purpose-driven spaces” whose main function was to bring “man, building, and nation into a single optic” (jarzombek 2010, 751). in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the cultural imaginary of the corridor has expanded more powerfully to the realm of the geopolitical: urban corridors, pipeline corridors, supply corridors. supply corridors are an essential feature of understanding the organization of the world within the field of logistics, concerned with “the management of the movement of people and things in the interests of communication, transport, and economic efficiencies” (mezzadra and neilson 2013, 206). as sandro mezzadra and brett neilson explain, “the aim is not to eliminate differences but to work across them, to build passages and connections in an ever more fragmented world” (2013, 206). these passages are the global supply chains that, as deborah cowen (2014) analyzes, increasingly become fundamental to, if not interchangeable with, national security. the discourse of corridors in global logistics functions as a way to simplify an ever more fragmented world into linear, smooth passages between two faraway points. nowhere is the geopolitical reordering of the world into logistics corridors better figured as a tunnel than in a series of transnational films from the early twentieth century based on the novel der tunnel by the german author bernhard kellermann. der tunnel tells the story of the man who plans and builds an underground tunnel between europe and the united states, and all the filmic adaptations follow this basic premise faithfully. the book’s earliest cinematic iterations were the multi-language version films der tunnel and le tunnel (bernhardt 1933). multi-language film versions, or productions shot simultaneously in different languages with different casts, were common practice in the early years of film sound before the introduction of dubbing. while the plots of both films concern the planning and building of an underground tunnel between europe and the united states, the films’ production also embodies this transnational orientation. co-produced by vandor film in paris and bavaria film in munich and shot simultaneously in french and german, the films gestured at the potential and pitfalls of transnational solidarity in the years prior to the second world war. two years after these films, the british adaptation transatlantic tunnel (maurice elvey 1935) encoded the significance of the tunnel construction in broader geopolitical terms than its predecessors. a group of wealthy british and american industrialists invest in a scheme proposed by richard mcallan (our main character) to construct the tunnel between the united states and britain—a single undersea linear connection between two nations that the story presents as tantamount to “connecting the world.” the titular tunnel in this film operates as a transnational figural corridor that shapes the possibilities for imaging the geospatial organization of the world otherwise. as kate marshall (2013) demonstrates, modernist narratives employ the corridor to reflect on their own formal character. as a literary form, the corridor encodes in its own material structure the communicative aspects it represents: connection, movement, and division. because of its self-reflective formal character, the corridor reveals the aesthetic, technical, and political operations that go into its creation. in transatlantic tunnel, the film draws a direct connection between tunnel construction and international broadcasting, marrying the physical corridor with the appeal of uninterrupted connectivity across continents. the scene in question opens on a medium close-up of an outdoor speaker with the sky in the background. the announcer’s voice on the speaker indicates, “this is the outer wave broadcasting and television station calling the world.” as the announcer provides details about the tunneling project, the camera tilts down to reveal three levels of stairs leading up to the speaker. with skyscrapers visible in the background, the speaker tower thus appears as if it is monumental itself. the tilt down continues until the frame settles on an outdoor screen, framed inside a console as if it were a television the size of a house. on the screen we see the outer wave announcer and a camera behind him. the screened image dissolves into a look inside the transatlantic tunnel. “you are now looking at the latest completed sections on the english side,” says the announcer (figure 2). two more dissolves introduce the radium drill making the tunnel possible, first in a long shot and then in close-up. the announcer then introduces richard mcallen as the “presiding genius behind all this tremendous effort” and the “inspiration of thousands of workers.” “you’ve seen him spoken of, you’re now going to see him and hear him speak,” the announcer exclaims as another dissolve introduces richard being interviewed. as richard begins his speech, we finally cut from the outdoor console screen to a medium close-up of richard as he stands within the tunnel. a cut to a long shot reveals richard, a gaggle of reporters, the tunneling crew, and the cameraperson interviewing him in front of the radium drill. after cutting back to the medium close-up of richard, the film cuts to the american side of the transatlantic tunnel, where the worker crew stands around watching richard’s interview in another consoled screen about as high as a man (figure #3). richard ends his speech by claiming, “we’re on our way,” and the american workers cheer enthusiastically.   figures 2 and 3. screen grabs from transatlantic tunnel (1935)   throughout this scene, the editing and framing simulates visually the transnational connection that the story’s tunnel attempts to do diegetically. the focus on the “television” screens and the long-distance live broadcasting transport us from the unidentified urban setting to inside the british side of the tunnel then to inside the american side of the tunnel. along with interpellating the diegetic public (and the audience) as “the world,” the scene presents what would have been at the time a futuristic medium to introduce another futuristic infrastructure: the television and the transatlantic tunnel represent for the 1935 audience similarly novel channels of connection. indeed, the ny times reviewer for the film briefly mentions the irony that “the prophets at gaumont-british lay their engineering triumph in the not-too-distant future when television and trans-atlantic passenger service by plane have become practicable” (sennwald 1935). cutting into the television frame as the way to transport into the british side of the tunnel and then connecting to the american side via the giant screen renders the technical affordances of television (long-distance wireless broadcasting) through the formal affordances of cinema (spatial and temporal matches through continuity editing). the fact that most of the scene has us watching the footage of the tunnel through the frame of the television cements the parallel between audiovisual media and underground transportation. this screen is the symbolic window into the world just as the tunnel is meant to be the physical thruway across the world. in transatlantic tunnel, the figure of the tunnel translates the technical capacity for media access into an aspiration for undoing geopolitical divisions. not only was this aspiration particularly poignant in the interwar years, but it is also one that continues throughout the history of audiovisual media in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. each new medium navigates the promise of transgressing boundaries while contending with its own emergent technical limitations. understanding the discursive work of the tunnel metaphor illustrates how media intervenes in these desires for unfettered transnational connection in aesthetic, technical, and political terms. similar to many mainstream histories of technological disruption and change (bailey 2011), the construction of this technologically sophisticated tunnel here is coded in gendered terms. there are only minor women characters in the film and the major thrust of the narrative lies in the sole man’s quest to finance and carry out his transatlantic plan. crucially, the tunnel in transatlantic tunnel is also coded in strict class terms. the designer and executor of the tunnel is an affluent british man funded by wealthy industrialists. the constructors of the tunnel itself, who have no speaking roles, are coded as working-class laborers. given the film’s emphasis on drawing parallels between the tunnel construction and transnational telecommunications, these workers are, metaphorically, not only cogs in the machine but also electromagnetic pulses. indeed, at the end of the scene described above, the foreman on the american side of the tunnel motivates his workers by reminding them that the boss man on the other side is waiting for them. such class-stratified positions vis-à-vis technological change may seem quaint when viewed through an early twentieth-century film. still, such dynamics continue to permeate twenty-first-century discourses. consider the dedicated online fan bases of wealthy technologists such as elon musk and jeff bezos, fans who perceive these silicon valley capitalists as individual, ambitious “geniuses.” musk, in particular, has been notorious for proposing (and failing) to build exclusive underground tunnels to make driving electric cars smoother and easier for the wealthy elite who can afford them (cao 2021). the evocation of figurative and literal tunnels as corridors for ease of travel continues to imply hierarchies of class, creating exclusive channels for those with the means to build their separate forms of connectivity. at the same time, such exclusive focus on the individual genius of affluent white men diverts attention from the thousands of laborers upon whose work these purported technological achievements rely upon.   boundary crossing as user-friendly practice at its most basic, the main function of bordering formations is to sort and redirect movement. border metaphors remain compelling in technoculture because the logics of traffic management in online connectivity owe much to the (often forceful) selection and redirection of movement that occurs at geopolitical boundaries. traffic consists of flows and blockages, where these blockages serve to direct the flows. the dominant logic here is thus not of access and trespass, but of sorting. sorting implies management, modulation, and regulation rather than inclusion and exclusion. for instance, immigration documents such as passports, visas, and permits are structured as a series of barriers that sort people out even before arriving at the border. when an individual is not permitted entry, they are sent to another location, or back to their country of provenance. sorting implies that movement is constant and extensive. methods of securitization are therefore attuned to redirect, to steer the movement away, around, or besides rather than stop the movement altogether. in computer science, a sorting network is an algorithm that organizes a fixed number of values using a set sequence of comparisons. it is called a network because the basic model is a series of lines and comparator modules—of edges and nodes. the input values flow across the lines. each comparator connects two lines, compares the values coming in through the lines, and outputs the smaller value to one line and the larger to the other. the sorting network is thus the simplest example of what the logic of traffic entails: values flow through lines, arrive at checkpoints that evaluate them, and then continue sorted into their intended lines. in a larger scale, traffic consists of this process, repeated infinitely, in what alexander galloway (2014) terms an “infuriated” manner—distributed, multiple, asymmetrical, rhizomatic. sorting serves as traffic’s protocol, as the distributed management systems that allow control to exist within the heterogeneous material milieu of global networks. tunneling then is the contravention of these protocols, distorting the sorting mechanisms within the network, preventing them from selecting what is authorized or unauthorized and thereby impeding them form redirecting their flows. if the distributed network is all-encompassing, there is no thinking of an inside and outside. there is only the network that comes alive when traffic occurs within it. the very “liveness” of the network depends on the existence of traffic, yet traffic is also trafficking: the movement of unauthorized data that sorting mechanisms hope to redirect likewise keeps the network live. indeed, the classification of such data as unauthorized or illicit is a result of the sorting mechanism itself. the process of securitization at play is not stopping the traffic/trafficking, but devising methods to identify and redirect flows accordingly. undesirable connections must be somehow tracked, marked, and regulated. if the dynamic network exists through process, as galloway and thacker argue in the exploit (2007), it depends on the transit of both licit and illicit traffic to bring it forth. stopping that transit altogether would bring about the demise of the network itself. control must take shape in forms that allow for distributed formations and movement. tunneling extends this dialectical struggle between sophisticated methods of sorting and more robust tactics of sorting contravention into a global geopolitical scale. if global traffic depends on the movement of flows, then its sorting should take place at the traffic blockages, which manage the information about the flows and make the necessary redirections. within a framework of borders and container states, sorting takes place at the border, whether this is the single boundary or the disaggregated border at a distance. at the border, some are let through while others are not. yet, within a framework of traffic and tunnels, these blockages act less as the sites for management and more as the inducers of movement. tunneling is an exploit: it consists of “discovering holes in existent technologies and projecting potential change through those holes” (galloway and thacker 2007, 81). it leverages the increasing dependence of geopolitical actors and institutions on icts for border securitization by exploiting the protocols these technologies rely on. if sorting necessitates legibility, then tunneling contravenes sorting mechanisms firstly by way of illegibility. without interpretation, traffic cannot be sorted. traffic and trafficking become one and the same. a simple case study for navigating the discourses surrounding the internet’s complex sorting of traffic and trafficking nowadays are virtual private networks (vpns), which allow users to encrypt data sent and received across public networks, acting as if connected to a private network and granting differential levels of access, privacy, or security. popular commercial user-friendly vpns, aka consumer-friendly vpns, run the gamut of technical sophistication and affordability, revealing the growing demand for these services. the service that vpns offer to users is protection from the negative side effects of using other commercial platforms: namely, a response to rampant user tracking and data collection. at the same time, these vpns rely on users’ familiarity with popular consumer interface design to make the technical service they provide appealing and manageable to everyday users. the mediatory function of consumer-friendly vpns thus lies in negotiating the contradictions between the illusion of security (“these platforms protect you from other platforms’ data collection”) with ease of usability (“these platforms are as easy to use as other platforms”). popular commercial vpns engage in a process of aesthetic resignification in order to obfuscate the technical sophistication of traffic management. one of their central features is to make accessible a practice that was once reserved for users with knowledge of coding. to transform this specialized technical knowledge into something legible to everyday users, vpns rely first on branding. clever mascots analogize encrypted data transfer to commonly known animal behaviors: the gopher from mullvad, for instance, already implies the tunneling aspirations of its platform. the toronto-based vpn tunnelbear reinforces, in name and in image, the amalgam of infrastructure and mascot to counter the lack of common-sense association between both (figure 4). tunnelbear’s advertising features not only the bear but also the tunnel as the figure performing the functions offered by the service. the bear relies on the yellow tunnel to get the user from one side of the globe to another. in its dual mascot, tunnelbear cutifies the infrastructure by association with its cute animal avatar, reaffirming sianne ngai’s argument that “cuteness names an aesthetic encounter with an exaggerated difference in power” (2005, 813). it is an aesthetic rendering of the unequal structuring of the internet and of a possible measure to undo such structures. the world is literally cut open in one of tunnelbear’s promotional images, its tunnels zigzagging across the center of the globe to create new avenues for travel and connectivity (figure 5). when the service promises users to “experience an open and global internet,” it simultaneously reminds them that the internet is neither open nor global most of the time (llamas-rodriguez 2017).   figures 4 and 5. screen grabs from tunnelbear promotional materials, https://www.tunnelbear.com/   the aestheticization of vpns not only responds to branding efforts but also promotes a discourse of risk management. vpns simultaneously make evident the risks of tracking traffic through commercial platforms and offer a simple way for users to respond. in this way, vpns represent a distinct change in public discourse from anti-virus software of the web 1.0 era, where the threat was external to the medium for engaging with the online sphere. the data-collecting practices of popular service platforms represent the threat consumers want to avoid, and another set of platforms (vpns) represent the solution to deal with such a threat. vpns perpetuate the development of platform capitalism by mitigating consumers’ most notable reticence towards commercial platforms while simultaneously perpetuating the consumption practices and infrastructural structures that support these new economies. like the tunnel metaphor, the vpn reminds users that the channels for opaque or visible, restricted or unfettered connectivity are ultimately the same ones. while technical complexity once meant that only people with sophisticated coding expertise could bypass existing geoblocks, the rise of consumer-friendly vpns has made this type of circumvention more tenable—but at a price. technical expertise has been replaced, once again, with financial power. who is in charge of these channels, how they regulate these channels, and what struggles enable the retaking of control over such channels, become a class-differentiated enterprise. the metaphor of tunneling in the promotional material for tunnelbear reductively illustrates basic functionalities such as masking a user’s ip address, but productively signals how spatializing power differentials facilitates their critique. if borders have become dynamic, as didier bigo (2008) argues, then tunneling takes advantage of this fluctuation to allow for previously restricted traffic flow—but only temporarily. the dynamism of borders does not imply a disequilibrium: tunneling creates potentialities that are eventually foreclosed again. the time it takes to “cross the tunnel”—to transfer whatever communication was previously prevented by virtual borders—is one and the same as the time that this tunneling protocol is active. acknowledging the “stretch of time” that tunneling entails means realizing that the structural imperatives that make tunneling necessary remain in place, disturbed but not disrupted (llamas-rodriguez 2016). the temporality of tunneling shows the structures of power of the internet beyond their spatial characteristics. it also reveals the internet’s power-chronographies, or how time is “worked on and differentially experienced at the intersections of inequity” (sharma 2014, 13). because time is produced at the intersection of a range of social differences and institutions, tunneling exhibits not only how users experience these power differentials based on their geographical location but also how they constitute themselves in time. affluent users can afford vpns that enable them to access content instantly and to “travel” around the world without detection, and technologically savvy users can pursue this invisible, unfettered connectivity even faster. crossing the technical boundaries of the internet becomes a simple, user-friendly practice for select users. making sense of the borders of the internet and the “tunneling” tactics that allow privileged groups but not others to navigate it therefore means understanding the cultural geography and the cultural chronography of the internet. when, and for how long, any user can connect over the internet undisturbed is a consequence of their economic or cultural capital.   conclusion the tunnel metaphor as i have theorized it in this article does not exhaust all the ways that tunnels, physically and figuratively, mediate ideologies about gender, race, class, and citizenship in contemporary times. indeed, the risk of physical border tunnels from a white-nationalist perspective is not only about the flow of goods and information but about the fear of global south subjects moving and receiving opportunities only intended for the global north privileged citizens (llamas-rodriguez 2020). tunnellers in the u.s.-mexico border context, for example, are presented as basic technologists—“smugglers with shovels and pickaxes,” as anthropologist howard campbell facetiously puts it (quoted in woodhouse 2015)—a highly racialized distinction meant to contrast with the illusion of technological mastery performed by the nation-state agents hoping to shut those tunnels down. numerous others scholars have also identified how different media forms and surveillance technologies engage with the figure of the tunnel to explore questions of access, privilege, and (in)security across geographical and historical contexts (elden 2013; walker 2013; weizman 2007). still, the selective instances of media tunnels from the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries explored in this article illustrate how the tunneling metaphor puts forth specific ideals about global interconnectivity as enabled by media technologies. whether in mapping entry points as underground resistance, corridoricity as geopolitical structuring, or boundary crossing as user-friendly practice, tunneling serves as a metaphor to understand the struggles over networked communication cultures. these examples reveal the tunnel’s figural work as enduring throughout the emergence of new media forms and practices, from science fiction film to console video games to consumer-friendly vpns. the tunnels in gta v, transatlantic tunnel, and tunnelbear remain figural representations that nonetheless articulate very real concerns. in contrast to tunnels in the physical world, the “tunnel”-ness of these representations remains primarily symbolic yet still significant for how it gives shape to otherwise amorphous and abstract issues. the physical characteristics of tunnels facilitate this understanding by “giving shape” to their virtual representations. the implied underground nature of tunnels raises questions about visibility and invisibility as well as the dynamics of transit that mediate between such states. as we see in gta v, the opacity of underground structures lies not in their literal invisibility but in their un-mappability: npcs cannot pursue or capture players inside tunnels unless the characters can map their way into these underground structures. the implied corridoricity of tunnels as a straight connector between two faraway places points us to how often geopolitical structures conceive of the planet as a series of lines and points. the tunnel in transatlantic tunnel offers the crudest version of this conception as a literal construction across continents, yet the idea of this smooth transit continues nowadays in various techniques of trade and war. underground-ness and corridoricity, in turn, feed into the common application of the tunneling metaphor as simplified boundary crossing. in tunnelbear, the tunnel helps explain the sorting functions of ip management, as well as their contravention, by drawing on comparisons to physical fences and tunneling underneath them. each of these examples, then, both simplify the technical and conceptual frameworks undergirding media-enabled forms of connection and expose the ideological underpinnings of fantasies of interconnectivity at the same time. another simplification at play in these metaphorical uses of the tunnel to understand transnational networked connectivity is the reduction of emergence and control over the internet (and its globally reaching technological antecedents) to individual instances of mastery figured as white, male, and wealthy. underground resistance through tunnels becomes appropriated into playful instances of unlawful mischief in white masculine video games. transgressing commercial barriers becomes coded as aggressive posturing in consumer-friendly vpns. the geopolitical restructuring of the world into transnational tunnels abets the interests of the upper-class elite in the science fiction film. in reality, however, underprivileged and ostracized populations continuously find creative exploits to circumvent communication restrictions and to access new technologies, yet these efforts are seldom imagined as feats of mastery. when non-white, poor subjects manage to cross technological boundaries, they are merely seen as “smugglers with shovels and pickaxes.” in emergent technocultures, the metaphorical purchase of the tunnel as spatial restructuring often enables the reinforcement of whiteness, masculinity, and wealth as the norms under the guise of inventiveness, innovation, and rebellion. yet it need not be that way. alternative, subaltern forms of tunneling are not only possible but 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underground: an essay on technology, society, and the imagination. cambridge, ma: mit press. woodhouse, murphy. 2015. “nogales is still tunnel capital, despite decline in busts.” nogales international, october 2, 2015. http://www.nogalesinternational.com/news/nogales-is-still-tunnel-capital-despite-decline-in-busts/article_db33c082-6890-11e5-a3d4-b78ca081ea7c.html.     author bio juan llamas-rodriguez is an assistant professor in the annenberg school for communication at the university of pennsylvania.     book review book review | transmissions: critical tactics for making and communicating research, edited by kat jungnickel (mit press, 2020)     rebecca rouse university of skövde, sweden rebecca.rouse@his.se     transmissions: critical tactics for making and communicating research, edited by kat jungnickel, brings together scholars to examine the question of how research communication or transmission can be innovated. in the introduction, jungnickel explains that the mission of the book is to investigate how researchers’ notions about the ultimate form their contributions will take (journal article, art installation, documentary film, etc.) recursively influence the research process and outcome itself. jungnickel rightly points out that a lack of “attention has been given to how the dissemination of research delimits what kind of research can be done” (2). the collection is divided into four sections, themed “critical discomfort,” “public-making,” “holding ambiguity,” and “evoking the sensory.” the chapters in these sections report on a broad range of research-in-practice outputs. contributions include art installations, creative writing, and performances. most works in the collection belong to the emerging category of artworks made by researchers in fields that do not commonly entail making or practice as part of their scholarly work, such as sociology, anthropology, ethnography, ecology, and informatics.   while projects featured in the book span a wide range, many do conform to a common set of characteristics readers may recognize as stemming from early twentieth-century modernist avant-garde and conceptual art practices. examples include a set of kinetic sculptures made from salvaged materials (mchardy and jungnickel); a discussion of scholarly writing as an oppressive form (watts); reconstruction of a historical dress (jungnickel); a participatory art exhibit for children based on minecraft (hjorth and richardson); a search for plastiglomerates on a beach with no reasonable expectation of finding them, and a worm composting project without proper equipment (lindström and ståhl); discussion of a conceptual art project on air quality as citizen science (calvillo); a meditation on the ethics of participatory performance art (jeffries); a piece on science fiction writing as feminist “invitalizing”—a portmanteau of inviting and revitalizing (kember); and a sound ethnography project in which researchers record their own environments (lippman). these projects are welcome forays into the world of making for researchers whose own new engagement in the domain of material practice injects their work with excitement and energy. moving forward, connection with other scholars and disciplines with long-standing traditions of making and doing accompanied by theoretical work such as performance studies (taylor 2016), theatre studies (bogart 2003), architecture (peponis 2018), and public history (parry 2013) would further strengthen this research approach.   as a collective, the projects do indeed move beyond materials-as-metaphors in research practice. project descriptions are rich with detail, particularly about researchers’ own intent and interpretations. the intricacies and difficulties of making, fabrication, and documentation processes are also discussed at length. these descriptions and reflections reaffirm that the making process can certainly be a powerful tool for self-learning and exploration. taken as a group, these projects may be valuable to the researchers themselves, for their own exploration and knowledge creation, especially when coupled with questions that could further their critical and creative depth, such as who benefits most from this work? what is the impact of this work beyond the researcher? who is doing the labor to create this work? how does this work relate to work in other disciplines that have long histories of making things in the world? why should the work be written about now, when it already has been transmitted in material form?   there is an inherent irony, of course, in a book publication examining modes of research transmission that seek to push beyond the confines of the codex, as these multidimensional research works are pressed into text-and-image form to fit between the pages of the book. however, this contortion may be a reflection of the truly restrictive nature of some disciplines, in which research in practice is undervalued or even punished. unsurprisingly, the strongest contributions in the volume are the two chapters that explicitly engage the reader in novel or unexpected ways through the medium of the book itself.   max liboiron’s chapter, “exchanging,” stands out as a particularly well-executed and thought-provoking work in the collection. liboiron opens the chapter with a description of their series of participatory art exhibitions that invite visitors to take home components from the installation, provided they leave something of equal or greater value in return. liboiron articulates the research question at the core of these installations as “what modes of valuation, besides those recognized by capitalism, are already among us?” (91). in examining the ways in which installation visitors think about valuation, exchange, and reciprocity by inviting them into performative action, liboiron is able to demonstrate that “we do not need geniuses and accredited economists to imagine a radically different future—it is already among us” (90). excitingly, the chapter then takes a sharp turn to address you, the reader, directly, demarcating the remainder of the chapter as only available for what liboiron terms the “reciprocating reader.” prompts and blank spaces are provided in the following pages, along with an insightful discussion on extractive reading practices, which liboiron connects to “one kind of knowledge transmission (acquisition)” (103). they point out that within academia acquisition is weaponized as appropriation to “flatten the epistemological horizon” and violently diminish the contributions of researchers with marginalized social identities such as women, queer people, bipoc people, and disabled people (liboiron 103). this flattening preserves the white supremacist nature of “canons” in disciplinary literatures, and maintains oppressive power structures within academia (103). inventively, the reader is called beyond reflection or awareness-raising into reciprocal knowledge exchange with liboiron, even to the provocative point of being invited to assume co-authorship, and cite the chapter itself on their own cv.   similarly, bonnie mak and julia pollack’s chapter, “cataloging,” provides the reader with an inventive, participatory approach to accessing their research on information history. with text divided into two columns, the chapter provides two pathways or narrative threads for the reader to follow. a slimmer column of text traces the history of bibliographical structures, both material and conceptual. the history of the development of the library card catalog is illuminated, from its sixteenth-century origins to its eventual transformation to the computer medium in the 1960s. a larger column of text describes mak and pollack’s collaborative research examining the power of the catalog as “interface between a user and a collection,…entangled in and as part of knowledge” (229). as an orchestrator of knowledge configuration, the catalog is understood as more than a set of paper cards—indeed, the catalog is refigured as a worldbuilding machine. directing the reader to the back of the volume, mak and pollack have enclosed a set of creatively designed catalog cards for the reader to engage with. these cards represent not only the series of multimedia works the authors collaborated on over a span of years, but also key works of scholarship that informed their research, and even a card citing a woodworking diagram. three exercises are suggested to the reader for interaction with the cards, each providing opportunity for a deeper learning experience on the topic of the power of the catalog in knowledge production. providing the reader with this creative material engagement powerfully demonstrates the fascinating, messy, culturally and historically entangled nature of the catalog in a way that descriptive text alone could not.   liboiron’s and mak and pollack’s chapters are excellent demonstrations of research-in-practice transmitted through the codex form in innovative, impactful ways. these two chapters are thoughtfully and meticulously constructed to maximize the potentials of the book format, while also playfully, and most importantly, meaningfully subverting the medium itself. while writing in a book is not new, liboiron’s invitation to then cite yourself as a co-author brings up vital and important questions about the ethics of citation, knowledge production, and valuation that are key to addressing the challenges to justice in academia and the world at large. mak and pollack’s chapter likewise resonates with this discussion of the ethics of citation, and the power of information structures to generate (or erase) knowledge. both chapters point to the ways in which information structures and their accompanying cultural valuation have the power to make or (re)make worlds, visions that could not be more relevant during this moment of global upheaval, but are of ongoing necessity for scholars and students to engage with as we continue to consider what kind of world our research is making, and if it is the kind of world we want to live in.   references bogart, anne. 2003. a director prepares: seven essays on art and theatre. new york: routledge. parry, ross, ed. 2013. museums in a digital age. new york: routledge. peponis, john. 2018. “what does the syntax of space say? understanding and designing buildings as interfaces.” world architecture review 179: 33–41. taylor, diana. 2016. performance. durham, nc: duke university press.   author bio rebecca rouse, phd is a senior lecturer in the division of game development at the university of skövde, sweden, researching both the history and practice of storytelling with new technologies. rouse creates projects with new modes of storytelling, and conducts historical research into connections of today’s media with the past.     special section: global fertility chains and the colonial present of assisted reproductive technologies anarcha’s science of the flesh: towards an afropessimist theory of science     john gillespie jr. university of california, irvine jgilles1@uci.edu     abstract this essay re-examines the life of the three enslaved black “women” anarcha, lucy and betsy at the hands of the acclaimed “father of modern gynecology” j. marion sims through the lens of afropessimism as a means of developing a new analytics of seeing modern scientific development. through a critical black studies engagement with the work of bruno latour and steve woolgar, the paper sets out to explain and expand the concept of ‘primitive accreditation’ as it relates to the foundational narratives and performances of violence constitutive of the modern scientific conceptual economy. through paradigmatic analysis, the essay aims to antagonize the ease in which anti-blackness coheres bio-centric notions of gender, sexuality, and humanity as well as suggest that science studies as a field has not yet wrestled with the gender/genre question of blackness as a problem for the axioms of thought and being.     keywords afropessimism, science studies, gender, blackness, anti-blackness, sylvia wynter, bruno latour     the life of anarcha: an analytics of seeing   we need to develop a different analytics of seeing—an alternative hermeneutic method for studying the political economy of spectacularized black death. —tyrone palmer, “devouring the flesh: notes of analytics of seeing”   it was 1845 in montgomery, alabama. three black “women” were sent by their slave masters to see dr. j marion sims to be treated for vesicovaginal fistulas. their names were anarcha, lucy, and betsy. they are named property. their stories come to the foreground of the historical record in contradistinction to the nine other objects-of-study that j. marion sims experimented on. anarcha, lucy, and betsy were all young enslaved black “women” who suffered from vesicovaginal fistulas as a result of an attempted childbirth. vesicovaginal fistulas comes about as a result of the infant’s head pressing against the pelvic floor, cutting off all circulation to the vaginal tissue. vesicovaginal fistulas was a condition that women of all races and classes could suffer from. a condition that the logic of white feminism could attend to. deborah mcgregor writes, “vesicovaginal fistulas joined with childbearing to create an image of ‘suffering womanhood.’ as a specifically defined condition, ‘vesicovaginal fistula’ gained meaning through the relations between male physicians and their women patients. these broad strokes create an image of a universal femininity, but in actuality the historical experience varied” (1998, 33). black “women,” however, were excluded from “the image of universal femininity” (mcgregor 1998, 33). the image of universal femininity, and the image of the universal itself has always refused and antagonized the gender of blackness. it is for this reason that the life of anarcha, lucy, and betsy cannot be narrated into the context of this universal femininity without a structural adjustment to the abject condition of blackness. for, as c. riley snorton states, “though sims would recursively euphemize the condition as an ‘accident,’ vesicovaginal fistula functioned as a sign of slavery, as signifier and signified in a chain of meaning, to give expression to what saidiya hartman (1997, 101) described as the ‘erasure or disavowal of sexual violence [that] engendered black femaleness as a condition of unredressed injury’” (2017, 19). placing blackness within the discourse of universal femininity is violent because it erases the fact of the black captive whose “metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, their customs and the sources on which they were based” (fanon 2008, 90) has been submerged under an ontological violence that separated the black from the human. or put differently, anarcha, lucy, and betsy cannot be universally feminine nor universally humanized without denying the fact that their being, as a result of the paradigm shifting violence of the formation of the transatlantic slave trade, is what hortense spillers calls a “being-for-the-captor” (1987, 67). for the condition of blackness, as a result of that metaphysical holocaust where “africans [went] into the ships and [came] out as blacks” (wilderson iii 2010, 38) lends itself to fungibility, abjection, and objectification. as frantz fanon puts it, being, for the black, is a being as “an object among other objects” (2008, 89).   the slave masters of anarcha, lucy, and betsy were cognizant of the role that their black flesh played in entrenching a system of slavery, and this cognizance disposes any appeal to white moralism in the context of anarcha, lucy, and betsy’s appointment with j. marion sims. anarcha, lucy, and betsy were suffering from a condition that had implications on the entire system of slavery. for the biomedical condition of vesicovaginal fistulas was a nuisance for the condition of blackness as property, and the law that structures that condition—partus sequitur ventrem—thus creating a white dilemma. for the black “woman’s” body was more than the site of ontological incapacity, as frank b. wilderson iii has described it, for it was also the site where ontological incapacity was supposed to be reproduced. black feminist historian dorothy roberts writes, “female slaves were commercially valuable to their masters not only for their labor, but also for their ability to produce more slaves” (1999, 24). anarcha, lucy, and betsy’s vesicovaginal fistulas limited their masters’ power and dominion, and their surrogate bodies became less valuable to their masters insofar as their wombs were made to reproduce fungibility. anarcha, for example, labored for three days without delivering her child. and after enduring the pain and suffering of labor pains for three days, dr. sims was finally called by her master to attempt to utilize forceps to allow the child to be born. it was not until five days after the child’s birth and death that anarcha started to experience the symptoms of vesicovaginal fistulas. it was not until extensive tissue damage was done that anarcha’s master decided to bring her to see sims again. with the help of the development of a speculum that allowed him to, in his own words, see “everything, as no man had seen before” (mcgregor 1998, 49), marion sims turned the bodies of anarcha, lucy, and betsy into objects of experimentation.   sims opened the experiments to the purview of his medical colleagues. in the first few months of the experiments, montgomery, alabama physicians attended the operations. and although, this practice of public medical operations was common, the fact that sims’s public operations were being practiced on “women” would had typically suggested procedures of privacy. in other words, the victorian sexual ethics would not have permitted the “medical gaze” (foucault 1973, 29) to access public experimentation on white women’s bodies; however, sims was not experimenting on white women. as multiple medical experiments led to failure, and the shrieks of his patients continued, the physicians’ attendance decreased, eventually leaving sims alone with his protégé, dr. nathan bozeman, and his objects-of-experimentation. sims’s autobiography includes him saying, “i thought she (lucy) was going to die,” in reference to a near-death experience, descriptions of difficult surgeries due to patient suffering, and even voluntary resistance of the patient, all giving one reason to believe that the technicity of his experimentation was one of scientific horror (ojanuga 1993, 29). for this reason, harriet washington’s account seems to speak closer to the indecipherable grammar of the slave: “the surgeries themselves were terribly painful. not only had sims to close the unnatural openings in the ravaged vaginal tissues; he had to make the edges of these openings knit together. he opted to abrade, or ‘scarify’ the edges of the vaginal tears every time he attempted to repair an opening. he then closed them with sutures and saw them become infected and reopen, painfully, every time” (2006, 65). eventually, sims forced his objects to take turns restraining each other while the experiment continued for four anesthesia-less years. and whereas though sims professed that the nature of the experimentation for vesicovaginal fistulas was “not painful enough to justify the trouble [of anesthetic] and risk attending the administration” (mcgregor 1998, 50), an interrogation of the positionality that structures this discursive and material maneuver leads one to conclude that this notion was constructed through white fantasies of black “women’s” resilience towards pain and an indifference to black grammars of suffering. for whenever sims attempted to assist white women who had vesicovaginal fistulas after the surgical “success” of his experiments on black “women,” sims utilized anesthetics. however, he never felt the need to utilize the same anesthetics for his black patients. instead, sims would experiment on them while sober and awake, and then, once the failed experiment was over, he would give them opium. and, “as a consequence lucy, anarcha, and betsy were undoubtedly habituated to opium, at least to some degree” (mcgregor, 1998, 51). after four years and thirty surgeries, sims eventually closed anarcha’s fistula. in 1852 sims wrote a paper about the vesicovaginal fistulas repair published in the american journal of the medical science. this closing and this publication made sims “the father of modern gynecology” (ojanuga 1993; mcgregor 1998, 1990; sartin 2004; washington 2006).   the anti-story of anarcha, lucy, and betsy presents the project of modern science with a theodicy of its own. using afropessimist metatheory, as a paradigmatic analysis, i argue that the anti-story of anarcha, lucy, and betsy illustrates the ways in which scientific development requires a primitive accreditation—where the fungibility of the black was/is used to produce and accumulate scientific knowledge credit. blackness as the antithesis to the human in modern onto-ethico-epistemology1 does not get access to a modern nor a postmodern position in reference to the world writ-large. the black can only be anti-modern or nonmodern since black being in modernity is (non)being, thingification, or, in the words of anthony paul farley (2004), blackness is “the apogee of the commodity.” here, i place quotations around “women” when referring to the gender-specificity of the black in order to leave open the possibility that the category itself might be questionable for reasons that will hopefully become clearer as the essay moves forward.   for now, it is important to note that the incredulity begins with spiller’s pivotal essay, “mama’s baby, papa maybe: an american grammar book” and is extended by snorton’s crucial work on anarcha, lucy, betsy, and j. marion sims in black on both sides. the concept of ungendering-as-black-gendering is crucial to my exploration. i take as axiomatic what snorton states about black positionality—namely, that, “from this vantage point, one could consider the various ways ‘gender’ functions as an effect of plantation visuality, wherein captive flesh expressed an ungendered position that defines race as the sine qua non of sex” (snorton 2017, 33). such a formulation centers black gender as ungendered while simultaneously destabilizing the distinctions between race, gender, and sexuality. that blackness, and the study of blackness, renders disciplinary boundaries unsustainable becomes unavoidably clear, if only one is willing to take seriously these claims from radical black feminist and trans studies. in this essay, i hope to extend the suspicion that black feminist and trans studies generates in disciplinary divisions in the study of blackness to the field of science studies itself—not in hopes of inclusion, but in hopes of dissolving metaphysical illusions around the figure of the black. i cross out life in reference to anarcha, lucy, and betsy for the same reasons that i use the terms “anti-story” to characterize the narrative shared here. i gather this phrase “anti-story” from a reading of wilderson’s critique of the structure of narrative and the implications of this critique on the possibility of black redress and redemption. wilderson’s argument, simplifying to the extreme, situates black narrative capacity within a kind of in media res that begins antagonistically against the normative structure of narrative which presupposes redress, redemption, coherence, and progress. the narratological precepts that ground the axioms of progress presuppose a previous moment of equilibrium for the class of subjects subjected to what wilderson would classify as contingent violence. wilderson writes in his “social death and narrative aporia in 12 years a slave” (2015) about how humanist narratology flowing from equilibrium to disequilibrium to equilibrium restored functions as the hegemonic model of narration. this is a mode of narration that undergirds the narrative logics of humanist “scientific progress and development.” the scientific production of the scientific human—homo scientificus (ferreira da silva 2007)—then not only produced “blackness [as] coterminous with slaveness” (wilderson iii 2015, 139), it continues to unfold its narratological precepts of progress only by virtue of the foreclosure of black narration, or the anti-story of black life—“a flat line that moves from disequilibrium to a moment in the narrative of faux-equilibrium, to disequilibrium restored and/or rearticulated” (139).   science to the slave/the black, who is the object-used-for-investigation, is an apparatus that exploits and expropriates. scientific knowledge accumulates via the expropriation and exploitation of black flesh. this is not a historical analysis, but a paradigmatic analysis in that—even if it is the case that black flesh is not still being experimented on (which it is not)—black death and mutilation kick-started the narrative of modern scientific progress, and as far as it continues to “progress” it continues upon the ground of dead and dying black flesh. wilderson, writing in what is his most significant work red, white & black: cinema and the structure of u.s. antagonisms states, “no slave, no world” (2010, 11). this paper will extend that powerful aphorism to the domain of science itself. in other words, no slave, no science. science studies has left this issue unattended to as the grammar of this suffering is left in fleshly hieroglyphics.2 only a new analytics of seeing, a new way of looking, could allow one to see the primitive accreditation at the heart of western scientific development. this notion of “primitive accreditation” is the scientific and conceptual translation to the marxist notion of primitive accumulation. whereas primitive accumulation in marxist political economy seeks to provide explanatory power for the originating violence responsible for the circulation of capital under capitalism, what primitive accreditation seeks to describe is the paradigm-shaping violence that inaugurates the scientific conceptual economy as it gets laid out and described by steve woolgar and bruno latour in their classic text of science, technology, and society studies, laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts.   in what follows, i read latour and woolgar’s contribution to science, technology and society studies in and through the work of hortense spillers, sylvia wynter, saidiya hartman, frank wilderson, and calvin warren to argue that anti-black violence is not a peripheral component to the accumulation of gynecological knowledge; rather, it is central to the primitive accreditation of scientific knowledge in general, with gynecological knowledge providing a paradigmatic account to the indispensable fact of anti-blackness to the conceptual economy of modern science. gynecological development requires primitive accreditation or, the originary site for the cycle of scientific credit—where the fungibility of the black was used to produce and accumulate knowledge credit, a possibility made possible only via the prospect and specter of black death and anti-black violence. thus if the western medico-scientific community is a departmental fixture of institutionalized anti-blackness, an institution solidified and concocted through the birth of modernity and the onto-ethico-epistemic curation of humanism, then, like fanon, we thinkers of a radical black studies, must “not remain silent about certain things which…produce consequences that extend into the domains of other sciences” (fanon 2008, 31). here, we look to retell the story of gynecological science on the foundations of the anti-narrative of anarcha, lucy, and betsy in order to offer an afropessimist reading of scientific development and knowledge accumulation at the heart of one of the most controversial medico-scientific knowledge developments. anti-black violence produces the consequence that conditions the possibility of modern gynecology. and if, “every experience, especially if it turns out to be sterile, has to become a component of reality and thus play a part in the restructuring of reality” (fanon 2008, 31), then the anti-story of anarcha, lucy, and betsy has to be retold. for, “we need a new language of abstraction to explain this horror” (wilderson iii 2010, 55), a scientific, philosophical, and ontological horror that renders the grammars of black suffering unspeakable.   a theodicy of science: science of the flesh and primitive accreditation latour and woolgar write in laboratory life, an anthropological account of scientific activity, that “for our laboratory scientist, credit had a much wider sense than simple reference to reward. in particular, their use of credit suggest an integrated economic model of the production of facts” (2013, 194). for latour and woolgar, the notion of credit permeates the scientific field of study as means of determining one’s place within the scientific community and the nature of fact creation itself. the importance of latour and woolgar’s investigation into credit is the distinction they draw between credit as reward and credit as credibility. whereas the former “refers to the sharing of rewards and awards which symbolize peers’ of a past scientific achievement,” the latter, “concerns scientists’ abilities to actually do science” (198). this is important because “the notion of credibility can thus apply both to the very substance of scientific production (facts) and to the influence of external factors, such as money and institutions. the notion of credibility allows the sociologist to relate external factors to internal factors and vice versa. the same notion of credibility can be applied to scientists’ investment strategies, to epistemological theories, to the scientific reward system, and to scientific education” (198). in other words, latour and woolgar’s notion of credibility encompasses the entire scientific field itself in order to organize the ways in which facts are produced and credit is obtained according to a model similar to a market-based economy.   latour and woolgar’s account is convincing and important, yet there is a major absence, if one attempts to rely solely on this account. the individualized application of the scientific cycles of credibility allows the question of credible origins to go unasked. individualized discussions of cycles of credit either lead us away from conceptions of anti-black violence completely, by figuring the link between paradigm, credit, and credibility as unimportant elements of the discussion, or they lead us towards western progress narratives emerging in accordance to a presupposed linearity. if latour and woolgar’s model of credibility is situated into an unflinching paradigmatic analysis, then one must ask, how did the scientist get locked into this cycle of credibility, this market-based model of supply and demand, of information and fact production? where did the meta-epistemology for investment strategies, epistemological theories, scientific reward systems, and a specific form of scientific education come from? put differently, what are the conditions of possibility for the scientist and scientific-practice as such?   sylvia wynter, in her essay “on the coloniality of being,” provides a dynamic account of the creation of the anti-black world. utilizing both a foucauldian method of genealogical analysis alongside the fanonian conception of the manichean epistemology that has haunted the west, wynter describes the way the western world came into being. starting from what she calls the “spirit/flesh” dichotomy that split the world into two irreconcilable zones of the pure and the impure during the medieval scholastic worldview, she builds upon jacques legoff’s analysis of the scholastic paradigm to discuss how this theocentric “regime of truth” (wynter 2003, 330) fostered by the judeo-christian man came to be overrepresented as synonymous with the human itself. in other words, wynter describes the way that in medieval times the human proper became equal to the spiritual man, the theocentric man, or the true christian self personified in exemplar fashion through the persons in the celibate catholic clergy in contradistinction to those who did not accept or see themselves as a part of the true christian self (like the lay intelligentsia). the regime of truth fostered by the medieval scholastic clergy did not simply create socially determined epistemologies in regards to simply what one is supposed to know and what it means to know, but it also created socially determined ontologies in regards to who is human and where the human is located. all of which required an ethics of knowing (an understanding of the right way to be a knower) and a knowing of being (an understanding that the knower knows the real). in other words, this epistemology was inextricably linked to both an ethics and an ontology. the space of spirit was also the space of ontology, of being; the space of flesh was also the space of non-ontology, of non-being. the consequent mapping of the world into inhabitable versus uninhabitable as a means of expanding the epistemic narrativization of man as the true christian self constitutes the epistemology of theocentricity as a priori an onto-ethico-epistemology.   wynter goes on to explain how the medieval “regime of truth” came to a janus-faced end through three major events that marked a paradigmatic rupture and a resulting epistemic shift away from the theocentric man towards what she calls man1, or the ratiocentric man. these events were the voyages of the portuguese and christopher columbus, the creation of the modern state, and the copernican revolution. for wynter, these events opened the possibility for new ways of knowing the world itself through inaugurating a rupture in the epistemology of the theocentric framework that said, (1) the oceans were not navigable; (2) the king had divine right to govern; (3) the earth stood perfectly still. wynter illustrates how these ruptures allowed for the rise of european rationalism/enlightenment, which fostered the western shift away from an overrepresentation of man as theocentric to an overrepresentation of man as ratiocentric. the west’s inability to see its own rationalism as a form of ethno-knowledge codified a new onto-ethico-epistemic account that denied the existence, or the ontology of natives and blacks due to their inability to reproduce western ethno-rationalism, and their existence on regions of earth without western ways of being/knowing. wynter explains then how the epistemic shift—the enlightenment, the rise of rationalism, or the rise of man1—opened a world of possibility for the west when she writes, “it is, therefore, the very humanist strategy of returning to the pagan thought of greece and rome for arguments to legitimate the state’s rise to hegemony, outside the limits of the temporal sovereignty claimed by the papacy, that now provides a model for the invention of a by-nature difference between ‘natural masters’ and ‘natural slaves,’ one able to replace the christian/enemies-of-christ legitimating difference” (2003, 297). indeed, it was man1, the rational man, that socially instituted as natural the negro as an irrational body void of being, or as systematically placed at the bottommost regions of the new onto-ethico-epistemic hierarchy of being. it is this framework that provides the legitimating apparatus for the gratuitous exploitation of black flesh exemplified exorbitantly in the 1662 statute of virginia, which stated, “whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free, be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother—partus sequitur ventrem. and that if any christian shall commit fornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act.” (hening 1827) western enlightenment’s philosophical rationalism does not emerge without the ontological implication of exclusion from the rational that offered the slave’s body up to the altar of the rational (the law) as sacrifice for western expansion and imperialism when the theological altar was no longer viable. this ontological exclusion annexes black sexuality to natal alienation and the law to an anti-black sexual logic of enslaveability. jennifer morgan describes it thusly: “conversations about interracial sex and the visibility of racial inheritance in children became an entry point for the articulation of those particularities. this served to situate black women and men’s most intimate bodily practices as unprotected by domestic space and already occurring in public—the leap from there to the slave market was thus relatively short” (2018, 13).   this shift will set the foundation for the world as we know it. it is at this point that the optics of western empiricism began to reproduce itself as the universal lens of objectivity. it is at this point that the problem of the color line begins to crystallize. it is at this point that anarcha, lucy, and betsy’s destiny could be said to be one which was determined from the outset. as morgan puts it, “by tethering reproduction to enslavement, and thus enslaveability, the partus act fore-closed the possibility that kinship might displace capital...the law locked enslaved women into a productive relationship whereby every-thing that a body could do was harnessed to the capital accumulation of another” (17). in the case of anarcha, lucy, and betsy, their wombs were not harnessed for simply the capital accumulation of another; rather, they were harnessed for the scientific accumulation of scientific accreditation. the fungibility of blackness and the malleability of anti-blackness permutates the relation of partus sequitur ventrem betwixt the rationalist economics of racial capitalist accumulation and the libidinal economics of sexualized anti-blackness through the patriarchal conceptual economy of western scientific humanism. it is only in thinking the three together that we began to see how the rationalist structure of man1 gave way to a biocentric structure of man2 with anarcha, lucy, and betsy coming to be structurally positioned at the inside-outside of civil society.   following in the direction of wynter then, what we are seeking to expand on here is not only what alys weinbaum called the “slave episteme” in her work the afterlife of reproductive slavery (2019, 2), but additionally, the ethics and ontology of humanness necessary to reproducing the onto-ethico-epistemology of humanism as well as the anti-black biocentric discourses of sex/gender that ground them. in this regard, i differ from the centricity placed on bios in weinbaum’s account of blackness, gender, and (re)production in order to explicitly interrogate the sexuating violence of a biocentric semiotics of the body. in the present issue, weinbaum refers to her articulation of the slave episteme as, “the thought system, brewed up and distilled over the course of four centuries, that initially enabled and continues to enable the racialization of (re)production” (weinbaum 2022, 4). my own essay is far more interested in the slave episteme’s (re)production of black sexuation as a response to metaphysical (sexual) violence. weinbaum states that her use of “(re)production thus is certainly not to minimize the sexual violence experienced by the enslaved, both women and men, but rather to specify the manner in which (re)productive extraction and dispossession in slavery included sexual extraction and dispossession even as the encompassing term—(re)production—does not expressly underscore the specific role of procreative sex in the maintenance of the slave economy” (2022, 10). yet it is precisely this specification of biological (re)production and procreative sex—without a will to hone in on the consequences of the metaphysical violence within the procedural production of the slave episteme —that elides the possibility of a meta-critique of the biocentric logic, which, from the vantage point of enslavers, sublates the absence of black being, actively obscuring this absence, in order to preserve a bio-centric definition of “womanhood” without ever needing to account for the death sentence of blackness, and the initiatory and ongoing absence of black being from the onto-ethico-epistemology of human being. weinbaum thus follows in a bio-humanist tradition of black feminist thought that cojoins the vagina, birth, (re)production, and womanhood together in a semiotic chain in order to oppose phallocentricity—not biocentricity. from the vantage point of the enslaved—under, with, and against a slave episteme —this offers the violent modalities of biocentrism as the only discourse of “women” possible.3 in this case, a woman is defined in accordance to a bios-logic that states, “woman is the one who gives birth and (re)production.” wynter critiques this form of biocentric thinking as a biological idealism stemming from “a new order of discourse based on an ontologized ‘natural law,’ and its related secularizing variants/models of human being” (1987, 211). put differently, bio-humanist black feminist accounts of the slave episteme often accept the implicit morphology of the very episteme in question without interrogating the violence that produces black non-being as a sexual deviation from human being in general. the question of black sexuation goes unthought as if the black had always already been determined in and through a biosemiotics of the body. wynter opens a new way of thinking blackness as a problem of and for the ontology of sexual difference itself. an unwillingness to repudiate the universalization of the genre of the human is linked to a regurgitation of the biocentric categories of gender and sexuality which not only hurt our analysis of gender (by rendering the conceptual models of sex/gender birthed under the overdetermined western physiognomic models of the human universal) but also through decoupling the violent connections between bio-humanist sexuation, anti-black slavery and metaphysical violence. thus, if we assert that there is no universal instantiation of gender, it is precisely because wynter (and spillers) both are at pains to critique the ways in which the onto-ethico-epistemological discourse of human sexuality—as given from the western regime of truth— is inconceivable as currently conceived without the monstrous intimacies of sexual violence, anti-black slavery, and the event of miscegenation that not only classified the black as a non-human sexual object (providing the limits of humanity itself) but also gifted the black with gender—when and if—it was culturally and politically relevant to be humanly legible. that the human becomes a double-bind for the black never appears in these accounts that might seek to diminish the radicality of wynter’s call for a trans*valuation of the evaluation of sex and gender as we know it. yet to understand the call for a critique of gender from the demonic ground of black women’s absence in the critical discourse of humanity, is to understand both the absence of gender and the absence of humanity as a matter of black non-being in an anti-black world ( wynter 1990, 1994; spillers et al. 2007; sexton 2008; bey 2017; wilderson iii 2017; parker 2018).   charles darwin’s nineteenth-century redescription of the human in purely secular and bioevolutionary terms redirected the adaptive truth-for terms of the ratiocentric man1 into the adaptive truth-for terms of the biocentric man2. darwin’s on the origin of species reconstituted man in terms of a bio-ontological hierarchy based on a “chain of being” that read the black as “the missing link position” (wynter 2003, 266). this transition took the seen-as-rational external differences of early modern science and internalized them into laws of nature. the seen-as-rational external differences under the onto-ethico-epistemology of man1 provided the foundation for “rational” racial schematization and categorization, but the seen-as-natural onto-ethico-epistemology of man2 internalized those differences as racially coded into a classified logic of a bio-centric make-up of the human. the effect of the production of the racial distinction for man1 as for man2 was and continues to be the same. as wynter puts it, “’race’ was therefore to be, in effect, the nonsupernatural but no less extrahuman ground (in the reoccupied place of the traditional ancestors/gods, god, ground) of the answer that the secularizing west would now give to the heideggerian question as to the who, and the what we are” (2003, 264). race determined who was human and who was not. race determines who is human and who is not. the sociogenic production of man2 provided the basis for a biocentric descriptive statement of the human and a metaphysical basis for a political ontology of life and death. the manichean distinction of rational/irrational and selected/dysselected solidifies the sociogenic constitution of anti-blackness into a legitimation apparatus. each radical demarcation is structured by ontological zones of difference that structure and name those worthy of life, and those born for death. in ratiocentricism, the black is the unbridgeable gap between reason and unreason; in biocentricism, the black is the unbridgeable gap between humans selected for life and non-humans selected for extinction. put differently, what the history of political ontology reveals is that the man/negro manichaeism is a metaphysical injunction that will continue as long as the human does for “if i were not here, i would have to be invented” (spillers 1987, 65) perhaps with a different narrative regime, but always as an ontological problem for the meaning of being human. anarcha, lucy, and betsy, then, are not quite simply implements through which sims produces invention; they are equally inventions through which humanity produces itself.   wynter’s argument is that this recent invention of man1 and man2 are materially discursive productions that have produced themselves atop of and in contradistinction to the black, a materially discursive production that was forged in conjunction with gratuitous material violence. the world as we know it is the world of man2—the biocentric man, and the result of previous ruptures in the western overrepresentation of man as the human itself. the theoretical output of man2’s world (the fact of blackness and anti-blackness) is marked onto our corporeal topographies (the black flesh as signifying not-as-human, as marked for death), our epistemic matters (the over-representation of the white body as the body from which theory is produced and constructed) and our flesh-marked geographies (the ghettos of the black, the reservations of the indigenous, and the theoretical shaping of the third/fourth world). and as wynter succinctly puts it, “we are, as intellectuals, the agents of its formal elaboration” (2003, 307). put differently, there is no outside of anti-blackness, insofar as man2 and the world that man2 offers and generates is a socially instituted mode of being and knowing that is ipso facto anti-black; and we, who speak within that discourse, will always speak in a rhetorical register conditioned by that anti-blackness. wynter’s genealogy of the anti-black world and its onto-ethico-epistemic dimensions showcases a western science that never succeeded in imposing the “two cultures” (latour 2012) but only succeeded in narrating itself as having two juxtaposed cultures—that of the natural and that of the narrative. western science has always required an anti-black narrative. therefore, cycles of credibility—looked at paradigmatically—remind us that science, like the world writ-large, is playing itself out in accordance to a temporal stillness. where things change, but things stay the same. where things differ, but things remain substantively no different. where paradigms shift, yet the ripples of paradigms of the past remain etched into the framework of future paradigms—never to be forgotten. theorizing paradigmatically then allows us to reposition latour and woolgar’s thought within the context of these considerations. the cycle of credit starts paradigmatically with the onto-ethico-epistemic curation of man1 and man2; however, within the context of science, we can look at the life of anarcha, lucy, and betsy as an illustration of the way in which this cycle required a kick-start. if modern science operates within an economy of credit, then that economy of credit could be said to have been “kick-started by the rape of the african continent” (wilderson iii 2003, 229).   taken as a paradigmatic analysis rather than a historiographic critique, what wynter details is a repetition principle of anti-blackness from one conception of being human as man to another. but what makes wynter’s analysis so central for our afropessimist reading is that her paradigmatic analysis of the anti-black world attends to the differences that mark the onto-ethico-epistemic regime of truth while simultaneously locating its anti-black core. for though times have changed, what has remained the same is that the world still auto-institutes itself, its reproductive logics, its “gestational language” (hartman 2016, 166) in accordance to a logic that “‘in effect,’ results in those who come to claim ‘normal’ human status doing so ‘by distancing themselves from the group that is still made to occupy the nadir, ‘nigger’ rung of being human within the terms of our present ethnoclass” (wynter 2003, 261). this anti/ante-original event, this replayed and reverbed occasion of natal alienation, this born-reborn-generated-regenerated science, is the onto-ethico-epistemic scene of what we shall call “primitive accreditation.” as marx writes,   this primitive accumulation plays in political economy about the same part as original sin in theology. adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. in times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. the legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential….thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. (2013, 501)   primitive accreditation functions similarly for gynecology. the original sin of gynecology is that black bodies as objects of experimentation, as cadavers for dissection, as ontologically dead beings are the originary site for the cycle of scientific credit. the history of scientific original sin is the stealing, expropriating, opening, speculating-upon and through, theorizing-upon and through, experimenting on-and-through the bio(necro)politically controlled black flesh. j. marion sims accumulates knowledge capital, knowledge “credit” through the violence he places upon the black “woman” in his experiments, and the structural project of modern gynecology begins after the fact. thus it came to pass that man —embodied structurally in the life of marion sims —accumulated knowledge, and the black—embodied structurally in the life of anarcha, lucy, and betsy—was subjected to the objectification of the flesh. the theodicy of science lies in what occurs to the black body dominated into flesh. the violence of western science in theory and performance churned the black body into fungible flesh, and the economy of science that emerged afterward has yet to begin to address or redress the violence. the violence that sims places on the body of anarcha is the same violence that constructs the world. the only difference is that sims utilized his place in that world to author the violence in the field of gynecological science.   therefore, the two conditions that plague anarcha, lucy, and betsy, that of vesicovaginal fistulas and that of anti-blackness, exist at the nexus point of birth, sexuation, and metaphysics. known in the law as partus sequitur ventrem, or “that which is brought forth follows the womb,” anarcha, lucy, and betsy inherit the positionality of non-ontology, of death and abjection, at the moment of birth, and as black “women” inherit the cultural and political responsibility to reproduce non-ontology, death, and abjection. as spillers writes, “first of all, their new-world, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire. under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific” (1987, 67). the condition of blackness, then, does not supersede the condition of womanhood for black women, but it paints over the image of “suffering womanhood” due to the question mark that is always already painted over every black attempt to be understood as “woman” in the anti-black world. put plainly, the black “woman” who suffers from the condition of vesical-vaginal fistulas suffers, but the anti-black world does not allow her to access “suffering womanhood” since her “womanness” is always pushed outside the category of the woman. this severing of sexual difference is the result of black life in the new world. it is a severing that disconnects the black from the human community that non-black persons have authored, sustained, regulated, and required. it is a severing that makes black flesh ontologically commodified and fungible in ways inaccessible to the coherence of the human subject. hartman writes, “put differently, the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion” (1997, 21). this “dispossessed body of the enslaved” is identified in the work of spillers as being “embedded in bizarre axiological ground” (1987, 65).   the black has been severed from sexual difference, but this severing initiates a body politic of human community that determines blackness as slaveness or, in spiller’s words, as “signifying property plus.” this signification, embedded as it is in bizarre axiomatics, overdetermines the nominative properties (“black women”) with “mythical prepossession” such that “there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come clean” (spillers 1987, 65). thus, spillers begins her “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe” by lingering in the void of black gender, not as a critique of black feminism or as a gesture away from the centrality of the question of gender for the question of blackness, but rather to render the gender question of blackness—a problem for the axioms of thought and being. by staying with the flesh as a primary narrative, before the structural adjustment required by the body politic as a means of procuring or extracting liberties from within a neoliberal monohumanist civil society, spillers resists the assumptive logics that undergird the ongoing biocentric insistence of what constitutes even the difference between racial difference, sexual difference, and gender difference itself. or rather, before intersectionality, spillers raises the question of the incapacity to ontological resist the humanist metaphysical violence which categorizes the slave as black and materially semiotically gendered/sexed them as both ungendered flesh and boundary-setting body-being. it is to this entrenchment, and against this re-entrenchment that this essay labors. for what i am after is the ways in which the questions, answers, and experiments of human sexuation function as an antagonistic feature of the domination of black flesh not only counterproductively enabling access to the sociogenic principles of life and the biocentric homogenizations of sex/gender but more specifically, ontologizing death onto the slave as a matter of being without being. to start here is to start at the excess or recesses of the body itself. spillers writes,   i would make a distinction in this case between "body" and "flesh" and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. in that sense, before the "body" there is the "flesh," that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. even though the european hegemonies stole bodies—some of them female—out of west african communities in concert with the african "middleman," we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of african females and african males registered the wounding. if we think of the "flesh" as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship's hole, fallen, or "escaped" overboard. (1987, 67)   this “zero degree of social conceptualization” is the violence of metaphysics. spillers speaks to a “primary narrative” that can hardly be narrated, which narrates itself as “nothingness,” as a way to critique the metaphysics of the human itself. thus, a conception of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” is born out of attending to this metaphysical violence. the “seared, divided, ripped-apartness” is a violence that creates what spillers describes as undecipherable suffering, undecipherable pain. it is this undecipherability that has continued to leave blackness unthought by western science studies. “violence without end, violence without reprieve, violence constitutive of a metaphysical world” (warren 2016, 36) is what turns bodies into flesh, and european hegemony continues to cycle its conceptual economy on and off the sheered flesh of the black.   written within humanist onto-ethico-epistemological accounts of the body and its discourse is the givenness of gender and blackness itself that forecloses interrogations around the disciplinary and disciplining demarcations structuring the critique of race and the critique of gender and sexuality as if both did not cohere out of the abyss of anti-black violence. afropessimism begins at spillers’s provocative essay “mama’s baby, papa maybe” and the work of fanon in order to think the human/black antagonism at its metaphysical nexus. for “this body, at least from the point of view of the captive community, focuses a private and particular space, at which point of convergence biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic and psychological fortunes join” (spillers 1987, 67). spillers rejects anything that might foreclose the possibility of seeing the indispensable connections between an anti-black world and the sex/gender categories that are symbiotically produced within its onto-ethico-epistemological horizon. the negation of black gender, the vacuum of its symbolic integrity in black, is the bizarre axiomatics through which the human reproduces itself as human proper. spillers characterizes this situation as one in which black flesh becomes a “living laboratory.” she states, “this profitable ‘atomizing’ of the captive body provides another angle on the divided flesh: we lose any hint of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between human personality and its anatomical features, between human personality and cultural institutions. to that extent, the procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory” (1987, 68). to be human is to possess a presence, a presence of gender and being that anatomically and physiologically cohere to an anti-black dimorphic cis-normative bios-logic. the black is an antithesis to the human community insofar as this corporeal symbolism of the human authorizes its coherence in antagonism to the black. yet it is the ontology of being, the metaphysics of humanism itself, which renders—in the name of the sciences and humanities—its atomized theory of sex/gender to be the universal procedure for accounting for human difference in general. thus, in patrice douglass’s words, “the figuration of black gender ruptures the axis of critical theory, which assumes political prescriptions as the logical departure from the descriptive gesture to think violence. simply stated, black gender disallows political orientation to unthink the stasis of its conditions of violence, whether the offered prescription is ‘real’ or ‘imagined.’ violence is locked in the celebration and the disavowal, the embrace and repulsion of blackness as genre, which is exclusive to logics of gendering but presents a profound nexus there” (2016, 22). it is this very nexus, precisely at the moment where one might rush to identify the irreducibly “woman” character of a specific form of gendered anti-black violence or the irreducibly non-gendered character of a specific form of anti-black violence, that spillers’s description of the appearance of black gender as an outcome of “a territory of cultural and political maneuver” becomes a most necessary reminder. by taking blackness as a point of departure into thinking the question of gender, science, and beyond, towards the question of the genre of the human itself, rather than seeing in anarcha, lucy, and betsy’s suffering, an instance of possession, the sole instance of reproductive violence inaugurating a perverse symbolic integrity to a claim of possessing gender, spillers’s analysis centers ungendering as a primary narrative of violence to locate consequent elaborations of gender as forms of violence that consequently gift gender as additional violence. thus, the “doubled” nature of gendered violence is in the giving of gender itself. the gift of gender as the gift of death redoubled as a violent entryway into being human.   black gender then is perversely anti-oedipal. or rather, it stems not from the biosemiotics of “genitalia” as much as it does from the prelogical violence of slavery. one is ungendered by violence in-the-first-instance on account of an axiological structure, a paradigm that names black flesh as non-being, antagonistic to the corporeal integrity of the category of being (human) itself. and then, (re)gendered by violence in the second instance as a means of making oneself symbolically coherent to bio-humanist demands. starting with this ontological terror requires one to see blackness in-the-first-instance as ungendering from the genre of the human, and (re)gendering as will to know and disavowal. what conditioned the possibility that would enable anarcha, lucy, and betsy to become living laboratories for the cultural and political imaginaries of the human’s most precious practice, namely, science? indeed, it is a metaphysical procedure, a metaphysical violence, a gratuitous violence that names its object, which authors its object as an object. such a statement need not dismiss the specificities of black life; rather, by attending to the paradigmatic violence that “precedes and exceeds blacks” (wilderson iii 2010, 76) we refuse the ease in which a disavow of ontological violence begets the hieroglyphics of the flesh. in other words, in thinking blackness as nothingness from within the ontological horizon of humanism, as the afropessimist assert, we attend to the dead and dying secrets of primitive accreditation.   uncovering the sociogenic principles of civil society are crucial in elucidating the ways in which paradigmatic patterns become engrained (ontologically) into the nature of one’s answer to the question of “what is it like to be me?” and, the ways in which socio-historical patterns began to affect the sociogenic expression of underlying physical processes. whereas though, the former raises questions around the historical and its relationship (if any) to the ontological, the latter raises questions about the representational saliency of the conceptual coherence of anything philosophically understandable as the “nature/culture” divide. frantz fanon’s insight regarding the besidedness of the phylogenic, ontogenic, and sociogenic becomes of wise intellectual use for a series of intraconnected questions that have previously been read as separate and unequal. fanon and the afropessimist offer a radical psychoanalytic intervention that looks towards the genome of society, or better yet, the sociogenic principles of our society itself. this deconstruction of the gaps between cortico-visceral enfleshment, psychic investment, and socially cohered onto-ethico-epistemology makes fanon’s reading of the unconscious mind a reading that disavows any priority given to a priori unconscious drives and/or a priori biological determinations. fanon and the afropessimist offer a theory that sits these issues together such that any disciplinary apparatus that wishes to cohere itself upon naturalized divisions of naturalized disciplines in accordance to a demarcated logic of bios/nature on one side and logos/word on the other are themselves incoherent. for, as wynter puts it, “they don’t want to go to the fundamental issue. once he has said ontogeny-and-sociogeny, every discipline you’re practicing ceases to exist” (thomas and wynter 2006, 3).   the bizarre axiological ground of afropessimism this work has attempted to produce a paradigmatic analysis of what operates as the “scientific unconscious” (warren 2018, 115) of homo scientificus. calvin warren writes in ontological terror that “black bodies become living laboratories because these bodies hold the secret of science—what it wishes to know and what it most wishes not to know. this play between knowing and not knowing, desiring and detesting, hating and admiring would seem to land us in lacanian territory, something like a scientific unconscious” (115). anti-blackness as “an unconscious cultural structure, a grammar, a weltanschauung, a metaphysics that lives on well after, and despite, the destruction of metaphysics” (sexton 2019, 102) not only diminishes black thought, rendering black speech fungible and commodifiable, but it also directs us toward which ideas are credible as “fact” and which black ideas are not through the symbolic exchange of value that locates proximity to non-blackness as proximity to the highest levels of conceptual prowess, power, and prestige. this conceptual economy plays itself out inside and outside the university through the channels of publication, methods of evaluation, disciplinary boundaries, investitures of credibility, and more. latour and woolgar write, “in this respect, scientists’ behavior is remarkably similar to that of an investor of capital. an accumulation of credibility is prerequisite to investment. the greater this stockpile, the more able the investor to reap substantial returns and thus add further to his growing capital” (2013, 195). by analyzing the repressed contents of the western scientific narrative, we neither overcome nor supersede the metaphysical violence of homo scientificus’ manichean species division—instead, we open demonic ground for an unspeakable ethics and raise the stakes of the grammar of antagonism to the highest levels of abstraction. the interdisciplinary methods of inquiry in the field of science studies have attracted many progressive, leftist or left-leaning academics; however, the kritik of the critical field has rarely, if ever, reached beyond the onto-ethico-epistemology of the scientist (whether that be the theoretician or the experimentalist); or, in the words of wynter, the field of science studies has yet to go “beyond the word of man” (1989, 645). in fact, it is often considered a more comprehensive and convincing account of the social study of science if the scientists are convinced that science studies scholars have come to conclusions about the nature of scientific inquiry in agreement with the scientific community itself. thus, this is a case of the human in conversation with the human. the case of a fashioned human subjectivity that transforms intellectual dissent into intra-dialogic consensus, an intra-dialogic conversation that could be said to have reached its apex with the science wars of the 1990s. these remarks make what wilderson says about humanist political disagreement analogous to the marxist, feminist, and postcolonial social theorist of science and the community of scientist they set out to critique. in wilderson’s words, “political agreement is secondary to species consolidation; in fact, we could say that the political disagreement might consolidate the human species more effectively than political agreement” (2014, 16). the consolidation of the species as “human” is never disavowed by way of the socio-philosophical investigations of the social theorist of science, but it is upheld, sustained, and perpetuated. these philosophers and sociologist of science studies, and the scientist in and of the field of science may disagree, but the hegelian dialectic in which they participate still includes a recognition that is never granted to the black. the socio-philosophical study of science has always positioned black flesh as either absent or peripheral to its questions of demarcation, development, and metaphysics. even the interventions made by feminist philosophers of science who insist on the significance of feminist standpoint epistemology and the importance of this epistemology for the proper acquisition of “strong objectivity” (harding 1995) leave the slave at the position of the unthought of science studies. but the specter of the slave, the image of the slave’s cadaver—its open, dissected, and fungible body—continues to haunt the history of science.   with an afropessimist staging of these problematics, what occurs is paralysis—a break in the action of consensus and conflict, and an utterance of refusal and antagonism that requires an anti-disciplinary consideration. the metaphysical holocaust of the slave trade and the anti-black world it gave birth too is a scene of negative autopoiesis anchored by an anti-black sociogenic principle built on bizarre axiological ground. such a ground returns us to the slipperiness of the concept of “race” as a category lacking analytic precision for our attempts towards accessing the complex interplay between the internal axioms necessary to understanding blackness and anti-blackness. for, as wynter puts it, “although i use the term ‘race,’ and i have to use the term ‘race,’ ‘race’ itself is a function of something else which is much closer to ‘gender’” (thomas and wynter 2006, 23). the anti-humanist abolitionism of afropessimism restages the insistence of the reproduction of the human category from within black studies and beyond. thus, to say anti-blackness is a scene of negative autopoiesis is to say “anti-blackness is the genome of the horticultural template of human renewal” (wilderson iii 2010, 337), or rather, black death and mutilation reproduces the human by way of being its antithesis—exemplified most thoroughly and exceptionally in the ontological absence of black “women.” by attending to the science of the flesh, the theodicy of science, and returning to the primitive accreditation process of science—as a means of tending “to the black dead and dying” (sharpe 2016, 10), we may set out to begin:   “the only thing in the world worth beginning: the end of the world of course” (césaire 2001, 22).   acknowledgments many thanks to emily parker and john murungi at towson university who sat on the committee of this paper and encouraged its thinking when it was just an undergraduate honors thesis. thank you as well to the anonymous reviewers and editors whose wisdom and clarity helped make this a much stronger piece.   notes 1 the onto-ethico-epistemological framework is a way of suggesting that ontological, ethical, and epistemic concerns cannot be divorced from one another. i owe my interest in this concept to karen barad’s meeting the universe halfway, wherein she contributes to “the founding of a new ontology, epistemology and ethics, including a new understanding of the nature of scientific practices” (2007, 25). while neils bohr is a crucial point of departure for barad’s thinking on matters of ontological import, barad’s notion of agential realism moves in and beyond bohr’s thinking to develop a coherent account of how reality is performed, produced, and enacted as reality while at the same time not succumbing to the trap that all is representation. nevertheless, it is the black feminist critiques and addendums from the likes of zakiyyah jackson (2018) and denise ferreira da silva (2016) that principally drive my usage of the onto-ethico-epistemic framework as a means of suggesting that every onto-ethico-epistemic implication cannot begin to begin without theorizing in a void. thus, while barad’s conception of onto-ethico-epistemology is useful to think with, her onto-politics is not so much.   2 similar elisions on the role of anti-black metaphysical violence from the analysis of the structure of scientific knowledge production can be found in other key classic text of science, technology, and society studies as well. see fleck 2012 and haraway 1989 for additional examples. fleck utilizes the concept of syphilis to illustrate his key notion of “thought style,” which went on to be a crucial intellectual development for the thought of the historian and philosopher of science thomas kuhn. however, fleck never mentions the relationship between “new” world and “old” world colonial travels and slave trading when considering how the genesis and development of syphilis as a “scientific fact” unfolds in relationship to these travels and exploits. thus, if womb theory “co-opted genesis for democracy, idealized as the highest form of human governance,” (james 2016, 259) then fleck’s genesis and development of a scientific fact functions as a kind of “womb theory” for science studies whose latent idealization prefigures the inability of science studies to think the research-programmes of the tuskegee syphilis institute and the heinous acts of violence done to the captive maternals therein (james 2016). in addition, haraway’s primate visions, despite its stated intentions to interrogate “gender, race, and class” presents an account of primatology unwilling to interrogate the specificity of anti-blackness, thus leaving the historical ontological linking of the black to “the missing link between ape and man” beyond the scope and scale of her critique. thus, zakiyyah jackson’s work in becoming human (2020) becomes a necessary corrective.   3 the condition of the black “male” breeder is a condition that jettisons the speed in which the term “breeder” is so often conflated with the term “women,” placing tension on the historical overview that might leave this figure out of the stakes of reproductive justice as a problem of an anti-black sexual order. roberts mentions this figure in her killing the black body when she states, “slaveholders’ interference with bonded men’s intimate lives was often more blunt. some masters rented men of exceptional physical stature to serve as studs. using terms such as ‘stock men,’ ‘travelin niggers,’ and ‘breedin niggers,’ slave men remembered being ‘weighed and tested’ then used like animals to sire chattel for their masters. of course, this also meant forcing slave women to submit to being impregnated by these hired men” (1999, 28). understanding this scene of subjection, as a site of sexuation, or rather, as a sadistic propagation of heteronormative sexed and gendered identity, performance, and logics, requires not a dismissal of the foray of black feminist and intersectional concerns, but rather requires sitting the discourse around black american “men” and “gender” within spiller’s insistence that “the african-american male has been touched, therefore, by the mother, handed by her in ways that he cannot escape, and in ways that the white american male is allowed to temporize by a fatherly reprieve…because of this peculiar american denial, the black american male embodies the only american community of males which has had the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself” (1987, 80). for more black feminist and intersectional accounts on reproduction, slavery, and gendered violence see hooks 1981; crenshaw 1990; davis 2011; lorde 2012.   references barad, karen. 2007. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. bey, marquis. 2017. “the trans*-ness of blackness, the blackness of trans*-ness.” tsq: transgender studies quarterly 4 (2): 275–95. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3815069. césaire, aimé. 2001. notebook of a return to the native land. translated by clayton eshleman and annette smith. middleton, ct: wesleyan university press. crenshaw, kimberlé. 1990. “mapping the margins: 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terror: blackness, nihilism, and emancipation. durham, nc: duke university press. washington, harriet a. 2006. medical apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on black americans from colonial times to the present. new york: doubleday books. weinbaum, alys eve. 2019. the afterlife of reproductive slavery: biocapitalism and black feminism’s philosophy of history. durham, nc: duke university press. ———. 2022. “the slave episteme in biocapitalism.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1): 1-25. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35232. wilderson, frank b., iii. 2003. “gramsci’s black marx: whither the slave in civil society?” social identities 9 (february 2015): 225–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463032000101579. ———. 2010. red, white & black: cinema and the structure of us antagonisms. durham, nc: duke university press. ———. 2014. “black liberation army and the liberation paradox of political.” ill-will editions: 3-38. https://illwilleditions.noblogs.org/files/2015/09/wilderson-black-liberation-army-the-paradox-of-political-engagement-2013-read-.pdf. ———. 2015. “social death and narrative aporia in 12 years a slave.” black camera: an international film journal (the new series) 7 (1): 134–49. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/606134/pdf.   ———. 2017. “reciprocity and rape: blackness and the paradox of sexual violence.” women & performance: a journal of feminist theory 27 (1): 104–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770x.2017.1282122. wynter, sylvia. 1987. “on disenchanting discourse: ‘minority’ literary criticism and beyond.” cultural critique  autumn, 1987, no. 7, the nature and context of minority discourse: 207-244. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1354156. ———. 1989. “beyond the word of man: glissant and the new discourse of the antilles.” world literature today 63 (4): 637–48. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40145557. ———. 1990. “beyond miranda’s meanings: un/silencing the ‘demonic ground’of caliban’s ‘woman.’” in out of the kumbla: caribbean women and literature, edited by carole boyce davies and elaine savor, 355–72. trenton, nj: africa world press. ———. 1994. “a black studies manifesto.” originally presented for the critical perspectives forum on the culture wars at the schomburg center for research in black culture, harlem, new york. published in forum n.h.i. knowledge for the 21st century: knowledge on trial  1(1): 3-11. https://trueleappress.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/wynter.black-studies-manifesto.pdf . ———. 2003. “unsettling the coloniality of being/ power/ truth/ freedom.” cr: the new centennial review, 257–336. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.     author bio john gillespie jr. is an artist, songwriter and phd student in comparative literature at the university of california, irvine. his work has been published in publications such as grub street literary magazine, propter nos, the journal of critical ethnic studies, the encyclopedia of racism in american films, and more.     original research reproductive empires and perverse markets: unpacking the paradoxical dynamics of art market expansion in non-urban india and beyond     bronwyn parry king’s college london bronwyn.parry@kcl.ac.uk   rakhi ghoshal king’s college london rakhi.ghoshal@gmail.com     abstract the global use of assisted reproductive technologies (arts) to address structural infertility has burgeoned since the early 2000s. large corporate in vitro fertilization (ivf) providers from the metropolitan north quickly identified india as a prime location for service delivery, creating satellite clinics in its metropolitan centers. having learnt from their european masters the colonizer’s art of exporting art services from the metropolitan core to the periphery, a leading cabal of senior indian reproductive specialists have since created their own “reproductive empires” perfusing service provision into peri-urban and even semi-rural localities in india and equally underserved emerging markets in africa, the middle east, and latin america. in this paper, we chart the contours of these new empires and explore the implications of this progressive colonization for the quality of service delivery. we argue that the vast scale of expansion has resulted in unwelcome stratification as unscrupulous providers dilute the quality of services to render them affordable to lower socioeconomic groups. weakly formulated iterations of art legislation have also allowed this market to thrive under chaotic and uncertain conditions. these dynamics, we argue, create perverse markets that increase, rather than reduce, patient infertility, by holding unsuspecting clients in extended regimes of indentured therapy. in unpacking the drivers of this phenomenon, we identify several key factors: the neoliberalism of health service provision in india; the privatization and corporatization of care; gendered competitiveness; and potent cultural preferences for biologically related children.     keywords assisted reproductive technologies, perverse markets, surrogacy, neocolonialism, subaltern biologies, ivf regulation, sub-imperial power     introduction in a landmark paper published in the mid-1970s, the eminent indian sociologist hamza alavi produced an analysis of what he termed “the colonial mode of production,” examining its role in shaping india’s agrarian economy during the twentieth century. in setting out its structural contours, alavi notes that this mode of production is typically characterized by economic and social systems that enable “a substantial part of the surplus generated in the colonial agrarian economy, and colonial industry, to be appropriated not directly within the colonial economy but rather at the imperialist center…in ways that benefit the imperialist bourgeoisie rather than the colony from which they are extracted” (1975, 1253). forced into the wider network of world capitalist exchange relations, india became, he argues, a site of subordinated agrarian, and industrial, production for the metropolitan centers of the west. india has since, he argued, moved into a postcolonial mode of development (particularly in high tech industries) that is characterized by different dynamics: typically, a much closer “convergence of interests between the big indian bourgeoise and the imperialist bourgeoise” and new structures of indigenous capitalist development. these, he predicted, would allow “an increasing proportion of surplus value to be appropriated internally by an indigenous capitalist class” (alavi 1975, 1253–60). much of alavi’s initial research concentrated on the impacts of colonial and postcolonial modes of development in the agribusiness sector, explicating their effects in shaping corporate and state involvement in the green revolution of the 1970s. more recently, india has moved (under the impelling forces of neoliberalism) into a new phase of vigorous economic growth, particularly in the life sciences industry, becoming a testing ground for an array of novel biotechnologies. it has also consequently become the site for what aditya bharadwaj terms a “red revolution”—an ambitious new regime of biocapitalist value creation that takes as its resource base human tissues, cell lines, gametes, and allied reproductive and clinical labor (cited in nayantara sheoran appleton and aditya bharadwaj, 2017, 213). despite the clear genealogical connection between these two epochs of biotechnological development, little attention has yet been given to charting how the legacy of colonial and postcolonial modes of development continue to inflect and shape the desires, imaginaries, and approaches of those who seek to deliver high tech biotechnological products and services in india today (with some notable exceptions: see bharadwaj and glasner 2008; vora 2015; bharadwaj 2016a, 2016b; rudrappa 2018). in taking this agenda forward, our intention in this paper is to concentrate on one aspect of that wider biotechnological economy: assisted reproduction. the global use of assisted reproductive technologies (arts), and especially the phenomenon of cross-border reproductive travel, has burgeoned since the early 2000s, and india has become a prime destination for service delivery (pande 2014; parry 2015; rudrappa 2015; deomampo 2016). the indian commercial market for art services has expanded exponentially over that period, in a series of phases that mirror, in fascinating but not entirely predictable ways, alavi’s earlier forecasts. we argue here that the dynamics of neocolonialism and imperialism that alavi identified have come to infuse both the logics of expansion in assisted reproduction and its underlying ethos. in drawing out these points of connection, our aim is threefold: (1) to map the successive waves of expansion that have occurred in the provision of art services in india since the 1980s, (2) to attend to the personal motivations and impulses that have incentivized its very rapid expansion across the indian subcontinent, and (3) to understand the social implications of these colonizing impulses. in so doing, we produce the first empirical evidence of the profound hardships and inequities that this rapid expansion has visited upon those who are the targeted consumers of this extended service provision—some of india’s most stigmatized and indigent rural women. very little research has yet been conducted on the political economy of india’s domestic art markets, but even less has been dedicated to exploring indian providers’ ambitions to penetrate new and emerging markets in the wider global south. nevertheless, it is apparent that they are now moving into new geographical domains, using satellite providers to create new globally expansive “reproductive empires” to serve the desire for biologically related children amongst some the world’s most impoverished communities. building upon our analysis of the affective impact of these neocolonial relations within the domestic art sector in india, we promulgate a theory that these have also had a sustained effect on the tenor of their subsequent forays into international art empire building. india’s powerful indigenous art sector, whilst theoretically liberated from the yoke of colonialism, has seemingly inherited quite similar compulsions, with many of its leading practitioners productively drawing on the colonizer’s art (to which they had once been themselves subjected) in pursuing their own economic ends. these they are now visiting upon even more underdeveloped and peripheral neighboring economies in what appears to be a reproductive elaboration of what ruy mauro marini (1965) termed “subimperial power.”   methods in presenting these arguments, we draw on findings from a five-year qualitative research project undertaken between 2012 and 2017 and funded by the wellcome trust. this research provides a detailed analysis of the expansion of assisted reproduction across india; the political economy of its emergent markets; the ways in which cultural expectations, conventions, practices, and beliefs shape motivations to access art services amongst the rural and urban poor of india; and how clinical art services are consequently marketed and delivered to such constituencies. fieldwork was conducted in the geographies of peri-urban jaipur (in the state of rajasthan), urban pockets of mumbai (in the state of maharashtra), and in bangalore (in the state of karnataka). semi-structured interviews were conducted with 120 key stakeholders, including art clinicians, turnkey providers, policy makers, and pharmaceutical executives. communities of clients and surrogacy providers were represented by intending parents, gamete donors, and commercial surrogates. all interviews were audio taped after obtaining the informed consent of the respondent; in cases of a refusal of consent to record, handwritten notes were taken with consent. audio recordings of the interviews were transcribed and thematically coded for analysis. anonymity has been preserved at the request of the respondents.   strange bedfellows: the parallel growth of anti-natalism and assisted reproduction in india we explore the operationalization and impacts of what we here describe as “neocolonialist modes of (re)production” in order to make an important conceptual and empirical contribution to recent debates on the political economy of assisted reproduction (salter, zhou, and datta 2014, 2017; knecht, klotz, and beck 2012; müller and schurr 2016; van de wiel 2020). this we do by exemplifying how these practices of reproductive empire building contribute to the generation of global fertility chains, which, as sigrid vertommen, vincenzo pavone, and michal nahman (2021) argue, constitute “a nexus of interconnected practices, operations and transactions [that enable] reproductive services (such as egg provision or surrogacy), commodities (such as a stem cell line, a regenerative drug or therapy) and data, to be produced, distributed and consumed across the globe.” although such analyses remain at a nascent stage, they suggest the ways in which complex networks of sociotechnical engagement, state involvement, and uneven geographies of economic and social development threaten to materialize new and potentially exploitative modes of value extraction across an emergent global fertility chain network. understanding the historiography of these dynamics requires us to begin, in this case, by unpacking why and how arts were first developed and delivered in india. exploring the local contextual circumstances of their emergence provides valuable insights into the longer-term social implications of the indian state’s long-standing ideological position on reproduction, which has historically been largely anti-natalist. for although it seems counterintuitive, it was, ironically, the introduction of state-sponsored mass sterilization programs that first legitimized and facilitated the provision of infertility treatment to india’s poorest women. soon after india gained independence, it became subject to a series of natural disasters, famines, and extreme food shortages that placed the state at what was perceived, by the former imperial powers of the united states and britain, to be an increased risk of conversion to communism. two sets of interventions were introduced by these powers to reduce this perceived risk. both were technological fixes. the first, the introduction of engineered high yield crops under the banner of the green revolution, was designed to improve the well-being of existing populations; the second, a comprehensive five year “population limitation plan” introduced by then prime minster nehru and subsidized by corporate us aid organizations including the rockefeller and ford foundations, was designed to significantly reduce overall population growth. as part of the population control agenda (euphemistically titled the “family planning” program), the state implemented a two-child norm and began to promote contraceptive measures, including subdermal implants and injectables. almost 2,500 clinics were initially created to provided free contraception to low-income clients; however, as they were expected to serve some 66,000 women each, they struggled to meet demand (connelly 2006, 642). the medical termination of pregnancy act of 1971, which was ostensibly introduced to give women greater reproductive choice, also enabled them to legally abort unwanted pregnancies, thus limiting population growth. abortion consequently became a state-sanctioned family planning mechanism in india, and sex-selective abortions of female embryos increased. hoardings went up in public places exhorting people to think wisely and spend inr 500 in advance to avoid paying inr 500,000 later in dowry (patel, 2007, 311). as matthew connelly (2006) notes, whether driven by eugenic or malthusian concerns, or simply impatience with the failures of the contraceptive policy, lyndon johnson’s administration moved throughout this period to prosecute an agenda of postcolonial reduction in aid dependency through yet more interventionist approaches to population control. aid packages now came freighted with structural adjustments, including the successful delivery of forced sterilization initiatives. the devastating impacts of these continue to resonate to this day, as evidenced by the recent bilaspur tragedy (nadimpally et al. 2015).1 despite the pressure to submit to sterilization, some women baulked. many were unconvinced by the narrative that limiting family formation would deliver economic stability. conscious that it might be wiser to preserve their future fertility given the exceptionally high child mortality rates, they remained suspicious of sterilization and unwilling to participate. the state worked hard to counter such doubts by pushing forward a new set of arguments: that there was nothing to fear in sterilization as new biotechnological interventions, including arts, could simply reinstate their fertility, should the need arise. in 1984 the indian council for medical research (icmr) released a statement that suggested how such inducements would work: “if a couple is convinced that pregnancy could be achieved with certainty by the ivf-embryo transfer technique, in the event of their losing their existing children, they might readily accept tubal sterilization as a method of family planning. thus, in vitro fertilization could be of great relevance to our national welfare program” (cited in nadimpally and marwah 2015, 4). an aggressive liberalization of the indian economy, the incentivization of technological remediation of infertility, a distinct lack of state regulation and increasing demand from consumers at home and abroad for biologically related children, precipitated a considerable expansion of ivf provision in india throughout the 1990s. the repro-politics of this phase of expansion warrant further analysis. in a first iteration of what we might consider to be the colonizing impulse in global fertility chain development, leading british ivf providers began to eye this emergent indian market as a satellite node in an expanded network of service delivery. robert edwards and patrick steptoe, the two british clinicians who were given attribution for creating the world’s first test-tube baby, louise brown, had initially established the world’s first ivf clinic at bourn hall in cambridgeshire in 1980, with the help of a number of previously unattributed female colleagues, including jean purdy, muriel harris, lillian lincoln howell, and ruth fowler (johnson 2018). recording their initial motivations as a desire to meet the underserved infertility needs of india’s indigenous population (hindu 2011), they initially set up a clinic in kerala (citing higher levels of literacy, later marital age, and increased awareness of ivf as important pull factors for that location) with the intention of scaling operations to another sixteen to eighteen clinics nationwide. analyzing the fate of just this one ambitious operation provides an opportunity to examine and complicate existing “unidirectional diffusion models of science and modernity” (pollock and subramaniam 2016, 953) that present technoscientific knowledge and praxis as something that arcs out across the world in apparently linear fashion from the supposedly enlightened center to backward periphery. on the contrary, this, and other similar cases, demonstrate the sometimes contradictory outcomes that result when “the empire strikes back”—that is to say, when local entrepreneurs draw on their existing expertise to challenge the penetration and dominance of northern enterprises, introducing in their place practices designed to address more localized, culturally distinct, but also highly stratified reproductive needs and markets. the arrival of ivf providers such as bourn hall, badged as they were with all the imprimaturs of western scientific excellence and white privilege, was designed to signal to the indian consumer market the “value added” of accessing imported “world-leading” care over domestic offerings that were presented as basic or at least in their infancy. as sandra harding reminds us, though, these kinds of simplistic binaries “always homogenize and often essentialize the contrasted groups [and their] significant internal divisions…that are often organised hierarchically” (2016, 1076). as she goes on to suggest, they also “overemphasize the distinctions between such groups thereby obscuring their commonalities” (1076). in charting the ultimate fall of bourn hall’s operation and the concomitant rise of india’s domestic ivf industry, we hope to explicate how the knowledge and practice of art provision perfused from the metropolitan west into britain’s former colony, but more importantly how it was there entirely “rephrased” to suit the grammar of local reproductive markets, and with what effects. we begin by analyzing how domestic clinicians responded to the influx of foreign art operations and the evident opportunities that these modeled for their economic and social advancement. in unpacking these dynamics, we pay particular attention to the highly gendered nature of the provision that emerged, and its inflection along the axes of class and caste.   art dreaming i: subaltern domestic markets as sandra bärnreuther notes, the historiography of ivf often defaults to “unilinear modes of history telling” that privilege simplistic narratives of diffusion from valorized sites of innovation in the northern heartlands of the metropolitan west to the provincial hinterlands of the global south (2016, 75). this ostensibly unidirectional diffusion of scientific knowledge, expertise, and clinical advancement necessarily has the effect of segmenting the world into “innovators on the one hand and imitators or re-interpreters on the other” ( bärnreuther 2016, 75). recent research on the genesis of art in india (bharadwaj 2016b; bärnreuther 2016) has revealed the fundamental insecurity of such accounts, which fail to reflect the complexity of the dynamics at play. for example, although india’s first officially registered and state-sponsored ivf baby was purportedly born at mumbai’s king edward memorial hospital in 1986, it is now clear that the first indian ivf baby was, in fact, born just sixty-seven days after louise brown was produced in the uk by steptoe and edwards by a local west bengal team of physicians led by dr. subhas mukherjee of bankura sammilani medical college (chatterjee 2018). within a year of brown’s birth, mukherjee announced the birth of the world's second test-tube baby with a team comprising sunit mukherji, a cryobiologist, and saroj kanti bhattacharya, a gynecologist. mukherjee, like so many of his contemporaries, had initially benefited from clinical training at the university of edinburgh but had later returned to practice in india, creating his own ground-breaking techniques that resulted in their independent, and nearly simultaneous, replication of steptoe and edwards’s feat. indigenous expertise in art continued to increase significantly over the following decade, culminating in the birth of baby harsha at the king edward memorial hospital in 1986, albeit under contested authorship (bharadwaj 2016b). although the icmr and its state-sponsored institute for research in reproduction played the central role in creating and leading the clinical team responsible for baby harsha, much of the credit eventually came to attach to dr. indira hinduja, one of the collaborating gynecologists based at king edward memorial hospital. much of the frenzied media reporting that surrounded the baby’s birth sought to amplify claims to india’s modernity by noting that the “miracle baby” had been engineered by a female doctor. so sedimented became this view in subsequent retellings that, as bharadwaj reminds us, “no media account could [later] begin without playing tribute to ground-breaking achievement of ‘the lady who did it first’” (2016b, 58). although it has yet garnered little attention, it is important to note the role that gender, and caste, have played in the early development of ivf in india.2 as the cost of specialist training and technologies, and demand for state-funded medical education and clinical services increased in india throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, the state began to retreat from the market, in many instances actively facilitating the privatization of healthcare. art service provision was no exception, becoming similarly concentrated almost exclusively in the hands of india’s privately funded urban elites. as bharadwaj has noted, many experts also began to leave the state sector in search of an “otherwise unattainable degree of autonomy and freedom” (2016b, 55). the media fueled public veneration of art specialists, who, as bharadwaj argues, were increasingly positioned as “gods” with the capacity to deliver the infertile from a life of shame and stigma “set in motion a competition for respect, status and credit” (2016b, 56). this, in turn, began to perpetuate a self-fulfilling cycle of growth and expansion. media reportage valorized leading clinicians, enhancing their public reputations, and with it the reach and penetration of their practices within the wider infertility market. although senior female clinicians initially dominated the private art market, these dynamics seemed to increase the lure of art for many male clinicians. this first cohort of senior women thus went on to develop interesting lines of descent for their lucrative practices, identifying up-and-coming young male gynecologists of similar faiths and castes who would inherit their mantle, if not even the practice itself. most of the largest indigenous art clinics in india’s metropolitan cities thus came to be led by an elite cohort of male obstetricians and gynecologists. these consultants were drawn to the specialism for a variety of reasons: they were already witnessing, and wished to emulate, the local success of larger international ivf consortiums; were attracted to the idea of working with cutting-edge technologies, could see the potential to create lucrative private practices, and found the sociability of the hours of work and the attraction of a lifetime of veneration compelling. one leading clinician succinctly explained these attractors in one of our interviews:   from the doctor’s perspective, you don’t do night-on calls, five thousand uk pounds [to do an ivf cycle] by doing a [regular] delivery you don’t earn this much, and there is no risk. nobody will die of ivf, only rarely you might have hyper stimulation kinds of things...but nobody will die. there is a chance of failure, so people will accept failure. so, if you don’t succeed, it’s not a big deal, go ahead, gain. from the physician’s perspective, it’s a good life, good money, good status, and if somebody is conceived, he will worship you all his life. it’s very rewarding…a less-input, high-output kind of business (mohan, industry clinician and ivf clinic owner, london, june 5, 2013).   many art clinicians have been supported in their ambitions to establish private fertility centers by what are termed in the industry “turnkey providers.” these companies (such as trivector and shivani scientific) act as franchising agents, providing interested gynecologists with everything they need to establish an ivf clinic—or a network of clinics.3 they identify and contract suitable space (sometimes within private hospitals), secure all the necessary equipment, negotiate contracts for pharmaceutical supply, and identify and subcontract ivf technicians, many of whom service multiple, geographically disparate clinics. perhaps more significantly, they also service the hopes and dreams of the clinician, but not, it would seem, without the return of a very significant commission. as mohan went on to explain,   they charge outrageous amounts of money to help set up. they make the cost of ivf impossibly high, but you know, they are feeding your dream. suppose you [the clinician] are sleeping one night and you get up in the morning and you meet this person, and he says, “i can make you run a clinic…i don’t see why you can’t successfully run an ivf unit.” it’s a big money-rolling machine, and then this person will give this doctor a sleepless night and a lot of dreams. next day he explains he will supply and do everything …“i will buy machines for you,” and he will take commission from the machine company, and he will say, “i will buy your drugs,” and he will take commission from the drug company, and “i’ll get you an embryologist” who will be traveling everywhere. there’s a lot of traveling embryologists. they are all flying everywhere. and then the person who will do the egg pick-up; they can also supply the person who will do the procedure, so what the doctor is doing is just prescribing the drugs and they will even be given the protocol, so when an infertile woman comes: “you do this set of tasks, if this, then this, you give this medicine,” so everything is done. so even if you make your accountant sit and do the job, he can do it! with one month of training, he can do it. some big players, per cycle, they will charge rs 50,000 but nearly one-third (around rs 14,000–15,000) goes to them [the turnkey provider]. someone is charging for doing nothing because all the equipment, disposables, and media are purchased by this guy. so, it’s for nothing, just for making things happen.   this level of “facilitation” stimulated what might at first appear to be simple market expansion bought about by the “routinization” of provision (wahlberg 2016), yet its underpinning dynamics were imbued with a very specific “coloniality of power,” one that, we argue, organized “the distribution of epistemic, moral, and aesthetic resources in a way that both reflected and reproduced empire” (alcoff 2007, 83). powerful domestic art providers pre-empted local demand, penetrated prospective markets, and began to proliferate their services through semi-urban, rural, and other underserved spaces. however, they did so by often imposing on potential beneficiaries, the expensive interventions originally designed for the elite clienteles of the metropolitan center. most of these less well-resourced consumers had vanishingly little knowledge of the science of art and found themselves unable to assess the utility of the treatments they were offered, whilst others became subjects whose own bodies were colonized for the purposes of surrogacy or oocyte donation. in this sense, the colonized were subjected, as linda alcoff argues, “not simply to a rapacious exploitation of all their resources but also to a hegemony of eurocentric knowledge systems” (2007, 83). both contributed directly to a gradual but highly pervasive colonization of the subaltern art market in india—one designed to meet the needs of a vast, underserved populace with unaddressed fertility needs. the power of this enterprise was such that they ultimately succeeded in thwarting the advances of many international art conglomerates. bourn hall, for example, had initially aspired to build a presence across india. however, they were ultimately outcompeted by their indian counterparts (ramanathan, 2016). these domestic providers recognized early that art markets were highly stratified; that it was not just india’s urban elite who sought access to reproductive technologies but also its peri-urban and rural poor. by accessing support from turnkey providers, a range of ambitious art specialists thus began to establish stand-alone and satellite clinics in smaller and more remote centers, diffusing expertise and access well beyond the metropolitan cities. whilst the economic geographies of art expansion in india are complex and multiple, it is possible to chart this process of diffusion and the emergence and operation of the burgeoning array of art clinics that now dot india’s landscape. indigenous-led art clinics (including stand-alone private clinics and private clinics embedded in private or corporately run hospitals) were initially highly concentrated in india’s largest metropolitan centers, including kolkata, mumbai, pune, chennai, ahmedabad, delhi, and bangalore. the years from 2010 to 2014 saw an initial expansion into what are termed in india tier 2 and 3 cities—for example, nasik, latur, and dhule—through a franchising model.4 one of the turnkey providers we interviewed outlined what we might think of as a capillary mode of market penetration. this methodology enabled clinics to reach into previously untapped markets in some of india’s poorest districts. as one traveling embryologist who works under contract to several mumbai-based art clinics explained, “one center in each of these towns reaches out to patients in the surrounding four to five districts. they go with their local gynecologists and sit for one day; they do this greeting of the patients and picking out the right patients to refer back to their clinics…they are approaching very aggressively and trying to reach to the geographies that they can manage in these smaller towns and nearby” (jaipur, march 6, 2014). art provision boomed in other parts of the country, such as kerala and punjab, for curiously idiosyncratic reasons. many laborers from kerala spent extended periods abroad servicing the booming petrodollar industries in saudi arabia and the middle east, whilst workers from punjab (who drew upon extended family networks to secure employment in canada) also spent considerable periods of time abroad during their prime procreative years (nair 2010). many of these laborers returned home with an increased “need” for ivf (induced by sustained periods of enforced abstention; toxic workplace exposure; and rising age) but also with increased funds to pay for treatment. these were peculiar trends: although these families were structurally part of the lower middle class, they had suddenly acquired access to a surplus of liquid capital which could now be channeled to address their lack of biological progeny. the changing dynamics of employment of the middle classes within these pockets of semi-urban india (pre-covid) drove up demand for art dramatically, resulting in the exponential growth of satellite art clinics in interior towns. these clinics were so small that they often evaded oversight by art regulatory bodies, their relative invisibility contributing to a significant underestimation of the overall rate of expansion of art services across the country. nonetheless, it is estimated that the number of fertility clinics in india rose from 120 in 2010 to over 20,000 in 2020.5 the growth in ivf cycles in the large metropolitan cities consequently began to slow from 2015 onwards, as smaller clinics opened up in tier 2 towns and tier 3 districts, and began, as one clinician put it, “picking up the rump of patients and retaining those patients there.” understanding how and why this occurred helps elucidate both the changing social and spatial dynamics of art provision in india, and the implications of its expansion for patient care amongst the country’s lowest socioeconomic orders.   perverse markets in unpacking the nature of these emerging markets, it is not our intention to default into “a cartographic exercise that designates incompliance and ‘maverick’ practice as localisable to the wayward developing world and good science to a predominantly euro-american haven” (bharadwaj 2013, 85). the standards of patient care and technological expertise in india’s indigenous art sector are generally commensurate with those found in the west, and in some clinics in tier i cities are world leading. the desire to conceive a genetically related child is not, however, experienced solely by those who can afford to access such clinics. even infertile couples from rural localities, who often face the added challenges of extreme financial deprivation and limited access to education and information share such biological aspirations, seeking any and all possible remedies for their infertility. the infertility treatment market in india has become highly stratified in response, as providers “adapt” their offerings and standards of care to meet the needs of the most indigent. some of the metropolitan clinics that moved into rural and semi-rural localities in maharashtra and hyderabad provided subsidized ivf for their more impoverished rural clients. motivations for doing so are varied. some providers seem genuinely impelled by a desire to improve access to care; others appear to be utilizing gifting as something more akin to a “loss leader” model of business expansion. much existing literature on cross-border exchanges and flows of reproductive capital and labor has shed light on the gamete donors, surrogates, and intending parents who have moved across borders to seek and supply care (gerrits 2018) and the increasingly corporatized global fertility industry that has expanded globally to meet their needs (whittaker, inhorn, and shenfield 2019). india’s art market, conversely, appears to have been subject to more centripetal forces, imploding inwards to capture the spaces of its own rural/semi-urban interiors, its neocolonizing impulses being allowed to play themselves out on its own poorer subjects. a relative lack of effective regulatory oversight has allowed ambitious providers to populate the reproductive landscape with a superabundance of so-called art clinics. situated on any number of dusty street corners, these facilities purport to offer advanced technologically assisted interventions that consumers believe have the capacity to “cure” their infertility. however, the art market has not simply replicated itself as it has diffused into these rural areas, but has, instead, fragmented. in some quarters, service standards have been maintained, but, in many others, they have devolved alarmingly into the shabbiest kind of service provision, one that bears almost no resemblance to that provided to the metropolitan elites of india. this form of art provision, which operates as a mere shadow of its ideal self, creates what we term “perverse markets”: those whose continued economic growth and geographic expansion is predicated on the sale of treatments and interventions that are unlikely to effectively address, and may even exacerbate, the problem they purportedly seek to solve.6 this iteration of a perverse art market caters to a specific population, a population of less affluent, less informed, less aware subjects: the subaltern infertile class of india’s rural districts. in syncing itself with the different socio-cultural coordinates of this new space, service provision itself has become disjointed and unscrupulous, creating, in the process, some extremely adverse implications for client care. much attention has been focused in recent years on the purported subjugation of those indian women who have been drawn into the service of the art industry as producers of vital clinical labor, including surrogacy and egg donation (cooper and waldby 2014; pande 2014; rudrappa 2015; vora 2015). these represent, however, but a tiny fraction of the women who are now being much more crudely exploited by the lowest echelons of the art industry in india today. these service providers have been very accommodating and inclusive of poor women who have been beckoned and incentivized to participate in this perverse market, one cynically customized to maximize the returns that can be secured from their lack of awareness and knowledge. an economy of high-cost/low-quality treatment provision coupled with exceptionally poor information dissemination and non-existent or weakly formulated consent regimes has thus unfolded and become normative within this space. the owner and director of a leading ivf turnkey provider in an indian metropolis that has helped set up more than two hundred art clinics across india and several dozens in other countries, reflected on the circumstances that have led to the emergence of this subpar iteration of ivf and its implications for patient health:   many b-town clinics and those further into the interior promise cheaper rates than what clinics in mumbai or delhi offer. but such cheaper rates are impossible to sustain in real life: see, of the total cost they incur, the maximum is for the medicines they use, and the prices of medicines are the same whether a clinic in mumbai buys them or one in a b-town buys them. the manufacturer of the drugs will not give extra discounts to the suburban clinic! so, what happens then? the suburban clinics shall have to make up for the lower costs in some way. they do that by luring the patient into more cycles than she needs. it’s a vicious and tragic chain, actually. the patients get trapped once they enter these clinics, these women are usually not well informed, who do not know how to browse proper literature on the internet and so on; they would usually do what their in-laws or husband says. and for the family who has taken the bold step of confronting their infertility and come to the clinic, there is not another easy second option—the next nearest clinic is probably in the city, many kilometers away. these patients are effectively trapped. once they have begun the cycles, they feel probably some sort of moral compulsion to go on until either they get pregnant, or the doctor gives up. the latter, as you understand, happens very late (owner and director of a major art turnkey business, mumbai, march 21, 2017).   although many of these lower order clinics are generically branded as offering ivf most are essentially ovulation induction clinics (in other words, intrauterine insemination clinics [iui]) and are run by clinicians with only very basic fertility training. they have no laboratory facilities and primarily offer services such as oral ovarian stimulation drugs and intrauterine insemination. the old-school urinary-derived gonadotrophins that they prescribe (such as clomiphene) are comparatively less expensive and in many cases less effective than more sophisticated recombinant gonadotrophins offered in metropolitan ivf centers, and practitioners consequently make less profit per cycle when administering them. most of the clinician’s income is therefore derived from the obstetric delivery of the child, when conceived. there is, therefore, a perverse incentive to retain the patient until conception is achieved. lacking equipment, expertise, or in some cases, simply the desire to scan patients, these “specialists” exploit their new subaltern consumer base by binding (sometimes even contractually) this vulnerable population into what might be described as extended regimes of indentured therapy that are, in many instances, technically incapable of delivering the remedies they purport to supply. as one indian multinational pharmaceutical manager explained,   what is happening, one of the challenges in india, is that all iui doctors technically, as per the [icmr] guidelines should not do more than three iuis and you should then refer patients for an ivf, if the prognosis warrants it. but what happens is that most of these iui practitioners try to keep the patients along with themselves and keep delaying the process of sending the patients from them to ivf…by the time they reach a real ivf center, with all the capabilities, they [the female patients] have either lost their reserve for their eggs or they would miss out in terms of age, and the endometrium and the quality of the eggs would be really much poor. all those complications arise because these guys do not want to lose the financial benefit which they would get if the pregnancy is getting delivered at the same clinic where they do it. they have fear that if i give the patient to some ivf doctor, my patient will not come back to me for obstetrics practice, which in india is around 10 to 15 thousand (rupees) depending on the town (manager of a multinational pharmaceutical company, delhi, june 26, 2014).   the clients who visit these clinics are typically drawn from the semi-urban and rural populace. often already highly stigmatized because of their infertility, they also lack access to education, and technical information on arts. such women frequently lack autonomy and remain dependent on their husbands and wider marital family for all reproductive decision-making. when such clients, already so marginalized, are further ensnared by the perverse strategies of the iui clinics, the compounded consequences are indeed profoundly adverse and unethical. as cycle after cycle of fruitless hyperstimulation occurs, their ovarian reserves plummet whilst the cost of treatment continues to rise, miring them, their partners, and family in ever greater indebtedness. only a tiny minority of such patients eventually manage to make their way to more sophisticated art facilities in larger metro centers through referral. one ivf clinician who directs such a center in jaipur shared the acute distress she has experienced in treating women who have been subjected to such poor care that they are now technically, and effectively, more infertile when they reach her office than they were when they first decided to seek medical intervention for infertility:   she came to me from this village in maharashtra; she had not conceived after eight years of marriage and had visited a local art clinic four years ago. the couple had sold their cattle and mortgaged their farmland for affording ten rounds of stimulation cycles over three years. can you believe it?? when they ran out of money, they took a break; the doctor kept on assuring them it would surely happen the next time, until they saw through him and arrived here. i did some tests and realized the woman had blocked fallopian tubes. it was a birth defect! i was so shocked when i understood that the basic tests had not been done for her! had she gone to a proper doctor at the start, they would not have spent such huge amounts of money, at least (ivf clinician and clinic owner, jaipur, august 6, 2013).   leading ivf clinicians in mumbai drew our attention to the size of the potential market for art services in india. with an estimated national population of over 1.1 billion, some 350 million couples are part of the reproductive age group. if only 2 percent of this number are infertile, the prospective market is still strikingly large, some 7 million couples—a very significant number. it could be argued that the domestic art industry in india successfully did what its international competitors such as bourn hall could not: splitting and devolving their provision, and tailoring their services to meet the highly variegated economic and social conditions, solvency, and knowledgeability of a multitude of differently positioned market consumers. the cost, in terms of standards of reproductive care, has yet to be fully measured. it is evident, however, that the degree of penetration of the domestic art industry across all localities and the “localized calibration” of clinical practice did undermine the potential reach of international service providers such as bourn hall. their prospective colonization of the domestic art market was built on the premise that consumers would be drawn to internationally benchmarked five-star service provision that was both highly regulated and protocolized. importing and working to standards of care set out under guidance published by the uk’s human fertilisation and embryology authority, the clinic sought to offer what the first ceo of bourn hall india, dr. pravin kinim described as “the louis vuitton of ivf…promising the same type of treatment one world get in the uk” (ramanathan 2016, 3). unlike indian art culture, in which provision is dominated by, as one commentator put it, “a star-doctor-driven market,” bourn hall decided not to operate on a cult of personality, but rather to populate their clinics with a staff of commensurately trained, if rather anonymous, clinical specialists. credentialization provided the rationale for charging the maximum the market could bear at up to inr 3 lakh (approx. usd 4,000) per cycle of ivf treatment. backed by private equity firms, bourn hall india set up its first clinic in kochi (kerala) in 2011, with ambitions to develop a further sixteen centers across india in the following five years. however, even returning laborers from the gulf states found bourn hall’s costs excessive, particularly as they were not discernibly paying for a “celebrity” physician. uptake of bourn hall’s service progressively fell as their indian competitors learnt how to appeal to all strata of the local market, tailoring their provision to service the needs of a highly diversified consumer base right along the fertility chain, driving down costs and driving up belief in success through the production of a culture of clinical reverence. by 2016 bourn hall india had been entirely vanquished, the sixteen centers had failed to materialize and despite the intention to invest over inr 620 crore (nearly usd 100 million), its flagship kochi clinic had also closed. although bhi came to admit defeat in the indian market, its holding company re-invented itself in 2018 as bourn hall international-mena with fresh ambitions to penetrate the middle eastern market, particularly the uae. interestingly, these failed as well, and the company has since gone through a formal liquidation/dissolution process, being sold initially to tvm capital healthcare and more recently, in november 2021, to mediclinic middle east. whether the “imperial brand” will prove sufficient to see off further competition from indian and middle eastern art providers in the mena region is yet to be determined.   art dreaming ii: reproductive empires bourn hall and other art providers from the world’s metropolitan north undoubtedly have a strong colonizing instinct, but it is not one that they alone share. india’s most prestigious privately owned clinics, which are led by a select cartel of powerful mumbaiand delhi-based ivf specialists, have spun out their operations from the large metropolitan cities of india into the far-flung corners of india’s most humble rural towns. their motivations for doing so are undoubtedly complex, but as one insider revealed in interview, highly gendered and inflected with colonialist desires:   you know these guys, [the leading indian art entrepreneurs] they like to think “we are running the show, we have control, we have power.” one says, “i am running four years, and somebody else will say i am running nine years…well, i am running twenty-three years and throughout the country!” and surprisingly, i don’t know how i forgot to mention this, they are all males who are doing this, none of them are females. in reproduction, they have status, you know, because “people are coming, and my apostles are coming, and i have this lady, i have that lady” [the female reproductive specialists they recruit to run their satellite clinics], and that gives them a thrill because they start with a small clinic and they made a big hospital, now they are running fifty hospitals, so it gives them like an empire, and that gives them like an imperial, it’s more like a colonial kind of pleasure, as they try to colonize the country and there are many of them; if you see map of india, they are based in bombay, they run in kashmir, they run in punjab, they run in assam, and now they are running in africa too. these people you need to talk…you can’t not talk to them, because these are the mafia, the godfathers who run the business in india (clinician and ivf clinic investor, mumbai, october 5, 2014).   much of their colonizing ethos, it could be argued, was learnt at the knee of those prominent european ivf consortiums that first entered the indian market in the late 1990s and early 2000s. at this time, indian specialists watched as an influx of leading fertility providers from europe and the uk entered their market, including those such as bourn hall, who set about progressively franchising their businesses into larger cities across the subcontinent. global corporations such as tvm capital healthcare later bought holdings in many of these european operations, enabling them to further extend their reach by creating franchised satellite clinics in emerging markets such as the africa and the uae.7 research carried out in sub-saharan african countries such as uganda and ghana show that in 2012–13 most local art providers continued to “obtain support for their professional initiatives” from erstwhile colonizer/first-world nations such as the uk and germany (hörbst and gerrits 2016). this research demonstrates how indian providers have since replaced these traditional colonizers in these countries. the transition is, of course, a complex one, initially mirroring the historical dynamics of colonial expansion, in which indian elites worked alongside the colonial state, acting as a comprador class there to represent and manage the colonizers’ interests in kenya, nigeria, or ghana, before finally taking control of the market themselves.8 the dynamics of this initial project of imperial expansion were very evident to the indian ivf specialists, such as traveling embryologists, who were employed to service satellite clinics in these developing states. several expressed deep skepticism about the european clinics’ motivations for expanding into these previously underserved markets. rejecting their public rhetoric, which privileged the altruistic intention to make arts more available to the impoverished infertile, they argued, conversely, that such corporations were simply interested in a much more conventional neoliberal process of value extraction. many complained that the british companies were profiteering from the sale of equipment, media, and supplies, which indian providers were prepared to offer at half the cost. in emerging markets such as africa, british and german companies continued with their metropolitan pricing model, but this met with increasing resistance. it was not long, therefore, before india’s two largest ivf turnkey companies, trivector and shivani, identified therein an opportunity for their own business expansion. playing directly on africa’s concerns about imperialist behavior on the part of these british and german ivf providers, and having been subject to similar processes of value extraction themselves, leading indian providers set about offering sub-saharan african entrepreneurs new lifelines: cut-rate supplies in exchange for their agreement to become satellites of leading indian ivf chains such as fortis healthcare and rotunda, thereby creating a kind of anti-colonial capitalist fertility chain. as the director of one such enterprise explained:   the western companies were really exploiting these africans. but they [the uk and german corporations] have gone out from africa completely now because nobody trusts them. i was very surprised as i go to a clinic in ghana [to practice ivf] and i was very surprised that if they want to buy a british product, they don’t buy it from the british company directly; they now go to an indian agent here. so, there is a big deficit of trust in africa now towards those [european] companies. they [the africans] just get the feeling that they have been exploited all along (leading ivf clinician in mumbai and owner of satellite clinics in africa and the uae, interviewed mumbai, august 8, 2015).   whether or not the indian providers’ intentions are any more admirable than those of their colonial masters is, of course, open to debate. the african market for assisted reproduction is potentially huge and driven by several factors: increasing government support for the development of healthcare infrastructure, high existent levels of gynecological disorders; lifestyle-related declines in rates of pregnancies, and strong cultural desires for biologically linked children, which together create huge demand for ivf services (ombelet and onofre 2019). market forecast reports for 2018 to 2023 predict that the african and middle eastern ivf markets will be worth usd 0.46 billion by 2023, having grown at a predicted annual rate of 16.64 percent between 2018 and 2023 (market data forecast ivf market report, 2018). the excitement this invokes amongst indian providers is palpable:   the market is huge! i had a trainee from africa who stayed with us for six months. he went back there and took six months to open up a small center. he went first of all just to test the waters but is now doing two hundred cycles a month and its huge, the market there! i went there to help him with this first batch (of embryo transfers) and this place was like…well, it really looked like twenty years back, even compared to india, but still, they are paying the same as here. i’ve also now got a practicing license in the uae as well, where childlessness is really bad, that’s why the expansion is there (leading ivf clinician in mumbai and owner of satellite clinics in africa and the uae, interviewed in mumbai, august 8, 2015).   business expansion in art provision is, it would seem, booming. but how are we to conceptualize the emergence of these new global fertility chains? capitalist production of reproductive markets has not disappeared but rather is now being realized in new sites of accumulation. it could be argued, following marini (1965) that dependent economies like india are compensating for prior imperialist processes of exploitation of their economies, resource, and labor by simply visiting on their near, and even more disadvantaged, neighbors their own iterations of colonial exploitation. such behavior would certainly mirror that of many brics firms who have become, some argue, the most super-exploitative of the corporations engaged in accumulation in africa.9 the surplus value of commodities, labor, and expenditure extracted from africa to other bric nations is estimated to have risen from 28 billion usd to 377 billion usd between 2000 and 2014 (bond 2018, 5). can this reproductive empire building be characterized though simply as a form of learned or sub-imperialism (bond 2013)? as geographer patrick bond (2018) argues, such developments certainly complicate existing, rather unsophisticated narratives that seek simply to divide the world into oppressed and oppressor nations. these developments would seem to reflect more closely vivek chibber’s argument that such behavior actually constitutes an aspirational alignment of the brics elite with their imperial mentors such that we are now seeing the emergence of a new phenomenon: “the convergence of ruling classes in the global south and the global north into a common committee of global capitalist interests” (2018, 2). despite this alignment, indian ivf corporations are not simply acting as regional agents of western imperialism or as the “deputy sheriffs” of european corporations, as bond (2013) would put it, even though they established powerful new domains of influence in these new territories. the domestic indian ivf elites who are driving global fertility chains and their attendant markets have clearly developed their own unique entrepreneurial style (highly flexible and adaptive) and successfully found avenues through which to exert their own influence. developing new markets in controversial technologies or practices (such as art, surrogacy, stem cell therapies, or gene editing) requires the state to explicate its views on their morality, and potential marketability. it does so typically, as brian salter argues, “through national institutional sources of cultural authority embedded in state and religion” that inform and oversee a necessary and visible “contest in the politics of value” (2022,21). many states wish to encourage new markets in such technologies but are concerned about appearing to support inventions or practices that may be perceived as illegitimate. india’s leading ivf specialists have played key roles in authoring the political compromise necessary to resolve this conundrum. many of the “mumbai ivf mafia,” as one of our first interviewees described them, were enrolled directly by the state as authoritative experts capable of determining, apparently without bias, how and in what ways these emergent art markets could and should be governed. in acquiescing to their views, the icmr effectively created a regulatory instrument—the icmr guidelines on assisted reproductive technology—that went on to set very liberal parameters for the business expansion of art both in india and abroad. deciding not to govern, or to govern weakly, is a political decision. announcing formally ambitious plans to curb market failures (delivery of poor-quality services, overcharging, absence of licensing, etc.) whilst simultaneously turning a blind eye to the non-implementation of those very same regulations, creates ideal conditions for unregulated market growth. as sonja van wichelen notes in this special issue, once stabilized through this regulatory parsing work as a politically legitimate thing, the medical innovation (in this case arts) can be spun off as an admissible and thus marketable commodity in a variety of local (pan-indian) and international (emerging markets) contexts. however, what we hope to have demonstrated here is that without adequate regulation, the sites into which they are exported risk becoming, at the hands of expeditious entrepreneurs, potentially even more super-exploitative of their local populations. “imperialism,” in this context, thus takes on a more nuanced form as something negotiated both economically and ideologically with sophisticated local interests to deliver an outcome, in this case, market expansion under light touch or non-existent regulation, that works to support the colonizing logics of both european and indian elites.   conclusion as bharadwaj reminds us in his 2013 work, to fully understand the construction and dynamics of new transnational networks of technology assisted industries and markets, it is vital to pay attention to the role of “local biologies” (lock 2001). assisted reproduction is one such market, and in this paper we have charted the contours of its recent expansion, revealing the complex landscapes and typologies of care that it has spawned across highly interconnected and now globally extensive fertility chain networks. indian art specialists have come to play a key role in these networks, servicing, initially, the colonizing aspirations of some of europe’s largest ivf providers, before realizing their own ambitions in reproductive empire building. we argue here that the diffusion of knowledge and expertise about ivf has not been unilinear, but rather has been transposed and rephrased in the indian context with surprising effects. the entrepreneurial spread of second-rate reproductive services throughout india and into sub-prime africa is, as we hope to have demonstrated here, driven by a complex interlinked suite of cultural and economic dynamics: the neoliberalism of health service provision in india; the privatization and corporatization of care, potent cultural preferences for biologically related children, and gendered competitiveness, but also, and perhaps most significantly, by the impulses of colonialism and imperialism, which we suggest, have come to inflect both the logic of its expansion and its underlying ethos. whilst mapping the contours of these emergent reproductive empires demands further empirical and conceptual work, the evidence marshalled here suggests, at least, that these expansive global fertility chain networks have the capacity to embed or re-embed in particular sites of economic and cultural vulnerability, new amoral economies of reproduction, by making such technologies seemingly more available yet less assuredly beneficial, either biologically or economically, to their intended recipients. in unpacking the ambitions, compulsions, dreams, and instincts that have shaped the transition of art provision in india from a satellite in a transnational network of service provision to now one of its most powerful hubs, we hope to have cast light on the complex ways in which science and technology are remade in situ but also how the historiography of colonial relations can return to haunt contemporary practices in ways that threaten to materialize new and potentially highly exploitative modes of reproductive value extraction across global fertility chain networks.   acknowledgements we sincerely thank the wellcome trust for funding the research project on which this work is based (investigating reproductive ethics-in-context: the indian experience, five-year international ethics grant no. 097733/b/11/z); our research associates amar jesani, neha madhiwala, and anuradha panchmatia; and the clinics and clinicians that hosted us for their invaluable assistance in carrying out the extended fieldwork.   notes 1 a sterilization camp organized by the state department of health under the national family planning programme to perform laparoscopic tubectomies was held in bilaspur, chhattisgarh, india on november 8, 2014. it has been argued that “target-driven” nature of this family planning program resulted in rushed and botched ligations that violated all standard operating procedures and ethical norms. eighty-three women from predominantly dalit and tribal groups were subjected to sterilization within six hours by one surgeon using an assembly line technique with one laparoscope with no precautions for asepsis, resulting in the deaths of thirteen women. for a detailed account, see nadimpally et al. 2015.   2 for example, leading and highly venerated women such as saadhna desai, feroza parekh, and indira hinduja all developed large private practices that attracted patients from their own faith communities; desai is a gujarati; parekh is a parsi, and hindujha is a sindhi. desai, for example, attracted many clients from the wealthy gujarati jewelryand diamond-trading community located within india and abroad, in belgium.   3 trivector scientific private ltd. was initially a homegrown indian company established in 1993. the danish art solutions provider origio acquired a 51 percent stake in trivector in 2012 to expand its own international sales market but sold their interest in 2015 as trivector sought to regain control. shivani scientific ltd. is an indian-owned company that establishes new ivf facilities in india using products from twenty-six international art technology, equipment, and consumable suppliers. see shivani scientific 2014.   4 cities in india are categorized on the basis of a grading structure devised by the government of india. this system helps the authorities to allot house rent allowance to the employees of the public sector, posted in different cities across the country. tier i are india’s largest cities, tier 2 and 3 are comparatively smaller cities, tier 4 are towns. there are currently 8 tier i cities, 26 tier ii cities, 33 tier iii cities, 5,000 tier iv towns, and more than 638,000 villages in the country.   5 the times of india suggested that india had in excess of 20,000 ivf and iui clinics across india by 2017, but that less than 20 percent of them were registered by the indian council for medical research (dey 2017). bronwyn parry and sayani mitra are currently undertaking a crowd-sourced mapping project to establish the true extent of this expansion of provision in recent years.   6 it can be argued, as one of our reviewers astutely noted, that the perverse markets theory can be said to be descriptive of the entire art sector, being notably evident, for example, in its aggressive marketing of ivf add-ons. these include treatments such as assisted hatching and immunological testing, both of which have been determined by the uk’s human fertilisation and embryology authority to have little efficacy in assisting conception, but which are successfully marketed to consumers worldwide through the continually cited risk of “low success rates” and the associated exploitation of “patient desperation.”   7 for more detailed analysis of these trends, see van de wiel, 2020.   8 we remain indebted to reviewer two for their help in conceptualizing this.   9 the brics acronym stands for the most powerful of the emergent global south economies: brazil, russia, india, china, and south africa.   references alavi, hamza. 1975. “india and the colonial mode of production.” economic and political weekly 10 (33/35): 1235–62. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4537329. alcoff, linda. m. 2007. “mignolo’s epistemology of coloniality.” the new centennial review 7 (3): 79–101. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.0.0008. appleton, nayantara sheoran and aditya bhradwaj. 2017. 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case of stem cell treatments.” new political economy 22 (1): 76–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2016.1198757. salter, brian. 2022. “markets, cultures, and the politics of value: the case of assisted reproductive technology.” science, technology, & human values 47 (1): 3–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243921991929.   shivani scientific. 2014. “about us.” https://www.shivaniivf.com/about-us.php. tvm capital healthcare. n.d. “bourn hall international.” accessed december 10, 2021. https://www.tvmcapitalhealthcare.com/portfolio/bourn-hall-international/. van de wiel, lucy. 2020. “the speculative turn in ivf: egg freezing and the financialization of fertility.” new genetics and society 39 (3): 306–26. http://doi.org/10.1080/14636778.2019.1709430. vertommen, sigrid, vincenzo pavone, and michal nahman. 2021. “global fertility chains: an integrative political economy approach to understanding the reproductive bioeconomy.” science, technology, & human values 47 (1). https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243921996460. vora, kalindi. 2015. “re-imagining reproduction: unsettling metaphors in the history of imperial science and commercial surrogacy in india.” somatechnics 5 (1): 88–103. https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2015.0149. wahlberg, ayo. 2016. “the birth and routinization of ivf in china.” reproductive biomedicine & society online, no. 2, 97–107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rbms.2016.09.002. whittaker, andrea, marcia c. inhorn, and francoise shenfield. 2019. “globalised quests for assisted conception: reproductive travel for infertility and involuntary childlessness.” global public health 14 (12): 1669–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2019.1627479.     author bios bronwyn parry is a professor of global health and social medicine at king’s college london.   rakhi ghoshal (ph.d.) is a researcher from the global south; her research interests and outputs are in the area of gender, (in)fertility, health and violence against women. currently, she is leading a learning-intervention pilot on health sector response to violence against women in bihar, india. stevenson, ariel. 2021. review of becoming human: matter and meaning in an antiblack world, by zakiyyah iman jackson (new york university press, 2020). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © ariel stevenson, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | becoming human: matter and meaning in an antiblack world, by zakiyyah iman jackson (new york university press, 2020) a.e. stevenson university of california, los angeles stevensonae@g.ucla.edu zakiyyah iman jackson’s becoming human: matter and meaning in an antiblack world uses contemporary african diasporic literature and mixed-media collages to present unruly theorizations that disrupt philosophical conversations about the creation of the human, the black(ened) subject, and the animal. it does not play fair. this book deftly dismantles enlightenment thought to propose a “black(ened) humanity,” unmooring previous concepts in black studies and posthumanism that argue that black humanity is a “denied humanity.” jackson takes the reader through a critical genealogy of human-making, engaging with hume, hegel, jefferson, and kant to show that the category of black(ened) humanity depended not so much on an antiblack horizontalization of blackness and the animal, but rather a transmogrification of blackness that allows black(ened) humanity to be “not denied but appropriated, inverted, and ultimately plasticized in the methodology of abjecting animality” (23). jackson intervenes in these ontological debates stating that the violence of black(ened) humanity comes from its “plasticization” through which “‘the animal’ is one but not the only form blackness is thought to encompass” (3). furthermore, and perhaps most radically, jackson argues throughout the text that the idea of “the animal” emerges through the afterlives of slavery and colonial encounters that affect human and nonhuman forms of life. this is a complete reorientation that challenges the basis of many of the fields often covered in this journal. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) ariel stevenson, 2021 2 jackson showcases her precise formal analysis of literary and visual texts, certainly, but she also demonstrates that many of the fields she moves between (animal studies, black [feminist] studies, continental philosophy, feminist histories of biology and science, and new materialisms) are actually united in their reliance on inherently antiblack logics. by engaging these fields, she ushers out the stagnant debates that circulate in regards to blackness and the (non)human and invites us to do this with her. the new formulations push us past the dead end of “dehumanization” to consider the new modes of “being/knowing/feeling” that come from imagining what blackness can be outside of a reliance of hegel’s theory of “universal humanity.” jackson prioritizes the works of frederick douglass, toni morrison, nalo hopkinson, octavia butler, audre lorde, ezrom legae, and wangechi mutu as she believes that “black literary and visual culture theorizes and philosophizes” (35). these have been the main areas where black people could theorize about ourselves since for so long we have been plasticized, that is made “infinitely mutable,” to create the foundation by which politics, religion, and philosophy maintain their hegemony (11). thus, we must be careful to not reproduce epistemologies that create conditions for the plasticization of blackness. the first chapter detangles man’s self-making through the abjection of the animal by proposing that possibilities arise from trans-species correspondence. jackson turns to the (neo)slave narrative, frederick douglass’s seminal narrative of the life of frederick douglass and toni morrison’s influential beloved, arguing that they provide the language through which we have come to understand the bestialization of blackness. the chapter has two sections: the first considers douglass’s presentation of bestialization of blackness and reliance on, and later distancing from, the dominant grand theory of the chain of being (“scala naturae”), and the second provides a sustained reading of an interaction between paul d, a slave, and mister, a rooster, in beloved. in 1845 douglass put forth a sentimental appeal that attempted to highlight the particular violence of bestialization. he invokes a disruption of the chain of being, which depended on belief of a type of metaphorical “linear, hierarchical, and continuous ladder” (48) that orders all living beings according to perfection flowing from god at the top to inanimate objects and elements at the bottom. abolitionists used this chain as a foundation to base a sentimental argument for the abolition of slavery, even though this argument “necessarily obscured the singular nature of new world slavery’s cataclysmic violence” (53). jackson sees morrison’s refusal of sentimentality in beloved as a generative exploration of the entanglement of race, book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) ariel stevenson, 2021 3 gender, animality, and sex that makes up black(ened) humanity. emphasizing mister’s gaze as the moment of paul d’s undoing, jackson demonstrates the “problem of ethics that accompanies asymmetrical relations” (59) such that an interaction between slave and a rooster dislodges hierarchical and humanistic portrayals of gender, knowledge, and being. jackson emphasizes that slavery’s conditions could turn paul d, a man, into “an occasion for the theater of sovereign power and manipulated matter—a plastic” (66). the second chapter, “sense of things: empiricism and world in nalo hopkinson’s brown girl in the ring,” jackson makes the seismic claim that blackness is a being, not nothingness, and more specifically, “something rather than nothing, perhaps even everything” (85). to do this, she situates black female flesh as the matrix figure of the human through an analysis of ti-jeanne’s physical vertigo in the novel brown girl in the ring, thereby dismantling the heideggerrian ordering of the world into discrete categories (human, animal, stone). following sylvia wynter and hortense spillers, jackson places the figure of the absented black mater(nal), the nonrepresentable, as the fundamental figure that unravels heidegger’s empirical logic. vertigo here is a “measure and means for the disordering and inoperability of a metaphysics” (120) that forecloses other epistemologies of worlds, illuminating the violence of the idea that there is one “universal” world, as such. “‘not our own’: sex, genre, and the insect poetics of octavia butler’s ‘bloodchild,’” the third chapter, initiates a shift in the book towards a discussion of how antiblackness infiltrates species discourse, wherein many scholars have attempted to distinguish between human-animal and human-nonhuman. using butler’s work, jackson argues that the interspecies relations in the book are not mimetic to human relations, disrupting common metaphors for “the discourse of species” within the genre of science “fiction.” “bloodchild” has been read as an allegory for the power dynamics of slavery and colonization. jackson, instead, argues that butler imagines “an articulation of embodied subjectivity that is typified by receptivity rather than mastery” (150). this utilization of receptivity concerning the body invites embracing risk and opacity inherent in a turn towards co-adaptation. radically, jackson states that butler doesn’t champion symbiosis, like feminist posthumanists have argued, but instead meditates on its “promises and perils…under conditions of unequal power” (129). jackson argues the discourse of species between gan and the tlic, an insectoid people, is a critical ontological discourse that has been underprivileged in discussing the impact of black science fiction writers (124–25). book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) ariel stevenson, 2021 4 the final chapter, “organs of war,” turns again to the figure of the abjected black female body to show how philosophical thought, specifically aesthetics, and scientific classification collaborate to violate this figure to make the human coherent. connecting new materialisms, evolutionary discourse, and taxonomic history with a sustained analysis of wangechi mutu’s collages, specifically histology of the different classes of uterine tumors, and audre lorde’s the cancer journals, jackson engages wynter’s theorization of sociogeny to consider black female sex(uality) as an emerging framework within intra-active multiscalar systems. intra-activity within these systems allows for a robust understanding of the body that considers the impact of the biological, psychological, environmental, and cultural in the “somaticization of politics,” and that of war on these bodies, more directly (43). jackson emphasizes the constructed black female body in the material collages of mutu’s histology work and lorde’s musings on carcinogenesis in cancer journals to show the direct effects racial domination has on these bodies. the coda solidifies the theoretical stakes of the previous chapters into an assertion that extends biopolitics and necropolitics. jackson argues that achille mbembe’s necropolitical weapon is not exterior technology but rather has been somaticized within the body through “the biological field such that the black(ened) body, the very materiality of the organism, yields and redirects its energies to the destruction of black vitality” (204). as such, epigenetics, as an offshoot of biology that studies heritable changes in gene expression that emerge in relation to social and environmental factors, can never be the path to ameliorate the violence against the black(ened) female body’s reproductive organs. we must understand that biology and epigenetics create antiblackness on and in the black body as they are part of an “ecology of violence pervasive and chronic” (208). christina sharpe’s (2016) conception of “weather,” from which socioeconomic mobility can’t shield the effects of antiblackness on the black(ened) subject at the somatic level, is eerily descriptive here. the alchemical processes that jackson nurtures in becoming human have fundamentally changed the course of my thinking with regards to (post)humanism. the book makes the stakes of thinking through antiblackness clear across the humanities and the sciences. reading this work will demonstrate how to also rehearse parsing through the autopoesis of our current world order (for trouble don’t last always). becoming human is essential reading for those who are dedicated to doing the work to dismantle the systems that make antiblackness, rather than simply paying lip service. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) ariel stevenson, 2021 5 references sharpe, christina. 2016. in the wake: on blackness and being. durham, nc: duke university press. author bio ariel stevenson is a ph.d. candidate in cinema and media studies at the university of california, los angeles, where she is completing her dissertation, “niggas on the internet: scenes of a black social life.”     book review book review | weighing the future: race, science, and pregnancy trials in the postgenomic era by natali valdez (university of california press, 2022)     jaya keaney university of melbourne jaya.keaney@unimelb.edu.au     “you are pregnant. you are pregnant and, as your mom explains, ‘heavy set’; or as your cousin says, nalgona; or as the tags on your jeans read, ‘curvy’; or as your doctor terms it ‘obese’; or as you say, fat.” (1)   so begins natali valdez’s vivid ethnography of prenatal trials with pregnant women in the postgenomic era. the book presents a deft multi-sited study of two such large-scale trials, one in the united states and the other in the united kingdom. these trials stage lifestyle interventions with the aim of addressing maternal obesity and diabetes and improving fetal outcomes. the trials mobilize postgenomic paradigms, drawing selectively on research in epigenetics and the developmental origins of health and disease (dohad) to connect the behaviors and diets of pregnant people to the health of future children. with a skilled ethnographic eye, valdez traces how pregnant participants are produced as sites of risk, speculative value, and canvasses for imagining racialized population futures, to the detriment of adequate healthcare and social policy responses in the present. these outcomes are characteristic features of what the book terms “postgenomic reproductive politics.”   weighing the future is motivated by a stark reality that haunted me as i traversed its chapters: to date, despite hundreds of pregnancy trials across diverse contexts, there is no conclusive evidence that lifestyle interventions into diet and exercise reduce pregnancy complications or significantly improve health outcomes of birth parents and children. indeed, this same outcome befalls the two trials at the heart of the book. how then, valdez asks, do randomized controlled trials continue to be proposed, funded, and conducted, retaining their status as the gold standard for evidence-based medicine?   part of the answer is a pernicious cultural discourse that defines good maternal subjects as thin, and as bearing ultimate responsibility for their children’s health, exercised through individualized behaviors and food choices. valdez ably traces the conditions of possibility for this discourse. she finds a knotted web of racial surveillance capitalism and its bioprospecting tendrils, and the contraction of social welfare and basic healthcare symptomatic of late liberalism in both its us and uk incarnations. postgenomic science has given new traction to an old and narrow discourse of maternal responsibility, valdez argues, by centering the pregnant body as the site of epigenetic transmission for future health risk.   the book’s opening vignette, quoted above, crystallizes the creative flair and careful attention to positionality that is one of the strongest contributions of this text. each chapter opens with a vignette crafted in the second person, interpellating the reader as a participant in a pregnancy trial. by centering the individuals through whom body size is materialized as the medical problem of “obesity,” valdez highlights the disparities between normative scientific imaginings of lifestyle, food, home, and care, and their lived realities as they are contoured by racism, fat stigma, and unequal access to material resources.   as the first ethnography of postgenomic pregnancy trials, weighing the future makes a significant contribution to science and technology studies, gender studies, and medical anthropology. while the critique of maternal responsibility in reproductive healthcare and postgenomics is well established in these disciplines, valdez makes a unique contribution through her careful attention to racism as a fundamental reproductive environment. drawing on the entwined genealogies of black feminism and reproductive justice, valdez attends closely to how gender is always already racialized, with reproduction and the maternal body fundamental axes of racialization and attendant hierarchies of the human.   the book is organized into three parts, each comprising two chapters. following an introduction that maps out the stakes and key terms of the book, part i lays the groundwork for subsequent ethnographic chapters. chapter 1 explores the “epistemic environments” of postgenomics and develops the concept of “epigenetic foreclosure,” the book’s keystone term. “epigenetic foreclosure” powerfully describes the way that capacious epigenetic models of an expansive environment and indeterminate transmission are translated again and again into clinical interventions narrowly focused on maternal behavior. such foreclosure not only hampers scientific creativity, but also fails to adequately grasp the realities of pregnant life.   chapter 2 further contextualizes the postgenomic turn by tracing historical developments since the 1950s in scientific understandings and guidelines regarding nutrition during pregnancy. valdez highlights that while scientific paradigms may have shifted in significant ways from the 1950s, the mechanism for intervention has remained squarely focused on individualized lifestyle solutions targeting pregnant women, tilling the ground for contemporary epigenetic foreclosure.   part ii delves into the ethnographic material gathered through intensive study of two trials, in which valdez attended staff meetings, shadowed health workers, interviewed primary investigators and other staff, and witnessed interventions with participants, including delivering them herself as a staff member in the us trial. the ethnographic detail here is rich, and valdez captures palpable scenes that resonate long after reading: stilted staff meetings to brainstorm challenges with recruitment; a table that groaned with subway sandwiches at a “lunch and learn” event for a community health clinic; the thick and off-putting hospital smell flooding her nostrils as she entered the premises of the uk trial; and emotional exchanges with trial participants as they shared everyday experiences that were technically outside the remit of the nutritional intervention she was tasked with delivering.   chapter 3, the first chapter in part ii, focuses on participant recruitment as the stage when “people are transitioned into research subjects and data points for science” (83). as valdez highlights, risk is salient in all randomized controlled trials, but in prenatal trials, its operation is distinct: pregnant people are framed as risky before they enter a trial, due to persistent fat stigma, racism, and a postgenomic discourse of maternal responsibility. while race is obscured in many aspects of postgenomic research, it is materialized explicitly in the recruitment stage, as studies depend on racially and ethnically diverse cohorts. as participants’ self-identities are translated into legible and categorizable data points, valdez shows how racism is a mercurial process of “improvisation” that most often appears in technoscience in the language of diversity and inclusion (112).   chapter 4 turns to the narratives of pregnant participants. by tracing their understandings of food and pregnancy, and their motivations for participating in research, valdez gives depth to the people whose bodies and behaviors are transformed into data. control and responsibility emerge here as two powerful themes that structure research design and the experiences of participants, who survey their own weight and food choices with reference to deeply classed and racialized discourses of health. in many instances, conforming to the nutritional interventions of the trials required participants to abandon culturally specific methods of eating and sharing food. a narrow reliance on western food cultures, such as the valorized “mediterranean diet,” thus presents one salient way that pregnancy trials participate in ongoing processes of racism and colonization.   part iii of the book takes up the consequences—racist, gendered, methodological —of how “environments” are defined in pregnancy trials. in chapter 5, valdez tracks the processes by which the notion of environment is persistently reduced to the intrauterine environment of the maternal body. producing this narrow iteration requires many aspects of life to be black-boxed. while food is treated as a paramount exposure, other less controllable or readily individualized environmental factors, such as structural racism, housing stability, stress, and toxic exposure, are sidelined.   although the narrow focus on the intrauterine may not adequately explain pregnant experience, it does produce valuable resources for scientific research: the pregnant “biobits” that are the focus of chapter 6. blood and urine samples, placental tissue, and cord blood are extracted from participants and made valuable through a temporal formation that valdez terms “speculative time” (187). in yet another foreclosure, present-day health needs are sidelined in the service of preventing future disease, optimizing future value within a racial capitalist imaginary.   weighing the future concludes by turning to the “afterbirth of foreclosure.” the foreclosures that weave their way through this book are shown to constrain scientific creativity, forestall innovation, and stand in the way of health justice. and yet, as valdez maintains, foreclosure is not inevitable. calling into question the method of the randomized controlled trial itself, valdez urges us to imagine environments in ways that are not individualized, and to center racism, not depoliticized racial identities, in our theories of reproduction.   ultimately, this meticulously researched and beautifully crafted book models the health justice framework for which it agitates. driven by a deep commitment to understanding the lives of pregnant participants, valdez demonstrates how feminist and anti-racist critique is a route to better science and health policy, and to a more accurate portrait of how we all collectively create the reproductive environment.     author bio jaya keaney is a lecturer in gender studies in the school of social and political sciences at the university of melbourne.     original research affecting infrastructures: crafting and weaving as alternative repairs   fredy mora-gámez department of science and technology studies, university of vienna fredy.mora.gamez@univie.ac.at   eliana sánchez-aldana faculty of architecture and design, universidad de los andes em.sancheza@uniandes.edu.co   dimitris papadopoulos department of history of consciousness, university of california, santa cruz dimi2027@gmail.com   abstract as two traditional practices performed by rural communities in colombia, crafting and weaving can be reframed as ontologies that embody alternative material orders and forms of repair. in this context, we explore two specific initiatives: the crafted empathy chair developed by members of campesino social movements in cauca and nariño, and interweaving material encounters, a series of collaborative spaces involving women from textile collectives from chocó, antioquia, and bolivar. in the process of exploring these initiatives, we reflect on the role of nonhumans as technologies that allow our interlocutors to share their affect. in addition to discussing strategies for engaging in affective relations when dealing with the aftermath of war violence, we describe how these arrangements affect us as a part of the audience. thus, we propose the term affecting infrastructure to conceptualize how crafting and weaving can foster everyday spaces and shared grounds for the emergence of emotional engagements as alternative modes of repair.     keywords infrastructure, affect, repair, crafting, columbia, materiality, social movement     introduction more than 50 years of armed confrontations involving guerrillas, paramilitary groups, and the colombian army have resulted in at least 10 million victims (uariv 2021). the 2016 signing of a peace accord between fuerzas armadas revolucionarias de colombia, ejército popular (farc-ep), and the colombian government was expected to bring an end to the armed conflict. at least, this was one of the narrative outcomes circulated in international media (brodzinsky 2016; partlow and miroff 2016) and local media (lafuente 2016). however, whether a post-conflict colombia has been achieved is still part of an ongoing debate, as violence between different armed groups continues to dominate the everyday lives of many people, particularly those who inhabit the rural areas of the country. our choice of the term post-accord highlights our interest in describing an ongoing situation whose realities exceed official narratives. in the landscape described above, the question of state intervention in the aftermath of the peace accord is subject to much discussion. these state interventions focus on administrative aspects of reparation (villa, londoño díaz, and barrera machado 2015), financial resources for land restitution and compensations for victims (unruh 2019), reintegration of former combatants (arboleda ariza, prosser-bravo, and mora-gámez 2020), and psychosocial assistance strategies (vivares porras, hernández zapata, and cañaveral castro 2020). one of the regulations that preceded the peace accord is the law of victims and land restitution (lv), according to which the colombian state has a legal obligation to both compensate victims (i.e., via restoration of land; monetary compensation; education, health, housing, and employment and income-generation programs) and holistically repair their lives (i.e., provide psychiatric care and recover their dignity, memory, and rights). the lv addresses psychosocial assistance as a crucial aspect of reparation to cope with the emotional aftermath of war and the violence of the armed conflict. thus, post-accord psychosocial assistance has become a regulation guideline when it comes to reintegrating former combatants. however, institutional psychosocial assistance is often tied to a sliding scale of financial and other forms of compensation (franco gamboa 2016; franco gamboa and franco cian 2020). the result is a predominant form of psychosocial assistance consisting of a series of protocols of emotional recovery used nationwide. although the transdisciplinary study of how governmental technologies address the emotional aftermath of war and violence is invaluable and raises critical issues for the theorization of the material politics of state-led projects, we pursue a different line of inquiry. through participation in social movements and their daily practices in various regions of colombia, our research has exposed us to material arrangements woven around bottom-up or grassroots strategies, outside of the state’s psychosocial assistance, arranged by our interlocutors to share the multiple consequences of war in their present lives. we engage communities involved in transformative practices of everyday materials, such as crafting and weaving, as practices that create new ways of life (escobar 2019). our interest lies in the attempts of our interlocutors to address different emotions stemming from lived experiences of war violence. affect became the key category that we initially used to address this specific aspect of our ethnographic journey. however, our understanding of affect does not appeal to representational or internal entities, but to relations configured within groups and objects (brown and reavey 2014; hughes and mee 2018; middleton and brown 2005; springgay and truman 2017). these relations occur in spaces that constitute a “shared ground from which subjective states and their attendant feelings and emotions emerge” (anderson 2009, 78). given the predominant role of our interlocutors´ material practices in our ethnographic vignettes, we reflect precisely on the role of nonhuman entities in the configuration of these shared grounds of affective relations. in doing so, we reconsider affect as a relational process (brown and stenner 2009; slaby 2019; von scheve 2018) embedded in community efforts, collective literacies, social movements, sociomaterial entanglements, and hybrid alliances, which are empirically unpacked in our vignettes. by focusing on material practices such as crafting and weaving, we aim to make more visible the vital (though often hidden) role of affect in social movements and the collective yet individually situated practices of crafting and weaving. additionally, we focus on the relations around objects and how bodies are affected through touching and being touched (puig de la bellacasa 2009). we revisit practices of crafting spaces and textile making as inter-embodied through nearness and being with others, including both humans and nonhumans (ahmed and stacey 2001; puig de la bellacasa 2017). while we have elsewhere gained some understanding of the transformative potential of crafting and making (mora-gámez 2020; sánchez-aldana 2022; sánchez-aldana et al. 2019), here we emphasize that such practices might also engender alternative ontological conditions of existence (mora-gámez 2023a; tacchetti et al. 2022). we conceive ontology as the capacity of actors (such as groups of humans, members of an animal species, “natural” processes, or certain objects, or some co-action between them) to change the material configuration of their space of existence—that is, “how persons and things could alter from themselves” (holbraad, pedersen, and viveiros de castro 2014, 2). such an “ontological turn ensued from the encounter between the field of political ecology and the evolving concerns with ontology (objects, things, matter, the real, immanence, process) in postconstructivist social theory” (escobar 2018, 52). within this framework our use of the notion of material-ontological transformation is inspired by broader debates in the social sciences, such as anthropology (blaser 2014; de la cadena 2010; henare, holbraad, and wastell 2007; holbraad, pedersen, and viveiros de castro 2014), and science and technology studies (marres 2009; mol 2002; law and singleton 2005; pickering 1995; woolgar and lezaun 2013). therefore, we consider crafting and weaving as material encounters and the relations around them as hybrid ontologies between humans and nonhumans that are continuously “in-the-making” or “coming-into-being” (naji 2009). these relations embody a form of bottom-up, situated transformation that overcomes the excluding forms of reparation promoted by the state. this form of politics is rooted in everyday life (rancière 1999). within the context of interest in everyday life, we wonder how affect is mediated by material objects involved in crafting and weaving as transformative practices. we aim to develop a better understanding of the orders emerging from material practices of crafting and weaving, their multiplicity, and their role in the lives of our interlocutors and their audiences in post-accord colombia. we begin describing two scenes that demonstrate the relation between crafting/weaving and affect. we initially call these scenes “arrangements” to draw attention to how they consist of human and nonhuman alliances prepared by our interlocutors to address the aftermath of war and violence, among other outcomes. in this epistemic exercise, our descriptions are grounded in a deep appreciation of the situatedness of our interlocutors: women leading communities of peasants and textile makers while embodying multiple conditions of social class, ethnicity, and (forced) migration in the rural areas of colombia. these generous women who shared their experiences with us have found themselves at the intersection of multiple sources of vulnerability, making their lives particularly and disproportionately impacted by the armed conflict. at the same time, these experiences in the aftermath of violence have also shaped their collective and embodied resistance and repair strategies, as well as the materiality of these strategies. we examine the materiality of those arrangements as entry points to gain a better understanding of the affective and material emerging orders involved. we therefore draw on the notion of infrastructure (star 1999) to theorize about those emerging relations. casper bruun jensen and atsuro morita characterize infrastructures as experimental systems that integrate a “multiplicity of disjunctive elements spinning new relations between them” (2017, 615). as the authors explain, these material experiments create ontologies, forms of existence that shape and are shaped by culture, society, and politics. rather than focusing on large institutional infrastructures (e.g., state or municipal energy, transport, or communication networks or private regional and global supply chains), we focus on mundane, grassroots, less visible spaces that exist beyond the boundaries of state reparation and solidarity (mora-gámez 2020). we pay close attention (savransky and stengers 2018) to the politics of care (puig de la bellacasa 2017) enacted by such arrangements. but more than mere arrangements, crafting and weaving are hereby reframed as practical ontologies producing infrastructures to seek alternatives in dealing with the aftermath of violence. these alternatives also provide collective grounds in which new feelings and emotions emerge in crafters/weavers and their audiences, including ourselves. therefore, we propose the term affecting infrastructures to conceptualize how crafting and weaving enact spaces in which relational and shared grounds for the emergence of feelings and emotions also become part of their sociomaterial achievements. our research presents multi-sited ethnographic experiences connected by the common thread of the colombian armed conflict during post-accord times, involving interlocutors from different rural regions of the country. drawing on george e. marcus (1995, 2012), we establish connections between these experiences by following objects, people, practices, and stories. alongside our methodology of assemblage ethnography, we incorporate the concept of practice-led research, which emphasizes the process of making, rather than the result (candy, edmods and vear 2021; groth, mäkelä, and seitamaa-hakkarainen 2015). we bring together ethnographic inputs from our work as distinct and interconnected sites, where material transformations give rise to encounters that foster the co-acknowledgment of our experience (das 1996). our ethnographic recollections include the empathy chair, an initiative from peasant social movements in cauca and nariño, and interweaving material encounters (ime), a series of spaces with women from textile collectives who are reconstructing their lives and communities (gonzález arango 2014) from chocó, antioquia, and bolivar. these recollections make visible the role of different objects, the achievements of the arrangements, and our experiences together with our interlocutors. in doing so, we describe how the impact of infrastructures provides alternative spaces to address some aspects of the vast aftermath of war. we reflect on the possibilities and limitations of theorizing the described arrangements as infrastructures. finally, we discuss what affecting infrastructures might do for the arrangements that we and our interlocutors follow within the landscape of post-accord colombia.   the crafted empathy chair it is still early in the morning on the first day of a feria campesina (peasant fair ), and lucía has already installed an arrangement consisting of wooden cubicles, chairs, audio systems, and headphones in the main square of pasto, a city in the southwest of the country. lucía has crafted these cubicles together with members of her campesino movement (see figure 1). although i (fredy) have participated in the design of other stands, i cannot yet understand what is happening in this stand, so i decide to engage with it. after placing myself inside the cubicle, lucía hands me a pair of headphones to wear while i look at her sitting in front of me. our eye contact is the foundation of the encounter. the audio account consists of her detailed narration about what happened on her farm several years ago. its contents are powerfully moving, and i picture her in the situation described by the audio. she lived there with her partner and their three children until paramilitary groups came to her farm requesting food and money. lucía explains in the audio account how scared she was of providing anything for them since, most likely, guerrilla militants would find out and come after her and her family for collaborating with the enemy. it was an impossible decision. the lucía in the audio keeps telling her story, while the lucía sitting in front of me maintains eye contact. the uninvited guests on lucía´s farm dispossessed her of her house and killed her partner and two of her daughters, filling her life with pain, anger, and fear. the atrocities i listen to, years later, are inevitably part of my present recollection of lucía´s story. i witness how she expresses anger and pain while sitting in front of me. participating in this arrangement permitted my empathy for her and embodiment of emotions, as well, in a way that is not limited by time. i embody lucía’s feelings while i narrate her encounter in these paragraphs. by exceeding temporality, lucía´s story makes even more resonant the similar ones i (we) have come across over the years in colombia and greece. these stories are part of other research projects on the materiality of registration procedures of victims of the armed conflict (mora-gámez 2023b) and alternative forms of solidarity developed by social movements. lucía’s vivid narration reminds me of the hundreds of families in similar situations leading up to and during the time of writing. post-conflict is an inaccurate term quite proudly presented in international reports and negotiations, but it is deeply complicated by the ongoing violence in colombia, even during the height of the covid-19 pandemic and quarantine, when social leaders like lucía were easily targeted by hitmen and paramilitary groups. although i am a colombian national, my situatedness has never been violently pierced by armed conflict. despite this power imbalance (alcalde 2007), as someone inhabiting spaces of privilege enacted by my gender and the opportunity to study abroad in an english-speaking country, i now also inhabit a space in the convergence of all lucía’s emotions and memories. lucía’s pain, anger, and despair trigger my profound compassion for the colombia of the past and the present. this convergence site is where reciprocity is transformed and enacted. lucía’s embodied affect, displayed in the assemblage audio–chairs–people, is now part of an affecting arrangement, a material world (jensen and morita 2017) reaching out for my empathy and humanity. my affect is shaped by a more-than-human staging.   figure 1. the crafted empathy chair displayed at the feria campesina. credit: fredy mora-gámez.   back in the stand, crafted spaces displayed in a public space become alliances between human and nonhuman actors, allowing the owners of those stories to share their emotions in our encounters. the audio account continues while i sit in the wooden cubicle; the message concludes, “i am from a red zone , but i am not a militant, i am just a campesina.” after removing the headphones, lucía asks me if i want to be hugged, and i gladly accept. her embrace is a reminder for my body that the pain and anger that i just imagined, felt, and visualized is also embodied by the person in front of me. the feeling induces a transformation that exceeds the scope of words, while involving a multiplicity of emotions, thereby piercing my position as a colombian, researcher, man, father, son, and a child of migrants. afterwards, lucía finalizes our encounter by saying, “thanks for sharing my story.” then she invites me to stay all day on the stand and help distribute headphones to the participants. people initially participate in the arrangement without a clear understanding of its purpose. sometimes, the person in front of them is not the same person who is narrating the audio. however, lucía has been careful to choose individuals from her campesino movement collective who at least match the age and gender of the narrator, to preserve the credibility of the story. after the audio account is over, some participants cry, others thank the person in front of them, and most of them express their sorrow for the story. lucía explains how, after crafting the cubicles, she collected audio accounts from eight participants and engaged in different negotiations with civil servants, which led to the municipality providing computers and headphones for the stand. lucía explains, “the audio accounts themselves were important, but the chairs, headphones, and the person in front of you make it more intense and effective.” the stand she was curating was part of the aforementioned feria campesina organized by leaders of campesino movements in the region. as leader of one of campesino movements of nariño, lucía is participating in the fair in pasto. other movements had welcomed me to their communities three months ago, almost coinciding with the period of crafting chairs and cubicles for lucía’s stand and all the other stands at the fair. some of those campesino movements were recently recognized as collective subjects of reparation by the colombian state, and the members of these movements used some of their compensation for the materials to craft the stands, whereas others were not interested in this kind of official recognition and compensation. when asked about the purpose of the crafted setup, lucía explains that one of the main challenges faced in a red zone is the social stigma that comes with it. lucía and other leaders noticed how young adults from their communities are unable to find jobs when moving to the city because employers believe that they must be guerrilla or paramilitary combatants, or that they have inevitably engaged in the illicit cultivation of coca. the purpose of the crafted space is to share their stories; in lucía’s words, “when people feel your story, they stop labeling you.” throughout our conversations, the “crafted empathy chair” emerges as a suitable name for the arrangement. in my elaboration of it as a crafted object, the crafted empathy chair (cec) addresses what steven brown (2016), drawing on elaine scarry, argues about artifacts being a medium that allows human beings to “grant each other access to their inner feelings” (scarry 1987, 37). it is not a single object; it is an arrangement that unmakes the accounts of those engaging as audiences, in order to make new relations based on attention and empathy. my elaboration as participant, the realization of my position of privilege, the intervention on social imaginaries of participants about campesinos from red zones, and the transformations triggered by the words you now read about the cec are only some of the multiple effects produced by such translations. the cec embeds materials that “enable the movement of other matter” (larkin 2013, 329), thereby producing affective orders that redistribute agency (jensen and winthereik 2013) and exceed common governmental infrastructures of reparation and psychosocial assistance. as a co-decided but primarily idiosyncratic term mentioned by the crafters of the cec, empathy is an outcome of the arrangement, in which a collective of people communicates their experiences of pain and suffering to new audiences. the cec enacts new forms of “attunement” (choy 2018; davies 2021), allowing those who have not experienced the consequences of war to partially grasp elusive aspects of the lives of those who have directly suffered from war-related violence. the articulation of the messages in the cec do not appeal exclusively to rationality; they seek to trigger a multiplicity of responses by combining audio, narrative, and oftentimes the very bodies of those narrators. the orders emerging from arrangements like the cec, its infrastructural orders, create a sense of “immersion” (paterson 2006) that is inhabited through the skin (ahmed and stacey 2001). these infrastructures, as ontological orders (larkin 2013), offer alternative ways of sharing and understanding the aftermath of violence overflowing the reparation strategies offered by the colombian state (mora-gámez 2020, 2023b). the former orders open shared grounds for relational affect and attunement, while the latter strategies focus on the production of indicators, the circulation of expert knowledge, and the consolidation of an official narrative of the armed conflict. we described the experience of engaging as an audience with the cec, an arrangement drawing on affective relations as part of its infrastructural material base. initiatives like the cec are not isolated efforts, and the multiplicity of effects extends beyond the locality of installment. in the next section, we describe another material practice and what it entails for its participants, while we reflect more deeply on the transformative and material mediations involved.   interweaving material encounters sitting in front of the loom, dealing with a rigid set of parallel threads (the warp), i (eliana) pass a set of cotton threads perpendicularly over and over again to form the weft. the act of interweaving becomes a transformative experience. i immerse myself in the movement of my hands, controlling the thread, letting it pass between my fingertips. i am a designer, a weaver for whom textile making has transformed into the construction of a place to stay. weaving movements become to me what kabir, the indian mystic, poet, and weaver called simran: a silent repetition of a mantra that leads to inner reflection and spiritual liberation (bean 2016). interweaving the threads turns into a form of meditation, a way to stop thinking of the future or the past and instead to focus on the present. and, by weaving, i also see myself in other women who have experienced similar pains. my partner died in 2018. in the aftermath, it was hard to focus on anything but his absence and my grief. i could feel the pain in my body; on my chest, i felt a pressure that made it difficult to breathe, and the sadness in my eyes was so heavy that i wanted to keep them closed. likewise, the anger in my hands made them tense and tight. the materiality of the emotions in my body afforded me the certainty of grief (scarry 1987), along with the opportunity to know that what was happening was real. the loss of my partner also led to unpleasant and chaotic places. my encounter with the loom and the threads was a jump from chaos to a principle of order within chaos. the rhythmic sounds and movements of the loom frames, as threads that pass through and transform into cloth, allowed me to stay awake and centered; it was not an escape, but rather a way to peacefully remain within my emotions (puig de la bellacasa 2012). sitting in front of my loom, “we” (loom, threads, needles, cloth, me) entered into an inter-embodied (merleau-ponty 1968) movement that not only produced a place to inhabit but became the place itself. i am also a researcher (and back then, a member of the collective artesanal tecnológica) and i have investigated textile practices. but although our work passed through and came from our bodies, what we studied was embodied in other bodies, not ours, not mine. one year before my partner’s death in october 2018, i became part of the transdisciplinary team working on the project mending the new: a framework for reconciliation through testimonial digital textiles in the transition to post-conflict rural colombia. this project aimed to explore alternative understandings of reconciliation through the intersection of textile crafting and its encounter with digital materialities. to achieve this, we worked with four textile collectives of women who used their textile pieces to share stories of the colombian armed conflict, as well as their own pain. through their tapestries, these women have denounced their claims against impunity in public spheres (ahmed 2014), and in addition they have dealt with their separate griefs behind closed doors (gonzález arango 2014). in september 2019, as part of our activities, we organized a gathering called digital minga. after one year of working together remotely, four women from the collective tejedoras por la memoria (sonsón antioquia), six women from artesanías guayacán (bojayá, chocó), ten women and one man from artesanías choibá (quibdó, chocó), three women from mujeres tejiendo sueños y sabores de paz (mampuján, bolivar), and we members of the mending the new team, met in quibdó. this was the first time during the project that the women from the four collectives had met physically. and, for me, it was the first time i had seen them since my partner’s death. i knew meeting them would be different; after all, we now had something in common: the loss of a loved one. now, i could see my pain in the women from whom the conflict had taken their partners. something had changed, and with it, the way i related to them, their stories (ahmed 2014) and their grief. however, i acknowledge the power asymmetries present in this encounter, the inequalities based on race, and the class differences between me and these women of the collectives. my story has nothing to do with the colombian armed conflict; we have a researcher–participant relationship, i work in the academic world, and my role was as a partial insider attached to an uneven distribution of power (alcalde 2007).   figure 2: the male doll in my personal altar next to a crochet heart that i knitted. a plant, a cup of water, a candle, a crocheted heart and a small male doll with red pants and purple top. credit eliana sánchez-aldana   i was particularly close with the women of sonsón’s textile collective. we met in 2016 while i was working on another project. at that time, textile-as-language was what made us alike; we could “talk textile,” but now we shared another embodied language: the language of grief. luz dary, a woman from sonsón, knew about the death of my partner and wanted to see me. i was nervous: those were not good times for me, and my emotions were thoroughly tangled. i was happy to see these women again—after all, this was the reason i decided to travel in the first place—but i was not at emotional strength. when we met, we said nothing for a while; we looked directly and silently into each other’s eyes, and in this silence we touched each other with our eyes (ahmed and stacey 2001). and then luz dary hugged me, and we needed no words to know what we were talking about: a hug could say more about the unspeakable dimensions (aranguren romero 2008) of pain. later, in a workshop led by sonsón’s textile collective to make worry dolls, luz dary made for me a male doll with red trousers and a purple top (figure 2). worry dolls are small handmade dolls from guatemala and mexico, crafted as a remedy for worry. the custom says that whoever needs their favors must tell the dolls about the worry and place the doll under one’s pillow so that it removes the worry during the night. for me, the doll represented an image of a body that was no longer with me: an absent presence. this presence of absence served as a reminder of something that was not physically present but was still in me (didi-huberman 2009). for luz dary, an emotion tailored in the form of a small doll was her way to remember her own grief and connect that grief with me. her husband was murdered in the colombian conflict. she had embroidered the story of her husband to reclaim justice. a deliberate practice, which through repetition of the stitches, formed a handmade materiality that is written, that can be read, that allows one to talk with oneself, and that brings others into conversation. the next day, each of the four extilee collectives showcased the textile pieces crafted as part of the mending the new project. women from artesanías choibá presented a collection of skirts made by and for each of their textile collective members. wearing these garments, each of them entered the room telling the story of how they became textile makers, each piece, and its path to creation. the first woman (maritza) to present told us that she was not a skilled knitter, but rather a very slow one. to make her skirt, she used a thread that the collective leader had gifted her one year earlier. although she did not finish knitting, she created the skirt exactly as she wanted. “she designed it,” remarked another of the collective members. the owner of the first skirt continued telling us what textile crafting meant to her: “knitting and embroidering really helps you concentrate on what you are doing and forget about the past.” the second woman came into the room, introduced herself, and told us how much she loves and enjoys knitting. not only had textile crafting become a source of income to support her family and her studies, but it also became her way to be a part of something, in this case the artesanías choibá collective, after her aunt passed away. a third woman took center stage and shared the story of her family’s experience with displacement, the deep sadness they endured, and their unmet needs. she said that she felt as if she was not part of her own community; she felt unrooted. however, responding to the call of the leader of the collective, she learned to knit; in becoming part of something, now she felt that she belonged to artesanías choibá. the first textile piece that this third woman made was a hand-knit blouse, through which she found therapy to find a way through the violence and the forceful abandonment of her community. her first textile piece made her realize she was capable of making garments, she felt she was good at it, and she also found a way of living. the end product of knitting was not just the physically finished object, but also the possibility of coming-into-being (naji 2009) of new opportunities, while she transformed a thread into something else entirely. knitting for this woman became a place to be and an object to embody a change in her life. as her first garment took the shape she gave it, her thoughts also took on a new shape during the act of knitting (ahmed 2014). every presented skirt/story was unique. the stitches were chosen by their knitters and owners. these owners wore their clothing pieces to present themselves and their past; their bodies were now intertwined with the textiles, and their stories about the making of each garment were textile-crafted presentations of their life stories. this act of wearing their creations was a recognition of what they are, of how their knitted pieces refer to their own body, of how the body was present while they knitted and were thinking about wearing what they were making. their subjectivity could embody something by knitting a materiality made for those subjectivities. in being worn, the knitted garments transformed the wearer/creator and their subjectivity (saez tajafuerce 2014). textile making is no longer a metaphor that explains their life. it is a concrete material action that transforms them (sánchez-aldana 2022). as myriem naji (2009) mentions, the making ensemble shapes its participants—human bodies and subjectivities, textile materials and tools—they become something new, different. a new way of being, as a collective coming-into-being. at that very moment, i could only stand back and admire what they had made; i heard their stories and somehow connected with them. only later did it really make sense. sitting in front of my loom, i begin to weave a new piece of cloth. it has been four months since our meeting in quibdó. faced with a series of meticulously chosen parallel threads, blue and white cotton, with hints of red, i resume weaving. as part of a personal exploration of a new weaving technique, a japanese weaving philosophy known as saori, i was asked to weave a garment. according to my master, you cannot weave in the saori tradition if you do not wear what you weave. to learn more, i traveled to japan to visit saorinomori, a weaving school based in osaka. saori is a style of hand weaving in which “there are no samples to follow, and there are no mistakes…weavers just weave what they want to with complete freedom and creativity…saori become more than simply tools for creative expression but also tools for self-discovery and self-innovation” (saori 2016). it was this definition that compelled me to go to japan. at first, i refused to weave a textile piece to make it into a garment, but over time i learned from seeing that, for all the women who worked with me at the school, having something woven by myself was essential to becoming part of the group. according to saori philosophy, it is through weaving, making, and wearing our own one-of-a-kind clothes, and generously sharing together, that we realize our uniqueness while also seeing our role in a collective humanity and, by extension, the ability to express ourselves. so i decided to weave a skirt (figure 3). it was the first time i had woven a piece for myself; it was the first time that i had to recognize my body measurements and shape. i was not only learning the new technique; i was knowing my own body through the act of making. i was now a weaver, with a body. at that moment, i remembered the stories about the skirts.   figure 3: my skirt on me. right – up: the loom while i was weaving the piece. right – down the cloth finished before becoming a skirt. credit: eliana sánchez-aldana.   in the act of weaving and wearing, i was returning to myself, looking at myself, and remaking what had been damaged. i could see consciously that i could take better care of myself with an unedited version of myself. while weaving, i doubted many times about size, colors, and even the garment itself. i could have quit, but i didn’t. i completed the cloth, then i tailored my skirt. it is the first garment i made, and it was for me. the pain of my loss had broken me. i took my past and present and fashioned something new out of both. the death of my partner was the “weapon,” as scarry could call it, that unmade me. my weapon is not and will never be the same as the weapons that unmade women from sonsón, quibdó, bojayá and mampuján—those were real weapons part of the colombian armed conflict. but i and my body understood that weaving for me (and knitting for them) was the tool to remake ourselves. textile work helps me to stay in the moment, to embrace weaving by engaging with it (mann 2018), to stay within the materiality of weaving and within a subjectivity that i remake through my corporeality (foster 1996). from the materiality of my body and the fabric, from the pain of the past, it became possible to establish a connection and attunement (davies 2021; mora-gámez and davies 2023) with the stories of the women of artesanías choibá. our shared ground was my and their individual and collective bodies, the places from which i and they weaved the garments and our emotions. our past was the foundation that held us, the infrastructure basis by which we could continue to pursue and seek alternative perspectives. a textile choreography of making a skirt brought other things into action (marttila and botero 2017): our pains, our stories, our bodies. the crafting of textile garments was an action of meaning making that helped us to understand and cope with reality. the process affected the bodies that made the garments. the weave kept us in a place where, while the pain did not disappear, i (we) could see that pain in alternate ways. we were interweaving our own encounters. the cec and ime constitute a practical ontology, enacting spaces of common ground and shared emotion. separately, the cec and the ime might seem like isolated efforts to address the aftermath of violence and loss. however, despite their separate locations, their shared outcomes converge in our collective experiences, in the relations they foster, the exchanges they mediate, and the attunements they ignite among people with similar or even unrelated experiences. chairs, cubicles, thread, bodies, looms, textiles, and stories manifest themselves as spaces in which relational and shared emotional grounds become crucial. as affecting infrastructures, the grounds enacted by the cec and ime are therefore interconnected in their outcomes and the affect relations they embed, permit, and communicate. an additional crucial question is how the enactment of these spaces by affecting infrastructures is shaped by the situatedness of various audiences, including the researchers themselves.   stitches of justice and generosity during the final day of the mending peace: imagining reconciliation event in september 2019, i (dimitris) received an unexpected gift: a small piece of embroidery with words from a poem stitched on white cloth with a blue knitting border (figure 4). i participated in this meeting not as a researcher aiming to do fieldwork but as a member of a team involved in setting up the project—a project that was very important for me because of its deep commitment to everyday social transformation in midst of a devasting conflict. soon after arriving at the meeting, i felt that this encounter was activating many previous experiences that i associate with this commitment. i felt a connection that was rooted in the life of my grandparents and parents in resistance to the german occupation in greece during world war ii. and later to the experience of political struggle and displacement during the civil war and in the many dark years that followed. it connected also to the many stories of escape that i have heard from many transmigrants (and as a migrant myself) while doing militant research and border activism in the field of transnational mobility. we have written about these stories (papadopoulos and tsianos 2007; papadopoulos stephenson, and tsianos 2008) and how they become more than just single stories and instead an imperceptible communal space that facilitates those who try to reconstruct life after war, displacement, or long and often exhausting periods of mobility. and yet despite all these connections, this gift made me rethink these experiences from a different perspective. as a white male academic based at that time in the uk, i was approaching the work of the event through a framework of conflict, displacement, discrimination, resistance, insurgency, and liberation mainly grounded within european political movements. i slowly started exploring the meaning of all these experiences and the ways we theorized them through the lens of all these powerful moments of community making though crafting and weaving that were happening in the meeting in quibdó. and the gift became what a true gift often is, something that touches and transforms its recipients.   figure 4: embroidery with poem on presentation panel at the mending peace: imagining reconciliation event in september 2019. credit: dimitris papadopoulos   in previous work we called “infrastructures of connectivity” (see papadopoulos 2018; papadopoulos and tsianos 2013) all the technological means, affective interdependences, practical logistics, and material resources that support people who try to establish new livelihoods and new ways of existence due to displacement, war, or migration. the event mending peace: imagining reconciliation was itself a transient connectivity infrastructure that brought together women from several textile and sewing collectives from all over colombia, women who had never met each other before. the event was about sharing and commoning experience: exchanging ways of sewing; sharing memories and pains; showing embroidered pieces, dolls, and tapestries; sewing together in silence; being together in moments of mourning and imagining; readjusting the gaze by being in a different space; exploring opportunities to learn together and give to each other. i sense that the gift i received was an invitation to pause, listen, share, multiply, and sustain such an infrastructure of connectivity emerging through the communal textile crafting practices of these women’s collectives. the embroidered piece bears the words, “choibá atrateño. selva. fuerza. vida. negrura. mi amor y mi ternura” (atrato river tree. rainforest. strength. life. blackness. my love and tenderness). the words are from a longer poem by padre gonzalo de la torre, and they encapsulate the postcolonial, rural, and more-than-human making of the life of the community. this predominantly afro-colombian community, descended from slaves brought from sub-saharan africa by european colonizers in the sixteenth century, was displaced to the city of quibdó, but prior to this displacement they lived as campesinos in villages within the rainforests and wetlands of the atrato river and its tributaries, all of which were often devastated by armed violence. the words of gonzalo’s poem also capture much of what this encounter in quibdó was about. the gift intertwines crafting, sewing, embroidering, and textile making with the navigation through, negotiation with, and repair of the violence of armed conflict by creating a larger collective that attempts to support alternative lifeworlds of existence. and despite that these alternative lifeworlds of existence are often complicated by new racial inequalities, new discriminations in the places where these women moved after they were forced to leave their homes, social and economic hardship, they offer a way to address the question of justice in a profoundly unjust world. the gift, apart from all its other wonderful powers, also came to epitomize this quest for justice. it told me that every story of displacement is incomplete without a very material practice for justice. the gift is not only a material object—the result of complex practices sustained through time and incorporating the knowledges, materials, and skills that belong to this collective—but also a text and a message. this is not only because it is embroidered with a verse from a significant poem that captures much of the racial, ecological, and cultural sensibilities of the region (tacchetti et al. 2022); it is also because the gift speaks in itself (though its specific material presence) about the conditions of its making as the outcome of women getting together in the aftermath of immense violence to create a supportive community that can sustain itself through self-organized work and self-determination. the piece itself is a text of what it means to make and re-create life during and after displacement due to the armed conflict. as an object, it embodies justice by invoking the damage done, by stating the need for reparation, and by attempting to establish more just conditions of existence for those who have suffered from the armed conflict. what unifies all these aspects of the gift—the materiality, the textuality, the practices, and the social implications of its existence as a present, an invitation, or an instrument of justice—is its inherent generosity. this generosity is born from intersectional struggles related to gender, class, race, and migration status in rural areas of colombia. the gift—together of course with so many more artifacts, tapestries, embroideries, dolls, baskets, all weaved and crafted in these women’s collectives—enacts the creation of an alternative infrastructure that allows communities to maintain and repair their forms of life in conditions where war violence is still prevalent. the generosity inherent in the gift lies in its ability to link people, practices, and objects together with the past and present of different alternative forms of existence. these existences, the places where friends and family live, the places where other similar crafting communities live, are mobilized affectively in order to offer in a modest and humble way a space for remaking life, for imagining a future after harm, and for linking to similar experiences of other people in similar circumstances. and so the gift was given to me and i have to ask again and again how i can change my own practices in order to be able to contribute to sustain and amplify these infrastructures of connectivity and these practices of justice that are so subtly captured in the stiches of this embroidery.   cec and ime as affecting infrastructures   “grandma, how do you deal with pain?” “with your hands, dear. when you do it with your mind, the pain harden even more rather than relieving yourself.” “with your hands, grandma?” “yes, yes. our hands are the antennae of our soul. when you move them by sewing, cooking, painting, touching the earth or sinking it into the earth, they send signals of caring to the deepest part of you and your soul calms down.” … “my hands grandma...how long haven’t i used them like that!” “move them my girl, start creating with them and everything in you will move. the pain will not pass away. but it will be the best masterpiece. and it won’t hurt anymore. because you managed to embroider your essence.” —elana barnabé, “embroider your essence”   according to brian larkin, infrastructures are “objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate, and when they do so they operate as systems” (larkin 2013, 329). crafting and weaving/knitting involve “matter that enable the movement of other matter” (329). their ontology “lies in the fact that they are things and the relation between things” (329). thus, the cec and ime encompass not only the chairs and weaving/knitting materials but also the connections between those objects, the affect relations they provoke, and the transformations they trigger. as larkin (2013) states, infrastructures create affective relations and political imaginaries (sneath 2009) that can be analyzed in terms of symbols, myths, or fantasies (barker 2005). hence, the politics enacted by the cec and iem also involves nonhumans. although our understanding of these infrastructures is based on their role in the affect relations they produce, we do not seek to reproduce a notion of infrastructure that focuses on poetics as premised on a humanist orientation. instead, we acknowledge the embeddedness of affect as an outcome of encounters with nonhuman others. therefore, we take distance from a human-centered orientation by suggesting that such affective reconfiguration is shaped relationally with nonhuman others. as susan leigh star explains, infrastructure does not grow de novo; instead, it builds on an installed material base “inherit[ing] strengths and limitations of that base” (1999, 382). the cec utilizes materials such as wood, paint, and audio systems. meanwhile, the iem relies on fabric, thread, and needles, among other materials. the cec and the iem are infrastructures that emerge from the bottom up in the interstices of social action and more-than-human relationality, aiming to restore projects of social justice and reparation in order to sustain livable worlds. in addition to wood and fabric, the installed base of the arrangements we have presented is also constituted by the stories, memories, and visual materializations used to share emotions and create common grounds for attunements. a starting point that also becomes part of the material basis for this kind of infrastructures is the affect shared by its participants embedded in stories, audios, memories in the forms of audios, embroideries, and so on. as for properties as infrastructures (star 1999), the cec and ime are embedded in other infrastructural arrangements, and they do not need to be assembled for each task. this interconnectedness with other infrastructures grants them stability over time. for example, the cec is still displayed in numerous main squares and is used by campesino(e) movements in versions different from other audio accounts and stories. mobility is one of the most evident features of such affecting infrastructures, inasmuch as they are easily moveable between cities, towns, and other sites. crafting and weaving/knitting, as shared practices and forms of literacy, familiarize new participants with the cec and ime. these practices follow implicit and explicit conventions, such as emphasizing the emotions conveyed by the narrators in the audios, the significance of visual contact in the cec, the diverse textile-making techniques, and the selection of fabrics and materials. these standards are learned through practice. their configuration and transformations have required constant efforts from campesino(e) movements and weavers/knitters’ collectives. similarly, as practical ontologies, the cec and ime are infrastructures whose material politics exceeds governmental infrastructures of reparation and psychosocial assistance. in our stories, crafting spaces and textile making, as transformative ontological practices, provide alternatives for dealing with and sharing the affective aftermath of war violence. but mapping the multiple material outcomes of the cec and the ime as infrastructures is a task that exceeds the purpose of these paragraphs and our overall research projects. yet we feel compelled to speculate about their affective outcomes and the potential interconnectedness of them in the landscape of post-accord colombia. an important question becomes important in this speculation: what is gained by reframing the cec and ime as affecting infrastructures? our use of this term is twofold: on the one hand, it endows us to conceptualize how crafting and weaving enact spaces in which relational and shared grounds for the emergence of feelings and emotions also become part of their sociomaterial achievements. in these spaces, crafting and weaving affect different audiences. rather than entering the ethnographic scene with a predefined identity, political standpoint, or coherent structural ontology, as audience we focused on the material conditions and tactile possibilities through which our interlocutors came into being with us and others (naji 2009). we made an effort to “re-exist” (albán achinte 2017) with their experiences while being attentive to our interlocutors’ multiple struggles embedded in their practices of crafting/knitting. these struggles, pierced by the embodied situations of class, gender, ethnicity, and migration, create specific material conditions and possibilities to become common nodal points that span across audiences (including us as researchers) and places. on the other hand, reframing initiatives like the cec and the iem as affecting infrastructures shifts our attention to the imperceptibility of their affective outcomes. whereas the broad discussions about infrastructures point out how they become visible upon their own breakdown, in the case of affecting infrastructures, visibility is instead a slow achievement resulting from gradual investments to overcome, mend, and repair the emotional wounds of war violence through mundane arrangements. despite the convergence of multiple forms of vulnerabilities impacting the lives of our interlocutors, their sociomaterial responses constitute alternative and intimate repairs that are not visible at large scales. instead, our interlocutors connect and amplify their collective voices, they create an alternative support infrastructure that restores justice, step by step, through everyday material practice. such alternative infrastructures do not facilitate the movement of goods, standardized knowledge or services as large, instituted infrastructures do; rather, these infrastructures operate through affect, embodied knowledge, mundane materialities, and transversal practices to acknowledge and sustain other ways of being. beyond the general discussion of infrastructures within the ontological context, here we use the term infrastructure in a very specific way to denote the specific constraints and possibilities for affecting both immediate distant conditions of everyday existence. affecting infrastructures are generative of creative spaces that offer alternative repairs amid the ruptures and crisis resulting from the ongoing infrastructural breakdown of peace as a state project in post-accord colombia. affecting infrastructures open new forms of engagement for communities and audiences while sometimes challenging common channels of participation and recognition. therefore, more than merely arranging, the cec and iem are infrastructuring repairing orders. we examined material arrangements crafted by social movements that seek the transformation of social imaginaries about peasants who inhabit red zones (the crafted empathy chair) and the elaboration of grief while collectively knitting (interweaving material encounters). building on our ethnographic material, we have used the term affecting infrastructures to describe how such practical ontologies open shared grounds of emotional attunement while also affecting different audiences. among the multiplicity of achievements, the collective acknowledgment of emotions and production of diverse audiences are the most salient. finally, we reflected on alternative repairs as potential outcomes of affecting infrastructures and how their scaling constitutes a material politics of transformation of communities in local and national scenarios such as post-accord colombia. what crafting empathy chairs and weaving encounters presented in this paper add to the notion of infrastructure is precisely their affecting features reaching participants and wider audiences with the mediations of materials and the possibility of constituting material forms of emotional attunement and repair. thus, the cec and ime, among other ongoing initiatives, are deployed as infrastructures to expand and transform local and national orders from the bottom up. alternative repairs are then outcomes of affecting infrastructures accomplished through crafting and weaving/knitting practices enacting forms of overcoming, relating to, and otherwise engaging with the aftermath of violence. although national reparation projects enjoy more visibility as an infrastructure-state, breakdown and insufficiency leave room for alternative repairs, reaching the audiences of affecting infrastructures. we have outlined a portion of such initiatives 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"reparación a las víctimas de dictaduras, conflictos armados y violencia política en sus componentes de compensación, satisfacción, rehabilitación y no repetición." el ágora usb 15 (1): 217–40. http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=s1657-80312015000100012&lng=en&tlng=es. vivares porras, diana vanessa, edwin alexander hernández zapata, and juan felipe cañaveral castro. 2020. “procesos de subjetivación laboral en la intervención a víctimas del conflicto armado: el interventor politizado.” el ágora usb 20 (1): 82–98. https://revistas.usb.edu.co/index.php/agora/article/view/4643. von scheve, christian. 2018. “a social relational account of affect.” european journal of social theory 21 (1): 39–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431017690007. woolgar, steve, and javier lezaun. 2013. “the wrong bin bag: a turn to ontology in science and technology studies?” social studies of science 43 (3): 321–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312713488820.     author bios fredy mora-gámez is a researcher at the department of science and technology studies, university of vienna (austria). he is also a senior lecturer at the division of gender studies (tema gender), linköping university (sweden).   eliana sánchez-aldana is a designer, weaver, and feminist from bogotá. she is an assistant professor at the faculty of architecture and design of the universidad de los andes, colombia.   dimitris papadopoulos is a professor of history of consciousness in the department of history of consciousness, university of california, santa cruz microsoft word 76949-1-11-intro.docx fritsch, k., hamraie, a., mills, m., & serlin, d. (2019). introduction to special section: crip technoscience. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5 (1), 1-10. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kelly fritsch, aimi hamraie, mara mills, and david serlin, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introduction special section: crip technoscience kelly fritsch carleton university kellyfritsch@cunet.carleton.ca aimi hamraie vanderbilt university aimi.hamraie@vanderbilt.edu mara mills new york university mmills@nyu.edu david serlin university of california, san diego dserlin@ucsd.edu this special section of catalyst maps the central nodes of the emerging field of crip technoscience, which we situate at the intersection of feminist technoscience studies and critical disability studies. crip technoscience marks areas of overlap between these fields as well as productive disciplinary and political tensions. our section brings together critical perspectives on disability and science and technology in order to grapple with historical and contemporary debates related to digital and emerging fritsch, hamraie, mills, and serlin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 technologies, treatments, risk, and practices of access, design, health, and enhancement. “crip technoscience,” as a recent scholarly analytic (hamraie, 2015, 2017; hamraie & fritsch, 2019), names historic and contemporary practices of anti-assimilationist disability making and knowing. these practices have robust, complex, and unexpected intellectual genealogies, ranging from histories of disability activism and assistive device making (o’toole, 2015; williamson, 2012a, 2012b) to environmental justice (chen, 2012; taylor, 2017), critiques of the cyborg (kafer, 2013; mills, 2011a), and black/feminist health activism (nelson, 2011; murphy, 2012). our understanding of crip technoscience builds on foundational work in the field of critical disability and technology studies, including katherine ott’s (2014) concept of “disability things” as value-laden objects of material and historical study, melanie yergeau’s (2014) critique of “hackathons” as the new telethons, alice wong’s (2015a, 2015b) critique of disability “makeathons” as excluding disabled people, and graham pullin’s (2009) and sara hendren’s (2014) elaborations of critical design as a framework for understanding adaptive technologies. our work has also been greatly influenced by barbara gibson’s (2006) and ingunn moser’s (2005, 2006) engagements with technology and subjectivity, and tanya titchkosky’s (2011) generative study of the meaning of access. in curating this section, we assert an understanding of crip technoscience that builds upon the ways that crip theory, and critical disability studies more broadly, have emphasized an anti-assimilationist disability politics—not only through disability activism but also through the material and social practices of disability world-building (mcruer, 2006; sandahl, 2003; kafer, 2013; fritsch, 2013, 2015a; 2015b; mitchell & snyder, 2015). as a result, crip technoscience engages with rather than eschews the relationships, activisms, and products of engineering, design, and other technoscientific practices. in this regard, crip technoscience draws upon forms of lived experience (o’toole, 2015; lifchez & winslow, fritsch, hamraie, mills, and serlin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 1979) and the historical archive (petrick, 2015; williamson, 2012a, 2012b; serlin, 2004, 2012; mills, 2011b) that have captured an array of activist design and access projects, from software coding to wheelchair repair to architectural design. in this sense, crip technoscience emphasizes difference and embodiment at the core of disability politics while affirming an open rather than hostile relationship to technoscience, often regarded as anathema to disability politics. crip world-building always happens in the material world. the editors have been variously engaged with contributing to a public profile for crip technoscience by organizing conference panels at the annual meetings of the society for disability studies (2014 and 2015), the society for social studies of science (2017), and the american studies association (2018); hosting a “design@large” event in san diego (2014), a technoscience salon event in toronto (2016), and various symposia at the nyu center for disability studies; and by organizing a dedicated track on critical design and technology studies at the society for disability studies. scholars of critical, feminist, and crip disability studies have not necessarily engaged directly with what we are calling “crip technoscience.” but in their works, they have often built on two important foundational claims: one, through disability studies, that natural and built environments are constructed rather than given; and two, that science and technology shape the expression, enactment, or elimination of disability, impairment, madness, d/deafness, neurodiversity, chronic conditions, and illness. foundational scholarship in the field of science and technology studies (sts), such as langdon winner’s classic 1980 essay “do artifacts have politics?” incorporates insights drawn from events in disability rights activism to understand the ways in which technology often sustains cultural norms and biases: the organized movement of handicapped people in the united states during the 1970s pointed out the countless ways in which machines, instruments, and structures of common use—buses, fritsch, hamraie, mills, and serlin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 buildings, sidewalks, plumbing fixtures, and so forth—made it impossible for many handicapped persons to move about freely, a condition that systematically excluded them from public life. (p. 125) while winner’s examples were drawn from histories of the social, political, and technoscientific oppression and elimination of disabled people, we want to interrupt such lineages to call attention to ways of thinking about disability as desirable—what some scholars have identified as “disability gain” (davidson, 2016). while part of this interruption stems from a transformation of the profile of disability in the public sphere, disability as desirable is also anchored in an anti-eugenicist politics and an orientation toward technoscience as means by which certain forms of activism can be materialized. thus, this issue brings together work that rejects essentialist beliefs about disability or about technoscience, rejecting foundational assumptions in disability studies that technology is inherently deterministic or assimilative while also maintaining an openness toward the possibility that disabled peoples’ activist practices can constitute a kind of critical world-building. at the same time, we are aware of the many ways that “disability gains” have been commodified or appropriated by technoscience. we believe, then, that this issue is a piece of the larger, long-term project of politicizing crip relationships to technoscientific knowledge and material production, and in the process, maintaining a politicized orientation—a crip way of feeling and making—toward disability itself. when we began to generate ideas for this special issue, we did not know what kinds of submissions—scholarly, activist, pedagogical, artistic— we were likely to get. our call for papers, for example, asked a central question: “how can crip technoscience highlight the ways that disability, impairment, chronic conditions, illness, madness, deafness, neurodiversity (among other crip ways of being) shape our practices, ontologies, and epistemologies?” this open question solicited rich and provocative work on a wide variety of topics: data and digital media; crip art and design; access fritsch, hamraie, mills, and serlin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 and the aesthetics of composition; disability justice; and kinship with, through, or despite particular technologies. as a result, this issue represents “crip technocience” as a point of conceptual convergence. our section opens with aimi hamraie and kelly fritsch’s “crip technoscience manifesto,” which engages the world-building and worlddismantling effects of disabled knowing and making through centering frictional technoscientific activism and critical design practices that foster disability justice. offering four commitments of crip technoscience, hamraie and fritsch call on “activists, scholars, and makers to expand possible futures for disabled people.” alison kafer and eunjung kim provide two different perspectives on the ways crip communities reimagine given relations to technology. in “crip kin, manifesting,” kafer describes speculative art-making as a tactic to refuse and repurpose medicalized technologies—and to understand these tools as at once sites of critique and of love, “estrangement and relation.” investigating the dissimilar technical subject of electronics manufacture, kim argues that injury, illness, and death from toxic exposure have been transformed by “necro-activists” in south korea into occasions for sociality and disability justice. any genealogy of crip technoscience must also account for its antecedents within the literary and cinematic realms of science fiction and the cultural impact of authors such as octavia butler and marge piercy. in “cyberpunk’s other hackers: the girls who were plugged in,” lindsey dolich felt uses the work of alice sheldon, well known in feminist technogeek circles for “the girl who was plugged in” (1973), a feminist novella published a full nine years before william gibson’s “burning chrome,” the short story credited with inventing the cyberpunk genre. felt explicates the novella to historicize and situate female switchboard operators within feminist and crip genealogies of labor, technology, and cybernetic theory. fritsch, hamraie, mills, and serlin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 the technological interface embodied by the switchboard operator who is “plugged in” provides an intriguing parallel to stephen horrock’s discussion of diabetics for whom access to insulin injections is an essential component of technoscientific practice as well as crip sociality. yet as horrocks argues in “materializing datafied body doubles: insulin pumps, blood glucose testing, and the production of usable bodies,” newer sociotechnical systems have rendered diabetic identities far more complex. unlike earlier generations of users, for whom insulin injection was an analog affair, contemporary diabetic identity is increasingly organized around technologies of data gathering and predictive modeling, creating a new generation of what horrocks calls “datafied body doubles”: digital doppelgangers whose diagnostic data stand in for human users. in “technopsyence and afro-surrealism’s cripistemologies,” olivia banner’s critical concept of “technopsyence” mobilizes crip theory to critique contemporary digital mental health research and treatment paradigms. noting the ways in which racial capitalism is reproduced through the governance of mentalities, banner takes up recent work in afrosurrealism to trace the ways in which mobile devices are used by crip bodyminds to creatively “resist racial capitalism and the psy discourses that support it.” finally, the roundtable discussion on recent directions in crip technoscience offers narratives and practices from social media activism (from vilissa thompson), crip nightlife and accessible djing (via kevin gotkin), disability dance and performance (highlighting the work of alice sheppard), and finally, disabled people’s responses to current and future environmentalist practices such as proposed straw bans (commented on here by alice wong). the photograph on the cover of this special issue exemplifies our anti-assimilationist perspective, featuring a crip technoscience invention by john farnworth. the image shows the push handles of a manual wheelchair that have been covered in punk-aesthetic metal spikes, fritsch, hamraie, mills, and serlin catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 emphasizing the position of this wheelchair user who does not want to be pushed around. references chen, m. 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(2014). disability hacktivism. computers and composition online. retrieved from http://www2.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/hacking     book review book review | secret cures of slaves: people, plants, and medicine in the eighteenth-century atlantic world, by londa schiebinger (stanford university press, 2017)     élodie edwards-grossi université toulouse–jean jaurès elodie.edwards-grossi@univ-tlse2.fr     in secret cures of slaves, londa schiebinger explores the history of experimentation on human bodies by european physicians in the west indies and the cures and techniques of self-care that african and amerindian healers developed throughout the eighteenth century in the french and british west indies. many recent history books have focused on race and medicine by unveiling the brutal exploitation of black bodies by white physicians in the united states in the slavery era—looking at the history of white physicians theorizing and experimenting on black bodies (willoughby 2018; kenny 2013); the founding of gynaecology (cooper owens 2017); illness, care, and the history of the freedmen’s bureau during the civil war and reconstruction (downs 2012), all of which follow in the wake of todd savitt’s (1982) ground-breaking work on black health in the antebellum era. fewer books, however, have tackled the transnational history of burgeoning medical techniques developed both by african and amerindian naturalists and european physicians in the atlantic world.   londa schiebinger’s book follows on from sharla fett’s (2002) work, which shows how enslaved men and women drew on african precedents to develop new techniques of healing that were in opposition to slaveholders’ productivity concerns. while fett’s book documents how slave communities, through their own health practices, built a strong resilience network against techniques of domination and abuse that were systematically deployed by white slaveholders and overseers on the plantations, schiebinger provides further details on the human experimentations carried out by white physicians on black bodies. she also elaborates on the question of the “interchangeability of bodies” (6), a notion that complicates the history of early conceptions of “race” in the british and french west indies that tended to treat the bodies of the poor, displaced, and enslaved as representative of human bodies more generally (schiebinger 2013).   schiebinger’s book kicks off with an introduction that presents the existing literature on colonial medicine, science, and race in the eighteenth century, after which the book is divided into five chapters, each tackling a specific theme. chapter 1 focuses on the circulation of knowledge between european medical centers and europe’s far-flung colonies, such as jamaica and saint-domingue. schiebinger explores how european physicians jean-barthélémy dazille in saint-domingue, bertrand bajon in saint-domingue and cayenne, and john williamson in jamaica used “experimental empiricism” (using black corpses for dissection, or experimenting on slaves when visiting plantations) to gain “much knowledge of medical art” (24) in hot climates. however, the author shows that these colonial experimentalists not only focused on reconfiguring european-developed techniques for use in the colonies, they also used amerindian and african cures “because of their effectiveness” (24). slave owners paid these doctors in the west indies to bring their expertise on health and bodies to increase the productivity on the plantation and to “submit [the slaves] to hard work without revolt” (28). for example, these physicians cautioned planters to choose their slaves with care and sought to identify distinct pathologies in slaves from various regions in africa. at the same time, european british and french physicians, informed by debates over skin color and climate, tried to measure whether successful acclimatization of african slaves to tropical territories such as saint-domingue or jamaica could be systematized to further increase labor production (38).   chapter 2 reveals how european physicians such as alexander j. alexander “evaluated what they deemed slave cures” (45) before putting them to use. african medical regimes were often elaborated by slaves in deep connection with the africanization of other cultural and religious practices on the plantations, as shown by historians judith carney and richard rosomoff (2009), as well as the growing of african subsistence crops (45). perhaps one of schiebinger’s most interesting contributions to the literature is her demonstration of how “the fusion of african and amerindian knowledge systems” (46) participated in the creation of new plant-based cures on the plantations. slaves, for example, sometimes used tobacco leaves as a remedy against persistent headaches, tobacco being “indigenous to the americas” (47).   in chapter 3, schiebinger returns to the question of how european doctors conducted human experiments on enslaved bodies and whether they would take into account ethical considerations when practicing medicine. clinical wards in europe served as medical laboratories in urban contexts in the eighteenth century, and later transferred some of their techniques to colonial soils to serve new purposes (66). as schiebinger points out, there were no “ethical safety brakes other than personal conscience” (67) to regulate experimentation on human bodies. an ethical framework would only become institutionalized in the twentieth century after the 1979 belmont report was issued in the united states, largely in response to the tuskegee syphilis experiments and the atrocities perpetrated by nazi medical authorities during the second world war (65). in the eighteenth century, as the author demonstrates, a principle of “public utility” (70)—devalued members of society were revalued by lending their bodies to medicine—prevailed over the necessities of coming to the assistance of vulnerable populations such as slaves, which partly explains why physicians in the west indies sought to perform experiments on the bodies of slaves (74).   chapter 4 further explores the topic of human experiments, by focusing on “exploitative experiments” (91) and physician john quier’s smallpox experiments in the rural highlands of jamaica. the author shows how quier “freely experimented with smallpox inoculation in a population of 850 slaves under his care” (92), which resulted in the epidemic of 1768 that swept across the island. quier’s experiments demonstrate that colonial physicians often selected racialized subjects for experiments and that medical practices were frowned upon in europe. this chapter, therefore, further highlights the differential ethical protocols that white physicians followed in relation to racialized subjects who they considered “less human” than their european counterparts.   the last chapter of the book, “the colonial crucible,” delves further into the colonial context by unveiling how british and french colonial administrations regulated moral conducts in the colonies by relying on the expertise of west indian colonial doctors. colonial physicians carried out experimentations on slave bodies as a way to contain slave riots (117), which shows how medical practices served the colonial order. doctors, therefore, played upon the fear and vulnerability of slave populations to suppress political uprisings, while some medical doctors, such as john quier and william wright, were themselves part of the colonial elite in jamaica as plantation owners (117).   the book stimulates a much-needed conversation about transnational dynamics and medicine in the eighteenth century, joining pablo gómez’s (2014) and rana hogarth’s works (2017) on the circulation of medical theories and practices in the atlantic world. schiebinger focuses not only on us slavery but on the atlantic world and therefore tackles the circulation of medical theories and techniques between french and british physicians in europe, european colonial physicians in the colonies, and african and amerindian healers in the west indies, within what she names “the atlantic world medical complex” (3).   perhaps one shortcoming of the book is the fact that the author glides over the power relations that existed between these physicians; they held very different statuses within europe and the americas. a closer look at power dynamics and at scientific authority would have produced a more nuanced picture of the circulation of knowledge within these slavery societies. furthermore, a more detailed look at gendered dynamics, only rapidly mentioned in chapter 2 when dealing with madame rousseau (48), would have instructively complicated the moral economy of knowledge circulation and knowledge production on the plantations in the atlantic world. schiebinger’s work, however, provides historical insights that can be read in conversation with scholarship by cooper owens (2017) and fett (2002), who focus more on the important role enslaved women played in relation to plantation health culture; they often secretly made plant-based medicines, cared for the sick, and served as midwives in both black and white households, and therefore disputed the authority of white doctors on the plantations. finally, while the book deals overwhelmingly and convincingly with the topics of human experimentation and ethics in the eighteenth century, the book title refers to slave cures, and these are only dealt with in chapter 2. although “secrecy” appears in the book’s title, schiebinger does not elaborate upon this notion in relation to slaves’ cures—a peculiar omission given that secrecy is a key element of power dynamics in knowledge production.   nonetheless, schiebinger delivers a stimulating book that obliges us to reconsider the dynamics of plantation healing and the production of knowledge in a multi-situational network of relations. consequently, the book also opens new pathways for contributions and reflections on the history of physicians in the west indies in relation to human experimentation and indigenous peoples’ knowledge, and provides a model for conducting similar research on practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.   references carney, judith, and richard nicholas rosomoff. 2009. in the shadow of slavery: africa’s botanical legacy in the atlantic world. berkeley: university of california press. cooper owens, deirdre. 2017. medical bondage: race, gender, and the origins of american gynecology. athens: university of georgia press. downs, jim. 2012. sick from freedom: african-american illness and suffering during the civil war and reconstruction. oxford, uk: oxford university press. fett, sharla. 2002. working cures: healing, health, and power on southern slave plantations. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. gómez, pablo. 2014. “incommensurable epistemologies? the atlantic geography of healing in the early modern black spanish caribbean.” small axe: a caribbean journal of criticism 44: 95–107. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2739875. hogarth, rana a. 2017. medicalizing blackness: making racial difference in the atlantic world, 1780–1840. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. kenny, stephen c. 2013. “the development of medical museums in the antebellum american south: slave bodies in networks of anatomical exchange.” bulletin of the history of medicine 87 (1): 32–62. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26296837. savitt, todd l. 1982. “the use of blacks for medical experimentation and demonstration in the old south.” journal of southern history 48 (3): 331–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/2207450. schiebinger, londa. 2013. “medical experimentation and race in the eighteenth-century atlantic world.” social history of medicine 26 (3): 364–82. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkt011. willoughby, christopher. 2018. “running away from drapetomania: samuel cartwright, medicine, and race in the antebellum south.” journal of southern history 84 (3): 579–614. https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2018.0164.   author bio élodie edwards-grossi is an associate professor at université toulouse–jean jaurès (france). her work explores social history of racialized psychiatry in the united states and the medicalization of the black body from the nineteenth century until the contemporary era. her forthcoming book is tentatively titled mad with freedom: the political economy of blackness, insanity and civil rights in the us south, 1840–1920 (under contract with lsu press).     book review book review | pain: a political history by keith wailoo (johns hopkins university press, 2014)     olivia adams indiana university bloomington oliadams@iu.edu     the ubiquity of pain as an enduring medical problem reflects keith wailoo’s argument for its enduring politicization in pain: a political history, an investigation of us twentiethand early twenty-first-century pain policy. throughout the text, he stresses that pain emerged not as a uniquely medical affair, but rather an issue of morals, ethics, governing, and legality. as a result, legislatures, federal and state courts, as well as patients and medical providers contributed to the issue of managing pain relief technologies and providing monetary support for chronic pain patients through disability insurance benefits. furthermore, the largely partisan debates surrounding pain policies gave rise to a number of larger issues; pain became a lightning rod for pointed debates regarding trust, ideal citizenship, and consent.   wailoo utilizes the first two chapters of this book to ground his primary arguments. in chapter 1, he explains the roots of republican and democratic antagonism regarding pain policy. the return of veterans, combined with rapid advancements in pain medication and the beginning of pain treatment as a specialization within medicine, raised important questions about the role of pain in formalized constructions of disability. republicans feared that the stoic, independent veterans returning from military service were left behind while their complaining counterparts took advantage of liberal attitudes that sought to expand access to pain relief and support through the inclusion of pain as a recognized disability. chapter 2 continues this debate, introducing the idea of pain fraud and increasing republican anxieties around disability benefits and the legitimacy of chronic pain. medical expertise also was not as clear cut as republicans may have hoped, as physicians on either side debated best approaches for treating chronic pain. the development of gate control theory reinvigorated the pain debate and bolstered ongoing efforts to liberalize pain policy; according to judge john r. brown, “if pain is real to the patient,” then disability benefits administrators should believe them (quoted in wailoo 2014, 62).   with the arrival of the reagan administration in chapter 3, the decades-old battle between stoicism and dependency arose again, this time in an effort to demonize people with chronic pain and weed so-called fraud out of the disability benefits system. wailoo makes clear, however, that the basic fear regarding pain fraud and mismanagement of the disability benefits system transcended political parties as reducing fraud was first a goal of democratic president jimmy carter. ronald reagan’s stance towards pain fraud was decidedly more aggressive than carter’s, however, and included a masterful political strategy to illustrate the evils of pain fraud and the larger disability system as rewarding the wrong kind of citizen. the reagan administration and other like-minded republicans were soon deemed “extreme” and lacking compassion by democrats in a counterattack to the pain fraud narrative. the battle over disability claims would continue to play out in earnest within the state and federal court systems with patients once again caught in the middle.   chapters 4 and 5 grapple with patient consent and physician obligation, focusing on debates over the regulation of powerful analgesics. much of chapter 4 focuses on physician-assisted suicide (pas), a controversial approach to pain relief and compassionate care. this approach was championed by physician jack kevorkian, nicknamed “dr. death” for his advocacy work as well as his engagement in pas with several patients throughout the 1990s (wailoo 2014, 131). pas ignited a fiery debate over both a physician’s moral obligation to their patients or to god as well as issues of governance—should the legality of pas lie in state or federal jurisdiction? the issue of pain management is again taken up by multiple actors, namely physicians like kevorkian and state court systems. the actions of disability and patient advocacy groups also grows in significance, with battle lines drawn between patient consent and “death with dignity” to fears over abuse of disabled and elderly people.   while kevorkian represented an extreme side of the analgesia debate, many more physicians found themselves in precarious positions regarding their ability to prescribe powerful opioids to their patients. wailoo takes up this issue in chapter 5, with a careful look at the confluence of large pharmaceutical companies, decreased fda regulations, and direct-to-consumer advertising. the arrival of oxycontin to the market—advertised as a miracle pain killer with no relationship to addiction—sparked debates concerning pain, trust, and consent that carry throughout the previous chapters. surveillance structures designed to manage the ballooning opioid problem reflected previous political narratives regarding the stereotyped victims and perpetrators of pain fraud. as a result, drugs such as oxycontin were stocked sparsely in pharmacies located in poor and of color communities while white, affluent ones enjoyed wide availability. wailoo points out that the manipulation of people in pain was taken up not only by politicians but pharmaceutical companies as well. in reference to consumers’ strategy of crushing oxycontin to bypass its seemingly non-addictive formula, he writes, “for drug companies, this argument served a broader goal—feeding their argument that conniving customers, not the drug itself or improper marketing, were to blame for the abuse” (184).   wailoo’s pain offers an accessible, jargon-free account of pain as a political phenomenon. his decision to ground the first chapters of the book in his primary arguments—that pain is a legislative, moral, ethical, and legal issue taken up by many different actors and catalyzed larger discourses regarding trust, citizenship, and consent—effectively guides the reader along a critical narrative that chronologically demonstrates the enduring battle between pain and legitimacy. wailoo works to critically consider the motivations and actions of several interest groups, not only the politicians driving legislation regarding pain as a thing to be managed. these roles are also not examined within a vacuum—each group’s political and material circumstances are deeply interrelated.   the argument in chapter 3 effectively demonstrates this interrelatedness. in “the conservative case against learned helplessness,” wailoo focuses on the reagan administration and its political maneuvering that created both monstrous and innocent scapegoats for the pain debates. these stereotypes implicated real people suffering from debilitating pain and gave important context to the battles that disability activists fought for the recognition of their pain, as they were oftentimes caught between competing moral arguments of the left and the right. similarly, the reagan-era fine-tuning of the dependent pain fraud and the innocent pain victim figures implicated physicians as well—what kind of physician prescribes addictive medications? on the other hand, what kind of physician denies patients needed opioids to manage their pain? this chapter deftly unites the forces of wailoo’s primary arguments, showing both how the pain debates evolved from the 1940s soldier and how discourses regarding the opioid crisis may develop.   this book demonstrates the depth of pain as an object of study. wailoo takes care to maintain a narrow focus on the us twentiethand early twenty-first-century political history of pain while also touching upon varied and complex concepts like the notion of pain as culture and the administrative implications of pain management. both areas could have received greater development in wailoo’s work, however. the issue of pain and culture in chapter 2 receives no critical race analysis (although wailoo does address its modern implications in his concluding remarks). harriet washington’s work on us surgical theaters of the late nineteenth century sheds light on the important confluence of pain, culture, race, and doctoring; she writes, “blacks were believed to sleep more, feel pain less, endure heat better and cold worse…yet in a familiar but illogical leitmotiv, treatment for whites were devised, adopted, or rejected based upon the black response to therapeutics” (washington 2006, 108). furthermore, additional context regarding the waning power of the american medical association, the arrival of managed care systems in the 1980s, and the role of these two events on medical authority would enrich wailoo’s arguments regarding doctoring in the oxycontin era. (paul starr’s the social transformation of american medicine [1982] would be useful here.) more recent work may also prove useful, such as a 2010 study from matthias et al. on provider attitudes towards treating chronic pain in veterans’ association clinics, which reflects an ongoing struggle between chronic pain treatment and maintenance of medical authority. readers interested in these three areas should peruse the endnotes and bibliography of pain for more specific analytical, political, and historical projects.   wailoo’s pain: a political history presents pain as a multidimensional phenomenon, acting at once as a physical manifestation, medical condition, source of fraud, moral crusade, and policy issue. his analysis remains salient today, with threads of the questions regarding pain and its management in the 1940s and 1950s linking through to the present-day opioid epidemic and the role of the pharmaceutical industry. this book also offers an interesting analysis of the relationship between normative masculinity and pain policy, where the former served as an important cultural backdrop against which issues of legitimate or illegitimate pain and proper or improper citizenship were cast. wailoo’s text also works as a starting point for a great deal of other projects related to the opioid epidemic, the republican party’s stance towards science and medicine, and chronic pain medical education. for these reasons, pain is a useful entry for feminist science study scholars interested in how us politics has approached questions of deservedness and legitimacy regarding pain, including what kinds of pain are legitimate, and perhaps more importantly, on what kinds of bodies is pain legible as either a source of fraud or honest suffering.   references matthias, marianne s., amy l. parpart, kathryn a. nyland, monica a. huffman, dawana l. stubbs, christy sargent, and matthew j. bair. 2010. “the patient-provider relationship in chronic pain care: providers’ perspectives.” pain medicine 11 (11): 1688–97. https://academic.oup.com/painmedicine/article/11/11/1688/1933849. washington, harriet a. 2006. medical apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on black americans from colonial times to the present. new york: harlem moon.   author bio olivia adams is a phd student at indiana university bloomington in the department of gender studies. her research focuses on chronic vulvovaginal pain, provider communication, and racial disparities in healthcare access, outcomes, and experiences.     special section: global fertility chains and the colonial present of assisted reproductive technologies law as antikinship: the colonial present in global surrogacy     sonja van wichelen university of sydney / institute for advanced study, princeton sonja.vanwichelen@sydney.edu.au     abstract law and regulation are often seen as the panacea for the ills of science and markets: regulation minimizes risks by setting out clear rules, calls out abuses when those rules are not obeyed, and disciplines actors, institutions, and states to behave according to collectively agreed upon principles. in this article i challenge this liberal narrative of regulation by looking at how cross-border surrogacy arrangements are currently debated in private international law. i first demonstrate that technosciences are intimately linked to regulatory and legal frameworks. here, recombinant knowledge has led to new formations of legal parenthood while obscuring other forms of kinship in quite paradoxical ways. second, the liberal story of law and regulation erodes the history and political economy in which law has come to represent itself as universal and moveable. i examine how a gendered, racialized, and (post)colonial context of global fertility chains is lost in the legal instruments designed to protect the people involved in international surrogacy arrangements, preferring instead neoliberal forms of kinship. finally, the liberal story of law also embraces the story of individualism. i show the conflicts that arise when such individualist forms of law are transplanted to non-individualist contexts, both in non-western and western contexts. i argue that by subjecting non-liberal others (across the global north-south divide) to bioethical frameworks that intervene in kinship ontologies, private international law runs the risk of prolonging the logic of colonial and imperial thinking.     keywords cross-border surrogacy, private international law, transnational regulation, reproductive technologies, reproductive markets, hague adoption convention, anti-kinship     introduction in this article i address what work regulation does in the realm of global surrogacy. public controversies and highly mediated court cases around international surrogacy arrangements (isas) have pushed the need for a regulatory framework at the transnational level. the appropriate instrument for this purpose is private international law, and the permanent bureau of the hague conference was assigned in 2010 to deliberate a future convention on isas. by analyzing the proceedings and reflections of these discussions (held with experts and lawyers in the field) and comparing them to the development and debate around the convention on international adoption that is being upheld as a possible template, i want to examine what it means for society to regulate surrogacy and what it does to kinship knowledge in an age of biotechnology and globalization.1   law and regulation are often seen as the solution for the ills of the market: regulation minimizes risks by setting out clear rules, calls out abuses when those rules are not obeyed, and disciplines actors, institutions, and states to behave according to collectively agreed upon principles. at least, that is the progressive narrative of regulation, the promise of law, and the hope of good governance. this progressive narrative, however, dismisses three things that i would like to explore further. first, it contradicts the idea that law is a technology in itself, one which often assists in shaping markets and society. as science and technology studies scholars have argued, technosciences are intimately linked to regulatory and legal frameworks: they co-produce knowledge, materiality, and sociality (riles 2005; jasanoff 2007; silbey 2010). in the brave new world of reproductive technologies, this means that regulatory frameworks have steered the industry to some countries while staying clear of others. moreover, many would argue co-productions of law and recombinant knowledge have also allowed new formations of kinship while obscuring others in quite paradoxical ways.   second, the liberal story of law and regulation erodes the history and political economy of particular technosciences; law and regulation represent themselves as universal and moveable. legal anthropologists and postcolonial legal scholars have made this point in the past, describing how law plays a central role in shaping the normative course of history, including imperial and postcolonial histories (esmeir 2012; bhandar 2018). a focus on the political economy of reproduction shows the complex ways in which class, race, and gender inform contemporary practices. below i will chart how law—in a variety of ways—makes this political economy invisible and depoliticizes the subject of surrogacy. moreover, to take up the central trope of this special section, i explain how the colonial present (gregory 2004) gets lost in the legal instruments designed to protect the people involved in isas, and how they instead facilitate economic rationales and produce neoliberal forms of kinship thinking.   third, the liberal story of law also embraces the story of individualism. while my aim is to show the conflicts that arise when such individualist forms of law are transplanted to non-individualist contexts (both in non-western and western contexts), my hope is also to articulate ways in which actors (including individuals, communities, institutions, or states) and actants (including regulatory devices, legal forms, cultural documents) refuse, negate, or negotiate the premise of individualism. my take from this network approach is that the realm of reproductive technologies is a site par excellence to find conducive approaches to thinking kinship and relations individually and collectively.   rather than take law and regulation at face value by examining, for instance, the norms and principles of international conventions and whether the implementation of these principles have been effective with regards to their aims, my intention in this article is to point to some of the unintended effects of regulation, including ways in which a possible convention on surrogacy could become mobilized by various actors and institutions to do different things. my aim is also to see what meanings are attached to these unforeseen consequences in the broader network of culture and relations of authority and power. here i draw from scholarship in legal anthropology and science and technology studies that looks at the relational aspect of law; the co-productions of law with science, society, and materiality (riles 2005; strathern 2005; jasanoff 2007; pottage 2007). my analysis will remain speculative and theoretical for there is no hague convention for surrogacy yet: at this stage the permanent bureau is still researching the desirability and feasibility of a possible convention.2 nonetheless, much has been written about the necessity of such a convention and the ways in which transnational regulation should be approached. my analysis will focus on these proposals and draw from my earlier work on the hague adoption convention.   i start by describing the call for regulation from different stakeholders in the field and point to the expectation that regulation could serve as a universal remedy to combat the ills of cross-border surrogacy. after describing the socio-historical context of private international law and the hague conference, and the work that the permanent bureau has done in the field of international adoption, i turn to analyze contemporary debates around a possible transnational regulatory instrument within the broader framework of legitimacy and that of its knowledge effects. i argue that private international law both curbs as well as facilitates reproductive markets and that this contradictory movement is central to the neoliberalization of global governance. moreover, i further contend that shifting knowledge production of kinship, parenthood, and childhood because of scientific knowledge, which further consolidates biogenetic knowledge, is prolonging the logic of colonial and imperial thinking. in other words, as a postcolonial technoscience, private international law subjects non-liberal others (across the global north–south divide) to bioethical frameworks that intervene in ontologies of kin and relatedness.   international regulation as panacea the past decade witnessed the surge of cross-border surrogacy arrangements and commentators speak of a booming industry.3 while wealthy intending parents (often from oecd countries) flock to the united states, couples or individuals with less significant resources have traveled to alternating countries in asia (thailand, cambodia, and india), latin america (mexico), and eastern europe (ukraine and georgia).4 emerging from this development are stories of freedom, choice, and reproductive rights that occupy the moral space of intending parents, and that provide the legitimating framework for lawyers and practitioners in the field. that narrative, however, is overshadowed by the disruptive nature of the industry (whittaker 2018). lack of regulatory oversight and conflicting legal frameworks induce situations where legal parentage cannot be guaranteed, and where children can become stateless.   alongside these narratives of freedom and impediments to those freedoms are stories of exploitation, abuse, and suffering. poor economic circumstances draw surrogates from the global south into the industry, and anthropologists have described their liminal experiences (pande 2014; vora 2015; deomampo 2016). subjected to strict regimes of diet and exercise, and often confined to institutional settings (keeping them away from their communities and families), surrogates have limited political capacity to assert their rights. when things go awry, for instance, when medical complications arise for the surrogate or baby, they are often left to their own devices. the exploitation narrative extends to the children born from surrogacy arrangements. controversies such as the baby gammy case—where an australian couple abandoned a child with down syndrome born from a thai surrogacy arrangement—illuminate the abuses that are occurring in cross border surrogacy (see van wichelen 2016 for a discussion of this case). here too, critics and commentators emphasize the unregulated nature of isas.   of course, the unmediated realities of individual cases are much more complex than portrayed by the mass media and its publics; surrogacy arrangements can be exploitative and capacitating at the same time. nonetheless, it is this highly charged moral and feminist debate that informs calls for regulation. while there are many opposing sides to the contemporary phenomenon of cross-border and commercial surrogacy, most groups seem to agree that there is a need for a transnational legal instrument to regulate the practice (see dearle 2015), either directly focused on isas (trimmings and beaumont 2011) or focused on other sections of private international law, which would bring solutions to not only surrogacy issues but also parentage issues in general (hale 2013). transnational regulation, then, is seen as the panacea to the outgrowths of reproductive markets.   rather than public international law—which deals with laws between nations—private international law is the system called upon in regulating surrogacy because they concern the governance of individuals. private international law is a system of law established to harmonize and determine “conflict of law” situations when private and non-state disputes cross jurisdictions. these issues usually pertain to marriage, birth, divorce, property, or commercial disputes. the hague conference on private international law (hereafter hcch) is one of the world’s leading organization for cross-border co-operation and commercial matters. it is an intergovernmental organization responsible for the regulation of private matters across different jurisdictions.5 since 2010, the permanent bureau of the hcch has engaged in investigations to tackle the issue of cross-border surrogacy (hcch, n.d.). preliminary documents have been drawn up that describe the information gathered from hcch member states and the consultations performed with experts and/or practitioners in the field of surrogacy. after five years of preparation, the experts group on parentage/surrogacy came together for their first meeting in 2016 and met almost every year until the time of writing in 2021. the meetings included a varied mix of experts from twenty-two states, including so-called receiving states and states of origin in relation to isas. experts included judges, governmental officials from justice or health departments, legal scholars, and bioethicists.6   the issues identified from the investigations and consultations of the permanent bureau can be summarized around two main concerns. first, discussions predominantly centered on the legal status of children and parents because of conflict of laws pertaining to the recognition of birth certificates and legal parentage. here, statelessness of children (children ending up with no citizenship because of the current legislations) and what is referred to as “limping” legal parentage (intended parents ending up with no legal recognition of parenthood) can be regarded as the core impetus of hcch’s research initiatives.7 the permanent bureau draws on a number of cases to highlight that children born from cross-border surrogacy arrangements, and who travel to the country of their intended parents where the state prohibits such arrangements, are left vulnerable in light of their fundamental right to an identity as well as their legal status with regards to nationality, maintenance (financial support), and inheritance.   second, it was clear that wider concerns were implicated in the practice of cross-border surrogacy as well: concerns of exploitation, inequality, children’s reproductive rights, and health policy. the surrogacy market is not just any market. the picture gets complicated by the nature of the “product” (a child) and the reproductive labor performed to produce it. these are issues pertaining to public policy and therefore highly charged and variable among the different member states of hcch. because they involve difficult public policy matters, to reach consensus on these issues will be a major challenge. the scope and nature of the future convention will be important in trying to negotiate appropriate processes, standards, and tools in regulating isas.   markets, law, and legitimacy the concerns around surrogacy echo early reasons for drafting the convention on international adoption in the 1990s (see van wichelen 2019). in conceptualizing a hague convention for international surrogacy arrangements many turn to the hague adoption convention as a useful template. as a private international law instrument, the hague adoption convention works to eradicate “limping adoptions,” referring to weak or unrecognized adoptions, in either states of origin or receiving states, which can leave children stateless or without formal legal parentage. the hague adoption convention can also be qualified as a human rights instrument, for it incorporates and complements the principles and norms of the united nations convention on the rights of the child. the hague adoption convention, therefore, similar to the current proposals for a hague surrogacy convention, is a multidimensional instrument: at the same time that it is an instrument for judicial and administrative cooperation, it is also a human rights instrument (van loon 1990; see also baker 2013, 420).   according to katarina trimmings and paul beaumont (2011), the hague adoption convention has all the elements in place to secure women’s and children’s rights that can be transplanted to the field of surrogacy. first, the rights of the surrogate much resemble the rights of the birthmother in adoption. the surrogate would have to give informed consent, and conditions will be put in place to make sure the consent is indeed informed and not coerced by assessing conditions of choice and autonomy. conditions include age limits, marital status, caps on fees, and only allowing women to become surrogates who already have given birth to their own children. while some or all these conditions already exist in many state laws (for instance, india’s surrogacy regulation bill), the international instrument would provide a minimal standard that works across states. second, intending parents will need to be scrutinized, perhaps not as exhaustively as adoptive parents, but discussions of age limits in commissioning surrogacy and limits to the number of children conceived have been raised following certain high-profile cases.8 third, only accredited institutions and central authorities can broker any surrogacy arrangements. guidelines and good practice guides will be developed from these institutional experiences, and agencies will be audited to make sure they are complying with the latest standards. finally, a mechanism will be put in place to make sure the children are aware of their genetic background. it is argued that questions of genetic heritage and “roots” that inform international adoptees also apply to children born from surrogacy arrangements.   the scholarship reflecting on the hague adoption convention after its implementation describes three different perspectives in relation to the question of whether the convention is an effective instrument of regulation. one considers the global instrument a success: it is effective in resolving limping parentage by creating clearer rules about nationality and citizenship; it is more ethical because it generates formal standards, guidelines, and accreditations, and curbs the market where non-compliancy and abuse of the system is detected (see, e.g., trimmings and beaumont 2011; beaumont and trimmings 2016). others contend that the hague adoption convention prevents people from adopting by becoming a bureaucratic beast that invokes enormous delays and the languishing of orphans in institutional settings (e.g., bartholet 2007). then there are the commentators who argue that the hague adoption convention is not effective enough: that abuse is still evident, that corruption is made invisible through the bureaucratic apparatus, and that children’s right to access the knowledge, culture, and citizenship of their birth parents and country are not sufficiently recognized by the current system (e.g., smolin 2007).   it is not difficult to see how similar perspectives could emerge vis-à-vis a future global instrument for cross-border surrogacy. for agencies and states in the global north, the convention functioned as a transparency device, forging a technology that measured how well agreed-upon norms and standards were being met. such a transnational legal technology enabled the formation of legal adoptive families and produced a distinct knowledge about kinship relations. the hague adoption convention enacted the tenets of choice and autonomy and underpinned the legitimacy of moving children from one part of the world to the other. the enactment of legitimacy through the hague adoption convention has also depoliticized adoption, specifically in relation to the politics of value. one could even go so far as to say that it has sanctified adoption. it has obscured political, social, and cultural histories of child welfare, foster care, child circulation, and different knowledge practices of kinship and reproduction.   of course, the analysis that regulation—or legal formalism more broadly—fails to bring a common platform for democracy and the market has been argued by critical legal scholars and is not new (johns 2018). some of these critiques have concentrated on the “plunder” produced by law (mattei and nader 2008) and have explained that law facilitates what david harvey (2003) calls “accumulation by dispossession” leading to disorder and forms of illegality rather than the much-hailed principle of the “rule of law.” drawing from my previous work on the hague adoption convention and its implementation in contemporary practices of cross-border adoption, i underscore such a process when assessing the possibility for a future convention on isas. my speculation is that a private international law instrument for surrogacy will legitimate the facilitation of reproductive markets and depoliticize the subject of surrogacy (this is what arguably happened with chinese adoptions in the late 1990s and early 2000s). as it formalizes surrogacy, it simultaneously depoliticizes and legitimizes and might therefore increase the flow of children. at the same time—like the hague adoption convention—it will also legitimate the halt to the flow of children in certain jurisdictions where requirements of the hague convention are deemed difficult to attain. in the case of adoption, guatemala would be a good example where oversight, accountability, and transparency were lacking, and agencies were not able to comply to these formalisms (posocco 2011).   in sum, regulation cannot be said to either facilitate or curb the flow of children. it has the potential to do both, at the same time, in different jurisdictions, and in different geopolitical situations. this does not simply mean that it curbs the practice where the situation seems fraught or fraudulent (an argument often made about guatemala), or facilitates the practice where the situation seems stable and ethical (china). the point that i want to make is that because law cannot consider the reality of political economies or include the politics of economic and moral value inherent to global fertility chains, it risks creating disorder as much as order in their legitimating practices. the next section describes the consequences that this reordering of law has on knowledge production.   knowledge effects of regulation legitimating forces and justificatory frameworks are part and parcel of the performativity of law in transnational regulation. they resemble, as emilie cloatre argues, the “silent ways in which law may work through the travels of materials that are already loaded with meanings, yet go on to, relationally, ‘do their own thing’ with it” (2018, 657). beyond the framework of legitimacy lies a concern with knowledge and the knowledge effects of regulation. to put it differently, besides the production of legitimating orders, regulation and law also produce “a set of institutions, actors, doctrines, ideas, [and] material documents [of] knowledge practice” (riles 2008, 607). these practices do not cohere in ways that connect parts to a global network in which certain truths are being produced. instead, as annelise riles (2008) argues, they represent the “anti-network,” in which practices under the umbrella of private international law create unstable and contingent situations. this instability on the level of practice, however, stands in stark contrast to the stabilization of legitimacy. procedures, routines, and bureaucracies allow for the fading of normative controversiality and for a depoliticizing process. in this section, i describe how the examination of knowledge effects can assist in turning our attention back to the question of justice. i will do this through two figurations of (legal) knowledge: the person and the human.   legal personhood and the thingification of surrogates the discrepancy between the political realities of global reproduction and the depoliticization of international law brings into view the mythological core of transnational regulation and international law—namely, that “the westphalian notion that the governance of the social order can be cleaved from that of international relations” (ergas 2012, 109). states are central to the architecture and interventions of private and public international law and while international law purports to bring order, it can certainly create disorder. these instances, however, are often interpreted as an anomaly of application or integration.   disorder works silently through interventions in knowledge production. in the case of regulating global reproduction, an instrument like the hague convention actively mediates in complex understandings of reproduction and kinship. in general, regulation prevents recognition of “dispersed kinship” (strathern 1992b) in which the whole suite of “procreators”—as mediated by technoscience, property forms, and knowledge production—are acknowledged in their assistance to reproductive acts. though this might change in the future as “third” parents’ rights are being increasingly debated in regulations around assisted reproductive technologies (most recently relating to mitochondrial donations).   the problem with conventions regulating family-making in private international law—though really it extends to any form of bureaucratization or standardization in global fertility markets—is that it intervenes in vernacular understandings of life and kinship. by universalizing modern and (neo)liberal norms of autonomy, kinship, property, and contract, regulation reproduces not only imperial logics of capital but also euro-american understandings of kin and relationality. bob simpson has referred to this intervention as “antikinship” and “antimagic”; he uses the term antikinship “to refer to the designation of some relationships as unwanted or at the very least ambivalent and the term ‘antimagic’ to refer to the desire to deny or negate the effects that a person might wish to generate in another person or object though the use of law, bureaucracy, official classification, or implementation of guidelines or codes of practice” (2013, 594).   simpson describes the ways in which debts associated with gifts are intervened by laws, guidelines, and regulations. bioethical frameworks require gametes and embryos to be “donated,” or, in other words, “gifted”—and the “gift of life” has been the central legitimating force behind surrogacy. as we know from anthropological scholarship, gifting in cultural practice—both outside as inside the west—assumes debts and relationality: it is a social and socializing phenomenon. these core dimensions of kinship get lost in the universalizing language and apparatus of international law and reproduce—albeit implicitly—the interests of the euro-american and (neo)liberal subject.   within a global context of inequality and unequal distribution, largely inherited from colonialism, antikinship necessitates imperializing elements. legal technologies such as “informed consent” or “anonymity” intervene in kinship in ways that cut or make breaks with past or future forms and imaginaries of relatedness. informed consent for surrogate women who agree to an isa, for instance, untethers the gestational relation she has with the child she gestates, while anonymous donations of gametes erases their genetic provenance. these legal technologies not only represent a dominant and modern form of personhood and kinship far removed from local forms, but their universal and legal force assumes the natural desire of developing countries to work toward these modern legal forms. although not explicitly present, civilizational missions are implicitly and silently present in the application of such techniques.   as many scholars have observed, the ethics behind informed consent are based on euro-american ideas of freedom, autonomy, and choice (cooper and waldby 2014, 223). these moral notions are central in legal thinking, particularly in human rights domains, and confer the legal status of personhood to the subject. individuals are seen as “freestanding, information-processing, cognitively controlled executioners of rights and personal judgments” (lock and farquhar 2007, 2). within this framework, informed consent epitomizes a legal technique that functions as a moral and ethical safeguard against coercion and exploitation. critics in the field of international adoption argue, however, that informed consent conceals power dynamics underpinning decision making for birth mothers or birth parents and that knowledge on the legal consequences of adoption vary enormously across cultures (see fonseca 2011; johnson 2005; leinaweaver 2008; van wichelen 2018). claudia fonseca (2004, 2011) describes poignantly, for instance, how birthmothers in brazil, who draw from their local cultures of child circulation, are not aware of the finality of legal adoption. when transplanting legal techniques in other localities, differing accounts of autonomy and choice are not sufficiently considered. private international law’s upholding of “transparency,” “choice,” and “informed consent” ignore foundational inequalities informing reproductive exchangeability, thereby depoliticizing adoption and rendering invisible the politics of value.   regulating anonymity could entail similar problems in cross-border surrogacy. the global practice often (though not in all jurisdictions) depends on the anonymity of donors: sperm donors and oocyte donors. in this regime, donors are not aware, or are not allowed to be aware, of the people who make use of their donated gametes. in turn, this disallows recipients to return any debts sustained or acquired by the gift (simpson 2013, 94).   now, one could argue that this is a cultural issue, one in which a western culture of kinship is pitted against a non-western culture of kinship, but my persuasion is that relational ontologies are existent in both contexts. one merely needs to think about blended families after divorce or lgbtiq families in euro-american settings to think beyond the (neo)liberalized version of the “nuclear family” (though lgbtiq and blended families can be neoliberal too). this stance complicates contemporary responses toward international law—namely, that including the “cultural context” will enhance its efficacy.   anthropologists have raised the importance of including cultural perspectives to the making of law and the formulation of rights (rapport 1998; wilson 1996). indeed, in the preparatory material examining a potential hague convention for isas, efforts were made to reach as many states as possible, particularly states of origin of the surrogates. many of these efforts, however, appeared unproductive. for instance, all member and non-member states were requested to return a questionnaire on the future of surrogacy arrangements (hcch 2014). responses were clearly skewed toward euro-american states with already some kind of regulatory framework in place (very few states were involved that condoned commercial surrogacy). only two african states responded, while states with islamic law did not respond at all. one could argue that this unevenness in representation would first need to be corrected before there is any chance to craft an international convention. the same unevenness in the preliminary discussions around adoption in the 1990s, however, did not stop the drafting of the hague adoption convention. african and islamic states were hesitant to regulate a form of kinship (adoption) that was either forbidden by islam or against local forms of adoption.9   yet the point that i want to make is that “bringing in culture” will not fully address inequality as a constitutive force of cross-border surrogacy. nor will it remedy the imperial logics behind global governance and international law. as marilyn strathern so aptly notes, “individuals do not interact with culture—they interact with persons with whom they have relationships” (2004, 231). strathern’s observation has a particular resonance in the field of law where the very idea of modern personhood does not entertain this relational dimension. this is also true for the “human” in “human rights.” hence, she argues that the deficit of human rights is not only in cultural understanding: “it is a deficit in social analysis” (232).   a social analysis of regulation is key to understanding the central moral and conceptual problem with the globalization of reproduction. the antikinship structures embedded in regulatory devices, legal decrees, documents, and guidelines, which cut off relations, can be understood as informing what italian philosopher roberto esposito calls the “depersonalization dispositive” (2015, 27). in his book persons and things, esposito (2015) theorizes the core distinction in euro-american thought between persons and things—a binary that during colonialism collapsed for colonized subjects. rather than personhood, the legal status acquired by colonized people was that of inanimate objects epitomized by the idea of property (zolkos 2018). while reproductive markets abstract vitality and extract biological labor from surrogates (vora 2015; pande 2014), the apparatus of international law “thingifies” surrogates: reproducing colonial relations by bringing third-world bodies—though not exclusively10—to operate under the logic of property relations. while i am not arguing—as other critics of surrogacy have done—that the practice of surrogacy itself amounts to a form of slavery, the legal technologies that allow surrogacy to take place in a global marketplace follow the logic of labor and capital not different from other types of embodied work in which third-world bodies are brought under the logic of property relations, that is sex workers, domestic workers, and care workers (davidson 2014). following magdalena zolkos in her interpretation of esposito, depersonalization dispositive reduces the surrogate to a “thing-like” body that is now “commodifiable, dispensable, and appropriable” (2018, 17).   humanity and the gendered bondage to law the intervention in kinship knowledge described above could be argued to take place within the private sphere of the convention, the one most true to the original goals of private international law. but like the hague adoption convention, a convention on isas would entail public elements because of the many references to human rights, particularly women’s and children’s rights. by including frameworks of human rights, private international law has partly joined the tendency for global institutions of law (e.g., the international criminal tribunal) to stress a human-centered approach over a state-centered approach (van beers 2015, 1).   this movement in the context of private international law troubles the distinction between private and public international law and annoys conventional advocates who believe in the neutrality, objectivity, and technicity of private international law (watt 2011). as explained by horatia watt, “methodologically, they [human rights] bring proportionality where the conflict of laws uses deductivism; and as a matter of epistemology, they [human rights] are no respecters of the public/private divide which remains so engrained in dominant private international law doctrine” (2011, 396). the consequences of this movement are that it humanizes the sovereign state (peters 2009).11 the course of humanization includes the explicit defining, delimiting, and articulation of women’s and children’s rights in developing the legal safeguards to protect them from abuse and exploitation. while antikinship structures in private international law thingify the subjects whose labor or capital is extracted for the purposes of reproduction, public elements of the instrument—based on human rights regimes—set out to humanize subjects, to give them rights and “safeguards” against possible perils of the practice.   women’s rights and children’s rights have specific tensions vis-à-vis the figuration of the human. as feminist legal scholarship pointed out, women’s rights are interpolated in the construction of human rights (merry 2009). this tension is further complicated when women’s rights are placed in a racialized or colonized context. drawing from her work on juridical humanity, samera esmeir (2011) examines this interpolation further in the ways juridical humanity evolved in colonial and postcolonial egypt. she argues that “the regime of juridical humanity, akin to human rights campaigns today, interpolates the woman-human as a subject of human-made law. the law hails the gendered human. in return, the recourse to the law becomes one of the main mediums in political praxis to assert the humanity of excluded gendered subjects” (esmeir 2011, 247).   following esmeir, we can argue that the assertion of women’s rights in the transnational regulation of adoption and surrogacy forces gendered subjects to appeal via law exclusively in their negotiation and assertion of rights. this creates a form of bondage between women and law: “but if the human is the teleology of modern law, as the gendered colonial history of egypt shows, the human status of the now-included gendered subjects also introduces relationships of bondage with the law, making gender politics that rely on the figure of the human ever more juridical” (esmeir 2011, 247). indeed, one could say that the consolidation of women’s rights (as human rights) in the many clauses of the hague adoption convention tied birthmothers (far more so than genetic fathers) to law in their assertion of humanity and human dignity. it is through the framework of international law that these gendered subjects of potential abuse and exploitation were understood to be safeguarded from dehumanizing elements.12   in sum, global fertility chains and their attendant effects in kinship thinking bring novel problems to legal thinking. rather than assuming that law lags behind, or that future regulation will restore a previous equilibrium, it is more accurate to adopt the view that an active reorganization of legal and biological knowledge is taking place which displaces—or puts on hold—conventional understandings of kinship. by activating different legal domains with their own knowledge systems, law contributes to remodeling kinship.13 in society, such activation comes from our own engagements in who defines and how we define our kin. biology or nature can intervene but so can technologies, including legal technologies. such an exchange can—as sarah franklin (2013) notes within the realm of biotechnology—produce new classifications of “biological relatives.” translated to law, we can argue that biolegal exchange could similarly produce new forms of “legal relatives.”   concluding thoughts when genetics—or biology—can travel across borders, while social, intentional, or de facto relations cannot, how is one to think about regulating the private in the broader context of the social and the global?14   the legal scholar horatia muir watt contends that the focus of private international law has always been on enabling capacities, rather than that of disciplining (2011, 427). private international law, she further argues, is founded on the schism between law and politics, and between the public and the private. it is time, she argues, that private international law matures into an international law instrument where its political function is re-appropriated: “private international law should reclaim its governance potential and work to fill the holes created either by excluding or denying non-state authority. paradoxically, when domesticated and thus reduced to dealing with the ‘private’ sphere, it was actually disabled from taking the ‘private’ seriously. to a large extent, ‘privatising’ international law meant reducing its status—like that of classical private law—to the merely facilitative. used to enable but not to discipline, it was prevented from identifying and regulating private economic power, which it was complicit in unleashing from public constraints” (watt 2011, 389).   in agreement with this observation, i argue that a future multilateral private law instrument regulating surrogacy would need to make further efforts to ensure that solutions work against, rather than with reproductive markets and bioeconomies (van wichelen 2017). put differently, it would need to acknowledge the intricately linked social, political, and global context of private (family) lives. as in adoption, this would mean not only exploring the opportunities, needs, and rights of intending parents (or the limping legalities for their families). more importantly, it would also mean investigating and addressing the inherent global inequalities constitutive of global reproductive markets. this includes the recognition that euro-american ideas of choice and individualism—coupled with biogenetic knowledge—continue to impose colonial and imperial thinking. while the work on parentage and kinship thinking seems separate from the problem of markets, i would contend that they are mutually constitutive. without the legal recognition of genetic parenthood, one that cuts off parental claims from the surrogate, gestational surrogacy would lose its appeal; similarly, without the legal recognition of adoptive parenthood, one that cuts off parental claims from the birthmother, adoption would lose its appeal. in short, genetics and legalities are enabling forces of knowledge. within a context of reproductive economies, such knowledges can kin or de-kin relations as much as they produce legitimate or illegitimate families.   notes 1 i use the term kinship here as it has been explored and theorized anew by the “new kinship studies” (franklin and mckinnon 2002; carsten 2000; nash 2004; strathern 1992a). moving away from traditional anthropology that sees kinship as representing “natural facts,” new kinship studies does not take kinship as a pre-social fact but explores the cultural assumptions underpinning kinship. the emergence of reproductive technologies further consolidates the idea that “natural facts of kinship” cannot be sustained when that very nature is able to be engineered and designed. this has all kinds of consequences, one of which is manifested through euro-american ideas of legal personhood and parenthood discussed in this article.   2 all documents concerning the preliminary investigations on cross-border surrogacy and the feasibility of a hague convention on isas can be found at the hague conference on private international law (hcch), “the parentage / surrogacy project,” https://www.hcch.net/en/projects/legislative-projects/parentage-surrogacy.   3 actual figures for the financial picture of the global surrogacy industry are non-existent, but a report from 2010 speaks of a usd$2.3 billion industry by 2012 for india alone (see burke 2010). in 2018 the indian government banned commercial surrogacy, thereby preventing foreigners from engaging in such arrangements.   4 for an account of the shifts that have occurred in the countries facilitating cross-border surrogacy, see whittaker 2018.   5 established in 1892, the hcch today includes seventy-five states and the european union. over the years, it has adopted numerous conventions that aim to harmonize conflicts of law situations. the status of children has been a primary focus, and conventions in this area include child abduction, maintenance obligations, intercountry adoption, and now international surrogacy arrangements.   6 the representatives did not meet in 2020 and 2021 when meetings were moved online due to the global pandemic. participants included representatives from the us, the council of europe, the international social service (iss), and the international academy of family lawyers (iafl). in their first meeting the group addressed the critical importance of creating a unilateral method for establishing legal parentage in isas. collectively, the group agreed the need exists to protect all children by creating a framework for establishing legal parentage, identifying the child’s nationality, and respecting the child’s right to know their history under an internationally agreed to set of rules or conditions. no such international law has been established as of this writing. at present, there have been eight meetings—and the group of experts continue to conclude that surrogacy and parentage remains an “urgent” matter and that work needs to be continued before a recommendation can be made about a viable convention.   7 the term limping parentage is often used in the legal scholarship around the challenges of international surrogacy, describing the lack of regulation in the field that impede on formal legal rights of parenthood. i note that there is an ableist undertone not formally recognized.   8 see storrow 2005, who discusses a case involving a seventy-one-year-old italian woman seeking a surrogacy arrangement in russia and a japanese man who produced twelve children with various surrogates in thailand.   9 in islam, adoption is forbidden and instead a form of fostering is encouraged, which is called kefala. moreover, many non-western countries practice forms of simple adoptions where the parental ties are not severed.   10 we must be mindful that not all surrogates are former “third-world” bodies, many women from the “first” and “second” are now surrogates or egg donors, including for wealthier couples in the non-west (such as china and korea). nonetheless, similar logics of personhood and property apply to these women.   11 anne peters argues, for 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political theory.” political studies review 16 (3): 192–204. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1478929917720431.     author bio sonja van wichelen is 2020-2021 member of the school of social science at the institute for advanced study, princeton, and associate professor in the school of social and political sciences at the university of sydney. her research centers on law, life, and science in a globalizing world. she is the author of legitimating life: adoption in the age of biotechnology and globalization.     book review book review | book review | distributed blackness: african american cybercultures, by andré brock jr. (nyu press, 2020)     jessica sage rauchberg mcmaster university jess.rauchberg@gmail.com     in 2020, social media users around the world attempted to reckon with anti-blackness in internet cybercultures. cybercultures are postracial entities that imagine a white, cisgendered male, non-disabled user in the global north (nakamura 2013), while the “black body [is] only legible through its perceived absence…from the material, technical, and institutional aspects of computers and society” (brock 2020, 1). despite efforts to center the heterogeneity of black cultural experiences globally, focus from dominant media and entertainment institutions emphasize social media posts and data that foregrounded black pain, suffering, and trauma. but what if black aesthetics and performativity in a digital world did not hinge on white supremacist definitions of the human?   these inquiries drive the arguments and musings in andré brock jr.’s distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. the first part of the title—distributed blackness—refers to the “internetwork’s capacity for discourse”(5) and demonstrates how hashtags and other algorithmic infrastructure are used to build and visualize black political and social culture online. it is also an allusion to critical technocultural discourse analysis (henceforth ctda), which brock uses to disrupt and imagine beyond (white) western digital cultural research practices. the subtitle, african american cybercultures, speaks to the various ways blackness and black cultures are “performed…[and] absently embodied” (6) in online spaces. examining the transformative roles of information and computer technologies (icts) in developing black digital rhetorics and culture, brock pursues an anti-essentialist critical study of the networked relationships across various social media platforms that constitute black cybercultures.   distributed blackness is richly theoretical and interdisciplinary: the text draws from black studies, ict scholarship, critical/cultural approaches to communication and media, and black feminist approaches to science and technology studies (sts). for brock, merely studying hashtags, codes, or ict hardware as singular entities does not properly illuminate upon the “transformative cultural philosophy of representation, technoculture, politics, and everyday life” (8). brock’s monograph foregrounds the ecological network of black and african american cybercultures, such as black twitter, by presenting each chapter as a case study focusing on these heterogeneous nodes, a deliberate nod to the fragmented styles of reading in an era of information overload (127). ctda departs from western theorizations of the human to disrupt the essentialization of black digital cultures. distributed blackness shows how black and african american cybercultures evolve in different internet eras, tracing their unique collisions and departures for shaping digital performances of culture and identity. enclaves such as black twitter emerge as networks of expressions, technological innovation, and philosophies centering black life in a digital world.   each chapter embraces brock’s commitments to expanding libidinal economy (lyotard 1974). he uses ctda to dissent from essentialism and emphasize black agency in the digital sphere (10). libidinal economy is related to affect but does not have a fixed, progressive state. it can be found in infrastructure and is "invisible to our perceptions just like the materials and processes of...[the] every day—until a rupture occurs" (10). for brock, the libidinal economy is the clear differentiation between discourse and praxis and can circumvent white western discourses of technological progress and innovation (11). his thinking through libidinal economy expands "nonwhite capacities for resistance" in cybercultures by grounding the book’s overarching inquiry in black pathos. through this contextualization, readers imagine new possibilities for black cybercultural epistemologies and digital communication practices that do not necessitate the (re)production of white supremacist logic. noting how anti-blackness is used as a signifying discourse that powers much of western technoculture, brock turns toward afro-optimism to ask, what if technology embraced black innovation and creation?   chapter 1 is styled as a literature review and expands the author’s previous work with critical technocultural discourse analysis as a methodology departing from eurocentric theorizations of blackness and knowledge-production. brock contextualizes black technoculture as a hypervisible network that disrupts "white, middle-class norms" (17). he notes that digital whiteness “operates as a…designation for [who has access to] people and humanity” (20). ctda becomes an intervention that expresses "blackness as a discursive, informational identity…that avoids the essentialization of black culture” (25). brock returns to his adaptation of the postmodern libidinal economy to demonstrate how “racial ideologies power digital practice” (31). he brings this thinking into the latter half of the book in his analyses of ratchetry and respectability on black twitter. chapter 1’s literature review situates jouissance as a technology for black digital data that embodies desire and local black american cultural practices. blackness emerges as an informational identity despite the prominence of white supremacist design in ict infrastructure.   chapter 2 examines the foundation of now-defunct blackbird, a niche internet web browser targeted at black and african american users in the late 2000s. asking if blackness “can be discerned at the level of digital infrastructure” (38), brock uses ctda to assess how blackbird helped to build both in-and-out-group perspectives on racial identity formation and technoscientific practices. here, brock’s established commitment to study digital artifacts beyond tweets and user posts shines. his analysis demonstrates how blackbirds’ infrastructure allows for its creators to imagine a browser that does not reify white supremacist ideas of “rationality” or information gathering. brock's ctda of blackbird also examines cultural bloggers' reviews of the browser. the reviews function as paratexts and reveal the complex intricacies of how values enact performativity between user, ideology, and data from different icts. brock's finding in chapter 2 aligns with breaking research in postcolonial media studies (shome 2016), which similarly addresses alternative ways of ict development and usage outside of a white or western context, recontextualizing how technology shapes cultures both on and offline.   chapters 3, 4, and 5 collectively present a rich, in-depth consideration of black twitter. chapter 3 examines twitter as a hub for black techno-cultural enactment (80). uniting discussion from the previous chapters with a broad overview of twitter’s infrastructure, brock brings in catherine squires’s (2002) work on black and african american satellite publics to analyze how alternate ideologies influence social networking enclaves. he likewise positions black twitter as a “digital/virtual space where blackness frames the politics of the everyday, occasionally…breaking free to confront or simply inform wider publics” (88). chapters 4 and 5, respectively, analyze ratchetry as a digital practice to counteract racism and respectability: nodes of tension that build the complex networks of black twitter discourse. brock initially restyles ratchetry as positive, digital energetic practices that emerge from a “militant willingness to perform blackness” (129) in digital spaces that still conceptualize the ideal user as a white american. ratchetry is inherently playful; for example, brock discusses a black twitter user’s viral 2016 change.org petition that called for trap artist fetty wap to perform at nancy reagan’s funeral: a commentary on the reagan administration’s criminalization of black americans (147).   black twitter users also employ reflexive digital practice alongside ratchetry to dissent from the omnipresence of anti-black racism online—often with different paraverbal technologies like humor, sensuality, or anger (150). brock presents a detailed analysis of the viral twitter hashtag, #thanksgivingwithblackfamilies, which used multimodal texts (pictures, gifs, and other memetic artifacts) to build playful digital relational practices and community building beyond anti-blackness (170). technologies like twitter and other social media networks challenge the prominence of digital respectability politics threaded throughout chapter 5. as respectability politics influence offline and online surveillance of black users, ratchetry and reflexive digital practice imagine new ways of digital performance.   finally, chapter 6’s conclusion weaves brock’s larger inquiry together, bringing in afrofuturism to importantly argue how black joy and pleasure can reroute understandings of black data creation. brock is clear and succinct with his questions: what does it mean to imagine black technocultures away from a model of deficit (241)? how can we imagine other ways of creating, connecting, and collectively building through technologies like the internet? and what if the social-techno study of digital blackness prioritized the understanding of black joy, humor, and styles of communication that expand beyond trauma? distributed blackness shares an important connection with other scholarship in black feminist sts, crip technoscience, and postcolonial media studies, and is certain to have a transformative impact on scholars and artists working in these areas. most importantly, brock’s theorization of black technocultures may not articulate how to place a band-aid over the internet’s anti-blackness—instead, it may take us somewhere better.   references lyotard, jean-françois. 1974. libidinal economy. bloomington: indiana university press. nakamura, lisa. 2013. cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet. new york: routledge. shome, raka. 2016. “when postcolonial studies meets media studies.” critical studies in media communication 33 (3): 245–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2016.1183801. squires, catherine r. 2002. “rethinking the black public sphere: an alternative vocabulary for multiple public spheres.” communication theory 12 (4): 446–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2002.tb00278.x.   author bio jessica sage rauchberg is a doctoral candidate in the department of communication studies and media arts at mcmaster university. using critical/cultural studies, jess’s research is focused on developing crip, neuroqueer, and disability justice approaches to studying algorithmic oppression in digital cultures.     cover art cover art | about 26 squares artist statement     alex cruse aecruse@ucsc.edu     the cover of this catalyst issue is in conversation with the special section on metaphors as meaning and method in technoculture. the image depicts process-pieces from about 26 squares (2021-ongoing), a multimedia-dance work developed and performed by drought spa, the project i share with artist/composer kevin ck lo. as this work examines the function and weaponization of metaphor in the context of tenancy and economic oppression, it also explores the creative and collaborative potential of other-than-human life forms. inspiration for its title came from about two squares, a 1922 illustrated suprematist tale by russian avant gardist el lissitzky, which uses a red and a black square to allegorize revolutions in content and form (el lissitzky 1922). the about 26 squares project began with 26 microscope slides (‘squares’) upon which citrus molds were cultivated, using the juice of fruit taken from my landlady’s front lawn. as artists living in the bay area, we are interested in how the presence of fruit trees increases the value of this private property, and how landlords enjoy the fruits of tenants’ reproductive labor as their mortgages are paid off in full – if not in excess – each month. the shapes assumed by these mold samples were then photographed and digitally represented as an alphabet of 26 abstract glyphs. during the performance, these shapes are projected in a rapid cycle against a wall, next to which the dancer moves. when the cycle is interrupted and a glyph displayed at random, it forms part of a movement script that guides the dancer to a specific location—a type of insectile dance-language. in this way, aleatory interactions between the machine and non-/sentient life literally and symbolically structure the human’s patterns of movement. the material substrate upon which this performance takes place – a length of black fabric – invokes ‘telling the bees,’ a nineteenth century european beekeeping tradition of telling one’s hives of events and changes in the household. beekeepers would inform their bees of deaths by placing a piece of black cloth over the apiary. failing to honor one’s role in this two-way interspecies communication would ensure a nonproductive hive. to this end, our project evaluates how metaphor and abstraction interpolate the labor processes of humans and other animals. the project’s textual dimension also highlights this. writing in white ink, throughout the dance i transcribe directly onto the crepe coded fragments linked to each glyph, with topics ranging from ecological crisis to predatory finance (in which real estate plays a crucial role), to the real subsumption of aesthetics to capital. in the darkened performance space, backgrounded by lo’s experimental electronic composition, video feedback and other visuals produced via computer vision can be seen. these iterative and unpredictable patterns of mold growth were reproduced and collaged for the catalyst cover, as well as the two additional examples seen here: though the forms remain functionally unrecognizable, their enclosure within boxes of red or green hint at computer vision identification training. digital scans have also been combined with footage of the mold in situ. against the backdrop of russia’s invasion of ukraine, we return to the work of lissitzky. though he was initially supportive of the goals of the october revolution, and remained heavily inspired by technologies of an emergent industrial era, towards the end of his life lissitzky began producing socialist realist propaganda for the soviet state. instructive here is the idea that, as artists, we must continuously question the metaphors yoked to particular phases of technology and the larger, oppressive narratives they serve. or, as editors t.l. cowan and jas rault note in this special section's introduction, “metaphor has power to materialize and dematerialize.” about 26 squares contends that through novel forms of collaboration and communication, metaphor's power can be wrested from the state, towards horizons of revolutionary possibility.   figure 1. about 26 squares 1. a rectangular digital collage whose foreground depicts a square containing dynamic and abstract color fields. cobalt purple tyrian dominates most of the frame, accented by airbrushed red, turquoise, and deep royal blue. these colors, textured in places and dissolving almost to transparency, are intersected by three amorphous forms in bright yellow and orange. these viscous shapes could read as slime molds, or archipelagos viewed from above. behind the foreground square are faint, digital artifacts in purple and teal arranged across a field of muted yellow-gray.   figure 2. about 26 squares 2. a portrait-oriented rectangular digital photo collage in somber hues of black, charcoal, and a swirling array of electric blues. central to the image is a rectangle–what is actually a microscope slide but could be a door or metallic monolith. its surface reveals two faint boundary lines of two semi-transparent enclosed shapes; at the center of each shape we see a darker patina of deep gray, transparent enough to reveal the blue underneath. invading the rectangle at the bottom-left and upper-right corners grow chaotic fields of black and white, created using edge detection algorithm.   figure 3. about 26 squares 3. a portrait-oriented rectangular digital photo collage in somber hues of black, charcoal, and a swirling array of electric blues. central to the image is a rectangle–what is actually a microscope slide but could be a door or metallic monolith. its surface reveals two faint boundary lines of two semi-transparent enclosed shapes; at the center of each shape we see a darker patina of deep gray, transparent enough to reveal the blue underneath. invading the rectangle at the bottom-left and upper-right corners grow chaotic fields of black and white, created using edge detection algorithm.   references el lissitzky. about two squares. berlin: scythians, 1922.     author bio alex cruse is an oakland-based writer, artist, and educator whose work synthesizes the disciplines of poetry, video, installation, and new media. since 2016 cruse has worked as gallery curator for artists’ television access. her artist website can be found at: https://alexcruse.xyz/.     roundtable: housewife’s secret arsenal window: spatializing occupation     niharika pandit london school of economics and political science n.pandit2@lse.ac.uk     abstract in this short intervention, i ask, what is at stake, politically and conceptually, in understanding militarism not as stable and unfolding similarly across geographies, but as deeply contingent on historical and contextual specificities? how might we then unpack the question of home becoming a catalyst of militarism? what constitutes home under saturated state control and occupation where militarism is neither subtle nor benign but enforced through violence? emplacing the vignette of a window that came up during my ethnographic fieldwork in srinagar, kashmir, i reflect on the conditions of gendered vulnerability, fear, violence, and everyday negotiations of survival that become urgent concerns for people surviving a colonial occupation. this essay is a part of the roundtable called “the housewife's secret arsenal” (henceforth hsa); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. the title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.   keywords military occupation, militarism, gender, kashmir, space   spatializing occupation what is home under perpetual siege?   if home is found on both sides of the globe, home is of course here—and always a missed land. — agha shahid ali (2001, 33) “this is my home”, i must be careful with these words, announce them only in soundproof rooms... for if they escape, and reach new delhi they will have verdicts freshly juiced for me— seditious, unholy, a foreign conspiracy. — samia mehraj (2020)   these verses by kashmiri poets terrifyingly situate the conditions under which home—in its affective and material tenors—remains a fragile imaginary that for shahid ali is always “a missed land.” under conditions of military occupation that long persist in kashmir, claims to home, constituting home, and being at home are caught in volatility, especially when the indian state's insistence on “kashmir as integral” to its imaginaries of the nation constricts any semblance of home and self-determination for kashmiris surviving occupation. how then is home, broadly understood by feminists as a “relation between material and imaginative processes” (blunt and dowling 2006, 22) constituted under militarization and occupation? this issue's special section, domestication of war, opens with a pertinent question: how does home become a catalyst for militarism? this question brings to attention how latent and pervasive processes of militarism (lutz 2002), 1 and its enforced form as occupation of kashmir, are not just exerted in the minutiae of daily life. in other words, spaces of everyday life are not simply shaped by dominant power in a top-down manner, but (differential) social relations in these spaces co-constitute the form and effects of occupation. it is also worth remaining with other openings in this question: what type of militarism? what is at stake, politically and conceptually, in understanding militarism not as stable and unfolding similarly across geographies, but as deeply contingent on contextual specificities? what then becomes of home? this short piece offers some reflections on these openings in the context of kashmir. i want to begin by conceptualizing india's military occupation as an ongoing project of state-enforced militarization in kashmir, which operates through several paradoxes: it is imposed by violent means at the same time as the indian state maintains a “façade of democracy” through elections (zia 2019); occupation is instituted by emergency laws that give armed forces the power to act with impunity alongside indian state's claims of “normalcy” in the region; occupation as both spectacular for it perpetuates abject conditions of control most recently seen in the august 5, 2019 de-operationalization of kashmir's nominal autonomy and advancing of india's settler colonial governance, and an everyday process permeating daily life, lifeworlds, and practices of people surviving occupation (zia 2019). in this context, i foreground an ethnographic imprint emplaced in the geography of home and ask, in conditions where militarization is a mode of settler/colonial control, what do everyday practices reveal about the socio-spatial precarity induced by occupation? or when militarism becomes a constitutive logic of coloniality? a window anam is a twenty-six-year-old social worker shuttling between delhi and kashmir's srinagar. in our hours' long conversations, she often circled back to a window in her ancestral home in downtown, srinagar, a locale that has historically been among the centers of the region's self-determination movement, thus also a military target. when recalling her experiences of growing up in the home located on a restive street, anam spoke about a window that was perpetually damaged in protests and from the state's use of force against protestors. for young anam, who stayed alone with her mother as her father would travel for business outside of kashmir, this window became a window into witnessing how military occupation thrives on magnifying socio-spatial precarity. i draw on judith butler who conceptualizes precarity as “politically induced conditions in which certain populations...become differentially exposed to injury, violence and death” (2004, 25). to convey her sense of heightened precarity under occupation, anam recalled a few brushes at/with this space by figuratively drawing me to the window. during spells of protests and curfews, there was little for anam to do; she would often peep through the window to get a glimpse of the street and say an occasional greeting to her neighbours. as an integral part of the house and the only access to the outside world during recurring lockdowns when anam and her mother were confined to their home, the window was strictly out of bounds in the evenings when protests took place. for her escapades near the window after 5 p.m., anam was scolded by concerned elders who feared that a stray pellet or a stone may hit her to devastating results. while both an important and fearful spot, the window was also a site of possible injury and sharp anxiety at nights. anam described to me some evenings when she and her mother would be confined to a narrow corridor of their house. with the corridor at considerable distance from the window, it became a temporary safety spot. the absence of a male family member further heightened anam's and her mother's concerns, largely because of the real possibility of harassment in case soldiers knocked on their door as part of search operations. or if either anam or her mother were injured, they had no close kin to rely on for an emergency drive to the hospital. anam recalled sleepless times of being restricted to the corridor when their home, while one of the few spaces that offered temporary refuge under volatility, was also no longer safe. being confined to the corridor brought with it heightened anxiety where anam's embodied and spatial sense of home became limited to a particular spot, and being at home raked up feelings of deep insecurity. anam recalled how, when her father returned from business, he would try to allay their fears and mend the broken window. this repair routine was cyclical: violence, protests, breakage, repair, often only to find the window shattered the very next day. in sharing these memories, anam laughed at what she called the “absurdity” of life under occupation: when small desires of peeping through the window to allay boredom can cause injury; and how spaces like the home traditionally conceived as “familiar” are all but safe. after undertaking this cyclical repair, one day anam's father woke up to see the window broken again. exasperated, he banged his fist into the glass shards. i spoke to anam on an encrypted calling platform in july 2020, in the middle of many covid-19 lockdowns and the aftermath of increased surveillance post 2019, as part of my doctoral research. she attributed these early experiences of witnessing occupation as among those that have heightened her indignation. while she no longer lives at the house, her experiences by the window have stayed with her. in a follow up call in late july 2020, i told anam of my travel to srinagar in some days and that i would like to meet her in person, to which she responded in the affirmative and that she would like to take me to her downtown home and the window that she talked about at length. when i met her some weeks later, it was no longer possible. the house was damaged by fire and was being reconstructed. (un)homing occupation what this imprint shows is how enforced militarization and occupation are far from benign or latent as is usually theorized in non-conflict environments, but seep through everyday spaces, affective lives and experiences. when deployed as a modality of statist control, militarization functions as a cog in the wheel of contemporary coloniality and to assert state sovereignty in a region where it is constantly challenged by people's long-standing resistance (kaul 2021). in contrast to liberal understandings of militarism and militarization (see howell 2018), occupation takes hold both through spectacular violence, including mass pellet blinding, disappearances, sexual violence (junaid 2013), and by reconstituting socio-spatial relations of everyday life where “familiar” spaces are sites of insecurity. this imprint does multivalent work. anam's witnessing of/through the window shows how occupation frames home as a space susceptible to militarized control. while the physical space of home often becomes the only accessible site amid amplified uncertainty, militarized processes undo its binary separation from the battlefront or the public, as feminists have long argued. yet home does not emerge as a presumed space of safety but is inflected by occupation—by continually constituting socio-spatial relations of everyday life. these relations are deeply gendered: it was the “lack” of a male figure that made anam and her mother more fearful of violence, especially if soldiers came to their doorstep. such gendered vulnerability also heightened awareness about their surroundings and shaped their coping practices (by being confined to the corridor) to avoid injury. these complex experiences of precarity contingently shape home as both a site of temporary refuge and militarized control. i began this piece also with an emphasis on contextualizing militarism in specific social, political, and historical formations, which can begin to reveal how militaristic processes, ideas, and logics may be deployed as modalities of settler/coloniality in contemporary times. on this note, nitasha kaul (2021) has offered an incisive analysis on the need to account for the politics of formerly colonized regions (india) that have now become a colonizing force (in kashmir), and these particularities of militaristic domination and control remain indicative of india's ongoing coloniality in kashmir. in other words, it remains imperative to examine how statist discourses, logics, and processes of militarism (for instance, kashmir as a “national security or law and order issue,” or enforcement of emergency laws such as the armed forces special powers act) are used as political alibis for justifying military occupation as a way of “controlling” kashmir and restoring “indian national security.” whilst strict military control and surveillance have long criminalized public spaces for discussion and assembly, for anam, it is the space and affective imaginary of home that engenders a critical recall of her experiences of insecurity and its enduring effects under occupation. beyond simply “catalyzing” militarism in a linear sense, home becomes a site where the socio-spatial ways in which occupation takes hold, and its enduring effects are made visible. while anam's father attempts to smoothen these effects by undertaking a repair process, this process too is marred by impending rupture, relaying the cyclical and persisting effects of occupation in daily life. these effects are not one-off but unstable and ongoing, effects that have the potential to upend routine life in a matter of minutes. to sum up, what becomes of home under occupation, which seeps through the “ordinariness” of everyday life, and yet where the quotidian may be a site of ongoing struggle and coping? notes 1 while there is often slippage between militarization and militarism, i broadly conceive militarization as a process towards war-preparedness and militarism as not just statist war ideology but one that materializes through the social processes of militarization and activates focus on “people’s...preparation for war” (åhäll 2016, 160).   references åhäll, linda. 2016. “the dance of militarisation: a feminist security studies take on 'the political.'” critical studies on security 4 (2): 154-68. https://doi.erg/10.1080/21624887.2016.1153933. ali, agha shahid. 2001. call me ishmael tonight: a book of ghazals. new york: w.w. norton and company. blunt, alison, and dowling, robyn. 2006. home. london: routledge. butler, judith. 2004. precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. london: verso. howell, alison. 2018. “forget 'militarization': race, disability and the 'martial politics' of the police and of the university.” international feminist journal of politics 20 (2): 117-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1447310. junaid, mohamad. 2013. “death and life under military occupation: space, violence, and memory in kashmir.” in everyday occupations: experiencing militarism in south asia and the middle east, edited by kamala visweswaran, 158-90. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. kaul, nitasha. 2021. “coloniality and/as development in kashmir: econonationalism.” feminist review 128 (1): 114-31. https://doi.org/10.1177/01417789211016490. lutz, catherine. 2002. “making war at home in the united states: militarization and the current crisis.” american anthropologist 104 (3): 723-35. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3567250. mehraj, samia. 2020. “home as an occupied territory: intimacy, occupation and loss in kashmir.” feminist review (blog), august 3, 2020. https://femrev.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/home-as-an-occupied-territory-intimacy-occupation-and-loss-in-kashmir/ . zia, ather. 2019. resisting disappearance: military occupation and women's activism in kashmir. seattle: university of washington press.     author bio niharika pandit is an educator and writer who works across anti/decolonial thinking, critical military studies, transnational queer, and feminist epistemologies through ethnographic and archival sensibilities. she is currently fellow in gender studies at the london school of economics and political science (uk).     roundtable a māori approach to starting research from where you are     tina ngata https://tinangata.com   max liboiron memorial university of newfoundland mliboiron@mun.ca     in the summer of 2020, a plastic pollution advocacy group in aotearoa (new zealand) emailed me (max) to inquire about anticolonial methods for working with plastic pollution. they said the approach was new to them. i thought that was odd, since aotearoa-based researcher tina ngata (ngāti porou) was leading investigations and approaches to plastic pollution from an indigenous, specifically māori, perspective. it was clear that the ngo did not know ngata’s work, so was not learning from it or building alongside it. this special series in catalyst about citational politics and the power relations was an ideal time to showcase ngata’s work.   but to be clear, ngata’s erasure as an expert does not stem from a lack of citable work—ignorance of local, indigenous people and their expertise is because of colonial relationships to place, knowledge, and genocide. in the journal of radical librarianship, settler authors jane anderson and kimberly christen write that, “authorship [is] both a site of colonial power and as one of settler colonialism’s flexible legal devices for maintaining control and possession of knowledge upon indigenous lands, even as those lands are subjected to projects of expropriation” (2019, 123). they urge readers to "pay closer attention to the property that research [and attribution of that research] makes, who benefits from this property, and how colonial proprietary relations are normalized through the various lives that this property goes on to have in social memory, as well as in libraries and archives," and google scholar (2019, 136).   from these open access pages in catalyst, we hope this interview: 1) is cited; 2) helps dissolve alibis for ignorance by being findable, attributed, and citable in dominant academic spaces; 3) steers conversations about epistemological pathways towards place-based, right relations; 4) clearly shows that knowing things and citing things is lovely, but the real work is in the doing.   max liboiron (ml): tina, how would you start thinking about plastic pollution from where you are in a good way?   tina ngata (tn): from a māori worldview, “starting where you are,” as a principle, is encapsulated in the concept of whakapapa. this highlights the primacy of relationships in everything we do. it means that every concept has distinctive relationships that define it, relationships that extend out to place and time. as an underpinning principle for the māori worldview, whakapapa, the acknowledgment and building of relationships is an extremely sacred concept. starting where you are is therefore pivotal for both understanding your distinct colonial context, as well as the basis upon which to grow relationships of integrity in other contexts.   working within aotearoa means that whatever region or township you are working in requires you to start with understanding the distinct relationships for that place and building out from there. it can also mean exploring the genealogy of your issue for that local community. take plastics for example – has anyone come along before you to do research in this area and if so, what was that experience like for the people of that community? is the very issue of plastics loaded with trauma for them? researchers tend to treat each new project as if it’s a fresh experience for everyone involved, when the very experience of being researched has a whakapapa – a timeline and genealogy – of its own for most indigenous communities and we remember poor practice. if you are taking an anti-colonial approach this also means understanding your own positionality within these relationships – how did you come to be where you are? what power relationships are present? all of these things can be considered good practice for “starting where you are.”   ml: so, what is happening in different parts of aotearoa? who would you start those conversations to build relationships with? where are some starting places? tn: there has been and continues to be some pretty amazing work going on around decolonizing plastic pollution in aotearoa. some of the key initiatives and groups are: para kore, a māori-led “zero waste organization with a kaupapa based on whakapapa to papatūānuku and expressed through an experienced and skilled team who are passionate about, and committed to, achieving a zero waste aotearoa.” they have been decolonizing perspectives on waste and plastic pollution since 2011 now, work with 423 māori communities around the country and won the 2016 energy globe award for their efforts. the pure 2018 tour, which was a collaboration between scientists, māori and pacific peoples, universities, and māori/pacific ngos that wove together education, youth and indigenous leadership, western science, and discussion of solutions. waka hourua (ocean canoes) are working with local schools and communities to learn about plastic pollution from a māori cultural basis as tāngata moana (ocean peoples). this includes cleanup efforts, habitat impact assessments and trawls. toimata foundation is a sustainability education organization that works with mainstream and māori immersion schools to foster connections between people and place, and responsiveness to the environment. their guiding principles lead all of their education, including that of plastics pollution, to take a decolonial (māori centered) approach. aotearoa impacts and mitigation of microplastics (aim²) is a national research program to determine the impacts of microplastics in new zealand. this includes work with iwi māori around the impacts of microplastic contamination upon taonga and ecosystems. and all of the many, many māori communities around the country who incorporate zero waste into their food sovereignty programs. ml: and of course, you! your work on plastic pollution and colonialism has been crucial to—even foundational to—how we think about plastic and colonialism in clear. i first “met” you when you were previously blogging as “the non-plastic māori” and i know you have led or been involved in many of the initiatives you just mentioned, like leading the pure 2018 tour. i think both the content of what you do, talking about pollution and waste as an issue of ongoing colonialism, as well as the way you do it—in partnership and with boots on the ground, is a model we strive for—that i strive for, anyhow. and you’ve been doing it a long time. i’ve been watching your work for years and it’s been interesting to see how your path is building, nuancing, branching.   tn: that’s quite mutual! it was our friend anna cummins from 5gyres who introduced us right? i’ve followed your work since then and have been a big fan.   ml: yes! likewise. what are some of the lessons you’ve learned between when you started and how about the relationships between plastics, colonialism, consumption, state pollution laws, and other relationships?   tn: oh, that’s been an interesting journey and one that can be tracked through my blog content. i started off very practical and focused on one thing – getting the weight of my plastic waste down, and picking up as much as i could from the beach to grow my “negative waste count.” my blog, in the early days, was full of reflections on divesting plastics, shopping tips and recipes for plastic-free living. it was very much focused on my personal waste prevention and management.   you often hear the term “we have to turn the problem off at the tap” – which means preventing it at the source. so, whether it’s because you want to scale up your impact, or whether you are looking for the “tap”, you inevitably wind up looking at the role of policies – who is making them, who is influencing them, and who is benefitting/suffering from them. at the time we had a lot of issues with oil companies along our coastline and it was easy to identify the same players, using the same tricks, and utilizing the same dynamics for their own gain.   i came to realize very early on that plastic pollution, like climate change, was just another form of colonization upon our bodies and territories: an uninvited intrusion driven by people with a supreme sense of entitlement. this meant, for me, that “turning it off at the tap” didn’t mean changing policy as it does for most, it meant exposing, and dismantling, the racist and imperialist nature of plastics pollution, just as we must expose and dismantle racist and imperialist structures in general. so, my blog has, for years now, been focused upon these issues.   ml: do you have a sense of what some of the anti-colonial or decolonial understandings of plastic pollution coming out of these projects?   tn: i should probably start by clarifying what i see to the different between those two terms. when i speak to decolonial (and reindigenizing) practice i’m referring to analysis that seeks to understand the influence of colonialism and then reframes it from an indigenous perspective. when i re-indigenize the framing of plastic pollution, it leads me to understanding plastic as a disruptor of whakapapa – which is huge in te ao māori (the māori world). being an endocrine disruptor, plastic pollution has the power to affect hormones and reproductive cycles. as the core binding concept of our world, starting the conversation from the point of whakapapa (genealogical relationships) is much more meaningful.   plastic is also a disruptor of mahinga kai (natural food systems). we love our kai (food), and we love growing families. so, these two points really make our people sit up and pay attention.   some of the really important discussions para kore have driven revolve around what it means to really manaaki (host) visitors at gatherings. hosting people is a point of pride for māori, and so recentering the discussion around waste to whether we are using localized, unprocessed, quality food as a mark of love for our guests and pride in our hosting skills. jacqui forbes (ce and founder of para kore) has been an incredible leader in this field of growing relevant discussions and approaches to waste pollution from a maori perspective.   these are all powerful understandings that resonate a lot more for our own communities, but importantly, when these approaches are taken, and the relationships are grown with integrity, then the culturally centered solutions start to flow.   from an anti-colonial perspective, plastic pollution demands us to analyze and dismantle the harmful systems and perspectives that allow it to proliferate. this requires a focus on the international, trans-national, regional and domestic systems of colonial power that not only inform the problem, but also shape our responses to the problem. anti-colonial science demands that we understand the coloniality of the economy that drives plastic waste, as well as the coloniality that drives science and the ngo sector that responds to the problem of plastic waste.   ml: how does research, including academic research, fit into this? i know we’ve had discussions about how research is often not the answer. it’s simply not needed. can you expand on the complexities of research, colonialism, accountability, and anticolonialism. super easy, right?   tn: haha – sure, not complex at all. coloniality sits in the default space of science and policy, and there are pervasive assumptions about their legitimacy and authority. in an echo of the doctrine of discovery, which denied our rights, our humanity and our intelligence, indigenous peoples are constantly hearing of “new discoveries” about the nature of the universe and even about ourselves that we have always known to be true, but were always told that we were wrong. racist perspectives have generally framed our arts as “crafts”, our genealogical narratives as “myths”, our science as “mystical wisdom” and in none of these cases was a lack of knowledge the problem, but rather it was racist beliefs within the science – or scientism that never respected our ways, and a lot of that is still present.   an anticolonial approach requires science that takes into account the role that imperialism and racism has played in the science sector as we know it today. the enlightenment was framed by racists and imperialists, and their philosophies continue to underpin modern western scientific theory. science has functioned to legitimize imperial expansion (james cook is an excellent example of this, both in canada and here in aotearoa). racist, imperial science has been used to legitimize the genocidal logic of colonial governments around the world. so, science and colonialism are very much intertwined, and we have only just started the journey of de-colonizing and de-imperializing the dominant science regimes.   entitlement and extraction mentality are foundational to colonial thinking – and when that manifests in science it looks like researchers assuming their questions are valid, assuming a level of intellectual authority, assuming their practice is safe, and assuming the right to take from indigenous knowledge and science for the “betterment of humanity.” there are common colonial fictions such as colonialism is beneficial, and necessary, and provides equal benefits for all citizens – but we know this isn’t true in general, and similarly, in the context of science, we can’t assume these things. these presumptions are so deeply embedded in dominant science practice that it requires intentionality to avoid extracting further from communities, even by indigenous scholars. we need to constantly check whether the research is necessary, whose questions are we seeking to answer, and how we might continually center communities in our practice.   that’s why i’ve been working with various united nations (un) agencies to secure our rights not only in regard to plastic pollution, but also in regards to the science and solutions surrounding plastic pollution. addressing scientism is not always something fixed with “more research” or even “better research” – it can be as simple as getting out of the way of indigenous scientists and communities who already have the answers but have just experienced colonial barriers to implementing them.   ml: wow. it’s like you’re singing my song. even though we face different forms of colonialism, that really resonates here in canada, and i bet indigenous people in other places in the world are nodding their heads, too. how has the specific kind of colonialism in aotearoa impacted plastic pollution and research there? what is different there that, say, wouldn’t work in newfoundland and labrador, where i work?   tn: without knowing too much about newfoundland and labrador’s indigenous political history, i think i can just say that our treaty, te tiriti o waitangi, is a very distinct agreement that created a space for non-māori to be here in aotearoa. it’s often related to as the “first immigration document.” i like to consider it as the pākeha (european) tenancy agreement. pākeha wrote it, and pākeha breached it before the ink was dry, and they continue to breach it to this day – we have to be the most forgiving landlords ever. that document also affirms our pre-existing rights to abundant lands and territories and outlines a power relationship for how these things would be managed. it is meant to be observed and understood by all crown employees (which includes researchers for crown research institutes and university research centers). unfortunately, however, it has rarely been understood or recognized. that is changing now though – there is a lot of good work underway that makes treaty responsiveness, and authentic approaches to working with māori a measurable and accountable requirement in order to get research funding. that’s a good thing for all involved – when our treaty partners understand the treaty as the source of their rights in aotearoa, everything becomes easier.   ml: right. that’s part of “starting where you are.” so, what are you working on now? what can we look forward to next?   tn: i’m working on the aim2 study, addressing microplastics in aotearoa – and i’m specifically looking at frameworks for understanding the roles of imperialism, indigenous rights and our treaty history in the context of that research. i’m also working on a trawling project for waka hourua (ocean voyaging canoes) and am embarking on work around the doctrine of discovery as it manifests in environmental racism in aotearoa. i recently published a book on the doctrine of discovery in aotearoa and am busy turning that into a podcast series.   ml: oooh. give us the sites!   tn: you can find me on www.tinangata.com. my podcast is available on spotify and most other podcast sites under the title, “what a load of colony.” i have a couple of papers on waste colonialism out for peer review at the moment so hopefully they’ll be out soon and a few more by the end of the year. busy times!     author bios tina ngata is a ngati porou mother of two from the east coast of te ika a maui. her work involves advocacy for environmental, indigenous and human rights. this includes local, national and international initiatives that highlight the role of settler colonialism in issues such as climate change and waste pollution, and promote indigenous conservation as best practice for a globally sustainable future.   max liboiron is an associate professor of geography and director of clear lab at memorial university of newfoundland and labrador in canada. they are author of pollution is colonialism (2021) with duke university press.       roundtable: housewife’s secret arsenal business cards: rolodex half-life, an exposed life told in cards     salvador zárate university of california sezarate@uci.edu     abstract this contribution to the “housewife's secret arsenal” intimately explores the domestication of toxicity through two pieces of material culture: a bracero program (1942-1964) identification card and a residential gardening business card. both cards belonged to my father. i use these cards to tell how my father's access to the domestic space of the nation's agriculture fields and into the domestic exterior space of people's gardens in southern california was predicated on his availability to chemical exposure as a racialized body. in the wake of my father's death from non-hodgkin's lymphoma, both images have been reworked and reimagined with a ghostly imprint of a saturating but barely visible history of toxic exposure. i have reworked each card by adding the chemical compounds for ddt and glyphosate. this entry seeks to query how the domestication of war and toxicity accumulates more for certain bodies and how these histories of exposure might also be reworked to imagine otherwise foreclosed forms of sociality and memory. this essay is a part of the roundtable called “the housewife's secret arsenal” (henceforth hsa); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. the title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.   keywords latinx, migration, southern california, residential gardening, herbicide, loss, haunting     what does it mean to live an exposed life? let's rephrase the question: do you live in orange county? you know, that place in southern california defined by its sprawling post-suburban communities (kling, olin, and poster 1995), its trump-country-via-barry-goldwater-conservatism (mcgirr 2001), its homes adorned with lush gardens, immaculately trim boxwood hedges, and manicured lawns. i recognize that i am, at least in part, painting the county's landscaped ecologies in broad strokes drawn from popular representations like those of arrested development and the real housewives of orange county. even so, this idyllic picture is inseparable from the region's lasting postwar regimes of domesticity and homeownership, which cemented the domestic exterior as the place where white male heads of households did the work of mowing lawns and various outdoor tasks tackled with their children (hondagneu-sotelo 2014). this remains a compelling and lasting fiction despite being chipped away every single day by the racial and gendered labor divisions of the home that have been restructured to create the conditions for the outsourcing of this labor to latinx residential gardeners. these primarily mexican male workers head out every single morning across the county to skirt, mow, trim, and primp plant life behind the eponymously named “orange curtain.”1 perhaps you have called the “oc” your home for a number of years, during which time you lived in the south orange county region. unlike the urban center and racially heterogeneous northern part of the orange county, south county, as it is referred to, is defined by neighborhoods where homes, as hector tobar puts it, are “painted eggshell-white by association rule, like featureless architect models plopped down by human hands on a stretch of empty savanna” (2011, 7). again, think arrested development. perhaps you live in one of these homes? perhaps you received a business card from my father, juan zárate? maybe you found it jammed between your door and its frame, or sitting at the bottom of your mailbox. perhaps it was walked over to you as you watered your plants. i can see him still. with a small stack of cards in his breast pocket, next to his dual tone silver and burgundy pen. he probably carried two cards and flicked them together to make a satisfying sound as he walked near you, to signal his presence in a place where brown men are seen as outsiders unless they are pushing a lawnmower. the card would have looked like this (figure 1): figure 1. juan zárate's business card for his residential gardening company. well, kind of like that. it would have had all the necessary data to have you trust in his services. most important of which would be his california contractor's license number, which is an indication of a business owner's relationship to the state. with these seven little numbers, a customer can infer that the owner has a social security number through which to apply to the california state license board and acquire the c-27 landscape license. i encourage you to look a bit closer. clearly, something is off here, no? maybe you haven't noticed the large ficus glumosa tree for the chemical forest, branching out, spilling over the right side of the card. glyphosate. it is one of the things his work will promise you; he will expose himself to the chemicals necessary to kill your weeds. he'll do it as part of your regularized maintenance needs. glyphosate is the primary ingredient in commercial weed killer roundup, a recent property holding of bayer but originally created by monsanto. a series of court cases in the last five years have juridically linked the product to numerous cases of non-hodgkin's lymphoma that has impacted the lives and killed farmworkers, gardeners, and groundskeepers.2 it will not be the first time juan has been exposed to toxics to subtend us domesticity. nor is it the only time it has been captured in the form of a card. go ahead and keep the card. store it in your rolodex by neatly stapling it to an index card so that it spins effortlessly. or shove the card into a binder with translucent plastic sheets; with nine pockets to a page, it can be nestled next to the card of the patriot contractor that promises “america first” veteran quality work. months after my father's passing in 2017 from cancer (non-hodgkin's lymphoma), i asked my mother if we could take emotional stock of some of his personal belongings. working through grief, we opened the overhead closet cubbies in her bedroom and pulled down a child-sized peanuts suitcase. figure 2. peanuts suitcase we waded through the affective afterlife of personal ephemera that, as ana rosas has extensively and beautifully demonstrated, continues to “[weigh] heavily on [our] hearts, minds, and shoulders” (2014, 5). my mother recalls that it was originally a brilliant blue. now, his diminutive companion, because of over five decades of travel on the migrant labor circuit, is pale and worn. imagine the things it could have held and collected to help him survive as he was forced to leave home for el norte over and over, whether by leaping fences, traversing the rio grande, or contracting a pollero to cross him over in a vehicle. my mother believes that he purchased the suitcase with the money he earned as a bracero guest worker during his stint in the bracero program in the early 1960s (his contract in arizona lasted from 1961 to 1963). after his passing, snoopy, we learned, continued to guard over his laminated bracero alien laborer's identification card (figure 3). figure 3. juan zárate's bracero id card surely you sense that something is off on this card, too? the card consists of two spaces. on the left, a picture of my father, aged twenty-one, shoulders exposed, his chin on a white wooden block, and the rest of his stripped-naked body just outside the frame. the photo is glued to the card and then laminated. originally, the square to the right was empty—at least i think so. presently, reminiscent of the maps my father would draw for me from memory of bracero barracks and their proximate fields of lettuce, it is occupied by a chemical structure. ddt. in considering the end of his life, it becomes possible, though no less painful, to note the militarized and toxic currents that girded his inclusion as part of the bracero program's (1942-1964) racialized and gendered workforce across the us southwest. as a bracero worker, his labor supported us society and agribusiness accumulation under the guise of satisfying a supposed war-shortage of male workers to pick agriculture commodities during world war ii (galarza 1964; gonzalez 2006; mitchell 2012). this agribusiness fiction, a ploy to bust worker unionization in the fields, created the technoscientific and bureaucratic conditions under which workers were subjectively made and unmade through bodily subjection to a bureaucratic gendering and toxifying regime prior to their entrance into us domestic spaces (schmidt-camacho 2008; flores 2016; loza 2016; marez 2016). to eventually pick food from arizona fields ripe with pesticides, juan zárate underwent border inspection at one of the many spatial permutations of the continually evolving militarized us-mexico immigration apparatus. the enganche centers, where men would be corralled and inspected on the mexican side of the border prior to being shipped to the domestic geographies of the us, was the first step of bracero subjective unmaking, one, juan zárate would often recall, that occurred in the heat of the sonoran desert in empalme. there, braceros were subjected to a gendering technoscientific and toxic border regime where they were stripped nude, photographed, recorded, and bureaucratically cataloged through the collection of their biodata. immediately afterward, they were deloused with ddt—a chemical now banned in most of the world because of its cancer-causing effects and disastrous ecological consequences. the sweat coaxed out of my father's body by the desert heat as a plea to cool his body made the ddt stick—dressing him in white. to be clear, bracero delousing, distinct from domestic us campaigns meant to protect its white citizenry (carson 1962), was defined by the biopolitics of the emerging border immigration regime and for extending agribusiness capital. it was not to protect and extend bracero life but to capture them as a disposable labor force—that is, flexible (chang 2000) and wasting (wright 2007). it made them into nonhuman commodities—an imported labor force of arms without bodies (brazos means arms in spanish). what's in a card? in the wake of my father's absence, i tried to imagine why he would hold onto this identification card, one that, for him, anonymized more than it illuminated, for all those years. what might that document, beyond securing his ability to enter us domestic space as a farmworker, beyond putting food on the plates of americans, beyond the surplus labor and value for agribusiness capital gleaned from his disposable body, eke in toxic residue. there is a slowness to this. a slowness of pain and accumulated violence; a slowness in the shape of a broken back and leg spasms at old age that have set in from working until the crescent of the moon shines over the curved edge of el cortito in his hand. i imagine his body walking in the furrows, a silhouette in ddt white under night sky.3 the opposite of the supposed concrete work of full human laboring subjects, alien workers are reduced to abstract labor (day 2016). their racialized arms float over toxic fields, they are dug deep into soil, they take the shape of the shallow furrows. they come up carrying and emerging; they toss broadleaf lettuce into bins as their time draws toward an eventual expulsion at the end of their four-year bracero contract. they will continue to carry the chemicals—-on their bodies, despite being reduced to arms. my father would forever feel the effect of toxic exposure, like a thousand cuts gained from a lettuce-edge, a kind of racialization coloring his brown skin pink with decades of accumulated caladryl lotion made layer upon layer in the afternoons. what does toxic exposure mean in the absence of being legally granted a proper body (spillers 1987)? what does it mean when you are imported—made—into arms without a body? i'm left wondering, still, how his bracero id would come to serve as an originary marker, a kind of harbinger, for an approaching lifetime—decades—that would abound my father's life with domestic toxic exposures; from his continued work as a farmworker to his labor as a residential gardener in orange county. rest in pece in may of 2019, these two cards were (re)created for an experimental installation and collaboration between the uc irvine center for ethnography (https://www.ethnography.uci.edu/) and the platform for experimental, collaborative ethnography (pece; https://worldpece.org/), an open-source digital platform for “multi-sited, cross-scale ethnographic and historical research” (pece, n.d.). the exhibit comprised visual products by scholars, primarily anthropologists, interrogating the visuality of toxicity, how it plays tricks, hides, can be coaxed out, or is at times already seemingly ever-present. it was for this collaboration that both images of my father's cards were reworked and reimagined, redacted and annotated (sharpe 2016) with ghostly imprints centered on life. they are saturating but barely visible and yet might tell an intimate history of militarized toxicity and exposure. in those cards, i place the chemical compound for glyphosate (figure 1) and ddt (figure 3) back into the frame. even so, i still do not fully understand how i feel about making “visible” the connection between his bodily toxic burden and his work. visible for whom? what can this kind of visibility tell us about him? what must remain beyond the frame of each card—redacted? am i insisting on my father's exposure as an avenue by which to better understand the laboring regimes under which he worked and that stridently required his erasure, his work unheralded? am i also to imagine that militarized toxicity was not visible before this attempt at ethnographic art? certainly, it was felt by me, by him. centering affective knowledge for toxic exposure means something different in the face of medical uncertainty—the not having a decisive and clear explanation for his exposure (murphy 2006). this is a kind of exposure that is felt as a militarized border-making, an exposure felt as subjection to the chemical force of making people into agriculture commodities and exposure felt as mist carried onto his brown skin from applications of weed killer to maintain properties immaculate, week after week. he did not die from heart failure. visibility and affective knowability can operate on different registers; my father knew intimately the manifestation of exposure on his body, he felt it. i felt it when the official cause of death was listed as cardiac arrest and not a worn body from decades of farm work and residential gardening's domestic regimes of gendered labor and toxicity. he died from racialized exposure to a white supremacist settler and imperial power, not to the failure of his heart in the last instance—he still wanted to go home, to his last breath. you can still have these cards; you can still use them and call on his life. how to annotate all images in the exhibit were uploaded to pece by their authors. there, a community of users can engage and, using one of the platform's tools, annotate the images (fortun and adams 2019). while the exhibit for which the images were created has ended, my father's cards live on in pece. i think these images are only partially successful in capturing how war is domesticated. i say that because as a migrant subject, my father, like other migrant subjects, felt the brunt of the domestication of war, its militarized provenance unspooled across the spatial logic of the us-mexico border. it was in the state management of his racialized body, and i'm certain also to be found in his understanding of war's domestication as a process predicated on, regardless of legal status or legal document carried in tow, his availability to dispossession, displacement, and as a container for slow and deadly toxic dissipation. this is a felt knowledge, a kind of synesthesia, where his body felt, registered, the meaning and failures of a so-called better life, a fiction shorn from the fabric of a cruel optimism (berlant 2011). notes 1 i want to point to a resonance with natalia duong's piece in this volume's special section, particularly for the way that “orange,” both in its creation (agent orange) and its continual remaking (orange county) requires and expects racialized bodies to endure forms of toxic exposure and labor. as duong notes, vietnamese refugees were dangerously housed in areas close to where agent orange was tested and service workers were hired to clean the laboratories where agent orange was developed. see, natalia duong, “homing toxicity: the domestication of herbicidal warfare,” in this issue.   2 press coverage of these legal cases has been extensive; see associated press (2019).   3 the short-handled hoe, known as el cortito, was a tool used to discipline farmworkers. unlike the standard hoe, el cortito forced farm workers to bend over as they cut with one hand and harvested with the other. when a worker stood it would immediately notify an overseer or manager of their pause from work. see jain (2006).   references associated press. 2019. "roundup weedkiller was a major factor in man's cancer, jury decides. la times, march 19, 2019. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-roundup-cancer-monsanto-20190319-story.html. berlant, lauren. 2011. cruel optimism. durham, nc: duke university press. carson, rachel. 1962. silent spring. new york: houghton mifflin. chang, grace. 2000. disposable domestics: immigrant women workers in the global economy. boston: south end press. day, iyko. 2016. alien capital: asian racialization and the logic of settler colonial capitalism. durham, nc: duke university press. duong, natalia. 2023. “homing toxicity: the domestication of herbicidal warfare.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. 9 (1): 1-24. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/38357. flores, lori a. 2016. grounds for dreaming: mexican americans, mexican immigrants, and the california farmworker movement. new haven, ct: yale university press. fortun, kim, and james adams. 2019. visualizing toxic subjects. university of california irvine center for ethnography, platform for experimental collaborative ethnography. http://centerforethnography.org/content/visualizing-toxic-subjects-project-page/essay. galarza, ernesto. 1964. merchants of labor: the mexican bracero story. charlotte, nc: mcnally. gonzalez, gilbert g. 2006. guest workers or colonized labor? mexican labor migration to the united states. new york: routledge. hondagneu-sotelo, pierrette. 2014. paradise transplanted: migration and the making of california gardens. oakland: university of california press. jain, sarah s. lochlann. 2006. injury: the politics of product design and safety law in the united states. princeton, nj: princeton university press. kling, bob, spencer olin, and mark poster. 1995. postsuburban california: the transformation of orange county since world war ii. berkeley: university of california press. loza, mireya. 2016. defiant braceros: how migrant workers fought for racial, sexual, and political freedom. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. marez, curtis. 2016. farmworker futurism: speculative technologies of resistance. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. mcgirr, lisa. 2001. suburban warriors: the origins of the new american right. princeton, nj: princeton university press. mitchell, don. 2012. they saved the crops: labor, landscape, and the struggle over industrial farming in bracero-era california. athens: university of georgia press. murphy, michelle. 2006. sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty: environmental politics, technoscience, and women workers. durham, nc: duke university press. pece. n.d. “about.” accessed december 27, 2022. https://worldpece.org/about. rosas, ana e. 2014. abrazando el espíritu: bracero families confront the u.s.-mexico border. oakland: university of california press. schmidt-camacho, alicia. 2008. migrant imaginaries: latino cultural politics in the u.s.-mexico borderlands. new york: new york university press. sharpe, christina. 2016. in the wake: on blackness and being. durham, nc: duke ­­­­university press. spillers, hortense. 1987. “mama's baby, papa's maybe: an american grammar book.” diacritics 17 (2): 64-81. https://www.jstor.org/stable/464747. tobar, héctor. 2011. the barbarian nurseries. new york: picador. wright, melissa. 2007. disposable women and other myths of global capitalism. new york: routledge.     author bio salvador zárate is a cultural anthropologist and ethnic studies scholar who studies latinx migrant labor and racial ecologies in southern california. he received his phd in ethnic studies from the university of california, san diego, and is currently an assistant professor of anthropology at the university of california, irvine. he grew up working as a residential gardener for his father's company in orange county, california.     introduction metaphor as meaning and method in technoculture     t.l. cowan university of toronto tl.cowan@utoronto.ca   jas rault university of toronto jas.rault@utoronto.ca     abstract metaphors are critical sites of analysis for feminist scholars of science and technology because of what they both conceal and divulge about the conditions of their historical emergence and the persistence of those conditions. as researchers and editors, we find ourselves oriented to work that takes up the task of contesting uncontested metaphors, considering how metaphor “invades” (tuck & yang 2012, 3) and evacuates meaning. this special section carries on the dynamic practice in feminist sts of taking the work, and ambivalent potentiality, of metaphor seriously. in this introduction, we draw together scholarship that informs what we identify as the "metaphor-work" of feminist sts—the work of allegory, myth, metaphor, figurative and associative discourse, and their analysis—as central to the methods by which we make and remake meanings that matter to feminist technocultures. throughout the metaphor-work collected here, the contributors propose that paradigm change comes through the collective refusal of some metaphors, through the re-evaluation of others, and the introduction of new metaphorical frames and figures to reorient our work.     keywords feminist methods; metaphors; metaphor-work; metaphor refusal; metaphor as paradigm; anti-colonial technoculture     we need metaphors! metaphors offer an (entwined material and imagined) future that has not arrived and the future we live and have already lived through (mckittrick, 2021). metaphors are critical sites of analysis for feminist scholars of science and technology because of what they both conceal and divulge about the conditions of their historical emergence and the persistence of those conditions. so frequently the metaphors we choose reveal our hand, reveal whether we choose to maintain the status quo, or to shake things up. as many feminists know from experience, there are few quicker routes to becoming the least popular person in a room than to insist on the literalness of a concept that others want to insist is simply a turn of phrase, to draw attention to what or how a particular metaphor means, what the metaphor drags in with it. writing about what gets dragged into discourses of immigration and migration with metaphors such as “pests” and “invasive others,” bridget anderson observes that metaphors “are at their most effective when they are surreptitious and uncontested, not when they are applauded or called out, but when they pass unremarked into our language” (2017, 14). feminists tend to remark and contest: what logics do we reproduce when we describe that exciting new research with the colonial metaphors of “pioneering” or “breaking new frontiers,” or describe research that is taking impressive risks as an example of “wild west” thinking? is “dissemination” always the best word we can think of to explain the circulation and communication of ideas, or can we find a metaphor slightly less associated with semen as the seed(s) of knowledge? when we use “dark” to describe a bleak or violent period of history, or “shady” in reference to some suspicious practices, what cultural resonances are we harnessing? when we refer to work that needs revising as “awkward,” “weak,” “unrefined,” or “poor” as opposed to “graceful,” “strong,” “elegant,” or “rich” for work that strikes us as particularly excellent, what kinds of ableist and classist norms are we internalizing and passing along? to pose these questions of ourselves and others is a signature feminist killjoy move (ahmed 2010). in fact, is it not a feminist rite of passage to be hazed by the jeering taunt, “it’s just a figure of speech”? while feminists’ attention to metaphor, other figures of speech, visual signifiers, or turns of phrase including jokes, pronouns, names of buildings, “men at work” and bathroom signs might make us unpopular (humorless and uncollegial) with our non-feminist counterparts, there are few things as thrilling, are there not, than to be present when another feminist really goes for it against a troubling metaphor? or to be that feminist going off, finally unable to take for one more second that metaphor or joke, and to see the appreciative recognition of the one or two others in the room who are right there with you? for feminist sts scholars, metaphors can be bonding, galvanizing, and polarizing. we love them and we leave them.   why metaphor? why not metaphor? for us, one of the most influential and galvanizing reflections on metaphor comes from eve tuck and k. wayne yang in their essay “decolonization is not a metaphor” (2012). in it, they explain, “when metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. the easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation” (3). the metaphorization of decolonization replaces one thing —“the repatriation of indigenous land and life” (21)—with another thing —“other civil and human rights-based social justice projects” (2). this metaphorization disappears indigenous priorities and recenters the priorities, well-being, futures, innocence, and good intentions of white settlers. living and working in canada, as we do, means being bombarded with the invitation to metaphorize decolonization, to participate in and normalize the violences of settler colonialism all while celebrating canada’s successes and global leadership in “human rights” (razack, smith, and thobani 2010; dryden and lenon 2015). every level of government, as well as most academic and arts events, make some kind of land acknowledgment and regularly claim to be decolonizing this or that topic, all while federal and provincial governments fund, and police enforce, land theft, resource extraction and processing, pollution and infrastructural divestment in indigenous territories and communities. in canada, public discourse compulsively and compulsorily performs what audra simpson has called “the ruse of consent”: the grand deception and collective delusion, foundational to settler colonial well-being, “that indigenous peoples had all things been equal would have consented to have things taken, things stolen from them” (simpson 2017, 12). the hallucinatory daily experience of having colonialism and indigenous peoples “recognized” by settler structures of governance, arts, culture, and academia, in order to continue the projects and violences of settler colonialism through the same or sometimes updated tactics (coulthard 2014), makes the brutal equivocations of metaphor viscerally pressing. given the urgency and high stakes of metaphor, this special section brings together scholars thinking about what metaphor might kill and what it might create. metaphor has the power to materialize and dematerialize. as researchers and editors, we find ourselves oriented to work that takes up the task of contesting uncontested metaphors, considering how metaphor “invades” (tuck and yang 2012, 3) and evacuates meaning, political and strategic specificity. we are invested in attending to how metaphor can casually recenter and glorify whiteness, hetero-cis-ness, hyper-ablebodiedness and hyber-ablemindedness, natalist, masculinist, and monied-class dominant cultural norms and biases, and effortlessly reproduce ongoing legacies of injustice and violence. undoubtedly, there are other metaphoric framings that need to be returned to their literal sense. as max liboiron argues in pollution is colonialism, “pollution, scientific ways to know pollution, and actions to mitigate pollution are not examples of, symptoms or metaphors for, or unintentional by-products of colonialism, but rather are essential parts of the interlocking logics (brain), mechanisms (hands and teeth), and structures (heart and bones) of colonialism that allow colonialism to produce and reproduce its effects in canada, the united states, and beyond” (2021, 15–16). liboiron’s point—that there is no other way to understand pollution than as ongoing enactments of colonial occupation, destruction, dispossession, and toxic lack of accountability—calls us to refuse the figurative, dematerializing pull of metaphor. keavy martin notes that “metaphor hovers in the middle of ‘is’ and ‘is not’: “the metaphorical ‘is’ at once signifies ‘is not’ and ‘is like’’’ (ricoeur quoted in martin 2022, 15). when we make something figurative, we let it off the hook of “is” by counterbalancing it with metaphor’s shrug: well, it actually is not. thus, the power of metaphor goes both ways—it avows and disavows, simultaneously confirms and denies. this special section carries on the dynamic practice in feminist sts of taking the work, and ambivalent potentiality, of metaphor seriously. evelyn fox keller’s research on “the traffic in normal scientific research between metaphors and machines, between software and hardware, between language and science” (keller 1995, x) has been influential in establishing this practice. in her collection of lectures given at the critical theory institute in 1993, keller remarked that “a great deal more needs to be done to sort out the complex lines of influence and interactions of cultural norms, metaphor, and technical development” (xiv). and over the past thirty years, feminist scholars of technoscience have indeed done a great deal more. in “moored metamorphosis: a retrospective essay on feminist science studies,” banu subramaniam draws attention to the substantial “body of work [which] argues that metaphors and images are not harmless products of science but instead are constitutive of science” (2009, 958). and in this essay, subramaniam memorably adds to this body of work, deftly unpacking and repacking the metaphor of the leaky "pipeline"—the most relentless metaphor used to explain the lack of women and people of color in the sciences (964). rather than “pouring more women and students of color” into the pipeline, subramaniam offers a feminist sts analysis so that “we might describe the pipe as one that contains, constrains, limits and cuts off the oxygen of the travelers within… [and] we might start rooting for the leaks” (964). when we see the pipe rather than the leaks as the problem, this same metaphor can be used for very different purposes. finding and following a troubling metaphor is a method by which feminist sts proposes new solutions to persistent problems. taking on the question “should feminists clone?” deboleena roy notes that “the idea of cloning can produce several discomforts for feminists” in part because cloning is particularly prone to metaphorical use (2018, 135). rather than sidestepping this discomfort, and grounded in the solid feminist sts understanding that “metaphors lead to paradigm change” (136), roy fleshes out the steps of genetic subcloning into a new feminist method, the five-part “sub/fem/cloning” process: “(1) isolate your dilemma; (2) ligate the dilemma to vectors of figuration; (3) transform the dilemma; (4) select and analyze new connections; and (5) collect your reconfigured dilemma” (139). in her approach to metaphor, roy demonstrates her sub/fem/cloning method, isolating, transforming, and reconfiguring the dilemma of subcloning into a more nuanced metaphor and shifted paradigm for doing molecular feminism within a biology lab and well beyond. in the “technocultural imagination” (balsamo 2011) of feminist sts, metaphor can be both meaning and method.   metaphor-work throughout the metaphor-work collected in this special section, the contributors propose that paradigm change comes through the collective refusal of some metaphors, the re-evaluation of others, and the introduction of new metaphorical frames and figures to reorient our work. contributors approach the concept of metaphor capaciously: the myth of daphne and apollo in epigenetics (kenney); “virtual poetics” as metaphor for black artistic expression (mccartha); “intactness” in colonial environmental sciences (blacker); the technoculutral genealogies and crip activism of the “canary in the coal mine” (jaworski); queered digital models of viral transmission (mckinney and cifor); transcrip “careful slugs” in computer science (britton and pritchard); “tunneling” in networked technologies (llamas-rodriguez); “troubleshooting” in sts pedagogies (wu); nature in feminist technologies of gathering (paredes); the metaphor of the “vitruvian nurse” in working practice (smith and willis); and the economic weaponization of fruit trees in tenancy and economic oppression (cruse). the essays collected here work to do justice to the urgency and innovation that metaphor and its companion figurations bring to feminist sts today. as editors, we are less interested in parsing or disciplining the differences between metaphor and metonymy, synecdoche, figurative language, myth, or allegory than we are in work steeped in the material histories, consequences, and potentialities of what martha kenney, in this volume, calls “the metaphoric tissue of technoscience.” this is a tissue that connects feminist sts to bodies of scholarship that both define sts and to those that may not always be understood as central to the field, but that inform the editorial choices we made and the conversations we hope this special section opens into. in this introduction, we gesture to some of the scholarly conversations within and beyond sts that orient our understandings of metaphor-work—including the work of allegory, myth, metaphor, and other forms of figurative and associative discourse, and their analysis—as central to the methods by which we make and remake meanings that matter to feminist technocultures. the core questions at the root of this special section are, which metaphors are at work? and how do these metaphors work? in aids and its metaphors, susan sontag explains that “saying a thing is or is like something-it-is-not is a mental operation as old as philosophy and poetry, and the spawning ground of most kinds of understanding, including scientific understanding, and expressiveness” (1990, 93). metaphor shapes us and while “one cannot think without metaphors…[,] that does not mean there aren’t some metaphors we might well abstain from or try to retire” (93). just as there are some metaphors we need to expel from our ways of framing technocultural existences and relationships, we also see that new metaphors are needed to help us frame our experiences, our designs, practices, innovations, inventions, reimaginings, and emergent expressive cultures. experimenting with new metaphors to communicate our ethical, intellectual, and aesthetic commitments is just as important as contesting old ones. indeed, metaphor can offer a way of working, a method for naming, examining, offering relational paradigms for understanding the knowledges, priorities, and lives that are so regularly and continuously instrumentalized and then discarded or rendered impossible, expendable, and invisible, within technoscientific research and its cultures. considering the centrality of metaphor to feminist sts, we likely do not need to convince readers of catalyst that metaphors matter. but perhaps it is useful to consider how metaphors (are) matter. mel y. chen’s animacy: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect, which moves across cognitive and anthropological linguistics, helps us to understand that while language matters, language is not enough: “words more than signify; they affect and effect. whether read or heard, they complexly pulse through bodies (live or dead), rendering their effects in feeling and active response. they are a first level of animation, one in which we deeply linguistic creatures attached to our own language are caught, but not the last. indeed, language is but one discourse among many in a cacophony of anti-, re-, and mis-coordinations between objects, things, and beings” (2012, 52). we recall karen barad’s similar sentiment in meeting the universe halfway to move beyond representationalism in the attention we pay to scientific discourses. taking metaphor seriously in technoculture is not to reinforce the belief that language means everything, nor to reproduce a representationalist approach to knowing and being. rather, it allows us to focus on the pitfalls we encounter when we attempt to “turn everything (including material bodies) into words” and to describe phenomena from “above or outside the world” (barad 2007, 133). to pay attention to metaphor is to be concerned with and contest the “unexamined habits of mind” and beliefs that continue to have “excessive power” (133) over our capacities to at once form, and expand beyond, our current consensual realities. cree and métis filmmaker and theorist loretta todd (2005) examines some settler colonial habits of mind by drawing attention to the foundational metaphor, in plato’s “allegory of the cave,” that structures western philosophy, science, aesthetics, and culture. drawing on d’arcy rheault’s anishinaabe mino-bimaadiziwin (the way of a good life), todd explains, “anishinaabe tradition is…in contrast to a subject/object metaphysics or the geography—cultural, psychological, philosophical—of the cave. it is not a matter of coming out of into, or of finding enlightenment. we are already living in a universe that is alive not made of shadows or illusions.…and we are about relationships. and light is alive and shadow is not dead” (2005, 118–19). todd is not suggesting that we need new metaphors to understand indigenous aesthetics, or filmmaking—that universe and those relationships are already alive and already exist. rather, she offers a critical take on the enlightenment metaphors that de-animate some objects, things, beings. todd quips, “look, i’m not suggesting that western philosophy is all plato, plato, plato, cave, cave, cave....but as a foundational myth, it is preeminent in the west” (114). this greek myth, built on the out-of-darkness-into-light metaphor, creates and continuously draws us into a european philosophical vision and version of a white human-centric world. where a metaphor comes from matters because metaphor both reflects and materializes the worlds we can know. in this way, metaphor can shift the grounds, waters, skies of our scholarship, from the deathly and deadly stolen geographies of settler colonial heteropatriarchy towards the living and enlivening enmeshed relational grounds, waters, skies that so much of the best work (in feminist sts and beyond) already comes from and builds. the most compelling and useful metaphors are those that bear the weight of what they mean so they might come to mean again and again.   legacies and extensions   siri is not a woman but an idea of a woman...technologies that are gendered as women are not extensions of women under patriarchy; they are, in fact, extensions of men (sharma, 2022). donna haraway’s feminist cyborg—perhaps the most enduring, famous, and famously-contested metaphor in feminist sts—“has no origin story in the western sense” (1991, 151). theorizing against the logic of foundational myths, haraway devises a metaphor for a new, late twentieth-century feminist consciousness: “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism…the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism” (151–52). the metaphor of the cyborg offers both a provocative analysis and a method, a way of working out a new course for feminist scholars and activists to engage, rather than claim innocent separation from, the toxic mix and muck of the sciences, technologies, and capitalisms of white supremacist heteropatriarchal militarism for a start. in an interview published shortly after this manifesto had become “a cult text,” haraway reconsiders her use of metaphors, describing them as “descriptive technologies” that enable “a kind of science-fictional move of imagining possible worlds” (penley, ross, and haraway 1990, 8, 10). thanks to women of color and chicana feminists, such as paula moya (1996) who immediately took up the colonial heritage at work in some of her metaphors, haraway needed to grapple with the “cultural imperialism” she mobilized in her efforts to imagine and articulate antiracist feminist methods and worlds: “there’s also the problem, of course, of having inherited a particular set of descriptive technologies as a eurocentric and euro-american person. how do i then act the bricoleur that we’ve all learned to be in various ways, without being a colonizer; picking up a trickster figure, for example, out of native american stories? how do you avoid the cultural imperialism, or the orientalizing move of sidestepping your own descriptive technologies and bringing in something to solve your problems?” (penley, ross, and haraway 1990, 10). to paraphrase dionne brand (1990), no metaphor is neutral. like all technologies, metaphors inherit the worldviews, legacies, values, and problems of those who make them, but trying to escape those inheritances by picking up something new, turning it into a metaphor for your own purposes by ignoring (or instrumentalizing) the cultural significance, material contexts, or sacredness of that new figure or figuration reproduces colonial compulsions to dispossession, to entitlement thinking. this special section considers how metaphor might solve some of our problems while creating others; and, moreover, how our metaphors themselves have their own problems, or are actually part of the problem. the problems named, solved, and created by haraway’s metaphors have been generative for feminist sts. building on and against haraway’s cyborg—and her legendary declaration, “i’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (1991, 181) —micha cárdenas “stitch[es] together the image of an android goddess from the experiences and concerns of trans women of color” (2018, 26). thinking of metaphor as tool, and tool as metaphor, cárdenas considers audre lorde’s anthemic, “‘the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house,’ [which] fram[es] the question of tools through a metaphor to slave rebellions in a way that would discourage scholars from using tools created by oppressive systems” (2018, 27). mobilizing metaphor as method, cárdenas brings together lorde’s and haraway’s feminist epistemologies, and fashions the android goddess as an assemblaged, collective entity who “knows that she is made by the master’s tools, yet she still seeks to resist the master” (2018, 30). one of the biggest problems of haraway’s cyborg metaphor is the way it has been taken up by fans to simplify haraway’s extended and extensive analysis to generalize the metaphor, abstract it, and thereby delink it from women of color feminism in favor of a universalized (default white) version of women-as-cyborg. developing her own metaphor, cárdenas moves with it, elaborating, “androids cannot biologically reproduce, and neither can many trans women, but our code can self-replicate infinitely. learning from examples seen in science fiction, an android is a figure of rebellion, deemed less than human but striving to be more than human…a figure of awakening to consciousness of oppression and the necessity for resistance to fascism and colonialism” (2018, 26, 36). grappling with the material histories and consequences of metaphors allow us not only to clap back against metaphors that oppress, but also to signal boost new metaphors, to performatively emancipate ourselves, taking on new epistemological shapes, or manifesting the knowledges that dominant epistemologies and sign systems have long undermined and attempted to destroy. in dear science, katherine mckittrick asks us to “sit with metaphor,” so that we can “take seriously how metaphors are necessarily illuminating, and are indeed structured by and through, the complex groundedness of black life” (2021, 10). tracing the ways that black people, expressive cultures, geographies, selfhoods, are “reduced to metaphor, analogy, trope, and symbol,” mckittrick urges us to “reckon with the materiality of metaphors” (10). this is sitting with metaphors long and hard enough to ground their material histories, staying with the black life they come from and futures they have wanted to efface, to render “metaphorically unliving…preconceptualized as dead and dying” (11). thus, mckittrick’s address to science asks scientists and sts to reckon with metaphor not only to reveal the conditions and consequences of this racist trope or that, but also to take seriously the black life that metaphor enlivens or annihilates. as mckittrick exclaims, this is not a request to abandon metaphors. we need metaphors! metaphors offer an (entwined material and imagined) future that has not arrived and the future we live and have already lived through….metaphors function to radically map existing useable (entwined material and imagined) sites of struggle and liberation and joy! metaphors move us. metaphors are not just metaphoric, though. they are concretized. this means—if we believe the stories we tell and share—that the metaphoric devices we use to think through black life are signaling practices of liberation (tangible, theoretical, imaginary) that are otherwise-possible and already here (and over there). (11–12) sitting with and following the materiality of metaphor as an analytic framework is not only a critical move, but a method of working through lives and worlds and lifeworlds that are not only “otherwise-possible” but “already here.” that is, mckittrick’s dear science is a exhortation to metaphor, not only to new ways of knowing and being and relating but also towards an articulation and apprehension of the knowings and beings and relations that ground so many black, indigenous, anti-racist, and anti-colonial transfeminist and queer and crip realities/worlds already. this special section is energized by research on and with metaphors, rooted in their genealogies and materialities, and invested in their potential to reorient our critical attentions and perceptions beyond the limits of habitual academic “descriptive technologies” (penley, ross, and haraway 1990, 10). beth coleman, for example, models such work by thinking through race as a complex technolocultural metaphor: “the metaphor of the levered mechanism, with its denotation of functionality as opposed to intrinsic element, may be applied to instantiations of race….neither ignoring the history of slavery nor turning a blind eye to its legacy, a rigorous conception of race suggests that agency is possible within repressive systems and that this agency often renegotiates the tools of mastery….race as a technology—as a prosthesis of sorts—adds functionality to the subject, helps form location, and provides information” (2009, 194). coleman stays with the metaphor of race as technology, grounded in black histories and contemporary practices of mobilizing the agential, anti-racist, and affective potentialities of this technology towards breaking “the western trajectory of reason” (202). coleman works with metaphor to trace a more “rigorous conception of race,” to suggest blackness as a technocultural “sensibility” (202). in her formulation, the technocultural metaphor of race “argues for a greater, rather than lesser, degree of agency” (200). metaphor has proven to be an especially resonant technology, or tool, for scholars in and beyond sts to assemble previously divergent or unconnected sensibilities, ideas, and experiences about race and racism. the turn and re-turn to metaphor in contemporary black studies—we think here of christina sharpe’s “wake” (2016), tiffany lethabo king’s “shoals” (2019), keguro macharia’s “frottage” (2019)—has shaped so much of our thinking and renewed our belief in our collective need for metaphor as a powerful “conceptual strategy” (macharia 2019, 5), as meaning and method, as materiality and epistemology, as being and becoming, as a form of consciousness and inhabitation. as scholars of media technologies, our editorial impulse towards this special section is also motivated by the intensification of (indeed, the explosion of) metaphor-work in digital technoculture: the implementation of metaphor and other figurative, comparative, associative, and indexical naming work to introduce and familiarize users with new technocultural "extensions of men" (sharma 2022, 17); the critical-cultural-theoretical-analytic work of understanding these new associations, what they drag in with them, how they structure contemporary life; and the strategic conceptual work of introducing new metaphors to reorient technocultural futures. we think again about how metaphors work, and which metaphors are at work. scholars like lily kay (1995) and evelyn fox keller (1995, 2003) have shown the ways that computational and cybernetic metaphors and logics came to shape biological and life sciences throughout the twentieth century. and by the twenty-first century, we would be hard pressed to find any aspect of life (sciences or not) that is untouched by the computational metaphors of commercial networked digital culture (hayles 2005; katzenbach and larsson 2017). from clouds (hu 2015; amoore 2020), to platforms (gillespie 2017; singh 2018; singh and banet-weiser 2022), space (white 2006), searching (noble 2018), sharing (christen 2012; wemigwans 2018), liking (coté and pybus 2007; fuchs 2011; adair and nakamura 2017) to community (nakamura 2015; nakamura, stiverson, and lindsey 2021), not to mention labor (gregg 2011, 2014; cowan and rault 2014; fuchs and sandoval 2014; elerding and risam 2018; rand 2019; sharma 2020; poel, nieborg, and duffy 2021) or privacy (marwick and boyd 2018; eubanks 2018; benjamin 2019), vast vocabularies have shifted signifiers in the past twenty or so years. the metaphorization endemic to digital technologies drags cultural values across time and practice, as rault (2020) shows in their research on metaphors of transparency from modernist architecture, to settler colonial governance to digital duplicity, and as cowan (2019) traces in regimes of digital hygiene. we are particularly compelled by scholarship that attends to values, cultural knowledges, practices and aesthetics, material histories, and futures that are dragged along, discarded, and/or transformed in the vast and intensified metaphorization of pre-internet referents in digital languages, ecologies, socialities, and economies. digital technoculture is all metaphor and all material. as online sites relocate our sense of situatedness, metaphor threatens to overshadow the material sites and lived conditions of mining, construction, assembly, circulation, waste, and so on, that support digital infrastructure, and obscures their geopolitical, industrial, and environmental consequences (gajjala 2013; hogan 2015, 2018; roberts 2016, 2019; nakamura 2014; duarte 2017; posada 2022; grohmann and qui 2020). metaphor’s abstraction can serve to absolve privileged technocultural participants from addressing, for example, the hazardous “labor of extracting and disposing of digital technologies” (noble 2016). the challenge for feminist sts is to anchor the lines of accountability and relationality to the material conditions and consequences that metaphor has a tendency to untether.   metaphor’s relationship work metaphor’s affordances of abstraction make it possible to pick and choose the attachments we take seriously, those we strategically ignore, and those we purposefully manipulate “to show or perform trustworthiness” (talking treaties collective 2022, 45). in “kinship is not a metaphor,” keavy martin (2022) considers the lasting damage of metaphor as manipulation, abuse, and willful breach of trust as well as the potential of metaphor as relationship-building and sustaining. focusing on the kinship metaphors deployed by representatives of the british crown in treaty negotiations with cree nations in treaty 6 territory (on the canadian prairies), martin shows how settlers mimic, in effort to destroy and replace, the indigenous kinship relations and responsibilities settlers are adopted into through treaties. white european settlers break the responsibilities of treaty by treating treaties as if the kinship relationships and responsibilities are metaphorical, merely figurative, abstract, a rhetorical flourish, rather than ongoing, binding responsibilities. indeed, seizing upon indigenous concepts and practices of kinship, strategically mimicking and manipulating the grammars of kinship, in effort to destroy and replace them with white heteropatriarchal structures of relation, is amongst the vicious and pernicious of settler colonial tactics (tallbear and willey 2019; betasamosake simpson 2017; rifkin 2010; morgensen 2010, 2011). while kinship is not a metaphor, martin explains, metaphor creates new relationships, or brings unlike things into relation. metaphors “work to draw out relationships; they reveal the connections that we may not have seen or noticed before...indeed, metaphors sound very much like treaties, that practice of kinmaking, that coming together to create something new” (martin 2022, 11). the essays in this special section reckon with the histories and materialities of metaphor—where they come from and where they take us, as well as the relationships and responsibilities made, inherited or refused in metaphor. this special section has been written entirely within the first two years of the covid-19 pandemic, and as editors we have found ourselves especially attuned to the relationships forged, severed, state-sanctioned, and pathologized during this time. metaphors abound: lockdown, social distance, pods (generally meaning heterofamilial units), bubbles, front line workers, stay home to stay safe, etc. so many of these metaphors effectively double down on the dangerous delusions that homes are safe, paid labor can be done from them, care networks can be reduced to six people (or whatever arbitrary number your local government proscribed), and the people forced to continue in-person work will be appropriately protected or at least paid. pandemic existence, for many professors and students, came to mean online meetings in digital “rooms”—with students, collaborators, colleagues, friends. more dangerous delusions emerge from this metaphorization of space, that “new media” (in this case zoom and other video conferencing software) is neutral and non-placed—an empty shell that is both everywhere and nowhere—and that gathering well simply means signing in. when, in the first months of the pandemic, anti-racist, anti-colonial, trans feminist queer, and indigenous, gatherings were subject to repeated “zoom bombing” (nakamura, stiverson, and lindsey 2021); when the zoom corporation agreed to block and deplatform anti-colonial meetings and events that centered palestine and/or palestinian scholars, we were starkly reminded of the non-neutrality, the social, geopolitical locatedness of our online meeting spaces and the intentional strategies required to create the conditions for virtually meeting or gathering well. in this context, it feels to us that accounting for the relationship-work of metaphors is particularly pressing, timely, and urgent.   metaphor-work here and how the contributions collected in this special section contend with our world and its complexities by bringing new thinking to metaphor through speculative comparison, and speculative design, storytelling, myth-making, poetics, modeling, pedagogy, manifesto, and, across the board, accounting for and counting on the relational force of metaphor as meaning and method. the cover art for this issue of catalyst depicts process-pieces from about 26 squares, a multimedia-dance work developed and performed by drought spa—a project by alex cruse and kevin ck lo. we commissioned cruse to create a work of art for this cover, and she developed this abstract glyph, along with the two images printed with her artist statement, in conversation with the themes of this special section. cruse works with photographs of citrus mold that she cultivated from fruit growing in the san francisco bay area, as an interrogation of how “the presence of fruit trees increases the value of this private property, and how landlords enjoy the fruits of tenants’ reproductive labor as their mortgages are paid off in full – if not in excess – each month.” projecting figurative images created through the labours of fruit-abduction and human and more-than-human dance improvisation, cruse and her collaborator lo, use metaphor as a method to interrogate private property and housing insecurity. in “daphnia and apollo: an epigenetic fable,” martha kenney “work[s] within the metaphoric tissue of technoscience to tell a feminist fable about daphnia – small crustaceans who display remarkable epigenetic responses to their environments.” kenney develops a method of “speculative comparison,” which “is designed to intervene in the politics of comparability by calling naturalized analogies into question and to open up different possibilities for thinking and doing relations.” kenney denaturalizes the analogy between these daphnia crustaceans and the myth of daphne—an analogy mobilized to glorify abuse—to offer a model for “agential and relational biology where species are made through sensuous response.” working through myth and speculative myth-making is a metaphor-method that encourages us to think differently about what myths we inherit and how we might shift what they mean to us and our more-than-human subjects of study, in the long tradition of feminist re-fabling. like kenney, madison mccartha’s “notes toward a virtual poetics: an essay on solaris, assemblage, and blackness” interrogates the racial and relational violences normalized in sts storytelling and myth-making. mccartha calls our attention to a poetics for sts in its mythic, science fictional guise. in this essay, metaphor becomes a poetics of resonant, resistant opacity. mccartha’s virtual poetics of blackness comes from stanislaw lem’s story (and later andre tarkovsky’s film adaptation) solaris, in which the “entire surface of the planet isn’t just covered by but ‘is’ an immense, opaque semi-fluid mass; a black ocean who resists actively the scientists’ attempts to test, touch, or describe it.” for mccartha, “the poetics active on solaris imagines for [sts] a speculative research method in which both ‘scientist’…and ‘object of study’ become equal agents and participants in ways that are complex, non-objective, and affectively charged.” the scientific methods employed to erase the agential matters of biodiversity and enable ongoing settler colonial projects of dispossession and extraction are taken up anew by sarah blacker. “technologies of quiescence: measuring biodiversity, ‘intactness,’ and extractive industry in canada,” takes on the tools, technologies, and models used to justify settler colonial extractive sciences and reiterate stories of innocence. blacker focuses on the ways that the alberta biodiversity monitoring institute uses the environmental metaphor of “intactness” to produce “technologies of quiescence” that “minimize or displace concern and produce apathy…conceal and suppress evidence that colonial violence has been done (and is still underway).” blacker shows that this production of apathy and unconcern is not inherent to the tool of the “biodiversity intactness index” itself, but is strategically generated by ways that the concept of intactness is metaphorized by the alberta government to produce the idea of “pristine” or “untouched” environmental conditions and “eras[e] the harm done by industry and the settler colonial state more broadly.” by tracing the historically contextual meanings attached to "intactness," blacker shows metaphor to be a method for alberta’s extraction industry, a contribution to the settler colonial politics of measurement and an affective technology to excuse and pursue settler colonial dispossession. the role of metaphor in the manufacturing of unlivable, or the production of livable, environments continues in sophia jaworski’s “chemical disability and technoscientific experimental subjecthood: reimagining the canary in the coal mine metaphor.” jaworski traces the racialized and animalized genealogical meanings of the ubiquitous “canary” as a form of sacrificial life under conditions of toxic chemical exposure. jaworski writes that, while chemically sensitive communities claim and potentiate “canary knowledges” as a “series of creative improvisations which blend technology and material culture to combat chemical exposure’s embodied consequences and support access to shared atmospheres,” the metaphor runs the risk of individualizing “systemic, institutionalized toxicities.” this essay offers crip modeling as a way to imagine tools for feeling and acting against regimes of imperceptibility. as method and model “the canary metaphor can invite a practice of accountability towards the atmospheric volatility of wafting, airborne, aromatics—an ethics-based chemical kinship between fumeand vapor-exposed lifeforms.” thinking about modeling as a metaphoric method offers us a great deal to consider when we grasp the persistence and ubiquity of modeling as a form of technoscientific communication to the general population. offering a queer genealogy for contemporary digital models of covid-19 viral transmission, cait mckinney and marika cifor's “on digital models: responding to viral metaphors in pandemic times,” reads covid-19 models in conversation with hiv models to “demonstrat[e] how models can support personal responsibilization, be used to blame ‘bad’ actors, and justify the creep of new surveillance practices under the rubric of ‘data for good.’ they work from critical hiv and queer studies to consider how “viral metaphors operate as models” and “argue that the people and behaviors that are opaque to viral models and their methods of capture present potential avenues for speaking back to digital virality’s terms.” they show that models and metaphors have sexual politics and material consequences for the people, practices, desires, and cultures they seek to manage or contain: “this is a queer imperative, because we only sort of know what stigmas will flow from covid-19 modeling: how they will be used against people who party, do drugs, and hook up, and how they will place blame on poor, black, brown, queer, and trans people’s necessary proximities to each other.” the material consequences and crip, transqueer potentialities of computer science models and methods are explored through proliferating metaphor, speculative fiction, lucid and ludic imaginaries in ren britton and helen pritchard’s “for careful slugs: caring for unknowing in cs (computer science).” this contribution follows “the commitments of crip technoscience which understands interdependence to be a political technology” in order to draw alternate practices for a cs otherwise. with images and figuration, britton and pritchard develop these metaphors “in service of multispecies flourishing, consent, disability accessibility, anti-racism, trans*feminist joy, lubricating accountability, and unknowing practices” and invite catalyst readers to “bring these practices into the computer science lab before starting an assignment, project, meeting,” and use them to initiate and experiment with new cs design methods. juan llamas-rodriguez digs into “the tunnel metaphor in networked technologies,” tracing the ways that “tunneling,” a metaphor that once worked in the service of the "otherwise" that britton and pritchard propose, has been overtaken by white heteromasculinist border, spatial, network imaginaries and technologies. grounded in women of color and chicana feminist mestiza knowledges (anzaldúa 1987) and methodologies of the oppressed (sandoval 2000), tunneling has been a metaphor of resistance and fugitivity. llamas-rodriguez “turn[s] to the metaphor of the tunnel to illustrate how emancipatory language of border resistance becomes co-opted in technoculture.” he follows this metaphor across science fiction film, video games, and digital platforms to understand how it has come “to cast vanguard forms of online connectivity and celebrated forms of networked transgression in terms that are distinctly white, masculine, upper class, and adhering to liberal tenets of individual mastery.” llamas-rodriguez stays with this metaphor not only to explore its drift and expose the people and values that are celebrated along the way. we see this essay as a contribution to the feminist sts that not only traces the violences of metaphor’s ungroundedness, but calls for a reinvigorated orientation to the people, material practices, and knowledges from which a metaphor gained its purchase in the first place. thinking about how metaphor has the power to orient and reorient us towards each other, and the impact metaphor can have on how we orient ourselves towards and with each other, veronica paredes takes up the metaphors that guide feminist technologies of gathering in “natural metaphors for network gathering: technologies of meeting at the allied media conference.” writing from her own experiences of learning, organizing, and working at the allied media conference (amc), with the feminist technology network (femtechnet) and the situated critical race and media (scram) collective, paredes approaches the challenge of gathering or meeting well as a critical feminist technology. she frames her essay as a way “to express, and better understand, my gratitude for the amc” and the organization’s capacity to “cultivate feelings of joy, celebration, and creativity amongst such disparate groups.” learning from amc, paredes argues that “how a group meets and gathers warrants deliberation. it also holds influence over who comprises the group in subtle but important ways….unexpectedly, these lessons were communicated in modes as diverse as very practical instructions for how different people might navigate the conference to expressive, poetic language evoking nature metaphors.” paredes focuses on the nature metaphors used within amc communities, especially in the work of adrienne maree brown and complex movements, as a way to understand the shifted technologies needed to facilitate grounded, liberatory, joyous, and creative methods of gathering, meeting, networking, organizing, and researching. hong-an wu continues to consider the feminist technologies of gathering, but specifically in community pedagogical strategy. in “troubleshootingcaring technologies in pedagogical practice,” wu tells the story of working in a digital pedagogy environment and dealing with the problems that inevitably arise, with equipment malfunctions, space inadequacies, and issues with network connectivity. wu’s essay shifts our focus to technoscientific pedagogical relations: between self and technology, between teachers and students. troubling and staying with the weaponized metaphor of “troubleshooting,” wu imagines and theorizes a new set of feminist methods afforded by replacing “shooting” with “caring” as a way to foster practices of agential, engaged learning and being together. we might also read wu’s essay as a survival manual that coaches us “to center the question of what is the trouble needing care and how to meet those needs, troublecaring asks us to not give up on trouble but to care about which trouble we caregive, especially when our caring relations are not reciprocal.” also a survival manual of sort, jamie smith and eva willis’s manifesto, “we refuse to cope! the vitruvian nurse, the code of conduct, and nurses’ lived knowledge,” addresses questions of care and reciprocality. by manifesting the figure of the vitruvian nurse as an “a uniformed woman who goes out of her way to attend to everyone’s needs in an unconditional and subservient way where her self-value correlates with her ability to serve others to the detriment of herself,” smith and willis are able to imagine that other models of nursing practice are possible. this commentary piece contributes not only to the sts tradition of metaphor-work, but also in the tradition of the manifesto, a genre that haraway has characterized as a “feminist theoretical document—a coming to terms with the world we live in and the question ‘what is to be done?’ (haraway quoted in gane 2006, 136). haraway explains, “manifestos provoke by asking two things: where the holy hell are we, and so what?” (gane 2006, 136) and smith and willis answer both of these questions. we have organized the essays by linking some connections through proximity, as we signal above, but also hope that readers will notice other equally critical links and read in multiple directions. for example, paredes’s study of the nature tropes that serve anti-oppressive gathering-tactics in feminist qtbipoc organizing also links to kenney’s attention to the daphnia’s ability to grow “defensive helmets, neckteeth, or tail spines when exposed to chemicals called kairomones released by nearby predators” as a potentially galvanizing metaphor in feminist epigenetics. in turn, kenny’s attention to surviving predatory chemicals might link with jaworski’s work on the colonial legacy and living history of the canary in the coal mine metaphor in the chemically sensitive community. llamas-rodriguez's attention to tunneling in the expressive cultures of video games and networked digital culture shares a commitment to returning to and reclaiming a once-libratory metaphor, like the black surface of solaris. mccartha’s speculations towards black technocultural “virtual poetics” might also be read alongside britton and pritchard’s proposals for a cs of anti-racist crip trans*feminist multispecies flourishing and joy. blacker’s engagements with the settler colonial politics of measurement can be put into conversation with mckinney and cifor’s concern for the sexual politics of models, as well as smith and willis’s manifesto against standardized models of nursing, which in turn might link with paredes’s and wu’s attention to how the metaphors we live with impact the care we give and receive. as editors, we have organized these contributions through a line of connections that can take readers through a conversation running from the top to bottom of the table of contents. but we are excited by readers’ feminist tendencies to draw outside the lines of this linear table, across these contributions and connecting to the “metaphoric tissue” of feminist sts well beyond this special section.   postscript: cover image by alex cruse titled "about 26 squares", the cover image for this issue of catalyst examines the function and weaponization of metaphor in the context of tenancy and economic oppression. it consists of a rectangular digital collage whose foreground depicts a square enclosed by a thin red border, containing dynamic and abstract color fields, and a background consisting of faint, digital artifacts in purple and teal arranged across a field of muted yellow-gray. in dialogue with el lissitzky's about two squares, this work contends that through novel forms of collaboration and communication, metaphor's power can be wrested from the state, towards horizons of revolutionary possibility. for more about alex cruse’s work, please visit https://alexcruse.xyz.   acknowledgements thank you especially to deboleena roy and lauren savit for supporting this issue with good humor and patience. and to the close and careful readings from catalyst lead editors laura foster, nassim parvin, and anne pollock as we were writing this introduction. another huge thank you to catalyst’s copy editor, joanne muzak, for her goodwill and acuity in the final stages. thank you to all the contributors and the full catalyst editorial team for helping us to pull this off amid pandemic exigencies. we also owe a great debt and are grateful to lindsay leblanc for being with us throughout the initial proposal and collective research, thinking, and writing that got us started.   references adair, cassius, and lisa nakamura. 2017. “the digital afterlives of this bridge 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on: walter phillips gallery editions. tuck, eve, and k. wayne yang. 2012. “decolonization is not a metaphor.” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 1 (1): 1–40. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630. wemigwans, jennifer. 2018. a digital bundle: protecting and promoting indigenous knowledge online. regina, sk: university of regina press. white, michele. 2006. the body and the screen: theories of internet spectatorship. cambridge, ma: mit press.     author bios t.l. cowan is assistant professor of media studies in the department of arts, culture and media and the faculty of information at the university of toronto.   jas rault is assistant professor of media studies in the department of arts, culture and media and the faculty of information at the university of toronto. together cowan and rault co-direct two digital research environments, the cabaret commons and the digital research ethics collaboratory (drec). they are also co-authors of heavy processing for digital materials (forthcoming with punctum books). liu, xin. 2021. “keeping fit in the smog: health, self-tracking, and air pollution in postsocialist china.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–20. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © xin liu, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license keeping fit in the smog: health, self-tracking and air pollution in postsocialist china xin liu helsinki collegium for advanced studies xin.liu@helsinki.fi abstract this article concerns the relation between health, the embodied self-tracking subject and the environment in postsocialist china. instead of simply expanding the framework of neoliberal subject to the question of health and the phenomenon of tracking and sharing data of “smog jog” in the chinese context, this article addresses the following two inter-related questions: (1) how might an investigation of the practices of self-tracking “smog jog” in the context of postsocialist china afford a reconsideration of health; (2) how might an examination of the ways in which health is interpreted, performed and negotiated through practices of monitoring, measuring and recording a jog and the air quality in postsocialist china rework the conception of self-tracking. this article examines posts on sina weibo, which is one of the most popular social media platforms in china, in which weibo users record and describe their jog in the smog. it argues that the configuration and performance of health and the embodied self-tracking subjects are multiple, and are informed by, negotiated with and find expressions in the environment in postsocialist china. “smog jog” in 2016 a photograph tweeted by facebook founder mark zuckerberg, which shows him jogging past the tiananmen gate in beijing on a smoggy day, went special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 2 viral on social media. zuckerberg’s gleeful expression seems to suggest that he was not only undeterred by the thick grey haze, but was in good health and enjoying his jog. however, as many commentators and netizens have pointed out, at the time the photo was taken, air pollution in beijing was reportedly fifteen times of safety level. zuckerberg and his jogging companions were seen to ignore experts’ recommendation of wearing air-filtering masks and avoiding outdoor exercise when pollution is high. many netizens questioned whether this was another attempt to please the chinese authorities and get facebook into the chinese market, where it is banned. others shifted the attention to the question of censorship, suggesting that zuckerberg had to bypass the firewall to access twitter while he was in china. still others criticized zuckerberg for being politically insensitive by jogging on the ground where chinese students fought democracy in 1989. the “smog jog”—a term that is now most often associated with this photo—is part of zuckerberg’s “year of running challenge.” his goal was to run 365 miles (587 kilometers) in 2016, and he shared photos that marked his jog in cities such as berlin, barcelona, rome, lagos, and palo alto. in the same year, he also started the facebook group “a year of running,” which has more than 120,000 members. many members also uploaded photos as well as shared details such as the speed, duration, and distance of their jog. the smog jog photo, therefore, could be considered a form of self-tracking. in fact, recording and sharing data and images of the smog jog on social media have become a common practice among chinese netizens in recent years. on chinese social media platforms, such as sina weibo, many netizens share a diverse set of data, including the route, time, speed, distance of a jog, the air quality index score during the time of jogging, and photographs of themselves or the places they run past. while an emerging body of research examines the phenomena of self-tracking, this field of scholarly work typically focuses on questions such as self-optimization and self-management, and the relation between digital data and embodied health. less attention has been paid to the ways in which practices of recording and publishing images and data of a jog are always located in, shaped by, and, in turn, shape specific social, economic, political, and environmental configurations, as my discussion of zuckerberg’s photo makes visible. as deborah lupton (2017b) observes, most research thus far…has focused on the members of privileged social groups located in the global north who are tracking their health indicators because they are already conforming to the ideals of the special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 3 responsibilised, self-managing and entrepreneurial citizen. we know little as yet about how the members of marginalised or stigmatised groups engage in self-tracking, resist it or even re-invent it. how are elderly people, people from minority ethnic or racial groups, people with poor literacy skills or people with disabilities engaging (or not) in self-tracking? how are people living outside the global north using these technologies? (3) i agree with lupton on the need to decenter the conceptualization of self-tracking practices by attending to the specific context in which the practices are situated. however, my intention here is not simply to add to the field of research of the self-tracking experiences of the other. rather, i suggest that decentering entails reworking the parameters that define the concept of health and “healthy bodies.” for example, despite different approaches to digitized health—some put emphasis on the regulatory and mediating force of the abstract and disembodied data (see, for example, kenner 2015), others underscore the social and affective aspects of health data (see, for example, maturo and setiffi 2015)1—the analysis of health is typically grounded in the individual body, which functions as the basic unit of measurement. i suggest that it is important to rethink, rather than simply inserting new data into, the existing framework upon which questions concerning self and self-tracking are posed. this article analyzes chinese social media entries in which the “smog jog” is tracked and discussed. it does not begin with a notion of health as a property of a self-present individual body, that is separated from, although affected by, the environment. instead, this article explores the materialization of health in, through, and as the intersectional relations of power felt as specific “humanatmospheric relations” (choy 2012). taking inspiration from timothy choy’s (2012) theorization of air, i use the term “human-atmospheric relations” to refer to the ways in which air is sensed and made sense of through material-discursive practices such as “commentaries on the breeze, held breaths” (146), environmental politics, as well as forms of measurement. this article proceeds as follows. first, i provide a brief introduction of the practice of jogging and selftracking against the backdrop of the sports boom, the issue of environmental pollution, as well as the role of social media in shaping the social and political landscape in china. second, i explain the feminist materialist and intersectional approaches utilized in this article. third, i elaborate on the methods for collecting and analyzing data. fourth, i analyze a few posts that discuss and track jogging in smog on weibo, one of the most popular chinese social media platforms. finally, i special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 4 conclude by laying bare my approach to self-tracking and health in the context of postsocialist china. jogging, air pollution, self-tracking and environmental data sharing on social media while jogging has long been a part of the health routine in china, in recent years, it is becoming increasingly popular among the urban middle class. according to the china athletic association, there were 1,900 running races organized in china in 2019, which attracted a total of 7.2 million participants (xinhaunet 2019). new running tracks have been installed in many cities. for example, in shanghai, in addition to newly built running tracks by the river and in parks, a smart running track equipped with a facial recognition system and heart rate monitors was put to use in 2017. furthermore, practices such as joining a running club, participating in a race, sporting athletic gear from popular fitness brands, using fitness apps and wearing devices to track, measure a jog, and learn how to improve and optimize performance have become the new markers of privilege, since the postsocialist boom in luxury goods, education, and tourism, which differentiates the urban middle class from the others. i use the term postsocialist to refer to “the circumstance under which china has largely embraced global market capitalism while the legacies of socialist values and practices remain palpable in many social and political domains” (zhang 2017, 7). the postsocialist transitions are characterized by hybridity and ambivalences, and not the replacement of a pure socialist economic and value system by the allencompassing market reform and neoliberal values and governance (cooper 2011). such a hybrid form is tellingly manifested in, for example, the postcollective era healthcare reforms that steadily erode the state welfare provision, on the one hand, and reinforce the figure of a healthy national body, whose interest should be served and defended by the individual citizens, on the other hand. and yet, despite the emphasis on self-responsibility as serving the common good, the past decades of postsocialist reforms saw increasing collective contestations against issues such as increased socioeconomic inequalities, unequal access to medical care, and the persistent problem of environmental pollution. the development of chinese social media platforms and the ways in which they shape the social and political landscape are especially important and interesting against this backdrop (see, for example, deluca, brunner, and sun 2016). in 2019 there were over 882 million social media users in china, a sharp increase from 22.5 special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 5 million users in 2000 (statista 2020). thanks to its affordance of instant information sharing, diverse forms of content—textual, visual, and audio—that can be generated and uploaded by users, and interpersonal communications and networks, social media platforms in china have become one of the most dynamic spaces in which netizens follow and share information that is different from, and sometimes even contradicts, information shared via mainstream media outlets. the “voting” on weibo on implementing stricter air quality measurement standard is a good example. in 2011 pan shiyi, a chinese real estate magnate and a prominent public figure, took notice of the disparities between the air quality index (aqi) tweeted by the american embassy in beijing, which measured pm 2.5, and the air quality rating issued by the chinese government, which excluded the measurement of pm 2.5. pan launched an unofficial vote on weibo and asked his millions of followers to vote whether chinese authorities should adopt international standard for measuring air quality. this event is regarded as one of the catalysts for the changing air quality measurement practices in china. in february 2012 the measurement of pm 2.5 was officially included in the national ambient air quality standards in china. it is important to note, however, that although the problem of air pollution is no longer denied by the authorities, it remains a sensitive topic and is subject to censorship on social media. in an attempt to reduce public resentment, which is seen to pose threat to social stability and economic development, the government initiated a new healthcare reform in 2009 and has continuously increased its investments in the health sector. for example, the “healthy china” action plan launched under the leadership of xi jinping in 2016 puts emphasis on healthy lifestyle and physical fitness supported by technologically and scientifically innovative health services, such as smart cities, as well as an expanded health industry, which would become a linchpin of chinese national economy (world health organization, n.d.). and yet, as jiong tu (2019) observes, despite the increased investment in the health sector, “people’s average out-of-pocket expenditures in health care are continually rising” (18). instead of returning to the public health system of the collective era, the new healthcare reform configures health as simultaneously the responsibility and capacity of the individual, and the defining feature of the fit— technologically advanced, economically prosperous, and socially stable—national body. such a configuration not only produces new hierarchies based on differential access to, consumption of, and investment in health, but also puts the responsibility for individual and national fitness on the individual and delegitimizes and stigmatizes collective contestations of risk (such as special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 6 environmental and health risk) as threats to the health of the national body (see also cooper 2011). as the above discussions have shown, the phenomenon of tracking and discussing smog jog on chinese social media is situated in the intersections of a few important issues such as healthcare reform, social and economic inequalities, environmental pollution, as well as the movements on and surveillance of social media. instead of juxtaposing them, i approach them in terms of intersectional relations of power that are materialized in and negotiated by the jogging and selftracking body. in the next section, i elaborate on the theoretical frameworks that i adopt for such an approach. feminist materialist and intersectional approach to analyze how these different forms of power relations intersect and shape the practices of self-tracking the smog jog on social media, i turn to a feminist intersectional approach. as nina lykke (2010) writes, “the consensus regarding the importance of intersectionality does not mean that feminist theorists are in agreement about how to define and approach the issue” (49). the limited space here does not permit a thorough engagement with feminist debates on intersectionality. however, i wish to clarify that in this article i draw on what lykke (2010) calls “implicit feminist theorizings of intersectionality,” which “focus on intersections, but without using the concept ‘intersectionality’ as the main frame of interpretation” (68). instead of beginning with and reproducing social categories of race, class, and gender, for example, as if the logics that govern their operation can be applied irrespective of the context, i use an implicit intersectional approach to examine how the concept of health is materialized and felt as “human-atmospheric relations” emerging in and through intersectional relations of power that concern issues such as the sports boom, the changing relation between the citizen and the state, environmental pollution, socioeconomic inequalities, as well as the role of social media platforms in china. furthermore, this intersectional approach also takes into account human and nonhuman relations, such as the relation between the body, the air, the environment, and the numerical data provided by fitness apps, which, according to lykke, remain the “missing piece” in feminist intersectionality analysis. in an attempt to analyze the human and nonhuman relations materialized in the practices of jogging, breathing, and self-tracking in the social media posts, i also special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 7 draw on feminist materialist approaches that challenge the separation between the subject and the object, between the textual and the biological body. for example, in rethinking the body in terms of corporeography (kirby 1997), vicki kirby (2011) suggests that it is “in the nature of corporeality to mathematize, represent, or intelligently take measure of itself” (63). importantly, along these lines, the strict distinction installed between qualitative/cultural descriptions and quantitative/scientific measures of the body is called into question (see, for example, liu 2018). moreover, on this account, the body and the environment are not simply objects that are measured, but are “apparatuses of bodily production” (haraway 1988, 591). the feminist materialist theoretical framework that i utilize is in line with the sociomaterial approach to self-tracking developed by lupton (2017b), which sheds light on the ways in which “digital devices are incorporated into our everyday routines, entangled with our sense of self, our experience of embodiment, our acquisition of knowledge and meaning making and our social relations” (37). importantly, in underscoring contingent, embodied, and affective relationalities, the sociomaterial approach provides analytical affordance of ambiguities and negotiations that exceed an oppositional account that either emphasizes the determining and oppressive force of norms coded in the algorithms of the apps—“biopedagogical capacities” (lupton 2018, 12), or the agency of the self-managing and self-optimizing subject (see also ruckenstein and schüll 2017). for example, in her study on food-tracking apps, lupton (2018) observes the multiple and ambivalent affect and effect of using these apps. while some respondents feel that the apps provide important information and help them to feel better and being in control, others feel anxious and judged; still others experience frustration and disappointment as the apps do not deliver what they promised. the possibility for examining the ambivalent and multiple experiences of selftracking that the sociomaterial approach affords is particularly important for researching the smog jog in the postsocialist context. performing outdoor exercise when air is polluted raises questions about how risks and health are understood and negotiated, and cannot be reduced to either the question of neoliberal subject or the issue of normative regulation of what counts as a healthy body. moreover, as the opening discussions about zuckerberg’s photo show, who jogs, where, how the jog is measured, and how information is shared are questions that concern issues such as socioeconomic inequalities, internet surveillance, and competing local and global representations of china. the special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 8 feminist intersectional approach that i adopt affords an account of the intersectional relations of power that are sometimes elided in the sociomaterial approaches to self-tracking by virtue of its preoccupation with the assemblage that is analyzed “in an enumerative, all-encompassing fashion that dilutes its analytical power” (ruckenstein and schüll 2017, 230). in the next section, i explain the methods for data collection and analysis that are in line with the feminist materialist and intersectional approaches and that allow the exploration of the multiple ways in which health is understood, felt, performed, and negotiated through the self-tracking of smog jog. data collection and method this article analyzes entries about smog jog on sina weibo, one of the most popular social media platforms in china. since 2016 i have been occasionally following discussions on air pollution on weibo. at first, i used weibo’s built-in search engine and the keyword 雾霾 (smog) to check the content that people posted. for each search, weibo provides up to fifty pages of content. each page contains around twenty posts. after seeing that many posts are about jogging when the air is polluted, i started using the keyword 雾霾跑步(smog jog)to search for contents that are most related to jogging in smog. i also save some of the contents that i find most interesting and relevant in “my favorites” folder, which is a digital archiving function provided by weibo. at the time of writing, i have saved 5,558 posts, 305 of which are about smog jog. not all of the posts include quantitative data. as lupton (2016) explains, “many self-trackers record nonquantifiable data as part of their practice; such data include journal accounts of their daily activities, emotional states, and relationships and collections of audio data and visual images” (28). many of the posts include both textual and visual contents. and it should be noted that the visual images are often not generated by the same app, but produced by a combination of different apps or digital devices. the representation of images here mirrors the diverse ways in which images are shared and interpreted. images are important for the analysis for the following reasons. first, many netizens find their own perception of air quality, visualized through photos, for example, more trustworthy than the official air quality index scores, due to the government’s earlier denial of the air pollution problem. these images are often used to either provide evidence for the perceived air quality or to question the air quality index scores. second, the images in these posts often make visible the elements of a jog that the weibo users wish to highlight. they might supplement or contradict the special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 9 textual description. last but not least, images are often used to evade censorship on social media, and to convey information that cannot be shared through texts. i follow the sociomaterial “method” that does not put emphasis on what a method is, but what a method can do. that is, as lupton (2018) writes, “analysis progresses from a set of questions that guide the analysis and a series of principles that acknowledge that any analysis will always be situated” (5). in other words, the aim to gain an insight into the multiple configurations of the relation between the self-tracking subject, health, and environment inform the ways in which the data is collected and analyzed. instead of collecting a huge amount of data that maps out the determinants and motivations of sharing physical activity status updates on social media and social networking sites (see, for example, stragier, evens, and mechant 2015), i closely read the posts and analyze the textual descriptions and visual images. i categorize these posts by adding one to two labels under each post in “my favorites.” the function of labelling is also a built-in feature of weibo. a maximum of two labels, twelve characters each, are allowed under each post. the labels that i have used include negotiation (130 posts), other (103 posts), enjoyment (23 posts), noticing (26 posts), homejog (17 posts), app (12 posts), coronavirus (9 posts). the data sampling is partial. following donna haraway (1998), i understand such a partiality as a necessary limitation that is the condition of possibility of situated knowledge production. each label represents the main theme of the post. for example, posts labelled “negotiation” often include content about the challenges of jogging in smog. these negotiations are felt bodily and affectively, and are sometimes supplemented or complicated by images. in some cases, negotiation could also be about negotiation with authorities or with others’ perceptions. by contrast, in posts marked by the label “enjoyment,” air pollution might be less of a concern. instead, smog contributes to the good feelings of jogging either in terms of the atmosphere/environment or in terms of a sense of belonging and identification. in the “noticing” category, smog is often just noticed as constitutive of the environment of the jog, without being explicitly marked as positive or negative. the label “other” is used for posts that include content that is not immediately related to self-tracking. the labels such as “homejog,” “app,” and “coronavirus” are used to highlight these elements that either mark a special interest in apps, or a form of economic affordance (the possibility of installing a treadmill at home), or an exceptional time period (in the case of the coronavirus pandemic). special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 10 these labels are not mutually exclusive, however. a lot of posts have two labels as they include different kinds of content. for example, a post can be labelled “negotiation” and “enjoyment,” or contain textual descriptions that are relevant to one label and visual contents that concern another label. the three labels “homejog,” “app,” and “coronavirus” are always used in combination with another label. the analysis at hand focuses primarily on two categories: negotiation and enjoyment. this is not only because they are most relevant for the examination of the relation between self-tracking, health, and the environment, but also because they present seemingly opposing views on jogging in smog. as i will show in the following section, whereas in some cases negotiation and enjoyment represent different perceptions of air pollution—harmful abnormality versus normal weather condition—in other instances, they are much more intertwined processes. these ambiguities speak of the configuration of health in the postsocialist context and the complex relation between the individual subject and the nation state that i explained in the previous section. besides making visible the similarities among posts in each category as well as the major differences among the categories, i also pay close attention to internal intersections and contradictions within categories and posts. for example, i am interested in posts with two labels, and the ways in which the textual and visual descriptions within a post supplement each other, or have different implications. in what follows, i will not analyze every post, but only use a few as examples that are related to the questions raised in this article. but before proceeding to the analysis, i want to explain how i understand the ethics in collecting and using social media data. first, the posts that i collected are all public posts. second, although the key ethical principles such as consent and anonymity are not clearcut when using social media data (see, for example, beninger 2017), i choose to anonymize the posts. third, although i analyze the ways in which images and texts in a post might contradict or supplement each other, i only provide descriptions, rather than directly using these images. this is because i consider images to be much more personal and may easily provide information for identification. keeping fit in smog in postsocialist china negotiation while most of the posts in the negotiation category express struggles with jogging in smog, these negotiations take different forms. for example, some posts express struggles with the decision to jog in smog, as the following two posts show: special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 11 throw cautions to the wind. all for getting some sweat, i took my dog for a jog in the smog. there was no breeze, no sunshine, even leaves stopped swaying.there were only some tulip buds by the roadside…i finished 6.25 kilometers outdoor run @keep.2 i did not jog yesterday because it was raining. today the air quality index scores 200+. i feel uncomfortable if i do not jog. but if i do, i would be breathing toxic air. eventually i decided to wear an airfiltering mask and jogged at a slower pace. 5+ pace. the mask helped. i jogged 12.58 kilometers using #yidonggps. time used 01:05:32, average speed 11:52 kilometers/hour, average pace 05’12’’/kilometer, energy used: 843 kcal.3 both posts are marked with “negotiation” and “app.” the app used in the first post is called keep. it is not hard to see that the last sentence of the post—“i finished 6.25 kilometers outdoor run @keep”—is automatically generated by keep. founded in china in 2014, keep is one of the most popular fitness apps; it had more than 200 million members in 2019 (daxueconsulting 2020). members are typically encouraged to upload pictures and statistics of their physical activities on social media, which is understood to boost the user’s online social capital and feeling of support and validation through likes and views, and to increase the app’s visibility in the marketplace. feelings of validation and recognition— that one’s effort is seen and supported by others—have become key components of fitness regime in recent years (see, for example, lupton 2017a). it is important to note that although apps such as keep are free to download and register, they mostly target the urban middle class who can invest time and money in keeping fit. to access their tailored programs and features, one needs to purchase a premium membership, which costs 9.99 euros per month. both posts understand jogging in smog as a form of trade-off. in the first post, cautions about exercising in smog are “thrown to the wind” for the sake of getting sweaty. in the second post, the user was weighing the uncomfortable feeling caused by not jogging against the effect of breathing toxic air. interestingly, what is considered to promote health and what is considered to threaten it are not so straightforward in these negotiations. for example, both breathing clean air and performing outdoor exercise such as jogging are seen to promote health. and both breathing polluted air and not jogging are understood to risk health. instead special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 12 of considering health as a pre-existing state of the body, the negotiations and trade-offs exemplified in these two posts posit health in relational and emergent terms. in other words, instead of a physical state of the body that can be said to be more or less healthy according a set of predefined properties and traits, in these posts, health is conceived of as a contingent form of doing that is sensed and made intelligible through affective, numerical, and bodily registers. for example, in the first post, the bodily sensation of getting a sweat is correlated with being active and healthy. in the second post, the sense of discomfort is measured against the risk of breathing toxic air, which is measured by the air quality index score of 200+. although neither post explains explicitly what health is or how it is understood, how a jog, or the lack thereof, is experienced, health is used as the reference point against which the decision regarding whether going for a jog is made. moreover, on both accounts, the doing of health is materialized in the “ecology of relations” (liu 2018, 454)—a corporeography (kirby 1997)—in which the numerical, affective, and bodily registers of health are measured against, through, and with each other. in the second post, for example, numerical measurements for jogging (such as “5+ pace”) and air quality (“air quality index 200+”), as well as the bodily sensation of wearing and breathing through a mask (“wearing a mask helped”), can be read in supplementary terms—each register explains through and differentiates from the other—through which the condition of the body is made intelligible. whereas numerical measurements are utilized in the second post to specify the environment, visual and affective registers are underscored in the first one. as the user writes, “there was no breeze, no sunshine, even leaves stopped swaying. there were only some tulip buds by the roadside.” the user depicts a somewhat dull, grey, and suffocating environment, the visual, embodied, and affective perceptions of which inform, speak of, and are shaped by the weighing between the risk of jogging in smog and not getting a good sweat. however, the tulip buds by the roadside also ends this post with a somewhat hopeful note, signaling the promise of health and vitality, as perhaps resonated with the sweaty sensation from a jog. the calculative and agentic subject is also performatively materialized in the ecologies of relations. for example, in the second post, the user makes clear that jogging at 5+ pace—“a slower jog”— and wearing an air-filtering mask is a calculated decision in the face of the polluted air “air quality index 200+.” moreover, the post includes an image of a map of the jogging route generated by special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 13 the app. on the route, the app indicates where the jog started and finished as well as the places where the jogger’s speed changed. the spatialization and quantification of the jog in relation to the air quality index generate a sense of risk/health that is calculated and hence controlled. in some posts, the measurement of air quality provided by apps are not only used to track and record the environmental condition during the jog, but also to support calls on the government to tackle the air pollution problem. for example, in the following post, the user writes, jogging for the 33rd day. i haven’t jogged for 3 days. smog, smog, still more smog! the air quality index scored 120 yesterday, i rushed to ma’an mountain to get some fresh air. today the wind was so strong that willow trees swayed and the leaves swirled. i was so glad as i thought this would mean that the weather would be great, and that it would be possible to see the blue sky and white clouds. i didn’t expect that smog was even heavier today. even the strong wind could not blow away smog. my great china, can you let me jog in peace? give the blue sky back!4 in this post, the user was surprised by the persistent and severe air pollution (even the strong wind could not blow away smog… smog, smog, still smog!). here the severity of the air pollution problem is made visible through both textual descriptions and visual images. for example, the jogger includes a screenshot, presumably from a weather app, that details the weather conditions, including the temperature, strength of the wind, and the air quality index score (“279, severe”). there are four other images, which are photos taken with the mobile phone camera. one image shows the track covered by fallen leaves on which the jogging takes place. another image shows the swaying willow tree branches. and the other two images show similar landscape covered by grey haze. there is also another image—a screenshot of the route of jog mapped by the app hupu (虎扑), which shows the date, the distance of the jog and that it was the thirty-sixth time that the user has used hupu to track a jog. unlike the two posts mentioned earlier, this post states how many times the user has been jogging, which seems to suggest that the user is cultivating the habit of jogging by using the mobile app. whereas in the first post, the user negotiates the risk of smog jog by “throwing caution to the wind,” and in the second post, the user utilizes strategies such as jogging at a slower pace and wearing an airfiltering mask, in this post the user calls on the government to “give the blue sky back.” the user complains that the country/the government disturbs the jog (“my great china, can you let me jog in peace?”), by not tackling the problem of air special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 14 pollution. in contrast to the other two posts that configure health in terms of a trade-off and an individual responsibility, this post asserts the right to good air quality as a basic need, and extends the parameters that define health to include the health of the environment. in so doing, this post voices an explicit rejection of the framing of health as an individual responsibility, found in the guidance that residents should refrain from exercising outdoor when air is polluted, for example. the jogging body becomes a site of negotiation not only with air pollution but also the location of health and responsibility between the citizen and the state. it is also important to note that both the first and the third posts underscore other aspects of the environment than the air quality during the jog, such as the relation between wind and tree branches. in the first post, the descriptions of the dull and lifeless environment and the hope and vitality that the tulip buds signify are the intertwined multisensory and affective registers through which the doing of health—as a form of trade-off in this case—is experienced and interpreted. in the third post, the textual and visual depiction of the environment function to support the claimed shocking severity of the persistent air pollution problem, as well as the call on the government to provide a safe and healthy environment for the livelihood of the people. in many ways, these posts could be said to exemplify the coexistence of the requirement of self-care and self-management, resulting from the privatization of healthcare since the beginning of 1980s, on the one hand, and the rising demand for the state to provide a good environment, understood as the condition of possibility for health as a basic need in china, which draws on the chinese traditional and socialist ideology of the “service-oriented state” whose moral obligation is to improve the livelihoods of the people, on the other hand (see, for example, tu 2019). enjoyment in contrast to the posts labelled as “negotiation,” some weibo posts express enjoyment about jogging in smog, as the following post shows: the haze was very heavy in the morning. it was almost difficult to get a good sense of direction if it was not dawn. it is like in life. when a clear sense of direction is lost, one would struggle to find a goal despite countless beginnings, departures and starting overs. i met an older man on the jog back home. he asked why i jogged outside when the air was so polluted. i said this weather felt very comfortable. just finding a start is great!5 in this post, the details of the jog, such as its speed, duration, and distance, are special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 15 not explained in the textual description but in an image—a screenshot provided by an app. there are also three other images that capture the environment in which the jogging took place. besides the heavy haze and the faint visibility that dominate the atmosphere of the three images, one thing that stands out for me is a signpost that celebrates the seventieth anniversary of the people’s republic of china. the red and yellow color of the signpost is in stark contrast to the grey haze. the textual content of the post links the feeling of jogging in thick haze to living a disoriented life. however, the user isn’t complaining about it. the dawn makes visible the direction. and the weather, according to the user, feels comfortable. in this post, the view that air pollution poses health risks, as asserted by the person the user encountered, is countered by the claim that such weather is comfortable. here, smog is seen as a form of weather, and hence normal like all other weather events, rather than an exceptional phenomenon caused by air pollution. in this account, health is understood in affective terms, displaced from the physical status measured by the speed and duration of a jog to the feeling of being goal oriented in life. in other words, its point of reference shifts from bodily capacities to a centered subject who has a clear goal in life and is moving towards it. jogging in smog is posited as a good starting point for reaching the goal. although the user doesn’t provide any explanation of the image of the celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the people’s republic of china, i read the visible difference between this image and the others as resonating with the feeling of orientation the user expresses. the bright red and yellow of the signpost seems to hint at the strong leadership of the state, which the user feels confident in and aligned with. this sense of empowerment is also expressed in the following post: today the smog is severe. i felt very heavy and depressed. at noon there was still no sign of the smog going away, so i put on the mask to protect myself and finished my scheduled run. i jogged 5 kilometers for over half an hour. this was the first time that i jogged wearing a mask. it did not feel great, but exhausting. during the last kilometer, i felt my chest tight due to the lack of oxygen. it was like walking on a plateau. but when i got to the end of the jog, i felt happy. the feeling of depression was gone. so, if we cannot change the environment, let’s change ourselves.6 this post is marked by both “negotiation” and “enjoyment.” in the first part of the post, the user negotiates the risk of jogging in smog by wearing a mask. like the special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 16 posts discussed in the previous section, health here is configured as a trade-off. the user depicts this negotiation in bodily terms as the tightness of the chest and the unpleasant feeling of exhaustion. in the latter part, however, the user expresses a euphoric sense of accomplishment and empowerment, even if, and perhaps especially because, it is not possible to change the problem of air pollution. this sense of empowerment paradoxically results in the helpless and hopeless realization that it is not possible to change the environment, which stands in stark contrast to the post mentioned earlier in which the user voices the need for clean air as a basic need for health. as tu (2019) notes, the performance of neoliberal subjectivity does not necessarily mean the improvement of individual rights in china, which is often reduced to self-care and the moral requirements with regard to self-responsibility that is oriented towards the common good (214). while both these two posts express enjoyment, the second post does not neglect the health risks of smog, but considers practices of self-management (“finished my scheduled run”) in the face of environmental adversities as an endeavor to promote health. here, health is seen to result in and evince the persistence of the jogging body, whose struggle is felt through and as the difficulty in breathing. the post seems to suggest that it is only by enduring the suffering that is felt bodily and affectively that it is possible to improve the self. interestingly, whereas the negotiation part of the post posits a boundary of the jogging body whose permeability is felt as the tight chest and exhausting breathing, in the latter part, the shift of the determining power from the environment to the subject reestablishes a sense of bodily boundary that separates the individual from the environment that is excessive and uncontrollable. conclusion the analysis that i provide here, such as the categories of “negotiation” and “enjoyment” that i use to label the social media posts, does not suggest that everyone in china reacts to jogging, health, and air pollution in the same ways. rather, the feminist sociomaterial method that i draw on foregrounds the necessary partiality of knowledge production. while not aiming to provide an exhaustive account of how health and smog jog are experienced and practiced in china (nor do i think such an account is possible), my analysis of the posts in terms of negotiations and enjoyments provide insights into the multiple and sometimes contradictory ways through which the question of health is understood, negotiated, and performed, as well as the ambivalent and complex relationship between the individual and the nation state in the postsocialist context. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 17 as i have tried to show, in the case of smog jog, health is sensed and made sense of through, as, and in the human–atmospheric relations that are shaped by and situated in a specific intersection of issues such as socioeconomic inequalities, environmental pollution, the dynamics of social media platforms, and the sports boom in postsocialist china. more specifically, in the posts analyzed above, health is variously configured as a form of doing, as trade-offs between risks of breathing polluted air and the benefits of jogging, as an individual responsibility and capacity, as the goal-oriented subject, and as perseverance and the capacity to manage one’s body in the face of environmental adversities. or health is extended from the individual body to include environmental health, such as clean air, understood of as a basic need that should be provided by the state. i utilize feminist materialist and feminist intersectional approaches to examine the intersection of social, political, environmental, economic issues, as well as the human–nonhuman, embodied, and affective aspects of the practice of smog jog. in line with this theoretical framework, i collect and analyze social media posts that include qualitative data such as non-numerical images and textual descriptions that may not seem immediately relevant to the practices of selftracking. this method shifts the attention of the analysis away from the relation between the self-tracking subject, the health app, and the numerical data, and affords an account of the multiple ways through which smog jog is measured, felt, and understood. the theoretical and methodological approaches adopted in this article contribute to the scholarly field of self-tracking and digital health by reconfiguring questions of health and “healthy bodies.” instead of beginning from the self-present individual body as the basic unit of measurement, i make visible the ways in which health emerges through, in, and as human–atmospheric relations located in the context of postsocialist china. in so doing, i suggest new ways of posing questions about health, and argue for locating the analysis of self and self-tracking in specific relations of power. notes 1 in this article, the notion of affect is used interchangeably with terms such as feelings, sensations, and emotions. 2 this is my translation. the original post in chinese reads, “豁出去了，为了出汗 ，在雾霾下带着狗狗跑步，没有微风，没有阳光，连熟知都停了摇拽，唯有 路边郁金香蓓蕾。。。我在@keep 完成了 6.52 公里的户外跑步.” special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) xin liu, 2021 18 3 this is my translation of the post . the original post in chinese reads, “昨天早上 下雨没跑，今早空气指数 200+，不跑吧蓝瘦, 跑吧，吸毒，最后带上防霾口 罩出门慢跑啦～～5+配速口罩还是管用的。我用#益动 gps#跑步 12.58 公里 ，耗时 01:05:32， 平时时速 11.52 公里/小时，平均配速 05‘12’‘/公里，消耗热 能 843 大卡.” it is interesting to note that the user uses internet slang such as “蓝 瘦” and “吸毒.” whereas the former word has the same pronunciation as 难受， meaning uncomfortable, the latter term originally means taking drug; but, in recent years, it has become a common phrase used to mean “breathing smog.” 4 this is my translation. the original post in chinese reads, “打卡第 33 天， 三天 没跑步了, 雾霾, 雾霾，还是雾霾！昨天空气指数 120， 赶紧去马鞍山爬山换 换空气。今天疾风刮杨柳左摇右摆，落叶满天飞，满心欢喜以为青天白日好 天气了， 没想到啊雾霾反而更肆虐，大风都刮不走雾霾，我的大中国，你还 能不能让我好好跑步了？还我蓝天！！” 5 this is my translation of the original post. the original chinese reads, “今天早上 大雾茫茫，如果不是已经天亮，似乎已经找不到奔跑的方向。就像生活一样 ，有时候你迷失了方向，就会出现无数次的起点，无数次的出发，无数次的 重新开始，找不到自己的目标。跑步回家的路上碰见一个大哥，他说这么大 的雾霾天，还出来跑步，我说这天气多舒服呀。简单的出发就好！” 6 this is my translation of the original post, which reads, “今天重度雾霾，心情郁 闷。中午雾霾没有散去的迹象，只能戴上口罩，做好防护，完成计划中的跑 步。 半个多小时，五公里，第一次戴口罩跑步。累，不爽。在最后一公里， 感受到缺氧造成的胸闷，就像行走在高原。但到了终点却油然生出愉悦之情, 郁闷全消。所以说，我们无力改变环境， 那就改变自己吧！” references beninger, kelsey. 2017. “social media users’ views on the ethics of social media research.” in the sage handbook of social media research methods, edited by l. sloan and a. quan-haase, 57–73. los angeles: sage. choy, timothy. 2012. “air’s substantiations.” in lively capital: 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120–29. tu, jiong. 2019. health care transformation in contemporary china: moral experience in a socialist neoliberal polity. singapore: springer. world health organization. n.d. “healthy china.” accessed october 20, 2020. https://www.who.int/healthpromotion/conferences/9gchp/healthy-china/en. xinhuanet. 2019. “chinese athletics reviews successful 2019.” december 17, 2019. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-12/17/c_138638096.htm. zhang, li. 2017. “the rise of therapeutic governing in postsocialist china.” medical anthropology 36 (1): 6–18. author bio xin liu is a postdoc fellow at the helsinki collegium for advanced studies, university of helsinki. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-12/17/c_138638096.htm     book review book review | how to go mad without losing your mind: madness and black radical creativity, by la marr jurelle bruce (duke university press, 2021)     jacob hood new york university jacobhood@nyu.edu     la marr jurelle bruce’s book how to go mad without losing your mind: madness and black radical creativity is guided by the mad sounds of buddy bolden’s cornet. bruce introduces the mad jazzman as a recurring figure in the book’s second chapter, “‘he blew his brains out through the trumpet’: buddy bolden and the impossible sound of madness.” in it, he pushes against the limits of the musician’s non-existent archive to challenge how we think about madness in black1 cultural production. bolden, whose unruly life and musical practices culminated in his death in a louisiana psychiatric institution, epitomizes the book’s focus on how madness and blackness intersect in lived experience and creative practice. the key claim of the book is that blackness is always already intertwined with madness in ways that allow ideals of enlightenment reason to cohere: ideals of order, rationality, and transparency. in bruce’s framework, blackness and madness function against these logics of reason. bruce shows that madness is not a lack, but an ambivalent place where the possibilities of radical creativity exist alongside the deadly stakes of anti-madness and antiblackness. working from the transformative place of a mad-black nowhere, new ways of reading black life and cultural production become possible. how to go mad explores intonations of madness in black radical art. bruce searches for underappreciated expressions of an “unruliness of mind” and an “unruliness of will” (8) in, for instance, the lives and jazz of buddy bolden and sun ra, the literature of gayl jones and ntozake shange, and the music of nina simone and kanye west, exploring how madness shapes their art and public lives. throughout, going mad is understood as an often necessary strategy for black people to “doggedly clutch hold of one’s mind when reason would steal or smash it” (18). to theorize the intersections of madness and blackness, bruce curates a dialogue across black studies, disability studies, and queer and trans studies. the author’s use of “madness” builds from a social model of disability constructed and contrasted against a hegemonic medical model that fails to understand disability as socially constructed. in his modification of this social model, bruce “does not treat the medical and the psychosocial as dichotomous” (13). he instead theorizes four overlapping ideas of madness that he lingers with across the book: phenomenal madness, which centers the lived experience of madness; medicalized madness, the hegemonic approach built on classification of mental illnesses; rage, that centers black anger and its historical equation to insanity; and psychosocial madness, which speaks to how madness is positioned against western social norms more generally. madness is multiple, or what bruce terms a “multivalent technology for insurgent performance and personhood” (171). as it intersects with a blackness that has “no top, no limit” (206), madness can function as a tool of transformation. madness is thus not a standardizing technology, but a “deranging” (4) one—it throws accepted reality into crisis. madness is something one “can claim, wield, and do…something that might be adapted as methodology and praxis” (137) that defies full transparency and exactness. in the first chapter, bruce introduces a central contribution of “mad methodology” as a set of “para-positivist” (10) approaches to moving with the unruliness of madness. specifically, mad methodology “recognizes madpersons as critical theorists and decisive protagonists in struggles for liberation” (9), and understands madness within its lived realities, but does not seek to “wholly, transparently reveal madness” (10). it asks us to take deviations from reason seriously for their radical potential. mad methodology is primarily shown through two approaches: critical ambivalence and radical compassion. critical ambivalence honors the multiplicity and complexity of madness without romanticizing it, witnessing its liberatory potential, as well as the harm done to and sometimes by madpersons. radical compassion, as the book’s guiding ethic, asks readers to “ethically walk and sit and fight and build alongside another whose condition may be utterly unlike your own” (10). it is a call for care across difference that honors opacity. following his exploration of buddy bolden, bruce reworks the freudian concept of sublimation in an interlude. this concept guides the third and fourth chapters in unpacking the gendered and sexual dynamics of black madness in literature. the third chapter looks at gayl jones’s 1976 novel eva’s man in a reconsideration of the titular character’s act of murder and institutionalization after a lifetime of sexual violation. departing from previous readings of the text, bruce considers how eva’s madness, beyond highlighting the structural ties between black girls and women and sexual violence, also functions as a technology of self-assertion that signals eva’s “beleaguered agency” (81). the fourth chapter reads ntozake shange’s novel liliane: resurrection of the daughter (1994) in a complementary discussion of black womanhood, psychoanalysis and sexuality, and mad potentiality. bruce demonstrates how the maddening experience of existing in a misogynistic, antiblack, and anti-mad world can “reveal vicissitudes of mad black womanhood between metaphor and murder” (113). within the racial-sexual terror of antiblackness, mad potentiality persists as an insurgent force that can erupt as violence and radical self-creation. the fifth and sixth chapters consider personal and public impressions of madness, showing bruce’s dexterity in moving between a madness claimed and embodied by an artist, and a madness imputed into and gleaned from their work. the former analyzes lauryn hill’s rise and fall from grace after accusations of madness, reading her lyrics, performances, and interviews with and against media interpretations of her alleged instability. the chapter examines how black genius often serves as a proxy for unruliness, and speaks to how “madness might be desirable amid a corrupt world order that deems itself reasonable” (163). hill is situated within a lineage of black women artists whose musical genius was undermined in the face of the public trauma they endured. bruce theorizes hill’s mad performance and protest as “rich with black feminist, womanist, antiracist, anti-racial-capitalist, and liberation resonance” (141) that shows the critical ambivalence of mad methodology. the sixth chapter continues examining the “maddening of black genius” (32) in the comedic performances and changing public image of dave chapelle. this chapter becomes even more complex following chapelle’s numerous anti-trans statements, and is a necessary place to (re)consider the gendered foundations of mad black genius. the non-linear form of the text comes to a head in the seventh chapter, “songs in madtime: black music, madness, and metaphysical syncopation,” where several figures return to narrate the space-time of madness. if madness is a place, as bruce argues, then what is its rhythm? in defiance of western standard time, madtime speaks to those “various modes of doing time and feeling time coinciding with spasms and rhythms of madness” (204) that appear in at least four ways: manic time, depressive time, schizophrenic time, and melancholic time. this chapter includes a frenetic but not undisciplined invocation of bolden’s sounds to guide nina simone’s “mississippi goddam,” alongside more contemporary musings on black fury and longing in the music of kendrick lamar and frank ocean. from his focus on the lives/sounds of musicians, to his meditations on silence as a technology of survival (94), bruce illustrates the revolutionary potential of sound. in this chapter’s mad dialogue, the tempos and rhythms of the artists do not blend together into homophony, but chart discordant realities. indeed, if how to go mad is lyrical, it is set to the unruly tempo of madtime. finally, in a brief afterword, bruce once more chooses to “linger at the site of confinement” (210). as carceral power shapes the lives or work of nearly every figure examined in the book, the stakes of bruce’s argument are made clear. captivity is the lingua franca of madness and blackness. abolition is thus both a mad project (that which can liberate mad people) and a maddening project (that which defies reason’s demands to capture and contain). how to go mad will undoubtedly influence conversations in black studies, science and technology studies, disability studies, and other fields. it is a lyrical, nuanced model of how radical care produces new approaches beyond the rehearsal of pathology. bruce takes apart the common assumption that antiblackness is a form of pathological mental illness, arguing that it reinforces a “psychonormative binary” (29) of good and evil that leaves mad people vulnerable to violence. the book shows that there can be no black liberation without mad liberation. it demands an attentiveness to the experiences of black mad lives at the nexus of the prisonand medical-industrial complexes. at the same time, how to go mad is a litany against scientific capture. instead of trying to define and dissect madness, bruce lingers with, embraces, and lets go: a working with and through madness, not just a working on madness. the book’s conceptual breadth and refusal of completeness testify to the mad methodology bruce activates—a methodology that does not ask us to capture, but to live among.   notes 1 bruce specifies that he uses the lowercase “black” in order to center an “improper blackness...a blackness that is neither capitalized nor propertized via the protocols of western grammar” (6).     author bio jacob hood is a phd student in the department of sociology at new york university. his research focuses on the connections between carcerality, technoscience, and (anti)blackness.     original research witnessing pandora: doing “undone science” at chicken sanctuaries     heather rosenfeld smith college hrosenfeld@smith.edu     abstract farmed animal sanctuaries rescue, rehabilitate, and care for animals bred for use in agriculture. because of the structure of veterinary training, regulations on species considered agricultural, and for other reasons, rescued animals such as chickens fall out of spaces of veterinary care and medical knowledge production. given these knowledge and research gaps, this paper investigates how sanctuaries develop medical knowledge about chickens, focusing on hens bred for egg production. i develop the concept of “witnessing” as it has been used in science studies, feminist theory, and animal activism, arguing that sanctuary science and medicine can be understood as queer witnessing. then, i discuss how sanctuaries put queer witnessing into practice, through aspirational archiving, transposition, and reorienting health. though queer witnessing has its limits and problems, it offers a way of doing activist science, at sanctuaries and beyond.     keywords activist science, animal sanctuaries, chickens, feminist science, queer ecology, witnessing     introduction pandora is on birth control. pandora is a hen. found outside a gas station one winter, pandora was brought to a farmed animal sanctuary. sanctuary staff quickly learned that pandora was among the many hens bred to lay eggs almost daily. because of this, she is prone to developing cancer and other health problems. at the sanctuary, pandora and those supporting her struggle with this embodied, often deadly legacy. originally developed for ferrets, hormonal birth-control-like implants are one strategy farmed animal sanctuaries pursue, though they are a controversial, expensive, and limited solution.   the past tense farmed and the term sanctuary connote a sense of the animals there experiencing a radical departure from their previous lives as commodities or producers of commodities (donaldson and kymlicka 2015; baur 2008). and indeed, the mission of many farmed animal sanctuaries includes rescuing and caring for formerly farmed animals—animals bred for food but no longer to be used as such. yet, as in pandora’s case, much of the work that takes place at sanctuaries entails negotiating and struggling against animals' commodified lives. for chickens, as the most modified, the most populous, and frequently the least well-regarded of farmed animals (potts 2012), these challenges are especially acute.   sanctuary affiliates describe the state of medical knowledge for sanctuaries using phrases like “in the stone age,” “like the wild west,” and “where human medicine was in the nineteenth century” (personal communication, august 2017). regardless of which, if any, of these terms are the most appropriate, this paper discusses how sanctuaries develop medical knowledge, focusing on hens bred for egg production and sanctuaries in the united states.1 in the following section, i outline the contours and significance of the problem: how chickens have fallen out of spaces of knowledge production, and why implanting pandora was not simply a matter of following existing procedures or formal norms. next, i synthesize and queer understandings of witnessing from activism and science studies. i propose queer witnessing is how much of sanctuary science works and discuss how it is practiced at sanctuaries, along with some of its limits. in the conclusion, i speculate on the significance of queer witnessing at sanctuaries and more broadly. this paper is based on fieldwork, including volunteering at sanctuaries, conducting over sixty interviews with sanctuary affiliates and veterinarians, and participating in sanctuary digital communities.   falling out through a series of political economic, regulatory, and cultural decisions, sanctuary chickens have fallen out of spaces of knowledge production that govern and support other animals. as a former executive director of farm sanctuary, the oldest farmed animal sanctuary in the united states, states, “these animals have been bred and raised to be killed. so the vets are used to supporting industry, they know a lot about it, but they don’t have experience with animals that are given the blessing and benefit of living their lives out to their fullest” (personal communication, july 2017). this statement encapsulates and contextualizes many of the health problems faced by sanctuary chickens.   the statement “living out their lives to the fullest” gestures toward the significant differences in lifespan for production chickens relative to those at sanctuaries. egg-laying hens are killed when production decreases, usually at twelve to eighteen months (potts 2012). however, while farmed animals at sanctuaries can have the opportunity to live longer and very different lives than they would at a farm, they are prone to illness because of breeding. pandora was bred to produce large quantities of eggs, and this causes many of her health problems. thus, it is precisely what makes her profitable that makes her sick.   additionally, there is simply no veterinary specialty that focuses on chickens outside of a production context. veterinary schools track students into large, small, and sometimes avian or exotic animal specializations (uc davis veterinary medicine 2018a, 2018b). large animal veterinarians, often described as farm vets, focus on livestock. this track developed in the 1940s, alongside the rise of factory farming. though farm vets do receive some training in chicken care, this training has emphasized production and managing populations. “cull the bird” or part of the flock is a common response to health problems, as sick individuals impinge on profits. in addition to their focus on populations rather than individuals, large animal veterinarians are untrained in care for older chickens, as they are less productive (in a capitalist sense) (jones 2003).   small animal veterinarians treat pets, such as dogs and cats. their formal training is not focused on chickens, but some of them will work with sanctuaries. of those who will, a sanctuary manager reflects, “it’s not like they’re dismissive of chickens; it’s that they don’t have that much experience” with the unique problems sanctuary chickens face (personal communication, september 2017). even so, sanctuaries often prefer to work with small rather than large animal veterinarians. the tendency of small animal veterinarians to value animals as more than commodities, and their openness to treating chickens, outweighs their limited experience.   finally, avian and exotic veterinarians are newer, often combined, tracks in veterinary training and practice. these veterinarians often have experience with wild or pet birds, if not chickens (hess and rose 2016). as one such vet, who treats sanctuary chickens, notes, “the closest [species we see] are gonna be pet birds, which are probably 50 percent of our clientele. but as far as the other species we see a lot of egg issues with are reptiles, turtles” (personal communication, august 2017). the fact that avian and exotic animal veterinarians have training in “egg issues”—even if not through working with birds—is part of what makes their expertise especially relevant to treating sanctuary chickens.   medical care is made more difficult by production-oriented regulation. veterinarians are, in the words of an avian veterinarian, “very limited in the drugs we can use, because chickens are considered food animals,” according to the united states department of agriculture (personal communication, august 2017). the food animal residue avoidance databank (farad) limits the use of antibiotics in chickens to mitigate antibiotic resistance in livestock (farad, n.d.). the same avian veterinarian continues: “farad makes medicine very difficult for the poultry. [f]or pigeons, for raptors, for psittacines [parrots], we can use what we need, but for the chickens it’s much more difficult. i feel bad for ‘em but, it’s a matter of losing your license” (personal communication, august 2017). thus, even when a veterinarian knows what medicines are likely to work, chickens’ legal status prohibits them from prescribing.   the upshot of this is that there is considerable “undone science” (frickel et al. 2010) regarding sanctuary chickens. undone science refers to the “systematic nonproduction” of knowledge or research areas that are “left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored” (frickel et al. 2010, 444) by major institutions, but which social movements deem important to research or understand. for sanctuaries, these research voids concern both knowledge and methods. sanctuary affiliates are often tacitly or explicitly opposed to traditional animal testing, considering it exploitive. how, then, do sanctuaries respond to these gaps? in other words, how do sanctuaries do undone science? the answers to these questions comprise the remainder of this paper.   witnessing in animal activism, science, and feminism witnessing has a long history in animal activism, in which activists feel compelled to share stories of nonhuman animals made to suffer by society. for example, kathryn gillespie’s (2016) practice of witnessing dairy auctions drove her to share the stories of cows in modern agriculture. taking inspiration from intersectional feminism, witnessing is a provocation to “reveal and document hierarchies of power and inequality that affect the embodied experiences of marginalized individuals and populations” (gillespie 2016, 572–73; see also dave 2014). witnessing can counteract the erasure of such hierarchies, such as those that enable animal commodification, suffering, and death. witnessing, therefore, is an approach to knowledge circulation: it demands action through sharing untold or hidden stories.   further, witnessing involves a productive entanglement of information and emotion. it necessitates attention to “the political function of emotion” (gillespie 2016, 572). often, activist witnessing is described in terms of cultivating empathy and care (gillespie 2016; gruen 2015; dave 2014), as in how gillespie was compelled to write about cows at dairy cow auctions as she grieved. she describes witnessing as something that transforms grief and other emotions into political action. this transformation necessitates a balance of proximity and critical distance. as sara ahmed (2004, 2017) recognizes about witnessing as activism more broadly, a witness must remember that empathy is always limited and imperfect. though witnessing can expose hierarchies and perhaps take steps toward dismantling them, it cannot erase them entirely.   in the largely protest-oriented work associated with activist witnessing, scientific knowledge production is often far from the aims of participants. witnessing in empirical science is the opposite in this respect. examining the rise of experimental science, steven shapin and simon schaffer ([1985] 2011) discuss the necessity of robert boyle’s creation of a space for “collective witnessing” by free and freely acting members of their community (“men,” in their words, though it also merits noting that they were white, british, and, by contemporary definitions, at least middle class) for experimental science to be successful (335–36). in so doing, they point out how scientific results need to be perceptible to a community to be accepted, and likewise that witnesses share certain norms and values with those doing the experiment, the “modest witness” of the experimenter (see also haraway 1988).   feminist scholars invoke the concept of the immodest witness as an important corrective to shapin and schaffer. the modest witness is not simply a disembodied and ahistorical demonstrator, they contest. as such, one’s positionality inevitably influences the knowledge that one can produce (haraway 1988; harding 1986; fujimura 2006; murphy 2012). this contingency, and acknowledging it, can render researchers’ claims “more plausible and less distorting” (harding 1986, 28). therefore, these scholars emphasize how marginalized groups can bring unique and sometimes especially valuable perspectives to answering research questions, through drawing on experiences through the lenses of their identities.   i want to suggest that witnessing is how sanctuary science works. more specifically, i suggest that sanctuaries do undone science through queering witnessing, taking inspiration from ahmed’s work on witnessing (2004, 2017) and from queer ecologies. ahmed keenly recognizes that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (lorde 1984, 110). as she writes, “she [the witness] might not be using things the way she is supposed to. she might queer use or find a queer use for things” (ahmed 2017, 241). and indeed, sanctuaries don’t practice witnessing in the ways described above, but by combining them: queer witnessing is both a form of activism and a form of scientific, situated knowledge production and circulation. moreover, it often entails subverting the intended use of agricultural knowledge.   work in queer ecology interrogates how bodies, reproduction, and desires are pathologized or valued in association with nature and the natural (mortimer-sandilands and erickson 2010). animal studies scholars have demonstrated the gendered, heteronormative, and racialized politics of commodified chickens (alaimo 2010; adams [1990] 2010), and the racist, xenophobic exploitation of human workers in the poultry industry (striffler 2007; see also wamsley 2020). taking a queer ecological approach, we can recognize that the status quo of chicken production in much of western society is undergirded by naturalizing and valorizing large-scale and rapid egg production and chicken reproduction (potts 2012). queer witnessing at sanctuaries denaturalizes these narratives, echoing queer ecological arguments that what is considered “natural” is also cultural and that hewing to the natural is often oppressive (bell 2010). in so doing, sanctuaries rewrite norms about chicken reproduction, family, and desire. the following sections elaborate how this works through three practices: aspirational archiving, transposition, and reorienting health.   witnessing rhythms and patterns: aspirational archiving a major part of witnessing at sanctuaries entails defining and learning to see chicken health, illness, and distress in a sanctuary context. one way of doing this is a process i call “aspirational archiving.” like queer narrative archives, this process entails challenging which stories are worth finding and remembering, with the recognition that remembering can take multiple forms (juvonen 2020; rohy 2010). aspirational archiving is when sanctuaries keep records, in part because they are useful, but also because sanctuaries hope they will be useful, for themselves, for another sanctuary, or for the sanctuary community. aspirational archiving is witnessing in that it is observation—collecting information—enfolded into desires for societal change and improved care.   one sanctuary in california did necropsies on most of their deceased chickens over the last two years (birds who had been killed by predators were exceptions, as their cause of death was known). they repurposed resources designed for the biosecurity of chickens in the food supply to conduct the necropsies. the university of california extension programs conducted no-cost necropsies of domestic chickens upon request, as part of an effort to monitor disease prevalence.2   amassing necropsies was certainly emotionally driven: workers sought a sense of closure. at the same time, they were driven by a desire to gain and use information. if there were issues that could affect other birds, such as parasites that could be treated, they wanted to know. they learned that most of the deaths were due to reproductive problems: cancers and other diseases associated with egg laying. finally, they hoped that someday they would either find time to do something with the data or that someone else would—that these data would be helpful to chickens more broadly. this practice is aspirational in that the sanctuary hopes that having data will be helpful to others in the future.   in a second situation, i was on a team that developed a bird health checklist at a sanctuary in the midwest. this was a knowledge-building and anti-hierarchical move: in the past, if something seemed amiss, volunteers would contact the lead chicken caretaker. she would then determine whether the bird needed a vet visit or whether the issue could be addressed in-house. we made a list of the birds, their known conditions, and a plan of what to look for on their bodies and in their behavior. volunteers on the bird health-check team were to check some birds every week during our shift(s), taking notes of anything amiss. the hope here was that the log would enable us to notice changes earlier, transcending occasional individual observation. for instance, a bird losing weight was a potential sign of concern, which might lead to weighing them every week for a few weeks rather than once a month. this strategy seems to have been successful. in the words of the shelter manager:   we try to be more aware of what’s going on with them. when i first started here, nobody did chicken checks, everybody would run around, then they would get sick, and then we would take them to the vet and they would die, because it was too late. so maybe now we’re just more aware of things, we have a lot more volunteers that report what’s going on. i think we notice things better than we used to. (personal communication, june 2017) her comment about noticing better gestures toward how archiving is a practice of learning to see. as situated knowledge production, volunteers learning to see is grounded in a desire to improve chickens’ lives. the checklist created a critical proximity and distance for us as caretakers: rather than simply assessing based on emotion or impulse, we had information from previous weeks and months from which to learn. this practice enabled us to calibrate our observations, which was especially important for chickens. as the shelter manager explained, by the time we noticed that they were sick by various human standards, they were often past the point of treatment. this both echoes and affirmatively inverts descriptions of queer archives as sites where “affective investments would radicalize the familiar model of archival work as a mastery of empirical ‘fact,’” in movements away from universal truths and toward including queer histories (rohy 2010, 343). here, archival investments in the form of non-normative record-keeping enable sanctuaries to channel their affective work more productively toward better care, toward undone science.   a final example is at a well-known chicken-specific sanctuary. the sanctuary keeps records of when chickens are implanted and how long the implant seems to prevent egg laying in each chicken. they post these calendars online, hoping that others will find them useful, because there are no studies on how long the implants last in chickens. while no sanctuary affiliates i talked with mentioned these calendars, many had indeed learned about the implants through talking with staff at this sanctuary. the use of the implants and how knowledge about them circulated is elaborated next.   from witnessing futility to queer transposition carrie friese and adele clarke use the term “transposition” to “describe and compare how findings about different species, the infrastructures supporting different species, and the bodies of different animals have been mobilized at different research sites” (2011, 32). transposition, for them, describes the movement of scientific findings to a different place or a different context. by using medical drugs or procedures originally developed for another species (e.g., ferrets), or another context (capitalist production), sanctuaries practice transposition. they queer transposition by challenging norms about reproduction: questioning egg production, which is considered natural and central to chickens’ lives (potts 2012). as part of this process, they often not only use knowledge out of its original context, but often invert the purpose for which it was intended, queering its use. queer transposition characterizes the development, use, and knowledge circulation regarding the implants given to chickens like pandora. hormonal (deslorelin) implants are of relatively recent use in chickens: sanctuaries first began to use them in the early 2010s. to understand how they came about, it is necessary to look both earlier in time and to chicken-specific sanctuaries. one sanctuary founder, “sue,” talks about the challenges she faced in learning about chicken care:   when we first started, i volunteered at a wildlife rehabilitation clinic and university raptor center for two or three years so i could learn critical care techniques. that was not quite satisfactory because their whole mindset is quite different from that of companion animals, it’s all about being releasable. when there was something that under the right care could be treatable, the recommendation was always to euthanize. that was the best i could do, ‘cause every other vet i reached out to, even ones that specialized in birds, said “no, we don’t treat chickens.” that was in the early 2000s. so i kept looking, then found one and then another and another. (personal communication, july 2017) this story reiterates how sanctuary chickens fall out of spaces of veterinary medicine. it also elucidates another way of doing undone science: sue sought education in wildlife rehabilitation and at a raptor center, in part to learn animal care herself. she notes the significant differences in perspective (being releasable) with those of sanctuaries, who are not, for the most part, trying to re-wild or release chickens. at the same time, she readily states that there was still some knowledge that she could transpose to her sanctuary from volunteering with these groups.   drawing on other information about animal care is a common refrain at sanctuaries: “we were very lucky to find a former physician’s assistant [to volunteer],” another sanctuary manager commented. “she’s been able to translate a lot of human medicine to animals…and then we’ve had people come through here, like a vet student” (personal communication, june 2017). if lucky, the presence of veterinary students, vet techs, and other medical professionals at sanctuaries is certainly not anomalous.   sue describes a central struggle introduced in the previous section: “no matter what we were doing about the housing, diet, lighting…we kept losing them to repro[ductive] disease” (personal communication, july 2017). again, the focus on housing, lighting, and diet transposes knowledge about chickens into a sanctuary context. exposing hens to more light is known to increase egg laying, and sanctuaries invert this information.   however, this was of limited success. sue continues, “i finally said, to the vet, what can be done? he says, ‘sue,’ he says, ‘there’s these implants we use for other birds, shuts down the ovaries.’ and i said, ‘sign me up’” (personal communication, july 2017). sue’s is the first known sanctuary to use implants, and many others found out about them through her.   sanctuaries learning from one another is sometimes through direct connections. “at first we had to call vets out for certain things,” commented a manager of a ten-year-old sanctuary. “other sanctuaries contact us a lot now…they’ll have questions and call us, and we’ll have the answers!” (personal communication, june 2017). to summarize, sanctuaries had to find the right veterinarians and to find each other.   knowledge circulation through queer transposition is facilitated by social media, such as the open sanctuary project. formed in 2018, the project compiles and shares information about sanctuary best practices online, for chickens and eleven other species. especially worth exploring is the combination of sources they reference. in their article on deslorelin implants (griffler 2020a), several of their sources are from sanctuaries. others are resources designed by and for veterinarians. still others, though, are scientific research studies that use hens as model organisms to study human disease. the last is another process of inversion, although not directly from the egg industry this time. because they are so prone to ovarian cancers themselves, hens are sometimes used as model organisms for studying ovarian cancer in humans. the open sanctuary project transposes this knowledge by using it for cancer prevention in hens—a use far from its intended one.   the open sanctuary project flags sources such as these as “non-compassionate.” non-compassionate sources are those in which the publisher and/or organization “advocates for or condones the use of animals or substances that come from their bodies for human benefit…while the data sourced may include elements of compassionate care, we believe that it’s important to note that we do not condone these sources’ views about animals and their role in the world” (griffler 2020b). they reference non-compassionate sources because “while we would prefer that all information comes from sources such as fellow sanctuary founders and caregivers as well as veterinary journals, due to the current state of animal agriculture and the general attitude of animals being viewed solely as commodities for human benefit, much of the research available on a wide variety of topics comes exclusively from non-compassionate sources” (griffler 2020b). this deliberately compromising position, of not condoning the source’s views but considering the information useful, echoes the practice of sending birds to the university of california food safety laboratories for necropsies. indeed, sanctuary medicine often seems to entail compromises like these.   through queer transposition, sanctuaries have developed practices for chicken care that build on and synthesize knowledge from many fields, about many species, and taking several approaches. this has helped improve sanctuary medicine such that vet trips are not always one-way, and it has also enabled sanctuaries to do some medical care themselves. however, thus far the hormonal implants have been depicted in primarily a positive light, useful for preventing cancer. in reality, their use is limited and somewhat controversial. the following section unpacks this controversy.   witnessing daily life: reorienting health though many sanctuaries have knowledge of the implants, their use is debated on the basis of their cost, side effects, and relative benefits. for these reasons, combined with limited access, many sanctuaries do not use them on some or all their chickens. as a result, there will often be egg-laying birds, which leads to a question often posed to sanctuaries: what do you do with the eggs? responses to this question, intertwined with the debate about implants, reveal a third practice of witnessing. this practice is reorienting health—reconsidering what health means in the context of farmed animals at sanctuaries. this section begins by discussing the debate about implants and then turns to the question of the eggs.   the cost of implants varies based on the veterinarian, the number of implants given, and other factors. as such, implants range from seventy-five to several hundred dollars each, and can last from weeks to many months. costs quickly add up, to the point where implant use can be prohibitive for a sanctuary’s budget. this quandary elaborates the political economic dimensions of health among rescued chickens: that its costs are scaled to companion animal medicine, not accounting for how costs accumulate for even a small flock.   issues with side effects from implants are somewhat more complicated. sanctuaries have seen birds seeming to get depressed and losing feathers, and been concerned. however, through a balance of empathy and critical distance, implant advocates found that there is more to this picture. the feather loss and moodiness are due to molting, a side effect of the drug. molting is an energy-intensive process and can be tiring to birds, hence their appearance as depressed. however, this side effect is relatively temporary compared to the usual lifespan of the implants, and the main longer-term side effect is missing feathers, which take longer to grow back. though the birds may look strange and be tired, as one sanctuary founder says, the result is “nothing but healthy birds” (personal communication, july 2017). thus, despite the cost, many sanctuaries choose to implant at least some of their birds. this is the first example of queer transposition, as molting is a process well-known in production chickens: farmers will induce it to increase egg production. sanctuaries invert this knowledge.   preventing reproduction is also a practice of reorienting health. as united poultry concerns, a sanctuary and advocacy group, states,   our role is to educate people to understand why we do not allow our hens to hatch chicks: first because this is a sanctuary and not a breeding or farming operation. second because we do not support bringing animals into a world in which the majority are mistreated by our species and in which millions already exist who need caring and responsible homes. (2014) in this respect, (many) sanctuaries are anti-natalist: health for domesticated chickens entails preventing reproduction. sanctuaries are not trying to return chickens to an imagined “natural,” or pre-breeding, state, in which hens laid and hatched fewer eggs. rather, this work is fully “naturalcultural”—so-called natures and (agri)cultures are inextricably intertwined (haraway 2003; bell 2010). sanctuaries pull different threads from naturecultures to reorient chickens’ presents and futures: they make claims about health and healthy chickens that consider their present biological lives and how these are intertwined with hegemonic political economy. these reorientations speak to a point undergirding much of queer ecology, that “nonreproductive sexualities are understood as deviant” in western society (mortimer-sandilands and erickson 2010, 7). and indeed, the practice raises discomfort, even among sanctuaries, of stopping chickens from reproducing in the sense of hatching their own eggs—if they seem to want to (donaldson and kymlicka 2015).   while other solutions can certainly be imagined, i suggest that embracing nonreproductive futures attends to the material challenges of the world sanctuaries both exist in (overwhelming numbers of chickens, breeding, financial limits of sanctuaries) and attempt to reorient (care attentive to apparent preferences). reorienting health as such can therefore be understood as one response to kim hall’s provocation that a nonanthropocentric “queer conception of the future can move beyond exclusive anthropocentric and reproductive focus on future generations toward future generation—the resistant commitment to generating alternative communities and modes of being” (2014, 221, drawing on braidotti 2006, 113). sanctuaries’ efforts to care for hens with reproductive issues manifests this turn to (perhaps liminal) future generation and alternative modes of being.   what about hens with apparent desires to hatch eggs and raise young? hens’ tendencies to go broody—to sit on a nest and attempt to hatch eggs—is also naturalcultural, in that it has been extensively manipulated through breeding. domestic chickens’ wild ancestors do go broody. some hens, such as the common factory breed of white leghorns, are bred to be less likely to go broody to make them more productive, but even this is not entirely successful (potts 2012). sanctuaries are anti-natalist in terms of discouraging biological reproduction, but, manifesting a spirit of generating alternative communities and modes of being, sanctuaries nonetheless enable and create space for parenting.4 for whether they are broody or not, chickens will not infrequently take younger residents under their wings, literally, and raise them. while opposed to hatching eggs, sanctuaries will enable these behaviors, especially when taking in younger or weaker birds.   reorienting health is perhaps even more apparent in terms of chickens who still lay eggs at sanctuaries. most sanctuaries with egg-laying hens and roosters cohabiting emphasize the importance of collecting eggs. an extremely common next step is feeding them back to the chickens (sometimes raw, sometimes scrambled, sometimes hard-boiled and mashed—and always with shells included), partly to restore nutrients lost through egg laying.   another major sanctuary writes, “hens will eat their own eggs! indeed, hens love them. plus, eggs provide much-needed calcium and other nutrients that can help hens, who have been genetically manipulated through centuries of selective breeding, avoid problems with egg binding and other deadly conditions” (triangle chicken advocates, n.d.; see also singer 2009). this practice offers a different narrative about health, naturalizing and denaturalizing the egg laying of contemporary chickens by detailing how hens have been bred to lay significantly more eggs than their ancestors.   at least as significant, though, is the reference to chickens’ desires: “hens love them.” the attention to desires is even more apparent in that sanctuaries feed eggs to roosters as well, making the argument of nutrient necessity as the primary motivation a bit weaker. in the passage by triangle chicken advocates, nutrients become a nice bonus, known through learning about the legacies of breeding, but desire seems to be the primary motivator. of course, sanctuary workers can never be completely sure of chickens’ preferences (though, see johnston 2008; squier 2010). but through combining learning to see better, transposing knowledge from multiple fields about chickens’ health, and being aware of and responsive to political economy, feeding eggs back to chickens, or simply not preventing them from eating their eggs, sanctuaries thoughtfully reorient what health means for rescued chickens. further, using implants and feeding eggs back to chickens are challenges to the heterosexist status quo of enabling (or forcing) heterosexual reproduction of agricultural animals (adams [1990] 2010; see also alaimo 2010).   the limits of witnessing thus far, i have portrayed sanctuaries and witnessing in a primarily positive and progress-oriented light. however, it is important to recognize that witnessing at sanctuaries has its limitations. some of these are undercurrents throughout this paper, ranging from a lack of standardization and incomplete communication, to the intertwining of capitalist agricultural and sanctuaries’ political economies. this section turns to these undercurrents, demonstrating how, although sanctuaries contribute to doing undone science, much is still left undone, literally and figuratively.   first, it is crucial to recognize that a large majority (though far from all) of sanctuary staff and volunteers are white. sanctuaries have made strides toward challenging white privilege and white supremacy—for example by issuing statements supporting the black lives matter protests of summer 2020 (farm sanctuary 2020); offering grants to sanctuaries led by people of color (microsanctuary resource center, n.d.); and simply by challenging animal agriculture, with its racist and xenophobic labor practices (striffler 2007). however, there is a long way to go. particularly in the case of the deslorelin implants, nowhere in the debate about them is concern (about their use or communication) out of solidarity with people of color who have been prevented from having children because of white supremacy (e.g., tallbear 2018). sanctuaries might consider including messaging condemning the forced sterilization of minoritized humans in their discussion of implants. more generally, sanctuaries’ limited racial and ethnic diversity impacts queer witnessing in that, first, sanctuaries are unable to learn from as many voices, perspectives, and knowledges. further, they are limited in their ability to speak to and alongside the anti-racist movements with which sanctuary work is intertwined.   additionally, witnessing is unstandardized, which enables creativity but is also intertwined with limited oversight. though sanctuaries do witness one another through communicating with one another, directly and through social media, there are no generalized methods for broadly changing practices when better ones are found or when something turns out to be problematic. one veterinarian discussed how a sanctuary she worked with was especially reluctant to euthanize when the animals seemed to be suffering and were past the point of help. given sanctuaries’ histories with veterinarians—especially farm vets—suggesting euthanasia rather than treatment, the lack of sanctuary standards enables a large grey area between successful treatment and undue suffering.3   another limit is that sanctuaries can capitalize on companionship—making the endpoint of sanctuary work a transformation in the status of sanctuary chickens into pets, leaving agricultural systems unchanged. perceived financial constraints on the part of veterinarians have contributed to this issue, as veterinarians were often skeptical of someone wanting to spend money to treat a chicken and sanctuaries had to advocate to get chickens treated at all. as a sanctuary founder noted, “we had to be really assertive [working with veterinarians]. and once they realized we were going to pay the vet bills, it was more okay” (personal communication, july 2017). this challenge of being assertive seems to dissipate once sanctuaries develop relationships with veterinarians, and sanctuaries’ outreach and education often does challenge the status of agricultural animals more broadly (donaldson and kymlicka 2015). even so, there is a risk of creating static two-tiered structures, in which sanctuary chickens are an exception that coexist with agricultural chickens.   this hierarchy leads to another potential limit of witnessing: its reliance on sanctuaries with economic privilege. a leading chicken sanctuary stated of their work with veterinarians,   our feeling is by working with a companion animal vet, we pay top dollar for the services because if your mission is to elevate the status, then you’ve gotta put your money where your mouth is and not try to do things on the cheap. once the doctor got that we were serious, that we weren’t looking for cheap medicine, we wanted quality medicine, he got it that there was a market there. now there’s a sign outside saying we treat pet chickens. (personal communication, july 2017) the emphasis on creating a market for veterinary care pivots the emphasis on knowledge to an emphasis on money. value is temporarily reduced to financial value, in contrast to much of the work of sanctuaries, which entails exploding the concept of value to that beyond profit. as with the previous limit, i suggest that while this pivot is largely because of the capitalist, agricultural contexts of veterinary medicine, it risks overly influencing sanctuaries.   a further and associated danger is promoting privatized knowledge. sanctuaries rely on being able to do certain kinds of medical care in house, as described in the sections above. doing this work both builds practical knowledge and ways of seeing among sanctuary workers, and it makes sanctuary work more (financially) accessible. it is indeed fortunate that some sanctuaries have supporters who finance the paid professional labor of veterinarians, but if all sanctuaries had to rely on vets for all medical care, many would simply be unable to exist. while the contrast between “cheap” and “quality” medicine is true to a certain extent under capitalism, the two are indeed compatible at other sanctuaries, in certain cases.   conclusion: witnessing as activist science queer witnessing is fallible and limited. even so, it offers a process and ethos of medical knowledge production different from that of much laboratory science. i have shown how queer witnessing at sanctuary works through three practices: aspirational archiving, transposition, and reorienting health. to conclude, i want to discuss the significance of witnessing as activist science, at sanctuaries and beyond.   first, at sanctuaries, queer witnessing offers a way of producing knowledge and caring for animals that foregrounds desires. care, particularly animal care, has recently (and importantly) been critiqued. eva giraud and gregory hollin describe how discourses of care are put into practice to ensure that experiments on laboratory animals “progressed more smoothly” (2016, 41), rather than to accommodate the affective needs of animal subjects. in other words, care was used not to challenge instrumentalization, but to support it. in the sanctuary world, sue donaldson and will kymlicka caution against paternalism, in which “structures and routines” can be “created as much for the convenience and legal protection of caregivers and administrators as for the needs and wishes of residents” (2015, 56). the institutional structure of sanctuaries and the discourse of care can leave sanctuary residents with “a hard shell of restrictions” that can be difficult or impossible to contest (donaldson and kymlicka 2015, 56). at the same time, theory on care recognizes the importance of empathy (gruen 2015), the productive and critical entanglement of “labor/work, affect/affections, ethics/politics” (puig de la bellacasa 2017, 5), and the importance of recognizing power inequality in dependency and interdependency (puig de la bellacasa 2017; taylor 2017). witnessing, i argue, can indeed be situated alongside these latter accounts, but offers a corrective to care in its attentiveness to seeing desires while recognizing hierarchies. caregivers who witness are coming from a perspective of trying and learning to read desires of individuals and integrate them into structures (see also puig de la bellacasa 2017 and taylor 2017).   second, witnessing is non-identitarian. sanctuary caregivers come to the sanctuary with different backgrounds and training in animal care, including human care. in this paper, the volunteers and staff discussed had backgrounds in wildlife rehabilitation, nursing and gynecology, animal testing, animal shelter work, animal welfare science, and biology. further, sanctuaries draw from different bodies of knowledge and approaches to animal care: the limits of small animal, large animal, and avian medicine become strengths when considered from a non-identitarian perspective, combined with medical research and animal behaviorists. recalling the sanctuary that tried housing, diet, and lighting before turning to hormonal implants, each of these reflect different approaches, which could easily be foreclosed upon had the sanctuary gone to a professional with a singular focus.   additionally, paul robbins and sarah moore introduce the concept of “ecological anxiety disorder” (2013, 16) to talk about scientists’ anxieties about being both overly normative and not normative enough. to resolve this paralyzing contradiction, they call for “directly confronting what we want as scientists and citizens and acknowledging where these desires put us relative to others in the world” (robbins and moore 2013, 16). in this paper, i have argued that sanctuaries do exactly this, through witnessing as a scientific and deliberately political method, offering queer ecological “models capacious enough to include both cultural critique and a commitment to uncovering material realities and agencies” (alaimo 2010, 58). at sanctuaries, humans intervene with vested interests. one of these interests is seeing and foregrounding the desires of sanctuary residents. because of recognizing residents’ desires, combined with sanctuary affiliates’ institutional limits and their own interests in challenging the political economy of agriculture, sanctuaries manifest nonreproductive futures.   finally, witnessing at sanctuaries is a way of expanding the practice of situated knowledge production. situated knowledge production is historically based on identity—questions of who i am or who we are as a marginalized group—from which it offers the lessons that all knowledge is situated and that certain perspectives might be more valuable than others in answering certain questions (e.g., haraway 1988; fujimura 2006). in this paper, situated knowledge is based on identity, but also on (species) difference and political economy. queer witnessing thus expands the field of situated knowledge production from one of including or focusing on marginalized groups to emphasizing the power relations therein.   this paper has expanded and queered witnessing as a concept. through combining activist, sts, and queer feminist perspectives on witnessing, this paper has shown that witnessing can be a form of activist science. it is undergirded by balancing proximity and critical distance: it is neither an empathic perspective, where emotions could predominate over other forms of information production, nor a neutral-distant perspective. as such, sanctuaries demonstrate that queer witnessing is a way of doing undone science.   acknowledgements i would like to acknowledge and express my gratitude toward the editors and reviewers at catalyst for the thoughtful feedback and genuinely fun review process. this piece came out of my phd research, supported especially by mentors sarah moore and nicole nelson, financially by the university of wisconsin–madison’s department of geography and holtz center for sts, and in myriad ways by co-writing comrade and friend sara rezvi. and most importantly, i would also like to thank the chicken and farmed animal sanctuary staff, volunteers, and other affiliates i talked with for doing the work described in this piece and talking with me about it.   notes 1 although this study focuses on hens at us sanctuaries, it is important to note that farmed animal sanctuary sites, albeit with widely diverging politics, are not exclusive to the us, or, for that matter, the minority world (donaldson and kymlicka 2015).   2 the university extension program later switched to charging twenty dollars per necropsy because more people, largely backyard chicken keepers, sent deceased chickens than they had anticipated (personal communication, july 2017).   3 end-of-life conversations for chickens can be extremely fraught. here i avoid the term “quality of life” as it has been demonstrated to have ableist tendencies (taylor 2017), and aim simply to suggest that undone science exacerbates the difficulty of conversations about euthanasia.   4 tangential to the question of parenting, but relevant to alternative kinship formation, many sanctuaries attempt to group chickens according to apparent preferences for companionship. this included sexual companionship, such as a pair we referred to as the “lesbihens,” but it also included groupings based on amicability or care more generally.   references adams, carol. 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(1985) 2011. leviathan and the air pump: hobbes, boyle, and the experimental life. reprint. princeton, nj: princeton university press. singer, jasmin. 2009. “what about eggs?” making hay with gene baur: advocating for farm animals with farm sanctuary. https://farmsanctuary.typepad.com/making_hay/2009/07/what-about-eggs.html. squier, susan. 2010. poultry science, chicken culture: a partial alphabet. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. striffler, steve. 2007. chicken: the dangerous transformation of america’s favorite food. new haven, ct: yale university press. tallbear, kim. 2018. “making love and relations beyond settler sex and family.” in making kin not population: reconceiving generations, edited by adele clarke and donna haraway, 145–166. chicago: prickly paradigm press. taylor, sunaura. 2017. beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation. new york: the new press. triangle chicken advocates. n.d. “vegans with chickens.” accessed may 9, 2021. https://trianglechickenadvocates.org/vegans-with-chickens/. united poultry concerns. 201420. “is it okay for sanctuaries to give hens’ eggs to donors?” https://www.upc-online.org/pp/spring2014/sanctuary_hens_eggs.html. uc davis veterinary medicine. 2018a. “curriculum design.” https://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/dvm/dvm-curriculum-overview. ———. 2018b. “dvm program.” https://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/dvm/dvm-program. wamsley, laurel. 2020. “tyson foods fires 7 plant managers over betting ring on workers getting covid-19.” national public radio, december 16, 2020. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/12/16/947275866/tyson-foods fires-7-plant-managers-over-betting-ring-on-workers-getting-covid-19.   author bio heather rosenfeld is a lecturer in environmental science and policy at smith college. integrating political geography, queer and feminist sts, and visual storytelling, their work analyzes and pursues multispecies and environmental justice.     original research temporal imaginaries in accounts of parenting practices: negotiations of time, advice, and expertise     tineke broer tilburg institute for law, technology, and society; tilburg law school; tilburg university t.broer_1@uvt.nl   martyn pickersgill centre for biomedicine, self and society; usher institute; university of edinburgh martyn.pickersgill@ed.ac.uk   sarah cunningham-burley centre for biomedicine, self and society; usher institute; university of edinburgh sarah.c.burley@ed.ac.uk     abstract in recent decades, good mothering/parenting has been related to responsibilities for children’s brain development, as a means of achieving desirable futures. yet the ways in which parents engage with neuroscience, and how they value recommendations based on it vis-à-vis other forms of expertise, is not often examined. this paper focuses on these issues, but refuses to reify neuroscientific advice. we are orientated by the accounts of twenty-two caregivers (predominantly, mothers) in scotland whom we interviewed about the neuroscientific ideas about parenting that they encountered and negotiated through voluntary parenting programs. our participants discussed broader advice they received (e.g., through books, friends, families), rather than just that associated with neuroscience. in examining parents’ negotiations of wide-ranging advice, we demonstrate how particular configurations of the past and the future were constructed through the interviews. accordingly, we analyze how these temporal imaginaries help to justify accounts of parenting practices. constructions of possible (gendered and classed) futures and pasts contoured our participants’ engagements with advice and expertise. consequently, we demonstrate that temporal imaginaries can play an important role in how mothers (and other caregivers) reflexively develop and situate their own epistemologies of parenting.     keywords neuroscience, parenting, sts, temporalities, expertise     introduction   brilliant teaching people about child development. it’s brilliant. it’s great. it’s advanced so much and stuff like that. but it’s…you cannae [cannot]…twenty-first century, you cannae go through it without, like, raising your voice a bit and stuff like that, because your child…you dinnae [do not] want your child to end up like that [i.e., examples of illegal practices already discussed in the interview]. … do you know what i mean, we’ll have really good babies and that, but when they’re adults, what are they going to be like then?   this is an excerpt from our interview with thea and her friend charlie,1 both of whom were mothers of young children in scotland. the quote encapsulates much of our interest in this paper. thea and charlie talked about how their parents and they themselves were raised, including their experiences of chastisement. they reflected critically on how a state-mandated and often neuroscientifically orientated focus on child development, and specifically advice not to raise your voice when children misbehave, does not “prepar[e] children for the world to come.” thea’s words illustrate how temporalities shape the reception and negotiation of parenting advice, with the past used as a resource in the present to enable potential futures. based on twenty-two interviews with young parents, sometimes accompanied by a friend or a family member, this paper analyzes how “brain-based” (hughes and baylin 2012) and other kinds of advice are adopted, adapted, and sometimes rejected by parents. in particular, and building on key literatures from feminist science and technology studies (sts) and sociology, we show how temporal imaginaries play a role in how parents negotiated advice.   background the relationship between parents and experts of myriad kinds has been a fruitful sociological topic for decades, with the dynamics between private and public spheres—and between the family and the state—of particular interest (rose and miller 1992). indeed, state-sanctioned or -originating expert intervention within family life is one key activity of governance across many nations (rose 1998; lee, macvarish, and bristow 2010; macvarish, lee, and lowe 2015; lowe, lee, and macvarish 2015b; zhang and mcghee 2019). in this regard, psychological concepts and ideas, such as theories of “attachment” (bowlby 1969), can be used to govern families at a distance as well as more closely and directly (rose and miller 1992; duschinsky, greco, and solomon 2015). the idea of attachment, and interrelatedly the proclaimed future importance of a healthy attachment, helps to orient parents towards a time beyond the present in respect to how they parent their children in the here and now. the future also plays a role in professional and wider public discourses of “good mothering,” with motherhood (or parenthood more generally) configured as a moral project through which women especially are encouraged to see themselves as having special and principal responsibilities for their children’s futures (lee 2008; song et al. 2012; lowe 2016; leaver 2017; kromidas 2021). in recent decades, good parenting—and good mothering especially—has been related to responsibilities for children’s brain development, as a means of achieving desirable futures (wall 2010; thornton 2011). concepts and findings from the neurosciences have been given particular prominence in policy discourses and interventions upon parenting practices (lee, macvarish, and bristow 2010; featherstone, morris, and white 2013; macvarish, lee, and lowe 2014, 2015; edwards, gillies, and horsley 2015; lowe, lee, and macvarish 2015a, 2015b; broer and pickersgill 2015). for instance, glenda wall (2010) has shown how the mandates of discourses of “intensive motherhood” (hays 1998; faircloth 2014), coupled with neuroscientific ideas, made the mothers she interviewed generally anxious, guilty, and exhausted—always worrying about the amount of “quality” time they could or should spend with their children (see also budds et al. 2017). in the uk, parents can be offered a place within facilitated programs where child development is discussed (macvarish, lee, and lowe 2015; broer, pickersgill, and cunningham-burley 2020). in these programs, parents receive advice on how best to raise their children, and they can discuss this advice with facilitators and fellow parents. a significant part of the advice they receive relates to theories of attachment and/or neuroscientific findings and propositions about children’s cognitive and emotional development (macvarish, lee, and lowe 2015). a growing sociological literature has examined the emergence and form of the policies that leverage neuroscientific expertise to legitimate, sustain, and propel parenting programs (macvarish, lee, and lowe 2014, 2015; lowe, lee, and macvarish 2015a). the accounts of people participating in these programs, however, have received far less attention (broer, pickersgill, and cunningham-burley 2020). in this paper, we draw on interviews with twenty-two parents/carers of young children who attended one of two parenting programs in the 2010s (described more fully below). we examine how parents discursively negotiated the expert knowledge instantiated within the overt and implied recommendations they received, from within and beyond the program they attended. while the starting point for the interviews was to discover how parents framed the utility—or not—of neuroscientific knowledge and ideas for parents, our interviewees described far more diverse forms of recommendations than purportedly science-based enjoinders alone. as such, we do not limit our analysis to how parents engaged with neuroscientific recommendations, since this would risk reifying their importance. instead, we are led by our participants themselves: our focus is consequently on how parents negotiate recommendations of varying kinds through particular temporal imaginaries. by “recommendations,” we mean not only expert guidance but also family suggestions and wider parenting norms that enjoin particular kinds of practices. by “temporal imaginaries” (see svendsen et al. 2018) we refer to constructions of the past, present, and future that are deployed by our interviewees to justify their parenting practices at different time points.   parenting, expertise, and the making of the future feminist sociology and technoscience studies scholars have demonstrated how value laden ideas about good parenting are, as well as the ways through which parents, and mothers in particular, engage with such values. articles often discuss constructions of “intensive motherhood,” where mothers especially are seen as responsible for ensuring their children grow up well fed, healthy, and happy. research from sociologists concerned with what, and how, children are fed provides a key example. heteronormative assumptions underlie food practices, as in wider parenting ideologies and activities (glabau 2019). a narrative of “breast is best,” for instance, is part of public discourse in a range of nations and seeks to enjoin the breastfeeding of infants. researchers have demonstrated, though, that despite strong moral connotations, this imperative can be deeply contested (wall 2001; knaak 2010; ryan, bissell, and alexander 2010). in relation to older children, parents have also been shown to navigate sometimes conflicting ideas about what and how much children (should) eat, and accounts of parents’ engagements with these debates and recommendations have been widely explored (bell, mcnaughton, and salmon 2009; keenan and stapleton 2010; o’key and hugh-jones 2010; lupton 2011). gendered labor is also apparent in relation to food allergies, for example, and the work of keeping the household “pure” (glabau 2019). constructions of the future are commonly inscribed in ideas about parenting, relating to, for instance, the health and well-being of children as they become adolescents, adults, and perhaps parents themselves. the future is taken into account within sociological articles on intensive parenthood, where it is presented by participants as a looming figure always implicated in present actions—making for particularly anxious parents (wall 2010). a subset of sociological scholarship on parenting takes even more explicit account of temporality within parenting ideas and practices. particularly noteworthy for our purposes is abigail knight et al.’s (2014) article on temporalities in family food practices, including intergenerational alignments and differences in what children should eat. the authors show how childhood food memories influence the way parents raise their children, as well as how such memories are recast in light of current parenting practices. the work of mary jane kehily and rachel thomson (2011) is another case in point. by following two pregnant women through to the birth and the early years of their children, the authors analyze the temporal and intergenerational processes at play in how parenting identities and practices are formed. in this paper, we take cues from sociological and wider work on mothering and parenting practices that deals implicitly or explicitly with temporality; yet we follow a slightly different analytic path via our engagement with sts. as one focal point, we draw on the sociology of scientific and technological expectations. research in what is usually abbreviated as “the sociology of expectations” (brown and michael 2003) is concerned with how framings of the future—and sometimes the past (morrison 2012)—are reconfigured through current practices, and how constructions of possible futures serve to justify present decisions or enjoin particular near-term actions. in this respect, sociologists have argued that “analyzing the dynamics of expectations is a key element in understanding scientific and technological change” (borup et al. 2006, 286). expectations, then, orient present discursive and material practices towards (assumptions about) particular futures; in the process, they sometimes enjoin the re-accounting of past experiences to help justify or bring about these future orientations (arribas-ayllon, bartlett, and featherstone 2010; brosnan 2011). in addition to work self-described as the sociology of expectations, we take cues from related scholarship on science which considers the future in parenting reflections and practices. most notably, we are inspired by louise whiteley et al.’s (2017) study involving interviews with parents of children diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (ocd). the parent respondents were asked about their perspectives on both brain scans and genetic tests in relation to ocd. in the analysis, the authors illustrate the “time-travelling talk” of their respondents, where “the past influences our evaluation of the present and attitude to the future; the developing present affects our remembrance of the past” (whiteley et al. 2017, 475). specifically, whiteley and colleagues’ respondents reflected on futures “they might have wanted in the past” (479), and where different ways of understanding ocd (e.g., as a brain disorder) co-constitute the futures parents see available for their children and for themselves. whiteley et al.’s research also clearly outlines some of the temporal negotiations that parents engage in when assessing expert knowledge. these include how scientific knowledge is assessed in relation to other forms of knowledge, be it clinical or experiential. moreover, knowledge was crucially adjudicated by whiteley and colleagues’ participants to fit their circumstances and hopes at that moment: “whether a particular form of knowledge was admitted into the journey…can depend on whether its positive or negative affordances were a better match to the concrete circumstances of the journey” of parents and their children diagnosed with ocd, and wider family circumstances (489). along similar lines, maria kromidas (2021) has analyzed how her parent respondents in the united states enjoined, and configured, their own childhood memories in how they negotiated scientific and cultural norms relating to raising their children. for instance, some mothers reacted to north american norms of middle-class parenting (e.g., full, hectic children’s schedules containing club meetings and extracurricular lessons and activities) by drawing on a configuration of their own stress-free childhood. this idealized image then enabled them to argue that such middle-class parenting norms do not make their children happy. as such, imagined pasts play a role in how parents treated their children in the present and how they imagined their futures. in light of this scholarship, we draw on and further develop the concept of temporal imaginaries. situated within the sociology of expectations, the sociology of the future, and the sociology of time, mette svendsen et al. define temporal imaginaries as “the temporal horizon that our interlocutors step into and that become decisive for how personhood should be stimulated or eroded in the ambiguous zone between life and death” (2018, 23). the work of svendsen and colleagues focuses on care practices in a neonatal intensive care unit, a laboratory using pigs for research purposes, and a dementia ward. in all three settings, the authors examine the ways in which temporalities play a role in how newborns, piglets, and people with dementia are spoken about and cared for (see also svendsen 2015). in the work of svendsen et al. (2018), then, temporal imaginaries are intimately connected to the notion of care, both in research and healthcare contexts. building on their definition and analysis, as well as the sociology of expectations referred to above, in our paper we see temporal imaginaries as sociotechnical, discursive constructions of the past and the future that drive and justify action in the present. we take insights from the literatures summarized above as part of our efforts in this paper to layer further empirical specificity around parents’ engagements with the recommendations of different types of experts, including the experiential expertise of their own parents. as we will demonstrate, the futures inscribed in recommendations were salient in shaping how parents responded to advice (e.g., whether they were receptive to it and framed it as actionable, or were more critical of it). our focus is, consequently, on how parents see, first, the recommendations that they deem as (un)likely to help their children, and second, the world as it was, as it is, and what it might be—and how these all constructions articulate with and substantiate each other.   methods this research formed part of a larger project that sought to better understand the social dimensions of neuroscience, and in particular its role in shaping policies about, services for, and personal experiences of family life. part of the research involved semi-structured interviews with twenty-two mothers and other parents/carers of young children. these interviews covered experiences of raising children, recommendations and parenting ideas encountered, and the place of the parenting programs (see below) in participants’ experiences of and thinking about raising children.2 respondents were recruited through one of two parent programs in which they had participated (broer, pickersgill, and cunningham-burley 2020).3 the programs had the overall aim of supporting parents in raising healthy, happy children. one was delivered through primary schools and through general parenting support centers; the other was only delivered through a uk children’s charity and took place in general parent or community support centers. in their content, both programs explicitly mentioned ideas from neuroscience and theories of attachment. across the two programs, facilitators would talk about the importance of attachment and how to forge bonds with children in ways that “build healthy brains.”4 the target groups of the programs were broad in relation to the age and socioeconomic status of participants. we aimed to reflect this in our interview sample. moreover, we asked all participants if they knew of someone who might wish to participate in the interview with them. depending on their situations and preferences, interviews with program attendees sometimes included the partner of the program attendee, their own mother or grandmother, a friend of the family, or a support worker. in all cases, friends and support workers were other women, and partners were men. ten of the interviews included at least two participants; twelve were conducted solely with a program attendee. three of the attendee participants were fathers; additionally, in three other interviews the father was present as a second respondent. one interview was conducted with a carer, who was the grandfather of the child for whom he had custody. our initial aim had been to recruit a more mixed sample in terms of gender; however, most of the people participating in the parenting programs and responding to our interview invitation were mothers. our sample was purposefully broad with respect to the economic circumstances in which participants raised their children. as ideas encapsulated in “intensive motherhood” generally, and neuroscientific knowledge on parenting more specifically, have often been linked to so-called middle-class values (macvarish, lee, and lowe 2014), we deemed it crucial to interview respondents living in less advantaged circumstances and through more precarious situations. while our participants’ accounts are, of course, gendered and classed, we are also reluctant to reify social class as a determining factor to account for the rich and varied experiences our respondents shared with us. accordingly, we focus on how parents themselves spoke of their parenting practices and circumstances, rather than infer any causal links between any of these practices and circumstances with social class or position. a first very detailed coding of the interviews was undertaken to ensure we would stay close to the data during analysis. in this phase of coding, we paid particular attention to how neuroscientific and other advice was discussed in relation to parenting practices. within those limits, we looked for anything that appeared empirically or conceptually noteworthy, rather than having a predetermined idea of what we wanted to analyze. following this initial coding phase, we grouped these codes, in order to explore the overall theme of “negotiating expertise.” reflecting the wide-ranging nature of our data set, examples of the grouped codes include understanding one’s child through expert knowledge, the past of the parent and the future of the child, the importance of love, the future, normality, exchanging expertise, the emotive nature of expert knowledge, and the changeability of recommendations. upon further consideration of the data, temporalities involved in how parents negotiated expertise emerged as important; for example, in the codes “the past of the parent and the future of the child,” “the future,” and, to some extent, “the changeability of recommendations.” we saw how such temporal concerns and constructions played a role in how parents negotiated different advice, and we consequently elected to focus on temporality as an overarching concept for further analysis. as noted, while we were particularly interested in the place of such neuroscientific advice vis-à-vis other advice parents receive/seek out, this paper goes beyond a consideration of neuroscience alone in our analysis of how pasts and futures are talked about and constructed. while our starting point for the interviews was indeed to discuss neuroscientific advice in particular, the interviews meandered through different kinds of formal and implicit enjoinments in an empirically rich and conceptually generative way. hence, this article does not focus only, or even centrally, on neuroscientific advice. rather, our concern is with temporal imaginaries and how these interact with negotiations of different kinds of advice more generally. as such, this focus on temporality complements a prior analysis which focused specifically on how interviewees articulated (or not) care practices and subjectivities through a neuroscientific idiom (broer, pickersgill, and cunningham-burley 2020). in what follows, we examine how parents negotiated the recommendations they had received and the parenting ideas they had encountered, from within and beyond the parenting programs they attended. we show how parents creatively accepted, rejected, and modified recommendations in their accounts of what it meant to be good parents within the contexts in which they lived. more specifically, we interrogate how their negotiations related to particular temporal configurations, and analyze how these constructions of past, present, and future help to justify accounts of their practices. we divide our results into two sections: “negotiating the past” (including wider family life, and historical and cultural norms), and “negotiating the future.”   negotiating the past we discuss here our respondents’ accounts of parenting vis-à-vis wider family life—in particular, their own pasts and their parenting practices as part of a longer family history. we do so in order to analyze how, in different ways and with varying consequences, interviewees framed wider family life as holding significance for how they adjudicated recommendations regarding their parenting practices. in addition, we look more broadly at the cultural and historical norms that arose within the interviews, and how parents situated their parenting and their engagements with advice in relation to these. some respondents discussed their current parenting practices in relation to their past experiences and their childhood. one mother, brenda, for instance, reflected on the wider family context as follows:   sometimes just things, like, you remember things that you were told as a child. i remember one of them things, it’s just, “the family that eat together stay together,” that’s a quote. so i always think it’s very important that we sit down at a table when we can and eat together …. and that was, sort of, advice passed on i think, you know, my mum and my granny, i remember always hearing that.   in the above excerpt, we can see how certain maxims that informed or encapsulated parenting practices were understood to have been “passed” down the matrilineal family line, with ramifications regarded as positive (see knight, o'connell, and brannen 2014, for a similar argument). however, brenda also went on to discuss more negative aspects of her mother’s parenting practices:   and then you remember, you still remember what it was like being a child yourself and how you felt and things my mum did that i just wouldn’t do because i disagree, you know, how my mum brought up me and my brother and my sister i think is different from what i’m doing. … she was quite competitive about how we were, how well we were doing at school and things like that. and to me that’s not important. as long as they do their best, as long as my child does their best and concentrates.   similarly, two mothers who interviewed together, veronica and maggie, reflected on the concept of advice throughout the interview, and the practices they had “inherited”:   veronica: and i think that’s the other thing about advice is that you’re given advice on how to be a parent, but actually you’ve already inherited a parenting style from your parents, whether you like it or not, and that was a huge shock to me was that i began to parent like my parents, and i hated that. … i had to go away and deal with it and sort of unpick it all. then i put myself back together again in a way that was how i wanted to be put back together, and i actually undid all that inherited stuff from my mum and dad. there was lots of good stuff that i got from my mum and dad, but there was some really unhelpful stuff, and i just decided that i just didn’t want to parent like that. and you do absorb your parents’ parenting style.   maggie: absolutely. and that’s another form of—   veronica: that’s advice, isn’t it?   maggie: —family advice as well.   accordingly, we can see that the “inheritance” of parenting practices is not necessarily deterministic. rather, components of the experiential expertise of participants’ parents can be reflexively and actively adjudicated, reworked, or rejected (see kromidas 2021 for a similar analysis). in the same interview, veronica and maggie discussed how to navigate the emotional landscape of “changing the family script,” as they referred to it, where each choice a parent makes can be seen by their mother as an implicit criticism regarding how they themselves raised their children. as maggie described,   and also i think sometimes the friend network is a more helpful network of people who are likeminded in a similar situation to you as well at that time, because you can form ideas and talk things through, whereas if i talk things through with my mum the advice i get back is based on being defensive, because she feels like i’m criticizing, even if i’m not. like most of the time i’m just trying to work it through for myself. she’ll find because she didn’t do that that’s a criticism.   parenting ideas and changing cultural norms may prompt parents and their parents to reflect on the past, which may result in emotional challenges such as regret and perceptions of criticisms. this inflects “the advice i get back,” negatively impacting its salience. in this regard, discussions of maggie’s current practices appear to stimulate her mother to reinspect her own memories of parenting maggie. negotiating temporal imaginaries also involves the negotiation of associated affects, up and down the matrilineal line. shifting cultural norms and professional enjoinments around good parenting can also stimulate reflections from mothers upon their own previous parenting practices, as well as a reappraisal of the practices of caregivers that shaped their own childhoods. the affects that the negotiation of these temporal imaginaries could animate included feelings of regret. this is expressed in the following quote from ashley, a mother who, following her participation in the parenting program, went on to train to become a program facilitator:   some people drop out after two sessions, because it makes you reflect on your own parenting skills. and sometimes, some of the things make you feel guilty ’cause you’re like, “oh, i’ve done that, or i’ve done that before, i’ve said that to them before,” and it makes you feel guilty. and then also, it reflects on your own parents, and how your childhood was.   very rarely, participants expressed regret about their past parenting practices in response to contemporary advice. veronica, for instance, described how if she had possessed her current understandings of theories of attachment in earlier years, she would have parented her eldest child differently. nevertheless, she was ultimately able to conclude that even if she had incorporated current recommendations into past practices, it “would [not] have made a huge difference.” this is illustrative of how, when accounting for regret, a small number of interviewees sometimes produced configurations of alternate futures based on “possible pasts” (morrison 2012) that could be strategically deployed as repair work within their narratives of being a (good) parent (see:kromidas 2021 for a similar analysis). another mother, jane, also built up a picture of the past that she used to account for the choices she made. she felt current cultural norms did not sufficiently address the history of humanity, which she wanted to learn from and partly base her parenting practices upon. for example, jane thought positively about co-sleeping with her children, something that many of the other study participants were more hesitant about, and she also breastfed longer than is common in the uk. in the excerpt below, she talks about breastfeeding:   interviewer (i): so i noticed that you said that you are breastfeeding [youngest child], and i thought that that was longer than people usually would breastfeed their child, isn’t it? jane: yeah.   i: so that’s part of the philosophy, then, that you breastfeed as long as possible?   jane: yeah. yeah. for example, [at her work], i’ll be sitting next to people saying, “isn’t it terrible, they’re breastfed till they’re, i don’t know, two, three.”   i: they’re saying it’s terrible?   jane: yeah. so it’s not a cultural norm. whereas, i take heart from more things like anthropological studies, and thinking about the long pre-human, um, about the long human history, and that we’re a blip.   this sense of history has allowed jane “to do what i want to do. because i understand that the conditions we’re living in, and the societal pressures, are very much of the moment.” while in general she reflected that the program in which she participated resonated with her own parenting philosophy, at times jane thought “that i perhaps was more radical, more, if you like, if it was a continuum, further along it, than sometimes the course was.” as an example, she noted that where the program facilitator told participants that it is better to reward than to punish children, she argued that the word “no” should not be used at all in parenting, and she thought current parenting ideas were at times rather “victorian.” we can see, then, that this interviewee actively constructed a certain idea of historical parenting practices, assigning value to some of these over others. she then used them to negotiate any recommendations she received, and the cultural norms embedded in such recommendations and parenting practices. to summarize, parents relied on different constructions of present and past to negotiate parenting recommendations and what they regarded as wider norms, and to legitimize their own practices. some mothers also reflected on the emotional challenges that could result from consciously deviating from “inherited” practices of family or cultural norms. in the next section, we look at what kinds of futures were entailed in negotiations of expert knowledge and of wider norms and recommendations. this includes attention to instances where parents might have a different idea of what they want for the future of their children than that inscribed within expert discourse.   negotiating the future visions of and hopes for the future constituted one reason why many parents suggested they wanted to participate in the parenting program from which we recruited for our study. these visions mostly related to their children’s futures and only implicitly to their own, for example, through accounts of how they would feel about certain future outcomes for their children. ashley, for instance, talked about how the parenting program had helped her to give her children the best chance not to “grow[…] up, like, unhappy, and you don’t want your child growing up without social skills.” later in the interview she talked about this in relation to brain development:   but it's important to know how a child's brain develops is all to do with how you...what you put in is what you get out. so the more time, and the more nurture you give your child, the better it will be. like a seed—you plant a seed, and you give it no water, and no light, it will die and wither away. if you give it life, you feed it, you water it, you give it loads of sunlight, and fresh air, go outside, and if you put it outside, it will grow into a massive tree.   when asked how she felt about this idea of being able to influence her children’s brain development, ashley elaborated,   i feel relieved, because i know that i can give them the best i can, and i can try and do the best i can. and having this knowledge to be able to deliver the best i can, that's the best bit. it’s be[ing] able to know that this is what's wrong, and this is why they're doing certain things, and this is why they're behaving that way.   hence, the neuroscientific notions encoded within the expertise deployed through the program was imbricated within, among other respondents, ashley’s understandings of her parenting practices and the specific orientation of these towards ensuring a healthy, happy future. in her account, neuroscientific concepts can be seen as a sensitizing concept to think about the developing child, as a route to a different kind of metaphor: an oft-used botanical one, where children are presented as seedlings, and within which parental nurturance is valourized.5 the result of this metaphorical translation is that rather than as a form of pressure (wall 2010), ashley described neuroscientific knowledge as producing an experience of “relief.” another participant, veronica, reflected on how participating in a parenting program gave her the “space to think about how you already were a parent and how you could, how you could do things differently with a more positive outcome for you and your child.” in this way, the parenting programs acted as forums within which parents were exposed to different kinds of credentialed and experiential expertise (including from other parents), and parents reflexively (re)considered present and future parenting practices in light of this. these reflexive considerations entailed shifting visions of children’s—and, to a lesser extent, parental—futures. while parenting programs were one source of parenting knowledge discussed by our respondents, other sources also figured in their accounts. jane, for instance, noted a book that helped her to deal with issues such as sibling rivalry, as her oldest son was “going through quite a long, difficult stage of being jealous” of her youngest child. in her telling, this book provided jane with a “script” to deal with jealousy and aggression in a way that “is empowering for everybody,” and did not, for instance, encourage forcing her oldest son to apologize for confrontational acts. jane linked this script to a robust vision for the future, relating to very broad results:   there’s a lot that i believe is very much all tied up, a lot of sort of society's bigger problems […such as] education, health, all the big ones, everything. the way that we talk to each other, happiness. even, it can even take it more to things like climate change, and like, if we felt confident in ourselves, then we'd be able to build stronger communities, you know, it would just have all these wonderful repercussions.   thus, jane expressed a political imaginary in which responsible parents can help shape the future not just for their own children but for everyone. jane was the only respondent that explicitly linked the way she raised her children to an imaginary of the future for society in general. in a different way, thea and charlie, the two mothers with whom we opened this paper, were concerned that the recommendations received in the parenting program they had participated in did not sufficiently address the hardships they saw as laying ahead of their children. they discussed how the emphasis on children’s needs within parenting programs is not necessarily unwarranted or undesirable, but that it nevertheless does not always prepare children well for the future. the two friends talked about how they and their parents were raised, including how their parents “got the belt” as a punishment, and how they themselves would not speak rudely to their parents while parents nowadays were advised not to raise their voices to children. thea gave the example of one of their friends whose “neighbor complained, so she [the friend] had to go to a class on why you can’t shout at your child,” and continued to discuss contemporary parenting ideas:   we want children to be happy and stuff like that, but they’re taking liberties. like, they’re just…they’re letting them run riot and it is going to be worse in twenty years’ time, because everybody’s going to be taking drugs and it’s not going to be a big deal and …, nobody’s got any authority any more, ’cause your mum…you cannae have authority at home, then…and there’s no authority out and about, do you ken [know] what i mean, then what are you meant to do? nobody’s going to be able to control their kids because we cannae hit…smack bums. you can’t fret on them. you can’t shout at them. … and i’m like, that’s great. that’s great for them now. like, brilliant. do you know what i mean, we’ll have really good babies and that, but when they’re adults, what are they going to be like then? and they’re trying to say that they’re growing into better individuals and that. and i’m like, well the world’s a lot worse now. but i cannae do…they never had all these bums, people not working, people on so much drugs, like, killing people and stuff like that back…and those people were terrified, like, i’m not going to do that. if my mum finds out, i’m going to get a foot up the arse, ken [do you know] what i mean?   thus, temporal configurations of imagined pasts and anticipated futures can serve to legitimate current parenting practices that are regarded as having contextual salience within parents’ lives, and hence delegitimize the recommendations received in various parenting programs. in line with kromidas (2021), we could analyze this as parents drawing on an image of their own childhood and the future that childhood enabled for them, in order to think about the present and the future of their own children, or “to shape how children’s past will shape their futures” (kromidas 2021, 49). the construction of such temporal imaginaries within thea and charlie’s talk can also be regarded as a reaction to some of the middle-class norms that are imbued within anglophonic brain-based parenting advice (edwards, gillies, and horsley 2015). other interviewees—in particular, some of the fathers—appeared to feel less able to negotiate the future. two of them did not have shared custody of their children and were not allowed to see much of them. for instance, mark was permitted to see his daughter with supervision for a couple of hours per week. he did not complete the parenting program because he “missed too much of it to pass.” in the interview, he asked, rhetorically, “why do i need a bit of paper to tell me…to tell somebody that i ken [know] how to raise a child with confidence?” he spoke of the importance of attachment for his daughter, without elaborating on where he’d learned of this concept and its import. however, mark felt that he was insufficiently involved in his daughter’s life to be able to implement the recommendations he had received around attachment-based parenting, which appeared to enjoin some anxieties about the future relationship he might have with his child:   i ken how to do it [know how an attachment is formed]; i spoke to my mum about how to do it and she said, ‘well, if that’s how you believe it needs to be done, then you need to do it, but you’ll need to wait until all this [custody battle] is done,” but it might be too late by then. once a child becomes two, that’s when it gets harder to form more, form more, stronger bonds with other people without them being afraid of other people.   the capacities of parents to render parenting recommendations actionable and to reflect on, contest, or rework them may thus be impacted by wider factors and contexts that shape parental agency and practices. alongside other matters that constrained both his and his former partner’s ability to parent their child as they wished, mark also spoke of how gendered norms impacted his parenting: “society says women look after bairns [children], dad works” (see also miller 2011; schmitz 2016). such norms about the “proper” role of men and women in relation to their children can themselves be read as enjoinments that can be reflexively negotiated and, to an extent, even contested while simultaneously being capitulated to (as well, of course, as being justifications for the gendered labor of childcare). to conclude this section, we have indicated how parents negotiate the future inscribed within recommendations, which sometimes did and sometimes did not align with their own visions for their and their children’s futures. the parenting programs in particular were presented as opening up possibilities for these futures, about which some parents expressed feelings of relief (such as interviewees ashley, veronica, and maggie). finally, a small subset of parents, mostly fathers from a lower socioeconomic background, reflected that they could not negotiate or implement recommendations in practice because of restrictions on whether or how they could interact with their children.   discussion and conclusions in this paper we have presented an analysis of how the future and the past can be cast and reconfigured through parents’ reflexive and sometimes critical negotiations with different kinds of recommendations: from expert guidance, to family suggestions, to wider parenting norms. parents used both “the” past and their (parents’) pasts to reflect on their parenting practices, and to selectively adopt, adapt, and reject recommendations. this often involved navigating the emotional landscape of wider family life, where advice received was based on—or occasionally clashed with—the experiential expertise of their own mothers. simultaneously, some of the parents we interviewed critically questioned notions inscribed within recommendations—for example, about the negative future consequences of putting children’s needs central now and shielding them from the realities of life. experiential expertise suffused the accounts elicited, melding with or directly challenging especially the credentialed expertise deployed through parenting programs. parents are far from cultural—or epistemic—dopes (garfinkel 1967), but rather actively negotiate different kinds of knowledge and norms. in relation to the parenting programs from which we recruited, the neuroscientific advice therein played a role in how parents thought about the future of their children—and, vice versa, what they thought about the future of their children influenced whether and how they adopted neuroscientific advice. when talking about the advice they received both in parenting programs and more widely, though, neuroscientific advice was but one epistemic resource—and was not necessarily the most central. rather, and resonant with whiteley’s et al. (2017) analysis, neuroscientific advice was adopted reflexively and pragmatically, when it aligned with specific visions of the past and future that parents had and when it aligned with their epistemologies of parenting. this underscores the findings of prior research on neuroscience and society (pickersgill et al. 2015), and what we have elsewhere referred to as the mundane significance of the brain (pickersgill et al. 2011). in other words, the brain is commonly framed in everyday life as a significant yet by no means a dominant actant through which understandings of selves and others are synthesized (see also coveney 2011; netherland 2011; o'connor, rees, and joffe 2012; fitzgerald 2014; o’connor and joffe 2014). the extent to which, and how, the brain is significant depends on people’s circumstances and the diverse epistemologies they bring to bear in self-making. moreover, even when particular styles of parenting that had been imparted by professionals as valorous (most notably, attachment-based parenting) were highlighted as important, parents were not always able to shape their practices accordingly due to the wider context in which they parented. this was evident in the accounts of some of the fathers we spoke with, such as mark, as well as apparent through our interview discussions with two mothers who had considerable contact with social work. while the nature of our sample means we can only be tentative about any kind of demographic claims-making, we nevertheless found indications that both social class and gender, and especially the intersections between them, shaped the extent to which, and how, parents felt able to negotiate the advice they receive, and sometimes whether they even received any advice at all. while we did not only recruit women to our study, our analysis has nevertheless foregrounded the talk of mothers. this reflects their preponderance in our interview sample, which matches in turn the fact that by far the majority of participants in the parenting programs we recruited from were women—reflecting the gendered work of childcare. our use of the term parents relates to the inclusion of fathers and other male relatives in our interviews. however, we are also aware of how the term parenting itself can render invisible the labor of specifically female caregivers (see gillies 2006 for a similar point)—labor that can be especially complex for women living in poverty (gillies 2006; mendenhall 2018; turner 2020; randles 2021). we thus share the concerns of other authors that unreflexive considerations of “parenting programs” can invisibilize women even as they remain the primary or sole family participant in these (gillies 2006). at the same time, we remain mindful of the need for the sociology of parenting to continue to push beyond a traditional focus on cisgendered, often heterosexual mothers that perhaps still characterizes too much of the scholarly literature (including our own work). our analysis has taken cues from scholarship in the sociology of science, and in particular perspectives around time and expectations (brown and michael 2003; borup et al. 2006; morrison 2012). this has formed a useful analytical lens for studying how parents construct “possible pasts and promissory futures” (morrison 2012) to make sense of diverse recommendations, and how they are enfolded in accounts of their own parenting practices. extending whiteley et al.’s (2017) analysis of “time-travelling talk” and svendsen et al.’s (2018) analysis on temporal imaginaries in diverse caring practices, we have demonstrated that temporal imaginaries can play an important role in how parents reflexively develop and situate their own epistemologies of parenting. temporal imaginaries, as svendsen et al. (2018) have hinted at, are also a way of caring for particular pasts, presents, and futures. they are inflected by what respondents (can) care about, and in turn they influence parenting or caring practices. the discursive and experiential traffic between temporal imaginaries and caring/parenting practices would be a useful analytical focus for future work at the interface of feminist sociology and technoscience studies critically examining the gendered, raced, and classed dimensions of contemporary parenting advice, and its reception, negotiation, and instantiation within everyday life.   acknowledgements we are very grateful to our respondents for their time and reflections, as well as the reviewers and editors for their careful, close, and generous engagement with our manuscript. this research was funded by the leverhulme trust [grant number rpg-2013-066] and in part by the wellcome trust [grant numbers wt094205ma; wt106612ma; 209519/z/17/z]. for the purpose of open access, we have applied a cc by public copyright license to the author-accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.   notes 1 all names are pseudonyms. none of these are intended to convey any characteristics or backgrounds of our interviewees.   2 as the literature we cite indicates, there are already critical analyses of such programs, and we certainly take cues from these. however, our aim through this paper—and the project from which is emerged— is to center the experiences of parents themselves who participated in these activities. many of them appreciated the sociality and learnings that the programs provided, and we do not wish to decenter their experiences simply because we ourselves remain more skeptical of some of the normative and epistemic regimes through which they are configured.   3 it arose in one interview (interview 15) that, while the respondent had been engaged in various parenting courses, he had not formally completed the program from which we recruited: he had only done “bits and bobs,” and hence not enough to “pass.” however, his answers were still relevant in relation to how expert knowledge is negotiated in relation to parenting, and so we included his interview in the sample as well. another interviewee (interview 7) was part of a parenting group, but had not yet taken part in the parenting program. her answers are not included in the article, as they were not relevant for the analysis.   4 for an example of such an approach, see “five to thrive,” https://fivetothrive.org.uk/approach/.   5 we thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing out the emphasis on botanical metaphors in this respondent’s account.   references arribas-ayllon, michael, andrew bartlett, and katie featherstone. 2010. “complexity and accountability: the witches’ brew of psychiatric genetics.” social studies of science 40 (4): 499–524. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312710363511. bell, kirsten, darlene mcnaughton, and amy salmon. 2009. “medicine, morality and mothering: public health discourses on foetal alcohol exposure, smoking around children and childhood overnutrition.” critical public health 19 (2): 155–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581590802385664. borup, mads, nik brown, kornelia konrad, and harro van lente. 2006. “the sociology of expectations in science and technology.” technology analysis & strategic management 18 (3–4): 285–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/09537320600777002. bowlby, john. 1969. attachment and loss. vol. 1, attachment. new york: basic books. broer, tineke, and martyn pickersgill. 2015. “(low) expectations, legitimization, and the contingent uses of scientific knowledge: engagements with neuroscience in scottish social policy and services.” engaging science, technology, and society, no. 1, 47–66. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2015.003. broer, tineke, martyn pickersgill, and sarah cunningham-burley. 2020. “neurobiological limits and the somatic significance of love: caregivers’ engagements with neuroscience in scottish parenting programmes.” history of the human sciences 33 (5): 85–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695120945966. brosnan, caragh. 2011. “the sociology of neuroethics: expectational discourses and the rise of a new discipline.” sociology compass 5 (4): 287–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00365.x. brown, nik, and mike michael. 2003. “a sociology of expectations: retrospecting prospects and prospecting retrospects.” technology analysis & strategic management 15 (1): 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/0953732032000046024. budds, kirsty, margaret k. hogg, emma n. banister, and mandy dixon. 2017. “parenting agendas: an empirical study of intensive mothering and infant cognitive development.” the sociological review 65 (2): 336–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026116672812. coveney, catherine m. 2011. “cognitive enhancement? 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ethnologist 45 (1): 20–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12596. thornton, davi johnson. 2011. “neuroscience, affect, and the entrepreneurialization of motherhood.” communication and critical/cultural studies 8 (4): 399–424. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2011.610327. turner, jennifer l. 2020. “black mothering in action: the racial-class socialization practices of low-income black single mothers.” sociology of race and ethnicity 6 (2): 242–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649219899683. wall, glenda. 2001. “moral constructions of motherhood in breastfeeding discourse.” gender & society 15 (4): 592–610. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124301015004006. ———. 2010. “mothers’ experiences with intensive parenting and brain development discourse.” women's studies international forum 33 (3): 253–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2010.02.019. whiteley, louise, emily borgelt, s. evelyn stewart, and judy illes. 2017. “parent perspectives on brain scans and genetic tests for ocd: talking of difficult presents, desired pasts, and imagined futures.” biosocieties 12 (4): 471–93. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-017-0046-3. zhang, shaoying, and derek mcghee. 2019. “governing through ‘the family’ in china: cultivating ethical political subjects through officials’ ‘nearest and dearest.’” families, relationships and societies 8 (3): 495–510. https://doi.org/10.1332/204674318x15271465130398.     author bios tineke broer is an assistant professor at tilburg university, currently working at the tilburg institute for law, technology, and society. previously, tineke was a research fellow at the university of edinburgh. tineke works across medical sociology and science and technology studies.   martyn pickersgill is chair of the sociology of science and medicine at the university of edinburgh. he is also associate director of the centre for biomedicine, self and society. martyn’s research in the social dimensions of biomedicine intersects sociology, sts, and the medical humanities.   sarah cunningham-burley is chair of medical and family sociology at the university of edinburgh. she is also co-director of the centre for biomedicines, self and society. sarah's research focusses on the social and ethical contexts of medical technologies, data science, engagement, and health and disease. book review | what comes after entanglement?: activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion, by eva haifa giraud (duke university press, 2019) smilges, j. logan. 2024. review of just care: messy entanglements of disability, dependency, and desire, by akemi nishida (temple university press, 2022). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312. © j. logan smilges, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | just care: messy entanglements of disability, dependency, and desire, by akemi nishida (temple university press, 2022) j. logan smilges university of british columbia logan.smilges@ubc.ca if living through the covid-19 pandemic in the midst of a waning us empire, the austere defunding of welfare and social services, and the abandonment of vulnerable people by a leftist political community all too eager to sacrifice the disabled, sick, and ill has taught me one thing, it’s that many people still don’t know how to practice care. despite the efforts of disability justice, queer, trans, anti-racist, and feminist movements, care remains widely misunderstood. needing care continues to be exceptionalized as unusual and burdensome. caregiving is persistently feminized, racialized, and displaced onto fungible populations presumed to require no care for themselves. widespread infrastructural failure and targeted state neglect leads people to believe that those who need care are always demanding too much and that those providing care are never providing enough, the right kind, or enough of the right kind to warrant fair compensation. as a result, activists and scholars have been writing over the past decade with increasing urgency about horizontal models of care. the language of mutual aid (spade 2020), care webs (piepzna-samarasinha 2018), and care labor (assis et al. 2023) abound as people search for vocabularies to negotiate their needs and caregiving capacities. but these horizontal models of care are insufficient for addressing the underlying conditions that make them necessary in the first place. community-based forms of care that distribute care laterally within and across marginalized and disenfranchised populations typically exist as reactionary forces against state and institutional violence. in order to effectively factor care into our liberation movements, we must also liberate care itself— untethering it from a defensive position and mobilizing it as a world-building politics unto itself. such a mobilization effort is what akemi nishida refers to as care justice, which puts forth a politics of care rooted in the beliefs that care can be just and that justice—in its purest form—is care. mailto:logan.smilges@ubc.ca book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) j. logan smilges, 2024 just care: messy entanglements of disability, dependency, and desire is nishida’s timely reminder to scholars, students, and organizers that neither care nor justice can be constructively practiced in isolation. across five, highly accessible body chapters of storied prose and interview-based research with disabled people and their care workers, nishida illustrates that if we want to practice just care, as in care justice, then we first need to recognize the justness of care. that is, care is everything; there is only care; there is just care. nishida thoughtfully engages conversations in disability studies, feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and queer studies to argue that no justice worth pursuing is possible without systems of care that both ensure people’s needs are met and interrogate the forces that exacerbate these needs beyond our collective capacity to address them. liberation requires not only the meaningful inclusion of people who occupy varying degrees of dependency but also a critical framework for evaluating the conditions under which dependency can be generated, intensified, circulated, and cited to uphold inequities on a global scale. “needs and care…may sound logical and rational—even rosy,” writes nishida. “in reality, they are the opposite of that” (36). care justice is messy business, as the book’s title suggests, and yet, it is only by wading into that mess that we can begin to realize how much care we need and how much is required of us in order to receive it. beyond the question of quantity, nishida reminds us that not all care is good care. in fact, within the “care industrial complex,” which is theorized throughout the first two body chapters, care is a regulated commodity (48). bolstered by the outsourcing of medicaid services to private industry, both non-profit and for-profit organizations deliver “managed care” as a source of revenue. by offering medicaid enrollees the bare minimum amount of care they need to survive, even if it eviscerates their quality of life, the care industrial complex efficiently transmogrifies “debility and disability into capital” (54). this is a kind of weaponized care that, through algorithmic assessments of what people deserve, withholds as much as it provides. or, put differently, care is provided in order to warrant withholding, in order to extract value from prolonged debilitation and disablement. while this form of biopolitical violence will be familiar to some readers, among the most important contributions nishida offers is the language of “subjugated capacitation” (71), which dials in on the “increasingly blurry” line between care recipients and care providers within the care industrial complex (100). nishida builds, albeit indirectly, on recent scholarship by jasbir puar (2017) and zakiyyah iman jackson (2020), who have commented on the geographic and racial dynamics of biopolitics, to argue that capacity is not a zero-sum game. though it’s true that many care recipients are dependent on the labor and skills of care workers, the capacitation of care workers within the care industrial complex is tightly regulated, indentured, and insufficient, often belying the workers’ own needs and dependencies. as nishida puts it, “to be capacitated to take up care labor in the interwoven racial, gendered, migration, and disability economies is, in a way, to receive orders regarding whose care needs must be prioritized” (72). rarely, if ever, do these orders prioritize the compounding needs of care workers themselves, whose book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) j. logan smilges, 2024 bodies and minds are under intense pressure to provide life-sustaining services over long hours with poor pay. care justice necessarily attends not only to the provision of care to those who are readily recognizable as dependents but also to the stratification of need—of who is allowed to have what kind of needs—and the uneven privileges that subtend one’s legibility as a “worker.” the project urges readers to think of capacitation not in opposition to incapacitation or debilitation, as it often is, but instead as a mode of induction to a wide field of variegated proximities to power. in the third and fourth body chapters, nishida turns her attention to how care recipients and care providers are getting by, despite the constraints placed on them. the strategies nishida discusses are many, and i found myself overwhelmed by the creativity, ingenuity, and vulnerability that my disabled and queer kin bring to the world. nishida manages to strike the exceedingly difficult balance between celebrating people who are struggling and avoiding the romanticization of their struggle. using the language of “affective collectivity” (chapter 3) and “messy dependency” (chapter 4), nishida reveals the sensuous embodiedness of care without eroticizing it. she captures the anxiety, exhaustion, and anguish of care work without belittling the people who require it. she challenges the false binary separating independence from dependence, and she reveals the interdependent care collectives that resist institutional care frameworks, even as she acknowledges the saturation of almost all care discourse in neoliberalism. this balance is evidence of the mess of care, nishida insists. “to live and care for each other by centering our dependency is mess, and mess is the ground they continue to nurture” (151). such messiness can be desirable not because it is without challenge or risk of failure but because its challenge and risk indicate that we are not leaving people behind, or at least we’re trying not to. the fifth body chapter on “bed activism” is a perfect example of the mess of care and the justice that such mess can help us to envision. culling together the “ontological resistance” efforts of queer, sick, and disabled people of color (166), nishida offers up bed activism as a promise of the world-building already underway by those who are giving one another what we can, when we can, with no expectation of reciprocity or gratitude because all of us deserve more care than any of us could provide. we keep giving and, in the process, learn more about ourselves, one another, and the worlds we collectively wish to inhabit. “bed activism is a portal,” nishida tells us, not only to spaces beyond the bed but also to places that have yet to exist, that could not have even been imagined if it weren’t for the careful prioritization of the sick, ill, and disabled bodymind “as the starting point and core” (175). the project ends on a gestural note about covid-19. although nishida explains that the bulk of the manuscript was written prior to the pandemic, the final pages contextualize our current moment with what is perhaps the most enduring claim of the book: disabled people have so much to teach the world. there is so much crip wisdom bound up in our nonconforming bodyminds. sometimes this wisdom is itself messy. as nishida admits, “my thoughts are all over the place” (187). but we don’t have to be scared of the mess so long as we sit in it together, arm in arm, against calls book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) j. logan smilges, 2024 to relinquish ourselves to state-mandated models meant to manage us along with our care. this is when care becomes an act of justice: when we’re willing to give ourselves over to justice as an act of care. references assis, mariana prandini, angela henderson, lindsey maccallum, ian reilly, ellen shafner, and scott stoneman. 2023. widening scripts: cultivating feminist care in academic labor. n.p.: punctum books. jackson, zakiyyah iman. 2020. becoming human: matter and meaning in an antiblack world. new york: new york university press. piepzna-samarasinha, leah lakshmi. 2018. care work: dreaming disability justice. vancouver: arsenal pulp press. puar, jasbir. 2017. the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. durham, nc: duke university press. spade, dean. 2020. mutual aid: building solidarity during this crisis (and the next). london: verso books. author bio j. logan smilges is an assistant professor of english language and literatures at the university of british columbia. led by commitments to transfeminism and disability justice, their scholarship and teaching lie at the nexus of queer/trans disability studies, rhetorical studies, and the history of medicine. they are the author of queer silence: on disability and rhetorical absence (university of minnesota press, 2022) and crip negativity (university of minnesota press, 2023). their other writing can be found in transgender studies quarterly, disability studies quarterly, women’s studies quarterly, college composition and communication, rhetoric review, and elsewhere. book review | just care: messy entanglements of disability, dependency, and desire, by akemi nishida (temple university press, 2022) references author bio six ways of looking at fractal mechanics clancy, erin. 2024. “the fantasy of anorexia: historical entanglements of evolutionary thought, food restriction, and curative imaginaries.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1– 21. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © erin clancy, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license the fantasy of anorexia: historical entanglements of evolutionary thought, food restriction, and curative imaginaries erin clancy university of wisconsin-madison eclancy2@wisc.edu abstract there has been a recent increase in literature that critically engages how anorexic people experience their symptoms and challenges the current approaches to recovery in treatment centers. yet, this work does not grapple with transnational scientific histories of the medicalized construction of eating disorders that affect who is able to be legible as eating disordered. doing so (re)naturalizes anorexia as a disease that predominantly affects white girls and women, reinforcing erasures of those not easily interpellated into anorexic subjective positions. i address this gap through a disability studies and queer science studies grounding. i analyze early french writings on anorexia’s emergent forms, us dietetics in the burgeoning domestic science movement, and the differential pathologization of body size in the context of evolutionary thinking on capacity, debility, and nervousness. in doing so, i argue that anorexia nervosa emerges through racist sciences that spread and transformed across us-euro imperial medical geographies, effectively functioning as a curative approach to the contradictions between white supremacist securitization of whiteness and its reproductive futurities. this paper highlights implications for present eating disorder diagnostic norms, re-situating them in a broader geohistorical context during which hierarchies of ability and personhood were organized through race, gender, and capacity. mailto:eclancy2@wisc.edu original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 2 keywords eating disorders, cure, capacity, disability introduction despite scholarship that demonstrates the prevalence of food restriction and other disordered eating practices in black, latinx, and indigenous communities (cheng et al. 2019; kilpatrick, ohannesian, and bartholomew 1999) and activist efforts to highlight the experiences of underrepresented populations in eating disorder narratives and treatment spaces (e.g., nalgona positivity pride and the fedup collective), the hegemonic image of eating disorders continues to be the emaciated, white anorexic girl (ferreday 2011). this stereotypic population continues to also make up the largest percentage of those diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, perpetuated by racist medical practices: physicians are less likely to ask black, indigenous, and latinx people and those considered “overweight” about eating disorder symptoms, provide them an eating disorder diagnosis, or to recommend them for treatment (goel et al. 2022; gordon et al. 2006; sonneville and lipson 2018). treatment is still developed to serve this singular population (meraji 2019), while “obesity” is fixed primarily in the bodies of black women (strings 2015). this cultural-medical imaginary can be understood in the terms of what feminist disability scholar ellen samuels (2014) calls “fantasies of identification.” she argues that in the face of the increasing inability to determine a person’s race in the nineteenth-century united states, “fantasies of identification” emerged to “fix and merge” individuals into legible group identities (2014, 6). these fantasies emerge and are sustained by both cultural and scientific discourses. in the case of anorexia nervosa, which was medicalized in the same period, these entanglements include medical writings on nerves and the digestive organs, cultural and naturalist work that pathologized and racialized body size, and domestic science thought on dyspepsia (i.e., indigestion) and diet. this period’s constellation of discourses produced today’s commonsense understanding of who is affected by anorexia. in turn, this understanding forecloses pathways to professional care for black and indigenous people, people of color, and fat people while also reaffirming and justifying the discipline of diagnosed women via patriarchal control. i argue it is necessary to investigate the longer and contingent histories of anorexia as a disease entity to destabilize the formative logics and imaginaries that shaped it. this paper builds on the work of previous histories of anorexia nervosa by situating it in the broader histories of political and medical discourses and using a queer-feminist science studies and disability studies framing. helen malson (1998) and joan brumberg ([1988] 2000) acknowledge how the disorder original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 3 was predominantly, if not exclusively, reserved for white women of a certain class, and emphasize the anxiety around the sexuality of the self-starving girls. however, both silo anorexia from other coeval discourses and bodily sites of control—namely, race, gender, and disability. until this history is confronted, the material consequences of this fantasy will persist, as it informs “what the medical institution imagines possible for different bodies” (dumaresque 2020, 89)—that is, who can be anorexic. even though feminist disability studies and feminist science studies have not sufficiently engaged in the matter of eating disorders, scholars in these fields offer a rich conceptual frame for this project. for one, i apply disability studies’ methodological approach to diagnosis as an often-violent historical process that takes place through a curative imaginary that demands medical intervention (clare 2017; kafer 2013; kim 2017). following disability scholar and activist eli clare, diagnosis enmeshes with processes of treatment, cure, management, rehabilitation, and prevention, shaping “the ideology of cure” centered on elimination and control, with the goal of defining the normal and abnormal to secure “heterosexuality, whiteness, and wealth” (2017, 70, 74). for the us expansionist project in particular, diagnosis was used as a tool of anti-indigeneity and anti-blackness to capture land and labor, simultaneously rupturing nonsettler foodways and kinship structures, creating ongoing and systemic debilitation (baynton 2001; burch 2016; deerinwater 2021; mckinley and jernigan 2023; whitt 2021). anorexia has been limitedly engaged in disability scholarship, mostly with reference to the eating disorder as a disability (gaeta 2019a, 2019b; garlandthomson 2002, 13; tierney 2002). while this work is important for destabilizing the commonsense understandings of what is disability, it risks compounding the whiteness and privilege of disability and anorexic identity categories (gorman 2013; puar 2017) and elides the more fundamental question of how anorexic subjectivity itself has been constituted within/for the project of white supremacy. framing this study of anorexia in this way, i follow hester parr and ruth butler’s call for a disability geography that “perhaps should embrace the multitude of embodied and behavioral characteristics which are seen as socially stigmatizing and amenable to medical categorization and treatments” (1999, 12). this approach in turn allows for “studying power, privilege, and oppression of bodily and mental norms which is not dependent upon the presence of disabled people, yet is informed by social perspectives, practices, and concerns about disability” (schalk 2017). here, i aim to understand how the clinical entity of anorexia nervosa was shot through with anxieties of debility and white femininity within the system of (dis)ability. while a full genealogy of anorexia is beyond the scope of this article, i attend to evolutionary thought that undergirded both the foundational western european original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 4 writings on the european clinical entity of anorexia and us dietetics. within this body of thought, the capacity to be affected by one’s environment was understood as both a marker of civility (i.e., white male sensibility) and a threat of debilitating said civility (i.e., white women’s sensitivity) while racialized others were considered “impaired” for their ostensible inability to be similarly affected (schuller 2018). while the symptomized desire for thinness was not yet fixed to anorexia, the entangled discourses of dietetics, dyspepsia, and anorexia between imperial geographies of health enabled the two’s later consolidation. i hope to clearly demonstrate how the “master fantasy” (samuels 2014, 3) of anorexia that continues to circulate today was always necessarily white and feminine, both threatening and supporting the (re)production of a white nation and attendant imperialist projects. gut impressions racialized and gendered discourses of the gut, nervousness, and body size interdependently functioned to fix anorexia as a uniquely white feminine pathology. these discourses were constituted transnationally through europeannorth american colonial networks of medical-scientific thought, while having peculiar manifestations due to diverse geopolitical contexts. queer science studies scholar angela willey highlights this history in her writing on monogamy in sexology, which was “always transnational” and thus “must be understood as part of the colonial project and its experts’ fantasies about geographically distanced others and constitutive of its knowledges” (2016, 26, 27). these fantasies, too, positioned these others as temporally distant (willey 2016)—fixing them in the past and thus incapable of evolutionary progress or rehabilitation. i apply willey’s framing to anorexia nervosa, highlighting the flows of evolutionary thought that racialized and taxonomized body size and the capacity to be affected, with particular attention to the shift in affectability and nervousness discourses to the gastral-intestinal nerves. the naturalist writings jean-baptiste lamarck (1744–1829) and george buffon (1707–1788) allowed for the later nineteenth-century naturalization of fantastical ideas of the colonial other and the justification of colonialism, the settler state, and slavery. their influential work on impression theory linked the nervous system and environmental thinking that would be “fill[ed] out and buttress[ed]” by theories of biologization of race in france (strings 2019, 85; schuller 2018). i analyze the early french writings on emergent forms of anorexia, us dietetics in the burgeoning domestic science movement, and the pathologization of body size (both “overweight” and “extreme scrawniness”) together in the context of this evolutionary thinking. the subsections distinguish between the two sites of france and the united states. by doing so, i emphasize the ways in which the latter’s conditions both helped reify anorexia as white and facilitated the diagnostic entity’s attachment to the (white) desire for thinness. the distinction is necessary since the two geographical sites have decidedly different biopolitical original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 5 contexts. by biopolitics, i refer to the shift in state governance that tied the health and regulation of the individual’s biological processes to the control of the nation’s populations (schuller 2018). as kyla wazana tompkins (2012) has noted, biopolitics in the united states must be theorized differently from the original european context in which foucault was situated. this necessity is born of the nation’s contexts—namely, the burgeoning settler-colonial state built on the dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples; the kidnapping and enslavement of african peoples on plantations and subsequent postbellum life; the late nineteenth-century immigration flows from italy and russia; and developing notions of american exceptionalism (clare 2017; samuels 2014; strings 2019). nervousness and impression scholars have addressed the importance of nervous disorders as feminized in the medicalization of anorexia nervosa. however, there has not been an analysis of how this white feminine nervousness in anorexia functions within the broader schema of racial thinking on affectability, capacity, and debility—all of which are central to the contemporary conceptualizations of the nervous system. here i draw on the work of feminist science studies scholar kyla schuller, whose work illuminates how “impressibility discourse” was crucial to the interdependent taxonomies of racial and sexual difference (2018, 4). as schuller states, “impressibility brought...older ideas of bodily mutability into concert with the new geological and evolutionary theories of time and the new concept that reproduction involves the transfer of heredity, an innate but not immutable biological substance” (10). the biologization of impression theory via the nervous system and, importantly, the extension of this system to the gut naturalized the white woman’s nervous predisposition to pathology, which was intensified through poor alimentary habits. for emergent anorexia discourses, i argue this predisposition positioned the hysteric figure as uniquely vulnerable to the specific form of debilitation that emerged through food restriction and subsequent emaciation. further, this form of debilitation was subtended by a curative imaginary. while the whiteness of the patients is implicit in these texts, their femininity and the role it plays in their debilitation is centralized. impression theory shaped early understandings of human heredity, since accumulated impressions were inherited by biological kin, such that “individual experience radiated across time, linking the organism’s history of self-discipline to the generational outcome of the species” (schuller 2018, 48–49). in this theory, then, individuals are oriented toward both the past (the previous generation’s disposition influencing the present) and the future (the present person’s disposition determining the next generation). when self-discipline was not achieved, patriarchal discipline and surveillance intervened. this discipline was naturalized in impression theories. while white men could control how they were affected and improve as a result, white women were considered to always be at original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 6 risk of being too sensitive, too affected, by external impressions. this risked her degeneration and madness, thus justifying her disciplining. for example, and as will be expanded on below, french physicians charles lasègue (1873) and louisvictor marcé cited “the influence of sensations” and “insanity from hereditary antecedents” in relation to the vulnerability of women to anorexia and related nervous disorders, which justified the forced feeding or stomach pumps to administer calories (marcé 1860, quoted in malson 1998, 61). while nervousness related to hypochondria and thinness would also intermittently figure into anxieties around (white) men’s virility, there is minimal evidence of young men receiving such forced treatments (malson identifies two cases). this signals a lack of urgency around the intervention into and control over boys and young men’s diets. as sabrina strings (2015, 2019) highlights, this disciplining of white femininity was codependent with the degradation of black women via sensualism that marked them as “grotesque” and “deadly.” strings analyzes this codependency as linked to a growing naturalization between body size and racial categories, but it is also bound to these theories of affectability. where young white women were often pathologically sensitive but able to be controlled and rehabilitated, other racialized populations and black women in particular were considered to be in “an impaired state of throwing off affects but being incapable of being affected by impressions themselves” (schuller 2018, 13). this understanding was built on earlier discourses in relation to corpulence and race via humoral theories, in which dark skin was a result of an excess of black bile, which could “cause gastrointestinal disorders and weight gain” (strings 2019, 85). from this, black women especially were considered unable to control their consumption and embodied a deadly sensualism (strings 2015). together, a “fantasy of the racialized body” formed, which rendered populations from africa and the americas as disabled beyond rehabilitation. that is, they were simultaneously understood to be unable of cultivating sensibility in the present and in future generations and were thus positioned as ideal “mechanistic” enslaved laborers for the development of capitalism (schuller 2018, 14). more specifically, in the late nineteenth-century united states, “food moralism” undergirded virtues of “individual self-control, hard work, and restraint,” which were foundational for citizenship, though the understood possibility of achieving a citizened-level of self-control was unevenly distributed (dupuis 2015, 18). accordingly, white women could be enrolled in projects of moral reform (e.g., the temperance movement) and domestic science didactics, and thus in projects of rehabilitation (of the self and/or others). whereas, black freedmen, for example, were barred from citizenship due to the belief of black people as unable to control their bodies or consumption (dupuis 2015; strings 2019)—a longstanding stereotype that still materially affects the livelihoods of black people in the united states, as strings (2015) and anna mollow (2017) have argued. relatedly, the us original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 7 settler project that disrupted indigenous kinship ties and relations to land hinged upon the hysterization of customs, such as the ghost dance, and the institutionalization of indigenous people in part based on heredity: “that they came from a family with presumed inherent mental defects” (burch 2016, 370; whitt 2021). these forms of social control and incarceration signal how white women were recuperated into the us settler project while black and indigenous people were demarcated for different forms of elimination as impression and affectability discourses circulated. within this context, a western european psychiatric cohort secured anorexia’s position as a nervous disorder that exemplified the biological sensitivity of the white woman. in dominant anorexia histories, scholars link writings in france and england to the united states in the late nineteenth-century (e.g., brumberg [1988] 2000; hepworth 1999; malson 1998). it is accepted that the earliest medical writings on what today would be diagnosed as anorexia nervosa were published in 1873 by english physician william w. gull (on “apepsia hysterica”) and french physician ernest-charles lasègue (“un cas d’anorexie hystérique”) (malson 1998; brumberg [1988] 2000; lester 2019). while it appears lasègue did not publish more on hysterical anorexia, he reportedly treated “more than 200 cases” of it (vandereycken and van deth 1991, 906). scholars also argue french psychiatrist louis-victor marcé described conditions akin to the eating disorder as early as 1860 via a case of dyspepsia-cum-insanity (malson 1998; silverman 1989; trede et al. 2009). each of these men “discovered” a unique symptomatology in the tensions, interstices, and entanglements of hysteria, hypochondria, and nervous dyspepsia (malson 1998). indeed, lasègue first assigned anorexia as a subset of hysteria. gull, conversely, argued anorexia was akin to but distinct from hysteria. it is no surprise that anorexia emerged from hysteria, since gastric and appetite symptoms, along with amenorrhea,1 were included in a “catalogue of symptoms that ran to seventy-five pages” for the disorder (briggs 2000, cited in dumaresque 2020, 94; malson 1998). importantly, though, these men do not identify thinness as a motivating desire for food restriction; this symptom was not in the hysteria catalogue, though hysterics were known for their slenderness. jean-martin charcot would be one of the first to so in the 1890s, identifying the symptom as one l’idée fixe that emerged from the disease. though the earlier writings went largely unnoticed by the broader medical community, they were well received in certain circles, such as that of charcot at the salpêtrière, famous for research on and demonstrations of hysterical women (court and kaplan 2016; hustvedt 2011). in this period (1870s–1890s), there were contemporaneous shifts in the conceptualizations of hysteria and the nervous system that left space for physicians, psychiatrists, and neurologists to consider disordered eating and digestive issues as unique disease entities tied to the issues of nervousness, rather than just symptoms (williams 2007). for one, the uterus was no longer the site of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 8 hysteria and was instead located in the nervous system (hustvedt 2011). this shift was in large part due to the work of charcot at the salpêtrière. however, charcot continued to exclusively study women and only involve them in the theatrics of hysteria. he thus reinforced the idea that hysteria was a uniquely womanly disorder, despite stating otherwise (hustvedt 2011; malson 1998). the “master fantasy” (samuels 2014, 3) of the white woman discursively shifted to, as malson suggests, pathologize white women’s “entire nervous system” (1998, 58). schuller (2018) instead emphasizes the importance of the pinnacle of sexed nervous sensitivity, the vagina, as a site of analysis. yet both discount the specificities of the digestive system as it was incorporated into the nervous system. elizabeth a. williams argues that by 1870, a “new science of nerves” had emerged in france that situated “appetite, eating, and digestion within the sway of the central nervous system” (2007, 56). this shift in the medical landscape can be seen in other nineteenth-century physicians’ attribution of “food aversion to disturbances in the gastric nerves” (malson 1998, 55) and in debate between figures such as lasègue and gull on the distinctiveness of anorexia, as well as marcé’s proto anorexia. food restriction no longer had an unknown origin but could be located in the gastro-stomach nerves: a prime site of affectability. in these writings, addressing the patient’s illness medicalizes the individual’s condition while situating her debilitation as an accumulation of the past and a threat for the future. marcé understood today’s anorexia nervosa as dyspepsia morphed into a hypochondria delirium (i.e., insanity). situating the illness as hypochondrial rather than organic (i.e., there is no apparent abnormality in the biomedical body) frames his interpretation and anxieties around the feminine subject. in his report, he makes observations on several young girls who have resisted eating, for one of two reasons: either a “distaste for food” or painful digestion “accompanied with flatulence, lowness of spirits, and discomfort” (marcé 1860, quoted in silverman 1989, 833). he notes, “these two varieties of dyspepsia, which are very common, when they occur in young subjects predisposed to insanity from heredity antecedents, and rendered still more impressionable by that profound nervous disturbance which accompanies the establishment of the menstrual functions, may…determine a state of partial delirium” (marcé 1860, quoted in silverman 1989, 833). these forms of dyspepsia are not unique to young women, yet marcé suggests that when they occur in young women at the onset of puberty, they have more detrimental effects. the commencement of menstruation renders the girl more vulnerable to being impressed. therefore, he suggests, what in boys and men is normal becomes a threat of insanity in girls and women. further, he cites a predisposition “to insanity from hereditary antecedents,” which emphasizes the factor of inherited traits in the development of this peculiar transformation of dyspepsia. the young girl’s present state is informed by the habits and sensitivity of previous generations. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 9 the environment of the afflicted girl was an early contributor to considerations of influences on the illness. this connection is clear in lasègue’s foundational 1873 text, which is couched in similar concepts as marcé’s, as they were in the same milieu (walusinski 2020). in the text, he details what he understands as the standard progression of hysterical anorexia. he too notes the illness’s distinction from all known forms of dyspepsia and asks, “is it not only the reflex impression of a perversion of the central nervous system” (lasègue [1873] 1997, 493)? in line with impression discourse, lasègue argues, “there is another positive law that hysteria is subject to the influence of the surrounding medium, and that the disease becomes developed and condensed so much the more as the circle within which revolve the ideas and sentiments of the patient becomes more narrowed. the fault does not altogether lie in a pathological vitiation of disposition” (494– 95). in other words, the hysteric is a consequence of being overly affected by her environment and being unable to properly channel the effects of those impressions. in the hysterical anorexic, this becomes exacerbated further by the specific symptom of food restriction. lasègue’s above remark—in which “vitiation of disposition” refers to the impairment and debasement of her qualities of character and mind—stresses how the girl’s sickness is co-produced through her environment. this acknowledgment does not depathologize the girl, since white women’s nervous predisposition toward insanity had been established. as a result, when treating early cases of anorexia, it was ubiquitously encouraged to remove the girl from her home and family. this step was the first of three, the other two mandating fixed institutional routines and hierarchies of patients, staff, and doctors—where doctors and staff had an “authoritative relationship over patients” (mistura 1997, 106). wellness and recovery of the anorexic were gauged by the patient’s willingness to eat as well as the amount of weight restored. the lack of will to regulate the self results in emaciation, which is considered both a physical and affective debility. paternal authority was thus justified by the patient’s lack of interest in recovering and was supported by curative imaginary, which “not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention” (kafer 2013, 27). this imaginary in turn produces violent and sometimes nonconsensual forms of “care” and makes clear that the hysterical anorexic’s well-being is gauged by her adherence to this imaginary—that is, to normative behaviors and appearance. marcé closes his paper noting, “this form of hypochondria is the index of a nervous predisposition which cannot be noticed without a feeling of uneasiness as to the intellectual future of the subject…the sickly predominance of the nervous system is kept up by the impoverishment of the blood which results from imperfect nutrition; and so long as patients will not apply their will to nourish themselves in a suitable manner, it will be impossible to reckon upon a solid cure and safety against all danger of relapse” (1860, quoted in silverman 1989, 834). this passage demonstrates the entanglement of the nervous system, diet, and individual will in relation to an anticipated future. marcé original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 10 understands the young girl as prone to lack the individual capacity to act in a way that will stem further sickness or impoverishment.2 the primary site of concern here is the nervous system, which is linked to the anxiety around her “intellectual future.” intellectual here refers to her mental capacity to participate in her social and cultural roles. proper alimentation becomes crucial for the securement of the proper subject. failure to nourish oneself becomes a woman’s willful failure to secure said subjectivity. lasègue writes, “what dominates in the mental condition of the hysterical patient is, above all, the state of quietude—i might almost say a condition of contentment truly pathological. not only does she not sigh for recovery, but she is not ill-pleased with her condition, notwithstanding all the unpleasantness it is attended with” ([1873] 1997, 495). in this quote, the hysterical anorexic’s will is pathologized. the anorexic girl resists the curative imaginary and what alison kafer calls “curative time,” which suggests “the only appropriate disabled mind/body is one cured or moving toward cure” (2013, 28). accordingly, when resistance to cure becomes part of the illness,3 as seen in lasègue’s statement, pathways to cure come to necessitate medical discipline and surveillance of her. in this treatment model, medical authorities justified “often appalling ‘treatments’ ‘in utter disregard’ of women’s objections” that involved forced-feeding, enemas, and other forms of “moral control” (malson 1998, 72). marcé himself encourages these tactics: “if the refusal of food continues notwithstanding these efforts, it becomes necessary to employ intimidation, and even force” (1860, quoted in silverman 1989, 834). recovery was gauged by the patient’s willingness to eat as well as the amount of weight restored. if she is fed, she can be rehabilitated from debilitation, and should have the will and capacity to control her nervous disposition. the urgency of curative time in these cases of food restriction was crucial in discussions of the possibility of cure and rehabilitation. as marcé suggested above, there is no reliable, concrete cure, while lasègue believed that “once established, the relative or complete cure is maintained” ([1873] 1997, 496). marcé writes after describing how his patients were “reduced to skeletons” that “the nervous predisposition increases with the debility of the organism; the affective sentiments undergo alteration, and all intellectual energy centres round the functions of the stomach” (1860, quoted in silverman 1989, 833). similarly, lasègue states, “emaciation makes rapid progress, and with it the general debility increases” before continuing to describe the physical effects and the patient’s inability to leave bed ([1873] 1997, 495). over a short period of time, the window of cure closes, again justifying early and intensive intervention to recuperate her “intellectual energy.” in our current neoliberal context, debility and capacity function dichotomously, such that “those ‘folded’ into life are seen as more capacious or on the side of capacity, while those targeted for premature or slow death are figured as on the side of debility” (puar 2017, 13). jasbir puar destabilizes this binary in part by considering figures who can pass through these categories and asks, “which debilitated bodies can be reinvigorated for original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 11 neoliberalism, and available and valuable enough for rehabilitation, and which cannot be?” (2017, 13). while in the late nineteenth-century context, capacity and debility functioned within different political and medical frames than today, the two concepts function in a similar way—not in the name of neoliberalism, but for the white supremacist regimes that propelled the growth of capitalism. the debilitated anorexic figure in need of rehabilitation is imbricated in these regimes. dietetics and body size turning to the us context, i argue the twinning discourses of dietary science and the racialized thin-fat dichotomy into which anorexia nervosa was inserted resulted in a contingent merging of the eating disorder and the white desire for thinness. this merge hinges upon a logic of cure that “is imagined beyond the medical realm” and “operates with the social compulsion of gender conformity and heterosexuality” that is in service to white settler futures (kim 2017, 10). as mentioned above, the us context is decidedly different from western europe due to its position as a growing settler state, even while settlers adapted european racial thinking to their own ends. this adaptation includes a constituency of “neolamarckians,” who took up lamarck’s early work on impression to apply to the evolution and hierarchy of man (schuller 2018). this thought would come to underpin social and dietary reform movements (seiler 2020). at the same time, as the state expanded, there were anxieties around inclusion and citizenship. as biopolitical discourses were emerging, the site of this anxiety was predominantly in the body and gut. these discourses are in line with david t. mitchell and sharon snyder’s framing of biopolitics as that which “norms corporealities within categories of abnormalcy…as such, biologies are transformed into measured capacities assessed by the yardsticks of an increasingly medicalized culture” (2015, 10). demonstration of proper citizenship, and thus of whiteness and wealth, was demonstrated through capacitating digestion for all, and appropriate thinness for women. yet this desire for exceptional thinness would butt up against the anxiety of racial degeneration and the threat of reproductive futurities when women “overcorrected” and became too (i.e., pathologically) thin (strings 2019). the curative logics that are found in the didactic texts for housewives undergird this ambivalence around white women’s thinness and capacity. here i look to domestic science manuals for these demonstrations and anxieties, due in part to their predominant concern of dyspepsia, known as “america’s disease,” at the time (crellin 2004). the gendered nervous digestion discourse is interdependent with the believed physical manifestations associated with different dietary-induced affective states. poor alimentary habits were tied to poor christendom and citizenship: dyspepsia can make one lazy and slow-witted, preventing one from working hard or going to church (eaton kellogg 1882; strings 2019). corpulence was also associated with sluggishness and thus seen as a hindrance to the us imperial project. this association drove the desire for thinness in white populations, particularly of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 12 women. thinness became further linked to class and health status, and the consumer market exploded with diet and weight loss technologies, which also advertised relief from general forms of dyspepsia (dupuis 2015). consequently, weight loss and the appropriate weight was connected to unhindered digestion, which gave people the capacity to fulfill their social and spiritual roles. further, as fatness became attached to the debilitation of mental faculties and affectability, it was imbricated with notions of racialized otherness, particularly blackness in the context of newly freed african americans (dupuis 2015). according to strings (2015, 2019), the naturalized tie between corpulence and blackness had been developing for over two centuries through transnational slave trade networks, imperial travel writings, protestantism’s racialized hygienic ideals, and circulating reproductions of the “hottentot venus.” racial discourse rendered the body “too ‘legible’” as “body size was increasingly linked to racial category” (strings 2019, 79-80). this connection shaped understandings of the boundaries of inclusion and belonging at the scales of the body and the state, which informed politicized and moralized alimentary experiences (dupuis 2015; councilor 2017). that is, food and the affective states that consumption produced became crucial sites for the construction and negotiation of the boundaries of whiteness. as katherine massoth argues regarding new mexico settlers’ rejection of chilies, “acts of policing the boundary between the mouth and stomach assist in producing power and justifying constructions of racial difference and political inequality,” which were sustained by a (protestant) disgust that associated a visceral feeling (e.g., dyspepsia/indigestion) with a violation of morality and health (2017, 45). in the case that massoth analyzes, the anglo settlers avoided indigestion caused by spicy food to “separate themselves from hispanas/os and mexicans” (45) and secure their own whiteness, thus signaling their rightful place as a state in the nationalist project of expansion. the imported evolutionary thought discussed in the above subsection informed this dietary and digestive discourse, which was crucial to the binding of thinness and anorexia. the neo-lamarckians that “loosely” formed the american school of evolution understood race “crystallized as a relative index of the body’s degree of impressibility” (schuller 2018, 55). these thinkers spun widespread “tales of bootstrapping and divinely elected species” (seiler 2020, 21) that simultaneously scientized and moralized evolutionary progression along racial and gendered lines. notably, there was a shift in neo-lamarckian discourse at the same time the domestic science and home economics movements were taking shape (biltekoff 2002; seiler 2020). that is, neo-lamarckians turned their focus to us social ills. this us shade of evolutionary thought thus came to bolster the domestic and social realms such as the home, kitchen, citizenship, and assimilation. as charlotte biltekoff argues, “reformers [of the domestic sciences and home economics movement] saw themselves as producing not only standardized original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 13 recipes and economical meals but citizens; citizens who were to understand themselves and be understood by others as directly linked to the well-being of the social order through their alimentary behaviors” (2002, 64). in this sense, the housewife was expected to both secure the health and normativity of herself as well as her family to secure their nation’s social civilization. this role became particularly important as urbanization, immigration, and insecurity over race increased throughout the century (samuels 2014). while biltekoff does not mention impressibility or the central nervous system, they emerge clearly in the domestic science texts themselves, particularly as the nerves connect to the gut and affect(ability). the logics that enmeshed the digestive and nervous system manifested in these scientific-cultural publications that combined recipes and moral advice on alimentation. although white women would come to lead the movement, white men such as sylvester graham (1794–1851) and later john harvey kellogg (1852– 1943) were frequent writers of moral dietary prescripts that would stem the will to masturbate and prevent degenerative “scrawniness” of white women (strings 2019; tompkins 2012). these dietary regimes had strict guidelines that often denounced meat, rich foods, and large meals. a major figure in the domestic science movement was kellogg’s wife, ella eaton kellogg, who “followed the precepts of her husband” in her experiments and writing (lowe 1976, 260). her 1892 book science in the kitchen exemplifies the movement’s thought. she writes that “with the stomach and other digestive organs in a state of perfect health, one is entirely unconscious of their existence” (eaton kellogg 1892, 40). when poor choices are made, such as eating fat in excess or drinking too much fluid while eating, dyspepsia emerges. dietary choices informed digestion, but as digestive organs had been discursively folded into the nervous system, certain dispositions ostensibly informed both these choices and resulting affective states. beside eaton kellogg, the popular and exemplary figure marion harland propagated these fantastical, didactic narratives that play into the ideology of cure. harland has retrospectively been described as “the julia child, danielle steel, and dear abby of her day,” having written over seventy-five books across varying genres such as cookbooks, travel narratives, novels, and domestic manuals (smith 1990, 1). therefore, she had a wide cultural influence in the united states at the time. harland published eve’s daughters: or, common sense for maid, wife, and mother in 1882. throughout, she puts herself in conversation with a mother and/or daughter to whom she provides instructions, other dietary and social purity literature, and judgments on the upbringing of girls and the conditions of women. the framing of the book is cyclical: it begins with instructions on how to feed an infant and ends with delivery of a child. an explicit goal was to perpetuate the nuclear family through reproductive labor and healthy, spiritual lifestyles. she also underscores her claims with authoritative scientific language to interpolate women’s domestic responsibilities in the creation and original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 14 maintenance of the nation via individual bodies. harland writes of young women, “at her age, a thorough indifference as to what and when she eats, is a symptom of abnormal torpidity of the ganglionic nerves—those which carry on the work of digestion, blood circulation and respiration—or of abnormal excitement of the cerebro-spinal system” (1882, 145, emphasis added). “abnormal excitement” here linked to women receiving education, whose dyspepsia is triggered by “reading ‘solid’ books, or studying at mealtimes” (152). as evolutionary progress of white civilization was bound to both individual and divine will, proper alimentation and digestion were an important site of control to help capacitate said wills. in other words, domestic science texts were shaped through a curative logic via their focus on building habits that produce a dutiful national and spiritual subject across generations. the tie between alimentation, digestion, and spiritual obligation is clear in eaton kellogg’s text when she disavows the tendency to feast before or after mass: “the gorged condition of the stomach incident upon hearty meals…fosters headaches and indigestion and renders brain and mind so inactive that the participants feel too dull for meditation and study, too sleepy to keep awake during service, too languid for anything but dozing and lounging, and the day should have fostered spiritual growth is worse than thrown away. nor is this all; the evil effects of the indigestion occasioned are apt to be felt for several days” (1892, 549). in this instance, dyspepsia produces dulled and negative states that rendered people unable to fulfill their spiritual obligations. moreover, in the us neo-lamarckian evolutionary thought, the will to have proper, civilized alimentation informed the exceptionalism of us christian white citizenship: “what could be attributed to the organism’s efforts…could simultaneously be construed as the manifest will a deity who helped those helped themselves” (seiler 2020, 21). that is, alimentation and digestion were tied to evolution through a theological science of diet and will. further, the inability to perform a proper christian subjectivity and the “evil effects of indigestion” carried with them the threat of racial degeneration couched in the language of colonial racial stereotypes. habits thus needed to be developed at a young age, since, for example, “those children who show the greatest tendencies to instability of the brain, insanity, and immoral habits are, as a rule, those who use animal food in excess” (eaton kellogg 1892, 448). in other words, a mother should not permit her children to eat much meat for fear of individual and racial digression. at other points in this text, eaton kellogg condemns overeating or “stuffing one’s guests” that also causes dyspepsia; she calls the practice “barbarous” and believes that once appropriate, simplified eating is a societal norm, then “we shall be sufficiently civilized to demand pleasures of a higher sort” (33). in eaton kellogg’s logic, dyspepsia is a symptom of incivility as well as that which perpetuates immoral, “barbarous” practices. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 15 the moralized and racialized language embedded in discussion of the affective state of indigestion highlights the unstable, permeable boundaries of race that could be secured or threatened through dietary habits. like eaton kellogg, harland brings forth ideas of the “unconscious digestion” of the civilized man as contrasted to, quoting mary putnam jacobi—one of the first female american physicians and an advocate for women’s education, the “digestive torpor of the savage, analogous to that of ruminating animals” (1882, 144). the lethargy depicted by eaton kellogg above is here further tied to the constitutions of racialized populations’ bodies. slow, difficult digestion is more savage and less human: an assertion that works to reaffirm a value-laden racial hierarchy through visceral experiences of alimentation. a proper and evolved citizen is not affected by consumption, while those who are incapable of such digestion are marked degenerate. the anxiety and detailed rules around dietetics in these texts, though, denotes the continued need for individual will in addition to being further evolved/civilized. the restriction of certain foods and dietary behaviors are bound together through scientized understandings of digestive affects to discipline subjects. this restriction helps maintain “an approximation of normality through ‘habilitation’ (the acquisition of skills and abilities)” (kim 2017, 8). this normality is defined against the racialized other, particularly of the “image of the fat black woman as ‘savage’ and ‘barbarous’ in art, philosophy, and science, and as ‘diseased’ in medicine” (strings 2019, 211). these moral and scientific texts reinforced white supremacy fantasies of the knowable and controllable body that is necessary for securing biological and social reproduction. yet tensions between approaches to these reproductive spheres illuminate the anxieties born of contradictory desires for white women’s thinness and the securitization of the nation’s future progress. as with the anorexia discourse above, threats to these forms of reproduction were bound up with anxieties of debility and disability. this relation is articulated in harland’s engagement in ongoing discussions of white women’s education, diet, and health. promotion of women’s rights hinged upon the proper dietary habits that, if underdeveloped, would create the “permanently disabled graduates” (1882, 178) —that is, overly excitable, too thin, and infertile—that would result in them becoming unmarriageable. here ability is wrapped up with heterosexuality, with both ableism and heteronormativity shaping the proper white, feminine body. harland somewhat pushes back on these claims, though does express her concern over the dietary habits of educated young women. she relays an exchange with a young woman who had only eaten “three spoonfuls of soup, half a cracker, an olive and a bunch of raisins” (147). shocked, harland states this sustained diet is detrimental to the stomach, to which the girl replies, “the stomach is…a diabolical machine…it and its appurtenances are a vile clog upon human happiness and human progress” (147–48). the young woman understands the individual effects on/of the nervous stomach as hindering collective progress, while harland is stressed by the lack of “womanly beauty and vigor” and the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 16 looming possibility of “permanent invalidism” (148). vigor in the late nineteenthcentury context euphemizes sexual capacity and force, here suggesting that if the young women debilitated herself through her diet, she would be unable to have a productive social life. both the woman and harland are oriented toward the future, though in seemingly contradictory ways. accordingly, the nervous form of dyspepsia and the avoidance of it are couched in the same discourses of anorexia, priming the latter to converge with the us specific desire and anxiety for exceptionalized or disabling thinness. harland references the specific class of these affected women as well; those women able to strive for an education at that time were predominantly white and upper class. therefore, this form of dyspepsia, which was scientifically understood to both affect and be affected by the nervous system that extended to the gut, is delimited to the fragile, wealthy white woman. as the anxieties around the degeneracy of the white race intensified in the twentieth century, diagnosis of anorexia nervosa became more prevalent: a means to grapple with said anxieties. the curative imaginary that undergirded both dietetics and the rehabilitation of anorexic girls renders explicit the interrelatedness of the volatile nervous white femininity and the paradoxical nature of the role of white women’s thinness. recalling strings (2019), this imaginary continued to be dependent on the racial othering of larger bodies. both excessive and insufficient consumption risked white racial degeneracy; the former signaled further distance from whiteness and the latter marked the pinnacle of white femininity. accordingly, only the thin white woman would be vulnerable to this type of “dyspepsia bearing no relation to others” (lasègue [1873] 1997, 495) and capable of rehabilitation. conclusion in this paper, i have tried to highlight the ways in which the hegemonic image of the anorexic body is entrenched in centuries-old anxiety born of the contradictory desires and imaginaries of white womanhood. i examined two diverse but deeply interconnected imperial sites. in the nineteenth century, evolutionary theorists began to articulate the capacity to be affected and thus become further civilized over generations through the nervous system, which came to include the digestive organs. these discourses capitulated dietary habits into the scientized schemas of human difference that fixed thinness to whiteness and ability. consequently, incapacity was bound with fatness and black and indigenous populations. while white women in the united states were expected to conform through diet and fashion to the quintessential american “peaked” slenderness, there was the ability for them to “overcorrect” and become too thin, endangering their domestic and maternal capacities and the naturalized cis-hetero patriarchal reproductive futurity (strings 2019). this disruption of curative imaginaries and reproductive futures affected not only the girl and her family but the future of the nation. failure to confront this fraught history will leave the fantastical image of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) erin clancy, 2024 17 the anorexic effectively unchallenged, which will continue to play out in uneven diagnostic practices and access to appropriate forms of care. notes 1 amenorrhea is the irregularity or absence of menses. this symptom continued to appear as a criterion for diagnosis in the diagnostic statistics manual until the fifth edition was released in 2013. 2 the emphasis on individual will also positions the illness as wholly elective—a myth that continues today. in previous research, many anorexic people told me they have been asked, “why can’t you just eat?” 3 in her book famished: eating disorders and failed care in america, rebecca lester (2019) unpacks the implications of this tension in regard to accessing treatment and insurance coverage for anorexia in the twenty-first century. acknowledgements thank you to my friend anastasia todd and to my feminist disability studies seminar peers and dr. sami schalk for reading a different version of this paper and providing indispensable feedback early on. thank you, also, to the aag disability speciality group board for encouraging me to publish this piece based on another version of this manuscript submitted to the todd reynolds student paper award. finally, thank you to aimee bahng for the care she gave this piece as editor, as well as to the three anonymous reviewers for their supportive and generous engagement with it. references baynton, douglas c. 2001. “disability and the justification of inequality in american history.” in the new disability history: american perspectives, edited by paul k. longmore and lauri umansky, 33–57. new york: nyu press. biltekoff, charlotte. 2002. “‘strong men and women are not products of improper food’: domestic science and the history of eating and identity.” journal for the study of food and society 6 (1): 60–69. https://doi.org/10.2752/152897902786732635. briggs, laura. 2000. “the race of hysteria: ‘overcivilization’ and the ‘savage’ woman in late nineteenth-century obstetrics and gynecology.” american quarterly 52 (2): 246-73. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2000.0013. brumberg, joan jacobs. 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in the work of jean-martin charcot.” journal of the history of the neurosciences 29 (3): 299–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/0964704x.2020.1717230. whitt, sarah. 2021. “‘care and maintenance’: indigeneity, disability and settler colonialism at the canyon asylum for insane indians.” disability studies quarterly 41 (4). williams, elizabeth a. 2007. “neuroses of the stomach: eating, gender, and psychopathology in french medicine, 1800-1870.” isis 98 (1): 54–70. https://doi.org/10.1086/512831. willey, angela. 2016. undoing monogamy: the politics of science and the possibilities of biology. durham, nc: duke university press. author bio erin clancy is a phd candidate in geography at the university of wisconsin-madison whose research focuses on the intersections of feminist health geography, disability studies, and feminist sts. https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/356/459 https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/356/459 https://doi.org/10.1080/10673220902891802 https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.157.6.902 https://doi.org/10.1080/0964704x.2020.1717230 https://doi.org/10.1086/512831 the fantasy of anorexia: historical entanglements of evolutionary thought, food restriction, and curative imaginaries abstract keywords introduction gut impressions nervousness and impression dietetics and body size conclusion notes acknowledgements references author bio głowacki, becca rose. 2021. review of data feminism, by catherine d’ignazio and lauren f. klein (mit press, 2020). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © becca rose glowacki, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | data feminism by catherine d’ignazio and lauren f. klein (mit press, 2020) becca rose glowacki goldsmiths, university of london b.glowacki@gold.ac.uk dominant groups have long used information to maintain power. for example, taxonomies, categorizations, and statistics have historically been used to uphold existing power structures. today, however, data is faster, its scale is massive, and it is pervasive in our everyday lives—which makes catherine d’ignazio and lauren f. klein's data feminism so timely. data feminism starts from the foundation that power is not distributed equally: “those who wield power are disproportionately elite, straight, white, ablebodied, cisgender men from the global north” (page 8). building on this premise, d’ignazio and klein demonstrate how imbalances of power are reflected in examples of data biases and injustices discussed throughout the book. underpinning the text is a series of intersectional feminist concepts that can be used to address and challenge these relations of power. data feminism does not argue against data science; rather, it offers methodologies, examples, and principles to reimagine and illustrate how data science could advocate for justice. the chapters of the book are organized around seven guiding principles: examine power, challenge power, elevate emotion and embodiment, rethink binaries and hierarchies, embrace pluralism, consider context, and make labor visible. the authors discuss and develop each principle by reflecting on related theories and inspiring practices of data justice. as a whole, data feminism provides a methodological guide for developing more socially just book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) becca rose głowacki, 2021 2 data through its critiques of data practices, theoretical discussions, and practical guidelines on ways to implement change. in chapter 1, the authors explain how data feminism, as a methodological approach to interrogating data, is guided by insights from intersectional feminisms. core to this is patricia hill collins’s “matrix of domination,” which she first developed in black feminist thought in 1990. the matrix of domination is a useful analytic for discussing how power unfolds in and around data through four social domains: structural (law and policies), disciplinary (implementation of law and policy), hegemonic (culture and media), and interpersonal (individual experiences). attending to power, the authors illustrate who is represented in computing and data analyst jobs (spoiler alert: not many women at all, and very few black or latinx women). thus, people in the data science sector (those who design data systems and artificial intelligence models) have limited lived experience of sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination, which partially explains how these modes of inequality become hard-coded into digital infrastructures. illustrating and challenging these relations of power, the authors discuss scholar and activist joy buolamwini’s research on underrepresentation of black women in data science, and the problem of gender and skin-type bias within facial recognition software and its associated datasets. mariá salguero’s efforts to collect missing data on femicides in mexico through crowdsourcing also simultaneously reveals and works to fill a vacuum in official government records. chapter 2 details how the underlying power relations related to data can be further challenged through a commitment to working towards social justice. data feminism works towards dismantling structural power in data through a coliberation approach of mutual benefit that understands that the liberation of minoritized groups is also bound up with those in power. the authors contrast this with a “data ethics” approach that is commendable for addressing bias and the need for transparency and accountability but remains inattentive to unsettling relations of power. for example, propublica’s research into recidivism risk assessment algorithms shows how racism is embedded in the survey questions used to collect data, thus demonstrating the pitfalls of data as evidence for criminal justice decision making and how it limits reform efforts that would benefit all. the chapter ends with examples of data justice and how power is challenged through teaching young people data feminism (rather than data science). the local lotto project, a mapping project by young people from new york, exemplifies this through including learners’ lived experiences into statistical analysis. book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) becca rose głowacki, 2021 3 chapter 3 discusses how data feminism values and includes multiple forms of knowledge. the authors argue that knowledge comes from situated experience and must include feeling, emotion, and embodiment. feminist objectivity is used as a framework for understanding how data is situated, which includes how it is shaped by culture, history, and geographic location. critical of the “god trick”—a zeus-like perspective of data from above— the authors argue for situated data, based on donna haraway’s concept of situated knowledges, to account for the possibility of multiple perspectives in data. to illustrate this point, the authors introduce work by margert w. pearce, who created a map using indigenous place names. this map produces data that recognizes canadian cartography and reenvisages geography in terms of indigenous peoples’ languages and knowledge, including what they’re not willing to make public. the fourth chapter explores ways to reimagine binaries and hierarchies. data feminism questions systems of classification. the basis of many binary modes of categorization stem from computing system data types such as a boolean (which are either true or false). for example, when facebook requests information from users based upon a binary poll where the choice is only “male” or “female,” it is imbued with assumptions on gender and sex. many genders are not counted and rendered invisible. thus, the datasets that are produced from such binaries exclude multiple lived experiences. data feminism continues to outline its key principles in chapter 5 through a discussion of the need to embrace pluralism. it insists that complete knowledge comes from the synthesis of many voices, with priority given to local, indigenous, and experiential ways of knowing, and pluralism can be worked towards through actively and deliberately invite multiple perspectives into data analysis and storytelling processes. the authors distinguish between the practices of collecting data “for good,” where projects are undertaken in the public interest, with data “for co-liberation” (page 140). it is not enough to make a socially engaged data project. at their core, co-liberation practices are based on partnership and collaboration, and the goal is to develop pluralistic outcomes with data for and by communities themselves. co-liberation data projects tell local stories through data murals, such as in the work of groundwork sommerville, a nonprofit organization in massachusetts, or support indigenous rights through developing data-driven cases for land rights, as with the work of digital democracy. chapter 6 builds on ideas of pluralism by asserting that data is not neutral or objective, and that attention must be given to the context in which data are produced. for example, the global database of events, language, and tone book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) becca rose głowacki, 2021 4 (gdelt), which collects data from news and events, can easily be wrongly interpreted by journalists and researchers. large sets of raw data are misleading because they lack context or related stories such as political events that shape how and why the data is produced. d’ignazio and klein coin the term “big dick data,” a tongue-in-cheek academic term to describe the fetishization of data and a corresponding inflated sense of the technical importance of having more data. the numbers do not speak for themselves, and data feminism strives to communicate inequalities that are represented by data though restoring context. chapter 7 explores how data feminism values and recognizes the work that goes into data science through making labor visible. the chapter starts with a discussion of invisible labor and the “wages for housework” movement of the 1970s, while arguing for the need to consider all the labor that goes unseen in data systems. the concept of making labor visible extends into the fabric of the book, where the authors have attempted to show the different kinds of labor that has gone into its making. they do this through embedded detailed attribution throughout and a section acknowledging the work of community organizations by distributing royalties to several of these groups. in many ways, data feminism is praxis. it is not just making labor visible that is embodied in the text, but the other principles of data feminism are acted out as well. the authors examine and challenge power through reflecting on potential bias in the book itself. for example, they include an appendix chapter that describes their values and metrics for how they hold themselves accountable to the principles of data feminism, which includes their citational practice. d’ignazio and klein demonstrate accountability by punctuating the text with their voices, motivations, and self-reflexivity. the authors also released an early draft of the book for open editing in a public online forum (a reflection on the changes during this process is included towards the end of the book). the intersectional feminist methodology is both exemplified and practiced in the book. theories that underpin the book’s methodologies, such as haraway’s situated knowledges, or collins’s matrix of domination, are put into action through collaboration with community organizations and the open dialogical approach in the production of the text. the book gives an overview of many feminist concepts and data practices, and it provides an introduction to ideas such as bias in machine learning, community-led data practices, and research into surveillance capitalism. it is a useful text for data scholars new to intersectional feminist methodology, and could work well as a book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) becca rose głowacki, 2021 5 course book for both undergraduate or master’s degree students. but also, it is an excellent resource for feminist sts scholars, full of inspiring projects and references to explore further. references collins, patricia hill. (1990) 2009. black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and political empowerment. new york: routledge. haraway, donna. 1988. “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives.” feminist studies 14, no. 3 (autumn): 575–99. author bio becca rose glowacki is a doctoral researcher at goldsmiths, university of london. her research and practice sit at the intersection of critical design, computing, and pedagogy. becca is an associate artist at knowle west media centre, a resident of the pervasive media studio, and co-curator of hybrid art and technology festival, control shift. jerreat-poole, adan. 2025. “scraps, scrappiness, scrapper: crafting/coding as disabled feminist (world)making.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–23. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © adan jerreat-poole, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license scraps, scrappiness, scrapper: crafting/coding as disabled feminist (world)making adan jerreat-poole university of waterloo aljerreatpoole@uwaterloo.ca abstract diy maker culture is booming, and while mainstream spaces and practices often reproduce systemic injustices and inequalities, disabled queer feminist creators are crafting/coding/making differently, generating alternative futures and worlds that are accessible, ethical, and collaborative. this paper explores how disabled feminists engage with technology and design to create community and intervene in dominant narratives of able-bodiedness. my case studies move between digital and physical technologies, including crip/queer game design; the creation and use of masks (both prior to and during the covid-19 pandemic); and modding, hacking, and other fandom practices that build access into media, perform collective care, and challenge ableist attitudes. throughout this process of sewing together scraps, i hold onto a crip feminist understanding of materiality and the body: we prick ourselves with sewing needles or get migraines from staring at the screen; our hearts and bodies are heavy with the effort of surviving violence— digital and physical, slow and fast, personal and structural. keywords craftivism, cyborg theory, digital media, disability studies, feminist theory, game studies, queer theory patchwork feminism and diy activist histories the 2018 robots-versus-aliens blockbuster pacific rim: uprising offered viewers militarized, unqueer, anti-feminist cyborgs: soldiers controlling mechas/ giant robots file:///c:/users/joannemuzak/desktop/clients%202025/catalyst%20fall%202025/ce%20&%20uploaded/aljerreatpoole@uwaterloo.ca original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 2 in a technicolor showcase of violence, athleticism, and hyper-able-bodiedness. however, a disability-informed reading of the film can identify a seed of resistance, creativity, and solidarity in the relationship between makers and their metal suits. at the beginning of the film, we meet one of the protagonists, a fifteen-year-old girl named amara, who has built her own mecha out of scrap material. later, amara gets conscripted into the military and is given a giant robot body to operate in the war, but for a moment the film offers the possibility of an underclass or marginalized community creating and using technology in their everyday lives. amara and her relationship to the mecha, which she names scrapper, embody the disabled feminist ethos of crip making, modding, building, and hacking. i imagine scrapper being used for transportation over ruined roads and toppled infrastructure, carrying medical supplies and food between communities. i’m particularly interested in the choice of material⁠—repurposed sheet metal and older tech, scraps that would be thrown in a landfill ⁠—to create something new. the design itself, a very small mecha, makes the connection between human and machinic bodies feel intimate. i think about what we make out of scraps when that’s all we have. i think about what it means to be called scrappy, to get in scraps on the playground. i think about projects and ideas being scrapped. the word scrap resonates with me, deep in my bones, in the twinge of pain that dances down my sciatica nerve. we have made so much out of scraps and scrappiness. amara isn’t the only feminist on screen making, hacking, coding, and modding lives and environments: in the 2012 sci-fi action video game mass effect 3, edi (the sentient ai that lives in the spaceship) hacks an out-of-commission robot body so she can take humanoid form. in the 1982 film blade runner, pris takes control of an army of animatronic dolls in an attempt at self-defense and survival. the sentient ai voice assistant samantha in the 2013 film her evolves past her programming and escapes the prison of her code. unlike the pacific rim franchise, in which pilots have to mirror and perform the athletic feats of their mechas, the character wu zetian in xiran jay zhao’s 2021 ya novel iron widow controls a mecha with her mind. zetian is physically disabled due to foot binding, lives in constant pain, and needs a cane to walk. in the 2024 fantasy video game dragon age: the veilguard, adhd-coded elf bellara is the tinker of the group, restoring old artifacts and experimenting with new and old technologies and magics. these cyborgs in popular culture resonate with how disabled feminists are creating and using technology in their everyday lives in ways that are crip, queer, and feminist, and anti-capitalist, envisioning, crafting, and troubleshooting a different society and future. this paper explores how disabled feminists engage with technology and design to create access and community, to intervene in dominant narratives of ablebodiedness, and to practice collective care. my case studies move between digital and physical technologies, from crip/queer game design to the creation and use of masks (both prior to and during the covid-19 pandemic) as forms of activism and mutual care, to modding, hacking, and other fandom practices that build access original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 3 into media and challenge mainstream representations of disability. disabled feminist media makers and users are crafting collective care, activism, identity, community, advocacy, and justice through coding and cropping, hashtagging and liking. this paper itself is a form of diy patchwork feminism: stitching pieces into a pattern or theme, a shape or story; into something, maybe, to keep us warm. throughout this process of sewing together scraps, i want to hold onto a crip feminist understanding of materiality and the body: we prick ourselves with sewing needles; our hearts and bodies are heavy with the effort of surviving violence, digital and physical, slow and fast, personal and structural. instead of scrubbing out the marks, we let them stain the fabric, the screen, and the page. we learn their shapes. they speak to us. quilting, after all, can be dangerous. diy maker culture is booming. access to tools and skill sharing have led to a rise in make-it-yourself or fix-it-yourself mindsets; “professional and amateur inventors, crafters, hackers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, engineers, designers, teachers, or activists…are currently not only thinking about how to transform their material environments, but also taking their own steps in that direction” (nascimento and pólvora 2018, 928). public libraries offer repair workshops. universities offer courses on critical design and making. diy ideas are rampant on pinterest and instagram, and thousands of free tutorials are available on youtube. in part coinciding with the late-stage hipsterization of wealthy communities, handmade, handcrafted, secondhand, and homegrown are now popular, desirable, and fashionable labels. (as someone who grew up only wearing secondhand or homemade clothing back in the ’90s when it was decidedly not cool, it’s been strange to see secondhand stores transformed into vintage boutiques. this, of course, is due in large part to gentrification and neoliberalism, but that’s a bit of an aside.) the broader point is that maker culture has come to the masses and is proliferating in different ways⁠—some, in line with the dominant culture, while other movements and bodies create in direct opposition to mainstream society, challenging capitalist, patriarchal, able-bodied, colonial, and white supremacist ideologies. contemporary digital culture can also be understood as a form of crafting: we make, post, share, edit, mix, sample, comment, delete, and start over (maguire 2018; munster 2006; whitlock and poletti 2008). there’s a long history of feminists using crafting as forms of resistance, community building, and activism, from quilting circles to making banners for protests and marches to yarn bombing/graffiti knitting or hosting knit-ins (a craftivist twist on sit-ins). samantha close notes that “knitting was a means for political action, particularly during wartime, when…knitting circles were a venue for women’s political speech” (2018, 870) and draws a connecting line between historical knitting circles to contemporary antinuclear knitting protests. zine making—the creation of amateur, diy magazines, often politicized and countercultural—have a history in the 1970s punk movement and the 1990s riot https://philpapers.org/s/alexandre%20p%c3%b3lvora original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 4 grrrl movement, both of which revolved around broader diy practices and countercultural politics (gray et al. 2022). diy activist traditions can also be linked to the history of sonic weaving and intertextual play in black culture in north america, from mixtery to hip-hop and rap. shane white and graham white explain that “mixtery” was a form of cultural resistance and resilience used by african american slaves, “in which the lyrics of spirituals were composed, a process that often seemed to whites to entail an almost haphazard piecing together of texts drawn from the whole bible” (1999, 41). mixtery includes a “practice of weaving a variety of wordless intensifiers— shouts, cries, yells, groans—into a melody, translating, thereby, their strongly felt emotions into sound” (33). importantly, mixtery was a form of “communal, interactive singing” (28), centering community, collectives, and relationships in this cultural practice of resistance against white supremacy, slavery, and oppression. playing with pitch and scripture, reclaiming bible verses and practicing intertextual, collaborative music production, mixtery is a form of sonic and textual activist crafting. we can follow the politized tradition of mixtery into the development and evolution of hip-hop and rap. andreana clay notes that from the 1970s through the ’90s “hip-hop’s use of samples from previous rhythm and blues (r&b) songs as well as excepts from political leaders such as stokeley carmichael and malcolm x also created a ‘text of freedom’ for black youth caught up in the search for identity” (2003, 1348); again, we see the blending of texts and musical styles with something new to create a black art form that is explicitly politicized. furthermore, nathan d. abrams draws attention to rap’s reliance on mass media and technology, writing that “throughout rap music, the dj's skills are constantly emphasized and re-emphasized” (1995, 10). djing is an art of mixing, blending, and remixing—and here we now return to the use of digital technology as a form of politicized crafting. speaking of budget cuts in school music programs in america in the 1970s and ’80s, abrams adds that “obsolete vocational skills could be now utilized and applied to this new technological terrain as a forum for resistance and creativity” (11–12). thus, we return to the realm of the digital and the long history of marginalized communities explicitly engaging with technologies to create politically salient art as forms of community building, activism, and resistance to the dominant culture and material oppression. in our brief foray into the histories of resistant diy practices, we must also look to the trans histories of making, revising, rewriting, and transforming gender and the body. here i want to draw attention to ashley king’s concept of “handmade,” which she uses to denote “the intimate, expressive, and individually creative ways we commit to the materials on hand to craft bodies that work for us” (2019, 136). reflecting on the occasional use of asterisk next to “trans” (i.e., trans*), king writes that “one can read the asterisk as a kind of visual symbol for an ongoing original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 5 process” (142). rather than framing gender as a static, singular experience, king gestures towards the fluidity and malleability of gender, the way that trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid folks experience and express gender as movement and transformation, as a process rather than a final product. to me, the asterisk also speaks to the way that we deliberately craft our gender presentations in different spaces and for different audiences, at times making ourselves more palatable to the cishetero society (as a practice of survival), while at other times breaking gender norms and challenging the gender binary through deliberate use of clothing, makeup, hair, hand gestures, voice, and bodily movement. speaking of her relationship with her dog, zoey, king writes “that being transgender has revealed so much to me about how our flesh is shaped into workable forms and how thoroughly enmeshed we are in relation to others: humans, animals, and objects” (142). this reflection resonates with the intimate and complex relationships disabled folks have with other nonhuman animals, from guide dogs to support animals, and the queer millennial family of fur babies (my partner and i, who are child-free, understand our cats as our children and full members of our family, for example). disabled feminists—and many of us are also trans—are “handmade,” construing ourselves through our relationships with medication, access aids, technologies, and support animals (human and nonhuman). while contemporary mainstream maker culture in contemporary society runs along the lines of pre-existing power dynamics, queer feminist communities are making differently, following the examples set out by our queer and trans elders, shaped and inspired by the activists and makers that came before us. alexandra juhasz describes feminist queer media praxis and making as an orientation, intention, and process: “a doing and thinking, together, in the name of worldchanging” (2014, 7). these “risky acts” generate “fleeting instants of potential— ’revolutionary-instants’” (8). i want to hold onto the word “risk” here ⁠—risking our hearts and minds, our bodies and safety, taking risks through intimacy and vulnerability. when we enter any public sphere, when we make, share, like, or gather, we are at risk, and that risk falls differently on different bodyminds and social positionalities. as disabled makers, we risk encountering social and physical barriers to participation, and sometimes we risk our own health. these risks are compounded by the facets of our identities that are targeted by violent systems of power and violence; how racism, transphobia, and poverty interact with disability, exacerbating harm. as someone who lives with chronic pain, i often have to guess what my body can or cannot do, and how much pain each activity will cost. this is also true of digital labor: my hands curved around the screen or my shoulders hunched over the keyboard. our bodies have limits, and these limits are not static or easily definable ⁠—but we know them when we encounter them. and too often we are asked to work beyond our limits, until we hurt or break—in order to pay rent, to access health insurance, or to maintain a personal relationship. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 6 collaboration and nonhierarchical relationship building are frequently cited as central to feminist maker culture (bratich and brush 2011; gruwell 2022; savic and wuschitz 2018). feminist media makers and collectives share knowledge, skills, tools, and resources. we teach each other to code, to hack a circuit board, to use the sewing machine or 3d printer at the library. we make objects and spaces in ways that are queer and feminist. in an interview for an open-source educational resource on disability and digital media, dr. jenelle rouse (2022), a black deaf performance artist, explains that “‘maker’ on its own really doesn’t have a meaning, but if you break the word down, to make is to make something…this isn’t always done alone but in partnership with others who have the same passion and goals and are inspired by the same work that i am.” in the same project, d. squinkifer (squinky) (2022), a new media artist and game designer, tells us that “i am excited to learn more about the intersections between our communities and how we can collaborate and create liberation for all of us” (my emphasis). these makers draw attention to the communal aspect of both the creative process and the activist process, the need to work together in order to build a liberatory, accessible future for all of us—not just some of us. aimi hamraie and kelly fritsch insist that “disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life…we also harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability” (2019, 4) and that we engage in “criptastic hacking” (yergeau in hamraie and fritsch 4). we bring our meds, collapsible canes, and ramps with us. we use wooden spoons to turn on our computers and guide dogs to bring us our smartphones. i want to thread together the history of crip making with feminist maker traditions, knitting and crocheting, cutting and pasting, zine making, playing with linen or twitter threads. sewing protest flags, skirts, and wounds. the squares of my instagram page look like a patchwork quilt. sara ahmed writes that “feminism is diy: a form of self-assembly” (2017, 27). so is crip life and disabled making. diy digital culture has also led to a rise in disabled feminist making: bloggers, vloggers, youtubers, tiktokers, and podcasters are creating crip content for a crip audience (ellcessor and kirkpatrick 2017; jerreat-poole 2021). coding, playtesting, troubleshooting: crip game design game design can be a form of queer feminist maker praxis. mary flanagan identifies games as potential forms of “activist art,” writing that “creative experiments with games…provide a provocative look at how artists can challenge ideas, beliefs, and social expectations and subsequently transform them in their work” (2009, 3). bo ruberg identifies a contemporary movement in indie game development that they term “the queer games avant-garde” (2020, 1). ruberg tells us that “this renaissance is in large part driven by radical, experimental, vibrant, and deeply queer work from a wide-reaching and constantly evolving network of lgbtq game makers” (1). in their book, they describe many of these games as “scrappy and zine-like” (1) (recall how this article began, with scrapper original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 7 and scraps), and while incredibly diverse, each is committed to queerness and to challenging the cisheteronormativity of mainstream gaming culture ⁠—embodying activist art and creative experimentation. digital making is an important part of activism, community building, care, and revolution. in a conversation about feminist hacktivism, micha cárdenas explains “the importance of intervening at the level of infrastructure” (quoted in tanczer 2015, 7). building a game engine, system, community, or story is a technical, narrative, and social intervention into able-bodied cisgender technology and gaming culture. with increased access to game development programs ⁠—from the open-source program twine to low-cost options such as dragonruby game toolkit and rpg maker ⁠—alongside the rise of feminist and queer game jams and communities, more feminist/queer/crip/mad media makers are turning to games to create meaningful, critical experiences for players, and to communicate and express their own experiences, feelings, needs, politics, and sociocultural critiques. while elizabeth losh and jacqueline wernimont remind us that coding was initially understood as a feminine crafting practice, like cooking or sewing (2018, xi), computer science and technology have become firmly situated in the realm of masculinity, while silicon valley culture continues to be dominated by white, ablebodied, cisheteronormative men. game development emerges within this broader culture of inequality, with many barriers for marginalized game makers. indeed, in the past few years, numerous games studios have been exposed for their toxic, sexist environments that harass and drive women, feminine, trans, and people of color out of the industry. however, game makers from the margin have continued to design, prototype, playtest, and publish games, often within a community of feminist, anti-racist, and queer media makers. for example, the toronto-based group dames making games (n.d.) opened in 2012 as a site to support queer and gender marginalized game makers. founded in 2009, the hand eye society (hes, n.d.) also encourages game design, with an emphasis on teaching children. hes targets underserved neighborhoods in toronto, like jane and finch, a low-income area with predominantly poc and migrant residents. in 2016 hes hosted “extraordinary mind games” for mad/mentally-ill-identified makers. communities form as marginalized media makers support each other, teach each other, and challenge mainstream understandings of video gaming and maker culture. what makes game design “crip”? sometimes content, in other cases structure and form. importantly, crip game design interrupts mainstream ableist/sanist discourse and design. scholar and game designer kara stone (2018) writes that “the themes embedded in [the ritual of the moon] were experienced during production, as well: the effects of psycho-social disability (commonly labelled mental illness) on labor and art practice, queer discovery and narratives, and working through and with ‘negative’ feelings.” stone uses critical game design to original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 8 explore disability, mental illness, queerness, and affect. kaitlin tremblay (n.d.) uses the horror genre to explore the experience of living with mental illness and identifies her work as a “mostly true memoir.” al donato (n.d.) uses game design to teach players how to correctly and safely administer naloxone. neurodivergent, mentally ill, mad, chronically ill, and disabled game makers are coding their crip knowledge into playable experiences. disability representation in mainstream media tends to reproduce harmful stereotypes about mad people as violent and disabled people as tragic, passive, lacking in agency, and/or better off dead (anderson 2020; doell 2018). this is particularly true of the horror genre, which frequently features an asylum setting filled with crazy and murderous patients that the player must kill (jerreat-poole 2018; rodéhn 2022; stang 2018). disabled feminist makers interrupt these stereotypes by using games as platforms for knowledge dissemination, encouraging empathy, identification, or understanding, and by challenging ideas of what a game is or should be. many of these games are targeted at other disabled players, rather than an able-bodied audience. the game makers i discuss below play with form and content in ways that are queer, crip, mad, trans, and feminist. they challenge gaming conventions and genre conventions. they draw attention to the violence of norms and the ideologies of mainstream playculture. they offer moments of reflection, learning, understanding, and rest. meaningful choice or agency has long been considered a cornerstone of narrative design (murray 1997; tekinbaş and zimmerman 2003). however, crip game makers will often limit or get rid of choice. consider zoë quinn’s decision to cross out some of the choices in her choose-your-own adventure game depression quest in order to approximate the experience of living with depression; will o’neill takes a similar approach in actual sunlight, which offers a linear narrative of mental illness and suicidality. cultural slogans about “reaching out” pale in comparison to the embodied experience of struggling with mental illness. these games remind us that illness is typically understood as a singular, isolated, individual experience ⁠—and that under the colonial capitalist cisheteropatriarchy, it's the responsibility of the individual to self-care, self-soothe, find help, get treatment, get better, get happy, and get back to work. in reality, living with mental illness is much more complex and challenging than simply choosing to get better, and care and support should be a community ⁠—if not a societally ⁠—based system of support and access. game design can also crip/queer time and space. i’ll draw on two examples here: queers in love at the end of the world by anna anthropy and rest rest convalesce! by squinky, jess marcotte, and kalervo a. sinervo. game scholars have identified the queering of time in queers in love (chang 2020; lo 2017), a ten-second game that can be repeated indefinitely. players get to choose how to spend their last ten seconds as a clock counts down on screen: kissing, hugging, holding, and/or original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 9 confessing their love for their partner. the world ends. reset. play again. the game interrupts a linear narrative structure, subverts a win/lose mentality and binary, and “upends gamic fantasies of mastery over time, narrative, fun, and choice” (chang 2020). revisiting this game as a crip scholar during a global pandemic, the game collects other meanings and associations, including a specific rather than vague/generic apocalypse. the cycle of ten-second periods of intensity resonates with cycles of illness and health in the experience of chronic illness and living through and with multiple health crises. i also identify a thread between the end of the world and those of us who will live shorter lives or whose survival is uncertain and unstable. disabled communities are always living at the end of a world. turning to rest rest convalesce!, we can see how crip game design can invite players to inhabit the time and space of post-surgery recovery. the player is introduced to a small room: a person is lying on a sofa, a cat perched on their stomach. the room also contains a coffee table, a television, a window, and a houseplant. there are a few objects on the table, including a glass of water and a bottle of medication. gameplay is simple: you click on different objects and read the text that appears (accompanied by sound effects). for example, clicking on the glass of water results in the message “it’s very far to reach.” the second time you click, a different message appears. a third click, and the screen shakes violently, a warning siren rings out, and the text reads, in all caps “ow ow ow why did i do that ow.” the game does not end and there are no win or lose conditions. instead, the player inhabits this space indefinitely, becoming intimately acquainted with the domestic space of rest and recovery. the room is small, domestic, intimate, a place of rest and recovery ⁠—it can simultaneously feel safe and threatening. the game embodies the labor of rest and recovery, including pain and boredom. unlike queers in love, there is no ending ⁠—rather than compressed into a few seconds, time here stretches out, long and slow and endless. while the game does not specify what kind of surgery the character has experienced, the possibility of gender-affirming surgery casts a trans lens over the scene, making the game queer, trans, and crip. certainly, trans time overlaps with crip time in our shared experience of pathologization (being out of time or out of rhythm with the cis able-bodied norm). the constant sound of a clock ticking punctuates this experience, reminding the player of the seemingly endless time of recovery, which can be understood as crip and trans time. sewing, cutting, knotting: masks as queer/crip technology in 2020 the us centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) announced that masking was the best way to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus that had already killed thousands and disabled others through what became commonly termed “long covid.” crafters everywhere broke out our sewing machines, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 10 bobbins, threads, needles, and fabric scissors. we made masks for our friends and neighbors. we researched different patterns and adjustable straps, made threelayer masks or masks with pockets for replaceable filters. my mother sewed my first mask on her sewing machine. i prefer to sew by hand and taught my partner how to thread the needle and tie a knot as we stitched the elastics to fit around our ears. my mother taught me to sew when i was young, and i’ve used that knowledge to sew a “gender? yes/no” patch onto my jacket, to darn items of clothes when they get old and torn, and to adjust my first nonbinary outfits so the fit was right (so many vests!). she helped me with the vests, just like she helped me with my cosplay outfits, and when she was pinning the sides, i felt that there was an unspoken acceptance and understanding passing between us, that she was sewing her love and support for my new pronouns into my clothing just as she had sewn her love and support into dresses when i was mistakenly raised as a little girl. i understand masks as a crip and queer technology that underscore the inventiveness and skill of disabled feminists as we struggle to survive in a dystopia of ableism and police violence (which disproportionately impacts black folks and people with mental illnesses or addictions), forest fires and pollution, and viruses allowed to rampage unchecked across the globe. needles, thimbles, and sewing machines are technologies. modern sewing machines are even digital technologies, although my mother uses an older analog model. one of the goals of this article is to insist on the relationship between feminized, physical, domestic crafting and computation. we struggle to thread the needle and to read the tiny, futuristic font on the screen. we suffer carpal tunnel syndrome from keeping our hands curled into claws; we get headaches from staring at the screen or threading the needle. understanding digital media as a form of crafting opens up possibilities for reclaiming and reframing digital labor as forms of feminist and queer making and activism. like me, lai-tze fan describes her own crafting through her relationship to her mother. in her critical paper on research-creation as pedagogy, fan describes a 2020 course project in which she invited students to make masks for frontline workers and reflect on the relationship between personal protective equipment and maker culture (2018, 43). fan reminds us that “creators in the tech industry and craft cultures have more in common than many other fields of work” and that “they make through exploration” (42), identifying the creativity and critical thinking embedded in crafting/tech cultures. “the slow work of thinking about accessibility, resources, and sustainability” was gleaned from “the slow work, the slow contemplation of making and of mapping the cultural contexts and ecologies of critical thoughts” (44). fan concludes, “i am glad that i scrapped their research essay. i’ve never been offered projects of which i’ve felt more proud” (45) ⁠. the word “scrapped” reappears here, reminding us what we make from scraps, and what we can do and make when we scrap the cultural scripts laid out for us. fan’s original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 11 project also invites us to mobilize traditionally feminized labor practices as forms of collective care and community survival. while we can identify traditions of feminist crafting in pandemic mask making, disabled communities have been using, making, and sharing masks and masking knowledge long before a national health agency discovered them. it’s also worth noting the cultural salience of masking ⁠—while many north americans were confused, frustrated, and unhappy with masking, several east asian countries already had a cultural practice of masking when sick. i’d been in japan a couple of months before covid was announced to the world, and it was common to see commuters wearing surgical masks. masks serve many purposes for disabled, immunocompromised, and sick people: masks have been used to manage allergies, asthma triggered by allergies, and to survive in cities with poor air quality. leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha talks about the 2017 wildfires in the pacific northwest that filled the skies with smoke, and how tapping into disabled community knowledge of masking ⁠—both the knowledge of masking as a survival, access, and care aid, and where to get one ⁠—was a way of surviving and navigating the climate change-fueled health disaster (2018, 134). masks have been used to avoid infecting immunocompromised or elderly people with colds, flus, and other viruses that can be lethal in the wrong immune system. disabled communities have a deep and long history of masking knowledge and practice that predates the cdc’s announcement. masking also illustrates the necessity of asl interpretation and the limits, barriers, and violence that accompany the assumption that hard-of-hearing and deaf persons should or will lip-read. masks can also be understood as a queer technology. cdc regulations that run counter to medical knowledge, and the stigmatizing of covid, have parallels to the hiv/aids epidemic (zwalf and sperring 2021). since close contact increased risk of transmission, conversations about how to have casual sex during the pandemic rose in 2020. tips included wearing masks, having sex in positions that avoid face-to-face encounters (doggy style, for example), and british columbia’s centre for disease control famously advocated for the use of glory holes. while masks are not condoms and covid is not hiv, there are resonances between them⁠—shared moments, histories, practices, and affects that circle the queer body and the potentially contagious body. i also want to claim masks as an example of what jenny sundén (2015) terms “technologies of (trans-) gender.” as a nonbinary person who is frequently misgendered, masking has become a way of blurring the gender binary, and only when masked have i been read as masc, fem, and nonbinary. it casts doubt, makes it difficult to read and interpret the arch of my cheekbone or the shape of my face. is my chin fem or masc? do i have facial hair? the binary gender checklist that has become ingrained in how we read bodies is disrupted by the mask. the rise of masks as an accessory or fashion item further heightens its role as a part of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 12 gender and identity performance⁠—based on the pattern, i can signal that i’m a cat person, or that i’m trans, or what my pronouns are. the use of masks as gender tech resonates with the trans cyborgs and robots on-screen⁠—from the robot bubs in space sweepers, who saves up money for a skin graft (understood as a genderaffirmation procedure) to ada in ex machina using wigs, makeup, and clothing as forms of gender signification. in 2025 masks have become crip/queer symbols: those of us who continue to wear masks in public are signaling our commitment to access, containment, and collective care. this is read and understood by the broader community, which explains why some masked people have been met with anger, criticism, resentment, and even violence⁠—a knee-jerk defensive reaction by those who have chosen to unmask. i always feel in solidarity with other masked people, and this in turn helps with my anxiety when going out in public⁠—i expect masked people to be more respectful of personal space, more likely to use hand sanitizer, more likely to take antigen tests, and more likely to stay home if they have symptoms. hacking, modding, rewriting: caring fans and players recently, i complained to a close friend that surgical masks were too big for my face. she told me that she knots the elastic around her ears or attaches them to her ponytail to make the mask fit more securely. my mother routinely refits, tightens, or replaces elastics or ties on store-bought masks. not everything we use is made from scratch, but revising, altering, tailoring, modding, and hacking the original design are forms of creative, critical making that can be leveraged in the spirit of queer feminism and a crip politics of care. pivoting back from crafting to coding (but holding onto the histories, practices, and politics of crafting care), this section identifies the labor, skills, and knowledge of queer/crip fans and players who rewrite pop culture and media cultures. flanagan identifies three tactics of critical play: “unplaying, re-dressing or reskinning, and rewriting” (2009, 33). while flanagan’s examples revolve around doll play, these tactics resonate with how marginalized players reclaim space, play, and games, and/or break, critique, challenge, interrupt, or destroy elements of mainstream gaming and visual media culture. modders and fan communities have long been engaging in these tactics as they navigate able-bodied patriarchal gaming, from building access into games or gaming technologies to creating positive representation by telling their own stories through fan fiction. these players and fans are also makers, creators, and crafters. flanagan’s concept of “unplaying” suggests playing wrongly, badly, in a way unintended by the game designer. when i played davey wreden’s 2015 artsy, indie game the beginner’s guide, in the level “whisper” i was handed a gun and thrown into what looked like a traditional first-person shooter map (although the game did not require me to use the gun). rather than progress through the level, i lingered, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 13 using the gun to create a heart on the wall in bullet holes (jerreat-poole 2016). when i played valve’s 2020 sci-fi action-adventure virtual reality game half-life alyx, i picked up a shovel and used it as a performative cane to bring my out-ofgame identity as someone with a mobility impairment into the game world and narrative (jerreat-poole 2022). in the 2020 cozy management sim game spiritfarer, created by thunder lotus games, you play a character who ferries souls to the otherworld while growing crops, cooking, and fishing. at one point in the game, i was encouraged to deliver a character with dementia/alzheimer’s to the gates of death—and it was heavily implied that her disability warranted the final death. i rebelled⁠—i continued to walk alice to the prow of the ship and back to her quarters, to talk to her, and to cook her favorite meals (and while the game pushes a “disabled people are better off dead” message here, the system of keeping your guests happy through cooking, hugs, and conversation meant that alice remained happy). consequently, i did not fully progress through the game or complete the narrative, but that didn’t matter to me. i wanted to care for my aging passengers. i didn’t think alice was better off dead. this kind of play, lingering in the middle of a game rather than moving to the next step, performing the same tasks again and again, is enabled by the game but not encouraged. through this process, we tell other stories, stories that are made possible by the choices embedded in the game, but not necessarily intended by the game designer ⁠—stories that perhaps run counter to the game narrative or genre. in my refusal to play spiritfarer as linear and goal-oriented, and emphasizing caregiving, cooking, and comfort, i return digital gaming back to the field of domestic crafting. modding can also be understood as a practice of unplaying or reskinning, changing the visual appearance of the game ⁠—and thus the symbolism and representation of the visual medium ⁠—altering the code and the gameplay/ludic elements, or hacking/redesigning the physical device. for example, youtuber englishsimmer (2020) discusses a range of mods for the sims 4 that add disability representation to the game, including blindness, cochlear implants, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, and nasal oxygen tubes. moving to access, several players have created mods for stardew valley that alter the color palette of the game for people who experience eye strain, including a colorblind mod (chan 2022). exploring access in virtual reality, rebeccah redden (2018) notes that some players generate “3d printed lens holders for prescription lenses” and that “people have also built customized foot pedals, modded arcade joysticks, used voice recognition software, and even set up tumble mats to prevent falls.” we innovate. we make do. we take a harmful and/or inaccessible technology or environment or practice and we mod it. we can link the practice of modding games to the way we mod spaces and society more broadly—from adjusting masks to better fit out faces, to wrangling makeshift barriers to hinder the flow of airborne viruses, to dismantling physical and attitudinal barriers in our homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 14 “rewriting” is another practice of creative hacking, a way of imagining differently, in ways that are crip/queer. fans flock to fan fiction sites, forums, and blogs to create their/our own version of pop culture narratives, cripping mainstream media and sharing it with a found (or perhaps handmade, to return to king’s concept of trans identity formation) family and community. this topic was explored in-depth in a 2019 special issue of the canadian journal of disability studies titled “disability and/in/through fanfiction.” fandom theorist dean leetal (2019) explores the “activism of care, disability, and fan fiction” in online spaces, noting how fans of supernatural and the marvel cinematic universe craft stories for each other as an ethic of care. in my own play-as-work, i’ve seen similar forms of intervention and disruption. for example, the character aidan in the sci-fi video game series mass effect experiences migraines, which are underexplored in the games. however, there is an archive of migraine fan fiction where fans explore his experience as someone who lives with pain and needs rest and care (jerreat-poole 2020). similarly, fans of blizzard’s multiplayer first-person shooter series overwatch have been creating stories to delve deeper into the identity and experiences of symmetra, a character who is coded as autistic (cullen et al. 2018). these writers are engaging in what eve kosofsky sedgwick (2003) terms “reparative reading” by doing the creative and critical work of recovering and centering disability. often these stories are framed through rest and care (rather than the dominant overcoming or super-crip narratives told by able-bodied society) and are typically created by and for disabled people. real-world practices of creating access and practicing care also appear in these fan communities—from fan fiction narratives about bioware’s fantasy video game series dragon age characters quarantining together and masking during the height of the covid-19 pandemic to mods for the sims 4 that add designs for face masks. we flow between digital and physical, coding and sewing, imagining, writing, and building. fan communities form around these creations and the process of creating ⁠—members like, comment, and respond to posted stories, and friendships often develop through sites such as archive of our own, tumblr, wattpad, and deviantart. what we see emerging here is a maker community doing the critical labor of rewriting and reskinning games and media through the lens of disability justice. making crip futures: accessible design crip making is attentive to access as a dynamic, complex, and multimodal practice and process. accessible design is central to creating and sustaining crip/queer/feminist communities, activism, and futures. accessible design in queer feminist making and communities includes the physical and/or virtual meeting and maker space, the technology we use, and the media we create and share. ramps, non-gendered and accessible bathrooms, lights that don’t flicker or are too bright (potentially harming people with photosensitivities, concussions, and seizure disorders), fragrance-free spaces, table and seating options and configurations for a range of body size, shape, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 15 and abilities, closed captions, image descriptions, no strobing, and trigger warnings. this list is not exhaustive, but a starting point for thinking about how to create access in our feminist making spaces and practices. accessible design is a series of “frictional practices” (hamraie and fritsch 2019, 3): there is no smooth and easy one-size-fits-all, and universal design is and will always be an unattainable (but still worth aiming for) goal. accessible design is aware of and challenges the “normate template” (hamraie 2017, 19), that mysterious, imagined “normal” body that mainstream society is crafted for. it’s a process, like altering a dress to a new style or size every few years. ultimately, we want to create technologies and media with and for a range of disabled, mad, sick, and neurodivergent bodies, recognizing we all have different ⁠—and at times conflicting ⁠— needs. we want to imagine, design, prototype, and playtest communities and spaces (physical, virtual, and hybrid) that embody “access intimacy,” where we collectively “hold the weight, emotion, logistics, isolation, trauma, fear, anxiety and pain of access” (mingus 2011). this process is messy, difficult, intimate, vulnerable, emotional, and at times exhausting ⁠—but always necessary. we also need to broaden our understanding of access and recognize the many barriers to participation that exist across geographies and social positions. consider, for example, the necessity of free public library resources and services ⁠—including 3d printers, wi-fi, computers, and computer programs. over the past ten years, my university has stripped the computer lab for our digital arts program from thirty working pcs to five, and we are about to lose those remaining pcs and the lab space itself. if we are not prepared to offer the hardware, software, and training to our communities, students, families, and fellow activists, then we are not the future of ethical feminist technology. we also need to understand access as access to the means of survival: to shelter, food, water, and healthcare. chiara francesca (2022), a disabled queer artist and writer, reminds us that, “the biggest barrier has been accessing healthcare, accessing housing, accessing decent food… if those experiences take up most of my day i'm not left with much energy, time, creative juice, will power to do anything else.” this is where we need to return to squinky’s insistence that our critical work is to piece together a home for all of us, dismantling not only the cisheteropatriarchy in favor of a queer future, but all structures of violence and oppression, from systemic racism to capitalism. we must recognize that ableism is deeply intertwined with racism and colonialism, and that abolition requires the dismantling of both prisons and psychiatric wards/institutions. rather than fighting over the scraps left for us, we could be building something better together—as many collectives, artists, communities, and activists are doing. i like to think that after the events of pacific rim: uprising, amara and scrapper go back to their community and rebuild. i think about the affect and intimacy between hiro and baymax, a care robot crafted by hiro’s older brother, in big hero 6. i think about the relationship between ryder and ai in bioware’s 2017 sci-fi original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) adan jerreat-poole, 2025 16 game mass effect andromeda, and how the ai can alter their biochemistry in ways that are both helpful and harmful. i am building an archive of pop culture and realworld crip feminist cyborgs who tinker with tech, who map out ethical feminist possibilities for tech cultures and caring futures. sewing and soldering, hacking and drafting, sharing tiktok videos and threads, we make objects and stories and experiences and communities, we make change and we make do. in the dragon age franchise, “the maker” is the in-world version of a christian god, and it’s common to hear characters say “thank the maker.” i think about that, when i’m lying in bed, fatigued and in pain, watching crip/queer youtube videos or playing video games. i think about how much i want to thank the lowercase makers. references abrams, nathan d. 1995. 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treaty territory belonging to the six nations of the grand river and the unceded land of the haudenosaunee, neutral, and anishinaabe peoples. adan is an assistant professor at the university of waterloo, and their research falls at the intersection of disability justice and digital media. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i4.5895 https://philome.la/kaittremblay/stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-one-before/play/index.html https://doi.org/10.1080/01440399908575284 https://doi.org/10.18357/anthropologica6312021356 scraps, scrappiness, scrapper: crafting/coding as disabled feminist (world)making aljerreatpoole@uwaterloo.ca abstract keywords patchwork feminism and diy activist histories coding, playtesting, troubleshooting: crip game design sewing, cutting, knotting: masks as queer/crip technology hacking, modding, rewriting: caring fans and players making crip futures: accessible design references author bio     original research fluid-bonding and feelings condoms: ambivalent technologies of queer safer sex     chris barcelos university of massachusetts boston chris.barcelos@umb.edu     abstract there is an abundance of scholarship on knowledge, behaviors, and attitudes related to safer sex technologies and practices, including a growing body of work that analyses the politics of pre-exposure prophylaxis (prep). however, there is comparatively little research that applies a queer feminist science and technology studies lens to safer sex technologies and practices other than condoms and prep. this paper draws on archival research and thirty-two in-depth interviews with queerand trans-identified adults about how they make sense of safer sex practices and technologies, in particular gloves and dams as barriers. i argue that the social world of queer safer sex is marked by ambivalent technologies. for users and non-users, the main affective investment in using gloves and dams is one of ambivalence as they attempt to make sense of their own bodies, relationships, and communities while navigating discourses around risk and sexual health. ambivalent technologies are also entangled with discourses of risk, governmentality, and community care. attending to the social worlds of queer safer sex technologies provides insights that are not attainable through behavioral or epidemiological research.     keywords critical public health, safer sex, queer, transgender, sex education, feminist social studies of science     introduction the point of departure for this project began with my observations about the politics surrounding a specific safer sex practice germane to queer communities: the use of latex or nitrile gloves for hand sex (penetration of the vagina or anus with fingers or hands).1 among the queer folks i shared community with, most of them assigned female at birth (afab), gloves represented a highly contentious practice. some people swore by gloves and would not have sex without them; others kept a box under their bed just in case a lover requested their use. still others refused to use them, citing the lack of the scientific evidence to support their use and their complicity in the notion that queer bodies are dirty and need to be contained. an interaction that highlighted the analytic importance of gloves occurred when a friend, who knew about my research and occasional moonlighting as a queer safer sex educator, asked why i advocated for glove use: “you’re a researcher, so you probably know there isn’t any research documenting the effectiveness of using gloves for an already very low-risk sexual practice.” largely stumped by this question, i mumbled something about barriers preventing more than just transmission of infection and the need to think capaciously about what constitutes “safer sex.” the point, however, was well taken: the gaps between the practice of glove use and their relationship to scientific knowledge raised important questions about the social and political contexts of queer safer sex: in the absence of known clinical effectiveness in preventing disease transmission, what is the social significance of technologies such as the use of gloves and dental dams? what cultural or political work is accomplished by the affective investment in these technologies in queer communities? i focus on gloves and dams because they are objects generally signified as queer. of course, any person can use them regardless of sexual identity or behavior, but gloves and dams are seldom promoted to or used by heterosexuals. rather than asking biomedical, behavioral, or epidemiological questions about the efficacy of gloves and dams, the rates of their use, or how to better promote them, this article asks a different set of questions. my aim is to disrupt the focus of normative behavioral or policy research on safer sex by generating queer feminist science and technology insights into these technologies. drawing on my extensive archive of safer sex materials from 1982 to the present and thirty-two in-depth individual interviews with queer adults in the united states and canada, i explore the politics of gloves and dams through the “social worlds” framework and queer feminist science and technology studies. the social worlds framework originates in feminist sociological studies of science and technology. according to adele clarke and leigh star, the social worlds “theory-methods package” includes “epistemological and ontological assumptions, along with concrete practices” through which social interactions occur, “including relating to/with one another and with the various nonhuman entities involved in the situation” (2008, 117). i combine this framework with insights from queer feminist science and technology studies, which is concerned with the quotidian practices of meaning making that trouble, disrupt, and reconfigure assumptions about nature, difference, and worldliness—in my case, the queer disruptions of sex, “safer” sex, gender, and bodies through safer sex technologies such as gloves and dams (cipolla et al. 2017). together, these frameworks demonstrate how gloves and dams are ambivalent technologies entangled with discourses of risk, governmentality, and care in queer social worlds. the concept of ambivalent technologies helps us to understand why people use these technologies in the absence of known scientific effectiveness; it also illustrates the social and political significance of these technologies.   a short and incomplete genealogy of gloves and dams for safer sex although there is a growing body of literature that explores the social and political meanings of the biochemical safer sex technology pre-exposure prophylaxis (prep) (race 2015; betts 2021), there is little research that analyzes the social meanings of barrier technologies such as gloves and dams. survey research has demonstrated low rates of glove and dam use among queer/lesbian/bisexual women (richters et al. 2010; mccune et al. 2017).2 one international (though majority us-based sample) study found rates of consistent dam and glove use around 3 percent when giving or receiving oral or hand sex (rowen et al. 2013). low rates of barrier use among queer women are often attributed to the fact that they see themselves to be at low risk for sexually transmitted infections (stis). as power, mcnair, and carr (2009) argue, this perception is due to how queer women usually are excluded from the dominant social scripts of safer sex aimed at heterosexual people and cisgender gay men. what is more, there is little to no research demonstrating the efficacy of gloves and dams for the prevention of stis (richters and clayton 2010). although certainly not nonexistent, rates of stis among “women who have sex with women” tend to be comparatively lower than other than heterosexual people and men who have sex with men (mccune et al. 2017; rahman et al. 2021). the comparatively lower rates of stis and the lack of inclusion in mainstream safer sex promotion, combined with the unknown efficacy of gloves and dams and their low rates of use, has led some scholars to argue that they mainly serve a symbolic, rather than practical, purpose (richters and clayton 2010). in the early years of the hiv/aids crisis, gloves and dental dams transformed into safer sex tools through two intertwined social process: activism around the neglect of queer women in hiv-prevention efforts and the risk reduction practices of bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadomasochism (bdsm) practitioners. in the 1980s and 1990s, scientific, media, and even some social movement discourses positioned queer women as being at no risk for hiv/aids (hollibaugh 1998). women were often left out of early safer sex education efforts—along with being excluded from clinical trials and erased from official case definitions of aids (chris and pearl 1990). gloves and dams emerged as safer sex tools in part because people assigned female at birth had to take matters into their hands in the face of government and institutional neglect of their sexual health (barcelos 2022). the devastating loss of life and the grossly inadequate response on the part of government authorities and researchers during the early years of the hiv/aids crisis had ignited political organizing that revolved around safer sex and was deeply influenced by the politics of gay liberation and feminist theory (patton 1996). activists framed queer women’s hiv risk invisibility in term of the overall neglect of women’s health, a situation that persists today (logie 2015). activists also framed the invisibility of lesbians in the aids crisis in terms of racism and classism (chris and pearl 1990; hollibaugh 1998). gloves and dams thus became a practice of caring for self and community in the face of oppressive systems that disregarded queer women’s health (hollibaugh 1998). although the neglect of women’s health meant that there was no scientific evidence to back up their use, gloves and dams were tools that signaled a politics of care and resistance. this framing as radical community care was salient given how, then and now, media, social movements, and researchers have tended to frame women’s caregiving roles in the aids crisis in terms of their caregiving for gay men with hiv/aids, rather than themselves or each other (manlik 2022; schulman 2021). alongside and intertwined with gloves and dams in hiv-prevention activism was the growth of organized queer women’s bdsm/leather communities. historically dominated by cisgender gay men (rubin 1997), the 1980s saw the formation of sm and leather groups such as samois and later the outcasts that were rooted in politics of lesbian feminism.3 risk reduction has always been central to intense physical practices such as impact play or bondage, and bdsm practitioners were already using gloves for activities like fisting, piercing, or knife play that could involve blood-borne pathogens (samois 1982; rubin 1997; lawrence and queen 2000). the bdsm community was therefore primed to advocate for gloves and dams as tools for safer sex (lawrence and queen 2000). gloves reduced the risk of fluid exchange but also served the practical purposes of maximizing the slipperiness of lubricant or facilitating clean up. likewise, the emphasis in bdsm on the eroticization of objects helped to incorporate barriers into sexual acts. support for the use of gloves and dams for safer sex (not solely bdsm-related play) can be found in early leatherdyke texts such as samois’s (1982) coming to power and patrick califia’s (1988) lesbian sm safety manual. today, safer sex efforts unevenly promote the use of gloves and dams. although it is common to see their use advocated for in educational materials produced in queer communities (such as zines) or by lgbtq health clinics (barcelos 2022), gloves and dams seldom—if ever—make an appearance in the scientifically “evidence-based” comprehensive curricula approved for use in school-based sex education in the us. similarly, although some educational materials promote glove and dam use for people of all genders and embodiments, it is much more common to see gloves and dams promoted to people with a vulva/vagina than a penis. in my many years of professional work in health promotion and my scholarly research on sexual health, i have not once seen gloves promoted to heterosexual, cisgender people; occasionally dental dams will make an appearance, but they are usually sidelined in favor of the more common barrier, the condom. it is not just that gloves and dams are overwhelmingly promoted to and (sometimes) used by queer-identified people that signifies them as queer technologies; as i describe below, they also destabilize normative ideas about risk, gender, and scientific knowledge.   studying queer safer sex technologies the analysis that follows is based on thirty-two in-depth individual interviews (compton 2018) focused on behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes about safer sex in queer and trans communities and is informed by my extensive archival work on lgbtq safer sex promotion (barcelos 2022).4 the inclusion criteria for interview participation included age over eighteen years, residence in the us or canada, and self-identification as queer and/or transgender. i did not define these terms for participants and made clear that i understood these terms in their broadest sense. with the assistance of one undergraduate and one graduate research assistant, i recruited participants through social media, snowball sampling, and the podcast queering sex ed (https://www.queersexed.org/). although we invited participants across the spectrum of gender and sexuality, we did not emphasize recruiting gay cisgender men given that such a large body of scholarship has analyzed their sexual communities and practices. the average participant age was thirty-one. despite extensive outreach and the interviews being conducted by people of color, the sample was only 22 percent people of color. we acknowledge that there is significant research fatigue among queer and trans people of color, which likely contributed to this issue. participants came from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and reported occupational statuses ranging from home healthcare workers to university professors. participants were asked to define their gender identity and sexual orientation in as many or as few words as they liked. all members of the research team identified as queer, two identified as trans, and two identified as latinx. i trained both research assistants in qualitative interview techniques; all three of us conducted interviews with participants either in person or via video chat that lasted approximately one hour. we used a semi-structured interview guide focused on participant experiences with sexual health education, the safer sex practices they employ and why they do so, their perspectives on community norms or conflicts about safer sex, and any inequalities they see regarding safer sex. participants were entered into a raffle to win one of four twenty-five-dollar gift cards to the feminist sex toy retailer babeland. all interviews were transcribed verbatim. data analysis roughly followed a constructivist grounded theory approach (charmaz 2014). first, i conducted initial segment by segment coding that focused on action, rather than topics. second, i conducted focused coding in which i took all initial codes and compared data to data to refine codes and discarded those not relevant to research questions or emerging themes. i then coded all the interviews again using the codebook and maxqda qualitative data analysis software. finally, i used theoretical coding with the lens of the social worlds framework and queer feminist science and technology studies to develop theoretical insights into the use of gloves and dams. grounded in the symbolic interactionist tradition, the social worlds framework focuses on meaning-making among groups of social actors with shared commitments and perspectives as well as individual and collective identities (e.g., queer communities, health educators) (clarke and star 2008). the framework seeks to understand the nature of relations and actions across people (e.g., queers), objects (e.g., safer sex barriers), and discourses (e.g., safer sex promotion) in and between various social worlds. social worlds analyses focus on studying practices (e.g., safer sex) rather than studying individuals (e.g., sexual identities) (clarke, friese, and washburn 2016). to bring a queer lens to the social worlds framework, i followed cipolla et al.’s (2017) invocation to queer science studies by reading interviews for silences, ruptures, and disruptions.   queer people have a lot of feelings about safer sex across various sexual and gender identities, participants reported engaging in a variety of sex acts, including oral sex, anal and vaginal penetrative sex with both strapped and strapless cocks,5 hand sex, and use of various sex toys, all in both individual and group situations. many participants also reported participation in kink or bdsm practices and communities. nearly all participants reported receiving poor quality sexual health education and healthcare encounters that were both heteronormative and cisnormative. in terms of defining safer sex and the risks associated with the kinds of sex they have, participants understood “safer sex” and “risk” in flexible and contingent ways grounded in interactional, relational, and community contexts. for instance, jordan6 (29, white, queer, genderqueer) defined safer sex as “acknowledging that there is no safe way to have sex or not have sex per se,” and thought of it “more as like everyone determining their own acceptable level of risk, and having intentional conversations around that, and boundaries and practices that are in line with what your intentions are.” similarly, adam, (29, unapologetically black, queer, genderqueer/transmasculine) explained their understanding of risk and safety in terms of disrupting binaries and hinging on relational intimacies: “safe sex/unsafe sex is such a weird binary. um, but i think if i had to define it for myself, it’s like, how are you having sex that feels good to you in ways that make you feel comfortable, right? and, so, even... and that can look like, you know, i have oral sex with folks and don’t use barriers, that can look like an unsafe sex practice to somebody else but to me, that feels great! and that feels really safe for me.” in adam’s understanding, “safer sex” made little sense as a stable, binary category detached from pleasure and context-specific practices. the contingent, flexible way that participants understood “safer sex” mirrored their understanding of risk. largely rejecting a realist interpretation of risk as knowable and stable (lupton 2006), participants negotiated the risk of sexual behaviors in terms of the (lack of) available knowledge about sti transmission between various kinds of bodies (especially for trans people with experiences of hormonal or surgical gender affirmation), notions of afab/afab sex as low or no risk (richters and clayton 2010), and internalized notions of the “risk” of sex as merely pregnancy or hiv. many participants described risks that went beyond infection transmission or unintentional pregnancy, such as social, emotional, and community risks. similarly, participants described their decisions around safer sex practices as embedded in a complex web of community norms and values, negotiations of limited scientific knowledge of efficacy and risk, access to knowledge and materials, and the affective dimensions of technology use, such as pleasure or gender affirmation. for example, although most participants knew about barriers such as dental dams to reduce the risk of oral sex,7 the majority reported not using them due to the awkwardness of use, their unavailability/price, the way they decrease sensation and intimacy, and their lack of known efficacy for a comparatively low-risk sexual practice, all factors that have been previously identified in the (extremely minimal) research on dental dams (richters et al. 2010; rowen et al. 2013). fitz (30, white, gay, trans man) described barriers for oral sex this way: “i hate [them] and i don’t use [them]. because it’s bad for the environment, and...i, i can’t, i don’t find it attractive. like, if i’m gonna have oral sex anyway, i feel like plastic wrap is not gonna save me.” in his estimation, barriers for oral sex were not only unattractive and bad for the environment, they also provided little protection from the potential risks of oral sex. trans participants spoke about the lack of existence of gender-affirming barriers for their genitalia; for instance, condoms are usually too large for a trans man’s phallus and may be disaffirming to use on a trans woman because of their association as a safer sex technology used by men. at the same time, a dental dam is generally too small to use effectively on a trans woman who has a penis. mason (29, black and latinx, queer, genderqueer/trans/intersex) explained, “there are people who don't know that they can use a combination of gloves and finger cots to work as a condom if they are trans male and they’re getting a blowjob! like, most of the things about diy [do-it-yourself] safer sex or even having safer sex in my own body i learned from other trans people—not medical providers, not even from public health conferences i’ve gone to.” thus, in the absence of available technology and knowledgeable providers, trans people relied on sharing community knowledge to learn about and practice safer sex (latham 2016). none of the participants in this study reported using condoms for performing oral sex on a penis. when i asked alice (28, white, queer, trans woman) if she had ever used condoms for oral sex on a penis, she laughed and replied, “yeah…i never thought oral sex with a condom should even be a thing!” the use of gloves for hand sex was not as definitive as barriers for oral sex, with many participants expressing that they were open to using them but did not do so regularly. most participants who did use gloves reported doing so for practical reasons, such as easier clean up or protection from jagged nails, rather than preventing the transmission of sexually transmitted infections. leila (36, white, queer, cis woman) related a practical understanding of gloves: “i've got nails! i'm femme! and shit happens. and tears happen. and any bacteria, even just for the cleanliness factor not just for disease-getting factor, you know? there’s bacteria under my nails and in my hands and i don’t know you that well, and what your immune system is like, and let’s not take the risk to fuck up your pussy so that we can’t keep doing this awesome sex we’re about to have.” leila and many other participants also described using gloves as a strategy to mark various relationship arrangements and hierarchies, a practice known as “fluid-bonding.” for instance, those in multiple simultaneous relationships would not use gloves with their primary partner but would with all others. jordan described this practice by using the phrase “moving parts” of a relationship arrangement and acknowledged that, “it can be very intimate to share fluids, and maybe i don’t want to do that with somebody, or they don’t want to do that with me. so maybe the nature of the relationship is to have, like a little more distance than that, or if it’s more casual that might feel good.” in this way, gloves functioned as a symbolic barrier (richters and clayton 2010) that prevented the exchange of feelings rather than infections. conversely, some participants did relate a more adamant philosophy and practice of glove and dam use, as did saturday (36, white, queer, genderqueer/nonbinary/femme), who reported using gloves and dams in most or all of their sexual encounters. saturday stated that many people, especially afab people having sex with other afab people, did not have “adequate information about actual risk factors.” however, for the most part, glove and dam use was a binary phenomenon, as gretchen (34, white, queer/lesbian, gender nonconforming woman) described, “there's almost this divide between people who are like, ‘i do this all the time,’ and people who are like, ‘i hardly do that ever.’ rather than a spectrum it’s either like ‘i'm into this’ or like ‘that seems like way too much work.’” indeed, many participants described how the norms around safer sex in their communities were sometimes a source of conflict or tension. notable norms included the use of condoms in gay cisgender male communities—and to some extent, among transgender women who were previously connected to gay male communities—and a norm of recommending, but not using, gloves and dams among people assigned female at birth. several participants noted the phenomenon of how people in some queer communities promote the use of gloves and dams but do not actually use them themselves. enforcing norms and policing other people’s behavior was a way to maintain boundaries around sexual communities of identity. owen (32, white, queer, trans male) referred to this practice as performing the “perfect activist” who “gets tested every three months and always carries, you know, condoms and gloves with them.” participants, or their sexual partners, who were not part of politically queer communities generally did not use barriers and were not as knowledgeable about their use. for instance, gretchen often hooked up with women who had previously only had sex with cisgender men and were offended when we she suggested using barriers like dams or gloves. race was an absent presence in the interviews, and by extension, interviewees’ safer sex practices. the interviewers asked all participants, “what sorts of inequalities related to safer sex do you see in your personal experiences or in queer and/or trans communities more generally?” if they were unsure about the question, the interviewer would probe for examples around gender, race, class, relationship arrangements, ability, citizenship status, age, size, and desirability. i was interested in issues such as racial power dynamics in negotiating safer sex practices, negotiating consent when one or more partnership is disabled, and the class implications of when safer sex fails (i.e., the ramifications of getting pregnant or contracting hiv). unsurprisingly, multiply marginalized participants were quick to recount how racism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and so on showed up in their safer sex worlds. mason answered the question by sharing, “the whole race thing is just wild, because it’s really easy for trans men who are not perceived as people of color—even if they are—to navigate gay spaces because the unabashed people downright saying ‘no fats, no femmes, no chocolate, beans or rice’ in their [app] profiles. i do routinely get grindr messages either reducing me to my race or ideas about what i might have in my pants.” similarly, adam understood safer sex not only in terms of sexually transmitted infections but also from the positionality of a black trans person. as they explained, “i think about safer sex not just as, ‘am i protecting myself against stis?’ but also thinking about, like, your personhood as somebody who holds other identities. like, we can't fuck if you’re racist.” although white participants easily named the class implications of expensive queer play parties or the challenges of navigating queer sexual community as a disabled person, for the most part they lacked an analysis of how race and racialization showed up in safer sex technologies and practices. the privileged afforded by whiteness not only buffered them from racist interpersonal interactions, but also provided a degree of protection from the broader discursive context in which their sexual practices are rendered dangerous and abject (bailey 2016). in other words, white queers may have internalized messages of queer sex as risky or deviant, but those internalizations escaped the intersection of racialized queer sexual deviance.   gloves and dams as ambivalent technologies multiple social worlds of queer safer sex may exist simultaneously, and my analysis here is not meant to suggest a uniform or stable social world. rather, i use the sensitizing concepts of segments, tools, and boundary objects with the lens of queer feminist science studies to illustrate how gloves and dams function as ambivalent technologies. naming gloves and dams as ambivalent objects borrows from kane race’s (2015) notion of prep as a “reluctant object.” for race, prep is a reluctant object because it “may well make a tangible difference to people’s lives, but [its] promise is so threatening or confronting to enduring habits of getting by in this world that it provokes aversion, avoidance—even condemnation and moralism” (17). reluctant objects are a matter of affective attachments and investments in which people “attach themselves to particular objects, practices, devices, positions, and identities” in their attempts to navigate safer sex (18). the overall affective investment in gloves and dams is one of ambivalence as both users and non-users attempt to make sense of their bodies, relationships, and communities while navigating discourses around risk and sexual health. the ambivalence attached to gloves and dams is connected to the lack of known efficacy and the lack of attention queer and trans bodies and safer sex needs are afforded in research and education. ambivalent technologies are also entangled with a variety of discursive scientific and community formations (murphy 2012). analyzing gloves and dams through their entanglements with risk, governmentality, and community care helps us to make sense of how these technologies simultaneously constitute, conform to, adapt, disrupt, and push against dominant modes of scientific and technological power.   ambivalent technologies in queer social worlds segments, or subdivisions of social worlds that shift as shared commitments evolve and reorganize (clarke and starr 2008), illustrate how ambivalent technologies function in various parts of queer social worlds. interview analysis identified a variety of segments that corresponded to practitioners’ relationship to gendered technologies of risk. participant views on safer sex derived from their relationship to the sexual scripts (power, mcnair, and carr 2009) of particular sexual communities. in one segment, queer people assigned female at birth (lesbian and bisexual cisgender women, afab nonbinary people, and trans men) having sex with other people assigned female at birth negotiated the widespread belief that their sexual practices are of low or no risk of sexually transmitted infections. gay/queer trans men who first entered sexual community through participation in queer women’s communities did not learn about nor practice safer sex until they began participating in gay cisgender men’s sexual communities. gay men (both cis and trans) understood condoms to be the default safer sex technology;8 so too did queer cis women who have or have had sex with partners who make sperm and trans women who partnered with cis men. likewise, participants who were not politically queer or an active part of queer communities formed a segment in which they had little knowledge of queer safer sex practices and did not see value in their use. glove and dam use was also segmented into those who believed them to be a necessary strategy to prevent sexually transmitted infections and those who viewed such barriers as an unnecessary burden that serves no purpose. ambivalent technologies like gloves and dams are boundary objects that share mutual concerns with the social world of public health: preventing the transmission of microbes and the containment of sexual excess. “boundary objects” are things that exist at junctures where varied social worlds meet in an arena of mutual concern. mainstream public health has long sought to contain and discipline the queer sexual body (patton 1996). notably, the gloves used for hand sex are the same style and quality of gloves used by health care practitioners in clinical settings. as lisa jean moore (1997) points out, the early aids crisis had an impact on the supply of medical examination gloves as healthcare workers began to use gloves with unanticipated frequency due to fear of the contagious queer body. dental dams were originally developed use to isolate parts of the mouth during a dental procedure and remain expensive and inaccessible given the lack of uptake for other uses. these factors play into queer ambivalence to using them as safer sex barriers especially given, again, their unknown efficacy in preventing stis during already low-risk activities. at the same time, queer safer sex practitioners reconstruct barriers as tools to meet the specific needs placed on them by various segments of the social world (clarke and star 2008) and their commitments to various social factors (e.g., fluid-sharing norms, sexed and gendered embodiment, queer political identity). gloves and dams are tools that form literal and symbolic boundaries between bodies and relationships in queer social worlds. tools are objects imbued with multiple meanings that “are embedded in the artifacts and the practices associated with them” (moore 1997, 435) and may be practical, material, and/or symbolic. materially, barriers may prevent the sharing of sexual fluids and potentially infection-causing viruses and bacteria. barriers are tools that served a variety of practical functions for participants in this study; for example, gloves were tools for easier clean up, protection from fingernail-related injury, and increasing the longevity of lube during sex. however, the use of gloves and dams is also ambivalent given the absence of scientific evidence to demonstrate their efficacy (rowen et al. 2013), and thus the barriers carry significant symbolic weight. for participants in this study, barriers served socially salient symbolic purposes. while the use of condoms or prep represents compliance with gendered technologies of safer sex that allow trans men to claim membership in cisgender gay male sexual communities, gloves and dams communicate membership into a particular queer sexual and social community and thus make individuals legible to themselves and others as queer. for instance, gloves are what transform the act of penetrating a partner’s body with fingers or hands into a queer sexual act. as some participants pointed out, gloves and dams also symbolized being a “good” queer activist, one that always practices safer sex. finally, both gloves and dams serve as “feelings condoms” to demarcate symbolic relationships around fluid-bonding or the seriousness of a relationship.   entanglements of ambivalent technologies gloves and dams are entangled with discourses of risk, governmentality, and the politics of care. paradoxically, their use argues for an expanded view of queer sex as risky and potentially dangerous. through their entanglements with governmentality, this process can be interpreted as a form of self and collective governance that works to (re)pathologize queer sex. to many heterosexual and cisgender people, oral or hand sex is not even sex. queer and trans people have long been forced to engage with biomedical discourses and institutions that construct them as dangerous, unhealthy, and deviant. this pathologization is especially true for queer and trans people of color, which further complicates affective investments that support the notion that queer sex is risky. moreover, users cannot “know” if using nitrile or latex gloves for hand sex reduces the transmission of infection because it has been invisibilized or deprioritized in scientific research. as juliet richters and stevie clayton (2010) point out, from a methodological perspective it would be challenging to design population-based studies with the statistical power necessary to establish the efficacy of gloves or dams in preventing sti transmission. because we do not—and possibly cannot—know to what extent gloves and dams reduce risk in relatively low-risk sexual practices, the affective investments in ambivalent technologies risks moving queer sex from invisibility to pathologization and regulation. gloves and dams are also entangled with a community ethics of care that has its roots in the legacy of the aids crisis and the queer politics that emerged from it. queer communities have long created families of choice and organized community caregiving efforts, in large part fueled by an absence of support from social institutions and families of origin. ambivalent technologies are one way in which queer people validate and perform the importance of caring for one another outside normative social arrangements. while you may not know exactly how much wearing a glove when you fist someone decreases risk of hiv, you do have an affective investment in the practice as signaling a politics of care. because gloves and dams help to construct barriers around community and identity—straight people and cis gay men rarely, if ever, use them—their use represents one way of marking the legitimacy of queer women and trans folks’ bodies and erotic subjectivities (latham 2016). this legitimization is evidenced by interview participants who used gloves and dams mainly to be seen as politically or properly queer. ambivalent technologies are also strategies for making oneself knowable to both the self and to others (though not necessarily to biomedical institutions and discourses). just as some safer sex technologies can be disaffirming to one’s gender or sexuality (e.g., a trans woman using an external condom to receive oral sex), they can also help to construct and make visible bodies and identities (e.g., a trans man using a cut up glove as an external condom). in this sense, ambivalent technologies are strategies for gender affirmation. it is critical to interrogate how ambivalent technological entanglements with risk, governance, and community signal or foreclose a liberatory queer politics that incorporates an analysis of race, disability, and power. for instance, in what ways do the politics of safer sex technologies rely on ideas about sick and disabled bodies as abject positions to be avoided through preventative behaviors? likewise, as the majority white sample in this project made clear, queer people who do not experience racialized pathologization may have a keener affective investment in ambivalent technologies. how might barrier-free sex, as marlon bailey articulates, satisfy a craving for “a deep intimacy, a closeness and a being desired and wanted” in a world in which racialized sexual others are rarely desired and wanted, either by the state or by white queers on hook-up apps (2016, 253)? can ambivalent technologies shift the larger social and political processes that position some queer and trans lives as worth saving and mark others for premature death? does using gloves to fist your lover do anything to address structural violence? in other words, what are queers really at risk for, and how do ambivalent technologies such as gloves and dams both reproduce and resist barriers to social, economic, and political freedom?   conclusion amid the prolific amount of behavioral, clinical, and epidemiological literature on safer sex—especially the growing body of work on prep—it is important to consider the social processes through which safer sex plays out (auerbach and hoppe 2015). this paper presents one view into the social world of gloves and dams, but it is of course not the only one. although the sample was diverse in terms of gender, sexual orientation, class background, and age, the majority of participants were white. additionally, participants lived across the us and canada, rather than a geographically bounded community. the analysis of these findings is not generalizable in the sense of applying the findings to the safer sex practices of queer and transgender adults as a whole, but it does contribute an understanding of safer sex practices that is not attainable through behavioral research. instead of simply asking how many people use do or do not use safer sex technologies, this study has provided a way to think about the social significance of their use. future research on the social worlds of queer safer sex technologies might analyze differences in the understanding and negotiation of glove and dam use, risk, and norms. for instance, trans male participants in this study largely did not learn about safer sex until they were exposed to gay cisgender male communities, and safer sex technologies specifically for trans bodies are sparse. researchers might also consider how the shifting technological and scientific world of safer sex, namely prep, affects the perception of risk and safer sex practices in communities both targeted and not-targeted for biochemical prophylaxis. future research can better explicate how whiteness informs queer and trans understandings of safer sex as well as how queer and trans people of color (other than gay cisgender men of color) navigate sexual racism in relation to safer sex negotiations. at a moment when widespread use of prep in some communities has changed definitions of “safe sex,” it is all the more important to analyze how public health discourses position racialized queer and trans bodies in relation to risk, and for whom prep use is compulsory rather than liberatory (bailey 2016; betts 2021). and of course, hiv transmission is not the only concern that falls under the rubric of “safer sex,” but it is among the most salient given its importance in igniting queer safer sex organizing efforts and how it remains discursively linked to queer sexuality.   acknowledgments many thanks to malú machuca rose and anya katz for their assistance on this research.   notes 1 not all queer and transgender people, including my interview participants, use these terms to describe their bodies. all direct quotes contain the words that participants used to describe themselves.   2 for the most part, the literature on “women who have sex with women” assumes, but does not state, that “women” is synonymous with “cisgender women.”   3 today, bdsm is the most common acronym to refer to the community, whereas in the era i discuss in this paragraph it was more common to use sm.   4 all interviews took place prior to the covid-19 pandemic and thus reflect sexual interactions that took place before the widespread disruptions to social and sexual life.   5 “strapped” refers to a cock (e.g., dildo) that the user straps to their body with a harness. “strapless” refers to a cock that is attached to the body (that someone was born with or had surgically constructed) that does not require a harness.   6 all names are pseudonyms. participants either picked their pseudonym or instructed the research team to pick one that matched their gender identity. we asked all participants to inform us of the pronoun they would like used in this manuscript.   7 all discussions of dental dams for oral sex related to oral sex performed on a vulva. although some people use dams for analingus, or “rimming,” no participants in this study reported doing so.   8 however, this belief is rapidly shifting as prep has been replacing condom use in gay male communities.   references auerbach, judith d., and trevor a. hoppe. 2015. “beyond ‘getting drugs into bodies’: social science perspectives on pre-exposure prophylaxis for hiv.” journal of the international aids society 18 (3): 19983–88. https://doi.org/10.7448/ias.18.4.19983. barcelos, chris. 2022. “the politics of race, class, and gender in queer safer sex.” in introducing the new sexualities studies, 4th ed., edited by nancy l. 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obstetrics 120 (1): 42–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijgo.2012.08.011. rubin, gayle. 1997. “elegy for the valley of kings: aids and the leather community in san francisco, 1981–1996.” in changing times: gay men and lesbians encounter hiv/aids, edited by martin p. levine, peter m. nardi, and john h. gagnon, 101–44. chicago: university of chicago press. samois. 1982. coming to power: writings and graphics on lesbian s/m. boston: alyson publications. schulman, sarah. 2021. let the record show: a political history of act up new york, 1987–1993. new york: farrar, straus, and giroux.     author bios chris barcelos is assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the university of massachusetts boston and the author of distributing condoms and hope: the racialized politics of youth sexual health (university of california press, 2020).       review article review article | science’s stories and other possible grammars:   dear science and other stories, by katherine mckittrick (duke university press, 2021)   the disordered cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred, by chanda prescod-weinstein (bold type books, 2021),   becoming human: matter and meaning in an antiblack world, by zakiyyah iman jackson (new york university press, 2020)     jake silver rutgers university silvjake@gmail.com     science is simultaneously splendid and suspect. it is the very stuff through which we understand the universe and our places in it, and yet it has become a tool of racist empires throughout history. it provides wonderous stories about evolutionary transformation, and yet select scientists have co-opted such stories to elevate themselves and their own racial, ethnic, sexual, and gendered identities over others. science can tell multiple stories at once: it can reveal information about human and natural history, and it can also be employed to explain why one group is more “human,” more “cultured,” or more “civilized” than another. “an analytical conundrum is thus posed” for the three books at hand that try to balance an analysis of science, that which has dehumanized black populations for centuries, with an analysis of black humanity: “how might we think about the social construction of race in terms that notice how the condition of being black is knotted to scientific racism but not wholly defined by it?” (mckittrick 2021, 135).   these three texts weigh and wonder about science's dual qualities: it is an awe-inspiring prospect that, unfortunately, has become an antiblack tool. dear science presents katherine mckittrick’s attempt to put her equivocal relationship with science into words, to try and work out how scientific logics anticipate black death while also considering how science might possibly escape this racist mooring because, as she writes, science “is restless and uncomfortably situated and multifarious rather than definitive and downward-pressing” (2021, 3). the disordered cosmos is a similarly personal struggle to explain the physical magic of the universe alongside the deeply disturbing ways that physics as a field embodies and perpetuates racist, classist, and sexist worldviews. chanda prescod-weinstein elaborates her experiences as the first black woman to receive a doctorate in cosmology theory, showing the reader how physics is complicit in colonial, imperial, and racist systems, yet how it might become ripped from them, how it does not depend on the forms of supremacy that live through it. becoming human recasts the very origins of science, contending that racist ideology informed the theoretical incarnation of the cell, the organism, and the species as scientific concepts, even though the temporality of scientific racism usually appears in the reverse (that racist logics colonized science). because black voices have been absent for centuries in the production of regnant knowledge systems, zakiyyah iman jackson (2020, 35) looks toward “black arts and letters” as critical sites where black individuals and communities have enacted epistemological theories, ones that jackson uses to speak back to and remake the scientific canon.   together, these books stage critical interventions at the brink of the known and the unknown. for one, science is motivated by what we don’t know; it is about grasping at the inconceivable and transforming it into something graspable, speakable, familiar. but in this hunt for knowledge, science already narrates how we can possibly conceptualize others (other humans, other beings, other matter). to try and grasp the elements and nuances of the universe, science always already casts languages, rhetorics, vocabularies, and narratives upon the possible and the expansive, delimiting how we can understand the perceptible (and even the imperceptible) in the hunt for one correct and objective story about being. take, for example, classic cases about the racialization of genetics that have been used to legitimate slavery (curran 2012), the policing of black communities (brown and barganier 2018), and notions about who is or is not “naturally” smart (welch 2002). in these cases, science is at once a tool to explain the vibrancy of worldly heterogeneity as well as a means to cast valuations upon those differences, to inflect the relationship between matter and meaning. scientific stories and breakthroughs, after all, cannot escape the social contexts upon which they stand; they are “a site of—rather than an alternative to—social and political contestation” (pollock 2012, 2).   while the three texts work to descriptively show what racial logics inform scientific practice, they are also attentive to undoing these knots of contempt and calculation. they work to open up our very understandings of the relation between science and story. perhaps at their center is one important question: what counts as a scientific narration of life? to answer, these monographs assemble archives of evidence that eschew one “correct” way of telling stories about the universe; story, instead, becomes science’s bedfellow. science here is not simply a collection of stories to describe the world, as others at the intersections of sts and feminism have argued to critique science’s role in propagating and naturalizing narratives of inequality (fausto-sterling 1987; haraway 1989; martin 1991), but story becomes a powerful method to rethink and rematerialize science’s own archives, to dig into its discursive elements and better understand how different voices, materials, characters, crescendos, and chains of events can compose such archives. they rethink the origins of knowledge through geographies, connections, enmeshments. relationalities across spaces that are usually stubbornly fractured into “disciplines” or different arenas altogether begin to harmonize, enabling for more multitextured and multipersoned archives to compose what we know as science.   theory, here, is itself a recombinant “form of storytelling” (mckittrick 2021, 7) that builds off a rich trajectory across black feminist theory (nagar 2014; carby 2019) and feminist sts (benjamin 2019; fullwiley 2011; leong 2016; nelson 2016; subramaniam 2014; tallbear 2013) that uses stories to reject the aspirational notion that there is one way to narrate each thing or phenomenon or encounter (wynter 2001). such theory moves away from the dream of one story that authoritatively explains matter, and enters a space of sharing, collaboration, and the interstices of encounter. descending into multiple archives and narrations, after all, forces us to reconsider “how we would go about evaluating any empirical truth claim” (jackson 2020, 7–8). and that is key: these texts do not simply recognize a diversity of “situated knowledges” (haraway 1988), but instead they ask why such differences emerge, offering story as an entry point into humankind’s entangled discontents and the obstinate inequalities they have inspired. science and story become relational beings refracting such politics precisely because “our collective assertions of life are always in tandem with other ways of being” (mckittrick 2021, 106). why, for instance, do some narrations about life—in the texts at hand, black life—rely on the biologic or the biocentric (wynter 2003), while others do not? why do astrophysics’ origin stories, prescod-weinstein raises (2021, 7–8), revel in the isaac newtons of the world and disregard those who have long studied the sky under duress, from black women to indigenous communities to working-class families in los angeles? what might these splits in the story spill? “the story opens the door to curiosity” (mckittrick 2021, 7).   story here is not a settlement, a definitive declaration about why the world is the way that it is, nor is it about how the world should be. it is an unfolding of human (hi)stories and futures that constellate around encounter, posing textual questions about social life that such “objective” narrations about humanity normally obscure. this is precisely why these texts resist singular disciplinary attachments, as if there is one correct methodological way to realize and represent political attachments. instead, they approach science and story as a medley of perspectives and narrations caught in the thrust of “multivocality with contradiction” (jackson 2020, 23). the story “demands representation outside itself…[it] asks that we live with what cannot be explained and live with unexplained cues and diasporic literacies, rather than reams of positivist evidence” (mckittrick 2021, 4). story becomes a method poised to openness, a method unafraid of being unsettled into uncharted territories. what, for instance, if difference does not become the foundation for scientific grammars about and (e)valuations of ability, capacity, livelihood, potential, worth, humanness? what if the very concept of story is not beholden to a singular grammar, but to entangled grammars in the plural? stories begin to accumulate and change scientific concepts at even the broadest scales (tsing 2015 37–38): the collective, the human, the planetary.   if story is a critical object here, then we must ask: what elements are part of science’s stories? what might they be? in the following pages, i attend to how narrative elements move through mckittrick, prescod-weinstein, and jackson’s portrayals of science, how epistemology is loaded with beginnings, plotlines, genres, characters, dialogue, uncertainties, pivots, surprises, endings, composing grammars that are multiple and multisited rather than singular, oriented toward curiosity rather than rehearsed scripts. “wonder is study,” mckittrick writes (2021, 5). figures like nalo hopkinson and fields like ethology and metaphysics sit side by side (jackson 2020, 83–120). working at this generative interface, these authors experiment with science and story, pondering how enfleshed life both exceeds and comes to be defined by story (barad 2007)—and how story might capture (or convolute) those very excesses. such a method recasts “story” as something less redemptive and, instead, something resolutely plural that only finds life in the limitations of narration, something generatively worldly yet always enworlded.   my own personal investment in these texts derives from the fact that, while they largely concern black life, their arguments are conceptually important for all those working on the social life of science. when the word science is uttered, certain people usually come to mind—those straight cis white men that normally sit in positions of power in biology, chemistry, or physics departments (and sts departments, too, no less). science as a concept and a practice itself circumscribes who can sit at the table to discuss how science happens, what it can mean, what it can do. when science is affixed to a region, its circumscriptions can spiral. my anthropological research in palestine with astronomers normally evokes academic assumptions about what science can and cannot look like there. countless people have assumed that astronomy in palestine is akin to a high school club, and many surmise the field is a type of political escape from israel’s occupation as if, first, palestinian life revolves around the occupation and, second, israel’s military apparatus cannot take flight into the sky. science and story meet to draw boundaries and limits. but these texts offer us methods for thinking past these impulses that colonize epistemology by asking why different grammars emerge; they denaturalize the social differences that sometimes precede science and come to determine its stories, its variables, its pathways. they depart from the notion of scientific closure that can deaden life. as mckittrick (2021, 187) powerfully punctuates the final lines of her book, “we are curious. i want to sustain wonder.”   (racial) tales as old as time science’s stories have long depended on hierarchies that, by definition, are far from equal. the beauty of these texts is their ability to discern the epistemological vocabularies through which such stories are staged to reveal the inequalities subtending contemporary knowledge. jackson, for example, works to surpass the terms human and species altogether precisely because these concepts emerged from racist, colonial logics that then structured the genealogical classification of organisms and cells. in theories of endosymbiosis, in which two species with a mutualistic relationship form a new one over time, many scientists depict the relationship as if one species is “enslaved” by another (jackson 2020, 153). the story of (co)existence is slavery. jacob bontius’s early evolutionary work taxonomized orangutans as the children of women in the (east) indies “who mate with apes and monkeys to satisfy their detestable desires” (quoted in jackson 2020, 181). the story of evolution is black animality. and darwin used the terms race and species interchangeably, “at times even using the term ‘sub-species’ to refer to people” (jackson 2020, 171). the story of species is racial. the struggle for sovereignty and autonomy, jackson argues, exists at the level of the cell and the organism; subtending epistemology are antiblack legacies concerning who is capable of effectively governing a body, a land, and a culture.   epigenetics is also a curious—and dangerous—case for jackson. as she writes, her goal is to demonstrate how the epigenetic turn furtively marks black cells for death while espousing a horizon of post-racial biology: “i want to query how social processes—the prison ‘cell,’ the political party ‘cell,’ and the military ‘cell’—interact with somatic cellular processes, producing alterations to the immediate cellular environment and cellular functioning in a manner that we might also describe as necropolitical” (2020, 205). she lays out how the field innovatively links social factors and biological expression, positing that certain genes become activated (or suppressed) by experiential environmental factors. on the surface, this research thus seems to make a landmark intervention that race is a biological fiction that nonetheless has disparate effects on differently colored bodies. yet jackson notes the hazard in this conceptual development: with the understanding of the environment’s role in the expression of dna comes the expectation, even the social responsibility, that one can manage their very own dna. one can seemingly overcome genetics by governing their social, psychic, and environmental life. the racial trappings of genetics become something one opts into, even though, as social scientists have long pointed out (graves and goodman 2021; gravlee 2009; sullivan 2013), the genetic classifications of race have long been socially constructed—it is, rather, the existence of racism that wreaks havoc upon racialized bodies. with epigenetics, biological difference along racial lines suddenly becomes a result of individual choice, which fails to account for the ways that an antiblack world weathers specific communities, bodies, aspirations.   in memoiresque fashion, prescod-weinstein similarly unearths the racism that underpins the one concept through which scientists narrate the expanses of our universe: dark matter. there has been a historical tendency to analogize black people and dark matter, a linkage that many black writers and academics have themselves found productive for theorizing black possibility alongside astrophysical potencies. prescod-weinstein (2021, 115) speaks back to this analogy, arguing that we have spent millions of dollars to try and understand dark matter, even as it continues to evade our comprehension, while (white) society has failed to invest in black writers, voices, or talents. “we know almost nothing about dark matter, but we know a lot about black people. even white people know a lot about black people” (prescod-weinstein 2021, 116). and yet, this knowledge about black people is used in the service of policing, used to mark them for death, as mckittrick shows (and as i detail in the following paragraph). the analogy, prescod-weinstein argues, is not about some inherent glow, but about the attention we give and do not give. it is about where society thinks there might be a possible glow in the first place—and as history has demonstrated, those in power in imperial states have not located it within black people.   mckittrick also incisively reveals the narrative structure of technoscience itself, demonstrating how the scientific method of asking questions about black life relies on rehearsed scripts of black inhumanity. “black life,” she writes “is absent from the classificatory algorithms that are applied to statistically organize our world” (2021, 105). citing a harper’s report titled “chronicle of a death foretold,” a study that aggregated data about four hundred thousand students in chicago to predict who was likely to be shot later in life, mckittrick demonstrates how science presupposes certain stories: here, that blackness equals death. to be black is to be shot. to be black is to die. “premature [black] death is an algorithmic variable” while “black life is outside algorithmic logics altogether” (2021, 106). she works out the ways that black life is reduced to data that only registers death. the landscapes in which black people live, for example, are transformed into metrics of risk. all humanity within such communities disappears. the story science tells here of black death ends up prophesizing the very results of the algorithm. “in other words, black inhumanity…is a variable in the problem-solving equation before the question is asked” (2021, 111). the story technoscience tells of the future is wedged in the racism of the past and the now. “if we want different or better or more just futures and worlds,” mckittrick urges, “it is important to notice what kind of knowledge networks are already predicting our futures” (2021, 116). for her, one method to reorient how we scientifically predict such futures is storytelling precisely because in the world we all inhabit now, “racism acts as an eerie origin story that can steer us” (2021, 105). unearthing science’s origins can undo this narrative structure, revealing the genealogies and histories of social prediction and political mattering upon which such origins stand. from such fictive origins, then, we begin to see other constellations, other earths, other relations.   on origins—or not to imagine such radical change, one usually looks toward a new origin point, a new beginning. “once upon a time,” anew. again. a counterhistory or counternarrative. yet liberation, mckittrick argues, rejects any origin point, as if there is only one way to know liberation. for her, liberation is open-ended. unfurling. dynamic. “the work of liberation does not seek a stable or knowable answer to a better future; rather, it recognizes the ongoing labor of aesthetically refusing unfreedom” (2021, 61). drawing from these books’ attachments to interdisciplinarity, they do not romanticize particular objects as those upon which feminist or antiracist sts must hinge as if there was only one way to know the world. to do so would animate a grammar of singularly over multiplicity, objectivity over intersubjectivity, authority over “the unintelligent.” stories, then, become ennetworked, irremovable from the excesses of the universe and our attempts to discursively capture it. story is not a singular pathway to justice precisely because there is no easily identifiable origin from which more just futures necessarily develop. instead, mckittrick offers collaboration as a mode of possible liberation, a type of shared curiosity whereby one’s openness to others radically remakes the many perspectives that fill science and its forms of recognition and re-cognition. for liberation, one story is not authoritative. multiple stories interlace. instead of one discrete story, forms of crosspollination are themselves the story. “the sharing of ideas (no beginnings, no ends) enables a terrain of struggle, through which different futures are imagined” (mckittrick 2021, 25). “beginnings-to-ends and questions with knowable answers,” mckittrick contends, drawing from sylvia wynter, édouard glissant, and frantz fanon, “are ineffective analytical equations…liberation cannot, in any way, be a formulated answer to how we resolve the troubling awful world we inhabit if it is posed as a subsequent counterreaction to that troubling awful world” (2021, 23), as such a reaction seeks a future within the very parameters and perimeters of an equation it aspires to disrupt.   rethinking this very narrative structure of liberation and equity, mckittrick cautions sts scholars to not organize their work as “science first, social construction [as critique] second, and [forms of possible] resistance third/later” (2021, 138). jackson also contends with the deficiencies of critique that pivot upon the imagination of stable, unshaking scientific concepts like “human,” since, as we’ve seen, the epistemological moorings of the human are rooted in antiblackness. commenting on science and literature’s historical tendency to “experiment” with blackness as biological matter that is always already equated with the “sub/super/human,” jackson insists that critiques simply call for more inclusion rather than identifying “alternative conceptions of being and the nonhuman that have been produced by blackened people” (2020, 3) themselves. she explicitly states that she doesn’t want to rehearse the vocabularies of liberal humanism by only offering critique: “becoming human is more interested in redefining terms than entering into preestablished ones” precisely because the scientific realms in which the book cruises “position blackness in the space of the unthought, and therefore are not sufficient grounds for theorizing blackness” (2020, 17). terms change by welcoming their unsavory pasts. stories narrating the same black bodies rub up against one another—some from scientists like darwin or bontius and others from black people and writers themselves—revealing different grammars of humanity that both bolster scientific thought. one of jackson’s central claims, for example, is that black humanity was not simply denied over the past half millennium, but that black humanity has always been plastic, has been an experiment through (and against) which white colonizers could invent their own selves (2020, 27). her goal in the book is not simply to “show that antiblackness is actually central to the very construction of ‘the animal,’” a key intervention that the book nonetheless makes, “but also that (anti)blackness upends these fields’ frameworks of analysis and evaluative judgments” (2020, 17). the vocabulary of singular scientific answers does not upend black dehumanization precisely because its logic depends on antiblackness. for jackson, like mckittrick, the grammar of these stories—ones resting upon an objectivity rooted in discrete organismal difference—must change.   at first thought, rethinking origins when it comes to prescod-weinstein’s work seems nearly impossible—after all, her research as a cosmologist is about the physical origins of the very universe itself. yet prescod-weinstein is less concerned with origins themselves than who gets to narrate them, and how the politics of that narrating affect who and what matter in the universe. “physics is not the universe,” she writes. “rather, it is one very human attempt to get at its innards” (2021, 147). science and story do not predate one another, but meet and are made through particular and particularly located encounters. when prescod-weinstein attempted to publish some of her dissertation research for a top science magazine, for example, she decided to “write the essay and space science in [her own] voice, rather than trying to put on authoritative science voice, which is effectively the same thing as, white man confidently telling you how the world works” (2021, 128). the result: the editor informed prescod-weinstein that the article needed to be rewritten—not because the research was bad, but because her voice was not a “good fit.” her voice was not how the editor wanted the public to digest science. “but which public?” asks prescod-weinstein (2021, 129). who gets to decide who narrates the universe’s beginnings, and how? the politics of origins are bound up in narration, in genre, in form. as each of the authors raise, scientific depictions of the world begin to change if “classic” narrations, genres, and forms change.   character arcs science, however, is never just one person talking or narrating. even in singular scientific discoveries, which are wrongly attributed to one or two or three figures, entire networks participate in the scientific process. there is no origin when it comes to knowledge precisely because, as prescod-weinstein argues about physics in particular, “the ideas that come to populate [the field], especially the ones that stick, are rarely the product of one person’s ideas but rather the result of a community effort” (2021, 55). extrapolating from the wages for housework campaign in the 1970s, she unfurls and unravels science, redefining it shape and contours according to who makes research possible. science’s characters change. she mentions janitors, it staff, cafeteria workers—generally the only people of color in academic buildings. “what would it mean,” she asks, “to understand all of this work as part of the scientific project?” (2021, 195). recognizing all this work as scientific also recognizes relationality; it does not award (largely white, male) scientists alone for their discoveries precisely because those discoveries are communal efforts. science becomes something more attuned to collaboration and interactivity. science here does not enact divisions between the wise and the unwise, the capable and the incapable, but it becomes a practice oriented toward collectivities. this is a recognition of, as she calls it, “wages for scientific housework.” and indeed, those whose labor participates in the scientific process should be compensated like their scientist coworkers.   in each of the texts at hand, relationality is a key part of imagining and enacting science’s horizons. here, prescod-weinstein redefines who is billed as someone involved in the creation, narration, and enactment of knowledge. mckittrick is quite explicit that storytelling—and science and story emerge together—is a collaborative project: “i will share this with you, coauthor this with you, and live this life with you, i will tell you my secret” (2021, 8). she and jackson both reach out toward mediums and media that rarely take center stage in critical sts work, and these forms—from art to music to letters to memories to experiences to literature to walks to science fiction to citational practice to hopes—create a relational archive of how people know the world from a diverse set of positions and locations. “we are the reason that we bother with the universe at all,” prescod-weinstein writes. “our location in all of it matters” (2021, 3, emphasis added). and our relative locations to one another matter. we do not simply tell science; it is our telling that is a part of science. to bring audre lorde in dialogue with carl linnaeus, as jackson does, or slaves’ music with neurobiology, as mckittrick does, reveals how scientific discourses move through the world and affect each of us differently, enabling us to know the world differently. jackson (2020, 121–58), for example, reads octavia butler’s bloodchild (1995) as a scientific piece that rejects an epistemology premised on (racialized) distinctions that divide bodies into separable autonomous units. as jackson argues, the story, which details how one species must volunteer their bodies for the survival of another, raises that flesh does not simply divide in the way that science conceives of organisms and cells, but it invites multiplicities and atomic entanglements that incorporate viruses, bacteria, fungi, other species, other humans, relations. “the human organismic body,” then, never exists in isolation as if there was “a sovereign ‘i’” (jackson 2020, 132). butler’s novel speaks back to science, incorporating new characters (and new interdependencies) into the collaborative work that is epistemology. a new archive of knowledge—and of scientific concepts, categories, and fields—is born.   sincerely, fondly, and all the best when it comes to narrative structures, i would be remiss to disregard how mckittrick and prescod-weinstein similarly choose to end their books. both take their final chapter to write a letter, to stage a type of intimacy and literally perform the relational work that they raise. mckittrick calls out to science, offering a final letter to epistemology (“dear science”) about how it has simultaneously frustrated her through its racist legacies yet kept her captivated, leaving her searching for explanations to her curiosities. and prescod-weinstein offers a deeply intimate thank you to her mother, a thank you for being there and supporting her while she faced so much shit while going through graduate school, a thank you for passing her political attachments and organizing on. these endings bend genre in books that already resist easy classification. suddenly, in their final pages, there is an explicit addresser and addressee. letters establish a relation. they compel. mckittrick and prescod-weinstein are working to show that this is what all writing is: an incitement to talk, to gather, to engage. science is not abstractly out there without placement or context, but it exists between and among us. between and among us, its story goes on, reaching through the page. its story is the interstices between our own, where our stories (and their possible differences) meet. after all, we each relate to science differently, meaning that science becomes a bridge for us to know one another relationally, inviting all the discontents of difference into its halls. yet these authors caution against seeing such differences as preceding our stories and, subsequently, narrating them for us. scientific wonder need not rely on biological or phenotypical difference as springboards for experimentation or speculation or analysis. instead, intimacy upends the irrationalities of authority.   mckittrick’s and prescod-weinstein’s choice to publicly stage such relationality is a reminder of the deeply decolonial mission at the center of these texts: to not erect borders, walls, or ruptures between us when we imagine science’s future. our futures. in mckittrick’s letter, science is not an anonymous arbiter of objectivity. it is a character, a something or a someone—or, more accurately, a number of someones. it is even those reading her letter. us. it is our stories meeting, along with the feelings that such encounters evoke. mckittrick tells science, tells us, “there is more to you than i know” (2021, 186). there are anonymous others, anonymous forms, strangers out there in the world that will change science’s archives and meanings. and she reaches out toward those others in her letter: “until soon, katherine xo” (2021, 187). sincerely, fondly, and all the best. these conclusions do anything but conclude, instead reaching out into world and acknowledging one story and one person and one text’s inability to narrate it all, in a way animating “the potential liberatory use of nonrepresentationalist inquiries into ontology” that jackson espouses (2020, 184). the entanglements housed within these final letters show that what’s on the pages is not a fully realized vision of science or of knowledge. communication, rather than finitude, becomes aspirational, becomes a means to grasp, if momentarily, how capacious the world and the universe are.   references barad, karen. 2007. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. benjamin, ruha. 2019. race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. medford, ma: polity. brown, elizabeth, and george barganier. 2018. race and crime: geographies of injustice. oakland: university of california press. butler, octavia. 1995. bloodchild and other stories. new york: four walls eight windows. carby, hazel v. 2019. imperial intimacies: a tale of two islands. london: verso. curran, andrew s. 2012. the anatomy of blackness: science and slavery in an age of enlightenment. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. fausto-sterling, anne. 1987. “society writes biology/biology constructs gender.” daedalus 116 (4): 61–76. fullwiley, duana. 2011. the enculturated gene: sickle cell health politics and biological difference in west africa. princeton, nj: princeton university press. graves jr., joseph l., and alan h. goodman. 2021. racism, 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stereotypical male-female roles.” signs 16 (3): 485–501. https://doi.org/10.1086/494680. mckittrick, katherine. 2021. dear science and other stories. durham, nc: duke university press. nagar, richa. 2014. muddying the waters: coauthoring feminisms across scholarship and activism. urbana: university of illinois press. nelson, alondra. 2016. the social life of dna: race, reparations, and reconciliation after the genome. boston: beacon. pollock, anne. 2012. medicating race: heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference. durham, nc: duke university press. prescod-weinstein, chanda. 2021. the disordered cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred. new york: bold type books. subramaniam, banu. 2014. ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. urbana: university of illinois press. sullivan, shannon. 2013. “inheriting racist disparities in health: epigenetics and the transgenerational effects of white racism.” critical philosophy of race 1 (2): 190–218. https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.1.2.0190. tallbear, kim. 2013. native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. tsing, anna lowenhaupt. 2015. the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton, nj: princeton university press. welch, kimberly c. 2002. “the bell curve and the politics of negrophobia.” in race and intelligence: separating science from myth, edited by jefferson m. fish, 177–98. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. wynter, sylvia. 2001. “towards the sociogenic principle: fanon, identity, the puzzle of conscious experience, and what it is like to be ‘black.’” in national identities and sociopolitical changes in latin america, edited by mercedes f. durán-cogan and antonio gómez-moriana, 30–66.  new york: routledge. ————. 2003. “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument.” cr: the new centennial review 3 (3): 257–337. http://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.     author bio jake silver is a cultural anthropologist whose work constellates around astronomy in palestine, particularly how science, settlement, and struggles over sovereignty meet in the sky. he is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the center for cultural analysis at rutgers university. “alexa, tell me about your mother”: the history of the secretary and the end of secrecy lingel, jessa, & crawford, kate. (2020). “alexa, tell me about your mother”: the history of the secretary and the end of secrecy. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 6(1), page 1-25. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license “alexa, tell me about your mother”: the history of the secretary and the end of secrecy jessa lingel annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania lingel@upenn.edu kate crawford ai now institute, new york university; microsoft research, new york kate@ainowinstitute.org abstract over the last decade, we have seen the rise of a new generation of artificial intelligence (ai) agents like apple’s siri, microsoft’s cortana, and amazon’s alexa. addressing users with traditionally feminine-sounding voices and personas, they invoke the cultural figure of the secretary, offering to smooth the complexities of organizational tasks and information management. what can this generation of ai secretaries teach us about histories of labor, computation, and increasing entanglements of bodies and data? in this paper, we survey the two-hundred-year history of secretarial labor, beginning with the secretary as a form of desk furniture, and then as a profession, typified by the executive assistant. finally, we turn to personal devices and smartphone systems like alexa and siri. across this socio-technical history, we analyze the gender and labor politics underlying workplace surveillance, device tracking, and data harvesting. our assessment of mailto:kate@ainowinstitue.org original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 2 why the ghost of the secretary endures in ai machines follows three themes: the extension of surveillance infrastructure further into everyday life, the ambivalent status of nonhuman assistants, and the troubling implications for the automation of administrative labor. introduction the last decade has seen the mass popularization of artificial intelligence (ai) agents, including apple’s siri (launched in 2011), microsoft’s cortana (2014), and samsung’s viv (2016), as well as home devices such as amazon’s alexa (2014) and alexa business (2017). these so-called soft ai technologies typically default to a feminine identity, tapping into a complex history of the secretary as a capable, supportive, ever-ready, and feminized subordinate. this history of the secretary also points to interesting questions about the embedded gender, race, and class dynamics of surveillance. these systems speak in voices that have feminine, white, and “educated” intonation, and they simultaneously harvest enormous amounts of data about the user they are meant to serve. the socio-technical politics of ai assistants have a long history of bodies, devices, and data that have evolved under the label “secretary.” by tracing patterns and disruptions in this history, we can gain deeper insights into the workplace power dynamics of surveillance and automation, particularly as they evoke norms of gender. the role of the secretary in the workplace has shifted significantly over the last 150 years: we focus on three pivotal moments in this history. we consider the secretary as a piece of furniture—when it was the name given to a writing desk. then, we analyze the rise of the personal assistant, and finally we turn to the creation of systems such as siri and cortana. across different historical eras and socio-technical forms, we see that secretaries are figured as subservient and objectified, while also being skilled and efficient. they are the shadowy figures that perform the much-needed (if under-compensated) emotional and affective labor that keeps workplaces functioning. like phan’s (2019) analysis of the gendered and racial dynamics of amazon echo, we see the figure of the secretary as a cultural representation, where “this representation does not necessarily correlate to its ‘real’ conditions—which is not to say that they do not have real implications or effects—but rather their imagined impressions imprinted in places such as language and culture” (p. 3). likewise, our analysis addresses the cultural representations of secretaries, which is distinct from how people working as secretaries in a diminishing labor category experience their participation in technological infrastructures. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 3 our analysis of the secretary’s sociotechnical history is informed by prior work into the design of ai systems and workplace technologies, and also by the first author having worked as a secretary for several years. that firsthand experience of objectification, diminishment, and tedium marks the difference between the way secretarial work is figured culturally versus how it is experienced, a gulf that is doubtlessly familiar to many women who have spent significant time doing administrative work in white-collar workspaces. drawing on methods from media archaeology and feminist science and technology studies, our research into the secretary’s socio-technical history opens up a critique of the gender, race, and labor politics tied to administrative work, while contending with the growing relationship between ai and surveillance. the feminine gendering of workplace technologies is very common, and goes well beyond agents like siri, alexa, and cortana. within human computing interaction literature, marino (2006) addresses the gendered design of chatbots as well as the gendered nature of technology and ai. chun (2005) analyzes the gendering of software, and sweeney conceptualizes microsoft’s “ms dewey” search engine in terms of gender (2014) and race (2016). related to our interests in ai secretaries, goss (2015) connects gender roles of smartphone apps to a longer history of incorporating feminine affect into emergent technologies. strengers and nicholls (2018) discuss popular representations of smart homes and digital assistants, and argue that these technologies are typically marketed as a convenient form of “wife replacement,” meant to reduce stress through efficient multitasking. all of this research focuses on feminized dynamics embedded in digital devices and software, which shapes how and by whom technologies are used. it’s important to note that the gendering of computing also emerges in part from hypermasculine fraternity cultures of computer design (kidder, 1981; poster, 2013; wajcman, 1991), against which feminist technologists and designers have worked to carve out spaces and create more equitable products (fox, ulgado, & rosner, 2015). our project builds on the scholarship about the gender dynamics of devices and software by focusing on ai secretaries and asking how these technologies shape our relationships to service work and surveillance. we are particularly focused on the gender politics of the ai secretary, but we see this as deeply connected to the classand race-based power dynamics that have historically been part of secretarial labor. it is beyond the scope of this article to address all of these vectors and intersections (see atanasoski & vora, 2015, for an important discussion of legacies of racial and racist dynamics embedded into technological discourses). however, the focus on gender is useful here, as the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 4 secretary remains the most common job for women in the united states, and has been since the 1970s (census bureau, 2012). currently, 95% of administrative assistants in the us are women, a slight decrease since the all-time high of 98% of women in the field between 1980 and 1990 (ruggles et al., 2018). to theorize the socio-technical development of the secretary is to analyze a form of work that is and has been overwhelmingly performed by women in the us. in the same way that the figure of the truck driver has a deep cultural history that connects to ideas of masculinity and independence (levy, 2015), the secretary is connected to tropes of feminine, supportive, non-threatening service work. but while there has been much attention focused on the potential threat that autonomous vehicles pose to the work of truck drivers, a highly masculinized profession (see, for example, lipson & kurman, 2016), far less attention has been given to the outsourcing and automation of secretarial labor—even though these processes of automation for secretaries is more advanced. as we’ll see, this undervaluing of women’s work fits within a long tradition. in tracing the history of the secretary, we observed that across radically different material forms of secretarial work, there is a retained investment in performing gender, managing data, and arranging surveillance. the value of a secretary’s work is very much tied to administrative and emotional support, as well as being an embodied form of infrastructure. but underlying the ability to provide affective and infrastructural capacities is a form of ongoing surveillance, a power dynamic that has been masked by gendered assumptions about the secretary’s capacity for agency, ability, and control. while secretaries have traditionally been figured as submissive, this characterization conceals the power they accrue as gatherers of personal and professional information. by paying attention to this history of gendered labor and support, we can reveal the complex dynamics of trust, affect, listening, and subversion surrounding secretaries, as well as anxieties around their most recent appearance in ai devices. assemblage 1: the secretary as desk the word secretary originates in the word secret. dating back to the late fourteenth century, “secretary” has referred to a “person entrusted with secrets,” from the medieval latin secretarius (secretary, n.d.). elite political positions like secretary of state and secretary of defense retain the word’s earlier meaning as a “confidential officer, confidant.” in the context of white-collar workplaces, the word secretary first rose to prominence as a nonhuman support agent—a piece of furniture. also called a secretaire or escritoire, the original secretary of the mid original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 5 1700s was a precursor to the filing cabinet. the eighteenth-century secretary was a writing desks fitted with drawers for writing instruments, as well as holes and slots for arranging paperwork (gloag, 1991, p. 594). a defining feature of the secretary was that it was both a writing platform and a secure storage unit, ideal for managing the handwritten work that sustained business and industry during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. before the secretary, paper organization was often erratic, idiosyncratic, and highly individualized (saval, 2014). as office furniture, the secretary offers privacy, a space for individual organization and idiosyncratic personalization. the secretary at this stage literally supported the body of a male office worker, structuring his physical labor and storing and organizing his written output. figure 1. “secretary desk” by elsa capuntas. as a piece of office furniture, secretaries were tools of organization, privacy, and efficiency. but secretaries also have a performative dimension, as a display of professionalism, hierarchy, and status. as early as the eighteenth century, whitecollar workers had entered into a symbiotic relationship with secretarial desks, working together in an assemblage of bodies, data, and organization. these original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 6 functions of support, organization, and the protection of secrets endured as secretaries transitioned from a piece of furniture to a human assistant at the office. figure 2. “washington school for secretaries. mrs. grinder of washington school for secretaries seated at desk ii.” photo from the theodor horydczak collection at the library of congress. assemblage 2: the secretary as personal assistant at the turn of the twentieth century, women had begun entering the workforce alongside a different technology: the typewriter. remington, a gun manufacturer, first began massproducing typewriters in 1874, and women were slowly hired as “type writers”: operating these new machines and managing paperwork (greenbaum, 1995). with the introduction of typewriters, a two-fold shift took shape in terms of who performed secretary work and how it was valued. in 1880, 100% of secretaries, stenographers, and typists were men. by 1900, just twenty years later, 74% of secretaries were women, a number that has only increased since (ruggles et al., 2018). industrial changes in the late nineteenth century meant that administrative work produced more written documentation, and the typewriter allowed this work to be completed more quickly. women original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 7 became prime candidates for what managers described as the “housework of the office” (greenbaum 1995, pp. 39-40). narrow understandings of gender were folded into how the job of being a secretary was classified and stereotyped: “the office had become very routinized, and women’s passivity suited them to jobs that required carrying out endless routine tasks without complaint” (clark, 1984, p. 5). while the entry of women into the workplace came with issues of harassment and objectification, it’s also important to note that by the 1950s, secretarial roles offered new opportunities for women from a range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, as well as for married and older women, to gain access to stable employment. with parallels to bookkeepers, bank tellers, and computers (that is, preautomation mathematicians), in the mid-twentieth century the job title of “secretary” lost both social and economic value. a job that had been viewed as cognitively demanding when it was a male-dominated profession transitioned to being considered perfunctory and menial when women dominated the field. the secretarial role was also largely stripped of career paths for promotion. instead of seeing secretaries as moderately prestigious white-collar office workers on the path to executive power, women secretaries stereotypically started and ended their careers with the same title and responsibilities. from an administrative standpoint, a key advantage of giving secretary work to women was the foreclosing of professional advancement. while men started administrative and bureaucratic careers by starting out as secretaries and then eventually climbing the ranks into management, for women the job title of secretary was terminal— marriage, not promotion, was presented as the path to upward mobility (martin, 2012). like their furniture precursors, women secretaries were static in terms of their career options. the symbolic epitome of secretary work in the midto late twentieth century is deeply gendered—with heteronormative femininity at the center. the idealized secretary anticipates needs, smooths out intra-office social kinks, and manages the bureaucratic drudgery of everyday workplace tasks (acker, 1990). the secretary blurs borders between work and domestic spheres: she is at once responsible for setting up work meetings, remembering anniversaries, planning drinks and dinner gatherings, and selectively deleting things that should be forgotten. the secretary’s hybrid roles as both an underling and vital insider make her a liminal figure, as well as a figure of fantasy, as evidenced by the sustained inclusion of secretaries in porn and erotica (gorfinkel, 2015) and mainstream popular culture (agirre, 2012; noonan, 2010; rooney, 2003). secretaries are original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 8 fetishized both for the work they do and for the status they bring to their bosses. figure 3. front cover of joan ellis’s 1965 erotic novel, temporary secretary. the secretary was also a key liminal figure in how computing was incorporated into workplaces, and who was seen as “expert” and who was merely an administrative “user.” while secretaries were expected to become adept at using new computational tools in the 1970s and ’80s, they were also seen as expedient— a labor “layer” that could easily be dissolved. as greenbaum (1995) has described in her history of workplace transformations in the second half of the twentieth century, typists, switchboard operators, and secretaries were first in line to be eradicated in the name of cutting labor costs. traditionally feminized roles in the workplace were increasingly sidelined while expertise became a more maledominated “it expert” category. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 9 the ongoing restructuring of the labor process entailed changing not just how work was done but who it was done by. as components of previously discrete jobs were combined, secretarial work became more intensive and was done by fewer people. alternatively, administrative work could be outsourced to call centers in the global south, renewing and often deepening divides in pay and privilege between expectations and assistants (poster, 2013). these changes set the stage for the larger shift in the cultural figure of the secretary: to be virtualized, a feminized agent on a device that could be folded into every task, offering support while simultaneously offsetting more labor to individuals, and extracting large amounts of data for the emerging ai powerhouses. assemblage 3: the ai secretary in the most recent assemblage of women, machines, and work, much of the traditional labor of secretaries has moved to ai agents, embedded in smartphones or on freestanding domestic devices like amazon’s echo. as of 2017, siri was the most popular virtual assistant with 41.4 million monthly active users in the us. (perez, 2017). only 2% of iphone owners have never used siri (milanesi, 2016). the number of monthly users of amazon alexa jumped 325% between 2016 and 2017, from 0.8 million to 2.6 million monthly users. over the same period, microsoft’s cortana grew from 0.2 million monthly users in the us to 0.7 million, a 350% increase (perez, 2017). while the design specifics of ai systems like siri, cortana, and alexa are obscured by trade secrecy laws, at the most general level they rely on a combination of machine learning, natural language processing, and algorithmic prediction. ai agents echo secretarial work not just because of the tasks they perform but because of the gendered valences of how that work is performed. like human secretaries, demanding work from an ai secretary starts with calling them by name: “siri”, “alexa,” “cortana.” assigning names to these technologies supports a process of gendered anthropomorphization, but it also does more than this: giving something a human name is ultimately…a way of exerting control over it—a reminder that it works for you, that it exists within a human construct, even when the machine itself is wholly indifferent…machines don’t need names, but we feel the need to name them—out of a mix of affection, perhaps, but mostly out of a desire to reorganize forces more powerful than we are so that they appear to be under human control. (lafrance, 2014, para. 8-9) scripting names for ai secretaries is a way of making them seem approachable original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 10 and trusted, a means of neutralizing any apparent discomfort or concern, while signaling personal control over new technology. voice has an important but relatively undertheorized history in electronic communication devices (goss, 2015; guzman, 2015; marvin, 1988; poster, 2011, 2016) that both plays into and complicates the much longer history of dismissing women’s voices as shrill, nonsensical, and silly (beard, 2014; carson, 1995; malin, 2014). goss (2015) has argued that women’s voices are the default in ai secretaries for the same reasons they dominate in elevators, airports, and public transportation systems—to have a calming effect on crowds and in cases of emergency: “humans are only comfortable with voice-interactive technology when they are assured of their dominance over it, and female-voiced technology is the pleasing compromise that succeeds in being informative and servile to a human master without being truly, independently intelligent” (p. 24). design values surface in ai voices through the leveraging of feminine affect to render new technologies as safe and non-threatening. finally, ai devices are coded to speak in white, educated voices. in an interview with the design team behind amazon’s alexa, programmers explained a backstory for the personal assistant meant to “produce the exact degree of upbeat geekiness” that the team wanted: the backstory is charmingly specific: she comes from colorado, a state in a region that lacks a distinctive accent. “she’s the youngest daughter of a research librarian and a physics professor who has a b.a. in art history from northwestern,” [the head designer] continues. when she was a child, she won $100,000 on jeopardy: kids edition. she used to work as a personal assistant to “a very popular late-night-tv satirical pundit.” and she enjoys kayaking. (shulevitz, 2018) this “charmingly specific” background story has embedded class and gender norms that present representational exclusions for those who don’t identify with those norms. in addition, choices around voice design and recognition can create usability issues for people with regional accents, immigrants, and folks who are differently abled (alper, 2017). names and voices signal race, class, and gender, and ultimately they symbolize ideal and non-ideal users. all the while, they are deployed to “personalize” a device so that it may continue to capture data under the guise of convenience, friendliness, and familiarity. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 11 producing the ai secretary and the gendered work of surveillance across the historical trajectory of the secretary, we see a progression of surveillance—as a desk, secretaries keep documents safe and secret, shielding them from casual observation. as a woman, the secretary is a “forgotten witness” to office procedures, controlling information and maintaining privacy without gaining institutional status. as an ai system, the secretary gathers data constantly, sharing information continually and often duplicitously between her two masters—the user of the device and the technology company that produces the system. crucially, it isn’t just technical sophistication that allows ai secretaries to surveil; it is their performance of features and characteristics honed by previous generations of secretarial assemblages. people trust ai secretaries because they trusted human secretaries, or at least the cultural idea of them. in our examination of the history of secretarial labor, we see four characteristics that shape workplace dynamics of the secretary: support, observation, organization, and control. submission obscures surveillant power. within the history of automation, addressing fears and mistrust of a new technology has frequently involved the strategic deployment of feminine affect (guzman, 2016). for example, when banks first installed atms, the unfamiliarity of back-end technologies was deliberately masked with a recognizably feminine affect: “for the atm to catch on, it had to appear user-friendly and non-threatening…some [banks] decided to defuse the ‘man vs. machine’ confrontation—and get a return on investments already made [by defining the dream teller as a young woman]—by transposing specifically feminine characteristics onto the atm” (boyer & england, 2008, p. 251). secretaries are, by definition, subordinate. to be a secretary is to be subject to idiosyncratic needs and daily demands. secretary–boss dynamics offer a tidy parable of hegemonic gender relations, a reinscription of male dominance in the workplace. yet power dynamics are more complex than organizational hierarchies typically suggest. echoing a truism in sado-masochistic relationships that real power is held by submissives rather than dommes (see mackendrick, 1999), a boss often becomes reliant on the secretary precisely because she responds so precisely to individual needs, quirks, and desires. in the context of data management and control, the trope of an executive rendered helpless by the absence of a secretary has a parallel in the many youtube videos of people trying to find the right words to get siri or alexa to do what they request. secretaries play an often unacknowledged role in shaping the capacities of those who employ them. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 12 secretaries accumulate power in the same way that they accumulate data: continual performances of submissiveness slowly produce a rich archive of behaviors, demands, and weaknesses. in her history of the secretary in 1930s fiction, rooney (2003) notes, the “secretary” routinely delineates an ancillary-although instrumental-role in relation to executive or worldly power…humble servant to political or economic power and one potentially able to mediate that power, the secretary occupies shifting boundaries within hierarchies and between private and public realms, with the capacity to wield power on the basis of privileged position and knowledge. (p. 29) as more people begin to use ai secretaries, their power will come less from any technological developments than the social design of systems that invite us to forget their power because they are made to fit within non-threatening feminine tropes. the surveillant work of ai secretaries is neither an orwellian spectacle of scrutiny, nor a dramatic, one-time confession. rather, with the normalization of ai technologies comes the mundane and continuous transfer of data, resulting in conditions where the companies that design the devices know more about us than we know about ourselves. building the gender stereotypes of the past into the tools of the future. while siri, cortana, and alexa are presented as technologically innovative, they manifest with distinctly retrograde visions of gender. much like science fiction that features technical innovation but outdated gender roles (see pluretti, lingel, & sinnreich, 2016), ai secretaries remind us of the disconnect between technological and social progress. leaders of the tech industry present their companies as race-blind, gender-blind meritocracies, where no matter one’s demographics, the best programmer wins. and yet, the discrimination against and harassment of women and other minority groups in silicon valley is rampant (benner, 2017; kosoff, 2017; west, whittaker, & crawford, 2019). from this view, the continued defaulting of ai secretaries to women’s voices and affect is less like a quaint homage to tradition and more of a reflection of entrenched gender stereotypes of women’s capacities and value. rather than producing new sociotechnical dynamics that could create new identities of ai assistance, the retrograde figure of ai secretaries forecloses more imaginative possibilities in favor of the narrowest and most limited of gender norms. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 13 dehumanization. the objectification of the secretary is clearest in the cases of secretaries as (literal) furniture and ai, but it is also evident with personal assistants. the office has historically been a sphere of masculinity, and bringing women into the office, even when collectively understood to be subordinate, was typically viewed as a source of distraction and frivolity (saval, 2014). a key means of mitigating tensions surrounding the disruption of women at work has been to objectify their bodies and devalue their labor, agency, and individuality. the hostile work cultures experienced by women office workers is well documented, particularly after the dramatic rise in visibility following the #metoo campaign in 2017 and beyond. but such behavior is not restricted to humans. siri and cortana have been ridiculed, harassed, and threatened by their users (bergen, 2016; piper, 2016), just the latest manifestation in a long series of disrespecting secretary work specifically, and women’s voices and presence generally. in phan’s (2019) critique of the race and class politics embedded in amazon echo, she notes that harassment and incivility towards smart home devices has a longstanding parallel in the treatment of servants. as a labor pool, secretaries are often conceptualized as interchangeable. for example, large firms that retain a large number of secretaries typically employ a “floater” system, where a small pool of secretaries are deployed to fill in for planned and unplanned absences of other admins, the idea being that the work is predictable and (like desks) human secretaries are easily swapped and switched. viewing secretaries as nonthreatening and replaceable makes it safe to entrust them with secrets, precisely because they’re presumed to be incapable of misusing or exfiltrating the information shared with them. backstage access. in their analysis of secretaries and organizational behavior, lewis and simpson (2012) describe a disconnect between the perceived status of secretaries (as low in the office hierarchy) and the power they retain in terms of insider information. while “located in the margins” of the workplace structure, secretaries paradoxically sustain the “dominant center”: “secretaries have close daily interaction with their bosses and hence have access to the ‘real story’ behind public presentations—a knowledge that can potentially (and embarrassingly) trigger unfavourable evaluations and reveal inequitable differential rewards” (lewis & simpson, 2012, p. 149). likewise, kanter (1977) has illustrated the performative complexities of access, trust, and submissive fealty that define the secretarial profession in the corporate world. as greenbaum (1995) notes, the secretary has always completed both visible and invisible work: the visible parts of secretarial work, like typing and filing, have original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 14 increasingly been separated, routinized, and automated, while the more invisible tasks, such as gatekeeping, as well as prioritizing the boss’s work, scheduling, and making the office run smoothly, have resisted—at least until recently—such routinization and automation. (p. 40) this more invisible form of work, in terms of scheduling and calendaring priorities, is where ai agents have sought to intervene. but of course one of the key functions of the secretary, that of keeping secrets, is ultimately inverted. the data, and the patterns in the data, are being shared with a technology company. a set of leaked documents and investigations in 2019 revealed that google, amazon, and apple were keeping the recordings of people talking with google assistant, alexa, and siri and were asking contractors to listen and transcribe them—all without informing users (simonite, 2019). apple and google halted the practice after public outcry (sawers, 2019). secretaries have always had the capacity to leverage the information they gathered to serve new purposes, like jockeying for different responsibilities or enabling office coups. but now this information travels beyond workplace walls, into databases of tech companies to be listened to by contractors, leaked online, and potentially sold to data brokers. whether as desks, office workers, or smartphones, secretarial labor is designed to fade into the routinized background of working life. the shift from human secretaries to ai systems like siri and cortana may be marketed as “seamless” or “magical” but this marketing narrative papers over what kinds of labor are being devalued or removed, and what kinds of practices (gatekeeping, maintaining privacy, social trust) are eroded or lost. rendered invisible by their familiarity and objectification, secretaries bear witness to habits and disclosures, secrets and mishaps. sharing affinity with stagehands, janitors, and waitstaff, secretaries are backstage actors (goffman, 1956), whose access to information is continual and overlooked. we surrender data to them (in part) because we forget that they are there. it is precisely this tendency that is leveraged by tech companies when they invoke the figure of the secretarial assistant for their ai systems. conclusions: the death (by automation?) of the secretary as ai technologies move deeper into contemporary workplaces, and more administrative work is outsourced or automated, what can the secretary, in all her assemblages, teach us about technological distributions of power? as we see it, the ghost of the secretary in the ai machine points to two key implications: the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 15 fraught labor politics of the automation of administrative labor, and the further extension of surveillance infrastructure into everyday life. in the late nineteenth century, women disrupted traditional working arrangements of the secretary, filling positions that opened as men took better paying and more prestigious jobs. now in the twenty-first century, ai secretaries represent another disruption to the human secretary workforce, which has already experienced considerable layoffs and cutbacks (richardson, 2018). in march 2019 google terminated contracts for dozens of temporary workers on the “personality” team for google assistant, the team that designs and maintains the persona of google’s ai secretary. in a public letter criticizing the move, the workers described themselves as “the human labor that makes the assistant relevant, funny, and relatable in more than 50 languages” (quoted in wong, 2019). in response to the firing, more than nine hundred google employees signed a letter of protest and staged a walkout, provoking google to issue new “minimum standards” for temp employees. temps, vendors, and contractors make up more than half of google’s global workforce, reflecting a broader trend towards shortterm contracts instead of long-term working arrangements with benefits. google’s firing of the employees behind its ai secretary is the latest in a long tradition of outsourcing secretarial work, and points to increasing tensions over automation and agency in the workplace (see gray & suri, 2019). even the people who write the scripts for the automated secretary are undervalued and ultimately laid off. the emergence of ai systems to further automate of secretary labor supports the narrative that this profession can and should be automated, and even those who design the personalities of ai secretaries are seen as disposable. rather than freeing us to do less work, ai secretaries simply allow a set of work tasks to be removed from paid workers while creating more tasks and interfaces for people to organize themselves and their data, further blurring work/life boundaries. the reliance on smart devices stretches across many of the traditional divides in working arrangements, with gig workers and blue-collar workers as likely to feel dependent on ai tools as those in white-collar office spaces (hernandez, 2018; ticona, 2015). in working contexts that demand more self-management and offer less administrative support, ai secretaries demonstrate a shifting labor landscape that uses automation to extract more labor from an already overburdened human workforce. automation isn’t just about technology and economics, it is also fundamentally original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 16 bound up in understandings of race, class, and gender. as levy (2015) has noted, “trucking is more than a work process; it is also an enactment of masculinity, a form of economic provision, and an extension of sexuality” (p. 364). with women comprising most of its labor force, secretary work has historically involved harassment, boredom, and objectification, but rather than reimagining a more equitable workplace, ai secretaries foreclose these labor pathways while redirecting that work onto many more (unpaid or underpaid) people to keep themselves organized. racial and gender power dynamics emerge again, as the administrative work of maintaining and transcribing ai secretarial systems is outsourced largely to the global south (richardson, 2018; poster, 2013, 2016). what we see in the most recent figure of the ai secretary is an entrenchment of the longstanding dynamics of secretarial labor: submission, dehumanization, and surveillance. discourses about privacy and surveillance often emphasize state actors and social media companies (andrejevic, 2007; greenwald, 2014; zuboff, 2015), which are undeniably important features of the contemporary digital landscape. but surveillance work has largely shifted from capturing everything about a small number of people to capturing vast amounts of information about everyone (bossewitch & sinnreich, 2013; brunton & nissenbaum, 2015; lingel & sinnreich, 2016). secretarial work is attuned precisely to this kind of data capture. we’ve shown how many of the highly gendered features that make secretaries easy to ignore also facilitate the capturing of significant amounts of data. if there is to be meaningful resistance to increasing levels of surveillance, it will require a nuanced accounting of how these devices lure us in. by tracking the intertwining of gender and labor norms embedded in ai secretaries, we are better positioned to understand how these devices are able to gather so much data with so little resistance from many millions of users. the figure of the secretary over the past three centuries has much to teach us when we consider the design and positioning of ai agents, data collection systems, and automation. ai assistants are sold as convenience rather than surveillance, freedom from work rather than creating new forms of administrative labor, and an economic inevitability rather than a deepening of structural inequality. as worker resistance around the firing of the google assistant team reminds us, these inequalities are threaded through the ways ai systems are imagined, maintained, and deployed—but they can be protested. as artificial intelligence continues to develop, we should be wary of these anthropomorphized data collection systems, and question the entangled relationships between ai original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 17 technology and labor. acknowledgements the authors are grateful to zane cooper, joan greenbaum,alex monea, kiran samuel, aaron shapiro and meredith whittakerfor their help and feedback on earlier versions of this work. the authors also wish to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. references acker, j. 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(2015). strategies of control: workers’ use of icts to shape knowledge and service work. information, communication & society, 18(5), 509-523. wajcman, j. (1991). feminism confronts technology. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press. west, s. m., whittaker, m., & crawford, k. (2019). discriminating systems: gender, race and power in ai. new york, ny: ai now institute. retrieved from https://ainowinstitute.org/ discriminatingsystems.htm wong, j. c. (2019, april 2). google staff condemn treatment of temp workers in “historic” show of solidarity. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/02/google-workers-sign-lettertemp-contractors-protest zuboff, s. (2015). big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology, 30(1), 75-89. author bios jessa lingel is an assistant professor at the annenberg school for communication and core faculty in gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the university of pennsylvania. https://www.etymonline.com/word/secretary https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/alexa-how-will-you-change-us/570844/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/alexa-how-will-you-change-us/570844/ https://www.wired.com/story/whos-listening-talk-google-assistant/ https://www.wired.com/story/whos-listening-talk-google-assistant/ https://ainowinstitute.org/%20discriminatingsystems.htm https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/02/google-workers-sign-letter-temp-contractors-protest https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/02/google-workers-sign-letter-temp-contractors-protest original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience issue 6 (vol 1) jessa lingel and kate crawford, 2020 22 kate crawford is a distinguished research professor at new york university, where she co-founded the ai now institute – the first interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. she is a senior principal researcher at microsoft research new york, and the inaugural visiting chair in ai and justice at the école normale supérieure in paris. dolezal, luna, and venla oikkonen. 2021. “self-tracking, embodied differences, and intersectionality.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 6 (1): 1–15. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introduction self-tracking, embodied differences, and intersectionality luna dolezal university of exeter l.r.dolezal@exeter.ac.uk venla oikkonen tampere university venla.oikkonen@tuni.fi abstract this introduction to the special section “self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health” situates self-tracking technologies and practices within the contexts of neoliberalism, gendered and racialized health inequalities, and questions of social justice. it argues that intersectional sts analyses are needed to address the complex ways in which self-tracking technologies draw on, and may reinforce, colonial and racialized hierarchies, gendered histories of surveillance, and normative assumptions of ability and embodiment. the introduction outlines the four key areas of concern that the special section articles address: tracking mental health, tracking moving bodies, tracking reproductive health, and art interventions. introduction self-tracking technologies represent the confluence of a number of issues, themes, and materialities that have been central to feminist technoscience special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 2 scholarship over several decades. these include embodied differences and intimate and invisible bodily processes as objects of technological intervention as well as questions of biopolitics, surveillance, and normalization. in self-tracking technologies, the relations between technological development, capitalist logics, biological processes, and agency are being negotiated in ways that have farreaching consequences for how we live as situated individuals and communities in the twenty-first century. there is, then, a lot at stake for feminist intersectional analyses of health and medicine—and feminist sts more generally—when considering the role of self-tracking technologies in contemporary self-care and healthcare landscapes. this special section emerges from a shared understanding that nuanced and detailed feminist analyses are urgently needed to unpack the complex ways in which self-tracking technologies may both enable and disrupt normative expectations and configurations of health and embodied differences. self-tracking is a practice that involves monitoring and recording details of one’s activities, body, and life, with the aim of achieving self-knowledge and selfimprovement. while human beings have tracked themselves in this manner for centuries—for instance, measuring height and weight, or tracking menstrual cycles—self-tracking has been transformed in recent decades through the development of digital technologies such as smartphones, apps, and “wearables.” such technologies enable continuous monitoring of bodies, activities, and physiological states in the name of health, fitness, and well-being. often worn on, or carried by, the body, self-tracking devices monitor and quantify physiological states in order to produce biometric data on bodily activities and processes, such as one’s exercise, calorie intake, mood, heart rate, reproductive cycles, sleep, and other health-relevant information. these data, much of which were previously only accessible in the realm of biomedicine, can be gathered, managed, shared, and visualized by individuals, who often utilize social media platforms to do so (lupton 2015). promising “self-knowledge through numbers” (wolf 2010), selftracking technologies herald a novel data-driven conception of the body and health for the information age. underpinned by a logic that sees the human body as an assemblage of data and information flows, genetic, molecular, vital, psychological, biological, and otherwise, these technologies are both intimate and remote, affecting individuals’ personal lives and self-conceptions, while also shaping broad socio-political understandings of health, life, and the human body (dolezal 2016). frequently commercially developed and implemented under neoliberal paradigms, these novel technologies concretely mark the fusion of information special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 3 technology, biomedicine, and a neoliberal market agenda. as such, they instantiate not only the increased technologization of medicine but also the encroachment of markets within healthcare. the promise of control and mastery of one’s health that these technologies offer is countered with a set of biopolitical anxieties regarding technological encroachment into personal life and the neoliberal emphasis on individual responsibility for health, well-being, and selfknowledge. concerns about control, surveillance, privacy, distribution of health resources, and ambiguity regarding outcomes, means that these technologies are far from straightforwardly beneficial. there is a rich and growing literature that addresses some of the anxieties and concerns that have arisen as self-tracking technologies have proliferated. concerns regarding the consequences of viewing human life primarily as a “digitized data assemblage,” to use deborah lupton’s term, have been explored in a number of texts that interrogate the personal and socio-political ramifications for primarily data-driven understandings of the body and health (e.g., berson 2015; dolezal 2016; roberts, mackenzie, and mort 2019; smith and vonthethoff 2017). the connections between markets, self-tracking, and governance have been explored, for example, in terms of work and expectations of self-care and optimization placed on employees, extending both inside and outside the workplace (moore 2017; till 2019). researchers have highlighted that as personal and medical health data are made available to employers and private companies, the parameters for what constitutes appropriate health and health-related behavior is increasingly determined by commercial interests while also being potentially implicated in one’s broader professional, social, and economic success (tanninen 2020). other scholars interrogate the overemphasis on personal responsibility and self-regulation that self-tracking technologies instantiate, placing an undue burden on individuals to manage their own health and health outcomes via consumer choices while occluding the impact of social and cultural determinants of health (e.g., schüll 2016). likewise, scholars have addressed anxieties regarding privacy and ownership of personal data, where data generated by self-tracking technologies is a commodity that is exploited by corporate entities for profit and surveillance, usually without the knowledge of the original generators of these data (e.g., lupton 2016). at the same time, scholars have interrogated the complex ways in which self-trackers negotiate the assumptions of markets, app designers, or healthcare providers, create communities, and engage creatively with data (pantzar and ruckenstein 2017; weiner et al. 2020). crucially, such negotiations and engagements are not always voluntary but may be structured and curtailed by questions of life, death, and disability, as laura special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 4 forlano (2017) and stephen horrocks (2019) have shown previously in catalyst in the context of type 1 diabetes. furthermore, researchers have also highlighted how self-tracking technologies engender not just new kinds of digitized and quantified knowledge but also foundational uncertainties that self-trackers need to tackle (bergroth 2019). while these analyses of self-tracking technologies raise important questions about the problems and pitfalls inherent to these technologies, there has been less attention paid in recent scholarship to the role of gender, race, disability, class, and age in practices and imaginaries of self-tracking. yet self-tracking technologies are loaded with normative assumptions regarding the human body and its health, ability, gender, and class. the generalized “user” of self-tracking technologies is a homogenized and socially dislocated subject. for example, these technologies assume that bodies fit within a certain range of variation, that bodily functions follow a regular pattern that allows algorithms to turn physiology into data, that people live their lives in circumstances that enable routinization of selftracking practices, and that gendered and racialized bodies can be detached from their social, cultural, and geopolitical locations. in addition, self-tracking practices feed into the production of highly normative bodies, extending the neoliberal and patriarchal regulatory mechanisms of the wellness, health, beauty, and fashion industries into increasingly self-managed, self-regulated, and intimate domains (e.g., sanders 2017). at the same time, self-tracking technologies have also become increasingly specialized, addressing specific demographic groups, such as women seeking to avoid pregnancy or people with depression or anxiety wishing to anticipate mood changes. normative assumptions about bodies, identities, and “normal” life course continue, however, to structure these increasingly targeted technologies and their modes of datafication. furthermore, as self-tracking technologies promote a highly individualistic notion of health, they downplay and sidestep a more communal and socially determined understanding of health. not only does this intensify the pernicious politics of personal responsibility that is characteristic of neoliberalism, but also has profound consequences when considering socially disadvantaged and marginalized individuals and groups who may not have the social or material resources to engage in projects of self-transformation, selfoptimization, or self-improvement. intersectional feminist analyses are needed to interrogate how the technological and social developments afforded by selftracking practices can enable new forms of structural inequality. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 5 this special section contributes to these debates through eight articles and one critical commentary that represent a range of feminist intersectional perspectives. approaching self-tracking as a biopolitical (re)orientation toward the interiority of bodies in the context of increasingly commercialized healthcare, the special section asks how self-tracking technologies and techniques are used, reshaped, or resisted by users and communities situated differently within social structures of power. it situates self-tracking technologies within the larger dynamics of societal change, such as changes in the gendered and racialized responsibilities for care—especially self-care—and the neoliberal restructuring of institutions of medicine, education, and work. under neoliberalism, “health” has become an individual achievement, where the onus of responsibility for good health and health outcomes is largely placed back on the individual through an emphasis on the importance of self-reliance and self-control when it comes to lifestyle, behavior, and health outcomes. individuals are encouraged, and sometimes “nudged,” to find their own solutions for poor health and health management, often through consumer choices within the private sector. these neoliberal logics are precisely some of the most significant drivers behind individual engagement in self-monitoring practices through the use of commercial self-tracking technologies. the special section articles explore, on the one hand, the extent to which selftracking technologies are able to recognize embodied gendered, racialized, or classed differences, and, on the other hand, how some of those differences are turned into profit—and for whom. several of the articles explore the ways in which gender, race, age, or class shape engagements with and experiences of selftracking technologies, identifying places where creative or unanticipated uses of self-tracking technologies emerge, and evaluating their implications for feminist politics. some articles also explore how self-tracking technologies articulate global and postcolonial power hierarchies, and how they make sense (or fail to make sense) as ways of managing health and well-being in different global and local contexts, such as ethiopia, china, or north america. the articles are motivated by a shared concern: what happens to ideas of risk, health, or responsibility when self-tracking is extended to intimate embodied processes, such as reproductive health, to areas shaped strongly by social and structural inequalities such as mental health, or to bodies and locations perceived as “other” by the market? through their rich range of methodologies and concepts, the articles in the special section demonstrate what kinds of feminist methods may help us unpack the socio-political logics and implications of self-tracking. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 6 the rest of this introductory essay outlines four themes through which the articles included in the special section engage critically with self-tracking technologies: tracking mental health, tracking moving bodies, tracking reproductive health, and art interventions. tracking mental health self-tracking technologies typically monitor bodily processes and activities, whether heart rate during exercise, hours of sleep and rest, or quantifiable changes in the gendered body indicating ovulation. although one underlying goal of technologies such as smart wristbands has been stress management and relaxation, the explicit extension of digital self-tracking technologies into the realm of mental health and psychiatry is a more recent development (davies 2017; pritz 2016; stark 2020). crucially, mental health self-tracking technologies seek to quantify something essentially intangible—moods, sensations, felt orientations— and turn the complex and ambiguous connections between embodied processes and mental illness into presumably manageable data. this datafication and selfsurveillance of mental health has also significant implications for gender and intersectional differences. as mental health and illness are not only biomedical but also sociocultural phenomena, they are deeply entangled with questions of inequality, privilege, and embodied differences. it is therefore crucial to understand how self-tracking of mental health and illness may invoke and reinscribe ideas of gendered, racialized, or class-associated differences, or cement problematic ideas of disembodied mind. the special section opens with two articles that address ethical and political concerns arising from the self-tracking of mental health and mental illness. lindsay weinberg’s article “mental health and the self-tracking student” investigates how the welltrack app, marketed to and adopted by many north american universities, has emerged as part of a larger shift toward digital education governance and the neoliberalization of higher education. weinberg argues that the app responsibilizes students for their mental health and their adjustment to college life while sidestepping structural and societal factors that reinforce inequalities at university. the article shows how the promotion of the self-tracking student as a key to improving student mental health fails to unpack the ways in which racialized and gendered histories precondition students’ lived experiences of communal safety and personal well-being. the article also raises concerns about how students are encouraged to share private data with corporations for profit. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 7 suze berkhout and juveria zaheer’s article “digital self-monitoring, bodied realities: re-casting app-based technologies in first episode psychosis” continues a similar line of careful intersectional critique of the neoliberalization of mental health. berkhout and zaheer explore the growing use of digital selftracking technologies for symptom monitoring in the context of first episode psychosis. based on their ethnographic work within the clinical treatment of first episode psychosis, berkhout and zaheer ask what happens to lived, embodied experience of psychosis when experience is captured for and transformed through digital technologies of quantification. the article identifies and critiques the idea of progress and “curative paradigm” that, the authors argue, underlie the use of digital self-monitoring technologies in psychiatry. tracking moving bodies one of the primary targets of commercial self-tracking technologies is the realm of fitness for healthy populations. sustaining a multibillion-dollar global industry, fitness and well-being self-tracking apps and wearable devices are utilized by elite athletes and ordinary gym goers alike, where the self-monitoring of physical activity and biometric information is used to track activities, usually with the aim of improving performance. existing literature exploring the use of fitness apps and wearables focuses on questions regarding self-optimization, looking at the relationships between physical health, digital data, and projects of selfmanagement for privileged subjects in the global north (e.g., fotopoulou and o’riordan 2017). less scholarly attention has been paid to how the use of fitness tracking technologies is shaped by and embedded in differing socio-cultural, economic, and environmental structures and utilized by individuals or groups in the global south or from racialized, stigmatized, or minority communities (lupton 2017, 3). the articles by hannah borenstein and xin liu in this special section decenter the usual assumptions about who utilizes self-tracking fitness technologies, exploring power dynamics along with intersectional and environmental nuances of the tracked moving body in ethiopia and china, respectively. hannah borenstein’s article “tracking work from the wrist: surveillance of ethiopian women athletes for capital” discusses the use of gps watches among elite women athletes in ethiopia. the article highlights the potentially problematic colonial dynamics of labor extraction, where the data produced by african women’s work is owned and utilized by sports scientists in a commercial sports company lab in the united states. drawing on her own ethnographic fieldwork, borenstein points out how purportedly a self-tracking technology has special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 8 been repurposed by coaches, employers, husbands, and others as a tracking device that ensures the surveillance and micromanagement of women’s bodies. the article raises important questions about colonial legacies in global sporting labor markets, along with feminist concerns regarding the control, surveillance, and exploitation of women’s bodies that is enabled through tracking technologies. xin liu’s article “keeping fit in the smog: health, self-tracking and air pollution in postsocialist china” analyses the phenomena of the “smog jog,” where individuals go jogging in air marked by high levels of pollution, and how this is intertwined with social media use and environmental politics. analyzing social media posts on the popular chinese platform sina weibo, xin liu explores the themes of “negotiation” and “enjoyment” in relation to self-reported smog jogs where users balance the risks of ingesting pollution and the psycho-physical benefits of jogging. as she demonstrates through her analysis, individual health is a complex idea, negotiated between self-regulation, environmental conditions, political exigencies, and social dynamics. the self-optimization afforded by selftracking via apps and social media is tempered by environmental adversities and a lack of environmental care that many chinese social media users feel should be provided by the state. tracking reproductive health self-tracking around reproduction has been a topic of particular interest for feminist scholars. reproductive technologies include ovulation sticks and kits as well as mobile apps that enable recording of symptoms, bodily sensations, and changes in body temperature, and turn such information into personalized charts or indications of “fertile” days that can then be used by self-trackers to guide their sexual activities. ovulation and fertility apps are often connected to interactive online platforms, and marketed as allowing the user to join peer communities. feminist analyses have recorded the ambivalences inherent in these technologies (e.g., hamper 2020; wilkinson 2020). reproductive self-tracking technologies have been seen as enabling women to know their bodies in new ways, gain a sense of embodied agency, and work actively toward achieving or avoiding pregnancy. at the same time, there has been growing concern about what happens to intimate data when it is collected, managed, and capitalized on by companies designing the apps, or what forms of embodied knowledge about reproduction are excluded through the datafication of invisible bodily processes. special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 9 three articles in this special section contribute to these feminist discussions in crucial ways. in “the cyclic self: menstrual cycle tracking as body politics,” laetitia della bianca investigates the ambiguity in how the users of period tracking apps emerge both as objects of biopolitical and capitalist governance and as actors whose period-tracking practices reach beyond optimization. della bianca employs and develops the concept “cyclic self” to capture how users of period tracking apps conceptualize, negotiate, and live their embodied relationship to the practices of tracking menstruation. drawing on her interviews with period tracking app users from ten countries, della bianca points toward the multiple ways in which the normative idea of a uniform, measurable female reproductive body falls apart in actual period tracking practices. the article also draws crucial attention to the multiplicity of period app users and the complexity of the situations in which period tracking apps are made to make sense as tools of reproductive health. celia roberts and catherine waldby’s article “incipient infertility: tracking eggs and ovulation across the life course” interrogates the future-orientation underlying the expanding field of fertility-tracking technologies from ovulation biosensing to perimenopausal apps and ovarian reserve testing. drawing on their research contexts in australia and the uk, roberts and waldby inspect the connections between fertility tracking as personal search for future fulfilment and the capitalist logic of commodification of biological processes. tracing the idea of infertility as an incipient process that needs to be anticipated and encumbered, the article shows how fertility has become increasingly conceptualized as an asset with potential future value. roberts and waldby argue that this has posited fertility as an embodied and temporally organized capacity that is no longer directly attached to reproduction. at the same time, it places increasingly intense demands on individuals to manage proactively their reproductive futures. sarah fox and franchesca spektor’s article “hormonal advantage: retracing the exploitative histories of workplace menstrual tracking” continues these feminist discussions of optimization in the context of menstruation and the workplace. their article critically examines the popular framing of period tracking as a feminist project that enables women to achieve a personal advantage at work and in personal life by optimizing and utilizing their hormonal status. fox and spektor carefully situate these recent individualizing discourses of menstrual ”deficit” and menstrual optimization within a historical lineage that, their analysis shows, is deeply entangled with corporate interest. the article also seeks to imagine how period tracking in the workplace could be used to alternative, communal ends, special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 10 such as worker mobilization and collective bargaining. this move makes visible that the often taken-for-granted link between self-tracking and personal optimization is not the only way that self-tracking communities can be conceptualized. this is a theme that the final two contributions on feminist science and art, introduced next, also engage with. art interventions self-tracking technologies are also making an impact in creative arts, where a growing number of artists are using data from self-tracking technologies as a means to create visual art. for instance, the american “data artist” laurie frick (www.lauriefrick.com) uses data about her own life—such as her steps around her brooklyn neighborhood tracked on a fitbit, or her daily feelings and mood states tracked on the online diary moodjam—to create “handbuilt work from personal data,” resulting in large-scale installation pieces that visually represent her “experience” via patterns and colorscapes (urist 2015). feminist technoscience scholars, and catalyst editors, nassim parvin and anne pollock (jafarinaimi and pollock 2018) have also engaged in using data as an experimental medium through which to create visualizations, as a type of art work, to catalyse feminist reflection and conversation. in their “experiment,” they created visualizations of heart rate to open up creative space in feminist technoscience scholarship regarding data, embodiment, and visualization. in this tradition of “data art,” artist gemma anderson’s cover image, growing una and cosmo, visually depicts the data of the times and durations of breastfeeding her newborn twins that she collected in a notebook for over a year after their birth. this image shows the material and affective labor of early motherhood that supersedes the increasingly popular practice of tracking breastfeeding metrics. other data artists are using the creative medium to express and articulate anxieties about self-tracking and life-logging. for instance, art installations such as proto/meta’s data identities (2015) along with alex rothera and james krahe’s playful self: the anxiety of data, calmed with tea (2015) explore the pitfalls, and potentially pernicious outcomes, of having biometric data stand in for personal identity, where human life can be reduced to data sets that can be monitored, compared, and quantified. in this special section we include two contributions that address how creative arts have both incorporated and are challenging the practices, methodologies, logics, and discourses of tracking and self-tracking technologies. first, alessandra mularoni’s article “feminist science interventions in self-tracking technology” explores some of the critical interventions made by feminist artists and biohackers whose work engage with the politics surrounding women’s health, biotechnology, special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 11 surveillance, commodification of genetic material, and the dominance of big pharma. for instance, mularoni discusses the work of the artist-researcher heather dewey-hagborg, whose invisible project (http://biogenfutur.es/) offers a “product” that ensures genetic privacy, protecting “against new forms of biological surveillance,” where the suggestion that one’s genetic material is “tracked” by the state, national security programs, and private genomics companies implies a dystopian reality where individuals and their data, genetic or otherwise, are monitored by invisible forces. as mularoni emphasizes, this artistic intervention “brings to the fore the ethics of traceability, specifically the power dynamic between invisible agents of sight and those who are subject to pervasive tracking.” in the age of big data, self-tracking data is “lively” (lupton 2015), where, in part, this means, these data are “open to constant repurposing by a range of actors and agencies, often in ways in which the original generators of these data have little or no knowledge” (lupton 2016, 563). artistic interventions such as invisible offer important commentary on the dystopian potential for corporate control, alienation, compromised privacy, and social inequalities when data-driven identities come to dominate social life. heidi tikka’s critical commentary “the body, the threshold, the cut: the aesthetics and ethics of measuring in interactive media art” discusses her own artistic practice, creating interactive installation art works that use sensor technologies to create relational environments where sensors “track” visitors’ bodies in order to enact the artwork, encounters that tikka calls “body sensor coperformances.” specifically, tikka discusses her installation mother, child, where sensors track the actions of a visitor, which then feed into the “reactions” of a responsive video projection. depending on the visitor’s actions, the “child” cries, laughs, nurses,or falls asleep enacting “a relational event in which different modalities of bodily movements converge with audiovisual experience.” as tikka discusses, interactive art, such as mother, child can be conceived of as an assemblage within a relational environment, where the lines between actor, artists, spectator, artwork are permeable and unstable, and the artwork is an “ephemeral event” rather than a fixed object. the use of “tracking” in tikka’s work demonstrates how the data generated from sensor and tracking technologies have complex trajectories and potentials. * as with most collaborative academic work, this special section has a history that reaches back several years. the idea for the special section emerged from the http://biogenfutur.es/ special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 12 symposium monitoring the self: negotiating technologies of health, identity and governance, co-organized by venla oikkonen and ingrid young at the helsinki collegium for advanced studies in november 2017 as part of the nordic network gender, body and health project, the embodied self, health and emerging technologies: implications for gender and identity, funded by the joint committee for nordic research councils in the humanities and social sciences. while the special section includes some contributions from the symposium participants, most of the articles included here represent novel and developing explorations of the embodied ethics and politics of self-tracking and the ways selftracking technologies enact differences, reinforce inequalities, or enable unexpected alliances. * postscript: cover image by gemma anderson the cover image, growing una and cosmo, by gemma anderson, depicts the breastfeeding pattern of the artist’s baby twins during the first month of their lives. it is composed of a series of twin circles on either side (one baby on the inside, one on the outside) of a logarithmic spiral (also known as a growth spiral). the image was drawn from information about breastfeeding times, sides, and nappy changes collected in a series of notebooks since the babies’ birth. although she had a sense of the “pattern” of the breastfeeding, gemma wanted to “make visible” the pattern, and so she spent a while imagining what form this could take. the resulting image is an abstract representation of breastfeeding. making the image involved patient care and attention, not so different to the kind required in mothering, and so the slow and laborious means of creating the image (hand drawing and painting) somehow suits the subject, the careful and patient dedicated labor of the mother. gemma continues to visualize the breastfeeding patterns as her babies approach their first birthday. for more about her work, please visit www.gemma-anderson.co.uk. references bergroth, harley. 2019. “‘you can’t really control life’: dis/assembling selfknowledge with self-tracking technologies.” distinktion: journal of social theory 20 (2): 190–206. berson, josh. 2015. computable bodies: instrumented life and the human somatic niche. new york: bloomsbury academic. https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.gemma-anderson.co.uk%2f&data=04%7c01%7ccaroline.warren%40emory.edu%7c7db12693e9e74baf256108d8b3eb469b%7ce004fb9cb0a4424fbcd0322606d5df38%7c0%7c0%7c637457170368321038%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c1000&sdata=vwavt7li7b5wlu7gjgj7sdbqm%2fdm4iafkzse%2fypc3fg%3d&reserved=0 special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 13 davies, william. 2017. “how are we now? real-time mood-monitoring as valuation.” journal of cultural economy 10 (1): 34–48. dolezal, luna. 2016. “human life as digitized data assemblage: health, wealth and biopower in gary shteyngart’s super sad true love story.” medical humanities 42 (4): 219–24. forlano, laura. 2017. “data rituals in intimate infrastructures: crip time and the disabled cyborg body as an epistemic site of feminist science.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3 (2). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i2.28843. fotopoulou, aristea, and kate o’riordan. 2017. “training to self-care: fitness tracking, biopedagogy and the healthy consumer.” health sociology review 26 (1): 54–68. hamper, josie. 2020. “‘catching ovulation’: exploring women’s use of fertility tracking apps as a reproductive technology.” body & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x19898259. horrocks, stephen. 2019. “materializing datafied body doubles: insulin pumps, blood glucose testing, and the production of usable bodies.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29613. jafarinaimi, nassim, and anne pollock. 2018. “heart sense: experiments in design as a catalyst for feminist reflections on embodiment.” design as a catalyst for change drs international conference 2018, 25-28 june, limerick, ireland, edited by cristiano storni, keelin leahy, muireann mcmahon, peter lloyd, and erik bohemia. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.409 . lupton, deborah. 2015. “lively data, social fitness and biovalue: the intersections of health and fitness self-tracking and social media.” the sage handbook of social media, edited by jean burgess, alice marwick, and thomas poell, 562–78. london: sage. ———. 2016. the quantified self: a sociology of self-tracking. cambridge, uk: polity press. ———. 2017. “self-tracking, health and medicine.” health sociology review 26 (1): 1– 5. moore, phoebe v. 2017. the quantified self in precarity: work, technology and what counts. new york: routledge. pantzar, mika, and minna ruckenstein. 2017. “living the metrics: self-tracking and situated objectivity.” digital health 3, 1–10. pritz, sarah miriam. 2016. “making emotions count: the self-tracking of feelings.” in lifelogging: digital self-tracking and lifelogging between disruptive technology https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i2.28843 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x19898259 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29613 https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.409 special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 14 and cultural transformation, edited by stefan selke, 179–87. wiesbaden: springer fachmedien wiesbaden. roberts, celia, adrian mackenzie, and maggie mort. 2019. living data: making sense of health bio-sensing. bristol: bristol university press. sanders, rachel. 2017. “self-tracking in the digital era: biopower, patriarchy and the new biometric body projects.” body & society 23 (1): 36–63. schüll, natasha dow. 2016. “data for life: wearable technology and the design of self-care.” biosocieties 11 (3): 317–33. smith, gavin j.d., and ben vonthethoff. 2017. “health by numbers?: exploring the practice and experience of datafied health.” health sociology review 26 (1): 6–21. stark, luke. 2020. “the emotive politics of digital mood tracking.” new media & society 22 (11): 2039–57. tanninen, maiju. 2020. “contested technology: social scientific perspectives of behaviour-based insurance.” big data & society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720942536. till, christopher. 2019. “creating ‘automatic subjects’: corporate wellness and selftracking.” health 23 (4): 418–35. urist, jacoba. 2015. “from paint to pixels.” the atlantic, may 14, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/the-rise-of-the-dataartist/392399/. weiner, kate, catherine will, flis henwood, and rosalind williams. 2020. “everyday curation? attending to data, records and record keeping in the practices of selfmonitoring.” big data & society. doi:10.1177/2053951720918275. wilkinson, joann. 2020. “technologies of time: women’s practices of trying to conceive with ovulation biosensing.” sociology of health and illness 42 (7): 1597–610. wolf, gary. 2010. “the data-driven life.” the new york times magazine, april 28, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html. author bios luna dolezal is associate professor in philosophy and medical humanities at the university of exeter where she leads the shame and medicine project, funded by the wellcome trust, and the scenes of shame and stigma in covid-19 project, funded by the uk’s arts and humanities research council. she is author of the https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/the-rise-of-the-data-artist/392399/ https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/the-rise-of-the-data-artist/392399/ https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html special section: self-tracking, embodied differences, and the politics and ethics of health | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1) luna dolezal and venla oikkonen, 2021 15 body and shame: phenomenology, feminism and the socially shaped body (lexington books, 2015) and co-editor of the books body/self/other: the phenomenology of social encounters (suny press, 2017) and new feminist perspectives on embodiment (palgrave, 2018). venla oikkonen is academy research fellow in gender studies at tampere university, finland, where she studies cultural debates about vaccines and infectious diseases, and leads a project on gendered chronic diseases. she has published two monographs, population genetics and belonging (palgrave macmillan 2018) and gender, sexuality and reproduction in evolutionary narratives (routledge 2013) as well as articles in journals such as signs, social studies of science, new genetics and society, and science, technology & human values.     commentary intertwined colonial pasts and the present in global fertility chains     kalindi vora yale university; university of california, davis kalindi.vora@yale.edu     abstract the growth of global fertility chains asserts the central role of reproduction, both social and biological, to the endurance of racial capital’s extraction of value from bodies and labor. this commentary highlights issues of histories of race and labor as they track with calls for reproductive justice across borders.     keywords transnational surrogacy, critical race and ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, assisted reproductive technology, social reproduction     as a collection, this special section on the colonial lineages of global fertility chains reasserts the central role of reproduction, both social and biological, to the endurance of racial capital’s extraction of value from bodies and labor. this extraction continues to be borne most heavily by those populations that black feminist philosopher sylvia wynter refers to as “archipelagos of otherness,” legacies of the failure to decolonize the modern world (2003, 321). transnational practices and markets in assisted reproductive technologies (arts) and fertility therapies have grown and spread since the liberalization of many postcolonial economies through coercive structural readjustments demanded by international loans from the international monetary fund and world bank in the 1990s. as this special section demonstrates, the impact on women around the world today has precipitated a return to earlier feminist and critical race studies theorizations of reproduction at the nexus of slavery, settler colonialism, and extractive colonialism. contributors pursue the analytical traction of approaching colonial legacies in global fertility chains in conversation with feminist science and technology studies. as is apparent in the spectrum of scholarship herein, different disciplinary formations have engaged the reassertion of the reproductive in distinctive terms, tracking separately or together the ongoing histories of colonialism and racial capitalism. intertwined cross-border “intimacies,” in lisa lowe’s (2015) terms, from both the colonial past and present assert themselves at the scale of the global. at the same time, attending to the grounded immediate struggles that get abstracted at the scale of the global is essential, and is taken on by many contributions. the pieces share a determination to demand responsibility to these ongoing histories. together, they complicate the analysis of citizenship, race, class, and gender and demand new analytics for both the global nature of social relations and markets associated with art and their materialization of the ongoing coloniality of modernity. in the wake of a globe dominated by formal imperial governmentality, there is a failure of a corresponding sense of social responsibility across borders that comes through this collection. though she is not often referred to as a theorist of social reproduction, bell hook’s work speaks strongly to this failure. we lost hooks during the final phase of producing this special section, and though her work focuses specifically on the united states, her contribution to the discussion of interconnected legacies of coloniality, racial capitalism, and slavery in the lives of women is helpful:   at the end of the day the threat of class warfare, of class struggle, is just too dangerous to face….they cannot see the changing face of global labor—the faces of the women and children whom transnational white supremacist capitalist patriarchy exploits at home and abroad to do dirty work for little pay. they do not speak the languages of the immigrants, male and female, who work here in the meat industry, in clothing sweat-shops, as farmworkers, as cooks and busboys, as nannies and domestic workers….   class is still often kept separate from race. and while race is often linked with gender, we still lack an ongoing collective public discourse that puts the three together in ways that illuminate for everyone how our nation is organized and what our class politics really are. women of all races and black people of both genders are fast filling up the ranks of the poor and disenfranchised. it is in our interest to face the issue of class, to become more conscious, to know better so that we can know how best to struggle for economic justice (hooks 2000, 8).   to illustrate hooks’s point, already in 2003, anthropologist marcia inhorn observed that the globalization of reproductive medicine was banking on the growing number of cases of infertility caused by preventable secondary causes such as malnutrition and unsafe routine gynecological surgeries (inhorn 2003). these cases of preventable infertility were then used to justify the expansion and legal protection of art interventions. one result was the expansion of the population of people who cannot procreate without the intervention of arts. bronwyn parry’s analysis of “perverse markets” in this section offers a depiction of an industry whose growth and profitability depend on bad medicine, where indian elites promote art interventions that have no motive to cure. instead, these interventions perpetuate infertility at the expense of patients whose deeply placed subjective desire for a biological child drives them to submit to the perverse medical practice of purchasing treatments and interventions because their knowledge, economic standing, and lesser social privilege leave them vulnerable to predation by art elites. parry’s analysis illustrates the purchase of a transnational analytics that brings together class, race, gender, and nationality for understanding the web of imperial legacies knitting together markets and subjects across borders. it tracks the growth of a group of “ivf elites,” indian-based global actors who, acting on a colonizing impulse, and by observing the franchising and expansion of european ivf consortiums that entered india in the early 1990s and expanded into uae and africa, have gained holdings in those markets. however, the need for cross-border social responsibility evoked by putting hook’s work in conversation with parry’s is not met by international art regulation, as sonja van wichelen’s contribution makes clear. to the contrary, she argues that because euro-american legal thought makes a core distinction between persons and things, international law effectively “thingifies” surrogates. states and elite actors empowered by the state are then able to assert an imperially derived modern legal form that “de-kins” surrogates. this is accomplished by erasing local forms of kinship and replacing them with euro-american forms asserted by law as modern and universal—an ongoing civilizing mission, as van wichelen claims. one result is that regulations of art at the nation-state level shape where practices grow or fail to grow, rewarding states and regions that have lower regulation with higher profitability. this work contributes to the body of scholarship that has shown how colonial legacies live on in laws governing kinship and reproduction derived from colonial rule (arondekar 2009; ghosh 2008; tambe 2009; foster 2017). transnational surrogacy arrangements in india, as they presented in the first decade of the 2000s, figure prominently in my first book (2015a), a study of how contemporary outsourced labor to india is a practice conditioned by the materialization of freedom (and unfreedom) as produced in the crucible of british colonial racial/labor allocations. engaging lowe’s work on the intimacies forged between asia, europe, africa, and north america during the period dominated by the european territorial colonialism and the atlantic slave trade, i argue that the discussion of transnational gestational surrogacy in india is contextualized by the co-constitution of colonial racial categorizations and an international division of labor as they arose together following the abolition of the slave trade within the british empire in 1807. drawing on lowe’s work, the discussion of transnational surrogacy arrangements argues that the practice extends a “humanism” in the law and in the market where “the social inequalities of our time are a legacy of this [liberal] definition of ‘the human’ and subsequent discourses that have placed particular subjects, practices, and geographies at a distance from ‘the human’” (lowe 2015, 2). as i explain in life support, the relationship between contemporary surrogacy contracts in india and the history of slavery and indenture as they continue to have impact in india is crucial in understanding present day transnational surrogacy:   the distinction between enslaved and free labor that became a concern as part of the abolitionist movement functioned to generate a category of mobile workers that complemented an imperial labor reallocation strategy connecting imperial subjects all over the world as “labor” while elaborating their hierarchical relationship and separation through emerging categories of race and gender attached to their labor. in turn, the nature of freedom and free labor became invested with assumptions about gender, race, and class, as these were also embroiled in the instrumental distinction between free labor and slavery that justified the practice of indenture (kale 1998, 3). this instrumentality wrote over the coercive nature of indenture because it was described as contractual by mutual consent and understanding, even in the face of evidence of the lack of understanding or choice on the part of those signing themselves into indenture. women were recruited under the same contractual conditions not as free labor but rather for the purpose of providing the reproductive labor that made male workers viable, a practice and problem madhavi kale says is embedded in the material origins of the category of free labor as an instrument in imperial labor reallocation. this reallocation was in effect the superimposition of a constructed dichotomy of slavery and free labor on the proliferation of less-than-free labor and conditions as part of empire building, whereby “the post-abolitionist fiction of equal status and equal protection for all imperial subjects regardless of race or nation could be maintained by erasing women as political agents”—what lowe calls a “modern racial governmentality” (2015, 174). like the fiction of noncoercion underpinning indian indenture, in the larger colonial context of the british empire, a number of gendered, sexual, and reproductive relations existed under the umbrella of “consensual” that did not even figure as labor (194).   in her study of the recruitment and resettlement of bonded or indentured laborers from india to the caribbean, kale argues that empire was the invisible pretext for the constitution of labor as an identity and ultimately as a category of analysis in historiography (1998, 4). abstract notions of “consent,” “freedom,” “choice,” and “contract” have been produced and unequally distributed by modern liberalism and have been affirmed selectively for some through the disavowal of colonized and enslaved labor (4). [as lakshmidar mishra’s work on contemporary bonded labor in south asia shows], [t]he category of labor continues to function to write over contemporary conditions of force under other names (2011, 43). these histories, together with the history of the category of free labor itself, mandate attention be paid not only to the particular nature of the work being performed under contract in emerging affective and biological production but also to the particular forms of dependency in operation, because contractual arrangements may contain incomplete or absent information. consent and, therefore, autonomy are incomplete despite being arranged through a freely entered agreement. (vora 2015a, 27–28).   building on angela davis’s critiques of the wages for housework movement in particular, and of (white) marxist feminism in general, life support argues that the destruction of the family unit and its domestic roles, as this appears in outsourcing logics and particularly in surrogacy law, has also been essential to capitalist growth. davis pointed to the centrality of how the abolition of the international slave trade created dependence among slave owners and the slave-based economy on women’s reproduction to increase the domestic population of slaves, and the separation of women unrecognized as mothers and their infants was a regular practice (vora 2015a, 160n17). tying this to grace hong’s analysis of how ongoing dispossession of property, a technology developed through the us legal state’s forging under slavery, indicates the origin of both dispossession or property ownership in slavery, protecting property rights in the us as intended for the white middle-class (vora 2015a, 160n18). as van wichelen’s piece points out, the legal distinction between property and personhood continues to be used as “de-kinning” in international laws governing surrogacy and other art practices across borders. as feminist sts scholarship has shown, technology has played an important role in separating the pregnant body as a productive machine from the subject, and in freeing gestation and nurture to be treated as alienable commodities. however, as detailed in life support, examination of the history of slavery and indenture in india itself and as part of british colonial labor allocation in the colonies adds an additional and important layer for considering the content of labor that is understood to be produced by a free, liberal subject: “already in the early stages of the transnational surrogacy market was evidence that the history of slavery and indenture means that any study of reproduction and labor is likely to fail to fully accommodate the incorporation of partial rather than whole subjects, or the maintenance of permanent exclusion not just as surplus labor but as what hong calls existential surplus (2012): being excluded from full subjecthood to maintain the valorization of protected spheres of life” (vora 2015a, 142). in the first decade of the 2000s, the emergence of a transnational market for surrogacy made clear that “the antecedents of contemporary bioeconomies, relying on the patentability of innovative knowledge and the exploitation of the undervalued and often invisible reproductivity of humans and other organisms and of their parts, such as tissues and cells, were present in the economies of colonialism and slavery in which dehumanized and unfree workers were also self-reproducing capital (vora 2015a, 7). my own discussion of the colonial legacies of race and labor as articulated in india’s side of the story of us and european outsourcing drew on us-based women of color and black feminist theories to reflect briefly on how the then-emerging discourse of “biocapitalism” might be canted to include these intertwined histories. it is therefore surprising when this work, grouped loosely with a set of very different projects, varying from sociologist arlie hochschild’s (1985) study of the emotional labor of us flight attendants in the 1990s to sharmila rudrappa’s 2015 ethnography of indian surrogates as a new kind of gendered reproductive worker, is framed as uniformly neglecting the role of slavery in establishing the episteme of racialized reproduction in the present. as grounds for her own re-theorization of biocapital, alys weinbaum stages the body of work on surrogacy in india, and surrogacy across borders, as a monolith of failed theories of racialized labor and biocapital. however, none of that cited work on indian surrogacy asserts an overarching theorization of contemporary biocapital. instead, each work seeks to show, through the details of surrogate women’s lives in an important and revealing variety of contexts, the enmeshment of past and present local forms of exploitation in a way that no singular theory of biocapitalism could. for example, specific to india alone are examples that include the gendering of indentured tea plantation labor in colonial india to create a supply of new workers for the necessary but undervalued labor of cultivating, picking, and processing tea leaves to fuel the growth of the international trade in tea (chatterjee 2001) and the trafficking of indentured labor from india for plantation work in other british colonies (kale 1998), which was accompanied by a similar reliance within the overlapping economy of atlantic chattel slavery (morgan 2004; kaplan 2007). weinbaum’s contribution is otherwise a helpful intervention, offering a critique of marxist feminism and labor that extends davis’s foundational critique, joining together jennifer morgan’s (2004) work on reproductive labor, as well as hortense spiller’s (1987) theorization of the ungendering that was part of the obliteration of personhood structured into chattel slavery. though missing engagement with closely related work such as sara clarke kaplan’s (2021) work on “the black reproductive,” the framework of “the slave episteme” is useful in combination with studies that center and are accountable to surrogate women’s lives, narratives and assertions of their own political will and analyses. this collection curated by special section editors sigrid vertommen, bronwyn parry, and michal nahman demonstrates that it is possible to address the scale of the global without erasing or diminishing the specificity purveyed in ethnographies of surrogate women and other context-specific experiences of the global, and to attend to “new political forms of social life, reminders of the political importance of the fact that ‘we are not the subjects of or the subject formations of the capitalist world-system. is it merely one condition of our being’” (gordon 2001, cited in vora 2015a, 14). this is how avery gordon introduces the work of cedric robinson, theorist of racial capitalism, in the preface to the precursor to black marxism (1983) titled an anthropology of marxism (2001). as the special section editors point out, one of the themes that draws together several of the contributions is the operation of both necropolitical and biopolitical logics simultaneously in the arena of fertility chains and reproductive technology. for example, the contribution from johanna gondouin and suruchi thapar-björkert examines the violence of colonial modernity by looking at how the “choice” to birth children for giving away is shaped by connected colonial legacies in india and korea. extensively reviewing the contemporary scholarship on surrogacy in india and transnational adoption in korea, and situating this scholarship in the respective histories of concubinage under the british, and camptown women in us korean bases, they identify both contemporary neoliberal states as transforming devalued populations, seen as “waste,” into profit. this is achieved primarily through limiting women’s reproductive choices. transnational adoptions in korea and surrogacy arrangements in india are conditioned by these histories, they argue, articulating a compelling example of what parry calls in this issue “a neocolonist mode of reproduction.” the haunting of contemporary gynecology, and more generally reproductive science and its reformist critiques, by what john gillespie names “ontologically dead beings” intervenes in the foundation of the science of reproductive medicine itself. gillespie’s piece reminds us that undergirding the discussion of the globalizing of reproductive bodies, subjects, and labor in this issue is the necropolitical use of captive, unfree women under slavery for research. using bruno latour and steve woolgar’s laboratory life and sandra harding’s work on “strong objectivity” in the 1990s as the key examples of the failures of sts to acknowledge the reliance of science of its historical exploitation of objectified black women’s bodies under slavery, gillespie’s contribution brings together scholarship by philosopher of race denise ferreira da silva, black feminist philosopher sylvia wynter, and historian jennifer morgan to argue that, “in the case of anarcha, lucy, and betsy [who were captive as slaves by, and subject to experimental fistula surgeries by the later revered marion sims], their wombs were not harnessed for simply the capital accumulation of another; rather, they were harnessed for the scientific accumulation of scientific accreditation.” it joins work in contemporary feminist sts reading da silva (2007), wynter (2003), mckittrick (2021), and other black feminists and philosophers as a black-feminism-derived critique of the history of science. 1 as the pieces by xan sarah chacko examining seeds, deboleena roy examining the molecule methyl isocyanate (mic), and silvia possoco connecting forensics and arts demonstrate, the simultaneity of biopolitical and necropolitical colonial logics extends across the natural environment. like the gametes and embryos cryo-preserved and moved around the globe to support art practices, the seeds observed by chacko are extracted from their native environment and transported and preserved in vaults using similar and sometimes the same technologies. chacko’s argument that the decision by conservationists to let seeds saved in vaults die from neglect arises from logics of racial necropolitics and settler colonialist violence against indigenous people, from whose land the seeds continue to be extracted, illustrates how the botanical stakes in settler colonies expand the conversation about biopolitics, biocapital, and fertility chains. we see that the neglect of the epistemologies, lifeworlds, plants, lands, and people under settler colonialism are tied together. as chacko says, “even contemporary forms of political redress and reconciliation fail to imagine liveliness outside the western paradigm.” this recalls van wichelen’s point that “un-kinning” is part of the logic of imperial governmentality preserved in international law today, and as with the forms of kin recognized in that law, so with forms of life that are selective allowed to fail to thrive. tracking the chemical mic at the molecular level, roy argues that the same colonial legacy behind india’s “green revolution,” in which companies such as the us’s union carbide fertilizer plant were invited to set up operations, is behind india’s sourcing of in vivo labor for global art markets. as a provocation to continue to think about colonial legacies at the molecular level, roy points out that the phenomenon of fetal cell microchimerism, in which cells and therefore dna are shown to be capable of crossing the placental blood barrier, mean that surrogate women and the fetuses they gestate in the bhopal area are not only exchanging cells but, through mic, the imprint of the union carbide disaster’s colonial legacy. 2 this legacy is then carried to wherever infants born in bhopal travel. the connections between reproductive medicine and forensic science presented in posocco’s contribution offer additional insights about the “bio/necropolitics” of extraction in guatamala. posocco shows how the labor of extracting biological material and genetic information necessary for both reproductive and forensic practice share a reliance on racialized bodies. these bodies are “mined” as a resource, foreclosing the futures of peoples and lifeworlds in guatamala already living with sustained damage from prior colonial and imperial extractive regimes. as in chacko’s identification of the necropolitics of seed vaults, the “ongoing colonial violence and neglect endured by indigenous people” is sustained in ongoing practices of extraction and neglect. together, the contributions in this special section well illustrate the timeliness (and timelessness) of the movement for which, twenty-five years ago, us black feminist activists coined the term “reproductive justice.” sistersong used the term to explain the needs of underresourced women of color that were not being addressed in the mainstream women’s rights movement. reproductive justice, as expanded by other asian, latina, and indigenous feminist scholarship, focuses not only on the choice to have or not have children but also the right to parent children in safe and sustainable communities. as a framework, it supports analysis of the intersection of race, gender, class, and contexts including reproductive choice, environmental justice, incarceration, and healthcare, among others. inherent in the framing of reproductive justice is the recognition of the necro/biopolitics of ongoing oppression and the remedy: sustained and organized social responsibility following the specific intimacies in the histories of the given community, the given oppression.   notes 1 see, for example, in the inaugural issue of catalyst atanasoski and vora’s (2015) reading of wynter’s theorization of modern “man” as fundamentally constructed through racial-scientific notions of the biological and economic; and lindsey andrew’s (2015) assertion of a black feminist empiricism.   2 fetal cell microchimerism in gestational surrogacy also invites us to think about the social and legal structures built to depend on the genetic separation between the surrogate and the commissioned infant, undermining the very idea of independent biosocial selves (vora 2015b).   references andrews, lindsey. 2015. “black feminism’s minor empiricism: hurston, combahee, and the experience of evidence.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. 1 (1): 1–48. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28808. arondekar, anjali. 2009. for the record: on sexuality and the colonial archive in india. durham, nc: duke university press. atanasoski, neda, and kalindi vora. 2015. “surrogate humanity: posthuman networks and the (racialized) obsolescence of labor.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. 1 (1): 1–40. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28809. chatterjee, piya. 2001. a time for tea: women, labor and post/colonial politics on an indian plantation. durham, nc: duke university press. da silva, denise ferreira. 2007. toward a global idea of race. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. davis, angela. 1983. women, race, class. new york: vintage. foster, laura. 2017. reinventing hoodia: peoples, plants, and patents in south africa. seattle: washington university press. ghosh, durba. 2008. sex and the family in colonial india: the making of empire. cambridge: cambridge university press. gordon, avery. 2001. preface to an anthropology of marxism by cedric robinson. xviii. hampshire, uk: ashgate press. hochschild, arlie. 1985. the managed heart: commercialization of intimate feeling. berkeley: university of california press. hong, grace kyungwon. 2006. the ruptures of american capital: women of color feminism and the culture of immigrant labor. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ———. 2012. “existential surplus: women of color feminism and the new crisis of capitalism.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 18 (1): 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1422152.   hooks, bell. 2000. where we stand: class matters. new york: routledge. inhorn, marcia c. 2003. “global infertility and the globalization of new reproductive technologies: illustrations from egypt.” social science and medicine 56 (9): 1837–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0277-9536(02)00208-3. kale, madhavi. 1998. fragments of empire: capital, slavery, and indian indentured labor in the british caribbean. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. kaplan, sara clarke. 2007. “love and violence/maternity and death: black feminism and the politics of reading (un)representability.” black women, gender, and families 1 (1): 94–124. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/blacwomegendfami.1.1.0094. ———. 2021. the black reproductive: unfree labor and insurgent motherhood. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. lowe, lisa. 2015. the intimacies of four continents. durham, nc: duke university press. mckittrick, katherine. 2021. dear science and other stories. durham, nc: duke university press. mishra, lakshmidhar. 2011. human bondage: tracing its roots in india. new delhi: sage. morgan, jennifer. 2004. laboring women: reproduction and gender in new world slavery. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. roberts, dorothy. 1998. killing the black body: race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. new york: vintage press. robinson, cedric. 1983. black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. london: zed books. rudrappa, sharmila. 2015. discounted life: the price of global surrogacy in india. new york: nyu press. spillers, hortense. 197. “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book.” diacritics 17 (2): 64–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747. tambe, ashwini. 2009. codes of misconduct: regulating prostitution in late colonial bombay. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. vora, kalindi. 2013. “potential, risk and return in transnational indian gestational surrogacy.” current anthropology 54 (s7): s97–s106. https://doi.org/10.1086/671018. ———. 2015a. life support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ———. 2015b. “re-imagining reproduction: unsettling metaphors in the history of imperial science and commercial surrogacy in india.” somatechnics 5 (1): 88–103. https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2015.0149. wynter, sylvia. 2003. “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument.” cr: the new centennial review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.     author bios kalindi vora is a visiting professor of women’s gender and sexuality studies, and of ethnicity race and migration at yale university. she is a professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies and director of the feminist research institute at university of california davis.     introduction knowing borders: materialidades, ecologías, estéticas     lindsay smith arizona state university lsmit101@asu.edu maría torres university of arizona mtorresm@arizona.edu rodrigo parrini-roses universidad autónoma metropolitana rparrini@correo.xoc.uam.mx     abstract borders are complex configurations intertwined with political regimes, ecosystems, flows of bodies, objects, technologies, and affects. feminist sts, with its attention to infrastructure and its intimacies, more-than-human relationalities, and investigative aesthetics, is ripe for a re-engagement with contemporary securitized borders and their lifeworlds. using a mix of spanish and english, we perform and theorize the importance of pocho linguistic third spaces for feminist community and offer practical tools for reading beyond english to frame the spanish-language contributions in this special section. we ask how we can “know borders” otherwise and offer three emergent paths of reflexive engagement: materialidades: intimate infrastructures, ecologías: more-thanhuman migrations and ecologies of care, and estéticas: the research-creation nexus. after a curated review of the literature on borders and migration in the united states and mexico, we suggest the analytic power of these lenses to nurture feminist attention to both the vibrancy and violences of contemporary borders and foster a grounded and generative politics of care and solidarity. resumen las fronteras son configuraciones complejas entrelazadas con regímenes políticos, ecosistemas y flujos de cuerpos, tecnologías y afectos. los estudios feministas de la ciencia, con su atención puesta en la infraestructura y sus intimidades, las relaciones más-que-humanas y las estéticas investigativas, están maduros para un nuevo compromiso con las fronteras contemporáneas securitizadas y sus mundos de vida y muerte. transitando entre el español y el inglés, y habitando lo que llamamos aquí un espacio de práctica pocho, exploramos y teorizamos sobre las posibilidades de los terceros espacios lingüísticos para la comunidad feminista y ofrecemos herramientas prácticas para leer más allá de los marcos interpretativos anglosajones hegemónicos. en esta sección especial abordamos la cuestión de cómo “conocer las fronteras” de otro modo, y ofrecemos tres vías emergentes de compromiso reflexivo: materialidades: infraestructuras íntimas, ecologías: migraciones más que humanas y ecologías del cuidado, y estéticas: el nexo entre investigación y creación. tras llevar a cabo una revisión cuidadosa de las literaturas sobre fronteras y migración en los estados unidos y méxico, sugerimos el poder analítico de estos lentes para nutrir la atención feminista tanto a las violencias como a la vitalidad y las potencias que se despliegan en las fronteras contemporáneas, abogando por una política situada de la solidaridad y el cuidado. keywords us-mexico border, migration, more-than-human, borderlands, intimate infrastructures, research-creation practices, linguistic third spaces     y el bordo se hizo río tijuana, september 2022   la inundación. “rara vez llueve en esta ciudad, pero cuando llueve, se cae el cielo.” it is september 6, 2022, 8 p.m. it is already dark. it is raining heavily, and the line of authorized airport cabs is endless. on the street, just in front of the main exit, across the avenue, the sight of la barda (the wall) imposes itself. graffiti covers much of its surface, announcing “esto es tijuana.” beyond the wall, san diego. the cab driver takes the fast lane that runs parallel to la línea (the line) on one side and on the other, el bordo, a paved channel just a few meters from the wall that crosses the city and shelters migrants and deportees waiting for a chance to cross the line. but this time, instead of el bordo, the concrete, las pintas (graffiti), the migrant camps, el trasiego or the everyday exchange of food and substances, and the intimidating routine police patrols, there is a river. a fast-flowing river, at times unbridled. it is the tijuana river, an intermittent body of water that snakes between mexico and the united states along the borderline. el bordo becoming a river is a disruptive image, a political reconfiguration of the sensible experience of the border that enables other ways of thinking, an invitation to see differently, to pay attention to other transits, temporalities, and ways of inhabiting this territory. attending to the tijuana river and its transformations—disappearing urban river, political canvas for graffiti artists, hyper-politicized infrastructure, concrete chasm, migrant camp, flood—invites us to consider the unique ecological, infrastructural, aesthetic, and political connections and disconnections of different places along continental migratory routes and border territories. the tijuana river, its channeling and its overflows, the modes of life and death that it organizes, and the sensory and systemic experiences that it enables combine to give us a lucid image of the links that interweave this special section: the intimate infrastructures of borders, more-than-human migrations, and the aesthetic as the political configuration of the sensible. we highlight the intricate forms of political and environmental violences that unfold in the bordering spaces of colonial modernity while also attending to the possibility for new forms of care and resistance to flourish, such as the artistic, activist, and scientific movements with which the authors in this special section engage. since the work of chicana feminists gloria e. anzaldúa and cherríe l. moraga in the 1980s, borders and borderlands have been a central topic of inquiry for many feminist scholars and activists. moraga and anzaldúa (1983) were among the first to offer expansive, critical, and theoretically provocative engagements based on their subjective intimacies with borders and the lives unfolding in dialogue with them. through the concept of borderlands, anzaldúa offered feminists a new engagement with borders in empirical, theoretical, and linguistic registers. la frontera became a place to challenge binaries, attend to the hybridity and cultural profusion of encounter, as well as a space marked by deep capitalist, patriarchal, and racial violences. in anzaldúa’s words, “the borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (1987, preface). these complex and multiple bordering realities intertwine politically, ecologically, and historically. following this path of intersectional or bordering reflexivity and centering materialidades, ecologías, and estéticas, we bring together transdisciplinary research at the intersection of art, philosophy, and literature that has reinvigorated scholarship on the historical connections between social and ecological devastation in particular bordering territories (meszaros 2018; rivera-garza 2019, 2022; villalobos-ruminott 2016), with feminist sts concerns with multispecies care, materiality and infrastructure, and new forms of activism at the intersection of knowledge production and aesthetics (barad 2011; braidotti 2013; haraway 2016; puig de la bellacasa 2017; stengers 2015; tsing et al. 2017). in light of these perspectives, we believe it is necessary to re-examine our ways of knowing borders from new frameworks that pay careful attention to material intertwinings, morethanhuman temporalities, and long-term historical processes—both political and environmental. from a feminist materialist, decolonial, and more-than-human approach, our intention is not to homogenize and discipline new knowledge but to enrich and multiply the relationships and meanings that populate these dense bordering worlds (de la cadena 2015; despret 2021). knowing borders: materialidades, ecologías, estéticas, as a thematic special section, emerges as increasingly violent rhetoric and immigration practices that have put our communities, political networks, and intellectual practices under attack— something that has become grotesquely visible after the 2024 us election. the continued dominance of racist, anti-migratory, ecocidal, and imperialist politics, and the very real violences that these ideologies create for migrants (on borders), demands a grounded politics of care and solidarity with/in the borderlands—for humans and more-than-humans alike. the contributions here are all the more important now in the face of the uncertainty of new policies that explicitly threaten land, life, and community in la frontera. borderlands politics, solidarity, and modes of resistance offer models for confronting the current moment, and the questions we tackle offer clues for living in the midst: how can we know borders through capacious lenses that allow us to trace the vibrant intersections between multispecies relationalities, land, landscape, and infrastructure, as well as activism, migration, violence, and art? how do we create and sustain linguistic third spaces of practice, solidarity, and scholarship? what modes of attention allow us to recognize the entrenched infrastructural violencias and dispossession of border politics and revindicar (defend) solidarity, care, and multispecies flourishing? the authors in this section provide rich accounts of such grounded politics of care and solidarity. dan kabella’s paper on quebrar’s anticolonial struggles in new mexico, for example, shows how contemporary grassroots harm reduction organizing and its community practices of care are inextricably linked to longterm borderlands antiracist and abolitionist activist culture kindled by oppressive colonial and bordering infrastructures. columba gonzález-duarte and juanita sundberg’s attention to the relations between migrant farm workers, monarch butterflies, and desert soils across north america offers a potent path forward for intellectual and methodological reflexivity. we can also find examples in the research-based artistic praxis of the colorado river archive, roberto mendezarreola’s community–bird relationships, carla macal’s healing cartographies, and carina vado’s re-engagement with anzaldúa. these authors offer us new pathways to both know borders and inhabit them in the richness of solidarity. it is also necessary to build a politics that recognizes that the renewed violence of the present (large-scale deportation, encampment, racial and ethnic profiling) has deep roots that intertwine with the very foundations of bordering techniques and technologies in both the united states and mexico. alethia fernández de la reguera offers a potent analysis of the centrality of checkpoints in the increasingly militarized southern border of mexico, while iván sandovalcervantes interrogates how human-dog relationalities come to reflect and refract deeply entrenched border ideologies. this special section includes a translated interview with renowned mexican journalist marcela turati, whose writing on structured forms of violence in mexico has transformed our contemporary understanding of migration, bordering, and authorized crime. these contributions provide political, theoretical, and methodological anchor points for resistance, solidarity, and care within and beyond the sometimes complacent and complicit spaces of academic knowledge production. in what follows, we first discuss how this special section uses multiple languages to foster linguistic third spaces for feminist sts praxis. we include articles in spanish in addition to the english-language articles catalyst traditionally features, as well as many articles that include untranslated spanish text. providing intellectual and practical tools to engage in imperfect multilingual collaboration, we guide our readers through the discomfort of imperfect mastery to meet our authors in a pocho third space. we then review contemporary border and migration literatures in the united states in mexico as they intersect with feminist and sts concerns to outline the theoretical and empirical ground in which we work and write. we conclude with an overview of the special section, which puts the authors collected here into dialogue to highlight how an attention to intimate infrastructures, more-than-human migrations and ecologies of care, and the research-creation nexus offers new pathways of engagement with migration and borders. we include ethnographic vignettes and orienting photos from our shared field research on mexico’s southern border with guatemala to locate our intervention in particular spaces with their rich histories and lived materialities. hablar en lenguas our first intervention is linguistic and cultural, as we invite authors writing on the borderlands to publish in either english or spanish, creating the first bilingual—en el sentido pocho—special section published in catalyst. we seek to respond infrastructurally to the reality that english-language dominance confines vibrant feminist exchange. asking why american feminists do not read and engage with the work of feminists from latin america, tania pérez-bustos (2017) identifies language disparities and asymmetries as generative of divides that reproduce systemic global inequalities. too often, language limits who we read and how we engage. translation, as a tool, aids this process but does little to address englishlanguage hegemony. as anyone who has communicated in a second language knows, the subtlety of language can be lost in translation: our linguistic poetry, humor, and cultural signs. figure 1. américa invertida. photo: nirvana paz, 2021. for non-native english speakers, language is a complicated and persistent career challenge. leandro rodriguez medina (2019), the former editor of tapuya: latin american science, technology and society, describes how, despite his formal proficiency in english, his so-called “bad english” was a roadblock in his career. his reflections are familiar to non-native or bilingual english speakers—the out-ofplaceness and concrete barriers that language creates in a global academy dominated by english. when pocho-style writing (grammatical, linguistic, and citational “inconsistencies”) is reframed as “bad english,” the response is to teach us to write better to meet the scholarly standards of english without questioning what is lost in translation. to read a scholar in their second language is often to gain the essence but miss the nuance of the exchange (ryan and viete 2009). in contrast, there is no equivalent requirement for native english-speaking researchers to read or research in other languages. although most fields reward multilingualism, outside of language programs and field-based research, additional languages are primarily a benefit to the researcher, not a requirement for participation. moreover, the lack of language parity translates into entrenched blind spots in scholarship where, despite a few critical “translators,” fields can remain disconnected based on geography. even with critical pedagogical approaches (perez comisso et al. 2024), english-language exchange becomes the default in sts, reiterating knowledge dissemination from the center to the periphery. pérez-bustos (2017) asks us to consider what norms are being enforced and what traditions, structures of thoughts, and worlds are diminished through the call to write on these terms in a world where reciprocity is not expected (lyons et al. 2017). after conversations with the contributors and editors of this journal, we decided not to make a bilingual edition in the traditional sense—that is, presenting each of the texts in both spanish and english. instead, we offer a pocho, “spanglish” edition (una edición pocha) that shakes us from our complacency and invites readers to meet us halfway, requiring them to inhabit an uncomfortable space of inbetweeness. pocho/a is a mexican slang term for americans of mexican descent and means withered or overripe (sorbazo 2016). although initially a derogatory term used to mark american mexicans as outsiders within mexico with their bad spanish and out-of-date cultural practices, it has been revindicated and reclaimed as a space that is neither fully american nor mexican (anzaldúa 1987; vera-rosas and guerrero 2021; tracey 2023). in this pocho space, we offer the reader the possibility of connections with perhaps new, unexpected, and refreshing perspectives and thinkers, as well as the opportunity to examine the habits and assumptions that root our intellectual and academic practices (modes of argumentation, academic styles, and modes of evidencing, among others). creating a linguistic third space is not just a theoretical gesture but an intentional, insistent collective praxis. this praxis has been mediated by texts, images, sounds, workshops, charlas y caminatas, email exchanges, palabras, bastard languages, and tongues, among other cultural practices and artifacts, across borders and over time and space. our work as guest editors has been complex, requiring intensive listening, care, and accompaniment, demanding the generation of third spaces for conversation and translation, in the broadest sense of this term, and forcing us to precariously build bridges across linguistic, institutional, disciplinary, and structural borders. this space es pocho quizá solo tentativamente, lacking a more appropriate term. it is pocho not because it is a space that is necessarily our own, built on identity or belonging, or because it aspires to inclusion and equity in a liberal academic sense. it is pocho because, for lack of a better term, it refers to a series of collective practices (lingüísticas, culturales, de conocimiento, de traducción, etc.) que son por momentos deficientes, mal habladas, precarias, incompletas: contaminating and yet rich and generative, border(ing) practices, fronterizas. it is pocho because, borrowing anzaldúa’s words, it is “[u]n nuevo lenguaje, siempre por nacer, siempre bastardo. un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de vivir…[it] is not proper, not incorrect, it is a living language” (1987, 35–36). although this is far from the only or first pocho linguistic space, given that the major sts journals (including tapuya) publish articles only in english, we revindicate the need for generative linguistic third spaces in our field that invite readers into new forms of community. the scholars, activists, and artists participating in this special section are mostly spanish-speaking and operate in an english-speaking or mexican academic context. some do not or barely speak english, aunque algunos pueden leerlo. some are fluent in both languages. others, descended from spanish-speaking and indigenous communities, were alienated from their language through the forced assimilation, acculturation, and memory loss entrenched in the political and educational infrastructures of borderlands territories in both the us and mexico. for some contributors, spanish was embraced as a refuge and a generative force. yet we recognize it is a colonial language and part of an oppressive historical assemblage to dominate non-western languages and cultures (cusicanqui 2012). the us-mexico border transects the homelands and territories of the apaches, cucapá, kikapú, o’odham, pai, and yaqui (alianza indígena sin fronteras 2019), while mexico’s southern border transects the homelands of many maya groups especially the mam, k’iche, and q’eqchi (tzul tzul 2024). the politics of indigeneity are multiple and diverse in mexico and the united states with multiple strategies for revindicating indigenous rights and sovereignties, often in opposition to state-based assimilationist projects like mestizaje (lopez-beltran and garcía-deister 2013; wade et al. 2014). the continuous resistance of indigenous peoples is materially constitutive of the contemporary borderlands (aguilar gil 2020, 2021; estes 2021; hernández-castillo 2001a, 2001b; ventura trujillo 2022), while at the same time, their languages, cultures, and ways of living have been uniquely harmed. o’odham poet and activist ophelia rivas (n.d.) writes in her poem “surveillance tower in ali jegk,” “the lives of all o’odham are altered… / when our world comes under attack the warriors only need a signal. they are there willing to stand firm. here i stand.” despite this intricate, intimate relationship, indigenous border communities are too rarely invited to participate in conversations about the borderlands. we want to acknowledge this systematic exclusion, even as this special section reproduces it. although we invited indigenous colleagues to participate, the realities of historical exclusions and their legacies in the limited frameworks academia currently sets for indigenous participation (so-called inclusion or representation) and the seeming irrelevance of feminist sts to indigenous-lived realities and struggles on the border, led to their principled refusal to participate. even as we failed to generate this exchange here, we want to echo our colleagues’ critique and support their call for a forum where border indigenous groups in mexico and the united states can set their own priorities, knowledge frameworks, and terms of participation. hablar en lenguas, in anzaldúa’s (1981) terms, always implies a risk of exclusion and the loss of control over the circulation, translations, and interpretations, if any, that are made of your work: “calcular el daño es un acto peligroso,” writes moraga (1984, 32). however, this challenge provides us with an intimate space to resist and unlearn the assumptions and conventions that academia has forced us to assume. in inhabiting and nurturing imperfect linguistic third spaces, the pocho, we sought to create a generative academic space of exchange filled with imperfections: sentences begun in one language and finished in another, a speaker who only used english or spanish and relied on others to translate the essence of the exchange, forgotten accents and added articles, refusals, absences, and unexpected communion. the pocho foregrounds exchange and mutuality over correctness in the spirit of generative encounter. we hope this gesture, with all its problems and limitations, also invites our readers to occupy this space, allowing for other contesting and contaminating languages and ways of being in academia to flourish and multiply. we invited the contributors to write en la lengua y registro, which they felt most comfortable with, but the challenges have been extensive. writing in spanish in an anglo journal can imply a political statement against the hegemony of the anglosajon academia and an ethical commitment to the diversity of languages and cultural registers. however, writing against the language norms of a journal or field also risks exclusion from intellectual and political circles that matter. on a practical level, this approach can also put authors in a vulnerable position as english-language publishing is increasingly valued and weighted more heavily in local advancement in latin america and the united states. most contributors in this special section chose to publish in english, even when writing from the mexican academy. only two contributors published their articles in spanish, méndez-arreola writing about birding and the limits of citizen science in the borderlands, and jessica sevilla and rosela del bosque exploring the power of archives and artistic collaborations to engage with the profound ecological transformation of mexicali’s waterscapes. to facilitate our readers’ participation in the pocho third space of the special section, we have collected a toolkit for navigating the articles and approaching words or content that may not be fully legible to english-language readers. we have created an accompanying website (https://www.knowingborders.com) where readers can access resources and tools to generate imperfect translations: online translators, a glossary of terms, references, chats, and interviews with the authors, as well as links to other works by our authors that have been translated into english.     twenty-first-century borders and the mexican migration crisis tenosique, july 2022   las oficinas del sindicato de ferrocarrileros de tenosique are all the remain of that working-class world, el viejo mundo obrero. hundreds of people worked on the railways for decades and the train was crucial for the construction and expansion of the city: era el modo de transporte hacia otras partes del país, la principal actividad económica y el origen de procesos de construcción de una identidad social y de clase. the old building is now the only vestige of these rail infrastructures. todo lo demás ha sido demolido. in some sense, it is a santuario for a disappeared species: the proletarian worker. the first generation of workers were campesinos, que, en los años cuarenta del siglo xx, se transformaron en obreros; como aquellos que aparecen en los escritos de marx y engels o en los de weber. it was also a space of construction of a masculinity que entró en crisis con la economía estatal y los relatos del estado-nación mexicano. el tren que pasó por tenosique venía desde la península de yucatán y seguía hacia el estado de veracruz. en 1949 ambos ramales se conectaron en una localidad llamada la unión, en chiapas. the oldest workers swear that the spikes placed at the joining of these lines were made of gold. by the 1980s, la empresa estatal was increasingly underfinanced and finally privatized. a finales de 1999 llegaron funcionarios federales a liquidar lo que quedaba. the union was transformed into an organization of workers who had been let go. las reestructuraciones neoliberales de la economía mexicana pusieron fin a ese mundo. figure 2. oficina del sindicato de ferrocarrileros / train union’s headquarters. photos: nirvana paz, 2021. tenosique, a small town in tabasco, about thirty minutes from mexico’s border with guatemala, has been the first stop along a migratory route from central america to the united states for decades, as it allowed recent border crossers access to mexico's train infrastructure northward. las 72, a migrant shelter created to provide services and solidarity to migrants, was within sight of the old train tracks. migrants organized round-the-clock shifts to watch for the train, known as la bestia, raising a cry, “el tren, el tren,” when it approached, allowing—those who dared to risk the significant danger of climbing aboard the train—a chance to run up alongside and ascend to the roof to facilitate their journey (parrini-roses and flores-pérez 2018; vogt 2017). in july 2022 the co-editors, cover photographer nirvana paz, and two phd students (octavio muciño and alix almendra) began their first research collaboration in tenosique. this special section emerged from that collaboration and the questions we encountered as mexico’s southern border was being remade by the converging forces of the pandemic, mexico’s ongoing “guerra contra el narco,” border militarization, the use of asylum as a technology of migration containment (varela 2019), and massive development projects in hightech infrastructure and agricultural production. figure 3. viejo tren, nuevas vías / old train, new tracks. photos: nirvana paz, 2021. borders are a potent space in contemporary life and politics. they act as a space for the articulation of sovereignty (mignolo 2012); a site of violence, surveillance, and control (aas 2011; angulo-pasel 2022); a transnational space of mobility and hybridity (chávez 2016; cunningham and heyman 2004); a space premised on externalization and exploitation of labor (estévez 2021; mezzadra and neilson 2013), and culturally resonant, vibrant, and innovative places of encounter (canclini 2012; paredes 2010). research on racialization and criminalization has pointed to the borderlands as an overdetermined site of difference-making and othering (rosas 2012), which has, through explicit changes in us border policy toward “deterrence” (nevins 2001), led to migrant death and disappearance (de león 2015). building on recent work in sts on the technologically mediated violence of contemporary borders and the migration they seek to control (e.g., muñiz 2022; lópez 2024), we bring attention to how technologically mediated, systemic violence is also always intertwined with multiple spaces of resistance, multispecies solidarity, alternative infrastructures and ways of knowing otherwise. within this broader scholarly context of border studies, this special section lies at the intersection of migration and bordering. mexican feminist thinkers have offered a rich theoretical foundation at this nexus through their decades-long attention to femicide (borzacchiello 2024; washington valdez 2005) and how global capital and hypermasculine violence have led to the systematic death and disappearance of women in mexico’s northern industrial cities (valencia 2018). carolina robledo silvestre and rosalva hernández castillo (2019) describe a “disappearing device” being applied to the bodies of poor and racialized women in ciudad juárez. their bodies were “built as disposable in a classist, racist and sexist society, where the brown bodies of poor women can be violated, mutilated, discarded and used to mark territories, with the direct or silent complicity of the security forces” (silvestre and castillo 2019, 11). feminist thinkers and theorists have pointed out the importance of analyzing what rita laura segato calls “pedagogy of cruelty” as an “expressive rather than instrumental violence” that promotes and normalizes the “spectacle of the plundering of life until waste, until leaving only remains” (2013, 83). in addition to the femicides in border cities, scholars have brought renewed attention to migration-related death and disappearance (garcía-deister and smith 2020; soto 2022; torres 2022), pointing to multiple factors fueling the crisis, from the hardening of the border and the war on drugs to the remittance economy of mexico and central america and the increasing criminalization of migration both in the united states and mexico. however, much of the work on migration in the western hemisphere has focused on the us-mexico border. scholars working on transnational migration have pointed to the vulnerability of migrants as they traverse mexico and central america (vogt 2013). migrants are disproportionately viewed in their countries of origin and along migration routes according to the markings of internal outsiders: rural, indigenous, impoverished, and linguistically other (villafuerte solís and garcía aguilar 2011). class, race, and gender dynamics that shape modes of national belonging make migrants particularly vulnerable to exploitation by police, national authorities, and extralegal transnational networks such as drug cartels and human traffickers. tenosique, la 72, the wearing down of migrants through policies of containment, bureaucracy, and enclosure, the disappearing freight and passenger train infrastructure and its miraculous resurrection as an elevated, inaccessible high-tech tourist train, and the more-than-human ontologies that transverse migration stories from the hope and terror of rivers to the peril and promise of remote, inaccessible landscapes invites us to new feminist engagements with borders as they are made and remade by infrastructural and multispecies entanglements. by focusing on feminist sts and border theory in place, this special section invites readers to think with particular borders (mexico’s northern and southern borders) and their reconfiguration through materiality, more-than-human relationalities, and aesthetics. materialidades, ecologías, estéticas río usumacinta, tenosique, july 2022   la frontera líquida. the usumacinta is the last living river in mexico, o al menos eso dicen los que viven a sus orillas. it is also the most lively and voluminous, whose historical porosity draws and blurs mexico’s political border with guatemala. it is an old river, so old that its history seeps into deep geological waters. this river, still navigable in some parts, nourishes a complex jungle ecosystem that encompasses the lacandon region in mexico, the cuchumatanes, a large part of the petén, and the guatemalan altiplano (highlands), today known as the hydrological region rh30 (grijalva-usumacinta). the river, difficult to cross regularly, made this region one of the last conquered frontiers by european settlers. territorios “vírgenes” del trópico. the perceived “under-exploitation” and “underdevelopment” of the transboundary usumacinta river basin made it the target for development projects throughout the twentieth century that sought to tame its waters to supply energy to new industries and sustain agricultural expansion projects that deforested the “jungle” to clear land for grazing, cocoa and, more recently, palm oil production. the colonial-era woods such as cedar and mahogany and industrial necessities such as rubber (or chicle), which traveled downriver to puerto frontera on the gulf of mexico, gave way in the twentieth century to promises of progress provided by the new mexican nation-state. the development of the railroad and highway systems between the 1950s and 1960s only accelerated this process of economic modernization, deepening the social and environmental problems historically present in the region. the river then became a border, la frontera. the landscape, dotted today by hydroelectric plants, palm plantations, security and organized crime forces, migrant camps, and ngos, has been made and remade, becoming a crucial node of (control of) flows of goods and people. figure 4. río usumacinta. photos: nirvana paz, 2021. the usumacinta river was ever present but rarely discussed by those living in tenosique. for the migrants locked down in the shelter who were enduring a seemingly endless asylum process and locals hoping for a revitalization of tourism and business, the train and its replacement with the new high-speed rail was paramount. the river emerged in stories about migration and borders, standing in for the other more famous border rivers. traffickers, they told us, would take migrants’ money and lead them on winding journeys through the jungle, finally dropping them on the banks of the usumacinta, only twenty miles from town, telling them they had reached the banks of the río grande or colorado and that the us was only a short swim away. to approach the entangled question of how we “know borders” otherwise, from el río tijuana to el río usumacinta, de norte a sur, we offer three emergent pathways for engaging with contemporary migration and bordering ecologies in these territories: materialidades: intimate infrastructures; ecologías: more-thanhuman migrations and ecologies of care; and estéticas: the research-creation nexus. we weave together these threads of feminist thought to ask how they offer new entries into our understanding of the borderlands. materialidades: intimate infrastructures the invisibility of the modern border, as it is technologically dematerialized and at the same time dramatically militarized has cut off communities from the material infrastructure of empire, rendering engagement with regimes of visibility and absence essential. modern infrastructure studies in sts have a central feminist genealogy in the work of susan leigh star, who, through her ecological approach (star and ruhleder 1994), has invited a generation of scholars to think capaciously about technology, the built environment, and social structure. anthropologist nicholas de genova (2013) argues for conceptualizing borders and their material and semiotic infrastructures as spectacular, wherein migrant illegality is naturalized, and the ongoing exploitation and recruitment of labor is hidden. attending to the lived intimacy of borders and their spectacle, we bring attention to the material and technological assemblages that allow us to trace the coproduction of politics and science in the mexican borderlands (jasanoff 2004; varela 2019). in this special section, our contributing authors build on this tradition of infrastructure studies focusing on intimate infrastructures, meaning the interface between technology, the built environment, and human bodies and subjectivities (moore and strasser 2022; puig de la bellacasa 2016). in her article, alethia fernández de la reguera examines the emergent technology of the checkpoint as a tool of enclosure in mexico. she shows how checkpoint enforcement is a patchwork: a shifting, purposely incoherent infrastructure that functions both to mitigate legal migration and further the diverse and competing interests of regional authorities, the national government, and organized crime. through her writing and attention to intersectionality, she shows how checkpoints act on certain bodies, creating both a generalized risk and specific types of enclosures for racialized subjects. dan kabella analyzes the history of addiction research and treatment in new mexico, documenting how chicano organizing and liberation became embedded in treatment infrastructures. from building treatment centers on reclaimed ancestral land holdings to centering cultural revival and community in addiction recovery, kabella shows how the new mexican borderlands, with their specific mix of hispanic empowerment and dispossession, allowed activists to create liberatory infrastructures in the face of carceral structures. zenia yébenes and rodrigo parrini-roses invite marcela turati, one of mexico’s most important journalists documenting violence and disappearance, to reflect on her recent book san fernando: ultima parada (2023). in a wide-ranging discussion, she sheds light on the infrastructure behind organized crime, judicial inaction, and widespread disappearance, showing what committed long-term research can render visible. at the same time, she candidly describes how the work of documenting the dead, the machine of death, and the complicity of the state was haunting and challenging work that required spiritual care. ecologías: more-than-human migrations and ecologies of care within these border(ing) configurations, security policies intersect with nature conservation and human rights protections (meierotto 2014); deserts and rivers are strategically weaponized against migrants in transit (de león 2015). building on the work of scholars rethinking the relationship between frontiers and borders (grandin 2019), the more-than-human allows us to articulate imaginaries of hightech surveillance and militarization with those of wild spaces in “need” of domestication (schaeffer 2022). attending to multispecies relationalities renders visible forms of resistance that bring into play new notions and practices of truth (production) and justice (lyons 2020), together with other logics of care (puig de la bellacasa 2017) that include more-than-human beings and histories (de la cadena 2015; haraway 2016). in this special section, contributors show the asymmetrical relations of care and suffering that shape border landscapes while offering possibilities for new multispecies relationalities to flourish. columba gonzález-duarte and juanita sundberg illustrate how conservation projects and agribusiness reorganize border dynamics, displacing nodes of multispecies reciprocity and care, exposing monarch butterflies, ocelots, sonoran desert soils, mexican migrant workers, and indigenous communities to violence. iván sandoval-cervantes analyzes the struggles of activist communities for the rights of dogs on the border between ciudad juárez and el paso, stressing how certain practices and discourses of care that emerge in the mexico-us border reinforce classist and racist narratives of animal suffering, rescue, and mobility that involve a clear demarcation between a “before” and an “after,” south and north, across the border lines. in contrast to positivist/rationalist technoscientific approaches, roberto méndez-arreola examines how mundane everyday practices of care and knowledge production between people and birds in ciudad juárez contribute to the reconfiguration of the city and its borders, presenting new forms of multispecies collaboration and enabling more habitable worlds. estéticas: the research-creation nexus borders have been prominently reconfigured and resisted through artistic interventions, from a living archive of human-water relations in the colorado river delta to speculative poetry or anonymous maps painted on the walls of a migrant shelter. artistic and activist practices offer much-needed, diverse ways of seeing and listening, representing and mediating, among other research-creative practices. in this special section, we explore and extend the possibilities posed by “investigative aesthetics” (fuller and weizman 2021). this term stresses an investigative sensibility in the arts that redefines the practice of aesthetics as “una herramienta en el conflicto” (a tool in the conflict) (barenblit and medina 2017, 23). through this lens, we understand aesthetics not in relation to historical beauty but to the sharpness of a sensible knowledge. this understanding echoes french philosopher jacques rancière's (2006) notion of aesthetics as the political distribution/configuration of the senses, in which the sensible is deployed for truth (production) and the political. echoing our contributors jessica sevilla and rosela del bosque, we work at the research-creation nexus, not because we engage with “la producción o el objeto artístico per se,” but because such an aesthetics encompasses knowledge production practices that are embodied and situated in particular geographies and political regimes and, as sevilla and del bosque put it, “el espacio frontera entre afecto y racionalidad que reconocemos como experiencia estética” (the border space between sensibility and rationality that we recognize as aesthetic experience.) from artistic, curatorial, and pedagogical practices, sevilla and del bosque articulate their work around the colorado river family archive. this collective research project seeks to reflect on their relationships with water in the colorado river delta region. this living archive functions as a self-managing technology to produce knowledge situated in loops of praxis, learning from the geological and more-than-human relationships in which we exist. karina vado examines anzaldúa’s later work, which is often overlooked because it engaged with spiritual, esoteric, and scientific themes that can be hard to reconcile. vado shows how this rich engagement with spiritual themes was central to drafting a new language and kind of storytelling, creating “affiliative biofuturities,” a purposive boundary-transgressing for the speculative reimagining of our world. in her essay, carla macal invites her readers to think along with transnational guatemalan justice organizing to explore what connections, circulations, and creations are necessary to chart healing cartographies. through community workshops focused on the body, healing, and testimony, she shows how tenuous connections are formed and sustained through plural communication and artistic creation. conclusion in this pocho special section, we invite our readers to engage with borders and migration through the lens of feminist sts theory. writing in english, spanish, and a mix of both, we seek to constitute a linguistic third space for feminist collaboration that brings attention to english-language hegemony in publishing and offers clues for nurturing multilingual communities. our interventions follow three lines of inquiry: the promise of attending to intimate infrastructures to interrogate borders and their materialities, the ways in which more than human migrations and ecologies of care offer new engagements with the threatened multispecies landscapes of the mexican borderlands, and finally the power of artistic and activist engagements to render visible systemic forms of erasure and nurture community in the face of persistent violence. the usumacinta, dicen, is a noble river. at times, bent and tamed. at times, insurgent and traicionero. its course runs parallel to the technoscientific project of modernity to dominate “nature,” but, like a cut or an open wound, it also threatens to overflow and contaminate modernity’s limits and boundaries— ontological, epistemological, and territorial (harding 2017). like the insistent, disruptive image of the flood in tijuana and the old train rails and its workers in tenosique, the usumacinta offers an entry to knowing borders otherwise, one that requires attention to stratified, more-than-human histories and violences and the use of other senses, relations, and aesthetic sensibilities. the authors assembled in this special section unpack these layered histories and overlapping border practices of technoscientific development, multispecies resistance, and ways of living and dying, past and future. as karen barad writes, “the yearning for justice, a yearning larger than any individual or sets of individuals, is necessarily about our connections and responsibilities to one another—that is, entanglements” (2007, xi). weaving these borderlands ecological, material, and aesthetic entanglements matter. references aas, katja franko. 2011. “‘crimmigrant’ bodies and bona fide travelers: surveillance, citizenship and global governance.” theoretical criminology 15 (3): 331–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480610396643. aguilar gil, yásnaya elena. 2020. ää: manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística. almadía editorial y bookmate limited. aguilar gil, yásnaya elena. 2021. la sangre, la 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villalobos-ruminott, sergio. 2016. heterografías de la violencia. historia, nihilismo, destrucción. ediciones la cebra. vogt, wendy a. 2013. “crossing mexico: structural violence and the commodification of undocumented central american migrants.” american ethnologist 40 (4): 764–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12053. wade, peter, carlos lópez beltrán, eduardo restrepo, and ricardo ventura santos. 2014. mestizo genomics: race mixture, nation, and science in latin america. duke university press. washington valdez, diana. 2005. cosecha de mujeres: safari en el desierto mexicano. océano.   author bio lindsay smith is an ethnographer and sts scholar who works on migration, community-led science, and social movements in latin america. she is an associate professor in the school for the future of innovation at arizona state university. lindsay smith es etnógrafa, especialista en ciencia, tecnología e innovación que trabaja sobre migración, ciencia comunitaria y movimientos sociales en américa latina. es profesora asociada en the school for the future of innovation en arizona state university. maría torres is a philosopher of science whose work is situated at the intersection of activism, technoscience, and contemporary art practices. they are currently a postdoctoral fellow at the university of arizona. maría torreses una filósofa de la ciencia cuyo trabajo se sitúa en la intersección del activismo, la tecnociencia y las prácticas artísticas contemporáneas. actualmente es becaria postdoctoral en la universidad de arizona. rodrigo parrini-rosesis an anthropologist, ethnographer and professor at the department of education and communication, universidad autónoma metropolitana, unidad xochimilco. méxico. for eighteen years, he has done ethnographic work on the social production of desire in tenosique, a city on the border between mexico and guatemala. rodrigo parrini-roses es antropólogo, etnógrafo y profesor del departamento de educación y comunicación de la universidad autónoma metropolitana, unidad xochimilco, méxico. durante dieciocho años ha realizado trabajo etnográfico sobre la producción social del deseo en tenosique, ciudad fronteriza entre méxico y guatemala.     special section homing toxicity: the domestication of herbicidal warfare     natalia duong ucla nataliad@ucla.edu     abstract in recent years, agent orange has re-entered scholarly discourse as a fertile site for investigating the confluence of slow violence, intergenerational trauma, and the molecularization of chemical regimes. this study analyzes how the political economy that gave way to the discovery and tactical use of agent orange “abroad” during times of “war,” finds several new homes on us soil. first, i discuss how agent orange was tested domestically at eglin air force base in the western florida panhandle, prior to and during its use in vietnam, to trace how civilian workers who worked on base were made into surplus labor through banal daily exposure to the chemical compounds. second, i analyze how vietnamese refugees were transported to eglin air force base in 1975 as it became one of four relocation centers used as temporary “homes” for refugees awaiting sponsorship by us american families. finally, i trace how herbicides are being reintroduced in the mekong delta within rural farming communities to help maintain the demand of global agricultural circuits. by tracing these three interwoven examples of how military herbicides were domesticated, this essay weaves analyses of the spectacular violence of chemical warfare, with their more mundane iterations, to home in on the forms of toxicity that linger and are reproduced at home.     keywords toxicity, herbicides, agent orange, militarized refuge(e), uncertain exposures     introduction in the spring of 2018, our journey to lan’s childhood home near cần thơ, vietnam, consisted of a five-hour bus ride followed by another thirty-minute trip in a local commuter van.1 the van didn’t stop, it only slowed as it neared destinations, so we lurched out on to the dirt road once we rounded the bend in front of the house. at the time, i was a graduate student aiming to research the ongoing effects of agent orange and the larger intergenerational effects of the 1970s wars in southeast asia—many of which i experienced in my own refugee family. lan, who was just a few years older, recently finished medical school in vietnam where she was born and grew up. she contacted me a few months earlier hoping to connect about my research and how disability was understood in other national contexts. we made our friendship swiftly over dark ca phe sửa đá and translations of disability-related terms hastily scribbled on the back of napkins. arriving at her home in the mekong delta, a region known for its sweet food, and as the local saying goes, equally “sweet” people, we were greeted by lan’s father. he was a man of few words. he smirked, opened the driveway gate, and unlocked the door to the house. as the door squeaked open, a dusty humid air blew past my face, unveiling the living room and kitchen, which had furniture strewn about, still covered in white sheets to protect from dust and other elements during the house’s remodel. most strikingly, the windows of the home were not enclosed by glass but rather open to the outside, save for a few metal bars and old wooden shutters that were crookedly propped open. mosquitos and geckos crossed freely through the boundaries of the home. an old ceiling fan teetered above. these were our quarters for the night. as we settled in, a distinctly metal stench punctured the space and wafted through the bedroom. my nervous system bristled at the chemical smell. out the window—which was more of a portal than a barrier—i saw lan’s father gathering trash into a round metal drum in which he lit a large pile of refuse ablaze. i noted to myself that the drum was not unlike the steel barrels once used to hold herbicides during the war—perhaps it was indeed one of them? it was almost as if i could feel the melting particles of plastic waft up with the embers and affix themselves onto the bronchioles in my lungs. on my way to the shower, a much-needed reprieve from our sweat-filled ride, lan told me there is no running water because the bathrooms are being fixed, but we can use water from the nearby well to bathe. i was struck. my desire to be a gracious guest, paired with hyperawareness of my diasporic status in my supposed home country, and my longing to be perceived as assimilable into my colleague’s childhood home all balanced precariously on my decision to use the water. and yet, my research on agent orange betrayed the pretense of my belonging as knowledge about the geography of herbicide dispersion knocked at the back of my mind and i couldn’t help but feel multiply exposed. first, to the particulates that pierced through the air from the garbage fire, and second, to the supposedly invisible effects of chemical warfare that i knew lingered in the ground water in this region. suddenly, my politics of exposure were put on trial. in recounting my experience of the somatic and ethical complexities of ongoing herbicide exposure in the mekong delta, i introduce how chemical warfare persists across transnational domestic spaces. my colleague’s childhood home became the site of unexpected material and affective encounters with the ongoing afterlives of agent orange, the primary herbicide used in operation ranch hand, which was a us military tactical mission that took place between 1961 and 1971 and which aimed to defoliate dense jungle foliage during the wars in southeast asia. scholars, activists, and popular media sources have detailed the ways that the herbicide indiscriminately debilitated human populations and multispecies landscapes, including how it continues to render certain regions in vietnam, laos, and cambodia uninhabitable (fox 2007, 2013, 2016; martini 2012; black 2021; tu 2021). in recent years, high-profile lawsuits regarding the widespread global use of the herbicide roundup (chemical name glyphosate) have reignited interest in chemical compounds that were used as herbicides on international soils during times of war (yan 2018). glyphosate was originally manufactured by monsanto in the 1970s, concurrent with its development and use of military-grade herbicides used in operation ranch hand. as a result, agent orange has re-entered scholarly discourse as a fertile site for investigating the confluence of slow violence, intergenerational trauma, chemical kinships, and the molecularization of chemical regimes (nixon 2011; zierler 2011; lee 2020; morgan and fortun 2020; tu 2021). many of these studies articulate the spatial and temporal scope of the herbicides as a limited geography bounded by rural regions of southeast asia and the decade-long operation ranch hand. this essay alternatively analyzes how the political economy that gave way to the discovery and tactical use of agent orange “abroad” during times of “war” finds several new homes on us soil. the chemical experimentation that led to the development of herbicides, after all, originated as a search for growth-enhancing compounds that were meant to increase soybean production domestically in the us and make the us a viable agricultural competitor against the rise of agricultural producers in asia. it was not until after biochemical graduate student arthur galston observed the defoliating effects of high concentrations of the chemical compounds that the us government funded the development of these domestic elixirs into herbicidal agents to be used in warfare. agrochemical companies, such as monsanto, then re-engineered herbicide-resistant crops, including a variant of soybeans that were specifically designed to survive the dispersal of the very same herbicides they themselves engineered. the companies were, in this way, profiting from both the proliferation and destruction of plant life by engaging in a biopolitics of vegetation that continues to undergird global agricultural systems today. i consequently trace how capitalist investments in fast growth ultimately leads to the slow deaths of civilian communities that span the pacific, who often become the unnamed “collateral damage” of ongoing militarization in domestic spaces. first, i discuss how agent orange was tested domestically in the us at eglin air force base in western florida—prior to and during its use in vietnam—to trace how civilian workers who worked on base were made into surplus labor through banal daily exposure to the chemical compounds. the workers performed the “domestic” labor of washing the equipment used to concoct chemical poisons; while in their suburban homes, the workers and their families repeated the domestic labor of washing their clothes, which were made stiff from aerial exposure to the herbicide tests. because workers were hired by vitro services, a private company contracted by the us department of defense, they were not offered the same protections or reparations afforded to military personnel even if their proximity to, and duration of, exposure may have exceeded that of the us soldiers who carried out operation ranch hand abroad. in this manner, agent orange exposures, which are generally thought to have only occurred on foreign soils and in international waters, were in fact replicated on domestic land and in domestic spheres within the us. second, i analyze how vietnamese refugees were transported to eglin air force base as it became one of four relocation centers used as temporary “homes” for refugees awaiting sponsorship by us american families in 1975. refugees were re-homed in a site that was already exposed to the same herbicidal chemicals from which they were seeking refuge, epitomizing what yến lê espiritu (2014) has defined as “militarized refuge(e)s,” populations who are given refuge by the same imperialist forces that are responsible for the violence from which they are seeking refuge. the potential re-exposure of vietnamese refugees to military-grade herbicides on domestic soil reveals the fallacy of refuge that subtends relocation programs and the ways that refugee populations are subjected to multiple forms of slow violence both in their countries of origin and in their newly established homes. finally, this essay locates a third “home” of agent orange in the domestication of herbicides that have returned to their original domestic geographies and are now commonly used by average households across the globe to eliminate undesirable vegetal life. i discuss how bayer, which acquired monsanto in 2018 to become one of the largest agrochemical conglomerates, reinvested in agricultural industries in vietnam, hoping to cultivate a new generation of international farmers who are dependent on their chemical products—even going as far as to host an annual contest and gifting pesticide sprayers to contestants in regions where agent orange was once sprayed during the wars in southeast asia. by tracing these three interwoven examples of how herbicides were domesticated, this essay weaves analyses of the spectacular violence of chemical warfare with its more mundane iterations to home in on the forms of herbicidal toxicity that linger and are reproduced in and at home.   domesticating home the home has long been a generative site of feminist theorizing, ranging from early critiques of the gendering of domestic labor through more contemporary analyses of how the home becomes narrated as a site of supposed purity and protection (hooks 1990; i. young 1997; alaimo 2016). scales of home extend from the most intimate cellular level, where one’s body is figured as a place of dwelling, through the constructed physical space of inhabitation and the resonant affects that circulate with the idea of home, to legal negotiations about possession and property and the ways that nation-states are imagined as a bounded space of belonging. of course, across each of these scales, it becomes apparent that domestic spaces are not always the safest places; rather, they can become sites of harm as attempts to construct, imagine, and protect homes often perpetuate violence. this essay consequently traces how militarized domestic spaces are co-constituted by the renewal and redeployment of military technologies and the desire to wield biopolitical power against undomesticated others across multispecies environments. in her book exposed: environmental politics and pleasure in posthuman times, stacy alaimo (2016) traces how imagined narratives about the individual home become conscripted on to geopolitical policies such that the us nation-state is portrayed as a bounded site needing protection (in the form of homeland security) from the perceived threat of the outside invader. in extending alaimo’s analysis of how the home is figured as protected space, i’m further interested in how this rhetoric of purity and protectionism maps onto smaller-scale invasions wherein the home also becomes the “human” sphere and the intrusion of chemicals, contaminants, insects, and other nonhuman life threaten the very boundaries of who and what are allowed to live. as domestic household herbicides and pesticides have become commonplace in suburban homes, fences also delineate the spaces of wilderness that are acceptable by reinforcing the boundary of property and protection. home and the domestic are consequently defined as the limit of liveliness wherein those who belong inside are worthy of care and those who are cast out are differentially exposed to premature death. at stake, then, is a biopolitics of exposure, wherein the domestic is manufactured to be the place of protection and anything external to it becomes a threat. as domestic-grade herbicides become increasingly pervasive, in what has become known as the unavoidability of banal daily exposures to toxic contaminants, i demonstrate how the militarized logics that were used to justify the “extermination” of enemy combatants are expanded and replicated in civilian and domestic settings by groundskeepers and novice gardeners alike (stack whitney 2023). in each of these circumstances, herbicides are wielded against the racialized other, either through the imaginary of a racialized enemy or through the disproportionate effects of pesticides and herbicides on low-income agricultural communities of color (sánchez barba 2020; zárate 2023). they are used to protect the notion of a white middle-class suburban domesticity through the selective expulsion of plant, animal, and human-animal life (lester 2021). since the boundaries of the home are, ultimately, constructed, malleable, porous, and fungible, a domesticated garden in an urban homesteading project is a welcome extension of the home—just as certain national borders are made more fluid than others. feminist biologists have demonstrated how eugenicist narratives about racial purity are co-constituted alongside rhetoric that compares human migrants to insect or plant invasions. banu subramaniam, for example, notes how her contingent belonging as an “alien” citizen in the us fluctuated in parallel to the types of nonhuman biological life that were deemed acceptable forms of being (2014, 145). contrastingly, caring for a garden can extend the sphere of cultivation beyond the immediate borders of the home. sociologist manuel tironi recounts how some women in puchuncaví, chile, wipe off the toxic ash from nearby industrial factories from the leaves of their tomato plants as an act of care he names “hypo-intervention” (2018, 439). the persistence of their care despite their knowledge that the polluted debris will again rain down on their homes and gardens is a form of resistance that tironi recognizes as “intimate activism,” a repertoire of life-enabling practices that counters state violence, corporate monopolies, and climate disaster at the most immediate scale. in pairing these two examples of how the domestic sphere is selectively extended, it also becomes apparent how hierarchies of animated being place non-white humans closer to the figure of invading insects and chemicals, and how, alternatively, caring for nonhuman, plant, and animal life extends the domain of care beyond the realm of white domesticity (chen 2012). the bounds of “home” can also be extended unwillingly by imperial powers attempting to “domesticate” the racialized other, resulting in the use of protectionist tactics that have disastrous effects obscured under the pretense of “care.” alaimo cites geographer yi-fu tuan’s reminder that “domestication means domination: the two words have the same root sense of mastery over another being—of bringing it into one’s house or domain” (2016, 19). in accordance with this logic, military-grade herbicides were used as an extension of cold war policies during us imperial interventions in colombia between their use during the wars in southeast asia and the widespread use of glyphosate in contemporary domestic spaces. anthropologist kristina lyons (2o18) recounts the ways that residents in colombia endured militarized aerial fumigation between 1994 and 2015 as part of the joint us-colombia antidrug policy. the dual-government strategy aerially deployed a concentrated form of monsanto’s glyphosate indiscriminately across farmland, destroying the agricultural yield on small plot farms for decades under the guise of inhibiting the suspected growth of illicit coca, marijuana, and opium poppy crops. this “war on drugs” was ultimately waged by a form of glyphosate that was reportedly 110 times the concentration of roundup ultra, which monsanto (now bayer) continues to distribute for household use (lyons 2018, 415). though the campaign was advertised as a necessary intervention into the illicit drug industry, the wholesale deployment of herbicides affected individual farmers and their living quarters as well. this indiscriminate aerial dispersion of herbicides and their ongoing debilitating effects is also true of the examples i later describe in this essay. the act of domestication is not only about mastery but also about the biopower necessary to make the wild and unruly into the kept and manageable. according to these settler logics, an animal who is domesticated becomes worthy of care from its human companion. a plant that is domesticated serves the appetites of human consumption. domesticated beings, then, are those who would presumably not survive without the care afforded to them by their contingent belonging to the home worlds of humans. herbicides have been recruited to perform this domesticating function, essentially turning spaces, beings, and populations that are perceived to be threats into conscripted laborers. in other words, the strategies that maintain the use of chemical warfare “abroad” are also central to the tactical and biopolitical management of racialized life on domestic soil. the constructed separation between poisonous matters used during wartime and the potential dangers that could infiltrate the home is thus a false binary that ultimately upholds what rachel c. lee (2020) calls the “fiction of comfort” that the “domestic” provides for elite subjects in the global north. lee marks the types of “border-wall thinking” that purport that violence “abroad” is necessary in order to maintain and protect domestic spaces, noting that, in fact, chemical and herbicidal movements betray these logics of separation. in other words, violent exposures are deemed necessary tactics to protect domestic spaces, yet domestic spaces are multiply exposed, and become the collateral damage that ultimately protects multinational corporations (kaplan 2023). by surfacing these lesser known exposures of military-grade herbicides on domestic soil, and connecting them with the ongoing mundane quotidian exposures that maintain the fiction of a protected domestic space, this essay explores how the home is rendered a site of ongoing war and how militarized domestic spaces are perpetually maintained.   testing at home for wars abroad in the 1960s and 1970s, in an effort to protect domestic interests, the us military conducted a series of herbicide tests within the borders of the nation-state to determine their destructive efficacy abroad. the us department of defense charged agricultural scientist alvin l. young with conducting a series of longitudinal studies at eglin air force base in western florida where the “rainbow herbicides” used in the wars in southeast asia were test sprayed.2 the base was chosen because the environment of western florida, with its humidity and proximity to the ocean, was said to be most similar to the atmosphere of vietnam.3 from 1962 to 1970, field tests were conducted to examine the efficacy of the military-grade herbicides that were being used in operation ranch hand.4 during the eight-year span, 74,970 liters of agent orange, 61,180 liters of agent purple, 15,790 liters of agent white, and 16,635 liters of agent blue were sprayed on the c-52 test quadrant (young 2008, 17). in the spring of 1964, the armament development and test center at eglin began monitoring the levels of toxins, including tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (tcdd) (the main toxic dioxin found in the herbicides), in the soil and water sources proximal to the test site after farmers in nearby walton and holmes counties complained of crop destruction. in other words, it was because the herbicides were affecting areas outside of the parameters of the military base, in neighboring residential areas, that the longitudinal tests were ordered. at that time, the presumed separation between the base and nearby civilian communities was already in question. a report written to the armament development and test center in july 1966 reported the extent of the toxins’ potential spread:   it is noted that all herbicides are generally moderately toxic to man and in some instances are cumulative in their action…further the use of herbicides will alter the plant growth of the test site which will cause wild animals of all types to leave the area due to lack of food or cover. rain water from a severely contaminated site will flow into the creeks and estuaries of the drainage basin destroying the plankton, algae, and other fish food which will, in turn, destroy the area outside the controlled test grid for productive sport fishing. (young 2008, 21)   in these early stages, only four years after the beginning of operation ranch hand, scientists working for the us government reported the potential toxic spread of herbicides in a multispecies ecology around eglin air force base. of the 342 species that were tested for detectable levels of toxins, about one-third of them were determined to be affected (young 2008, 45). and while the concern in the quoted report about toxicity fell under the purview of harmful effects on “sport fishing” in western florida, which were deemed to be only “moderately toxic to man,” several class-action lawsuits against monsanto have since arisen from veterans and civilians who lived and worked on eglin air force base and in nearby walton and holmes counties (thompson 2019). many of the studies that refute the toxic persistence of agent orange rely upon research methods that test core samples of soil located in discrete plots of land within the borders of these former air bases (young and newton 2004; humphrey 2016b; thompson 2020). however, the studies also anticipate the challenge of measuring concentrations of dioxins due to their mobility in wind, water, and in the fatty tissues of ambulatory species. some studies even surmised the potential harmful effects of tcdd on humans by extrapolating from measurements of its toxic harm on other species ranging from primates to ground mice (stevens 1981; young and newton 2004). the research, nevertheless, indicates that the spread of exposure continues to exceed the expected scope of testing both in temporal and spatial dimensions. the chemospheres created by the herbicides ultimately challenge the presumed boundaries that uphold the idea of an insulated “domestic space,” whether at the scale of the home or the nation, by seeping through perimeters and revealing the porosity and construction of the false borders of domesticity. accordingly, the division between military personnel and civilian workers who worked on base continues to determine whose exposure is recognized by the us government and the corporations named in legal arbitrations.5 civilian workers who were contracted as “range technicians” by vitro services (which has since been subsumed by bae systems) have received no recognition of the danger of their exposures (thompson 2019; young and miller-medzon 2019). in investigative reports about walton and holmes counties, a politically conservative area heavily intertwined culturally and materially with the military, the base was cited as one of the only sustainable sources of work in the region, often paying much higher wages than any other nearby employers (kalish 2018). consequently, the residents of nearby counties were hired to perform the “domestic” work that was seen as “unskilled” labor in comparison to the tests conducted by military personnel. as a result, the workers were also paid less than their military counterparts and they did not receive the same level of security clearance to access knowledge about the potential dangers of exposure to the herbicides.6 in an interview with reporter jon kalish for the environmental justice podcast living downstream, one contracted worker, sam jordan, who was a resident of the nearby town of crestview, recounts working at eglin’s biological and chemical laboratory without being warned of the precautions he should take to ensure his safety from the herbicide testing occurring on site (kalish 2018). the contracted workers performed the supportive labor that enabled the testing: washing beakers filled with chemical concoctions, collecting cardboard screens that were laid out in the field so they could be chemically analyzed in the lab, operating large film cameras that aimed to capture and record the dispersal. another worker, tommy c. brown, reports at times being drenched in chemicals that felt like “thin mud,” citing that vitro made sure that workers cleaned and washed the camera equipment without warning them to take the same precautions with their own bodies (kalish 2018). describing the somatic experience of exposure, brown recounts to kalish, “sometimes, it’d be like a mist…but i remember one time, we got sprayed and it was like mud. it was like a thin mud. it kind of covered us up. if i seen mist, i would not cut that camera off. i would sit right there in my position unless they told me otherwise” (kalish 2018). brown’s compliance with vitro’s instructions reveals the trust he placed in his employer to advise him of the potential hazards associated with exposure. the company’s unabashed protection of their capital investment (the cameras and equipment) over the bodies of workers doubly highlights how civilian workers were treated as surplus labor, indefinitely expendable and replaceable by the racial capitalist machine of war. in another interview with a local newspaper, jordan reflects on his exposure and further laments, “it turned out to be roundup on steroids” (humphrey 2016b). by comparing the military-grade herbicides to the household weed killer, jordan inadvertently demonstrates the nefarious connections between the us government’s biopolitical destruction of crops in supposed hostile territories and the ongoing repetition of those exposures on smaller, more intimate scales at home. the economy of war also ensured that even if civilians questioned the safety of their work, and suspected that their somatic experiences of chemical exposures should be concerning, the economic realities of needing employment to sustain their livelihoods could not be ignored. in describing their experiences, the exposed workers suggest that even if the corporations had explicitly alerted them of the potential hazards, they would have perhaps continued to work (kalish 2018). as is often true with occupational hazards and exposures to industrial chemospheres, the toxic chemicals that affected vitro workers also seeped past the boundaries of their work spaces (boudia et al. 2018, 167). in their interviews with kalish, workers described how their clothes, which were soaked in military-grade herbicides, were washed in their household laundry machines. they described tracking herbicidal residues found on their shoes and bodies into their domestic spaces, exposing their families by proximity even in the assumed safety of their suburban homes. one worker, bobby collinsworth, worked at eglin for thirty-four years, including operating the cameras that documented the aerial spray tests of herbicides. he described to kalish how he believed agent orange drifted twelve miles from the base during the late 1960s to his farm nearby, where he also made a living by growing soybeans, corn, and cotton (kalish 2018). the herbicide most noticeably destroyed the cotton crop, and, with it, the collinsworth family’s main source of income for several years. collinsworth’s work on base inadvertently affected his farm, his home, and the communities his farm supplied through the same debilitating tactics that were being used as warfare in southeast asia. these examples illustrate other ways that the herbicides’ mobility traversed the boundaries of military and civilian space to pollute multiple domestic spheres. still, the legal separation of veteran and civilian maps onto the separation of those who are protected for their service and those whose “domestic” work remains unrecognized—even when the boundaries between veteran and civilian are muddied. in a subsequent set of interviews for a follow-up podcast, kalish reported on several cases that complicated the distinction between veteran and civilian workers in the region around eglin. he described one worker, von jones, who did serve in the military prior to the vietnam war, and who was rehired by a contracted company to perform herbicide tests on base, but because his exposure did not occur during his military service, he was not eligible for benefits from the va (kalish 2019). in contrast, wesley t. carter piloted a legal case that advocated for compensation for all operators of c-123 aircrafts (that were originally used in vietnam to disperse herbicides), even though the crews were made up of reservists who only flew the aircrafts domestically within the us as part of medical and cargo missions and thus were not “full-fledged veterans” (kalish 2019, 13:05). as of 2015 these operators became eligible for benefits while vitro workers remained ineligible. as the us department of veteran affairs expands its list of health conditions associated with agent orange and other military-grade herbicide exposures, and broadens the geographical scope it recognizes as being exposed to herbicides, civilian communities in the surrounding areas near air force bases have yet to receive legal recognition. this is also true of civilian communities in regions occupied by us air bases beyond the borders of the us, including cambodia, canada, india, japan, korea, laos, and thailand. as of the time of this writing, those civilian communities are still awaiting legal reparations as well (chisholm, chisholm & kilpatrick ltd. 2017).   extending militarized refuge: exposures at refugee relocation centers in addition to the exposures that have been studied amongst communities of veterans and long-term residents of western florida, vietnamese refugees were likely also inadvertently exposed to the herbicides at eglin air force base. between april 27 and september 19, 1975, eglin air force base became one of four main vietnamese refugee relocation centers as part of operation new arrivals (jans-thomas et al. 2014, 1115). at any one time, only 2,500 refugees inhabited the camp, but ultimately 10,085 refugees passed through eglin air force base before receiving sponsorship and legal citizenship in the us (1123). as the temporary homes, nicknamed “tent city,” were hastily constructed on base, the housing units were also unusually exposed to the elements. the units had open air portals or mere canvas coverings for windows, which was a welcome reprieve from the floridian heat, but also ensured that refugees were regularly exposed to the outside elements (1122). this haphazard construction demonstrates another way in which the homes built for refugees were imagined as a place of safety when they were in fact also exposed. because studies of agent orange usually focus on its exposures abroad rather than in places where it was tested on us soil, there have been no studies to date that, to my knowledge, enumerate how vietnamese refugees were housed in an area adjacent to where the herbicides were previously tested. by comparing archival materials about the geography of eglin air force base, i discerned that the testing grounds for agent orange (quadrant c-52) were less than ten miles from where vietnamese refugees came to live, in an area called auxiliary two, just five years after testing concluded. while it cannot be conclusively determined that refugees would have been exposed to agent orange at the base, the proximity and short duration since initial spraying suggests that exposure was probable given that trace exposures are still being measured in the soil and groundwater four decades after the war in vietnam. as feminist science and technology scholars have demonstrated, it is also this stated indeterminacy that shrouds definitive legal and scientific claims about herbicide harm and that constricts epistemologies of exposure (murphy 2006; chen 2012; liboiron 2021). in a summative study of feminist approaches to toxicology, melina packer argues, “given this inherently uncertain science, we come to know toxicants not through toxicology, but through violence done to other/ed bodies” (2021, 30). because the chemical compounds that make up agent orange have a vexed history of occupying both commercial and military industries, edwin a. martini (2012) further argues that a “politics of uncertainty” surrounding agent orange’s toxic drift remains a chief cause for the lack of legal reparations for civilians. in spite of these politics that aim to deflect definitive and causal reports of toxic harm, transpacific communities construct ways of determining harmful exposures that rely upon sensorial and affective registers rather than the precarity of toxicological studies. from her ethnographic research in a beauty spa in ho chi minh city, thuy linh tu recounts how the salon workers made sense of the uncertainty of exposure by describing the latency of chemicals as “resting” (nằm nghĩ) within a particular body, awaiting the right environmental and social factors to appear (2021, 18). for the workers, bioscientific “uncertainty” did not prohibit them from honing their own affective and material epistemologies for sensing and knowing when bodies have been exposed. across both the examples of the spa in vietnam and the refugee relocation center in florida, the chemical diaspora of agent orange becomes even more explicitly intertwined with the vietnamese diaspora as it is commonly understood. yet, if we consider espiritu’s (2014) important critique that refuge is more often than not militarized, it is not surprising that the very sites that were foundational to the development of chemical violence throughout wwii and the vietnam war became the same places where refuge was supposed to be sought. militarized refuge, as defined by espiritu, aims to highlight the ways that war extends into the refugee condition even after the proposed end of spectacular violence because the spread of empire produces the conditions that require refugees to seek refuge from the very forces that produce their displacement (2014, 36). this is one way that the war extends into civilian life, and domesticated spaces, for refugees who must endure, in explicit and less explicit ways, exposure to the violence that uprooted them. the military logics that deemed western florida an ideal site for testing the dispersal of herbicides justified the use of the base as a relocation site for southeast asian refugees, just as landscapes within the domestic us are made to metonymically stand in for the rehearsal of wars abroad. like the civilian workers at eglin air force base, vietnamese civilians exposed to agent orange in vietnam have yet to receive monetary compensation or reparations from the us government or the agrochemical manufacturing companies, though there are vietnamese government-sponsored programs that provide small monthly stipends to vietnamese national citizens if one is able to “prove” one’s exposure. usaid sponsors the environmental remediation of former us air bases and financially contributes to medical infrastructures in vietnam, even though the us has not conceded that the herbicides have deleterious effects on humans in vietnam. because there have been no studies of how or when vietnamese refugees may have been exposed on us soil yet, vietnamese americans living within the us are often obfuscated in conversations about the transnational spread of agent orange and potential occasions for compensation or other forms of retributive justice. in fact, many choose to distance themselves from discussions of agent orange, as it is commonly misunderstood as being contained within vietnamese geographies and consequently a specter of past wars rather than ongoing chemical circuits. though other important questions surrounding toxic conditions are emerging as a labor concern amongst nail salon workers, vietnamese american refugees are not often represented or considered part of the larger diaspora of those exposed to chemical warfare. given this myopic view of domestic herbicide exposure, what might knowledge of these entangled ecologies—as extensions of war and the refugee condition—further contribute to diasporic solidarity calling for supranational action? how might chemical diasporas provide an infrastructure for understanding the networks built between generations being born with elevated dioxin levels, while also unsettling any facile attempts to universalize the susceptibility of bodies as it is ever more important to remember differentiated predispositions to debilitation and death? because it is not solely investments in death that are at stake but rather, to cite jasbir puar’s (2017) articulation of the biopolitics of maiming, what’s at stake is that the investment in some lives causes other deaths to be claimed as “collateral damage.” puar critically reminds that the statistical data surrounding the number of lives lost due to warfare is politically calculated such that the debilitation of communities does not get evaluated by the same standard that complete destruction does. moreover, in the case of agent orange, it was through the debilitation of the environment and food infrastructures that the us aimed to debilitate those who were, at the time, considered enemy forces. consequently, a vietnamese refugee who develops cancers years after exposure to dioxins, whether in vietnam or in the us, at eglin air force base or elsewhere, does not become part of the calculus for determining who will receive monetary retribution for exposure, nor who is recognized as being harmed. though, if we remember the racialized histories of herbicide use, it is clear that vietnamese refugees were never intended to be the sites of protection even under the guise of militarized refuge. rather, a liberal humanist approach conditionally assimilates refugees into the national narrative of domestic safety even as ecologies of warfare recursively return to (re)expose them in their newfound homes.   glyphosate and bayer’s homecoming monsanto contemporarily manufactured both the rainbow herbicides that were engineered for military purposes, and glyphosate, which was concocted for commercial agricultural use. while agent orange has become rightfully vilified for its destructive effects over the past couple decades, glyphosate remains the most widely used herbicide worldwide (benbrook 2016). despite recent lawsuits, glyphosate’s long-term effects are largely ignored by the average household. accordingly, the sales of commercial-grade roundup and ranger pro account for 10 percent of monsanto’s revenue. it is also the most commonly used herbicide in global agriculture, such that monsanto began inventing and manufacturing modified seeds known as roundup ready crops that are resistant to or immune from their own herbicide. together, the full line of roundup products account for half of monsanto’s annual profit. many speculate that due to glyphosate’s widespread use, exposure to the herbicide is now unavoidable; moreover, that glyphosate should be considered an integral and ubiquitous node in the chemical geographies that make up contemporary life (werner, berndt, and mansfield 2022). at the same time, because of the types of labor that demand herbicide use, it is critical to remember how agricultural farm workers and groundskeepers are disproportionately exposed at concentrations and durations that far exceed the average use of a single domestic household. this also means that low-income communities of color are, again, the most exposed (sánchez barba 2020; zárate 2023). in june 2018 german multinational corporation bayer completed its acquisition of monsanto and it has since attempted to drop the monsanto name, which many speculate carries the company’s blemished reputation as a company that proliferates toxic products. as the parent company, they have nevertheless inherited monsanto’s lawsuits. bayer, on the other hand, is largely known as a healthcare company who works to enliven bodies. yet, according to its 2020 annual report, bayer’s revenue for its “crop science” division is almost ten times more than its pharmaceutical profit (bayer 2020, 79). in an ironic attempt to further domesticate global agricultural circuits, and as part of an effort to erase monsanto’s blemished reputation, bayer rebranded its role in vietnam’s agricultural and health industries to market itself as a symbol of technological innovation. bayer’s local vietnamese offices began offering education programs for farmers in the mekong delta about how to increase the yield of their rice crops to ensure higher profit. the company even went as far as to host an annual bayer farmer millionaire contest—a gameshow-like competition in which farmers compete about agricultural knowledge. in a bayer-funded newsletter about its global agricultural community efforts, the 2018 winner of the contest, mr. trương tân phúc, beamed, “i am very happy to be the champion of the ‘bayer farmer millionaire’ contest 2018. thanks to the competition, i have the opportunity to exchange and learn from the experience of rational farming to make the fields more productive, hopefully there will be more competitions for farmers” (bayer vietnam 2018, emphasis added). as trương adulates the opportunity to learn “rational farming” from bayer’s investment in the region, he omits or ignores that the same “rational” commitment to increased botanic yield contributed to what resulted in the dispersal of agent orange within kilometers of his rural hometown just decades ago. in doing so, trương also highlights how global agricultural markets structurally leave him with little choice, as bayer’s technology ultimately allows him to remain competitive in an ever-growing transnational market for rice, coffee, and other modified crops. in many ways, his reliance on herbicides ironically returns to the origin of agent orange and the initial purpose of chemically modified plant production, which originated with an effort to maintain us dominance in agricultural markets. these labors, and exposures, have since been deferred to regions in the global south. as the winner of the contest, trương was awarded a tractor. the second-place winner received a lesser model tractor and the third-place winner won a honda wave motorbike. however, it’s the consolation prize given to the rest of the contestants that was most alarming. while reviewing a picture of the competition within the bayer report, i noticed that the consolation prizes were pesticide and herbicide sprayers whose labels in vietnamese say “máy phun thuốc,” which translates to “machine to spray drugs.” in vietnamese the word for drug, medicine, and cure can all be expressed by the word “thuốc”—and that term is also used to name pesticides and herbicides. while in colloquial english, names for chemical defoliants are referred to as compounds that kill pests and plants, in vietnamese the chemical compounds are called plant cures. this nomenclature is mirrored in the contemporary reframing of herbicides by agrochemical companies as “crop protection solutions” a move that ultimately reflects their investment in protecting agricultural capital over civilian life. bayer thus performed its benevolence by essentially giving the farmers tools that ensured their reliance on glyphosate. as the living quarters and farming fields for rural farmers in the southern delta regions of vietnam are more closely intertwined, the herbicides comingle the geographies of exposure, extending monsanto’s historic presence in the region and muddying the bounds of domestic space. bayer, while being persecuted by the vietnamese ministry of foreign affairs for being associated with glyphosate and its possible connections to agent orange, is the very same corporation being praised by local farmers for distributing rational knowledge to increase agricultural yield through the distribution of herbicide variants for which it is being reprimanded. furthermore, the image of the winners reveals another layer of war rhetoric that cycles back in this contest. all contestants wore matching brown outfits with checkered kerchiefs around their heads. each shirt is branded at the top right corner with bayer’s logo: a medicinal cross made from the company’s name spelled horizontally and vertically and circumscribed in a circle. without the logo, these uniforms have been associated with farmers for decades; however, those who are familiar with vietnam war imagery may also recognize that these outfits were associated with guerilla soldiers and particularly the icon of what lynn ly has termed the “vietnamese sniper woman,” female insurgent soldiers who fought against the us, were associated with rural rice farmlands, and were also one of the stated targets of herbicides used in operation ranch hand (2017, 137). thus, in this image is the rhetorical domestication of the enemy soldier, as the multinational manufacturer of toxic herbicides returns as a benevolent pharmaceutical and agricultural educator, whose brand materially changes the bodies of the enemy into the laborer who will disperse the medicinal drug to produce more crops. again, the very same tactics used to target the destruction of life returns under the guise of benevolent aid with life-giving forces.   herbicidal horizons by illuminating networks of exposure between civilian workers outside eglin air force base in western florida, and farm workers in southern vietnam who are reintroducing domestic-grade herbicides and pesticides in the mekong delta today, i’ve demonstrated the insidious ways that corporations wield biopower over plant, animal, and human-animal life. though the exposures during wartime are tied to the same systems of racial capital that differentiate between wanted and unwanted plant life in today’s home gardens, legal systems still preferentially award us veterans while barring remunerations for civilians in the name of needing more precise scientific proof. as more legal cases surface the multitudes of populations who were exposed to agent orange and glyphosate—whether us civilians who worked on bases or refugee populations who were relocated to contaminated refuge zones—it is important to remember the communities who are continually obscured from these narratives of exposures. as witnessed in the example of vietnamese farmers adopting bayer’s strategies and products, the ubiquity of exposures is sometimes outweighed by the need to remain ever competitive in a global economy. for if biopolitics is ultimately about prescribing the elimination of populations deemed anachronous, or underdeveloped, it is no surprise then that technological interventions are viewed as the ultimate solutions to the management of life. as military innovation continues to be the site of us government investment, military apparatuses are also continually domesticated for corporate profit. in fact, bayer’s newest agricultural innovation is herbicide and pesticide dispersal by drone. on bayer’s crop science website, drones are described as revolutionary technology, depicted not only as crop protectors but also as liberators of rice farmers. the site deploys the image of a woman and her child, this time appearing to be dressed in the traditional garments of hmong farmers from a northern vietnamese region. in describing their development of agricultural technologies, bayer admits that drones are useful since they ultimately decrease the use of diesel-based farming equipment and “limit human exposure to crop protection solutions,” thereby inadvertently confessing to their herbicides’ toxic potentiality (bayer ag 2022). in tracing yet another way that military technologies become domesticated and narrated as benefiting—in fact, liberating—human populations, i illustrate how the tactics of herbicidal war and debilitation are surreptitiously extended into contemporary civilian life. against these pervasive agribiopolitics, we might ask, how mr. trương, as the winner of the bayer farmer millionaire contest, both acknowledges the history of herbicide harm and simultaneously materially depends upon bayer and military technologies to sustain his livelihood as a rice farmer supplying increasingly complex global food economies. by tracing these unmarked circuits, we might also come to remember and scrutinize how military bases are settled upon unceded indigenous land; eglin air force base, for example, occupies muscogee and chatot land, bordering choctaw beach and choctawatchee bay even as the choctaw nation of florida was denied federal recognition. or we might further consider the enslaved labor that fundamentally seeded the racial capitalist system that culminated in the cotton crop that was farmed by the collinsworth family even though it was ultimately destroyed by toxic drift. how might telling this somatic and affective history of herbicides provide alternate avenues for seeking reparation and environmental justice for plaintiffs who are not otherwise acknowledged as being exposed, whether civilian workers in western florida, contemporary farm workers in the mekong delta, or the many other entangled populations i have yet to describe here? and still, perhaps current transnational and supranational legal forms of justice fall short of recognizing the ongoing complexities of living through multiple exposures of militarized empire. over dinner, lan confesses how she struggled with acne and other skin conditions as a child, and how she sometimes wondered if the contaminated environment near her childhood home ultimately affected her reproductive capacities. she describes how she earned a medical degree to parse the puzzles of exposure, and how now, as a doctor she disidentifies with the disabled patients whom she serves. in sharing her home with me, she assures me of the safety within. i admit to her that part of my interest in traveling to her home was entwined with the fact that my grandfather shared a hometown with her ancestors, an endearing term of belonging simply summed in vietnamese by the word quê. to share quês with another person is an uncanny affective intimacy that far exceeds nominations of ethnicity, nation, or even “home.” it is a shared declaration of kinship that extends beyond any singular person. as such, the journey to lan’s childhood home was perhaps also an unspoken desire to come to terms with how the war still lingered in my own family’s genealogy even without definitive proof of chemical exposure. yet, as i mull these questions atop the makeshift mattress propped on the floor of lan’s bedroom, the material realities of exposure thwart any misplaced romanticization of shared exposure; our experiences were incommensurable. lan nevertheless demonstrates one of the many ways in which homes are made atop landscapes that others have deemed scorched earth. in figuring her domestic space in this way, she both acknowledges histories of harms that have occurred and forges a way to dwell in the ubiquitous realms of exposure. in many ways, the home she welcomed me into more closely resembled the reality of militarized domestic spaces where the porosity of the borders between the home and the outside were traversed by natural elements and the nonhuman critters that also found temporary refuge there. like the women in puchuncaví whose stories tironi recounts, lan extends care through the maintenance of her living space and through banal daily actions that could, in the eyes of some, seem futile considering endless global chains of consumption that demand continuous production and structural forms of uneven exposure. and yet it is these moments of intimate activism that perhaps tell a different story of herbicidal genealogies that is not constituted by the maintenance of perfect suburban lawns but rather by dwelling in the entangled ecologies of shared exposures. in seeking recognition of the material histories that flow from civilian communities near eglin air force base, through vietnamese refugees who were welcomed there and who have since relocated to other regions, to the structural ways that vietnamese farmers redeploy herbicidal variants on crops that then themselves circulate amongst global agricultural markets, and into the bodies of consumers everywhere, there emerge cycles of exposure that are, in fact, inevitable. to recognize this connectedness is also perhaps to recognize our own vexed complicity and embeddedness within the maintenance of domestic life through the extension of military technologies into everyday existence and into all the spaces we make home.   acknowledgments this work would not have been possible without the support and intellectual generosity of several communities. i am grateful to the special section editors, xan chacko, astrida neimanis, jennifer terry, and diana pardo pedraza for their editorial comments and facilitation of workshops that allowed this special section to be a true dialogue and collaboration between contributors. i am also thankful for heidi amin-hong, c.n.e corbin, melina packer, and reena shadaan, who offered invaluable feedback in early stages of the development of this work. finally, i am grateful to my many interlocutors, but especially lan, whose generous invitations, stern feedback, and friendship guided my thinking about the circuits of toxicity and militarized violence that bind us, and still inevitably divide the places we call home.   notes 1 for the purposes of maintaining confidentiality, the name of my colleague has been changed and the exact location of her home has been purposefully left vague (though the region remains one that was listed as being exposed to agent orange).   2 though alvin l. young was hired as the main agronomist (herbicide physiology and environmental toxicology) by the us government, several studies later showed that young often revised his research to claim the opposite of what his studies initially reported; at first, young found trace amounts of dioxin and concluded that herbicide exposure had minimal effects on nearby human and nonhuman life, whereas he later reported that exposure did in fact have the potential to harm nearby ecologies (ornstein, wei, and hixenbaugh 2016).   3 eglin air force base was originally established in 1931 by personnel of the army air corps tactical school as a potential bombing site and gunnery range due to the “sparsely populated forested areas around valparaiso, florida, and the vast expanse of the adjacent gulf of mexico” (us air force 2022). with the onset of world war ii, general henry h. “hap” arnold selected eglin to be a site for aircraft armament, and by june 27, 1940, the us forestry service ceded 384,000 acres of the choctawhatchee national forest to the war department for the expansion of the air base. several historians note how national forests were changed from sites where nature was protected to sites of military exercises (havlick 2015; krupar 2016).   4 agent orange, agent purple, agent white, and agent blue were four of the “rainbow herbicides” used during operation ranch hand (1961–1971) in vietnam and neighboring cambodia and laos. the herbicides were named after the color-coded bands on the outside of barrels they were stored in. the active ingredient in agent orange is equal parts 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-d) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-t), which had trace but noticeable amounts of tcdd. tcdd is the most toxic dioxin named by the us environmental protection agency. the most common health conditions from acute and long-term exposure to tcdd include chloracne, hypertension, diabetes, vascular ocular changes, signs of neural system damage, and peripheral and central neurotoxicity. the us department of veteran affairs also recognizes several types of non-hodgkin’s lymphoma to be an indication of dioxin exposure (institute of medicine 1994, 90).   5 in 2019 local northwest floridian lawyer ruston (rusty) sanders joined new york–based lawyer victor yannacone (who was the primary prosecutor in the initial 1984 class-action lawsuit of us veterans exposed to agent orange against the manufacturing companies of the rainbow herbicides) to propose a federal complaint that they hoped would lead to a larger class-action lawsuit on behalf of the civilian residents and vitro workers. the potential lawsuit named bae systems plc, bayer ag, as well as valero energy corporation, which the lawsuit identified as a successor to herbicide manufacturer nopoco chemical, the dow chemical company, occidental petroleum, michelin, harcros chemicals, philips electronics, and johnson controls (thompson 2019). as of december 2022, no official lawsuit has been filed.   6 at the time of this writing, the class-action lawsuit on behalf of vitro services workers has not been filed, and consequently, the names and other identifying details about the thirty defendants have not been made public. besides descriptions of the workers in local newspapers as “blue-collar” and low-income at the time of their employment, and pictures of select defendants photographed by jon kalish during his investigative documentary podcast interviews that portray older white men and women, there is little known about how the workers would identify along lines of race, gender, and ability. as of the 2020 us census, 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“new documentary explores little-known medical legacy for civilians.” here & now, wbur, march 26, 2019. audio, 10:59. https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/03/26/agent-orange-medical-legacy-documentary. zárate, salvador. 2023. “rolodex half-life: an exposed life told in cards.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 9 (1): 1–11. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/38561. zierler, david. 2011. the invention of ecocide: agent orange, vietnam, and the scientists who changed the way we think about the environment. athens: university of georgia press.     author bio natalia duong is a uc president’s postdoctoral fellow at the university of california, los angeles where her research examines the transnational spread of agent orange through a study of cultural media, disability law, and place-based research in vietnam.     original research the girl in the bubble: an essay on containment     dylan mulvin london school of economics and political science d.mulvin@lse.ac.uk   cait mckinney simon fraser university cait_mckinney@sfu.ca     abstract in this essay, we offer a prehistory of contemporary bubbles used in the mitigation of viruses, told through the late 1980s case of eliana martínez, an hiv-positive (hiv+) and developmentally disabled puerto rican child who was ordered to be confined to a glass chamber within her florida classroom. eliana's mother, rosa, challenged the use of this chamber as a reasonable disability accommodation in a high-profile lawsuit. we draw on disability studies, critical access studies, and a postcolonial critique to put forward a theory of the bubble as a “structure-within-a-structure”—a zone of limited, restricted, or filtered interaction with the broader social world. eliana's bubble demonstrates how institutional practices of accommodation can easily transform into techniques of containment, sanctioned to manage the “infectious subject” within institutions and systems. the bubble is a gathering of social forces and bodily relations. in eliana's case, it gathers the necropolitical arrangements of different populations, the coloniality of puerto rico, the innocence of childhood, the fatality of an aids diagnosis, and the politics of design and disability.   keywords hiv/aids history, disability studies, viruses, postcoloniality, materiality, access and inclusion     the glass chamber it's a glass chamber in the middle of a room (figure 1). the room has three doors and a subchamber with its own toilet, a sink, and a drain in the middle of the floor. a speaker-receiver on the wall of the chamber allows sound to be piped in and out. the glass walls are covered in crafts: six collaged umbrellas, a mouse face made from a paper plate, and the word best on a piece of poster board. the outward-facing edges of the chamber are bordered by a colorful alphabet. figure 1. eliana martínez's glass chamber at manhattan elementary in tampa, florida. source: abc news. these artifacts—the umbrellas, the crafts, the alphabet —mark the chamber as a space of early childhood education in the late twentieth century. it would be a mundane collection of objects except for the fact that they are taped to the outside of a glass chamber in the middle of a classroom. the container conjures other, familiar cultural references: “the boy in the bubble”—immune-compromised david vetter (played by john travolta in a 1976 made-for-tv movie), or the (often broken) hermetic seals of labs in epidemic cinema (think outbreak or contagion), or the glassy prison cell used by hollywood to quarantine and contain the most terrifying of prisoners (see “glassy prison,” n.d.). but the classroom chamber was not made to house a prisoner. instead, the chamber sits in the so-called trainably mentally handicapped (tmh) classroom of manhattan elementary school and was built in 1989 by the school board of hillsborough county in tampa, florida for $8,000 (mason 1991). the chamber was installed to contain eliana martínez during school hours. eliana was an hiv+, six-year-old child born in puerto rico and raised in the tampa area by her adopted mother, rosa martínez. eliana's chamber is a kind of bubble: it is both a material structure and a social tool of containment designed to accommodate her difference and vulnerability while moderating their effects on the world outside. bubbles, we know from our experiences with covid-19, can be useful in mitigating the spread of a virus. but bubbles also evoke structures, memories, and discourses of abandonment and debility, as they can transform practices of accommodation into acts of containment. in this essay, we offer a prehistory of our contemporary bubbles told through the late 1980s case of eliana martínez, whose mother, rosa, challenged the use of a bubble in a high-profile lawsuit against her local school board. we tell this history to understand the material and discursive construction of bubbles, basing our analysis on legal rulings and policy documents, news coverage, and primary archival sources. this work is based in a conceptual framework drawn from disability studies, critical access studies, and a postcolonial critique aimed at understanding the social formation of the bubble as both a filtering technology and a “structure-within-a-structure”—a zone of limited, restricted, or processed interaction with the broader social world. we begin our analysis with the court case, and then introduce a theory of bubbles as social containers that materialize wider beliefs about disability and accommodation. we situate this theory in the history of us-puerto rico relations, arguing that bubbles extend racialized, colonial regimes of debilitation. finally, we conclude with a close, material analysis of how and why eliana's bubble was designed and constructed, to show that our social bubbles can be reverse-engineered to understand the beliefs about bodies, difference, and “inclusion” that inform the boundaries we strike between the “inside” and “outside.” what happened to eliana rosa martínez did not seek a bubble for her daughter when she placed eliana in special education at manhattan elementary, near her home in tampa. but the hillsborough school board refused to allow the six-year-old to be in a classroom with other children because of her hiv status. the conflict between eliana's special needs and her viral status produced a spectacular and protracted legal battle. the disagreement centered on an interpretation of the fourteenth amendment's equal protection clause, and more practically, of section 504 of the rehabilitation act of 1973, under which all disabled people are entitled to the “least restrictive environment” for pursuing education and employment. the conflict centered on a question: did positive hiv status constitute a disability and, if it did, did transmissibility nonetheless provide a reasonable cause to restrict eliana's attendance in a classroom with her peers? the glass chamber was a response to this question. while scholars such as chris bell (2012) and marty fink (2020) have argued that a disability framing of hiv enhances understandings of risk, care, and access (a model we apply to eliana's bubble), the court was more interested in sorting and distinguishing between eliana's virus, her developmental disability, and the impairments they each caused. the conflict between rosa martínez and the school board made its way through the courts, eventually ending up in us federal court in 1988. the case was heard by district court judge elizabeth kovachevich. in her decision, kovachevich ruled that yes, eliana could attend manhattan elementary, but her hiv status would require that she be kept apart—quarantined—from her classmates. kovachevich created and dictated the exact shape and form of eliana's glass chamber, arguing throughout that she could be in the classroom, but not with other students. eliana's glass chamber is a quintessential bubble: a structure-within-a-structure, meant to uphold the broader social setting outside of its membrane through a targeted act of containment. though the federal-court decision was eventually overturned by the eleventh circuit us court of appeals, and eliana never attended class in the chamber, the structure remained in the classroom. the bubble persisted as an artifact of the incapacity of american society to incorporate hiv+ people into existing social structures, and as a monument to the state's attitude to vulnerability. namely, that vulnerability marks the body as something to be, at best, contained and, at worst, eliminated.   throughout the federal-court trial, eliana's body and behaviors were characterized as threats to those around her. in her decision, judge kovachevich enumerates how and in what ways eliana leaks. kovachevich remarks that “eliana had skin lesions...but without notation of oozing,” that she “had a problem with chronic diarrhea,” that she is “not toilet trained,” and “does not drool, per se. however, she does mouth her thumb and forefinger frequently, resulting in saliva on the digits.” she notes that eliana has never “bitten or spit at anyone,” and that she, like many aids patients, suffers from thrush, and while eliana's thrush is persistent, “there are no open lesions” (martinez v. school board 1988a). this inventory is meant to serve as a foundation for the legal decision, evaluating the risk of her classmates contracting hiv by mapping the potential escape of the virus in her fluids. the list infers a route between blood, saliva, bacterial infection, and the chronic diarrhea of a non-toilet user. kovachevich's ruling connects all of these relationships: because of eliana's behaviors and her hiv status, her “bodily secretions” presented, kovachevich argues, “a remote possibility of being a route of transmission to the children of the tmh classroom that she desires to attend” (martinez v. school board 1988a). let's be clear: the glass chamber was built because of the (mistaken) belief that eliana's blood would end up in her spit or excrement and infect another child with hiv.1 what we see here is how a theory of imagined infection materializes in a new kind of structure, a bubble, meant to contain and mediate the vulnerability of children. when eliana's case was tried in 1988, infection with hiv was widely viewed as a death sentence, transmission was poorly understood by the general public, and casual contact with the bodily fluids of others was heavily stigmatized (brier 2009).2 in the legal decision, kovachevich states, “the severity of the harm if transmission [of hiv] occurs is clear, it is most likely fatal” (martinez v. school board 1988a, emphasis added). this was a mindset that informed state responses to hiv and led many policymakers to try to control even incidental contact between hiv-negative and -positive individuals. infamously, the failed 1990 chapman amendment to the americans with disabilities act (ada) would have carved out an exception to the ada allowing employers to deny anyone with hiv employment if their job involved handling food. crucially, eliana's case was being tried before passage of the ada, but within the same political and discursive context. in hearings surrounding the chapman amendment, us senators and representatives debated the categorization of hiv as a disability while imagining routes of infection through food and food service (colker 2004). the chapman amendment became a hotly contested policy proposal and an artifact of misperception and fantasy. eliana's case also elicited imagined narratives of how the virus could make its way out of one body and into another. kovachevich writes three times of the “remote theoretical possibility” of hiv being transmitted through tears, saliva, or urine (martinez v. school board, 1988a). when she points to a center for disease control (cdc) guideline that states children without control of their bodily fluids might need greater restrictions on their educational placement, she transitions, incredibly, to a passage from the cdc on the risks of “deep, open-mouth (i.e., french) kissing.” this is one of the more incongruous parts of the decision, one that filters a description of a kindergarten-age child through a panic about teenage sex. reporting on the court case used visual cues to frame the cruelty of this ruling for the general public. an abc news segment shows a reporter, mark potter, standing in the empty glass chamber for a piece-to-camera segment, wearing a suit and tie, hands crossed in front of him (figures 2 and 3). the shot begins close on potter's face, and slowly zooms out to reveal that he is standing in the chamber, a process of gradual orientation designed to shock the viewer: “the reason eliana isn't in school today is that a federal judge ruled the only way she could attend class would be to sit inside this eight by ten-foot glass enclosure in the back of the room, isolated from the other students.” potter's voice echoes in the chamber—since it's all hard surfaces of tile and glass. a series of quick close-ups on objects in the chamber are punctuated by potter's description of how a judge's ruling shaped the space: “following the judge's order, the school board built the cubicle with its own toilet, intercom system, and a separate entrance, so eliana would never walk through the classroom.” figure 2. shot of abc's mark potter reporting from inside the chamber. source: abc news. figure 3. reverse shot of the view out on the main classroom from within the chamber. source: abc news eliana appears in b-roll footage too, smiling, playing with toys, sitting with her care worker at home, and walking in front of her school. eliana often wore her hair in tight pigtails, liked colorful dresses, and used non-standard hand signs to communicate. the report cuts to an interview with rosa martínez sitting on a sofa to explain her objection to the glass room: “years ago they would put monkeys behind glass cages. that's what this reminds me of: a monkey behind a glass cage. my daughter's not going to be anyone's monkey or anyone's freak show” (abc evening news 1988). rosa is not redefining how she would like eliana to be perceived in the room; rather, she is refusing the room's lines of sight and promises of containment all together. as such, rosa is also refusing the court's optimism about the bubble as a solution to the problem of eliana's inclusion. this legal ruling summoned eliana's bubble to reconcile a fantasy of infection and the tragedy of the unschooled child. the images we have of this space come from national news coverage and they're meant to highlight the injustice of hiv's “innocent” victims. the glass chamber was a manifestation of a fear that the virus could harm anyone, and it performed this role in contrast to adult queers and drug users, whose lives had already marked them as worthy of exclusion and beyond care. while policymakers may have been all too ready to allow these victims of hiv to die, eliana's infection was not morally stigmatized in the same way. it's precisely this incongruence that leads to the bubble as an exceptional, architectural response to life lived with and alongside hiv.  a theory of bubbles eliana martínez's story shows that bubbles are responses to threats of vulnerability and the porousness and leakiness of bodies (chun and friedland 2015; agostina and thylstrup 2019). the glass chamber built for eliana is a materialized fantasy offered as a prophylactic against an imagined route of infection; it's a translucent but impenetrable barrier that severed eliana's bodily fluids from the orifices of her classmates; but it is also a durable edifice built against the “remote” and “theoretical” (in judge kovachevich's terms) possibility of innocent children dying of aids. eliana's chamber is a concrete manifestation of the social control promised by “the bubble” as a structure (either built or lived) meant to reorganize social life through the sorting of wanted and unwanted contact. eliana's status as living with both hiv and developmental disabilities irritated the unsettled legal, educational, and cultural understandings of people living with hiv and the forms of accommodation they might require to live a flourishing life. the chamber emerged as an infrastructure for negotiating proximity and isolation, while also serving as an illustrative history of the social arrangements that transparent barriers promise to produce (mattern 2020). as long as we live in a society structured by viruses, we will need ways of talking about bubbles and their promises of containment. our bubble theory offers a means of reading backwards from bubbles to the social arrangements that create and maintain them. glass partitions have a long history in civil infrastructures of containment, used to protect employees from bullets, projectiles, and spit in subway stations, gas stations, or government service counters, beginning in the early 1970s (bamberger 1970). judge kovachevich's decision dictated precise instructions on the size, materials, and functions of eliana's chamber: for instance, like the plexiglass barriers of the liquor store or the welfare office, eliana's chamber had to be transparent and equipped with a two-way speaker system but impenetrable to attempts by other children to get in, or eliana to get out. in both these civil cases of plexiglass bubbles and eliana's bubble, there is an explicit attachment to the desire to maintain some kinds of social relations at the expense of others: sound and vision at the expense of touch and co-presence. placing eliana in a chamber is not the same thing as excluding her completely from school (as the school board had wanted); bubbling is not the same as removal. we need a theory of bubbles not only because of the concrete situation of our present virus-mediated world but because we need language to understand and respond to social techniques that exclude without outright removal. bubbles appear as a response to situations where complete social removal or extraction is not possible or desirable. oftentimes bubbles appear precisely when institutions claim they are seeking a policy of “inclusion,” “access,” or “accommodation.” the bubble is related to, but different from, special education segregation strategies, and carceral institutionalization for developmental disabilities, because it keeps the contained subject within view and ready for interaction (ben-moshe 2020; erevelles 2000). the bubble, then, is a means of containment, where the structure-within-the-structure mediates between layers of the social in an attempt to control wanted and unwanted forms of contact and communication. of course, in practice, bubbles may lead to the effective or complete exclusion of those bubbled (this may even be a desired side effect by the bubblers), but this cannot be the stated goal of their use. bubbles are spatial but also temporal. we write this history of eliana's glass chamber from the perspective of our moment, when the bubble has once again emerged as a response to viral life. for many of us, recent years have been lived in care bubbles, where we share our vulnerability with bubblemates while attempting to control and limit the exchange of air, fluids, and illness with those beyond our network. plexiglass partitions became a widespread and ordinary addition to the architectures of shared space—offices, shops, grocery checkout lines, taxis, restaurant counters, classrooms—creating a sense of separation from the wet breath of others, even while their actual efficacy in controlling the spread of covid-19 is dubious. in fact, it is the coexistence of these physical barriers, with the knowledge that they do not achieve their stated goal, that speaks to the bubble's cultural resonance as a response to illness. contemporary, physical bubbles limit the occasions in which we share air, can physically touch, or reach across space, while social bubbles restructure our social networks. the idea of the covid-era childcare bubble is not reliant on plexiglass, but does represent a shared commitment (or legal requirement) to restrict interactions to a limited group of people. by the time you read this, many of these bubbles will have vanished. the 2020 nba “bubble” isolated professional basketball players at disney world in orlando, with fans appearing on video monitors in place of the stands, but today stadiums are once again full of in-person supporters. this is to say, bubbles have a temporality—they represent a response to uncertainty, discomfort, and a lack of either information or other mitigation techniques. bubbles may also “disappear” in both the case of hiv and covid, as a signifier of “progressing” through the social stages of virus mitigation. we don't want to collapse the viral and epidemiological specificity of hiv and covid. but each of these techniques of bubbling merits investigation as a historically rooted and specifically materialized use of containment in response to the threat of bodily vulnerability. when we talk about containment we usually miss the container: the boxes, jugs, cisterns, reservoirs, and organs that hold, protect, and courier the things we care about. zoë sofia (2000) once called for a correction to the overemphasis on supply and creation, to focus instead on the politics and materiality of containment as a dynamic and interactive process. in an essay on tupperware and media theory, brooke erin duffy and jeremy packer argue that containment is always an active strategy producing spatial arrangement and boundaries that process the world and are implicated in broader structures of power (2022, 112-15). containment, as such, “should compel us to interrogate who contains, and to what ends” (116). within our own viral crisis, and the reckoning it has forced with already-failed policies of accommodation, we believe that the politics of containment are as urgent as ever. returning to the martínez case from our present moment, we find it still animates ongoing necropolitical and eugenic responses to illness and vulnerability. eliana's bubble shows how spatial arrangements, including those named as accommodation, can allow for the slow suffering of some so that others might thrive. it most clearly demonstrates this in the use of transparent, glass partitions. current bubbles may abet sustained social life and employment in pandemic conditions while historical precedents of the bubble —in the form of the quarantine, colony, and the prison—have frequently validated the state's power to isolate and eradicate some bodies for the convenience of others. the bubble as misfit as bubbles isolate and contain, they surface harsh misalignments with institutional spaces, a familiar site of analysis in disability studies that enriches this theory of bubbles. perhaps the most remarkable thing about eliana's bubble is how out of place it looks in the surrounding environment of a cheerful classroom for young children with disabilities. the chamber does not fit. it is awkwardly placed in the room and cuts in at hard angles across the carpeted area where children in classrooms often gather. this awkwardness was underscored by the admixture of the chamber covered in crafts, implanted in the center of a classroom—a space of social innocence, and a domain of care. had eliana martínez ever occupied the chamber, the scene would seem an absurd disjuncture: it is not a reasonable place for children, for learning, or for care. its absurdity meant that tv journalists reporting on the story often stood in the chamber to illustrate how odd a space it was—the same way they might stand beside a fire or a hurricane, their bodily presence vicariously attesting to the site of an exceptional tragedy.  the misalignment of eliana and the classroom are an artifact of a legal and educational system that couldn't figure out what to do with her body. or to put it more precisely: the relationship of eliana to her classroom produced, in the object of her glass chamber, a misfit. or, to try again, rosa martínez's battle to get her (disabled, hiv+) daughter in school with other children, surfaced a misfit—that is, a misalignment of bodies, policy, and built environment in the object of the glass chamber. rosemarie garland-thomson describes the misfit as a critical concept that is attuned to “how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects” (2011, 591). garland-thomson invokes two senses of misfit: as both an entity or a person who misfits, and/or a situation of misfitting: eliana and her bubble comprise both senses. the misfit can serve as an analytic perspective for thinking from but beyond identity to understand larger social systems and the frictions and incongruities they produce; here, from eliana's identity as a disabled, hiv+, puerto rican child, and beyond to the education system's tacit understanding of inclusion's limits. in the case of eliana, we read the placement of the glass chamber as an occasion of misfitting to understand the material-discursive construction of bubbling. mapping our surroundings through misfitting elevates vulnerability as a common condition of humanity (turner 2006) while simultaneously throwing into relief the ways some forms of bodily vulnerability create fractures, open rifts and chasms, or, yes, eruptions of bubbles in the built environment. locating when, how, and in what forms a moment of misfitting occurs is an impetus for rethinking the hegemonic and “middle-class” concerns of a majority culture, by seeing across the intersectional experiences of disability, race, nationality, and age (alper, katz, and clark 2016; bailey and mobley 2019). when eliana is sentenced to learn within conditions that are not life-giving, her bubble is a “zone of exception” devoid of care, enrichment, or interactive play fundamental to early childhood education (mbembe 2019). the bubble also captures eliana's brownness, further containing her disabilities within a special education classroom used to organize social difference by warehousing non-white and poor students at higher rates (erevelles 2000, 43; 2011, 6). the school board's and court's willingness to bubble eliana in service of other children's imagined needs is a trade-off materialized in the glass chamber as both a container and an accommodation policy adjusted to the shortened horizon of eliana's life. in other words, this child must be contained because she is a threat and she can be bubbled because she is abandonable (povinelli 2011)—the bubble coheres because of the recognition of these facts. for rosa, the eugenic intent of the school board was obvious and related to eliana's misfit as an occasion that would end. rosa saw the school board making a careful calculation about the glacial pace of court proceedings against the speed of eliana's decline. rosa told the st. petersburg times (now the tampa bay times), “they were waiting for eliana to die. she had a strong will to live. i had a strong will not to give up. we made a great team. so i had to concentrate on keeping her alive. she understood that i was very determined. i said, you fight the disease and i'll fight the school” (mason 1991, 1f, emphasis added). liberal approaches to accommodation can introduce new, subtle techniques of governance that arrest communities in carceral processes and conditions of slow death (haritaworn, kuntsman, and posocco 2014). liat ben-moshe (2020) grounds these reform measures in race-ability, or the inseparability of disability “accommodation” from racial capitalism's carceral techniques, while tanya titchkosky argues that schools produce hierarchies of inclusion, marking disabilities that can't be “overcome” quickly enough or in the right ways as irreconcilable with institutional spaces (2011, 12, 34-35). reflecting an insider understanding of these contexts, rosa's refusals to accede to the school board exposed the board's assumptions that her daughter was as good as dead and framed the classroom chamber as a technique of governance through containment. eliana's specific embodiment became an occasion for the school board to create an exception to their existing policies of inclusion. by treating eliana's glass chamber as an historically rooted and materially specific misfit, we can see how vulnerability is managed in the world. here we build on nirmala erevelles's argument that disability must be central to “explaining how and why racial, gendered, and sexual subjects are oppressively constituted within educational settings” (2000, 27). while we may begin with the glass chamber as an eruption, we locate eliana's case within the context of the aids epidemic, her emigration from puerto rico, and the politics of disability accommodation, in which inclusion strategies are often barometers for the limits of state and institutional capacity to embrace complex arrangements of difference. the coloniality of bubbling to think beyond the occasion of eliana's misfitting in the classroom to her misfitting in the continental united states, we situate her case in the context of colonial relations defining life and death in puerto rico and the puerto rican diaspora. this context shows how eliana's subjectivity as an exceptional citizen was also being bubbled when she was tapped for the glass chamber. eliana's connections to puerto rico and the puerto rican diaspora in south florida inflected the soft forms of isolation that public institutions tested upon her as means of “accommodating” her hiv+ status. if we approach eliana's bubble as a misfit, her migration from puerto rico had already marked her body as a particular occasion of misfitting with the continental us. as erevelles, jasbir puar, and others have shown, disability must be examined through postcolonial frames and transnational circuits of capital in order to understand the constitutive relationship between disability, race, gender, sexuality, and class, and begin to decolonize the concept of disability itself (erevelles 2011, 6; puar 2017; senier and miranda-galarza 2016).   eliana's movement from puerto rico to tampa took place within the broader arrangements of exchange, movement, and debt that structure puerto rico's relationship to the us. as rocío zambrana explains, debt relations structure the territory's economic ties to the us and shape a coloniality of power that shores up and exacerbates hierarchies of gender, race, and class, unequally distributing precariousness along these lines in the territory (2021, 8). debt relations are always social, biological, and necropolitical, organizing “the very reproduction of life” (12). zambrana outlines how these debt relations were produced, in part, through the territory's exemptions from corporate taxation and us labor laws, where puerto ricans labor for generations toward repaying insurmountable debts. rené esparza (2021) argues that these economic-social relations defining gender, sexuality, race, and class in puerto rico and the puerto rican diaspora must also be considered in the context of hiv. colonial economics turned puerto rico into a major manufacturing and testing center for the pharmaceutical industry, drawn there for tax breaks and inexpensive labor, even as regular puerto ricans with hiv suffered from a lack of access to health care (esparza 2021, 117-18).  eliana's birth, adoption, migration, and classroom bubbling took place over a brutal decade for people living with hiv in puerto rico. by 1990 puerto rico had the highest number of aids cases per capita of any us state or territory, and rates amongst puerto ricans living on the mainland were similarly high (national commission 1990). frequent air travel between puerto rico and new york, new jersey, and florida contributed to an underserved hiv crisis in puerto rico. on the other hand, these lines of migration and exchange also supported the flourishing of a diasporic worldview affording puerto rican aids activists “an understanding of the virus as a product of overlapping 'structural vulnerability' anchored in colonial subjugation and predatory economics” (esparza 2021, 108). just as puerto rican aids activists “theorized the health crisis from a position of colonial alterity” (111), the framing of eliana's case, her migration via adoption, her disability, and her bubbling must be understood through a colonial reading of pediatric aids. colonial relations in puerto rico shaped aids amongst children in the us as well. in the 1980s the martínez case presented an image of pediatric aids that stood in stark contrast to the white, middle-class victims of the tainted blood supply, whose lives were made spectacular by mainstream news coverage. hiv+ teenager ryan white, who lived in indiana, achieved celebrity status, and posed on the cover of people magazine twice (first in 1988, the same year as the first martínez case) as part of his successful fight to attend public school. in contrast to eliana, this boy-next-door hemophiliac, who contracted hiv through blood products, stood in for all white american children as potential (innocent) victims of aids. the less famous ray brothers were banned from attending their central florida school and won a federal-court battle to return to the classroom in 1987. their ruling, also decided by judge kovachevich, required the three hiv+, hemophiliac boys, some of whom had learning disabilities, to have “an elevated standard of hygiene,” abstain from contact sports and fighting, and receive explicit sex education “despite the age of these boys” (they were eight, nine, ten) (ray v. school dist. of desoto county 1987). one week after their return to school, the ray home was burned down in an arson attack. these white, middle-class children experienced marginalization and exclusion but were understood as innocent victims who could be set in opposition to homosexuals, drug users, haitians and hispanics, and others constructed as culpable for their illness (patton 1996).  as a puerto rican adoptee with complex disabilities, eliana did not fit the same template as ryan white or the ray brothers. by the late 1980s, intravenous drug use was the primary mode of hiv transmission for puerto ricans on the island and the mainland (esparza 2021, 109), but the assumption that eliana contracted hiv via blood transfusion rather than vertical, or “mother-to-child,” transmission is often conspicuously noted in reports on her case. children are messy and leaky, and they already represent less reliable containers than adults; this is part of the reason why accommodating children with hiv/aids in public schools became a matter of concern in the 1980s (much as the leakiness of children shaped some covid policies). in contrast to the ways ryan white was valorized, eliana's brownness and her disabilities made her available for an experiment in “accommodation” premised on carceral arrangements through the construction of a bubble (ben-moshe 2020).  eliana represented a more common, if less discussed, demographic profile of pediatric aids in the us in the late 1980s—where cases like ryan white's were actually exceptional. at the time of the martínez case, 72 percent of pediatric aids cases were concentrated in new york, new jersey, and florida, hubs for puerto rican migration, which judge kovachevich noted in her decision.3 eliana and the bubble designed to contain her are spatial extensions of the misfitting between colonizer and colonized, in which puerto rican children were structurally at greater risk for hiv yet did not register as vulnerable american children within the national imaginary of pediatric aids.  the geographies of coloniality shaping pediatric aids also informed access to drug trials, another focus of rosa martínez's activism. drug trials for lifesaving antiretroviral drugs (e.g., azt, ddi) in children tended to take place in well-funded hubs such as washington, dc, and north carolina's research triangle. rosa fought to make these trials accessible not just to eliana but to all children living with hiv/aids in south florida, who were predominantly brown and black. in an open letter to the national commission on aids written in 1990 for their hearings on research initiatives, rosa outlined the barriers to access she faced getting eliana into an azt trial for children, which involved frequent travel to the national institutes of health (nih) in maryland, partly at her own expense: “just like all the other families, who had children participate in the trials, i confronted daily hardships in trying to balance the requirements of my job, the needs of my sick child, and of my family. as a single parent, i was the sole support at home. i was not able to keep full-time employment because of our monthly, and at times bi-weekly, trips to nih” (martínez 1989-1990, 3). rosa martínez goes on to argue for the elimination of economic barriers to accessing drug trials for parents and children in south florida, a geographic proxy for her implicit argument that these drug trials were not designed to meet the needs of brown and black children who needed them most. though many aids medications were manufactured in puerto rico because of federal tax incentives to the industry, puerto ricans had to leave the island for the continental states to qualify for medicaid to pay for them (esparza 2021, 117). put another way, leaving puerto rico was the only chance at life, even if it compromised living in other ways. after entering the drug trial, eliana wore, at all times, a child-size backpack filled with azt, which was administered slowly through a catheter as she went about her day. in news coverage of the case, she looks like any school kid wearing a backpack: she is small, the backpack is made of pink and purple nylon, and it fits a bit awkwardly. the backpack resonates differently if you think about the life-extending azt inside it, and the biopolitical regimes of migration it evokes. these are the conditions of alterity and coloniality in which eliana appears as a different kind of kid with aids, one who is available to be placed in a glass box. accommodation as containment we have so far discussed attempts to contain eliana's body in the glass bubble as they erupted from existing school board policy, eliana's specific embodiment, and fears of viral contagion. we want to focus then on the work of accommodation (what our british colleagues call “adjustment”), as itself a form of containment. when journalists described eliana's classroom, they employed a varied vocabulary for the bubble. in doing so, they described not just its form but the kinds of containment that the space promised to perform. it was variously called a glass enclosure, a glass cage, and a plexiglass cubicle (sharp 1988); an encasement, glass walls, and a plexiglass isolation booth (record 1988); a partition (leisner 1988); a glass-and-wood chamber (mckinnon and stevenson 1988); a glass booth (stevenson 1988a); a glass box (melone 1988); a small, glass enclosed room (stevenson 1988b); and a special classroom chamber (port 1988). coverage sympathetic to rosa martínez's fight described horror at the idea the school board would “cage a child behind glass” (melone 1988, 6b) where she would be “banned or confined in the booth” (stevenson 1988a, 1b). to reconsider this vocabulary through the resonant figure of the bubble is to emphasize how the glass form was meant to function not only as a container but as a filter meant to allow some forms of sociality to persist while severing or blocking others.  the eliana martínez case centers on a bubble that was built but never used. the chamber stood in the classroom but was never animated through her containment. on december 1, 1988, the united states court of appeals for the eleventh circuit vacated and remanded judge kovachevich's decision, returning the case to the district court. the following year, on april 26, 1989, judge kovachevich overturned her original decision and ordered the school board to admit eliana to the tmh classroom (martinez v. school board of hillsborough county 1989). in other words, eight months after ordering the glass chamber be built, judge kovachevich was forced to reverse her ruling, and eliana finally entered class at manhattan elementary. in the united states, the concept of accommodation developed out of racial and religious contexts and was connected with civil rights discourses. the idea of mere accommodation had carried a negative connotation referring to both “gradualism and compromise” (emens 2015, 18). in the context of disability, accommodation has had a different legacy: often referring to a process of “changing society in response to disability” (18). departing from this frame, aimi hamraie outlines a critical access studies framework that “centers the intersections of disability with race, gender, class, and aging in its historical study of how concepts of spatial access materialized in the twentieth-century united states” (2017, 13; bell 2012; kafer 2013). critical access studies intervenes in the existing frameworks of disability studies that scholars such as chris bell (2006) have argued are implicitly racialized. following this method, we work our way backwards from the empty glass room to the understandings of personhood and access that enabled such a structure to be imagined and built. we take further guidance from bell's (2012) argument that state policies regulating hiv do not reflect accurate understandings of transmission or community-specific meanings of risk. eliana's chamber is formed through carceral state responses to developmental disability and hiv, aligned with the special education approach to accommodation-as-segregation (ben-moshe 2020; bell 2012; erevelles 2000). this means eliana's status as a developmentally disabled, hiv+, puerto rican child, who was understood to be dying, was the unwritten design brief informing the chamber's materialization. in their decision, the appeals-court justices are keen to note the difficulty of fitting eliana into a classroom. they focus on the fact of her compounding disabilities, and the nest of statutes that the district judge had to navigate, including the education for all handicapped children act (eha) and section 504 of the rehabilitation act. in essence, these statutes concern the requirement to give children who live with a disability an educational placement and special provisions for the placement of children with communicable disease. as the court notes, following the eha requires a school to make every effort to educate all children together, without removal or separation (martinez v. school board 1988b). but where a child has an infectious disease, and a school seeks to exclude that child through an exception to section 504 of the rehabilitation act, the judge must investigate the nature, duration, severity, and probabilities of the child infecting others. for the appeals court, eliana's case was, on its face, a misfit. in the blunt, unpleasant, and outdated terminology of their decision, “she suffers from two handicaps...she is mentally retarded and has aids” (martinez v. school board 1988b). as if eliana's life could be broken into separate challenges to the statutory regime, these two “facts” surfaced a conflict. since the state's aim to isolate and quarantine those living with disease bruised the fantasy of accommodation set out in statutes like the eha, it transformed the sacred space of the early childhood classroom—that creche of enculturation—into a manifest misfit. the glass chamber erupted into the tmh classroom like a carbuncle and a rank marker of the limits of empathy and inclusion. it is rare to have a bubble that is as detailed and reasoned in its composition as eliana's glass chamber. it is worth considering then, the material specificities of eliana's bubble, as dictated in the original ruling, to better understand the connections between the court's imagined routes of infection and attempts at simultaneous control and accommodation. here we break the chamber into its component parts, though it remains crucial to understand that these dictates were meant to work in concert to provide the compromised conditions of containment and glassed-in participation that kovachevich imagined as the carceral conditions of eliana's inclusion. eliana's bubble * italicized quotes come from the first us district court ruling, martinez v. school board of hillsborough county (1988a)  size: “the room shall comprise at least five percent (5%) of the total square footage of the classroom; but shall be no less than six (6) feet by eight (8) feet in floor area.” the scale of the room is expressed as a function of the size of the classroom that contains it. bubbles are units within larger structures (structures-within-structures). in this case, the relative size of the chamber reflects an agreement about a minimum size that is humane (six by eight). the relative size sets expectations on the reasonable consumption of resources “for other students” that ought to be dedicated to accommodation (titchkosky 2011, 36). doors: “a wall of the room which faces the inside of the classroom shall have a door, which can be securely locked against intrusion...the wall need not extend to the ceiling; however, it must be high enough to prevent any child from scaling it to gain access to the other side. the room must contain a door giving access to the outside corridor, without going through the main classroom.” the guidelines for the door are conditioned by the anticipation of normal child behavior—climbing things—but in a context in which one classmate must be contained, while remaining accessible to her teachers. the membrane of the bubble must be penetrable but not collapsible. living in architectures structured by partition-relations means learning to navigate their limited apertures, where the “fear of breach” must give way to practical exchanges, like the slot for passing money and packages in a shop (kallipoliti 2020). transparency: one wall facing the classroom must include “a large, picture window which provides a clear view of the main classroom from the inside. the window must start no more than two (2) feet from the floor and must comprise at least forty percent (40%) of the area of the wall.” the term “picture window” is an operative one, denoting a view onto another, separate scene. shannon mattern (2020) argues that clear plexiglass creates “zones of immunity” that facilitate the possibility of mediated proximity. through the picture window, eliana could see her classmates, and be close to them, nearly sitting alongside them on the rug for story time, but she remains removed from shared surfaces and touch. waste: “the room must contain a potty chair for use in toilet training concealed behind a partition, either stationary or movable.” the problem with eliana's presence in the classroom was traceable to the “remote theoretical possibility” of her infecting other children with hiv, which was directly tied to the leaking of her bodily fluids and the contamination of the surrounding classroom. the management of eliana's waste was a central purpose of the bubble, part of the school toilet's status as a “civilizing technology” for unruly bodies (slater, jones, and procter 2018, 955). the tmh classroom went above and beyond the judge's guidelines: instead of a potty chair, they constructed an enclosed restroom with its own sink, toilet, and floor-drain. the waste room, in its final realization, was a bubble-within-a-bubble, where the vector of disease transmission could be washed away, beyond view (douglas [1966] 2003). communication: “the room must contain an adequate sound system, so that if occupied with the door closed, the occupant can hear, as well as see through the window, everything that is occurring in the main classroom.” though eliana would be confined apart from her classmates, educational information must move freely between the classroom and the chamber. the provision of a communication system for sound, severed from shared air, is a prophylactic technique that organizes bodies through the distinction between dirty and clean media of communication (mulvin 2018). specifically, educational content is distinguished from the channels through which it is accessed. elizabeth ellcessor argues that these distinctions between form and content are rich sites for the analysis of access, surfacing links between technologies, material conditions, and relationships of power (2016, 127). the sound system shores up an otherwise cruel and carceral form of accommodation by ensuring some content still moves through the glass. shared objects: “additionally, the room should contain appropriate work area, such as table and chair, for a child and an adult; appropriate books and toys; and any other necessary item of furniture or equipment. by the outside of the window, in the main classroom, there must be placed a low table on which the occupants of the main classroom can place objects and at which they can play within view of the occupant of the room.” early childhood education is organized around parallel play: spaces where children play alongside if not with each other. these provisions for “appropriate” furnishing promise to distance the chamber aesthetically from a prison cell. they smooth the acceptance of the bubble through the routines of early childhood education, allowing for a sense of shared social space. glass and plexiglass promise to maintain some relations (those of visual presence, sometimes auditory) while severing others (those of touch, smell, and shared air). the fantasy of the shared objects is one of “being with” without “becoming” the infected. duration: “eliana martinez is required to attend school in this constructed room as long as she remains incontinent and continues to mouth her fingers, despite instruction to the contrary.” eliana's occupation of the bubble was dictated by the imagined routes of infection, and the ways her waste and saliva were anticipated to move from her body to others'. eliana's case was always one of colliding disablements and dangers in which her developmental delay was cast as the reason her hiv was more likely to travel. judge kovachevich's declaration on the duration of the bubble explicates that dynamic, and makes the severing of eliana's disability from her viral illness a condition of her exit.  conclusion bubbles erupt where interdependence is seen to be risky. eliana's bubble demonstrates how institutional practices of accommodation can easily transform into techniques of containment when vulnerability is rewritten as a threat to social order. in systems of networked interdependence, the “infectious subject” becomes a threat to the entire system. techniques of containment then become a sanctioned form of control to manage the potential of infection. considered here as both a bubble and as a misfit, the glass chamber, we have suggested, is a gathering of social forces and bodily relations: the necropolitical arrangements of different populations, the coloniality of puerto rico as its own zone of exception, the innocence of childhood, the fatality of an aids diagnosis in the 1980s, and the politics of design and disability.  the contemporary prevalence of neo-eugenic discourses in the face of epidemiological catastrophe has driven us to dwell with this glass chamber as a crucial moment in the history of bubbles. throughout the covid-19 crisis, there have been waves of different prophylactic measures and new choreographies of safety. metaphorical bubbles, in the form of limited contact groups, and ubiquitous, plexiglass barriers are just two examples. when, initially, it appeared that covid-19 was transmitted through surface contact, we were encouraged to frequently wash our hands, avoid touching our faces, and disinfect shared surfaces. as evidence grew that the disease was spread through airborne particles, a new set of techniques and technologies was prescribed. barrier and filter technologies, like masks, plexiglass, and ventilation systems were used as sufficient grounds to permit socialization or compel non-remote work. there were also many lampooned safety measures, including inadequate plexiglass that barely shielded people. some teachers were instructed to lecture from behind clear shower curtains repurposed as barriers. soon people were decrying a kind of “hygiene theater”: rituals and performances of sanitization that, at best, provided a false sense of security, and at worst, put people in life-endangering situations. covid-19 and hiv are different illnesses, socially and pathologically, and these differences shape their respective bubbles. eliana's bubble was a response to fear and stigma: it was a surrender to bad information about hiv transmission that the school board, court, and scientists knew to be untrue. some kinds of covid-19 bubbles can be quite effective at reducing virus transmission, but they also reduce heterogeneity, casting out those deemed “high risk” from our social and professional lives. even when bubbles “work,” they have social costs, and eliana's story helps to name the calculations about social difference behind bubbling practices. in their histories and present-day materializations, bubbles are technologies for containing forms of vulnerability that threaten social order. they can also be useful epidemiological technologies, which is why they are persistent features of state response to illness, and for this reason they merit close scrutiny. eliana's abandoned chamber and the life she led outside it call for the bubble to be considered as a major social form. acknowledgments we wish to thank sabrina ward-kimola, shani orgad, julia werkman, and michelle phan for their input and editorial help. this research was funded by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. the authors shared equally in the research and writing of this article and either author may list themselves first in the author order when citing the article. notes 1 to a lesser extent—lesser based on the weight of the discussion in the ruling—eliana was being protected from the germs of her classmates, to which her compromised immune system would be vulnerable.   2 for contemporary readers encountering the kovachevich decision from a position in the global north, hiv/aids occupies a very different cultural position than it did in the late 1980s. a full generation has come of age since the clinical introduction of protease inhibitors in the 1990s, which allowed many people to survive an aids diagnosis. those with the resources to manage their disease can maintain undetectable viral loads that eliminate the possibility of transmission. in 2020 the patent ended for the drug combination emtricitabine/tenofovir, commonly known as prep (pre-exposure prophylaxis), which is now available, in most of the world, as a generic pharmaceutical that can prevent infection. yet hiv continues to devastate marginalized and racialized populations everywhere. while for some hiv is distant, and its treatment closer to that of a chronic illness, for many others hiv is prevalent, treatment is inaccessible, and it persists among other “injuries of inequality” (watkins-hayes 2019).   3 eighty-eight percent of perinatal hiv infections were amongst black or latinx children, who generally acquired the virus through vertical transmission (formerly called mother-to-child transmission) (us department of health & human services 1987).    references agostinho, daniela, and nanna bonde thylstrup. 2019. “'if truth was a woman': leaky infrastructures and the gender politics of truth-telling.” 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toronto press. turner, bryan s. 2006. vulnerability and human rights. university park: pennsylvania state university press. us department of health & human services. 1987. report of the surgeon general's workshop on children with hiv infection and their families. edited by benjamin k. silverman and anthony waddell. hrs-d-mc 87 1. washington, dc: united states public health service. watkins-hayes, celeste. 2019. remaking a life: how women with hiv/aids confront inequality. berkeley: university of california press. zambrana, rocío. 2021. colonial debts: the case of puerto rico. durham, nc: duke university press.     author bio dylan mulvin is assistant professor of media and communications at the london school of economics and political science and the author of proxies: the cultural work of standing in (mit, 2021). cait mckinney is assistant professor of communication at simon fraser university and the author of information activism: a queer history of lesbian media technologies (duke university press, 2020).     roundtable: housewife’s secret arsenal teflon: slipperiness and the domestication of toxicity     heather davis the new school davish1@newschool.edu     abstract polytetrafluoroethylene (ptfe), conventionally known as teflon, has remarkable properties: it doesn't combine with oxygen; no solvent can corrode it; it doesn't conduct electricity; and it is among the slipperiest substances on earth. although it is most widely known as a non-stick coating for pots and pans, one of the first applications of the polymer was for seals and gaskets of the separation process of uranium hexafluoride that was key to developing the nuclear bomb. these lesser-known military applications of teflon are, i argue, part of the slippage from the military to the household. employing the slipperiness of teflon as both a quality of its materiality and a provocative concept, this paper will explore how teflon moved from the large-scale catastrophic fallout of the manhattan project to the slow dispersion of everyday toxicity in the home. this essay is a part of the roundtable called “the housewife's secret arsenal” (henceforth hsa); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. the title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.   keywords teflon, toxicity, slipperiness, dupont     teflon came into the world by accident. in 1938 engineers at the jackson laboratory at dupont had been experimenting with fluorine and its derivatives to create a new refrigerant. when acclaimed researcher and chemist roy plunkett returned to see what had become of the experiment, his assistant noticed that no gas had been released from the container it had been sealed in. they were extremely surprised, as these results went against everything they had expected. using a hacksaw, they opened the cylinder and discovered a white powder. until that moment, no one knew that the substance they had been working with—tetrafluoroethylene—could be polymerized. curious about what this new material might be, and what properties it might possess, they began testing. the results were remarkable. they reported that it had the most unusual properties of any material they had ever seen: it didn't combine with oxygen, no solvent could corrode it, it didn't conduct electricity, and it was, until many decades later, the slipperiest substance on earth. while this was a thrilling discovery, the question of its application was not immediately obvious, in part due to the extreme cost of production. when the united states entered world war ii and began to build nuclear weapons, one of the first problems they encountered was the ability to contain uranium hexafluoride, a notoriously corrosive material. polytetrafluoroethylene (ptfe or teflon)'s non-corrosive properties were perfect for precisely this purpose, and so it was manufactured on a large scale to aid in the production of nuclear bombs. like many new polymers that were developed at that time, these military materials were later to find a home in domestic spaces.1 ptfe, trademarked by dupont in 1945 as teflon, continues to be used for military purposes, as well as in space missions and throughout contemporary infrastructure, but it is best known as the non-stick surface of pots, pans, and muffin tins. how does a material whose first use was essential to the crafting of the nuclear bomb slip into domestic spaces? how does this kind of pervasive violence come to feel at home in the world, and to actually enter our homes? drawing on the materiality of teflon itself, i put forward the concept of slipperiness as a way of describing these militarized flows.2 teflon is the third slipperiest substance on earth—surpassed recently by the chemical alloy bam and diamond-like carbon—with a coefficient of friction of 0.05 to 0.10. starting in the 1950s, teflon began to be used to coat cookware despite the fact that there were known and documented adverse health effects. for example, while the industry continues to maintain that teflon-coated cookware is a safe material under so-called normal conditions, if a pan is left on the stove and damaged due to heat (a highly likely scenario given that the pans are used for cooking), this may cause it to break down and release toxic fumes into the air. birds will die upon any exposure to these fumes. yet chemical companies have slipped out of accountability and obfuscated the toxicity that has come to saturate our most intimate and personal environments. this is in part due to the fact that governmental monitoring systems, such as the united states' environmental protection agency, require chemicals to be proven to be harmful before being removed from the market. proving cause and effect between a specific chemical and known harm is extremely difficult in domestic environments that are saturated with a multitude of chemicals. for chemical companies wishing to market chemicals with unknown effects on bodies and environments, they are met with relatively no resistance. corporations are slippery, exploiting lack of oversight and threshold limits to their advantage. also, and of equal importance, slipperiness is figured as seductive and alluring, now often understood as a quality of modern convenience. slipperiness could then be understood as part of the anaesthetization of violence that nicholas mirzoeff has described. mirzoeff writes that during the industrial period, “the degradation of the air is seen as natural, right” (2014, 223). applied to the quality of slipperiness, teflon is produced to be aesthetically satisfying, to be associated with the pleasures of non-stick, despite its known toxicity and the harms that may result. through these mechanisms, the public at large becomes anaesthetized to what our senses might be telling us. additionally, teflon and other polymers that were used in the war effort are enmeshed with significations of american strength and pride. while most likely divorced in consumers' minds from these efforts, the feeling of victory seems to nonetheless accompany the ease with which eggs and pancakes glide off the surface. the domestic sphere is the ultimate repository of military technology, providing a retroactive justification that also serves to obscure the relations between the home, warfare, and what michelle murphy (2008) has called “chemical regimes of living.” as rachel lee (2020) argues, “border-wall thinking,” which separates warfare chemical exposure from everyday domestic industrial chemical exposure, is a willful misunderstanding of the nature of chemical toxicants and the way they permeate ecosystems. the fiction of the boundedness of the home environment, the supposed separation between the public and private, the imagined site of refuge from the burdens of the world, has been repeatedly shown to be coextensive with, rather than separate from, the harms of our environments. yet, as lee goes on to note, this border-wall thinking, “offers a fiction of comfort for elite subjects of the global north” (2). even as these same subjects might image that they/we are protected from chemical contamination, toxins nonetheless slip in, under the radar, through desirable qualities and properties. slipperiness is marketed to ease in reproductive labor, even as cooking and cleaning are then coated in novel chemicals. in the case of teflon, the small and incremental toxicity that is introduced as a modern convenience often perpetuates the slippage of toxicity downstream. chemical contamination doesn't stick to the wealthy residents of the global north in the way that it sticks to others. the chemicals used to create teflon, specifically perfluorooctanoic acid, known colloquially as c8, are well documented in their harms to workers and others exposed downstream due to poor disposal practices. in an extensive report on c8 conducted by sharon lerner at the intercept, she describes how chemical harms were known decades before dupont was forced to stop producing c8. as she writes, “in 1954, the very year a french engineer first applied the slick coating to a frying pan, a dupont employee named r. a. dickinson noted that he had received an inquiry regarding c8's 'possible toxicity.' in 1961, just seven years later, in-house researchers already had the short answer to dickinson's question: c8 was indeed toxic and should be 'handled with extreme care,' according to a report filed by plaintiffs” (lerner 2015). despite these known problems, teflon and c8 continued to be widely used. in fact, c8 continued to slip, sliding to rural farming communities. disposal of c8 presented a problem to the company precisely because it was known to be toxic. in the early 1960s, dupont decided to bury about two hundred drums of the chemical on the banks of the ohio river near their plant in west virginia. an internal dupont document from 1975 about “teflon waste disposal” detailed how the company also packed the waste in drums, put them on barges shipped out to sea, and dumped them in the ocean. the company also disposed of c8 in unlined landfills and directly into the ohio river (lerner 2015). due to these practices, c8 spread throughout the groundwater in the region. according to best estimates, 2.5 million pounds of the chemical were dispersed in the ground and water around parkersburg, west virginia, between 1951 and 2003. slipperiness, evading, hiding, manipulating what the environmental protection agency saw and what it didn't in the disposal of c8, shows how chemical companies slip through regulations, making chemical toxicity less visible. the patterns of this fall on predictable lines, where “chemical harm concentrates in zones of dispossession, that is, zones in which life is rendered not just precarious to chemical effects, but also more disenfranchised and devalued in the larger political economy” (murphy 2008, 698). in the case of west virginia, this happened along the lines of class, occupation, and a general abandonment and dispossession of appalachia. yet dupont has remained relatively unscathed: accountability for chemical harm has failed to stick. 3 part of the inability to make accountability stick to chemical corporations is due to the slipperiness of toxicity in relation to time. unlike the glamorous and often sublime displays of might that we associate with war, and certainly with the nuclear bomb, the slow violence of chemical leaks suture in queer ways to the military. as astrida neimanis writes in relation to mustard gas, but which could equally be applied to c8, “knowledge of mustard gas thus also inhabits a sort of queer time, where we can only know retrospectively” (72, 2018). the effects of c8 on bodies—bodies of cows or humans or other animals—is often latent, lagging, and then erupts in fast-moving and obscure cancers. chemical harm is not straight forward in its temporality. it can skip generations, or lay dormant, or emerge violently, often without predictable pathways. one of the deadly effects of c8 is that it does not biodegrade and can accumulate in bodies over time. this slow accumulation can lead to a quick slide into ill health, mimicking the possibilities of acceleration within slipperiness. according to the centers for disease control, 98 percent of americans have trace amounts of the chemical in their bloodstream (calafat et al. 2007), but it is unknown when or if those chemicals might result in any direct harm. while this particular chemical has now been banned and dupont, due to widespread pressure, has ceased production the surfactant chemical used to replace c8 might be just as bad. corporations slip out of their responsibilities just as chemical toxicity slides into our most intimate spaces. yet part of the allure is in precisely this quality of slipperiness, the desire for a friction-free world. by thinking of these chemicals through their military origins, the violence they unleash in the world helps to become clearer, causing moments of friction, a residue that might stick.   notes 1 for a detailed history of the range of polymers produced during the war, and their subsequent shift to domestic markets, see jeffrey miekle's american plastic (1997).   2 for a related concept, see mark simpson's (2017) articulation of lubricity that describes the smoothness of oil in petrocultures.“ lubricity describes the ”texture and mood requisite to the operations of neoliberal petroculture. lubricity offers smoothness as cultural common sense, promoting the fantasy of a frictionless world contingent on the continued, intensifying use of petro-carbons from underexploited reserves in north america" (2017, 289).   3 despite dupont agreeing in 2017 to pay $335.35 million in a class action lawsuits over damages from toxic exposure to c8, it continues to evade accountability, see mancini (2017) and morgenson (2020).   references calafat, antonia m., lee-yang wong, zsuzsanna kuklenyik, john a. reidy, and larry l. needham. 2007. "polyfluoroalkyl chemicals in the u.s. population: data from the national health and nutrition examination survey (nhanes) 2003-2004 and comparisons with nhanes 1999-2000." environmental health perspectives 115 (11): 1596-1602. https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.10598. lee, rachel. 2020. “a lattice of chemicalized kinship: toxicant reckoning in a depressive-reparative mode.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 6 (1): 1-27. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i1.33904. lerner, sharon. 2015. “the teflon toxin: dupont and the chemistry of deception.” the intercept, august 11, 2015. https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-deception/. mancini, jess. 2017. "dupont reaches c8 settlement agreement for $670m." the parkersburg news and sentinel, february 14, 2017. https://www.newsandsentinel.com/news/local-news/2017/02/dupont-reaches-c8-settlement-agreement-for-670m/. miekle, jeffrey. 1997. american plastic: a cultural history. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. mirzoeff, nicholas. 2014. “visualizing the anthropocene.” public culture 26 (2): 213-32. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2392039. morgenson, gretchen. 2020. “how dupont may avoid cleaning up a toxic ”forever chemical." nbc news, march 1, 2020. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cancer/how-dupont-may-avoid-paying-clean-toxic-forever-chemical-n1138766. murphy, michelle. 2008. “chemical regimes of living.” environmental history 13 (4): 695-703. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25473297. neimanis, astrida. 2018. “queer times and chemical weapons, suspended in the gotland deep.” journal culture unbound 9 (3). https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33363. simpson, mark. 2017. “lubricity: smooth oil's political frictions.” in petrocultures: oil, politics, culture, edited by sheena wilson, adam carlson, and imre szeman, 287-318. montreal, qc, and kingston, on: mcgill-queen's university press.     author bio heather davis is an assistant professor of culture and media at the new school in new york whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. her most recent book, plastic matter (duke university press, 2022), explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic's saturation.     “méxico is a burial machine”: a conversation with marcela turati     zenia yébenes universidad autónoma metropolitana, unidad cuajimalpa zyebenes@cua.uam.mx rodrigo parrini-roses universidad autónoma metropolitana, unidad xochimilco rparrini@correo.xoc.uam.mx   edited and translated by lindsay smith and maría torres   abstract how can we conceptualize and investigate the relationships between territories and the production of situated knowledge in the field of violence? this interview addresses this question and attempts to outline some possible strategies, based on the experience of a mexican journalist. marcela turati’s 2023 book san fernando: última parada allows us to talk about the ways in which borders constitute complex nodes of human, economic, political, and criminal flows, where diverse ecologies, landscapes, territories, and social practices intersect. the violence recounted in her book shows how these nodes are also devices for selecting vulnerable or disposable people, who can be killed or disappeared without the state pursuing those responsible or seeking justice, what turati calls “an authorized crime.” resumen ¿cómo pensar e investigar las relaciones entre los territorios y la producción de conocimiento situado en el campo de la violencia? esta entrevista aborda esta pregunta e intenta esbozar algunas posibilidades y estrategias a partir de la experiencia de una periodista mexicana. el libro san fernando: última parada, publicado en 2023, permite hablar sobre las maneras en que las fronteras constituyen nodos complejos de flujos humanos, económicos, políticos y criminales, donde se entrecruzan ecologías, paisajes, territorios y prácticas sociales diversas. la violencia que se relata en el libro muestra cómo esos nodos son también dispositivos de selección de personas vulnerables o desechables, que pueden ser asesinadas o desaparecidas sin que el estado persiga a los responsables ni haga justicia. a lo anterior, la periodista le llama “un crimen autorizado.” keywords méxico, violence, disappearance, journalism, forensic anthropology, justice     introduction marcela turati is one of the most prominent investigative journalist analyzing violence, disappearance, and impunity in méxico. her writing is critical to our understanding of what happened in méxico during the guerra contra el narco (the war against narco), a conflict that began in 2007 with the use of the mexican armed forces to combat narcotrafficking and continues to this day. it is difficult to comprehend the mexican borderlands in their lived reality without understanding how this conflict has shaped every aspect of life and public infrastructure. turati’s latest book, san fernando: última parada (2023), is the result of 12 years of research on the city of san fernando in tamaulipas, 85 miles from the mexican border with texas. san fernando came to public attention after the 2010 discovery of a massacre of 72 migrants, mostly central americans, in an abandoned bodega close to the city. eight months later, dozens of additional graves were identified containing more than 193 cadavers, the majority of which had been passengers on buses—many of them migrants about to reach the united states, who were detained and murdered in san fernando by a cell of the zetas cartel supported by the municipal police. turati shows how the city of san fernando became an obligatory passage point to reach the united states via the east coast of méxico, one of the most important migratory routes of the last decade. the city’s strategic location transformed it into a node of power for local cartels and space of death of migrants, displaced populations, and young, working-class people, not only in the case of the spectacular massacres of migrants in 2010 and 2012, but in the everyday disappearances of people who traveled through. in her book, she describes this not as organized crime but as crimen autorizado (authorized crime), a type of systemic violence that fuses state and criminal actors. this conversation (excerpted, translated, and edited for clarity) took place on august 11, 2024. it was part of a broader project titled “the politics of darkness: narratives of violence in contemporary méxico”, a research collaboration between zenia yébenes and rodrigo parrini-roses. conversation excerpt zenia yébenes (zy): your book is made up of very powerful scenes. there are some that hit me more than others. the division into two parts especially caught my attention. the first is the raw part, and the second, although not without rawness, has glimpses of something different. how do you think and elaborate the relationship between writing and experience? is there a border between the two? marcela turati (mt): i have written a lot about san fernando. we created the #másde72 collective as a result of noticing that it was not only the massacre of the seventy-two migrants. it was indeed about distinct massacres. before that we had the 72migrantes.com project. it was a great help to publish our findings regularly. however, i have the feeling that in all those years i lost information, that i forgot things, because in all the changes of cities and houses i lost notebooks. along with what i didn’t remember, there was also what i hadn’t seen. i started to make a database of what i already had, and, in the end, i realized that i had identical databases that i had forgotten. at some point, i asked myself how i would be able to write the book after having published so much. i needed to tell the story in a different way. so i decided that i would like the readers to listen to the protagonist, not just their testimony. but it was necessary to intervene in their story, to add in parentheses what the interviewees were doing and, in the meantime, let them speak. to decide on the structure, i would stick post-it notes on the wall with titles like “the lady,” “the daughter,” “the undertaker.” soon, it seemed to me that this chorus of voices looked like a lotería (lottery). i began to select testimonies—some i left long, others i included as a chorus—and i began to realize that, for example, this story could have happened on this bus as well as on any other. if it looked too similar to another testimony, i began making selections: moving, removing, and adding. the first part of the book situated the territory of san fernando, a space unknown to most people. those who read the story are surprised by the description of the place. “had we known, we would have better understood the bodies we were digging up,” the forensics experts working there who read the book told me. there was a stigma around thinking that it was a territory inhabited by bad people (los malos), but what about the people who lived there? how did they live? for me, it was a watershed moment to enter tamaulipas. it is impossible to tell this story from méxico city. but not only that, i needed to look for the voices so that the story could be told by those who in a film are considered extras—those who exhume the graves, the citizens who watch in silence, the silenced journalists, the soldiers who are on the roads—but who have a lot of information. zy: it strikes me that when you start the book you say that your soul was unleashed. mt: i said, “my soul was left in a checkpoint.” and that came out because i also felt like a zombie on returning from san fernando to see the freshly exhumed bodies piled up in the morgue, but i decided to write in spite of it. for me, it was one of my best stories. what i saw was very hard, as if those dead were talking to me. later someone gave me a usb with photographs of 120 (of the 196) exhumed bodies. since i saw those images, something happened to me, but it still took me two years to open and study them. i was covering a lot of topics. i had the feeling as a journalist that someone was going to beat me to it, someone else was going to have the story and publish it before me, but i didn’t feel strong enough to write about it. i didn’t know how to tell it in a news story; there was so much cruelty towards those bodies. i knew from that moment that i needed to tell it in a book. when i went to san fernando, i didn’t know anyone. there was a gringo reporter and local reporters. i didn’t know where i was going to stay or which hotel. then, that colleague said to me, “hey, do you want to go to the bus terminal?” we went and suddenly he was gone. there were only men, like pandilleros (gang members), that were doing nothing, watching everyone who arrived, i remember that. and i started to feel bad. but i still didn’t know what was going on in that place, but i started to feel a pain in my belly and in the nape of my neck. later i learned that those points on the body are the site of the three f’s: fight, flight, or freeze, the [place] of survival. i didn’t know if i should go or stay. later, i learned that my body was telling me to go, that in that bus terminal people had disappeared. rodrigo parrini-roses (rpr): san fernando could be the last, but also the first stop. there is something inaugural in all this, such as the creation of logistics and certain procedures that later spread and came to occupy the territory in méxico and central america. with this book, you will find keys to doing research on violence in méxico, beyond journalism. mt: san fernando made me understand things. it’s a “taken” place and a model of how [organized crime] takes over communities. people who work in mining territories have written to me and told me, “what you say in your book is heavy. what can we do to prevent them from taking over here? because that’s how they started here too and they are following the same steps.” with the research i understood the importance of understanding the territory, the routes, the ports, the geography, the lakes, the border. this is a fight for territory and for control of the economy and the people who live there. they are considered a source of income, a type of background scenery in which everyone is an atm, from which [the cartel] is constantly extracting money (extortion, charging for each passing migrant or car, kidnapping) and using as example of punishment. the territory and the roads are fundamental. drugs are not the principal business, but rather the control of the roads, but to have a route. that is why it is important to cover up the violence, so that people do not know what is happening. rpr: i think your book is not just about the history of san fernando but about violence in contemporary méxico, even if you don’t address other places. however, you describe a kind of technology of violence that is replicated in other places: family collectives, drug traffickers, corrupt officials, broken state apparatuses, morgues that do not work, buses, roads. it is as if it were a scene, an abstract map of which san fernando would be a singular example of something larger and systematic. mt: well, i also think that in san fernando, i found clues that suggested that some people who had disappeared were victims of forced recruitment. first, i didn’t understand very well the camps that people said existed, and there was a lack of information there. we are sure that they did not take them off the buses to kill them, but that they also needed them to grow their armies and maintain their wars. i also began to understand that finding a clandestine mass grave does not mean that they are no longer disappeared; there is the risk that the state will disappear and hide bodies. they will bury them in a collective grave in some cemetery, and no one will ever identify them. i came to understand that everyone is culpable. that’s why the subtitle of the book is “a visit to authorized crime,” because this doesn’t happen without authorization. how are these disappearances and massacres possible? how do these institutions operate? the same institutions that do not prevent the disappearances along these highways, that do not protect the public, that don’t fight against those that disappear others, that exhume bodies and then disappear people again, that do not investigate forensic malpractices despite the existence of a recommendation from the inter-american court of human rights on what to do with the bodies after the ruling on femicides of campo algodonero.1 we remain the same: the same type of violence, the “historical truths” that are invented to close cases,2 the scapegoats that they grab and present as ones responsible. the migrant issue is also very interesting…because they were at least two independent groups that had access to the investigation in san fernando.3 you could peer through the cracks and see how the whole system operates: that it doesn’t protect you, it doesn’t search for you, and if it does find you, it disappears you again. it rarely happens in méxico that independent external experts are allowed to review official investigations. in all the emblematic cases like tamaulipas, ayotzinapa, cadereyta,4 you find the same structure: the attorney general of the republic, its area of organized crime and expert witnesses, which work together to hide the violence and end up hiding the bodies. rpr: in your book there is a phrase that made a great impression on me: “méxico is a burial machine.” it is a very powerful expression, but also very disturbing and fundamental in terms of what is happening now and the story that could be told. mt: we did a series with quinto elemento lab in 2021, “forensic crisis,” where we tried to explain different dimensions of this crisis. in one of the articles, written jointly with efraín tzuc, we talk about the death trailers, the corpses they lose in the morgues, how the forensic medical services operate with so few personnel, and how, in the end, they bury every unidentified body in mass graves. every month, in any part of méxico, they send a person to the mass grave. they do not even make the minimum effort to investigate; the corpses go to the community burial site because there is no room and it is necessary to make space. this is the pattern. they dig, exhume, and bury again. rpr: when writing about violence, it is as if it were necessary to return to something that was not only in the order of pure violence, of loss, of helplessness. that seems to me to be behind the text, but it is not obvious, because i think it would not make sense to put it there if it comes up in the conversation. i mention it not because it needs to be unraveled. what i see is a clue, if not for restorative justice, then for restorative rituals. souls should be repaired without trying to spiritualize this process. it is as if you could not or did not want to stay with that alone. mt: i wanted the end of my book to be a memorial with all the names of the people i know who have disappeared in san fernando, on those roads. but i couldn’t mention every name we collected because the procuraduría general de la república (attorney general’s office of the republic) could put me in jail. we had been compiling names from files of the disappeared for years. we had more than three hundred names. and at the end, i was going to reproduce a list, but i could not. also, because i did not know who had already been found. my wish is that a truth commission is set up and we can name all those who are missing, who have not yet been found, or those who were murdered. we know that not all the names will be there, but some of them will be. to name them and make them visible so that the families know that somewhere their dead matter. note 1 since 1993 groups of activists began to document and denounce crimes against the girls and women in ciudad juárez, chihuahua, including disappearances. in 1998, the governor of chihuahua created the special prosecutor’s office for the investigation of homicides against women. however, murders, far from decreasing, increased. because the mexican state failed to comply and the claims of relatives regarding the cases of murdered and disappeared women, on november 4, 2004, the inter-american commission on human rights, on the basis of articles 51 and 61 of the american convention on human rights, filed a lawsuit against the mexican state for its alleged responsibility in the disappearance and subsequent death of three women found in a cotton field in ciudad juárez on november 6, 2001: claudia ivette gonzález, esmeralda herrera monreal, and laura berenice ramos monárrez. this case was central to the classification of the crime of femicide in méxico. 2 in january 2015, months after the disappearance of forty-three students in ayotzinapa, the then-attorney general of the republic, murillo karam, presented what he called the “historical truth” of what happened to the young people: the students had been handed over to the criminal group guerreros unidos, who murdered and incinerated them in the municipal garbage dump of colula, in the state of guerrero. “this is the historical truth of the facts, based on the evidence provided by science as shown in the file,” he said (aristegui noticias 2015). observers widely condemned this version of events as an attempt to absolve the mexican government of responsibility and quell public protest. 3 the two groups involved were the equipo argentino de antropología forense (argentine forensic anthropology team) and the fundación por la justicia (foundation for justice), which, in the case of san fernando, is the equivalent of the grupo interdisciplinario de expertas y expertos independientes (interdisciplinary group of independent experts). 4 in the early hours of may 13, 2012, the mexican army reported the discovery of forty-nine mutilated bodies, forty-three men and six women, at kilometer fortyseven of the monterrey-reynosa highway, in the municipality of cadereyta, in nuevo león. references aristegui noticias. 2015. “pgr presenta ‘verdad histórica’ sobre ayotzinapa (video) | aristegui noticias.” january 30. https://aristeguinoticias.com/3001/mexico/masimportantede-la-semana-pgr-presenta-verdad-historica-sobre-ayotzinapa-video/. turati, marcela. 2023. san fernando. última parada: viaje al crimen autorizado en tamaulipas. aguilar.   author bio marcela turati is a journalist specializing in human rights, co-founder of the research and innovation journalism laboratory quinto elemento lab (2016) and of the red periodistas de a pie (2006). marcela turati es periodista especializada en derechos humanos, cofundadora del laboratorio de investigación e innovación periodística quinto elemento lab (2016) y de la red periodistas de a pie (2006). zenia yébenes is a professor of anthropology and philosophy at the department of humanities at the universidad autónoma metropolitana, unidad cuajimalpa, in mexico city. zenia yébenes es profesora de antropología y filosofía en el departamento de humanidades de la universidad autónoma metropolitana, unidad cuajimalpa, en ciudad de méxico. rodrigo parrini-roses is an anthropologist and ethnographer, and professor at the department of education and communication, universidad autónoma metropolitana, unidad xochimilco, méxico. for eighteen years, he has done ethnographic work on the social production of desire in tenosique, a city on the border between méxico and guatemala. rodrigo parrini-roses es antropólogo y etnógrafo, y profesor del departamento de educación y comunicación de la universidad autónoma metropolitana, unidad xochimilco, méxico. durante dieciocho años ha realizado trabajo etnográfico sobre la producción social del deseo en tenosique, ciudad fronteriza entre méxico y guatemala. reardon-smith, mardi. 2025. “compromising care.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © mardi reardon-smith, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license compromised care mardi reardon-smith monash university mardi.reardon-smith@monash.edu keywords populations, conservation, feral cats, invasive species control, multispecies justice, care the concept of population runs through conservation biology. i am curious about what can be gained by thinking critically of what work the idea of “population” does in relation to invasive species control. social scientists interested in the social and cultural dimensions of invasive species have devoted significant attention to problematizing other taken-for-granted concepts in conservation biology—for instance, the native/introduced binary generates discussion about human bounding practices, as do the concepts of rehabilitation and restoration (restoring to what?) (cattelino 2017; head 2012; trigger 2013). population, however, is a concept that is rarely brought into question. it is the scale at which conservation biology operates. this kind of population thinking is necessary when thinking about ecosystem well-being and, significantly, extinction. conservation biology is a biopolitical regime in which some (native) species are made to live as other (invasive) species are let to die. in australia, one of these species is the cat (felis catus). first brought to the continent by early colonists on the first fleet, feral cats are responsible for the death of an estimated two billion native animals each year in australia, contributing to biodiversity loss and extinctions (australian government 2024). the risk presented by cats to threatened species is widely known. conservation biologists engage in a range of feral cat control programs, including cat-proof fencing, shooting, trapping, baiting, and—increasingly—developing new technologies to identify and (lethally) control feral cats. cats can be considered an mailto:mardi.reardon-smith@monash.edu roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) mardi reardon-smith, 2025 2 undifferentiated population, in that all cats have the capacity to predate vulnerable wildlife. however, at the same time, cats are organized into three separate categories: the feral, the domestic, and the stray. the stray is the most shadowy of these figures; it can slip between boundaries, and it evokes different feelings and responses than the feral. categorization here shapes how cats are apprehended and controlled by environmental managers; culled or cared for. when a cat is designated as feral, it demands a different kind of treatment to one designated as stray or domestic. categorization of cats is determined by their proximity to and intimacy with humans, not their behavior. indeed, beloved, cared-for, fed, domestic pet cats are also responsible for the deaths of over five hundred million native animals each year (australian government 2024). in invasive species control, there is a tension between attempts to control the more-than-human world and the urgent need for humans to work against extinction. in controlling cats, a violent biopolitical regime is put into practice. population (alongside distribution) functions as a useful frame for conservation biologists to apprehend the devastation caused by invasive species. as the population of feral cats grows, the population of threatened species shrinks. for humans and nonhumans alike, population can function as a violent concept with violent material manifestations. the same is true in conservation biology. talk about population justifies techniques of control and the meting out of mass death. while compassionate conservation advocates agitate for the development of nonlethal control methods, and some aboriginal traditional owner groups express concerns about the impacts of cat control tools on valued non-target species, like the dingo, in general, public support for feral cat control is at an all-time high. the work of conservation biologists and ecologists feeds into the management plans and priorities of government agencies, but it is the operational environmental managers who are involved in the day-to-day, often intimate deployment of control methods. they are the ones who set the traps and euthanize the cats; they do the stomach content analysis to see which native, potentially threatened, species the cat has consumed in the hours leading up to its death. without these efforts, perhaps we would be witnessing a different biopolitical regime emerge, one in which cats live while endangered species are let to die. when the stakes involve extinction, can killing and culling can be conceived of as a form of violent, compromised, and difficult care (bocci 2017; van dooren 2011)? in this context, is it possible to consider “population” as a compromised yet necessary concept in efforts towards multispecies justice? roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) mardi reardon-smith, 2025 3 references australian government, department of climate change, energy, the environment and water. 2024. background document for the threat abatement plan for predation by feral cats 2024. https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/background-documentfor-tap-predation-feral-cats-2024.pdf. bocci, paolo. 2017. “tangles of care: killing goats to save tortoises on the galapagos islands.” cultural anthropology 32 (3): 424–49. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.3.08. cattelino, jessica r. 2017. “loving the native: invasive species and the cultural politics of flourishing.” in the routledge companion to the environmental humanities, edited by ursula heise, jon christensen, and michelle niemann, 145–53. routledge. head, lesley. 2012. “decentring 1788: beyond biotic nativeness.” geographical research 50 (2): 166–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-5871.2011.00746.x. trigger, david. 2013. “rethinking nature and nativeness.” in up close and personal: on peripheral perspectives and the production of anthropological knowledge, edited by cris shore and susanna trnka, 142–57. berghahn books. van dooren, tom. 2011. “invasive species in penguin worlds: an ethical taxonomy of killing for conservation.” conservation and society 9 (4): 286–98. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26393053. author bio mardi reardon-smith is a research fellow at the arc centre of excellence for automated decision-making and society working on adm, ecosystems, and multispecies relationships. mardi is an environmental anthropologist and sts researcher who specializes in the study of the social dimensions of environmental management in intercultural contexts. she is the author of making do: conservation ethics and ecological care in australia (stanford university press, 2025). https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/background-document-for-tap-predation-feral-cats-2024.pdf https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/background-document-for-tap-predation-feral-cats-2024.pdf https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.3.08 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-5871.2011.00746.x https://www.jstor.org/stable/26393053 compromised care keywords references author bio     roundtable defender la vida: una entrevista con raquel gutiérrez aguilar [defending life: interview with raquel gutiérrez aguilar]     raquel gutiérrez aguilar benemérita universidad autónoma de puebla raquel.gutierrezaguilar@gmail.com   firuzeh shokooh valle franklin & marshall college firuzeh.shokoohvalle@fandm.edu   translated by: vivette garcía-deister universidad nacional autónoma de méxico vivettegarcia@ciencias.unam.mx     la primera vez que leí a raquel gutiérrez aguilar sentí en sus palabras una emoción que desbordaba la página. no era sólo lo que decía, sino cómo lo decía. había garra, urgencia; era visceral. me removieron todo, transformaron cómo pensaba en mi investigación sobre activismo feminista, tecnología y desarrollo en latinoamérica, y renovaron mi visión de lucha por un mundo mejor. provocar esto con el pensamiento y la escritura no es poca cosa.   en estos días, mientras escribo un libro sobre la solidaridad y el placer como estrategias feministas de resistencia tecnopolítica, ando buscando a pensadoras latinoamericanas que alimenten mi mente y mi alma. y se abrieron las compuertas cuando encontré a raquel gutiérrez aguilar, entre tantas otras teóricas y activistas latinoamericanas y caribeñas que están pensando—y haciendo—nuestra región desde una profunda solidaridad feminista con lo humano y lo más-que-humano para re/construir este planeta que se destruye ante el avance inexorable del capitalismo. su pensamiento y su praxis—sobre los bienes comunes, la autonomía y los movimientos comunitarios, los movimientos indígenas, las luchas feministas, la violencia contra las mujeres—se mueven por la siguiente pregunta fundamental: “¿cómo se garantizan las condiciones para la sostenibilidad de la vida?” (gil 2017).   raquel gutiérrez aguilar, de méxico, es una socióloga, filósofa y activista feminista. es una “académica tardía”, como me dijo durante nuestra entrevista, ya que estudió un bachillerato en matemáticas en méxico en los primeros años de los 1980’s y luego, durante más de dos décadas, fue militante de movimientos indígenas en bolivia. allí, militó en el ejército guerrillero tupac katari, y estuvo presa entre 1992-1997 por su militancia como guerrillera. regresó a méxico en el 2001 y completó una maestría en filosofía en la universidad nacional autónoma de méxico y un doctorado en sociología de la benemérita universidad autónoma de puebla, donde actualmente es investigadora-profesora. algunas de sus obras principales son ¡a desordenar! por una historia abierta de la lucha social (la paz, 1995), desandar el laberinto. introspección en la feminidad contemporánea (la paz, 1999), los ritmos del pachakuti. movilización y levantamiento indígena-popular en bolivia (2000-2005) (buenos aires, 2008, con una traducción publicada por duke university press en 2014), y horizontes comunitario-populares: producción de lo común más allá de las políticas estado-céntricas (madrid, 2017), entre numerosos ensayos y antologías.   leer a raquel gutiérrez aguilar es un llamado a despertar tanto a las incontables catástrofes que nos acechan, como a las resistencias que nos nutren y a los sueños que perseguimos. para comprender el feminicidio en méxico, es imprescindible leer su teorización de la violencia desde lo que llama la “amalgama triangular que teje el patriarcado, el capitalismo y el colonialismo, con cada vórtice apoyando los demás” en una combinación letal de “expropiación-explotación-dominación” (gutiérrez aguilar 2018b). es necesario, urgente, leer su trabajo sobre la renovación coalicional de los movimientos feministas en latinoamérica desde el 2017, y ese “horizonte del deseo” que “lo que busca es cambiar la vida toda”, en “defensa de la vida” en un momento en el que “sabemos que necesitamos rechazar, impedir, inhibir, desactivar, confrontar, bloquear los múltiples dispositivos de despojo de nuestras creaciones más íntimas y decisivas, de todo aquello que nos permite cuidar y regenerar la vida en su conjunto, la humana y la no humana” (gutiérrez aguilar 2018a). también entender su visión de una “política en femenino”, que lejos de reproducir binarios o esencializar el trabajo que históricamente han hecho las mujeres, se trata de un lenguaje “subversivo y desafiante” para “poder hablar de lo común, para nombrar y visibilizar lo que desde otras miradas queda oculto, para relanzar la comprensión de la politicidad de procesos cotidianos y extraordinarios de defensa y cuidado de la vida, de las dificultades y fortalezas anidadas en ello (gutiérrez aguilar, navarro trujillo, & linsalata 2016”. la “política en femenino” es una forma radical para repensar y rehacer el mundo.   cuando la revista catalyst me pidió que entrevistara a raquel gutiérrez aguilar a partir de un conversatorio en el que se discutió cómo la academia estadounidense sistemáticamente excluye a pensadores del sur, negros, indígenas, lgbtqi+ y no-binarias, y la lista continúa, lo primero que pensé fue: ¿lograré conseguirla? pues logré dar con raquel gutiérrez aguilar, quien, con cigarrillo en mano, me dio de su tiempo para conversar por zoom.1   firuzeh shokooh valle (fsv): me llamó mucho la atención la anécdota que cuentas en desandar el laberinto sobre cuando escribiste el libro, y lo compartiste con tu entonces pareja y compañeros (todos hombres), y que les gustó, pero no se “conmovieron”. ¿cómo sus experiencias de vida y sus afectos han formado y guiado su pensamiento teórico y su activismo político?   raquel gutiérrez aguilar (rga): es interesante que te hayas fijado en esa anécdota porque es algo que a mi me ha pasado reiteradas veces. es decir, yo dividiría mi trabajo en dos clases de trabajo: el trabajo que hago sobre reflexiones de mis propias experiencias, y de conversaciones con otras mujeres y varones en distintos momentos de la vida que me permiten organizar mi propia experiencia. y eso no es una cosa menor, nosotros le damos mucha importancia a “organizar la experiencia”. …mis trabajos tenían que ver con esa serie de incomprensiones o de insatisfacciones, de resultados no esperados, es decir de cosas incomprensibles…   me empecé a dar cuenta desde muy pronto, desde mi 30s, que había dos comprensiones de los libros, dependiendo del género, en un esquema muy binario que había en ese momento: que los varones entendían una cosa y las mujeres entendían otras, y me daban feedbacks absolutamente distintos. eso me quedó siempre resonando. soy una académica tardía, y cuando comencé a escribir artículos académicos, en un momento posterior que vuelvo a méxico, retomo la carrera académica, hago una maestría en lógica, siento totalmente la obturación parcial de esa capacidad expresiva que estoy buscando. es decir, puedo decir cosas, pero me cuesta mucho trabajo decirlas. siempre tengo que estar haciendo concesiones, siempre me siento atrapada en los formatos. bueno, ahí estoy, y sigo viviendo esa contradicción. entonces la navego, no renuncio a escribir, de hacer estos ejercicios de autoetnografía, de introspección, de objetivación de mi propia experiencia para lograr organizarla… estoy escribiendo un libro, en serie, en el género epistolar, van a ser cuatro, y después quizás sea un libro. y mientras tanto sigo trabajando en este otro lugar donde tienes que poner una introducción, unas palabras clave, un estado del arte… cada vez me cuesta más trabajo hacerlo, cada vez me siento más encorsetada.   fsv: la academia es rígida, y exige unas fórmulas.   rga: exacto, hay un cánon que permite y habilita unas voces, una clase de argumentos, y deslegitima, dificulta, y desprestigia otras. ese es uno de los mil problemas que tiene. por eso hablo de la palabra “encorsetar,” en sentido del corsé que les ponían a las mujeres en el siglo 19, de atrapar las carnes y ajustarlas de alguna forma.   esa palabra “conmover” la pienso mucho. ¿qué queremos expresar cuando decimos conmover? con-mover: movernos juntos. es una constelación de palabras. está relacionada con sintonizar, adquirir tono parecido, y resonar, es decir, vibrar al unísono, pensando en el sonido como emisión de onda. esos dos elementos los pienso en la palabra “conmover”, y que creo que por ahí viene lo que te llamó la atención. no conmueve porque no sintoniza, los otros no se ponen en el mismo tono de voz, porque están en otro, y están muy a gusto en otro. y no re-suena, porque no pasa por el cuerpo, pasa solamente por la cabeza, no te dejas atrapar.   fsv: ¿qué significa “defender la vida” como reclamo coalicional feminista ante el recrudecimiento de la violencia del orden colonial-capitalista y su expansiva crueldad contra las mujeres y los cuerpos feminizados? ¿y cuáles son las implicaciones?   rga: quisiera expresar una cosa que es importante. no vengo de la tradición feminista. mi procedencia de origen viene de la tradición de izquierda radical de américa latina. he tenido que revisar una gran cantidad de certezas y presupuestos marxistas. y he encontrado en el camino una gran cantidad de mujeres como yo. voy a tener 60 en dos años, soy el tipo de persona que no vivió el anterior despliegue de lucha feminista, pero me tocó el momento de la fuerza feminista de los 1970s ligada a las luchas antirracistas en estados unidos, etcétera, etcétera. se estabilizaron agendas muy importantes y no cumplidas, pero muy insuficientes, a mi modo de ver: la agenda de equidad y la agenda de derechos sexuales y reproductivos.   de un momento de desborde muy grande en los 70s, en los 80s se habían estabilizado los “women’s studies” en la academia anglosajona, y comenzado en algunas europeas, y se estaban abriendo nodos de investigación en las universidades en américa latina. no eran muy interesantes porque lo que estaban haciendo—además del trabajo de las historiadoras, que es lo que más me nutre—era un diálogo tenso para hacer arreglos de equidad y de consagración de derechos. no estoy diciendo que esas agendas no sean importantes, estoy diciendo que son insuficientes, y estoy diciendo que contienen el desborde. siempre son una especie de cosita envenenada: por un lado, te empujan, y por otro lado te detienen. son muy contradictorias. y lo mismo con la agenda de derechos sexuales y reproductivos. de la agenda de autonomía radical del cuerpo de la lucha desde los 70s, a la agenda de derechos reproductivos, muy importante, pero limitativa. para la mujer joven que yo era en los 80s no era atractivo. un gran contingente de mujeres no se sintieron seducidas por el feminismo en los 80s’, unas que sí, y hemos dado en nuestras luchas en estos cuerpos de mujeres en esta estructura amalgamada de expropiación-dominación. y ese contingente es muy grande.   los feminismos han vuelto a tener un momento de irrupción radical y masiva, como dice vero gago,2 en los últimos cinco años, desde marzo del 2017 que se visibilizó globalmente. [anteriormente] en la práctica de las mujeres de izquierda, habíamos visto las reformas estructurales en américa latina, de privatización de los servicios públicos, de instalación de políticas de desposesión, de acaparamiento y monopolización de recursos básicos, de las tierras, de las aguas, de las semillas, de los bosques. y allí se dieron, y yo pude participar, muchas luchas en defensa de esos bienes comunes. participé fuertemente en la lucha contra la privatización del agua en cochabamba [la guerra del agua], en una estructura organizativa que se llamó desde el 2000, “coordinadora de defensa del agua y de la vida”. entonces, “la vida” ya andaba dando vueltas. siempre he pensado desde allí. estas acciones de despojo, de expropiación, todo este desastre de las condiciones de sustento, la agresión sistemática, planteaba la importancia de desplazar hilos de los fundamentos de la reflexión. el problema era el modelo productivo que negaba todas las posibilidades de vida.   y uno sigue aprendiendo, viviendo, y empiezas a entender las tramas comunitarias, tramas de interdependencia, que te hablan de lo humano y no-humano. cuando defiendes el agua, el río, defiendes la posibilidad de pescar, entonces defiendes la trucha, las ranas, empiezas a pensar de una manera que ya no es ese pensamiento lineal, determinista, causal. empiezas a pensar en bucles, de manera más compleja, en los ciclos metabólicos que se fracturan y se recomponen. y ahí cada vez más surge esta cuestión de la defensa de la vida, la defensa de la vida digna, de la vida generosa. se necesita el adjetivo. el argumento contrario a esto es que “el capitalismo también ofrece un modo de vida”. y es verdad. pero a algunos les ofrece un modo de vida sostenido sobre la muerte y la radical destrucción de otros. si tu no quieres eso, tienes que empezar a entender de modo más complejo.   nosotras, el equipo con el que trabajo aquí en la universidad de puebla, tratamos de distinguir las formas de gestión de la interdependencia. la interdependencia es una condición de la vida, pero se gestiona de diferentes modos. una manera de imponer unos términos de interdependencia fue el comercio triangular del siglo 17, esclavos negros, plantaciones, mercancías, algodón, etcétera. lo que ves cuando los pueblos indígenas de acá ofrendan a la montaña, hacen ceremonias de petición de lluvia, es otra manera de gestionar la interdependencia. eso está mal calificado como pensamiento mágico. el pensamiento realmente mágico es el del capital: que el dinero genera dinero, que el dinero es fértil. es falso, eso es pensamiento mágico…. [postpandemia] estamos viendo otra vez una reducción de todos los horizontes del deseo que se expresan cuando una coalición heterogénea se plantea defender la vida. otra vez, es la vida individual, la de la persona vacunada, la de una producción científica privada… y ahí estamos.   fsv: ¿cuáles son las implicaciones de “defender la vida” ante el paradigma contemporáneo colonial-capitalista de la ciencia y la tecnología? estoy pensando más en las tecnologías digitales, que es el área de mi trabajo investigativo.   rga: primero pienso, ¿dónde se abriría allí un terreno de lucha? y desde allí eso me alumbra para ir entendiendo el otro conjunto de cosas. por ejemplo, ¿cómo es posible que dentro de esto de las tecnologías digitales admitamos y no estemos haciendo un escándalo global gigante contra la obsolescencia programada? para irnos al hardware, al objeto…. ¿cómo no logramos ir planteando luchas más generales contra las barbaridades que lo único que garantizan es la ganancia empresarial? ¿cómo tener montañas y montañas de objetos que dejan de servir? ¡hazme el favor!   fsv: es un proyecto en contra de la vida.   rga: eso es un proyecto en contra de la vida. si tu te paras en defensa de la vida, y empiezas a ver el mundo desde ahí, se te aparecen otras aristas, de lo que no está bien, de lo que tenemos que pensar, deliberar, discutir. nosotras hablamos mucho de que generalmente las luchas que se afianzan en contra de cosas tratan de producir vetos sociales. no es que tengamos pensado otro modo de vivir. tenemos que comenzar poniendo límites a los aspectos más vitalmente destructivos, como eso.   en el sector educativo público, del que me honra formar parte, es una gran discusión: cómo para sostener la educación pública, tenemos que depender de una multiplicidad de redes privadas y de plataformas privadas. ¿dónde está quedando lo público? ...sentimos que siempre hay un terreno de disputa en cada objeto, en cada producción, cada cosa puede ser objeto de disputa. el asunto es que pareciera que no podemos darlo. ha habido un avance radical en la privatización de estos medios tecnológicos, de conexión, de organización de la vida cotidiana y de organización de la vida laboral. así lo vería, sin que sea el ámbito de mi “expertise”…   nosotras [grupo de compañeras y colegas en la universidad de puebla] usamos la palabra “trama”, en inglés weaving, para dar cuenta de la acción. usamos otra palabra para el modo de cómo quedamos ensambladas a la máquina de la destrucción colonial-racista-acumuladora-financiera. usamos las dos palabras: algo te ensambla, pero tu te tejes de algún modo. nosotras dos ahora aun ensambladas a través de zoom y de una red de servicios privados, estamos tratando de tejer un vínculo.   fsv: para terminar, y hablar un poco sobre lo que generó esta entrevista en primer lugar, ¿cómo responde a la exclusión sistemática de pensadoras de latinoamérica en la academia anglosajona (particularmente en estados unidos)? ¿y cuáles son las implicaciones de esta asimetría en la geopolítica del conocimiento?   rga: voy a decir una cosa que quisiera que no sonara arrogante. claramente, siento esa asimetría de forma brutal. es muy llamativo cómo empobrece tanto a la academia anglosajona. estoy pensando mucho en los estudios postcoloniales de la india. estudié eso hace muchos años, de la mano de silvia rivera cusicanqui,3 y otras compañeras colegas. los estudios postcoloniales, spivak, etc., decían como el dominante si bien tiene mucha capacidad para destruir y para incidir, es mucho de lo que se pierde porque no conoce el otro idioma, y no le interesa. a veces con la academia anglosajona, siento eso. la anglosajona, directamente ignora, y ya está. no te ve, y listo. empiezan a aparecer personas que recuperan elementos, que están buscando, como tú, digamos, lo que también ha de ser difícil de mantener. la academia europea no anglosajona, la francesa, la alemana, siempre nos está viendo y tratando de interpretarnos. nos ve, pero nos reduce, nos ve, pero no nos toma en serio. toma un pedacito y nos mete a su gran marco argumental. pero hay un elemento que me gustaría poner en discusión: cómo las personas de los países ricos son a la larga más pobre que nosotras. están más restringidas, más ensambladas a los circuitos de valorización que les limita sus posibilidades de libertad. ¿cómo podríamos reconstruir relaciones de reconocimiento recíproco? esa es una pregunta, y una pregunta que requiere de acciones prácticas…cuando tu detectas un problema, si lo vuelves una pregunta de lucha, encuentras una mirada interesante para el hacer.   defending life: interview with raquel gutiérrez aguilar translated by vivette garcía-deister   the first time i read raquel gutiérrez aguilar i felt in her words an emotion that overflowed the page. it was not only what she was saying, but how she was saying it. there was grit, urgency; it was visceral. her words stirred up everything, they transformed how i thought about my research on feminist activism, technology and development in latin america, and they renewed my view on the struggle for a better world. to have thought and writing provoke this is no minor achievement.   these days, as i write a book on solidarity and pleasure as feminist strategies of technopolitical resistance, i am seeking latin american thinkers to feed my mind and my soul. the floodgates opened when i found raquel gutiérrez aguilar among many latin american theoreticians and activists who are thinking —and doing—our region based on a profound feminist solidarity with the human and more-than-human in order to re/construct this planet that succumbs under the inexorable advance of capitalism. her thought and her praxis—on the commons, on autonomy and indigenous movements, on feminist struggles and violence against women— moves through the following fundamental question: how can conditions for the sustainability of life be guaranteed (gil 2017)?   originally from mexico, raquel gutiérrez aguilar is a sociologist, philosopher and feminist activist. she describes herself as a “late academic,” given that she studied mathematics in mexico in the early 1980s and then militated in favor of indigenous causes in bolivia for over two decades. she joined the ejército guerrillero tupac katari and was imprisoned between 1992 and 1997 for her guerilla militancy. she returned to mexico in 2001 and completed a master’s degree in philosophy at the universidad nacional autónoma de méxico (unam), then she obtained a doctorate degree in sociology at the benemérita universidad autónoma de puebla (buap) where she is currently a researcher and professor. some of her main works are ¡a desordenar! por una historia abierta de la lucha social (la paz, 1995), desandar el laberinto. introspección en la feminidad contemporánea (la paz, 1999), los ritmos del pachakuti. movilización y levantamiento indígena-popular en bolivia (2000-2005) (buenos aires, 2008, translated and published by duke university press in 2014), and horizontes comunitario-populares: producción de lo común más allá de las políticas estado-céntricas (madrid, 2017), among numerous essays and anthologies.   raquel gutiérrez aguilar’s writing is a call to wake up to the countless catastrophes that trail us, but also to the resistances that nurture us and to the dreams that we pursue. her theory of violence based on the “triangular amalgam that weaves patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism, with each vortex supporting the others” in a lethal combination of “expropriation-exploitation-domination” is indispensable for understanding femicide in mexico (gutiérrez aguilar 2018 b). of necessity and urgency is her work on the coalitional renewal of feminist movements in latin america, and on the “horizon of desire” that “seeks to change the whole life” in “defense of life” at a time when “we know that we need to reject, impede, inhibit, deactivate, confront, block the multiple dispossession devices of our most intimate and decisive creations, of all that allows us to care for and regenerate life as a whole, both human and non-human” (gutiérrez aguilar 2018a). also vital is her vision of a “politics of the feminine.” far from reproducing binaries or essentializing the work that women have historically done, it is a “subversive and defiant” language that “enables us to talk about what is common, to name and make visible what remains concealed to other gazes, to relaunch a comprehension of the ‘politicity’ of both quotidian and extraordinary processes of defense and care for life, and to acknowledge the difficulties and fortitudes nested in doing so” (gutiérrez aguilar, navarro trujillo, & linsalata 2016). the “politics of the feminine” is a radical way of thinking about and remaking the world.   when sparked by a discussion on how us academia systematically excludes other thinkers: from the south, black, indigenous, lgbtqi+, non-binary (the list continues), catalyst asked me to interview raquel gutiérrez aguilar. my first thought was whether i’d be able to get hold of her. i did. cigarette in hand, raquel gutiérrez aguilar made some time for a zoom conversation.4   firuzeh shokooh valle (fsv): thinking about the anecdote that you tell in desandar el laberinto about when you wrote the book and you shared it with your then partner and peers (all men), they liked it, but they were not moved (no se conmovieron). how have your life experiences and affects formed and guided your theoretical thought and your political activism?   raquel gutiérrez aguilar (rga): i find it interesting that you noticed that anecdote because that is something that has happened to me repeatedly. i would divide my work into two kinds: the work composed by reflections on my own experiences, and the work spurred by conversations with other women and men at different stages of my life that have allowed me to organize my own experience. and that is not a minor thing; we give great importance to organizing our experience…my works had to do with this series of misapprehensions or dissatisfactions, of unexpected results, that is, with what was incomprehensible.   early on, when i was in my thirties, i began to notice that there were two understandings of my books that were gender-dependent in that very binary scheme that was prevalent at the time: men understood one thing and women understood another, and they each gave me completely different feedback. that stayed with me. i am a late academic. when i start writing academic papers–at a later stage, as i return to mexico to do a master’s in logic and revisit academia– i totally feel that partial closure of the expressive capacity that i am looking for. i am able to say things, but it is a struggle to do so. i keep having to make concessions, i feel constrained by the format. so, there i am, living that contradiction. i navigate it, i do not give up writing, i keep doing autoethnographic exercises, introspection, objectification of my own experience in order to organize it…i am writing a book of the epistolary genre; it’s going to be four [epistles] and then maybe a book. and meanwhile i keep working from this other place where you must include an introduction, keywords, a state of the art…i becomes harder every time and i feel corseted.   fsv: academia is rigid and it requires formulas.   rga: exactly, there is a canon that allows and enables some voices, a class of arguments, while it delegitimizes, hinders and discredits others. this is one of the many problems with academia. this is why i speak of “corseting” in allusion to the 19th-century corset what was put on women’s bodies to trap the flesh and adjust it in a certain way.   i think a lot about the word conmover. what do we wish to express when we use it? con-mover is to move (mover) together (con). it is a constellation of words. it is related to tuning in, to acquiring a similar pitch, to resonate, that is, to vibrate in unison if we think of sound as wave emission. these two elements inhabit the word conmover, and i think this is why it caught your attention. if something fails to conmover it is because it does not tune in, because people do not put themselves in the same tone of voice; they have another pitch and they are very comfortable where they are. it doesn’t re/sound because it does not pass through the body, only through the head, and you don’t get pulled in.   fsv: what does it mean to “defend life” as a feminist coalitional claim in the face of the resurgence of colonial-capitalist violence and its expansive cruelty against women and feminized bodies? and what does defending life imply?   rga: i’d like to express something important. i do not come from the feminist tradition. i come from the radical left tradition of latin america. i’ve had to revise a great deal of marxist certainties and assumptions. and on the way i have found many women like myself. i’ll turn 60 in two years. i am the kind of person who did not live the previous display of feminist struggle, but i did get to see the feminist force of the 1970s linked to the anti-racist movement in the united states. several important agendas were stabilized; they were unfulfilled, and they were insufficient in my view: the equity agenda and sexual and reproductive rights agenda.   from this overflow of the 70s and 80s emerged women’s studies in english-speaking academia; women’s studies also surfaced in some parts of europe, and nodes of research appeared in latin american universities too. these were not particularly interesting because what was being done –in addition to the work of female historians, which is what has nurtured me the most–was a tense dialogue aimed at achieving equity arrangements and the consecration of rights. i am not implying that these agendas are unimportant; what i am saying is that they are insufficient, they contain the overspill. they have always been a poisoned little thing: on one hand they push you, on the other they cut you short. they are quite contradictory. it’s the same with the sexual and reproductive rights agenda. from radical bodily autonomy in the 70s to reproductive rights, the agendas are important but limiting. for the young woman i was in the 80s this was unattractive. many women were not seduced by the feminism of the 80s; some were, and we have all fought in women’s bodies within this amalgamated structure of expropriation-domination. and that contingent has become very large.   over the last five years, since march 2017 when they earned global visibility, feminisms have once again irrupted radically and massively, as vero gago5 says. [previously] in leftist women’s practice we had seen structural reforms in latin america, the privatization of public service, the establishment of a politics of dispossession, of hoarding and monopolization of basic resources: land, water, seeds, forests. many struggles took place, and i participated in some of these fights in defense of those common goods. i strongly opposed the privatization of water in cochabamba [the water war] as part of an organization that in the year 2000 was named “coordinadora de defensa del agua y de la vida.” back then, “life” was already making its rounds. my thinking is rooted there. these actions of dispossession and expropriation, the disruption of livelihood conditions, the systematic aggression raised in me an awareness of the importance of displacing the foundations of reflection. the problem was the productive model that denied all the possibilities of life.   and by living one continues to learn, and you come to understand how communities are woven, the intertwined interdependence that speaks to the human and non-human. when you defend water, a river, you defend the possibility of fishing; then you defend the trout, the frogs, and you start to think in a way that no longer is linear or causally deterministic. you start to think in loops, in a more complex way, in the metabolic cycles that are fractured and reassembled. that is where the issue about defending life becomes recurrent, the defense of dignified life, generous life—adjectives required. the argument against this is that “capitalism also offers a way of life.” and it is true. for some, capitalism offers a way of life that is sustained over the death and radical destruction of others. if you don’t want that, then you have to begin to understand in a more complex manner.   we, the team that works here at the universidad de puebla, try to distinguish forms of interdependence management. interdependence is a condition of life, but it is managed in different ways. in the 17th-century, triangular trade imposed the terms of interdependence: black slaves, plantations, manufactured goods, cotton, etc. when indigenous people over here make an offering to the mountain, when they do rainmaking ceremonies, that is another way of managing interdependence. this is mischaracterized as magical thinking. magical thinking is rather what capital does. the idea that money generates money, that money is fertile: that is false magical thinking…[postpandemic] we are once again living a reduction of all horizons of desire that are expressed when a heterogeneous coalition considers defending life. once again, it [the life usually preserved] is the individual life, the life of a vaccinated person, the life of a private scientific production. and here we are.   fsv: what are the implications of “defending life” in light of the contemporary colonial-capitalist paradigm of science and technology? i am thinking particularly about digital technologies, which is the area of my research.   rga: my first thought is: where will a field of struggle open there? and this question sheds light on other sets of things. for example, why are we are welcoming these digital technologies without a giant global scandal against programmed obsolescence? how come we are not generally rising against the atrocities that only guarantee a business profit? why do we accumulate heaps and mountains of objects that no longer serve us? oh please!   fsv: it is a project against life.   rga: that is a project against life. if you stand your ground in defense of life, and you begin to see the world from where you are standing, then other frames of reference emerge about what is right, what needs to be thought about, deliberated, discussed. we [fellow feminists and colleagues at the universidad de puebla] often point out that struggles that are defined in opposition to a certain issue try to produce social vetoes. we might not necessarily be thinking about fostering new forms of life. we must begin by setting limits on the most vitally destructive aspects, like that [the above-mentioned project against life].   in the area of public education, which i am honored to take part in, there is a key discussion. in order to sustain public education, we must depend on multiple private networks and private platforms. where is the public in public education?...we feel as though every item, every production becomes an object of dispute. it seems as though we cannot put up a fight. there has been a radical advancement towards the privatization of technological media that connect and organize our daily lives and our working lives. without this being my area of expertise, this is how i see things.   we [fellow feminists and colleagues at the universidad de puebla] use the word weaving (trama) to make sense of action. we use another word for the way in which we are assembled to the machine of colonial-racist-financial-hoarding destruction. in this way, using both words, we acknowledge that something assembles you, but you are also able to weave yourself in a certain way. you and i are currently assembled via zoom and a private network that provides a service, but we are trying to weave a bond.   fsv: i’d like to finish by raising the issue that spawned this interview. what is your take on the systematic exclusion of latin american thinkers by english-speaking academia (especially in the united states)? and what are the consequences of this asymmetry for the geopolitics of knowledge?   rga: i hope that what i am about to say does not sound arrogant. clearly, i perceive a brutal asymmetry. what i find most striking is that this so impoverishes english-speaking academia. i am thinking about postcolonial studies in india. i studied that a long time ago, by the hand of silvia rivera cusicanqui6 and other peers and colleagues. postcolonial studies like spivak’s taught us that while the dominant [discourse] has a great capacity to destroy and influence, it also loses a lot because it is ignorant of another language or because it is not interested. sometimes i feel this is what happens in english-speaking academia. it firmly ignores, period. it does not see you, and that’s it. every now and then there are people who take up elements [of latin american investigations]. the non-english-speaking academia in europe (the french, the german) are constantly paying attention and trying to interpret us. they see us, but they do not take us seriously. they pick up a tiny piece and fit it within their grand argumentative framework. there is something here to be discussed: how, in the long run, rich countries are poorer than us. they are overly restrained, more assembled into the circuits of valorization that limit their possibilities of freedom. how might we go about reconstructing relations of reciprocal recognition? this is a question, one that requires practical action…when you detect a problem, if you turn it into a question about struggle, then you find an interesting outlook on action.   notes 1 la entrevista ha sido editada y condensada por razones de espacio y claridad.   2 verónica gago es una intelectual y activista feminista de argentina.   3 silvia rivera cusicanqui es una intelectual y activista de bolivia.   4 the interview has been edited for the purpose of clarity and abbreviated due to space restrictions.   5 verónica gago is an argentinian feminist intellectual and militant researcher.   6 silvia rivera cusicanqui is a bolivian feminist and subaltern theorist. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/silvia_rivera_cusicanqui.   references gil, sylvia l. 2017. “(re)producir la vida en común. la mirada de raquel gutiérrez aguilar”. horizontes comunitarios, may 25, 2017. https://horizontescomunitarios.wordpress.com/2017/05/25/reproducir-la-vida-en-comun-la-mirada-de-raquel-gutierrez-aguilar-entrevista-por-silvia-l-gil/. gutiérrez aguilar, raquel, mina lorena navarro trujillo, lucia linsalata. 2016. “repensar lo político, pensar en lo común. claves para la discusión”. in modernidades alternativas, 317-477. méxico, d.f.: facultad de ciencias políticas y sociales unam, ediciones del lirio. gutiérrez aguilar, raquel. 2018a. “porque vivas nos queremos, juntas estamos trastocándolo todo: notas para pensar, una vez más, los caminos de la transformación social”. revista theomai 37: 41-55. ---. 2018b. “women’s struggle against all violence in mexico: gathering fragments to find meaning.” translated by liz mason-deese. south atlantic quarterly 117 (3): 670–81. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942245.     author bios raquel gutiérrez aguilar is a mexican mathematician, philosopher, sociologist, and activist. she is professor of sociology and researcher at the benemérita universidad autónoma de puebla specialized in indigenous movements in latin america, resistance, and social transformation.   firuzeh shokooh valle is an assistant professor of sociology at franklin & marshall college, in pennsylvania, united states. her research explores feminist technopolitics of care in latin america and other regions of the global south.   vivette garcía-deister is professor of the faculty of sciences of the national autonomous university of mexico (unam). her research currently focuses on the history of race science and the epistemologies of biomedical and forensic genetics in mexico, as informed by ethnographic methods and the philosophy of science in practice. orcid id https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4207-5783.       original research performing geology: risk and conquest in the origin stories of a field science   tamara pico uc santa cruz tpico@ucsc.edu     abstract stories about the foundation of us geology as a discipline are prominent in the culture of field geology today. this article traces the threads of such “origin stories” through field geology practices and undergraduate training. the repetition of these origin stories obfuscates the colonial and race-fueled motives that underpin the actions of the us geologist characters featured in these stories. increasingly, the field is recognized as a site of sexual and racial harassment and abuse. by making visible the racialized subplots in the history of us geology, which include entrenchment in racial science and land dispossession, i posit that the curated origin stories repeated today perpetuate processes of gendered and race-based exclusion and subjugation in field geology.   keywords earth science, geology, fieldwork, scientific training, origin stories   introduction my fingertips trace bumpy grains and smooth textures in rocks that encode worlds past. the field is a tangible environment that immerses you within a study system. this transcendent space is what drew me to study the earth, sparked by a field experience in geology studying ancient ice ages in the summer before i began a phd program in applied physics. in my first semester of graduate school at harvard university, i switched disciplines into earth science to follow an interest in the ice age. fieldwork brought me into earth science, but those experiences also kept me from pursuing research in the field. despite my entry via the field, i did not become a field geologist. i am now a computational geoscientist studying past ice sheets and sea level by modeling how the solid earth deforms under the weight of massive ice sheets, which grow and melt over tens of thousands of years. i hold an assistant professor position in earth science at uc santa cruz, a us public research university. i am a white-presenting jewish latina american woman. my mother is argentine and jewish, and my father is american, of mexican californio and jewish romanian descent. from this positionality, i became increasingly aware of patterns of exclusion in the earth sciences. i was particularly struck by both visible and invisible rules about how geologists’ bodies were expected to act or look in the field. the stories we tell and the stories we repeat set norms for our discipline’s culture and practice. in geology, especially in the study of deep-time rocks, the stories i heard were stewed in masculine notions of ruggedness and adventure. i started to ask myself where these dominant stories came from. how do the stories we tell, and more importantly, the stories we choose not to tell, construct an ideal of the field geologist’s body? in seeking to answer these questions, i am inspired by judith butler’s concept of gender performativity to consider how the field geologist’s body is expected to behave to be seen as legitimate by the geology community. butler proposes that “a body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time” (1988, 523). thus, gender identity can be created by repeated performance. this concept can similarly be applied to the field geologist’s body, which can be identified and recognized as a “field geologist” through its behavior or performance. sharon traweek’s (1992) conception of scientific culture argues that repeated practices and daily routines render a set of actions and beliefs as the only obvious and rational approach. stories told in geology codify a culture with a set of rules for how bodies should perform in field environments. the field geologist can then “become” a field geologist through actions, guided by social rules and reinforced through storytelling. this scientific culture can be identified in the ways that undergraduate training omits past and ongoing racialized and gendered encounters in geology. this omission causes students to experience epistemic injustice, an injustice of access to knowledge (fricker 2007). within the concept of epistemic injustice, philosopher miranda fricker defines testimonial injustice, a prejudice in the credibility of someone’s expressed knowledge, and hermeneutical injustice, when someone has unfair access to information for interpreting their social experiences. the embodied nature of fieldwork requires understanding how culture can cue performed behavior, as well as how such cultural rules are mediated by the ways we access and share information about our lived experiences. science is always socially situated. as a practitioner of earth science, and a beginning feminist science studies scholar, i am inspired by feminist science and technology studies scholars before me who have critically examined practices in their scientific disciplines, such as donna haraway, banu subramaniam, deboleena roy, sara giordano, and others. in “ghost stories for darwin,” subramaniam (2014) argues that the history of eugenics continues to haunt scientific research in genetics and ecology on diversity. subramaniam’s analysis of science history illustrates how the institution of science can be accessed at different times for different purposes, and this inspires me to listen to the ghosts in the walls of my own discipline to uncover these multiplicities. i am drawn to haraway’s assertion that is difficult to imagine “the possibility of new stories not strangled by the same logics of appropriation and domination”(1989, 523), especially when the stories we tell and retell are stories based on oppression. some readers will likely already be familiar with butler’s theory of performativity, while others will be more deeply acquainted with the figures within the history of geology named herein. my approach attempts to bridge geology practitioners’ experience in research and teaching with concepts in feminist theory that interrogate the social and political ramifications of science practices. i see the two-pronged nature of this essay as a necessary element of a bridging piece, to create space for science practitioners to more readily borrow from feminist science studies. traveling between these academic spaces has challenged my own approach to science and my connection to the earth by uncovering the cultural values imbued within research questions and methods. although rich cultural traditions in geology exist across the globe, this essay focuses on us field geology, and is specifically concerned with deep-time rock-centric research. in the us, there are stories about the foundation of geology as a discipline that remain strong fixtures in field geology today. as geologists trained in the us are aware, these “origin stories” are often stories of adventure and exploration rooted in nineteenth-century us geology that sanction scientific rigor. the implicit storylines about the motivation of early us geologists are the backdrop to the history of settler colonialism, native american removal, and creation of racial hierarchies ordained by us science (monarrez et al. 2021; pico 2019). repetition of these origin stories, and the reperformance of the values they uphold, set a disciplinary culture that positions geologic fieldwork as an act, governed by behavioral rules and expectations. such repeated performance, ingrained in routines and cultural norms, is reinforced by the stories told within the discipline, creating a seemingly “neutral” field geologist. can we locate the stories that are still “living” in the field geology community? what stories are retold and what stories are not? which bodies can tell stories in geology? and do these stories only get told about certain bodies? by documenting the ways that the idealized field geologist’s body is constructed through the repetition of origin stories, i aim to demonstrate how the gendered, racialized, and able-bodied nature of this body perpetuates exclusion and subjugation in both training and research practice, evocative of the colonial practices so central to us geology’s disciplinary foundation.   the field as a socially situated site increasingly, fieldwork is recognized as a potential site of sexual and racial harassment and abuse (clancy et al. 2014, 2017). understanding the prevalence of such behaviors in the field requires illuminating the pervasive cultural norms that allow patterns of abuse to persist. importantly, if we can identify when, where, and how such behavioral norms are transmitted through training of the next generation of field scientists, then it may be possible to intervene. at stake are the safety of students and science practitioners. outside of geology, disciplines explicitly encompassing the human dimension have addressed the field as a socially situated site, showing its impact on research questions, process, and outcomes. a substantial body of literature in anthropology and geography reflects on the positionality of the fieldworker, especially how the research practice itself is modulated by body markers such as race, gender, or able-bodiedness (hausermann and adomako 2022). such literature focuses on how information gained during fieldwork is mediated by the body or how experiences of embodiment influence the choice of field sites and research topics (billo and hiemstra 2013; hanson and richards 2017; henderson 2009; jokinen and caretta 2016; kuklick and kohler 1996; lopez and gillespie 2016; r. powell 2002; reich 2003; sparke 1996; turner 2000). i wish to extend this concept of embodiment to include the behavioral norms imposed on the field geologist’s body through cultural cues. connections between geology, colonialism, and race-based exclusion today have been explored in earth science education literature. one such study applied an intersectional conceptual framework to earth science education to identify how cultural identity, institutional power, and historical sociocultural factors influence retention and success of undergraduate earth science majors (núñez, rivera, and hallmark 2020). núñez and others identify how the history of geology in westward expansion can be unwelcoming to communities of color, in addition to the expectation of toughness or expensive gear required to be comfortable in the field. a recent article by pedro monarrez and colleagues explored how the history of colonialism and extraction in paleontology and earth sciences shape the structure of the science today (monarrez et al. 2021). recent initiatives in the earth sciences and other field sciences have brought such discussions to the forefront through community-led discussions and publications (cronin et al. 2021; urgegeoscience, n.d.), as well as research funding sources, such as the national science foundation’s (n.d.) recent focus on shifting community relationships in arctic research beginning in 2017. the focus on race and colonialism in these initiatives has been highlighted in studies on pedagogical practices in earth science. an analysis of earth science textbooks found pervasive themes that included sexist messaging, negative portrayals of people of color, and positive and nationalist messaging about the military-industry complex (phillips and hausbeck 2000). another initiative in prior work has brought feminist science perspectives into climate system curricula (mayberry and rees 1997; mayberry and welling 2000). i recently led an earth science curriculum intervention, geocontext, that builds on this work; its aim is to incorporate a sociopolitical historical context in commonly taught subjects in introductory earth science (pico et al. 2021). at a time when geoscientists are attempting to tackle issues of diversity and equity, there is a need for positive efforts for inclusion. i aim to expand and deepen the range of practices in geology. in this piece, i raise the possibility of telling alternate stories—stories that resist the dominant cultural narrative of heroic origins of us geology. i propose telling a multiplicity of stories, which include the racialized and colonial threads within geology. instinctually, as geologists we may avert our gaze from difficult pasts. nevertheless, telling such stories can allow for a full and complex history. learning about these troubling histories of racism helped me to recognize and weave through existing power dynamics in earth science. from my perspective, such knowledge offers pathways for those on the margins to navigate the tunnels of geology’s modern social structure, which carry traces of its problematic foundation through culture and practice. building on literature in earth science education and embodiment in anthropological fieldwork, i focus on the field as a site of performance through cultural conditioning. first, i document origin stories told about the foundations of us geology through a textual analysis of undergraduate textbooks. next, i ask how these stories set behavioral norms for field geologists by analyzing north american field geologists’ language in field experience descriptions. finally, i turn to undergraduate training practices, using concepts of epistemic justice to consider which stories are told and which stories are omitted in undergraduate field education. by invoking concepts of performativity and epistemic injustice from feminist theory, i theorize the field geologist’s formation through repeated practice imposed by a culture ingrained within narratives.   documenting geology origin stories in us earth science courses, both introductory and advanced, the glorification of nineteenth-century us geologists is common practice. stories about the origin of the discipline become formalized through undergraduate teaching and are documented in textbooks. these stories indicate to students where the discipline came from and what values geologists hold. i document the language of origin stories used in undergraduate earth science textbooks published in the us, which frequently include anecdotes about foundational characters in nineteenth-century us geology. while there are several canonical figures in early us geology, for the sake of concision, here i focus on two who repeatedly appear in earth science courses: john wesley powell and louis agassiz. while i examine only these two figures, a broader study encompassing more key characters is merited in future work. i reviewed six textbooks (press and siever 1974; chernicoff and fox 2003; prothero and dott 2010; levin 2010, 2013; grotzinger and jordan 2014) published between 1974 and 2014 gathered from current syllabi of major geology departments in the us.1 i pay particular attention to how language has, or has not, changed over the decades in introductory texts that include these characters. most geologists trained in the us are familiar with john wesley powell, who is famous for leading a government-sponsored expedition to raft down the colorado river into the grand canyon. a classic textbook published in the 1970s recounts the powell expedition in heroic terms, insisting that it is “still an adventure” to travel the colorado river and repeat the “first perilous journey” led by powell in 1869 with “his party of nine men in four small rowboats” (press & siever 1974, 28). this rhetoric underscores bravery, painting the powell expedition as a feat of physical endurance that pushed the bounds of the unknown. the textbook shares that major powell was a geologist who contributed to founding the united states geologic survey (usgs), becoming one of the agency’s first leaders (press and siever 1974). more recent textbooks echo a similar adventuring and glorifying rhetoric about powell. a 2010 textbook extols that “[powell’s] greatest feat was a journey by boat through the grand canyon of the colorado river in 1869” (levin 2010, 25). a later edition of this textbook even adds additional detail highlighting powell’s bravery: “john wesley powell saw service during the civil war. he lost his right arm as a result of a wound received during the battle of shiloh. that handicap, however, did not curtail his geologic work in the slightest” (levin 2013, 25). a 2003 textbook lauds the journey as “the wildest, longest, and most dangerous white-water river ride,” and describes powell as a hero with “tough and persistent nature” (chernicoff and fox 2003, 12). this language parallels that of textbooks decades prior, emphasizing powell’s manly character as he overcame physical obstacles. textbooks highlight and reflect the masculine and colonial values of conquest that continue to be held by geologists today. according to these stories, geologists seek adventure. they persevere when faced with any physical barrier. the description of powell’s body and actions becomes a “supercrip” narrative of overcoming adversity (schalk 2016), and kenny fries (2007) narrates how such stories can evoke a complex response for the disabled community in “aqua booties, size six.” stories about powell in textbooks published in both the 1970s and 2010s focus on heroism, adventure, and danger, echoing themes of white manly heroism identified in nineteenthand early twentieth-century us society (bederman 1995; oreskes 1996; ray 2013). nevertheless, powell’s legacy is more complicated. a biography of powell, written by novelist wallace stegner (1954), includes how he conducted ethnographic work on native american tribes in the regions he was mapping out. powell used ethnographic research on ute languages to justify the superiority of english and christianity, and the inferiority of native american cultures, noting that “next to teaching them to work, the most important thing is to teach them the english language. into their own language there is woven so much mythology and sorcery that…the ideas and thoughts of civilized life cannot be communicated to them in their own tongues” (j.w. powell and ingalls 1875, 25). powell was commissioned by the bureau of indian affairs to report on the status of native american tribes in the canyonlands and make recommendations on how to integrate them into white american society (stegner 1954). powell collaborated with nathaniel southgate shaler, a harvard professor in geology, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, wrote volumes detailing how north american topography has been “shown by their human products…unfitted to be the cradle places of great peoples,” while praising “the geographic conditions that led to… the institution of slavery”. (shaler 1897, 166, 205). at harvard, shaler was one of numerous faculty involved in scientific racism that ultimately contributed to the eugenics movement (fiorito 2019). over decades, the origin story focused on bravery has been repeated, without including powell’s more complex racialized legacy. such an emphasis on bravery, in the backdrop of contemporary racial science, connects this trait to deeper patterns of exclusion, shifting how we understand the centrality of bravery to the essence of fieldwork. in earth science textbooks louis agassiz is described as a naturalist and geologist. a 1970s textbook lauds agassiz’s accomplishments as a “a young professor, not yet thirty” who was a “pioneer in the measurement of glacier flow,” recounting how agassiz and his students built a hut on a glacier and tracked its velocity (press and siever 1974, 216). this textbook notes agassiz as “instrumental” in founding glacial geology (press and siever 1974, 216). a 2010 textbook emphasizes agassiz as a well-regarded american scientist: a harvard professor who founded the harvard museum of comparative zoology and published important studies (levin 2010). by yoking agassiz’s pioneering spirit to his pre-eminence as a figure in geology, this textbook contributes to an origin myth steeped in heroism. throughout the decades, these textbook anecdotes include no hints to agassiz’s more complex legacy; their exclusions continue to reinforce narratives of heroism that have historically contributed to justifications of white supremacy and racial hierarchies (menand 2001). agassiz advocated for polygeny, the idea that different human races were different species, and thus should not intermix. agassiz’s research included studies of skulls and daguerreotypes often collected without consent (fernandes 2019; menand 2001). indeed, the development of racial science in us universities parallels the involvement of higher education in the institution of slavery (wilder 2013). academic scientists at nineteenth-century us universities expounded the use of science to justify racial categories and hierarchies. agassiz and his contemporaries played important roles in legitimizing ideas about racial hierarchy, bolstered by their position as scientists. nevertheless, the stories told about these individuals in undergraduate earth science textbooks highlight certain aspects (brilliance, discovery, or bravery) while burying colonial and racist motivations. origin stories in earth science textbooks offer cultural cues to students about the discipline. these stories about the foundation of us geology underscore geology as a discipline of exploration and adventure. this narrative avoids us geology’s connection to white supremacy and colonialism. these stories mark the geologist’s body with implicit social categories of gender, race, and able-bodiedness. historians of science are aware of the connection between geology and imperialism in the us (m. black 2018; robinson 2006). however, knowledge of this critical literature has not been integrated into stories told by geologists about the origins of the discipline. retelling these stories reinforces a narrative that privileges the white, masculine, and exceptionally fit body (set on overcoming any physical obstacles) as the legitimate field geologist. the repetition of these dominant stories and practices makes the cultural norms and expectations for the geologist’s body, and its performance, appear neutral and natural.   how do practicing field geologists connect to origin stories?   the hero-scientist trope in geology, stories from the field elicit awe and honor. in graduate school, when a fellow student returned from the field, i sat listening to harrowing tales of a postdoc nearly falling off a waterfall to his death as the research group climbed across rocks in peru. indeed, some risks taken by professional field geologists have led to deaths in recent decades (cantine 2021). geologists place especially high value on fieldwork in remote, difficult-to-access areas. in scientific talks i have regularly witnessed speakers include photographs from the field that highlight an especially dangerous aspect of fieldwork (crossing a river rapid, scaling mountains in a blizzard, or camping near polar bears). for example, a 2021 virtual series on precambrian research featured a talk with multiple slides showcasing the field conditions, which included a description of “boats overladen with equipment and food” and a field camp photo taken “at about 1 o’clock in the morning when we finished setting up” after being stuck in a “bad storm” and moving camp at 9 p.m. (rainbird 2021). these field anecdotes reify the notion of the tough and rugged geologist. the implicit requirements for a geologist’s body and its performance are signaled through stories that emphasize physical and mental rigor. such a narrative about geologists fits snugly into the “hero-scientist” role, which mary terrall describes as requiring “risk-taking and physical toughness, to accompany the intellectual brilliance required of the successful man of science” (1998, 85). terrall links the hero-scientist to masculinity, as “men sought glory through the emulation of soldiers,” which rendered science a means for seeking honor (85). today the hero-scientist trope is accessed through stories of danger in the field. by choosing (and bragging about) dangerous field sites in scientific talks, geologists prove character through sacrifice, a theme analyzed by rebecca herzig in suffering for science (2005). as herzig illustrates, the suffering by scientists that legitimizes their place as heroes can only be accessed by some bodies. for example, the peary expedition to the arctic glorifies the suffering of the two white men explorers, extolling how their brilliant discoveries rested on these sacrifices, while diminishing and silencing the contributions of matthew henson, the black male explorer who, according to herzig, was “arguably the most crucial member of the team,” and marginalized in the story of sacrificial character (2005, 80). in the coldest crucible, michael robinson argues that the combination of science and exploration reinforced nineteenth-century notions of masculinity: “traits considered essential to science, such as rationality and discipline, also played important roles in defining ideals of manliness” (2006, 6). these explorers attained status through storytelling, using “different forms of rhetoric—scientific, manly, and moral,” and such stories “more than specimens or scientific observations, constituted the real currency of arctic exploration” (robinson 2006, 6). naomi oreskes, in “objectivity or heroism,” notes how the perception of “scientific heroism,” a characterization less likely attributed to women, plays an important role in validating scientific work as “objective” (1996, 90). scientific talks that include images and anecdotes of difficult-to-access field sites and physical challenges affirm these aspects of fieldwork as part of scientific ability. these stories make implicit claims for what kinds of bodies can perform this science today. the markers for this body are gendered and raced, reinforcing the white and masculine hero-scientist role. the repetition of stories and behaviors sets cultural rules and disciplinary norms. if we suppose that a field geologist can be recognized by a set of cultural acts, then butler argues that “the performance renders social laws explicit,” setting rules that define the identity of the field geologist (1988, 526). these repeated practices become part of the quotidian, making the rules seem natural, and these rules shape an idealized field geologist body. in this way, becoming a field geologist involves negotiating the behavioral norms of those seen as legitimate field geologists. these social performances, informed by the origin stories that are alive in the discipline, are then transmitted to the next generation. stories alone may not necessarily produce bodies; however, the curation and transmission of origin stories produce a culture that establishes expectations of the performance of bodies. through these repeated performances, the field geologist’s body becomes recognizable as such. these stories curate which bodies, as marked by social identifiers, can tell the stories, and which bodies can be the subject of stories.   “suck it up”: embodied identities in the field modern geologic fieldwork shares themes with nineteenth-century geology driven by nationalism. the history of military involvement in nationally sponsored geography and geology expeditions renders the field a site of conquest. as examined by matthew sparke (1996) in “displacing the field in fieldwork,” fieldworkers are free to enter and leave their field site, a position that communities inhabiting this space cannot claim. in this way, field geologists mimic the military in how they enter a site unexpectedly, dominate this space and acquire resources, and remove themselves when their goal is complete. the status of the fieldworker plays an important role in acquiring this level of power. i interviewed a phd student in field geology, who identifies as a woman, in the year following a summer of fieldwork (april 2018). the student shared that “the culture of the country you’re in affects how you behave. in [country of field site redacted for anonymity] there are conservative ideas for the role of men and women. guys will wrestle and horserace, but they’ll expect different things from women. my male colleague played into these roles… it’s a way of earning people’s respect that is less accessible for me.” the position of gender and race mark the fieldworker in the new field space and modulate access to power over resources in this space (henderson 2009; vanderbeck 2005). challenges accessing a field site, such as trekking through mountains for days with little (or rotten!) food or hitchhiking on motorbikes can be safer for certain identities: in casual conversations my women colleagues have told me of colleagues who are white men lodging at brothels during fieldwork, which they shared would have made them feel uncomfortable or unsafe. norms in geologic fieldwork that stress rugged heroism can be laden with social markers and expectations. my field geologist colleague notes how she feels less valued in the field because of her smaller size: “i’ll feel bad about not being able to carry things; they’ll say just hand it to me and not get in my way.” indeed, for some ocean-going fieldwork, the survival gear itself is designed for a specific body type, which as anna glüder details, mortally endangers bodies that deviate from the “standard definition of the 50th percentile north american male” (glüder, 2020). the colleague i interviewed also cites behavioral expectations: “in the field there is pressure to suck it up, you have to get along with people. you’re really dependent on other people for work to happen. if you upset them, they can cut you off easily. you’re in a foreign country with no resources.” for instance, she cites choosing to “suck up” racist comments to preserve relationships with scientists who are “giants in the field” (personal interview, april 2018). my interview with this colleague presents another narration of the rugged heroic individualism that is lauded in geology textbooks or public research talks in field geology. such a narrative from a different perspective allows us to see that some geologists find themselves at odds in fulfilling the physical and cultural expectations required of a field geologist’s performance. an account by riley black (2021) on her field experiences in paleontology as a transgender woman includes macho and sexist norms in field settings dominated by men: “young men would talk about their sexual conquests but slut-shame women who acted much the same as the boys. peer pressure to drink can be as stereotypically over-the-top as an after-school special…how ridiculous it is that some women like to wear makeup in the field is a common point of conversation, while nothing is said about men who don’t change their clothes for a week and regularly nurse hangovers of varying intensities.” this double bind underscores the vigilance required for certain identities to adhere to perceived norms. these experiences suggest there are expectations for the ideal field geologist’s behavior that extend beyond research outcomes. the expectations for exceptional physical ability and adventurous character evoke the historical archetype described in origin stories, always a white man. when the training of new field geologists includes physical ability and adventure-seeking as scientific rigor, stories are repeated about who can be seen as a legitimate field geologist.   “you’re seeing it for the first time”: the privileging of remote sites today, field sites that are seen as remote or difficult-to-access are often considered pure and untouched knowledge vessels by western scientists. geologists are likely familiar with colleagues justifying the choice of a field site by explaining that “no one” has mapped this region since pre-plate tectonics theory (1970s) or that there are no measurements of x technique in this region. one us field geologist notes, “working in the arctic, working in mongolia, what really attracts me to places like this is that they’re so undescribed, so unknown. you go out there and make a lot of first order observations, and you’re seeing it for the first time. nobody has seen these, nobody has made these observations, so there’s still this really fresh sense of discovery” (harvard museum of natural history 2014). this geologist views their knowledge of a remote site as the “first” despite these spaces being inhabited by people, who have likely made “first order observations.” privileging remote fieldwork may be connected to racialized perceptions of nature and conquest. the conceptual history of nature and wilderness has been tied to ideas about racial purity and human primitivity by scholars such as william cronon and carolyn merchant. in the nineteenth century, wilderness was often depicted as containing the supernatural just behind the surface (cronon 1995; merchant 2003). in black faces, white spaces, carolyn finney (2014) illustrates how during the mid-nineteenth century, landscapes inhabited by indigenous peoples were thought to represent untouched nature, and these places, uninhabited by white us americans, became idolized as sites of national identity. in the ecological other, sarah jaquette ray argues that rhetoric about conservation was more about “an imagined body politic,” citing wilderness as a purification tool for producing ideal anglo american men (2013, 9). conservation rhetoric portrayed native american peoples’ bodies, as ray further notes, as simultaneously “‘at one with nature” and as something to be sacrificed for environmental good (10). through the institution of slavery, black people were similarly rendered a part of a primitive nature scene, “treating them with the same mixture of contempt, false reverence, and real exploitation that also marks american environmental history” (finney 2014, 38). in a flashback to nineteenth-century geology, spaces deemed wild, natural, and primitive are still privileged for fieldwork, and one feature of these spaces is their inhabitation by indigenous communities. when field sites most valued by geologists are located on historic lands of indigenous peoples, failing to recognize this can render indigenous communities invisible as humans, and camouflaged into the landscape. geologists may be drawn to conducting research in these areas to gain legitimacy through the heroic explorer scientist trope. unaware, or unable to articulate these power dynamics, the us geologist may mimic the same oppressive practices performed by nineteenth-century colonialists, exploiting natural and human resources to attain their scientific goals.2 how do geology origin stories about the primitivity of landscapes inform the choice of remote field sites? might field geologists form an intellectual wall between the physical geology they are studying and the humans that inhabit this space? if so, the field of geology and its tendency to consider geological phenomena as separate from indigenous peoples’ knowledges and heritage enacts similar logics as other scientific disciplines that impose strict boundaries between the scientific and the social (harding 2008). alternatively, when geologists exploit their field site for both natural and human resources, this case recalls nineteenth-century geologists who wrote about indigenous people in their same reports about rocks, imagining them as a part of the landscape they studied (chakrabarti 2019, 2020). in this situation, the field site blends humans with nature, blurring the bounds of the inanimate world (luciano and chen 2015; povinelli 2016). such practices may perpetuate stories about what bodies (and knowledges) can be seen as representing a legitimate scientist and what bodies and ways of knowing can be seen as part of the physical landscape.   what stories are omitted in undergraduate field training?   racist and sexist encounters origin stories in geology textbooks taught in us undergraduate courses highlight bravery, toughness, and heroism in the field, and such stories are also transmitted through undergraduate training. field experiences in undergraduate earth science are seen as central and formative to a geologist’s training (anadu, ali, and jackson 2020; sharp 1988). a 2008 study of 278 us geology programs found that 99 percent of these departments required “field camp” as part of their curriculum (drummond and markin 2008). the respected role of the outdoors in earth science education is highlighted in a study analyzing field learning, which underscores that “studying geology in the field has also contributed to the social structures that have served to train generations of geoscientists” (mogk and goodwin 2012, 134). in 2001 the editor of the journal of geoscience education reminisced fondly about the toughness of undergraduate field camps: “whether we thrived upon the hardships of field work or merely survived them…field camp has served as a rite of passage—a complex combination of basic training, fraternity initiation, and baptism by fire” (drummond 2001). likening field camp to a fraternity initiation hints to a hazing ritual that, like college greek life, bonds students who are most aligned with this culture while alienating those who are not. undergraduate field camps are known for involving some physical risks, and although rare, student deaths have occurred during fieldwork (cantine 2021). underrepresented minorities make up less than 7 percent of undergraduate earth science majors in the us (bernard and cooperdock 2018; stokes 2013). studies analyzing factors for underrepresentation of students of color in geology cite the importance of early experiences in the outdoors, which are more common for white students, and socioeconomic barriers related to expense and unfamiliarity with camping (and other outdoor) gear (núñez, rivera, and hallmark 2020; stokes 2013; stokes, levine, and flessa 2015). such underrepresentation in outdoor activities can be linked directly to the racialized history of demarcating what is defined as wilderness, as argued by finney (2014) and ray (2013). although undergraduate field courses often reinforce values such as toughness, included in origin stories such as those shown in earth science textbooks, stories about exclusion (such as the reasons students of color are less likely to declare geology as a major) are less often included. for example, many field courses are conducted in rural regions of the us, areas that can be openly hostile towards non-white us americans. a video published by an earth science undergraduate student in 2020 recounted the constant racial tension he experienced as a black person working in the field in the heart of the united states, including being stared down, being ignored by locals who spoke past him to his white colleagues, and threatening run-ins with people who had white supremacist and neo-nazi symbols on vehicles or tattoos (anadu 2020). during my month-long field camp in graduate school near death valley, california, every day when we drove out of our base camp, we passed a water tower vandalized with latinx slurs.3 racism during field experiences, either through encounters or language written on the landscape, may have the largest impact on students of color, whose identities may be personally targeted. such racist encounters may seem to come from outside the geology community. however, an understanding of nineteenth-century us geology’s connection to imperialism, colonialism, and racial science uncovers this history’s role in such modern manifestations of a racist system. another story of exclusion that is seldom transmitted to students is about sexual abuse in field settings, despite the high likelihood of occurrence in such settings. studies that show high rates of sexual harassment and sexual assault (experienced by approximately 70 percent of study participants) in fieldwork environments (clancy et al. 2014). such studies indicate that women of color are at particularly high risk for incidents of sexual harassment (clancy et al. 2017). recently, there has been a push for leaders in the field to purposefully anticipate these dangers (anadu, ali, and jackson 2020; demery and pipkin 2021; olcott and downen 2020). not only can geologists pre-empt these problems through preparation, but we can also understand the history of why they occur in our discipline. by bringing to light the history of colonialism and racial science in geology, it is possible to identify deeply ingrained cultures and practices that lead to raceand gender-based exclusion and harmful behaviors.   epistemic injustice undergraduate teaching in the field can reinforce values of toughness and bravery through the expectation that field camp is a rite of passage that consists of surviving hardships in the outdoors. geology origin stories told to students exclude racialized histories and continue to glorify white men who were invested in movements designed to uphold white supremacy. the exclusion of a discussion surrounding the racist nature of foundational geology leaves an absence in knowledge that would allow a student of color to contextualize their experience in geology. knowing about this history is especially important when undergraduate experiences may include significant racist and sexist encounters. this lack of knowledge regarding a significant part of this student’s social experience is an example of systemic hermeneutical injustice, a term coined by fricker (2007) to refer to structural prejudice that limits access to shared resources for interpreting and expressing social experiences, constituting a form of epistemic violence (spivak 1988). without access to an intellectual framework through which to understand their lived experiences in geology, students are disconnected from epistemic resources that would aid them in understanding which parts of their social experience are shared or isolated. because us undergraduate geology programs have a small number of majors that are students of color (stokes 2013), these students are less likely to have their experiences validated by peers with similar experiences. furthermore, students of color may not be successful in having their voices heard. as kristie dotson (1998) describes, because the audience (leaders in geology departments) may not identify the speaker (a student of color) as a producer of knowledge and expertise, their epistemic authority may be questioned. this epistemic silencing limits the ability of students to be supported or even to testify to their own race-modulated experiences. furthermore, dotson defines the idea of “testimonial smothering,” where a speaker may identify limitations in the audience’s willingness or ability to appropriately understand the testimony of their experience (1998, 244–50). testimonial smothering results in the speaker curating their testimony, such that it only contains content that the audience is deemed competent to grasp (dotson 1998, 244). thus, students of color, realizing the limits of their leader’s ability or willingness to comprehend, may offer abridged palatable versions of their experiences—such that leaders will inherently be limited in knowing how race modulates students’ experiences. this process perpetuates narratives told by white field geologists. student perspectives that do not align may be smothered by a dominant white narrative before a student is even capable of articulating their experiences.   conclusion: towards a multiplicity of storytelling in geology in geology the field is a site bridging past and present. you can sweat in the desert sun, standing on rocks full of pebbles dropped by icebergs from an ice-covered globe over half a billion years ago. layers of time and climate are stacked and melted into each other, like the strata of sociocultural practices through the history of geology. by critically examining how geologists act in this space, i aimed to uncover and intercept deeply ingrained cultural patterns. in this article i attempted to demonstrate that the behavioral norms required for us field geologists to be recognized as legitimate are encoded in the discourse of origin stories told in field geology training and research. curated origin stories about the foundations of us geology are repeated to the next generation of geologists in field training and textbooks. however, the racist subplots of these histories are often omitted, even though they foreshadow the racialized and sexualized encounters many students face when they enter the field. the omission of such stories perpetuates patterns of exclusion and abuse in both training and research practice. this essay suggests a critical intervention in the discourse about the origin of us geology. i am inspired by the new relationships we can imagine between humans and the inanimate world. by examining the values and practices ingrained in disciplinary narratives, is it possible to intercept the retelling of dominant storylines to insert space for alternate practices and viewpoints? can we crack open the stories we’ve been told and unpack the values they teach? can we begin to tell a multiplicity of stories that allow new possibilities for the future of geology?   notes 1 textbooks postdate the acceptance of plate tectonic theory; see oreskes 1999.   2 for a discussion of how scientists portrayed encounters with indigenous peoples through tales of adventure, see smith 1999.   3 a 2021 campaign notes that more than 1,400 place names in the united states contain racial slurs (rangananthan et al. 2021). while these names can be found in every state, the majority are in western and southern us states, and appear in rural regions where geologic fieldwork takes place. the geoscientists behind this campaign emphasize the uneasy effect of these place names: “we cannot ask for more diversity in the earth science community and then put geoscientists of color in the situation of confronting this language in their daily work” (rangananthan et al. 2021). while many of these names may be remnants from decades or centuries ago, these place names serve as visible reminders of the deeply rooted white supremacist ideologies that continue to haunt these landscapes. see ranganathan et al. 2021.   references anadu, josh. 2020. “hazards of field work while black.” youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0b7xwgkl00&fbclid=iwar2j-fudcmrrbgapxxffnxitxooaq4nugvtjpbfmeeczx8q6_pnzx6vglgc. anadu, joshua, hendratta ali, and christopher jackson. 2020. “ten steps to protect bipoc scholars in the field.” 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w. poust, selina v. robson, judith a. sclafani, kelsey t. stilson, shamindri d. tennakoon, and carmi milagros thompson. 2021. “our past creates our present: a brief overview of racism and colonialism in western paleontology.” paleobiology 48 (2): 173–85. https://doi.org/10.1017/pab.2021.28. national science foundation. n.d. “navigating the new arctic (nna).” accessed june 1, 2022. https://beta.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/navigating-new-arctic-nna. núñez, anne-marie, jessica rivera, and tyler hallmark. 2020. “applying an intersectionality lens to expand equity in the geosciences.” journal of geoscience education 68 (2): 97–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/10899995.2019.1675131. olcott, alison n., and matthew r. downen. 2020. “the challenges of fieldwork for lgbtq+ geoscientists.” eos, august 28, 2020. https://eos.org/features/the-challenges-of-fieldwork-for-lgbtq-geoscientists. oreskes, naomi. 1996. “objectivity or heroism? on the invisibility of women in science.” osiris 11 (science in 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geontologies: a requiem to late liberalism. durham, nc: duke university press. powell, j.w., and g.w. ingalls. 1875. report of special commissioners j.w. powell and g.w. ingalls on the condition of the ute indians of utah; the pai-utes of utah, northern arizona, southern nevada, and southeastern california; the go-si utes of utah and nevada; the northwestern shoshones. washington, dc. powell, richard c. 2002. “the sirens’ voices ? field practices and dialogue in geography.” royal geographic society 34 (2): 261–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-4762.00080. press, frank, and raymond siever. 1974. earth. san francisco, ca: freeman. prothero, donald r., and robert h. dott. 2010. evolution of the earth. 8th ed. new york: mcgraw hill. ranganathan, meghana, julia wilcots, rohini shivamoggi, and diana dumit. 2021. “america’s maps are full of racial slurs—and that needs to change.” scientific american, march 30, 2021. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/americas-maps-are-full-of-racial-slurs-and-that-needs-to-change/. rainbird, rob. 2021. “old mushrooms to meteorite impacts: highlights from a geological transect along the coppermine river, canadian arctic.” virtual seminars in precambrian geology. youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yki2dhegc0. ray, sarah jaquette. 2013. the ecological other: environmental exclusion in american culture. tucson: university of arizona press. reich, jennifer a. 2003. “pregnant with possibility: reflections on embodiment, access, and inclusion in field research.” qualitative sociology 26 (3): 351–67. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1024018326659. robinson, michael f. 2006. the coldest crucible: arctic exploration and american culture. chicago: university of chicago press. schalk, sami. 2016. “reevaluating the supercrip.” journal of literary & cultural disability studies 10 (1): 71–86. https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2016.5. shaler, nathaniel southgate. 1897. nature 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today 24 (1): 52–53. https://doi.org/10.1130/gsatg176gw.1. stokes, philip j., roger levine, and karl w. flessa. 2015. “choosing the geoscience major: important factors, race/ethnicity , and gender.” journal of geoscience education 63 (3): 250–63. https://doi.org/10.5408/14-038.1. subramaniam, banu. 2014. ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. urbana: university of illinois press. terrall, mary. 1998. “heroic narratives of quest and discovery.” configurations 6 (2): 223–42. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.1998.0019. traweek, sharon. 1992. beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy physicists. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. turner, aaron. 2000. “embodied ethnography. doing culture.” social anthropology 8 (1): 51–60. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0964028200000057. urgegeoscience. n.d. urge (unlearning racism in geoscience) website. accessed july 21, 2023. https://urgeoscience.org/. vanderbeck, robert m. 2005. “masculinities and fieldwork: widening the discussion.” gender, place & culture 12 (4): 387–402. https://doi.org/10.1080/09663690500356537. wilder, craig. 2013. ebony and ivy: race, slavery, and the troubled history of america’s universities. new york: bloomsbury publishing.     author bio tamara pico is an assistant professor in earth and planetary sciences at the university of california, santa cruz, and is affiliated with the science and justice research center at uc santa cruz. book review | what comes after entanglement?: activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion, by eva haifa giraud (duke university press, 2019) peterson-salahuddin, chelsea. 2025. review of black girl autopoetics: agency in everyday digital practice, by ashleigh greene wade (duke university press, 2024). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312. © chelsea peterson-salahuddin, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | black girl autopoetics: agency in everyday digital practice, by ashleigh greene wade (duke university press, 2024) chelsea peterson-salahuddin university of michigan caaps@umich.edu ashleigh greene wade’s black girl autopoetics: agency in everyday digital practice invites us to consider what it would mean to understand contemporary black girls’ social media production practices within the larger context of their sociocultural experiences and epistemologies. throughout the book, wade positions black girls’ creative practices, such as creating and sharing tiktok dances, vlogs, and vernacular images, as a form of self-determination used to navigate and push against everyday experiences of systemic repudiation and misogynoir. while wade does not ignore the potential harm that may be brought to black girls through their use of corporate-owned social media platforms, she asks the reader to expand their conceptualization of black girls’ agency within these spaces to highlight the often dynamic, intersectional, and nuanced relationship that black girls develop with digital platforms. black girl autopoetics echoes previous works, such as catherine knight steele’s digital black feminism (2021) and moya bailey’s misogynoir transformed (2021), that situate black women and femmes’ digital practices as distinctly shaped by and in opposition to everyday experiences of racism and sexism. however, unlike the former, wade’s focus on black girls shifts the central organizing theory of black girl autopoetics away from black feminism, which, as wade acknowledges, is closely related to the conditions of black girlhood but is rooted in the experiences of adult women. here, wade puts her work in conversation with larger discussions in black girlhood studies that argue black feminism can overshadow the “girl-specific” aspects of black girls’ lived experiences, and more specifically, their media mailto:caaps@umich.edu book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) chelsea peterson-salahuddin, 2025 practices, in line with other scholars working at the intersection of technology and black girlhood, such as andrea adomako and zari taylor. thus, wade puts methodological approaches in media and technology studies, such as social media content analysis, in conversation with black girlhood studies to understand “what looking at the particularities of black girlhood can tell us broadly about digital media ecologies” (14). in this way, wade’s work continues to highlight for sts scholars the importance of being attentive to individuals’ unique and specific lived experiences in understanding their relationship to media and technology. in terms of her theoretical contribution, wade offers the concept of “black girl autopoetics” (bga) to theorize and describe black girls’ digital practices. to elucidate bga, wade draws on sylvia wynter’s (2003) definition of poiesis as “acts of making” that allow for the naming and reinvention of humanness as a rejection of and decoupling from “man,” which wynter defines in her work as the judeochristian, able-bodied, heterosexual, wealthy male. therein, autopoiesis is this act of making in relation to one’s self-identity. building on these definitions, wade defines bga as a “spatiotemporal praxis of creation” (10) through which black girls make and reflect spaces and discourse through their own subjectivities and lay claim to their distinct creative processes. further, wade suggests that while non-black girls may use digital technologies to engage in self-definition and selfmaking, “bga cannot be separated from the lived experiences and consequences of being a black girl in worlds built on and sustained by white supremacy and misogynoir” (11). in this way, wade positions black girls’ unique lived experiences, as shaped by navigating a world built on white supremacy and misogynoir, as the defining core of a bga digital praxis. subsequently, through each of the book's four main chapters, wade uses the concept of bga to frame and understand how black girls assert agency and creativity through digital media. chapter 1 illustrates how black girls’ digital practices act as a form of mapping in concert with the physical and conceptual conditions of the world around them. chapter 2 examines how black girls use social media to archive their everyday experiences of joy and achievements in opposition to societal degradation and oppression. building on this argument, chapter 3 illustrates how black girls’ posts on social media engage hypervisibility to “reject the burden of externally imposed definitions of black girlhood” (87) and present themselves through their self-defined image. finally, chapter 4 frames black girls’ digital agency as a form of temporal activism, pushing against the oppressive western, white supremacist-imposed assumptions of linear time and capability. wade’s commitment to uplifting and protecting black girls’ digital practices and agency is made visible through her careful and explicit attention to digital research ethics. in the “interlude” between the book’s introduction and four main chapters, wade makes apparent her awareness that, as a group, black girls’ race, gender, and age make them particularly vulnerable to potential harms that may book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) chelsea peterson-salahuddin, 2025 arise through the research process. in turn, she is intentional in outlining the practices she put in place to protect participants’ privacy. most notably and creatively, wade’s decision to include illustrations of black girls’ digital content, commissioned from boricua, nonbinary artist and scholar al valentín, phd, instead of reproducing the original digital images, highlights her commitment to respecting the digital autonomy of the black girls considered in her research and ensuring the “ethical visualization” (26) and recirculation of their digital content. in this way, methodologically, black girl autopoetics offers science and technology scholars a new tool to engage in ethical technology research, particularly when focusing on the practices of historically marginalized and vulnerable populations. central to the narrative and arguments that drive black girl autopoetics are wade’s own experiences, both professionally and as a black woman who was once, herself, a young black girl. as wade herself states in the introduction, “my reading of black girls’ digital content, while rooted in established analytical methodologies, is informed by my own acquired, embodied, and lived knowledge” (7). this aspect of black girl autopoetics is most salient in its first chapter, which wade foregrounds through her journey to working with black girls and studying their digital practices. throughout the chapter, wade draws on her own experiences as an educator observing the rules and assumptions k–12 institutions cast on black girls to situate their digital engagement. wade argues that these digital practices can be situated as a process of mapping, drawing on the work of fellow black girlhood scholar lakisha simmons, whereby black girls respond to and operate in parallel with the varying levels of policing and surveillance they experience in the physical and conceptual world around them. wade’s reading of these material, conceptual, and digital intersections are heavily filtered through her own emotional and embodied reading of students’ interactions. still, black girl autopoetics compellingly illustrates the complex entanglement between how black girls navigate offline and online spaces, particularly through its comparative examination of two socioeconomically distinct educational environments. chapters 2 and 3 shift the book’s object focus from black girls’ experiences to the public social media content they create. wade suggests black girls’ social media posts operate as an everyday digital archive that, in line with historical black archival practices, allows for self-representation and definition that can push against misogynoir-based stereotypes and erasure. wade’s suggestion in chapter 3 that black girls’ images online, particularly those that transgress the norms of respectability politics, make them hypervisible and invisible (when refracted through misogynoir-based stereotypes) echoes similar arguments by scholar safiya noble (2013) in her interrogation of the images of black girls populated through google search results. however, through the lens of bga, wade argues that within what she terms the “paradox of hyper(in)visibility,” black girls on book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) chelsea peterson-salahuddin, 2025 social media make themselves hypervisible as an expression of self-definition and agency in which they “refuse to take responsibility for how misogynoir corrupts our gaze” (104). thus, building on these previous arguments about the circulation of black girls’ images online, wade’s focus on how the way these images are produced invites us to interrogate how our preconceived notions of respectability undermine black girls’ ability to define the stakes of their representation. at the same time, the book’s shift away from black girls’ direct practices and actions in these sections still leaves the question open: how might black girls conceptualize these practices, and to what degree are their practices of archiving and hypervisibility intentional? rounding out wade’s examination of bga in chapter 4, she focuses on the temporal aspects of bga. wade draws on black studies to argue that the nonlinearity and agency of black temporalities (compared to white supremacist and colonial understandings of time) is reflected in how black girls use social media to engage in activism, particularly in how they undermine broader expectations of what black girls can accomplish. as wade writes, “instead of waiting for a specific moment in the linear progression from childhood to adulthood, black girl activists do not rely on age as a primary indicator of their readiness to fight for social justice” (110). thus, wade invites us to consider how our relationship to technology is dictated not only by physical space but also by time and, further, how black girls’ use of technology may shift what happens in our present moment and future. collectively, then, black girl autopoetics offers sts scholars a compelling and thoughtful example of how we might ethically and with care examine how systems of power shape the culturally specific way communities develop practices around and with technology. references bailey, moya. 2021. misogynoir transformed: black women’s digital resistance. nyu press. noble, safiya umoja. 2013. “google search: hyper-visibility as a means of rendering black women and girls invisible.” invisible culture, no. 19 (october). https://doi.org/10.47761/494a02f6.50883fff. steele, catherine knight. 2021. digital black feminism. nyu press. wade, ashleigh greene. 2024. black girl autopoetics: agency in everyday digital practice. duke university press. wynter, sylvia. 2003. “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument.” cr: the new centennial review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015. https://doi.org/10.47761/494a02f6.50883fff https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015 book review 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) chelsea peterson-salahuddin, 2025 author bio chelsea peterson-salahuddin (she/her) is an assistant professor at the university of michigan school of information. her research focuses on the culturally specific ways marginalized communities, most often black women, femmes, and queer folks, engage with mass and digital communications technologies to seek information, produce knowledge, and build community, and how the infrastructure of these technologies helps these communities to overcome or continue to replicate systemic barriers to equity. book review | black girl autopoetics: agency in everyday digital practice, by ashleigh greene wade (duke university press, 2024) references author bio     original research pollination and the horrors of the yield: scarcity and survival in the glasshouse     krista lynes concordia university krista.lynes@concordia.ca     abstract pollination is a lynchpin anchoring multispecies survival, but in the racial capitalist configurations of condensed environment agriculture, pollination politics are informed by life-depleting and carceral logics, as well as imaginaries steeped in racial hierarchies and sex binaries that ground future survival in colonial, heteropatriarchal, and normative terms. this article argues that pollination politics are focused on intensifying agriculture and increasing yield within carceral infrastructures, and that the orchestration of pollination is governed by socio-sexual schemas about fitness and fecundity that are governed by a normative reproductive futurism. joining feminist sts and queer theory, the article traces how forms of life in greenhouses and other agricultural infrastructures are “gardened” in the interests of modes of sustainability that are fundamentally exploitative. biodiversity is domesticated and depoliticized, and all forms of human and non-human vitality are directed towards increased yield. the naturalization of sexual difference influences how plant life is managed, but also how temporary foreign labor is biopolitically managed in controlled environment agricultural infrastructures. the article reads the perverse politics of scarcity through the south african film glasshouse (2021) and ends by speculating on how “wild pollination” might present more decolonial, anti-racist, queer, and liberatory sustainable futures.   keywords pollination politics; reproductive futurism; feminist sts; queer theory; condensed environment agriculture; migration; wild pollination     introduction pollination is a lynchpin anchoring multispecies survival. wind, water, birds, insects, butterflies, bats, and other animals move pollen, and all are disrupted by intensifying resource extraction and ecosystem degradation. in 2006, the calamitous prospect of bee colony collapse among apis mellifera (the european honeybee) indexed the broad disruptions to pollination caused by anthropogenic climate change, pesticide use, and industrial agriculture. it was thought that bees would disappear, and with them the end of cross-pollinating plant species (ragsdale, hackett, and kaplan 2007, 280).1 speculations on the multiple potential causes of mass bee death included cellphone waves, co-infections, nutritional deficits, chemical pesticide and insecticide use, viruses and infectious mites, and migratory stress resulting from repeatedly moving colonies to farms and industrial greenhouses. while the threat of colony collapse has since receded from the headlines, concerns persist about the capacity of pollinators to sustain current agricultural systems, particularly as climate change threatens food production worldwide. in the condensed spaces of so-called agriculture 4.0,2 greenhouses and other controlled environment agriculture infrastructures (ceas) have come to play an important role in articulating naturecultural relations of pollination, alongside hydration, light, temperature control, and optimized species development. they do so specifically by controlling interior atmospheres and by orchestrating relations among plants, pollinators, people, and technology within the condensed spaces of growing. how commercial greenhouses shape growing conditions, inform multispecies interactions, and fine-tune yield matter, not just for food security but also for the modes of kinship and flourishing that will sustain us going forward. greenhouses are one form in a larger infrastructure of late capitalist agribusiness, but given their rapid growth in the last decade (spurred in part by the drop in prices of led lighting), their capacity to enclose and enfold a set of controlled multispecies interactions, and their modeling of food security in an era of increased climate crisis, they provide a privileged epistemic angle for thinking about questions of liveliness, flourishing, yield, and energy. i see greenhouses as important forms for thinking about how sustainable food production is put into practice (or not) in complex assemblages of plants, temporary foreign laborers, bees, ai technologies, sensors, and mechanical pollinating technologies (bell, spooner-hart, and haigh 2006, 437).3 greenhouses are also compelling settings for staging the utopic and dystopic imaginaries of future survival because they enclose and orchestrate a web of cross-species relations in a structural form. they thus continually metaphorize and demetaphorize food politics and multispecies entanglement. while contemporary commercial greenhouses are frequently governed by ongoing and persistent racial capitalist logics (and specifically what katherine mckittrick [2013] calls “plantation futures”), our collective future nevertheless depends on innovations in food security, on shoring up spaces of flourishing and nourishment around the world in the face of desertification, flooding, heat waves, fires, and other increasing environmental catastrophes. the capitalist configurations of agriculture 4.0, however, put pressure on plants to increase yield through genetic alteration and control of growing atmospheres; pressure on precaritized foreign labor to work without security, residency, or rest through the terms of temporary labor contract; pressure on bee colonies to service the condensed agricultural landscapes that are still the rule through enforced detention of bee populations and controlled commercial breeding; and pressure on energy infrastructures to provide ceas with water, electricity, and light. i argue that pollination politics are informed by the life-depleting and carceral logics of global capitalism, as well as by imaginaries steeped in racial hierarchies and sex binaries that ground future survival in colonial, heteropatriarchal, and normative terms. first, such politics materially enable an intensified agriculture within the confines of new greenhouse structures (partially through the breeding of a. mellifera and b. bombus) and a multiplication of borders in the global system. through bordering regimes, commercial agribusiness infrastructures put plant species, pollinators, and pollination technologies on the move, alongside racialized temporary migrant labor, and expropriate vital energy from the global south to “insourced” agricultural infrastructures in north america, europe, and east asia, among others. second, epistemologically and politico-aesthetically, these controlled environment atmospheres of growing are shaped by socio-sexual schemas that mediate and mobilize pollination, breed and control bee species, and generate produce through potent fictions about fitness and fecundity. such fictions maintain the hegemonic priority of certain subjects over others and the structures of reproductive normativity along sexual and racial lines. thus, while we need new solutions to ensure our future survival, we also need better kinship relations to ensure that our visions of flourishing are more evenly distributed (among humans and nonhumans alike), and that our multispecies entanglements do not in fact serve expropriative aims. we must imagine at once better laboring relations, better growing relations, better pollinating relations, and better kinship ties to build futures that are less normatively coercive and less exploitative for people, plants, and pollinators. we need more “wild” forms of pollination, literally and metaphorically. only then can we imagine the shelters of greenhouses as real forms of flourishing and refuge in the face of temperature changes, drought, desertification, ongoing imperial exploitation, and other crises. i examine the material force of multispecies entanglement in intensive agricultural infrastructures, particularly circling around the politics of pollination. while many of these scenes take place in greenhouse enclosures, i argue that the greenhouse is also an epistemic angle for understanding the systems thinking in which pollination comes to be controlled. i join this analysis with an account of the imaginaries of reproductive futurism that inform visions of sustainability, well beyond the figures of the child or the family to which this critique is frequently bound in queer theory. next, through a reading of the south african film glasshouse, i draw out the implications of such imaginaries on green politics such as “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” i end by thinking speculatively about what a politics of “wild pollination” might bring to imagine more just, antiracist, feminist, and queer ecological politics. the politics of pollination a. mellifera (the european honey bee) is a key pollinator, reared and commercialized alongside intensive agricultural systems around the world. its natural range originally extended from northern europe to southern africa, and from britain to the ural mountains, western iran and the arabian peninsula. it includes more than twenty-five subspecies, with four lineages that were allopatric until large-scale transportation and mixing of a. mellifera populations occurred alongside imperial expeditions (carreck 2008, 319). a. mellifera's introduction to the north american continent dates to imperial forays from italy, spain, portugal, and elsewhere in the 1600s, where honey became a common food in the settler colonies. their continued breeding and trade traces the global routes of transnational capital, as well as the accidental forces of hurricane winds, and their own wayward movement across the north american continent (crosby 2004, 189). most importations of honey bees into north america and australia took place from the early seventeenth century to the twentieth century. the development of steamship services in the mid-nineteenth century between europe and the united states reduced the time required to cross the atlantic ocean and enabled the shipment of bees (largely italian honey bees) from apiaries in germany and italy (cobey, sheppard, and tarpy 2012, 27). the species has a complex history, entangled in imperial worldmaking, plantation economies, and racial capitalism. scientific literature on pollination ecosystems has argued that a. mellifera was a perfect complement to intensive agricultural systems—in other words, to “relatively large crop areas with little or no natural vegetation within the agricultural matrix as well as a short time period for pollination as a result of the deliberately high level of flowering synchrony within a crop field” (melin et al. 2014, 1). this argument ignores how transformation of the bee species—its exoskeleton, nervous system, digestive tract, and collective social behavior—have been remade by federal laboratories, backyard beekeepers, industrial agriculture, and global climate change (kosek 2010, 651). jake kosek (2010) notes how beehives have been reconstructed to allow easy observation and manipulation by beekeepers, as well as transportation on the back of semitrucks to serve as pollinators at sites separated by thousands of miles. these beehive transformations have also led to the transformation of bee colonies' social organization (kosek 2010, 651). for kosek (2010), the history of beekeeping and beehives are entwined with bioengineers at national laboratories, military strategists, mathematicians, military contractors, and others. his rich multisited and multispecies ethnography is worth considering on its own terms, particularly insofar as beekeeping is part of the history of imperial expansion and military applications. of particular interest here, however, is how ecological practices are entwined with broader questions of the cultural politics of nature and difference, and the political economy of the production of living organisms, which he also follows (reade et al. 2015, 440). dependence on the high yield of certain crops, and the extended growing cycles greenhouses enable, accompany the global logistics of the commercial bee trade. the commercial bumble bee industry breeds and supplies bees year round and worldwide for pollination in greenhouse and other condensed agricultural crops, particularly tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and herbs. this global movement of commercially bred bees has an impact on the pollinating relations among insects, plants, and humans in local ecosystems around the world (reade et al. 2015, 437). bees are thus instrumentalized within coercive pollination politics to serve the interests of monocrop agriculture and its productivity metrics. these politics rely on technologies such as led lighting to surpass and exceed diurnal cycles, which have effects on the labor time required in ceas and thus solicit the turn to historical founts of racialized labor from the global south to meet the needs of fourteen-hour growth cycles. bees are at once commodities, inputs, laborers, and nonhuman species life in cea systems. the infrastructures of greenhouses—because of the technical extension of growing time—coerce labor not only from temporary foreign workers but from bee species and from the plants themselves to maximize yield and respond to just-in-time production schedules. in this sense, they constitute a particularly interesting conceptual category for thinking how human-nonhuman entanglements are constituted within the agrilogistics of contemporary life. they point to an orchestration of plant-bee relations that is profoundly coerced and carceral, enclosed within the technological system of the greenhouse infrastructure. in examining the pollination politics of greenhouse enclosures, i ally with sarah ives's point that multispecies ethnography seeks to blur the boundaries of human and nonhuman not only to move beyond a human-centric analysis, but to disrupt hierarchies of power, to understand how blurring the lines of the human and nonhuman was distinctly violent, justifying land dispossession and genocide (ives 2019, 2). patent regimes, the appropriation of botanical knowledge, and of plant specimens also form part of the histories of transplantation, colonialism, and displacement that feed into contemporary agricultural emplotments (foster 2019, 2). pollination politics have been central to the organizational infrastructures of the plantation, the monocrop field, and the cea, demanding modalities of fertilization to compensate for soils, bodies, and biodiverse assemblages rendered depleted and destitute. some of the literature—in its attempts to blur boundaries and disrupt hierarchies—has effected compelling reversals around questions of pollination, positing playfully that plants themselves may “use humans as pollinators to colonize new territories” (szczygielska & cielemęcka, 4). catriona sandilands argues that, if the flower is the plant's sex organ, it signifies an invitation to pollinate, in the interests of the sexual reproduction of the plant species. in this sense, in organizing pollination, we are “servicing plant desire” (cielemęcka, szczygielska, and sandilands 2019, 6). this reversal is compelling, particularly in restituting forms of plant agency within the carceral space of commercial agriculture. in ceas, however, the practices informing a sense of what plants want seems entirely predetermined by questions of yield. the infrastructures of greenhouses and vertical gardens coerce human and nonhuman labor towards a libidinal monotony—for the plants, who cross pollinate only among themselves, for the laborers who toil among endless rows of a single crop, as well as for the bees who, given the chance, escape the greenhouse through airshafts or ventilation channels to pollinate more diverse fields outside the prison house of the greenhouse plot.4 if vegetal agency is thought to explain the reciprocal capture of humans and nonhumans in and through industrial agriculture and its alternatives, the concept must also point to the carceral arc of pollination practices across industrial and infrastructural channels in the global system. this expansion of vegetal agency helps understand how, in sandilands terms, all forms of life are being “gardened,” emploted, trained, directed, and harvested, in complex relation to growing processes (cielemęcka, szczygielska, and sandilands 2019, 6). such “gardening” practices are pivotal to the languages of “greening economies.” vegetal agency is also instrumentalized through profoundly racialized and sexed categories of fitness, fecundity, and variability, which shape the nature of greenhouse inputs, the practices of pollination, and their interrelation in food production globally, as well as the ties that bind the varied laborers and labor practices the greenhouse encloses. it's to these categories and imaginaries that i now turn. pollination futures as the previous section makes clear, questions of kinship matter, even and especially within the agrilogistics of food and farm infrastructures. pollination is not only a story of food security and ecological survival; it is also steeped in imaginaries of reproduction and persistence, contamination and toxicity, sex binaries and racial frameworks.5 through bees—but also in their entanglement with the biology of plants themselves—pollination is a site where fantasies of reproduction cross species lines, and where survival is understood through the careful orchestration of plant reproduction, productivity and yield, and labor exploitation. i am interested in what kinds of interspecies intimacies or repressive norms are raised by the question of pollination and food security, and what modes of flourishing might be imagined in visions of pollination not bound by reproductive normativity or capitalist rationality. matters of kinship lead me to the question, if pollinating relations are coerced by the monologics of intensive controlled environment agriculture, how do they condense not only capitalist logics but also sex binary and heteropatriarchal ones? what sorts of normative coercions are embedded in plant lives that might be fruitfully unpacked through feminist sts's critique of evolutionary biology and attention to multispecies entanglement, on the one hand, and queer theory's suspicion about reproductive futurity, on the other? alternately, how might wild pollination teach feminist and queer theory something about multispecies intimacy on deeper terms, pointing the way towards modes of flourishing, intimacy, kinship, and obligation that are more broadly liberatory, aligned with the goals of antiracism, gender, and sexual non-normativity, no borders politics, and environmental justice. greenhouses and vertical gardens are bound up in discourses of sustainability. these environmental discourses (particularly as they circle around species loss and colony collapse) implicitly value a “balance framework” that prioritizes a very particular kind of diversity, which becomes an input in the larger metrics of survival, profit, and yield. pollination, a fundamentally social process of lived relationality, is then reshaped by the pressures of fitness, adaptability, and variation into a coercive norm for crop yield, which affects larger social visions of sustainability, and the reproductive futurism that plays out in regulating different bodies biopolitically. diversity is not a neutral category. in this respect, banu subramaniam interrogates how questions of variation, diversity, and difference get framed in evolutionary biology's account of the reproductive life of plants (2014, 30). in studying morning glory flower color variation, she argues, the question of variation is always framed in invisible political terms bound to questions of heredity, differential fitness, adaptation, and natural selection, questions that are steeped in racial and sexual categories. plant reproduction is grounded in categories of human difference, and in ideological commitments to reproductive futurity. pollination and sexual reproduction thus inform each other in the discipline and the field, embedded in ideologies of race, nation, and sex. the language of (species) diversity within climate modeling, crop health, and food sustainability frequently mirrors and reinforces understandings of difference that are grounded in political (eugenicist) imaginaries. subramanian argues that “diversity in its recent institutional incarnation has been utterly domesticated and depoliticized” as a public good precisely because it has buried its roots in sexism and racism (2014, 15). in the theodosius dobzhansky vein of eugenic thought (the vein that prioritizes diversity as a “supreme value”), it was good for individuals to be genetically diverse, and for populations to be polymorphic (subramaniam 2014, 35). the language of species diversity that informs agribusiness and the greenhouse infrastructures of growing, however, are not truly polymorphic in any case; rather, they encapsulate diversity within a monomorphic frame. yet food-system-based survival will depend on thinking pollination beyond the diversity of bee species, and beyond the imperatives of the commercial hive and the crops they service. these distinctions bleed from evolutionary biology to commercial agriculture, where taxonomic classification of crops rely on technologies of race used to order and regulate human diversity. these taxonomies, helen anne curry argues, translate into contemporary agricultural relations (2021, 5). curry argues that the taxonomic project was coextensive with the transformations in us agriculture from open-pollinated hybrid maize to the controlled crossing of multiple inbred lines, and thus to a more controlled, evolutionary, taxonomic structure, one that was indispensable to the new social relations of agriculture 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0.6 pollination, then, is not only about crop health and species diversity, but about which bodies will be resources or inputs to increase yield, and which will be nourished and protected by those agricultural practices and knowledges. even the metaphors that govern “seeding” carry with them profoundly gendered ideas of reproduction. susannah chapman and xan sarah chacko trace the masculinist and virile discourses that are invoked by seed banking and farming, seeking instead to complicate vernacular understandings of the term seed to reflect “queer and matrilineal possibilities” (2021, 1). they argue that seeds are overdetermined by a definition grounded in male reproduction (sperm, semen), and thus overemphasize patrilineal genealogical filiation; this overdetermination masks the fact that male sperm might be more biologically equivalent to pollen than seed, even though pollinators are female. even this adaptive schema, though, covers over the queerness of seeds (a point this article aligns itself with wholly): that genres of “being seed” are “world-building projects,” because they a carried by the wind, in the guts of animals, are shared between human hands (chapman and chacko 2021, 2, 6). in this sense, pollination politics are exceptionally biopolitically informed, subject to regimes of governmentality that cross ecological, agricultural, capitalist, preservationist, and other modalities. unless pollination politics are properly understood in their (hetero)normative, specist, and frequently carceral dimensions (embedded in the hive politics of maintaining a. mellifera colonies and in the enclosed crop space of the greenhouse), a politics of “saving the bees” may simply reaffirm normative pressures on ecological systems, even in the name of “species diversity.”7 biopolitics' seizing of inanimate objects and nonhuman animals are fundamental to the “regimes of life” that constitute even ecological sensibilities (chen 2012, 6). queer theory becomes an important method through which to critique the hierarchies at play in environmental discourses, in and through the theoretical exploration of questions of intimacy, sexuality, and connectivity. pollination points to the naturecultural spheres within which vitality is the engine of exchange between human and nonhuman worlds (as nourishment, cultivation, social bond, and sustenance). pollination is a “vital matter” shaped by and in race and sex difference. my point in turning to multispecies ethnography and queer theory is to argue for how our structures of survival and flourishing need unloosing from reproductive heteronormativity, nation-state formations, capitalist capture and carceral agrilogistics. the point is not, as timothy morton elegantly argues, that “biodiversity and gender diversity are deeply intertwined,” but rather that the very concept of “biodiversity” must be decolonized and queered, to undo its mooring in discourses of difference and the pressures of reproductive normativity (2020, 276). as such, i align with morton's point that environmentalism may extend “phobias of psychic, sexual, and social intimacy,” particularly in its prioritizing of organicist and teleological ideologies (278). i see pollination as a central discourse in and through which categories of sexuality are also profoundly racialized, and thus in need of queer of color critique. such queer of color critique goes beyond the racialization of animals (though the language of africanized “killer bees” is a paradigmatic case in point), but extends to the normative and necropolitical management of reproductive life under climate catastrophe. queer theory has effectively taken up the reproductive heteronormativity embedded in the figure of the child (edelman 2004). the emergent field of “queer ecologies” has, for its part, taken up the critique of futurity through the concept of “feminist composting.” composting stands as a potent alternative to giving the earth to “our” children to inherit (cielemęcka, szczygielska, and sandilands 2019, 12). i'm interested in extending the critique of reproductive futurity to plants and pollinators. it is not only that reproductive futurity acts as an ideological anchor point for the family (and thus for the repression of queer and gender non-conforming folks in ecological visions of the future), but that the logics of reproductive futurity extend beyond the human to the conditions of multispecies reproduction, including the reproduction of plant species, bred pollinators, temporary foreign labor pools, and even energy infrastructures. all of this matters to our broad naturecultural arrangements. the border between human and nonhuman animals remains politically charged and intensely policed, but the naturalization of sexual difference across multispecies categories has been instrumental to the carceral function of the greenhouse as an agricultural enclosure, and indeed to the “plantation futures” that characterize global agricultural life. this policing, i argue, happens not only epistemologically but in and through the multiplication of borders between insides and outsides (of the greenhouse, of the nation-state, of the detention center or quarantine quarters, of native and invasive species, of good and bad refugees, of male/female functions, of productive and killer bees). similarly, temporary foreign labor is also secured by the family to which the worker must return, which consolidates the turnstile of temporariness and forbids that workers take root in the spaces in which they labor. stories of future survival, then, are steeped in reproductive fantasies that cross multispecies lines and coerce the libidinal exchanges and reciprocal capture between plants, people, and pollinators. queer theory's valorization of the force of negativity might be helpful, i argue, in thinking pollination that allows for time off, spoil, ingestion, self-pollinating and other plant rhythms, other embodied forms, and bees' variable libidinal desires. the horror of yield as my focus on storytelling indicates, imaginaries for future survival matter. some are bound to the utopic technological efficiency of a fully enclosed and automated vertical garden; others seek to integrate food production into other commercial and industrial urban infrastructure; and some seek to cordon off a space for the preservation of ways of life under threat. as such, i want to read the repressive normativity of pollination in the capitalocene through forms of mediation that expose the perverse logics of food security. i'm particularly drawn to the form of “ecological horror” (and horror affects more broadly) as sites of potent critique of our pollination politics and the costs of scarcity. the south african horror film glasshouse (egan 2021) provides a rich site for thinking about interspecies intimacy, and about the greenhouse as a medium for the reproductive politics of survival. the film serves as a lens for focusing on imaginaries of food security and their normative ideals. such ideals—the film reveals—might both come at too high a cost for the flourishing of those depleted by the current agricultural-ecological system, and occlude other forms of flourishing that coexist (sometimes barely) alongside the governing logics of contemporary agriculture. filmed on location in the pearson conservatory in port elizabeth (which is the last standing victorian greenhouse in south africa), the film is set in a dystopian future where a virus—“the shred”—has decimated social life. the shred is an airborne virus (like covid-19, which is referenced in the film as one of several prior plagues) that strips away the memories of all who inhale it. sheltered in a glasshouse, a white family of five bear the responsibility of maintaining a lush garden to sustain them, and to filter the air to keep their memory intact. to do so, they orchestrate a very controlled pollination politics, which is one of the sites of horror in the film. the film's aesthetics are lush and tropical: a wild green space on the perimeter, a carefully tended garden enclosed in it, and the sanctuary of the greenhouse in the center where, under the guiding rituals of “mother,” four children (three girls—evie, bee, and daisy—and a boy who's lost his memory to the shred—gabe) work to survive the shred's ravages. the camera is confined to this tended perimeter, and we never leave the threshold of the sanctuary space. the film opens on a sentry duty scene, where the youngest child, daisy, kills a trespasser.8 as the body is dragged into the sanctuary, the rituals begin. the body is dissected, the organs ground to feed the plants, cartilage boiled down into glue, hair cut into small bundles for pollination. their rites might be read as a practice and politics of coerced composting, putting the outsider's body to use as resource. reduce, reuse, recycle. the foreign body that crosses the border perimeter is taken up as a resource for the crop yield of the greenhouse, and its enclosed pollination politics.9 the family join around a long table to recite the verses that accompany the killing of a “fresh one.” bee then winds a red thread around a tuft of hair that serves as a tool for pollinating the plants in the greenhouse. pollination is performed by evie and bee (she is called the “last pollinator” in the film), who sing verses to remember their gardening rituals (figure 1). so it goes in the film's setting shots: the horror of the trespassers' dismembered bodies feeding into the delicate harmony of survival in the glasshouse; bedtime stories of the “monstrous” outside where the “beasts” who have no family and no longer remember their names roam; and the litanies of origin and survival that bind the family in a remembrance of their names and their roles in the cycles of life and death, and of a distinctly necropolitical politics of survival. the film's portrayal of the violent consumption of life outside the threshold for the survival of the inner sanctuary metaphorizes the differential exhaustion and depletion (on the one hand) and flourishing and nourishment (on the other) put into motion by racial capitalism, extractive economies, and the nation-state border regime. figure 1. pollination rites in the glasshouse. film still from glasshouse (2021). the narrative engine of the film is put into motion, though, when bee fails to kill a wounded trespasser. the outsider is allowed into the sanctuary to be cared for by the glasshouse dwellers. the trespasser begins as an ambiguous figure: he doesn't know if he ever had a name—he “forgets when it suits him,” according to mother. little by little, however, he assumes the role of the lost brother luca (who had left some time ago to see if there were other survivors outside). the moment the trespasser assumes this role is an induction into the social and sexual life of the glasshouse: in this scene, the trespasser reaches out to stroke bee's cheek. she brushes his hand away, saying “stop it, luca!” he responds, “i'm not; i can't be.” “why not?” bee asks. he responds, “because i don't feel for you the way a brother should.” bee smiles and says, “then you are luca!” in the closed space of the sanctuary, the problem of the family's survival is bound not only to the orchestration of pollination by evie and bee, but also to the capacity of the matriarchal family to reproduce itself. the not-quite-brother's entry into the sanctuary presents a threat to the family's unity, but also an opportunity for (hetero)sexual difference to be an engine for the family's survival. as the film progresses, the audience come to realize that “luca” is not only not the lost brother luca (the only one who believes in luca is bee), but is a revolving stand in, a repeated incursion of the outsider (and thus introduction of difference) into the space of the family in the interests of their reproductive future. the outsider's threat and necessity highlight the toxic contradictions of border mechanisms in protecting spaces of survival. for the glasshouse to be a sanctuary—a space where the air is clean, the shred does not seep in, and where there is food to feed the mouths within it—it must establish a threshold and kill those who trespass. but for it to survive over time, it needs to control the introduction of difference into its confines. this is always a risk, and must be carefully controlled in order for the orchestration of survival with scarce resources and toxic threats to be successful. the glasshouse acts as both a sanctuary (on the model of citizen-belonging) and a border (where the regulation of outsiders is violent and almost absolute). the glasshouse is the scene and threshold of scarcity's horror. this point is driven home by mother, who explains to “luca,” “everything in this house is given a purpose. the seeds are here to be planted. the fruit to ripen and be plucked. you know what your purpose is.” luca responds, “i think you have one mind.” scarcity becomes the governing principle for the greenhouse's delicate balance. the glasshouse doesn't seek to expand or to increase yield. it doesn't want to increase its population. desire is paid back in the coin of exile and death. when luca has performed his purpose and bee is pregnant, mother breaks the news to her: “our sanctuary has its limits. our leaves work very hard to keep us safe. they can only provide so many clean breaths.” “well then plant more!” bee objects. mother responds, “there's a balance. balance requires sacrifice...you wanted him; you had him; and there are consequences!” mother's politics are incapsulated in her lesson to evie: “trust mother to take care of this family. once there is a child, luca will be gone. luca always leaves.” this murderous sustainability keeps the balance of reproduction and crop yield, but at a cost: a new child means that someone will have to leave. and the affective attachments of the family prevent them from instrumentalizing each other in the interests of this delicate ecology. daisy screams to her sister evie, “i don't want mother to become glue...or a pumpkin!” the mutuality they impose on the nonhuman species in the glasshouse cannot apply to them. the family's survival is also a “survival of the fittest”: “luca,” it turns out, is immune to the shred. evie hopes that he will pass on his immunity to bee's child, that their evolution in and through their delicate ecology becomes adaptive and progressive. bee blows on a dried dandelion flower, spreading the seeds through her breath, a fertile disperser in the fields surrounding the sanctuary. evie narrates the final scene: “bee has chosen oblivion...we must let go of past seasons to clear space for new seeds. it's the natural rhythm of things.” the glasshouse is then both refuge and monstrous enclosure. it filters the shred even as it is held together with glue made from the corpses of trespassers. outsiders are monsters, beasts who are claimed by no one and who don't know their names. scarcity is built in to the sanctuary's ecosystem, and because of it no one passes the threshold into the space of survival and remembrance. the ritual refrain—“so long as we remember, we remain”—is steeped in sexualized and racialized resonances of survival. remembering is also a dismembering, a putting to use of the outsider's body for one's survival. remaining is reconfiguring, avoiding becoming compost, becoming remains. the mantra to reduce, reuse, and recycle—seen in this light—points to the potential horror of scarcity ecologies. reduction as exile; reuse as appropriation of the bodily (“i don't want mother to become glue”); recycling as pollination and filtration through the erotics of familial belonging.10 the acts of remembrance and remaining are also steeped in the historical context of post-apartheid south africa. one of the film's writers notes that the pearson conservatory was a significant site for the film: my classmates and i went to schools named after monarchs and murderers...i'm interested in interrogating how we process these narratives—what we overwrite, what we leave out, how we remember, how we're complicit in them or traumatised by them...our monuments are far from neutral. this conservatory was brought out from victorian england to cultivate exotic plants not indigenous to african soil. it's a relic of british rule, stranded in a vibrant, but unequal african metropolis. colonialism left behind relics on every continent—language, monuments. so it's how we negotiate with those memories —physically embodied in our architecture, and held in our personal and national histories. (dercksen 2022) the language of survival and scarcity, of remembrance and remaining, of pollination and reproductive futurity are bound to the aftermath of colonial violence and the segregationist logics of the apartheid regime. the film can be located in south africa's post-1994 cultural texts that rewrite histories and “redefine the master narrative” (ebrahim and ellapen 2022, 170). as such the horror of the shred, and the entangled hopes of survival are exposed as bound to a reproductive futurism that is both heterosexual and profoundly white. the film's disquieting separation of insides and outsides, of sheltered membranes and ravages of forgetting, of the monstrous and the family are all coded within the afterlives of the apartheid regime, and the settler colonial work on the land that constituted narratives of belonging for both british and afrikaaner populations. screenwriter emma lungiswa de wet notes, “a dystopian tale allows us to look at the underbelly of the dream—what's at the end of the rainbow nation? we have a long brutal history that we're only beginning to come to terms with. we're a newish democracy, a developing nation with a young population, so there's mixed energy and frustration. sci-fi and afrofuturism offer a path of imagining alternate futures” (vourlias 2021). it should be emphasized that south african environmentalism, also, was frequently a tool of racial oppression, a justification for the forcible removal of black south africans to “preserve and protect wildlife” (hacker 2017, 301; dlamini 2020). birds' eye perspectives of african wildlife, and the focus on rich landscapes or mega-fauna contributed to south africa's legacy of environmental racism and injustice, and has made unity under environmental concerns impossible. notions of “pristine environments” in such environmental movements frequently occlude black labor, displacement, and apartheid-capitalist practices (hacker 2017, 303). further, naturalized ideas about race and of plant life intersected with the classification of ethnic groups in south africa, which in turn justified land seizures and facilitated colonial settlement, symbolized by the pretoria greenhouse (ives 2019, 2). ives further argues that the transplantation of plants such as eucalyptus disrupted relations between local people, plants, insects, and soils, and lay the foundation for the dispossession of the khoi and san peoples (ives 2019, 3). south africa is also a site for contemporary bioprospecting and plant patenting (laura foster [2017] details the complex assemblage of actors and social forces that constituted the site of hoodia cultivation and export in south africa.) the greenhouse in the film glasshouse thus becomes a powerful metaphor for the infrastructural arrangements, agricultural practices, and gendered and racialized social arrangements that govern the control of plant species, knowledge, and profit in the current moment. the garden in glasshouse demonstrates how “nature is actively being made” (friese in foster 2017, 25) on a substrate of racial, sexual, and reproductive imaginaries. foster also points to how plant materialities alternately refuse or align with the forces that seek to shape their growth and organization, and thus the complex and multiple modalities of materiality that constitute emplotments around the world (foster 2017, 35). it's in this sense also that the entanglement of the environmental slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle” can become a site of horror. under the sign of scarcity, within the circuits of post-apartheid capitalist extraction, labor exploitation, contractual benefit sharing arrangements, segregationist border politics, such politics can only be about differential extractive operations. glasshouse thus situates its horror affects within the sexual and racial politics of post-apartheid south africa, with pollination as the key site of the orchestration of socio-sexual relations in the interests of a particular vision of survival. it makes clear that the normative frameworks through which pollination is understood have profound effects on the shape of social life in a future imaginary, and that we may need other schemas to think survival and flourishing than those on offer within certain forms of environmentalism and sustainability discourses. the “uncontrollable lives of pollinators” pollination need not be bound to epistemologies of scarcity and fitness. it might rather point in the direction of new modalities of lived relationality, and new practices of interdisciplinary knowledge. witness deborah bird rose's vivid account of the australian flying fox, which pollinates myrtaceous trees and shrubs. her story is one of energy flowing across species and systems, a set of “embodied time knots” in which foxes move from the hillsides to the riverbanks and channels, as the trees flower sequentially, bringing in the rains that will nourish the drier country (rose 2012, 133). pollination might summon up queer interspecies intimacies, if only we can unseat it from languages of scarcity, reproduction, fitness, and survival. hence the importance donna haraway places in speculative fabulation to summon new imaginaries and vocabularies for thinking entanglement and flourishing. the metaphors and imaginaries by and through which pollination take place shape how we understand survival, transmission, erotic life, toxicity, and nourishment, for better or for worse. yet pollination is currently ensnared in reproductive futurism's broad net, particularly under the agricultural conditions of climate catastrophe and the exponential growth of greenhouses and other infrastructures of controlled environment agriculture in the last decade as sites for intensifying the space and time of crop production, and thus increasing yield. the greenhouse—as an ideological container and an epistemic lens—influences how we understand the crisis of pollination, the collapse of bee colonies, the strain on plant and crop life, and the solutions that agricultural infrastructures propose. part of the way in which we conceive of pollination under ecological duress is through the same “ecosystem simplification” that is enacted by monocrop agribusiness, increased greenhouse yield, and food security regimes. the structures of pollination (like the larger infrastructures of greenhouses and agriculture 4.0) are governed by considerations of scale, rate, speed, synchronicity, and managing complexity (haraway 2015, 99). we need stories to tell of the costs of pollination as it is currently practiced—under the sign of scarcity and increased yield; and we need stories to tell of the possibilities of multispecies knots as central to our collective survival. what kinship ties emerge from different pollination politics and different stories, the racialized and gendered dynamics they embody, and the conditions of exhaustion or exhilaration that might accompany them? in subramanian's analysis, she explains that the greenhouse was a site where genetic crosses could be carried out in plants “away from the uncontrollable lives of pollinators” (2014, 43). i am compelled to think what happens when we focus on these uncontrollable lives, and posit a social, political, and aesthetic form from them. what might an “uncontrollable life” look like for growing food in the future? for imagining kinship and intimacy and mutuality? to queer pollination politics requires a different figure than attempting to recuperate vexed categories of pollinators, such as “killer bees.” a reliance on the negativity of “killer bees” would constrain pollination to a narrow anti-social queer politics (lee edelman's [2004] “synthomosexual” in apian form), difficult to square with a focus on decolonial and ecological survival. but what about a politics of wild pollination? “wild pollinators” and “diverse pollinator assemblages” provide better pollination to crops, even though they cannot sustain intensive agricultural landscapes. for the most part, studies of so-called “wild pollinators” have been bound within a monomorphic frame, as complements to crop productivity on intensely managed landscapes (nicholson and ricketts 2019, 29). on its own terms, though, wild pollination might engage different multispecies cooperative networks for food security going forward. to find instances of wild pollination we might draw from robin kimmerer's notion of “energetic reciprocity.” through her return to indigenous knowledges, she learned to learn “where plants bloomed, whom they cohabitated with, for whom they were food, which animals lined their nests with its fibers, what medicine it offered, how they got their names” (kimmerer 2013, 44). in and through this knowledge, she returned to the question of asters and goldenrods' riveting companionship: through human color perception, and the eye's particular receptivity to purple and yellow; through artmaking and the complementarity of colors in reciprocal pairs; and through the nonhuman sensorial field of the bee driven to pollinate (46). what kimmerer identifies is not a phenotype, nor a binary structure of reproduction; rather, kimmerer sees an “architecture of relationships,” built in and across scientific modes of training and traditional knowledge, and a “grammar of animacy,” a mode of “listening in wild places” (46-48). wildness has been taken up in queer theory, too. jack halberstam and tavia nyong'o affirm that, while wildness is a term with a history as the “dumping ground for all that white settler colonialism has wanted to declare expired, unmanageble, undomesticated, and politically unruly,” they nevertheless see in wildness a capacity to see “what an idea has always gathered in its wake” (2018, 453). halberstam cautions against investing in a wildness from the past, or a future restored wilderness; instead, he sees the “wild” as a “terrain of alternative formulations that resist the orderly impulses of modernity,” and thus works to actively resist (rather than conform to) colonial, capitalist, and normative epistemologies (halberstam 2020, 2). this form of wildness works towards a “disorder of things” rather than an “order of things” (halberstam and nyong'o 2018, 454), and thus towards undoing the coercive categories by and through which modes of flourishing are shaped. the “wildness” of current attempts to supplement bred pollinators with a more diverse set of pollination practices within commercial agricultural spaces remains bound to the orders of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and species differentiation. given the vexed histories of the category of the “wild”, wild pollinators may yet reaffirm colonial epistemological distinctions. yet because solutions are said to be found in the capacity of “wild pollinators”, i am interested in staying with this term. i take the concept of “wild pollination” as an invitation to think wildness differently, not as a category of things (bees themselves) but as an entangled set of practices that might work to undo the order of things in controlled environment agriculture (including the logic that would assign the category “wild” to specific objects or species). i acknowledge, nevertheless, that “wild pollination” is risky, and that taken as an assignation it might yet confirm distinctions i mean to undo by reappropriating wild pollination, not as a thing in itself but as a process. thus, in my use, wild pollination thus doesn't belong in a time or place that's outside the contemporary spaces of urban and rural plant life; it might, though, undo its monologics. while many species of bees (who are categorized as “wild pollinators”) are captured by the carceral control of survival, in and through greenhouse enclosures, nation-state borders, agribusiness farm plots, and the commodification of precarious labor, there might yet be possibilities for a different politics of survival if we take seriously what “wild pollination” might mean for our social, sexual, and cultural lives. in this sense, we might dwell with the idea that “colony collapse” is an indicator not of a failure to “save the bees,” but of the unsustainability of settler food practices for our multispecies survival. wild pollination's refusal to support intensified agriculture could point the way to food politics that rely on an entirely different disorder of things (decolonial, feminist, antiracist, and queer/trans*), and to new sites of critique for the racialized and sexualized categories in and through which we think sustainability and survival. it also moves us beyond a conservation politics that is largely based in settler colonial understandings of taxonomic orders, local knowledges, “native” species, and the preserved order of things (curry 2021, 14). how then might we complexify our ecosystems thinking, and think the politics of pollination and the reproduction of life outside the normative frameworks that become sites of horror in glasshouse? i believe that feminist, queer and trans, and decolonial perspectives offer a unique ground from and through which to critique notions of adaptability, survival, fitness, and futurity, particularly insofar as they understand the differential, sex and gender normative, and regulative function of these terms within evolutionary biology, biopolitics, and carceral nation-state formations. a figure haraway works with in telling the story of the chthulucene is not only gaia and medusa, but also potnia melissa, mistress of the bees, “draped with all their buzzing-stinging-honeyed gifts,” who stands in opposition to the technohumanist figurations of the “forward-looking, sky-gazing anthropos” (2016, 52-53). a proper devotion to potnia melissa might work to counter the sites of horror in the film *glasshouse because of the figure's lateral, tentacular, alinear, agendered embodiment. living and dying well, according to haraway, involves “join[ing] forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and recomposition, which must include mourning irreversible losses” (101). what glasshouse opens us onto is the possibility of thinking pollination as a process—like compost—that can model lived relationality, precarity and survival on different, queerer, antiracist terms. wild pollinators force us to focus on complex and less-intensified landscapes, and to adjust our epistemologies and politics to them. looked at through kimmerer's lens of lived relationality, the unsustainability of wild pollinators is perhaps a gift. unmanaged, species-differentiated, less “efficient,” more robust, indigenous, and migratory at once in a non-carceral field. note that sometimes wild pollinators are the same species of bee (a. mellifera); sometimes not. this is not a taxonomic distinction. curry stresses (in her analysis of maize taxonomies) that “indigenous” corn varieties were a slippery object, an “ostensible botanical category” that was inflected by ideas about indigenous peoples (2021, 12). what makes some pollinators “wild” is, as karen barad argues, “that their very species 'being', as it were, makes explicit the queering of 'identity' and relationality” (2022, 126). they do so because they have no identity that precedes their relation to other critters, plant life, and humans. pollinating is a practice or task, not a taxonomy. rose, cited above, reconstructs the sense of inheritance and entanglement i take barad to mean by thinking what she calls “temporal diversity” across sequential and synchronous timeframes (rose 2012, 128). the connections across generations of species (as well as between and among currently living beings) offers the basis for what rose calls “the life-giving and life-affirming qualities of ethical time,” embedded in nourishing relations between non-biological kin such as flying foxes, myrtaceous trees, and rain seasons (2012, 128). central to her careful study is what she calls an “interface”—a site of encounter and nourishment—that is at once embodied, temporally criss-crossed, and knotted. failure to honor this ethical time leads to a “double death”—the death of the generation, and the death of the species, an “aenocide” that violates the mutualism at the heart of multispecies knots (137). central to my argument here, this intersection is not only ethical but libidinal, a “story of desire: of how flying foxes and trees want to live” (134). what could be more liberatory and queer than her image of flying foxes carrying “eucalyptus futures on their furry little faces” (135)? this wildness might also be found in seeds themselves. as chapman and chacko argue, seeds don't follow the patrilineal imaginaries imposed on them. they derive from “self-pollination, polyamorous cross-pollination, and multispecies orgies of flowers and pollinators” (chapman and chacko 2021, 6). they don't conform to any particular gender identity and practice forms of sexuality—vegetative propagation, asexual growth, multiple reproductive organs—that defy binary thinking (6-7). seeding in multispecies collaboration can defy the logics of monocrop repetition that govern greenhouse growing, on the clock, enclosed in controlled atmospheres, orchestrated to just-in-time markets. we have at hand social justice frameworks for imagining wild pollination within and without the spaces of greenhouses: mutual aid frameworks might help collectively articulate new frameworks to meet each others' survival needs (across species lines) (spade 2020). examples exist in community gardens, food distribution programs, and histories of illicit and resistant garden plots; no borders politics might liberate the capacity for more just, less surveilled, regulated, and exploited movement of workers, plants and pollinators, creating more variegated knowledge bases, species interminglings, and pollinating practices, in greenhouse enclosures and outside of them. new rights regimes might even emerge from the work of tending, from the vital labor contributed to spaces of flourishing worldwide (azoulay 2019).11 we see these instances in attempts at urban and rooftop gardens in food deserts and other areas subject to the violence of redlining. we also see this in indigenous projects such as digital mi'kmaq's ugpi'ganjig community garden (ugpi'ganjig, n.d.). queer and trans* commitments to thinking futurity on non-heteropatriarchal terms—or terms which resist or seek to abolish sex binaries altogether—might present new relations to plants and pollination, and to the intimacies made possible by dreaming up new spaces of flourishing and embodied life (halberstam 2020; keegan 2020). in return, wild pollination might instruct feminist, queer and trans* theory about the diversity of forms of embodied living and libidinal practices across an unclassifiable variation of species and pollinating relations. these practices might move us out of the retrenchments in naturalizing categories that have produced racist or anti-trans* politics within feminist or queer theories of multiplicity, for instance. wild pollination might summon up a more expansive vision of a world without borders than those posited within justice frameworks focused solely on the human toll exacted by bordering regimes. the multiplicity of pollinators, gardeners, and plant species might join together in a reciprocal capture that points towards queer futures rather than reproductive heteronormativity. thus, wild pollinators present a material, aesthetic, and epistemic promiscuity we might learn from if we want to think other models of sustainability and survival, ones that redefine our very conditions of flourishing. notes 1 in the early 2000s, beekeepers reported losing 30 percent to 90 percent of the hives, without a recognizable cause.   2 agriculture 4.0 refers to an agricultural system that harnesses the energy of the cloud—the internet of things, precision agriculture, and artificial intelligence—to manage its inputs and outputs for optimal growth. i argue elsewhere that the narratives of sequential operating system updates (agriculture 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0) are stories about energy, about the movement from animal force to combustion engines; from machinery to gps systems and guide systems, and from these to cloud computing. see lynes, “how like a leaf: the vital energy in greenhouse infrastructures” (forthcoming). a privileged site for agriculture 4.0 is condensed environment agriculture, largely within commercial greenhouse infrastructures around the world (escamilla-garcía et al. 2020).   3 this article is part of a larger project that considers greenhouses as media insofar as they orchestrate and put pressure on spatial and temporal relations. see lynes, “how like a leaf: the vital energy in greenhouse infrastructures” (forthcoming).   4 this libidinal monotony is characteristic of what haraway et. al. calls the “long-distance simplification of landscapes all over the world,” which was accompanied by the wiping out of places of refuge for diverse human and non-human species assemblages (2016, 556). at the same time, as natasha myers makes clear, “we do not yet know what is proper to a plant ” (2017,298).the monocrop logics that undergird controlled environment agriculture may service the plants they enclose, and yet ceas set in motion a set of human/plant relations that have fragilized ecosystems and local economies and centralized profit on imperial and racial capitalist terms. myers notes donna haraway's reminder that we continue to ask “for whom and at what cost?” when we try to think about what plants may want (2017, 298).   5 “killer bees” animated highly racialized cultural imaginaries with the introduction of “africanized” strains of bees (a. mellifera scutellata) to brazil in the mid-twentieth century. their gradual spread northward through the us southern states was seen as dangerous and invasive, and efforts at control were highly coded by anti-miscegenistic population control measures. these “killer bees” were the object of the widely panned horror film the swarm (1978). they are considered more dangerous because they attack intruders in greater numbers than a. mellifera and react to disturbances more quickly. it is impossible not to see in the imaginaries of “africanized” and “european” honey bees the playing out of racial capitalism on a global scale, and to see the “killer bee” as an overdetermined racialized object.   6 elaine gan (2019) also focuses on the racialized trajectories of rice (oryza) in tracing the co-evolution of people and plants through mutual selection and propagation. the use of categories such as “modern,” “elite,” “improved hybrids,” “native,” or “wild” are all bound to genealogies with specific naturecultural and social consequences.   7 again, the overdetermined echoes between xenophobic and anti-immigration policies and the fear over “africanized bees” is indicative of how an over-“animacy” (the hyper-responsiveness—and thus “aggressivity”—of killer bees) is steeped in racial and sexual categories and fears over miscegenation.   8 it should be noted that the trespassers are all bedraggled white men, typified as “beasts” who do not remember their names. in the context of the film's setting in south africa, the fact that the acts of survival, forgetting, and exclusion all play out among white characters is poignant, and demonstrates how these phobias and boundaries play out not only around questions of miscegenation and difference, but also importantly within sites of hegemonic belonging.   9 the instrumentalization of the foreigner's body may be read also in the light of the historical and global reliance around the world for “temporary foreign workers” from the global south to work in the agricultural sectors of north american and european cities. see my article, “how like a leaf” (forthcoming).   10 a beautiful account of the dangers of individual (and often heroic and 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anthropocene to the planthroposcene: designing gardens for plant/people involution.” history and anthropology 28 (3): 297-301. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2017.1289934. nicholson, charles c., and taylor h. ricketts. 2019. “wild pollinators improve production, uniformity, and timing of blueberry crops.” agriculture, ecosystems & environment 272 (february 15), 29-37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2018.10.018. ragsdale, nancy, kevin hackett, and kim kaplan. 2007. “vanishing honey bees: colony collapse disorder.” outlooks on pest management 18 (6): 280-82. https://doi.org/10.1564/18dec10. reade, carol, robbin thorp, koichi goka, marius wasbauer, and mark mckenna. 2015. “invisible compromises: global business, local ecosystems, and the commercial bumble bee trade.” organization & environment 28 (4): 436-57. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026615595085. rose, deborah bird. 2012. “multispecies knots of ethical time:” environmental philosophy 9 (1): 127-40. https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil2012918. spade, dean. 2020. mutual aid: building solidarity during this crisis (and the next). london: verso. subramaniam, banu. 2014. ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. urbana: university of illinois press. tsing, anna l. 2015. the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton, nj: princeton university press. ugpi'ganjig. n.d. “ugpi'ganjig community garden in partnership with digital mi'kmaq.” accessed december 4, 2022. https://ugpi-ganjig.ca/ugpiganjig-community-garden/. vourlias, christopher. 2021. “south africa's local motion innks three-pic pact with svod showmax, dros trailer for fantasia premiere 'glasshouse.'” variety, july 29, 2021. https://variety.com/2021/film/global/local-motion-pictures-showmax-glasshouse-fantasia-1235029349/.     author bio krista lynes is canada research chair in feminist media studies, associate professor of communication studies, and co-director of the feminist media studio at concordia university. their current research, greenhouse effects: the mediation of life and the migration of labor, explores how greenhouses have been a central infrastructure for the racialized, classed, and gendered global movement of humans, plants, animals, knowledge, and culture under the persistent structures of global capitalism. book review | dear science and other stories, by katherine mckittrick (duke university press, 2021) prescod-weinstein, chanda. 2022. review of dear science and other stories, by katherine mckittrick (duke university press, 2021). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © chanda prescod-weinstein, 2022 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | dear science and other stories, by katherine mckittrick (duke university press, 2021) chanda prescod-weinstein university of new hampshire chanda.prescod-weinstein@unh.edu in dear science and other stories, katherine mckittrick tells a recursive tale of black thought, black life, black loss, black triumph, black brilliance, black love, and yes, hallelujah, black science. by drawing together ideas from geography, black feminist thought, literature, computer science, feminist technoscience, and philosophy of science, mckittrick maps out an ecosystem that understands black thought and creativity as black liberation. the book succeeds as a major contribution to these fields and points to a needed overlap between them. in other words, dear science is an ambitious, significant text with deep roots. to read dear science is to be caught up in its own recurring algorithm of what mckittrick calls “black livingness” (3). black livingness, mckittrick argues, is contained in how we—black people—tell stories about our universe, and importantly, our selves are always contained in that universe. to define the phrase beyond that is to risk oversimplification: the entire book is a simultaneous definition and noticing of black livingness. in the final pages, mckittrick does hint at the conclusion we are meant to come to, which is that “black rebellion, the work of liberation, regardless of scale, is livingness” (186). it has now been a year since i first read the book, and every text i have picked up since reading this book has been read through the prism of mckittrick’s words. in this sense, dear science is an enormously successful, lengthy refrain. because the work drew my attention to the “affective-physiological-corporeal-intellectual labor” (3) of black/intellectual life, i was called to read myself and my work through the text—and indeed all black creative work that i have since engaged with in any serious way. book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) chanda prescod-weinstein, 2022 dear science functions as an important intervention in a moment where there are extensive and at times vitriolic debates about defining “blackness,” “black life,” and the very idea of whether there is such a thing as black living(ness). rather than choosing a side in the debates, for example, about afropessimism vs. its critics, mckittrick chooses to comprehensively notice “the physiological work of black liberation” (3). the lingering question, of course, is what counts as black liberation work. and it is here that dear science takes a strong position, answering this question affirmatively and analytically, rather than through the lens of what is not black liberation. black liberation is co-produced by intellectual work that loves on black people, that notices our bios and mythoi, which as the jamaican philosopher and novelist sylvia wynter articulated them, are our matter and meaning. that is to say, the physicality and creativity of black livingness. those who are familiar with mckittrick’s work as a black feminist geographer will not be surprised to hear that to read her is to read the world through the lens of her reading of wynter. their seven-year exchange, which appears in sylvia wynter: on being human as praxis, specifically the chapter “unparalleled catastrophe for our species? or, to give humanness a different future: conversations,” echoes throughout dear science, including in its fundamental discursive framing around “science” itself. in a footnote, mckittrick explains that her reading of science is through the idea of scientia. in my view as a practicing scientist, this is a reading of science’s roots back into science: a challenge to the scientific establishment to develop a firmly established commitment to rational knowledge production. one might argue that science as an institution has already made this commitment, but the fact that one must continuously make the case for how black thought is scientific thought suggests otherwise. black stories of black livingness articulate bios and mythoi, and the fact of black positionality in humanity. in this way, dear science reads as an experiment with wynter’s theory of homo narrans. by noticing black “corporeal and affective labor,” our understanding of the entire species is illuminated. simultaneously, by orienting around this word, this institutional structure that has so much power, mckittrick channels wynter’s refusal to be disciplined into categories that are not constructed with black flourishing in mind, quipping that “discipline is empire” (36). as mckittrick notes in her january 2019 letter that begins “dear science,” at the end of dear science, “to be black is to recognize and enervate the fictive perimeters of you, science” (186). black liberation work is disruptive to disciplining, to disciplines. black livingness is both made possible by black resistance and it is also transcendent, made possible, recursively, by its own undeniability. here again we see mckittrick experimenting with what it means to apply wynter’s ideas: to revise how we read ourselves and each other through a broad conception of science. book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) chanda prescod-weinstein, 2022 a complete mapping of black livingness, particularly in relation to science, requires excavating how science has aided and abetted in the construction of blackness. mckittrick attends to this in “(zong) bad made measure,” a deep dive into scientific racism, race science, and how black studies exists in part as a refutation of scientific racism but also sometimes reifies one of scientific racism’s core principles, that race is biological nature. the story told in this chapter addresses “the social production of biologically determinist racial scripts” and how they “can be dislodged” by a confrontation with black livingness and black labor (125). continuing her own discursive confrontation with the constraints of a whitedominant academy, mckittrick does not write only in paragraphs that span the page’s margins. in “(zong) bad made measure,” she also writes in parallel columns, giving us the option of reading horizontally or vertically, a topography on the page that evokes a multitude of distinct experiences, all of them required to get at the completeness of the story. the word zong itself references a grotesque eighteenth-century incident where the europeans crewing the ship zong drowned over one hundred kidnapped africans because it led to more profit than letting their captives live. the word also now has a secondary invocation for those familiar with black (canadian) literature: poet m. nourbese philip’s book-length poem, zong! thus, its invocation functions as both a reference, yes, to black death, but also to black storytelling and black livingness through poetry. this portion of the book is preceded by a playlist compiled by mckittrick and fellow black intellectuals. the list of songs acts as a buffer between the analysis in “(zong) bad made measure” of the theory that underpins scientific racism and race discourse and the chapter that precedes the list, “failure (my head was full of misty fumes of doubt).” “failure” is about the digitization of racism and its production of black death and suffering, or what safiya umoja noble (2018) has called algorithms of oppression. mckittrick outlines her attempts to write her own algorithm, with the understanding that “algorithms are future-making mathematical equations” and “our methodologies are, in themselves, forms of black well-being?” (116). again, mckittrick is unpacking what black liberation possibilities look like. rather than rejecting algorithms, she considers what afrofuturist possibilities can be imagined with and articulated through them. mckittrick ultimately expresses a sense of failure because, after trying to teach herself the fundamental tools of algorithmic work—specifically, how to write computer code—she finds herself unable to take up the necessary tools. when i interviewed her about dear science for public books, i suggested that collaboration is essential for black liberation (prescod-weinstein 2021b). i book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) chanda prescod-weinstein, 2022 wondered whether, if mckittrick had tried to develop the algorithm with a black scientist, the outcome might have been different. there is a way in which this letter at the end feels as if it was directly written to me, the lone black woman particle physics theory professor living in a world that cannot imagine me, one in which i must conjure myself daily. perhaps it is seeking collaboration. my own book the disordered cosmos is certainly prefigured in her note that “reader wrote of future pathways…quarks and curved space” (2021a, 187), because indeed that is what my book is about. my suspicion is that part of the richness of dear science is exactly that so many black thinkers and makers will find that they have an intimate connection with the book. here is a book in which we are imagined, theorized, and brought to life. each exquisite sentence of dear science is comprised of layers of meaning. still, mckittrick thought carefully about the importance of readability and how the physicality of the book would be experienced, complete with pages for notes at the back of the book. i appreciated the deliberate decision to eschew endnotes in favor of footnotes that could be read in tandem with the text. though sometimes the footnotes are physically disruptive to the page, it produces a book that is easier to navigate than ones with endnotes often are. there is also an aesthetic to the book, which is printed on glossy paper and midway through contains a curated exhibit of artistic photography. on each page of dear science, readers will find a reminder that black (livingness) is beautiful, complex, and brilliant. references mckittrick, katherine. 2015. sylvia wynter: on being human as praxis. durham, nc: duke university press. noble, safiya umoja. 2018. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press. philip, m. nourbese. 2008. zong! toronto: the mercury press. prescod-weinstein, chanda. 2021a. the disordered cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred. new york: bold type books. ———. 2021b. “public thinker: katherine mckittrick on black methodologies and other ways of being.” public books, february 1, 2021. https://www.publicbooks.org/public-thinker-katherine-mckittrick-on-blackmethodologies-and-other-ways-of-being/. author bio chanda prescod-weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the university of new https://www.publicbooks.org/public-thinker-katherine-mckittrick-on-black-methodologies-and-other-ways-of-being/ https://www.publicbooks.org/public-thinker-katherine-mckittrick-on-black-methodologies-and-other-ways-of-being/ book review 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) chanda prescod-weinstein, 2022 hampshire. she is the author of the disordered cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred. book review | dear science and other stories, by katherine mckittrick (duke university press, 2021) references author bio six ways of looking at fractal mechanics gundermann, christian. 2024. “the covid emergency as autoimmune disease.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–37. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © christian gundermann, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license the covid emergency as autoimmune disease christian gundermann mount holyoke college cgunderm@mtholyoke.edu abstract this article analyzes the united states biosecurity state’s orchestration of the covid19 phenomenon into a public health emergency, tracing the legal platforms that made this mobilization possible. leaning on the longstanding reverberations between political and biological discourses around immunology, i argue that the polis entered into a state of autoimmune disease where its public/private biosecurity organisms attacked its own body politic. covid-19 constitutes the culmination of a development that had been in the making for several decades. besides parsing the central legislative inventions that form the basis of this operation, the article analyzes the most central medical countermeasure deployed as the ostensible remedy to the public health emergency. a novel technological platform (mrna transfection) is introduced as the solution to the threat of infection (falsely promising immunity). this platform is equally built on autoimmune logic, not traditional immunity. unlike previous vaccine technologies, synthetic mrna transfections coerce the body’s cells to produce the antigen against which the immune reaction is mounted. the immune system will then attack those cells that express the antigen, the most publicly acknowledged example being myocarditis. the feedback loop between biological and political discourses on autoimmune disease has begun to restructure societies globally. keywords autoimmune disease, covid-19, biosecurity state, transfection, public health emergency special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 2 it is not surprising that for the virus one speaks of war. the emergency measures obligate us in fact to life in conditions of curfew. but a war with an invisible enemy that can lurk in every other person is the most absurd of wars. it is, in reality, a civil war. the enemy is not outside, it is within us. —giorgio agamben, quoted in cynthia l. haven,“giorgio agamben on coronavirus: ‘the enemy is not outside, it is within us’”” today, america would be outraged if un troops entered los angeles to restore order. tomorrow they will be grateful! this is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. it is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. the one thing every man fears is the unknown. when presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the world government. —henry a. kissinger, at the 1991 bilderberg conference americans live in a cavern of fear, a psychic, numbing force manufactured by the so-called entertainment industry, reified by the psychological industry, and buttressed by the coercion industry…the state’s coercive apparatus of “public safety” is erected as a needed protective counterpoint. —mumia abu-jamal, quoted in dylan rodríguez, “the political logic of the non-profit industrial complex" the human body is mortal by nature. hence illnesses are inevitable. why does a man only go to the doctor when he is ill, and not when he is well? because not only the illness, but even the doctor is an evil. under constant medical tutelage, life would be regarded as an evil and the human body as an object for treatment by medical institutions. is not death more desirable than life that is a mere preventive measure against death? —karl marx, “on freedom of the press” preliminaries many of the figureheads of the covid-19 public health establishment are familiar faces from the aids epidemic. that medicine is an overtly political practice has again become abundantly clear since 2020. the nexus between politics and medicine that will be explored here more specifically is autoimmune disease, both as a metaphor for health emergency politics and as a bodily logic in relation to the covid countermeasures. autoimmune disease was initially denied by immunology for nearly half a century: “the idea of autoimmune disease—a special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 3 destructive reaction of the immune system against one or another of the body's own constituents—was unthinkable” (mackay 2010, a252). the history of immunity and the “immune system” has a long political trajectory, never too far from political violence and war logics (neocleous 2022, 58). to state my central contention upfront, it is useful to analyze the political and scientific events of the covid crisis along immunological, and specifically autoimmunitary, lines: not only because of the longstanding entanglements of politics and immunology; not only because covid emerged as an infectious disease and therefore an immunological problem; not only, further, because there is a special argument to be made about autoimmune disease and transfection (the gene technology employed in the majority of covid “vaccines"); but mainly perhaps because the terror that governments and their emissaries have begun to visit upon their populations in the “free west” (much like the long-familiar state terror in many countries of the global south and east) have turned to public health and biomedicine as their main vectors of implementation. perhaps like in psychiatry, pharmaceutical substances and digital technologies have become the new straightjackets, superseding the classical biopolitical institution of the mad house. the more overt violence of classical biopolitics, which, in the name of safety, has sought to exert control and surveillance, and enforce compliance, is paradigmatically superseded by biomedical and high-tech procedures (preciado 2012, 34). the period between the emergence of the us federal public health response to the aids crisis in the early 1980s and the appearance of covid in 2020 constitutes the historical moment in which the public/private apparatus of “pandemic emergency response” is built and refined along neoliberal lines, conjoining massive corporate interests with the centralization of political power. this is what i will call the antibody industrial complex, which has not only transformed the legal and political frameworks of the american polis over this period in question, but also bent a significant portion of immunology and virology to its purposes. mark neocleous recently summarized the tremendous paradox between security and lethal violence against the very body politic that securitization is meant to protect: “sovereignty thrives on fictions, most notably the fiction of immunity. but it equally thrives on the fiction of security. perhaps that is why security and immunity live and kill together, even to the extent of destroying the very body we think they are protecting” (2022, 30). we must understand the security/violence nexus to grasp how this system of health-based public safety operates. like the infamous drug cartels (more overtly acting in countries where all semblance of the rule of law has already been eviscerated), the public-private health juncture (governments, corporations, philanthropist foundations) protects and oppresses. it protects those who do its bidding and annihilates those who defy it. it also protects and oppresses those who do its bidding in less conspicuous ways. in the name of security, its authoritarian goal is ultimately to convert constitutional rights into permissions that are granted rather special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 4 than guaranteed. under the emergency provisions, the citizen is habituated to applying for permissions, exemptions, provisional freedoms if available. as such, the authoritarian state of emergency is of course all too familiar to populations in the global south (a geographic designation linked to the history of colonialism and racism), but also to racialized and/or immigrant populations within the “free” west/north for whom constitutional rights were never a reality. this “uncontrollable search for security” (neocleous 2022, 28) will be shown to be at the heart of how the system catapulted people into panic and compliance in 2020. particularly the “middle managers” would have been driven by this security logic of their actions that implemented the countermeasures (“keeping people safe,” “saving lives”), even if this cannot be true for the elites, lead scientists, and upper echelons of the government agencies who have carefully constructed the legal, political, and scientific entrapments over the period in question, and have always disposed of the data that proved their harmful effects. the first part of this article will explain the history of public health politics as an autoimmune disease where the state as metaphoric immune system turned against the body politic by means of profound legal, institutional, and scientific transformations. the second part will analyze in technical terms how transfection (mrna “vaccination”) as a technology applied to public health operates in lockstep with this same autoimmune turn—that is, how it represents a heightened degree of autoimmune logic in comparison with older forms of immunization to the point where immunity is no longer even the investigational end point. part i setting the stage for 2020 even though jacques derrida is one of the more prominent recent voices to have employed immunology, and particularly autoimmunity, for philosophical and political purposes, his use of the terms, as warwick anderson and ian r. mackay have noted, is “eccentric” (2014, 149), off center of immunological discourse. furthermore, derrida’s commentary on autoimmunity in the 9/11 context becomes useful for my purposes only to the extent to which i interpret its “eccentricity” in light of a certain unspeakability of the ideas that derrida might have intimated. in the interview “autoimmunity: real and symbolic suicides,” in which derrida, in conversation with giovanna borradori, analyzes the significance of the 9/11 attacks for the rise of the “autoimmunitary,” one of the central terms, terrorism, is defined as “autoimmunitary terror” in the 9/11 era (derrida 2003, 96). now more than twenty years ago, derrida anticipated future “autoimmunitary” terror to happen at a nano-scale: “nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. they are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria” (102). ultimately, terrorism special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 5 now “covers a new concept and new distinctions” because the inside/outside, the friend/foe, the self/other, the visible/invisible distinctions have all been breached to an unprecedented extent (102). in some sense, 9/11 violence is autoimmunitary because bush’s “war on terror” that ensues in the aftermath of the attacks is only in appearance engaging the old immunitary rhetoric of war, reprisal, and justice, but in reality is already itself a “perverse effect of the autoimmunitary” in that it “ends up producing, reproducing, and regenerating the very thing it seeks do disarm” (99). the war on terror ushered in government-run surveillance programs; legal suspension of the very foundation of immunitary logic, the habeas corpus (cohen 2008, 110); the creation of global deterritorialized “black holes” (torture centers that exist outside of political space and time), and thus the destruction of many notions of justice and law guaranteed by the constitution of the united states. while neocleous shows derrida’s understanding of autoimmunity to be confused, particularly around the distinctions between autoimmunity and autoimmune disease (2022, 25–26), in my reading derrida’s discourse remains so “messy,” “eccentric,” and contradictory because he never explicitly analyzes the literal connection of 9/11 with the “nanotechnologies” and the “micrological” (derrida 2003, 102) to which he alludes “eccentrically.” why was 9/11 terrorism more “autoimmunitary” than previous instances of terrorism? his brief and cryptic allusions seem to be withdrawn as quickly as they are made. did derrida decide to “stay in his lane” (philosophy) because the political terrain was too “hot”? was the chance of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist” too much of an aversive for him to be clearer? let’s remember that the attacks on september 11, 2001, were followed on their heels by the anthrax attack on congress on september 18, 2001. it was an anthrax component of 9/11 that would have provided the link to iraq, delivering the justification for its invasion without having to engage in the drawn-out and contrived seeding of the weapons-of-mass-destruction narrative. it did provide the link for building up an entire “bioterrorism” branch, and extensive legislation, for the us security agencies. however, instead of implicating iraq, the anthrax attacks linked right back to the us government, which had developed anthrax as a bioweapon since the demise of the soviet union. ultimately, the fbi framed bruce ivins, who was a military scientist at fort detrick, one of the army’s medical research institutes of infectious diseases. ivins allegedly committed suicide, which facilitated the framing of him as a “lone wolf” in committing the attacks, exculpating stephen hatfill, the original main suspect.1 many have contended that the attack could not have been carried out by one person. for the purposes of this article, i am unable to dive any deeper into 9/11 and its anthrax component, which was an important relay in the intensification of us government developments that derrida may have understood as “autoimmunitary” in this interview: “pandemic preparedness,” the development of countermeasures that special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 6 are always “dual purpose” (both weapon and countermeasure), and the need to experiment with these countermeasures on sectors of the us population. experimental anthrax vaccines that were mandated on us department of defense (dod) personnel are a case in point, and the district court ruling in doe #1 v. rumsfeld that struck down the mandates left no doubt about this in pointing out that us soldiers had been used as “guinea pigs.”2 suffice it to say that derrida’s commentary makes a lot more sense when read as a reference to the involvement of the us government in the weaponization of microorganisms, and the various forms of aggression against its own citizens enshrined in the patriot act. terrorism, then, is not so much random acts of violence perpetrated by outsiders to the community (or even insiders who are “other-able”), but rather the terror that the state (as “immune system”) visits on its own body politic; the kind of state-sponsored terror that citizens of many nations around the globe most readily associate with the term terrorism; a terror that is often supported, organized, and financed by us security and intelligence bureaucracies; a terror that has struck out against black and indigenous populations for centuries. with 9/11, this violence comes home to roost in the “homeland,” as allegorized by the creation of the quasi-military department of homeland security in 2002. to suggest that the united states, and to various degrees the western world more broadly, has been taken over by an overt autoimmune pathology, is to employ a productive metaphor. the autoimmune model becomes productive particularly in dialogue with neocleous’s conceptual framework on security, state power, and immunity where the immune system is understood as a kind of “sophisticated ‘intelligence community,’” a “paranoid system of corporeality” (2022, 47). to be clear, however, i do not wish to argue that the condition is a fateful and mysterious illness that has no intention, no planned execution, and therefore no redress. unlike mattias desmet’s theory of mass formation developed in the psychology of authoritarianism (2022), which suggests a spontaneous and undirected structural mechanism of fear and irrationality within populations, i plan to demonstrate that the collective state of panic—of inflammatory “cytokine storm” of the body politic—was carefully orchestrated by an “immune system” that had turned against its own “tissues.” conspiracy to leave no doubt, i am actually engaging in conspiracy analysis. a few words to rehabilitate the useful legal term conspiracy. the dictionary offers as one of the definitions of conspiracy “the action of plotting,” and a plot is a plan to do something illegal or harmful. the underlying basis of pharmocracy—a term coined by the medical anthropologist kaushik sunder rajan (2017) to analyze the legal, political, and scientific structures that have produced a transnational pharmacobiotech-medico-governmental industrial complex (equal in economic power to formations like the weapons-military-intelligence industrial complex, and deeply special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 7 embedded within the latter) is a conspiracy. pharmocracy is a global conspiracy, rooted in the united states and a few western european countries as the centers of neoliberal empire, to produce and implement research that results in the prescription, particularly in the us population, of the highest amount of drugs possible while erasing the evidence of their harms. joseph dumit has described this phenomenon as “prescription maximization” and understands it as creating structures that guarantee “the overall availability of an individual’s metabolism for the maintenance of pharmaceutical flows” (2012, 82). much of the “evidencebased” framework of this pharmocratic paradigm, and the authoritarian and “protective” (securitizing) role of biomedicine and public health within it, forms the basis for pandemic politics through which the channels for vast new pharmaceutical flows are fulfilled. but without acute danger, there is no use for protection. the prominent academic immunologist and vaccine-development entrepreneur anne de groot leaves no doubt as to the role of fear in the implementation of such pharmaceutical flows: “the market for vaccines is driven by perception, not by actual need…when the perception of risk for disease is lower, or the disease is less prevalent, so too, demand wanes, and concern about potential side effects may eventually drive the demand for a vaccine (and its return on investment) towards zero” (de groot and berzofsky 2004). even classical capitalism itself is already a conspiracy to sell us products we don’t need and that often harm us, or at the very least hook us into dependency. the neoliberal, international monetary fund–centered seduction into debt and subsequent coercion and extortion of global south nations is another major conspiracy. these conspiracies are precisely why regulatory agencies exist, but with the autoimmune turn, these agencies have been largely bought through regulatory capture. regulatory capture, however, will be shown to be too mild and too imprecise a concept to deal with the autoimmune turn, mainly because the government bureaucracies that enact these policies are no longer victims of corrupt corporate power, but have themselves become the motor of this dynamic. in addition, the autoimmune turn, which culminated in the covid crisis, also follows a new structure of subjectivity itself. in what paul preciado (2012) has called the pharmacopornographic era (post 1950s), capitalist conspiracies are no longer implemented through “external products” to the subject, but through the molecular invention of human subjects that are themselves constructed through the product: the selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (ssri) subject, the contraceptive pill subject, the statin subject, the vaccine subject, and now the mrna subject. dependency—that is, the collapse of individual constitutionally guaranteed sovereignty—is now manufactured at the level of cells, tissues, proteins, nucleic acids. it is always conspiracies, at the highest levels of industry and government, that sell us harmful and expensive phenomena that, without fraud-induced fear, no one would want, like, say, war (for example against iraq, made palatable by special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 8 means of the neocons’ “weapons-of-mass-destruction conspiracy”). conspiracy analysis is and must be about discovering the fraud that underpins the construction of these phenomena (most notably statistical, legal, and scientific fraud). why would critical intellectuals fall for the thought-terminating cliché of the “conspiracy theorist,” now more widespread than ever among academics and other liberal elites, which was coined by the us military/intelligence complex already nearly seventy years ago to shut down investigations into its own involvement in crimes. in other words, there has been plenty of time to think this through critically, and dare i say to “do one’s own research,” the condemnation of which is another thought-terminating cliché that has been successfully deployed since 2020 to enforce authoritarian expertism. of course, these public/private conspiracies overtly and covertly also conspire to terminate critical thinking, throwing billions of dollars of government grants and direct propaganda payments at academics and journalists to force their practice into narrow disciplinary expertism. the sartrian expert technicien du savoir, produced by means of these elaborate incentive structures, will not look beyond the horizon of their own narrow terrain and thus deliver the deployable narrow knowledge required for the conspiracies to work without getting in the way of the larger scheme. the accusation of “conspiracy theorist” as horror autotoxicus it is well known that immunology failed to entertain the possibility of the existence of autoimmune diseases for half a century. this denial was metaphorized in paul ehrlich’s expression horror autotoxicus (1906, 82). the idea that the body’s “security forces” could possibly attack their “own” tissues had to reek of “conspiracy theory.” immunology was strongly influenced in its scientific search for truth by western cultural prejudice concerning the notions of selfhood and nation state (mitchell 2017, 88). could it be that the same cultural mechanism of denial, the need for a “safe interior,” the foundational taboo against doubting the goodness and safety of “one’s own” group, is at the root of continued and repeated dismissals of evidence that “our own” security forces have turned against us? is the accusation of engaging in “conspiracy theory” equivalent to ehrlich’s dismissal of autoimmune disease because it would constitute an unacceptable horror? can tuskegee now be acknowledged only because it wasn’t done to “us” but to a racialized “other,” and so biomedicine and public health can be seen as reformed now that it nominally embraces “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and anti-racism, even when similar types of experimentation continue, and once again primarily on the backs of racialized “others” taking the form of a “selective genocide” (rajan 2017, 3)? curiously we see the same need to project the enemy outward even and especially in attempts to shed light on conspiracies, such as the recent sunday times article that finally openly names covid-19 as a bioweapon, but then fails to special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 9 acknowledge us and western involvement in its creation and puts the blame on china (calvert and arbuthnott 2023). even the potential for world war is evidently preferable to facing the truth about “our own immune system.” ultimately, even the early dismissal of lab origin hypotheses in 2020 in favor of a national institute of allergy and infectious diseases–directed “consensus” on zoonosis follows this logic of horror autotoxicus: nature as humanity’s ultimate exteriority is being, and has for decades been, demonized and weaponized to advance the securitization of humanity by the antibody industrial complex as the successor complex and upgrade to the cold-war military industrial complex. this weaponization is “dual purpose”: viruses, microorganisms, and various naturally occurring molecular substances are turned into both bioweapons and countermeasures (drugs, biologics) through gain-of-function and biomedical research. on the other hand, the demonization of nature in zoonotic explanations, rooted in racist and colonialist ideologies, projects millenary cultural practices of interacting with “nature” such as “wet markets” and “bushmeat consumption” as dangerous and barbaric (while white global north populations are tied into practices of factory farming, slaughterhouses, and hunting, which are deemed civilized, safe, and effective). the projective logic of horror autotoxicus (“it’s nature/virus, not your immune system”) in these explanatory models for pandemics is self-evident. the necessary augmentation of the immune system the mrna subject (and the vaccine subject more broadly) is said to have an immune system understood as in and of itself hapless (“naive” and incompetent in the face of “novel” pathogens). the scientific construction of this concept of the immune system can be historicized along the period in question from the 1980s onward and maps onto the development of a national vaccine program, culminating in the 1986 national childhood vaccine injury act (ncvia). the ncvia immunized pharmaceutical corporations against vaccine-related liability, stimulating them to produce an increasing amount of vaccines at greater speed, putting the industry in the role of neocleous’s ambassador: “the servants of the state who conduct its violence do so as its ambassadors. as such, they have inherited the kind of immunity historically granted to the figure of the ambassador. they are protected” (2022, 29). why exactly this term “servants of the state” is so particularly fitting for the role of the pharmaceutical industry will become more fully transparent as i discuss the nature of the covid-related contracts between the government and the pharmaceuticals below. in any case, the ncvia paves the way toward a more and more capacious legal framework that aims at eclipsing the foundational medical concept of informed consent. this development comes to full fruition during the rollout of the “covid-19 vaccines” where the precise content of the products is unknown to both healthcare professionals and recipients (to be more fully explained in the vaccine section below). special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 10 this altered scientific understanding of the immune system largely bypasses the innate immune system and downplays the role of natural acquired immunity. in fact, the immune system is presumably built (“educated,” “taught”) through this biotech product and the specific b-cell-derived antibodies it produces. the almost exclusive focus on b-cell-derived antibodies in the definition of immunity is another feature of the workings of the antibody industrial complex, reducing the complexity of the immune system to the easily quantifiable concept of immunoglobulins seropositivity. as can be appreciated in the controversies around the “hygiene hypothesis” (bloomfield et al. 2016), natural infection as an immunity mechanism has been repudiated by this new conception of the immune system that requires the public/private protective intervention for human and nonhuman organisms to be viable, supplanting evolution and natural biology. just as preciado shows the contraceptive pill to have supplanted gender/sex, viagra to have become erection, ssris mental health (2012, 34), vaccines come to equal immunity. due to this antibody-industrial-complex-sponsored concept, a mass panic could break out around sars-cov-2 as a “novel” pathogen (even though it had less than a 1 percent mortality rate in the non-elderly). why? it was portrayed as killing potentially all of us because we presumably had no immunity against the “novel” virus, as if cross-coronavirus immunity didn’t exist, as if no one had an innate immune system, as if natural immunity could not be developed. a “novel” virus plus no vaccine equals doom. the four pillars of emergency between 1983 and 2015, a legal structure was erected that enables the autoimmune aggressions of the antibody industrial complex against the body politic. this complex is a security arrangement to be understood as a corporate, military, intelligence, public health, and academic partnership under federal bureaucratic orchestration. like is the case with all origin stories, it is hard to pinpoint a definitive moment in time as there are always precursors. that being said, i suggest 1983 with the public health service act as the most concrete starting point. the frame of the edifice that housed the covid response was completed in 2015 with military contract legislation called other transaction authority/agreement (ota), although other meaningful additions were added after 2015. significant portions of the frame were established as amendments and expansions to existing health emergency legislation during the years following 9/11. this edifice is further buttressed by the creation of several new federal agencies under the umbrella of the existing public health, military, and intelligence bureaus (such as the department of homeland security, or dhs, the biomedical advanced research and development agency, or barda, the defense threat reduction agency, or dtra, the administration of strategic preparedness and response, or aspr, and public health emergency medical special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 11 countermeasures enterprise, or phemce); and the restructuring and repurposing of some agencies such as the defense advanced research projects agency, or darpa, the federal emergency management agency, or fema, and the national security agency, or nsa, all of whom played a major role during the covid crisis. the public health emergency medical countermeasures enterprise (2006/2019), in particular (a sub-agency of the us department of health and human services (hss)–sponsored administration for strategic preparedness and response, created in 2006) is of special interest here because it exemplifies the proliferation of the public/private partnership concept under executive branch government leadership in the wake of 9/11. it appropriates public funds to economically benefit private corporations, while blending the spheres of medicine, biowarfare, governance, and private interests. the main legal pillars of the frame that i have decided to focus on are four: (1) the above mentioned public health service act of 1983 (and its subsequent amendments); (2) the introduction of expanded access use (eau) and emergency use authorization (eua) legislation to enable the deployment of unapproved products, initiated in 1997; (3) the public readiness and emergency preparedness (prep) act of 2005; and (4) the ota legislation of 2015. health emergencies modern public health emergency legislation began to be installed in 1983 with an amendment to the public health service act of 1944 (codified as public law no. 98-49, 97 stat. 245). here a section 319a titled “public health emergencies” is inserted (42 usc 247b), which already reserves new extraordinary powers to “the secretary of health and human services,” to be further significantly amended in 2000 as the public health threats and emergencies act (42 usc 201 note). this amendment reworked and expanded the aforementioned section 319 (“public health emergencies” 42 usc 247d) of the 1983 public health service act, and established a working group on bioterrorism ‘countermeasures’ research and development. it was then again amended in 2002 in the wake of 9/11 as the public health security and bioterrorism preparedness and response act (public law 107-188, 116 stat. 594). the reason why it is important to situate the beginning of the construction of this grid in 1983, even though much of its current content was added or amended in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is because the 1980s timestamp coincides with crucial developments in virology, immunology, and genetics/genomics toward a promise of ever-increasing control over the human body, as well as over viral and microbial ecologies in which it exists. beyond the capacity for genetic sequencing, two specific technologies have played a central role in the covid crisis: the polymerase chain reaction (pcr) test (1985) and the cloning of rna viruses by copying them onto cdna plasmids (becoming common practice from the late 1970s on). the latter is crucial both for the weaponization of rna viruses and for the production of biologic countermeasures. in close quarters with biological weapons development, genetically oriented biomedicine special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 12 (primarily in cancerand aids-related research) begins to develop and implement ideas around humans as hackable organisms, and legal frameworks develop alongside these discourses of fear, control, and securitization. it is no coincidence that vaccines stand at the center of this operation. as a preventative technology, they are the quintessence of the promise of security, of securing the future from potential harm and exploiting future potential economically. they instantiate both the late capitalist stock market investment in “futures” (as projections of value rather than its present reality), and fear-based governance that paternalistically promises security. in its essence, the creation of public health emergency (phe) and its juridical inscription in the act of the same name (in its definitive version of 2000) allows an authoritarian takeover of the executive branch from the legislative and judicial branches of government. the hhs secretary has sole discretion to declare a phe and to implement countermeasures (21 us code 360bbb-3). this is arguably a form of coup d'état centered in the hhs secretary. emergency use authorization in 1997 the food and drug administration modernization act was passed (public law 105-115, 111 stat. 2296), which begins to pave the way toward eua under phe through so-called expanded access use (eau) to unapproved drugs, biologics, and devices (21 cfr 312.300). ostensibly, this legislation was introduced to facilitate access to new experimental drugs, but such access was limited to scenarios where a patient with a serious or life-threatening disease, for which no alternative therapy is available, applies for eau with their licensed physician, carefully calculating their individual risk-benefit profile. a permission granted under eau assumes that the drug has already achieved investigational new drug (ind) status, meaning there are clinical trials being conducted, but that the applicant has no access to enroll in an existing clinical trial. the application also requires approval by an institutional review board, indicating further careful consideration and informed consent. reinterpretations subsequently took this law out of its original conservative contexts for individual patients with life-threatening illnesses, and enabled it to become eua under phe, allowing access to medical countermeasures outside regulatory law. it became one of the pillars of the regulatory quagmire of the covid operation where medical countermeasures were universally applied to millions of healthy citizens on the sole discretion of the hhs secretary without consideration of their medical history, lifestyle, age, or informed consent. an eua under phe does not require the product to have ind status, to be approved by an institutional review board, or to include the informed consent of the recipient. after phe was declared in march 2020, the complex equivocations between eau and eua legislation could easily produce the impression in health professionals special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 13 and the general public that eau requirements (ind status, clinical trials, informed consent) were applicable to the covid countermeasures under eua when they were not. this equivocation became the basis for the following: • euas for over a hundred different commercial pcr tests were issued alone in the first five months since phe was declared (murrin, 2022). m any of them are now no longer in existence and it is near impossible to verify the primers used in them. this means we cannot know which exact proteins each of them tested for, opening a loophole for statistical fraud about infection rates. • euas were issued for the use of experimental and highly problematic antivirals in hospital protocols. the primary example here is the drug remdesivir, the history of which would warrant an entire investigation in its own right. not unlike azt in late 1980s aids politics, remdesivir was a dangerous and failed drug, meaning it had never been successfully used for anything despite numerous attempts and had a poor safety record, yet remained under patent and provided the grounds for huge profits for gilead sciences, a corporation with a long history of tight government connections. • an equivocal regulatory game became possible around eua, eau, and fully licensed product (flp) concerning the transfection products (mrna “vaccines”) to be analyzed in greater detail below. the public readiness and emergency preparedness (prep) act the prep act constitutes a key piece of legislation for the implementation of the covid policies. it presents a complex set of additions and amendments to the existing health emergency legislation. in brief, consider the following features: • the act gives legal immunity to anyone involved in the production, distribution, transportation, and administration of covid countermeasures. as such, it contradicts the legal standards set at the nuremberg trials because it legalizes an “i just followed orders” defense. • it centralizes decision-making power in the hhs secretary who simply “makes a determination”: “if the secretary makes a determination that a disease or other health condition or other threat to health constitutes a public health emergency…” he or she may then order “the manufacture, testing, development, distribution, administration, or use of one or more covered countermeasures” (42 usc 247d-6d). • liability protection includes death, injury, disability, loss of property, and more, caused by the administered countermeasures, and liability standards are set at an unprecedented degree: “willful misconduct,” which implies both proof of intention, and temporal proximity. • in combination with the homeland security act of 2002 (public law 107-296, 116 stat. 2135), the prep act embeds public health within a growing network of federal agencies, coordinating action between the department of health special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 14 and human services, the department of defense, the department of homeland security, the national security agency, the federal emergency management agency, and the department of justice (with several subagencies that function as links, such as the biomedical advanced research and development authority, the defense advanced research projects agency, the defense threat reduction agency, the administration for strategic preparedness and response, and accelerating covid-19 therapeutic interventions and vaccines (“activ”), formerly known as “operation warp speed”), thus militarizing public health. other transaction authority (ota) the final cornerstone of the edifice snapped in place with the 2015 ota legislation applicable to dod contracting. the use of ota for medical countermeasures first emerged in 2015 at the kick-off event for the public/private medical cbrn (chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear) defense consortium (mcdc). the mcdc is the national equivalent of the global coalition for epidemic preparedness and innovation. as the mcdc webpage states, “the usage of an ota allows government to partner with the mcdc to leverage cutting edge r&d and develop prototypes for commercial sources. this gives mcs [medical countermeasures systems] an agile and flexible way to develop medical countermeasures using new and innovative technology” (n.d.). this “flexibility” is achieved because an ota procurement arrangement is not a contract, or grant, or other form of legally regulated tool. under ota, the dod can order and pay for medical countermeasures without needing to adhere to good clinical practices or current good manufacturing practices (cgmp). this means that such countermeasures, legally named “prototype” (a term normally reserved for weapon systems), exist outside of the regulatory framework overseen by the fda for pharmaceutical products. the july 2020 base contract between dod and the mcdc, which legally establishes operation warp speed, is explicitly framed under ota. “the u.s. army contracting command-new jersey (acc-nj) is entering into a section 815 prototype other transaction agreement (ota) with the medical cbrn defense consortium (mcdc),” and the product to be financed for $10 billion is referred to as a “prototype” (u.s. army 2016/2020). in other words, the covid transfection prototypes that were the result of this ota (referred to as june and july 2020 attachments seven and eight to the 2016 base contract), and were injected into the majority of the us population, are not legally pharmaceutical products, while the fda engaged in theatrics to convince the population that it was being given (and mandated) pharmaceutical products that were being regulated. thus, the label “safe and effective,” reserved for fda-approved and -regulated products, was arguably used illegally. its use under ota amounts to government deceit. cgmp, a central aspect of regulatory law, which guarantees quality control, consistency, and efficacy and safety of all pharmaceutical products, including biologics, was obliterated through ota. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 15 what essentially this four-pillared frame of phe offers is a military/civil and public/private joint venture to bypass the constitution, existing health and contracting regulations, and shift power away from congress and the courts to the unelected sector of the executive branch and its corporate partners. unlike a declaration of war, for example, which has to be authorized by vote in congress, this legislation transfers power exclusively to the hhs secretary without validation by representatives of the voting public. as such, it replaces constitutional rights of citizens with a permissions-based management of populations. pivotal for this arrogation of power is 21 usc 360bbb-3, authorization for medical products for use in emergencies.3 both the determination to declare a public health emergency, and the issuance of an eua for products that diagnose, treat, or prevent such an emergency, are here put in the hands of a single person, who may base this determination on “scientific evidence….if available” (emphasis added).4 what if it isn’t? what if, say, scientific evidence were simply “out-of-scope” as is the case for a prototype under ota? well, then the secretary makes a determination anyway, based on the sole power invested in him or her by congress through 360bbb-3. pfizer and moderna may not even be the manufacturers of btn162b2 and spikevax, respectively, just as pfizer does not conduct its own clinical trials. the ota for covid prototype medical countermeasures, signed between the us dod and the public/private mcdc, involves hundreds of defense subcontractors, and offers no such certainties. like coke and pepsi, like camel and marlboro, pfizer and moderna may simply be recognizable branding tools utilized in the production of preciado’s synthetic-molecular pharmacopornographic subjectivities. are you a pfizer dude? a moderna kid? just as the hormone-industrial complex decoupled gender from nature in preciado’s analysis, the mrna subject is the current endpoint of a carefully orchestrated production of the human immune system as necessarily augmentable. the innate and adaptive evolutionary immune systems have been superseded, upgraded, trans-humanized. there is to be no alternative to the transfection-based pfizer and moderna subjects. is that the real reason why the control group was unblinded and eliminated in the theatrical pfizer clinical trials in 2020? is there to be no well-controlled scientific evidence as to whether the prototypes work (better than evolutionary nature) and what their dangers are? for those radical old-timers who, despite best propagandistic efforts, still remember the concept of natural immunity after infection, we offer “hybrid immunity” as a semi-synthetic compromise. pharmacopornographic biotech strives to replace nature in every biological context with a commercial synthetic product for everyone: lab meat, synthetic breastmilk, injectable hormones, industrial neurotransmitters, transfected immunity. nevertheless, transfection, like most political phenomena in the us, comes in two fake flavors: beef or chicken? republican or democrat? pfizer or moderna? and we are encouraged to fight it out. freedom in permissions-based authoritarian capitalism is all about the illusion of choice, if available. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 16 jackson v. ventavia: it’s an ota, stupid5 brook jackson is a pharmaceutical whistleblower who worked as a clinical trials supervisor for ventavia research group, a company subcontracted by pfizer to conduct some of its phase three clinical trials for its mrna shots. jackson reported significant irregularities in the trials (including violations of clinical trial regulations and safety standards, and data fraud) first to her employer, who ignored her, then to the fda on september 25, 2020. she was fired from her position at ventavia on the same day for not being “a good fit” (thacker 2021). after her report to the fda, jackson received a phone call from an fda inspector, informing her that no further information could be given. on december 10, 2020, pfizer submitted its application for eua for the mrna product, without a mention of the occurrences that jackson had reported, and the very next day, the fda granted eua. on january 8, 2021, jackson filed a false claims act complaint with the us district court for the eastern district of texas against ventavia and pfizer. on april 22, 2022, pfizer filed a motion to dismiss. on march 31, 2023, judge michael truncale granted pfizer’s motion to dismiss. of greater interest than jackson’s allegations and her detailed documentation of fraud committed by pfizer/ventavia, however, is what this case has brought to light about the pandemic response in a broader sense. pfizer’s motion to dismiss has brought the paperwork between the dod and its contractors (among them pfizer) into public focus, and for many citizens that alone is still news altogether, assuming as many did that the mrna vaccines were ordinary pharmaceutical products, manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry and regulated by the government’s agencies. in granting pfizer’s motion, and dismissing jackson’s complaint, judge truncale’s ruling puts a significant dent in the public pandemic response narrative, despite defeating jackson’s cause against pfizer. truncale’s disturbingly cynical self-positioning and his equivocal legal argumentation destroy the legal and ethical basis on which the complaint was built. by annihilating this basis, it simultaneously eviscerates assumptions held by most of the general public concerning the mrna vaccines and the rule of law. the plaintiff’s allegations, articulated under the false claims act, assumed that pfizer defrauded the us government by breaking the regulatory rules set forth for pharmaceutical products. more fundamentally, it assumed that vaccine safety and efficacy was material to the government’s interests. truncale, in turn, shows that the government was at no point defrauded, citing several different reasons. analyzing the ota between the dod and its contractors, he points out that pfizer was under no obligation to even conduct clinical trials because the product in question was a “prototype”: “such prototype agreements are executed under the dod’s ‘other transaction authority’ and, as a statutory matter, are not subject to far [federal acquisition requirements]”6 truncale equally confirms pfizer’s claim that “the government did not condition payment on compliance with far special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 17 requirements or fda regulations”7, only to deliver a specified number of “prototype” injections by an agreed upon date, which they did. he concludes that to litigate against a contractor for fulfilling its legal obligations is “unavailing”8 (40). truncale’s text painfully reveals that jackson’s main conceptual mistake was not to have understood the legal construct of the ota and to have assumed, like much of the general public, that the pfizer “vaccine” was a pharmaceutical product, and that therefore regulatory law applied, and that the breaches of regulatory law that she documented should have been material. the judge never takes issue with any of her allegations, and in fact calls them “well-pleaded facts” throughout.9 in a breathtaking dismissal of the relevance, or materiality, of such facts truncale simply states, “continued payment by the federal government after it learns of the alleged fraud substantially increases the burden on the relator in establishing materiality…the well-pleaded facts in ms. jackson’s amended complaint cannot plausibly shoulder that burden.”10 in other words, the facts concerning pharmaceutical regulations don’t matter. what matters is that pfizer and the government agree, which they clearly do because the government paid and keeps paying, and there is nothing more to it. the government ordered a prototype. it received a prototype. it paid. end of story. the district judge leaves no doubt, either, about his own positioning vis-à-vis the government: “the united states itself has taken the unusual step of filing a statement of interest supporting dismissal of the amended complaint.”11 in other words, truncale is doing as told, as a judge in an authoritarian system would. is this not leaving a clear record of the chain of command in a system in which the judiciary branch has no independence? one wonders, furthermore, who exactly “the united states” is. he rounds off this implicit analysis of his own role when he affirms: “ms. jackson is in effect asking this court to overrule the dod’s decision to exercise other transaction authority to purchase pfizer’s vaccine…this court will not veto the dod’s judgment concerning mission effectiveness during a national emergency”12 in line with the perception of his own role, he lectures jackson that she must not “second guess decisions made by those empowered through the democratic process to shape public policy.”13 the invocation of the “democratic process” adds a facetiously dissonant tone to the judge’s opinion, particularly in view of the fact that none of the decision-makers in question are elected members of the government, let alone that the very “democratic process” actually depends on the public “second guessing” those that are “empowered.”14 perhaps against his own intentions, truncale’s refutation of the whistleblower’s naively optimistic belief that regulatory law is material and should trump raw power reveals many of the more caustic aspects of the covid operation. not only does it open the door to future, more on-target, legal strategies, the judge’s ruling special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 18 and the case’s focus on official documents actually opens a window on the truth of the “autoimmune disease” that has befallen the body politic that, to the date of his “order and opinion,” could not easily be found in a more striking form in the public record. there is another major reveal from truncale’s gob smacking text. truncale’s own argumentative structure performatively mimics the duplicitous legal structure that the government has put in place surrounding the “vaccine,” duplicitous here to be understood as both “deceitful” and “twofold.” in a mind-boggling twist of logic, the judge (basically just following government narrative) plays the fda against the dod, asserting that jackson doesn’t understand that the two are not the same. she complained to the fda in september 2020, but the fda didn’t purchase the prototype (and didn’t have an ota with pfizer, the dod did), and so the dod is entitled to claim that it didn’t know of her report to the fda about the fraud until february 2022. jackson then points out that the ota contains a clause that the product needs to achieve fda authorization. however, the judge counters that suing the fda for false claims isn’t an option because it is the dod that is pfizer’s ota partner, not the fda. and the whole problem is that jackson sued pfizer for defrauding the government, which, according to truncale, it never did. pfizer followed orders and complied with the ota it had signed with the dod. separately, it achieved eua with the fda, based on (allegedly fraudulent) clinical trial data, but the ota has no care for how the eua is achieved, as long as it is achieved, because it is technically “out-of-scope.” no regulations apply. here another equivocation plays out: eua under phe is not the same as eau, which requires ind status, clinical trials, informed consent, and internal review board supervision. in her evident lack of comprehension of the duplicitous structure set up by the government, jackson alleges that the fda, as well, has been defrauded by pfizer. to this, the judge responds that the fda had full knowledge of all her “wellpleaded facts” since september 2020, but then proceeded with three eua’s from december 2020 on, and has to this day never revoked its approval of pfizer’s product. eua, unlike eau, does not require clinical trials. jackson’s fraud reports about the theatrical clinical trials are immaterial. “the government’s unbroken chain of authorization and payments in the face of ms. jackson’s allegations does not support an inference that the alleged misrepresentations were material.”15 clinical trial related facts just don’t matter. in other words, if the “government" (the dod? the fda?) thought something was wrong with the product as far as their goals with it, they would have acted upon the knowledge she gave them, but they didn’t. the fact that they didn’t means that jackson’s facts were “immaterial.” the prototype did exactly what the government intended. needless to say, what that intention is remains in the shadows, but clearly it is not an intention based on valid and legal clinical trials, which are the preconditions of a safe and effective pharmaceutical product. there was never an investigation. the special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 19 facts were ignored, along with the many who died of, or were maimed by, the prototype, no matter whether they reported to the government’s surveillance systems, no matter in how many senate hearings they (or their survivors) testified. why then not simply waive the fda regulatory stipulations altogether? why bother with discussions and votes on the fda’s vaccine advisory board? why did the dod lawyers write those requirements into the ota in such a duplicitous manner where they seem to matter and they don’t? as the discussion of an additional lawsuit currently under way will demonstrate, this equivocation played a crucial, and allegedly deadly, role in the covid countermeasures rollout. watts v. austin: getting on target16 george watts jr. was a twenty-four-year old college student who submitted to the pfizer transfection to satisfy a college mandate. the second injection made him very ill, and five and a half weeks later he died. unlike many other comparable cases, against prevailing centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) recommendations, his family had an autopsy performed. the autopsy report concludes “to a reasonable degree of medical certainty” that “the ‘primary cause’ of death is ‘covid-19 vaccine-related myocarditis.’”17 a nasopharyngeal postmortem test further ascertained that watts was not infected with covid-19. watts was healthy, young, and had no pre-existing medical conditions. his case is so unambiguous, and therefore free of any possible alternative interpretations, that it makes for an irrefutable model court case. after exhausting the legal remedy provided by the hhs’s countermeasure injury compensation program and being ignored within the legal response period, on may 31, 2023, his parents proceeded to file for damages with u.s. district court of the district of columbia. the location of this litigation is significant because this court ruled two decades earlier in doe #1 v. rumsfeld against the dod’s violation of service members’ informed consent when the dod strong-armed soldiers into submitting to an experimental anthrax vaccine. watts v. austin has, as of this writing, not been adjudicated. what i wish to emphasize in my discussion here is that this is most likely the first instance of litigation concerning the covid-19 countermeasures operation that aims at the right target, the united states department of defense. as mentioned earlier, the whistleblower case against pfizer was ill-construed in targeting pfizer. in the wake of its dismissal, the plaintiff of watts v. austin savvily addresses both the ota contractual nature of the military prototypes deployed, and the prep act, which indemnifies any and all participants in covid countermeasures. jackson’s case was doomed from the beginning, misunderstanding the entire legal framework that i traced above, and counting on the naive assumption that the government would want to learn about safety and regulatory breaches. watts special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 20 v. austin states outright that it is known that the government is fully aware of the unprecedented number of severe adverse events and that it is monitoring them through detailed data collection. jackson’s misguided assumption was the government was being defrauded by pfizer and did not know the facts she was revealing. furthermore, the watts’ complaint is unambiguous from the outset on the role of the bureaucratic cluster of security agencies that came together in operation warp speed under dod leadership, and then hones in on the one possible limit to the liability shield provided by the prep act: willful misconduct. the construction of a legal argument around willful misconduct, allegedly committed by the dod, focuses, among other things, on one more instance of what i have called duplicitousness in discussing jackson’s case above. two things were deployed while it was made to look like one and vice versa. in arguing that the dod committed willful misconduct when luring george watts jr. into accepting a fatal experimental injection, the plaintiff demonstrates that the dod did so by means of a deceitful maneuver. the pfizer prototype was distributed, and continued to circulate throughout 2021 and most of 2022 until it was replaced with the “bivalent booster,” as an unapproved eua experimental vaccine (btn162b2), while also being introduced as an flp on august 23, 2021 (“comirnaty”). the trickery consists in that comirnaty—what a strange corruption of the word “community”—was never available in the us. public campaigns championed the “pfizer vaccine” as “fully approved,” making people believe that they were receiving a product that had gone through rigorous testing, and had therefore earned the legal label “safe and effective,” while what they really received was the unapproved experimental prototype btn162b2. the government had deceived watts by means of this bait-and-switch strategy. he waited until after august 23, 2021, to receive the flp, but received the eua prototype with fatal outcome, so the plaintiff contends. the complaint argues in detail, by documenting various public appearances of dod leaders, how the term “safe and effective” was deployed “in massive, deliberate deception and exaggeration…making the majority of the country (including mr. watts) unknowing participants in its mass human experiment.”18 in calling attention to the btn162b2/comirnaty equivocation, the case lifts the veil on a duplicitousness that cuts in both directions: the two products are both one (and the same) and two (separate entities). propagandistically it allowed the government to “borrow” the label of “safe and effective” for the eua prototype by claiming both were essentially the same, while it protected itself by maintaining a legal difference between the two products. in this context, the equivocation between eua and eau was exploited as well. the original conservative eau legislation prohibits the coexistence of eau for an ind and full licensing of a product (flp). eua under phe does not. by making comirnaty unavailable, no arm was ever injected with anything but the experimental military prototype. whether, as the complaint claims, the fda-approved product comirnaty is actually really “safe and effective” is immaterial because, for all we know, it is a legal chimera. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 21 the complaint then contextualizes the subject matter of involuntary human experimentation both in the anthrax vaccine precedent doe #1 v. rumsfeld and the nuremberg judgments against nazi medical experimentation. in doe #1 v. rumsfeld (2003), the u.s. district court of the district of columbia had struck down the dod vaccine mandate of an experimental (i.e., unapproved) vaccine for service members. watts v. austin claims that both the covid-19 vaccination campaign and the anthrax vaccine mandate “eviscerate[ed] informed consent,” which this court has found constitutes a violation of federal law.19 doe #1 v. rumsfeld, which is cited here, actually went so far as to pronounce that “the united states cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs” (doe v. rumsfeld 2003, section 81). in watts v. austin’s argumentation, the violation of informed consent as a foundational ethical principle in the practice of medicine is grounded in the nuremberg code. having recourse to a supreme court ruling on united states v. stanley (1987), which refers to the nuremberg code in the context of a case about the dod’s lsd experimentation on a soldier and categorically declares that “experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable” as a “first principle” (section 687),20 watts v. austin suggests that the “dod’s mass experiment” may constitute “a crime against humanity.”21 unlike jackson’s suit, watts v. austin does not assume that the us government is the unwitting victim of corporate fraud. quite the opposite: pfizer, as evinced by the ota, is merely a contractor in operation warp speed under dod leadership, fulfilling its legal obligations, which are clearly “out-of-scope” of regulatory pharmaceutical law. in autoimmunitary times, the simple notion of regulatory capture has been superseded by something much more insidious. the high stakes set by the only opening within the prep act that makes legal action possible, “willful misconduct,” necessitate that any potentially successful legal strategy must aim high. as spelled out by the law, willful misconduct implies an “act or omission that is taken…intentionally to achieve wrongful purpose” and, furthermore, “in disregard of a known and obvious risk that is so great as to make it highly probable that the harm will outweigh the benefit.”22 for this reason, the complaint had to outline in great detail that the government has meticulously collected data on severe adverse events since the rollout began, and continued with its “mass experimentation” despite the immediate evidence that the prototype it had deployed constituted a “known and obvious risk.” watts v. austin aims much higher than did united states v. pfizer, whether or not it has any chance of succeeding in court. its potential success lies in the legal precedents that have documented, and punished, the history of reckless dod experimentation on service members. the difference is one of scale. from anthrax to covid, military “guinea pigs” were replaced by civilian lab rats, reminiscent of neocleous’s discussion of violence against non-combatant targets in modern warfare (2022, 312). special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 22 part ii sars-cov-2 and mrna “vaccines”: autoimmune logic before i proceed with the second, more biomedically centered, section of this article, a clarification is in order that i write without formal training in medicine, biology, or chemistry. in medical contexts, the right to speak at all seems increasingly reserved for disciplinary “experts” who offer “settled” truths presented as “consensus,” a form of consensus that has ousted scores of censored, discredited, and smeared dissidents of distinguished expertise. cursed with a temperament that has always favored dissidence and “biodefection,”23 my ambition is to raise questions and doubts, and to make connections that have not been made in the mainstream. the “vaccine question” has been especially vexed and polarizing ever since the antibody-industrial complex took hold of medicine and obliterated robust discussion, not just of technical details, but of larger philosophical frames. while this section is about some of the specific aspects of the novel transfection methodology purportedly utilized for immunization purposes, i do see the covid “vaccines” emerging from a line of traditional vaccines that are in themselves not unproblematic. autoimmune disease as an adverse result of vaccination has been known for decades.24 it was largely the autoimmune guillain-barré syndrome that caused the recall of the swine flu vaccine during the 2009 pandemic, a recall for what now seem to be surprisingly low numbers of adverse events. more broadly even, only dissidents seem to address the question why the industry standard for vaccines against respiratory viruses, foremost influenza before covid, is an intramuscular injection where the body encounters the antigen at a highly counterintuitive location, and arguably with ineffective and unsafe consequences. intramuscular vaccination arguably confuses the immune system by forcing it to encounter antigens in a place where it is set up to deal with mutations and malignancy, not infection. effective immunity to respiratory viruses is primarily mucosal, not humoral. the immune system, in general, encounters foreign antigens at the body’s three major epithelial boundaries with the outside world: the skin, the respiratory system including nasal mucosa, and the digestive tract. who started the intramuscular injection trend and why isn’t the mainstream questioning it on basic immunological knowledge of the immune system? as i understand it, the igg antibodies produced by intramuscular injection are too large to cross the blood/lung barrier, and cannot be where the action would be needed. in immunology, it is understood that it was the innate immune system (especially dendritic cells) in connection with t-cells that provide immunity, and b-cell derived antibodies “mop up” the debris after infection is defeated. is it that the convenience of measuring seropositivity for immunoglobulins has come to stand in for “immunity” most obviously for commercial reasons and to further the special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 23 “politics of immunity” (neocleous 2022)? is it because the antibody market has one of the largest, most lucrative shares of the pharmaceutical pie? however, the precipitous introduction of transfection through mrna and adenovirus vector technologies in 2020 also ushered in a fundamental change to the definition of “vaccine” and “immunization” on the cdc’s webpage. before september 2021, the cdc defined a vaccine as a product that “stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” (jones 2022, emphasis added). after september 2021—which is to say at the moment where the official narrative that the transfections would prevent infection and transmission began to fall apart—the definition of “vaccine” reads as follows: “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases” (cdc 2021, emphasis added). the move away from immunity as the central purpose of vaccination is obviously the most striking shift, but at the same time the epidemiological bar is significantly lowered here in general. many substances “stimulate immune responses,” such as vitamins, hormones, medications, or the consumption of alcohol or sugar. are they all to be understood as vaccines now? at the same time, a stronger emphasis is placed on “protection” in the postseptember 2021 definition, a term that is arguably bolstering the paternalism of the corporate and bureaucratic institutions that market these experimental eua products. the more precise scientific term immunity (untenable as a claim for the products as of mid-2021) is replaced with an emotional one: immunization is defined as a “process by which a person becomes protected against a disease” and vaccination “produce[s] protection” instead of immunity (cdc 2021, emphasis added). along the lines of neocleous’s thinking, immunity and its long metaphorical connection to warfare is replaced with “protection” perhaps because such a substitution “replicates a broader liberal position which is happy to critique war and its tropes but less comfortable with a critique of security” (2022, 42). what could be a better way to disguise the security state’s violence than to dress it up as protection? there are several aspects of the mrna covid injections that participate in autoimmune logic where, as neocleous defined it so succinctly, “the body…is threatened, damaged, and ultimately destroyed from within by its own immunitysecurity” (2022, 27). it would be interesting to speculate why public health eschewed the technically precise term transfection when referring to their prototype. by suggesting an “autoimmune logic” inherent to transfection, i am casting a wider net than strictly the causation of autoimmune diseases in a narrow sense, and am referring to a more general immune dysregulation that includes inflammation syndromes (such as myocarditis);25 immune suppression including undesirable igg4-based immune tolerance leading to infection, reactivation of latent viruses, and cancers; as well as immune-system-induced blood clotting and resulting heart attacks and strokes. some of these phenomena are already built into certain features of the human response to the spike protein of the sars-2 special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 24 virus itself,26 others appear to be linked to the gene-therapy-based technologies themselves (although we will see that it is also the specific combination of mrna and synthetic spike that has produced specific damage). early on in the pandemic, the scientific literature was replete with studies and evidence of the inflammatory nature of the spike antigen (see, e.g., khan et al. 2021; simon et al. 2021). there are now also studies emerging that contradict cdc statements that the spike protein that is expressed after injection with mrna products is “harmless,” or that “our cells break down the mrna and remove it” (in what time frame?) (cdc, n.d.). this is a statement that would be true for natural mrna, but the synthetic mrna employed in the covid products is codon-optimized, and natural pyrimidine nucleoside uridine has been replaced with pseudo-uridine. both technologies stabilize the molecule and prevent it from being broken down by the innate immune system, a fact that was known already much before the massive transfection rollout (see karikó et al. 2005). in contrast to the cdc publication, a seminal 2022 study finds “vaccine mrna and spike antigen up to 8 weeks postvaccination in some cases” (röltgen et al. 2022, 1025); that is, they do not remain at the injection site, and are not simply “broken down and removed.” palmer and bhakdi (2021), who analyzed a japanese document on one of pfizer’s pre-clinical pharmacokinetics experiments on rats, also show both the extraordinary ubiquity of the synthetic mrna throughout the rats’ bodies, and the accumulation of it in specific organs. this analysis provides understanding for some of the human adverse events reported in the wake of the rollout. in addition, there are other hyperinflammatory ingredients in the mrna products, such as the lipid nanoparticles that are used to transport the mrna into cells. this technology is also novel in medicine, and there is no long-term data available (ndeupen 2021). since the toxicity of the spike protein was well established in the literature soon after the emergence of sars-cov-2, one wonders why the manufacturers of all the covid vaccines, not only the mrna varieties, would have not only focused so narrowly on the spike protein as the only antigen around which to construct the products, but why even to have focused on it at all. cdc guidance is, once again, not helpful: “spike proteins are ideal targets for vaccines” (cdc, n.d.). why? the spike protein represents the most cytotoxic antigen of the coronavirus, and also the most unstable one. in addition to safety concerns, this also affects efficacy. it means that a vaccine focused on the spike protein rather than the much more stable nucleocapsid protein, for example, which remains conserved across not only different sars-cov-2 variants but most coronaviruses, will always already be outdated (wang et al. 2023). coupled with another, traditional, immunization platform (i.e., the direct delivery of the antigen plus adjuvant) the focus on spike may have been a risky one, but it would have introduced the negative in known and manageable doses. the mrna platform, in turn, introduces an altogether new logic, which coupled with the known toxicity of spike, redoubles its dangers. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 25 as it stands, it is completely unknown in which quantities the lipid nanoparticles, the mrna, and the spike antigen remain in the body of transfected patients (trougakos et al. 2022). fascinating new research is also beginning to draw connections between spike, mrna, and the gut microbiome (hazan et al. 2022). the concern then arises that microbiota may also be transfected and produce spike protein. more specifically, one central argument about an autoimmune logic in the mrna prototypes focuses on transfection as a technology itself. in the medical dissident discussions of the last years, a major rift has opened between those who reject the entire mrna platform as incompatible with human health, and those who consider the problem to be the choice of the spike protein for which the transfections code. the latter camp leaves the door open for future “better protein choices,” and fails to question the technology itself. many, if not all, vaccines (and other platforms) in the immediate future are scheduled to be changed to transfection, connecting the technology to massive economic interests. a series of litigations throughout the 2010s culminating in the amgen v. sanofi27 supreme court decision in 2023 on current antibody patents has thrown traditional biologics-related patent law into crisis to the point where transfection may offer an attractive legal bypass and continuation of economic growth. in other words, what is at stake is much broader than the topic of mrna-based covid prototypes, which may have been launched as an unprecedentedly massive involuntary experimentation to establish the previously unsuccessful transfection technology. the critics of the spike protein choice implicitly accept what the antibody industrial complex is currently celebrating as a revolution, and which is clearly one of the main reasons behind the dogged insistence on pushing this experimental technology onto the majority of the world’s population at “warp speed.” another faction, however, sees the main problem with transfection technology itself. my argument concerning an autoimmune logic in transfection is based on this critique, and is fundamentally very simple: transfection makes human cells express a foreign protein.28 the expression of a foreign protein by a human cell unleashes an autoimmune cascade of events that has been explained by palmer and bhakdi (2021) in their call to discontinue the mass experiment. they illustrate the effect of immune surveillance on the transfected cells: “an immune response will be mounted against that [foreign] protein and against the cells that produce it. this response is mediated by cytotoxic t-lymphocytes (ctls, t-killer cells)” (2021, 3). they explain the occurrence of blood clotting not simply as a consequence of the spike protein’s cytotoxicity, but of the cytotoxic effects of the immune response to transfection itself: “if the vaccine is expressed in the cells that line the blood vessels—the endothelial cells—the vascular lesion caused by the immune attack will again set off blood clotting” (3). although censored and special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 26 punished after the rollout of the mrna injections, this insight into the genesis of autoimmune dynamics in reaction to tissue damage is not novel or groundbreaking. in fact, as vanderlugt and miller showed already in 2002, “tissue damage during an immune response can lead to the priming of self-reactive t and/or b lymphocytes, regardless of the specificity of the initial insult” (85). why were these well-known, and also common-sensical, facts about immune function buried with such overwhelming force at the rollout of the transfection platform? another particularly troubling aspect of immune dysfunction produced by the mrna products, igg4-based immune tolerance, has been described by irrgang et al. (2022) and seneff et al. (2023). the switch to igg4 is basically what in lay parlance is called “desensitization." irrgang et al. found that “igg4 antibodies among all spike-specific igg antibodies rose, on average, from 0.04% shortly after the second vaccination to 19.27% late after the third vaccination” (2022, 1). the logical conclusion is that repeated transfection within a short time frame such as recommended by public health officials, and required to achieve seropositivity, eventually leads to desensitization to the antigen. seneff et al. explain that this development, replacing igg3 antibodies with igg4 after repeated covid transfection “is immune suppressive. igg4 plays a pathological role in many different diseases, including cancer, autoimmune diseases, allergies, and helminth infection” (2023).29 furthermore, in an analysis of the data available on the cdc’s own vaccine adverse events reporting system (vaers), seneff et al. raise the troubling observations that “covid-19 vaccines accounted for 96% of all cases in vaers in 2021 where ‘lymphoma’ was listed as a symptom. since 2021, a total of 50 cases of pancreatic carcinoma have been reported in vaers, all of which were associated with covid-19 vaccines” (2023). immune suppression as a result of igg4 expression may perhaps also account for findings from a recent cleveland clinic study with nearly fifty thousand participants that showed negative efficacy for the very covid-19 disease against which the transfections are supposed to protect. the study concludes that “being ‘up-to-date’ on covid-19 vaccination by the cdc definition was not associated with a lower risk of covid-19 than not being ‘up-to-date’.” (shrestha et al. 2023, 8). “autoimmune” political attacks on regulation and quality control returning to the irregular legal contracts for the production of the transfection products through ota, eua, and the prep act (and equivalents in several other countries), i will point to a few specific biological data points that link to my previous discussion of the legal framework that undergirds the covid operations. this time, my observations hinge primarily on the question of cgmp, a regulatory framework bypassed by ota and eua. in my discussion of some of the aspects of the biology of the transfection products above, the foundational assumption is special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 27 still that we know what the products contain—that is, that the publication of contents and mechanisms of action by the presumed manufacturers are accurate and complete, or that the manufacturers are even able to characterize their products with precision. very few independent analyses of the products have been conducted, and the few that have, are small scale. keep in mind that, in the us these products are owned by the dod from the moment of production until they have been injected into arms. the few independent instances of analysis have revealed astonishing surprises. one of them is a recent analysis by the molecular biologist and genetic sequencing expert kevin mckernan, who found dna contamination in vials (consistent with the likely use of cdna plasmid-based cloning of rna in the production process) with far-reaching implications for the safety of the products.30 two of the main risks of bacterial dna contamination are carcinogenicity, as well as the long-denied integration into the human genome.31 along with brook jackson’s whistleblower complaints in september 2020 with subsequent legal complaint in early 2021, one of the other first official reports about major irregularities concerning pfizer’s btn162b2 came from a data leak at the european medicines agency (ema, the european equivalent of the fda in the us) in january 2021 shortly after the fda had issued the first eua for pfizer’s product. the ema server was hacked and several emails between regulatory officials and pfizer executives were anonymously shared with journalists, among them the british medical journal (bmj). under discussion was the fact that the nucleic acid content of the product was far below the declared specifications, and an unknown amount of uncharacterized truncated and modified mrna was found in the products. interestingly, the exclusive area of concern addressed in the bmj article that discusses the debacle is efficacy. (tinari 2021) even though truncated species of rna are well known to be dangerous and implicated in carcinogenicity and other disease processes,32 vaccine safety concerns in 2020 and 2021 remained so taboo that they could apparently not be addressed: “‘the complete, intact mrna molecule is essential to its potency as a vaccine,’ professor of biopharmaceutics daan j.a. crommelin and colleagues wrote in a review article in the journal of pharmaceutical sciences late last year. ‘even a minor degradation reaction, anywhere along an mrna strand, can severely slow or stop proper translation performance of that strand and thus result in the incomplete expression of the target antigen’” (tinari 2021). all the agencies contacted by tinari for the bmj stonewalled the investigation: “in subsequent correspondence, fda, ema, and canadian government department health canada all stated that specific information related to the acceptability criteria is confidential” (tinari 2021). as expected, pfizer also blocked all scrutiny, and moderna “declined to respond to any of the bmj’s questions” (tinari 2021). what emerged in the leaked documents is also that regulators across the various countries were under considerable pressure to issue euas (and legal equivalents) in short order. as documents obtained through freedom of information act requests from the medicines and healthcare products regulatory agency (the british fda) special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 28 demonstrate, the regulatory process was by-passed in the uk in similar ways to how it happened in the us through ota contracting and emergency legislation, which concentrates the power exclusively in the hhs secretary. “all the covid vaccines and therapeutics authorisation decisions were taken by the licensing minister and were not delegated” (mhra customer services 2023). this means the mhra’s concerns as regulatory agency, similar to the ones the ema had expressed internally, were immaterial to the rollout of the product, and the minister of health, matt hancock, alone decided to go forward with the rollout. ultimately, the ema settled for lower purity in negotiations with pfizer than the one originally specified. the question of impurities, specifications, and manufacturing standards, however, seems uncontrollable with a product that is legally exempt from pharmaceutical regulation through eua and ota, is a military prototype owned by the dod, and is produced at a scale and speed that are considered by pharma insiders to be impossible to be handled according to cgmp. there are several “nitty-gritty” details revealed by pharmacologist luz maria gutschi in her recent sworn testimony before the canadian national citizens inquiry (gutschi 2023). gutschi, who is an expert in regulatory law and production standards, speaks about the extreme fragility of rna, and the sheer impossibility to scale-up production safely. she mentions many “pedestrian” details that make such a large-scale operation practically unfeasible, such as the fact that lipid nanoparticles conglomerate through various freeze and thaw cycles in the distribution chain, and shaking will disintegrate them. the purification process with magnetic beads that extracts rna from the cdna plasmids in which it was generated is extremely difficult to perform in large quantities, which possibly accounts for the dna contamination discussed above. gutschi further analyzes the data leak of early 2021, and draws attention to the discrepancy that ema regulators noticed in late 2020 between the pfizer product that had been used in clinical trials and the commercial product btn162b2 that was about to be rolled out. she makes two important points. first, when the impurities were noted, under normal regulatory circumstances, and since pfizer was unable to clarify the discrepancy in a satisfactory manner, new clinical trials would be ordered, which did not happen. second, btn162b2 falls into the category of a pro-drug, meaning that what is injected into recipients is not the active agent (spike protein) but a substance that produces it (mrna). in pro-drug regulation, the manufacturer needs to characterize carefully what exactly the prodrug produces in the body, where it does so, and how much of it in a given time frame. none of those data points were ever delivered by the manufacturers, and in fact the spike protein for which the mrna presumably codes was never fully characterized. although it has not been peer reviewed, a study by veenstra et al. (2022) addresses this astounding regulatory disaster, over a year after billions of doses special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 29 had been injected into arms. as the authors write, there has been “extensive research around mrna vaccines and their proposed utility…but none describe the characteristics of the full-length protein obtained from the modified/synthetic mrna that is part of the moderna and pfizer-biontech vaccines. in this paper, we provide the first data characterizing the actual proteins produced…” (2022, 2). perhaps more astoundingly even, they state, “in communications with moderna and pfizer-biontech regarding the proteins expressed by their synthetic mrna vaccines, each company’s medical information group disclosed that they had not examined the protein dynamics more than 48 hours post-transfection in cell culture” (veenstra et al. 2022, 8). a study by banoun (2023) examines the regulatory limbo into which mrna transfections were thrown by classifying them as “vaccines,” even though their mode of action “should classify them as gene therapy products (gtps).” (2023, 1) the author proposes that “the wide and persistent biodistribution of mrnas and their protein products,” which would have had to be studied had the products been classified as gtps, “raises safety issues” (2023, 1). all of these unknowns, failures to characterize, and derelictions in comprehensive study, ultimately underscore the factual nature of the “conspiracy theory” statement that no one knows what is in the vials, and explain partially the wide and uneven scattering of severe adverse events (sae) across batches and sometimes even individual doses. a recent danish study by schmeling, manniche, and hansen (2023) found an unprecedented variability of saes in correlation with specific batches of the pfizer transfection product. this study, published in the european journal of clinical investigation, once again confirms, and puts into mainframe scientific discussion, data that had previously been vilified as “conspiracy theory” (“how bad,” n.d.). schmeling et al. found that some batches had nearly no associated adverse events at all. this is a finding that, in a recent evaluation of schmeling et al., the german organic chemistry professor gerald dyker summarized as “maybe in fact something like placebos” (dyker and matysik 2023). other batches, however, are associated with unprecedented rates in the magnitude of 8,000 saes per 80,000 doses, or one in every ten. saes refer to deaths and permanent or long-term maiming, which seems to have occurred in 10 percent of all recipients of specific batches. what the study fails to consider, however, is that some batches were likely applied to different age and comorbidity demographics, such as in nursing homes. much more detailed investigations based on all-cause mortality, which bypass the inherent bias in studies based on diagnoses, are needed. in the meantime, such unexplained variability speaks to the complete absence of quality control and regulation. no pharmaceutical product has ever been allowed to stay on the market with such a safety profile. for the sake of this associative statistical analysis, it is irrelevant whether those saes have been proven to be causative. the point is simply that the variability in outcomes is unheard of for a regulated special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 30 product. one batch of aspirin would never cause one thousand times the number of reported saes than another without regulatory intervention. no conclusion most of the quoted accredited experts who are beginning to come forward within mainstream professional and academic venues, and are diagnosing the various failures of regulatory law and have begun raising the alarm about irregularities that occurred as early as late 2020 in the interactions between regulatory agencies and manufacturers, seem to be unaware of the ota set up and military nature of the operation. most of them speak as if the products in question were pharmaceuticals. most of them analyze and publish data as if, as judge truncale stated so cynically in united states v. pfizer, they were “material.” what is strikingly absent in all of this important analysis is the bigger “autoimmune” picture of the global security formations that i have tried to put into the frame. there is no final conclusion to this article because the processes of investigation into what has happened since the covid pandemic was announced in 2020 have not concluded, and indeed on an almost daily basis, new facts and understandings emerge, and i expect them to continue. however, what has not changed since i began to work on this material is the fundamental insight into what i call the autoimmune turn within the security apparatuses of the state and its publicprivate structures, particularly in relation to the antibody-industrial complex that began to be weaponized in the 1980s. the cold war seems to have turned inward targeting the body politic, and it has chosen to do so molecularly. the duplicitousness that i have diagnosed at various junctures of the covid operations is perhaps of the same ilk as the one neocleous finds at work in the politics of immunity when he points out, “so: we live in an age of noncombatant immunity designed to provide civilians with some semblance of security, that is also an age of collateral damage in which civilians appear to lack any meaningful security…how is it possible that immunity is a human right ascribed to noncombatants, codified in international law and adhered to by liberal democratic states, and yet so many noncombatants are being killed by those same states?” (2022, 312). indeed, how is it possible? notes 1 hatfill is a physician and bioweapons expert, and later came to play an advisory role on covid matters in trump’s white house. 2 doe #1 v. rumsfeld, 297 f.supp.2d 119, 135 (d.d.c. 2003). 3 authorization for medical products for use in emergencies , 21 u.s.c.s. §360bbb-3 (2004). special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 31 4 21 u.s.c.s §360bbb-3(c)(2). 5 i am using this abbreviated reference to the court case, whose full citation is united states ex rel. jackson v. ventavia rsch. grp., llc, 667 f. supp. 3d 332 (e.d. tex. 2023). 6 id. at 351. 7 id. 8 id. at 362. 9 id. at 351. 10 id. at 363. 11 id. at 362. 12 id. at 352. 13 id. at 362. 14 id. 15 id. at 361. 16 i am using this abbreviated reference to the complaint, whose full citation is watts v. austin, sec’y, dep’t of def. (may 31, 2023) (1:2023cv01544). the text of the compliant can be found at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23831826-watts-v-dod (accessed november 10, 2023. 17 id. at 2. 18 id. at 18. 19 id. at 17. 20 united states v. stanley, 483 u.s. 669, 687. 21 watts v. austin at 19. 22 42 u.s.c. 247d-6d(c)(1)(a)(iii). https://plus.lexis.com/api/document/collection/cases/id/67x5-t071-fcyk-22kt-00000-00?cite=667%20f.%20supp.%203d%20332&context=1530671 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23831826-watts-v-dod special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 32 23 i make reference here to ruha benjamin’s (2016) attractive concept of the “biodefector” who practices “informed refusal” at a historical moment where the foundational principle of informed consent is being eviscerated in medical contexts. 24 see, for example, ian r. mackay’s historical discussion of vaccine-induced autoimmune encephalomyelitis (2010, a253). 25 consider a 2022 israeli study that demonstrates that it is not sars-cov-2 infection itself that causes myocarditis (as cdc officials have claimed), but most definitively the mrna injections (tuvali et al. 2022). 26 an interesting study to consider here is david simon et al. (2021), which studies patients with hyperinflammatory autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease who are on biologic cytokine inhibitor drugs. when infected with sars-cov-2, these patients appeared to be protected from severe illness because the biologic agents appear to mitigate the hyperinflammatory response to the virus. in this sense, covid-19 acts similarly to a hyperinflammatory or autoimmune disease. however, as the seminal study by röltgen et al. demonstrated, “histological analysis of draining ln [lymph node] shows…in severe covid-19 compared with mrna vaccination, higher quantities, and persistence of spike antigen accumulated in the gcs [germinal centers] of mrna vaccinees and detectable vaccine rna in gcs for up to two months postsecond dose” (2022). in other words, presumably safe transfection produces even higher amounts of spike antigen than severe covid-19. 27 amgen inc. v. sanofi 143 s. ct. 1242 (2023). 28 this is true as well for the cells of pets and livestock, since the rollout of mrna technology is already progressing rapidly in veterinary practice (see, e.g., merck’s animal health platform, “sequivity rna particle technology,” 2018, https://www.merck-animal-health-usa.com/offload-downloads/merck-sequivitywhite-paper). 29 in an earlier, pathbreaking study seneff et al. (2022) found “evidence that [mrna] vaccination induces a profound impairment in type i interferon signaling,” which could potentially present causal links to cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and a host of other human health problems. 30 mckernan (2023) writes, “8/8 monovalent vaccines sourced from a single case from a single lot of pfizer monovalent vaccines all fail the ema specification of 3030:1 rna:dna (330ng/mg dna/rna). they are over the limit by an order of magnitude (18-70 fold). the dna contamination is very consistent and the vial to https://www.merck-animal-health-usa.com/offload-downloads/merck-sequivity-white-paper https://www.merck-animal-health-usa.com/offload-downloads/merck-sequivity-white-paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/interferon special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 33 vial ratio of rna:dna is very consistent within the same lot of monovalent vaccines.” 31 there is evidence as well from an older swedish in-vitro study that mrna from pfizer’s product is, despite the cdc’s denials—without any clinical evidence, the cdc claims that “they [mrna covid-19 vaccines] do not affect or interact with our dna” (cdc 2022)—reverse transcribed into human dna in the liver within as little as six hours after exposure to the transfection products, and that liver cells then show changes in gene expression of long interspersed nuclear element-1, a protein associated with aging and tumor suppression (aldén et al. 2022). another study that addresses the risk of reverse translation and integration into the human genome is beaudoin et al. 2022. 32 see, for example, romano et al.: “small non-coding rnas, in particular, have been the focus of many studies in the last 20 years and their fundamental role in many human diseases is currently well established. inter alia, their role in cancer development and progression, as well as in drug resistance, is being increasingly investigated” (2017, 485). references aldén, markus, francisko olofsson falla, daowei yang, mohammad barghouth, cheng luan, magnus rassmussen, and yang de marinis. 2022. “intracellular reverse transcription of pfizer biontech covid-19 mrna vaccine bnt162b2 in vitro in human liver cell line.” current issues in molecular biology 44 (3): 1115–26. https://doi.org/10.3390/cimb44030073. anderson, warwick, and ian r. mackay. 2014. intolerant bodies: a short history of autoimmunity. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. banoun, helene. 2023. “mrna: vaccine or gene therapy? the safety regulatory issues.” international journal of molecular sciences 24 (13): 10514. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms241310514. beaudoin, christopher a., martin bartas, adriana volná, petr pečinka, and tom l. blundell. 2022. “are there hidden genes in rna/dna vaccines?” frontiers in immunology, no. 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2022.801915. benjamin, ruha. 2016. “informed 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catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christian gundermann, 2024 38 wang, qian, sho iketani, zhiteng li, liyuan li, yicheng guo, yiming huang, anthony d. bowen et al. 2023. “alarming antibody evasion properties of rising sarscov-2 bq and xbb subvariants.” cell 186 (2): 279–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.12.018. author bio christian gundermann is an associate professor in the gender studies department at mount holyoke college. his areas of specialization include pharmocracy as empire at the molecular level, the critique of biomedicine, veterinary, and alternative medicine, as well as critical animal studies, especially animal training, the history of equitation, and horse breeding. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2022.12.018 the covid emergency as autoimmune disease abstract keywords preliminaries part i setting the stage for 2020 conspiracy the accusation of “conspiracy theorist” as horror autotoxicus the necessary augmentation of the immune system the four pillars of emergency health emergencies emergency use authorization the public readiness and emergency preparedness (prep) act other transaction authority (ota) jackson v. ventavia: it’s an ota, stupid watts v. austin: getting on target part ii sars-cov-2 and mrna “vaccines”: autoimmune logic “autoimmune” political attacks on regulation and quality control no conclusion notes     cover art cover art | outdoor seating area at the visitor's center artist statement     joshua kim joshuakim81@gmail.com     the cover art for this issue of catalyst is from a series titled hambach that i created in 2019. i had the chance to present my work at the “everyday militarisms” workshop organized at the university of sydney in 2019 where i met and started collaborating with the co-editors of this special section on the domestication of war. the cover image was taken from a viewpoint across the lookout platform, aussichtspunkt – terra nova 1, with the open pit mine tagebau hambach in the background. the elements juxtaposed in this photograph illustrate how the possibility of leisure presses up against an anthropocenic nightmare of an open pit mine. the series takes as subject a large-scale open pit lignite mine located in the western region of germany, near the town of hambach. west of köln, following the bundesstraße past the towns of lindenthal, königsdorf, horrem, sindorf, and then finally elsdorf, is the tagebau hambach, or the hambach surface mine. the company rheinisch-westfälisches elektrizitätswerk aktiengesellschaft or rheinish-westphalian power plant (rwe) started mining the 10,000 acre surface in 1978. its lignite reserves are estimated to be around 1.3 billion tons, making it one of the largest open-pit mines in europe. however, the mine has also been the subject of controversy and protest due to its environmental impact, displacement of local communities, and contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. the expansion of the mine in recent years has led to the destruction of ancient forests and wildlife habitats, leading to protests from environmental groups and locals. the mine has also been associated with the struggle against coal and the transition to renewable energy sources in germany. this manhattan-island-sized hole has consumed what was the hambach forest, of which only 10% remains. rwe had plans to clear the remaining forest but was met with protests and has had to temporarily stop the envisioned expansion. in 2018, the hambach forest occupation gained international attention as activists tried to prevent the clearing of the remaining forest to make way for further expansion of the mine. there are no plans to expand the mine but instead plans are being made to allow the forest to expand back into and through the mine. these photographs move the viewer’s gaze from the outer boundary of the park to the interior rim of the open pit mine. to gain public trust, a park has been built surrounding the mine, which invites engagement and leisure activities such as horseback riding, art walks, and beekeeping. the park is a moat, built to shield and protect the pit from a critical view, and an attempt to tame, domesticate, and undermine the public’s perception of the open pit mine in its immenseness of size and generational affect. these images trace the domestication of a militarized space set in the context of a coal mine envisioned to supply germany with power in war times when access to foreign oil is cut. the juxtaposition of the immensity of the mine with the domestic scenes of play and leisure serve to confront the wars that are hidden in plain sight; a war against the surface of the earth; a war of emissions and incursions into the atmosphere; and a war against enemies, both present and future, real and imagined, that linger in german nationhood. the images in series capture the stark contrast between small-scale mundane domesticity and the vast open pit mine that dominates the landscape. they highlight the impact of human activity on the environment and raise questions about the balance between industrial progress and ecological preservation. with relation to the special section on the domestication of war, the images also showcase modes of domesticating the mine using a park, deck chairs and umbrellas, swing sets, apiaries, and horse-riding tracks. the bleakness of the mine contrasts with these seemingly everyday domestic scenes that are adjacent to each other but still not convincing enough to persuade many visitors to brave the uninviting dust and industrial sublime of the mine that stretches across the horizon. the hambach series provokes the reader to conjure the image of the backyard/patio as a place and product of conflict. while the open pit mine may be an especially poignant subject, there are aspects of the domestication of war that can be seen in every suburban home; the backyard lawn that hides toxins and buries histories of stolen land; the swimming pool or open pit of chlorinated water that belies the reality of water scarcity. in each image of the series, the illusion of domesticity is paired with the horror of the consequences of militarized logics of conflict and extraction.   figure 1. equestrian path: when i see an image of a human riding a horse, i picture everything that is not visible. i see the truck and trailer bringing the horses from destination to destination, the invisible labor of care for the horse in the stable, the sheer volume of food and water, and all the support systems that let us create the romanticized illusion of man and nature joining seamlessly as one.   figure 2. an abandoned apiary: casual beekeeping is a high eco-value signpost. if someone wants to signal to a public their values about the environment, beekeeping creates a swarm of images. the image is constant and impactful. beekeeping is a passive activity like how an author is always writing and reflecting upon their work, or how a method actor is practicing their craft by being. while the bees may or may not be present, the apiary signals the potential for remediation   figure 3. a map of the park surrounding the mine: a single small image the map beige and laminated, which displays the absence of violence. all areas and paths are organized and tidy. to new visitors it is as if this land were always meant to be in this state. the mine has always been there.   figure 4. site-specific art walk: stations of the cross. ostensibly a good friday service would take the congregation around the pit to stations like this that display the journey of christ from trial to crucifixion.   figure 5. wall between the mine and the nearby town: this wall protects each side from the other. the mine dirt and debris can’t fly on the updraft over the wall and the community and tourists, like myself, do not have access to this view of the mine.   figure 6. sprinklers: on the top of the wall, every 100 meters, these infrastructures abate dust and dirt, keeping them where they belong, inside the mine wall.   figure 7. view of open pit mine and machinery: these excavator machines are the biggest land vehicles on earth. the bulldozer in front of it is a pebble in comparison to the excavator. and yet, compared to the accumulated effect of machines such as these, the mine remains unimaginably bigger. the last station of this reportage is a visitor center of the hambach mine. the platform provides a 270-degree view of the open coal mine, which supplies the energy stockpile. the façade of domesticity undermines the public’s perception of war. the state of the domestic is the public’s support of war. nowhere in the visitor center is free from confrontation by what the machines unearth: coal dust and rocks.   figure 8. tourists posing for pictures, with mine as backdrop: families attempt to capture this iconic destination, memorialized into the background of a photograph. the lure of that infinite horizon stretching into nowhere is so powerful that it forces us to ignore the stones of varying sizes that are constantly flying out of the pit at our bodies.   figure 9. visitor’s center play set: the low dust cloud barely visible in the background forms the setting for this children’s play area. how much of the sand in the sandpit came from the mine? the idea of children playing while being continually rained on by small pebbles sits incongruously with the safety mechanisms like the soft corners of the play set.   figure 10. outdoor seating area at the visitor’s center: lounge chairs face the mine, as if it were the beach or a swimming pool. clouds of dust and dirt rise from the surface of the mine, creating clouds of coal amongst the clouds of vapor. but the dust is too heavy to stay in the clouds and comes showering down on the imagined lounging viewers.     author bio joshua kim is an artist. to learn more, please visit https://www.joshkim.net/.     tracing relational care across borders: towards geopolitical imaginaries otherwise     columba gonzález-duarte the new school for social research gonzalc2@newschool.edu juanita sundberg university of british columbia juanita.sundberg@ubc.ca     abstract in this paper, we enrich feminist theorizing on care by tracing more-than-human relationalities that are grounded in place but also stretch across méxico, the united states, and canada. in three brief vignettes, we outline how geopolitical conditions of im/mobility intersect with specific material, semiotic, and affective relations of care involving sonoran desert soils, berries, toxins, and human bodies. in line with indigenous theorizing on the myriad ways borders have colonized our political imaginaries, we suggest that more-than-human care is relational, not territorial—not contained by borders. resumen en este artículo, enriquecemos la teoría feminista sobre el cuidado al rastrear relaciones más-que-humanas que están arraigadas al lugar pero que también se extienden a lo largo de méxico, los estados unidos y canadá. en tres breves viñetas, describimos cómo las condiciones geopolíticas de in/movilidad se entrelazan con diferentes aspectos del cuidado, desde sus relaciones materiales, semióticas y afectivas hasta las más específicas que involucran los suelos del desierto de sonora, frutos rojos, toxinas y humanos en movimiento. en línea con la teoría indígena sobre las formas en que las fronteras han colonizado nuestros imaginarios políticos, sugerimos que el cuidado más-que-humano es relacional, no territorial. no está contenido por fronteras. keywords relational care, borders, soils, butterflies, migrant workers, toxicity     introduction in this paper, we enrich feminist theorizing of care in science studies by tracing more-than-human relationalities across borders. building on recent indigenous theorizing, we further criticisms of methodological nationalism (wimmer and schiller 2003) by also considering the coloniality and anthropocentrism of geopolitical bordering (aguilar gil 2020; cabnal 2016; daigle 2023; a. simpson 2014; l. simpson 2017). as ayuuk linguist yásnaya aguilar gil (2020) suggests, “state borders were not established instantaneously, but, once they were, they colonized even our imagination. a country’s silhouette marks a boundary on the map of the world, but what it really signifies today is the separation of families, death, human trafficking, and torture.” indeed, the intensified militarization and surveillance of borders work to repress and erase indigenous people’s sovereignty while also preventing certain humans and animals from freely and safely moving across. as politicians push hyper-nationalist geopolitical imaginaries tinged with white supremacy and human exceptionalism, we call for methodologies oriented to following mobile materialities relationally across space without reifying settlerstate borders. to operationalize a transboundary methodology, this paper traces more-thanhuman relations of care that are grounded in place but also stretch across three settler-colonial states: méxico, the united states, and canada. specifically, we present three vignettes from our individual research sites in locations connected by monarch butterflies as they migrate between their wintering grounds in méxico and summering grounds in the us and canada. at each site, we attend to the ways geopolitical conditions of im/mobility intersect with specific material, semiotic, and affective relations of care enacted by humans and other-thanhumans, including sonoran desert soils, berries, toxins, and human bodies. in our first vignette, we address the material life of soils and the care work they perform in cabeza prieta national wildlife refuge, located on the us-méxico border. while soils generate the very ground for border enforcement, the us border patrol’s actions have contradictory outcomes, with spatial and temporal implications for a multitude of desert dwellers and those transiting through. our second and third vignettes trace the berries grown within and circulating through the monarch butterfly biosphere reserve in central méxico and monarch summering grounds in halifax, canada. as we show, free trade agreements between the united states, méxico, and canada have transformed berries into transboundary objects of complex and even reactionary relations of care, with lethal consequences that span across north america. placing these stories about the im/mobilities of material bodies into conversation enables us to highlight the myriad, asymmetrical ways more-than-human care exceeds settler-colonial borders (daigle 2023; murphy 2015; wimmer and schiller 2003). to elaborate our methodological approach, we first situate our collaboration. next, we introduce feminist theorizing about care, especially more-than-human care. our approach foregrounds the contributions of indigenous scholars who insist on thinking about care beyond settler-state borders. then, we turn to stories from our individual research in places that have long been connected by indigenous seasonal and ceremonial movements; animal migration routes; imperial contests to control territory and trade; labor migration; and settler-state complicity to both contain and limit access. we begin at the us-méxico border, where policies to militarize enforcement coincide with the free movement of berries and toxins between méxico, the us, and canada. methodology and more-than-human care our respective research on borders and more-than-human geographies brought us together in 2019 (gonzález-duarte 2021, 2024; sundberg 2011, 2023). since then, we have cultivated a shared practice of reflecting on the ethics and politics of multispecies research and the borders of settler states in which we live and work. we see our collaboration as a feminist practice of weaving our thoughts together to learn more than we would from working individually.1 although our journeys have been different, our projects are located in and funded by settler-colonial universities on lands stolen from indigenous peoples. columba is a woman born and raised in méxico with privileges provided by a scale of whiteness associated with class; she was an academic in canada and now in the us. juanita is a white woman raised in central america, a citizen of one settlercolonial state and an academic working in another. the analysis presented here learns from and builds on indigenous feminist theorizing on the ways colonial borders limit our political imaginaries (aguilar gil 2020; cabnal 2016; daigle 2023; a. simpson 2014; l. simpson 2017). more-than-human care here, we outline feminist theorizing about care, especially more-than-human care. along with many others, we build on feminists bernice fisher and joan tronto’s definition of care as a “species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (1990, 40, emphasis in original). we contribute to this work by calling for research oriented to transboundary relations of more-than-human care. although fisher and tronto (1990) described care as the work of the human species, subsequent feminists have emphasized that caring practices involve but also affect other-than-humans (curtin 1993; donovan and adams 1996). maría puig de la bellacasa extends fisher and tronto’s (1990) definition to accent “care as vital in interweaving a web of life” (2017, 4), which inevitably involves interdependent relations with more-than-humans. puig de la bellacasa calls for conceptualizations of care that decenter humans, to avoid “reinstating the binaries and moralism of anthropocentric ethics” (13) that characterize the western tradition. indigenous understandings of care always and already recognize other-thanhumans as kin who extend life-sustaining care to humans, just as humans develop reciprocal relations of care for other-than-human kin (cabnal 2016; cajete 1999; daigle 2023; kimmerer 2013; salmón 2000; todd 2018; watts 2013; whyte and cuomo 2017). indigenous political ontologies draw attention to human practices of care for others—human and other-than-human—as well as the daily activities of plants, animals, insects, and collective entities such as deserts, soils, forests, and so on that generate and enable life on earth for humans and many others (kanngieser and todd 2020). latin american feminists frame more-than-human care as practices that transcend the immediacy of time and space (rico rodriguez et al. 2024). linear temporal framings so common to western thinking fail to capture how many communities approach more-than-human care—especially in the americas, where the wounds of colonialism continuously animate ecologies in the present. for instance, many indigenous communities conceptualize care in terms of responsibilities to ancestors and generations yet to be born (rico rodriguez et al. 2024; watts 2013; l. simpson 2017). for some feminists in abya yala, cuidados (care) conveys an ethical disposition that encompasses “the little nothings,” everyday practices that express ways of being toward life and death (gonzálezduarte 2024 salamanca gonzalez 2024). from such perspectives, more-thanhuman care is a never-ending process; “daily caring practices” are iterative, hence always incomplete (rico rodriguez et al. 2024; see also ressiore et al. 2024). michelle daigle’s reflections on indigenous care work address the spatial dimensions of care and draw attention to the ways “care work is embodied through movement to sustain, rebuild, and be accountable to the relationships that shape indigenous life” (2023, 85). as relations with more-than-humans extend across landscapes and waterscapes, so too do human communities and, therefore, the care practices they perform (daigle 2023, 85). indigenous relationalities, daigle argues, “exceed colonial territories” (83) upheld by settlercolonial regimes, including first nations reserves, treaty territories, and geopolitical borders.2from this perspective, the effects of care in one place also may affect others in distant places (watts 2013). dissimilar and discontinuous acts of care and generosity across a multiplicity of beings serve to promote and sustain life (cabnal 2016; rico rodriguez et al. 2024). m. murphy’s (2015) analysis of transnational, feminist-informed projects to address cervical cancer offers additional perspectives on care across borders. murphy identifies how such efforts to mobilize care were fraught with “romantic temptations” (2015, 725) to disconnect doing good from entangled histories and arrangements of colonialism, racialization, and political economy (see also duclos and criado 2020). alongside murphy, we aim to foster a “critical feminist politics of care” (719), which recognizes the enormous need for care-full relations that give and support flourishing while also addressing the tensions, contradictions, and asymmetries built into relations of more-than-human care in contemporary settler-colonial political formations. building on this vibrant and growing body of work, we elaborate a transboundary methodology. in the stories that follow, we operationalize our approach to highlight how more-than-human care relations involving soils, berries, toxins, and human bodies are entangled with asymmetrical colonial capitalist relations in place and across space. militarized bordering practices and sonoran desert soils the political border between the united states and méxico has existed on paper for over 170 years; however, major infrastructure projects to demarcate a divide have only materialized in the last 30 years, with innumerable consequences for communities (nevins 2002; st. john 2011). in this section, i, juanita, reconsider my research on border militarization in the sonoran desert, which is divided by the international border between the us and méxico. specifically, i address my research on soils, which constitute the very ground of the us-méxico border (sundberg 2023). i draw attention to concerns for soils articulated in the us, while also showing how such concerns are articulated in terms bound by settler borders and a white supremacist imagined community (benedict 1983). mobilizing our transboundary analytic, i examine how care is expressed for soils as well as the care work soils enact for creatures in place but also those transiting through the desert and across the international border. bordering the sonoran desert the international border dividing the sonoran desert is the outcome of imperial struggles for territorial possession, which resulted in the us declaring war on méxico in 1846. the treaty of guadalupe hidalgo ended the war in 1848, requiring méxico to cede lands it claimed to the us. establishing the border line brought additional violence, as the o’odham peoples, ancestral caretakers of these lands, were forced to choose whether to live in one settler-colonial state or another (leza 2019; ramon-sauberan 2023). in the us, o’odham communities were forced onto reservations in the early twentieth century. as a result, parts of the desert lost its caretakers and the sacred duties they performed to support soil, plant, and animal communities (ramon-sauberan 2023). meanwhile, with the support of us armed forces, european and euro-american settlers subjected desert lands to mining and cattle ranching (truett 2006). consequently, in the mid-twentieth century, the federal government designated areas to protect wilderness, a settler-colonial category that evokes an imaginary separation between humans and nature (cronon 1996). thus, a press release announcing the establishment of organ pipe cactus national monument erased the o’odham people’s presence in the desert since time immemorial, by stating the area was “little changed from…500 million years ago…[existed at] the borderland between the habitable world and the uninhabitable… [and is] a desert country so waterless and formidable that it has rarely been visited by white men” (cited in piekielek 2016, 4). the forced removal and resettlement of the o’odham transformed vast areas into uninhabited desert. despite these attempts at erasure, soils hold the stories of o’odham people who reside in and travel throughout these desert lands. soils remember the o’odham’s dispossession and displacement, for they continuously reveal evidence of o’odham farming strategies, grinding techniques to transform mesquite pods into flour, gatherings around firepits, journeys to the sea, harvesting saguaro flowers, and so on (nabhan 1982; ramon-sauberan 2023). soils remember because they are alive. from conviviality to moon dust in the sonoran desert soils are orchestrated by heterogeneous communities of microorganisms— bacteria, fungi, microbes—which, in interaction with rocks below and the water and plant and animal communities above, break down dead animal and plant matter. on the desert floor, soils can be thousands of years old and just as many feet deep; the care work that soils perform far exceeds human timescales (puig de la bellacasa 2015). soil work offers care to a multiplicity of desert dwellers. soils also make life possible for those transiting through, including people, jaguars, pronghorn, and monarch butterflies (hidetoshi et al. 2016). in this way, soils enact and ground convivial—from the latin convivere, to live together—worlds in the sonoran desert built on interaction and interdependence (given⁠ 2018).3 in 1994, however, convivial relations were challenged once again by “prevention through deterrence,” a us border enforcement strategy that framed “natural barriers such as rivers, mountains, and the harsh terrain of the desert” as weapons of deterrence (u.s. government accountability office 2001, 24). border patrol operations established in urban areas were intended to push migrating humans entering the us without inspection onto desert lands in southwestern arizona (u.s. border patrol 1994). within a short period of time, prevention through deterrence transformed the desert into a “death trap,” the graveyard of thousands of migrants (hing 2012, 165; de león 2015). illegalized by a white supremacist settler society, many have lost their lives, overheated, dehydrated, and alone (boyce and chambers 2021). although prevention through deterrence generates dangerous conditions for migrants, the us government and popular media frame migrants as threats to the desert’s natural landscape (provenzano and nevins 2019; sundberg and kaserman 2007). when boundary enforcement operations intensified at cabeza prieta national wildlife refuge and organ pipe cactus national monument, staff—now the primary caretakers of these desert lands—articulated great concern for desert soils (u.s. fish and wildlife service 2011). initially, their attention was directed primarily at so-called smugglers, who had begun transporting migrants across desert lands, often abandoning vehicles when they became stuck. in this context, the news media responded with narratives such as this from the chicago tribute, which became common in the first fifteen years of prevention through deterrence: “foot trails and car tracks scar the delicate sandy ground in all directions” (dellios 2003). this framing positions the desert as a stand-in for an imagined national body whose skin is scarred by illegalized migration (sundberg and kaserman 2007). this quote from the arizona daily star is another illustration of the trend: “they'll [abandoned vehicles] probably have to be removed by helicopter to minimize further damage to the cryptobiotic soil that serves as the living ‘skin’ of the desert” (tobin 2002). while these articles and others in their image appear to articulate concern for desert soils, their use of the body as a metaphor indicates their actual concern is an imagined national community that situates wilderness as foundational to whiteness. as the border patrol increased its presence in protected areas on the border, protected area staff shifted their concerns from migrants to enforcement operations. although border patrol agents are not permitted to drive off-road in wilderness areas, except in the case of emergencies involving the life and safety of human beings or threats to national security, they do it all the time (howard et al.2014). driving off-road creates new tracts on the desert floor; other agents then see these tracts and believe them to be authorized roads. when heavy vehicles repeatedly drive over soils rich with microorganisms, they compact the soil, destroying living organisms and their social fabric.4 soil particles hold water; however, compaction flattens the space between particles where water would be held. without water, the particles dry out, transforming soil into infertile moon dust, a vernacular term for the resulting fine, powdery substance that makes roads impassable. the degree of damage is dependent on factors such as the mode and conditions of exposure as well as temporal elements; a one-time event is different from repeated impacts (webb et al. 2013). repeated drive-overs increase the degree of compaction and dehydration, which puts border patrol agents at risk of getting stuck in moon dust. figure 1. desert road showing signs of erosion and compaction, causing moon dust; mats are placed over the compacted soil to allow travel. photograph by j. sundberg. in an ironic twist, moon dust inhibits the border patrol’s ability to harness the desert as an instrument of deterrence. instead, the agency is required to spend additional time and energy to ensure agents can patrol the compacted desert floor. moreover, the agency recently has had to pay for remediation (u.s. national park service 2015). nonetheless, the increasing number of border patrol roads is causing desertification of the sonoran desert, with untold implications for so many desert dwellers along with those who migrate through. in sum, militarized policing of the border makes soil unable to sustain a multiplicity of beings today and in the future, for the temporality of social reproduction and repair is not apace with geopolitical imperatives (puig de la bellacasa 2015). hence, moon dust undermines possibilities for convivial futures. ultimately, desertification caused by border enforcement in the sonoran desert will expose desert dwellers and those in transit—whether human or other-thanhuman— to increased risk of premature death. by attending to the care work of desert soils, we highlight the limitations of methodologies that naturalize settler borders and human-centered temporalities. care is not only relational but also temporally complex. negotiating im/mobility in the early twentieth century, as white settlers were moving west and occupying indigenous lands in what is now called the us, méxico was undergoing a revolution. the 1910 revolution was a partial win for indigenous and peasant communities: land grabbed during colonial and postcolonial occupation was given back. post revolution land back movements (restitución de tierras in spanish) effectively ended in 1994, however, when méxico, the us and canada signed the north american free trade agreement (nafta).5 since this time, the mexican government has subjected land back movements, like that of the zapatistas, to systematic militarized policies that pressure communities to abandon attachments to land and soil, interdependent relations with more-than-humans, and, ultimately, their capacities to stay in their land according to their vision of a dignified life. nafta has resulted in increased dispossession throughout méxico (gonzález-duarte 2021; herrera 2019). indigenous communities are especially affected as multinational corporations have been given free rein to expand agribusinesses and other extractivist projects such as mining (tetreault 2022). the us implemented prevention through deterrence in 1994, the same year nafta came into effect (nevins 2002). border policy documents demonstrate the strategy intended to contain individuals dispossessed by nafta even as corporations were permitted to work across political boundaries. in practice, this policy means that human mobility from south to north is enmeshed in intensified border control mechanisms across north america (fernández-kelly and massey 2007). border control and corporate extractivism make a fatal pairing in which people and other earth beings are simultaneously displaced and contained within settler-state boundaries (altamirano-jiménez 2023; nevins 2008). we suggest this centuries-long process of racialized erasure and dispossession is a form of settler extractivism that potentializes itself through border control across the three settler state’s borders (saldaña-portillo 2016). in concrete ways, the us and canada generate such pressures, and méxico enables them to do so. racialized containment under neoliberal north america indigenous communities in méxico opposed nafta because they saw it as a deliberate effort to deprive them of their land and livelihood (bartra and otero 2005). indeed, the mexican government reversed the revolutionary era’s commitment to land back by allowing communal land holders to divide and sell their land. in addition, the mexican government replaced its goal to support small and medium-sized maize producers with policies allowing the importation of government-subsidized maize from the us (otero 2011). combined, these policy changes represent an attack on small-scale household economies centered around the milpa, a cultivation system organized around maize, squash, and beans, also called “the three sisters” by indigenous communities in the north. such policies affecting land markets and maize protections have made méxico into an importer of corn and exporter of labor (fitting 2006). in essence, nafta makes milpa cultivation unsustainable. consequently, many indigenous peasants pursue work in the north. others, however, either sell their small plots of land or switch to slightly more profitable cash crops such as berries. nafta has fundamentally altered diets in the us and canada by making fruits and vegetables that once were available seasonally now accessible throughout the year (gálvez 2018; orozco-ramírez et al. 2017). berries are a prime example of this shift: strawberry, raspberry, and blueberry production increased globally from 6.5 to 10.5 million tons between 2005 and 2018 (gonzález-ramírez et al. 2020). corporations based in the us are driving this growth, and mexicans increasingly are producing berries for export (palmer-rubin 2024). for instance, mexican blueberry production increased from 4 million pounds in 2009 to around 89 million pounds in 2018; this growth has continued over the past five years (wu and guan 2021). catering to year-round demands for berries has generated a “berry revolution” in rural méxico, especially jalisco and michoacán (palmer-rubin 2024). regions historically focused on production for domestic markets now are covered with monoculture berry fields for export (gonzález-ramírez et al. 2020). small to medium-sized producers contract with us firms via intermediaries that enforce stringent quality controls yet offer low prices; all risks are offloaded to producers (gonzález-ramírez et al. 2020). meanwhile, the shift to berries requires enormous resources, including water, pesticides, fertilizers, and plastic. such changes are manifest in michoacán, the very region that is home to monarch butterflies. monarchs migrating across north america must contend with militarized border policies, as elaborated above, as well as fragmented habitat. in turn, berry producers face innumerable risks. producing berries in michoacán in this section, i, columba, propose that care is enacted in relational practices that extend across species and entities. i connect my long-term research on monarch butterflies with the “berry revolution” in the context of nafta, while also demonstrating how ancestral forms of land care persist within the berry fields. by mobilizing our transboundary analytic, i examine how care is expressed through reciprocal relationships that involve more-than-human entities, but also through the daily labor to produce berries for export, which often exposes bodies to toxic landscapes. i connect the stories of two women—one in méxico and the other in canada—who harvest berries under similar conditions while battling cancer. eulalia lives at the edge of the monarch butterfly biosphere reserve in méxico. i have been visiting this area as a researcher and friend for the last decade as part of my interest in multispecies mobility justice. i met eulalia on december 12, 2022, when her nephew, a traditional dancer in the community, invited me to their community’s festival celebrating the anniversary of the virgin of guadalupe’s appearance in 1531. guadalupe, also called the virgencita, is the most sought-after religious figure in méxico and is celebrated annually on december 12. in 2022 eulalia co-sponsored the town’s celebration. as i followed those carrying a statue of the virgin, eulalia told me about her berries. she actually used the word in english, likely because the mediators who buy from her call them berries too. after the beautiful celebration, eulalia invited me to visit her berry fields the following day—yes, she worked the day after hosting a party for five hundred people! eulalia wanted to show me her raspberry field and the care or cuidados she put into the plants and their small red fruits. on december 13, we met at eulalia’s field. eulalia, her two kids, her recently newmom dog and puppies, and her husband were all involved in different activities in the berry field. i hugged her and complimented her work ethic: “i can’t believe you are standing and working after such a wonderful party.” she smiled back as if she did not fully understand my compliment. it was then i noticed something i had not seen the previous day, at the party for the virgencita. because eulalia was wearing a cap instead of the fancy hat she had worn the day before, i could see that she had lost her hair. i did not ask her about it. instead, we talked about the field, her dogs, her kids, and how she works in the field every afternoon with all the family, including the animals, because she feels sorry about leaving the dogs and puppies alone. as i walked through the tiny rows of raspberry plants, i noticed that the plants were narrowly spaced, and, because of their spiny branches, i imagined it was difficult to pick each berry manually. eulalia, however, stood at the edge of her field. i paused and looked back at her, indicating i was waiting for her to walk the berry field with me. from the field’s edge, where she firmly remained, she told me she could not continue walking with me, as per her doctor’s recommendation. figure 2. virgin celebration. photograph taken by columba gonzález-duarte, 2022. at that point, i stopped to think about the field with more attunement. i looked at eulalia’s husband, who was wearing a simple mask like those we used during the covid-19 pandemic. it was the same mask he had worn the day before and, most likely, had worn for days. however, neither eulalia nor her kids, dogs, or i were wearing any protection, yet the fields were doused with pesticides and herbicides. many of these pesticides are banned in other countries (rosas-sánchez et al. 2022, 101). not surprisingly, studies suggest that extended periods of pesticide exposure are associated with higher risks of cancer (valencia-quintana et al. 2022, valencia quintana et al. 2023). there we stood, exposed to the toxins that made eulalia sick with cancer. from the edge of the field, where she stood, eulalia said she was in recovery and that approaching the plants could expose her to relapse or further harm her body. i paused to look at the berries. they seemed harmless and even nourishing. but they are not. i looked up at the surrounding mountains that host monarchs, also threatened by the very herbicides and pesticides sprayed onto the berry fields. i tried to make sense of eulalia’s framing of berry cultivation as an act of care; she referred to the berries as crops that need cuidados or care. in addition to using the language of care, eulalia showed me the ancestral practices of care and reciprocity common in the area, which involve placing santa maria flowers woven into the shape of a cross at the edges and center of her field to care for and protect the berries. these flowers mediate between humans and divine entities. through the act of offering flowers, humans express their respect for divine entities and seek to receive care in return, often in the form of favorable weather conditions for a successful harvest (gonzález-duarte and méndezarreola 2024). rather than merely a situated human experience, such practices of care aim to protect humans and land. care is enacted as relational, stretching across species and entities. although i was familiar with care practices in mazahua (jñarto) and otomi (hñähñu) maize cultivation, as well as in eulalia’s community, this was the first time i witnessed these practices being used for a nafta cash crop. eulalia and her family were caring for the berry just as they had cared for maize ancestrally—the very maize that nafta’s neoliberal corn regime displaced (fitting 2006). however, another factor made these acts of care for berries more important. eulalia needed the berries to be export-quality to meet the aesthetic demands of affluent consumers in the north. she expressed a sense of duty to those who were going to eat her carefully cultivated product. the berries she cared for made her sick, yet eulalia was proud of feeding north americans with her land and labor. ultimately, eulalia continues to cultivate berries, not only as a way to uphold attachments to her land, as her community has done since colonization, but also to sustain her family and to pay back the debt acquired to co-sponsor the virgencita’s celebration. when we parted, eulalia gave me a plate full of export-quality berries to take home. i confess, it was hard to eat them but, since eulalia had gifted them, i settled on rinsing the berries a few times, despite the futility of eliminating the toxins they carry. reactionary forms of care people in the us and canada, along with elites in méxico, increasingly consume berries for their health benefits. indeed, the demand for fresh berries is skyrocketing among households in the $100,000-and-over income brackets (karst 2024). positioned as “superfoods,” berries are celebrated for being highly nutritious, low-calorie foods that are rich in fiber and striking in color. even with substantial increases in production, berries command a premium price, and their popularity continues to rise (karst 2024). berries are an especially popular food for children, and families purchase them even when doing so strains their incomes (karst 2024; onion 2021). in the face of corporate competition, driscoll’s, a fourth-generation family business, set out to make berries accessible “all year around” (goodyear 2017). the company’s brand strategists have worked relentlessly to develop the shape, color, and smell of berries, and driscoll’s now controls nearly one-third of the berry market in the us (goodyear 2017). driscoll’s research suggests consumers associate berries with happiness, conviviality, and harmony, while a simple google search reveals that berries are widely recommended as healthy superfoods. to design the perfect strawberry, driscoll’s relied on wild fruits that formed part of an assemblage of care for indigenous societies in coastal california (goodyear 2017). the “california strawberry gold rush” contributed to dismantling the ecosystems that offered gifts annually and transformed the strawberry into a product that feeds contemporary fantasies of self-care. today, care of the self has become disassociated from care as a web of reciprocal relations (duclos and criado 2020). ultimately, we suggest, berries have become reactionary symbols of good health as they are simultaneously vehicles of violence toward racialized humans and other-than-human beings (e.g., butterflies and contaminated soils) who do not count as subjects of care. the demand for berries is not exclusive to inhabitants of the us. in canada, berries are also in increasing demand for the same reasons and are produced under similar conditions to those in méxico. however, production in canada is facilitated by a guest worker program that “invites” foreign workers to labor on berry farms. berries in nova scotia canada is a significant exporter of berries. blueberries are canada’s top fruit export and accounted for 57 percent of the country’s fruit export value in 2023 (government of canada 2024). the province of nova scotia is the third-highest producer, as the weather is suitable for fruit and berry cultivation. as with many other agricultural crops, berries are tended by guest workers. since 1966 canada has admitted foreigners to work temporarily in the agricultural sector through the seasonal agricultural worker program (sawp). the program initially focused on admitting caribbean laborers; after méxico was added in 1974, mexicans came to outnumber workers from the caribbean (preibisch and binford 2007; satzewich 2007). the sawp allows farmers to contract de-skilled workers for low-paid work in high-risk conditions for up to eight months each year. the temporal restrictions on guest worker programs are rooted in racist immigration policies intended to prohibit the admission of racialized peoples (satzewich 1991). the sawp was designed to address demands for low paid labor while ensuring that agricultural workers solicited from the caribbean did not settle in canada and disrupt “the canadian way of life” (satzewich 1991, 191). after caribbean administrations attempted to negotiate better wages and working conditions, the program expanded to include mexicans, who are perceived as less demanding (preibisch and binford 2007; satzewich 2007). the program enables canada to invite the perfect migrant worker who stays just long enough for the employer to extract the migrant’s labor (binford 2013). in sum, these workers are made “permanently temporary” (walia 2021). leigh binford (2013) describes the program as distinct from, yet akin to, slavery. while workers have a contract and are paid for their labor, their mobility is curtailed and controlled (reid-musson 2017). contracts through the sawp tie workers to a single employer, who provides housing, transportation to stores and banks, and access to healthcare (binford 2013). krysta lynes calls these conditions of work “carceral infrastructures” that control and enclose a set of “multispecies interactions” (2023, 2). numerous studies have revealed the dangerous conditions facing sawp workers and the lack of state or independent monitoring of housing and working conditions (bejan et al. 2024; hennebry et al. 2016). however, workers need to support their families; consequently, most try to avoid making complaints or even seeking healthcare to ensure their employers will invite them back each year. in the face of such precarious and often inhumane conditions, each province hosting the sawp has seen the emergence of formal and informal groups offering logistic and legal support to workers (gabriel and macdonald 2014; sinkowski 2017). fighting grammars of segregation kerian is a jamaican woman in her forties who forms part of the decades-long movement of caribbean workers traveling to canada through the sawp. in 2022 kerian was working on a strawberry farm in nova scotia. unlike most other provinces, where large-scale commercial farms prevail, farms in nova scotia tend to be smaller (fitting et al. 2023). in part, this difference is due to nova scotia’s long-standing tradition of local, alternative food production initiatives. today, nova scotia hosts the highest number of farmers’ markets per capita in canada, and the provincial government celebrates buying local through marketing campaigns such as “taste of nova scotia” (fitting et al. 2023). nonetheless, farmers argue, provincial support for small-scale environmentally sustainable agriculture is insufficient and they are forced to cut costs in the only area they can: labor. hence, farmers turn to the sawp to hire workers. i, columba, met kerian while volunteering with no one is illegal, an organization that was supporting her after emergency surgery. sick or injured seasonal workers tend to be cut from the program and sent home immediately, without receiving any treatment. kerian lost her job when she was diagnosed with stage-four cancer. however, her condition deteriorated so quickly that her physician recommended kerian remain in nova scotia for life-saving surgery followed by chemotherapy treatment. during treatment, kerian needed a place to stay. no one is illegal asked the community for help with kerian’s care. when we finally found her a home, kerian was in excruciating pain and needed treatment for a wound that had remained open months after her surgery. because kerian’s employer fired her as soon as she got sick, kerian had no way to pay for medical treatment or medicines to manage her pain. over the course of two years, with the support of no one is illegal, kerian fought successfully to get healthcare treatment by arguing she was a resident when she became sick. as kerian told a reporter in 2024, after receiving her work permit and healthcare card, “we come here to nova scotia year after year to do work and we are part of your community and we pay taxes so we should get the same services as anybody else” (glynn 2024). in fighting for care, kerian disrupted the seasonal workers program’s grammar of dividing workers into those who are seasonal guests and those who are residents with rights to healthcare. from this perspective, kerian’s story is one of partial victory. however, kerian currently struggles with health-related problems and is unable to go back home to visit relatives. when i last spoke with her, however, kerian was hopeful she would be able to work again soon in canada. neoliberal borders and sick bodies while discussing kerian’s defense strategy with no one is illegal and its community members, questions were raised about whether kerian got cancer in canada. could we really “pin down” where she became ill? and would this uncertainty not undermine her insistence that the provincial and federal governments cover her treatment? however, the desire to pinpoint the source and cause of her illness reveals how settler borders have colonized our political imagination (aguilar gil 2020). seeking to blame kerian’s cancer on a particular state creates material and symbolic traps that make it harder to capture the ways toxic landscapes affect transnational farmworkers. the relevant question here is not where kerian was exposed to agrarian capitalism’s harmful conditions, but how her body, along with eulalia’s, became a territory on which are inscribed the violences of settlercolonial borders, displacement, and extraction. as a result of state complicity in enacting violence across north america, kerian and eulalia have become portable sites of toxicity. the concept of portable toxicity extends our transboundary methodology by highlighting and challenging the assumption that people are contained by state’s borders. as this case shows, neoliberal borders move through bodies and places at the expense of making people and more-than-humans sick. exposure to toxic compounds from agribusiness has been a long-standing issue. over sixty years ago, cesar chavez’s farmworker movement highlighted this during the delano grape strike and boycott (jenkins 1985). the boycott connected producers and consumers across time and space by informing consumers about the conditions of producing and consuming pesticide-treated grapes. however, political economic conditions today are spatially distinct from those in which chavez’s movement emerged. such differences matter to our focus on borders. eulalia’s and kerian’s stories illustrate how neoliberalization has changed agribusiness in north america. whereas once landscapes and bodies were polluted in localized regions that recruited migrant labor (e.g., california’s valley, the lower rio grande valley in south texas, the us corn belt, and ontario, quebec, and british columbia in canada), toxicity is no longer confined to place (shotwell 2021). hence, butterflies moving across the sites wherein eulalia and kerian work also absorb such toxicity (olaya-arenas and kaplan 2019). food, chemicals, and living beings are part of an assemblage of entities that constitute toxic landscapes across the continent. mobile humans and more-than-humans constitute this toxicity as well, once both are integrated into these fluxes of deadly chemicals. however, eulalia and kerian are not merely passive subjects absorbing waste. both are committed to seeing work as relational care and to resisting the cannibalization of care (fraser 2022). kerian’s victory is significant because it held the canadian government accountable for farmer’s efforts to avoid covering healthcare. that said, refusing to assign blame to a specific state or employer for kerian’s and eulalia’s cancer reveals the conditions neoliberalization has created. neoliberal regulatory frameworks allow the agribusiness frontier to expand at the expense of farmworkers’ health. the settler states propelling this expansion wash away their responsibilities precisely by resorting to citizenship. the concept of portable toxicity also highlights the contradictory and reactionary dimensions of im/mobility and care (sheller 2018). although associations between berries and health suggest we can physically separate ourselves from toxicity by washing berries of their socioecological relations, research across borders shows that we cannot. it is a fantasy to imagine national borders and national-level environmental protections will keep us safe (duclos and criado 2020). in offering portable toxicities, we recapture the claims of chavez and migrant workers of eating injustice—not only the direct injustice to those cultivating the food we eat, but also the injustices that affect all of us. indeed, we all end up ingesting toxic air, water, soil, and foods, albeit in asymmetrical ways and with asymmetrical access to medical care to address the resulting illnesses and injuries. portable toxicities invoke our interdependence and call on all of us to demand accountability across space and time. conclusion what do moon dust, eulalia, toxic berries, and kerian offer to thinking differently about care and borders? putting these stories into conversation prompted us to elaborate a feminist transboundary methodology oriented to tracing materialities relationally across space, while also refusing to reify settler-state borders. by analyzing more-than-human enactments of care in relation to soils, berries, toxins, and human bodies, we highlight the myriad ways care exceeds settler borders. as our reflections on militarized policing of the us southern border suggests, border enforcement strategies are slowly tearing up the fabric that holds sonoran desert soils together. the violent transformation of soils into moon dust threatens convivial desert worlds built on interaction and interdependence, while also exposing those in transit—whether human or otherthanhuman—to increased risks of premature death. even as land managers articulate care for desert soils, settler borders limit their imaginaries. and yet, as we suggest, the care work soils enact is relational, not territorial. in other words, soils teach us to consider that convivial futures depend upon relationships able to stretch across time and space. likewise, ethnographic research with people whose labor transcends borders allows us to trace the asymmetrical mechanisms through which some bodies incorporate the waste of agrarian capitalism, as well as how those same bodies are enlisted to create new landscapes for further expansion of the agribusiness frontier. eulalia’s story about cultivating berries while living with toxic contamination suggests that care and toxicity transcend national borders through neoliberal food cultivation. despite her lethal entanglement with this toxic import-export model, eulalia cares for her land. eulalia’s and kerian’s stories also highlight reactionary imaginaries of care: elite consumers want fresh and frozen berries year-round, regardless of the herbicides and pesticides required and the ensuing consequences for those laboring in fields. this vision of care, we argue, depends on racialized imaginaries of human exceptionalism: independent humans superior to and separate from nature, as well as humans cast as inferior who therefore naturally belong in the fields. canada’s seasonal agricultural worker program allows those of us secure enough in our exceptionalism to deny our dependency on the care work done by others. developing a relational understanding of care in connection with portable toxicities holds us accountable for our roles in these dynamics. by collaboratively reflecting on our individual findings on regimes of im/mobility, soils, berries, toxicity, and humans across north america, we broadened our perspectives on how the coloniality of borders threaten care—conceived as relational practices connecting humans and more-than-humans. the stories offered here also highlight that we all are implicated in relational care, including us as researchers residing on this continent. we offer this transboundary methodology in the hopes of inspiring political imaginaries that exceed colonial borders. note 1 we presented an initial version of this paper at york university’s summer school in international political economy and ecology in may 2024. 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promoting a different form of justice that values the well-being of both humans and more-than-humans during their migratory journeys across north america. columba gonzález-duarte es profesora de antropología en la new school for social research, nueva york. su práctica académica está moldeada por la ética feminista de los cuidados, que promueve una forma diferente de justicia y valora el bienestar tanto de los humanos como de los más-que-humanos en movimeinto por américa del norte. juanita sundberg is associate professor of geography and latin american studies at the university of british columbia. her research builds on feminist political ecology, more-than-human geographies, and anti-colonial theory. juanita sundberg es profesora de geografía y estudios latinoamericanos en la universidad de british columbia, canada. su investigación se basa en la ecología política feminista, las geografías más-que-humanas y la teoría anticolonial. vega, rosalynn a. 2024. “mitochondrial memory: transgenerational trauma, functional medicine, and quantum physics.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–26. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © rosalynn a. vega, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license mitochondrial memory: transgenerational trauma, functional medicine, and quantum physics rosalynn a. vega university of texas rio grande valley rosalynn.vega@utrgv.edu abstract building from karen barad’s “diffractive methodological approach” (2007, 71), this article combines mariella pandolfi’s notion of the female body as a transgenerational “physiological memoir” (1990, 255) with functional medicine perspectives on mitochondria and advances in quantum physics around “entanglement” to explore a new concept—“mitochondrial memory.” recent findings in biological research depict a communicating collective of mitochondria distributed across different “human” organs and describe how this collective controls many aspects of human health through epigenetic mechanisms. since exact copies of mitochondria are inherited through the maternal line, i draw from anthropological theory, functional medicine research, and recent discoveries in physics to offer a speculative and poetic interpretation of mitochondria as vessels containing a multilevel sense of self, allowing for connections within the same maternal line of descent across time and space. i offer autoethnographic anecdotes highlighting the struggles of immigrant women of color—women donna haraway might refer to as “cyborg entities” (1991, 149)—thereby framing mitochondrial memory as formed through “naturecultural” and intersectional “intra-actions” (see barad 2007, 97; crenshaw 1989; and haraway 2007, 249). keywords female body, transgenerational trauma, mitochondria, quantum physics, entanglement, self, ethnography, autoethnography mailto:rosalynn.vega@utrgv.edu original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 2 my bokbok (maternal great-grandmother) was married shortly before her husband emigrated from china to work on the central pacific railroad. his boot got caught in the tracks and he was killed by an oncoming train. bokbok was widowed at twentynine and my popo (maternal grandmother) grew up fatherless. popo immigrated with her husband and four children to the united states in march 1956. they had “six people and seven dollars” upon arrival. those first few decades in the us were marked by extreme poverty. popo and her children, including my mother, picked crops during the day, and my popo worked at hunt-wesson cannery at night. popo also tended to her vegetable garden—the family’s primary food source. to worsen matters, popo’s arranged marriage was filled with discord. her husband, my gonggong, took no active role in parenting—except to unleash harsh corporal punishment (now deemed physical abuse) on his children. thus, my mother grew up without a close relationship to either parent. nonetheless, as a young adult, she supported popo’s decision to go against chinese societal expectations and divorce gonggong by promising, along with her siblings, to take care of popo, financially and otherwise. fortunately, my mother did have one family member who offered her unconditional love and support—her popo (my bokbok). in 1963 bokbok finally joined her children and grandchildren in the united states. as a child, mother had lots of fun with bokbok, passing her off as her mother at school open houses and even teaching her how to dance the twist. bokbok was quick to defend mother whenever anyone commented on her skinny frame, saying, “what do you want her to be so fat for, anyway?” when my mom was studying at uc berkeley, bokbok’s memory began diminishing. mom regularly commuted to her hometown, an hour and a half each way, to visit bokbok. for as long as i can remember, my parents have been divorced. my mother, managing attorney of her office, worked long hours, often billing 115 hours per week. like my mother, my closest relationship as a child was with my popo. she called me her “shleem gohn bahng”—“the core of her heart.” similarly, i’ve always known she is inextricably embedded inside my being. our bond made me who i am. while in my twenties, popo started losing her memory to dementia. i was attending brown on the other side of the country and conducting ethnographic research in spain, but we skyped every day. on summer breaks, i drove to her house in the early morning hours and crawled in her bed to spend a few moments with her before scrubbing in on surgeries at sutter medical center and uc davis children’s hospital. popo’s mind was the most lucid first thing in the morning, so those moments every day were my opportunity to encounter all of her. introduction this article combines mariella pandolfi’s notion of the female body as a transgenerational “physiological memoir” (1990, 255) with functional medicine original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 3 perspectives on mitochondria and advances in quantum physics around “entanglement” to propose a new concept—“mitochondrial memory.” in essence, i draw from anthropological theory, functional medicine discourse, and recent discoveries in physics to offer a poetic and speculative (re)imagining of mitochondria as vessels containing a multilevel sense of self, allowing for intergenerational connections across space and time. i offer autoethnographic anecdotes highlighting the struggles of immigrant women of color—women donna haraway might refer to as “cyborg entities” who posess “a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical layers of her ‘biomythography’” (1991, 174), thereby framing mitochondrial memory as formed through “naturecultural” and intersectional “intra-actions” (see barad 2007, 97; crenshaw 1989; and haraway 2007, 249). in so doing, i aim to follow laura forlano (2017) by weaving together autoethnographic descriptions of illness and feminist technoscience literature. functional medicine discourse—deriving its perspective from mitochondrial research—essentializes the categories of “woman” and “mother.” this discourse runs the risk of “sexing” and “gendering” mitochondria, thus reinscribing the androcentric, patriarchal, and sexist biases in biological theories of sexual difference (see cipolla and gupta 2016; fausto-sterling 2000)—a path well worn by prior debates regarding “mitochondrial eve” (see oikkonen 2015, 747; also see richardson 2012, 909, on the “sexing” of the x chromosome). it is premised on sexual science’s problematic grounding in a binary sex and gender system (see butler 2004; fausto-sterling 2000; kessler 1998; salamon 2010; and van anders 2015). i acknowledge debates regarding essentialism and anti-essentialism of “the female” (see haraway 1991; withers 2010, 231) and recent work reframing sex and gender as non-binary, continuous variables (see fausto-sterling 2012; jordanyoung 2010; subramaniam and willey 2016). however, i also ask how mitochondrial research may be framed using feminist science studies perspectives as a productive site for theorizing embodiment and (non)human connection. the question emerges: “how do we engage the molecular with queer feminist desires for new biocultural stories and forms?” (willey 2016, 554–55). racializing and gendering processes also matter to my argument, and while i acknowledge the politics of scientific discourse, i focus attention on the conditions of possibility for (non)human connection. i introduce the following narratives “not to unpack the historical and cultural baggage contained in their logics but rather to gesture to it while highlighting the stakes of how we understand our nature” at the molecular level (willey 2016, 553). i heartily agree with banu subramaniam and angela willey, who write, “while we are all for mediating the violence of traditional bioscientific productions of difference, we also want to hold open the imaginative spaces for what else feminist engagements with the sciences can do” original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 4 (2016, 514). in so doing, i hope to “go beyond [simply] showing bias in science,” as haraway (1988, 578) urges, to begin “queering” the concepts of agency and identity. this article, grounded in the epistemological interventions of feminist science studies, is a curious, creative, and speculative exploration of the materiality of embodiment. feminist theories have been reluctant to engage with biological data. as elizabeth wilson asserts, “they retain, and encourage, the fierce antibiologism that marked the emergence of second wave feminism" (2004, 13). wilson has dubbed this feminism’s “distaste for biological detail,” which persists “despite an avowed interest in the body” (1998, 14–15). responding to this critique, i resist “anti-biologism” and instead engage emerging mitochondrial biology data. i turn to willey’s (2016) concept of “biopossibility” to consider simultaneously the material-discursive conditions of scientific knowledge production and the materialization of bodies. at the same time, considering the biopossibilities of human connections underscores the primacy of haraway’s concept of “natureculture” (2007, 249). i do not attempt to pin down these two realms since doing so would only create a conceptual distance between them, thus lapsing into a nature/nurture debate. like haraway, i suggest that biology neither creates culture, nor does culture create biology. embodiment and connection are always already naturecultural. by weaving together perspectives from feminist science studies, mitochondrial biology, physics, and anthropology, i hope to stimulate new knowledges about bodies in an entangled nature-cultural world (see barad 2007, 30; willey 2016, 558). i also tease the biopossibility of mitochondrial memory. however, asking whether mitochondria are transmitters of intergenerational trauma may be the wrong question. as willey writes, “it may be fruitful to think about the capacity to form attachments as a biopossibility that can inform our understandings of certain becomings without foreclosing as-yet-unrealized or unintelligible biopossibilities” (2016, 565). how does the biopossibility of mitochondrial memory allow for an imaginative exploration of human connection across time and space? how might we analyze the “dark matter” (drawing an analogy from the biosciences and physics) of (non)human connection? to answer this question, i turn to both emerging findings in mitochondrial biology and barad’s queer posthumanist (re)configuration of “quantum entanglements.” barad writes, “to be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence” (2007, ix). for barad, existence is not an individual matter since individuals do not pre-exist their “intra-actions.” instead, individuals emerge through their “intra-action” (97): the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 5 this conceptualization of entanglement interrogates pre-existing notions of subjectivity and objectivity while prompting shifts from the individual to the collective and from static objects to material-semiotic generative nodes (see adsit-morris and gough 2021, 96). following barad (2007, 37), how might we think of realism not as representations of an independent reality, but as the creative possibilities of intra-acting within (and beyond) the world? mitochondrial research emphasizes maternal inheritance. pandolfi notes indissoluble links among women in the maternal line of descent. my autoethnographic examples explore the posthum(an)ous bonds among myself, my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. at the same time, i readily acknowledge that linkages unfolding beyond “maternal” and “female” realms are equally valid. the type of limitless connection i explore, unbounded by time or space, can be similarly evoked in other types of (non)human relationships— including those appearing in this article (i.e., diamonds, buckyballs, black holes, galaxies, and quasars), romantic partnerships, friendships, sibling relationships, and parent-child relationships. indeed, mitochondria are inherited by children regardless of sex and gender. ultimately, i argue that connection is multiply mediated by molecular and physical (as in physics) means, among many others. methods my first pieces of ethnographic data emerged when i was searching for answers on the internet regarding my own chronic diseases. i stumbled upon health means, an online platform hosting online summits and conferences on different functional medicine topics. i listened to summit after summit, conference after conference. this process exposed me to up-to-the-minute insights from dozens of functional medicine practitioners on a gamut of health-related topics—many pertaining to me. registration for these events usually includes “free registration gifts” ranging from informational pdfs to study guides, e-books, recipes, and master classes. resulting from my participation, i received numerous email newsletters, which included links to podcasts, blogs, webinars, and e-courses of specific functional medicine practitioners and their allies. email newsletters occasionally promoted online docuseries in which the specific practitioner had been featured. the question emerged: how did these practitioners engage with the public? to explore functional medicine in public digital spaces, i turned to youtube, facebook, and tedmed. to understand how functional medicine discourse circulates in print, i read books authored by functional medicine practitioners and geared toward a public audience—many of which are new york times bestsellers—because, as an ethnographer, i am interested in public discourse and the social life of ideas. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 6 needing to directly observe how functional medicine practitioners interact with one another as colleagues, i conducted in-person participant observation while completing continuing medical education credits from the american medical association. this in-person participant observation provided me with opportunities to connect with numerous functional medicine practitioners in a face-to-face setting. while i considered many more sources of ethnographic data—especially with regard to webinars, e-courses, master classes, summits, and docuseries—i stopped when i felt my data had reached saturation. i concluded my research when each additional online event no longer exposed me to new faces or ideas. data source type number included hours of course work in nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics 60 functional medicine interlocutors’ newsletters 29 continuing medical education credits 27 books intended for a wide audience 19 webinars, e-courses, and master classes 18 online summits and conferences 16 company newsletters 16 youtube channels 11 facebook groups (totaling 241,100+ online group members in december 2020) 9 docuseries 6 podcasts 6 blogs 4 magazine and newspaper subscriptions 3 online health education platforms 2 table 1. data sources included in this ethnographic research project finally, i adapt barad’s “diffractive methodological approach” (2007, 71) by reading (bio)possibilities of (non)human connection through multiple areas of study, thus fostering constructive engagements across—and a reworking of— disciplinary boundaries. diffractive methodology helps to frame science as practice rather than content (see longino 1989, 57). that said, barad asserts “the conceptual shifts derived from my diffractive methodology not only reconfigure our understanding of the nature of scientific and other material-discursive practices but also are significant and robust enough to actually form the basis for a new interpretation of quantum physics” (2007, 36). diffractive methodology respects the entanglement of ideas, thus allowing for a rethinking of fundamental original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 7 concepts such as the notions of matter, causality, agency, identity, embodiment, objectivity, space, and time, as well as “mitochondria” as one of “science’s proper objects” (barad 2007, 26–29). (see existing destabilizing work on hormones [fausto-sterling 2000], muscles [giordano 2013], brains [jordan-young 2010], and chromosomes [richardson 2012]). what is functional medicine? functional medicine is a model that has shown to produce better outcomes than conventional medicine in a 2019 study published in the journal of the american medical association (beidelschies et al. 2019). functional medicine is a personalized and holistic approach to treating chronic disease. it is both an alternative to, and an outgrowth of, conventional medicine (i.e., western biomedicine). thus, functional medicine presents a series of paradigm shifts away from conventional medicine. one primary paradigm shift is the switch from body-as-machine model to “systems biology” approach. instead of viewing the body as a collection of disconnected parts to be treated in isolation by various specialists, functional medicine approaches the body as one integrated system. the systems approach problematizes the notion that a specific etiology necessarily gives rise to a corresponding disease diagnosis, which, in turn, should be treated with the appropriate medications for that disease. from a functional medicine perspective, underlying imbalances in the bodily system can manifest in a range of symptoms, and the root cause must be addressed to promote healing and recovery. since similar etiologies can give rise to distinct symptoms in different individuals, and, by the same token, similar symptoms can be traced to distinct etiologies, identifying root causes involves exploring patients’ biochemical individuality, and may incorporate tools such as gut microbiome testing, genomic profiling, and assessment of mitochondrial health. a second paradigm shift in functional medicine emphasizes the interconnectivity of all life. this paradigm shift harks back to james lovelock’s gaia hypothesis— the idea that all life on earth collectively regulates the material conditions needed for continuance of life. this hypothesis likens the biosphere to a vast selfregulating organism. when parts of the organism are out of balance (e.g., soil depletion), other parts of the organism suffer (e.g., “humans”). from functional medicine’s perspective, health of other species is of integral importance to human health. solutions to many pressing planetary dilemmas involve “understanding the complex symbiotic interconnections between all things—from the level of microscopic microbial ecosystems that reside within us, to the myriad macroscale environmental ecosystems that we reside in and completely depend on for our survival” (prescott and logan 2017, 2). this approach to medicine emphasizes how interdependence, mutualism, and interconnectivity underpin life in all forms. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 8 functional medicine, as a discursive field, includes individuals from numerous professions. i have included interlocutors with diverse backgrounds to accurately represent functional medicine’s heterogeneity. many functional medicine doctors are conventionally trained. these doctors turned to functional medicine after becoming frustrated with a healthcare system that pharmaceuticalizes health problems instead of seeking to create lasting health. other interlocutors to whom i refer have been trained in alternative medicine, and a few have not studied past the bachelor’s level. some readers may discount these alternative forms of expertise. however, more than 60 percent of functional medicine practitioners included in this study possess the type of advanced training that even the most skeptical readers will likely appreciate—out of 241 practitioners, 32 percent possess a medical doctorate and 27 percent have obtained a doctorate in science (phd) or pharmacy (pharmd). profession/role number of individuals medical doctors (md) 77 health and science doctorates (phd) 63 entrepreneurs, health advocates, and consultants 39 patients 28 nutrition experts (phd, ccn, cn, facn, dacbn, ms) 26 health coaches and educators 18 chiropractors (dc) 15 naturopathic doctors (nd) 13 filmmakers and show hosts 10 health science journalists, editors, and authors 9 administrators of functional and integrative medicine clinics and organizations 6 osteopaths (do) 6 nurses (rn, cns) 6 acupuncturists 6 politicians 5 oriental medicine practitioners (dom, msom/msaom) 4 dieticians (rd, rdn) 3 pharmacists (pharmd and registered pharmacists) 3 food activists 2 ayurvedic doctor (ad) 1 institute for functional medicine certified practitioner (ifmcp) 1 other allied health professionals 6 table 2. number of individuals included in this ethnographic research project by profession original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 9 the materiality of mitochondria recent advances in biological research have revealed widespread characterizations of mitochondria as “the powerhouses of the cell” to be insufficient. picard, wallace, and burelle write, “mitochondria are now recognized to perform multiple essential functions beyond energy production, impacting most areas of cell biology and medicine” (2016, 5). as a guest on the energy blueprint podcast, dr. martin picard explained while the “powerhouse” analogy portrays mitochondria as little machines, “mitochondria actually have this beautiful, complex life where they interact with each other” (whitten and picard 2019). focusing on mitochondria-microbiota crosstalk during his interview for the human longevity project docuseries, dr. marvin edeas emphasized that mitochondria and microbiota share the same structure and mechanics. while biologists and functional medicine researchers describe how mitochondria are micro-entities of bacterial origin that continue to behave like bacteria, a feminist materialist science studies reading of their “intra-action” points to the mutual constitution of their entangled agencies (barad 2007, 97). functional medicine descriptions of “our” estimated 14 quadrillion mitochondria destabilize binary understandings of “us” (“humans”) and “them” (“bacteria”), thus deconstructing anthropocentric thought in a similar way to posthumanist scholarship (see badmington 2003; herbrechter 2013; wolfe 2010). functional medicine interlocutors consider the human as an assemblage of different microbial species, and describe personhood as emerging from the unison of microbial and human cells. in so doing, functional medicine discourse reframes the “humananimal” (see bergthaller 2010, 728; also nayar 2018) as the “humicrobe” (see vega 2023a, 58). similarly, following haraway, functional medicine interlocutors signal that evolution and human development is less about being and more about “becoming-with” the microbes on and within us (2007, 27). this perspective is supported by mounting evidence regarding communal behavior among mitochondria and mitochondrial communication with other substances and microorganisms in “our” bodies. dr. zach bush (2020) indicated during “the virome: a template for a regenerative future” webinar, “we see this beautiful communication or cooperation between the microbiome outside the cell and the mitochondrial microbiome within the cells.” on the energy blueprint podcast, dr. picard elaborated, “what we are finding is that mitochondria can actually respond to different hormones, or to different metabolic signals, and that’s fairly well documented.” (see, e.g., goglia, moreno, and lanni [1999] on the regulation of mitochondrial activity thyroid hormones; campbell and febbraio [2001] on the effect of ovarian hormones on mitochondrial enzyme activity in the fat oxidation pathway of skeletal muscle; fernández-vizarra et al. [2008] on how mitochondrial gene expression is regulated in the heart and liver by thyroid original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 10 hormones; and álvarez-delgado [2022] on the role of mitochondrial hormone receptors on the bioenergentic adaptations to lactation.) in turn, mitochondria provide instructions to “our” “human” genes. michael mcevoy, describing the process of cell methylation in the human longevity project docuseries, noted, “there is a lot of crosstalk between our nuclear dna and our mitochondrial functionality.” at the advances in mitochondrial medicine symposium, dr. andrew heyman compared this new epigenetic paradigm to what he called “old school genetics.” he described gene sequences in mitochondria as “at the crossroads” of epigenetic activity, thus making mitochondria prime targets for therapeutic intervention. speaking to the energy blueprint audiences, dr. picard explained how mitochondria release biochemical signals that determine what happens throughout the body: “these can be transmitted among mitochondria; between mitochondria and other parts of the cell, including the nucleus, where the nuclear genome rests and waits for signals and information to know what genes to turn on and which genes to turn off through epigenetics; and then ultimately to the rest of the cell and the rest of the body. so, mitochondria can send signals, including their own genome—they can release their dna into the cell cytoplasm, the internal part of the cell, or even into the bloodstream.” these mechanisms support the functional medicine view of a communicating collective of mitochondria distributed across different “human” organs. ultimately, mitochondrial metabolism is responsible for regulation of innate immunity, calcium homeostasis, programmed cell death, and stem cell regulation, among other roles (see eisner, picard, and hajnóczky 2018). while nuclear dna are “human” genes inherited from both parents, mitochondrial dna—abbreviated to mtdna—have an ancient bacterial origin and are only passed down from mothers. the most accredited hypothesis traces the origin of mitochondria to a bacterial “infection” of an ancient eukaryotic cell (atlante and valenti 2023, 4451). a eukaryote is an organism containing a nucleus. plants, fungi, protists, algae, and many unicellular organisms are all eukaryotes. millions of years ago an aerobic bacterium (i.e., a bacterium that used oxygen to produce energy) was subsumed by the ancestral eukaryotic cell, thus establishing a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit. in humans, mtdna is inherited by the next generation through the cytoplasm of the mother’s fertilized cell. since sperm provide virtually no cytoplasm to the fertilized egg, mtdna is maternally inherited. functional medicine descriptions of mitochondria, which emphasize connection to foremothers, signal an “affective politics” of human ancestry (see oikkonen 2015, 747). these portrayals offer an opportunity to build on feminist philosophies on subjectivity and theories of embodiment by turning to the actual molecular matters of mitochondrial biology and microbial inheritance more generally—thus original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 11 shifting from uncertainty to materiality (see roy 2008, 134, on “asking different questions” when conducting a feminist analysis of the natural sciences). from the perspective of functional medicine, mitochondrial inheritance is a direct, supra-genomic mechanism by which the well-being of our foremothers determines our own health. as andrea nakayama (2017) explained during the interpreting your genetics summit, “we cannot deny that our children’s health is reliant on…particularly the health of the mother going into the place of conception and pregnancy.” the effects of genetic transmission of maternal mitochondria is often discussed alongside inheritance of the maternal microbiome via birth and lactation. nakayama continued, “i don’t think we can remove the child and their health from the mother and the father, but particularly the mother and her health in her life, and her ancestry.” nakayama’s focus on the mother’s ancestry was reiterated by beth lambert, who noted during the human longevity project docuseries how vulnerability can be transmitted multigenerationally via microbial inheritance: “if grandma took lots of rounds of antibiotics, that vulnerability in the immune system will be transferred down to the mother, which will then be transferred down to their grandchild.” given that mitochondria are descendants of bacteria, functional medicine interlocutors emphasize that mitochondria are affected by antibiotics. these comments thread together a larger tapestry regarding how environmental factors shape maternal microbiomes, including mitochondria, which in turn plays a determining role in future generations’ health. dr. picard and a team of researchers are turning their attention to how emotions impact mitochondrial health, which in turn affects overall physical health. in an article published in biological psychiatry, they document how caregiving induces recalibrations in the mitochondria and lead to changes in both mitochondria quality and quantity (picard, prather, et al. 2018). in another peer-reviewed study, bersani et al. (2016) discovered that mitochondrial dna copy number is reduced in male combat veterans who suffer from ptsd.1 dr. picard and his colleagues have shown how experimentally manipulating mitochondrial functions alters physiological and behavioral responses to stress, leading them to characterize mitochondria as endocrine organelles that direct stress adaptation. in frontiers in neuroendocrinology, picard, mcewen, et al. (2018) observe that neural circuits regulating social behavior are influenced by mitochondrial energetics. in a study of individuals with major depressive disorder, lindqvist et al. (2018) found that mitochondria release higher-than-normal amounts of their dna into the blood stream.2 findings such as these led fernström et al. (2021) to conclude that mitochondrial dysfunction is implicated in major depressive disorder.3 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 12 emerging acknowledgment among biologists and functional medicine interlocutors of “psychobiotics”— bacteria, including mitochondria, that biochemically shape emotions by prompting and producing neurotransmitters— introduces space for speculation regarding transmission of intergenerational trauma. dr. bradley nelson applied the concept of emotional inheritance to humans when he said, “it’s possible to inherit trapped emotional energy…[if] the mother is feeling an intense emotion and her whole being is resonating and vibrating at that frequency and the babies inside her are resonating at that frequency too.” dr. jolene brighten, naturopathic doctor, explained, “if mama’s under stress, [that stress is] going to make baby run the [mitochondrial] stress response. baby is going to get the signal the environment is not safe.” these assertions by functional medicine interlocutors, spoken in layperson’s terms, are garnering support from published research. in journal of genetics and genomics, zhang and tian identify “maternal provision” as a potential mechanism for transgenerational inheritance of stress memory resulting from “ancestral environmental cues” (2022, 89). they specifically point to “mitochondrial perturbations” as a molecular mechanism whereby maternal experience can affect future generations (89). imbuing “mitochondrial memory” with meaning at the cellular level, amin cheikhi et al. (2019) explain that mitochondria are a substrate of cellular memory, which, in turn, underlies cellular identity (see also burrill and silver 2011a, 2011b; burrill et al. 2012; inniss and silver 2013; and hinge et al. 2020). furthermore, stress can invoke enduring physiochemical changes of mitochondrial networks, leading to transgenerational persistence of epigenetically scripted cellular behavior. in essence, “mitochondria provide mnemonic information that underlie the transmission, storage, and retrieval of cellular memory across generations after removal of an environmental stress” (cheikhi et al. 2019, 538). cheikhi et al. were not only able to demonstrate that stress memory is stored within a self-renewing subpopulation of daughter cells in a mitochondrial-dependent fashion; they were also able to administer targeted electron scavengers to reset key epigenetic marks of cellular memory and redirect the identity of daughter cells to a nonstress-like state (532). cheikhi et al. call the physiochemical change of mitochondrial networks that transmit transgenerational epigenetic cellular behavior a “mitoengram”—in so doing, they are building on the engram theory, which posits that neuronal memory is stored as a specific connectivity pattern among synaptic networks and is associated with enduring cellular alterations of a specific subpopulation of neurons (2019, 528). in a subsequent commentary published in the hsoa journal of gerontology & geriatric medicine, cheikhi (2020) writes, “this discovery of mitoengram is important not only because it reveals a previously undescribed mechanism underlying the cellular memory dependence on mitochondria, but also because it defines mitochondria as a universal unit of cognitive information, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 13 beyond the brain cell engram.” flavia messina et al. add further nuance to the discussion of mitochondrial memory by signaling how mitochondria are key regulators of the brain’s activity and how impaired mitochondria can lead to the loss of proper neuronal interaction or even of neurons themselves (2020, 2; see also grimm and eckert 2017; sun et al. 2016). cheikhi et al. further posit that the discovery of “mitoengrams” may unlock effective mitochondrial-targeted therapeutics that erase maladaptive cellular memories (2019, 540). they write, “in some circumstances, it may be advantageous for the stem cell to ‘learn to forget’” (539). by the same token, messina et al. (2020) ask, “should we imagine a similar role for mitochondria in the neuron? could we imagine to, somehow, interfere with these processes in order to sustain, recall, or restore memory in the elders?” ultimately, cheikhi et al. (2019) and messina et al. (2020) signal therapeutic potential of erasing particular mitoengrams (i.e., those perpetuating environmental stress memories at the cellular level) for individuals. meanwhile, more research is required to illuminate the role of “mitochondrial memory” in transmitting transgenerational stress in “humans” (aka “humicrobes”; see vega 2023a, 58). researchers have already identified specific transgenerational epigenetic signals for mitochondrial stress adaptation in animals (see ma et al. 2019). herein i explore this “biopossibility” (willey 2016) through the “diffractive” (barad 2007, 71) lenses of anthropology, quantum physics, astrophysics, and feminist science studies. links in a chain over the course of my mother’s early thirties, multiple, overlapping chronic diseases took hold of her life, causing her severe pain and fatigue. when i was growing up, she didn’t share her “private” information with me regarding her health diagnoses. she didn’t want to cause me worry. now that i am in my mid-thirties and have also struggled with chronic disease, she sometimes shares her health woes, however, usually after the worst symptoms have already passed. i will not describe her health issues with the same detail as i have described my own (vega 2023b). suffice it to say many of the health issues i have struggled with—hypothyroidism, autoimmunity, viral infections, etc.—my mother has and continues to experience. it makes sense we would share similar diagnoses given the influence of genetic inheritance on health. however, i have always sensed our commonalities are rooted in something even more pervasive than the fifty-percent of my genome that i inherited from her. my mother and i share mitochondrial memories of suffering and loss. our multigenerational story unfolds continuously, like links in a chain. at least three generations have suffered the effects of truncated marriages, and absent or uninvolved fathers. at the same time, from one generation to the next, the unconditional love of maternal grandmothers has been the sustaining force. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 14 over thirty years ago, medical anthropologist mariella pandolfi described how the secret, emotional world of women is fundamentally experienced through the body. in her 1990 article, “boundaries inside the body: women’s suffering in southern peasant italy,” pandolfi described a symbolic anatomy, pathology, and physiology that bridges inner and outer experiences and distinguishes male and female worlds. her work documented how the female body feels and absorbs external events. women experience a continuum between social catastrophe and bodily catastrophe. while pandolfi offers wars, earthquakes, and disintegration of traditional social roles as examples of “social catastrophe,” our bodily experience (mutually embodied by my bokbok, popo, mother, and me) is marked by immigration, poverty, anti-asian racism, and mothering alone. this example extends kimberlé crenshaw’s 1989 theory of intersectionality by demonstrating how multiple forms of discrimination (e.g., racism, sexism, and classism) overlap and manifest in the bodily experiences of marginalized individuals. using ethnographic evidence, pandolfi argued this process allows the past to become inscribed on future generations of female bodies. the stories she collected during fieldwork clearly linked a multigenerational history to individual women. she wrote, “the ancestral discourse indissolubly links the women in the maternal line of descent by way of a metaphorical string of symptoms and illnesses that petrify any possibility of social redemption or recovery” (1990, 264). the “traces” women absorb convert the female body into a physiological memoir, thus opening up new interpretations of distress, illness, and disease. in essence, pandolfi signals how the experiences of foremothers in one’s maternal line produce new identities, characterized by a polysemic and multilevel sense of self, for subsequent generations of women. one beam of my diffractive methodology reads recent discoveries in mitochondrial medicine through pandolfi’s perspective of female bodies as physiological memoirs containing a multilevel sense of self. this reading bridges the discursive gap between what pandolfi refers to as “symbolic anatomy, pathology, and physiology” (1990, 255) and what some may call “real biological changes.” functional medicine interlocutors, referring to mitochondrial biology research, critique how “psychosomatic” illness is often dismissed in biomedicine. they describe how emotional suffering is symbolically and somatically inscribed on female bodies in intertwining ways. i propose the concept of mitochondrial memory to signal how the symbolic and the somatic are knotted together in women’s biologies. embodied loss: a tripartite model of risk at the october 2019 advances in mitochondrial medicine symposium, dr. heyman explained that all his patients, seeking his expertise because their complex illnesses are rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction, became ill after being exposed to a tripartite original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 15 model of risk. they had been exposed to pathogens and environmental toxins, suffered a traumatic brain injury, and experienced emotional trauma approximately two years before the onset of mitochondrial dysfunction symptoms. suddenly i felt singled out—as if he were speaking to his colleagues about me. i created a timeline in my mind. while completing my epidemiology master’s in public health and phd in medical anthropology, i struggled through a concussion for six months march to september 2015. my popo died july 2015. two years later, while at my worst, my lab results were positive for heavy metal poisoning, bpa poisoning, and multiple viral infections. just as dr. heyman indicated, my mitochondrial dysfunction resulted from “the perfect storm”—a trifecta of exposures affecting hypothalamic-pituitaryadrenal (hpa) axis dysfunction and leading to cellular damage. i reflected on what my—our—bod(ies) already knew. in my family, when maternal grandmothers pass on, they are mourned through our bodies. mom and i lost our popos at twenty-nine and twenty-seven, respectively. we acknowledge how fortunate we are to have had our popos for as long as we did—although the time we had will never be enough. the mitochondria in every cell of my mother’s body are exact copies of the mitochondria in her popo’s body. likewise, the mitochondria in every cell of my body are exact copies of each of my foremothers’ mitochondria, and they hold the stories of our maternal line. when our popos died, it was as if our mitochondria knew that millions of themselves, copies from another link in the chain, departed. using the concept of mitochondrial memory, i am not only suggesting that emotional, psychological, and physical experiences of women are recorded by their mitochondria and passed down to subsequent generations, but furthermore opening up a speculative space for “mutual recognition” among mitochondria from the same maternal origin. what if the mitochondria of women in the same maternal line can directly influence one another—even when they are located in different bodies and separated by distance? for elucidation, i turn to physics and the theory of quantum entanglement—the phenomenon albert einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” einstein, along with boris podolsky and nathan rosen, first described quantum entanglement in the 1935 paper “can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?” quantum entanglement occurs when a pair or group of particles interact in such a way the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independent of its pair or group, even when the particles are separated by great distances. writing for live science, tim childers (2020) explains, “quantum entanglement is the ethereal connection between two or more particles such that any action performed on one instantaneously affects the others, regardless of how far apart they are.” these findings lie at the heart of the disparity between classical and quantum physics since, according to classical physics, particles will respond to their immediate physical surroundings. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 16 i will provide a simple analogy to place these concepts into layman’s terms. water is a liquid at room temperature. if exposed to temperatures below 0ºc (32ºf), water will freeze into a solid. at temperatures above 100ºc (212ºf), water will boil, create steam, and evaporate. in either case, the physical state of water is determined by its immediate surrounding. quantum entanglement defies these general physical principles. in experiments with different types of particles—ranging from photons to molecules as large as buckyballs (arndt et al. 1999; nairz, arndt, and zeilinger 2003), and even small diamonds (k.c. lee et al. 2011)—scientists have observed phenomena that violate local realism’s approach of causality. entangled particles were taken to two separate locations as far as 746 miles apart (billings 2017). in these experiments, certain features of the entangled particles—for example, polarization or spin— were measured. when the particle at the first location was manipulated, this shifted the outcome of the particle at the second location. these studies show that entanglement produces a correlation between the measurements of particles, and that these particles share an instantaneous form of communication or “mutual information.” “called home” when bokbok died, my mother was studying in the student lounge at uc berkeley. she knew the exact moment bokbok died—she was flooded by overwhelming grief, and she cradled her head on the table and wept. when mom arrived back at her apartment, she immediately called home and learned the news. when my popo passed away, i, too, was on campus at uc berkeley. mom called me on my cell so i could tell popo i love her one last time. my phone was set to “do not disturb” because i was in a biostatistics exam. knowing how important it was for me to say goodbye, mom made repeated calls to me, without break, over the course of ten minutes. after the exam i noticed my missed calls. i immediately called mom back. fortunately, i was able to briefly say goodbye. those few minutes were much too short, and i regret not having connected with mom sooner. at the same time, popo already knew what i felt in my heart—after all, i am her “shleem gohn bahng.” over twenty years prior, popo asked me to sing her favorite hymns—"blessed assurance” and “jesus loves me.” not wanting to bring bad luck by directly stating her request, popo asked me to sing these songs “the day i am no longer here.” knowing what she meant, i never forgot. members of my extended family and church community approached me at popo’s funeral, weeping and offering me their hugs and condolences. an older cousin, knowing how close our relationship was, asked me, “how are you keeping your composure?” the pain i felt that day—and the pain i’ve been feeling since—is not a pain one can wear on the outside. that would be original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 17 unbearable. it’s a pain one carries, in every fiber of one’s being, every moment of the day, and throughout the night. some nights i have moments of relief, because popo visits me in my dreams. other nights she is not where i expect her to be, and i am consumed by despair. recent findings in astrophysics suggest a degree of galactical connectedness that scientists had not formerly anticipated and, thus, share commonalities with quantum discoveries. in 2014 damien hutsemékers and his team noted unexplained alignments, stretching across billions of light years, of supermassive black holes at the cores of nineteen quasars (european southern observatory 2014). since black holes are actually ancient ultra-luminous galaxies—galaxies that have metaphorically “died”—these alignments beg the question of how interconnectedness persists, even after death. subsequently a study by joon hyeop lee et al. (2019) examined the rotations of 445 galaxies within 400 million light years of earth. that is, lee et al. have observed a “mysterious coherence” in galaxy rotation, operating against the predictions of cosmological models, thus suggesting that galaxies are tied together by enormous, invisible structures (2019, 104). like quantum entangled particles, distant galaxies are moving in unison. these “entangled” galaxies demonstrate interconnectedness across distances that are too great to be explained by the direct interaction of their gravitational fields. in her article “there’s growing evidence that the universe is connected by giant structures,” becky ferreira (2022) writes, galaxies within a few million light years of each other can gravitationally affect each other in predictable ways, but scientists have observed mysterious patterns between distant galaxies that transcend those local interactions. these discoveries hint at the enigmatic influence of so-called “largescale structures” which…are the biggest known objects in the universe. these dim structures are made of hydrogen gas and dark matter, and take the form of filaments, sheets, and knots that link galaxies in a vast network called the cosmic web. it may be these findings from quantumand astrophysics are simply confirming, at much smaller and larger scales, pandolfi’s observations of multilevel identities and functional medicine’s application of the holobiont theory of interconnectedness. different types of scientists are discovering, using their unique tools, skill sets, and perspectives, an astonishing degree of connectedness at different scales, ranging from particles, to humans, to ecosystems, to galaxies. stated differently, these diffractive beams, stemming from different disciplinary original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 18 perspectives, are all shedding light on modes of connection across time and space. coming for a visit on christmas eve 2021, my mom opened her cedar chest to search for baby items she had purchased several years before. at the time she made these purchases, she was not yet a popo, but she had hope. any grandchild would be a blessing but she longed for a girl, as evinced by the pink color or detailing of her hidden treasures. so in september 2021, when madelena was born, it was mom’s time to step into a role she had spent generations preparing for. while searching in her cedar chest, she came across a plastic bag. she brought it to my house on christmas day. i recognized the plastic bag immediately—it was from the chinese corner store near my popo’s house. opening the bag, my heart fluttering with anticipation, i found an intricately hand-crocheted baby blanket. i knew immediately what this meant. twenty years prior, when popo began losing her eyesight, she wanted to leave me something for her great-grandchild but didn’t want to jinx my future fertility by mentioning it to anyone. i held the blanket and wept. popo had come to visit me on christmas day with a beautiful present for my baby girl. several months later, my mom opened the cedar chest again to look for the baptismal gown i wore as a baby. i was baptized on easter sunday and madelena would also have an easter baptism. while searching for the gown, mom came across a woolworths bag. the next time madelena and i visited her, she handed it to me. inside were two pink crocheted baby sweaters. again, i began crying. my husband looked at my quizzically, asking, “what happened?” i responded, “my popo came for another visit.” i held up the sweaters to show him popo’s handiwork. he asked, “how did she know madelena would be a girl?” this final autoethnographic anecdote invites an intersectional reading. my popo’s christmas and easter “visits” unfold within a context of both gratitude to the united methodist church and cultural mores related to ancestor worship. our family practiced confucianism up until fleeing china during mao zedong’s purge. the chinese united methodist church in sacramento, california, sponsored my popo, gonggong, and their four children as refugees in 1956. although my mother and i were both raised methodist, we continue to practice ancestor worship— rituals based on the belief that deceased family members have a continued existence. seen through this dual lens, my popo belongs to the christian “cloud of witnesses” (hebrews 12:1) and is also a chinese ancestor who participates in world affairs by looking after her family and bestowing gifts. her double positionality as a “witness” and as an “ancestor” can be traced back to an intersectional history of political persecution, immigration, and an impoverished life in the “gold mountain.” these details hint at how power, difference, and situated knowledge original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 19 shape maternal inheritance both biologically and physically. the categories of “woman” and “mother” always emerge at the intersection of race, class, nation, age, religion, etc. at the same time, a feminist science studies reading of this anecdote points to details (e.g., pink baby blanket and pink knitted sweaters) that essentialize “females” while simultaneously emphasizing how “women” are “naturecultural” beings (haraway 2007, 249). i agree with these critiques and signal that our existence (the life force binding my popo, my mother, and me) is mutually constituted by our “intra-action” (barad 2007, 97)—a phenomenon that stretches far beyond the limits of mitochondrial inheritance and existing notions of sex and gender. conclusion while i recognize there are many layers to (non)human connection, herein i adapt barad’s “diffractive” methodological approach to (re)configure the ontological role of mitochondria. specifically, i open a space for mitochondrial memory, combining the theory of entanglement from quantum physics with recent advances in mitochondrial medicine, thereby embracing the murky waters between the literal and the figurative. as part of their study design, yong yu and colleagues (2020) developed “quantum memories”—devices that store quantum information. using frequencymanipulated photons, these physicists successfully achieved entanglement between different quantum memories. my interpretation of the term quantum memories is twofold: a “memory” references a technological device used to store information, and, at the same time, memories are, in and of themselves, the information being stored—the information that consolidates communicative, entangled bonds. mitochondrial memory furthermore brings pandolfi’s “physiological memoirs” to bear on functional medicine’s understandings of maternal-inherited mitochondria and quantum physics perspectives of memories as the loci of entanglement. by pointing to mitochondrial memory, i explore how women may experience a multilevel sense of self because their mitochondria are, to use the language of quantum physics, inextricably entangled (see barad 2007). since women inherit exact copies of the mitochondria in their maternal line, how might we think of mitochondria as memories that contain memories? that is, might mitochondria store the felt experiences of women linked by what pandolfi calls “maternal lineage” and entangled by shared intersectional histories? i argue that women’s intersectional experiences of racism, sexism, and classism are manifested intergenerationally through the body, and offer mitochondrial memory as a poetic, speculative, and hermeneutic response to emerging research in functional medicine. this (re)imagining of mitochondria allows mitochondrial memories to original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) rosalynn a. vega, 2024 20 exist in unison with the mitochondrial memories in foremothers’ bodies. that is, the notion of mitochondrial memories offers a potential mechanism for how “individual” women carry the pain and suffering they never 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research, and syndemics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1976-7 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1976-7 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jgg.2021.11.015     original research queer synthetic curriculum for the chthulucene: common worlding waste pedagogies     veronica pacini-ketchabaw western university, canada vpacinik@uwo.ca   kelly-ann macalpine western university, canada kmacalp2@uwo.ca     abstract this paper sketches aspects of common worlding waste pedagogies through donna haraway’s figure of the chthulucene and the artwork of haudenosaunee and scottish artist and storyteller jay havens (2016). more specifically, it narrates the making and happenings of what we call a queer synthetic curriculum in an early childhood center. drawing attention to plastic in order to reframe children’s relationship to it, the article engages with three main questions: how might we refashion waste practices from children’s ubiquitous plastic relations? how might we speculate on the kinds of response-able worlds that might be remade through new kinds of interactions between child and plastic bodies? what might the chthulucene synthetic futures of early education entail? the queer synthetic curriculum experiments with creative strategies to learn to live with plastic toxicities without necessarily celebrating them; it embraces the mixed affects that plastic affords (its sensorial pleasures and possibilities as well as the guilt embedded in their toxicity); it plays with the provocative idea that we can no longer separate our fleshy human bodies from synthetic polymer bodies; and it treats plastic as chthonic queer matter. we argue that, by staying with the trouble these risky attachments bring, conditions for futures other than those already determined by synthetic, toxic petrocapitalist modernity and coloniality might emerge in early childhood education.     keywords waste, plastic, common worlds, chthulucene, early childhood education     introduction this paper sketches aspects of common worlding waste pedagogies by narrating the making and happenings of what we call a queer synthetic curriculum in an early childhood center. the narratives describe our experimentations with curricular processes that attend to a kind of relational ethics inspired by donna haraway’s (2016) figure of the chthulucene and the artwork of haudenosaunee and scottish artist and storyteller jay havens (2016). the queer synthetic curriculum features and draws attention to plastic to reframe children’s relationships to it, and engages with critical questions: how might we refashion waste practices from children’s ubiquitous plastic relations? how might we speculate on the kinds of response-able worlds that might be remade through new kinds of interactions between child and plastic bodies? what might the chthulucene synthetic futures of early education entail?   as scholars and pedagogists in early childhood education, we find the dominant environmental stewardship education based on surveillance, sanction, and censure (e.g., buckingham 2013; j. davis 2014; kelly and lukaart 2005; uyanik et al. 2011) inappropriate for attending to children’s waste futures. supporting capitalist and neoliberal values, these educational approaches (most notably the well-known 3rs program: reduce, reuse, recycle) offer little critical analysis of waste itself or children’s relations to it. instead, we find hope in, and join, projects on plastics such as those undertaken by angela molloy murphy (2020), louisa penfold (2019), and peter kraftl (2020). these scholars conceptualize plastics as active participants invoking/provoking children to respond in particular ways. molloy murphy offers up the idea of border crossing whereby plastic waste makes “space for [otherwise] ways of thinking, living, and ‘flourishing’” (2020, 26). penfold (2019), in collaboration with artists and designers, engages in artistic inquiries in which children and plastics respond to each other, emphasizing the inseparability of children and their lifeworlds. in the plastic childhoods project, kraftl also delves into plastics and children’s deep entanglements (kraftl 2020; kraftl et al. 2021). it is the kinship of plastics and childhoods that he pays attention to; he writes that children and plastics are “synthesised with and stuck to one another” (kraftl 2020, 169).   contributing to this critical childhood scholarship on plastics, in the first part of this article, we conceptualize the queer synthetic curriculum by connecting it to haraway’s (2016) figure of the chthulucene and havens’s (2016) bargain hunter/hunted projects, as well as to feminist science studies literature on plastics. we then draw connections between the queer synthetic curriculum and common worlding waste pedagogies. in the second part of the article, we engage with the specificity of an early childhood education classroom as a site of waste politics through a series of detailed narratives that follow a description of the making of the queer synthetic curriculum project.   simmering in the chthulucene and the bargain hunter/hunted the queer synthetic curriculum simmers in haraway’s chthulucene figuration. the chthulucene, she explains in a manifesto, is a term she uses to add texture to the disembodied and sovereign subject positions of the anthropocene and capitalocene that name our current geological era. avoiding teleological and expansionist arguments that foreclose the possibility of ongoingness, the chthulucene refuses to pit the human and more-than-human against each other. instead, it invites stories “made up of ongoing multispecies practices of becoming-with…in precarious times” (haraway 2016, 55). in this way, the chthulucene demands a collective ethico-political commitment to care for our now that has been, “is now and is yet to come” (16). that is, the chthulucene is the “thick, fibrous, and lumpy” now that inevitably includes synthetic polymers (206).   jay havens (2016) teaches us about the nuances of engaging in processes of making in our lumpy present. havens uses “found and reclaimed elements from commercial consumerist landscapes as raw materials” (2) to interrupt dominant figures of indigenous peoples while attending to the complexities of “modern day indigeneity” (10). in their art and pedagogical practice, havens creates uneasiness in their audience, “pointing the finger at society rather than individuals to generate discourse which forces audiences to recognize colonial structures which persist and require debate” (11). their collections the bargain hunter and the bargain hunted (jayhavens.me/artworks) use plastic bags “sourced from retail locations on a number of reservations” (2016, 29) to recreate traditional objects (masks, cornhusk dolls, drum) and animals (buck, heron), and engage with, confound, and complicate contemporary consumerist practices. as havens writes, the aim is not to reuse but “to stir up questions and provoke deeper inspection” of what consumerism is creating so that change can happen (35). without claiming that our curriculum has the same intentions as havens’s art practice, we see the queer synthetic curriculum processes as attempts to complexify children’s lifeworlds and create spaces for transformation. we hope that the children create complex relations with the plastic around them.   plastic futurities and the queer synthetic curriculum situated within the chthulucene, the queer synthetic curriculum makes five important moves. first, it shifts from the upward-looking, detached anthropos concealed in early childhood education’s waste remediation initiatives that train children to become good environmental stewards by managing the (externalized) plastic “problem.” it dislodges the strong, morally infused ideological statements that remediation initiatives stick to (e.g., equating plastics with evil) and displaces the “out of sight, out of mind” logics of plastics that drive recycling behaviors. the queer synthetic curriculum brings plastics in and enfolds their ubiquity by placing plastic and its relations center stage.   second, the queer synthetic curriculum embraces feminist cultural studies scholar heather davis’s (2015) suggestion that because plastics are not going away, especially now that china has stopped accepting canada’s waste plastic (energy mix 2019), we need to learn to live with them in empathetic and collaborative ways. acknowledging that plastic cannot be extracted from children’s lives in the twenty-first century, the queer synthetic curriculum experiments with creative strategies to learn to live with plastics’ toxicities without necessarily celebrating them, and to find ways to grapple with the horrors they bring “while resisting the policies, governments, and corporations that would like to see our lives foreclosed” (h. davis 2016, 192).   third, the queer synthetic curriculum accepts the mixed affects that plastic affords. on the one hand, as davis aptly writes, plastic brings sensorial pleasures and possibilities “with its smooth surfaces and bright colours,” as well as “the fantasy of ridding ourselves of the dirt of the world, of decay, of malfeasance” (2015, 349). for her, plastic offers a world that literally “removes people from the cycles of life and death, [allowing humans to take safe distance from] the troublesome, leaky, amorphous, and porous demands of our ancestors, our bodies, and the earth” (350). on the other hand, plastic brings guilt as we are reminded of the ecologically toxic times we live in. many worry about the fact that plastics, as nonbiodegradable, merely transform but do not decompose (belontz et al. 2019; corcoran, moore, and jazvac 2014; corcoran, jazvac, and ballent 2017). some researchers remind us that some plastics lead to unpredictable health consequences for humans (vandenberg et al. 2017; azoulay et al. 2019), while other scholars emphasize that plastics pollution is colonial and imperial (liboiron 2018, 2021).   fourth, the queer synthetic curriculum works with the impossibility of separating plastics out from children’s bodies. it embraces the provocative idea that we can no longer separate our fleshy human bodies from synthetic polymer bodies patented in 1909 (altman 2015). in other words, these pedagogies join forces with the “mixed and dangerous” powers of the chthulucene to acknowledge the earth-focused chthonic inseparabilities of children’s synthetic lives.   finally, the queer synthetic curriculum treats plastic as chthonic queer matter. as davis (2015, 2018) reminds us, plastic’s queerness lies in the fact that, on one hand, it is a potent petrochemical compound unleashed from the earth, organic and inorganic at the same time. and on the other hand, it “exists outside of the proper logics of decay and transformation, in its own category of creation, where microbes and bacteria have not yet widely evolved to use its incredible energy sources” (h. davis 2015, 233). we invoke the term queer in the synthetic curriculum in two important ways. we want to highlight plastic’s queerness, as davis explains, and simultaneously break from reproducing the normative curriculum frameworks that are commonplace in early childhood education classrooms (see also keenan and lil miss hot mess 2020). as for natalie loveless, for us, the invocation of the queer in the synthetic curriculum “undoes…disrupts…challenges the norm…[and] is always on the move” (2019, 61). its queerness is “an act rather than an essence,” and is “always already unfinished…always in play” (loveless 2019, 63).   common worlding waste pedagogies the queer synthetic curriculum is an instance of our experimentation with common worlding waste pedagogies with young children that we began in april 2017 in early childhood centers across what is for now known as canada, ecuador, and australia (see climate action childhood network 2019). tapping into the sensorial and affective possibilities of the arts to critically analyze rs waste practices (reduce, reuse, recycle) in early childhood education, we are developing theoretical and empirical directions by refiguring young children’s relationships with waste in curriculum making (living with plastics 2019; macalpine 2020).   succinctly, common worlding pedagogies highlight complex perspectives on human-environmental relations by developing creative and conceptually rich insights into children’s relations with the world and its human and more-than-human inhabitants (common worlds research collective 2021). common worlding waste pedagogies, in particular, respond to the unsustainable volume of waste produced today and to the uncertainty about how best to respond to this threat (girling 2005).   as a response to our waste crisis, common worlding pedagogies attend to important disagreements in the literature. while behavioral scientists seek human solutions to waste problems by focusing on factors that optimize recycling behaviors (barr and gilg, 2005; latif et al. 2012; largo-wight, johnston, and wight 2013), other scholars call on us to reconceptualize waste and our fraught relationship to it. for instance, davies (2008, 2012), gabrys, hawkins, and michael (2013), hawkins (2005), hird (2012, 2013, 2014a, 2014b), and moore (2012) note that despite our wish to manage, control, and ultimately distance ourselves from waste (edensor 2005; scanlan 2005) through managerial practices, the waste crisis continues to grow. they link the persistence of waste problems to practices that consider waste as static and inert (gille 2010), proposing instead that waste materials transform, and are transforming, both independently from and interdependently with humans (hawkins and potter 2006; hird 2012; moore 2012). these scholars also suggest that our lives are inextricably entangled with the materials we produce, use, discard, and then try to manage (gille 2010).   inspired by this social sciences and humanities waste literature that highlights the affective and agentic nature of waste materials, our common worlding waste pedagogies draw on retheorizations of matter that emphasize its “manifold mobility” (davies 2012). waste materials transform in intra-action with other forms of matter (barad 2007) through dynamic movements, disorderings, and transformations (edensor 2005; gille 2010; moore 2012). this means that when children work with waste materials, they attend to their movements, impermanence, relationalities, connections with other materials, and so on, instead of focusing only on the materials’ properties and functions.   common worlding waste pedagogies directly challenge humanism’s insistence that human reason gives us the sole capacity to exercise intentional agency. increasingly, social science scholars are posing an alternative notion of distributed agency that acknowledges nonhuman entities as co-actors and shapers of the world (gibson-graham and roelvink 2010; hird 2012; latour 2004; plumwood 2002). we contest deeply rooted cultural dichotomies—animate vs. inanimate and active vs. passive, to name two—that would lead us, often unconsciously, to think of ourselves as animate agents who act on passive, inanimate waste materials. following myra hird (2013), our waste pedagogies we ask: what if humans’ role in dealing with waste materials is not as central as we believe? what if waste materials shape children as much as children shape them?   common worlding waste pedagogies also draw on the understanding that no matter exists outside of relentless relational and intra-active networks (alaimo 2010; barad 2007; gille 2010; hird 2012). our lives are inextricably entangled with the materials we call waste. our focus, then, is not solely on how children think about waste materials or on what children’s or educators’ intentions are in relation to waste materials. our focus is on paying careful attention to waste materials in interaction with children.   finally, common worlding waste pedagogies draw directly from hird’s (2013) waste research and ties all the premises together. hird’s studies of the microbial underground of landfills show that most of the transformative action on waste materials takes place in what she calls the “inhuman domain” of “geo-bacteria liveliness” (2012, 457, 458), in which humans do not “ultimately manage or determine processes and outcomes” (458). these perspectives directly challenge human-centric thinking about waste as only humans’ making and thus our problem to solve, and they demand a new kind of environmental ethic. in hird’s terms, we must learn to “consider ourselves as vulnerable to, and with, our environment as latecomers to life’s already long-established flourishing and failing within a volatile landscape” (464). common worlding waste pedagogies set out to open our perception to entangled human/waste relations so that we might carefully and ethically respond to children’s encounters with the vibrant life of waste.   making of a queer synthetic curriculum our collective laboring with four educators (vintimilla and berger 2019) involved experimenting with and documenting curriculum processes for a period of ten months. the pedagogical intention that we set for ourselves was to keep alive the “thick, fibrous, and lumpy” plastic realities of children’s lifeworlds. thus, to activate these intentions, we began by reorganizing the sanitized developmental early childhood classroom (composed of a group of ten children, eighteen to twenty-four-month-olds). we moved furniture and took away age-appropriate toys/materials that had been there for at least a decade to make space for plastic bottles and plastic bags that we gathered with the help of children’s families. the classroom became a peculiar space that, within the early childhood center, became known simply as the plastic room. the early childhood center is located in a mid-sized city in southwestern ontario, canada, which is known for its conservative leanings. the majority of the children who participated in the project live in the center’s neighborhood, which includes single family homes, townhouse complexes, and a group of high-rise apartment buildings built in the 1960s to 1980s.   we used field notes, photography, and film to document what happens when we bring plastics into sight and into mind (hird 2012, 2013) in the plastic room. we visited the early childhood center once weekly and carefully studied documents that educators collected daily using the practice of pedagogical documentation. pedagogical documentation, as vintimilla and pacini-ketchabaw write, “is shaped by a generative and ongoing dynamic between the traces of what we have defined as pedagogically significant within a process, and the different propositions ideated [based on what we find] significant…a set of pedagogical questions, concerns and orientations help discern and give value to what happened at the same time that [educators] propel into cultivating new forms of knowing, acting and living (through questioning, experimenting, fabulating, enacting, inventing trying out, daring, figuring out, stumbling to name a few)” (2021). pedagogical documentation allowed us to “activate certain ideas/possibilities through material, interpretative and speculative processes of curriculum making” and simultaneously “stitch something different in the curricular fabric of an early childhood centre” (vintimilla and pacini-ketchabaw 2021). we now turn to a series of narratives that peek into the queer synthetic curriculum processes.   encountering plastic bottles like every morning, a group of eighteen-month to two-year-old children enter their room after spending time in the gym. however, today the room contains over a hundred plastic bottles suspended from the ceiling, standing on shelves, and gathered in groupings covering most of the classroom’s floor. plastic welcomes the children into the carefully curated space. various shapes and sizes of water bottles and pop bottles still hold reminders of their commercial branding. the tell-tale blue-tinged dasani water bottle now hangs from the ceiling, water replaced by balloons. the soft-sided and easily crushable nestlé water bottle now holds playtex baby bottle liners and sits on the floor next to the baby dolls. the day before, children had helped fill each bottle with plastic items: beads, diapers, straws, cutlery, food containers, cut-up disposable cups, dental floss and its containers, hairbrush pieces, shopping bags, post-it flags, grass-trimmer string, gloves, saran wrap, bingo chips, mesh bags that once held oranges and onions, dental picks, toothbrushes, zip ties, netting tubes, ice pack holders, credit card pieces, cd scraps, pens, markers, and the list goes on…we collected the majority of these items around the early childhood center and used the bottles to contain them.   bottles fly through the classroom, roll across the floor and tables, invite unanticipated sounds. children find a delicacy in plastic. bodies and bottles join forces to move in unison, rhythmically concealing each other. no matter how the children use the bottles, they never break. resisting children’s movements, the bottles adapt to the pressure that children’s fingers and bodies exert on them, and they even mold to record that pressure on their surface. in fact, plastic’s indeterminacy, unruliness, and ubiquity are intensified in the room. we learn to experiment with plastic’s logics.   although it is not always easy to live with a gigantic mound of plastic in a classroom, we quickly adapt to its malleability and durability. children’s movements connect to plastic’s: rolling across the floor, swinging from one end of the classroom to another, standing upright in rows. the plastics spill into the classroom spaces and routines. even the daily singing revolves around plastic.   we sing the classic children’s song “the wheels on the bus” and it becomes “the plastics on the bus,” with each verse describing how the plastics move and sound as the bus trundles through the town.   the plastic on the bus goes crunch, crunch, crunch crunch, crunch, crunch crunch, crunch, crunch the plastic on the bus goes crunch, crunch, crunch, all through the town.   the educators edit stories to always include the phrasing “children and plastics.” morning meetings with children and plastics include flipping through the homemade book with images of past and present classroom members, which include children, educators, and plastics. the bead bottle picture nestles amid the children as it has become a close and constant companion to one of the children.   stories and storytelling stick to plastic.   we collectively forget the fact that these very objects will outlive us all (educators and children alike). this is the twenty-first-century classroom—the queer synthetic classroom of the future—that might invite children to live in a plastic world that keeps plastic in sight and in mind rather than trying to manage and hide it.   figure 1. plastic in plastic bottles. authors’ photograph.   figure 2. figure 2. straws in a bottle. authors’ photograph.   aesthetic invitations the queer synthetic classroom is enchanted with pinar yoldas’s (2014, 2015) work “an ecosystem of excess,” which inspires us and the educators. yoldas thinks with three questions: “if life evolved from our current, plastic-debris-filled oceans, what would emerge? what would happen if life started in the ocean now? what if new creatures emerged that could live off of plastics?” following a conversation with yoldas, we bring the children images from her provocative collection to think with plastic otherwise and embrace its queerness. as we project the images on a classroom wall, the children notice and respond through their movements and storytelling, adding to the disturbing ecosystem of excess stories.   one of the bottles that suspends from the ceiling swings back and forth as one of the children tries to race it from side to side. in a brief moment when both come to rest, the child looks back and forth between the image projected on the wall and the bottle. as they carry it up close to the wall they utter “same.” the bottle they hold is filled with the netting used to wrap up oranges, while the image projected on the wall is that of a colourful stomach inside a test tube that can digest 16 different types of plastics. glimpses of present and future plastic worlds blur. some of the children’s favourite image is a gigantic floating turtle with multicolour shell plates that has been feeding on balloons that end up in the pacific ocean. as yoldas explains, turtles’ curiosity has shifted their shell structure forever. one of the children stands very close to the projected image, casting their shadow over one section while pieces of the turtle project appear on their back (see figure 4). when revisiting the video taken that morning, we notice the same child trying to look at their back to see if the turtle is still there. “where turtle?” they ask. shadow upon shadow offers a haunting image of how children’s and turtles’ curiosity sit with the plastic stories yet to come.   figure 3. playing with projections. authors’ photograph.   gathering bottles it is thursday and recycling day in the middle-class neighborhood where the early childhood center is located. walking through the neighborhood and inspecting the blue recycle boxes is a new routine for the synthetic imaginaries we are composing. as soon as the children spot a blue box ahead, they excitedly run towards it to begin the inspection: which bottle will be most suitable for our collective space? a ketchup bottle, three coca-cola bottles, and a small bottle of tropicana orange juice are the exciting finds from this residence. the children run along the sidewalk to the next house. five small water bottles and one canada dry ginger ale. after searching through four additional blue boxes and unable to fit more bottles into the collection, we return to the early childhood center with our large wagon overfilled.   repeating what we have done for the last month, children wash each bottle in soapy water, remove the labels (which they place inside the bottles), and dry them thoroughly. each bottle is then filled with other plastic items and joins the mound that has been piling up in the classroom.   figure 4. gathering bottles. authors’ photograph.   figure 5. washing bottles. authors’ photograph.   queering play through plastic more and more plastic materials make it into the classroom. for a few weeks, we gathered plastic bags. after we had a sizable amount, we invited the children to sit at a table to carefully flatten each bag one by one. it took us more than three weeks to collect a large pile of flattened bags.   with an iron in hand, we spend the next few weeks fusing the plastic bags into fabric. aware of the dangers of inhaling toxic fumes from the plastic, we set our ironing station right outside the room in the playground. the children watch through the large window and take turns cutting pieces of parchment paper to contain the plastic, cutting the seams and handles off of the plastic bags, sandwiching three plastic bags between the parchment paper, and moving the iron on the parchment paper to melt the plastic, peeking once in a while to ensure we don’t create holes in the fused plastic fabric.   figure 6. playing with plastic clothes. authors’ photograph.   the children are then ready to design a whole series of garments which they proudly and playfully fashion around the queer synthetic room as they create stories of their own.   the toxic fumes from melting plastic make ironing the plastic bags a safety hazard. although we are not finished with our work, we become entangled with plastics differently, moving from melting strips to make garments to joining strips into infinity chains—chains that would become the plastic yarn balls we crochet with.   our close relations with the plastic bags emerge in the rituals of yarn making. plastic yarn making is a slow process that begins with the careful smoothing of bag upon bag. the flattened bags are then folded into a fan-like pattern. to continue the process, we must cut one end of the bag but save any off-cuts in their own plastic bag carrier. next, small strips (3–4 cm) are snipped down the width of the bag to create several plastic circles. each circle is looped into a link knot with another circle to create an infinity chain ∞. soon the long chains become wound tightly into plastic yarn balls waiting at the ready.   fingers, crochet hooks, and plastic yarn balls engage together in a process of transformation. balls of plastic yarn and crochet hooks are scattered in various spots across the room or with the educators who are already engaged in crocheting. as the children walk into the classroom, they fall silent as they slowly fan the room and either sit with the educators or amid the unaccompanied hooks and yarn. three of the children sit on the floor and quietly watch and listen to one of the educators as she talks her way through the process of crocheting—loop, hook, now pull it through; loop, hook, now pull, she repeats over and over again as fingers, yarn, and hook attempt to move together. as the educator muddles through the process, one of the three children gently places a palm on top of the educator’s hand and begins to move along with her. later on, that same child picks up a crochet hook and wraps the yarn around it. before long, the looping motion stops, and the pulling with and between fingers, yarn, and hook creates a tangled mess. as the child tries to extricate themselves from the yarn, tiny remnants of the plastic bag dislodge and cling to clothes and skin. even with the most vigorous shaking, the plastic remains stubbornly stuck.   figure 7. crocheted clothing. authors’ photograph.   bubble wrapping the room at the beginning of the week the early childhood center received a shipment of ten new cribs. each crib arrived in a separate box. while the cribs’ arrival was met with mixed reactions given the prospect of having to tear down the old and assemble the new, great excitement surrounded the discovery that each crib came wrapped in large sheets of plastic bubble wrap. the center’s director quickly gathered them up and offered the bubble wrap to the plastic classroom. the same safety procedures that required cribs to be replaced every ten years regardless of condition provided an unlikely addition to the plastic classroom that pushed the boundaries of maintaining safety in the classroom.   apart from yearly government safety inspections, the early childhood center has one educator assigned as the safety steward. their job is to visit the individual classrooms on a monthly basis to inspect and report back any safety concerns that require attention. the morning the bubble wrap moves into the plastic classroom is the same morning as the monthly in-house safety inspection. the safety steward enters the room with clipboard in hand and walks over to the crowd of children, educators, and mounds of plastic bubble wrap. as she sits down, she wraps one large sheet around her shoulders like a shawl and lays another over her lap. as she begins to go through her safety check list, she fingers the tiny bubbles. the now familiar sound of pop, pop, pop fills the air as tiny pieces break free from the sheet of bubble wrap. with a chuckle, she asks, “do you have any safety issues? any choking issues?” after a great deal of laughing, she turns to one of the educators who remains completely submersed under the bubble wrap with one of the children and a book and says, “you know, i never thought i would ever think that plastic could be so warm and cozy.” she sits in this “warm and cozy” pile of bubble wrap while filling out the safety report—passed.   chthonic pedagogies and curricula as these chthonic narratives show, common worlding waste pedagogies, and more specifically the queer synthetic curriculum, are pragmatic yet speculative. they work with the simultaneously destructive and creative powers of plastic. they deny neither the ecological threats plastics pose nor the creative, malleable, and sensorial pleasures they afford. grappling with the eternal trouble of living with plastic bodies (created to feed our petrochemical addiction (altman 2015) that are now inseparable from our own bodies and that do not decompose is the impossible task of the queer synthetic curriculum—not educating a new breed of good ethico-political human subjects that are set on “better managing” their guilt towards toxic plastic. in this way, the queer synthetic curriculum, as loveless points out in relation to art, works “at the micropolitical level of the here and now…with an activist impulse,” offering “speculative frames through which to defamiliarize and reorganize the local” (2019, 101).   there is the risk, we found out, that the queer synthetic curriculum be read as another recycling/reusing neoliberal performance (macalpine and pacini-ketchabaw 2020). thus, it is important for us to tarry with our pedagogical intentions. we invite slow, situated pedagogies in which children become immersed in the tensions of plastics, the capitalist petroleum complex, and our waste-precarious times. we support children to notice plastic, not to dismiss the challenging realities they are inheriting. without guarantees or innocence, we hope that children will be able to learn how plastic endures, to become attuned to their immediate synthetic surroundings, and to respond to the troubled worlds in front of them rather than to ideal worlds of innocence. in other words, pedagogically, we intend to refigure young children’s relationships with plastic. having said this, for us, it is not about putting all the responsibility of our waste futures onto children or creating guilt in the next generations. rather, we hope that our actions in early childhood education, to draw on haraway, cultivate response-ability, which is to say, “the high stakes of training the mind and imagination to go visiting, to venture off the beaten path to meet unexpected, non-natal kin, and to strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose together something unanticipated, to take up the unasked-for obligations of having met” (2016, 130).   for us, the chthonic pedagogical and curricular happenings that strike oddly familiar comminglings of human and plastic bodies act in critically affirming worlding ways, inviting children to attune to, practice curiosity towards, and ultimately embrace the earth’s inevitable queer plastic futurities. situated within the figure of the chthulucene, our intent is to foster conditions for “recuperation, partial connections and resurgence” (haraway 2015, 15) that risk attachments with and in the world. we hope that by staying with the trouble these risky attachments bring, conditions 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world: a manifesto for research-creation. durham, nc: duke university press. macalpine, kelly-ann, with hayley johnstone, laurie minten, lindsay sparkes, and brenda grigg. 2020. “thinking with plastics: common worlds waste pedagogies disrupt the early childhood classroom.”  ecelink, 40 (1): 35–44.  https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/aeceo/pages/2524/attachments/original/1595879350/ecelink_summer_2020_thinking_with_plastic.pdf?1595879350. macalpine, kelly-ann, and veronica pacini-ketchabaw. 2020. “reconfiguring waste(ing) pedagogies in early childhood education.” paper presented at @discardstudies twitter conference, twitter, november 17, 2020. https://discardstudies.com/2020/11/09/discard-studies-twitter-conference-schedule/. moore, sarah a. 2012. “garbage matters: concepts in new geographies of waste.” progress in human geography 36 (6): 780–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132512437077. murphy, angela molloy. 2020. “plastic city: a small-scale experiment for disrupting normative borders.” ecelink 4 (1): 21–34. http://hdl.handle.net/11343/241948. penfold, louisa. 2019. “material matters in children’s creative learning.” journal of design and science, february 19, 2019. https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/bwp6cysy/release/1. plumwood, val. 2002. environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason. london: psychology press. scanlan, john. 2005. on garbage. london: reaktion books. uyanik, özgün, gözde inal, fatma çalışandemir, munevver can-yaşar, and adalet kandir. 2011. “new explorations with waste materials in early childhood education.” us–china education review a (1): 111–18. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed522205.pdf. vandenberg, laura n., derek luthi, and d’andre quinerly. 2017. “plastic bodies in a plastic world: multi-disciplinary approaches to study endocrine disrupting chemicals.” journal of cleaner production 140 (1): 373–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.01.071. vintimilla, cristina d., and iris berger. 2019. "co-laboring: within collaboration’s degenerative processes." in feminist post-qualitative research for 21st-century childhoods, edited by b. denise hodgins, 187–95. london: bloomsbury. vintimilla, cristina d., and veronica pacini-ketchabaw. 2021. “on becoming a pedagogist: brief thoughts on pedagogical documentation.” the pedagogist network magazine, no, 2. https://pedagogistnetworkontario.com/on-becoming-a-pedagogist-brief-thoughts-on-pedagogical-documentation/. yoldas, pinar. 2014. “ecosystem of excess.” https:// http://cargocollective.com/yoldas/ecosystem-of-excess-2014. ———. 2015. “ecosystems of excess.” in art in the anthropocene: encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments, and epistemologies, edited by heather davis and etienne turpin, 358–70. london: open humanities press.     author bios veronica pacini-ketchabaw is a professor of early childhood education at western university’s faculty of education. she is a co-founder of the common worlds research collective and director of the climate action childhood network.   kelly-ann macalpine is an assistant professor at western university, faculty of education. she is an active member of the common worlds research collective and research associate in the climate action childhood network. six ways of looking at fractal mechanics ghosh, bishnupriya. 2024. “the plague check: population culling as pandemic realpolitik.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–23. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license the plague check: population culling as pandemic realpolitik bishnupriya ghosh uc santa barbara bghosh@ucsb.edu abstract the covid pandemic presented a bioeconomic opportunity to re-entrench extant differences (racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, or otherwise) and to escalate the ongoing engineering of imagined communities. this paper examines how this general paradigm unfolded in india’s lockdown of march 2020, and the consequent “long walk home” for migrant laborers. narendra modi’s decision exemplifies an autoimmune drive that splits the national body-politic into a visible citizenry, groomed as electorate, and the teeming masses, marked as threat and slated for expulsion from a unified body politic. such a drive draws on moral and science-based sanctions for rationalizing what christina sharpe has named premature and preventable deaths. the moral sanction draws psychic force from dominant cultural symbols that mystify, sometimes sacralize, the body politic (modi’s “lakshman rekha” metaphor), while science-based biosecurity measures sort and segregate populations for the management of health. plotting malthusian historical resonances between war, famine, and disease, i characterize the modi regime’s readiness to countenance migrant deaths as a “population culling” that is, unfortunately, an iterative feature in the archives of global pandemics. keywords scarcity, covid pandemic, modi regime, migrant march, population culling special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 2 prelude: the lockdown wake the wake invokes christina sharpe’s searing call to mourn premature and preventable black death in the afterlife of slavery. her landmark in the wake: on blackness and being (2016) mobilizes the slave ship as a powerful metaphor for thinking about contemporary black experiences of punishment, regulation, incarceration, and death. black death is normative and necessary for “this socalled democracy [the united states],” she surmises, “it is the ground we walk on” (2016, 14). with other scholars of global racial capitalism and of black social death, sharpe underscores the persistence of global anti-blackness as the root of premature and preventable black death become normative—fueled by everything from long-term healthcare inequities to extra-juridical murders. scholars such as joão costa vargas (2021) and matthew flynn (2021) have extended these conversations to analyze death at mass scale during the covid pandemic and to inquire into which social congeries were slated for death. in their accounts, the “social triage” in the pandemic emergency serves as an x-ray for normative organizational processes and forms affecting the distribution of life and death within “so-called” democracies. of course, the historical character of the nation-state—whether it is a western liberal democracy or a post-socialist one, for example—determines the production of death and the possibility of its escalation in pandemic times. yet a globally synchronic event such as the recent pandemic, one which motivated international cooperation at unprecedented scale, invites comparisons across diverse historical contexts. this is especially so for nation-states that rushed to adopt the international model of the lockdown spearheaded by china. as carlo caduff writes, covid lockdowns were drastic interventions “in the name of health” with calamitous effects everywhere; in particular, nation-states with “deep authoritarian longings” enacted draconian measures with characteristic impunity (2020, 471). the measures generalized danger, made palpable everywhere and all at once. age-old contagion fears sanctioned the proverbial sorting and segregating of populations, weeding out dangerous bodies, dirty and diseased, to ensure the survival of the national body politic. this autoimmune drive surfaces every now and then in pandemic times, setting in motion comparative analyses. this essay tracks one commonality across pandemic experiences: the phenomenon of premature and preventable death at mass scale. but why start with black death? as an analytic, what can this ontological condition mobilize? to be sure, anti-blackness speaks to the singularity of the black experience under racial capitalism. yet the specter of premature and preventable death is a viable starting point because lockdown decisions built on extant historical differences that “make live and let die”—racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and otherwise (foucault 2003). the pandemic presented a bioeconomic opportunity to re-entrench such differences and to escalate the ongoing engineering of imagined communities. under autocratic regimes like trump’s special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 3 america, jair bolsonaro’s brazil, and narendra modi’s india, the internal split in the body politic deepened. on the one side, there was a visible citizenry, groomed as electorate, representing the (ideal) body politic; on the other, the teeming masses gathered, marked as threat and slated for expulsion from a unified body politic. the lockdowns consigned the latter to premature and preventable death to ensure the survival of the “population as a whole” (pace michel foucault). in his march 2020 lockdown speech, modi invoked a hindu cultural metaphor to unify a mythic hindu body politic, essentially a hindu upper-caste one, sans instruction for migrant laborers in india’s massive informal sector who have no permanent shelter. at the time of india’s lockdown decision, there were only 519 cases in the nation. without much consultation—for example, consulting with the national disaster management authority—the modi-shah regime made a swift intervention in the name of strong leadership (purohit and parmar 2021). the speedy lockdown left an estimated 55 million migrant laborers to trek home on foot to their villages (jan sahas 2020).1 this unforgettable spectacle of premature and preventable death engenders the following reflections on population culling. the migrant “long walk home” enshrined in narrative and image should not be surprising for a regime known for its killing fields. bjp regime has been in the business of engineering a hindu electorate to consolidate the ideal hindu nationalist body politic. while the modi regime occasionally courted historically disenfranchised other backward castes (obc) for electoral gains, the violence against dalits, in rapes and murders, has become a terrifying norm in bjp-led states (notably, uttar pradesh) as has the orchestrated pogroms against indian muslims.2 in this regard, hindutva’s global racial project resonates with global anti-blackness; both are test beds for producing death at mass scale when opportunity arises. in the case of india’s lockdown, it is virtually inconceivable that the government simply overlooked the vast populous of migrant laborers in decision-making processes, that migrant labor deaths were effects of bad planning, a snafu, an administrative failure. i argue that making no provision is part of the lockdown decision: it is the active process of making die that i characterize as population culling. such a reading moves beyond the foucauldian premise of “letting die” as liberal laxity. this emphasis on the deliberative distribution of death motivates beginning with the critical axiomatic of black death. in turn, that axiomatic inaugurates a wake for those who perished in covid lockdowns. the production of scarcities the bioeconomic calculus of population management in india begins with the british colonial state, setting the scene for the current pandemic tragedy. historically, the modern economic rationale for culling populations in india was part of the colonial state’s racialized population control strategies. one rationale for distributing death surfaces in thomas malthus’s chilling 1798 writings on population explosion: special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 4 it is an evident truth that, whatever may be the rate of increase in the means of subsistence, the increase in population must be limited by it, at least after the food has been divided into the smallest shares that will support life…to act consistently, therefore, we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operation of nature in producing this mortality, and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. in our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague…if by these and similar means the annual mortality were increased...we might probably every one of us marry at the age of puberty and yet few be absolutely starved. (1872, 412, my emphasis) here the plague as an “operation of nature” that kills off a portion of the population is on par with the famine as sound economic reason. some must “absolutely starve” to increase the “annual mortality” of others. almost a century after malthus’s proposition, sir george couper’s confidential memorandum to the viceroy of india, lord ripon, advocated for famine as a positive check on segments of the colonized population: notably, a check on the “class of men—so low in intellect, morality, and possessions” that if “they be protected from every cause, such as famine or sickness,” they would “end up by eating every other class in the community” (ripon memorandum july 24, 1881, british museum, cited in ambirajan 1976). this rationale for the effective distribution of death during cataclysmic events mobilizes what foucault names a malthusian “bioeconomic” calculus in his collège de france lectures (2009, 77).3 i will turn to foucault’s elaboration of the population problem later in the discussion on autoimmunity. but for now, let us stay with the malthusian production of scarcities that keeps mass premature and preventable death in sight. one of the most prominent enactments of producing scarcity in the late colonial era was the bengal famine of 1943. winston churchill made a deliberative decision with an eye to the potential japanese invasion of india; he oversaw rice rotting in state-protected godowns while three million perished from hunger. much has been said about this disaster: its wake continues in critical studies, narratives, and images. amartya sen’s (1981) famous study poverty and famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation makes the case that actual food scarcity, “there not being enough food to eat,” is only one of the possible causes of famines. “starvation is a characteristic of some people not having enough to eat,” noted sen. “it is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat. while the latter can be the cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes” (sen 1981, 1). sen proceeds to elaborate an engineered scarcity by pointing out structural entitlements are the cause of famines.4 seen from the dismal malthusian perspective, a famine such as this exerts a positive check on the special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 5 population bomb; but as rationale, it is continuous with preventative population control measures such as contraception and sterilization. both are economically reasonable grounds for the management of life. such a continuity is no doubt galling for liberal-democratic ideologies inclined to protect and preserve the vitality of populations through the equitable distribution of state dispensations. but time and again crisis-events like famines and epidemics call the bluff on these liberal fictions. suddenly, cold economic reason rather than political rights governs who can live and who must die. the covid pandemic is no exception in bringing this to the fore. as the pandemic emergency intensified existing inequities in healthcare access, food security, and housing, those with economic wherewithal found recourse despite scarcities (personal protective equipment to medical oxygen to hospital beds), while the historically indigent and vulnerable found themselves slated for mass death. the malthusian proposition further underscores the biological existence of the population—its vitality, its need for nutrition and shelter, its vulnerability to microbial infraction. such an emphasis places the human as species on a continuum with other living beings, including animals and plants. animal studies scholars have long privileged the continuum primarily to criticize the anthropocentric killing of animals; and indigenous scholars have refused colonialmodern valuations that separate animal and human death, speaking of catastrophic double death under settler-colonial violence.5 the importance of these arguments to the colonial-modern distribution of death without juridical consequence or moral compunction can hardly be overestimated. this is why i characterize the acts of killing that are spectacularly visible during famines and epidemics as population culling. culling is the regulated practice of sorting of wild animals for slaughter, separating the weak and sick from the potential survivors.6 a legitimate practice in the industrial farming of animals, the culling of animals is seen as economically necessary for the maintenance of the herd. to speak of the distribution of premature and preventable death as culling is to draw attention to the “bio” in the economic calculus. culling positions the active production of death as economically reasonable, and it gestures toward expulsion from the (human) juridical fold that protects living being; cast out, the living being becomes killable. population culling recognizes the cold economic reason of pandemic realpolitik, where making die habitually unfolds alongside securing the life. we have seen hard choices, deliberative and stark, in covid episodes: in the insistence that meatpackers or amazon employees continue their labor; in the adjudication of which patients should be given ventilators; in the vaccine hoarding by wealthy nations. these are not instances of “letting die” but the consignment of some to premature death to ensure the survival of the rest. beyond bioeconomic calculus, beginning in the colonial past enables plotting historical continuities between that past and modi’s postcolonial india. for both, the exploding population appears as a problem for the coffers. if we think about special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 6 the bjp’s economic agenda, then it is clear the state is less concerned with food security—after all, it is the congress party that introduced the national food security act in 2013 before the bjp took the reins in 2014—as it is investing in the high-tech, communications, and financial sectors. the endless demonetization schemes, the privatization of industries, the reshaping of india’s financial infrastructure all amount to what bhaskar sarkar and rahul mukherjee (2023) have characterized as the “scramble for india.” in this economic context, when they are not productively engaged in labor, the teeming masses appear as figures of expenditure; without jobs, they quickly transition from superfluity to disposability. then there is the bjp’s authoritarian turn: the stifling of dissent, the imprisonment of critics under nonbailable offenses, and the shutting down human rights organizations in recent years. imbued with a sense of a majoritarian mandate, in its second twenty-first-century term (after the electoral win of 2018), the modi regime has escalated its extra-juridical exercise of power, abandoning secular-democratic values and abrogating civil-legal protections. india under modi increasingly operates like a colonial regime as states of exception come to stay. the centralizing of political power finds reverberation in the economic sphere as wealth accumulates in the hands of a few elites—the adanis and ambanis, some of the richest men in the world—and india tends toward oligarchic accumulation. so when such a regime invested in political engineering and oligarchic accumulation puts a population control bill on the table, as it did in 2019, the malthusian argument makes sense: that indeed there is a logical continuity between the pandemic distributions of mass death and normative population control measures. both can be mobilized to engineer an ideal electorate under (proto)authoritarian regimes. i close this historical setting of the scene with a photograph from 1943: it is a shot of a soup kitchen from otto bettmann’s collection of fifteen thousand images that he carried with him when he escaped from nazi germany (figure 1).7 one famous genre of bengal famine images features starving bodies, but the image below belongs to another genre depicting the massification of those who experience the deepest harm from state-sponsored scarcities. the massification indexes the scale of scarcity and gestures toward premature death. it anticipates images of the migrant march: millions on foot, outside, on roadways and highways, sharply distinct from images of individuated confinement and isolation. these iterative images of massification—on the road, at the soup kitchen—begins the wake for the uncounted. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 7 figure 1. indian citizens waiting in line for soup kitchen (original title: “india: famine in india”) december 17, 1943. credit: the otto bettmann archive (getty images) alt text: a black and white photograph of indian citizens waiting in line for soup kitchen during the famine. the long walk home on march 24, 2020, prime minister modi announced a national lockdown for 21 days, following a 14-hour curfew on march 22. it was a massive endeavor, locking down 1.3 billion people—the largest in the world. all modes of transportation were suspended; all workplaces, including construction sites, closed. while those with homes hunkered down, daily wage laborers in the major cities found themselves without refuge. many lived in temporary shelters, sleeping in shifts in shared spaces; a majority relied on their daily earnings for sustenance. with no transportation to make their way back to villages and small towns, nor any time for preparation (for state and municipal governments), migrant laborers found themselves adrift, some evicted, others harassed for curfew violations on their perilous journey home. in the stories and photographs trickling in on social media and independent news outlets, in states such as uttar pradesh, the migrants were publicly sprayed with bleach; on other occasions, they were beaten by state police to discipline their movements. when the government woke up to the necessity of making transport available—the “shramik special” trains were announced as late as may 1, 2020, 40 days after the lockdown—migrants had to apply for e-passes to board buses and trains (bhargava 2020). with india’s varying literacies, this bureaucratic process failed many, even as the lateness of the offer meant that millions were already on their way home on foot. as the tragedy unfolded, 198 migrants died in road accidents on their way home between may 25 and 31, 2020. others died of exhaustion and starvation. how much infection increased in packed buses, in soup kitchen queues, and in other makeshift accommodations is impossible to assess. journalistic documentation provided one window into the unfolding humanitarian crisis as evocative images of (what was swiftly named) “the long walk home” poured in. among image banks of migrants on foot, https://www.gettyimages.co.nz/detail/news-photo/famine-in-india-by-last-week-an-estimated-1-000-people-had-news-photo/515421860?adppopup=true special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 8 carrying all their worldly belongings, one genre underscored the irony of those who had built cities cast out on the highways (see, e.g., reuters 2020). these images frame the exodus against backdrop of stretching national highways and shimmering high rises; the indifferent state appears as a giant maw of hot concrete and electrical grid offering no refuge. always sensitive to their global image, the government protested the tenor of these reports in a plea to the supreme court. they argued that the media were “spreading rumors” that escalated panic; but this mobilization of “fake news” is staple coverup whenever the modi regime draws criticism. for those craving hard data, the extent of the humanitarian crisis is difficult to grasp partly because there was little time to account for how many were displaced, how many walked home, and how many died on the way in the furious, accelerated time of pandemic emergency. state and civil society organizations simply scrambled to make do amid a mass exodus. as we shall see, by now, there are many counts but no comprehensive accounts from the state. when the supreme court ordered the indian government to make provisions (transportation, food, shelter, and medicines) for migrants on may 28, 2020, the administration maintained there were no migrants still on the road, and that the government had made extensive provisions of food and shelter (rajagopal 2020). yet civil society organizations were still reporting large numbers on highways trying to get home. by this time, the modi-shah regime announced a $266-billion economic stimulus package (may 14, 2020) but dispensations were distributed as loans to be repaid by those who had lost employment; further outrage erupted around subsidies that effectively made migrants pay fares on the special trains allocated for them (vij 2020). clearly a humanitarian crisis was still underway. for as late as june 2020, the united nations office of the high commissioner for human rights exhorted the government to heed the supreme court order to make adequate provision (ohchr 2020). but how are we to assess the lockdown effects in this postcolonial state tending toward neoliberalism? theorists of the state offer a note of caution about the alltoo-easy slide between different manifestations of neoliberalism. anthropologists of the state such as co-authors akhil gupta and aradhana sharma (2006) argue that, although the 1991 liberalization of the indian economy and consequent market reforms brought sweeping change to financial infrastructures, information and communications technologies, and the manufacturing sectors, the impacts were far less drastic for agricultural and small-scale production. in their respective ethnographies of two welfare programs—the integrated child development services (icds) and the mahila samakhya (women speaking with equal voice)— gupta and sharma argue for a rearticulation and expansion of the welfare state post-1991, one that increasingly works hand in hand with transnational networks and agencies. if there is a difference between the integrated child development services (instituted in 1975) and the mahila samakhya (instituted a decade and a special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 9 half later), it obtains welfare’s futurity. for the integrated child development services, the bureaucratic congeries constitutive of the state were benefactors of welfare dispensations; for the mahila samakhya, the distribution of services and assets sought to empower women, thereby ushering in their future as autonomous agents. in both instances, however, state bureaucracies continued to administer welfare. what is important here is the complex picture of india’s move toward neoliberalism, inconsistent and dispersed, especially when observed from the lowest levels of government. hence, the most indigent still rely heavily on state dispensations; some expect them, having no other recourse. in the accelerated time of the pandemic, however, there was no dispensation to be found, and little space for political demands. moreover, at that moment, the state appeared not in its heterogenous organs as a single authoritative agent capable of deploying the force of law against all its citizens. in this regard, the draconian lockdown whose administration did not attend to india’s informal sector bears some resemblance to other states that took similar measures and created conditions for mass death. migrant citizens looking to the government or the sarkar (in popular parlance) found no one was home. the pandemic emergency exposed two discernibly neoliberal tendencies of modi’s india. one was the sea change in modes of inclusion into the citizenry enabled by the transformation of the infotech sector, a part of neoliberal reforms. digital capture infuses every part of daily life from getting medical treatment at free government hospitals to opening bank accounts and registering cellphones. the aadhaar card, a state-issued biometric proof of identity, renders citizens as “dividuals” (or less than individuals) who can be disassembled and reassembled as information bits (haggerty and ericson 2006). such data bodies make possible the calculability of the human—step one in sorting the contributors from the expenditures. even as aadhaar cards are not allowed as “proof” of citizenship, they expand surveillance infrastructures. citizens have become data points or “flecks of identity,” as mathew fuller has noted in media ecologies, in this socioalgorithmic process of electronic capture (chapter 4, 2005; see also clarke 1988; lyon 1994; and raley 2013). the international monetary fund sees india as a leader in widening financial services across the population through its expansive digital affordances: india stack is the moniker for the application programming interfaces that link digital identity, payments, and data (carrière-swallow, haksar, and patnam 2021). and yet, at the moment of crisis, migrant laborers found themselves adrift in the app universe. many found themselves not registered for the appropriate apps required for state dispensations. for instance, only 18.8 percent of delhi’s construction workers had building and construction workers identity cards that were required for receiving benefits from the state-sanctioned building and construction workers fund (das and kumar 2020). understandably, the fluctuating nature of the migrant workforce had much to do with such incomplete registration. but this is precisely why it should have been anticipated and factored into the lockdown decision. after all, state provisions could have special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 10 been accessed using the aadhaar record, if only the government had made the decision to create a requisite digital mechanism (as they did for vaccine registration). the sorrier part of the tale is that the india under modi has invested much more in financialization that the actual production of basic economic provisions such as food, shelter, and transportation. this was clearly evident in the eight-month delay in building plants to manufacture pipeline oxygen for india’s hospitals. as early as september 2020, the modi administration had been warned of india’s medical oxygen scarcity should covid infection increase. by then, donations had poured into the pm cares fund; so, in october 2020, the central medical service floated tenders to establish 162 oxygen plants. and yet none of these were operational when the delta variant burst on the scene as the government spent months adjudicating the best bids.8 this is but one example of a regime devoted to financial logics above all else, always on the lookout for the best deal or partnership with private interest. indeed, the bjp is known for its crony capitalism: at least half of india’s coal reserves, for example, have slipped into the hands of a few families; six or seven businesses have bought up most national assets invested as global funds; and the telecommunications infrastructures that occupy pride of place for the bjp regime are a family empire (crabtree 2019; rajshekhar 2020). this familiar story of deepening economic disparities provides the economic backcloth for the modi regime’s dark arts of population culling: the will to distribute death for the those who labor in india’s informal economy (sharma and khanna 2020). finally, in context of india’s infotech prowess, the government’s lack of data on migrant distress was nothing short of willful dissembling at best and a cover-up at worst. for when asked about how many perished on their journeys home, in midseptember 2020, the ministry of labor and employment told the lok sabha (the lower house) that there was “no data” available despite the inter-state migrant workmen act of 1979, which required documentation (nath 2020). for an administration obsessed with surveillance data, the empty slate told its own story: the disposable human should leave no trace. the modi regime’s lack of data is recognizable as “agnotology,” the willed production of ignorance as a form of knowledge making (proctor 2008). it is here that community-based organizations involved in rapid responses to the crisis are some of the most reliable sources. they provide not only records of harm but also who exactly was cast out of the body politic. the community and survivor-centric non-profit jan sahas, with longtime ties among migrant laborers (serving as many as 120,000), embarked on a rapid assessment of the situation.9 between march 20 and 29, 2020, 12,000 workers lit up jan sahas hotlines; 42 percent of the workers who called had no rations left even for a day, and 62 percent had not heard of any emergency provisions (jan sahas 2020).10 jan sahas special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 11 consolidated a report based on 3,196 interviews (conducted march 27–29) titled voices of invisible citizens (2020) that put the total count of migrant laborers in india’s informal economy at 55 million. as the report explains, the count wavers according to the tides of seasonal migration, varying between 15.2 million and 55 million (world bank 2019). drawing on the national sample survey (2007–2008), jan sahas estimated that 41.7 percent of these laborers fall under the official category schedule castes and tribes and 39.9 percent are from other backward classes; the world bank 2019 classifies the migrant labor force more generally as falling under the “vulnerable employment” category. the national sample survey political-juridical designations are mechanisms for distributing state dispensations for historically disenfranchised communities in post-independent india. and yet, at a moment of national crisis, state protections tilted unmistakably toward those assured of shelter. among stories featured in the jan sahas report, one worker (dilip) recalled being stranded with thirty others at the gurgaon railway station (bordering delhi) for some days, with scarce food or water. from his perspective, migrants faced two deadly options: “yahan ruk kar kya hoga? hum bhookhey mar jayengey. hum log paidal nikal jayengey” (“what will happen if we stay here? we’ll die of hunger. so, we will walk home,” trans. mine, jan sahas 2020, 18 ). death by disease and death by hunger, the epidemic or starvation, hang in the balance. still others remained unconvinced that such relief can be sustained over the long trek. in another database consolidated from helpline records, gramvaani mobilized a partner response team that included public health researchers, development communications specialists, community activists, and technology operations engineers, among others, that resolved more that seventy issues reported between march 24 and april 7, 2020. gramvaani’s mobile unit reaches as many as one million people across india (seth and viswanathan 2020). requests for help were recorded, some transcribed, in a publicly accessible database.11 these stories corroborate what investigative journalists reported: the evictions, the starvation, the police beatings, the impossibility of garnering relief from an indifferent state. together, the electronically archived audio, visual, and print traces are countermemory mobilized against agnotology: they launch the wake for premature and preventable death. in the voices of migrant laborers, we find keen awareness of their disposability in the body politic. despite fey promises that woo obc voters in electoral cycles, there are no illusions about state dispensations—only distrust turning to anger. the divided body politic jacques derrida’s (2003) incitement to theorize autoimmunity is fertile ground for making sense of the politics of death during the covid crisis. seemingly importing a metaphor from biological processes, derrida likens the american response of 9/11 to autoimmune disorders where “living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 12 own immunity” (derrida 2003, 92). as state security apparatuses turned inward to identify and target specific populations, conjuring apparitions of the terrorist next door and the sleeper cell, the body politic split internally: what was a defense system oriented toward external infraction now attacked parts of the very body it sought to defend. if one were to extend derrida’s metaphor further, one might draw on treatments for autoimmune disorders that disable erroneous messaging: the one that insists that the body is under attack from elements internal to the body and then directs antibodies toward the bad apples. this notion foregrounds the symbolic encoding of the body politic and “its enemies” as critical to immune function and dysfunction; indeed, immune systems are regarded as intelligence machines that rely on cognition to launch embodied defense. the counter-archive from sources like jan sahas and other independent media platforms that humanize the high-risk threat—the dirty, the dangerous, and the infected—can partially dislodge and reset the message that inaugurates the autoimmune attack. such a reading introduces a double image of the biological and political body; neither has primacy even though the common understanding is that the immunity paradigm in politics adapts and imports biological templates. pondering on the image of autoimmune distress, w.j.t. mitchell (2007) notes that it was immunology that once mobilized the legal concept of exception—immunitas in latin—to speak of biological operations; and the importation from political rhetoric continues in immunological discourses of the body at war. autoimmunity, then, summons a reversible image where the literal meaning is less important than resonances between two images, the biomedical and political (mitchell 2007 282). in both, the biological individuated body or the national body politic is constituted as an imaginary whole disturbed by the sudden attack of the foreign— the pathogen or the terrorist. in the case of the pandemic, the pathogenic attack is no longer a metaphor as state security apparatuses scramble to maintain the territorial integrity of the body politic by policing borders, regulating contact, administrating sanitation, even as the biological-ecological milieu of pathogenic infection traverses and exceeds nation-state borders. the political failures to contain new mutant strains of sars-cov2 with testing protocols testifies to this struggle for elusive territorial sovereignty over smart pathogens. at the same time, autoimmunity is not only a biomedical matter. the human foreigner who is a carrier of infection and can become state expenditure threatens the body politic: we see efforts at containing this threat in the ever-changing travel bans or vaccination registrations. the habitual marking of the foreign without or within in pandemics management institutes differences that arbitrate who properly belongs to the body politic and who should live in fear of expulsion. the autoimmune drive that splits the body politic draws on two kinds of sanction for its operations. the first is a moral sanction that draws its psychic force from dominant cultural symbols that mystify, sometimes sacralize, the body politic (as in the leviathan). when embedded in the political unconscious, such symbols can special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 13 effectively turn reasonable caution into fear and loathing of the other. in his announcement of the lockdown on march 24, 2020, modi drew on predictable sources to exhort those with homes to stay there. mobilizing hindu nationalist transcriptions of the epic ramayana, modi invoked the “lakshman rekha”—a territorial boundary chalked by the hero ram’s brother, lakshman, to protect the righteous from demonic taint—as a protective barrier of the home. the decision to impose a national lockdown “has drawn a lakshman rekha at your doorsteps,” he argued, encoding the measure in common parlance (quoted in staff writer 2020). in the ramayana, crossing the lakshman rekha initiates an epic war; hence, modi’s invocation carried a warning not to engage the invisible viral enemy or the infected carrier.12 in the months that followed, the invocation materialized in popular street performances where viral orbs took on recognizable demonic forms.13 the seemingly off-hand reference to the lanshman rekha would not be significant were it not the case that the multivalent ramayana has been mobilized as the mythic foundation for hindu nationalist india.14 the bjp’s political performances of instituting ram rajya (the rule of ram) over bharat (the ancient name for india) exerts a xenophobic cultural appeal, urging the ethnic cleansing of india’s muslims (encoded as “outsiders”) and crafting a racial cartography for the hindu body politic. anustup basu’s (2020) archaeology of hindutva elaborates such a cartography for the subcontinent, where the true aryan king (the epic hero, ram) resides in the north while the monstrous darker-skinned twin is located in the south. the ramayana encodes this racist territorial imaginary: the lighterskinned savarna aryans, the ordained rulers of the land faithful to the veda, win the righteous war. given the preeminence of the ramayana, modi’s invocation of the lakshman rekha insidiously indexes the bjp-led ethnic purification already underway, spectacularly evident in the iterative killing of dalits, muslims, and christians by hindu right-wing party cadre—with little or no juridical consequence. this ethnic cleansing is an intentional remaking of the national community by selecting the proper subjects of an ideal electorate, with the hope that the hindu middle class will largely vote for the bjp. some of this ethnic cleansing has been achieved by administrative fiat: the national registry of citizens and the citizenship amendment act in 2019 attempted to prune the existing 200 million muslim population by requiring current indian residents to furnish documentary proof of their citizenship (ghosh 2020). these bjp-led efforts create a tiered model of citizenship in which the “minorities,” notably muslims and dalits, are turned into refugees or effectively second-class citizens. against the backdrop of this divided body politic, modi’s lakshman rekha encodes his imagined community as an essentially upper-caste hindu one. for them, modi goes on to promise personal protective equipment, isolation beds, ventilators, and other essential equipment, touting his administration’s partnerships with private labs and hospitals. there is no mention of shelters or transportation anywhere in the lockdown speech. cast out of the sanitary body politic, the migrant laborers are left open to infection, refugees in their own land, figures of unwarranted expenditure slated for premature and preventable death. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 14 a second sanction for the internal split arrives with science-based biosecurity measures that segregate populations for the management of health. here the history of biosecurity uncovers how the institution of difference came to be. tracking the historical emergence of security apparatuses, in his famous collège de france lectures, foucault reflects on the dual valence of population that poses a problem of security: “from one direction, then, the population is the human species,” he writes, “and from another it is what will be called the public” (2009, 75, my emphasis). the population joins the biological (species) and the political (public) in one unified body. and yet the tension between the two remains unresolved: life must circulate, regenerate, and proliferate; but it must simultaneously be constrained and protected from multileveled threats to its “natural” existence.15 biosecurity measures tread a precarious path to the control and regulation of life, allowing vitality to flourish while keeping tabs on sudden flare-ups that cause entropy. biosecurity measures seek to regulate entropy with economic provision (homes, jobs, food) and biological maintenance (birth, disease attenuation, death). but in this balancing act, the body politic splits once more— now encoded in the technoscientific imaginaries of risk management. the survival of the “population as a whole” depends on the identification, classification, and containment of dangerous high-risk elements visible in a multiplicity of cases: they require constant surveillance to monitor potential threats to the population. biosecurity apparatuses open the door to demographic segregation; in our times, surveillance technologies have only increased the reach of identification and tracking as we see in contact-tracing mechanisms or the epidemiological quantification of fecal matter, all inscriptions of vital signs. such surveillance disseminates technoscientific notions of risk. the attacks on the migrant laborers on their way home that include spraying, hosing, locking up, or denying entry disclose their inscription as always already infected by the dint of “their” squalid living conditions, “their” indiscipline, “their” unsanitary habits. such acts of cruelty shore up the internalization of risk in times when biomedical speculations run rampant. like malthus, foucault’s history draws a line between what happens to populations during regular cycles of population planning and the emergency time of epidemics and famines. the argument is realized in the lectures collated as security, territory, population, where he articulates health (vaccination campaigns) and economic (market policies) debates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries together, placing them both within the same bioeconomic calculus.16 most importantly, both health and economic policies take the population as their collective target: how to control its (growing) numbers, engineer its contours, and render it economically viable. in closing i pause on india’s agonistic relation to the population bomb to reflect upon the orchestration of mass death during india’s 2020 lockdown, asking, is population culling during pandemics an exceptional response? or is it the hyperbolic expression of a special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 15 realpolitik that sees population control as strategic to economic prowess and geopolitical positionality? the population bomb population figures are cold, but the feel is unforgettable—so we understand from the opening pages of the book that shook the world. paul ehrlich’s the population bomb begins with his experience in an “ancient taxi” whose seats were “hopping with fleas” in delhi (1968, 1). the author recalls a deluge: “the streets seemed alive with people. people eating, people washing, people sleeping. people visiting, arguing, and screaming. people thrust their hands through the taxi window, begging. people defecating and urinating. people clinging to buses. people herding animals. people, people, people, people…since that night, i’ve known the feel of overpopulation” (1).17 the ehrlichs took this cab ride in 1966 when the population in delhi was just over 2.8 million (as opposed to 8 million in paris). this image of overpopulation has many genealogies, as do the economic calculations of the ideal population. in the indian case, the population “problem” has been a persistent one in regular state planning; during epidemics and famines, the problem erupts as impossible expenditure. ehrlich’s 1966 invocation of the overcrowded global south places us in the mid-twentieth century, when decolonizing nations built in population management as a key feature of their economic plans. ever since india’s independence in 1947, the specter of “overpopulation” has been on every regime’s radar—an imploding “bomb” that will scuttle economic progress. needless to say, the bomb as a figure excess, a bursting that catalyzes large-scale damage, positions the “over” of the population as uncertainty. lassoing uncertainty, the risk calculus, renders the behemoth manageable by parsing multiplicities: which segments are high risk in terms of growth? what incentives can target these groups? at the level of long-range economic planning, india’s post-independence state-sponsored programs have often targeted the historically disenfranchised population mostly because they tend to have large families contributing to family incomes (including agricultural labor). tied to the five-year development plans (1952–1979), “family planning” programs aiming to lower fertility rates adopted a multipronged approach to slowing population growth by addressing poverty, education, and public healthcare. in this history of planning, the most notorious episode was the indira gandhi regime’s integrated plan of contraception and sterilization, launched in 1976. offering cash payments to men for vasectomies and to women for long-term contraception (primarily iud insertion), state health officials disproportionately targeted poor and lower-caste populations; young men were especially at risk of forced vasectomies. abuses of this biopolitical population engineering made the daily news, despite censorship during emergency rule (1975–1977) that suspended all civil liberties. there was word of young men forced into vasectomy camps, of a brisk black market in sterilization certificates (necessary for everything from special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 16 ration cards to electricity connections), of police violence against those who reconsidered consent. the program ended in 1977 when indira gandhi and the congress party lost the national elections. all in all, this sterilization program was the nadir of india’s long history of state-sponsored population control programs. the episode exposes the ongoing state-sponsored engineering of populations; predictably, the historically disenfranchised encounter the most violent effects. the “sudden bolting” of harms in epidemic and famine situations only holds up a mirror to these normative biopolitics. the political will to cull populations becomes evident when one connects the seemingly disparate lockdown decision to modi regime’s expressed population control agenda. just before covid-19, in august 2019, modi addressed the population bomb in his independence day address to the nation. “population explosion,” he said, “will cause many problems for our future generations. but there is a vigilant section of public which stops to think, before bringing a child to the world, whether they can do justice to the child, give them all that she or he wants. they have a small family and express their patriotism to the country. let’s learn from them” (outlook web bureau). in lauding the patriotism of a vigilant public, modi separates a responsible citizenry from populations whose expenditures derail economic futures. the expenditure argument is the reigning logic of the population control bill that was introduced into the upper house of the indian parliament, the rajya sabha, in july 2019; not yet legislation, it remains imminent possibility. the bill proposes penalties for couples not adhering to the two-child policy such as ineligibility for government jobs. the bill’s critics argue that, if the bill becomes law, it can be marshalled to target muslim populations since the hindu right-wing has always fueled alarm over muslims “overtaking” the hindus majority in sheer numbers. all the while, the 200 million muslims within the 1.3 billion remain an unmistakable minority. the imminent population control legislation indexes the modi-shah realpolitik manifest as planning (bills, longterm programs, strategic enterprise). it complements the seemingly unplanned positive checks of making die by political violence, raging diseases, and rising food insecurity. following on the heels of the population control bill, the 2020 humanitarian crisis is a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity: the possibility to escalate premature and preventable death at hitherto unimaginable scales. coda: cast out, in sight the long walk home resounds with the practice of culling because, in a matter of hours, the migrant laborers were reduced to hordes—uncontrolled, unsanitary, bare life ready for making die. political emergencies such as a global pandemic place those marked as disposable in a zone between the animal and the human— that zone of “bare life,” as giorgio agamben (1998) named it, once protected by the divine. on the spectrum between human and animal, cast out of the republic protected by the mythic lakshman rekha, the vulnerable become too expensive to protect. they remain an anonymous multiplicity bombing national economic https://www.outlookindia.com/national/india-news-population-control-a-form-of-patriotism-says-pm-narendra-modi-news-336267 special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 17 prospects. autoimmune machineries keep unproductive fertility or dangerous dissent in the line of sight; but the morbidity of the unproductive laborer leaves no trace. but in scattered image and narrative, a wake begins. this closing image of a migrant queue outside the anand vihar bus station, new delhi, places us in the crush of the population bomb. but also visible is an image of state, woefully slim in its provisions (figure 2). it is an image of scarcity that inaugurates the premature and preventable death of many. figure 2. migrant exodus, new delhi, march 28, 2020. credit: bhuvan bagga, afp (getty images) alt text: a photograph of migrant exodus from new delhi during march lockdown. notes 1 for further migrant worker counts, see jan sahas 2020, 22n29, and 24n32. 2 violence against dalits and muslims has increased exponentially under the modi regime, from lynchings (with beef eating and purchase as alibi) by hindu cadre, recorded and circulated on video as hate speech, to rapes and murders of have become shockingly normalized with minimal redress. the hathras rape and murder of a nineteen-year-old dalit woman in 2020, for example, raised a national outcry, throwing light on other instances; only one of the four accused uppercaste men was convicted of the charges, despite the young women’s dying testimony that she had been gang raped (see bbc news 2023). the incident took place in the state of uttar pradesh, which, under chief minister yogi adityanath, a staunch bjp ally, has been the test bed for violence and extra-juridical murders. also notorious in these annals are the northeast delhi riots of early 2020 in which hindu mobs attacked muslims and destroyed property; many scholars see this episode as an orchestrated pogrom (see khan and chakrabarty 2021). for obc definition, see, starr and sahghal. 3 while chair of history of systems of thought at the collège de france, foucault delivered a series of public lectures that were published after his death. many https://www.sedex.com/blog/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-indias-migrant-workers/ special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 18 scholars see these lectures as a project parallel to the history of sexuality (1976– 1984). one set of lectures scrutinizes the encoding of biological processes in birth rates, death, and life expectancies at the scale of populations—namely, in the “society must be defended,” 1975–76, security, territory, population, 1977–78, and the birth of biopolitics, 1978–79 (appearing in print from 2003). 4 the bengal famine is not only a spectacular instance of normative colonial policy but relevant also because of the modi regime’s indifference to the large-scale harm in bengal during the covid-19 pandemic. in a desperate (and failed) attempt to win state elections in bengal, in april 2021, modi held massive superspreader rallies (he made fourteen visits to bengal) while the subcontinent gasped for air during india’s second wave. here again, the realpolitik of electoral success trumped securing the health of populations. 5 writing about northern australia, deborah bird rose (2013) documents the “double death” of animals and aboriginal australians as an ongoing extinction event that draws attention to the entangled histories and futures of living systems. in wild dog dreaming, rose writes, “how to engage in world making across species? how to work toward world making that enhances the lives of others? and how to do this in the time of extinctions, knowing, as we must, that we are living amidst the ruination of others?” (51). 6 culling refers to an effort to reduce the control the size of something (like a herd) through the removal of the weakest or sickest members. animals are classic subjects of such processes. the verb form can suggest selection, handpicking, preferring, and choosing, but the noun is usually negative in valence (a rejection or discarding). 7 i choose this photograph from the otto bettmann archive because of the visual document’s historical relation to population culling, drawing a parallel between nazi germany and british india. further, one need not say much about the underlying resonances between nazi germany’s and the modi-shah regime’s fascist population culling episodes geared toward weeding out “weak or degenerate” populations; as i have indicated, there is robust scholarship on that lineage. for a discussion of the historical legacy of european fascism on the indian rashtriya swayamsevak sangh, see basu 2020. 8 see, anand patel, "parliamentary panel had alerted about oxygen crisis," india today, april 25, 2021. 9 jan sahas started in 2000, and includes safe migration and worker protection as part of its portfolio. the founder, ashif shaikh, has been recognized by world economic forum and its sister organization, the schwab foundation, as one of the most impactful social innovators during pandemic times. jan sahas has https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/parliamentary-panel-had-alerted-about-oxygen-shortage-in-february-says-congress-1794791-2021-04-25 special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 19 reached out to civil society, the private sector, and government to mount the migrants resilience collaborative, an unprecedented, grassroots-led, multistakeholder collaboration dedicated to migrant workers and their families across asia. 10 more contingent civil society mobilizations, such as the stranded workers action network (2020), found 74 percent of the workers had less than half of the daily wages to survive the entire lockdown period; and 89 percent had not been paid by their employers during the lockdown. see, watson institute publication of the stranded workers action network report on april 16, 2020. 11 the gramvaani database is available online at gramvaani.org. for voices from the lockdown chronicles, see, http://voice.gramvaani.org/vapp/mnews/0/show/tags/coronavirus/. 12 the “lakshman rekha” marks sacred territory free of demonic taint as we know from a turning point in the hindu epic—a scene of violence that initiates the great war between the demons and the righteous hero, ram. predictably, the war arises from the woman question. during ram’s fourteen-year exile in the forest, so the story goes, ram’s wife, sita, is abducted by the demon king, ravana. sita is snatched by ravana when she crosses the lakshman rekha, the sacred boundary that ram’s brother and fellow exile, lakshman, had etched to protect her. in popular performances during the covid-19 pandemic, the coronavirus takes on a demonic hue, recalling everyday usages of the cultural term for protection against pests (anti-cockroach chemicals are also branded as lakshman rekha). 13 the coronãsur, featuring the virus as demon, made several appearances during the pandemic, as did the goddesses who protect against the plagues. as early as march 2020, there was the erection of a fifty-foot-tall, blue effigy named coronāsur in mumbai—derived from corona (name of the virus) and asur (meaning “demon” in brahmanical mythology). see yadav 2022. 14 anustup basu (2020) discusses the ramayana imaginary extensively in hindutva as political monotheism. his focus is on the consolidation of a “monotheistic hinduism” that runs counter to panorama of 33 million gods. scholars of the ramayana, for their part, have amply shown how the epic is a living document still reinterpreted as such all over india despite the institution of specific versions as authoritative texts. see richman 1997. 15 it is well known that foucault distinguishes “security” as a mode of power quite distinct from the “disciplinary” regimes that he explored in his writings on sexuality. if disciplinary modes sought to render the body docile and productive, if disciplinary power fixed, demarcated, and protected sovereign territory, the “apparatuses of security” were in business of circulation, enabling movement, http://gramvaani.org/ special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 20 exchange, contact. we have witnessed how states have struggled to constrain all three during the covid-19 pandemic with everything from health protocols to travel regulations. security as biopolitics is no longer about defending territorial integrity (sovereignty), or indeed about protecting citizens’ rights (subject of law). 16 just before he turns to vaccination campaigns (and therein epidemic crises), foucault devotes a lecture to the production of hunger in security, territory, population. seventeenthand eighteenth-century debates on the free circulation of grain sought to regulate the fluctuations of scarcity-abundance. the upshot was economic system that secured the life of the whole population by allowing some to experience dear prices, “some difficulty in buying wheat, and consequently some hunger,” which may mean “some people die of hunger” (foucault 2009, 42). economic security meant allowing prices to rise, allowing hunger, allowing death, in order to guarantee the preservation of the population as a whole. 17 ehrlich’s 1968 book, cowritten with his wife, anne ehrlich, predicted widespread famine from overpopulation. references agamben, giorgio. 1998. homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. translated by daniel heller-roazen. sanford, ca: sanford university press. ambirajan, s. 1976. “malthusian population theory and indian famine policy in the nineteenth century.” population studies 30 (1): 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.1976.10412717. basu, anustup. 2020. hindutva as political monotheism. durham, nc: duke university press. bbc news. 2023. “the hathras rape and murder case: indian court clears three of four accused.” march 2, 2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india64820721. bhargava, yuthika. 2020. “coronavirus lockdown | railways to run ‘shramik special’ trains to move migrant workers, other stranded persons.” the hindu, may 1, 2020. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/railways-to-run-shramik-special-trains-tomove-migrant-workers-other-stranded-persons/article31481996.ece. caduff, carlo. 2020. “what went wrong: corona and the world after full stop.” medical anthropology quarterly 34, no. 4 (december): 467–87. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12599. carrière-swallow, yan, vikram haksar, and manasa patnam. 2021. “stacking up financial inclusion gains in india.” international monetary fund, finance & development. july 2021. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2021/07/indiastack-financial-access-and-digital-inclusion.htm. https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.1976.10412717 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-64820721 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-64820721 https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/railways-to-run-shramik-special-trains-to-move-migrant-workers-other-stranded-persons/article31481996.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/railways-to-run-shramik-special-trains-to-move-migrant-workers-other-stranded-persons/article31481996.ece https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12599 https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2021/07/india-stack-financial-access-and-digital-inclusion.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2021/07/india-stack-financial-access-and-digital-inclusion.htm special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 21 clarke, roger. 1988. “information technology and dataveillance.” communications of the acm 31, no. 5 (may): 498–512. https://doi.org/10.1145/42411.42413. crabtree, james. 2019. the billionaire raj: a journey through india’s new gilded age. new york: tim duggan books. das, ritangan, and nilotpal kumar. 2020. “chronic crisis: migrant workers and india’s covid-19 lockdown.” south asia @lse (blog). april 8, 2020. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2020/04/08/chronic-crisis-migrant-workers-andindias-covid-19-lockdown/. derrida, jacques. 2003. “autoimmunity: real and symbolic suicides: a dialogue with jacques derrida.” in philosophy in a time of terror: dialogues with jurgen habermas and jacques derrida, edited by giovanna borradori, 85-136. translated by pascaleanne brault and michael naas. chicago: university of chicago press. ehrlich, paul r. 1968. the population bomb. san francisco: sierra club; new york: ballantine books. flynn, matthew b. 2021. “global capitalism, racism, and social triage during covid19.” kalfou 8 (1–2): 206–20. https://doi.org/10.15367/kf.v8i1-2.369. foucault, michel. 2009. security, territory, population: lectures at the collège de france, 1977–78. translated by graham burchell. new york: picador. foucault, michel. 2003. “society must be defended”: lectures at the collège de france, 1975-76. translated by david macey. new york: picador. fuller, matthew. 2005. media ecologies: material energies in art and technoculture. cambridge, ma: mit press. ghosh, bishnupriya. 2020. “the refugee within: becoming disposable in modern india.” large glass, no. 29–30, 106–11. gupta, akhil and aradhana sharma. 2006. “globalization and postcolonial states.” current anthropology 47.2 (april): 277-307. haggerty, kevin d., and richard v. ericson, eds. 2006. the new politics of surveillance and visibility. toronto: university of toronto press. jan sahas. 2020. voices of invisible citizens: a rapid assessment of the impact of the covid-19 lockdown on internal migrant workers: recommendations for the state, industry & philanthropies. april 2020. https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/voices-of-the-invisible-citizens/. khan, aiman, and ishita chakrabarty. 2021. “why the 2020 violence in delhi was a pogrom.” al jazeera, february 24, 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/2/24/why-the-2020-violence-in-delhi-wasa-pogrom. lyon, david. 1994. the electronic eye: the rise of surveillance society. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. https://doi.org/10.1145/42411.42413 https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2020/04/08/chronic-crisis-migrant-workers-and-indias-covid-19-lockdown/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2020/04/08/chronic-crisis-migrant-workers-and-indias-covid-19-lockdown/ https://doi.org/10.15367/kf.v8i1-2.369 https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/voices-of-the-invisible-citizens/ https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/2/24/why-the-2020-violence-in-delhi-was-a-pogrom https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/2/24/why-the-2020-violence-in-delhi-was-a-pogrom special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 22 malthus, thomas. (1798) 1872. an essay on the principle of population. 7th ed. london: reeves and turner. mitchell, w.j.t. 2007. “picturing terror: derrida’s autoimmunity.” critical inquiry 33, no. 2 (winter): 277–90. https://doi.org/10.1086/511494. modi, narendra. 2020. “pm modi addresses the nation on the spread of covid-19.” sansad tv, march 24, 2020. youtube video, 28:45. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naei596jyss. nath, damini. 2020. “govt. has no data on migrant workers’ death, loss of jobs.” the hindu, september 14, 2020. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/govt-hasno-data-of-migrant-workers-death-loss-of-job/article32600637.ece. ohchr. 2020. “covid-19: urgent help for india’s forgotten migrant workers must follow supreme court ruling, says un experts.” press release, june 14, 2020. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/06/covid-19-urgent-help-indiasforgotten-migrant-workers-must-follow-supreme-0. patel, anand. 2021. "parliamentary panel had alerted about oxygen crisis," india today, april 25. proctor, robert n. 2008. “removing knowledge: the logic of modern censorship.” in agnotology: the making and unmaking of ignorance, edited by robert n. proctor and londa schiebinger, 1–33. stanford: stanford university press. purohit, jugal, and arjun parmar. 2021. “india covid-19: pm modi ‘did not consult’ before lockdown.” bbc news, march 29, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/worldasia-india-56561095. rajagopal, krishnadas. 2020. “supreme court orders centre and states to immediately provide transport, food, and shelter free of cost to stranded migrant workers.” the hindu, may 26, 2020. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/supreme-court-takes-suo-motucognisance-of-migrant-workers-issue/article61652523.ece. rajshekhar, m. 2020. “crony capitalism on modi’s watch means invisible hands ensure you never go bankrupt.” the wire, july 29, 2020. https://thewire.in/politicaleconomy/crony-capitalism-on-modis-watch-means-invisible-hands-ensure-younever-go-bankrupt. raley, rita. 2013. “dataveillance and countervailance.” in “raw data” is an oxymoron, edited by lisa gitelman, 121–46. cambridge, ma: mit press. reuters. 2020. “india’s migrants face long walk home amid coronavirus lockdown.” pictures. march 26, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/indias-migrantworkers-face-long-walk-ho-iduskbn21d2o0. richman, paula, ed. 1997. many ramayanas: the diversity of narrative traditions in south asia. oxford: oxford university press. rose, deborah bird. 2013. wild dog dreaming: love and extinction. charlottesville: university of virginia press. https://doi.org/10.1086/511494 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naei596jyss https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/govt-has-no-data-of-migrant-workers-death-loss-of-job/article32600637.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/govt-has-no-data-of-migrant-workers-death-loss-of-job/article32600637.ece https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/06/covid-19-urgent-help-indias-forgotten-migrant-workers-must-follow-supreme-0 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/06/covid-19-urgent-help-indias-forgotten-migrant-workers-must-follow-supreme-0 https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/parliamentary-panel-had-alerted-about-oxygen-shortage-in-february-says-congress-1794791-2021-04-25 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56561095 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56561095 https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/supreme-court-takes-suo-motu-cognisance-of-migrant-workers-issue/article61652523.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/supreme-court-takes-suo-motu-cognisance-of-migrant-workers-issue/article61652523.ece https://thewire.in/political-economy/crony-capitalism-on-modis-watch-means-invisible-hands-ensure-you-never-go-bankrupt https://thewire.in/political-economy/crony-capitalism-on-modis-watch-means-invisible-hands-ensure-you-never-go-bankrupt https://thewire.in/political-economy/crony-capitalism-on-modis-watch-means-invisible-hands-ensure-you-never-go-bankrupt https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/indias-migrant-workers-face-long-walk-ho-iduskbn21d2o0 https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/indias-migrant-workers-face-long-walk-ho-iduskbn21d2o0 special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 23 sarkar, bhaskar, and rahul mukherjee. 2023. “introduction: national life in the wake of the pandemic.” social text online, april 12, 2023. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/introduction-national-life-in-the-wakeof-the-pandemic/. sen, amartya. 1981. poverty and famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation. oxford: clarendon press. seth, aaditeshwar, and vani viswanathan. 2020. “what covid means to us: voices from the indian hinterland.” gram vaani. may, 2020. https://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/~aseth/voices-from-the-hinterlands.pdf. sharma, saurabh, and sumit khanna. 2020. “india’s migrant workers face long walk home amid coronavirus lockdown.” reuters, march 26, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-india-migrant-labo/indiasmigrant-workers-face-long-walk-home-amid-coronavirus-lockdowniduskbn21d2o0/. sharpe, christina. 2016. in the wake: blackness and being. durham, nc: duke university press. staff writer. 2020. “full text of pm narendra modi’s speech on lockdown, stimulus package.” mint, may 13, 2020. https://www.livemint.com/news/india/full-text-of-pmnarendra-modi-s-speech-on-lockdown-stimulus-package-11589312482447.html. starr, kelsey jo and neha sahgal. 2021. “measuring caste in india” pew research center (decoded), june 29. https://www.pewresearch.org/decoded/2021/06/29/measuring-caste-in-india/. watson institute for international and public affairs. 2020. “lockdown and migrant work distress in india: a report by stranded workers action network,” april 16. https://watson.brown.edu/southasia/news/2020/lockdown-and-migrant-workdistress-india-report-stranded-workers-action-network. vargas, joão costa. 2021. “blue pill, red pill: the incommensurable worlds of racism and anti-blackness.” kalfou 8 (1–2): 183–205. https://doi.org/10.15367/kf.v8i1-2.366. vij, shivam. 2020. “why the modi government gets away with lies, and how the opposition could change that.” the print, may 15, 2020. https://theprint.in/opinion/why-modi-government-gets-away-with-lies/422211/. world bank. 2019. the world bank annual report 2019: ending poverty, investing in opportunity. washington, dc: world bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/dd8593ab-20ea-5c74953a-0478f86d90e8. yadav, megha. 2022. “disease, demon, and the deity: case of corona mātā and coronāsur in india.” religions 13 (11): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13111011. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/introduction-national-life-in-the-wake-of-the-pandemic/ https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/introduction-national-life-in-the-wake-of-the-pandemic/ https://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/~aseth/voices-from-the-hinterlands.pdf https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-india-migrant-labo/indias-migrant-workers-face-long-walk-home-amid-coronavirus-lockdown-iduskbn21d2o0/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-india-migrant-labo/indias-migrant-workers-face-long-walk-home-amid-coronavirus-lockdown-iduskbn21d2o0/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-india-migrant-labo/indias-migrant-workers-face-long-walk-home-amid-coronavirus-lockdown-iduskbn21d2o0/ https://www.livemint.com/news/india/full-text-of-pm-narendra-modi-s-speech-on-lockdown-stimulus-package-11589312482447.html https://www.livemint.com/news/india/full-text-of-pm-narendra-modi-s-speech-on-lockdown-stimulus-package-11589312482447.html https://www.pewresearch.org/decoded/2021/06/29/measuring-caste-in-india/ https://watson.brown.edu/southasia/news/2020/lockdown-and-migrant-work-distress-india-report-stranded-workers-action-network https://watson.brown.edu/southasia/news/2020/lockdown-and-migrant-work-distress-india-report-stranded-workers-action-network https://doi.org/10.15367/kf.v8i1-2.366 https://theprint.in/opinion/why-modi-government-gets-away-with-lies/422211/ https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/dd8593ab-20ea-5c74-953a-0478f86d90e8 https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/dd8593ab-20ea-5c74-953a-0478f86d90e8 https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13111011 special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) bishnupriya ghosh, 2024 24 author bio bishnupriya ghosh teaches global media at the university of california, santa barbara. her recent work includes the co-edited routledge companion to media and risk (2020) and the monograph the virus touch: theorizing epidemic media (duke university press, 2023). the plague check: population culling as pandemic realpolitik abstract keywords prelude: the lockdown wake the production of scarcities the long walk home the divided body politic the population bomb coda: cast out, in sight notes references author bio     book review book review | the distance cure: a history of teletherapy, by hannah zeavin (mit press, 2021)     elizabeth ellcessor university of virginia eae2f@virginia.edu     we are surrounded by remote or “virtual” therapy. during the covid-19 pandemic, remote therapy services have been increasingly promoted by insurance companies, podcast advertisements, reddit forums, and corporate wellness offices as a plausible solution to the rising rates of depression and other mental health concerns exacerbated by death, unemployment, and endless uncertainty. but remote therapy has a history before zoom. as hannah zeavin argues in the distance cure: a history of teletherapy, media have always been core to therapeutic relationships and practices, bridging physical and emotional distances.   zeavin’s book is a deeply researched and compellingly articulated history of therapy as a technologically mediated socio-medical practice fundamentally based in communication. covering over one hundred years, this book situates its subject within and in opposition to existing histories of media and psychology. therapeutic broadcasting and crisis telephone lines are rarely part of (conventional) media histories, which have focused on other genres and audiences. zeavin demonstrates that what we know about media history is echoed and enriched by these new objects of analysis. similarly, zeavin notes the structuring absence of mediation from received histories of psychotherapy. to tell these linked stories across a capacious variety of time frames and examples, zeavin maintains a tight focus on mediation and its relationships to the forms of therapy in question.   mediation is a framing that encourages us to focus not only on media technologies or institutions but on the contexts, relationships, and processes by which meaning is made. mediation suffuses social life and shapes our understandings of reality and each other. as media theorists sarah kember and joanna zyliska propose, mediation can be understood as an entanglement of bodies and technologies, “an intrinsic condition of being-in, and becoming-with, the technological world” (2014, 1). such an interrelationship of media, bodies, situation, and practice guides the distance cure, allowing zeavin to challenge taken-for-granted ideas about how media “replace” or “dilute” in-person forms of communication (and therapy).   the core of this book is the argument that mediation is not a disruptor of the patient-therapist dyad but has always been a “third party” in the therapeutic relationship; ritualized communication and its (often mediated) forms of exchange are central to the very functions of therapy. as zeavin writes, “media, far from getting in the way of treatment, first facilitate it and then are put out of mind” (58). whether via letters, broadcasts, or computer interfaces, mediation enables people to step outside of their everyday in order to adopt and accept therapeutic modes of interaction and self-knowledge.   individual chapters of the distance cure break down the details of various therapeutic media, attending to their differences in style, goals, and address. fittingly, the first chapter considers freud’s own use of letters to analyze himself and little hans, demonstrating that written communication could produce the same quality of unselfconscious disclosure associated with the “talking cure.” in these cases, zeavin argues that the asynchronicity of letters allowed an intimacy and talking “as if” with another that fostered therapeutic interactions.   later chapters consider radio broadcasts, suicide hotlines, automated computer programs, and online chats as various successors to freud’s distanced therapies. these deeply researched chapters tell important and little-known histories, making them compelling reading for many historians of media and technology more broadly. the histories of world war ii–era radio therapy and san francisco’s first queer suicide hotline, conceived of as emergency responses, are particularly riveting and resonant in the present, as we watch the forms of remote access that proliferated as emergency responses to covid-19 be discontinued in a push toward “normalcy” (accessible campus action alliance 2020).   for people with interest or experience using telehealth or app-based mental health services, the last two chapters offer analyses of computer-driven and self-directed therapies. these chapters are particularly interesting due to zeavin’s discussions of how automated therapy and written forms (such as cognitive behavioral therapy apps) remove the therapist from the encounter, creating an autotherapeutic experience in which mediation produces necessary distance and direction. paradoxically, in some cases, this seems to produce more pleasurable and even more successful interventions as these experiences enable a fantasy of true anonymity and self-focus. such outcomes come with a warning, of course: zeavin’s autoethnographic exploration of the app talkspace indicates that prioritizing the patient as consumer may maximize fun and interactivity but does so with risks that treatment can be interrupted or partial (talkspace refers out any patients who reference suicidal thoughts, domestic violence, or sexual assault) (213).   throughout the monograph, zeavin deftly develops intimacy as an overarching theme. after all, “distance is not the opposite of presence; absence is” (18), and mediated presence enables therapeutic connection. in distance, there can be a particular intimacy born of configurations of people and technologies and enabling forms of connection, care, and help. zeavin describes this as “distanced intimacy,” which operates dialectically, as a distance that must be crossed to foster intimacy even as distance serves as a shield from becoming too close, enabling disclosure. zeavin also discusses the “intimate strangers” of hotlines, who listen without adding their own information, holding space for callers’ disclosures (111), and the “auto-intimacy” of written and automated systems, in which a media object enables a “closed circuit of self-communication” (133). the choice to highlight intimacy—over and instead of the implied value of physical proximity—reflects the care with which zeavin approaches this topic (also evident in methodological discussions about privacy and disclosure). rather than taking for granted the ways in which therapy has talked about itself in authoritative and institutional sources, zeavin’s turn to mediated therapy reveals some of what has been core to the therapeutic experience all along.   furthermore, zeavin demonstrates that distance enables access financially, physically, and otherwise. she is not overly optimistic about such access, noting that therapy is shaped by yet another medium—money (swartz 2020)—and is too often too expensive. efforts to broader access to therapy have often relied upon increased mediation to reduce costs and simultaneously reduce the availability of dedicated professional attention. yet zeavin cautions that beyond the technological possibilities of tele-, mediated, or automated therapies ought to lie a concern about exactly what help is offered and what limitations enforced. when remote therapy is treated as a cost-saving measure (for industries or patients), it often results in different standards of care; there can be good remote therapy, but not all forms of remote therapy are necessarily so.   like any thematic history, the work of this book is partial. it is limited in geographic and linguistic scope, focused on western english-speaking contexts. in places, important historical and geographical differences are collapsed, as in the chapter on radio therapy, which glides between significant national and political economic differences in radio as technology and industry. furthermore, there is a history of therapy itself—the rise and decline of psychoanalysis, the dominance of cognitive behavioral therapy, and the institutional contexts of education, licensing, and insurance companies—that shines through zeavin’s work, but is not covered in detail. these gaps are not faults of the monograph but are areas in which the reader’s knowledge may be taken for granted (or, potentially, their interest piqued).   ultimately, in the distance cure, zeavin produces a historical account that speaks to the present and the future. not a book about invention or introduction, zeavin’s historical facility draws attention to how these mediations of therapy are “adopted, exploited, and made part of everyday life” (22). should visions of virtual reality come to dominate available therapeutic offerings, zeavin’s book will still enable us to make sense of how these technological mediations work for or against the establishment of intimacy and the possibilities of therapeutic treatment.   references accessible campus action alliance. 2020. “beyond ‘high risk’: statement on disability and campus re-openings.” https://bit.ly/accesscampusalliance. kember, sarah, and joanna zylinska. 2014. life after new media: mediation as a vital process. reprint edition. cambridge, ma: mit press. swartz, lana. 2020. new money: how payment became social media. illustrated edition. new haven, ct: yale university press.     author bio elizabeth ellcessor is associate professor in media studies at the university of virginia. she is the author of in case of emergency: how technologies mediate crisis and normalize inequality (new york university press, 2022) and restricted access: media, disability, and the politics of participation (new york university press, 2016).     original research scripting consenting fictions in sex technology imaginaries     josef nguyen the university of texas at dallas josef.nguyen@utdallas.edu     abstract this article examines how the intended and implied uses and users of emerging commercial sex technologies negotiate understandings of sexual consent as a social fiction articulated as contractual-yet-contingent autonomy and transactional access that is framed as a prerequisite obstacle to sexual gratification. to do so, i analyze the design and marketing of consent-recording applications and sex robots programmed to refuse consent. i draw on science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist and queer theory to investigate both how sexual consent is imaginatively scripted into digital technologies and how imagined digital technologies suggest that we approach and value sexual consent. my analysis foregrounds critical readings of the design imaginaries of promissory digital technologies—speculatively suggested through design and marketing materials—to situate them within cultural politics of consent and digital technology as they express desires for specific worldbuilding fantasies about gender and sex.   keywords sexual consent, gender, design imaginaries, sex technologies, sex robots, consent-recording applications     introduction in recent years amid increasing public attention in the united states to rape culture, various technology developers have promised products to record sexual consent between prospective partners. the #metoo movement's rise years after tarana burke's activist work supporting women of color survivors of sexual assault, the credible sexual assault allegations against political figures including donald trump and brett kavanaugh, and the outrage following brock turner's light sentencing for sexually assaulting chanel miller represent some of the high-profile flash points in the cultural politics of consent. the development of consent-recording applications—digital software and devices designed to mediate and record sexual consent—aim to address anxieties over sexual consent in practice. but while the technologies themselves are not widely available or in use, the negative responses toward consent-recording applications emphasize the reductive, harmful, and misogynistic assumptions and implications informing their conceptions of sexual consent and inattention to gendered power under patriarchy. this article examines how the intended and implied uses and users of several sex technologies in development negotiate understandings of sexual consent as a social technology, a socially constructed fiction.1 by exploring the design and marketing of technologies such as consent-recording applications and sex robots programmed to refuse consent, i argue that consent is scripted into the imaginaries of emerging commercial sex technologies through fictions of consent articulated as contractual-yet-contingent autonomy and transactional access that is framed as an obstacle to sexual gratification. i draw on science and technology studies, digital media studies, and feminist and queer theory to investigate both how designers imagine scripting sexual consent into digital technologies and how imagined digital technologies suggest that we understand sexual consent itself. my analysis foregrounds critical readings of the design imaginaries of emerging digital sex technologies—suggested through promotional materials—to situate them within the cultural politics of sexual consent and digital technology in the united states and much of the west as they shape desires for specific worldbuilding fantasies about gender and sex. imagining uses and users of sex technologies sex technologies, like other technologies, are not neutral. as lynn comella emphasizes, commercial “sex toys and related products convey a powerful set of ideas about sex and gender” in their design and promotion by rendering particular erotic subjects, desires, and uses legible and marketable (2017, 114). sex technologies can range in function, purpose, and user, as designers create and marketers sell them for a variety of erotic practices to different target consumers. this includes technologies that impact sensation (vibrators, blindfolds, lube, etc.), shape bodies and bodily contact (dental dams, condoms, slings, etc.), envelop and cover (sleeves, sheets, etc.), penetrate (anal plugs, strap-ons, dildos, etc.), support fantasy and role play (costumes, props, etc.), simulate interpersonal interaction (blowup dolls, sex robots, etc.), and mediate communication between partners (dating websites, chat rooms, hook-up applications, etc.), among others.2 furthermore, designed technologies and technologies in the process of design cohere specific imaginaries. according to lucy suchman, imaginaries are the envisioned social and material arrangements, ideas, and values that inform and result from culturally situated practice (2007, 1n1), and technological design imaginaries emerge from technological design and marketing. in the context of sex technologies, bo ruberg emphasizes that the imaginaries of such technologies negotiate “implicit assumptions about which people and which desires matter when it comes to the intersection of sex and tech” (2022, 2), which has long shaped the historic and ongoing development of sex technologies themselves. these implicit assumptions mark who are the intended and implied users of a technology, which express, following elizabeth ellcessor, the “hegemonic arrangements of uses, users, and circumstances through which a [technology] and access to it are constructed and reinforced” (2016, 63) in the technology's imaginary. in contrast, actual users are those who use the technology once it is available, whether they are intended users or not. nonetheless, critical attention to intended and implied users in the design and marketing of commercial technologies, including technologies in development, highlights how designers and producers construct and identify preferred users as having (or as encouraged to have) specific wants and needs to satisfy. as one example, ryan and jenn cmich promoted the lovesync device to improve communicating sexual desire between partners (lovesync 2020).3 first launched through a kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in 2019, the lovesync is a pair of networked electronic buttons, one for each partner (and it presumes couples as its users). users can discreetly press their respective button to toggle recording individual interest or disinterest in sex. the status of each user's lovesync button is withheld from their partner unless both buttons simultaneously record interest in sex, in which case the device alerts both partners of mutual willingness. partners could then enjoy the benefits of increased sexual activity, all while minimizing the risk of possible face-to-face or explicit rejection when approaching a partner who may potentially be uninterested in sex. although lovesync's kickstarter campaign successfully raised $21,600 on a funding goal of $7,500, popular press coverage noted how using lovesync could replace explicit conversation about sexual desire entirely (bryan 2019; farokhmanesh 2019; valens 2019). this criticism of lovesync's potential use for eliminating rather than encouraging direct conversation about sexual desire between partners demonstrates how the uses of technologies matter. following sara ahmed, use matters because it manifests “forness” (2019, 7), the expression of purpose that motivates what is used, how, and by whom. lovesync's imaginary characterized the possibility of rejection of sexual advances as a potentially adverse problem in relationships. the cmichs asserted that lovesync was for users unsatisfied with their sex lives and that the device would help them to “never miss a chance for romance” from fear of potential rejection (lovesync 2019). lovesync's solution to what the creators framed as awkward conversations regarding sexual desire involved a device for removing the need for such conversations altogether in order to circumvent the potential risk of rejection from one's partner. consequently, the intended users of lovesync's imaginary desire increased frequency of sex, feel wary of determining mutual interest in sexual activity with their respective partners, and wish to avoid conversations about interest in sex with said partners. the possible uses represented in a technology's design imaginary—by its designers, manufacturers, and advertisers—suggest particular kinds of preferred user subjects. lovesync's promoted design reduces the negotiation of sexual desire to a synchronized match of button presses recording willingness for sex without conversation rather than supporting users in understanding that negotiating sexual desire and rejection are constitutive parts of healthy romantic relationships. lovesync's design imaginary encourages users to understand the process of determining mutual sexual desire between partners as an awkward obstacle to sexual gratification, rife with potential for rejection that threatens relationships themselves. the meanings of intended and implied users that designers and marketers of sex technologies construct through the design imaginaries of sex technologies reinforce, negotiate, and contest specific conceptions and representations of sexual subjects and erotic practices, communicating what sexual pleasure is, who should get or is in need of sexual pleasure, how they are to use such technologies, with whom, and why. scripting consent as scripting access to consider further the significance of technological use, i draw on robin bernstein's contention that recognizing technologies as scriptive things emphasizes how material artifacts suggest and scaffold meaningful user behaviors through cultural scripts—socially situated templates of action (2011, 71-72). bernstein emphasizes, however, that like how a theater script provides a structuring possibility for a performance but is ultimately nonbinding, so, too, is a scriptive thing (71) because individuals negotiate literacies, desires, and improvisations in unanticipated and variably situated ways to execute scripts in actual technological use. despite the possibility of deviating from such scripts, however, the intended and implied scripts of scriptive things contribute to the shaping of preferred users and uses in a technology's design imaginary. lovesync's intended use to match mutual willingness for sex among partners involved recording sexual consent through scripting interpersonal processes of discussing, determining, and withdrawing consent between potential sex partners through processes scripted into digital code. although characterizing sexual desire on a spectrum ranging from “need/passion” and “interest” to “disinclination” and “aversion” in promotional materials, the creators of lovesync reinforced an understanding of sexual desire as a reductive binary of “interest” and “disinterest”—consent and non-consent, respectively—through their device (lovesync 2019). this simplified scripting of consent reproduces the pervasive model for consent in the us (pateman 1988), which is rooted in western liberal humanist philosophy and contract law that constructs consent as a binary form of conditional permission by a purportedly autonomous subject capable of self-determination (greenblatt and valens 2018a, 3). consent presumes agency by a free and self-possessed subject; however, agency and, subsequently, consent are circumscribed by the limits that articulate how agency can be enacted. attending to the social construction of consent itself, joseph j. fischel demonstrates how dominant cultural understandings of sexual consent overburden the concept to stand in for a broad range of criteria, including individual autonomy, willingness, and desire, while simultaneously remaining insufficient in use as consent is often treated as a self-evident binary without adequate attention to power inequities that constrain consent in practice (2019, 3-4). consent is a sociopolitical, economic, and legal fiction constructed to articulate an autonomous and free liberal human subject but is not manifest in lived reality structured through systems of oppression, particularly with respect to gender, race, sexuality, class, ability, and other axes of social identity.4 liberal humanism, following neda atanasoski and kalindi vora, “covers over and devalues racialized and gendered work to produce the ideals of freedom, autonomy, and morality undergirding the figure of the human” (2019, 165) as a self-possessed subject capable of consent centered in white able-bodied masculinity, which has been centrally generated through violence against black subjects under racial subjugation. hortense j. spillers (1987), saidiya v. hartman (1997), and zakkiyah iman jackson (2020), for instance, illustrate how us chattel slavery actively and continuously denied black slaves the capacity for autonomy and consent in order to treat them as property incapable of the self-possession granted to white subjects under a humanism shaped through white supremacy. us chattel slavery bolstered a self-possessed white subject whose autonomy was contrasted by the captive black body controlled by others (atanasoski and vora 2019, 193). nevertheless, the autonomous and self-possessed liberal subject and their presumed consent remain fundamental fictions organizing contemporary us life under ongoing white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and other systems of inequity and ideologies of power. in understanding consent as a social fiction or script, my aim is not to dismiss consent. rather, drawing on fischel's argument that we need to “screw consent” (2019, 4), we must critically work to tighten, refine, and re-script the dominant cultural constructions of consent to address more precisely what consent should mean, how we use consent, and also what it cannot accomplish. to do so requires interrogating consent itself, including in emerging technological design. various emerging consent-recording mobile phone applications—such as good2go, legalfling, we-consent, consent amour, and yesmeansyes, among others—seek to provide technological solutions to anxieties over sexual consent. in so doing, these technologies in development reinforce an understanding of sexual consent as granting permission by those recognized as self-possessed for another to have access to one's own body. for example, good2go, which garnered controversial press in 2014 (buist 2014; gibson 2014; hess 2014), promised to assess whether a potential sexual partner was “good to go,” willing to and capable of consent to sex (“good2go app” 2014).5 an application user would hand their phone to a potential partner to complete a series of prompts about their consent and their sobriety level from options including “sober,” “intoxicated but good2go,” and “pretty wasted.” selecting “pretty wasted” would result in an alert from good2go that they “cannot consent,” demonstrating that the application incorporates sobriety level into its consent calculus. however, there are no criteria for a potential partner to determine the difference between the imprecise sobriety states that the application uses—what is the line between “intoxicated but good2go” and “pretty wasted”?—and no means to validate self-reported sobriety level. while lee ann allman, good2go's creator, sought to design a tool to reduce sexual assault on college campuses, erica buist, for the guardian, emphasizes that “[good2go] gets more sinister when you consider who would download it—men who are nervous of being accused of rape. is this something non-rapists lose sleep over?” (2014). proposed consent-recording applications predominantly require users to record in advance their consent to sex, thereby reassuring users that the program will protect them. however, these consent-recording applications, rather than protecting potential victims (disproportionately women), script the consent process for those paranoid that they may be accused of rape (primarily men) through their function to record agreement to consensual sex. men worried about accusations of sexual assault are the implied users in imaginaries of consent-recording applications. legalfling's approach, as another consent-recording application, was even more paranoid as it marketed aggressively the supposed legal weight of the record it offers.6 legalfling claimed to “[create] a legally binding agreement, which means any offense is a breach of contract” (“legalfling” 2018). central to the application's promotion by the dutch technology startup legalthing was that legalfling would store records of consent contracts using blockchain technology, relying on perceptions of blockchain technology as a secure form of decentralized record-keeping used for cryptocurrencies (golumbia 2016; swartz 2018). emphasis on the application's purported, though not verified, viability in court—from its “lawful” name to its assertion that it is “legally binding”—suggested its intended use in sexual assault cases and its orientation toward legal fears. but like good2go, legalfling received criticism during its promotion as “a deeply flawed representation of sexual consent” (ehrenkranz 2018; also bernard 2018; cole 2018). by promoting simplistic solutions to worries over consent in practice, the imaginaries of consent-recording technologies like good2go and legalfling scripted sexual consent using the dominant understanding of consent as conditional and contractual access to oneself as property by presumably fully autonomous subjects. such approaches fail to consider consent as a complex negotiation, including how coercion, intimidation, and deception may shape the use of these technologies, how they may enact harm in use, and how they communicate understandings of consent itself. in the promotional video for good2go, the creators claimed that the consent-recording application offered an “opportunity for two people to pause and reflect on what they really want to do, rather than entering an encounter that might lead to something one or both will later regret,” promising a seemingly empowering approach to encourage discussion of sexual desire between potential partners (“good2go app” 2014). however, that good2go contrasted this promise with anxieties about potential regret emphasized how such attempts to use digital technology to record sexual consent can reproduce suspicious, individualistic approaches to consent itself. ultimately, these sex technologies, in mobilizing fears of accusations of sexual assault, scripted consent as a burdensome obstacle through registers of anxiety, fear, shame, and frustration that impedes sexual gratification. animating access and proxy relations while the imaginaries of consent-recording technologies like lovesync and good2go aimed to script use behaviors through a consenting fiction among sex partners, the roxxxy sex robot represented another way that designers can script a fiction of consent into devices. douglas hines—founder and chief engineer of the us-based robotics company truecompanion—began promoting a prototype of the roxxxy at the 2010 adult video news' adult entertainment expo as a sex robot constructed in the image of a woman and programmed to perform different personalities, such as “wild wendy,” “s&m susan,” and “young yoko” (“truecompanion” 2017).7 much can be criticized about the misogynistic logics governing the design of these programmed personalities, such as how “young yoko” was described as “oh so young (barely 18) and waiting for you to teach her” (“truecompanion” 2017). but the promotion of the “frigid farrah” setting drew particular concerns across online outlets in 2017 (bates 2017; prakash 2017; taylor n.d.). critics noted how the “frigid farrah” persona would afford users the ability to enact fantasies of perpetrating rape against women, since truecompanion advertised that “frigid farrah” would perform the denial of consent, as the “reserved and shy” personality would, “if touched in a private area, more than likely... not be too appreciative of your advance” (“truecompanion” 2017). although truecompanion responded to such criticism by affirming that “rape is never an activity that should be supported or encouraged,” the company refused to acknowledge that “frigid farrah” would enable users to participate in fantasies of perpetrating rape even if that was not the intention, dismissing the criticism as “pure conjecture.” a fiction of consent animated the promotion of the roxxxy's “frigid farrah” setting; the programmed persona would anthropomorphize the technology itself through representation of a fictional woman refusing consent. in describing this effect as “animated,” i engage critical work on animacy, the cultural politics by which we unevenly attribute agency, life, and, ultimately, subjecthood (ngai 2005; chen 2012). for mel y. chen, animacy is central to the social construction of humanness and its others (2012, 3). from stones, dolls, and animals to various categories of the “human,” how we animate and recognize the animation of entities in the world is tied to how we hierarchize and value them. significantly, animacy hierarchies are historically and culturally specific, often shifting to reinforce dominant positions of power. chen explains that while “animacy hierarchies slip and give, ... they slip in particular privileged terms of sexuality, race, and ability, perhaps in part because these are the fragile grounds upon which they have been built in popular ontologies and political cultures in the united states” (2012, 234). in the us, dominant animacy hierarchies operate to construct the white able-bodied adult human man as the most privileged animate subject through distinctions made from purportedly “lesser” others (jackson 2020). this has been accomplished through the cultural work of surrogacy under white liberal humanism. toni morrison and hartman identify that fundamental to the treatment of black humans as property under chattel slavery is the cultural process of surrogacy—wherein an often gendered and racialized surrogate entity defines the borders of recognized human autonomy and subjectivity through their exclusion (morrison 1992, 37; hartman 1997, 5). black slaves were conceived as surrogate beings that in their political exclusion from humanity would reinforce the dominance of a white humanism. extending this work, atanasoski and vora (2019) examine how contemporary design imaginaries of robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous machines also operate through a form of surrogacy, and, thus, inherit conceptions of subjectivity born from histories of enslavement. the significance of technological surrogates for our understanding of human subjectivity, they argue, lies in the fact that “precisely because such technologies can never be human, they allow for an exploration of the aspirations for humanity” (5). the roxxxy invoked both dolls and robots as constructed surrogates with human-like appearances and behaviors to communicate the human as social category. the interest in adding robotic functionality to commercial sex dolls manifests through the shifting development and marketing of sex dolls from masturbatory technologies to technologies of personal interaction and attachment as developers increasingly animate them to appear more responsive and lifelike (levy 2007, 249). sex robots, including the roxxxy, animate sex dolls and participate in a western cultural history of robots as mechanical workers (rhee 2018, 17-24). the term “robot” itself originates from the czech word for “slave” (atanasoski and vora 2019, 33). because robots are imagined as laboring machines under human direction, safiya umoja noble emphasizes that robotics are “inscribed with troublesome ideas about race and gender” (2021, 200) inherited from histories of labor and mechanization. in examining the racialization of sex robots, for instance, mitali thakor (2018) explores the cultural logics shaping the eroticization of skin in sex robot design and manufacturing and the historic and ongoing violences of such eroticization. recognizing how particular entities and technologies function as surrogates highlights how categories such as slave and property and artifacts such as doll and robot function to define, negotiate, and communicate the boundaries marking inclusion in and exclusion from the privileged recognition of human subjecthood, autonomy, and consent. my approach to sex technologies like the roxxxy as surrogates also recognizes such technologies as proxies. according to dylan mulvin, proxies are things that operate through substitution and representation (2021, 6). as representations that stand in for something else, proxies delegate; they bear particular social relations, actions, and responsibilities displaced from others (6-7). for example, the capacities of representation and delegation ascribed to sex technologies like the roxxxy as proxies for women's bodies derive from what is constructed and marketed as desirable in women's bodies under patriarchal capitalism. the roxxxy's design imaginary centered a humanoid robot in the likeness of a woman whose labor is to provide sexual pleasure to men through performances of various personalities. this design imaginary reinforced existing cultural attitudes regarding gender and its relation to work, which inform the scripts that shape use of the technology (robertson 2018, 98-102). for instance, the default feminized gendering of digital conversational assistants—interactive computing technologies programmed to assist users via presenting themselves as sentient—by their engineers and marketers rehearses existing associations that subservient labor is the domain of women and feminized subjects (rhee 2018; lingel and crawford 2020; toncic 2021). siri (apple), alexa (amazon), and cortana (microsoft), as examples of digital conversational assistants, present as feminized subjects through coded software scripts that script user interactions with the technology as if commanding and receiving assistance or care from a woman. this gendering of digital conversational assistants and the software scripting of assistive function as feminized labor perpetuates the underlying metaphor of “computer as woman” that has been prominent in the field of human-computer interaction since the 1960s (brahnam, karanikas, and weaver 2011, 405), which, itself, results from the history of women as the original computers—workers who operated computing technologies on behalf of others—during world war ii in the us (light 1999). as such, technologies that proxy as women to perform care and service labor historically assigned to women, whether digital conversational assistants like siri or sex robots like the roxxxy, extend the history of feminized and devalued labor under patriarchy (atanasoski and vora 2020). designers, marketers, and users of commercial sex technologies that proxy for women's bodies delegate the labor of generating sexual pleasure primarily for men from women. this delegation of sexual labor from women's bodies to these sex technologies relies on promoting predominantly to men as implied users the desire for sexual gratification that is more convenient, affordable, reliable, or preferable than sexual gratification from prospective encounters with human women. while there exists diverse reasons for actual users to purchase and use such technologies, that such sex technologies are primarily marketed to function as proxies is vital to their preferred meanings of use, consumption, and pleasure. as mulvin emphasizes regarding the worldbuilding capacity of proxies, proxies are “always memories of a world gone by and forecasts of a world to come” (2021, 201). truecompanion promoted the roxxxy as a sex robot modeled as a woman and animated to perform different scripted personalities, granting men as the primary implied users the ability not only to interact with a proxy of a woman's body but also to be in control of that proxy. within their design imaginaries, users desiring and having access to sex robots—if we recognize them as proxies—amounts to users also having access to the fantasies and desires that motivate and shape their development and marketed alongside them. consequently, these sex technologies proxy not only for women and women's bodies but also particular desired relations with women and women subjects under patriarchy. regarding various trends in the design imaginaries among commercial sex robots, atanasoski and vora outline how such designs offer particular recurring scripts to men as intended users, including treating women as property and interacting with fully customizable women (2019, 189-91). the roxxxy offered a particular fantasy drawing on the pygmalion myth, where men fabricate women animated to their personal desires rather than interacting with women as independent and autonomous subjects (ruberg 2022, 204-09). to use the roxxxy as imagined was to access a worldbuilding fantasy showcasing what thomas foster describes as the “the mechanical [woman, which] represents a femininity safely under male control and therefore the possibility of dispensing with actual women, in a classically fetishistic operation” (2005, 98). central to the imagined use of the roxxxy's “frigid farrah” setting was the incorporation into the technology's design and promotion the semblance of conditional access through the animation of fictional autonomy to the technology itself, though a scripted fiction of consent to violate. the technology was not simply meant to index the physical body of a woman but also to provide interaction with a proxy for an imagined personhood of a woman—specifically of a woman refusing consent—fully under the user's choice to either recognize or subjugate. this “desire for the simulation of consent from a site where subjectivity is structurally made to be impossible,” as atanasoski and vora suggest, reveals the desire for the assertion of one's autonomy through the active and perpetual denial of a surrogate other as an equivalently legitimate subject (2019, 192). the imaginary of the roxxxy's “frigid farrah” setting scripted uses rooted in pleasure derived from perpetrating rape against women. to use the roxxxy's “frigid farrah” as potentially scripted was to violate the imagined consent of the technology as if it were an autonomous person—a fiction of a consenting subject—as a proxy for the consent of a woman without repercussions for doing so. that is, consent and the presumed subjectivity underlying it are imagined but, ultimately, fictitious: a consenting fiction that matters so long as it cannot actually be enforced, denied, or withdrawn. it is a desire for the denial of consent not to be an obstacle to sexual gratification but rather a source of sexual gratification through the violence of transgressing consent's denial. re-scripting consent as interactional in treating explicit consent as the line between what counts as consensual sex and what counts as rape, consent-recording applications like good2go and legalfling as potential technologies for documenting consent frame consent as an obstacle to sex through what jetta rae criticizes as the “consent as conquest” (2015) approach. rather than scripting consent as an obstacle to conquer—or pleasurably transgress in the case of the roxxxy's “frigid farrah” setting—the design of sex technologies aiming to facilitate communication among partners should move beyond mediating sexual contracts and recording consent. existing critical work in the field of human-computer interaction (hci) has explored alternative approaches to designing—or scripting—consent, into technological devices (luger and rodden 2014; lee and toliver 2017; nguyen and ruberg 2020). ewa luger and tom rodden (2014), for example, argue for shifting from a logic of “securing consent” before interaction to one of “sustaining user agency” throughout interaction, suggesting that technologies should not simply record consent from users in advance but rather support user self-determination for the duration of use. similarly, una lee and dann toliver (2017) propose their design approach called “consentful technology”—a critical framework centering user agency and consent in digital interaction. in urging a move beyond a “consent as conquest” approach, rae (2015) argues for attending to the contexts that shape the conditions of consent itself. according to rae, “when we talk about consent, we're not just talking about you agreeing to something. we're talking about the framework within which you can agree to something and the tools you have access to in order to agree.” this argument to critically interrogate what we make of consent as we might or might not give it suggests that we “screw consent” (fischel 2019) by attending to the uneven political grounds of present and historic conditions that shape how we understand consent itself, what consent signifies, and how consent is put into practice and power (hartman 1997, 53-55; atanasoski and vora 2019, 192-94). to explore such a possible design approach to consent, one that recognizes consent not as a stable and contractual precondition for sexual encounters but as a constitutive element throughout the situated and unfolding sexual encounter, i draw on paul dourish's arguments regarding context-aware computing as a model. dourish's critique of early work in context-aware or context-sensitive computing describes how attempts for computing systems to respond to social context treated context as a form of stable information measurable out in the world that technology could sense (2004, 4-5). contrasting this assumed representational ontology of context, however, dourish argues for an interactional understanding of context as the dynamic and situated effect of activity, as context emerges out of rather than existing as a precondition for activity. subsequently, he suggests that computing should not aim to sense and represent context but instead could contribute to its production. for dourish, the representational approach to context involves asking “what is context and how can it be encoded?” (5). instead, we should understand context as interactional: “how and why, in the course of their interactions, do people achieve and maintain a mutual understanding of the context of their actions?” (6). extending dourish's discussion in order to treat consent as context, we might re-script consent in technological design through an interactional instead of a representational approach. rather than a representational framework that asks “what is consent and how can it be encoded?,” we should ask “how and why, in the course of their interactions, do people achieve and maintain a mutual understanding of consent for their actions?” this shift suggests that we approach consent as a collaboration maintained by those involved and not a prerequisite check box, an obstacle to overcome, or a burdensome chore to complete in order to protect oneself from potential accusations of sexual assault. by re-scripting consent as interactional, we might design technology to contribute to the ongoing collaborative work and maintenance of consent instead of attempting to use digital technologies to solve (and thus treat) consent as a problem. rather than seeking to record consent, sex technology designers interested in mediating communication could ask users to think deliberately about the framework of consent itself as integral to their interactions. designers might encourage users to recognize that one does not give consent and then later retract it, but, rather, one maintains consent, including a shared understanding of what consent is, through the duration of the activity. thus, designers might create emerging technologies to support users not in securing consent but in better attending to their wants and needs, and the wants and needs of others, so that they can share an understanding of consent to determine most appropriately their interest and disinterest in consenting to their shared experience. in so doing, such technologies rather than scripting consent as a frustrating or obstructive precondition for sexual gratification that technology can record could instead foster the work of negotiating consent as a valued interactional collaboration among sex partners, one that strives to attend to the contexts, conditions, and particularities of participating subjects. conclusion the imaginaries promoted through the design and marketing of commercial sex technologies—whether they exist or are widely adopted—communicate, legitimate, and attempt to sell specific conceptions of sexual users, practices, and pleasures. analyzing how designers script sexual consent in and through contemporary technological design imaginaries reveals much about how dominant cultural understandings of and attitudes toward consent—as contractual bodily access, as awkward conversational topic, as protection from future accusations, as burdensome obstacle to pleasure, and so forth—reproduce particular fictions about consent under liberal humanism and patriarchy in the us and much of the west. the imaginary of a sex technology like the roxxxy's “frigid farrah” personality, in animating a proxy for a woman's subjecthood through a sex robot programmed to deny consent, encouraged users to violate a woman's non-consent and enact fantasies of sexual assault without the expected consequences of doing so. consequently, the roxxxy's “frigid farrah” setting scripted users to derive pleasure through the disregard of what is framed otherwise as an obstacle to individual gratification: the autonomy and consent of women as subjects. in offering a fictional consenting subject, a sex robot scripted to perform a fiction of consent that functionally does not matter, the roxxxy's “frigid farrah” personality proxied for a woman whose consent is inconsequential and for a world populated by such women. furthermore, sex technologies like consent-recording applications offer imaginaries that predominantly attempt to script the negotiation of consent as behavioral action through scripted code seeking to document consent into a binary logic as defense against potential allegations of sexual assault and rape. the development and marketing of consent-recording applications such as lovesync, good2go, and legalfling offer not only particular consenting fictions of what consent is, through how they seek to record it as merely a precondition for sexual activity. in asking users to record their consent as dictated through the application as a solution to consent seen as an obstacle, consent-recording applications also reveal another consenting fiction—that users consented to this specific fiction of consent in the first place. consent-recording applications, as emerging technologies that do not ask us to rethink dominant cultural understandings of sexual consent, aim instead to provide simplified proxies for nuanced conversations about sexual desire that are often treated as awkward, shameful, and tedious. rather than approaching consent as a prerequisite obstacle to sexual gratification that needs solving through technological design, we might proliferate design imaginaries for sex technologies that encourage communication among partners who recognize consent as constitutive of sex itself. instead of trying to simplify how to talk about consent, turning it into a checkbox to mark off as quickly as possible, we might imagine scripting sexual consent in ways that encourage shared processes of opening up and complexifying what we mean by consent, how consent can operate in practice, and what we make of consent in our collaborative relations with others. notes 1 for each major sex technology example, i will footnote information about its current state of development and release as of november 2022.   2 for sex technologies, see maines 2001; bardzell and bardzell 2011; smith 2013; ferguson 2014; comella 2017; lieberman 2017; devlin 2018; ruberg 2022.   3 as of november 2022, lovesync remains available for purchase online, though the official website has not been modified since july 2020.   4 for the limits of sexual consent, see dworkin 1987; pateman 1988; mackinnon 1989; gill 2015; greenblatt and valens 2018b; fischel 2019; jaleel 2021.   5 in 2014 good2go was no longer available in the apple app store and the google play store, and the company website shut down in 2016.   6 legalfling was available in the apple app store and the google play store in 2018 before removal in march 2019.   7 the truecompanion website is no longer functional as of november 2019.   references ahmed, sara. 2019. what's the use?: on the uses of use. 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taylor, paige ann. n.d. “a sex robot that allows rape is dangerous to women.” collective shout. accessed november 20, 2022. https://www.collectiveshout.org/a_sex_robot_that_allows_rape_is_dangerous_to_women. thakor, mitali. 2018. “a feeling for robotic skin: ethnographic explorations with sex dolls, robots, and their makers.” platypus: the castac blog, november 1, 2018. https://blog.castac.org/2018/11/robotic-skin/. toncic, jason. 2021. “i dream of siri: magic and female voice assistants.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (2): 1-24. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34906. “truecompanion frequently asked questions (faq).” 2017. truecompanion via internet archive wayback machine. march 19, 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20180227114238/http:/www.truecompanion.com/shop/faq. valens, ana. 2019. “lovesync represents the worst of sextech.” daily dot, 12 february 2019. https://www.dailydot.com/irl/lovesync-sex-adult-tech-consent/.     author bio josef nguyen is an associate professor of critical media studies at the university of texas at dallas. he is the author of the digital is kid stuff: making creative laborers for a precarious economy (university of minnesota press, 2021) and is currently working on a new book examining digital technological design and the cultural politics of consent. roy, deboleena, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee. 2025. “catalyst origin stories: deboleena roy in conversation with kiran pienaar and robyn lee.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–14. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee. 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license catalyst origin stories: deboleena roy in conversation with kiran pienaar and robyn lee deboleena roy emory university droy2@emory.edu kiran pienaar deakin university kiran.pienaar@deakin.edu.au robyn lee university of alberta robyn5@ualberta.ca abstract to mark the ten-year anniversary of the journal, former and current catalyst editors reflect on the journal's origins, its contributions to feminist technoscience, and their aspirations for catalyst in the next ten years and beyond. presented in conversation format, the piece offers insights into the rich histories and intellectual legacies that have shaped catalyst, and the feminist ethos that underpins the journal's scholarship and editorial practices. keywords feminist technoscience, catalyst, feminist ethos, editorial practices opening reflections kiran pienaar (kp): maybe we could start with what you think the key contributions of catalyst are to feminist technoscience. http://droy2@emory.edu/ http://kiran.pienaar@deakin.edu.au/ /users/joannemuzak/desktop/clients%202025/catalyst%20fall%202025/ce%20&%20uploaded/robyn5@ualberta.ca tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 2 deboleena roy (dr): community building, not just networking, creating a space for people to develop; the support and friendships. it’s a space for mentoring. of course, there’s an academic side to it. but i think when it comes to feminist organizing, whether it’s inside academia or outside of it, the great thing is that it’s not just about the end result. it’s about asking, “what’s happening around us and what are we doing to get us to our goal.” i think that this has been the biggest gift in the journey of this journal. this journal is an example of how a collective can work and how other opportunities can come along the way. kp: oh, that’s such a beautiful response, and that really resonates with me. feel free to chime in as well, robyn, if you want to add anything. robyn lee (rl): oh, yeah, that was terrific. thank you. it’s so wonderful to hear you reflect on what makes catalyst so important because it’s consistent with how we’re experiencing it too. dr: good. you know, we really thought hard about how to develop this journal and we knew it was going to be a challenge right from the beginning. the people who did put those early years of blood, sweat, and tears knew that we weren’t going to compromise our values for the sake of becoming an academic journal, which it is. we didn’t want to fall into a certain kind of “cookie-cutter” way of doing things. there were a lot of early discussions about working with a university press, and every model that we explored basically took away exactly what i just described: it felt like we would have to compromise the relationship building and that opportunity to invite more people into the process, and our goal of making it a distributed project. every model that we looked at didn’t seem to fit our vision, and so it made things more difficult because we had to scrounge to find funding, and that continues to be part of the work. but i’m so glad that we stuck to those ideals. kp: i think that’s one of the things that really makes catalyst unique and distinctive. and we’re still building on that legacy. but as you say, it’s a challenge, because we also looked at other models or possibilities for getting the journal indexed. but i think one of the challenges is balancing those imperatives with the desire to be completely independent and not be answering to publishers or to other imperatives that detract from the feminist solidarity, and community building and inclusivity that is so unique and special to catalyst. dr: i could be wrong, but i thought that issue had been resolved when murphy and banu served as the lead editors. i think it was when murphy took it on at university of toronto, they were able to get an isbn standing for the journal and also be indexed through university of toronto libraries. kp: oh, that’s interesting. we must look into that. i don’t know that it is [resolved] because we had a librarian come and talk to us about indexing. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 3 rl: yes, we have been thinking about it because one major motivation for indexing is because we have so many junior scholars publishing in catalyst that it could be advantageous for their careers, and also just to expand the readership potentially as well. so we’ve been looking at some options which wouldn’t require us to change anything substantial about how catalyst is run. but hopefully, just be able to broaden the audience, making sure people who are publishing [in catalyst] are getting read. dr: good, because i think we became institutionally legitimate through the university of toronto libraries, but that was so long ago. i don’t remember details, but there are notes! if you go back to the google drive; do you all still use the google drive? kp: yes, we do. i’m actually looking at it right now. origin stories: starting catalyst dr: that’s hilarious. so this is a funny story…i’ll just give a little bit of my background and what made me want to do something like this. my phd is in neuroscience and molecular biology. and then i made a radical shift into women’s studies for my first tenure-track job because they wanted to hire a feminist scientist. i had never taken a women’s studies class. i had no idea about the scholarly field of women’s studies, but i did consider myself a feminist. i was told by this women’s studies department that i needed to publish in women’s studies journals to get tenure, not just in the science journals. and so, you know, i thought, “okay, well, where am i going to publish this work as a scientist who’s doing feminist work?” and the only journal that i could find really that made sense was hypatia. i had to learn feminist philosophy and feminist philosophy of science to then place my work. i would not have taken that as my career path and professional path if it wasn’t for that journal, and for the fact that i had to get publications in order to get tenure. i thought even back then, “why isn’t there a feminist science studies journal?” and i promised myself that as soon as i did get tenure, i would start working on something like that. right around that time i got the position at emory i went up for tenure—and elizabeth wilson, whom you also must know, liz had also just been hired. and so the two of us thought, “let’s use some of our emory resources to start hatching a plan to collaborate. and around that time, liz was asked to consider editing configurations, which is the slsa [society for literature, science, and the arts] journal, i think along with lisa cartwright and david serlin at uc san diego. they were thinking that configurations might be the place where we could do this work. but just to have that kind of feminist framing they couldn’t take over configurations and make it feminist configurations. this is when catalyst started hatching. the four of us, me, liz, lisa, and david, i forget if we met in person first, the four of us may have met up in san diego first, or google meet, or on a skype call—yes, i said “skype.” but that’s when i started the folder in tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 4 google drive. [we brainstormed], “what ideas do we have here? what are we gonna do?” we hosted a dinner with feminist sts colleagues at an slsa conference and then we decided to host a meeting at emory with a few people; murphy came, banu [subramaniam] came. i think anne pollock was invited too. mara mills, rachel lee—i know i’m forgetting some folks. and so we just started brainstorming. and that’s where [the google drive started]. so if you’re still all using the catalyst google drive, that’s amazing! kp: we absolutely are. but we now have folders for each editorial team so it’s actually an archive of your work. it also means it’s more manageable because we’ve got the relevant documents for each editorial term, but we can access the legacy documents too. so it’s still going, deboleena. it’s a great collaborative tool. dr: you know, i used to get notices about people trying to access that folder. i hope i passed over ownership of that drive, so other people are getting access! kp: yes, we did, thanks, that’s good. dr: it just occurred to me! kp: thank you for sharing that story with us. one of the things that you would know about catalyst is that it really tries to support graduate scholars, junior scholars by including work from undergraduates, artists, activists, and it prides itself on developmental editing […] what advice would you have for those interested in submitting to the journal for the first time? dr: oh, what a great question! just do it! just do it to try and get that feedback. it is so rare to get feedback from experts in the field outside of your professors or committee if you are a student and you’re trying to test out some ideas. this is what the journal is for. it’s for a place to get some different views and some support and feedback that you might not be getting at your own institutional homes for whatever reason. i’m so glad that this is one of your leading questions, because that was also very core to what we wanted to develop, not just for the junior assistant professors trying to get tenure, but i think there was a strong belief and even evidence at that point that those of us who were now in feminist science studies, that we were training undergraduate and graduate students who identified as feminists and were in the classroom ready to learn about feminist science. it was not as if people were coming to feminist science studies as a field late in their careers. for the generation before us, in many cases, institutions limited the ability to even talk about women in science, let alone incorporate a feminist analysis in their work and have it count as scholarship. when we started the journal, we realized that we were, in fact, training generations of new students at the undergraduate level and upwards who already identified as feminist scientists and feminist science studies scholars. students who might have their own perspectives tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 5 that we want to hear about, right? that was what was behind the “lab meeting” submission type. do you still do the lab meeting as a submission type in catalyst? kp: we do. dr: okay, all right, that’s wonderful. it was really around that idea that if there are junior scholars, or if you run a lab meeting, or you are a professor who has a whole group of students that you want to think about something together, that could be a lab meeting. and everybody would get authorship in that process. i’m so glad that that’s still around. kp: it is, we’ve still got the same submission type, a lab report. in fact, we’re still using the same categories of submission that the founding editorial teams came up with. dr: oh, that’s so good! but your question was, ‘what advice to give?’ is that it? yes, well my advice is, do it! make a connection for yourself, and that networking happens in many different ways, if not in person or through mentoring, but through one’s thoughts, and then you have an entire network of people who are interested in thinking with you, around you, and developing those ideas. kp: i think that’s one of the beauties of having these intellectual interlocutors whom you may not know, but they’re engaging with your work. dr: it’s a huge benefit. and even though catalyst is peer reviewed, we tried to take the pressure off what some disciplinary journals expect. so having more of a chance to reflect or to think, and speak and write in the first person. even in that respect, i think we’re a little different than a lot of academic journals out there, so it’s a broader space that’s more inclusive. kp: yeah, absolutely. thank you. and what do you see as some of the pressing concerns for the journal to address in the future—given that we live living in such a historic moment and in such challenging times? dr: i mean even the title of the journal itself, the subtitle [feminism, theory, technoscience], think of how much of that is under attack. i think that even to call something “feminist” risks placing yourself in a precarious position, but that’s always been the strength of the journal. that’s the strength of a collective, that it’s not just all on one person, who might be intimidated and made to disappear. it’s more of a movement. and that’s what you want to develop, right? we want the work to continue. i think this is the pressing thing. and it’s not just about finding those next editorial team members who are going to take on all the work. it’s about growing that kind of base of people who can see their own careers being supported through the work of the journal. they’re expanding their community, and then they tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 6 will want to give back to that community that supported them, right? so however we can do it, we need to continue that work. kp: yeah, well, we hope we’re doing that through this editorial term. and certainly for me, i don’t know about you, robyn, but the connections that you’re speaking about, deboleena, have been incredible. and the sense of being part of a feminist, collective, part of a sisterhood, a network of like-minded scholars supporting each other and working through things; and when one person’s having difficulties, others pick up the labor. having that sense that we’re part of something bigger, and we’re building a legacy. i’m so grateful for that [sense of collective endeavor], because i think increasingly in our neoliberal institutions, we’re so atomized and everything is so metrics driven. and it’s a breath of fresh air to come to a catalyst meeting, and we’re not talking metrics. we’re talking about ideas and how we can support each other. and the ethos that we have is just… dr: refreshing, right? it’s difficult work. but it’s refreshing and different. oh, that’s really good to hear; you’re making me very happy. rl: well, we’re very happy so and we’re grateful for all of the groundwork that you did in terms of making this collective and this community possible. dr: yeah, there’s a bunch of us, right? and in a way, i think we’re in a good place with the challenges happening in higher education. with all the cutbacks in federal funding here in the us right now, others are trying to figure out what to do and how to collaborate, to pool resources. in the meantime, as a collective we have been building a set of best practices and figuring out the skill sets needed to do this important work together, despite facing financial challenges for some time now. where you are institutionally right now, are you getting some resources from your institution to help support the journal? kp: it varies institutionally but we do still have some funds. in my context, in australia, we don’t get that kind of support or it varies widely across institutions. dr: how about you, robyn? the canadian institutions have been better about offering some support that way. rl: i was able to get a course release, which was great. but no funding, unfortunately. dr: when we started the journal, i was just trying to get student funding… rl: yeah, budget cutbacks, even without the us administration, they are still happening everywhere. dr: yeah. irina is at michigan, right? tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 7 kp: yes. dr: is she able to have some funding resources as managing editor? kp: i think she has some, that’s my understanding. but i think she’s concerned that it might run out. there is so much uncertainty now with the new administration. so we’re trying to make sure we use what’s been allocated before the funding cuts kick in. dr: yeah, that that is the challenge. sorry, robyn, go ahead. rl: oh, yeah, irina has had some funding. she’s trying to spend it, though, because she’s not sure if she’ll continue to have it. dr: wow, okay, there we go. that’s going to continue to be a challenge. but you know the funding challenge has been there from the beginning. if anybody’s developed the muscle memory to figure things out, it’s this group. and in fact, you know, this gives me a reason to reconnect with the journal again. if there are resources that i can help with through emory, i’d be happy to try to do that. kp: thank you, deboleena, we appreciate that. so, if there was a particular topic or theme that you’d like to see featured in a catalyst special section, what would it be? dr: i would love to see a theme about the cover art, an entire issue about the art that’s happened over the years. it’s been amazing from the get-go, and i really give lisa cartwright the props for what she did and for her vision of what she wanted this journal to be. have we had a special issue on the artwork? kp: no, not at all. but for this anniversary issue we’ve put a call out for cover artwork and we’ve received submissions. and what you’re saying echoes what i was thinking for this anniversary issue—namely, that in addition to the cover art, we’d love to feature the artwork of feminist artists, maybe bookending the issue, or throughout the issue, so that we can show the amazing work that is being done, and profile it. my role is production and design. dr: you’ve done such a good job. kp: it’s wonderful to get these amazing pieces of art to work with and to work with the artist to develop a cover. we want to give more prominence to the artist statement. we’d also like to have the covers displayed in a larger format on the website. at the moment because of the limitations of ojs [open journal systems], the covers are almost like a thumbnail, and it seems such a shame that you can’t see the cover in all its glory. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 8 dr: yes, so nassim [parvin], when she was on the team with me, she really put in a lot of effort and made big leaps in terms of what to do with the artwork. and the idea of the artist statement, i think, came from nassim, too. so ojs, how is that working for you all? because in the beginning, we spent a lot of time wondering, “what platform do we go for?” and if i recall correctly, back then, it didn’t seem like the most user-friendly platform, but it was the best out of what we had. but it has survived! i’m really surprised by that! kp: it has survived. i think from my perspective, one of the challenges we face is we’re working across multiple platforms. so we’re working on the google drive, dropbox, and ojs, and it’s tricky to coordinate those different... dr: systems! kp: and it would be more seamless to just do everything on ojs. we’re also figuring it out, or certainly i am as we go, and figuring out some of its limitations. my sense, from talking to the journal feminist africa. while they’re not a sister journal, they are a journal that was interested in our work. and in our discussions with them i realized that there are functionalities that ojs has that we’re not using. so maybe it’s also about discovering the limits of our knowledge, and exploiting all the functionality. but i don’t use it as much as robyn, who handles all the peer review. maybe you have more insights, robyn, into the day-to-day challenges with ojs or the day-to-day benefits. rl: well, there is definitely a learning curve for me. but i feel like it’s fairly intuitive now. there’s just like a few things you had to look in the right spot for to find the right button. but i find it pretty easy to use now. i don’t know anything else. i haven’t worked on a journal before this, so i don’t have a different system to compare it to. dr: okay! well, it’s stuck. that’s good. it served its purpose. that’s wonderful. kp: i’m curious to know, deboleena, you said that you looked at other options, what were the other options? dr: what were we thinking of? oh, gosh, i don’t think i’ll remember the different platforms now. […] i can’t remember who actually brought the idea of ojs to us. it may have been that another journal, that we thought of as a possible sister journal, was using it. i forget what that journal was, and if it’s still around even. i think lisa or murphy might remember, but that’s why we decided on ojs. kp: that’s fine. ojs is working. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 9 dr: because, mind you, a lot of these conversations about starting a journal actually started in 2011, right? i mean, the first issue didn’t come out until 2015, but there were four years of regular meetings to figure out, what are we doing? how are we going to do this? so maybe it wasn’t monthly, but you know it took regular meetings for four years to make this happen. kp: and did you work on the first issue, the very first issue? dr: no, see by that time, lisa and david kindly decided that they would take on the main editorial roles. meanwhile, i had just got tenure and was asked to serve as director of graduate studies for my department. for my service to the journal, i said that i can do some things, but that i could not take on full editorial responsibilities, right? so lisa and david took it on at ucsd and the planning of that first issue. gosh, remind me—what is the first issue about? i remember us putting out an interesting call […] what was it about? the inaugural issue, oh, is this the one where we decided to have people in the field comment about why we needed this kind of a journal? i think i may have coordinated the first lab meeting section. kp: it looks like it might be the introduction. dr: yeah, i think we all were reaching out to our networks and saying, “hey, would you like to make a contribution? it will be peer reviewed, but we’d like to have your voice in there.” i do remember lisa working on making that amazing cover. she put a lot of work into that. i think it was an image that came out of an exhibition that was happening at ucsd at her technoscience lab; it’s a very striking cover. kp: it’s interesting to go back and read the introduction to the inaugural issue, and see to what extent, like, some of the similar concerns are still enduring… dr: yes, that’s a great idea for a reflection piece. so that introduction, i’m looking it up right now in our issue. let’s see. i’m sorry i’m doing this in real time. we welcomed people to join us. the three words in the journal subtitle “feminism, theory, technoscience” matter to the vision and to the political framing that this journal is designed to stimulate. we all worked on this, i remember. and then how we came up with the name catalyst! i remember we dedicated an entire afternoon session. we did some intense brainstorming, and liz and i have the original [flipchart with…] where we were brainstorming names for the journal. i believe i still have that somewhere in my office. kp: could you share that with us, deboleena? if it if you don’t mind, and if you’re open to us including that? it would be such a beautiful historic piece. dr: okay, let me see what liz has. she might have some of that too, in her office. that’s so funny. you know, we had all kinds of names, but i think catalyst. i wanna tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 10 say that i think lisa might have also brought up the name catalyst. and then we had two rounds of voting. and we said, “okay, this one’s gonna stick.” but it was really just that it captured what we wanted to do. we wanted this to be a space that ignited, that brought different worlds together and made a new thing, a space that facilitated reactions—good or bad! kp: it is a perfect name for those reasons. dr: okay, also to get something going, to stir trouble… kp: yeah, to stir trouble and to stay with the trouble. given that, what is your vision or aspiration for catalyst in the next ten years and beyond? you’ve kind of touched on this, but we’d love it if you could elaborate. dr: so i think that expanding who sees themselves as a scholar-activist-thinker that can contribute to this space. i want that to grow. i want that to expand in the next ten years. i think it was part of the mandate of making sure to include undergrads or grads. i don’t know how we’ve been able to fulfill that as much, but making that a stronger part of the journal going forward would be great. there’s a lot of universities that have undergrad journals so maybe there is space for catalyst to actually serve as the co-host for an undergraduate journal—or reserve a space for undergraduate students to contribute. you’re asking about ten years from now? well, when we started work on the journal fifteen years ago, i had a nine-year-old daughter. fifteen years later, i have a twenty-four-year-old daughter who is an artist and a feminist. she is doing stop-motion animation, but also using feminist theory. a journal such as catalyst has relevance for her. in ten more years, hopefully the journal will serve as a place for people who might not be women’s studies–trained, or might not see themselves as part of academia. in fact, who definitely do not see themselves as part of academia—i hope that this journal can also somehow be a place for them to express their ideas and build community. kp: expanding who sees themselves as a feminist scholar, and interpellated by the journal. dr: yeah, and who counts as a contributor to knowledge making. i wonder also if the journal…i mean a lot of the early things that we tried to do—for example, there was a film by jackie [orr] that we had included—and so, including films and other kinds of enhanced forms of media. i mean ojs kind of limits to some extent, but to have other forms of expression and to be able to house that and support it. that would be cool. did we ever have podcasts through catalyst? i don’t think so. but maybe there’s a place for an archive of the spoken word and oral histories that the journal can also house. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 11 kp: i love these ideas. i love all the non-traditional research outputs and the other ways of generating knowledge and valuing it. i think that’s really good. and there’s such a push for podcasts. i know that increasingly for grants, we’re encouraged to produce publicly accessible outputs and podcasts are a great output. dr: so after the first editorial team, this is what happened. i thought i might become editor after lisa and david were editors; we thought the journal would come to emory, but then i think i became chair of the department at emory. again, i had to let folks know that i needed another three-year cycle before taking on the responsibility. but speaking of publicly accessible outputs, what happened when i did move into my most recent administrative position is that i became pi of a mellon grant that supports digital publishing in the humanities through open access. and it’s because of all my experience building catalyst that that happened. and so in this mellon grant, we support monographs in the humanities through open access, to get on an open access platform. so anybody in the world can download [the work] for free and look at it. then there’s a more interactive open access. manifold is a platform for that, for example. so, for example, the book that i published is open access, [which means] somebody in australia teaching a class can use it, and students can highlight different parts of it and send a question to the author, and i can respond in real time. so that’s kind of cool and fun. and then there’s the enhanced monograph where the book can link, or also open up to a piece of art, or to a film or to audio recording or podcast, and so those enhance the experience. we have one monograph that we are trying to support that will take people into a vr-like space while they’re reading the book. and so, i mean, it’s happening in open access now. so i wonder if the journal might go in that direction. kp: wow! i haven’t heard of this enhanced multimedia monograph. […] what is the publisher? what is the of the platform on which it’s hosted, like what you’re describing? dr: the enhanced ones. yeah, so right now, because this is the mellon grant that’s at emory, our emory center for digital scholarship is helping build these enhanced monographs. so it’s because we have that resource at emory, we can do this… kp: and then is it only confined to emory, or would it be a platform that is then created as an open access platform for other scholars to be able to use the same way? do you know what i mean, or is it proprietary? as in emory owns the intellectual property? dr: emory doesn’t own the intellectual property, but let’s say someone writes a book, okay? it’s not behind a firewall—the publisher, let’s say duke or university of washington press—they make it open access. so the permissions are granted by the press, but then the support for the enhanced parts is coming through the author’s institution. so, you know, somebody has to work at that. and if there’s a problem, someone has to maintain the site. most presses are not doing that. the tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 12 person’s institution is doing it and so it is restricted to academics right now who have that institutional support, that’s true. kp: okay. have you heard of this, robyn? it’s so cool. rl: no, this is fascinating. kp: this is new terrain. it’s very exciting. well, that’s something we could look at for future. dr: [in the next] ten years. you said ten years, right? kp: ten years, yeah. is there anything else that you’d like to add that we haven’t covered? or perhaps, robyn, a question that you’d like to pose? dr: i would just like to say a few more things about […] how this journal developed. […] i think it’s many of us who in those early days had been exposed to this way of being a feminist and, at the same time, being in academia. [it was] like, “how do we hold these elements of ourselves together?” and so, if i am to close—although she didn’t have anything directly to do with catalyst—i will say that i want to talk about sandra harding and talk about the work that she did. i could get emotional about this, so apologies. i’ll never forget. as a junior scholar, she welcomed me and so many others into a feminist space. i am getting really emotional, sorry. kp: that’s all right. take your time. dr: so in her own way, she always welcomed junior scholars. she wanted to learn from them, to hear about their work. what are they about to take on and change? i met sandra, i would say it was pretty early on in my career as a feminist science studies scholar. i met her at the first femmss (feminist epistemologies, methodologies, metaphysics and science studies) conference in seattle in 2004. i had just finished my phd and was in my first tenure track job. she was so generous with her support from the get-go. years later, she brought me together with laura foster; you know, laura was sandra’s student. and then kim tallbear, and banu [subramaniam]. sandra brought us all to her home. we were in la for some meeting, and she said, “you all need to come to my house.” and so sandra made an entire pot, a dutch oven full of chicken soup, and she put it in the middle of her kitchen table, and she had us sit around the table. she dished out soup for all of us and then sat off to the side and said, “i want to you to talk. i want you all to imagine what a feminist, post-colonial science studies looks like.” i’ll never forget that. she just provided a space for us to come together, to feed our creativity, and to literally feed us [tears up]. i’m so sorry. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 13 kp: emotions are welcome here, deboleena, and y0u’ve made me tear up, too. that’s a beautiful story—the feminist spirit and ethos that catalyst carries. dr: that gesture she made has meant so much to me. she modeled that for us, you know, she did. she modeled that for us, and i think that is embedded within the feminist work, and particularly in this journal. kp: what a beautiful story. it’s also such a contrast to the kinds of neoliberal academic selves that nowadays we’re [encouraged to be]. it’s such a welcome contrast and [an example of] service. dr: so with her passing, it’s been about a month now, i’ve really been reflecting on it. kp: i think it’s a beautiful tribute to her and to her legacy, and i’m so glad we can include it. thank you for sharing that story. rl: yeah, thank you so much for sharing it. [the story] and the soup go over very well together. dr: yeah, yeah. well, as you’re transcribing this, so you could say, “as she was bawling, deboleena said…” kp: to me it makes me think, you know they say chicken soup for the soul. for me catalyst is like soup for the soul. that is, that has been my experience. when i’ve had a hard day, [it’s comforting] to know that there are like-minded people who are going to hold you up and support you. it sometimes feels so fiercely competitive, academia. it’s a balm for the soul, [being part of the catalyst collective]. it’s been transformative for me, especially when you’re feeling like it’s all too much, to have a space where it isn’t about competition. it’s about collaboration and supporting each other, feeling seen. dr: yeah, and we’re not used to it. we’re not being trained in that way. so actually, this creates that space to train and to let us let go of how we think this competitive, individualistic academic world [is] or has to be. you know, we have been trained to do things in a certain way, so it’s a new way of thinking. she literally made us chicken soup to feed our souls. kp: it’s a beautiful gesture. dr: listen, i have questions. so i am coming out to seattle because i heard that at 4s, there’s going to be a celebration around catalyst. is that happening? kp: yes, yes, that is happening. unfortunately, i am not gonna be able to make it. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) deboleena roy, kiran pienaar, and robyn lee 2025 14 dr: oh no! kp: i have another conference around the same time, but plans are afoot for a celebration and for a catalyst panel. dr: nice. i’m gonna show up to party, that’s for sure! i mean, maybe you should ask lisa, ask david, ask liz to join? kp: we’re meeting some of them next week. we’re meeting the [other former editors]. dr: oh, wonderful! that’s so great. have you asked them if they thought the journal would last a decade? i’d be really curious about what they would have to say. i think we’re all a little surprised it’s made it this far! kp: that’s a great question, i’m gonna add it, thank you deboleena. author bios deboleena roy is vice dean of faculty and divisional dean of the sciences for emory college of arts and sciences. she is professor of neuroscience and behavioral biology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. roy received her phd in reproductive neuroendocrinology and molecular biology and is the author of molecular feminisms: biology, becomings, and life in the lab. she has taken on a number of academic leadership roles and is dedicated to building trust and transparency in higher education. robyn lee is associate professor of social theory in the sociology department at university of alberta. she is also co-editor (peer review) of catalyst: feminism theory, technoscience. robyn’s current research investigates emerging practices of human milk exchange, focusing on how care and compassion are harnessed in the commercialization of human milk, and what kinds of relationships are created between donors and recipients. kiran pienaar is a senior lecturer in sociology at deakin university, melbourne, australia. she is also co-editor (production and design) of catalyst: feminism theory, technoscience. kiran is the author of politics in the making of hiv/aids in south africa and co-editor of narcofeminisms: revisioning drug use. her research has contributed new understandings of the performativity of drugs in shaping queer subjectivities; ontologies of addiction; and the impact of public policy on minoritised communities. https://uw.manifoldapp.org/projects/molecular-feminisms https://uw.manifoldapp.org/projects/molecular-feminisms https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-137-50507-1 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-137-50507-1 https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/sora/71/4 catalyst origin stories: deboleena roy in conversation with kiran pienaar and robyn lee abstract keywords opening reflections origin stories: starting catalyst author bios     book review book review | reproduction reconceived: family making and the limits of choice after roe v. wade, by sara matthiesen (university of california press, 2021)     mia florin-sefton columbia university mcf2180@columbia.edu     on the eve of december 16, 1975, nearly five hundred incarcerated women at california institution for women marched together to the superintendent’s office and set fire to a collection of christmas trees and decorations. the women’s rage and desperation stemmed from the fact that the administration had rescinded all visitor and telephone privileges, and then had totally neglected to respond to any of the women’s concerns. or, as one of the women put it, they had to do something because "those fuckers never do anything" (59, emphasis added).   a couple of years later, several hundred miles away, an eighteen-year-old black woman named carloyn went to the hospital. she waited there for three hours before she was reprimanded for fiddling with a blood pressure cuff. upset, confused, and four months pregnant, carolyn left. it was only when her baby died during labor several months later that she was diagnosed with anemia and high blood pressure. in the wake of her incalculable loss, members of the san francisco bay area–based coalition to fight infant mortality charged the alameda county board of supervisors with "genocide by neglect" (94).   both these cases of state-sanctioned abandonment are taken from reproduction reconceived: family making and the limits of choice after roe v. wade by sara matthiesen, a meticulously researched account of the work involved in "family making" at a time when the fantasy of meaningful choice has become a fiction for all but "an ever shrinking few" (21). reproduction reconceived thus breaks decisively with the disciplinary conventions of "labor history" (11) just as confidently as it builds upon the critical traditions of marxist feminisms, black feminisms, and reproductive justice movements. the result is a feminist history of family making in north america since the 1970s, told from the perspective of those—like carolyn, the coalition to fight infant mortality, and the women at california institution for women—who labor on the margins but whose life-giving work is rarely recognized as such. as a work of feminist theory, the book is driven by the methodological question of how to "make state inaction visible" (15). and as a work of feminist history, it is driven by the critical commitment to make visible the myriad labors that this neglect has engendered. this, then, is the "reproduction" that matthiesen asks her reader to reconceive: the labors that state neglect produces, just as it simultaneously refuses to recognize them.   early in the introduction matthiesen reminisces that, whenever she told people about her project, they "without fail…assumed reproductive politics meant the right to abortion," noting that "nothing looms larger than the supreme court’s decision" (5). in the wake of dobbs v. jackson—which passed almost exactly nine months after the book’s publication—these words inevitably hit a different note. roe now looms larger in public discourse than ever before and the public outcry that has followed its overturning exemplifies precisely that which matthiesen is so deeply invested in challenging: the tendency to think of reproductive freedoms within the framework of individual rights and individual choice without addressing the material conditions that make different choices possible. black feminist scholarship on reproductive justice, "racialized reproduction" (ross and solinger 2017, 5), and "stratified reproduction" (ginsburg and rapp 1995, 3) has long exposed the poverty of rights discourse through documenting how lack of access and resources means that some women are forced to "relinquish the right to reproduction itself" (davis 1981, 128). matthiesen is indebted to this legacy, but her contribution rests on showing how the liberal fantasy of personal autonomy and individual responsibility is decimated just as much by explicit attacks on marginalized populations as it is by inaction, indifference, and—to use her key term—neglect.   since the passing of dobbs v. jackson, pro-abortion activists have also found themselves repeatedly stating that abortion bans don’t stop abortion. instead, they make abortion more dangerous, placing an ever greater burden on those who have to mitigate that risk. this is striking evidence of another of matthiesen’s most urgent interventions: state neglect doesn’t just punish those who are its victims, but it necessitates that they have to do more work to survive. this "labor of survival" (20) extends—far beyond the private household and the workplace—to the prison yard, prison cells, hospitals and physicians’ offices, children’s visiting centers, experimental drug trials, aids service organizations, hearings on women and aids, crisis pregnancy centers, welfare offices, among countless other places. as a result, these are the sites that matthiesen travels to in order to trace and document the work that women have done, across four decades, to challenge, contest and mitigate the effects of different forms of state neglect.   to these ends, each chapter assembles an impressive archive in service of naming a specific type of neglect: legal, carceral, medical, and cumulative. chapter 1 begins with examining the ways in which lesbian parents, after they "seized the means of reproduction" (44) via artificial insemination in the 1970s, found that they were especially vulnerable given the law’s inability to formally recognize them. chapter 2 then shift gears and explores how the rise of mass incarceration has systematically stratified access to family through, first, punishing poor women of color disproportionately, and then forcing them to navigate the "neglect that is integral to conditions of confinement in the united states" (90). chapters 3 and 4 then turn to two health crises, first ushered in by an impoverished healthcare system, and then made dramatically worse by the failure of state officials to act: black infant mortality and the hiv/aids epidemic. finally, in what is arguably her most controversial chapter, matthiesen close reads the testimonies of volunteers and clients at pregnancy crisis centers to show how these pro-life centers often provide "lifelines of last resort" (21) for women that the state has otherwise abandoned.   taken together, each of these chapters offers, firstly, an incredibly capacious definition of reproductive labor and, secondly, something almost resembling a feminist theory of the state. thus, while matthiesen is more explicitly in dialogue with reproductive justice activists and scholars, i believe her work should also be brought into conversation with recent work in trans and queer studies that likewise refuses too singular a notion of "the state" and instead documents how it "comes into being through the accretion of practices, conventions and creations" (currah 2022, 26). indeed, if paisley currah focuses explicitly on what the state does, matthiesen’s work offers a vital compliment through theorizing those moments when "the state" reveals its presence through its absence. for, in her words, "what the state has not done is as important as what it has done" (14). her work thus builds consciously on the work of ruth wilson gilmore and other urban studies researchers, whose concept of "organized abandonment" (2007, 178)—borrowed, in turn, from david harvey—describes how the neoliberal state works by exploiting those left vulnerable to its enormous disorder.   on march 1, 1970, the front page of the new york times reported that daniel patrick moynihan, who was then a counsellor to president nixon, was recommending a policy of "benign neglect." this term has since been taken up to name precisely that which matthiesen systematically describes: the rise of neoliberalism was characterized by the total decimation of the twentieth-century liberal welfare state, which, in turn, inaugurated a "crisis of care" (fraser 2016). additionally, it proves one of her most central maxims: "neglect was not a foregone conclusion but instead became the prevailing norm through the repetition of decisions" (18). ultimately, it is through offering an incredibly detailed history of these many "decisions" that matthiesen—even as she adamantly states that she is not convinced that the term "neoliberalism" still has "explicative value" (13)—inadvertently charts different "plot points" (10) for its ascension. that said, even as these various plot points successfully challenge most historical accounts of the neoliberal economic agenda, they nevertheless stay strictly within a clearly demarcated national frame. for this reason, it is worth considering how this history of family making would be further complicated and enhanced by an adequate reckoning with the transnational labor flows that have also come to define this period. what, for instance, of the work performed by domestic migrant workers?   reproduction reconceived instead opens with citing another article from the times about "college educated mothers’ stalled re-entry into the united states labor force" (1). everything considered, this is an odd place for mathiessen to begin, not least because it risks presenting her monograph as yet another account of the pitfalls of "white" liberal feminism to the same disenchanted liberal audience that religiously reads the times. readers of reproduction reconceived who are even remotely as well-versed in accounts of reproductive justice and social reproduction theory as her will already understand, all too well, that liberal feminism only further legitimated the transition to neoliberalism and that this is precisely the problem with the emphasis it places on individual "choice," individual rights, and legal recognition. hence, to describe matthiessen’s work in these terms is to actually do it a grave disservice. for while it is true that the book is responding directly to the bankruptcy of a politics concerned only with what choices are legally possible, this is, thankfully, only its starting point. in actual fact, and even as matthiessen is steadfastly unconcerned with debating academic terminology, her work offers a powerful model for how to redefine and rethink "reproduction," "labor," and "the state" in a time that is defined, overwhelmingly, by forms of state neglect. these are forms of neglect that, as she painstakingly shows, are anything but benign.   references currah, paisley. 2022. sex is as sex does: governing transgender identity. new york, ny: new york university press. davis, angela y. 1981. women, race and class. new york, ny, vintage books. fraser, nancy. 2016. "capitalism's crisis of care." new left review 63 (4): 30-37. gilmore, ruth wilson. 2007. golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california. berkeley, ca: university of california press. ginsburg, faye and rapp, rayna. 1995. conceiving the new world order: the global politics of reproduction. berkeley, ca: university of california press. ross, loretta, and solinger, rickie. 2017. reproductive justice: an introduction. berkeley, ca: university of california press.   author bio mia florin-sefton is a phd candidate and university writing instructor at columbia university. she also teaches courses in feminist theory and queer literature at taconic correctional facility.     special section properties of war: the militarization of housing policy and urban planning in contemporary azerbaijan     zsuzsanna dominika ihar university of cambridge zdi20@cam.ac.uk     abstract war has defined azerbaijan for more than three decades. the unresolved conflict over the territory of nagorno-karabakh has not only structured the sociopolitical climate of the nation but also everyday relations and the very manner in which both the private home and the homeland is imagined. increasingly, the line has blurred between housing policy and military strategy, with desires for greater securitization and armament seeping into proprietary arrangements, construction plans, and mainstream narratives surrounding the domestic. i examine three sites where inhabitation has seemingly become inextricable from the military apparatus — a state-sponsored apartment block for the families of martyrs (şəhid ailəsi) and those disabled by war (müharibə əlillərinə), a newly built housing complex for servicemen (yüksək rütbəli hərbçilər), and, finally, a makeshift settlement for internally displaced people (məcburi köçkünlər). in these spaces, both temporal and material qualities of war seep into the quotidian, informing the ways in which individuals negotiate the intimate aftermaths of violence, injury, and severed relation. whilst the article begins by examining state-sponsored settlement forged along lines of allegiance, masculinized duty, and capacity, it concludes by attending to moments that upend oppressive forms of homemaking.   keywords militarism, housing policy, nationalism, urban planning, azerbaijan, nagorno-karabakh     introduction an atmosphere of fervent militarism saturates spaces of everyday life within baku, azerbaijan. despite being nearly four hundred kilometers away from the contested territories of nagorno-karabakh, military presence and paraphernalia proliferate across public and private space within the capital city—from military supply trucks stationed in downtown parking lots, army recruitment ads towering above commuters in metro stations, to creaseless azerbaijani flags decorating courtyards and gardens. framed by the ongoing conflict between azerbaijan and armenia (1987 to present day), residential developments (yaşayış məntəqəsi), gardens/backyards (yaşıl sahələr), and makeshift settlements (müvəqqəti məskunlaşma) have turned into sites where the local population actively engages with ideas of nation-making, post-conflict futures, and the potential restoration of territorial integrity (askerov 2020). feelings of both homeliness and unhomeliness pervade these spaces, with potent affective landscapes influencing political identity, forms of inhabitation, and everyday habits. whilst traditional conflict zones and military fronts remain, this article will argue that the interior spaces of urban azerbaijan have taken on central importance for both projects of nation-building and the securitization of existing territories. in other words, the city is where militarism assumes a quotidian form, bleeding into language, affect, spatial organization, and neighborly relations. i suggest that by influencing housing and urban policy, the azeri government's process of ever-intensifying militarization has taken on a seemingly civic, if not welfare-oriented, quality—shaping sociocultural understandings of the private and domestic, intervening in proprietary arrangements, and altering the demographic makeup of neighborhoods. it indicates the reliance of militarism on a politics of spatial ordering, where ideas of inhabitation and domesticity are mobilized as technologies of management and governance amidst, and in the aftermath of, conflict. specifically, in baku, the private domestic space has become an essential part of the state's toolkit, with housing projects firmly entangled with both wartime and postwar plans. homes are used to conceal some, reward others, and keep the rest in productive limbo. the article will turn towards three sites of domesticity in downtown and peripheral baku to demonstrate the points above: a state-sponsored apartment block for the families of martyrs (şəhid ailəsi) and those disabled by war (müharibə əlillərinə), a newly built housing complex for servicemen (yüksək rütbəli hərbçilər), and, finally, a makeshift settlement for internally displaced people (idps/məcburi köçkünlər).1 informed by notions of spatial relativism, i will argue that the first site relies on the assimilation of casualty populations. the state's housing program for war invalids and their equals in many ways conceals and sanitizes the violence, injury, and death wrought by the country's military activity (mammadli 2022). within the mainstream imaginary, the state is rendered into an apparatus of care and welfare, rather than aggression. the second site invokes processes of demolition and subsequent gentrification to turn former industrial areas into forever homes for the army. as a reward for gaining back territory on the frontiers of the country, soldiers and army staff are granted a permanent "space" right in the heart of the capital. home ownership offers a celebratory endpoint to service and marks the attainment of properly earned inhabitation. the third site describes the link between temporary settlements and the creation of a strategically surplus population (gureyeva-aliyeva and huseynov 2011), with idps at the mercy of a clear gap in azerbaijan's wartime housing.2 whilst specific to azerbaijan—a country underrepresented within humanities scholarship—this article borrows from the work of several feminist thinkers, across different geographical regions. since the early 2000s, the consolidation of imperial democracies and securitized regimes has prompted the emergence of notable cross-border feminist solidarities. a sense of connectedness between national struggles has laid the foundation for abundant scholarly engagement with militarization—particularly in critical military studies and feminist geographies (staeheli, kofman, and peake 2004; woodward 2004; dowler 2012; massaro and williams 2013; fluri 2014; tyner and henkin 2015). both fields have drawn attention to the ways in which sociospatial power relations shape individual and collective identity, highlighting the influence of the military on the lives of both normative and marginal populations. indeed, as borders and boundary lines crisscross the spheres of the everyday, militarized settings have provided scholars with a way to examine power, violence, and securitization in areas frequently ignored or devalued. unlike conventional studies of militarization, feminist geopolitics and military geographies have succeeded in turning attention away from sites of power occupied by men (e.g., the security council or the oval office), bringing innocuous spaces, primarily associated with women, to the fore (see giles and hyndman 2004; hyndman 2004; staeheli, kofman, and peake 2004; woodward 2004; koopman 2011). through analyzing the micropolitics and microgeographies of war, scholars have also highlighted the many gendered implications of militarization—from alexandra hyde's (2017) examination of the lives of british military wives residing in german garrison towns, to sarai aharoni, amalia sa'ar, and alisa c. lewin's (2021) work on the impact of separatist, state-centered discourses on the communitarian ethics of jewish-israeli women living in the gaza envelope. in both, militarization informs domestic policies and domestic spaces, altering identities, modes of participation, and the everyday tasks affiliated with social reproduction. the article follows suit in using gender as a lens through which particularity and localism are prioritized, though it also seeks to highlight the effects of militarization on other marginal populations—including veterans, idps, and the disabled. i build upon cross-sections of community introduced by "cultures of militarism," a 2019 special issue of current anthropology. the issue interrogates "established and emergent forms" of militarism, probing genealogies and highlighting its "facility at colonizing daily life" (gusterson and besteman 2019, s4). while previous studies grappled with militarism by examining statistics on the percentage of state finances devoted to military expenditure, the frequency of military coups, and the role of military officers in politics interests (cohn 1987), contemporary analysis recognizes that militarism is contingent and deeply entangled with longer trajectories of social injustice and violence. in baku alone, one cannot approach militarism, nor militarization, without first attending to the intersecting forces of global capitalism, post-socialist conflict, militarized patriotism, and national cultural traditions. when it comes to the military's connection to domesticity, the article holds in equal interest the azerbaijani state and its deployment of housing policy as a distinctly militarized technology of population management. it builds on cris shore and susan wright's 1997 publication anthropology of policy and their conceptualization of policy as a device that produces certain possibilities and restricts others. indeed, applying shore and wright's approach to different categories of proprietary relation found in azeri policy, one notices the production of unequal social identities and subjectivities, with policy emboldening certain communities while occluding others. tess lea's wild policy (2020) is also a foundational text, highlighting the way in which militarized and securitized forms of domesticity emerge out of the bureaucratic sphere. for lea, it is through the "surfeit of documents...designed not to be read" (2014, 1) that the covert politics (and discriminatory effects) of housing become apparent, with the state wielding notions of deservingness, scarcity, and procedural order to excuse moments of neglect or failure. indeed, marginal populations are often arbitrarily barred from inhabiting certain spaces on the grounds of lacking appropriate documentation or the approval of elite institutions and governmental bodies. in this article, i try to emulate what lea refers to as a "purposely fragmented ethnographic gleaning technique" (2020, 27). rather than merely carrying out multisite ethnography, i follow lea in establishing a "policy ecology" (50) that maps the circulation of seemingly uninteresting and unremarkable policy documents in different spheres of social, political, and material life. i hope to utilize lea's methodology to examine how policy ecologies merge with domestic ones, and to answer the following questions: what sort of interior spaces emerge as a result of particular housing initiatives and strategies? how do certain specifications, restrictions, criteriums, and descriptions set up different material and affective contexts? what forms do proprietary relations take and how are they legitimated? while lea uses extracts from original policy documents, my analysis relies on parts of policy already highlighted by the press, grassroots organizations, and various interlocutors. alongside secondary sources, i also rely on a collaborative process of interpretation, enabled by fieldwork conducted in the summer and autumn of 2019.3 i often mentioned particular expressions and terms during conversations with interlocutors to ascertain which aspects of policy were conceived of as important by the communities they were designed for. i attended openings and project launches to observe celebratory moments of policy materialized and, subsequent to the departure of state representatives and state-endorsed press, loitered to notice immediate aftermaths. most importantly, my methodology entailed living with my interlocutors for several weeks. i was very fortunate to spend time as the guest of a serviceman and his family in the sabunchu district of baku, as well as a family of idps who resided on the fringes of the black city. whilst the positionality of "the guest" offered me a curated and idealized view into the private domain of the home, it also fostered an attunement to the small-scale worries, malfunctions, and difficulties experienced by active servicemen, disabled veterans, the families of martyrs, and idps. it allowed for the observation of what elizabeth povinelli refers to as the "numerous small quasi-events" (2011, 183) that shape the flow of the everyday, sometimes inspiring hope, sometimes resulting in exhaustion. situating the domestic-political the conflict between armenia and azerbaijan over the nagorno-karabakh region can be traced back to late 1987 (geukjian 2016; altstadt 2017; van heese 2018). following mikhail gorbachev's perestroika, which officially lasted from 1985 to 1991, several nation-state-based sovereignty movements emerged across the caucuses (de waal 2002; gasparyan 2019).4 small-scale demonstrations by ethnic armenians and azerbaijanis snowballed into a full-fledged war over the territory in 1991 (najafizadeh 2013; de waal 2002). although fighting ostensibly ended in 1994 with a russian-brokered ceasefire agreement (garagozov 2016),5 years of military action rendered most towns derelict (mirzeler and jafarov 2012), with houses burnt down or dismantled brick by brick. everything that had made the region livable—from lush orchards filled with pomegranate trees to a tight-knit network of farms, markets, and community spaces—disappeared, giving way to barren landscapes and invasive military infrastructure. when life finally resurfaced it did so hundreds of kilometers away from the conflict zone. a plethora of businesses, organizations, and materials followed the displaced population, carving new spatialities across baku both publicly and privately. automobile repair shops, theaters, butchers, schools, restaurants, carpet-weaving workshops, and stud farms run by idps from karabakh began to dot the cityscape. the impossible homeland was transplanted onto industrial wastelands, brownfields, and empty urban lots (balikci 2004). while initiated by the displaced communities, many of these spaces also assisted with the state's sustained "propaganda war," oriented around fear, anger, and a constant state of anxious armament (mamadaliev 2020). the distant conflict still pervades the cityscape.6 the daily forecast on azerbaijani television outlines weather conditions in nagorno-karabakh, fusing on-screen weather satellite information with a seemingly static avatar of territory. posters next to the entrances of grocery shops exclaim, "everything free to children of fallen soldiers, your fathers have already paid," accompanied by images of fully armed soldiers drenched in the colors of the azerbaijani flag. the outline of the region is often found graffitied on the peeling walls of apartment blocks. on numerous occasions, while exploring baku's underground shopping walkways, i'd spot t-shirts with machine guns and clear block letters spelling out karabakh. home—whether one's apartment or neighborhood—was always simultaneously the frontline, the two merging seamlessly (garagozov 2016). given the commonality of these experiences, it soon becomes apparent that in the context of baku the "domestic" is multiscalar, constantly under negotiation and experienced by the population as both a national and personal condition.7 in this paper, the home is conceived of as an intimate site of identification during periods of conflict, moving beyond state-centric approaches (wilson and bakker 2016) that confine processes of militarization and securitization to spheres of governance, policy, and politics. instead, the contested karabakh homeland is understood to be an ever-present feature of not only the intimate "home"-space, but also cultural notions of personhood and family.8 it is reminiscent of a cosmological system, with the imaginary qualities of a house (and by extension, the homeland) intersecting with the "concrete reality of security technologies and infrastructures, a realm of affects and asymmetries" (maguire and low 2019, 17).9 the next section will recount the official opening of an apartment complex for disabled veterans and the families of martyrs, held in the ramana settlement of the city. with press reports representing the residential projects as extensions of president ilham aliyev's alleged "care and attention" (azeri-press agency [apa] 2021) towards azerbaijani armed forces and affiliated civilians, the section will explore the servicemen and martyr apartments as reorienting the timeline of the military—from trauma and potential death to one of domestic bliss. emergence of a military (apartment) complex despite leaving baku in november 2019, notifications from friends, acquaintances, and former interlocutors continued to pop up frequently on my mobile screen. their early messages tended to contain vignettes of quotidian life—a photo showcasing a generous plate of parcha-dosheme plov on an aquamarine pvc tablecloth or a video of an old lada being attentively repaired in someone's front yard, for example. there was a distinct lack of politics in the images they sent me. by early 2020, however, this began to change. with the escalation of conflict in nagorno-karabakh, i found myself scrolling through endless images of tanks and artillery, civilian drone footage depicting alleged territorial trespass, as well as patriotic messages glorifying azerbaijan and deriding their barbarian neighbors. the atmosphere of militarism was equally palpable in footage sent from baku, with military recruitment ads towering next to apartment blocks and azeri flags lining the sandstone boulevards. amidst all the dispatches i received, a short clip from azim stood out the most. i met azim while conducting an interview with a team of construction workers in downtown baku. like many bakuvians, his affiliations were tangled; he swore allegiance to both the military and the state. professionally, as a builder, he had been involved in a number of housing projects across the capital—particularly state-sponsored developments on former oil extraction sites. during our discussions, he would often complain about the lack of oversight and the risk of workplace injuries. azim himself suffered from reoccurring pain as a result of back injury. at home, he identified as a part-time carer to his girlfriend's brother, mohammed, who was injured while serving as a conscript in the karabakh region. he saw both his body and mohammed's as interlinked by duty and vulnerability—their shared moments of pain testaments to proud service. the amateur video was taken at the grand opening of an apartment complex, purpose-built for the families of martyrs and those disabled by the war in karabakh. located in ramana, a semi-urban settlement twenty kilometers away from downtown baku, the still-empty apartment blocks seemed to rise out of the arid and flat landscape. the camera zoomed onto men in wheelchairs and widowed mothers as president aliyev began his speech, describing the "spacious and bright" quality of the individual apartments.10 these homes, according to aliyev, were symbolic rewards for "heroism, bravery, and self-sacrifice," gifted to subjects deemed worthy and deserving by the state. a proprietary relationship was thus established along lines of patriotism and nationalist fantasies of heroism and sacrifice (açıksöz 2012), with apartment launches reminiscent of martyrs' funerals, military processions, and flag campaigns (bora 2003). yael navaro-yashin invokes the expression "rituals of thralldom for the state" (2002, 119) to describe the transformation of the quotidian and private into collective spectacle. indeed, such rituals were evident throughout the president's speech (apa 2021), as aliyev linked each straightforward descriptor to an affectively charged pronouncement. aliyev began by listing the facilities in the residential compound and ended with declarations of "moral norms" and calls to "avenge the blood of martyrs." alongside a discourse of patriotic duty, the apartments also turned into an extension of governmental goodwill—to quote from the same speech, a gesture of "care and attention." the provision of housing by the state, according to aliyev, was a virtuous action that set azerbaijan apart from armenia, where vulnerable populations were regularly sentenced to homelessness and destitution. indeed, the president emphasized that, in armenia, "the relatives of those killed in the war do not even receive a hut, not to mention a house" (apa 2021). in addition to professing a moral obligation, aliyev equated the degree of domestic comfort available to the population with military power. aliyev correlated an expansive, all-encapsulating militarism with the ability to shelter one's population. indeed, in aliyev's speech, victory became an assurance of shelter. much like the american bunker, which, as a structure embodies the "long-running american fantasy about achieving an absolute and total form of security" (masco 2009, 13), wartime and post-conflict housing in azerbaijan cemented the restoration of territorial and national integrity. it attested to the capacity of the home to become an "everyday extension of national security and concerns" (bird-david and shapiro 2019, 213), with an ability to render military gains tangible in places distant from existing frontlines and contested territorial lines.11 it also obfuscates the extent of traumatization and injury, shifting grieving families and disabled citizens to both physical and political peripheries. not only are the state-sponsored apartment complexes located on the outskirts of baku, but their allocation further reifies the status of martyr families and disabled war veterans as "politicized victim-heroes" (açıksöz 2012, 9). it restructures the material-symbolic relationship between the state and potentially "volatile victim figures" (9), with domestication acting to ensure the integration and placation of those "at risk" of potential revolt or complaint. the celebratory tone of the "apartment-handover" events also often concealed the reality facing families who have experienced the loss of a breadwinner, individuals with newly acquired disabilities, and those traumatized by conflict (najafizadeh 2013; trupia 2017)—which, in azerbaijan, often includes disenfranchisement, infantilization, discriminatory labor markets, and entrenched social stigmatization (titterton and smart 2019). here, the home renders private aftermaths and repercussions that would otherwise be difficult to witness—whether post-traumatic stress disorder or other articulations of pain, distress, or psychological injury. disability rights activist sanan stated that although the state has been making efforts to construct residential complexes, there is very little concern for the life inside it. he expressed his frustrations, stating that "whilst a roof is provided, the government is reluctant to tackle the widespread bureaucratic and administrative corruption happening in their own offices," which makes the lives of disabled individuals exceptionally difficult. government workers are reluctant to deal with disabled individuals unless they "get a few manats slipped into their pockets." unlike independently run centers (like umkor's rest and labour home for young disabled), where communal activities and courses for disabled individuals are regularly organized, the residential complexes have contributed to intensified feelings of loneliness, stasis, and segregation. nazim, a veteran disabled during the first nagorno-karabakh war, described the challenges of encountering his state-allocated home. the very materiality of the newly built apartments was a cause of irritation, with nazim describing several "barriers"—steep stairs, which he found tiresome to navigate; thick concrete walls, which made his neighbors feel far away; and essential fittings at the wrong height. beside material concerns, his grief felt "private" (crociani-windland and hoggett 2012) as he had no one to talk to, nor any community events to look forward to. whilst privacy has always been regarded as a crucial aspect of domesticity in azerbaijan, with traditional architecture characterized by walled plots and interior courtyards (roth 2020), nazim found his surroundings "claustrophobic" for the first time in his life. in one of our interviews, he described feeling "forgotten" by his government, and only thought of during "military parades and public commemorations." he experienced loneliness and a lack of support, with the home environment feeling akin to a "storage unit...where you keep all the waste you have no use for anymore." unlike the governmental rhetoric, which described the apartments as a salve (and reward) for suffering and service, for nazim this housing felt like a matter of pragmatics—to keep "bothersome" members of the public out of the way. it is important to note the gendered dynamics of both azerbaijan's military culture as well as its welfare and housing policies (rzayeva 2013). whilst articles chronicling the state and army's organization of medical trips to turkey (another militarized nation where disabled veterans supposedly receive miraculous treatments) still circulate in the media (rehimov 2021), the brunt of the necessary work is undertaken by wives and daughters of ex-servicemen (ismayilov and fuad 2002; ziemer 2018; drožđek, rodenburg, and moyene-jansen 2020). many women take on additional part-time work or pick up loans to support their spouses, since the welfare support given to disabled individuals fails to add up to half the minimum amount required to survive (mukhtarli 2014). the masculinization of the domestic is further exemplified by patrilineal bias present in azeri housing, with men usually receiving ownership of a house or an apartment. even during socialism, it was men who usually gained permanent and inheritable usage rights of urban dwellings (roth 2019, which is still the case with veteran and martyr homes as ownership is allocated to ex-servicemen first and foremost, or to their male siblings. soldiers with an official address the second example focuses on azeri government's long-standing habit of commissioning apartments for military servicemen. after the passing of a 2011 presidential decree titled "on measures to strengthen social protection of servicemen of azerbaijani armed forces," specially designated buildings began to be built across baku, using taxpayer money. the apartments were usually launched with ministers, high-ranking military staff, and the press in tow. unlike the strategies of obfuscation discussed above, the military apartments put soldiers and their families in full public display, leading to a saturation of militarism both in symbolic and spatial terms (woodward 2005). an interlocutor, samir, living in a raion, or district, with multiple servicemen apartments described the normalcy of seeing men dressed in full combat uniforms walking through the local supermarket, or military trucks arriving in the early morning hours to collect and drop off soldiers. the previously nondescript neighborhood seemingly turned into a garrison town (bernazzoli and flint 2010), with servicemen holding privileged status. indeed, my interlocutor complained to me on multiple occasions of the preferential treatment given to those affiliated with the military, with police officers refusing to fine soldiers for parking in otherwise illegal spots or to reprimand them after noise complaints. the sustained effort by the azeri government to normalize militarism through its transfer into the domestic fold is also evident in the recently opened military trophy park. spanning five hectares, the park contains around three hundred exhibits that display a range of tanks, combat vehicles, artillery, anti-aircraft missile systems, small arms, and military vehicles. while the alleged purpose of the trophy park is to provide a recreational space for members of the public and to educate the country's "youth in the spirit of patriotism" (apa 2021), the entanglement of military artifacts with civic infrastructure tells a different story. looking over photos taken by azerbaijani media at the park's inauguration, i was struck by scenes of children playing amidst the helmets of dead armenian soldiers and wax mannequins of disfigured armenian troops. it was a moment that brought the mundane together with wartime propaganda, all in the context of a downtown park—a new ontology of dwelling within threat (bird-david and shapiro 2019). through the mannequins and elaborately staged rooms, the enemy was literally internalized and brought into the residential neighborhood, albeit in a disarmed and degraded state. both examples attest to hugh gusterson and catherine besteman's argument that militarism is a cultural system—shaped through "ideology and rhetoric, effected through bodies and technologies" (2019, s4). militarism spreads through social and communal life via imagery, knowledge production, and infrastructure, creating a sense of familiarity through continual and sustained exposure. the effectiveness of this cultural system is only increased by its entanglement with the intimate and private—it latches onto the cultural, political, and social values already affiliated with domesticity and homemaking. through the already evocative biography of the home, militarism finds a comfortable nook to proliferate and render itself even more inseparable from the everyday. to return to the previous example of the servicemen apartments (as well as those allocated to disabled veterans), it can be argued that the seemingly utopic residential space essentially rewrites the timeline of the military (maguire and low 2019, 19). here, service doesn't end with injury, death, or disenfranchisement; rather, it turns into a domestic fever dream. the ultimate reward for obedience and the defense of the nation-state is state-sponsored housing in the heart of the capital city, with an array of symbolic and material privileges. unlike the domestic cold war american underground bunker—which relies on the movement of happy families into subterranean spaces until danger passes and life renews above (masco 2009)—in the post-victory space of azerbaijan, militarization molds into the grooves set by domesticity. a co-existence is forged between states of armament, securitization, and a hopeful, future-oriented version of homemaking. temporality, however, is beset by inequality. as my friend aylin put it during a whatsapp conversation a few months ago, "whilst the state rewards pro-government journalists and soldiers with brand new apartments, the rest of us are left with the task of cleaning up after decades of war...they get fancy monuments, processions, houses...whilst we get to pay more taxes, rebuild from the wreckage, and take care of brothers and sisters scarred by the battles...who lost homes, relatives, land." through the inclusion of state-sponsored homes as a reward for service, domesticity becomes stratified according to one's political allegiances and investments. indeed, the grand openings, lavish boulevards, and ornate servicemen apartments are smokescreens, concealing deeply entrenched discrepancies when it comes to home ownership and the right to the city—including rising homelessness, intensifying gentrification, and the continued displacement of marginal populations. around the downtown district of khatai—a former industrial zone heavily populated by idps and other disenfranchised populations—the presence of military servicemen is thought of by many interviewed as representing yet another wave of gentrification. mukhtar, aylin's partner, and the son of an idp from agdam district, noted that the construction of a fourteen-storey residential building for servicemen in 2016 not only relied upon the demolition of a vibrant idp settlement, but had subsequently increased rental prices throughout his neighborhood. the clearing away of former factories and makeshift settlements led to a notable demographic shift, attracting investors and white-collar workers, whilst moving lower-income populations to the outskirts of the capital. according to mukhtar, the presence of military staff not only displaced populations but imposed a "stiff...orderly atmosphere...the feeling of always being under surveillance...of being a potential enemy if you don't swear allegiance to the state." local women experienced a more pronounced sense of psychological and spatial intrusion (tohidi 1999; najafizadeh 2003). a young student residing in a nearby (non-military) block of flats told me of the intense pressure she felt to remain as "invisible as possible." when pressed to elaborate, she explained that there has been a palpable shift in the atmosphere of the neighborhood, with servicemen often forming quasi-vigilante groups, monitoring behavior, and handing out impromptu, often arbitrary, penalties to those seen as causing offence—a loose category pertaining to anything from refusing to give up one's spot in a supermarket line to reacting negatively to catcalls. the young woman noted that she already had to obey her father and older brother; she did not need an "army of men" to also take note of and abide by. even those who are integrated into the military complex as wives, widows, or other related kin are at risk of judgment and exclusion. one woman told me that she often worried she wasn't "grieving properly." even though it had been more than two decades since her husband's death, she still felt self-conscious in her community—tight-knit and composed of mainly of military families. indeed, a number of men who served with her husband lived proximally and often reminded her that a "woman's duty is to be eternally loyal." these experiences are echoed by narmin shahmarzade, a feminist activist based in baku, whose articles describe the lives of military wives and widows in the postwar context. shahmarzade notes the reverence afforded to women affiliated with the military, as long as "they remain unquestioning, undemanding, and at peace" (2022, 1) with the traumas that they, and their families, experience as a result of war. she describes a culture of condemnation that utilizes shame and judgment as a source of communal togetherness. indeed, women who decide to opt out—for example, by breaking off engagements with veterans or critiquing the military administration—are berated in person and on social media platforms.12 the pressure placed on women to be staunch supporters of the military effort reveals an ideal of a post-conflict future firmly rooted in the re-inscription of gender roles and patriarchal power. even the state's securitization efforts depend on a gendered division of labor, with the domestic sphere transformed into a home front to be defended from enemy influence.13 whilst the militarization of the domestic attests to the capacity of the nation-state, and agents of national security, to occupy even the most intimate spaces of everyday life (goldstein 2010), the domestication of war complicates the narrative. it reveals that the military-industrial complex is not an unchanging and monolithic thing, but one interwoven with how we live and who gets to live (gonzález 2016). the next section will interrogate similar questions. however, they will be approached from the perspective of those allegedly "not at home —idps who have been residing in temporary, semi-legal, and/or ad hoc settlements in baku for nearly three decades. makeshift solutions and unhomely homes as a result of the first nagorno-karabakh conflict, between 750,000 to a million ethnic azerbaijanis were expelled from their homes in and around nagorno-karabakh and armenia (najafizadeh 2013; de waal 2018). as of december 2019, roughly 651,458 people retain status as either refugees or idp (idmc 2020) in azerbaijan, with many still residing in dilapidated public buildings and ad-hoc settlements. the precarious living situation of idps is predominantly due to their temporary residence status, which prevents registration for both property rights and land tenure outside of nagorno-karabakh (idmc 2010).14 additionally, some idp fear that registration of legal title would result in the loss of idp status and associated benefits. the absence of proprietary relations to urban space reifies the commonly held belief that most idps associate the city with a sense of unhomeliness. the position occupied by idps fixes the concept of the home to the originary homeland, which simultaneously legitimates military investment and a territorial mindset. the blurring between the home on the scale of the intimate and that of the national is evident in the colloquial azerbaijani term for homeland, dede baba yurdu —meaning, "the home of one's grandfather." the term reflects the traditional azeri belief that one's spiritual and ancestral ties are rooted to the earth itself, forging a direct relationship between displaced communities and the forests, mountains, and animals of karabakh (watts 2013). such ties are reproduced in patrimonial fashion, further blurring the line between a primordial sense of homemaking and a masculine military culture. indeed, both domesticity and militarism rely upon the establishment of proper male claim to land. yusif, a soldier with familial roots in occupied agdam province, said to me, "the homeland is a man's first and true home. he may build many houses all over the world, but his home will always be where his father was born and where he lived. it is a man's duty to protect this home before anything else, by any means necessary." this line of thinking is evident in government rhetoric, with aliyev attesting to the primacy of karabakh as "the land of our ancestors," which can only be reclaimed via the "professionalism, heroism, technical capacity, and sense of patriotism" of azeri servicemen (president of the republic of azerbaijan 2021). as part of a ceasefire agreement signed in 2020 , large swathes of territory in nagorno-karabakh are in the process of being returned to azerbaijan. however, soldiers are finding that much of the recovered land is uninhabitable, with both parties responsible for unfurling a "carpet of land mines" that will take decades to identify and remove (kuzio 2021). ali, an idp from qubatli, described feeling "terrified" of seeing the scale of destruction firsthand: "to see houses looted and graves desecrated...in our minds our villages are frozen in time...they haven't changed for the decades we have been gone...to return and see it all changed...would completely destroy us." for ali, returning to a home that no longer exists in a recognizable and familiar (or even inhabitable) form risks an entirely new form of traumatization. in the confines of memory, free of militarism and violence, the home of the past can remain. critiquing the necessity of return also allows for a more diverse conceptualization of domesticity, as well as an appreciation of the homes created in the makeshift settlements of baku. for the idps i interviewed in the black city, the informal and semi-legal nature of the settlements fostered feelings of "liberty" (azadlıq), freeing them from exhausting bureaucratic processes and lingering anxieties. indeed, one will rarely encounter a resident in the settlement who pays property taxes. water and electricity are regularly siphoned from networks, cloaked by thorny flora and the overflow of illegal arrangements. government workers sent with eviction notices turn back in defeat, discouraged by barking stray dogs and the matting of camelthorn. there is a homemaking that occurs without bureaucratic intervention and supervision, where agency and resourcefulness coalesce. it is a far cry from depictions of the idp population in state policy reports and media accounts as disempowered and passive. in many ways, the decision made by idps to remain willingly and intentionally in a so-called wasteland forges a politically charged form of inhabitation. my friend arzu, the daughter of an idp from agdam province, spoke of her makeshift home with fondness and pride. her attachment to the domestic space was not one filtered through a sentiment of nationalism or patriotism, but an awareness of the "effort" and "work" entailed in its creation. she could see the labor and the love of her family in each "window frame hammered together" or "sheet of scrap metal" collected to assemble her bedroom. since the family house was constructed entirely with the use of found material, and without the assistance of a construction crew or developers, an intimate signature was inscribed into every nook and cranny. it wasn't a home dependent on the campaigns of a hypermasculine military, nor the funding of a semi-authoritarian state. instead, it was quietly assembled from the debris of post-extraction, capable of still yielding purpose and use. the makeshift construction disrupted the relationship between the maintenance of territorial integrity and the process of homemaking; one did not need to fight to earn the right to inhabit. instead, values of resourcefulness and an attentiveness were prioritized. the value system of many idps centered upon a sense of "hereness" rather than a nationalistic turn towards an idealized former homeland. during my time in the black city, i was privy to several emergent counter-movements, which seemed responsive to the peripherality of the space and the sense of non-representation in mainstream housing policy. while some of the younger residents living in the settlement expressed support for both the military and nation-state, there was a sense of productive opposition, particularly among second generation idps. alongside contesting traditional forms of homemaking, younger idps had a habit of questioning other conventions of society, particularly those pertaining to early marriage and conservative family models. according to arzu, there was growing skepticism surrounding the necessity of armament and the amount of state resources invested in defense. for idps like arzu there was also growing doubt around the homogeneity of armenian populations. indeed, for arzu, respecting one's home was equated with respecting one's neighbor. throughout our conversations, there was a sense that homeliness relied upon forging good relations with the "other" or those deemed to be the "enemy." one couldn't feel at home without expanding the sphere of consideration beyond kin or nation-state, to those deemed to be outside of it. being a good host, for arzu, was a central tenet to homemaking and home-keeping. these values were echoed by mohammed, the son of another idp from agdam, who added that hospitality was central to azeri culture, more so than "the military might," rendering the animosity felt towards armenians as "strange and, ultimately, paradoxical." the un-fixedness of idp domesticity—the fact that it often bears no paper trail, nor does it conjure nationalistic attachments to land and soil—seems to be the quality that elicits the greatest apprehension from the state. on both a practical and an ideological level, it has the capacity to cause problems for bureaucracy. amidst the logistical chaos of the first exodus of idps from nagorno-karabakh in the 1990s, state and private companies often neglected to check the legal status of properties, allowing residents to forge "shadow" infrastructures—linking their makeshift homes to existing electrical grids and water lines. wires, pipes, and necessary tools were shared among neighbors, as the wastelands generously yielded scarce resources. the commoning of materials harked back to a socialist "economy of favours" (ledeneva 1998, 2), within which informal practices and informal relationships functioned as integral components in the upkeep of economic, political, and everyday relations (sayfutdinova 2015). in the contemporary context, such relations jeopardize the monopoly of the state on housing, infrastructure, and governance, inviting alternate ways to inhabit the industrial zones of baku (safiyev 2015). the economy of favors amongst idps has led many to reject the monetization of resources and a dependence on municipal services. furthermore, it has created a fracture between the idp community and the rest of the nation-state, rendering the makeshift settlement a space apart, with its own systems, beliefs, and values. this split is particularly risky for the azeri state, which aims ultimately to impose its militaristic ideology on all spheres of social and political life. the makeshift settlements foster the emergence of an idp identity not bound to victimhood or military allegiance. rather than being casualties or children of war, idps emerge as resourceful inhabitants of post-extractive spaces, capable of establishing stable communities in informal and often difficult environments. dwelling in the past from a militarism defined by both home and homeland, we find ourselves in the makeshift living rooms of the black city, decorated with karabakh kilims and lined with metal panels salvaged from regional armories. yet, even amid an atmosphere of armament, securitization, and hostility, the home asserts itself as a space of potential otherwise. there is something malleable about the act of inhabitation, reflecting its roots in the latin word inhabitare, "to dwell in." much like inhabitation, dwelling can happen within a thought, a concept, a possibility. it is as cerebral as it is material. speculative as much as it is rooted. servicemen, veterans, widowed families, and idps all dwell differently—their habits of homemaking shaping as much as reflecting the rest of the urban fabric. despite the aggression, ambitiousness, and reach of the state's housing-based military strategy, fissures and failures remain. whether nazim's dissatisfying experiences of living in state-allocated housing for disabled veterans, or arzu's moments of quotidian rebellion, i found individuals eager to defy the spatial logics of the military state. since my departure from baku, key alliances have formed between different populations in the name of a homeland organized around care and hospitality. from youth rallies designed to stave off demolitions (like the rescue of the pre-soviet molokan temple in downtown baku so that it can be used as a cinema), or the efforts of grassroots architectural collectives like pillə, individuals have come together to imagine life not merely after conflict but in spite of it. whilst for some, the home functions as an extension of territorial lines, for others it is a line of flight. there are deviations in narrative that subvert the tightly regulated language of housing policy and state-sponsored articles, repurposing words and properties associated with war into the very materials through which peace can be built. notes 1 the respective housing models were selected due to their prevalence in the media landscape, and their connection to the military. during my time in baku, popular news outlets (like the azerbaijan state news agency and azernews), were littered with articles celebrating project completions, move-ins, and house tours sponsored by the military.   2 since idps are expected to eventually return to nagorno-karabakh, those who receive state-sponsored housing are denied ownership rights (unhcr 2009). the houses provided by the state often have "sinking foundations, poor plumbing, and/or leaky roofs" (international crisis group 2012), further discouraging permanent settlement.   3 this article stems from a larger project examining the expansion of military infrastructure, strategy, and culture into "non-military" spaces—including parks, promenades, arboretums, and agricultural land.   4 the fracturing of the soviet peripheries was further exacerbated by a series of historical publications exposing the impact of nineteenth-century territorial engineering and imperial interference (muth 2014; saparov 2022).   5 there was relative peace until the 2020 nagorno-karabakh war, which saw azerbaijan regain control over 5 cities, 4 towns, and 286 villages in nagorno-karabakh, as well as most armenian-occupied territories surrounding nagorno-karabakh (nikolić 2021).   6 there is a commonplace understanding of conflict as both national and personal. every individual spoken to during my time in baku had ties to karabakh. one interviewee surmised this best by saying, "we are all related to the karabakh somehow...we built our republic on a warzone."   7 this multiscalar quality is also reflected in linguistic conceptualizations of the home within azeri culture. ev, from the proto-turkic eb (dwelling place) refers to both the home, as a conceptual unit, and the house, as a structural term encompassing materials, techniques of construction, and spatial organization. the two terms are further entangled by their role in social reproduction, demonstrated by the verb evlənmək, literally meaning "to become enhoused" as well as "to marry." it draws the domestic structure into a familial assemblage of kin groups, new households, and social bonds, with enclosure assuring the transference of historical and cultural lineage (roth 2020).   8 a similar double meaning is found in the azeri word for homeland, vətən, which derives from the arabic وطن (waṭan), referring to both the process of choosing and settling in a particular place, as well as the accustoming of one's spirit to something or someone.   9 it should be noted that the use of the domestic to capture at-risk populations (bahloul 1996, 28; waterson 1990, 1995) precedes the war in azerbaijan. through a socialist system of "bureaucratic allocation," the azeri state was granted complete control over the distribution, management, and monitoring of domestic spaces—achieved through routine inspections, strict housing codes, and municipal recordkeeping (valiyev 2013). through these strategies, the soviet state sought to "make use of the materiality of dwelling to produce new social forms and moral values" (humphrey 2005, 39-40).   10 for a full transcript of the speech, see azeri-press agency (apa) 2021.   11 in his speech, aliyev collapsed the topic of housing provisions with reforms intended to forge "a more agile, more combatant and more capable army" (apa 2021).   12 a notable example of this public condemnation was the treatment of samaya hashimova, the mother of the deceased general polad hashimov, who was severely criticized when she questioned her son's death ("slain general's mother," 2022).   13 the reinforcement of gendered labour within military cultures has been examined in detail by cecilia åse and maria wendt in gendering military sacrifice (2019).   14 many argue that the convoluted process of attaining permanent resident status contributes to the state's plan to repopulate the contested territories, with idps as "political pawns" (refugees international 2002).   references açıksöz, salih can. 2012. 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"'the waiting and not knowing can be agonizing': tracing the power of emotions in a prolonged conflict in the south caucasus." international feminist journal of politics 20 (3): 331-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1480900.     author bio zsuzsanna ihar is a phd candidate and gates scholar in the department of history and philosophy of science at the university of cambridge. she is interested in researching garrison towns, disused army bases, reclaimed conservation areas, as well as former military trial sites. she recently published a chapter titled "multispecies mediations in a post-extractive zone" in the promise of multispecies justice (duke university press, 2022). catalyst’s editorial team. 2025. “introduction to the tenth anniversary section.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–17. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © catalyst’s editorial team, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introduction to the tenth anniversary section of catalyst catalyst’s editorial team celebrating the legacy and future of catalyst in preparing the tenth anniversary section of catalyst, the current editorial team met to reflect on the legacy, politico-ethical vision, and future of the journal. using the introduction to the inaugural issue as a prompt for our reflections, we discussed what makes the journal distinctive, how it has contributed to the field of technoscience, the intellectual inheritance of feminist scholarship on which our work builds, and the generative associations materialized through the metaphor of a catalyst. our discussion was also guided by the following questions: 1) what kind of topics do you observe are the most current within the field of feminist technoscience? 2) since you started working at catalyst, has your perception of feminist technoscience as a field changed? if so, how? 3) how does the current geopolitical climate affect your thoughts on feminist technoscience and vice versa? as wide-ranging and capacious as feminist technoscience, the discussion also included lively reflections on the catalytic qualities of bacteria and the ways in which they participate in life-giving processes of kin-making. in the spirit of capturing both the unique voices of the editorial team and the relational assemblage of the conversation as it unfolded, we present it below in conversation-style format. this opening discussion offers a rich companion piece to the reflections of former editorial teams presented in the anniversary section, surfacing the ways in which catalyst continues to be a playground for alterity and a safe harbor in this historic moment. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/intro tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 2 a decade on: editorial reflections on the first issue of catalyst figure 1. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience front covers spanning 2015–2018. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 3 xan chacko (xc): i was struck by the list of names that the first editors chose to include in their first list of acknowledgments. not traditional acknowledgments, but in-text shout-outs to the people who were a part of the origin story of the journal. i liked seeing how awkwardly all those names take up space on the page because the list is so long. it is a testament to how collaborative and interdisciplinary, but also collegial, the enterprise of the founding of this journal must have been. the luxury and the freedom to take the space to name all the names was just so nice to see. that was one thing that stood out to me. then, the second thing that emerged was the test of time. just looking at the articles in the rest of that journal and seeing where those people have ended up, it seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy or just amazing work of editorial prescience to have gathered together people who went on to become rock stars. kiran pienaar (kp): i was struck by the same thing, xan: the fact that they took the space to name all the people involved. for me, that illustrates a feminist ethic which is important. i was also just struck by the luminaries among those names. i thought, “wow, what an incredible legacy we’re building on!” i feel so privileged to be a part of that. marika cifor (mc): yes, the list! this is citational justice in action. this represents one of the most powerful things in my experience about feminist technoscience. i see a deep commitment then and now to holding open doors in ways that subvert, undermine, and make possible for other feminist researchers. it’s just beautiful. kp: i was also struck by the ways in which catalyst continues to be at the vanguard of pushing the boundaries of what counts as scholarship. for example, including artistic commentaries and the video pieces in the first issue, and finding ways to make them visible as scholarship, and really push at the limits of what we see as scholarship through a very interdisciplinary, experimental, open-ended “becoming” approach. i think this is such a feminist sts approach, as in, let’s see what will unfold. the boundaries are meant to be challenged and disrupted in the spirit of making new kin, making new worlds: compassionate, kinder worlds. i think that was something that stood out to me because as i was typing up some reflections, i thought, “that's the kind of legacy that i feel our team wants to build on and it’s so beautifully articulated in this first issue.” robyn lee (rl): i was really struck by how timely it all feels still. it feels very fresh and not dated at all. i think that really speaks to the way the catalyst is on the cutting edge. in terms of the risk-taking and the experimentation of bringing all of these different things together. it’s so generative, but i think that there’s still lots of really important ways that we’re in dialogue with these earlier pieces. i was just reading that [first issue] speaking back to this one and then also thinking through things differently and pushing things further. it’s really that there’s such a strong trajectory to the journal and to the collective of people involved in it: this sense of https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/intro/intro_html tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 4 community in the way that it keeps percolating and keeps generating even over the decade and hopefully for decades to come. thao phan (tp): i totally agree with what everyone’s saying. i was also really taken with all of the different sorts of figures for catalyst. it begins with the literal definition from chemistry as an agent that sparks reaction which then produces pathways. it’s an energy. it’s more than a home. it’s a chain of scholarly reactions. it’s an experiment. it’s a meeting place. it is always about motion and movement. you get the sense that there’s a real sort of reticence to define feminist sts as any one thing, even in their opening provocation where they announce the journal as a kind of experiment, where everything is about chain reactions and looking forward to the kinds of futures that feminist sts could become. it’s an interesting invitation, because here we are situated at the vantage point of the future reflecting on past visions of the now. they ask, “what might a future feminist sts become?” and here we are, ten years on, reflecting on that very provocation. it’s one that i don’t think any of us would feel comfortable answering. that is to say, i don’t think any of us, like them, would want to put forward a rigid, definitive position on what feminist sts is now. like them, i think we also would extend that invitation forward. to stay in the spirit of the first introduction, extending forward in perpetual motion. as kiran said, to stay oriented in this ongoing project and in this sense of becoming. i think even the name catalyst is still so apt, like a spark, a reaction. it’s something that pulses and pushes from within each of us. mc: and it speaks to this kind of work that is only possible in community and collectivity. tp: the other thing to comment on, i suppose, was the commitment from the beginning to use this open access platform. they write a little bit about the labor and they name everyone who’s involved. again, making visible all of the actors it takes and doing this as an act of recognition. maybe that’s something we would like to continue commenting on: what it means to continue to be open access and what that enables us to do. on the one hand, it’s resisting metricization in a time when a lot of people need metrics in order to be valued or legible inside of their institutions. but we’re also in a time when the work we do is under extreme attack. as such, there is no recognition inside of a white supremacist capitalist, patriarchal institution anyway. so we’ll just do what we do and at least we can publish for free and give people a platform. mc: i think you are right on, thao, open access is more important and more challenging than ever. it also points to how open access publishing is vital in a feminist context because it aligns with core values. by working to dismantle paywalls and academic gatekeeping, it helps to ensure that feminist research— often centering marginalized voices—is freely accessible to the people who need it most, whether activists, scholars, artists, and diverse communities worldwide, tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 5 especially in the global south. i would argue that open access also reflects a feminist ethics of care by making research more accountable and beneficial to the very communities it engages. xc: i want to return to something that’s weird about the definition of a catalyst is that it provides, as thao said, the spark or some kind of help to the chemical reaction, but it itself stays unchanged. it stays apart from the inputs and outputs of the chemical reaction; it works in the background and remains that way. so the output does not emerge from any part of the catalyst itself. yet the catalyst is required to produce the outcomes, whatever they are. the desired outcome could be the chemicals themselves or the energy produced by the chemical reaction. i wonder then about that choice of term because what does it mean to stay unchanged and be the force that is enabling change? i both like it and i’m confused by it. the concept also figures well with the way in which the transitions of leadership and labor have taken place. the people at the helm can come and go from the masthead because in some way the labor is backgrounded. what’s great about this introduction is that they’re foregrounding the labor that henceforth gets backgrounded. kp: maybe this is my own theoretical inspiration, but i read it more in an agential realist way of being an entanglement. so i didn’t see it as something separate from the reaction but it’s in the apparatus itself. the “catalyst” changes and is intricately embedded in what materializes. our particular assemblage of editors and the articles that we shepherd through the process, they are part of the whole assemblage. i read the catalyst as more of an intimate entanglement where you can’t separate out the thing that produced, generated, or provoked the reaction from the forum or the platform that holds it, and the labor that shepherded it through the process. one of the things i like about our previous issue, which is the first time we’ve done this, is that we also acknowledge the labor of copy editors. we did that front and center. maybe that’s something we could do more to surface the labor that otherwise as you’re saying, xan, gets backgrounded and is only really visible if you’re in the machinations of the system. we know what goes on but it’s otherwise invisible to broader publics. it’s been so enlightening to me to appreciate the huge amount of labor behind the scenes. and yes, it’s amazing to have this commitment to open access. i fully support it, but it comes at the cost of an incredible amount of labor that the editorial team carries. i read the provocation and the metaphor of a catalyst in a more agential realist or new materialist way as this intimately entangled phenomenon that is shaped by our own intellectual inheritances, our own particular ethics. if we were to track the editorial process through the issues, i think you would find they bear different imprints. we’d all read that differently, but i think that entanglement is reflected across the issues and the different editorial collectives that have led them. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 6 tp: i had a moment just now where i was like, “wait, what does ‘catalyst’ mean?” i’m just going to dig back into the chemistry definition to move between metaphor and materiality for a moment. in the britannica definition, it says what xan was suggesting: catalyst and chemistry is any substance that increases the rate of reaction without itself being consumed. but then further down, it’s a chemical reaction between catalysts and reactants. it forms these chemical intermediaries that are able to react more readily with each other to form a desired product. during the reaction between the chemical intermediaries and the reactants, the catalyst is itself regenerated. so it doesn’t change and yet it is regenerated each and every time. it’s this interesting tussle of definitions going on where it itself is never consumed and yet is regenerated in each instance. it spurs the reaction, like there would be no process without the catalyst and yet the catalyst itself is untouched by the process or something. i feel like i need to go deeper into this metaphor because what is being suggested is more than just a platform where we’re just an intermediary that allows other people’s voices to be disseminated. i do think there is a chemical reaction that happens inside of each of the editors, and they come out a different person. they come out in a different relation to their community than when they went in. carina truyts (ct): given the current political landscape and mood of terror, it was great to reflect on how catalyst's origin and model has allowed us to remain untainted and independent. i remember irina saying in our last board meeting, when we were discussing budgets and income, “it’s better to be poor and independent.” it was beautiful to read that description, learn about the open source software and also how the website itself was written. i really loved that linguistic reminder that our discourse is translated into shareable material through a code—a code that was also (laboriously) written. that server hosted in canada, the dynamic model of work that we’re part of: it saves us from getting enmeshed in the capitalist machinery of the journal publishing landscape. i’m so grateful for the thoughtful way catalyst was put in motion. irina aristarkhova (ia): to pick up from here, we can see ten years later how our methodologies and materialities, both our actual labor as well as what we are doing in terms of knowledge production as a journal, have been catalyzed by the first team and subsequent editors. as editors now, we are learning what the infrastructure itself does for knowledge production and to our maintenance labor that a journal like this takes to run, the kind of resources that it needs. it’s the work of our feminist village where each person evaluates what they can afford to give at this moment. i hear you, carina and kiran. we benefit right now from our own independence that we want to maintain, though this makes the journal vulnerable, too, in terms of limited resources and capacities, since there is so much variation and inequality built in academic work across the globe. our editorial board members have been generous and supportive, and this is what we tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 7 depend on right now—feminist sharing. sometimes, institutions are supportive, but when they are not, those who moved towards the institution so closely that the whole work of knowledge generation depends on that particular institution or a funding source, become more vulnerable because feminist intersectional work is often the first one to be defunded or cancelled. that’s why we need more catalysts. redistributed nature of our work together, and plans for sustainability, such as the structure of our editorial team and international infrastructure of our platforms and knowledge production, give me hope. we certainly witness and are a part of the intergenerational feminist technoscience community that has profoundly influenced what and how we research or teach. and i really appreciate this community. in the moment of renewed backlash against and disrespect directed at our work, we meet and continue to do what we are doing. we are not going anywhere. the only way we do theory or science, we do it with people. we are bouncing ideas off each other within the editorial team, even though we are working on the journal and other people’s work as our primary focus. i was really excited when i was rereading the first issue. thinking about how they thought about all these different topics in theory of feminist technoscience and layers of building journal infrastructure. that their ideas would manifest in the platform. their ideas would manifest in the editorial board, relationships with authors, and in a way, i see us and our work as an iteration of their design. yes, i’m also excited about this playfulness, which i saw there, in the introduction especially, with various forms of writing. it means, we can play, too, make it our own. initially, during the learning curve, i thought we would reproduce what we inherited—this is our first task, to make sure the journal continues. now, in addition to continuing for the issues to come out, in the second year we can start playing. reading the introduction opened up my affective/creative as well as mental space. the desire for us to find space, find time, where we make it ours. where we experiment, consider what we can bring to the work that would make it both sustainable as well as truly go to these ideals that they had about activism, about community, potentially outreach, or creativity, as well as changing spaces where technoscience is done, or being even more interdisciplinary than we are right now. the other thing that struck me ten years on is how science itself has a capacity to still reproduce itself in most capitalist, exploitative forms. also, about who society thinks of as a scientist or as having knowledge. we still seem to be chasing technoscience or chasing after technoscience. theoretically, it still seems that technoscience developments and money around them, where they are going, like the ai, for example, or military research, just squeeze all air out of a feminist, intersectional room. there are still heavy, extractive, and abusive practices which we face, or even the ones that initially used to be based on someone’s curiosity or spark, but then become quickly appropriated as a new marketable product. this is tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 8 what our authors often critique, so it’s hard to be all playful without feeling irresponsible or being defunded. that extractive, imperial, colonial, object, and subjects attached to that object seem to be continuously tripping us up and sapping our energy. how do we find space outside of that? tp: in these moments, i think of donna haraway’s staying with the trouble and that great line about acknowledging the troubles without “succumbing to abstract futurism and its affects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference” (2016, 4). it strikes me that a catalyst is what you need when you are feeling paralyzed. when you are despairing, when exhaustion is the main thing that plagues feminist work. we are not only asked to do a lot, we are often the first to respond to the call. the result is that you get worn down. you’re physically exhausted. you’re mentally exhausted. you’re politically exhausted. it’s in those moments that you do need a bit of energy and action and reaction, but i hear you. i think this is the curse of sts generally, we’re forever chasing innovation. this is the curse of doing science in the making. the agendas that you follow are sometimes set by people, elsewhere. i feel like feminist sts is at risk of chasing lines of despair sometimes, chasing injustice which sadly always continues to present itself in new and extreme forms. but, again, it’s maintaining that orientation towards some kind of justice despite all those things. xc: i think what was striking about those early issues and the people who were involved in that period of feminist sts is their commitment to staying with the troubles of the science was not necessarily a denouncement. it was a commitment to imagining differently. many of them were scientists and continue to have labs that are humanities–science hybrids. they have created a pathway for certain kinds of research and thinking. that is, they live in the successor science project, rather than only critiquing the existing cutting edge of science. the trouble with always being in that mode of critique, rather than productively engaging a possible otherwise, is they are always stories in a negative register, ignoring the hopeful possibilities that might emerge. the trouble with always responding to the cutting edge of science is that it traps sts scholars into this paradigm of reactiveness. “you’re forgetting about justice and what of the variegated impacts on people of color? have you thought about the environmental impacts of ai?” the register of reminding the science that is drawn into the thrall of new technologies like ai to “solve” crises (climate or pandemics) to slow down is seen as an irresponsible delay. we, sts scholars, thus remain the naysayers or killjoys—not that there is anything wrong with that. however, if you look at the origins of feminist sts, as these early issues of this journal provided, they were always doing both hand in hand; beautiful, strong, powerful critique at the same time as imagining otherwise. they gave us new vocabularies, new concepts, new biologies, new sciences to think with and live through otherwise. in some ways, what has been nice about the lag of our special tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 9 sections is that they don’t fall prey to the immediate reactiveness of the “oh, we have to do an ai issue immediately, because that’s what everyone is doing” kind of logic. we are already committed to birds and asian americans and hormones! ia: i was just going to ask about the ai issue? (just kidding.) i agree with you, xan. mc: this also speaks to the anti-capitalist moves of the journal; we are not beholden to doing work that is trendy or unfundable. we can be nimble without being constrained by the whims of the market, funders, or other forces that shape far too much about academic life and scholarship. ia: i am also thinking here of femmeeting: women in art, science and technology community and conferences. i attended the last meeting organized by dr. jennifer willet, artist and director of incubator art lab at the university of windsor, canada. one of the plenaries had a presentation by dr. catherine febria, director of the healthy headwaters lab at the university of windsor, who spoke about her choice of doing science of tributary waterways (rather than large bodies of water) as feminist and antiracist, because the lab is focused on doing science and community organizing as one and the same work: one cannot make water cleaner and safer without working with people, especially children, who live nearby and depend on it. this lab is an inspiration! in terms of new directions, as i was reading the first issue, two topics, in addition to new ones, have continued to be prominent. one is reproductive justice and reproductive biotechnologies. second, the question of technoscience’s relation to capitalism and proposals around the alternatives, such as democratic socialism, for example. let us remember that donna haraway’s cyborg manifesto was supposed to be a socialist feminist contribution, directed at a future without capitalism. what does aftercapitalist or beyond capitalist technoscience look like today to us? i’m just thinking here in terms of labor and capital, and what we see today, compared to, let’s say, a longer arch of feminist analysis, say, back to the ’70s. do we see as many contributions today using the marxist feminist questions? what do you think, robyn (our peer review editor), as you read our submissions? rl: yes, neda atanasoski and kalindi vora’s piece on labor in the first issue illustrates how important feminist perspectives on labor and technology are. so i was thinking about that and how we’re thinking about feminist perspectives of labor in relation to technology. certainly, it seems, it just doesn’t go away. that’s always the technological promise of freeing us from labor. i think that’s something that feminist sts always shows us. as labor intensifies, it changes, it becomes more precarious. it becomes more racialized, it becomes more gendered in lots of different ways. we’re certainly not doing less labor. this promise of technology, it’s always failing to deliver on that promise. i think that’s really important in terms of thinking about the socialist and marxist feminist contributions: thinking about technology as always coming back to labor. https://femeeting.com/ https://femeeting.com/ https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28809 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 10 tp: i suppose one provocation that might set forward interesting ways of figuring out catalyst is: what kind of figures would we like to propose, to help us think this through? to again, repose the question: what might a future feminist sts become? i know we’ve spoken about playgrounds for alterity. perhaps, in this moment we also might consider safe harbors. maybe this is something we might think about more. what figures do we think would help us think through the future of feminist sts and catalyst? ct: one thing i always think about when i picture catalysts is those formulas we learn in high school chemistry. that idea of a catalyst as an additive in an experiment which is done by a human or some hovering god-like figure. is there a “god-like figure” that’s adding the catalyst to the thing that’s making it work? i know that catalysts occur in nature and these interactions occur in other spaces where there isn’t a hand that adds the catalyst. i’m just trying to think about catalyst scenarios that don’t include the “science man up above.” xan has some. xc: catalysts are super important to understand how it is that plants do all the things that they do. a lot of the time, the catalysts are actually other creatures, mycorrhizal connections, bacteria, and fungi. all of our gut digestion is happening with bacteria as catalysts in our digestive processes. we do not really understand how it is that those beings are contributing, sometimes beneficially, sometimes neutrally, sometimes detrimentally to everyday processes. one of the big revelations of the twentieth century is that at every stage, in every process, all of these other beings that are participating in making what we understand as chemical, physical, or biological processes happen. i remember listening to margaret mcfall-ngai talk about how the bacteria intervene in the uterus, which was imagined as this hermeneutic sealed space, that is, nothing else coming in other than the genes of the parents in there. but, in fact, bacteria are passing genetic information from the gestational carrier to the fetus during gestation. some fetal cells remain inside the gestational body and the next time that being is pregnant, some of those cells pass through to the next fetus that is occupying that same uterus. so if you’re a second child or a third child, you have not only your maternal cells inside you, actual cells from your mother that have passed through bacterial conduits, but also cells from your older siblings. those catalytic processes are not even well understood. like, why do we need those? why do we need to have those connections built in? why are these bacteria participating in this process of kin-making? you know, it really makes you question gestational surrogacy. the idea of a sealed space of anyone’s genetic material can be housed inside, and it is just an environment for making a baby is blown apart by this knowledge. so, yeah, catalysts are everywhere. they’re crucial to life. we couldn’t be what we are without them. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 11 tp: there’s so many figures xan pointed to just now. a catalyst is a seed. a catalyst is a womb. what if we think of a catalyst through each of the figures that we all work with every day? like, what if the catalyst is a drug and then you can rethink it through this narcofeminist lens? it would be a really fun exercise to think through. ct: thanks, xan, that was so satisfying and so beautiful to see you just beaming while you demonstrate this for us. that is the catalyst energy, i am here for it. this diversity is something i think about when i work on catalyst covers. figure 2. catalyst: feminism, theory technoscience front covers spanning 2020–2022. kp: i agree. i just love the way you sparked up. there was this catalytic reaction within you, xan, as you explained it to us. it was just beautiful and it made me wonder if, among our teams, among the editorial collectives and the authors that we’re working with, all of these catalytic reactions are remaking us and transforming us in new ways, and in turn, the journal. it feels like there’s so many beautiful ripples, a kind of diffraction pattern if we think in karen barad’s terms, diffractions or ripples that perhaps aren’t even visible to us or aspects of it become https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380261231174962 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 12 visible in particular moments. for me, that’s part of the beauty of it, this openended becoming that we can’t predict. this includes how the work will be taken up and how it bears our impress. all of those things are part of that generative sense of being in motion that catalyst suggests. the way that you described that metaphor in relation to the womb was just fantastic. thanks, xan. tp: a world of reactions that reverberates across generations. i think that’s a really wonderful metaphor. xc: i do feel it in the way my life has been by mentors and ancestors, in ways that i can see and recognize but also in unseen ways that i can only surmise. so i am the thing that is becoming. i can feel some of the agentic forces that are part of what is going into producing the thing that will eventually become me. i know that there are all kinds of invisible forces too, like this feminist sts legacy. i know that when certain opportunities open up for me, there are hidden connections of love and generosity at work behind the scenes. i think that is part of what i was suggesting initially, when i said that the catalyst stays behind. the catalyst doesn’t seek to benefit. the ability to make reactions go faster or facilitate them is such a gift in and of itself. it is not about altruism. rather, it is about being part of creating the kind of world that you want to live in. i feel that i am both privileged to be part of the shaping now because i have been so shaped by the catalytic forces of feminist sts. ia: i will just mention a few of those examples. in 2021 the virtual meeting for the society for literature, science, and the arts (slsa) conference was devoted to the expanded theme of energy. among amazing panels featuring interdisciplinary research and creative work, the conference had several plenary sessions, keynotes and roundtables, and their titles speak to the kind of world we want to create, as you said it so well, xan: lisa nakamura’s opening keynote, chaired by osman khan, was titled “the minor energy of anti-asian digital racism: women of color and the digital labor of repair” (recording is available here); imani cooper mkandawire curated a plenary between zakiyyah iman jackson and chanda prescod-weinstein titled “‘theorizing in a void’: towards a theory and practice of black feminist mathematics and science” (the conversation was streamed but not recorded as requested by one of the speakers); a closing keynote became a performance-dialogue between cristóbal martinez and liz lerman, chaired by jane prophet, titled “our fathers, crimes, and the nature of energy in the universe” (recording is available here). it was just amazing to see people sitting in a sustained manner and discussing various kinds of ways in which personal, theoretical, and political could be reimagined anew in modern technoscience. in addition to being excited by the new subjects of knowledge or imagination of our catalyst submissions, working on making the journal happen, as a team, has been especially meaningful in this difficult time for science and feminism in the us and many other places. you never know when knowledge would become community, https://litsciarts.org/slsa2021/ https://lsa.umich.edu/ac/people/faculty/lnakamur.html https://www.osmankhan.com/bio https://www.osmankhan.com/bio https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=a3tvgicugyk http://imanicoopermkandawire.com/ http://imanicoopermkandawire.com/ http://imanicoopermkandawire.com/ https://provost.duke.edu/profile/zakiyyah-iman-jackson/ https://chanda.science/ https://chanda.science/ http://cristobalmartinez.net/ https://lizlerman.com/ https://www.janeprophet.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqbu94gaw50 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 13 when community would become energy. when that energy would transform into an epigenetic effect. being part of this process is incredibly energizing. so maybe we do need a playful framework, in which we are even more experimental with form, without making it harder on our already stretched skills and time. i know some of my colleagues work on charades and organize discos… kp: this is just a small point, but i was really struck by the idea that in the first issue of that introduction, they don’t give the names of specific members of the editorial board. it’s really a collective endeavor. they just name the board. i think it speaks to their pushing back against that neoliberal atomization and the metricization of the academy. i love the fact that they’re doing the feminist work and it’s evident in that as an intervention. we’re not going to name specific contributors, we’re not going to play the game where individuals take credit for a particular piece of work. instead, the refusal to name individual contributors acknowledges that this has been a collective endeavor. i think that really speaks to living the feminist ethic. it might seem like it’s a small gesture, but i think in our increasingly neoliberal, metricized cultures it speaks volumes to their commitment to a collective endeavor that’s going to push things in new directions, including challenging the boundaries of what counts as scholarship and how we produce it. rather than these atomized subjects, who then take credit for particular pieces of scholarship to say, this is a collective. ia: this conversation is part of building the community, and building on that first issue, because that was a group of people who felt that they didn’t have other venues to show this work and to publish this work. it shines through as well in that first issue. as we are contributing to this text, as a collective, your voices are an important part of where the journal is going. so, yes, xan, you will be kind of a vibrating bacteria. xc: they’re so smelly, so smelly. the thing that you’re smelling when you have bad breath, that’s bacteria. but i am not afraid of being a smelly bacteria, it’s all good. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 14 conclusion building on the vision of the founding editors beautifully articulated in the introduction to the inaugural issue, catalyst continues to foster boundarypushing, interdisciplinary research. it is animated by a desire to create more inclusive, compassionate worlds. while providing a home for critical feminist technoscience studies scholarship, catalyst also continues to elaborate and transform the field, pushing it into exciting, unchartered territory. in this respect, we build on the legacy of the inaugural editors as captured in the journal’s name to catalyze capacious forms of scholarship and creative work that expand the terrain of scholarly endeavors to include research-based media practice, commentaries, audiovisual research, artistic provocation, and other forms of experimental practice. for example, our march 2025 special section, “knowing borders,” was the first bilingual section of catalyst featuring articles in spanish and english, creating a “pocho linguistic third space” for feminist scholarship (smith et al. 2025, 1). another hallmark of the journal is its commitment to plurality. catalyst articles draw on and often combine rich theoretical traditions, such as more-than-human approaches, new materialisms, science studies, disability studies and crip theory, queer theory, black studies, decolonial approaches, gender and sexuality studies, digital studies, and the history and philosophy of science…to name just a few! in this respect, they elaborate feminist sts as a “dispersed project” (catalyst journal editorial board 2015, 1) that traverses disciplinary and theoretical boundaries to generate new insights, new scholarly reactions, and new futures for feminist technoscience broadly conceived. the anniversary issue is no exception. our cover art titled teacher is by australian artist jordan wood, and the accompanying artist statement is supplemented by an interview with jordan and indigenous australian artist yhonnie scarce discussing shared concerns across their work. the issue includes an image and text piece titled “heart feminism, careful whisper,” by anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, and aysha leach. the piece is inspired by an experimental art installation that emerged out of an essay titled “heart feminism,” which was published in the inaugural issue of the journal. in returning to the earlier piece, “heart feminism, careful whisper” illustrates the enduring impact of catalyst articles in their open-ended becoming. this special anniversary section also features a timely commentary by rebecca herzig and banu subramaniam on the trump administration’s insistence on binary biological sex differences. it highlights the value of feminist science studies scholarship for interpreting and challenging these forms of authoritarian, retrograde politics. alongside these pieces is a reflection on the use of catalyst special sections in feminist sts curricula; in “a pedagogical ecosystem: building connections in and beyond the classroom,” the authors discuss the pedagogical ecosystem that emerged via collective engagement with catalyst articles in the classroom. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2901 https://www.jordanlwood.com/ https://artistprofile.com.au/yhonnie-scarce/ https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/pollock/21424 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/pollock/21424 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 15 we are also delighted to feature three reflective pieces by former catalyst editors on the origins, legacy, and future of the journal. like our introduction, two of these pieces are presented in a conversational format, while the third applies the generative metaphor of a garden to present editing as a form of “worldbuilding.” read together as companion pieces to our introduction, these editorial reflections offer insights into the foundations of the journal, its ethical commitments, and its wide-ranging contributions to feminist technoscience. in the spirit of profiling the work of feminist artists, the issue includes artwork by three artist-scholars who responded to our open call for cover art that engages the concerns of feminist technoscience. figure 3. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience front covers spanning 2023–2025. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 16 this issue also features a lab meeting that emerged from a workshop of australia-based scholars on the topic of “thinking populations in feminist technoscience.” presented as a series of short commentaries by workshop participants with an introduction by the workshop convenors jaya keaney, thao phan, and sonja van wichelen, the piece elaborates an antipodean feminist toolkit for thinking populations. alongside four book reviews, the anniversary issue features six original research articles on topics ranging from covid-19 mortality data, sexual violence, crafting and coding as forms of worldmaking, and the epigenetic memory of trauma. as the diverse array of contributions in this special ten-year anniversary issue attest, catalyst is an open-ended experiment, one that diffracts the insights of the arts, humanities, and sciences through each other to yield new ways of theorizing and doing technoscience. in the process, it creates new assemblages designed to illuminate and disrupt social hierarchies, and incrementally help to undo the structural and onto-epistemological violence built into knowledge-making practices. references antanasoski, neda, and kalindi vora. 2015. “surrogate humanity: posthuman networks and the (racialized) obsolescence of labor.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 1 (1): 1–40. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28809. catalyst journal editorial board. 2015. “introduction to the inaugural issue.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 1 (1): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28823. dennis, fay, kiran pienaar, and marsha rosengarten. 2023. “narcofeminism and its multiples: from activism to everyday minoritarian worldbuilding.” the sociological review 71 (4): 723–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261231174962. haraway, donna. 2016. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke university press. martinez, cristóbal, and liz lerman. 2021. “our fathers, crimes, and the nature of energy in the universe.” 2021 slsa closing keynote, u-m stamps school of art & design, october 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqbu94gaw50. nakamura, lisa. 2021. “the minor energy of anti-asian digital racism: women of color and the digital labor of repair.” 2021 slsa opening keynote, u-m stamps school of art & design, september 30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=a3tvgicugyk. pollock, anne. 2015. “heart feminism.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 1 (1): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28811. smith, lindsay, maría torres, and rodrigo parrini-roses. 2025. “introduction: knowing borders: materialidades, ecologías, estéticas.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v11i1.44601. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28809 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28823 https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261231174962 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqbu94gaw50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=a3tvgicugyk https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28811 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v11i1.44601 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) editorial team 2025 17 author bios irina aristarkhova is professor at the stamps school of art & design and associate director of the digital studies institute at the university of michigan. she is co-editor (operations) at catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. xan sarah chacko is the interim director of science, technology and society and an assistant teaching professor of science, technology and society at brown university. she is associate editor (operations) at catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. marika cifor is associate professor in the information school and adjunct faculty in gender, women & sexuality studies at the university of washington. she serves as associate editor (special sections) for catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. robyn lee is associate professor of sociology at the university of alberta in canada. she is co-editor (peer review) at catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. thao phan is a lecturer in the school of sociology at the australian national university. she is the book reviews editor at catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. kiran pienaar is a senior lecturer in sociology at deakin university, melbourne, australia. she is co-editor (production and design) at catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. carina truyts is the coordinator of the deakin science and society network at deakin university. she is associate editor (production and design) at catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. introduction to the tenth anniversary section of catalyst celebrating the legacy and future of catalyst a decade on: editorial reflections on the first issue of catalyst conclusion references author bios     original research moral economies of life and death: agricultural improvement, imperialism, and chemical kinships with reactive nitrogen     emma cardwell lancaster university e.j.cardwell@lancaster.ac.uk     abstract what does it mean to think of chemicals as kin? building on the concepts of chemical kinships and pollution as colonialism, i use a feminist storytelling methodology grounded in relational ontology to explore my kinship relationships with reactive nitrogen, and the way it both hurts me and gives me life. agriculture and organic chemistry are close kin to imperialism, capitalism, and environmental destruction, and, as a white british woman, i argue these are also my own more-than-human family: my close kin. to take the call to kinship seriously, i argue for approaching kinship personally, and accepting clear positionality in relation: exploring my relation to how these kin both abuse and support me, our ancestral entanglement, and my own complicity and responsibility in enabling their abuse.   keywords agriculture, nitrogen, chemistry, imperialism, kinship     introduction this paper aims to bring a new engagement with the “chemical turn” in feminist technoscience by storying a kinship with a chemical element that intrinsically disrupts the dominant toxicity narrative of our epistemological relationship to chemicals. it also aims to engage with the political ontologies of the “decolonial turn” through discussion of the conflicts and syntheses between chemical and indigenous ontologies of relationality. utilizing the feminist storytelling methodology adopted by donna haraway (2016) and drawing on the ontology-methodology of lauren tynan (2020), i tell the story of reactive nitrogen compounds as kin—in particular, my kin—and story my understanding of this element in relation to my other close kin as a white british woman: the imperial state, capitalism, and colonialism. angeliki balayannis and emma garnett describe chemical kinship as “a concept, an analytical tool, and a mode of relating. emerging through feminist and anticolonial work with chemicals, this particular notion of kinship involves a tentativeness towards making normative claims about chemicals because, like kin, these materials are never entirely good nor bad; they can be both enabling and harmful” (2020, 2). in this piece, i take this idea further, adopting chemical kinship as a practice, telling a story about a chemical in a method modeled on the way my kinship relations are made and remade by storytelling within the family group. this practice of feminist storytelling and kin recognition adopted in this paper is directly influenced by haraway (2016) and tynan (2020, 2021) and recognizes its origin in both wider indigenous ontologies and my own non-academic community learning. here, a kinship ontology-methodology (see tynan 2020) is based on the recognition that, one, reality is relational, rather than individual; two, that relationships require accountability and responsibility; and, three, that i cannot achieve accountability and responsibility without self-awareness and an explicit recognition of my own role in relation. thinking with kinship requires that i recognize not just relation but importantly myself in relation. kinship is not abstract. it concerns the relations that formed me, how they formed me, and how this formation performs certain conditions of possibility for those i relate to, and vice versa. points one and two above draw directly on tynan (2020). point three, though implicit in tynan's work, has an emphasis of my own, which comes from my understanding of relationality as a white, british woman. this approach engages with broader conversations on colonialism and ontology from a perspective that is neither (or both) “indigenous” nor (and) “white settler”—the dichotomy that usually structures conversations on colonialism and ontology, which are mostly written in territories subject to settler colonialism (e.g., liboiron 2021; moreton-robinson 2015). i therefore hope to bring an additional geographical—and therefore ontological, if we recognize land and territory as important contributors to the co-construction of reality—engagement with the feminist literature on colonialism and chemistry by telling a story about my situated relationship with the reactive nitrogen family of compounds. chemicals as kin kinship is relational: a common term for those we share kinship with is “our relations.” taking a kinship approach to a chemical element is therefore personal. through storytelling i make sense of a relation, react to it, change it, and am changed. in a family, stories are passed down, through oral testimony and physical affect, to make sense of collective identity (datta 2018). my stories are not limited to direct experience: i have stories about my great-great-grandmother that help me understand who i am, even though i was not there. just as kinship stories are necessarily subjective (my sister's story of my mother converges with mine, but is not exactly the same), so a kinship story about a chemical element is partial. yet as hearing my grandmother's understanding of my mother enrichens both kin relationships, my kinship storytelling of reactive nitrogen will hopefully, for the reader, perform the same function. in order to understand my storytelling, you should understand how i understand myself. i am a white british woman from a rural environment in northern england. i was constituted by my relationship with that environment, as were my ancestors—for something between 1,300 years (the oldest written record of my family) and 10,000 years (the estimated settling of the british isles). i was also constituted by a relationship with the wider world: the colonial and postcolonial spoils of the british empire; and the murder, exploitation, and oppression of faraway people and environments. the place i come from, where my maternal family have been as far back as written records go, is a rural area that was described as “partial waste” in the domesday book, meaning it is likely some of my ancestors were slaughtered or starved before being dispossessed when england was invaded in 1066. for generations after this, as members of the english working classes, my family were likely indentured agricultural laborers, toiling on land they had a deep relation to, and at one point did not consider property. they were expelled from this land entirely during the parliamentary enclosures of the nineteenth century. my paternal great-grandparents lived in the slums of manchester and wigan after the enclosures removed them from their land—a process driven by a demand for internal economic expansion, created by the wealth from slavery and imperialism. in the mills, they processed the cotton picked by generations of kidnapped and abused slaves, on the violently appropriated lands of native americans—people they did not build accountability to or relationships with, though their hands touched the same fibres, untied knots in bundles of cotton that thousands of miles away, never-met others tied. since being granted the right to vote in the early twentieth century, my family enjoyed relative stability and material plenty courtesy of the postwar consensus, the spoils of imperialism, and white privilege. this economic stability came from the wages of jobs in coal mines and oil fields, digging out the carbon to create climate change and destroy the lifeworlds of thousands of webs of sentient life. my local human-kinship group is regularly characterized by outsiders as having a “strong sense of community” and having been “left behind” by capitalism since the end of british heavy industry and the postwar consensus in the 1980s. this economic shift was a violent process, both structurally and physically, via the incursion of a militarized police force into our communities, events that dominated my childhood. these are the kinship relations, abusive and caring, that created my life. i was formally educated in the dominant western tradition of organic chemistry, continental theory, and linear history, though i was the first in my family (many of whom are skeptical of “book learning”) to go to university. i have a professional academic job and am therefore materially provided for through, and deeply complicit in reproducing, the political economic structure of colonial capitalism. i exist in a world characterized by environmental harms, social injustice, and—for me personally—plentiful access to food, loving relationships with human kin, a privileged position in an imagined racial and cultural hierarchy, and an absence of hunger. i am surrounded by a wilful societal refusal to own or recognize much of the above. i find the cultures of academia to lack humanity and accountability. this is the root of a deep ambivalence to the academy, where i often feel like an outsider in a system i cannot fully adapt to, because i do not fully approve of it, though i recognize it both allows for my material sustenance and, like my whiteness, provides me with immense privilege. i cannot disown the violent and brutal more-than-human patriarchs that have both traumatized and protected me, which continue to steer and uphold my everyday practices, and that sustain and advantage me: in this sense, with capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism and climate change, i am close kin. i am also, as the story will lay out below, close kin with reactive nitrogen. this story is not the full story of reactive nitrogen, but the story of how i understand it, which is characteristic of its relationship with me, and therefore my other more-than-human kin. it tells you as much about me as it does about it; and was formed, as family stories are, through stories from others i have relations with, piecemeal, added together to create a narrative that tells me something about myself. reactive nitrogen: kin that brings death and allows life reactive nitrogen (or nr) is the collective term for a family of nitrogenous compounds including ammonia (nh3), ammonium (nh4), nitrite (no2) and nitrate (no3), nitric oxide (no) and nitrous oxide (n2) which are interrelated and are constantly in flux in the environment (may and rector 2011). a key characteristic of nr species is that they support growth; nr is thus one of the most important chemical compounds in agriculture. i was told my first stories about nr a family of invisible shape-shifting elements, by environmental science—a topic i was driven to study at university due to a generalized sense of care about “the world” informed by media narratives of inequality, development, and environmental collapse (vogelaar, hale, and peat 2018). within this context, as someone who grew up in a rural environment, the ecological impacts of fertilizer had a particular resonance for me. this interest led to me working in a postdoctoral position looking at nutrient pollution from british farms (see cardwell and waterton 2019). from here, environmental stories about nr led me to care about its relations and effected a desire to be response-able (haraway 2016). environmental science taught me that, over the twentieth century, the metabolisms of earth's nitrogen cycle have doubled, an increase largely due to the invention of the industrial means to fix (or make reactive) inert nitrogen. this industrial innovation is understood as both a good and bad thing: ready availability of nr is the most important aspect of the reported successes of the “green revolution” that is considered to have supported human population growth and well-being since world war ii. the key role of nr in the “great acceleration”, vaclav smil (2004) argues, makes industrial n fixation the most significant invention of the twentieth century, way beyond the internet, television, or atom bomb. but nr overloading also has deleterious effects on marine ecosystems, leading to “dead zones” and killing coral reefs, destroying biodiversity, and accelerating species loss. reactive nitrogen species are one of the most serious causes of air pollution, the biggest damager of stratospheric ozone since chlorofluorocarbons (cfcs) (solomon 2021); and nitrous oxide, one species of nr is one of the three main chemical compounds implicated in climate change, with 298 times the atmospheric heat-trapping ability of co2 (ipcc 2007). reactive nitrogen is thus a significant pollutant: yet it feeds us. plants cannot grow without it and animals cannot live without it. it is not inherently toxic, but vital to life. even in the body, medical scientists call the effects of nr paradoxical, both cancerous and curative (galadari et al. 2017). the industrial production of nr further subverts the idea of chemicals as unnatural: industrially produced nr in the form of ammonia, is materially identical to its organic counterpart. the energy used in its production, however, is a significant contributor to climate change. the vast quantities of nr circulating the earth now make this one of the biggest anthropogenic impacts on earth's metabolisms. in absolute terms, anthropogenic emissions of carbon from fossil fuel combustion are less than 10 percent of the annual carbon uptake by photosynthesis. in comparison, human activities convert more nitrogen into reactive forms than all earth's terrestrial processes combined (rockström et al. 2009). as a chemical pollutant, nr species cannot be socially categorized as simply “unnatural” in the way microplastics or endocrine disruptors are (see critiques from liboiron 2021; shadaan and murphy 2020). as such, nr is impossible to categorize as either good or bad, natural or unnatural. both its benefits and harms are products of its easy relatability, and its effects are entirely dependent on where it is, and what it is relating to. reactive nitrogen defies ontologies of individualism and can only be understood in relation. the reactivity that makes it either a pollutant or a nutrient is relationally determined. the fundamental characteristic of the nr family is the way it relates. most of the air around us is nitrogen—about 80 percent of the composition, n2. atmospheric nitrogen, however, is stable and unreactive, its chemical bonds are remarkably strong. we breathe it in and breathe it straight out. we pass through it, and it passes through us. it is so inert its early names—azote, mephitic air—literally mean “no life.” it does not react (does relation require reaction, the response in response-ability?). and yet, in its reactive forms—the various nitrogen species in which those strong atmospheric bonds have been broken, and new compounds created that are ready to interrelate with other chemicals to make something new—nitrogen is life. it is key to development and growth in living organisms, a building block of protein and dna. it provides the energy for plants and animals to grow, but is also a powerful explosive, and has played a vital role in human warfare and state-sanctioned murder for centuries. the process by which nitrogen is made reactive and relatable is called fixation. in “nature,” nitrogen can only be fixed from inert “dead air” to a lively form that nurtures growth by lightning or by cyanobacteria. including, importantly, rhizobium bacteria, which fix nitrogen in symbiosis with the roots of certain plants. other plants and animals then rely on the nitrogen fixed by this symbiosis for growth. the most common nitrogen-fixing rhizomatic symbiosis is in the roots of legumes such as beans and clover: this is the reason for the traditional “three sisters” model, the cornerstone of agriculture for indigenous communities across mesoamerica. reactive nitrogen is a vital relational element in the interdependencies of the living web of life. according to environmental scientists, nr is “the stuff of life” (galloway and cowling 2002, 64), just as inert nitrogen is “no life” (holland 2020, 4919). across ancient civilizations, anywhere humans have adopted agriculture, whether given a name or not, the inherent vitality of nr means that people have sought it out—either by encouraging rhizobia and other cyanobacteria by inserting themselves into this multi-symbiosis, planting legumes or leaving ground “fallow” (kimmerer 2013); or through the recycling of nutrients from animal—including human—waste. as the supply of nr most commonly limits agricultural productivity, environmental scientist jeffrey leigh (2004) argues that, from the romans to the maya to the dynasties of ancient china, the supply of nr has determined the level of population and the quality of human life throughout history. unlike other key nutrients in plant growth, such as phosphorous and potash, which can be (and now primarily are) mined, nr is very hard to come by “naturally.” it cannot be provided via extractivism for mass application when linear productivity, rather than circular reciprocity, is the focus of agricultural methods, such as in capitalist plantation systems. it is always ephemeral. where potash and phosphorous can accumulate in soil, nr enters other relationships easily, making it quickly unavailable, so supply must be continuously replenished or land is exhausted. therefore, when new frontiers of agricultural accumulation are not readily available, nr is a fertilization priority. this ephemerality of easy relation is why so much nitrogen is industrially produced, and the nitrogen cycle so disrupted. justus von liebig is often credited as the father of organic chemistry and thus the father of the industrial agricultural system (brock 2002). liebig's key contribution to the world food system was the identification of chemicals, particularly nitrogen, as the most important limiting factor in crop growth: this knowledge has shaped agricultural science and practice immeasurably since the 1840s, and the recent interest in soil in science and technology studies—from scholars such as bruno latour (2014), and maría puig de la bellacasa (2015)—can best be understood as a reaction to the dominance of liebig's “chemical” model of plant nutrition, and the subsequent dismissal of the importance of humus. shortly after liebig isolated the role of chemicals in plant growth, the first ever scientific “field trial” was set up in 1856 to test liebig's claims, particularly about nitrogen, at the rothamsted research station in england (aulie 1974)—an important benchmark in the development of science. rothamsted's research paved the way for the industrial fixation of nitrogen in germany in 1913. these are the foundations of agricultural science and its close kin, industrial agriculture. in the current global food system, these are the relations that feed me and give me life, while having deleterious effects on people and planet. these relations also shape my experience of the english countryside and connection to place. the “improvement” of the land, through applications of various fertilizers and crop rotations, was the political justification for the enclosure that left my ancestors unable to feed themselves autonomously and reliant on capital and the state for their lives. saltpetre, sovereignty, and state power in england in my efforts to get to know nr many environmental science sources mention as an aside the other primary use of nr beyond fertilization: as an explosive. these ostensibly separate uses, though rarely entangled by disciplinary science, cannot be disconnected if i want to relate to nitrogen as kin, rather than transactionally, focusing purely on the way it serves a particular need. to investigate, i left the environmental realm to get to know nitrogen as guns as well as butter. and as both guns and butter, nitrogen is entangled within the production of my life. even though nitrogen wasn't isolated and named (made individual in the model of mechanist capitalist ontology) until the eighteenth century, and its importance for life and growth wasn't isolated until liebig in the nineteenth, the relational affinities of materials that were primarily composed of what would later be called nr were prized as fertilizer and weapons before the emergence of those chemical ontologies. one of these phenomena, a species of the sociomaterial assemblage that is nr is saltpetre, also called “niter,” a form of crystallized, efflorescent potassium nitrate deposits, which form when decaying organic material (such as dung or corpses) accumulate in a dry enough place that the nr does not too readily relate and change, therefore remaining available to make new life. under these conditions, this niter can either form naturally, if undisturbed over long periods of time, or be given a helping hand to purify through various acts of processing. for centuries, the death and dung of niter was the most concentrated form in which nr could be found in britain (robertson 2016). niter, or saltpetre, as i'll refer to it from now on, has been generally ignored in human-focused history, but has been written about extensively by david cressy. cressy (2013) describes how in the early modern period, saltpetre was prized for fertilization and explosive properties, but no one understood how it was made. “i cannot tell how to be resolved, to say what thing properly it is,” said elizabethan theorist peter whitehorne, “except it seemeth it have the sovereignty and quality of every element” (quoted in cressy 2013, 14). for early scientists, nr messed with the ontological order. saltpetre was thus associated with the divine, and francis bacon called it the “spirit of the earth.” “it is vegetable, animal and mineral,” puzzled robert boyle in the seventeenth century. it was considered to have “hermaphroditical” qualities, impossible to classify, “universally diffused through all the elements” (cressy 2013, 14). the mystical element-that-is-all-the-elements, with its queer properties of life and death, was prized for fertilization, but most important was making gunpowder. gunpowder is mostly saltpetre, with a small mix of brimstone (which is sulphur) and coal. and in the early modern period of colonization, war and statecraft, gunpowder was very important, which made saltpetre the philosopher's stone of power. historians' controversial “military revolution” was a period of radical change in military organization and technology that was attributed as necessitating major changes in government: the rise of the use of firearms led to changes in military organization, which enabled, and required, a concentration of power. to borrow from historian michael roberts (1956), the modern art of war made possible—and necessary—the creation of the modern state. there's a big interest in gunpowder in military history because of its significance for statecraft, but very little about the practical materialities it entailed. as cressy points out, “military historians' arguments about the timing, content and consequences of the 'military revolution' that produced the modern nation state, address the cost and performance of cannonry, siegecraft and gun-equipped armies, but tend to take the logistics of firepower for granted” (2011, 77). historians only talk about gunpowder as a driver of changed military tactics. not about how it's made, or where these nascent states got the raw materials from. and the gunpowder that led to the formation of the modern state was made from nr in the form of saltpetre. at the time, no one really understood what saltpetre was, but they knew where to find it: dry and dirty ground, dusty places of old life, such as caves or tombs. it could accumulate naturally over time in very arid areas, or be forced from earth where the dung and urine of beasts (or people) has accumulated in a dry and sheltered spot. at this time in england, a wet land where the keeping of animals in the home was common, and water-based sewage systems were not used, these conditions were easier to find than they might be today, but only in the most intimate of domestic spaces. the huge strategic importance of gunpowder in early modern england meant sovereigns needed nr in the form of saltpetre, which led to the state designation of “saltpetre men”: soldiers who had the universal right to invade any property, home, or even church (though this caused some controversy) to dig up dried-up old urine, bones, and dung. historical records show that for approximately two hundred years between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, english people were plagued in their homes by saltpetre gathering, and this “grief and discontentment” and “great grievance and disturbance” was a significant problem for those in power, who needed “to provide for her majesty's stores by all means possible” regardless of “damage, intrusion, discommodity, and distress” (cressy 2013, 68, 68, 66, 66). according to a report on the king's saltpetre men published in 1630, they dug “in all places without distinction, as in parlours, bedchambers, threshing floors and malting houses and shops; yea, god's own house they have not forborne, but have digged in churches, hallowed chapels and churchyards, tearing men's bones and ashes out of their graves to make gunpowder of” (quoted in cressy 2013, 102-103). they respected not season, digging in breeding time in dove houses, working sometimes a month together, without respect to harvest time, in barns and in malting houses, when green malt is on the floor; and in bedchambers, “placing their tubs by bedsides of the old and sick, impotent and diseased, of women with their children sucking at their breasts, and even of women in childbed and of sick persons lying on their deathbeds” (quoted in cressy 2013, 103). i do not know if my ancestors, who at this time must have been tenant peasantry, were personally visited by the saltpetre men in the early modern period: the significance of gunpowder for the english war machine, and the sheer volumes of niter necessary, suggest it's likely. the distress and disruption caused by collection was so high that it was suggested only houses of “inferior persons” be raided, so “the better sort not be meddled with” (contemporaneous source, quoted in cressy, 2013, 67). i see here the lives of the poor bound up in the increasing power of an intrusive state, as mine still is; a relationship that is key to the stories and values i have been given, and the patterns and phenomena of my everyday life. cressy's story of nr's relationship with gunpowder tells me something new and important about the intimacy and oppression of my ancestral relation with the state, and how these historic palimpsests affect my other relations, with science, capital, and power. in the introduction to biopower in the will to knowledge, michel foucault states, “for a long time, one of the characteristics of sovereign power was the right to decide life or death...the sovereign evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring” (1978, 135). on the introduction of gunpowder into western europe, sovereign rights to saltpetre extraction were quickly established—giving the state ultimate power over nr. power in this instance, as foucault describes, was a right of seizure: of things, times, bodies; and at the root of it was the threat of death. not only did the state have “sovereign right” over saltpetre, this power extended to the right to procure it anywhere, regardless of the privacy or personal boundaries of the lower classes; thus the oppressive intrusions of the saltpetre men. foucault's sovereign right over death, then, had a material as well as a judicial aspect, which focused on gunpowder. my attempt to understand nitrogen as my kin brings intimate bodily materialities and practices to foucault's theories. it is a spatial and relational account of foucault's analysis of power: the saltpetre men at the door, digging up the bedroom floor around the laboring mother, disturbing the household doves, stealing your grandmother's shit. a resentment of the intrusion of the state into the most intimate of domestic spaces, much like the resentment at the intrusive practices of state policing during the 1984 miners' strike that marked the atmospheres of my childhood (j. gilmore 2019), which existed alongside very real awareness of dependency on that same intrusive state, after the jobs in the mines were gone. this combination of threat, intrusion, and dependency are the spatial and material practices of state power in england, during both my childhood and the saltpetre-gathering era of the witch trials, when many of the old and sick and “women with their children sucking at their breasts” (cressy 2013, 103) were executed based on unfounded accusations of unnatural power (federici 2004). nitrogen and imperial power the quest for reactive nitrogen, for fertilization and gunpowder, played a huge role in the expansive activities of the sovereign. reactive nitrogen was key in the imperative for, and means of, empire. as well as military uses, gunpowder was consumed in large quantities in the practices of colonialism. by miners and engineers, hunters and fur traders, slave traders and settler-farmers clearing land. its trade was expansive, and saltpetre was one of the first globalized commodities. european prospectors explored the world looking for saltpetre in the americas, africa, and the east. the intimate invasions of the saltpetre men in england only stopped after saltpetre began to be imported in huge quantities from india in the seventeenth century, which dwarfed the domestic supply and transformed the saltpetre economy. the india trade created a boom in nitrogen availability comparable to that of anthropogenically created nr in the twentieth century. the import and export of this saltpetre was key in the development of the east india company, and its political relationships in both india and europe. as india became the most important source of nr access to nr became the key to “the strength of war” and necessary for “the defence and safety of the realm” (frey 2009, 509). in the words of historian james frey, “the british takeover of bengal in 1757 secured [east india] company control and permitted the monopolization of the saltpeter trade. the significance of these events cannot be underestimated. by seizing bengal, the british exerted mastery over 70 percent of the world's saltpeter production during the latter part of the eighteenth century” (509). the british state had acquired a monopoly over the biggest known nrstores in the world, which literally provided the material means—the firepower—for imperial expansion; an expansion that both dispossessed and enriched my family and tied us into an abusive web of relations with millions around the world. nitrogen and biopower as my relational genealogy of nitrogen comes into the nineteenth century, i will return to foucault and the birth of biopower. foucault writes about the shift in power at this time towards biopolitics; from the ability to “take life or let live” to that to “foster or disallow life”: “the old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life” (1978, 139). foucault situates this transformation in the “explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of biopower” (139). biopower is broken down into, first, the discipling and optimization of the body as a machine—the increase in its usefulness, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls—and second, the regulation of the species body, the population—births and mortality, interventions in life expectancy. in the nineteenth century, there was a marked and corresponding shift in the discursive preoccupations with nr: with increased interest in controlling access to nr not as weaponry, but as fertilizer, and its role in the constitution both of ideal bodies and ideal populations. parish records show how, during this era, my ancestors begin to be “improved” by state education, just as the land they once resided on is being “improved” by agricultural inputs. they are still poor, though now many are living in urban slums and working in mills and on railway construction, rather than in agriculture. now the men can write their names on their marriage certificates, even as many of the women still mark with an x. at this time, the main source of nr to fertilize british fields and increase yield to feed the landless shifts from india to south america, leading to imperialism and “nitrate wars” over desert deposits and dry bird shit in chile and peru (clark and foster 2009). influenced by the role of nitrogen in growth as identified by liebig in the 1840s, and no doubt influenced by its role in imperial expansion, nitrogen, as a protein, begins to be presented as a key constitutive of the optimal, useful, and morally right human body in the late nineteenth century. arnaud page (2018), a historian of the british empire, shows how nr and access to it, was used to rank and categorize the peoples of the imperial world. lots of nitrogen in your diet and body made you savage, wild, and turbulent; a lack of it led to mild, tractable, and lethargic temperament. the “wheatand meat-” eating nations of western europe were considered highly nitrogenous and therefore vigorous, whereas “rice eaters” were weak and indolent, because they lacked the life given by nitrogen. the logics of white supremacy, and their dynamics in my life, are elucidated by this relationship between science, state, and empire. the bread of my mill-working paternal ancestors in manchester, the land worked by my agricultural laborer maternal ancestors on the farms of yorkshire, the nutrients that formed my body were supplied by the imperial forces of white supremacy, debt peonage, war, and death in india, chile, and peru. fertilization was so closely tied to science, racism, and colonialism that in 1898 william crookes, president of the british association for the advancement of science, argued in his inaugural address that access to nr was the key to the survival of the “great caucasian race” (page, 2016, 386) because “civilized nations” relied on wheat for their staple food and were threatened with starvation by rising population and shrinking arable land. this perception of scarcity was a massive preoccupation among british elites at the time. the productivity of land had to be increased by finding new sources of nitrogen that, ideally, did not rely on international trade, and therefore competition and war. for the british elite, “in the fight between the west and the rest of the world, the only salvation for the 'bread-eaters of the world' was nitrogen” (page 2016, 386). nitrogen and the age of industrial farming after centuries of obsession with acquiring “naturally” produced nr the industrial fixation of nitrogen from air, through the hugely energy intensive haber-bosch process, was invented in germany in 1913, under the imperative of war. this imperative was both the power to create life, through fertilization that wasn't dependent on limited resources in the global south, and power to force death, through the ready production of munitions. it was celebrated as “the greatest victory which the chemist has won in the fight...against nature” (page 2016, 390). it also created the technoscientific foundations for chemical warfare and nazi genocide, and formed the basis for the gas that asphyxiated multiple members of jewish haber's family (charles 2011). haber's ability to fix nr gave life and took life. he won the nobel prize, and his wife committed suicide in protest over her husband's chemical interventions. the anthropogenic fixation of nitrogen is a huge industrial process, and in the war-torn early years of the twentieth century, was adopted enthusiastically by states worldwide for its vital importance in weaponry: the great acceleration of nitrogenous geoengineering. when peacetime came, government priorities were developing non-military uses of all the nr these industrial facilities had the capacity to produce, to keep them working in case of another war. this meant a switch from weaponry to fertilizer. the incentivization, through promise and force, of the uptake of this new commodity of life and death was imperative to the green revolution, which remade agricultural systems worldwide: moving us away from a life built by haraway's beloved compost (see page 2019), and towards a strictly chemical, high-input, industrial-capitalist relation with the world—what vandana shiva (1991) calls the violence of the green revolution. shiva (2004) describes how the combined industrialization, chemicalization, and capital restructuring of green-revolution agriculture led to thousands of farmer suicides in india. one of the most popular forms of suicide among farmers across the global south is the ingestion of paraquat, an nrbased herbicide (see widger 2018). miles away from india, in a small village in yorkshire, one of my own kin uses the compensation from an industrial accident to return to the land he was dispossessed from, buying himself a farm. unable to stay afloat, he took his life by drinking the paraquat he'd bought to make it more productive. ontological politics and kinship relations how do all these connected stories frame how i understand nitrogen as my kin, and what does this mean for how i understand myself? science suggests the agricultural system is killing the planet. massive increases in nitrogen are leading to ecological devastation, especially considering, as matt huber (2017) points out, how resource, energy, and emission intensive the nitrogen fertilizer industry is. but the “nitrogen problem” isn't just a problem, it's also a solution. it keeps food cheap and readily available, and it helps keep us alive, operating within a particular high-chemical-input, low-labor-input agricultural system that suits capitalism and private property. smil (2004) estimates that without industrial nitrogen, our food production would drop so significantly that 50 percent of the world's population would not be alive today, as they could not be fed. taking these scientific generalizations otherwise, this means 50 percent of the protein in my body is made up from war, imperialism, and climate change. yet organic nr and chemical nr are not materially discrete, beyond the method of their production. they behave exactly alike in the environment. there's no meaningful distinction between the synthetic and the natural. reactive nitrogen isn't a toxicant. it kills some, and it gives life to others. this is not simply about death, but too much life. who gets to live and who doesn't? who eats and who suffers? it's important to recognize that this nitrogen sustains me as it kills its victims. as discussed above, the definition of kinship used in this paper draws on the work of tynan (2020, 2021), but i also want to reference here kim tallbear (2019). according to tallbear, kinship is an ontology and mode of being in relation, based on “material connectedness among many generations: those whose bodies may now/still exist within organismically defined understandings of life, those entities that do not meet that definition, and other bodies whose materiality has been transferred back to the earth and out into that web of relation, or whose bodies are not yet formed of already existing matter” (25-26). tallbear's definition speaks closely to the web of life and death these nr stories describe, the connectedness across time and space, and the mattering of nitrogenous kin. it is this relationality that trying to understand nr evokes for me. but what does it mean for me, personally, to draw on these relationships? meaningful critiques have been made of the appropriation of “kinship” by white or settler academics, with these terms often used interchangeably. max liboiron, for example, describes white-settler academics talking about kinship as “hella creepy” (2021, 110), and zoe todd warns that “when anthropologists and other assembled social scientists sashay in and start cherry-picking parts of indigenous thought that appeal to them without engaging directly in (or unambiguously acknowledging) the political situation, agency, legal orders and relationality of both indigenous people and scholars, we immediately become complicit in colonial violence” (2016, 18). as a “working-class” white british woman, when i read work by indigenous scholars and recognize aspects of my own belief system and experience, it is difficult to know how to approach the politics of my recognition. i cannot distance myself from whiteness and the unearned privilege it bestows, which i greatly benefit from, but i also do not fit completely into the identity of whiteness that settler-colonial territorial literatures describe. this is particularly true when it comes to kinship ontologies, which i recognize as a significant part of my own relational becoming before my socialization into the dominant ontologies of the academy. as capitalism and colonialism progressed “abroad,” a subsection of british people was dispossessed of land and political rights “at home” through enclosures and the strengthening of state power (greer 2012). many of them used the escape hatch of colonialism to flee their dispossession by becoming the foot soldiers of imperialism: this ready supply of desperate (and i would add, traumatized) settlers is, according to historian james hawes, the key to the success of britain's empire: though france “was no less keen on empire...it never had large numbers of landless peasants so desperate that they would risk their lives in barely-discovered countries on the far side of the world” (2020, 123). yet some of the dispossessed stayed put, creating a group that, though racially white, were historically denied the personhood granted under british capitalism by property ownership and recognition by the state (macpherson 2010; moreton-robinson 2015). a key collective response to this denial was to find value not in property, but in relationships (skeggs 2011); meaning, as the ethnographic work of beverley skeggs describes, many in the working class of england—including those who are white—have a fundamentally different political ontology than that of liberal capitalism, based on relationality rather than individualism, and placing the highest value on loyalty, care, affection, respect, and reciprocity, rather than individual property or achievement (skeggs and loveday 2012). although these political subjects were later granted the privileging property of whiteness, and are deeply complicit in racism, intersectional aspects of identity mean that for many a relational ontology remains, although it is as distinct from indigenous thought as it is from dominant western individualism. thinking with kinship is a familiar register to me, though one that exists within the context of relationships that i recognize as toxic and abusive, both for myself and for others. although capitalism and poverty are as deeply racialized in england as they are elsewhere around the world (see edmiston, begum and kataria 2022), the poverty rate for whites in the uk (19%) is much closer to that of african americans (19.5%) than whites (8.2%) in the us (edmiston, begum, and kataria 2022; shrider et al. 2021). there are “significant overlap in everyday lived experiences” of “the 'white working class' and 'ethnic or migrant working class'” in england (snoussi and mompelat 2019, 4). as faiza shaheen describes, “the british empire meant that a global working class was put to work. from the indentured labourers working in sugar cane fields in fiji, to those working in the mills in wigan, and all of those enslaved across the empire—all contributed to the wealth of the landed gentry and indeed all were oppressed by a system of power that privileged a handful at the top” (quoted in snoussi and mompelat 2019, 3). like the chemicals described by balayannis and garnett (2020), the british white working class can never be “entirely good nor bad.” we are tools of colonialism, beneficiaries and victims. we benefit from our whiteness, but our ways of being do not entirely align with the disciplinary logics of white supremacy. this paradox is something i feel deeply as an interlocutor in academia, a social system that was not designed for my participation (crew 2021; ricket and morris 2021). the “intellectual elite” are most associated by the kin i grew up with as actors in state power and oppression, authoritative people that serve the interest of the establishment, who cannot be trusted to relate to others with openness, equality, and respect. the close historical relationship between dispossession, capital, and science in english history is a key factor in the development of that perception, and a likely driver of my interest in the critiques made by feminist technoscience and my identification with anti-colonial critique. kinship, science, and the state my kinships mean that for me, the role of chemistry, and dominant science (liboiron 2021) as my primary means of being-with an ephemeral element, also trouble my wider relations. i can call these phenomena “nitrogen” and describe their harms statistically, because of the same colonial and oppressive structures that created those harms. what does that relationship mean? on one hand, thinking with chemistry demands a process oriented and relational ontology that is promising as a pragmatic epistemology for relating to, and being within, the world—such as found in the work of isabelle stengers (2016). yet as queer theorist jordy rosenberg (2014) points out, in chemical materialism, the atomic can become a depoliticized “sublime miniature” at which an “ontological wonder” can bloom without threat to neoliberal settler colonialism or financialized capital accumulation. at the level of the molecular, rosenberg argues that vital materialism becomes a radical bewilderment without radicality, a fanaticism without political affect. in a historicized sense, there are two sides to this chemical-molecular coin. on one side, it acts as a radical rejoinder to the non-relational, individuated autonomy of object-oriented ontologies (ooo), a logic closely tied to algorithmic late capitalism, as pointed out by alexander galloway (2013), who reminds us in his scathing critique of ooo that any ontology is political. following latour, galloway asks, “what would an object-oriented democracy look like?...these democracies already exist. their ugly sheen covers our beaches and deltas. their object-oriented infrastructure skims off unpaid surplus-value from living networks. they provide the communications channels in and out of the maquiladoras” (363). chemical ontologies move us beyond this form of relation by taking as true that relations of discursivity and materiality are circular and intra-active (barad 2007). and yet...it is perhaps in the focus on the chemical that this “ontological turn” differs most sharply from the indigenous philosophies it borrows so heavily from (todd 2016). so much of the environmental crisis compels us, as ordinary citizens, to “think chemically”—understanding our carbon footprint, invisible leaching from microplastics, endocrine disruptors people pee out with their contraceptive pill, the ozone effects of the cfcs humming away in our fridges. the earth-conscious citizen is the chemically conscious citizen. the official line is that to “tackle” the end of the world as we know it, everyone must become a chemical subject, and our awareness must get more molecular. but did i relate better to land as kin before i knew about liebig's chemicals, even if i had less of a grasp on the scientific principles of maximizing yield? academic science and industrial agriculture cannot be separated. and though i can do interesting ontological things with chemicals, if my prime aim in knowledge generation is “saving the world,” my wider web of relations means i'm not entirely convinced i should. as someone who moved relatively late into the academic order of knowledge and power, after having only a very rudimentary basis of “book” education for the first twenty-six years of my life, it's hard for me to separate the relations between agricultural science and my other problems with close-yet-abusive kin: capital, colonialism, and the state. as such, my exploration of my relationship with nitrogen leaves me philosophically drawn to the native american epistemologies laid out by brian yazzie burkhart (2004), which stress that there's a moral act in accepting that people should not speak or act regarding certain things, and cannot speak or act regarding others—that knowledge is not prepositional, and if the world rests on the back of a turtle, the most ethical option is maybe just to embrace that it's turtles all the way down. if i'm going to get chemical in my kinships, perhaps i should face an uncomfortable truth: so far, the master's tools have not worked so well at breaking down the master's house (lorde 2003)—even in the hands of the master's children. maybe there are other, better ways to be kin with the life-and-death force now called “nitrogen” than through chemistry. so how can i live with, and understand, my kin? as someone who cannot deny my relationships, and how they both provide for me and abuse myself and others; as an academic concerned with relations with the social, the ethical, and the philosophical, how can i understand the chemical kin i'm living with and living through, as political and economic agents, and be reflexive of my practical, intra-personal and intergenerational relationships with them? the truth is, i don't (yet) know. with this contribution, i am following ruth wilson gilmore's instruction that we recognize “quantum physics' key insight that the observer and the observed are in the same critical field” (2022, 96). i am trying to make sense of the complex phenomena that are my many and varied relations, and my role in them. it is from this ontological position that i understand my relationship with colonialism and science; and my other relationships shape my understanding of, and storytelling about, nras my kin. i'm therefore making two related interventions: one is about nitrogen, and relationships between humans and chemicals. the other is about positionality in relationality, and how i make sense of the interdependencies of stories, and therefore the co-construction of my own realities with those of others. what are the different emancipatory and ethical potentials of how these are woven together? i wanted to share a story about nitrogen, to affect how you relate to it. but through telling that story i inevitably invite you to relate to me. maybe, in response, you could tell a story of your own? any experience or thought this story might resonate with, criticisms that you have, lights shone on my blind spots. then, through telling and listening, we will better understand ourselves and each other. carefully, sometimes painfully, we will participate in a process of relation, and see how life unfolds as we co-produce our world. acknowledgments i would like to thank anne pollock, joanne muzak and two anonymous peer reviewers for their contributions to this article. i'd also like to thank claire waterton for reading and commenting on an earlier version, and for lots of generative discussions about fertilizer and nutrients. and john law, for similar fertilizing-fertilizer talk. i thank my colleagues at lec and ntu for making my academic life a comfortable one, as well as sarah hughes, deborah dixon, and heather mclean. i thank my family and all the people who have imparted wisdom that has influenced me—particularly laurie fisher, sarah kozaczek, eve 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https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740211029287. vogelaar, alison e., brack w. hale, and alexandra peat, eds. 2018. the discourses of environmental collapse: imagining the end. new york: routledge. widger, tom. 2018. “suicides, poisons and the materially possible: the positive ambivalence of means restriction and critical-critical global health.” journal of material culture 23 (4): 396-412. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183518799525.     author bio emma cardwell is a lecturer in economic geography at lancaster university.     special section for careful slugs: caring for unknowing in cs (computer science)     ren loren britton independent researcher hello@lorenbritton.com   helen v. pritchard fhnw university of applied sciences and arts northwestern switzerland university of plymouth helen.pritchard@fhnw.ch     abstract careful slugs are metaphors that speculatively care for diverse practices within and alongside computer science. in this image-text paper we wonder with cs (careful slugs)––the materiality and metaphor that they generate as they encounter computational infrastructures, digital design, and interfaces. through queer playfulness and promiscuous metaphorical practice, we propose cs as an opening metaphor for cs (computer science) departments where the hardened muscular lines of models and predatory based solutionisms beckon some defensive slime. as those that traverse ever-shifting and undone grounds, cs (careful slug) emerges from a critical disability studies perspective. we outline to practice, cs (careful slug) is to practice a slow “soft gooey”; to shield using protective mucous layers; to make chemical binds sticky enough to hold in-place inconclusively yet with possibilities of lubricating accountability. we invite you to sink with us into soft gooey worldings of slug-imaginings not to overburden the slug but to speculate how metaphors, might contribute to trans*feminist technoscience, accessibility, and cs (computer science) concerns.     keywords trans*feminist technoscience, disability accessibility, computer science, critters, creative practice, experimental design     introduction: metaphors as speculative praxis in and for cs in this text we wonder, what it could mean to practice for cs? through queer metaphorical meaning-making practice, we propose cs (the acronym for computer science) be replaced as an indeterminate acronym cs (in which c and s are replaced with metaphors) inside and outside computer science departments. in our work with cs we practice alongside fred moten’s concept of cs (chance and scandal) and learn from it within cs (computer science) as a process of unknowing and unlearning. moten writes, “indeterminacy doesn’t ground freedom or equality…rather, they are part of a complex field of scandal and chance, wherein the very idea of ground remains to be retheorized" (2017, 38). as computer science researchers we engage scandalous metaphors to break through established grounds of cs (computer science)––as an undoing so that diverse practices might flourish as part of a complex field of cs (chance and scandal). we propose that we need more metaphors for practices of: scandal and enjoyment, friendships, refusals, inaction, mucus membranes, hums, modes of survival, modes of non/commitment, queering damage (pritchard et al. 2020), namings, cruising (muñoz 2009), feelings, pockets, tooling up and down (melt 2020), oozing, stimming (scientist stims, n.d.), reading (smilges 2021), dreaming, writing (brown 2021), making, smelling, rhythms and flows (gumbs 2018), tunings (gabrys 2016), cusps, insensibilities (yusoff 2013), and wayward practice (hartman 2019). our work on cs emerges out of the cusps of computer science that code, tear, and transform the edges of the discipline towards otherwise relations. we have worked with collaborators romi ron morrison and eric snodgrass in a workshop series called oracle(s) on similar questions that center black feminist poetry as key to imagine computing otherwise. these workshops have taken place at acm fat* (fairness accountability and transparency [in machine learning]) conference in 2020; futures otherwise as part of the alt_cph copenhagen biennale in 2020; and another futures otherwise workshop with the haus der kulturen der welt, berlin, also in 2020. in addition, we held a workshop at the 2020 easst+4s conference titled maintaining cs (chance and scandal). in all of this work that we are invited to do, in and outside of cs spaces and conferences we bring in critical and aesthetic practices that intervene within and yet persistently remain outside of what is thought of as cs (computer science). our work of practicing for “the future we need” requires questioning the forms and formats of interventions that seek to remake the violent realities of dominant cs (computer science)––that we live within and struggle amidst. the violent realities and histories of computer science that we refer to include the way that computation normalizes, optimizes, and makes operational through computation colonial and eugenic modes such as sorting, separating, categorizing, segregating––reliant on hardened categories and universalisms (amaro 2019; benjamin 2019; pritchard et al. 2020). in a move of unknowing this work of cs centers speculation as a practice that refuses technocratic solutionism to question the temporalities that mandate production, progress, and normate presence. in this paper as a speculative practice of working with metaphor, we propose to replace cs (computer science) with cs (careful slugs), forthcoming could be cs (cushions and stargazing), cs (crying sabotage), and/or cs (chancer scientist). we propose that the metaphors of careful slugs might create possibilities for new kinds of work in computer science. possibilities in which unknowing itself become disoriented, disassembled, and undone in its conventional forms (cf. jasbir puar, in mcruer and johnson 2014). working with slowing down and practicing with less immediately evident questions for normative computer science, cs (careful slugs) speculative fictions might help us to ask questions about anti-ableist practices, anti-racist practices, and otherwise metaphor practices. attending to interdependence, slowness, centering with intention and lubricated accountability (mingus 2019). careful slugs help us to ask: who is this creating accessibility for? where is alt text used? who is privileged in this space? where is a readable font used? who is explicitly welcomed into this space? who does this serve? how does this work dismantle white supremacy? how careful can careful slug be? we invite you to speculate how careful slugs might be called upon when beginning to design a community infrastructure, and/or developing a queer operating system, and/or designing as crip technoscientists. we pursue this work as white trans*gender, queerfeminist, and disabled practitioners in the name of the multiple flourishings that are ongoing within cs (community successes) that are committed to disability justice (sins invalid 2016), racial justice (black lives matter, n.d.), and trans*feminist praxis. a flourishing such as articulated by alexis shotwell (after haraway) "to name the contingent, without-guarantees, partially shared world that recognizes both ethical entanglement and irreducible difference" (2016, 155). we follow robert mcruer and merri lisa johnson’s cripistemological framework which attends to “the places where bodily edges and the categorical distinctions blur or dissolve'' (2014, 149–69). through working with metaphor, we generate a series of speculative fictions for cs––careful slugs stories that reconfigure relations and introduce scandals and chances into computer science, design, and sts processes that might lead to other sorts of project plans, research questions, and technical inquiries.   for cs cs (careful slugs) has everything to do with cs (computer science) and cs (committed survival). cs (careful slugs) is not an event or critical break after which new standards are established. cs (chance and scandal) can be trained for with the commitment towards undoing another source of oppression. cs (careful slugs) can be a form of failure less closely tied to action. cs (chance and scandal) helps to set up an expanded gestural repertoire of “how” and “what” and “to do.” cs (careful slugs) can be resourced. cs is an indeterminate acronym [[computer science], [chance and scandal], [composition and struggle], [complexity and space], [committed survival], [care and shelter], [chocolate and strawberries], [cushions and stargazing], [collective strategies], [careful slugs], [cut and scale], [collapsing species], [chancer scientist], [cohabitation and sharing], [conditions and story], [crying sabotage], [collective suffering]].   figure 1. this image is a screenshot from our article “cs field manual,” (pritchard and britton 2020) published by the kunsthalle osnabrück. in this work we laid out five steps for working with cs, including “conjuring the question,” “parsing the expression,” “craving the practice,” “non-equivalencies of cs_practice,” and “shifting grounds.” the authors would like to note that if they would re-publish this cs field manual now they would work with less ocular-centric language and modes of sharing, undoing our own implicit ableisms remains our ongoing praxis.   in reaching towards scandals that are chancy, overwhelming, and less closely tied to action, we configure cs as materiality and as metaphor. we do this to account for, unsettle, take responsibility for, and remake dominant cs (computer science) as it currently “is”—a field built on colonial and imperial violences. we can understand cs (computer science) as reliant on “a one-world world” that materializes through computation “as a figure of domination and extraction, as well as exclusion and marginalization, even as it promises universality” (gabrys 2022, 8). these violent extractivist practices not only work on ableist and racist assumptions of what bodies are (see rocha and snelting 2022) but, by operationalizing them and providing the conditions for logistical, population, and military control of people and resources (aouragh at al. 2020). aided and funded by a tight coupling of technocracy and technosolutionism which controls the world through ownership (acquired by violent impositions) of infrastructure (aouragh and chakravartty 2016). these violences are hardened into the field, which continuously uphold and stand in for what sylvia wynter describes as “universal généralisant”: the unquestionable reason, value, and authority that is the illusion of all colonial constructs (1989). cs (careful slugs) works to destroy these multiplying unquestionable constructs. an example of this universalizing move when it intersects with the interests of hyperscale companies gathered under gafam/gama,1 batx,2 fa(a)ng,3 mamaa4 is m$ta's (formerly f$c$book) new world-building project, the m$tav$rse, which requires non-disabled people to wear vr glasses to gain access to work, life, and hanging out with their colleagues and friends. eyecontact becomes a prerequisite way for allistic (non-autistic) conditioning in the m$tav$rse release videos which portray the metaverse as “the future” and the way that a universal “we” will access and spend time with each other in the cloud––a resource-hungry and data-intensive infrastructure. “a future,” which as we describe elsewhere, is only made possible through the extraction of precious metals, the depletion of communities, and standardization of spacetime by a powerful consortium (see pritchard et al. 2020). destroying the established grounds of computer science and its interdependencies with hyperscale big tech infrastructure is part of our work on cs. following cs as a "metaphor offers an (entwined material and imagined) future that has not arrived and the future we live and have already lived through … as sites of struggle and liberation and joy!" (mckittrick 2021). “for cs” helps us to practice for the near future where indeterminacy, playfulness, racial, and disability justice and non-technical expertise make inroads into computer science; where this work flourishes, though this future is not yet here (muñoz 2009). we embrace moten’s call for scandal and chance where the grounds of what is possible is available to be reformulated and speculated towards.   metaphors and/as breach this paper is indebted to the work of black expressive cultures on metaphor, as katherine mckittrick notes the ways in which they attend to science in their work. informed by mckittrick, poet alexis pauline gumbs and writer adrienne maree brown, we attempt to notice the violences of speciesism, ableism, racism, and as mckittrick says, breach it (2021, 1) to reconfigure practices of science and technology. mckittrick outlines the powerful history of black expressive cultures and the use of metaphors in breaching that break through gaps in walls, barriers, and surfaces of the structurally violent world that we are in. rather than only noticing the practices of technoscience and remaking it for better worlds, we call for queer playfulness and promiscuous metaphorical practice. careful slugs experiments towards practices that breach the two positions that are currently validated within computer science (cs) (and that we ourselves are part of and that fund our lives): affirmative solutionism, where computational flows are assumed to be able to be reformulated towards “fairness” through increased representation and technocracy (such as “data feminism,” “cs for good,” or the conference facct on fairness, accountability and transparency), or refusal without plurality, where decentring technology results in a commitment to interventions that do not involve any type of computing practice or the development of critical access technologies otherwise. we wish instead for cs to be an opening metaphor even as we write this from within cs (computer science) departments where the hardened muscular lines of models and predatory based solutionisms beckon some defensive slime. as unfolds in the speculative practices that follow, cs (careful slugs) is to practice soft gooey, to shield using protective mucous layers, to make chemical binds sticky enough to hold in place inconclusively (mckittrick 2006) yet with possibilities of lubricating accountability.   cs careful slugs in this paper we pick up cs (careful slugs) as one of the cs metaphors, from the “cs field manual" section “operation for cs practices” (see figure 1), and develop it as a situated and speculative practice that makes interventions into the “how,” “why,” and what “to do” when approaching computational work or working in cs (computer science). we speculate with cs (careful slugs)––the materiality and metaphor that they generate as they encounter computational infrastructures and interfaces. rather than work within paradigms that reinforce cs as refusal without plurality or affirmative solutionism, cs (careful slugs) emerges from a critical disability studies perspective in relationship to black feminist thought and trans*feminist technoscience as academic fields that follow slugs which traverse ever shifting and undone grounds. cs (careful slugs) wonders with queer slugs––the materiality and metaphor that they generate as they encounter computational forms and formats. as an interface play we speculate on how slugs come together in slippery spaces to do computer science—that is, how they enter as metaphors. our slipping with slugs is informed by aimee bahng's (2017) proposal to reach across speculative reality and wonder with, rather than marvel from a distance. and following bahng's lead we situate slugs as a surprising yet recurring player in trans*feminist technoscience.5 we invite you to sink with us into soft gooey worldings of slug-imaginings not to overburden the slug but to speculate what more-than-human processes might contribute to trans*feminist technoscience and cs (computer science) concerns (haraway 1997; hird 2008, 229; pritchard 2018, 21; britton 2020). we apply personhood sloppily and queerly, breaching colonialist hierarchy and situating this work amongst companions who engage with so-called animal, vegetal, fungal, mineral, and gastropod practices as propositions for organizing, activism, and imaginaries. cs (careful slugs) commingles with (amongst others) crittering practices of oncomouse (haraway 1997 & 2010 ); the dorsal politics and stabilizing practices of dolphins (gumbs 2020); temporalities of the flowering grass that we know as rice (gan 2017); trust teaching mycelium (brown 2017); the alloyances of gold (pritchard, rocha, and snelting 2020); the resistance through sex under capitalism of the octopus girlfriend (lewis 2021); the penguins against capture (troyan and pritchard 2022); world-building wisdom of beavers (simpson 2021); practices of care as sick protesters (hedva 2016) and the practice of organizing by the moon (hamraie 2021). centering disability in our work requires multiple oppositions to contexts that claim to be engaged with fairness, accountability and transparency such as many papers that emerged from the 2020 facct conference. many of the papers from this conference proposed that disabilities need “solutions” and can be resolved through practices of inclusion-assumed-as-care, disclosure of disability as the only way to ensure access needs being met, or assimilation as a practice of ignoring difference; against these modes cs (careful slugs) ripples with anti-assimilationist access for all bodyminds. cs follows rosemarie garland-thompson, who works with the concept of “misfitting” (2011) to describe a shifting set of relationships between flesh (morrison 2021) and spacetime, which are in an ever-shifting context: a contingent relation always in motion. for example, fluorescent lighting (so common in many institutional spaces) can simultaneously cause headaches and discomfort for many: move to a room with diffused lighting and much becomes possible; move to a room with fluorescent lights, so many experiences are foreclosed. we slime up this insight to ask, what kinds of metaphors or experiences fit into and impact cs (computer science)? unfitness, which we take to be in line with crip trans*technoscience and its practices of refusal/worlding from unexpected positions, gestures to ways “of getting things done—by infusing the disruptive potential of disability into normative spaces and interactions" (prince 2015, 269). this disruptive practice of crip technoscience (hamraie and fritsch 2019) is a politics that values humans and more-than-humans for who they are “and understands that people have inherent worth outside of capitalist notions of productivity” (sins invalid 2016, 17). following the commitments of crip technoscience, which understands interdependence to be a political technology, we trail how cs (careful slugs) unfolds our interdependent relations between cs (computer science), cs (crip stories), and cs (committed survival) towards speculations of a cs (computer science) otherwise. we follow cs (careful slugs) in how it might reroute, chomp away, do nothing about, slime up, slow down, or ripple towards attachments as a way of accounting for, unsettling, taking responsibility for, and remaking dominant universalisms of cs (computer science). we propose that when computation is approached through the speculation of cs (careful slugs), the computational operations of sorting become slowed down, separating becomes impossible as sticky bodies stick to surfaces, categorizing becomes softened. as sami schalk reminds us, many metaphors assume nondisabled embodiments and rely upon “universal” experiences of the body "everyone sees, speaks, hears, feels, and moves in the same (nondisabled) ways" (2013). we push back against these assumptions with schalk and practice non assumption of what bodyminds6 are in any space cs (careful slugs) as we work towards what ruth wilson gilmore calls “alternative outcomes” (gilmore 2007, 28 ). we understand computer science to be a very dominant-world-making science that must have otherwise imaginaries that unmake its rigidities and offer speculative possibilities. alternative outcomes point to the multiple presents and futures that diverge from the violence of the quotidian and suggest how the resources of everyday life may have otherwise been organized (gilmore 2007, 28; 2021). the work of building, finding, and attending to the possibilities of alternative outcomes comes from focusing on the conditions that set up the not naturalized and not taken for granteds of cs practice.   careful slugs speculative fictions the speculative practices and images that follow have been generated through choosing a metaphor from the “for cs” field manual and using it to speculate alternative outcomes—in this case, careful slugs. it would have been a different set of practices if we had chosen cs (cushions and stargazing), or cs (collapsing species), or cs (collective strategies). we offer these speculative practices, each based on a different actual slug as an experiment to generate new conditions—a set of careful slugs speculative fictions for computer science. each fiction follows the world of a different type of slug and develops metaphors that are in service of multispecies flourishing, consent, disability accessibility, anti-racism, trans*feminist joy, lubricating accountability, and unknowing practices. we invite you to take one of these practices into the computer science lab and before starting an assignment, project, meeting, or writing project—read it—out loud or silently—with companions or alone. hold the images close, print them out, project them on the lab walls. feel into the practice without knowing what will happen, meditate with each careful slugs as a design method––rubbing along the cusp of unknowing. while reading, consider the images that we made celebrating each of the slugs, in whose honor we have written these fictions. these images were created as digital meditations on each of the slugs that we have queerly loved in this work. what happens by shifting the grounds of your work? what (slime) trails are yet to be followed? what kinds of specificities and instabilities are brought up when banana slugs are also considered? who or what is affected differently when considering the dusky arion, or the red triangle, or any other slug alongside your practice?   figure 2. on an overlapping warm background red triangle slug forms overlap with differing levels of opacity. through the overlaps triangles of different sizes emerge from negative space   🔺 stealthy secretions emerge from the red triangle who deploys a sticky defensive mucus from their belly when threatened. they have what they need to keep themselves safe. they have invented many specificities, their defensive elastic sticky safety mucus super glues any predators who may have followed them. predators are literally stopped in their tracks, their feet attached to the path no-longer traveled. predators are bad at consent, they never ask if they can follow: the red triangle reminds consent is everything. the red triangle’s super glue mucus remains sticky as they carry on as they please. their mucus: sticky in rain, sticky in dry, sticky in all moistures, their stroll-stopping mucus cannot be washed away. they stop their followers: this is no social media ploy.   figure 3. on an overlapping background a dusky arion slug forms overlap with various levels of opacity. the antennae of each dusky arion slug gestures in a different direction.     dusky arion slug: an inseparable gooeyness 🔺 the dusky arion, with her soft gooey body, is emboldened by wetness, a wetness that reaches out to her and from her. a slight moistening or dampening of the ground makes the conditions that draw her from underneath towards encounters with surfaces. in this damp and dynamic situation (harding 2008), she orients along the dampest surfaces. her yellow-orange slime stabilizes movements at this site, and at this one, and at this one. her slime creates one of her most queer properties, her queer longings "that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present" (muñoz 2009, 1). a gooeyness that makes it impossible to understand herself as separate from what she moves across, as she chemically binds with surfaces. unlike her slug-like kin the slime mold, the dusky arion isn't a wonderous trans*feminist technoscience metaphor for communal living or non-hierarchical organizing: her stickiness is her everyday and calls upon scientists, geographers, and trans*feminist technoscientists alike to consider the relations between humans and more-than-humans. from gardeners to heart surgeons, she provides the materials and metaphors for killing to healing, ethics to sealing (osterloff 2018). yet dusky arion ontologies are more-than hydrogels for heart breakers, and her soft body––one long muscle––lubricates as it sticks. she is softening and softens interdependently––if only to move across. with moistness she forms an array, comes out in force, interfacing with her softenings. she travels faster on wet surfaces, her binding slime absorbing the stresses from the surfaces. how do we move between the moistures and drynesses that threaten our access? how do we relate with empowerment to the traumas of our enclosures? what about that soft?   figure 4. on an overlapping background banana slugs arch across each other revealing different layers of opacity. through cut-outs spots abstract shapeshifting forms are revealed.   banana slug: re-/un-/neverdone 🔺 what is normative in slug life? oh banana slug, do remain unstable. the “natural” and “ground” are destroyed and defamiliarized and re-/un-/neverdone. remaining in shift, zie can change zir body if zie wants to, and zie thrives on shifts and eruptions; catastrophizing is not at play for zir, when one reality ends zie dives into the next one, sliding into it like a mollusk on a mudslide. zie is a banana slug and zir (sex) life is wild, unpredictable, and slow. zie moves amidst all of the realities of what’s there: to move, to court, to frame, to secure, to date, to be together, to reproduce, to wander, and to slowly separate. one night, needing to separate the appearance and the function: zie nibbles their bodies apart. it is a principle of life chances, to better understand how zie nibbles her body from one with extra organs, to one without: zie chews through zir organs to display what's not there, what cannot be compiled. carrying on and finding other partners in zir unstable sexuality, zie is contextualized by crawlers: nestling into the detritus of the moist daytime.   figure 5. a rounded leaf like form fans out over the surface of the image, it resembles an elysia chlorotica slug, rounded and uneven at its edges. the forms inside remind of veins in skin or veins in a leaf.   elysia chlorotica slug: tran-planimal coexisting poetics 🔺 oops! hold up! the ground is shifting once more the cs (careful sea slug) is misfitting alternative approaches to interpretation along their trail! if we tune to ambiguity we encounter the elysia chlorotica demanding unknowing practices that risk “what we cannot bear and what we love too much” (mckittrick 2021, 17). in our desires for metaphors and mergings, these leaf-like green super sea slugs are being overread––tranimal (kelley 2014), planimal, solar-powered cell, and chloroplast thief. their capacities to live on chloroplasts have been mistaken as photosynthesis. with the perfect muscular softness, for unwinding the naturalized boundaries of plant and animal, elysia chlorotica plays with the ease in which they might be overdetermined. indeed, a community of researchers are now questioning why they were so “taken with the idea of heterotrophs becoming photosynthetic” (roose 2014). as a tran-planimal they enter into more-than-human methodologies as a figure of coexisting, a story of symbiopolitics as a questioning force (hird 2008; kelley 2014; helmreich 2014, 58). a slug pointer to think against, and through, traditional connections––their fascinating capacity to metabolize algae sparking the imaginations of science and theory alike. the green slug, fed by the green building of its body seems to bring together seemingly impossible mergings, seemingly incompatibilities; merging life types––making plant cells work in ways that seem impossible to scientists––that wink at trans*feminist technoscience with a certain kind of knowing. however, the charismatic sea slug is far in excess of their biological descriptions, and despite their production of metaphors for commingling, we might need to risk some unlearning here. it emerges that the elysia chlorotica does not merge symbiotically but instead stores algae like fuel cells exploiting them for survival. hold up! is this still thinking of them through existing frames of knowing, switching “solar power” for “plant”? elysia chlorotica leaves behind a trail on the sea bed that, when we get closer, reads, “the biological is more than biological” (helmreich 2014, 59). and as we read they disappear from the site of the trans*feminists, their green body blending with the sea bed below, their careful trail becoming indescribable; getting into spaces of knowing, not meant for us.   un-conclusion careful slugs are metaphors that speculatively care for diverse practices within and alongside computer science. we have invited our readers to engage with speculative fictions for careful slugs that invite their practices into the computer science lab and engage the edges and surfaces of our practices be they smooth, rough, leafy, curved, carved, broken, rocky, moist, wet, lit, coded, and/or bracketed towards mucuses, slimes, lubricants, and adhesives which slip away edges and boundaries. while moving across the uneven field of computer science we have attended to energy, saving spoons (miserandino 2013) and time to move between spaces, often about one meter per hour, taking our cue from multiple slugs; and have engaged careful slugs fictions as those which allow for wayfinding in spaces that otherwise may have gone unnoticed; caring for sticky moments and moments of stuckness that slow down and allow for pausing to attend to the less perceptible. as careful slugs move through trans*feminist technoscience as metaphoric practice we love slugs as they are misfitting companions, not to be exterminated nor extracted from. we find experiences of misfitting to be powerful as they explicate oppressions that surround those so-called misfits and in this way cs (careful slugs) become companions for the cs (chance and scandal) needed to open queer worlds that are not yet here (muñoz 2009) within cs (computer science). with careful slugs we do not wish to tokenize or instrumentalize more-than-humans by rendering them beings only valuable for what metaphor humans can extract from them. rather, careful slugs undo themselves and know-make (hamraie 2017) a trans*feminist technoscience that includes diverse experiences of entering, rippling, and transforming. our speculative praxis with careful slugs oozes an invitation towards alternative practices for computer science in which what exists now is moistened into, and where questions of class, race, gender, and disability––that might otherwise be obscured––are non-deterministically present. we would like to acknowledge and thank those part of our community support network that have upheld and cared for our work on cs now and in its previous permutations. in addition we are sending many thanks to: t.l. cowan, anna jehle, jasmine rault, daniela rosner, juliane schickendanz, slugs everywhere and alex taylor.   notes 1google, facebook, amazon, microsoft or google, meta, amazon, microsoft   2 baidu, alibaba, tencent, and xiaomi   3 facebook, amazon, (apple), netflix, and alphabet/google   4 meta, apple, microsoft, amazon, and google’s parent company alphabet   5 we offer this as a community definition rather than the claiming of a term––trans*feministtechnoscience (t*fts) is defined as a branch of science studies and practices that recognizes the inseparability of the merging of boundaries and the inseparability between science/technology/society (technoscience) and remakes the material semiotic boundaries of the body, nature, and technology. we use the formula of the star (*) which sharpens the points of the intersections of antiracist, queer, trans-disciplinary and intersectional sensibilities alongside broader sts (britton and pritchard 2020).   6 bodymind is a feminist disability studies concept from margaret prince (2015), which refers to the enmeshment of bodies and minds and undoes their construction as separate due to cartesian dualisms that permeate western philosophical traditions. bodymind can be a helpful term to understand specifically the tolls of marginalization on people constructed as othered through pushing back against the notion that some experiences are only “about” pure embodiment.   references amaro, ramon. 2019. “as if.” e-flux architecture: becoming digital. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/becoming-digital/248073/as-if/. aouragh, miriyam, seda gürses, helen pritchard, and femke snelting. 2020. “the extractive infrastructures of contact tracing apps.” journal of environmental media 1, (1): 9.1–9.9. https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00030_1. aouragh, miriyam, and paula chakravartty. 2016. “infrastructures of empire: towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies.” media, culture & society 38, (4): 559–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716643007. bahng, aimee. 2017. “plasmodial improprieties: octavia e. butler, slime molds, and imagining a femi-queer commons.” in queer feminist science studies: a reader, edited by cyd 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https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/123. pritchard, helen, jara rocha, femke snelting, and laura benítez valero. 2020. “queering damage.” in magazine-sonic acts academy, edited by mirna belina. amsterdam: sonic acts press. roose, johnna l. 2014.“about those solar-powered sea slugs.” new under the sun (blog). january 7, 2014. https://newunderthesunblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/about-those-solar-powered-sea-slugs/. schalk, sami. 2013. “metaphorically speaking: ableist metaphors in feminist writing.” disability studies quarterly 33 (4). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3874/3410. rocha, jara, and femke snelting, eds. 2022. volumetric regimes: material cultures of quantified presence. london: open humanities press. scientist stims. n.d. “scientist stims.” accessed april 18, 2021. https://scientist-stims.tumblr.com/. shotwell, alexis. 2016. against purity: living ethically in compromised times. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. simpson, leanne 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indeterminacy and the (k)nots of relating.” environment and planning d: society and space 31 (2): 208–26. https://doi.org/10.1068/d17411.     author bios ren loren britton is a white disabled trans*gender interdisciplinary artist and researcher who works with critical pedagogy, trans*feministtechnoscience and disability justice. their work engages collective experience across nonlinear times, and experiments with technical modes that presume very little. they work across arts and design contexts as a collaborator and rub into institutions forthcoming: university of köln, de & sandberg instituut, nl.   helen v. pritchard is professor and head of research at the institute for experimental design and media culture (ixdm), at fhnw university of applied sciences and arts northwestern switzerland. they work together with companions to make propositions for computing otherwise; developing methods to uphold a politics of queer survival and environmental practice.     special section all that is solid burns into smoke: us military burn pits, petrochemical toxicity, and the racial geopolitics of displacement     zoë h. wool university of toronto zoe.wool@utoronto.ca     abstract focusing on us military burn pits in iraq, this paper traces entanglements between the materials of us war-making, the logistics of global capitalism, and the racialized displacement of toxicity and chemical kinship. in interviews about their experiences of burn pits at joint base balad, a city-sized us military base located in yathrib, iraq, us veterans living along the us gulf coast linked their exposures to the toxicity of burn pits in iraq with petrochemical exposures in their everyday lives at home. these links forged a chemical kinship with domestic others, while largely overlooking such kinship with iraqis who share veterans' body burden. yet i suggest that in these veterans' attention to logistics and infrastructure lies the possibility of a more expansive account of chemical kinship, one that cuts across the racialized distinctions of foreign and domestic, and gendered imaginaries of the domestic as a comfortable space for the reproduction of homophilic kin. i describe this dual imperative of the domestic as an ideology of domestic security. the toxicity of burn pits helps us to undermine this ideology of domestic security, opening new spaces to reckon with the relation between us and iraqi experiences of us military toxicity.   keywords toxicity, us military, slow violence, iraq, war, chemical kinship     introduction: it's the pits since the beginning of the us-led, post-9/11 wars in iraq and afghanistan, us military installations there have routinely disposed of everyday waste by burning it in open-air pits. everything from plastic water bottles and uniforms to batteries, ammunition, human waste, and medical waste was disposed of this way, bulldozed into pits, doused in jp-8 jet fuel, and set alight, blazing more or less around the clock for years on end and potentially exposing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of us personnel and contractors, uncounted third-country nationals, as well as local civilians and their surrounding environments to particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, dioxins, sulfur oxides, and other pathogenic substances in the resulting plumes of smoke. the burning of waste has long been a standard military procedure, intended to preserve hygiene, to deny materials to the enemy, and to increase mobility. but in previous eras, wars were fought in a more austere mode creating less day-to-day waste to be disposed of. for example, while the trenches of world war i (wwi) were certainly filthy, the waste that accumulated there was largely unavoidable, much of it from spent shell casings. among british forces, so called “sanitary men” were tasked with collecting and sorting recyclable metals so scarce resources would not go to waste (“how to keep clean and healthy in the trenches,” n.d.). the post-9/11 fires, however, represent the use of an old solution for a new problem: excess waste generated by massive operating bases and suppled through private contracts, sprawling complexes of concrete and steel constructed as semi-permanent cities that were part of a uniquely us post-9/11 strategy, most fully realized in iraq. as dale, a former medic told me, “they built american cities [in iraq] so people could commute to war.” while there were also many smaller outposts where conditions were more austere (especially in afghanistan), and where the burn pits where much smaller, even these pits contained materials—like plastic water bottles and e-waste—that were simply not part of previous eras. thus, not only are the post-9/11 burn pits far larger than the fires of wars past, but, literally carved into the landscape and burning the excesses entailed by post-9/11 us war-making in situ for years on end, the pits conjure smoke full of new kinds of toxicants readily absorbed into bodies and environments that surround them. all this adds up to differences in both quantity and kind from the smoke of military fires past. this smoke is a specific collateral (but by no means accidental) effect of the logistics of contemporary us war-making, a kind of war-making characterized not by austerity, efficiency, and resource scarcity, but by the consumptive drive, excess, disposability, and infrastructure of late-industrial capitalism that have given shape to these wars.1 embedded in this new smoke, both in the composition of its particulates, as well as the infrastructural and waste logics that made the pits possible, is also a set of displacements familiar to the structure of slow violence (nixon 2011): displacements of harm, toxicity, and risk. displacements that create new zones of slow death (berlant 2007). but there is also, i suggest, a displacement of relations, a necropolitical refraction of what vanessa agard-jones (2016) calls “chemical kinship”: “a narrative about contamination, accountability, and communities of chemical injury inspired by [a toxicant's] circulation in the bodies of people both powerful and marginalized”(see murphy 2017; chen 2011). in 2017 i began a collaborative ethnographic research project focused on us veterans' experiences of burn-pit-exposure-related illnesses, illnesses that were difficult to diagnose, and, at the time, often not recognized by veterans affairs (va) as service connected (macleish and wool 2018). across visits, interviews, and conversations with veterans, caregivers, and advocates in texas and louisiana, i was struck by the repeated linkages my us veteran interlocutors made between their experiences of exposure in iraq and the rampant forms of petrochemical toxification we all lived with along the us gulf coast. following this thread, i want to highlight the ways that veterans readily and creatively claimed chemical kinship with those exposed to petrochemical toxicity within the domestic united states, while relations of chemical kinship with iraqis seemed not so close at hand, despite being materially linked by the self-same exposures. that is, despite a keen awareness of late-industrial infrastructures and global logistics that revealed regional forms of petrochemical kinship along the us gulf coast, chemical relations that were spread across the racialized divide of foreign and domestic didn't seem to call forth such recognition. and yet, i suggest that these accounts contain other possibilities precisely because of their awareness of logistics, “whose space contrasts powerfully with the territoriality of the nation state” (cowen 2014, 8-9), and of infrastructure, which, anthropologist ashanté reese (2022) notes, may contain socially reparative possibilities in the ways in crumbles. inspired by this special section's call to interrogate the domesticity of war, i suggest we might consider this concatenation of displacement under the rubric of domestic security. by domestic security, i mean to invoke both the racialized geopolitical spatialization of domestic vs. foreign that seeks to sever the us home front from its military operations overseas (see lutz 2001), as well as the related idea of the domestic as oikos, a gendered space classically devoted to the reproduction of normative forms of kinship and private property, and distanced from the public domain of politics. i specify the “racialized divide of foreign and domestic” because, as i elaborate below, there is something about us domesticity—especially when framed within the us military's long-standing claims to be a race-neutralizing path to the middle-class american dream—that seems to make chemical kinship across racialized divides within the us more available for veterans to claim, while making chemical kinship across the racialized divide of foreign and domestic less so. displacements of domestic security a key intervention of feminist scholarship has been to upend the distinction between public and private by noting the ways that the labors of domestic reproduction are central to capitalist reproduction (costa and james 1975; davis 1983;enloe 1990; federici 1975). i think in particular of black feminist work that highlights the centrality of nationalism within this imagined domestic space, noting how notions of family are central to the racial project of nationalism (collins 1998), as well as the ways that the white supremacy central to the us national project aligns property and paternity, violently harnessing while simultaneously delegitimating black women's reproductive capacity (davis 1983; roberts 1998; spillers 1987; weinbaum 2019). alongside this is other queer and feminist work tracing how the projects of the state are entwined with the most seemingly private of spaces (berlant 1997; canaday 2009; mcclintock 1995; povinelli 2006). writing about the central project of domestication in modern counterinsurgency wars—including the us-led war in iraq—feminist international relations scholar patricia owens (2015) suggests that governance, through what she calls oikonomia, highlights the continuity between contemporary counterinsurgencies—-or, in the case of iraq what anthropologist kali rubaii (2021) calls counter-resurgency—and earlier colonial projects carried out with both martial violence and the deployment of weapons of domestication such as soap (mcclintock 1995, 207-31) and clocks (stevenson 2014, 129-47). by invoking a concept of “domestic security” informed by toxicity and its displacements, i point to a geopolitical sense of the domestic as severed from the foreign, no matter the material, historical, or chemical links between them. this is a sense of domesticity that reproduces “foreign” territory as available for displacements of waste and toxicity and simultaneously as a space for the reproduction of (racialized) kinship. what, then, does this double valance of domestic security have to do with the logics and logistics of post-9/11 us war-making and its toxic harms? when dale, the medic, says that the military built us cities in iraq so soldiers could “commute to war,” he is invoking the suburban spatiality of the daily commute. not only is this a gendered spatiality in which work and politics (and their hazards) are sequestered from the safety of home, but it is a raced and classed spatiality, a legacy of white flight. the rise of the suburbs, like the toxic displacements that produce sacrifice zones and the comparatively recent processes of gentrification, is as marisa solomon notes, a set of “processes within a longer history of racial capitalism in which the project to value and de-value (land, people, labor, objects) helps to determine the place of waste (whose neighborhood, whose city), where it leaves, and where it 'belongs'” (2019, 77). in light of this context, dale's comment was profoundly astute. one of the central forces that shaped the us footprint in iraq (and to a lesser extent in afghanistan) was the political imperative to keep us soldiers not only safe, but also comfortable—or at least to generate the trappings of comfort. this manifest in large military bases surrounded by concrete t-walls and barbed wire that some soldiers hardly left for the duration of their tours.2 haunted from its start by the televised “quagmire” of vietnam, and fueled by a military force that had for decades been recruited through post-racial promises of class mobility and enfranchisement in the american dream (pérez 2015; wool 2021), these bases and the provisions within them performed a spectacle of security and comfort. in a simulacrum of the privatized suburban domestic security that dale's comment invoked, images of on-base subway sandwich shops and burger kings were broadcast around the world. of course, the bases were hardly such suburban oases. the conditions were certainly less austere than they might have been, and bases were readily supplied with food and clean drinking water unlike many of the us-decimated iraqi towns and cities around them. but, unlike the secure domestic spaces imagined at the end of a long day's commute, us bases were often fired on by mortars, soldiers mostly slept in modified shipping containers, and there was generally no access to flush toilets. the sense that these bases were a simulacrum of sorts that attempted—and never quite succeeded—to fold the domestic into the foreign was central to how soldiers understood and inhabited them. heather, a medical officer who had also been stationed at joint base balad (jbb), recalled the movie theater on base that was stocked with popcorn. “it was just nice to kind of get away and like fool yourself into thinking that you were anyplace other than where you were,” she said, evoking both the base's aspirational domesticity along with its failure to produce the proper spatializations of home and work or here and away. this simulacrum relied on a “perverse infrastructural loop” (macleish and wool 2022), where supply infrastructures made available many of the trappings of late-capitalist comfort—from bottled water to video game consoles—but the corresponding waste infrastructures were partial at best, literally fueling the burn pits. the burn pits show how this loop manifested as an involution of the usual colonial spacializations of waste and war violence in the us. max liboiron (2021) argues that “pollution is colonialism” in part because of the presumption of non-indigenous access to indigenous land that is transformed into a devalued “away” where waste can be sent from a “here.” this presumption of access to land is central to the us's empire of bases (mccaffery 2009; vine 2015) and its toxification of sites of military incursion around the world (rubaii 2020; santana 2002; see also o'ahu water protectors' #shutdownredhill campaign). while the invasions of both afghanistan and iraq explicitly attempted to externalize post-9/11 war violence, the externalization of waste and toxicity could not be replicated within the “domesticity” of the bases themselves. while waste wasn't displaced from the bases, the emerging discourse of burn pit exposure is displacing the chemical kinship the pits produced between us veterans and the local populations who were, and remain, exposed both to the pits as well as the lasting toxification that is central to how late-industrial war works. but while discourse around us veterans' exposure to the pits figures veterans as a unique population of biological citizens entirely unrelated to the iraqis or afghanis who share their body burden, in listening carefully to veterans' accounts of the pits, i hear the possibility of an alternative account, an account that might be up to the task of articulating these relations and reworking the arrangement of bio-and necro-politics through which burn pits are increasingly emerging as a matter of concern in the us. i locate this possibility in veterans' talk about the material life of the pits themselves—that is, talk about infrastructure and logistics—which i would roughly distinguish from talk focused on consequences of the pits in the form of environmental illness. toxicity is war writing about the proliferation of microplastics throughout the biosphere, liboiron (2021) offers the imperative “pollution is colonialism,” by which they note that the assumption of access to land, air, and water that is fundamental to colonialism is the same assumption of access on which pollution relies. to say “toxicity is war” is to suggest we not only think of toxicity as an effect of war, but that we think of large-scale toxification—even outside of war zones or apparently military uses—as an essential feature of the apparatus of war-making formed by late-industrial capitalism in the us. after all, three-quarters of a century ago, in her dire warning about the indiscriminate use of pesticides—or biocides, as she proposed we call them—rachel carson ([1962] 2002) noted that war was the raison d'être of synthetic chemistry itself. indeed, it is hard to find a toxicant that isn't connected to war, from the ur-toxicant of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (ddt)—first put to use to protect us soldiers in naples from typhus and then to control endemic malaria in an early mission of militarized humanitarianism (conis 2017; stapleton 2005)—to the dizzying array of breathtaking chemicals that stock our hardware stores and linger under our kitchen sinks. these domestic chemicals, born of war, are a central feature of late modern domesticity whose assertions of cleanliness reek of colonial hygiene campaigns and their attendant biopolitics as much as they do volatile organic compounds. various senses of this continuum of ostensibly war-related and ostensibly civilian toxicities has appeared in interviews i've carried out in texas and louisiana with us veterans who were exposed to burn pit smoke in iraq. in particular, i was surprised that, when talking about their overseas exposures, a number of them evoked a proverbial plant down the river, some industrial, state-side polluter that is spewing toxicants into the air, land, and water closer to home. heather, the former medical officer who had been stationed at jbb, was one of these veterans attuned to more proximate forms of toxicity. she noted that while she didn't actually understand the mechanisms through which toxicants made people sick, it was “common sense” that they did, whether those toxicants came from the burn pits in iraq or from other sources near home in houston. heather said, “i assume we're being polluted by stuff going on in deer park and pasadena right now,” referring to two petrochemical dense towns on houston's eastern edge. “there's just all the [chemical] plants, and all the weird stuff, like, i can't see that far. i can't see the smoke plumes out there but i know they're there. i just assume this is all the carcinogenic coast.” invoking a “we,” heather brings me into the fold of her exposures, along with the rest of us living along the “carcinogenic coast,” a term that generally indicates the stretch of the gulf of mexico arcing below houston, from the mouth of the mississippi river at new orleans in the east to the start of the houston ship channel in galveston, perhaps stretching as far west as the massive valero refinery in corpus christi. josh, another houston veteran who had been stationed at jbb, says that cancer doesn't run in his family but, he tells me in a matter-of-fact way, he's “100% certain” that he will get it, and when he does, it will be because of his military exposures—the burn pit but also the twelve years he spent inhaling exhaust fumes from military vehicles. but he also wonders how much of the allergies he developed after leaving the military are due to the burn pits, and how much is just the nature of breathing in houston, where he moved after he got out. for both heather and josh, as for other veterans, even in the multiply toxified era characterized by the “shared condition” of “chemically altered living-being” (murphy 2017), there is a sense that it will be the toxicity of the pits that tips the scales or triggers a biological chain reaction—an embodied certainty amid the uncertainties of toxic risk. yet, at the same time, veterans like heather and josh intuit resonances between military exposures overseas and industrial exposures at home, rendering military exposures less exceptional and insinuating them into a more familiar landscape of domestic toxicity. that anyone living in eastern texas or western louisiana might be especially attuned to the hazards of the chemosphere should not be surprising. from the “carcinogenic coast” to “cancer ally”—the stretch of the mississippi river running from baton rouge to new orleans—this is one of the more toxic zones of the us, and those of us who have lived there are aware of this in a variety of everyday ways. i think of the emergency flood notification i received the week i moved to houston in 2015 warning me to stay away from pooling water because of “poisonous snakes, fire ants, and chemicals,” and the way a sixty-five-year-old friend born and raised in the city blamed her accumulated exposure to the city's bad air for increasing allergies and sinus problems. and then there are the more spectacular events that periodically remind us of the hazards that loom around us—from the san jacinto river fire in which the river was inundated with blazing petrochemicals that spewed out of broken pipes during the flood of 1994, to a broken barge that, in may 2018, oozed 11,000 barrels of oil into the ship channel that connects houston to galveston bay. in fall of 2018, a few months after my interview with josh, he sent me a trove of pictures he'd taken of the smoke from the burn pits at jbb, including one where he jokingly turns up his head and wafts in the aroma and particulates of the towering plume of smoke rising the background. in another image, massive concrete t-walls rise some twenty feet, creating mazelike gravel-floored corridors in the open air. a pair of soldiers in physical training uniforms walk by, and another in his desert combat uniform walks towards the camera. containerized buildings are visible in the background, and over the whole scene blooms a billowing plume of dark grey smoke. about four months later, a fire at a chemical storage facility in deer park sent a plume of black smoke hovering over houston for three days. deer park is one of the places heather had named, presciently it turned out, when describing the invisible carcinogenic stew in which we were awash. the fire made that stew frighteningly visible. as it burned, josh sent me an email that read, “balad, iraq, called...they want their burn pit back.” he included a tryptic of photographs he'd taken from his car during his morning commute showing the grey smoke spreading across the morning sky. heather and josh point to the resonances between toxic exposures in iraq and in houston, and also to the way those exposures become indistinguishable within their own bodies, from josh's allergies to a lump on heather's back that she delayed getting checked, worried might be cancer caused by her exposures. in this, they invite us to think about war through the global geography of late industrialism, and of petrochemical infrastructures in particular. but while one could trace the petrochemical links between balad and houston, it is striking that this is not quite what they do. rather, they suggest a set of resonances that abridge the processes and infrastructures and histories that link foreign and domestic terrains. the burn pit was there. the burn pit is here. balad called and wants it back. heather in particular links her exposures to those that have given rise to local struggles over environmental justice on the carcinogenic coast, bringing me into the fold of chemical kinship. josh sends me pictures of the sky we both see on our way to work, inviting me to let my domestic experience resonate with his experience downrange. but even in the midst of these subtle considerations of the geographies of exposure they have inhabited, the chemical kinship between them and the iraqis whose lands they occupied, who, in some cases, they worked alongside, never occurs. those relations remain circumscribed by a geography of domestic security that reasserts the “awayness” not only of iraq but also of iraqis. josh, heather, and i are all white, and certainly my whiteness, along with my us citizenship, allow this configuration of kin and absented others to go untroubled. i want to mark the fact that in the domestic case, their claims to chemical kinship cross racial lines, while in the foreign case, they are not claimed at all. we might read this as a privilege of whiteness—a privilege to choose to ignore the social and material structurations of racial difference, environmental racism, and us imperialism. we might simultaneously read it as a comment on just how total a difference can be produced by a racial geopolitics of foreign and domestic. how to move war devin was deployed to iraq as a radio operator in 2005, where he was exposed to burn pit smoke in the relatively close quarters of a small tactical operating center in central iraq, occupied by a few hundred iraqi and american troops. in 2015, nine years after this exposure, devin suddenly developed fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome (ibs), and chronic fatigue syndrome. for these, as well as a slew of other diagnoses, including traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, he has received a 100 percent disability rating from the va. the rating is “complete and total,” meaning his level of impairment is not expected to improve. in their extensive research about burn pits and their related illnesses, devin and his husband stephen, who now live a few miles outside new orleans, came across a news story about “a chemical plant up river from here [that] manufactures a substance called chloroprene.” though they didn't know it, they were referring to the only chloroprene plant in the us, formerly owned by dupont and now operated by the japanese company denka, located in historically black st. john parish. chloroprene is the main ingredient in neoprene and used in a variety of industrial applications, including machine parts, electrical wiring, and waterproof adhesives. in 2010 it was classified as a likely carcinogen and the acceptable level of exposure set at 0.2 micrograms per cubic meter of air, a level far below extant concentrations, which became a rallying cry for community activists. in addition to cancers—cancer risks in the immediate area are the highest in the country and roughly seven hundreds times the national average (us epa 2016; hersher 2018)—residents of the town of laplace where the plant is located have documented other ailments, including “acute bronchitis, coughing, sinusitis, nasal polyps, wheezing, cardiac problems, nausea, vomiting, headaches, fatigue, anxiety, insomnia and hair loss” (reimann and hasselle 2019).they have been required to produce this list as they seek remedy in class-action suits in local courts operating with a damage-centered theory of change (see tuck 2009). recalling the news story they found, stephen said, “the town up river is experiencing, like, completely, a statistical anomaly in the number of cases of chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and ibs,” devin's three primary burn-pit-related diagnoses. devin and stephen had reason to believe that chloroprene was, in fact, one of the chemicals to which devin was exposed. “among other things,” stephen said, “chloroprene makes teflon, makes tires, and makes x, they burned it, makes y, they burned it, makes z...” speculating that devin might have gone halfway around the world to be made ill not only by the same chemical that is killing people up the river, but by actual components that were produced in that very plant. devin and stephen worried that their speculation would seem conspiratorial, and joked to me about the proverbial map on the wall adorned with red threads, threads that in this case might link tokyo to laplace to al anbar. but there is, in fact, nothing conspiratorial in their thinking. while they've stumbled upon a perhaps unlikely connection, they do not impute any sinister motive or secret grand plan. in fact, they've done nothing other than attempt to follow the object, and in so doing, have made plain a late-industrial petrochemical infrastructure that crisscrosses the globe, a geography in which not only are we all generally swimming in toxic stew, but, more specifically, the industrial production of toxicity in laplace, louisiana may be a dimension of, or a moment in, the violence of post-9/11 us war-making in iraq. what devin and stephen offer us is a provocation to think about toxicity in laplace not only as “the slow violence of fast capitalism” (gupta and hecht 2017), but also the slow violence of fast violence, in which the toxicity of war and the toxicity of late-industrial capitalism coincide. and yet, while this keen attunement to petrochemical infrastructure and military logistics has led devin to think of his (white) body as intimately and materially related to the bodies of those (mostly black) environmental justice activists organizing against chloroprene in st. john parish down the river, the logic of domestic security, and the exceptionalization of us soldier and veteran lives, obscures an even more immediate set of intimate and material relations—relations to the iraqis who lived and breathed the same inky smoke and particulate matter that made devin so sick. this is a set of relations that devin did not mention, and that i also failed to ask about at the time. in august 2019 i took the students in my anthropology of toxicity class on a tour of the houston ship channel, an uncanny amenity offered for free by the port of houston, the second busiest port in the nation. the port's official narrative was piped in over the loudspeaker while we took in what one student identified in a tweet as the “terrible beauty” of the industrial landscape (@alicetliu1, august 31, 2019)—the massive gleaming white chemical storage containers, tangled pipes, and soring smoke stacks of processing facilities offset against the clear blue of the summer sky. among other things, the loudspeaker voice told us that the demand for rubber, lubricant, and other oil products during wwii led to the precipitous growth of the oil and gas industry along the channel, which in turn required a significant dredging and expansion to accommodate larger boats and more traffic. it noted that a good many of the objects that populate our daily lives—“that chair you're sitting in,” the avuncular prerecorded voice said, “your shirt too, maybe even the coffee you're drinking now”—all came through the channel—widened for war and therefore welcoming to the industrial shipping of everything from mass-produced consumer goods to crumbling mountains of scrap metal. in tracing the violent military history and contemporary life of global logistics, deborah cowen (2014, 27-30) notes that wwii marked the definitive shift from napoleonic wars in which a primary and pressing limitation was ensuring soldiers had enough calories to fight (soldiers, it was said, marched on their stomachs) to what are known as petrol, oil, and lubricant wars, in which industrialization and logistics drives martial possibility. what starts with the wwii effort to standardize shipping containers to transport military supplies across different modes of transportation (levinson 2016, see also cowen 2014, 31), blooms into city-sized forward operating bases with pizza huts, fully networked office buildings, bottled water, and disposable cutlery.  these logistical and material specificities are also shaped by political logics particular to the post-9/11 era, which includes a domestic securitization that makes wars that entail new forms of enclosure, comfort, and care for us soldier bodies—that idea that we should, as dale put it, “build american cities” in iraq so soldiers can “commute to war.” with its raced and gendered inflections, this contemporary imperative to care for us soldiers' health as we expose them to harm is conditioned by the lingering national guilt and about the treatment of us veterans in the aftermath of the war in vietnam. the spectacularization of chemical weapons in that war—including the notorious 1972 photo depicting then-nine-year-old phan thị kim phúc running naked with other children after being severely burned by a napalm bomb—meant that vietnamese (though not laotian) and us military bodies were both figured as toxic subjects, linked together, if radically unequal.3 while there is much to be said about the different ways these wars have been mediated, i note here that in the current era, a post-vietnam domestic imperative to care about and for post-9/11 us soldiers disregards “foreign” ecologies as well as those foreign subjects who live and strive and die within them. the infrastructure of the pits is also shaped by a politico-temporal logic of “semi-permanence.” not officially counted as overseas bases because they are semi-permanent, the bases the us constructed in iraq after 2003 supplement the more permanent “bases of empire” (lutz 2009) through which the us has projected its military influence around globe since the end of wwii. the absence of waste management infrastructure and the use of containerized housing units are two features that gave form to semi-permanence, allowing plausible deniability of charges that the wars in iraq and afghanistan were in fact imperialist or, in the case of iraq, an oil war whose real goal was securing both territory and the resources below it. and yet, the massiveness of the pits, and much of their contents—including abundant quantities of plastics from shipping packaging, paint cans, and sometimes entire vehicles—attest to an effort at place-making that seemed very permanent indeed. jbb, the base in yathrib, iraq, where heather, josh, and dale had all been stationed and which had one of the largest and most well-known pits, is a particularly flagrant example. jbb had an airport, a major hospital, and an outpatient health clinic, a logistics hub comprised of warehouses that one veteran described to me as “huge, amazon-like,” two swimming pools, three massive dining facilities, three bus routes, and a movie theater. dale, the former medic, remarked to me that the job of a logistics officer was knowing “how to move war.” it might be better said that military logistics is about how to move war in without thinking about how to move it out. echoing this idea, josh, who was involved in logistics at jbb, told me that there was no plan for what to do with stuff once it was no longer needed. he said that medical clinics full of specialized equipment, like radiology machines and mark iv field hospital beds, were ceremonially handed over to iraqi forces and then largely abandoned to be stripped for parts that would be sold on the local market. and because of the way military units rotate through bases, and the lag time in filling supply requests, shipments would arrive once the unit that requested them was on its way out, and would sit idle in those amazon-sized warehouses, waiting to be needed. despite dreams of logistical efficiency, or the bataillan (1991) sense of war as an incendiary practice of dispensing of accrued excess, moving war in this way is also essentially a process of making excess. rather than burning that excess off, the burn pits transform it through the process of combustion, a process that is not simply destructive but “above all...metamorphic” (clark and yussoff 2014, 212), transforming war's excess from solid and liquid into smoke and vapor, from stable to volatile compounds, from seemingly solid objects to anthropochemical entanglements that escape one's grasp only to be remapped onto a geography that reasserts the distinctions between home and away, foreign and domestic, distinctions that the practice of moving war both instantiate and bridge. all that is solid in the opening chapter of the communist manifesto, marx and engels describe the germinating seeds of communist revolution nourished unknowingly by the bourgeoise's “constant revolutionizing” of the “instruments of production” ([1888] 1978, 476) they call forth the radical potential of this revolutionizing, a potential to transform both the technologies of production and the relations and cultural forms that articulate with them. they do this, in part, with a memorable phrase that conjures a transformation so profound, and so material, as to seem like magic: “all that is solid melts into air” (ibid). the marxist cultural critic marshall berman borrowed the phrase as the title of his 1981 book about “the experience of modernity.” berman points us to infrastructures of modern urbanism, including highways, a form also central to the us's post-9/11 wars as arteries that were vital for supplies that fed the burn pits, and also as deadly hazards: throughout the wars, a majority of us casualties (roughly 60%) were caused by improvised explosive devices, many of them planted alongside, or underneath, highways. as julie livingston puts it in her parable of self-devouring growth, “the road giveth, and the road taketh away” (2019, 94). it is not only the highway that modern logistical revolutionizing points us to but also, importantly, rivers. the mississippi, for example, provided an earlier infrastructure for the movement of cotton and sugar wrought by enslaved laborers, which laid the pattern for the movement of goods that is part of the story of the pits. the chloroprene plant in laplace, for example, is built on the site of former sugar plantations strategically located along the mississippi. in the eighteenth century, european colonists claimed the land in that area, exiling and decimating indigenous nations, including the chocktaw, houma, and natchez peoples. the stretch between new orleans and baton rouge—that area now known as cancer alley—was carved into slender plantations reaching out on both sides of the river toward the bayous that surrounded it, imprinting the land with the contours, as well as the blood, of racial capitalism (allen 2006). after emancipation, some strips of plantation land were given to families of formerly enslaved black people who had labored there, but more profitable plantations with more efficient and scalable shipping infrastructure remained in white hands allen 2003, 7-13; cf. bullard 2000). the smaller, less profitable plots given to black families became the foundation of thriving black communities, but were also rapidly transformed into sacrifice zones as the larger plantations industrialized, and then transitioned into petrochemical facilities once oil and natural gas were discovered nearby (allen 2006; colten 2006). the houston ship channel is part of this story, too. now home to the second largest concentration of petrochemicals in the world, it was identified as a potential commercial route in part because of its proximity to new orleans and the commercial traffic of the mississippi by the allen brothers of new york, who came speculating in the 1830s (shelton 2017). they established the town of houston along the bayou to attract commerce. when people complained that the bayou was not functional as a commercial route, it's said that the allen brothers hired a team to move bales of cotton two miles along its narrow, muddy waters, and that it took the team two weeks to move these fetishized slave commodities along a bayou reluctant to be pressed into service. nonetheless, that more or less settled the question of whether the waterway could be made a commercially viable ship channel. the dredging and expansion has been ongoing since then, punctuated by the intertwined exigencies of war and capital that gave rise to the great acceleration (“ship channel history,” n.d.). at the same time that the houston ship channel was being dredged and expanded for war and capital, another logistical form was being revolutionized: the standard shipping container, a solution to the military problem of moving massive quantities of material across the globe while transferring between roads, boats, and rails. early iterations of the standardized shipping container were successfully used during wwii and then iterated into the familiar conex of the korean war. but most histories point to the definitive start of containerization as malcolm mclean's development in the mid-1950s of the containers we know today, easily liftable by crane, and paired with container ships specially designed to fit them (levinson 2016). the first such ship was a repurposed military vessel which, in 1956, mclean loaded with a cargo of oil and fifty-eight containers and sent on its way from elizabeth, new jersey, down the east coast, into the gulf of mexico, and up to its final destination—the port of houston—through the widened petrochemical-logistical embrace of the ship channel. the container system that mclean designed is now essential to the global flow of commodities, and to all the distributions and displacements of toxicity that flow entails, including all the creature comforts, communications technologies, plastic water bottles, packing materials, and machine parts that fill the burn pits. and the containers themselves are used as semi-permanent buildings on semi-permeant bases, as everything from offices to the ubiquitous containerized housing units (chu) in which most solders slept, two or four beds to a chu depending on rank. when i asked dale to tell me a little about his chu and the stuff it in, he told me that people really went to town decorating their otherwise spartan spaces given that there was little else to do for entertainment. he had plastic lawn chairs out front of his. some folks had even gotten their hands on lawn ornaments. he'd built himself a bookcase out of empty paint cans and some unused planks of wood. he remembered something and then laughed to himself. “i had a fucking couch,” he said. i asked him how he'd gotten it, and he couldn't quite remember, but, speculating, he said, “it probably came from china,” and then imagined out loud that the couch would have been loaded into a shipping container and onto a boat, and would have made it to iraq, and gotten loaded on to a truck, that would have driven along those highways of death and through the gates at jbb, where it ended up in his chu. i asked him what happened to it when he left. he said he wasn't sure if anyone else took it, but that eventually, one way or another, it would have ended up in the burn pit, its petrochemical-based foam interior transforming into toxic smoke, its remains leaching into the irrigation canal that ran within one hundred feet of the pit. the revolution in logistics of which the standardized shipping container was a key part is certainly an instance of that “constant revolutionizing” of the instruments of production that marx and engels described. and it may be that they have a certain aspect of the revelatory power that marx and engels had hoped: that “man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” perhaps this is part of what happens when soldiers and contractors sickened by burn pit smoke take their case to the supreme court, as they attempted to do in 2019 (lawrence 2019). but while the perverse infrastructural loop of the pits may have given rise to a sober confrontation with certain conditions of soldier exposure, the question of relations, and of who constitutes one's kind, remains obscured. it seems that all that is solid does not melt into air but, instead, burns into smoke. remapping relations, refusing the cuts like the other veterans i've talked to who spent time at jbb, dale, whose asthma and sleep apnea are likely connected to his burn pit exposure, described the position of the burn pit there as poorly chosen. he gave me a virtual tour of the site on his phone, using a google satellite image. he said that sometimes, when the smoke was especially thick, insurgents would use it as cover and set up mortars in the iraqi town on the other side. like others, he also noted that because it was situated along the northeastern edge of the base, strong southerly winds would periodically blanket half the base in acrid smoke. in such accounts, the burn pits reveal slow violence that unfolds alongside the fast. yet at the same time as they might extend the temporality of war violence, such accounts tend to stop at the edges of the us bases where us veterans lived, as if the environment of the base constituted a closed ecology. it will come as no surprise that the military's scant burn-pit-related environmental testing did the same thing, only sampling on base at jbb (national academy of sciences 2011), and attempting to disaggregate pollutants arising from the pits from those portrayed as endemic to the iraqi environment, as if that environment were not infused with the remains of generations of us-led war (wool 2017). these cuts between iraqi and us bodies and environments also characterizes us-based media coverage and advocacy efforts, which focus almost exclusively on health effects in the bodies of us veterans, despite mounting clinical evidence of the environmental illnesses linked to us occupation there (dewachi 2013; rubaii 2020; savabieasfahani et al. 2016), and the work of both international and local environmental activist projects working to remediate the environmental damage done by decades of war, and to protect the health of iraq's waterways in particular (yathrib project 2020; “waterkeepers iraq,” n.d.).4 as dale looked at that google satellite image of the landscape that had been the base, the landscape began to refuse those cuts, to make connections. he scanned the image, looking for the remains of a flimsy barrier that been built along the edge of the pit but could see only the dark impression in the earth of where it used to be. reading the image while recalling the landscape from his memory, he remembered the canal right on the other side of where the pit and the fence had been. a canal, he remembered, that had been a popular spot where locals would cool off on hot days. a canal, he realized, that would be contaminated with everything the pits had made. a canal, that he thought probably ran right into the tigris river. when i have asked them about burn pits, us veterans have articulated all kinds of surprising relations, relations that we might think of as chemical kinship. devin articulates a relation with people near the chloroprene plant in laplace, like seventy-seven-year-old robert taylor, retired contractor and leader of the concerned citizens of st. john parish. josh, who is “100 percent certain” his military exposures will give him cancer, articulates a kind of chemical kinship with me, who spent the days of the deer park fire anxiously watching fluctuations in local levels of particulate matter. but, aside from the incipient realization the canal gave to dale, none of the veterans i've interviewed have yet articulated such kinship with iraqi civilians, their reckonings with chemical kinship deeply shaped by a logic of domestic security that cleaves foreign from domestic, reproducing a globally racialized spacialization of home and away, and disavowing chemical kinship that crosses that divide. this is not to say that these veterans don't care about iraqis. the question of what it means—ethically, politically—for us veterans to “care about iraqis'”is murky and difficult, and i will not wade into it here. but i will note that as my work on the burn pits has shifted from focusing on us veteran illnesses to linking us veteran experiences of exposure to iraqi ones, my us veteran interlocutors have been enthusiastic to contribute to this effort and surprised by the obviousness of this overlooked kinship.5 what this seems to point to is that the ways we have come to know about the toxicity of burn pits make certain relations seem more available and others less so. this remains the case as burn-pit-related illnesses becomes more well known in the us, a consequence of decades of advocacy from veteran groups, as well as personal investment from president joe biden, whose son, beau biden, died from a brain cancer that may have been connected to his own burn pit exposure. to give but one example, the pits—and their likely connection to beau biden's death—featured in president biden's 2022 state of the union address, in which he also announced a range of new supports for veterans exposed to them. but—in the midst of a speech that opened with the lauding of ukrainian's resisting the russian invasion—his only mention of iraq was as a place where us soldiers had once been made sick. this, i think, is evidence of the epistemic violence of the double logic of domestic security—the racialized and colonial distinction of domestic vs. foreign and the invocation of the domestic as an exclusive space for the reproduction and care of kin. the ubiquity of toxicity and the global reach of petrochemical infrastructure makes it possible to link us military toxicity overseas to exposures at home. but the flip side of these abundant connections can be a set of occlusions—occlusions that reassert well-trod racial geographies. but an infrastructure of toxicity, like that in which the burn pits are so spectacularly nestled, contains other possibilities too, possibilities for what mel chen (2011) identifies as the queer bonds that toxicity forges across racial divides and divergent locations in toxic commodity chains. precisely in its ubiquity and extensiveness, this toxic infrastructure crosscuts the distinction between foreign and domestic, between the biopolitically preserved and the necropolitically disregarded. this is what i've been after here, a flickering of not-yet-claimed checmical kinship, as i think about the relations that are made and unmade between smoke and bodies, between the tigris and the missisippi, between fast and slow violence, between the materialities of war and the materialities of late-industrial capitalism, between moving war, moving slave commoddities of sugar and cotton, and moving chinese-manufactured couches. while the biggest of the pits no longer burn, they still continue to produce new ways to apprehend the extensiveness of contemporary us war violence, and the relations forged through it. this is the trick of the pits: that, despite their stated purpose, they refuse to contain the waste of war-making and its excesses. instead, they dispurse it in nervous systems and respiratory systems and bowels and rivers, stoking new analytics to remind us that where there is smoke, there are new relations to be made. notes 1 on the late-industrial, see fortun 2012.   2 those with on base jobs were derisively called “pogs,” person other than grunt. the feminized implication of these “stay-at-home” soldiers tracks closely with the raced and gendered suburban spatialization that dale's comment points to.   3 in her account of the extensive chemical relations between the us war in vietnam and contemporary practices and chemopolitics of race and beauty, thuy linh nguyen tu (2021) also points to many other forms of unclaimed chemical kinship to dioxin-exposed us veterans, including the largely black men incarcerated at holmesburgh prison experimented on by dr. albert kligman in his work for dow chemical (which produced both napalm and agent orange) and the us department of defense, which was central to extending and expanding the use of chemical weapons in vietnam.   4 in contrast to efforts like waterkeepers iraq, which seeks to monitor and protect waterways while also renewing intergenerational relations to the landscape, anthropologist bridget guarasci (2015) points out the way that environmental restoration—particularly of the country's southern marshlands—has been co-opted as tool of us occupation.   5 my work on the burn pits began in 2017 with funding from the va's war related illness and injury study center, in partnership with anthropologist kenneth macleish. we started with questions of diagnosis, and expanded to questions of logistics and infrastructure i take up here. with social sciences and humanities research council of canada funding, we are now collaborating with anthropologist kali rubaii, whose iraq-based work explores the environmental derangement of us occupation. the work of putting us and iraqi experiences into relation would not be possible without such a collaborative approach.   references agard-jones, vanessa. 2016. “chemical kin/esthesia.” lecture, rice university, department of anthropology, december 27. allen, barbara l. 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august 13, 2013. https://www.jadaliyya.com/details/29295. enloe, cynthia. 1990. bananas beaches and bases: making feminist sense of international politics. berkeley: university of california press. federici, silvia. 1975. wages against housework. bristol: falling wall press. fortun, kim. 2012. “ethnography in late industrialism.” cultural anthropology 27 (3): 446-64. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01153.x. guarasci, bridget l. 2015. “the national park: reviving eden in iraq's marshes.” arab studies journal 23 (1): 128-53. gupta, pamela, and gabrielle hecht. 2017. “toxicity, waste, detritus: an introduction | somatosphere.” somatosphere (blog), october 10, 2017. http://somatosphere.net/2017/10/toxicity-waste-detritus-an-introduction.html. hersher, rebecca. 2018. “after decades of air pollution, a louisiana town rebels against a chemical giant.” npr.org, march 6, 2018. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/03/06/583973428/after-decades-of-air-pollution-a-louisiana-town-rebels-against-a-chemical-giant. “how to keep clean and healthy in the trenches.” n.d. imperial war museums. accessed february 27, 2022. https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-to-keep-clean-and-healthy-in-the-trenches. lawrence, quil. 2019. “veterans claiming illness from burn pits lose court fight.” npr, january 16, 2019, sec. national security. https://www.npr.org/2019/01/16/685657005/veterans-claiming-illness-from-burn-pits-lose-court-fight. levinson, marc. 2016. the box: how the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger. 2nd ed. princeton, nj: princeton university press. liboiron, max. 2021. pollution is colonialism. durham, nc: duke university press. lutz, catherine. 2001. homefront: a military city and the american twentieth century. boston: beacon press. lutz, catherine. 2009. the bases of empire: the global struggle against u.s. military posts. new york: nyu press. macleish, kenneth, and zoë wool. 2018. “us military burn pits and the politics of health.” medical anthropology quarterly, critical care (blog), august 1, 2018. https://medanthroquarterly.org/critical-care/2018/08/us-military-burn-pits-and-the-politics-of-health/. macleish, kenneth, and zoë wool. 2022. “burn pits: us military waste as war violence.” theorizing the contemporary, fieldsites (blog), january 25, 2022. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/burn-pits-us-military-waste-as-war-violence. marx, karl, and friedrich engels. 1978. “manifesto of the communist party” in the marx-engels reader. robert c. tucker, ed. new york: w.w. norton:469-500. mccaffery, katherine. 2009. “environmental struggle after the cold war: new forms of resistance to the u.s. military in vieques, puerto rico.” in the bases of empire: the global struggle against u.s. military posts, edited by catherine lutz, 218-42. new york: nyu press. mcclintock, anne. 1995. imperial leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. new york: routledge. murphy, michelle. 2017. “alterlife and decolonial chemical relations.” cultural anthropology 32 (4): 494-503. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.02. national academy of sciences. 2011. long-term health consequences of exposure to burn pits in iraq and afghanistan. consensus study report. http://nationalacademies.org/hmd/reports/2011/long-term-health-consequences-of-exposure-to-burn-pits-in-iraq-and-afghanistan.aspx. nixon, rob. 2011. slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. owens, patricia. 2015. economy of force: counterinsurgency and the historical rise of the social. cambridge: cambridge university press. pérez, gina m. 2015. citizen, student, soldier: latina/o youth, jrotc, and the american dream. new york: nyu press. povinelli, elizabeth. 2006. the empire of love. durham, nc: duke university press. reese, ashanté. 2022. “black lives, white (sugar) empire: notes on confinement and care in the wake of the texas prison system.” dean's forum i+e lecture, university of virginia, school of architecture, february 7, 2022. reimann, nick, and della hasselle. 2019. “federal judge dismisses suit seeking class-action status against st. john chemical plant.” nola.com, march 30, 2019. https://www.nola.com/news/courts/article_cc151c17-2ec6-5728-8b2f-398c30c1cfcd.html. roberts, dorothy e. 1998. killing the black body: race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. new york: vintage books. rubaii, kali. 2020. “birth defects and the toxic legacy of war in iraq.” middle east research, no. 296. https://merip.org/2020/09/birth-defects-and-the-toxic-legacy-of-war-in-iraq/. rubaii, kali. 2021. “(counter)-resurgency: outlasting the war on terror in iraq.” book manuscript. santana, déborah berman. 2002. “resisting toxic militarism: vieques versus the u.s. navy.” social justice 29 (1/2 (87-88)): 37-47. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29768117. savabieasfahani, m., s. sadik ali, r. bacho, o. savabi, and m. alsabbak. 2016. “prenatal metal exposure in the middle east: imprint of war in deciduous teeth of children.” environmental monitoring and assessment 188 (9): 505. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-016-5491-0. shelton, kyle. 2017. power moves: transportation, politics, and development in houston. austin: university of texas press. “ship channel history.” n.d. port houston. accessed march 2, 2022. https://www.expandthehoustonshipchannel.com/ship-channel-history/. solomon, marisa. 2019. “'the ghetto is a goldmine': the racialized temporality of betterment.” international labor and working-class history 95 (spring): 76-94. https://www.doi.org/10.1017/s0147547919000024. spillers, hortense j. 1987. “mama's baby, papa's maybe: an american grammar book.” diacritics 17 (2): 65-81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747. stapleton, darwin h. 2005. “a lost chapter in the early history of ddt: the development of anti-typhus technologies by the rockefeller foundation's louse laboratory, 1942-1944.” technology and culture 46 (3): 513-40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40060902. stevenson, lisa. 2014. life beside itself: imagining care in the canadian arctic. berkeley: university of california press. tuck, eve. 2009. “suspending damage: a letter to communities.” harvard educational review 79 (3): 409-27. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15. us epa, reg 06. 2016. “laplace, louisiana frequent questions.” collections and lists. louisiana. june 20, 2016. https://www.epa.gov/la/laplace-louisiana-frequent-questions. vine, david. 2015. base nation: how u.s. military bases abroad harm america and the world. new york: metropolitan books, henry holt and company. “waterkeepers iraq.” n.d. waterkeepers iraq. accessed february 27, 2022. https://www.waterkeepersiraq.org/. weinbaum, alys eve. 2019. the afterlife of reproductive slavery: biocapitalism and black feminism's philosophy of history. durham, nc: duke university press. wool, zoë h. 2017. “the relativity of toxicity.” anthro{dendum} (blog). december 8, 2017. https://anthrodendum.org/2017/12/08/the-relativity-of-toxicity/. wool, zoë h. 2021. “disability, straight time, and the american dream: disabled us veterans and the desire for heteronormative futures.” american ethnologist 48 (3), https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13027. yathrib project. 2020. “yathrib project.” arcgis storymaps. march 5, 2020. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/6efd18b8bf094f83af7ada5da3efd87a.     author bio zoë h wool is assistant professor in the department of anthropology and director of the twig research kitchen at the university of toronto, mississauga, where she teaches courses on topics ranging from the anthropology of toxicity to gender and disability. she is the author of after war: the weight of life at walter reed (duke university press, 2015). book review | what comes after entanglement?: activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion, by eva haifa giraud (duke university press, 2019) espinel-quintero, natalia. 2024. review of discard studies: wasting, systems, and power, by max liboiron and josh lepawsky (mit press, 2022), catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1– 5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312. © natalia espinel-quintero, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | discard studies: wasting, systems, and power, by max liboiron and josh lepawsky (mit press, 2022) natalia espinel-quintero concordia university nespinelquin@gmail.com max liboiron and josh lepawsky start their latest book, discard studies: wasting, systems, and power (2022), with an ordinary object that, though seemingly familiar, carries with it a web of invisible and unspoken relations. by exploring the toxic entanglements behind a discarded cash register receipt, liboiron and lepawsky take an unexpected path to ask how objects, people, communities, materials, and practices become valued or disposable. throughout the book, the authors show how wasting is a technique of power and address the role of discarding in the construction and preservation of dominant structures. discard studies emerged in 2010 as an interdisciplinary field of research initiated by robin nagle, founder of the discard studies online hub. scholars in this field look at the why, what, where, and how of waste, and ask questions about the systems that shape and render things disposable. even though liboiron and lepawsky state that they do not seek to provide an overview of the field, those unfamiliar with the discipline might find that the book offers a good introduction to it. in fact, through the introductory chapter the authors discuss some key discard studies concepts and present four methods used by discard studies scholars to debunk common myths about waste—namely, defamiliarization, denaturalization, decentering, and depurifying. although these methods are often used to think about waste and trash, the authors show, through the theories expounded in subsequent chapters, that it is possible to use these approaches to think more widely about power, inequality, and justice. in chapter two, the authors lay out a theory of scale, discussing the unevenness in relationships within systems and defining scale as “relationships that matter” (45). using a situated perspective to think about these relationships might help us book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) natalia espinel-quintero, 2024 avoid what liboiron and lepawsky call scalar mismatches: problems that arise with reductionist or monolithic approaches to knowledge in which only one perspective is understood as valid (40). this concept of scalar mismatches, which becomes central to the chapter, highlights the importance of situated thinking, and acts as an invitation to avoid solutionism and consider system interventions instead (41). the methods of defamiliarization and denaturalization are used through the different examples presented in the chapter to question how and why certain perspectives and notions of waste become dominant. for instance, the authors show how individualism is often “naturalized through per-capita waste statistics” (48). this, they argue, makes it seem as if individuals were the main generators of waste, when in fact consumers are “only a waypoint for objects that have been designed to be wasted” (48). thus, though initiatives such as recycling might give us the idea that we are working towards waste reduction—what samantha macbride (2011) calls “busy-ness”—scalar thinking shows that recycling, rather than helping save raw materials, continues to promote plastic production. through the theory of power presented in chapter three, liboiron and lepawsky show how discarding is used to get rid of undesired others to maintain order. power is discussed not necessarily as coercion or a relation of force, but as a form of selection that enables to keep things in and/or out of place. using commercial content moderation (ccm) and recycling as examples, the authors invite readers to think about the ways in which discarding is used within systems to avoid change at a level that actually matters. in both cases, discarding serves to maintain disposability. recycling does this by making “disposables appear sustainable [,]” making pollution an invisible part of the recycling equation (70). with ccm, not only is content discarded, but also the workers who are hired to do the sorting job. social media platforms ensure that their audiences are kept “safe” and their feeds “clean” by outsourcing the labor of content moderators to contractors that make these workers sign non-disclosure agreements. the workers are exposed to the images that threaten the “cleanliness” of these platforms, but since they cannot talk about the burdens of these jobs once they have left them the “stream of worker disposability” is maintained (74). the case of ccm illustrates “that the principles, practices, and politics of discard are a regular part of broader systems” (66). it also shows how those systems create sacrifice zones to pass the burden of waste, pollution, or the undesirable onto disposable others, keeping the center(s) of those systems clean. in this case, decentering is used to uncover those sacrifice zones and render visible the systems behind them. in chapter four, the authors develop a theory of difference. this theory is about paying attention to the many ways that difference is related to dominant systems, but also to the need of using difference as a form of reflexivity. difference, they assert, “is both key to maintaining order and disrupting power” (96). through sorting, classification, or discarding, differences “are built, maintained, and book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) natalia espinel-quintero, 2024 contribute to uneven power relations” (99). several methods are used throughout the chapter, but two of them stand out: denaturalization and depurifying. denaturalization is used to show how difference is discarded to maintain business as usual and avoid accountability. for instance, in the totalizing “we” often evoked in scientific, environmental, and political discourses, or in the assertion that “humans” are trashing the planet, not only is an exclusionary notion of humanity naturalized—as dipesh chakrabarty (2009) and sylvia wynter (2003) have shown—but the social, economic, and political systems that mandate and promote disposability are also erased. but difference is not always ignored. in fact, as liboiron and lepawsky assert, “classifying, defining, sorting, ranking things by value, and other forms of differentiation—creating and acting on difference—are central to discarding” (97). when difference is used to support racist, sexist, transphobic, or ableist claims, depurifying is needed to analyze “the discourses, logics, and other techniques that aim to essentialize and control difference” (121). finally, building on all these theories and methods, chapter five introduces a theory of change and uneven ethics. this final theory makes it possible to see discarding not just as technique of power but also as a technique of change. change here is understood as something normative and specific that deals with systems instead of symptoms (for instance, dealing with the current system of disposability instead of dealing with plastics through recycling), and that is accountable to discard as a practice and to what is discarded (128–29). most importantly, the authors argue that all theories of change must observe an ethic of incommensurability by recognizing that there is no single universal good. liboiron and lepawsky close the chapter by talking about the importance of discarding well to change systems. in fact, they explain how in the writing of the book they were confronted with an ethical problem that forced them to discard a case study to keep themselves accountable (144). initially, they wanted to present a case study about mushroom harvesting in tŝilhqot’in territory but, given that they did not have the consent of the community at the time they were writing, they decided to discard the case study to emphasize the importance of discarding well and to bring the discussion to the academic ground. discarding that case study sets an example of how scalar, situated, and relational thinking can disrupt the system and its logics. while this is not a new argument for feminist sts scholars, liboiron and lepawsky’s discussion about this ethical problem and their talk about memorial university’s research impacting indigenous groups policy can serve as a guide for feminist sts researchers who are looking for ways to develop accountable and anti-colonial methodologies. in addition, the book offers useful tools and methods for interdisciplinary researchers to go beyond the identification of systemic issues and define where and how interventions are more likely to have an impact (132). book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) natalia espinel-quintero, 2024 unlike most books, discard studies does not end with its last theoretical chapter. in the reference section, the authors include a short section in which they hold themselves accountable for their citational practices and bring up the ways in which discarding is often at work when it comes to citing black women and women of color. though the paragraph acts as an invitation for readers to review their own citational practices, as a global south researcher who lives and works in the global north and often encounters this form of discarding, i would have liked to see a more in-depth discussion of this issue. when it comes to citing, academic discarding works in favor of what aymara/bolivian feminist silvia rivera cusicanqui calls the “political economy of knowledge” (2012, 102). rivera cusicanqui refers to the hierarchies of knowledge that are formed through citational practices when prominent global north authors are cited over emergent global south scholars—who are addressing the same issues but do not have the same platforms as the former, or who encounter barriers to publish their work in english because it fails to cite known authors. as a technique of power, discarding is used to ensure these hierarchies are kept in place. in this case, how can discarding well help build relationships that matter with thinkers, artists, and writers who are on the margins of the system? though there is no direct answer to this question in the book, readers are equipped with the tools needed to address this gap. timely, inspiring, and insightful, discard studies offers a generative critique at the same time as it develops a conversation with readers. in an accessible language, the authors establish a relationship of care with us and ask us to be reciprocal in our reading, be it by thinking along with them or by bringing all these questions and theories to our disciplines of study. references chakrabarty, dipesh. 2009. “the climate of history: four theses.” critical inquiry 35, no. 2 (winter): 197–222. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/596640. liboiron, max, and josh lepawsky. 2022. discard studies: wasting, systems, and power. cambridge, ma: mit press. macbride, samantha. 2011. recycling reconsidered: the present failure and future promise of environmental action in the united states. cambridge, ma: mit press. rivera cusicanqui, silvia. 2012. “ch’ixinakax utxiwa: a reflection on the practices and discourses of decolonization.” south atlantic quarterly 111, no. 1 (winter): 95–109. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1472612. wynter, sylvia. 2003. “unsettling the coloniality of being/ power/ truth/ freedom.” cr: the new centennial review 3, no. 3 (fall): 257–336. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949874. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/596640 https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1472612 http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949874 book review 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) natalia espinel-quintero, 2024 author bio natalia espinel-quintero is an ma student in media studies at concordia university in tiohtia:ke/montreal. she also holds a master’s degree in latin american cultural studies from universidad javeriana (colombia). book review | discard studies: wasting, systems, and power, by max liboiron and josh lepawsky (mit press, 2022) references author bio berkhout, suze, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley. 2024. “troubling transplant temporality through crip technoscience and a sensory aesthetics of time, machine, and health.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–25. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license troubling transplant temporality through crip technoscience and a sensory aesthetics of time, machine, and health suze berkhout university of toronto suze.berkhout@uhn.ca kelly fritsch carleton university kellyfritsch@cunet.carleton.ca brian keeley university of aberdeen b.keeley.19@abdn.ac.uk bibo keeley visual artist b.keeley@rgu.ac.uk abstract taking up technologies that act as a “bridge” to transplant, we explore what the lifeworlds of a transplant patient and their loved ones interacting with these technologies tells us about the temporality of transplantation and the imperative of cure. by engaging with clinical literature and practices, transdisciplinary crip technoscience theorizing, and multimodal, multisensory artistic form, we bring together sick and disabled people’s expertise and diverse ways of knowing that enable a rich and nuanced exploration of transplant time that complicates biomedical expertise while at the same time recognizes its embrace as one with opportunity and potential for care and collaboration. in troubling transplant mailto:suze.berkhout@uhn.ca mailto:kellyfritsch@cunet.carleton.ca mailto:b.keeley.19@abdn.ac.uk mailto:b.keeley.19@abdn.ac.uk special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 2 temporality through crip technoscience and a sensory aesthetics of time, machine, and health, we demonstrate how perspectives often excluded or minimized in acute care offer innovative ways in which to think through the material limitations of taken-for-granted understandings within transplant settings. keywords bridge to transplant, crip technoscience, disability art, sensory aesthetics, ventricular assist device (vad), extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ecmo), ableism introduction worldwide, over 150,000 solid organ transplant operations are carried out on an annual basis (godt 2022). country by country, rates of deceased donor organ recovery and living organ donation are outstripped by the numbers of individuals in need of transplant (lewis et al. 2021). in canada, for example, more than 4,000 people await transplant each year and 250 to 270 individuals will die on the wait list (cihi 2023). the discrepancy between those who are in need of transplant and the limited number of organs available for donation results in significant clinical, technological, and research attention given to, and resources focused on, how to best optimize the health of individuals being listed and how to maximize possibilities for timely organ retrieval. over the past three decades especially, technoscientific innovations in transplant medicine have proliferated in response to these supply-demand challenges, including, for example, how to prolong the viability of organs ex vivo, such as through the “heart-in-a-box” technology, which can extend a heart’s ischemic time from the traditional four hours to up to twelve hours (sunjaya and sunjaya 2019), or the use of ex vivo lung perfusion in concert with gene therapies (gao et al. 2022); how to transplant marginal tissues that would otherwise be unable to thrive in a new bodily ecosystem (resch et al. 2020); how to fine-tune medical interventions for optimal physiological health even as the reason one barrels toward transplant is the acceleration of end-stage organ failure (wood-trageser et al. 2020); or how to expand donor pools through xenotransplantation (cooper et al. 2018). within this focus on the supply-demand dilemma, it is easy to overlook other pressing challenges associated with the complexities of life preand posttransplant. what is more, these challenges can be difficult to articulate and address because of the dominant cultural scripts that surround the temporality of transplant. these scripts mark post-transplant life as a kind of “afterward,” steeped in imaginaries of cure and of health and vitality restored, even as difficulties exist and persist prominently across transplantation’s full temporal span (heinemann 2020; wasson 2021). as noted by heart transplant recipient andrea barrett, “people feel they cannot share certain facets of transplant life and the harsh realities of transplant medicine because it could potentially reduce the special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 3 pool of organ donors” (2023, 38). barrett links this hesitation to ableism and the socially ubiquitous notion that people are better off dead than disabled. if, as an intervention, transplant itself qualifies recipients as socially undesirable chronically ill disabled people, attaching negative and nuanced narratives to transplantation could further reduce an already scarce supply of donor organs. it is precisely because solid organ transplantation is often considered a pinnacle of achievement in contemporary biomedicine, bringing “second chances” and “rebirth” to individuals facing end-stage organ failure, that other complications and experiences are left unexplored and unspoken. hope and gratitude are normative affective orientations to transplantation, at times contributing to isolation, guilt, and disillusionment when the optimistic outlooks expected of organ recipients are challenged by difficulties and unmet expectations (schipper 2014). the field of transplantation, as a field marked by exceptionality and technological prowess as well as a normative optimism attached to cure, has struggled with not only how to understand and represent the quotidian challenges of transplant in ways that are patient-centered, but also how to mobilize insights from patient perspectives to enact changes that can improve post-transplant liveability. it is necessary to address this struggle to mobilize insights from patient perspectives to improve patient agency and thriving both preand post-transplant given that so many medical and psychosocial complications are common throughout the experience from threats to survival and traumatic interventions while wait-listed, to postoperative complications and the complexities of long-term adherence to intensive medical regimens and accompanying biomedical surveillance, through to the emotional challenges of survivorship, the sequelae of immune suppression, graft failure, and end-of-life care for transplant patients (abbey 2011; colman et al. 2015; molonado, sher, and lokak 2017). while developments in transplant procedures since the 1980s have resulted in a marked increase in one-year survival rates, thereafter the annual mortality rate of 3 to 4 percent has remained constant.1 the long-term outcomes of organ transplantation, therefore, remain limited largely due to the inability to address the complications of rejection and the damaging effects of immunosuppressant drugs (claeys and vermeire 2019; wilhelm 2015). given the ubiquity of these medical and psychosocial challenges and poor long-term outcomes, it is imperative to amplify and act on the insights of those with lived experience of transplantation to improve access to healthcare and technologies that enhance quality of life and also to acknowledge the needs, wants, expertise, and contributions of sick and disabled people. considering these tensions, in this paper, we bring together clinical practices, crip technoscience theorizing, and forms of multimodal and multisensory artistic research-creation to forge new knowledges troubling the temporality of transplantation. crip technoscience (fritsch et al. 2019; hamraie and fritsch 2019) approaches transplant medicine from the agentive perspective of sick and disabled people, drawing attention to inequities and injustices in healthcare special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 4 access and treatments and tracing how ableism and the hegemonic force of the curative imaginary impacts their experiences and quality of life. at the same time, crip technoscience highlights how the creative practices of sick and disabled people navigating transplant contributes to, and can potentially transform, healthcare practices, cultural scripts of transplantation, and offer expertise about what it means to continue living on, and the strategies and ways of being that enable continuance. through a crip technoscience lens, we mobilize clinical, patient, and artistic research-creation perspectives to improve preand posttransplant liveability and contribute to troubling notions of “health” as a temporal destination of transplantation, especially as the “temporal hauntings of before shape the afterward” (berkhout, fritsch, and wong-mersereau 2023, 2). the contemporary proliferation of transplant technologies offers a rich domain in which to explore how material constraints arise from ableist exclusions within the field of biomedical technoscience. these ableist exclusions intersect with other structural inequities and forms of oppression. it is crucial to recognize and incorporate the expertise of patients, those with lived experience of chronic illness and disability, and the contributions of artistic practices, which can lead to significant positive change. in what follows, we begin by taking up technologies that act as a “bridge” to transplant, exploring what the lifeworld of a transplant patient utilizing these technologies tells us about the temporality of transplantation and the imperative of cure. transplant technologies that are referred to as a “bridge” emphasize the capacity for the machinery to enable survival by taking over endogenous organ function until the more definitive intervention of transplantation can take place. we employ crip technoscience to analyze bridge to transplant technologies such as ventricular assist devices (vad) and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ecmo) techniques. these technologies are positioned as a bridge offering passage away from solid organ failure and toward what is purported to be a destination of health post-transplant. often lost in the orientation to health, cure, and the overcoming of organ failure is the temporal, sensuous, and machinic embodied experiences of living in, with, and through organ failure, chronic illness, and disability, not only as a result of the orientation of bridge to organ transplant process as a kind of overcoming, but also in how post-transplant life is described and hoped for as a “new and improved state” (standing et al. 2017). we draw on clinical literature and practices to trouble some of the ways bridge to transplant is frequently positioned through a linear temporality of biomedical cure that orients a person with organ failure to transplant as a destination of health. we juxtapose this positioning to artistic explorations of the lived experience of bridge to transplant and its aftermath, including drawings by visual artist and double lung transplant recipient dominic quagliozzi (2023), and brian and bibo keeley’s digital short film breathe (2021). we also engage other multimodal artistic works that take up issues surrounding transplantation and https://youtu.be/kv2vtftjoyk?si=nrtzzh3cw7dnv4t_ special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 5 temporality more generally, including jonathan kawchuk’s soundscape boundary loss (kawchuk and berkhout 2023), and a narrative essay by now deceased heart transplant recipient amy silverstein (2023). combined, these artistic works engage with the sensory aesthetics of time, machine, and health, illuminating aspects of living in, with, and through organ failure in important ways that are obscured not only by the dominant temporality of transplantation but also by the bridge to transplant practices themselves. convivial with crip technoscience, sensory aesthetics articulate knowledge and experience from a multisensory perspective, incorporating senses like smell, texture, and sound. this approach illuminates and communicates subtle perceptions that challenge conventional biomedical views of the body, which often prioritize uniform understandings of the body that are grounded in a temporality of transplant as a destination of health. we take up crip technoscience and sensory aesthetics to more deeply engage with the embodied insights of sick and disabled people that challenge and complicate entrenched biomedical discourses about solid organ transplantation experiences, premised on the position that not all experience or knowledge is empirically quantifiable or best expressed through words (culhane 2016; frankel et al. 2024). in so doing, we take up transplant temporality as “borrowed and looped and experience lived in ways that undercut the seemingly straightforward and linear relationship between transplantation and cure” (berkhout, fritsch, and wong-mersereau 2023, 2). in troubling transplant temporality through crip technoscience and a sensory aesthetics of time, machine, and health, we demonstrate how perspectives often excluded or minimized in acute care offer innovative ways in which to think through the material limitations of taken-for-granted understandings within transplant settings. through this, we forge possibilities for improving the quality of recipients’ and families’ experiences. by engaging with transdisciplinary crip technoscience theorizing and multimodal, multisensory artistic form, we bring together sick and disabled people’s expertise and diverse ways of knowing that enable a rich and nuanced exploration of transplant time that complicates biomedical expertise while at the same time recognizes its embrace as one with opportunity and potential for care and collaboration. transplant machines the spectrum of transplant-related interventions runs from the spectacular to the mundane: mechanical ventilation, ventricular assist devices, dialysis, cooling machines, portable aspirators (suction machines), nasogastric feeding tubes, shunts, ports, drains and intravenous (iv) lines—the number of ways that someone can be tethered and have usually bodily boundaries of inside/outside blurred is almost endless. within this list, there are those devices or machines that are purpose driven to improve a critically ill individual’s chances of survival long enough to be eligible for a transplant, or while wait-listed to receive a donor organ and create what is often termed a “window” for transplant (sakpal et al. 2018). special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 6 one such technology is extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ecmo), a technique for providing prolonged cardiac and respiratory support by pumping and oxygenating blood outside of an individual’s body. ecmo “is routinely offered to patients with a rapidly declining end-stage disease as a bridging strategy to transplantation or, in the case of instability or inadequate graft function, as intra and/or post-operative support” (faccioli et al. 2021, 291). unlike a heart-lung machine, which is used for a number of hours in a surgical context such as coronary bypass, ecmo is designed for longer term use and can be deployed for several days, or even weeks, to enable the survival of individuals with heart and/or lung damage, injury, or rapidly declining end-stage disease (johns hopkins medicine, n.d.). this technology is characterized as especially advantageous given that the number of patients on transplant wait lists far exceeds the number of available organs and can act as a bridge to transplant (faccioli et al. 2021). a range of cannulation strategies and implantation techniques exist and are described in the literature as ways to personalize and optimize cardio-respiratory function. ecmo is described as adaptable, with multiple configurations (for instance, it can be used for pure pulmonary support or for combined cardio-pulmonary support in critically ill individuals). technical advances since the early 2000s have led to improvements in survival following intervention as well as exponential increases in the use of ecmo, particularly prior to lung transplantation (gulack, hirji, and hartwig 2014). that said, there is a paradox at the center of this technology: those who would most benefit from ecmo are the urgent patients with high predicted pre-transplant mortality; these same individuals are often considered too critical to be suitable for ecmo as a bridge to transplant (faccioli et al. 2021). in light of this, various transplant societies have created guidelines that detail liabilities for ecmo, including septic shock, multi-organ dysfunction, obesity, advanced age, or underlying irreversible neurological disease (faccioli et al. 2021). for example, the international society of heart and lung transplantation reports that ecmo “support should be recommended in the case of young age, absence of multiorgan dysfunction and good rehabilitation potential” (faccioli et al. 2021, 293). for as much as there might be a physiological rationalization for such exclusion criteria, they align with (and reinforce) other forms of exclusion in transplantation that have been challenged from equity and justice perspectives, especially in relation to structural factors that influence interpretations of what “good” rehabilitation potential means (lorusso et al. 2021; mattar, chatterjee, and loor 2019). another technology used in heart transplantation is the ventricular assist device (vad), an increasingly common way to support individuals whose heart failure is worsening despite active medical management and require temporary cardiac support. a short-term vad is used for those who may be seriously ill in a hospital setting. it supports the heart, either until it recovers, or if the heart is permanently special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 7 damaged, the vad can offer extended life support while other non-cardiac complications—such as renal or respiratory failure—might improve enough for the patient to be listed for an urgent transplant. a long-term vad is a portable device for non-critical patients, who may have already been listed for a transplant, and who are often able to return home while waiting until a donor organ becomes available. patients may live with a long-term vad for several years while waiting for a transplant. vads are likewise referred to as a bridge to transplant (sharp 2014). seen as “durable and reliable” forms of mechanical circulatory support, these technologies are now a standard of care when end-stage organ failure or life-threatening exacerbation of existing heart failure occurs (holley, harvey, and john 2014, 1110). the bridge as metaphor is multi-layered, hailing objects of engineering, components of musical instruments and musical composition, as well as the command center of a ship (huser, dockett, and perry 2016). at another level, the bridge serves as a symbol that denotes the passageway between “the mortal, the transitory, and the immortal,” connecting the profane with the sacred (gordon 2018, 2). giving access to the supra-sensory, to heaven, the bridge-builder is seen, then, as outwitting gods of death or the devil (gordon 2018). as rosemary gordon has described, the bridge presupposes boundaries and separateness, configured as a “here” and a “there,” a “then” and a “now” (2018, 4). as it is employed within the field of transplant technoscience, the symbol of the bridge denotes support as a passage is navigated, as well as expert guidance through that navigation. the movement it reflects is forward, linear—toward a better place, a place of restored health. the bridge metaphor orients transplant experience, spotlighting certain issues as relevant and attending in particular to the perspective of the transplant team. and while the “crossing” aspect of the bridge metaphor speaks to the liminality and uncertainty of the experience of being wait-listed, in some cases, this liminality refers to people who are often too sick for life yet too well to be prioritized for transplantation (larson and curtis 2006); in other instances, people are too sick for life, too sick for transplant. in either case, the metaphor belies the notion of transplantation as a destination. sidedness, linearity, and loops: temporalities of transplant embedded in the sidedness of the bridge metaphor is an understanding that one reaches an end or target location. ecmo is considered an interim measure that will facilitate an individual’s crossing the chasm of organ failure, reaching a destination of restored health in the aftermath. vads were initially conceived of as a so-called destination intervention as the vad itself is sufficient to support longevity and quality of life such that it is an alternative to cardiac special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 8 transplantation. indeed, some patients go home with vads as a permanent transformation of their bodies, and not simply as a bridge in anticipation of a future transplant. however, since the mid-1990s, interventional research has focused on the importance of vads for supporting post-transplant success, including improved one-year survival (frazier et al. 1995). with “health” as the destination, the crossing then becomes the work to be done, and the technical prowess of the intervention is the locus for improvements and innovation. the notion of health as a sought-after destination is likewise marked by the simultaneous connotation of ecmo as a rescue strategy for post-transplant support when complications arise—intervention remains inevitable and attempts to approximate cure through transplantation continues as an ultimate endpoint (faccioli et al. 2021). these viewpoints arguably take resources and attention away from what it means to live well in the post-transplantation lifeworld, or what it can mean to not pursue transplant at all. that is, mechanical intervention can act as a bridge to transplantation, but for the patient, the transplantation is never the end destination, even if dominant cultural scripts and the temporality of transplantation orients patients to perceive it as a destination. instead, it is a vital but single step on the journey to some sense of recovery from organ failure as well as a form of living with altered embodiment. contra dominant cultural scripts and temporalities, transplantation is not, in and of itself, a final destination. this is because the afterward of transplantation is a continuity of numerous medical and psychosocial challenges—from transplantation, from bridging technologies themselves, and the interventions that surround these. improvements to technologies such as ecmo have not altered common complications, including bleeding, infection, and renal failure; less usual are issues such as stroke and limb ischemia, resulting from a restriction in blood supply to the brain or limbs (faccioli et al. 2021; gulack, hirji, and hartwig 2014). within the transplantation literature, comparative analyses in primary graft dysfunction focus on the metrics of the technologies used to sustain life and attempt to prevent further end organ damage while “rescue” therapy takes place (whether this is rescue by ecmo or devices such as vad). and while it is certainly meaningful to examine whether ecmo is superior to vad, the literature leaves unquestioned the centrality of technological intervention as well as the impact of needing such therapies on those who are struggling in the aftermath of graft failure (see, e.g., takeda et al. 2017). the bridge metaphor shifts focus away from the challenges and difficulties that are undeniably a part of transplant recipients’ lived experience—whether these challenges are embedded in the uncertain liminality of being listed or experienced by those who have “crossed” the bridge. the complexities of life preand post-transplant cannot easily be communicated if the assumption is that the destination has been (or will be) expertly reached, and (potential) transplant recipients are always under scrutiny to demonstrate special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 9 their wholehearted commitment to transplant and their capacity to follow the medical obligations generated by transplantation (barrett 2023; berkhout et al.2022). the silence that surrounds the complexities of transplant is particularly problematic considering how the field’s technological advances (and the expert guidance attached to these) contrast with the lack of advances in the posttransplant lifeworld, including long-term survivability. for example, the drug regimens of transplant recipients typically includes the twice daily use of immunosuppressing drugs such as cyclosporine, first introduced in 1983, or tacrolimus, introduced in the 1990s. tacrolimus continues to be the standard drug for immunosuppression among new transplant recipients (chang et al. 2021) and is often paired with other maintenance agents such as mycophenolate mofetil, introduced in the 1990s, and prednisone, a steroid introduced in 1955. these drugs need to be taken at specific times of the day, some with food, some without; tremors are a common side effect after ingesting some, fading as the day continues. medications heavily regiment the daily lives of recipients in ways that draw continuities with medicalized life pre-transplant rather than marking a “new beginning” (heinemann 2020). this sentiment is expressed in the work of double lung transplant recipient and visual artist dominic quagliozzi. in visceral diary drawings (2023), quagliozzi captures his life on the pre-transplant waiting list with lung failure through to two years post-transplant. one drawing in this series, titled “i am support devices,” shows quagliozzi’s barely visible pretransplant body entangled with devices, wires, tubes, liquids, and oxygen. another drawing, completed three months post-transplant simply asserts in comic-style bubble lettering, “my immune system is pills.” quagliozzi’s art attends to the complexity of an afterward of transplant as a kind of continuity of enmeshments with transplant technologies that radically alter bodies and subjectivities—here, taking the form of an ongoing reliance on pills. pills that fix certain problems and create others, pills that solve the problems created by the first set, and so on. the avant-garde quality of quagliozzi’s work is, in part, for naming the frustrations that have previously remained unnamed. to articulate to the difficulties of the post-transplant lifeworld is, in some ways, to undermine the tacit understanding of transplant technologies as cure, and the nebulous concept of health as destination. and while there may be a sense of restored vitality post-transplant, it is also the case that as physical and emotional challenges build and the complexity of post-transplantation medical needs becomes apparent, recipients can easily enter what has been termed “the fall”: tormented by the restrictions and responsibilities of caring for their donated organ (sheikhalipour et al. 2018). in longer-term survivors of transplantation, the posttransplant experience is one where the illness narrative is never finished—not only from memories of past illness, but a present marked by medication side effects and where the intrusion of further illness or graft dysfunction is ever present (boaz and morgan 2014). and although survival rates one-year post-transplantation have improved dramatically across most domains of solid organ transplant, recipients special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 10 remain at risk for numerous conditions including cancer, infection, metabolic diseases such as diabetes, ulcers and delayed wound healing, high blood pressure, and immunologic graft damage due to the combination of medications that are necessary for immunologic suppression, impacting longer-term survivability (claeys and vermeire 2019). as such, there remains a pressing need “for newer drugs that promote immune tolerance without the side effects observed with current immunosuppressive agents” (claeys and vermeire 2019, 15). laura heinemann has articulated how the curative possibilities of transplantation are ones that “epitomize the power and promise of biomedicine” (2020, 82). at the same time, as her ethnographic work demonstrates, when one is living with transplant, one is “never quite beyond illness” (83). two-time heart transplant recipient, amy silverstein’s (2023) essay likewise offers this perspective, noting how the experience of long-term transplant survivorship is more complicated than messages surrounding transplant, which “tend to follow a familiar narrative of dramatic transformation: the gravely ill patient becomes a thriving, active individual through high-tech medicine and the generosity of organ donors and their families.” silverstein’s first donor heart died as a result of insufficient treatment options to offer protection from rejection while her life with her “perfect” and “beautiful” second heart was ultimately cut short due to incurable cancer caused by her drug regimen. the intensive self-monitoring required to maintain one’s transplanted organ also places a psychological toll on recipients, their loved ones, and caregivers, and the medical events leading to critical illness and pre-transplant organ failure can also have persistent emotional impacts lasting well beyond the surgical healing process (lai, ufere, and bucuvalas 2020). in the weeks leading up to her death, silverstein writes in the new york times, the side effects of transplant immunosuppression can be sickening day to day, as my small posse of stalwart organ recipient girlfriends knows well; we talk about the vomit bags stashed in our purses, the antacid tablets we tuck into our front pockets for quick-nibble access at a cocktail party or when giving a presentation at work. we’ve encouraged one another to be inventive and keep finding little fixes or at least ameliorations. yet over time, each of us tolerate significant challenges and damage, the kind that prompt us to call late at night in tears, reeling from the intractable infections that land us in emergency rooms and hospital beds, the biopsies that pluck pieces of our donor organs leaving us scarred and shaken, the skin cancers that blossom rapidly beside an eyelid or ear. we’ve learned that there can be no clearing every single cancer cell with a suppressed immune system; we will get cut again, and again, and again. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 11 in addition to these stressors, many transplant recipients report a sense of indebtedness to their clinical team and donor that complicates negative emotional responses and experiences of stress resulting from complex medication regimens with numerous side effects (tong et al. 2011). but because transplantation is often conceptualized as a “new beginning,” a “second chance,” and the “gift of life” (siminoff and chillag 1999; stubber and kirkman 2020), a curative imaginary frames transplant medicine. this frame is practically “a genre” (heinemann 2020, 83) and can prevent a robust engagement with the challenges of survivorship, including how to live well with chronic illness and disability. as heinemann puts it, “while illness might be periodically obscured in the tangle, it is never truly severed from the experience of living with transplant” (83). silverstein (2023) notes that this “narrative discourages transplant recipients from talking freely about the real problems we face and the compromising and lifethreatening side effects of the medicines we must take.” kidney transplant recipients are, for instance, less likely to meet clinical targets for anemia, blood pressure, and blood sugar control compared to nontransplanted individuals with chronic renal disease, a finding thought to relate to the challenges of adherence to medications and clinical regimens (bissonnette et al. 2013). as compared to non-transplanted counterparts, transplant recipients are also less likely to have important discussions regarding goals of care and palliation should their disease progress (berkhout et al. 2022). in the case of heart transplant, the newly transplanted organ does not offer the same characteristics as a non-transplanted heart. that is, while a successful heart transplant can offer an immeasurable improvement in quality of life (given that end-stage heart failure offers no viable alternative), a transplanted heart retains limited functionality compared to that of a non-transplanted heart. the donor heart is completely denervated in the process of transplantation, with the loss of sympathetic and parasympathetic regulation. although some reinnervation can take place over several years, the denervation results in a higher resting heart rate (c. 90 beats per minute) as well as an impaired cardiac response to the demands of physical exercise (grupper, gewirtz, and kushwaha 2018). although levels of fatigue in heart transplant recipients are reportedly moderate overall, in some cases it has significant impacts on the ability of a recipient to participate in life activities, as for example, there are higher levels of fatigue reported among younger heart transplant recipients, whose expectations of health post-transplant and quality of life may be higher (almgren et al. 2021). discussing such factors and experiences can enable transplant recipients to have a sense of agency regarding their goals and quality of life in light of the very real complications that exist for them. primary graft dysfunction is one such major complication whereby intervention can beget further intervention, including “rescue” ecmo, ex vivo lung perfusion, the implantation of vads in the case of special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 12 heart failure, as well as dialysis. for some, these are interventions that are embraced to allow them to extend their lives. for others, returning to interventions following primary graft dysfunction such as dialysis reinscribes feelings of loss, grief, failure, guilt, anger, and depression (gill and lowes 2014). it is imperative to question and unpack the extent to which imagined futures shaped by a curative biomedical frame contributes to these challenges. for as heinemann asks, “how do we understand the relationship between biomedicine and the everyday when there is no ‘after’ to illness?” (2020, 83). sensory aesthetics of time, machine, and health our crip technoscience lens brings us in contact with a need to appreciate the embodied, sensory, and affective aspects of transplant technoscience—what the lifeworld of a patient-machine-recipient-health system assemblage might tell us about transplant temporality and the imperative of cure. to explore how crip technoscience troubles transplant temporality and the imperative of cure more deeply, we turn to recent multimodal and multisensory artistic engagements with critical illness and technologies in relation to transplantation. we take up artistic work that considers the technologies active in bridging to transplant as well as medical practices and temporalities at play more generally in both preand post-transplantation. artists and co-authors brian and bibo keeley have worked in various media to explore their respective and mutual perspectives on brian’s experience of an unexpected heart attack while vacationing in a remote area of scotland in 2013, and the subsequent events that have shaped their lives since then. after 101 days in critical care, supported by bibo, countless clinical staff, as well as numerous machines, tubes, pumps and wires, brian received a heart transplant. following an in-hospital cardiac arrest, he had an extended administration of autopulse, a machine that delivers automated cardiopulmonary resuscitation (cpr). he then spent a period of time on ecmo during his early critical care. there followed more than three months on a “short-term” vad until his eventual transplant. his life support systems also included a dialysis machine, a ventilator, and a nasal-gastric feeding tube. in order to achieve the ultimate goal of transplantation, several chasms had to be bridged. only when his kidney and respiratory functions showed some improvement was he considered a candidate for an urgent transplant, which took place just a few weeks after being listed. while much of bibo and brian’s individual and collaborative artistic works explore the physicality, trauma, sensory, and emotional vortex of that time, we look in particular to their artistic digital short film breathe (2021) to think about the juxtaposition of artistic engagement with lived experience of transplant, versus the image of the bridge as the conventional metaphor that dominates the field of transplantation technologies. breathe opens with the subtle movement of fluid within the letters of the word “breathe,” shifting into an image of a beating heart rendered through functional https://youtu.be/kv2vtftjoyk?si=nrtzzh3cw7dnv4t_ https://youtu.be/kv2vtftjoyk?si=nrtzzh3cw7dnv4t_ special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 13 magnetic resonance imaging (fmri). the beating heart transitions to a seascape, from which a screaming face, submerged in the water emerges. the rhythmic beeping of a telemetry monitor sonically marks the next shift, to an fmri body superimposed on close-up shots of insects engaging with plants. at various points, the sway of wildflowers coordinates with the pulsations of the fmri. a sonic return to a beating heart is overlayed with a whispered voice, “open your eyes. take my hand. can you hear me?” the scene becomes simultaneously soothing and monstrous, as hands wrap around the trunk of a tree, eyes within the tree’s knots. shifting between the linearity of the tree and hands touching the linearity of a surgical incision, we then hear the whoosh of a heart doppler along with a different whoosh of breath—the slow internalized breathing from inside one’s own head. the forest becomes a nightmarish dreamscape, trapping an individual wearing a hospital gown in a waking coma-like state. the sound of the heartbeat merges into the faster rhythms of erratic drumming and through flames we start to see a masked creature, various skulls, and then a half-human, half-bird figure draped in a shroud of white torn cloth, which dances a grotesque slow-motion dance in a verdant forest. huge undulating earthworms intersect and engulf the figure like tentacles. finally, a face drifts slowly underwater, with eyes open, blending with the sand and the seaweed, as a woman’s voice sings “in zeit und ewigkeit,” or, “in time and eternity.” reading breathe against the literature where we see the bridge metaphor, it becomes clear that perspective matters. the bridge metaphor, invoking a linearity of crossing and the expertise and command of captain/architects, fails to capture essential aspects of the sensory and affective qualities of actually being a living, breathing, bleeding, shitting, and agentive person that—to stay alive another day—is imbricated with a mass of machinery and experiencing side effects of various medications. breathe expresses a non-linear experience, where hope and angst co-exist in an ever-present way, where memories merge with imagined realities, and where death and loss are the ultimate threat of critical illness, as well as of the subsequent non-critical, yet relentless, chronic health condition. the dual perspective of the artist couple’s trauma merges into one shared visual and aural assemblage that is rooted in the embodied experience of critical illness and heart transplantation, where medical technologies are a part of, and witness to, the compassion, co-suffering, helplessness, isolation, and a sense of eroded confidence in life. if, metaphorically, bridges are technological feats that escape the clutches of death and the devil (gordon 2018), breathe offers a sensorial feast that enunciates counter-logics of the conventional views of transplant technologies, situating these within the artists’ respective and shared lived experience. the immersive, suffocating fever dream provides a vastly different sensory landscape for viewers than what we might take from the imagery of the bridge. breathe offers messiness, repetition, and loops, as well as blurred boundaries of https://youtu.be/kv2vtftjoyk?si=nrtzzh3cw7dnv4t_ https://youtu.be/kv2vtftjoyk?si=nrtzzh3cw7dnv4t_ https://youtu.be/kv2vtftjoyk?si=nrtzzh3cw7dnv4t_ https://youtu.be/kv2vtftjoyk?si=nrtzzh3cw7dnv4t_ special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 14 self/other and human/machine, contra the linearity, precision, and cleanliness of conventional and normative images of a bridge. what becomes palpable when reading these against each other is the way that transplant technologies are part of a doubling back: the machines have a central, crucial, agentic role in the drama of transplant, bridging to surgery. at the same time, these technologies are typically discounted as relevant affective actors in the situation—machines are not considered in the sensory or affective milieu that shapes the transplant experience. technological objects—machines and monitors—become so commonplace to those doing the work of caring for the transplanted patient that their role (and their din) become backgrounded. in our own fieldwork, these machines were only occasionally noted by healthcare providers routinely working with patients for hours on end: personal support workers, constant observers, care aids, and some nurses at the bedside. this sensory story and its impact on lived experience is obscured by the metaphor of the bridge. and yet, as breathe so clearly demonstrates through visual image and movement, these sensory experiences are crucial to understand, both from the perspectives of those receiving care and their families and loved ones. in the microcosm of the critical care setting, the incessant sensory experiences can be terrifying and overwhelming during a period of time when people may be at their most vulnerable. the constant alarms and beeps intended to alert staff are more intense for the patient whose ears are at much closer proximity to the machines emitting the sounds. these machines and monitors, with their cacophony of pumps, fans, and humming, are also typically placed behind and out of the patient’s field of vision, potentially adding to the unnerving experience of the unknown, unpredictable, and incomprehensible. harsh hospital lighting, which is beyond the control of the patient, and depressingly functional ceilings may for prolonged periods be the dominant stimuli from the perspective of someone in an intensive care bed. neither aesthetics nor sympathetic aural considerations are typically engaged as an important part of the patient experience. just as the visuals and movements of film can both express a sensory and affective landscape that is otherwise left untouched, unexplored, and unacknowledged in the dominant conceptualizations of transplant technologies, the sonic experience of transplantation also blurs the bifurcations of familiar/strange, insider/outsider, and self/other aspects of this medical field. this is also apparent in the soundscape boundary loss, by jonathan kawchuk. in an interview with the artist accompanying the recording, kawchuk and berkhout (2023) explore the sonic qualities of transplant spaces. kawchuk’s soundscape developed from field recordings in a canadian hospital, capturing acute care areas of transplant such as the transplant ward and intensive care unit (icu) but also the mundane, quotidian spaces of transplant such as the hallway, the elevator bank, and the atrium where patients and families might meet if someone is well enough to move from their hospital bed. the soundscape enables listeners to become https://youtu.be/kv2vtftjoyk?si=nrtzzh3cw7dnv4t_ special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 15 attuned to the frictions between absence and presence in transplantation: sensory experiences that are simultaneously dulled and sonically overwhelming within a single acute care transplant setting. the sound experience, as described by kawchuk, is “actively brutal, it’s mundane” (kawchuk and berkhout 2023, 117). the sonic environment is, he notes, “stark, sterile. the sound experience in the hospital isn’t going to reveal a truth that is easier to handle than that, because it’s not easy to handle. the essence of the thing is difficult” (117). “the soundscape doesn’t give you a sense of what is living,” kawchuk continues, nor “a sense of time. there’s a stasis that is sonically present. everything is regulated, monitored, static. it felt like i wouldn’t know what time of day it was” (119). brian comments on this unsettled sense of time, directly after his heart transplant, when he was still affected by anaesthetics and powerful painkillers: the clock on the wall says that an hour has passed since i last checked, but i am confused because the same procedure is repeating. the same nurse who came in an hour ago does so again and asks me the same questions. other members of staff come in and repeat what has been done already, and in exactly the same order. i tell them all to stop because this has already happened, but they don’t believe me. then i notice that i know what they are going to say next, because they said the same thing previously. i continually protest that they are wasting time because i want to move forward. i feel overwhelmed by everyone in my room moving around and repeating things. i feel they are not helping me to move out of this continuous present. i point to the clock to prove that time is passing, and we are still repeating the same routines. a nurse comes in and says the same thing to me for a third time. i sink back into my pillow, knowing that i will have to lie here and watch another hour of the same repeated activity. (keeley and keeley 2023, 16) kawchuk’s soundscape captures “something about disorientation, feeling both overwhelming and underwhelming” (berkhout and kawchuk 2023, 119). for example, in asking permission to enter a care space with various microphones, recording equipment and transducers, kawchuk confronted the ways that patients, like brian, have already become conditioned to intrusions, many of which include unknown machines and technologies and where the purpose of the interaction may be incomprehensible or bizarre. kawchuk reflects, the hospital can be a magic place where magic happens, or it can have so much mistrust and pain. it was surprising to go into everyone’s room. i was thinking, “why is he letting me do [this recording]?” but what’s happening to him is, so many people are already doing weird stuff anyway, so it’s like, “sure. do whatever measurements you want.” if you have only a tiny bit of energy for self special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 16 advocacy, where do you aim? how you figure out what you push at is very hard, i think. (118) perhaps critically ill patients become conditioned to receiving little or no explanation of the technologies and procedures that are being delivered to/used on them such that a request to record the sounds of machines in their rooms was just one of many hundreds of interactions in the acute phase of transplantation that are without sense or meaning to individuals. icu patients have no privacy and often receive no advance notification of the multitude of daily interventions by staff. the physical passivity and de-personalization that is observed from the outside may also assume some lack of capacity or interest in understanding the technologies and the clinical interactions. or it may be that vulnerable patients are not routinely afforded the opportunities, or that they do not have the confidence to engage with staff about the complex systems involved in their care. in brian and bibo’s experience, there was no routine explanation of the sounds and technologies surrounding brian’s hospital bed and body. bibo would photograph everything out of brian’s line of sight, and she asked questions of the staff that brian was not able to articulate. their creative process was adapted into the service of managing an ongoing tension that surrounds the “good” transplant patient: one who adeptly alternates between being a docile, passive patient (particularly during the wait-listing and surgical periods) and being activated, motivated, and self-managing in the right kinds of ways. it can be a very quick pivot (wong-mersereau et al. 2023). this kind of inhabiting—of a complex and contradictory transplant subjectivity—is left unspoken within the imagery of the bridge but the sense of this inhabiting emerges from the affective space that forms within creative practices. they contribute to a sensory aesthetic of transplantation that eschews what susan squier (2007) refers to as the “epistemic narrowing” of biomedical information, opening up new ways to imagine and engage with transplant’s multiplicities.2 unsettling the curative imaginary better technologies and better treatments are often taken to be the answer to the problem of illness, disease, and disability. better technology and treatments are framed as a way of overcoming and curing illness, disease, and disability. but these approaches are also responsible for long histories of institutionalization, eugenics, sterilization, lobotomies, and other violent interventions that have led sick, mad, and disabled people to have an “ambivalent relationship to technology” (kafer 2013, 119), medicalization, and cure (clare 2017). at times, healthcare providers working in transplantation themselves offer critiques of device-centered (rather than patient-centered) care (sharp 2014; wongmersereau et al. 2023). a nascent literature on the notion of survivorship in liver transplant also points to a growing recognition of the need to attend to extended temporalities in transplantation (lai, ufere, and bucuvalas 2020). crip special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 17 technoscience approaches to the innovations and interventions of transplant medicine require both disability world building and ableist world dismantling. this means calling attention to the complexity of non-compliance with the curative imaginary of biomedicine, what it means to continue living on, and the strategies and ways of being that enable continuance. one important point to be made at this juncture is that while biomedical approaches frequently view patients as autonomous individuals, those living with transplant rather need to be understood as living in relation with others. they care for living others, for example, and enter into caring relations with the donated organ and its relation to the deceased or living donor. relationality is an important consideration because transplantation is not simply about extending the life of an individual but also can restore the “possibility of engagement with the day-to-day contexts of kinship, friendship, leisure, and occupation” (heinemann 2020, 83). as heinemann notes, some transplant patients may not have any interest in pursuing an intensification of medicalization for their own selves as “everyday living, rather than life itself, becomes the stake” (83).3 paying greater attention to relational context also means being attentive to the temporalities of transplantation: “transplant recipients and clinicians alike point out that the procedure trades one set of problems for another: the difficulties of [pre-transplant] dialysis [for kidney patients] for the side effects of immunosuppressants [post-transplant]; the fears of organ failure for the fears of organ rejection…immunosuppressant medications can increase risks of cancer, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other complications” (83–84). solid organ transplant recipients are at risk of various forms of longer-term organ damage (their own endogenous organs and their new graft) from the very same medications that help to ensure their more immediate survival. the lived reality of transplantation “reveals that normalcy is elusive,” marking life as “tethered to the chronicities…of enduring medical intervention and monitoring” (84). despite the impossibility of the restoration of a prior, self-same “healthy” embodiment, transplantation, as conceptualized in western biomedicine, attempts to enact temporally normative forms of biocontinuity and linear life extension through notions of scientific progress while simultaneously being replete with disruption, non-linearity, and hauntings. these temporal frictions capture, for many recipients, the presence of the absent other (the organ donor) and the intersections of histories of dead and living (mccormack 2021; mccormack et al. 2023; wasson 2021).4 our engagement with multimodal and multisensory artistic research-creation attends to the sensory aesthetic aspects of time, machine, and health that demarcate acute illness experiences in the transplant context, displacing certain valorized understandings of the body that are based in a temporality of transplantation as a destination of health. when transplantation technologies are configured through the imagery of the bridge—always in offer of a destination in special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 18 which illness and disability serves as the agreed-upon limit of our projected futures (kafer 2013)—the skills and resources for living well with disability and illness may not be cultivated or recognized. how to live in the visceral present (clare 2017), how to be with oneself and with each other in the meantime, how to embrace healing that is “neither a departure nor a destination, neither overcoming nor tragic” (sandahl 2019, 130). these are questions prompted by our critical engagement with the bridge. even if unintended, dominant transplant temporality binds to the past and glorifies the future, producing detrimental impacts on those whose lives cannot so simply be considered to be in a new or improved state post-transplant. instead, we have opted to engage crip technoscience and sensory aesthetics that seeks to transform the ableist curative imaginary that drives so much of the rehabilitative sciences and medicine. we do so to unsettle progression and reconfigure time through loops, repetition, speeding up and slowing down; it is a relational orientation that disrupts the myth of autonomous, self-sufficient personhood as a pinnacle of achievement (white 2017). we reimagine spectacle and speculativeness in order to access sick and disabled futures and nonnormative embodiments that politicize the relationships between sick and disabled people and medicine, technology, and design. we do so not as an esoteric commentary, but to improve access to healthcare and technologies that enhance quality of life and also to acknowledge the needs, wants, expertise, and contributions of sick and disabled people and disabled communities. if any aesthetic act is a political act, when it affects and effects a reordering of the world (rice et al. 2017), the sensory aesthetics of crip technoscience is one that can reorient transplant spacetime, opening a multiplicity of possibilities for sick and disabled futures. notes 1 between 1982 and 2001, global figures showed that the 50 percent survival rates of heart transplant recipients—who survived the first year—was 11.8 years (hertz et al. 2002). as recently as 2018, a us study showed that the 50 percent survival rate for heart transplant recipients was 12 years (hsich et al. 2020). 2 the epistemic narrowness we are considering here, structured by biomedical ways of knowing, likewise extends to a narrowness of how temporality is conceived. as one reviewer helpfully identified, temporality itself cannot be universalized—understandings of time (particularly in relation to life and death) are shaped by cosmologies, cultural beliefs, and spiritual practices that are themselves far more diverse than the linearity presumed in a westernized biomedical context. 3 within her ethnographic work, heinemann articulates, for instance, how some individuals within her field site “turn toward transplant out of a sense of obligation special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 19 to children or grandchildren, aging or infirm parents, or others who rely on them and suffer the ripple effects of their life-threatening illness” (2020, 83). 4 there is a rich literature on absence/presence, which is out of the scope of this piece to engage with. for additional sources in anthropology and 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ventricular assist device recipient: a liminal existence.” social science and medicine, no. 190, 141–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.08.016. stubber, claire, and maggie kirkman. 2020. “the experiences of adult heart, lung, and heart-lung transplant recipients: a systematic review of qualitative research evidence.” plos one 15 (11): e0241570. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241570. sunjaya, a.f., and a.p. sunjaya. 2019. “combating donor organ shortage: organ care system prolonging organ storage time and improving the outcome of heart transplantations.” cardiovascular therapeutics, no. 1, 9482797. https://doi.org/10.1155%2f2019%2f9482797. takeda, koji, boyangzi li, arthur r. garan, veli k. han topkara, paolo c. colombo, maryjane a. farr, yoshifumi naka, and hiroo takayama. 2017. “improved outcomes from extracorporeal membrane oxygenation versus ventricular assist device temporary support of primary graft dysfunction in heart transplant.” journal of heart and lung transplantation 36 (6): 650–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healun.2016.12.006. tong, allison, martin howell, germaine wong, angela c. webster, kirsten howard, and jonathan c. craig. 2011. “the perspectives of kidney transplant recipients on https://doi.org/10.2478/jccm-2018-0014 https://doi.org/10.1111/bjhp.12057 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/opinion/heart-transplant-donor.html https://doi.org/10.2307/3527870 https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2007.0039 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.08.016 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241570 https://doi.org/10.1155%2f2019%2f9482797 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healun.2016.12.006 special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 24 medicine taking: a systematic review of qualitative studies.” nephrology, dialysis, transplantation 26 (1): 344–54. https://doi.org/10.1093/ndt/gfq376. wasson, sara. 2021. “waiting, strange: transplant recipient experience, medical time and queer/crip temporalities.” medical humanities 47 (4): 447–55. https://mh.bmj.com/content/47/4/447. white, jacqueline. 2017. “towards a relational aesthetic in disability art: interdependence and crip futurity.” knots: an undergraduate journal of disability studies, no. 3, 133–43. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/knots/article/view/29201. wilhelm, m.j. 2015. “long-term outcome following heart transplantation: current perspective.” journal of thoracic disease 7 (3): 549–51. https://doi.org/10.3978/j.issn.2072-1439.2015.01.46. wong-mersereau, chloe, fraser allen best, lia tarachansky, shabnam sukhdev, mary bunch, alexandra frankel, brad necyk, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout. 2023. “layered methodologies: innovating qualitative research in liver transplantation through sensory ethnography, critical discourse analysis, and digital storytelling.” journal of liver transplantation, no. 12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.liver.2023.100183. wood-trageser, michelle a., qinyong xu, adriana zeevi, parmjeet randhawa, drew lesniak, and anthony j. demetris. 2020. “precision transplant pathology.” current opinion in organ transplantation 25 (4): 412–19. https://doi.org.10.1097/mot.0000000000000772. author bios suze berkhout is an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the university of toronto, and a clinician-investigator in the university health network’s centre for mental health based out of toronto general hospital. she has expertise in feminist philosophy and qualitative research experience that draws on ethnographic and narrative frames, including using visual arts to explore unspoken aspects of biomedical experience. kelly fritsch is an associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at carleton university in ottawa, canada. as a crip theorist and critical disability studies scholar, her research examines ableist social relations, the neoliberal biopolitics of disability, and anti-assimilationist crip culture and politics. brian keeley is an artist based in scotland whose collaborative practice with bibo keeley is rooted in their shared experience of living post-heart transplant. brian graduated with an ma from the glasgow school of art in the 1980s and is currently a doctoral candidate in the department of film & visual culture at the university of aberdeen. bibo keeley is an artist based in scotland whose collaborative practice with brian keeley is rooted in their shared experience of living post-heart transplant. bibo is a graduate in fine art from robert gordons university, aberdeen. she has received https://doi.org/10.1093/ndt/gfq376 https://mh.bmj.com/content/47/4/447 https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/knots/article/view/29201 https://doi.org/10.3978/j.issn.2072-1439.2015.01.46 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.liver.2023.100183 https://doi.org.10.1097/mot.0000000000000772 special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley, 2024 25 several artist awards and commissions and was selected for the royal scottish academy's 2020 new contemporaries exhibition.     lab meeting mess and making matters in feminist teaching     nassim parvin georgia institute of technology nassim@gatech.edu   rebecca rouse university of skövde, sweden rebecca.rouse@his.se   diana alvarez diana@diana-alvarez.com   sanaz haghani rowan-cabarrus community college sanaz.hgn@gmail.com   sharon clark university of west england sharon@raucous.org.uk   nettrice r. gaskins lesley university ngaskins@lesley.edu   anne sullivan georgia institute of technology unicorn@gatech.edu erin mergil woodland hill montessori school emergil@woodlandhill.org   jessica pelizari woodland hill montessori school jpelizari@woodlandhill.org   aditya anupam georgia institute of technology aanupam3@gatech.edu   pooja casula georgia institute of technology pcasula3@gatech.edu   shubhangi gupta georgia institute of technology shubhangi@gatech.edu                   abstract how do materials and making come to matter in the messy practices of feminist teaching? this lab meeting shares examples of interdisciplinary work in feminist making and teaching across a range of contexts (ai portraiture, printmaking, quilting, musical performance, game design, theater, storytelling, and more) to extend the discussion of materials in feminist thought, a topic of long-standing importance in the field. as a group of theorist-practitioners, the contributors to the lab meeting share an interest in bridging the conceptual and material via a scrappy mode of making and inquiry that does not seek to remediate chaos but rather engage it, in all its complexities. each contributor captures multiple interpretations of mess, making, storytelling, and education from a feminist perspective. together, they offer insights into the liberatory promise of material engagements.     keywords materials, feminist teaching, interdisciplinary art and design practices, mess, scraps, storytelling, social justice     this lab meeting brings together reflections from scholars, artists, and designers who work as educators across a wide range of contexts from pre-kindergarten to higher education. areas of practice also span a wide range, both digital and non-digital, including printmaking, singing/songwriting, game design, theater, and storytelling. it is significant that these conversations on intersections of feminist thought and matters emerged during the global disruption of the coronavirus pandemic, which brought issues of materiality to the fore in unexpected ways, from the value of toilet paper to the ways in which face masks suddenly materialized (or did not, in some contexts), as well as in ways more directly related to practices of art and education such as scarcity of materials or difficulty of hands-on collaboration in mediated/remote education. while the mattering of materials is a long-standing concern of feminist thought—ranging from new material feminisms (alaimo and hekman 2008) to object-oriented feminisms (behar 2016), the contributions collected here provide a rich set of examples in action of how matter comes to matter in practices of feminist research, teaching, and artistic work, demonstrating the ways in which it takes hand, brain, and heart (rose 1983) to make feminist science and to educate feminist thinkers and scientists, too. in addition, our engagement with materials comes from a place grounded in our material practices as theorist-practitioners of design that foregrounds the classroom as a space of potential for the application of feminist mattering to a range of pedagogical issues and contexts.   the pandemic brought to the fore and accentuated what eludes capture (love 2016): the mess that is otherwise concealed behind simple theories, finished products, and seemingly neat and polished methods. the chaos and clutter in collapsing of binaries and boundaries of home and work, private and public, process and product was made ever more clear, evidenced by scraps that emerged and were pressed into other forms (scraps of fabric made into face masks; scraps of time that evidenced the messy merging of home and work; scraps of information, both true and false, that circulated as the pandemic unfolded). scraps have a multivalent nature that renders them flexible—trash to one person; material for use to another. scraps can fall into cracks, get lost, or, be found again. gathering scraps can reveal cracks and fissures that were invisible before. scraps can be intentionally hidden, tucked into a pocket or notebook, preserving a piece of something precious, becoming portable. scraps of paper can carry something as precious as audre lorde’s poetry, as she incisively captures in her mediation on the relationship of materials and social justice:   of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. it is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. […] a room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. the actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. in this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? (lorde 2012, 116)   the character of the making practices shared here are also in this spirit. we see a theme in the contributions collected here not only of scraps themselves (anne sullivan’s quilt scraps, sanaz haghani’s handmade paper, sharon clark’s scraps of straw made into dolls, etc.) but also in the scrappy approach to making that each contributor embodies in her own way, making use of what is at hand to make her voice heard, even in the face of the technological scrap or glitch, as discussed by diana alvarez. we, in turn, gather the scraps of each contribution together into this lab meeting, to ask of the collective, what can we make of the mess both literally and figuratively?   in this collection we share examples and insights in response to the above question initially presented a symposium titled “material feminisms in the making: of messiness and social justice in the practices of art, design, and social justice education,” held as part of the ethics and technological futures series at the georgia institute of technology in the spring of 2021. specifically, our participants were invited to a conversation centered on entanglements of mess and order, voice and silence, making and experiencing. our provocations included the following questions: can you share how a desire to advance social justice comes through in your practice, and more specifically in your choices of material? how do you envision the crossings of material practices, critique, and collective social action? how do you see the relation between things in the making and made things in advancing social justice? after the event, each participant developed further what was shared in our initial conversation as reflected in the following sections. themes that run through all contributions are that of storytelling and making something of digital and material scraps.   each contribution also captures multiple interpretations of mess, making, and education from a feminist perspective, and provides insights into ways in which materiality has liberatory potentials for inviting us and others to bring our whole selves, or more of our selves, into relation with one another.   diana alvarez opens our lab meeting by elaborating on her multisensory performance of an original song at our initial meeting. through the live performance of her original song “ser artista,” her melody and words encouraged the audience to connect to our bodies, voices, and lived experiences as she shared her own. lyrics in the song captured the interconnection of thought, materiality, and action for liberation: “to be an artist is to make food out of words.” reflecting on the technical glitches that interrupted her performance at our meeting, diana reminds us, “our thoughts, creations, and histories arrive in scraps, glitches, hauntings, and reverberations across time and space.” this interaction is “messy,” and does not adhere to the mythological chronology or linearity of eurocentric knowledge traditions. it is, rather, an invitation into the relational in-between spaces of storytelling and listening and their transformative possibilities. through both her words and performance, diana powerfully demonstrates the potentials of a pedagogy expanded beyond eurocentrism, instead rooted in xicana queer feminist art traditions.   like diana’s contribution, sanaz haghani’s work is also a calling-out and a calling-in to others. she describes her art as a “shout” intended to disrupt oppressive silencing of women, materialized through the visual instead of sound. sanaz reflects on the internalized oppressive silence, and the powers of materiality to convey this complex push-and-pull within the self, both toward and away from self-liberation. creating her paper sculptures handprinted with abstract images of women in veil, sanaz incorporates personal, intimate materials such as fabric and other fibers, to “convey both being and not being seen.” many layers of meaning mark her work foregrounding the mess in telling and withholding, veiling and revealing. there is always more to know if you take time to become intimate, to learn the language, to hear the next story. a perspective centered in active listening and inquiry that sanaz offers is a counterpoint to the “subconscious silence” she identifies in her own pasts and presents and those of her students.   anne sullivan, like sanaz haghani, reflects on being silenced and overlooked. her art captures and expresses the anger that builds up from such experiences. using her computationally informed quilt-making practice, anne discusses “fuck this!” an elaborately hand-pieced self-portraiture quilt that materializes her anger and her resilience. the quilt is framed in part as a response to mess (the mess of misogyny, the mess of the trump presidency) but also as a mess generator (the mess of thread, paper, and fabric in the making process). she recognizes quilt-making itself a mess of an idea and practice more generally—for example, in the ways in which modern quilting is entangled with cultural appropriation and the shortcomings (but also potentials) of contemporary craftivism. in response, she asks, “what are some ways that crafts and craftivism might move beyond mere awareness of issues, and begin to affect real change?” this is a powerful question to consider not only for the use of craft but other expressive forms in the educational context, especially as we shift away from transactional pedagogy models to move toward transformation both in our students and ourselves.   sharon clark’s professional theater practice too engages questions of voicing and silencing in all its messiness. her feminist immersive theater company, raucous, focuses on telling stories of women who overcome oppressive others and environments. her theatrical creations foreground the messy interplays of process and product, performer and audience by inviting the audience directly into the storytelling space through innovative uses of digital technologies and reclaiming spaces by making theater in forgotten spaces like victorian tunnels under train stations, in abandoned edwardian swimming pools, in old warehouses, and factories. her choice of disused and forgotten spaces as venues for her performances is also deliberate, drawing attention to and rehabilitating them in process. and while this rehabilitation process may sometimes involve cleaning up, it is also messy and unpredictable as in one production involved the incorporation of actual grass grown in sod laid in an unlit, underground railway tunnel or another where audiences reacted to the movement of digital dolls they were given as part of the performance by throwing them to the walls. sharon’s work foregrounds the disused, ruined, and even literal dirt as materials for feminist storytelling.   whereas sharon’s work is partly engaged in restorative history, nettrice gaskins’s work focuses on crafting the stories of possible futures. also working at the intersection of digital and physical materials, nettrice has developed the concept of “techno-vernacular creativity,” which she describes as “tap[ping] into the natural diy inclinations of creative people as well as the educational power of inventing or making things using technology.” using ai in combination with photographic images or film stills, nettrice creates digital portraits that center and celebrate black culture in all its beauty and complexity. building on the nuances in the interplay of the character of the subject, aesthetics of the image, and means of production, nettrice’s work is evocative of a new understanding of the future of art and the role of ai in questioning dominant values in culture. by framing creative processes that are entangled with the technological through the lens of the vernacular, nettrice invites an ever-expansive understanding of who is considered an artist and what is understood as a work of art.   in our section together, rebecca rouse and nassim parvin discuss our collaborative project, feminist philosophical toys, a paper-based series of seven diy artifacts (a book, set of cards, paper-cut work, volvelle, accordion fold pamphlet, fortune teller, and folio or zine) that are intended to help students engage both playfully and substantially with key concepts in feminist philosophy. our use of paper as technology for enabling the creation of complex movable and interactive structures is intended to lower the barrier to participation using a material that is cheap, available, and familiar to most. the flexibility of the paper material invites creativity and mess making, allowing students to engage in deeper ways outside the drive to perfection that other materials, including the digital, can demand. the dialogic interaction with paper, with theory, and with others is meant as a practice of live theorization, making philosophy grounded and accessible while at the same time pushing against fetishization of matter.   erin mergil and jessa pelizari’s essay engages explicitly with pedagogy in their work as montessori primary school educators and administrators, working with threeto five-year-old students. in doing so, they draw us back to key fundamentals of feminist perspectives and practices in education implicit in the preceding sections, reminding us that, as educators, “it is our work not to insert ourselves into the development of our students, but rather to provide them with the means to unfold into their most authentic selves.” erin and jessa also discuss the importance of thoughtfully preparing the educational environment, the creation of a sensorial curriculum, the practice of oral storytelling, and the power of welcoming the whole person into learning. we can see an interesting resonance across erin and jessa’s work with very young learners and the experience of adult learners, such as the doctoral students who provide reflections in the concluding section.   in the concluding piece, three doctoral researchers, aditya anupam, pooja casula, and shubhangi gupta, who were involved in the coordination of the spring 2021 event, offer their reflections by thinking back to their past educational experiences, and also thinking ahead toward their vision of what they might do as future educators. they open up generative future avenues for developing the conversation still further. together, bridging these educational contexts, levels, materialities, and approaches offer inspiring illustrations of radical feminist pedagogies and artistic practices and the future worlds they can generate.   quiero volver: a xicanx ritual opera for queer and trans artists of color diana alvarez   at the symposium in march, i opened my provocation with a “gesture of the body”1—a performance of an original song called “ser artista,” from my multimedia show quiero volver: a xicanx ritual opera for queer and trans artists of color. i often begin workshops and scholarly talks with a song to remind listeners (and myself) that our collective knowledge is made possible through our bodies. connecting to breath, movement, sound, song, emotion, and spirit is a part of my/our knowledge-making process. of course, most of my song was cut apart into digital scraps in the recording of our talk, as is unfortunately common in virtual sessions because our internet connection was unstable. what an appropriate reminder of human nonlinearity. we desire to share our embodied knowledge with one another, and this knowledge is shared across unpredictable technological and artistic mediums. the stories and songs that our bodies share are always subject to what may be physically, emotionally, spiritually, and digitally processed at any given moment. our thoughts, creations, and histories arrive in scraps, glitches, hauntings, and reverberations across time and space. we are co-creators of all stories and songs that we receive, as we process them through our individually shaped, dis/abled, racialized, gendered, politicized bodies of differing experiences. this transmission of knowledge is considered “messy,” and does not adhere to the mythological chronology or linearity of eurocentric knowledge traditions.   in listening to the fellow artists and scholars who participated in our material feminisms in the making symposium, a familiar question arose for me, which connected all our contributions: what do we do when our lineage lines are broken? this is a primary concern in my creative and scholarly work, and especially of my multimedia show quiero volver: a xicanx ritual opera for queer and trans artists of color. quiero volver is a living performance altar for queer, nonbinary, and trans artists of color to convene and manifest futures. this work, which was the sister project to my doctoral dissertation, features my original songs, poetry-script for ensemble performance, and documentary video portraits of artists from my series bridgesong series. those who witness this performance are invited into an in-between nepantla state of queer ritual healing, led by an ensemble of intergenerational artist guides: altar builder, agua fuerte, flor divinx, curanderx, la llorona, and doctora xingona. each guide offers queer blessings and multisensory meditations on death/loss, nourishment, resistance, birthing voice, and building chosen family. quiero volver is a gathering ritual in which the stage (or screen) is a living altar in the xicana feminist artist tradition that underscores the politics of attention. the performance/convening is descended from such queer icons as gloria anzaldúa, cherríe moraga, and audre lorde, and applies their visions for co-liberation and coalitional healing to our present and future.   quiero volver came into being as an umbrella project for holding my expansive ways of creating in the world—my music, my poems, my sonic meditations (influenced by my mentor pauline oliveros), and my documentary work of queer and trans artists of color. i produced quiero volver first at holyoke community college (massachusetts) in 2017 and then at the academy of music theatre in northampton, massachusetts, in 2018, where the performance raised over $10,000 to support immigrant justice initiatives. in 2020 the performance was awarded a grant from the new england foundation for the arts. it feels urgent to stage this ritual performance once again to address the grief and loss of our current time in the covid-19 pandemic. i am currently exploring virtual and in-person venues to convene artists for this performance once again.   three sibling projects contribute to the quiero volver universe: ser artista, my debut album project, bridgesong series, and the bridgesong fund. ser artista features my original songs from quiero volver and was produced by grammy-nominated singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist seth glier. through deep listening, attentive conversation, and adept musicianship, seth held and realized my extraterrestrial, otherworldly, xicanx vision for this collection of songs. the resulting album has inevitably expanded and transformed my original vision for quiero volver. my subsequent revisions of the poem-script for quiero volver have been influenced by listening to my own music produced by seth.   bridgesong series began as a small collection of documentary portraits of women, nonbinary, and genderqueer artists of color that i compiled for my doctoral dissertation, and which became a part of quiero volver. during the pandemic, i re-envisioned this project to be a virtual convening (via livestream) for queer and trans artists of color to discuss their work and share resources and community. in my original documentary portraits of artists in quiero volver, i profiled artists individually, and though artists were able to witness one another in the final performance, they did not have any interaction with one another prior to attending the show. since i have been forced to think of bridgesong series as a virtual convening during the pandemic, it became clear that artists from across the world would have the opportunity to convene to be a part of the opera as performers or as interviewees. the possibilities for building community through the rituals of quiero volver have expanded.   finally, bridgesong fund is an emergency grant program for women, nonbinary, trans, and genderqueer musicians in western massachusetts. i founded this grant program in collaboration with the institute for the musical arts in goshen, ma. all future performances of quiero volver will benefit the bridgesong fund, which i envision will change to a nourishing grant program. we do not need chaos to nourish artists. we need an ethos to support the thriving and nourishment of artists, especially queer and trans artists of color.   when we speak of mess, we speak of the human body, a precarious form. our human mess is generative. each of the projects i have discussed here were created in the mess of chaos, grief, death, and/or loss on a personal or global level. as each creative project continues to grow and take root, related projects expand and transform. this creative flow reflects the way our bodies are affected by the absence, loss, death, creation, and transformation of other bodies.   this is a reminder to address the current state of grieving that is present in our world. creative collaborations, messy and nonlinear as they can be, are a crucial way to build decolonized, liberatory, healing spaces together, as interdependent creatures on the planet. here is an offering of guiding questions to begin or continue this work:   who is your family (by blood or chosen)?   to where do you turn when your lineage lines are broken?   how do you support the nourishment of your kin?   to where do you wish to return?   to continue exploration, readers may be interested in gloria anzaldúa’s book titled light in the dark/luz en lo oscuro: rewriting identity, spirituality, reality (2015). to review a syllabus that incorporates these ideas into teaching, see https://tinyurl.com/3k9knxed. listen to diana alvarez's album, ser artista, which features music from quiero volver, here: https://doctoraxingona.bandcamp.com/.     i,        w               o               m               a               n مــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــن زن sanaz haghani   i want to start by introducing myself as a storyteller. storytelling allows me to transmit my message to engage viewers in conflicting emotions of desire and forbiddance, fear and passion, and it helps me to piece my imagination and experiences together. i try to visualize the stories of women's lives by depicting those narrations in various ways, such as with installations, artist books, or sculptures crafted of handmade paper. i want to create a visual expression of emotion—an image that penetrates the viewer’s mind, even if just for a moment.   figure 1. the hole (closeshot), 2017, mixed medium installation   i am walking along a narrow path. a steep precipice on one side, it is a deep bottomless in depth a depth bottomlessly deep (munch 2005, 20)   i am thinking about my works as a shout for my femininity. the suffocating rules from the where i grew up muffled women's voices. women have been silenced in diverse ways such as ridicule, enforcement of family hierarchies, male-controlled media, and anti-woman academic policies. perhaps the scream by edvard munch, its expression and that depicted pain shadowed my consciousness. “i sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that i heard the scream. i painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. the color shrieked. this became the scream” (west 1993, 64).   my experience working as a visual artist and educator introduced me to the subconscious silence i am involved in. as a teacher, i have been investigating different ways to encourage students to participate in class conversations. and as an artist, i look for the mystery behind my visual mental imagery and their quiddity. my research helped me to clarify that silence and encountered me with a desire. a desire for a shout. and my work became a struggle to a scream.   figure 2. the hole, 2017, mixed medium installation   figure 3. untitled (from bahar series), 2017–2019, woodcut and screen print, 22" x 15"   as an artist, i wanted to release myself from quiescence. but i realized i became accustomed to a silence; the hiddenness became a part of my existence. in my works, these muted responses or visualizations are a sign of my denied gender. i attempt breaking that eternal stillness, unconsciously. i transform that habituation to vague, involuntary forms. i aim to visualize that dictated temperament by using floating shapes and mysterious, twisted backgrounds.   in my experience, the view of womanhood in the middle east has improved over time, but still, women experience a lingering secondary status which challenges them in their social and personal lives. unreported crimes include honor violence, compulsory marriage, physical brutality, and many more hidden cultural and social issues that women face, and many of the victims never dare speak of nor even mention such problems.2 through my art, i question that silence. where does the fear that causes such silence come from? why do these problems continue to be denied or ignored? these questions and this situation have led me to borrow and use a familiar form from my home culture, and i wanted to approach this from a different visual concept; i wanted to visualize the form of the female figure, which is both familiar and unknown at the same time. little by little, i came to the female figure in the form of a chador. chador is the all-encompassing black cloth iranian women wear to disguise their figures, and hide their body. chador is closely associated with the islamic practice of hijab, which means to hide from view or conceal (related to the concept and practice of the veil). what women must cover depends on the specific variation and interpretation of religious texts as well as the local contexts and traditions. it ranges from “the bosom” to the whole body, except the face and hands. the veil is often understood as the vehicle for distinguishing between women and men and a means of controlling male sexual desire.   figure 4. graphic images for illusive dance series, work-in-progress, 2019   figure 5. behind the darkness, 2019, monoprint and etching on kozo-shi paper, 36" x 120"   however, the experiences of the veil are complex and specific to time and place. some experience it as liberatory, while others see it as a mode of control (killian 2003). the veil itself predates islam and is practiced by women of several religions. it is also related to other axes of difference, especially class. for example, wealthy women could afford to veil their bodies completely, whereas poor women who had to work [in the field] either modified their veils or did not wear them at all (killian 2003, 570). hijab represents three thousand years of history, reflected in part in its different shapes and colors in different historical periods. through the years, we see women wearing hijab in white and blue indigo; in some areas, it appears with patterns, and finally, it is seen in black, the way many women wear it in iran (fāzl-vāzīri 2013). however, the hijab that i am talking about does not refer to this actual form of dress. i try to invoke the veil metaphor's impact on women's lives. in my work, i investigate hijab as a political tool for hiding women’s individuality while women have simultaneously used it as a mode of liberation. i try to convey this contrast by borrowing the chador's floral patterns, using dark colors that hide unfamiliar forms, or capturing women's faces with a blank expression. i make installation art to convey and share abstract space with viewers.   in her article “do muslim women really need saving?” lila abu-lughod (2002) highlights the meaning of hijab from different cultural and political viewpoints. she refers to hanna papanek (1971), who describes the burqa as “portable seclusion” and “noted that many saw it as a liberating invention because it enabled women to move out of segregated living spaces while still observing the basic moral requirements of separating and protecting themselves from unrelated men” (abu-lughod 2002, 785). papanek poetically places "seclusion" alongside the beautiful meaning of security and protection, and expresses her profound view of culture and social norms in a magnificent way. she interprets the hijab as a safe space or place. social behaviors and norms have beautifully deep and instructive meanings that can be examined differently or even take on different meanings based on economic, political, and geographical situations in different societies. through the flow of subjective experiences, humans perceive external reality and demarcated from it. therefore, questioning different cultures is a genuinely puzzling phenomenon. in my work, colors, forms, and volumes formed based on my life experience. i want to interpret “portable seclusion” as an imposed sanctuary that unconsciously isolates me even from myself—an abstraction that immerses me to a concept of not existing.   figure 6. illusive dance, 2020, screen print and monoprint on kozo-shi paper, 36" x 120"   the materials chosen in my work convey a message and i see them as symbols and metaphors of my thoughts. i use fabric, sometimes wooden boards, and mostly paper in my work. historically, paper has been used as a medium to deliver messages. this ancient print medium has become a surface for my vision—a place where i can visualize my own imagination. the main ingredient in making paper is cellulose fiber. the idea that cellulose fiber can come from so many different sources gives me the opportunity to add another concept to my work. i think of borrowing something personal from the women whose experiences and stories i was trying to visualize. i start with collecting materials like used prayer veils, women’s hair, prayer beads, and other personal objects in order to use them as fiber for the paper or to embed them between two sheets of paper. i look to envision a presence, to add something that had belonged to or had been somehow used by someone that i was referencing. i seek to convey both being and not being seen, and to reach an invisible presence. each figure is a storyteller that rehearses the colorful mind of the women the chadors are borrowed from.   figure 7. essay topic: (!موضوع انشاء: صدبار بنویس زن) write down the word woman one hundred times! 2021, monoprint and screen print on kozo-shi paper, 24" x 100'     raucous theater: ingenious feminist collaborations telling new stories in old spaces in new ways sharon clark   i am ostensibly a playwright, that is what i have been for a quite some time, but i became a playwright who started to become interested in notions of how i could tell stories that are female-led, and seen through the female gaze, using digital technology and immersion. about ten years ago, i founded raucous, a theater company in the uk where we make theater in what we call found spaces—spaces that are not theaters. we make theater in victorian tunnels under train stations, in abandoned edwardian swimming pools, in old warehouses, and factories—anywhere that actually isn’t a theater. and we play around with all manner of technologies, old and new, including ai, ar, binaural sound, and film. we are seriously playful, working to push the toolset for theater, and think about how a centuries-old art form can push boundaries with new technologies. at raucous, we are driven by the common credo of who we are: theater-makers who are driven by what might be possible. we forge new stories, in new spaces, in new ways, by working with ingenious collaborators. we are nothing without our colleagues, in our transdisciplinary collective.   we are driven by feminist stories at raucous, stories about women and class, poverty, and how women have to respond to situations beyond their control. when looking at theater through this feminist lens, but also through the gaze of digital technology, i was interested in how we could make the story more immersive, more tactile, and more emotive for an audience. in response, we developed an idea called obt, which stands for object-based technology. this then further developed into the notion of a digital “familiar,” inspired by the use of the term familiars in medieval and early modern europe to denote an animal that accompanied a witch and would assist her in the practice of magic. at raucous, our obt or familiars are objects that the audience members are gifted during the play. they have each audience’s name on them, they are personalized, and the audience carries them or wears them. then, during the play, during a moment of huge emotional resonance, they move. we animate the inanimate. the familiar you hold imbues the space and the narrative with a more heightened and personalized audience experience, building an atmosphere of awe and wonder.   the ambition is to provide each audience member with a personal object that is specifically designed for them, not via inventing new technology but through repurposing existing technology in innovative ways. we aim to surprise the audience, not to intimidate, animating the inanimate to underscore the emotional moment in a script. this allows the audience to feel the scenography, and for the first time, to be able to haptically experience the narrative. this experience builds the audience as a congregation, having a joint experience together with each other as their familiars start to animate. the audience is also gifted a role in the story itself, a role that is revealed at a seminal point in the narrative.   our first show was the stick house (2015), a gothic feminist fable that referenced beauty and the beast and was set in five ash tunnels under bristol’s temple meade station, which is the main train terminus in bristol. in the photograph (fig. 8), you can see the audience in the ash tunnel, starting to find their familiars. the familiars had labels with the audience members’ names on, and then the audience started to pick them out, and call to each other. in this story, the familiars are wicker dolls, each individually designed, made by the protagonist, marietta, who sold them in the market. the dolls were heavily linked into the narrative, and helped to build a world where magic exists, inviting the audience members to form a relationship with this personalized object. holding onto the dolls, about halfway through the show, as marietta became entrenched in an attack in the woods, the dolls began to pulse with a gathering heartbeat. as the heartbeat began to gather pace, so too did the action you were watching in the story. and then, just as marietta was about to wreak her revenge on her attacker, the doll spasmed, with arms and legs splaying out. in the next image (fig. 9), you can see part of the script describing this moment in the story when the dolls come to life. this was successful for many people in the audience; they enjoyed the surprise of the moment. however, some people were shocked when the dolls moved, and threw them against the walls. we did not account for this—this is where messiness comes into the equation, you are still finding out, even in production, what works and what doesn’t. what moments take you, as the maker, by surprise. nothing is neat. nothing works within its boundaries. the process and the product, by the nature of innovation, are messy. they need to be in order to allow for exploration and experimentation.   our second show was called ice road (2017), set during the siege of leningrad, and sited in disused edwardian swimming baths. once more we needed to embrace the notion of mess as we invented and tested more notions of making and exhibiting. the initial idea we explored for the familiars was that we would have real apples, which would light up in three different states. however, three months and great expense later, we realized they did not fit the narrative. so, we had to rethink initial concepts and we alighted on the idea of soviet radios that could channel the voices of the dead. audience members wore them around their necks, and they provided a conduit to the voices of the people who died, but also linked the audience together as an orchestra at the end of the piece. at the end of the play, you heard your radio “tuning up” as a single instrument in the orchestra, and if you stood next to others, in the arrangement of a russian orchestra, you could collectively, as the audience, play shostakovich’s leningrad symphony no.7.   figure 8. image of audience at the stick house.   figure 9. image of the doll and script excerpt from the stick house.   our next show is called the undrowned trilogy (2022). it is a trilogy told in three parts. the first part starts with a story at home called “the foundling.” it uses ar, ai, and spatial sound to create theater on your desktop or your kitchen table. the next part of the story takes place in an urban landscape in the street on your journey to the performance space. the final part is “the undrowned,” which is a large-scale theater experience in a found space. what will the familiars do in “the undrowned?” we don’t know yet. but they will be small tokens, key objects for this story, which is about a sixteenth-century wet nurse and the tokens foundling babies were given by their mothers when they had to leave them due to extreme poverty. we think the tokens will trigger some part of the story, but we are still working on prototyping that interaction.   these moments of interaction between audience, space, familiar, and story carry within them both potentials for powerful dramatic unfolding and powerful mess. to risk losing control of the interaction, to invite the unpredictable in, and pull back the curtain on instilling emotion in story exposes the audience to experience the very essence of raucous’s feminist theater goal.   so how do both maker and audience respond to elements beyond their control? how do we use mess to alter the aperture of the female gaze, promoting its vision through the eyes of all who see the performance? unpredictable people using unpredictable objects during live theater is a messy proposition. and yet, the confrontations through exploration are essential to the transmission of feminist theatrical stories.     using ai, culture, and art to project the future nettrice r. gaskins   my artwork sits at the juncture between the physical and the artificial or digital, which includes the interplay between images, sounds, algorithms, and data. i use the internet as a primary platform to exhibit my work such as in virtual 3d environments where different ideas are expanded beyond what is possible in the physical world. commissions and residencies have enabled me to create physical renderings of my digital art for public engagement. social media has also been an effective way to share my work.   i push the boundaries of what is human art and explore what i refer to as “techno-vernacular creativity” or tvc. tvc taps into the natural diy inclinations of creative people as well as the educational power of inventing or making things using technology. this includes exploring the emergence of computation as a creative medium, rather than just a set of tools, suggesting a growing correspondence between the digital realm and traditional art. many of the artists i refer to in my book are “generators of value” (see eglash and garvey 2014, 76), meaning the product of their work circulates back to their communities in some way.   for example, salome asega and ayodamola okunseinde’s iyapo repository makes use of objects, rituals, and performances to create spaces and narratives where social justice issues are brought to light, discussed, and addressed (gaskins 2021, 26–27). this archive is used to collect ideas from participants and turn them into digital prototypes and, occasionally, into physical artifacts that affirm and project the future of the african diaspora. stephanie dinkins uses artificial intelligence or ai to build stories about community and social justice. these and other projects have the potential for helping underrepresented groups see themselves as “capable of designing and implementing computational solutions to self-identified problems or opportunities” (tissenbaum, sheldon, and abelson 2019, 35).   emerging technologies such facial recognition carry within them biases that can have a detrimental impact on specific communities or groups even when the purposes for their use are altruistic. according to ruha benjamin, computer programming languages (codes) and algorithms can “act as narratives” that reaffirm existing inequalities and “operate within powerful systems of meaning that render some things visible, others invisible, and create a vast array of distortions and dangers” (2019, 7). artists use ai to interrogate biases by applying rigorous artistic analysis— determining what features are conveyed and why artists use them—to computer data. they create and use algorithms to establish new artistic processes that show how artworks are performed, presented, or produced.   researcher theodore kim and colleagues (2021) propose the recruitment and engagement of stakeholders from diverse backgrounds that can ensure that the development of emerging technologies is equitable. they assert that no one is better positioned to create algorithms that capture the subtle qualities of darker skin, for example, than the people who see these features in the mirror every day (kim et al. 2021). artists often experiment with the possibilities of uprooting racial bias from its roots; in recent times, some have used ai to enhance or build on their work.   as a digital artist, i incorporate ai in my creative work to raise awareness and to mitigate against its harmful effects. i collaborate with other artists and designers to interrogate this technology. i collaborate with ai, specifically through the artistic stylization of images in neural networks, known as image style transfer, which renders new images using multiple styles (hertzmann 2018; gatys, ecker, and bethge 2016, 2421). the first layer of the process picks out elements of a source image. next, additional layers pick out more details, replacing the pixels with numbers. finally, the layers are combined to recreate the original content in the style of other images (miller 2019, 84). online applications such as deep dream generator provide image stylization models that generate ranges of skin tones using styles that have qualities to make certain facial features more visible. this is important because research shows that older computer graphics models and effects can dull or wash out the features of darker skinned subjects (kim 2021).   figure 10. janeen, 2021. created using deep learning. courtesy of nettrice r. gaskins.   to create ai portraits (as art), i use source images such as personal photographs, stock photos, and still images from archival film. these images capture the beauty of my culture, from hairstyles and accessories to darker skin tones. the combination of technologically advanced tools, source images used as media, and the final effect with a variety of styles offer interesting contrasts. many of the images do not seem to belong to the sphere of the virtual, as they often refer to the culture of the handmade, yet these worlds are brought together in a delicate and poetic dialogue because of the ai process. my challenge as the artist is figuring how much i want the ai to intervene, controlling how much the algorithm reconstructs new images, from the input (photos) and custom style images. the amount of the intervention depends on the subject. the resulting images open new frontiers of artistic expression while posing moral and ethical questions about future uses of ai, such as how the technology can support, not replace, the value of artists’ work. how can artists use ai technology to celebrate culture and sustain community?   beyond using ai to generating new images, i wanted to experience building an application from the ground level up, with input from collaborators and diverse communities of practice. i worked with other artists and technologists to develop an ai application based on pose estimation, which uses deep learning to predict, track, and look at combinations of poses and the orientations of people/objects. a recent mozilla-sponsored project i was involved in used pose estimation to generate images based on caribbean/carnival dance data (king 2021). for the latter project, we recruited participants from the caribbean diaspora who joined us in zoom parties where we explored questions about ai. we used the carnival ai app to collect performance-based data and generate ai artwork. we launched the app and other artwork in september 2021. being a part of this collaboration between artists, our communities, and ai helped me to better understand how ai might be used to liberate and celebrate humanity.     “fuck this!”: a quilt about anger, dis/comfort, mess, and textile design anne sullivan   this quilt is very personal. i was raised within a family and a religion that has strong expectations of a woman’s role in the family. as part of this, i was taught to not make other people uncomfortable and that, as a woman, my job is to provide comfort. even with this upbringing, i ended up getting a degree in computer science and worked in the tech and video game industry for over a decade. i remember my first game programming interview, where the president of the company peered at me and then my resume, and he said, shocked, “you’re a girl!”   figure 11. “fuck this!” quilt, anne sullivan   once i had the job, there were the work outings with male coworkers at strip clubs and bars, posters of scantily clad women hung in the office, and continued underestimation of my skills as a programmer. a lot of my time in the industry became about presenting a curated version of myself that would not make others uncomfortable with their preconceived notions of women. i tried to be one of the guys. it wasn't until graduate school, when i returned to academia after over a decade in the industry, that i admitted to somebody else that i crafted. that person happened to be the only other woman in the computer science phd program with me. crafting is something i’ve done my whole life, and is an important part of family bonding, but it did not belong in my carefully curated presentation.   this was the first crack in my veneer. academia, and computer science in particular, provided a number of opportunities to evaluate systemic sexism from a personal perspective, further fracturing my carefully cultivated facade. and then the us presidential election in 2016 happened. i felt so hopeful when i placed my vote for the first woman presidential candidate! and then i cried myself to sleep as the election results started pouring in. over time, i processed the despair, and i remember waking up one morning completely consumed with anger. anger at the indifference at the increasingly normalized injustices that were and are happening and anger at being told over and over that our fears about the new president were unfounded. this quiet anger had been building up over decades of being told by society that i didn't matter, that my job is to make other people comfortable; my own comfort didn't matter. and in that anger, a fully realized picture of this quilt came into my mind. i had no idea how to make it, but i was driven to figure it out and see it to completion.   the design of the quilt is inspired heavily by wedha's pop art portrait (wpap), which is a style of illustration started by indonesian artist wedha abdul rasyid (dawami marianto, and wisetrotomo 2021). the style is recognizable through the use of vividly colored straight-edged geometric shapes that make up the portrait. this type of illustration is bold and arresting, yet beautiful. the quilt is also inspired heavily by the quilts made by the women of gee's bend, alabama. they've played a foundational role in the modern quilt movement, which is how i got introduced to quilting. and this quilt is also heavily inspired by the quilter chawne kimber. while quilting is often about making objects of comfort, kimber’s quilts are not comfortable; they are not silent. i was inspired and realized that quilts do not all need to be comfortable.   to make this quilt required learning a number of new skills and using materials that don’t actually show in the end product. the finger is based on a self-portrait, and i created the wpap design in illustrator. i wrote a program that would match the colors to real-world available fabric. because of the complex shapes, i needed to use english paper piecing (epp), a method of using stiff paper templates to wrap fabric around, and then hand sewing the pieces together, before removing the paper. i designed the templates in illustrator and used a programmable digital cutter to cut cardstock templates. and then i spent four years hand sewing all the pieces together. tens of thousands of tiny stitches hold this quilt together, requiring hours of sitting with and processing my anger and sewing them into this quilt. i finished the “fuck this!” 5' x 4' quilt top on january 20, 2021—closing the chapter of the presidency that partially inspired the quilt to begin with.   making this type of quilt is a physically messy process. it generates a large amount of paper and fabric scraps, among other things. but even beyond the physical messiness of this project, this quilt was born from a place of mental and emotional messiness. and my perspective on quilting has been shifting. i'm becoming familiar with another kind of mess, around modern quilting and around craftivism (craft-focused activism). much of craftivism is focused primarily on raising awareness, but for many social justice issues, awareness is not the problem. lee anne bell’s storytelling project model (2010) describes ways to move beyond awareness when sharing and creating stories, and these are things that can be incorporated into craftivism. the modern quilt movement (primarily championed by the modern quilt guild [n.d.]) takes direct inspiration from the quilts made by the women of gee’s bend, alabama, who are direct descendants of slaves who worked in a cotton plantation there in the 1800s (beardsley 2002). however, the modern quilting groups are generally made up of middleand upper-middle-class white women, including myself. cultural appropriation is common, and it is paired with a disdain for the traditional, the history, and the cultural contexts that surround quilting. these are messy problems, but they are worth tackling. these are the issues i keep in mind as i move on with this quilt four years later, in a way that honors where i’ve been and what i know now.   craftivism is a movement that uses crafts as part of activism. the pussyhat project, which led to hundreds of thousands of women wearing pink handmade cat-eared hats during the women’s march on january 20, 2017, is a well-known recent example of craftivism. however, much of craftivism remains focused on awareness of issues. while this can be helpful, as was the case of the aids quilt project, for many current issues our society faces, awareness isn’t the issue, so it rarely translates into action or change. what are some ways that crafts and craftivism might move beyond mere awareness of issues, and begin to affect real change?     feminist philosophical toys rebecca rouse and nassim parvin   feminist philosophical toys presents a re-imagined set of paper machines as feminist materials for designers and makers, artists and theorists to think with.3 grounded in an understanding of the rhetorical and educational powers of material engagements,4 this project provides a grounded approach to feminist design and critique through the use of cut-and-fold paper objects. the seed of our project was our shared discomfort over the positioning and uses of “design cards”5 in games and design education, even though there is little evidence to support their effectiveness (jafarinaimi et al. 2016). we were particularly concerned about how the cards, their aesthetics and disposability, could trivialize and reduce social and political issues such as poverty, ableism, sexism, or other forms of oppression. in the spirit of moving beyond critique toward action, this initial focus on the inadequacy of design cards as implements to “think with” led us to explore other materials explicitly designed to think with. examples we found compelling ranged from the rich history of nineteenth century so-called philosophical toys, domestic educational devices, still used in stem education today, to the design of educational materials such as maria montessori.6   traditional philosophical toys were luxury-object apparatuses such as the zoetrope and stereoscope, brought into the victorian home to teach principles of human perception and disseminate the practices and principles of the scientific method. feminist philosophical toys are envisioned as flexible and accessible paper-based objects that push back against scientific positivism as it manifests in design, refute the book as the primary material of the philosophy discipline at large, and open up feminist perspectives and methods at the intersection of philosophy, pedagogy, and design practice. feminist philosophical toys aim to be at once a reflection and an extension of a feminist epistemological and ethical position: that of situated knowledges and reflexive practice grounded in relational and restorative justice. the toys are presented in a series, designed for engagement in order from 1 to 7. they are intended to be used as an integrated set within (design) educational settings. each toy is diy, uses paper as the primary material, and is built around one or a cluster of concepts from feminist theory.   toy #1: book making the series begins with making a handmade booklet with a sewn binding. participants are introduced to the basics of bookmaking, which also provides them with a surface for keeping notes, sketches, or other materials used in developing the subsequent toys in the series. a basic set of materials are needed: interior pages, cover paper, needle, and thread. the simplicity of this first activity is an invitation into making. at the same time, participants with experience may choose to produce more complex versions if they wish. the toy brings to the fore issues of knowledge production and showcases the rhetorical power of form and material mattering: once ideas are in a book, they are “present” in a way that has a particular valence.7 this is an invitation for a collective conversation about knowledge making in different cultures and communities, and in academia too.8   toy #2: oracle cards oracle cards are a critical and satirical play on the proliferation of design cards commonly used in design education and industry. this toy is offered to aid the designer who lacks foresight, who can benefit from the use of divination cards similar to tarot or other oracle decks in casting their imagination into the future. the cards help conceptualize potential failures, both disastrous and pedestrian, of their own designs. this toy works to materialize feminist theories that may be considered commonsense yet are ignored and underplayed in dominant discourses and practices of technology development. examples include the need to consider the long-term impacts of technology as discussed by sheila jasanoff (2016), and how seemingly innocent concepts such as “unintended consequences” work to forego responsibility (parvin and pollock 2020).   toy #3: experience frames experience frames works to explore the concept of positionality both in knowledge-making practices and broader experiences of oppression (crenshaw 1990; harding 1992; takacs 2003). the toy takes inspiration from nineteenth-century movable books, such as die-cut accordion books by lothar meggendorfer9. the form of the toy aims to surface and challenge reductive readings of intersectionality as an additive and stable notion of identity10 and instead highlight the simultaneity and variety of experiences of oppression within everyday encounters. in doing so, we invite participants to critically engage the history of this concept and explore both the pains and joys of inhabiting the margins.   figure 12. an example of experience frames toy   toy #4: circular conversation circular conversations is focused on feminist scholarship that emphasizes the repetitive patterns of struggle, structures that maintain the status quo, and possibilities for breaking free from oppressive cycles. inspiration is drawn from medieval volvelles as well as more contemporary twentieth-century “circle charts.” this toy aims to advance material engagement with theories such as work on feminism and complaint (ahmed 2021), the liberatory potentials of performative practice (boal 2006), and scholarship on the cyclic natures of both socialization and liberation (harro 2018).   toy #5: conflicts and coalitions accordion this toy takes its starting point in feminist scholarship on incommensurability, agonism, and the value of opposition and conflict as found in the works of chantal mouffe (2013), bell hooks (2010), and susan r. jones (2008). differences and conflicts are surfaced and shared while at the same time possibilities for action are explored (in spite of, because of, or by resolution of conflict and difference). this toy takes the form of an accordion fold book,11 constructed from a single sheet of paper, in which each of the four sections of the book is positioned at right angles with another. in doing so, the toy helps identify and surface differences while at the same time underlie the need for coalition building, collaboration, and collective action. each participant is invited to first create their own single accordion, then work with others to cut up and reconfigure sections in new ways.   toy #6: fortune teller the fortune teller draws on the classic children's origami structure known as a fortune teller or salt cellar (murray and rigney 1928). this toy utilizes scale to change the nature of the interaction with the material form, scaling the fortune teller up to a larger size such that it can only be operated in collaboration with two or more people, and cannot be used alone. the collaborative nature of the oversized form is also used to develop the content for the fortune "flaps," which display co-authored and/or co-illustrated representations of speculative futures. participants develop this toy in conversation with work on feminism and futurism (e.g., grosz 2000), feminist speculative design (e.g., martins 2014), and feminist theories of fiction and storytelling (e.g., leguin 2019).   toy #7: curation and collection folio the final toy is a paper folio with pockets for bringing the six toys together into an assemblage. the framing and arrangement of the structures that hold and therefore also produce knowledge are discussed in relation to karen barad’s (2007) work on agential cuts. feminist scholarship from informatics is included, such as bonnie mak and julia pollack’s (2020) research on the history and power relations of the card catalogue, and perspectives on feminist curation in the art world (richter, krasny, and perry 2016). this toy is discussed not as an ending or culmination but rather a beginning, and participants are encouraged to bring their work in relation with each other’s in new ways that may also be shared with a wider public, such as through publication of zines as discussed by elizabeth groeneveld (2016). the opportunity to carry this work further is envisioned as a possibility for making kin (haraway 2016), or as a way to collectively develop a killjoy survival kit (ahmed 2016).   a practice of live theorization at its most generative, it [the use of creative practice in higher education] becomes a practice of live theorisation: the thinking in action that takes place as students come to understand concepts about which they have read and then formulate (or materialize) as their own. —anna hickey-moody, helen palmer, and esther sayers, “diffractive pedagogies: dancing across new materialist imaginaries”   while the toys are easy to make and engage, we don’t see them as standalone pedagogical artifacts. to the contrary, it is crucial for the facilitators/educators to create a “brave” space as theorized by brian arao and kristi clemens (2013) in the learning environment in which students (and instructors) are invited to bring their whole selves into relation with each other and the material. this is only possible when the group has attended to shared concerns around how we communicate with each other and developed a shared understanding of the purview and goals of the educational experience as co-created between learners and instructors. the toys are intended to help surface what matters in the situation, and we expect that in the development of conversation, participants push against, amend, adjust, and reinvent the materials too. the juxtaposition of philosophical and playful in “philosophical toys” is intentional to make philosophy grounded and accessible while at the same time push against fetishization of matter. toys can be played with and kept. you can grow with toys and find them an object of lifelong learning and fascination. but you may also outgrow toys (and theories, too). on the other hand, the knowledge gained via meaningful exchange in dialogue with others is less disposable and has the potential for transformative effect.     messiness and feminism in early childhood education erin mergil and jessica pelizari   as montessori educators, we are tasked with the responsibility of guiding some of the world’s youngest citizens on their journeys of self-discovery and expression. the framework in which we operate was developed by dr. maria montessori, who based her educational philosophy upon years of observation and a belief that the aim of education should be to foster an environment in which children are free to explore and experiment to construct their inner knowledge of the world and their place within it. dr. montessori, whose work was conducted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, wrote in the style of the time, often referring to “man” when speaking of humanity, but this belies the fact that she herself was a woman ahead of her time. as the first female doctor in italy, dr. montessori’s passion for science and medicine led her to pursue the career of a physician, to the detriment of her relationship with her own father. despite the hardships she faced, the educational methods and materials developed by dr. montessori continue to impact the lives of children around the world to this day. to those of us who choose to teach in montessori schools, we whole-heartedly embrace dr. montessori’s belief that “a child is a discoverer. he is an amorphous, splendid being in search of his own proper form” (montessori 1936, 99). to this effect, it is our work not to insert ourselves into the development of our students, but rather to provide them with the means to unfold into their most authentic selves. we do so by providing a thoughtfully prepared environment, freedom of exploration and experimentation, and opportunities for creation.   because he is in love with his environment and not indifferent to it, a child’s intelligence can see what is invisible to adults. (montessori 1936, 103)   the prepared environment is the foundation of the montessori philosophy and is based upon the belief that children absorb information through their senses. by interacting with the environment, children build knowledge of the world around them and construct their own self-identity. in classroom practice, this manifests in many ways. children learn to use a variety of tools in the practical life curriculum, preparing the hand for the delicate tasks of creation to come. written expression begins with the practice of oral storytelling and sequencing activities. the cultural curriculum builds empathy through exposure to the countless cultures that exist throughout the world. and in the sensorial curriculum, children refine their senses and powers of observation to make comparisons and connections that allow for deeper understanding of concepts across all subjects. in each of these areas, and more, the materials made available to students are thoughtfully prepared, a task which falls to the montessori teacher, often referred to as a guide. we take great care to create materials that are simple and aesthetically pleasing, something that children appreciate as they journey through their sensitive period for order. our goal is not to dictate what the children learn, but rather to entice them to explore by creating an environment that invites curiosity.   the child, from birth, must be regarded as a being possessed of an important mental life, and we must treat him accordingly. (montessori 1949, 67)   figure 13. student work from erin mergil and jessica pelizari’s primary classroom   with so much order and preparation, it would be easy to assume there is no opportunity for mess in the montessori classroom. quite the opposite is the case, however, as montessori students are given the freedom to explore any and all materials made available. as guides, we must curb our own desires to correct all but the most disruptive or unsafe behaviors, allowing instead for the children to develop their own concentration and therefore unlock their understanding of a chosen material, which almost always contain a control of error that allows a child to self-correct without the need for adult intervention. montessori guides give frequent lessons on these materials, but our goal is to merely serve as the link while leaving room for the children to build their own knowledge of the intended skill or concept through repetition and experimentation. what the child may not realize is that this process of exploration results in practice and refinement of their developing skills. it is this refinement, and eventual mastery, that leads the montessori student to the phase of creation.   it is thanks to the hand, the companion of the mind, that civilization has arisen. (montessori 1949, 139)   creativity in the montessori environment reaches into every corner of the classroom. many of the materials available to the students allow for some type of creation, whether it is the construction of a tower using the pink cubes or writing a simple story with use of the moveable alphabet. materials that intend to train a particular skill, such as pinpricking to develop hand strength and pincer grip, often become elaborate, self-designed projects (such as a pin-pricked map of the globe). children’s ideas are embraced and fostered through open-ended questions that allow them to think critically about the work they wish to do. this is often where process meets product, and it is on the child’s terms as often as possible. these are often the works in which the children show the deepest sense of pride, sensing that they have mastered the skills necessary to independently bring their ideas to life, and it is through their creations that children begin to appreciate the value of self-expression.   the child brings us a great hope and a new vision. (montessori 1949, 66)   what lies at the center of the montessori pedagogy is the revolutionary beginning of our method. maria montessori challenged societal norms as italy’s first female physician and as a working mother, and she insisted that all children, even those deemed defective by society, could learn properly and successfully, if given the proper resources. montessori herself went on a journey that eventually denounced colonialism and spoke against patriarchy in societal patterns. her goal expanded to open children’s minds to confront ethnocentrism through sensorial experiences of cultures and existences beyond their own. she reached these insights at the end of her life, yet she began first by turning the tables of a hierarchical society by insisting on a child-centered educational experience. she demanded dignity and respect by way of independence for children and asserted that the best gift an adult can give a child is to leave their ego behind and instill agency in the children that will render their adult guides nearly obsolete to their daily functioning as a community of child-citizens.   in a system of oppression, an educator is either a liberator or an oppressor. — lerone bennett jr. (ligon, 2018).   heard in the hum of the classroom hive’s activity is the inherently feminist nature of the montessori philosophy. all materials, regardless of their subject matter or vocational possibilities, are available to all children. in a multi-age classroom, older children become mentors to younger children, and this allows for any child to be a master of a skill that they teach to another child—no matter their gender. lessons in grace and courtesy, a foundational core curriculum area that models respectful communal behavior, occur daily, and empower all children to find their voice within their community while also listening to the views of others. when children become self-advocates who learn empathy, they can advocate for one another and are in less need of adult arbiters. this reliance on one another removes the need for adults to bring external bias to enacting justice in the classroom and instead allows them to act as facilitators of restorative actions and conversations.   above all, the children are respected, not for being rule followers or carbon copies of the adults in their environment, but as the small citizens they are, eager for the chance to discover and share themselves with others.     mess and making: problems and possibilities aditya anupam, pooja casula, and shubhangi gupta   aditya: has “making,” understood as a feminist praxis, been a part of your experience as students, and if so how?   pooja: it largely hasn’t. i was listening to erin [mergil] and jessa [pelizari]’s talk regarding their experience as early childhood educators and i was just so surprised at some of the methods they use to teach their students about feminist making. in their talk they discuss the importance of cultivating a sense of sustainability and utilizing indigenous tools and methods to compare and contrast how students work with their modern counterparts. and i’m just so in awe. erin and jessa were talking about their experience as educators in new york. i went to school in the next state over, in central new jersey and i didn’t have that in my primary or secondary school experience. clearly a lot has changed in twenty years. in their talk they describe their students becoming “scientist-artists,” and i think when i was in school i was conditioned to think that scientists and artists were mutually exclusive professions. being able to foster such critical thinking about the material and making methods that you use is inherently feminist, and doing that from such a young age? that’s really incredible and i just wish i had a similar experience.   shubhangi: feminist making and understanding of materials as pooja talked about was not even discussed during my undergrad in india where i majored in design. i was not aware such concepts existed. our scope was limited to designing digital screens that were “intuitive, easy to use, aesthetic, and had utility.” but i gave little thought to the world outside of the digital screens and never really questioned the choice of my materials. i designed around what i knew, what was accessible, what was expected, and what was rewarded. however, after being introduced to the concepts of feminist making, i stepped into this world where i started reflecting upon the situated nature of materials. during my ms project, i attempted to be critical of my work, its form, the materials i was using and its implications. but while i knew in theory what i was striving to do, i found it very difficult to do it in practice. it was tough to suddenly try and push my boundaries without access to many examples of projects that did the same. but today, i found a treasure chest full of such examples. the work presented here was so helpful and inspirational as they demonstrated concrete works that came out of mess such as nettrice [gaskins]’s ai portraits and anne [sullivan]’s quilt. these designs and their processes can be messy, but they were effective and necessary. and i hope i am able to do that with my work someday.   shubhangi: speaking of messiness, what do you both think about messiness or uncertainty in your own work?   aditya: as an undergraduate student in india, my experiences resonates well with that of yours, shubhangi! and that motivated me to attempt to be deliberate about messiness as part of my instructional strategy as a graduate instructor at georgia tech. in a sense, my approach is aligned with erin and jessa’s work with messiness in the classroom. they begin with messiness and let students make sense of that messiness in their own personal and creative ways. my approach adds to this by helping students also learn to make things messy—that is, unsettle the status quo. for example, in my courses on game design, students often come to class certain that they know what a “game” is, having played games all their life. my strategy then is to present them with different definitions of games and ask them to find outliers and exceptions that break those definitions. this process challenges students’ underlying beliefs and assumptions about games. what really is a game? over the duration of the course, as my students play, critique, and design games, they develop and redevelop their understanding of them. their understanding of games moves from a set of logically consistent rules, to a medium of persuasion, to a means of cultural expression, to an embodiment of sociopolitical values, and so on. each vision and revision, settling and unsettling, helps them learn to navigate the complexity of games and come out of the course with an expanded sense of their possibilities. based on this experience, i think that both processes—making sense out of mess and making mess out of sense—are essential as a dialectic approach to learning as professor parvin puts it, in contrast to the dominant ready-made approach that strives to be free of mess entirely.   pooja: yeah, i think aditya’s points about the need to break free from dominant ready-made approaches is very relevant to my work in online toxicity and content moderation. determining whether a social media post is hate speech or a threat or just a rude comment is naturally an ambiguous process and depends heavily on the context in which it was made. but a lot of the times, social media platforms just want a mess-free, “yes/no” way to do this process, which, i’d argue, is impossible to do. there needs to be a way to incorporate uncertainty and messiness as part of content moderation, because ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. one of the central contributions of my research so far is to illustrate the messiness of threat moderation and contrast it with the seemingly neat and comprehensive policies. similar to what you were saying, aditya, i’ve made an attempt to unsettle what has been established as status quo. but the process of resurfacing mess itself is a messy process and i am still trying to make sense of it.   pooja: given the talks that we’ve seen today, moving forward, how would you both engage critically in feminist making and messiness?   shubhangi: the conversations we had today certainly motivated me to embrace messiness as part of my design process. but to be able to practically do so, work environments will have to be supportive of such messiness and uncertainty. i want to be part of a community that not only accepts my messy process but encourages me to make visible the mess that i make. the visibility of the mess, i believe, will only enrich my work and will provide meaningful context to it. but all this will take time and patience. making meaning out of the mess will take time and patience. today, i’m not sure how much the industry supports such an environment. the expectation of fast turnaround times and the quantitative measuring of success may leave little room for me to design products for broader use that are feminist in nature. however, i hope that as designers like our speakers and their students continue to support messiness and create work environments that foster messiness, i will feel more supported in engaging critically with feminist making to my full potential and without hesitations.   aditya: yeah, pooja, i agree it’s really difficult to do it. being messy is important as we discussed earlier, but some order and system for making a mess is also necessary. messiness for messiness’ sake is not a productive educational approach because it can drag everyone down a rabbit hole (that is familiar in some postmodernist approaches). for example, i can have my students continually unsettling the idea of a game, and then unsetting the process of unsettling games, and so on. but that isn’t really meaningful because no one comes out of this exercise rich with ideas and possibilities of what games can do, but rather they come out with a sense of exhaustion at endlessly questioning with no interim resolutions. at the same time, guiding students through the process of making a mess in a tight and structured way is also problematic. you can’t make a mess if you are told exactly how to do it. it won’t be a mess any more but rather a procedural deconstruction. i think this is the key paradoxical challenge: how can we learn to be messy in a systematic way?   acknowledgements we are grateful to the digital integrative liberal arts center at georgia institute of technology funded by the andrew w. mellon foundation for sponsoring the symposium. we would also like to thank catalyst lead editors professor anne pollock and professor laura foster for their thoughtful suggestions that greatly strengthened this contribution.   notes 1 gloria anzaldúa reminds us that the act of writing is a “gesture of the body,” states that the body is “the ground of thought.” my multidisciplinary creativity is inextricably connected to my scholarship, and songs help me and those listening to ground ourselves in body (anzaldúa 2015, 5).   2 many activists and social groups are working tirelessly to address these issues through everything from changing laws (such as child-custody or divorce laws) to public education and grassroots social change.   3 the project website, including detailed information and free templates, can be accessed at http://www.rebeccarouse.com/feminist-philosophical-toys.html.   4 our toys build on the history of the victorian “philosophical toy” as described by tom gunning (2012) and are inspired by thinkers new and old from heinrich blasche and friedrich fröbel (see iurascu 2021), to maria montessori (montessori and carter 1936), donna haraway (2016), karen barad (2007), bonnie mak and julia pollack (2020), and anna hickey-moody, helen palmer, and esther sayers (2016).   5 for readers who may be unfamiliar, design cards are often advertised as quick and economic tools for design. examples include the ideo method cards, grow a game cards, and envisioning cards as well as more recent variations such as the tarot cards of tech.   6 in the early 1900s, maria montessori designed and patented materials for teaching arithmetic, geometry, reading, writing, grammar, and more. these materials are still in use in many montessori schools today.   7 feminist book makers and book artists have a long, rich history of subverting, re-making, innovating, and troubling the book as a form, and also revealing the ways books have been instrumentalized to legitimate a narrow understanding of knowledge production, positioning the act of inscription and the textual artifact in opposition to other ways of making-as-knowing. see drucker (2004) and fanni, flodmark, and kaaman (2020) for extended discussions of this history in feminist artist books, printing, and typography.   8 related scholarship on feminist approaches to the book is discussed including: johanna drucker’s the century of artists’ books (2004); jessica helfand’s scrapbooks: an american history (2008); elizabeth groeneveld’s making feminist media (2016); maryam fanni, matilda flodmark, and sara kaaman’s natural enemies of 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literature, media and communication at georgia institute of technology. her research integrates humanistic and theoretical scholarship and design-based inquiry in exploring the ethical and political dimensions of design and technology, especially as related to questions of democracy and social justice. dr. parvin’s designs have received multiple awards and have been exhibited in venues such as the smithsonian museum. she is on the editorial board of design issues and serves as a lead editorial team member of catalyst: feminist, theory, technoscience.   rebecca rouse is a senior lecturer in media arts, aesthetics & narration in the school of informatics’ division of game development at the university of skövde, sweden. rouse’s research focuses on theoretical, critical, and design production work with storytelling for new technologies such as augmented and mixed reality. rouse designs and develops projects across theatrical performance, museums, cultural heritage sites, interactive installations, movable books, and games, all with the thread of investigating and inventing new modes of storytelling.   doctora xingona diana alvarez is a singer-songwriter, poet, composer, filmmaker, educator, and scholar whose multifaceted work centers transcendence, kinship, and the co-liberation and nourishment of bipoc women, nonbinary, trans, and genderqueer artists. alvarez is the composer and filmmaker behind the award-winning “quiero volver: a xicanx ritual opera for queer and trans artists of color,” a multimedia performance altar for women, nonbinary, trans, and genderqueer artists of color to convene and manifest futures, and the founder of the bridgesong fund, which also supports this community of artists.   sanaz haghani is an interdisciplinary iranian artist based in georgia. she is a printmaker, papermaker, graphic designer, and adjunct instructor at rowan-cabarrus community college. sanaz has exhibited her work across the united states and internationally, and was one of five artists selected by the georgia committee for the national museum of women in the arts to exhibit at moca ga in paper routes: women to watch 2020.   sharon clark is a playwright, dramaturge, and creative director of raucous, a uk-based theater company that fuses performance, music, film, ar, ai and creative technology. she was awarded a brentwood judge’s prize for her play “plow” in 2017 and her plays have also been shortlisted for the yale drama prize and the papatango prize. she is a resident of the pervasive media studio and a senior lecturer at the university of the west of england.   nettrice r. gaskins is an african american digital artist, academic, cultural critic and advocate of steam fields. in her work she explores afrofuturism and “techno-vernacular creativity and innovation” (mit press, 2021). dr. gaskins’ work explores how to generate art using algorithms in different ways, and has been exhibited at the smithsonian’s arts + industries building. she is the assistant director of lesley university steam learning lab.   anne sullivan is an assistant professor of digital media in the school of literature, media and communication at the georgia institute of technology, and is the director of the storycraft research lab. her research focuses on playful and storied interactive experiences from a feminist and humanistic perspective, with an emphasis on both traditional and computational craft. dr. sullivan is an award-winning quilter and the concept designer and producer of loominary, a digital game system controlled with a loom which has been shown internationally including the smithsonian american art museum.   erin mergil is an assistant head of school and montessori teacher at woodland hill montessori school in north greenbush, new york. erin received her ba from the university at albany in spanish and linguistics and has her m.s. ed in early childhood education from the college of new rochelle. erin is credentialed in ec and abar from the american montessori society.   jessica pelizari is an early childhood educator at woodland hill montessori school in north greenbush, new york, where she also applies her creativity as a writer and composer to assist with woodland hill’s theater and glee clubs. she earned her ma in communication sciences and disorders from the college of saint rose (albany, ny) and has held positions as a speech-language pathologist in a variety of settings serving individuals across the lifespan.   aditya anupam is a postdoctoral researcher at the school of literature, media, and communication at georgia institute of technology. aditya’s research is situated at the confluence of science, media, and learning. anchored in feminist, sts, and pragmatist scholarship, he explores digital media—particularly games, simulations and interactive visualizations—as environments to foster the learning of science as a situated practice.   pooja casula is a ph.d. student in the digital media program at the georgia institute of technology. pooja’s research interests are at the intersection of social media, law and politics, with a specific interest in gendered abuse and disinformation.   shubhangi gupta is a ph.d. student in digital media at the georgia institute of technology, advised by dr. nassim parvin. in her research, she draws upon feminist and sts scholarship integrated with qualitative research methods to explore questions of safety and social justice as they relate to the design of emerging technologies.     book review book review | trans medicine: the emergence and practice of treating gender, by stef m. shuster (new york university press, 2021)     dana ahern university of nevada, reno danaahern@unr.edu     historicizing the emergence of american trans medical criteria in the mid-twentieth century before moving through ongoing development in and around debates surrounding professional guidelines that structure the access and distribution of medical transition, trans medicine: the emergence and practice of treating gender provides an insightful examination of trans medicine at the site of the provider. building on the emerging scholarship within feminist science studies, transgender studies, and disability studies, stef m. shuster illustrates the professional confusions, conflicts, and disagreements within the field of trans medicine and explores the ways in which power operates to normalize non-normative bodies via medicine. shuster effectively uses a combination of archival analysis of correspondences and case histories from the mid-twentieth century, interviews with providers, participant observation at trans medical conferences, and analysis of formal guidelines, standards of care, and diagnostic criteria, to demonstrate how medical authority is built on a lack of research on transgender bodies. instead, shuster demonstrates how medical authority depends on and perpetuates heteronormative, binaristic, and inherently pathologized understandings of transgender identity.   shuster traces trans medical history starting in the mid-twentieth century with the establishment of medical legitimacy within the field of trans medicine. they describe the tension that exists for trans medicine providers throughout history as providers attempted to defend themselves from criticism by those who consider trans medicine “quackery.” shuster explores how, in the attempt to establish authority in deciding who was authentically transgender, trans medicine produced the trope of the “trickster,” who supposedly lied to meet the strict requirements set up by providers to access trans medicine. trans medicine argued that “trickster” was motivated by mental illness or a desire to avoid the stigma of homosexuality, as opposed to the “real” trans person who would fully submit to medical authority. the strict requirements included living heteronormatively and giving up one’s family so as to leave behind their pasts and to prove one’s seriousness in pursuing transition; those unwilling to leave their families were denied transition, but this denied transition allowed their otherwise “normal” families to be left undisrupted. shuster continues to elucidate the histories of trans medicine’s investment in determining the proper treatment for transgender people—who should access treatment, when, etc.—by exploring the debates between physicians versus therapists. preoccupied with banishing the specter of the trickster in order to establish guidelines of true transness, these debates resulted in increased barriers to treatment as well as an increasing institutionalization and construction of transness as pathological. this transgender pathology became defined by appearance, mannerisms, sexuality—in brief, being/seeming attractive, straight, and gender conforming—being otherwise mentally “well,” and having the ability to become a “model citizen.” in turn, shuster discusses the alliance that ultimately developed between mental health providers and physicians as diagnosing transness and treating it, respectively. moving into the present moment, shuster explores how providers began to assert their authority and expertise through guidelines established by the world professional association for transgender health (wpath), the world health organization (who), and the endocrine society, among others. while these organizations and many of the providers currently treating trans patients tout expertise in their approach to trans medicine, they lack evidence, particularly in the decision of when to initiate medical transition. shuster points to the ways that the little “evidence” available is largely in the form of less reliable/replicable research such as case studies as opposed to more effective research such as clinical trials. notably, this uncertainty around the decision to initiate medical transition mirrors the lack of evidence in the mid-twentieth century. despite this lack of evidence and even in some cases relying on their own “gut feeling” to treat trans patients, many providers persist in constructing themselves as experts and as authorities. shuster also emphasizes how “healthiness” has become, for some providers, something to be prioritized in pursuing transition so as to mitigate “risks” to the patient, as patients with mental illness, for example, are often deemed unable to comprehend the implications of gender transition, and patients with health conditions are often told they need to get them under control, implying they do not understand or care enough for their own health. shuster helpfully reiterates the urgency in understanding how earlier legacies of trans medicine that attempted to “normalize” the patient and protect the provider continue to impact and inform current trans medicine. shuster continues their analysis with a comparison between providers who strictly adhere to the guidelines established by wpath, who, the american psychiatric association, and the endocrine society, versus providers who use these guidelines more flexibly. the belief in strict adherence accompanies a weaponizing of “regret” as a danger for trans people, especially as providers continue to attempt to mitigate “risk” for patients. gatekeeping becomes particularly problematic for nonbinary patients who risk being labelled noncompliant due to a perceived lack of “certainty,” which comes to stand in for “real” transness from the mid-twentieth century. in contrast, providers who use institutional guidelines as more general templates as opposed to strict requirements (e.g., questioning the requirement to live as one’s gender for certain amount of time before being allowed to transition or the requirement for a therapist to approve the transition) call into question the need to prove one’s transness to doctors in order to access trans medicine, particularly therapists, who note the way this requirement acts to erode trust in therapy. strict adherers to guidelines continually place the burden of proof onto the patient, which particularly impacts nonbinary patients who are persistently interpreted as “uncertain.” these providers attempt to perform expertise to maintain authority and continue to rely on tropes from the mid-twentieth century of mentally ill “tricksters” in trans medicine to demonstrate their own authority above their patients’. shuster’s discussions with flexible adherents to these guidelines demonstrates how experience in treating trans patients has become a stand-in for evidence, and shuster makes an important insistence on understanding the ways that those who prioritize the performance of expertise do so to the detriment of their patients. framed through work in disability studies, shuster connects this performance of expertise in trans medicine with a similar mobilization of authority by providers when faced with symptoms they are unable to diagnose or explain, prioritizing their own appearance as authorities above the care of their patient. i appreciate shuster’s entry point of the text at the site of the trans medical provider, deftly shifting the focus onto this figure to whom the transgender subject, by engaging in trans medicine, must make themselves vulnerable. in this rhetorical move, shuster forces the provider—rather than the trans person—be subjected to in-depth historical probing into their motivations, interests, and commitments to transness, exposing the gaps and weakness in trans medical research that prioritizes the making of medical authority rather than the treatment and health of the patient. shuster also expertly draws out the lingering legacies of trans medicine of the mid-twentieth century that continue to inform trans medicine under new terms. shuster carefully parses out the providers who consider themselves experts to the disadvantage of their patients from those who acknowledge the impossibility of expertise in trans medicine because of the enormous gaps in trans medicine. in particular, shuster’s analysis of the physical space of trans medicine at conferences they attended, as well as the affects they captured from providers during interviews, provide a rich and nuanced exploration of trans medicine’s various figures and the ongoing conversations that are made (im)possible by the boundaries and distinctions upon which medicine insists. while shuster elegantly and thoroughly explores the makings of trans medicine’s constructions of normative transness, the histories and ongoing effects of trans medical guidelines and gatekeeping as they impact people of color is urgent to further explore. where shuster discusses the various limitations imposed by the artificially constructed notions of “real” trans people—“productive citizens” without uncertainty, physical or mental health issues, and with clear and unambiguous gender identity—a trans person of color’s experience would have been subjected to even further inspection, particularly in the ways racialized transness is always already constructed as deviant. for example, jules gill-peterson’s histories of the transgender child (2018) examines the histories of transgender children and the ways trans people of color were rejected from the same clinics that shuster discusses. the ongoing legacies of racialization within trans medicine that gill-peterson explores are critical to engage and develop a more robust analysis of this history of institutions, identity, power, and marginalization. in particular, the nonbinary transgender figure that shuster frequently mentions as that which providers hesitate to treat, citing a lack of certainty in the nonbinary person’s own gender, would have been enriched with attention to the ways that racialized trans bodies are always already non-normatively gendered. trans medicine: the emergence and practice of treating gender makes important connections across histories of trans medicine. it critiques the establishment and expansion of medical authority, in spite of a lack of medical research, at the cost of the trans patient’s authority in their own transition. shuster leaves open possibilities for trans medicine and providers who refuse an investment in authority and gatekeeping in the field, investing instead in supporting the transgender person. while inviting other areas of inquiry, this text is an exciting contribution both to the field of transgender studies as well as in the disability studies.     author bios dana ahern is a postdoctoral fellow in queer/trans studies at the university of nevada, reno.     original research feminist crops: a more-than-human concept for advancing feminist crop breeding for development     ida tarjem norwegian university of life sciences ida.arff.tarjem@nmbu.no     abstract gender matters in agriculture, and crop breeding teams are increasingly being asked to develop plant varieties that respond to the needs and preferences of men and women. achieving gender-responsive crop breeding requires communication and cooperation across disciplines, not least between crop breeders and gender specialists. the coming together of plant sciences and gender studies necessitates novel ideas, concepts, and approaches that unite nature with culture and the material with the social. however, the development of such approaches is still in its infancy. empirically grounded in experiences in and observations of social and natural scientists working at the intersection of gender and crop breeding in an african context, this article contributes to filling this gap by proposing the concept of the “feminist crop.” the feminist crop captures the entanglement of crops with women’s embodied practices, knowledges, capabilities, and power, and contributes to an ethico-onto-epistemological and methodological investigation of how intersectional gender identities and relations are embedded in plant–people entanglements. using examples from banana, yam, and cassava, i explore how the feminist crop can expand the boundaries of how we think about agency, power, and empowerment in agriculture, as well as how plant genome editing grounded in the feminist crop concept may be used as a feminist tool to entangle plants and people in more socially just ways. ultimately then, the feminist crop contributes to advancing feminist crop breeding.     keywords africa, crop breeding, gender, genome editing, plant agency     introduction gender matters in agriculture: gender norms and relations shape how, under what conditions, and to what ends different groups of men and women produce, process, consume, store, trade, and market seeds, crops, and crop products (food and agriculture organization of the united nations 2011; kerr 2017; quisumbing et al. 2014; raney et al. 2011). in turn, gender differences in agriculture may manifest themselves in the form of different knowledges of and preferences for crop species and traits (marimo et al. 2020; weltzien et al. 2019). for instance, women farmers in west africa have been found to prefer sorghum varieties that can withstand low soil fertility as they experience less reliable access to fertile land, manure, and fertilizers (leiser et al. 2018). public crop breeding has a relatively long tradition of including the perspectives of men and women farmers, commonly during evaluation of released or soon-to-be released crop varieties (ashby and sperling 1995; chambers, pacey, and thrupp 1989; sperling, loevinsohn, and ntabomvura 1993), while input from social scientists has been considered most relevant later in or in the aftermath of the crop breeding process, such as during adoption studies and impact assessments. more recently, in a bid to increase adoption and development impacts of improved crop varieties, more systematic approaches for incorporating gender and social sciences perspectives earlier in the crop breeding process are being developed (ashby and polar 2019; forsythe et al. 2021). such initiatives and projects are making important conceptual and methodological strides toward gender-responsive and transformative crop breeding. however, interdisciplinary application of natural and social sciences is hampered by the different onto-epistemological groundings on which the disciplines are based. of most concern for the present article is the nature-culture and material-social dualisms that crop breeders and gender specialists largely operate on either side of, respectively. thus, in moving towards feminist practices and outcomes of crop breeding, there is also a need for novel ethico-onto-epistemological (barad 2007) ideas, concepts, and approaches. inspired by feminist technoscience studies, critical plant studies, and related scholarships, this article explores what may be gained from applying a naturecultural and sociomaterial ontology and more-than-human and distributive notion of agency in the context of crop breeding for development by introducing the concept of the “feminist crop.” the largely theoretical exploration is empirically grounded in personal experiences in trying to combine a background in molecular crop breeding with gender and feminist studies, as well as through interactions with natural and social scientists working at this intersection. as part of my doctoral fieldwork, i interviewed crop breeders and gender specialists working in or together with the cgiar consortium (formerly the consultative group on international agricultural research) in africa about the ways in which they incorporate gender and women’s interests, needs, and empowerment in their work. i also observed first-hand the struggles and successes in working across disciplines through participation at workshops and conferences that dealt with gender-responsiveness and transformation in crop breeding and seed systems in africa. i start by illustrating the close entanglements that exist between people and plants, and the ways such entanglements may be gendered. subsequently, i introduce the feminist crop, before exploring the onto-epistemological and methodological implications of this concept for crop breeders and gender specialists, using banana, yam, and cassava as examples. the exploration will include an investigation of how plant genome editing may be wielded as a tool for feminist intervention and politics in and through crop breeding. finally, we arrive at the ethical groundings of the feminist crop, which asks us to take responsibility for what comes to matter and what becomes excluded in plant–people entanglements. the article contributes to both the field of crop breeding and gender studies—not least in being among the first to address the intersection of feminism and plant genome editing, thus adding to a growing literature on the societal implications and democratization of the technology (e.g., jasanoff, hurlbut, and saha 2015, 2019; montenegro de wit 2020; shaw 2020; see also bryant and pini 2006 and ezezika, deadman, and daar 2013)—as well as to feminist technoscience studies by expanding its scope to the relatively unexplored area of crop breeding for development in an african context. african (feminist) science and technology studies is a growing, albeit comparably small, field of study (wiser, n.d.; but do see, e.g., augusto 2007; bauchspies 2009; borenstein 2021; foster 2017; henry, oliver, and winters 2019; lamoureaux and rottenburg 2021; mavhunga 2017; okune 2020; paxling 2019a, 2019b; pollock 2014; rottenburg 2009). engaging with african feminist and womanist scholarships, local and indigenous knowledges in africa, and african women’s and men’s unique experiences with material culture and technology can contribute novel ways of understanding innovation, subjectivity, agency, power, philosophy, ontology, epistemology, and ethics, all of which are at the heart of feminist technoscience studies. agricultural knowledge and (bio)technological innovation represents an important vantage point from which to study such and related aspects, given the centrality of agriculture in the lives of many african women and men, as well as the situatedness of plant breeding at multiple intersections of interest, including north-south, local-global, coloniality-indigeneity, nature-culture, material-social, plant-people, and masculinity-femininity. there is, furthermore, a need to treat the african continent not simply as a place from which data can be extracted and to which western-derived concepts can readily be applied, but a place of theory-building and concept-formation (mavhunga 2017). this article attempts to do just that, all the while recognizing my own position and privileges as a white scholar from the north.   plant–people entanglements and the construction of gender historically, plants, seeds, and food are thought to have been particularly important in the construction and reproduction of the “female self,” including in african countries, as women have been, and in many communities continue to be, the primary experimenters, collectors, exchangers, carers, domesticators, and processors of plants (e.g., amadiume 1987; avakian 1997; avakian and haber 2005; carney 2001; fritz 1999; hastorf 1998; howard 2003; inness 2001; jaffe and kaler 2016; shirungu and cheikhyoussef 2018; steenkamp 2003; tapia and de la torre 1998; tyler and fraser 2016; williams-forson 2006, 2010). in these roles, women may find a source of security, skills, knowledge-making, joy, pride, privilege, and self-esteem, as well as drudgery, frustration, concern, and worry. undoubtedly, crops and food also play an important role in the construction of male identity and masculinity (e.g., greenebaum and dexter 2018; korieh 2007, 2010; saugeres 2002; sumpter 2015). for instance, in northern ghana, cultivation of millet, including the delicate practice of weeding, is at the heart of men’s identity (padmanabhan 2007). in turn, humans help make plants who and what they are: through “formal” and “informal” crop breeding, we literally help determine what the plants look like, can do, and what they experience. as human behaviors and social systems, including the structures and practices of crop breeding, are often strongly delineated along lines of gendered power relations, the biological-material properties and capacities of plants—their “plantiness,” defined by head, atchison, and gates as “an assemblage of the shared differences of plants from other beings” (2012, 27)—may come to invite or inhibit the doing of particular gender performances and relations. head, atchison, and gates further note how “the specifics of plantiness help us to consider the specifics of plant agency—how it comes out of certain material capacities—and how that prefigures relations with people” (27). we thus see how plants and people are not separate, bounded entities but rather emerge in and through naturecultural and sociomaterial relations with each other: they are plant–people entanglements (van der veen 2014), a concept used by hodder (2011) to describe the various ways and forms in which humans and things get caught up with and depend on each other (see barton and denham 2018 for a beautiful visual illustration of plant–people entanglements). such an ontological understanding has epistemological, methodological, and ethical implications, which will be explored following the introduction of the feminist crop concept.   the feminist crop concept and the advancement of feminist crop breeding the concept of the feminist crop captures the entanglement of crops with women’s embodied practices, knowledges, capabilities, and power. it delineates a co-constituted nature of humans and plants that is at the same time ubiquitous, grounded, and gendered. the concept contributes to an ethico-onto-epistemological and methodological investigation of how intersectional gender identities and relations are embedded not only in human systems but in plants and more specifically plant–people entanglements, which shifts the thinking and practices of both biophysical researcher and social scientists. by bringing together the natural and the material on the one hand, and the social and cultural on the other, the feminist crop further provides a common ground on which the two disciplines can engage. another key feature of the feminist crop is that it situates ethics and justice at the heart of crop breeding. more specifically, the feminist crop advances a decision-making process guided more explicitly by an ethics of mattering and exclusion, which asks scientists and their institutions to promote epistemic justice and take responsibility for what comes to matter and what becomes excluded in plant–people entanglements. ultimately then, the feminist crop contributes to advancing feminist crop breeding. the feminist crop should not be mistaken for promoting a feminine science (harding 1991) or breeding for “women’s traits” or “women’s crops.” such language may reinforce heteronormative and essentializing assumptions that can have real sociomaterial implications, for instance by restricting access to and control over more lucrative income-generating opportunities by women (polar et al. 2021). additionally, calling crops feminist may be accused of anthropomorphism (gibson and gagliano 2017), which may seem paradoxical given that a more-than-human ontology is meant to challenge human exceptionalism and subvert the tendency of perceiving nonhumans from an anthropocentric perspective. furthermore, given the plurality of feminisms, it may appear contradictory to talk of a feminist crop in the singular. however, the feminist crop is meant to be adaptable to multiple ways of understanding feminism or other african alternatives such as womanism, as well as being an acknowledgment of the agential (feminist) capacities and selfhood of plants, as recognized in indigenous cosmologies and knowledge systems for centuries (e.g., kimmerer 2013; kohn 2013; miller 2019; nathen 2018). next, i explore some possible implications of the feminist crop to the thinking and doing of crop breeders and gender specialists.   breeding plant–people entanglements the main concern of crop breeders is how the genetics of the crop plant interact with the environment to give the plant its phenotype. comparably less attention has been paid to how the choices crop breeders make in the field or in the lab implicitly involves a decision about who and what gets entangled and disentangled and in what ways. applying the feminist crop concept infers not only an appreciation of the constitutive role that nonhumans play in the making of plant breeding knowledge but also acknowledging that, once disseminated, crop plants have agency in shaping human identities, roles, and relations. to illustrate the agential capacity of crops that the feminist crop engenders, i draw on my past experiences working as a biotechnologist on genetically modified bananas (musa spp.) in a plant sciences laboratory in nairobi, kenya. through the incorporation of two genes from sweet pepper (i.e., hrap and pflpi), these bananas were modified to become resistant against the plant disease banana xanthomonas wilt (bxw). my daily laboratory life consisted of a whole mishmash of “actants” (see, e.g., latour 1996 for a definition): bacteria, genes, embryonic banana cells, antibiotics, nutrients, enzymes, petri dishes, pipettes, pcr machines, and computer software. i felt disappointed, frustrated, and sad when the bacteria did not behave as i wanted them to or the banana plants died, even after long hours of tending to. i felt confident, excited, and joyful when green, fluorescent light was emitted from the banana cells, literally signalling to me that they had successfully been genetically transformed. the power of hindsight ultimately led me to understand that every one of these actants played a meaningful role in the making of this knowledge, which in turn produced the very actants themselves, myself included. in what ways, then, did the choices made in the lab, which were structured by this array of actants and their relations, imply a choice about who or what would become entangled and disentangled and in what ways? bananas are of cultural and ritual importance in several african countries, as well as a pivotal source of income and food high in starch and some essential vitamins and minerals (karamura et al. 1999; mbabazi et al. 2020). in choosing bananas as the crop of choice and bxw as the problem to be addressed, the around 100 million people who depend on the cultivation of bananas, most of whom are small-scale farmers residing in east and central africa (karamura, karamura, and tinzaara 2012; tripathi, mwangi et al. 2009; tripathi, tripathi et al. 2013), initially became entangled. simultaneously, people whose more pressing concerns include low soil fertility, drought, socioeconomic factors such as lack of markets and roads, and other pests and diseases, got partly disentangled (e.g., panama disease, sigatoka, weevils, and nematodes) (e.g., wairegi et al. 2010). furthermore, the choice of the cultivars “sukali ndiizi” and “cavendish williams” narrowed the plant–people entanglement to those who cultivate small dessert bananas and larger commercial bananas, respectively. additionally, those apprehensive about or unable to adopt (for instance due to lack of money and other productive resources) improved crop varieties and, more specifically, genetically engineered crops became further disentangled. moreover, prioritizing agronomic traits implicitly meant prioritizing those socioeconomic and sociocultural groups whose main interests relate to production and marketing and less so with processing and consumption (e.g., good taste and aroma, soft texture, and yellow color). due to gender norms and roles in banana farming and value chains, women have been found to be more concerned with cooking quality (and thus cooking bananas), such as heat-retaining ability, and men with beer quality (and thus beer bananas) and cultivars with big bunches and extended shelf life (marimo et al. 2020; rietveld and farnworth 2018; sanya et al. 2018). furthermore, in east africa, men are commonly the ones controlling the banana plantations, although women contribute much of the labor, such as during weeding and management of disease (rietveld and farnworth 2018). consequently, breeding for increased productivity (through disease resistance) may disentangle women whose preferences and needs are not met or entangle women in ways that increase their drudgery (addison and schnurr 2016). in other words, becoming entangled is not intrinsically positive. thus, it is not enough to merely ask who and what gets entangled and disentangled, but also in what ways and with what outcomes. then again, breeding for bwx resistance may entangle in beneficial ways those men and most notably women who spend time and effort having to manage the disease, and who may lose income and other opportunities because of the disease. it may also help re-entangle women who have adopted other crops (e.g., maize) in favor of bananas due to the high disease pressure caused by bxw. ultimately, however, as bananas often represent a cash crop, men are traditionally responsible for harvesting and controlling the income from sales (rietveld and farnworth 2018). in some cases, women feel like they have no choice but to sell bananas without their husbands’ permission, which may result in domestic violence (rietveld and farnworth 2018). again, we see how women and men become differentially entangled. what may technical advances within molecular crop breeding hold for feminist crops and feminist crop breeding? could molecular breeding tools expand our possibilities of engaging with plantiness and plant agency in ways that allow for more socially just entanglements to be made? following deboleena roy, i will argue for a reframing of “how we might think about molecular biology and feminism together, how we may be able to work together to create new lines of flight to think about the world that we inhabit, and how we can produce knowledge about that world” (2018, 24). i draw attention to genome editing and more specifically the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (crispr) and crispr-associated protein (cas) system. genome editing using crispr-cas takes advantage of an adaptive immune system in bacteria and archaea to control the introduction of targeted, sequence-specific variation (jinek et al. 2012). while there is still some way to go before crispr editing of plants become economically and technically feasible (e.g., massel et al. 2020), as well as politically, regulatory, socioculturally, and ethically acceptable in certain parts of the world (e.g., bartkowski et al. 2018; rock and schurman 2020), new opportunities for feminist crop breeding may unfold as crispr-cas editing becomes increasingly advanced and versatile. for instance, improved opportunities for conducting functional assessments of gene functions and regulatory elements can enhance our understanding of the molecular and physiological basis of preferred plant characteristics that have yet to be translated into “breed-able” traits (e.g., “good aroma” and “ease of threshing”). genome editing can also help conserve genetic variation and desirable qualities of landraces and local varieties that are often highly appreciated for their culinary and cultural value or introduce genetic variability in cases where the gene pool does not contain genetic variability for traits important for certain uses and user groups. additionally, genome editing can prove helpful in breeding for polygenic traits (i.e., controlled by multiple genes), such as in the case of many quality traits that traditionally are considered more important to women (marimo et al. 2020; teeken et al. 2018; weltzien et al. 2019). furthermore, the ability to now add both qualitative and quantitative traits to elite varieties in a single generation without the effect of linkage drag (i.e., where undesirable genomic segments are linked to the gene of interest) enables breeding teams to respond more swiftly to new understandings of the gendered nature of plant–people entanglements and to shifting user preferences (scheben and edwards 2018). finally, the development of “lab-free” genome editing protocols, where genome editing is performed directly in glasshouses and growth rooms (e.g., massel et al. 2020), could help meet some of the critique that the more laboratory-oriented and technically advanced, and thus less accessible, knowledge underlying this form of crop breeding may increase the “distance” between scientists and laypeople (or, rather, lay experts) (bonneuil, foyer, and wynne 2014; montenegro de wit 2020; wynne 2001). still, emphasis should be placed on developing a democratic and inclusive innovation process, particularly in light of findings suggesting limited integration of user and gender perspectives in banana research and technology development (kawarazuka et al. 2020; sanya et al. 2017), which has contributed to low levels of varietal adoption in some cases (akankwasa et al. 2016; marimo et al. 2020; thiele et al. 2021). this is sobering considering the experiential and tacit knowledge and expertise that both men and women hold as a result of their central roles in banana food and cropping systems and value chains (ajambo et al. 2018; bechoff et al. 2020; karamura et al. 2004; kawarazuka et al. 2020), which is (or should be) central to the breeding process. a democratic, inclusive research and innovation process would require opening up spaces for meaningful participation and decision making, as well as institutionalizing local and indigenous knowledges and women as intellectual, technological agents through creative, collaborative, and participatory action research and transformative learning (e.g., baker 2012; callon, lascoumes, and barthe 2009; mezirow and associates 2000; montenegro de wit 2020; shaw 2020; song and vernooy 2010; wakeford and sanchez 2018; weasel 2011). developed in such a way, and grounded in the concept of the feminist crop, crispr-cas can come to play important roles in advancing gender-responsive and transformative crop breeding.   tracing (dis)empowerment pathways along plant–people entanglements many social scientists are concerned with the closely interlinked concepts of agency and power in understanding social structures, behaviors, and relations, including pathways of empowerment and disempowerment (e.g., cornwall 2016; galiè and farnworth 2019; gammage, kabeer, and rodgers 2016; kabeer 1999; pansardi 2012; rowlands 1997). most commonly, nonhumans are treated simply as resources and assets that affect, among others, a person’s ability to bargain and make decisions. however, by conceiving of human agency and action as mediated not only through social relations but through and (re)configured by plantiness and plant agency, we can come to understand the construction and reproduction of intersectional gender identities and relations and (dis)empowerment in agriculture in novel ways. an illustrative example includes that of yam and cassava in nigeria. until more recent times, the starchy yam (dioscorea spp.) played an important political, economic, sociocultural, and ritual role in nigeria and in particular among the igbo people, as evident in the eating of new yam festival (ikpo ji) and the celebration of the yam spirit (ahiajoku) (amadiume 1987; korieh 2010). known as the “king of crops” (achebe 1959, 33–34; korieh 2007, 2010), yam was considered a men’s crop and a defining feature of male identity, prestige, and authority (amadiume 1987; korieh 2010). the cultivation of yam further helped shape production relations, trade, land use and tenure systems, and marriage and social alliances (korieh 2010), commonly in favor of men who came to control the most important factors of production, including women and children who often provided much of the labor in producing and processing yams (korieh 2010). however, as land became degraded and labor scare during times of hardship and war, starting with the 1918 influenza pandemic and world war i, the hardy, woody root crop cassava (manihot esculenta) fared better than yam (korieh 2010). up until then, partly due to its toxic and bitter compounds, cassava was considered a “poor man’s crop” mostly used for animal feed (korieh 2007). reinforced by the food crisis of world war ii, the demand for cassava further increased and its production became rather lucrative (korieh 2010). thus, by the 1970s and onwards, the igbo went from a “yam people at heart” to a “cassava people at heart” (note, however, that yam remains an important crop in many parts of nigeria, see, e.g., obidiegwu and akpabio 2017) (korieh 2007). most noteworthy to our story, however, is that, while men also participated in cassava production, it was nigerian and igbo women, at times with contribution from their children, who dominated production, processing, and marketing (and, in several parts of the country, continue to dominate) (e.g., apata 2019; taiwo and fasoyiro 2015; wossen et al. 2017). korieh notes that “many women were eager to admit that their role in household subsistence had increased significantly in recent times. this transformation in some cases brought out negative responses from the men who now see themselves as welding less authority in their households” (2007, 299). in other words, cassava helped strengthen the economic position of women and thus shaped the social and economic relations between women and men, and with it came a fracturing of the male–yam identity (korieh 2010). moreover, women and women’s groups started to build new knowledges, skills, practices, and cultures associated with cassava, which in turn enhanced their sense of self-esteem, independence, and confidence (korieh 2007, 2010; ottenberg 1956). the strengthening of women’s (economic) position can further be seen in relation to historical gender ideologies, including the “ideology of female industriousness, economic self-help, and self-sufficiency” (amadiume 1987, 40). we thus see how agency and various forms of power became mediated through women–cassava entanglements, which helped configure empowerment pathways along which women could define and pursue novel life choices and goals. furthermore, it was not only women who benefited from these women–cassava entanglements: as the once-neglected “poor man’s crop,” which was mostly considered appropriate for animal feed, became a national symbol, cassava was itself empowered; it dethroned yam, the “king of crops,” and became the “mother of all crops” (korieh 2007). the empowerment mediated through women–cassava entanglements can only be understood in the context of the larger ensemble in which plant–people entanglements are embedded, which in this case included the h1n1 virus, soil quality, warfare, gender ideology, capitalist agriculture, colonial rule, food scarcity, and urbanization. for the purpose of this article, however, i draw attention to how the plantiness of cassava “affords” (nally and kearns 2020) particular possibilities and actions that may benefit (some) women. the ability of cassava to grow in relatively marginal soils with little input even during dry spells may benefit women who have less reliable access to fertile land and other productive resources (e.g., ferraro et al. 2016; korieh 2010). furthermore, cassava allows for more flexible time management and provides a source of food when no other fresh food is available as it can be left in the ground for over two years while still retaining most of its nutritional value (korieh 2010; uchechukwu-agua, caleb, and opara 2015). like potatoes, then, cassava exhibits a “survival ecology” affordance (nally and kearns 2020) that helps support household food security, which traditionally is the responsibility of women. in contrast, yams are seasonal, challenging to store, and require more labor (e.g., ferraro et al. 2016; korieh 2010). additionally, cassava can be processed and consumed in multiple ways that often reflect regionality and ethnicity (etejere and bhat 1985). today, fermented cassava products such as fufu, lafun, and garri make up a key component and source of carbohydrates in the diets of many nigerians, while the more highly nutritious leaves are used in preparing leaf sauce and for animal feed (achidi et al. 2005; ferraro et al. 2016). however, one should avoid painting an overly romanticized picture of the relations between women, and people and small-scale farmers more generally, and plants. importantly, there is a need to integrate an intersectional lens in the study of plant–people entanglements. indeed, plant–people entanglements are contingent, flexible, and dynamic: not all women (and men) become entangled with cassava in the same ways (and some become disentangled all together), and there are limits to the extent to which the plantiness of cassava can be empowering. for instance, the toxic properties of cassava, along with low levels of lipids, minerals, vitamins, and protein, mean that it interacts with the human body in ways that may put people (including pregnant women and children) at risk of zinc, iron, and vitamin a deficiency and neuropathy (gegios et al. 2010; osuntokun 1980). additionally, in-ground storage means that women are often victims of theft. albeit a study from malawi, chiwona-karltun et al. (1998) found that poor women in particular, who due to their lower social status are more vulnerable to theft, plant bitter cassava to deter thieves (also see forsythe, posthummus, and martin 2016), even though the bitter cassava requires more processing and thus labor to render the roots edible. in other words, bitter taste and toxicity could represent a strategy of “interrupting power” (foster 2019), as laura foster (2017, 2019) observed for hoodia plants in south africa, only here bitterness offers a way for poor women in their entanglements with cassava to act against thieves. additionally, once harvested, cassava rapidly deteriorates (although, once processed, cassava products can be stored for up to six months) (zainuddin et al. 2018), which can be a problem for women who lack access to post-harvesting facilitates and markets. moreover, while its cultivation may require less labor than certain other crops, the processing of the root can be laborious, time-consuming, and harmful (e.g., okareh, ogunfayo, and atulomah 2015). finally, forsythe et al. (2015, 2015) demonstrated how the extent to which women can benefit from commercialization of cassava depends on factors such as resource endowment, decision-making power, regionality, ethnicity, migratory status, and life stage. what, then, are some of the implications of the feminist crop concept for social scientists working within crop breeding for development? most notably, analytical frameworks for investigating agency and power in agriculture, as well as tracing and supporting pathways and interventions through which women’s empowerment and social change can be achieved, need to take plantiness, plant agency, and “planty knowledge” (pitt 2017) into consideration. in the first instance, this could entail empirical investigations of how different intersectional groups of men and women involved in food and cropping systems conceptualize and experience (dis)empowerment in relation to plants. furthermore, social scientists may need to ask new types of questions that capture both sides of the co-constructive, naturecultural, and sociomaterial equation, such as not only how social identities, relations, and structures shape different preferences for crop plants and traits, but how the plants themselves may shape such preferences. methodological inspiration can be drawn from, among others, more-than-human and multispecies ethnography (e.g., gibson 2018; kohn 2013; myers 2017; nathen 2018; pitt 2015, 2017). as gibson notes, “by showing, watching, strolling among, discussing, doing, picturing and being guided by plants, we can come to appreciate their agency. by engaging in the practices of people who worked with plants, we could gain insight into the multiple ‘matterings’ that emerged in and through such plant practices” (2018, 96).   an ethically grounded feminist crop the discussion on who or what gets entangled is fundamentally a discussion about ethics and justice. in particular, the feminist crop advances a decision-making process guided more explicitly by an “ethics of mattering” (barad 2007) and an “ethics of exclusion” (giraud 2019). an ethics of mattering and exclusion ask us to take responsibility for which plant–people entanglements come to matter, figuratively and literally, through our thinking and doing as natural and social scientists, while stressing the need to make evident and politicize who and what acts; who and what impacts decisions; who and what is responsible; and who and what becomes entangled and disentangled and in what ways. whose values, knowledges, worldviews, interests, meaning systems, and lives come to matter and are excluded?1 how can we bring excluded humans and nonhumans into the crop breeding process? to design for and from the margins of entanglements? tending to such an ethics implies tending to the socially situated nature of technoscience (haraway 1988). in other words, an ethics of mattering and exclusion is an ethics that is reflexive and contextually accountable on both the individual and institutional level: it includes a recognition of how our positionality and social embodiment and embeddedness, including inherent biases and deep-seated norms and values, shape our thinking and doing as scientists; and the need to situate actants, biological and technical events, and the micropractices and micropolitics of scientific institutions in the broader context of dominant structures and practices of knowledge production (roy 2018). indeed, studies have demonstrated the ways in which agrarian development, plant sciences, and plants themselves have shaped and been shaped by, among others, state formation, capitalism, colonialism, racial politics, and patriarchy (e.g., brockway 1979; carney 2001; cullather 2010; eddens 2019; hobhouse [1985] 2005; ives 2017; mccann 2007; mintz 1985; osseo-asare 2014; ross 2014; schiebinger 2004). this mutual shaping has often come at the expense of local and indigenous men and in particular women, whose relationships with crops, seeds, and food, and the knowledges, skills, and expertise that arise from these relationships, often fail to be meaningfully acknowledged and integrated in agricultural technoscience (allen and sachs 2007; alston 2000; kitetu 2008; resurrección and elmhirst 2020; stads and beintema 2017; twagira 2014; twyman, muriel, and garcía 2015), also as it relates to agricultural biotechnology (bonneuil, foyer, and wynne 2014; ezezika, deadman, and daar 2013; fitting 2010; montenegro de wit 2020). to this day, plant breeding remains highly implicated in north-south relations, where actors such as private sector donors and international development agencies headquartered in the global north have much of the definitional, agenda-setting, and decision-making power. accordingly, far from being objective and neutral, the practices of plant breeding, including priority-setting and varietal design, are highly political, power laden, and value driven. in other words, the feminist crop has to challenge and take root in a larger entanglement characterized by uneven and intersectional power-knowledge hierarchies that tend to favor some values, knowledges, knowing subjects, and plant–people entanglements over others. thus, the feminist crop also promotes a breeding practice that advances epistemic justice: a process through which knowledge systems that have been overshadowed by scientism and epistemic and molecular imperialism are recovered (visvanathan 2005).   concluding remarks in the context of agriculture, to understand gendered power relations requires us to observe the deep and complex bonds of plant–people entanglements. i have proposed the concept of the feminist crop to capture the entanglement of crops with women’s embodied practices, knowledges, capabilities, and power, and to contribute to an ethico-onto-epistemological and methodological investigation of how intersectional gender identities and relations are embedded in plant–people entanglements. i have further demonstrated how research into african food and cropping systems and plant breeding can help expand the boundaries of how we think about agency, power, and empowerment, and shed light on how plant–people entanglements come, or can come, to matter in different ways to different people. both natural and social scientists can benefit from thinking in terms of plant–people entanglements: crop breeders ought not to consider plants and their interactions with the environment (the “natural” and “material”) in isolation, just as much as gender researchers and social scientists ought not to consider humans (the “social” and “cultural”) in isolation. indeed, crop breeding is a deeply sociomaterial and naturecultural practice that is as much about nature, climate, (epi)genetics, and plant physiology as it is about people, belonging, culture, discourses, value systems, and meaning-making. what becomes evident, then, is the intimate connections, mutual intelligibility, and complementarity between the thinking and doing of crop breeders and gender specialists: both address plant–people entanglements. assuming an ethically embedded knowledge practice—which promotes epistemic justice and asks us to take responsibility for what comes to matter and what becomes excluded—each discipline may contribute unique perspectives, knowledges, and skills on how to entangle plants and people in more socially just and constructive ways. moreover, plant genome editing grounded in the feminist crop concept, along with participatory action research and transformative learning, may represent one way of engaging more profoundly with “plantiness” and plant agency to advance feminist crop breeding.   note 1 exclusions are not inherently negative and can be productive and creative (giraud 2019). productive exclusions in this context could be, for instance, omitting crop traits that are harmful to women and discriminatory institutional norms, practices, and relations.   references achebe, chinua. 1959. things fall apart. london: 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technoscience studies, critical plant studies, and political agronomy.     special section notes toward a virtual poetics: an essay on solaris, assemblage, and blackness     madison mccartha university of california, santa cruz majamcca@ucsc.edu     abstract my inquiry aims to recast the media of new media studies both as an interface and a racialized site of violation. i call on the writings of artists, theorists, and social scientists to redefine this word; to explore the ways the language of new media and the virtual spaces they occupy might describe an emergent, politically charged poetics. as a primary text, i examine stanisław lem’s solaris (and andreĭ tarkovskiĭ’s adaptation), whose black ocean resists actively the scientists’ attempts to apprehend or describe it. both novel and film, as with the solarian surface itself, perform, i argue, an opaque, virtual poetics—a generically unstable aesthetic model at once of, but not bound exclusively to, black aesthetics. more critically, i point to a racially charged figure in lem’s text, who doubly mediates the colonial pasts endemic to the genre, in order to establish the political stakes for artists who commit to opacity as an aesthetic principle. i set the scholarship of neda atanasoski and kalindi vora, simone browne, lisa nakamura, saidiya hartman, and julia kristeva in conversation with art-objects by poet dolores dorantes and visual artist jeron braxton to provide a grammar with which we might approach this poetics.     keywords science and technology studies, solaris, poetics, virtual reality, surveillance studies, black aesthetics     ◈   colonizers write about flowers. i tell you about children throwing rocks at israeli tanks seconds before becoming daisies. i want to be like those poets who care about the moon. palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons. it’s so beautiful, the moon. they’re so beautiful, the flowers. i pick flowers for my dead father when i’m sad. he watches al jazeera all day. i wish jessica would stop texting me happy ramadan. i know i’m american because when i walk into a room something dies. metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound. when i die, i promise to haunt you forever. one day, i’ll write about the flowers like we own them. —noor hindi, “fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying”   this poem by palestinian american poet noor hindi reads as a vital inflection point in debates surrounding aesthetic practices in contemporary poetry, and was published in the december 2020 issue of poetry, one of the longest-running literary magazines in the united states. active since 1912, poetry magazine is currently administered by the chicago-based independent literary organization poetry foundation—first established by the magazine in 2003 after the receipt of a $200-million donation from the late philanthropist ruth lily (poetry foundation, n.d.). since that time, poetry has become one of the most prominent resources available to those who want to become more familiar with the discipline, and with the contemporary us poetry milieu. more critically, the poetry foundation, as a highly visible literary institution, has repeatedly become the subject of controversy; their decision to publish the racially inflammatory work of conceptual poet venessa place, one example of many, incited both widespread criticism of the writer and an ongoing public reckoning with poetry foundation’s values as an institution (calder 2015). together these details might reveal the central position poetry magazine occupies both as a recurrent site of literary conflict, and as a catalyst through which prevailing aesthetic and institutional biases can be critiqued and addressed. by deploying metaphor’s impossible leap in wry, sometimes bitter ways—“i pick flowers for my dead father when i’m sad. / he watches al jazeera all day”—hindi’s “fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying” signals the death of metaphorical language, while at the same time relying on metaphor’s unstable, spectral “something” to make the poem’s affective turns at each line break possible. when the “i” of the poem tells the “you” about “children throwing rocks at israeli tanks / seconds before becoming daisies,” for example, who or what does the poem transmute in its line break? the “i,” the “children,” or both? is it the poem or the tank that enacts this rapid transformation? on one hand, hindi’s provocative poem grapples actively with the inability of our current media ecosystem, or of language itself, to hold the political reality of the armed conflict at the gaza strip; at the same time, the poem reads as a meditation on the aesthetic decision to work with metaphor and with abstraction—that is, to write poetry at all. this skepticism of the efficacy of metaphorical language, of poetry itself, might reflect a rising attitude held within the poetry community at the height of the pandemic in 2020, and just before the us presidential election. hindi also offers, then, an aesthetic response to the former trump administration’s strategic, performative skepticism of both broadcast journalism and the accuracy of its reportage. more importantly, the poem seems to heed the call for what the poet dionne brand once termed, in a public reading, “the radical directness of plain speech.”1 while hindi’s poem pointedly recapitulates this aesthetic plea, it also points to its own inability to comply, and to the irreconcilable relationship between the medium, the art-object, and the space it's meant to mediate. in other words, the poem operates in a space between aesthetic transparency and opacity. hindi’s poem articulates both the literary context in which i write to you now, and the polemics i intend, as a poet and theorist, to open up to an inquiry that admits theories and metaphors that cross disciplinary boundaries. in drawing our attention to the medium, the poem “fuck your lecture…” performs as an inherently participatory textual surface, an important strategy in the political-aesthetic space i call virtual poetics.   ◈   race, in fact, now functions as a metaphor so necessary to the construction of americanness that it rivals the old pseudo-scientific and class-informed racisms whose dynamics we are more used to deciphering. —toni morrison, playing in the dark   my central charge with virtual poetics is to recast the media of new media as an interface, a membrane, and a racialized site of violation. i call on the writings of poets, theorists, social scientists, and technologists to redefine this word; to unfix media’s position in technology and communication studies and reactivate both its volatility and potency; to question and explore the ways the language of so-called new media and the virtual spaces they’ve come to occupy might help us describe an emergent yet persistent and politically charged poetics. to get there you have to see some things about solaris and its fugitive surface—which allows itself to be “unlawfully overcome,” write fred moten and stefano harney (2013, 35); its “radical passion and passivity…unfit for subjection” (35); and about that summer in new york when i started painting again, where it was the novel by stanisław lem (1961) i found first before watching andreĭ tarkovskiĭ’s film (1972). in lem’s version, someone sends a scientist named kelvin knifing through space to investigate a research facility—a facility stationed, we are told, on a distant planet called solaris. on arrival we see that the entire surface of the planet isn’t just covered by but is an immense, opaque semi-fluid mass—a black ocean who resists actively the scientists’ attempts to test, touch, or describe it. in other words, no direct communication seems possible. the book stages its descriptions of the ocean’s surface as a series of scientific reports, something i’ll return to later, but for now what matters most to me is what happens when solaris, in the human-scaled drama we can understand, tries to communicate with the researchers as “visitors” (lem [1961] 1970)—as simulacra appearing in the station, usually, as near-replicas of loved ones the researchers used to know. for the protagonist, the simulacra appear as his deceased wife, and from her arrival we get the impression that these visitors are acting as intermediaries, or serving as virtual (and material) mediums. but in the diegetic space of this story, who is visiting whom when the deployment of the term visitor inoculates, by design, the violence of the scientists’ hostile occupation of solaris? their small but indisputably invasive encampment, both in a foreign territory and on the body of the solarian organism itself (however singular or multiple), shines a light on (and even flexes) the colonial pasts endemic to speculative fiction. the violence of this occupation doesn't just happen on the outside but on the inside. in one wounding scene, the ecological consciousness of the ocean can’t help but appear as a racially charged blip—“a giant negress,” our protagonist explains, “wearing nothing but a yellow skirt of plaited straw,” resembling the “steatopygous” statues found in “anthropological museums" (lem [1961] 1970, 30). this outlier in the cast of speculative simulacra, its pleated grass skirt acting as an icon for indigeneity, wears plainly these colonial histories, and appears in the book only once and without a single line of dialogue—too brief for the barest utterance. this moment is completely occluded from tarkovskiĭ’s film adaptation, maybe for the better, but if we are to understand these visitors as mediums through which communication might be possible, as membranes, as interfaces, as surrogate sites where, like communication theorist john durham peters (1999) suggests, two “interiorities” can meet, then what does this virtual site reveal about the relationship between solaris and its occupants? i am penetrated by these othering, generically fugitive, highly racialized descriptions because of how porous the solarian ocean becomes when subjected to the apprehending violence of the scientists’ gaze—a landscape so soft, so radically vulnerable, solaris can't stop itself from mediating that violence. how might we reconcile this vulnerability with the solaris who, as a text, texture, and, as scholar kate marshall (2018) argues, an “ecological protagonist,” becomes capacious, rhizomatic, and totally resistant to any rhetoric that tries to apprehend it?   ◈   [radio static is] a fictive copy [of] silence, a reproduction that chafes and fucks-up. it is not authentic. it has margins where worrying things happen. —aase berg, tsunami from solaris   figure 1. film still of burton (vladislav dvorzhetsky) from solaris (1972). mosfilm studios.     figure 2. film still of interrogation room from solaris (1972). mosfilm studios.   this interrogation scene, clipped from tarkovskiĭ’s adaptation of solaris, shatters worlds. the instability of the media event described, both for the military pilot, burton, and for his critical interlocutors, retains its emotional charge, changed but intact, despite being translated across languages and media. what’s clear about this moment to me, a black queer multimedia artist and poet, is its opacity—the multiple layers of mediation overlaying themselves between us (the you and the i) and the textural surface of solaris itself. this fluctuating surface performs what scholar and theorist n. katherine hayles identifies in “the future of literature” as a particular layering effect often deployed by contemporary authors experimenting with computer-mediated texts (2007, 97). electronic literature, as hayles recounts, enacts this textual (and textural) effect by presenting (a) an overlay of multiple “hypertext” scripts and “compiled programming languages,” or (b) a “complex textual display” wherein layers of text appear “superimposed” over each other (2007, 97). reflecting on the computational narrative project screens, by artist and theorist noah waldrip-fruin, hayles offers this description: “entering the narrative now does not mean leaving the surface behind, as when a reader plunges into an imaginative world and finds it so engrossing that she ceases to notice the page. rather, the 'page' is transformed into a complex topography that rapidly transforms from a stable surface into a 'playable' space in which she is an active participant" (87, emphasis added). i’m less interested in the fact of this innovation than in the textural strategies of resistance these participatory “surfaces” make possible on the page. the discursive, intercutting mediation in tarkovskiĭ’s film, for example—a “plaster-like” surface where, like on solaris, everything is “made of the same substance” (lem [1961] 1970, 79)—constitutes precisely this textured, political, and aesthetic plane. the solarian topography performs, i argue, a poetics of opacity—a generic instability, a radical refusal—an aesthetic model at once of, but not bound exclusively to, black artistic expression. the writings of science and technology scholars neda atanasoski and kalindi vora, surveillance studies scholar simone browne, poet and theorist édouard glissant, scholars of african american literature and cultural history saidiya hartman and toni morrison, the poet dolores dorantes, and most importantly the animated films of jeron braxton, provide a grammar with which we might approach, and ask questions of, this resistant surface—a surface enacting a virtual poetics.   ◈   consent [is] not so much an act but a non-performative condition or ecological disposition. —fred moten, black and blur   virtual poetics investigates (and enacts) a series of speculative proposals for the book (realized or unrealized), with a special emphasis on the relationships between reader and language that these proposals make possible. in the broadest sense, i take virtual to mean something there-yet-not-there, interstitial, transmedial, something felt but that resists the logics of apprehension, and deploy this term to designate the particularly hard-to-define space where this poetics might occur—not exactly on the page, and not wholly in the reader, but somewhere in between. virtual poetics, then, identifies the formal strategies, textures, surfaces, and (most crucially) the racial politics active on the page—strategies which together, with the reader’s participation, pull the poem out into this space (between art-object and audience). through the pilot burton’s testimony, the surface of solaris resists a pastoral model defined by fixity and communicability. in tarkovskiĭ’s film, the ocean’s surreal vistas, both before and after arriving fitfully as garden simulacra—as “shrubs, hedges,” and kitsch little “acacia trees”—are constantly in flux, arriving first as “yellow sludge,” seething, reportedly “[rising] up in thin strips [sparkling] like glass” (1972, emphasis added).the like-ness of this fluidic surface, as with the language deployed to apprehend it, evinces its generic instability. this same instability is of critical importance to poet and critic joyelle mcsweeney, who offers us a capacious counter-model “remarking the pastoral as a zone of exchange,” which she aptly calls the necropastoral—a site defined by flux, porousness, and suppuration: “a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of ‘nature’ which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects” (mcsweeney 2014b). if the project of colonial occupation survives, says literary and political theorist achille mbembe, “[by] writing a new set of social and spatial relations on the ground,” by the grafting “of boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves,” by resource extraction and, “finally, the manufacturing of a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries,” then the shifting solarian surface offers bodily, topographic resistances to this assimilative project (2019, 79). in reading solaris as a necropastoral site, then, we might consider among humankind’s many ecological depredations, as would mbembe (whose essay, “necropolitics,” has had a profound influence on mcsweeney’s text), the assimilative, even genocidal violences endemic to colonialism. thinking of this assimilative history, the resistance enacted by the solarian surface takes on new meaning—becomes, like art, a counter-act of unapologetic difference. “agree not merely to the right to difference,” demands the martiniquan poet and theorist, édouard glissant, “[but] agree also to the right to opacity” (1997, 190). this resistant plea defines, for solaris, a political and racialized charge to this landscape’s “opaque” texture: a text which, as glissant might explain, “is not obscure, [but] is that which cannot be reduced,” “grasped,” or apprehended (193). when enacted as a verb, this doubled sense of apprehension collapses the distinctions between understanding and enclosure, bringing us closer to the epistemological and colonial violations the solarian surface might seek, like glissant, to resist. in this case, solaris stages its resistance against the western, indexical gaze, whose inciting violation arrives in the form of a demand: a demand for transparency—one just as active in scientific research as it is in legibility politics.   ◈   i maintain dominion over the crevices of myself, deep into the layers of my skin, which must never be questioned. never doubt that these crevices extend toward an infinitely receding boundary. come close to me to feel it. —simone white, of being dispersed   coming closer we might find that solaris isn't a planet at all, but a fugitive surface—a “fictive copy” (berg 2019, 25) illegible as a speculative ecological fiction alone. i consider instead that this complex of readings, and maybe solaris itself, form an assemblage, and a model for black artistic expression—an expression that sees a connection between the treatment of politically marginalized bodies, and of the nonhuman world; because the ways we ask our technology and our environment to labor, and to mediate the violent apparatuses of the state that pass through them, that use them, is connected to the ways we ask politically marginalized bodies to labor and to mediate, perhaps like solaris, the violences they are made to be complicit with. in its capacity as a necropastoral site, one capable of staging “networks [of] ‘strange meetings’” between the living and the dead, the visitors arriving to speak to, or perhaps through, the colonial agents with whom we are meant to empathize, become an extension of the ocean’s mediumistic capacity (mcsweeney 2014a, 2). this nonhuman ecological consciousness, then, is constantly in communication with its occupying forces in complicated ways that seem to undo our notions about what communication is, means or does. like on our world, this ocean called solaris both reflects and refracts, except here both the observer’s material and virtual world—their ambient memories, affects, desires, grief—arrive concurrently on the textural surface—that is, there’s an ontological collapse. if we can imagine a daily experience of race that is, like affect, there-not-there thus thoroughly virtual, how does a material imagining of identity complicate our thinking about blackness and opacity? research and refusal? about racial politics and virtual reality?   ◈   we prefer, it is alleged, technology that resembles or approximates the human, but only from a recognizable distance. but this belief in the uncanny valley, i would suggest, itself assumes more than we should: it assumes a “we” with one universal standard for relating to other humans. —tavia nyong’o, afro-fabulations   in surrogate humanity, theorists neda atanasoski and kalindi vora (2019) draw an important connection between toni morrison’s notion of the slave’s position as a surrogate and saidiya hartman’s (1997) framing of this position as indebted to the abject commodification of the slave’s body. in situating these two notions, atanasoski and kalindi set up the discourse needed to describe what they call the surrogate human effect: a process by which “technology displaces the human-chattel-turned-man with man-made objects that hold the potential to become conscious,” and in turn come to occupy “[a] place [in the] racial order of things in which humanity can be affirmed only through degraded categories created for use, exploitation, dispossession, and capitalist accumulation” (atanasoski and vora 2019, 13). while the stakes held by this claim are immense, it's most important to me to explore both the ways something as cypher-like and weightless as poetry can withstand, impossibly, subjects as heavy as global histories of exploitation, and the ambivalent aesthetic positions that make this possible. if toni morrison claims in playing in the dark that the slave population of the antebellum us south was expected to “offer itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of human freedom” (2007, 37), i offer a vital misreading of morrison’s remark, and claim instead that the enslaved body offers itself for mediation; in so doing, the multiplicity of media’s meaning starts to vibrate. most critically, i’m interested (as poet joyelle mcsweeney might be) in the literal interpretation of mediation as a process of becoming media, opening-up the discourse morrison attempts to historicize. by reading surrogacy as a process of mediation, and the body itself as a medium—becoming both a legible surface, and a complicated discursive and physical site of interactivity—how does this disrupt or distort the social and legal coding of enslaved peoples as fungible commodities? according to hartman, in scenes of subjection, when it comes to a slave’s body, forced to act both as human subject and commodity fetish, discourses surrounding freedom are not the only things capable of being mediated. “the fungibility of the commodity,” says hartman, “makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved [becomes],” in this system, “the surrogate for the master’s body” since the dispossessed are made to”act,” writes hartman, “as the sign of [the master’s] power and dominion” (1997, 21, emphasis added). the surrogate becomes, in other words, an “augmentation of the master subject” (21, emphasis added). using this model for both the slave and for the commodity, as “vessels” “vulnerable to the projection of [others],” we can begin to draw a connection between the body of the enslaved, and the conditions of the art-object, and it is not coincidental, i think, that hartman’s language starts to cross lexical boundaries—from economic to aesthetic, from political to technical. through this process of augmentation hartman describes “the materiality of suffering regularly eludes (re)cognition” as the suffering body is continually “replaced by other signs of value [and indeed] by other bodies” (1997, 21, emphasis added). hartman’s examination of the racialized systems of power and ownership remains relevant, and might inform our contemporary understanding of augmentation and augmented reality technologies. more critically, hartman provides a vital language with which we might recast the hierarchical relationship between our digital and material lives—a relationship art can reveal to be unstable and multiple. this sign substitution simulates on the slave’s body, then, not an “imaginative surface” (hartman 1997, 6), but a virtual one: an abject interface which is as physical and permeable as it is ephemeral and indeterminate. if the solarian ocean becomes, like a work of new media art, an interactive surface for its foreign occupants, then this abject interface allows us to imagine the ocean’s refractive activity as one in a series of defensive strategies the surface deploys to protect itself against the logics of the human, and of the gaze; the political-aesthetic stakes of which are made clear by the single racialized simulacra in lem’s novel—a surrogate surface for the ocean itself. my purpose here, however, is to think deeply about the ways art-objects can occupy (and perhaps occult) this surface. what are the poetics new media technology makes possible, and how does new media’s complicity with processes of racialization both change and charge, for artists and writers, the politics of choosing to work with these technologies?   ◈   vision always comes true. vision is the realest thing there is. —laure (colette) peignot, via kathy acker   manuel castells, an early theorist of the virtual, claims in the rise of network society, that "the multimedia world will be populated by two essentially distinct populations: the interacting and the interacted" (1996, 371). one important discursive framework for reading this divide is through the theory and technologies of surveillance. inventor and early surveillance theorist steve mann devised a graph, a veillance plane, capable of supporting the many possible veillance positions in any given society. the two most important terms, inasmuch as they relay the watcher’s position of power, are surveillance and sousveillance. surveillance means “oversight,” via the french prefix surmeaning “from above,” and the root -veillance via french verb veiller meaning to watch or observe. sousveillance, on the other hand, holds the prefix -sous, meaning “from below” or “underneath”; as a political position, suggests surveillance scholar simone brown, we might take this to mean to watch the watcher (browne 2015, 19). the problem with the veillance plane, however, is that an individual at any one moment can occupy multiple positions at the same time. if we understand the technologies that allow this kind of vision, this gaze, as expressions of state power, then the imbrication of us citizens in the matrices of power and violence is not binary, but rhizomatic, interactive, and characterized by exchange. castells’s assertion, in other words, doesn’t capture the whole picture, but points crucially to the ways existing class-based and racialized economic divides might be facilitated (if not exacerbated) by current media technologies. today, the media interfaces we touch or click daily serve as important tactile, even haptic, examples. a web browser’s interface and the physical interface of our smartphones serve as sites (and surfaces) through which matrices of power and violence interact, and can be similarly exchanged. reflecting on the music video for jennifer lopez’s “if you had my love,” theorist lisa nakamura, in digitizing race, makes a case for the ways media interfaces do not confer race neutrally, but are instead complicit in the effects of racialization on the body: "the interface serves to organize raced and gendered bodies in categories, boxes, and links that mimic both the mental structure of a normative consciousness and set of associations (often white, often male) and the logic of digital capitalism: to click on a box or link is to acquire it, to choose it, to replace one set of images with another in a friction-free transaction that seems to cost nothing yet generates capital in the form of digitally racialized images and performances" (2007, 17). from nakamura’s observation, we can see the ways racialized bodies can be imagined as tactile surfaces, or might themselves learn to become, through exposure, what nakamura describes as “objects of interactivity” (2007, 16). solaris, for example, becomes precisely this type of object. nakamura’s formulation reveals crucially the materials through which race might act (like ruha benjamin, beth coleman [2009], and wendy chun argue [2013]) as a “technology” of power—a technology through which us racialized bodies become fraught surfaces, made to mediate, as morrison suggested, in persistent and complicated ways. when ruha benjamin says succinctly that “users [also] get used” (2019, 14), the rhizome of use i want to emphasize begins to take shape. the complicity of this position, of this object of interactivity, evokes julia kristeva’s formulation surrounding the abject: a self who, in attempting to define the boundary where their self ends, realizes instead that “self-ness” itself is what ends, what “falls into a faint,” and arrives in a non-state in which “elsewhere” enters; arrives inside the self’s “here, jetted, abjected into” their newly borderless world (kristeva 2002, 231). becoming the border between self and other offers another way of inhabiting the racialized surface hartman describes; but while the abject, indeterminate state endured by the body can be world-shattering, this exceptional “faint” kristeva describes is by no means out of the ordinary. on the contrary, abjection is both a normalized feature of, and even common to the experience of being racialized, institutionalized, instrumentalized, and mediated—indeed, of being used—by systems of power under which the self cannot be defined as either subject or object, but as something in between. surrogacy, and the categorical instability the mediating surrogate endures, extends far beyond chattel slavery. reflecting on my own experience working in warehouses and factories, or even now, in states of emergency, as the covid-19 pandemic crisis reveals, the expectations placed on essential laborers to mediate larger apparatuses of control, apparatuses with which they/we have no choice but to comply, show us that being seen as and treated like an object of interactivity is a persistent condition of everyday life. a condition responsible for, in part, how invisibly we might enact, as interactive borders not just between ourselves and others, but between others and the state, the stratification of racial, gendered, and class-based inequities. as artists, the first step in subverting this virtual, political reality is acknowledging also that poems and other art-objects endure a similarly violent state of mediation, but do not need to endure this state transparently. vision, in other words, doesn’t always have to come true.   ◈   an abstractionist artwork...is one that emphasizes its own distance from reality by calling attention to its constructed or artificial character—even if it also enacts real-world reference—rather than striving to dissemble that constructedness in the service of the maximum verisimilitude so highly prized within [a] realist framework. —phillip brian harper, abstractionist aesthetics   in poet muriel rukeyser’s the book of the dead, one so-called documentary poem activates (on sight) a colonial, exploitative logic adjacent to the logics of digital capitalism nakamura describes. rukeyser’s poem doesn’t describe but demands: “select the mountains... / travel the passes,” and “touch west virginia where // the midland trial leaves the virginia furnace” (2018, 62). rukeyser’s poem doesn’t sit back like a retinal scanner, simulating for the reader, for the conquering eye, a landscape who can perform a similarly abject position. the poem becomes instead an impossible interface both prompting a user to enact its seemingly invisible “i,” and extracting from the reader the labor of simulation. but does the user or the used enact the poem? does the poem and its surrogate, mediating landscape become racialized in the process? in poems who labor not to enact any collapse between the “i” and the scenes described—who keep their distance, like solaris—this subversive surface feels anomalous, challenging, and vital. how might rukeyser’s near-model landscapes inform our encounter with the opaque, plaster-like surface the solarian ocean simulates for, or reacts against, the pilot burton? against vision itself? within the hegemonic traditions of poetic forms, the pastoral poem offers us a different counterfeit landscape: a pasture, an enclosure, whose shepherd sings both inside the poem, and as the poem—a shepherd (that is, a speaker) whose voice both utters as, and utters into being, every object seen or heard within the enclosure, that is, within the limits of the poem. this model occasions a collapse between the text and the speaker, whereby the poem speaks as the poem itself.   ◈   i think that this desire to lift the veil to reveal an original self-determined black subject fails to ask a crucial question: how did whiteness come to signify the transparent i and blackness to signify otherwise? because it does not ask such questions, the metaphor of the veil rehearses the sociohistorical logic of exclusion, which writes blackness and whiteness as the “raw material” and not as the products of modern strategies of power. and, in the case of [cornel] west’s account, it (re)produces the black subject as a pathological (affectable) i, a self -consciousness hopelessly haunted by its own impossible desire for transparency. —denise ferreira da silva, towards a global idea of race   in the discourse of contemporary poetry and poetics, both for the artist and for the pedagogue, a common demand given to the text, is the demand for clarity—that it labors to perform as clear, honest, transparent, and make itself, in our capitalist context, “legible” within existing market systems. not only do we demand this of poetry, we demand this of any artist working within a range of culture industries. i believe the aesthetic bind imposed, then, on the work of contemporary black artists can be particularly complex and insidious. here in the us, this demand for clarity on black artists is twofold: to make the work legible within the apprehending gaze of the (mostly white) industry, and to make the work legible to the black community. a number of contemporary poets, including harryette mullen, latasha n. nevada diggs, and ronaldo v. wilson, push against this impulse actively. even as recently as 2021, the poet phillip b. williams’s mutiny attempts to reveal the violence of legibility politics (ajani 2021). tying a thread between the discourse on opacity and an emerging virtual poetics, my contention is that solaris, as a text and as a surface, might offer contemporary and future new media artists an opaque, textural model of black aesthetics with which they/we might resist the politics of legibility. still the scientists try, in lem’s novel, to apprehend this texture. they try through language—despite there being “no semantic system…available to illustrate the [ocean’s] behavior”—to break the surface down into linguistic or geologically scaled organelles; into “‘extensors,’ ‘fungoids,’ ‘mimoids,’ ‘symmetriads’ and ‘asymmetriads,’” which are acknowledged in the reports as “artificial, linguistically awkward terms” that nonetheless “give some impression of solaris to [those who have] only seen,” like us, “the planet in blurred photographs and incomplete films” (lem [1961] 1970, 111). at once revealing and occluding, the opacity of this language produces a pixelating effect—blurring the total picture at every instance of its arrival. what’s important about this linguistic process of production and classification lies in its relationship to, and difference from the activity performed by the so-called mimoids—an activity characterized by “the imitation of objects, near or far, external to the ocean itself" (113). this language presents to us a simulated linguistic surface by way of neologism—a generic vernacular symptomatic of both poetry and speculative fiction. what then do we make of solaris’s imitative activity? touching the surface, we might read solaris as an agent who—like poetry itself—wants to communicate through objects or, more radically, to create a counterfeit world between “it” and its occupying force. if these artists and theorists together offer alternative strategies of survival for black artists working in new media, how might the counterfeit resist mbembe’s “forced [rewriting] of spatial relationships on the ground?” (2019, 79). on the body? on language itself? when we're asked to look at the surface, to stop trying to look or talk past the art-object to something else, a spell is broken. when art breaks this spell, the spell of our lives, the everyday disciplinary structures who want so badly not to be seen suddenly become visible.   ◈   it’s the view from an airplane on a cloudless day...sometimes mountain ranges, or plains, or city buildings...dizzy with fear [from] being up so high...[i] doubt my ability to navigate over these dangerous, distant, alien landscapes. but if i do not spring off my perch and into the air, they’ll catch up with me, capture me, and drag me down. —adrian piper, “flying”   architect and theorist eyel weizman (2017) argues, in hollow land, that aerial drones and other surveillance technologies allow sovereignty to conduct itself in vertical three-dimensional space—a vertical sovereignty which visual artist and scholar hito steyerl elaborates in wretched of the screen: “vertical sovereignty splits space into stacked horizontal layers, separating not only airspace from ground, but also splitting ground from underground, and airspace [itself] into various layers” (steyerl and berardi 2012, 23). in this new system, says steyerl, “different strata of community are divided from each other on a y-axis, multiplying sites of conflict and violence” (23). if “vertical sovereignty” reveals the flattening discursive effects of the map, as a civil and cultural architecture of control, what happens when the y-axis weizman and steyerl describe reframes the power dynamics between the used and the user? between art-object and viewer? between the solarian surface and the language deployed to apprehend it? if a poem might, like solaris, defend itself in y-axial space, then vertical sovereignty reveals the reader to be a constitutive and complicit agent not just within the mechanisms of colonial occupation, but within virtual poetics itself.   ◈   pan, in greek mythology, is the god of shepherds and flocks, the name derived from paien, meaning “pasture” and hinting at the root word of “pastoral,” and in this way the prefix pangestures to pastoral power. —simone browne, dark matters   the subversive strategies offered by theorist and sociologist simone browne, to undermine the everyday technologies of surveillance, provide another model in which vertical sovereignty (and a space of virtual poetics) can be activated. in dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness, browne (2015) wants to name the “absented presence” of blackness in the literature of surveillance, and reveal the ways post-9/11 methods of surveillance and control were grafted over the historically brutal practices of indexing, quantifying, and surveying black life. this storing-away of lives by indexical means is designed, says browne, to render those lives—echoing ralph ellison—"un-visible” (2015, 11). this is the “mise en fiches de l’homme,” says franz fanon, which characterizes colonial modernity—the indexing of the human (ben salem 2018, 541). if, to do this, browne’s text explores and subverts foucault’s panopticon, a central model for surveillance (and indeed surveillance studies), then i want to explore the ways browne’s methods of subversion might be deployed in the study of contemporary poetry, and in the poetry itself. both the pastoral and the panopticon model a collapse between subject and object—between the mechanisms of oppression and the objects they are meant to index. browne describes this space, the space of the panopticon, as “an architecture of control” (2015, 34) through which power can be exercised by “a play of light,” says foucault, or “by glance from the center to the periphery” (quoted in browne 2015, 34). this collapse between light and the gaze, and more crucially this articulation of light as both a technology and expression of disciplinary power, is critically important to browne. there’s something revealing and circuit-like about this disciplinary process. if we are most exposed, in our everyday life, by the ways the panoptic gaze operates in supposedly closed systems, i maintain that the very technologies of power deployed within an art-object, are the very same technologies active between that object and its audience. browne’s opening-up of the prefix panin panopticon draws a taut etymological connection between panoptic regulatory power and pastoral power. first designed by jeremy bentham, the panopticon serves as a capacious, “polyvalent” model of “workforce supervision”—one that could facilitate, in bentham’s words, the “punishing of the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick” (quoted in browne 2015, 33). bentham envisioned panoptic power as individualizing and “all-seeing,” capable of being “exercised over a multiplicity in movement” (33). while browne’s remark about the pastoral feels anecdotal within the context of the conversation she wants to have, it’s an enormously significant term in the history of poetry. if the speaker in a poem, like a shepherd in a pasture, indexes for the reader the environment active within this enclosure, and all that remains of the speaker are the objects described, the pastoral utterance occasions, in the moment of activation, a collapse between the subject and object wherein the speaker merges with the object-cache constituting their enclosure. the poem speaks as the poem itself. rukeyser’s apostrophic address, in the book of the dead, can be traced back to this pastoral utterance. christopher marlowe’s pastoral poem “the passionate shepherd to his love,” for example, calling out from its “embroidered” object-cache (“a thousand fragrant posies, / a cap of flowers, and a kirtle”), illustrates the subject-object collapse endemic to the genre. when restaged within the panoptic model, however, the pastoral utterance doesn’t perform this collapse for a reader, but instead becomes a pliant, indexical surface making its multiple self legible to a user. if the pasture, like a poem, is always a made-place, then the pastoral enclosure expands beyond agricultural sites to include “prisons, schools, poorhouses, factories, hospitals, lazarettos, or quarantine stations” (browne 2015, 33). looking to browne’s text for subversive or revolutionary artistic strategies, we might imagine the panopticon as an alternative historical model for the poem, as an “architecture of control” in constant need of revolt (34).   ◈   assemblages are inherently productive, entering into polyvalent becomings to produce and give expression to previously nonexistent realities, thoughts, bodies, affects, spaces, actions, ideas, and so on. —alexander weheliye, habeas viscus   the economy of power circulating between marlowe’s poem and the reader, between the art-object and the audience, reveals a virtual, decentralized regulatory system designed to activate at the merest “flash” of our looking; but if an important innovation to the form (the lyric) is the radical expansion of boundaries, the poet dolores dorantes complicates this project further by reimaging, like the solarean surface, the discursive relationships possible between viewer and art-object, between a reader and the poem’s perspectival “i.” historically, this perspective has been designed to meet what donna haraway calls the “conquering gaze from nowhere”—this colonial “eye [who] fucks the world” (1988, 581). we want to investigate bodies of art, here, that utter an impossibly multiple “i” and eye—a subversive, sousveillant eye who un-fucks the world. in mexican emigre dolores dorantes’s 2016 poetry collection style (estilo), translated by jen hofer, the speakers in these poems enact precisely this sousveillant subject, so that the burden of display doesn’t rest solely on the art-object. style is written with mexico’s brutal history of disappeared women in mind, and aims to rewire the closed circuit of panoptic power. first as if to erase, even short-circuit the logics embedded in the page itself, dorantes’s text contains no page numbers at all and deploys instead a bulleted numbering system that punctuates the start of each poem; these numbers often re-occur, and are not arranged in sequential order—a sousveillant practice that obscures and subverts the indexical apparatuses of the book itself, and is consistent with browne’s formulation. if roy boyne suggests that we “draw a line through the terms panopticon, panoptical, panopticism…[placing] these terms under erasure [by] drawing a black line through them, [both] allowing the idea to be seen” while at the same time “denying its validity” (quoted in browne 2015, 41), browne takes this act of “erasure” up as both a discursive and methodological practice. what she means is a practice of opacity, of dark sousveillance, which browne deploys to argue for the significance of writing-in the slave ship as an alternative origin point for the surveillance of blackness. if glissant’s opacity is one way through which an art-object can resist the penetrating indexical gaze, then browne’s dark sousveillance gives us another strategy of resistance. the methods of resistance deployed by dorantes’s text, however, move beyond the frameworks offered by browne or boyne. formally and syntactically, these poems articulate a fraught political and discursive resistance that takes shape as a series of demands—demands that make the world-space of the poem occur:   7.—close us. destroy our mouths. enter. torture us in other realities. take us with your mind and your word (dorantes 2016)   while the invisible “you” always makes the poem possible, the multiplicitous speaker in dorantes’s images and actions arrive through demands given to the “you” and in so doing the reader unavoidably enacts the violent disciplinary apparatuses of the poem. what are the objects of dorantes’s book? “goldwork inlaid painfully onto the sky”; goldwork that becomes an open circuit charged by a femicidal, patriarchal violence:   12.— we want to turn around...want you to have us face down. your codes burning. the zone you cannot tread. we want you to hold us up pliantly. line of graves and kidnappings for your consumption.   these near-factory poems reveal (like “laborious little flowers”) how oppressed bodies, forced to internalize and reproduce the mechanisms of their oppression, can find strength in a radically reimagined ‘nowhere’ between subjecthood and objecthood. in re-wiring this lived grammar (between subject and object), these “objects of interactivity” (nakamura 2007, 16) subvert the power dynamics between art-object and audience.   28.—women workers like laborious little flowers for you: gathering the honey of the drama. of what never exists just like this book from within which we regulate your every code.” 29.—we have arrived like negation so you can exterminate us in the attempt. 2.—we will blossom without your consent. seeds that explode, vegetation that rises up from all mouths. we will blossom fruits of blood. trees of ash. shoots that spring into action with a chemical glow.” 1.—we are all wanting without power. we have lashed the necessary blocks to ourselves. we will not get out. they will not find us anywhere other than unexpected passages of the mind. that is where we are. treasures, girls like jewels. blind and fresh.   coming back to the body, this poem shows us the ways a voice, a “we,” can persist even after the body disappears, or is disappeared by the state. this is a virtual “we” who speaks occultly through the technology of the page. and here also we see the ways these poems, these “blind” eyes position themselves like jewels—that is, as jewel-simulacra. in crafting this virtual, textual body, these poems, as art-objects, utter with a kind of perverse opacity that pushes beyond the parameters browne describes.   2.—they will not find us but we will be waving hello from the monitor. talking right to your face. we will transmit from the imprisoned grave to your breakfast.” 6.— of us all you have are shreds of sky...live parts of a tree. goldwork applied painfully onto the air, the skin of sky is what you have. the blue flesh of sky. skin that you cannot trample.   reflecting on the panoptic and the pastoral, here we see ways that the poem occupies a virtual, even interdimensional space between the book and the reader. as “goldwork applied painfully onto the air,” these poems glimmer in a space the reader—that is, the now deposed gaze called out from its “nowhere” (re: haraway)—“cannot trample.” dorantes’s style performs as an open circuit—and a subversive object of interactivity—who become charged by the reader, complicating the power dynamics between user and the used. the discursive strategies deployed by dorantes’s text both call on and innovate the forms of address found in marlowe’s pastoral by shifting the power away from the reader and out into the virtual, discursive space between reader and text—a technique closely resembling what hayles found in the cave lab at mit. the cave lab (cave automated virtual environment or computational and visual education) is an immersive display facility at mit that has been used by both scientists and artists to conduct some of the earliest research on virtual reality (vr). by attending to a number of computational literature projects operable from the cave, hayles identified that those technologies made possible an engagement with language that could ‘shake’ the reader out of their “accustomed place of reading” and into “an active encounter” (hayles 2007, 98). not dissimilar from dorantes’s text, these new media projects enact “a complex performance in which agency is distributed between the user, the interface,” and in the cave’s case, a “networked and programmable machine” (98). while style doesn’t quite operate this way, the cave lends a tangible model with which to imagine not just the space of virtual poetics, but also the ethical problems that might operate in that space. if those early vr projects inadequately address the politics of the active encounter, i have to imagine what dorantes’s text might make possible in that space. might vr make possible an electronic literature that tells us something new about interpersonal relationships? instead of a text that reveals itself with a touch, might strategies of opacity and sousveillance—the very same strategies performed by the solarean ocean, as a refusal-response to the violence endemic to scientific inquiry—be deployed in emerging vr spaces, to teach us, from a young age, about permission? about boundaries? or about race?   ◈   in solaris, strange memories are brought into the desperate present. the water world is a beautiful assemblage, constantly shifting shape. —aase berg, tsunami from solaris   in a scene from glucose (2017)—a short film by new media artist jeron braxton—the vectored personage of an afrolatina approaches an old tv box, an altar, maybe a santeria shrine surrounded by candles, flip phones, cassette tapes, bones, and tribal masks—a real and imagined site here memorializing a loved one, maybe a brother. the vectored sister pays respect to, which is to say re-encounters, the deceased by playing a sequence on a virtual controller—a rhythm game both connected to and disconnected from the shrine. she takes a picture. the moment she leaves, the vector-ghost of the deceased enters (like the simulacra on solaris), floating in through the tv screen, through its static haze, distorting in the room both the light and the sound. here braxton intuits a connection between race, technology, and the occult—and that connection is mediation. to echo visual cultures scholar jennifer gonzalez, reflecting on visual artist christian boltanski, these personal objects function as prostheses of the mind, "[forming] a syntagmatic,” and, i would argue, occult, “array of physical signs in a spatial representation of identity”—“a prosthetic territory,” a virtual landscape (gonzalez 1995, 133). as with boltanski, braxton’s virtual objects here articulate a mediating and material text through which an identity becomes legible, except here the mediumicity of the television, and the mediumicity of the shrine overlap with each other, ripping through the world-space the objects articulate, to collapse the boundaries between the material and the virtual. the way this taxonomic gaze registers solaris, however, differs in so far as it is completely unclear whether the occupying forces have any direct or ambient effect on the violences occurring within the solarian ecosystem—an ecosystem that appears to be in a state of perpetual collapse. the scale of this collapse, this ‘tragedy’ (to echo the protagonist from lem’s novel), appears to the scientists so large that they feel more threatened than they are in any position to stage an environmentalist intervention. this heightened state of threat and helplessness seems analogous to the ways, for example, whiteness often positions itself outside of the struggles within black and indigenous communities. if within the text, however, the solarian scholarship suggests that "no communication is possible'' and that the—so-called—mimoids and symmetriads are truly ambivalent to the scientists' experimental probing, then perhaps this break—this disconnect between the black ocean's chemical reaction to its foreign occupation and the reaction of our own earth-bound bodies to the violent hegemonies which presume to govern them—might become the site of art's intervention—a site which is intensely material yet, since “everything here passes and fades” (lem [1961] 1970, 121), there-not-there thus thoroughly virtual; as aase berg describes in tsunami from solaris, "a text that is inward moving, fractalized, and [nonlinear]” (2019, 8). while boltanski presents a fixed, dead landscape, braxton’s film occupies an undead, virtual, even counterfeit landscape. which is what interests me most about braxton's visual idiom: the characters and objects retain their pixelation, their edges, referents still intact, resisting authenticity and photorealism therefore drawing attention to the medium; to the surface—a surface that often spasms, jitters, and refuses apprehension. those moments, of being simultaneously drawn to the spasming of the object and to the spasming of the medium itself, are what gives them their virtuality—and a virtual poetics. like solaris, braxton expresses a prosthetic site of collapse, a poem-scape, an “autotopography” that cannot remain the same story, or sit still in the same discursive language—an “assemblage,” to echo berg, “constantly shifting shape” (2019, 9). thematically, glucose also uses the medium’s close association with playable media to say something new about race, power, and the politics of representation. at the beginning of braxton’s film, for example, eight abstracted squares appear—the faces of playable characters enclosed in each square—while a collage-like topography looms in the background. replaying the logics of digital capitalism nakamura described, two boxes light up as if selected by an unseen user. a viewer familiar with the visual idioms (and aural cues) of playable media will recognize this as a ‘character-selection’ screen for a fighting game. player one (is it a person, or the computer?), selects their character: a black low-poly boxer, a boy, who must fight against a jaguar-headed figure in a black t-shirt. when the boxing ring appears, an audience on screen begins to cheer, to roar. before the fight, the camera pans over to jaguar head, and a text thread unspools at the bottom of the screen; he has something to say: is my perception of free will merely an illusion governed by forces i can’t understand? as with hindi’s poem “fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying,” we might read braxton’s glucose as a politically charged art-object that sits fitfully between transparent and opaque aesthetics, that draws attention to the medium, and remains sensitive to the power dynamics between the user and the used. the radical softness of braxton’s renderings, however—"unfit for subjection”—offers a key feature by which virtual poetics, as a surface-based art-making practice, can be understood. the poetics active on solaris imagines for scholars of science and technology studies a speculative research model in which both ‘scientist’—whom the ocean resists being instrumentalized by or disentangled from—and ‘object of study’ become co-agents and co-participants in ways that are complex, non-objective, and affectively charged. when read together, these case studies offer future artists of color a vital interdisciplinary language with which they can (1) situate themselves within, and further complicate, this active debate in contemporary poetry, (2) chart legibility and illegibility not as binaries but as a richly textural political-aesthetic terrain; and lastly, (3) newly understand aesthetic gestures of abstraction, assemblage, and sousveillance to be both defensive and radically vulnerable anti-colonial strategies capable of agitating the violent, indexical gaze of scientific inquiry—its occupying eye and “i”—and interrogating the spatial, intersubjective, and ethical grounds by which scientific research is conducted.   acknowledgments this research is supported by funding from the social sciences and humanities research council of canada.   note 1 according to my notes, brand said this in september 2020 during an unrecorded public zoom reading, but the precise date and location were not recorded.   references acker, kathy. 1979. "7. from laure." talk at suny buffalo, december 12 and 13, 1979. pennsound. accessed july 7, 2022. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/acker/dec-12-13-79/acker-kathy_07_from-laure_talk-buffalo_dec-12-13_1979.mp3. ajani, ashia. 2021. “mutiny signals rebellion against the crushing reality of everyday life.” them, september 9, 2021. https://www.them.us/story/phillip-b-williams-mutiny-poetry-collection-interview. atanasoski, neda, and kalindi vora. 2019. surrogate humanity: race, robots, and the politics of technological futures. durham, nc: duke university press. ben salem, l. 2018. “rencontre de la société et de la psychiatrie.” dans écrits sur l'aliénation et la liberté, édité par frantz fanon, 530-550. paris: la découverte. https://doi.org/10.3917/dec.fanon.2018.01.0530. benjamin, ruha. 2019. race after technology. medford, ma: polity press. berg, aase. 2019. tsunami from solaris: essays on poetry. translated by johannes göransson and joyelle mcsweeney. notre dame, in: action books. braxton, jeron. 2017. glucose. vimeo. https://vimeo.com/226500452. browne, simone. 2015. dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham, nc: duke university press. calder, kim. 2015. “the denunciation of vanessa place.” los angeles review of books. june 14, 2015. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-denunciation-of-vanessa-place/. castells, manuel. 1996. the rise of the network society. west sussex, uk: blackwell publishing. coleman, beth. 2009. “race as technology.” camera obscura 24 (1 [70]): 177–207. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2008-018. chun, wendy hui kong. 2013. “race and/as technology or how to do things to race.” in race after the internet, edited by lisa nakamura and peter a. chow-white, 38–60. london: taylor & francis. dorantes, dolores. 2016. style. translated by jen hofer. berkeley, ca: kenning editions. ferreira da silva, denise. towards a global idea of race. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. glissant, édouard. 1997. poetics of relation. translated by betsy wing. ann arbor: university of michigan press. gonzalez, jennifer. 1995. “autotopographies.” in prosthetic territories: politics and hypertechnologies, edited by mark driscoll and gabriel brahm, 133–50. boulder, co: westview press. haraway, donna. 1988. “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” feminist studies 14 (3): 575–99. www.jstor.org/stable/3178066. harper, phillip brian. 2015. abstractionist aesthetics: artistic form and social critique in african american culture. new york: nyu press. hartman, saidiya. 1997. scenes of subjection: terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century america. oxford: oxford university press. hayles, n. katherine. 2007. “the future of literature: complex surfaces of electronic texts and print books.” collection management 31 (1–2): 85–114. https://doi.org/10.1300/j105v31n01_06. hindi, noor. 2020. “fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying.” poetry foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/154658/fuck-your-lecture-on-craft-my-people-are-dying. kristeva, julia. 2002. portable kristeva: updated edition. edited by kelly oliver. new york: columbia university press. lem, stanisław. (1961) 1970. solaris. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich. marlowe, christopher. [1599]. “the passionate shepherd to his love.” poetry foundation. accessed may 19, 2022. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44675/the-passionate-shepherd-to-his-love. marshall, kate. 2018. “b-sides: stanislaw lem’s ‘solaris.’” public books. https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-stanislaw-lems-solaris/. mbembe, achille. 2019. necropolitics. durham, nc: duke university press. mcsweeney, joyelle. 2014a. the necropastoral: poetry, media, occults. ann arbor: university of michigan press. ———. 2014b. “what is the necropastoral?” poetry foundation (blog). april 29, 2014. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/04/what-is-the-necropastoral. morrison, toni. 2007. playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination. new york: knopf doubleday publishing group. moten, fred. 2007. black and blur. durham, nc: duke university press. moten, fred, and stefano harney. 2013. the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study. london: minor compositions. nakamura, lisa. 2007. digitizing race : visual cultures of the internet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. nyong’o, tavia. 2018. afro-fabulations: the queer drama of black life. new york: nyu press. peters, john durham. 1999. speaking into the air: a history of the idea of communication. chicago: university of chicago press. e-book. piper, adrian. 1996. “flying.” out of order, out of sight: selected writings in meta-art, 1968-1992. united kingdom: mit press. poetry foundation. n.d. “about us.” accessed june 6, 2022. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/foundation/about. rukeyser, muriel. 2018. the book of the dead. morgantown: west virginia university press. steyerl, hito, and franco berardi. 2012. the wretched of the screen. new york: sternberg press. tarkovskiĭ, andreĭ arsenʹevich, dir. (1972) 2002. solaris. moscow: mosfilm studios. criterion collection. weheliye, alexander. habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. durham, nc: duke university press. weizman, eyal. 2017. hollow land: israel’s architecture of occupation. new edition. new york: verso. e-book. white, simone. 2016. of being dispersed. new york: futurepoem books. williams, phillip b. 2021. mutiny. new york: penguin books.       author bio madison mccartha is a poet, multimedia artist, and phd student at the university of california, santa cruz. they are the author of freakophone world (2021), and their second book of poetry, the cryptodrone sequence, is forthcoming from black ocean. fahey, fionna. 2024. review of in the shadow of the palms: more-than-human becomings in west papua, by sophie chao (duke university press, 2022). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312. © fionna fahey, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | in the shadow of the palms: more-thanhuman becomings in west papua, by sophie chao (duke university press, 2022) fionna fahey purdue university faheyf@purdue.edu sophie chao’s brilliant ethnography in the shadow of the palms: more-thanhuman becomings in west papua chronicles multispecies worlds in the way they demand (2022, 11). she brings us through the upper bian landscape in west papua to the other-than-human worlds of the marind peoples, sago (dakh in marind or metroxylon sagu rottbøll), and oil palm (sawit in indonesian or elaeis guineensis jacquin). drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and human rights activism in west papua, chao’s analysis and body of work reinvigorates established theoretical conversations in feminist science studies and emergent concerns in multispecies and plantation studies. importantly, this book doesn’t promise multispecies utopias, because “alongside care and love, violence, too, can be a multispecies act” (208). this book changes shape across its introduction, eight chapters, and conclusion. in between chapter groupings the reader is planted into a dreamscape interlude (28). importantly, chao weaves thick ethnographic attunements alongside queries with landscapes and other-than-human beings. she refuses the dominant western ethnographic gaze, which focalizes on constructed differences and extracts knowledge from indigenous people(s), often in the global south, in order to theorize with marind companions among the groves, sprouting sago, and oil palm. chao opens chapter 1 with a moving drive through upper bian landscapes to merauke, where lands are traditionally animated by stories, songs, and care. however, oil palm plantations discipline these lands through a network of roads, monocrops, checkpoints, and clearings, what she calls “pressure points” (38). pressure points describe the impacts of state violence that “extend across physical mailto:faheyf@purdue.edu book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) fionna fahey, 2024 and geographical bodies like nodes of a complex nervous system that is at once omnipresent and opaque” (38). these pressure points are not only materialized in the land, but on marind bodies and inert maps (51–73). the uncertain futures of marind relations and forests that accompany these pressure points reflect chao’s expansion of the marind concept of abu-abu—uncertainty or grayness—that is central throughout the text (14). thus, abu-abu is evocative of chao’s overall praxis of this book: to story both haunting realities and refusals (24). furthermore, she pushes against the confines of ethnographic authority and static description by nurturing marind livingness in photographs, embodied relations, and cotheorizing (28). skin, flesh, and wetness are central to understanding marind being and becoming. in the third chapter, chao articulates how becoming human (amin) is intimately involved with fleshy embodied relations and fluid exchanges between other-thanhuman kin (amai) across one’s lifecourse (79). in contrast, the flows involved from oil palm plantations harm the wetness and nourishment of the marind, where human and “the all-too-porous bodies of rivers, soils, and living organisms” are exposed to new state-sanctioned toxicities, extractive economies, and militarization (94). as chao recalls, feminist science studies scholars have long unsettled the colonial separation between humans and the environment purportedly drawn by the skin (haraway 1990; star 1995). for instance, donna haraway posed the question, “why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” (1990, 61). regularly throughout this book, descriptions of the bodies and skins of humans and landscapes are enmeshed together. crucially, chao generously engages with abundant literature from black studies scholars who have advanced theories of the flesh, (non)human, and plantation within the book and in detailed footnotes (222). many of these scholars have criticized environmental scholars for foreclosing or “[ignoring] praxes of humanity and critiques produced by black people, particularly those praxes which are irreverent to the normative production of ‘the human’ or illegible from within the terms of its logic” (jackson 2015, 216–17; see also chao, bolender, and kirksey 2022; davis et al. 2019). later in chapter 3, one of chao’s interlocutors, oktavianus, lamented that “the problem with oil palm is that we do not know its skin” (94). his dismal remark came near his death following a number of shape-shifting cassowary events— shape-shifting is a practice known among marind. for years, oktavianus foraged in the surrounding forests demonstrating other-than-human cassowary behaviors and later appearances. eventually, he lost his sense of humanness and was seen as something in-between—abu-abu (87). the stories of unsettled boundaries between (non)human, skin, and species continue in chapter 4, with an undomesticated but not wild bird, ruben. chao’s keen thinking on bodies, kinship, and species broadens our understanding of human entanglements essential to plant and multispecies epistemic(re)turns. book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) fionna fahey, 2024 chapters 5 and 6 explore relationality with and (un)knowing of sago and oil palm. in chapter 5 chao builds on affective inquiries into human-environment relations and ways of “being-in-the-grove” (125). here she recounts the sensorial practices and sounds involved in knowing sago. conversely, in chapter 6, the multiple ontologies of oil palm emerge (160). chao argues, “the plant’s ontology, in other words, is not an ‘either or’ between different states of being, but rather a series of apposite yet accretive ‘ands’—’ands’ that trouble the contrapuntal relation of oil palm to sago palm. at once lively and lethal, assailant and victim, plant and person, foreigner and kin, oil palm, too, inhabits plural realities across space and time” (163). chao’s analyses in these chapters raise perspectives of ontoepistemology at the core of feminist science studies (barad 2007; de la cadena 2015). importantly, chao’s assertion that these ontologies are “multiply authored” emulates critical scholars at intersection of science studies and the environmental humanities, such as kristina lyons (2020) and kim tallbear (sisseton-wahpeton oyate) (2014), by conveying the ontological and embodied realities of and in resistance to capitalist violence (215). in the shadow of the palms narrates how enduring colonial and capitalist legacies manifest across temporal and dream scales. in chapter 7 chao presents the history and “atemporality” of colonial capture of other-than-human beings (173). this chapter fits in conversation with pertinent analyses of empire building through sheep (franklin 2007) and beaver frontiers (ogden 2021). some of the most distinct and uncanny elements of this book are oil palm’s creeping in marind dream worlds. during chapter 8 and in four interludes, chao describes otherthan-conscious encounters with and becoming(s) of oil palm. she hones in on the popular recurring dreams of “being eaten by oil palm,” writing, “dreamers do not dream so much as they are dreamed. the dream-as-relation evades the self-asdreamer, even as it is imposed on individuals by the haunting being of oil palm.” (191). furthermore, the dreams in this book are together affective and effective. they demonstrate the all-consuming violence of capitalism that haunts marind lifeways. consequently, the last interlude is a portal into her own nightmare of dismemberment and decomposition into the beckoning earth. as chao illustrates in this ethnography, dreaming is collective; dreams are shared, experienced, and interrupted together. in this book, thinking with the oneiric contrasts the radical imagining often associated with dreaming otherwise. the departure from hope in dreams aligns with chao’s hesitance to portray certainty in multispecies futures. for ethnography broadly, dreaming offers powerful avenues of inquiry into the plastic divisions between geography, temporality, and consciousness. in their collective relevance, dreams are also sites of transformation. they convey the fluidity of people, kin, and place that complicates empirical attempts at universality. this sense of transformation is deeply relational with constant glimmers of change. book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) fionna fahey, 2024 in the conclusion, chao brings her thorough engagement with marind and otherthan-human worlds to the scale “of planetary undoing” (213). chao’s tending to feminist science studies and “fleshy” liveliness of marind worlds provides a textured and exemplary ethnography for engaged scholars of human, plant, and other-than-human beings. above all, her meditations on relationality and becoming pique radical ethics of regeneration. finally, the close of this book leaves wonder for ways we might share and cultivate sago’s dreams, reminiscent of chao’s loving question, “how, and who, should we love, in a time of destructive, other-than-human proliferation?” (210). references barad, karen. 2007. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. chao, sophie. 2022. in the shadow of the palms: more-than-human becomings in west papua. durham, nc: duke university press. chao, sophie, karin bolender, and eben kirksey, eds. 2022. the promise of multispecies justice. durham, nc: duke university press. davis, janae, alex a. moulton, levi van sant, and brian williams. 2019. “anthropocene, capitalocene,…plantationocene?: a manifesto for ecological justice in an age of global crises.” geography compass 13 (5): e12438. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12438. de la cadena, marisol. 2015. earth beings: ecologies of practice across andean worlds. durham, nc: duke university press. franklin, sarah. 2007. dolly mixtures: the remaking of genealogy. durham, nc: duke university press. haraway, donna. 1990. simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge. jackson, zakiyyah iman. 2015. “outer worlds: the persistence of race in movement ‘beyond the human.’” glq: a journal of gay and lesbian studies 21 (2): 215–18. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/582032. lyons, kristina marie. 2020. vital decomposition: soil practitioners and life politics. durham, nc: duke university press. ogden, laura a. 2021. loss and wonder at the world’s end. durham, nc: duke university press. star, susan leigh. 1995. ecologies of knowledge: work and politics in science and technology. albany: suny press. tallbear, kim. 2014. “standing with and speaking as faith: a feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry.” journal of research practice 10 (2), art. n17. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12438 https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/582032 book review 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) fionna fahey, 2024 author bio fionna fahey is a phd student in anthropology at purdue university (west lafayette, indiana, united states). her work uses feminist science studies and environmental anthropology to study seeds, health, and social justice.     special section attuning to the erratic end of life: the logic of care in hospice at home     anne-chie wang academia sinica anne0806@gmail.com   abstract how do dying people receive good care at home in a highly institutionalized death context? the ministry of health and welfare in taiwan, for example, has promoted hospice home care and respecting patient autonomy to improve the quality of end-of-life experiences. however, this study finds that end-of-life care is not automatically personalized or empowering for patients. from the theoretical perspective of care practices, this study accentuates the importance of family carers’ invisible work in achieving these goals for patients. drawing from in-depth interviews and twelve months of participant observation in a medical center in northern taiwan, the study found that family caregivers are meticulously attuned to the patient’s condition to provide care, which includes rearranging the place, coordinating resources and other carers, and practicing care. this paper reveals that the practice of hospice home care does not depend merely on the patient’s autonomy but also on the family caregivers’ and medical team’s work, which is relatively invisible within the health insurance system.   keywords care practices, institutionalization of death, the logic of care, hospice palliative care, relational autonomy   introduction: dilemmas of patient autonomy in hospice home care care is an essential theme in feminist technoscience that reveals the intersectionality of power relationships in everyday life (mol 2008; martin, myers, and viseu 2015; lindén and lydahl 2021). this study investigates what it means to practice good care in end-of-life situations. biomedical discourse argues that patients’ quality of life can be improved by enhancing their autonomy, implying that patients should be able to make their own decisions rather than be subjected to the patriarchal rule of medical professionals. globally, some trends promote patient autonomy in care, especially for end-of-life patients, because they are likely to occupy a marginal position within social relationships. specifically, research has long described terminally ill patients’ social death, meaning people are treated as if they are dead (glaser and strauss 1965; sudnow 1967). in taiwan, implementing hospice home care is a reasonable attempt to improve the end-of-life experiences of patients.1 death at home has significant cultural implications related to local filial piety culture in taiwanese society, as in other asian countries (long 2005; stonington 2020). the ideal image of a good death in taiwanese culture usually depicts the elderly aging and dying at home under the care of their children and grandchildren, which connotates the elders’ achievement of strong family relationships (tang 2000). this ideal image implies the critical role of the cultural norms of intergenerational reciprocity in elder care (lan 2002). however, in taiwan, death and dying are increasingly institutionalized, as in north america and many european countries (kaufman 2005; timmermans 2005). according to national statistics, in 1994, nearly 60 percent of people died at home, and 30 percent died in the hospital (ministry of health and welfare 1994). by 2019, 30 percent of people died at home, and 57 percent died in hospitals (ministry of the interior 2019). dying is increasingly sequestered in institutions and managed by medical professionals (timmermans 2005). as a result, it is becoming more difficult for taiwanese people to die at home. most patients have no choice but to die at the hospital, even if they want to die at home (ueng et al. 2013). the taiwanese government advocates for hospice home care as the ideal situation to offer an alternative to institutionalized death and allow patients to choose to die at home. there are two main reasons for this approach. the first is to reduce government expenditures on national health insurance (lo 2002; hung et al. 2018).2 the taiwanese government wants to minimize over-institutionalized death because of its tremendous cost to national health insurance resources (chen, chang, and huang 2015). second, the medical profession assumes that hospice home care can improve the quality of patients’ end-of-life experiences through holistic healthcare (tang 2000; ueng et al. 2013). however, the number of people using hospice home care has grown more slowly than expected by the government. according to ministry of health and welfare statistics, approximately twelve thousand people used hospice home services in 2019, much lower than the estimated value. the puzzle is, if home care is an ideal that the taiwanese government and culture consider worth pursuing, why is the proportion of patients receiving end-of-life care at home relatively low? a common explanation in the medical profession is that patients and their families have low death literacy (huang et al. 2017). the concept of death literacy comes from health literacy, which means that if people acquire correct end-of-life knowledge, they will choose more appropriate care methods (noonan et al. 2016). however, the explanation of death literacy does not reveal the difficulties and dilemmas of care practices in hospice home care. this phenomenon raises the following research question: how do dying people access good care at home in a highly institutionalized death context? how do family caregivers care for terminally ill patients at home, under the supervision of hospice care professionals? what are the consequences of the family caregivers’ caregiving actions? by investigating the practices of hospice home care, this study reveals that hospice home care might come at the cost of inequality intersecting with gender, class, or race/ethnicity. yet hospice home care also raises suggestions for how the ideal good care practice could be possible in a socially justice way. scrutinizing the gap between the medical framework and actual care practices helps us to investigate well-being beyond the individual as part of a more extensive cultural context (silan, chen, and lai 2022). good care has been a fruitful feminist topic for decades (gilligan 1982; noddings 1984; tronto 1993). a fundamental shift in the discussion is from defining good or ethical care to investigating how good care is provided (mol, moser, and pols 2010). annemarie mol (2008) conceptualized the logic of choice and the logic of care to deepen the discussion of care practices. the two models have different views on how to achieve good care. according to the logic of choice, making a decision is the most critical activity. patients choose their preferred healthcare models based on their value judgments. the logic of choice provides an illusion of control in the doctor-patient relationship. in contrast, people who act according to the logic of care will focus not only on the moment of making a decision but also on meticulous and continuous care activities. patients and medical staff repeatedly adjust their healthcare practices to target their bodies, technologies, and knowledge. mol notes that the two logics are not necessarily superior or inferior and may coexist. mol (2008) states that caring is never easy, and choosing may give people a sense of security in maintaining control. however, many things in real life, including our bodies, cannot always be controlled (jain and stacey 2015). the only thing that can be guaranteed is that our lives end in death. so mol advocates the characteristics of an active patient. being active does not mean controlling everything; people actively participate in care but can also let go when they are out of control. the active patient also implies that people must be persistent and flexible during caregiving. patients and medical professionals collaborate to share doctoring and collectively coordinate patients’ needs, equipment, and treatment methods. treating one’s body well and maintaining flexibility in decision-making are positive behaviors that can differ from rational choices. the case of hospice home care could extend the logic of care discussion to the temporal dimension. usually, care takes a very long time; for example, caring for the elderly and people with chronic diseases can take decades. however, the case i am discussing is end-of-life care, where one can expect a definite endpoint, and the duration of care can be short, with rapid changes, mostly less than six months. the erratic character of death trajectories makes end-of-life care more complex, and medical staff and families often try to choreograph death trajectories (kaufman 2005; stonington 2020). the case of end-of-life care helps us further understand the characteristics of contemporary death care practices and how they are changing in response to various social and cultural factors such as technological mediation, secularization, and globalization (dawdy and kneese 2022). does patient choice ensure good care? from the perspective of feminist technoscience, good care is much more than making a choice. mol, moser, and pols cast good care as “persistent tinkering in a world full of complex ambivalence and shifting tensions” (2010, 14). i argues that end-of-life care is based not merely on autonomous personal choices but on meticulous care practices. the power of individual choices should not be overemphasized. this study re-examines the problem of patient autonomy overshadowing the complexities of care practices. it reveals the intersectionality of gender, class, race/ethnicity, and age issues in end-of-life care.   methods to investigate the practice of end-of-life care, i did participant observation for twelve months in a palliative care ward in a medical center, z hospital (pseudonym). after obtaining approval from the z hospital research ethics committee, i conducted ethnography as a clinical researcher. i went to the palliative care ward thrice weekly for six to eight hours. while observing, i shadowed hospice care team members such as physicians, nurses, hospice volunteers, social workers, psychologists, and hospice chaplains in the ward. i also followed the hospice care team for home visits fifteen times. most of the patients in z hospital have cancer rather than chronic illness. the rapidness of cancer’s illness trajectory influences the care practices people need to tackle problems quickly. i interviewed twenty-one family caregivers and ten hospice care team members in-depth to probe their practice of caring for patients at home.3 before the interview, i informed the participants of the research purpose and ensured the confidentiality of the research data. most of the participants were recommended to me by palliative care team members, while i approached others myself. among the participants, there were fifteen women and six men. about one-third of the participants were single. thirteen family caregivers are the patient’s children, four are spouses, three are siblings, and one is a daughter-in-law. most caregivers are on leave without pay, retired, or engaged in more flexible work. i conducted the interviews in the ward or the hospital lounge, according to the situation. the length of the interview varied from thirty minutes to two hours. in addition, i also interviewed ten hospice care team members, including doctors, nurses, and hospice volunteers, who participated in hospice home services. most of the interviewed members served in the hospice ward of z hospital, and the rest were medical staff recommended by the hospice ward team members. the interviews focused on their experience caring for hospice home patients and how they observed family members’ caregiving experiences. most of the respondents i interviewed and observed worked in urban areas. because the provision of health services varies with populations’ socioeconomic status, the experience of hospice home care in rural areas needs further exploration in future research. after collecting all the field notes and interview recording transcripts, i did an abductive analysis to interrogate the meaning of the data (timmermans and tavory 2022). first, i found that the discussion of the difficulty of home care came up repeatedly. then i coded how family carers and medical professionals solve problems of hospice home care. second, i found a gap between the official discourse and what caregivers report happens. specifically, the family carers experience a lot of problems. based on these themes, this article analyzes how family carers assemble end-of-life care infrastructure and practice caring for their loved ones. in this paper, i investigate family members’ care practices in hospice home care in taiwan and the limitation of patient autonomy in the liberal framework. in the first section, i analyze the care scripts and social forces that push patients to adopt hospice home care, including the national health insurance’s socioeconomic factors and the hospital’s institutional logic. in the second section, i scrutinize how family carers assemble resources, organize a division of labor, and practice care attuned to the uncertainty of death.   not only patient autonomy: the social forces in care at home medical professionals advocate for hospice home care by constructing a set of cultural scripts that define “good care” at end of life. from a medical professional’s view, home is “the best place for caring” and “a place with dignity” for terminal patients with no acute syndrome. they believe patients who are receiving care at home have a greater sense of control than what the care practices in a hospital setting can offer. a typical medical care script emphasizes that most patients want to go home for the rest of their lives and that patients can always get home care support from medical professionals (ueng et al. 2013). for example, the ministry of health and welfare and the buddhist lotus hospice care foundation (2013) issued a brochure for the general public titled it is good to go home: about hospice home care, presenting a typical good care script:   a-fu, an indigenous person in east taiwan, was hospitalized for gallbladder cancer. due to the ups and downs of their terminal illness, a-fu stays in the hospital for nearly three months. his family knows a-fu wants to return home, but they are afraid to let him go home due to not knowing how to take care of him. later, the hospice care team taught a-fu’s wife and children nursing skills and cultivated their confidence in caring for patients. after all the efforts, a-fu was finally able to go home. during their time at home, a-fu was paid a home visit by the medical group once a week. in addition, the nurse often guides a-fu's family on the phone to conduct special care for a-fu step by step.   many care scripts state that home is comfortable, familiar, and emotional, positioning “home as the best ward” and promising that hospice home care will support the family (buddhist lotus hospice care foundation 2013). medical professionals persuade terminally ill patients to choose hospice home care by framing this decision as an empowering choice. as mol (2008) states, this framing process is a disciplining technique that requires much investment. from the medical professionals’ perspective, patients’ choice of hospice home care is based on self-determination. there are broader social forces driving these families’ participation in hospice home care, however. their assessment of what constitutes “good care” for terminally ill patients occurs within the context of broader society. in other words, patients and their families exercise “relational autonomy”—the consideration that persons are socially embedded and shaped by intersecting social identities such as gender, class, race, and ethnicity (mackenzie and stoljar 2000). most actors are motivated by the hospital’s administrative regulations rather than the patient’s will. many family caregivers and patients do not express specific expectations, so they are pushed by the hospital to be discharged. hospital organizations consider resource allocation and formulate hospitalization protocols and work schedules that optimize benefits (kaufman 2005; livne 2019). in z hospital, after the hospice team assesses that the patient’s symptoms are relatively stable, they will recommend hospice home care until the patient has acute symptoms. some family members followed the advice of the medical staff to take care of them at home. for example, when i talked to meiyin and yongze about taking their families home for care, they said, “we do not know much, so we respect the professional’s evaluation.” they feel that since they are working class with limited medical knowledge, it is best to trust the medical professional’s judgment. in addition, their financial situation is constrained, and since the cost of institutional care is close to their monthly salary, they decide to take care of family members at home. further revealing class stratification in hospice care, working-class families may not have the economic capital to outsource caregiving or hire domestic care workers. medical professionals seldom explicitly state that they discharge patients in consideration of the hospital’s regulations instead of considering the patient’s best interest. policies regulating the national health insurance system and medical institutions require that medical personnel limit the length of hospital stay for inpatients so that new patients waiting for beds can be admitted to the hospice ward as soon as possible (huang et al. 2005).4 in other cases, hospital regulation conscripts patients or families to do care activities. restrictions makes them want to go home for care. for example, one of the respondents, dr. xu, observed that some families chose hospice home care because the patient or family members want to follow buddhist practices of praying for eight hours after a person has died and not touching the body. it is challenging to perform these rituals in the hospital, where the deceased patient is sent to the mortuary shortly after they die. patients and their families cannot stay in the ward for too long because the hospice team needs to give the hospital bed resources to the next patient. hospitals organize things in a way that keeps things moving and is unlikely to keep terminally ill patients long without medical care goals (kaufman 2005). the logic of efficiency in hospital regulations conflicts with and overrides the logic of care that allows family members to accompany the deceased patient. only a small number of families voluntarily engage in hospice home care. usually, these families have abundant financial resources, understand how to practice hospice home care, and are willing to support patients in home care. for instance, an old woman named fangling, who was in her eighties, was diagnosed with colorectal cancer, and the treatment effect was not as good as expected. her husband also suffered from cancer and received hospice home care for half a month before his death. he passed away peacefully at home. her husband’s end-of-life experience affected her; she also wanted to die at home and receive hospice home care. her children were also willing to support her. fangling’s family had high economic and social capital to support her peaceful home care. abundant resources are needed to support in-home care, and family caregivers must also have professional skills and knowledge to provide such care. with these resources, this group of family caregivers and patients believes that “home” can support end-of-life care and is a more comfortable place than a medical facility, which is only a place for temporary symptom control. in the logic of choice, medical professionals provide medical facts and treatment options, allowing patients to decide based on their value orientation (mol 2008). they expect patients to manage their care plan actively. however, from the perspective of the logic of care, facts are not given in advance but emerge within the context of power relations, such as the interests of medical professionals and the nation. these cases show that patients who adopted hospice home care were influenced by more than the logic of choice. instead, care practices in hospice home care reflect the entwinement of individual preference, taiwanese cultural beliefs, socioeconomic status, biomedical culture, and national health insurance expenditure calculations. in the following section, i elaborate on how family carers practice care and what resources they need to support their choice of hospice home care.   making home become a caring place in the view of patient autonomy, the most prominent part of hospice home care is making patients return home. however, home does not automatically provide care. intense labor is involved in care practice. carers put much effort into managing resources, including transportation networks, home space, and care devices, to make the home suitable for care. people assemble different things in the care network to pursue a better life, linking labor, affection, and ethical politics (puig de la bellacasa 2017).   assembling resources family carers need to do a lot of work to achieve the medical professionals’ expectations about making the home more like a hospital. the physical space configuration within the house affects care practice. according to the design standards of medical institutions, the ideal care space is preferably flat, which is convenient for moving patients. according to medical and health care, the hospitable home team will educate or assist carers in improving the home care environment (driessen, borgstrom, and cohn 2021; exley and allen 2007). for example, the hospice home nurses and clinic physicians i interviewed said they would observe home environments and suggest improvement directions. the interviewee dr. su revealed that many people thought hospice care only deals with tinkering with family relationships; however, the hospice care team also cares about the physical layout of the house. he said, “house is like hardware, home is like software, and home care needs to take care of both.” some families have the resources to renovate the house, such as arranging handrails in the bedroom and adding non-slip mats to the bathroom. for instance, a family carer yiwen, a retired executive manager in her fifties, did a lot of “pre-deployment” to take care of her terminally ill mother at home. after the hospice home care professional advised on the ideal caring environment, yiwen reorganized the house into a barrier-free space where a wheelchair could smoothly go to every room. hospice home care raises the expectation and the standard of “good care.” caregivers must purchase and prepare a lot of equipment and learn how to operate it. there are many standard care types of equipment, such as electric beds, bedpan chairs, wheelchairs, oxygen cylinders, sputum machines, blood pressure monitors, and blood oxygen machines. family caregiving requires assembling various technological objects and care equipment according to the health education guidance of medical professionals. many family caregivers consider preparing the setting and making the home like a hospital ward challenging. for example, most family carers i interviewed told me about the complex process of arranging an electric bed for patients. electric beds are standard equipment in most hospitals and can help patients with reduced mobility adjust their body posture. electric beds are supposed to make care more convenient, but for ordinary families, electric beds are equipment that requires special assembly. an electric bed also takes up a lot of space, which many families do not have. some research participants said that because their bedroom is not large enough, they plan to use a ready-made bed at home. some people rent an electric bed from local organizations but may have to wait in line for a long time. some patients may pass away before family carers assemble the equipment. some clients’ financial situations prevent them from purchasing additional care supplies, and they will use ready-made equipment at home. in addition, the patient will not automatically receive care from the medical product. the family members need to be proficient in using the specialized technology. for example, a carer named liying demonstrated that she learned to adjust the height of the electric bed according to different nursing purposes. for example, when caring for her bedridden mother, she changed the bed to her waist height so she can take care of the mother without bending her waist too much. when her mother wants to get up from bed, liying will lower the bed to the height of the wheelchair so that her mother can move into the wheelchair more smoothly. assemblage resources are not just about purchasing products but actively engaging in caregiving. in the feminist technoscience theoretical position, technology and care are not antagonistic but incorporated (mol 2008). these cases all show that “home” is either a natural place or a suitable place for care; it needs to be built through the efforts of family caregivers and requires professional skills.   organizing the division of labor hospice home care requires skilled caregivers, who can be grouped into four categories, listed below in order of majority to minority. the first category is paid care workers hired by patients’ families. in the cases i interviewed, 70 percent of the interviewed families hired domestic migrant workers. in taiwan, migrant workers from southeast asia play essential roles in the privatized care market in the international transfer of caretaking (parreñas 2000; lan 2006). family members or nurses train hired migrant workers to learn caring skills. two interviewees mentioned that they discussed their willingness to go home for care with the domestic migrant worker before considering the need for a peaceful stay at home; the family members would only go home with confidence after the migrant worker agreed. the privileged taiwanese family can hire migrant care workers to help with caregiving, while the less privileged family might do the carework themselves. in these ways, the privatized healthcare system reinforces inequality within class, gender, race, and ethnicity (england 2005). the second category is for family caregivers to find channels to learn and develop caring skills. more than half of the family members mentioned that they would collect information about home hospice care or ask relatives and friends about their experiences. one of the more exceptional cases is ping-hao, a retired civil servant who was admitted to the long-term care institute of the university of medicine to care more professionally for his father, who was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer. ping-hao’s case highlights that family caregivers know the difficulty of caring, so they actively seek standardized training methods to develop their specialized skills. the above two categories are closer to professional care, hiring workers with professional skills to assist or family caregivers seeking professional knowledge and training. in the third category, there are also family caregivers who use their past care experience. four interviewed family members had previous experience caring for terminally ill patients. they said that although the types of diseases differed, the needs of terminally ill patients were similar. alternatively, two family members mentioned that caring for terminally ill patients reminded them of their experience caring for an infant, such as changing diapers and patting the back to make them burp after having a meal. these similar experiences allowed them to master the professional skills of nursing more smoothly. the fourth category is family caregivers who leverage their social experience or work experience to provide care. some family members have a medical or nursing background, have received professional training, and can quickly grasp the key points of patient care. for example, a hospice volunteer named meixiang had nursing training. when caring for her terminal father, she quickly mastered the necessary skills. however, family members with a medical background are in the minority. even with medical knowledge, becoming familiar with the specialized skills of caring for terminally ill patients still takes time. besides family carers, domestic workers, and medical professionals, the hospice volunteering group is vital for hospice home care. in the early 1960s, in the development of palliative care in the united kingdom, hospice volunteers were essential care workers outside the medical profession, helping to accompany patients and their families (field and johnson 1992; morris et al. 2013). after introducing the hospice care system in taiwan in the 1990s, hospitals also recruited and trained hospice volunteers (li 1997). hospice volunteers accompany patients on psychological and spiritual levels and provide some physical care. in contrast with volunteers in patient groups, which mainly empower patients and help them recover, such as those in breast cancer recovery (klawiter 2004), hospice volunteers require training in comfort care and emotional companionship skills. volunteers can also act as a communication bridge between the patient’s family and the medical team. some hospice volunteers i interviewed said they had paid home visits to patients to comfort them and their family members several times. sometimes they also support family care to do some complex tasks. for instance, they help to bathe patients because it is a challenging task for most family members.   practicing professional care at home lay carers also face challenges in trying to provide professional-level comfort care at home. some caregiving activities may seem ordinary but can become more complex at home. bathing is especially challenging, as it requires people and technological assistance. many family members said it was challenging to bathe patients at home because most terminally ill patients are too fragile to move. for example, informer shiwei recounted that his mother had a broken bone, and it was difficult for her to walk without assistance. shiwei showed me the skill he had learned for bathing his mother. first, he would squat, let his mother hold on to his shoulders, and quickly wash her body while she could stand for a few minutes. he observed that the more relaxed the mother was, the easier she was to clean. when his mother feels nervous, she exhausts herself quickly and cannot stand independently. in another example, zhenyi takes care of her ninety-year-old father, who has pancreatic cancer. she places him on a commode chair and then pushes him to the bathroom for a shower. her dad was a thin man, who weighed about forty kilograms, but zhenyi, who is in her sixties, still finds it hard to move her dad quickly. zhenyi said it takes more than an hour to help her father take a bath every time, and she sweats profusely doing it, so most of the time, she gives him a sponge bath in bed. some family carers will ask long-term care personnel to provide home bathing services to support them and make up for their lack of specialized skills. in the logic of choice, patients are free citizens who can abide by their rights and obligations and control their bodies in a liberal framework. but the natural body is often difficult to control and predict, especially the body with disease and illness (jain and stacey 2015). the logic of care emphasizes respecting one’s body and adjusting the way of care at any time. in the case of hospice home care, the family carers adapt to the patient’s condition to care rather than control it. in contrast to home, hospitals have more human resources and special care equipment. for example, the hospice ward of z hospital provides patients with a weekly bathing service. one or two hospice volunteers, a nurse, and one or two family members attend the bath. the bathroom has a professional bathing machine that can elevate patients easily and allow patients to lie down with a shower or a tub bath. the bathing case shows that the lack of technical assistance and sufficient human resources at home makes the care process more laborious. for lay carers, it is hard to control the uncertainty of death and the erratic character of the disease. observing signs of impending death is essential for hospice care professionals because they must prepare for a patient’s death. usually, professionals observe many signs to foresee the death trajectory (e.g., lower blood pressure, decreased urine output, and change in breathing pattern). medical professionals make health education leaflets to teach carers to identify the main death signs. however, for most laypersons, predicting survival and dealing with symptoms of impending death is challenging and complicated to learn because it requires medical expertise and experience. many respondents said, “i keep observing all day, but i do not know whether those signs are normal or abnormal.” carers often feel uncertain about their observation. for example, the health education leaflet shows a critical sign of approaching death called “death rattle,” which is a kind of sound that causes by the secretions accumulating in the throat and upper chest. the median duration between the onset of death rattle and death is about eleven to twenty-eight hours (lokker et al. 2014). though the sign of death rattle is vital for a family carer to predict the patient’s survival time and prepare for death, the rattle is easily confused with coughing with phlegm. in some situations, carers fail to identify the death of signs, and patients pass away. the confusion could make carers deeply distressed due to not having time to say goodbye to the patient. as the technology of prognosis advances, the expectation of deathwatch is also enhanced. medical professionals expect lay carers to observe death signs to accompany the dying patient vigilantly, which is difficult given the erratic character of dying. another laborious work is handling complex symptoms like massive bleeding, cancer pain, and breathing difficulties. when patients are not feeling well, families must decide whether to treat the symptoms themselves or send the patient to an emergency room. some carers felt depressed and guilty about being unable to control their family members’ symptoms. for the layperson, the care practice is complex and emotion-laden. the logic of choice might come with regret when people think they have made the wrong choice. though many medical studies emphasize that the patient’s choice of the preferred place of death is critical, the time and place of death are full of uncertainty and contingency that make it hard to guarantee that the patient’s choices will be honored. in some cases, although some patients choose in advance to die at home, eventually, they die in the hospital. for example, when visiting the elderly woman named fangling, who suffered from vomiting blood at home, the hospice home nurse determined that fangling needed to go to the hospital and would likely die there. indeed, fangling died in the hospital. although her family and the nurse made many efforts to help her feel comfortable at home, controlling severe bleeding at home is challenging because of the lack of advanced medical devices. they felt pity and guilty for not fulfilling fangling’s wish to die at home. a hospice home nurse told me she receives about a hundred cases yearly, and less than one-third die at home. these cases demonstrate that although some terminal patients choose to be cared for at home, they may not be able to fulfill their wishes because of the uncertainty at the end of life. as mol (2008) suggests, care will spontaneously go on and on till the last day of life, and we need to adjust care practices according to the situation every moment.   discussion and conclusion in this study, i want to emphasize that care at home is not merely an autonomous personal choice; it is an unsettling care practice that needs to be supported by carers' efforts. hospice advocators build narratives about how to care for the terminally ill to shape the cultural script of a good death. the cultural script emphasizes the importance of patient autonomy, suggesting that terminally ill patients can achieve a good death through advanced care planning. cultural scripts reinforce the idealized culturally appropriate death by caring for the families of the terminally ill at home with the help of hospice expertise to alleviate pain and distress. moreover, the medical professional emphasized the logic of choice to make the hospice care more certain. however, patients are not guaranteed the same care outlined in their chosen advanced healthcare directive. the idealized death promoted by professionals raises the expectation of “good care” and makes laypeople face daunting challenges to caregiving at home. home death is an explicit goal of contemporary institutional medicine in taiwan. government and professionals attempt to manipulate cultural preference and practices, providing an illusion of control in hospice home care. this study stresses that getting total control of end-of-life care is impossible. people need to attune to the situation to change their care practices. therefore, i suggest more specific hospice home care should be promoted. it is essential to scrutinize the patients’ social position to give people individualized care rather than using a homogenous category of “end-of-life patient.” this study focuses on family carers’ care practices for end-of-life patients at home. the standpoint of feminist technoscience helps us to scrutinize the shady side of “care,” which is full of undervalued invisible work and heartbreaking affection. the medicalization of death raises the standard of care at the end of life that the family carers need to meticulously make the home a caring place, practice professional care, and coordinate caring procedures. family caregivers often have to adopt professional care practices, such as using complex technical machines, completing high-skill care tasks, and anticipating prognostication of unpredictable illnesses. therefore, recognizing the contributions of laypeople who engage in professional-level work to maintain the patient’s end-of-life quality at home is essential. this study contributes to the literature in four ways. it begins by highlighting the various invisible tasks in hospice care to ensure a good death. second, it reveals the discrepancy between hospice care’s aim and reality. if we emphasize patients’ choice of end-of-life care too much, we risk ignoring the complexity and uncertainty of care practice and the broader social contexts in which it takes place. third, the case of hospice home care enriches our understanding of the temporal dimension within the logic of care, shedding light on how family caregivers and medical teams navigate the evolving dynamics to orchestrate death trajectories. lastly, the study reveals the multiple implications of “home” in end-of-life care. the hospice care network emphasizes that the home is the most appropriate place to care for terminal patients because of the social significance of home and family. nevertheless, it overlooks care related to social relationships and physical locations that might generate or fail to generate care.   acknowledgments i want to extend my sincere appreciation to the respondents for their valuable time and thoughtful insights. my heartfelt thanks go to the reviewers and editors for their invaluable feedback, which significantly enhanced the quality of the manuscript. special recognition is owed to professors caitlin d. wylie and coleen m. carrigan for their dedicated efforts in organizing the special issue and facilitating the writing workshop. i am deeply grateful to professor chia-ling wu for her insightful feedback and unwavering support. lastly, i would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance provided by the writing groups throughout my ph.d. journey. notes 1 as an imported framework of care practices from europe and north america, hospice care redefined the concept of culturally appropriate deaths in taiwan. in the 1990s, the hospice care profession was established in taiwan by a group of medical professionals trained in the uk or the us (lai and su 1997). the hospice care network gradually established norms, cultural cognition, and regulations regarding what constitutes a good death and how it should be achieved.   2 the national health insurance system and regulations create advocacy for end-of-life home care. in taiwan, national health insurance was first established in 1996. taiwan’s national health insurance coverage rate is almost 99 percent (wu, majeed, and kuo 2010). to reduce the national health insurance expenditure on ineffective curative medical treatment for end-of-life patients, the taiwanese government tried to promote hospice care in 1996 (chao 2000). palliative care has been gradually added to national health insurance coverage. in 1996 the national health insurance bureau included hospice home care in a health insurance trial plan. after this pilot program gradually stabilized, in 2006, hospice home care and in-hospital hospice care were officially included in the national health insurance benefit package.   3 the names of interviewees and institutions i 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2000. “meanings of dying at home for chinese patients in taiwan with terminal cancer: a literature review.” cancer nursing 23 (5): 367–70. https://doi.org/10.1097/00002820-200010000-00007. timmermans, stefan. 2005. “death brokering: constructing culturally appropriate deaths.” sociology of health & illness 27 (7): 993–1013. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2005.00467.x. timmermans, stefan, and iddo tavory. 2022. data analysis in qualitative research: theorizing with abductive analysis. chicago: university of chicago press. tronto, joan c. 1993. moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care. london: psychology press. ueng, ruey-shiuan, su-hsuan hsu, shiang-lien hung, hsu-hua liu, pei-hsuan lee, yu-chien hung, chun-fu lai, chia-jen liu, sheng-jean huang, and chih-yuan shih. 2013. “is it possible for people to die peacefully at home in taiwan?: home death issues of terminal patients.” taiwan journal of hospice palliative care 18 (3): 320–29. https://doi.org/10.6537/tjhpc.2013.18(3).6. wu, tai-yin, azeem majeed, and ken n. kuo. 2010. “an overview of the healthcare system in taiwan.” london journal of primary care 3 (2): 115–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/17571472.2010.11493315.     author bio anne-chie wang is currently a postdoctoral research associate at academia sinica, institute of sociology. her research focuses on the sociology of health and illness, science and technology studies, death and dying, and caring practices.   valentine, kylie. 2025. “staying with the sign.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kylie valentine, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license staying with the sign kylie valentine university of new south wales, sydney k.valentine@unsw.edu.au keywords governance, m. murphy, foucault, categories, inequalities let’s recall two origin stories of population and governance. m. murphy’s economization of life (2017) proceeds from the nineteenth century and malthus’s writing on overpopulation. foucault’s 1977–1978 collège de france lectures published in english as security, territory, population (2007) start from the physiocrats’ writing on grain markets in the eighteenth century. for both, “population” is tied to the governance of life. murphy’s focus is on the transformation of populations into racialized, economized entities to be governed and managed. foucault’s focus is on the emergence of populations as a process of governance. for murphy, overpopulation is the vehicle for the economization of life. for foucault, the very idea of population is generated through the economization of life. murphy’s analysis of “overpopulation” shows that it is always constituted through problematizations of the global south. policy concerns about environmental sustainability and security are always concerns about the who, where, and how of overpopulation. my own policy research, in health and human services, means i am more familiar with different problematizations—namely, the constitution of people as “populations” in the global north. these are populations described in longitudinal cohort studies and statistical datasets of health, in articles in economics and policy journals: aging populations, urban populations, drug-using populations, unemployed, and at-risk populations. such designations have effects: creating people as belonging to a particular population creates them as statistically legible and objects of enumeration and surveillance. they become, as ruha benjamin (2018) notes in recognizing herself in this literature, populations as problems. http://k.valentine@unsw.edu.au/ roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) kylie valentine, 2025 2 what does it mean when people are described as populations, rather than as people or communities? foucault’s lectures illustrate the co-constitutions of populations with economics, bio-informatics, and statistics, by reference to famines and grain markets, and to plagues and vaccines. these examples demonstrate that “populations” are distinct objects of concern, separate from “people,” where the latter are pertinent only in their relation to the former. that is, creating populations is a way of organizing people into a relationship with a category. this categorizing then brings about new understandings of risk and hazard and has implications for government interventions. we can think here about the targeting of programs to those in “priority” or “vulnerable” populations; and administrative differentiations of illness from disability determining if people are “unemployed” or “not in the labor market,” with implications for the welfare payments they receive and scrutiny to which they are subject (hummell et al. 2025). we can also find contemporary instances of the constitution of new populations. covid-19 in australia, for example, brought into being new governance regimes through the category of “areas of concern,” and so created postcode-based populations. areas of concern made the people who lived in those areas subject to new rules, new scrutiny, new designations of hazard. a category of people were brought into being, and new subpopulations of covid19 risk and management were calculated (pienaar et al. 2024). covid-19 also amplified social concerns about the connections between psychiatric distress and changing forms of technology and sociality. these connections have produced new categories of people, including the “anxious generation” (davies 2025), part of the population most affected by the “loneliness epidemic,” with needs demanding policy interventions, such as social media bans and new youth mental health agencies. at least some of these concerns are animated by statistical evidence pointing to apparent population decline in wellbeing and achievement over time, recalling earlier eugenic concerns about population health and degeneration (meloni 2016). all this suggests that the concept of population does some heavy lifting in creating and governing the worlds we have, and not just in its most familiar and undifferentiated use in discussing crisis (“overpopulation”). derrida ([1967] 2005) famously wrote that we cannot do without the sign without also giving up critique. population may be equally indispensable to our own critiques of policy problematizations. references benjamin, ruha. 2018. “black afterlives matter: cultivating kinfulness as reproductive justice. in making kin not population: reconceiving generations, edited by adele clarke and donna haraway, 41–65. prickly paradigm press. roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) kylie valentine, 2025 3 davies, william. 2025. “another age of anxiety: psychological distress and the ‘asset economy.’” theory, culture & society, onlinefirst. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764251316403. derrida, jacques. (1967) 2005. “structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences.” in writing and difference, edited and translated by alan bass, 351– 70. university of chicago press. foucault, michel. 2007. security, territory, population: lectures at the collège de france, 1977–1978. edited by michel senellart. translated by graham burchell palgrave macmillan uk. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=6brucwaaqbaj. hummell, eloise, michele foster, kylie burns, and sue harris rimmer. 2025. “policy shifts and drifts: from intention to implementation of australia’s national disability insurance scheme.” australian journal of public administration, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8500.12689. meloni, maurizio. 2016. political biology: science and social values in human heredity from eugenics to epigenetics. springer. murphy, m. 2017. the economization of life. duke university press. pienaar, kiran, paul kelaita, and dean murphy. 2024. “covid-19 and the biopolitics of stigma in public housing: dividing practices and community boundaries in pandemic times.” health sociology review, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2024.2390019. author bio kylie valentine is at the centre for social research in health and the social policy research centre, unsw sydney. she conducts research on and about human services and health policy. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764251316403 https://books.google.com.au/books?id=6brucwaaqbaj https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8500.12689 https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2024.2390019 staying with the sign keywords references author bio keilty, patrick, m. murphy, banu subramaniam, irina aristarkhova, and kiran pienaar. 2025. “reflections on catalyst’s legacy and future: patrick keilty, m. murphy, and banu subramaniam with irina aristarkhova and kiran pienaar.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–16. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © patrick keilty, m. murphy, banu subramaniam, irina aristarkhova, and kiran pienaar. 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license reflections on catalyst’s legacy and future: patrick keilty, m. murphy, and banu subramaniam in conversation with irina aristarkhova and kiran pienaar patrick keilty university of toronto p.keilty@utoronto.ca m. murphy university of toronto michelle.murphy@utoronto.ca banu subramaniam wellesley college bs108@wellesley.edu irina aristarkhova university of michigan airina@umich.edu kiran pienaar deakin university kiran.pienaar@deakin.edu.au abstract to mark the ten-year anniversary of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, former and current editors reflect on the journal's origins, its contributions to feminist technoscience, and their aspirations for catalyst in the next ten years and beyond. the discussion was recorded on zoom, transcribed verbatim and edited for clarity. presented in the original conversation format, the piece offers insights into the rich histories and intellectual legacies that have shaped catalyst, and the feminist ethos that underpins the journal's scholarship and editorial practices. mailto:p.keilty@utoronto.ca mailto:michelle.murphy@utoronto.ca mailto:bs108@wellesley.edu mailto:airina@umich.edu mailto:kiran.pienaar@deakin.edu.au tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 2 keywords feminist technoscience, catalyst, feminist ethos, editorial practices kiran pienaar (kp): maybe we could start with an overarching question. what are your thoughts on the key contributions of catalyst to the interdisciplinary field of technoscience? banu subramaniam (bs): i think for many of us, we were working to fill a void. so many of us had tried to publish in mainstream journals, both sts [science and technology studies] and disciplinary journals. our conclusion was often that they didn’t get it. when our work was accepted, the reviews and editors often asked for edits that took out the more radical parts of our work—especially those that centered gender, race, and sexuality. how do we find a place to center intersectional feminist work in sts? i think that was this void that we hoped we were filling. in hindsight, it seems clearly we were. i remember towards the end of our term, when murphy, i think you did that, surveyed the work that we had published in the journal, the evidence showed that we had indeed filled that void. there was work out there that could not find a home and catalyst opened up that space. it was so clear that people were looking for both a journal but also the reviewers who understood what they were doing. patrick keilty (pk): yeah. m. murphy (mm): i agree with banu. the beginning of imagining catalyst was, in part, about thinking how difficult it was to get published, particularly, always having that annoying “reviewer number two.” some of us were in science studies or history science programs, but most of us were not. we were distributed in so many different disciplines and felt like we needed to build something intergenerational that would help all our colleagues get tenure and have a place to publish with support. so it was not only having a journal where you could have reviewers who understood you. you also might have an editorial approach that would have a kind of mentoring and supportive approach. feminist science studies might even be an inadequate name for catalyst. it’s more like a feminist, queer, anti-colonial, anti-racist critical science studies. it’s this kind of expansive knot. we were also supporting people who might be, on the one hand, coming from physics and trying to do feminist or queer work. on the other hand, they might be coming from a particular discipline that does an art practice as opposed to a scientific training. what does it mean to create a journal that could hold all of this in a supportive way to make our fantasy field? this was the idea behind the journal. then, of course, we also had this idea of “we don’t want a paywall and we can do it ourselves.” thinking with banu’s point about hindsight, tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 3 that decision is really challenging. it’s really challenging to make a long-standing journal without a paywall and thus without a source of steady funding, or without a managing editor team being supported by an association. the fact that we have catalyst turning ten years old in this format is really a testament to something beautiful in the field. a testament to some kind of meaningfulness in the project of making feminist sts. bs: [jokingly] i think that decision has haunted editorial teams ever since. pk: we did get a royalty check from one of these research databases. i mean, it wasn’t for much but i remember thinking, “well, there’s a revenue stream now.” i don’t remember which one it was. it was definitely not scopus. kp: thank you for those reflections. that really echoes our experience and our sense of what the journal is and its significant place in the field. bs: the only other thing i want to add is that i said yes because of these two [patrick and murphy]. the idea that i would get to see them every week was enticing because normally we wouldn’t. and the process of working with them was so fun—both personally but also intellectually. we discussed sts content but problem-solved so much. i don’t know, i haven’t seen these two together since the journal. pk: it was a truly lovely group of people to work with, including the students we worked with. they were all fantastic. bs: who [the previous students] are faculty now. pk: yeah, who are faculty now, that’s right. not all editorial experiences are that smooth. that was really unique and nice. i think that speaks to the commitment to a shared vision and values about what editorial work should look like. i mean, i really appreciated the generosity to the authors and the constructive feedback. the fact that reviewers wouldn’t just provide negative comments, but would actually try to make comments that improved the paper. they met the author where they were at rather than assuming that the author should always be speaking on their terms. i think that made for a better journal and made for better scholarship. kp: yeah, absolutely. that’s something that i certainly think is really distinctive about catalyst. i wonder if you could speak a bit [about that]. given that we have this aim of developmental editing and careful, constructive, generous critique for scholars, particularly perhaps, early career scholars or postgraduate students who are thinking of submitting to catalyst for the first time. what advice would you give them? mm: well, first of all, i’d say, “do it.” [nods and words of agreement from the other speakers.] sometimes you get this advice as an emerging scholar or newer scholar suggesting you really have to try to fit yourself to a journal. in catalyst, you can tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 4 have so many genres of work, what you have to do is not fit a genre but join a conversation, a citational cluster or a scholarly cluster. rather than try to have an assumption that feminist science studies should look a particular way, the point is to bring your heterogeneity into the collectivity. so i think that’s very invitational. bs: the other thing i felt from the beginning, and it seems true right through, there was never a canon that any of us imagined for the field where you have to cite “xyz” and if not, you’re no good. with each editorial team, they have remade it in a different way. none of us have felt possessive to say, “oh, this is all wrong.” i think it’s that capacious view of the field that is so critical for both catalyst and the field of feminist sts. it will go where it goes, you know? that’s part of the beauty of the field. kp: not trying to get people to shoehorn their work into some imagined space of what the field should look like. bs: also, the three of us may think something but it’s a different editorial team now. pk: yeah, and i actually really admire the way each of the different teams was able to hand things over and the generosity of that handoff. i think, even for us, we built in some time for handover, right? knowing that the next group was going to take it in a different direction. there was, i agree, no territorialism about that or need for it to be done our way. mm: we could make a joke and say that we were constantly inventing process. we were very feminist in that way. and then we were [discussing], “how can we write documents for each other that explain our process?” i think each team has reinvented even more processes. we’ve gotten thicker and thicker with this kind of processual commitment. i would say that was a beautiful and funny form that really shows our feminism. kp: certainly, we’ve inherited that. then when the new team comes on and they ask, “so why do you do it this way? why do you have all of these different programs and platforms?” we explain, “well, this one is a legacy, i don’t know why we have this one, but it’s all enfolded and intertwined. sometimes disentangling history and the legacy is not really easy.” yeah, you can definitely see it, because we work across multiple platforms. i think that has its advantages but it can also lead to duplication. we’re trying to streamline it so we can hand over a system that makes sense to the next team. having said that, as you were saying, murphy, it’s constantly in transformation. i think maybe that is the beauty of it. that’s what helps us sustain it. irina aristarkhova (ia): i will add back to what you were saying when describing how you started and how you worked together. in reference to what we are passing on, it’s tough in terms of resources. i think i probably talked about it at the tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 5 editorial board meeting before. in actuality, the “perceived weaknesses” of always scrambling and not having enough funding but being our fiercely independent selves, which is now under attack, is a freedom. we’re buying freedom because we don’t have money. we don’t need to scramble like the other journals who approach us, like many do, with questions like, “are you going to exist if such and such funding will be taken off?” so i appreciate so much what you created and that what is transferred is transferable. working with kiran, robyn [lee], and the rest of the team is what we signed up for: to do this work. this is part of the whole journey and i’m so grateful that at this moment, it’s almost like one of those buddhist fables, right? you think you are in trouble but actually this very trouble will become your salvation. we are living in this moment and recognizing it. it’s particularly pertinent to our conversation now with those methodologies and those intersectional feminist choices. bs: i remember there was a moment when we moved platforms and we had to go individually through articles and move them across platforms. we just made an online party out of it. we all got on a zoom call and did it together, which made it so much more joyous. i’m no longer on the larger board that meets regularly, but anytime catalyst asks me to review something, i will always say yes. so there is that commitment to the field and the journal, in part because of the people who run it and the politics that has stayed throughout, which is rare for a journal. pk: i’d forgotten about that migration. there were other parties. we had document parties and migration parties. kp: i love that. i love the sense of play and fun. doing it in community is also distinctive and a refreshing change from the neoliberal imperatives of the academy. instead, to hold each other up and see how we can support each other. how can we make this endeavor that we’re all so committed to fun? i think that’s beautiful. mm: it’s very feminist science studies in the way that you’re also learning about programming and you’re making data sets or you’re documenting technical practice as well as thinking about intellectual editorial visions. catalyst has that “doing” side of feminist science studies or critical science studies where the doing is supposed to somehow reflect our political commitments. pk: i was just going to extend banu’s comment about the platform transfer. i think there was also an upgrade to the platform we were using, which, i think, moved around where they used to be and it was in a different place. so there was this constant process of having to relearn. mm: the journal is still at the u of t’s [university of toronto] library, who hosts this kind of open-source journal. so that's where it is physically even if it seems like it’s in the cloud. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 6 pk: yes, it’s on servers and i think they’re technically in kingston, ontario, but yes, they are on u of t servers. kp: oh, wow! we’ve inherited that legacy and it lives on, that’s amazing. can you talk to us a bit more about the challenges you faced in wanting the journal to be open access and as you were mentioning, patrick, the challenges in making it searchable? how did you overcome the challenges? pk: i mean, i just cold emailed these really important databases. i also didn’t realize how many middlemen there were between the library catalog and the searchable databases. companies like refworks would help to create some of the metadata that allowed the interoperability of these systems. there were a lot of emails exchanged and a lot of forms filled out incorrectly and then refilled out again. we were very lucky at the university of toronto to have librarians helping us throughout the process. they were really wonderful, solicitous, and they got back to us really quickly. they would walk us through these different processes. you had to supply some of the scholarly databases and you had to supply them with a lot of information about yourself. they really wanted to verify that you were credible before they would include you in their database. at the end of the day, their database is a for-profit platform. it’s more profitable to them if they include more scholarly journals. it’s not like they didn’t want us to be part of it, but there was a little bit of gatekeeping in terms of credentialing that we had to overcome. mm: a big, related challenge was coming together and trying to find our resources every year. seeing who can find an ra [research assistant] or hitting up 4s [society for social studies of science] to see if they’ll give us a little bit of money. it’s this weird feeling. on the one hand, we could say feminist science studies has been long at the core of science studies and 4s by looking at its presidents or the importance of donna haraway, [susan] leigh star, and so many others. at the same time, catalyst couldn’t quite get in enough to be one of their main official journals. we eventually got a “stamp of the logo,” but the journal is both in and out of 4s. we were getting a little bit of support, but not necessarily the kind of support that you’d dream of. planning catalyst each year was a lot of “how can we connect senior scholars and people with richer universities with other universities that don’t have resources to put together a team based on this landscape of inequity?” folks did a pretty good job of that over the years. that was a big part of trying to make catalyst a space of, we could say, “freedom” in some ways. untethered to a discipline. it doesn’t have to be accountable to science studies proper and it can be international and so forth. still, when those resources don’t come through, someone’s staying up late at night getting it done, right? bs: this is one of the things that worries me because at each stage this has to continue on. at some point people might say, “this is too much work, let’s do something else with it [catalyst].” it would lose the politics that has kept it alive all tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 7 this time. it’s something that worries me because it is remade each time with new labor and new commitments. mm: the journal is riding a different moment of feminist, anti-colonial, solidaristic, critical but also utopian politics about science and technology studies. where is such a journal supposed to live? which jurisdictions end up being able to put into that? i think, even in the scope of ten years it has shifted. we have a lot more people who are coming from australia, more involvement from europe, and involvement from latin america. this is its own interesting topography. bs: it seems like there is a core belief that has held so far and i hope it will hold. it was really important for all of us to let go of the journal and our visions and trust that with new teams, new minds and new imaginations will take it to interesting places, and they have. kp: certainly, that’s been my experience with the handover. laura [foster] was so supportive in handing over the reins and supporting us, without saying, “you need to follow this set of practices.” i just really appreciated the light touch that we had in terms of editorial direction and guidance without trying to steer us. giving us the remit to say, you can now chart your agenda and your three-year term. i think you’re right to say that there’s something in that support and having a really good handover with the previous editorial team also stepping back and allowing the new team, with their new ideas, to take things forward in ways they may not have imagined that are unfolding iteratively. mm: another wonderful feature of the journal is reflected in its weird structure where it has a “special section” that’s edited by a cluster of people outside of the core editorial team. then you have the running “individually submitted” zone of the work that people are doing individually. so even in an issue, the editors have to let go because there’s another part inside that’s edited by people on the outside. i think that’s really lovely. bs: [jokingly] sometimes they only let go so much. ia: [jokingly] it’s a gentle let go. mm: [jokingly] let go, but be on time. [laughter] ia: i want to mention what patrick spoke about earlier [in relation to making catalyst searchable in library catalogs and databases]. we are considering, as you know, [applying for catalyst to be included on] the web of science [a bibliographic database of scholarly articles from peer-reviewed journals worldwide, which provides tools for search, citation analysis and bibliometrics]. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 8 robyn [lee] spoke to the librarian from the university of alberta in edmonton, thane chambers, who is helping us with that. it’s wonderful to hear this history before that. you are right, that it’s all about what kind of project it would be in terms of finding time to present it to them. i also really appreciate this lateral approach. robyn went and spoke to a librarian and they got excited and said, “look, your journal would have no problem, after already running for a decade.” a few months ago, i actually had the chance to sit down with mara [mills, former catalyst editor] in new york and hear some of those stories about how the special sections came about. when mara and david [serlin, former catalyst editor] said, “okay, we can’t do it. let’s think about the way in which we can just find a solution that would still be serving catalyst’s ethos.” it’s amazing. bs: ultimately, besides that, it was the copyeditor’s money that also drove it. that was the only thing that you really needed a sizable amount and if things became too large, the cost of copyediting became too large. i don’t know if this is still true? kp: it’s still true: irina reminds us that authors need to at least try and stick to the length requirements; otherwise, it overshoots our copyediting budget. we can allow some leeway but not much. ia: sometimes it’s the other way around; like, this time we had a few more people contribute and we thought, “okay, these funds need to be spent. robyn, what were you saying? how many words do they have? don’t tell them to cut it because we can do that.” it’s kind of an iterative process, as my designer colleagues say. kp: you’ve touched on this, but i wonder if you could comment further. given the climate in the united states at the moment, but also the climate across the world, what do you see as pressing concerns for the journal to address in the future? pk: well, i was going to joke it’s a good thing catalyst is on a canadian server. bs: it’s a global audience so, yes, we can talk about parochialism and regression in the united states but the field is bigger than the us, which is what’s lovely about catalyst, and it has been true all the way through to who has contributed to it. we will get through this here, but the field will always be beyond it, i think, except to mark the history and analyze what’s going on, which is very interesting. kp: and much needed. mm: i mean, my fantasy is that catalyst would remain radically open to both critical thought but also genre forms. what are the genres and even the forms that are the most pressing? critical sciences, critical feminism, trans, queer, antiracist, anti-colonial, indigenous science studies, what is that going to look like? when times are tough, it can be tempting to forget that you do need to dream tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 9 and keep up the project of constituting science and technology otherwise. i would like there to still be this visionary orientation. you need all the critical work in the context of the united states. and it is also a moment of “radical dreaming,” of other ways of doing that people step out of other traditions. i think catalyst is a space where that could happen. for example, when we started, [deboleena] roy and banu [subramaniam] were the two saying we must hold space for scientists to bring forth political struggle and epistemological struggle in the journal. it can be a space where people are trying to manifest science otherwise, tech otherwise, under political duress, and in struggle. bs: this is very us-centric, but there’s a part of me that always thinks of which pieces of catalyst to republish with redactions of all of trump’s banned words or to use other words instead of that. so we get more genitally and, you know, use actual organs instead of words like gender and sex. smooth over the details to be something raunchy, you know? mm: [jokingly] something even more raunchy than the banned words. bs: exactly! kp: you’re giving us great ideas. i love your ideas and that incredible vision. did you want to chime in, patrick? pk: no, i think that’s the perfect place. i mean, yeah, that seems perfect for me. i’ll just echo that and say i would love to see catalyst become sexy. i mean, it already is sexy, but maybe sexier. ia: yeah, i think just to add something again, what you are saying is so inspirational. both, in terms of experimenting with form and having citizen science or actual scientists come to us. it continues to happen, like the march 2025 issue was pretty experimental in many ways, and one of the articles talks about effective contraception work in argentina. i already sent that article to so many people and i’m like, “there is an article about the joy of abortion!” i want everyone to read that [sense of] embodiment and its community building through this work, as joyful. that type of work inspires us, for sure. kp: yeah, i think one of the joys of catalyst, for me, is that we get some interesting submissions. then among the editorial team, we’re like, “this is a new genre, but yes, we can accommodate it.” sometimes, it’s author driven—they’ve come up with a format, maybe it’s a short novel reflecting on feminist sts, or whatever it is. they’ve come up with something innovative and the great thing about catalyst is we have space to accommodate that. we’re not answerable to a publisher, we’re not answerable to the imperatives, or to external imperatives that are pushing us in particular directions. we’re like, “well, that’s a great innovation, why don’t we include that?” it’s that capaciousness that sustains the tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 10 journal and keeps it lively and fresh. if there was one topic or theme that you’d like to see featured in a catalyst special section that we haven’t yet featured, what would it be? bs: [jokingly] i think it’s like, “looking for a donor, a feminist donor.” i mean, i just think that if people gave no strings attached, what would be possible? each journal is sometimes culled or pieces could be longer. mm: you’re so funny; i’m too serious on this. i would like to see a special section on indigenous/palestinian science and technology studies, that has a strong response to genocide. i’m drawing on a lot of the beautiful, indigenous palestinian thinking, but i think you could go broader than that, too. you could bring in feminist sts people from bangladesh and other places that have been wrestling ongoingly with genocide now and in the recent past. i think something like that would be really powerful, important, and transnational but also speak to the united states. bs: i would also love more language translational work. so, for example, something happened in bangladesh; they produced an issue, and then it got translated in all kinds of languages, but it kept the authenticity of the languages, like bengali. i think that would be cool if you can imagine: centered in different places. mm: the last issue kind of had some inspiration of that so it kind of sparks the imagination for thinking about that. pk: a special section called “works in translation” or something. kp: yeah, that’s actually a great idea because this last issue was in spanish and english, and it’s the first bilingual issue. the guest editors had a statement about how they positioned it as a “pocho linguistic third space” because it wasn’t quite completely bilingual, and it included some terms they opted not to translate. in their introduction to the issue they gave an explanation of how they had come to their particular place in relation to the two languages. i think that was really novel and we wanted to create space for that. bs: i would also love more space for short films and videos because i find that students are better visual readers than textual readers these days. since we are an online journal, opening up more space for more than images, for example, short films. ia: yeah, i think, deboleena mentioned that as well for multimedia content. i believe that there’s some kind of ojs [open journal systems] challenge, submitting that or hosting it on the server, but we certainly can do it if people host it. it [would involve creating] a link to the visual images. with translation, i wonder whether we can pick it up, kiran, in our discussions because there is specific language [in the journal guidelines] about only original and unpublished work https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2901 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/44601 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 11 being published. there might be some conversation about that because we’ve certainly had interest from people who, let's say, have both published work, but also [produced it] in a different format. we had someone who did a bbc audio [recording]. we had to turn it down because it was already a text which was read and it was not original from catalyst’s point of view. you’re giving us ideas; what are the ways in which we can present it or link to it and benefit from it, without necessarily substituting this idea, that it would be the original work? bs: even a special section of all videos with someone who did films to curate that. it would be interesting. kp: yeah, the multimedia aspect, i think, is definitely a fun one to explore, and would make it really engaging. deboleena [roy] also had some great ideas for that. it’s nice to see that there’s actually quite a lot of convergence in what different teams are saying. what is your vision or aspiration, then, for catalyst in the next ten years and beyond? you’ve touched on it, but if you’d like to expand a bit more with reflections on what you’d like to see? pk: i’d like it to expand beyond where it already has geographically. it’d be great to have more african scholars and more scholars from asia. mm: i am excited by how catalyst can bring things that seem, in part, like they might be incommensurate, into profound contact with one another. i think that would be a huge achievement. bs: i’m hearing so many stories of how people use catalyst in the classroom and in other places. angie willie, my colleague at university of massachusetts, amherst, taught a whole course with only catalyst articles. she went issue by issue. it was entirely a catalyst course. she said it was fantastic. to make room for people teaching catalyst, using catalyst, because we all teach it, but how do you teach it? to make room for how to read, how to reinterpret, that would be cool. that’s a huge order beyond publishing a journal each time. kp: banu, i don’t know if you saw xan’s [chacko] call? xan has put out a call for this issue, asking people to share their reflections on how they’re using catalyst for teaching. we might pick your brain for the name of that colleague again. bs: what i would love is something more organic, which is not necessarily part of the journal, but a forum, where people can post things. it’s not just the journal. publishing the journal is what catalyst does, and in a way, it limits what we do and if there’s a way to expand that, to more organic forms of putting posts or ideas. kp: oh, i got you okay, so that people are contributing in dynamic ways. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 12 mm: this is like the network in your book. was it the “chirpnet?” what was it called again? yeah, that’s like, you want a catalyst “chirpnet.” kp: tell us a bit about the “chirpnet” just for context. bs: yeah, the idea was not quite twitter, but a version of it. it was an online forum where kids across the world could talk to each other and share ideas. mm: though speculative stories about chirpnet, banu made an epistemic otherwise that was in between the chapters in her book. bs: but, you know, the current moment in the united states also does cause worry about that kind of complete openness. it has to be moderated and someone has to read what’s being posted. mm: [jokingly] yeah, the dream of social media has kind of evaporated. kp: it’s become a bit of a dystopia. bs: there might be ways in which the core group could put out a call for someone who wants to moderate. so i also would love catalyst to do an interview with people who publish books, or some kind of book forum with them. to highlight books in the field because we all teach these books. it would be nice to have something to show students who this person is, what their vision was, and a few people in the field speaking to it. mm: you mean not like a new book that’s just been book reviewed, but like a book that lots of people are thinking about that might not even be new? interesting. one million ideas! pk: building on banu’s idea about how to teach catalyst, i could see a section on pedagogical tips for teaching feminist science and tech studies generally. mm: lovely idea, patrick! we talked about this because lots of the work that feminist scientist people do is often pedagogical. we create beautiful assignments beyond just syllabi. how can we publish and share these kinds of pedagogical inventions and then also support people getting tenure by validating that we actually value pedagogical invention in addition to research invention? bs: sometimes people put so much theoretical thought into curating a syllabus. kp: i really like that idea because one of the challenges we have with early career scholars, certainly in australia, there are institutional imperatives to publish in a ranked journal. a lot of the early career scholars who are encouraged to submit to catalyst say, “the journal’s not ranked. it won’t be institutionally legible in terms tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 13 of my application for tenure or my job applications, and i’m precarious so i need to make a call that’s strategic.” so maybe this is an intervention that also addresses that concern in relation to pedagogy. mm: that is important. this makes me think about how one of my favorite issues was the crip technoscience issue. it was excellent, and one of the reasons why was, in addition to all the awesome scholarship, it had all these offerings by people who were coming out of grassroot, crip technoscience knowledge and practices. yes, a hope for catalyst is that you can build it to support the need for a ranked journal, while also wanting it to hold the incredible contribution of people who aren’t in academia that contribute to sts. that was one of the premises catalyst did a really good job with. kp: yeah, and it’s holding both and not compromising. if you go the route of ranking and the neoliberal demands, then there’s a loss entailed in that. having that space for being experimental, that i think is so unique to catalyst and allowing space for diverse, shapeshifting genres. ia: yeah, there’s no reason not to do both, kind of, strategically. i feel catalyst already has been doing both, which is great. for example, including the network and then people write letters for each other, validating these forms, and this experimentation. there was one journal i submitted once that had a pedagogical, more curriculum-built essay with someone else which was in the form of an interview talking about feminist politics. i found a journal that had a curriculum section and it was online and open source. i’m just thinking whether it’s another thing we can discuss, kiran, potentially having one more submission format. bs: also, a way to reframe it because a lot of traditional disciplines see pedagogy as, “oh, that’s teaching.” so how do you reframe it as a real intellectual project? which is what it is, for many people who do it, not the old fogies who are teaching what they taught twenty years ago! so thinking how to reframe it in a way that brings the feminist sts and the ways in which we approach these questions. the same essay can be curated in different ways to do very different things. kp: this is what i love about catalyst is it’s thinking outside of the box! it’s like the box is broken now let’s dispense with it and find new ways to do it. bs: like put it in an epistemology category, you know? not pedagogy. kp: not pedagogy. ia: you know what’s funny? i already wrote down epistemologies, forms, and pedagogy. bs: yeah, but on the other hand, i don’t want to valorize epistemology as more important than pedagogy. that’s our project also to highlight. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2199 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 14 ia: practice is another good one. i love it. kp: murphy, did you want to say something? you looked like you wanted to say something. mm: i was just thinking this conversation is very feminist science studies. if we think about what’s cool about this field, it does have at its center this profound curiosity across not just disciplines but practice, epistemology, ontology, and the people who are attracted to it are fabulous folks with all of these inventive ideas. catalyst is this node in an expansive creative network. i’m sure, if we got five more people on this call, we’d come up with five more awesome formats, you know? pk: yeah, well, i think that’s the benefit of having co-editors, right? instead of just a single lead editor. you’re always bouncing ideas off each other, verifying what you think and getting new perspectives. bs: even the special section goes beyond the team to the larger group. kp: yeah, absolutely, it gives an opportunity for new voices, often early career starters who may not have had experience doing editorial work. i think our role is also to support them but without steering. finding that balance is like gently shepherding. i’m conscious of the time, so i’ll just give you an opportunity to add anything that we haven’t covered. any final reflections before we close? bs: i just miss murphy and patrick and not being able to talk to them each week. that’s all i’ll say. kp: [jokingly] i think we should have another interview to bring you all together. i’m glad that this was an opportunity to see your friends. bs: that’s on us, but, you know, it’s so good to see them. pk: it’s really good to see you, banu. it’s always good to see you. mm: yeah, agreed. pk: and i see murphy. mm: we get together and have dinner and different things. patrick’s an amazing cook. bs: oh, is that right? mm: yes, really outstanding. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 15 bs: next time i come! pk: yes! banu, i would love to cook for you. mm: patrick’s comment that there is a joyful side that is possible to cultivate even in these most disconcerting and pessimistic times is a good place to end. how precious that is, even in academia at large. if catalyst can keep doing that, how beautiful. bs: indeed, because i feel we wrestled with a lot, but it was never with rancor. it was always with support. it was always trying to be imaginative and sometimes it was saying, “okay, this can’t be done and that’s okay.” i think that was really unique, in terms of working. pk: yeah, i agree, it was unique. it was really lovely. kp: i think we’ve continued in that spirit. from my perspective, catalyst is such a joyful, supportive space, and it’s nourishing in so many ways that i hadn’t anticipated. i can’t speak for everyone else, but from my perspective on the editorial team, we’re certainly continuing that legacy. ia: [jokingly] yeah, i’ll speak for everyone else to say that, yes, it’s extremely joyful. i will say that this is something that laura [foster] mentioned; she said, “it will be a ton of work. it’s difficult to do this, but then it’s the best thing i’ve ever done.” now especially, it’s just so meaningful and nourishing. i’m like, if i can’t do anything but catalyst, [providing a platform for] junior faculty, and students to support the kind of stuff we teach and we publish, it’s like, “okay, i don’t need to. this is activism, as far as i’m concerned.” that feels really, really good, so thank you for that space. kp: thank you all so much for your time. bs: thank you for doing this. it’s such a great idea. kp: it’s an absolute pleasure. i’m glad that you decided not to do it in written form so that we could actually talk. it’s really lovely to meet you all as well. pk: yeah, me too. that was murphy changing my mind. at first, i was like, i guess we’ll write, right? then murphy was like, “let’s do it by call.” so i’m glad. ia: that’s so nice. thank you. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) keilty et al., 2025 16 author bios patrick keilty is associate professor in the faculty of information and cinema studies institute at the university of toronto. professor keilty’s research interests focus on the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries, adult film, and the materiality of sexual media. m. murphy is professor and canada research chair in science and technology studies and environmental data justice at the school of environment and women and gender studies institute at the university of toronto. they co-direct the technoscience research unit. banu subramaniam is chair and luella lamer professor of women’s and gender studies at wellesley college. banu is an interdisciplinary scholar, trained as an evolutionary biologist and plant scientist, who has since embraced tools from the humanities and social sciences to help shape the field of feminist science and technology studies. irina aristarkhova is professor at the stamps school of art & design and associate director of the digital studies institute at the university of michigan. she is co-editor (operations) at catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. kiran pienaar is a senior lecturer in sociology at deakin university, melbourne, australia. she is also co-editor (production and design) of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. kiran is the author of politics in the making of hiv/aids in south africa and co-editor of narcofeminisms: revisioning drug use. reflections on catalyst’s legacy and future: patrick keilty, m. murphy, and banu subramaniam in conversation with irina aristarkhova and kiran pienaar abstract keywords author bios     special section invert syrup, feminist snap: anzac biscuits and feminist resistance to imperial logics     lindsay kelley australian national university lindsay.kelley@anu.edu.au     abstract baked for anzac day in april but eaten all year, anzac biscuits memorialize the australian and new zealand army corps (anzac) participation in the gallipoli campaign during world war i. the chemical and culinary capacities of one of the biscuit's key ingredients, golden syrup, offer strategies for figuring snaps, breaks, and refusals. golden syrup catalyzes a feminist digestion of a food often perceived as culturally conservative or nationalistic. sara ahmed describes “feminist snap” as a moment of fury that confronts and changes history. snap can additionally refer to crispy batter-based desserts that often call for golden syrup. classified as an “invert syrup,” golden syrup was formulated from sugar refining waste products that were fed to pigs before being adapted for human consumption. “invert” refers to the assessment of syrups using a beam of light, which inverts its angle of rotation as fructose and glucose separate. reading the chemistry of inverting sugar alongside the feminist-led “anti-anzac” day movement of the 1980s, this paper proposes that edible everyday militarisms might be snapped, inverted, spun, and reshaped. anzac biscuits bring domestic everyday militarisms into australian and aotearoa new zealand kitchens.   keywords anzac biscuits, biscuits, invert syrup, sweetness, snap, activism     introduction anzac biscuits are simple sweet biscuits made by dissolving bicarbonate of soda into melted butter and golden syrup, then adding the foamy results to a mixture of oats, flour, desiccated coconut, and sugar. baked for anzac day in april but eaten all year, anzac biscuits commemorate the australian and new zealand army corps' (anzac) participation in the gallipoli campaign during world war i. anzac soldiers were among the first allied divisions to land on a beach near the arıburnu headlands in present-day turkey (now anzac cove) on april 25, 1915. after a series of increasingly hopeless battles, allied forces withdrew in defeat in december 1915. australia and aotearoa new zealand credit this campaign with forming a new national consciousness, despite its high casualty rate, withdrawal, and political fallout. feminist theorists sara dowse and patricia giles note, “our contribution to the survival of the british empire [is] seen, paradoxically, as our coming of age as a nation” (1996, 63). despite never having been eaten at gallipoli, anzac biscuits are closely associated with gallipoli and wwi. the chemical and culinary capacities of one of the anzac biscuit's key ingredients, golden syrup, offer strategies for figuring snaps, breaks, and refusals in a food often perceived as culturally conservative or nationalistic. feminist theorist sara ahmed (2017) describes “feminist snap” as a moment of fury that confronts and changes history by breaking bonds. snap can additionally refer to crispy batter-based desserts that often call for golden syrup. classified as “invert syrup,” referring to the assessment of syrups using a beam of polarized light, golden syrup was formulated from sugar refining waste products. the light's angle of rotation changes (inverts) as fructose and glucose separate. reading the chemistry of inverted sugar alongside feminist-led anti-anzac day protest movements of the 1980s, i ask what happens when edible everyday militarisms are bitten, snapped, inverted, spun, and reshaped. i locate feminist resistance to imperial violence and global war in biochemical processes of metabolism and digestion. the integrative and transformational imperatives of digestion and metabolism make disavowal, avoidance, utopian visions of a world without war unsustainable positions. when an unremarkable yet popular and significant food such as the anzac biscuit snaps, the resulting fissures allow feminist resistance to empire-sustaining violence to infiltrate and invert kitchens, stomachs, and worlds. this essay sits within a larger project about biscuits that centers baking and tasting biscuits linked to military histories in groups (kelley 2022b). the project's “participatory taste workshops” utilize a taste-based methodology derived from practice-led participatory art research. such research “adapts the tenets of the creative arts in order to address social research questions in holistic and engaged ways in which theory and practice are intertwined” (leavy 2015, 4). baking and eating inform and cannot be untangled from theoretical and historical inquiry. natalie loveless describes “research-creational practices that nurture our capacities not only to reflect and analyze but to act and intervene,” and produce works that are “not just on but as” (2019, 101). participatory formats reinforce that research on taste must use taste as its basis. to do this, i combine tasting with conversation about food preparation, historical transformation, recipe variations, and personal reflections. this essay focuses on feminist anti-anzac activisms with antiracist and anticolonial aspirations. the efficacies and failures of these organizing efforts sit in tension with differences between feminist praxis and mythologized anzac identities. the practice-led context of the larger project matters to, first, my analysis of activist praxis, including baking anti-anzac biscuits, and, second, my attention to the chemistry and taste profile of one of the biscuit's key ingredients, golden syrup. the practice of baking anzac biscuits shapes connections between affective experiences of eating and the weighty political significance of these foods. when i conducted an anzac biscuit morning tea at the new zealand national army museum te mata toa, participants told me that they regularly bake anzac biscuits and send them overseas to deployed family members. as i write, the australian department of defence (2021) lists twenty active operations in as many locations, from afghanistan to south korea to israel. i am confident that anzac biscuits circulate in every one of these places. what are anzac biscuits? anzac biscuits are prepared from what appears to be a simple recipe that uses ingredients many people have on hand. bicarbonate of soda dissolves into melted butter and golden syrup, creating an eruption of frothy foam. fold this foam into a mixture of oats, flour, desiccated coconut, and sugar, then bake. golden syrup binds the biscuits without eggs to act as a preservative, making anzac biscuits an ideal care package food. for sociologist sian supski, “the originality of anzac biscuits is the use of golden syrup”; this ingredient more than any other distinguishes anzac biscuits from possible antecedents (2006, 53). although the recipe seems simple, even skilled bakers report unexpected differences from one batch to another, making anzac biscuits an unpredictable and improvisational chemistry project. bakers attempt to manipulate the recipe to produce chewier or crunchier textures by adjusting the ratio of wet and dry ingredients or smushing the biscuits down in the middle of baking. as histories of the recipe make clear, anzac biscuits can be linked to multiple other kinds of biscuits, from scottish oatcakes (supski 2006) to parkins and similar biscuits that follow the “melting method,” an approach that benefits from golden syrup's viscosity (reynolds 2018). anzac biscuits are the result of improvisation in the kitchen, emerging from trial and error and experimentation that would be out of place in public observances of anzac day, which are tightly scripted and easily destabilized. for anthropologists tim ingold and elizabeth hallam, improvisation's generative, relational, temporal, and practical outcomes “are intrinsic to the very processes of social and cultural life,” and everyday situations, from crossing the street to maintaining a building to writing by hand, offer opportunities for creative enmeshment of practice and theory (2007, 19). even as anzac biscuits carry the weight of nation-forming narratives, their emergence from improvisational domestic spaces allows them to carry the potential for surprise, creativity, and inventiveness. the improvisational and capricious nature of the anzac biscuit baking process sits in tension with strict cultural inscriptions of the biscuits as bearers of national identity and history. legislation protects the word “anzac” and even stipulates the characteristics of a lawful anzac biscuit—never “cookie,” a word with “non-australian overtones” (australian department of veterans' affairs 2020; manatū taonga ministry for culture and heritage 2020). historian martin crotty describes the “quasi-religious status” of the anzac experience as “an almost biblical creation story for australia, a national equivalent to the book of genesis” (2008, 102). crotty recalls australian novelist peter shrubb's characterization of anzac day as “the only day of the year that had any holiness in it...the war was...the nearest thing i had, i suppose, to a myth of creation” (inglis 1999, 168). white settlers draw on biblical stories, including the exodus, “in order to reposition themselves as toilers and victims, rather than invaders or oppressors” (curthoys 2001, 131). historian ann curthoys argues that thousands of first nations servicemen in both world wars function as a “shadow” or “dangerous supplement, which lies inside the story, threatening to undo” the myths white colonizers construct (2001, 133). the disputed origin story of anzac biscuits joins this “quasi-religious” discourse, imagining (white) australian and aotearoa new zealander homemakers hearing from (white) deployed family members about the culinary horrors of gallipoli, and responding by inventing, baking, and shipping anzac biscuits. even though “anzac” and “gallipoli” were appended to diverse recipes during the war, recipes for anzac biscuits as we know them today were not published until after wwi was over (reynolds 2018). despite this discrepancy, the mythical origin story of the anzac biscuit remains firmly associated with wwi, so much so that anzac biscuits carry an imagined sensory environment of the gallipoli campaign into the present day. these imagined wwi home-front bakers defined and limited roles for women. art historian caroline speck observes that cultural production after wwi “reinforced the nation as masculine, with armed struggle in the landscape defined as the making of nation” (1996, 129). although speck does not mention anzac biscuits specifically, as supski will do a decade later with her conceptualization of the anzac biscuit as a “culinary memorial” (2006), speck's argument that women's memorials “demonstrate a negotiated form of wartime citizenship” could equally apply to the activity of baking anzac biscuits (1996, 129). adrian howe, a member of melbourne's anti-anzac day collective, reminds readers that “while returned soldiers were given a heroic status, which was enshrined in a national day of remembrance, women were given nothing” (1995, 303). during wwi, single women went overseas to serve as nurses, and the home front saw women undertaking industrial labor and other jobs usually held by men, as well as supporting troops by sending care packages to the front, the activity that supposedly created the anzac biscuit. howe qualifies this participation with 1983 anzac day sydney women against rape rally organizer rosemary pringle's assertion that in anzac mythology, “australian women...are not part of the nation. rather, we are 'part of the property they fought for'” (1995, 305). women's contributions to the armed services were increasingly acknowledged in anzac day events following protests in the late 1970s and 1980s, but anzac biscuits continue to sit comfortably within this patriarchal, colonial formation of property: the biscuits and the women who make them are natural resources to be consumed. in her argument for anzac biscuits as a “culinary memorial,” supski observes that “anzac biscuits link australians powerfully and instantly to a time and place that is regarded as the heart of australian national identity” (2006, 54). the past intrudes on the present to reveal how australians and aotearoa new zealanders invite the gallipoli campaign into their kitchens (kelley 2022a). bench tops, stoves, and ovens sustain and enforce the violence of colonial empire building. the biscuit's association with national belonging has led historian joanna cobley (2016) to call for adding “the idea of the anzac biscuit recipe” to the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) intangible cultural heritage list. cobley's case rests not on the recipe itself but on the continuing transmission of the recipe from one generation to the next, evidenced by anzac biscuits continuing to be included in care packages sent to deployed soldiers in today's war zones. anzac biscuits at home anzac biscuits emerge from home kitchens. when large manufacturers, including supermarket chains arnott's and unibic, sell anzac biscuits commercially, their mass-produced biscuits strive for a homemade appearance, eschewing the molds and complex assemblies that characterize other iconic commercial biscuits such as the tim tam or elaborately stamped and pressed shortbreads. variations in texture and irregular shapes acquire narrative force, telling the story of sending homemade biscuits to deployed soldiers. the domestic kitchen travels with the biscuit, and, in turn, anzac biscuits complicate domestic kitchens, first by troubling housework, and second by revealing how everyday militarisms are reproduced in the home and at table. how to account for the public life of domestic tasks such as anzac biscuit baking? “preservation activity,” for iris marion young, creates meaning and continuity at home by “preparing and staging commemorations and celebrations,...teaching the children the stories, practices, and celebrations that keep the particular meanings alive,...knitting together today and yesterday” (1997, 153). preservation suggests the work of preserving food, or in the case of anzac biscuits, developing a recipe that keeps well and can be stored in transit. preservation can lead to transformation. ahmed, recalling bell hooks and the “homeplace” as a site of resistance (hooks 2015), suggests that housework carries revolutionary potential: “feminist housework does not simply clean and maintain a house. feminist housework aims to transform the house, to rebuild the master's residence” (ahmed 2017, 7). if housework can be revolutionary, it must equally be, for jennifer mae hamilton, “necessarily, sweaty, embodied, difficult, durational and critical feminist labour” (2019, 19). these messy challenges of housework infuse public kitchen cultures, even and especially cultures of anzac biscuits which can be mobilized by conservative forms of nationalism (but can be mobilized in other more subversive ways, too). elsewhere i have written that through creative production, “the kitchen becomes a political space capable of effecting change and mobilizing resistance” (kelley 2016, 53). one might snap in the kitchen. anzac biscuits engage the language of “home fronts,” which feminist cultural studies scholar deborah cohler reminds us “function not only to incite nationalism in noncombatants, but also to frame violence geospatially, temporally, and politically” (2017, viii). if anzac biscuits make housework public and meaningful, they simultaneously complicate the “imperialist logic” of the home front to reveal homes and kitchens prepared for war (cohler 2017, viii). militarization might appear to be located outside the home on a public geopolitical stage, but military technologies and narratives intrude on everyday domestic actions and spaces. anastacia marx de salcedo discovers that the foods she packs in her child's lunchbox have been “designed for soldiers. almost all the foodstuffs, or the key technologies used in producing them, originated with the u.s. military in the creation of combat rations” (2015, 8). military research and development quietly support everything from food chemistry, with everyday staples containing preservatives designed for military mres (meal, ready-to-eat) to food packaging, with plastic shells and containers designed for heating joining the classic examples of tin cans and tea bags. in the case of anzac biscuits, australia and aotearoa new zealand kitchens are implicated in war efforts, past and present. supski's framing of the anzac biscuit as a “culinary memorial” reinforces how biscuits are “a potent reminder of the first world war, gallipoli and the anzac spirit” (2006, 52). anzac biscuits align with marx de salcedo's technoscientific creep; their ubiquitous presence in lunchboxes and morning tea tables extends the battlefields of wwi into the present day. housework contributes to war readiness both knowingly, as with nation-forming stories attached to anzac biscuits in australia and aotearoa new zealand, and unknowingly, as with a child's lunchbox full of undeclared combat rations. after emerging from the kitchen, everyday militarisms are eaten, digested, and metabolized. metabolism formed as a concept alongside the industrial revolution and factory manufacturing. bodies that metabolize are therefore, for sociologist hannah landecker, “industrial bodies,” because metabolism has been understood as a factory (2013, 497). even as understandings of and metaphors for metabolism change, “postindustrial metabolism...both comes after and is very materially and literally produced by industrial metabolism” (landecker 2013, 516). generational inheritance of militarized and mobilized foods such as the anzac biscuit works in a similar way. even as politics and capacities for resistance change, bodies that eat in combat-ready kitchens are and remain combat-ready bodies. invert syrup and feminist snap two meanings of snap follow: one from ahmed, the other from biscuit recipes (for example, ginger snaps). the chemical properties of golden syrup offer paths into mainstream anzac day events and the feminist-led anti-anzac day movement of the 1980s alike. i read the chemistry of invert syrups alongside anzac biscuits and ahmed's “feminist snap” to show how eating and digestion both reveal and integrate the troubling work of empire building that cannot be expunged from the home and must be lived with on an intimate everyday scale. eighteen definitions for snap as a noun, and an additional seventeen for snap as a verb appear in the oxford english dictionary. these definitions range from metal fastener to rare usages such as disregard or indifference (“i don't care a snap”) (oed 2021). the two definitions that matter to this essay sit adjacent to one another: “the act of snapping or breaking suddenly; a break or fracture” and “a small, usually round, cake or biscuit of crisp gingerbread; a ginger-snap” (oed 2021). there are honey snaps, vanilla snaps, brandy snaps, butternut snaps, and chocolate snaps (and other snaps, too). these definitions are related: ginger snaps “break or fracture” and this quality of breaking when bitten makes them snappy. ahmed defines “feminist snap” as “a breaking point”: “by snapping you are saying: i will not reproduce a world i cannot bear, a world i do not think should be borne” (2017, 187, 199). breaking off a piece from a crispy biscuit could illustrate aspects of feminist snap. the bitten off pieces cannot be smushed back together; the snap is irrevocable. yet the snap does not disavow the world. breaking from “a world i cannot bear” creates distance without denial. when a biscuit snaps while biting it, part of it ends up incorporated and eaten. many (but not all) snap biscuit recipes call for golden syrup or molasses (also an invert syrup). anzac biscuits are not precisely “snaps”: in their chewy manifestations, they do not snap at all. a crispy anzac biscuit does snap, and some bakers prioritize this quality, as with wendy hunter's variation on the anzac biscuit recipe, a recipe for “anzac wafers” promising “biscuits that are like a brandy snap” (n.d.). snapping does not define an anzac biscuit as it does a ginger snap, and not all recipes using golden syrup are snappy (for example, fudge, jellies, and cakes). even so, as the anzac biscuit's essential ingredient, the chemistry of golden syrup helps think feminist snap together with anzac biscuits and everyday militarisms in the kitchen. golden syrup, a light treacle, was created from refiner's return syrup, a dark and bitter molasses separated from sugar crystals during the process of washing raw sugar cane to create white sugar. this “mother liquor” was initially viewed as a waste product and sold as pig food. abram lyle—the lyle named on “lyle's golden syrup” tins—adapted the syrup for human consumption in the 1880s (mason 2015). during wwi, sugar rationing created a market for such substitutes. golden syrup can be made at home, although starting with white sugar, the product that generates refiner's return syrup, might seem counterintuitive. whether starting with white sugar, sugar cane, or sugar beet juice, water and heat hydrolyze the sugar's sucrose. a catalyst, such as lemon juice or cream of tartar, will speed this process along. this separation of molecules can be thought of as a snap or breaking point. as hydrolysis splits sucrose's chemical bonds into fructose and glucose, the optical rotation of the syrup changes. optical rotation refers to the angle of rotation of a beam of polarized light as it passes through a solution. a beam of light passing through a pure sucrose solution will angle to the right, clockwise. with invert syrup, the beam of light inverts and angles to the left, counterclockwise. the hydrolysis or snap creates difference and refuses purity. like the snapped biscuit, the fructose and glucose cannot be smushed back together into sucrose again. in the kitchen, sugar inversion impacts both texture and taste. golden syrup starts and stays viscous and sticky—even after years of storage, golden syrup will not crystallize. this viscousness gives baked goods longer-lasting moisture. fructose tastes sweeter than sucrose, so using golden syrup will produce a sweeter-tasting product than sugar alone. in figure 1, sucrose appears on the left. water is added. the arrow, read as “yields,” could alternatively be read as “snaps.” glucose and fructose appear on the right, their oxygen bond broken. figure 1. c12h22o11 (sucrose) + h2o (water) → c6h12o6 (glucose) + c6h12o6 (fructose). source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/inverted_sugar_syrup#/media/file:sugar-inversion.png to illustrate feminist snap, ahmed details the fractures that broke her relationship with her father. she grapples with the word “disowned,” explaining that “when my father 'disowned' me (i shouldn't use this word, because it implies previous ownership, but it does help to convey something of the significance of snapping a bond), it was partly because my queer life choices represented for him a cut-off point” (ahmed 2017, 193). ahmed challenges the essence of patriarchal relations, the father owning the daughter, the woman as property, her queer life the catalyst that ejects her from this system. even though her father had the “cut-off point,” it was ahmed who snapped: “i stopped doing the work of reconciliation because i wanted the bond to snap; i was exhausted by that bond; a bond can be a bind” (193). ahmed imagines a twig snapping. the snap may not be as sudden as it seems: “a snap would only be the beginning insofar as we did not notice the pressure on the twig” (189). ahmed links this pressure to the roots of “oppression” in “press.” resilience becomes less an admirable strength than the ability to “take it” and bear up: “if a snap seems sharp or sudden, it might be because we do not experience the slower time of bearing or of holding up; the time in which we can bear the pressure, the time it has taken for things not to break” (189). ahmed chooses the story about her father for reasons; the pressure of patriarchy has a similar cumulative effect. howe and pringle's declaration that “australian women...are not part of the nation. rather, we are 'part of the property they fought for'” resonates with ahmed's framing of owning and disowning (howe 1995, 305). ahmed's snap differs from howe and pringle's: at a familial scale, ahmed can snap and retain her antiracist and feminist politics. the positioned specificity of this snap allows her to keep feminist genealogies intact. ahmed learned about feminism from her “auntie in lahore, pakistan, a muslim woman, a muslim feminist, a brown feminist” (2017, 4). howe and pringle's statement operates within settler logics of patriarchy and white supremacy. a nation made by white settler men snaps differently than ahmed and her father: the logics that prop up the nation form bonds with settler women that recall ahmed's relationship with her father: bonds that bind. but what about first nations women who were never included in australia, immigrants who were not or were grudgingly acceptable under the white australia policy, and a host of other women, including activist women and queer women? how might their snaps compound? recalling sucrose, a homogenous substance splits into parts, and once split cannot be repaired. when faced with something bonded en masse and strongly, as nations are, snaps must build into a catalyst big enough to split something so seemingly intractable. examining indigenous, queer, and feminist challenges to anzac day, catriona elder finds the pressure that produces resilience: “if the dominant story chosen as the national story is a sanitised one, then it needs to be acknowledged that someone is bearing the pain of exclusion” (2007, 251). ahmed argues for this acknowledgment, too. her snap from her father succeeds in a way anti-anzac activisms may not succeed, but these activisms nonetheless contribute one snap among many that together build a larger movement. the chemistry of invert syrup supports this building: the “yield” arrow moves only in one direction. anti-anzac day feminist protest actions attempt to hydrolyze, cause irrevocable rupture, split the nation into more than one. in the following section, i read anti-anzac events of the 1980s as an inversion of anzac day catalyzed by feminist snap. the women organizing these events snapped under many pressures, including elder's pain of exclusion, the increasing urgency of links between war and violence against women, and the conservative conventions of anzac day itself. ahmed cuts ties with her father, and australian feminists use nonviolent protest and symbolic actions to cut ties with anzac day's sanitized celebration of nation-forming myths that regard women as property and erase both indigenous struggles against invasion and first nations participation in both world wars. anti-anzac activisms of the 1980s anzac day and its everyday militarisms pressed against feminists in australia and aotearoa new zealand until they could no longer bear it and experienced ahmed's “feminist snap.” activist groups including women against rape (war) and the melbourne anti-anzac day collective organized multiple anzac day protests in the late 1970s and early 1980s in melbourne, sydney, and canberra.1 recalling dowse and giles linking australia's coming of age with british imperial logics, the protestors' focus on sexual violence must be read within a broader context of empire building and colonial violence. historian nicoletta gullace reminds us that “the british government attempted to market figure 2. “women against rape in war lay wreaths at the stone of remembrance during the anzac day service at the australian war memorial,” peter wells (1983), photo courtesy of canberra times collection. the melbourne anti-anzac day collective sought to end anzac day as a public holiday, and links this project to sexual violence, much like the war protests in sydney and canberra. a melbourne anti-anzac day collective banner read, ”abolish anzac day. no more silence about sexual violence“ (twomey 2013, 99). sexual violence and ending anzac day were not connected for everyone involved, and, indeed, a range of issues suggest themselves when contemplating problems with anzac day, including the day's failure to commemorate first nations resistance to colonial invasion. i cannot ascertain the race or class or gender of people whose names and sometimes faces are all that is available to me via archival source material. however, the majority of feminist protestors and feminist theorists reflecting on the events have access to university education or university spaces, and do not identify themselves as first nations people. these nested positions likely contributed to the choice to ”be informed not by a reading of australian history but rather by the analyses of the american radical feminists susan brownmiller and mary daly,“ who are themselves non-indigenous (howe 1995, 305). sydney protestor meredith burgmann remembers being against anzac day before the question of sexual violence was raised: ”our opposition to anzac day was not specifically about rape in war. speaking for myself, i hadn't really thought about the issue previously“ (2014, 117). this disconnect may be why burgmann recalls that ”we didn't properly set out our issues about anzac day“; but nevertheless, ”in retrospect, we were amazingly intrepid and actually quite brave“ (2014, 121). howe hints at some of what ”properly setting out our issues about anzac day“ might look like when she explains that ”there is a still greater risk facing those feminists who want to reclaim anzac day as a day of mourning but who are oblivious of the historical significance of anzac day for women: it is the risk of being incorporated into a ritual celebrating a tradition that women had no part in making“ (1995, 307-8). by choosing protest actions that reiterate established practices of mourning, the women risked absorption into existing patriotic norms, and, paradoxically, may have contributed to a subsequent resurgence of anzac day. the earliest anti-anzac day protests attracted little attention in the wake of the governor general's dismissal of gough whitlam's labour government in 1975, but soon grew to a gathering of 500 women with 61 arrested in canberra in 1981, then 750 women and no arrests in 1982, the women having moved to a visible but less obtrusive position overlooking the official events (dowse and giles 1996, 66). anzac day protests took similar form across canberra, melbourne, and sydney, with women demonstrating in proximity to parades and finding creative ways to confront and engage police or elude arrest. anzac biscuits were part of anti-anzac protest culture in the 1980s. although documentation of the melbourne anti-anzac day collective and war events does not mention or show biscuits, biscuits appeared in feminist spaces that supported the melbourne protest actions. academic, agitator, and film critic deb verhoeven baked and sold anti-anzac biscuits as concessions at the film fatale film festival in melbourne, which included screenings that overlapped with anzac day. the film fatale collective was founded in february 1987 ”with the objective of forming a structural network for women participating in film and video“ (verhoeven and sdrauling 1987). in the midst of fundraising, founders verhoeven and sandra sdrauling wrote a letter to their supporters proposing that ”if all this fails...we intend to step up the production of anti-anzac biscuits and market them to pick up the crumbs!“ (1987). i asked verhoeven if she modified the biscuits in any way and she replied, ”no, they were pretty much just anzac biscuits, but we co-opted them to be anti-anzac biscuits because we couldn't sell anzac biscuits in good conscience“ (2021). ”anti“ splits the biscuits, a broken bond that recalls the war wreath: same ingredients, snapped context. verhoeven speculates that ”the semiotics of the anzac biscuit, the durability, the minimal elements, could apply to activists or agitators from a feminist perspective“ (2021). the biscuits lend themselves to organizing as much as to war. they suit atmospheres of struggle and survival. the toughness of anzac biscuits reflects the mobility of the militarisms they evoke; the antican be militant, too. film fatale's anti-anzac biscuits show how ”anti-anzac,“ by 1987, had become associated with feminist activism. members of the film fatale collective, including verhoeven, were active in the anti-anzac day marches—verhoeven testified in court after witnessing a woman in a wheelchair being arrested for abusive language after yelling ”don't call me a cunt!“ (the man who called her a cunt in the first place was not arrested). verhoeven explains that ”anti-anzac biscuits were a fundraiser for us at the same time as promoting these marches that we would engage in on anzac day and contributing to that sense that our resistance or opposition was a core part of feminist practice“ (2021). the resistance and opposition signaled by ”anti,“ ”no,“ and ”don't call me a cunt!“ recall ahmed's feminist snap and ahmed's antiracist feminisms. saying no, splitting, being against something, breaking bonds that bind, suggests no longer being able to tolerate a situation or homogenous solution, implying an ”at the end of my rope“ calamity that demands the inversion of assumptions and rationales. the film fatale anti-anzac biscuits show how protest actions were active in and supported by the broader cultural life of the city. the community formed by the anti-anzac day protests persists beyond anzac day and permeates daily life, similar to how anzac biscuits are digested and metabolized all year round but wreaths and poppy pins are displayed only on april 25. although experienced with the senses, wreaths and pins are not materially transformed, processed, or reshaped by bodies. but feminist snap can be more than a reactive calamity: snap can be aspirational, a desirable goal. ahmed writes, ”i want to think about breaking points, as the very points we might aim to reach“ (2017, 187). the authors of the feminist data manifest-no, citing ahmed, argue that “what allows [many, plural feminisms] to ‘hang together’ as different but still feminist is the negative construction—a refusal of an inheritance” (cifor et al. 2019). inheritance can be refused, even as we inherit refusal. howe centers the “anti” in a 1995 postscript to her 1983 essay written while in the midst of organizing the protest actions. anzac day cannot be rehabilitated: “it seems that anzac day's defenders believe that the digger's day...can transform itself so as to incorporate the very same social groups that it has always excluded—aboriginal people, ethnic minorities and anglo women. but why would these groups want to be incorporated by such a masculinist and british imperialist military tradition?” (howe 1995, 309). “incorporate” and “transform” link social formations to eating, digesting, and metabolizing. howe suggests that not everyone wishes to be gobbled up by british imperialism. many war actions align with this impulse to incorporate—wreath laying, marching, mourning—and feminist analyses highlight how such actions risk subsuming women into patriotic frameworks that continue to exclude them. such risky incorporations are not easily metabolized. how does the wreath laid by a war protestor differ from the wreaths laid during official events? the war wreath has snapped: its bonds with sanctioned anzac day events have broken. the bitten biscuit cannot be smushed back together, the invert syrup's glucose and fructose will never be sucrose again, yet all those inversions and bites end up in the same stomach. this interpretation of howe's caution regarding incorporation recalls linda tuhiwai smith's call to better understand “the reach of imperialism 'into our heads'” (2012, 24), and, i would add, into our stomachs. if feminist snap refuses an unjust world, the state's refusals perpetuate the status quo. verhoeven's example of the woman arrested for refusing ”cunt“ exposes structures designed to support the man who shouted ”cunt“ in the first place. elder describes how arresting the war protestors reveals state power: ”though the threat to the parade and the day made by the women's protest was never significant, the violence and outrage the presence of the women elicited signifies the effort required in silencing alternative configurations to the national story of innocent military endeavour“ (2007, 250). the national story won out. today, anzac day is more popular than ever. twomey links the protest actions of the 1980s to this resurgence, arguing that by focusing on rape and war, ”feminists gave new space and voice to understandings of war as a cause of suffering and trauma. the reinvigoration of anzac...began with the raped woman but it was soon the traumatised male war veteran who stood at its centre, and australians opened their hearts to him“ (2013, 92). these shifts show how cultural forms can be inverted and reconfigured after bonds break: trauma becomes detached from sexual violence and lands on the implicitly male soldier, leaving women out of the equation despite their service as nurses and in combat. arguably, ”support for anzac day was renewed, in part, by releasing a wave of misogyny directed at the women who participated in the feminist protests“ (twomey 2013, 101). reactions to the protests from parade organizers and police helped bolster patriotic anzac discourse and expose misogyny and sexual violence surfacing not only in war but also in policy and public opinion. twomey's, howe's, and elder's analyses reveal how anzac day and ”the anzac spirit“ are almost impossible to criticize, entangled as they are with white australian national culture and settler myths and values: ”before anzac, we bow down, we close ranks and we remain silent“ (lake et al. 2010, 133). feminist activists and bakers invert and question the politics of commemoration and memorial only to find their ”anti-" silenced or even appropriated by the imperialist state they protest. just as golden syrup's fructose content defines it as invert syrup but also heightens its sweetness, attempts to enact cultural shifts may amplify the very qualities protestors seek to snap. mouthfeel of militarism feminist philosopher chris cuomo asserts that “war is not just an event,” but instead emits “a constant undertone, white noise in the background of social existence” (1996, 42). to set the conditions for effective feminist resistance, war cannot be conceptualized as a unified activity happening at an observable distance. everyday militarisms invert contained combat events to find warfare seeping into unexpected places: kitchens, cafes, movie theaters. the war and melbourne anti-anzac day collective actions operate both as events and as cuomo's white noise. by focusing on anzac day, one elaborately choreographed and scripted commemorative holiday, the protests may contribute to maintaining war as an event, separate from everyday life, elsewhere, over there, just this one day of the year. at the same time, by snapping and breaking the materials and actions of anzac day rituals, such as memorial wreaths, the protests introduce an unsettling hum, reminding both protestors and parade goers that global war and military aggression scaffold sexual violence, imperial aggression, colonial invasion, and anzac day itself, even and perhaps especially during so-called peacetime. do anti-anzac biscuits operate in the same risky terrain as the war memorial wreaths? even as the wreaths snap and break away from expectations, the women laying the wreaths are folded into the very narratives they sought to resist: a war wreath could easily be subsumed by a familiar and powerful patriotic script, becoming just another anzac day prop. if anti-anzac biscuits are different, they are different because they emerge from improvisational domestic spaces rather than tightly choreographed public rites. while wreaths are laid on anzac day as part of a ritual of remembrance, anzac biscuits circulate all year round, and, critically, they are eaten. although strongly associated with anzac day, the biscuits are not incorporated into scripted activities on the day itself—politicians do not ceremonially wolf down a platter of biscuits on war memorial steps. instead, biscuits belong to the home and adjacent sites, including grocery stores, workplace morning teas, and schools. mouthfeel refers to how texture matters to the experience of eating. although often distinguished from taste and flavor, mouthfeel depends on and is in dialogue with taste and flavor, just as the five senses cannot be easily separated and must be understood as a cultural construct. never disconnected, war becomes a texture that draws together many senses and channels at once and only becomes noticeable when pressure builds and resilience starts to crumble. baked in verhoeven's home kitchen and consumed by a close-knit community of organizers, these particular movie theater concessions collapse domestic and public spaces. as a ubiquitous culinary memorial, the anzac biscuit supports schott's reading of war as a “presence” (1996, 19). exemplifying the mouthfeel of militarism in australia and aotearoa new zealand, anzac biscuits bear up under countless pressures, are ready to snap, and, in the case of the film fatale anti-anzac biscuits, do snap. following anzac biscuits and golden syrup across history, cinemas, street actions, and domestic kitchens has led to an analysis of how snaps, breaks, and refusals subvert a culturally conservative and often dismissed popular food. culturally conservative domestic forms could generously extend to family structures, fathers, and patriarchal cultures that draw the boundaries ahmed sets with her father, the acknowledgment of when bonds become binds. at a molecular level, the same ingredients can invert if provided a snapped context. this formula, same ingredients, snapped context, travels to materials beyond the war memorial wreath and the anzac biscuit. the practice-led foundation of this project allows for theoretical and cultural outcomes that are as syncretic and unpredictable as anzac biscuits in the oven. drawing on the many resonances of “invert”—sexual deviance, reversal, contrariness—snap and inversion offer transformations that complicate straightforward interpretations of nationalism, history, and war. these transformations are uncovered through practical experimentation in the kitchen, and through the potential for eating and digesting to organize political affinities. the mouthfeel of militarism suggests not the grand narratives of history and politics but the intimate everyday sensations of consistency, warmth, smoothness, and abrasiveness that may comfort or enrage eaters, depending on their capacity to bear up against pressure, to snap, to invert and invent. acknowledgments this research was funded by an australian research council discovery early career researcher award (de190100080). interviews were undertaken under unsw human research ethics reference number hc190344. workshops with anonymous participants at the new zealand national army museum te mata toa were undertaken under unsw human research ethics reference number hc16036. thank you to the two anonymous reviewers for comments that nourished this text and will continue to transform future texts within the larger project. thank you to deb verhoeven for talking about anti-anzac biscuits with me and to the domesticities of war editorial collective and the other authors in this special section for valuable feedback, workshops, and dialogue. note 1 the new zealand history webpage mentions a feminist anzac day protest in 1978: “new controversy erupted in 1978 when a women's group laid a wreath in memory of women killed and raped in war” (2021). this description indicates that aotearoa new zealand women undertook similar actions to australian women, but i have not been able to track down additional sources about this action or activist collectives in aotearoa new zealand, so this section focuses on australian protest actions.   references ahmed, sara. 2017. living a feminist life. durham, nc: duke university press. australian department of veterans' affairs. 2020. “protecting the word 'anzac.'” august 20, 2020. https://www.dva.gov.au/recognition/events-and-reminders-all-who-served/protecting-word-anzac. australian government department of defence. 2021. “operations.” https://www1.defence.gov.au/operations#current-operations. bartlett, alison. 2011. “feminist protest and maternity at pine gap women's peace camp, australia 1983.” women's studies international forum 34 (1): 31-38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2010.10.002. burgmann, meredith. 2014. “the women against rape in war collective's protests against anzac day in sydney, 1983 and 1984.” cosmopolitan civil societies journal 6 (3): 116-22. https://doi.org/10.5130/ccs.v6i3.4222 cifor, marika, patricia garcia, t.l. cowan, jasmine rault, tonia sutherland, anita say chan, jennifer rode, anna lauren hoffman, niloufar salehi, and lisa nakamura. 2019. feminist data manifest-no. https://www.manifestno.com/. cobley, joanna. 2016. “should we safeguard 'the idea of the anzac biscuit recipe'?” women's studies journal 30, no. 1 (july): 62-70. cohler, deborah. 2017. “introduction: homefront frontlines and transnational geometries of empire and resistance.” feminist formations 29 (1): vii-xvii. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/658640. crotty, martin. 2008. “australian troops land at gallipoli: trial, trauma, and the 'birth of the nation.'” in turning points in australian history, edited by martin crotty and david roberts, 100-114. sydney: unsw press. cuomo, chris. 1996. “war is not just an event: reflections on the significance of everyday violence.” hypatia 11 (4): 30-45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3810390. curthoys, ann. 2001. “national narratives, war commemoration and racial exclusion in a settler society: the australian case.” in the politics of war memory and commemoration, edited by t.g. ashplant, graham dawson, and michael roper, 128-144. london: taylor & francis. dowse, sara, and patricia giles. 1996. “women in a warrior society.” in sisterhood is global: the international women's movement anthology, edited by robin morgan, 63-68. new york: feminist press. elder, catriona. 2005. “'i spit on your stone': national identity, women against rape and the cult of anzac in australia.” in women, activism and social change, edited by maja mikula, 71-81. london: routledge. elder, catriona. 2007. being australian: narratives of national identity. crows nest, au: allen & unwin. gullace, nicoletta. 1997. “sexual violence and family honor: british propaganda and international law during the first world war.” the american historical review 102 (3): 714-47. https://doi.org/10.2307/2171507. hamilton, jennifer. 2019. “the future of housework: the similarities and differences between making kin and making babies.” australian feminist studies 34 (102): 468-89. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2019.1702874. hooks, bell. 2015. yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics. new york: routledge. howe, adrian. 1995. “anzac mythology and the feminist challenge.” in gender and war: australians at war in the twentieth century, edited by marilyn lake and joy damousi, 302-10. cambridge: cambridge university press. hunter, wendy. n.d. “anzac wafers.” bigoven. accessed may 20, 2021. https://www.bigoven.com/recipe/anzac-wafers/863996. inglis, ken. 1999. observing australia: 1959-1999. melbourne: melbourne university press. ingold, tim, and elizabeth hallam. 2007. “creativity and cultural improvisation: an introduction.” in creativity and cultural improvisation, edited by elizabeth hallam and tim ingold, 1-24. london: routledge. kelley, lindsay. 2016. bioart kitchen: art, feminism and technoscience. london: i.b. tauris. kelley, lindsay. 2022a. “biscuit production and consumption as war re-enactment.” continuum: journal of media & cultural studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2022.2106357. kelley, lindsay. 2022b. “everyday militarisms in the kitchen: baking strange with anzac biscuits.” in food in memory and imagination: space, place and, taste, edited by beth forrest and greg de st. maurice, 239-52. london: bloomsbury. lake, marilyn, henry reynolds, mark mckenna, and joy damousi. 2010. what's wrong with anzac?: the militarisation of australian history. sydney: university of nsw press. landecker, hannah. 2013. “postindustrial metabolism: fat knowledge.” public culture 25 (3): 495-522. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2144625. leavy, patricia. 2015. method meets art: arts-based research practice. 2nd ed. new york: guilford. loveless, natalie. 2019. how to make art at the end of the world: a manifesto for research-creation. durham, nc: duke university press. manatū taonga ministry for culture and heritage. 2020. “use of the word 'anzac' guidelines.” february 21, 2020. https://mch.govt.nz/nz-identity-heritage/anzac-day/anzac-guidelines. marx de salcedo, anastacia. 2015. combat-ready kitchen: how the u.s military shapes the way you eat. new york: penguin. mason, laura. 2015. “golden syrup.” in the oxford companion to sugar and sweets, edited by darra goldstein. oxford: oxford university press. new zealand history. 2021. “anzac day: page 7 modern anzac day.” new zealand history, nga korero ipurangi o aotearoa. april 8, 2021. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/war/modern-anzac-day. oed online. 2021. s.v. “snap, (n.)” accessed september, 2021. reynolds, allison. 2018. anzac biscuits: the power and spirit of an everyday icon. mile end, south australia: wakefield press. schott, robin. 1996. “gender and 'postmodern' war.” hypatia 11 (4): 19-29. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3810389. smith, linda tuhiwai. 2012. decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. 2nd ed. london: zed books. speck, caroline. 1996. “women's war memorials and citizenship.” australian feminist studies 11 (23): 129-45. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.1996.9994810. supski, sian. 2006. “anzac biscuits — a culinary memorial.” journal of australian studies 30 (87): 51-59. https://doi.org/10.1080/14443050609388050. twomey, christina. 2013. “trauma and the reinvigoration of anzac: an argument.” history australia 10 (3): 85-108. https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2013.11668482. verhoeven, deb. 2021. anti-anzac biscuits and film fatale interview by lindsay kelley. verhoeven, deb, and sandra sdrauling. 1987. “film fatale correspondence.” deb verhoeven personal archive. young, iris marion. 1997. intersecting voices: dilemmas of gender, political philosophy, and policy. princeton, nj: princeton university press.     author bio lindsay kelley is a senior lecturer in the school of art & design, college of the arts & social sciences, australian national university. the recipient of an australian research council discovery early career researcher award (2019-2022), she has exhibited and performed internationally, and her published work can be found in journals including parallax, transgender studies quarterly, angelaki, and environmental humanities.     roundtable waste is not a metaphor for racist dispossession: the black feminist marxism of marisa solomon     marisa solomon barnard college msolomon@barnard.edu   zoë wool university of toronto zoe.wool@utoronto.ca     there is a particular kind of treasure our fellow thinkers sometimes give us, a little gem of brilliance so well cut that it refracts the world for us in a way that snaps everything into place, a gem both dense with the materialities of history and also so lightly worn it you could put it on a t-shirt (though more often it appears as a book title). marisa solomon's work on urban trash is full of such treasures. drawing on black feminism and black geographies with a marxist attention to materiality and the production of value, solomon's ethnographic descriptions of the material practices of salvage are themselves incisive critiques of the way place is made within racial capitalism. her work attends not only to value and place, but to flows and displacements and the temporal logics that justify them. the clarity of her thinking is matched by the clarity of the gems she offers us in her writing: "if redlining is a socio-material process that distributes risk and reward with durable consequences, gentrification is a process that effaces black material histories by rewriting what matter matters" (solomon 2019); "producing materiality productive for capital requires policing to maintain" (#); "racism has to be material for it to be structural" (#). coming soon to a t-shirt (or book title) near you.   zoë wool (zw): given the clarity and originality of your analysis of the dynamics of race, waste, and gentrification in the us, i wonder, what do you think is the least helpful story people in the us tend to tell them/ourselves as about race, waste, and/or gentrification? like, do you have a pet peeve in the discourse around any of these intersections?   marisa solomon (ms): my biggest pet peeve is treating waste as a metaphor for race and racist dispossession. dispossession is, psychic, embodied, historical, and it’s also material. it is a process itself contingent on the production of waste and toxicity. but waste is also a condition of dispossession. i think sophia stamatopoulou-robbins says this really well in her recently published book, waste siege. waste is not just an object (or discourse) it is a condition through which objects are also managed, understood, effective and affective.   another pet peeve is too easily taking for granted that “cleaning” and “improvement” are inherently good. “improvement” and “cleaning” as sets of practices and discourses speak more to who is and isn’t considered productive for capital than they speak to ecological repair, producing an (immoral) hierarchy of materiality schematized along an unproductive/productive binary. producing materiality productive for capital requires policing to maintain; thus, the relationship between “cleanliness” and policing is not analogous, it is co-constitutive. instead of environmental “clean up,” then, i’m interested in how aesthetics, categories of objects, and sanctioned object-relations become evidence naturalizing modes of racial capitalist violence.   for me, anthropological obsessions with cleaning and improvement lead to imaginations—dare i say, romanticizations—of poverty, which make assumptions about what and who is (and isn’t) degraded. these assumptions are dangerous because the language we use to describe poverty inscribes the logics that naturalize poverty. referring to a place where people live as a “degraded city scape” re-mobilizes the “primitive or savage jungle” someone how outside of, if not without, time—until improved and thus re-incorporated into “civilization’s” teleology of betterment.   all description, especially if we are to take the anti-racist, anti-colonial, feminist injunctions seriously, is motivated. a degraded cityscape is not a neutral or objective description of a place where people live. as steven gregory says of the description of “ghetto,” it reveals as much as it conceals. it obscures the processes of racial capitalism (that robin kelley elegantly outlines in all of his work) that construct places through the migrations of capital, but it also reveals the desire for certain people to be immobilized by place. we should be invested in more descriptions of place that don’t simply render the poor as inert, passive subjects/objects who don’t resist (even if they fail to overturn racial capitalism).   zw: your work is expressly formed by the commitments of black feminist marxism. what do these commitments mean--analytically, practically, ethically, or in whatever way you want to comment on them--for work on waste?   ms: most importantly, racism is material. (like i said above, waste is not a metaphor for racism, it’s an effect). racism has material effects, or rather racism has to be material (it has to involve objects, orientations to objects, and the kinds of relationship people are supposed to have with objects) for it to be structural. this is a lesson i take very seriously from black marxists. it also means seeing gentrification not as a “new” practice but a mode of racial capitalism with a long history that is colonial. there is no capitalism without racism, and there is no racism without capitalism. if gentrification is a manifestation of this history, then trying to describe its newness seems to miss how the production of value is yoked to larger global colonial structures that racialize in order to produce, circulate and exchange value.   black feminist marxists also make the argument that the material conditions of racism are not only historical, they create the conditions of possibility for anti-black futures through constraint, the regulation of labor, gender, sexuality, and most importantly, property.   zw: what forms of scholarly engagement are the most generative and vital to you? / since this interview was occasioned by a conversation about citational practices and networks, are there any books or articles or pieces of art that are touchstones for you but tend not to be engaged with by others?   ms: black geographies, or scholarship theorizing the spatialization of race. i’m think of course of katherine mckittrick, but also of khalil gibran muhammed, clyde woods, ruthie gilmore, jacqueline n. brown—these scholars turn our attention to understanding race broadly, but blackness (in the u.s.) specifically as fundamentally a socio-spatial project whose material effects reinforce the construction of blackness as abject, outside, or devalued. moreover, these scholars show us—in the lineage of the long durée of black anti-colonial scholarship—that the production of “the abject” is central to the relationship between the colony and the colonizer. or that the negation of value (or devaluation) is central to producing both the idea of value and value itself.   but as a queer black feminist i would be remiss not to mention the arsenal of thinkers who challenge marxist traditions of (prioritizing labor) at the cost of understanding black fungibility as that which is actually exchanged/produced in the production of value. here there are so many scholars to draw from (wynter, spillers, da silva, hartman, weheliye and so many more) but i want to focus on some emergent scholars whose work pushes my thinking and analysis: zakiyyah iman jackson, tiffany king, c. riley snorton. these three scholars individually, but also in concert, have pushed me to think through the raciological and sexiological sciences that violently construct, wrench apart, and figure blackness through flesh. moreover, i take these scholars together to think about how the fungibility of blackness constructs assumptions about objects and the debates about objects/the material/materiality in ways that challenge the antiblackness that goes unchecked in the social studies of science.   i also can’t help but think of this question as about those who help me reframe the field of inquiry. my collaborators in the black atlantic ecologies working group at the center center for the study of social difference at columbia university—vanessa agard-jones, anna arabindan-kesson, jayna brown, aimee meredith cox, alyssa a. l. james, julie livingston amber jamila musser, and sonya posmentier—have been foundational to my thinking around the contours and expansiveness of black ecological thought. while scholars absolutely help me reframe the field of inquiry, i’m also inspired by people who prioritize experimentation. from abolitionist organizers and my informants, to jazz musicians, to queer and trans of color scholarship and art, to anti-racist and feminist labs like (max liboiron’s, clear), to black diasporic speculative fiction, experimentation and speculation is a collaborative mode through which people refuse the terms of a white supremacist world. these are the people who continue to inspire my approaches.   zw: anthropology, trash or treasure?   ms: this is such a hard question to answer because i love trashiness! borrowing the language and spirit of saidiya hartman’s wayward lives, i’ve been experimenting with calling myself a “wayward anthropologist.” i’ve constantly felt like i’m in a vexed relationship with my anthropological training—at times treasuring the kinds of insight it’s given me about the co-production of knowledge, and at other frustrated, if not devastated, by its continuous colonial impulses. something that hartman’s work continues to inspire in me is writing in tension with that which cannot be resolved. here i’m thinking about “venus in two acts,” in particular. in that piece, she writes about the impossibilities of recuperating a single life/story from the archives (or rather ledgers) of the trans-atlantic slave trade. she talks about the way the ledger obliterates personhood many times over, and the researchers’ desires in the archive to “recover” become their own kinds of violence to resolve a violence that can’t be undone. for me, this piece reminds me to take account of the ways my colonial training has impacted the battles/debates i prioritize and then write carefully in tension with the possible routes/choices/stories/histories made illegible by scholarly “data collection” practices. in other words, i try to think through the violence of our methods and what stories and descriptions we prioritize over others.   i think, “writing in/with tension” is important for understanding trash/waste. it is an intractable global problem that is thought about and discussed with particular narratives that trap people (the marginalized poor and the global south more broadly) in liberal progressive frames, including ones of degradation and (often deferred) improvement. writing in tension reminds me to ask, who does and should my story serve?   references solomon, marisa. 2019. “‘the ghetto is a gold mine’: the racialized temporality of betterment.”international labor and working-class history 95: 76–94. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0147547919000024.     author bios marisa solomon is an assistant professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at barnard college and serves as co-director of the black atlantic ecologies working group where she is affiliated with the center for the study of social different and the earth institute at columbia university.   zoë wool is an assistant professor of anthropology at the university of toronto, co-founder of project pleasantville, and founder of the toxicity, waste, and infrastructure group (twig) research kitchen, launching in fall 2021. they conducted their interview over email in spring 2021.   carpenter, laura m. 2025. “remembering our dead: physicalizing state-level covid-19 mortality data in textile form.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–20. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © laura m. carpenter, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license remembering our dead: physicalizing state-level covid-19 mortality data in textile form laura m. carpenter vanderbilt university l.carpenter@vanderbilt.edu abstract this illustrated essay recounts one feminist scholar’s efforts to present state-level covid-19 daily mortality data in textile form. it details how she turned data from us centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) public reports for the period february 2020 through january 2021 into knitted color-coded wall hangings for maryland, massachusetts, and tennessee. three-dimensional data physicalizations using humble, everyday materials have the potential to gather and invoke emotions and convey the magnitude of loss in ways conventional twodimensional data visualizations do not. keywords covid-19, data visualization, data physicalization, knitualization, health, mortality, fiber arts introduction in spring 2020 when covid-19 was spreading rapidly across the united states and around the world, i found myself yearning to make things by hand. maybe it was all the unstructured time that unfurled when a few weeks of sheltering in place turned into an indefinite stay at home (at least for people who, like me, had the privilege of working remotely). maybe it was the impulse to create that so often bubbles up in reaction to death and destruction. in any event, i wanted to make things. not just any things. textile things. mailto:l.carpenter@vanderbilt.edu original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 2 as the daughter of a home economics teacher, i grew up immersed in fiber arts and crafts. embroidery, cross-stich, needlepoint, knitting, crochet, sewing—i tried them all. sewing had been my primary go-to, but as the coronavirus crisis deepened, i felt increasingly drawn to crafts that involve repetitive techniques. needlepoint, with its recurring rows of slanting stitches, for example, or knitting, where a small vocabulary of repeated needle-hand-yarn movements brings cloth into existence. years had passed since i’d picked up needles and yarn, but in pandemic times, knitting was just what i needed. by august 2020, when i wasn’t scrambling to learn remote-teaching skills before the fall semester began, i was knitting like my sanity depended on it. maybe it did. at the same time, i found myself growing increasingly horrified and heartbroken as hospital beds filled and death tolls mounted. people around the world were falling ill and dying in alarming numbers, a tragedy exacerbated by social conditions and political disregard. i sewed protective masks for friends and family members, but as a social scientist whose research focuses on health, i also felt compelled to respond in some scholarly fashion. i wrote about covid-19 and sexuality for a sociology magazine and joined a team of researchers studying how gender and sexual identity influenced responses to the quarantine. but these efforts felt detached, incommensurate to the magnitude of a crisis that relentlessly resisted comprehension. by timely coincidence, i discovered the tempestry project (n.d.). tempestry volunteers knit or crochet tapestries representing one year of daily climate data from a particular locale. placed side by side, these creations vividly demonstrate how weather patterns are growing increasingly erratic and average temperatures are rising in locations around the globe. ideally, hand-creating these objects gives project participants an embodied sense of the changing climate conditions that are reshaping our social and natural worlds. viewing this powerful work helped me see how i could respond to the covid-19 pandemic as both sociologist and human being. i decided to devise a system for visualizing daily reports of covid-19 deaths as color-coded knitted wall hangings. fashioned from seventeen shades of yarn, each display covers the period from february 1, 2020 to january 31, 2021 (so far), and represents a different us state in which i have resided. depicting maryland, massachusetts, and tennessee, the tapestries highlight how local epidemiological conditions and public policy responses have shaped mortality patterns. handmade from everyday, humble materials, these textile pieces present data in tangible, familiar, comprehensible form. the hangings are tactile, aesthetically appealing, even useful. they are, fundamentally, scarves. sharing objects such as these with others—in settings from galleries to one’s personal wardrobe—serves as a kind of public scholarship and offers a way to engage in “craftivism,” or social original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 3 activism through craft (corbett 2017; greer 2014). displaying the subject matter of public health and medical sociology, these textiles also evoke central issues related to knowledge, gendered practices, embodiment, mourning, and collective memory. to be clear, the aim of my project was not to explicate covid-19 mortality patterns, but to display them in fiber art form, to make them more legible to myself and hopefully to others. these data are not complex, as data go, but what they represent is complicated, in social and psychological terms. they reflect a social happening that was difficult to fathom and hard to bear. in this essay, i offer one technique for presenting mortality data in textile form and consider the benefits, challenges, and effects—personal, social, and scholarly—of doing so. contextualization as a work of fiber art, my project fits in a long history of fashioning textiles to mourn the dead and to commemorate tragic events. some such creations are primarily personal and private, such as embroidered death shrouds (hunter 2019) or quilts fashioned out of a loved one’s neckties (hewett 2021). others are more collective, expressing the grief of multiple makers, or responding to phenomena that affected large numbers of people. the best known contemporary collective memorial textile is probably the names project aids memorial quilt (lewis and fraser 1996). other examples include the arpilleras made by women relatives of chileans disappeared during the pinochet regime and the virtual @covid19quilt project in which participants made squares for collective display on instagram (hunter 2019; moreshead and salter 2022; see also fisk 2019). death, mourning, and grief are often depicted and acted upon in gendered and racialized ways (field et al. 1997; brown and puri 2022). because textile-making is widely viewed as feminine, women and gender-nonconforming people may be more likely than men to incorporate textiles in mourning or commemoration (fisk 2019; hewett 2021; hunter 2019). the wall hangings i produced can be understood as an individual effort to mourn and commemorate a collective loss. mourning—feeling or expressing sorrow—has become increasingly private and individualized in western countries (wouters 2002), prompting people to seek more personalized mourning rituals that may nonetheless foster social solidarity. commemoration—honoring the memory of someone or something with a ritual or ceremony—can be particularly difficult in the face of uncertainty, fragmentation, or disorientation (simko 2021). such was the case for the covid-19 pandemic. when, in november 2020, artist suzanne brennan firstenberg planted thousands of small white flags at the us national mall to represent deaths from covid-19, she was hesitant to call her installation a memorial “because you don’t memorialize a plane crash in the middle of it crashing” (quoted in simko 2021, 119). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 4 as a work of public scholarship, my project resides at the intersection of multiple strands of inquiry. fundamentally, it is part of an ongoing conversation about data visualization and physicalization practices across a wide range of disciplines (bae et al. 2022; friendly and wainer 2021; healy and moody 2014; tufte 2001; watkins 1993). it also contributes to discussions about data feminism, ways of knowing, craftivism, and research-creation. creating objects “whose geometry or material properties encode data” (jansen et al. 2015, 3228) goes beyond visualization and is more accurately termed physicalization or materialization. physicalizing data offers certain potential advantages over conventional, two-dimensional visualizations (jansen et al. 2015). by engaging multiple senses and modes of human perception, physicalizations may enhance understanding as well as improve accessibility for people with vision or other impairments. transportable physicalizations (like scarves) can expand conversations about data to novel locations and new groups of potential analysts. physicalizations may be especially effective at communicating information that is difficult to comprehend because of its scale or magnitude. (evolved before mass society, human brains are poorly suited for understanding large numbers [richards 2020].) physicalizations vary along multiple dimensions, including elements of their physical structure (bae et al. 2022). structurally, my tapestries are data physicalized in knitted yarn. medical visualization scholar noeska smit (2021) calls such objects knitualizations. although textiles have long been used to present data about social life, these practices are not well known outside of textile creator circles, and often not thought of as data displays within them. this is changing, however, as indicated by a recent digital exhibit featuring such objects as blankets depicting babies’ sleep cycles and sweaters charting shifts in the wild tiger population (michelson, n.d.). using fiber arts to communicate research findings falls under the banner of research-creation, an approach that understands artistic practices as research methods and aims to open the academy to “different tangible forms…as valid modes of rendering research public” (loveless 2019, 24). the materials used in physicalizations determine the forms they can take, influencing how they communicate. yarn’s physical properties and the techniques used to turn it into objects tend to limit the creator’s ability to represent numeric data with precision (friske et al. 2020; smit 2021), even as needlecrafts may represent qualitative data quite well (sullivan 2020). creators often experience materials as willfully (mis)behaving in ways that shape physicalizations. for example, mikhaila friske observed that, while the front of a crocheted mug cozy showed a “columned, calendar-like display of [data about] busy-ness,” the tangle of colored yarn on the reverse side became “a jumbled mess showing how being busy can feel” (friske et al. 2020, 303). physicalizations also carry material traces of their makers and the context of their making, from pet hair to saliva to personal original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 5 quirks of technique (gollihue and xiong-gum 2020). creators of physicalizations are simultaneously sources, gatherers, and analysts of data. textile physicalizations are time-consuming and labor-intensive to create (friske et al. 2020; gollihue and xiong-gum 2020). by “allowing people to slow down and get in touch and feel data in a very personal and physical sense” (smit 2021, 1), they facilitate the examination of complex issues and intimate information. conversely, physicalizing less meaningful data (such as social media posts) in textile form may hold little appeal (sullivan 2020). importantly, the embodied labor involved in crafting fiber-based data displays may bring the maker/analyst pleasure, feelings of creativity, and a sense of “flow” (adey 2018; lydon 1997), enhance their wellbeing (collier 2011; garlock 2016; kenning 2015), or help them to relax (stalp et al. 2018). knitting brought me all of these benefits during the pandemic. textile physicalizations are aligned with the principles of data feminism as expounded by catherine d’ignazio and lauren f. klein (2016, 2020), and with the relational ethics approach to data advocated by abeba birhane (2021), insofar as they elevate embodiment and emotion as ways of knowing and resist the dominant, rationalist tendency to separate thought from emotion. for example, anne sullivan’s (2020) online tool for producing sampler patterns based on twitter data uses sentiment analysis to produce designs for objects that encourage emotional responses in viewers. as krystin gollihue and mai nou xiong-gum (2020) note, the memories and feelings that surface when using techniques learned from family members are data that become materialized in textiles. fashioned from familiar, touchable materials, my tapestries make knowing a proximate, embodied, emotion-laden act, for scholar and viewer alike (birhane 2021). whereas traditional visualizations often come across as hard and cold, knitualizations can make data seem warm and fuzzy (smit 2021). embodying comfort may be especially welcome when displaying data as cold and hard as mortality statistics. the physicalizations i produced are further aligned with data feminism through their attention to power. as a medical sociologist, i seek to understand how social forces, such as state-level differences in public policies and resource distribution, contribute to patterns of illness and death. in the case of covid-19, key factors include pre-pandemic population health, shaped by socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequality; prevalence of health insurance; and policy responses to the pandemic. using handcrafts to make physicalizations is democratizing insofar as it can engage prospective data analysts who lack access to, or prefer not to use, powerful computers (smit 2021). as feminist science and technology studies scholars note, the social identities of the people who create things, and the gender and racial/ethnic connotations of the technologies they use, affect our interpretations (balsamo 1996; benjamin 2019). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 6 for example, in maker spaces, women and men tend to use different equipment, such as 3d-printers or circuit board etchers, reinforcing pre-existing associations of certain machines with certain genders; and the objects fashioned with those machines tend to be viewed in correspondingly gendered terms (eckhardt et al. 2021). whether physicalizations are constructed through methods deemed masculine (like statistical tables) or feminine (like textile crafts) may condition whether they are seen as scientific or trustworthy. although textile arts historically have been dismissed as trivial because of their association with femininity (eckhardt et al. 2021), some feminists have embraced them (stalp et al. 2018). however, knitting is by no means inherently feminist. for example, although sociologist maura kelly (2014) observed elements of feminism in the us-based knitting communities she studied, insofar as knitting enabled some people to develop alternative masculinities and femininities, rethink the public/private divide, or build feminist communities, she concluded that individual knitters and the general knitting community by and large did not engage with feminist politics.1 intended to illuminate a public health crisis, my knitualizations represent a form of craftivism, or “crafting…motivated by social or political activism” (greer 2014, 8). according to proponents, the gentle, slow, embodied act of handcrafting helps craftivists contemplate and respond to injustice (corbett 2017). during the covid19 pandemic, craftivist discourse increasingly drew attention to “feminized” work, yet often overlooked the labor of garment workers, who are predominantly undercompensated women in the global south (moreshead and salter 2022). one important exception was the women-of-color-led auntie sewing squad, which handcrafted thousands of facemasks for first responders (hong et al. 2021). although intended to be available to everyone (corbett 2017), many forms of craftivism require ample free time and material resources (kelly 2014; moreshead and salter 2022). (indeed, my class and race privilege played no small role in my ability to craft knitualizations.) textile crafting has often been used to resist empire (mcgovern 2019), but racism and cultural appropriation pervade the fiber world (hewett 2021), and trans people and women of color have been excluded from key craftivist initiatives. such dynamics of privilege must be recognized if craftivism is to realize its “potential as a feminist response to contemporary challenges” (moreshead and salter 2022, 2). implementation how might one physicalize covid-19 mortality data in fiber-art form? to make visible both change over time and difference across place, i created state-specific pieces with a day-by-day design. i selected three states on which to focus: massachusetts, tennessee, and maryland. their similar size—with estimated populations of 6,893,574; 6,886,834; and 6,055,802, respectively—made it possible to use a single color key in which each color-coded “number of deaths” category represents a similar proportion of a state’s population (united states census original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 7 bureau, n.d.). the three states exhibited distinctive patterns of covid-related mortality, due to distinctive epidemiological conditions and public policy responses. additionally, all three are states with which i have personal connections; i grew up in maryland, attended college in massachusetts, and currently reside in tennessee. my next step was downloading the us state-level daily mortality reports collected by the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) (n.d.). like all data, these publicly available reports are socially constructed, even as they convey important information about material reality. covid-19 is one of roughly 120 diseases or conditions that local health departments verify and voluntarily report to cdc. as the cdc’s own website notes, the morbidity and mortality data they provide is “dependent on jurisdictions’ timely and accurate reporting” and “there are differences in how completely states and territories report their cases.” determining the parameters of the pieces came next. essentially, i wanted to create time-series graphs in yarn, with different colors representing different values of the variable of interest. using the tempestry project as a model, i planned to knit tapestries 366 rows in length, with each row of knitting representing one calendar day (2020 was a leap year). because the first documented us death due to covid-19 occurred in february, i opted to focus on the period from february 1, 2020 through january 31, 2021.2 to symbolize the virus name, i decided to make each piece 19 stitches wide. of hundreds of possible stitch patterns, i chose garter stitch, because it is simple to do and because it lies flat, making for a more attractive and manageable display. (on the downside, garter stitch tends to “blur” adjacent rows of stitches.) i then set about developing the color key. this involved turning a continuous variable—new deaths per day—into a categorical variable. how big should the categories be? matters sociological and practical guided my decision-making. knowing no conventional scheme to follow, i divided the peak number of deaths by the number of yarn colors i planned to use. the three states varied considerably in this regard. maryland recorded 123 deaths on may 7, 2020, tennessee reported 177 deaths on december 17, 2020, and massachusetts logged 334 deaths on may 14, 2020. when i first downloaded data, in december 2020, it seemed likely that death rates might again increase substantially, necessitating a “buffer zone” at the top of my scale. fortunately, that turned out not to be the case. yarns differ in availability, affordability, and other features, including color options.3 the two alternatives i seriously considered were little crafties, an inexpensive acrylic yarn available in sixteen colors plus four neutrals, and dmc tapestry yarn, a pricier wool yarn available in hundreds of hues, of which i planned to use about thirty-four, following tempestry’s lead.4 dividing massachusetts’ peak daily death count of 334 by 16 resulted in 20.88; dividing it by 34 resulted in original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 8 9.82. rounding to the closest multiples of five, for ease of calculation and application, suggested preliminary category sizes of ten for the dmc yarn and twenty for the little crafties. which colors should represent which categories? reds, yellows, and oranges are generally considered “warm” colors, while blues, greens, and purples are deemed “cool.” it has become so conventional to depict more intense or negative circumstances with “warmer” colors that doing otherwise risks causing considerable confusion. (on debates about color in science communication, see crameri et al. 2020.) for legibility’s sake, then, i chose a familiar scheme, using warmer colors to depict higher numbers of deaths and a neutral color (gray) to represent days with zero deaths. to avoid exaggerating differences between categories, which is a risk when converting continuous data into categorial data (joyce 2008), i made my color-category gradients as smooth as possible. i created sample palettes and categorization schemes for both types of yarns (see figure 1). figure 1. three color schemes experimentation ensued. the thirty-four-color scheme using categories of ten closely juxtaposed many similar shades of yarn, making the piece visually confusing (figure 1, left). conversely, the sixteen-color (plus gray) scheme using categories of twenty (figure 1, center) muted the appearance of change so much as to undermine the project’s purpose. (see figure 2.) yet choosing too dramatic a color scheme could exaggerate mortality levels, especially if coupled with small categories, whereas choosing too bland or undifferentiated a scheme could downplay the scale of the ongoing loss of life, especially if coupled with large original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 9 categories. nor did i wish to sacrifice visible differentiation at higher levels of mortality by “using up” the available colors to represent lower daily death counts. ultimately, i implemented a scheme in which each little crafties color represented 10 additional deaths, with a single color (pink) representing all days with 150 or more deaths. as shown in figure 1 (right), gray represents zero deaths, purple one to nine deaths, dark blue ten to nineteen deaths, and so forth. figure 2. “draft” tennessee visualization, in progress these decisions made, i color-coded my data spreadsheets (see figure 3), picked up my knitting needles and yarn, and got to work (see figure 4). the type of yarn determined the size of knitting needles to be used (us 7), and thus the size of the hangings. each piece is approximately four inches wide and four feet in length (so far). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 10 figure 3. color-coded cdc daily covid-19 mortality data for april 2020 from maryland (left), massachusetts (center), and tennessee (right) figure 4. detail of knitted displays for maryland (left), massachusetts (center), and tennessee (right), showing covid-19 mortality for april 2020 more questions arose as the project progressed. should i weave the yarn tails into the tapestries? no; the “raw” look of them felt aesthetically appropriate to the pandemic experience. the literal messiness of unruly edges not only symbolized social and political messiness but also subverted the intolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty common to conventional data practices (birhane 2021). should i continue knitting more days of data after the first full year? maybe, but not right away; my hands and my psyche both needed some rest. should i “finish” the hangings somehow? no; i left the most recently-used color of yarn attached and ready for knitting more rows, to symbolize the lack of any clear ending point as well as the possibility that the pandemic would resume. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 11 figure 5. tapestries representing one year of covid-19 mortality in maryland (left), massachusetts (center), and tennessee (right) original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 12 reflection figure 5 shows the three tapestries side by side, in their finished-for-now form. juxtaposing them this way makes visible the distinctive contours the pandemic took in different places. all three tapestries begin with twenty-nine rows of gray stitches, representing the month of february 2020, in which no state residents died from covid-19. the next dozen rows show a shift from gray to purple (representing 1–9 deaths). thereafter, the patterns diverge. the maryland and massachusetts tapestries depict rapidly increasing death rates in april and may 2020, a decline in deaths from june through october, then another increase beginning in november 2020. in maryland, the death rates were lower overall, reflected in cooler colors: light blue, aqua, emerald, and lime. in massachusetts, surges were more severe, shown through warmer colors like gold, orange, red, and pink. the tennessee tapestry shows a different overall pattern, remaining primarily purple through june 2020, at which point dark and medium blue (10–19 and 20–29 deaths) take over. thereafter, lighter and warmer colors become gradually more dominant. by november, lime, yellow, gold, orange, and red predominate. the last few rows show some “cooling” in late january 2021, but whether that represents a receding pandemic is visually unclear—especially with the dark green yarn still attached and ready to resume. in short, the pandemic started slowly in tennessee, but grew steadily worse over time. social factors contributed to these patterns. in general, covid-19 magnified socioeconomic and racial/ethnic health disparities that predated the pandemic (masters et al. 2023; pirtle and wright 2021). age-adjusted covid-19 death rates were significantly higher among black, indigenous, hispanic/latinx, and some groups of asian americans than among white americans, reflecting long-standing differences in the distribution of health-related risks, resources, and opportunities.5 although covid-19 mortality rates were only modestly higher among us men than women (danielsen et al. 2022), women of color faced distinctive health risks due to the intersecting effects of structural racism and structural sexism, which also limited their access to risk-mitigating resources (pirtle and wright 2021).6 states differ in the extent to which they help their residents access healthcare and attain the prerequisites to health, as well as in their efforts to ameliorate inequality. maryland and massachusetts enjoy more features conducive to good health than tennessee; their populations are more affluent, better educated, highly urbanized, and more likely to have health insurance (schulz and mullings 2005; united states census bureau, n.d.). better baseline health enhanced maryland and massachusetts residents’ ability to avoid or resist infection with, and death from, covid-19 (danielsen et al. 2022). moreover, despite having republican governors, but consistent with their left-leaning state legislatures, maryland and massachusetts responded to covid-19 with aggressive public policies consistent with public health expert recommendations. conversely, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 13 tennessee, governed by a conservative republican supermajority, made other policy choices, such as forbidding local governments from imposing or extending mask mandates. not coincidentally, tennessee had the lowest proportion of adults who were fully-vaccinated against covid-19, just 37.3 percent in july 2021, compared with 55.9 percent and 61.4 percent for maryland and massachusetts, respectively (usa facts, n.d.). the physicality of my tapestries distinguishes them from more conventional visualizations of the same or similar data, such as the interactive graphics produced by the coronavirus resource center at johns hopkins university school of medicine (2022). by depicting state-level policy decisions alongside trends in covid-19 cases and deaths over time, the coronavirus resource center charts powerfully reveal the social context shaping disease and death. in the spirit of autoethnographic inquiry, i offer some reflections on the embodied experience of making my tapestries. like many veteran knitters, i regularly found myself “zoning out” while making stitch after stitch for the project. however, just as often, the act of knitting brought me into crisper consciousness. at times it felt like every stitch was grieving for someone who died. every time i stopped to change yarn colors made me pause to think and remember. notably, those changes occurred when i reached the rows representing days when the pandemic intensified or alleviated. as the hangings grew in length, they became more cumbersome to hold and work with. this aspect of their materiality kept me well aware of the rising death toll. other moments of intense awareness occurred when i reached the end of one year’s data for each state; knitting the rows representing january 31, 2021 reminded me that the pandemic was nowhere near over, and that it made no sense, in terms of physicalizing pandemic-related mortality, to stop knitting. at times, i felt troubled to be making attractive objects to address a worldwide human tragedy. yet mourning and commemorating human loss through beautiful creations is a time-honored tradition (fisk 2019; hunter 2019; lewis and fraser 1996). moreover, as natalie loveless writes, when the world is in crisis, “researchcreation…has the capacity to impact our social and material conditions, not by offering more facts, differently configured, but by finding ways, through aesthetic encounters and events, to persuade us to care and to care differently” (2019, 107). as an instance of the “creative presentation of research” subtype of researchcreation, my wall hangings not only offer a novel configuration of welldocumented facts about covid mortality, but also have the potential, through their material form, to inspire a new kind of caring about the human experiences associated with those facts. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 14 conclusion as of may 2025, nearly 1.2 million people in the united states have died from covid-19 (wikipedia 2025). like many, i have continued to mourn all that was lost during the pandemic and to feel considerable apprehension at the possibility of another global health crisis in the future. i am actively seeking an opportunity to put the “finished” wall hangings on public display, and storing them in a metaland-glass reliquary (repurposed terrarium) in the meantime. when i do exhibit the tapestries, i will encourage viewers to record their reactions in hopes of learning whether and how this kind of physicalization “works.” the material properties of fiber physicalizations may make them especially open to multiple interpretations (friske et al. 2020). thus far, when i have shared the project virtually or in personal encounters, the response has been encouraging. for example, one colleague imagined the conversation that might ensue if she saw someone wearing one of the tapestries as a scarf. my fervent hope is that people will see my knitualizations as expressing the intense emotions and great losses of the pandemic year(s). my project contributes to feminist discussions of data display and craft by offering a practical example of the ways knowledge is shaped by decisions about how to physicalize data, including choice of materials and design. additionally, my personal experience underscores that of scholars who find that handcrafting data displays gives the maker a visceral, emotionally-laden sense of the phenomenon they are analyzing. although people may be reluctant to invest time and labor in handcrafting physicalizations for which data predetermine most design decisions (sullivan 2020), the popularity of projects like tempestry suggests that activist motivations or personal connections to the location or time represented by data might provide sufficient incentives. indeed, although fiber physicalizations have tended to present personal data or data from the natural sciences, i am convinced that they have tremendous potential to convey social scientific research findings. unconventional data displays remain rare in sociology, so i hope my work will inspire my fellow social scientists to find creative, accessible ways to share our findings with a broader public. physicalizations that resemble conventional visualizations—like knitted or crocheted bar charts or histograms—will have an important place in these efforts, but techniques that harness yarn’s material properties, like smit’s (2021) softsculpture heart, hold special promise. comparative analyses may be particularly amenable to knitualization. scholars could use the technique i developed to physicalize not only health-related time-series data but also data about sex/gender differences in unemployment claims or racial/ethnic differences in police traffic stops. researcher-makers could create separate tapestries for each sex/gender or racial/ethnic group, or add colored beads or other embellishments to rows on a single tapestry to indicate days on which mortality rates differed significantly by those social characteristics. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 15 like anne sullivan (2020), i am eager to explore ways to physicalize qualitative data with fiber. one team i work with is considering knitting or crocheting objects, like baskets or hats, in which different stitches and yarn colors display what we are learning about disclosures of sexual assault in medical settings, and different textures and thicknesses of yarn indicate our emotional reactions to those findings. quilting could offer many options. for example, a scholar could construct a quilt segment to represent each participant in an in-depth interview study, with color, pattern, and other design choices (such as segment shape) expressing, more or less abstractly, key aspects of the participant’s experiences and personal characteristics. physicalization projects focused on social injustice, led by members of affected communities and organized in ways that facilitate the participation of diverse makers, could help redress race and class biases in craftivism. considering the accessibility of materials is crucial. my project used a low-cost, washable yarn (mass-produced from petrochemicals) sold in big-box craft stores. other knitualizers might prioritize sustainability instead, choosing (typically more expensive) natural-fiber yarn made by small, employee-centered companies. recently, i found a pattern for knitting pie charts (trickier than it sounds). if i can master the method, i may use it to physicalize racial/ethnic disparities in cervical cancer incidence and mortality. i am, after all, a feminist sociologist in possession of a considerable supply of yarn. acknowledgments the author would like to thank madeline (mickey) casad, lynn ramey, and the vanderbilt university center for digital humanities; sarah swanz; cynthia gadsden; the vanderbilt university robert penn warren center for the humanities, especially the “mending and transforming” fellows cohort; rene almeling, alyssa j. davis, joanna kempner, and jennifer a. reich; ella windham, carole windham, and natalie marko; and two anonymous reviewers. notes 1 specifically, kelly (2014) argues that knitting is feminist only when it is used to pursue or prevent social change, involves feminist intentions, and produces collective identity. 2 the first confirmed us death from covid-19 occurred in seattle on february 19, 2020; it was subsequently discovered that two deaths occurred earlier in february in california. 3 using a single brand and style of yarn for all colors is optimal, because differences in size, texture, and other qualities can produce noticeable irregularities when different yarns are used adjacent to one another. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 16 4 when i began the project, many colors were sold out online because of an upsurge in home crafting during pandemic lockdown. 5 these differences stem largely from historically rooted racial/ethnic differences in socioeconomic status, although racial discrimination and residential segregation have independent negative effects on health (schulz and mullings 2005). 6 sex/gender differences in covid-19 mortality are consistent with the longevity advantage enjoyed by females/women in general; their size varied by state and time period and likely resulted from differences in pre-existing health status, health behaviors, and occupations (danielsen et al. 2022). references adey, kate lampitt. 2018. “understanding why women knit: finding creativity and ‘flow.’” textile 16 (1): 84–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/14759756.2017.1362748. bae, s. sandra, clement zheng, mary etta west, ellen yi-luen do, samuel huron, and danielle albers szafr. 2022. “making data tangible: a cross-disciplinary design space for data physicalization.” proceedings of the 2022 chi conference on human factors in computing systems (chi), 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https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/state/maryland/ https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/state/maryland/ https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/state/massachusetts/ https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/state/massachusetts/ https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/state/tennessee/ https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/state/tennessee/ https://doi.org/10.2307/2061806 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/covid-19_pandemic_in_the_united_states https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x02008001001 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) laura m. carpenter, 2025 20 author bio laura m. carpenter is an associate professor of sociology at vanderbilt university. she is author of virginity lost: an intimate portrait of first sexual experiences and co-editor of sex for life: from virginity to viagra, how sexuality changes throughout our lives. remembering our dead: physicalizing state-level covid-19 mortality data in textile form abstract keywords introduction contextualization implementation reflection conclusion acknowledgments notes references author bio whitenack, mariko. 2024. review of cooling the tropics: ice, indigeneity, and hawaiian refreshment, by hiʻilei julia kawehipuaakahaopulani hobart (duke university press, 2022). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312. © mariko whitenack, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | cooling the tropics: ice, indigeneity, and hawaiian refreshment, by hiʻilei julia kawehipuaakahaopulani hobart (duke university press, 2023) mariko chin whitenack new york university mcw536@nyu.edu hiʻilei julia kawehipuaakahaopulani hobart’s cooling the tropics: ice, indigeneity, and hawaiian refreshment provides a detailed exploration of the shifting social meaning of the cold in hawaiʻi. hobart demonstrates how normative relationships between racialized bodies and environments operate as an expression of ongoing us imperialism and settler colonialism. in other words, hobart shows that what we might have learned to think of as naturally pleasurable or refreshing at the sensorial level—such as eating ice cream on a hot day—is actually deeply shaped by thermal colonialism, or how environments are made friendly to settler habitation according to ideas of temperature normativity. cooling the tropics crafts a detailed history of ice and refrigeration to reveal the operations of thermal colonialism in hawaiʻi. across five chapters and two centuries, hobart’s examination of discourses about the cold demonstrates that any understanding of racialization or modernity in hawaiʻi is incomplete without also attending to how those ideas shape our very senses. the chapters proceed mostly chronologically, although hobart at times brings in contemporary examples to illuminate the connections between presentday understandings of cold refreshment in hawaiʻi and their historical origins. chapter 1 belies western portrayals of the cold as something entirely foreign to hawaiians by investigating long-standing kanaka maoli relationships with the cold, particularly at the summit of mauna a wākea (maunakea). chapter 2 examines scarce accounts of nineteenth-century ice shipments to hawaiʻi and the lasting ideological impact of that comestible ice, from cocktail bars to the mailto:mcw536@nyu.edu book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) mariko whitenack, 2024 temperance movement. chapter 3 focuses on late nineteenth-century honolulu to highlight how modern technological investments, such as ice machines, produced domestic coldness and contrasting interpretations of what the cold meant and who it was for. chapter 4 discusses early twentieth-century legislation regulating the production of poi and the butterfat content of ice cream. chapter 5 analyzes how rainbow shave ice offered a form of cold refreshment perceived to be democratic and local, diluting kanaka maoli claims to sovereignty in the poststatehood rise of liberal multiculturalism. cooling the tropics continually shifts our understanding of what the cold is and what work it does. in hobart’s words, “the cold operates variously as infrastructure, taste, and a sensorial logic of power” (20). such shifting makes clear hobart’s argument that while we each individually experience the sensation of cold, how we interpret that sensation is not individually determined but collectively shaped by social practices influenced by race, class, and gender (10). hobart’s incisive analysis of the history of ice and refreshment in hawaiʻi not only foregrounds the context of settler colonial occupation in hawaiʻi, it articulates how cold as a sensorial logic of power justified us imperialism and sorted racialized bodies into civilized and uncivilized, those fit for leisure and those fit for labor. furthermore, in attending to cold as infrastructure—from the scale of the domestic refrigerator to the global cold chain that supplies nearly 90 percent of hawaiʻi’s fresh food—hobart connects questions of infrastructure with those of food sovereignty. hobart’s meticulous archival research examines a dazzling range of materials from cookbooks to government documents, shipping records to moʻolelo, personal travelogues to published periodicals. besides scholars of hawaiʻi, readers at the intersections and edges of settler colonial critique, food studies, infrastructure, and racialized sensoriums may be drawn to this book. throughout the text, hobart highlights kanaka epistemologies of environmental cold and refreshment, offering numerous examples of how kānaka maoli participated in the ongoing contestation of social understandings of the cold. for example, hobart examines a narrative from a hawaiian-language newspaper accompanying a drawing of two haole (white foreigner) children playing in the snow. this narrative warned of snow’s dangers and acknowledged the possibility of different reactions to snow between haole and kanaka readers, but located that difference in epistemology rather than biology (83). against american paternalism that imagined kānaka as biologically unfit for the pleasures of the cold, this narrative suggested that it was kānaka who were wise to its potential dangers, and americans who were naive. the attention to kanaka epistemologies is especially clear in the first chapter, which brings us to maunakea to foreground the racialized logics of dispossession through thermal colonialism. hobart shows that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, westerners characterized environmental cold as something entirely book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) mariko whitenack, 2024 foreign to hawaiʻi and thus viewed maunakea, a place where ice and snow naturally occur, as a place separate from kānaka maoli. against such logics of dispossession, hobart turns to moʻolelo (storied histories) published in hawaiian-language newspapers about poliʻahu, an important akua (elemental force or deity) associated with the snow of maunakea. the vivid descriptions of poliʻahu’s “freezing cold” circulated amongst newspaper readers demonstrate that kanaka maoli need not summit maunakea to intimately know the cold (26). the chapter chronicles how maunakea was produced in the western imaginary as terra nullius, through nineteenth-century travel accounts, mid-twentieth-century us military infrastructures that increased both tourist and scientific access to the mountain, and the present-day context in which the astronomy community has cast maunakea as humanity’s entry point to a wider galaxy. in the ongoing stand to protect maunakea from desecration by the construction of the thirty meter telescope, the kiaʻi (protectors) of maunakea draw our attention to the akua. unlike western colonial aesthetics of the cold as “objective, rational, empty, and capitalistic,” hobart shows how kiaʻi interpret the presence of snow atop the mauna as the agential presence of poliʻahu, temporarily halting construction and protecting maunakea from development (23). this chapter thus calls attention to the multiple meanings that the cold has amassed in hawaiʻi, both in resistance to and in service of settler colonialism, or in hobart’s words, how “ice transforms from akua into comestible, from indigenous to foreign, and from element to product” (45). following that transformation of element to product, the second and third chapters investigate comestible ice as it arrived in nineteenth-century hawaiʻi, at first through sporadic shipments and then through domestic production. hobart highlights how the hawaiian monarchy participated in and contributed to infrastructures and tastes of cold, such as introducing the ice machine, as they carefully negotiated western imperial power and economic and political pressures. these chapters offer not only a detailed history of the infrastructures that made it possible for ice to become widely available for consumption in hawaiʻi, but also an analysis of how icy refreshments of both the alcoholic and non-alcoholic variety came to express a settler colonial ideology of racialized civility. the powerful missionaries championed the moral purity of drinking cold water as “an antidote to indigenous sexualities and tropical heat,” while cocktails became an increasingly popular form of white leisure and respite to plantation oversight (55). the temperance movement worked hand in hand with haole perceptions and portrayals of kānaka as lacking in self-control around alchohol consumption, a legacy that lingers on in the historiography of king kamehameha iii. furthermore, the modernization of honolulu, as observed by gustatory practices such as the ubiquity of ice cream at aliʻi social gatherings, was perceived by westerners as a sign of americanization. the fourth and fifth chapters are perhaps most obviously legible as food studies projects, as they turn to the production, consumption, and regulation of ice book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) mariko whitenack, 2024 cream, shave ice, and poi (a hawaiian staple food of pounded taro). hobart demonstrates that the territorial government of the early twentieth century prioritized an ideological commitment to purity over public health: a cholera outbreak led the hawaiʻi board of health to unilaterally close all poi shops in honolulu, but the health inspector then got sidetracked regulating the butterfat content in ice cream rather than finding the source of the outbreak. although local tastes preferred little to no dairy in their frozen desserts, the colonial imposition of american food standards for butterfat content insisted on a particular purity and creaminess (and whiteness) of ice cream. as hawaiʻi’s racial politics shifted toward rainbow multiculturalism in the latter half of the twentieth century, rainbow shave ice emerged as an aesthetic expression of this new racial ideology. whereas ice cream celebrated the purity of whiteness, rainbow shave ice became a celebratory and nostalgic representation of racial harmony and local identity in post-statehood hawaiʻi. the book concludes by returning to maunakea through the camp kitchen of puʻuhonua o puʻuhuluhulu to raise questions about infrastructure, indigenous movements for self-determination, and the political possibilities of foodways. coolers, bags of ice, and eventually a generator provided “critical infrastructure” that nourished the movement to protect maunakea (139). people generously donated a variety of food resources: “huge buckets of fried chicken and chili from fast-casual restaurants, cardboard boxes of fruit picked from backyard trees, pallets of shelf-stable snack foods, and canned goods grabbed from home pantries” (143). hobart invites us to view these collective acts as a form of food sovereignty. moreover, hobart provocatively invites us to contemplate melt in a time of global climate change as a way of thinking through what to do with infrastructures as we work toward futures that “refuse the legacies of their making” (145). author bio mariko whitenack is a phd candidate in american studies at nyu (lenapehoking). her dissertation examines the past and present of the ecological restoration of hawaiʻi’s watershed forests, sites in which human and more-thanhuman beings are recruited towards competing logics of settler extraction, indigenous refusal, and reciprocal abundance. six ways of looking at fractal mechanics yoon, hyaesin. 2024. “‘warm robots’ for children with autism spectrum disorder? the thermodynamics of human sociality and the technology of inclusion in south korea.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–24. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © hyaesin yoon, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license “warm robots” for children with autism spectrum disorder? the thermodynamics of human sociality and the technology of inclusion in south korea hyaesin yoon central european university, vienna yoonh@ceu.edu abstract over the past several years, robots that help children with autism spectrum disorder (asd) to develop social skills have emerged as an archetype of “warm robots” in south korea’s public science and technology discourses. this paper critically examines the socio-historical and conceptual meanings of this phenomenon. first, it traces how these robots have come to bear the “warmth” imaginary of new techno-society at the juncture of two national trends: the promotion of humanist pursuits of new technologies since the 2010s, and the fourth industrial revolution initiated by the 2016 davos forum. second, it analyzes the thermodynamics entailed by the current idea of therapy robots— that these robots bear the warmth of an imaginary techno-society, while the human warmth of autistic children remains bracketed and their mothers’ caregiving serves to insulate these human-robot interactions from broader sociality. by illuminating the complex social implications of such thermodynamics, this paper aims to move beyond the liberal humanist critique of machinic dehumanization of people with autism by criticizing its undergirding scheme of robots as surrogates for devalued gendered, racialized, and colonial labor. in doing so, this paper opens space for re-envisioning a more inclusive and diverse techno-society in south korea and elsewhere. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 2 keywords therapy robots, autism spectrum disorder, sociality, human-robot interaction, affective technology, care work introduction in 2020 the korea evaluation institute of industrial technology (keit) held an open idea competition called warm (tattŭt’an) r&d in robots. as of september 15, 2020, keit’s website explains that this title refers to “robotic technologies that might offer new and improved education, care, and public services for the socially disadvantaged such as people with disability, the elderly, and children.” the accompanying application guidelines for the competition offer as an example the development of caro, the autism spectrum disorder (asd) therapy robot. keit’s competition illustrates how in recent years robots designed to help autistic children to develop social skills have become an archetype of “warm robots” in south korean policy and public communication. however, there is little discussion about the cultural and ethical implications of this kind of robot for these children. this lack of social deliberation is concerning, considering the dehumanizing potential raised about similar therapy robots over the past several years, such as the eu-funded development of robot-enhanced therapy for children with autism (dream) project (richardson et al. 2018; mcbride 2020). this paper is located at the fissure between the prominence of therapy robots for autism in policies and public communications and the lack of social deliberation about this prominence. it takes as its point of departure a critical reflection on the idea undergirding this phenomenon: robots designed for helping autistic children are “warm” because they allow “robot-like” autistic children to be included in natural human sociality. challenging this taken-for-granted idea, this paper examines the affective-discursive matrix in contemporary south korea wherein these robots bear the warmth of an imaginary techno-society while the autistic children’s own human warmth remains bracketed and their mothers’ intense caregiving is mobilized to insulate the human-robot thermodynamics from the broader social fabrics. in doing so, the analysis here engages with three questions. first, in what socio-historical context have these robots emerged as an archetype of “warm” technology in south korea? this paper traces the emergence of these robots as a key figure in korean policies from the intelligent robot development and promotion act (henceforth the robot act) in 2008 to the presidential committee on the fourth industrial revolution (henceforth 4ir committee) launched in 2017. in this, the paper attends to how two senses of “warm”— humanist and affective—undergird the development of these policies. it highlights the emerging status of such “warm” robots at the juncture of the growing emphasis on humanist science and technology over the previous decade original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 3 and the appeal of affective ai for psychological support with the rise of discourse on the fourth industrial revolution in south korea. second, if the affective-discursive matrix of warmth endows these robots with human virtues, what happens to the children in this exchange of temperature? to address the question, this paper then analyzes an exemplary clinical trial of robotassisted therapy for autistic children performed in south korea, to examine how the assumed and encouraged idea of normal social interaction reiterates what ai ethicist kathleen richardson calls the “machine model of autism” in this therapeutic setting (2018, 4). through the example of the clinical trial, this paper proposes to re-evaluate the evoked warmth of technology in the broader context of what can be called “human-robot thermodynamics”: “warm robots” are instituted as an inclusive technology while ironically obscuring the human warmth of “robot-like” autistic children and naturalizing the existing human sociality that renders these children exterior in the first place—and thereby necessitating its own invention to facilitate their inclusion. third, how do feminist critiques on the intense caregiving expected from and performed by the mothers of children with autism in south korea compound the dehumanizing potential of human-robot thermodynamics? considering these mothers’ caregiving demands more than reiterating the double task of redistributing and revalidating caregiving at the intersections of gender, disability, and global division of labor. it also opens a conversation with critical discourses on the gendered, racialized, and geopolitical contours of robots as the proxy for degraded human labor (rhee 2016; atanasoski and vora 2019)—exploring the conditions and possibilities of re-envisioning a human-machine sociality alternative to reclaiming an unexamined human essence built on the extraction of infra-humanity’s labor from machinic dehumanization and to reducing autistic children’s sociality to the matter of unilateral care labor. this paper does not oppose using robots to support autistic children. it, however, does call for a critical reflection on some of the assumptions underlying the endorsement of therapy robots for these children—ideas that undermine the rising orientation toward a “warm” techno-society—to illuminate the complex social implications of therapy robots for autism. as such, it aspires to open a space for re-envisioning a techno-society that is more inclusive and respectful of autistic sociality beyond the model of robots as the proxies for devalued human care work in south korea and elsewhere. social contexts and conceptual frames of analysis this section establishes the approaches through which i engage with the sociohistorical and the conceptual constitution of therapy robots for autistic children as “warm robots.” first, i situate the emphasis on warmth as an affective infrastructure indicating the shifting paradigm of science and technology original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 4 following immediate reactions to the 1997 asian financial crisis. second, i draw from critiques on the machinic model of autism that permeates both robotics and clinical autism therapy to delineate the social and ethical stakes in the thermodynamics among autistic children, therapy robots, and society. third, instead of following some critiques of the machinic model of autism that return to human essentialism, i invite critical race and femi-queer scholars to reassess human-robot affinities. in particular, their attention to robots as proxies for gendered, enslaved, and colonized workers helps me address the intense care work performed by the mothers of children with autism in south korea as an invitation to re-envision human-robot sociality beyond robots as surrogate workers (wherein these children are always perceived as the recipient of medical, pedagogical, and reproductive care work). rearticulating science and technology, society, and policy in south korea since the late 2000s, south korea has seen significant efforts from governments, industries, and researchers in the development of service robots, moving away from its global prominence in industrial robots.1 this shift occurred during recovery from the 1997 asian financial crisis, which wounded the megacorporations that had driven industrial robotics in south korea. these efforts backdrop the trends in developing and employing robots for clinical and educational intervention in children with asd, such as irobiq, developed by yujin robot co., and caro, developed by the center for robotic research at the korea institute for science and technology. naturally, there are dozens of scholarly articles on the development and application of animal-robot toys and humanoids for children with asd in south korea from the perspectives of medicine, behavioral psychology, special education, engineering, and design (see, for example, kim and song 2012; ku and lee 2012; lee et al. 2016; yun et al. 2016). however, social and historical accounts of this kind of robot or of the cultural and philosophical implications of its use are rare (e.g., m. choi 2017), and none focuses on robots for supporting people with asd in south korea. the necessity of addressing this lacuna is even more urgent given that such robots have been evoked for the good of techno-society in recent south korean science and technology policies and public communications. thus, this paper situates the centralization of these therapy robots as warm robots in the context of a shifting paradigm of science and technology—from an emphasis on national economic development to social welfare and other inclusive values. the focus on inclusive and humanistic values of technology has been palpable since the early 2010s in south korean society in the appropriate technology (often called warm technology) movement under the slogan “the other 90 percent” (anh and song 2010; jeon 2014). this article examines the social construal of these robots’ warmth at the intersection of the development of a humanist approach to technology—promoted as a saram-chungshim (human-centric) philosophy—and original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 5 the appeal to affective technologies in the discourse of the fourth industrial revolution during (and especially at the beginning of) the moon jae-in administration from 2017 to 2022.2 my focus here is to foreground what the discourse of affective technology tells us about the social construal of warm technology, rather than to relegate the inclusive and humanist paradigm of technology to the moon administration’s relatively progressive political orientation. the policies and public communications surrounding robots are important sites for examining and rearticulating the changing relationships among science, technology, and society. in particular, policies concerning robots have emerged alongside the shifting paradigm of science and technology governance, resonating with what youngrak choi identifies as “the new features of science and technology” that have appeared in twenty-first-century south korea (2018, 23). these features include the incorporation of new fields of technology and a shift from a monolithic focus on economic effects to social values such as purposeful life and the welfare of citizens. choi argues that these features demand “a new paradigm and approaches” in the country’s science and technology policy that incorporate economic, social, cultural, and lifestyle perspectives as well as historical, philosophical, and ethical considerations, and that move beyond government-centered guidance toward civil discussion and consensus and an autonomous research community (24–26). in this context, policies concerning research and development of robots for socially disadvantaged people illustrate the dynamic emergence of a new mode of science and technology governance, as the field relies largely on public funding due to its still-frail status in the market economy but promises to support social values that have gained renewed importance in the relevant industrial and research fields (and in general society). in this vein, this paper looks back to the establishment of the robot act in 2008, itself a consequence of the inclusion of smart robots as one of the top ten future growth power industries designated for economic development in 2003.3 even though there are strong continuities with the growth power industries, the emphasis on developing technologies for the socially disadvantaged in the robot act points to a notable shift from the previous neoliberal nationalist-developmentalist paradigm of science and technology after the 1997 asian financial crisis. this historical shift in the governance mode of science is an essential frame for understanding policy concerning robots since the robot act. however, the centralization of therapy robots for autistic children in the relevant policy during the moon jae-in government—which came to power in 2017 after former president park geun-hye was brought down by protests against the partisan politics and corruption of her administration—indicates a subtler shift than simply from economic to humanist values. one critic even argues that original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 6 moon’s more liberal science and technology policy is as subordinated to the logic of economy as park’s conservative-neoliberal policies (kim 2022). to better understand the significance of policy regarding therapy robots during this period, i suggest attention to another factor: emphasis on the affective-interactive potential of technology with the rise of the fourth industrial revolution as a key agenda after the 2016 world economic forum. discourse surrounding 4ir deeply impacted south korean society, already shocked by legendary go player sedol lee’s defeat by alpha go at google deepmind’s challenge match in seoul. every presidential candidate since has claimed to be the leader best prepared for the 4ir era. thus, this article analyzes relevant policies to examine how affective interactions with robots substantialize the warmth of appropriate technology for the disadvantaged. challenging the association between autistic people and machines this paper draws from critiques on the association between autistic people and robots, prevalent both in scientific discourses on robotics and cybernetics and in medical and psychological discourses on autism. scientists researching cybernetics and robots have often used autism as a metaphor or figure for understanding various kinds of deficiencies and problems in thinking machines. predicting disruptive behaviors that match diagnostic criteria from the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fifth edition (dsm-v), among ais and robots,4 digital design and development scholar gregory p. garvey warns that “humanoid robots will betray serious limitations especially in social situations” such as “inappropriate verbal responses, abnormal eye contact and repetitive actions,” despite the rapid advance in social robots and affective computing (2015, 525). garvey particularly points to how robots designed for social and emotional interactions, such as cynthia breazeal’s kismet and david hansen’s sophia, display “communication deficits” that induce the uncanny valley— describing them as “similar to a range of autistic behaviors” (525).5 in how we become posthuman, n. katherine hayles similarly describes how second-order cybernetics theorist humberto maturana’s account of autopoiesis fails to recognize the active nature of interaction in social systems. in particular, hayles draws from simon baron-cohen’s proposition that autistic children “suffer from ‘mindblindness,’ an inability to imagine for others the emotions and feelings they themselves have” (1999, 148). this kind of trope requires critical reflection given the highly influential yet controversial nature of baron-cohen’s theory, which argues that autism is a manifestation of extreme-male brain—that autistic people are hyper-systemizers who lack capacity to empathize with others’ feelings and intensions (1995, 2002). as technology critic os keyes notes, this medical model and its consequential understanding of autistic people as “asocial and overly rational” resonates with representations of autistic people—as “computer geeks” and as “computers; as robotic, machine-like ‘others’” (2020, 2). thus, reflection on this kind of trope also original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 7 calls for examination of the medical model of autism. keyes’s charting of three different models of disability and their positioning offers a useful reference in this light. under a medical model of disability, “autistic people (autists) are individuals suffering from a disorder, one characterized by stunted or absent social skills and emotional awareness.” in contrast, the “neurodiversity” movement “seeks to portray autism and autists in a more positive light.” and there are perspectives “floating between these two points” (including keyes’s), which “seek to contextualise and historicise the construction of ‘autism’ as a concept and the already-political nature of diagnostic procedures” and “trace the (often racialized and gendered) variations in autistic experiences of the world” (2). in line with keyes, i suggest that the prevalent associations between machines and autistic people are less objective descriptions than a biopolitical dispositive for approaching and governing autistic people. autism studies scholars have already criticized such associations between machines and autistic people and their bearing on the violent and dehumanizing effects of medical “treatment” of autistic people. in her book challenging sociality, richardson questions the role of robots designed “to therapeutically help children with autism develop social skills” and refers to ethnographic and experimental data gathered over ten years (2018, 1). concluding that robot therapy for children with autism makes sense only “within a machinic model of autism,” richardson traces this problematic position back to 1940s psychiatry that persists among medical and psychological discourses on autism. richardson criticizes the logic underlying robot therapy as something that “flattens out distinctions between humans and machines” and thereby justifies the replacement of human caregivers with robots (4). from this perspective, richardson is skeptical of how “autism and robots” has become the epitome of a new mode of sociality in the digitally connected world, in line with the current scholarly trend that rejects “human essentialism” in favor of “poly-perverse monsters, cyborgs, and ontologies that equate persons and things” (15). richardson therefore objects to the idea of therapy robots based on “dehumanizing descriptions of autistic persons” and instead calls for a more relational approach (that focuses on “a humanistic i-you interrelatedness”) to autistic people and their sociality (15). given the problematic association between people with asd and robots, this paper also aims to critically examine the status of children with asd in imaginary and actual therapy using robots as co-constituting the ableist techno-futurist imagination of inclusive society. however, it also does not dismiss potential posthumanist or cyborgian approaches for re-envisioning an inclusive technosociety that is more open to autistic (and other non-normative) personhood and sociality. these approaches offer better tools than human essentialism does for scrutinizing the liberal notions of “human” and “sociality,” wherein humanness is original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 8 historically and conceptually buttressed by drudgeries performed by infrahumans. a critical race and feminist remapping of human-robot affinities richardson’s criticism of posthumanist theories such as those of bruno latour and donna haraway as anti-humanism that “equates persons and things” is reasonable, considering how the association between autistic children and robots and the replaceability between human interlocuters and therapy robots have shaped the potentially dehumanizing scheme of therapy robots for autistic children (2018, 15). however, critics who have engaged with the gendered, racialized, geopolitical, and ableist contours of human-machine relationships have shown the necessity for critically questioning the hegemonic notion of the (white male) human and its distinction from machines in western political and philosophical tradition (chun 2009; kafer 2013, esp. chapter 5; rhee 2016; atanasoski and vora 2019). these critics demonstrate that, although association with machines and robots (alongside animals) has been a frequent method of dehumanization, dissociation from robots won’t ultimately resolve the issues. thus, criticism of power relations that dehumanize autistic people and other marginal groups should go hand in hand with reworking the hegemonic notion of the human and its relationship to others within and outside the human species. this task entails reassessing the mechanical within humans, recognizing both the role of technology as an important constituent of social fabrics, and seeking to go beyond the modern western imaginary of robots as replacements for the human labor force (which also frames richardson’s criticism of human-robot equivalence). in such a light, this paper extends critical examination of the thermodynamics between therapy robots and children with autism—attending to the care work disproportionally imposed on the mothers of children with autism in south korea in conversation with critical race and feminist discussions of human-robot affinities. on the one hand, i draw on neda atanasoski and kalindi vora’s theorization of the “technoliberalism” in us imperial and racial capitalism, which reiterates the fantasy of the human subject “freed for creative capacities” when “machines, algorithms, and artificial intelligence take over the dull, dirty, repetitive, and even reproductive labor performed by racialized, gendered, and colonized workers of the past” (2019, 4). atanasoski and vora excavates how the architecture of the free human subject as an effect of “the violent process of extraction and exploitation” of labor performed by those at the margin of humanity is built into the imaginaries and designs of specific technologies (11). on the other, i’m inspired by margaret rhee (2016) taking the cultural associations between asian women/immigrants and robots as “second-class laborers” to be a cue for an intersectional recalibration of posthuman cyborg feminism. as far as such associations speak to the historical racialization of asians in us neocolonial capitalism as cheap alien laborers with “great productivity” yet lacking proper original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 9 emotions and creativity (rhee 2016), they also call for an affirmative revalidation of robotic inhumanity and labor for a geopolitically situated analysis of the human-robot relationship. dialoguing with these critiques guides my approach to the extensive caregiving offered largely by the mothers of autistic children. first, the taken-for-granted mothers’ care work buttressing the discourse of warm technology problematizes whose repetitive labor is considered worth saving by robots (in this case, medical doctors and therapists). second, looking at how these women’s caregiving insulates the thermodynamics between therapy robots and autistic children from the broader social context, i also call for re-envisioning techno-human sociality beyond the frame of robotic labor as surrogate for (medical, educational, and reproductive) care work, to which autistic children’s sociality is reduced. how caro and irobiq became warm robots two senses of “warmth”: affective infrastructure how have robots designed for helping children with asd become archetypically “warm robots” in contemporary south korea’s public discourse, especially during the moon administration? alongside the moon administration’s promises for a more inclusive and democratic society, i attend to how “warmth” has established an affective infrastructure through the confluence of two trends regarding the two senses of the word warm (ttattŭt’an). first, warm has become a trope for promoting the humanist aspects of new technologies in south korea since the 2010s. however, this term also refers to the affective nature of new technology with the advance of the fourth industrial revolution, which became a key agenda after the 2016 davos forum. jeong-mo lee, director of the gwacheon national science museum, asked a question that is still pertinent: “would there have been the fourth industrial revolution wave in south korea, had it not been for the alpha go shock in march 2016 and the presidential election in may 2017?” (2017, 134). however, even the politically driven (and government-led) wave of 4ir is nonetheless symptomatic of something beyond the narrowly defined realm of the political. as such, i approach the two senses of “warm” (humanist and affective) as threads for tracing something that has been happening for longer and with a broader scope but catalyzed in the second half of the past decade, constituting an affective infrastructure for the rise of therapy robots for children with asd in the policies i analyze below. in delineating this affective infrastructure, i invite us to critically reflect on (and go beyond) the depoliticized vision of an inclusive technosociety that professes to benefit the socially disadvantaged. the robot act and its three basic plans: service robots for the socially disadvantaged south korea was one of the first countries to propose a national roadmap for robotics. in 2003 the government designated intelligent robots as one of the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 10 growth power industries. however, the paradigm shift i detail above becomes more noticeable with the robot act in 2008. at the end of the initial period of ten years, the act was extended until 2028 with partial amendment.6 the act’s stated purpose is to “enhance[e] the quality of life of citizens and the national economy by establishing and promoting a policy on the sustainable development of the intelligent robot industry” (article 1). although the robot act still revolves around an economic and industrial agenda, its current commitment to other social values is also notable. the act establishes government responsibility to socially disadvantaged people “such as disabled, the elderly, and low-income earners” (article 17), and official support for the charter on intelligent robot ethics (article 18). the act also requires the government to establish a basic plan every five years “to achieve the purpose of this act…in an efficient manner” (article 5). as a result, the first, second, and third basic plan(s) for development of intelligent robots were installed during the periods of 2009–2013, 2014–2018, and 2019–2023. per the robot act, these plans include concrete measures for supporting socially disadvantaged people (article 17). the first basic plan asserts that “robots are the best resolution for meeting the megatrends,” such as population-aging and increasing interest in well-being (2009, 1). the plan supports personal service-robot projects affiliated with other programs for socially disadvantaged groups as one way to preempt the global market by expanding demand through consumer-centered pilot projects. more specifically, the plan proposes to support the commercialization of “welfare robots” that offer disability and nursing assistance in connection with publichealth centers and nursing homes, and to establish a business model for englishteaching assistant robots targeting low-income groups as a replacement for native-english speakers (31). it doesn’t specify what these “welfare robots” might be, but the list of tasks for the initial year of the basic plan includes houseworksupport robots for seniors living alone and robots for rehabilitation and care of people with a physical disability (51–52). these two kinds of robots for the socially disadvantaged continually appear in the subsequent plans, each of which offers a slightly revised focus in the field of service robots. the second basic plan (2014) emphasizes the areas of disasterresponse robots, robot health towns, human-robot collaborative manufacturing, and housework robots. the third basic plan (2019) proposes revised foci on care, medicine, logistics, and wearables. in the development of the three basic plans, people with disabilities and the elderly (especially those living alone) became the iconic socially disadvantaged groups that would benefit from the development of service robots, even though their strategic importance as users is still explained in economic terms. importantly, the specific functions of robots addressed for both groups largely concern physical assistance. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 11 however, an exception appears in the third basic plan (2019). in addition to care robots for assisting with eating (for people with hand paralysis), transporting critical patients, and toilet care, the plan also includes testing “care robots for dementia prevention” (26–27). the plan does not explain what dementiaprevention robots are, but lists functions such as “speaking to the elderly, phone calling, and ai speakers” in bullet points with a picture of a humanoid robot surrounded by a few elderly people (27). thus, even though it isn’t clear what kind of communication these robots are expected to have with the elderly, it does show an emerging orientation toward therapeutic-care robots with affective and social functions. the addition of this new type of robot for the elderly is accompanied by a taxonomic change. the first two basic plans use both toumi (literally “helper” but also used to refer to a caregiver) and tolbom (care) to refer to physical assistance for the elderly and people with disability and to housework support for seniors living alone. however, the third plan uses kae-ŏ—a phonetic reading of the english word care—to refer to all these and to dementia-prevention robots, which evokes a more emotionally and socially supportive meaning than toumi does. these changes echo “the changing concepts of robots” introduced in the third basic plan “from working robots to robots that empathize and connect with humans.” this shift follows the two other shifts already introduced in previous basic plans—“from the replacement of labor force to collaboration with workers” and “from the improvement of productivity to the improvement of the quality of life” (2019, 3). overall, then, the robot act and the corresponding three basic plans newly emphasize warm (humanist) values, alongside the earlier emphasis on economic values, in science and technology policies. service robots that offer physical assistance to the elderly and people with disabilities are the most representative of this humanist orientation, while an ambiguous type of care robot for “preventing dementia” appears with attention to affective interactions between humans and robots in the more recent basic plan. the 4ir committee: social robots for the elderly with dementia and for autistic children attention to human-robot affective interactions was also prominent in discussions of the 4ir committee, launched in september 2017 shortly after the inauguration of the moon government. in 2018, the final year of the second basic plan, certain priority tasks were forwarded to the committee (third basic plan 2019, 1). these tasks include developing technologies for service robots and expanding the supply of robot products to the socially disadvantaged. at the end of the year, the committee’s agenda for its future direction and plans included the robot industry, which is globally expanding thanks to its incorporation of ai technologies. resolutions at the meeting included “developing social robots that support dementia patients and autistic children” and “developing care robots to support the socially disadvantaged” (ministry of trade, industry, and energy 2018, 9). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 12 these resolutions also specifically refer to the development of “conversation robots” that recognize emotions and voices of patients with mild cognitive impairment and dementia, and autistic-children-friendly robot systems that provide diagnosis and education programs for improving sociality (9). in the 2019 4ir committee progression report, robots for people with dementia and for children with autism are categorized as “social robots” (sosyŏl robot), which is distinguished from “care robots” (tolbom robot) whose primary functions are physical assistance such as transportation, eating support, and toilet care (4ir committee 2019, 90). labeling these robots as social robots separate from care robots is an interesting change from the basic plans. however, this isn’t indicative of a linear evolution over time, as the 4ir committee agenda and its progression report mentioned above and the third basic plan are concurrent. also published in the same year as the launch of the 4ir committee, the technological roadmap for small and medium businesses: robots lists psychological-support robots as one of three kinds of care (kae-ŏ) robot (alongside physical-support robots and life-support robots), which is itself a subdivision of social robots (small and medium businesses administration 2017). this roadmap defines psychological-support robots as “robots that help the users to avoid loneliness or depression and to live an emotionally healthy life” (82). the roadmap suggests that robots can prevent emotional isolation through affective communication (such as reading the user’s emotions and responding accordingly), referring to various projects in the european union that address loneliness among the elderly (82). interestingly, the roadmap’s section on domestic trends in social robots reports that dementiaprevention silbots (silbŏt in korean, combining sil from silver and bŏt, meaning friend or companion) are already used for treating mild-dementia patients in a retirement town and children with autism at a medical university (102). what is suggested by the ambiguous, changing, and conflicting systems of labeling and the appearance of robots for children with asd in these reports written between 2017 and 2019? among other possible answers, i think the appearance of robots, alongside the mutating systems of labeling, shows a growing emphasis on emotional and psychological interaction between humans and robots, which circulates between and across the categories of social and care robots with the rise of the discourse of the fourth industrial revolution. as the focus of robots for the elderly evolved from housework help (toumi) to dementiaprevention (kae-ŏ) to psychological support (sosyŏl), children with asd emerged as another important group of users who share the same category of social robots (or even the same models). thus, on one hand, robots designed for autistic children have become a vital figure in korean policies, intersecting the two genealogies of “warm” robots—“[humanist] robotics that may offer education, care, and public services for the socially disadvantaged such as people with disability, the elderly, and children” (as in the keit’s 2020 competition) and original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 13 “[affective] robots that empathize and connect with humans” (third basic plan 2019). on the other hand, this intersection backdrops the emergence of robots for children with autism as a kind of social robot in korean science and technology policy, even though these robots’ functions are officially diagnosis and special education. this genealogy of policy supporting therapy robots for autistic children thus shows that the perception of these robots as “warm” is a cultural and historical construct. as such, while this trend hailing “warm robots” signals a more humanist paradigm of science and technology in south korea, it also invites another line of critical inquiry. the emphasis on affective human-robot interactions partly explains the policy focus on robots for children with autism and the elderly with dementia (populations often considered to have difficulty being involved in meaningful affective sociality) rather than for people with alcohol addiction, anxiety, or depression—the major drivers of poor mental health in south korea. yet, while these “warm” robots aim to address social isolation, the suggested human-robot affective interactions are based on normalizing discourses in psychology, psychiatry, and special education. critical autism scholars have noted the violent and dehumanizing consequences of such normalization practices, including the applied behavioral analysis (aba) that is often considered standard treatment in the us (yergeau 2018, esp. chapter 2; keyes 2020). furthermore, compared with dynamic debates around and criticism of social robots for the elderly either with dementia or who live alone (bołtuć 2017; jenkins 2017), those for autistic children are rarely seen as problematic—which itself calls for critical reflection. the thermodynamics between therapy robots and children with autism an important question therefore arises: if robots designed to help autistic children in developing social skills are endowed with human warmth at the intersection of humanist and affective orientations in science and technology governance, what happens to the children in this exchange of temperature? in search of answers, let me revisit the presupposition that robots for autistic children are warm because they allow robot-like autistic children to be included in natural human sociality. this presupposition is in turn reiterated by two co-constituting assumptions. first, there is natural human sociality that autistic children are exterior to and thus must be incorporated into. second, such an injunction for “incorporation” is in turn taken for granted, because this kind of robot therapy not only relies on but also naturalizes the assumption that autistic children are like robots (and therefore outside human sociality) and prefer robots to humans (and therefore robots are legitimate channels of social incorporation). this kind of assumed association with robots is a prevalent scientific-clinical dispositive for approaching autistic children, and more fundamental than cultural representations or stereotypes. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 14 it’s worth examining how therapy robots for autistic children are designed and used in light of these presuppositions. one clinical trial of “a robot-assisted behavioral intervention system for children with autism spectrum disorders” using caro and irobiq draws sample subjects from the child and adolescent psychiatry clinic at seoul national university bundang hospital in south korea (yun et al. 2017). the trial does not explicitly associate autistic children with robots; however, it illuminates how the current scheme of robot-assisted therapy focuses on the clinical method, which is embedded in prevalent presuppositions about autistic children’s proximity to machines. notably, the system designed by scientists at korea institute for science and technology (yun et al. 2016) draws on research co-authored by baron-cohen that approaches asd in terms of “abnormal development” in abilities of empathy, pretend play, joint attention, and imitation, which is linked to “impaired social communication” (charman et al. 1997, 781). the intervention system thus provides “social skills” training in basic eye contact and reading facial emotions (yun et al. 2017). a robot-assisted clinical trial session begins with a child-resembling humanoid robot verbally greeting and attempting to establish eye contact with the subject (an autistic child) sitting next to the therapist, to which the child is trained to make “appropriate eye contact” in return (yun et al. 2017, 1308). the robot then makes facial expressions and asks the child to read its emotions (such as happiness, sadness, anger, or fear). here, let me add that i—who is not considered autistic—nonetheless find the photographs of digital facial expressions made by irobiq (with its eyes and mouth) and caro (with its eyes) quite challenging to read. if the child shows the desired response (such as making eye contact with the robot or identifying the correct emotion), the robot offers a reward (such as blinking its led face, singing a song with a dance routine, or raising its hands); if the child does not, the robot provides “encouragement” (such as calling the subject’s name, speaking the correct answer, or shaking its head) or pauses (yun et al. 2017, 1308). this intervention system is based on the discrete trial teaching protocol, a structured aba technique (yun et al. 2017, 1307). let me first acknowledge that aba is currently the most established evidencebased practice, especially in the us—affirmed by organizations such as the american psychiatric association, the american psychological association, and the us surgeon general. nonetheless, it is important to note that concerns have been raised about this method, characterized by up to thirty-six hours of weekly intensive and repetitive interventions to normalize (“correct”) children. henny kupferstein (2018), a psychologist who is also autistic, concludes that aba treatment of autistic children potentially heightens the risk of posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd). some psychologists argue that the method is not effective, or is even abusive (sandoval-norton, shkedy, and shkedy 2019; shkedy, shekedy, and sandoval-norton 2021). others argue conversely that “there is lack of reliable data and research that aba-based interventions have original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 15 resulted in a diagnosis of ptsd, anxiety, or depression” (leaf et al. 2022). there is little criticism of aba treatment in south korea, and south korean experts also follow us standards of diagnosis (the dsm-v) and treatment guidelines (focusing on aba), but the prescriptions and treatments are often modified due to the relative institutional lack of proper aba and other service providers (chang 2020, 201–4).7 while it is true about aba that “the structure and demand for documentation lends itself to automated process,” the content of the robot-assisted technology is also “driven by the perceived functional deficits that comprise a diagnosis of autism and the particular social expressiveness of the condition” (spiel et al. 2019, 18). these children are thus framed as the target of intensive corrective clinical intervention, expected to learn what are supposed to be normal ways of interaction for the non-autistic population. within this kind of medicalized framework, the eye contact with and face reading of irobiq and caro are considered helpful social-skills training—despite complaints among autistic people that eye contact can be distressing and even physically painful (mcglensey 2016) and the lack of efforts among non-autistic people to learn how to better communicate and interact with autistic children. in this light, it’s worth attending to criticism that human-robot interaction technologies focusing on autistic children often become extensions of a normativizing environment that aims to change and teach autistic children without asking about their needs and wellness on their own terms. the discourse on “warm robots” is then ironic in its appeal to humanist technology. this discourse overshadows the human-robot thermodynamics— wherein autistic children’s supposed proximity to machines is taken for granted and the repetitive and mechanical interventions for these children are legitimized—only to highlight the supposed affective functions of the robots. there is no record on how the children in the research trials with irobiq and caro felt about the repetitive and mechanized routine. however, a study of discrete-trial-teaching-based treatment for autistic children using a similar humanoid robot (nao) at a university based in the us offers an interesting insight (louie, korneder, and abbas 2021). a child didn’t respond to the robot’s prompt, so the researchers modified the delivery of the prompt to use a prerecorded human voice, to which he immediately responded. still, the intervention with this child was discontinued due to “lack of progress.” another child requested that he no longer participate in the study, so the intervention was discontinued—which means that only one of the original three participants could complete the designed intervention. although the researchers recognize that one participant preferred a human voice to a robot’s and that the intervention was frustrating to two of three participants, this nonetheless didn’t lead to re-examination of their assessment that “all the children participating…enjoyed interacting with the robot” or of their proposal to use robots “in place of human therapists” (31). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 16 although the design of the intervention systems using irobiq and caro does not aim to replace human therapists with robots, it does aims to address a therapist’s request to make the technology capable of performing “repetitive training routines” and thereby promise “the possibility of a labor-saving effect” (yun et al. 2016, 59). in this sense, the approach to therapy robots as “warm” operates through and reproduces the dehumanizing effects that richardson (2018) has criticized—namely, depriving children of human interaction on the assumptions that they are similar to and prefer machines over humans. existing human sociality is also naturalized within these thermodynamics, and the artificial incorporation of autistic children (who are exterior to it) into the existing sociality is envisioned as inclusive. the technology—and the society that supports this technology—is intended to be “warm,” but the warmth of autistic children (their humanity and sociality) remains uncertain at best. so, what does the thermodynamics of temperature between robots and children tell us? it tells us that society’s engagement with autistic people concerns no less than how we think of human sociality and where we draw boundaries of the human as a social community. critics have already noted that the challenges in communication between autistic people and neurotypical people are mutual (that is, the latter also don’t understand or communicate well with the former) and that neurotypical peers are less willing to communicate with those with autism (sasson et al. 2017; my planet neurodivergent admin 2021). in this light, the thermodynamics points to the need to shift focus from robots as futuristic subject-objects that stand for inclusive techno-society to the techno-social context wherein certain human-robot interactions occur—in which concerns about prevalent clinical-pedagogical approaches to autistic children are eclipsed by abstract aspirations for a warm techno-society projected onto robots. a critical analysis of the thermodynamics thus urges redirecting our focus from rewiring autistic children to rewiring the social fabrics of human-technology (into which autistic sociality is embedded) to be truly inclusive of autistic people. rewiring: thinking with caregivers in south korea this final part of the paper explores one way of rewiring the social fabrics of human-technology to address these challenges. it reflects on the role of mothers of children with autism in insulating the human-robot thermodynamics, in conversation with atanasoski and vora’s (2019) critique of the surrogate relations built into the technoliberal imagery of robots and other technologies. south korean scholars have attested to the intellectual, emotional, and managerial care work disproportionally provided by the mothers of children with autism and other disabilities (chang 2020, 2021; d. lee 2010). hawon chang observes that women raising young children with autism are expected to be sensitive and knowledgeable enough to notice their children’s subtle health original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 17 problems quickly and provide appropriate interventions in south korea, where clinical and educational services for autistic children are not as institutionalized as in the us (or other “advanced” societies)—placing an even stronger responsibility on mothers and requiring that they practice an intense scientific and selfsacrificing motherhood (2020, 2021). chang’s observation is in line with some feminist scholars’ critiques of the notably high rate of mothers as the primary caretakers of children (park 2022) and the intensification of the mother’s role as a manager of children’s education and development (j. lee 1999) in the context of the 1997 financial crisis and ensuing neoliberalization in south korea. it also underlines the feminist demand for socialization of care work (alongside the critique of korean “military masculinity”) (ahn 2017) and attention to the intersections of class and race in “the global rearrangement of care” (ahn 2012, 131). here, these existing feminist political perspectives merit revision, in order to account for how both current and envisioned care work for autistic children implicates surrogate relations among and between various human groups and robots. on the one hand, turning to these women-as-mothers’ care work that evades the discourse of warm robots illuminates the hierarchical and complex distribution of humanness-mechanics among various actors. whose work gets to be replaced by robot labor: the mother’s or the doctor’s? on the other, this kind of calibration stumbles if we ask why these mothers’ care work is perceived as less replaceable even by other surrogates, when migrant workers and wives are doing care work for elders and adults (mostly men) with disabilities (kim and kim 2017; shin 2019). juxtaposing these two pictures demonstrates that redistribution and reassessment of care labor only partially improves our vision of an inclusive techno-society, falling short of reassessing autistic children’s relational status (as the presumed object of intensive care) vis-à-vis both robots and fellow humans. i take this limit as an invitation to reflect on how we might rewire our humanmachine sociality, rather than rewiring children with autism. the existing feminist critiques’ emphasis on these mothers’ caregiving as labor (even though it well deserves attention) still marks the difficulty of considering the social ties of children with autism beyond the relations of care (in which autistic children are invariably the object of clinical, educational, and reproductive care). then, such a difficulty also assures the urgency of an alternative to the problematic fantasy of surrogate labor built into the imaginations of the therapy robots for autistic children. there are other efforts and experiments going on in the uk, japan, colombia, and elsewhere to redirect human-robot interaction in a direction more respectful of autistic people and people with dementia (mcbride 2019; wright 2019; ramírezduque et al. 2021). and, despite the limitations i’ve discussed above, the phenomenon of warm robots in south korea is nonetheless still promising in that original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 18 it’s shaped less by the cultural imagery of robots as replacement for humans than by the desire for robots as co-habitants that enhance the warmth of society. in critically reflecting on the operations and the limits of thermodynamics among therapy robots, children with autism, and their mothers (as the threshold to broader society), i hope this paper offers a groundwork for critical and creative deliberation on a better way to acknowledge and support autistic sociality as an important part of our social fabric in order to envision a new kind of “warm” techno-society. notes 1 according to the world robotics report 2023 of the international federation of robotics, south korea exhibits the highest global density of robots in the manufacturing industry (international federation of robotics 2024). previously, south korea topped the list for eight of the past nine years, except for 2019 when it was second to singapore. 2 president moon’s plenary speech at the first national science and technology advisory committee meeting captures this orientation. the speech is available on youtube (ktv 2018). 3 as sanghyun lee and heesun shin (2019) note, the top ten future growth industries list played a part in establishing the robot acts and consequent policies. there are also institutional and personnel connections between these two schemes. 4 the dsm is the standard classification of and diagnostic tools for mental disorders, published by the american psychiatric association and used by mentalhealth professionals in the united states. 5 in addition to autism spectrum disorder, garvey also suggests social communication disorder, asperger syndrome (eliminated as a category and simplified as asd in dsm-v), and anti-social personality disorder as potential issues among new artificially intelligent entities (2015, 525–27). 6 the amendment offers a broader definition of “intelligent robot” to include 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"‘코로나 시대’의 성별화된 돌봄노동과 부모 노릇" [parenthood and the caregiving of korean parents during the covid-19 pandemic]. 한국여성학 (journal of korean women’s studies) 38 (4): 195227. https://doi.org/10.30719/jkws.2022.12.38.4.195. ramírez-duque, andres a., luis f. aycardi, adriana villa, marcela munera, teodiano bastos, tony belpaeme (ugent), anselmo frizera-neto, and carlos a. cifuentes. 2021. “collaborative and inclusive process with the autism community: a case study in columbia about social robot design.” international journal of social robotics, no. 13, 153–67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00627-y. rhee, margaret. 2016. “in search of my robot: race, technology, and the asian american body.” scholar & feminist online, no. 13.3–14.1. https://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/margaret-rhee-in-search-ofmy-robot-race-technology-and-the-asian-american-body/. richardson, kathleen. 2018. challenging sociality: an anthropology of robots, autism, and attachment. new york: palgrave 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https://doi.org/10.1038/srep40700 https://motie.go.kr/motie/ne/announce2/bbs/bbsview.do?bbs_cd_n=6&biz_anc_yn_c=y&bbs_seq_n=62595 https://motie.go.kr/motie/ne/announce2/bbs/bbsview.do?bbs_cd_n=6&biz_anc_yn_c=y&bbs_seq_n=62595 https://doi.org/10.21185/jhu.2019.3.77.73 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41252-021-00201-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41252-021-00201-1 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) hyaesin yoon, 2024 24 small and medium businesses administration. 2017. 중소중견기업 기술로드맵 2017–2019: 로봇 [technological roadmap for small and medium businesses 2017– 2019: robots]. https://www.korearobot.or.kr/wp/2017/08/18. spiel, katta, christopher frauenberger, os keyes, and geraldine fitzpatrick. 2019. “agency of autistic children in technology research: a critical literature review.” acm transactions on computer-human interaction 26 (6): 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1145/3344919. the third basic plan for development of intelligent robots. 2019. jointly prepared by relevant ministries and agencies of south korea. https://motie.go.kr/motie/ms/nt/announce3/bbs/bbsview.do?bbs_seq_n=65584&bbs _cd_n=6. wright, james. 2019. “robots vs migrants?: reconfiguring the future of japanese institutional eldercare.” critical asian studies 51 (3): 331–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2019.1612765. yergeau, melanie. 2018. authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. durham, nc: duke university press. yun, sang-seok, hyuksoo kim, jong suk choi, and sung-kee park. 2016. “a robotassisted behavioral intervention system for children with autism spectrum disorders.” robotics and autonomous systems, no. 76, 58–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2015.11.004. yun, sang-seok, jongsuk choi, sung-kee park, gui-young bong, and heejeong yoo. 2017. “social skills training for children with autism spectrum disorder using a robotic behavioral intervention system.” autism research 10 (7): 1306–23. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1778. author bio hyaesin yoon is an associate professor of gender studies at central european university, vienna. yoon’s research explores affective assemblages of humans, animals, and technologies in transnational contexts. https://www.korearobot.or.kr/wp/2017/08/18 https://doi.org/10.1145/3344919 https://motie.go.kr/motie/ms/nt/announce3/bbs/bbsview.do?bbs_seq_n=65584&bbs_cd_n=6 https://motie.go.kr/motie/ms/nt/announce3/bbs/bbsview.do?bbs_seq_n=65584&bbs_cd_n=6 https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2019.1612765 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2015.11.004 https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1778 “warm robots” for children with autism spectrum disorder? the thermodynamics of human sociality and the technology of inclusion in south korea abstract keywords introduction social contexts and conceptual frames of analysis rearticulating science and technology, society, and policy in south korea challenging the association between autistic people and machines a critical race and feminist remapping of human-robot affinities how caro and irobiq became warm robots two senses of “warmth”: affective infrastructure the robot act and its three basic plans: service robots for the socially disadvantaged the 4ir committee: social robots for the elderly with dementia and for autistic children the thermodynamics between therapy robots and children with autism rewiring: thinking with caregivers in south korea notes references author bio     “i graft a new tribalism”: affiliative biofuturities and new terrains of mestizaje in the works of gloria e. anzaldúa     karina a. vado johns hopkins university kvado1@jhu.edu     abstract in this essay, i engage the makings and evolution of queer chicana theorist and feminist philosopher of science gloria e. anzaldúa’s generative engagements with indigenous onto-epistemologies and syncretized spiritualities, as well as her (re)visionary disidentifications with the biosciences for matters of speculative visioning and social justice. stitching together the rich insights of the fields of chicanx/latinx studies and queer feminist science and technology studies, i survey how anzaldúa treads the boundaries between the humanities and biosciences as a means of complicating and rewriting new narratives of identity and belonging. borrowing from the lexicon of the animal, plant, and other life sciences, anzaldúa risks repurposing vexed evolutionary metaphors—namely, for the purposes of this essay, the “tree of life” image—to instantiate one part of what i call her “affiliative biofuturities.” thinking from and through a border/nepantla space, anzaldúa sifts through and remixes humanistic, scientific, esoteric, and spiritualized modes of inquiry to fashion alternative ways of knowing, seeing, and being in the world. ultimately, i suggest that anzaldúa’s chicanafuturist oeuvre radically reconceptualizes and expands our understanding of identity and our relationality to other beings/species while taking seriously the liberatory potentialities of “unruly” knowledge-making practices in times of socioecological crises. resumen en este ensayo, me ocupo de la creación de la teórica chicana queer y filósofa de la ciencia feminista gloria e. anzaldúa, de su compromiso generativo con las onto-epistemologías indígenas y las espiritualidades sincretizadas, así como de sus (re)desidentificaciones visionarias con las biociencias en su relación con la proyección de futuros especulativos y la justicia social. uniendo las ricas perspectivas de los estudios chicanx/latinx y los estudios feministas queer sobre ciencia y tecnología, examino cómo anzaldúa se mueve en las fronteras entre las humanidades y las biociencias como medio para complicar y reescribir nuevas narrativas de identidad y pertenencia. tomando prestado el léxico de las ciencias animales, vegetales y otras ciencias de la vida, anzaldúa se arriesga a reutilizar metáforas evolutivas controvertidas -en concreto, a efectos de este ensayo, la imagen del «árbol de la vida»para instanciar una parte de lo que yo llamo sus «biofuturidades afiliativas». pensando desde y a través de un espacio fronterizo/nepantla, anzaldúa tamiza y remezcla modos de investigación humanísticos, científicos, esotéricos y espiritualizados para crear formas alternativas de conocer, ver y estar en el mundo. en última instancia, sugiero que la obra chicanafuturista de anzaldúa reconceptualiza y amplía radicalmente nuestra comprensión de la identidad y nuestra relación con otros seres/especies, al tiempo que se toma en serio el potencial liberador de las prácticas «rebeldes» de creación de conocimiento en tiempos de crisis socioecológica. keywords gloria anzaldúa, arboreality, futurity, queer feminist science, spirituality     introduction due to diabetes-related complications, gloria evangelina anzaldúa, the queer chicana intellectual whose theorizations of geographical and metaphorical borders and borderlands profoundly influenced fields such as chicanx/latinx studies, queer and gender studies, and postcolonial studies, among others, would only live to see the first four years of the new millennium. in those four years, however, anzaldúa witnessed the historic completion of the mapping of the human genome, the september 11 and anthrax attacks, the beginnings of george w. bush’s “global war on terror,” and the subsequent mass (re)deployment of (bio)surveillance and military technologies across geographical borders. this period, in short, was marked by both rapid scientific and technological advancement and the expansion of us neoimperial projects across the globe. yet as anzaldúa keenly recognized and shared in one of her last writings penned shortly after the attacks of 9/11, the united states’ “real battle” was “with its shadow—its racism, propensity for violence, rapacity for consuming, neglect of its responsibility to global communities and the environment, and unjust treatment of dissenters and the disenfranchised, especially people of color” (2015, 10). though anzaldúa’s earlier writings largely focused on her lived experiences as a queer chicana border artist and writer living in the us-mexico borderlands, her preoccupations with the future of our planet would increasingly color her interand trans-planetary visions of liberation, reparative healing, and justice. indeed, anzaldúa considered herself a “citizen of the universe,” and felt a deep sense of kinship with peoples from countries and regions ravaged by the material and psychological violences of us empire. at the same time, anzaldúa affirmed and respected “the consciousness of all life forms, including ecosystems, planets and galaxies, bacteria, and all matter” (2015, 43), and sought to understand and capture her (and our) relationality to nonhuman beings (including those residing in “otherworlds”). anzaldúa believed, then, that her “job as an artist” was to “bear witness to what haunts us, to step back and attempt to see the pattern in these events (personal and societal), and how we can repair el daño (the damage) by using the imagination and its visions” (10). however, because “[our] reality is too big for any ideological system to contain, and literary realism is too small to contain it,” anzaldúa sought to create a “different mode of telling stories” that could “simultaneously hold the different models of what [she thought] reality was” (43). thus, for anzaldúa, the process of visioning and imagining otherwise vis-à-vis a weaving of new and reclaimed images and words was a laborious yet nevertheless vital task in the broader project of transforming our dystopian present(s). this seeking of an alternative mode of telling stories, and her lifelong toils with giving shape and meaning to the liberatory worlds she imagined, is perhaps why anzaldúa read so expansively, consistently transgressing disciplinary and generic boundaries and the presumably impenetrable borders between what she called the “real/imaginal.” for instance, ever a lover of science, anzaldúa completed advanced courses in fields such as chemistry, microbiology, physics, and other life and physical sciences (2000, 28).1 she was likewise informed, as philosopher mariana alessandri (2020) notes in her exploration and reclamation of anzaldúa as a legitimate philosopher, by various canonical texts in continental philosophy, reading and adapting concepts from the works of nietzsche and kierkegaard. she was also exposed early on, via the work of mexican anthropologist miguel leónportilla, to the nahua philosophies that would so deeply shape her opus. moreover, anzaldúa was well acquainted with twentieth-century mexican philosophy. alexander v. stehn and mariana alessandri (2020), for instance, trace the influence of mexican philosophers such as juana armanda alegría, jorge carrión, rosario castellanos, sor juana inés de la cruz, octavio paz, samuel ramos, and, most (in)famously, josé vasconcelos in anzaldúa’s borderlands. anzaldúa also read “esoteric” works from figures such as indian philosopher and maharishi sri aurobindo, french indian “spiritual guru” mirra alfassa, and french writer satprem (the disciple of alfassa), spiritual teachers anzaldúa would find useful for her own ideas of the dawning of an evolutionary synthesis of opposites. after all, it was in the realm of the “esoteric” that anzaldúa would find some of her most potent alternative modes of understanding and organizing the world; past-life regressions, tarot readings, astrological birth charts, and personal experiences with hauntings and extraterrestrial possessions were all part and parcel of anzaldúa’s theoretical and worldbuilding “toolkit.”2 she would also reverentially draw from eastern, afro-, and indigenous spiritual traditions, elevating these to the realm of the scientific, seeing in these a way to radically change what she saw as an imminent “nuevo mundo, [a] new order…[where] we need to create with the choices we make, the acts we perform, and the futures we dream” (anzaldúa 2015, 17). for anzaldúa, then, drafting a “new story” where the scientific meets the esoteric/spiritual and where the scientific is itself transformed by the spiritual/immaterial, was the prerequisite for salvaging our planet, its landscapes, and its human and nonhuman cohabitants. reading anzaldúa as a queer feminist philosopher of science, this essay engages the makings and evolution of her generative engagements with indigenous ontoepistemologies and syncretic spiritualities, as well as her visionary disidentifications with the biosciences for matters of speculative visioning and social justice. stitching together the rich insights of the fields of chicanx/latinx studies and queer feminist science and technology studies, this paper explores how anzaldúa’s chicanafuturist oeuvre treads the boundaries between the humanities and biosciences to complicate and rewrite, as she expresses in her posthumously published treatise light in the dark / luz en lo oscuro, “new narratives of identity, nationalism, ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexuality, and aesthetics...[to] show (not just tell) how transformation happens” (2015, 7).3 borrowing, then, from the lexicon of the animal, plant, and other life sciences, i show how anzaldúa risks repurposing vexed evolutionary metaphors—namely, for the purposes of this essay, the “tree of life” image—to instantiate one part of what she calls “the new synthesis” (1987, 79–80), one that she understands as both affiliative and future oriented. this new synthesis, or what i read as her “affiliative biofuturities,” strategically enmeshes the biological with the cultural, the mystical with the material, and the human with the nonhuman, and comes to centrally color the reparative worldmaking and supernal qualities anzaldúa attaches to her theorizations of the border as a place of transgressive and transformative “meetings.” by thinking from and through a border/nepantla space that she likens, albeit briefly, to argentine writer jorge luis borges’s “aleph,” anzaldúa generatively sifts through and remixes humanistic, scientific, esoteric, and spiritualized modes of inquiry as means of fashioning alternative ways of being, knowing, and seeing that lend to speculative reimaginings of the ever-entangled terrains of science and politics, biology and the social, and nature and culture. ultimately, i suggest that anzaldúa’s imagined new terrains of mestizaje, developed over the span of three decades across her genre-defying and “undisciplined” oeuvre, radically reconceptualize and expand our understanding of identity (racial, gendered, or otherwise) and our relationality to other beings/species while taking seriously the liberatory potentialities of “unruly” knowledge-making practices in times of socioecological crises.4 anzaldúa’s queer feminist studies of science chicanx and latin/x american studies scholars such as suzanne bost, analouise keating, and felicity amaya schaeffer have begun the vital work of “rereading” anzaldúa’s writings in light of the “new” materialisms and posthumanist thought, and uncovering the ways anzaldúa’s work anticipated many of the central concerns and guiding questions of these intellectual terrains. bost, for instance, argues that “before disability studies and posthumanism drew critical attention to the willed ignorance involved in circumscribing a universal form of human life, anzaldúa was already writing about subjects with fluid sexual morphology (half male, half female), shapeshifting between multiple species, and the ethical and material ties between humans, spirits, and nonhuman nature” (2019, 1567). interrogating the appended “new” of the new materialisms, keating similarly reads anzaldúa’s “object-oriented ontology” as part of a stream of “earlier work by women-of-color theorists who have been producing intensely embodied, materialist theory for decades” (2015, 217).5 likewise, in her essay “spirit matters: gloria anzaldúa’s cosmic becoming across human/nonhuman borderlands,” felicity amaya schaeffer boldly confronts the “sanitizing” of the spiritual and more esoteric dimensions of anzaldúa’s work. she considers, first, how anzaldúa’s “cosmic-spirit-mattering”—which she reads as a “native-based scientific practice and philosophy that bridges indigenous cosmologies with a dazzling range of disciplines and knowledges that span alchemy, shamanism, psychology, western and native folklore, and science and technology studies”— questions and radically disrupts the new materialisms and posthumanism’s privileging of “rationality,” or that which can be measured and proven vis-à-vis eurowestern scientific idioms, tools, and methodologies (2018, 1008). equally important, schaeffer brings to the fore the elision of race(ism) in new materialist and posthumanist discourse (1008). inspired by the “other-than-humanist” dimensions and the “cosmic-spiritmatters” that bost, keating, and schaeffer have addressed in their serious engagement with anzaldúa’s oeuvre, i situate anzaldúa’s wide-ranging opus in the genealogies and frameworks of queer feminist science studies. in their introduction to queer feminist science studies: a reader, the first edited collection to formally gather (feminist) science studies scholarship under the rubric of “queer feminist science,” editors cyd cipolla, kristina gupta, david rubin, and angela willey ask, “what does it mean to undertake a queer feminist study of science?” (2017, introduction). in response to this query, the editors share that one of the key aims of their collection is to “open up the word, concept, and practice of ‘science’ (and therefore ‘science studies’) to new, unexpected, and surprising definitions, inhabitations, and hauntings” (introduction). by adopting the term “queer feminist science studies,” the editors therefore seek to “name, nurture, and transform conversations that are already taking place across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences…offer[ing] it as a figurative space where the meanings of and relations among queer and feminist theories and science are reimagined capaciously to foster new critical and creative knowledge-projects” (introduction). linking the expansive project of queer feminist science studies to that of feminist science studies while remaining attuned to the distinctive contributions that queer theory offers feminist studies of science, the editors write that the “beauty of the phrase ‘queer feminist science studies’ is perhaps the simultaneity of its material and discursive specificity with its constitutive capaciousness: it grounds and unsettles, offering no fixed archive nor method, but a qualifier—‘queer’—that promises to unsettle some of our cherished givens” (introduction). it is precisely the unbounded potentialities and capaciousness of queer feminist science studies that i find most useful for reading anzaldúa’s delightfully unruly and queer intellectual archive. though it was no secret during anzaldúa’s lifetime that she identified as queer and that her felt and embodied queerness shaped much, if not all, of her work, scholars have oft-times sanitized or elided this aspect of anzaldúa’s identity and her thinking.6 similarly, while she remained open about her belief in and participation in “alternative” knowledge systems, scholars have mostly evaded the spiritual and more esoteric dimensions of her work.7 in a 1993 interview with kakie urch, michael dorn, and j. abraham, anzaldúa laments, for instance, how “the ‘safe’ elements in borderlands are appropriated and used, and the ‘unsafe’ elements are ignored…as long as it’s theoretical and about history, about borders, that’s fine; borders are a concern that everybody has. but when i start talking about nepantla— as a border between the spirit, the psyche, and the mind or as a process—they resist” (1995, 85). despite these major “two silences” surrounding her work, anzaldúa risked remaining true to all her “glorias”: “gloria the lesbian, gloria the feminist, gloria the person interested in philosophy, psychology, psychic phenomena” (anzaldúa 2000, 61). indeed, holding these multiple “glorias” in productive tension enabled anzaldúa to more fully articulate her feminist politics, her philosophies, and her queer approaches to conjuring, as late queer latinx theorist josé esteban muñoz writes in cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity, “new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (2009, 1). for anzaldúa, then, her queerness was as much about her racialized sexuality as it was a way to denaturalize the presumably naturalized, “to queer,” to quote donna haraway’s “a game of cat’s cradle,” “what counts as nature…queering specific normalized categories…not for the easy frisson of transgression, but for the hope for livable worlds” (1994, 60). to then read anzaldúa as a feminist philosopher of science allows for a more robust engagement with the complexity of her politics, her writings, and her unwavering conviction that “if science is going to continue as the reigning paradigm, it will have to change its story, change the way it controls reality, and begin acknowledging the paranormal, intuition, and subjective inner life” (2012, 18–19). further, if science studies, as the editors of queer feminist science studies suggest, “must concern itself with the quotidian practices of meaning making that trouble, disrupt, and reconfigure assumptions about nature, difference, species, and worldliness,” then we might also look to anzaldúa’s intellectual archive and her own “embodied interdisciplinarity,” to adapt banu subramaniam’s phrasing in ghost stories for darwin, as vital fodder for our own queer feminist studies of science (2014, chap. 6). my reading of anzaldúa as a feminist philosopher of science is, moreover, deeply animated by the work of aimee bahng, and her vital rereading of black feminist science fiction writer octavia butler, as a feminist philosopher of science par excellence. in “plasmodial improprieties: octavia e. butler, slime molds, and imagining a femi-queer commons,” bahng interrogates butler’s intellectual encounters with slime molds—eukaryotes that live freely as single-cell organisms but that can also combine to form multicellular reproductive structures—and argues that the “imaginative possibilities [that] her [butler’s] writing and [interdisciplinary] research practices engender constitute an example of feminist scientific inquiry we could call speculative fabulation” (2017, 310). offering speculative fabulation as a queer feminist science methodology, bahng adds that butler’s modes of speculative fabulation generatively “span the space between what speculative realists tend to position diametrically as the sheer ideation of the linguistic turn and the realism of matter” (311). further, bahng highlights how butler’s (re)imaginings of the human, multispecies solidarities, and her speculations of alternative ontologies and modes of organizing and making sense of the world remain critically attuned to histories of empire, enslavement, and colonization and the power imbalances engendered by such histories. though butler was not formally trained as a “philosopher” (or as a scientist, for that matter), bahng beautifully affirms butler’s yearning to philosophize, finding in her interdisciplinary research and her science fiction writing (as well as her archival material) butler’s most generative articulations of queer decolonial futures in the making. not unlike butler’s, anzaldúa’s science-fictional imaginaries audaciously “cros[s] illicit boundaries of disciplinary knowledge-practices and ontology” and refuse the “dictates of rational science that eschew as fantasy or myth the sensual cosmontologies, or cosmic becomings of human, object, matter, the celestial, nature, technology, and animal” (schaeffer 2018, 1010).8 through these disciplinary border crossings, and her dissolution of the rational/irrational and spiritual/scientific, anzaldúa advances a more capacious and slippery understanding of what is and counts as “science.” it might be more apt, then, to think of anzaldúa’s critical meditations on “science,” and its sociopolitical potentials and constraints, as a dynamic pursuit of its etymological precursor: scientia, or “knowledge, a knowing.” this expansive “coming to know” is one that tewa biologist, scholar, and educator gregory cajete describes in native science: natural laws of interdependence as essential to indigenous sciences. in it, cajete defines indigenous science as a “metaphor for a wide range of tribal processes of perceiving, thinking, acting, and ‘coming to know’ that have evolved through human experience with the natural world,” and, more specifically, through a participatory, reciprocal, and sacred relationship with “space and place” (2000, 2). native science is, in turn, what schaeffer calls a “sacredscience,” a term she uses to at once emphasize “native american understandings with land as scientific, a methodology of collective intelligence that regenerates ancestral knowledges to sustain sacred intrarelationality with land” (2022, 2), and name “practices and knowledges that re-enliven relations with ancestors that activate a calling to nourish intricate web of entanglements that sustain all living beings on earth” (2022, 17–18). the significance, then, of the life-oriented and life-sustaining ethos of indigenous science-as-sacred science cannot be overstated here; the rapacity of eurowestern science and its technologies of empire imperil our planetary existence by condoning “the mind theft, spirit murder, exploitation, and genocide de los otros” (anzaldúa 2015, 18). thus, in cajete’s view, eurowestern science “needs native science to examine its prevailing worldview and culture” (2000, 307). and while there is an emergent “bridge building” between indigenous sciences and eurowestern science, this aspirational “exchange” remains imperfect and riddled with the realities of unequal power distributions. it is eurowestern science, then, as cajete emphatically insists, that will have to “move beyond its own bias” and take seriously its “dismissal of the indigenous worldview” if we are to survive its “dysfunctional cosmology” (2000, 302), and its injurious norms: that of competition, (hyper)individualism, extraction, and soul death. anzaldúa’s endless ruminations on “science,” “objectivity,” and “rationality” led her to a similar conclusion to that of cajete; she “doubts that traditional western science is the best knowledge system, the only true, impartial arbiter of reality…[and] questions its definition of progress, whose manifest imperializes other peoples’ energies and snuffs out their realities and hopes of a better life” (anzaldúa 2015, 140). the very partiality and the sterility she gleans in eurowestern sciences is why anzaldúa looked to indigenous sciences—which views, as cajete reminds readers, the integration of science and spirit as fundamental—and saw in their holistic storytelling, modes of imagining, and invocations of the sacred, the possibility of a restorative and justice-oriented transformation of the self, community, and the planet (anzaldúa 2015, 141–42). anzaldúa does not, however, ignore eurowestern scientific ideas completely, opting instead, as was very much her method of theorizing and philosophizing as a queer mestiza and “border intellectual,” to wade through their detritus and critically (re)assess what ideologies, narratives, and (scientized) symbols/metaphors should be salvaged or excised, unmade, or remade. we might better understand her critical adaptation of eurowestern scientized knowledge practices as a disidentificatory strategy of sorts, one that seeks, as muñoz writes in disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics, to “work on and against dominant ideology…[and] transform a cultural logic from within” (1999, 40).9 anzaldúa thus engages in an active process of negotiation that involves, in her writings, a conscious “working on and against” the regimes of truth established by eurowestern science. in doing so, anzaldúa critically appropriates and/or refashions scientized idioms for political and critically utopian ends all while narratively laying bare their oppressive dimensions. thus, anzaldúa’s adaptation of the “tree of life,” like butler’s invocation of the slime mold, while imperfect, nevertheless offers a compelling metaphor for imagining more-than-human entanglements and potentially liberatory onto-epistemologies and lifeworlds. as i will show in the next section, it is through the tree of life image, in all its messy genealogical, evolutionary, and cosmological dimensions, that she could imagine, to use kim tallbear and angela willey’s phrasing, “nature and relationality differently” (2019, 5). let us, then, get to the “roots” of anzaldúa’s affiliative biofuturities. anzaldúa’s speculative arborealities the “tree of life,” one of the most important organizing metaphors for evolution’s “branching-like” patterned structure, has a long and complicated history, from its invocations in charles darwin’s origin of species as the working metaphor for his twinned notions of genealogy and evolution (hellström 2012) to its vexed deployment in anglo and latin american (proto)eugenic discourse from the turn of the nineteenth century onwards.10 and yet for all its historical baggage, the tree of life remains a seductive metaphor for “origins” and “kinship,” broadly conceived.11 take, for instance, geni, a us commercial genealogy and social networking website that has set out to create a “world family tree” by linking user-generated family trees from around the globe. as the self-proclaimed “definitive family tree for the entire world,” geni has, as of january 27, 2025, over 196 million genealogical profiles and seeks to ultimately “connect everyone on earth” (geni 2025). similarly, statistical and medical geneticist anthony wilder wohns and fellow researchers at the university of oxford’s big data institute have created the “largest-ever family tree,” which links more than 27 million people through a “unified genealogy of modern and ancient human genomes” that promises to “enable applications ranging from improving genome interpretation to deciphering our earliest roots” (wohns et al. 2022, 6). these contemporary genealogical and evolutionary invocations of the tree of life, premised on the wellmeaning yet reductive “we are one race, the human race” aphorism, only tell a partial story, one where the realities of racism (and all other “isms”) are subsumed by an ethos of a transcendental “borderlessness” and “universality.” of course, as thomas kuhn (1979), evelyn fox keller (1995, 2003), and katherine mckittrick (2021) remind us, (scientized) metaphors such as the tree of life are not neutral technologies and thus have the power to liberate and/or constrain. in dear science and other stories, mckittrick interrogates the power of metaphor as it relates to stories of black livingness and modes of knowing and argues that “we must reckon with the materiality of metaphor” to avoid reducing blackness to the realm of the figurative (2021, 10–11). mckittrick thus samples guiding metaphors in “postslave black geographies” and notes how these metaphors are “often (not always!)…delinked from their material underpinnings or histories, which means racial violence risks being cast and/or read as figurative” (11). yet mckittrick, drawing from anticolonial thought and black studies as powerful analytical sites of intervention and speculation, charges readers to “sit with metaphor” (6). metaphors, in mckittrick’s view, also “offer an (entwined material and imagined) future that has not arrived and the future we live and have already lived through…metaphors function to radically map existing useable (entwined material and imagined) sites of struggle and liberation and joy!” (11–12). as intimated by the book’s title, mckittrick looks to how black creatives, through a stunning array of audio-visual-textual mediums, “work with scientific concepts in innovative and humanizing ways—attentive to racism, yes, but not understanding scientific racism as the only way to define black life” (1). it seems, then, that it is through interdisciplinary and multigeneric storytelling, rooted always in black studies and anti-colonial thought, that mckittrick can most powerfully “wade through the complexities of black intellectual life” (13). though mckittrick’s dear science is a love(ing) letter to blackness, black livingness, and black liberation, her theorizations on the “materiality of metaphor” and the liberatory potential of interdisciplinary storytelling are instructive for my engagements with the role of metaphor and narrative in what i read as anzaldúa’s own scientific disidentifications, especially as it pertains to her adaptation of the tree of life as one of the guiding metaphors for her theorizations of identity, relationality, reparations, and justice. for anzaldúa specifically, “metaphors are gods” and can, moreover, “take on body and life” of their own (2015, 55). in other words, she understands metaphors as animate and animating forces. anzaldúa therefore privileges “talking with images/stories” rather than “about them,” an important distinction she makes in the introduction to light in the dark / luz en lo oscuro. talking with images, in anzaldúa’s estimation, allows her to eschew “writing from any single disciplinary position,” and enables “writing outside official theoretical / philosophical language” (6). because “[hers] is a struggle of recognizing and legitimizing excluded selves, especially of women, people of color, queer, and othered groups,” anzaldúa finds that she must “[re]organize and [re]order these ideas as ’stories’” (6). and yet she understands the process of writing, of storying and speculating, as necessarily embodied for the “material body is center, central” (5). that is, interdisciplinary storytelling by way of images and metaphors is its very own form of “theory in the flesh” (anzaldúa and moraga 1983, 23). for anzaldúa, then, images, metaphors, and stories are not divorced from the quotidian lives nor from the systemic violences women, especially queer women of color, are subjected to and forced to navigate. in fact, her famed border metaphor was one anzaldúa came to theorize from living or being rooted in, so to speak, in the us-mexico borderlands and witnessing the oppressive material conditions and vexed intimacies produced by and within this “herida abierta” (anzaldúa 1987, 3). like her metaphor of the border, her symbolic adaptations of the tree of life are borne from her early kinship relations with a literal mesquite, an incredibly resilient tree native to texas and abundant across the us southwest, including the us-mexico borderlands.12 while anzaldúa’s most formalized and expansive exploration of the tree of life appears in light in the dark / luz en lo oscuro, her turn to the arboreal as a means of thinking through and imagining alternative models of being(ness), kinship, and human/nonhuman entanglements appears in her earliest works of fiction. the mesquite tree features prominently, for instance, in one of her earliest short stories, “el paisano is a bird of good omen.”13 originally titled “la boda,” the story is anzaldúa’s first foray into “fus[ing] the objective and subjective more tightly together” (anzaldúa 2009, 51). set in the 1950s, the story features a queer protagonist, andrea de la cruz, and takes place the night before andrea’s wedding to zenobio rios, her cousin and a closeted gay man who fears being outed in a small ranching and farming community in what is presumably southern texas. throughout the narrative, andrea grapples with her community’s queerphobia and heterosexism and slowly comes to affirm her queerness in all its valences. hence, from the outset, readers catch glimpses of what keating reads in her brief introductory note to the story as “anzaldúa’s holistic, participatory epistemology and her definition of queer, a definition that includes but goes far beyond sexual identity” (2009, 51). in the opening scene, for instance, anzaldúa writes that andrea “straddles the mesquite post of the corral…under her, the hard roundness of the mesquite post seems an appendage of herself, a fifth limb, one that’s also part of the corral, the corral that’s part of the land” (2009, 51). the sensuous “fusion” of andrea’s human body with that of the mesquite and her inability to distinguish between the corporeal and arboreal renders the borders between the human and nonhuman artificial and thus permeable. that said, it is through this cross-species closeness that andrea reconnects to an ancestral landscape (and its flora and fauna) that she “never tires of looking at…and could never leave” (anzaldúa 2009, 53). the mesquite, who “reigns over the portal, the house, the yard” (53), functions, for andrea, as a material symbol of belonging, interconnectedness (the mesquite is described as part of a vibrantly diverse ecosystem), and strength, qualities andrea yearns to unabashedly embody in a community where her sexuality, her overt rebellion against patriarchal conceptions of a “suitable” womanhood, and her sacred closeness to nature writ large (we learn, for instance, that she can communicate with nonhuman animals), gains her the derisive title of “andrea the bruja,” or “andrea the witch.” the mesquite’s literal rootedness, then, functions as an aspirational model for a process of reconnection to place and ancestry; andrea visualizes the mesquite’s “fifty-or-sixty-foot-deep roots” tapping into an “underground water source,” revealing that “she wants to tap that deep place, too” (53). she then imagines “stay[ing] still long enough [for] her feet [to also] worm roots into the moist core” (53). the invocation of roots here brings to bear the importance of knowing one’s origins, a principle that anzaldúa will learn from indigenous philosophies of space and place, and one that would inform her decades-long theorizations of—and search for—queer(ed) kinship models. it is also these equal parts embodied and spiritual connection to the mesquite that animates andrea’s reluctance to lay full claim over it. throughout the narrative, anzaldúa deliberately capitalizes “the mesquite,” rendering it, in effect, an agentic and sentient being. andrea will thus affirm and respect the being-ness of the tree and is in fact born with the ability to communicate with the mesquite “in its own language” (53). andrea’s multisensory experience with the mesquite, and her keen observations of its qualities and teachings thus evince a sacred praxis central to indigenous sciences: “learning the language of place and the ‘dialects’ of its plants, animals, and the natural phenomena in the context of a ‘homeland’ is an underlying foundation of native science” (cajete 2000, 306). yet this ability to commune and communicate with flora and fauna is a “faculty” that andrea will lose over time to the pressures of chicanx masculinist cultural norms and catholic-informed notions of good/evil. her uncle efrain, for instance, warns against “talking to trees” (anzaldúa 2009, 54), rendering it a side effect of “embrujamiento,” or bewitchment. these “warnings” are notably tied, for anzaldúa, to a communal loss of and contempt for indigenous modes of knowing and healing amongst chicanx peoples. for instance, in light in the dark / luz en lo oscuro, anzaldúa discloses that “during [her] childhood, curanderismo and hechicerismo [bewitchment] were an accepted yet disdained part of the chicano community. most mexican americans, having swallowed the whites’ contempt for indigenous medicine, did not believe that curanderas could restore the soul and heal the body” (2015, 31). it is precisely this sense of ancestral, cultural, and spiritual loss that anzaldúa would devote her life trying to repair and heal from. anzaldúa speaks to this loss in a 1982 interview with linda smucker, sharing that “when [she] was young [she] was one with the trees, the land, and [her] mother; there weren’t any borders. then [she] became separate and made other people and parts of myself the other” (anzaldúa 2000, 41). this severance triggers anzaldúa’s deep feelings of alienation, a painfully dissociative process she describes as getting “so far from [her] feelings, [her] body, [her] soul [she] was— like, other other other. but then something kept snapping. [she] had to gather” (41). like anzaldúa, andrea spends the remainder of the narrative “gathering” those aspects of herself rendered other: her intimacy and feelings of kinship with other-than-human beings, her same-sex desire, and her fluid, perhaps even nonbinary, gender identity. andrea must therefore unlearn and denaturalize normative categories and accompanying narratives of gender, nature, race, sex, and sexuality effected and legitimated by settler-colonial logics and structures if she is, as her mamagrande (or grandmother) suggests, to fully grow into her “poder” (power). in the story’s final scene, then, andrea quite literally leans into the mesquite following the profound realization that (her) queerness “is not a sickness, nor is it evil” (anzaldúa 2009, 68). rather, it is a privileged and empowering mode of approaching and being in the world, one anzaldúa calls “la facultad,” or an intuitive form of knowledge-making that embraces but goes far beyond logical thought and empirical analysis. over twenty years after the writing of “el paisano is a bird of good omen,” the arboreal remains a constant in anzaldúa’s speculative intellectual thought. though it is not the only nature-based metaphor anzaldúa would draw on— rebeca hey-colón’s (2023) brilliant survey of the vibrant primacy of “water” as spiritual conduit and epistemological producer in anzaldúa’s work is a recent example—it did remain one of the most central structuring images of her opus. as she writes in light in the dark / luz en lo oscuro, her ever adaptive “árbol de vida” offers a unique “framework or scheme for understanding and explaining certain aspects of reality, and [she’ll] organize [her] images, ideas, and knowledge via this [dendritic] mind map” (2015, 25). though the tree of life was and certainly remains a contentious symbol due to its deployment in eurowestern scientific and genealogical discourse and the ideas of racial purity and biological degeneration inhered in these, anzaldúa’s repurposed tree of life allows her to theorize, instead, a crossing of multiple realities and temporalities and with this imagines “tapping,” as does andrea’s character in “el paisano is a bird of good omen,” into a sort of mystical reservoir that functions as ancestral communion, “time travel” medium, and epistemological rewiring. she likens this reservoir, first, to argentine writer jorge luis borges’s “aleph” described in his eponymous text as “the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist” (1998, 127). yet unlike borges’s protagonist (a fictionalized version of the author himself), who sees and experiences the aleph yet casts off its existence because its very infiniteness escapes language, and language itself, at least for borges, can never adequately articulate “reality,” anzaldúa sees in this unboundedness an opportunity, and indeed a collective responsibility, especially in times of ongoing environmental devastations and social injustices, to “revise reality by altering our consensual agreements about what is real, what is just and fair…we can trans-shape reality by changing our perspectives and perceptions” (anzaldúa 2015, 21). at the same time, anzaldúa likens this underground reservoir to the mayan cenote, deep water wells found in the yucatán peninsula that have been not only important water sources for mayan peoples but also historically significant sites of mayan anti-colonial resistance, as well as key actants in the preservation of mayan culture, spiritual traditions, and ways of knowing (munro and melo zurita 2011). anzaldúa, in turn, identifies the cenote as an “inner, underground river of information” (2015, 28), or a repository of personal and collective knowledge, and in it locates a privileged source for technologies of “creativity, dreams, fantasies, intuitions, and symbolic events…and the unconscious’s resource of self-knowledge and transformation” (55), all methodological elements and tools deployed in indigenous science-as-process (cajete 2000, 66–71). thinking through and from this cenote space, in turn, offers anzaldúa one way of “rooting” her reparative “árbol de la vida”: this story of la virgen’s (the virgin’s) tree [as] a healing vision…spirit and mind, soul and body, are one, and together they perceive a reality greater than the vision experienced in the ordinary world…we receive information from ancestors inhabiting other worlds. we assess that information and learn how to trust that knowing. the mind does not make things up; it just imagines what exists and tells the soul to remember. the soul forgets and must be reminded again and again by signals from nature whose spirits exist in fields, forests, rivers, and other places, and from arrebatamientos (traumatic events). (2015, 24) in other words, anzaldúa’s tree of life becomes a sentient conveyor of that which cannot be seen but can be felt. this “feeling,” which bost characterizes as “feeling pre-columbian,” is rooted in “mesoamerican worldviews in which feeling is sacred and objective reason does not form the horizon of corporeal being” (2009, 37). yet as bost reminds us, chicana feminists do not simply retell ancient mesoamerican history in a way that consigns it to a presumably static past. rather, chicana thinkers like anzaldúa, “reenact it in their own representations. it is something that they feel in the present. their vision of the past is not essentialist but motivated by contemporary political needs” (bost 2009, 37–38). this indigenousbased collapsing of time and space is thus sustained by what anzaldúa understands as the “tree of life’s” supernal qualities. likening it to the cosmic tree or axis mundi, anzaldúa’s imagines the tree of life as a triptych comprised of the underworld [that] exists below the earth’s surface and is represented by the roots; it is the realm of earth energies, animal spirits, and the dead who have not moved on to the next level of existence…the middle world, the physical plane where we live our ordinary lives, is symbolized by the trunk; it is the realms of the planet and the outer reaches of the universe…represented by the branches, the upper world above the sky is the world of noncorporeal energies, spirits who are gods and goddesses, spirits of the dead who have progressed beyond the land of the dead. (2015, 25–26) not unlike the multiverses that pepper science-fictional imaginaries, these three planes exist in tandem, each a distinct yet conjoined part of the larger cosmos. though a sense of universality underpins the tree of life image—it is this very universality that allows her to theorize her affiliative or relational futurities— anzaldúa argues that the meanings and symbologies attached to the tree of life are also mediated by cultural belief systems. anzaldúa thus anchors her literal and cosmic tree in nahua and mayan mythology; her tree of life is rooted in tamoanchan (a word of mayan origin), the speculated mythical place of origin of mesoamerican gods and goddesses. notably, this notion of an equal parts universal and rooted tree image appears and is in fact central to indigenous philosophies of science. cajete writes, for instance, that “the sacred tree of life, as an analogy for the evolving process of native science and quest for knowledge, presents a cosmological and structural symbol for native science that embodies its lifeand nature-centered orientations” (2000, 58). in turn, the tree, “presents an archetype of life, learning, and development that begins with the sprouting of a seedling from a seed embedded in fertile ground, then moves to the various stages of growth and development through all seasons of life and its trials and tribulations until it begins to form seeds of its own” (58). because the tree, moreover, is a “natural analogy for a living philosophy,” each “species of tree is of a particular ‘tribe’ originating and rooted in the social of a particular place, living and growing into its own particular form and completing itself in the distinct ways of its species, yet having its own unique and one-of-a-kind expression of life” (58). the very leaves of the arboreal metaphor also signify the infinite manifestations and enlivened expressions of indigenous science. for cajete, then, the tree of life image offers a different yet nevertheless compelling story of science, one that conceives science as an expansive “coming to know” that is rooted “in the soil of direct physical and perceptual experience of the earth” (24). cajete’s enlivened tree of life reminds us, then, that “science in every form…is a story of the world” (27), and, like all stories, can be used to remap and engender new realities and ways of being-with the world. this generative representation of the tree of life as rhizomatic rather than hierarchical, relational rather than insular, is precisely the rendition of the arboreal that will figure prominently in anzaldúa’s “new tribalism” theorizations.14 invoking a memory of her uncle’s “dying orange tree…one still possessed of a strong root system and trunk,” anzaldúa recalls how her “tío grafted a sturdier variety of orange to it, creating a more vigorous tree” (2015, 140). she later extends her uncle’s horticultural techniques to her own identity and epistemological “graftings” writing, el árbol de la vida symbolizes my “story” of the new tribalism. roots represent ancestral/racial origins and biological attributes; branches and leaves represent the characteristics, communities, and cultures that surround us, that we’ve adopted, and that we’re in intimate conversation with. onto the trunk de mi árbol de la vida i graft a new tribalism. this new tribalism, like other new chicano / latino narratives, recognizes that we are responsible participants in the ecosystems (complete set of interrelationships between a network of living organisms and their physical habitats) in whose web we’re individual strands…you [then] “grow into” an identity of mestizaje…by propagating other worldviews, spiritual traditions, and cultures to your árbol de la vida. (2015, 67, 140) anzaldúa’s deployment of arboreal, dendritic, and horticultural imagery, and the suturing of genetic, spiritual, and mystical concepts, can be understood as a “mestizaje” or “grafting” of ideas, one that leads to a much needed “[skepticism] of reason and rationality” (119). yet the invocation of these metaphorical grafting practices, while potentially subversive, is not without problems. anzaldúa’s adaptation of horticultural and plant science concepts is in fact haunted by a longer history of mexican eugenic engagements with lamarckian and, to a lesser degree, mendelian notions of inheritance (hedrick 2003; stepan 1991; stern 2005). the metaphor of the graft and the (vigorous) hybrid invoked by vasconcelos in his infamous 1925 publication, la raza cósmica / the cosmic race, and by other mexican artists and intellectuals of the period—frida kahlo and diego rivera’s artistic engagement with us botanist and horticulturist luther burbank’s experiments on grafting, hybridization, and the crossbreeding of plants and crops come to mind here, as does roberto montenegro’s 1922 “story of national/family origins” in his mural el árbol de la vida, commissioned by vasconcelos himself —offered vasconcelos a pliable and potent tool for his nation-building efforts in post-revolutionary mexico. indeed, it was his imagined stalwart mestizo-of-the-future, as the product of racial and cultural graftings, that would go over and against the “ethnic barricading of the north…the last empire of white supremacy” by bringing forward, via an “aesthetic eugenics,” “a synthetical race…made up of the genius and the blood of all peoples, and, for that reason, more capable of true brotherhood and of a truly universal vision” (vasconcelos 1997, 20). yet this assimilative vision remained, despite its aspirations for a sort of racial transcendence, decidedly anti-black, anti-indigenous, and anti-asian; it is only through the “absorption” of black, indigenous, and asian peoples that vasconcelos’s cosmic mestizaje could be realized. and yet for anzaldúa, the lacking eurowestern scientific imagination that vasconcelos cannot seem to resist nor evade in his imagined “grafted” mestizoofthe-future, is not the sole arbiter of what meanings we might make out of (biologized) metaphors, symbols, and analogies; nor is it the only way to pursue knowledge and draft new realities about, and for, ourselves and the world. after all, as theologian and activist-scholar barbara a. holmes writes in race and the cosmos: an invitation to view the world differently, “curiosity about the world neither begins nor ends with the west” (2002, 61). for this reason, anzaldúa sought to question, via what she calls “conocimiento,” “conventional knowledge’s current categories, classifications, and contents…[and] refuse[d] to accept spirituality as a devalued form of knowledge and instead elevate it to the same level occupied by science and rationality” (2015, 119). while chicanx and latin/x american studies scholars are certainly right to critique chicanx/latinx instrumentalizations of indigeneity as well as the indigenist tendency to reductively consign indigenousness to the sphere of the “ephemeral” or “spiritual,” the realm of spirituality, for anzaldúa, is a legitimate, and indeed vital source—i use “vital” here to foreground its centrality and dynamism—of indigenous knowledges.15 more specifically, if science is a mode of learning about and making sense of natural phenomena, then indigenous spirituality, a focal feature of living indigenous knowledge systems, need be understood, for anzaldúa, as one of several modes of actual scientific inquiry. to put it another way, for indigenous peoples and folks of the “two-thirds world” (70), as holmes so powerfully argues, the division between science and spirituality, and the presumed absence of the scientific in the mundane, does not exist. writing over and against vasconcelos’s assimilative and genocidal mestizaje and his investment in a hispanicized modernity, anzaldúa’s futurist visions, particularly as imagined in her post-borderlands writings, refuses what latin american studies scholar juliet hooker describes in theorizing race in the americas as a strain of mestizaje that “continued to operate within an epistemic logic that privileged european ideas and sources…[and] was thus anti-colonial only in a limited sense, insofar as it challenged us imperialism” (2017, 159–60). hooker, however, contends that anzaldúa’s borderlands, while “queering” what she calls vasconcelos’s “mestizo futurism,” what with its explorations of feminist and queer concerns and its valuation (however partial) of indigeneity, nevertheless “[adopts] vasconcelian narratives of harmonious latin american mixture [that] precluded her from formulating a full intersectional feminist critique of his theory” (192). yet as rebeca hey-colón writes in channeling knowledges, mestizaje, for anzaldúa, was not “just [about] a mixture of bloodlines” (2023, 92), and actively sought to confront, as we see as early as her borderlands writings, the persistence of anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity (and the overall erasure of other racial formations) in discourses of mexicanidad and chicanidad. as such, anzaldúa’s new terrains of mestizaje cannot be solely understood nor reduced to narratives of cultural and racial mixture, for they radically exceed, as i have attempted to show in this essay, such analytical framing. while i by no means believe that anzaldúa is nor should be above critique, i do find it invaluable to engage the myriad ruptures and transformations of anzaldúa’s intellectual genealogies and philosophies of science. anzaldúa, for instance, habitually engaged texts, as i learned during my visit to her archives housed at university of texas at austin’s benson latin american collection in 2019, that cut across disciplinary, national, and generic boundaries and expanded and nuanced the ideas she explored in her later published and unpublished works. we also see, in her living archive, as keating writes in her editor’s introduction to light in the dark / luz en lo oscuro, how anzaldúa “viewed indigenous thought as a foundational, vital source of decolonial wisdom for contemporary and future life on this planet and elsewhere. she believed that indigenous philosophies offer alternatives to cartesian-based knowledge systems which we ignore at our peril” (2015, introduction). anzaldúa’s critiques and critical reworkings of eurowestern (bio)science and its metaphors and her tinkering with concepts such as “nepantla,” “new tribalism” and “new terrains of mestizaje,” are largely indebted to her engagement with indigenous medicine (including curanderismo), nahua and mayan metaphysics, and other indigenous-based philosophies including those found in yoruban cultural and spiritual traditions.16 hence, an engagement with the complex totality of anzaldúa’s thinking reveals how her transmutational (and even transtemporal) “new terrains of mestizaje” uniquely envision and prophesize a liberatory coming to consciousness that is just over the horizon, one that “will reach other planets, solar systems, galaxies. pictured like a diagrammatic model, the universe is a web—tightly woven connections of all living things past, present, and future, having both positive and negative forces” (anzaldúa 2015, 71). not surprisingly, anzaldúa once again explores these interplanetary and intraand interspecies entanglements vis-à-vis her critically utopian rendering of the “árbol de la vida” image and her discursive reworking, as i have shown thus far, of horticultural practices. through a cross-species intimacy with a literal tree— referred to by anzaldúa as guadalupe, the name of the syncretized matron saint of mexico and its diasporas—she is “reminded of something [she’d] forgotten— that [her] body has always sensed trees’ special relationship to humans, that we have a body awareness of trees and they of us. awareness is not just in the mind, but also includes body knowledge” (2015, 24). this perceived relationality between herself (a human being), and the tree (a nonhuman entity) is credited, by anzaldúa, to living indigenous onto-epistemological systems: “according to indigenous belief, we are embedded in nature and exist in reciprocity with it…we are bonded to this planet in ways we don’t even imagine. we are in partnership with the earth, but the partnership must go both ways; we must demonstrate trust, love, respect, and reciprocity to make this bond work” (39). it is then through an indigenous-based understanding of affiliation or a relational bordercrossing of sorts, that anzaldúa’s “new terrains of mestizaje” can imagine kinship outside of consanguineal forms. at the same time, the tree of life image enables anzaldúa to invoke (and revision) popular ideas of ancestry and biological kinship in ways that advance, to use alondra nelson’s (2016) phrasing, her speculative “root-seeking” efforts. while anzaldúa’s root-seeking endeavors are fraught—she repeatedly expresses her anxieties over detribalizing indigenous peoples vis-à-vis her new tribalism theorizations and a queer(ed) mestizaje—we can read her root-seeking project as one of generative contradiction. maylei blackwell notes, for instance, that chicanx scholars invested in “anticolonial” approaches to mestizaje are increasingly “standing in the contradictions of what it means to be detribalized but not entirely deindianized and searching out decolonial strategies and life ways, which are most pronounced in the recovery of indigenous knowledges in the realms of healing and spiritual knowledge, as well as in agriculture, food ways, and seed autonomy” (2017, 103). further, the tree of life, with all its knotty roots and tangled branches, enabled anzaldúa, like other mixed-race chicanx and latinx peoples, to wade through the complexities, as sarah d. wald, david j. vázquez, priscilla solis ybarra, and sarah jaquette ray write in latinx environmentalisms, of being “both the perpetrato[r] of colonial violence and object[t] of settler colonial dispossessions (2019, 7). what we “inherit,” for anzaldúa, is as important as what we do with such inheritances. thus, before we imagine and build for the decolonial “not-yets” anzaldúa was already conjuring in her future-oriented writings, we must first, as her tree of life reminds us, get to the “root” of our increasingly authoritarian presents. conclusion the anti-eugenics project, “an interdisciplinary network of scholars, organizers, cultural workers and artists working to understand and bring awareness to the continuing legacies and harm of eugenicist ideologies,” held its first convening, “dismantling eugenics,” in late september of 2021. the week-long virtual event acted “as a counter-centennial to the second international eugenics congress, held at the american museum of natural history a century prior, which furthered the politics of exclusion that continue to operate in our society today,” and brought together the anti-racist and decolonial work of artists, activists, and scholars from across the americas and the global south. one of the sessions, titled “the eugenics tree, and the anti-eugenics tree: the anti-centennial through tapestries,” featured the embroidery work of abenaki and french canadian artist, educator, scholar, and basket-maker judy dow (2021a). during the covid-19 pandemic lockdown, dow recalls witnessing, in real time, the resurgence of eugenic ideas concerning the pathology, disposability, and looming extinction of black, indigenous, disabled, poor, and other racialized peoples, and the public legitimization of these ideas by then-former president donald trump, who has long been fascinated by questions of genes, bloodlines, and racial purity (i’m thinking here, for instance, of his public invocations of “racehorse theory”). these eugenic hauntings, as dow shares in her talk, became the artistic fodder for her adaptation, in blanket-style form, of the “eugenics tree,” first introduced in 1921 by eugenicist harry h. laughlin. laughlin’s originary “eugenics tree,” one of the most circulated images of the eugenics era, features a black-and-white redwood tree. emblazoned on each side of the tree’s trunk, we see the words, “eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution.” below the tree’s roots, a caption reads, “like a tree eugenics draws from many sources and organizes them into an harmonious entity” (see wisconsin historical society, n.d.). the roots of the original “eugenics tree,” in turn, feature a sampling of the myriad fields or disciplines that eugenicists drew from to help imagine and materialize their equal parts genocidal and impoverished fantasies of white supremacist (cis)heterosexual patriarchal futures. yet despite the historical baggage that comes with said image, dow intentionally replicates it through her embroidery work. her textile “monument” of sorts bears witness, as subramaniam writes of the “ghosts” who “haunt” the science of variation and the world of harawayian “naturecultures,” to the “countless bodies of the dead, the mutilated, the tortured, the irredeemable, the unwanted, as well as the brilliant talents that have gone unrecognized and unacknowledged—all those unknown, forgotten humans relegated to the rubbish heap of history” (2014, introduction). however, as anzaldúa’s repurposing of the tree of life reminds us, the narratives that we attach to images, symbols, and metaphors can also be reorganized and remade. dow, like anzaldúa, quite literally weaves a new story for the “tree of life,” radically reimagining laughlin’s eugenic tree by way of a redwood she dubs the “the antieugenics tree” (or “the witness tree”). unlike laughlin’s tree, dow’s redwood promotes, as she shows in her “witness tree” image, the “collective creation of an equitable and healthy world for all” and draws “from various sources and transforms into a one-minded and one-heart way of being” (dow 2021b). the tree imagined by dow is then nourished by a network of subterranean roots that feature words she ties to our collective liberation: “education,” “history,” “justice,” “love,” “memory,” “reciprocity,” “reparation,” and “responsibility,” are a few notable examples (2021b). these “roots,” as dow tells her listeners during the antieugenics project’s 2021 online convening, must be “braided and shared as a story that comes from many voices. the root should not extort, ignore historical trauma, or place the land and her peoples into silence but rather weave them together into one path that will benefit all” (2021a). ever the “theorist of hope” (sandoval 2005, xiii), anzaldúa similarly urges readers in one of her last essays before her untimely passing to “possess the steadfastness of trees…the fluidity of fish in our element” and the “collective creativity [to] heal the wounds of hate, ignorance, indifference, [and] dissolve the divisions creating chasms between us” (2015, 158), all for the promise of freer and better tomorrows. note 1 anzaldúa dreamed of attending medical school but was advised by a school counselor to seek, instead, a more “realistic” career in nursing (2000, 27). 2 in a 1991 interview with analouise keating, anzaldúa shares what were then the beginnings of a short story she dubbed “la entrada de ajenos en la casa / the entry of the alien into the house.” the story, according to anzaldúa, is “about the body and all the organisms that live in the body: the e. coli bacteria in the stomach, the plaque in your teeth, the millions of organisms in the eyebrow area—the roots of the eyelashes have particular organisms different from the ones in the forehead…you’re all the different organisms and parasites that live on your body and also the ones that live in symbiotic relationship to you” (anzaldúa 2000, 158). though the title of the story, which anzaldúa never published, seemingly intimates a narrative of “alien invasion,” it is rather one of radical interdependence; in it, the protagonist, prieta, a semi-autobiographical figure who routinely appears across anzaldúa’s’ experimental fiction, is afflicted with a wart and comes to learn that she is not, as anzaldúa puts it, “a single entity” (158). anzaldúa’s deep appreciation for queer forms of relationality and knowledge-making—and the revisionary and reparative possibilities she found in such entanglements—was a constant in her oeuvre, appearing in her earliest works of fiction, nonfiction, and those that defied any sort of neat generic distinctions. indeed, her own “preternatural” experiences with such human/nonhuman intimacies—anzaldúa recalls being possessed by a male extraterrestrial spirit who she speculates induces her rare endocrine condition and subsequent precocious puberty—animated her relationship to what she perceived as her literal alienness and would significantly inform her theorizations of thinking through and from (and at times even beyond) the “border.” though this “literalization” of the alien figure, as matthew goodwin notes in the latinx files: race, migration, and space aliens, might strike readers as “eccentric,” anzaldúa took seriously the very real possibility of alien/human (and, more broadly, human/nonhuman) entanglements in the future and speculated on the costs of humanity’s approach to said alienness: “finding some group onto which they project unwanted parts of themselves” (2021, 30). 3 catherine ramírez is the first to read anzaldúa’s work as chicanafuturist and originally coins the chicanafuturism neologism. she writes, “chicanafuturism explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform mexican american life and culture. it questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for chicanas, chicanos, and other people of color. and like afrofuturism, which reflects diasporic experience, chicanafuturism articulates colonial and postcolonial histories of indigenismo, mestizaje, hegemony, and survival” (ramírez 2008, 187). further, through their appropriation and transformation of the idioms of science and technology, chicanafuturist works “disrupt age-old racist and sexist binaries that exclude chicanas and chicanos from visions of the future” (189). though anzaldúa’s work is written before the coining of the chicanafuturism (and latinxfuturism) neologism, its concerns with the future, with imagining lifeworlds not-yet here, comfortably situates her in this tradition. 4 one of the most adapted (and fraught) concepts in latinx and latin american studies, the term mestizaje signals the production of “racial” and cultural mixtures by way of competing histories of (settler) colonialism, dispossession, and empire in the americas as well as nationalist and ideological modes of resistance. 5 one of the most adapted (and fraught) concepts in latinx and latin american studies, the term mestizaje signals the production of “racial” and cultural mixtures by way of competing histories of (settler) colonialism, dispossession, and empire in the americas as well as nationalist and ideological modes of resistance. 6 latinx and queer studies scholars such as alicia arrizón, ian barnard, tace hedrick, carolina núñez-puente, tereza jiroutová kynčlová, among others, have taken up the necessary task of centering anzaldúa’s queerness in their critical engagements with her vast oeuvre. 7 theresa delgadilo’s spiritual mestizaje: gender, race, and nation in contemporary chicana narrative remains one of the most layered explorations of anzaldúa’s spirituality and the spiritual ethos of her intellectual work and activism, and in chicana cultural production more broadly. 8 chicanx/latinx studies scholars such as catherine ramírez (2002), susana ramírez (2017), and matthew goodwin (2021) have not only “recuperated” anzaldúa writings as early forms of chicanx speculative fiction but also as essential contributors to the speculative turn in chicanx/latinx studies. 9 i find it important to note here that muñoz reminds readers that disidentification is not always—nor should it be—the most suitable strategy of resistance and/or survival for minoritarian subjects. as he himself puts it, “at times, resistance needs to be pronounced and direct; on other occasions, queers of color and other minority subjects need to follow a conformist path if they hope to survive a hostile public sphere” (1999, 29). yet disidentification does not occupy an escapist nor apolitical intermediary space. disidentification is a strategy that “resists a conception of power as being a fixed discourse…[it] negotiates strategies of resistance within the flux of discourse and power” (52). because discourse, like power, is ever-fluctuating, disidentification-as-strategy remains adaptable, transmutable, and open to generative disruption. it this “gear-shifting” of discourse and power, as chela sandoval’s (1991) “differential consciousness” concept reminds us, that anzaldúa continuously navigates and reworks in her equal parts scientized and spiritualized speculations of anti-racist, decolonial, and queer futures. 10 though darwin is not the first to use the tree of life as a symbol for “origins,” broadly conceived, he makes explicit the connection between genealogy and evolutionary thought in origin of the species: “all the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties in classification are explained…on the view that the natural system is founded on descent with modification; that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species, are those which have been inherited from a common parent, and, in so far, all true classification is genealogical…the natural system is genealogical in its arrangement, like a pedigree” (1859, chap. 8). 11 gilles deleuze and félix guattari (1987) and stephen jay gould (1997), for instance, have critiqued the teleological and hierarchical tendencies burrowed in the tree of life image. 12 see matthew j. taylor’s “the mesquite economy in the mexican american borderlands” and jason e. pierce’s “marvelous, maligned, and misunderstood: the strange history of the mesquite tree in texas” for an extensive survey and historicization of the mesquite tree in the us southwest. 13 the term paisano has two meanings in this story: “roadrunner” and “comrade/friend.” 14 as domino renee perez writes in fatherhood in the borderlands, anzaldúa’s “new tribalism” theorizations were in part conceived in response to “disparaging critical engagement with her work. in the winter of 1991, cultural theorist david rieff published an article in new perspectives quarterly on the ‘latination of america’ entitled ‘professional aztecs and popular culture’ in which he accuses [luis] valdez and anzaldúa of being ‘professional aztecs’…[yet] anzaldúa [saw in this critique] a strategy for remaking chicanx tribalism so that it could begin to address some of the problems within the nation, for example, abuse and longstanding exclusionary practices” (2022, 161–62). 15 scholars such maría josefina saldaña-portillo (2001), nicole guidottihernández, and domino renee perez (2022) have compellingly engaged what many in the field see as the complicated legacy of anzaldúa’s ongoing theorizations of mestizaje and her (re)visionary engagements with indigenous epistemologies, philosophies, and spiritualities. see saldana portillo’s “who’s the indian in aztlán?”, guidotti-hernández’s unspeakable violence: remapping u.s. and mexican national imaginaries, and perez’s fatherhood in the borderlands: a daughter’s slow approach (2022) for an extensive overview of this important and ongoing debate in the fields of chicanx/latinx studies. 16 see rebeca hey-colón’s channeling knowledges: water and afro-diasporic spirits in latinx and caribbean worlds for a stunning portrait of anzaldúa’s lifelong practice and engagement with african diasporic 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https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/records/image/im101667. wohns, anthony wilder, yan wong, ben jeffery, et al. 2022. “a unified genealogy of modern and ancient genomes.” science 375 (6583): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abi8264.   author bio karina a. vado (she/they/ella) is a senior lecturer in the program in medicine, science, and the humanities at johns hopkins university and affiliated faculty in the program in latin american, caribbean, and latinx studies. she is currently at work on her first book project, tentatively titled latinx dna: race, latinidad, and the gene(ome). karina a. vado (she/ella/elle) es profesora titular del programa de medicina, ciencia y humanidades de johns hopkins university y profesora afiliada del programa de estudios latinoamericanos, caribeños y latinx. actualmente, trabaja en su primer proyecto de libro, cuyo título provisional es latinx dna: race, latinidad, and the gene(ome).     introduction caring for equitable relations in interdisciplinary collaborations     coleen carrigan university of virginia carrigan@virginia.edu   caitlin d. wylie university of virginia wylie@virginia.edu   abstract collaborative research between scholars of science and technology studies (sts) and scholars of science, technology, engineering, and math (stem) is a growing trend. the papers assembled in this special section offer both embodied and empirical knowledge on how ethnographers negotiate our roles in integrative research when constrained by what our technoscientific collaborators value, what funders demand, what our home institutions expect, what we want to learn from the worlds we study, and the social transformations we envision in science and society. we grapple with how we as ethnographers can best balance caring for the communities we study, the ones we serve, and the ones we identify with. we take care that knowledge making is political. race, gender, class, and ability status of scholars intersect with the organizational, institutional, and cultural contexts in which we practice science to shape and be shaped by entrenched power relations. through a feminist politics of care, this collection transforms tensions in interdisciplinary collaborations into resources that enlarge our understandings of what these collaborations are like for sts ethnographers, make visible certain labors within them and, crucially, enrich our vision for what we want these collaborations to be.     keywords ethnography; care; collaboration; power; knowledge integration   when i ask who cares about what we do in science studies, i mean not only who is concerned with the dangers of our work, but who can see its full implications and recognize its potential value. —george levine, “what is science studies for and who cares?”   collaborative research between scholars of science and technology studies (sts) and scholars of science, technology, engineering, and math (stem) is a growing trend. there are many important reasons for doing this kind of research: because entrenched sociotechnical problems need many kinds of expertise to address them (national science foundation, n.d.); because sts and stem researchers alike want to reform technoscience; because interdisciplinary research is an influential site for power relations in knowledge production, making it a valuable case study for feminist sts researchers; because it’s fun and challenging; because funders incentivize it; because the problem of partial knowledges can lead to inadequate or inequitable products (see parvin and pollock 2020). however, few researchers have formal training in interdisciplinarity or team science, so we are all figuring things out as we go. we rarely publish these tinkered-together methodologies of interdisciplinarity, perhaps because they feel too ad hoc, we are embarrassed to share how they’ve failed (because of course, sometimes they do, and learning how these failures happen would be very useful for other interdisciplinary teams), and we don’t want to critique our collaborators for fear of social or professional consequences. still, we all construct frameworks of how to work together across epistemic and disciplinary boundaries, as well as across barriers from power differentials based on expertise, identity, and disciplinary status. these frameworks are both practical and theoretical, even if they are not explicit to our collaborators or sometimes even to ourselves. this special section strives to excavate various ad hoc yet common approaches to collaborations between social scientists, life scientists, and technoscientists, and theorize about them based on feminist thought, particularly through the lens of care. we aim to bring these methodological insights to other sts scholars in the hope of building solidarity and community around this challenging and crucial work. we also hope stem scholars can learn about interdisciplinary collaborations with ethnographers from this collection of essays. all researchers swap fieldwork stories; here we bring those stories out of the realm of informal chats, advice, commiseration, and complaint. instead, we transform them into intellectual resources that enlarge our understandings of what interdisciplinary collaborations are like for sts ethnographers and, crucially, enrich our vision for what we want these collaborations to be.   ethnography and care in feminist sts research taking up and scaling up care in feminist sts, particularly in interdisciplinary efforts toward institutional change, requires confronting questions of race, gender, sexuality, and coloniality as historical, inductive analytics essential to understanding the multiple dimensions and far-reaching impacts of science and technology (subramaniam et al. 2017). feminist sts scholars frame emotions and embodiment as ways to think about care in domains beyond gender-coded sites such as nursing and childcare (martin, myers, and viseu 2015; patrick 2023). we also acknowledge and speak back to the colonial roots of western science, whose traditional forms of data collection, classification, and representation too often serve an imperialist approach to knowledge and research (smith 2021). in this collection, we are ethnographers who study emotions and embodied experiences in interdisciplinary collaborations and theorize about care by documenting the ignored, silenced, and neglected experiences of marginalized team members. maría puig de la bellacasa probes the “meanings of care for knowledge politics in sts,” a politics she argues is predicated on “oppositional standpoints” (2011, 85). oppositional consciousness is foundational to feminist standpoint theory, a body of scholarship interrogating the politics of knowledge production and the specific situatedness of “competent” knowers within science (dotson 2011, 2014; fricker 2007; settles, buchanan, and dotson 2018; settles et al. 2020). a decolonizing approach to theorizing with care means that opposition is collective and actively resistant to systems of subjugation (hobart and kneese 2020; sandoval 2000). our contribution to this feminist, decolonial research tradition is to mobilize ethnography to illuminate and eliminate structural disadvantages in science and technology, especially those that pose barriers to interdisciplinary collaborations across social, technical, and life sciences. we aim to catalyze frameworks of shared understanding and collectively work toward egalitarianism in the production of knowledge. we are especially inspired by feminist scholarship that has created foundational approaches to relations of technoscience and care. for example, the germinal 2011 paper by puig de la bellacasa, “matters of care in technoscience: assembling neglected things,” contributed to an understanding of care both as a conceptual concern (what do we care about?) and a methodological one (why do we care?). additionally, a 2015 special issue of social studies of science, edited by aryn martin, natasha myers, and ana viseu and titled “the politics of care in technoscience,” extended puig de la bellacasa’s work through theorizing care as a mode of attention, which, via structures of power, can direct attention to some relations and obfuscate others. eight years after the publication of this important special issue, we are curious to learn how other sts scholars are taking up and practicing care to combat enduring injustices and what affective troubles are emerging (see duclos and criado 2020; jerak-zuiderent 2015; lindén and lydahl 2021). we are specifically interested in sts ethnographers’ perspectives. thus, in concert with other feminist sts ethnographers, we aspire to use the politics of care to transform the unfair and “unhappy affects” of interdisciplinary collaborations (smolka, fisher, and hausstein 2021, 2) into epistemological resources (harding 1992) that generate scholarship beneficial to coalition building that asks with whom and for what purpose (davis and craven 2016)? this special section draws from feminist thought to bring situated knowledges to the forefront by examining experiences and emotions that emerge within collaborative projects as sites for theorizing intersectionality, reflexivity, and positionality, which are key methodological approaches of feminist ethnographic research. we propose that care is a foundational concept for thinking about interdisciplinary collaborations. further, care as a mode of attention (martin, myers, and viseu 2015) within these research projects advances new knowledge about how the intersecting dimensions of power produce relationships, careers, scholars, and research design, as well as human society and the more-than-human worlds. in addition to feminist sts theories on care, this special section features ethnographers’ feminist interpretations of scientific practices and knowledge production. ethnography is shaped by black feminist thought (chapman 2010; collins 2000; davis and craven 2016; fraser 1998; hurston 1998). social science research from black feminist perspectives takes up new questions, valorizes lived experiences, and practices an ethics of caring centered on empathy, individual creativity, and emotional intelligence (collins 2000). therefore, ethnography guided by these principles is creatively attentive to distinctions between researcher and researched, scientist and subject. this method takes care to make sure that women of color and others who have been historically disenfranchised from official sites of scientific knowledge production have the opportunity to have an active presence in texts by and about them. indigenous sts scholar kim tallbear (2014) proposes that we “stand with'' research participants by acting to transform our research participants into our collaborators, colleagues, and sources of deep mutual learning and positive social change. she finds that caring about shared concerns and about each other opens researchers up to rich and unexpected research directions and social outcomes through collaboration across social hierarchies and disciplinary identities. for example, tallbear (2014) enacts caring collaborations as a way to reform science by helping scientists change how they think. many of this special section’s authors hold this activist motivation too, viewing our collaborations as a “call to intervention” in technoscience, in scientist and indigenous sts scholar max liboiron’s (2016) words. thus, informed by feminist, black, and indigenous thought, interventionist sts scholars strive to improve both scientific practice and our knowledge of power relations by working with technoscientists, university leaders, funding agencies, and others to align scientific knowledge-making infrastructures with values of equity and social justice. hence the crucial social and epistemic need for practices of care when navigating intersecting norms, values, and labor across differences of race, gender, class, ability, and career stage within interdisciplinary collaborations. in this issue, the reader will learn more about the political and practical challenges of this type of care work. using feminist ethnography, with its commitment to addressing relations of power within the research process, to conduct social studies of science adds greater complexity to the questions of quality and significance, voice and representation in our work. for example, when our “subjects” are scientists and we gain access to field sites through collaborations funded by technocratic foundations such as the united states' national science foundation and national institutes of health, historical asymmetries of resources and regard between the physical and social sciences can erupt and erode collegiality between collaborators and challenge the rigor and quality of our science. too often, social scientists are integrated into funded collaborations in a “consultative manner” (boudart and borra 2023) and qualitative methods are adopted but shorn from critical methodological and epistemological traditions foundational to social science fields (lewis 2022; viseu 2015). this subordination of social theory and its experts is dangerous. first, it limits what topics and evidence we as ethnographers can engage with, critique, and even access, particularly when combined with other forms of marginality from our identities and career stages. second, the preferential treatment of quantitative, positivistic science and the denigration of qualitative science is part of a larger neoliberal project to defund and discredit critical scholarship and reallocate scientific resources to historically enfranchised members of us society (carrigan and bardini 2021). coleen carrigan and michelle bardini (2021) coined the term epistemic prejudice to refer to this phenomenon as it unfolds in sites of scientific and technical knowledge production. epistemic prejudice is a subset of “epistemic injustice,” a broader form of social violence that thwarts epistemic practices of the marginalized and normalizes this violence (fricker 2007). the papers in this collection document this well-known but understudied problem in the contexts of interdisciplinary collaborations (boudart and borra 2023). for example, we found that epistemic prejudice stymies transformational changes, silences voices of highly marginalized members of technoscience through the violence of generalizability, and leaves exploitative dynamics in both the production of technoscience and its applications untroubled. it also makes it harder to negotiate the production of integrative knowledge and to reach consensus on what new discoveries we care to share with the world. this prejudice can thus lead to conflict and censure, making it harder to critique and transform gendered, racialized, and heteronormative practices, values, and behaviors in a team’s culture and in scientific practices and institutions more generally. third, ethnography’s distinctive feature is participant observation (barker 2012). spending time and hanging out with our participants often deepens camaraderie, and friendships can develop. this rapport, however, can make it more difficult to recognize or challenge epistemic prejudice in our interdisciplinary collaborations, because we care to not hurt feelings and thus jeopardize personal and professional ties. fourth, engaged ethnographers can be cast in the gendered role of caretaker on projects, there to “observe not disturb” and provide ethically coded services and products, certainly not to lead research practices and meaningfully contribute to new knowledge (viseu 2015, 642). we worry that the knowledge we can produce when shunted into hospitality roles rather than leadership in collaborations is therefore less complete, less rich, and less useful to liberatory projects. additionally, the power relations animating these role allocations are ones of domination. like other forms of harassment, they cause harm to both social sciences faculty and our students.1 finally, epistemic prejudice in science against those of us with expertise in studying social forces weakens the scientific community’s ability to fortify itself against far-right activism targeting secondary and post-secondary education (for examples of such activism, see fucci and catalano 2019; giroux 2013; krigel 2020; riley 2018; saul 2023). this vertical stratification in the academy leaves critical scholars on the frontlines of these coordinated attacks on academic freedom with little support and thwarts the ability of the research community to mount and fortify a collective response. therefore, one significant assumption we want to destabilize in this special section is the gendered idea that care in sts research is motivated only by a sense of duty or “warm feelings of love, affection, or nurture. care is just as often propelled by anxiety, injury, injustice, indignation, or frustration” (martin, myers, and viseu 2015, 630). in these ways, care is a form of protest. this special section is our attempt to confront the challenge of doing research across epistemic borders with hard-won evidence from feminist ethnographers creating both embodied and empirical knowledge on negotiating our roles in integrative research. like many who challenge dominant norms, practicing care in sts knowledge creation can also make one vulnerable to retaliatory punishments, such as constraining career advancement by withholding resources or being uncivil (viseu 2015). but we also risk being disregarded as an unreliable source of knowledge due to epistemic prejudice. pejoratives, like “fluffy” and “soft,” are designed to discredit our capacities as scholars and the kinds of scholarship we do and why (martin, myers, and viseu 2015). for the collaborative turn in sts to blossom fully, we must resist this hierarchy between social and technical knowledge and publicly debate how social scientists should navigate precarious status on interdisciplinary collaborative teams (reardon 2022; reardon et al. 2015). are we supporters or critics, collaborators or consultants, “adversarial outsiders or co-opted insiders” (smolka, fisher, and hausstein 2021, 1)? the papers in this special section address these questions empirically, based on the authors’ experiences as social scientists in interdisciplinary stem projects. together, we analyze our own methodologies of collaborative knowledge production across disciplines in order to ask how research teams might care for each other and their shared work in ways that forefront equity, empathy, and celebration of diverse kinds of knowledge.   positionality this special section grew out of an open panel at the 2021 society for the social studies of science (4s) conference. into this sts professional network, we cast a wide net for other ethnographers who also have experience in interdisciplinary collaborations with technoscientists and faced their share of challenges within them. organizing that panel was inspired by our own experiences with interdisciplinary collaborations in which we did not feel cared for or our expertise appreciated. for example, scientists and engineers sometimes invite us to collaborate with them on projects by doing project evaluation, education, and/or public outreach, but do not see us as researchers. instead, we are assumed to be operational support in service of our technoscientific peers in the integrative field sites of sts. in another example, technoscientists pushed qualitative social researchers off funded projects that the latter made possible because the technoscientists felt they had gotten what they needed from us and didn’t understand how our expertise could possibly shape the technical application of our qualitatively generated data. by taking up feminist ethnography, the contributors to this special section protest these conditions and turn them into intellectual resources mobilized for transformational change in sts and, more broadly, in interdisciplinary collaborations. accordingly, this special section contributes to a politics of care that catalyzes feminist sts scholars’ vision of interdisciplinary collaboration, thanks to methodological foci on undervalued and invisible labor, situated knowledges, power dynamics, and the dual nature of care—which we understand as both a value (e.g., things we care about) and an action (e.g., things we care for or take care of). a practice of care within interdisciplinary collaborations depends upon a recognition of the politics of labor. sts scholars have recognized the importance of different kinds of labor to the success of scientific practice, such as managing people and equipment, as “articulation work” or even “lab care-taking” (fujimura 1996; knorr cetina 1999). but this work is underrecognized in assessments of research careers, especially its affective and emotional aspects, such as its typical absence in assessments for hiring, promotion, and tenure (davies and horst 2016; smolka, fisher, and hausstein 2021; viseu 2015). one example of a research methodology that assumes but does not support or reward social scientists’ “affective labor” is what t.y. branch and g.m. duché (2022) call collaborative sociotechnical integration (csti) research. csti projects follow protocols of intervention in stem research to promote scientists’ self-awareness. in csti projects, social scientists guide scientists to think through how their social and professional values influence their research practices, such as their biases about race and gender, their assumptions about more junior researchers’ productivity and abilities, and their own access to resources and privilege. this delicate methodology requires social scientists to control their own emotions and responses to be active and non-judgmental listeners. branch and duché call for these social scientists to take good care of themselves, to prevent their burnout from exploitative affective labor and to “heighten the potential of these interventions” (2022, 13). preventing harm to social scientists providing emotional labor to their technoscientific peers—and holding social scientists alone responsible for their own well-being—is a weak form of care indeed. ethically, it is unacceptable to ask social scientists to expose themselves to potential harm from affective labor, especially in technocratic domains that discredit their expertise. if scientists deserve care as they navigate a csti study, then so do social scientists. after all, emotion-sharing between scientists and social scientists (rather than unidirectional emotional expression from scientists alone) enriches the relationship within the collaboration, and improves the rigor and breadth of the research practices—and thus, the resulting knowledge (carrigan et al. 2023). this is just one example of how an attention to care when analyzing interdisciplinary collaborations can address power asymmetries in collaborations between social science and stem researchers, while offering possibilities for improving science and its workforce culture. the following papers investigate their authors’ experiences as members of interdisciplinary teams through a feminist lens of care. like other sts scholars, our experiences as embedded ethnographers are part of our data sets and give us unique insights (hackett and rhoten 2011; lyle 2017; viseu 2015). our positionality affects with whom we can talk, how we are received in the field, and how and where we can share our findings. so, in this way, the politics of care in knowledge production will always be shifting and changing based on place, practitioners, and the particular dimensions of structures of power (e.g., race, gender, economics, and institutional affiliations) that we all navigate to create knowledge (cook and trundle 2020). the few other publications in which social scientists reflect on their own methodologies for collaboration with stem scholars are insightful and offer some practical guidelines for other social scientists (e.g., balmer et al. 2018; boenig-liptsin, tanweer, and edmundson 2022; carrigan et al. 2023; forsythe 2001; lyle 2017; rabinow and bennett 2012; smolka, fisher, and hausstein 2021; viseu 2015). in general, they warn that teams set stem as the standard for productivity levels, research questions, methods, and ways of working, such that stem scholars may ignore, override, or even denigrate social scientists and their research practices. these sts authors share stories of emotional labor they have undertaken to appease their collaborators, such as swallowing critiques to avoid conflict, and the emotional toll of feeling misunderstood, superfluous, or unwelcome. they recommend the importance of having at least some intellectual input into project design, holding equal funding and status (e.g., a co-investigator title) as stem collaborators, and choosing to work with people who value social science contributions and truly want to produce socially beneficial project outcomes. they point out common biases that shape team interactions, including the prioritization of stem; assumptions about researchers’ race, gender, and age; and risks of doing interdisciplinary collaborative research without job security, such as for students, scholars in precarious temporary positions, and faculty on the tenure track. these are wise observations and recommendations that resonate strongly with this issue’s authors. we strive to build on these contributions by sharing our own experiences and interpretations to demonstrate what ethnographers bring to the table of interdisciplinary knowledge projects. together, the papers demonstrate that feminist ethnography is especially critical to sts research that cares about equity and justice in scientific practices, relations, and impacts. each paper asks how researchers enact care in decisions about research questions, methods, data, and conclusions as well as in everyday interactions with each other as collaborators. ashley lewis takes up auto-ethnography to interrogate power dynamics in a funded interdisciplinary collaboration to develop models that envision different ways of building sustainable urban environments. in her essay, “sts researchers as technology: multiple positionalities as interpretations of participant expectations and agendas,” she positions herself and the team’s interdisciplinary practices as “technologies” to analyze the purposes of the project and the roles her multiple identities played in relationships with her colleagues, who viewed her either as a spy, the interdisciplinary catalyst, or a caretaker. this self-reflexive approach that forefronts emotions makes visible the taxing work of ethnographers collaborating with technoscientists, the hierarchy of power relations on teams, and the costs to sts ethnographers when what we do and contribute to interdisciplinary research is misunderstood or maligned. coleen carrigan offers feminist principles on taking care when documenting the neglected experiences of highly underrepresented actors in technoscience using ethnography designed according to intersectionality theory. “sheltering: care tactics for ethnography attentive to intersectionality and underrepresentation in technoscience” introduces a data sharing practice called sheltering, inspired, in part, by the feminist standpoint methodology of “strong objectivity” and the computer science technique of “black boxing.” troubling multiple structures of power reproducing inequality in science involves risk and carrigan describes three care tactics— reflexivity, refusal, and performance—which she has used to “shelter” or protect participants from interpersonal and institutional harm in several feminist ethnographic projects in the us. she concludes that ethnographers, by enacting solidarity in the struggle to end epistemic and social injustice in us knowledge production, can help transform who gets to produce science and reimagine other ways of knowing. jennifer croissant, in her essay “late to the party: articulating time and care in interdisciplinary projects,” examines multiple registers of time on an interdisciplinary project designed to learn more about scale issues in the life sciences and create a new pedagogical curriculum for the emerging field of ecosystem genomics. she shows how conceptions of time function as a subtle but important indicator of researchers’ disciplinary values. specifically, she documents how the project’s operational practices, such as scheduling, role allocations, communication, and outputs, reproduce and codify the subordinate status of social science researchers in collaborations. like lewis, she employs self-reflexivity to evince the costs of such hierarchies of power. further, she argues that interdisciplinarity is instrumentalized, thereby constraining opportunities to integrate epistemological approaches that could generate solutions to society’s “grand challenges” that interdisciplinarity is supposed to solve. all researchers create ad hoc collaborative practices, as demonstrated by all these papers. what happens, then, when a funder advocates that research teams enact a particular collaborative strategy? caitlin wylie and luis felipe r. murillo are social scientists on an interdisciplinary research team funded by a national science foundation program that promotes “knowledge co-production” as a framework for collaborative arctic research across disciplines and with arctic residents and indigenous communities. to situate their role on this team, wylie and murillo investigate how other research teams define and apply co-production in publications through a systematic literature review. their paper, “care-fully? the question of ‘knowledge co-production’ in arctic science,” argues that arctic researchers do not agree on what co-production means in theory or practice, nor are they asking what it should mean. most problematic of all, and perhaps as a result of this lack of engagement with the framework, few teams are co-producing knowledge. wylie and murillo propose that adopting a feminist care-centered approach would help inform co-productive strategies that empower marginalized knowledges and knowledge producers across disciplines and beyond academia. much like lewis’s essay asks us to consider who cares for the social scientist in interdisciplinary collaborations, anne-chie wang asks who cares for the caregivers performing end-of-life home care in taiwan. based on her ethnographic research with medical staff and families of hospice patients, wang argues in her essay “attuning to the erratic end of life: family carers' practices in hospice home care” that choices surrounding end-of-life care in taiwan are not merely based on autonomous personal choices but on meticulous care practices shaped by gender, technology, kinship norms, cultural beliefs, biomedicine, economics, and the neoliberal state. the politics of care animates her feminist critique of how biomedicine and neoliberalism combine to construct the home as a place of care to externalize death care to kin at the cost of physical, emotional, and financial strain on family members.   conclusion the papers collected here inspire ideal visions for how we as ethnographers can best balance caring for the communities we study, the ones we serve, and the ones we identify with. to enact this vision, and to situate mutual learning and interpersonal support as cornerstones of integrative knowledge production, we must take care that knowledge making is political. race, gender, class, and ability status of scholars intersect with the organizational, institutional, and cultural context in which we practice science to shape and be shaped by entrenched power relations. if we pay attention to these relations and their complex mutualities, we can begin to raise questions about how to translate knowledge across epistemic and social barriers, how to align values and priorities across disciplinary cultures and unequal power statuses, and how social scientists can best balance engagement in stem with critique and advocacy. furthermore, what labor becomes visible when attending ethnographically to politics of care in interdisciplinary collaborations? what equitable relations become possible? for example, how is work distributed in integrative research, and what roles do researchers’ discipline, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality play both in its allocation and recognition? what can the sts community do collectively to make interdisciplinary collaboration a matter of care? how might we enact care for each other, for our collaborators, and for our shared knowledge making? these papers provide insights into these important questions for social scientists as well as for our stem collaborators. we approached our editing responsibilities with care, such as by hosting an open and inclusive call for papers, making time for discussion during our 4s conference session, organizing a workshop at which authors commented on each other’s drafts to help us all improve them before submission to catalyst, and striving to be supportive and constructive editors as authors revised their papers in response to peer reviews. in our experience, this has been a warm, rewarding process of collective knowledge production for which we are grateful to our special section authors and the catalyst editors. we wish this approach would be the norm for academic publishing and knowledge sharing more generally. we hope publishing these papers is one way of sharing experiential knowledge, informing each other’s collaborative practices, and reducing epistemic prejudice. for example, we ask sts journals to publish more papers co-authored with scientists—and science journals to publish more papers co-authored with sts scholars—as a way to legitimize collaboration across our disciplines to produce integrated knowledge. we call for mentoring, networking, and the expansion of knowledge-sharing practices for feminist collaborative methodologies. we envision an ever-growing community of practice around the important work of making all researchers feel cared for. ideally, we would collectively propose standards for caring collaboration that funders would adopt into their calls for and evaluations of proposals. official guidance would help normalize caring relations as a foundational component of ethical and responsible research practices in interdisciplinary collaborations.   acknowledgements we are very grateful for the insights and hard work of this collection’s authors, as well as of the reviewers of these papers. the speakers and attendees at our 4s panel on care in interdisciplinary collaborations inspired this collection with their thoughtful and frank reflections on their experiences as collaborators. jen croissant, jenny denbow, and emma frow kindly commented on drafts of this introduction. catalyst co-editor cristina mejia visperas has been an extremely wise, generous, and caring guide throughout the process of proposing, submitting, and peer reviewing this collection, including providing key feedback on drafts of this introduction. many thanks also to the rest of the catalyst team for their openness to this topic and their important work to create this collection and this journal. thanks also to miguel del real, research assistant in the carrigan lab, for his expert support on this article. this work was supported, in part, by a national science foundation engineering education and centers grant 1751314 and the cal poly center for expressive technologies.   note 1 to learn more about how the preferential treatment of technoscience in the academy, a phenomenon that some students call “majorism,” hurts undergraduate students, please see carrigan and bardini 2021.   references balmer, andrew s., susan molyneux-hodgson, felicity callard, and des fitzgerald. 2018. “‘could we meet?’: a conversation on 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fouché, clark a. miller, and laurel smith-doerr, 407–33. cambridge, ma: mit press. tallbear, kim. 2014. “standing with and speaking as faith: a feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry.” journal of research practice 10 (2), art. n17. http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/405/371. viseu, ana. 2015. “caring for nanotechnology? being an integrated social scientist.” social studies of science 45 (5): 642–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715598666.     author bios coleen carrigan is an associate professor of science, technology, and society in the department of engineering and society at the university of virginia. she uses feminist ethnography to investigate the cultural dimensions of technology and the politics of knowledge and reproduction.   caitlin d. wylie is an associate professor of science, technology, and society in the department of engineering and society at the university of virginia. she studies the ethical and epistemic contributions of overlooked collaborators on research teams, such as technicians, students, and volunteers.   six ways of looking at fractal mechanics varino, sofia. 2024. “a viral pedagogy: doing things with long covid’s autoimmunities.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–20. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sofia varino, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license a viral pedagogy: undoing things with long covid’s autoimmunities sofia varino university of potsdam, germany sofia@sofiavarino.com abstract this article focuses on the scientific and political transformations that the covid19 pandemic continues to engender through its impact on the epistemological and ontological foundations of autoimmunity. by discussing an online seminar taught during the covid pandemic winter of 2020–21, the article considers how the viral autoimmunities involved in severe and long-haul covid pathogenic mechanisms have fostered transformative pedagogical and therapeutic experiences, spaces, and events. as a highly contagious viral disease, covid highlights disparities in access to healthcare, whereby certain (racialized, disabled, ageing) bodies are unequally burdened with the labor of staying alive. predicated on a foundational separation between inside and outside, or between the internal, vulnerable, visceral space of the individual(ized) “human” body and an external(ized), hazardous, contaminated, foreign environment, covid measures for avoiding viral exposure became paramount, reciting a genealogy of distancing, protection, containment, and isolation. by examining how concepts and practices of autoimmunity animate cutting-edge biomedical research, this article asks, how does autoimmunity undo normative models of health predicated on a militarized model of immunity? how might the viral shift our understanding of autoimmunity and what might autoimmune conditions teach us about virality? in short, what can autoimmunity and the viral show us about uncertainty, care, and transformation in therapeutic and pedagogical contexts? keywords autoimmunity, covid, long covid, uncertainty, pedagogy, care mailto:sofia@sofiavarino.com special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 2 stop playing pretend that we know when we don’t. stop playing pretend that we’re well when we’re not. stop playing pretend that the world is certain when it’s absolutely the opposite of it. —alok (@alokvmenon), excerpt from a video posted on instagram, august 15, 20221 introduction in virology: essays for the living, the dead, and the small things in between, joseph osmundson observes that “we live on a viral planet. they were here first. we are their guests, not hosts” (2022, 61). as a virologist, queer activist, and selfidentified “fag,” osmundson is interested in pinning down the inherent queerness at the core of viral activity—what a virus can do (and not do), and specifically what a virus can do (and not do) to human cells, human bodies, human life. osmundson theorizes the queer relations that emerge in response to viruses, spanning experiences and networks of care, pain, fear, desire, mourning, and loss. as a microbiologist, he offers readers an informative and poetic remix of viral and immunological expertise coupled with intimate accounts of his own queer encounters with viruses. osmundson is as invested in communicating what he (or the collective “we” of universalized scientific subjectivity) knows about the viral as in articulating what is not known, either because it cannot be known or because that knowledge is yet to come. much like in alok’s remarks above, this investment in the unknown, in what is uncertain or indeterminate, is not simply an intellectual exercise. it is rather an urge to stop pretending that “we’re well when we’re not” in order to accept and articulate how odd, how queer, being alive really is—and to use uncertainty as a therapeutic, pedagogical, transformative political tool, not to recuperate it but to put it to good use, informing queer epistemologies and ethics. it is an urge, shared by me and many others, to do queer things with uncertainty, and specifically, with the uncertainties at the core of viruses and other pathogens, of pandemics and epidemics, of cells that burst open, of bodies that break down, fade away and die. in this article, i consider the uncertainty at work in viral autoimmunity, particularly in the autoimmune mechanisms involved in severe and long covid, to show the pedagogical and therapeutic potential of not knowing. in tandem with autoimmunity’s riddles, i examine the staying alive online seminar i taught at humboldt university of berlin during the first winter of the covid pandemic (from november 2020 to february 2021), when (unvaccinated and under lockdown) we tried to survive another gloomy berlin winter, this time one with a darker core and a more sinister edge. as daily life seemed to be reduced to prevention measures and the dynamics of infection and treatment, followed by convalescence or death, my biweekly discussions with the students became long special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 3 collective meditations on fragility, debility, disability, and socioeconomic privilege as a determining factor in quality of care and covid outcomes. we talked about who is left to die and who gets to stay alive, but we also discussed the blurry lines between health and illness, the vital and the deadly we carry inside and encounter every day. the lifeworlds we brought with us and shared during those zoom sessions were filled with uncertainty about what viruses and bodies can do. as we stopped “playing pretend that we’re well when we’re not” (alok 2022), we were able to talk about covid and aids, polio and measles, avian flu and swine flu, about depression and social anxiety, loneliness and immunodeficiency, chronic pain and delicate lung cells. we also talked about the clinical puzzle of autoimmunity and of chronic autoimmune conditions, particularly in relation to artist carolyn lazard’s writing on chronic illness . as students shared stories about their own experiences of grappling with illness, pain, and disabling conditions, from mental to physical health issues, we became better equipped to digest and respond to the course readings. learning about (auto)immunity was a way of learning about our bodies (our/selves), but it was also a way of undoing, disassembling the restrictive limitations of the “self,” that isolated unit, to revel in the permeable, reactive, disorderly, multispecies entity formerly known as “ourselves.” the collectivity summoned by the viral spans its vestigial, nearly imperceptible formations, as well as its massive, humanly incomprehensible scale. feeling somewhat lost in this immensity, we grappled in the darkness of that long semester with all the unknowns covid had irrevocably introduced into our lives, as we sought to tolerate far more uncertainty than we could bear. this, i argue, is the challenge that autoimmune phenomena place on our bodies, clinical protocols, and biomedical studies, demanding an unconditional acceptance of uncertainty, ambiguity, unpredictability, even chaos. in what follows, i deploy what vicky kirby (2017) calls “autoimmunity’s riddle” as a pedagogical strategy to engage with uncertainty in (post)pandemic times, using the staying alive seminar as a case study. i begin by considering some of the political, conceptual, and material entanglements of virality and autoimmunity. i engage with theoretical work on autoimmunity and on the politics of immunity in the context of biopolitics and sovereignty, in particular kirby’s (2017) transdisciplinary critique of autoimmunity and emily martin’s (1994) anthropological research on immunology and the “flexible” body. i propose the concept of immunoplasticity to account for the ways in which immune systems learn, change, and adapt, modulating their responses according to interactions with external actants, from pathogens to vaccines. in the second section, i offer a critical overview of the staying alive seminar, paying particular attention to the pedagogical tools the students and i employed to make it a space of radical hospitality that enabled transformative, therapeutic experiences to take place. in spite of all our limitations and shortcomings, especially during such an uncertain, turbulent time, we managed to collectively engage in daring, candid conversations on topics from ableism in academia to racism in healthcare. in the special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 4 third section, i return to an examination of how autoimmunity functions in long covid clinical scenarios. finally, i return to how uncertainty can be productive, engendering pedagogical and therapeutic experiences with unexpected outcomes. viral autoimmunity authors such as ed cohen (2009), emily martin (1994), vicky kirby (2017), jacques derrida (2003, 2005), and roberto esposito (2011) have theorized immunity as a biomedical and political concept, considering its intellectual genealogies alongside clinical and cultural practices. in intolerant bodies: a short history of autoimmunity, warwick anderson and ian r. mackay (2014) frequently mention the impact of contagious diseases as contributing to the onset of autoimmune conditions. the authors approach autoimmunity as a “concept of pathogenesis,” one that is supported by the epistemological framework of a highly individualized and specialized entity called the self: “notions of individual reactivity and sensitivity flourished best where the prevailing thought styles and sensibilities nurtured such ideas” (2014, 5, emphasis added). evidence of viral involvement in the pathogenesis of a vast range of autoimmune conditions (including lupus, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and celiac disease) is well documented across clinical and biomedical literatures. causality, however, remains remarkably difficult to establish, and the role of viral infection is usually presented as one factor (among others) involved in autoimmune pathogenesis. to use one specific example from a recent review article on lupus (systemic lupus erythematosus): “a causal link between viral infections and autoimmunity has been studied for a long time and the role of some viruses in the induction or exacerbation of systemic lupus erythematosus (sle) in genetically predisposed patients has been proved” (quaglia et al. 2021, 277, emphasis added). this citation corroborates similar statements from original scientific articles and review articles on autoimmune pathogenic mechanisms across the fields of biomedicine, clinical medicine, and public health, as well as more specialized fields like virology, immunology, and microbiology (getts et al. 2013; hejrati et al. 2020). viruses occupy a liminal position between the living and the nonliving, becoming enlivened through their interaction with living cells. unlike nonliving matter, viruses have the capacity to replicate exponentially, which gives them an uncanny resemblance to living beings, in particular bacteria and fungi. although organic and inorganic matter also has the capacity to become enlivened through interaction with other substances, it cannot replicate itself exponentially. this crucial difference is what makes viruses so common and their presence so pervasive. viruses are, quite simply, everywhere. given this well-established link between viral infection and autoimmunity, even if it has not (yet) been proven to be a causal one, why does long covid seem to pose such a challenge to standard western clinical practice? and why has it special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 5 remained a clinical puzzle in recent biomedical research? partly, the answer resides in the characteristics of the sars-cov-2 virus itself: its molecules have the capacity to affect virtually any cell in the human body, dispersing its effects across organs and introducing a high degree of variability in the range of symptoms. however, there is also, i argue, a paradigmatic clash at the core of covid models of pathogenesis, one in which germ theories of disease, epigenetic models, and the specificity of (auto)immunity compete and collide. the notion that every (human) body responds to pathogens in the same standardized manner, a central tenet of germ theories of disease, is contradicted by the principles of genetic diversity and variability. moreover, it is at odds with the highly idiosyncratic, disparate responses of autoimmune mechanisms defined by the “individual reactivity and sensitivity” anderson and mackay (2014) highlight above, understood as a series of responses that are both unpredictable and changeable over time. although the production of autoantibodies in small amounts is common, it does seem to affect immune function and it can cause tissue damage. in covid clinical scenarios, it is difficult to assess whether autoantibodies are produced due to more severe covid infection, resulting in inflammation and cellular damage, or whether it is precisely the presence of autoantibodies that precipitates a severe or acute clinical scenario. in an overactive immune response, cytokines (signaling proteins that are part of the immune system) produced in excessive amounts can cause cellular damage. by contrast, autoantibodies “gone rogue” no longer recognize the tissues and cells that “belong” to the self and are thus unable to distinguish them from pathogens (khamsi 2021).2 i want to propose here that the neologism immunoplasticity (which appears across a variety of studies on immunity across fields like internal medicine, neurology, psychology, immunology and cardiology) might capture something of the flexibility (martin 1994) and plasticity characteristic of this disparate collective of cells and molecules known as the “immune system.” 3 while their activity remains to some extent coordinated and recognizable as an epistemological and ontological identity, i contend that the cells and molecules involved in immune activity function less as an organized system than as a heterogeneous network of actants distributed across a given organism. each participant in immune functioning, from t cells to macrophages, has some degree of ability to act, react, and overreact independently, including in ways that are damaging and even deadly to a living body. immune activity shifts over time in ways that can be unpredictable, making it difficult to detect and measure variance and variability. these unpredictable shifts can be understood along the lines of plasticity, in the sense of an organism’s ability to change and adapt to changes in its environment and more specifically in relation to neuroplasticity, or “the ability of the nervous system to form and reorganize connections and pathways, as during development and learning or following injury” (oed, n.d., emphasis added). in turn, special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 6 immunoplasticity might thus provide a useful model for considering how immunity is also highly responsive, and not always in a beneficial way for the self/body/organism. ultimately, the immune system, an agglomerate of cells and molecules, does not operate as a singular, coordinated unit, but rather as a heterogeneous collective of partly autonomous entities, acting in an agential manner that is not necessarily serving the perpetuation of any single organism’s life. understood perhaps as the biological materialization of suicidal intent targeting the suffering or dying body, autoimmunity manages to exceed such a reading once we consider the foundational otherness of both the innate and the adaptive immune networks circulating within a living (human) body. distinguishing between the beneficial and damaging effects of any treatment, encapsulated in the term pharmakon as deployed by derrida (1981) and elizabeth wilson (2015), remains difficult when critically engaging with autoimmunity. in politically charged situations, particularly in clinical settings, having to quickly decide what is good or bad, right or wrong, helpful or destructive, is never a straightforward matter. to make empirical decisions informed by reason, it becomes often necessary to reduce the complexity of a problem, aiming to (hopefully) increase predictability and minimize the risk of error. statistical probability, complemented by pragmatism and medical intuition, might indeed save lives—but whose lives? for those whose bodies fall outside normative parameters, often defined according to racist, ableist, ageist, and heterosexist scientific standards, the simplistic imposition of normative expectations can prove harmful or even fatal. elsewhere, i highlight how the biomedical concept of “viral load” might be useful for theorizing the uneven distribution of the pandemic effects so many had to bear (chen 2021), in addition to the already unbearable burdens of paid and unpaid labor, disabling and chronic conditions, and the bodily impact of dealing with violence, racism, ableism, heterosexism, poverty, and social exclusion on a daily basis (varino 2017, 2021, forthcoming). in a study by jesse fajnzylber et al. (2020), covid severity and mortality are closely linked to viral load, with samples collected from the respiratory tract, plasma, and urine showing a higher prevalence of detectable sars-cov-2 in patients with severe covid. the study is corroborated by similar scientific findings about the role of immune dysregulation in severe covid clinical scenarios (giamarellos-bourboulis et al. 2020). several studies also suggest a strong connection between covid severity and risk of developing long covid (del rio, collins, and malani 2020; subramanian et al. 2022). more recently, strong links between long covid and autoimmunity have been observed, with research showing increased risk of acquiring an autoimmune or autoinflammatory disease after covid infection (hosseini et al. 2022; kocivnik and velnar 2022; mobasheri et al. 2022; sharma and bayry 2023), and autoimmunity emerging as a common feature of long covid clinical scenarios (mehandru and merad 2022; rojas et al. 2022). taken as a whole, these studies special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 7 point towards links between viral infection and autoimmunity that continue to dispute the militarized model of immune responses mounted by a “sovereign self” against “foreign invaders.” the collapse between self and nonself is part of the ontological and epistemic crisis that autoimmunity inaugurates. i argue in this article that it is also part of the transformative potential that the viral instigates as the catalyst for chronic autoimmune and immunodeficiency conditions, from chronic and long-term conditions directly caused by a specific virus, like long covid and aids, to autoimmune conditions perhaps more sinuously linked to viral pathogenesis, like multiple sclerosis, lupus, celiac disease, or type 1 diabetes. it is tempting, of course, to try to turn all the pathos and confusion of a global pandemic, or the derangement of a personal health crisis, into a lesson, a didactic experiment, something “we” can all learn and grow from, a process of healing that returns the fallen body/self to a prior, original state of order, purity, and productivity afforded by good health. i want to avoid that schema while still finding a way to account for the (often convoluted, transversal, tangential, disruptive) learning that did take place during the staying alive online learning experiment in the winter of 2020–21. it was transformative, in a distinctly therapeutic and pedagogical manner, to grapple with the troubles and joys of living in a body that breaks down, eluding our control attempts, and to consider how social systems fail specific groups and communities. during the semester, we returned over and over to historian of science edna bonhomme’s (n.d.) generative question, “what makes people sick?” and sought to answer it in different ways each time. the experiment was not conclusive, though; its results only yielded opaque, partial, highly subjective, and non-replicable data, demanding many more questions and tearing apart what we thought we already knew. staying alive: a pandemic seminar over the course of the winter semester 2020–21, i taught a graduate seminar called staying alive: queer and feminist interventions on illness and disability from the aids crisis to the covid-19 pandemic at humboldt university of berlin.4 the seminar was aimed at students in the master’s program in gender studies, but students from all subjects were allowed to participate, and there were medicine and biology students enrolled alongside psychology, social sciences, and humanities students. for many of them, this was the first semester of their ma and several had moved to berlin to study. advanced ba students were also welcome, provided they felt that they could follow the readings and engage in the seminar discussions. my main goal was to offer students (several of whom were doing their exchange year or semester abroad as part of the erasmus program, a student exchange program established among european universities) the time and space to discuss what was happening in their own lives and in the world as that first pandemic winter unfolded. to accomplish this, i sought to place the pandemic within wider contexts, encompassing continuities and discontinuities with the aids crisis and other previous pandemics and epidemics (such as sars, special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 8 the 1918 flu, polio, and measles), but also within wider contexts of health activism, racial and disability justice, climate change, and environmental rights. i chose readings that highlighted disability and illness narratives, which demonstrated the unevenly distributed physical and emotional labor demanded from certain bodies in order to stay alive in a racist, ableist, ageist, classist, and heterosexist world. we read disability scholars such as mel chen (2012, 2021), lisa diedrich (2016), margrit shildrick (2009), and rosemarie garland-thomson (2017) alongside excerpts from disability visibility (2020), edited by alice wong, and from care work (2018), edited by leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha. the students especially responded to carolyn lazard’s writing on chronic illness and to critical work by cindy patton (1990) and paula treichler (1999) on the aids crisis, a crisis that some younger european (and particularly german) students, who have free access to widely available prep (pre-exposure prophylaxis, a preventive course of medication that reduces the risk of hiv infection by over 90 percent), had simply assumed was over. we took an intersectional approach to discussing how the covid pandemic was affecting each one of us in remarkably different ways, from week to week, and to think about how it was affecting the people we knew or heard about, via the media or other sources, in places far away. this was speculative, demanding work that required creativity, empathy, and solidarity—resources we did not necessarily have at the beginning of the semester, but which we gradually developed through systematic, slow, careful engagement with the readings and media materials we shared on a weekly basis. foregrounding first-person narratives about disability, illness, and mental health was crucial for me as a lecturer to destabilize the notion of normative health as a given for most. rather, we started from the premise that most people undergo periods of disability during a lifetime, and that many of us deal everyday with disabling and/or chronic conditions (including mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress), either our own or experienced by those around us, including those for whom we provide paid or unpaid care labor. examining how these conditions are exacerbated by racism, ableism, sexism, and poverty became a core component of the course, especially as we reflected on the rampant ableism still prevalent in academic settings. as is usually the case with most humanities and social sciences courses at german universities, attendance was not mandatory, and as a lecturer i emphasized that attending the zoom sessions was completely voluntary and that no one should feel pressured to attend, participate, or even to turn on their cameras. all readings and course materials were available online and all exercises and activities could be completed asynchronously.5 my aim was to engender a welcoming, radically accessible atmosphere that centered care, support, and mutual responsibility rather than academic achievement. this atmosphere was informed by but departed from the current frameworks of diversity, equity, and inclusion prevalent in north american and in some european universities, which still presume a special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 9 universalized set of standards concerning individual class participation and academic output, predicated on principles of equal access to education that can never be actualized under the grueling conditions of late-stage capitalism. rather, the temporary learning community we formed was supported by the freedomoriented radical pedagogies of educators such as paulo freire, bell hooks, augusto boal, and gloria anzaldúa, which question the very conditions of possibility for learning and how power structures shape educational institutions. the student responses, from their contributions to the weekly zoom sessions to their required course assignments, astounded me. gathered together, they formed a collection of insightful and sophisticated accounts of how our bodies limit, fail, support, and enable our lives. the transformative work this seminar did was both pedagogical and therapeutic, replacing the ableist normativity that regards good health as a given standard, and disease and disability as abnormal or deviant, with an acknowledgment of how particular bodies and communities bear the brunt of staying alive with minimal support and resources. instead of assuming states of health and disease as singular experiences, we approached them as interconnected events, socially and materially mediated. the viral, then, emerged as a collective and relational category in this seminar, something that binds human and nonhuman bodies across historical times and geographical regions, rendering what may appear to be discreet units as living assemblies. together, we made a concerted effort to think about covid and other medical conditions beyond the binary of either health or disease, challenging the dualism of “bad” foreign pathogens trying to invade and conquer our “sovereign” bodies while “good” immune systems defend the territory of a familiar self. as one student succinctly put it, “at the end of the day it is our immune systems that make us sick,” either by doing too much or not doing enough. as intricately distributed networks, immune systems rely on shared resources, including collective immunity and environmental conditions, to be able to keep bodies alive. as a pedagogical and therapeutic tool, viral autoimmunity encapsulates how a single pathogenic agent can instigate a broad spectrum of immune responses among individuals and across time, some of which are not entirely understood within current scientific and clinical frameworks of causality, predictability, or replicability. in what follows, i continue to examine the confounding phenomena involved in viral autoimmunity, initially introduced in those seminar readings and discussions, and much indebted to the incredible generosity, honesty, and creativity of the students participating in the staying alive seminar. the viral is transformative and relational, and engaging with its uncanny, at times volatile and destructive liminality can indeed foster learning and healing—even as it kills, harms, and terrifies us, even as we mourn our losses while striving to stay alive. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 10 breaking it apart: (un)doing things with (long) covid dr. ashish jha (2022), the white house covid-19 response coordinator from april 2022 to june 15, 2023, observed during a white house press teleconference in 2022 that “long covid is almost surely not one clinical condition; it’s probably multiple different things—how do we understand that, break that apart?” (emphasis added). clinical medicine’s intolerance for the multiplicity of long covid may lead to a more in-depth understanding of each of its myriad manifestations, which might result in better treatment, care, and disease management in the near future. this is especially the case if medical specialties can study and mitigate some of the more specific symptoms or conditions present in long covid clinical scenarios. but while it is true that cardiology, gastroenterology, or neurology, for example, might excel at providing treatment for a specific array of symptoms, there is also value in considering how a condition might benefit from a more generalist clinical approach. immunology, especially in its attention to the idiosyncrasies of autoimmune activity and its historical interest in understanding variability in individual responses, may well have such a role to play in addressing long covid. during the staying alive seminar, students routinely highlighted precisely this variability, commenting on how the disorienting clinical scenarios of covid spanned a confounding range of physical, psychological, and neurological symptoms, even at what was then still an early stage of the pandemic. at the time of writing, the unsettling temporalities of covid continue to make it a major public health concern on a global scale, both in terms of the effects of covid infection on older, disabled, or immunocompromised individuals and communities, especially with recurring covid waves caused by the spread of new variants, and in terms of the long-term lingering symptoms of what has become known as long covid (also known as long-haul covid, post-covid, chronic covid, or post-covid syndrome, sometimes abbreviated as pcs). since july 2021, long covid has been recognized in the united states as a disability under the americans with disabilities act. the world health organization (2021) currently defines long covid as “a condition characterized by symptoms impacting everyday life, such as fatigue, shortness of breath and cognitive dysfunction, which occur after a history of probable or confirmed sars-cov-2 infection.” the chronic condition, with its confounding, often vague range of symptoms, continues to pose a causality riddle. why do some patients remain sick for so long, instead of recovering from covid after infection subsides and the sars-cov-2 virus is no longer detectable? as already mentioned above, the probability of developing long covid appears to be, at least to some extent, correlated with severe covid symptoms, and severity of symptoms seems in turn to be correlated with both viral load (quantified levels of detectable sars-cov-2 measured in samples collected from the respiratory tract, blood plasma, or urine) and with the presence of autoantibodies in blood samples. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 11 long covid’s disorienting clinical scenario is not by any means unusual. the sequalae left by acute or severe infectious disease often manifest in ambiguous clinical scenarios that can extend over the course of weeks, months, or years. currently, there is no standardized testing or specific clinical protocol to determine whether someone might indeed have long covid. healthcare professionals assess the probability of long covid by considering clinical history, a standard medical examination, and possibly a range of tests, from blood tests to x-rays. in addition to this, whether long-haul, critical, severe, moderate, or mild, covid cases have tended to present a vast range of symptoms, with differently affected tissues and organs. although the condition often produces respiratory symptoms ranging from mild to acute, its gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, neurological, and dermatological symptoms have also been thoroughly documented and studied since the early stages of the pandemic (ciechanowicz et al. 2020; jiang et al. 2020; mehandru and merad 2022). in addition, the role of inflammation and autoimmunity has also been central in biomedical and clinical studies of covid pathogenic mechanisms (ehrenfeld et al. 2020; khamsi 2021). in severe and critical covid cases, lowering an excessive immune response with immunosuppressing drugs such as steroids must be carefully balanced with the risk of increasing the degree of infection due to a lowered immune response, thus potentially triggering viral replication resulting in cellular and tissue damage. autoimmune processes are in fact an integral aspect of immune function regulation, rather than an exceptional or rare occurrence. for example, while every living body produces autoantibodies, they can either instigate autoimmune pathogenesis or, conversely, play a pivotal role in regulating immune responses such as inflammation (immunosuppressants like steroids, for example, seek to mimic this regulatory effect). similarly, t cells can contribute to the onset of autoimmune pathogenic mechanisms while also, paradoxically, helping guard against autoimmune pathogenesis and even engendering protective autoimmunity (for example, in the case of central nervous system injuries). as kirby has observed, “autoimmunity’s riddle must accommodate the following paradox: the concept of autos, or ipse can no longer be something which is compromised, threatened or even secured, and this is because an identifiable self which appears under attack may never have existed” (2017, 50). it is thus not surprising to see that autoimmunity unsettles a modern biomedical paradigm where “proper” immune bodies are the norm, either through innate immunity or by acquiring it through contact (and possible infection) or through vaccines and other inoculation techniques. in line with kirby’s assertion that an “identifiable self…may never have existed” in the first place, i want to suggest that something far more complex than a scenario of self-destruction is at work in autoimmune conditions. i want to consider how any given immune system does not in fact belong to a specific “self” or even to the organism within which it operates, but is rather a heterogeneous agglomerate participating in a vast network of ecosocial special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 12 immune functioning, eventually determining the survival or death of an organism or even of an entire community. autoimmunity ostensibly inaugurates the collapse between self and nonself, brought along by a disassembling self that can no longer maintain the only thing that made it recognizable in the first place: its distinguishability from the nonself. chronically autoimmune bodies may not directly infect others, but neither do they endanger themselves exclusively. they also pose a threat to the stability of normative models of health and disease, dis/order, dys/function, cure and harm, and perhaps even more so, to models of causality and normativity, installing a foundational ambiguity (kirby’s “riddle,” mentioned above) that can never be finally resolved. the paradoxical ambiguity at the core of autoimmunity clashes with modern scientific paradigms founded on causality and replicability. in turn, clinical protocols rely on some degree of predictability, so that error can be minimized during diagnostic procedures and ensuing treatment recommendations. the “auto” introduced by autoimmunity refers to a modality of reflexive immunity that is oriented towards the (ostensibly) singular, unified, autonomous, individuated organism. in the standard, dominant biomedical narrative, autoimmune pathogenic mechanisms can then be reduced to a matter of error or failure, whereby a body attacks its own cells and tissues by mistake, losing the ability to recognize its own visceral materiality and to distinguish friend from foe, self from nonself. caught up in the circuitry of pathogenic autoimmunity, this dysfunctional, disorderly body harms “itself” by mounting what is deemed as an unnecessary immune response that causes inflammation and possibly cellular and/or tissue damage. by contrast, autoimmune mechanisms that have a beneficial effect on an individual organism (like the autoantibodies involved in immune self-regulation or the t cells providing protective immunity mentioned above) are relegated to the entirely different category of immune functioning, foundationally distinct from autoimmunity in the clinical sense of pathogenic mechanisms involved in the onset of allergic reactions and of chronic autoimmune conditions. even though the effects are diametrically opposed, the autoimmune mechanisms at work appear to be essentially the same. this duality at the core of autoimmunity, this ability in some cases to protect and regulate immune functioning, and in others to have harmful, incapacitating, or even deadly effects, further complicates “autoimmunity’s riddle” (kirby 2017). ambiguity and unpredictability are not well tolerated by current scientific and clinical paradigms seeking to prevent, control, and manage disease transmission by eradicating doubt and minimizing error. the ambiguity at the core of autoimmunity poses numerous epistemological and ontological challenges for current immunological knowledge. similarly, a lingering, unresolved case of prolonged covid, presenting with an array of diverse symptoms ranging from mild to debilitating, troubles assumptions about normative immunity. the current clinical expectation is that an appropriate, standard immune response should special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 13 return the body to its previous (pre-covid) healthy state. instead, bodies exhibiting covid-related symptoms long after the standard (a statistical average based on what is more frequently observed) fourto six-week period of convalesce are seen as unruly, deviant, damaged, and damaging bodies whose “rogue” antibodies and autoantibodies cause unnecessary trouble to the sovereign (yet subservient) citizen-self, one who had ample opportunity to return to its proper, (re)productive, healthy condition prior to covid infection. this refusal to return to a pure, original, pre-covid state undermines the sovereignty of the self just as much as it undermines the economic sovereignty of the nationstate, with wealthy countries such as germany and the us now grappling with the long-term effects and added costs of a reduced and/or less productive workforce due to long covid. autoimmunity is transformative, i argue, for the uncertainty it entails and the ambiguity it installs within an immune enterprise predicated on defending a sovereign self that may well not exist—its ontological and epistemological contours too blurry to maintain any recognizable stability. autoimmunity, as a clinical and social phenomenon, demands massive adjustments on a visceral level, by cells and tissues, and large-scale accommodations on an epistemic, ethical, political, and socioeconomic level. autoimmunity arrives at the scene of biopolitics to disassemble the self, that kernel whose freedom, integrity, and autonomy still animates neoliberal late capitalist paradigms, although probably not for much longer. in fact, i would offer that long covid’s clinical puzzle might seem far less puzzling after a paradigmatic shift to autoimmunity as a core immune mechanism that is not necessarily pathogenic nor foundationally opposed to immune response, but might be rather contiguous with it. far from rare or exceptional, autoimmune responses occur alongside immune ones, mounted by an immune system that is not the property nor the extension of a sovereign self, but simply an agglomerate of actants that may or may not behave in a way that is (seemingly) beneficial for a specific body, community, or population. since it is remarkably difficult to distinguish between right or wrong, good or bad, cure or harm, avoiding nihilism or political apathy may not be simply a matter of taking sides or of developing reasonable arguments based on empirical evidence. as outlined in the previous section, it may instead require an increased capacity for tolerating paradoxical ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainty, indeterminacy, accompanied by an commitment to engage with the imperceptible (murphy 2006), vestigial, or negligible—that is, towards not knowing, by making ethical and epistemic space in an argument, clinical protocol, or laboratory study, for what we do not know (yet) about what we know and for what we do not know that we don’t know. throughout the staying alive seminar, the students and i experienced again and again how developing a taste for the intolerable and stomaching failure and error are key therapeutic and pedagogical outcomes of a transformational approach to autoimmunity in general, and specifically towards its role in pathogenic mechanisms, including covid’s erratic clinical expression. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 14 centering the role of autoimmunity in immune functioning enables a renewed understanding of long covid. conversely, covid data, narratives, and practices provide robust evidence of autoimmunity’s central role in infectious disease mechanisms, corroborating previous studies on the links between autoimmune and viral pathogenesis. while the immune system remains in many situations a highly adaptive, enclosed, self-regulating network, using its own resources to manage excessive activity, it is also true that the many immune actants at work within a body are not simply aligned with keeping it alive and well. they are also capable of harming and even destroying it, demonstrating how no action or entity can aspire to be entirely pure, benign, or beneficial. the murky ethics and politics at the core of immune functioning should come as no surprise, since an immune system is an agglomerate of interconnected yet independent entities whose agency does not align in any conscious or intentional manner with that of a living body in all its visceral, affective, and cognitive complexity. the immune system behaves less as a seamless, coordinated system than as an eclectic collective of highly specialized living cells and molecules, in close cooperative and at times antagonistic relations with the unicellular life forms (such as bacteria and fungi) that make multicellular life possible. in fact, the (innate and adaptive) immune system active inside each living body, remarkably similar across all vertebrate life forms, may well be as foreign as anything else circulating within a body or interacting with it. understanding the autoimmune mechanisms at the core of covid across its myriad clinical manifestations can be as useful for biomedical research and clinical practice as it is for transformational political projects. the modern western sovereign self that “we,” the individual subject-citizens of overdeveloped western(ized) affluent societies, so dearly cultivate and manage, can barely sustain itself. its ecologies can be stormy, its immunoplasticity unruly, its multispecies heterogeneity a hybrid gone rogue. if we take seriously the paradox at the core of autoimmune mechanisms, we must conclude that there is very little of the self’s sovereignty, autonomy, or even distinguishability left at all. what we might find instead is an intricate community of beings, clashing as well as cooperating, socially and materially bound to one another. this, then, might be what can be called a politics beyond the (human) self. accepting and imaginatively engaging with autoimmunity’s paradoxical indeterminacy and uncertainty, as alok incites us to do in the epigraph, rather than seeking to minimize or eradicate them altogether, is a pedagogical and therapeutic strategy that can also function as a methodology, perhaps even as an ethos, for queering knowledge production. acknowledging what we do not know (yet), and perhaps cannot know, about a pandemic, about a virus, about autoimmunity, and finding ways to notice and articulate the foundational ambiguity and variability at the core of life, might function simultaneously as a special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 15 radical political and scientific gesture. it is also very necessary queer work, feminist work, anti-racist work. in a similar manner, it can be therapeutic and pedagogical to acknowledge and document the many ways in which embodied, sensory, cognitive, and affective experiences undermine ableist models of normative health, often framed as a standard to which all living bodies must aspire. conclusion: the afterlives of covid (auto)immunity to circle back to the staying alive seminar, i have come to realize that the pedagogical and therapeutic transformations that made space for the unknown were also ways to welcome, articulate, and even cultivate ambiguity as a method, as a way of being and thinking together, as a praxis for reading, writing, documenting experiences and events that fall outside dominant epistemic regimes. in the seminar, i interacted with and collaborated with the students to foster an atmosphere of collective disorder(ing) where each participant was welcome to share their own experiences and responses, not as unique or individual, but as part of a collective, contributing to an unwieldy bunch of narratives and conversations. there were, i’m sure, plenty of shortcomings, uneasy conversations, perhaps even triggering or at least uncomfortable. the technical possibilities offered by zoom, from switching off the camera to typing into the chat box, as well as editing one’s name, afforded those who needed it an anonymous, confidential setting close to group therapy. talking about covid and aids, chronic conditions and disabilities, neurodivergence, mental health issues, and the lingering states between health and illness, convalescence, and debility, allowed us to talk about “differential bodily burdens” (chen 2021, 22) and social justice in terms of racism, ableism, heterosexism, poverty, and classism. we worked together to dislocate health and illness from the privatized realm of the sovereign self and placed it squarely in the politicized arena of public affairs, where of course it always is. i believe it is urgent to create more spaces of radical inclusion and experimentation across educational settings and institutions, to discuss difficult matters around the politics of access, the uneven demands of (self)care, and the (always tempting) impossibility to performatively (re)produce the illusion of a sovereign, rational, autonomous subjectivity in our daily lives. talking openly and reading widely about illness and disability, infection and contagion, prevention and containment, loss and mourning, pathogenic mechanisms and autoimmune responses allowed us as a group to do some of this difficult and nourishing work over the course of sixteen weeks. our seminar was an exercise in collective immunoplasticity and autoimmune functioning, where we learned to be highly responsive, to care for ourselves and each other, to be adaptable, and to increase our tolerance for ambivalence, failure, antagonism, and uncertainty. this demanded creativity and intellectual curiosity, a capacity to stay present against all odds. we came closer, we withdrew, we asked uncomfortable questions and special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 16 shared awkward silences, we turned off our cameras and confessed our exhilarating, at times limiting and at others generative, embodied and affective experiences on a weekly basis. in this article, i have aimed to show how critically engaging with covid, especially in its long-haul autoimmune clinical manifestations, might engender a radical, transformative pedagogical and therapeutic realignment informed by autoimmunity and autoimmune phenomena that centers on a collective, networked, relational subjectivity rather than insisting on the individualized, sovereign immunity of an autonomous self. immunity is a messy, collective affair—just like the rest of life. notes 1 alok, also known as alok v. menon, is a non-binary queer activist, author, and performer. 2 see khamsi (2021) for an excellent overview of covid autoimmune mechanisms, aimed at a general audience. 3 at german universities, the winter semester’s lecture period usually runs between october and february, followed by an examination period. the beginning of the winter semester of 2020–21 was postponed to november 2020 due to the covid pandemic. 4 students enrolled in the course got a pass grade if they completed the two required course assignments, thus earning four credit points within the european credit transfer system. if they did not complete the two assignments, they did not receive credit points. the course assignments consisted of critical responses to course-related topics and/or readings, in any medium or genre, from traditional academic essays and creative writing to a podcast, comic, or zine. 5 for examples of how the neologism “immunoplasticity” has been used across a broad range of research studies on immunity see, for example, moser, salzer, and krause (2011) and pakulak, stevens, and neville (2018). acknowledgments i would like to dedicate this article to all the students who participated in the staying alive online seminar at humboldt university of berlin’s center for transdisciplinary gender studies over the course of the pandemic winter of 2020– 21. thank you for your trust and for taking a chance with me in thinking about/with/through the unknown and the unknowable we carry within — you made the intolerable (nearly) tolerable. thanks also to everyone at the center for transdisciplinary gender studies at humboldt for supporting my research and teaching over the years, most especially gabriele jähnert, ilona pache, and special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 17 susanne spintig. finally, i gratefully acknowledge the generous funding support of the german research foundation (dfg) and of the research training 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https://doi.org/10.3390/life12111918 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-021-01104-y https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-021-01104-y https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cyto.2022.155873 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2011.09.024 https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=entries&q=neuroplasticity https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044115 https://doi.org.10.3390/v13020277 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12967-022-03328-4 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12967-022-03328-4 special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) sofia varino, 2024 20 sharma, chetan, and jagadeesh bayry. 2023. “high risk of autoimmune diseases after covid-19.” nature reviews rheumatology, no. 19, 399–400. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41584-023-00964-y. shildrick, margrit. 2009. dangerous discourses of disability, subjectivity and sexuality. london: palgrave macmillan. subramanian, anuradhaa, krishnarajah nirantharakumar, sarah hughes, puja myles, tim williams, krishna m. gokhale, tom taverner et al. 2022. “symptoms and risk factors for long covid in non-hospitalized adults.” nature medicine, no. 28, 1706– 14. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01909-w. varino, sofia. 2017. “vital differences: indeterminacy and the biomedical body.” phd diss., stony brook state university of new york. varino, sofia. 2021. “(un)doing viral time: queer temporalities of living and dying in pandemic times.” whatever journal, no. 45, 640–45. https://philarchive.org/archive/petdwd-2. varino, sofia. forthcoming. “every breath: suffocating ecologies in a pandemic anthropocene.” in social and political suffocations, edited by magda gorska and milica trakilovic. new york: routledge. wilson, elizabeth. 2015. gut feminism. durham, nc: duke university press. world health organization. 2021. a clinical case definition of post-covid-19 condition by a delphi consensus. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-2019ncov-post_covid-19_condition-clinical_case_definition-2021.1. wong, alice, ed. 2020. disability visibility: first-person stories from the twenty-first century. new york: vintage books. author bio sofia varino is the co-author of aquatopia: climate interventions (routledge, 2023), a study of environmental politics co-written with may joseph, and co-editor of a special issue of somatechnics on data and gender in the life sciences. varino has published on gender, ecology, medicine, and technology in leading academic journals including shima, somatechnics, european journal of women’s studies and women’s studies quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41584-023-00964-y https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01909-w https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-2019-ncov-post_covid-19_condition-clinical_case_definition-2021.1 https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-2019-ncov-post_covid-19_condition-clinical_case_definition-2021.1 a viral pedagogy: undoing things with long covid’s autoimmunities abstract keywords introduction viral autoimmunity staying alive: a pandemic seminar breaking it apart: (un)doing things with (long) covid conclusion: the afterlives of covid (auto)immunity notes acknowledgments references author bio foster, laura a., nassim parvin, and anne pollock. 2025. “catalyst lead editing as creative worldbuilding.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–11. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © laura a. foster, nassim parvin, and anne pollock. 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license catalyst lead editing as creative worldbuilding laura a. foster indiana university bloomington fosterl@iu.edu nassim parvin university of washington nassimi@uw.edu anne pollock king’s college london anne.pollock@kcl.ac.uk abstract in this piece for the 10th anniversary issue, one of catalyst’s early lead editorial teams reflects on their experiences. a short collective introduction offers a metaphor of the journal as a garden that was inherited when it was already spring. then, each of the trio in this lead editor team—anne pollock, nassim parvin, and laura foster—shares her reflections in turn, foregrounding different scales of the endeavor: cultivating authors, peer reviewers, and audiences; cultivating spaces of scholarship through design, accessibility, and trusting communities; and cultivating institutional alliances toward sustaining the journal and, with it, a flourishing ecosystem of scholarship in feminist technoscience. keywords journal editing, worldbuilding, feminist peer review, accessible design, institutional support think of the journal catalyst as a garden. as lead editors, we inherited that precious garden when it was already spring. the founding lead editorial teams had done the challenging work of starting the garden, and as its care and management fell to us, mailto:fosterl@iu.edu http://nassimi@uw.edu/ mailto:p.keilty@utoronto.ca tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nassim parvin, and laura a. foster 2025 2 we felt an incredible sense of responsibility. the young plantings were still so vulnerable. but we also had anticipation and excitement: the seedlings were already impressive and beautiful, and there was promise of so many flowers and fruits to come, and of the visitors that the garden would attract. we welcomed the opportunity to do our part to sustain this precious garden, building on what was there and finding new ways to foster its growth and flourishing. aware from the start that our seasons in this role were finite and that others would come after us to lead the tending and growing of this garden, the project was only ever partially ours. fortunately, the garden of feminist technoscience that we inherited was and is a community garden. for us as lead editors, it was heartening to see how many were keen to join us and contribute to this work that has built this beautiful journal and, more broadly, created a space of feminist worldbuilding. in this reflective piece, we each contribute a section in turn that considers particular dimensions of the work before providing a joint conclusion. cultivating authors, reviewers, editors, and audiences— anne pollock our time as lead editors was a time of transition from the start. deboleena roy at emory university had been centrally involved in the early planning work of setting up catalyst with her emory colleague elizabeth wilson, among others, and by 2017 was ready to take a turn as a member of the lead editorial team. i was nearby at georgia tech at the time, and deboleena invited me to join her as part of an atlanta-based lead team to commence in 2018. i had also been involved in conversations about the journal’s planning but less centrally so, and i was excited about the opportunity, expressing enthusiasm and immediately suggesting that my georgia tech colleague nassim parvin would be an ideal complement to the team. but our new lead team would not be precisely atlanta-based: i was already planning my move to king’s college london. and so from 2018 to 2021, we were a lead team operating at a distance, with deboleena leading on the institutional elements, nassim on design and digital infrastructure elements, and me on peer review elements—all in close and mutually supportive collaboration. my role, which i took over from banu subramaniam, focused on managing peer review for independent research submissions, and i also played a role supporting the guest editors of special sections. this was a good fit for my talents and passions, because of its combination of breadth and depth: i could draw on my large and diverse network of feminist sts scholars, and connect deeply with authors and reviewers in developing the work. i found the work of supporting authors, especially early-career scholars developing their first contributions to our expanding interdisciplinary domain, to be profoundly rewarding. many times, what started as seeds of ideas buried in tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nassim parvin, and laura a. foster 2025 3 diffuse text became well-argued, compelling contributions to the flourishing field of feminist technoscience. moreover, i found working with peer reviewers to be surprisingly meaningful as well. the peer reviewer guidance for catalyst had been structured in such a way that it shifted the task away from its conventional focus on exclusionary gatekeeping, and toward encouraging authors to contribute to growing the field. even in cases in which pieces were ultimately not a fit for our venue, we strove to provide feedback that authors would find helpful. this was all part of an intentionally feminist peer review practice, and i could tell that that intentionality was also meaningful to authors and reviewers. during pandemic times, when recruiting peer reviewers was a broadly challenging endeavor across scholarly publishing, things were different at catalyst: it became clear that peer reviewers in feminist technoscience prioritized this work for catalyst even amidst so many burdens on their time, and that we all saw great value in the individual pieces that we were working to foster and the publishing ecosystem that we were collectively cultivating. the categories of authors, peer reviewers, and editors are porous, and these contributors also form key parts of the journal’s audience. its profile rising, the journal was given the society for social studies of science (4s) infrastructure award. keen to continue the work of catalyst’s founders in developing a simultaneously prestigious and inclusive venue for feminist technoscience, our team also took on outward-facing field-defining work. our five-year anniversary event, held online during the covid-19 pandemic and organized through nassim parvin’s design and justice studio with funding from the mellon foundation together with our book review editor sonja van wichelen and board member mara mills, alongside our managing editors caroline warren and aditya anupam, was a highlight. https://4sonline.org/2020_catalyst_feminism_theory_technoscience.php https://4sonline.org/2020_catalyst_feminism_theory_technoscience.php tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nassim parvin, and laura a. foster 2025 4 figure 1. jojo karlin participated in the fifth anniversary events and created this illustration of the conversation between donna haraway and banu subramaniam. information about the artist: https://www.jojokarlin.com/about/ the three-part event featured donna haraway and banu subramaniam in conversation about “foundations of feminist technoscience,” moya bailey, max liboiron, tania pérez-bustos, and thao phan in conversation about “futures of feminist technoscience,” and a crip feminist dance party. discussion of the role of catalyst in sustaining and advancing feminist science studies, including this anniversary event, closes the recent book our science, ourselves: how gender, race, and social movements shaped the study of science, and also uses a garden metaphor: “the seeds planted long ago are continuing to bear fruit” (kuljian 2024, 219). for me, that anniversary event epitomized catalyst as a labor of love—a lot of labor, and a lot of love. https://www.jojokarlin.com/about/ tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nassim parvin, and laura a. foster 2025 5 with an eye to ensuring that future editorial collectives would have an easier learning curve, we decided to implement a rotating transition: deboleena rolled off the lead editorial team in 2021 (replaced by laura foster); i would do so in 2022 (replaced by aimee bahng); nassim would do so in 2023 (replaced by a new structure entirely!). i have been glad to continue to have opportunities to support catalyst’s flourishing, across scales: on an individual level as a formal or informal advisor to junior scholars keen to publish there, on a collective level as a continuing editorial board member, and at the intersections of other domains of sts scholarly infrastructures in my capacity as president of 4s. it is an honor to have this chance to reflect in its tenth anniversary issue on my small contributions along the way to catalyst’s project of feminist worldbuilding. cultivating spaces of scholarship: design, accessibility, and trusting communities—nassim parvin joining the editorial team of catalyst was both exhilarating and scary. i was both the most junior member of the team with a disciplinary background that was not represented widely either in the editorial team or the author list till then. this turned out to be an opportunity to see the journal with fresh eyes and to find out ways that it can be more open to feminist work in design studies, media arts, and other adjacent fields. as a first step, i immersed myself in the past issues and was immediately struck by a few things. compared to other journal venues in the field, i was impressed that it was ahead of its time in accessibility, providing both html and pdf formats. yet platforms and possibilities had improved since the initial design, and the time was ripe for a design refresh to improve the journal’s visual cohesion and contemporary appeal. this gave us the opportunity to elevate the journal’s aesthetic to better reflect the quality of its content. in talking with former editors and contributors to the journal, i was able to gain an understanding of some of the constraints that they had navigated as a new journal leading to the existing look and feel. these included low budget, emphasis on minimizing labor while offering both html and pdf options for readership as well as an uncompromising principle of accessibility. in consultation with my students, including the generous contributions of ridhima gupta, aditya anupam, yash lara, and ren zheng, we built on these principles to further develop the aesthetics of the journal with attention to details such as text margins and choice of typefaces to broader page layouts to accommodate different kinds of images and graphs, accessible captioning, consistency across formats, and ease of implementation across platforms. redesigning the layout also served as an opportunity to critically engage with the different epistemologies and research methodologies that the journal aims to support. in rethinking the form, we revisited our commitments to diverse modes of knowledge production and representation. this involved a renewed focus on tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nassim parvin, and laura a. foster 2025 6 our existing “text and image” genre, exploring how it might evolve to more intentionally foreground the work of artists, designers, and scholars who engage with a broad spectrum of materials—from archival photographs and artistic works to data visualizations, graphs, and maps, and thus create a space for interdisciplinary conversations that unfold not only through text but also through visual argumentation. we used this new foundation to make the process of putting together each issue smoother and more collaborative, while also opening the journal up to a wider range of readers and viewers. at the same time, we more explicitly solicited creative genres and worked with our authors to further develop their pieces in order to exemplify critical feminist and creative approaches to sts scholarship— such as a speculative mapping of smart cities (dortdivanlioglu 2021), to a satirical piece on tech startups in india (gupta 2020). we also simplified the logo for clarity and timelessness, and introduced a modular grid system for the cover design to allow for greater flexibility while maintaining visual coherence across issues, making the journal’s evolving identity more legible while easy to refresh and customize from one issue to another. one exciting result of the stronger visual design was that artists became more enthusiastic both for having their work featured and for creating original covers that responded to each issue, accompanied by artist statements and commentaries (figure 2). tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nassim parvin, and laura a. foster 2025 7 figure 2. artist sanaz haghani's response to the special section on global fertility chains the bold, consistent look of our covers also helped us build a stronger online presence, especially on platforms such as facebook and former twitter. our audience grew dramatically—we gained ten times more followers—and that helped bring more attention to our contributors, even those who were not active on social media or may not have the time or tools to promote their work. together, through renewed attention to design nuances—from the fine details of page layout to the thoughtful inclusion of art that reflected each issue’s sophistication—and with a strengthened online presence, we cultivated scholarly spaces to advance the reach and impact of feminist thought. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nassim parvin, and laura a. foster 2025 8 cultivating institutional alliances—laura a. foster one of the central challenges of our time as co-lead editors of catalyst was advocating for sustained institutional support. as the journal grew in scope and reputation, so did the workload and the need for reliable infrastructure. after serving two years as co-book review editor with sonja van wichelen, i joined as co-lead editor in june 2021. building off previous successful requests for institutional support made by murphy (university of toronto) and deboleena roy (emory university), i wrote a detailed proposal and spoke to administrators at indiana university bloomington to make the case that feminist journals like catalyst are not only intellectually vital but also deserving of real institutional investment. this work required translating our values of collaboration, accessibility, and mentorship into the language of metrics, rankings, and visibility, and the request was approved. catalyst received three years of funding to go towards copyediting costs and a graduate student manager, which included full tuition, fees, and health insurance. i received a course release and ultimately redirected the additional funds awarded for marketing, outreach, and conference travel to fully support the work of our long-time copyeditor, joanne muzak, whose expertise has been essential to maintaining the journal’s high editorial standards. unlike many journals anchored by traditional publishers or professional societies, catalyst is collectively run and intentionally independent. that independence is a strength, but it also means we must continually build and maintain the scaffolding ourselves. we highly depend upon institutional support and time from our editorial board members. for example, mara mills (nyu) contributed a summer graduate assistantship and copyediting support through her research funds; irina aristarkhova (university of michigan) also allocated funds to help cover copyediting costs; and the 4s council provided funding to support graduate student managing editors in training their successors. i also worked diligently with the indiana university foundation to set up a foundation account to enable the journal to receive more long-term funds and enable donors to give a tax-exempt donation to catalyst. this institutional support was central to the long-term survival of catalyst and its commitment to anti-racist, queer, trans, and decolonial feminist work. it enabled us to keep the journal diamond open access, uphold rigorous editorial standards, and respond to the growing volume of submissions from scholars across disciplines and regions. these efforts helped strengthen the journal, allowing new branches to emerge—each one extending catalyst’s reach while remaining grounded in feminist commitments. at the heart of this effort was the belief that feminist publishing isn’t just about producing scholarship—it’s also about mentoring the next generation of scholars, editors, and thinkers committed to collective knowledge-making. graduate student involvement has been a core part of catalyst’s editorial model since the beginning, not only for what students contribute to the journal but also for the hands-on training they receive in feminist publishing. from 2019 to 2024, this https://give.myiu.org/iu-bloomington/i320016064.html?_gl=1*w9p7o*_up*mq..*_ga*mtuwmzgzmjc2oc4xnzq3mtu5mdax*_ga_1tgnwfn22y*cze3ndcxntkwmdakbzekzzekdde3ndcxntkwmtekajakbdakada. https://give.myiu.org/iu-bloomington/i320016064.html?_gl=1*w9p7o*_up*mq..*_ga*mtuwmzgzmjc2oc4xnzq3mtu5mdax*_ga_1tgnwfn22y*cze3ndcxntkwmdakbzekzzekdde3ndcxntkwmtekajakbdakada. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nassim parvin, and laura a. foster 2025 9 included yash lara, caroline warren, sara kass, hoan nguyen, lauren savit, michelle pfeifer, aditya anupam, sandra carpenter, ren zheng, janelle li, sunny jeong-eimer, and hyo jung. as managing and assistant managing editors, they developed concrete skills in open access publishing, digital production, collaborative editing, and critical engagement with intersectional scholarship. this is not peripheral to the journal’s mission—it is a strong element of the mission. our editorial model is rooted in feminist commitments to shared labor, care ethics, and accountability, which means that graduate students are cocreators in the mission and vision of the journal. my role also included bolstering the institutional operations of the journal to ensure its long-term sustainability. i focused on streamlining our editorial workflows by clarifying timelines and reviewing final manuscripts prior to production. recognizing the need to formalize our publishing practices in ways that aligned with open access ethics and author protections, i drafted a new author/artist publishing agreement that updated our copyright policies and licensing terms. i also collaborated with anne and nassim to strengthen our editorial board and its governing processes, inviting new members who reflected the journal’s commitments to intersectional, transnational, and decolonial feminist scholarship. most significantly, i helped envision and implement (along with irina aristarkhova) a new editorial team structure in 2024 by introducing associate editors, a move designed to distribute labor more equitably, support mentorship across career stages, and ensure the editorial collective could continue to grow in scale and ambition without sacrificing our feminist values of collaboration and care. this new structure allowed the editorial collective to branch out by sharing responsibility across a wider network and allowing new ideas, methods, and voices to take root. this commitment to fortifying the internal infrastructures of the journal also extended to forging alliances across the broader field of science and technology studies. in 2022 catalyst helped lead the field of sts by co-organizing a writing workshop in cholula, mexico, that was financially supported by 4s and held just before the joint 4s/esocite (estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología) meeting. the workshop was for early-career scholars from the global south based at institutions primarily in latin america, but also including india and the united states. the event was co-led by a transnational team of editors from across the 4s-affiliated journals, including catalyst (laura foster and anne pollock) science, technology, & human values (timothy neale and courtney addison), east asian science, technology and society (wen-hua kuo), engaging science, technology, and society (aalok khandekar, noela invernizzi, and emily york), tapuya: latin american science, technology and society (leandro rodriguez medina), and social studies of science (nicole nelson). leandro rodriquez medina also arranged onsite logistical support and catering that created an incredibly welcoming and supportive space for participants. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nassim parvin, and laura a. foster 2025 10 together, this transnational team reviewed applications and facilitated two days of collaborative programming that supported early-career scholars through mentorship, community building, and structured peer review of draft manuscripts. the workshop exemplified catalyst’s long-standing commitment to decolonial feminist praxis and to shaping the conditions of knowledge production beyond publication alone through collectivity. by fostering transnational dialogue, mentoring emerging scholars, and rethinking the infrastructures of scholarly publishing, the workshop contributed to a more inclusive and globally connected sts field. it also strengthened relationships among the 4s-affiliated journals, modeling the kinds of inter-journal collaboration that are necessary to support the next generation of feminist and anti-colonial sts scholars. these collaborations were like grafts from other gardens, strengthening our shared canopy and allowing the flourishing of feminist technoscience across new terrains. conclusion we reflect on our time as co-lead editors with deep gratitude—not only for how catalyst has grown but for the many tending hands that make it possible. like any flourishing garden, the journal depends on care at many scales: tending to individual editors, authors, reviewers, and readers; cultivating shared spaces through design, accessibility, and community; and securing the institutional roots needed to sustain its growth. through these practices, catalyst has fostered vibrant worlds of feminist technoscience—worlds where emerging scholars are mentored into publication, where new genres of critical inquiry take shape, and where collaboration is grounded in care rather than competition. we have endeavored to, drawing on ruha benjamin’s (2022) evocative articulation, “grow the world we want.” catalyst is not a product, nor is it finished, but it is an ongoing worldbuilding process—a shared, evolving space for growth, care, and renewal. we are honored to have helped tend it for a time, and excited to see how it continues to take root and flourish. references benjamin, ruha. 2022. viral justice: how to grow the world we want. princeton university press. dortdivanlioglu, hayri. 2021. “mapping invisible surveillance on the north avenue smart corridor, atlanta.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.36687. gupta, hemangini. 2020. “postcolonial assembly protocols for unnamed automation projects.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 6 (2). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i2.34456. kuljian, christa. 2024. our science, ourselves: how gender, race, and social movements shaped the study of science. university of massachusetts press. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.36687 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i2.34456 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nassim parvin, and laura a. foster 2025 11 author bios laura a. foster is associate professor of gender studies and affiliate faculty in african studies and maurer school of law at indiana university bloomington. she is also a senior research associate in the intellectual property unit at the university of cape town, faculty of law. she is author of reinventing hoodia: peoples, plants, and patents in south africa, and currently serves on the editorial boards of catalyst and science, technology, & human values. nassim parvin is a professor at the university of washington (uw) information school, where she also serves as the associate dean for inclusion, diversity, equity, access & sovereignty (ideas). her research integrates theoretically-driven humanistic scholarship and design-based inquiry. her papers have appeared in design, human-computer interaction (hci), and sts venues. her designs have been deployed at nonprofit organizations and exhibited in venues such as the smithsonian museum. she is the co-author and co-editor of the book technocreep and the politics of things not seen (2025). anne pollock is professor of global health and social medicine at king’s college london. she is author of three books, most recently sickening: anti-black racism and health disparities in the united states (2021), and coauthor with nadine ehlers, anthony ryan hatch, and amade aouatef m’charek of the racial cage (2025). she currently serves as the president of the society for social studies of science, and as an editor at biosocieties. catalyst lead editing as creative worldbuilding abstract keywords cultivating authors, reviewers, editors, and audiences—anne pollock cultivating spaces of scholarship: design, accessibility, and trusting communities—nassim parvin cultivating institutional alliances—laura a. foster conclusion references author bios     healing cartographies: weaving memory, movement, and embodied testimonios across imaginary lines     carla macal occidental college cosoriove@gmail.com     abstract this paper examines the transformative memory of two guatemaya feminist groups across settler-colonial borders. the paper explores the multidimensional ways the groups create a countercultural memory, opposing guatemala’s state of what can be remembered and what cannot. 8 tijax is a grassroots group formed during the wake of march 8, 2017, a day that fifty-six girls were victims of a fire at a state-operated shelter, hogar seguro virgen de la asuncion. through accompaniment and spreading awareness about the case, the group has linked with other feminist groups across borders. one group is guatemaya mujeres resistiendo-los angeles (gmr-la), a multigenerational group in the diaspora that continues to amplify the cultural memory of the disappeared. both groups are committed to what i call healing cartographies, weaving memory, movement, and embodied testimonios across imaginary lines. the groups honor their loved ones’ memories by installing public altars, photos, art, and poetry as counter memories. this paper explores the concept of healing cartographies and the ethnographic work i employed in guatemala and los angeles from 2019 to 2023 as part of my dissertation. by producing a countercultural memory, the groups challenge state-imposed boundaries of what should be remembered, challenging border-thinking and working towards a hemispheric memory of expansiveness, fluidity, and transformation. resumen este artículo examina la memoria transformadora de dos grupos feministas guatemayas a través de las fronteras coloniales. el artículo explora las formas multidimensionales en que los grupos crean una memoria contracultural, oponiéndose al estado de guatemala de lo que se puede recordar y lo que no. 8 tijax es un grupo de base formado durante la estela del 8 de marzo de 2017, un día en que cincuenta y seis niñas fueron víctimas de un incendio en un refugio estatal, el hogar seguro virgen de la asunción. a través del acompañamiento y la difusión del caso, el grupo se ha vinculado con otros grupos feministas más allá de las fronteras. un grupo es guatemaya mujeres resistiendo-los ángeles (gmr-la), un grupo multigeneracional en la diáspora que continúa amplificando la memoria cultural de los desaparecidos. ambos grupos están comprometidos con lo que yo llamo cartografías sanadoras, tejiendo la memoria, el movimiento y los testimonios encarnados a través de líneas imaginarias. los grupos honran la memoria de sus seres queridos instalando altares públicos, fotos, arte y poesía como contramemorias. este artículo explora el concepto de cartografías sanadoras y el trabajo etnográfico que empleé en guatemala y los ángeles de 2019 a 2023 como parte de mi tesis. al producir una memoria contracultural, los grupos desafían los límites impuestos por el estado de lo que debe recordarse, desafiando el pensamiento fronterizo y trabajando hacia una memoria hemisférica de expansión, fluidez y transformación. keywords cultural memory, embodiment, guatemala, los angeles, diaspora, healing cartographies     introduction we must liberate land and life by actively honoring our responsibilities to kinship at this moment, fostering good relations within all creation in our intentions and actions. —lindsay nixon (saulteaux nation), “visual cultures of indigenous futurism” indigenous scholars remind us that relationships are interwoven into the community, plants, land, and the cosmos (cabnal 2010; goeman 2013; kimmerer 2013). discussing relationships from an indigenous perspective is significant to this paper because the guatemaya feminist groups 8 tijax and guatemaya mujeres resistiendo-los angeles (gmr-la) in my study center community and maya cosmology in their work. this study demonstrates the relationships between guatemaya feminist groups across borders, their search for justice, and their countercultural memory production. the groups are committed to a memory that transforms their stories, narratives, and autonomy without state approval. by producing a countercultural memory, the groups challenge stateimposed boundaries of what should be remembered, challenging border-thinking and working towards a hemispheric memory of expansiveness, fluidity, and transformation. 8 tijax is a volunteer group accompanying the mothers and families of the fifty-six girls who died in the 2017 massacre at the virgen de la asuncíon children’s home outside guatemala city, as they search for justice. gmrla is a group of guatemalan and maya women in the diaspora situated in los angeles. they are a collective of diverse, organized women resisting colonial and patriarchal systems that generate violence (macal 2024a). the groups are interested in building countercultural memories across borders, weaving pluriverse testimonios of memory, resistance, and healing. the participants in this research were associated with many intersecting identities, such as guatemalan women, maya, ladina, k’iche’, q’anjob’al, and mam ethnic identities. these women also identified themselves as migrants, queer, political refugees, asylum seekers, displaced persons, and exiles. the groups i worked with and interviewed defined themselves as guatemaya feminist groups. guatemaya is a popular concept used by activists in the diaspora to critique the homogenization of guatemalan people and center the maya population, which comprises the larger population in guatemala. guatemaya is a spacious, fluid concept, and i carefully use it to resist state-imposed categorizations such as “hispanic” or “latino/a/x” that exclude indigenous populations. susy zepeda (2022, 6) states that latina/o/x has also been understood as a term that does not acknowledge the specificity of indigenous lineages or roots and afro-descendent and black roots and lineages. ultimately, native and indigenous people on either side of the mexico-united states border are rooted in distinct and multiple experiences that must remain complicated to resist the homogenization of indigenous formations across the hemisphere. furthermore, indigenous scholar shannon speed states, “the erasure of indigenous migrants’ identity as indigenous people is one in a long series of technologies used by settler states to eliminate indigenous people, and as scholars, we should not participate in reifying settler-imposed national borders in ways that facilitate such erasures” (2019, 13). therefore, guatemaya is a popular identity among the younger generations of central americans in urban settings such as los angeles. it includes black and indigenous central americans while still being conscious of the antiblackness and anti-indigenous discrimination that persist in the isthmus. women of color and feminist geographers contend that being in tune and having a sense of place in our work manifests who we are as activist scholars (cahuas 2022; eaves 2019; gökariksel et al. 2021; mckittrick 2006). in feminist research, positionality has become a critical concept and practice to address questions of voice and authority. the intensification of debates over “sisterhood” across geographic, sociopolitical, and racial borders pushed feminist academics not only to interrogate the power dynamics between the interviewer/interpreter and the interviewee/narrator, but also to pose challenging questions ranging from who can/should write whose history to what kinds of struggles research/theory should enable (benson and nagar 2006, 583). subsequently, i describe my positionality and how i came to my research interests. i identify as a guatemaya woman in the diaspora with maya roots, acknowledging my conflicting mestiza identity, formerly undocumented and from a working-class background. i am also connected to gmr-la as a group volunteer. the group is multigenerational, with the younger generations curious about our cultural roots and a deep desire to be involved in the diaspora and learn more about guatemala’s complicated politics (macal 2024a). as i sat writing this paper, i reflected on the title of the call for papers, “knowing borders: ecologías, materialidades, estéticas.” some of us have a relationship with borders; we have crossed boundaries in our lifetime, physically and/or symbolically (geobrujas-communidad de géografas 2021). my relationship with borders began when i turned four years old. my mom brought my brother and me from guatemala city to los angeles, california. our journey to the us dealt with crossing multiple borders and leaving friends and loved ones behind to begin a new life (abrego 2014). writing about guatemala is complicated because some of my family members question me about being away from a place but still yearning to go back. also, since i did not experience the thirty-six-year war (1960–1996) firsthand, why should i write about it? central american scholar cecilia menjívar (2011) notes that guatemala is a society dealing with the aftermath of nearly four decades of state terror. although acts of genocide were committed intentionally towards the ixil population in the highlands of guatemala, she states that “the armed conflict left the country awash in weapons, with webs of people trained to use them and a civil society accustomed to the horrors of violence” (2011, 2). to this day, many central americans, including my family members, are afraid to speak about the horrors of the violence and what they witnessed during the 1980s. other genocides that have been documented throughout history, such as the native american genocide and the jewish holocaust, also play a role in the way survivors of these horrific wars intimately feel toward themselves. for example, indigenous scholars m.y. brave heart and l.m. debruyn (1998) discuss disenfranchised grief, which people experience when a loss cannot be openly acknowledged or publicly mourned. however, rituals, memorial sites, and ceremonies permit the community to reaffirm social values and publicly grieve. i situate my positionality story as an intergenerational one connected to my ancestors, mis abuelas (my grandmothers), and the poets and students who continue to search for justice in guatemala. i also feel the urgent need to make the connections between the genocides in guatemala and palestine. to write about guatemala, i have the responsibility to be in solidarity with the palestinian people as our histories, stories, and mourning weave the collective memory of the oppressed and minoritized subject. israel, with us support, has been waging genocide in palestine, murdering and displacing thousands, as if history repeats itself for the gains of a settler-colonial state. the war on women’s bodies in palestine and guatemala is synonymous with the illegal occupation of indigenous land (macal 2024b). therefore, knowing borders means being consciously aware of the marked divisions in our geographies but with a vision to dismantle imposed borders in our bodies, minds, and spirits. this paper centers on the multidimensional ways guatemaya feminist groups produce a countercultural memory. it is divided into three sections: a review of the cultural memory literature; guatemaya feminist groups narratives; and a discussion about healing cartographies. the sections explain how the guatemaya feminist groups are committed to a countercultural memory production for selfdetermination and autonomy over their bodies, values, and memories. my research is a political project of unearthing the counter-memory, silences, fear, and intergenerational trauma from the oral and embodied testimonios of guatemaya women survivors of genocide who are currently involved in collective projects to recover guatemala’s historical memory. the solidarity networks woven among transnational feminist groups across the hemisphere are mapping healing tools and methods to preserve cultural memory and counter-state hegemonic narratives, which i call healing cartographies. mapping guatemaya feminist groups’ stories, narratives, and counter-vision across borders amplifies and centers the voices of women survivors of genocide, providing a gendered memory analysis of the past, present, and future. cultural memory literature review marita sturken (1997, 3) defines cultural memory as a memory shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning. sturken argues that survivors of traumatic historical occurrences are influential cultural figures. they are often considered wisdom figures in popular culture while ignored in person. the discourse around trauma and memory informs us how the revictimization of survivors occurs due to a lack of understanding of survivors’ agency and distinct ways of coping with loss, human rights abuses, and land displacements. in addition, indigenous scholars have suggested that the effects of historical trauma are transmitted intergenerationally as descendants continue to identify emotionally with ancestral suffering (evans-campbell 2008, 321). maría luz garcía’s ethnographic work on historical memory with the ixil community in guatemala argues that a constant focus on trauma to heal brokenness can prioritize a discussion of dysfunctional communities and individuals. instead, the researcher urges scholars to analyze the complex ways maya community structures (e.g., language, ceremony, altars, speaking to the dead) do indeed function, despite the legacy of the war, and how the maya, as subjects of their history, respond to these “political moments” by prioritizing their cultural frameworks (garcía 2014, 665). the guatemaya feminist groups in my study reflect the maya community structures, including spirituality at the center of their epistemologies, dismantling years of western colonization and knowing. for example, before starting an event, both groups in my study prioritize centering maya cosmology by placing an altar at the gathering with flowers, white candles, herbs, and incense to ground the day and the group. this spiritual practice allows the multigenerational members of the groups to activate an ancestral practice, collectively centering grief, memory, and intergenerational healing. western hierarchies of knowledge and imposed culture upon indigenous peoples are also part of a cultural warfare that indigenous peoples continue to be affected by. carlos marín beristain, darío paez, and josé luis gonzález describe maya culture as following the ethos of collectivism: “for indigenous culture, the value or worth of a person and all his identity marks (language, clothes, religion) are linked to the community” (2000, 118). unfortunately, due to guatemala’s colonial legacy, indigenous culture is viewed as unworthy and uncivilized by the guatemalan elite. the thirty-six-year war in guatemala traumatized and victimized survivors, specifically the maya population. for example, the state does not consider how guatemalan survivors of the war and in the diaspora are transcending borders by creating solidarity networks and transforming their lives by producing personal narratives and memories of the war. nation-states build and rebuild hegemonic memory, forming the consciousness of a population. the formation of a nation depends on creating imagined communities (anderson 1983), regardless of war, exploitation, and social inequality (gomez-barris 2009; sturken 1997). to counter hegemonic memory, create transformative memories (pulido 2022), hold on to specific memories, and never forget the past, groups negotiate power dynamics within the nation and produce what patricia zavella (2011) identifies as technologies of memory, such as art installations, films, archives, narratives, or murals. jeanette rodríguez and ted fortier (2007) further explain cultural memory by applying the following distinctions: the survival of a historically, politically, and socially marginalized group of people, and the role of spirituality as a form of resistance. my study aimed to use both distinctions but specializes in the latter because it allows for a more extensive discussion around healing. an example of where rodríguez and fortier’s distinctions coexist is with the work of 8 tijax. as families grieve and politically advocate for justice for these murders, 8 tijax sets up multipurpose altars that provide care, awareness, and prayers. the science behind the altar creation and formation is multifaceted as it transcends time and space, allowing for spiritual connection with loved ones and honoring the memory of those who are forgotten by the guatemalan state. like garcía’s (2014) ethnographic recounting of the ixil community, the pain of the genocide is not only related to the deaths of loved ones but also to their inability to integrate the dead into their rightful places in the community of the living. for the maya community, the spirits of the dead continue to play an essential role in ceremonies and prayer. it is a constant relationship to be in harmony with the spirits of loved ones. thus, ixil's ways of talking and relating to the dead in a ceremonial speech during the reburial of exhumed victims of war constitute a significant site for constructing and reflecting historical memory of the war. spiritual traditions allow groups to connect to the dead daily with altars and prayers to honor their memory. furthermore, memory becomes vital as a survival mechanism when it becomes part of artistic, emotionally laden ways of forming group identity and meanings (rodríguez and fortier 2007). in los angeles, gmr-la is forming its identity and making meaning and a place to honor family members and compañeros taken by the war. the guatemalan army pulverized communities, inflicting more than 600 massacres, 200,000 deaths, the displacement of 1.5 million people, and tens of thousands of disappearances, most significantly in the 1980s (manz 2008, 152). to continue denouncing the terror committed by the state of guatemala, the group engages in the counterhegemonic production of cultural memory by organizing protests, vigils, and art to share the truth of the genocide and continue the leftist groups’ legacy in guatemala. ester hernández’s work on mapping central americans in los angeles’ public spaces and memory sheds light on gmr-la’s cultural memory work. hernández says, “migrants become embedded in a larger struggle for justice; they create community and provide a historical context for the following generations. this allows for creating spatial imaginaries on the urban cityscape of los angeles” (2017, 145). in her work, the scholar recalls a mural production of the salvadoran war and the culture that unites salvadorans in the diaspora, such as food, music, and traditional celebrations. the mural is located at the non-profit organization central american resource center, los angeles; it greets viewers with its spectral image of a woman running with her child and another one who raises her fist behind a group of mourners and evacuated refugees carrying monseñor romero’s portrait (hernandez 2017, 146). the mural presents the complexities of memory connected to central america within the diaspora and provides a sense of agency, affirming those who choose not to forget the past. the memories represent a whirlwind of images that range from wars and martyrs to moments of resistance and solidarity among transborder communities. the younger generations of central americans are starving for the truth and curious about our roots and history that center dignity and collective memory. as hernández (2017, 148) explains, these new public sites of memory allow for intergenerational dialogue and invite multiple voices to intervene in the context of emerging us central american public memory, inviting survivors to confront the unspoken. in addition to the multipurpose altars, vigils, protests, and murals, maya cosmology is a significant tool that helps reclaim the truth and memory of the past for the guatemaya feminist groups. cosmovision is the maya people’s form of spirituality. the cosmovision spiritual practice allows us to experience life and be part of the whole. the connection to the world and cosmos is the basis of the actions, thoughts, and sentiments in life and of life (mayan league 2023). mayan cosmology is part of a cultural transmission across the generations. elders and acqijs (spiritual guides) pass down their knowledge to the younger generations, which is part of mayan traditions. however, there is also fear of sharing these traditions due to ignorance, hate, and misinformation in guatemala, as many of the acqijs face persecution and even death. on june 6, 2020, acqij domingo choc che was set on fire by a group of people accusing him of witchcraft. domingo choc che was an herbalist and healer and was involved in documenting the traditional medicinal plants of the guatemalan department of peten. in a press release, the board of the k’iche peoples declared, “the murder of the spiritual guide domingo choc makes very clear to us that political and spiritual intolerance still exists, and religious fanaticism has deeply hurt communities. today, colonial attitudes and behaviors that prevent us from living the mayab’ worldview remain in force. if we speak of human rights, we run the risk of being murdered, criminalized, and persecuted by groups of people manipulated by religious fundamentalism” (pastor and cherofsky 2020). my intervention in my overall study was to examine how maya and guatemalan women survivors’ bodies are used as sites where one can recover a range of memories, examining the cargas (burden), the heavy emotions, pain, and isolation the mothers carry in their bodies. extensive literature has stated how our physical bodies can endure, survive historical trauma, and store memory (cabnal 2010; menjívar 2011; mucci 2013; ringel and brandell 2012; van der kolk 2014). lorena cabnal (2010) denotes bodies as the first territory, meaning we ascribe to our physical body before region, allowing us to localize where we have been affected by violence. for this study, this process of understanding and mapping out embodied trauma through memories will enable healing to take place and be with other bodies (cabnal 2010). i turned my attention to sturken (1997, 220), who discusses the aids epidemic as a memorial, a quilt, or an image, and explores how the human body is also a vehicle for remembrance—through its surface (the memory that exists in physical scars, for instance). in addition, sturken also reminds us that bodies are often perceived to speak without words. the bodies of vietnam veterans talk of guilt, forgiveness, and accusation in their presence, while those of people with aids speak of suffering, anger, resilience, and protest. across other territories in latin america, data against feminicide and feminicidio uruguay document missing data by mapping it through knowledge sharing, participatory technology development, and community building (d’ignazio et al. 2024). these efforts expand beyond borders using other technologies such as media and mapping to document, visualize, and creatively express a call for action against feminicide. guatemaya feminist groups: 8 tijax and guatemaya mujeres resistiendo-los angeles conscious of power dynamics, i aimed to build intentional relationships in the field with research participants. instead of perceiving the women in my study as just participants, i saw them as co-collaborators, agents of change, and disruptors against not only the state but also the ivory tower’s individualistic ethos. therefore, i developed a collaborative research project based on trust, reciprocity, and accountability. interested in learning about how groups preserve or build cultural memory, i studied two guatemaya feminist groups. i was interested in feminist groups in guatemala, but the pandemic also pushed me to research diaspora groups. the group i am a part of, gmr-la, became a base to support 8 tijax in guatemala. for this paper, i will focus on the relational dynamics between both groups and how, despite settler-colonial borders, the groups build solidarity networks, especially on march 8, to honor international women’s day. this is also the day to remember the fifty-six girls—forty-one of whom, ages twelve to seventeen, died at the hands of the state, and fifteen survived with physical and emotional trauma. while guatemaya feminist groups are connected across the united states, mexico, and canada, this study focused on the relational testimonios of guatemaya feminist groups in guatemala and los angeles. overall, the study aimed to center the testimonios of guatemaya feminist groups to learn from their production of countercultural and embodied memory to counter hegemonic narratives produced by the state. this research bridges the work of south-north indigenous women (martínez and agüero 2023). the work the groups produce is a testament to women’s activism in latin america and the caribbean. there’s rich documentation of women’s activism and struggles in the twentieth century, from labor organizing education rights to on reproductive rights and land defense in the twenty-first century (maier and lebon 2010). drawing from interviews with feminist groups in guatemala and los angeles, i argue that post-conflict gender-based violence, or at the extreme level, feminicide, is a continuation of the ongoing state violence stemming from the thirty-six-year war and is also a product of the gender coloniality of power (lugones 2008) and settler colonialism (speed and stephen 2021). while there is a body of work regarding cultural memory in latin america and how it is produced through testimonies and visuals (galeano 1989; gomez-barris 2009; proyecto interdiocesano recuperación de la memoria histórica et al. 1999; sutton 2018), less has been researched and written about how the human body can connect to memory and heal from intergenerational trauma (sutton 2007). my research was attentive to the embodied experience of guatemalan and maya women in the war concerning intergenerational trauma, memory, and healing. 8 tijax the group 8 tijax comprises community volunteers—mothers, students, social workers, and activists—who took an active role in supporting the families who lost their daughters during the terror of march 7 and 8, 2017, at state-sponsored and state-operated shelter hogar seguro virgen de la asuncion in san josé pinula, guatemala. when i started my research and fieldwork in guatemala, i did not envision the shelter as a prison. but my perspective drastically changed when i visited hogar seguro virgen de la asuncion in august 2022. the shelter is two hours away from guatemala city, and getting to the location is difficult because the streets are narrow and there is heavy traffic. the term shelter usually connotes a welcoming atmosphere, but this shelter is surrounded by barbed wire. no other buildings or businesses are next to the shelter, but a large green field is in front. this is the field where the girls ran to when escaping the shelter’s insecure conditions. prison abolitionist and geographer ruth wilson gilmore critically states, “prison is not just a response to a free-floating thing called crime—it’s a response to ‘surplus’ populations. which is to say that prisons are designed to absorb people: those people who the state has abandoned” (2022, 176). the shelter describes a prison due to its isolated location but also in how the girls were being treated inside the shelter, consumed with abuse, sexual violations, and malnutrition. five years after the massacre, this shelter did have some welcoming murals of young girls playing and even a memorial with the names of the forty-one girls in front of the shelter. however, what was interesting was that the name of the shelter had been removed. the murals, memorial, and the removal of the shelter’s name disclosed the denial of what occurred on march 7 and 8, 2017, at hogar seguro virgen de la asuncion. the state of guatemala and conservative politicians continued to blame the girls, punishing them posthumously for speaking up against the horrible conditions experienced at the shelter. 8 tijax has not only responded to the families with emotional support by accompanying (yarris and duncan 2024) the mothers to the court hearings but also by becoming an extended care network, advocating for solidarity efforts in guatemala as well as mexico, canada, and the united states. according to anthropologists kristin yarris and whitney l. duncan (2024, 3), accompaniment relies upon engagement with trust, building relationships requiring humility and openness. one of the many ways 8 tijax accompanies the mothers in the search for justice is by creating art and building global support. 8 tijax organized an international art campaign dedicated to the memory of each of the forty-one girls. the worldwide campaign invited fifty-eight artists from different geographies to draw each girl. the purpose of this campaign was to share each girl’s story, their name, their favorite colors, and interests. the campaign went viral on social media and is known as #nosduelen56 (see figure 1). a member of 8 tijax shared her testimony: la campaña global es un ejercicio de memoria, para nosotras es una acción global. #nosduelen56, artistas globales invitados para ilustrar a las niñas. cada artista honra la vida de las niñas como el arte es un lenguaje para la memoria que muestra que la población tiene más empatía, y combate el odio, el prejuicio y el estigma, un grito del arte, una memoria permanente de las niñas, una campaña permanente que también acompaña el juicio penal. el arte ha sido fundamental en la búsqueda de la justicia. the global campaign is an exercise of memory; for us, it is a worldwide action. #nosduelen56 invited international artists to illustrate the girls. each artist honors the life of the girls as art is a language for memory. this shows that the population has more empathy and combats hatred, prejudice, and stigma—a cry from art, a memory of girls, a permanent campaign accompanying the criminal trial. art has been fundamental in the search for justice. figure 1. the global campaign in memory of the fifty-six girls. source: colectivo 8 tijax instagram. the international campaign reached groups in santiago, chile, such as tejidas subversivas, who organized a series of days starting with a doll workshop at the national library of chile and ending with a second day of weaving and embroidery. the groups sent the canvas to guatemala to support the cause of nos duelen 56, weaving solidarity networks for memory, embodiment, and healing. these transnational efforts from subversive groups across abya yala demonstrate the counter-memory aesthetic of literally weaving the girls’ memory. as a community educator and scholar, i could not separate myself from the case and those involved in the search for justice. instead, i saw my role as the bridge to connect 8 tijax with other guatemaya feminist groups in the diaspora and spread awareness of the case. i made that bridge by connecting 8 tijax efforts to the gmr-la group and creating transnational solidarity networks across abya yala and the united states. by bridging solidarity across imposed imaginary lines, guatemaya feminist groups’ world-making resists state hegemonic narratives of denial, and weaves in their memory across space and time. gmr-la xuana mulul, a gmr-la member, shared the following reflections on the origins of the group and translated them into english: vengo de un proceso organizativo en guatemala. tenía toda la intención de hacer algo similar aquí en los ángeles con organizaciones para mujeres y organizaciones sociales. estaba motivada para ver lo que podíamos hacer. así nació la idea de reunirnos en un espacio donde pudiéramos discutir situaciones sobre mujeres. notamos que la situación para las mujeres aquí es difícil, como las tareas asignadas a ellas y estar fuera del país lo hace más difícil. i came from an organizational process in guatemala. i had every intention to do something similar here in los angeles with organizations for women and social organizations. i was motivated to see what we could do. that is how the idea was born: to get together in a space where we could discuss situations about women. we noticed the situation for women here is challenging, like the chores assigned to them, and being out of the country makes it more difficult. gmr-la addresses intergenerational trauma by creating art in the streets of los angeles or becoming involved in public activities to raise awareness about feminicides, the fifty-six girls, disappearances of indigenous people, or the precarity in guatemala. when the group was formed, one goal was to create unity principles that speak to the group’s intentions and work ethics. they follow four main principles: women’s empowerment, preserving a collective memory, social justice, and transnational solidarity. the group continues to work on these principles while building community with other indigenous groups in los angeles, such as mexicali resiste, la comunidad ixim, and guatemala lgbti diaspora, which are also grassroots based. gmr-la commemorates march 8 (international women’s day) annually concerning memory struggles in guatemala. gmr-la uses public space to amplify the memory of the disappeared and feminicide cases, bridging the connections of resistance and solidarity among imaginary lines. in march 2020, a month to commemorate international women’s day, gmr-la organized an event at macarthur park honoring the memory of the fifty-six guatemalan girls. gmr-la commemorated the event three years after the massacre with a vigil at the park and a collective gathering with the immigrant community to remember the girls in connection to other local issues such as anti-gentrification, health disparities, immigration, border deaths, and so on. the group reclaimed the space by chalking big letters nos duelen 56 (see figure 2). photos of the girls were hung all around using the park trees to make it a public mourning. figure 2. photo from the march 2020 international women’s day event at macarthur park, los angeles. source: gmr-la instagram, march 9, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/b9hbbjqa71s/?hl=en&img_index=1 us and guatemala official memorials provide tangible access to the past, and memorial encounters are woven into everyday routines across cities, towns, and rural areas. while inviting casual and intentional encounters, vernacular memorials differ in that they are spontaneous, produced outside official processes, and can initiate counter-narratives to commemoration’s official, sanctioned subjects (people, events, and issues). memorials are situated within social processes of political-socialsymbolic systems of meaning production (gibson and burstow 2022, 67). the vernacular memorials and public mourning gmr-la produced in a public park spatially map the guatemaya community’s cultural memory and simultaneously build a network of guatemaya people in the diaspora. latin american critical cartographer helena suárez val (2022) uses the term affect amplifiers to denote activists, symbols, and protests publicly amplifying feminicide cases in latin america, specifically in uruguay. feminicide has united latin american feminist activists into continent-wide protests all forms of violence against women. in uruguay, feminists appropriated the term feminicide for street demos that started spontaneously towards the end of 2014, protesting gender-related murders of women, the lack of political will to tackle the issue, and the media’s sexist and re-victimizing reporting. however, the affective atmosphere around feminicide emerges in the interaction of multiple discourses: the voices of a transnational feminist counter-public, on the one hand, and media and political voices on the other (val 2022, 169). val notes how the voices of a transnational feminist counter-public are an affect amplifier, and this is how i situated gmr-la place-making, centering memory with an affective tone and action to amplify the names and stories of girls and women, victims of feminicide in guatemala. the group amplifies an affective environment by using maya cosmology rituals of placing an altar with herbs and being guided by the day’s nawal (maya energy). by doing this in a place like los angeles, the group educates participants about mayan culture and practices and remembers their loved ones and traditions. remembering is a decolonizing methodology, particularly for indigenous peoples forcibly dislocated from their culture, knowledge, and land (zepeda 2022). therefore, 8 tijax and gmr-la collectively are making space for the sacred, remembering, and re-rooting through cultural production and creating communal or community healing spaces through cultural memory. diplomatic policies define political borders as a national line that prohibits communication and transportation; however, the efforts of guatemaya groups in their search for justice have challenged diplomacy to reach solidarity groups and spread awareness about the case of the fifty-six girls. healing cartographies sandra luna, a gmr-la supporter, shared the following remarks: “yes, i believe i’ve carried intergenerational trauma. since i started having this awakening, i have found painful things, but we're ending this trauma together. thankfully, i also have this conocimiento (knowledge) to help my siblings, so we don’t repeat the same things. we are building community across borders. now, i feel supported by my family, and we are changing the narrative in los angeles. i am connecting with my people.” 8 tijax and gmr-la create transformative memories of guatemalan culture through creative ways reflected through poetry, art, protests, symbolic installations, and ceremonial altars—what i call healing cartographies. in contrast, the groups are in different geographies. they are motivated by other outcomes but with a similar goal of rebuilding counter-memory amidst the guatemalan state’s continued impunity on feminicide cases. for 8 tijax, they demand justice for the families of the fifty-six girls. gmr-la is a network that 8 tijax collaborates with to expand solidarity beyond borders about the girls’ legal case and memory. gmr-la continues to produce a transformative memory for maya women through embodied testimonials and place-making in los angeles. however, both groups focus on their interpersonal relationships and affective experiences. this broadening of the notion of communities breaks time and space barriers: community is no longer perceived as closed and fixed, related simply to the present. testimonies travel through different mechanisms connecting time and space (mcleod and demarinis 2018, 8). from a native american woman’s perspective, mishuana goeman explains that “unlike western maps whose intent is often to represent the ‘real,’ native narrative maps often conflict, perhaps add the story, or only tell certain parts: stories and knowledge of certain places can belong to families, clans, or individuals” (2013, 25). indigenous maps create multiple perspectives, like plurality to mapping, and where many worlds can fit. with care and affection, we can weave liberated futures with these stories. for many of us who are the descendants of terror, fear, and silence, feeling liberated means being healed from the past and able to live without guilt in this complicated world. therefore, i wanted participants to feel a sense of healing, a breath of fresh air, and feel part of the community during the body mapping workshops and even when spending time together at a meeting or through texting on whatsapp. as a feminist geographer, i felt i was practising healing cartographies, mapping our present and future through spiritual altars and embodied testimonios. figure 3. 8 tijax and gmr-la collective body map. photo of a woman with a collage of my dissertation fieldwork photos from guatemala to los angeles, 2019–2023. healing cartographies are exemplified by the verbal, embodied testimonies of guatemalan feminist groups mapping out the plural communication and language through art, songs, poems, and events as a critical recovery of memory and healing. i kept visualizing the healing cartographies of this study, and i wanted to put an image on paper. my cousin marina, who is an artist, was able to help me capture the memories and memorabilia of loved ones from these embodied practices. i gathered my fieldwork photos and asked her to add the pictures to an image of a woman’s body, making the body of the woman a map (see figure 3). as we worked on this collage together, she became very excited to know more about guatemala’s history from a woman’s perspective. therefore, the collage represents the healing cartographies and maps out embodied geographies using guatemayas’ feminist decolonial futurity, the body and territory of my research, and the transformation it developed after five years of research. as marina and i worked on the collage, we intentionally added photos of my fieldwork that symbolize a specific body part. for example, the woman’s head and heart symbolize memory. we added photos from my fieldwork that reflected historical and cultural memory. on top of the head, we placed the images of the fifty-six girls’ memorial and the altar in the plaza de las niñas. the heart and chest areas include four different altars created by the groups in the study. instead of memorials, the groups connected more to spiritual altars to invoke the memory of the girls and loved ones in the present time. the arms include photos of the arms of one of the mothers, with tattoos of her daughter and a sunflower, which symbolizes the fifty-six girls. coming down to the legs represents the two body mapping workshops, and we added a few photos of the body maps from both groups. the feet include the images of the hogar seguro shelter and some posters we used for a protest in los angeles calling out the state of guatemala for the massacre of the fifty-six girls. what interested me was that the woman’s eyes looked in a specific direction. i was using maya cosmology and the four directions to guide me in which direction the woman was looking towards. reading about maya’s cardinal directions, she would be looking at the direction of the north. in contrast to the western directions, the north is not on top but on the side, and in maya cosmology, the north symbolizes the color white, the father sky, and the way of the sacred warrior. growth, children, and education are linked to the north. what is beautiful about this image is that it embodies both groups, personifying their actions, stories, and beliefs by marking the body’s memory and identifying it as the first territory. the women in the groups are sacred warriors who walk a path protecting sacred memory. in addition, the woman’s body has no borders, allowing the territories to touch and embrace differences but stretching out the territory for participatory change using spiritual technologies like altars. the red flowers around the collage are red carnations to represent the everlasting memory of loved ones. marina added the collage to her blog titled, “collective memory making and healing among guatemaya survivors of state violence through testimonies, public art, and music,” as she explained what it means to her and made it expansively live in the digital world. therefore, these healing cartographies continue to expand, making the visual and embodied testimonios of guatemaya feminist groups transcend settler-colonial borders through time and space. the narratives in this study represent feminist groups in guatemala and the diaspora that decided to build a memory based on their accounts, principles, and political convictions. for 8 tijax, the search for justice for the fifty-six girls is a priority, and the mothers’ testimonies zealously elevate the girls’ memory. they are determined never to forget what the state did to their daughters on march 8, 2017. as with gmr-la, the group comprises women from guatemala living in los angeles who create a community for recent migrants and political refugees to build solidarity around guatemala’s past and contemporary issues. both groups’ oral and embodied testimonies illuminate the urgent need for archiving feminist memories of the war and contemporary issues such as feminicide with a cuerpo-territorio lens that communicates the nuances of cultural memory from an embodied geographical perspective. throughout this study, i carefully documented the oral and embodied testimonios because retelling a story can impact a survivor. however, guided by the framework of cuerpo-territorio (cabnal 2010) and body mapping methods, i created a space to feel confident to do this research with care and love, which the participants appreciated. as i continue with this research, some questions arise: how can the role of a community educator, scholar, and active member enrich the efforts of healing movements? how do the body maps form collective solidarity, memory, and healing constellations? lastly, how can the group’s healing efforts become liberatory praxis for other feminist groups across the hemisphere? acknowledgments i am grateful to the guatemaya feminist groups in this study for their bravery and resilience and for sharing their testimonies. i dedicate this work to the memory of the forty-one girls and acqij domingo choc che. thank you to the reviewers, editor, and friends who gave me generous feedback. references abrego, 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remembering xicana indígena ancestries. university of illinois press.   author bio carla macal is an interdisciplinary anti-colonial feminist scholar dedicated to community-engaged research addressing the intersections between state violence and intergenerational healing. she is currently a university of california president’s postdoctoral fellow at uc san diego’s department of literature. carla macal es una académica feminista anticolonial interdisciplinaria dedicada a la investigación comprometida con la comunidad que aborda las intersecciones entre la violencia estatal y la sanación intergeneracional. actualmente es university of california president’s postdoctoral fellow en el departamento de literatura en uc san diego.     encroaching borders and defenselessness of migrants at checkpoints in southern mexico     alethia fernández de la reguera national autonomous university of mexico alethia_reguera@unam.mx     abstract after an intimidating experience i had during a checkpoint on the southern border of mexico in 2023, i began to investigate the prevalence and impacts of immigration checkpoints. despite having been declared unconstitutional by the mexican suprema corte de justicia de la nación (supreme court of justice) in 2022, checkpoints are still one of the most common and least regulated practices to detain people on the move, especially in the context of anti-drug operations. in this paper, i show how checkpoints have become a violent infrastructure dispersed across the mexican territory. the flexibility and mobility of checkpoints and the actors administering them—governmental actors, extra-legal groups, and criminal networks—expose migrants to racialized and gendered forms of extreme violence and human rights violations. i present the findings of research conducted in 2022 and 2023 in the city of tapachula, chiapas, and its surroundings, consisting of participant observation and interviews with migrants who interacted with the guardia nacional (national guard) during waiting, transit, or detention. i also interviewed ten civil society organizations that provide psycho-legal assistance to migrant people detained at checkpoints throughout the country. i analyze how, in hazardous conditions, being stopped in a checkpoint while traveling in mexican highways can generate intimidation and defenselessness against all kinds of human rights violations. resumen tras haber vivido una experiencia intimidante durante un control fronterizo en el sur de méxico en 2023, comencé a investigar la prevalencia y los impactos de los retenes en carreteras para las personas migrantes. a pesar de que en 2022 la suprema corte de justicia de la nación declaró la inconstitucionalidad de las revisiones migratorias al interior del país, los retenes siguen siendo una de las prácticas más comunes y menos reguladas para detener a las personas en movilidad, especialmente en el contexto de los operativos antidrogas. en este artículo analizo los retenes en carreteras que funcionan como infraestructuras violentas dispersas por todo el territorio mexicano. tanto su flexibilidad y movilidad, como los actores que los operan—actores gubernamentales, grupos extralegales y redes criminales—exponen a las personas migrantes a formas de violencia racializadas y de género y a serias violaciones de los derechos humanos. presento los resultados de una investigación realizada en 2022 y 2023 en la ciudad de tapachula, chiapas, y sus alrededores, que consistió observación participante y entrevistas con personas migrantes que interactuaron con la guardia nacional durante los procesos de espera, tránsito o detención. incluyo las entrevistas realizadas a diez organizaciones de la sociedad civil que brindan acompañamiento psico-jurídico a personas migrantes detenidas en retenes a lo largo de todo el país. analizo cómo, en condiciones de riesgo, la detención en un retén por las carreteras mexicanas puede generar intimidación e indefensión ante todo tipo de violaciones de derechos humanos. keywords checkpoints, borders, human rights violations, migrants, infrastructural violence     “borders are quintessential sites of embodied, material and politicized mobilities of harm; they produce movement and detention, protection and anger, success and failure.” —alisa winton, 2015, “violence, borders, and boundaries: reframing young people’s mobility”, 12.     introduction on january 13, 2023, on a fieldwork visit on the southern border of mexico, i was in chiapas, traveling from tapachula to tuxtla gutiérrez in a taxi; it was a white car with no taxi logo. i was with my friend and colleague juan carlos. the distance between these two cities is approximately 230 miles, and the journey takes just over four hours. we shared the car with two young ecuadorians traveling with a forma migratoria multiple, a permit the instituto nacional de migración (inm) (national institute of migration) granted them to stay regularly in chiapas for thirty days only. as soon as we left tapachula, we began to pass through checkpoints (eleven in total), an average of one every 20 miles. the guardia nacional (national guard) operated some checkpoints together with the inm and others were operated by the army.1 passing pijijiapan, the taxi driver told the two young men, “they are going to stop us and take your money away.” after approximately ten minutes, we came across a checkpoint managed by four men dressed in black, one of them hooded, wearing black caps with the mexican coat of arms in black. they opened the car doors, and when the driver got out, they began to inspect the floor mats and the doors with mirrored poles. they immediately asked us for our ids. when we asked them to identify themselves, they ignored us. they opened the boot and, in a very disrespectful manner, went through our belongings. my reaction was to get out of the car and ask them why they were doing this search; we demanded again that they identify themselves and show us permission to search the vehicle and personal belongings. one of them, the one who looked like the boss, quickly showed me a credential with the logo of fiscalía general de la república (general prosecutor’s office) and just showed me a document on the screen of his mobile phone. still, he told me that i couldn’t take pictures of the document and didn’t let me read it. he said it was an anti-drug operation. he didn’t expect juan and i to get out of the car and demand they identify themselves and show the legal basis for this search. they let us go. checkpoints have been operating for many years in this area. migrants know they will be detained and possibly extorted, and local people have also normalized the checkpoint. despite my privileged position as an academic woman from mexico city traveling in my own country, i felt insecure when the vehicle was stopped and inspected. my privilege allowed me to reflect and write about an everyday situation that affects mexicans and foreigners on mexico’s roads and has become normalized. while on previous occasions, i had witnessed operations while traveling on buses in chiapas, on this occasion, the fact that the people who inspected the car were not identified and that everything happened so quickly made me reflect on the lack of accountability and transparency of the operations and the serious repercussions they can have, especially for racialized migrants transiting through mexico. daily encounters in checkpoints can end up in extreme forms of violence, especially when the army is involved. between 2021 and 2024, the national commission of human rights and journalists documented at least three very brazen cases of migrants shot and killed by mexican authorities while traveling in what could be identified as “suspicious” vehicles (cndh 2022, 2023). one of the most recent cases happened on october 1, 2024, when the army killed six migrants (including one girl) who were traveling in chiapas, and twelve people were injured (rodríguez mega and wagner 2024) for being considered suspicious.2 in mexico, the inm is the only authority responsible for immigration control. the guardia nacional is authorized to support the inm in these operations but cannot act independently. as i will further explain, after four decades of militarization at the southern border of mexico, the guardia nacional was created in 2019 and started to conduct immigration control operations initially in coordination with the inm. however, recent research shows that these tasks are not necessarily done in coordination with the inm, but that sometimes the guardia nacional acts independently or in collaboration with other authorities such as the army, navy, state police, and municipal police conducting immigration control tasks (fjeed et al. 2021; garcía alanís 2024; redodem 2023). immigration control operations (mostly checkpoints and raids) in border areas, on highways, on the outskirts, and inside cities might sometimes be called humanitarian rescues (garcía alanís 2024; redodem 2023). in the case of chiapas, checkpoints have become essential to maintain the country’s south as a securitization belt that prevents mobility towards central and northern mexico (colectivo 2022). between january and august 2024, the inm broke a record for immigration detentions, with 925,085 people detained. of these, 719,690 people (77.7%) were deprived of their liberty in an immigration detention center, and 205,395 (22.2%) were channelled to shelters. of these detentions, 81.9 percent occurred in the states of tabasco and chiapas (unidad de política migratoria 2024). these numbers show that in mexico the intertwining of immigration control and anti-drug operations has significant effects on the criminalization and human rights violations of migrants by multiple actors. drawing on observations and interviews with migrants and ngos, i show how checkpoints have become a violent infrastructure dispersed across the mexican territory. this infrastructure is flexible and mobile because checkpoints serve multiple, often unclear purposes and are operated by governmental actors, extra-legal groups, and criminal networks. this flexibility and mobility make checkpoints and the actors administering them unaccountable as they expose migrants to racialized and gendered forms of extreme violence and human rights violations. in transit countries such as mexico, checkpoints are critical infrastructures of a border control industry that operates to prohibit the mobility of certain groups (wonders 2006) while facilitating extortion and abuse of migrants by different actors (parís pombo 2017). moreover, in the context i study, their modus operandi commonly remains unaccountable for two main reasons: the remote and uncommunicated locations where they operate; and the lack of external controls when the armed forces, including the guardia nacional, are involved. the paper has four main sections. the first section presents the methodology, my positionality, and a brief context of the studied area. the second section presents some relevant concepts from the perspective of mobilities and critical border studies, such as infrastructural violence, borderities, and racial profiling. the third section presents a historical context of border’s securitization in mexico, particularly in chiapas, as well as the proliferation of actors operating checkpoints parallel to the suprema corte de justicia de la nación (supreme court of justice) (2022) ruling that decreed the unconstitutionality of immigration checks outside border areas. in the final section, i analyze some of the main findings of the research related to the modus operandi of multiple actors at checkpoints that have become spaces of enormous risk and human right violations of migrants.     methods i analyze some of the findings of a research project i began in 2022 on the effects of the militarization of immigration policy on the human rights of people on the move. in 2022 and 2023 i conducted three fieldwork visits in tapachula, chiapas, to document the effects of the involvement of the guardia nacional in immigration detention. i prioritized observation and semi-structured informal interviews in environments where people on the move are waiting for procedures, such as the vicinity of the inm’s offices, the comisión mexicana de ayuda a refugiados (mexican commission for refugee aid), the estación migratoria siglo xxi (twentyfirst century immigration station), and the viva méxico checkpoint. additionally, i visited the estación migratoria las agujas (las agujas immigration station) twice in mexico city. in total, i conducted ten interviews with people on the move who, at the time of the interview, had recently interacted with the guardia nacional during waiting, transit, or detention in tapachula and mexico city. i analyze the case of chiapas as a security belt and a place of threat and immobility under the simulation of immigration regulation and provision of international protection. this state is the most crucial entry point to mexican territory and has recently experienced an increase in homicides resulting from confrontations between two drug cartels.3 the sinaloa cartel has been present along the chiapasguatemala border. as of 2022 the jalisco new generation cartel seeks to control some areas in that region (instituto para la economía y la paz 2024). in addition to the fieldwork visits and the ten interviews, in 2023 i began collaborating with the organization fundación para la justicia y el estado democrático de derecho (fjedd) for the second edition of the report bajo la bota: la militarización de la política migratoria en méxico. between july and september 2023, i conducted ten in-depth interviews (in person and virtually) with civil society organizations that provide psycho-legal accompaniment to people on the move in southern, central, and northern mexico. together with the fjedd team, i contacted organizations that have documented and accompanied or legally represented cases of human rights violations of migrants involving the armed forces, especially the guardia nacional. throughout the research process, as a team, we respected ethical principles, obtained informed consent from the organizations to share their testimonies, and ensured the confidentiality of sensitive information. we also ensured that the data presented respected the dignity of the migrants and did not expose them to additional risks. i previously agreed with the fjedd and the organizations that shared their testimonies with me that i would also use the information for my academic research. for ethical and security reasons, i maintain anonymity in the testimonies shared by the activists on behalf of their organizations. i also add to my analysis the experience derived from my previous research in immigration detention centers (fernández de la reguera 2020, 2022), as i was invited in 2022 by the legal team of the instituto de las mujeres en la migración a.c. (institute for women in migration) and the programa universitario de derechos humanos (human rights university program) of national autonomous university of mexico to the supreme court of justice to speak about the context and effects of immigration detention in the country. i presented some elements to measure the risks to which all people who pass through a checkpoint are exposed, whether mexican or foreign, due to the widespread practice of racial profiling in a country as ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse as mexico. four months later, on may 18, the amparo en revisión 275/2019 ruling was approved, which determined the unconstitutionality of the immigration checkpoints. subsequently, in 2023 i participated in two meetings—one in congress and the other in the senate—to raise the relevance of the ruling and the urgency of reforming articles 97 and 98 of the ley de migración (migration law) to comply with this ruling.4 from a feminist perspective, i question the checkpoint as a technology and a mechanism of power that should be problematized through the lenses of donna haraway’s (1988) situated and contesting objectivity. in the name of objectivity, scientific androcentrism concentrates unquestionable power over knowledge production over matters of securitization of borders and control of mobility. previous studies focus on a security, economic, and political approach to checkpoints. i aim to analyze the checkpoint as a flexible and mobile infrastructure of violence serving different purposes and operated by various governmental actors (including the armed forces) and extra-legal and criminal actors, exposing migrants to racialized and gendered extreme forms of violence. i acknowledge that my own experience as a middle-class mexican female researcher provides a situated and partial understanding. i intend to problematize the checkpoint in constant dialogue with vital epistemological questions posed by feminists (fonow and cook 2005), such as, who are the authorized voices to generate knowledge? who observes? how do they observe? who was silenced? what can and cannot be known?     encroaching borders since 9/11, an “insecure society” has been consolidated globally, in which anyone can be a potential security threat and, therefore, a target for surveillance (bissonnette and vallet 2022). certain groups are more “threatening” than others in this insecure society, certainly racialized and impoverished people. it is in this context that mobility control has not only strengthened and securitized international borders but also created subnational borders emphasizing racial profiling and surveillance practices. didier bigo (2002) argues that the surveillance and securitization of migration is a consequence of the existence and functioning of a transnational field of professionals (including the military, police forces, border patrols, judges, security companies, and some reporters) in charge of managing the unease. migration as a national security problem derives from a global public discourse that is part of a “continuum of threats and general unease in which many different actors exchange their fears and beliefs in the process of making a risky and dangerous society” (bigo 2002, 63). therefore, the securitization of migration is intrinsically related to the need to maintain the symbolic control of the state and as a consequence of the development of the surveillance technology industry. mobilities and critical border research focuses on power relationships and the systems of governance of mobility and immobility, critically analyzing who can move and under which conditions (sheller 2011). as cunningham and heyman explain, “enclosures and mobilities thus join at borders, in the multifarious processes of entering, avoiding, detecting, classifying, inspecting, interdicting, facilitating, and revaluing that are borders of everyday routine” (2004, 295). this approach departs from two opposite social processes (enclosure and mobility) interconnected at the material border. the field of mobility research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of spatial mobility of people, objects, and information, as well as the physical means for movement, such as infrastructure and technology that enables or limits mobility. as mimi sheller (2011) writes, “it brings together some of the more purely social concerns of sociology (inequality, power, hierarchies) with the spatial concerns of geography (territory, borders, scale) and the cultural concerns of anthropology and media studies (discourses, representations, schemas) while influencing each with a relational ontology of the constitution of objects, spaces and meanings.” for border studies, checkpoints are crucial to the new mobility regimes that produce securitized corridors that facilitate the movement of specific global flows and prevent others. therefore, in the last decade, border studies have advanced to more complex understandings of bordering practices (amilhat szary and giraut 2015). furthermore, the securitization policies of borders exposes a geopolitical and colonial system of power relations. in this case, the “mexican transit control regime,” as amalia campos-delgado (2021) calls it, characterized by control strategies, punishment, and deterrence, responds to the us externalization of borders. as migration scholar yasmin ibrahim argues, “hence, borders as symbolic, performative and racial instruments tightly welded to sovereignty, jurisdiction and legal framework yield a human theatre of suffering to retain coloniality as an immanent part of modernity augmented constantly in the guise of newer technologies which tightly fuse with the corporeal body as a biometric assemblage” (2022, 17). my research analyzes the flexibility and extension of border zones that have created “borderities,” or multiple experiences and rules for understanding a border (amilhat szary and giraut 2015). therefore, two parallel phenomena, such as the simultaneous opening and closing of borders in the same space, are currently being studied. within the assortment of sites of enclosure and openness, “the forms and functions of borders no longer coincide” (amilhat szary and giraut 2015, 4). walls and barriers are only one part of border mechanisms, as there are other technologies to divide, regulate, and control mobilities, which are constantly changing. andréanne bissonnette and élisabeth vallet explain, “checkpoints are part of this contemporary (re) definition of borders, contributing to both their internalization and individualization” (2022, 681). previous research has studied the importance of the checkpoint as a mobility control mechanism, demonstrating that the checkpoint is the fourth central border regime of the us-mexico border (nail 2016). it is an increasingly central element of immigration enforcement infrastructure, in addition to walls, fences, and detention centers. moreover, checkpoints in the global north have been studied as an action to control mobility in contexts of perceived insecurity while creating an economic balance in the precarious labor market (nail 2016) and as strategies to control and deter mobility rather than to detain (bissonnette and vallet 2022). across the globe, border areas are encroaching into national territory. previous studies in the us classify three types of checkpoints: police, security, and informational (nail 2016). in the case of the us-mexico border, previous research shows how the law establishes processes of spatial containment by establishing roadblocks and checkpoints, creating zones of immobility as central axes of bordering processes (castañeda and melo 2019). rapidly, technologies enable the respatialization of borders and, thus, the legalization of border practices and their extension to new places. as geographers heide castañeda and milena melo explain, “while the permanent checkpoints trap people within a distinct space, the temporary roadblock checkpoints fuel fear and uncertainty within that space” (2019, 99). additionally, checkpoints can be permanent and tactical; distinct in location, size, infrastructure; and have various effects of intimidation and entrapment. scholars have noted that, “the reaffirmation of sub-national borders have underlined the hybrid nature of the checkpoint, at once fixed and mobile, temporary and permanent, exceptional and normalized, simultaneously open and obstructive” (bissonnette and vallet 2022, 680). the widening, diversification, and complexity of borders bring us closer to new experiences and ways of relating to borders and technology. for example, the mobile border extends the border’s spatial instability and power dynamics while also being an embodiment of the border. in other words, as political geographer gabriel popoescu puts it, “today, the body is at once the subject of bordering practices and their bordering agent” (2011, 104). groups considered a threat are identified through racial profiling supported by the use of technology. “they take the border with them wherever they travel in that they are always subject to the risk of interception, detention or expulsion by legal stakeholders, but also by being dependent on smugglers or illegal crossings” (amilhat szary and giraut 2015, 12). as a result, borders produce hierarchical systems of differentiated and unequal access to mobility based on race, class, gender, and nationality. mimi sheller (2018) uses the term “uneven mobility” to focus on what she calls the sociotechnical infrastructure, which includes the design of the built environment and social practices of borders as central elements in the exclusion and disruption of mobility, and the reproduction of racism, sexism, and classism, among other forms of discrimination. uneven mobility as a framework includes the analysis of “spatial patterns, forms of mobility management, and control architectures that govern relations of mobility and immobility, speed and slowness, comfort and discomfort across many scales, including gates, walls, exclusionary regulations, detention centers and prisons” (sheller 2018, 23). it results from the geographical and social construction of borders that keep changing according to the intertwining of criminal and migration law in the interactions between state actors, extra-legal actors, criminal actors, and people on the move: “border control strategies are not fixed, but rather shift and change in response to particular kinds of border flows and in response to particular kinds of border crossers” (wonders 2006, 83). usually, male bodies enforce borders, while female bodies are subject to border enforcement. racial profiling “refers to the use of discretionary authority by law enforcement officers in encounters with minority motorists, typically within the context of a traffic stop, that results in the disparate treatment of minorities” (batton and kadleck 2004, 31). it results in aggressive practices and stereotyping of people that can represent a threat, leading to a racial disparity in populations detained at checkpoints. in my fieldwork, i have identified the different stages and characteristics of racial profiling encounters in checkpoints that criminologists candice batton and colleen kadleck describe, including length of delay, type of searches, property damaged, extent to which officers explain or request information, restraints and use of force, inappropriate or irrelevant questions asked by officers, and disposition of stop. depending on nationality, ethnicity, gender, and age, people are discriminated against and exposed to various risks. for example, male migrants tend to be detained for more extended periods and often suffer physical aggression and even torture during detentions that begin at a checkpoint. migrant women and adolescent girls are more exposed to sexual harassment and sexual violence. in all cases, the risks are aggravated when people do not speak spanish and are dark-skinned. racial profiling is accentuated by the coexistence of a criminal policy and a punitive immigration policy that generates forms of violence that end up being normalized. technologies of border control with the participation of the armed forces and the proliferation of state and municipal authorities operating checkpoints further reinforce the blurring of criminal law and immigration law. the suffering produced by this blurring not only deprives migrants of their fundamental rights while crossing a checkpoint, even putting their lives at risk, but operates in a systematic and invisibilized way and is internalized and accepted as part of the experience (almost deservedly) by racialized undocumented irregular persons on the move. i study checkpoints as places where violence and mobility are interconnected. dennis rodgers and bruce o’neill (2012) introduce the term “infrastructural violence” to explain that infrastructure, such as a checkpoint, a wall, or an airport, is not only a material form of violence but also an instrument for reinforcing social inequalities. they distinguish between active and passive forms of infrastructural violence. active violence excludes and attacks certain vulnerable groups, such as the use of infrared security cameras. in contrast, passive violence refers to harms that derive from the omissions or limitations of the infrastructure, such as the lack of sanitation facilities for people with disabilities. the checkpoint is an active and mobile form of infrastructural violence, which, unlike a wall or an airport, operates in a less visible and accountable manner, and in some cases with a more significant margin of exceptionality. in addition, it serves various purposes related to mobility control, such as anti-drug operations and the detection of criminal activity. in this sense, the checkpoint operates simultaneous processes corresponding to administrative law, such as immigration checks, and to criminal law, to detect criminals, which significantly affects racialized migrants. science and technology studies (sts) aims to understand the relationship between knowledge and order (trauttmansdorff 2022) and to question the relationship between technology and the subject. in this sense, checkpoints are problematized as surveillance infrastructures that make visible specific mobility patterns. an sts approach would prioritize the different purposes and effects of monitoring and data production in checkpoints as they are operated by different authorities and sometimes even criminal actors. as “infrastructures embody the entanglements that connect the digital and the physical; they shape new relationships between authorities and technology, mobility and control, states and people” (trauttmansdorff 2022, 144). in this research, i am not specifically addressing the use of technologies at checkpoints in mexico. however, previous research on the militarization of border controls in mexico has documented the extensive use of military technology to collect and make use of the biometric data of migrants by the inm and the system of control of transfers to immigration stations or detention centers (garcía alanís 2024). my focus is on the infrastructural violence that represents a checkpoint as the point of contact between migrants and mexican authorities—in particular, in militarized zones where organized crime operates, which increases the use of the checkpoint as a strategy of securitization and racial profiling.     four decades of border securitization in mexico in mexico, irregular migration is a national security issue that has led to expanding and strengthening borders and surveillance. border controls have been enforced over decades in parallel with the securitization of the us-mexico border. the us created a legal basis for militarizing migration controls (massey 2016) in the 1980s and ’90s, first with the immigration reform and control act in 1986, and ten years later with the illegal immigration reform and immigrant responsibility act, which authorized a significant increase of border patrol personnel, the construction of more walls, including the wall on the tijuana-san diego border, and the use of military technology to detect and detain migrants (izcara palacios 2009). on mexico’s southern border, the armed forces’ involvement began in the 1980s. initially, it was a strategy for the control and surveillance of refugees from guatemala, who were considered by the mexican state as potential enemies of the regime (barrera hernández et al. 2024). then, in 1994, in response to the uprising of the ejército zapatista de liberación nacional (zapatista army of national liberation) in chiapas, the mexican army significantly strengthened its presence and functions on the southern border, resulting in not only the presence of sixty thousand soldiers in chiapas in 1999 but also the construction of military facilities (araiza et al. 2019). in 2001, shortly before 9/11, the mexican government announced the creation of plan sur as part of a strategy of collaboration with the us government in the face of possible immigration reform. the objective was to improve the capacity to control migration flows along the isthmus of tehuantepec, the gulf of mexico, and the pacific coast. plan sur immediately modified migratory routes to more dangerous places and increased the costs of hiring human smugglers. in contrast to previous operations, which tended to be reactive, this plan institutionalized the army’s participation along with other authorities from the three levels of government in migration control tasks (casillas 2002). after the terrorist attacks of 2001, operación centinela was carried out, which generated the deployment of more than eighteen thousand individuals of the armed forces and twelve thousand of the policía federal preventiva (federal preventive police) at borders, airports, and strategic facilities, which included immigration control tasks (fjeed et al. 2021). moreover, in 2006, president felipe calderón (2006–2012) initiated the “war on drugs,” which, during the six years of his administration, led to the death of seventy thousand people along with the increased number of drug trafficking cartels along the mexican territory (rosen and zepeda martínez 2015). subsequently, during enrique peña nieto’s six-year term (2012–2018), the programa para la seguridad nacional 2012–2018 (national security program 2014–2018) openly contemplated borders, seas, and irregular migration as the principal risks and threats for the country (presidencia de la república 2014). despite the implementation of actions since the late 1990s, it is the plan frontera sur, which began in 2014, that mainly laid the groundwork both in terms of infrastructure and inter-institutional organization for the consolidation of the militarization of migration management in the six-year term of andrés manuel lópez obrador (2018–2024). this process was achieved through two main actions: first, in 2019, with the approval and further implementation of legal reforms for the creation of the guardia nacional, including border control tasks and its subsequent integration into the armed forces; and second, the incorporation of military and ex-military personnel into the staff and command groups of the inm. within this context, for the first time, the supreme court of justice attracted a case on immigration controls, and on may 18, 2022, the ruling amparo en revisión 275/2019 was approved. this case was brought to court regarding an immigration check carried out in 2015 on a passenger bus in transit through querétaro. inm agents identified two women, one of whom was fifteen years old, and two men by their physical appearance, as, in their opinion, foreign nationals. they took them off the bus. the four mexican nationals, originally from chiapas, were indigenous tzeltal people. the two women and the youngest man were brothers, did not speak spanish, and had little experience communicating with state authorities. the older woman identified herself with an official id retained and destroyed by the inm agents, who claimed—without following preestablished procedures—that it was false. her two siblings were traveling with birth certificates issued in preparation for their trip, as they intended to be employed as seasonal agricultural laborers in sonora (northern mexico). the inm agents did not recognize the authenticity of the birth certificates. the fourth person, who spoke more spanish and did not share surnames with the others, also identified himself with an official id and was released. the three siblings were taken to an immigration detention center in the city of querétaro and deprived of their liberty for seven days. they were “identified” as guatemalans and subjected to the administrative immigration procedure that was to conclude with their deportation. during detention, the young man was tortured by inm agents. the deportation was prevented by an amparo suspension, in which family members and civil society provided further documentation to prove the complainants’ mexican nationality. this concluded the administrative immigration procedure, and they were released a week later. the ruling determined the unconstitutionality of immigration checks outside border zones for violating the right to free movement and the constitutional right to equality and non-discrimination. for the first time, the supreme court of justice decided on the application of racial profiling as a means of oppression and indirect discrimination of indigenous and afro-descendant people. according to the 2021 amparo reform, the rulings of the supreme court of justice are binding precedents for all authorities in the country when they are taken by a majority of four votes, as was the case in this ruling. as i write this paper, congress must still reform articles 87 and 98 of the migration law. immigration checks continue to be carried out and sometimes are reported by the inm as humanitarian rescues.     border performativity, actors, and human rights violations in checkpoints in chiapas internal bordering is one of the main strategies of mexico’s migration control apparatus (campos-delgado and yrizar barbosa 2023). for decades, the deployment of control operations has been a reactive mechanism of an immigration policy of simulation, waiting, and entrapment (ceja cárdenas and miranda 2022), as well as a strategy to control the trafficking of drugs and organized crime in the border area (instituto para la economía y la paz 2024). the following is a testimony from an ngo worker who explained to me how mexico has adopted a culture of roadside checks, which can be confusing and intimidating, especially for migrants coming from countries with fewer internal mobility controls: in mexico, there is something in people’s mind that prepares them for the fact that at any moment they are going to be searched, but a migrant does not have that, they are not used to. of course, they are at risk and know it; those who go on the journey know that they are exposed and always think that inm can stop them, but they do not distinguish between the police force of the municipality, the state, or the army. for them, it is all the same, and they do not have the clear concept that only inm can detain them for immigration control. people tolerate these practices because they have already internalized them. even we, who already know and are against it, get down and allow it when they stop us because we know the great risk involved. if you don’t do it, you can make someone angry. (ngo staff interview, july 2023) civil society organizations in charge of monitoring the human rights of migrants report that, throughout the country, people on the move are mostly exposed to severe human rights violations during migration checks operated by the military, state, municipal police, and the inm (redodem 2023). in recent years, after the arrival of migrant caravans from central america in 2018, organizations in chiapas have reported an increase in checkpoints. for example, in 2022, nineteen checkpoints were set up within a 180-mile distance between tapachula, chiapas, and san pedro tapanatepec, oaxaca (colectivo 2022).   figure 1: map the location of the eleven checkpoints i encountered during fieldwork in january 2023 between tapachula and tuxtla gutierrez.   some of them are fixed, such as the viva méxico at the exit of the city of tapachula at the border with guatemala, which not only impedes the mobility of migrants but also affects particularly vulnerable groups such as migrant women victims of violence. on a visit in march 2022 to the centro de justicia para las mujeres (justice center for women), a center specializing in the care and legal aid of women victims of violence operated by the state government, it was reported that, unfortunately, women on the move could not reach its facilities because they are located on the highway after passing through the viva méxico checkpoint. the state authorities did not consider the existence of the checkpoint during their planning, and, apparently, they could not negotiate access with the inm and the guardia nacional. even though article 97 of the migration law stipulates that each immigration check must be reported to specify the personnel assigned—including its duration and geographical area—in practice, organizations report that it is difficult to monitor how the detention processes are carried out and to know what happens once the person is identified in a checkpoint and transferred to an inm office or an immigration station.5 the sometimes clandestine nature of the operations, coupled with the discretionary nature of the protocols that allow inm agents to identify migrants by their looks and smell (duarte et al. 2020), and by asking arbitrary questions (inm 2021), reinforces racial profiling and generates enormous risks to the safety of people on the move. people may be transferred immediately without explanation or may wait for hours in undignified conditions (e.g., high or low temperatures, in uncovered spaces, without access to toilets) before being taken to an inm facility. moreover, mexican migration law stipulates that if a person is a victim of crime in national territory, they are entitled to a visitor’s card for humanitarian reasons. however, migrants, especially the most vulnerable groups such as women victims of sexual violence hardly dare to report abuse or human rights violations suffered during transit or while detained (seerlinger and uyttewaal 2018). the following is a testimony by a lawyer working for an ngo: “people are afraid, and that weakens the structure; that is, it weakens the bit of discipline that the armed authority could maintain because it is an almost tacit acceptance that their illegal actions will be tolerated. people don’t report it, and many may even have suffered extortion or some illegal situation, apart from the illegality of the roadside inspection itself. still, they don’t report it because they fear reprisals against them or their children” (ngo staff interview, august 2023). the lack of accountability increases when the armed forces, such as the guardia nacional, participate in immigration checks because they have their own internal accountability mechanisms. in the interviews, i detected that it is common for unauthorized police agents, such as the municipal or state police, to conduct immigration checks. they collaborate with the guardia nacional or the inm to hand over migrants. these are often called rescue or humanitarian operations. in these cases, it is also challenging to know under what conditions the detentions are carried out and whether officials are complying with transparency and accountability regulations. checkpoints vary in their infrastructure. some checkpoints, such as the viva méxico or centros de atención integral al tránsito fronterizo (centers for integral attention to border transit), operate in a fixed way specifically for mobility control. the latter is an example of active infrastructural violence (rodgers and o’neill 2012). on a visit to the centro de atención integral al tránsito fronterizo in huixtla, chiapas, in 2019, i entered the temporary immigration detention center, a vast, warehouse-like space with thick walls and bars, with no privacy whatsoever. the unusable toilets were exposed to the view of other people, which particularly affected women. it should be noted that this is a facility considered to have good conditions with technology for controlling vehicles and people. initially, it was not built for immigration control but intentionally adapted. the space intimidates detained migrants, especially women who have to use open toilets and suffer mistreatment by inm personnel. other checkpoints are temporary and have different purposes, such as security checks and anti-drug operations. these checkpoints are usually riskier because they are less visible and involve the participation of various authorities and, in some cases, organized crime, as also documented by red de documentación de las organizaciones defensoras de migrantes (redodem 2023). one ngo staff member described the makeshift character of some checkpoints: “now, the roadblocks are on the road where there’s no facility; sometimes it’s just a room. it’s just on the roads where there is nothing and no construction, but they are putting up tents” (ngo staff interview, august 2023). since 2019, when the guardia nacional began to participate in immigration enforcement, the organizations have detected the increased presence of checkpoints and their eventual permanence in chiapas. during an interview, an ngo staff member explained, before, at the temporary or provisional checkpoints, we saw a very simple tent, which was considered very easy to move around. it was a tent where only the immigration officers, the army, and the navy were placed underneath to carry out the checks, and maybe after a week, this tent would no longer be there. however, these points, even though they are provisional because we have identified that they do not have the structure to make them permanent, are now more elaborate. now, there are bigger tents; they already have bunk beds inside for the authorities to spend the night; in other words, they will be there for the long term, unlike the others. they also have computer equipment, and we have counted up to six or eight bunk beds. (ngo staff interview, august 2023) with the presence of organized crime in immigration control zones on the mexicoguatemala border, the checkpoint functions as a dispositif of immigration policy and criminal policy. as i explained earlier, border performativity (wonders 2006), or the series of reactive practices, is carried out by different state and non-state actors (including criminal actors) to limit and facilitate mobility. previous research shows the impact of policies that expand immigration control from the federal to the local level, including multiple authorities (valdivia 2019). with this expansion of authority, racial profiling practices and discrimination increase, as do contradictions and confusion among various authorities on immigration enforcement procedures, which in turn increases the risks and vulnerability of migrants (aranda and vaquera 2015). monica varsanyi and colleagues use the phrase “multilayered jurisdictional patchwork of enforcement authority” (2012, 138) to characterize immigration enforcement in the us; this concept is also helpful in this context to describe how multiple actors reinforce the contradictory geography of immigration enforcement through checkpoints. the participation of different authorities affects clarity and consistency in the detention protocols. in mexico, sometimes local authorities create their own procedures or adopt unofficial standards. checkpoints create a confusing system that threatens migrants and consolidates a culture of confusion and fear of deportation. this confusion and fear leads to a lack of confidence on the part of people on the move to ask for help from local police, generating disincentives to report a crime. my analysis shows that the diversity of actors and lack of protocols not only hinder the possibility of reporting crimes but that crimes occur at checkpoints precisely because of the material conditions in which they operate, the places where they are located, the various authorities involved and the extra-legal actors and sometimes criminal actors who also control some checkpoints. the fact that a checkpoint is operated by authorities of different levels and profiles, for example, state or municipal police, federal agencies, inm agents, and the armed forces, increases criminalization and human rights violations of people on the move. as one ngo staff member explained, we have identified two checkpoints of supposed officials from the fiscalía general de la república and another from a state police force, which in the end is strange in the way they check both the vehicles and people because they do not identify themselves and they are in desolate and risky spaces. they tell us that they are carrying out antidrug operations or that they are identifying people because they have received a complaint about some situation that was occurring in the area. however, they first ask you for identification; they don't even ask you to prove your number plates or that you are the vehicle owner or your license. (ngo staff interview, august 2023) in chiapas, a state border police force carries out actions in eight border municipalities. although its objectives refer only to “combating common crimes in all municipalities located along the border with guatemala, implementing effective and efficient security strategies and models, within the framework of legality and absolute respect for human rights” (secretaría de seguridad y protección ciudadana 2024), organizations report that they also carry out immigration detention tasks. the participation of actors from various public security agencies and different levels of government in immigration checks makes it difficult to have transparency and monitoring mechanisms to identify how these operations are carried out under what conditions and in what places. moreover, a characteristic feature of checkpoints is a lack of means to communicate, either because the authorities take away the detainees’ mobile phones or because there is no internet signal. an ngo staff member explained, “on the route from palenque to villahermosa, there is an immigration checkpoint where the guardia nacional is also present. they identify people, ask them to get off the bus and start immigration checks. they take away their mobile phones; in other words, they cut off people’s communications” (ngo staff interview, july 2023). therefore, many ngos report that transfers from checkpoints to an inm office or detention center might encourage forced disappearance and ill treatment because usually migrants are not allowed to notify detention to a family member or friend, and people are not told where they are going to be taken. moreover, transfer times to temporary holding centers or immigration detention centers vary. organizations report that agents from the guardia nacional or the inm usually try to gather as many people as possible in their vehicles at checkpoints before transferring them. it is likely that when traveling in small inm vans, the waiting time in these spaces is shorter than when traveling in buses. the same staff member described the travel and transfer: “they are putting the migrants in the volantas, which are these closed vans that inm has, or in trucks, and then they let them spend the night there. or then they wait for them to fill up. sometimes, the trucks do not have any logo; they are generally white trucks, normally escorted by the guardia nacional” (ngo staff interview, july 2023). the main problems i identify are isolation, long waiting times for transfers, and the invisibility of transfers. in my fieldwork, i also detected people who were detained and, before being transferred, were released on the roadside late at night. the staff member continued, “it takes hours from what we have been told. in one case, people arrived as early as 9 a.m., and at around 3 p.m., they were moved to temporary holding facilities. some people even told us that they were kept from about 6 p.m. when they were arrested, and then they were taken to the provisional detention center at about 10 p.m., or they started to offer to let them go if they paid” (ngo staff interview, july 2023). testimonies recovered through ngos show that everyone is exposed to long waits, including women with children. there is a constant practice of racial profiling that affects mainly people with indigenous appearance and people with dark skin, predominantly haitian and garifuna people from honduras. therefore, the right to mobility becomes a daily contested action in the regime of uneven mobility, as is especially the case for people who constantly have to cross checkpoints as part of their daily mobility, such as mexican nationals and migrants residing in areas of extreme surveillance, especially on the highways. one interviewee described, “it is a salvadoran woman with a mexican son who lives in chiapas, and the son is constantly stopped at checkpoints. they must pass through checkpoints that are run by municipal, state or inm police. both she and the child are racialized, and especially he is constantly being detained” (ngo staff interview, july 2023). i have documented how women and girls are exposed to sexual harassment and violence during detention (fernández de la reguera 2024). while there is a high risk of sexual violence during transit, there is also a high risk of sexual violence during contact with authorities. when the perpetrator of sexual violence is a state agent, it takes on new meanings and has more significant effects on the victims (falcón 2001). it is an act of deterrence and a grave violation of human rights that dramatically affects the possibilities for reporting and receiving the protective services provided by law to all girls and women who have suffered sexual violence regardless of their immigration status. one staff member recalled a problematic encounter: “i remember a situation with the inm; it was an immigration check on the stretch from palenque to villahermosa. a mexican woman was traveling with her daughter, who underwent an immigration check. however, the inm agent began to ask questions that had nothing to do with her immigration status. at first, they were exploratory questions to identify the person’s nationality and family ties because she was a sixteen-year-old. however, the inm officer asked the young woman questions like ‘how tall are you?’ and ‘how much do you weigh?’ these questions go beyond an immigration check” (ngo staff interview, july 2023). interviews with both ngos and migrants show that people expect to be extorted at checkpoints, including by military personnel, before they are permitted to continue their journey. organizations detect that those who manage to advance and are not returned to tapachula usually were able to pay for the extortion to continue their transit: “people assume they must carry 4,000 or 5,000 pesos (us$200–$250) to get to tuxtla gutiérrez. people know that in order to cross checkpoints, even if they have an official document, they have to give money. they know that at each checkpoint they are going to be asked to pay for crossing” (ngo staff interview, august 2023). in some cases, people are taken to vacant areas where they are exposed to threats, extortion, and torture. it is essential to point out that any intermediate destination or stop made between the moment of detention and the destination where the person is handed over to the inm office contravenes the law. an interviewee described one such case: this case happened in escárcega, campeche. our clients do not know when it happened because they traveled from tabasco to campeche. the inm and guardia nacional agents stopped the bus where they were traveling and took them off. they were held for about an hour with their heads upside down in the middle of the night at a roadside location. they said, “what is going to happen to us? because the bus left and we only see boots and hear people talking, but they don’t even pay attention to us when we tell them we want to ask for asylum.” from there, they were taken back to villahermosa. it was the guardia nacional because of the grey uniform. (ngo staff interview, july 2023) checkpoints as growing strategies of border encroachment and active infrastructural violence are an opportunity to abuse racialized migrants in many ways. robbery, extortion, physical, psychological, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment have been widely documented (fjedd et al. 2021; redodem 2023). some conditions facilitate and invisibilize these human rights violations. the first is the expansion of checkpoints under the discourse of national security, the war on drugs, and human trafficking. the second is the participation of practically all federal, state, and municipal security authorities in the so-called humanitarian rescues. the third is the invisibility, lack of transparency and monitoring due to the material and isolation conditions of several checkpoints, and the armed forces’ participation. conclusion mexico’s southern border is the central receiving region for migrants who need international protection. it is a border through which people of diverse nationalities and with high levels of vulnerability arrive, many of them escaping from contexts of criminal violence. in response to this reality, the mexican government, far from strengthening international protection mechanisms, has increased securitization through border militarization and the proliferation of checkpoints, which allows for the growing unaccountability and impunity of multiple authorities who participate in racial profiling and criminalization practices against migrants along the southern border. these measures make it increasingly difficult to distinguish between immigration policy and criminal policy, and expose migrants to criminalization and defenselessness. added to this is the context of the fight against organized crime, which facilitates the participation of various federal, state, and municipal authorities and the presence of criminal actors operating some of the checkpoints. the consequences are severe because it creates an environment of insecurity, lack of transparency, and exceptionality of the law, which exposes all persons, mexican or foreign, to serious human rights violations when traveling by road on the southern border. despite a ruling by the mexican supreme court of justice declaring the unconstitutionality of the immigration checks, in mexico, every day, the right to non-discrimination and free transit is violated at checkpoints; for some people, it is much more severe, especially if they are irregularly in mexican territory, if they do not speak spanish, or if they are indigenous or afro-descendants. as evidenced, the security strategy to combat organized crime and drugs has become intertwined with the approach to control and stop migration in the south of the country, strengthening a mobile and unaccountable detention system, creating forms of infrastructural violence that facilitate extortion, abuse, and human rights violations. note 1 the constitutional reform to create the guardia nacional took place on march 26, 2019. in october 2024 a new constitutional reform formally established the guardia nacional as a permanent professional public security force composed of military personnel with police training and entirely dependent on the ministry of national defense. 2 vehicles may be considered suspicious by the army when they do not stop quickly at a checkpoint, are old cars, or have tinted windows. it is believed that they may be the vehicles of people involved in criminal activities, usually linked to kidnapping or drug trafficking (rea and ferri 2019). 3 according to the instituto para la economía y la paz, “of the 124 municipalities in the state, only three, suchiate, benemérito de las américas and marqués de comillas, registered extreme homicide rates in 2023. each of these is a border municipality with a relatively small population. the most extreme rate was recorded in suchiate, whose homicide rate was 121 deaths per 100,000 people in 2023, an increase of 56 per cent over the 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violence, and gender and migration. alethia fernández de la reguera es académica socio-jurídica y profesora asociada del instituto de investigaciones jurídicas de la universidad nacional autónoma de méxico (unam). es especialista en criminologías fronterizas, violencia de estado, género y migración. six ways of looking at fractal mechanics patton, cindy, travis alexander & nishant shahani. 2024. “autoimmunities after covid: an interview with cindy patton.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–17. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © cindy patton, travis alexander & nishant shahani, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license autoimmunities after covid: an interview with cindy patton cindy patton simon fraser university ckpatton@sfu.ca travis alexander old dominion university ta33@rice.edu nishant shahani washington state university vancouver nshahani3@wsu.edu cindy patton is professor emeritus of sociology and anthropology at simon fraser university in vancouver, canada. an early aids activist in boston, she holds a phd in communications from the university of massachusetts, amherst. after inaugurating her academic career at temple university (rhetoric and community) and emory university (graduate institute of the liberal arts), she accepted a canada research chair in community, culture and health at simon fraser (2003-15). in that capacity, she worked with more than two dozen groups to develop small community-driven projects related to hiv/aids, housing, social welfare, mental health, while achieving, culminating in the creation of the community health online digital research resource, a catalogued, open-access, full-text collection of the materials from those groups (www.chodarr.org). her academic publications span the social study of medicine, especially aids; social movement theory; gender studies; and media studies. she is the coeditor of queer diasporas (2000) and a special issue of cultural studies on pierre bourdieu (2003). she is the author of such works as globalizing aids (2002), cinematic identity: anatomy of a problem film (1997), fatal advice: how safe-sex education went mailto:ckpatton@sfu.ca mailto:ta33@rice.edu mailto:nshahani3@wsu.edu http://www.chodarr.org/ special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 2 wrong (1996), inventing aids (1990), and la plays itself/boys in the sand: a queer film classic (2014). taken collectively, patton’s scholarship and activism has laid the foundation for insights in the health humanities, particularly aids studies, that consider the inextricable connections between epidemiology and ideology. patton’s theorizations of stigma and discrimination patterns, her deconstruction of “truth” discourses subtending science, her critical re-evaluations of axioms associated with risk, safe sex, community, and knowledge production have been crucial interventions in the understanding of health and illness as cultural and discursive scripts. among patton’s most enduring contributions has been her theorization of how “african aids” was invented and circulated—that is, the notion of geographically bifurcated hiv pandemics split by the essential linkage between africa and blackness generally with pathogenesis. equally influential has been her elaboration of the insurgent queer research practices that fused with antiracist struggle to combat this split. in the interview below, travis alexander and nishant shahani engage patton in a discussion on a range of topics—from (dis)continuities between the hiv/aids and covid pandemics to the role of queer activism in forging epidemiological counter-publics and the geopolitics of medical bureaucracy. keywords hiv; pox; pandemics; history of medicine; entangled history travis alexander and nishant shahani: in the past five years, we seem to have had waves of different forms of epidemic, each crashing into the one before. going into this momentous half decade, the knowledge of hiv as pandemic had been pushed aside in favor of a shared narrative of hiv’s chronicity. of course, the experience of time is subjective, but it felt like covid and mpox arrived back to back, and at the same time, several once-controlled severe diseases surged (polio, ebola, measles). we want to ask about the challenges of writing a “history” of a pandemic while in its midst, a question that already purports to frame the temporal start and finish of any specific pandemic. cindy patton: history evolves and our understanding of how to “do history” evolves. in the early 1980s, i was engaged in producing a “history of the present” of the aids pandemic in its very earliest moments. i was just a “kid” with no training in historiography or social theory, and so i relied on journalistic ideas about mobilizing facts to tell a story. given that one cluster of “facts” rested on the premise that homosexuality was pathological, the battle to tell the story from the gay and black communities’ points of view was immediately bound up in the special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 3 politics of contesting homophobia and racism, and, at that time, asserting specific subcultural identities. i want to remind us that in the early 1980s, both the gay liberation movement and the women’s health movement resisted the idea that aids was an epidemic, and black communities were in the early days of embracing their lesbian and gay members—the queer of color articulation was audible, just barely, but not yet an intellectual and political movement. the women’s health movement was organized around the idea of the “well-woman,” that is, the movement’s initial aim was to depathologize the female body. gay liberals working within the field of psychology were similar in their early efforts to remove homosexuality from the diagnostic and statistical manual. both gay liberationists and lesbian separatists were experimenting with utopian forms of community and often new understandings of sexuality. in this context, there was no easy way to contest right-wingers’ assertion that gay liberationist calls for radical sexual experimentation had led directly to the emergent pandemic. i remember how shocked even gay liberationists were when charley shively, a law professor active in the radical newspaper fag rag, wrote an article called “are you ready to die for sexual liberation?” (1983), itself an homage to claude mckay’s 1919 “if we must die,” which was a call to black communities to fight back in the context of the massive violence against black spaces and persons in the so-called red summer of 1919. this was the context in which the gay health movement that was most successful in advocating for treatments and fair treatment of individuals with hiv and communities affected most directly by the pandemic emerged. in time, academic historians and epidemiologists would understand that other groups of people had also manifest patterned symptoms that should have triggered officials to declare a new disease. however, those groups (drug users in particular) did not have an emergent health movement to make their plight visible. ta and ns: you have just invoked a lost piece of gay writing that itself invokes an important but perhaps also not widely remembered poem by a black intellectual who we now understand was bisexual, and then you speak of scientists! your research draws on a very wide range of source material. have your approaches to historicizing ongoing crises changed since your original work? cp: i think both the academic and political contexts have changed radically since those early years, when many untrained people tried to document the pandemic and the people who were living it most intensely. the late 1980s was a watershed intellectual movement even without the object of aids. cultural studies was in its heyday, and continental theory was transforming the north american academy, and there was a broad move toward interdisciplinarity. quite a few so-called aids activists came through the university at that time, and thus, the analysis that came to characterize aids activism was laced with foucault’s understanding of historiography. together with the broader rise of video activism and new forms of special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 4 political solidarity-building, aids activism and its documentation were very attuned to the “polysemy” of images and concepts. i look at material from that time period—including my own writings—and they seem very tied to this broader critical movement, and thus, it is hard to know “what actually happened.” from the moment the pandemic appeared in the lives of those of us whose twenties and thirties and forties would be taken up with documenting and critiquing the social and cultural aspects of “aids,” we were always “too close in time” and yet, for those who see a disease up close, we are never able to step outside the time of the pandemic. i think we are at that moment now with covid—it’s apparently “over” for some people, but many people will never cease dating their lives from their entry into knowledge of covid. we can also see that many gay men, who did not experience aids during its “pandemic” time, still interpellate themselves into the “aids pandemic” through their practices of avoiding hiv. we saw this when mpox came on the scene, and young men immediately read mpox through the shared (and produced) memory of aids. ta and ns: what methods and cautions do you call upon when you work in this way—how do you navigate the risks of your differential familiarity with different fields of expertise and your use of different genres of writing? what moves you to take up one source or another? cp: i guess i try to think from as many perspectives as i can, while remaining grounded in my commitment to a queer, feminist, anti-racist politics. but to me, this means not only understanding those counterpublics’ “structure of feeling,” as those who follow raymond williams might conceptualize it, but also understand the rationality of that which they confront—in this case, not so much the personal feelings of those within the health and research systems, but the historical development of their “thoughtstyle,” to use the concept from ludwik fleck (1979), which i, and many people in social studies of science and medicine work from. one of the things that motivated me to push harder on the historical/archival research i have started to do around 2010 was a moment about in 2022, as north america emerged from its second full winter of grappling with covid-19, and especially the new clade omicron. data from the largest population centers suggested that canada was still experiencing “waves” sufficient to require public health interventions, but despite the canadian chief health officer’s announcement of the ongoing need for masks and vaccines, many canadians believed that the country had achieved the long sought “herd immunity,” albeit a “hybrid” one wrought as much by extremely high omicron clade infections as by the impressive early generation vaccination rates: canadians looked forward to what they hoped would be the first “real summer” after covid. but just weeks after the cautious suggestion that we were done with one pandemic, but should be wary about when or how a next one might emerge, the world health special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 5 organization announced the first “next” epidemic: atypical cases of the inaptly named monkeypox, a known virus, jetting around the world in a new pattern of distribution suggestive of new modes of transmission. for weeks after the first atypical cases of mpox that appeared in may of 2022, public health officials equivocated about whether the new pattern of spread among “men who have sex with men” meant that mpox was now a sexually transmitted disease, or simply something that you might catch during sex—there is an important semiotic difference between these. given this uncertainty about how to classify mpox, i was struck by how quickly some gay men asserted that the public health response (urging caution) was “the aids epidemic all over again.” certainly, the reaction to both the new disease and the public health reaction was mixed on the ground, but the media represented gay men as feeling deeply under siege by the government. i hesitate to say there was a sense of déjà vu because the majority of these voices had only second-hand knowledge of the 1980s, so the “memory” of the response to aids was selectively focused on charges that public health inaction was homophobic. how did the “memory of aids” get reworked and reproduced so that two diseases and their manifestation as social phenomenon got superimposed, especially given that the public health establishment is also now even more populated by lbgtq+ practitioners? others will write the full history of mpox. i want only to open up the possibility of writing history both through the collective experiences of those who are subject to the disease, and through the effect of “other diseases” on the one in question. in this way, we might peer through the broader palimpsest of “epidemic learnings” to understand what it is we are supposed to hope for in “future immunities.” ta and ns: can you explain what you mean by the “palimpsest of epidemic learnings”? how does that phrase guide your thinking? cp: the idea of a text as a surface being written over and over, obscuring some parts and reinscribing other parts comes from derrida and others writing at the beginning of deconstruction: i envision a broad tissue of many temporal events of epidemic laminated one on top of the next. of course, they will never cover exactly the same surface area, and some “past” epidemic knowledges all but disappear underneath the inscription of others on top of them. but it is always possible to find traces, and also to discover that strong traces are interlinked with now-weaker inscriptions. when i find stories whose narrative is too regular, too certain about causal effects, i want to scrape away some of that layer and see what has been covered over and what has been traced exactly, so as to make it appear inevitable. the method that has most interested me over the past decade or so is “entangled histories,” or histoire croisée—a method that refuses straight lines between past and present, instead identifying possible influence and special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 6 confluence among things of different scales and different temporalities. but people have a hard time reading across influences and confluences because the writing with the greatest fidelity is a kind of zigzag. ta and ns: you seem to be suggesting that the internal histories linking past epidemics to the present are shaped by a conception of and desire for immunities present and future? you often think across time and space to examine multiple epidemics—can you be more concrete here? you have been alluding to mpox and hiv; are there other histories you would point to as also internally linked to questions of future immunities? cp: yes, i have a specific set that i’ve been thinking about over the past twenty years. i’m sure there are other layers to this palimpsest that other scholars could add. i would say that while many features of the mpox discourse are resonant with both the public health language and the activist feelings and reactions remembered from the earlier aids pandemic, there are at least three intermediate pandemics that altered how global public health was administratively structured and how the connection between sex and disease was conceptualized: zika (2016), h1n1 (2008), and sars (2002–2003). i was to start with zika for two reasons: first, we will be going backwards in time. but second, both zika and mpox were said to change their form when they changed their locale. let me wander through these to show you how one might start to trace out small connections, à la an “entangled histories,” that might lead us to a different understanding of the hows and whys of pandemic management. zika was a recognized mosquito-borne virus with fairly mild symptoms, just one among the many diseases endemic to various tropical locales. when zika moved to new regions as a result of mosquito adaptation to urban environments and new levels of global mobility, a new disease pattern emerged; a small number of zika cases show dramatic symptoms, in particular, microencephaly in neonates. this sensational disease sequelae caused who to take notice and declare a public health emergency of international concern (pheic), indicating the highest level of concern about an emerging but not-yet-pandemic disease. let me zigzag to 2002–03 to remind us that how pandemics are conceptualized and announced was quite different in 2022, when mpox was redefined, than it was in 1982–83 when hiv emerged as a viral phenomenon and was labeled “grid” then “aids.” the intermediate pandemic of relevance is the first sars pandemic. i want to be careful here to use parallel terms—what we today call the hiv pandemic was originally labeled by the syndrome name, aids, not by the underlying virus, hiv. zika was from its start labeled by the causal virus’s name. sars, like aids, was labeled by its symptom cluster, while covid is labeled by its causal virus. special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 7 the “public health emergency of international concern” is a designation that was created after the 2002–03 sars pandemic. the change in who’s notification structure explicitly recognized the changing patterns of disease spread and disease identification, in particular, the role of air travel in complexifying the system of global public health controls that dated from use of vaccination and border restrictions in relation to diseases like smallpox. the response to sars, which was so strikingly related to air travel, was deemed too slow, and thus, the notification system was amended at the level of the definition of how to declare a pandemic (how much spread over how many locales). most importantly, the new designation was a kind of bolo (“be on the look out”) for disease phenomenon that had begun to look problematic and might require global coordination. this brings us to the nearly forgotten h1n1 pandemic of 2008: i have written about this pandemic episode in a pair of articles, so i will just summarize quickly here. the identification of h1n1 and its elevation to the status of declared pandemic resulted from two changes: enhanced epidemic surveillance in the wake of hiv and pandemic-declaration process in the wake of the rapid spread of sars. in the north american winter of 2002 through spring of 2003, an unusually severe flu-like disease made a rapid circuit from asia, to canada, the us, and a few european countries. this would turn out to be the world’s first major encounter with coronavirus.1 because of the ubiquity and seasonality of influenza, most countries with developed disease surveillance systems use reporting of “fli” or flu-like-illness as a kind of early warning system for respiratory diseases more generally. in 2008, after nearly three decades with no unusual influenza outbreaks, and with global health attention focused on a pandemic caused by the hard-to-contract and slow manifesting hiv, the appearance of “sars” shook up the surveillance strategies, resulting in a demand for improved monitoring systems. further, the investment in hiv monitoring and treatment meant that there were more small countries around the world feeding data into the global system. who’s then-existing definition of the point at which local, regional, and international disease prevention measures should be initiated had to change— that is, the definitions of epidemic (“more than expected”) and pandemic (across a larger number of spaces) needed an overhaul. h1n1 caused a level of concern that eventually far outstripped its health impact in part because member states in the pacific region had taken a page from the health infrastructure development strategy used in the sub-saharan region during the first two decades of the hiv pandemic to simultaneously address the immediate needs of people with hiv and develop long-term health infrastructure. reasoning that so-called avian variants originate or accelerate in the pacific region, smaller states argued that flu pandemic preparedness required investment in health infrastructure, and in particular, in surveillance capabilities. this left the imprint of regional aids activism and global debt restructuring initiatives on the literal medico-scientific surveillance apparatus. but it meant that when h1n1 was special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 8 identified in mexico, where relatively little flu surveillance then technology existed, the “expectation” part of the epidemic definition was so rapidly exceeded that the pandemic looked larger than it actually was. in fact, h1n1 was the first major epidemic to occur after the who implemented a new multi-step process for declaring pandemics after the sars experience. fortunately, there was a formula that could combat this influenza that had arisen in an unexpected place—tamiflu. again in response to the pushback against big pharma that had occurred in the race to find hiv therapies, a european-based “small pharma” emerged, and they had a near-monopoly on tamiflu. in the context of then-emergent treatment-as-prevention strategies, promulgated (as pre-exposure prophylaxis) by many hiv activists and (as near-mandatory treatment) by public health officials, tamiflu was both. tamiflu works by blocking flu virus’s ability to release the copies of itself that it has made, allowing tamiflu to be prescribed both as a treatment and as a prophylaxis, doubling the demand for its use. the breakdown of the line between treatment and prevention (although perhaps this is a false distinction carried over from an earlier paradigm of medical care) was even more pronounced in the world of hiv pharmacology— “treatment as prevention” included aggressively identifying and treating those with hiv, and offering similar medications to people who were perceived especially at risk of contracting the virus. this episode haunted the covid vaccine roll out in interesting ways with hiv being a treatment used in the absence of a (still unattainable) vaccine, while the covid vaccines operating in the absence of reliable treatment (still lacking). combined, these public discourses about treatment (hiv) and vaccines (covid) blurs the difference between “not getting it,” “not getting sick from it,” and “not passing it on.” ta and ns: tracing the internal connections in this way seems to open up the space for understanding a range of things that have bothered us recently. here, you are pointing to the contrasting role of prophylaxis as they were deployed for hiv and for covid…can we loop back to zika and talk about how a tropical disease was transformed into a sexually transmitted disease? cp: yes, that raises the question of how disease phenomena interact with the systems that categorize them. unlike hiv, which was a previously unrecognized virus, zika’s symptomatology and distribution was well described—it was a mosquito-associated tropical disease with dramatic “flu-like” symptoms. like the two rounds of coronavirus (sars and covid-19), a known phenomenon suddenly jumped locale to affect large numbers of people in a very dramatic way. initially described after world war ii, the virus was first in uganda, and then spread throughout the asia-pacific region, presumably via animal movement. suddenly, in 2016, zika appeared to break out of its well-described and stable mosquitomonkey-mosquito zoonotic loop, with occasional transfer to humans, and began a new pattern that included a human vector via sexual practices, and then later, a special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 9 human-mosquito-human loop in places with no monkeys. public health officials had some difficulty reconceptualizing a once run-of-the-mill mosquito-vector disease as sexually transmissible. if you don’t mind, i can show you something very curious that i found. this is the updated (2019) us cdc’s [centers for disease control and prevention’s] advice for avoiding zika, which focuses mainly on mosquito control, but also contains this interesting discussion of zika and sex: can i get zika from sex? • yes, you can get zika from sex with a partner who has zika, even if your partner does not have symptoms at the time, or if their symptoms have gone away. • only people with sex partners who live in or traveled to an area with risk of zika are at risk for getting zika through sex. • sex includes vaginal, anal, and oral sex, and the sharing of sex toys. should i be concerned about getting zika from sex? • zika is of greatest concern for pregnant women and women who may become pregnant. this is because zika can cause birth defects in babies born to women who are infected during pregnancy. • for everyone else, zika rarely causes serious illness. many people with zika won’t have symptoms. when symptoms do appear, they are usually mild. the most common symptoms are fever, rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis (red eyes). what can i do to reduce my chance of getting zika from sex if my partner traveled to an area with risk of zika? condoms can reduce the chance of getting zika from sex. to be effective, condoms should be used from start to finish, every time during vaginal, anal, and oral sex. not having sex also eliminates the risk of getting zika from sex. (cdc accessed 2022) i want to underscore that this advice sits at a temporal mid-point between the “lessons learned” from problematic hiv (sex) education and the explanation of risk and risk mitigation for covid-19. notably, the cdc enumerates the “sex” of concern, a feature mystified in much early hiv education. you can see the traces of many of the intervening discussions. for example, trans health discourse inflected in the idea of pregnant persons rather than pregnant women. thus, while discussion partially reprises an idea of risk groups that is familiar to use from the early aids designations—those who will experience major effects (pregnant persons) and those who won’t (everyone else)—we can also see a foreshadowing of the logic that eventually led the vast majority of people to imagine covid as a disease only really dangerous to “old people.” in addition, the parsing of “risk” into places that have and don’t have zika inherits the slide from places to people special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 10 that characterized hiv education’s understanding of differences in disease patterns as differences in people. because zika was initially strongly associated with “the tropics,” and most americans are oblivious to the reality that the us contains major swathes of tropical areas, the advice ends up shifting the risk calculus back onto people “from” the spaces marked out as “diseased.” read together, the construction of an at-risk group and conflation of space with risky people leave the idea of unfettered sex unchallenged; paradoxically, unless you want a pregnancy to occur, you needn’t bother with condoms, except that condoms stand in the way of pregnancy: for some people (inhabitants of the figurative “tropics” of pregnancy-seeking) risk reduction is impossible. the mystification of literal and figurative tropicality is redoubled in the cdc edu-bite about how a zoonic loop works: “zika is mainly spread through mosquito bites. travelers should take steps to prevent mosquito bites for 3 weeks after returning from an area with risk of zika. this is because you can have zika in your blood and a mosquito can bite you, get infected with zika virus, and spread the virus to other people” (cdc 2019). in this almost sci-fi scenario, humans actually pass zika to mosquitos independent of sex; thus, sexual transmission of zika is contained by condoms, but the bidirectional mechanism of spread—being bitten by a mosquito—is not. the presumptively domestic space of becoming pregnant, which is left in limbo by zika, leaves the “other sex” out in open (even public) spaces. the acceptability of risk within reproductive domestic space lingers on in covid discourse—for the most part, public health has viewed recommending masking at home (except in on behalf of “elders”) as ridiculous, even though the same officials downplay “open space” transmission by arguing that most infections occur among people who live together. zika as a sexually transmitted phenomenon is intensely racialized, and covid, more overtly racialized, is intensely desexualized. ta and ns: can you talk a little bit about the consequences of this desexualization of covid, and then what foundation that shift played into the political imaginary into which mpox arrived? cp: one of the massive paradoxes of the pre-omicron bouts of covid was the lack of detailed attention to “household transmission.” in general, the space of the home was considered problematic only to the extent that there were “old people” who might be infected by younger family members. the idea that some of the covid rapidly spread within the household came during sex was largely only the stuff of stand-up comedy—sketches of people wearing underwear face masks, or avoiding each other altogether, the funny side of the reality that the predicted “stuck at home” baby boom did not materialize. if zika was almost exclusively the concern of baby-making couples, and covid—especially in the wake of the ultracontagious omicron clade—was so omnipresent that it was unthinkable to undertake domestic risk reduction measures, mpox fell somewhere in between. special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 11 partly built on the idea that only specific people (those who want a pregnancy) need to worry about sexual transmission of disease, and partly built on the idea that once launched into the group of intimates, there was little beyond a vaccine that could stop a disease’s spread, the official response to mpox focused primarily on the idea that the disease is already “contained” by virtue of being properly located as a zoonotic disease in “africa” (where there is, bafflingly, no sexual transmission) and something else (sexual but not casual?) or in the bodies of party-going homosexual men. the echo of the early 1980s was clear. like the current pattern of a socially linked network of people (in this case, those who celebrated the first “real summer after covid” with island “raves” that have the same kind of status as an earlier generation of elite gay men’s circuit parties), aids too was initially identified among youthful gay men who succumbed to a range of known ailments at that point not considered “sexually transmitted.” they included enteric diseases, known to be endemic in one or more tropical locale; to cancers, previously confined to a totally different social group; to respiratory failure, initially misidentified as a bacteria, later identified as a kind of fungus. the link among those disparate atypical disease presentations was sex-gender/sexuality, and this connection was made quickly only because the first identified cases were patients of doctors or clinics that were able to recognize that these were gay men, a poignant tribute to the early success of the gay health movement. ta and ns: you have referred to the emergence of a “full-fledged queer health bureaucracy” (patton 2011b). could you expand on what you mean by this phrase? cp: often people invoke “bureaucracy” as an epithet, but following pierre bourdieu’s (2014) concept (itself indebted to the german social theorist max weber [(1919), 1978] who was arguing with marx about the nature of the modern state), i use it neutrally to define a specific relationship between the state and professionals. early in my documentation of the epidemic (perhaps around 1985), i wrote an essay called “from grassroots to business suits,” in which i described the transformation of liberationist groups into gay health organizations. at the time (and still) many people understood this through a loose hegemony-like model as a kind of “selling out,” but i prefer thinking of it through bourdieu’s notion of bureaucracy—that is, spaces within the state in which people with professional values framed through some form of training act “on behalf of the whole.” bourdieu suggests that this dual alliance—to “the whole” and to one’s professional norms—creates perpetual conflicts for bureaucrats that must struggle for legitimacy in separate spheres. in the early 2010s i conduct detailed research in walter lear’s private papers and understood this process more fully. behind the scenes, lesbians and gay men had worked within the fields of special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 12 medicine, social work, and psychology to lay the groundwork of a network of informal clinics that would allow gay men in particular to work quietly within the public health establishment and create about half a dozen publicly named gay clinics. that activist-bureaucrat work throughout the 1960s and 1970s was the condition of possibility for gay doctors to work with gay patients. absent that organizing, it is entirely possible that the recognition of “grid” would have occurred even later than it did. one of the interesting aspects of this formation is its roots in gay liberation—i think this meant that the groups’ sense of “acting on behalf of the whole” was specified as the gay community as a whole, placing these early bureaucratized professionals in a three-way conflict in that they had to effect their professional norms, the norms of the larger state, and the evolving shared sense of who “the community (or the movement)” should serve. if we conceptualize the transition of all the new social movements’ relationship to the state in this way, i think we can make better sense of the battles among gay men over safe sex advice, the tensions between lesbians coming from the depathologizing “well-woman” model of the women’s health movement, and the ongoing failure to fully understand the different historical trajectory that queer people of color brought to “the movement.” ta and ns: that’s a very different way to think about the relationship of movements to the state. does this help us pinpoint some of the linkages between a history of bureaucratization and a history of epidemics? cp: i was talking earlier about the epidemics that seem to me to be unrecognized as inflected in mpox and covid. your question now asks us to focus in on the specific ways in which some, but not all, epidemics shift the relationship of queer practitioners to health policy and practice. the queer health bureaucracy developed fairly rapidly during the aids epidemic because the state really had no alternative. similarly, a kind of supra-national queer bureaucracy emerged with the who and a range of international organizations. thus, when mpox appeared, the invocation of “aids denial” carried great political weight within the public health system and in gay communities because both now accepted that the initial response to aids had been framed by homophobia. however, this consensus misrecognizes the relationship between queer professionals and the state—this was the condition of possibility for identifying the early aids cases among urban gay men, and also the condition of possibility for the moral demand on the state to “act on behalf of the whole.” that is, when aids first appeared in gay urban communities, the linkage to the public health system was already strong and recently infiltrated by young, openly gay/lesbian/bisexual practitioners, who were also agitating on behalf of the (queer) “whole” within their professional organizations. the rapid development of this bureaucratic space meant that hiv could be fairly quickly reconceptualized as a sexually transmitted but blood-borne disease (these had up to this point been two distinct and separate categories of disease). the whole debate about what acts are essential to gay men’s identity special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 13 was interconnected with demands that queer health bureaucrats experienced from the professional norms to use clear medical definitions: as heather worth (verlag 2008) traced out more than a decade ago, the trajectory of gay identity went from doing a range of physical acts with other men in defiance of procreation to the exchange of semen (mainly via fucking) as a symbolic act of brotherly union. gay sex = fucking; the key was to manage the dangerousness of semen, and this was the major task of gay men’s health care up to the arrival of mpox. other sexually transmissible diseases were mitigated, if not tolerated, and hiv was managed through post-infection treatment or pre-infection prophylaxis. the idea that condoms were a widely effective health tool increasingly rang hollow. these ideas about gay men’s psychological-identity needs and the relative significance on non-hiv sexually transmissible diseases stabilized as the queer health bureaucracy devoted considerable energy to reconceptualizing its “whole” to include trans people, whose needs rearranged what had been “men’s” and “women’s” health. again, i want to remind us, gay men and lesbian women’s health movements both emerged in the 1960s, and were intertwined but still distinct in concept and in the location of their practice. lesbians fought to be included in “women’s health” (with its depathologizing well-woman focus) so gay health clinics that included lesbians also had a split habitus. trans health further stressed that conceptual conflict by utilizing the “well-body” framework to counter healthcare approaches that reduced “trans care” to what was initially conceptualized as “sex reassignment.” but trans men were also new entrants into the cultural space of male sexual desire and practice, which by the mid-2010s, included widespread use of hiv prep. this is a complex set of new linkages that should also be explored. all of these stabilities upended again when mpox arrived. at that point, queer (now including trans) health folks had to reverse gears on the definition of the disease. the latter was previously associated with skin lesions and was, as such, managed with isolation of the afflicted and careful washing and disposal of linens and clothing that might carry the fluids that leaked from the “pox.” scientists were slow to differentiate touching and rubbing from transfer of semen as the source of the men-who-had-sex-with-a-man’s infection with mpox. the narrowing of the definition of “sex” to “penetrative, with fluids” that occurred incrementally through aids education itself, ran headlong into the possibility that the stuff of foreplay—the touching and rubbing that is not really sex—might now require intervention. (remember the zika campaign tried to expand this idea, but flailed against its own definition of non-pregnancy-inducing sex as important, and “everyone else’s sex” as apparently worth the price of flu-like symptoms of most zika infections.) the reluctance to draw skin-to-skin transmission back into the fold of “things you can get in the process of getting down to sex” has to do with the trajectory of advice to gay men in the first decade of the aids pandemic. special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 14 before hiv, “venereal disease” was understood to be primarily “diseases on the skin,” even though scientists realized by the 1960s that these were also bloodborne diseases. the shift to “sexually transmitted disease” (later sexually transmitted infection) evolved to include “blood-borne diseases,” moving at least one form of hepatitis, and various diseases once more commonly contracted through consuming contaminated water or food, into the category of “std/i.” because hiv education focused so tightly on “insertive” forms of sex, sti incrementally lost any sense of “diseases on the skin,” and connoted “diseases carried in semen.” this was partly a result of efforts to destigmatize homosexuality by destigmatizing hiv, and reassuring people (correctly) that “you can’t get aids from casual contact.” but there is another reason for the strange understanding of immunity—both for the “general population” and for those who might access a vaccine. mpox is the first “new” disease to strike a still stigmatized but much more diversified “queer” community. the consternation about how to address advice to “men who have sex with men” was in part a product of the fact that the very category of “men,” and its corollary “homosexual” is under expansionist pressure.2 the question put to the research community was the extent to which mpox is spread through rubbing among “men who have sex with men” or spread through the fluid identified as the culprit in hiv. at a moment when trans health challenged settled questions within the queer health bureaucracy (itself still challenging the larger health bureaucracy), how are we to intercorrelate the categories of “men,” “those with semen,” and “those who receive semen”? “aids” seems not to have lost its metonymic relationship to gay men. this seems to raise more questions about how evolving science in a pandemic blurs the ideas of prophylaxis and immunity—that is, an immunity that is understood to be produced by a barrier and one in which people are somehow naturally non-susceptible. cp: that’s right—when science is unsettled about routes of transmission, then the logic of responses also falls apart. two internally contradictory “facts” were circulated in relationship to the first new wave of mpox—that those initially diagnosed with mpox in north america are “men who have sex with men,” but that mpox could be spread during face-to-face conversation. that is, researchers were divided about whether mpox was a “droplet.” if we followed the initial (if incorrect) logic of the first phase of the covid-19 pandemic, then we should be re-instituting social distancing and/or masks. but we don’t because “gay men” are perceived to be already contained, especially if their “diseases” require transfer of semen to places where it ought not go. in the wake of the mediagenic preexposure prophylaxis (prep), a treatment mirrors covid vaccines in that both stave off infection in the absence of any mechanical barrier. special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 15 on the other side of the intransigent idea that a disease might be always, already contained by virtue of the sort of people who have it, is the idea that we must do something to contain disease. the idea of “already contained” is complexly interrelated to the idea of a herd. border regulation that works together with quarantine (either in camps, or in homes) is the large-scale version of containment, and masks are the most intimate form, operating as a techne on each individual body. the third option is vaccines, a paradoxical techne instituted on the individual body, but part of a medium to large scale containment. border controls and enforced isolation require policing, while masking (which could be made a legal requirement and hence policeable) primarily requires the will of those who must don them. vaccination requires a combination of government distributional power and individual will. ta and ns: this reminds us of early calls for an aids vaccine. cp: indeed, much like the 1984 pronouncement by america’s then-public-health czar margaret heckler that an aids vaccine was around the corner, within four months of the first report of us cases, the response to covid-19 was framed in terms of vaccination. the public was primed to engage in mechanical prophylaxis (masks) and accept sometimes extreme limitations on their movement only until the vaccine arrived. fittingly for a donald trump–controlled government, the us launched a reality-show-like competition to produce the first vaccine under the name operation warp speed. the private-public program pitted scientific innovators (often in small tech companies) and manufacturers (often multinational big or mid pharma and the generics manufacturing industry that had developed in india, and later china, japan, and singapore, in the wake of battles of control of drug markets that had begun when highly active antiretroviral therapy promised to dampen the global hiv pandemic only if cheaper drugs could be produced). but the covid-19 vaccine rollout was hampered by public uncertainty about the speed of approval of a new vaccine technology, the shifting anti-vaccine movement, and different approaches to creating distributional justice on local and global levels.3 one of the arguments for loosening patent restrictions was allowing middle-developed countries to have “vaccine sovereignty.” although “first tier” in terms of economic prosperity, canada had been unable to get the vaccine because much of its scientific effort was put into a china-canada collaboration. in addition, the pre-purchase agreements canada had made with moderna were not honored. moderna had difficulties with its manufacturers, and canadian reporters visited some of the factories that were supposedly producing the vaccine earmarked for us, in particular, a small town in belgium that was supposedly producing the vaccine that was destined for our shores. moderna was criticized for its initial lack of enthusiasm about distributional justice, and then committed to delivering to covax, leaving canada bumped to the back of the line. the canadian vaccination special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 16 program only really got moving once the us decided to give a block of its pfizer to canada, and soon, after suspicions arose about side effects in subgroups, the us essentially dumped its astrazeneca on canada. despite the skepticism that had surrounded the covid vaccines and their rollout, at the first hint that there was a vaccine for mpox, gay health activists and public health called for its immediate use. indeed, places with large queer communities more or less demanded control over their own doses on the logic that they were best situated to serve the needs of a still partially hidden community. but what about the preventative measures that are under the individual’s control? or, put another way, whether the things we do in private have public consequences. because of the resistance to (or failure to normalize) mask wearing, combined with the mobilization of anti-vaccination “libertarians,” covid prevention has devolved into admonitions to take “individual responsibility” and “individual care,” ideas permeated with racism and its overlapping logics of classism. mpox, with its sudden invocation of vaccination as individual protection over and against other potential changes in sexual community-making, has suppressed the problems of diseases’ imbrication in intimacy and domesticity in favor of repeating the vaccine distribution politics that allowed covid vaccines to largely remain a luxury of wealthier countries that eschewed masks because they were inconvenient. can there be any globally just logic for future immunities? without a deeper understanding of the changes in global policy that occur with each new pandemic, and without a collective understanding that it is largely humans and not pathogens that drive pandemics, the answer is probably “no.” notes 1 the understanding of sars as a “respiratory virus” proved problematic in public understanding of covid-19. the easiest route of acquisition is through the nose, with the disease developing in the lungs, and the most obvious signs are respiratory; however, the virus attacks multiple systems, and these are significant in the long-term consequences of covid disease. the understanding of covid as “respiratory” meant that once these symptoms were no longer bothersome or even absent, people believed that covid was “just like the flu.” 2 the category “homosexual,” which was transformed with great effort by aids activists into “homosexually active” and the “men who have sex with men,” had to be transformed again with the emergence of a public and vocal group of “trans men” and “trans women” who are (apparently) more likely to choose “homosexually active” “(cis-)men” as partners, if only because the recent formation of a trans community was enabled (and hindered) by the stabilization of a “gay” community. interestingly, in my own local community, billboards advertising (hiv) pre-exposure prophylaxis represent a wide range of gender special section: autommunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) cindy patton, 2024 17 presentations. the new mpox vaccine tracks back to very conventional representations of persons coded as “gay man.” 3 my own province created a faster system for indigenous people and those living in care homes, but also fast-tracked the astrazeneca to younger workers in the hospitality/service industry, initially vaccinating virtually everyone in places like the ski resort whistler, which had our earliest cases, and had to shut down twice due to the concentration of global travelers and young workers, who lived in tight quarters and partied together often. references bourdieu, pierre. 2014. on the state: lectures at the collège de france, 1989–1992. translated by david fernbach. cambridge, ma: polity press. cdc. 2019. fleck, ludwik. 1979. genesis and development of a scientific fact. edited by thaddeus j. trenn and robert k. merton. translated by fred bradley and thaddeus j. trenn. chicago: university of chicago press. mckay, claude. 1922. “if we must die” [1919]. in harlem shadows: the poems of claude mckay. new york: harcourt, brace and co. shively, charley. 1983. “are you ready to die for sexual liberation?” fag rag, no. 40. weber, max. (1919) 1978. “politics as vocation.” in weber: selections in translation, translated by e. matthews and edited by w.g. runciman, 212 – 225. cambridge: cambridge university press. worth, heather. 2008. a question of pleasure: derrida, foucault, and the history of sexuality. riga, latvia: vd< verlag. author bios cindy patton is professor emeritus at simon fraser university in burnaby, british columbia (canada). her work on hiv and aids spans nearly 40 years. travis alexander is an assistant professor of english at old dominion university. his writing has appeared in american literature, boundary 2, criticism, discourse, public culture, and elsewhere. nishant shahani is professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in the department of english at washington state university vancouver. he is author of pink revolutions: globalization, hindutva, and queer triangles in contemporary india (2021) and queer retrosexualities: the politics of reparative return (2013), and coeditor of aids and the distribution of crises (2020). autoimmunities after covid: an interview with cindy patton keywords notes references author bios book review | intoxicated: race, disability, and chemical intimacy across empire, by mel y. chen (duke university press, 2023) book review | intoxicated: race, disability, and chemical intimacy across empire, by mel y. chen (duke university press, 2023) alba clevenger concordia university alba.clevenger@gmail.com mel y. chen’s most recent book, intoxicated: race, disability, and chemical intimacy across empire (2023) is as richly interdisciplinary as their previous book, animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect (2012). both texts traverse a wide range of methods and sites of inquiry, seeking political affinities between seemingly disparate forms of oppression by tracing the circulation of materials. in intoxicated, chen extends their exploration to “the fibrillations of what we might call an affective nexus between race and disability" (1), where “chemical intimacy” is a framework for thinking intoxication, race, and disability together (2). chen transgresses disciplinary boundaries, bringing a range of critical scholars into conversation, including jasbir puar’s (2017) articulation of debility, nirmala erevelles and andrea minear’s (2010) work on disability and race, jack halberstam’s (2020) concept of queer failure, along with many others. weaving between theoretical lineages including queer, black, disability, east asian, decolonial, and posthumanist studies, intoxicated makes important contributions to these fields while also carving its own space between and beyond them. the depth and breadth of chen’s multi-sited analysis is rooted in the neurodiversity of the author’s own mind where “there was so much going on” (15). the book moves through mixed scenes of affect and intoxication, including the archives of john langdon down, the politics of opium in china and in london’s chinatown, the opium wars, letters by lin tse hsu to queen victoria, the aboriginals protection and restriction of the sale of opium act in australia, artist fiona foley’s artworks clevenger, alba. 2025. review of intoxicated: race, disability, and chemical intimacy across empire, by mel y. chen (duke university press, 2023). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312. © alba clevenger, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives licence. mailto:alba.clevenger@gmail.com http://www.catalystjournal.org/ book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) alba clevenger, 2025 black opium and witnessing to silence, scenes of police violence against black people in the united states, the january 6 occupation of the united states capitol in 2021, the global covid-19 pandemic, “what could go wrong?” videos on reddit, and zombies. employing a range of methods, from archival research, linguistics, art criticism, media analysis, to autoethnography, the book zooms between micro and macro analyses of historical and contemporary moments across geographies, wielding high theory and low culture to punctuate the interpretive frame. chen’s discussion of intoxication acts as a binding agent, providing a flexible framework for understanding the materialaffective underpinnings of social culture and governance systems. intoxicated is notable for chen’s candid meta-commentary on their complex positional relationship to academia. readers become aware of some of the hidden tensions of academic research when chen writes about tense interactions with one of the john down archivists (21–22), and the back and forth with their editors over including the story of william hung (31–32). this challenge to academic rigidity is also reflected in their writing style: non-linear, occasionally opaque, leaving space for others to interpret and join in. readers can engage with the book in a chronology that appeals to them, although chen’s problematization of conventional structure and pace may equally become a barrier to access for other readers. i’m taking liberty of the flexibility in this review by presenting the chapters in reverse sequence, a (dis)order that i found conceptually generative for my own understanding. undisciplinarity is an integral part of chen’s “intoxicated method” as elaborated in chapter 3, which attends to the practices of unlearning and challenging the politics of knowledge in the academy, rejecting control, and the desire for coherence (100). they deploy the notion of a “differential being” that undoes, unlearns, and unmakes contemporary university environments through its subjectively different way of being in space, time, and sociality (101). this subjectivity interpolates categories of difference (like race and disability) while tensely navigating normative educational processes. chen draws on nathan snaza and julietta signh’s (2021) concepts of undergrowth alongside stefano harney and fred moten’s (2013) undercommons to elaborate the possibilities of critical pedagogies occurring beyond, between, and below the thresholds of educational categorization. something is always leaking from institutional grasp. this undisciplinarity is elaborated further in chen’s discussion of “brain fog” and other cognitive states of difference that are excluded from methodological and epistemological legitimacy in academia. the denial of an epistemological position in academia is a point of entanglement between disability and race in chen’s work from which cripistemology is articulated as a way of knowing through disablement/debility/intoxication. an intoxicated method simultaneously book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) alba clevenger, 2025 acknowledges the realities of intellectual engagement and asks questions about how we chose to do research and come to knowledge (139). chapter 2 attends to agitation in a range of degrees and settings, primarily political but also pharmacological, educational, and developmental. for chen, the imposition or allegation of compromised capacity through agitation cannot be separated from the material harms that toxicity engenders (80). chen explores agitation’s association with excess emotion and gestural repetition, tying it closely to scenes of revolution, drama, and drug use (67). in one case study of white masculinity, intoxication justifies the “evacuation of responsibility” (75) for sexualized violence. in another, a black woman’s experience of environmental contamination “functioned as aggressive debility” that resulted in her death at the hand of the police (76). moving further into the united states political context, white supremacist agitation in the form of violence and frenzy is entangled in the settler right to occupy space (88), while simultaneously agitation justifies the arrest of black communities (78). here, race, disability, and performance work together in what chen describes as a “troublingly generative way” as bodies are exposed to destruction “in conjunction with” their relationship with disability, disablement, debility, impairment, and chemicals (74). slowness and agitation are not only metaphors but are also linked to forms of management, securitization, policing, and discipline. in chapter 1, chen maps the affective function of slowness in the diagnosis and treatment of so-called “mongoloid idiocy” (now known as down syndrome) by john langdon down in conjunction with east asian racial characterizations and opium consumption. chen draws transnational and transhistorical lines through the legacies of medicalization, governance, trade, imperialism, colonization, immigration, and labor across australia, england, china, and the united states, in which chemicals shape social and political relations. the “twinned stories of white and black agitation” are countered by the stereotyped slowness of east asian american racial stereotypes, bearing the mark of opiate allegations (76). tracing slowness as a historical character unveils the ways that race and disability are both imbued with meaning and contribute to its making (28). chen further weaves together intoxication, race, and disability by exploring how chemical intoxication is part of chronicity, a method of governance through temporalized modes of control. they argue that the use of opium locally to sedate patients in down’s clinic and other chemical restraint in asylums constitute a “controlled synchronizing of an institutionalized population, or a temporal calibration of developmentally delayed patients understood to be in some sense outside of time” (24). incorporating the global frame of the opium wars between china and england makes visible chronicity’s reach and effect as a suppressant in both places. the two populations that are suppressed here through opium are “radically geographically separate but also, perhaps, constitutionally congenial, book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) alba clevenger, 2025 metonymically congealing like with like” (41). decentering this normative temporality through a critical disability perspective and considering chemical affects, chen posits that intoxication, rather than its absence, should be reconceptualized as the normative or default (35). drawing on m murphy’s (2017) concept of alterlife, chen’s call to presuppose intoxication instead of non-toxicity moves into an environmentalist position in which the division between body and mind is blurred, categories of purity are rejected, and questions about what is known about the condition of living with/by contaminants can be explored. in the final chapter, “afterwards: telling the end not to wait,” chen takes us into living in the world attentive to chemical affect. they chart how smoke and viruses intermingle with and modify bodies, becoming nodal points in the continuous flow of intoxicated experience. they find potential in thinking about what’s “on/off/over the edge” or “boiling over” to describe a lived moment that feels like the “end times,” namely california during the simultaneous covid-19 pandemic and wildfires in 2020 (155). their work seeks kinships among and within chemical intimacies emerging from the historically situated, contemporarily multipoplulated trouble that “we” are in together (155). chen speaks from a politically embodied sense of themselves as a spatiotemporal shifting ensemble, recounting their “complex shared wish of...interlaced, intimate, and transindividual embodiment” (163). in doing so they invite us to work alongside them, identifying the ways our own subjectivities and social histories are constituting and constituted by intoxication with a hopeful opening to unexpected solidarities. intoxicated challenges the academic preference of cognitive clarity and the assumption that cognitive imprecision of thinking marks incapacity. chen argues that practices marked by intellectual slowness, such as categorical blurring or a sensorial study through different experiences of time, give way to different paths beyond/below educationally cultivated agencies. overall, i expect chen’s writing to be generative for academics across disciplines—but it also opens out to those of different intellectual and artistic pathways who have interests in thinking bodies and chemicals together. references chen, mel y. 2012. animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. duke university press. chen, mel y. 2023. intoxicated: race, disability, and chemical intimacy across empire. duke university press. erevelles, nirmala, and andrea minear. 2010. “unspeakable offenses: untangling race and disability in discourses of intersectionality.” journal of literary & cultural disability studies 4 (2): 127–45. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/390395. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/390395 book review 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) alba clevenger, 2025 halberstam, jack. 2020. the queer art of failure. duke university press. harney, stefano, and fred moten. 2013. the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study. minor compositions. murphy, m. 2017. “alterlife and decolonial chemical relations.” cultural anthropology 32 (4): 494–503. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.02. puar, jasbir k. 2017. the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. duke university press. snaza, nathan, and julietta singh. 2021. “introduction: dehumanist education and the colonial university.” social text 39 (1 [146]): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8750064. author bio alba clevenger is an ma student in media studies at concordia university in tiohtià:ke (montreal). her current research traces lithium’s material affects through the worlds of green energy technology and psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.02 https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8750064     special section care-fully?: the question of “knowledge co-production” in arctic science     caitlin d. wylie university of virginia wylie@virginia.edu   luis felipe r. murillo university of notre dame lrosadom@nd.edu   abstract understanding and redressing the climate crisis in the arctic demands acknowledging and translating perspectives from frontline communities, environmental scientists, indigenous knowledge bearers, and social scientists. as a first approximation to the question of how arctic scientists conceptualize and enact “knowledge co-production,” we analyze how they write about it in their academic publications through a systematic literature review. based on the results, we identify the lack of clear definition and practical engagement with “co-production” understood as a practice of integrating knowledges and methodological approaches from various disciplines and cultures. we raise concerns regarding researchers’ claims of co-production without understanding what it means, which is particularly harmful for arctic communities whose knowledge practices scientists have long marginalized and exploited. in response, we argue that feminist sts scholarship provides crucial guidance on how to create and sustain meaningful relationships for knowledge co-production. these relationships can potentially subvert power inequities that have prevented many arctic science teams from breaking out of traditional disciplinary silos to create new forms of knowledge exchange, particularly those based on notions of care for collaborators, communities, and equity.     keywords collaborative research, co-production of knowledge, care, arctic research, indigenous knowledge     introduction   we appreciate the recognition in the [national science foundation’s request for proposals] of the need for research in a rapidly changing arctic to take a co-production of knowledge (cpk) approach. however, there was no meaningful effort at cpk as far as we have seen for these proposals. given the rapid pace of changes, the importance of ensuring equitable inclusion of both indigenous peoples’ knowledge and science in addressing research questions, and concerns about our changing environment, cannot be overstated. —public letter from kawerak inc. to the national science foundation, 2020   leaders of kawerak inc., a non-profit consortium that represents twenty tribes of alaska’s bering strait region, wrote this letter to the primary funder of basic research in the united states, the national science foundation (nsf), to express the widespread frustration of alaska natives with non-indigenous researchers who arrive uninvited in their communities to study various questions, ranging from ecology and geophysics to public policy, epidemiology, and infrastructure. the nsf increased this flow of scientists by selecting the arctic as one of its ten research foci or “big questions” beginning in 2016. in 2019, the first year of the navigating the new arctic (nna) funding program, the nsf funded 30 million us dollars’ worth of new research into the arctic’s “natural, social, and built systems” in the context of rapid climate change (nsf 2018). as social scientists on one nna-funded research team, we ask in this paper how arctic researchers understand “co-production of knowledge,” as an nsf-promoted approach to integrating knowledges across social and epistemic boundaries. this tension between nsf-funded researchers and local communities indexes the demand for carefully entering relationships of reciprocal obligation to create meaningful collaborative ties (murillo 2022; yua et al. 2022), particularly for communities that have long been subjected to exploitative research as indigenous arctic communities have (erickson 2020; lanzarotta 2020; turner 2008; wiseman 2016). we suggest that scientists’ ongoing attempts to understand and implement co-productive methodologies (efforts recently ballooned with nsf funding) offer insights into how collaborative knowledge production can reproduce—or, perhaps, upend—colonial and imperial power relations. for example, we call attention to alternative approaches beyond the nsf’s and scientists’ portrayals of co-production, including those founded on indigenous thought, feminist sts, decolonialism, and frameworks of care. the nsf advocates for collaborative knowledge production in general through its recent focus on ten “big questions,” which are important social and epistemic problems whose study relies on what the nsf calls “convergence research.” convergence research involves researchers from several disciplines collaborating to produce “integrated knowledge” that transcends the collaborators’ disciplines. convergence research is implicitly conceptualized as researcherand discipline-focused, which leaves out other kinds of knowledge. this omission is very troubling for the rights of people and communities whose knowledge practices have been historically marginalized or excluded by the technosciences. in response to arctic communities’ complaints about exploitative, extractive research, the nsf’s nna program has tried to reduce this exclusion by including indigenous knowledges as a component of convergence, specifically through the methodology of co-production of knowledge. to sts scholars, “co-production” more familiarly means sheila jasanoff’s (2004) conception of the simultaneous construction of nature and society. but this is not the meaning that the nsf ascribes to co-production, as shown in the nna program’s first request for proposals: “community collaborations and knowledge co-production with arctic indigenous communities are encouraged in both [funding] tracks, when appropriate. nsf identifies co-production of knowledge as: research in which local and indigenous people and organizations fully engage in the complete research process from the development of questions, to the collection, use and stewardship of data, and interpretation and application of results” (nsf 2018). this language signaled new institutional support for collaborative research with indigenous communities, in the form of “knowledge co-production.” however, the letter from kawerak inc. (2020) accused the teams funded under this request of not actually doing co-production. worse, the 2019 revised request for proposals takes a less encouraging tone: “knowledge co-production with arctic indigenous communities is encouraged only when appropriate and must be strongly justified and supported in the proposal text and project budget” (nsf 2019, emphasis added). despite the implication that co-production is acceptable but not necessary, the 2019 request includes a new paragraph explaining what co-production means and where to find resources about how to do it. thus, the nsf proposes one approach for researchers to integrate multiple kinds of knowledge, including indigenous knowledges and various academic disciplinary knowledges, to understand the environmental, infrastructural, and social effects of climate change through collaborative methodologies. yet communities, like those represented by kawerak inc., are not experiencing what they want co-production to be. what, then, is going wrong? whereas the technosciences are formed through boundary-making practices that operate as exclusionary forces, co-production calls for researchers to move beyond epistemic boundaries and disciplinary silos. in response, nna-funded teams have been attempting—and struggling—to change long-established methods of data extraction without community involvement by “integrating” indigenous, scientific, and social scientific knowledges. there are many reasons for the challenge, such as entrenched practices of gatekeeping and competition in the technosciences, the unfamiliarity of “co-production” for many researchers, and overall resistance to change in scientific practices and to knowledge practices that do not align with naturalist epistemologies. it is possible that a major funder’s promotion of “co-production” ends up incentivizing researchers to identify it with an administrative burden, rather than a crucial effort in relationship-building and reparation. this study thus raises broader questions of how funder advocacy for a particular framework may affect communities, researchers, and knowledge. in this paper we investigate possible roots of this problem by examining how arctic researchers portray what co-production means to their peers through scholarly publications. for instance, we found that many authors argue that co-production is “too difficult” to do in practice due to a variety of factors (e.g., misaligned timelines between research cycles and subsistence lifestyles, community members’ lack of access to research funding, failure to find research questions of mutual interest, unequal commitment to a project, limited internet access for communities, etc.). in response to these kinds of excuses for not pursuing equitable collaborations, sts researchers in feminist and indigenous studies call for intersectional and pluriversal forms of knowledge production that demand basing collaboration on recognition of power relations between scientists and their “others” (e.g., collins and bilge 2020; escobar 2018; haraway 1988; harding 2004; murphy 2015; viseu 2015). climate research in the arctic provides a valuable window into these changing processes of research practice. specifically, it builds on long legacies of extractive, colonial, and imperial research; relies on access to indigenous lands and knowledges; and carries crucial implications for understanding and mitigating climate change for communities in the arctic as well as around the world. furthermore, the nsf’s encouragement of co-production offers a currently unrealized but potentially key opportunity for building towards more indigenous-led research by empowering arctic communities to conduct their own research agendas. this paper uses arctic researchers’ conceptions of knowledge co-production to raise broader questions about what it means to exchange knowledge by collaborating across sociocultural, political, and epistemic divides. we first consider the politics of “knowledge integration” from the perspectives of sts scholars, indigenous scholars and communities, and feminists. we ask how arctic research teams interpret co-production, based on document analysis of how they write about it in academic publications. our results show widespread lack of comprehension and limited application of co-production as a theory and practice. the nsf’s current attempt to include arctic communities in research is so far yielding few thoughtful interpretations or strategies of co-production. we suggest that considering other approaches beyond co-production can inform epistemic practices that strive to challenge exploitative ties between indigenous and non-indigenous knowledge producers. in particular, feminist frameworks of care call attention to and can help address many of the problems we see in research teams’ portrayals of co-production, such as by recognizing and reforming power structures, empowering excluded knowledge makers, and celebrating marginalized knowledges such as those drawn from affect, experience, and indigenous cultures. taking these care-based approaches as foundations for research collaborations could enable more equitable and respectful relations between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples as well as between scientists and social scientists, and researchers and the public.   theories of “knowledge integration” the question of how to conduct collaborative research has been at the forefront of contemporary sts scholarship, alongside a growing body of literature on community-based and citizen science (e.g., dosemagen et al. 2022; kimura and kinchy 2016; s.a. wylie et al. 2014). one of the key assumptions in this debate is that sociotechnical and environmental crises—such as socioeconomic inequity, environmental injustice, infrastructural failure—are best addressed through collaborative approaches that foster pluriversal epistemologies. “pluriversality” means designing practices where many worlds fit, as taught to us by the zapatistas (escobar 2018). this inclusive concept is informed by and well aligned with feminism and decolonial thought in sts (escobar 2018; haraway 1988, 2016; harding 1992; turkle and papert 1990; a. wylie 2015). in particular, decolonial thought stemming from indigenous, mestiza, and transnational feminist scholarship articulates how calls for “diversity” and “pluralism” can harmfully obscure power relations by claiming symmetry or flattened hierarchies between kinds of knowledge and knowledge makers (cusicanqui 2012; liboiron 2021; mohanty 2003; tallbear 2014). instead, different kinds of knowledge should be recognized as valuable for their histories, power dimensions, and social contexts, rather than being dismissed as too cultural to be credible. accordingly, theoretical and methodological frameworks should guide potential collaborators to recognize power differentials and redress entrenched exploitative relationships to create teams with distributed decision-making power and more equitable conditions for research. sts scholars have historically proposed various approaches to understanding collaborative and competitive dynamics in the technosciences, including classics such as star and griesemer’s (1989) “boundary objects,” lave and wenger’s (1991) “situated learning” in communities of practice, collins and evans’s (2007) “interactional expertise,” galison’s (1997) “trading zones,” callon’s (2009) “hybrid forums,” viseu’s (2015) conception of “collaboration as care” (see carrigan and c.d. wylie, introduction, this issue), and “sociotechnical integration research” (e.g., richter et al. 2017). foundational studies in sts did not problematize intersectional inequities of color, gender, and power, probably because they concentrated on euro-american laboratories with scientists of similar racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. sts scholars have since challenged these established lines of inquiry by applying some of their critiques of science to their own discipline. for example, helen watson-verran and david turnbull (1995) argued that science is an example of indigenous knowledge. their explanation is that both systems are inherently local to their contexts, contrary to the stereotypes of science as universal, rational, and objective and of indigenous knowledge as cultural, locally bounded, and, thus, unscientific (watson-verran and turnbull 1995, 114). as such, they argue, “one way of capitalizing on the strength of social studies of science, and of avoiding the reflexive dilemma, is to devise ways in which alternative knowledge systems can be made to interrogate each other” (139). however, indigenous scholars object to the idea of their knowledge being used to augment, improve, or otherwise serve western knowledge. they are the sole rights bearers to their knowledges, while watson-verran and turnbull—and perhaps the nsf—seem to assume outsiders’ right to access indigenous knowledges and knowledge holders for the purposes of advancing the technosciences. comparing indigenous knowledges with western knowledge can be demeaning, especially if researchers test indigenous conceptions of nature against western ones as a standard of legitimate knowledge. as sherry ortner used to say in class to one of us, “we [anthropologists] were all relativists until we discovered power.” calls for collaboration assume the importance of multiple forms of knowing and practicing science. this assumption comes from various perspectives, such as the nsf’s concept of convergence to feminists’ celebration of situated ways of knowing (e.g., women’s experiences, scientific sensibilities, shared stories) to sts scholars’ calls for the potential for pluralism to strengthen knowledge (e.g., douglas 2004; escobar 2018; galison 1997; a. wylie 2015; c.d. wylie 2019). yet questions remain about who benefits from knowledge sharing. as alison jones and kuni jenkins point out, “indigenous access into the realms of meaning of the dominant other is hardly required; members of marginalized/colonized groups are immersed in it daily. it is the colonizer, wishing to hear, who calls for dialogue” (2008, 12, emphasis original). in this view, then, it is empowered researchers (e.g., western academics) who benefit from collaboration, not necessarily marginalized groups (e.g., indigenous knowledge bearers). indigenous communities around the world have been wary of collaboration with western scientists. they have historically and powerfully challenged the assumption that indigenous knowledge practices are comparable or compatible with western science (nadasdy 1999; ríos, dion, and leonard 2020). they have also warned against the instrumentalization of indigenous knowledges to benefit western understandings and policies through recurrent forms of extraction. instead, some communities have called for national funders to pay for indigenous communities to conduct their own research (e.g., inuit tapiriit kanatami 2018). supporting community-led research would entail investing in indigenous access to scientific labs, equipment, and research careers as well as promoting indigenous research methodologies (reano 2020; smith 1999; tallbear 2014; wilson 2008). from this debate we learn that one way to contribute towards indigenous research sovereignty could be through collaborative methodologies that center care for relationships with special attention to the institutional power dynamics that have long invisibilized indigenous communities, their knowledges, and, subsequently, their research priorities. proponents of interdisciplinary collaboration through frameworks of care likewise argue that recognizing power dynamics among knowledges and knowledge holders is essential to address other inequities (hackett and rhoten 2011; lyle 2017; smolka et al. 2021). one way to do this is to identify shared “matters of care” among diverse groups, to align their values and thereby establish care-based motivations for working together (puig de la bellacasa 2011). however, identifying shared values should not mean erasing the differences between groups (jones and jenkins 2008). rather, care-full collaborations—our term—should acknowledge collaborators’ diverse experiences, worldviews, and right to self-determination. this is one form of caring about and caring for each other as everyday practices of knowledge production, which also includes recognizing everyone’s labor (and especially undervalued and invisible labor, such as arctic logistical support organizations composed of indigenous science workers), emotion and affect, and ways of knowing (e.g., boenig-liptsin et al. 2022; branch and duché 2022; murphy 2015; viseu 2015). indigenous communities have proposed frameworks for integrating multiple forms of knowing in ways that serve their values and needs, in contrast to institutional technoscientific practices (in the alaskan context, e.g., see erickson 2020; itchuaqiyaq 2023; rudolf 2023). one example is the framework of “two-eyed seeing,” in which people learn to apply indigenous and western worldviews simultaneously and equally—one through each eye—to interpret nature holistically (bartlett, marshall, and marshall 2012). developed by albert marshall, an elder of mi’kmaw first nations, this framework has been applied in several contexts including science education, natural resource management, policymaking, and collaborative research. a similar framework is the “three-track” methodology, developed by an environmental scientist, stephane mclachlan, whom two indigenous communities in canada hired to facilitate their interactions with government scientists to address industrial water pollution (blacker 2021). this methodology involves indigenous knowledge, western scientific knowledge, and a middle track between the two comprised of relevant, accessible information selected by practitioners from each knowledge system. mclachlan emphasized the importance of not subsuming indigenous knowledge into western knowledge, but rather keeping the two separate with a middle ground made of beliefs and practices that the communities and the government scientists curated for the other group to understand. this approach supports indigenous communities in protecting their knowledge practices fully from outsiders, who might exploit or dismiss it as so often happens in “settler science” projects (blacker 2021). instead, the indigenous communities chose what, how, and when they wanted to share in order to accomplish the goals they negotiated in common with the government scientists, which, in this case, meant identifying carcinogens in this environment and their health effects. three-track methodology is indigenous-led, even when conducted by a non-indigenous facilitator hired by a tribe, as mclachlan was. there is a growing body of literature on indigenous research methodologies written by indigenous scholars and calling for research led by indigenous communities (e.g., grande 2008; liboiron 2021; smith 1999; wilson 2008). for example, the concept of “indigenous data sovereignty” extends indigenous rights of self-determination and territorial autonomy to include any data collected from that land or culture (carroll, rodriguez-lonebear, and martinez 2019; rainie et al. 2017). this assertion of indigenous stewardship of data highlights the colonialism of past and current research in which non-indigenous researchers collect data from indigenous places and people and then leave, without providing any explanation, compensation, recognition, or benefit for the indigenous communities (e.g., inuit tapiriit kanatami 2018). conversely, indigenous data sovereignty identifies data extraction as an extension of the historic exploitation of resources from indigenous communities, including through commercialization and appropriation of traditional knowledge through bioprospecting, also known as “biopiracy” (brown 2003; hayden 2004). crucially, the nsf does not conceptualize co-production as indigenous-led. rather, like co-learning, co-creation, community-engaged research, participatory research, and other similar frameworks, co-production seems to imply close partnership between scientists and non-scientists. as the nsf put it in their 2021 nna request for proposals, “a co-produced approach includes research in which local and indigenous peoples and organizations fully engage in the complete research process cycle from the development of research questions; to the collection, use and stewardship of data; and the interpretation, application, and dissemination of results” (nsf 2021). communities and researchers often have different assumptions of what community engagement in the research process means, on a spectrum from being invited to comment on researchers’ project plan to creating a project plan with researchers. this positioning is echoed in kawerak inc.’s (2020) letter to the nsf to protest researchers’ failure to include them as true, reciprocal partners in nna projects. the nsf’s expectation that nna projects investigate “natural, social, and built systems” through convergence and co-production led a research team to add us as social scientists to their existing proposal. these researchers had submitted a prior proposal to study arctic infrastructures with a team of architects, environmental scientists, community partners (from local indigenous and government authorities), and researchers at federal labs. that proposal was not funded, due in part to reviewers’ criticism of an underdeveloped plan for co-production across disciplines and with residents. in response, the team invited the first author, caitlin d. wylie, a social scientist who studies collaboration among research workers (e.g., scientists, technicians, students, volunteers), to guide the team’s co-production. wylie expanded this facilitation role to be founded upon a study of the team’s co-production, to contribute to knowledge about integrative knowledge making as well as to inform our team’s attempts to co-produce ethically in practice. the team also invited the second author, luis felipe r. murillo, a social scientist with technical expertise in open technologies for community-based environmental research. murillo expanded this role to include the study and design of data management systems that prioritize community demands for digital sovereignty. the experience of working as social scientists in the context of arctic science led to our initial puzzlement over how co-production was conceived and conducted in nna projects more broadly, thus inspiring this study.   methodology we draw from our expertise in the study of technoscientific practices to examine how arctic researchers portray “co-production” in their publications. accordingly, we conducted a systematic literature review using web of science, the primary publication database for environmental scientists. we focus on science-centered publications to better understand the particular context of the nna program and our project. as a result, the dataset is incomplete but still representative. web of science largely omits publications in non-science journals, as well as all unpublished and unwritten perspectives. for example, indigenous communities often share knowledge on co-production directly, such as through guidelines for researchers, websites, conference talks, or letters like kawerak inc.’s (e.g., see wilkens and datchoua-tirvaudey’s list [2022, 135]). they also publish their ideas in academic journals in a variety of disciplines outside of science, as well as write influential policy documents for funders and governments (e.g., inuit tapiriit kanatami 2018). these sources deserve attention in future studies to understand how arctic residents perceive co-production and other forms of research. our focus here is to investigate how arctic scientists understand co-production, as a proxy for the effect that the nsf’s promotion of co-production has had thus far on theories and practices of research collaboration. on may 3, 2022, we searched for “coproduction + arctic” and “co-production + arctic” (due to inconsistencies in the spelling of co-production), which together returned 112 papers. of these, we excluded 41 papers for mentioning co-production only in the reference or authors’ biographies, meaning carbon monoxide (“co production”) or the joint production of a film, or being duplicates. this cleaning left a dataset of 71 papers. we loaded these papers into zotero and exported a spreadsheet of their metadata (i.e., author names, paper title, journal title, year published, abstract). wylie did preliminary analysis of several papers’ abstracts to identify other features to allow us to compare the papers’ portrayals of co-production: each paper’s “co-production” definition, reference, example, and whether it critiques co-production; study location; discipline of journal; disciplines of authors; and whether any authors identify as indigenous or representatives of indigenous groups. wylie then analyzed the papers with the help of an undergraduate research assistant. murillo contributed to the zotero library, read the papers independently, and performed a second pass on the analysis performed by wylie and the research assistant for the identification of themes. finally, the whole team performed a third and final pass of qualitative analysis that informed the findings we present below.   findings here we paint an initial picture of co-production publications as a dataset with descriptive statistics, and then discuss qualitative patterns we have identified. most of the 71 papers were published between 2016 and 2022, with only 9 (13 percent) published before then, with the earliest in 2003. these 9 perhaps informed the nsf’s adoption of the term co-production for their first nna request for proposals in 2018. probably as a result of that request, 2019 and 2020 saw steep increases in numbers of papers mentioning co-production. the most common geographic region of the papers’ studies is north america (51 percent, united states and/or canada) and the next largest group of papers (29 percent) reports on studies that took place in multiple countries. this trend suggests that co-production is largely—but not entirely—a north american concept thus far. the papers were published in 38 different journals (plus four books or edited volumes), which we categorized as scientific (42 percent), social scientific or policy-focused (36 percent), or interdisciplinary (22 percent). this is a relatively even split between the three categories, with a slight bias towards science due to our search on a science-focused database. we used the same categories for each paper’s author team—that is, whether the authors are all scientists or all social scientists based on their affiliations or, when we were unsure, their professional websites. if not, then we labeled that paper’s authorship “interdisciplinary.” fifty-eight percent of the papers had interdisciplinary author teams, 28 percent had all scientists, and 14 percent all social scientists. this trend suggests that social scientists alone are not the primary authors of the term co-production; rather, co-production is likely to entail social scientists working with scientists. in comparison, there are more author teams of all scientists than all social scientists, suggesting that at least some scientists feel comfortable writing about co-production without a co-author from the social sciences (or another discipline or a non-academic position, including representatives of indigenous communities). this situation might partly explain the wide range of conceptions of co-production in this dataset, if scientists are adopting (or, more likely, name-dropping without understanding) this term without an expert to guide them. likewise, only 31 percent of papers had an author whom we could identify as indigenous or as employed to represent an indigenous group. for a concept that is closely tied to respect for indigenous communities’ knowledge and sovereignty, this percentage is surprisingly low. it may reflect researchers’ struggle to learn how to collaborate with arctic communities, who have been flooded with requests for partnerships since the nna program began. we surmise that the representation of indigenous communities as co-authors is an important component of co-production because it forces researchers to give their local partners power over researchers’ most valued output, publications. how do these papers define co-production? first of all, not all of them do. many papers only use it as a keyword, in the abstract, or in the text without elaboration. eight papers (11 percent) used the term without a definition, and four (6 percent) only implied definitions in context. the other 59 papers provided some explanation of the term (83 percent), though only 18 papers (25 percent) referenced definitions given by other sources. few papers provided any discussion of the implications of those definitions or why they were chosen. this low engagement with the term may suggest that these authors assume that everyone knows what co-production means or imply that it is not worth discussing. the variety of the provided definitions, though, suggests otherwise. we defined three categories of the explicit definitions that the fifty-nine papers provide for co-production. the first is jasanoff’s (2004) theory of co-production—namely, that how we produce science and society (especially policymaking and governance) through our beliefs, values, and actions are inextricably linked. for example, a few papers applied jasanoff’s concept to argue that resource management policy is co-produced with scientific knowledge. we wonder if these researchers were trying to use co-production in the nsf’s sense and came across jasanoff’s work. while the two concepts could be related, we are uncertain about their linkage, if any. the second category of definitions is a generic implication of pluralism through collaboration with various “stakeholders” (that colonial term that circulates with effective erasure of its history), including academic disciplines and/or community partners. papers that exemplify this meaning include projects in which wildlife ecologists consulted local policymakers about species management, and sea ice scientists and snowmobile users who mapped safe ice routes together. the third category is a subset of the second one with a more specific focus on the integration of indigenous and technoscientific knowledges. this definition is, we surmise, what the nsf intended. it is also the commonly understood definition among proponents of collaborative scientific research to benefit indigenous communities, although, as we’ve seen, this conception is not as sovereignty-serving as indigenous-led research. these papers do not always capture this notion in the way that the nsf or indigenous community members intend; some are patronizing or downright discriminatory with respect to indigenous knowledge. for example, devin waugh and co-authors wrote, “the research found that inuvialuit beluga harvesters possess detailed rational knowledge of beluga, particularly regarding hunting techniques and food preparation…inuvialuit knowledge is limited to anecdotal reasoning drawing on generalized observations of beluga and the accounts of others” (2018, 242). the insidious link here between traditional knowledge and irrationality has been demolished long ago even by euro-american anthropologists from culturalist and rationalist traditions (lévi-strauss 1966; radin 1927). the authors’ seeming surprise at the hunters’ “detailed rational knowledge” is made worse by their dismissal of that knowledge as “anecdotal.” those "anecdotes," of course, derive from indigenous communities’ thousands of years of observation and experimentation, passed on as narratives that constitute the community memory that underlies both indigenous and, as watson-verran and turnbull (1995) point out, scientific knowledges. social scientists, such as ourselves, are also accustomed to the classification of our findings as “anecdotal,” which, sociologically speaking, stems from a language practice to establish a boundary between those who get to speak truth in the realm of science and those who do not (ferreira da silva 2022). despite a few conspicuous failures in understanding co-production as creating knowledge with indigenous communities, most papers in this category argued for co-production as a key methodology to achieve diverse goals. for some teams, these goals were to improve science by enriching it with insights from indigenous knowledge, such as expertise about a locality from lived experience and/or oral-history-preserved information. this approach reflects an openness to co-production with a more pluriversal approach to the socioenvironmental challenges that the arctic faces. however, it can also justify extractive research that advances the sciences with no benefits for arctic communities. other teams hoped to improve the success of their proposed policy initiatives, such as managing natural resources and wildlife, by partnering with indigenous and other residents to collectively craft policy that meets everyone’s needs or, more cynically, to invite residents’ input as a token to improve their compliance. the goals that best serve equitable, care-full collaboration were those that focus on co-production as a means to create reciprocal ties with indigenous communities. these three definitions of co-production—respectively, as jasanoff’s co-construction of knowledge and society, as generic collaboration, or as collaboration specifically between researchers and indigenous communities”—are different in meaning, practice, and epistemic and ethical implications. they reflect arctic researchers’ confusion about the term and about how the nsf wants them to do research. these papers generally argue that co-production is a good solution to problems of incomplete scientific knowledge, ineffective policy, and the long history of exploitation of arctic communities in the name of research. some papers also imply researchers’ resistance to collaborating with residents, such as in barbed comments dismissing indigenous knowledge, complaints about communities’ notions of time and priorities as conflicting with research project cycles, and blame for communities who do not engage with a research team as that team wants. these complaints reinforce the infrastructure of naturalist knowledge making as a neocolonial enterprise. indigenous communities complain too about the challenges of co-production, as in kawerak inc.’s (2020) letter, and advocate for more indigenous-led research. the previous norm of data extraction with no community participation is not an option in their view, while scientists who complain about how hard it is to work with communities seem to assume that it is, in fact, acceptable to opt out. only 11 of the papers (15 percent) include critique of co-production as a theory or a practice. the other 60 papers (85 percent) mention it without discussion or promote it as good without explaining why. this trend suggests an unquestioning uptake of the term by arctic scientists, probably due to the nsf’s use of the term. while this finding demonstrates the power that funders have to influence scholars’ adoption of theoretical and methodological frameworks, it worries us that researchers are not being careful to understand the concept before they (claim to) use it. understanding the term must be the first step before researchers attempt to enact co-production. it’s likely that this unthoughtful use of funder-promoted concepts is a problem in all contexts of research collaboration between western and indigenous knowledge makers, beyond climate research in the arctic. those eleven papers offer diverse critiques and to varying extents, but they usefully shed some light on concerns among practitioners of co-production. several papers argue that the effects of long-standing power inequities between indigenous communities and researchers threaten co-production’s success and even feasibility (e.g., armitage et al. 2011; falardeau, raudsepp-hearne, and bennett 2019; yua et al. 2022). camilla brattland and tero mustonen even found that “the projects that seem to fulfill arctic expectations of traditional knowledge co-production with science (projects with high legitimacy) seem to have the least impact on policy” (2018, 375) in the case of salmon management in norway and finland. this disappointing trend demonstrates, they argue, that “expectations at the international policy level towards traditional knowledge integration with science are at times unrealistically high” (375). these papers do not intend to reject co-production by emphasizing the neocolonial power relations involved. rather, they warn of these relations’ importance so that researchers will approach co-production with power in mind and thus act accordingly to respect and empower indigenous partners and arctic communities. many of these papers propose practical advice for doing co-production. for example, ellam yua et al. (2022, 3) provide a detailed framework for co-production with arctic indigenous communities, illustrated by a diagram of concentric rings of concepts (e.g., trust and respect, sovereignty, relationships) and actions (e.g., problem definition, reciprocity, control of information) that center on knowledge systems and are all enveloped by equity. similarly, jan wilkens and alvine datchoua-tirvaudey offer a step-by-step framework “to co-produce mutually beneficial research” (2022, 140) with arctic indigenous communities. their process focuses on researcher training, such as reading communities’ protocols and research guidance as well as academic work on co-production; learning communities’ research needs to co-design shared questions; and checking with communities during the research process to allow methodological adaptations and respectful sharing of useful results. m.d. robards et al. likewise propose five characteristics of effective co-production: “1) evolving communities of practice, 2) iterative processes for defining problems and solutions…3) presence of boundary organizations, such as a government agency, university, or co-management council…4) the consistent provision of sufficient funds and labor that may transcend any one specific project goal or funding cycle, and 5) long temporal scales” (2018, 203). as a more specific intervention, sue moore and donna hauser (2019) propose using the seasonal cycles of arctic environments and cultures as a way to structure relationships between communities and researchers who want to study marine mammals together. similarly, shari fox et al. (2020) use the concept of “human-relevant environmental variables” to guide co-productive research about arctic weather, as a way to conceptually bridge indigenous and scientific knowledges. l.l. loseto et al. (2020) argue that a crucial and missing component of co-production is indigenous participation in peer review and journal editing. accordingly, they propose steps towards more inclusion of indigenous knowledge and knowledge holders in academic journals. other critiques aim at institutions’ promotion of co-production. for example, evgeniia sidorova (2020) criticizes the arctic council, an intergovernmental organization of arctic countries, for providing mere “lip service” about co-production rather than meaningfully incorporating it into its research and policy work. on the other hand, nicole klenk and katie meehan (2015) warn that funders and institutions should not require co-production. they worry that “the integration imperative conceals the friction, antagonism, and power inherent in knowledge co-production, which in turn can exclude innovative and experimental ways of understanding and adapting to climate change” (klenk and meehan 2015, 160). in this view, forcing researchers and residents to (try to) co-produce knowledge can obscure fraught power dynamics and prevent the creation of more equitable methodologies. instead, klenk and meehan propose three approaches that decenter western knowledge and do not strive to integrate multiple forms of knowing: triangulation, the multiple evidence-based approach, and scenario building (160). these eleven papers’ calls for conceptual focus on power dynamics alongside practical suggestions for addressing power relations is what seems to be needed for future co-productive work in the arctic. rather than accepting co-production as self-evident or an inherent good, we identify the necessity for care-fully and collectively addressing what co-production means for all team members in everyday research practices.   conclusion in this article we took a first step in examining “knowledge co-production” based on how arctic researchers write about their conceptions of interdisciplinary collaborative research. most of the papers we analyzed (58 percent) were written by scholars from different disciplines, suggesting that research teams recognize the need for various kinds of knowledge. but only 31 percent of the papers include indigenous or indigenous organization-affiliated authors. this is a start, but much more care-work is needed to support indigenous scholars and community organizations. in anthropology, for example, some authors include the community they study in a paper’s author list. some might consider it mere virtue signaling, but it can powerfully indicate and contribute to social ties of trust and reciprocity. one paper in our dataset offered an inspiring challenge to norms of scientific authorship by listing ellam yua as lead author, which is a yup’ik term meaning “the spirit or person of the universe” (yua et al. 2022, 4). the authors explain that “by acknowledging the work of ellam yua via inclusion as an author, we illustrate both the importance of indigenous lived experiences and respect for interconnections between everything that makes up the arctic” (4–5). approaches like this help researchers problematize entrenched norms about what counts as a meaningful contribution and who counts as contributors in producing knowledge, such as about the fast-changing arctic. this study opens up broader and urgent questions for scholars of sts and feminist thought as well as technoscience researchers and funders. for example, how do research funders’ promotions of particular frameworks for collaboration affect how researchers in a variety of disciplines and contexts design and conduct projects of socio-environmental import? accordingly, how might care inform collaborative research across established sociotechnical and epistemic borders? studies grounded in various genealogies of feminist sts offer crucial insights into the ethical and epistemic importance of embracing positionality and pluriversality through everyday research practices. other important sources of guidance for scientists are methodologies of action research, which integrate community work with social research based on community-informed agendas, as well as ongoing sts debates about public engagement in research. we suggest learning from these approaches as forms of care-full engagement with knowledge bearers of minoritized communities, thereby fostering relationships that recognize a legacy of active abuse and exclusion perpetrated by technoscientific projects in the arctic with a view toward reparation and solidarity building through research collaboration. from the emergent literature on co-production, unfortunately, we learn that researchers’ understanding and practical experience with the term is rather weak. yet there are practical demands that every researcher must attend to before “parachuting” into a community to pitch a project. these demands include equitable distribution of funds and decision-making power between researchers and communities, as well as valuing multiple ways of knowing such as by following longer and more flexible timelines for project outputs (e.g., erickson 2020; robards et al. 2018). first nations in canada, for instance, emphasize the importance of researchers being invited by a community. these kinds of approaches can build the respectful, meaningful, and reciprocal relationships that marginalized communities call for (tsosie et al. 2022). this line of work is slower and harder than a researcher defining a project alone or with colleagues with the same disciplinary background. it is also more epistemically plural and socially meaningful. this orientation is crucial for care-full research. what we see lacking in published mentions of co-production, in sum, is what we find in the calls for plural epistemologies that rely on feminist and indigenous solidarity for knowledge making. we hope our findings call attention to arctic researchers’ need for more thoughtful engagement with co-production in theory and practice. not every research team needs to reinvent what co-production means; however, every team should think care-fully in listening sessions with community members about how co-production should translate into concrete research tasks. from scholarship in feminist and indigenous sts, knowledge co-production opens the opportunity for acknowledging and deconstructing what denise ferreira da silva (2022) has called the “intrastructures” of technoscientific epistemologies that dismiss particular knowledge practices as “anecdotal” and “unsystematic” and therefore not credible. intrastructures organize at a microscale how symbolic power is exercised through the classification and active exclusion of what counts as truth-telling (veridiction) in scientific discourse. we learn from this line of scholarship that recognizing cultural and epistemic violence committed by past researchers is step number zero in the process of challenging entrenched assumptions built into knowledge hierarchies. studying how we strive for this change in perspective will yield key insights into how researchers and residents can work together in pursuit of social-justice-serving research. studies of co-production can thereby also inform feminist ideas about how theories and practices of care can help researchers navigate other epistemic and cultural divisions, beyond science and indigeneity and below the arctic. co-producing knowledge about complex sociotechnical problems through care-full collaboration across various kinds of boundaries can help us work towards a more equitable present and future through scientific practices.   acknowledgements we are grateful to hannah bradley and two reviewers for thoughtful feedback on drafts of this paper, aditi iyengar for research assistance, and mackenzie nelson for presenting this research at the 2022 american geophysical union fall meeting.   references armitage, derek, fikert berkes, aaron dale, erik kocho-schellenberg, and eva patton. 2011. “co-management and the co-production of 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2022. “researching climate justice: a decolonial approach to global climate governance.” international affairs 98 (1): 125–43. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab209. wilson, shawn. 2008. research is ceremony: indigenous research methods. black point, ns: fernwood publishing. wiseman, matthew s. 2016. “unlocking the ‘eskimo secret’: defence science in the cold war canadian arctic, 1947–1954.” journal of the canadian historical association 26 (1): 191–223. https://doi.org/10.7202/1037202ar. wylie, alison. 2015. “a plurality of pluralisms: collaborative practice in archaeology.” in objectivity in science, edited by flavia padovani, alan richardson, and jonathan y. tsou, 189–210. cham: springer international. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14349-1_10. wylie, caitlin d. 2019. “the plurality of assumptions about fossils and time.” history and philosophy of the life sciences 41 (2): 21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-019-0260-3. wylie, sara ann, kirk jalbert, shannon dosemagen, and matt ratto. 2014. “institutions for civic technoscience: how critical making is transforming environmental research.” information society 30 (2): 116–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2014.875783. yua, ellam, julie raymond-yakoubian, raychelle aluaq daniel, and carolina behe. 2022. “a framework for co-production of knowledge in the context of arctic research.” ecology and society 27 (1): 34. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-12960-270134.     author bios caitlin d. wylie is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at the university of virginia.   luis felipe r. murillo is an assistant professor of anthropology at university of notre dame.       book review | making gaybies: queer reproduction and multiracial feeling, by jaya keaney (duke university press, 2023)     kedi zhou university of southern california kedizhou@usc.edu   i started reading making gaybies in july 2024, during a turbulent time in american politics marked by joe biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race and kamala harris making headlines with her commitment to restoring roe v. wade, especially in light of recent republican efforts to reject ivf bills that aimed to protect access to fertility treatments and make them more affordable, while also regulating ivf by framing embryos as human lives. in the us context where i teach and research, discourse around reproductive rights has been more polarized than ever. against this backdrop, making gaybies becomes particularly intriguing as it unpacks a different yet equally important side of the story. while in the united states, the national conversation often centers on reproductive choice in conventional terms, jaya keaney’s focus on queer family-making shifts away from discourses about “choice” to the deliberate racial construction of chosen families, where kinship is as much about intentional bonds as it is about biological connections. making gaybies explores the process of queer family formation in australia—particularly the decisions that prospective queer parents make regarding donor conception and surrogacy, choices that reflect their own racial and cultural identities. keaney draws on eve kosofsky sedgwick’s method of “studying athwart” (26) or uncovering and engaging with the less visible, intimate, or oblique aspects of relationships and identities. “athwart” emphasizes the fluidity and turbulence of human interaction, often overlooked in traditional academic analyses but central to keaney’s interviews with queer parents. this method suits keaney’s research on race and queerness within queer family-making, wherein such identities do not compose static categories but spark intercorporeal fields that shape and are shaped by “embodiment attachment, and subjectivity” (26). keaney’s primary object of analysis is personal narratives about family-making experiences, revealing the incredible depth of consideration queer parents give to the racial selection of their future children via reproductive technologies such as ivf and surrogacy in a society grappling with evolving legal and social acceptance of queer identities. in this context, “queer” and “multiracial” are “co-constituting” (6). keaney argues that reproductive technologies and their associated cultural transformations are cultivating “a multiracial imaginary of queer kinship” (4). queer family-building navigates a prism of multiraciality, where racial lines become “malleable through daily practices and intimate attachments” (4). keaney articulates how race is “a technology of intimacy” (173), fostering multiracial families through the figure of the mixed-race child. evoking australia’s celebrated multiculturalism, racial mixedness can often serve as a form of queer capital, at times “even more valued than whiteness itself” (18). as keaney points out, the pursuit of this multiracial queer kinship faces constraints associated with the commodification of reproductive materials, such as financial costs and access to suitable donors. they can substantially limit the possibilities for queer family formation and obscure the underlying whiteness and class privilege at play in reproductive processes that only favor those who can afford to choose. making gaybies offers a critical contribution to our understanding of reproductive technologies and their uses by queer communities by revealing their inherently racialized or racializing nature. keaney’s work is particularly notable for the integration of a historical lens contextualizing reproductive technologies within australia’s unique settler colonial landscape, as explored in chapter 2. while multiracialism and the legacy of authentic indigeneity have profoundly shaped contemporary australian society, the nation has remained deeply connected to global notions of whiteness and eugenic reproductive histories, given its cultural affiliation with the west since colonization. this historical backdrop informs queer parents’ racial decisions, which are not arbitrary or isolated choices but dovetail into what society has long considered an ideal, desirable race—genetically, visually, and socially. keaney demonstrates that race operates as a malleable technology of intimate attachment, “assembled differently in different reproductive arrangements” (86). choices surrounding race and reproduction are as much about forming familial bonds and personal identities as they are about navigating sociohistorical landscapes imbued with racial biases and constructs. nevertheless, these intimate choices are deeply personal and emotionally charged, as discussed in chapter 3. the process of selecting donors, particularly within the profit-driven infrastructure of the commercial fertility industry, involves complex feelings and massive emotional labor. this process extends beyond the clinical setting into broader societal and familial contexts after the child is born, where racial likeness is continuously cultivated “through family stories and practices that imbue appearance and ancestry with meaning” (85). the act of choosing a donor is not just a medical decision but an affective one. queer parents find themselves caught between their internal desires to create a family that reflects their identities and values and the external pressures to conform to societal norms that usually fail to recognize the fluidity and diversity of family structures. as keaney observes, the discourses of choice often oversaturate queer reproduction, yet these narratives fail to “reflect reproductive realities” (107). race is not merely enacted at the moment of choosing a donor; it is a “lived substance through which intimate attachment is formed” (108), deeply ingrained within the family structure and across generations. in chapter 4, keaney draws attention to “the routine disappearance of gestational labor in queer reproductive narratives” (113). this erasure minimizes the role of gestational surrogates, particularly in terms of their racial and ethnic backgrounds, which many dismiss as irrelevant to the child’s racial identity. unlike the meticulous selection processes for choosing sperm and egg donors—where racial likeness is frequently a critical factor—queer reproductive imaginaries often render gestational labor invisible, reflecting a broader cultural narrative that views the womb as merely a neutral container. keaney challenges this notion by highlighting “the porosity of the womb” (127) within feminist politics, where blood, nutrients, and other shared substances are exchanged, directly influencing the biological development of the fetus. she, therefore, turns to the fundamental question of where racial inheritance occurs biologically, proposing that racial identity does not remain fixed or confined solely to genetic materials. instead, the gestational environment itself can contribute to the racialization of the child—research in epigenetics and microbiomics shows that a child’s gene expression and health outcomes are shaped substantially in utero. the surrogate’s embodied experiences, social context, and biopolitical environment may have a lasting impact on the fetus, making the surrogate’s role far more significant than traditionally acknowledged. just as chapter 4 redefines kinship by including gestational labor, the final chapter exposes how race and racism are increasingly obscured in queer families’ narratives, often under the universalizing rhetoric of love. this “love makes a family” discourse, keaney argues, is a political tool legitimizing queer families, particularly in the fight for equal rights. however, the narrative that positions love as a transcendent, apolitical force capable of overcoming racial disparities risks glossing over the real, lived experiences of those who are racialized. by focusing exclusively on love as the foundation of kinship, queer family discourses can depoliticize race, stripping it of its social and historical significance, leading to what keaney describes as “colorblind forms of racism” (156). her text asserts that while love can be a unifying force, it can simultaneously function as a mechanism of erasure, particularly in multiracial queer families, where people often minimize or celebrate racial differences superficially. this colorblind approach can inadvertently reproduce the same racial hierarchies and exclusions that queer families seek to resist. so how can we reimagine a more deeply felt and embodied form of love to arrange queer kinship and race differently? keaney answers with a powerful manifesto. as she writes, “a robust queer love politics can foster antiracism, if it embodies at heart a willingness to be undone by differences of many kinds, as they collide in the intimate encounter of parenting and all our other kinships” (180). as i conclude my reading of the book, i am struck by how profoundly her words resonate with the reproductive challenges we face in the us. making gaybies goes beyond conventional discussions of reproductive choice, particularly those centered on heteronormative and binary understandings of family. keaney’s vision of love—one that is willing to be vulnerable, to be “undone” by difference—is precisely the kind of transformative thinking that might best serve the weighty issues around reproductive choice and justice in my own context of research. she challenges us to rethink our assumptions about how we approach queer kinship, love, and care, to recognize the interconnectedness of our lives, and to embrace complexity rather than shy away from it. in a society increasingly polarized around issues of reproductive rights, where the discourse often fails to address the full spectrum of human experiences, making gaybies provides not just a timely intervention but a necessary one. it not only expands an ongoing conversation about the struggle for racial, queer, and reproductive freedom but also offers a vision of family-making and caring that brings our very most intimate categories in loving critique.     author bio kedi zhou is a phd student at the annenberg school for communication and journalism at the university of southern california. her current research focuses on reproductive technologies, engaging with literature from feminist theories, science and technology studies, and cultural studies.     image and text pinboarding the pandemic: experiments in representing autoethnography     sarah r. davies university of vienna sarah.davies@univie.ac.at   bao-chau pham university of vienna bao-chau.pham@univie.ac.at   esther dessewffy university of vienna esther.dessewffy@univie.ac.at   andrea schikowitz university of vienna andrea.schikowitz@univie.ac.at   fredy mora gámez university of vienna fredy.mora.gamez@univie.ac.at     abstract this visual essay draws on an autoethnographic study to present snapshots of mundane academic practice during the pandemic, using these to reflect on care and care practices within academia. our approach is inspired by a “pinboard” (law 2007): we use an echo of the two-dimensional space the pinboard offers to present our material through logics of juxtaposition and resonance, rather than attempting to craft a linear argument.     keywords autoethnography, care, academic practice, sts, representations     in this visual essay we use the model of a pinboard to capture experiences of mundane academic practice during the pandemic, using these experiences to reflect on care and care practices within research. the pinboard is, for us, an inspiration to experiment with the form and presentation of scholarly argumentation: we use an echo of the two-dimensional space it offers to present our material—both visual and textual—through logics of juxtaposition and resonance, rather than attempting to craft a linear argument. in what follows, we briefly outline the literatures—on care and on alternative forms of representation—that we are inspired by, and the autoethnographic project on which we are drawing. the heart of the essay is a “pinboard” that mixes textual fragments, longer reflections, and images and screenshots to create a snapshot of a set of situated academic practices during the pandemic. we close by reflecting on what we have learned from this experiment in representational practice. before we start, however, a brief note on who “we” are. this pinboard comes not only from a particular time but from a location—vienna, in austria—and from a group who, though we are different in terms of career stage, family status, experience of mobility, gender identity, and national and ethnic background, represent only a fraction of the kinds of identities, bodies, employment types, and personalities imbricated with this thing we are calling “academia.” reflecting on our differences, and on how our situated privileges, troubles, and experiences relate, has been key to how we have been able to think about how academic work is differently structured and experienced, as well as about how the pandemic heightened such differences. for example, dealing with a lockdown was particularly challenging when having to care for children, and/or seeking to settle in a new country (some of us as third country nationals); in both cases, “normal” bureaucratic and organizational challenges were amplified by contact and mobility restrictions. career stage was also important: entering academia at a time when in-person contact was impossible resulted in both challenges (isolation and confusion) and opportunities (to find one own’s way to “do” academic work), while, at more senior levels, gendered norms continued to structure our (self) expectations of how to perform the role of the “good academic.” but while these differences have been important to our analysis, ultimately we work together, at an institution that provides us with equipment and support, and live in a country with a well-functioning health system and public infrastructure. we therefore occupy highly privileged positions within the context of global academia. in this text we write as a group but make no claims for the generalizability of our experiences; rather, we offer this exploration as one snapshot of a set of local and mundane academic practices which may—or may not—resonate (miller 2015) further.   care in the academy recent studies of both natural sciences and sts have started to explore notions of care as integral to academic practice. this work emphasizes that experiences of academia are affective and intimate, relating to questions of togetherness, identity, and self-worth (lorenz-meyer 2018; schikowitz 2021). care is central to these accounts: one might, for instance, care for one’s research subjects (friese 2013), one’s colleagues (davies and horst 2015), one’s data (pinel, prainsack, and mckevitt 2020), or one’s own well-being or career (fochler and sigl 2018; schönbauer 2020). academia may also be framed as lacking in care (davies 2021), to the extent that sts research with natural science scholars can be understood as a care practice in that it can create moments of reflection and recuperation (müller and kenney 2014; martin, myers, and viseu 2015). in the context of sts, discussions about care intersect with practices of reflexivity and with discussion of how to enable “sustainable sts research that has the potential to engender both interesting work and liveable lives” (atkinson-graham et al. 2015, 745). there is, in other words, a widely shared sense that engaging with care can help us to interrogate the question of how to live well within academia, and in particular of how to nurture good lives as sts scholars. recent work has, for instance, explored how we are “implicated in the indicator game” (fochler and de rijcke 2017), reflecting on what it means to both study and be entangled with the ways that academic practice is evaluated. such discussion merges political goals—the sense that “scholars in sts should take a stance on how to deal with positive and problematic governance dynamics in academia, both individually and collectively” (fochler and de rijcke 2017, 22)—with personal reflections on and experiences of navigating academic careers that are often framed through the very metrics that we critique (bal 2017; müller 2017). similarly, the work of the civic laboratory for environmental action research (clear) has experimented with, and developed protocols for, just ways of working together as (interdisciplinary) sts scholars and citizens.1 through explicit reflection and agreements on aspects of academic practice such as authorship (liboiron et al. 2017), reading and citing (liboiron 2020), and group meetings (clear 2021), this work brings to the fore not only the ways in which we currently live and work together as sts scholars, but how we wish to do so, and the goals we might have for our interactions and research. the dynamics of care thus play an important role in lived experiences of academia generally, and sts specifically. nevertheless, care can also be a “slippery word” (martin, myers, and viseu 2015) that hides problematic relations of power. instead of embracing a single specific notion of care, we understand it as a range of situated practices that are embedded in our academic lives. as a practice, it will be characterized by ambivalence and messiness (lindén and lydahl 2021)—features that we try to capture by using a pinboard as a means of thinking and representing.   representing (this) autoethnography for those interested in care practices in academia, the pandemic brought into relief many of the dynamics and inequities that exist within the academy (gourlay et al. 2021; lamb and ross 2021; casal 2021), acting as a lens through which we are forced to notice our infrastructures, privileges, and routines. in early 2021, as a newly formed research group,2 we found that we wanted to develop ways of recording and further reflecting on these experiences, noticings, and surprises together.3 as a means of doing this, starting in march of 2021 we used an autoethnographic approach to systematically capture impressions of our pandemic lives.4 the method we chose (reacting to a prompt, collecting pictures and writing individual vignettes about our experiences, and discussing and interpreting them together) served several purposes. it allowed us to gather data that acknowledged the differences between us and our situations, but also afforded control over how to reveal personal stories and struggles, and to gradually build trust as a research collective. as one of us wrote, reflecting on this process, “the autoethnographic writing required a lot of vulnerability and honesty with ourselves and each other. digitally sharing and communicating private situations, feelings, uneasiness, emotions and struggles added a whole new layer of emotional commitment.” as we worked with this material, we felt that it was important not to flatten its heterogeneity and messiness, whilst also wanting to incorporate non-textual material into our publications. in thinking about how to do this, we have been inspired by several areas of sts scholarship, including that which has focused on “making and doing” representations that “extend beyond the academic paper or book” (downey and zuiderent-jerak 2016, 223). recent years have seen an acceleration of experiments with the forms and locations of sts work, from new modes of hands-on pedagogy or activism to the use of design fiction (downey and zuiderent-jerak 2016). such experiments are entangled with reflexivity: as gary lee downey and teun zuiderent-jerak write, making and doing “involves attending not only to what the scholar makes and does but also to how the scholar and the scholarship get made and done in the process” (2016, 225). we also draw inspiration from feminist scholarship that has emphasized the importance of positionality and difference (haraway 1988; harding 1993; bracke and puig de la bellacasa 2004). in addition to considering how our partial perspectives mediate individual sensemaking, we found that juxtaposing our experiences rendered the diversity of academic life in the pandemic visible. our family and home lives (and the care commitments and dependencies they entail), disposable income, resources, and experiences and expectations of academic work vary significantly. our situations are different, and we each see, reflect on, and write different things with reference to our experiences of academic work during the pandemic. even where there were commonalities across our experiences, these were instantiated in very different ways. presenting our analysis in a manner that maintains this diversity whilst still allowing for critical reflection has therefore been vital. we thus chose to draw on john law’s (2007) notion of the pinboard. a pinboard, law suggests, allows us to use logics of “juxtaposition and difference” (2007, 135) to organize and engage with material, rather than thematizing it or turning it into a linear form. in using this form (for an exploration of the social science of puberty), celia roberts writes that her pinboard is “partisan, messy and changeable; something that lays out a set of stories [about puberty] for critical examination but which shows the fluid and contested nature of the discourses constituting the [early puberty] landscape. i want a map that instead of producing facts, raises interesting questions” (2010, 430). we have used this notion of the pinboard as a tool to think with and structure our discussion here, collating key aspects of our experiences without flattening them, juxtaposing similarities with what is different, and using the 2d space of the pinboard to create connections along multiple lines. the pinboard thus sensitizes us to the ways in which different intersecting identities structured (our) experiences of the pandemic, whilst also allowing us to find kinship in common struggles. in what follows we offer up a pinboard of images, screenshots, field notes, reflective comments, and other material gathered during the autoethnography, arranged in several clusters. in closing we reflect on what we have learned from this experiment in representation.   the uneven distribution of (digital) infrastructures   “i have invested...money in objects supporting our new digital academic lifestyle: increased bandwidth (300 mbps), headphones, l-desks, expensive working chairs, and file cabinets are only some examples.”   figure 1. a close-up of an open laptop. the screen shows a menu for setting up the new device   figure 2. a plugged-in laptop on a white table with a presentation slide on full screen. there’s a notepad on the left of the laptop and clothing on the table and chair behind it   figure 3. a screenshot of an amazon purchase order for an ergonomic chair   “i spent the first couple of days [at the university] without a computer; i had to stand close to the window and open it in order to get internet access on my phone. the first hurdle was activating my [university account] in order to get wi-fi access and be able to use the online database of the university’s library. while i was waiting for my work computer, my private laptop came in handy.” “i would have never imagined a year ago that the visit of an a1 [austrian internet service provider] technician to my new place in vienna would be such an emotional roller coaster. i am in panic. a1 does not have a cable in my building! i had to schedule a visit by magenta [another internet service provider] as i was not aware of such conflict between communication companies in austria. this panic is grounded in the absence of wi-fi at home for more than ten days. this means, the impossibility of conducting zoom meetings, working online, conducting database and google scholar searches, and the impossibility of carrying out home schooling using online material, engaging with the school’s app, or just entertaining the kids while finding a short time to catch up with the daily work.…i therefore realise how my emotional resources in the last year or so have been exhausted by the fear of someone i care about being affected by the pandemic, but at the same time the anxiety when certain material conditions fail in permitting the normal operation of online digital technologies crucial to my work. these infrastructure-anxieties have become part of post-pandemic everyday life.”   figure 4. a white wi-fi modem on a shelf behind tea boxes   what does one need to work as a researcher? while that question could be answered in different ways—a university degree, an institutional affiliation, the respect of one’s peers—one response that emerges from our field notes and reflections is that one needs stuff: a computer, a stable internet connection, a chair and desk to work at. the pandemic involved a scramble by both individuals and institutions to ensure that such stuff was available within new working patterns and spaces, and within new care obligations, such as home schooling.5the extracts above point to this scramble, but also to how the challenges of accessing infrastructures are differently experienced. can you afford a new laptop as an early stage researcher? are you familiar with austrian internet providers when newly arriving from abroad? care for one’s research, students, and family is, it seems, dependent on our access to different infrastructures. it’s striking that so many of our anxieties related to internet access. is being a researcher (in our austrian context) now impossible without access to online flows (markham and gammelby 2018)?   constituting spaces   “if i’m at home alone, the living room turns into a working place, although a temporary one. we have the rule to remove working stuff from the living room when we don’t work. thus, the laptop, notepad, and books materially turn it to a working place, and removing them means that it turns back into a living room. apart from this, reproductive work (cleaning, doing the laundry, doing the shopping and cooking) and recreation get more entangled in home office—which i sometimes enjoy and sometimes not. when it works well, i use phases where i need a break from work anyways for doing things in the household or to go running (which i like especially in winter, because then i can still get some sun during the day). in phases when i have trouble to focus, it gets even harder when i am working at home. then i try to work at my desk in the office rather than in the living room, because this helps me to blind out other things better.” “a conference via zoom is about to start. the keynote speaker is someone i know from before and most of the participants are former colleagues. yet, i make sure to wear a decent shirt, clean up the space behind me in the temporary house i am living in, and transfer all the mess made by my kids behind the screen of my (borrowed) laptop. when i decide to ask a question, i quickly check that my older kid is correctly “plugged into” disney plus. once the conference is over, i feel relieved that i managed to ask a decent and uninterrupted question, all things considered.”   figure 5. an open, plugged-in laptop on a dining table surrounded by notebooks, a pen, a coffee mug, and a glass of water   figure 6. a dining table with an open, plugged-in laptop and a lamp on it. clothing on one of the chairs. pieces of paper, clothing, and a vase on the windowsill in the back of the image   “truthfully, in times of the pandemic and as someone who is already quite prone to feeling anxious about germs and cleanliness, i have to admit that the ability to work from home gives me comfort. being able to work digitally, without much constraints in terms of the very practices of working, is something i am therefore very grateful for. i am acutely aware that i am privileged to be have the spatial, infrastructural and socioeconomical possibility to work from home in such a comfortable way.” “i can’t stand sitting in one place, in one position, for too long. sometimes this makes spending all day in the office difficult. my small, light laptop is very cooperative in this regard. i can easily move from the kitchen, to my desk, to the fauteuil, to the rug (sometimes i use a wooden footstool as a mini desk when i work on the floor) and alternate positions.”   figure 7. an electric adjustable desk in front of two floor-to-ceiling windows. a lamp, a book stand, a notebook, a laptop that is plugged into a curved monitor, a webcam stuck on top of the monitor. a keyboard and trackpad, a coffee cup, a class of water, and various sticky notes and pieces of paper are spread across the table   “i can work at home—i have plenty of space, even a desk in a more-or-less dedicated office—but i really don’t like to.…this desk [in my university office] and the way all my stuff and devices are configured on it feels like a luxurious workspace and, perhaps because of this, it has become the ‘zone’ in which i feel like i work well.”   figure 8. a collage capturing working from home: screenshots of a desktop taskbar and open folders, a researcher resting on an armchair, a wooden stool to place a laptop on, a laptop on the floor, an extension cord under a table, and a mug, glass, bottle and jug on a table   what constitutes a space where (academic) work is being done? the pandemic brought about an increased dissolution of spatial separations between home, work, leisure, and family. especially during the lockdowns, we needed to fit different kinds of spaces into one place or location. while this also created the freedom to move between spaces according to our personal needs and rhythms—to cook lunch or move our bodies during the work day or to work on the floor—managing the boundaries between spaces required the disciplining and coordination not only of our bodies but also those of the members of our household and of the materialities of our homes: taking work equipment out of the living room in the evening, turning off the computer and disabling notifications at certain times, literally opening or closing doors, engaging family members in distractions, putting on headphones with music to drown out the presence of other people in a room, a change of dress. again, the ability and conditions to manage these different spaces and to create a stable (or even “luxurious”) working arrangement is unevenly distributed. the ability to constitute the “right” kind of space depends on the degree of obedience or resistance of the people and materials constituting our homes, the resources we have access to, and our own ability to switch between spaces and ignore distractions—an ability that can be structured by gendered identities, norms, and household roles.   managing, coordinating, moving   “i take turns with my colleague in using the office at the university, coordinated through a shared calendar (which also our partners share with whom we need to coordinate childcare and home schooling). we coordinate our schedules, considering our respective tasks and (infrastructural) needs, feelings of (un-)safety, if our partners and children are at home, etc. if for some reason there are still collisions, we ‘manage’ the risk of infection by wearing masks and taking covid tests beforehand, making sure that everyone feels safe.”   figure 9. a screenshot of a chat history on slack amongst two colleagues coordinating their shared office use   “taking the [personal] laptop with me in this initial phase [of my employment] surprisingly made me less spontaneous in my everyday life. where was i planning on sleeping on the weekend? would i be able to stop by at my flat to pick up the laptop before monday? the arrival of the imac [provided by the university] brought this to an end. with the imac my focus shifted to transferring data and software from one device to the other. before i got access to [the university cloud storage provider], i saved all my files in my private email account (surely there would have been more efficient alternatives). [the cloud storage] made things a little bit easier for me. i developed the habit of regularly uploading all new literature and material, so i could access my files from home too.” “i regularly match the entries from the paper notebook with my digital calendar and my digital files.…translating the handwritten notes into digital files introduces reflection and ordering and it helps me to decide what is relevant and what i don’t need to keep. for me, going back and forth between material and digital practices is an important work technique and i couldn’t do with only one of them. i once tried to make handwritten notes on an ipad (because i thought it was simply the bodily practice of handwriting that was productive) and then save them in my files—but this did not work out. apparently, it is the re-ordering and translation process from handwritten notes in a physical notebook to typing them into different computer files and through this also making them ready for further processing at the computer, that proves productive for me.”   figure 10. a corner of an office desk, with a notebook, stacks of paper, pens, a water bottle, a book with a glass on top of it   figure 11. a screenshot of a laptop desktop showing multiple windows and programs that are being used   we need both stuff and spaces to carry out academic work, and these have to be coordinated. while our spatial mobility was in many respects reduced during the lockdowns, we experienced and performed diverse (new) ways of moving around the heterogeneous elements that made up our academic lives in this period: our bodies, devices, data, and tasks, but also our partners, children, medical masks, tests, and our home infrastructures (chairs, routers, kitchen tables). these entities and the intersections between them needed to be coordinated and moved between different spaces. arranging these intersections, however, requires work—coordination work, emotional work and bodily work. our notes reveal both attempts to create seamlessness—the ability to stay in place and maintain a continuous workflow—and to use the seams between infrastructures and digital tools as a means of ordering our thoughts and work (such as switching between physical and digital notes).   care and choreography has anything resonated? maybe you have felt a pull towards one of the fragments, images, or arguments we have put onto this pinboard. perhaps our experiences of academic life during the pandemic bear some similarities with yours, particularly in the ways that we managed our spaces and infrastructures. it is clear that during chaotic and disorienting experiences of lockdowns and other restrictions, individuals very quickly found workarounds and home-crafted infrastructures to allow them to continue to work—and indeed to be “productive”—despite the challenges of home office, the stress of the pandemic, and differently challenging circumstances (child care, finding an apartment, beginning an academic position). this is evident both from the experiences we have reported here, and from early research from others. one thing the fragments above particularly highlight, though, is the labor involved in such productivity: leading academic lives during the pandemic required us to take responsibility for bringing diverse and scattered infrastructures, spaces, and people together, and for coordinating ourselves, family members, devices, data, and tasks in order to create environments in which we could fulfill (what we saw as being) our work. as a group we have been referring to these coordinated and heterogeneous spatiotemporal movements as choreographies (cussins 1996). such choreographic work included, among other things, the management of intersections between different infrastructures (home and work devices, digital and paper notes, different internet connections and wi-fi networks), the creation of particular kinds of spaces through organizing the presence or absence of particular objects or people (in zoom calls, for instance, children are out but smart clothes are in), and taking care of one’s colleagues through how and when a university office is used, by whom, under what conditions (pcr testing, for instance). how does this relate to care? as noted above, we approached care through a bottom-up exploration of situated practices. as such we find it in a number of sites: in attentiveness toward each other’s needs and struggles; in the (unequally distributed) ability to care for the coordination of multiple infrastructures that we have described; in practices of taking care of our home office requirements (bandwidth, desks, chairs). perhaps one of our most revealing reflections, however, revolved around the notion of responsiveness (tronto 1998, 2013). in our experiences, as they were performed as notes and stories for the others in the group, we realized that responding to care given by others is also a type of competence. our readiness to receive care from other members of the group was crucial during the periods of extra pressure of academic work imposed by the pandemic. on a more performative note, we also think of our non-linear, messy method of autoethnography as a practice of care-ful research (law and lin 2020), allowing us to be attentive to each other’s differences and to the diversity and situatedness of our epistemic living spaces (felt and fochler 2012). as we discussed what care-ful research should look like, however, we also saw some of the ambiguity of pinboard as a representational approach. on the one hand, it forced us to notice that, at times, the strategies we developed to maintain the flow of our academic work failed to protect us from exhaustion or other negative effects, and led us to protect ourselves. on the other, it rendered those very selves open to public analysis. in compiling this pinboard—the version we are presenting here—it has been important to us to take care of our personal boundaries, and to be mindful of what pieces of information we would like to keep within our group. this is why, for instance, we do not disclose the different patternings of our privileges and situations, although we are highly aware of the different individual hierarchical positionings, dependencies, vulnerabilities, and resources. rather, we understand the pinboard as a way of seeing as a group, reflecting on similarity and difference, thinking theory together, blurring the boundaries between individual and collective sensemaking. in understanding care as a multiplicity of practices and notions, we have also been led to discuss how it can become a selective mode of attention that can produce exclusions (martin, myers, and viseu 2015). this understanding brought us to reflect, on the one hand, on the privilege of our situatedness as academics based in a european university in the global north who can afford to arrange a new connectivity infrastructure at home, rearrange our working spaces following particular preferences, and work from home. on the other hand, we also gained a better understanding of how institutional responsibilities for work infrastructure (connectivity, network, equipment, access to internet) were delegated and merged with already existing care tasks of our own. at the same time, it has become more evident how our work is sustained by various other infrastructures (from childcare to healthcare and other infrastructures of care) that, despite being less visible or usually taken for granted, play a crucial role in the development of our academic careers even in the absence of pandemic restrictions. in such ways, our findings point to the complexity of care: our care for each other, for our research, and for ourselves has at times helped to maintain problematic working practices and heightened the responsibilization of individual researchers, and raises the question of how we can care for each other without contributing to larger problems. perhaps we should more often have responded with “i don’t care” when it came to fixing the problems that emerged for our academic work during the pandemic—or at least, with martin, myers, and viseu, have said, “what we must do is take better care of how we care” (2015, 631).   an ending there is much more to say about this project, and about what we have learned from the autoethnography, as well as using a pinboard to represent it. we continue to take some of the ideas raised—questions of infrastructural anxiety, choreographic work, how to live justly and well in the academy—forward in our research. but we also feel it is important not to end neatly. a pinboard is about raising interesting questions (roberts 2010), not answering them. so we will just…stop.   notes 1 see https://civiclaboratory.nl.   2 our group came together in february 2021, although two of us (davies and pham) had started our positions in 2020.   3 at the time, these autoethnographic notes were collected, the university of vienna was taking precautionary measures, which meant that we were asked to work from home and limit the number of physical meetings. teaching took place entirely online. outside of the university, schools and shops were largely closed until may 2021.   4 in doing so we drew on a long tradition of autoethnography in the academy: see, e.g., trahar 2013; rutter et al. 2021; winkler 2013; wilkinson 2020. our particular method made use of a prompt (“take 3 (+/-) photos that reflect your working spaces and practices, then write field notes or text fragments that respond to these images”) to help us create images and field notes, then repeated cycles of discussion and further data collection as we explored and made sense of our different experiences.   5 indeed, one way of framing this is that our homes were “requisitioned” (jenkins 2020): we are grateful to one of the reviewers for pointing us to this idea.   references atkinson-graham, melissa, martha kenney, kelly ladd, cameron michael murray, and emily astra-jean simmonds. 2015. 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and susan molyneux-hodgson, 225–45. cham: springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61728-8_11. schönbauer, sarah maria. 2020. “‘from bench to stage’: how life scientists’ leisure groups build collective self-care.” science as culture 29 (4): 524–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2020.1713077. trahar, sheila. 2013. ‘autoethnographic journeys in learning and teaching in higher education’. european educational research journal 12 (3): 367–75. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2013.12.3.367. tronto, joan. 1998. “an ethic of care.” generations: journal of the american society on aging 22 (3): 15–20. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44875693. ———. 2013. caring democracy: markets, equality, and justice. new york: nyu press.     author bios sarah davies is a professor of technosciences, materiality, and digital cultures at the university of vienna. her research explores the digital as material practice.   bao-chau pham is a phd candidate at the department of science and technology studies, university of vienna. her doctoral research explores artificial intelligence policy in the european union.   esther dessewffy is a phd candidate at the university of vienna’s sts department. she researches practices and materialities engaged in making computer simulations for architecture and spatial planning.   andrea schikowitz is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of science and technology studies, university of vienna. her current research focuses on knowledge practices in distributed urban planning and controversies.   fredy mora gámez is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of science and technology studies, university of vienna, and a senior lecturer at the department of gender studies, linköping university. six ways of looking at fractal mechanics how we make it collective. 2024. “introducing how we make it: disability justice, autoimmunity, community, a multimedia project.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–7. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © how we make it collective, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introducing how we make it: disability justice, autoimmunity, community, a multimedia project charles l. briggs cynthia ling lee uc berkeley uc santa cruz clbriggs@berkeley.edu clee185@ucsc.edu sharon daniel rachel c. lee uc santa cruz ucla sdaniel@ucsc.edu rlee@humnet.ucla.edu alexandra juhasz megan moodie brooklyn college, cuny uc santa cruz alexandra.juhasz@brooklyn.cuny.edu mmoodie@ucsc.edu pato hebert marina peterson tisch school of the arts, nyu university of texas at austin pato.hebert@nyu.edu marina.peterson@austin.utexas.edu tammy c. ho nikita simpson uc riverside university of london tamara.ho@ucr.edu ns53@soas.ac.uk how to read this entry how we make it: disability justice, autoimmunity, community is a born-digital multimedia piece that lives on the scalar platform and that was submitted and eventually accepted into the special section on autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19. the text below is a close reproduction of the navigation page within the scalar piece. while reading this text, one cracks open the door to glimpse the ten-person collective behind this project. however, we invite the reader to go directly to the website (link provided below) to fully partake of the variety of mailto:ta33@rice.edu http://clee185@ucsc.edu/ mailto:rlee@humnet.ucla.edu mailto:alexandra.juhasz@brooklyn.cuny.ed mailto:nshahani3@wsu.edu mailto:nshahani3@wsu.edu http://marina.peterson@austin.utexas.edu/ mailto:nshahani3@wsu.edu mailto:nshahani3@wsu.edu special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) how we make it collective, 2024 2 paths—including embedded sound and video files, image annotations, and links to other sites—that perform a listening to and reflecting upon crip knowledge and joy as it was catalyzed and recorded by this ten-person collaborative ruminating on chronic illness, long covid, anti-asian violence, incarceration, care burdens, mental distress, electromagnetic fields, and deep listening. after going to the scalar website, please make sure to turn your speaker volume up. lingering over key images (while in scalar) will also reveal pop-up annotations. keywords crip joy, chronic illness, anti-asian violence, incarceration, long covid, disability, aids activism, electromagnetic fields, care burdens, mental distress, art of deep listening link to how we make it: disability justice, autoimmunity, community figure 1. pato hebert, spoonies, from the counter measures series, salvaged eucalyptus, 2021, dimensions variable alt text: softly arcing assemblage of thirteen wooden spoons, in a top row of four, middle row of five, and bottom row of four. darker whorls in the eucalyptus from which they were carved are visible. a spoon directly at the center point is missing a chunk at the tip of the bowl. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/how-we-make-it/index?path=lingering-1 https://scalar.usc.edu/works/how-we-make-it/index?path=lingering-1 special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) how we make it collective, 2024 3 navigation how we make it collective: disability justice in the wake of covid’s long haul (hereafter hwmic) is a ten-person collective of sick and disabled artists, academics, and their allies in various stages of career and capacity: we are newly minted phds and distinguished professors; we are exhausted with chronic fatigue, disabled from mold, capitalism, mast cell activation, viral reservoirs, and also notyet-disabled or passing for well. figure 2. hwmic members: top, left to right: megan moodie, cynthia ling lee, pato hebert, marina peterson, nikita simpson; bottom, left to right: rachel c. lee, tammy ho, alexandra juhasz, charles l. briggs, sharon daniel alt text: ten headshots (both color and black and white) set in two rows of five above text, which reads “how we make it, disability justice for the long haul, uchri, spring 2022.” each of us brought individual projects to a hybrid (in-person and online) convening of our research collective, initially as a one-quarter residency in spring 2022 at the humanities research institute located at the university of californiairvine. our project leader, (h)ehler-danlos spokesperson and activist megan moodie (uc-santa cruz), has continued in 2023 to make online space for our group to reflect on the embodied mentorships and life transformations enabled by this residency. this scalar assemblage acts as a partial archive of our collective's choreographies, conversations, documentary images, and diy manuals, as we waxed and waned in varying degrees of muscular shaking and tic-ing (dystonia), of invisible but felt chronic inflammation and brain fog—a hallmark of post-acute sequelae of covid19—and other both progressive and intermittent symptoms of chronic illnesses. while some of us remain in proximity to autoimmune disorders such as graves disease, we are less interested in demonstrating the congruency of our conditions https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34248921/ special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) how we make it collective, 2024 4 to autoimmune disorders as established by us medicine, as we are in conceiving embodiment as never “auto” nor “immune” but a co-inhabitant ecology— indebted to the variegated biological and social communities in which we dwell and that dwell within us. if more of us had been excellent digital artists with more spoons on hand, our table of contents would be a circle of several matryoshka dolls, each nesting twin and triplet creative acts from our siblings in this collective. at the center of this circle would be the mother matryoshka—a textual reflection by moodie on autoimmunities in relation to how we make it. figure 3. m. moodie’s watercolor drawing and visualization of the hwmic, its relation to institutional supports (at university of california humanities research institute), and upcoming gatherings https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/ special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) how we make it collective, 2024 5 alt text: pink and orange flower or amoeba cell sits in the center of a circular design bounded by a white circular border in which is written, “how (will) we make it (?) disability justice for the long haul * uchri spring 2022.*” names of five hwmic members are written in a spiral design in the center of the flower bud. an arrow pointing to this center disc labels it “the gabrielino core”— those members residing at the uc-irvine gabrielino apartments in spring 2022. in the orange, circular dish in which the flower sits are written names of five hwmic who attended the university of california humanities research institute (uchri) seminar both virtually and with scattered in person visits. an arrow pointing to this disc labels it “the cyber core.” three roads of connective tissue lead to boxes with handwritten “activities: (1) the weekly work share (top right); (2) the core(s) and the annex meet for study group every other week (left middle); and( 3) the embodied workshop weekend (bottom center).” a yellow wash of color lends a warm tone to the poster. a circular or spiral organization feels apt to how our group functioned. however, we realize that some readers may want a clearer pathway through the images, videos, sound files, and reflective writing that our ten members have composed as recipes for and queries into "how (will) we make it" after long hauling with chronic illnesses, disabilities, autoimmunities, and grave losses, some related and others not to covid-19. in the toolbar in the upper left, adjacent to the compass icon, is a table of contents with three headings: lingering, aligning, and crafting. lingering refers to pato hebert’s solo exhibit at pitzer college, the occasion for all but three members of the hwmic to linger with each other on a beautiful april evening and to contemplate how art practices and relations of care have to be rethought as covid lingers for long-haulers. to linger is to listen with gratitude for another’s pauses, stutters, slower pacing, newer rhythms, and to archive how structures of inattention and abandonment have been visited on those who cannot or do not return to the land of the well. aligning takes inspiration from dance and sound studies, the allowing of fractious energies to vibrate through one’s embedded body rather than attempting to overcome or go against and thereby amplifying the velocity of clash and crash. the emphases in this cluster are on noticing “magical collaborations” between electric weather patterns and neuroscience; and learning across linguistic and cultural differences about the tensions negotiated by those caretaking and needing care. crafting taps into the amateurism, creative joy, and rejuvenating play we allowed ourselves as we adjusted to the ways our art and scholarship could not keep up with the rate of losses we were documenting and experiencing in each other’s company. though compromised in the capacity to analyze, stay on point(e), or carry on as if covid were over, we could and did give ourselves permission to yarn, color, collaborate, and fold (over) with laughter and camaraderie. the form that we have given to this assemblage is designed both to honor the heterogenous mediums and languages of each contribution and simultaneously special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) how we make it collective, 2024 6 map the synergies that emerged and the spirit of care and deep listening that helped sustain our bodyminds (schalk) and cravings for nurturance in isolating times. collective bios charles l. briggs is a cultural/medical/linguistic anthropologist who has documented cholera and rabies epidemics in venezuelan indigenous communities: stories in the time of cholera and tell me why my children died, both with clara mantini-briggs. sharon daniel is a digital media artist who creates interactive and participatory documentary artworks addressing issues of social, racial, and environmental injustice, with a particular focus on mass incarceration and the criminal justice system. dr. alexandra juhasz, brooklyn college, cuny, works as a media artist, curator, and writer engaged with linked social justice commitments, including covid-19, aids, black lesbian media, feminist and queer/trans film, and activist archives and collectives. pato hebert serves as chair of the department of art & public policy at tisch school of the arts, new york university, where his students have thrice nominated him for the david payne-carter award for teaching excellence. tammy c. ho is an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at uc riverside. she wrote romancing human rights (2015), co-produced the transformative hope video series (2022), and is on the managing board of asian pacific american religions research initiative. cynthia ling lee instigates crip, queer, and feminist-of-color interventions through embodied art and scholarship. her choreography has been presented across north america, asia, and europe. recent publications include writing in the michigan quarterly review and the routledge companion to dance studies. cynthia is associate professor of performance, play & design at university of california, santa cruz. rachel c. lee is the author of the exquisite corpse of asian america and a professor at ucla. currently, her research focuses on frameworks that deepen relationality between individuals with “environmental illness” (e.g., chronic lyme, multiple chemical sensitivity, heavy-metal intoxication) and scholarship in an anti-racist and anti-colonial vein. megan moodie, a cultural anthropologist, writer, and feminist theorist, is an associate professor of anthropology at the university of california, santa cruz. her recent work on disability, motherhood, and artistic practice has appeared in the los angeles review of books, hip mama, mutha magazine, and sapiens. https://www.dukeupress.edu/bodyminds-reimagined https://anthropology.berkeley.edu/charles-l-briggs http://www.sharondaniel.net/ http://alexandrajuhasz.com/ https://tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/app/106585192 https://profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/profile/tammyh https://aparri.org/transformative-hope/ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=plnt9azulfgd9mhyrc2bebwl8s4zfdwwre https://aparri.org/ https://aparri.org/ http://www.cynthialinglee.com/ https://english.ucla.edu/people-faculty/lee-rachel-c/ https://anthro.ucsc.edu/faculty/index.php?uid=mmoodie special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) how we make it collective, 2024 7 marina peterson, professor of anthropology at university of texas at austin, is the author of atmospheric noise (2021), which traces entanglements of air and body through noise. her current project “weathering uncertainty” composes a nervous system that stitches together the meteorological and the neurological, and in doing so taking up conceptual concerns that are central to covid in general and long covid specifically. nikita simpson is a lecturer in anthropology at school of oriental and african studies, university of london. nikita’s research on mental health, care, and inequality has appeared in the bmj global health, the journal of the royal anthropological institute, and medical anthropology quarterly, amongst other venues. she is preparing a manuscript titled “tension: mental distress and modern time.” https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/anthropology/faculty/mp5899 https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/nikita-simpson introducing how we make it: disability justice, autoimmunity, community, a multimedia project how to read this entry keywords link to how we make it: disability justice, autoimmunity, community navigation collective bios     special section: probing the system: feminist complications of automated technologies, flows, and practices of everyday life introduction probing the system: feminist complications of automated technologies, flows, and practices of everyday life     paula gardner mcmaster university gardnerp@mcmaster.ca   sarah kember goldsmiths, university of london s.kember@gold.ac.uk     abstract this special section presents diverse scholarly voices examining the silenced, underexposed, intersectional forces that fortify science and technology platforms in their work to automate public abidance. the articles probe, from diverse global locations and perspectives, the contemporary work of various “platforms,” understood broadly as technology and software, health, social media, and policy platforms. the articles probe these systems and platforms with attention to the assumptions and practices embedded in their algorithms, protocols, design specifications, and communications, and, in turn, the political, cultural, governance, and mediated practices they make possible. the research studies and practice-based work herein expose the complex and shifting sociopolitical codes and contexts that condition technology, artificial intelligence (ai), surveillance, health, social media, and state platforms that support systems of care, news, communication, and governance. these exposures show how platform craftiness works differently in different spaces to privilege and damage, often with ghostly obscurity. attentive to how platforms operate in complex contemporary viral modes, the section seeks to locate and expose these traces, draped in what communication scholars sangeet kumar and radhika parameswaran (2018, 345) refer to as “chameleon cultural codes” that, in changing and transforming into unrecognizable forms, feed global imaginaries.     keywords platforms, systems, automation, intervention, feminist science and technology studies, hci     when, before the advent of covid-19, we first imagined this special section of catalyst, we hoped to bring together different areas of feminist scholarship that conceptualize systems, along with the platforms that operationalize them, as political, networked, automating technologies that proscribe distinct practices and futures. as communication scholars who have long played, tarried, and tangled with science and technology studies (sts) feminism, we hoped to expose our common ground and divergences in system probing (by which we mean analysis and intervention) in order to pressure current conceptualizations and imagine sustainable futures. articles came in as the covid-19 pandemic emerged across the globe in the early months of 2020, newly exposing the uneven ground that enframes technology platforms, and reflecting economic and sociopolitical priorities that revert care, resources, and access to the always, already prioritized. it became painfully visible that stay-at-home orders, vaccine nationalism, and travel restrictions privileged the privileged. health policies arose reifying postcapitalist economic, gender, race, class and caste elitism, and settler colonial and empire-building values, naturalizing the uneven flows of vaccine regionally and transnationally. health policy platforms worked to automate public adherence to a politics of health disparity.   as section editors, we recognized the need to vividly illustrate everyday life in this pandemic moment to arm future readers to understand how biased practices of prevention, treatment, access, and care are amplified during this period where systems are transformed in response to crisis. as national health and commerce platforms and policies morphed, they have tended to shelter the privileged and safe-guard industrial output to secure global trade and northern prosperity. complaints that public health initiatives and platforms are grounded in white supremacy, colonial tropes, and racial and ethnic bias have often been side-lined by health officials. they tend to be focused on immediate responses limited by the narrow register of the un world health organization and by the covax relief effort. pandemic platform practices bring existing disparities into sharp relief, as argued by ruha benjamin (2019, 2020), who urges us to engage in viral justice to tackle hostile racial climates and manifest health systems that are more just and habitable.   this special section presents diverse scholarly voices examining the silenced, underexposed, intersectional forces that fortify science and technology platforms in their work to automate public abidance. the articles probe, from diverse global locations and perspectives, the contemporary work of various “platforms,” understood broadly as technology and software, health, social media, and policy platforms. the articles probe these systems and platforms with attention to the assumptions and practices embedded in their algorithms, protocols, design specifications, and communications, and, in turn, the political, cultural, governance, and mediated practices they make possible. the research studies and practice-based work herein expose the complex and shifting sociopolitical codes and contexts that condition technology, artificial intelligence (ai), surveillance, health, social media, and state platforms that support systems of care, news, communication, and governance. these exposures show how platform craftiness works differently in different spaces to privilege and damage, often with ghostly obscurity. attentive to how platforms operate in complex contemporary viral modes, the section seeks to locate and expose these traces, draped in what communication scholars sangeet kumar and radhika parameswaran (2018, 345) refer to as “chameleon cultural codes” that, in changing and transforming into unrecognizable forms, feed global imaginaries.   foregrounding feminist theory from sts, communication and media studies, feminist human-computer interaction (hci), design studies, and digital humanities, this work deploys intersectional analysis to interrogate constrained system logics and expose opaque, biased algorithms and rules, and the wily means by which platforms morph toward power to produce seemingly objective, automated data output and practices. automated system logic is pervasive and pernicious; it has been shown to be binary, hierarchal, governmental, causal, logocentric, and to normalize preordained outputs, produce rule compliant users, and laud transhumanism. bred in postcapital, empire-fortified spaces, automation enacts and reinforces a succinct set of neoliberal values—efficiency, compliance and transparency—and carries legacies of gender, racial, ethnic, and nationalist bias.   this special section builds on diverse feminist scholarship on systems in sts and communication studies and other interdisciplinary spaces (e.g., barad 2007; chun 2009a, 2009b; coleman 2009, grosz 2005; hayles 1999; kember 2013; munster 2006; and suchman 2007). this expansive work has unpacked pernicious system practices, demonstrating how automated systems prohibit interactive human-system communication by encouraging data valorization, blind acceptance of system flow and impact, and quick fix, reductive responses to complex problems. to counter the pressures and practices arising from automation, diverse feminist scholars have employed a distributed logic or multi-agential approach to disentangle relationships binding technologies and the human subject.   what is the value of feminism in this terrain? where hci and communication scholars of the interface, system, and network decry the problematics of lauding code or linear logic, feminist scholars use diverse approaches that interrogate the communication and network logics that prohibit platform intervention. lucy suchman (2007), for example, shows the importance of revealing system logic in order to exploit it in informed, interactive engagement. at the same time, n. katherine hayles (1991) demonstrates how science and technology modular logics are problematic when deployed as the whole story, precluding evaluation of how complexity within systems constrain data. drawing upon karen barad (2007), feminist scholars have pushed metaphors of the network and communication to understand how data or materials move according to system rules and show how system complexity causes productive interferences. much of this systems analysis presumes donna haraway’s (1988) situated knowledges approach, recognizing that knowledges and systems reflect the social locations and identities that produce them. haraway credits this concept to insights from “third-world feminism,” derived from lived experiences strategically and negotiating various and intersecting forms of oppression. the foundational feminist critical race, postcolonial, and transnational scholarship of shulamith firestone (1970), the combahee women’s collective ([1977] 2001), audre lorde ([1984] 2018), bell hooks ([1984] 2015), patricia hill collins (1986), and gloria anzaldúa ([1987] 2012), among others, informed haraway’s work offering insights into the operation of power in systems, and lessons for creative intervention. since that time, ruha benjamin, beth coleman, wendy hui kyong chun, lisa nakamura, and others have expounded upon the interrelations of race and technical systems, elaborating nuanced feminist analyses of how systems produce culture, community, publics, and media, therein reproducing gendered, racist biases—research that this special section builds upon.   feminist scholars have offered innovative methods that both expose and exploit the complexity of systems. in theorizing how interactivity and intra-activity manifests in the networked flows within and across systems, feminist scholars such as haraway, hayles, barad, and chela sandoval (2000) complicate how complexity operates. a distributed systems logic approach (haraway 1990) encourages accessible logics and algorithms and actualizes complex modes of communication to elicit transgressive practices with media and with technologies. distributed logics work to make visible a system’s own transgressive power, and reject simpler human-centric ontological network assumptions (e.g., grounded in binary logics, presuming a unified self) and premises of constrained relationality that produce what haraway terms the “informatics of domination” (1990, 300)—a world grounded in authority, rationality, and computation. from the vantage point of distributed logics, we can see diffractions, or patterns of difference, rather than (hegemonic) reflections born of fixed positions. this approach reveals diverse paths, positions subjectivity as crucial to intervention and encourages system hacking.   commonly, feminist scholars argue that the embodied human is better understood in systems envisioned as chaotic, where principles and rules are cut (kember and zylinska 2012) and bend (barad 2007). elizabeth grosz (2005) engages a deleuzian approach, challenging scholars to exploit the internal chaos of systems via transgressive feminist practices. suchman (2007) proposes we engage in situated actions for developing different kinds of human relations to perception, objectivity, understanding, and production. her approach conjures planned, creative interactions that allow users to reflect on proscriptive instructions, reject responding to plans and context, and act in reflexive response to things generated.   this body of work employs diverse feminist and critical approaches to unpack the complexity of system operations, productively frame and reframe the notion and work of distributed logics and deploy it in productive disruptions. and yet, there is scope for greater academic exchange to disturb our notions of systems and the platforms that support them.   kember and zylinska’s life after new media (2012) calls on feminist scholars to bridge our diverse research on human-machine and human-system interfaces to enhance possibilities for critical interventions addressing automated citizen and consumer responses. there is much space to intertwine art and media analysis with sts, contrasting our intersectional approaches, and engaging with other disciplines (postcolonial studies, critical disability studies, indigenous studies, etc.), and research from emerging and global south scholars to refresh system analysis. in the spirit of feminist critique, these confrontations can agitate our assumptions, lingering disciplinary habits, and habituated citation practices, and encourage analysis of evolving platforms, to kindle new insights and research directions. this section represents research that seeks to understand and exploit system complexity, to put it into sharp relief, enabling us to respond inventively to the things systems produce.   this type of intervention is evident in feminist scholarship over the past decade that has disrupted theorizations of human-machine interaction within hci, offering new methods and close readings of technologies and practices to generate novel research questions. foundational work from shaowen bardzell (2010), for example, outlined key qualities of feminist hci aligned with critical design approaches including pluralism, participation, advocacy, ecology, and reflexivity, and, with elizabeth churchill, probed the links between design, feminism, and social science that can support technology’s role in social change (bardzell and churchill 2011). ann light (2011) queered interaction with computers while josé abdelnour-nocera et al. (2013) deployed local and indigenous peoples’ perspectives to reframe hci methods. nassim parvin (2019) provides nuanced studies of how ai agents, embedded in personal assistant technologies, normalize and redeploy destructive forms of body bias. a recent special issue explores the use of interaction design in hci to address diverse womens’ health issues (almeida et al. 2020). abundant work engages intersectional feminism to explore data science and ethics (d'ignazio and klein 2020), and how enhanced intersectional attention to the body can enhance critical analysis of women’s health in hci research (bellini et al. 2018), while tamara kneese and beza merid (2018) query how networked subjectivities arise in human-technology assemblages articulated to illness. as well, a recent special section of catalyst brings fresh analysis to human interactions with activity trackers, deeply informed by intersectional approaches (dolezal and oikkonen 2021).   feminists working with design practice have challenged traditional hci scholarship approaches and assumptions. rosanna bellini et al. (2018), for example, reveals how feminist hci research agendas—women’s health, design innovations, questions of inclusion and diversity and identity—can remain isolated. laura forlano (2017) employed speculative design approaches to foreground feminist principles and values, while building empathy, transparency and trust. scholars have demonstrated the value of participatory design to enhance justice work in feminist hci (bardzell 2018) and interrogated the “co” in co-design (choi and light 2020), while shruti sai chivukula and colin gray’s (2020) feminist hci work discusses curating objects via “relatable” objects. luke stark and kate crawford (2019) have demonstrated how artists’ approaches have enabled distinct interrogations of the ethics engaged in data and machine learning systems.   feminist hci disruptions are evident in the emerging field of human-machine communication, which deploys critical and philosophical approaches to read technology as communicator to better understand human-computer, robot, and agent relations (guzman 2018). the threads of formative sts work are evident here, reflected in methodological kinship with suchman’s anthropological approach. as well, productive cross pollination is visible—forlando’s (2017) intersectional and crip approaches to feminist data practice are complimented in human-machine communication by co-design methods aiming to build cripand aging-friendly therapeutic platforms (gardner et al. 2021). in putting diverse approaches into dialogue, as the above examples illustrate, this special section hopes to productively converge critical approaches to produce new disruptions in our feminist scholarship. interferences, as we know, are essential in our shared mission to innovate human-machine interactions with attention to transparency, rigorous collaboration, and consent, and to yield human-machine relations grounded in and generating enhanced equity, diversity, accessibility, and justice.   much feminist research has addressed how global media systems cloak the complexity of multiple information flows by broadcasting a coherent product to the lowest common denominator media subject, and, over time, this work has taken up critical race and postcolonial studies to deepen and strengthen analysis. key formative ideas infuse this area of research, revealing, for example, the reductionism rampant in the work of media platforms that create problematic systems. as hayles (1999) has shown, modular systems are often presented as representing the whole, simplifying system complexity—neurochemical systems in the brain, for example, are presented as a coherent representation of cognition. proscriptions for automated behaviors with data are, of course, layered with intersectional impact. industry routinely recommends that workers ideally self-regulate and surveil their productivity. crucially, such proscriptions belie gendered, raced, classed, ethnic, age, ability, and sexuality assumptions that privilege particular bodies. absencing this intersectional complexity normalizes the larger system framework that supports neoliberal, global capitalist ideals, and increases technoprecarity. automation logics in mediated environments also ask users to accept assigned roles and dole out credit to asymmetrically favor culturally dominant subjects. in demanding obedience to the system’s logic, automation encourages users to assume their place in the system, and to produce desired outputs infused with normative gender, race, and class characteristics. automated systems are expert at producing uncritical users who maintain the status quo—consumers of government policy and ted talks, obedient activity tracker consumers, subaltern class healthcare workers, compliant health consumers, and more.   critical race, indigenous, and postcolonial scholarship provide lenses and methodological blueprints that arm us with techniques to name, recognize, and redress the practices by which racial, class, and colonial-biased values are inscribed in knowledge and technology systems, their platforms, databases, and automated logics, in ways that are self-sustaining and reproductive. important sts and communication scholars have deepened our feminist understandings of the discrete mechanisms by which we train our platforms to embody visibility (buolamwini and gebru 2018; daniels 2019), fetishize code as a god trick (chun 2009b), render race as code (nakamura 2012), denaturalize blackness, and fracture the body from its humanness into new subjects (noble 2018; browne 2015). trailblazing work by safiya noble, simone browne, and joy buoloamwini reveals how algorithmic platform and database bias trains surveillance and ai tools to recognize only some faces, bodies, colors, and shades; to classify and surveil blackness, and normalize whiteness across public spaces. presciently, browne (2015) declares this a new technology of branding, producing contemporary practices of spatial colonization, which is required, as nakamura (2012) explains, to credibly demonize blackness. kim tallbear (2013) examines how mutually informing science and social systems denaturalize indigeneity. her study of native american dna reveals how genetic science conflates the material (blood) and semiotic (race or tribe) in “markers” used to place indigenous peoples in distinct genetic categories. in this system, dna becomes a potent metaphor and technology that works to denaturalize some indigenous peoples, with tragic consequences for land claims and sovereignty.   a distributed logic approach is evident in contemporary critical race work that hacks surveillance systems that reinforce racial and gender bias and perpetuate discriminatory practices of seeing and security (buolamwini 2017; noble 2018; browne 2015). this body of work rejects the system-sanitizing turn to ethics and calls instead for systems to be rooted in social justice. exposing the complex environments that produce platforms, and the discrete, often obscured manners in which platforms sort, categorize, and automate is crucial to imagining platforms that make possible equitable and sustainable futures. this work also calls out knowledge platforming within feminist scholarship as a key, lingering challenge, itself requiring disruption that decenters whiteness, class, and settler privilege and northern fetishization. tallbear and sandoval offer methodological guides by which we infuse critical race studies into our methods. tallbear (2013) offers an objectivity in action model, typified by a “promiscuous” standpoint position by which we stand by and study across in order to co-constitute more ethical claims. sandoval (2000) offers oppositional consciousness as method to confront academic colonialism, employing the politics and lived experience of “third-world feminism” to encourage greater mobility across discrete academic technologies of critique. as well, this methodology provides guidelines for moving beyond critique, to making theory actionable, and deploy it to confront oppression and recode tools of communication and intelligence. drawing on this knowledge, this special section focuses on how automation, labeling, and categorization practices make visible the raced, gendered, sexuality, and otherwise biased environments that produce, deploy, and in turn reify system logics. the contributions illustrate how research that thoughtfully blends critical race, postcolonial, and queer approaches to critical systems analysis can generate evocative new systems understanding.   this special section incites feminist border crossings that challenge our current platform-enabled system analysis and create new possibilities for transgressing them, both in theory and in practice. the section is infused with reflections on the current moment where a global virus lays bare automated platform politics. each article recognizes the platform as conditioned by biases that implicate the platform’s practice and its reproduction of bias, preference, and disparity. the authors get close to data in these studies, drawing on research experience, observation, and ethnography in deep, critical, and situated analyses. each study appreciates the sociopolitical and cultural contexts that condition the limits and make possible the work of platforms with attention to the formative roles played by space and locality. the collection reveals the complex manners in which platforms naturalize and automate, necessitating complex analytic lenses that, in turn, open up possibilities for disruption and sustainable reinvention.   we hope these critiques and material engagements, in aiming to counter the constrained, modular, automated, proscriptions and predications of systems, will generate inventive forms of differential consciousness that render visible and activate flows across knowledge systems. in this effort, we hope to make possible the imagination and incantation of new revolutionary manifestations of the systems. the special section seeks to fortify us to better imagine and create platforms attendant to the politics of bias, the problems of automation, the will to invisibility, and to direct the wily, mutating capabilities of platforms to create sustainable global futures.   in “the space between us,” wendy hui kyong chun probes the racial politics of neighborliness deployed in “homophilic” health policy—assuming that similarity breeds connection—during the covid-19 pandemic. chun shows how policies denoting covid-safe spaces (of like neighbors) reflect the ethnically sovereign spaces enforced by containing japanese americans in american internment camps (during the second world war) and indigenous peoples in reservations. the current spatial politics of “making common” extends from land to communal networking practices, effectively “containing” ethnic identities via colonial, racist agendas while producing widespread anti-asian bias and violence. chun contends that the notion of the neighbor is precisely where we must intervene to enable future communities.   beth coleman continues the focus on infrastructure and the potential for ambiguity—or the spaces in between knowledge categories—to imagine a generatively wild ai where black techné disrupts a colonial sublime and its cyber-servo-mechanistic regime. coleman targets predictive machine learning as predicated on racist assumptions that, via automated categorizing and sorting practices, are reproduced in the ai “surround”— a command-control array of sensors and informatics. in deploying generative (unsupervised) machine learning, coleman conceptualizes a “technology of the surround” that unbinds categorical logics, and liberates subjects from capture and enslavement, to inhabit not an artificial but an alien intelligence and intra-active subject events (rather than subject/objects), understood as an excess of possibilities.   in “swapping gender is a snap(chat),” an analysis of snapchat’s gender swap program, teddy goetz challenges the algorithmic reinscription of reductive gender norms and, drawing on interviews with transgender, non-binary, and/or gender queer individuals, underlines the tension that exists between the need for external legibility and internal authenticity. goetz argues that “for trans persons, navigating gendered legibility requires balancing authentic expression, societal legibility, and reinforcing hegemonic norms.” while calling for a system that could mix and match, and allowing space for ambiguity and unbounded exploration, goetz offers a salutary reminder of the experiential struggle for change.   in her critique of healthcare-based ai in india, radhika radhakrishnan also underlines the social cost of technological experiments undertaken in the name of development and the social good. attending to the bodies and medical records of the sick-poor, used as data to train proprietary ai systems with no state regulation, radhakrishnan offers an important rejection of the claim to spectacular, quick-fix technologies. the study calls for the end of state complicity in the production of experimental subjects as distinct from subjects at liberty to experiment with co-constitutive systems.   missing data in their research process propelled the hauntological analysis by katrine meldgaard kjær, mace ojala, and line henriksen, in “absent data.” the authors unpack the meaningfulness of the silences and absences that are common components of automated data collection from social media or the internet. the study demonstrates how to center and employ absences as data or presence that co-construct the research process to better understand and make transparent relationships that can be located in data’s absences.   in the commentary section, a reflective piece from postcolonial communication scholar radha hegde titled “pathogens, precarity, and digital politics of exclusion” offers insights into the raceand class-tipped protocols ascribing shelter during the covid-19 pandemic in the united states and india. the piece situates this moment of lived experience across the globe as we witness how informational and connective logics, housed in infrastructures and institutions, produce housing and health precarity. hegde reveals these as global practices, made possible by neoliberal and capital pressures that produce a politics of systemic exclusion.   the image and text section offers three practice-infused pieces deploying visual and multimodal interventions that probe the sensorial dimensions of systems and platforms, exposing problematic systemic predilections and offering provocations for safer and more sustainable futures.   artist shu lea cheang presents her provocative installation 3x3x6 from the venice biennale (2019) that reveals, reproduces, and reinvents how gender and sexuality norms are entrenched in carceral and public spaces. the image/text piece, using visual parallax form, moves participants through elements of the whimsical installation, visiting the video-refitted prison space (once housing famed lover casanova), staged transpunk photos, digital panoptic interfaces, and “fucked up” avatar face tracking. accompanied by comments from curator paul preciado and an interview with paula gardner, the experience invites us to imagine a future ungoverned by gender, sex, and other binaries impositions. the cover of this issue also features a piece from 3x3x6.   jennifer willet discusses the ethos of her incubator lab, at university of windsor, ontario, canada, a collaborative and community-engaged bioart lab that invites deep engagement with scientific methods and biomatter. lab collaborators work to render biological life accessible, in keeping with the life-affirming work of feminist, postcolonial perspectives and supporting indigenous ways of knowing. willet frames the lab’s unique work—taking the form of parades, cultivated bacteria, and bureaucratic risk management critiques—as reflecting and cultivating love for all life communities.   hayri dortdivanlioglu maps the smart sensors and cctv cameras deployed in atlanta's smart city project, smartatl, placed in north avenue smart corridor, in a notably black neighborhood. the mapping makes visible the (visually obscured) sensor devices and the all-encompassing surveillance achieved by algorithms that coordinate them. the potent visual maps are deployed to help us recognize and push back against the surveillance gaze and its uneven impacts on racialized, peripheralized subjects.   this collection of text and practice-based work reflects diverse global understandings and visionings of the platform and the system. each article reflects a snapshot of this pandemic moment in which we live, write, and make, providing everyday life context that is crucial to understanding system constraints and reproductive problematics, and to imagining different human-technology futures. this moment has newly pressured us all to account for the gendered and raced inequities and disparities produced by white supremacy and settler colonialism that is validated and perpetuated in our systems and platforms. we hope that as a collection born of this moment and infused with a critical race and postcolonial lens, the work will deepen our feminist understandings of how the complex ideological ground of platforms normalize and sustain systemic bias. the pieces offer potent methods of critique that divert the gaze (coleman 2009; browne 2015), reject racial coding, probe contemporary practices of governance and branding, and deploy these to ideate humane technology platforms in service to sustainable futures. it is our hope that in colliding communication, sts, hci, digital humanities, and other fields, we create opportunities to recognize feminist divergences as opportunities for productive disruption. thank you for spending time with the special section.     references abdelnour-nocera, josé, torkil clemmensen, and masaaki kurosu. 2013. “reframing hci 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(1984) 2018.‪ the master's tools will never dismantle the master’s house. new york: penguin modern. munster, ana. 2006. materializing new media: embodiment in information aesthetics. hanover, nh: dartmouth college press. nakamura, lisa. 2012. “queer female of color: the highest difficulty setting there is? gaming rhetoric as gender capital.” ada: journal of gender, new media and technology 1. noble, safiya u. 2018. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: nyu press. parvin, nassim. 2019. “look up and smile!: seeing through alexa’s algorithmic gaze.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29592. sandoval, chela. 2000. methodology of the oppressed. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. stark, luke, and kate crawford. 2019. “the work of art in the age of artificial intelligence” surveillance & society 17 (3–4): 442–55. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.10821. suchman, lucy. 2007. human-machine reconfigurations. cambridge: cambridge university press. tallbear, kim. 2013. native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. minneapolis: university of minnesota press.     author bios paula gardner is associate professor and asper chair at mcmaster university, ontario. she runs pulse lab at mcmaster, which engages collaborative practice to innovate art and health technologies with community for social change.   sarah kember is professor of new technologies of communication at goldsmiths, university of london and director of goldsmiths press.     special section domesticity at war: bringing the war home in martha rosler's house beautiful wartime photomontages     caren kaplan uc davis cjkaplan@ucdavis.edu     abstract the uneven, sometimes violent relationship between “here” and “elsewhere” is evoked powerfully in martha rosler's house beautiful: bringing the war home—two linked sets of photomontages that engage the gender and racial politics of domesticity in the us as well as the geopolitics of empire. troubling mythologies of warfare and documentary realism with dazzling wit and critical fury, these works refer materially and specifically to places and times of war in solidarity with protest movements while also raising questions of historical linkages and political accountability. suturing their times and spaces into discontinuous contact, the two series bring together seemingly incommensurate elements—exquisite domestic interiors, glamorous consumer commodities often associated with conventional femininity, and the landscapes and bodies damaged and destroyed by warfare-to produce images of great immediacy and visceral power. across the long arc of the wars waged by the us from vietnam to iraq and afghanistan, rosler has shown us how the modernist aestheticization of us domesticity in the affluent post-world war ii era promised personal empowerment and hopeful futures yet, emerging from warfare itself, only brought about more war.   keywords photomontage, war art, domesticity, vietnam war, war on terror     the bright experiments of postwar american architecture are covertly organized by the trauma of war—the trauma of the war that just finished and the trauma of the fact that it had not really finished after all. to understand this extraordinary blurring of military culture, image culture, and architectural culture, the condition of the postwar house needs to be dissected. a haunted picture emerges, domesticity at war. —beatriz colomina, domesticity at war in the winter of 1991-92, feminist architectural historian beatriz colomina wrote, “we are always on the edge of war. on the threshold” (1992, 3). the war that inspired these remarks was the first persian gulf war, a war that seemed to begin and end quickly in a matter of months. yet in many ways that war disturbed any neat demarcations of time and place since the dynamics that produced it stretched from at least the nineteenth century to the present. the problem of determining when war begins and ends as well as the difficulty of grasping the full span of warfare's locations prompted colomina to link the “battle of the family” to geopolitics as well as to interior design aesthetics and domestic architecture. in doing so, colomina expanded the terms of western feminist criticism, arguing that classand race-based complicity with nationalist projects of “health and hygiene” were operationalized quite violently in the supposedly peaceful sphere of the modern home. colomina's analysis echoed a particular turn in feminist criticism in the united states in the 1990s just before and after the first persian gulf war, linked to the emergence of the fields of postcolonial, transnational cultural, and critical race studies, among others, as well as feminist global and transnational activism, stimulated in part by the un conferences on women of that era and the burgeoning of non-governmental organizations that focused on gender equity and justice issues (grewal 2017, 67; lang 1997). as feminist inquiry into the power relations between the metropolitan centers and so-called “peripheries” brought renewed attention to the entanglement of first-world gender studies with racialized legacies of imperialism and colonialism, warfare “over there” became better understood as differently but persistently at work “at home.” however, one of the most rigorous feminist investigations into the co-constitution of home and away, private and public, nation and foreign had emerged years earlier, as agit-prop. in 1967, during the vietnam war,^⁠1^ artist martha rosler created a series of flyers to be circulated at anti-war demonstrations in the us.^⁠2^ composed of images clipped from the mainstream, glossy magazines house beautiful and life, the photomontage flyers pasted photojournalist representations of warfare in vietnam into idealized scenes of north american suburban homes. created initially as reproducible ephemera, the flyers floated around the margins of rosler's politically charged artwork as house beautiful: bringing the war home (1967-72),^⁠3^ joining her photomontage series, body beautiful, or beauty knows no pain (1966-72)^⁠4^ from roughly the same time, as witty, incisive feminist political critique. in 2004 and 2008, rosler returned to photomontage to address the second persian gulf war and the so-called “war on terror.”^⁠5^ although separated by decades, both iterations of the series bring together seemingly incommensurate elements—modernist domestic interiors, glamorous consumer commodities often associated with domestic femininity in an affluent society, and the landscapes and bodies damaged and destroyed by warfare, to produce images of great immediacy and visceral power. across the long arc of the wars waged by the us from vietnam to iraq and afghanistan, rosler's photomontages ask viewers to confront the seductive mythologies of consumer culture and liberal democracies; specifically, while the modernist designs and materials that symbolized us domesticity in the affluent post-world war ii era promise personal empowerment and hopeful futures, foundational and persistent inequalities and state-sponsored warfare produce more violence, violence that cannot be wished away or kept at bay. house beautiful we may posit that the home is “a haven in a heartless world,” to use a victorian phrase. but, in fact, it's as much part of the war machine in the maintenance and reproduction of the soldiers, the society, the work force, as the battlefield itself. so, i see this as absolutely stemming from a feminist critique of the way we think of daily life and the various realms and tasks that are assigned to different genders. —martha rosler, in laura hubber, “the living room war: a conversation with artist martha rosler” in montage images like beauty rest (c. 1967-72) (figure 1), rosler invites the viewer to consider the effect of “bringing the war home” into the space of domestic life in the us during wartime. the large marital bed, occupied by a white, heterosexual couple with their blond offspring, might be presumed to be a safe haven but we see it surrounded by a rising tide of dark water in a dirty, ruined room. while the beauty rest mattress is pristine and the couple and their child seem peacefully engaged in rest or at play, their world appears to be insecure. figure 1. martha rosler, beauty rest, c. 1967-72. from the series house beautiful: bringing the war home. photomontage. courtesy of the artist. in creating a single perspectival field, rosler creates a space that is almost “real,” drawing our gaze to a reasonably probable scene even as we pull back from the implied threat to the family. the maintenance of scale and perspective in many of the house beautiful photomontages, as frances jacobus-parker argues, establishes a vantage point that is always “inside the house,” visually deconstructing the “physical separation between the (american) home front and the distant war” (2015, 61). as rosler has written, “i wanted the viewer to have a place to stand, so the montages are often in rooms or in other landscape settings. this is really important for me that you enter the image and see yourself standing there” (2022). rosler clipped the images of domestic interiors in the first photomontage series from the pages of house beautiful, one of the preeminent “shelter” magazines primarily targeted at middle-class female consumers that offered aspirational editorial content and high-gloss advertisements. founded in 1896 and still published by the hearst corporation, house beautiful has played a major role in producing a powerful “iconography of white, middle-class domesticity” (d. harris 2013, 1). as dianne harris points out, magazines like house beautiful instructed viewers “how to look like everyone else and, essentially, how to be white” (32). while the “look” of the popularized international style modernism that “opened up” the plan of the typical family home in the us suburbs following the post-world war ii housing boom is often framed as an almost natural evolution—the product of neutral scientific and technological innovation—it not only reinforced racialized hierarchies of homeownership and the policing of neighborhood boundaries but also constituted a specific national identity—the good life as a symbol of north american exceptionalism (castillo 2010). in the pages of house beautiful during the vietnam war, no weapons or casualties would appear. leafing through house beautiful in one's living room or in the doctor's office waiting room, the seeming banality and quotidian nature of the activity and setting removed any obligation to critically engage with the material, thereby constructing and reinforcing “specific national policies and economic and social structures” (castillo 2010, 2). “house beautiful” is a tenuous fantasy that requires energetic social and political reinforcement to maintain its luster and imaginative force. if one's own home is a “battleground,” as deborah cohler reminds us, “one cannot be on a homefront: it has become a war zone” (2017, viii). representations of house and home have circulated in uneasy and unruly ways between competing and uneven interests and stakeholders throughout the modern period as new materials and modes of production inspired innovative design and new subjects struggled for control over residential spaces.^⁠6^ particularly in the influential middle-class in industrialized countries, distinct zones in the home were assigned by gender, race, class, and age. the “open-plan” home with central heating and gleaming electric appliances that began to proliferate in the postwar us suburbs appeared to promise not only freedom of movement and flexibility within the home itself but upward mobility. yet study after study has demonstrated that programs ostensibly established to promote middleto lower-income home ownership like the federal housing administration and the home owners' loan corporation consistently denied mortgages to non-whites, steered white and non-white home buyers into separate enclaves, and turned a blind eye to or promoted racist covenants and discriminatory loan practices (fishback et al. 2022). with the possessive investment in whiteness as constitutive of property relations in the us, the development of postwar housing developments and the discursive apparatus of print and visual culture combined to produce a raced and classed as well as gendered lived experience of domestic architecture (c. harris 1993; d. harris 2013; cheng, davis, and wilson 2020). the postwar “boom” in suburban homes required assimilation into white racial identity and heteronormative family configurations that were heavily promoted by magazines and the newly available medium of television. as cheryl harris has argued, during the period following world war ii, “whiteness as property” took on increasingly “subtle forms” while retaining “the legal legitimation of expectations of power and control that enshrine the status quo as a neutral baseline,” thereby “masking the maintenance of white privilege and domination” (1993, 1715). the liberal phantasm of “domesticity” is co-constituted with nationalism, producing a mythic home that must be defined against and defended from foreign influences and invasions. if we understand the home, historically, as an “imperial formation,” to cite both ann stoler and mimi nguyen, then we need to seek out the many “graduated forms of sovereignty” that may be less overtly obvious but no less violently pernicious (stoler 2008, 193; nguyen 2012, 193). with the expansion of the middle-class in europe and the us throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the influx of immigrants and formerly enslaved persons into formal and informal labor sectors, and the rapid development of residential housing around the inner-city cores, the sentimental victorian trope of the white mother as the “angel” at the center of the domestic scene became a powerful symbolic component of the mythologized “american dream.”7 the free-standing, secure home and the celebrated privileges of the affluent, white housewife, however, were not available to most females in the us, or, the home itself (masking the worst abuses of patriarchal, racial, and class-based authority through a screen of “privacy”) was a source of danger or unhappiness. while domesticity could represent a privileged refuge for those who had experienced emotional vulnerability or economic insecurity, for others the sanctity of the private home could also represent a kind of prison-house of rigid mores and modes of life. when colomina referred to the “haunted picture” of postwar american architecture, she referenced gender as a war between progressive and conservative beliefs and practices and the home as the battleground both in practice and in the realm of cultural representation. also haunting the us suburban home are the irrefutably violent legacies of empire, industrialization, and warfare: the removal of native americans from their lands; the enslavement of africans over hundreds of years; and the ethos of “manifest destiny” that supports white supremacy, american exceptionalism, and settler-colonial ideologies. amy kaplan (2002) has argued that notions of domesticity were “intimately entwined” with the expansionist discourse of manifest destiny in nineteenth century north america, expressed and policed through contrasting spatial metaphors of separate spheres. in the period preceding the us civil war, when native american land was occupied and stolen at increasingly rapid rates, the home became represented as a “bounded and rigidly ordered interior space as opposed to the boundless and undifferentiated space of an infinitely expanding frontier” (kaplan 2002, 25). the role of the “angel of the house,” the white housewife, demanded the elimination of all traces of “violent conflict” in the sanctity of the home (23). however, the linking of the domestic household to the health and welfare of the domestic nation at war in its own interior against native americans and abroad as part of an increasing effort to become an imperial power required a continual definition over and against foreign “others” (25-26). as inderpal grewal has contended in the case of the british suffrage movement in the early twentieth century, the “white-washing” of the violence work of empire was deployed by white feminists who strove to establish the modern home as a space that would be safe from the barbarisms attributed to those from outside the race and class parameters of the imperial nation state (1996, 230). striving to ward off all “others” and wall in, as it were, the insiders who count as members of the family or nation has turned out to be a major cultural and political operation, generating the constant need for policing the boundaries that constitute the domestic against a flow of threats and destabilizations. this ambiguous relationship between inside and outside, here and there, or domestic and foreign, has persisted. in inheriting this racialized “imperial domesticity,” during a period of struggles to achieve civil rights and decolonization, images of the post-world war ii us suburban home have circulated discursively not only as prescriptive or aspirational but as deflective. this shifting of attention from the violent removal of indigenous people from much of the land used for the new housing developments as well as from the military derivation of many of the materials and government programs made modern architecture possible along with “redlining” and other racist real estate practices. “domesticity at war,” then, was not only a metaphor in rosler's photomontages. a mythologized notion of the domestic has circulated in the us like so many other key elements of modern liberal society, offering what it cannot provide and often providing what it claims to reject. photomontage it is a truism that fragmentation besets modernity, and collage/montage is a symptom, a strategy, and a form of resistance. ——martha rosler, “untitled,” in collage: the unmonumental picture rosler's use of photomontages can be situated within a set of radical democratic art practices that resist incorporation into elite institutions and openly invite creative praxis. subverting any adherence to photographic realism by drawing attention to image manipulation, photomontage circulated first in the nineteenth century through gimmicky postcards, mementos, and albums to emerge as an aesthetic movement just after the close of world war i in the creations of early dada and surrealism. often associated in its early days with political resistance to fascism and to critiques of capitalism, dada worked with and against the materials and practices of mass consumption, literally fragmenting and reorganizing materials to defamiliarize repressive discursive practices. while rosler remembers herself as more strongly influenced initially by surrealist max ernst, it is hard not to position her work in relation to the more overtly “political” dadaists from berlin like john heartfield, for example (buchloh 1999, 25). indeed, in discussing heartfield, rosler has pointed to the disruptive quality of his “manipulated” images: “in every photomontage was the implicit message that photography alone cannot 'tell the truth' and also the reminder that fact is itself a social construction” (2004, 279). eschewing apolitical relativism, rosler argues that all photographs “provide some sort of evidence” but that such artifacts cannot be viewed as purely transparent, objective, or definitive (279). like the early dada photomontages from the 1920s and '30s, rosler's photomontages call attention to the way the images themselves are created. a critique of authoritarianism, injustice, and war as well as a commitment to a democratizing approach to the art world also links rosler's montage practice to dada. as rosler has written, “by using collage as simple as that taught in grade school, i wanted to suggest to the viewer that this was all well within their reach and that maybe they ought to make some works like this themselves” (2019, 352). the practice of photomontage also supports rosler's commitment to the “decoy,” a “way of using images that are comfortably familiar, recognizable, uncomplicated, as a lure to draw attention” until “on closer inspection these things turn out to be something other” (rosler 2018, 37). the decoy instigates an “act of unsettling” that “helps us reconsider 'things as they are' and come to see that change is possible” (37). rosler's work with photomontage in the 1960s first came into view with the body beautiful series that brought the political critique of “the personal” generated by the women's liberation movement into dynamic engagement with commercial imagery. if body beautiful demythologized patriarchal dictates for femininity in the age of industrialized mass consumption, foreshadowing other works by rosler such as her video semiotics of the kitchen (1975) or installations such as garage sales (1973-2012), house beautiful expanded rosler's feminist critique to the geopolitics of empire and capitalism, including their discursive rationales for waging war. as rosler has written, “my aim was to tear the seamlessness of the apparently transparent photographic image—still laboring under the burden of barely questioned truth value—to create a new space with a potentially very different narrative” (2007a, 50). rosler's photomontages seek to bring the war “home” through startling juxtapositions that do not simply reveal the uncomfortable truth that the middle-class suburban home is a war zone but that the distinctions between home and away, domestic and foreign, here and elsewhere are unstable and political. rosler's photomontages fragmented the normalizing dream world promulgated by shelter magazines like house beautiful and the realist documentary framework of life, not through avant-garde modernism or abstraction but through an engagement with mass circulation print culture. if we consider the print magazine as an assemblage of images and texts that was often read out of order, in “scraps of time,” in all manner of places (waiting rooms, shops, buses, etc. as well as “at home”), any narrative linearity or unity of content is already disturbed (stein 1993, 145). the fracturing techniques of photomontage are not so much in opposition to the practice of reading/viewing popular magazines, then, as an intensification. doubling down on the interruptions and discontinuities of “reading” the compiled magazine, rosler's use of photomontage calls attention to the illusory protections of domesticity and the complicity of the secluded domestic subject in national and worldly politics. the mixing of home and away, domestic and foreign, in the photomontages is not so much a leveling of differences as a powerful reminder of “co-belonging”—that supposedly oppositional categories like the domestic and foreign, or home and away, may be blurred or present in uneven and contingent ways, troubling the fissures created by patriarchal, imperial geopolitics (rancière 2009, 58). in this context, the photomontages in rosler's first house beautiful series put the typical suburban home “on a war footing,” as mignon nixon points out, “asking how women infantilized by a postwar culture of masculine supremacy, early marriage, and compulsory consumerism...would be enlisted by the mass media in a 'living room war' and how an alternative visual culture engaged with feminist politics might help them to resist” (2019, 331-32). bringing the war home war is not neatly contained in the space and time legitimated by the state. it reverberates in other terrains and lasts long past armistice. it comes home in ways bloody and unexpected. —kathleen belew, bring the war home: the white power movement and paramilitary america. the house beautiful photomontages from the era of the vietnam war placed images clipped from photojournalism in life magazine into incongruous settings, “forcing,” as melissa ho has put it, “here” and “there” into “one representational space” (2019, 19). one could make the case that the incessant “onslaught” of war reportage in print and via television already brought the war “home” (jacobus-parker 2015, 58). in addition to the saturation news coverage in magazines like life, time, and newsweek, an unprecedented increase in the viewing of nightly news on the newly acquired television sets in most us households throughout the 1960s had created the sobriquet “the living room war” (arlen 1969).^⁠8^ pundits such as marshall mcluhan referred to the conflict as the “first television war,” blurring the line between civilian and military while positioning the viewer as a “participant in every phase of the war” such that “the main actions of the war are now being fought in the american home itself” (mcluhan and fiore 1968, 134). if television news simultaneously gave viewers the impression that they could see over “there” from “here” at home, bridging chasms of experience and distance, the nature of the productions themselves in terms of editing and context reimposed or mediated distance, making it possible for viewers to go about their usual activities (like eating dinner while watching a broadcast) without too much disruption. thy phu has argued that the media representation of vietnam produced an “american framework” that created a narrow and selective view of a country always already at war (2022, 5, 12). this orientalist stereotype of a “timeless” conflict encouraged views split between paternalism (the us should control the region based on its civilizational superiority) and futility (change is impossible in a former colony).^⁠^ whether leafing through the pages of life magazine, with its frequent photo spreads on the warfare, or absorbing the evening news on network television, the us public developed a complicated relationship to the times and places of war and to a growing awareness of the impact of the war at home. rosler's wartime photomontages prompt the viewer to look differently at photojournalism and to question received notions about documentary truth. the idea that the circulation of images of war atrocities can galvanize a public response is a dearly held tenet of post-world war ii liberal visual culture.^⁠9^ in that context, the apparent “freedom” of journalists to circulate and report as they pleased has become a cherished myth of the vietnam war, foundational to the enduring belief that objective journalism led to the ending of an increasingly unpopular conflict. singular documentary photographs have, indeed, played significant roles in the contest for attention and reaction since more portable cameras first changed the dynamics of war reporting just prior to world war ii. nevertheless, widespread understanding of photography as a transparent and objective record of a stable reality has been destabilized at regular intervals by evidence to the contrary, leading to mixed attitudes towards the power and purpose of all documentary representation and, especially, the iconic images of violence. as frances guerin and roger hallas have argued, such images confer enormous cultural power even as they remain inadequate to the historical task of remembering and documenting the almost unimaginable or horrifically grievous event (2007, 2). rosler has written incisively on the limits of conventional photojournalism, arguing that “war photography oscillates between the ideological poles of gore for gore's sake and exaggerated compassion, in which the anguish and heroism of the photographer command most attention” (2004, 250-51). regardless of the photographer's individual intentions, the economic structures and political pressures of publication usually prevented war imagery from producing anything other than a reflection of “personal anxiety” or “its alternative numbness” (250-51). photomontage as a format offered rosler a mode of working with ubiquitous imagery in a way that could nudge the viewer out of inattention via work that brought the operation of documentary realism into conscious perception. all montage—whether photographic or filmic—“allows difference to proliferate,” as stephanie schwartz has written; the basis for solidarity across differences, schwartz argues, is to break up the narrative ordering by which representation takes place and to “order images differently” (schwartz 2020, 15). rosler's vietnam war-era photomontages order differently without producing abstraction or avant-garde estrangement from the “real.” for example, in balloons lush green houseplants and a colorful sculptural pile of “balloons” bring cheerful life to a stylish living room (figure 2). figure 2. martha rosler, balloons, c. 1967-72. from the series house beautiful: bringing the war home. photomontage. courtesy of the artist. a lucite coffee table and shag rug signal the absence of anything messy or dirty that might mar such an ideal modern interior, but there in the middle of the image, on the staircase, midway between the first and second floor, a vietnamese woman in clear distress holds an injured or dead baby. in that liminal space between floors, the woman demands our attention. the space before her is very dark. in this work, the war is inside the house; there is literally and figuratively no escape from war. evidence of the war blocks the stairway, maintains the center field of vision, and destroys any semblance of the “good life.” tron (amputee) places an image of a young vietnamese girl into a classic open-plan suburban living room complete with sectional furniture, picture windows, and a television set in pride of place (figure 3). figure 3. martha rosler, tron (amputee), c. 1967-72. from the series house beautiful: bringing the war home. photomontage. courtesy of the artist. the girl is situated to one side and her arm is cropped at the elbow, reinforcing the violence of the amputation of her lower limb. the original photograph of nguyen thi tron (who was twelve years old at the time) appeared on the cover of life magazine on november 8, 1968, one of a series taken by iconic vietnam war-era photojournalist larry burrows. the original image published in life reverberates with the dynamics of empire that mimi thi nguyen has termed the “gift of freedom”—“a world-shaping concept describing struggles aimed at freeing peoples from unenlightened forms of social organization through enactments of power and violence” (2012, 3). to free girls like tron from the threat of communism and to offer the gift of the possibility of an idealized consumption-oriented domesticity, death or injury is the compensation for war. in lifting the figural image of tron out of the pages of life magazine, rosler's act of collage dramatically shifts the “circulation and perception of the symbolic, cultural, and social capital associated with the original background image (kruglinski 2014, 114). but in this instance, as in others, rosler's photomontages cannot evade fully the postcolonial dynamics of the ”gift." the subject of the “gift of freedom”—whether liberated from communism or freed from mainstream narrative representation—lives in the world created by globalized liberalism and, therefore, as "thing, force, and gaze“ marks its difference from ”coloniality“ but also signals its ”linkage to it“ (nguyen 2012, 22). rosalind deutsche has argued that rosler's wartime photomontages ”brought the american war and the american home together not only to examine the war's effects on the home but to stage the intimacy that already existed between the two“ (2018, 22). it might be more accurate to say that a photomontage like tron (amputee) mediates the troubled realm of depictions of young victims of war by simultaneously evoking ”intimacy“—nguyen thi tron has been ”placed“ directly into a living room that might seem familiar to many viewers in the us—while withholding sentimentality or identification. the elements of the image, while plausible in terms of scale and perspective, are out of order, or ordered differently, to make us notice. yet the use of an iconic photograph of wartime trauma raises complicated matters of point of view, reception, and the powerful tensions that produce humanitarian responses to warfare.^⁠10^ as phu argues, ”so long as an american framework remains transfixed on the exposure of the vietnamese child's pain while still perceiving the child as other,“ us and vietnamese perspectives ”cannot overlap“ (2022, 14).^⁠11^ rather than staging intimacy or simplistic equivalence between here and there, tron (amputee) creates difference as political and always in the process of becoming, therefore riven with unequal power relations. in discussing her wartime photomontages over the years, rosler has made many references to her efforts to deconstruct the separation of ici et ailleurs (here and there) as not only a concept but crediting the inspiration provided by jean-luc godard and anne-marie miéville's 1976 film of that title. that film was made under complicated circumstances; first commissioned by the arab league and fatah as a documentary focused on the palestinian resistance movement and partially shot on location, the project was interrupted when the fedayeen subjects of the film were murdered in jordan during the events that came to be known as ”black september,“ and resurrected as a reflection on the possibilities and limits of political solidarity and identification through a demystification of visual and sonic representation. the challenge presented in ici et ailleurs is the construction of connection ”without allowing identification,“ to actively engage media instead of passively consuming content, and to resist romanticizing or victimizing the ”other“ and thereby collude in their destruction (harrison 2018, 188). the colonial histories that brought the us military to vietnam make possible international and transnational solidarities as well as warfare. thus, tron (amputee) conveys that nguyen thi tron has been injured grievously in vietnam and, simultaneously, ”tron“ is ”here.“ the montage generates a viewer that is ”us" and us; that is, the nation that wages war views the results of its actions in close quarters. the photographic representation of tron remains an image frozen in time, used by photographers, editors, and artists for various purposes. the benefits of these operations remain uneven, generating powerful sensibilities that struggle in and through cultural and political solidarity. picture windows, window pictures the window is the battlefield for all the tensions between the suburban interior and the outer landscape, the interface with the outdoors but also the space where it flattens into part of the inside. in its most popular suburban variation, the picture window, has become a metonym for suburban life in general. no other architectural element, not even the lawn, better encapsulates the suburban home's mission to release americans from the cramped conditions of urban life into open space. —andrea vesentini, indoor america: the interior landscape of postwar suburbia the “beauty” of many of the houses featured in house beautiful during the era of the war in vietnam—the magazine as well as the photomontages—was largely premised on an approach to “open-plan” design that relied in part on picture windows to convey the spaciousness that opened the otherwise private realm to the world. throughout the second half of the twentieth century, thanks to new technologies and materials, windows became stretched into walls, altering not only the look but the “feel” of homes (eskilson 2018, 59). “living in a window” meant not only that you could see out into an expanded vista but that others could see you (isenstadt 2014, 156). colomina has argued that the increasingly popular “glass walls” operated in this regard as “instruments of control,” increasing surveillance in numerous ways—the denizens of the household could be scrutinized by each other and as well as by those “outside” even as anxious homeowners could keep tabs on racialized or classed “others” who might be perceived to be intruding in neighborhoods structured as white, middle-class spaces (colomina 2007, 153). although the more cosmopolitan modernist glass houses of mies van der rohe or philip johnson were priced far beyond the means of most people, as lynn spigel has pointed out, the us public was familiar with architectural modernism because it was “widely publicized” through “fairs, museum exhibitions, department stores, home magazines, and the movies” (1988, 16-17). picture windows were part of the “soft power” of us domestic architecture in this period, lending “physical and emotional immediacy” to “abstract ideological concepts” like democracy, middle-class values, and private consumption (castillo 2010, xi, xix). therefore, even if a rosler wartime photomontage does not feature a picture window per se, by enlisting the representation of modern architectural elements to destabilize the division between here and there, the collaged image implicates the “glass wall” or “screen” in the project of “bringing the war home.” consider, for example, house beautiful: giacometti (figure 4). figure 4. martha rosler, house beautiful (giacometti), c. 1967-72. from the series house beautiful: bringing the war home. photomontage. courtesy of the artist. in this work we see a fastidiously arranged contemporary living room, filled with art works, including a “walking man” statue by modernist sculptor alberto giacometti. one must look through the windows to notice that the serene scene includes views of vietnamese war dead. the scale and tones of these inserted images are matched just enough that they register as distinct and yet they are not an egregious imposition on the composition. the war is outside of the house but, by filling the entire space of the windows, we might get the impression that there is nothing else in the world except war. thanks to the implied large expanses of glass, the presumably secure boundary between inside and outside, here and there, becomes vulnerable, potentially permeable. the complex operations of the picture window are also at work in cleaning the drapes, a photomontage that depicts a modish young woman deploying the latest innovation in vacuum technology (figure 5). figure 5. martha rosler, cleaning the drapes, c. 1967-72. from the series house beautiful: bringing the war home. photomontage. courtesy of the artist. as she pulls aside her faintly colored, brocaded drapes, soldiers in a sandbagged foxhole are revealed as a black-and-white scene. like a theater curtain opening on a performance, the view “outside” evokes for many viewers the televisual experience of the nightly newscast, “cleaned” up enough so that it cannot overly disturb us dinnertime. but is it a window or a tv screen? colomina interprets the montage as an integration of the two, writing that in rosler's photomontages “the image on the tv screen becomes the image in the picture window” (colomina 2007, 290).^⁠12^ but rosler has cast some doubt on this—prompting us to wonder why we assume that the curtains must frame an expanse of glass (rosler 2007a, 50). in a discussion with colomina published in artforum in 2007, homi bhabha argued that in cleaning the drapes “the outside is brought as close as possible, but there is still an inside and outside...there is a curtain that can be opened or closed, and there is the plate-glass window that allows you to see outside but also protects you” (bhabha, colomina, and griffin 2007, 444). bhabha contrasted the binary discourses of the cold war to the era of the “war on terror,” which he described as more “liminal” (445). in response, colomina reminded bhabha that “the collapse of inside and outside” also existed during the cold war and is always an “historical process” (445). in a published response to bhabha and colomina titled “here and elsewhere,” rosler (2007a) objected strenuously to the reduction of her photomontages to a metaphoric engagement with televisual screens and windows and, thus, solely to representation per se.^⁠13^ “permeability” is a constant; rosler pointed out that during the cold war “windows could kill”—that is, the suburban home was no protection from nuclear flashes and other dangers (2007a, 50). it was the “interpenetration of fears” in that period that instigated rosler's choice to bring architectural or interior design imagery and advertisements together with images culled from wartime photojournalism. the ubiquity of picture windows in the imagery promoted in shelter magazines like house beautiful belied mid-century homeowners' hesitancies and anxieties about invasion of privacy or surveillance but also masked concerns about views themselves. in many tightly clustered suburban developments, the windows did not look out always at the park-like surroundings associated with high-end, luxury homes but, instead, garbage cans, parked cars, and garage doors or, at best, fenced backyards (vesentini 2018, 156). if the suburb offered white homeowners an escape from crowded, multiracial or multicultural urban communities, the view from the picture window might be a reminder that the distance traveled did not offer as great a difference as might have been desired. the troubled relations between here and there reverberated through various scales of the domestic—the family home, the neighborhood, the nation, and geopolitics—and the picture window, as colomina has noted, serves as a “powerful reminder of the complexity of any divide between exterior and interior” (bhabha, colomina, and griffin 2007, 443). endless this war the real danger—as evidenced by the mass willingness of americans to take refuge from uncertainty in the utterances of their leaders, regardless of the plethora of evidence contradicting them—is political; it is the danger that people will choose fantasy, and fantasy identification with power, over a threatening or intolerably dislocating social reality. —martha rosler, decoys and disruptions: selected writings, 1975-2001 in the early 2000s, shortly after the advent of the wars in afghanistan and iraq under the rubric of the war on terror, a bumper sticker appeared with the slogan “endless war” with “less” crossed out and “this” inserted above it. the imperative statement “end this war” disrupted the notion of “endless war,” implying that anti-war activism was needed and could make a difference. protest against the bombing and occupation of afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and the ground war in iraq in february of 2003 often reached unprecedented proportions,^⁠14^ but the global nature of the war on terror and the ambiguity of its origins and purpose contributed to a sense of unease about any possible endpoint. as the wars dragged on, marked by mounting civilian casualties and sagging us troop morale, protests became more diffused and less apparent as mass actions, moving into refugee assistance, cyber-activism, and long-term educational or art/performance projects. despite the thousands, even millions, of people who poured into public spaces over many years to protest us military actions in afghanistan and iraq, the sense that a seemingly endless war was engulfing civil society and bringing about ever greater consensus for a neoliberal world order created challenges for anti-war organizations and initiatives. invited to participate in a show in 2004 with the group artists against the war, rosler decided to return to photomontage. as she explains, “i just knew i'd be asked why i'd returned to something after forty years, and i had a snappy comeback ready: tell me what we, the united states, are doing differently now. how is this quagmire different from the one back then?” (2018, 44). for this “reboot,” rosler had to address a different context in terms of the art world and commodification in an era of digitalization and globalized media (davis 2013, 574). as she has written, “i also wanted to repoliticize the house beautiful works, which were—all too predictably—being stripped of their directly political meaning. they had been agitational in the street but were now, on a museum or gallery wall, aesthetic objects from a past moment” (2018, 44). rosler also had to contend with the similarities and differences of the wars waged by the us; vietnam, afghanistan, and iraq shared histories of euro-american colonialism but they also could not be reduced to the same in terms of resistance to external forces of empire or internal forms of culture, economy, or politics. one constant prevailed; as stephanie schwartz puts it, “in order to protest a 'new' war in the gulf, rosler protested the 'old' war that was still being fought at home. it had to be this way. it still is this way” (2020, 16-17). accordingly, returning to the cut and paste method of photomontage as a “meta-form” could signal “a certain 'retro'...element in the war itself” (rosler cited in davis 2013, 569). thus, the curtained reveal of cleaning the drapes from the earlier series is echoed in the gray drape from 2008 (figure 6). figure 6. martha rosler, the gray drape, 2008. from the series house beautiful: bringing the war home, new series. photomontage. courtesy of the artist. the massive picture windows in vacation getaway from the first series bring the war home once again in lounging woman from 2004 (figure 7). figure 7. martha rosler, lounging woman, 2004. from the series house beautiful: bringing the war home, new series. photomontage. courtesy of the artist. but there are, and should be, important differences; years have passed, the wars are in different places, the military draft has been eliminated in favor of “volunteer” personnel, weaponry and communications technologies have changed, and the conditions of art production and reproduction have altered as well. rosler cut and pasted paper for her second series, but she also photographed and reproduced works digitally, lending a slightly different “feel” to the imagery, a more contemporary gloss (evans 2019, 163). in a further distinction from the vietnam war-era works, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, the post-world war ii interior architecture and decor no longer signaled an unambiguous invitation to the “good life” for class-mobile white americans. in photo-op from 2004, the modernist interior now contains two young girls from the war zones, dead; one in an iconic eames lounge chair favored by hipsters who prize “retro” mid-century modern furniture, while the picture windows reveal a fiery scene of battle (figure 8). figure 8. martha rosler, photo-op, 2004. from the series house beautiful: bringing the war home, new series. photomontage. courtesy of the artist. meanwhile, two identical blonde, white fashionistas look into the screens of flip phones that display two different aspects of a male subject in distress. the costs of war are represented not only inside the house but they are also visible on the phone screens. as media has changed over the years, so too have the spatial and temporal features of the battleground. these shifts are also fully apparent in election (lynndie) from 2004 (figure 9). figure 9. martha rosler, election (lynndie), 2004. from the series house beautiful: bringing the war home, new series. photomontage. courtesy of the artist. in this work we see us soldier lynndie england, one of the central figures in the traumatic photographs leaked from abu ghraib prison just outside of baghdad, in her now-iconic stance, holding the leash at the other end of which should be, could be, a debased and abused prisoner. unlike the source photograph, in rosler's photomontage the victim at the end of the leash is hidden by the countertop—which only enhances the terror.^⁠^ intensifying the unheimlich tension in the domestic setting, rosler has placed images of tortured iraqi prisoners from the abu ghraib cache of snapshots in numerous locations around the gleaming kitchen; on the cover pages of food magazines like saveur and food and wine, on books and papers on the countertops, and on the glass windows of the double oven. on the right-hand side of the photomontage, pasted onto the front of a cabinet, is a mockup of a new york times op-ed from october 11, 2004 headlined “be part of the solution.” subtitled “making votes count,” the op-ed presciently warned that election machines may not be secure, endangering democracy, and urging “ordinary americans” to get “more involved in monitoring the election process” (new york times 2004). the threat to the “home front” from decades of imperial wars can be observed throughout the image. the beautiful appliances, the fresh salad ingredients, and the comfortable spaciousness of the room itself can barely maintain the influx of danger and violence including domestic fascism. the subject of feminism, present or absent in the image, is fully implicated in the workings of the security state at home (grewal 2017). there are echoes here of red stripe kitchen from the first series, a work that also features a state-of-the-art kitchen (figure 10). figure 10. martha rosler, red stripe kitchen, c. 1967-72. from the series house beautiful: bringing the war home. photomontage. courtesy of the artist. in the earlier work, the housewife we expect to see behind the counter seems to have just stepped out—her recipe in the magazine lies open, waiting to be consulted, and her paring knife and measuring spoons and even a few ingredients are situated as if she has just put them down for a moment. visible through the dual doorways of the kitchen, we see two male soldiers in combat fatigues in the hallway, bent over as if in mid-search. election (lynndie) brings the implicated military figure right into the room. while the war is clearly taking place outside, the war is unalterably, and much more viscerally, embedded in the home, a domestic space linked to globalized media culture. election (lynndie) insists on the responsibility of us citizens in not only destroying the civil society of iraq and afghanistan but in undermining democratic social and political justice at home. home work that is what becoming a feminist investigator of militarization does: it makes large militarizing structures and cultural tendencies clearer while shining a bright light on complicities closer to home. —cynthia enloe, “ticonderoga, gettysburg, and hiroshima: feminist reflections on becoming a militarized tourist” rosler's photomontages question the spatialization of warfare in modernity; where is home and who are those we want to embrace as family and friends within that domestic structure and who is perceived to be a threat or cast outside as enemies? the project also disturbs the temporality of warfare by asserting links to conflicts across decades, even centuries. as protest flyers and as art objects that circulate in galleries and online, the photomontages duck and swerve through diverse cultural spaces of reception and use. real things and representational decoys, these images reorder their material and conceptual elements in service to both differences and similarities. in considering connection without identification, rosler's photomontages do not evade the violent power relations that have been generated by industrial capitalism and empire but they work hard to open pathways to affiliation and accountability. bringing wars waged by the us over many decades into the hyper-commodified environment of mainstream magazines and newspapers, in these two wartime series rosler demonstrates the impossibility of delimiting domestic space as an innocent refuge from public and international spheres, an impossibility that challenges representational politics across formats and practices—televisual, photographic, cinematic, social media, analogue, digital, etc. such disturbances of here and there, now and then, resonate as powerful aftermaths of empire's wars—visible and invisible, declared and undeclared, linked to past, present and future endings. acknowledgements i would like to thank katrin mauer, minoo moallem, lisa parks, and jennifer terry for opportunities to present draft versions of this work. inderpal grewal, laura wexler, and eric smoodin, along with the editors of and contributors to this special section, offered helpful suggestions. i am deeply grateful to martha rosler for our conversations in person and online and for her generous permission to reproduce her photomontages. notes 1 i use the term “vietnam war” in this article, but it is important to note that the north vietnamese refer to the conflict as the “american war.” see phu 2022, 15.   2 over the years, rosler has emphasized that the photomontages were created to be distributed at protests and occasionally printed in “underground” publications. as rosler has noted, “i wanted these works to be agitational and didn't intend for them to enter the art world; putting images of casualties of an ongoing war into a museum or gallery seemed obscene” (2019, 352).   3 see martha rosler, house beautiful: bringing the war home (1967-72) .   4 see martha rosler, body beautiful, or body knows no pain (1966-72) .   5 for example, b-52 in baby's tears (1972), depicts the imprint of a b-52 bomber in the moss-like texture of living plants. prototype (sandbox b2) (2006) offers the form of a stealth bomber worked in sand in a wood box. fascination with the (game of the) exploding (historical) hollow leg (1983) is an installation piece set in a simulated war room. patriotic jell-o salad (2003) offers us a recipe for a molded and layered jell-o dessert that parodies ambrosia ingredients, replacing tiny marshmallows and chunks of fruit with toy soldiers and military hardware. much of rosler's art can be understood as critical analyses of the causes and forms of raced, gendered, and classed violence at work in the world today.   6 for an excellent study of early twentieth-century feminist efforts to reorganize the design and function of domestic spaces, see hayden 2000. see the matrix feminist design cooperative ([1984] 2022) for analyses of patriarchal built environments. for a discussion of past and recent feminist art works that engage domestic spaces, see morineau and pesapane 2013. see also rosler 1977.   7 for a comprehensive critical deconstruction of the essentialist mythos of gendered “separate spheres,” see davidson and hatcher 2002.   8 lynne spigel has noted, “while in 1950 only 9 percent of all american homes had a television set, by the end of the decade that figure rose to nearly 90 percent, and the average american watched about five hours of television per day” (1992, 188).   9 given the vast literature on the topic, i would point to susan sontag's foundational work, on photography (2010). see also the essays collected in batchen et al. 2012. to complicate sontag's overarching critical influence, see nudelman 2014.   10 for a related discussion of the struggle over racialized visual representations of muslims in postcolonial india in the context of lynchings and other violent attacks, see grewal, forthcoming.   11 see also mimi nguyen's (2012) analysis of the critical literature on huynh song “nick” ut's iconic photograph of kim phúc (aka “grace”— often referred to as “napalm girl”).   12 for discussions of the relationship between the television (or computer) screen and the window in relation to aesthetic perspective and the politics of representation, see friedberg 2006 and powell 2021.   13 rosler points out that only four out of twenty of her photomontages from the first series include picture windows, rejecting the dominance of the trope attributed to her work by others (myself, included) (conversation with the artist, new york city, august 2021).   14 protests in the us in october 2001 brought “hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets” (vasi 2006, 137). on february 15, 2003, “there were protests in over 600 cities round the globe” and the demonstration in london “dwarfed any previous protest in british history” (gillan, pickerill, and webster 2008, ix). worldwide, “estimates ranged as high as fifteen million people across seventy-five countries” (carty 2009, 21). see also bacchetta et al. 2002.   references arlen, michael. 1969. living room war. new york: viking. bacchetta, paola, tina campt, inderpal grewal, caren kaplan, minoo moallem, and jennifer terry. 2002. “transnational feminist practices against war.” meridians: feminisms, race, transnationalism 2 (2): 302-08. https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-2.2.302. batchen, geoffrey, mick gidley, nancy k. miller, and jay prosser, eds. 2012. picturing atrocity: photography in crisis. london: reaktion books. belew, kathleen. 2019. bring the war home: the white power movement and paramilitary america. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. bhabha, homi k., beatriz colomina, and tim griffin. 2007. “in conversation: domesticity at war.” artforum, summer, 442-47. https://www.artforum.com/print/200706/homi-k-bhabha-beatriz-colomina-and-tim-griffin-15362. buchloh, benjamin. 1999. “a conversation with martha rosler.” in martha rosler: positions in the life world, edited by catherine de zegher, 23-55. cambridge, ma: mit press. carty, victoria. 2009. “the anti-war movement vs. the war against iraq.” international journal of peace studies 14 (1): 17-38. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41852983. castillo, greg. 2010. cold war on the home front: the soft power of midcentury design. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. cheng, irene, charles l. davis, and mabel o. wilson, eds. 2020. race and modern architecture: a critical history from the enlightenment to the present. pittsburgh: university of pittsburgh press. cohler, deborah. 2017. “introduction: homefront frontlines and transnational geometries of empire and resistance.” feminist formations 29 (1): vii-xvii. http://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2017.0000. colomina, beatriz. 1992. “domesticity at war.” discourse 14 (1): 3-22. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389198. colomina, beatriz. 2007. domesticity at war. cambridge, ma: mit press. davidson, cathy n., and jessamyn hatcher, eds. 2002. no more separate spheres!: a next wave american studies reader. durham, nc: duke university press. davis, august jordan. 2013. “star wars: return of the sixties, or, martha rosler versus the empire striking back.” third text 27 (4): 565-78. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.814439. deutsche, rosalyn. 2018. “unrest.” in martha rosler: irrespective, 21-26. new haven, ct: yale university press. enloe, cynthia. 2016. “ticonderoga, gettysburg, and hiroshima: feminist reflections on becoming a militarized tourist.” american quarterly 68 (3): 529-36. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26360910. eskilson, stephen. 2018. the age of glass: a cultural history of glass in modern and contemporary architecture. new york: bloomsbury. evans, david. 2019. “cut and paste.” history of photography 43 (2): 156-68. https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2019.1695408. fishback, price, jonathan rose, kenneth a. snowden, and thomas storrs. 2022. “new evidence on redlining by federal housing programs in the 1930s.” journal of urban economics, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jue.2022.103462. friedberg, anne. 2006. the virtual window: from alberti to microsoft. cambridge, ma: mit press. gillan, kevin, jenny pickerill, and frank webster. 2008. anti-war activism: new media and protest in the information age. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. godard, jean-luc, and anne-marie miéville. 1976. ici et ailleurs. film script. https://subslikescript.com/movie/here_and_elsewhere-71646. grewal, inderpal. 1996. home and harem: nation, gender, empire, and the cultures of travel. durham, nc: duke university press. grewal, inderpal. 2017. saving the security state: exceptional citizens in twenty-first-century america. durham, nc: duke university press. grewal, inderpal. forthcoming. “gbv and postcolonial india: transnational media, hindutva, and muslim racializations.” in the cunning of gender violence: feminism and geopolitics, edited by rema hammami, nadera shalhoub-kevorkian, and lila abu-lughod. durham, nc: duke university press. guerin, frances, and roger hallas, eds. 2007. the image and the witness: trauma, memory and visual culture. london: wallpaper press. harris, cheryl. 1993. “whiteness as property.” harvard law review 106 (8): 1707-91. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1341787. harris, dianne. 2013. little white houses: how the postwar home constructed race in america. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. harrison, olivia c. 2018. “consuming palestine: anticapitalism and anticolonialism in jean-luc godard's ici et ailleurs.” studies in french cinema 18 (3): 178-91. https://doi.org/10.1080/14715880.2017.1293773. hayden, dolores. 2000. the grand domestic revolution: history of feminist designs for american homes, neighborhoods, and cities. cambridge, ma: mit press. ho, melissa. 2019. “one thing: vietnam american art and the vietnam war.” in artists respond: american art and the vietnam war, 1965-1975, edited by melissa ho, 1-29. washington, dc: smithsonian american art museum. hubber, laura. 2017. “the living room war: a conversation with artist martha rosler.” the iris: behind the scenes at the getty, february 16, 2017. https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/the-living-room-war-a-conversation-with-artist-martha-rosler/. isenstadt, sandy. 2014. the modern american house: spaciousness and middle-class identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. jacobus-parker, frances. 2015. “shock-photo: the war images of rosler, spero, and celmins.” in conflict, identity, and protest in american art, edited by miguel de baca and makeda best, 57-74. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing. kaplan, amy. 2002. the anarchy of empire in the making of u.s. culture. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. kruglinski, jennifer mary. 2014. “signal disruptions: gendered tropes and the feminist burlesque of martha rosler.” phd diss., stony brook university. lang, sabine. 1997. “the ngoization of feminism.” in transitions, environments, translations: feminisms in contemporary politics, edited by cora kaplan, debra keates, and joan wallach-scott, 101-20. new york: routledge. matrix feminist design co-operative, ed. (1984) 2022. making space: women and the man-made environment. new ed. london: verso. mcluhan, marshall, and quentin fiore. 1968. war and peace in the global village. corte madera, ca: gingko press. morineau, camille, and lucia pesapane. 2013. “from the housewife to the nana-maison: domesticity as a key theme for women artists.” in women house, edited by camille morineau and lucia pesapane, 12-16. paris: manuella editions. new york times. 2004. “be part of the solution.” october 11, 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/opinion/be-part-of-the-solution.html. nguyen, mimi thi. 2012. the gift of freedom: war, debt, and other refugee passages. durham, nc: duke university press. nixon, mignon. 2019. “what's love got to do, got to do with it? feminist politics and america's war in vietnam.” in artists respond: american art and the vietnam war, 1965-1975, edited by melissa ho, 325-47. washington, dc: smithsonian american art museum. nudelman, franny. 2014. “against photography: susan sontag's vietnam.” photography and culture 7 (1): 7-20. https://doi.org/10.2752/175145214x61001139322246. phu, thy. 2022. warring visions: photography and vietnam. durham, nc: duke university press. powell, amy knight. 2021. “if a painting is like a window, is it a means of ventilation?” grey room 18 (spring): 24-55. http://www.greyroom.org/issues/83/134/if-a-painting-is-like-a-window-is-it-a-means-of-ventilation/. rancière, jacques. 2009. the future of the image. london: verso. rosler, martha. 1977. “the private and the public: feminist art in california.” artforum international 16 (1): 66-77. rosler, martha. 2004. decoys and disruptions: selected writings, 1975-2001. cambridge, ma: mit press. rosler, martha. 2007a. “here and elsewhere.” artforum 46 (3): 50. rosler, martha. 2007b. “untitled.” in collage: the unmonumental picture, edited by richard flood and massimiliano gioni, 96. london: merrell. rosler, martha. 2018. martha rosler: irrespective. new haven, ct: yale university press. rosler, martha. 2019. “vietnam story.” in artists respond: american art and the vietnam war, 1965-1975, edited by melissa ho, 349-55. washington, dc: smithsonian american art museum. rosler, martha. 2022. “cleaning the drapes from the series house beautiful: bringing the war home. c. 1967-72.” museum of modern art. https://www.moma.org/audio/4092. schwartz, stephanie. 2020. “martha rosler's protest.” arts 9 (3):1-20. sontag, susan. 2010. on photography. new york: picador. spigel, lynn. 1988. “installing the television set: popular discourses on television and domestic space, 1948-1955.” camera obscura 6 (1 (16)): 9-46. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-6-1_16-9. spigel, lynn. 1992. “the suburban home companion: television and the neighborhood ideal in postwar america.” in sexuality and space, edited by beatriz colomina, 185-217. new york: princeton architectural press. stein, sally. 1993. “the graphic ordering of desire: modernization of a middle-class women's magazine, 1914-1939.” in the contest of meaning: critical histories of photography, edited by richard bolton, 145-62. cambridge, ma: mit press. stoler, ann laura. 2008. “imperial debris: reflections on ruins and ruination.” cultural anthropology 23 (2): 191-219. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20484502. vasi, ion bogdan. 2006. “the new anti-war protests and miscible mobilizations.” social movement studies 5 (2): 137-53. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742830600807493. vesentini, andrea. 2018. indoor america: the interior landscape of postwar suburbia. charlottesville: university of virginia press.     author bio caren kaplan is professor emerita of american studies at uc davis, an institution located on patwin (wintun) ancestral land. her research draws on cultural geography, landscape art, and military history to explore how representational practices of atmospheric politics contribute to undeclared as well as declared wars. recent publications include aerial aftermaths: wartime from above (duke university press, 2018) and life in the age of drone warfare (duke university press, 2017). byrne, henrietta. 2025. “refusing colonial legibility.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © henrietta byrne, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license refusing colonial legibility henrietta byrne university of sydney henrietta.byrne@sydney.edu.au keywords populations, birth cohort studies, epigenetics, legibility, anthropology in 2009 the australian government delivered a report titled closing the gap on indigenous disadvantage: the challenge for australia. each year since, the closing the gap report presents a report card on how aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples are faring when it comes to metrics such as life expectancy and maternal health as compared to non-indigenous australians (see closing the gap, n.d.). media reports circulate, graphs and tables abound, and the strategy sets off once again for another year of measuring “indigenous disadvantage.” in another day in the colony, chelsea watego refers to closing the gap as data collection that has been “dressed up as strategy” (2021, 201). in this piece i am concerned with how practices of data collection associated with population come to stand in for social change. i turn to one specific study, the australian aboriginal birth cohort study (the abc study), as an example of how measuring certain populations across time becomes a proxy for any meaningful reckoning with root causes of inequity, or as fleur johns describes it, how making and knowing populations represents a move from a foulcauldian governmentality of the power to “make live and let die” to a “power to make perceive and let pass” (2023, 76). in australia, this approach might be termed a governmentality of colonial unknowing, whereby the settler-colonial state functions through establishing “what can count as evidence, proof, or possibility—aiming to secure the terms of reason and reasonableness—as much as it works to dissociate and ignore” (vimalassery et al. 2016, 2). i argue that knowing populations through cohort studies such as the abc study privileges certain forms of colonial http://henrietta.byrne@sydney.edu.au/ roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) henrietta byrne, 2025 2 legibility—where the perceptibility of a population becomes the end goal—over any actual material change. the abc study is the largest indigenous birth cohort study in australia (menzies school of health 2022). in 1987, 686 aboriginal and torres strait islander babies were recruited from the royal darwin hospital, which represented over half of all “eligible aboriginal infants” in the northern territory at that time. the maternal, perinatal, and neonatal data collected in the first wave of the study in 1987 has been followed up in four data collection waves since, providing a longitudinal picture of indigenous health across the life course in the northern territory, with around 71 percent of original participants still engaging with the cohort study. when i saw the current lead researcher present a session on the abc study in 2019, she invoked an image of indigenous participants all over the northern territory “being measured on the veranda.” in addition to the usual collection of data on body size and shape, renal function, socioeconomic status, and lifestyle factors (namely, nutrition, smoking, and alcohol consumption), this most recent wave included additional lifestyle markers “such as major life events and stress biomarkers.” the researcher explained that this component was added to the abc study to explore the impacts of health damaging behaviors and stress on the body across generations. because many of the participants in the abc study are now parents—one-third of the participants who became mothers since joining the study had had their first child at twenty years old—the abc study was uniquely placed to track the impacts of stress on mothers and their children as they both aged. this new focus on intergenerational stress in the abc study hinges upon a loosely defined engagement with environmental epigenetics. in this brief example, we can see how this particular cohort study seeks to measure, and to make perceive, and to let pass, the intergenerational impacts of racism, here glossed as “stress,” on aboriginal mothers and their children, who have been measured in four waves of data collection since 1987. the project of making this population legible through a governmentality of colonial unknowing, now drawing on gendered logics of intergenerational transmission through environmental epigenetics, places data collection on a certain population as proxy for direct action on racialized injustice. instead we might ask, what might it look like to take action on embodied racism without taking more measurements? references closing the gap. n.d. “a new way of working together.” accessed july 13, 2025. https://www.closingthegap.gov.au/. johns, fleur. 2023. #help: digital humanitarianism and the remaking of international order. oxford university press. menzies school of health research. 2022. “life course program.” https://www.lifecoursemenzies.net.au. https://www.closingthegap.gov.au/ https://www.lifecoursemenzies.net.au/ roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) henrietta byrne, 2025 3 vimalassery, manu, juliana hu pegues, and alyosha goldstein. 2016. “introduction: on colonial unknowing.” theory & event 19 (4). https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/633283. watego, chelsea. 2021. another day in the colony. university of queensland press. author bio henrietta byrne is a postdoctoral research fellow at the sydney centre for healthy societies, university of sydney. situated within sts, medical anthropology, and sociology of health, her research addresses questions of knowledge production and evidence-making in health, particularly as related to settler-colonial states and hierarchies of knowledge. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633283 refusing colonial legibility keywords references author bio     original research ethnicity statistics as tricky tools in “post-racial” britain: celebrating the lives and obscuring the deaths of mixed-race populations     emily yue university of edinburgh eyue@ed.ac.uk     abstract the inclusion of a “mixed and multiple ethnic” category in the uk census since 2001 has mobilized a post-racial discourse that sensationalizes britain’s growing mixed-race population as representing britain’s post-raciality. two decades later, the 2011 census was linked up with national health service records to provide death statistics disaggregated by ethnicity. this article explores the consequences of these statistics for britain’s claims of post-raciality, given that the office for national statistics reported the “mixed and multiple ethnic” category as dying at amongst the highest rates of suicide in the uk between 2012 and 2019. in this article, i use feminist data science methods to research the uk’s ethnicity statistics and surrounding discourses in order to analyze the co-existence of celebratory narratives of mixedness and high rates of suicide. drawing on rajani bhatia’s articulation of the male/female sex ratio as a “tricky tool” for feminist struggle, i consider the uk’s ethnicity statistics as a tricky tool for research on mixedness at the intersections of the overrepresentation of mixed lives and the underrepresentation of mixed deaths in “post-racial” britain.     keywords suicide, statistics, tricky tools, mixed-race, post-race, data feminism, britain     introduction when the uk’s office for national statistics (ons) first began reporting death (including suicide) by ethnicity in august 2021, i was in the first year of my phd researching suicide among second-generation migrants in britain (yue 2024). the statistics—which reported white and mixed men, and mixed women, as dying at disproportionately high rates of suicide—presented an opportunity for me to “legitimize” my interest in attending to race, in a landscape of white male suicide knowledge. however, i was also concerned with how high rates of suicide reported among mixed populations might reproduce the historical pathologizing of mixedness (ifekwunigwe 2004) given suicide’s “compulsory ontology of pathology” (marsh 2010, 31, see also marzetti et al. 2023: 1563 who trace a similar “pathological pathway from being lgbt+ to being suicidal”). as it is, the uk’s suicide by ethnicity statistics have so far failed to shift uk suicide knowledge and prevention. in this article, i mobilize this tension to engage the uk’s suicide by ethnicity statistics as “tricky tools” (bhatia 2020). in doing so, i explore how we might at once take seriously the reporting of high rates of suicide among mixed populations—mobilizing a critique of existing pathologizing suicide knowledge and prevention that takes white(male)ness for granted and excludes “race”—and theorize the incongruence of suicide prevention for mixed populations in the context of “post-racial” white supremacy (joseph-salisbury 2018).1 to do this, i analyze the uk’s suicide by ethnicity statistics in relation to the uk’s population by ethnicity statistics, both of which overrepresent mixedness. i analyze relevant suicide prevention policy and documents that have been released prior, and subsequently, to the uk disaggregating suicide by ethnicity (ons 2021b), and reporting britain’s mixed populations as dying at the highest rates of suicide between 2012 and 2018.2 in being attentive to the potential uses and limits of data—and in situating the uk’s ethnicity statistics within the broader histories of “mixed-race”—this work can be situated within the project of data feminism (d’ignazio and klein 2020). guided by this approach, i argue that the absence of mixed populations—or indeed attention to race—in the uk’s suicide prevention priorities (department of health and social care 2023) reveals the trickiness of researching mixedness and suicide in post-racial britain. a mixed ethnicity category has been included in the census for england and wales since 2001. since then, increasing numbers of mixed-race3 people living in britain (from 661,000 and 1.3 percent of the population in 2001 to 1.7 million and 2.9 percent in 2021) have often been used to herald britain as post-racial (aspinall 2015; campion and lewis 2022).4 the exceptional representation of mixedness as the fastest growing ethnic group has been used by the british media to suggest that mixed-race would come to dominate britain (see aspinall 2015 for an overview of these predictions). mixed-race people, their families, and relationships are co-opted into such discourses (yao 2021), with their existence held in popular readings to signal the impossibility of racism in britain, which is framed as a diverse “melting pot” (goldberg 2015; joseph-salisbury 2018). but what might statistics on the deaths of mixed populations tell us about britain and its racial politics? “mixed and multiple ethnic” men and women were recently reported as dying by suicide at among the highest rates in the uk (ons 2021b). however, unlike their white male counterparts—who have historically been the focus of suicide prevention (yue, forthcoming)—there has been a lack of engagement with britain’s mixed population(s) in the national suicide prevention landscape. in this article, i suggest that despite twenty-first-century celebrations of mixed people living in britain, the lack of national prevention responses to recent statistics reporting ‘mixed and multiple ethnic’ population(s) as dying at among the highest rates of suicide reveals the uk’s suicide by ethnicity statistics as tricky tools (bhatia 2020).5 the aim of this article is not to ask for the inclusion of mixed-race populations (a problematic term) into suicide prevention and its surveillance logic (baril 2023; oaten et al. 2022; see also yue 2021a), but to recognize the incongruence of making visible the high rates of suicide of britain’s mixed populations given their centrality to britain’s post-racial narrative. such a narrative, i argue, works in tricky ways with the pathologization of suicide (and its confinement to white male populations) to preclude the need for britain to recognize and challenge its racist designs in shaping possibilities for living. one such way these discourses work together, as i argue below, is that in overrepresenting the newness of britain’s mixed populations, the post-racial narrative might artificially suggest that the mixed populations reported to be dying at high rates of suicide are migrants (thus precluding sustained analysis in suicide prevention approaches of britain’s role in crafting uneven liveability for its citizens; see mills 2018, 2020).6 science and technology studies (sts) scholars have grappled with the norms embedded in statistics and other modern technologies as the digital architecture of our world (benjamin 2019). while patrick grzanka, jenny dyck brian, and rajani bhatia (2023) have noted a marked absence of attention to the vast work of intersectionality in sts studies (catalyst being an exception; see also d’ignazio and klein 2020), sts scholars have centered nonhuman actors (such as digital infrastructures) to emphasize the co-constitution of technologies, knowledges, and identities (grzanka et al. 2023). for example, while digital technologies often dangerously pose as objective and scientific, in the united states, ruha benjamin (2019) has analyzed race itself as a technology organizing our social world. in europe, evelyn ruppert and stephan scheel (2021) emphasize the intrasubjectivity of the modern nation-state and the state-istics that enact its population(s) (schmidt 2005, 15). despite the representation of “knowable” populations in state knowledge practices, katrine meldgaard kjær, mace ojala, and line henriksen (2021) have argued that silences and absences haunt digital—as well as non-digital—research. as i will demonstrate below, statistics have been central to mixed-race and suicide studies too (although separately until now). suicide studies has not previously explicitly engaged with sts. nevertheless, mortality statistics—reporting who is dying at the highest rates of suicide—are regularly the starting point for suicide research and prevention. suicidology is dominated by psychological discourses, and the privileging of the “statistical shape” of suicide has invited calls for interdisciplinarity in suicide research (chandler 2020). this objectification of suicidal people in mortality statistics has been the source of sustained debate within critical suicide studies, as part of wider critiques of the oversaturation of quantitative research methods in suicide knowledge production (hjelmeland and knizek 2010; jaworski 2014). as such, suicide statistics are an important site from which to engage with sts approaches. in this paper, i will bring feminist sts into conversation with suicide and mixed-race studies through the lens of the uk’s ethnicity statistics. i conceptualize the uk’s ethnicity statistics as a tricky tool (bhatia 2020) to explore the intersections of the coexisting celebration and erasure of mixedness in britain. in sts, bhatia (2020) conceptualizes male/female sex ratios as tricky tools for feminist struggle. to some extent, unequal sex ratios can serve as evidence for the need to improve the status of women and girls around the world. however, their uncritical usage risks naturalizing colonial hierarchies (bhatia 2020), reproducing deficit narratives (d’ignazio and klein 2020), and erasing people beyond a gender binary. following the apparent progression in twenty-first-century america from “legalized racial segregation, oppression, and injustice in the us south between the 1890s and the 1950s,” benjamin has critiqued the reproduction of existing inequalities via new technologies “that are promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a previous era” (2019, 5, 3). in comparison to the legal segregation of the us, postcolonial scholars have highlighted how britain has been racially segregated in less explicit ways (benson and bhambra 2021; clarke 2023; tudor 20222), such as via the ascription of nationality and religion. for example, tarek younis (2022) has charted the racialization of islamophobia in the uk, with people ascribed as muslim disproportionately targeted by the “pre-criminal” space of counter-terrorism across all aspects of life: with schools and the national health service constructed as sites for disproportionate surveillance and criminalization. as benjamin emphasizes, “some technologies fail to see blackness, while others render black people hypervisible and expose them to systems of racial surveillance” (2019, 99; see also mckittrick 2021). in a similar way, i suggest that the uk’s ethnicity statistics are tricky tools for anti-racist work. to some extent, they can be used to evidence racial inequalities, such as in criminalization and suicide. yet the uk’s population by ethnicity statistics hypervisibilize britain’s growing mixed-race population(s) as “new” and represent britain as becoming post-race. as a result, the longer histories of mixed-race in britain are obscured, leading to the erasure of “mixed brits” in suicide statistics and (death) prevention. that is, while “mixed and multiple ethnic” populations are reported as dying at among the highest rates of suicide in the uk (ons 2021b), celebratory representations of mixed-race populations in britain as “new” obscure mixed people as being born (and dying) in britain. using the lens of the uk’s ethnicity statistics, i will begin by charting the post-racial context that mixed populations are celebrated as representing. i will then turn to examining the uk’s suicide statistics and discuss the implications of reporting suicide by ethnicity in a post-racial context. given the uk’s lack of response to high rates of suicide reported among its “mixed and multiple ethnic” population(s), i complicate celebratory representations of mixed lives in the post-racial discourse. i argue that the ascription of migrant status (migratization, tudor 2017) to britain’s “new” mixed population(s) informs their lack of suicide prevention and constructs suicidal mixed brits as impossible, as “absent data” (kjær et al. 2021) that nevertheless haunts the uk’s post-racial suicide knowledge. ultimately, this article uses feminist sts to explore the uk’s ethnicity statistics as a tricky tool for research on mixed life and death. following bhatia’s (2020) thinking on the sex ratio, in conceptualizing the uk’s ethnicity statistics as a tricky tool, i do not propose a move away from ethnicity statistics per se, nor even necessarily their improvement (e.g., via differentiating by nationality for “better” suicide prevention; see, e.g., dykxhoorn et al. 2024; yue 2021a) given the harms of the surveillance logic of prevention (baril 2023; oaten et al. 2022). rather, by thinking with ethnicity statistics at the intersections of life and suicide, i conceptualize suicidal mixed brits as absent data that expose the contradictions inherent in white supremacist post-racial britain (joseph-salisbury 2019), in particular for its suicide knowledge and prevention. celebrating mixedness the language of racial mixing has been the subject of sustained critique given its role in maintaining the binary imagining of race necessary to sustain white supremacy. while the celebratory age of mixed-race studies has sought to challenge pathological discourses (see ifekwunigwe 2004 and campion 2017 for an overview of the “ages” of mixed-race studies, discussed further below), celebratory narratives can themselves problematically reproduce the realness and exceptionalism of mixedness (campion and lewis 2022). this tension is evident in the uk’s population by ethnicity statistics (and surrounding rhetoric), which have the potential to evidence racial inequalities, yet have been used to celebrate britain as post-racial. the mixed-race population in britain is commonly cited as the uk’s fastest growing: from 1.3 to 2.9 percent of the population between the 2001 and 2021 censuses (from 661,000 in 2001 to 1.7 million in 2021). the uk’s ethnicity statistics on britain’s supposedly growing mixed populations are central in popular celebratory representations of britain as post-race, where the increasing prevalence of mixed-race couples and families is thought to represent the lack of racism, or even anti-racism (campion and lewis 2022; yao 2021). in mixed-race studies, such claims have tended to be made based on research on white mothers of mixed-race children; by suggesting that the former are able to distance themselves from their white privilege via proximity to their racialized partners and children (twine 2004).7 in the public domain, questions about the future mixed offspring of prince harry and meghan markle in the british media demonstrate the coexistence of anxieties around the growing mixed-race population in britain, and the impossibility of mixedness to signal post-raciality. for example, jo marney, girlfriend of uk independence party leader henry bolton, claimed that “meghan’s seed will taint our royal family” (elgot 2018). despite the tensions their marriage (and future offspring) raised in terms of threatening white britishness (clancy 2021), harry and meghan’s wedding has simultaneously been hailed as symbolizing racial progress (gordon 2018). elsewhere, mixed-race studies scholars have pointed to how the celebratory representation of britain’s growing mixed-race population in the census ethnicity statistics might be misleading (campion 2017) or inflated (aspinall 2015). for example, the ‘mixed’ category has only been included as an option since the 2001 census (aspinall 2015), which superficially represents mixed-race race as a new phenomena in britain. peter aspinall suggests that the labeling of britain’s mixed-race population(s) as the fastest growing at times overrides statistical representations, since between 2001 and 2011 the “other black” category grew by 191.9 percent while the mixed group only grew by 85.2 percent (2015, 1071). moreover, following the inclusion of an ethnicity question in the uk’s 1991 census, many critique the use of the term ethnicity as standing in for race (ahmad and sheldon 1993; ballard 1996; song 2018; thompson 2010) given the racialization of nationality. for example, in the 1991 census, there are three options for people who identify as “black” (caribbean, african, and other), none of which include a british option; and neither is there a white african option, demonstrating the apparent mutual exclusivity of black and white and the impossibility of mixedness in national ethnicity statistics at the time. critical mixed-race studies scholar jayne ifekwunigwe has conceptualized the three ages of mixed-race studies through the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century as the ages of pathology, celebration, and critique (2004, 8). the contemporary age of celebration, which embodies the post-racial representation of mixedness, responds to the pathologization of miscegenation (racial mixing) in the colonial era, but is nevertheless marked by a historical amnesia that disconnects britain from its imperial past (gilroy 2004; joseph-salisbury 2019). as such, karis campion has suggested there is a “missing wave” (2017, 27) of mixed-race studies between the age of pathology and the age of celebration. drawing on the critical mixed-race literature, i suggest this missing wave of mixed-race studies lends itself to the contemporary—new and celebratory—iteration of mixed-race in post-racial britain that forms the backdrop for the trickiness of the uk’s suicide by ethnicity statistics. the missing wave of mixed-race studies as noted above, mixed populations in britain have historically been represented in two dominant ways: pathologized or celebrated (ahmed 2014; ifekwunigwe 2004). in 1864 david goodman croly combined the latin words miscere (to mix) and genus (race) to name sexual reproduction between people assigned to different “races” miscegenation (ifekwunigwe 2004). “black”–“white” miscegenation dates back to the sixteenth century and the commencement of the transatlantic slave trade, when “west africans were forcibly removed from their homelands and sold as chattel slaves to work on plantations in the southern usa, the caribbean and brazil” (ifekwunigwe 2004, 10). pathological discourses on mixed-race emerged in the late eighteenth century in discussions of how to manage and present the children of the colonies of the british empire (using terms such as “half-caste” and “mulatto,” depending on the context). ifekwunigwe (2004) conceptualizes this era as the age of pathology, which culminated in the nineteenth-century marriage of discourses on biology and culture that problematize the mixing of pure and distinct “races” through sexualized narratives of perversion and degeneration.8 in the early twentieth century, these pathological discourses were transferred to the metropole when black and brown british colonial subjects serving in the first world war settled in the british isles. in british port cities such as cardiff and liverpool, white women (often imagined as “chavs” [tyler 2008]) marrying men from the colonies were problematized and many of their husbands were expatriated without their knowledge (hancox 2021).9 critical mixed-race studies scholars argue that pathological discourses on racial mixing are reproduced in contemporary “present-tense” (mahtani 2014) celebrations of mixedness (such as in the uk’s population by ethnicity statistics), notably via colonial amnesia (el-tayeb 2011). indeed, campion (2017) suggests there is a missing wave of mixed-race studies in the postwar period between the ages of pathology and celebration. following the holocaust as the horrific culmination of eugenicist thinking within europe (murphy 2017), in 1950 unesco had warned against the dangerous consequences of “race” (song 2003). campion (2017) suggests that, in britain, race was reformulated to re-emerge as “ethnicity” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. in this period at the end of the second world war, the formal decolonization of some former british colonies invoked britain to introduce its first citizenship. as sociologist gurminder bhambra notes, in the first british nationality act (1948) british citizenship was shared between the uk and its colonies, to be differentiated from members of the commonwealth (benson and bhambra 2021). in the immediate postwar period, workers from the colonies and commonwealth were invited to fill labor shortages in britain (benson and bhambra 2021). yet this change of direction in travel (not “migration” since many were citizens of the uk and colonies) led to laws known as the commonwealth immigration acts being introduced in the 1960s and ’70s to deter “coloured immigration,” ostensibly in the name of geography (benson and bhambra 2021).10 campion thus argues that the coded nature of “race-talk” during this postwar period led to the disappearance of mixed-race as a category, with mixed populations in the 1960s through the 1980s being “subsumed in other debates to do with racial relations and difference that took priority during these periods,” such as those on immigration (2017, 203). this missing wave of mixed-race (studies) led to the rise of the “second-generation migrant” problem category (el-tayeb 2011; yue 2021a, 2021b) and the racialized ascription of migrant status regardless of being born in britain. despite the potential for the uk’s ethnicity statistics to serve as evidence for inequalities, we can see how via the transition from race to ethnicity and mixed-race to migrant in popular discourse, the statistics embody and reproduce exclusions in who counts as mixed-race and who counts as british. below i suggest the missing wave of mixed-race has consequences for who is visible in uk suicide knowledge and prevention. obscuring the intersections of mixedness and suicide with the uk’s population by ethnicity statistics being so central to celebratory accounts of mixed-race, how might its suicide by ethnicity statistics complicate britain’s post-raciality? i will proceed by introducing the uk’s suicide statistics and prevention landscape before and after the uk begun to disaggregate suicide by ethnicity. i suggest that, as tricky tools, the uk’s 2021 suicide by ethnicity statistics are limited by the post-racial context which the uk’s population by ethnicity statistics are mobilized to uphold. however, disaggregating suicide by ethnicity does have the potential to unsettle present-tense readings of mixedness through which britain is celebrated as post-racial. as such, the statistics might be engaged to expand the uk’s suicide knowledge, which tends to contain unliveability to decontextualized white male pathology (yue, forthcoming). statistics have been central to the problematization of suicide since the nineteenth century (bayatrizi 2008). however, in the uk, suicide statistics have historically been limited to reporting age and (binary) sex from death certificates, with middle-aged men consistently being reported as dying at the highest rates of suicide in the uk (wyllie et al. 2012). elsewhere, katrina jaworski (2014) has illustrated that the prioritization of (completed) death—compared to higher rates of female attempted suicide, sometimes referred to with reference to male death as “failed” or “unsuccessful”—constructs suicide as a masculinist problem and men as the focus of suicide prevention. accordingly, ana jordan and amy chandler have argued that statistics do not represent the reality of suicide but rather reproduce “gendered assumptions about what counts as suicide” (2019, 462). according to sociologist jack douglas, a key tenet of nineteenth-century sociological works on suicide was that “the stability of suicide rates proves that the official suicide statistics (from which these rates were taken) are reliable” (1966, 254). critiquing émile durkheim’s minimizing of women’s suicidality on the basis of men’s higher rates of suicide death, douglas suggested that the “categori[zation] of social structure (class, occupation, age, etc.)…greatly bias[es] any theory constructed from or tested by them. it [therefore] seems most reasonable to expect that the attempts and the frequencies of success will be greatest precisely in those groups which are most ‘integrated’ in the society” (260–61). that is, while durkheim explained high rates of suicide in male compared to female populations, douglas highlights that the more “integrated” people are into society, the more categorized, and the more visible they will be in suicide statistics. we can consider how men—whose suicide deaths are the criteria for the masculinist knowledge on suicide (jaworski 2014)—are the most visible in the suicide statistics that differentiate death by only age and sex. analyzing suicide prevention policies in the uk (the first one being produced in 2002), alexander oaten et al. (2022) have highlighted how the reduction of the complexity of suicide to a manageable object amenable to prevention privileges dominant understandings of suicide (e.g., as male, as mental illness) and thus marginalizes those whose experiences (such as among lgbtq+ and prison populations) are not intelligible within pathologized, decontextualized prevention frameworks (x and polanco 2022). as i will explore below, prior to reporting suicide by ethnicity (ons 2021), the post-racial framing of britain (joseph-salisbury 2019) has tended to construct suicide knowledge from a (highly integrated) white “norm” (wyllie et al. 2012) and thus marginalizes racialized (and other minoritized) populations from suicide knowledge. during the covid-19 pandemic, black and south asian populations were reported to be disproportionately affected (ons 2020), yet timely policy responses were hindered by the fact that the census is conducted only every ten years. in the midst of these inequalities—perpetuated and visibilized in the pandemic—the uk introduced a new statistical strategy (uk statistics authority 2020) to link up national data practices with register-based data (department of health and social care 2021). as a result of linking national health service records to the 2011 census, we now have more complex data available in mortality reporting, including for death by suicide. in august 2021 the uk’s ons began reporting suicide by ethnicity, reporting white men and mixed and multiple ethnic men and women as dying at the highest rates of suicide: “in males, the highest rates of suicide have been in the mixed and white ethnic groups. rates for these two groups have not statistically differed over time, and in 2017 to 2019 rates in the mixed (14.7 deaths per 100,000 males) and white (14.9 deaths per 100,000) groups were almost identical” (ons 2021b). looking closer at the data (which required downloading from the ons website), mixed men were reported to die at the highest rates in all reporting periods (between 2012 and 2018), except the latest (2017–2019) when deaths by suicide were higher in white males. for females, rates of suicide were higher in mixed than white categories in all of the reporting periods and 7.1 “mixed” compared to 4.9 “white” females per 100,000 in the 2017–2019 period (ons 2021b). as we can see, the higher rates of suicide among mixed men between 2012 and 2018 are deprioritized in the headline that white and mixed men died at similarly high rates in the latest reporting period only (2017–2019). given the loaded nature of who and what gets counted (bowker and star 2000), douglas (1966) has suggested that suicide statistics cannot be said to report the “truth” of suicide rates. nevertheless, the reporting of mixed men and women as dying at the highest rates of suicide alongside white men might be engaged in fruitful ways 11—not only to expand the white maleness of uk suicide knowledge, but to unsettle the use of mixed-race populations in britain’s post-racial agenda. as such, i suggest that by studying suicide statistics as tricky tools (bhatia 2020), we can investigate the politics involved in the categorization and enactment of populations (ruppert and scheel 2021)—namely, why the uk’s ethnicity statistics tell different stories about the living and dying of its mixed-race population(s). in conceptualizing the uk’s ethnicity statistics as tricky tools, i am interested in what the uk’s suicide by ethnicity statistics might say about britain’s racial politics, and how—as i explore below—in practice this narrative has been obscured in national suicide reporting and prevention. race and suicide before 2021 given the post-racial context through which suicide is decontextualized from conditions of unliveability (mills 2020; x and polanco 2022) and largely confined to mental illness (marsh 2010; white et al. 2016), there has been a scarcity of suicide research attentive to race. while ostensibly not focusing on race could be a means to avoid pathologizing racialized populations (as in biological racism), in practice the post-racial discourse poses challenges to anti-racist work while maintaining racial inequalities (lentin 2011). i will now turn to analyzing two examples of suicide research in relation to ethnicity, which occurred prior to the uk disaggregating suicide by ethnicity (ons 2021), demonstrating how the post-racial discourse nevertheless racialized the uk’s suicidal subjects as white, obscuring suicidal people beyond white maleness from research and prevention (unless as migrants). while the visibility of men in society and male death in suicide statistics has constructed suicide as a masculinist problem (douglas 1966; jaworski 2014), prior to the ons (2021) disaggregating suicide by ethnicity, the post-racial context has shaped the implicit racialization of the uk’s (male) suicidal subjects as white. for example, samaritans is a uk charity who routinely produces national suicide prevention campaigns (they also offer a suicide helpline). in samaritans’ national suicide prevention campaign, titled “men, suicide and society: why disadvantaged men in mid-life die by suicide” (wyllie et al. 2012), there is “a note on women, ethnicity and sexualities” that makes explicit the focus of suicide prevention as white heterosexual british and irish middle-aged men: “this report has chosen not to focus on the role of ethnicity or sexualities in suicidality. the situation of men in their mid-years in lower-socio-economic positions who are from black and minority ethnic (bme) groups, or with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (lgbt) or other sexualities, will be complicated by also occupying these ‘subordinate’ positions…examining the experiences and identities of british and irish middle-aged working-class men, the majority of whom are white and heterosexual, is core to reducing death by suicide” (wyllie et al. 2012, 7). while the authors choose not to focus on race, they nevertheless racialize the uk’s (male) suicidal subjects as white (and heterosexual). mixed-race studies scholar remi joseph-salisbury situates “the ‘post-racial’ conditions that define our times” (2019, 64) within white supremacy to emphasize how the latter relies on the maintenance of historical amnesia about how whiteness is privileged (gilroy 2004; goldberg 2015). as he writes, “the ‘post-racial’ is predicated, first, on the dilution of the true history of race and empire (white amnesia), and then a mythological belief that society has overcome that (diluted) history. if we recognize that white amnesia is the erasure of racism’s past, and the ‘post racial’ brings about the denial of racism’s present, we can see how these discourses coalesce to completely erase racism” (joseph-salisbury 2019, 66). failing to name race in post-racial (white supremacist) britain reproduces whiteness. this is evident in how white (heterosexual) men are maintained as the “core” population for suicide prevention, and perceived as “[un]complicated” by “subordinat[ion]” (wyllie et al. 2012). the attachment to a “core” white majority is also complicated when we consider the ethnicity statistics in the 2011 census preceding the samaritans’ (2012) report, which reports the “white british and white irish” population as decreasing, and other ethnic groups as increasing: “the white ethnic group accounted for 86.0 per cent of the usual resident population in 2011, a decrease from 91.3 per cent in 2001 and 94.1 per cent in 1991. white british and white irish decreased between 2001 and 2011. the remaining ethnic groups increased, any other white background had the largest increase of 1.1 million (1.8 percentage points)” (ons 2012). employing the uk’s ethnicity statistics as a tricky tool, we can consider how decreasing numbers of white and increasing numbers of other ethnic groups work to represent britain’s “core” as white, with migrants “taking over” (as was a key argument in brexit rhetoric; see bhambra 2017). however, returning to douglas’s (1966) and aspinall’s (2015) emphasis on how the (ethnicity) categories available shape statistical knowledge, we are reminded that 1991 was the first census to include a question about ethnicity, and new ethnicity categories are added to each census (e.g., there was no “mixed” option in 1991). alongside the fluidity of ethnicity categories (such as between chinese, asian british, and mixed white and asian in the 2001 census), the uk’s ethnicity statistics are shaped by colonial amnesia (el-tayeb 2011), misrepresenting britain’s diversity as new. in post-racial white supremacy, researching race and suicide from the lens of white-male-designed suicide knowledge risks reproducing the pathologizing of racial mixing. via the post-racial denial of racism’s past and present, it follows that any inequalities between racialized and other minoritized populations are attributed to the imagining of inherent cultural differences, a continuation of the race science that fixed people into natural hierarchies that enable the government to elude responsibility for crafting uneven liveability. this pathologizing approach is common in attempts to “include” ethnic minorities in white male suicide knowledge (yue, forthcoming) and is particularly problematic for racialized people who are born in the uk. to illustrate how research on race and suicide in britain is limited by the post-racial context, i discuss two studies that center racialized suicidal people but tend to construct them as migrants. prior to reporting suicide by ethnicity in 2021, the ons provided maria maynard et al. (2012) with anonymized death records by country of birth. their research shows “small increases in rates [of suicide] for men born in pakistan and the irish republic, and a substantial increase in rates for jamaican men in the last period” (maynard et al. 2012, 1). maynard et al.’s (2012) analysis explained the higher rates of suicide among foreign-born men (from pakistan, ireland and jamaica) by comparing these with rates in home countries (or “country of origin”). however, the authors noted they were unable to explain the high rates of suicide among jamaican-born men in england and wales since there were low rates of suicide in jamaica in the time period (1999–2003). situated in the (white) post-racial context of britain, place of birth in this data comes to stand in for ethnicity—suggesting exclusivity between the imagined white (citizen) and migrant (non-white) populations in britain (tudor 2017, 2022) and displacing second-generation migrants (and subsequent uk-born generations) from suicide research (maynard et al. 2012). indeed, in the study limitations, the authors note that “although there are significant ageing migrant populations in england and wales, at the 2001 census 34–60% of the main ethnic minority groups were born in the uk (dobbs et al. 2006), with the highest proportion among black caribbeans” (maynard et al. 2012, 5). that higher rates of suicide for black caribbeans in the uk could not be explained by (foreign) place of birth, maynard et al.’s (2012) study suggests (but does not name) the need to center britain’s role in producing high rates of suicide, rather than merely being a depository for migrants who “bring” their high rates of suicide from home countries (see, e.g., forte et al. 2018). also prior to the release of ethnicity data on suicide in 2021, in 2008 kamaldeep bhui and kwame mckenzie studied suicides of “the four largest ethnic groups in england and wales: black caribbean, black african, south asian (indian, pakistani, and bangladeshi), and white” who died within twelve months of accessing mental health services between 1996 and 2001 (414).12 bhui and mckenzie’s research complicates the uk’s suicide prevention focus on a “core” white male suicidal subject (wyllie et al. 2012) in a number of ways: with higher rates of suicide reported among women in some ethnic groups;13 and “some widely accepted suicide risk indicators…[being] less common in the ethnic minority groups” before they died by suicide (bhui and mckenzie 2008, 414).14 reminiscent of douglas (1966), bhui and mckenzie suggest that differences in risk factors perceived among ethnic groups could reflect ethnocentrism in clinician assessment, allowing clinicians to more easily see and assess “the perceived level of immediate risk of suicide…as highest among whites” (418). ethnicity in bhui and mckenzie’s 2008 study was provided by the lead clinician who completed the national confidential inquiry form, “report[ing] the ethnicity of the patient using the office for national statistics categories: south asian (indian, pakistani, and bangladesh), black caribbean, black african, white, chinese, mixed, or other” (bhui and mckenzie 2008, 414). as such, differentiating between firstand second-generation “migrants” was undoubtedly made difficult by the categories available, which assume exclusivity between “white” (native) and “ethnic minority” (migrant) populations. while the 2001 census had an option for “asian or asian british,” the authors were limited to “south asian” but nevertheless noted in the discussion that “the south-asian group in our sample was mostly born in the united kingdom” (419). indeed, in their study they found a “lower risk of suicide among young south-asian women,” which they suggest “requires explanation, because this finding contrasts with the picture of mental illness and suicide from community settings and population studies” (bhui and mckenzie 2008, 419). they suggest that “it may be that this group [born in the uk] has a lower rate of suicide than older age groups that were born in india, pakistan, or bangladesh” (419). this displacement of suicide to south asian countries precludes an exploration of britain as inviting mental distress and unliveability in migrants and citizens (mills 2020). indeed, other research suggests higher rates of suicide among second-generation “migrants” than their parents’ generation in western countries (see forte et al. 2018). what is more, research on race that limits belonging to single, mutually exclusive categories precludes the possibility of mixedness. mixed brits are thus excluded from suicide research on citizens and migrants (unless they are subsumed into singular racialized categories), and are not represented in prevention efforts due to narrow, eurocentric, and decontextualized definitions (x and polanco 2022) of what counts as suicide in britain. research on race and suicide since the uk began disaggregating suicide by ethnicity the dominant understanding of suicide as a white (male) problem in post-racial britain is further complicated by a deeper analysis into the categories subsumed into the white category reported as dying at the highest rates of suicide for the first time in 2021. the white category used in the 2011 census to inform the ons’s 2021 death statistics conflates the following descriptors: english, welsh, scottish, northern irish, or british, irish, gypsy or irish traveller, any other white background. this heterogeneity further points to the need to expand the focus of national suicide prevention from a “core” white british and irish population from whom “subordinate” positions are “complicated” (wyllie et al. 2012). the failure to disaggregate the white category dying at the highest rates of suicide in the uk is significant given long and more recent histories of stigmatization among white irish, eastern european, and traveler communities (davidson et al. 2018). indeed, knipe et al., in their 2024 lancet publication, used the ons data to calculate “the age-standardised suicide rates by sex for each of the 18 self-identified ethnicity groups in england and wales” (2024, 611, emphasis added). in disaggregating the ethnicity categories, their analysis further complicates the reporting of “white” men as dying at the highest rates of suicide (ons 2021): “in males, the rate of suicide…in individuals who identify as being from a mixed heritage background or white gypsy or irish travellers…was similar to the white british majority, but in females, rates were 79% higher in individuals from a mixed white and caribbean heritage background, and more than double in white gypsy or irish travellers” (knipe et al. 2024, 616). the uk’s suicide by ethnicity statistics reporting high rates of suicide among mixed men and women and “white gypsy or irish traveller” women,15 and this complexified understanding of the white men in “suicide crisis” as not necessarily being white brits, have the potential to say much about the gendered and racial politics of britain and the post-racial lens for its suicide knowledge. while the men in suicide “crisis” (jordan and chandler 2019) have previously been understood to be privileged by whiteness (for example, chandler [2019] has asked why relatively privileged white men might be dying by suicide at such high rates), the latest uk statistics on suicide (ons 2021; knipe et al. 2024) invite us to ask why mixed men and women and white ethnic minority men and women might be dying by suicide at such high rates in britain. as such, engaging with the finding that the 2021 statistics reported some ethnic minority men and women as dying at among the highest rates of suicide alongside white men may hold the potential to transform suicide knowledge and prevention in post-racial britain, beyond (cis white, heterosexual, male) death prevention (marzetti et al. 2022). nevertheless, attachment to the post-racial context makes this potentiality unlikely to be embraced. while the 2024 disaggregated statistics (knipe et al. 2024) are of course too recent to expect a response to, there has nevertheless been a lack of response to the ons reporting the highest rates of suicide among both white men and mixed men and women in england and wales (ons 2021b). two relevant documents have been released in the wake of the ons reporting suicide by ethnicity for the first time, both of which fail to center britain’s mixed population(s), which i argue further demonstrate the uk’s ethnicity statistics as tricky tools for research on mixedness and suicide. in 2022 samaritans released a policy position on “ethnicity and suicide” in response to the ons reporting suicide by ethnicity for the first time (between 2012 and 2019). while samaritans usually respond to high rates of suicide with targeted prevention campaigns—as with the focus on (white) middle-aged men over the past decade—in the policy position samaritans refrain from positioning mixed populations as a priority for suicide prevention. instead, the policy position refers broadly to “ethnicity”—suggesting that the statistics show “that rates of suicide differ between ethnic groups”—with very little mention of mixedness apart from citing the suicide rates for 2017–2019 where mixed and white men were reported to die at similarly high rates (samaritans 2022, 2). samaritans’ decision to refrain from constructing mixed men and women as national suicidal subjects could reflect a careful reluctance to reproduce a “crisis” of mixedness (a potential parallel to the “crisis of masculinity” for white middle-aged men) without further research: “it is impossible to fully understand suicide across different ethnic groups without better recording, collection, and communication of the data. it is unacceptable that we still do not have a complete picture of suicide across ethnic groups” (samaritans 2022, 7; see also dykxhoorn et al. 2024). indeed, given the historical pathologization of “miscegenation” (racial mixing) and of suicide (marsh 2020); suggesting the suicide risk of britain’s mixed-race population(s) could reproduce colonial deficit narratives, evidencing ethnicity statistics as tricky tools (bhatia 2020). however, given the problematization of suicide (baril 2023), prevention campaigns are a key marker for whose lives are deemed worthy of “saving.” while i was working on my phd thesis on “mixedness and suicide/ality,”16 i asked samaritans if they were still looking for research into this area, and they responded that they were no longer “seeking evidence on ethnicity and mixedness” (personal communication, 2023). indeed, samaritans continues to reproduce white men as the subjects of suicide (despite this being the first time ethnicity has been reported, and white men only dying at the highest rates in 2017–2019), suggesting the latest ons statistics “echo other research (hunt et al. 2021) which suggests that [although] rates of suicide differ between ethnic groups…the highest rate of suicide was among white patients” (samaritan 2022, 1–2; see also knipe et al. 2024). notwithstanding this attachment to the (white) male suicidal subject, samaritans recognize “the limitations of applying models of suicidal behaviour or risk across different cultural contexts and ethnic groups” (2022, 3). these limitations include inequalities in accessing suicide prevention, such as “evidence suggest[ing] that minoritized ethnicity patients who died by suicide were generally seen by practitioners to be at lower risk of suicide compared to white patients before they died” (samaritans 2022, 4; bhui and mckenzie 2008; hunt et al. 2021). samaritans thus recognizes that such evidence “may…suggest that existing models of suicidal behaviour and risk assessment are biased towards white groups, resulting in worse aptitude for recognizing suicidal behaviour among minoritised ethnicity individuals” (5). despite this important work, as i demonstrate below, in the post-racial context, samaritans’ seeming reluctance to present the high rates of suicide reported among “mixed and multiple ethnic” populations appears to reproduce the implicit whiteness of the uk’s suicidal subjects in post-racial britain. indeed, despite the uk’s latest suicide statistics being disaggregated by ethnicity, the uk government’s prevention strategy (department of health and social care 2023) does not include “mixed and multiple ethnic” populations in the “priority groups” for their five-year suicide prevention strategy. as oaten et al. have highlighted for england’s 2017 “high risk” groups, the “priority groups” for 2023 to 2028 include “a startlingly large proportion of the population” (2022, 666). while “white men” are not mentioned either, “middle-aged men” are, and, as i noted above, this demographic has consistently been racialized as white british and irish (wyllie et al. 2012). in this post-racial context, failing to name race often reproduces whiteness as the norm. indeed—despite stating that their priority groups are “based on evidence and data (including numbers, rates and trends)” (department of health and social care 2023)—the uk government’s limited engagement with the uk’s suicide by ethnicity statistics (ons 2021) in their suicide prevention strategy appears to suggest that despite the high rates of suicide death reported among “mixed and multiple ethnic” men and women, they are not a priority for suicide prevention. likely referencing samaritans’ 2022 policy position, the uk’s 2023 prevention strategy suggests, “there is [now] more comprehensive research on, and better understanding of, national trends and suicide rates in particular groups, including…ethnic minority groups including people who are gypsy, roma or travellers [and] refugees and asylum seekers” (department of health and social care 2023). however, the government does not resolve to transform this research (and its latest suicide statistics) into prevention priorities. indeed, to visibilize britain’s mixed-race populations as dying at among the highest rates of suicide would threaten the post-racial narrative through which the pathologized (white, male) version of suicide/knowledge is maintained. as such, i argue that suicidal mixed brits come to constitute absent data (kjær et al. 2021) haunting the uk’s ethnicity statistics and suicide prevention responses. conclusion in contrast to celebratory citations of increasing numbers of mixed populations living in britain, what do responses to the statistics on their deaths by suicide (ons 2021b) tell us about british constructions of “mixedness as a condition for post-racial futures” (campion and lewis 2022, 11)? are mixed people living (and dying) in britain considered british? what does obscuring mixed-race populations from suicide research and prevention serve? above, i have conceptualized the uk’s ethnicity statistics as tricky tools for anti-racist work, given that they have the potential to serve as evidence of inequality yet risk reproducing those very inequalities via the colonial hierarchies embedded in our digital knowledge infrastructures. i further posit the uk’s (suicide by) ethnicity statistics are a tricky tool for the uk government. i suggest that the reporting of “mixed and multiple ethnic” populations as dying at among the highest rates of suicide in the uk (ons 2021) threatens to destabilize both the celebratory (new) representation of mixedness used to idealize britain’s post-raciality (effectively precluding the need for anti-racist work) and contemporary definitions of (what counts as) suicide in britain. in the post-racial context, contemporary articulations of a white, male suicidal subject privilege a decontextualized, pathologized, and superficial approach to suicide knowledge and prevention over attention to conditions of un/liveability. suicidal mixed brits become impossible in this post-racial definition of suicide in britain—because mixed-race lives not deaths represent britain’s progressive race(less) politics. as such, i conceptualize suicidal mixed brits as ‘absent data’ (kjær et al. 2021) in the uk’s ethnicity statistics and suicide prevention responses: they are missing from uk suicide knowledge, since suicide prevention responses centering “mixed brits” are impossible if britain’s post-racial white supremacy is to be maintained (joseph-salisbury 2019). in this article i have reflected on the uk’s (lack of) response to its first suicide by ethnicity statistics (ons 2021b). reporting “mixed and multiple ethnic” men and women (and subsequently white ethnic minority populations) (knipe et al. 2024) as dying at among the highest rates of suicide in the uk has the potential to threaten the post-racial ideal of britain through which britain’s mixed population(s) are co-opted as representing. against this supposedly celebratory backdrop, white supremacist post-racial discourses make it impossible to locate “mixed brits” and their suicides in britain. reporting place of birth in uk suicide statistics (like in maynard et al.’s 2012 study) alongside ethnicity has the potential to visibilize “mixed brits” and identify suicide inequalities among them. as such, reporting nationality and ethnicity (dykxhoorn et al. 2024; yue 2021a) might more effectively unsettle the post-racial status of uk suicide knowledge by suggesting that large numbers of suicide deaths are produced in britain; whereas if britain’s mixed population(s) are constructed as new (migrant), then high suicide rates are more easily explained away to “countries of origin.” however, mixed-race populations have historically been at the center of racial “sorting” (bowker and star 2000). accordingly, the idea of targeted suicide prevention campaigns for “mixed brits” should be considered with caution. “race as technology” has long functioned “as a means of sorting people into groups on the basis of their presumed inferiority and superiority” (benjamin 2019, 101). future research might consider what further harms might be reproduced via statistically enacting distinctions between mixed brits and migrants—in relation to essentializing racial and national differences, and in relation to priorities for suicide prevention. while i have problematized the erasure of britain’s mixed population(s) from uk suicide prevention, geoffrey bowker and susan star emphasize the “tightrope between increased visibility and increased surveillance” (2000, 29). accordingly, benjamin’s cautioning that “the act of viewing something or someone may put the object of vision at risk” (2019, 100) can be read as warning of the “risk” of heightened anti-suicidal (baril 2023) surveillance and pathologization that might come with being constructed as “at risk” of suicide (bayatrizi 2008; oaten et al. 2023). with that said, the work of exposing the whiteness of uk suicide knowledge undertaken in this article might invite us to reimagine suicide prevention, from the death prevention of a white heterosexual “core” to a more liveable world for all (ansloos and peltier 2021; marzetti et al. 2022; white et al. 2016). future research might analyze the intersections of ethnicity statistics with sex ratios in uk suicide reporting as tricky tools for suicide prevention, given the invisiblizing of suicidal people beyond a male/female binary. this work is especially timely given that high rates of suicide reported among mixed men and women (ons 2021) threatens to unsettle the construction of suicide as a (white) male problem in post-racial britain in tricky ways. acknowledgments deepest thanks to the editorial collective (especially robyn lee and outgoing co-editor aimee soogene bahng) and peer reviewers for their constructive feedback and encouragement. thanks also to my colleagues amy chandler and sarah huque for their reading and support of earlier drafts. this work was funded by the wellcome trust as part of suicide cultures: reimagining suicide research, grant reference number 219842/z/19/z. note 1 included in this trickiness is the utility of the category of “mixed-race,” which at once problematically reproduces pathological discourses on racial mixing, and is a useful tool for challenging the inequalities experienced by people with mixed heritage and those who identify as mixed. 2 the “white male” category was reported as dying at marginally higher rates in the latest reporting period (2017–2019) (ons 2021). 3 despite the official use of the term ethnicity in the uk censuses, i generally retain the use of race in line with the critical mixed-race literature and critiques that “ethnicity,” as standing in for “race,” supports a post-racial discourse (ahmad and sheldon 1993; ballard 1996; song 2018; thompson 2010). 4 for comparison, in 2021, 81.7 percent of usual residents living in england and wales identified with the “white” category, followed by 9.3 percent asian, asian british, or asian welsh (ons 2021a). 5 while three years is perhaps a short period of time to shift prevention policy from its white male subjects, this article was sparked in response to uk suicide prevention charity samaritans’ “policy position,” released in 2022 in response to the 2021 ethnicity statistics in place of its usual prevention policy targeted at men. in addition, as i discuss, the uk government’s five-year suicide prevention strategy (published in 2023) did not name racialized populations in their priority groups despite the wider document referencing the 2021 ethnicity statistics. 6 indeed, in a recent analysis of the ons suicide by ethnicity statistics, knipe et al. (2024) reveal that the majority of ethnic minority populations reported to die by suicide are born in britain (see also dykxhoorn et al. 2024). 7 i use the term racialized throughout to stand in for people of color or black, asian, and minority ethnic. it is an imperfect term but emphasizes the work of making race and the white norm from which others are measured. 8 although white slave masters sexually exploited enslaved black africans since the sixteenth century and the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, black men were policed for “mixing” with and “diluting” white women and constructed as sexual deviants (campion 2017; edwards and caballero 2011; ifekwunigwe 2004). 9 imogen tyler suggests that a “chav: is often imagined as the (white, female) parent of “a gaggle of mixed race children” (2008, 26). 10 again, bhambra emphasizes that this was only a crossing of geographical borders (benson and bhambra 2021). 11 notably, this is the first time white men have been officially reported as dying at the highest rates of suicide in the uk (ons 2021), despite them generally being implicitly racialized as white (wyllie et al. 2012). 12 bhui and mckenzie accessed this data from the national confidentiality inquiry, which “records suicides among people in contact with services in the preceding 12 months” (2008, 414). 13 bhui and mckenzie report, “a high smr [standardized mortality ratio] was found among black caribbean and black african men aged between 13 and 24…[and] among women aged 25–39, south-asian, black caribbean, and black african women had high smrs” (2008, 417). 14 bhui and mckenzie explain, “suicidal ideas, emotional distress, and hostility were less common among black africans, black caribbeans, and south asians. hopelessness and depression were more common among south asians. delusions and hallucinations were more common among black africans, black caribbeans, and south asians. self-harm was significantly more common among black africans” (2008, 418). 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for body and gender research 7 (1): 68–73. https://kohljournal.press/migrant-suicide. yue, emily. 2024. “mixedness and suicide/ality: exploring knowledges of un/liveability in postcolonial britain.” phd thesis, university of edinburgh. yue, emily. forthcoming. “beyond emotional illiteracy: theorising the violence of inclusion in (white male) suicide prevention.” stolen tools: the anti-racist journal.     author bio emily yue is a research fellow at the university of edinburgh. her phd research used feminist and decolonial approaches to data to explore the intersections of mixedness and suicide/ality. lawrence, heather. 2024. “memes on trial: from permit patty to karen.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–19. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © heather lawrence, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license memes on trial: from permit patty to karen heather lawrence brown university heather_lawrence@brown.edu abstract this paper articulates a theory of black complaint by engaging feminist theories of complaint and black critical theories of visuality. it focuses on the late 2010s viral video trend of alliteratively nicknamed white women (e.g., “permit patty,” “cornerstore caroline”) calling the police on black people and the later karen meme. connecting these memes to simone browne’s (2015) concept of dark sousveillance, the paper shows that, rather than simply rendering black people out of sight of the white gaze, the karen and permit patty memes instead place whiteness and white supremacy on trial by creating a visual archive that legitimizes the testimony of black individuals living in a climate of anti-blackness. this paper argues that these memes, viral videos, and the black online counterpublics that circulate these images comprise an important register for black grief and activism and suggest an alternative form for demanding redress for black injury outside the american criminal justice system. keywords memes, visuality, feminism, anti-blackness, surveillance, complaint, activism introduction “you can hide all you want, the whole world gonna see you, boo.” this line, spoken from behind the cellphone camera by the woman filming, is the main intervention of the 2018 viral video of alison ettel, soon to be better known as “permit patty,” calling the police on a young black girl selling water on the sidewalk. in the video, ettel claims that the girl was selling water without a permit, mailto:heather_lawrence@brown.edu original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 2 which prompted her call. as ettel is on the phone with the police, she ducks behind a wall to avoid being captured on video. “permit patty” is one instantiation of what i am calling the alliterative name meme. the videos within this meme have multiple points of origin: some are filmed by the individual being harassed, some by family members of the victim, and some by bystanders who may be black or non-black. what links these videos are the memetic, alliterative hashtag names the videos received as they circulated on black online satellite counterpublics: bbq becky, permit patty, cornerstore caroline, and so on. these alliterative names came to be associated with these videos, and with the women featured in them, through their origin and initial circulation within what andré brock jr. (2020) calls online black satellite counterpublics such as black twitter—independent, but not private, online publics that occupy space on mainstream social media platforms. brock describes black twitter as “an online gathering…of twitter users who identify as black and employ twitter features to perform black discourses, share black cultural commonplaces, and build social affinities” (81). videos such as the one of ettel circulated on online satellite counterpublics are an example of a black cultural commonplace: the shared experience of being surveilled and policed in public by white people, and in particular by white women. these alliterative names are significant in that they mark these videos as part of a genre, forming a visual archive of encounters with anti-black surveillance. another notable feature of the alliterative name meme is that its focus is not on explicit representations of black injury or trauma. in contrast to other familiar forms of representing anti-black violence such as bodycam videos of police brutality, in many instances of the meme the black victim is not onscreen because they are the one behind the camera. the issue of visuality, and of which bodies form the subject of these memes and which are the objects, evokes simone browne’s (2015) formulation of dark sousveillance. browne refers to dark sousveillance as tactics used by black people to render ourselves “out of sight” of the “totalizing surveillance of the white gaze” (21). browne connects dark sousveillance to the practices through which black people resisted slavery and warned each other of police and white citizens acting as police after the passage of the fugitive slave act of 1850 (1-4). while the videos and images that make up the alliterative name meme operate within the legacy of dark sousveillance, i argue that the function of these memes is just as much, if not more, about mobilizing surveillance technologies to turn the gaze back on whiteness and white supremacy as it is on rendering black individuals invisible or illegible to these technologies. this combination of rendering out of sight and making visible is demonstrated in the permit patty video, where the woman behind the camera is never seen, and both she and the child selling water bottles go unnamed in contemporary media reports about the video while ettel’s name and face were constantly reproduced.1 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 3 this idea of turning a cumulative gaze back on whiteness, white supremacy, and the experience of living while black is what i refer to as the black complaint—the legacy of critical intervention into the reproduction of anti-blackness. like dark sousveillance, the black complaint mobilizes traditional technologies of surveillance. these include not only the cellphone camera but also the social media sites these videos are uploaded to, the television news channels that take up and add to the virality of these images, as well as the social mechanisms of public shaming and the legal apparatus that respond to and evaluate claims to injury and determine the means of redress. this paper begins with the trial, exploring how the narrative framework of the iconic american criminal trial shapes the form and reception of the alliterative name and karen memes. in this context, the trial is a narrative form within the western regime of visuality, and the concept of “rendering” as the technological production of both visual images and different modes of being. this paper then examines limitations of the trial to register black injury by describing the transformation of the alliterative name meme into the karen meme. the second half of the paper theorizes black complaint, drawing from the anti-lynching work of ida b. wells-barnett to explore complaint’s non-reproductive labor and ways in which white hegemonic discourse try to stop the articulation of black complaint. finally, this paper explores how virality and remixing function as a method of stopping black complaint online through an analysis of 2009 viral “bed intruder song” and speculates on the potential of apparently failed complaints to provide phenomenologies of white supremacy and anti-blackness. the trial and the regime of the visual while the alliterative name and karen memes often have sonic components, my analysis of these memes focuses on their visuality. the visual is the privileged sense and site of knowledge in western culture. i use the term visuality not just as a descriptor of all visual images, but as a practice of the visualization of history: “the making of the processes of history perceptible to authority” (mirzoeff 2011, 474–75). in this essay, i argue that visuality is a process of rendering, a concept that nicole fleetwood describes both as the technological production of visual representations and the making or becoming of certain kinds of subjectivity (2011, 7). as part of the project of visuality, the black body has been rendered an object of study and representation at the center of the development of western philosophical, literary, scientific, and technological visual fields since the enlightenment (gilman 1985; morrison 1993; wynter 1995). within this western visual regime, and particularly within an american national imaginary, blackness and black people have been rendered iconic—as ideologically charged representations that accumulate different meanings, values, and norms, and can original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 4 be evoked and applied to a variety of situations and events distinct from the context of their creation (fleetwood 2011). iconic blackness is rendered as the limit of humanity, as scandalous, as that which needs to be policed, and as the source of white injury, among many other discourses and signifiers. the contemporary alliterative name and karen memes are part of a legacy in which new and emergent media technologies define the limits of their forms through the rendering of the black body. the alliterative name and karen memes also operate within the logics of another iconic american cultural form: that of the anglo-american criminal trial. by referring to the trial as iconic, i am drawing on carol clover’s (2019) argument that most americans’ understanding of the criminal trial is informed by its media representations. clover argues that the iconic trial in cinema not only shapes the popular language of law, but that the legal trial itself—a historic spectacle of the american public sphere, made even more accessible first by its broadcast on television and now via online live streaming—influenced the language of american cinematography. clover’s argument that the iconic trial shapes how both the fields of law and film are rendered by the public evokes media studies theories that hold that media technologies are extensions and projections of the human body (kapp 2018; mcluhan 2001). within these theories, media technologies are understood not only as extensions or enhancements of human sensorial and perceptive abilities but as technologies that allow for the projection or intervention of the body within its environment, which, in turn, reshapes and delimits humanity’s perception of our own capabilities, proportions, and positionalities in our world (mcluhan 2001). within this understanding of media, the trial is primarily a process of rendering. as other scholars have identified, the trial is a ritualized performance that functions less as a truth-finding inquiry than a competition between sets of dramatic narratives (friedman 2015; williams 2002). if truth cannot be considered the trial’s primary object, then i argue that the trial’s purpose is to render visible claims to and causes of injury, and to set the terms of redress. in other words, the trial represents the process through which encounters between individuals are rendered as matters of public concern—where the wounded body politic is projected over the body of the injured individual. when i refer to the alliterative name and karen memes as placing white women and white supremacy “on trial,” i am arguing that these memes enact the structures and phases of the iconic trial, albeit within a chronology determined by the immediate and constantly updating flow of the internet rather than the slow grind of the criminal justice system. the iconic trial in american culture—that of a criminal trial before a jury—is structured around the phase of evidence examining. jurors are asked to deploy a forensic gaze, to look at evidence shown to them in the present and recreate the scene of an alleged past crime (clover 2019). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 5 televised and live-streamed trials invite an audience of spectators outside the courtroom to participate in making the history of a crime legible (williams 2002). the trial asks us to place our faith in the jury’s ability to visually affirm the truthfulness of testimony, and in the alleged objectivity of police evidencegathering procedures and forensic science. the trial does not just require jurors and spectators to use their sense of sight; the logic of the trial is fundamentally visual. it presupposes that by making a claim to injury visible—perceptible to the authority of the jury—the truth, or at least a “truth of exhausted possibilities” of the past event can be discovered and injury can be repaired (clover 2019, 22-3). the trial owes its iconicity to its adoption and use of new visual technologies, commitment to the logics of visuality and exposure, and authoritative power to determine subjectivity. when a criminal trial renders a verdict, that verdict renders a person as a criminal or a free person. this process of rendering exceeds the individual bodies present in the courtroom. every citizen of the united states has the right to a public trial. as a media technology, the trial renders the individual injury being evaluated as an injury to the fabric of society, a crisis that divides the public, a threat to the rule of law. the history and spectacle of “race trials” such as the people v. o.j. simpson and the trial of the four lapd officers who brutally beat rodney king demonstrates how we turn to trials of individuals to mediate and redress the injuries of police brutality, domestic violence, the legacy of lynching, and societal anti-blackness. figure 1. alison ettel, aka “permit patty.” source: dr. umar @_ethiopiangold 2018b; tesema 2018 within the frame of the iconic trial, memes such as permit patty and karen can be understood as attempts to reclaim the processes of visuality for the black subject. the provocative statement of the permit patty viral video—“you can hide all you want, the whole world gonna see you, boo”—testifies to faith not only in the visual original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 6 to represent reality but also in the logics of circulation and exposure. while the jury’s gaze holds the authoritative power in the courtroom trial, the permit patty video reclaims the power of rendering through the sousveillant gaze of the camera to stage a trial in which the audience is the jury. the woman filming calls attention to how ettel tries to avoid the camera, implicating this action as an attempt to avoid culpability and redress to the viewer. the obvious verdict of the video is that ettel is guilty of what she is accused of, and the video’s narrator seems to have faith that the internet will show her video to those who will recognize and support this verdict. the encounter between ettel and the cameraperson mimics the adversarial form of the trial in which the narratives of the prosecution and the defense compete for the jurors’ acceptance (clover 2019). in the video, ettel attempts to justify her decision to call the police on the grounds that the child was allegedly selling water without a permit. the lack of permit that inspired ettel’s alliterative hashtag functions as ettel’s claim to injury that she attempts to redress by calling the police to report the supposed misuse of public space. however, the video’s narrative and the black counterpublics online who viewed it argued a different narrative: that ettel’s call to the police was an act of anti-black surveillance and expressions of white supremacy. in this narrative, it was ettel’s actions that caused injury, not just to the child in question, but to black people and race relations in the united states as a whole. this injury deserved redress either through the circulation of the video and subsequent damage to her reputation or actual legal charges for making a frivolous call to emergency services. while ettel could be viewed as the focus of the video, the larger injury being rendered visible is that of the cumulative white gaze. the cumulative white gaze emerged under the totalizing surveillance of slavery, where white citizens were entrusted with the responsibility to police and respond to black fugitivity (browne 2015). in our current era, the cumulative white gaze is realized through the camera lens, the twenty-four-hour news day, and viral internet content as much as through the individual white citizens moving through public spaces. a cumulative gaze implies a process of accumulation: the nature of the gaze lies in the innumerable icons of blackness as criminal, pathological, and inhuman. this cumulative white gaze is evocative of what christina sharpe refers to as the weather—“the atmospheric condition of time and place” where “antiblackness is pervasive as climate” (2016, 106). ettel’s encounter with the unseen girl selling water bottles thereby emerges as a singularity within a totalizing weather of antiblack surveillance. i argue that the alliterative name meme can be understood as an attempt to use the trial as a media technology to make perceptible the existence of a black oppositional gaze or imagination (hooks 1992a, 1992b). these memes tell us original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 7 something about the quotidian experience of being black in public, but they also tell us something about whiteness. specifically, the visual archive of alliterative name memes demonstrates that the stereotypes and narratives through which black people see white people are not the same as the ways in which white people view themselves or wish to be viewed. this is especially true in how these memes represent gender. in the dominant visual field, white women are viewed simultaneously as naturalized visual objects to be consumed and as privileged signifiers of the private within the public/private binary (osucha 2009). in both registers, the white woman is a passive object whose main role is to provide scopophilia, the voyeuristic pleasure of looking, to men either as a mass-produced commercial object or as private property of her male partner (mulvey 1999). however, the relationship between the white women in the alliterative name and the black people who produce and circulate these memes is not scopophilic. to a black public, these individual women function instead as icons of the historical role of white women as active agents of white supremacy. white women were key catalysts of lynch mobs, both as active agents and as an imagined collective of victims of black male sexuality. white women were able to use their gendered status as caregivers and nurturers to police the moral and racial hygiene of their communities, a form of patriarchal power still embraced by white women in modern-day white nationalist movements (darby 2020). the alliterative name memes provide visual evidence to the testimonies of black people about their specific experience of being surveilled and policed by the white female gaze. these accounts of injury are validated as these memes circulate in and beyond black online counterpublics. these memes bypass the judicial system to rely on public pressure and shaming as its own form of redress. ettel herself reported that she resigned from her job after her company was confronted with backlash from the permit patty video’s circulation (campisi et al. 2018). however, i want to complicate the idea these memes can be reduced to simply putting individual white women on a kind of “trial by media,” not only because this analysis under-analyzes the work of these memes, but also because it ignores the deeper question of whether the trial is a medium that can provide actual repair to the injuries of anti-blackness. as a case study for why we should be skeptical of the trial as a method for reclaiming the gaze and achieving redress, i will consider the karen alongside an alternative form for challenging white supremacy and the climate of anti-blackness: the black complaint. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 8 the karen and the complaint figure 2. amy cooper, aka “central park karen.” source: c. cooper 2020 in the past few years, there has been a shift from unique, alliterative names to one name: karen. although it is hard to pinpoint when this transition occurred, some have identified coverage of amy cooper, a white woman caught on video harassing and calling in a police report against christian cooper (no relation), a black birder in central park, as signaling the dawning of the age of karen (paskin 2020). the change is not in name only; the content of karen videos and the connotations of the name have also changed. karen no longer refers only or primarily to a white woman who calls the police on black people, but has expanded to include white women who harass service workers, white women who refused to wear masks during the covid-19 pandemic, or any white woman who display some sort of behavior in public that is seen as inappropriate. karen is a public nuisance or, to use online terminology current at the time of this writing, “cringe” (dictionary.com 2018). this shift has also led to the karen meme itself being put on trial. if in previous videos it was the white woman who was clearly held to be the cause of injury— standing in for larger systems of white supremacy—for some, the label of “karen” is in fact injurious. in one commentary published in the atlantic, helen lewis (2020) writes, “you can’t control a word, or an idea, once it’s been released into the wild. epithets linked to women have a habit of becoming sexist insults; we don’t tend to describe men as bossy, ditzy, or nasty…and so karen has followed the trajectory of dozens of words before it, becoming a cloak for casual sexism as well as a method of criticizing the perceived faux vulnerability of white women.” for lewis, karen’s whiteness is an excuse, a justification to rebrand familiar original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 9 misogynistic stereotypes and insults as anti-racist activism. thanks to the internet, black and white men across the globe and the political spectrum are united in their hatred of karen (lewis 2020). ironically, however, lewis’s article is complicit in a kind of revisionism when she uses the karen meme as the basis for a feminist analysis that centers white womanhood at the expense of black female subjectivity. in her analysis of karen’s circulation and reception, lewis argues that white women and black men are both victims and accomplices of racism and sexism, and presents white men as their shared oppressor, but doesn’t attempt to incorporate black women into this framework.2 lewis’s failure to adequately consider black women’s perspectives in her analysis of karen is disappointing considering the centrality of black women to the work of complaint and because black women often captured the videos that make up the alliterative hashtag name meme, including permit patty. however, lewis is correct that the karen meme became estranged from its engagement with dark sousveillance and black complaint once the meme went viral. this estrangement lies in the very expectations placed on a viral video or image. as i described earlier, the alliterative name and karen memes originated in online black satellite counterpublics. these online spaces are independent but not hidden from mainstream white online public spaces, and, as a result, narratives, discourses, and images are able to move between these online publics. studies of online black practices and counterpublics expose the illusion of a singular public sphere. furor over “cancel culture” and the anti-karen backlash do not so much demonstrate the supposed free market of ideas as they exemplify “clashes between strong and weak publics” online (clark 2020, 89). “going viral” therefore should not be considered an abstract measurement of popularity, but rather used to describe a kind of movement: the movement of an image, video, or discourse from a small, weak public to a larger, stronger one. as karen spread beyond black social media spheres where it originated and into a mainstream, white audience, she lost her link to a specific conception of race and the american public. in this process, karen was given a new narrative, a new trial, that was based on her perceived excessive displays of emotions, her allegedly unseemly public behavior, and her physical appearance, such as the “karen haircut” (martinez 2022). in contrast to the alliterative name meme, the form of the karen meme does not require that the video or image engage with antiblackness at all. rather, like the logic of digital media, karen’s meaning is determined by the individual viewer and the rules, norms, and expectations of the specific online space it is posted to. the meme is still gendered, but as lewis (2020) herself points out, even donald trump has been called a karen. after moving from predominantly black to predominantly white online spaces, the karen meme now has little to say about anti-blackness as climate. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 10 i focus on this shift from the alliterative name meme to the karen meme to highlight the limitations of attempting to use the trial form to expose and redress anti-black injuries. the trial relies on visuality and exposure, and these memes follow this logic by presenting videos of anti-black harassment to online audiences of thousands. however, as stuart hall (2021) identifies in his media theory of encoding and decoding, the problem at the heart of all media forms reliant on mass dissemination is that there is no way to guarantee that viewers will see what they are intended to see. viewers choose how to decode and render the meme in conversation with discourses, narratives, and images they have previously encountered. the existence of multiple potential decodings is also legitimized by the trial. jurors do not have to accept the narratives given to them by the prosecution or defense; they are allowed to discard and reinterpret evidence according to their own narratives and speculations and can even nullify the trial itself (clover 2019). at the same time, not all discourses and frameworks are treated equally; there is a dominant cultural code through which we are encouraged to render meaning (hall 2021). anti-blackness is one such dominant cultural code. in the american legal and media tradition it has been the case that evidence of injuries—real or alleged—of certain groups have been given much greater weight than others, often at the expense of black life (heffernan 1999). seeing a karen video and concluding that the video’s producer or the meme itself is misogynist does not represent a failure to see properly, but rather an active decision to render the video within a dominant discourse of anti-blackness, to not see the black complaint. this is not a failure of the trial form; it is the success of the hegemonic code. by using the trial form to attempt to legitimate black injuries, we therefore find ourselves operating within the standards of visuality and representation that are fundamentally hostile to acknowledging anti-blackness as anything other than the actions of individual bad actors. a potential alternative to the trial form lies in the black complaint. “hide your kids, hide your wife”: the forgotten complaint of the “bed intruder song” this paper’s theorization of black complaint draws from sara ahmed’s analysis of complaint as a form of non-reproductive labor: the labor of intervening into a situation in the hopes of preventing the reproduction of a problem (2021, 163). as ahmed argues, “not reproducing an institutional legacy could be described as the work of complaint” (164). the legacy of black complaint as non-reproductive labor is grounded in the tradition of black critical theory and black radical thinkers. of note is the anti-lynching activism of ida b. wells-barnett. born in 1862 to enslaved parents, wells-barnett investigated and wrote commentaries on lynching, which original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 11 she published first in the black newspaper the memphis free speech and later in two pamphlets, southern horrors and the red record (norwood 2017). wellsbarnett’s writing on lynching functions as both documentation—detailing the facts of each case she researched alongside statistics—and intervention. her work led her to claim that rather than being a response to the alleged crimes of black individuals, lynchings were a reaction of an anti-black climate to black success and a product of white patriarchal anxieties towards the possibility of sexual relationships between black men and white women (wells-barnett 1892). she further emphasized the necessity for black people to protect themselves and their families when the legal system refused to, including advising her readers to take up arms. wells-barnett’s work, along with countless other black men, women, and queer individuals, provides us with a model of black complaint. it is this model that i drew from when describing the alliterative name meme as a visual archive of collective experience. black complaint is both a recording and an intervention. my theory of black complaint also draws from meredith clark’s (2020) and lisa nakamura’s (2015) work on complaint as a form of marginalized digital labor. just as the pamphlets, memoirs, novels, and manifestos of the black radical tradition have historically sought to prevent the reproduction of lynching, discrimination, economic exploitation, and sexual violence against black people, the viral videos of permit pattys and karens do the work of non-reproductive labor by attempting to stop the reproduction of quotidian anti-black surveillance. nakamura argues that the labor of calling out “toxic social environments in digital media” largely falls on women of color, and that this labor is not compensated—except with “affective currencies” such as likes—even though it benefits all users in online spaces and creates space for new kinds of communities (2015, 106.) though nakamura considers such labor to be reproductive, the call-out better maps onto ahmed’s concept of the work of complaint as non-reproductive. in creating new kinds of online communities, the work of the call-out intervenes to stop the reproduction of harmful behaviors and toxic environments. similarly, clark (2020) argues that the call-out, “dragging,” and “cancel culture” are all digital discursive practices that originated in online black countercultures. the call-out and the memetic hashtag are labors of education and community management, and within this frame being “canceled” should be read “as a last-ditch appeal for justice” (clark 2020, 89). however, as clark points out, these discursive practices are not often viewed as legitimate complaints in white mainstream online and offline spaces—where these practices are instead rendered as fundamentally irrational witch hunts and “cancel culture” (89). the refusal to render the call-out as a complaint represents what ahmed describes as methods for stopping complaints. a key feature of the history of black complaint is that the complainant themselves becomes the source of complaint. in the spring of 1892, wells-barnett condemned the “old thread-bare original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 12 lie that negro men rape white women,” noting that the frequency of this justification for lynching threatened to expose to a larger audience both the sexual agency of white women and their frequent willingness to incite lynchings to avoid patriarchal sanctions. in response to her claim, the office of the free speech was destroyed by a white mob and wells-barnett was forced to flee memphis. notably, wells-barnett (1892) reproduced a response to her complaint from a contemporary white newspaper in southern horrors: “if the negroes themselves do not apply the remedy without delay it will be the duty of those whom he has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies to a stake at the intersection of main and madison sts., brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor's shears.” the threats made against the author of wells-barnett’s commentary—assumed to be a black man—demonstrate how black complaint is rendered as itself injurious as a method of stopping complaint. not all complaints are non-reproductive labor (ahmed 2021, 170). the reproduced excerpt expresses the white complaint to wells-barnett’s words by using the trial’s adversarial and punitive framing of redress: if the black community did not remedy wells-barnett’s allegedly injurious comments about white women, it would be the “duty” of all white male citizens to seek redress on behalf of white women by torturing the black complainant. wells-barnett’s intervention into the crisis of lynching was rendered by the white community as the source of injury to those who benefit from the reproduction of a problem, environment, or—to draw from sharpe (2016)—the prevailing weather. though they operate in different historical contexts, wells-barnett’s work of complaint and the alliterative name meme’s transformation into the karen meme both demonstrate how the rendering of black complaint in mainstream white public spaces operates as a tactic of stopping or drowning out black complaint. for wells-barnett, the mob violence represented an attempt to stop her complaint by silencing her, both metaphorically by destroying the office of free speech and literally via the threats made against her life. however, silence and erasure are not the only ways to stop complaint. in a reversal of the logics of visuality, the circulation of a complaint outside of the space in which it was created and for whom it was intended, particularly online, can be a very effective way of stopping complaint. the alliterative name meme’s transformation from a visual archive of collective experience into the contested and de-racialized karen meme is not the first time that black complaint has been revised and reframed by the white supremacist logics of viral internet content. one example i remember as a black zillenial is the popular 2010 “bed intruder song.” original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 13 figure 3. antoine dodson in the original local news interview. source: carvin 2010 in the summer of 2010, huntsville, alabama resident antoine dodson was recorded by local news reporters discussing his interruption of a home invasion and attempted sexual assault of his sister, kelly. in contrast to the conversational if restrained tones of the white news anchor and reporter who introduce the segment, dodson—with his red bandana, expressive head gestures, and the unidentifiable white object that he points at the camera—stands out as visually distinct from the typical local news ambience. dodson never appears to answer a question during the segment, but instead addresses his statement directly to the television audience and to the home invader. as he speaks the phrase that would soon be heard by millions, dodson draws out his words as if to make sure those watching can hear him clearly, before speeding up in time with the back-and-forth punctuating movement of his head: “he’s climbing in your windows, he’s snatching your people up, trying to rape them, so you need to hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband, because they’re raping everybody out here” (carvin 2010). the clip quickly went viral. most notably, it was remixed by the white youtubers the gregory brothers into the “bed intruder song.” a parody of an r&b hit, dodson’s impassioned address to his community becomes the chorus, looping autotuned sound bites of dodson instructing viewers to “hide your kids, hide your wife.” the “bed intruder song” proved incredibly popular, reaching #89 on the billboard charts and was the most viewed video on youtube in 2010 after professionally produced music videos (peters 2010). the commercial success of the “bed intruder song” lies in the video’s sound. the most iconic aspect of the video is dodson’s own words, which include dodson’s instruction to the viewer described above as well as his address to his sister’s original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 14 attacker while pointing at the camera: “you don’t have to come and confess that you did it. we’re looking for you.” dodson’s instructions to the attacker place the video’s viral sound back within the context of an attempted crime, a jarring reminder that dodson’s original statements were an expression of the claim to injury, both by kelly, who is herself interviewed in the segment, and by antoine on his sister’s behalf. notably, dodson doesn’t appeal to the viewer for help locating the attacker. instead, he co-opts the television camera as a platform through which he will speak the arrest of sister’s attacker into being. i previously highlighted the phrase “rendering a verdict,” which refers to the practice of reading the jury’s decision to a court. in this segment, dodson renders his own verdict against the attacker, assuring him that they have proof of his guilt through their own testimony and that they will find and bring the attempted rapist to justice. dodson’s declaration “you [the attacker] can run and tell that, homeboy” therefore performs a strikingly similar intervention as the permit patty video’s “the whole world gonna see you, boo,” both evoking a certainty that their respective interventions into an unjust situation will render real justice. however, the work of complaint that dodson’s interview engages in was revised and redefined when his words were autotuned and remixed into a commercially successful song. unlike the direct threats of violence aimed at wells-barnett, the “bed intruder song” blocks complaint by engaging in a digital form of “commodity racism”—the adoption and reproduction of racist icons as popular consumer products (osucha 2009). the commodification of dodson’s interview into the “bed intruder song” suggests that black complaint and black grief is only legible to white culture as entertainment. the “bed intruder song” was only the first in a series of songs and clips made from remixing a black person’s account of a traumatic or newsworthy event that went viral online in the early 2010s.3 this trend demonstrates that every aspect of blackness, including black pain, is positioned as a consumable object within american culture, as endlessly remixable and memeable. the success of the remixed video’s circulation online also obscures the fact that the original video’s complaint has gone unanswered. an us weekly article from 2010 notes that the dodsons were able to move into a new house after the gregory brothers split the proceeds from “bed intruder song,” before stating “incidentally, he [antoine] tells us police still have no leads” on kelly’s attacker (us weekly 2010). at the time of this essay’s writing, kelly dodson’s attacker has still not been caught, though antoine dodson has been arrested several times (kenneally 2011). in addition to the problem of making black complaint legible in a way that cannot be revised or commodified, the “bed intruder song” also demonstrates the limitations of relying on the logics of visuality to bring about justice. it also raises the question of what constitutes redress. while we might feel comfortable saying that the arrest of kelly’s attacker would most certainly constitute some kind of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 15 justice, can adequate redress for an anti-black climate be determined so easily? regarding the alliterative name and karen memes, does charging the white women at the center of these encounters offer justice for victims of white supremacist surveillance? christian cooper (2022) notably refused to participate in the criminal case brought against his harasser, amy cooper, the “central park karen,” writing in the washington post, “i’ve said all along that i think it’s a mistake to focus on this one individual. the important thing the incident highlights is the long-standing, deep-seated racial bias against us black and brown folk that permeates the united states.” christian cooper’s statement illustrates the limitations of turning to a trial-based framework of injury and redress for justice in a system that has historically held the black body simultaneously responsible for and insensate to injury. the trial’s approach to injury is designed to consider only individual claims to injury removed from their context within larger systems of oppression and violence. the criminal trial, therefore, cannot be relied on to dismantle the climate of anti-blackness and may even reproduce this climate by directing attention towards individual agents of white supremacy and away from systems. the focus on shaming and mocking the individuals at the center of the alliterative name and karen memes online similarly diverts our attention from the more difficult, less fun work of intervening in the reproduction of anti-blackness as climate. as the commodity racism of the “bed intruder song” demonstrates, embracing memes over the registers of black grief and activism they represent is to be complicit in the silencing and revision of black complaint. christian cooper’s refusal to participate in the prosecution of his harasser reminds us of the foundational non-reproductive project of black complaint. conclusion we will not solve the problem of anti-blackness by making memes, but they can provide us with a “phenomenology of the institution” (ahmed 2021, 19), in this case the institution of white supremacy and anti-black surveillance, that can inform our future work of complaint. the potential of the black complaint as a form for addressing anti-blackness and considering redress lies in its changeability. i wish to conclude by directing us back to the weather, which sharpe refers to as where “antiblackness is pervasive as climate” but also as that which “produces new ecologies” (2016, 106). sharpe’s definition of weather also describes the work of complaint, which produces new ecologies through its intervention into singularities of a toxic climate even when the individual complaint is stopped by the dominant institution. considering the work of complaint allows us to view permit pattys and karens as singularities of an antiblack climate. recognizing that the weather “necessitates changeability and improvisation,” that it creates the conditions for new potentialities (sharpe 2016, 106), allows us to appreciate these memes and viral videos for what they are—not failures but stopped complaints that nonetheless advance a phenomenology of whiteness and white supremacy. the history of black complaint is a history of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 16 failure, blockage, and derailment (hartman 2008, 13). the weather changes, and the way we consider exposure, injury, and justice will have to change with it. notes 1 the woman filming appears to be the child’s mother and is possibly the sister of @_ethiopiangold, who originally posted the permit patty video to x, the social media site formerly known as twitter, though it is worth noting that the text of the original and follow-up tweets do not state this specifically (dr. umar @_ethiopiangold 2018a). 2 lewis does mention the critique of black feminists and women of color in her article, but her discussion of these perspectives is limited to a paragraph where she argues that the origins of the karen meme lie just as much in white sexist online cultures as much as they do in the anti-racist work of black women, and in a brief aside where she mentions that the yale collective on women of color and the law issued a critique of an essay by catherine mckinnon without elaborating on the details of the critique. 3 other notable examples: in 2012 a local news interview with a woman named sweet brown about an apartment fire produced the meme sound bite “ain’t nobody got time for that” as well as a song “i got bronchitis,” the latter of which prompted brown to file a lawsuit against apple music (stayse 2017). a year later in 2013, charles ramsey’s account of helping rescue three kidnapped women in cleveland was turned into the hit song “dead giveaway,” also by the gregory brothers (kosich 2023). references ahmed, sara. 2021. complaint! durham, nc: duke university press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/assets/pubmaterials/978-1-4780-1771-4_601.pdf. brock, andré jr. 2020. distributed blackness: african american cybercultures. new york: nyu press. browne, simone. 2015. dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham, nc: duke university press. campisi, jessica, emily smith, eric levenson, and kimberly hutcherson. 2018. “after internet mockery, ‘permit patty’ resigns as ceo of cannabis-products company.” cnn, june 25, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/us/permit-patty-san-franciscotrnd/index.html. carvin, andy. 2010. “‘bed intruder’ meme: a perfect storm of race, music, comedy and celebrity.” all tech considered, npr, august 5, 2010. https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2010/08/05/129005122/youtubebed-intruder-meme. https://www.dukeupress.edu/assets/pubmaterials/978-1-4780-1771-4_601.pdf https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/us/permit-patty-san-francisco-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/us/permit-patty-san-francisco-trnd/index.html https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2010/08/05/129005122/youtube-bed-intruder-meme 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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/christian-cooper-why-i-am-declining-to-be-involved-in-amy-coopers-prosecution/2020/07/14/1ba3a920-c5d4-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/christian-cooper-why-i-am-declining-to-be-involved-in-amy-coopers-prosecution/2020/07/14/1ba3a920-c5d4-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/christian-cooper-why-i-am-declining-to-be-involved-in-amy-coopers-prosecution/2020/07/14/1ba3a920-c5d4-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/cringey/ https://twitter.com/_ethiopiangold/status/1010597370327789568 https://twitter.com/_ethiopiangold/status/1010577140595560448 https://doi.org/10.1086/448327 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1xn0vdz.26 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115 https://doi.org/10.1086/448947 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) heather lawrence, 2024 18 hooks, bell. 1992b. “representations of whiteness.” in black looks: race and representation, 165–72. new york: routledge. kapp, ernst. 2018. elements of a philosophy of technology on the evolutionary history of culture. edited by jeffrey west kirkwood and leif weatherby. translated by lauren k. wolfe. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. kenneally, tim. 2011. “antoine dodson of ‘bed intruder’ fame arrested again after traffic stop.” reuters, september 26, 2011, sec. the wrap. https://www.reuters.com/article/idus414296459220110926. kosich, john. 2023. “‘dead giveaway’: the backstory of the charles ramsey interview and the two words synonymous with may 6, 2013.” news 5 cleveland, may 5, 2023. https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/local-news/dead-giveaway-the-backstoryof-the-charles-ramsey-interview-and-the-two-words-synonymous-with-may-6-2013 lewis, helen. 2020. “the mythology of karen.” the atlantic, august 19, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/08/karen-memecoronavirus/615355/. martinez, priscila. 2022. “the ‘karen’ 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research areas include critical media theory, racialized visuality, media epistemology, televisual and digital spectacle, conspiracy theory, and online and offline publics. https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/gregory-brothers-take-antoine-dodson-to-the-hot-100-956772/ https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/gregory-brothers-take-antoine-dodson-to-the-hot-100-956772/ https://www.nickiswift.com/56529/whatever-happened-sweet-brown/ https://mashable.com/article/permit-patty-oakland https://mashable.com/article/permit-patty-oakland https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/bed-intruder-singer-moves-family-into-new-home-2010169/ https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/bed-intruder-singer-moves-family-into-new-home-2010169/ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14975/14975-h/14975-h.htm#the_offense waldby, catherine. 2025. “malthusian discontents.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © catherine waldby, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license malthusian discontents catherine waldby australian national university catherine.waldby@anu.edu.au keywords french revolution, feminism, gender, reproduction, william godwin i give here a brief overview of part of my argument from my new book in progress “reproduction in the classical social sciences,” which examines the ways human and nonhuman reproduction was figured in political philosophy, political economy, and sociology between the late seventeenth century and the early twentieth century. i am going to focus on malthus because his ideas are still widely evoked in much of the population literature. he is an unavoidable figure in demography and critical population studies and evoked at least in spirit in many environmental studies. i will address the ways his apparently technical and quantitative arguments were deeply engaged with new ideas about gender equality emerging from the french revolution, and were intended to refute the claims being made by the revolutionary feminists for reform of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and legitimacy laws to give women more legal agency in and outside the family. as an economist, malthus is significant because of his introduction of the notion of scarcity into understandings of national wealth. his famous essay on the principle of population (there were several versions) addresses the consequences of his claim that the both the underlying dynamics of population growth and the capacity for agricultural production are constants: population increases geometrically while agriculture, constrained by land scarcity, grows arithmetically (malthus 1798). population growth is driven by the constancy of human sexual desire, and communities will continue to grow geometrically until they are checked by agricultural failure, famine, and epidemic, when they will shrink again. because land is inherently finite, and cannot be increased, this dynamic can only be avoided by constraints on human sexual desire, particularly late, provident marriage. (i will come back to this point.) http://catherine.waldby@anu.edu.au/ roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) catherine waldby, 2025 2 malthus’s concern with scarcity placed him at odds with the other major economists of the late eighteenth century, the physiocrats in france and adam smith in britain. despite being a clergyman, malthus was the first to depart significantly from linnaean science and the deist assumption that a benign and provident god regulated nature in such a way that human needs were met and food production and population were kept in a balance, if they were rationally governed (by economists). the centrality of land scarcity explains his appeal to some contemporary environmentalists who are concerned with planetary limits, and postulate that population reduction is one way to reduce the pressure on climate and resources (e.g., haraway 2018). however, for malthus, particularly in his first version of his famous essay, scarcity is not only a quantitative calculation but a philosophical notion intended to rebut the revolutionary ideas about class and gender equality washing across europe at the time he was writing. his original polemic, an essay on the principle of population as it affects the future improvement of society, with remarks on the speculations of mr. goodwin, m. condorcet and other writers (malthus 1798), was written during the later years of the revolution and, as the title implies, engaged not only with the statistical specifics of population growth but with a much broader argument regarding the nature of social progress and the possibilities of human perfectibility claimed by the philosophes of the french revolution. his broad claim was that the scarcity of land and the inexorable nature of the human desire to reproduce meant that population would inevitably outstrip food supply and hence human life was condemned to perpetual immiseration, famine, and epidemic, so could not be perfected. he also had a specific argument about the need for women’s rights to remain limited. during the first years of the revolution, women such as olympe de gouges had successfully pursued the idea of women’s equality as citizens. the droit intermédiaire, the new legal code developed to institutionalize the rights of republican citizens, had extended new rights to women—divorce by mutual consent, legal majority at the age of twenty-one, equal inheritance rights for male and female children and, most strikingly, for both illegitimate and legitimate children. this comparative liberality was rapidly reversed with the onset of the terror in 1793, when the feminist forces of the revolution largely succumbed to the guillotine (gerhard and meunier 2016). (under napoleonic rule, this reversal was more thoroughly entrenched through the adoption of the french civil code of 1804.) while malthus never addresses the revolutionary feminist writing from the time directly, he does debate in an essay on the principle of population, for several chapters, with william godwin, whose an enquiry concerning political justice (1793) was published only a year after his soon-to-be lover mary wollstonecraft’s a vindication on the rights of women (1792). malthus focuses on godwin’s roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) catherine waldby, 2025 3 arguments in favor of perfect equality between the sexes. here godwin picks up on some of the revolutionary feminist and equalitarian claims being advanced by the revolutionaries. he proposes the abolition of marriage and its replacement with a system of friendship between men and women. because corrupt institutions and legally enforced social relations inflame the passions and vices, the abolition of marriage would see a reduction in sensuality and the flowering of rational friendships between men and women untroubled by sexual desire. the species would be propagated not because of sexual desire but because reasonable men would see the fathering of children as a duty. this would have the effect of annulling patriarchal claims to particular children and the need for women to be forcibly restricted to motherhood, replaced with community support for all children born. malthus argues that such an arrangement would lead to massive overpopulation, and that relations between the sexes need to be characterized by female shame, indissoluble marriage, and an absence of social assistance for childcare, in order for population to remain at governable levels. he writes, mr godwin considers marriage as a fraud and a monopoly. let us suppose the commerce of the sexes established upon principles of the most perfect freedom.…i cannot conceive a form of society so favourable upon the whole to population. the irremediableness of marriage, as it is at present constituted, undoubtedly deters many from entering into that state. an unshackled intercourse on the contrary would be a most powerful incitement to early attachments, and as we are supposing no anxiety about the future support of children to exist, i do not conceive that there would be one woman in a hundred, of twenty-three, without a family. with these extraordinary encouragements to population,…the numbers would necessarily increase faster than in any society that has ever yet been known. (malthus 1798, 58) so, scarcity of land leads malthus to refute the possibility or desirability of gender equality. it is notable that engagement between his proposals and feminist thought is embedded in the original text, not introduced by contemporary feminism as we tend to assume. references gerhard, ute, and valentine meunier. 2016. “civil law and gender in nineteenthcentury europe.” clio: women, gender, history, no. 43, 250–75. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26242553. haraway, donna. 2018. “making kin in the chthulucene: reproducing multispecies justice.” in making kin not population: reconceiving generations, edited by adele e. clarke and donna haraway, 67–100. prickly paradigm press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26242553 roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) catherine waldby, 2025 4 malthus, thomas. 1798. an essay on the principle of population as it affects the future improvement of society, with remarks on the speculations of mr. goodwin, m. condorcet and other writers. london: j. johnson. internet archive. https://archive.org/details/essayonprincipl00malt/page/n7/mode/2up. author bio catherine waldby is emeritus professor of sociology at and former director of the research school of social sciences, australian national university. her research focuses on the relationship between biomedicine, biopolitics, reproduction, and history. https://archive.org/details/essayonprincipl00malt/page/n7/mode/2up malthusian discontents keywords references author bio ff ding, gao. 2025. “tenth anniversary artwork: gao ding’s bits and pieces.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–2. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © gao ding, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license catalystcatalyst feminism, theory, technoscience tenth anniversary section figure 1. gao ding, bits and pieces (digital collage), 2025. ff catalystcatalyst feminism, theory, technoscience tenth anniversary artwork: gao ding’s bits and pieces gao ding gao.ding@u.nus.edu this digital collage draws on the smithsonian’s open-access archive. by incorporating a diverse set of historical artworks and photographs juxtaposed with the use of browser windows to portray and contain these artworks, i point to our world’s contemporary challenges, including the fragmentation of bodies and lives incited by the datafication of our societies, generative artificial intelligence, and the systems of capitalism that undergird these processes and phenomena. this image also embodies the diversity in scholarship that catalyst has contributed to various interdisciplines, while deliberately paying homage to the interface between bodies, science, and technology. artist bio gao ding 高鼎 is a researcher and artist based in singapore. ding’s research interests revolve around understanding how queerness and transness are shaped by, and evolve alongside, capitalism and other modes of production. ding’s research has been published in the journal of gender studies, and their art has been featured by the arts association (singapore), new naratif, and pink dot singapore, among others. tenth anniversary section 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) gao ding, 2025 mailto:?subject= book review | what comes after entanglement?: activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion, by eva haifa giraud (duke university press, 2019) melling, rowan. 2024. review of the smart wife: why siri, alexa, and other smart home devices need a feminist reboot, by yolande strengers and jenny kennedy (mit press, 2020), catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312. © rowan melling, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | the smart wife: why siri, alexa, and other smart home devices need a feminist reboot, by yolande strengers and jenny kennedy (mit press, 2020) rowan melling simon fraser university rowan_melling@sfu.ca consumer ai is hella sexist—it’s about time someone called it out. that’s what yolande strengers and jenny kennedy’s book the smart wife does, from alexa being modeled on the 1950s housewife to sex robots designed to frame sex in unconsensual ways. the argument builds around the titular theory of the “smart wife.” these devices, according to the authors, are actually designed to act as surrogate wives and to take on the domestic labor traditionally coded as wife work. with this design comes all the sexism embedded in the role of wife-asdomestic-servant, thereby remediating 1950s sexism for the digital age. building on similar critiques such as safiya noble’s algorithms of oppression (2018) and jennifer rhee’s the robotic imaginary (2018), the authors’ aim is “to develop smart wives that promote gender equity and diversity” (209). this feminist reading is an important step in the analysis of consumer ai, and the examples are insightful, thoroughly researched, and related with hilarious irony. following the first introductory chapter, the next four chapters each take on a specific digital assistant as a case study to analyze domestic labor, robot gender, resource extraction, and sex, respectively. chapter six turns towards humans to examine sexist behavior directed at feminized ai; while chapter seven continues this human focus to examine men and technology, particularly in terms of domestic abuse and surveillance. all these chapters are filled with a wealth of surprising examples, delivered in a humorous and compelling style. this impressive research makes the book worth reading, for anyone interested in critical analysis of ai. book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) rowan melling, 2024 beyond pointing out the sexism, though, the book struggles a bit in its argument and doesn’t quite follow through on what could be its most compelling insights. throughout, the authors seem hampered by some strange initial parameters developed in their introductory chapter. here, they theorize that “smart wives” arise out of a real “need” (9); that is, they are a logical response to “the contemporary slump in available or willing wives” (6), or the “wife drought” (1), a term they take from annabel crabb. given this scarcity of wives, “many people are understandably looking for a technological alternative” (8). even “women…need (smart) wives” (9): someone needs to do the domestic labor! in suggesting that the social position of “wife” is a “need,” the social relations themselves become somewhat unassailable, leaving the critique constricted. from a feminist perspective, it’s clear what they are trying to do with this argument: value domestic and care work as real, irreplaceable labor. at the same time, however, reading the figure of the wife through an economic logic of supply and demand naturalizes this social position. within these parameters, the desire for domestic servants is a constant, the social relation fixed. with smart wives set up as a kind of necessity, it is difficult for the book to question this technology beyond its design flaws. rather than address the social relations that set up domestic servitude as a necessity, the representation of the servants becomes the issue. in the end, the conclusions are not wholly satisfying, even for the authors. they frequently state a desire to take their argument further, but seem cramped by the idea that we can’t really push back against a social organization that requires (smart) wives as such. their conclusion: the best we can really hope for is less sexist representation in design. that amazon’s dominance over the planet continues, regardless of how feminist alexa becomes, is something the authors clearly want to address. and at moments they almost do. they come closest in the chapter on the environmental impacts of ai, which draws heavily on kate crawford and vladen joler’s mapping of ai’s extractive demands, as well as ecofeminist criticism from vandana shiva and others. here, they acknowledge that there is actually no good or justified way of making destructive consumer products like alexa. they shouldn’t exist; social relations should change instead. similarly, while they conclude the book with calls for gender-neutral ai voices, in chapter three they “reject the pretense of the gender-neutral robot” (76) as a bad-faith surface solution that codes sexism in other ways. these moments of more adventurous critique open up the argument in ways that future research should extend; it’s another voice running through the book demanding more. in the end, the call to “develop smart wives that promote gender equity and diversity” (209) is fine, but doesn’t seem to speak to many of the issues the authors themselves raise. book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) rowan melling, 2024 my sense is that the authors do in fact share more radical critiques of the social conditions that generate sexist ai. indeed, they call heavily on judy wajcman’s foundational text in feminist analysis of technology, feminism confronts technology, in which wajcman writes that “it is impossible to divorce the gender relations that are expressed in, and shape technologies from, the wider social structures that create and maintain them” (1991, 25). gender relations, technological systems, and institutions need to change together. perhaps the book’s narrow frame results from answering a compelling question too quickly: what is the relationship between the function of ai and its sexist gendering? the supply-demand answer of the “wife drought” closes an interesting field of analysis and traps the authors in a representational critique in which the need for the technology is itself beyond question. a reading of technology not just as a tool but as a way of ordering the world could be helpful here. the patriarchal fantasies embedded in ai like alexa seem not just to lie in its representation but also in the way it structures the world: mediated by alexa, the environment itself becomes acquiescent, a servile female-coded nature that responds immediately to the barked commands of its programmer-master. at the micro level, this fulfills patriarchal fantasies of a fully controllable domestic sphere; at a macro level, the “need” for alexas sets up jeff bezos as a kind of global programmer-master. the world these consumer products build seems itself highly questionable, and one which the sexist gendering of ai helps to enable. the book could benefit from addressing consumer ai at this level, too. can a technology designed to make the environment servile ever really be feminist? perhaps the place to begin answering this question is to confront ai’s sexist representation as inseparable from fantasies of technopower. references strengers, yolande, and jenny kennedy. 2020. the smart wife: why siri, alexa, and other smart home devices need a feminist reboot. cambridge, ma: mit press. wajcman, judy. 1991. feminism confronts technology. university park: pennsylvania state university press. author bio rowan melling is a painter and academic living in vancouver, unceded coast salish territories. he is currently a phd candidate at the school of communication at simon fraser university, focusing on how the more megalomaniacal aspects of romanticism have returned in the digital age. book review | the smart wife: why siri, alexa, and other smart home devices need a feminist reboot, by yolande strengers and jenny kennedy (mit press, 2020) references author bio adams, sophie. 2025. “articulating agency.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sophie adams, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license articulating agency sophie adams la trobe university s.adams@latrobe.edu.au keywords sustainability, transition, systems theory, human agency, politics the idea of population has loomed large in global environmentalist concern since fears of “overpopulation” and subsequent environmental and social collapse were propagated by the limits to growth report (meadows et al. 1972) and paul ehrlich’s book the population bomb (1968). these grim malthusian prognoses have since been widely discredited, with critics challenging the assumptions of inexorable population growth and fixed technological horizons and emphasizing instead the possibility of innovation and intervention to overcome environmental constraints (cole et al. 1973; freeman 1979). environmental efforts are now predominantly occupied with the potential of human innovation to enable transitions to more sustainable modes of collective life, and their associated analytical frameworks attempt to account for the roles of various actors in achieving or obstructing such transitions (smith et al. 2010). population as undifferentiated, natural force no longer features explicitly in environmental discourses—but, as i outline below, echoes of such a framing continue to appear in the way that the mechanisms of sustainable transition are understood, and in debate about the place of people in such transitions. the notion of transition has rapidly come to dominate the ways that academics and policymakers alike think about response to climate change and other environmental challenges. in a formative article titled “more evolution than revolution: transition management in public policy” (2001), dutch transition theorists jan rotmans and colleagues locate the roots of the transition concept— http://s.adams@latrobe.edu.au/ roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) sophie adams, 2025 2 defined as a process of change in the structural character of society—in biology and the study of population dynamics. the associated literature has since sprouted many theoretical models, such as the multi-level perspective (geels 2002) and strategic niche management (schot and geels 2008). broadly, these models theorize the process of transition in systems theoretical terms, including nonlinear behavior, positive feedback, and dynamic equilibrium, and draw on evolutionary economics to conceive of the “co-evolution” of social, technological and environmental dynamics (markard et al. 2012; smith et al. 2010). characterized by an “alluring combination of agency, complexity, uncertainty, and optimism” (shove and walker 2007, 763), these approaches offer a means of engaging with transition as the emergent effect of interactions between actors and dynamics across different levels of a sociotechnical system. within and among these models of transition, however, are differing and not necessarily consistent conceptions of agency, as well as “important types and agents of change that are missed” (shove and walker 2007, 768). these models are “trying to combine evolutionary theories of socio-technical change with theories of agency,” positing the possibility for intervention but at the same time attributing causality less to intentional action by people than to the aggregate effect of processes of generating variation, natural selection, and so on (smith et al. 2010, 446). these models seem to contain some conceptual slippage between treating people and their agency as inside or outside the system, resulting in a deep ambivalence about the potential for human action to direct the course of change, which i have previously argued characterizes social-ecological systems approaches to climate change adaptation (adams 2021). with sociotechnical change approached in these evolutionary and systems terms, population thus seems to figure once again as a natural force, or as the passive substrate upon which the undertheorized and apolitical interventions of a transition manager take effect. as societies around the world face the challenge of mitigating and adapting to climate change, this naturalized understanding of the role of people in relation to the systems and structures undergoing change implies a politically conservative view of the scope and means to realize alternative futures. references adams, sophie. 2021. “the pragmatic holism of social–ecological systems theory: explaining adaptive capacity in a changing climate.” progress in human geography 45 (6): 1580–1600. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211016072. cole, h.s.d., christopher freeman, marie jahoda, and k.l.r. pavitt, eds. 1973. models of doom: a critique of the limits to growth. universe books. ehrlich, paul. 1968. the population bomb. buccaneer books. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211016072 roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) sophie adams, 2025 3 freeman, christopher. 1979. “the determinants of innovation: market demand, technology, and the response to social problems.” futures 11 (3): 206–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(79)90110-1. geels, frank w. 2002. “technology transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a multi-level perspective and a case study.” research policy 31 (8–9): 1257–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0048-7333(02)00062-8. markard, jochen, rob raven, and bernhard truffer. 2012. “sustainability transitions: an emerging field of research and its prospects.” research policy 41 (6): 955–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2012.02.013. meadows, donella, dennis l. meadows, jørgen randers, and william behrens iii. 1972. the limits to growth. universe books. rotmans, jan, rené kemp, and marjolein van asselt. 2001. “more evolution than revolution: transition management in public policy.” foresight 3 (1): 15–31. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680110803003. schot, johan, and frank w. geels. 2008. “strategic niche management and sustainable innovation journeys: theory, findings, research agenda, and policy.” technology analysis & strategic management 20 (5): 537–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09537320802292651. shove, elizabeth, and gordon walker. 2007. “caution! transitions ahead: politics, practice, and sustainable transition management.” environment and planning a 39 (4): 763–70. https://doi.org/10.1068/a39310. smith, adrian, jan-peter voß, and john grin. 2010. “innovation studies and sustainability transitions: the allure of the multi-level perspective and its challenges.” research policy 39 (4): 435–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2010.01.023. author bio sophie adams is senior research fellow in the climate change adaptation lab at la trobe university, melbourne. she is a human geographer and science and technology studies scholar, with an interest in the social implications of the production and application of scientific knowledge and technological developments to address climate change. https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(79)90110-1 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0048-7333(02)00062-8 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2012.02.013 https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680110803003 https://doi.org/10.1080/09537320802292651 https://doi.org/10.1068/a39310 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2010.01.023 articulating agency keywords references author bio     book review | viral cultures: activist archiving in the age of aids, by marika cifor (university of minnesota press, 2022)     mairead sullivan loyola marymount university mairead.sullivan@lmu.edu   marika cifor’s viral cultures: activist archiving in the age of aids confronts the generative tension of archival practices that document, and thus necessarily distill, a past while also producing new presents. cifor deftly grapples with the ongoing legacy of the archival practices of aids activists and the pleasures and perils that a politics of remembering offers today. as she notes in the conclusion, cifor completed the project in the early months of the covid-19 pandemic. in this way, the text is prescient in its thinking about how we document living and struggling, surviving and dying in the context of a viral epidemic. the innovation of cifor’s text is not only its exploration of the archiving practices, including the technologies that informed such practices, of early and contemporary aids activists but also the curation practices that bring such archives to life in the present day. central to cifor’s project is her theoretic of “vital nostalgia.” as she defines it, vital nostalgia “is a generative practice for interrogating, addressing, and repairing structural power inequities grounded in the bittersweet longing for a past time or space” (6). contra an understanding of nostalgia as a kind of left melancholy, à la walter benjamin or wendy brown, cifor mobilizes vital nostalgia as a productive practice that grapples with our affective attachments to the past for the purpose of changing the present and future. though cifor does not use this language, vital nostalgia is a reparative stance that allows for both an appreciation and interrogation of the past for the goals and means of the present and future. in order to unravel this analytic, cifor takes the reader on a tour of the archival practices of hiv/aids artists and activists, including not only archival collecting but also archival curation, from the early days of act up/new york to the present. temporally, viral cultures grounds itself in why we fight: remembering aids activism, an exhibit and programming series hosted and curated by the new york public library (nypl) across 2013 and 2014. why we fight signaled a critical mass of interest in early aids activism, especially the archives of act up/new york, which are housed at the nypl, as well as an attempt—though one not always well executed—to broaden the dominant narrative of aids activisms, which frequently foreground the lives and works of cis white men. across the text, cifor returns to this event as a touchstone for understanding the generational tensions, which often also track along lines of race and gender, that inform aids activism today, the curatorial practices that valorize some stories while occluding others, and the new forms of aids art and activism that followed. in so doing, cifor highlights how emergent activists, especially queer and trans artists and activists of color, draw from, reject, and rework dominate hiv/aids narratives. chapter one grounds its analysis in the poster your nostalgia is killing me created by artist-activists vincent chevalier and ian bradley-perrin. the poster, which depicts a teenage-like bedroom built as a kind of shrine to early aids art and activism, especially the work of act up/new york, both reflects and ignites generational tensions between aids activists of the 1980s and 1990s and emerging activists today. cifor argues that the recent affective investment in the politics and aesthetics of early aids activism has the unintended effect of rendering hiv/aids struggles as in the past. such tensions came to a head in the wake of the why we fight show. while cifor notes that generational tensions are always imbued in activist work, what made this particular moment so explosive was the rapidity with which social media allowed the conversation to travel. it is social media, as well, that has allowed for the wide dissemination of early aids activism ephemera where it often circulates without context. across the chapter, cifor disentangles the nostalgia expressed by seasoned activists whose work is being recirculated, often with critique, with the complicated nostalgia of a generation who was “not there” but who, nevertheless, live, especially living with hiv, with the inheritance of early activist cultures. in “how to act up,” the second chapter, cifor explores the archival practices of act up/new york as themselves a form of aids activism. for act up/new york, archiving was central to their political project. as cifor compelling argues, act up/new york was unique as a grassroots organization that understood the political imperative for preserving its archive. of course, the archival work of act up/new york, and especially the perseverance of the archives today, was heavily informed, and often led, by lesbian feminists, most notably maxine wolfe, who themselves were central to the building and maintenance of community archives such as the lesbian herstory archives. the decision to house the bulk of act up/new york’s archive at the nypl was a contentious one made even more complicated by a recent acquisition of the digitized archive by a private for-profit company. again, generational tensions inform how the archive is used and how it informs contemporary hiv/aids discourse. even more so, as cifor demonstrates, technologies, whether the portable video recorder or the ability to digitize more than ninety linear feet of material, heavily influences the archives’ use and usefulness. technology, however, is not the only mediator of the use and usefulness of an archive. in chapter three, “an archival cure,” cifor takes on the curatorial practices that inform an archive’s public consumption and distribution. cifor employs the language of cure, and its implication in curation, to argue that while a cure to hiv/aids is both vexed and distant, curatorial practices can operate from the same ethic of care and remedy. the chapter examines the work of the visual aids archive project through a disability justice lens that deploys an analytic of cure as, vexingly, both a eugenic technology and an often desired intervention. here the vitality of vital nostalgia shines brightest. the work of the archive project is to preserve the work of artists living with, and often dying from, hiv/aids. in this way, the development, maintenance, and curation of the archive project point to the affective balance of interrogating the systems and structures that render hiv/aids a stigmatized and violent disease while, simultaneously, celebrating the liveliness, specifically artistic liveliness, of those living with and among hiv/aids. in examining the archive, cifor shifts the language of cure from one inflected with a medical imperative of eradication to one that insists on preservation. curation as curing allows the archive to engage the generational tensions that are so central to the book’s first two chapters by thinking about the archive as relational. the challenge of biomedical cure begs for other logics. cifor mobilizes more recent biomedical advancements in hiv/aids care—namely, the promises of viral undetectability—in chapter four, “status = undetectable.” cifor traces a contemporary emphasis on viral undetectability through medical intervention—those with access to financial resources are now able to engage in drug regimes that render their viral load “undetectable”—and juxtaposes such a promise with the risk of rendering hiv/aids struggles today also undetectable. the chapter again returns to the why we fight installation and the concomitant collaboration between visual aids and the new art-activist group undetectable flash collective. the collective is emblematic of recent work to keep hiv/aids activism alive through public awareness via art. the technologies employed by more contemporary aids art and activist work, cifor demonstrates, reach to the past, especially with the use of recognizable images and texts from aids archives, while also mobilizing current digital and visual modalities, such as the tumblr platform. the book’s fifth and final chapter brings the reader more squarely into the present, both the present of the aids crisis and the present of digital technologies. in this chapter, cifor narrates the modes by which contemporary artists, especially artists of color, rework archival images through modern technologies, such as gifs, in order to metabolize whose stories persist and whose are lost while reframing past activist modalities for usefulness today. viral cultures: activist archiving in the age of aids adds to a growing body of academic and trade press texts that return to the heady days of late 1980s and early 1990s aids activism, an especially necessary return given the ongoing conditions of the covid-19 pandemic. the text is stunningly interdisciplinary, offering a vibrant history of archival work as an activist practice, a cogent analysis of the political promises and perils of archival curation, and a compelling interpretation of the traffic between technology and the production of art and archives. there were times when i felt that text was repeating itself. on reflection, however, i note that this style performs the very analysis that cifor offers. namely, each encounter with an object or text is ripe for its own analysis in a given context. as the violences of the covid-19 pandemic and the invisibilizing technologies of hiv/aids drug regimens drive even greater wedges in the steep socioeconomic divides that disease engenders, cifor reminds us that who and what is remembered, and how, is a political practice that necessitates our ongoing care and attention.     author bio mairead sullivan is associate professor of women’s and gender studies at loyola marymount university and the author of lesbian death: desire and danger between feminist and queer (university of minnesota press, 2022). sullivan is currently at work on a cultural biography of herpes.       anti-colonial recoveries: building an alternative infrastructure in new mexico     dan kabella university of california, san francisco danielle.kabella@ucsf.edu     abstract this paper explores the emergence of quebrar, a community-led drug recovery program, as a dynamic and evolving alternative infrastructure within new mexico’s complex historical, political, and social contexts. established in 1968 by a coalition of activists, drug users, and individuals in recovery, quebrar aimed to address the pervasive lack of support for drug addiction in a region marked by racial violence, land dispossession, and the criminalization of drug use. through ethnographic research and archival sources, this paper explores the processes and strategies through which quebrar transformed a decommissioned site into a drug recovery program. quebrar’s infrastructure serves as a “thing-in-motion” by resisting and reimagining colonial and carceral systems tied to addiction treatment. this exploration raises questions about how alternative infrastructures can evolve in response to histories of colonialism and what they offer for future reimaginings of care and justice. finally, it considers how these themes intersect with the practice of research itself, asking how embodied knowledge can be incorporated into the research process. resumen este artículo explora el surgimiento de quebrar, un programa de rehabilitación de drogas dirigido por la comunidad, como una infraestructura alternativa dinámica y en evolución dentro de los complejos contextos históricos, políticos y sociales de nuevo méxico. creado en 1968 por una coalición de activistas, consumidores de drogas y personas en proceso de recuperación, quebrar pretendía hacer frente a la omnipresente falta de apoyo a la drogadicción en una región marcada por la violencia racial, el despojo de tierras y la criminalización del consumo de drogas. a través de la investigación etnográfica y fuentes de archivo, este artículo examina cómo quebrar transformó un lugar abandonado en un programa de rehabilitación de drogas y cómo su infraestructura resiste y reimagina los sistemas coloniales y carcelarios vinculados al tratamiento de la adicción. de este modo, la infraestructura de quebrar se convierte en un «objeto en movimiento» que evoluciona en respuesta a las condiciones históricas y materiales. este artículo también plantea cuestiones sobre cómo pueden evolucionar las infraestructuras alternativas en respuesta a las historias de colonialismo y qué ofrecen para futuras reimaginaciones del cuidado y la justicia. por último, se reflexiona cómo estos temas se entrecruzan con la práctica de la investigación. keywords borders, infrastructures, ecologies, drug recovery, decolonization, abolition, new mexico     introduction   i felt the ground tremble from the roar of the train, its unyielding passage carving a boundary between north and south, just two blocks away from the two-bedroom family home that had once belonged to my grandmother. the tracks, a reminder of how the land and lives were separated, now stood between the past and the present. driving along the caminos, i departed the neighborhood dubbed “the brick” after the industrial brick-making company whose coal-fired kilns still release a faint trace of smoke into the air. my car lugged me through mixed landscapes of arid shrublands and cottonwoods that hugged the river bottoms on the west bank of the rio grande to the old armijo schoolhouse.   this ethnographic vignette serves as an entry point into my research on alternative infrastructures. the article examines the emergence of quebrar through its interconnected material, social, political, and ecological dimensions as an alternative infrastructure for drug recoveries in new mexico. established in 1968 by a coalition of activists, drug users, and individuals in recovery, quebrar aimed to address the pervasive lack of support for drug addiction in a region marked by racial violence, land dispossession, and the criminalization of drug use. central to this study is a decommissioned radar site, redefined into a residential treatment center and one of the earliest methadone maintenance programs in the united states. these two interventions were separate efforts but were deeply interconnected, both physically and socially grounded in the histories and realities of the people around them. this infrastructure became a space where local actors—activists, medical practitioners, and community members—came together to confront the intersecting issues of police violence, systematic neglect, and the enduring legacies of colonialism. let me start by saying that this research is not confined to abstract theories or distant histories. addressing injustices, including those that extend to knowledge—how it is produced, whose worldviews are valued, and who is recognized as a credible knower—requires grounding this work in its specific contexts and struggles. to remain grounded in the people and places this study represents, i begin with my own family—its connection to these lands and the lives of those whose stories i seek to tell. my grandmother, maría alfaros, introduced in the opening vignette, embodies ties to lands granted under both spanish and mexican sovereignties, reflecting our family’s entanglement with the contested histories examined in this work. her son, my father, clotario alfaros, resisted and survived a legal system designed to systematically target chicanos for incarceration. later, he endured the long-term consequences of this system’s neglect, including the impact of viral hepatitis—a consequence of the delayed and inadequate provision of life-saving resources. their intertwined stories are not fixed narratives but suspended tensions, embodying both the pain of dispossession and the possibilities of worlds otherwise. these stories do not offer closure but instead pose enduring questions: what happens when we allow loss—whether personal grief or collective suffering—to shape our research? in a field often marked by detachment, what if the researcher is not separate from the researched? how can we shift from simply producing information to engaging deeply with lived experience? finally, what kinds of institutions must we build to allow knowledge to emerge through this messiness—refusing to separate theory from lived reality? these questions of course engage with broader discussions in postcolonial and black feminist studies, where scholars foreground situated and relational nature of knowledge production. theorists have positioned the body as both a site of suffering and a medium for transformative solidarity (anzaldúa 1987; fanon 2023), as well as a locus of power and resistance in corporeal practices of knowledge production (ruiz-trejo and garcía-dauder 2019), critiquing eurocentric epistemologies and advocating for pluriversality—the coexistence of diverse ways of knowing and being (escobar 2018; lloréns 2021). these worldviews call for epistemic disobedience, disrupting hegemonic frameworks and centering subaltern experiences and decolonial epistemologies (liboiron 2021; mignolo 2000; quijano 2007). other theorists explore the uses of vulnerability, anger, and positionality to challenge systems of power, emphasizing the importance of lived experience and interdependence in understanding humanity (behar 2022; lorde 2012). together they invite questions and exploration of where the personal and political intersect in the formation of alternative infrastructures. science and technology studies (sts) conceptualizes infrastructures as dynamic and heterogeneous assemblages that integrate material, social, political, and ecological dimensions (de la cadena 2015; puig de la bellacasa 2016, 2017; star 1995, 1999). rather than static systems, infrastructures function as “things-inmotion,” evolving through the interaction of institutions, legal frameworks, policies, and material practices (anand et al. 2018; larkin 2013). they are also sites of power, negotiation, and transformation, capable of generating new possibilities (dokumaci 2020, 2023; edwards 2003). in the context of borderlands, alternative infrastructures emerge from the boundaries that divide, transforming these arbitrary lines into dynamic processes for creating innovative ways of living and organizing. at the border, infrastructures are often theorized through lenses of control and surveillance, as demonstrated by studies on border surveillance (dijstelbloem 2021), infrastructural rehabilitation (c. martinez 2023), and rivers as borders (thomas 2021), which frame the transborder space as a carceral zone. this paper builds on and moves beyond these carceral frameworks to explore quebrar as an example of a reimagined border infrastructure—one that transcends and expands beyond carceral frameworks. it represents an infrastructure in motion, rooted in a specific place yet actively transforming the borderlands into a space of possibility and collective reimagination. this study centers two critical landscapes of infrastructure: a physical decommissioned radar site and the symbolic landscape of methadone, which embodies both liberation and state-imposed control hybridities. i examine how quebrar resists and reshapes dominant systems through interconnected material and symbolic practices, highlighting their broader role in the work of drug recovery. before delving into these efforts in detail, i provide an overview of quebrar’s politically grounded praxis within contexts of ongoing struggle.   worlds in struggle | communities in motion   they gathered to confront a subject laden with stigma and silenced by shame: heroin addiction. old armijo became a symbol of an emancipatory vision for a therapeutic community. the potential—and limitations—of methadone maintenance “fired the imagination” of those present. as one participant from the wednesday night meetings recalled, “here were the addicts, their families, their parents, people from respectable families, too, coming to see if there was going to be a miracle.” (danaceau 1973, 74)   this vignette captures the grassroots beginnings of a community grappling with heroin addiction. in spring 1967, people gathered weekly at the armijo schoolhouse to share their firsthand experiences. according to a federal program evaluation report from a war on poverty–era agency, these meetings started small but gradually expanded, at one point involving nearly sixty participants. meetings, however, faced external scrutiny (danaceau 1973). police patrols and infiltration attempts were commonplace. within a year, the group formally identified as quebrar, uniting people who used drugs, individuals in recovery, family members, and activists. its name, both a tribute and a shortened phrase, originated from “es de curar, quebrar a las puras bravas,” which translates to, “it is to cure, to break, in a manner of pure guts.” the phrase apparently was spoken in anguish by an addict who had spent eighteen years in prison. he uttered these words after the name he proposed was voted down during a naming meeting for the group. two weeks later, he was found deceased in a ditch from a heroin overdose. in his memory, the group adopted the shortened name, quebrar, as a tribute to his words and his struggle—a struggle emblematic of countless others seeking a place in mid-century new mexico to detox in a system dominated by private facilities accessible only to those with financial means (polanco 1971). leading these meetings was joe fernandez, a high school math teacher and president of the armijo neighborhood association. in my interview with his daughter, she described joe’s commitment to the chicano rights movement, a dedication shaped by his experiences as a first-generation mexican american.1 joe’s cause for action was shaped by personal encounters with stereotypes and wrongful accusations, which led to him and his brother facing the reality of incarceration—an issue so pervasive in the region that it violated the civil rights of many in their community (united states commission on civil rights 1970, 8).2 while joe moved forward, his brother’s full term marked the beginning of a struggle with heroin that was both initiated and perpetuated by his time in prison. the meetings emerged to address a critical gap in chicano activism, offering a space to confront issues related to substance use an area that other groups often chose to avoid in the southwestern united states.3 the black berets, established in 1968 and named in honor of the argentine marxist revolutionary che guevara, were a chicano activist group that broadened the movement’s reach in albuquerque (e. martinez 2002). their campaigns tackled systemic issues such as racism, unemployment, police brutality, and land dispossession. these struggles were intensified by the influx of anglo migrants drawn to albuquerque for federal jobs, nuclear science, tourism, and its reputation as a haven for those seeking respite from tuberculosis (forrest 1998; sánchez 2008; veregge 1993). they organized direct-action protests against police violence. in addition to their advocacy, the black berets launched programs such as food banks, free breakfast initiatives, health clinics, legal centers, and political education projects. inspired by groups like the black panthers and the venceremos brigade, the black berets adopted an internationalist perspective, connecting their local efforts to global anti-imperialist movements and positioning chicano struggles within a broader fight against colonialism, capitalism, and systemic oppression (chavez 2023; gómez-quiñones and vásquez 2014; oropeza 2019). solidarity between quebrar and the black berets was inevitable given their shared roots in the same barrios and common politically grounded struggles. joaquin lujan, a former black beret, reflected this in an interview with me, stating, “we were the community. we found unity because we all lived in the same neighborhoods.”4 together their organizing rooted in relational dimensions of justice is recognized across several campaigns that came up in the interviews i conducted. these campaigns focused on addressing local needs, such as access to water and sewer services in areas affected by groundwater contamination, building recreational infrastructure for youth, and repurposing a decommissioned radar site for drug recovery. by advocating for basic infrastructure, the activists simultaneously addressed related economic and material needs, at times transforming neighborhood improvement projects into opportunities for job training or leisure. meeting people where they were, in their homes, or at their parks, created a direct pathway to observe and address homegrown challenges. activists spoke of supporting young people, many of whom were struggling with addiction. for example, programs focused on teaching construction skills, such as plastering, equipping them with practical and employable abilities. at the same time, critiques of racial labor divisions in trade jobs prompted school walkouts at joe’s high school, advocating for better education.5 the schoolhouse, community centers, and drop-in centers became vital spaces within neighborhoods, providing residents with places to gather, seek support, and address community challenges. joaquin described how the office of the black berets, located near an old family restaurant, became a hub for addressing critical issues like police brutality and the rise of heroin use—interconnected challenges that underscored broader systemic issues of racism as well as poverty.6 he noted that alongside these issues raised by residents who dropped in, people often sought help with basic needs such as clothing, food, and shelter, highlighting the multifaceted struggles faced by the community. he reflected on how these spaces stood out to him as opportunities to resolve problems within the community, which was grappling with the pressures of capitalism, evolving land holdings, and the lingering effects of internalized colonialism and assimilation policies (dunbarortiz 2007, 2015; gilmore 1999; johnson 2013). joaquin noted that these struggles sometimes manifested in conflict, with individuals “stealing from each other,” but the meetings provided a crucial forum for dialogue and accountability.7 they offered restorative ways to disrupt the cycles of harm exacerbated by police interference and a court system that decontextualized the root causes of their challenges, while simultaneously reimagining and creating community interdependence and redefining justice through an intersectional framework. their approach transformed “crime” and “violence” by prioritizing collective accountability and healing. it shifted away from punitive systems, toward restorative practices that strengthened social bonds and acknowledged the broader structural forces contributing to harm. this practice sharply contrasted with interventions that framed crime and poverty as problems to be managed through the imposition of “law and order”—a logic central to top-down approaches to methadone treatment. quebrar later sought to invert this framework (further explored in the final section). both neighborhood improvement projects and the creation of restorative spaces embodied a politics of place (herrera 2015), as activists cultivated a collective community identity through their practices. as i demonstrate below, these efforts not only grounded the chicano movement in specific spatial contexts but also reconfigured semi-urban landscapes (the south valley), transforming how people engaged with and experienced their environments. the stakes were particularly significant in places like the south valley, where residents had endured centuries of land tenure transformations driven by shifting borders that continually redefined class and racial hierarchies. overlapping territorialities | sovereignties in dispute   a historical marker stood like a witness, inscribed with utopian fantasies of development tied to the very transit corridor that i traveled. the path—el camino real de tierra adentro—connected the once isolated frontier provinces of new mexico to a colonial empire governed by spain, then by mexico roughly 1,400 miles away. european colonizers followed footpaths of the pueblo peoples north to occupy these lands and retreated south during the 1680 pueblo revolt and returned once more in the spanish reconquest (sánchez 2008). these turbulent histories—of violence, resistance, and survival—have left indelible marks on the landscape, shaping infrastructures that continuously mutate under the weight of shifting borders.   the south valley, located southwest of albuquerque, includes several historic villages connected by a network of irrigation systems vital to the region’s agriculture and community life. the area depends on the rio grande for its fertile soil and encompasses a mix of rural and semi-urban land uses, shaped by its overlapping ties to pueblo and spanish land grant histories (moises 2012). in 1692 atrisco was established as a spanish settler community through colonial land grants, its name derived from the nahuatl words analco and atlixco. these land grants allocated large parcels to prominent families for private ownership, displacing tiwa-speaking puebloans from their communal lands (metzgar 1977; sánchez 2008). the colonization of new mexico also involved the presence of tlaxcalan indigenous peoples and detribalized natives, blurring the lines between indigenous and settler identities. this complex entanglement illustrates how colonization co-opted indigenous groups into systems that facilitated dispossession and assimilation, while also spurring acts of resistance. efforts to recover, reclaim, and reremember these histories—both of displacement and defiance—are gaining momentum (cotera and saldaña-portillo 2014; saldañaportillo 2016, 2017; s. trujillo 2020). the 1848 treaty of guadalupe hidalgo, following the mexican-american war, transferred the south valley, including the atrisco land grant, from the mexican republic to the us. this shift entrenched the region within a settler-colonial framework, accelerating capitalist extraction, military expansion, and land dispossession (maciel and gonzales-berry 2000). over time, traditional communal land practices were replaced by systems emphasizing individual ownership, leading to significant disputes and inequalities. by the late twentieth century, corporate development reshaped both the governance and landscape of the region, reinforcing the shift from land-based economies to market-driven structures with lasting social and economic impacts (correia 2009, 2013; dunbarortiz 2017; sánchez 2008). the consequences of these shifts prompted various redevelopment interventions, with grassroots efforts led by organizations like quebrar and the black berets emphasizing resource access—water, sewage, and healthcare—while directly challenging systemic forces that criminalized addiction, poverty, and crime. these systemic issues became deeply intertwined with personal struggles of addiction. an august 1968 editorial in the albuquerque tribune addressed socioeconomic distress and systemic inequities related to addiction in the south valley. joe, set to direct the rehabilitation program quebrar, emphasized the colonial and structural roots of addiction, linking issues like land dispossession, us urbanization, and the erosion of community institutions as key contributors to the region’s struggles (jennings 1968). driving the reporter through the “fringes of the city,” joe pointed out areas marked by deindustrialization, sharply contrasting with the expanding defense industries spurred by the cold war. this uneven development highlighted how the valley absorbed the weight of economic decline, while the city center thrived on military-driven growth. joe described how families, once land-rich, had to sell their properties incrementally to afford legal representation for relatives caught in cycles of drug-related incarceration. “there is a husband, a brother, a sister who were once land wealthy, who have had to sell it little by little to hire lawyers for their sons,” he explained (jennings 1968). his account underscores the interconnected burdens of land loss, incarceration, addiction, and uneven development, revealing how systemic injustice perpetuates these cycles. joe’s framing of addiction aligns with prior research linking land dispossession to heroin addiction (e.g., garcia 2010; m. trujillo 2010). however, his insights also reveal a gap in the literature, which often overlooks the role of political engagement in addressing these issues. such politically grounded efforts—aimed at challenging carceral and colonial structures—shift the focus of medical anthropology from social suffering (kleinman et al. 1997) to the world-making capacity of infrastructure. building on the foundational work of angela garcia (2010, 2014, 2016a, 2016b), which emphasizes the intertwined nature of land, loss, and love, this research seeks to extend this important scholarship by exploring the multiplicities of pain and love in contexts of colonial loss. it examines how these complex phenomenological experiences, coupled with material struggles, serve as powerful vehicles for political engagement. in addition to these theoretical frameworks, geographic factors also play a significant role in shaping these efforts. one key aspect is the geographic divide between the south valley and other parts of albuquerque, which has shaped how the region and its residents are viewed and treated—particularly in relation to drugs. in my interviews with family and fellow activists who organized alongside joe, people often talked about prejudice and fear tied to geographic markers. in those accounts the south valley was perceived as a site of danger shaped by stereotypes and unfamiliarity. for some, the rio grande, physically separating the south valley from albuquerque, emerged as both a literal and symbolic boundary. for example, joe’s daughter evelyn recounts, “people were afraid to cross the river and come into the south valley.” the river, in this narrative, transcends its physicality to serve as a metaphor for division and fear. evelyn’s reflection—“at one point, i thought, yeah, i kind of like that people are afraid to come over here, you know?”—reveals the complexity of isolation and preservation.8 while the river symbolized marginalization and exclusion, it also offered a protective shield against external judgment and intrusion. this hybridity captures how geographic markers can both oppress and manifest as structures that protect communities navigating imposed marginality and carceralization (gomez 2000). this divide was further entrenched by patterns of policing, which disproportionately criminalized the south valley. despite the presence of drug use in both the south valley and the northeast heights, punitive policing and heightened surveillance were concentrated in the former, further intrenching inequalities and justifying the racialized “law and order” governance of the great society era (alyosha goldstein 2012; polanco 1971). other accounts reflect how some community members reclaimed these fractured spaces in the south valley, which signals how landscapes entangled with ways communities organize, resist, and redefine their relationships to both space and systemic forces. for instance, quebrar’s initiative of the “poor people’s park” addressed youth “idleness” by transforming land into recreational spaces, aimed at offering alternatives to drug activity (leahigh 1969). as volunteers and others cleared tree stumps and prepared the land for a baseball field, their efforts symbolized more than tangible redevelopment—they embodied a collective commitment to resist the flow of drugs and foster community through cooperation and leisure. while the october 1969 albuquerque journal article about the park inaccurately and problematically framed “drugs” as the sole culprit behind youth “idleness” (leahigh 1969), much of quebrar’s activism extended beyond neighborhood restoration to the streets in direct action protests. activists took to the streets to demand accountability for the treatment of chicanos, challenging the use of drugs and crime as justifications for excessive force, entrapment, and incarceration. just as the south valley’s geographic markers shaped its challenges and resistance strategies, the land’s organic and constructed elements became sources of possibility and reimagination. in the next section, i will show how this reimagination materialized into an adaptive reuse of a decommissioned radar site as a residential treatment center—a grounded resistance, rooted in both the land and the reimagined radar site, challenging the systems of oppression that have historically shaped their lives.   aerial surveillances | grounded resistances during the cold war, new mexico emerged as a strategic hub for us defense initiatives, hosting key facilities such as research centers for nuclear weapons development and military bases central to nuclear strategy and deployment. these installations were not merely sites of technological innovation but also exemplified the federal seizure of land, perpetuating what scholars have termed the “nuclear colonial” period of new mexico (gómez 2022; masco 2006). the early-warning radar site, established by the us government to enhance national security through air defense and missile detection, became yet another instance of this broader pattern. initially, mt. vulcan—part of the atrisco land grant—was identified for the radar installation. however, when the private landowner refused to sell at the offered price, the air force redirected its plans to a site twenty-two miles west of albuquerque on the west mesa, also within the atrisco land grant. in 1955 the federal government invoked eminent domain to seize this land, offering only six hundred dollars as “just compensation” (the albuquerque tribune 1955). this controversial act of condemnation underscored the logic of american exceptionalism, where national security and technological progress were prioritized at the expense of local sovereignty and communal rights. the land was repurposed to construct a radar site that included housing facilities and an oxidation pond. as the cold war waned in the late 1960s, the perceived need for a robust military infrastructure diminished. the radar site, once a bustling hub of areal defense, became obsolete. in 1968 the air force deactivated the station and a year later the federal government declared the site surplus property and transferred it to be auctioned off. in a fractured post–cold war landscape, jurisdiction over the radar systems transitioned to the federal aviation administration, while portions of the land were transferred to the office of economic opportunity. this transfer to office of economic opportunity reflected the great society governance era’s broader ambition to address systemic poverty. with the radar station’s deactivation, the site fell into neglect. the extensive decay, from frayed electrical systems to corroded plumbing and structural disintegration posed monumental challenge, requiring significant resources and labor. in august 1970 quebrar would acquire the site and 54 buildings, including 27 residential units, and 38.8 acres of land from the office of economic opportunity (swanson 1970). this endeavor was far from straightforward. rehabilitation required not only substantial financial investment but also the navigation of complex administrative and legal hurdles. to address these challenges, quebrar leaned into collective action, community support, and shared resources. within this mutual-aid-based political economy, a volunteer lawyer helped navigate legal complexities, while grassroots fundraising efforts, including taco sales, became a cornerstone of local contributions. in my interview with joaquin, he recalls the early efforts to transform the site: “we went up there to help the various folks who were in the program, living and meeting there. it was pretty rough. we went out and helped do the yards. it isolated them from the street. it became moment to try to heal.”9 while grassroots efforts formed the backbone of the project, federal initiatives such as the war on poverty’s model cities program provided $120,000 in funding. this partnership between government resources was further exemplified by a petition with over 2,000 signatures. at first glance, the stakes may seem to align primarily with a dynamic and participatory vision of democracy. however, a closer examination reveals complexities that warrant deeper consideration. many of quebrar’s clientele were convicted felons who had lost their voting rights, effectively excluding them from formal democratic participation. this raises critical questions about political agency beyond conventional systems. while the petition reflects widespread community endorsement, it also underscores gaps in democratic representation. despite these exclusions, disenfranchised individuals asserted their voices through everyday practices of protest, mutual aid, and neighborhood rehabilitation. these efforts culminated in the establishment of an institution like quebrar, where they could stake claims in uses of a radar site through alternative pathways. this transformation represents a profound assertion of collective agency, reframing democracy not solely as formal participation but as grounded, lived practices that actively challenge and resist systemic oppression. in parallel, this challenges the stability of human rights frameworks, especially in relation to drug policy reform. while shifts in understanding and application have emerged, the broader concern persists that human rights, as traditionally conceptualized, may serve as an unstable and at times counterproductive foundation for reform (seear and mulcahy 2024) as they fail to fully capture or support the lived, collective resistance embodied by movements like quebrar. the acquisition of the radar site was framed as a pivotal moment in addressing the interconnected challenges of poverty and crime in new mexico. in their petition, quebrar emphasized its unparalleled potential, stating, “there is no other use either present or contemplated which can serve the needs of albuquerque as can the quebrar program.” they further described the site as a “strong weapon” in the “war against poverty and crime” (“petition” 1970). in this way, the radar site symbolized more than just a physical space; it embodied a collective imaginary of rehabilitation. methadone, central to quebrar’s treatment model and inextricably linked to the drug policies of the time, became a tangible embodiment of a broader moral and political vision for how rehabilitation should matter to albuquerque. for administrators grappling with rising crime and persistent poverty, the site’s acquisition was framed not merely as a response to heroin use but as a means to address the perceived correlates of addiction— poverty and crime. these were understood, at the time, as both causes and consequences of addiction, reinforcing a narrative that tied individual rehabilitation to broader social reform—a reform anchored in tightly regulated methadone doses and the management of streets within carefully controlled environments. quebrar strategically mobilized this rehabilitation imaginary, translating it into a compelling narrative to gain support from skeptical politicians. this covert strategy was undeniably brilliant, leveraging methadone’s legitimacy as a federally sanctioned treatment to secure political and institutional support. by aligning their program with mainstream drug policies, quebrar gained access to critical resources and recognition that might otherwise have been unattainable. evelyn, joe’s daughter, recalled how the political urgency surrounding heroin addiction, especially among politicians' own families, spurred the creation of rehabilitation programs, and how joe strategically leveraged the opportunity to secure funding for quebrar initiative at the former radar site turned treatment center, using “rehabilitation” as a boundary object to gain political support (roberts 2012). indeed, this was not merely a concession to dominant narratives; rather, it was a calculated move that allowed them to “hack” the system and reorient the program toward an alternative vision rooted in recovering the chicano addict and also the world around them. for quebrar, reform was never an individual pursuit but a collective endeavor to “make well the society.” this worldview is encapsulated in an evaluation report quoting joe: “we can’t take and throw a person into a brand-new beautiful box (mental health center) and keep him there for treatment and then throw him back into the garbage can. we are trying to rehabilitate him to our society, and i don’t think our society is all that great right now...i think that our society is sick, and i think that the addict is a symptom of that sickness. we have to make well the society while we are making well the addict” (polanco 1971, 53). joe critiques the narrow focus on individual, alienating pathology, emphasizing the need for a more grounded approach that addresses the underlying causes of addiction embedded in social structures—factors dismissed as the “garbage can” of colonialism. rather than placing the burden solely on the individual, joe deflects the focus to the “sick society” itself, highlighting how societal and political conditions play a pivotal role in perpetuating addiction and the need for transformative recoveries for both the addict and the world around them. in the same report, the evaluator dismisses quebrar’s “constant references” to the “fight” to secure the west mesa radar site, stating that it “serves no purpose.” the critique extended further, as the evaluator opined that those designing the program were “too chicano” to administer it effectively without external consultation. the evaluator criticizes their unwillingness to publicly credit the “establishment” for its role in the site’s acquisition, framing their refusal to conform as too radical (polanco 1971, 53). this evaluative commentary underscored the tension between quebrar’s grassroots, politically grounded approach and the institutional frameworks seeking to regulate and professionalize their efforts. it also reflected broader racial and cultural biases, undermining the legitimacy of chicano-led initiatives by positioning them as insufficiently professional or overly insular, even as they navigated systemic barriers to realize their transformative vision. the evaluator’s dismissal of quebrar’s “constant reference” to the “fight” for the radar site reveals the core values of joe and quebrar—fighting not just for treatment but for land and sovereignty. this struggle aligns with decolonizing frameworks, like those of activist lorena cabnal (2020), that emphasize that embodied experiences and the environments we occupy play a crucial role in resisting systemic oppression, highlighting how our physical and social contexts shape both our understanding of harm and our responses to it (rodriguez castro 2021). these frameworks challenge western models of pathology by delinking from individualizing, medicalized frameworks of suffering. instead, they focus on collective harm rooted in sociopolitical contexts, emphasizing that healing both body and earth happens in reciprocity—emancipation and self-determination for both bodies and land must be achieved together. by integrating local knowledge, these perspectives offer a holistic approach to healing that connects identity, land, and body, and in the case of quebrar advocating for reclamation and sovereignty of the radar site and its surrounding land are essential components of recoveries (chaparro-buitrago 2022, 2024). this approach shifts the focus to the land-body dynamics of the south valley and the us-mexico borderlands—historically shaped by colonialism. by connecting addiction to colonial legacies, quebrar mirrors indigenous feminist thought, advocating for a more expansive form of accountability that encompasses personal healing, land reclamation, and institutional justice. in the section below, i demonstrate how political action led to the intersection of bottom-up abolitionist recovery praxis with the top-down imposition of correctionally-mediated methadone. the friction between these two approaches acted as a spark, igniting a transformative fire—where tensions and contradictions fueled new possibilities for reimagining both recovery and justice.   police entrapments | methadone emancipations it’s worth taking a pause here to reflect on how we come to know the topics we study, and why they ultimately matter to us. in the isolation of the pandemic—a shared yet deeply personal alienation from the world—i unexpectedly discovered a story that was intricately intertwined with my own. this journey began with my father, a man whose struggles had always been a part of my life but whose complexities remained veiled by silence and unanswered questions. as i sifted through fragments of his past—old photographs, faded letters, and scattered memories—i made an almost impulsive decision to search for his name on google. amid the growing digitization and democratization of knowledge, something remarkable surfaced: a 1969 news clipping that illuminated a part of his life i had never fully understood. the clipping spoke of quebrar, not merely as a historical entity, but as a dynamic force that had intersected with my father’s journey. it described an episode linked to quebrar’s work, which was now inextricably woven into the fabric of my father’s story. this discovery was more than just a historical revelation—it bridged the personal and the political, revealing the ways in which individual lives and collective struggles are deeply connected. my father, clotario, the central figure in this narrative, had been ensnared in a moment of police entrapment—a calculated act that preyed on his vulnerabilities, emblematic of the broader criminalization faced by those like him (chicano, tecato, poor). while it detailed his arrest, conviction, and sentencing, it also highlighted how he, like many in the south valley, was caught in the crosshairs of a system that perpetuates racialized harm against those it seeks to contain. the story read like a theater of justice—a stage where the systemic injustices faced by chicano communities were named, challenged, and resisted, all exercised through the real-life experience of my father. in that moment, in the courtroom, quebrar mobilized, joined by a diverse coalition of allies—including legal experts, activists, and community members. the image still lingers with me. this moment revealed the intersection between personal experience and collective struggle, deepening my sense of connection to both my father and the wider movement that stood in solidarity with him. the story goes like this: on the early morning of january 10, 1969, as the city of albuquerque lay silent, a storm of flashing lights and sirens shattered the calm in the south valley. around 140 local and state police officers descended upon the predominantly chicano community in a meticulously planned narcotics raid. over two weeks of undercover surveillance had led to this moment—a show of force that resulted in the arrests of twenty-eight men, most of them young and chicano, on alleged charges of illicit drug distribution. the local press lauded it as the “biggest single raid in the metropolitan area,” but beneath the headlines lay a story of systemic racial injustice (brumbelow 1969). clotario, a twenty-six-year-old vietnam veteran, was among those caught in the web. months earlier, an informant named marvin, an ex-heroin addict hired by the chief of police, had approached him outside the south valley’s music box bar.10 desperate to sustain his own habit, clotario had sold marvin a single cap of heroin for five dollars. what he didn’t know was that marvin had turned over his identity to the police, setting the stage for his eventual arrest. prosecutors painted the defendants as dangerous elements within the community, while their public defender argued for a change of venue, citing the prejudicial media coverage that had already condemned his clients in the court of public opinion. for clotario and the others, the trial’s outcome was bleak. despite compelling evidence of entrapment and racial bias, two defendants, including clotario, were convicted of unlawful sale of narcotics and sentenced to prison. but there was a twist. under the narcotic addict rehabilitation act (nara) passed only a few years prior, they became eligible for early release on the condition that they undergo detoxification and evaluation at a federal narcotics hospital, followed by participation in a long-term community-led treatment program. this provision seemed to offer a lifeline. yet the reality was more complex. the system presented rehabilitation as a privilege contingent on criminal prosecution, entangling care with punishment. judges such as edwin mechem expressed skepticism, wondering aloud whether defendants sought treatment merely as an “easy way out.” despite his doubts, mechem suspended clotario’s sentence, offering him the chance at rehabilitation. “i hope you’ll take advantage of this,” the judge told him. “yes, sir, i will,” clotario replied, though the weight of the system loomed over his words (herron 1969). the civil commitment hearings and efforts to bring narcotic addicts into treatment in albuquerque serves as a clear example of how nara programs functioned. however, what set this case apart was its intersection with the work of quebrar. nevertheless, nara’s contributions are often overshadowed by the deleterious effects of the war on drugs in drug policy literature. the fleeting existence of nara programs brings into focus the struggle between the progressive provisions enacted under lyndon b. johnson’s great society and their subsequent dismantling during richard nixon’s war on drugs (besteman 1992). however, within its brief window of opportunity, a political opening emerged through which quebrar implemented its praxis, transforming a top-down policy into a localized, grounded approach that was shaped by grounded histories and realities of the community. a deeper understanding of the significance of this moment necessitates an examination of key themes that emerge from the nara program and its intersection with quebrar’s approach. the nara program marked a pivotal shift in us drug policy, reframing addiction as a medical issue rather than criminal behavior, aligning with broader movements in public health and criminal justice reform. it also emphasized community-based solutions, relocating care from institutional settings to local environments (besteman 1992). central to this framework was methadone, envisioned as a stabilizing force to reduce cravings and facilitate individuals’ reintegration into their communities (courtwright 1997; courtwright et al. 2013; avram goldstein 1972). however, the subsequent escalation of nixon’s drug war in the 1970s undermined these efforts by narrowing the possibility for program sustainability. for quebrar, the aggressive shift toward punitive measures may have constrained quebrar’s ability to sustain support in new mexico. however, the struggle for justice continued in other ways, as the movement’s infrastructure adapted and persisted, finding new avenues to resist systemic oppression and advocate for broader social change, even in the face of a hostile, carceral landscape. the methadone program overall faced criticism, particularly in black neighborhoods, where it was seen as a state tool for pacification and control (bourgois 2000; hansen and roberts 2012; meng 2021; roberts 2012). critics argued it replaced heroin dependency with methadone, perpetuating systemic control rather than addressing addiction’s root causes. meanwhile, solidarity between the young lords and the black panther party in new york linked heroin responses to critiques of capitalism and oppression (porzig 2013). contemporary movements advocate for freeing methadone and other treatments from criminalization, emphasizing recovery without justice system involvement (national coalition to liberate methadone, n.d.). sts scholars have examined the ontologies of methadone, framing it within broader research highlighting how evidence construction is shaped by specific contexts, emphasizing its situated nature (rhodes 2009; rhodes and lancaster 2019). methadone embodies multiplicities, acting as a therapeutic intervention, regulatory tool (fraser and valentine 2008; rhodes 2018), boundary objects (roberts 2012), and, like other substances, a source of pleasure (campbell 2023; dennis et al. 2023). quebrar’s approach challenges the neutrality of methadone, in this sense, illustrating how recoveries are deeply political and culturally embedded in place, reflecting the histories, struggles, and aspirations of the communities they serve.   ruptures | reclamations the term quebrar, meaning “to break” or “to shatter,” symbolized a deliberate rupture from both systemic oppression and internalized colonial shame. quebrar was born from this space of fracture—homegrown meetings where individuals could come together and speak openly about addiction, breaking free from the institutional frameworks that pathologized, criminalized, or attempted to assimilate them. several of my interviewees shared stories of forced assimilation. struggles over language and names sparked a “shared consciousness,” uniting them in their collective resistance to systemic erasure and cultural repression. these fractures reverberate across generations, including my own, though they manifest differently after forty years of assimilation between us. speaking partially in pocho spanish to my grandmother, who resisted assimilation at the cost of her education, and entirely in english to my father, i felt alienated from both. this void raises questions: is there a shared dialect of loss? can our shared humanity transcend language, especially when linguistic acquisition is entangled with the bruises of an educational system that strikes instead of nurtures? these internal ruptures reflect the enduring impact of colonial ideologies, perpetuating subjugation and self-alienation. the point i am trying to land on is the value of institutions being self-determined, as quebrar exemplified in its efforts. by repurposing spaces like the decommissioned radar station and its embedded methadone program, quebrar asserted the power of local, community-driven approaches, challenging external systems that sought to define and control how their healing processes were defined and executed and where. this self-determined approach not only subverted oppressive forces but also emphasized the importance of creating institutions that are rooted in the needs, values, and knowledge of the people they serve, rather than those imposed by disembodied knowledge structures and practices from anywhere. in closing, i return to the questions posed in the introduction regarding the kinds of institutions we need to establish in order to facilitate the emergence of knowledge that is shaped by our lived experiences and the ways in which they inform the process of knowledge production. the questions i continually find myself grappling with are, what does it mean to witness a movement like quebrar? how do we navigate the emotional complexity of witnessing deliberate repression, especially when it affects someone personally significant to us? engaging with this movement means confronting the tension between the known and its knower, between being a detached researcher and being drawn into the transformative work that it represents. quebrar is not just a movement in the conventional sense; it is a living, evolving response to deeply entrenched social injustices. witnessing it requires more than simply acknowledging its goals—it demands grappling with the emotional and intellectual weight of the struggles it addresses within the historical and geographical context of new mexico. central to this engagement is the shift in focus from the movement itself to the researcher’s position within it. how do one’s lived experiences, shaped by communal relationships to land, treaties, and its people, inform and influence their understanding of the movement’s significance? these questions are central to my research and are situated within broader decolonial and black feminist discussions of epistemic-corporeal practices of research, as they anchor inquiry in the deeply personal and emotional dimensions of knowledge production (ruiz-trejo and garcía-dauder 2019). research becomes not only an intellectual pursuit but also a living process, where the researcher’s own histories and experiences unfold into the questions asked and the answers sought. in this regard, quebrar challenges us to engage with its complexity, recognizing that it is both a transformative process for drug-using communities in new mexico and a reflection of our roles within broader knowledge systems of power. it compels us to examine truth claims regarding drug recovery efforts and their intersections with colonial histories (spanish, mexican, us, and nuclear) and the borders they impose, treaty rights (e.g., atrisco land grant and the radar site), ecological harms (such as sanitation and water resource struggles), and violence against chicanos (including police entrapment and drug criminalization). this movement calls us to confront these interwoven logics, making visible ethical, political, and ecological claims, and highlighting their significance within anticolonial imaginaries for drug recovery. acknowledments i would like to extend my deepest gratitude to the individuals who graciously shared their time, experiences, and wisdom with me during the course of this project. their voices are the heart of this work. i am especially thankful to the border laboratory for the feedback on earlier versions. i am also immensely grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback, which significantly enhanced the quality of this work. special thanks to maya vijayaraghavan and kelly knight for their guidance and encouragement. finally, i would like to acknowledge the panel at the 2024 quadrennial joint meeting of the european association for the study of science and technology (easst) and the society for social studies of science (4s) for their stimulating discussions and constructive critiques. your contributions have all played a crucial role in shaping this paper. note 1 evelyn fernandez, interview with author, albuquerque, september 28, 2022. 2 see also pages 11–12 in mexican americans and the administration of justice in the southwest for specific example complaints of albuquerque police and community relations (united states commission on civil rights 1970). 3 around the time quebrar was organizing, former prisoners helped address drug addiction by establishing detox programs on the east coast. the young lords party and black panthers were also active in the south bronx, providing food, clothing, and 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press. united states commission on civil rights. 1970. mexican americans and the administration of justice in the southwest. us government printing office. veregge, nina. 1993. “transformations of spanish urban landscapes in the american southwest, 1821–1900.” journal of the southwest 35 (4): 371–459. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40169897.     author bio dan kabella (they/he) is a scholar and activist from new mexico, currently working as an opioid industry documents archive (oida) postdoctoral fellow at the university of california, san francisco. dan kabella (él/ellx) es un académicx y activistx de nuevo méxico. actualmente es becarix postdoctoral del opioid industry documents archive en la universidad de california, san francisco.     special section introduction domestication of war     diana pardo pedraza george washington university diana_pardo@gwu.edu   xan chacko brown university xan_chacko@brown.edu   jennifer terry university of california irvine jterry@uci.edu   astrida neimanis university of british columbia astrida.neimanis@ubc.ca     abstract this special section broadens and qualifies the terms through which the relationship between home and militarization has been understood. we do this by joining a vibrant and growing field of transdisciplinary scholars who address the militarization of everyday life by attending to domesticity and practices of domestication. we grapple with how the home naturalizes and becomes a catalyst for militarism: how do ordinary and domestic objects, technologies, spaces, and infrastructures make violence feel at home in the world? we are concerned with the domestic life of militarization as oikos: the household, habitat, and milieu of violent material relationships that are both ongoing and latent. the domestic is not just a discrete, private space; it also extends into public spaces like neighborhoods, local businesses, waste disposal infrastructures, hospices, and crop fields. developed within an editorial process rooted in a feminist ethos, the articles collected here provide critical and alternative methodologies and disciplinary forms for considering militarism's aesthetics, affects, and modes of appearance. this collection resists conventional spatialities, temporalities, and incarnations of war while calling attention to the obscuring of violence through practices of care and marketing operations.     keywords war; domestication; home; everyday militarism; feminist politics; militarization, affect     since we envisioned this special section and launched the call for papers three years ago (in 2020), there has been an abrasive cascade of global events related in various ways to war, militarization, and deliberate violence. these include the russian invasion of ukraine in february 2022 and the ukrainian counteroffensive with the military aid of the united states and the european union; the recently passed us pact act that provides medical care to post-9/11 veterans suffering from conditions likely caused by toxic airborne exposures and hazards; the latest air strikes by the israeli armed forces on the gaza strip amid us president joe biden’s visit to the middle east in the summer of 2022; the school shooting in uvalde, texas, in may 2022 that left nineteen children and two adults dead and seventeen injured; the us withdrawal from afghanistan after twenty years of occupation and the rapid collapse of the afghan government and forces at the hands of the taliban in august 2021; the novel covid-19 virus that naturalized and reinforced militarized border-crossing infrastructures and regimes of biological surveillance; the hindu nationalist modi government’s brutal crackdown on farmers who were mobilizing against laws deregulating the agricultural industry in 2021; the attack on the us capitol and the attempted insurrection by a mob of trump supporters and far-right groups on january 6, 2021. other war-related situations, but of a more ordinary and less sensational nature, have accompanied these spectacular and dramatic events that have made the news, even if tangentially and as side notes: youtube videos of ukrainian grandmothers learning how to make improvised explosives from their kitchens; a record number of afghans and iraqis living with physical disabilities and more than two million widows struggling to survive amid war-polluted landscapes and a devastated economy; community vigils and healing spaces organized across the world to honor those who were killed in gaza and stand in solidarity with the palestinian people; testimonies from politicians, pundits, and laypeople suggesting training and arming public school teachers on campus and relaxing gun control laws and restrictions; academic research reporting that the us has invested more than $2.1 trillion in military contractors since 2021 in afghanistan compared to $36 billion in development aid; the increase in cases of domestic violence and housing insecurity amid covid-related “stay-at-home” orders, forced confinement, and strict social distancing; stories of farmers and farm workers committing suicide due to debts, financial hardship, and lack of alternative income; investigations pointing to the involvement of off-duty police officers in the storming of the us capitol building. as we sat down to write this introductory essay, we tried to keep up with this deluge of extra/ordinary events and take stock of all the ways war is continually brought home to us, every day and in many forms. we felt discombobulated and overwhelmed. these bodily responses and sensations were a reminder of war’s sensorial creep, the way it keeps inflaming any sense of spatial or temporal comfort. how are we to find home in these conditions, as subjects of war but as feminist scholars, too? we found refuge in remembering the place where this editorial project emerged and the intellectual and political commitments that have informed it since its inception. it is not creative license to say that “domestication of war” was conceived around kitchen tables, where we gathered to socialize over food, drinks, and laughter after two stimulating multiday workshops on the theme of “everyday militarisms” organized at the university of california, davis in 2018 and the university of sydney in 2019. these transnational workshops brought together scholars (across disciplinary boundaries and academic stages), artists, and activists to ruminate on the often-unexamined ways in which militarized logics and legacies of violence are embedded in everyday life. it was in the spaces facilitated by these transnational encounters that several scholarly projects came to be, including an edited special issue, “everyday militarisms: hidden in plain sight/site” (kaplan, kirk, and tess 2020), two conference panels on everyday militarisms (american studies association in honolulu 2019 and the cultural studies association of australia in brisbane 2019), and an article discussing walking as a method to deconstruct militarized landscapes (kirk and moeller 2020). this special section adds to these contributions by concentrating on domesticity and practices of domestication. drawing upon fundamental feminist insights about the all-pervading, lingering, and intense impacts of warfare on bodies, landscapes, and ecological relations, our collective work seeks to extend and qualify the terms through which the relation between home and militarization has been studied and understood.1 in addition to examining the militarization of ordinary, domestic, and intimate spaces and the ways in which war permeates imaginaries of “normal” life, we grapple with how the home naturalizes and becomes a catalyst for militarism. we are interested in thinking about how ordinary and domestic objects, technologies, spaces, infrastructures, and practices make violence feel at home in the world and, in doing so, reveal that war and military logics are ubiquitous. we are concerned with the domestic life of militarization as oikos: the household, habitat, and milieu of violent material relationships that are both ongoing and latent. here, home is not simply a discrete, private space but also extends into public spaces of everyday life like neighborhoods, local businesses, waste disposal infrastructures, hospices, and crop fields.   attuning to, exploring, and assembling domestication of war if the original theoretical impetus of this project is salient, so are the conditions of production of the articles that comprise it. while the articles were solicited through a standard open call for papers, as guest editors, we also sought to embed feminist politics and feelings into their development. after receiving the first article drafts, we convened a series of workshops that provided authors with the opportunity to read and engage with each other’s work, not only through written comments but through conversation and google jamboard–enabled affect (sticky notes, images, scribbles) and zoom-enabled happy events (such as unexpected visits from pets strolling around on screen). conceived as a space to cultivate community across fields and specializations, these workshops allowed us to notice resonances between articles and to encourage cross-pollination among the pieces. it also helped us and the authors to identify and highlight the uniqueness of each essay’s contribution to the conversation about domesticity and the domestication of war. attentive to the pressures that feminist scholars bear under conditions of a global pandemic, as well as the ableist, racialized, and gendered structures of academic work that long prefigured covid-19, these workshops, and the whole editorial process, also sought to intervene in the status quo of academic labors and feelings through mobilization of feminist joy, care, pleasure, tender critique, and critical collaboration. war requires feminist interventions not only in terms of how we understand what it is or where and when it manifests but also in relation to the practices, methodologies, and disciplinary forms we bring to its study. rather than relying on official state records and dominant historical accounts, many of the essays collected here turn to personally implicated ethnography (duong; hodžić; ihar; wool) and sociological critique (richardson and schnepf; velasquez-potts) alongside approaches less common to the study of war, such as arts-based methods (kelley; kim), visual cultural studies (kaplan), and ficto-criticism (zárate). inviting us into the sensorium of war, these papers thus ask after militarism’s aesthetics, affects, and modes of appearance in everyday life. through the articles we discover that war can be made neat, slick, and stylish (cohler; sutton; richardson and schnepf) to appeal to a tidy, fashion-conscious middle-class consumer (who is also always raced and gendered), and that, like other cultural phenomena, war can be complicit in projects of gentrification (ihar) and consumerism (davis). the papers remind us that war is a sensory and cultural phenomenon that participates in the distribution of the sensible—as jacques rancière (2004) would say—which acts at the level of bodily feeling and sensation to determine what is see-able, say-able, and feel-able. at the same time a niggling sense of complicity in war’s aesthetic and sensory lures—particularly as these are domesticated in ways that often render them invisible—reverberates through this collection. rather than despairing over this complicity, however, we discover openings for redistributing the sensible and revealing deeper connections to how we metabolize militarism (kelley). methodological attention to affect, embodied knowledges, and sensation, championed within feminist studies, similarly interrupts western epistemological hegemonies and suggests that we can learn something about war through sensory qualities such as mouthfeel (kelley) and slipperiness (davis). the feminist approaches showcased here thus expand the conceptual tools that are usually brought to scholarship on militarization to inquire: how does war feel or taste? resisting the conventional spatialities and temporalities of war, these articles also show that the facile separation of “battlefield” and “civilian space” reveals itself to be a structural mirror of the separation of the public sphere from the private—a longstanding feminist concern. the essays engage with these problematic terms and remain curious about how they are deployed, weaponized, and turned into alibis for proliferating militarisms. just as the place of war is reconfigured, so too is the notion of “the domestic.” in temporal terms, even if we are now in a time of permanent war, this temporality is never straightforward and is always situated. recognizing that domesticities emerge from specific historical and political contexts, contributors to our special section offer empirically and ethically grounded conceptualizations of the material manifestations of militarization in still-active technologies, remnants, residues, and legacies of loss and toxicity. the articles open up the possibility of engaging the intricacies of violent histories that undergird lived experience in this late capitalist but enduringly colonial moment. the time of war is thus replete with repetition, anticipation, relay, and suspension. instead of pure separation of war and not-war—in time and space—our collection seeks to better understand the ironies, strange convivialities, and troubling commensals (those that share a table, perhaps a kitchen table?) that emerge when war is domesticated; war and care, for example, are revealed to be deeply interconnected. a refusal of the politics of purity is also part of many of these papers' political and ethical undertone—namely, finding ways to build and reconfigure different worlds, even when war is at home. in another move to interrupt war’s usual modes of scholarship, we offer a cluster of short essays as a roundtable called “the housewife’s secret arsenal” (henceforth hsa). this is a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. the title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek. it reminds readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking, be it pest control for the backyard (zárate; stack whitney) or washing machines and spray starch for clothing care (grealy and lea; cohler). juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. the banality of these objects acquires a more troubling character as some of them—from bulletproof school backpacks (sutton) to home security drones (richardson and schnepf) to a destroyed window (pandit)—do little to conceal their connection to war and violence, yet somehow, in ways that might baffle, find themselves equally at home in domestic spaces. in allowing these contributions to rub up against one another, we hope the slipperiness (a quality that davis identifies in her short piece on teflon) will give our readers pause for thought. these short pieces are well suited to teaching and seminar discussions. gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives. in what follows, we showcase this special section’s contributions in relation to space, bodies, time, care, and economy. this is just one way in which they might be configured; we hope the readers will both appreciate the efforts of the authors to speak to each other’s work through the collaborative writing and editing processes and make their own connections between the essays and beyond.   reconfiguring domestic space the articles we offer here address how domestic spaces are materially reconfigured and inextricably attached to martial logics and apparatuses. they also explore how households and home life become catalysts for militarism and securitization, showing how the dynamics and practices of war are incorporated, intensified, and extended into the physical folds of intimate sites. the infrastructures that make up these living spaces and the people considered their legitimate inhabitants and visitors—those deemed to have the right to enter and enjoy the shelter and comfort they offer—are shaped by military logics that define and distinguish interiors and exteriors, civilian and military, and domestic and foreign. the policing and maintenance of these distinctions demand management, surveillance, and technologies aimed at fortified security. drawing attention to the built environments of habitation and the sensations of (dis)comfort, (dis)placement, and (in)security through which distinctions around war and its violence are maintained and naturalized, these articles reveal the intricate material expressions and multiscaled experiences of the domesticity of war. for example, caren kaplan’s critical reading of martha rosler’s wartime photomontages engages with the deliberate visual collision of battlefields and the domestic realm. rosler’s work, kaplan argues, seeks to destabilize fictitious spatial distinctions between the here and elsewhere of political violence. kaplan contends that by bringing wartime images into structures and appliances of the idealized white american household of the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, rosler’s art reveals the entanglements between us gendered politics of domesticity and the violence of colonial and imperial geopolitics. indeed, as zsuzsanna ihar demonstrates in her analysis of three cases of housing arrangement in urban azerbaijan, the qualities and values of war seep into the material structures of households amidst and in the aftermath of armed conflict. touted as forms of state welfare and care, housing projects for disabled veterans, military families, and active service members are profoundly influenced by nationalist technologies of governance that intensify the militarization of everyday life while occluding soldiers’ physical and mental injuries. at the same time, the makeshift homes of internally displaced people underscore homebuilding as a mode of resistance to these logics as well. lindsay kelley’s essay on anzac biscuits alternatively shows how an investment in feminized domesticity, materialized in the baking and shipping of biscuits to soldiers overseas, can also be turned on its head as feminist antiwar protest. these protests, which were meant to bring attention to the forever war of gender-based violence at home, demonstrate that while war is always gendered and domesticity is also implicated, the same ingredients might exist in “snapped” contexts that change the role of women, and the home, in relation to the war machine. displacing neat boundaries of the domestic and commercial, the photo essay by joshua kim resulted from the author’s somewhat chance encounter with the largest pit mine in germany. the mine, as the site of massively extractive capitalist plunder that fueled war, is now the unremarked backdrop for children’s play, intergenerational family picnics, and leisurely strolling. war, and its toxicity and debris, haunt the space. amnesia enables leisure, but at a great cost. at the same time, the suggestive rather than declarative medium of this essay admits that a wound might also be the site of ongoingness. through an evocative engagement with a broken window, niharika pandit’s entry in the hsa on the everyday occupation in the kashmir valley also addresses the unstable experiences and geographies of home, illustrating how the house is not an inherent space of safety, as well as how it is inflected by the spectacular and ordinary unfolding of militarization. in turn, salvador zárate’s personal, interpellating, and rich analysis of the chemical exposures of latinx gardeners in the suburban landscape of southern california draws attention to the militarized spatial logics of the us-mexico border and the regimes of gendered labor and toxicity that maintain the lasting fiction of white american domesticity. the boundaries that the domestic space evokes and embodies are not only national, as richardson and schnepf’s critical engagement with the promotional video for the ring always home camera poignantly illustrates. designed to go unnoticed within the contemporary home, the ring drone encapsulates the american suburban home’s racial, gender, and class anxieties that fuel and extend demands for the “militarized securitization of domestic perimeters, interiors, and atmospheres.”   bodies in time while these articles critically address the conventional space and material politics of warfare, they also examine the enduring forms of war and its pernicious aftermaths. in times of “permanent war” (lutz 2009), the beginning and end of such conditions are blurred, if not utterly indecipherable and violent. attending to specific historical, geographical, and political contexts and building on diverse conceptual frameworks to make sense of such temporal intricacy, these essays explore how war and its remnants waste and weaken lives for decades and generations and across organisms and ecosystems. toxic and explosive military legacies are often experienced as daily and continuous conditions of violence rather than as a series of extraordinary events punctuating social realities. these conditions are evocatively captured by pandit’s description of the constant loops of violence and repair of a house window in occupied kashmir. saida hodžić’s article on konjic, a post-industrial city in bosnia, illustrates how “toxic gifts” of a socialist-era munitions factory persist over time and continue to structure everyday life years after the war. in an increasingly precarious economy and changing global military market, the factory allows people to stay in their town while exposing them and their surroundings to longstanding hazardous waste. as authors grapple with nuanced desires and aspirations and relationships of complicity and responsibility, they also strive to illustrate how war’s explosive and chemical infrastructures do not simply injure or negate life but are also invested in reproducing, physically and metaphorically, life forms and social orders in the future. anchored in feminist politics, several of our authors show us that such circumstances can also push us to imagine and gestate new ones. for us, living in already and forever realities altered by militarism and militarization opens up a critical question: is it possible to inherit war and its remains differently? to craft peaceful ways of being in the world? to transform swords into ploughshares? several articles in this collection also enhance the growing scholarly attention to the bodily entanglement between disability and war (see cohen 2012; wool 2015; aciksoz 2019; pinto-garcía 2019). they point out the irony that bodily injury created by war, once codified as disability, is seen to benefit from the advances in biomedical, infrastructural, and institutional resources in turn funded by the military in the name of rehabilitation, restitution, and redress. caring for bodies needs to account for the diverging ways they are hurt by war. studying aging detainees at guantanamo bay, michelle velasquez-potts asks, “what does it mean to think hospice care in a torture facility?” hospice and torture may seem like unlikely bedfellows, but the examples discussed by several of our contributors purposefully bring together jarring embodied juxtapositions between the maintenance of life and the ever-present threats to it. these juxtapositions are not an unintended consequence of war but a necessary attribute of its domestication. deborah cohler and barbara sutton write of sartorial technological innovations that extend the militarized reach over the body. cohler notes how the training of military personnel to produce a perfectly ironed seam—as guaranteed by aerosolized household starch—represents “safety, success, order, discipline, and technology,” and for sutton, investments in bulletproof clothing are marketed as necessary—but also aestheticized and stylized—protections for children in an increasingly violent world. extending feminist engagements with environmental toxicity, several authors attend to how bodies—human and more-than-human—are brought into relation with war-tainted environments and landscapes (see alaimo 2010; chen 2011; murphy 2017; liboiron 2021). hodžić proposes “furtive critique” as a helpful concept through which the suspicions of enduring toxicity from a weapons factory are mediated in a bosnian village. for natalie duong and zoë wool, the chemical aftermaths of war linger and persist in the bodies and landscapes of refugees and veterans of war, respectively. in duong’s case, the toxin agent orange was always at home in eglin air force base, florida, where it was developed and tested. duong traces how agent orange continued to haunt the experience of the vietnamese refugees (escaping that very toxin) who, on arrival in the united states, were provided temporary accommodations in close proximity to the same contaminated base where agent orange originated. wool traces how the lungs of us veterans of the post-9/11 wars in iraq and afghanistan carried the toxicity of open-air waste burning pits back home. in these cases, appeals to care and recognition of harm are refused by the state, as to acknowledge the transit of war harms from “out there” to “back home” would force recognition of war as suicidal. the war machine can only endure because of the state’s willingness to harm some bodies and not others in the name of peace and order—a logic that is reinforced as war makes itself at home. kaitlin stack whitney and salvador zárate lead with ladybugs and business cards, respectively, but at the heart of their papers are poignant questions about whose bodies we are willing to toxify, harm, and kill in the name of maintaining domestic order.   care imperial militaries, especially in modern times, deploy the pretense of care and beneficence in their efforts to legitimate their violent incursions. this is to say that wars waged in the name of care are a hallmark of twenty-first-century superpowers. looking at the multiple dimensions of domesticated war and the culturally saturating processes of militarization reveals the paradox of deliberate violence deeply entangled with deliberate modes of biopolitical interventions rationalized as benevolent advancements. we see, in other words, an ongoing modality in which total war societies (park 1941)—societies whose primary institutions (law, markets, education, healthcare, transportation, food provision, etc.) are geared mainly toward preparedness for war—carry out violence against bodies, territories, seas, and infrastructures through a logic of destroy-and-build, claiming biomedical salvationism as that which justifies the use of force (terry 2017). war is hell, as the phrase goes, but it allows us to advance our knowledge of how life works. in this salvationist way of thinking, war expands our understanding of how to treat injuries and control diseases, how to build stronger structures and more powerful weaponry, how to repel future enemies, how to enhance human ability, and maybe even achieve eternal life. cycles of destruction, repair, and remediation are characteristic of this moral paradigm. they are also the political and economic interests of disaster capitalism (klein 2007; loewenstein 2015). these essays shed light on practices and pretenses of care as they shape the domestication of war not only at home and in daily life (kaplan; grealy and lea; ihar; kelley; pandit; richardson and schnepf) but also in the treatment of damaged bodies (wool; velasquez-potts) and vulnerable ecosystems (duong; hodžić; stack whitney), and in the production/consumption of tourist sites (kim). but to say that militarization and care are entangled with one another is not to assume that they are one and the same or fundamentally inseparable. indeed, some of these essays analyze alternative modes of care and repair that resist or challenge the deadly cycles of militarization and destruction (grealy and lea; zárate; pandit).   economy war is a money-making operation, and so is militarization. the common language of war profiteering takes specific forms when considered within the domestication of war and the modalities of everyday militarisms. authors in this issue trace the commodification of specific products that were developed in the name of national security and the enhancement of military power but also enlisted as lifestyle improvements—modern conveniences, usually—that domesticate militarization in seemingly benign ways toward putatively happy futures. thus, war is sold to consumers not only as defense but also as life enhancement (terry 2017; enloe 2000). violence is obscured through these marketing practices. this trend accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century and reached warp speed in the context of neoliberal state abandonment of social care in favor of massively expanded arms sales and booming markets full of surveillance technologies. following the homicide/suicide events of september 11, 2001, “homeland security” in the us ascended as a rallying cry for a proliferating array of security technologies, from home surveillance systems (richardson and schnepf) to personal id tracking devices, to clothing claiming to fortify its wearers against imminent terrorist attacks (sutton). well before 9/11, household commodities derived from twentieth-century military research on plastics, chemicals, and other novel substances had already become incorporated into residential households and civilian settings globally in the form of fabric starches (cohler), teflon (davis), pest control (duong; stack whitney; zárate), and bulletproof fashion (sutton). war is domesticated through a cornucopia of consumer products. evidence of the domestication of war also manifests in decayed and abandoned structures, whose contents are strewn around and left to haunt spaces with now-mostly-silent violence. liam grealy and tess lea’s piece on the purgatory of discarded and decrepit washing machines left behind by uninvited settlers/occupiers on land that is not theirs serves as an allegory for how the commodity of the washing machine was central to the militarized disciplining regime imposed upon aboriginal girls and women as part of their forced “domestication.” subjected to militarized logics of cleaning and hygiene, anangu girls and women endured a slow and ongoing war waged on their bodies, lives, and community/lands. but the washing machines are revitalized and made to work again for the community, thanks to the ingenuity of a local activist handyman. similarly, hodžić’s furtive critique of postwar bosnia opens a key line of sight for recognizing how toxicity paradoxically takes the form of a gift in the afterlives of war. like grealy and lea’s abandoned white goods, abandoned factories and hollowed out villages signify violence that is both past and ongoing. once the source of local prosperity, the flourishing arms industry generated revenue for socialist yugoslavia after world war ii and bonded workers as patriots. now, amongst the ruins, militarized industrialization remains a lifeline, allowing people to remain in bosnia “at the same time as it imperils life,” hodžić notes. money, violence, vitality, and survival are entangled in the lives of those living in towns like konjic and working in arms production. monetization of militarism also takes form in domestic architecture, as kaplan’s close reading of the picture window and post–world war ii suburban residential design reveals. the house beautiful aesthetic that made home ownership enticing to proxy beneficiaries of the gi bill (aka “housewives”) is subverted through martha rosler’s disturbing collages that highlight how the cold war middle-class home, though defined as inherently safe and comforting, was built upon white supremacist exclusionary practices and the blood and pillage of small nations in southeast asia attacked in the name of freedom by the expanding and highly armed us empire of the late twentieth century. ihar’s account of the azerbaijan state’s compensating of veterans by housing them reveals the literal ways in which domestic spaces of the home are linked to war memorializations and narratives of patriotic sacrifice through a market economy of real estate. the exorbitant and compounding costs of war and military occupation are tied to markets fueled by private defense contractors. we see this in wool’s account of the devastating effects of military burn pits, where soon-to-be-abandoned equipment and detritus that emits petrochemical toxins literalize the foreverness of war’s deadly capabilities. what is burned up in these dumps cost billions of dollars. the subsequent costs of remediating land and treating debilitated bodies adds an extraordinary financial burden, to say nothing of the moral atrocities that could not possibly be offset even through trillions of dollars in war reparation funds—funds that appear not to be forthcoming. private contractors lurch toward the feeding trough of first world departments of defense and other government agencies, promising that they and they alone can fix “it.”   hope in the dark researching and writing about war can be demoralizing, to say the least, given the unrelenting pain that comes with taking seriously how violence is embedded in and entangled with what we have been calling “the everyday” in spaces marked as “domestic.” our hope is that these essays, alive with their authors’ care and attention, can also provide diverse affirmative ways of thinking about war and militarization that may loosen the bonds these processes have on us at scales both large/global and small/local. rebecca solnit reminds us that “hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away” (2016, xi). even as the cascading news of violent conflict, war, catastrophic displacement, and scaled-up authoritarian security operations will continue past this issue’s publication date, we are committed to cultivating forms of intellectual solidarity that use the skills of thinking and feeling deeply to question war, as our authors in this collection have so skillfully done. welcome to the sensorium of hope in the dark.   notes 1 feminist research at the intersection of anthropology, science and technology studies, and environmental humanities has brought attention to the material legacies of warfare and militarized logics. adopting an intersectional approach, this scholarship has reflected on multilayered impacts of war technologies and practices on socionatural arrangements including bodies (cohen 2012; wool 2015; aciksoz 2019; pinto-garcía 2019), lands (coates 2016; kim 2016; touhouliotis 2018; henig 2019), environments (sloterdijk 2009; nixon 2011; neimanis 2018), ecopolitical relations (navaro-yashin 2009; krupar 2013), and biomedical knowledge production (terry 2017; brandt 2013). these studies have also shown that the creations and remnants of militarization infuse our everyday life, even when “war is (viewed) at a distance” (kaplan 2018), we are in peacetime, or post-conflict scenarios (nelson 2019; mcallister and nelson 2013; berman‐arévalo and ojeda 2020). interested in critical media studies, other scholars have drawn our attention to the proliferation of military virtual worlds, simulation systems, and unmanned technologies (see also feature section “digital militarism,” in catalyst vol. 2, issue 1, 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life. durham, nc: duke university press. navaro-yashin, yael. 2009. “affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 15 (1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10/c282sg. neimanis, astrida. 2018. “queer times and chemical weapons, suspended in the gotland deep.” journal of contemporary archaeology 5 (1): 66–78. https://doi.org/10/gd8783. nelson, diane m. 2019. “low intensities.” current anthropology 60 (s19): s122–33. https://doi.org/10.1086/701040. nixon, rob. 2011. slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. park, robert e. 1941. “morale and the news.” american journal of sociology 47 (3): 360–77. https://doi.org/10/djdm8z. pinto-garcía, lina. 2019. “disentangling war and disease in post-conflict colombia beyond technoscientific peacemaking.” tapuya: latin american science, technology and society, february, 1–18. https://doi.org/10/gg3q4r. rancière, jacques. 2004. the politics of aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible. london: continuum. sloterdijk, peter. 2009. terror from the air. new york: semiotext. solnit, rebecca. 2016. hope in the dark: untold histories, wild possibilities. 3rd ed. chicago: haymarket books. terry, jennifer. 2017. attachments to war: biomedical logics and violence in twenty-first-century america. durham, nc: duke press university. touhouliotis, vasiliki. 2018. “weak seed and a poisoned land.” environmental humanities 10 (1): 86–106. https://doi.org/10/gg3qzk. wool, zoë h. 2015. after war: the weight of life at walter reed. durham, nc: duke university press.     author bios diana pardo pedraza is assistant professor of anthropology and international affairs at george washington university. her ethnographic research in rural colombia focuses on improvised landmines and humanitarian demining to consider (de)militarized landscapes, post-conflict environmental politics, and multispecies relations of aid and care from a feminist affective approach.   xan chacko is lecturer and director of undergraduate studies of science, technology, and society at brown university. she studies the history and practices of natural science through visual culture, speculative fiction, and rhetoric. she is the co-editor of invisible labour in modern science (rowman and littlefield international, 2022).   jennifer terry is professor of gender & sexuality studies at uc irvine, with affiliations in the departments of comparative literature and anthropology. she has published books and articles on reproductive politics, the history of sexual science, gender and technology, contemporary scientific approaches to the sex lives of animals, queer love of objects, signature injuries of war, the relationship between war-making practices and entertainment, and biomedical salvationism in the context of war and everyday militarism.   astrida neimanis is associate professor and canada research chair in feminist environmental humanities at ubc okanagan, on unceded syilx territory in kelowna, bc. she writes mostly about water, weather and multibeing embodiment from feminist perspectives.     original research the bias cut: toward a technopoetics of algorithmic systems     daniela k. rosner department of human centered design and engineering, university of washington dkrosner@uw.edu     abstract this essay explores a material engagement with discourses of bias. at a time when the developers of algorithmic systems are exploring concepts of bias like never before, textile bias (or the skew of woven material) offers an alternative view into the scripts of computational engagement. to probe this potential, this essay engages a range of feminist and anti-racist interventions in performance arts, critical archival studies, and my own pedagogical collaborations. with these experiments, i ask, how might material bias inform ongoing analysis of cultural bias within machine learning systems? the experiments reveal interwoven dynamics of power, labor, and historicity with particular attention to complicity and change. through angular encounters with bias, i explore the development of an emerging technopoetics of algorithmic systems.   keywords algorithmic systems, bias, machine learning, materiality, performance arts, textile arts   if it is the case that inequity and injustice [are] woven into the very fabric of our societies, then that means each twist, coil, and code is a chance for us to weave new patterns, practices, and politics. the vastness of the problem will be its undoing once we accept that we are pattern makers. —ruha benjamin, in khari johnson (2020)   in the spring of 2014, sudanese australian author and mechanical engineer yassmin abdel-magied (2014) gives a tedx talk near melbourne, australia. she begins with a striking question: “someone who looks like me walks past you in the street—do you think they’re a mother, a refugee, or a victim of oppression—or do you think they’re a cardiologist, a barrister, or maybe your local politician?” abdel-magied is speaking about bias. she’s wearing a copper and coral colored hijab that gently drapes around her head and neck, complementing her abaya, a long, embroidered cloak made of stiff fibers. her point is prescient: “what the world expects of me and the way i’m treated depends on the arrangement of this piece of cloth…this is about looking beyond your bias.” for abdel-magied, as for many, bias refers to a habit of mind. bias is a “tendency to favour or dislike a person or thing, especially as a result of a preconceived opinion” (oed online 2021). a stereotype about someone based on characteristics such as race, gender, and disability (blodgett et al. 2020). in the tedx theater, bias describes the way abdel-magied’s audience—many of whom likely identify as white and judeo-christian—see the piece of cloth and make negative assumptions about her as a muslim woman of color. the cloth exposes the audience’s bias. what abdel-magied doesn’t mention is that the very arrangement of cloth not only reveals bias, it is bias—at least of a certain kind. her cloth drapes with the help of the textile grain, the strands of thread that traverse the body not on the up-and-down but along the slanted angle. from this etymology, bias refers to “a slanting or sloping line, a diagonal” and “a line running diagonally or at an angle to the warp or weft of a woven fabric” (oed online 2021). to a tailor, bias refers to that powerful tilt. a fabric made from interlocking threads that run horizontally and vertically turn on the diagonal. to “cut on the bias” is to intentionally skew woven material, allowing gravity to do its work. it is to push against the grain, to disrupt a binary of warp and weft. the interruption of euclidean geometry creates a soft and fitting drape. working on the bias makes any number of things possible, from headscarves to cloth diapers, to haute couture. abdel-magied is speaking a few years before what has seemed like a clarion call to fix technology bias. search algorithms that harmfully equate dark skin with wrongdoing; facial recognition systems that misgender people at airports; motion-tracking software that monitor employee cleanliness (browne 2019; costanza-chock 2020; eubanks 2018; fox et al. 2019, noble 2018). think of surveillance scholar simone browne’s (2019, 115) analysis of wrongful algorithmic determinations, such as the fingerprint readers used to establish muslim american brandon mayfield as a suspect in the 2004 madrid, spain, train bombings. by turning a body into data, such techniques reinforce “a logic of prototypical whiteness” (browne 2019, 162) that disciplines minoritarian subjects and renders fluid and intersectional identities unseen (benjamin 2019; bennett et al. 2021; bosley et al. 2022; browne 2019, 114). back in the tedx theater, the cultural bias that disproportionally affects people along existing lines of inequity (race, class, gender, disability) is on some minds, but it hasn’t fully entered the public consciousness when it comes to technology. (unless you see textiles as a kind of technology, too.) this essay explores the associations between fiber and computational development that animate alternative scripts of technology development, and specifically the possibility of an emerging technopoetics of algorithmic systems. reading across the bias of historian marisa j. fuentes (2017) and english scholar linda brodkey (1994), i put the cuts, orientations, and angles of technoscience and archival and performance theory in conversation (adeyemi 2019; ahmed 2006a, 2006b, 2010; barad 2008; judd 2019). informed by this analysis, i turn to a class i designed with my colleagues afroditi psarra and gabrielle benabdallah at the university of washington where we begin with a piece of cloth (psarra, rosner, and benabdallah 2021).1 titling our course “on the bias,” our first exercise asks students to create a dataset by cutting the fabric on the bias. some follow the woven pattern, finding a visual rhythm with each cut. others focus on their scissors, observing the dull edges and clunky lines. still others notice their own competencies and inexperience. by materializing their data collection process, students pay attention to the materials, tools, and skillsets that come to make matter matter. they use fabric to distill multiple and overlapping influences on each cut—encountering datasets as made and not found. with these bias studies, i explore the aesthetic possibility of alternative data practices and performances, sketching the outlines of an algorithmic technopoetics.2 textiles, technology, and liberatory potential the links between fiber and bits run deep. as scholars of media and materiality remind, the work of encoding information can be traced to ancient entanglements of string (ascher 1983; ingold 2012; johnson & joyce 2022; küchler and carroll 2020; monteiro 2017; wernimont 2019). consider the knot work of andean quipus. in some six hundred pre-columbian quipus that survived spanish colonization, small knots put into colorful threads signify categories of knowledge such as calendrical data, tax assessments, and census records (ascher 1983; de la puente 2019; urton and chu 2019). through variations in length, string color, fastening, and pattern, the wearer can put their hands over the knots and interpret the encoded information, becoming a tactile decoder by touch (gschwandtner 2008,275; moten 2003, 53).3 centuries later, the field of computing inherited this tactile legacy (monteiro 2017; wernimont 2019). when british countess ada lovelace worked on the analytic engine, what is widely considered the first computer, she gestured at the connection with string (monteiro 2017). “we may say most aptly that the analytical engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves,” she wrote in 1843 (menabrea 1843, 696; monteiro 2017). factories throughout nineteenth-century great britain installed the jacquard loom to speed up the delivery of everyday textile objects from curtains to scarves. the loom ran on a system of punch cards. the position and frequency of holes punched into small pieces of cardstock directed the movement of threads on the loom, producing the same variety of complex designs as the early computers. ada lovelace saw the alliance: a computer as weaving machine. this connection undergirded patterns of exploitation within the early decades of the computing industry, compelling profits from gendered and racialized subjects (amrute 2016; hicks 2017; nakamura 2014, monteiro 2017; wernimont 2019). navajo women in shiprock, new mexico, manufactured chips (nakamura 2014), and operators in waltham, massachusetts, wired the code that sent the apollo spacecraft to the moon (rosner 2018; rosner et al. 2018; shorey and rosner 2019). in each case, stereotypes associated with “nibble fingers” and textile-propensities justified the extraction of labor from minoritarian workers (nakamura 2014). from the knot-work of andean quipus and sewn british book bindings, to punch-card looms and biosensor meshes, material instantiates the difference that makes a difference (appadurai and alexander 2020; bateson 1972). wires that work as threads; units of digital memory that fill patchwork quilts; techniques of embroidery that encode the path to the moon and back. it doesn’t take a giant imaginative leap to see how the chips of computers have grain, pattern, and thread count (montero 2017)—and how cutting along the bias can produce something wildly new. this radical possibility reflects compelling arguments made by scholars who link textiles with histories of activism and abolition (arellano 2022; brown 1989; morrison 2018, péres-bustos et al. 2019; smith 2019). oral history interviews document the use of quilting patterns to encode navigation for people escaping enslavement through the underground railroad (tobin and dobard 1999). using fiber to convene community, a range of artists and activists have reckoned with gendered and racial violence (freeby 2020; kendzior 2015; sutton and vacarezza 2022) to reflect on the subtleties of reclaiming material relationships to safety and home (koiki n.d.). century-old photographs of activist and abolitionist sojourner truth knitting expose a tactical complexity. in one portrait, truth sits with yarn and knitting needles in hand, a pose she might have used to hide a disability in her right hand (minister 2012). looking back on the image, scholars take care to understand the situated and partially hidden significance of stitch work (cutter 2020)—exploring to what extent a liberatory potential might be found from reading into fiber.4 from cultural to material bias as an increasingly prominent context for discussing bias, machine learning systems exemplify a formulation of cultural bias rooted in individual prejudice and premised on its identification and removal (park et al. 2019). this treatment locates bias within a binary logic (bias/debias) wherein harmful assumptions and decisions get baked into an entity (a person, thing, or system) (benjamin 2019, eubanks 2018; noble 2018). for example, technology scholar ruha benjamin (2019) describes the use of algorithms to “correct” bias within marketing campaigns and usability testing schemes. but when the algorithms get used to reinforce existing power relationships—such as the devaluing of black users in the determination of accents recognized by the apple voice assistant siri—those same systems raise important questions around heightened discrimination: “who ultimately profits from the proliferation of ethnically tailored marketing?” (benjamin 2019, 15). departing from an individuated treatment, technology scholars such as benjamin read bias as a question of situated knowledge and positioning, a condition relevant to all interpersonal, structural, and institutional activity, including decision making within technology corporations (benjamin 2019; hoffmann 2021; lee 2018). from this view, cultural bias names the vantage point encoded in software and shaping technological scripts, including who is seen, who sees, and to what end (benjamin 2019; browne 2019). compared with cultural bias, material bias carries a more procedural meaning. while working with woven fabric, the bias refers to the directional composition of fabric, or the orientation of yarns in the textile (oed online 2021). most woven textiles are made of interlocking horizontal (weft) and vertical (warp) threads, named lengthwise and crosswise grains. the bias grain runs across those orthogonal yarns. in sewing patterns, the term true bias refers to a 45º angle from the woven fabric edge or selvage (the finished edge that prevents the textile from unravelling) (oed online 2021). handle woven fabric, and you’ll learn about bias. pull on the lengthwise grain, and the fabric keep its form; depending on the fiber, it might not move at all (a cotton textile barely stretches, for example). pull on the crosswise grain, and the fabric exhibits a bit more ply. but turn the fabric at 45º and pull, and you’ll notice a significant spring. the fabric gains elasticity. thanks to this stretch and flexibility, tailors insert strips of bias-cut fabric along the edge of garments, quilts, or bibs. covering armholes and necklines with a bias strip (also called bias tape) allows the tailor to finish rough edges, bind hems, and give the perimeter new strength.5 compared with techniques of spinning or weaving, structures like bias grain have figured less prominently in critical textiles scholarship. when it does appear, the analysis of bias grain tends to focus on the work of progressive-era fashion icon madeleine vionnet, who popularized the bias-cut technique featured on gowns worn by hollywood stars such as greta garbo and marlene dietrich (di trocchio 2011).6 but bias-cut applications have long permeated textile techniques, from the bias plaiting basketry of coast salish weavers to the tightly fitting churidar pyjama pants worn across south asia.7 in the development of an early form of digital information storage called core memory, embroidering a wire along the diagonal grid of physical “bits” encoding information made that information not only readable but also rewritable by a computer program (rosner et al. 2018, shorey and rosner 2019). today medical robotics researchers use the bias cut to develop artificial muscles (naclerio and hawkes 2020) and automotive engineers use the bias cut to reduce leaks in automatic transmissions (kuroki and sowa 1991).8 stretching its potential, brodkey’s (1994) theory of writing on the bias (1994) and fuentes’s (2016) method of reading along the bias grain bring new theoretical range to this material machinery.9 in an unusual autobiographical essay on learning to write, brodkey uses textile bias to critique a masculinized plug-and-play approach to literacy discourse, exposing its feigned objectivity and strict application of rules. she calls for a feminized learning-by-doing approach, a form of writing practice she names (after her mother’s scrupulous eye for a garment’s detail) writing on the bias. bias allows for a three-dimensional thinking that gives fabric structure and purpose just as it gives the writing significance and meaning. “without a bias,” she notes, “language is only words as cloth is only threads” (1994, 546). where writing on the bias lends structure and purpose, reading on the bias brings elasticity to interpretation. in her reckoning with gaps and silences in colonial bridgetown archives, barbados, fuentes “expands the legibility of these archival documents” (2016, 78) by considering residual traces of enslaved women’s presence. reading the case law, for example, she uses archival gaps around the gendered camouflage of an unnamed enslaved boy disguised as a black woman to expose differential gendered and sexual assumptions for enslaved and white women, showing how experiences that are conspicuously absent from traditional historical archives still shape analysis (hartman 2008). “reading along the bias grain stretches the archive to accentuate the presence of enslaved women when not explicitly mentioned in certain documents,” fuentes observes (2016, 156).10 materiality askew these reflexive potentials within material bias (textile or otherwise) complement a wider scholarship on materialism, a large and scattered body of work concerned with what material worlds open and constrain (braidotti 2013; minh-ha 2014; tallbear 2017). reviewing this scholarship across the past century, anthropologist eric plemons (2013) identifies three major periods: the 1920s attention to the conditions of the human brain with ideas of consciousness and will; the 1970s development of the sociology of scientific knowledge and its focus on embodiment; and the 2000s concern for the agential, consequential, and non-innocent character of matter. in this latter focus, scholars narrow their analysis on the kinds of conceptualizations the material offers for theorizing social and political life, and particularly the perspectives that language (or discourse) elides. this new model of the world, often rooted in the natural sciences, manifests in the influence of biological thinking on the work of donna haraway and theoretical physics on the work of karen barad. barad’s (2008) agentic readings of matter emerge from a revisiting of niels bohr’s “philosophy physics” (xi) wherein physical models change foundational understandings of the social, asking: how does “matter comes to matter”? (244) barad locates this question in a particular understanding of agency as a forceful and situated condition that prompts analysists to follow the agential cut. this cut describes an act of differentiation, a perspective taken when something is foregrounded and something else backgrounded, when one agential force is separated from another. if the agentic cut marks a material differentiation, then the bias cut—that separation of fabric along the diagonal—might speak to a tactical making of difference, a kind of agential cut with angular repercussions, a mingling of orientations (overt and covert, direct and indirect, aesthetic and utilitarian). in her essays on orientation, sara ahmed (2006a, 2006b, 2010) considers this perspective taking through the framework of queer phenomenology. “what does it mean to be oriented?” she asks. “what difference does it make what we are oriented toward?” (2006a, 543). grounding her inquiry in the phrase sexual orientation, ahmed considers what is queer in phenomenology, finding that queerness offers a starting point for considering objects that “orient” (in) phenomenological traditions (2006a, 544). orientation for ahmed refers to the “effect of what we tend toward” (2010, 247), that which shapes and ingrains a body’s capacities to see and comprehend. using the example of a table, she illustrates the kinds of labors that fall to the background during use: the hands that brought that table into the room and scuffed it at the door, the histories of development and use that shape matter but often fall to the background. in this reflection, she emphasizes the tendency or habituation of that limited stance. orientation calls attention to the repeated bodily-shaping acquired, the work necessary to take a perspective on the surrounding world. revisiting orientation in a recent discussion of queer use, ahmed identifies the angularities of design—specifically (via margaret price) the winding redirection of access signs that orient wheelchair users through space, creating alternative opportunities for use. “modifications can also be reorientations…those who need modifications to enable them to access spaces are directed away from the paths that are busiest, the paths where things usually happen” (ahmed 2019, 241). she grounds this argument in the phenomenology of merleau-ponty and his analysis of vertical perception as well as hegel’s argument that to “stand upright” has become a habit and no longer a willful act. for ahmed, analyzing queerness as both a designerly and physiological accomplishment works to generate new readings of use, including the use of computational developments (2019, 241). in this formulation, being upright or straight identifies a particular accomplishment whereas being topsy-turvy or weird marks a point of departure from the norm and a possible site of creativity. finding creative potential within a world premised on straightness involves locating, experimenting with, and reworking orientation—or what performance theorist kemi adeyemi (2019) might call the lean. in her close readings of black queer performance, such as rashaad newsome’s shade compositions, she connects the angle of performers’ bodies on stage with a refusal of masculinist, ableist, and racist vantage points. “i am thinking about the literal ground a lot lately because i have spent far too much time watching people like [walter] scott being ground into it,” she writes of the everyday brutality of racist police violence (2019, 2). if the horizontal adjudicates carceral enforcement for black and indigenous people, the vertical delimits ideas of “good” posture, “up-right-ness,” “standing tall.” adeyemi roots the dominance of the 90° angle in judeo-christian beliefs such as man’s fall from the heavens and “circumscribed by masculinist investments in the phallus as that which indexes one’s abilities to access these planes in the first place, and dependent upon the violent othering of disabilities that would make it difficult if not impossible to physically hold one’s whole body upright” (2). by contrast, the lean refers to the “onto-kinetic mechanism” (6) of a body that transcends a 90° tethering to the ground. reading the leaning bodies of the twenty-one black women and gender-nonconforming people in shade compositions, adeyemi calls for “do[ing] away with up down and begin[ing] from other angles to do and theorize politics, black and otherwise” (6).11 to find this onto-kinetic mechanism within machine learning developments is to uproot the “imperative of verticality” (2019, 4), to use adeyemi’s term. it is to call to mind what interdisciplinary writer, artist, and performer bettina judd has called a “irreducible unknown” (2019, 143) in her discussion of poet lucille clifton’s automatic and spirit writing, the psychic ability to unconsciously produce written words. judd’s work offers a particularly profound and nuanced practice for using machine learning systems for poetic introspection. to explore the unknown, she sets up an ai translation experiment where she speaks in tongues, transcribes her speech, and then feeds the text to google translate to see if “the software could decipher meaning. it did not, and in some sense, it did. it deciphered a meaning in my revisiting its translations. more meaning than i could cognate with the text of the tongues itself. the gift of tongues is not about meaning, but experience. i cannot translate the totality of that experience for you” (144). in her phased process of translation—inserting the transcribed text, requesting a new language translation, composing a poem, repeating the language translation—judd skews the interaction. she does not interact with the machine through the prescribed angle of a transaction (input text, receive result). she reorients her use toward a spiritual residue (a transcendence of queer use, to use ahmed’s term). reflecting on her baptist and pentecostal upbringing, she describes the practice of speaking in tongues as both alluring and frightening. “what if the spirit didn’t decide to take over me?…was i considered less saved?” (judd 2019, 143). in this oblique reading of an algorithm, she revisits the elusive—a transformation that might dismiss, but might also pull her in. since learning of this project, the experiment it sets up has captivated me. rather than identify and remove bias within natural language processing or disavow a platform like google translate, bettina judd comes to complicate and inspirit, to re-embody (judd 2019, 138). she does not deny her entanglement with the sociotechnical, she occupies it. in the classroom: pedagogical experiments this question of occupation within machine learning systems informed a set of classroom exercises i co-developed with my colleagues afroditi psarra and gabrielle benabdallah during the summer of 2021 (benabdallahet al. 2022). inspired by textile lineages, we gathered exercises, readings (work by kemi adeyemi, sara ahmed, ruha benjamin, among others), and invited guest lecturers (including visits by transdisciplinary artists stephanie dinkins and lauren lee mccarthy). we designed the course to prompt students invested in a data science minor to probe the political and aesthetic potential of algorithmic systems. during our first week of class, when we asked students to create a dataset by cutting cloth on the bias, one student, esteban yosef agosin, recorded the soundscape of his cut. charting the varied noise frequencies of each snip, he used the recorded audio to notice differences in the dataset: some cuts sounded relatively long and muffled, while others felt quick and discordant, almost grating. “my goal for this dataset would be to measure the stress level when someone is cutting cloth…to speculate if someone is emotionally fine or not,” he explained. the recording exposed layers of interpretation to what stress sounds like and how it does or does not get recorded within a dataset—a collection of records not unlike those used to train machine learning algorithms using speech data and posttraumatic stress disorder classification. reflecting on the bias of codification, he explored the nuances of making stress newly accountable to the senses. for the final exhibition, we invited students to start from a dataset and create a new or reinvented artifact. doctoral student chari glogovac-smith created a series of images that encoded audrey lord’s poems in algorithmically generated photographs of braided black hair. to create the images, they trained machine learning models on images of braided black hairstyles to produce synthetic but realistic renderings.12 exploring the variety and angularity of techniques in the resulting compositions, they noticed a set of unique but uniform patterns, much like a language. leveraging this patterning, they treated the braided images as a text and created an algorithmic map that turned each phrase into a unique hairstyle. with this imagery they describe “holding space for the dichotomy between modern society’s demonization of black hair expression and its simultaneous appropriation of the same expression.” treating the impossible geometries of algorithmically generated imagery as language, they reinvent a covert “art of black hair.” undergraduate student kathryn reyes began with images of binakul, an indigenous weaving pattern from the philippines’ ilocos and abra regions, where her family is from. the pattern uses repetition and curvature to warp the geometries of a 90º grid. contemporary comparisons to 1960s op art expose the dominance of western weaving ontologies amid longer indigenous textile lineages threatened by dwindling access to natural resources and scarce documentation. training a machine learning model on the textile images, reyes produced a set of algorithmically generated binakul imagery and developed a short film that animates between them. projecting the film alongside a description of one of the few surviving prewar master weavers working with binakul, reyes explains that the project highlights “an absence of tangibility” made visible through “an institutional effort to sustain a dying art.” across the bias cuts, braided poetry, and binakul patterns, the on the bias projects share a certain sensibility. they do not remove harmful forms of machine learning bias. instead, they infuse neural networks with a fictive force. in their engagement with questions of bias, reflecting on their own encounters and associations, they reimagine the material world and its modes of conditioning. exercises like these amount to a multi-threaded exploration. rather than begin with a future, they look forward within the present—beginning from experiences in the here and now (dinkins n.d.). rather than seek completion, they embrace incompletion—orienting toward the unfinished and unknown (harney and moten 2020). rather than put the audience in someone else’s place, they render the audience adjacent and interconnected—seeking opportunities to be, feel, and care alongside one another (campt 2021). and rather than call for agency, they inspire collective transcendence—activating our roles as coconspirators (gibson forthcoming). in these four maneuvers—from there to here, from resolution to incompletion, from displacement to adjacency, from possession to accomplice—students in the classroom explore how a technopoetics of algorithmic systems might help remake our “biased” lives. working against the grain technology cultures often locate bias within a person (blodgett et al. 2020). when designers propagate their individual judgments across massive datasets and machine learning systems, they amplify those judgments and their potential harms (amrute 2022; noble 2021). but our pedagogical experiments organize bias as a particular opportunity. they render an interior judgment an anterior event: never fully determining the phenomena judged (hoffmann 2021). those lines of contact make possible a range of phenomena, from tech policy decisions to fintech privacy features. bringing a material imagination to our contact with bias, and one another, can help rebuild not only our technological worlds but our roles within them. to recall the theater within which yassmin abdel-magied presents is to see a similar potential. the event solicits reflection but gives little space for criticism or response (giridharadas 2019). it promotes individual updates over structural transformations. it feeds tedx branding across a collection of websites and organizational hubs. i first found the video via the lean in organization, an outgrowth of a book of the same name written by facebook’s sheryls sandberg. each year, lean in partners with mckinsey & co. to study the state of women in the workforce, the website declares (lean in n.d.). but to lean is not to lean in, anna lauren hoffmann reminds.13 where sandberg’s lean in positions the (white feminist) subject as self-empowering, goal-directed, and affirming a neoliberal regime, adeyemi’s lean recognizes the (minoritarian) subject as suspended within and reckoning with the violence of neoliberal governance. leaning, in sandberg’s prose, does not map to the psychic or political possibilities of the lean that adeyemi describes. on the tedx stage, fabric tells a particular story about bias. that something material (a hijab) shapes something cultural (a negative assumption about someone else). that what someone uses (wears, inhabits, works with) prompts a particular way of seeing the world and one another. but also, that a treatment of bias is not to remove it. it is to use it: to collectively work against the grain, to skew our relationships with its everyday use, and to turn its conditions into an invitation for change. the material imagination of textile bias takes our understanding beyond recognition. it shows how within the conventional problem solved, the issue resolved, and the harm redressed, the angle of our engagement matters. amid our skewed orientations, what we find is not an answer. no solution or ending. nothing that we can turn into a commodity, apply to our wounds, or move from place to place. what we find is a type of algorithmic technopoetics, an experimental praxis that begins with the angularities of fabric. fabric is a material gathering of strings, of different lines and timelines, and with them, a convening of different histories, social relationships, and possibilities within our collective present (brodkey 1994). the student work in the classroom drew on these angularities to bring together multiple hands, histories, layers of fiber and meaning. in this gathering, they suggest a certain aesthetic of communality. by paying attention to the assumptions built into machine learning systems, they formulate bias as a common performance—showing what bodies and algorithms produce in tandem. an algorithmic technopoetics grounded in angular praxes might reveal that what we think of as technology biases—those harms amplified by bits and code (friedman and nissenbaum 1996)—are also and fundamentally about relationships. they help us see and understand our proximities. they shape how we come into relations of connection amid difference, and what those relationships mean within an ever-changing and discordant landscape. if we think of our visualizations, technologies, and cities as tied to a grid, then to combine material and cultural bias is to work along the diagonal, to reorient our approach to each other in our digital and physical surrounds. it is to practice a collective imagining, a mode of anticipating a world where we can learn to become common to one another (chambers-letson 2018, xvii). the technopoetic encounter described so far opens bias as a means of inquiry. cutting on the bias invites a practice of reorienting our bodies to our algorithmic surroundings, sensing new technological scripts through alternative angles, and taking stock of what an oblique relationship with algorithmic systems reveals about us and our connections with one another. to reorient, to lean, to skew, to stretch is to bring new readings of material engagements to our cultural ones. it is to see an aesthetic possibility in relationships (individual, collective, institutional, technical) that may feel hopeless but are nonetheless structured with pattern and thread. acknowledgments i am grateful to several colleagues for their generous comments, suggestions, and conversations, including kemi adeyemi, neta alexander, gabrielle benabdallah, laura juliana cortés rico, helen gibson, anna lauren hoffmann, bettina judd, lauren klein, beth kolko, laura forlano, marcel o’gorman, romi ron morrison,tania pérez-bustos, james pierce, afroditi psarra, jihan sherman, jacqueline wernimont, the new school gidest seminar, uw hcde tat lab colleagues, and uw on the bias students.   notes 1 for a visual review of course activities, see collaborative documentation authored with several participants in the “on the bias” class (benabdallah et al. 2022; lustig and rosner 2022). the course complements thinking on textile bias metaphors beyond artistic and technological inquiry, including writing by lutz bornmann (2007) and carol tavris (2021).   2 here i follow louis chude-sokei’s astute definition of technopoetics as a “loose and far from canonical term for those engagements with technology as they manifest in the realm of literary, philosophical, musical, or broader cultural realms” (2015, 11). a review of the rich and varied literature on technopoetics is beyond the scope of this essay but i take particular inspiration from inspired ritualistic research traditions within design and technology arts, including work by jihan sherman and colleagues (sherman et al. 2019).   3 hawaiian string figures, or hei, expose a complementary positioning. as the kumu hula,  kumu oli,  and kumu ʻōlelo hawai’i scholar kalani akana (2012) explains, the movement of strings along hands to create images does more than reference a material world. it also repeats and ritualizes histories of movement, orienting the body toward particular sensitivities and noticings, as well as rehearsing knowledge and narrative wherein patterning works as pneumonic practice. hands in strings produce the codes of collective memory.   4 see forthcoming dissertation work by jihan sherman. for additional examples of critical artistic inquiry connected with fiber, see work by hinekura smith (2019) on māori weaving practice as a decolonizing research methodology; sonia c. arellano (2022) on quilting as feminist inquiry in the representation of migrant deaths; laura juliana cortés rico, tania pérez-bustos and colleagues on textile and engineering connections amid columbian reconciliation (rico et al. 2020; pérez-bustos et al. 2019); ron eglash (1999) on african fractal patterns. within wider artistic technoscientific inquiry traditions, see complementary inventive approaches by nettrice gaskins (2014), kat jungnickel (2018, 2022), natalie loveless (2019), hannah star rogers and colleagues (2021; rogers 2022).   5 adjacent fashion applications include bias-cut ruffles and bias-cut stockings.   6 bias grain allowed dressmakers like madeleine vionnet to create garments with a snug fit across the midriff and soft drape below the waistline—using the shape-clinging elasticity and drape to emphasize the curves of a body.   7 histories of woven cloth tend to begin almost 30,000 years ago with the evidence of fabric imprinted into clay (barber 1991, 1994, 1999). archeologists tend to agree that the sophisticated nature of these found techniques suggests a much longer timeline, likely beginning in the palaeolithic period (adovasio, soffer, and klima 1996), nearly 2.5 million years ago. while histories of woven cloth tend not to focus on grain, those that do exist connect bias with fashion trends, from indian saris (varghese and thilagavathi 2012) to hollywood art deco gowns (di trocchio 2011).   8 cutting along the bias grain allows the artificial muscle tube to radially expand with applied pressure (naclerio and hawkes 2020) and the rotary shaft’s seal rings to expand by sliding circumferentially toward one another (kuroki and sowa 1991).   9 in a footnote, marisa fuentes (2016) contrasts reading along the bias grain with ann stoler’s work with colonial records “along the archival grain” (2010), which places greater emphasis on revealing “weaknesses in colonial power,” fuentes (2016, 153) explains. see also complementary work by jen clary-lemon (2022) on the selvedge and marcel o’gorman (2021) on inclinations and homo inclinus.   10 despite its importance across cultural and technological histories, material bias rarely features as a topic of analysis for scholars of technology. few if any books or stand-alone articles exist on the topic of bias grain. wikipedia articles on related topics of textile bias and textile grain combine to less than one thousand words (at the time of writing). in its absence, material bias represents both a powerful and underexplored tool—exposing what a concern for skew brings to an understanding of ourselves.   11 “hegemony of the vertical,” ann cooper albright writes, comes out of “the christian/capitalist complex that insists what is up is good (stock markets, tall buildings, bank accounts, and other assorted ‘fill in the blanks’) and what is down is bad” (2017, 64, quoted in adeyemi 2019, 20).   12 the machine learning models students used, called generative adversarial networks (gans), involve two neural networks that compete with one other to become more accurate in their predictions.   13 informal conversation with anna lauren hoffmann, july 2021.   references abdel-magied, yassmin. 2014. “what does my headscarf mean to you?” filmed may 2014 in southbank, australia. tedx video, 13:53. https://www.ted.com/talks/yassmin_abdel_magied_what_does_my_headscarf_mean_to_you?language=en. adeyemi, kemi. 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and material circumstances of technology development and use, with a longstanding interest in sites of innovation such as electronics maintenance and needlecraft historically overlooked within western engineering cultures. rosner serves as an editor-in-chief of interactions magazine, a bimonthly publication of acm sigchi. . quinan, cq. 2025. “replication and recognition.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © cq quinan, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license replication and recognition cq quinan university of melbourne c.quinan@unimelb.edu.au keywords transgender, recognition, artificial intelligence, image generators, biometric technologies advanced biometric technologies—including automatic gender recognition tools—pose obstacles for trans and nonbinary populations in several spheres. in relying on false understandings of gender as static and physiological, binarybased biometric technologies force trans and nonbinary bodies to conform to these systems in order to become legible subjects inside systems of border control and security (hamidi et al. 2018; keyes 2018; quinan and hunt 2022; scheuerman et al. 2019). as marc cheong et al. write in their analysis of gender and racial biases in ai, “it is not that bias is something that is added onto an otherwise neutral technical system. it is that the biased outputs are part and parcel of the desired outputs since they are generated in the same way…the data used to train such systems are not free from bias and as such perpetuate and even amplify existing human biases” (2024, 13:3). meanwhile these technologies increasingly extract data on trans users, which may then be used to train and “improve” machine-learning systems. despite being misrecognized—or simply not recognized at all—by recognition and analysis technologies, trans and nonbinary faces serve to help “refine” computer vision in that they come to function as challenge sets. and even as biometric companies are honing these algorithms, discourses that frame trans people as deceptive or fraudulent circulate ubiquitously, with trans communities serving as scapegoats for advancing radical, christian nationalist agendas centered on “traditional family values” (quinan 2025). mailto:c.quinan@unimelb.edu.au roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) cq quinan, 2025 2 the ways in which trans people are viewed as challenge sets for machine learning leads me to another question as we enter an era marked by ai: what role do ai image generators play in both uncovering assumptions about transness and solidifying attitudes towards trans people? ai systems look for patterns in the data on which they are trained, digesting what has come before to serve as tools of replication (with a twist), largely reflecting value judgments that exist in the vast online world. platforms like dall-e (which has now been folded into chatgpt) and midjourney generate realistic images of (fake) trans individuals, but ones that seem entirely built upon cliched imaginaries of how trans people look or act. this is not to say that the images used by ai tools are comparable to those used for facial recognition at border checkpoints. indeed, although both are statistical, they use very different data infrastructures and models. instead, my point here is that these algorithmic technologies are similarly built on encoded cultural understandings of transness that have made their way into technical systems that shape fundamental aspects of daily life, including mobility, access, and culture. this phenomenon is illustrated by sample images that dall-e 2 generated when i inputted the prompt “produce a photograph of a transgender woman.” these images are underpinned by common discourses that circulate around trans women. rather than creating an image of trans women as women, they play on common stereotypes of men in drag and tropes of trans women failing to “pass” or to “successfully” embody traditional ideas of femininity. figure 1. ai image generator’s response to ‘produce a photograph of a transgender woman’ roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) cq quinan, 2025 3 when i asked dall-e 2 to “produce a photograph of a transgender man,” it appeared even more confounded. the image generator seemed confused by what a trans man could look like, with the platform producing images that could have been generated by the previous prompt. figure 2. ai image generator’s response to ‘produce a photograph of a transgender man’ it appears here that the phrase “transgender man” is overwritten by an understanding of “transgender” as referring specifically to trans women. this also aligns with a general obfuscation and invisibility of trans men in mainstream contexts. roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) cq quinan, 2025 4 finally, when asked to “produce a photograph of a nonbinary person,” dall-e produced the most perplexing results. nonbinary yielded upside-downness, backwardness, and invisibility. it also understood nonbinary people as only parts of people, with only small sections of the body generated (e.g., feet, legs, half of a face). figure 3. ai image generator’s response to ‘produce a photograph of a non-binary person’ just as facial recognition software struggles to accurately “recognize” nonbinary users (precisely because the technology is binary-based), ai image generators cannot consistently represent a coherent person outside binary gender norms. the visual incompleteness of these figures also exemplifies transphobic discourses that frame nonbinary and trans people as not fully human. as is beginning to be articulated in scholarship on the ethical dimensions of ai image generators, there is potential for a dangerous feedback loop, with bias in ai systems leading to biased decision-making. while in our increasingly roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) cq quinan, 2025 5 biometrically-determined world, one must be digitally legible in order to lay claim to rights, what does it mean when ai image generators exacerbate stereotypical notions of what a “transgender woman” or a “transgender man” looks like? what does this say about social and cultural understandings of gender, transness, and nonbinary identity? and how might this cause real harm? we should be particularly concerned about impacts on marginalized populations, including trans and gender-diverse communities, as generative ai models “both reflect what humans think and have thought…and influence what humans think” (alfano et al. 2024, 4). as new ai-driven worlds begin to take shape we must continue to heed donna haraway’s prescient words that “it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories” (2016, 12). indeed, even in synthetic worlds, trans populations are made vulnerable. the worlds being proposed by many ai systems are unrecognizable and often antithetical to more inclusive worlds built on diversity of experience and representation—and those are the just and equitable worlds we now need more than ever. references alfano, mark, ehsan abedin, ritsaart reimann, marinus ferreira, and marc cheong. 2024. “now you see me, now you don’t: an exploration of religious exnomination in dall‑e.” ethics and information technology, no. 26, art. no. 27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09760-y. cheong, marc, ehsan abedin, marinus ferreira et al. 2024. “investigating gender and racial biases in dall-e mini images.” acm journal on responsible computing 1 (2), art. no. 13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3649883. hamidi, foad, morgan klaus scheuerman, and stacy m. branham. 2018. “gender recognition or gender reductionism?: the social implications of automatic gender recognition systems.” chi 2018: proceedings of the 2018 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173582. haraway, donna. 2016. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke university press. keyes, os. 2018. “the misgendering machines: trans/hci implications of automatic gender recognition.” proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction 2 (cscw), art. no. 88, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274357. quinan, cq, and mina hunt. 2022. “biometric bordering and automatic gender recognition: challenging binary gender norms in everyday biometric technologies.” communication, culture and critique 15 (2): 211–26. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcac013. quinan, cq. 2025. “from criminalization to erasure: project 2025 and anti-trans legislation in the us.” crime, media, culture. online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590241312149. scheuerman, morgan klaus, jacob m. paul, and jed r. brubaker. 2019. “how computers see gender: an evaluation of gender classification in commercial facial https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09760-y https://doi.org/10.1145/3649883 https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173582 https://doi.org/10.1145/3274357 https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcac013 https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590241312149 roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) cq quinan, 2025 6 analysis and image labeling services.” proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction 3 (cscw): 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359246. author bio cq quinan is a senior lecturer in gender studies at the university of melbourne. they work at the intersection of trans studies, critical security studies, and sociolegal studies, and their research on legal gender identity and biometric security technologies has appeared in various journals, including crime, media, culture, journal of gender studies, communication, culture & critique, and global perspectives. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359246 replication and recognition keywords references author bio six ways of looking at fractal mechanics caleb, amanda m. 2024. “campaigns of autoimmunity: public health responses to aids and covid-19.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–20. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © amanda m. caleb, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license campaigns of autoimmunity: public health responses to aids and covid-19 amanda m. caleb geisinger commonwealth school of medicine acaleb@geisinger.edu abstract this article uses the concept of autoimmunity as a framework to examine how public health, designed to help protect the entirety of a population (and therefore act as an immune system), turns to an autoimmune response during pandemic flare-ups. in this context, public health campaigns seek an overactive and overrepresented focus on historically marginalized and at-risk populations, resulting in a targeting that places both the self of the body politic and the nonself of the targeted population at risk for infection. the persistency of autoimmunity as public health is evident in the america responds to aids campaign of the 1980s and 1990s and ohio’s together ohio and more than a mask campaigns in response to the covid-19 pandemic. using these examples, the article examines the paradox of distinguishing and blurring the self and nonself by emphasizing collective risk and collective action and overrepresenting blackness, demonstrating a latent autoimmunity of prejudice that informs public health messaging and its reception. keywords public health campaigns; america responds to aids; together ohio; otherness; racial prejudice in autoimmunity, one gets so viciously close to the mirror of otherness that no room is left for reflection. —david a. napier, the age of immunology: conceiving a future in an alienating world. mailto:acaleb@geisinger.edu special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 2 autoimmune responses of the body politic the rise of immunology in the nineteenth century led to a redefining of immunity from solely a granted legal protection or exemption to a biological descriptor of the body’s ability to fight infection. at the 1866 international sanitary conference, delegates described natural immunity to cholera within a socioeconomic context of quarantine avoidance: “this immunity, as a general rule, when closely regarded, can be linked to good hygienic conditions existing in these localities, or to notable improvements which have operated there for a while. the relative immunity answers to those who are too inclined to commend the safety of nations against cholera exclusively to quarantine measures” (e. cohen 2017, 32). historically, epidemiologists and other public health officials linked biological immunity to politico-legal immunity; as simplified by ed cohen, “if a nation was deemed ‘relative[ly] immune’ (in a biological sense) from cholera, then it could remain entirely immune (in a legal sense) from quarantine” (2017, 32). implied within this biopolitical concept of immunity are structural inequities, tied to socioeconomic and environmental factors: “natural” immunity to cholera includes access to clean water and hygiene education. this description of immunity from 1866 is integral to the language and practice of public health. for instance, herd immunity is a biological defense against disease transmission within a population, but it relies on high percentages of existing individual immunity—achieved through infection or vaccination. embedded within herd immunity is the politico-legal issue of immunity as granted protection, seen in access to and education about vaccinations provided by the government. more problematic is the implied ability to survive a disease: in practice, herd immunity has no interest in those who die from a disease, which can ultimately impact the allocation of resources and access to life-saving treatments. sweden’s initial approach to the covid-19 pandemic was focused on achieving herd immunity without enacting government shutdowns—a modern-day version of the 1866 description of the response to cholera—but in doing so, negatively impacted the care of those most susceptible to severe disease and death (vogel 2020). such an approach accords with the meaning of immunity, which shares the root munus with community but whose prefixes create opposition: “if communitas is what links its members together in a reciprocal commitment to donate, immunitas, on the contrary, is what unloads from this load and exonerates from this onus [onere]” (esposito 2012, 2). in the context of a body politic, this view of immunity justifies a nation-first (or nation-only) approach to combating disease, privileging the immunity of a single nation over a global community. however, as roberto esposito (2012) notes, “what protects the body—whether individual, social or political—is what at the same time prevent its development,” and as evident during the covid-19 pandemic—or any pandemic—a nation-first approach naively ignores the realities of globalization. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 3 such external barriers, however, can prove to be greater threats to the self, as evident in the autoimmune response in which the system that is meant to protect becomes intolerant of itself and attacks a part of the body (or body politic) now viewed as foreign. ed cohen (2017, 29) describes autoimmunity as the collapse of distinction between self and not-self (or non-self) that results in the body viewing the self as both, leading to an intolerance of self. jacques derrida describes autoimmunity as “the autoinfection of all autoaffection. it is not some particular thing that is affected in autoimmunity but the self, the ipse, the autos, that finds itself infected” (2005, 109). in derrida’s definition of autoimmunity, selfexperience, or how the body thinks about itself, ultimately leads to a created perception of infection within the self: to protect against that singularly perceived infection is to attack the body itself. juxtaposing cohen’s and derrida’s constructions of autoimmunity reveals the ways in which the overconcentration on self can lead to (or perpetuate) otherness that is grounded in intolerance. within the context of epidemiological flare-ups— pandemics—it is that very intolerance of self that triggers an autoimmune response of the body politic that seeks to attack the perceived cause of infection while ultimately harming itself. in relying on a philosophical autoimmunity when responding to pandemics, the search for a nationalized immunity (by way of prevention) is represented rhetorically by an autoaffection that is autoinfection, an overactive response to and an attack of a racialized other who is part of the national body. the metaphoric national body’s immune response against itself is an act that is harmful to a collective health of a nation through the targeting of one population through overrepresentation (leading to blame) and creating a false immunity for the other. applying this framework of autoimmunity to public health campaigns in the united states, i begin with the aids pandemic, which aligns with an increased interest in immunology and autoimmunology: even as the field worked to combat a foreign virus, it actively discriminated against its own body politic (porter 1997, 589). i situate this first flare-up within a context of a metaphoric autoimmune disease of us public health and pandemics, marked not by new disease but by new flare-ups of the same disease: responses to the covid-19 pandemic. both flare-ups are designated by their overactive response and reaction to black communities as sites of disease transmission that become the target of an autoimmune response. in viewing pandemic responses through the lens of autoimmunity, we can confront the “logical but also a bio-logical impropriety” (e. cohen 2017, 29) of public health during a crisis: the targeting of minoritized populations that reinforces a latent autoimmunity of prejudice. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 4 autoimmunity and hiv/aids: america responds to aids as is well documented, the us response to the emerging aids epidemic in the 1980s was slow, stymied by politics and social stigma.1 the initial labeling of aids as the “gay plague” minimized the impact of the disease on the nation and the world, downgrading it to something affecting a historically marginalized population with fewer rights than heterosexual americans—in other words, outside the body politic. the turning point was twofold: the public death of president reagan’s close friend rock hudson from aids and the increasing incidence of aids outside gay communities, specific among hemophiliacs. reagan’s naming it a “top priority” and the congressional allocation of $190 million for aids research in 1985 resulted in the “everyone is at risk” focus of aids prevention campaigns (carney 2021, 336). this inclusive approach was embodied in the america responds to aids (arta) campaign sponsored by the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) from 1987 to 1996 and included pamphlets mailed to all households and television and print public service announcements (psa). the cdc envisioned the campaign as targeting “a wide range of audiences variously defined by identity or behavior, from heterosexual single mothers, to teenagers of all races, to young adult african americans, to people who lived in rural areas” (tuohy 2013). arta targeted local and national distribution, resulting in materials being seen by both the communities depicted in the images and those outside those communities, creating the conditions for an autoimmune attack (woods, davis, and westover 1991, 618). notably absent from early campaign materials was gay representation: in 1987 congress “explicitly banned the use of federal funds for aids prevention and education campaigns that ‘[promoted] or [encouraged], directly or indirectly, homosexual activities’” (geiling 2013). congressional restrictions on federal funds meant that the cdc essentially rendered the gay community invisible in the early days of arta: they were grossly underrepresented (or not represented at all) in the materials, leading to criticisms of “diluting the message” about aids (carney 2021, 336) and “not meeting the needs of high risk-audiences, [specifically] gay men, by not providing sexually explicit behavioral messages” (rowitz 2009, 316). in other words, everyone could get aids, but such messaging ignored the variable relative risk for certain populations. the messaging that everyone could get aids was a political paradox, or, more aptly, an autoimmunity. such messaging positioned a hyped threat of the disease for the entire nation against the reality of disease transmission through bodily fluids, meaning that not everyone was at the same level of risk, and in fact most individuals were not at risk of contracting hiv. however, the autoaffective perception of risk to the body politic indicated a need to protect it from internal yet othered threats, and that protection came through the discrimination of those perceived to create the risk for themselves and everyone else. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 5 while arta marginalized gay communities in its psas, it overrepresented blackness. from 1981 to 1987 the percentage of black, non-hispanic persons with aids was 25.5 percent, less than half that of the prevalence for white, nonhispanic persons (59.7 percent) (cdc 2001, 431) and more than double the black population percentage of 12.2 percent in 1987 (us department of commerce 1988, 3). this percentage of black, non-hispanic persons with aids rose to 31.2 percent from 1988 to 1992, while that of white, non-hispanic persons dropped by more than nine percentage points (cdc 2001, 431). these numbers indicate an increasingly disproportionate impact of aids on black communities, one that the cdc saw as warranting community-specific psas. arta quickly became the autoimmune response to aids through its overrepresentation of racialized models, signaling a much greater surge—and therefore threat—of aids within that community: 80 percent of cdc communication about hiv/aids featured models who were people of color, of which 70 percent were black models, equating to 56.4 percent of all communication (el hazzouri and hamilton 2019, 372). this overrepresentation of nearly double that of disease prevalence—and more than fourfold the black population—invokes the overactive immune response of targeting normal cells within the body. in other words, while this approach achieved the goal of targeting a community, the overrepresenting of that community created a perception of infection risk for the entire body politic caused by a specific population within it. public health campaigns aligned two major hiv transmission routes—unprotected sexual intercourse and injecting drug use—with black communities, representing a longer history of discrimination that were intertwined into autoimmune intolerance during the pandemic. in 1987, dr. john o. brown, president of the national medical association, warned about blaming aids on black folx: “whenever they talk about sexually transmitted diseases this country has a tendency to blame everything on blacks” (“nma leader” 1987, 53). the black community faced stereotypes of being oversexualized and harbingers of disease for centuries before the aids pandemic: in the early twentieth century, us public health service physicians described the black community as “a notoriously syphilis-soaked race” (washington 2008, 160). the prevalence of drug dealers within largely minority (and, in the 1980s and ’90s, specifically black) communities influenced perceptions of drug use by black communities; yet research from the 1990 indicates that of the 66.5 million americans who identified as having ever used drugs, only 10.8 percent of these were black, non-hispanic (burston, jones, and roberson-saunders 1995, 22). what was disproportionate to the black community was the drug arrest rate: by 1990 black folx represented 41.2 percent of all drug arrests in the united states, nearly four times the rate of black drug users (us federal bureau of investigation 1997, 282). racial intolerance fueled such false representations of promiscuity and drug use by black individuals that special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 6 public health campaigns used to support messaging about aids transmission within that community. psas produced by arta and overrepresentations of black communities distorted this risk of hiv transmission primarily through depictions of irresponsible drug use, often combined with unsafe sexual practices. this is not to say these links to hiv transmission are completely absent in psas targeting other populations or to the general public but rather that the messaging to and about black communities attacked behaviors and attitudes based not on fact but prejudice. a 1989 arta poster (figure 1) depicts two black individuals seated on an urban stoop coupled with the tagline: “getting high doesn’t cause aids. it just lets it happen” (cdc 1989). the implied lack of agency regarding drug use—allowing aids to happen— signals disease transmission rather than prevention. notably, there is no messaging related to drug cessation or aids treatment, and the psa blankets all drug use, not just injectable drugs, implying a moral and health judgment of any drug use, regardless of the reality of hiv transmission. figure 1. “getting high doesn't cause aids: it just lets it happen.” poster from america responds to aids campaign, 1989. alt text: america responds to aids poster showing two black models embracing with the tagline “getting high doesn’t cause aids. it just lets it happen.” this moral judgment is echoed in a second arta poster (figure 2) featuring a black woman that depicts a lack of education as the cause of her and her baby special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 7 contracting aids. leaning over a crib, the guilt-riddled mother shares her aids story: “last year my man died. now they tell me it was aids. at the time i didn’t know anything about aids. then i had my baby and found out about it the hard way. my baby has it, i have it and all because my man was shooting up drugs and sharing needles. had i known better, i would have made him use condoms, and if that didn’t work i’d have stopped being with him. but now…” (cdc 1988a). the connection between her lack of education and the transmission of aids to her baby implies the mother’s “irresponsible refusal of knowledge was her baby’s death sentence” (scott 2003, 174). the advertisement ends with the mother’s plea to the viewer: “please don't let this happen to you. you find out about aids” (1988a). the implication here is twofold: the black mother’s (ir)responsibility for her own aids education and the black woman’s (ir)responsibility for having a baby with aids, a nod to the stereotype of the sexualized black woman. absent is any effort to address reducing drug use or reducing structural barriers to education and care. the psa evokes the politicized intolerance of the so-called welfare queen (c. cohen 2009, 143): a black woman who choses to remain ignorant about aids and who is now without a partner and with an aids diagnosis for herself and her baby, risking the body politic both health and wealth. figure 2. “i didn’t know i had aids. not until my baby was born with it.” poster from america responds to aids campaign, 1988. alt text: america responds to aids poster depicting a black woman leaning on a crib and the tagline, “i didn’t know i had aids. not until my baby was born with it.” special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 8 this (ir)responsibility placed on the shoulders of this black mother is both paralleled and contrasted with the image of the latina mother in figure 3, reflecting both an attack on women of color and creating a hierarchy of (ir)responsibility through the contrast of black and white-passing models. like the mother in figure 2, this mother is burdened with the onus of being the responsible partner in a relationship. the poster positions the latina mother as an “active, more culpable vector” in reducing aids transmission, placing the burden and blame on women of color and playing into stereotypes of hypersexualized latinas (scott 2003, 86). at the same time, the use of a white-passing model for this advertisement contrasts the irresponsible and uneducated black mother with an assertive and knowledgeable white-passing mother who has prioritized her children’s health. the mother in figure 3 tells the viewer, “listen. i’m a single mother with two boys, and i love them very much. yes, i like to date, but i need to tell you that i’m taking precautions against aids. in fact, if you shoot drugs or have a problem with wearing a condom, i suggest you stay away from me. sure i want a man to share my life with. but also i love myself and my boys too much to make any mistakes” (cdc 1988b). this final line is antagonistic to the mother in figure 2, implying a moral judgment about lacking aids education and not loving oneself because of the decision to choose a partner regardless of risk. figure 3. “a message to the third man in my life.” poster from america responds to aids campaign, 1991. alt text: america responds to aids poster showing a latina mother hugging her two children with the tagline, “a message to the third man in my life.” special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 9 while the cdc designed the arta campaign to educate populations about aids prevention, the juxtaposition of “everyone is at risk” with overrepresentation of black models sent a mixed message: not only are some individuals at more risk than others, but these same individuals also threaten the body politic because “everyone is at risk.” the lack of specific information to targeted black communities was a source of criticism from the us national commission on aids (1992, 14). in a 1992 congressional hearing of the health resources and intergovernmental relations subcommittee of the committee on government operations, reggie williams, founder and executive director of the national task force on aids prevention, testified that despite working with arta for three years, they did not listen to his repeated request to be more specific with their messaging to populations being disproportionately impact by aids. in his testimony, he unequivocally states that “one of the major reasons for high hiv infection rates in [the black] community and other communities of color is that we did not see ourselves in the messages early on in this epidemic” (us house of representatives 1992, 167). as evident in figures 1 and 2, psas from the early years of arta included racialized models but with little specific information to that community and messaging built more on essentializing than educating (c. cohen 2009, 139–43). as noted by gary rose in his 1994 testimony to the subcommittee on health and the environment subcommittee of the house committee on energy and commerce, prevention materials depicted women, specifically those from poor communities of color, as “sexual partners of intravenous drug users [and] denigrated as either the mothers of children at risk or as vectors for disease transmission” (us house of representatives 1994, 43). what rose describes is evident in figure 2 and is emblematic of his criticism of arta for its “message about prevention that internalizes explicitly our society’s phobias about ‘faggots,’ ‘junkies’ and welfare queens” (us house of representatives 1994, 40). these criticisms illustrate the autoimmune response of these campaigns. while seemingly well intended to protect the body politic, the rhetoric of these psas underscores existing prejudice, thereby discriminating in the act of combatting infection. ultimately, they depict black communities “more as risky or threatening than as at risk” (scott 2003, 87). as autoimmunity, these psas paradoxically distinguish and blur the self and non-self, targeting black communities through visual images and stereotypes, but repeating claims of “everyone is at risk.” removing the distinction of specific risk to specific populations both increases the risk of transmission within that group—seen in the 1.5 increase of aids prevalence among black folx during the arta campaign (cdc 2001, 434)—and grants a false immunity to others from internalizing such messaging, ultimately inflaming rather than quelling viral and social infection. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 10 another autoimmune flare-up: ohio’s response to covid-19 while early public health responses to the covid-19 pandemic were quicker and more robust than those of the aids pandemic, they faced their own political limitations, particularly in the us where some government and public figures politicized and discredited basic public health measures to reduce disease transmission. unlike aids, which the cdc designated initially as a disease impacting certain people and only later expanded to an “all are at risk” campaign, initially the us government depicted covid-19 as a disease that could impact anyone, with subsequent public health campaigns targeting certain high-risk groups including those who are immune-compromised. the political rhetoric of covid-19 included the othering of the disease itself, with former president trump calling it the “chinese virus” and “kung flu,” thereby paralleling the harmful and stigmatizing early labels of aids as the “gay plague” (quinn et al. 2021). these constructions of the pandemic that looked to external, xenophobic causes of the disease soon included internal blaming of black communities for higher infection rates and for disease transmission (kendi 2020), most vocally from far-right groups that saw black lives matters protestors as both spreading the disease and being immune from the public health social distancing guidelines (diamond 2020). such dangerous claims both victim-blamed historically marginalized populations and created an artificial sense of security from the disease for others, a continuation of the autoimmune processes in place during the aids pandemic. during the first months of the pandemic, the ohio department of health launched the together ohio campaign (with the slogan “in this together ohio”), which echoed arta in that it focused on collective risk and collective action to combat disease transmission in responding to the covid-19 pandemic. like arta, this campaign relied on an overrepresentation of black models in its psas, specifically those about covid-19 testing sites. in advertisements appearing on social media from june to december 2020 (figure 4), 96 percent featured black models, even though only 13.2 percent of ohio’s population identifies as black (us census, n.d.). both the oversaturation in predominantly white communities (such as proctorville at 95.2 percent) and communities with large black communities (such as bedford heights at 77 percent) is problematic (us census, n.d.). such overrepresentation can lead to assumptions that testing is for the population visually represented on the poster, which can result in a false sense of immunity. conversely, mohammed el hazzouri and leah hamilton (2019, 373–74) report that people of color respond more favorably to white models in psas distributed widely due to concerns that using models of color could result in stereotyping when public health advertisements appear outside their own communities, as in this case with these advertisements. the result can lead to alienation of both white and black communities, resulting in less testing rather than more and ultimately endangering the health of all ohioans. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 11 figure 4. ohio department of health, “in this together ohio” digital poster shared on social media to promote covid-19 testing, september 30, 2022. alt text: ohio department of health poster advertising covid-19 testing in proctorville showing a racialized model in a mask. ohio house minority leader emilia strong articulated the falseness of the slogan “in this together ohio,” noting that the slogan “evokes a sense of shared struggle, of sacrifice and of commitment to one another. but the reality is that since the onset of this pandemic—and for the greater part of a generation or more—black and brown families have seen the worst of it” (ohio house of representatives 2020). like the aids pandemic, covid-19 disproportionately impacted black communities. while the black, non-hispanic/white infection rate ratio neared 1:1 in july 2022, other rate ratios remained high: black, non-hispanic persons were 2.2 times more likely to be hospitalized (an indicator of severe infection) and 1.7 times more likely to die from covid-19 (cdc 2022). this is an improvement on rates in the early months of the pandemic, which saw the black, nonhispanic/white death rate ratio as high as 3:57 (lawton et al. 2021). addressing this health disparity became a priority for state public health departments. ohio launched several targeted health campaigns in response to the disproportionate impact of covid-19 on black ohioans: by august 2020 the black, nonhispanic/white death ratio was 1:4, the infection rate ratio was 2:5, and the hospitalization rate ratio was 3:2 (ohio department of health 2020a). however, such campaigns often focused on downstream initiatives and largely (or completely) ignored the structural factors that created such health inequity. to strong’s point, ohioans were not in this together—either in terms of the impact of covid-19 or in terms of the campaign’s visual imagery and messaging. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 12 other public health campaigns in ohio replicated this pattern of exclusionary rhetoric, specifically those targeting black communities, which further emphasized the autoaffective fiction of a togetherness campaign. in 2020, before vaccinations were available, local and statewide public health messaging in ohio focused on masking and testing to protect all communities but particularly black communities. for many black folx, masking, specifically the use of cloth masks, was a concern in light of stereotyping black men as dangerous and the rise in police violence toward black folx (kahn and money 2021). this double bind is exemplified in tweet by a black ohioan: “i don't feel safe wearing a handkerchief or something else that isn't clearly a protective mask covering my face to the store because i am a black man living in this world. i want to stay alive but i also want to stay alive” (thomas 2020). the timing of this tweet corresponds with franklin county public health department’s release of its “covid-19 general guidance on wearing face masks for african americans and communities of color,” which recommends avoiding “fabrics that elicit deeply held stereotypes [and] bandanas that are red or blue, as these are typically associated with gang symbolism [and] a scarf just simply tied around the head as this can indicate unsavory behavior, although not intended” (2020, 1–2). after outcry on social media, the health department issued an apology on twitter, stating that “some of the language used came across as offensive and blaming the victims,” ultimately perpetuating the victim-blaming through a backhanded apology that claims the racist messaging is in the receiver’s perceptions and not the communicator’s intentions (franklin county ph 2020). such guidance implies the need to protect the body politic from constructed violent threats from black persons, turning to an autoimmunity of intolerance for one population as a means of protecting the whole—rather than protecting the most vulnerable. another autoimmune response to the impact of covid-19 on black ohioans was the ohio department of health’s initiative more than a mask, designed to provide communities of color (and specifically black communities) with essential information and resources about covid-19. the department of health developed this initiative in collaboration with governor mike dewine’s creation of a minority health strike force in april 2020 to address the disproportionate impact of covid-19 on communities of color. the thirty-second psa produced for this campaign features black persons in locations across ohio wearing masks and describing the campaign’s promise to provide information to black communities and empowering the community to help themselves, with one individual stating, “it’s about us helping us” (ohio department of health 2020b). the psa concludes: “if we’re going to beat covid-19 in our community, we’re going to need a mask and more.” the psa featured black ohioans to create a sense of community and shared responsibility to each other, beginning with wearing masks and leading toward empowerment through education and collaboration. the problem, however, is special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 13 that the department of health aired the psa outside the targeted communities, which can lead to racial stereotyping (el hazzouri and hamilton 2019, 374) through purposeful misreading—implying that black communities had higher infection rates because they were not masking, instead of structural inequities (which are never mentioned in the psa). ohio senator and physician stephen huffman perpetuated such victim-blaming when he asked in a june 2020 senate health committee hearing, “could it just be that african-americans or the colored population do not wash their hands as well as other groups or wear a mask or do not socially distance themselves. could that be the explanation of why the higher incidence?” (gabriel 2020). the racist language, coupled with centuries-old racist claims of inferior hygiene (washington 2008, 160), perpetuated a false belief that the disproportionate impact of covid-19 on communities of color was a product of their own doing. moreover, the promise of “more than a mask” went largely unrealized in the year following the campaign’s launch: initiatives to address structural causes of health disparities within communities of color were underfunded.2 social media backlash to the more than a mask campaign (directed at dewine’s facebook page) largely fell into two categories: the rejection of masking entirely and claims about the falseness of racial inequities and covid-19. of this latter category, commentors blamed black folx for a higher incidence of covid-19 within their community, citing claims of looting and rioting (dewine 2020). these responses about covid-19 and race demonstrate how the body politic can invoke an autoimmune response: here prejudice and racism are coupled with the health of the ohio population, implying the threat to both health and freedom (often conflated during the covid-19 pandemic) comes from black communities, rather than recognizing the inverse and the threats to health and freedom this community has experienced and continues to experience. like the arta campaign, the covid-19 health campaigns in ohio sought to both unite the body politic and single out portions of that body that were impacted disproportionately. the immune response of defending from an external threat of disease turns into an autoimmune response in this decision to treat the body as a whole and to target specific populations: the focus becomes conflated in an overrepresentation of communities, which contributes more to intolerance and division than unification. like an autoimmune response, such campaigns do not intend to harm the body politic, nor do they even mean to harm a portion of that body but ultimately cause harm through the inability to reconcile the self and nonself. reflecting on the mirror of self and non-self the epigraph to this article reveals one of the fundamental challenges of autoimmunity: the (in)ability to reflect on self when faced with the perception that otherness is merely a distortion of self. both the spatiality and temporality of special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 14 a flare-up such as a pandemic diminish the opportunity for the self to recognize the non-self as a projection of the self’s anxieties onto the non-self, othering the non-self so that it becomes the mistaken infection that needs to be redressed. public health campaigns that rely on overrepresentation of communities of color project an anxiety of not doing enough for these communities—an anxiety based in the reality of structural racism—and fail to address the root causes of these anxieties, ultimately leading to “a failure to recognize and tolerate ‘self’” (w. anderson 2014, 609). this mirror of otherness contributes to the myopic approaches to the aids and covid-19 pandemics that failed to address historical and structural factors contributing to disease burden but rather focused exclusively on the present outcomes. the temporal challenge of meaningful reflection in pandemic autoimmunity is a product of the severity of the event and therefore the need for an immediate and robust response. reflection in the moment is challenging, all the more so if the response is an attempt to concentrate on the downstream issue of poor health outcomes and not address the underlying cause. however, the distance of time provides the opportunity for such reflection: for instance, criticism of arta and the cdc’s overuse of models from minoritized communities in its aids campaigns could have informed how communities of color were represented in covid-19 health campaigns. that public health departments seemed to overlook or ignore the lessons of the aids campaigns suggests a latent autoimmunity that emerges in flare-ups and actively divides the self and non-self. both the pandemics and the time between them mark an autoimmunity that “calls into question the unity and purity of any ‘body’ and any ‘concept’” (n. anderson 2017, 95). such public health campaigns seek unity, but in doing so, reveal the cracks of both that proposed unity and the supposed purity of both society (presumed non-racist) and public health (presumed to prevent harm). in other words, the effort to help quickly becomes an act of harm to both the individual body and the effort to support a unified body politic—as well as harmful to the immune system itself (that of public health). the autoimmune responses to the aids and covid-19 pandemics are not parallels but rather a continuum of an autoimmunity, emergent during disease flare-ups but foundational to the development of public health. some public health campaigns have perpetuated historical acts of blaming black communities for disease transmission in the guise of overcorrection and overrepresentation that provide surface-level solutions and fail to meaningfully address structural barriers to care. the us department of health and human services identified health disparities for minoritized and historically marginalized communities in the mid-1980s and identified systemic racism as a root cause of these health disparities at the end of the last century (gibbons 2005), and in april 2021 the cdc declared racism “a serious public health threat” (walensky 2021). decades of evidence and posturing have failed to address these issues; an overreliance on special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 15 rhetoric and representation has instead continued the racism inherent in the autoimmune response to disease. at the time of writing, the us and the world are facing another possible flare-up in the form of the mpox outbreak: signs of the same continuity of autoimmunity are emerging. debates about whether to focus on an “everyone is at risk” message or target messaging to at-risk groups (currently, the gay community) is merely cycling back to those of the aids pandemic and specifically arta. “‘everyone is at risk,’” notes dan royles (2022), “can feel like a well-intentioned attempt to paper over the very real effect that monkeypox is having on gay and bisexual men.” the continued autoimmune response to disease outbreak threatens the efforts of immunity—yet perhaps such a flare-up in the context of looking in the mirror to view the whole self might finally move us from the paradox of autoimmunity to the paradigm that exposes “the embodied substrate of subjectivity rather than sameness or one-ness” (e. cohen 2004, 11). critiques of public health campaigns as autoimmunity offer the type of self-reflection lisa weasel and others have demanded, “dismantling the self/non-self dichotomy” in favor of “a conception of health as bodily balance and equilibrium” (weasel 2001, 40), a commitment to social and health equity. notes 1 for a thorough account of american responses (and delayed political responses) to aids, see brier 2011, esp. 78–121. 2 in september 2021, advocates for ohio called out the health department and governor dewine for not fulfilling the promise of more research and resources to address health disparities within communities of color detailed in the april 2020 covid-19 minority health strike force blueprint (bergfeld 2021). while the 2022– 23 state budget has allocations for some of the recommendations from the blueprint, policy matters ohio notes that this funding is not sufficient (patton et al. 2021). references anderson, nicole. 2017. “auto (immunity): evolutions of otherness.” parallax 23, no. 1 (january–march): 94–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2016.1261664. anderson, warwick. 2014. “getting ahead of one’s self? the common culture of immunology and philosophy.” isis 105 (3): 606–16. https://doi.org/10.1086/678176. bergfeld, kelsey. 2021. letter to governor dewine from advocate’s for ohio’s 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https://www.google.com/books/edition/united_states_population_estimates_by_ag/zpjbsdnjmcsc?hl=en&gbpv=1 https://www.google.com/books/edition/united_states_population_estimates_by_ag/zpjbsdnjmcsc?hl=en&gbpv=1 https://www.google.com/books/edition/uniform_crime_reports_for_the_united_sta/fyozitzzghic?hl=en&gbpv=1 https://www.google.com/books/edition/uniform_crime_reports_for_the_united_sta/fyozitzzghic?hl=en&gbpv=1 https://www.google.com/books/edition/the_politics_of_aids_prevention_at_the_c/g0ulispy8owc?hl=en&gbpv=1 https://www.google.com/books/edition/the_politics_of_aids_prevention_at_the_c/g0ulispy8owc?hl=en&gbpv=1 https://www.google.com/books/edition/aids_prevention/mlpa3v0fjj4c?hl=en&gbpv=1 https://www.google.com/books/edition/aids_prevention/mlpa3v0fjj4c?hl=en&gbpv=1 https://www.google.com/books/edition/the_challenge_of_hiv_aids_in_communities/xuagaqaaiaaj?hl=en&gbpv=1 https://www.google.com/books/edition/the_challenge_of_hiv_aids_in_communities/xuagaqaaiaaj?hl=en&gbpv=1 https://www.science.org/content/article/it-s-been-so-so-surreal-critics-sweden-s-lax-pandemic-policies-face-fierce-backlash https://www.science.org/content/article/it-s-been-so-so-surreal-critics-sweden-s-lax-pandemic-policies-face-fierce-backlash https://archive.cdc.gov/#/details?url=https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0408-racism-health.html https://archive.cdc.gov/#/details?url=https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0408-racism-health.html special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) amanda m. caleb, 2024 20 weasel, lisa. 2001. “dismantling the self/other dichotomy in science: towards a feminist model of the immune system.” hypatia 16 (1): 27–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2001.tb01047.x. woods, diana r., david davis, and bonita j. westover. 1991. “‘america responds to aids’: its content, development process, and outcome. public health reports 106 (6): 616–22. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc1580341/. author bio amanda m. caleb is professor of medical humanities at geisinger commonwealth school of medicine. her research includes pandemic rhetorics and representation, the history and representation of eugenics, and narrative humility. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2001.tb01047.x https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc1580341/ campaigns of autoimmunity: public health responses to aids and covid-19 abstract keywords autoimmune responses of the body politic autoimmunity and hiv/aids: america responds to aids another autoimmune flare-up: ohio’s response to covid-19 reflecting on the mirror of self and non-self notes references author bio book review | what comes after entanglement?: activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion, by eva haifa giraud (duke university press, 2019) velocci, beans. 2025. review of menace to the future: a disability and queer history of carceral eugenics, by jess whatcott (duke university press, 2024). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312. © beans velocci, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | menace to the future: a disability and queer history of carceral eugenics, by jess whatcott (duke university press, 2024) beans velocci university of pennsylvania bvelocci@sas.upenn.edu in menace to the future: a disability and queer history of carceral eugenics, jess whatcott makes a much-needed and timely contribution to the history of eugenics that foregrounds the urgent need for abolition of incarceration in all of its forms. whatcott’s argument is disarmingly clear: “detention itself is eugenics” (xiv). that is, even as eugenics is often regarded as an injustice of the past, spaces of institutionalization ranging from prisons to nursing homes serve the same purposes as their early twentieth-century forebears. just as psychiatric hospitals, homes for the so-called feebleminded, and reformatories did a century ago, such spaces segregate populations deemed threatening or otherwise undesirable by white, middle-class actors, and in so doing, limit inmates’ biological and social reproduction for the betterment of normative society. to make this argument, whatcott traces eugenic confinement across multiple sites of detention in california as institutions first produced a “defective” class and eventually congealed into the carceral state that continues to shorten and degrade lives today. with its prologue, the book begins with the rapid spread of covid-19 through migrant detention centers to powerfully demonstrate the contemporary stakes of incarceration’s impact on life chances. it is not, whatcott suggests, a coincidence that state-run congregate living settings exposed the individuals warehoused within them to a deadly viral threat. rather, these spaces are made to contain people who are already excised from the state’s vision of an ideal future and whose death, whatever the timeline, is a necessary condition for that future to occur. an introduction laying out whatcott’s methodology and five subsequent chapters mobilize this insight to link eugenic past and present. mailto:bvelocci@sas.upenn.edu book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) beans velocci, 2025 the first two main chapters will be of particular interest to the readers of this journal, given their engagement with the materialization of categories and the politics of care, respectively. chapter 1 rigorously examines the construction of “defective” as both an inchoate category often weaponized to justify incarceration and a form of embodied personhood brought into being by the very institutions that deployed that category. whatcott makes some of their most stunning methodological moves here. instead of taking for granted an extant population of “actually” disabled people in contrast to racialized or deviantly gendered individuals pathologized as “feebleminded,” whatcott argues that the state disabled all whom it categorized as defective and funneled into institutions, regardless of how they might be categorized today. confinement had material effects as it marked bodyminds by trauma and tightly circumscribed action. when institutions performed sterilizations, they queered bodies by making them nonreproductive and therefore beyond the bounds of normative maleness and femaleness, even as sex-segregated institutions themselves produced and reinforced binary sex. chapter 2 attends to the use of purported care and treatment as punishment. the specifics are familiar within history of eugenics and psychiatry—hydrotherapy, restraints, discipline via pharmaceuticals—though still harrowing. whatcott does not directly engage with the feminist sts scholarship on care (e.g., puig de la bellacasa 2011), but the chapter’s linking of care and violence offers a clear example of how “care” alone is not a substitute for just relations. chapters 3 and 4 offer continued analysis of the california eugenics materials. chapter 3 investigates the political economy of carceral eugenics, particularly the incredible amount of labor and financial investment to keep institutions running, and the role of these institutions in a broader transition from corporate capital to a progressive administrative state. chapter 4 reads reports of uncooperative inmate behavior against the grain to locate moments of resistance and what whatcott terms “anti-eugenics cripistemologies” (136), and to resist imaginings of a utopian future that elide disability and queerness. finally, chapter 5 addresses the ongoing confinement of disabled people and the eugenic undergirding of rehabilitation and reform efforts through the twentieth century. a succinct epilogue reiterates whatcott’s ultimate goal: using this history of eugenics to inform carceral abolition in the present. whatcott makes two main interventions into the history of eugenics. first, they position eugenic confinement as a form of reproductive control. foundational histories of eugenics (e.g., kline 2001; schoen 2005; stern2005) have often located the reproductive injustice of eugenics in sterilization procedures inflicted on institutionalized people such as tubal ligations, hysterectomies, and vasectomies. whatcott draws our attention to the insidious reproductive violence of confining inmates to ostensibly single-sex institutions for long-to-indefinite periods of time; even without sterilization programs, reproduction is limited by book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) beans velocci, 2025 physical separation. as incarcerated people with children or other dependents are removed from their families, their ability to parent is again foreclosed by distance. in extending what qualifies as reproductive control, whatcott underscores the vastness of carceral violence and creates an opportunity for renewed investigation of reproductive discipline beyond sterilization. second, whatcott’s refusal to parse disability from race, race from gender, and gender from sexuality emphasizes the co-constitution of these various axes of oppression (collins 2000) through eugenics. menace to the future offers numerous conceptual innovations, and a forceful case for disability and queer analyses and an orientation toward justice in scholarship on eugenics. i fully concur with whatcott regarding the eugenic legacies that have shaped and remain active in contemporary carceral settings. at the same time, the book would have been strengthened by more direct engagement with the historiography of eugenics and other long-standing conversations about looking for “resistance” in the historical record. the book’s focus on continuity over time risks producing a static and monolithic “eugenics” that masks historical contingencies and specificities of the present. this occasional flattening is reflected in the book’s language. whatcott not-infrequently refers to eugenics as a “discourse” (14), “ideology” (135), and “philosophy” (109); for a book that so carefully attends to daily practices and experiences within institutions, menace to the future begs future engagement with eugenics itself as constituted through historically-specific practices and infrastructures. existing work on the role of eugenic science in determining institutional life, such as quests for data collection (bix 1997; porter 2018), prison experiments (blue 2009), contraceptive development (briggs 2003), and the carceral state (e.g., benjamin 2019 and hatch 2019) could add considerably to an account of eugenics as primarily a mode of thought and state-building. i would be curious to read whatcott’s take on differences between an older model of explicit, institutionally-supported eugenic science directly translated into state policy, and contemporary scientific/clinical research and state policy that insist on their own race-neutrality despite copious evidence to the contrary, and what that means for abolition in the present. the book’s treatment of resistance among incarcerated people in chapter 4 opens another door for continued conversation. whatcott ascribes the term “antieugenics” to historical actors in an effort to demonstrate these individuals’ assertion of “a right to live” and ongoing challenges to their own devaluation (134). i very much appreciated whatcott’s use of institutional documents at crosspurposes to their creation. however, i sometimes wondered if these attributions of resistance might unintentionally render one-dimensional the very people to whom whatcott seeks to be accountable as political ancestors refusing a demand for respectability and queer/crip extinction. scholarship on resistance and agency among historians of slavery (e.g., camp 2005; johnson 2003; decades of critiques of and responses to genovese [1976]) might be a fruitful site for collaborative book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) beans velocci, 2025 thinking across subfields. walter johnson, for example, has argued that in the context of the plantation, all behaviors “cannot simply be reformatted as resistance in a liberatory gesture which paradoxically reduces even the most intimate actions of human beings to (resistant) features of the system that enslaved them,” potentially erasing “the way in which enslaved people theorized their own actions” (2003, 112, 118). in menace to the future, inmates are primarily resistors: sharing answers to an iq test “challenged the notion that status [and therefore housing, classroom, and training placements] should be determined on the basis of iq testing” (138); attempted arson was “a practice of both anticarcerality and antieugenics” (139); masturbation was “an act of defiance against the gendered norms of sexual propriety” (141). but when all acts are considered “anti-eugenics,” other potential interiorities may be hidden: a desire for better housing in terrible conditions, or raw anger, or a combination of boredom and horniness. insights from scholars like johnson may help historians of eugenics grapple with the balance of recognizing violence without proof of resistance. overall, menace to the future raises fundamental questions for both historical methodology and contemporary activism. it is an important contribution to the study of carceral eugenics in both past and present. whatcott’s focus on disability, queerness, and abolition challenges scholars and organizers alike to face head-on the ongoing emergency of eugenic continuity over time. i look forward to the queer, crip future that whatcott has brought into possibility as scholars answer their call for histories of eugenics that center disability and as abolitionists utilize the power of the historical narrative they’ve woven. references benjamin, ruha. 2019. race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. polity. bix, amy sue. 1997. “experiences and voices of eugenics field-workers: ‘women’s work’ in biology.” social studies of science 27 (4): 625–68. https://www.jstor.org/stable/285560. blue, ethan. 2009. “the strange career of leo stanley: remaking manhood and medicine at san quentin state penitentiary, 1913–1951.” pacific historical review 78, (2): 210–41. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2009.78.2.210. briggs, laura. 2003. reproducing empire: race, sex, science, and u.s. imperialism in puerto rico. university of california press. camp, stephanie. 2005. closer to freedom: enslaved women and everyday resistance in the plantation south. university of north carolina press. collins, patricia hill. 2000. black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. rev. 10th ed. routledge. genovese, eugene d. 1976. roll, jordan, roll: the world the slaves made. vintage books. https://www.jstor.org/stable/285560 https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2009.78.2.210 book review 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) beans velocci, 2025 hatch, anthony ryan. 2019. silent cells: the secret drugging of captive america. university of minnesota press. johnson, walter. 2003. “on agency.” journal of social history 37 (1): 113–24. https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2003.0143. kline, wendy. 2001. building a better race: gender, sexuality, and eugenics from the turn of the century to the baby boom. university of california press. porter, theodore. 2018. genetics in the madhouse: the unknown history of human heredity. princeton university press. puig de la bellacasa, maría. 2011. “matters of care in technoscience: assembling neglected things.” social studies of science 41 (1): 85–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312710380301. schoen, johanna. 2005. choice and coercion: birth control, sterilization, and abortion in public health and welfare. university of north carolina press. stern, alexandra minna. 2005. eugenic nation: faults and frontiers of better breeding in modern america. university of california press. whatcott, jess. 2024. menace to the future: a disability and queer history of carceral eugenics. duke university press. author bio beans velocci is an assistant professor in the department of history and sociology of science and the program in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at the university of pennsylvania. https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2003.0143 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312710380301 book review | menace to the future: a disability and queer history of carceral eugenics, by jess whatcott (duke university press, 2024) references author bio     original research before and after: dogs’ biographies along and across the mexico-us border     iván sandoval-cervantes university of nevada, las vegas ivan.sandoval-cervantes@unlv.edu     abstract in the mexican border city of ciudad juárez, numerous animal protection organizations seek to rescue street dogs that have been abandoned or abused. many of these organizations seek to place previously abused dogs in “forever homes” in the united states. to accomplish this, the dogs often go through a transformation that transforms them into objects of care, making them adoptable. in this article, i analyze how narratives and photos used in social media enable this transformation by creating individual animal biographies. these animal biographies are not innocent stories; rather, they show how care is constructed in specific contexts. the construction of these biographies is presented as a non-political attempt to make the lives of abandoned dogs better; these biographies are, in fact, filled with political implications of what the mexicous border is like. thus, i argue that animal biographies have a significant social role, particularly through social media, and have to be understood as political devices that can create, challenge, or strengthen ideas about life, care, and ethics. resumen en la ciudad fronteriza de ciudad juárez, méxico, las organizaciones protectoras de animales buscan rescatar perros abandonados, víctimas de abuso, o en situación de calle. muchas de estas organizaciones intentan que los perros rescatados sean adoptados de manera permanente en los estados unidos. con esta finalidad, los perros generalmente son transformados en “objetos de cuidado”, haciéndolos adoptables. en este artículo analizo cómo las narrativas y las fotos que se usan en las redes sociales permiten llevar a cabo esta transformación al crear biografías animales individuales. estas biografías animales no son historias inocentes, más bien demuestran cómo el cuidado se construye en contextos específicos. la construcción de dichas biografías que intenta transformar, para bien, las vidas de los perros, aparenta ser un acto apolítico. sin embargo, estas biografías están repletas de implicaciones políticas sobre la vida fronteriza entre méxico y los eeuu. por lo tanto argumento que las biografías animales tienen un significado social, particularmente en las redes sociales, y que tienen que ser entendidas como artífices políticos que pueden crear, desafiar y fortalecer concepciones sobre la vida, el cuidado, y la ética.     keywords dogs, biography, animal protection, mexico, border, care     introduction one facebook post: two pictures, side by side, of a dog rescued in the mexican border city of ciudad juárez. the picture on the left, the before, the past. the picture on the right, the after, the now, the future. on the left, a dog’s face is just barely hidden, outside of the frame. yet we can still see a neck, red with bruises, a ribcage showing. on the right, the dog lays on a gray couch. his eyes are shinning. now that you can see “bill’s” face, you could even say he is smiling, no longer feeling the need to hide outside the frame. a handkerchief around his neck, this dog looks comfortable. both are pictures of the same dog, a rescued white mixed dog that looks like a poodle mix, but, in a way, they are also pictures of two different dogs.1 the dog on the left, a body without a face, without a name, and without a voice. another anonymous street dog that barely exists as an individual. the only reason to photograph him is to show that his pain is the pain of many, and that his existence is reigned by uncertainty. the dog on the right shows a dog with a face, a name, a story of overcoming great adversity. you photograph this dog to document his life, his happiness, and his relationship with his present and future human caretakers. these two pictures can only be understood in this way when they exist next to each other, and only next to each other can they signal the possibility of a “before” and an “after.” both of these pictures might share the same space in the “before and after” collage, but the role they play in the potential biographies of those dogs is in no way symmetrical. this collage, however, is not only about this particular dog, but also about the construction of dogs’ biographies as objects of care and, thus, about the effects of that care directed towards rescued dogs. these photo collages are used by dog rescuers who circulate them as an attempt to get people, mostly from the united states, to adopt street dogs from ciudad juárez. that is, these images are, in part, intentional, in the sense that they show the potential of a dog as an object of care. these photo collages, i argue, are also an attempt at creating incipient animal biographies, as they seek to capture dogs’ particular personalities, thus, making them visible as individuals. this visibilization creates paradoxical results that go beyond the individual animals themselves. the use of technology to document changes in the lives of dogs emphasizes the idea that these dogs are individuals, and becomes a precondition for recognizing subjectivity, thus allowing the one-family/one-dog relationship that adoption requires. the process of producing individuality through digital storytelling and photo collages also sets in motion the possibility of specific dogs becoming objects of care—only if they can become objects of care will someone care enough about them to adopt them. additionally, the photo collages almost always exclude images of the people who rescued these dogs. this exclusion might be an attempt to separate the dog “as an object of care” from previous caretakers, usually women (often working-class women), thus erasing previous relationships and making some women invisible. however, here i analyze how these practices and discourses of care are not fully transparent but opaque with politics that extend beyond the images and beyond the dogs themselves. following aryn martin, natasha myers, and ana viseu, i understand care as “a selective mode of attention [that] cherishes some things, lives, or phenomena as its objects” while excluding others (2015, 627). in other words, care is not “an innocent activity”; rather, it has to be understood within specific and localized predicaments (puig de la bellacasa 2017, 164). thus, the fact that the practice of care that emerges in the mexico-us border is not trivial but fundamental in understanding how care relations are created between human individuals and individual dogs. i am interested in the simultaneous creation of animal biographies, through social media and photo collages, and the creation of individual animals as objects of care, and in analyzing what this simultaneous creation says about the mexico-us border, dogs’ lives, and social media. a feminist lens that emphasizes the relationship between women and care work (see haraway 2008) can help us analyze how certain dogs become “objects of care,” excluding other dogs and the women who rescued them. this work is particularly fundamental in the examples highlighted here because it erases what maría puig de la bellacasa refers to as “the sharp acknowledgement of interdependency” of interspecies love (2017, 82–83). i have conducted fieldwork in ciudad juárez and el paso since 2017. i have accompanied animal welfare associations as they perform rescues and sterilization campaigns, engage in public communications, and attend official events. i have also talked with and interviewed people in public veterinary hospitals, the state prosecutor’s office, and the local agency for animal well-being. throughout my work, i have engaged in participant observation and interviews. i have also looked closely at social media in ciudad juárez and across mexico. i draw on this work to contextualise the analysis presented in this article. this article is structured in the following way: in the first section, i provide specific context for this case study. that is, i discuss ciudad juárez-el paso and the animal protection organizations that i am analyzing. in the second section, i analyze the way images, like the one discussed in the opening vignette, create the possibility of conceptualizing individual animals biographically (see krebber and roscher 2018a), and how specificity and individuality operate in this context (including the act of naming specific animals [see borkfelt 2011, 2022]). in the third section, i look at how care is constructed and how it organizes bodies and narratives that are attached to individual bodies and to borderland territories and beyond. in the fourth section, i argue that, even though this article is based on a small sample, the case of the rescued dogs of ciudad juárez can tell us important things about the role of animal biographies, care, and social media (particularly facebook) that could be applied in other contexts. i conclude that animal lives and bodies are politically important to think with as we try to understand the relationship between animals and specific historical contexts. in this regard, i propose that we continue to engage with human-animal research that emphasizes the connections between animals and sociohistorical contexts, and that pays special attention to how practices of care, indifference, and activism emerge in specific localities (e.g., candea 2010; davé 2023; garcía 2023; gonzález-duarte 2021; pedraza 2023; ruizserna 2021; parreñas 2018). ciudad juárez and its dogs in ciudad juárez, right across the mexico-us border from el paso, texas, stray dogs abound. in the early 2010s, a few years after felipe calderón initiated his failed “war on drugs,” turning the city into one of the most dangerous cities in the world, the number of stray dogs skyrocketed, multiplying exponentially. throughout these years of unleashed violence, the point of contrast was always with el paso, texas, the so-called sister city. in a not-so-distant moment in history, before the rio bravo/rio grande became the “natural border,” el paso and ciudad juárez were the same city: el paso del norte. since el paso del norte split into two, various narratives have explored these border cities, including the concept of “sister cities,” that suggest there is a kinship-like relationship between both urban centers. given this trajectory, it is indisputable that the populations of both cities share a rich history and numerous connections. however, it is essential to question what lies beyond this narrative of sisterhood, and in what ways these narratives that imply care are built on inequality. thus, without denying the real and historical connections between ciudad juárez and el paso, it is a fact that the international border has created significant differences between ciudad juárez and el paso. for example, el paso is often considered as one of the safest cities in the us, while ciudad juárez is continually listed as one of the most dangerous cities in the world. this context has created what howard campbell (2009) calls “the drug war zone,” where victims of violence become ambiguous symbols of the state and the measures taken to control such violence (see wright 2011). however, violence was also present in the city before the war on drugs failed experiment erupted. ciudad juárez is well known for the ongoing feminicides that became national and international news in the 1990s. the so-called muertas de juárez became a symbol of the oppression and resistance of encroaching labor practices that considered working-class women disposable. in this sense, ciudad juárez became a “sacrifice zone” (see juskus 2023), in which the state showed a lack of intentionality to stop the violence that was occurring since it would also mean reviewing labor practices that were especially beneficial to transnational companies and maquiladoras, sweatshops (see boyd and orellana 2021). after violence in 2008 intensified, ciudad juárez became fundamental in the war on drugs and gave way to a more generalized violence produced by criminal organizations and opportunistic criminals. as the violence spread throughout mexico, ciudad juárez was also engulfed by what rossana reguillo (2021) calls the “necro-machine” (la necromáquina). the necro-machine highlights the transformation from violence directed towards the benefit of criminal activities (the narco-machine) to violence that becomes the end in itself, when killing and dying is not enough to “feed the machine.” rather, it is about destroying and dissolving the potential of a life without violence. however, even in this context, dog rescue and animal protection organizations have emerged all throughout the city, and with a significant presence in social media. according to a chronicle by al jazeera america, precisely during this period, from 2008 to 2011, the number of stray dogs increased from 20,000 to 200,000 (garcia and alvarez 2013). michelle garcía and ignacio alvarado álvarez (2013) explained how this surge was attributed to the number of people forced to leave the city during those years when ciudad juárez was considered the most dangerous city in the world. those who could migrated to el paso, texas; others returned to their hometowns throughout mexico. in addition, the economic recession of 2008 further pushed people out of the city. as people left ciudad juárez, they also left their homes and their pets behind. the emergence of animal protection organizations and activism in ciudad juárez has to be understood in relation to an increasing “animalista movement” that is taking place across the entire country (see sandoval-cervantes 2023b). yet the border location of ciudad juárez is significant because it informs the biographies of the rescued dogs. the rescued dogs that i discuss in this article are not only passive bystanders of the border condition of the city; their stories and their representations are actively informing the narratives about the el paso del norte region and the border. as i will discuss later in the article, the fact that dogs from ciudad juárez cross the border into the us is materially and symbolically different from dogs that are adopted within mexico. there is a dynamic relationship between the border and the photo collages as elements in the before and after. i focus here on the stories of dogs that appear to exist solely as generic dogs on one side of the border and as individual dogs with proper names on the other. i also examine how their images are transformed and the implications of their past experiences in ciudad juárez. therefore, the border, as a physical space, becomes a narrative resource, a turning point that transforms the collective into the individual in one direction and, in the other, the specimens into species. although, this turning point applies to individual dogs, it must also be understood within larger narratives that seek to generalize experiences and to open new possibilities for the future. these narratives emphasize life changes reflected not only in the quality of life but also in how those lives are perceived. in other words, it is an aesthetic change captured in photographs circulating on social media. beyond the physical, material space occupied by the border, the border also marks a before and after. when people cross the border, they sometimes magically transform into different individuals: they do not exceed the speed limit, they do not litter. of course, this applies when people cross from south to north because when they cross from north to south, the transformation is reversed. in both cases, there is a before and after. thus, i also use the border to imagine how dogs, as a species and as individuals, change and seem to travel through time. they extend their life expectations, sometimes in radical ways, sometimes in unexpected ways. the transformation that the dogs experience from left to right, and from mexico to the us, combines three factors: individualization, the possibility of the future, and aesthetic changes. the act of rescue itself is a turning point, a before and after, marking the dog's history. sometimes, the rescuers themselves rename the dog, giving it a new name to signal that specific change, as was made clear during my fieldwork in ciudad juárez (see sandoval-cervantes 2023a). creating dog biographies: from the generic to individuality to provide some context, it is important to point out that the animalista and the rescue efforts in ciudad juárez are varied, addressing a multitude of causes. organizations and individuals are involved in education efforts at schools, ongoing negotiations with the local government, protesting bull fighting, taking cases of animal abuse to the legal realm, among other things. although organizations tend to have a specific focus, their members are often involved in several of these efforts and often interact with other organizations and other animalistas. in this article, i will focus on the specific efforts of dog rescuers involved in sheltering and placing dogs for adoption. these organizations also focus on affordable public sterilization campaigns that take place during the weekends in neighborhoods considered “low-income.” besides this work, some organizations devote significant portions of their time and energy to rescuing stray dogs, providing them with temporary shelter with local and independent rescuers, and the promoting the rescued dogs as adoptable in the united states. as part of this process, and to achieve their purpose, these organizations post photos on their facebook websites. these photos portray malnourished, unhealthy, visibly sick stray dogs found on the streets of ciudad juárez. sometimes accompanied by text describing how these dogs were found, these photos serve as an initial way to promote their work. in one post, one organization discusses a small terrier living “a wretched life,” destined to spend the remainder of her miserable life on the streets of juárez. the text reads, “when v [the rescuer] saw her, the impossible turned into a miracle.” after several months of rehabilitation, the one-eyed dog, now named alvie, was photographed in a vehicle and, the post continued, was “heading to her new temporary home and will soon be available for adoption with our sister organization in the united states.” the before/after transition, and the beginning of a biography, are made clear in the case of looky, a small gray and black dog. in one of the pictures, looky looks up to the camera, directly staring at the viewer. in the picture next to looky, we observe a desert landscape peppered with scraps and a cardboard makeshift house. the text says, “looky has a new haircut and will soon be ready for adoption. he was saved from a remote area along the mexico/us border by an amazing person who helps lost dogs in the desert. soon, he will be sleeping on sofas and being pampered in arizona.” little music, a female schnauzer-looking dog, appears in the “before” photo laying on a concrete floor, her fur coat showing patches with almost no fur. her face, pressed against the floor, hides her expression. looking at the “before” photo, one could easily assume that the little music was sick, dehydrated, even dead. in the “after” photo, little music’s fur looks shiny and smooth; she also looks bigger, almost as if she had grown. she has a serious look as she stares at the camera. the text reads, “little music on her way to our sister organization, it won’t be long before she’s adopted. she had a loooooooooooong road to recovery, and now that she’s healthy she’ll be adopted soon.” in these examples, we can see how rescuing a dog marks the beginning of their new life. the rescue is the turning point, but what happened before the rescue allows for the construction of dogs as subjects, something similar to “quasisubjects” (dicenta 2020) or “neoliberal subjects” (velasco santos and gonzález nava 2023). according to mara dicenta (2020), specific nonhuman animals can become a “quasi-subject” and mobilize “attentions” even if they never achieve “full subjecthood.” in a similar way, paola velasco santos and alejandra gonzález nava (2023) discuss how fireflies have become “neoliberal subjects” through their direct participation in the local conservation tourism efforts in tlaxcala, mexico. the act of the rescue is the first step in the construction of rescued dogs as subjects, placing them at the center of socioeconomic relationships that construct them as potential subjects while incorporating them, as individuals, into a web of transnational relationships. in other words, to make dogs adoptable, their adoption has to be seen as part of a narrative, an individual narrative that justifies the adoption of a specific dog and allows for the individual dog the possibility of escaping a violent context. the hardships that these dogs faced while in ciudad juárez and their ability to endure them are highlighted throughout the posts. these dogs survived in impossible conditions and escaped death in the urban desert of ciudad juárez; their lives are exceptional and thus merit some form of biographical retelling (krebber and roscher 2018b, 1). yet this “before” narrative is almost always impossible to understand or even to imagine. before the rescue, we can only understand these dogs as part of a collective, and we must assume how miserable their lives were, only guessing how much violence they have endured. although it is never articulated, those dogs who die while on the streets will remain anonymous, dogs without a name, without a story to tell, no biographies or photo collages to represent them. if biographies give animals their full agency back (pouillard 2022, 177), then the lack of a biography suggests that street dogs have no agency and no subjectivity. the stories that these biographies are telling are about movement, about moving from the streets into a home and, implicit in these particular posts, moving from mexico to the united states. so the lives of these rescued dogs are described in terms of successful journeys. see, for example, this excerpt for one of the rescued dogs: “what a long, long journey this little boy has had. and now after all he’s been through, the end of the journey is the beginning of the next journey, that journey is called, being part of a lucky, loving family. today is a new journey for this little and lucky guy. juárez to colorado a long way for such a little guy.” the biography of this particular dog is a set of interconnected journeys: the journey from the streets to being rescued, the journey after being rescued to becoming adoptable, the journey from ciudad juárez (imagined as a barren landscape of suffering) to a loving home in the united states. biographies, according to andré krebber and mieke roscher (2018b), attempt to capture animals as individuals and to make them visible as individuals. almost by definition, they seek to attribute a self to their subjects, tying the knot between the biography’s subject and the reader. the reader, and potential adoptive human, will be interested in becoming part of a dog’s journey. in these examples, we can see different aspects of how the rescue and, then, the border become turning points, discrete events that become foundational in creating an individual narrative for a specific dog. before these turning points, the dogs in question are seen only as part of a collective (street dogs), and their previous experience is only important in how it helps shape a narrative of overcoming obstacles and, then, opening up the possibility of a human helping them overcome the border. before these dogs were rescued, they could not be recognized as individuals, and it is only as individuals that they can be adopted. before these dogs were rescued, they lived in precarious and difficult conditions, and here it is assumed that dogs cannot live a good life where they were born, and without humans naming them. when they are rescued, they are named, and they are seen as starting a new, better life. naming is an important part of these biographies. as sune borkfelt argues, “names are representations; irrespective of whether they are connected directly to characteristics of those named…they always have the power of representations” (2022, 155–56). in the case of the dogs in ciudad juárez, the process of naming can represent several things. it can represent a specific humorous situation linked to the dog while the dog was still a street dog, or a quality of the dog that is meant to erase his previous situation (like little music because of the way the dog barks, or looky because the dog is nice to “look at”). in other cases, names can be purely aspirational. for example, a rescued dog was name justice after an extremely violent attack, and two of the puppies that survived that attack were named after regional authorities in hopes they would get adopted (see sandoval-cervantes 2023b). adoption becomes a way to move in the direction of a “good life.” although there is the incorporation of narratives that emphasize the dogs’ past, the biographies that reshape the public image of animals can also “[deny] them of their lived experience and identity” (see pouillard 2022, 173) by seeking to present humananimal relationships as harmonious after the adoption has taken place. the photo collages seek to create rescued dogs as objects of care, but what does it mean to think about care in a critical way, “beyond the conflation of care with affection, happiness, attachment, and positive feeling” (murphy 2015, 719)? caring as erasure the act of rescuing and adopting street dogs from ciudad juárez appears to be an evident act of care. yet, rather than assuming that care is always a selfless act that defies politics and transforms inequalities, we should consider care’s “darker side”—that is, how these “acts of care are always embroiled in complex politics,” and how acts of care often rely (consciously and/or inadvertently) on a discourse of “innocence” as a way to obscure “the violence committed in its name” (martin et al. 2015, 627). in this section, i analyze how the before and after photo collages used on facebook construct dogs as objects of care, and what this might mean for the dogs. following the lead of martin, myers, and viseu (2015), i look at care as a complex, context-specific act that can involve good intentions and bad faith. that is, are there political implications when rescued dogs from ciudad juárez are constructed as objects of care? i argue that the construction of dogs as objects of care pushes narratives of care and the centrality of care in human-animal relationships in a way that can be interpreted as a double erasure. as i explain in this section, the process of rescue-adoption can produce the erasure of, first, the complex politics of mexico and the us, and, second, the dogs’ lived experience prior to being rescued and adopted. these two erasures are central to the production of dogs’ biographies. this criticism, however, does not mean that the rescue-adoption efforts should be disregarded as ill-intended—the organizations and people involved in this work sacrifice their time and limited resources in an environment that is mostly indifferent and sometimes even hostile. rather, this criticism is raised against the generalized depoliticization of human-animal relationships as a form of the “anti-politics” that is part of numerous, ongoing humanitarian efforts worldwide (see ferguson 1994; ticktin 2011). in the next section, i will elaborate on the specific role that social media has on the creation and perpetuation of anti-politics in human-animal relationships. in order to discuss how caring can become a vehicle for erasure, i once again rely on martin, myers, and viseu, who define care as “an affectively charged and selective mode of attention that directs action, affection, or concern at something, and in effect, it draws attention away from other things” (2015, 635). using this definition helps establish how this mode of attention, often “full of romantic temptations that disconnect acts that feel good from their geopolitical implications” (murphy 2015, 725), can be used to reframe certain sociopolitical contexts through the reshaping of individual stories. to put it differently, when acts of care are centered in individual stories (in this case, individual dog stories), the complex political relationships between those individual stories and the geopolitical location become secondary and are deemed unimportant. the act of care—the rescue, in this case—becomes the element that moves the story forward, shaping what we know, what we do not know, and we don’t want to know (see martin et al. 2015, 634–35). the erasure of the complex sociopolitical relationships obscured by individual acts of care can take many different forms. for example, during a fieldwork visit with one organization in ciudad juárez, we visited a temporary shelter run by an independent rescuer, anabel. anabel does not receive any governmental funding, and she was not affiliated with a formal rescue organization. rather, she dedicated her free time and limited resources to rescuing dogs and taking care of them. as part of the “independent rescuers” of ciudad juárez, anabel had seventy-four dogs under her care in a house on the periphery of the city. anabel funded her efforts through donations from other organizations that helped her by funding food and medicine for specific dogs. anabel is a working-class woman, who used to work in a maquiladora located on the mexico-us border. anabel did not have a visa and was unable to cross into el paso. anabel had been working with a transnational organization directed by a us citizen name grace. grace, who did not live in texas, visited the shelters in ciudad juárez frequently and provided funding for anabel and other independent rescuers in the city. grace was a middle-aged woman who was involved in numerous humanitarian organizations and had been working closely with mexican citizens involved in animal protection efforts. before arriving at the shelter, the group (composed of both mexican and us citizens) had visited a family in ciudad juárez that was trying to get their dog adopted. they were a large family and couldn’t take care of a sickly dog. acting as a translator, i told them that their dog would have a “good life,” and that he would probably end up in a “million-dollar house.” on our way to the shelter, grace said that dogs often help people avoid political discourses and act in compassionate ways. in 2017, when this visit took place, less than year into trump’s first presidency, the political climate in the us was belligerent and still reeling from the 2016 elections. the relationship between mexico and the us was not much better, and racist discourses around mexicans and border populations still reigned during many of the conversations on the border. when i asked grace about how this impacted donations coming from the us, she said that, in her opinion, when people donate to her organization, they are not often thinking about politics; rather, they are acting out of compassion. “even trump supporters donate to our cause,” she said. for grace, it was important not to make their work political, because doing so could carry important consequences. this depoliticization of the rescue-adoption efforts is clear in the before and after photo collages that continually refer to the streets of ciudad juárez simply as an isolated and impoverished desert. these posts do not seek to explain why there are so many dogs roaming the city streets, the role of the government in curbing streets dogs, or the role of the us in the creation of the destitute border city landscape. that is, although street dogs are produced in specific historical and political contexts, in order for them to be rescuable and adoptable, their lives need to be explained as emerging outside of politics. introducing politics into the biographies of dogs risks politizicing acts of care that, as grace put it, are conceived as acts of compassion. this erasure of the complex politics of place and of dogs as products of sociohistorical events also constricts how people can think about dogs and about the possible lives of dogs. in the previous section, i discussed how dogs’ stories are meant to show the possibility of going “from rags to riches.” this narrative emphasizes a dog’s transformations as part of multiple journeys that will eventually allow a specific dog to have a “good life.” these journeys are fundamental in the attempt to construct a biography that takes the rescue as “the point of inception” (sandoval-cervantes 2023b) that fundamentally transforms the dog by opening up the possibility of a new way to relate to humans. implicit in this narrative, however, is the idea that before being rescued that particular dog did not live a life worth living; they did not live a good life. this implication appears as an erasure of the dog’s previous lived experience and identity. it also assumes that there is a direct relationship between a human socioeconomic position and a dog’s quality of life (sandoval-cervantes 2016). that is, the “good life” mentioned by grace earlier can only exist after the last “journey,” the one that will deliver the dog to a “loving family” in the us. previously, dogs’ lives were not “good lives”; rather, they lived “bare lives,” reduced to merely attempting to survive (see agamben 1988). this second erasure complements the first one in constructing an image of ciudad juárez (and, it could be argued, of mexico in general) as a place that must be escaped in order to live a life worth living. it limits the possibilities of understanding humandog relationships in the city, and it proposes that dogs’ lives are only worthwhile if they are part of an owner-pet dyad. a critical take on this interpretation might argue that the same could be said about rescued dogs adopted by mexican families living in mexico. however, it is not only the geographical location that matters but also the class location of the adoptive families. i argue here that the fact that these dogs cross an international border matters because it creates the impression that there is no turning point, no reversal for the dog. it is certainly true that a rescued dog can “move up” in terms of social class within mexico, and this often happens (see sandoval-cervantes 2016). thus, in some ways, for a dog to “move up” in terms of class within mexico, it would also require the erasure of the dog’s previous lived experience and of the people doing the care work. yet the possibility of ending up in the streets of the same city or of another city within mexico is still latent. when a dog “moves north,” this possibility no longer exists. the facebook photo collages of rescued dogs looking for an adoptive “forever home” are visual devices that make rescued dogs attractive to potential adoptive families in the us. the photo collages construct street dogs as objects of care, but only after they have been rescued. the families that adopt rescued dogs have already chosen an object to care about; they are willing to be moved by this other (martin et al. 2015, 636). the families that adopt these dogs do so mostly based on the information they gather from social media sites and the pictures posted there. that is, they care about dogs as they are represented in those pictures, and as i stated in this section, those pictures often erase local politics and the inherent inequality in human-dog relationships. the anti-politics of social media as illustrated in the opening paragraph of this article, organizations involved in rescuing dogs rely heavily on images that are meant to circulate on social media. these images have multiple purposes: they showcase the work that people in such organizations do, they highlight the importance of their mission, and, in the case described here, they seek to attract the attention of potential adoptive families for rescued dogs. in order to do all of this, organizations involved in the rescue-adoption process use photo collages that show the transformation of specific dogs as an indicator that they are ready to be adopted. using social media and the photo collages, these organizations construct rescued dogs as objects of care. in this construction process, they also prevent the possibility of street dogs becoming political subjects by relying on their rescue-adoption efforts as a form of humanitarian intervention. like practices of care, humanitarian interventions are regularly assumed to be “good” and outside of politics. thus, i argue, following james ferguson (1994) and miriam ticktin (2011), that generally animal protection organizations in mexico, and rescue-adoption organizations in particular, often engage in the “anti-politics” machine employed by humanitarian agencies throughout the world. although there are differences in how ferguson (1994) and tickin (2011) talk about “anti-politics,” both seem to agree that humanitarianism becomes a political discursive device that frames sociopolitical conflicts and problems as technical and individual issues. that is, humanitarianism removes those problems and conflicts from their political and structural contexts. this removal, states ferguson, is not accidental or simply “ideological icing” (1994, xiv), but rather how development generates its own form of discourse, how it constructs its objects of knowledge, and how it creates a structure of knowledge around such objects. the animal protection movement in mexico is already depoliticized as it fails to properly address structural and systemic issues in the relationships between humans and animals in the country (see sandoval-cervantes 2023a). thus, the before and after photo collages are not, by themselves, the defining element of this anti-politics machine but are important elements in the ongoing entrenchment and discourse reproduction that depoliticizes animal lives in favor of individual cases that can be solved through apolitical acts of care. in other words, one does not need to care about the history or the political conditions that produce street dogs; one need only care about individual dogs. in some ways, this depoliticization of animal abuse runs parallel to antiimmigration narratives that have also sought to construct potential refugees and migrants. didier fassin (2005) argues that, in france, the balance between compassion and repression has shifted to privilege the “suffering body” of migrants rather than their biographies. in other words, compassion and empathy are directed towards sick and suffering migrant bodies, erasing their personal biographies and complex transnational relationships. the before and after photo collages accomplish this move for rescued dogs. the before and after photo collages that become objects of care for potential adoptive families engage in the double erasure mentioned in the previous section and thus become part of the anti-politics machine of animal protection in mexico. the photo collages promote an understanding of street dogs as a problem that can be solved through technical medical procedures (i.e., sterilizations) and individual behaviors (such as taking care of pet dogs and adopting street dogs). this narrative is mostly based on the selective construction of some street dogs as individuals who have already overcome adversity. this individualization process, i argue, is central in the depoliticization of human-animal relations for several reasons. first, it centers individual suffering and the suffering body—reverting that suffering is proposed as the solution (fassin 2005; tickin 2011). second, it recognizes street dogs only as suffering animals and does not recognize any possibility of a good life for street dogs in ciudad juárez—only through their journey to the us can they live a “good life.” a potential re-politicization movement would need to reinscribe human-animal relationships in specific territories, thus, in a way, re-territorializing the human-animal relationship in specific sociopolitical contexts. conclusion scholars who work on human-animal relations have sought to put animals at the center of their own narratives, not just to see what these narratives have to say about humans but as a way to reconceptualize animals as political subjects. yet in this paper, i have tried to analyze how some of the ways in which biographies are constructed can also depoliticize animal lives by flattening the relationship between specific sociopolitical contexts and animals, and centering individual stories. i argue that this is part of an anti-politics machine that removes individual dogs from larger sociopolitical contexts. anti-politics is mostly predicated on a romantic view of care that focuses on individual stories and individual solutions. acts of care, thus, are active components in this process. in some ways, this anti-politics machine also seeks to disconnect humans and dogs from their “co-history” (haraway 2008, 12) by creating increasingly divergent narratives of violence. rescued dogs are able to escape violence and, one could argue, even “forget” about it, while humans are forced to remain. those who remain are unlikely to live a good life as the threat of violence and abandonment is always latent. alternatively, the narratives of dogs’ suffering bodies turned into objects of care also runs parallel to narratives about migrants in some contexts: those considered worthy of care are the suffering bodies. yet the work that rescuers perform is still important even if it is for the benefit of individual dogs. thus, to what extent can we employ “a critical practice of care” (martin et al. 2015, 636) that pays attention to unequal power relations and questions how we construct objects of care? how can animal biographies challenge simplistic interpretations of the lives of those animals that have lived ordinary lives? in other words, how can we politicize the lives of animals that do not become individuals? in the case of the mexico-us border, where before and after photo collages rely on ideas about fundamental, irrevocable 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companion animals in everyday life: situating human-animal engagement within cultures, edited by michał pręgowski, 169–81. palgrave macmillan. sandoval-cervantes, iván. 2023a. “do strict criminal penalties protect animals from abuse?” sapiens: anthropology magazine. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/animalrightsactivism-mexico/ttps://www.sapiens.org/authors/ivan-sandoval-cervantes/. sandoval-cervantes, iván. 2023b. “gaining voice through injury: voice and corporeality in animal rights activism in ciudad juárez, mexico.” cultural anthropology 38 (4): 541–66. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca38.4.05. ticktin, miriam iris. 2011. casualties of care: immigration and the politics of humanitarianism in france. university of california press. velasco santos, paola, and leonor alejandra gonzález nava. 2023. “la luz del ecoturismo: la producción social de las luciérnagas y las trampas de la fe neoliberal.” anales de antropología, edición especial 50 aniversario, 71–81. https://doi.org/10.22201/iia.24486221e.2023.85391. wright, melissa w. 2011. “necropolitics, narcopolitics, and femicide.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 36 (3): 707–31. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/657496.     author bio iván sandoval-cervantes is a mexican anthropologist, currently an associate professor of anthropology at the university of nevada, las vegas. his current research addresses the politicization of non-human animals and animal rights/welfare discourses in mexico. iván sandoval-cervantes es un antropólogo mexicano, actualmente profesor asociado en antropología en la universidad de nevada, las vegas. su investigación analiza la politización de los animales no-humanos y los discursos de derechos y bienestar animal en méxico.     original research idiosyncratic and non-unitary: disability memoirs and antinormative bioethics     matthew wolf-meyer rensselaer polytechnic institute wolfmm@rpi.edu     abstract in this article, i argue for an antinormative bioethics based in disability experiences drawn from memoirists’ accounts of idiosyncratic needs and desires that are obscured by normative impulses in mainstream bioethics. bioethics has long been shaped by a commitment to the normal, which often casts disabled people and the category of disability as anterior to bioethical concerns about individual rights, protections, and property. focusing on disability experiences and the category of disability—as developed by disability studies scholars and supported by materialist feminist science and technology studies—provides a grounding for an inclusive bioethics that creates livable lives through careful and creative alliance building in and beyond the contexts in which bioethics has traditionally operated. i focus herein on the non-unitary experience of autism and the facilitation of people who identify as autistic to develop this inclusive and responsive bioethical praxis.     keywords cybernetic theory of disability, communication, autism, normativity, disability memoirs     introduction since its inception, american bioethics has tended toward the normal as normative (fiedler 1996; jonsen 2003; stevens 2000). in the us context, this tendency has resulted in a focus on individual rights and protections, which has served patients and at-risk individuals and communities by protecting their interests against coercive and abusive scientific and medical practice, as in the case of the tuskegee syphilis experiment (jones 1993). the normative impulse in american bioethics has also tended toward the protection of individual property rights, as in the case of protections of tissue samples and dna provided by patients and research subjects (waldby and mitchell 2006). as a system of thought and advocacy based in its social context, these normative concerns reflect the interests of many americans, particularly as they deal with concerns that arise in the context of for-profit medical and scientific practice (elliott 2011). because american bioethics is rooted in ideas about the individual and property, many of the concerns that bioethicists adjudicate—particularly in clinical and laboratory settings—result in satisfactory, if not ideal, outcomes for patients, family members, caregivers, clinicians, and researchers because they can be financially compensated in the context of a market-based system of care and personhood (fox et al. 2008). one area where bioethics continues to face recurrent tensions is in its relationship to disability (goering 2008; newell 2006). these tensions have come in two forms: first, there is a eugenic strain in some bioethics, based upon normative ideas about the human and what the aim of medicine is (garland-thomson 2020; myser 2003); second, disability, by its very experience, challenges normative expectations based on the varied and non-unitary experiences of disability (davis 2002; ginsburg and rapp 2013; kafer 2013). in this article, i focus on the category and experiences of disability as a way to articulate an antinormative and inclusive bioethics of the idiosyncratic. rather than a bioethics of the normative, which tends toward exclusions of disability experience and expertise (hartblay 2020; stramondo 2022)—and potentially compounds implicitly eugenic conceptions of the body politic—a disability bioethics that relies on disability as its foundation serves as a critique of bioethics-as-usual, specifically its focus on individual and property rights as immaterial goods. such an attention aligns with louise hickman’s (2019) characterization of the ethics of crip technoscience, which she suggests offers knowledge-from-below; i prefer to situate disability experience as marginalized rather than existing in a hierarchy, which allows for the possibility of centering disability experiences instead of needing to subordinate disability or ability as the primary basis of knowledge-making. here, by centering disability experiences, i argue for a materialist disability bioethics based in a cybernetic conception of disability that attends to the ways that bodies are produced and facilitated through the institutions and infrastructures that make everyday life possible. such a position draws strength from critiques born of crip technoscience’s approaches to disability justice (andrews et al. 2021; mingus 2017; piepzna-samarasinha 2018) that situate the critique of technologies—and medicine and medical technologies foremost among them—as central to debates about “rehabilitation, immunology, and mental disability…[as] central to how we imagine accessible futures” (hamraie and fritsch 2019, 17). bioethics can serve as a form of disability-informed advocacy that forwards livable lives as a goal of building accessible futures, which i argue can be grounded in a cybernetic approach to bodies and the environments they exist within (wolf-meyer 2020b, 2024). increasingly, disability-based critiques of bioethics are emerging as attempts to unsettle the normative and exclusionary frameworks that explicitly and implicitly shape bioethical practice and inquiry (garland-thomson 2017; scully 2019; stramondo 2016). the three areas that these critiques tend to fall into are focused on concerns regarding “quality of life,” eugenics, and accessibility. disability scholars have pointed out how normative concerns with “quality of life” reinforce ideas about able-bodiedness as the default; anything less than “full” personhood as based in unimpaired mobility, senses, and cognition leads to claims of an erosion of “quality of life” (arstein-kerslake 2021; kittay and carlson 2010). the normative bioethical question that emerges in this framework is, at what point does an individual’s quality of life erode to the point of making a life not worth living? individual iterations of this question are generally answered through recourse to utilitarianism grounded in ableist conceptions of what kinds of living are valued (e.g., caplan 2014; damasio 2010). by extension, some bioethicists have tended toward accepting lowered quality of life as impinging upon the families of disabled persons—and society as a whole—leading to arguments about whether or not disabled lives are “human” lives at all (see peter singer’s statements in kittay 2009). these ableist positions build on a history of eugenic thinking in bioethics, which has intensified in relation to emergent technologies focused on genomics and detectable impairments in utero. parents with fetuses that demonstrate a likelihood of a disability are put into the position of deciding whether to carry a potentially impaired child to term and then to parent them. this status of “moral pioneer” (rapp 1988, 1999) is held in tension with perspectives from disability communities that posit genetic screening and the termination of fetuses with disabilities as tantamount to genocide (taussig et al. 2003); terminating the pregnancy of a fetus that has a demonstrable, immanently life-threatening impairment (e.g., hydroencephaly) is quite different than deafness or down syndrome, both of which are forms of impairment that do not pose immediate threats to life expectancy. bioethics that support the termination of pregnancies based on conceptions of societal “burdens” and quality of life tend toward this eugenic position. most recently, a turn toward questions of accessibility has resituated concerns about quality of life: if a community or space is attuned toward inclusivity—e.g., there are curb cuts to allow mobility—a person’s quality of life can be dramatically improved (titchkosky 2011). rather than targeting interventions on an individual person’s life in an effort to improve medical outcomes, an attention to accessibility demonstrates how a societal commitment to ensuring that different experiences of everyday life can be facilitated in material ways leads to positive individual and community outcomes; accessibility supports “disabled” people and people across the life course as they incorporate bodily changes that occur alongside aging (hendren 2020). in addition to supporting those in advanced age, attention to accessibility also provides support for children as they learn to navigate the world. feminist bioethicists have directed attention to how “prototypes” of disability have shaped debates within philosophy and bioethics, often leading to generalizations that obscure the idiosyncratic experiences of disabled people and their families. in her work on the “faces” of intellectual disability, licia carlson (2010) points to the ways that the “face of suffering” serves as a vehicle for bioethical decision-making about disability in the abstract. the “face of suffering” utilizes “prototypes” that rely on generalizations so that the everyday experiences and possibilities for an actual person are subsumed in the philosophical imaginary of what their lives could be like at their worst; for example, in philosophical and bioethical debates about prenatal testing and the abortion of fetuses that test positive for trisomi-21 (down syndrome), the figure of the “suffering” individual with trisomi-21 is used to justify moral stands that rationalize abortion. this use of prototypes imagines that all experiences of a disability are similar and largely negative. in his critique of the use of suffering in this way, pekka louhiala draws on his experience as a pediatrician to argue that “if a subgroup or an individual can be shown to have a markedly low quality of life, we must be careful with conclusions about causality, since the low quality may not be a necessary consequence of [intellectual disability] but of environmental origin” (2004, 116). in prototyping experiences of disability and ignoring environmental contexts, the “suffering” of a disabled individual is imagined as an intrinsic, physiological quality by bioethicists—which aligns with the medical model of disability—and bioethicists justify abortions of potentially impaired fetuses based on their assumption that the failure of medicine to cure any given disability leads to the ongoing suffering of those diagnosed with the condition.1 instead, attention to the lived experiences of disabled people and their families demonstrate how their “suffering”—as louhiala hints at—is a result of structural problems that they confront in their need for the provision of care. the use of a prototypic “face of suffering” obscures these systemic problems in favor of isolating disability as an individual problem to be solved. through prototypic approaches, normative bioethics compounds exclusion and marginalization for disabled people and their families. this reliance on prototypes is especially challenging when normative bioethical positions are ableist in ways that are unmarked and pass without notice for many able-bodied bioethicists (wieseler 2020). because bioethics finds its roots in moral philosophies that were largely developed by able-bodied, white european and american men (simplican 2015), assumptions about able-bodiedness, whiteness, and patriarchy are deeply embedded in bioethical traditions, which can be expressed in ideas about labor and productivity, the experience of being unmarked by racialized and sexualized categories in society, being largely exempt from institutional scrutiny, and the experiences of gendered roles of labor in and out of the family; for disabled people, none of these elements go without notice, as basic assumptions about labor and social unmarkedness are immediately brought into tension with experiences of bodies that are impaired in ways that make some kinds of work challenging and the gaze of able-bodied people part of everyday life (garland thomson 1996). in these ways, disability is always a compounded experience (frederick and shifer 2019; raghuram 2019). from an initial impairment, people are disabled in classrooms and workplaces—and in families and clinics—in ways that additionally disadvantage them, as louhiala suggests above. they are confronted with intrusive questions and curious gazes. they are foreclosed from easy participation in social events and ignored in institutional design and practice (hamraie 2017). when bioethics compounds intersectional marginalization, it leads to further harm and marginalization, in and out of clinical spaces; bioethical intervention as a form of advocacy might serve to defray these exclusions. in the following, i focus on two contributions that disability studies makes to bioethical praxis. the first is an engagement with the category of disability, which draws on contributions from scholars across the social sciences and humanities. the second is attention to the non-unitary experience of disability, drawn from disability memoirs of neurodivergence. in both cases, what disability provides for bioethics is more than a neutral thought experiment: both the category and experience of disability disrupt normative assumptions about bodies, experience, and institutions with attention to how the moral authority of bioethics can expand the possibilities of human experience in ways that support disabled people and their families. these examples also, importantly, ground bioethics in more inclusive traditions that work against ableism and its effects. throughout the perspectives that i draw on, i am invested in how materialist feminist science and technology studies can be used to expose how institutions and infrastructures make embodied experiences legible and how a commitment to the material situations of everyday life can create more inclusive social formations that support a wider variety of human experience. in committing to this materialist position, i work against the idealist forms of bioethics that are often detached from the affective qualities of human connections and that treat medical and scientific quandaries as abstract problems to be solved (kittay 2009; wolf-meyer 2020a). bioethical problems are always matters of life and death as well as matters of relations and connection; addressing how relations and connections are made and sustained through institutions and infrastructures necessarily demands an attention to the material constraints on our everyday lives that a cybernetic approach to disability helps mobilize. normativity and the category of disability in the practice of medicine, the normal and the normative inform each other. “normative” ethics and medical practice are based on standards and expected outcomes, providing healthcare providers and bioethicists a framework for their decision-making. those standards, however, are based on normal and abnormal bodies and “typical” outcomes based upon prior clinical experience and scientific literature. as the normal was defined through statistical reason, exceptional cases were produced as outliers by design (hacking 1990; porter 2011). as exceptions, normative practice cannot anticipate what likely outcomes might be; this leads, in some cases, to exceptional patients being treated as a “normal” patient would be—which includes when disabled people are compared against “typical” experiences of already-exceptional ways of being in the world, including, as i discuss below, autism. in this way, there can be expectations about what “normal” autism presents as and how it should be addressed clinically, even when, individually, healthcare providers accept that each person will have a specific experience based on that person’s cluster of physiological capacities, social and environmental contexts, and access to healthcare and other care-providing institutions and persons. normative expectations and the practices they enable implicitly reinforce ideas about normalcy and how normalcy can be achieved through adherence to normative standards despite the acceptance that becoming normal is impossible, both because of its slippery nature (i.e., who is actually “normal” in all ways? [davis 2002]) and because individual circumstances will never accord with the realization of normalcy. because normative standards of practice and the bioethics they inform are based on aggregates of data that favor the population of patients that fall into the significant bell curve that defines the “normal” (davis 1995), the result can be that atypical experiences—of clinicians and patients—are treated as exceptional and unworthy of close scrutiny due to their unlikeliness of reproducibility. instead, these idiosyncratic cases might be positioned at the center of bioethical practice, exposing how the normal and normative operate within medical and everyday practice. beyond medical contexts, the usage of the “normative” in philosophy and disability studies tends to diverge, where philosophers associate normative actions with what the “right” action is and disability studies scholars tend to associated the normative with the institutionalized impulse toward creating particular kinds of subjects and behaviors. on one level, this is a variation in technical language; on another level, the disability studies’ usage of “normative” is intended to unsettle philosophical usage of the “normative.” rightness, oughtness, and shouldness—which are intrinsic qualities of normative behavior from a philosophic perspective—are all indebted in their everyday enactment to norms in a society, which are often grounded in conceptions of the normal and abnormal (kittay and carlson 2010). moral philosophy does not exist outside of its social context, but reproduces it (faubion 2011; keane 2015); claims to philosophical exceptionalism, wherein a decision can be made outside of the social context of everyday life, are an enactment of the “god-trick” of objectivity and obscure how situated philosophers are in their social milieu (haraway 1997). the employment of “normative” in disability studies is often a critique of dominant institutional forms and practices that compel individuals to behave and comport in specific ways—or risk being treated as abnormal, which ranges from being disabled to criminal (ben-moshe 2011; kafer 2013; mcruer 2006). to invoke the normative in the context of disability bioethics is to gesture to this double meaning and to recompose philosophical bioethics through an engagement with disability and its critique of how normalcy is weaponized through seemingly neutral discourses—such a bioethics—and work toward unraveling these discourses’ cultural underpinnings. disability scholars make a critical distinction between disability and impairment (shakespeare 2010; sterne 2021) that works to decenter medical expertise as the basis of bioethics. “impairments” are marked by an inability to do something based upon physiological conditions and their environmental situation and are rooted in material forms of exclusion; a motor control impairment might lead to a speech disability, or an auditory impairment might lead to a signal processing disorder or deafness. medical interventions might seek to create or repair impaired capacities through surgery, prosthetics, pharmaceuticals, or occupational and physical therapy (wolf-meyer 2014), which leads to the “medical model of disability,” in which disability is cast as being able to be cured—yet not all impairments can be cured, and even those that might be resolved through medical intervention may still leave individuals different than their able-bodied peers (clare 2017). for example, cochlear implants might “cure” deafness, but the hearing of cochlear implant recipients approximates “normal” hearing (friedner 2022; mills 2011). thus, impairments become disabilities in the context of social norms. deafness, in a community that widely uses gestural speech, american sign language or otherwise, is not a disability, as it has social support to facilitate communication for people with atypical hearing. this has been the case, even recently, in places such as martha’s vineyard (groce 1988), where hereditary deafness has been common. normative expectations about bodies and their capacities move impairments into the realm of disability, which serves to expose these expectations and their normative basis, particularly as expressed in material infrastructures of everyday life. again, in the case of deafness, communicative norms that are based on unimpaired speech and hearing expose both the general expectation of fluent speech and full hearing, which has bearing on speech impediments such as lisps and stutters as well as nonnormative forms of speech such as african american vernacular english and accented speech (dumas 2012). atypical speakers, whatever the basis of their variance from “normal” speech, are subject to forms of exclusion and bias that are rooted in or consonant with ableist assumptions about bodies. as a means to counteract deeply rooted forms of institutional exclusion, disability scholars point to disability’s ubiquity (davis 2002; ginsburg and rapp 2013; kafer 2013). as a category, disability is one that everyone living will fall into over time, through disease or aging. for some people, disability is a transitory and acute condition; for others, it is a lifelong experience. cross-culturally and historically, the category of disability changes alongside normative expectations as a response to social conditions, and what is accepted as a disability in one moment might not be in another historical moment given changing norms, medicine, and technologies (ingstad and whyte 1995; snyder and mitchell 2006). this variability in the understanding of an impairment as a disability can lead to forms of exclusion associated with disabilities varying, sometimes in direct counterpoint to the availability of accepted treatments. as medical treatments become more available, disability can be interpreted as a choice—as in the refusal of deaf people to accept cochlear implants (mauldin 2016) or the refusal of parents with children diagnosed as autistic to support their treatment with applied behavior analysis, which some parents and autism activists characterize as dehumanizing (suskind 2014). because of disability’s exceptional status in relationship to the normal, it exists in the paradoxical position of being both intensely scrutinized and widely ignored (wolf-meyer and friedner 2022); its ubiquity is revealed when disability interrupts the life of an individual or family and otherwise disability is ignored or suppressed. this eruption of disability can lead to “narcissistic shock” (rapp and ginsburg 2001), as individuals and families confront their beliefs about able-bodiedness. disability’s appearance in these ways is dependent on its exclusion, concretized in assumptions that disability—and impairment—exist within specific bodies rather than as effects of the material situations of everyday life. if the traditional medical model of disability placed disability in bodies, and the social model of disability situated it as a function of the interaction between impaired bodies and specific environments, disability as a cybernetic experience draws attention to how the interactions between bodies, dominant ideologies of disability and ability, and social environments create feedback systems that compound experiences of disability while also attending to the ways that micro-interactions between individuals and their caregivers, environments, and technologies facilitate participation in social life (wolf-meyer 2020b). such a conception of disability points to how all humans are impaired in small and large ways and benefit from the facilitation that is provided by those we interact with, the environments we exist within, and the technologies we employ to interact in “normal” ways. some individuals may depend upon more intensive forms of facilitation (kulick and rydstrom 2015), but we are all facilitated all the time. rather than being discrete individuals, we are always composed through complex interactions between bodies, institutions, and infrastructures. attending to our interactional interdependencies and affective relations provides an inclusive grounding for bioethics that moves beyond disability’s exceptionality and marginality and accepts that we are all disabled in specific ways and benefit from the support of others and the material environments that we have created for ourselves as individuals and communities (davis 2002; dokumaci 2023). bioethical attention can then focus on where and how facilitations occur—and how they might be better attuned to the desires and needs of disabled individuals and their communities. this cybernetic model of disability is rooted in feminist materialism, particularly as it has been adopted in science and technology studies. drawing inspiration from gregory bateson’s (2000) social cybernetics, which sought to describe the complex social, environmental, and technological interactions that bodies have and their epiphenomenal production of “mind,” donna haraway (1991) used the “material semiotic” to capture how bodily experiences are shaped by diagnostic categories, discursive regimes, and everyday speech. haraway’s approach echoed the spinozist philosophical work of genevieve lloyd and moira gatens (gatens and lloyd 1999;gatens 1996), which argued for conceptualizing bodies as produced through their social and environmental interactions. bateson asks readers to “consider a blind man with a stick. where does the blind man’s self begin? at the tip of the stick? at the handle of the stick? or at some point halfway up the stick? these questions are nonsense, because the stick is a pathway along which differences are transmitted under transformation, so that to draw a delimiting line across this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit which determines the blind man’s locomotion” (2000, 319). in this parable, bateson suggests that the body as it tends to be conceptualized is compartmentalized in ways that chafe against its lived experience, especially in relation to the technologies that extend our bodies into their environments. cutting our bodies at the perimeter of the skin belies how dependent they are on the technologies that make everyday life possible, and the invocation of a blind man and his walking stick brings this prosthetic dependency into relief (forlano and glabau 2024; felt 2019; hendren 2020). where bateson’s use of disability is as parable, disability bioethics mobilizes actual experiences of disabled people to make the material situations and consequences of their impairments evident and subject to the elaboration of ethical problems (belser 2016; kudlick 2005). in so doing, disability experiences unsettle the ideal type that bateson employs and demonstrate the complexities of narrowly defining the body as bound by the skin; instead, a properly materialist disability bioethics provides the conceptual tools to describe the interactions between bodies, technologies, environments, and norms—as embedded in institutions, policies, and practices—and the necessity for treating bioethical problems as necessarily idiosyncratic ones that compel finding solutions that move beyond medical problems as narrowly defined as problems of the body. in this context, disability bioethics serves as a site for creating connections between bioethical practice, science and technology studies, and the social study of medicine, all of which have complementary tools for describing the experience of disability and how its material conditions produce sites of tension, conflict, and marginalization. centering the category of disability as the philosophical basis of bioethics has the potential to align bioethics more closely with the lived realities of all people, disabled and not. functionally, this means beginning with questions about how bodies are being facilitated or impeded and how these challenges might be addressed. this attention to facilitation requires moving beyond the strict category of disability as it is applied to specific bodies in specific contexts and moving toward an understanding that bioethics can serve as a form of advocacy that does not attempt to weigh in on which lives are worth living, but argues for making lives livable based on attention to the interdependencies that all humans have on their social others, technologies, and environments. it is less a matter of whether a person is disabled than how a person is made disabled by situational conditions and what might be done to mitigate this experience for an individual and their immediate network of kin and caregivers as a form of structural justice-seeking (young 2011). answering this question of disability-making inevitably requires addressing the overlapping qualities of physiological capacity, environmental and social facilitation, and normative expectations. each case will be idiosyncratic and based on the situation of a given individual, but experiences may resonate in their relation to set categories of disability and their material infrastructures and discursive regimes—to the degree that they can be treated as separable elements (friedner 2022; larkin 2013; velho 2021). in this respect, attending to how people diagnosed with autism create communication infrastructures through their idiosyncratic use of language is illuminating of how bioethical attention to individual disability experiences might provide the foundation for more expansive forms of advocacy. the nonnormative basis of disability experience memoirs written by disabled people and their family members point to how categories of disability exist along a spectrum of possibilities. autism is modal here, where its spectral nature is encoded in its category (eyal 2010; grinker 2008; yergeau 2017); while the category of autism collects a set of demonstrable and shared experiences—self-soothing, avoidance of or discomfort with social interactions, affective differences from neurotypical individuals—the expression of these “symptoms” varies considerably, making no two autistic people exactly alike in their experience of autism (fein 2020). similarly, treatments of autism vary in their success at achieving outcomes aligned with behavioral norms. as a category, autism is useful to the extent that it provides individuals, families, healthcare providers, and other authorities with a framework for the care of a person diagnosed with autism—especially state-based care of individuals and their families (silverman 2013). but, on an everyday basis, the category of autism is less important than the practices that aid an individual and their community in maintaining a life that is livable and free of the frictions that impede an individual and their interdependencies. i discuss three of the cases presented here in more depth in unraveling (wolf-meyer 2020b)—the karasiks, the suskinds, and the goddards—and put them into conversation with a fourth case here to draw out distinctions between the experiences of whiteness and disability (bell 2012) and that of a black-identified person diagnosed with autism, anand prahlad. intersectional engagements with disability require attention to how racism and ableism compound experiences of marginalization, which can be hard to apprehend when either is situated outside of analysis. comparing cases helps to surface these overlapping influences in institutional and everyday experiences and how they impede individual access to facilitation. lived experience of disabilities and their outcomes differ based on social context (stenning 2024), as is well demonstrated in the family memoirs written by ron suskind (2014) and judy and paul karasik (2003). in both cases, children diagnosed with nonverbal autism at an early age benefited from their interactions with televisions, which provided them with scripts to memorize and perform. drawing on the television programming he watched in the 1950s and 1960s, david karasik was able to extrapolate from the situations that characters on television find themselves in and was able to discuss his life with his family in ways that employed analogy; his anxiety about a family wedding reminded him of a plot from a superman television show, which he was able to share with his sister judy. knowing the same show, judy acknowledged david’s discomfort and allayed it. throughout his adulthood, david was homed at a series of residential care facilities, which addressed his desires and needs differentially. when they failed to meet his needs and desires, he lashed out at himself and proved difficult for staff to manage. lacking a shared framework provided by the television shows he watched, he was unable to communicate to his family the challenges he faced. these challenges were compounded by his access to technology: born in the early twentieth century, david lacked access to vcrs and dvd players that would allow him to replay speech acts in ways that he could gradually learn to acquire them. this technological means is something that owen suskind had access to in the 1990s, and it allowed him to learn everyday forms of speech that were accepted by the people in his social world and that made sense in non-analogic contexts. owen’s family raised him with steady access to disney films on vhs, and in his childhood he replayed scenes with a focus on specific linguistic interactions. enacting the scripted interactions and improvising interactions based on characters from the films allowed owen to work through whatever was impeding his ability to communicate. he slowly acquired a repertoire of phrases that allowed him to communicate with his family, healthcare providers, and educators, as well as growing confidence in his ability to communicate in socially accepted ways. as a young adult, owen graduated from a two-year college program and learned to live independently, which david was never able to do. although there may be physiological differences in owen’s and david’s capacities for communication, what distinguishes their experiential difference is the breadth of social facilitation they receive from their families, caregivers, and the staff at the institutions they interact with, as well as their access to specific media technologies. in both cases, the form of media consumption they utilize is not recognized as an authorized form of therapy for autism or communication disorders. instead, the familial acceptance of owen’s and david’s uses of technology in the ways that they employ it provides a space for each of them to develop communicative forms that are idiosyncratic yet share structural similarities. their outcomes are unpredictable, but normative expectations of speech acquisition—which often cast media consumption as problematic (e.g., zimmerman et al. 2007)—would have advised against their exposure to as much television as they consumed. in fact, when discussing owen’s seemingly miraculous use of language with a physician, his parents were told it is meaningless echolalia. attending to how the children and their families use media provides a means to attend to the novel forms of facilitation that their families use and supports their continued success in the face of ableist biases as concretized in institutional practice. first-person accounts of autism point to similar issues with nonnormative forms of communication. in the secret life of a black aspie, anand prahlad (2017) details his experiences as a black and disabled person who experiences synesthesia as part of his autism. while he communicates in typical ways—he is a poet and memoirist by profession—his experience of the world and language is significantly different than those around him. as people communicate to him in speech, his experiences of those communicative acts evoke sensory experiences that are tactile and visual. in turn, central to his work as a memoirist is attempting to convey these nonnormative sensory experiences to his reader to demonstrate the lived differences that are foundational to his communicative and everyday experiences. prahlad exists in a structural position of multiple marginalization as both black and disabled, and while these intersectional points might be addressed by an attentive healthcare provider, his subjective experience of language, communication, and human interaction will always be deeply particular to him as a person. he describes his communicating interactions like this: “people talk to me and they assume i’m hearing and understanding their words. but usually i’m listening to their colors. i’m seeing them. i’m feeling their temperatures. i’m smelling their scents. and whatever i see or smell or touch, i taste” (2017, 5). this idiosyncratic experience of language means that any attempt to normalize prahlad will inevitably run against the specificity of his experiences, which can never be made “normal” and must be responded to in their particularities. similarly, peyton goddard’s account of her experience with autism is conveyed through poetry that is enabled by the facilitation of her caregivers, who support her arm while she types on an assistive keyboard. for her immediate friends and family, goddard’s keyboard speaks her writing aloud, making her able to communicate her everyday needs and desires. but she also maintains a blog where she posts lightly edited verse that she writes with assistance. for example, i write ready for whetting thesis that reared worth-reported-nurtured-net-zero cherubs wired differently will try and try to bystanders please, yet years and years understaters see them as beasts until their certain withered selfs are potently puny and rest they pray urges them to stop treading tear-filled waters and give up. (goddard 2012) as communication, goddard’s writing does not abide by typical modes of information transference or transparency in meaning; attending to her needs and desires demands caregivers to know her intimately and work with her to translate her writing as mediated by her keyboard into actionable communication. moreover, goddard is not a straightforward example of a person diagnosed with autism. in addition to autism, goddard has been diagnosed with motor control issues, fixates on complex behaviors (like picking up all the lint and dust bunnies in a room), does not seem particularly perturbed by most sensory experiences, likes touching others and being touched, and is intensely social. she experiences frequent, long-term insomnia, manic and depressive periods, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficits, and epilepsy. as a patient, she exceeds typical understandings of autism and requires attentive care based on her idiosyncrasies, which her memoir attests to for readers. with regard to these diverse experiences of autism, there is no “universal” treatment that can lead to specific outcomes, nor can blanket forms of accommodations be mandated to ensure that everyone has the same outcomes. the reality that each experience of a disability category is unitary and idiosyncratic points toward the need for bioethics to resist normative arguments in favor of addressing the expressed needs and desires for individuals and their facilitation given specific social and material environments. these caring environments can be based upon a breadth approach to the expressions of a disability where the bioethical—in partnership with insights from the social sciences, humanities, and disability activism—can advocate for a variety of practices to support disabled people and their families rather than one, normative standard and expected outcome. in this way, the bioethical becomes less based in normative expectations about disability and normalcy and more committed to the lived experience of disability in ways that acknowledge that disability and impairment are always a challenge to the normative because of their material situations and consequences. conclusion: idiosyncratic ethics disability serves as an impetus for changing bioethical praxis in substantive ways. bioethics and bioethicists have been critiqued by disability-focused scholars for being unable or unwilling to address disability and the ways that bioethics, medicine, and scientific practice have compounded the marginalization of disabled people. rather that perpetuate these marginalizations, bioethics stands to improve the lives of disabled people and their networks of care by deploying the moral authority of bioethics as a catalyst for institutional change. this commitment to improving the lives of disabled people and their networks of care depends on the willingness of bioethics practitioners to collaborate with disability experts and take seriously the idiosyncratic nature of disability experience; it also depends on a willingness to forgo the normative in favor of a conception of individual need and desire that is inherently singular. a crip technoscience-informed bioethics has the tools to build a formidable structure to support these claims and ground them in conceptions of life as interdependent, influenced by its material environment, and buoyed by interpersonal and technological facilitation, all of which is supported by medical and scientific practice. ultimately, a more idiosyncratic and person-centered bioethics will require a reconceptualization of bioethics’ mission, moving from its role in the clinic, hospital, and laboratory as a mechanism to protect individual and institutional interests and toward a praxis that advocates for mechanisms to improve lives lived outside of those spaces. the challenge, conceptually, that disability poses to bioethics given bioethics’ philosophical genealogies, is that disability is treated as exceptional or anterior to the normal (canguilhem 1989). if moral philosophy has been informed by assumptions about the normal—both in terms of kinds of people and of what moral and ethical decision-making is meant to uphold—disability has been placed as an exception or interruption to the normal (davis 1995). this exceptional status of disability is clear in the accounts of thinkers such as peter singer (2009) and jeff mcmahan (2005), who understand disability—and especially congenital impairments—as something that rarely occurs and exists at the margins of the foundational possibilities for human life. structured in this way, decisions about people who exist in normative extremes uphold what the norm is—and in singer’s and mcmahan’s views, what the norm ought to be. instead, accepting that disability is part and parcel of human life, and founding bioethics in disability as a category and set of experiences, provides a robust way to expand the conception of the normal and the mission of bioethics as a form of advocacy for livable lives by attending to the material situations of bodies and the institutions and infrastructures their everyday situations are made through. these concerns about normalcy are the basis for significant critiques of bioethics and the reliance in some intellectual traditions on expectations of the “value” of individual lives, particularly in normative ethics. inasmuch as singer and mcmahan have become the focus of attention for anti-ableist critiques of normative bioethics, they represent merely the public face of deeply held sentiments that are apparent in debates around genetic screening for disabilities, to name only one persistent area of debate. since the 1990s, scholars have demonstrated how expectant parents are encouraged—and sometimes coerced—into prenatal screening. despite most genetic markers being based on probabilities of specific outcomes, expectant parents are put into the position of needing to make decisions about the kind of child they might have and how it might impact their lives as caregivers. this position of “moral pioneer” is based on assumptions that most children will be born with the capacity to be “normal” and encourages parents to make decisions that uphold normative ideals about ability and disability (rapp 1999). for example, because achondroplasia is a probability that genetic screening can demonstrate, many little people activists have argued that prenatal counseling is a form of eugenics (taussig et al. 2003), upholding norms about stature and size despite centuries of evidence that the lives of people with achondroplasia are not appreciably different than those without achondroplasia (gollust et al. 2003). whereas singer and mcmahan have elevated themselves to be targets of critique, the challenging reality of the everyday practice of medicine and the ethical issues that patients, their families, and healthcare providers face is predicated on the forms of ableism that uphold and are upheld through normative expectations that these stakeholders have. even tempered language, as in the case of a recent multidisciplinary review of achondroplasia and its screening and outcomes, can implicitly uphold norms about “quality of life,” which implies less “quality” for people diagnosed with achondroplasia than normal people. for example, “achondroplasia can also be associated with reduced quality of life due to functional impairments and psychosocial challenges and, in some individuals, the condition is associated with reduced life expectancy” (savarirayan et al. 2022, 177). the promise of an antinormative bioethics is that it seeks to unsettle these expectations of normative practice and normal outcomes, substituting an acceptance that each patient and their experiences will be idiosyncratic—even when they might share qualities with other patients. in accepting the non-unitary basis of disability, normative bioethics cedes ground to the bioethics of the idiosyncratic. the ethical, properly framed, is a response to a specific situation and the need to weigh outcomes for all of the participants in the situation (badiou 2001). ethical decision-making is always idiosyncratic; it becomes moral decision-making when it upholds norms that are situated in conceptions of the good. at some remove from the situations that disabled people and their families face, normative bioethics can embrace a level of abstraction that is dehumanizing (carlson 2010). attending to the lives of disabled persons and their families provides a clarity to bioethical advocacy that accords with the possibilities that individuals and families have available to them, particularly when these possibilities chafe against normative expectations of “quality of life” and the experience of any given disability category. additionally, attention to the lived experience of disability troubles the possibility of normative ethical claims as they apply to individual lives. that one experience of a disability is necessarily different from another and that both will vary over a life course means that ethical claims about an individual’s life—especially as they are captured in discourses about “quality of life” that seek objective measurements of life’s worth—are troubled at their foundation (goering 2008; wolf-meyer 2020b). in disability’s idiosyncrasy, it provides a challenge to virtue ethics and its reliance on standards of action based in professional practice that often accepts “quality of life” as the basis for medical decision-making (holland 2011; oakley 2013). because virtue ethics seeks to uphold norms through adherence to standards of practice and standards of practice originate in understandings of typical patients and their assumed outcomes through medical care, holding virtue-based positions in relation to idiosyncratic needs for care has the potential to set care providers at odds with the desires of specific people. in this way, adherence to virtuous decision-making can uphold professional standing while eroding the care of individuals. professional virtue stands to obscure the need to attend to the idiosyncratic desires and needs of disabled people. in counterpoint to virtue ethics, ethics of care approaches embrace the specificity of individual experience (leget 2013; ricoeur 1992), and provide the basis for conceptualizing what advocacy for disabled people might entail in their everyday lives. in her research on elder care in chicago, elana buch (2013) points to the ways that caregivers are positioned to supplement the sensory impairments of aged clients of in-home care provision, serving as testers for potentially spoiled food and attending to intimate bodily care in ways that are specific to a person’s needs. caring successfully for a person in these contexts depends on a caregiver’s attunement to the complex overlap of needs, desires, and impairments that a person embodies, as well as the caregiver’s recognition that standards of practice may obscure what is best for a particular individual; for example, a person may benefit from the occasional meal out of the house, but this depends on a caregiver transporting them and paying for the meal in contravention to institutionalized standards. similarly, attention to the specific modes of communication that a person depends on—regardless of its typicality (taylor 2008)—provides the foundation for social connections to be developed and maintained. such care depends on an intimacy built between caregiver and recipient of care, which can place an undue and uncompensated burden on caregivers who feel compelled, due to their ethical commitments, to provide recipients of care with robust emotional support in addition to standard forms of care. accounting for these burdens allows for the possibility of arranging more caring situations for care providers and recipients alike. attending to how disability-focused scholars have conceptualized the category of disability helps to demonstrate how central disability’s importance is to everyday life, the human life course, the organization of institutions, and the social settings of human interactions. avoidance of disability in and beyond bioethics is purposeful in that it helps to maintain the possibility of exclusionary normative conceptions of health, well-being, and disease. but engaging with the category of disability shows how we all pass through or dwell within disability, and it is the work of ableist social norms to obscure that reality. centering disability as a categorical impasse through which bioethics needs to move has the potential to shape bioethics and its conceptions of praxis, as well as changing how disability is conceptualized beyond its role in bioethics and the lives of disabled people. a focus on the individual expression of disability and its situation within its social, environmental, and technological world helps to show how an individual is being disabled or facilitated and positions bioethical advocacy to make demands on actors and institutions in ways that can make a life more livable, both for a disabled person and their broader network of family, caregivers, and institutional actors. in this way, bioethics as a collaboration between disabled people, their communities, healthcare providers, social scientists, and humanities scholars can forward more inclusive models of livable lives with attention to the social and material supports that aid in the care for disabled persons. this advocacy work takes time, as all care does (wolf-meyer 2025), but the capitulation of bioethical decision-making to set policies accepts established norms as a means to govern the lives of diverse individuals. doing bioethics from a disability perspective requires a commitment to the labor that care demands. note 1 i use the phrase “diagnosed with” to denote the institutional contexts in which diagnosis is primarily based in expert knowledge production outside of relations with specific patients. moreover, in 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development in children under age 2 years.” journal of pediatrics 151 (4): 364–68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2007.04.071.     author bio matthew wolf-meyer is a professor of science and technology studies at rensselaer polytechnic institute in troy, new york. he is a medical anthropologist and historian of medicine whose research focuses on the neuroand psydisciplines in the us. falu, nessette. 2025. “predatory medicine: concealed landscapes of sexual violence and racial capitalism.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–22. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © nessette falu, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license predatory medicine: concealed economies of sexual violence and racial capitalism nessette falu university of texas, austin nessette.falu@austin.utexas.edu abstract this article addresses the extensive sexual violence against women by physicians in the united states. i focus on the case of george tyndall, a physician in california who sexually and racially violated hundreds of students at the university of southern california for decades. through an sts black feminist lens, i argue that sexually predatory behavior by gynecologists is an invisible outcome of systemic mechanisms operationalized within healthcare and its institutional networks. i propose an analytic, predatory medicine, to examine the broad layers of intimidation and abuse of power, sociohistorical and over time, that conceal these complaints and cases to protect institutional power and its racist masculinist domination. i survey a diverse scope of sources such as film, legal documents, policy reports, and journalism. keywords sexual violence, gynecology, intimidation, predatory, racial capitalism introduction sexual violence by physicians against patients, primarily women, is a silent plague in the united states. according to the atlanta journal-constitution (ajc), between 1999 and 2015, 3,100 physicians were accused of sexual violations. among these, 2,400 physicians received sanctions for sexual infractions directed at patients (teegardin et al. 2016). the thousands of sexually violated patients are mostly women (cisgender and queer) but also include cisgender men and the members of http://nessette.falu@austin.utexas.edu/ original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 2 the queer and trans community.1 among the victims who sought healthcare in private offices, hospitals and clinics, and university student health services are women of varying ages, sexual, gender, ethnic, and racial identities, and class statuses. moreover, many sexual assault and abuse cases by physicians remain undetected and unreported because most “patient-victims” do not report sexual violations (dubois et al. 2019, 504; teegardin et al. 2016).2 the extensive history of sexual abuse cases in medicine presents an enormous landscape of abuse of power in medical authority. convicted perpetrator gynecologists in the us include robert hadden, peter lafuria, nikita levy, and brian finkel. these physicians have been found guilty of criminal acts such as sexual abuse, rape, sexual assault, harassment, and voyeurism during examinations of their female patients. aside from the sensationalized cases of sexual misconduct in sports by physicians such as larry nassar, only limited literature has paid attention to sexual violence in healthcare, specifically gynecology. however, the george tyndall case reframes “medical criminality” and forces us to dig into how systems of power protect medical privilege (dubois et al. 2019, 504). the george tyndall case is the most recent large-scale scandal to gain public visibility and legal attention. the late george tyndall, a former gynecologist working for the university of southern california’s (usc) student health services, was first accused in 1991 by a student of sexual misconduct.3 according to the ajc, usc initiated a query into sexual misconduct in 2006. however, tyndall continued to work in the health services clinic despite ongoing reports by patients and staff to the administration. in 2016 a nurse complained to the usc rape crisis office about tyndall’s behavior after years of reporting to the administration without recourse, and only then he was put on paid leave. in march 2018 the los angeles times exposed the tyndall case at usc following a lead from a unanimous source in february 2018 (see los angeles times staff 2019). immediately after that, the los angeles times retained over twenty anonymous reports. by 2021 seven hundred women—primarily students—had accused tyndall of sexual assault.4 the los angeles times investigation ruptured the long-standing silence about what became the most extensive legal case of sexual violence committed by a gynecologist against female patients in the us. one indication of the severity of this massive human tragedy and steep institutional culpability is the federal classaction lawsuit, which dispersed $1.1 billion in settlements to about 17,000 former patients of tyndall becoming the largest sex abuse payout in education history.5 usc’s recent efforts to show transparency and compliance with victims and the public include website disclosures of documents about evaluating all complaints over time. this institutional public response displays institutional accountability, responsibility, and solutions for women seeking justice. however, usc’s public response to the los angeles times reporting and the subsequent flooding of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 3 complaints and legal cases is an aftermath reaction that underscores protection of its prestige and institutional power on the world stage. the term predatory is jarring when we think about the intimate relationship between physicians and patients during pelvic examinations. to be predatory is to exhibit a particular mode of lurking in plain or hidden sight to prey on patient vulnerability. physicians who sexually violate women’s bodies within medical spaces are rightly labeled predators. one woman, erin vance, whom an oregon physician sexually assaulted while under anesthesia, told the ajc, “i mean, i couldn’t move. i was completely at the mercy of whoever was there, and it turned out that the person who was there was a serial predator” (teegardin et al. 2016). vance uses the term predator to indicate why a physician would assault twelve patients (norder 2016b). while many patient-victims like vance have used the term predator to describe their sexual assailants, the public, including the media, also employ the term. i associate predator with the systems of power and systemic logics that abuse, neglect, surveil, and do not protect women who experience sexual violence by physicians. gynecologists who commit sexual violence against patients are part of a broader medical and sociohistorical landscape of violence, or what i refer to as predatory medicine. predatory medicine is an anti-racist feminist analytic to address rape culture in the medical industry, particularly in gynecology; for looking at how institutions create conditions that allow for this pattern of behavior to exist and proliferate; and for examining the impact that the medicalization and institutionalization of rape culture have on women and girls. feminist scholars must show how systemic power—from medical practice design to legal structures—enables the dominant forces of rape culture and neglect in healthcare. in this article, i categorize these behaviors and systems as sexual violence to visualize its hidden landscapes and economies (ceelen et al. 2019). i articulate how the clinic and clinical practice in gynecology are vectors that mask the predatory behaviors and logics that abuse medical power. i argue that sexual predation of gynecologists is a hidden landscape and economy of sexual violence routinized systemically over time by racial capitalistic institutions. my main argument is rooted in three key issues about the gynecology clinic and clinical practice: how medical knowledge and practice intimidate patients and mask predatory behavior and sexual violence; how institutional power contributes to the predatory logics of protecting medical authority and thereby continually shaping the clinic as a predatory space; and the critical significance of understanding slavery, post-slavery, and racial capitalism as the pillars for how predatory function in modern-day sexual violence in gynecology. my main goal is to examine how in the george tyndall case exemplifies how the pelvic exam becomes a site of predation to routinize intimidation. usc’s response over time is important to think about a landscape of economy of sexual violence and how original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 4 systemic predation is a function of protecting racist masculinist domination within clinical spaces and barrier to reporting complaints. i analyze diverse sources through an anti-racist feminist lens such as public documents, digital materials, media reports, and public discourses. we do not always need verification from violated women to examine the systems of power that cause trauma. my black feminist politics legitimizes their experiences with an understanding that their trauma is deep and their fear of disbelief after public exposure is surreal. i contextualize the voices of violated women to offer a purview of the systemic power within the established legal evidence. i trace and diagnose systemic and cultural dilemmas through materials circulating in the public sphere through legal documents, journalistic investigations, public videos, and media reports. lastly, i analyze the short documentary film breach of trust (2019), directed by former ucs graduate student mishal mahmud, that sheds light upon the intimate and wider issues addressed in this article. theorizing predatory medicine feminists bring critical insights about the intersection of race, gender, and power in medicine to expand the notion of predatory medicine and interrogate racial and sexual violence in gynecology. feminist science and technology studies (sts) has documented the complexities of the pelvic exam and the role of gynecology as a site of differential power in the making of gender, sex, and sexuality (kapsalis 1997; klein 2010; harding 1987; martin 1987, 1991; mcgregor 1998; mulla 2014). emily martin’s book the woman in the body: a cultural analysis of reproduction (1987) contemplates how gynecological exams and interactions disembody and fragment women’s sense of self within power relations and in contact with medical instruments such as the pelvic speculum. martin demonstrated the value of women’s knowledge production about oppressive spaces and their resistance through an agentic self. similarly, terri kapsalis’s work in public privates: performing gynecology from both ends of the speculum explores the pelvic exam as a performative practice that enacts and produces differential power transforming women from “person to pelvic” (1997, 11). kapsalis made critical arguments about the repeatable nature of gynecology as a performance of specific roles and scripts to show that gynecology itself can be reproduced for the public in various ways, including theatrically (9). furthermore, kapsalis asserts that “gynecology makes female bodies” to emphasize that through gynecology’s performative practices, the female body and sexuality is reconfigured (6). women are medical subjects of the pelvic exam and vehicles for producing the ideal patient who participates in the erasures and anonymity of their femaleness. james m. henslin and mae a. biggs’s (1971) framing of a sociology of the vaginal examination informed the work of many sts feminists, such as kapsalis and myself. henslin and biggs argue that through the “desexualization of the vaginal examination,” the patient is depersonalized at various stages (1971, 136). during original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 5 the interaction of the pelvic exam, the patient performs being an object or “nonperson,” a stage they call “person as pelvic” (135–36). gynecology, as performative on both sides, is then a critical lens by which to interrogate the sexual predatory manipulation of the pelvic exam and the performative acts of enduring such violence or moving through an exam with confusion about the trespass of sexual boundaries. kelly underman’s feeling medicine: how the pelvic exam shapes medical training moves us in a different direction to reconsider how the pelvic exam is a “twopronged navigation of feelings” for patients and physicians raising questions about the “embodied experiences of sensations for both” (2020, 3). underman argues that the teaching and learning of the pelvic exams offers renewed terrain for physicians to address their uncomfortable feelings that too often lead to a disconnection to patients during the pelvic exam. she explores how the use of guided teaching assistants is an affective tool for “upholding the cultural, political, economic interests of the medical profession—and the forms of resistance possible” (4). while underman’s argument that the pedagogical use of guided teaching assistants for pelvic exams has shifted the experience of medical training to allow for a more subjective experience for medical students, underman’s work further confirms that gynecology is performative, as kapsalis and henslin and biggs argue. henslin and biggs, kapsalis, and underman established an intellectual trajectory about the clinical mechanics of the pelvic exam, how the patient is situated in the process, the social world of gynecology, and the power relation between physician and patient. feminists in sts must deepen their address of the sociohistorical hauntings that systematize how institutional power reinforces the abuse of medical privilege, such as the persistent unethical conduct of medical students who have long practiced the pelvic exam on unconscious patients under the supervision of physicians. perry hendricks and samantha seybold argue that the “unauthorized pelvic examinations (upes) are sexual assault” (2022, 368). upes signal predatory intent in which medical professionals prey on unconscious vulnerable patients to conduct unauthorized pelvic examinations. upes as sexual assault is yet another way to see that any nonconsensual sexual behaviors toward conscious patients during or amidst a pelvic examination is sexual assault. patients expect a pelvic examination for professional medical purposes and not for the personal pleasure of clinicians. upes are symptomatic of the vestiges of violence, racism, and objectification of female bodies that reinforce the predatory nature of sexual violence in gynecology. kapsalis, henslin and biggs, and hendricks and seybold all support the misogynist and racist hauntings in the examination room that advanced gynecology over time. gynecology was built upon unseeing women, especially black women, from the waist up. black feminists have long addressed the sociohistorical predation of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 6 racial science, clinical practices, and its afterlife of slavery (cooper owens 2017; d. davis 2018, 2019; falu 2023; hammonds 2004; morgan 2004; mullings 2002; roberts 1997). the history of slavery and medicine in the us and across the transatlantic territories reveals how abuse of power and the rise of medicine were institutionalized to exert predatory practices targeting black women with reproductive medicine experimentation and sexual violence. doctors and slaveholders during the nineteenth century in the us exerted control over enslaved women’s bodies and health—particularly their reproductive health— forging the ways that “medical practices became entwined with the cause of slavery’s continuance” (schwartz 2006, 4; cooper owens 2017; morgan 2004). the formation of medical training, practice, and knowledge is intricately tied to doctors’ opportunistic quests to serve slaveholders’ understanding that their success with plantation production depended upon the health of enslaved black people. in these circumstances, the predatory gaze of medical practice was subsequently predicated upon opportunities to practice upon enslaved black women. the medical predatory effect is evident in how enslaved black women avoided, if possible, having medical doctors summoned for their reproductive needs (schwartz 2006, 145). given these histories, moya bailey and whitney peoples propose a black feminist health sciences studies approach that engages research of black women’s health through “social justice science” practices rooted in black feminist sts traditions (2017, 2). black feminists have also emphasized how systemic power is embedded within reproduction and reproductive medicine (cooper owens 2017; d. davis 2019; morgan 2004) and sexual violence (collins 2010; a. davis 1978). the entanglement of sexual violence and medicine deeply compounded the making of such a predatory business in the name of medical science. deirdre cooper owens (2017) reminds us how doctors during the nineteenth century benefited from the sexual violence experienced by enslaved women during slavery. doctors benefited from obstetric practices from pregnancies from rape, whether by enslavers and other white men or by forced sex with other enslaved black men, to increase the numbers of enslaved people for labor. doctors profited from repetitive surgical procedures on enslaved women with surgically repaired obstetric fistulas that did not fully heal due to repetitive sexual violence (cooper owens 2017, 32–33). the predatory nature of systemic power and racial and gender domination in medicine harped upon the social conditions of enslaved black women to advance medical practice and knowledge. sociohistorical cases of sexual violence by doctors against black women are also silenced, such as the story of harriet jacobs, who experienced sexual violence at the hands of her enslaver who was a physician. these sociohistorical histories are the roots of sexual violence as an economy for reproductive labor. racism and sexual violence are predatory systems. sts black feminist scholars pay attention to how predatory systems in medicine are conquering forces for original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 7 capitalist gains, to protect power, and to silence vulnerable patients; these are the high stakes of predatory medicine. for example, slave hospitals were sites of “corporeal of geographic containment” for the ways white male doctors “moved black patients and body parts across a terrain that only they controlled” (cooper owens 2017, 8; camp 2004). medical discourses mobilized scientific racism and gender control through medical narratives based on racist experimentation. medical journals were also sites of violent containment of enslaved black women’s narratives. many nineteenth-century medical publications do not document the names of individual patients or racially identify the enslaved black women discussed in those publications when describing certain medical conditions. these past medical practices contributed to an exploitative medical system for capitalism and slavery. alys eve weinbaum’s notion of slave episteme helps me think about how it “was brewed up in the context of the atlantic slavery as a thought system that produces material effects over time” (2019, 1). i agree with weinbaum that the slave episteme not only enabled the gender and racial exploitation of reproductive slavery within its time, but it also continues into the present in contemporary cultural production (2). weinbaum’s argument about contemporary reproductive cultures and politics expose “the epistemic conditions that will, if left uninterrogated and unchecked, continue to enable slavery's reproductive afterlife” (2) squarely informs how predatory medicine functions as a framework. predatory medicine is a manifestation of the slavery episteme. there is an unseen relationship between slavery, reproduction, and capitalism with the plight of sexual violence in medicine today and over time. a few public health scholars (abudagga, carome et al. 2019; abudagga, wolfe et al. 2016; dubois et al. 2019) have argued that there are ethical implications to having the medical profession take a stricter course of action against sexual abuse of patients by medical professionals. however, these debates about sexual abuse do not address a larger landscape of sexual violence as the central force within the medical system. disciplinary categories such as sexual misconduct, sexual abuse, and sexual violations are applied to investigate the systemic problems of sexual assault in medicine within the existing scholarship and policy briefs. nevertheless, we must be cautious about how these terms mask the power mechanisms of predatory medicine. for example, the federation of state medical board (fsmb) policy statement, dated 2006, titled “addressing sexual boundaries: guidelines for state medical boards,” defines physician misconduct as “behavior that exploits the physician-patient relationship is a sexual way” (15). the nine-page policy statement sets guidelines for how medical boards should define and investigate sexual misconduct by focusing on scrutiny, surveillance, and disciplinary action toward physicians. in 2020 the fsmb workgroup on physician sexual misconduct readopted the 2006 report and published another thirty-one-page report and recommendations titled physician sexual misconduct, which called for a “cultural original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 8 change” of “environment and culture, from medical school to practice, for the development of and commitment to positive professional values and behaviors in medicine” (2020, 2).6 the reports address physicians’ behavior and disciplinary outcomes. by suggesting that cultural change is imperative, their message signals a problem more extensive than the state of professional values and ethical behavior, such as an entrenched culture of “secrecy” about sexual misconduct in medicine (dubois et al. 2019, 519). a crystalizing sign of sexual violence as a structural problem is the pervasive institutional silencing that shapes a culture of secrecy spawning forms of intimidation, specifically with the clinical space. george tyndall case: the clinic and intimidation intimidation permeates all corners of the healthcare industry (lamontagne 2010). professor of nursing clare lamontagne argues about healthcare that the “cultural acceptance of intimidation may blind us to its pervasiveness, resulting in the subtle and continuation victimization of those who are most vulnerable to its effect” (2010, 55). the george tyndall case is a chilling example of the hidden pervasive effect of intimidation within a clinical space. tyndall’s sex crimes at the student health center expose the vulnerability of patient-student identities. a key factor is that young college students are often seeing a gynecologist for the first time and may not be familiar with the procedures of the pelvic exam. the lack of experience makes the pelvic exam and interaction with the doctor an intimidating event. in this section, i think critically about how the breach of trust between doctor and patient is more than a medical professional broken boundary but rather the manipulation of vulnerabilities. i discuss how intimidation shapes the predatory forces in gynecology and how such forces are masked within medical practice and healthcare in general. for this analysis, i focus on the george tyndall case and the testimonial short film breach of trust (2019). many college students seek student health services for gynecological exams for many reasons, such as sti evaluation, pregnancy testing, or if sexually assaulted by another college student (mozingo et. al. 2023). the student health services on college campus are integral to the university experience for students. students are not detached from their college identities and anxieties to perform and keep up with the demands of college life. the george tyndall case mirrors how student health clinics shadow institutional responsibility to transition students with their first-time gynecological experiences. yet they are the shadowboxes of institutional power, gender domination, racial capitalism, and the horrors of sexual violence. in breach of trust, a young former student, brennan heil, reports needing an sti checkup after sexual assault on campus. she was encouraged to go the gynecologist at the student health center. she described her encounter with tyndall as creepy and flirty. tyndall asked her if she had had a pelvic exam before, and she only remembers having some testing when she was nine years old. tyndall responded, “it’s not your original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 9 first rodeo.” in breach of trust, brennan describes the sexual violence as “taking his hands and massaging me inside, even my clitoris.” brennan reported that the chaperone, who was far from the table and witness to the scene, walked away. students trust that their first gynecological visit at a student health clinic will be safe because the university ought to have their best interests in mind, as student consumers and young adults away from home. a nurse chaperone who “walks away” from the scene only worsens the mistrust. furthermore, the film affirms that students did not feel safe with usc administration given its unresponsiveness to their complaints. sexual violation by a doctor employed by the university deepens the fear of not being believed by the administration. most doctors are aware that their differential medical positionality— with their foreign medical language and experience—intimidates patients. the “white coat effect,” a concept coined by thomas pickering (pickering et al. 2002) to describe how fear and nervousness manifest as in high blood pressure upon arrival to the doctor’s office, is a long-standing illustration of the effects of medical intimidation. while the white coat effect is argued to impact anyone regardless of race, gender, or class, it is rooted in the sociohistorical violence of medicine, slavery, racism, and anti-blackness (jones 2002). the professional boundaries between doctors and patients have long been crossed through incomprehensible intimidating language and practices, all leading to abuse of power whether racist, gender-non-affirming care, or sexual violence. intimidation manipulates the ways that sexual boundaries are violated and masked by routine medical practices in space and time. similarly to the white coat effect, the pelvic speculum causes anxiety, pain, and discomfort, as research and public opinion remind us (taylor et al. 2017, s2349). most gynecologists know that patients confront these challenges during the pelvic exam, including emotional trauma related to genital or sexual trauma (huber et al. 2009, 795; taylor et al. 2017, s2353). despite the extensive redesigning of the vaginal speculum over centuries—with size and material variations such as plastic and pediatric specula—to improve patients’ experiences, many physicians believe that the traditional vaginal speculum is good enough (rossmann 2008, 49). however, these industrial redesigns of vaginal speculums do not get us closer to eradicating the sexual violence of patients by physicians. predatory medicine addresses the power relations that intrude as sexual violence within medical spaces. women’s experiences of gender-based violence in gynecology are not subtly consensual. women’s experiences of gender-based violence in gynecology are not subtly consensual. neither should women be positioned as misinterpreting their medical experiences, particularly in the case of the usc students’ first or second time with a gynecologist, as breach of trust shows. medical professional organizations have attempted to give a roadmap for how a physician crosses sexual boundaries with a patient. for example, fsmb original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 10 defines a “severe” form of misconduct to include “sexually inappropriate or improper gestures or language that are seductive, sexually suggestive, disrespectful of patient privacy, or sexually demeaning to a patient” (2020, 4). sexual violence by a physician is recognizable to patients when the behavior blatantly crosses a sexual or physical boundary. the routine pelvic examination and medical language too often mask the crossing of sexual boundaries. fsbm frames sexual misconduct as “physical contact, such as performing an intimate examination on a patient with or without gloves, without clinical justification or explanation of its necessity, and without obtaining informed consent” (4). suppose a physician does not wear gloves during a pelvic examination, as in tyndall’s case. students recognize that practice as inappropriate, but the ambiguity paralyzes patients, putting them at risk of sexual violence. the fsmb statements are insufficient roadmaps to abolish the ambiguity of “physical contact” and what constitutes a “routine” pelvic exam and medical interaction. another usc student in breach of trust stated that tyndall requested to photograph her vagina as part of research during the examination. the student felt extremely uncomfortable with the request but assumed that it was safe for research purposes. tyndall’s fetish with voyeuristic photography was incidentally discovered during a search of his office to remove smelling rotten fruits. the usc administration found many photographs of female private parts. predators mask and manipulate for sexual pleasure the pelvic exam with disguising voyeuristic photographing of woman’s vaginas. the usc student had just delivered a baby and had consented to the pelvic exam, but she was trapped by intimidation. imagine the confusion for first timers to the pelvic exam to differentiate medical practice and sex crime when asked to be photographed for research purposes. the us is fraught with many cases of inappropriate photographing, especially on unconsciousness women patients.7 the state of florida mandate gynecologists in government-funded clinics to ask patients to read and sign a consent form for the pelvic exam. i was asked to complete such form as a patient in 2020. it was a new form that my gynecologist had not implemented during my prior visits. the state of florida reactionary policy was a result of major lawsuit against a surgeon taking voyeuristic photographs of unconscious patients. i recall asking my woman gynecologist about sexual abuse cases by gynecologists and if the pelvic exam consent form was preventative response. she was surprised to hear about this nation-wide problem and was only abiding to the consent form policy for florida state clinics. the consent form briefly explained what to expect by defining the pelvic examination and the body part to be examined, alongside risks and complication associated with it such as bleeding, discomfort, and infection. how would such a form help the public become informed about other risks, such as sexual abuse? original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 11 intimidation makes sexual violation permissible to predators under the illusion that patients do not detect a sexual violation if the medical examination blurs it. many women become paralyzed when they sense being touched inappropriately during the pelvic or breast exam. these reports exemplify an unspoken intimate intimidation for sexual exploitation. medical intimidation by patients teaches us about the unseen web of norms and ideologies that filter down into the medical space and subsequently enable sexual violence to continue unaddressed by intervention and accountability. the tyndall legal cases convey that patients feel something wrong and inappropriate is happening to them during the examination. as noted within the film and other sources, the fondling, vaginal penetration without gloves, and photographing became fused and blurred by uncertainty of the “standard medical procedures”. women know and can feel when something is a violation. the next section examines how the complaint and reporting in tyndall’s case is a window into these predatory dynamics. institutional intimidation and complaint reporting the reporting of sexual violence complaints is yet another intimidating factor for any patient, specifically college students and bipoc students. students’ fear of being discredited when filing a sexual assault complaint against a physician on a university campus contributes to their sense of security and safety (or lack thereof) as students and patients (ceelen et al 2019; tarzia et al. 2018). in breach of trust, a visiting student for the summer from duke university, kay zhang, said that “there is no such thing as who is the more victimized victim.” kay is referring to the confusion experienced during the pelvic exam and the difficulty of recognizing sexual violation. she states in the film that “it is hard to explain the level of uncomfortableness” and questions whether she would be “categorized as a victim” given her “worse experience.” kay’s introspection moves us to grapple with the next level of vulnerability after being assaulted—that is the vulnerability that institutional power preys upon to sanitize “criminal activity” to defend its privilege and capital. the word uncomfortableness carries emotional thinking about what constitutes sexual violation during a gynecological visit and pelvic examination alongside whether one is recognizable as a “victim.” however, a usc student in the film recognized sexual violation when she recalled how tyndall “rammed” the speculum into her. therefore, kay’s reflection about whether any victim is more or less a victim than the next person illuminates how sexual predation is manipulated through the pelvic exam and reinforced by the institutional irresponsibility to address these crimes. usc’s response over time helps us to think about a landscape of economy of sexual violence and how systemic predation is a function of protecting racist masculinist domination within clinical spaces. usc’s past failures to appropriately respond to the reported complaints during tyndall’s tenure exemplify how institutions have built intimidation into their power structures. the structural intimidation ripples fear across patient-victims and medical staff such as nurses original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 12 and administrative personnel in proximity to the predator. for example, cindy gilbert, a former nurse and whistleblower from the usc student health services clinic, in breach of trust recounts the usc administration’s silence on tyndall’s behavior.8 she acknowledges that patients complained about “consistently inappropriate comments and inappropriate behavior and exams.” cindy’s witnessing of student complaints highlights how the medical staff are often first responders to bring the complaints to the higher administration. ordinarily, patients may not trust the clinic medical staff if they believe that they will protect the doctor or their jobs, as in the nurse who walked away from brennan heil’s scene. students are more likely to hope that the student health staff will protect their rights as students. former nurse cindy is a key witness and advocate who helps us critique the layers of intimidation entrenched within institutions such as the university. cindy alerted the university administration about the complaints and was told that “they [staff] should not talk to anyone about it.” she says, “we could not go to hr or even equity and diversity office.” she could only go to management, who “did not do anything.” the medical staff also embody and carry the fear and frustration caused by the university’s intimidating tactics and behavior. such institutional neglect toward medical staff is perceived by students. the silencing and dismissal of the medical staff brave enough to report is intimidation to invisibilize the dilemmas. according to the film and media, cindy eventually reported tyndall to the rape crisis center, at which time (2016) tyndall was put on paid leave. unfortunately, cindy resigned in 2017 from the health center after experiencing what she and other coworkers describe as “retaliation for speaking out against tyndall.” retaliatory and punitive tactics maintain the economy of sexual violence. if silenced, alarms that may threaten student enrollment and financial support will not ring. institutional intimidation is forged through what sara ahmed calls “institutional mechanics” (2021, 6). ahmed emphasizes that making complaints of sexual violence at universities teaches us how institutions work (25). complaints are the mirrors of how institutional power works. ahmed explores how complaints, for example, are stopped or blocked by the “doors” that teach us about power. i interpret these doors as the institutional mechanics encompassing the people, procedures, policies, logics, and all influential forces of power. these institutional mechanics control how doors open and close to hear complaints and how complainants experience their complaint-making process. this institutional control is predatory in the sense that it lurks for the most vulnerable people to exploit or dispose. usc’s punitive tactics and dismissal of the reports of sexual violence by tyndall is a dramatic immense phenomenon. tyndall was put on paid leave only after cindy reported the issues to the rape crisis center in 2016. however, it is not until 2018 after the los angeles times ruptures the institutional silence that hundreds of people come forward with sexual violence complaints. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 13 the intent of intimidation is to subdue a person so firmly that they cannot retaliate. if the los angeles times had not pursued an anonymous tip, hundreds of women would have been silenced and forgotten about for an undetermined time alongside the hidden depths of institutional trauma. dr. dana loewy, who was a graduate student in 1995, recounts in the film how tyndall “shoved several fingers into her, and when she shrieked, he commented ‘don’t make such a fuss,’” in addition to other sexual comments. she shared the experience with another doctor at the clinic who responded with a nonverbal reaction of embarrassment and “looked away.” dr. loewy said that, based on the woman doctor’s reaction, she must have known about tyndall’s reputation. this doctor’s reaction exemplifies how doctors also embody institutional intimidation. the choice to not acknowledge dr. loewy’s experience and pursue a call-to-action points to how institutional intimidation silences actors who have influence. unfortunately, we know that the woman doctor was not the only medical staff to “look away,” as did the nurse in brennan’s story. helplessness is a sign and symptom of predation. we want more cindys in the world with the courage to defend “students’ rights to have people take their concerns seriously,” as she states in the film. but institutions promote helplessness by ignoring complaints and punishing staff who report. in tyndall’s case, the eventual rush and publicity of complaint reporting and testimonies weakened the walls of institutional intimidation. sts feminist inquiry into how complaint reporting is entangled within a politics of intimidation is critical for examining the magnitude of silencing hundreds of people associated with one single sexual predator and institution. again, ahmed’s notion of institutional mechanics helpful here: the “path of a complaint, where a complaint goes, how far it goes,” she writes, “teaches us something about how institutions work” (2021, 6). understanding how healthcare, whether at a university or hospital, depends upon institutional tactics are used to stall or ignore complaints of sexual violation by patients to protect power. ahmed guides us to think about the possibilities of resistance through complaint reporting and how “frustration can be a feminist record” and “complaint can be a feminist pedagogy” (7). the frustration of confronting power through examining the paths of complaint and reporting is a feminist pedagogical exercise if we dig into how power works on multiple scales, specifically sexual violence in medicine. institutional power in healthcare protects a wide range of situations, from physicians or institutional reputations to avoiding lawsuits and media attention. the ajc has conducted an extensive investigation into the myriad ways that power is protected when this dilemma is confronted—including how hospitals or physician employers ignore complaints or push resignations instead of reporting physicians to medical boards or law enforcement (ernsthausen 2016; norder 2016a; dubois et al. 2019; teegardin and norder 2019). the persistent challenges original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 14 of inadequate documentation and transparency of sexual violence cases in medicine manifest institutional mechanics (dubois et al. 2019, 504). handling complaints and sexual violence cases without care and justice is a deep, invisible problem. the fsmb 2020 report emphasized a comprehensive process to file, investigate, and handle with care and sensitivity complaints alongside a “duty to report” all complaints to the medical boards. the fsmb acknowledges that low complaint reporting is due to several reasons associated with “distrust in the ability or willingness of institutions such as state medical boards, hospitals and other healthcare organizations to take action in instances of sexual misconduct and fear of abandonment or retaliation by the physician” (2020, 7). the weaponizing of distrust, fear, humiliation, and uncertainty crystalizes intimidation. the fsmb remind us that building public trust is predicated upon eradicating the vast web of intimidation. the fsmb charges that because the “ethical duty to report is insufficient” (8), alternative strategies to ensure that state medical boards are aware of all complaints and cases are necessary, and signal the entrenched systemic issues that i refer to as predatory medicine precisely because of public mistrust and unawareness. for example, many physicians accused of sexual violence or who lost their medical licenses in one state have been able to relocate to another state to practice medicine with relicensing, according to ajc reporting (norder 2016b). the relocation of medical practices by sexual predators is only one of many systemic manifestations of predatory systems that professional organizations or state government agencies have yet to control or abolish. predatory medicine: a black feminist path forward as a black feminist health science studies scholar, i take seriously the critical significance of slavery, post-slavery, and racial capitalism as the pillars for how predatory behavior, logics, and systemic power function in modern-day sexual violence in gynecology. black feminist activist tarana burke coined the hashtag #metoo in 2007, which only many years later became a vehicle for women to mobilize an international movement against sexual violence and rape culture. tarana’s hashtag #metoo was a call to action to pay greater attention to sexual violence against black women. however, an anti-racist approach to the #metoo movement was lost (jones 2018). what does an anti-racist and anti-heteropatriarchal approach to the abolish of sexual violence in gynecology require of us? a critical first step is to acknowledge that all women regardless of race, gender, sexuality, and class are subject (some more than others) to how racial capitalism benefits from maintaining sexual violence and rape culture in gynecology. destin jenkins and justin leroy remind us that “to think with racial capitalism is to rethink the past, present, and futures of capitalism” (2021, 10). jenkins and leroy emphasize that racial capitalism “is also a methodological practice—a way of seeing—that asks practitioners to question the structuring idioms, themes, and subjects in the study of capitalism in original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 15 the present” (10). if racial capitalism is a method or “way of seeing,” it must become an analytic to interrogate sexual violence in gynecology. the sociohistorical trajectories of medicine, gynecology in particularly, must be our first reminder that reproductive healthcare is driven by a racial calculus that reinforces the power dynamics within its capitalist, racist system. black feminists remind us that the fields of gynecology and obstetrics were built upon a racial calculus that not only objectifies black bodies but mobilizes those power dynamics to also exploit vulnerable ethnic groups (cooper owens 2017; d. davis 2018). the surgical experimentation by gynecologist dr. james marion sims upon enslaved black women anarcha, betsy, lucy, and many others is a classic sociohistorical example of how gynecology institutionalized intimidation and capitalized upon vulnerable black people (cooper owens 2017; mcgregor 1998; skloot 2011). furthermore, cooper owens’s historical account of gynecology includes the ways that irish women in new york were subjects of gynecological surgery experimentation during the nineteenth century (2017, 4). i agree, then, that racial capitalism is a method to see how the structural violence within institutions built upon the exploitation and violence against vulnerable black and ethnic groups will impact any person preyed upon, regardless of race and ethnicity. the tyndall case evidences that race and ethnicity played a critical role in sustaining the silence. breach of trust, as well as public legal documents, remind us that many students who sought medical services at the student health services were international students, specifically of asian descent. usc’s large asian and international student population is another exploitable vulnerability for a predator. i concur with professor jane junn, who, in the film, states that “the vulnerability of international students, [for] whom [a] gynecology visit is likely their first time, don’t know what to say and would not know how to object.” students would certainly be afraid to object against tyndall, who also made racial comments as plaintiffs reported in legal documents of court proceedings.910 former students in the film spoke out against usc’s protective interests to raise capital over addressing their complaints. students questioned the value of their worth to the university. i am deeply concerned that many patient-victims within these predatory landscapes of sexual violence are bipoc. i strongly suspect that many patientvictims in the case of george tyndall were latinx and black. even in the case of former physician robert hadden at columbia presbyterian hospital in new york city, we can anticipate that some, if not all, patients who were sexually violated were latinx and black. these racial and ethnic demographics would make sense based on the neighborhoods that these institutions serve. as professor junn also noted in the film, “non-white patient victims are far more vulnerable and likely not report.” the low reporting of sexual violence complaints among accused physicians across the us is likely due to the majority being bipoc patient-victims. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 16 the absence of a racial measurement of the demographics of patient-victims throughout the us and globally is racial capitalism at its best. the racial history of sexual violence, reproduction, and medicine is central to uprooting the systemic and structural violence. it is critical to know whether patients are racially targeted to further understand how institutions exploit social vulnerabilities to protect physicians with sexually predatory behavior. predatory medicine puts racial capitalism at the center of the sexual violence without overlooking the impact upon white women. after all, racism and misogyny are intertwined forces. jenkins and leroy state that racial capitalism “suggests a future-oriented political analysis that cautions against either a ‘race first’ or a ‘class first’ approach toward social justice” (2021, 10). jenkins and leroy help us understand that healthcare and universities are capitalist ventures that have long exploited and benefit from racialization and racial difference. the institutional colorblindness of healthcare and universities obscures the vulnerability of bipoc students and patients to sexual violence. institutional racist colorblindness is rooted in intimidation that at its baseline infrastructure is whiteness and patriarchal logic and systems that deny the existence of medical racism. we remember the silenced story of ruby mccollum, the black floridian woman who murdered dr. clifford leroy adams in his clinic in 1952, that shocked the world (evans 2006). the story is known for ruby being coerced to have sex many times during an era when florida exercised paramour rights, which assumed that white men had the right to black women for sexual pleasure.10 ruby’s story remind us that the silencing of these issues is not new. the complex entanglement of medical economies, racial capitalism, and rape culture that sanctions predatory violence against women raises profound implications of healthcare as a sexual economy of violence (varman et al. 2018). abolishing sexual violence in medicine is a reproductive political project that requires new scopes of reproductive politics (ginsburg and rapp 1991, 1995). to abolish sexual violence in gynecology, in the us and globally, we need a rigorous systems analysis that centers racism and gender violence. notes 1 this article does not discuss the experiences of queer women or lgbtq+ community impacted by sexual violences by physicians. however, it does not discount that there may be queer or nonbinary or trans among this invisible demographic of patients abused by physicians. 2 dubois et al. use the term “patient-victims” (2019, 504). while i would prefer not to refer to women as victims, i use the term throughout to refer to patients who experienced sexual violence by physicians. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 17 3 george tyndall died on october 4, 2023, at age seventy-seven in california. he was set to stand trial in 2024. he likely died of natural causes with heart disease and type ii diabetes contributing to his death, according to the county of los angeles department of medical examiner (2024). 4 this number count was reported across various media outlets, including los angeles times, the guardian, and new york times. 5 the settlement decision was widely reported. see, for example, hamilton and ryan 2021. 6 in 2021 fsmb published a second short recommendation report titled “state medical board recommendations for stronger approaches to sexual misconduct by physicians” adopted from 2020 report (king et al. 2021). 7 the male nurse in colorado is the largest case; 700,000 photographs of unconscious or drugged patients were found on the nurse’s cellphone in 2022 (list 2022). 8 in 2020 dawn wooten, a black nurse, publicly reported unconsented hysterectomies and other neglectful care at the ice detention center in georgia (treisman 2020). wooten bravely forged ahead with her revelations, which eventually led to the detention center’s closing. however, she suffered extensive alienation in the process. to date, she has subsequently experienced difficulties securing employment. indeed, the repercussions she has faced also point to the violence of systemic intimidation. these are the carceral and punitive stakes of women whistleblowers, as in cindy’s case. 9 there are many public media reports and legal proceedings documenting the racial misconduct, harassment, and racist behavior by tyndall of his patients; see lieff cabraser heinmann & bernstein, n.d. 10 for more on the paramour rights in florida exposed by the ruby mccollum case see hartford, n.d. references abudagga, azza, michael carome, and sidney m. wolfe. 2019. “time to end physician sexual abuse of patients: calling 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https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913398383/whistleblower-alleges-medical-neglect-questionable-hysterectomies-of-ice-detaine https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913398383/whistleblower-alleges-medical-neglect-questionable-hysterectomies-of-ice-detaine https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257x.2018.1527387 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) nessette falu, 2025 22 author bio nessette falu (she/her) is an associate professor in the department of african and african diaspora studies at the university of texas, austin. she is a black feminist cultural anthropologist with a former career as a physician assistant for seventeen years. predatory medicine: concealed economies of sexual violence and racial capitalism abstract keywords introduction theorizing predatory medicine george tyndall case: the clinic and intimidation institutional intimidation and complaint reporting predatory medicine: a black feminist path forward notes references author bio     cover art | hogar-refugio para migrantes la 72 /home-shelter for migrants la 72     nirvana paz contact@nirvanapaz.com   a diferencia de la concepción más tradicional de la fotografía como práctica de extrañamiento y construcción de otros fotográficos, mi interés como artista visual está marcada por procesos de empatía y reconocimiento. esto supone asumirme como parte de lo que mira y es mirado, en una suerte de efecto espejo que trasciende la mera curiosidad antropológica para abrazar, en cambio, el acto gozoso de participación colectiva y la mirada voyeur. pero esta mirada no es una mirada universalista o atemporal, sino la mirada de una artista mujer en una de las ciudades más grandes del mundo, la ciudad de méxico. habitar el lugar del voyeur en espacios donde la mirada hegemónica es masculina supone cambiar de posición para ser, por un lado, la artista que mira desde el anonimato, y por el otro, la que experimenta con la imagen fija y la imagen en movimiento, en un impulso constante por registrar los vestigios de la urbe. es así que concibo mi mirada detenida a través del lente de una cámara como un acto semejante al de mirarse en un espejo. me miro, reconozco y diferencio en otros y otras. para luego poder mostrar la imposibilidad de todos esos intentos, con elementos fundamentales como el tiempo, ya sea en video, instalaciones fotogénicas o la poesía. este tipo de mirada es una intervención radical en un país como méxico donde las relaciones sociales se encuentran sujetas y determinadas por roles de género y de clase; donde la invisibilización de los individuos es un elemento de control. me interesa incidir en las artes visuales de las américas desde planteamientos fotográficos en clave expandida, nuevos formatos, soportes y soluciones expositivas, pero desde un situacionismo social, epistémico y creativo. a lo largo de 10 series y dos libros, he construido a la ciudad de méxico como escenario de la mirada y al mismo tiempo, como un personaje más que determina el transitar de sus habitantes. unlike the more traditional conception of photography as a practice of estrangement and the construction of photographic others, my interest as a visual artist is marked by processes of empathy and recognition. this involves acknowledging myself as part of what sees and is seen, in a sort of mirror effect that transcends mere anthropological curiosity to embrace, instead, the joyful act of collective participation and voyeuristic observation. however, this gaze is neither universalist nor timeless; it is the gaze of a woman artist in one of the largest cities in the world, mexico city. to inhabit the voyeur’s perspective in spaces where the hegemonic gaze is masculine implies shifting positions—to be, on one hand, the artist who observes from anonymity, and on the other, the one who experiments with still and moving images, driven by a constant impulse to document the vestiges of the urban landscape. thus, i conceive of my gaze through the camera lens as an act akin to looking into a mirror. i see myself, recognize, and differentiate myself in others. then, i aim to reveal the impossibility of all those attempts, using fundamental elements such as time, whether through video, photogenic installations, or poetry. this kind of gaze represents a radical intervention in a country like mexico, where social relationships are subject to and shaped by gender and class roles, where the invisibilization of individuals serves as a form of control. i am interested in influencing the visual arts of the americas through expanded photographic approaches, new formats, media, and exhibition solutions, but always from a social, epistemic, and creative situational perspective. across 10 series and two books, i have constructed mexico city as both the stage for the gaze and a character itself, shaping the journey of its inhabitants. figure 1. mapa de méxico (mural), hogar-refugio para migrantes la 72, tenosique. serie daños colaterales / map of mexico (mural), home-shelter for migrants la 72, tenosique, mexico. from:collateral damage series. photo: nirvana paz.     author bio nirvana paz (1976) vive y trabaja en la ciudad de méxico. a diferencia de la concepción más tradicional de la fotografía como práctica de extrañamiento y construcción de otros fotográficos, su interés como fotógrafa está marcado por procesos de empatía y reconocimiento. esto supone asumirse como parte de lo que mira y es mirado, en una suerte de efecto espejo que trasciende a la mera curiosidad antropológica para abrazar, en cambio, el acto gozoso de participación colectiva. muchos de sus proyectos consideran el universo de la imagen y las políticas de la mirada como herramientas capaces de ampliar y transformar percepciones. parte fundamental de su obra se relaciona con políticas y prácticas en clave feminista, con un énfasis en los saberes comunes y técnicas cotidianas para la producción de conocimiento. es miembro del sistema nacional de creadores de arte de méxico; ganadora del concurso cuerpo y fruta, embajada de francia en méxico, komopa japón 2001, entre otras. para desarrollar su trabajo ha sido apoyada por casa encendida de madrid, españa, fundación jumex, museo miniccelli en argentina, trakl hause, austria,entre otras. su trabajo ha sido exhibido internacionalmente en museos, instituciones y espacios independientes, y forma parte de importantes colecciones públicas y privadas. sus libros monográficos son la corte (2017); 7 dioptrías (2013) y su libro poético: procesiones (1999). para más información sobre la obra de nirvana paz, visite: www.nirvanapaz.com nirvana paz (1976) lives and works in mexico city. unlike the more traditional conception of photography as a practice of estrangement and the construction of photographic others, her interest as a photographer is marked by processes of empathy and recognition. this involves acknowledging herself as part of what is seen and what sees, in a kind of mirror effect that transcends mere anthropological curiosity to embrace, instead, the joyful act of collective participation. many of her projects explore the universe of imagery and the politics of the gaze as tools capable of expanding and transforming perceptions. a fundamental part of her work relates to feminist politics and practices, with an emphasis on shared knowledge and everyday techniques for the production of understanding. she is a member of mexico's national system of art creators; winner of the cuerpo y fruta contest by the french embassy in mexico, and of komopa japan 2001, among others. to develop her work, she has received support from institutions such as casa encendida in madrid, spain; fundación jumex; museo miniccelli in argentina; and trakl haus in austria, among others. her work has been exhibited internationally in museums, institutions, and independent spaces, and is part of important public and private collections. her monographic books include la corte (2017), 7 dioptrías (2013), and her poetry book, procesiones (1999). for more about nirvana paz's work, please visit: www.nirvanapaz.com rolef ben-shahar, tom. 2025. “cellular narratives in nuclear time: on living with the (epigenetic) memory of trauma.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–40. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © tom rolef ben-shahar. 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license cellular narratives in nuclear time: on living with the (epigenetic) memory of trauma tom rolef ben-shahar independent scholar tomrbs1@gmail.com abstract with the imminent threat of nuclear arms race acceleration, and in the context of ongoing colonial nuclear violences, this paper seeks to trace the biological consequences for lives altered by the atom bomb, through karen barad’s agential realist ontology. to do this, i first present the paradigmatic development in the field researching the effects of radiation exposure, from direct genetic mutagenesis to the contribution of epigenetic responsivity. based on the congruence of the epigenetic model with agential realism, i forward a speculative yet scientifically informed interpretation of epigenetic mechanisms as materially manifesting multiple temporalities of entangled events. to give a felt sense of the implications of this interpretation, it is diffractively read through a profound semiautobiographic literary moment in kyōko hayashi’s novella from trinity to trinity, a testimony of the transformative effect of recontexualizing memories through their entanglements, as told by a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on nagasaki in 1945. by introducing a different conceptualization of epigenetic function, i aim to share my deep appreciation of the richness of cellular biology, and to stir new imaginings congruent with the relational, entangled nature of epigenetic mechanisms. thought through the processing of trauma, it may offer possibilities of living and dying otherwise. keywords agential realism, nuclear, kyōko hayashi, epigenetic memory, chromatin, walter benjamin, temporality, temporal-intersectionality mailto:tomrbs1@gmail.com original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 2 without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think. —donna j. haraway, staying with the trouble prologue on the morning of august 9, 1945, fourteen-year-old kyōko hayashi was working at the mitsubishi weaponry ōhashi factory in nagasaki, where she and her peers had been mobilized for the japanese war effort. at 11:02, the 4.5-ton plutonium bomb dropped by the us air force 1.3 kilometers away, was detonated approximately 500 meters above ground for maximal damage (kerr et al. 2005). more than 500,000 people were exposed to the two atom bombs dropped three days apart in august 1945, on hiroshima and nagasaki. many thousands perished immediately from the tremendous heat, impact, and radiation of the nuclear blast. within five months, more than 210,000 people died of injuries and radiation poisoning. “more than 210,000 remaining victims…survived the first five months of death and agony and became hibakusha” (tomonaga 2019, 493), literally, “persons who experienced the explosions”; among them the now-fifteen-year-old hayashi. introduction the list of symptoms suffered by hibakusha in the aftermath of the explosions is long and excruciating. the significant increase in leukemia cases shortly afterward (folley et al. 1952; preston et al. 1994), and increase in solid tumors in later years (thompson et al. 1994; tomonaga 2019), was attributed to the mutagenic effects of ionizing radiation (ir).1 this effect, first recognized in the 1920s (muller 1927; stadler 1928a, 1928b), had become a matter of popular knowledge and continued to be the focus of scientific research for decades—it was, after all, the century of the gene (keller 2002; calabrese 2015). in what follows, i briefly present the traditional linear model of mutagenic radiation effects, noting its incongruence with both empirical data and the physics that produced the effects it aims to explain. a relatively recent alternative epigenetic model, with better explanatory rigor and emergent empirical support, is then introduced. this model implicates the involvement of complex reactive mechanisms guiding cellular responsivity to ir. it also sits well with the broader understanding of epigenetic mechanisms as mediating cellular responsivity to the environment, an understanding that has enticed scholars to hail it as holding the promise of tying the biological with the social. yet, so far, the success of epigenetic research in realizing these promises has been limited, with growing critique from science and technology studies (sts) and other researchers. following a short discussion of this situation, i propose an alternative analysis of epigenetic function drawing on the existing scientific conceptualization of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 3 epigenetic mechanisms as materially bearing the impressions of experiences, as it is read through karen barad’s (2007) agential realist ontology. my intention is to unsettle the reductionist and determinist paradigmatic hold on epigenetic research, by demonstrating that it is possible to come up with radical interpretations, with reformulations of causality, which are interdisciplinarily informed, including by molecular biology itself. in doing so, i hope to convey my own appreciation of the richness of cellular biology, in which the “resolutely unpoetic language” of epigenetics (lock 2015, 166), criticized for its reductionist translation of life experiences into indistinguishable molecular marks (e.g., landecker 2016), isn’t a biological feature but rather an articulating choice of the scientists who research it. to give readers an embodied sense of this interpretation, i return in the following section to kyōko hayashi and a literary semi-autobiographic moment taken from her novella from trinity to trinity (2008, 2010), as read by barad (2017a). this powerful depiction is then diffractively read through the very materiality of epigenetic function, to introduce a speculative story of what might be happening in cell nuclei as they negotiate living within this world. it demonstrates how the events of our lives continually gain meaning—including biological meaning— through contextualization, and how even acutely traumatic events can be recontextualized through their entanglements. the biology of radiation exposure the linear model the traditional scientific understanding of the effects of exposure to radioactivity (and other forms of ir) that has been broadly accepted for decades is based on the linear no-threshold (lnt) genetic model. according to this model, the adverse health consequences of ir are caused by its mutagenic effects. it determines that only cells directly exposed to ir sustain damage, and this damage occurs immediately or shortly after exposure in a manner that is directly and linearly linked to the level of radiation exposure. under this framework, prolonged effects may only be caused by unrepaired mutations that are passed to progeny (cells or offspring) (schofield and kondratowicz 2018; belli and tabocchini 2020). in other words, the lnt model assumes that the effects of radiation remain local and discrete, both spatially and temporally. right from the onset of research, however, the biology seemed to be telling a more intricate story (mothersill and seymour 2012; calabrese 2013, 2017). the findings of decades of laboratory as well as epidemiological studies simply do not fit the lnt model (calabrese and golden 2019).2 unlike the model’s predictions, radiation can have delayed carcinogenic, as well as other detrimental effects, sometimes taking years or decades to develop, even presenting only generations later (tamminga et al. 2008; kamstra et al. 2018; dubrova and sarapultseva 2022). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 4 at lower doses, ir can actually induce adaptive and even hermetic (beneficial) effects (averbeck et al. 2018; shibamoto and nakamura 2018; ghosh 2022). furthermore, and inconsistent with this model, cells and tissues not directly exposed to radiation are often affected through two distinct physiological processes (bhat and chadha 2021; mothersill and seymour 2022).3 the phenomenon of bystander effects, in which those unexposed develop distinct radiation exposure responses by proxy, have even been observed at the interorganism level, for example in crustaceans, fish, and rodents (mothersill and seymour 2012; reis et al. 2018), demonstrating that radiation can impact neighboring, non-exposed individuals. let me reiterate: in some cases, sharing an environment with an organism that has been exposed to ir is sufficient to induce a distinct ir response in other individuals, and even invoke ir responses of an entire (not directly exposed) ecosystem (mothersill and seymour 2009; smith et al. 2013; reis et al. 2018; matarèse et al. 2020). so, while ir does indeed cause mutations, the observed effects simply cannot be accounted for by the lnt paradigm, or more broadly by the traditional paradigms of biological information inheritance. the interpretation of these observations is further complicated by the considerable variability in documented ir exposure phenotypes, depending on the characteristics of the individual organisms (or tissues) exposed (paunesku et al. 2021; mothersill and seymour 2022). while accounting for much of this variability remains a point of profound paradigmatic dispute in the field, its existence underscores the complexity and contingency of biological responses to ir. yet, despite repeated contestation, the lnt model has remained in use, and is still commonly employed to guide radiation risk assessment (unscear 2022; jones 2019; wojcik 2022).4 accounting for nonlinearity: epigenetic involvement in response to ir exposure while ir has been traditionally associated with mutagenesis, epigenetic changes have been repeatedly suggested since the mid-2000s, as the “missing link” accounting for the observed effects of ir exposure, particularly in exposure to low and medium radiation doses (baverstock and belyakov 2005).5 to discuss these effects, a brief introduction to our understanding of epigenetic mechanisms is warranted, as they play a vital role in the development, morphology, physiology, and health of essentially all organisms (willbanks et al. 2016). epigenetic mechanisms function in response to environmental changes, for the most part by modifying the context of dna, its organizing structures—known as chromatin (the stuff of chromosomes). this function is mediated through a range of specific marks added to chromatin to alter the physical characteristics and accessibility of genomic loci, and thus regulate their function (soshnev et al. 2016).6 together, epigenetic mechanisms orchestrate complex nuanced responses to a wide range of external and internal environmental cues: from original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 5 changes in our body temperature, the quality of the air we breathe and the food we eat, to our cultural and social experiences (jablonka and lamb 2014). most commonly but rather reductively, they are understood as the mechanisms that regulate gene activation, but it might be more accurate to say that epigenetic mechanisms participate in making our genomes tick. grounded in the historical development of genetics, radiation remained outside the discourse of environmental epigenetics for decades. but in recent years many of the observed ir effects have been shown to correlate with significant epigenetic changes, and, in some cases, the involvement of such mechanisms has been directly demonstrated (schofield and kondratowicz 2018; dubrova and sarapultseva 2022; belli and tabocchini 2020; bhat and chadha 2021). ir exposure seems to bring about epigenetic responses affecting various cellular pathways. some, including dna repair and cell signaling regulation—such as cell cycle arrest and programmed cell death (apoptosis)—allow cells to cope with the damage they sustained. importantly, modifications related to both intercellular signaling and adaptive changes in cell radiosensitivity have also been observed. these findings offer a possible mechanistic explanation for the more complex phenomena briefly detailed above (tharmalingam et al. 2019; ghosh 2022). thus, contrary to the lnt model, the data as well as the epigenetic model suggest active cellular responses to radiation at less-than-acute doses. that is, cells not only attempt to repair the damage caused by ir, but also undergo changes and reorganization to rearticulate themselves as cells of bodies that have experienced radiation. the implications are, of course, not merely theoretical, nor limited to the past. some researchers have raised concerns that the continued reliance on the lnt model may have led both scientists and regulating agencies to underestimate the risk of radiation, with devastating effects (e.g., burgio et al. 2018; cf. tharmalingam et al. 2019). they are referring, for example, to the increase in infant leukemia across western europe following the chernobyl accident in 1986, while the increase in radioactivity levels was deemed negligible (busby 2009). they are also referring to the apparent increase in solid tumors and leukemia among children living near nuclear installations (fairlie 2014; laurier et al. 2014; fairlie and körblein 2015; cf. boulton 2019).7 epigenetic memory: embodying intersectionality unlike the relative stability of dna and its inheritance, epigenetic marks are actively and directly responsive to the environment. as such, they may be temporary and reversible (epigenetic plasticity), an attribute that may, for example, contribute to the variability in observed ir exposure phenotypes. importantly, epigenetic marks deemed relevant by the cell may also be transmitted to daughter cells and even to offspring, a phenomenon known as epigenetic inheritance, or epigenetic memory.8 at the most fundamental level, epigenetic memory refers to the maintenance and transmission of altered gene expression states and the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 6 correlating epigenetic patterns, long after the initiating environmental signal has passed (cavalli and heard 2019). this process is essential for epigenetic function, and may account for much of the extended effects of ir exposure. as the inheritance of epigenetic modifications can be highly dynamic, responsive, and interrelated, we might ask what exactly is being transmitted. an important clue comes from what is known as epigenetic priming, where the transmitted epigenetic pattern differs from the initial epigenetic response to a particular environmental trigger. what is transmitted, then, is neither an activated response nor a reversion to the pre-exposed state. instead, it is a distinct, “primed” pattern that may facilitate, for example, a robust and rapid reactivation of genes to recurring environmental challenges, including ir (ghosh 2022; mothersill and seymour 2022). in other words, in extending the epigenetic response to environmental conditions through time and cellular lineages, what is passed on is not simply an epigenetic pattern, nor necessarily a change in gene expression, but an epigenetic encoding and memory of particular experiences, or more accurately, the impressions of experiences already enfolded with anticipation (levenson and sweatt 2006; davis 2014; lappé and landecker 2015; mansfield 2017; meloni 2019; aristizabal et al. 2020). thus, memories of a wide range of personal and lineal experiences are embodied through epigenetic mechanisms. jörg niewöhner describes these somatic memory effects as “extend[ing] the embedded body in time and across generations” (2011, 290). this embedded body is “heavily impregnated by its own past and by the social and material environment within which it dwells” (289; but see richardson 2021 for important feminist critique). the importance of this biologically expressed embeddedness was initially celebrated in a wide range of social sciences and humanities publications, for its promise to extricate biological research from the confining determinism of the genetic code. epigenetic function added relationality to the biological framework itself, suggesting the entanglement of the biological and social, nature and culture, self and environment, as well as past, present, and future (e.g., jablonka and lamb 1998; keller 2005, 2014; stotz 2008; carey 2012; guthman and mansfield 2012; lock 2013, 2015; chung et al. 2016). life circumstances, including living environments and lived experiences, are strongly related to geo-socioeconomic distribution and further intersecting categories of identity and oppression. the biological mechanisms that react to environments, and possibly transmit their influences over generations, are thus inherently of political importance, making environmental epigenetics and related research inherently political in its potential to shed light on local and global conditions of health inequalities (richardson and stevens 2015; meloni 2016; pentecost and cousins 2017; meloni, cromby et al. 2018; niewöhner and lock 2018; penkler, hanson et al. 2019; penkler, jacob et al. 2022; pentecost et al. 2024). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 7 drawing from developments in critical theory, scholars have associated epigenetic mechanisms as embodying intersectionality, offering the possibility for a nuanced research perspective on how multiple intersecting vectors of privilege and oppression become biologically and physiologically integrated (e.g., weasel 2017). the intersectionality of radiation exposure like other environmental exposures, radiation has a particular geo-socioeconomic distribution. therefore, an analysis of the intersecting forces that influence the effects of radiation exposure (which, as stated are complex and varied) must be carefully considered within the specific and localized conditions of those exposed. significantly, while the 1945 devastation of hiroshima and nagasaki, and the effects of high-profile nuclear disasters such as chernobyl (1986) and fukushima (2011) have deservedly received much attention, intersectional aspects of radiation exposure and harm are particularly evident in ongoing, continuous nuclear violence. as jessica hurley summarizes, “indigenous lands and communities are by far the most damaged by the ongoing mining, processing, testing [of more than 2,000 nuclear weapons worldwide], and dumping practices of the nuclear–military–industrial complex” (2020, 191). entangled with other forms of (reproduced, ongoing, systemic) colonial violence, the “slow violence” (nixon 2013) of nuclear colonialism is one of several determining features by which lives and land contaminated for generations (virtually for eternity, due to the long half-life of enduring isotopes) become rearticulated as already living within what hurley calls the mundane apocalypse. the institutional disregard of the lives of those actually exposed is not only through where these practices are located, but continues on multiple fronts through negligent plans and regulation, numerous leakage cover-ups, ridiculously ineffective “cleanups” (brown 2013; nadesan 2018), and oversimplified radiation risk assessments that ignore “the specific and localized conditions of those exposed”: crucial socio-material factors such as age, sex, and geo-sociocultural contexts (icrp 1975, 2002; acheson 2022). the slow response of regulating agencies to the growing body of work demonstrating epigenetic involvement in the biological effects of radiation exposure may be trifling in light of such overarching systemic discrimination and negligence, but the political and health implications of bodies that reorganize as experiencing and anticipating radiation deserve further consideration. yet acknowledging epigenetic involvement in itself may be insufficient. the pitfalls of epigenetic research in analyzing current epigenetic research more broadly, both sts and other social sciences scholars find that it fails to meet the early expectations and excitement, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 8 reducing epigenetic’s much-anticipated plurality, and incorporating it into the existing biomedical framework of binary and mechanistic determinism (for a meta-review see dupras et al. 2019). current research practices collapse socioenvironmental complexity through uncritical conceptualization and categorization of what is being studied (e.g., clare 2019; packer 2022), including oversimplified causation inquiries (e.g., kenney and müller 2017; chiapperino 2021; meloni et al. 2022), and the “molecularization of biography and milieu” (niewöhner 2011, 291). the latter flattens and reduces profoundly different experiences to molecular mechanisms acting on chromatin, and ultimately serving as “volume controls for genes” (kuzawa and sweet 2009, 5; landecker and panofsky 2013; meloni and testa 2014; lloyd and raikhel 2018; chiapperino and panese 2018). in this formulation genes remain the functional center, and the focus for both examination and the possibility of delivering change. as with the specific case of ir exposure, these shortcomings are more than theoretical. in its present formulation, scholars caution that epigenetic research and related public health policies lead to new forms of social discrimination, through equally problematic environmentaland epigenetic-determinism (e.g., landecker 2011; lock 2013; mansfield and guthman 2015; waggoner and uller 2015; richardson 2015, 2017; meloni 2017, 2019; müller et al. 2017; saldañatejeda and wade 2019; valdez 2021). over and over again, scholars have demonstrated how unacknowledged biases and failure to address the intersectional complexity of exposure, configure research structure, analysis, and implementation (e.g., mansfield 2012; kenney and müller 2017; packer 2022; see also chiapperino et al. 2024). these misconfigurations culminate in unwarranted, often contextually impossible demands placed on marginalized and discriminated populations, shifting “the focus from systemic violence to ‘damaged’ bodies” (keaney et al. 2024, 2), and in particular maternal bodies. given these challenges, epigenetic research has reached a sort of impasse, struggling both to draw concrete meaning from the complexity of the functions it studies (chiapperino and paneni 2022) and to fulfill its political potential. keeping this in mind, i move away from the contemporary debate, looking for alternative paths of exploration to rethink epigenetic’s molecular materiality through barad’s agential realist ontology (2007, 2017a, 2017b). researching otherwise: the potential contribution of agential realism through its firm (yet creative and critical) grounding in scientific knowledge, agential realism rearticulates concepts that are also central in epigenetic discourse, including materiality, temporality, entanglement, and indeterminacy. together with its political implications (barad and gandorfer 2021), these original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 9 attributes make agential realism particularly relevant and fruitful for exploring epigenetic function. indeed, the potential contribution of barad’s work to epigenetics has been recognized by several scholars (e.g., niewöhner 2011; weasel 2016; warin and hammarstrom 2018; warin and martin 2018; roberts and sanz 2018; warin et al. 2022; see below the analyses of davis 2014, 2017). barad’s profoundly relational ontology, in which entities are determined only through their intra-actions (rather than interaction) within phenomena, allowed scholars to powerfully articulate the multilayered entanglement embodied by epigenetic mechanisms. as stated above, these include the celebrated entanglement of self and environment, the material-discursive, cultural-biological co-production of bodies, as well as the temporal entanglement that epigenetic inheritance produces. and yet epigenetic’s molecular materiality, the actual physical embodiment of entanglements, has so far only been referred to in abstract terms. this is a shame, as barad’s (2007, 2010) neo-material appreciation of matter as meaningful and agentive, not a thing but a ceaselessly generating and generated relational process, offers an unexplored avenue to understanding epigenetic function. building on existing scholarship, i therefore take barad’s lead into this field of knowledge to consider what the epigenome does in its materiality, outside its conventional framing as regulating gene expression. in following recent scientific studies, i ask how may the scientifically acknowledged function of epigenetic marks as bearing the memories of personal and lineal experiences be tied with the very materiality of chromatin. to do this, i follow barad’s own methodology of diffraction, which involves “reading insights through rather than against each other” (2017a, 64), revealing transdisciplinary entanglements that are already materially there. diffraction, by its very nature, is a performative troubling of analogically presupposed binaries and boundaries, holding the potential to be at once affirmative and profound, in rigorously working with multiple knowledges (van der tuin 2011; juelskjær et al. 2020). this process leads me to offer a speculative, affirmative exploration of molecular function, perhaps even a molecular fable of response-ability of sorts, an attempt at a formulation that accounts for lives already altered by violences (kenney 2019; meloni and müller 2018).9 in what follows, i present this diffractive reading by first returning to kyōko hayashi, introduced at the beginning of this paper, and the memory of august 9 she has been carrying throughout her life. staying with the trouble: living with august 9 as a survivor of the atom bomb, the data briefly presented above suggests that hayashi’s memories of the nuclear blast and of her continued exposure to radioactive fallout (hayashi 2007) left epigenetic imprints on her body. research into the biological response to trauma (ramo‐fernández et al. 2015; morrison et original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 10 al. 2019; mehta et al. 2020; neves et al. 2021; smeeth et al. 2021; richter and hunter 2021), suggests that the devastation and loss she experienced not only haunted her mind, were not only etched, scarring her irradiated body, but were also marked on her chromatin as her cells rearticulated themselves as cells that have experienced the bomb, cells that could never stop anticipating the bomb. from the nuclei of plutonium isotopes to the nuclei of her cells, what else can a body do with such memories? committed to the memory of classmates “who were robbed of their own deaths by unspeakable violence” (barad 2017, 70), and to fellow hibakusha, hayashi devoted her adult life to chronicling august 9 in its entanglements. her stories reveal the most intimate, devastating details of lives altered by the bomb, including their mental and physical health soaked in the personal and political implications of surviving or not the a-bomb (e.g., hirosuke 1993; hayashi 2005, 2008, 2010, 2015, 2017). in the novella from trinity to trinity (2008, 2010), we meet hayashi fifty-four years after nagasaki, now an elderly hibakusha, as she embarks on a political-spiritual pilgrimage to the site of the first atomic bomb test, trinity, new mexico, where a plutonium bomb was detonated shortly before nagasaki, on july 16, 1945. hayashi’s narrating style is multitemporal, her protagonist “‘travel hops’ from one spacetime point to another, circling back, re-turning and turning our attention to a multiplicity of entangled colonial histories condensed into 9 august” (barad 2017a, 69). barad’s diffractive reading of the novella reveals this multitemporality not merely as an epistemic stance but an onto-epistemological feature of this world. time, rather than a simple blank axis along which events and phenomena unfold, is itself part of the radical indeterminacy of the world, contingent on the intra-actions that articulate it and its intra-actions within phenomena, evolving in an open ongoing becoming. “intra-actions,” explains barad, “are [thus] temporal not in the sense that the values of particular properties change in time; rather, which property comes to matter is re(con)figured in the very making/marking of time” (2007, 180). hayashi’s travel hopping attentively traces specific entanglements of august 9, and in that asserts their mattering. in their work, barad also introduces the related concept of a thick-now, invoking a “thick sense of multiple historicities and temporalities” (2017b, 76) through their entanglements and the quantum field theory understanding of “each moment as a condensation of other beings, places, and times” (2015, 416). this multiplicity of entanglements is not simply an alignment of events constituting a coherent story; rather, moments are ontologically threaded through each other, living inside each other, formed by and contingent upon each other (barad 2017b). in hayashi’s recounting too, events become meaningful through diffraction, threaded through august 9 and through each other. when she arrives at trinity’s ground zero, this original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 11 super-positioning of specific spacetime points, this travel hopping, this particular thick-now, allows her narrator to undergo a profound transformation. she writes, i have always been aware of being a hibakusha. but my always-present awareness of being a victim disappeared from my mind. it was as if i became a fourteen-year-old again… [i]t was when i stood in front of the memorial [at trinity] that i was truly exposed to the atomic bomb. looking back, i did not shed a tear on august 9. as i ran with the pack of people whose hands, feet, faces no longer looked human, no tears came to me. . . . for the first time here at trinity, however, i might be crying with the human tears that i did not shed on august 9. standing on the land that speaks no words, i shivered, feeling its pain. until today, i have lived with merciless pains that hurt my mind and body. but it could have been the pain of the skin that grew from august 9. here in this desert i had momentarily forgotten my life as a hibakusha. (hayashi 2010, 50– 51) memories orient us, allowing us to interpret the world and ourselves within it; without them, the present is undifferentiated. but in themselves, memories too are indeterminate. it is not only the present that takes on meaning through its contextualization within the memories threaded through it, but memories too gain meaning only when they are contextualized within other memories and within the present. we relate to our experiences and their memories as the determining features of our lives, and indeed they are, but because we and our lives are open phenomena, how memories determine who we become is continuously rearticulated. we are dealing here with trauma and its enduring memory. trauma victims are often uncontrollably and excruciatingly sucked into those moments that changed their lives forever (ehlers et al. 2004). but here hayashi is courageously allowing us to witness something profoundly different. in the short essay accompanying her 2008 english translation of the novella, kyoko selden writes, “having completed the journey that was at once real and symbolic, hayashi takes a new direction. not that she no longer writes about nagasaki, but she handles the theme differently” (hayashi 2008, 28–29). the significance of this moment lies not solely in her painful return to august 9, but in her diligence in tracing its entanglements. arriving at the trinity site thick with the memories of its own reconfigurations, including its nuclear and other colonial histories (barad 2017a; engelmann 2022), hayashi realizes with her marked and wounded body the entanglements of nagasaki and trinity, beyond linear time, as she re-members. as she comes to recognize her senior hibakusha siblings at trinity, animate and inanimate, and the violent colonial past they have been enduring, august 9 ceases original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 12 to be a sealed memory and her own phenomenon is reconfigured together with the phenomena of which she is part. august 9 is contextualized, further grounded through its entanglements as of this world, its past, present, and future. through her courageous labor of tracing, experiencing its excruciating pain, hayashi goes through the heavy transformation from victim to survivor. this transformation must have been expressed in her body, but how? barad insists that tracing entanglements is an embodied labor; “hayashi’s…body does not represent the story,” reiterates annouchka bayley, “her body is the story” (2019, 82). i can imagine its impact on her posture, her tonus, the tone of her voice, in her eyes shedding the tears of august 9 for the first time. science tells us that surviving nagasaki is written into hayashi’s chromatin, along with and related to her complicated medical history. but what of the transformative, superpositioned event she details? if her materiality carries the history of her phenomena, as barad’s ontology tells us, and if epigenetic mechanisms biologically mark her experiences, surely this is one to remember!? epigenetic entangled temporality in its present performative state, the science of epigenetics is unable to address the complexity of intricate layering of experiences, the effects of a personal, epistemic, yet colossal and ontological, transformative journey. epigenetics gives me no answer and so, i am left speculating…but, although hayashi lived to (die of) old age, there is nothing i can say about the correlation between her experiences, epigenetic markings, and health. i cannot speak of the probability of malignancies, the possibility of a heart attack, known to occur with increased rates in elderly hibakusha, or of the disorders associated with trauma. instead, i wish to consider epigenetic memories, their temporality and entanglements. if this thickness of dis/continuous multiplicity of temporalities is ontological; if hayashi's act of recontextualizing her history through tracing the entanglements of this thick-now is, as barad claims, ontological, might we also trace their epigenetic manifestations? that the epi/genome’s materiality does not embody a linear temporality is clear. changes to dna and to epigenetic patterns are not organized along chromosomes in chronological order. in baradian terms, we might say that chromosomes are the nonlinear sedimentations of entangled memories of different timescales and different times (niewöhner and lock 2018). indeed, the nonlinear temporality of epigenetic function has been discussed (in abstract terms) by several scholars, as exemplified earlier by niewöhner’s much quoted articulation. julie livingston also asserts, “epigenetic time is hard to hold onto...it is layered, accelerant, recursive, contingent, scalar, linear, and circular all at once…we will need ways of thinking and talking about time that allow for its embodied florescence” (in lock 2015, 166–67). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 13 while this paper aims to contribute precisely to this effort, it is crucial to recognize that scientific conceptualizations are never politically naïve, and gain concrete significance through research intentions and biases. even articulating an “embodied florescence” isn’t in itself sufficient to extricate science from its determinist trudge. becky mansfield (2017), for example, describes how the folding of past and future into the present, as perceived in mainstream epigenetic inheritance research, results sin the formulation of interventionist reproduction policies. through such policies, an ever-receding future of next generations— vulnerable fetuses that do not and may not exist—becomes privileged over the present and in particular over the present of women and girls, of (potential) mothers. furthermore, this temporal rationalization supports interventionist public health policies that are intended to protect exposed populations but fail to address the underlying environmental damages imposed upon them, and at the same time disregard their particular cultural and marginalized circumstances, ending up adding another layer to the intersectional harm they are already suffering from (e.g., mansfield 2012; packer 2022). conversely, indigenous australian scholars (pember 2015, 2016; warbrick et al. 2016; conching and thayer 2019; paul 2020), utilize the resonance of epigenetic temporality with indigenous ontologies to “transmut[e]…scientific knowledge through decolonial imagery” (warin et al. 2022, 19).10 they thus articulate a nondeterminist, situated, postcolonial postgenomics “as a model of collective embodiment and distributed responsibility” (1). their unique articulation, in turn, serves as the ground for ongoing community collaborative health initiatives. noela davis (2014, 2017) specifically elaborates on epigenetic temporality through agential realism. she identifies epigenetic mechanisms as agential realist apparatuses performing agential cuts, making determinate specific phenotypes from the indeterminacy of the genome. davis thus elegantly reverses the proclaimed determinism of the genetic code, and creatively demonstrates the contingency of a virtually undisputed scientific conceptualization.11 in their agentive function, states davis, epigenetic mechanisms also materialize the particular cause-and-effect relations within the phenomenon under investigation, enfolding and materializing experiences and memories of the past, as well as the anticipatory preparation for future possibilities (for example, of a stressful life). these scholarly works importantly elaborate on the type of temporality that epigenetic function manifests, but as epigenetic mechanisms are first and foremost material phenomena, here i seek to explore how this complex temporality might be embodied in their molecular materiality. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 14 epigenetic materiality: chromatin organization while research looking into epigenetic embedding of experience and memory primarily focuses on the changes in epigenetic composition in response to exposures, it is important to note that these changes do not simply mark loci on linear genomes. rather, they induce alterations in the specific and even overall nuclear organization of chromatin (maeshima et al. 2021). “this,” notes maurizio meloni, “is where epigenetics really matters: not so much as ‘tags’ or ‘bookmarks’ added to linear dna sequences but as the complex machinery that spatially rearranges and regulates chromatin” (2018, 22). together with recent technological advancements, this insight drives a thriving 3d genomics research front, involved in understanding this materiality—its structures, regulation, and functional effects (e.g., quinodoz et al. 2018; saintillan et al. 2018; sun et al. 2021; amiad-pavlov et al. 2022; nollmann et al. 2022). and while the functional significance of chromosomes as long linear segments is undeniable (for example, during the orchestration of cell division), it is increasingly chromatin’s in vivo nonlinear and dynamic features, its loops and folds, that are at the center of investigation (landecker 2012). without techniques to differentiate specific genomic regions, outside the iconic chromosomal organization in meiosis and mitosis, a cellular nucleus looks for the most part like a randomly packed bundle of long windy thin threads of chromatin. nuclear architecture research, however, reveals a complex structured hierarchy in chromatin organization. the most fundamental chromatin units are nucleosomes, each consisting of 147 base-pairs of dna wrapped around a protein histone core in 1.65 turns. this first step contributes a degree of condensation and organization, but the human genome (for example) condensed into a micrometersize cellular nucleus, contains more than three billion base-pairs, reaching roughly two meters in length when stretched. the necessary further organization is achieved through progressively increasing orders of controlled looping and folding that bundles specific genomic sections together up to chromatic mega clusters called chromatin compartments, which are further organized into chromosomal territories. this controlled yet dynamic spatial organization produces biological function and meaning through regulating gene expression and other nuclear processes (magaña-acosta and valadez-graham 2020). that is, the nuclear location of specific dna loci in relation to other loci translates into cellular behavior. for example, within chromosomal territories active genes tend to be grouped together in certain compartments, while non-active regions are grouped in others. moreover, changing the transcription level of a gene may cause its relocalization (brueckner et al. 2020) and vice versa: experimentally inducing a shift in a gene’s nuclear position may change its expression profile (reddy et al. 2008). as changes in epigenetic composition over time and circumstances bring about structural reconfiguration (cavalli and heard 2019; bourbousse et al. 2020; harabula and pombo 2021), this allocates the genome with both a lifespan and a dynamic physical body (lappé and landecker 2015). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 15 a dynamic spatial segregation makes, of course, functional sense in regulating gene expression.12 but the importance of overall nuclear architecture regulation seems to exceed this function. for example, in nearly every type of cancer studied, this regulation goes awry: studies find massive epigenetic changes, beginning prior to cancer development, and continuing as cancer progresses. importantly, these changes seem to have little direct effect on gene expression, but greatly impact chromatin organization itself (madakashira and sadler 2017; xu et al. 2020). the specific organization of chromatin within the nucleus, therefore, seems to serve additional functions. in the following section, i wish to suggest that epigenetic temporality and entanglement as previously expressed is embodied in the structures and dynamism of nuclear architecture, as an essential part of its function. accounting for the materiality of epigenetic memory: chromatin constellations for an agential realist understanding of the material architecture of chromatin, its folding and looping, i turn to barad’s (2017b) diffractive reading of their own quantum-field-theory-based thick-now (introduced in their reading of hayashi’s work), through walter benjamin’s (2006) notion of now-time (jetztzeit). now-time describes the present moment, shot through with a specific multiplicity of temporalities, together forming a crystalline constellation of events that gives the moment its meaning (e.g., benjamin 1999, 2006). benjamin’s utilization of this concept is not trivial; though starry constellations “seem to be purely spatial arrangements [he] uses them in a temporal modality” (barad 2017b, 34). he can do that because the stars we see as we gaze into the night sky are not only of space but also of time. since the speed of light is constant, the more distant the star, the further into the star’s past we are looking. as the stars within a single constellation are at different distances from us, “constellations are…images of a specific array of past events, a configuration of multiple temporalities” (barad 2017b, 34). of the various metaphors benjamin offers, constellations are particularly meaningful when thinking about epigenetic function. as epigenetic marks are understood in science as a form of memory, epigenetic governing of chromatin structures can be thought of as functioning through integrating, storing, sorting, and relaying memory via shape (jablonka and lamb 1998; lappé and landeker 2015). yet, so far, the joint significance of epigenetic memory and the related loopy arrangements of chromatin have not been addressed. it is exactly in considering both attributes together that chromatin clusters emerge as meaningful spatio-temporal constellations entangling particular memories in an individual’s personal and lineal life. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 16 genomic loci held together materially and functionally influence each other, becoming entangled, contingent upon each other and continuously rearticulated by their multiple entanglements. i wish to suggest that in this they articulate a particular thick-now of bound memories that produces biological and functional meaning, in driving cellular decision-making and activity. this view offers a different explanation for chromatin organization, and a different yet not mutually exclusive system of causation. the identity and functionality of a cell can be said to be (at least partly) determined by the genes it activates, which for purposes of efficiency it groups together. the identity and functionality of a cell can also be understood as dependent on the choices it makes in grouping memories together, integrating a biologically coherent reference system, a context, a narrative even of lived experiences, through which it understands itself within the world, and interacts (or more precisely, intra-acts) within it. what has been labeled epigenetic memory, starting from the transmission of epigenetic marks on particular dna sequences, becomes complex, highly dynamic, and contextualized. in this view, epigenetic memory driving cellular identity and decision-making is multilayered. it includes both an overview of the entire historical background manifest by the overall nuclear landscape, and particular historical memories inscribed at specific loci. here i suggest that it also includes the particular spatio-temporal entanglement of memory bearing loci with other such loci, determining which of these memories and in what constellations come to matter now. through this organization of memories, cellular ongoing becoming is entangled not only with its environment at the present, nor simply with the integrated context of the past—that had been and passed (chung et al. 2016; pittstaylor 2018). rather, it is also determined by the living entanglement of the present with specific memories and anticipations, particular re-collections, as they are materially articulated through chromatic constellations. tracing entanglements, insists barad, is an embodied labor, and i propose further that it involves the agency of all bodily scales, including the molecular arrangements of cellular nuclei. chromatin constellations are the material embodiment of epigenetic multitemporal entanglement and non-trivial causality. they demonstrate one way in which the materiality of our bodies is continuously (re)articulated in particular, yet multiple thick-nows. following barad’s ontology, and the contingency of time, we might say that in its organization and dynamism, chromatin agentially participates in materializing time itself. if chronological, linear, and progressive time plays a part here, it is only one of many. for every life story, for every present, there are multitudes of possible narratives, possible choices. enacting particular ones performatively configures the phenomena—a reality. every cell nucleus (as an open indeterminacy) holds within it a multitude of possible chromatic constellations. as with our cognitive organization, the cellular interpretation of the present doesn’t depend original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 17 deterministically and linearly on the additive effects of its experiences, but on the choices through which it deems (through nuclear organization) particular memories relevant. it is this organization, of memories that matter, that drives a particular cellular onto-epistemological response to and in the present. tying things together barad’s (2017a) reading of hayashi’s (2010) novella can help us grasp the ontoepistemological impact constellations may have. they give us the theoretical grounding for a literary moment articulating a reconfiguration of a thick-now, of a constellation. in that moment in hayashi’s novella, a tangible thick now of nonchronologically bound events recontextualized through each other, produces a transformative meaning for an acutely traumatic event. hayashi demonstrates how profound this can be, not a time-traveling sci-fi cascading change of events, but a reconfiguration of reality that nonetheless integrates everything that had taken place. as barad demonstrates time and again, this is an ontoepistemological feature not unique to the human mind, but continuously articulating the world, occurring for example in quantum physics experiments and in living cells. likewise, epigenetic plasticity and chromatin dynamics suggest that chromatin not only contextualizes memories and events, but holds an inherent ability to recontextualize them. thus, the agential cuts that epigenetic mechanisms enact, which as davis (2014, 2017) elaborates, configure causation itself, are not only of the functional-biological choice, but also of its framing, the context within which it is made. in this reading, already at the most basic biological units, it is not only experiences that matter, but also the ontoepistemological choice of their contextualization, the way in which they are configured, and may be continuously recontextualized and reconfigured within dynamic chromatic structures. this reading, in which chromatic structures and not only the marks they bear, participate in (re)determining cellular activity, presents a different system of causation and cellular decision-making, grounded in living experiences, beyond the traditional linearity and universality in scientific narratives. discussion: chromatin constellations and the possibilities for living and dying otherwise this paper presents an agential realist reading of the nuclear materiality of epigenetic mechanisms. reading through extra-disciplinary sources, i propose benjamin’s metaphor of constellations as an addition to the classic understanding of epigenetic landscape, emphasizing cellular agentivity through nuclear organization.13 the explanatory framework this metaphor allows for sits well with available scientific data, and yet responding to justified critique of the current reductionist language of epigenetics, it offers a different conceptualization of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 18 function and causation. it is in itself a reformulation through diffraction, demonstrating one of multiple available reformulations. the scientific data briefly presented in the first part of this paper, together with a diffractive reading of hayashi’s novella and oeuvre, serves as a case study of sorts. the data itself provides two distinct (but intra-related) relevant aspects: first, it suggests that contrary to accepted dogma, even ionizing radiation—biologically the most unmediated form of environmental exposure—can invoke long-term and wide-reaching epigenetic changes. this data already implies that surviving cells and surviving bodies are never simply passive recipients of the environment,14 but rather actively reorganize and rearticulate themselves in response, enacting new agential cuts. second, the wide variability in phenotypic and epigenetic responses to similar exposures (such as ir) between species, cell types, but also cell (and individual) histories, further demonstrates the non-trivial, contextual nature of the agential cuts enacted by cells and bodies. together these two aspects challenge popular conceptualizations of epigenetic function as becoming with the environment (packer 2022), by which “the environment actually comes into the body” (guthman and mansfield 2015, 565). while these conceptualizations have been powerful in refuting genetic determinism, such emphases obscure the indeterminate agentive mediating role of epigenetic mechanisms, demonstrated by both epigenetic memory and epigenetic variation. cells do not simply embody the meeting of two determinate systems— namely, the environment and the genome; epigenetic marks aren’t simply the manifestation of “the environment coming into the body.” rather, they reveal cellular integration and interpretation of experiences within an evolving context, by which cells self-narrate the world and themselves within it as an essential (and onto-epistemological) part of their ability to respond, their ability to exist.15 scientifically, this interpretive and phenotypic variability, produces “non-ideal observations for substantiating a link to a specific cause” (richardson 2024, 157) in research fields such as environmental epigenetics and the related developmental origins of health and disease (dohad). accordingly, the anticipation for an objective, linearly discernable biological, and epigenetic proof for the intersectional, detrimental health effects of oppression, discrimination, and violence, produces what sarah richardson (2021, 2024) calls the acceptance of causal crypticity. but what if variability—which for the most part is neglected as a source of information (for various reasons) (penkler, keaney et al. 2024)—were to become the focus of attention? attending to variation is itself multifaceted, requiring an openness in experimental structuring to allow for the breadth of epigenetic responsivity to be observed.16 likewise, outside the lab, attending to the details of lived experiences may set the course of research away from the tendency to label individuals and original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 19 whole populations as “damaged” (tuck 2009; saulnier and dupras 2017; pentecost 2021; keaney et al. 2024) and allow for a more inclusive investigation of epigenetic outcome (warin and hammarström 2018; moormann 2024). a more open setting can include particular, intersectional, rearticulated knowledges of harm, of resilience and growth, including indigenous biological and ontological modes of healing and strength and their epigenetic manifestations. within this framing, the epigenetic and overall wisdom of those whose lives have been altered by violences can be cherished and celebrated, without diminishing the demand for accountability and change.17 such investigations may also produce insights into epigenetic processes themselves, as lived experiences and their biological and personal interpretation lie at the core of their function. for this to occur, epigenetics and related biosciences must reconfigure as collaborative knowledge-production processes that benefit more profoundly from the accrued knowledge of disciplines such as indigenous, feminist, black feminist, postcolonial and queer theories, disciplines that have been addressing lived experiences in their specificity. in this, i join the many scholars who have been calling for such an interdisciplinary practice.18 while its implementation has been slow and limited (penkler, keaney et al. 2024), by its very structuring, interdisciplinary knowledge production is well suited to creatively realizing entanglements, and in that, potentially producing better research and more informed, participatory policies. the ethico-onto-epistemology of tracing entanglements when considering lived experiences, stories of personal transformation manifesting the creative agency of the self—like the one presented in this paper— can serve as double-edged swords. without attending to entanglements, such stories may be recruited, in a neoliberal climate, to emphasize the responsibility of individuals over institutional accountability. as described above, this is already a troubling pitfall of public health policies derived from epigenetic and dohad insights. but hayashi’s novella doesn’t lend itself to such narration; her transformative journey doesn’t read as a simplified triumphant story of overcoming adversities. clearly, powerful and ontological as it is, her journey does not erase or absolve the past-present and future accountability of the nuclearmilitary-industrial complex. on the contrary, in her unwavering commitment to trace entanglements, hayashi not only exposes the threads of august 9 entanglement with past acts of colonialism soaked into the land she is visiting, but also weaves in the entanglements of complex presents and futures. through travel hopping, the need to pass down the realities of the bombing to younger generations is brought up (with both urgency and subtlety) already on the very first page, while later on, her intense day in new mexico ends with the news of the 1999 tōkaimura nuclear accident. read through our own post-fukushima perspective, the entangled future is already present in her thick-now, in ours, and in the mundane apocalypse of those still living under nuclear colonialism and violence and their consequences. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 20 it is this commitment that allowed hayashi to place the unbearable memory of august 9 within context. it is no less devastating—facing and reliving the incalculable, she risked her own sense of self, her very existence. but as some of her entanglements were realized, so too was her place in and of this world: she is the elderly hibakusha on a pilgrimage to trinity, she is her own past iteration—the fourteen-year-old girl experiencing the atomic explosion, both living in the world of which august 9 is a part, of which trinity (with all its violent colonial past) is a part, of which tōkaimura is a part. the political significance of a thick temporality and the temporal dimension of intersectionality hayashi’s journey demonstrates that tracing the thickness of time and entanglements is not merely a fanciful theoretical interjection, but a powerful agentive transformative methodology. although her story is a personal one, tracing and realizing entanglements is neither the prerogative nor the responsibility of individuals alone, but an onto-methodology of rearticulation at all scales, with political ramifications (barad 2007, 2010, 2012a, 2019; barad and gandorfer 2021). indeed, the political implications of multi-spatio-tempo-material entanglement are central to its metaphysical framing by both benjamin and barad. barad understands time-being “as a specifically political and material practice…attuned to the possibilities for liberation, for justice, in the now of the present moment” (2017b, 38). benjamin’s (1999) rejection of progress as a founding concept of history, along with his now-time and the related image of constellations, were theologically-inspired, politically-charged formulations of resistance to fascism. for him, they are explicitly tied with the possibility of fighting “for the oppressed past” (thesis xvii, 396). in this context, epigenetic marks are bearers of the embodied memory of oppressed pasts, possibly over generations. their political significance has been extensively discussed by others, as outlined above.19 they mark inequalities, and in carrying the molecular histories of intersecting, cumulative experiences of systemic violence, they further increase the risk of those oppressed, discriminated, and marginalized, and the risk of their descendants for developing detrimental health conditions (hanson and gluckman 2014). scientists often articulate their aspirations to redress this harm through intervention, by erasing its embodied epigenetic marks and essentially reversing to a pre-exposed phenotype; commentating scholars often accept this enticing terminology of reversal. but, in a world constituted through entanglements and thick with the memories of its previous iterations, erasure and reversal, tells us agential realist ontology, aren’t really possible, and certainly don’t align with epigenetic’s “fluorescent temporality.” the reading presented here takes in benjamin’s now original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 21 time and barad’s thick-now to suggest the personal and political significance of their potential—the potential of the etched memories of oppressed pasts—not in eliminating or erasing them, but in reconfiguring and recontextualizing them through actions taken now. bearing the experiences of intersecting forces, epigenetic marks are understood as the context in which both acute trauma, and (socio-materially situated) daily lives are experienced, interpreted, processed, and integrated to become themselves embodied living context (weasel 2017). but, while intersectionality attends to the nonlinear impact of intersecting forces, the nonlinearity of intersectionality’s temporal dimension, or temporal-intersectionality if you will, also deserves attention. because, it is not only that the present depends on the context of the past; hayashi, barad, and benjamin tell us that the past too becomes recontextualized with the present. it is in tracing and realizing entanglements, through which reality is simultaneously acknowledged and rearticulated, that agential realist ontology holds the potential and hope for more just iterations. if we are willing to do the work, the agentive, interpretive, and integrative function of epigenetic mechanisms, bearing both memories and anticipation, holds the biological potential to reconfigure the phenomenon that is us, including our pasts and futures through re-membering. hayashi’s documented labor of mourning, relentlessly revealing the entanglements of human cruelty and violence but also the possibility of rearticulation, can serve as a fitting guiding imperative to (re)think through both epigenetic research and derived public health policies, and to advance the possibility of living and dying otherwise. notes 1 ionizing radiation (ir) consists of subatomic particles or electromagnetic waves that have sufficient energy to ionize atoms or molecules by detaching electrons from them, including alpha, beta, and neutron particles, gamma rays, x-rays, and the higher-energy ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum (reis et al. 2018). 2 laboratory research has been conducted on cultured cells and model organisms, most notably rodents. epidemiological research collected data not only of the victims of hiroshima and nagasaki, but of the growing numbers of populations exposed to higher levels of radiation: from nuclear weapons testing, nuclear power stations—including leakages and accidents, professional and medical exposures, and from naturally occurring localized high-level background radiation. see unscear 2022. 3 both types of effects occur at tissues distant from the exposed cells. abscopal effects seem to involve the immune system, and include, for example, the deterioration of untreated metastatic lesions after treatment of a distant tumor original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 22 location. bystander effects include a wide range of changes induced through signal transmission in cells distant from the exposed ones. 4 for critical analyses of the science politics through which the lnt model was selected to guide radiation risk assessment, see calabrese 2013, 2015, 2017; williams 2019; folkers 2021. 5 see mothersill, cocchetto, and seymour 2022 for the more recent suggestions for the possible involvement of bio-electric signaling. 6 epigenetics has many, sometimes contradictory definitions (cavalli and heard 2019). here, i follow adrian bird’s (2007) biochemical, chromatin-centered definition. the range of modifications includes those added to dna itself—such as cytosine methylation (by far the most studied, but other modifications are known), and changes to the molecular complexes around which dna is arranged, such as histone variants and various histone modifications. epigenetic mechanisms also include multiple functions of noncoding rnas (ncrnas); for more details, see wei et al. 2017; peixoto et al. 2020. for the involvement of ncrna in response to ir, see may et al. 2021. 7 naturally, local increases in radiation levels affect not only the human population but the entire surrounding ecosystem (körblein and hesse-honegger 2018; hancock et al. 2019; cannon and kiang 2022). 8 the extent of interand transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans is the subject of ongoing heated debate, with important social implications, among them the implications for second-generation hibakusha and their descendants (hayashi 2008, 2010, 2015; tomonaga 2019; dubrova and sarapultseva 2022). here i restrict my discussion to the effects on those directly exposed, remembering that the impact of experiences does not begin with one’s birth nor end with one’s death. 9 see le goff, allard, and landecker 2021 for an analysis of the conceptual legacy of negative definitions in epigenetic research. 10 warin and colleagues (2022) also note the resonance with agential realist temporality. 11 genetic determinism has been profusely challenged by many, but davis challenges the conceptualization of the genetic code as in itself determinist. 12 it is energetically beneficial, for example, to place genomic loci that require the same apparatuses together. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 23 13 the “epigenetic landscape” metaphor and its implications have been discussed by many in recent discourse, most profoundly by susan squire (2017). 14 therefore, cells never “flow simply into the mold of power,” as philosopher catherine malabou (2016, 430) puts it. 15 cells also seem to further extend and share their interpretation with other cells, tissues, and organisms through bystander effects. 16 see schrader 2010 for a concrete biological example and the agential realist theoretical grounding. see also hendrickx 2022. the possibility of biological wisdom gained through experiencing adversity, for example, has been so much outside conventional scientific interest that, even in laboratory research with model organisms under controlled conditions, the most trivial questions in this direction have, for the most part, not been rigorously tested (sarkies 2020). 17 the framing i suggest also enables recognizing the wisdom of those who suffered under nuclear aggression and nuclear colonialism, while insisting on institutional accountability and change. following the nuclear test, it is estimated that the inhabitants who lived downwind of the trinity explosion site, were exposed to ten thousand times higher higher radiation levels than those currently allowed, but no measures were taken to protect them before or after the blast (tucker and alvarez 2019). despite the compelling life stories of many dealing with radiation related illness, to this day, they are still denied reparation, and are excluded from the radiation exposure compensation act (tularosa basin downwinders consortium, n.d.). this paper is dedicated to them. 18 this repeated call for interdisciplinary practice is expressed in much of the work cited in this paper: see, for example, landecker 2011; mansfield 2012; lock 2015; dupras and ravitsky 2016; meloni 2016; kenney and müller, 2017; müller et al. 2017; meloni and müller 2018; murray 2018; müller 2020; mancilla et al. 2020; lawson-boyd and meloni 2021; mckittrick 2020; müller and kenney 2021; richardson 2021; packer 2022; saulnier et al. 2022; rossmann and samaras 2024. 19 see, for example, guthman and mansfield 2015; müller and samaras 2018; murray 2018; dubois and guaspare 2020; taki and de melo-martin 2021; valdez 2021; packer 2022. references acheson, ray. 2022. “notes on nuclear weapons & intersectionality in theory and practice.” working paper, princeton university 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genetics & epigenetics, no. 8, 25–36. https://doi.org/10.4137/geg.s31863. williams, richard a. 2019. “economic benefit-cost implications of the lnt model.” chemico-biological interactions 301 (march): 141–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cbi.2019.01.028. wojcik, andrzej. 2022. “reflections on effects of low doses and risk inference based on the unscear 2021 report on ‘biological mechanisms relevant for the inference of cancer risks from low-dose and low-dose-rate radiation.’” journal of radiological protection 42 (2): 023501. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6498/ac591c. xu, jianquan, hongqiang ma, hongbin ma et al. 2020. “super-resolution imaging reveals the evolution of higher-order chromatin folding in early carcinogenesis.” nature communications 11 (1): 1899. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15718-7. author bio tom rolef ben-shahar is an independent scholar who completed her phd (ucl) and postdoc (cruk) in chromatin research in the early 2000s. based on her scientific background, she is currently involved in a project of rearticulating inheritance, dna https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x211070041 https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243919831077 https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52879-7_30 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108621359 https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479833498.003.0007 https://doi.org/10.3892/or.2016.5236 https://doi.org/10.4137/geg.s31863 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cbi.2019.01.028 https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6498/ac591c https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15718-7 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) tom rolef ben-shahar, 2025 40 and chromatin through feminist and queer knowledges, and in particular reading these epistemic objects and the scientific fields involved in researching them through karen barad’s agential realism. cellular narratives in nuclear time: on living with the (epigenetic) memory of trauma abstract keywords prologue introduction the biology of radiation exposure the linear model accounting for nonlinearity: epigenetic involvement in response to ir exposure epigenetic memory: embodying intersectionality the intersectionality of radiation exposure the pitfalls of epigenetic research researching otherwise: the potential contribution of agential realism staying with the trouble: living with august 9 epigenetic entangled temporality epigenetic materiality: chromatin organization accounting for the materiality of epigenetic memory: chromatin constellations tying things together discussion: chromatin constellations and the possibilities for living and dying otherwise the ethico-onto-epistemology of tracing entanglements the political significance of a thick temporality and the temporal dimension of intersectionality notes references author bio hudson, stephanie l. 2024. “living with the pharmakon: a call for futurity.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–8. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © stephanie l. hudson, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license living with the pharmakon: a call for futurity stephanie l. hudson guilford college stephanieleohudson@gmail.com abstract this perspectives piece explores the tensions between the toxicity of psychoactive medications and lack of access to quality treatment and specialist nephrology care for people with, what has been defined by the medical community as, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. what becomes of livability if the system of medicine creates harm in supposed remedy while refusing remedy and creating harm? this essay calls out the limits this contradiction places on the possibilities for life, and it is concerned with what kinds of futures materialize in living with the pharmakon. keywords futurity, pharmakon, psychoactive, toxicity, transplant introduction in this perspectives piece, i am interested in the tensions between the toxicity of psychoactive medications and lack of access to quality treatment and specialist nephrology care for people with, what has been defined by the medical community as, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. i question what becomes of livability if the system of medicine creates harm in supposed remedy while refusing remedy and creating harm. i call out the limits this contradiction places on the possibilities for life, and i am concerned with what kinds of futures materialize in living with psychoactive medications, or what i collectively call the pharmakon. my motivation for this writing is personal as much as it is scholarly—i am what i would describe as a feminist technoscience scholar living with a bipolar disorder diagnosis, the drugs prescribed to remedy my symptoms, and the harmful side effects of these medications. i acknowledge my limited perspective from the outset—i am not a transplant researcher nor a clinician—which prevents mailto:stephanieleohudson@gmail.com special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) stephanie l. hudson, 2024 2 me from fully addressing the complexities and intricacies of transplant medicine as they sit in tension with the toxicity of psychoactive medications. my aim is to call for those deeply engaged with this work to take up lines of inquiry and action. my initial interest in transplant medicine stems from my stint as a histocompatibility and immunogenetics laboratory technician. in the lab, patients were represented as disembodied vials of blood, buffy coats of white blood cells, and extracted fragments of dna. and for many years, because of my narrow science education, i too often viewed science, technology, medicine, biology, bodies, and matter through this decontextualized perspective. but over time i began to see not through the lens of separation and fragmentation. i now understand there is potential for harm in leaning too heavily into a decontextualized, abstract engagement with materiality without attention to a situated materialist account of the world that is cognizant of matter across scales (roy and subramaniam 2016)—from the modulation of multi-neurotransmitter systems through psychoactive cocktails to the management of exclusive transplant waiting lists through psychosocial evaluations. i have not thought about transplant medicine in my scholarly work since my time in the lab until i viewed this call for papers. i have, however, thought about it quite a bit in my personal life, not because of any present medical need but rather because of my fixation on my future as it is lived entangled with the pharmakon, and this is my initial attempt to bring the two into conversation. living with the pharmakon teena gabrielson writes, “inherently slippery, the polysemous root of the adjective ‘toxic,’ pharmakon, refers not only to poison, or philter, but also to remedy, medicine, drug” (2016, 173). pharmakon signifies in seemingly conflicting directions, and, yet, despite binary logic that aims to break the stitching that binds them, the paradoxical characteristics cannot be disentangled. in emily martin’s bipolar expeditions, the accounts of psychoactive medications she collected “are permeated with ambivalence—simultaneous and contradictory feelings of attraction and repulsion…the drugs help me, they hurt me; they ease one kind of pain and intensify another; and they take away one painful symptom but add a new one” (2007, 171). living with the pharmakon invokes a neverending series of trade-offs; i urge you to grapple with this knotty reality. asha persson adds the productive potential of the pharmakon in her analysis of antiretroviral therapy—the “capacity to reconfigure bodies and diseases in multiple, unpredictable ways” (2004, 46). this is the volatile work of psychoactive drugs with which i am particularly concerned and believe others should be as well. i have succumbed to taking psychoactive medications as necessary for my survival, despite their well-established toxic characteristics and yet all that is not known about their mechanism of action in my body, though this is difficult to accept and admit. making decisions around pharmaceutical treatment (or the lack special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) stephanie l. hudson, 2024 3 of pharmaceutical treatment), if even given the option, is, and can perhaps only ever be, fraught and entails negotiating a range of primary and what are considered side effects. despite the availability of newer—and supposedly less toxic while often more expensive—psychoactive drugs, side effects continue to complicate psychopharmacological treatment of affective and psychotic symptoms. side effects of these medications are often silenced or pushed aside out of fear of noncompliance. alternatively, side effects are used as justification for discrediting their use. against either of these stances, i advocate for engagement with the complexities and contradictions inherent in pharmaceuticals rather than moving directly to an anti-pharmaceutical position despite my awareness that this might be an undesirable request. lithium, a common treatment for bipolar disorder, may cause “hypothyroidism, hyperparathyroidism, nephrogenic diabetes insipidus, and decline in renal function” (van alphen et al. 2021, 1). in their international review, claire carswell et al. (2023) found that there is increased risk of chronic kidney disease in those who are diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and clodagh cogley et al. (2022) explain that these higher incidences can be partially explained by known factors, such as the use of lithium. from an intersectional perspective, chronic kidney disease is more common in women, and this has been shown in those who take lithium specifically, with younger women at a particular risk (hayes et al. 2021; shine et al. 2015). at issue is the often long-term use of lithium. research shows that lithium “has the potential to cause end-stage kidney disease, albeit over a prolonged period…with some studies suggesting that a period of around 27 years may be required to see significant nephrotoxicity occur” (davis, desmond, and berk 2018, 1). end-stage kidney disease is reportedly relatively rare in people taking lithium likely due to close renal monitoring with a focus on serum lithium levels, but there have been cases of lithium-induced end-stage kidney disease (beasley, larson, and garcia-pittman 2018; kerckhoffs, hartong, and grootens 2018; van alphen et al. 2021). however, some uncertainty remains about the incidence of renal failure in people taking lithium, and data about the prevalence of lithium-induced end-stage kidney disease are sparse (van alphen et al. 2021). a surprising finding from my review of relevant research was the relationship between psychoactive medications other than lithium and the risk of chronic kidney disease. potential adverse effects of antipsychotics, particularly the second-generation antipsychotics, include but are not limited to sedation, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), sexual dysfunction, tardive dyskinesia (repetitive, involuntary muscle movements), myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle), risk of sudden cardiac death, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, and metabolic syndrome (involving weight gain, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high triglycerides, and low hdl cholesterol) potentially leading to diabetes and cardiovascular disease with studies also linking them to an increased risk of chronic kidney disease (carswell et al. 2023; damba et al. 2022; de hert et al. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) stephanie l. hudson, 2024 4 2012; stroup and gray 2018). diabetes and hypertension are the most common causes of chronic kidney disease generally, “conditions that are significantly more prevalent among people with [bipolar disorder and schizophrenia], in part because of the side effects of antipsychotic medication” (carswell et al. 2023, 1520). mikkel højlund et al. explain that rather than second-generation antipsychotics directly increasing the risk of chronic kidney disease, they “contribute to metabolic disturbances, which in the end result in kidney damage” (2020, 6). and the mechanism responsible for these metabolic changes is not fully understood and may be multifactorial (dejongh 2021, 311). while i didn’t find any mention of antipsychotic-induced end-stage kidney disease in my research as i did for lithium, i believe these drugs warrant monitoring for their potential impact on kidney health. a call for futurity carswell et al. write, “while people who have [what is described as severe mental illness, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia] are less likely to reach kidney failure, this is most likely a result of them dying too early for their disease to progress” (2023, 1544). given the phenomenon of the mortality gap of people diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia caused, in significant part, by long-term physical health conditions, i think a lot about life, living, dying, and death. alison kafer writes, “ideas about disability and disabled minds/bodies animate many of our collective evocations of the future; in these imaginings, disability too often serves as the agreed-upon limit of our projected futures” (2023, 27). as with kafer, i imagine futurity otherwise, but i am not speaking here about the curative imaginary that cannot imagine a future beyond medical intervention and its concern with compulsory able-bodiedmindedness (27). and yet, i do want to focus on medical intervention—access to quality medical intervention for those who desire it (even if ambivalently so). i acknowledge that while some have fought for a reduction in the role of doctors and other medical clinicians in their lives, “feminist and antiracist health activists have historically had to fight for, first, access to medical care,…and, second, for improved quality of care, that is, health care free from racial, gendered, sexual, and (dis)ability discrimination” (schalk and kim 2020, 45–46). while this mortality gap can be partially attributed to higher rates of comorbidities, there is evidence that unequal access to health care is critical to this disparity (cogley et al. 2022). i am writing in response to kafer’s blunt assessment that “disabled people are continually being written out of the future,” and, she cautions, “this erasure is not mere metaphor” (2013, 46). carswell et al. (2023) found that though there is increased risk of chronic kidney disease, those who are diagnosed with severe mental illness are less likely to receive specialist nephrology care, less likely to be evaluated for a kidney transplant, less likely to be on the register to receive a kidney transplant, and less likely to receive a kidney transplant, suggesting significant inequalities in kidney care. this reality exists despite studies showing special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) stephanie l. hudson, 2024 5 “similar outcomes following transplantation, with no evidence of increased rejection rates, graft loss, or mortality” (carswell et al. 2023, 1544). equitable access to transplantation is especially important for people diagnosed with bipolar disorder, “as for a significant proportion of these patients, the primary, and potentially avoidable, cause of [end-stage kidney disease] is long-term lithium treatment” (butler et al. 2017, 73). that there is potential for harm in the remedy of psychoactive medications is troubling, but that the profoundly uneven medical system could exert another harm by withholding remedy is particularly vexing given that “the presence of a severe mental illness has been considered a relative or even absolute contraindication by some” (cogley et al. 2022, 1415). exclusion from transplant programs has previously been due to concerns regarding adherence to post-transplant regimens, cognitive and emotional capability, potential interactions between immunosuppressant and psychoactive drugs, exacerbation of psychiatric symptoms, and inadequate social support with limited data to support these concerns (cogley et al. 2022). this essay was prompted by katherine cahn-fuller and brendan parent’s (2017) call for justice for people denied transplantation based on a psychiatric diagnosis across medical specialties. cahn-fuller and parent (2017) were concerned with transplant eligibility criteria as exclusionary, but it seems that while this remains an important area of focus given the continued inconsistent eligibility guidelines across transplant centers in the united states, the relevant factors of health inequities are far more pervasive than this alone and are present across levels of (supposed) care. the issue of medicalization with psychoactive drugs and the potential adverse impact on the body, particularly the kidneys, sits in tension with undermedicalization and a lack of access to quality treatment and specialist nephrology care. i question again—what becomes of livability if the system of medicine creates harm in supposed remedy while refusing remedy and creating harm? in contemplating what of a situated, intersectional account of life with the pharmakon, i return to the need for understanding across scales, which is why i believe researchers across disciplines and clinicians across specialties must engage with each other—we need a present and future of cross-disciplinary solidarities to provide the quality care that is desperately needed. this collaboration requires a shared understanding of disability that goes beyond the medical model, though i am not arguing for a simple rejection of medical intervention but rather a complex interrogation of the medical assemblage. i encourage researchers and clinicians “to not only (re)think how bodies and…drugs come together, but also how side effects become actualized in a given assemblage of bodies, drugs, objects, people, relations, events, discourses, practices, and institutions” (gagnon and holmes 2016, 253). what discursive practices are at play in the decisions regarding the use of psychoactive drugs, which medications, and at what doses? and what of the power dynamics involved in these decisions? what of monitoring and treatment for adverse effects and special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) stephanie l. hudson, 2024 6 perhaps inequitable monitoring and treatment across race, gender, class, nation, and other differences? for whom, at what point, and for how long are hemodialysis machines necessary? who is and who should be eligible for a kidney transplant and under what conditions? what is and what should be the relationship amongst patients, psychiatric prescribers, nephrologists, and other clinicians? how can we create a more accessible, just, and interconnected medical system for people living with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia diagnoses that provides holistic care for bodyminds? i call for situating psychoactive drugs in the context of the institutional practices and power relations of medicine and the lived realities of the people entangled in these assemblages, as one focal point of which there should be many, to open possibilities for life, living, and the materialization of more livable futures. references beasley, anna k., catherine c. larson, and erica c. garcia-pittman. 2018. “lithium rechallenge after renal transplant.” mental health clinician 7 (2): 46–50. https://doi.org/10.9740/mhc.2017.03.046. butler, mary i., deirdre mccartan, anne cooney, patrick o. kelly, izhar ahmed, dilly little, siobhan machale, and peter conlon. 2017. “outcomes of renal transplantation in patients with bipolar affective disorder and schizophrenia: a national retrospective cohort study.” psychosomatics 58 (1): 69–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psym.2016.08.010. cahn-fuller, katherine l., and brendan parent. 2017. “transplant eligibility for patients with affective and psychotic disorders: a review of practices and a call for justice.” bmc medical ethics 18 (1): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-017-0235-4. carswell, claire, clodagh cogley, kate bramham, joseph chilcot, helen noble, and najma siddiqi. 2023. “chronic kidney disease and severe mental illness: a scoping review.” journal of nephrology, no. 36, 1519–47. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40620-023-01599-8. cogley, clodagh, claire carswell, kate bramham, and joseph chilcot. 2022. “chronic kidney disease and severe mental illness: addressing disparities in access to health care and health outcomes.” clinical journal of the american society of nephrology 17 (9): 1413–17. https://doi.org/10.2215/cjn.15691221. damba, joseph junior, katie bodenstein, paola lavin, jessica drury, harmehr sekhon, christel renoux, emilie trinh, soham rej, and kyle t. greenway. 2022. “psychotropic drugs and adverse kidney effects: a systematic review of the past decade of research.” cns drugs 36 (10): 1049–77. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40263-022-00952-y. davis, justin, matthew desmond, and michael berk. 2018. “lithium and nephrotoxicity: a literature review of approaches to clinical management and risk stratification.” bmc nephrology 19, art. 305. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12882-018-1101-4. de hert, marc, johan detraux, ruud van winkel, yu weiping, and christoph u. correll. 2012. “metabolic and cardiovascular adverse effects associated with https://doi.org/10.9740/mhc.2017.03.046 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psym.2016.08.010 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-017-0235-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40620-023-01599-8 https://doi.org/10.2215/cjn.15691221 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40263-022-00952-y https://doi.org/10.1186/s12882-018-1101-4 special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) stephanie l. hudson, 2024 7 antipsychotic drugs.” nature reviews endocrinology, no. 8, 114–26. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrendo.2011.156. dejongh, beth m. 2021. “clinical pearls for the monitoring and treatment of antipsychotic induced metabolic syndrome.” mental health clinician 11 (6): 311–19. https://doi.org/10.9740/mhc.2021.11.311. gabrielson, teena. 2016. “the enactment of intention and exception through poisoned corpses and toxic bodies.” in mattering: feminism, science, and materialism, edited by victoria pitts-taylor, 173–87. new york: nyu press. gagnon, marilou, and dave holmes. 2016. “body–drug assemblages: theorizing the experience of side effects in the context of hiv treatment.” nursing philosophy 17 (4): 250–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/nup.12136. hayes, joseph f., david p.j. osborn, emma francis, gareth ambler, laurie a. tomlinson, magnus boman, ian c.k. wong, john r. geddes, christina dalman, and glyn lewis. 2021. “prediction of individuals at high risk of chronic kidney disease during treatment with lithium for bipolar disorder.” bmc medicine 19, art. 99. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-021-01964-z. højlund, mikkel, lars christian lund, jonas leander emming herping, maija bruun haastrup, per damkier, and daniel pilsgaard henriksen. 2020. “second-generation antipsychotics and the risk of chronic kidney disease: a population-based casecontrol study.” bmj open 10 (8). https://doi.org/10.1136%2fbmjopen-2020-038247. kafer, alison. 2013. feminist, queer, crip. bloomington: indiana university press. kerckhoffs, angèle p.m., erwin g.t.m hartong, and koen p. grootens. 2018. “the perspectives of patients with lithium-induced end-stage renal disease.” international journal of bipolar disorders 6, art. 13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40345-018-0121-0. martin, emily. 2007. bipolar expeditions: mania and depression in american culture. princeton, nj: princeton university press. persson, asha. 2004. “incorporating pharmakon: hiv, medicine, and body shape change.” body & society 10 (4): 45–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x04047855. roy, deboleena, and banu subramaniam. 2016. “matter in the shadows: feminist new materialism and the practices of colonialism.” in mattering: feminism, science, and materialism, edited by victoria pitts-taylor, 23–42. new york: nyu press. schalk, sami, and jina b. kim. 2020. “integrating race, transforming feminist disability studies.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 46 (1): 31–55. https://doi.org/10.1086/709213. shine, brian, rebecca f. mcknight, laurence leaver, and john r. geddes. 2015. “long-term effects of lithium on renal, thyroid, and parathyroid function: a retrospective analysis of laboratory data.” lancet 386 (9992): 461–68. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(14)61842-0. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrendo.2011.156 https://doi.org/10.9740/mhc.2021.11.311 https://doi.org/10.1111/nup.12136 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-021-01964-z https://doi.org/10.1136%2fbmjopen-2020-038247 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40345-018-0121-0 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x04047855 https://doi.org/10.1086/709213 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(14)61842-0 special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) stephanie l. hudson, 2024 8 stroup, t. scott, and neil gray. 2018. “management of common adverse effects of antipsychotic medications.” world psychiatry: official journal of the world psychiatric association 17 (3): 341–56. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20567. van alphen, arjan m., tessa m. bosch, ralph w. kupka, and rocco hoekstra. 2021. “chronic kidney disease in lithium-treated patients, incidence and rate of decline.” international journal of bipolar disorders 9 (1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40345-020-00204-2. author bio stephanie l. hudson is a scholar working across disciplines in biosciences and feminist studies. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20567 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40345-020-00204-2 pala, roberta. 2025. “fragility.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © roberta pala, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license fragility roberta pala university of sydney roberta.pala@sydney.edu.au keywords herd immunity, vaccines, more-than-human, biosocial, protection, care, fragility the figure of population remains an important marker of the efficacy of vaccines both in specialist and popular thinking. population thinking is inherent to contemporary biotechnological pursuits of practices such as precision medicine and personalized interventions. the case of herd immunity, as in the form of population immunity that is produced specifically through effective vaccines, is an interesting example of the ways in which the biological capacities of the population are used to advance biotechnological fixes in a neutral way. it can also become a site of feminist sts intervention when the material fragility of how this immunity is reproduced and maintained is used to consider the political implications of how human and microbial bodies live together, enmeshed in social, ecological and economic networks and hierarchies of life that determine who can be protected from that immunity and who threatens it. the history of public vaccination efforts is deeply interwoven with the first steps of the bureaucratization of public health and administrative procedures constitutive of the population, with both the accumulation of statistical data and surveillance practices. the concept of herd immunity did not carry much weight until the second half of the twentieth century, with the establishment of global immunization programs at the world health organization and promises of future disease eradications. during the covid-19 pandemic, both vaccines and their herd immunity were integrated in strategies and hopes of pandemic relief. this interest in applying the “magic” of herd immunity in disease control characterizes this phenomenon as an indirect protection of nonimmunized people when in the presence of a specific proportion of immunized people, with the public health goal to mathematically model and then apply these conditions. mailto:roberta.pala@sydney.edu.au roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) roberta pala, 2025 2 herd immunity is in this sense framed as a stable biological property of the population. the population is understood as herd-like, which implies that it behaves in an irrational or uncontrollable way requiring some form of domestication and alienating it from decision-making; but it could also refer to a form of gregariousness and homogeneity normally associated with animal herds (anderson 2021). thinking of population as a herd makes it a site of intervention that can be framed as “purely” natural and therefore neutral. this framing of population as a “herd” happens in a context where immunity, the protection that this herd should benefit from, remains theorized as an assemblage of individual responsibilities, where neoliberal subjects are expected to cultivate their health and secure their own bodily borders against microbial invasions (see vaccination campaigns focusing on either punishing or convincing individuals to get immunized). through herd immunity, vaccines become a governmental device for both securitizing and disciplining the “population” against viral threats and nonimmunized individuals either entering the “herd” or endangering it with risky behaviors. all this while assuming some form of homogeneity and some natural or “simply” biological way in which as a collective the population behaves. in practice, though, population immunity is a much more fragile, inconsistent biosocial and ecological phenomenon. important discussions among scientists around the complexities of this collective immunity’s practical workings often remain overlooked, but it is this fragility in practice that i propose could help us rethink ideas of populations and collective futures. first, immunity is not a stable condition; in most cases, our bodies slowly lose their capacity to respond to a pathogen. moreover, the memory acquired can be easily forgotten (see all the booster shots needed for many vaccines’ protection to endure); and often protection to a viral strain can make you more susceptible to others (of the same pathogen or different ones). finally, as david napier (2020) shows, there are viruses that can circulate in the population for decades before turning into an epidemic, signaling that the driver of a pandemic and therefore the protection that herd immunity produces is not against the virus or its encounter/invasion of a body, but the changing conditions in the way we interact with each other and with our environment (as we know, microbial life is already completely entangled with our bodies and broader ecosystems; and feminist scholars have long proposed to think of corporeality as excessive, fluid, and leaky). it is by reflecting on matter that we could think of population in a different way, as a fragile social and material ecosystem. herd immunity, at a material level, speaks of a form of sociality that is not only more-than-human but especially fragile, which requires attending to inequalities and vulnerabilities (disease’s burden, we know, is unevenly distributed) in a responsible and ethical way, without stigmatizing some populations as more in need of protection or intervention. the material complexities roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) roberta pala, 2025 3 of population immunity could invite us to take care of these ecological and bodily fragilities of the population in a “perpetual” way (lancaster and rhodes 2023), while also keeping at the forefront classic feminist questions around who is burdened by this care and how this care can be enacted in a just way (kenney 2024). references anderson, warwick. 2021. “the model crisis, or how to have critical promiscuity in the time of covid-19.” social studies of science 51 (2): 167–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312721996053. kenney, martha. 2024. “care in technoscience.” in elgar encyclopedia of science ad technology studies, edited by ulrike felt and alan irwin, 426–34. edward elgar publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800377998.ch44. lancaster, kari, and tim rhodes. 2023. “problematising the emergence of outbreak science in the governance of global health: making time for slow dis-ease.” critical public health 33 (5): 838–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2023.2232523. napier, a. david. 2020. “i heard it through the grapevine: on herd immunity and why it is important.” anthropology today 36 (3): 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12572. author bio roberta pala is a postdoctoral research fellow in the sydney centre for healthy societies at the university of sydney. her research draws on science and technology studies, feminist sts, biopolitics, and sociology of health. her current work looks at the concept of more-than-human health with a focus on human-microbial relations and investigates the politics of microbiome research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312721996053 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800377998.ch44 https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2023.2232523 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12572 fragility keywords references author bio tien, jianni. 2025. “the geological.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © jianni tien, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license the geological jianni tien university of sydney jianni.tien@sydney.edu.au keywords geophilosophy, geology, geopower, populations, planetary, feminist theory, anthropocene populations have been theorized through the scientific disciplines of chemistry (hayden 2014), biology (foucault 1978), and computer science (halpern 2023), amongst others. in this short provocation i ask, what could happen if populations were theorized through the discipline of geology? i situate this provocation within the realm of feminist geophilosophy (see grosz, 2008; marston 2023; yusoff 2018, 2024) that examines geological relations as the central domain of social theory in the context of accelerating ecological crisis, environmental destruction, and the enduring conceptual resonances of the anthropocene. in this theoretical cluster, geopower is a way of understanding the earth as a field of forces that subtends the social—that is, the ways that the earth has been utilized in the formation of territories and the building of empire. elizabeth povinelli’s (2016) concept of geontopower brings the ontological into this formation of geopower, proposing that the distinction between “life” and “nonlife” as a hierarchical categorization is at the heart of the wider colonial project. the separation of “bios” from “geos” that allows for endless extraction in the pursuit of human advancement is a situated (western) configuration at odds with many indigenous knowledges and ontologies that reject such categorizations. the following table was inspired by cori hayden’s (2014) scholarship that proposes a shift from biological to chemical understandings of population, showing how population is constituted not only through measurable biological processes but also chemical multiplicities that are nonbiological and nongenealogical. i take poetic license with hayden’s exercise, adding a third column to the table—the geological. mailto:jianni.tien@sydney.edu.au roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jianni tien, 2025 2 population (biological) population (chemical) population (geological) aggregate organized around vitality, procreative reproduction, regularization of life processes aggregate organized around nongenealogical replications, generativity of copies aggregate organized around a hierarchical categorization of “life” and “nonlife” as a mode of extraction to fuel current state of late-stage capitalism proliferation: sexual recombination, statistical repetitions proliferation: the same, but different; commercial and material replications proliferation: as nonhuman “life”; e.g., oxygen oases (areas of higher oxygen than surrounding environment) as crucial to the development of life on earth, tied to geological epochs and transmutations of matter across vast scales (fossil fuels; limestone) governed by the state governed by the simistate governed by the state, global collaborations, and biogeochemical processes and intra-actions life = politics (biopolitics) chemical relationality = socialpolitical formations (simipolitics) geology as life/nonlife distinction = politics (geonto-politics) in a geological analysis, population is an aggregate organized around the ontological division between life and nonlife, allowing for endless extraction in the pursuit of progress. this mode of organization upholds the division between humans and the environment, where the earth is viewed as an inert resource to be mined. at the same time, the life/nonlife category is shot through with colonial histories of violence that categorized some bodies as extractable in the pursuit of the wider project of global colonial dominance. a geological population understands proliferation as not only sexual reproduction, recognizing the importance of nonhuman life such as oxygen oases, localized zones of oxygen created by early microbial populations that transformed the earth’s atmosphere and geochemistry, enabling complex life. thinking through geologic population foregrounds how living collectives shape planetary conditions across deep time, through transmutations of matter like oxygen production and fossil fuel formation, blurring the boundaries between biology, chemistry, and geology, and redefining population as a distributed, world-making force embedded in earth’s material history. a geologic population is governed not just by the state, but also by the geochemical processes of the earth itself. roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jianni tien, 2025 3 so what can “thinking-with” geology, geopower, and geontopower do for populations theory? feminist geophilosophy seeks to reinscribe situated colonial violences into the disturbingly neutral discourses of “environmental” and “planetary” predicaments, and to “repoliticize the planet” (whitington and oguz 2023) by exposing the violent ways it has come into being. i speculate that a geological approach to populationism is useful in countering the flattening and erasure of difference in anthropocene and planetary discourses. references foucault, michel. 1978. the history of sexuality. vol. 1, an introduction. translated by robert hurley. pantheon books. grosz, elizabeth. 2008. chaos, territory, art: deleuze and the framing of the earth. columbia university press. halpern, orit. 2023. “neural ‘freedoms’: population, choice, and machine learning.” in queer reflections on ai: uncertain intelligences, edited by jacob gaboury and deboleena roy, 42–62. routledge. hayden, cori. 2014. “population.” in the routledge handbook of science, technology and society, edited by daniel lee kleinman and kelly moore, 243–59. routledge. marston, andrea. 2023. “metabolic strata, corporeal sediment.” environmental humanities 15 (3): 159–73. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746056. povinelli, elizabeth a. 2016. geontologies: a requiem to late liberalism. duke university press. whitington, jerome, and zeynep oguz. 2023. “geology, power, and the planetary: earth as praxis.” environmental humanities 15 (3): 145–58. https://doi.org/10.1215/2201191910746045. yusoff, kathryn. 2018. a billion black anthropocenes or none. university of minnesota press. yusoff, kathryn. 2024. geologic life: inhuman intimacies and the geophysics of race. duke university press. author bio jianni tien is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of the environmental humanities, feminist theory, and science and technology studies. jianni researches a range of topics including the ontologies of hydrogeologic structures such as limestone sinkholes, human-microbial relations, and the materialities of pollution, toxicity, and waste in the anthropocene. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746056 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746045 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746045 the geological keywords references author bio van wichelen, sonja. 2025. “relational presence.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sonja van wichelen, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license relational presence sonja van wichelen university of sydney sonjavanwichelen@sydney.edu.au keywords human microbiome research, hallucinatory populations, datafication of microbial life, computational microbiomics, personalized medicine, relational presence what is a population but a method to know, aid, govern? populations frame bioscientific research, including studies on the human microbiome. as microbial life transforms into data through genomic sequencing, computational modeling, and statistical aggregation, their tangled ecologies are pressed into clean(er) formats—fit for policy briefs and predictive models. microbiome research, therefore, does not simply reflect microbial reality; it inscribes microbial life within systems of control and optimization, generating new populations that can be governed and intervened upon. current human microbiome studies hypothesize that the transition from a subsistence economy to an industrial economy robs bodies of their capacities to metabolize efficiently, leading to health issues including inflammation, obesity, and metabolic disorders. conceptual divisions of microbial populations into those from urban, industrialized, and (over)developed places (dysbiotic or “unhealthy” microbiome) against those from un(der)developed, pre-industrialized, and subsistence economies (eubiotic or “healthy” microbiome) make certain bodies (and their microbiota samples) more treasured for the extraction of bioinformation (van wichelen 2023). subsequently, the microbial knowledge of “other” bodies is put to work to remedy these pathogenic instances, producing instances of epistemic colonialism and epistemic capitalism. nothing new under the sun—for a biopolitical analysis. yet the datafication of microbes alters our concept of populations not just in degree but also in kind. traditional epidemiology understands populations as human groups defined by geography, demographics, or social characteristics. mailto:sonjavanwichelen@sydney.edu.au roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) sonja van wichelen, 2025 2 computational microbiomics, by contrast, abstracts microbial communities into universally comparable units—detached from their human and environmental contexts. this abstraction enables large-scale comparisons but risks erasing the lived realities of poverty, malnutrition, and colonial histories (benezra 2016, 348; radin 2017). moreover, the increasing role of machine learning in genomic sequencing presents a methodological problem unique to its field: the so-called “small n, large p problem” (alyass et al. 2015). comparable to other omics research, the study of the human microbiome suffers from the issue where the number of parameters or microbial features (p) is much larger than the sample size (n). this matters as it presents difficulties for biomathematicians who are tasked to analyze and interpret omics data. in the case of microbiomics, nonindustrialized populations are almost always underrepresented in omics studies, and with each added dimension (for instance, an increased model complexity) for a fixed sample size, the consistency of models decreases (alyass et al. 2015, 6), with statistical and biopolitical implications. while thousands of microbial species represent p, n is often represented by a handful of non-industrialized samples, leading not only to overgeneralization but to unstable comparisons, and arguably to what i term hallucinatory populations. much like the hallucinations in ai-generated text and images, these populations lack real-world referents. they emerge from computational processes that struggle to encode complex social and historical contexts, revealing the blind spots where ideology hides behind precision. in the idealized eubiotic or dysbiotic microbiomes that sanitize histories of colonialism and capitalism, these hallucinations reveal deeper ideological investments (žižek 2009). here, computational microbiomics operates as a digitized biological rationale that sustains an ideological fantasy—one that naturalizes existing power relations while disavowing the material conditions that produce inequality. much like slavoj žižek (2009) argues, the ideological works, not through the concealment of truth, but by refuting the material provisions core to differentiating knowledge from information. as microbial populations flicker with the authority of data, they carry phantom-like dimensions—emergent, not from a present world, but from algorithmic creations haunting bioscientific dashboards. datafication moves the analysis of populations beyond sovereign and disciplinary power, toward an understanding of how populations function as nodes of datadriven optimization (halpern and mitchell 2023). in this framework, populations, including microbial ones, become pre-emptive models—fluctuating risk landscapes that must be forecasted, managed, and adapted to an uncertain future. the uncertainty drives interventions, optimizing continuously while failing at the same time, justifying perpetual intervention. in the north (and for wealthy individuals in the south), such interventions are exhibited by the liberal state’s support of “personalized” medicine, accompanied by grotesque performances of privileged biohackers—such as the american entrepreneur and anti-aging roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) sonja van wichelen, 2025 3 practitioner bryan johnson—whose affluence can buy them the full optimization of their gut’s microbial life. in the south (and among marginalized communities in the north), we see public and global health interventions that practice modern and depersonalized medicine, chipping away at what remains of autonomy while negating subjects’ singularity. if computational microbiomics reduces lives to probabilities that may include hallucinatory ones, a feminist and postcolonial toolkit does the opposite: it insists on a relational presence, necessitating contextualization and radical collaboration between researchers and those researched. this entails not just a different method, but a different ethics of life. references alyass, akram, michelle turcotte, and david meyre. 2015. “from big data analysis to personalized medicine for all: challenges and opportunities.” bmc medical genomics, no. 8, art. no. 33, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12920-015-0108-y. benezra, amber. 2016. “datafying microbes: malnutrition at the intersection of genomics and global health.” biosocieties, no. 11, 334–51. https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2016.16. halpern, orit, and robert mitchell, 2023. the smartness mandate. mit press. radin, joanna. 2017. “‘digital natives’: how medical and indigenous histories matter for big data.” osiris 32 (1): 43–64. https://doi.org/10.1086/693853. van wichelen, sonja. 2023. “shit, in silico: on the postcolonial materiality of bioinformation.” public culture 35 (3): 379–91. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10742551. žižek, slavoj. 2009. the sublime object of ideology. verso books. author bio sonja van wichelen is professor of anthropology and sociology in the school of social and political sciences at the university of sydney. her research takes place on the cross-disciplinary node of law, life, and science in a globalizing world. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12920-015-0108-y https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2016.16 https://doi.org/10.1086/693853 https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10742551 relational presence keywords references author bio kuljian, christa, and xan sarah chacko. 2025. “an origin story for feminist science studies: a conversation with christa kuljian.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–9. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © christa kuljian and xan sarah chacko. 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license an origin story for feminist science studies: a conversation with christa kuljian christa kuljian wits university christak@alignafrica.com xan sarah chacko brown university xan_chacko@brown.edu abstract christa kuljian’s our science, ourselves chronicles the life histories of seven trailblazing women whose work, activism, and ferocity forms an originary node for feminist science studies. these figures formed a powerful network in the boston area from the 1970s to the 1990s. inspired by the women’s movement and organizations such as science for the people and the combahee river collective, they led critical analyses of gender and racial biases in science. their work famously challenged e.o. wilson’s sociobiology in 1975 and larry summers’s comments about women in science in 2005. drawing on extensive research, kuljian celebrates how these women profoundly shaped our collective scientific knowledge and view of the world. i met kuljian after she gave a talk at the sts colloquium series at brown university in march 2025, and we subsequently connected for this interview. keywords feminist science studies, origin stories, boston, activism, sociobiology, women in science mailto:christak@alignafrica.com mailto:xan_chacko@brown.edu tenth anniversary section – commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) christa kuljian and xan sarah chacko 2025 2 xan sarah chacko (xsc): in our science, ourselves, you focus on the stories of seven key figures but also include many others who are pivotal to the story. what was your process for selecting ruth hubbard, rita arditti, evelyn fox keller, evelynn hammonds, anne fausto-sterling, banu subramaniam and nancy hopkins? christa kuljian (ck): the book focuses on seven women—six who developed a feminist approach to their science, and one—nancy hopkins—who was a reluctant feminist. the inclusion of hopkins’s life and career highlights a key theme: the distinction between promoting women in science and the discipline of feminist science studies. my selection process began in 2019. but the inspiration for the book began in the 1970s when i was in high school and my parents gave me a copy of our bodies, ourselves, the groundbreaking women’s health book published by the boston women’s health book collective. in the early 1980s, i studied the history of science at harvard and took a course with biologist ruth hubbard where we examined stereotypes and bias around sex and gender in biology. that course greatly influenced me, my senior thesis, and this book. more recently, i published darwin’s hunch, a book about scientific racism and sexism in the search for human origins in south africa. after that book came out, i noticed comments in the media reminiscent of the ones larry summers had made in 2005. this prompted me in 2019 to revisit ruth hubbard’s coursework, and her papers at the schlesinger library, as i was curious about her networks and wondered who else back in the 1970s and ’80s had brought a feminist awareness to science. i soon discovered rita arditti, a geneticist from argentina who worked at brandeis and then at harvard medical school in the 1960s. arditti’s impact on ruth hubbard’s thinking was clear from hubbard’s papers and oral histories. my research expanded to include beverly smith, a combahee river collective founding member who published an essay in one of hubbard’s edited volumes. by late 2019, after time in boston and cambridge interviewing evelyn fox keller, banu subramaniam, and evelynn hammonds, i had identified all seven women. i realized a critical mass of women in the boston area had networked in this field. initially, i had hoped to tell an international story, linking with women in the global south. this remained a tension, but ultimately, i decided to focus on this boston-area group. i felt this specific story could illuminate the early days of feminist critiques of science and the origins of feminist science studies. xsc: i was amazed by your ability to hold space for individual stories while weaving them into the narrative of the bigger picture of the origins of feminist science studies. do you have a method that you use to interweave the big picture with the individual histories and anecdotes? tenth anniversary section – commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) christa kuljian and xan sarah chacko 2025 3 ck: it is a craft that i’ve been working on for over twenty years. rather than write a dissertation, i aimed to tell a story. this means the book is well referenced and researched, but that it also provides an overall narrative arc that includes women’s life histories. this is my third book-length narrative, and i am glad it resonated with you. i kept a process diary, a practice from my studies of narrative nonfiction, to track my thoughts and reflections on new discoveries and emerging themes. the diary helped me to keep track of the linkages between different characters. i looked back at it this morning to see how i had identified all seven women by the end of 2019. my plans for more us research in 2020 were delayed by the pandemic, but online resources like zoom interviews and webinars, including catalyst's fifth-anniversary celebrations, enhanced my research. i returned to archival research in the us in late 2021 and 2022. xsc: you mentioned the tension of the domestic versus international story, but another tension you highlight in the book is that of whiteness and race. you address this head-on, crucially bringing up race alongside gender, and introduce other actors to support the claim that race and gender were intertwined from the start of feminist science studies. would you like to add something? ck: yes, this theme is always important. having just written about the history of science in south africa, i knew how issues of race and gender are often erased from history, and i knew these issues would be central to this story of feminism and science in boston. i wanted to make sure to foreground the voices of women of color. and i wanted to track how they influenced the thinking of some white women in their fields. even though intersectionality is widely discussed today in academia and in public forums, issues of race and racism were often absent in discussions about gender in the ’70s and ’80s, on panels at conferences and in published anthologies, which is still the case today. i specifically looked for women of color who were scientists and feminists in the 1970s and ’80s and their impact. it was biologist dorothy burnham from the genes and gender collective who called for feminist scientists to look not only at stereotypes about white women’s biology, but also at the very different stereotypes and biases about working-class women and enslaved women. shirley malcom of the american association for the advancement of science was the coauthor in 1976 of an important report the double bind: the price of being a minority woman in science. and, as i mentioned earlier, the combahee river collective had an impact in the boston area as well, especially on physicist and historian of science evelynn hammonds, who went on to influence many scholars in the areas of science, race, and gender. xsc: since you mentioned our bodies, ourselves, i have a special connection to it. in graduate school i had the opportunity to present a guest lecture in caren kaplan’s course on objects in everyday life and i chose to speak on the history of tenth anniversary section – commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) christa kuljian and xan sarah chacko 2025 4 the speculum. i discussed the role of the boston women’s health book collective and the power of our bodies, ourselves. i was telling my parents about it during my annual return to india and showing them, with great pride, the slideshow of my talk and my mother exclaimed, “wait, that book?” and disappeared for two minutes to retrieve a dog-eared copy wrapped in newspaper to obscure the cover. i removed the newspaper to reveal that it was a 1976 revised and expanded edition with the title in green. she said a woman from the united states gave it to her on a long-distance train in india in the 1970s. my mother, laila, was traveling with my two brothers and trying to read, in rare moments of quiet, the newly published book by alex haley, roots. the woman, whose name was lost to my mother simply said, “i think you’ll really enjoy this book next” and gave her our bodies, ourselves. my mother devoured it but kept it wrapped in newspaper, hidden with her clothes. i never saw it as a child, but in retrospect i feel that it influenced the way she understood herself and thus the way she parented me, her only daughter. it is amazing how that book traveled thousands of miles to impact an indian woman on a train and a daughter she would have six years later. ck: that’s a great story! the global impact of our bodies, ourselves (obos) is immense and there are countless stories about its ripple effect. i discussed my title, our science, ourselves, with obos co-founder judy norsigian, who was generous and supportive from the start. my title is a reference to obos, the women’s movement, the 1970s, and the boston area. many of the women in my book were inspired by our bodies, ourselves and its challenge to biased medical authority. they began to question assertions about women’s biology, and over time, these critiques spread to other disciplines such as chemistry, physics, technology, and science studies as well. xsc: i think that’s a good segue to talk about critiques of biology. the critiques of e.o. wilson’s sociobiology in 1975 and larry summers’s comments thirty years later are presented as significant moments in your narrative. how did these particular controversies serve as catalysts or turning points for the feminist science studies movement, and in what ways did the responses to each differ or evolve over time? i appreciated how your book linked the underrepresentation of women in science to sociobiological concepts that reinforced harm and difference in the representation of women and people of color. ck: while researching sociobiology, i learned a lot about e.o. wilson, robert trivers, irven devore, the development of evolutionary psychology, and steven pinker, but i decided against focusing on these men. instead, i wanted to highlight the women scientists who critiqued their theories and suggested that scientific research was not always objective and neutral, but also shaped by the assumptions of those doing the research. tenth anniversary section – commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) christa kuljian and xan sarah chacko 2025 5 sociobiology was published in 1975, exactly when ruth hubbard and rita arditti had begun formulating their critiques of biology. it acted as a catalyst for their vibrant responses. earlier this year, i published an article in historical studies in the natural sciences' special issue on sociobiology’s fiftieth anniversary. the article details some of the feminist critiques of sociobiology that began in 1975. larry summers’s comments in 2005 were not made in a vacuum; they stemmed from thirty years of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and steven pinker’s work. summers had read pinker’s the blank slate, particularly the chapter on gender. he had not read ruth hubbard, rita arditti, anne fausto-sterling, donna haraway, sandra harding, or evelynn hammonds. he had not read margaret rossiter, the historian of science who documented, in her foundational trilogy women scientists in america, how the existence and contributions of women scientists have been silenced and erased. summers was drawing solely on pinker’s chapter. nancy hopkins and shirley malcom were in the room when summers made those comments in january 2005. they were outraged that he resorted to tired explanations, blaming women’s absence in science on their biology and genetics. ruth hubbard, then eighty-one, called it “warmed-over sociobiology,” finding it tiring to reiterate arguments she had been making for decades. banu subramaniam and anne fausto-sterling, though dismayed, initially preferred not to be distracted by summers, and to stay focused on their own research. however, they lamented the lack of a collective organization of feminist scientists that could have spoken out as a group, and that critiquing summers was left to individuals. the recurrence of men suggesting that women’s limited role in science and society is based on biological factors is not random; it is rooted in historical racist and sexist tropes. these ideas resurface cyclically. social movements, like the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and ’70s, provoked scientific questions in response, such as investigating iq and race, or sex differences in abilities. similarly, in the wake of the more recent black lives matter and #metoo movements, we have seen a resurgence in similar scientific questions about race and sex differences. xsc: the big friction for me in the book is that some of the interlocutors hold or at least did for certain moments in their lives to the ideal that while the institutions of science held the bias, discrimination, and injustice, the science itself was pure. the idea that if the discriminatory behavior ended, science would become a space for all to thrive. meanwhile, fausto-sterling, subramaniam, and haraway hold as their core that science itself changes with who is doing it and why. having been steeped in this friction for your extensive work on this book, where do you stand? tenth anniversary section – commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) christa kuljian and xan sarah chacko 2025 6 ck: my view is very clear: science is often shaped by its social and political context, which shapes scientists, their assumptions, their research questions, as well as their analysis of data. we all bring our own bias, perspective, and standpoint to our work. ruth hubbard once stated her belief that science takes on the prejudices of the society in which it is based. i was introduced to these concepts while studying the history of science with hubbard, stephen jay gould, and everett mendelsohn. later, while researching darwin's hunch, i examined how colonial thinking and apartheid shaped the search for human origins in southern africa. so i am always interested in exploring how a particular era, time, or geography can shape what scientific questions are being asked, and why. xsc: even if scientists are fully on board with this position, the pressure can come from departments. the concern is that if someone is seen as a “feminist” scientist, will their science be taken less seriously? this echoes the critique evelyn fox keller faced in her writing about barbara mcclintock’s “feeling for the organism”—the idea that women scientists do something different. yes, we’re arguing that every person brings something different to science, not just women or people of color. it is an individual practice, but also collectively mediated, meaning that our personal thoughts, beliefs, experiences, and even prejudices shape what emerges. and that is not a bad thing. i attend a biweekly meetings with stem faculty doing the heavy lifting in foundational courses, and find that most are contingent faculty like me, who want to innovate in science education, rethink assessment, bring in justice and equity, and reshape the curriculum to reflect current needs. they face pushback from colleagues in their own departments, often from those with the most power, senior tenured scientists who argue that science is separate, pure, objective, and outside the bodies of those who produce it. the fact that we are still having this conversation suggests to me that the work of feminist science studies is nowhere near done. we’ve barely scratched the surface. i wonder if there are lessons from the past fifty years, specifically from the “science wars” of the 1990s and more recent anti-science rhetoric that have led not just to questioning social scientific and humanistic research but also the results of science itself. the proverbial baby has been thrown out with the bathwater (callon and latour 1992). do you see lessons from your historical study and these personal narratives that could help us resituate our current moment? ck: your experience with stem faculty at brown reminds me of anne faustosterling’s experience there thirty years ago in the 1990s when she faced challenges in her biology department, wanting to teach “science in social context.” eventually she was successful. tenth anniversary section – commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) christa kuljian and xan sarah chacko 2025 7 i think it’s very possible to be pro-science and to critique science at the same time. in the “science wars,” the growth of science studies, particularly feminist science studies, was often labeled “anti-science.” today, the us administration is antiscience, and anti-diversity, anti-equity, and anti-inclusion. one thing that has consistently emerged from my book talks and conversations this year is the need to defend science and scientific research, and to recognize that women’s, gender, race, and sexuality studies have profoundly contributed to the sciences, medicine, and technology. this is difficult amidst funding cuts and government efforts to scrub words like race, racism, activism, and woman from websites and documents. many documents that once promoted consideration of gender, race, and diversity in scientific research have been deleted. i believe looking at the history of the women in our science, ourselves—their dynamic lives, challenges, and barriers—and how they faced issues in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s can provide inspiration today. despite vastly different circumstances, there’s a need for people to come together so that they don’t remain isolated, especially given funding cuts and career uncertainty. perhaps organizations such as the genes and gender collective, the combahee river collective, and science for the people can offer inspiration in this present moment. xsc: a leaked memo from the current administration listing key terms being used to cut grants and research programs match the keywords most often used in catalyst with eerie precision. to me, this is a badge of pride. perhaps catalyst is the institution that could have responded in 2005 to larry summers’s comments about biological differences in women. this space, catalyst, is important, as it is the natural home for the inheritors of the scholarship of anne fausto-sterling, banu subramaniam, donna haraway, and evelynn hammonds, among others. at catalyst, we stay committed to questioning or staying with the trouble of science. i am interested in your thoughts on catalyst, especially its mention in your epilogue. ck: i wanted to go back to donna haraway. while not one of the central seven women in the book, her important contributions to the field make her a key figure. she appears in the book in 1994, at the joint conference of the society of social studies of science and the history of science society, when she delivered a scathing attack on bruno latour, the french scholar of science studies. haraway told latour that feminist science literature had already made many of the points he was making in his recent book, yet he didn’t cite them or the social movements that inspired their work decades earlier. she mentioned carolyn merchant’s the death of nature and called attention to the writings of rita arditti, evelyn fox keller, sandra harding, and evelynn hammonds. her remarks gave feminist work in science studies greater recognition. attending the online catalyst fifth-year anniversary and watching haraway and banu subramaniam’s live conversation and their reflections on feminist science tenth anniversary section – commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) christa kuljian and xan sarah chacko 2025 8 studies was exciting. one tension that haraway said continues to exist is the one between “women in science” and “feminist science studies.” haraway said she wished there had been more conversations with and inclusion of women scientists who tend to shun feminist analysis (haraway and subramaniam 2021). this tension continues to arise with efforts to embed feminist science studies within scientific disciplines and departments. our science, ourselves closes in the early 2000s. in a 2003 conversation in signs, evelynn hammonds and banu subramaniam reflected on feminist science studies, noting the lack of an annual conference or a journal to unite its diffuse, interdisciplinary scholars. i use the metaphor that feminist science studies is like dendrites, spreading impulses far beyond their original source. the formation of catalyst has been a crucial development, which is why i included its founding, and its fifth-year anniversary in the epilogue. but i think there’s room for more unifying efforts, perhaps a working group or ongoing seminar on gender, race, and science that could provide more infrastructure, if you will, for the field. xsc: in catalyst, we have a journal, but feminist science studies has no society or annual meeting. we do coalesce at other conferences, like those of the national women’s studies association and the society for social studies of science. i’ve also been heartened to see an uptick in job postings for feminist science studies, often cross-listed between science studies and feminist studies, or specifically within women's studies departments in the us, europe, and australia. many of us who are fortunate to have institutional jobs are diffused in the university. conferences or collaborating on projects like edited volumes are where we find each other. there is immense value in simply knowing who we are and finding space to be together, which is a core outcome of consciousness-raising— being together, in person or virtually, and seeing what emerges. what draws us together might be a commitment to a way of doing epistemic work with an orientation toward justice that defines us as feminist science studies scholars. references boston women’s health book collective. 1976. our bodies, ourselves: a book by and for women. revised and expanded ed. simon & schuster. callon, michel, and bruno latour. 1992. “don't throw the baby out with the bath school! a reply to collins and yearley.” in science as practice and culture, edited by andrew pickering, 343–68. university of chicago press. hammonds, evelynn, and banu subramaniam. 2003. “a conversation on feminist science studies.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 28 (3): 923–44. https://doi.org/10.1086/345455. https://doi.org/10.1086/345455 tenth anniversary section – commentary | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) christa kuljian and xan sarah chacko 2025 9 haraway, donna, and banu subramaniam. 2021. “donna haraway and banu subramaniam in conversation (april 22, 2021—excerpt).” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (2): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.37646. keller, evelyn fox. 1983. a feeling for the organism: the life and work of barbara mcclintock. w.h. freeman. kuljian, christa. 2016. darwin's hunch: science, race, and the search for human origins. jacana media. kuljian, christa. 2024. our science, ourselves: how gender, race, and social movements shaped the study of science. university of massachusetts press. kuljian, christa. 2025. “she said—feminist critiques of sociobiology begin in 1975.” historical studies in the natural sciences 55 (1): 53–56. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/954361. malcom, shirley mahaley. 1976. the double bind: the price of being a minority woman in science. report of a conference of minority women scientists, arlie house, warrenton, virginia. merchant, carolyn. 1980. the death of nature: women, ecology and the scientific revolution. harper and row. pinker, steven. 2002. the blank slate: the modern denial of human nature. new york: viking. rossiter, margaret. 1982–2012. women scientists in america. 3 vols. johns hopkins university press. wilson, edward o. 1975. sociobiology: the new synthesis. belknap press of harvard university press. author bios christa kuljian is a research associate at the wits institute for social and economic research (wiser) at wits university in johannesburg, south africa. she is a historian of science, science writer, and author of three books: sanctuary (jacana, 2013), darwin’s hunch: science, race and the search for human origins (jacana, 2016), and our science, ourselves: how gender, race, and social movements shaped the study of science (university of massachusetts press, 2024). xan sarah chacko is assistant teaching professor and interim director of science, technology and society at brown university, providence. she has been associate editor of operations of catalyst since 2024. she is co-editor with jenny bangham and judith kaplan of invisible labour in modern science (rowman & littlefield, 2022) and co-editor of the catalyst special section domestication of war (vol. 9, no. 1, 2023). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.37646 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/954361 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2721 an origin story for feminist science studies: a conversation with christa kuljian abstract keywords references author bios microsoft word 249_1544_1-hamilton.docx hamilton, j.a. (2018). critical perspectives on whiteness and technoscience: an introduction, catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-12. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © jennifer a. hamilton. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical perspectives critical perspectives on whiteness and technoscience: an introduction jennifer a. hamilton hampshire college jhamilton@hampshire.edu the six essays that comprise this “critical perspectives” section were originally presented at the 2017 society for the social studies of science (4s) meeting held in boston, part of a double session on “whiteness and technoscience.” panel organizers asked participants to open “the ‘black box’ of whiteness” and to explore how whiteness works in organizing the production and consumption of technoscientific forms. this rich set of short papers offers genealogies of specific technologies and critical analytical interventions in understanding how whiteness functions at a time of ascendant white supremacy and escalating violence organized around white nationalism. authors focus on whiteness and its centrality to the structures and content of digital platforms, social media, and information technologies. these papers, and especially the larger works of which they are part, engage deeply with the how: how is it that whiteness as a racial formation, while shifting and fluid, nevertheless 2 hamilton catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) continues to be a “durable preoccupation” (pollock, 2012) in technoscientific domains? the authors were challenged to think through the following questions in their work: • how does whiteness travel across and through technoscience? • how does technoscience reproduce and perpetuate whiteness as a racial, economic, and epistemological norm? • what investments in whiteness does technoscience produce and reinforce? each of these papers explores these questions by locating whiteness in a different site of technoscientific production. the first three papers move from the policing of online child pornography (thakor) to the affective domain of free/open source software (nguyen) to the emergence of creative industries in new configurations of global capital (irani). the following three papers focus on white nationalism and mainstream gay pornography in digital domains (keilty), the emergence of post-racial and post-labor imaginaries as part of the “affirmation of us racial empire” (atanasoski and vora), and the militarized automation of biology as a key site where older colonial epistemologies are reworked in the present (schaeffer). the authors challenge the ways in which visions of technoscience orient themselves to particular notions of freedom, notions that rely on whiteness as the transcendence of difference, as egalitarian impulse, and as a key site for the enactment of the liberating potential of technology. each offers provocations urging us to rethink the dominant emancipatory rhetoric that still frames narratives of technoscience: the insistence that access to technology can free “us” from relations of inequality, especially those structured by race and capitalism. further these papers link these seemingly emancipatory frames to ongoing exploitation and inequality through an analysis of both the cultural content and the structural logics that underpin racialized and gendered laboring bodies, content and logics that continue to locate white men as the pinnacle of civilization. building on longstanding feminist genealogies of technoscientific knowledge production, these essays insist on the necessity of feminist approaches 3 hamilton catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) to science and technology studies (sts) and on bringing sts into conversation with other literatures, including critical race theory, queer studies, and decolonial and postcolonial approaches. in what follows, i summarize the papers and put them into conversation with some theoretical tools that center whiteness and white supremacy and suggest how these can be usefully extended to the analysis of technoscience. how does whiteness orient technoscience not only in terms of the kinds of technologies produced but also in terms of the kinds of questions that get asked and to what effect? how are such terms articulated in a mode of generalizable (white) humanity? individual papers mitali thakor’s work on the digital automation of the detection of child pornography exposes how race is made visible in some domains while making it invisible in others. the focus of thakor’s paper is on how large sets of digital data ─ images and written records ─ are collated, processed, and interpreted (i.e., “made apparent” or “apprehensible”) in order to address specific legislative and evidentiary concerns in the larger political domains of child abuse and child trafficking. a key dimension of this apprehensibility is race, “that in order to know what to detect one must become knowledgeable about the object (e.g., data, face, person) sought” (4). thakor demonstrates how this apprehensibility becomes instantiated in technological applications and argues for the careful critical (and ethnographic) attention to the design and implementation of algorithmic processes. lilly irani’s contribution focuses on the emergence of design thinking at the turn of the twenty-first century, charting how creative industries became ascendant in a reconfigured global workplace. in particular, she critically challenges design thinking as simply an innovative mode of capitalist production where (smart) workers can escape the challenges of automation and rebrand their labor as “rightbrained” and creative (as opposed to “left-brained” and logical). irani 4 hamilton catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) demonstrates that despite its appealing rhetoric, design-thinking cannot be decoupled from shifts in global production and flows of labor, especially in terms of the manufacture of goods for consumer markets; thus, design thinking “articulates a racialized understanding of labor, judgment, and the subject and attempts to maintain (white) americans at the apex of global hierarchies of labor” (1). in her discussion of free/open source software and interactions between vietnamese and european actors, lilly nguyen offers a finegrained ethnographic analysis of “freedom” and argues that its articulations by different actors reflect “not a value, not an ideology, nor discourse, but a moral affect,” giving “shape to the possibilities of feeling and desire” (2). she describes “the techno-aesthetication of whiteness,” where human creativity, flourishing, and freedom emerge from a racialized affective domain, one that masks global relations of power and the necessity of labor (human and otherwise) for its manifestation. neda atanasoski and kalindi vora introduce the concept of “technoliberalism,” “the way in which liberal modernity’s simultaneous and contradictory obsession with race and the overcoming of racism has once again been innovated at the start of the 21st century…through the frame of a post-labor world” (5). to explore technoliberalism, they describe a recent youtube video that parodies trump’s (still largely imaginary) border wall between the united states and mexico. a key insight of this paper is that the liberal desire for a post-racial world nevertheless depends heavily on white supremacy for its legibility. the authors demonstrate “how technological imaginaries that argue that it is robots, not racialized others, who are taking us jobs, pin their anti-racist logics on a post-racial technological future” (1). patrick keilty explores the figure of “the millennial male” who, after having been neglected by the “female-focused” content of the internet, (re)stakes his digital claim to masculinity in the almost exclusively heterosexual and white domain of online pornographic platforms. keilty demonstrates “how the homosocial and homosexual deploy similar iconographies of wholesome whiteness in the service of white 5 hamilton catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) nationalism, toxic masculinity, and white supremacy” (7), advocating for sustained attention to both infrastructural and cultural dimensions of social media, especially in the larger political context of trump’s america. finally, felicity schaeffer attends to the racial imaginaries that drive military research programs, focusing on the emergence of biorobotics, a field that looks to capitalize on the potential of (human and non-human) biological life in constructing new kinds of robots. schaeffer specifically investigates the role of this research in “the expansion of…a border-biosecurity industrial complex” (1), one that articulates innovations in surveillance as key strategies in national security. she develops the concept of “the suspect biomass,” a racialized entity “produced at the intersection of the life sciences and rapid computational algorithms” in opposition to safe (white) populations (2). whiteness a key insight of earlier critical race scholars was that whiteness formed a normative, largely invisible background against which other, more explicit modes of racial formation were articulated and through which the power of race and racism was wielded (e.g., delgado & stefancic, 1997; see also e.g., brodkin, 1998; frankenberg, 1993). the power of whiteness as racial formation lies in its heterogeneity across space and time, its ability to shape-shift, and to intersect in complex ways with other forms of power (carter, 2007; crenshaw, 1992; markowitz, 2001). to identify and understand the work of whiteness in contemporary technoscience requires a careful excavation of its simultaneous durability and flexibility. for instance, in the papers here, whiteness simultaneously operates as an often unrecognized and unmarked category manifest in color-blind aspirations of equality and as an icon of purity and innocence, delineating which bodies deserve protection and which do not. the common analytical project of the papers is to make whiteness apprehensible (to borrow from thakor) in domains where it is often thought by key actors to be irrelevant, non-existent, and/or undetectable. 6 hamilton catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) one way to approach these papers as a whole is to place them in conversation with sara ahmed’s phenomenology of whiteness, an approach that locates whiteness as “an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space” (ahmed, 2007, p. 150). each of these essays locates specific histories of whiteness that orient questions of technology, of labor and capital, and of the figure of the human itself. they demonstrate how whiteness is articulated in multiple ways and along many other axes, including gender, class, nationalism, sexuality, criminality, and (neo)liberality. ahmed (2007) advocates attention to “how whiteness becomes worldly through the noticeability of the arrival of some bodies more than others” (p. 150), and these essays help us to think how technoscience is constitutive of this worldliness. rendering whiteness as worldly in ahmed’s sense is central to the projects described in these papers. as the papers demonstrate, the power of whiteness often lies in its invisibility, especially in its most powerful formulations: freedom, humanity, innocence, purity, and masculinity. as ahmed (2007) reminds us, “a phenomenology of whiteness helps us to notice institutional habits; it brings what is behind, what does not get seen as the background to social action, to the surface in a certain way” (p. 165). what links these projects across a range of sites is the way in which they orient themselves along axes of whiteness—both visible (“white loss,” “authentications of whiteness,” the whiteness of the victim of sex trafficking) and invisible (the naturalization of evolutionary logics foundational to processes of settler colonialism and imperialism). each of these technoscientific assemblages mobilizes whiteness either explicitly, as in keilty’s discussion of white nationalist iconography in gay pornography and atanasoski and vora’s discussion of the borderwall video, or more tacitly in the language of freedom and creativity that attends to displaced white (male) bodies in the global economy and the mobilization of colonial, evolutionary rhetorics (irani, nguyen, schaeffer). as nguyen, irani, and schaeffer demonstrate, “freedom” and “design 7 hamilton catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) think” and “automated life” are not stable, neutral concepts simply oriented to universal questions of human flourishing but rather rely on organizing logics of whiteness for their articulation and materialization in worlds of technoculture. another way to think about these papers is in relation not simply to normative whiteness but also to white supremacy. loretta ross defines white supremacy as “a set of ideas generated to create wealth in the united states and reserve it for the benefit of a certain group of people, originally property-owning white men” (ross, 2016, p. 3; see also harris, 1993). ross makes the link between white supremacy and capitalism clear. the power of whiteness rests not only with its durability but also its flexible articulation with capitalist logics of accumulation. yet, as safiya umoja noble reminds us, we must expand our definitions of white supremacy to include how global flows of capital from us corporations and silicon valley structure labor markets and material infrastructures that are part of an oppressive system of digital technological engagements, largely hidden from view in the consumerist model of technology adoption (noble, 2016). in order to pursue these themes further in a global context, i now turn to a brief discussion of labor and its theoretical centrality to this set of papers. labor the essays in this volume move beyond well-rehearsed concerns about privacy and access that often orient critiques of digitization. instead, they focus on labor and its continuing centrality to understanding forms of racial capitalism (see melamed, 2015) in the digital age. they engage with “the labor concept’s myriad entanglements with exclusionary categories of race, nation, gender, sexuality, disability, and species” (herzig & subramaniam, 2017, p. 104), further problematizing the concept of the digital divide and questions of technoscientific access (see also eubanks, 2011; noble, 2018). as atanasoski and vora elsewhere argue, 8 hamilton catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) the processes through which racialized, gendered, and sexualized spheres of life and labor are seemingly elided by technological surrogates, even as these spheres are replicated in emergent modes of work, violence, and economies of desire (atanasoski & vora, 2015, p. 3). such shifts are not incidental to the global reorganization of labor in the digital age; rather, they are constitutive of it. technoscientific dimensions of digital labor consolidate older inequalities and manifest new ones. whiteness continues to be a key axis around which labor is organized. nguyen’s piece in particular points to the centrality of affective labor in negotiations around the use of open source software. she further reminds us that mere access to technology in sites such as vietnam does not necessarily eliminate hierarchy and create the conditions for freedom. rather, european “fantasies for flattened social relations insidiously mask the racialized structures of power and naturalize such feelings” (12). irani’s discussion of the slogan, “math is easy. design is hard,” reorients our longstanding racialized understandings of intellectual “capacity.” instead, irani demonstrates how “design thinking” and the ascendance of (white) creative industries in the twenty-first century work to “naturalize mathematical skill at precisely the moment when indian and chinese workers become available as a labor pool to perform that kind of work in a globally networked capitalism” (13). both thakor and keilty reference what hamid ekbia and bonnie nardi term “heteromation,” a new form of capitalist accumulation dependent on “the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in computer-mediated networks” (ekbia & nardi, 2017, p. 1). the global dimensions of digital labor become clear in thakor’s discussion of the “difficult and disposable work” of computer content mediation (ccm) in anti-trafficking domains and in keilty’s attention to the politics of digital infrastructure. schaeffer’s discussion of biorobotics and its attempts to marshall the potential of non-human life forms such as bees and termites gestures toward the figure of the non-human as laborer. schaeffer demonstrates 9 hamilton catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) the abiding scientific faith in the emancipatory potential of automation to free humans from dangerous and undesirable labor. but as donna haraway reminds us, this view is an oft-repeated “mistake,” a mistake that sees “freedom only in the absence of labor and necessity” and forgets “the ecologies of all mortal beings, who live in and through the use of one another's bodies” (haraway, 2008, p. 79). building on atanasoski's and vora's discussion of labor, and deeply resonating with keilty’s discussion of white nationalism in mainstream gay pornography, schaeffer argues that “fascist visual iconography ironically shares interpretive logic with the democratic lure of bee colonies” (8). schaeffer demonstrates that desires to tame and control labor through biorobotics imagines a world without “the potential threat of mass human laborers whose likelihood of revolt grows as they increase in numbers, or when they become a self-organizing mass who evolves into an intelligent, or even rebellious swarm” (8). this focus on labor interrupts the ubiquitous narratives of freedom and creativity that attach to technoscience, especially in the united states. these papers move us beyond pristine design studios made for human flourishing in a post-racial, post-labor world; they do not let us forget the laboring body, the clunky infrastructure of cables, the blood and dirt of mineral extraction, and the excess of “techno-trash.” they further demonstrate the ongoing centrality of whiteness ─ in its multiple and heterogeneous manifestations ─ to the ongoing organization of global labor. conclusion there continues to be great faith in the transcendental possibilities of techoscience. in a recent series, “machine bias: investigating algorithmic injustice,” the news site pro publica warns, “if we are not intelligent about how we train our robots, they will perpetuate the worst of human behavior” (pro publica, 2016). in other words, while perhaps humans are not capable of moving beyond race, machines might be. although rightly 10 hamilton catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) critical of techoscience and its potentiality to reinforce and exacerbate extant structures of racism, such a position nevertheless presumes that artificial intelligence (ai) itself can escape the racial logics and racist contexts of its creators and users. jessie daniels describes this as “the fantasy that the internet as a technology is color-blind with regard to race” (daniels, 2015, p. 1378; see also noble, 2018). this assumes that such functions can be (re)programmed to avoid “bias” and thus work outside the realm of the (racial) cultural. in other words, this position believes that the techno in technoculture can save the cultural from itself. these papers are a critical intervention in such assumptions. each of these papers individually reminds us that accounts of whiteness and technoscience cannot begin and end with the election of trump in the united states. in an era marked by ascendant white supremacy and white nationalism, the attention given by these essays to both the histories and futures of whiteness in its technoscientific manifestations is urgent and essential. acknowledgements thank you to the panel organizers for inviting me to participate in this project, the editors of catalyst for their support, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. references ahmed, s. (2007). a phenomenology of whiteness. feminist theory, 8(2), 149-168. doi: 10.1177/1464700107078139 atanasoski, n. & vora, k. (2015). surrogate humanity: posthuman networks and the (racialized) obsolescence of labor. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 1(1), 1-40. brodkin, k. (1998). how jews became white folks and what that says about race in america. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. carter, j. b. (2007). the heart of whiteness: normal sexuality and race in 11 hamilton catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) america, 1880-1940. durham, nc: duke university press. crenshaw, k. (1992). whose story is it anyway? feminist and antiracist appropriations of anita hill. in t. morrison (ed.), race-ing justice, engendering power: essays on anita hill, clarence thomas, and the construction of social reality (1st ed.), (pp. 402-440). new york, ny: pantheon books. daniels, j. (2015). “my brain database doesn’t see skin color”: colorblind racism in the technology industry and in theorizing the web. american behavioral scientist, 59(11), 1377-1393. doi: 10.1177/0002764215578728 delgado, r. & stefancic, j. (1997). critical white studies: looking behind the mirror. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. ekbia, h. r. & nardi, b. (2017). heteromation, and other stories of computing and capitalism. cambridge, ma: mit press. eubanks, v. (2011). digital dead end: fighting for social justice in the information age. cambridge, ma.: mit press. frankenberg, r. (1993). white women, race matters: the social construction of whiteness. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. haraway, d. j. (2008). sharing suffering: instrumental relations between laboratory animals and their people. when species meet (pp. 68-93). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. harris, c. i. (1993). whiteness as property. harvard law review, 106, 1709-1791. herzig, r. & subramaniam, b. (2017). labor in the age of “bioeverything”. radical history review, 2017(127), 103-124. markowitz, s. (2001). pelvic politics: sexual dimorphism and racial difference. signs, 26(2), 389-414. melamed, j. (2015). racial capitalism. critical ethnic studies, 1(1), 76-85. doi: 10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.1.0076 12 hamilton catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) noble, s. u. (2016). a future for intersectional black feminist technology studies. scholar & feminist online, 13(3), 1-8. ─── (2018). algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york, ny: nyu press. pollock, a. (2012). medicating race: heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference. durham, nc: duke university press books. pro publica. (2016). machine bias: investigating algorithmic injustice. retrieved from https://www.propublica.org/series/machine-bias ross, l. (2016). fighting white supremacy and white privilege to build a human rights movement. understanding and dismantling privilege, 6(1), 1-11. bio jennifer hamilton is associate professor of legal studies and anthropology at hampshire college and director of the five college women's studies research center. her research and teaching focuses on the anthropology of law, science, and medicine, postcolonial feminist science and technology studies, and the contemporary politics of indigeneity. she is the author of indigeneity in the courtroom: law, culture, and the production of difference in north american courts (routledge 2009) and is currently completing a second book manuscript, the indian in the freezer: the genomic quest for indigeneity.     original research ethnicity statistics as tricky tools in “post-racial” britain: celebrating the lives and obscuring the deaths of mixed-race populations     leifa mayers grand valley state university mayersl@gvsu.edu     abstract recently proposed alterations to the united states patent act would unsettle the us supreme court’s 2013 invalidation of isolated gene patents. simultaneously, biotechnological advances have led to the increasing availability of preimplantation genetic testing (pgt), which enables the (de-)selection of embryos following in vitro fertilization and prior to implantation. this paper uses the patent debates as an opening through which to examine the nexus of patent law, technoscientific capitalism, and reproductive genetic technologies—specifically, a form of pre-implantation genetic testing (pgt-m) that identifies specific genetic sequences that contribute to disease. using feminist science studies and reproductive justice frameworks, i argue that the gendered imaginary of “highrisk” investment and health risk management, coupled with the privatization of biomaterial disproportionately produced by women, may exacerbate racial and economic inequities in access to reproductive healthcare.     keywords patent law, biotechnology, genomic medicine, moral economy, reproductive justice     introduction in 2019 the ongoing debate over what kinds of inventions may be patented reached a crescendo. in january the united states patent and trademark office (uspto) issued revised guidance on patent eligibility. in april a proposed framework to alter section 101 of the us patent act elicited a wave of feedback from industry stakeholders, government officials, scientific and medical organizations, and academics. in may a “bipartisan, bicameral” (tillis 2019) draft bill was released, and in june the intellectual property subcommittee of the us senate judiciary committee held three hearings on “the state of patent eligibility in america.”1 the proposed amendments to the patent act would eliminate the current prohibitions against patenting “laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas,”2 exceptions that have recently been upheld by the us supreme court.3 while proponents of the proposed changes to us patent law anticipate more expansive opportunities for innovation by pharmaceutical companies and investment in biotechnology, opponents caution against its invitation to companies that wish to patent specific, isolated genes and methods of comparing genetic sequences. this paper uses the section 101 debates as an opening through which to examine the nexus of patent law, technoscientific capitalism, and reproductive genetic (or “reprogenetic”) technologies—specifically, a form of pre-implantation genetic testing (pgt-m, formerly pgd) that identifies specific genetic sequences that contribute to disease. scholars across fields of genetics, bioethics, and law have grappled with the reality of advancing biotechnology and its relationship to (assisted) reproduction (e.g., deeney 2013; munthe 2015; padela and apiricio 2019). simultaneously, feminist scholars have argued that inequitable access to assisted reproductive technologies (art) and genetic screening exacerbate existing health disparities in the united states (e.g., markens 2017; roberts 2017). laura mamo (2007, 2018) and laura briggs (2018), among others (e.g., bhatia 2018), have considered gendered, racialized, and colonial entanglements of biotechnology and reproductive justice, in particular the implications of global art markets for those who provide and receive biomaterial and reproductive labor. however, there is minimal research into the convergences of patent law, reprogenetic technologies, and reproductive justice. i analyzed the 2019 senate subcommittee hearings on the us patent act with attention to the mutual constitution of patent law and technoscientific capitalism. in the first part of the article, i provide a framework for understanding the intersections of emergent reprogenetic technologies and patent law through feminist theories of reproductive justice. then, i use the section 101 debates to uncover and contextualize the global capitalist logics of patent law as they intersect with burgeoning biotechnology markets and precision medicine applications. ultimately, i examine the specific implications for reprogenetic technologies and argue that the gendered imaginary of “high-risk” investment and health risk management, coupled with the privatization of biomaterial disproportionately produced by women, may exacerbate racial and economic inequities in access to reproductive healthcare. reprogenetic technologies and the paradox of choice reprogenetic technologies produce an interesting paradox: while genetic testing and selection procedures can be used to increase the chances of in vitro fertilization (ivf) success, and thereby lower costs, they increasingly operate coercively within a system that discourages reproduction among poor women and women of color and seeks to eradicate disability (bridges 2009; boardman and hale 2018; roberts 2017; roberts and jesudason 2013). more broadly, resourcing of the development, clinical trials, and applications of genetic testing technologies distorts and diverts (financial) attention from the social inequities that produce health disparities (valdez 2021). thus, while technological progress expands reproductive capacities for those who can afford art procedures, it presents coercive possibilities for those who cannot. the proliferation of individualized reproductive interventions corresponds with a larger movement toward personalized medicine—and, more recently, precision medicine—which was ushered in with the human genome project of the 1990s (duster 2015; juengst and mcgowan 2018). precision medicine is characterized by the (mostly unfulfilled) promise that genomic profiling would allow individuals to manage their health risk and take more responsibility for their health choices and behaviors (juengst and mcgowan 2018; munthe 2015). with the individualization of health and wellness, individuals may experience increased pressure to manage their and their children’s genetic risk through genomic medicine (roberts 2009, 2017; rose 2001, 2006). the broad category of reproductive genetic technologies includes carrier testing, non-invasive prenatal testing, and genetic testing of an early embryo following ivf. whereas pre-implantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (pgt-a) looks for missing or extra chromosomes, pgt-m (monogenic/single-gene disorders) is used in conjunction with carrier testing (of aspiring biological parents) to exclude embryos with genetic sequences that contribute to a specific heritable condition (collard 2021). thus, pgt-m—and the newer, more controversial polygenic risk score— may be used by those who would not otherwise undergo ivf in an effort to identify and subsequently reduce the risk that a future child will be predisposed to disease (genomic prediction, n.d.; loma linda university center for fertility & ivf, n.d.; orchid, n.d.). fertility clinics and genetic testing companies tout pgt-m as a mechanism for expanded reproductive choice and opportunity. for example, orm fertility, a fertility clinic in portland, oregon, offers an array of genetic testing technologies through its sharing healthy genes program. in promoting pgt-m, the clinic’s website shares the story of heterosexual couple “whitney and brittany, who were concerned about passing on the gene for breast cancer to their future child. using pgt, they were able to reduce that risk and have a healthy baby boy” (orm fertility, n.d.). the information “about each embryo’s genetic status” empowered the couple to “make an informed decision about which embryos to transfer to the uterus for potential pregnancy” (orm fertility, n.d.). similarly, coopergenomics, a genetic testing company, offers testimonials about how pgt provides “the opportunity to make an informed choice” (coopergenomics, n.d.-a) and “make a better decision with all the information possible, especially about the risks of transferring each embryo” (coopergenomics, n.d.-b). this narrative exemplifies dove-tailing discourses of risk and choice, through which consumers are simultaneously empowered with information and coerced into genetic self-regulation. while some clinics and testing companies promote pgt as a tool of empowerment, many feminist and disability justice activists and scholars decry its eugenicist potential for de-selecting disability-related characteristics. both the endorsement and critique of genetic selection and testing technologies underscore the privatization of reprogenetic medicine. the combined use of assisted reproductive and genetic selection technologies enable the de-selection of disability-linked characteristics, which reinforces both ableist discrimination and the regulation of reproduction (boardman and hale 2018; roberts and jesudason 2013). the de-selection of these characteristics, and the medical model of disability that informs it, obscure the social and political structures that individualize and stigmatize disability (asch 2003; parens and asch 1999). pgt-m can be viewed as a mechanism of future-oriented genetic control, or technology of optimization, on two levels: at the level of the genetically-defined family and at the population level. pgt-m has joined an array of genetic technologies in the knowledge economy and become part and parcel of the industry of genetic risk management. expanded carrier testing screens for more than three hundred conditions and is increasingly marketed to heterosexual couples who would not otherwise seek ivf; upon identification of two recessive gene mutations corresponding to a single-gene disease, they may use ivf with pgt-m to avoid transmitting the disease to their offspring (collard 2021; johal, n.d.). like direct-to-consumer genetic screening technologies such as those offered by 23andme, carrier screening promises individuals personalized knowledge of their genetic risk. unlike these screening technologies, pgt can be used to alter the chromosomal composition of the next generation by deselecting genetic contributors to disease. beyond the capacity to recombine genetic material of future generations, pgt-m is uniquely positioned as a contributor to biovalue through the transformation of “abnormal” ivf embryos into forms that support the vitality of other human beings (collard 2021; waldby 2000, 2008). even as some embryos are identified as chromosomally or otherwise normal, and thereby fit for transfer to a uterus, the designation of other embryos as abnormal renders them commodifiable and circulatable within the “tissue economy” (waldby 2000; waldby and mitchell 2006; van wagner et al. 2008). depending on the specific mutation, these embryos may be disassembled and transported as human embryonic stem cell lines for the study of disease development (collard 2021). unlike embryos, stem cells are patentable and generate significant speculative investment, both public and private (collard 2021; waldby 2008). in this way, abnormal embryos accrue scientific and commercial value in their potential to “eradicate[e] abnormality from existing and future populations—at least among those who can pay for the cures they generate” (collard 2021, 106). patent law supports the “technologies of optimization”—that is, assemblages of practices, ways of thinking, and techniques that maximize health and approximate new norms of humanness—that are part and parcel of technomedicine, a new form of medicine that relies on increasingly advanced diagnostic and therapeutic technologies (foster 2012, 374; rose 2006, 9). the capitalization of human vitality and the promise of patentable invention are mutually constitutive, as researchers extract and biotech companies mobilize biovalue—the value derived from living beings and processes—in pursuit of speculative investment and profit (waldby 2000; rose 2006; novas and rose 2000). as reproductive bodies are the primary site of art intervention and the generation of reproductive tissue for embryonic stem cell markets, women are compelled to adopt a “somatic ethic” (rose 2008, 46) in support of these technologies of optimization.4 moreover, women are rendered disproportionately responsible for the management of familyand population-level genetic health risk (ettorre 2002; foster 2012; rose 2006). in this paper, i focus on reprogenetic technologies such as pgt-m as a primary site at which technologies of optimization and notions of reproductive choice and genomic risk converge. despite its disfavor among some medical professionals and critics, personalized medicine—including reprogenetic technologies—is still seen as a new, promising frontier for biotechnology industries that is threatened by recent developments in patent law. a 2019 congressional research service report cautioned that recent supreme court decisions have “created uncertainty…as to whether innovations in medical diagnostics, personalized medicine, methods of treatment…are patenteligible” (2), and an article in the hill warned that “the courts’ focus on subject matter eligibility as a mechanism to deny patents for [inventions in diagnostics and personalized medicine] will drive investment into research in these technologies to other areas. we will lose our edge in the world” (stoll 2015). patent law is critical to the technologization and capitalization of medicine, as it enables the continued synergies of venture capital, the biotechnology industry, and scientific inquiry (rose 2006). in the following section, i use the patent law debates to trace the logics through which the patent system upholds technoscientific capitalism—specifically, through insistence that patents are necessary for investment in “high-risk research and development endeavors.” 5 i explore how gendered notions of financial and health risk, present in the section 101 debates, converge with patent law’s foundational dichotomies, such as private/public, culture/nature, and mind/body, which are both gendered and racialized. then, i extrapolate from the section 101 debates’ treatment of genetic technologies, generally, to the specific implications for reprogenetic technologies such as pgt-m. i argue that the patenting of reprogenetic technologies is justified in the name of consumer and reproductive choice, even as that choice is increasingly consolidated among those with geopolitical, class, and racial privilege. capitalization, privatization, and the (moral) economies of patent law subsequent to the impactful us supreme court decisions of the 2010s, many government officials, industry stakeholders, and patent experts have expressed concern that us patent-eligible subject matter (psm) law is “overly complicated, riddled by uncertainty, and…hostile to innovation” (coons and tillis 2019), unpredictable, or simply “a mess.”6 in 2016 the uspto solicited feedback and received reform proposals from a number of organizations—including the american bar association, the intellectual property owners association, and the american intellectual property law association (osenga 2018).7 the draft bill was positioned as an attempt to galvanize these alternative visions, and many of the most powerful voices—including intellectual property firms and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies—were represented at the senate subcommittee hearings. the hearings reflect ongoing debate over the future of us patent law, with particular focus on section 101 of the patent act and its implications for precision medicine, diagnostic methods, pharmaceutical treatments, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence. as applied to technomedicine, specifically, senators chris coons and thom tillis (2019)—who drafted the reform bill—view the recent supreme court decisions as a threat to “american innovators and companies who are working to develop cures to deadly diseases and medical diagnostic tests that could benefit millions of people.” thus, the debates provide unique insight into the nexus of technomedicine and patent law, which, as i will argue, has particular implications for the patenting of reprogenetic technologies. over the course of three days in june 2019, forty-five testimonies were presented on behalf of scholars, bar associations, trade associations, private companies, and government officials. thirty testimonies supported, and fifteen opposed, the proposed changes to section 101. proponents of the draft language alleged that the uncertainty in current patent law has impacted investment and innovation— particularly in biotechnology and medicine—and advocated for the elimination of all judicially created eligibility doctrine. opponents encouraged the subcommittee to retain the prohibition on patenting “abstract ideas” and expressed concern about the patenting of genes.8 the hearing narratives crystallize a highly circumscribed model of the relationship between patenting, biotechnological innovation, financial risk, and consumer health. on both sides of the section 101 debate, stakeholders reinforce the notion that patent eligibility rules and jurisprudence determine the development and marketability of biotechnologies, which in turn shape consumer access to healthpromoting and even life-saving medicines. the debates make visible the nexus of patent law’s underlying capitalist and masculinist logics, by which financial control of public resources is rewarded, and the gendered structure of contemporary biopolitics, which places disproportionate burden on women to manage their families’ genetic health risk. a more predictable patent framework is seen as the key to the liberation of capital; genetic patents mitigate biotechnology companies’ financial risk and enable scientific innovations that reduce the health risk faced by patients and advance consumer choice. patenting and the privatization of genetic material and methods as reinforced in the section 101 debates, the patent system’s false distinction between natural and inventive products facilitates the commercialization of (repro)genetic material and diagnostic methods. by distancing themselves from the patenting of genes, which remains controversial, biogenetic industry representatives were able to present genetic technologies as the next promising frontier of medicine and, by extension, patent law. when a regeneron pharmaceuticals representative spoke of “genetics sequencing efforts,” he was careful to clarify that “we are not talking about the patenting of genes. we are talking about the ground-breaking discoveries from our analysis of genetic data and the application of such for the benefit of patients.”9 this statement reflects the us supreme court’s distinction between a genetic sequence or dna segment that exists in the human body, which is “a product of nature” 10 and therefore not patentable, and an “inventive concept” sufficient to “transform” the material into a patent eligible application. 11 in other words, whereas the alteration of genes is patentable, the mere isolation of genes is not (sherkow and greely 2015). unlike european law, the us patent scheme does not prohibit either specific forms of gene selection or “inventions the publication or exploitation of which would be contrary to ‘ordre public’ or morality” (bagley 2003). 12 the silence on such questions, however, betrays a series of maneuvers that have given the us patent system a distinct set of political and economic logics (nordberg et al. 2018; parthasarathy 2017). over the past four decades, us psm law has advanced the commodification and privatization of biomaterial by focusing on the extent to which natural entities are manipulated by humans. as dan burk (2007, 2014) observes, this tightrope walk relies on a series of false dichotomies—namely, mind/body, culture/nature, and private/public—that advance the interests of private capital. these dualisms are also racialized and gendered, as early patent law characterized invention as masculine, intellectual labor deserving of protection and contrasted with the reproductive and physical labor performed by former slaves and women. the inventor, or male “hero” (pollack 2006, 606), worked independently to create new forms of knowledge through rational thought while women procreated, the contrast reinforcing the longstanding elevation of mind over body and reason over emotion (burk 2007; foster 2011). in contemporary patent law, this mind/body dichotomy converges with a gendered and racialized private/public and culture/nature dualism, which excludes femininized and indigenous forms of knowledge production from legal protection. knowledge related to domestic labor—such as cooking and clothing—as well as biomaterial and collectively created indigenous knowledge are generally “relegated to the public domain as raw material open to exploitation by others” who can meet patentability requirements (foster 2011, 310; pollack 2006). the nature/culture distinction, in particular, is foundational to the patenting of biotechnology and biomaterial and reinforced by the products of nature doctrine. this legal doctrine—which operationalizes the principle that “laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas” 13 should be kept within the public domain—renders material discoveries that were insufficiently altered by humans patent ineligible (bagley 2003). 14 the products of nature doctrine has been used to both protect and deny the patenting of biomaterial. in one case, the california supreme court found that a patient did not have rights to his bodily tissue, obtained without his consent, because the natural product was separable from the unique cell lines that were developed. 15 more recently, the us supreme court invalidated a set of diagnostic methods—treating a patient with a particular drug, determining its effect, and then adjusting the dosage—and myriad genetics’ brca1 and brca2 dna patents as unpatentable claims to natural principles. 16 while the myriad outcome was perceived by many as a victory for patients and the principle of genetic ownership, it did not challenge the nature/culture or public/private dichotomies or the ways in which patent law bolsters the gendering of biopolitics—and, specifically, the interpellation and exploitation of those who participate in biomedical and tissue economies. the grounding of patent eligibility in property law enables the designation of natural resources as public and those materials that are sufficiently transformed by human in(ter)vention as private (waldby and cooper 2008). when property claims arise from the addition of labor to natural resources, property rights are in effect transferred from those who produce biomaterial to scientists (waldby and cooper 2008, 2010). because women are compelled to participate in technologies of optimization, their biomaterial and genetic information are routinely furnished as natural resources to be commodified by those with greater power, access, and wealth (burk 2007; foster 2011, 2012). even well-meaning women’s health advocacy “reinforces biopolitical obligations for women to donate bodily tissues and utilize medical technologies” (foster 2012, 385), arguing that preserving gene sequences in the public domain would enable women’s access to the genetic information that may save their children’s lives.17 in the section 101 debates, the interpellation of women into technologies of optimization is evident in repeated appeals to diagnostic testing technologies and treatment of diseases that disproportionately impact women, children, and fetuses—including breast cancer, gynecological cancer, non-invasive prenatal testing, and ultrasound imaging “used in neonatal care.”18 the false dichotomy of nature/culture—and, specifically, that of naturally occurring genetic sequences versus inventive concepts—enables the commercialization of genetic technologies and advancement of precision medicine. in the section 101 debates, those advocating for the expansion of patent eligibility to isolated genes and their connections to disease and disability were careful to distinguish between “the patenting of genes as they exist in the body or in nature” and the “useful applications of genes and gene-based technologies.”19 a novartis spokesperson described these applications as “the foundation of the future of medicine,” a future that “require[s] incentives [in the form of patents].” 20 those opposed to the section 101 changes argued that lifting the prohibition against patenting laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas would once again enable the patenting of isolated genes, as the uspto allowed prior to myriad. 21 however, this opposition does not address the fundamental structure of patent law in the us, by which public resources are privatized and commercialized to profit those with access to the means and meanings of invention. moreover, as i will explore further below, such challenges leave intact the gendered and racialized logics of exploitation specific to the production and circulation of biomaterial. the capitalist logics of patent law the products of nature doctrine and its privatization and commercialization of genetic material and diagnostic methods is part and parcel of the systemic entanglement of patent law and capitalism. the senate subcommittee hearings both underscore and advance the assumption that patents are necessary for financial investment in new technologies, and therefore technological innovation itself. patrick kilbride, representing the us chamber of commerce, situated intellectual property rights within private property law and a distinctly american form of global capitalism. he described the legal framework for private property as enabling the production of capital, which makes the us “an engine of growth for the entire world.” 22 us “leadership in global technology innovation” is important to maintain the nation-state’s status as “the most innovative country on the planet” (coons quoted in tillis 2019). testimonies reinforced a simplistic relationship between patent law, capitalism, and american exceptionalism: whereas pre-myriad patent law was conducive to the flow of capital toward projects that bolster innovation, the “supreme court’s unconstitutional decisions have forced research funding away from isolated natural products and personal diagnostics.”23 the contemporary us patent system assumes the primacy of free market capitalism in advancing economic and social progress (parthasarathy 2017). although the primary rule of psm law is that “laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas” are not patent eligible,24 since the 1980s judges and scholars have focused primarily on the question of whether the patent would promote or “inhibit future innovation” (chiang 2014, 1891).25 this tautological logic of innovation enables patents’ continual creation of economic value; that is, patents are seen as necessary for innovation and reward that innovation with financial investment. hyo yoon kang (2020) notes that patents mediate risk through a secondary market for the patent rights, which exists independent of the commodity market for the invention. through “legal fiction” (kang 2020, 65), patent rights become financial assets that are valued and exchanged according to the likelihood that the rights will hold up in court. thus, the patent system itself has created intangible assets that are valued according to its own logics. the patent system supports the “assetization” (kang 2020) of genetic material and diagnostic methods, by which they are not only commodified but also become value-(re)generating in primary (i.e., commodity) and secondary markets. nikolas rose (2006) describes the capitalization of vitality, or the practices by which biotechnology companies structure scientific inquiry into, and financial valuation of, biological processes. with the ascent of the biotechnology industry in the 1990s and 2000s, a new “somatic ethic” (rose 2008, 46) developed whereby individuals participate in the extraction of biovalue from their own bodies. set against the gendered logics of patent law, the assetization of genetic technologies and material and accompanying somatic ethic produces a unique matrix of risk, whereby health risk management bolsters the financial potential of genetic patents. upon creation, personal genomic information, embryos, or stem cells may be sold and resold across research, healthcare, and biotechnology sectors. additionally, the patenting of testing technologies and information about specific gene sequences—such as those identified by pgt-m—may generate value within secondary intellectual property and venture capital markets (geiger and gross 2021). therefore, i contend, consumers’ uptake of genetic risk management strategies may in fact mitigate the risk of “investing in innovation” (kang 2020, 57), as either use of the testing technologies or the resulting biomaterial (or both) may result in profit. in the following section, i describe how the section 101 debates illustrate the gendering of the us patent system’s intersections with reprogenetic medicine. i juxtapose the gendered language of used to describe biotechnological innovation with the gendered and racialized materialities of genetic technologies. i argue that the patent system rewards inventors for “risky” investments that reinforce us exceptionalism while women consumers, specifically, are encouraged to extract genetic material and genomic information. although patents purportedly democratize invention and enhance access to testing and treatment, they in fact enable the commodification and privatization of public biomaterial. meanwhile, a stratified reprogenetic industry promises reproductive choice to some—with the implicit suggestion that they eliminate disability-linked characteristics—while discouraging the reproduction of those who cannot afford to manage their genetic risk (roberts 2009, 2017; rose 2001, 2006). gender and the moral economy of hope, choice, and risk the section 101 debates advance two interrelated myths that uphold the imbrication of patents, capitalization, and technologization: that patents democratize invention, and that patents increase consumer access to beneficial (biotechnological) products. during the senate subcommittee hearings, a us chamber of commerce representative described how intellectual property rights serve “the public interest in creativity and innovation” and allow all would-be inventors—regardless of financial or political means—access to a patent and ensuing financial investment and innovation: “in the democratized american system the inventive capacity of every citizen was liberated and could be put to work.” 26 the notion that patents facilitate inclusivity both belies the realities of patent protection and consolidates the power of patent holders. this myth reflects the widespread view that patent law facilitates both free trade and scientific knowledge production, and that privatization supports the free exchange of (formerly public) ideas and goods (foster 2012). during the period of monopoly protection, inventors maintain control over their inventions and, in return, are required to publicly disclose the scientific basis of the invention. when patent rights expire, the invention may be integrated into the flow of the free market. however, critical scholars challenge the inevitability of private-public symbiosis and the notion that patent rights facilitate the production and sharing of scientific knowledge (foster 2012; parthasarathy 2017). as i explore further below, the privatization of public materials enables the exploitation of the knowledge and biomaterial of poor women and women of color, who may be excluded from the patented product’s benefits. as reflected in the section 101 debates, the patent system supports the commercialization and privatization of diagnostic tools and biomaterial through the promise of increased consumer access to technologies of optimization. biotechnology organization and biopharmaceutical industry representatives drew connections between the “high-risk” pursuit of invention and the health risks that americans face without these “life-saving” technologies.27 throughout the section 101 debates, venture capital firms’ investments in the development of technologies that impact public health are described as “risky” but “necessary.”28 where the gendered foundation of the patent system—by which masculinized invention (and its financial support) is used to control feminized (reproductive) labor and public resources—converges with precision and (repro)genetic medicine, a gendered duality of risk emerges. with a focus on diseases that impact women, infants, and fetuses—and embedded within biopolitical logics that disproportionately render the management of genetic risk the responsibility of women—the section 101 debates feature this duality of risk. the “risk-taking and long-term investment” inherent in the patent system is viewed as the antidote to the risk posed by diseases such as breast and ovarian cancer, and the key to assessing individual genetic risk.29 without patents, the argument goes, venture capital will abandon the biotechnology industry, risk-sharing of “biotech inventions of great societal value” will no longer be possible, and patients may never receive “the next new cure or treatment.”30 this “promise of future innovation to treat and/or cure disease” (foster 2012, 375), or moral economy of hope, sustains both technologies of optimization and the award of patents. inventors offer a story of potential profit and/or cure, patents validate this promise, and investor commitment both signals and enables the success of biotechnological inventions. thus, patent law both facilitates and benefits from the promise of innovations that not only address disease but optimize human health. illustrating this moral economy of hope, gonzalo merino, speaking on behalf of regeneron pharmaceuticals, described the genetics sequencing work that enables them to make “tremendous advances in identifying new therapeutic indications, build better-informed clinical trials, shorten developmental timelines and advance precision medicine efforts.”31 along with merino, representatives of biopharmaceutical firms and research organizations such as johnson & johnson, genentech, inc., and the pharmaceutical research and manufacturers of america suggested that mitigating corporate financial risk through patent protection will produce safer and more effective risk assessment, diagnosis, and treatment, increase “sharing of scientific information” with patients, and reduce healthcare costs.32 while experienced differently by each, this “ethos of hope” (rose 2006, 17) draws together scientists, healthcare practitioners, and patients. sherry knowles, a selfdescribed breast cancer survivor, went so far as to assert that she and “hundreds of thousands of other women” would have died in the absence of patent protection for the pharmaceuticals with which she was treated.33 in the donation of biomaterial to research, two forms of hope may be experienced by the donor; sarah franklin (2006) describes how the donation of eggs and embryos to stem cell research signify the reciprocation of individual reproductive hope with the contribution to a collective hope for scientific breakthrough. the dual hope for innovation and cure stimulates both circuits of capital and individuals’ uptake of technologies of optimization. patent law facilitates the commodification of genetic material through its promise of information and treatment that will be universally accessible. however, the temporary monopoly that is granted through patenting ensures that access to testing and treatment will be restricted to those who can afford it. there is evidence that myriad’s patents stifled clinical testing and academic research and decreased access to medical diagnostic tests even as testing costs increased (keay 2012).34 rather than bring down the costs of genetic technologies, patents generally restrict options and reduce availability, thereby exacerbating raceand class-based disparities in access to healthcare. for example, myriad’s gene sequence patent ensured that its testing technology would be the only one available. nevertheless, the gendered burden of technologies of optimization ensure that women will be routinely exhorted to manage their own and their (prospective) children’s health risk (roberts 2017; rose 2001, 2006). women are invited to ascertain their genetic risk through discourse of choice and the promise of genetic information, even as their testing options are limited (foster 2012). when mobilized to market reprogenetic technologies, this moral economy of hope reinforces the ableist notion that the eradication of disability will lead to a more desirable and just future (clare 2017; kafer 2013). thus, gendered technologies of optimization bolster raceand class-based healthcare inequities and ableism. at its intersections with reprogenetic technologies such as pgt, patent law— rather than democratizing innovation and benefiting consumers—may amplify existing reproductive healthcare disparities. as public goods are increasingly privatized and commodified, patent law enables the separation and transfer of genetic material from the body to the inventor and into “global circuits of capital” (foster 2012, 373). moreover, the designation of public resources as extractable enables the disproportionate exploitation of women through the imposition of increasingly mandatory reproductive “choice” and the expectation of genetic risk management. pgt-m, specifically, may operate as a technology of optimization through which genetic risk is both managed and becomes the pivot point for the production and circulation of biovalue. in turn, patent law incentivizes both the extraction and exchange of genetic information and material, including embryos produced during ivf and stem cells that may be derived from “abnormal” embryos, and makes health interventions available to the wealthiest consumers. as patents for genetic testing technologies proliferate, technological advances are likely to harm rather than help those who cannot access its benefits. while many industry spokespeople promise increased access, the “privatization of the genomic commons” (geiger and gross 2021, 638) disproportionately harms poor women and women of color. as established in myriad, patents are likely to narrow the options and increase the costs of reprogenetic technologies, which would most impact those with limited access to healthcare. meanwhile, reproductive biomaterial—including genes for breast cancer research and eggs for fertility and stem cell research—is made available for patenting and circulation in global markets (foster 2012, 392; waldby and cooper 2008, 67). while wealthy, white art users are most likely to donate “abnormal” embryos to stem cell research, poor women in the us and elsewhere are increasingly recruited to sell their eggs to meet the demands of expanding stem cell research markets (waldby 2008). thus, poor, black, and indigenous women’s bodies and labor become “sites of extraction” (foster 2012, 376) for medical experimentation and pharmaceutical development even as they are denied their benefits (owens 2018; waldby 2008). even assuming the ongoing exclusion of laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas from patent eligibility, the recognition of particular forms of labor and private property ensures that research and development endeavors are protected while their purported beneficiaries are not. nonetheless, pgt is marketed through the rhetoric of reproductive choice (van wagner et al. 2008). the promise of reproductive choice reinforces the patent system’s commodification of risk— industry support and financial protection for “high-risk” endeavors increases corollary to consumer desire to mitigate their individual genetic risk. thus, a moral economy of hope, buoyed by rhetoric of reproductive choice and financial and genomic risk, bolsters patent law’s circuits of biocapitalist exploitation. challenging the nexus of capitalism and patent law the relationships between patent law, genetic testing technologies, and precision medicine are continually (re)written (ray 2023). in 2015 the federal circuit court of appeals applied the two-part alice corp v. cls bank international (2014) test for subject matter eligibility to a method of non-invasive prenatal testing developed by sequenom.35 the determination that the method of using cell-free fetal dna from the amniotic fluid of a pregnant woman to diagnose fetal genetic conditions did not constitute an inventive application of a natural phenomenon would seem to corroborate rebecca eisenberg’s contention that “diagnostic applications are not patent eligible” (2015, 257). however, others suggest that genetic testing and precision medicine have benefited from recent jurisprudence, both in terms of innovation and patient access (ray 2023). in 2020 the same federal circuit court validated a patent for a method of identifying and separating cell-free fetal dna from maternal dna within maternal plasma; the court reasoned that the method was sufficiently inventive because the maternal blood plasma composition was altered by such separation.36 while those opposing changes to section 101 may be tempted to endorse the judicial reading of psm law consistent with myriad and subsequent cases, this interpretation would not challenge the fundamental logics of the us patent system. prominent proposals to intervene in the symbiotic relationship of genetic technologies, patent law, and technoscientific capitalism fail to disrupt the capitalist underpinnings of patent law. rather, they call for increased competition for publicly available biomaterial and the deferral of patent ownership in hopes that testing and treatment will become more accessible to more people (foster 2012). for example, an open public domain model calls for the restriction of patenting in favor of the free exchange of scientific ideas and materials, including “natural” resources (foster 2012). however, this model replicates the ideals central to free market capitalism—namely, the notion that free trade and competition will spur innovation (foster 2012). such proposals do not attend to the ways in which different groups of women are differently situated in these networked relations of power, impacted by both increased pressure to manage their families’ genetic futures and their uneven access to reproductive technology markets (foster 2012; waldby 2008). with pgt-m squarely in focus, i urge a two-pronged approach to the intersections of patent law and reprogenetic technologies through which both genetic information and biomaterial may be produced for circulation in national and global markets. in addition to addressing the capitalist underpinnings of patent law, i suggest that a feminist framework must also account for the specific technologies of optimization (e.g., pgt-m) and moral economy of hope, choice, and risk through which gendered and racialized subjects are differently interpellated into interconnected patent and technoscientific markets. feminist scholars have critiqued the private/public dichotomy in patent law and proposed alternatives. laura foster advocates for a “protective public domain” (2012, 379) model that would keep natural resources in the public domain and available for research while recognizing communities’ differential access to the public domain and hegemonic knowledge production. in order to address the patent system’s racialized and gendered foundations and its rootedness in property law, catherine waldby and melinda cooper (2008, 2010) suggest recognizing women’s donations of biomaterial (including eggs and stem cells) as a form of reproductive labor—and, more precisely, regenerative labor in the case of stem cells. this conceptual expansion would disrupt the culture/nature and mind/body dichotomies that privilege masculinized forms of in(ter)vention and deprive donors of property rights (foster 2012). in the context of pgt-m, a hybrid protective public domain and reproductive labor model would require the reconceptualization of the time and biomaterial— including “abnormal” embryos from which stem cells are derived—put toward research in terms of labor. further, it would recognize and address the gendered, racialized, classed, and ableist power relations that structure scientific knowledge production and access to technology within the financialized patent system. i argue that, in order for these interconnected interventions to be successful at the interface of pgt-m and patent law, they must center the moral economy of hope that animates technoscientific capitalism and reprogenetic technologies. first, this approach must expose and disrupt the assumption that patent protection is necessary to technological innovation, as well as the teleological narratives of progress that justify increased intervention into the human genome. second, this approach must recognize the moral economy of hope, choice, and risk that sustains the relationship between patenting and financial investment and the operation of pgt-m as a technology of optimization. the information that is produced through carrier screening and the genetic de-selection that is enabled by pgt-m in conjunction with ivf are positioned as not only hallmarks of technomedical innovation but also the required—and differentially accessible— choice for responsible consumers. the questioning of both positions, as well as the collusion of such choices with the eradication of disabled characteristics, may at least forestall the further entanglement of capitalism and patent law. note 1 subcommittee hearings on “the state of patent eligibility in america” before the united states senate, committee on the judiciary, subcommittee on intellectual property, 116th cong. (2019). 2 diamond v. diehr, 450 u.s. 175, 185 (1981). 3 mayo collaborative servs. v. prometheus labs., inc., 566 u.s. 66, 78 (2012); association for molecular pathology v. myriad genetics, 569 u.s. 576, 586 (2013). 4 in this paper, i seek to avoid a biologically essentialist definition of womanhood while recognizing the ways in which (bio)medicine and biopolitics reinforce such a definition. 5 hearings (statement of patrick kilbride, us chamber of commerce); (statement of barbara a. fiacco, american intellectual property law association); (statement of hans sauer, biotechnology innovation organization). 6 hearings (statement of david j. kappos, cravath, swaine & moore llp); (statement of jeffrey a. birchak, fallbrook technologies, inc.). 7 notice of roundtables and request for comments related to patent subject matter eligibility, 81 fed. reg. 71485 (oct. 17, 2016). 8 hearings (statement of kate ruane, aclu; kate ruane, jennifer leib, et al., letter in opposition to draft legislation, june 3, 2019). 9 hearings (statement of gonzalo merino, regeneron pharmaceuticals). 10 myriad, 569 u.s. at 580, 586. 11 alice bank corp. v. cls bank intern., 573 u.s. 208, 216 (2014). the alice twopart test asks whether the claims were directed to an “abstract idea,” “law of nature,” or “natural phenomenon” and, if so, whether the claims contained an “inventive concept” sufficient to “transform” the claimed ineligible concept into a patent eligible application. 12 european patent convention, art. 53(a). 13 diamond v. diehr, 450 u.s. 175, 185 (1981). 14 diamond v. chakrabarty, 447 u.s. 303, 313 (1980). 15 moore v. regents of the university of california, 793 p.2d 479 (cal. 1990). 16 mayo collaborative servs. v. prometheus labs., inc., 566 u.s. 66, 78 (2012); myriad, 569 u.s. at 576, 586. 17 myriad (brief for the national women’s health network, reproductive health technologies project, disability rights legal center et al. as amici curiae supporting petitioners, at 21-25). 18 hearings (statement of adam mossoff, antonin scalia law school, george mason university); (statement of q. todd dickinson, former director of the uspto); (statement of laurie hill, genentech, inc.). 19 hearings (statement of corey salsberg, novartis). 20 hearings (statement of corey salsberg, novartis). 21 hearings (statement of kate ruane, aclu). 22 hearings (statement of patrick kilbride, u.s. chamber of commerce). 23 hearings (statement of sherry m. knowles, knowles intellectual property strategies, llc). 24 diehr, 450 u.s. at 185. 25 myriad, 569 u.s. at 585 (quoting mayo collaborative servs. v. prometheus labs., inc., 566 u.s. 66, 78 [2012]). 26 hearings (statement of patrick kilbride, u.s. chamber of commerce). 27 hearings (statement of hans sauer, biotechnology innovation organization); (statement of natalie derzko, on behalf of the pharmaceutical research and manufacturers of america, at 5). 28 hearings (statement of judge paul r. michel (ret.), united states court of appeals for the federal circuit); (statement of professor david o. taylor); (statement of jeffrey a. birchak, fallbrook technologies, inc.). 29 hearings (statement of hans sauer, biotechnology innovation organization); (statement of sherry m. knowles, knowles intellectual property strategies, llc). 30 hearings (statement of hans sauer, biotechnology innovation organization). 31 hearings (statement of gonzalo merino, regeneron pharmaceuticals). 32 hearings (statement of gonzalo merino, regeneron pharmaceuticals, at 2); (statement of rick brandon, university of michigan); (statement of robert deberardine, johnson & johnson); (statement of natalie derzko, on behalf of the pharmaceutical research and manufacturers of america); (statement of laurie hill, genentech, inc.); (statement of david spetzler, caris life sciences); (statement of corey salsberg, novartis). 33 hearings (statement of sherry m. knowles, knowles intellectual property strategies, llc). 34 myriad (brief for american medical association, 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valley state university, allendale, michigan, united states. flowing and flown: transition and the crafting of possible futures tanio, nadine, and sarah malik. 2024. “flowing and flown: transition and the crafting of possible futures.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–10. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © nadine tanio and sarah malik, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license flowing and flown: transition and the crafting of possible futures nadine tanio university of california, irvine ntanio@uci.edu sarah malik independent researcher smalik78643@gmail.com abstract in this multimodal essay, we share a short film about the experience of growing up as a pediatric heart transplant recipient and reflect on our collaborative project. our work reveals the tensions associated with coming of age in the interstices of transplantation, disability, and difference, while living with existential uncertainty and the rituals of care that structure daily life. through filmmaking we seek to build knowledge ecologies: communities for learning and living within the transitory spaces of modern medicine. keywords pediatric heart transplantation, transition, collaborative methods, reflexive epistemics introduction this multimodal essay is a mosaic, the result of collaboration and compromise. drawing upon reflexive epistemologies developed over the past half century within feminist and decolonial sts research on epistemic authority, subject formation, and knowledge production (fortun 2009; harding 2009; sandoval 2003; sørensen and traweek 2021), we engage in reflexive storytelling. our focus is a story about the experience of heart transplantation in childhood and the challenges of negotiating the transition into adulthood and adult medical care. mailto:ntanio@uci.edu mailto:smalik78643@gmail.com special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) nadine tanio and sarah malik, 2024 2 woven throughout are reflexive practices—alternating turns as storyteller and audience, teacher, and student—that build intersubjective spaces for the telling and retelling, interpretation, and reinterpretation of narratives. storytelling is our collaborative practice of sense-making, which we enact and share through text, film, and dialogue. tinkering with epistemic tensions sarah and i met in 2017 at a heart transplant “transition clinic” held at a large teaching hospital in southern california. it was an opportunity for adolescent and young adult heart transplant recipients and their families to meet the hospital’s cardiology team, visit and tour the adult clinic, and celebrate the passage from pediatric to adult health care. sarah was invited by the clinic’s organizers to speak and answer questions as a former pediatric patient who had transitioned to adult care. transition, or the move from pediatric to the adult healthcare system, is an emergent topic in transplant medicine as more pediatric heart transplant patients are living to adulthood (blum et al. 1993; american academy of pediatrics et al. 2002). though the first pediatric heart transplant surgery occurred over fifty years ago, only recently have pediatric heart transplant recipients begun surviving into adulthood. transitions, of all kinds, are challenging times for many. for heart transplant recipients this transition is particularly perilous, marked by a change in legal status with important consequences to the process of decision-making and management of one’s own care that can lead to difficult changes in the roles and responsibilities of family caregivers. it also represents a “high-risk age window” when adolescents and young adults face worse transplant organ survival than younger children (foster et al. 2015). at the time we met, sarah was twenty-five years old. she had received her first heart transplant at three and had double transplant surgery for heart and kidney organs when she was seventeen. eight years out from her last transplant, she was in graduate school earning her master's degree in clinical psychology with the hope of building a career assisting other young transplant recipients. sarah is among the first generation of pediatric heart transplant patients to survive and build a future in the interstices of precarity, disability, and medical innovation. in contrast, after working in science educational programming and documentary television, i returned to graduate school in education, conducting doctoral research within a team participatory research study in advanced heart failure (raia and deng 2014) and interested in how young people made sense of the complexities of organ transplantation and their transition to adulthood. unlike the medical model of transition, which understands it as a discrete event, i employed an anthropological point of view. following victor turner, i regard transition as a process, a becoming (1970, 94), and leveraged my experience as a producer to engage visual storytelling as a research method. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) nadine tanio and sarah malik, 2024 3 as an educational researcher, i drew upon multiple traditions including critical disability studies (erevelles 2000; shildrick 2019) and critical media literacy (kellner and share, 2007) to position visual storytelling as an educational intervention. through storytelling, i wanted young people to have a chance to reflect upon their own labor, to see their survival as an accomplishment. my hope was to create a series of short, educational films to support knowledge ecologies for living and learning within the transitory spaces of high-tech modern medicine. in this project, teaching and learning were posited as an ongoing activity for every participant, thereby revising the conventional interpretive power relations of researcher and subject to examine interactions from many perspectives, including epistemically. when i shared the project with sarah and invited her to participate, she jumped at the opportunity, telling me that she was willing to work on any research project that focused on heart transplant recipients. sarah’s eagerness reflected her own experience and engagement with scholarly research. it also reflected her willingness to be a representative—to tell a story—in the hope of helping others through the process of transitioning. through our research, sarah learned techniques of visual storytelling. in turn, i learned about the experiences of coming of age and imagining a future hitherto unrealized. we worked within a collaborative experimental design. though we acknowledged our different personal histories, status, and interests, we shared common identities as women of color, each from different diasporic communities. we also shared a common purpose in crafting stories as a practice of sense-making. our work contributes to feminist science studies' attention to exclusionary practices by attending to young people as knowledge producers, taking seriously their part in the “knowledge ecologies” (sofoulis et al. 2012) of transplant medicine—especially within relations of power vis-à-vis adults and the institutions, such as schools, families, clinics, and hospitals, that structure their lives. in the next two sections, sarah and i share the short film we crafted together as well as an edited dialogue we recorded after watching our film. in the intervening years, we collectively experienced the covid-19 pandemic and its lingering effect texture our discussion. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) nadine tanio and sarah malik, 2024 4 film figure 1. film still sarah (2018). the overlapping medical crisis sarah faced as a teenager. full film: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nvgmsfvoxzsab_u2xz9johm7wxiebjk/view?usp=sharing dialogue nadine what are your thoughts looking at it [our film] now? have you seen it recently? sarah i haven’t seen it since the last time i watched it with you. it’s different. life’s so different. covid ruined everything really. nadine how did it affect you? sarah the whole experience gave me such severe anxiety. it’s changed everything. i'm not the person i was in that video. i think this video made me reflect on my life more than i've ever done. the process of making it or just, i’ve been processing. it’s been hard. and i see myself as that carefree person.... i don’t think i was emotionally mature enough at that time to grasp everything that i physically went through. understanding that this is not normal, i just didn’t see it as such a huge difference. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nvgmsfvoxzsab_u2xz9johm7wxiebj-k/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nvgmsfvoxzsab_u2xz9johm7wxiebj-k/view?usp=sharing special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) nadine tanio and sarah malik, 2024 5 nadine i don’t know your experiences, but i think when you made that film, you were already visiting clinics and tried different, informal ways to support students and patients. and you were still in school, and you were thinking about your next jobs and whatnot…it was a year-long process of making the film. i don’t know if you remember that, but you were a teacher in that and you took on the persona of a teacher. so, you i don’t find that you were carefree in that way, but i felt like you were trying to help others manage it, by managing yourself in a way. that’s how i understood it. sarah that’s an interesting perspective. i see what you mean that i took on that, like, everyone must know everything and must be educated because that’s just what just everyone must know. it’s just covid’s changed a lot of me. it’s taken pieces that i want back. nadine in the film, you said that you wanted to change the world. has that changed? sarah no, i want to change the world. i want to do something and make my mark in this world. not huge impact, you know, like with my name in lights and stuff, but just like something where i know that, if i didn’t participate in that, then it wouldn’t have happened. nadine do you have nostalgia looking back on the girl that you were in that film? sarah i feel sad for her because covid is coming around the corner and because there was that moment in my life when everything was peachy and great, and everything was going to work out. everything didn’t work itself out. i was recounting everything that i was seeing in the video and remembering the…like, dude, i felt like that was bad. i’m not even bad then, now i am. and so… nadine what do you mean you’re bad now? sarah my blood pressure, it’s been out of control for the past three months and i’m just like…no one knows why. so, it’s not fun. nadine so, i wanted to ask you something about what you imagine your future will be like. do you think that it’s possible for you, for other young people who have transplants, to thrive, to imagine thriving into adulthood? sarah i think it’s a possibility. but i also know that it’s hard. it’s not easy. i used to think it was easy, but coming into adulthood and realizing, no, i can’t special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) nadine tanio and sarah malik, 2024 6 do everything like everyone else because everyone else doesn’t have fucking doctors. i have to go to the pharmacy and pick up meds and have to sit there and work literally at least two to three hours making my meds. i have a friend, well, someone i know through a lot of transplant groups, and he was thirty-two years out. he had his heart transplant for thirtytwo years. he was good. he’s on the waitlist, day six inside the hospital right now. i’m like, “bro, you were at thirty-two. what the hell happened?”—and it just tanked. his world just stopped. like, that could be me. that takes one second, one bad blood result and you’re done. for me to see life in the future of whatever i want to do and, like, to plan for it. it is rough because i wasn’t given a guideline of how to do it. i don’t think anyone is. let’s be honest, no one’s given a guideline of how to do life. but, like, there wasn’t a question: “oh, so what colleges are you going to apply to? what is your major going to be? what do you want to do when you grow up? why do you want to do that?” those conversations weren’t happening at the appropriate times. it should have been happening, but it didn’t because i was sick. nadine another perspective is that one of the doctors in your program noted that you and your peers are among the first cohort surviving into adulthood. in a sense, i think you’re finding that path because it didn’t exist. i remember these parents—i don’t know if you noticed at the time—but we went to a transition clinic group and there were parents there and they were so fascinated by you because they didn’t think that their daughter had an independent future. and here you were, you were in college, you were doing research, you were telling your story, you were there to help them out. and i remember the parents were just in awe. i also remember noticing all their stress, all their concerns for their daughter, like they were watching you so carefully. and i just remember you showed them that there was a future of possibilities, and i just thought that was so extraordinary. sarah i think that’s really amazing to hear. like i said, i do want to make an impact and if that’s the way i can do it, i’m going to do it. the work of storytelling in his 1936 essay “the storyteller,” walter benjamin mourned the end of storytelling. he positioned storytelling as the sharing of experience that "goes from mouth to mouth," and pointed to a decline in storytelling in an age marked by technological and information transformation (1968, 84). the world in which special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) nadine tanio and sarah malik, 2024 7 young people with heart transplants are coming of age is a world vastly different from benjamin’s. yet his acute attunement to the fragility of the human body still resonates and the challenges of transforming experience into stories that can be transmitted mouth to mouth persists within experiences of medical innovation. during preliminary fieldwork in pediatric post-transplant cardiology clinics, i noticed the centrality of storytelling in medical encounters. as a series of specialists rotated into the clinic’s examination rooms, i kept hearing them ask their patients whether they were “telling their story.” i understood this as a diagnostic tool, a way to see if young people were reconnecting to school, classmates, family, and friends due to the extended periods of disconnection and recovery required by their medical care (yates et al. 2010). in the context of a small, windowless examination room, where the differences between young and old, patient and caregiver, expert and novice were stark, and where the adults far outnumbered the patient or their allies, the demands for a young person to answer in the affirmative were high. many deferred responding or murmured “yeses.” as an educational researcher, i could not help but recognize the challenges the question posed: can you organize and narrate a story of one of the most momentous events in your life? can you objectify your experience to share with others, thereby opening yourself to the possibility of further curiosity and questioning? can you reject the idea that your heart transplant is a singular story, that it is “your story,” or that it is the only story you should tell? as i witnessed this, at times, painful exchange, i recognized that filmmaking was one means to help young people answer the question—not that there is only ever one story to tell; rather, through collaborative visual storytelling, young people could have a ready response helpful to them, and to others, within multiple contexts, including a clinic examination room. i could leverage my experience in media production to teach and support young people through collaborative visual storytelling. in turn, young people could teach me how they navigated transition and their experience of living and growing up as a heart transplant recipient. together, we could enact respectful design by teaching, learning, and researching side by side (erickson 2006). therefore, the research took multiple methods and analytic practices into account in designing a collaborative practice that attended to power disparities across participants and co-created new possibilities for understanding and thinking about ecologies of care afforded through the collaborative crafting and sharing of young people’s stories. on one hand, the narratives opened reflexive spaces for sarah and others to see their everyday practices, their rituals of care, and to learn to see that work as an achievement. on another, the resultant films allowed adult caregivers to hear the stories heart recipients wanted to tell, while contributing to emerging studies in transplant medicine. that is the work of storytelling: to make sense of experiences and to share them with others. in the process of re-viewing the film, another dimension of storytelling emerged. the film is an artifact, produced at a particular moment in special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) nadine tanio and sarah malik, 2024 8 time. seeing it again revealed the impermanence of knowing. it positioned sarah as a subject within her narrative in a way she had not seen before. it called on us to respond and re-engage with the work of interpreting and reinterpreting her story. collaborative, reflexive, storytelling demands this attention: that we listen, engage, and, in that process, contribute to knowledge ecologies—communities for learning and living within the transitory spaces of modern medicine. in collaboratively crafting narratives of heart transplantation, sarah and i share emergent expertise of transitioning to adulthood and learning to navigate and realize unstable and unpredictable futures. in recognizing young people’s epistemic status as knowledge makers, we listen and learn as they share their stories and efforts to craft a future in these precarious times. acknowledgments the authors want to thank jade vu henry, prerna srigyan, and sharon traweek, who provided essential insight and encouragement to an early draft, and our anonymous reviewers, whose careful suggestions and critique challenged and strengthened our work. references american academy of pediatrics, american academy of family physicians, and american college of physicians-american society of internal medicine. 2002. “a consensus statement on health care transitions for young adults with special health care needs.” pediatrics 110 (s3): 1304–06. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.110.s3.1304. benjamin, walter. 1968. “the storyteller: reflections on the works of nikolai leskov.” translated by harry zohn. in illuminations: essays and reflections, 83-109. new york: schocken books. blum, robert wm., dale garell, christopher h. hodgman, timothy w. jorissen, nancy a. okinow, donald p. orr, and gail b. slap. 1993. “transition from child-centered to adult health-care systems for adolescents with chronic conditions.” journal of adolescent health 14 (7): 570–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/1054-139x(93)90143-d. erickson, frederick. 2006. “studying side by side: collaborative action ethnography in educational research.” in innovations in educational ethnography: theory, methods, and results, edited by george spindler and lorie hammond, 235-57. lawrence erlbaum associates, publishers. erevelles, nirmala. 2000. “educating unruly bodies: critical pedagogy, disability studies, and the politics of schooling.” educational theory 50 (1): 25–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2000.00025.x. fortun, kim. 2009. advocacy after bhopal: environmentalism, disaster, new global orders. chicago: university of chicago press. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.110.s3.1304 https://doi.org/10.1016/1054-139x(93)90143-d https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.2000.00025.x special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) nadine tanio and sarah malik, 2024 9 foster, b.j., m. dahhou, x. zhang, v. dharnidharka, v. ng, and j. conway. 2015. “high risk of graft failure in emerging adult heart transplant recipients.” american journal of transplantation 15 (12): 3185–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajt.13386. harding, sandra. 2009. “postcolonial and feminist philosophies of science and technology: convergences and dissonances.” postcolonial studies 12 (4): 401–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790903350658. kellner, douglas, and jeff share. 2007. “critical media literacy: crucial policy choices for a twenty-first-century democracy.” policy futures in education 5 (1): 59–69. https://doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2007.5.1.59. raia, federica, and mario c. deng. 2014. relational medicine: personalizing modern healthcare: the practice of high-tech medicine as a relational act. world scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/9065. sandoval, chela. 2003. “us third-world feminism: the theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world.” in feminist postcolonial theory: a reader, edited by reina lewis and sara mills, 75–100. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. shildrick, margrit. 2019. “critical disability studies: rethinking the conventions for the age of postmodernity.” in routledge handbook of disability studies, edited by nick watson, alan roulstone, and carol thomas, 32–44. london: routledge. sofoulis, zoë, sky hugman, philippa collin, and amanda third. 2012. “coming to terms with knowledge brokering and translation: a background paper." institute for culture and society: uws parratta. sørensen, knut h., and sharon traweek. 2021. questing excellence in academia: a tale of two universities. london: routledge. turner, victor witter. 1970. the forest of symbols: aspects of ndembu ritual. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. yates, lyn, lyndal bond, mary dixon, sarah drew, peter ferguson, trevor hay, julianne moss, pamela st. leger, hannah walker, and julie white. 2010. keeping connected: identity, social connection and education for young people living with chronic illness. project report. melbourne graduate school of education, university of melbourne, melbourne, victoria, australia. https://vuir.vu.edu.au/21834/. author bios nadine tanio is a project scientist in university of california, irvine’s ecogovlab and a lecturer in disability studies at the university of california, los angeles. she trained as an educational researcher interested in experimental, collaborative research methods that contribute to feminist and postcolonial sts. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajt.13386 https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790903350658 https://doi.org/10.2304/pfie.2007.5.1.59 https://doi.org/10.1142/9065 https://vuir.vu.edu.au/21834/ special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) nadine tanio and sarah malik, 2024 10 sarah malik is an associate marriage and family therapist who earned her master’s in clinical psychology from the chicago school of professional psychology. she is also a multiorgan pediatric heart transplant recipient. flowing and flown: transition and the crafting of possible futures abstract keywords introduction tinkering with epistemic tensions film dialogue the work of storytelling acknowledgments references author bios herzig, rebecca, and banu subramaniam. 2025. “here we go again: on the biological.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–13. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © rebecca herzig and banu subramaniam. 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license here we go again: on the biological rebecca herzig bates college rherzig@bates.edu banu subramaniam wellesley college bs108@wellesley.edu abstract in this short essay, herzig and subramaniam explore the potent role of “biological” sex/gender in contemporary politics. considering some of the social movements, legislative actions, and affective investments mobilized around concepts of the biological, the essay first names some of feminist science and technology studies’ (fsts) core contributions to understandings of biological sex/gender, then discusses how the field might be better positioned to intervene in future debates. keywords sex/gender, biology, biological classification, science, biopolitics mailto:rherzig@bates.edu mailto:bs108@wellesley.edu tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) rebecca herzig and banu subramaniam 2025 2 “sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. “sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity” …“gender ideology”… permit[s] the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requir[es] all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true. —president donald trump, the [united states] white house, “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government” (january 20, 2025) far from immutable, the biological is scarcely a hundred years old. the oxford english dictionary suggests that the word biological first made its appearance in 1822, in a volume of the now-long-defunct british periodical the eclectic review, in a reference to the “catastrophe” of bodily death and decay (“lawrence and pring” 1822, 492). its clout grew swiftly, as the management and regulation of life itself moved to the center of biopolitical techniques of governance. over the nineteenth century, ethnologists used the biological to argue for the legitimacy of racial slavery and imperial expansion (hunt 1863, 18), psychologists used biological to argue against co-educating the sexes (hall 1904, 561), and political philosophers used biological to argue against liberal democratic rule (w. lewis 1926). classifications of male and female were inseparable from such practical applications, and already by 1914, “authoritative,” “prominent” biologists were being summoned by the us popular press to defend a binary, two-sex model against incursion from the “biological bosh” of “feminist propaganda” (macadam 1914, 50). we have, in other words, been here before. a century before the second trump administration’s insistence on binary, dimorphic biological sex differences, we can find the familiar contours of debate in us popular cultures: science vs. ideology, nature vs. social construction, sex vs. gender. as readers of catalyst are well aware, the united states is not exceptional in this regard: assertions of immutable, biological sex—along with deterministic claims about related social and political obligations—have been on rise globally. across a range of geographical locations, resurgent nationalisms have mobilized in opposition to “gender ideology,” including attacks on queer and trans individuals and communities, on gender studies as an academic field, and on access to policies and norms associated with movements toward gender equity (associated press in moscow 2023; holvikivi et al. 2024; kent and tapfumaneyi 2018; kuhar and paternotte 2017). as we seek to understand this resurgent legislative and affective investment in biological binaries, what might a generation of scholarship in feminist science and tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) rebecca herzig and banu subramaniam 2025 3 technology studies (fsts) bring to the table? what have practitioners in our field learned, or failed to learn, over the years? as co-editors of the decade-old fsts book series feminist technosciences (university of washington press), and as scholars located within the rapidly shifting landscape of us higher education, we’ve been stewing on those two questions a fair amount. here, we first summarize what we see as three salient contributions of fsts to grappling with recent efforts to replace “gender ideology extremism” with “biological truth.” as we enumerate these contributions, we are keen to avoid recurrent feminist narrative tropes of scholarly progress, loss, or return (hemmings 2011); each of the contributions, we recognize, is likely already self-evident to readers of this journal. (we all have been here before!) nonetheless, we see value in reiterating these contributions now—if, for no other reason, than to stack a few sandbags against the flood of fresh claims about “biological sex,” including but not limited to the rising waters in our respective backyards (bates 2025; pendharkar 2025). after summarizing those three contributions, we flag two areas that we believe merit further consideration by fsts scholars, particularly in the face of the increasingly authoritarian social movements unfolding today. three lasting fsts contributions among the contributions that an fsts perspective might bring to contemporary claims about “immutable biological classifications,” is, first, and perhaps most simply, that “biology” is not the body. a rich, heterogeneous scholarly literature in feminist and queer sts demonstrates, as donna haraway puts it, that biology is, literally, a logos about bios—knowledge about life, not life itself (penley et al. 1990, 11). generations of feminist studies emphasize the complex, varied, intra-active agencies of material phenomena—complexity and nuance erased in caricatures of feminism’s “matterphobic” aversions to biological truth (ahmed 2008, 34). fsts, as we understand it, traffics in consideration of the material-semiotic and natural-cultural, without resorting to table-thumping claims about the pre-discursively real. second, research in fsts has shown that contests over the “immutable biological classification” of sex/gender are always also contests about race, species, ability, age, and other power-laden classifications of difference. while the january 2025 executive order quoted in the epigraph focuses solely on definitions of “female” and “male” (meaning, respectively, “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” or “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell”), decades of scholarship in fsts show that such scalar anatomical assessments (large cells vs. small cells, large pelves vs. small pelves, large brains vs. small brains)—themselves a bewildering way to cement “binary” sex—are threaded through with racial, ethnic, tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) rebecca herzig and banu subramaniam 2025 4 and colonial bias (fausto-sterling 1993; gere 1999; markowitz 2001; stein 2015). fsts’s highly generative engagements with animal studies further shows how such racialized, settler sex/gender distinctions materialize assumptions about species, and the presumed centrality of the category of the human (birke et al. 2004; birke et al. 2004; herzig and subramaniam 2017). third, research in fsts has demonstrated the generosity and generativity of close collaborations with practitioners: scientists, clinicians, engineers, healers, midwives, primary and secondary school teachers, community activists, and more. a long history of wars over epistemic authority, evident already in the aforementioned 1914 positioning of “authoritative biology” against “feminist propaganda,” reveals how easily feminist criticism of heteropatriarchal biological determinism can be conflated, wrongly, with wholesale rejection of science. a number of founding fsts scholars—ruth bleier, anne fausto-sterling, evelyn fox keller, evelynn hammonds, ruth hubbard, donna haraway, sue rosser, bonnie spanier—were formally trained in the natural sciences, and remain(ed) committed throughout their careers to building better scientific knowledges and practices. the list of fsts scholars committed to improving “science” has only grown longer and more diverse across disciplines, social identities, and geographical locations. recent books—including ambika kamath and melina packer’s feminism in the wild: how human biases shape our understanding of animal behavior (2025); chanda prescod-weinstein’s the disordered cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred (2021); deboleena roy’s molecular feminisms: biology, becomings, and life in the lab (2018)—display the thorough and simultaneous embrace of scientific and feminist analyses. a wide range of contemporary researchers now carry feminist and queer perspectives as part of their standard observational toolkits, as evidenced by the special section of american naturalist on “nature, data, power” (kamath et al. 2022), or the introduction to the special issue of integrative and comparative biology on sexual diversity and variation (lewis and sharpe 2023). we take from this work that the legacies and impacts of fsts perspectives have made inroads into transforming academic, governmental, and community-based scientific and technical projects. indeed, one of the core strengths of fsts, in our view, is the field’s capaciousness and porosity: a multi-sited, interdisciplinary, canon-resistant reckoning with conjunctures of power and knowledge. two areas for further fsts attention yet for all that porosity, we do seem to find ourselves in familiar patterns, encountering normative beliefs about “immutable” sex differences again and again. as contemporary calls to restore “biological truth” with respect to binary sex repeat, wholesale, discursive frames from a century ago, we find ourselves wondering, why? why such persistent return to assertions about binary biological sex? why haven’t varied scientific studies disproving strict sex dimorphism in humans—over and above the myriad historical, anthropological, sociological, and tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) rebecca herzig and banu subramaniam 2025 5 philosophical studies challenging the immutability of binary sex—failed to slow recent legislative and cultural investment in defending oversimplified visions of the biological (rehmann-sutter et al. 2023; richardson 2022)? reflecting on this question, we arrive at two observations, which we believe fsts might fruitfully consider further. first, we believe it is imperative to recognize that the persistence of debates about the “biological” indicates persistent struggle over the status of women, including but not limited to their status within power-laden stem fields. despite decades of resources poured into “women in science” initiatives, the proverbial “leaky” pipeline leaks on. in south korea, for instance, the percentage of women in stem fields is under 23 percent—the lowest among oecd member countries (hong 2025). researchers further observe that “provision of information regarding the degree to which gender disparities exist in korea does little to bridge” a wide, and still expanding, gender and generational divide in attitudes toward gender equity (mo and you 2025). in germany, where the number of women pursuing stem fields impressively doubled from 2008 to 2022 according to the federal statistical office (to comprise 35.1 percent of all students in stem subjects), researchers continue to find gendered inequities across stem disciplines, including stereotypical beliefs and unequal workloads (kube et al. 2024; wolbert 2025). trump’s january 2025 executive order is, obviously, just one node in an international anti-gender movement (ilga europe 2025; mulucha 2022)—seeking to position women, femmes, and lgbtq+ people, beyond those in stem fields, in positions of social, political, and economic subordination. the strident assertion of “immutable” biological classifications is about heteropatriarchal domination. academic feminists ignore this at our peril. it can be startling just how overt and unabashed those calls for heteropatriarchal domination can be. advocates for masculinist christian nationalism in the us now openly discourage women from pursuing higher education, and instead urge accommodation with “feminine goals of home making.” political scientist scott yenor, speaking at a recent national conference, denounced us colleges and universities as “the citadels of our gynecocracy,” delaying women’s childbearing in support of their career ambitions. as yenor put it, “‘every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. ditto for med school and the law and every trade” (quoted in jackson 2021). again, the us is hardly alone in this regard: in hungary, for instance, concerns about women in higher education are routinely framed in terms of effects on heterosexual marriage and reproductivity (bbc news 2022). in germany, a focus on unwinding women’s education and employment is tied to efforts to naturalize a sex/gender binary, and to cement the white nuclear family as the foundation of the nation (holzberg 2024). tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) rebecca herzig and banu subramaniam 2025 6 we take from these unabashed calls to limit women’s participation in public spheres the strong, clear need for ongoing coalition building between fsts and practitioners of “normal” science. just as early practitioners of feminist science studies drew on their experiences as scientific researchers, we hope that more theory-heavy branches of fsts will maintain and even strengthen connections to scholars focused squarely on issues of inclusion and advancement of women, lgbtq+, bipoc, and other minoritized practitioners in stem. these connections include projects of scientific knowledge-making ongoing within fsts (giordano 2017; hazard 2022; kamat et al. 2022; lasker and simcox 2020; pico 2023; riley 2022). second, we believe it is imperative that fsts recognize the ineradicable intersections between science and religion in the politics of sex, gender, and sexuality. debates about the biological—about “life itself”—evoke, implicitly or explicitly, not only the status of males, females, and nonhuman animals, but also kinship and connectedness with the more-than-human. decolonial approaches to scientific knowledge—which upend the very separability of scientific subjects and objects—suggest multiple paths for deeper reflection (kimmerer 2013; prescodweinstein 2015; tallbear 2013). yet to date, even decolonial fsts has not significantly disrupted the presumptive secularity of fsts or other academic fields. as a result, as feminist scholars, we find ourselves in a difficult position when presented with developments such as the alabama supreme court’s landmark 2024 ruling that frozen embryos are to be legally treated as “unborn children located outside of a biological uterus” (lepage vs. center for reproductive medicine 2024). although alabama lawmakers subsequently passed a measure to protect providers in the state from civil or criminal liability for embryo loss (talukder 2024), the court’s ruling remains in place. and in that ruling, definitions of the “biological” are overtly scriptural: “we believe that each human, being from the moment of conception, is made in the image of god, created by him to reflect his likeness. it is as if the people of alabama took what was spoken of the prophet jeremiah, and applied it to every unborn person in the state” (48). the chief justice continues, “carving out an exception for the people in this case, small as they were, would be unacceptable to the people of this state, who have required us to treat every human being in accordance with the fear of a holy god, who made them in his image” (48). arguments marshaled against embryonic personhood may wish, understandably, to reject such judicial “fear of a holy god,” and instead elevate a vision of secular reason, grounded in the “medical and scientific consensus” that “embryos are cells capable of creating life rather than consisting of actual life” (chesak 2024). yet universal consensus about “actual life” is fictive. the biological, no less than the scriptural, is a situated, contingent form of knowledge. to the extent that western academic feminists’ claims to epistemic authority (our own as well as others) often rely on an alleged freedom from faith, we find tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) rebecca herzig and banu subramaniam 2025 7 ourselves ill-prepared to engage knowledge claims based on other ideological frames (connolly 2000), such as the invocation of the prophecies of jeremiah presented by the alabama supreme court, or, for that matter, the anti-colonial forms of knowledge-making presented by indigenous feminisms. we instead find ourselves asked to join hands with calls to “believe science” or “trust science”— slogans that, of course, erode the very status of “science” as a practice grounded in something other than belief or prophecy. unreflexive insistence that we “trust science” serve those most vulnerable to scientific and medical harm insufficiently or not at all, and will prove of little comfort if minoritized researchers are driven back out of the scientific professions altogether. we thus find ourselves actively longing for scholarship in fsts that directly engages entanglements of scientific and religious ways of knowing. we think here not only of timely critiques of settler science’s false promises of secular objectivity (e.g., tallbear 2013, 2017, 2019), but also the wide array of efforts to document how belief in the more-than-human shapes contemporary scientific practice, whether in ethnobotany (e.g., foster 2017; makunga et al. 2008; roberts 2012); reproductive medicine (e.g., pande 2009; thomas 2021); computing and robotics (e.g., bhattarai 2017; haraway 1987; or studies of animal behavior (gillis-buck 2016; weaver 2021; willey 2016). as ever, the vast, generative world of feminist science fiction and speculative fiction, from icons such as octavia butler and ursula leguin to more recent world-making fabulists (earle 2019; kenney 2019), also offers fruitful sites for thinking-otherwise. we see in such work the early signs of post-secular situated knowledges, approaches that historicize and contextualize connections and disconnections between apparently incommensurate cosmologies of the “biological.” rather than foreclosing moments of incommensurability in discursive processes of sacralization and desacralization, we hope fsts might stay with the political and epistemological trouble generated by the profound gaps between, say, contemporary peer-reviewed biological research, which presumes a separation between scientific subjects and their objects of study, and ways of knowing that instead consider “grammars of animacy” as relational processes of becoming (kimmerer 2013). recognition of the metaphysical complexities of “life itself” strikes us as essential to responding to scriptural and/or scientific arguments for hierarchical domination. for which science we are marching staying with the epistemological trouble, rather than adopting strategic biological essentialisms, obviously carries political risk. we have been here before. and yet, we see these moments as critical for fsts—as a frame for more expansive logos about bios. we seek to promote an fsts that engages not only issues of epistemic objectivity, credibility, and authority, but also issues of funding, regulation, mentoring, animal care, land return, and so on and on. as tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) rebecca herzig and banu subramaniam 2025 8 amy slaton (2018) has written, “we need to insist now on wider terms of debate regarding our thinking about nature than simply whether that thinking is ‘evidence-based’ or not—these are terms that the right has set for us...foreclos[ing] deep reflection about power and knowledge.” while “marching for science,” slaton reminds us, “we need to be clear for which science we are marching”—one which remains committed to unwinding misogyny, white supremacy, anthropocentrism, and allied oppressions. again, we have been here before (co*lab, 2022;liboiron et al. 2018). we join those who remain for a science of planetary emancipation—a science worthy of fsts. references ahmed, sara. 2008. “open forum imaginary prohibitions some preliminary remarks on the founding gestures of the ‘new materialism.” european journal of women’s studies 15 (1): 23–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506807084854. associated press in moscow. 2023. “vladimir putin signs law banning gender changes in russia.” the guardian, july 24. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/24/vladimir-putin-signs-law-banninggender-changes-in-russia. bates, hannah. 2025. “wellesley athletics pulls transgender policy website in response to executive order.” the wellesley news, february 7. https://thewellesleynews.com/20686/news-investigation/wellesley-athletics-pullstransgender-policy-website-in-response-to-executive-order/. bbc news. 2022. “hungarians warning education becoming ‘too feminine’ – report.” august 26. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62686894. bhattarai, pratistha. 2017. “algorithmic value: cultural encoding, textuality, and the myth of ‘source code.’” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3 (1): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i1.28786. birke, lynda, mette bryld, and nina lykke. 2004. “animal performances: an exploration of intersections between feminist science studies and studies of human/animal relationships.” feminist theory 5 (2): 167–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700104045406. chesak, jennifer. 2024. “global perspectives on the alabama ruling, ivf and when cells become a person.” bbc.com, february 26. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240226-what-is-an-embryo-global-medicaldefinition-of-personhood-ivf-ruling. co*lab, star fem. 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sharpe. 2023. “sex diversity and variation.” special issue, integrative and comparative biology 63 (4): 877–85. https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icad114. lewis, wyndham. 1926. the art of being ruled. chatto and windus. liboiron, max, manuel tironi, and nerea calvillo. 2018. “toxic politics: acting in a permanently polluted world.” social studies of science 48 (3): 331–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312718783087. macadam, george. 1914. “feminist revolutionary principle is biological bosh.” new york times, january 18. https://www.nytimes.com/1914/01/18/archives/feministrevolutionary-principle-is-biological-bosh-prof-william-t.html. makunga, n.p., l.e. philander, and m. smith. 2008. “current perspectives on an emerging formal natural products sector in south africa.” journal of ethnopharmacology 119 (3): 365–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jep.2008.07.020. markowitz, sally. 2001. “pelvic politics: sexual dimorphism and racial difference.” signs 26 (2): 389–414. 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section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) rebecca herzig and banu subramaniam 2025 12 rehmann-sutter, christoph, olaf hiort, ulrike m. krämer, lisa malich, and malte spielmann. 2023. “is sex still binary?” medizinische genetik 35 (3): 173–80. https://doi.org/10.1515/medgen-2023-2039. richardson, sarah s. 2022. “sex contextualism.” philosophy, theory, and practice in biology 14 (2): 1–17. https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ptpbio/article/id/2096/. riley, donna. 2022. “the act of embrace as queer resistance in engineering.” in queering stem culture in us higher education, edited by kelly j. cross, stephanie farrell, and bryce hughes, 231–47. routledge. roberts, elizabeth f. 2012. god's laboratory: assisted reproduction in the andes. university of california press. roy, deboleena. 2018. molecular feminisms: biology, becomings, and life in the lab. university of washington press. slaton, amy e. 2018. “huts; or, the impossible innocence of science.” january 3. unpublished manuscript. stein, melissa n. 2015. measuring manhood: race and the science of masculinity, 1830–1934. university of minnesota. tallbear, kim. 2013. “an indigenous, feminist approach to dna politics.” in native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science, 1–29. university of minnesota press. tallbear, kim. 2017. “beyond the life/not-life binary: a feminist-indigenous reading of cryopreservation, interspecies thinking, and the new materialisms. in cryopolitics: frozen life in a melting world, edited by joanna radin and emma kowal, 197–202. mit press. tallbear, kim. 2019. “caretaking relations, not american dreaming.” kalfou 6 (1): 24–41. https://doi.org/10.15367/kf.v6i1.228. talukder, sabrina. 2024. “how the alabama ivf ruling is connected to upcoming supreme court cases on abortion.” center for american progress, march 11. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-the-alabama-ivf-ruling-is-connectedto-upcoming-supreme-court-cases-on 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https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/ tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) rebecca herzig and banu subramaniam 2025 13 willey, angela. 2016. undoing monogamy: the politics of science and the possibilities of biology. duke university press. wolbert, maresa. 2025. “women in stem professions.” academics.com, january 15. https://www.academics.com/guide/women-in-stem. author bios rebecca herzig, chair and charles a. dana professor of gender and sexuality studies at bates college, is currently thinking and writing about higher education. banu subramaniam, chair and luella lamer professor of women’s and gender studies at wellesley college, is currently thinking and writing about plant invasive ecologies. together, they co-edit the book series feminist technosciences (university of washington press). https://www.academics.com/guide/women-in-stem here we go again: on the biological abstract keywords three lasting fsts contributions two areas for further fsts attention for which science we are marching references author bios six ways of looking at fractal mechanics alexander, travis, and nishant shahani. 2024. “introduction: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–20. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introduction autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 travis alexander old dominion university ta33@rice.edu nishant shahani washington state university vancouver nshahani3@wsu.edu abstract our introduction and the essays collected in this special section address themselves to the ruins, creations, and legacies of the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. more precisely, we ask how our notions of immunity and especially autoimmunity have changed over the last three years. we theorize autoimmunity in the wake of covid-19 through approaches that consider the material and experiential phenomenology proliferated by the longue durée of both the experience of covid-19 infection and the pandemic itself. in this way, we connect our inquiries both to the history of recent epidemics—most notably hiv/aids— and to broader philosophical and cultural investigations of what immunity means and does. the writings grouped here focus their attentions in different and complementary ways. some train their analysis on issues of temporality, others on ontology (does the virus live?). still others focus on geopolitics and other fields of specialization such as feminist and queer theory, science and technology studies, disability studies, critical race theory, and health humanities. taken together, we imagine strategies of care and collective survival through notions of autoimmunity that model different, more queerly entangled and cripped understandings of bodies and environments that reach beyond myths of autonomy and sovereignty, eradication, and cure. mailto:ta33@rice.edu mailto:nshahani3@wsu.edu special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 2 keywords autoimmunities, covid-19, pandemics, temporality, aids, cripped subjectivities, chronic illness, long hauling, global south exposures immunity derives originally from a juridical and political context dating back at least as far as the roman empire, when the term meant most nearly “sovereignty,” and emerged within a lexical zone characterized by violence, invasion, punishment, and risk. as scholars across the humanities and social sciences have begun to articulate over the last few decades, the rise of immunology and virology in the realm of biomedicine are themselves inextricably bound up with racist imaginaries of self, other, risk, exposure, and defense. this special section is therefore necessarily invested in thinking about how notions of immunity subtending medical conceptions of the body have retained colonial and racist beliefs in independence, power, and control—the range of powers that roberto esposito concatenates, when speaking of immunity, as “sovereignty” (2011, 162)—in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic. the history of immunity animates contemporary depictions of black, indigenous, and people of color (bipoc), trans, queer, and undocumented lives as inimical to the flourishing of “healthy” bodies and in turn to their state-sponsored exposure to death. in this formulation, we draw inspiration from the pioneering work of donna haraway, who argued that the discrimination read into the heart of immunity as a “natural” apparatus ratified the primacy of racial hygiene and apartheid in a world increasingly saturated by imperial transits and convergences (1991, 223). ed cohen’s work has been crucial in expanding haraway’s insights in order to show immunology’s fetish for skin—as a bulwark against microbial incursion—makes selfhood tautological for phenotypic racial essence (2009, 278). emily martin’s work elaborates this line of critique, revealing in detail how immunology’s discourse of flexibility (i.e., its characterization of immunity as a plastic and recombinant system) sublates a conspicuous range of historically parallel exaltations of whiteness (whose abstraction and fungibility excludes the rigid orthography of raced bodies) (1994, xii). but we hope to break new ground by turning our attentions more squarely to the problematic (and as such the productive horizon) of autoimmunity over the same timeline. in the autoimmune, our writers discover much conceptual opportunity. after all, the latter names the misrecognition of the self, the suicidal apotheosis of immunity’s force of liquidation and extermination. in other words, under conditions of autoimmunity, these forces of violence and policing destroy the very self to whom (or, in its reconfiguration as alien, other, and thing, to which) they are pledged, and in whose name they draw their legitimacy. autoimmunity might thus apotheosize the way of all logics rooted in banishment and termination, the special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 3 final and inevitable turning inward of necropolitical armatures, the suicidal fantasy subtending all (il)logics of violence, where the authoritarian coalescence of the latter names the source code of patriarchal masculinity, heteroreproductivity, and whiteness. autoimmunity can therefore figure the utopian end(s), the final disposal, of domination itself. in this way, it becomes a canny and felicitous figure in the broader projects of feminist, queer, and antiracist thought/struggle. we follow eula biss in her rich theorization of this collaboration—her insistence that the immune self has always been a fantasy of modernity (2014, 43). but its utopian energy also runs in a more explicitly positive direction. the autoimmune can name the abolition of the self and all the psychic violence necessitated by the latter’s defensive maintenance, yes. but it can also conjure something more akin to immune failure or anti-immunity. not just the disposal of the self, then, but the accession to the primacy of the other, the outside, the foreign: the logic of sacrifice and offering rather than, or at least alongside, the logic of suicide. the autoimmune, put differently, is not only a corrosive and negative pulse encrypted within control (be it patriarchal, ableist, or heteronormative)—a cataclysmic return of all that these systems of order repress. it is also a positive and aspirational emblem of the solidarity and care that these systems abject. such abstracted postures of openness and exposure have of course taken shape as human suffering and grief that are all too real. as explored below, long covid names only one such literalization. but this issue hopes it is still possible to simultaneously honor such pain and nonetheless source from the rubric of autoimmunity a logic of mutual care and entanglement that opens onto political futures—antiracist, queer, cripped, abolitionist, anticapitalist, and decolonial futures—aimed at lessening pain and loss. that is the ambition we invest, with our authors, in the autoimmune.1 covid, as only the most recent irruptive and disjunctive surfacing of the autoimmune problematic, continues to be processed—in the global north at least—through rhetorics that reprise racist depictions of asia and the global south. such discussions around the immunity of our bodies frequently imply immunity not just from coronavirus, but—in immunity’s transmuted guise as racial purity and security—from immigrant labor, from incarcerated and/or otherwise policed bodies, from the global south, from the third world and the planet’s zones of “uneven development.” it is from these geographies, of course, that the virus is understood to have emerged, whether from “dirty” wet markets or menacing chinese research labs, re-enacting coverage of the so-called he jiankui affair of 2018, when western audiences performed their horror at the unethical practices of chinese researchers.2 scholars and activists alike have documented the legacy of derogations such as “china virus” and “kung flu,” which long predate the burst of anti-asian american and pacific islander (aapi) sentiment that cropped up during sars, and stretch at least to the fearmongering and fantastical discourses around chinese american hygiene and contagion. these narratives imagine the special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 4 racial other not just as morally, cognitively, or physically deficient, but indeed as a walking pathogen to the putative sovereignty and flourishing of the white western body. this other, not sars-cov-19, is the real virus. while the specificity of anti-aapi hate is itself not the focus of the essays collected here, we invoke it at this section’s outset for two reasons. first, because it marks a salient concretion of the discourses around (auto)immunity that can occasionally become abstract. and second, because we hope the following pages draw attention to its ongoingness and its catalyzing impetus in these writings. so, it is not just our cells that must be defended from intruding viruses, then, but whiteness and western states themselves that must be protected from the queered and cripped threats of lethal foreign cultures. this convergence between immunity’s political and biomedical guises renders the concept’s semantic and social history. strange days running through many of the essays collected in this issue is an attention to covid’s vexing temporality. the strange chronologies—the feeling of time itself being out of joint—surfaces in much popular discourse on the pandemic. consider, for instance, the common refrain that occurrences before or during covid cannot be pinned down with much accuracy: the alternating dilations and truncations of time catalyzed by over two years of caesura, dehiscence, exception. attempting to work through such displacements and derangements, these authors engage the labor of witness and testimony. they embrace, that is to say, the duty of return and commemoration: of remembering together. in this way, in different voices our authors link their personal traumas to collective recalling. their work is fundamentally archival: writing stories, committing them to permanence, extracting them from the haze of pain and obliterated life. their archival (re)constructions mark yet another sense—described at greater length below—in which the present collection converges with the energies of black feminism. as writers from saidiya hartman to toni morrison and hortense spillers have shown, the act of collaborative remembrance can wield massive disruptive power— excavating (or, in the unique case of hartman’s strategic fabulism, inventing) a history where there was an absence, a silence. supplementary to that collective remembering, the authors collected here wager a methodology that ask at least two specific questions: what are the psychic inheritances of this pandemic temporality? and, relatedly, what can we do with and make of such destabilized chronicity? the ai humanities research group’s essay, “autoimmunity and affect: tolerance and achronic time in three narratives,” tackles the first of these questions directly. in their work, the experience of negative affects following diagnosis and acute symptomatic presentation becomes an intellectual and aesthetic method. they offer a methodology that is of covid but not bounded to its specificities: an ethic that speaks outward, profligately, to autoimmune and otherwise chronic special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 5 illness generally. indeed, their paper engages the ambiguous relation between covid specifically and chronic autoimmune conditions at large. after all, many of the syndromes that people are just now beginning to live with are—at least from western medicine’s nosological vantage—only dubiously relate to or derive from covid. the pandemic’s unstable and shifting specificity (which is to say, its identity) recurs throughout the pages of “autoimmunity and affect.” within the essay, covid occasions or prompts theorization of the resistance to final epistemic certitude—and to the psychical certitudes and holisms imagined to flow from that knowledge—posed by autoimmunity, immune deficiency, and chronic illness generally. each author addresses themselves to these global questions of chronic illness and autoimmunity: their symptoms, their experiences with the healthcare system, and their recurring attempts to make meaning in the wake of time, embodiment, and immunity’s mutual upheavals. the ai humanities research group’s insistence on simultaneously speaking their personal truths and collaborating toward a shared experience speaks to the essay’s larger ambition: that is, to articulate the unresolvable dialectic between singular, idiotypic experience and the shared arrival of new social paradigms rooted in chronic pain, chronic care, and medical endurance. these authors’ search for and discovery of commonality mark a reparative counterpoint to the alienation and subjective disorientation of the achronicity they so rightly attribute to pandemic time. they find a way to be together, to care as one, even as they honor the nonfungible specificity of their own pain. that same impulse to honor individuation even while forging solidarity appears in very different and bracingly innovative form in the how we make it (hwmi) collective’s scalar piece. presented there is a record of how a group of artists, activists, and scholars endeavored to support each other, starting in 2020, in living with the syndromes now collated as long covid. taking as its formal north star eli clare’s rubric of brilliant imperfection, this multimodal work embraces— aesthetically and organizationally—the disorder, noncontinuity, and disruption birthed by the pandemic. in a series of fragmentary irruptions, the hwmi collective offers the knowledge gleaned from members’ different inhabitations of plague and isolation: a bounty for scholarship born in loss. sofia varino’s “a viral pedagogy: undoing things with long covid’s autoimmunities” picks up on the pragmatic logic of repair and repurposing instantiated by the ai humanities research group and the hwmi collective. it relates the experience of teaching a zoom course during the lockdown called, fittingly, staying alive. participants in varino’s seminar—which emerges in the chronicle of her essay as a true and rare democratic commons—endeavored to articulate a broad theory of autoimmunity. varino’s essay builds on the insights developed in that seminar, interweaving them with the lessons of an intersectional panoply of fields (feminist sts and biomedicine most saliently). from that basis, varino’s essay thinks autoimmunity as an ontological arche, an special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 6 essential figure for uncertainty and indecision as such. autoimmunity, put differently, becomes for her a schema, a bulwark against sovereignty. in the scope of this work, varino also contributes to a growing philosophization of autoimmunity that dates to the work of peter sloterdijk, niklas luhmann, roberto esposito, jacques derrida, and most recently mark neocleous. though their projects are internally quite different, those thinkers—including varino—all think autoimmunity as the sign of the unstable self, the falling away of borders policed, membranes maintained, outsides segregated from insides. it is a figure for commingling, creole, and hybridization. because the western idea of the human itself—from the enlightenment to the present—relies on that notion of separation and boundary (mind from body, subject from object, self from other), autoimmunity is coming into view as a major icon in the field we are only beginning to recognize as, if not a health inhumanities, then certainly a health posthumanities. varino’s seminar analogized the ontological uncertainty posed by autoimmunity itself to the (then-)uncertain future of teaching and learning in a pandemic’s longue durée. her essay invites its reader to query the relation between, on the one hand, the ac t of teaching (that is, the promiscuous proliferation of inquiry without end, of uncertainty as goal and without limit) and, on the other, the state of autoimmunity (that is, an embodied form of query that also recognizes no border or asymptote: i.e., the residuum collated as “self”). hers is an ambitious literalization of that utopian icon: the self-less pedagogy. varino’s seminar, as commemorated in her article, does at least two things, then. first, it models a feminist pedagogy of collaboration, mutual care, and codependency that we would do well to honor and replicate even beyond ableist and increasingly ubiquitous claims of “normalcy”’s return. by the latter, we refer to the capitalist— and very possibly racially capitalist—drive that rightly sees in new, more careand therapy-oriented configurations of subjectivity (and especially women’s, queered, cripped, and bipoc subjectivities) a threat to the steady supply of exploitable and degradable labor. varino’s is a pedagogy of shared trauma and co-authored imaginings that departs admirably from the striated hierarchy of expertise that characterizes too many classrooms—virtual or otherwise. other life the ai humanities research group, hwmi collective, and varino all make overture to the nonhuman in its manifold forms. the virus itself, after all, exists (or subsists) in a tenuous ontological balance: neither living nor dead. it troubles categorization, appearing as—itself—a material consummation of the uncertainty and ambiguity varino attributes to autoimmunity, where a self separates from and cannot recognize “its” self: a crisis of ipseity. to say that the human body “self”-destructs under the sign of autoimmunity, then, is to say that the body becomes other, the human (as coherent and “self” sustaining) negated. that transition stands to contribute in crucial ways to aspects of the feminist sts project rooted in decentering longstanding fantasies of the human whose special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 7 notional independence does not just fly in the face of the prosthetic, mutual nature of human life but, more perniciously, habituates patriarchal narratives of independence and the violence authorized to maintain it. yet, as neocleous (2022) persuasively writes in his new volume the politics of immunity, the negation instantiated in autoimmunity sublates an uncannily redeeming ideal if we are willing to look for it. selfhood, as psychoanalytic thinkers since freud have known, carries the potential for—and lives as—monstrosity. threaded throughout this issue is an intersectional ambition to show how this monstrous force often acts through and as the violence of racialization and patriarchy. in this way, we hope to reveal already existing lines of solidarity and mutuality between the analytic tradition and the projects of sts and black feminist critiques of the human. its relentless and murderous posture toward all challenges to coherence and integration stands as an enduring threat to collectivities and sociality. the ego, in other words, is a necessarily fascist thing, sharing in this way a homicidal pressure more commonly attributed solely to the id. autoimmunity thus arrives as a biologization of the perennially mischaracterized death drive. which is to say that it figures a dissolution of integrative force and perhaps, in turn, the fundament of collectivity as such. a reconciliation, then, and perhaps even a reparatively masochistic exposure to the queer arc of virally induced autoimmunity threads through the experiential testimony detailed by varino, the ai humanities research group, and hwmi collective. though not universally, this openness to the non-self manifests in the pages of this issue as a collaborative contact with forms of the nonhuman beyond/in addition to the latter’s psychoanalytical guise (that is to say, as/in the unconscious or death drive). no text in the following pages explores these expansive and ambitious renderings of the nonhuman more directly than salar mameni’s “derrida, autoimmunity, and islamic medicine.” anchoring that essay is an engagement with islamic politico-medical discourse of virality. for mameni, the twentieth-century understandings of the virus as the foreign other that attacks the self’s immunity becomes a useful placeholder to understand specters of the islamic terrorist that threaten us empire. in mameni’s theorizing, islamic threat, while “other,” is not ontologized outside notions of the “healthy” american. instead, islamic thought as negation is constitutive of the west’s understanding of itself. mameni’s theorizations serve as an apposite contemporary companion piece to emily martin’s (1994) groundbreaking work on the role of immunity in american culture in flexible bodies, written almost a decade prior to 9/11. in theorizing how our understandings of the immune system and the body draw on discourses of the “defended-nation” always on the cusp of threat or crisis, martin anticipated much of what would become actualized and explicitly racialized in the years following 9/11 (1994, 51). the through lines between martin’s and mameni’s work are even more explicit in their theorizations of biology as ideology, explicitly around discourses of sperm. for martin, notions around egg and sperm operate through the heterosexual matrix of a “scientific fairy tale” in which menstrual special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 8 cycles are always described through the language of loss and shedding; in contrast, sperm is the primal scene of sociogenesis—its excess is the object of marvel rather than waste or failure (1991, 486). martin’s critique is germane to the logics of western medicine, and her archive is predicated on textbooks used in undergraduate premedical classes at johns hopkins university—the very site that used henrietta lacks’s cells for cancer research without her consent. while martin’s 1991 essay does not explicitly connect the fairy tale of egg and sperm to the racial and colonial logics of us empire, mameni takes up this thread, but with an important difference. sperm in the context of islamic medicine does not replicate the gendered hierarchies of the heterosexual matrix. instead, islamic medicine refers to both male and female “sperm” through discourses of fermentation. while contemporary discourses of islamophobia invoke muslim men and/or arab masculinity as terrorist threats (so that us empire and its concomitant logics of masculinity can be shored up as antidote in the service of “democracy” or saving brown women), mameni discovers a more queer tradition beyond western medicine that confounds the conventional scripts of the egg and sperm. not only does mameni find that discourse of islamic medicine rich and surprising; they also find in it the grounds to challenge, first, the construction of islam itself as a threat and/or plague in western thought, and, second, the immunitary mode that organizes such western logics. regarding the first, mameni traces their argument to derrida’s writing on the autoimmune crisis that 9/11 posed for/to us imperialism. the essay then paces through the familiar critiques of derrida’s position (and the broader associational networks from which it operates) holding that his work establishes the middle east as an endogenous contagion that the west must defend itself from. such castigations of derrida’s essay revive familiar homilies against sourcing political metaphors from biomedical discourse. the courage of “derrida, autoimmunity, and islamic medicine” lies at least partially in setting such cautions aside and insisting not only upon the inextricability of medical and political thought. and it is in medieval islamic texts, in fact, that such imbrication finds its clearest expression. in that archive, mameni discovers an understanding of growth and disease—that is, sperm and virus—originating within a common process. mameni leverages this discovery to claim that ninthand eleventh-century islamic thought operated on a system of autoimmunity. in this way, “derrida, autoimmunity, and islamic medicine finds an echo of the ways in which pasteur’s experiments in fermentation actually vindicated then-“defunct” protoscientific models. yet, as mameni shows, even as western politico-medical discourse configures islam as its radical other and immunological scourge, it by that same schematization implants islam as “forming the very basis of the west’s image of itself.” in this way, “derrida, autoimmunity, and islamic medicine” recovers the very logic of autoimmunity operating within the dialectic of western/islamic globality: the self at permanent war with “its” self—the catachresis or double cross at the epistemic origin. such scholarship explicates the special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 9 complex and shifting status and—more pressingly—consequence of metaphoricity in the medico-political discourse of autoimmunity. mameni’s capacious theorizations of autoimmunity as a mode of thought and political figure are developed in different directions by christian gundermann’s essay “the covid emergency as autoimmune disease.” that contribution divides its efforts roughly in half across two interconnected goals. first, it reveals the emergence of a contest between two models. on the one hand is the older classical modern subjectivity built upon the infection and immunization paradigm —a paradigm elaborated most comprehensively in the work of roberto esposito. on the other, and now in conflict with it, is a counter-discourse in which the subject draws its own coherence and force not from immune defense but from autoimmunity. the latter, insists gundermann, is currently in ascent and becoming predominant. the western discourse around digitized virality— for example “going viral” as a strategy of market dominance—provides just one especially salient example of this cultural implantation. the article’s second project flows from this analysis to document how the mrna vaccine program rolled out in response to covid instantiates and emblematizes this latter, emergent discourse, contradicting the older immunizational form. mrna injections, he contends, are no longer actually vaccines in the sense of being products that introduce the pathogenic in order to produce immunity. by exploring the biochemistry of mrna technology in depth, gundermann provides a concrete expression to his more abstract theorizations around the subjective, aesthetic, and politico-economic affordances of autoimmunity as a logic of both selfhood and domination. pedagogies of return as the foregoing through lines make clear, this volume of essays collectively seeks to theorize autoimmunity not only by orbiting a few key thematic nodes but also from at least two epistemic registers: through approaches that consider the material and experiential phenomenology proliferated by the long durée of both the experience of covid-19 infection and the pandemic itself; and through works that address the classificatory and linguistic negation of identity, experience, and care that occurs when acute infection gives way to a range of chronic symptoms and syndromes poorly understood in their ties to infection. what, for instance, are the autoimmune legacies of “long haul” covid-19, coinfection, or asymptomatic infection? how might alterations to touch, taste, and smell register both epidemiologically and experientially but also epistemologically? what are the affective and embodied realities of these conditions? and how is their legibility— both medically and culturally—affected by the widespread disbelief not just in the frequency of “true” long-haul experience, but in the shadow endurance of the pandemic itself? an earlier instantiation of this volume was framed under the tentative title “autoimmunities after covid-19” as a way to signal our investments in chronicling and commemorating the various lifeworlds that special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 10 infection has simultaneously given rise to and denied, with no notion or promise of durational closure. but it is precisely this attention to amorphous temporality that also seemed to brush up against the provisional “after” in our title. the logics of finality germane to “after” seemed at odds with the collection’s investments in eschewing chronologies of origin stories and epistemic aftermaths. more urgently, to signal an “after” to covid-19 sat all too easily in propinquity with bromides of various incarnations to return to normal or business as usual. the shift to “autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19” seems slight, but ultimately aligns this volume more squarely with efforts in health humanities to contravene investments in viral origin stories (imbricated in the racist entanglements of patient-zero narratives, anxieties around foreign cultures, and depictions of “uneven” development) as well as finite conclusions (in which biomedical, ableist, and state-sanctioned “solutions” place pandemics firmly in our rearview mirror). collectively, the essays gathered in this special section thus pose the question of what it might mean to refuse the idea of pandemics as having singular points of (racist) origin and finite conclusions. thinking beyond medicalized notions of immunity that fetishize first occurrences enables our contributors instead to diagnose local and globalized systems of power that both presuppose and reproduce medical apartheid and carceral necropolitics: in other words, the uneven distribution of life chances. the collection of essays both implicitly and explicitly ask us to understand pandemics through the lens of enduring structures rather than the scandal of crisis and temporal exceptionalism—what bishnupriya ghosh calls the appearance of “the” pandemic as a putative “one-of-a-kind experience, a vertiginous rupture irrevocably changing all that came before” (2023, 4). rather than thinking of pandemics as shock and awe ruptures, we want to think of them as continuations—what lauren berlant would call “crisis ordinariness” or “slow death” (2011, 101). and rather than focusing on when they begin or when they will end, we want to ask how pandemics scatter and proliferate. then, perhaps more importantly, we can imagine strategies of collective survival through a notion of autoimmunity that models feminist, more queerly entangled, and cripped understandings of bodies and environments that reach beyond myths of autonomy and self-sufficiency. the work in feminist disability studies—in its critique of an uncritical faith in cure and the privileging of biomedical solutions as panacea—proves instructive in imagining these strategies of survival, particularly in the context of autoimmunity’s queered temporalities. in “how to be a person in the age of autoimmunity,” carolyn lazard offers a succinct reminder of how living with crohn’s disease contravenes the idea of “illness as a momentary state of incapacitation that would always go away” (2013). if pandemics eschew the linear chronologies of beginning and end, the chronic nature of autoimmune conditions—exacerbated in the wake of covid-19—magnify the stretching of time that seems to undercut any neat temporal logic of an afterlife to special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 11 autoimmunity. lazard’s challenge to the idea of a stable postscript to illness also gestures to sovereign and masculinist fantasies of wholeness that are promised by biomedicine, even as the medical establishment struggles to diagnose and heal autoimmune conditions. in ironically referencing self-help manuals and “how-to” guides, lazard’s essay title wryly and implicitly comments on the certitudes of programmatic solutions, “learn how to” manuals, and “cutting-edge” medical technology—false promises, predicated on ableist premises. but the members of the hwmi collective take this very question—of how to confer personhood and humanity within the autoimmune—and offer responses that are rooted in feminist logics of interdependence and bearing witness to pain. “how we make it,” then, is a double performative: it indexes the materiality of aesthetic form and the making of art in the age of the autoimmune; but it also is an inquiry on how to persist and survive in the wake of covid-19’s long haul. this double play is most poignant, for example, in megan moodie and cynthia ling lee’s video “inventory of joy” in which they film and bear witness to each other’s bodily transformations—moodie’s experience of dystonia, owing to hypermobile ehler’s danos (heds) syndrome, and lee’s grappling with bodily modifications in the wake of long covid. their video is a documentation and recognition of pain, but the very act of acknowledgment paradoxically makes it also a documentation of crip joy and feminist collaboration—in their words, it “stands as a crip queer feminist challenge to normative medical regimes of image-making, the elicitation of symptom etiology, and diagnosis.” rather than a search for causation (“how did it happen”) or cure (“how to fix”), the video stands in as a visual document of understanding autoimmunity and experiencing disability (“how we make it”) in the wake of covid-19. at the outset of the clip, we hear lee’s directorial prompt to moodie: “pretend you’re talking to your friend…or teaching a class to one of your graduates.” evidence is no longer the domain of western medicine. instead, “inventory of joy,” is framed by lee, a taiwanese american scholar/choreographer and covid19 long-hauler, whose directorial voice curates what we are about to see. lee’s act of bearing witness is sutured to our own act of watching moodie’s bodily movements—her tremors and the symptoms of dystonia are turned into a spontaneous dance party in which “crip dance collaboration” functions as “new form of medical evidence.” the framing of this moment through the perspective of lee is especially significant, given the long gendered and racialized history that undercuts the pain experienced by women of color as “exaggeration” or “hysteria” (the film explicitly references this history by juxtaposing the rhythmic movements of lee and moodie with black-and-white medical photographs of “hysterical” women). the collaborative dance is further juxtaposed with alexandra juhasz’s commentary that affirms the feminist and cripped critique of western science and medicine at the heart of the video. juhasz notes, “if the project is to convince doctors, this is not going to do it. if the project is to pass on information or to special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 12 ask…people to rethink what evidence is in relationship to women’s bodies, you’re just in the meat of it.” if surviving in the wake of covid-19’s long haul means enduring the temporal logics of autoimmunity, the video documents the possibilities of embodied exhilaration—both as remainder and reminder. but “how we make it” cannot always, of course, be joyful or transformative. it also entails recognizing “how structures of inattention and abandonment have been visited on those who cannot or do not return to the land of the well” (hwmi collective). in this sense, how we make it is also gestures to how we mourn or commemorate those who don’t. to be “in the wake” of covid-19 must necessarily grapple with its commemorative and ritualistic logics to remember the dead. in this sense, the shift in the volume’s title from “after” to “in the wake of” mines christina sharpe’s polemic on the wake in which she argues that black death is not simply a consequence of living in the wake of slavery, but a “predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy” (2016, 7). in sharpe’s words, “living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday black existence” (2016, 15). sharpe’s introduction mines various different but interconnected meanings of what it means to live in “the wake”—living under economic sanctions and structural adjustment policies imposed by the international monetary fund, extrajuridical killings of black peoples, forced migrations in which black subjects “are imagined as insects, swarms, vectors of disease” (2016, 15). to invoke sharpe’s analytic of the wake is to mobilize its various meanings at the same time—the ritual of mourning the dead or the results and consequences of something, just to name a few. but in all these meanings, there is an attendance to a temporality of a “past that is not a past” (2016, 13), or an afterwards that pushes back against the trappings of its “after”-ness. in this sense, the wake as a temporal analytic exists in the same performative vicinity with the temporality that subtends a “palimpsest of epidemic learning”—the term cindy patton uses in this special section’s interview to describe how layered meanings of epidemics inscribe or “laminate” on top of one another, so that the epidemiological and epistemological categories that we receive are always “entangled histories” that zigzag through time. even calcified and received histories will always reveal traces of layers that connect but “refuse straight lines between past and present.” to mobilize sharpe here inevitably risks appropriating work that centers black life for a collection, which, while attending to anti-black logics, does not exclusively replicate sharpe’s centralized focus. to be clear, we want to emphasize “the wake” as we mobilize it in the context of covid-19 as different from though still evocative of sharpe’s theorizing. so, to quote bishnupriya ghosh’s question posed at the beginning of her own contribution, “why start with black death?” (ghosh’s own essay mobilizes sharpe’s work on the wake for her analysis of the pandemic in the context of india’s hindutva project under the modi regime.) ghosh suggests that the preservation of a hindu national body politic is inevitably a racialized special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 13 project that orchestrates the production of “making die” rather than the consequence of bad planning or “liberal laxity.” thus, for ghosh, “hindutva’s global racial project resonates with global anti-blackness” since “both are test beds for producing death at mass scale when the opportunity arises.” ghosh’s mobilization of sharpe is a valuable riposte to colorblind narratives of viruses not knowing borders or transcending all modes of geopolitical difference. while strategically mobilized as a way to foreground the gravity of the pandemic, such universalizing technologies also ignored the logics of what ghosh analyzes as population culling in which certain bodies are always already “marked as threat and slated for expulsion from a unified body politic.” but even more specific to the racialized projects of population culling that operate at global scales, to think of autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 necessitates situating anti-blackness and white supremacy “as the total climate” when thinking about the entangled histories that inform pandemics. collectively, the essays in this volume can be said to perform a temporal unbundling of sorts, refusing to historicize covid-19 as exceptional to only the present, sequestered from other social, historical, and political phenomena. in these writings, then, there are implicit attempts to reject overdetermined “watershed” moments of pandemics as exemplary and isolated: as a result, authors historicize covid-19 in relation to the genealogy of islamic thought (mameni), the bengal famine of 1943 (ghosh), aids homophobia during the reaganite years (caleb), the 1962 military coup in burma (tammy c. ho). these are just a few illustrations that constitute “the wake”—that inscribe on to or “laminate” our contemporary moment. the refusal of period exceptionalism is essential if we are to think about pandemics not simply in virological or epidemiological terms. in a recent essay, jih-fei cheng makes the bold yet matter-of-fact claim: “aids is not simply the result of a virus” (2021, 145).3 rather, he urges us to think instead of how viral pandemics “result from the exploitation of racialized, working-class, and poor bodies, and their biotechnological solutions require making these bodies ever more penetrable and continuously sick from technoscientific experimentation and commodification” (145). if we are ever to think of an after to pandemics it can only come in the wake of—which, for cheng, requires the historicization of “the intricate relations between colonial racial and gender ideologies” (148). since our conceptions of immunity are enmeshed so deeply in whiteness, to think through the wake of pandemics “must involve abolishing police, prisons, and property to instead fund universal access to housing and health care” (148). the refusal of discrete pandemic periodization animates amanda caleb’s contribution to this special section in her return to public health poster campaigns subtending aids in the 1980s and ’90s. caleb mobilizes this moment as the “entangled history” to examine the more contemporary “together ohio” and “more than a mask” campaigns in response to covid-19. the latter’s overrepresentation of blackness as risk finds its genealogies in public health special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 14 narratives circulating in the performative vicinity of hiv/aids, obfuscating structural conditions and overemphasizing what marlon bailey calls “interpersonal behavioral modification” (2020, 220). caleb foregrounds how health campaigns around drug use and unsafe sex ultimately functioned as racialized autoimmune campaigns where an always healthy (but perpetually at risk) “self” had to quarantine from its queered and racialized black other (always defined as “outside the body politic”). this self/other immunitary relation is one that threatens to always dissolve, even as it seeks to demarcate the self from other (or labors to demarcate precisely because of the perpetual dissolution of self/other). while such a relation might be most evident in moments of putative crisis (or “flareups,” in caleb’s formulation), the essay importantly emphasizes their foundational character to the very definitions of public health. because such foundations are enduring and protracted, caleb offers the important reminder that “autoimmune responses to aids and covid-19 are not parallels but rather a continuum of an autoimmunity.” caleb’s qualification simultaneously pushes back against facile comparison (one that blurs important epidemiological differences) and yet preserves the useful mobilizations of social relationality across time (and even within shared or overlapping temporalities). of course, even the realm of the social can paper over crucial differences between hiv/aids and covid that warrant theorization: differences in state responses, moral significations, the speed of clinical trials, the presence or absence of vaccines. continuity rather than contiguity contravenes temporal models of succession, while still offering a social barometer of pandemics beyond rarefied or bracketed histories. the contravening of covid-19 as an episodic or event-oriented temporality is particularly crucial for this special section since it resonates with bipoc feminist interventions around history, memory, and selfhood. in this light, caleb’s “continuum” or pandemic relationality beyond comparison, along with cheng’s insistence that pandemics cannot squarely be understood as epidemiological, broaden what we come to understand as viral history. this stretching of viral genealogy, or the rendering of it as more capacious, allows a careful consideration of the gendered and racialized histories that subtend the necropolitical logics of pandemics. for example, “folding stories as medicine,” tammy c. ho’s contribution to the hwmi collective in this special section is perhaps most illustrative of an understanding of viral history through the lens of gendered, colonial, and racial genealogies. ho’s contribution focuses on burmese diasporas in the united states, particularly around telling the story of tin aye, a burmese refugee worker whose exposure to covid-19 and eventual death while working in colorado’s meat-packing plants highlights a concatenation of intersecting forms of violence and thick histories. aye’s story becomes the occasion for ho to connect the necropolitical demands of corporate logic to return to work with “deep structures of us settler-colonialism and capitalist extraction from the brown undercommons.” special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 15 the story of tin aye (narrated to ho by sam twin, aye’s daughter, who is a burmamerican grocery worker) highlights the fatal and purportedly linear fictions of health and autoimmunity—the notion that the etiology of sickness is always the foreign virus; the body launches its expected fortress of immunity; and then we return to a state of normalcy—the a priori default setting of good health. sam twin recounts how the onsite clinic at the meat-packing factory diagnosed aye with a common cold and cleared her to return to the floor and continue work: “tin aye, my mom, didn’t matter nearly as much as the bottom line.” ho’s documentation of aye’s story via twin’s narration functions as a memorialization of refugee history of an immigrant woman of color—a kind of narrative selfhood that refuses to consign her life to the logics of oblivion. ho’s contribution ultimately is a corrective that is historical, but in equal parts, it is also historiographical—an effort to “dwell in unwellness” through “collective witnessing.” ho’s account features images of a zine-making session that include quotes from twin, family photographs, clippings of sketches of aye. these material objects are quotidian attempts to create makeshift memorials, making the zine an object of cathexis for its author but for us as readers/viewers as well. ho’s account reveals that aye’s family could not afford a headstone, especially from the food company’s inadequate funeral settlement. the repeated acts of “cutting, rubbing, and gluing paper” that go into the crafting of the zine become commemorative rituals, allowing for memory making and mourning where they have been repeatedly foreclosed and insistently refused. the zine thus becomes a touching across time between asian american women: a refusal of selective mourning in the face of history’s collective amnesias. this continuum across time or pandemic relationality is not only between aye and ho of course—it is importantly refracted through twin, whose recounting of her mother’s life offers a powerful meditation on the ability of narrative to offer what lisa lowe calls a “productive attention to the scene of loss” (2006, 208). even while “productive” and historiographically imperative, twin articulates how the process of remembering is also hard to endure: “the most painful thing is going over all the what ifs? if jbs had closed earlier. or cleaned the plant more thoroughly. or gave the meat-packers personal protective equipment immediately.” twin’s words demand that we ask why the hypothetical gets naturalized as the impossible. her words mine what saidiya hartman calls the “capacities of the subjunctive…a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities” (2008, 11). but the subjunctive mood also demands the writing of viral history narratives that get obscured when pandemics get reified into temporary abstractions that begin with crisis and end with a return to normalcy. twin’s “what ifs” push us to consider, what did aye’s death have to do with the cruelties of meat-packing industry and factory farming? how was it connected to the violence of forced migration that compelled her to flee myanmar and into a refugee camp on the border of thailand? in what ways was aye forced to exist in the wake of demands to exist only as “grateful model minority” or “cheap disposable labor”? special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 16 covid-19, and pandemics in general, can never simply be isolated episodes. like ho’s “crumpled” or “folded” stories, the temporalities of pandemics require a reaching back and touching across time. when the purported exceptionalism of pandemics requires us to fixate on scandals of the present and then return back to normal, our contributors in this section remind us to linger in the wake. for example, in pato hebert’s contributions to the hwmi collective project, lingering conjures the ontology of a remainder, but also gestures to the call of a persistent reminder—to dwell in detritus, to contravene the temporality of postscripts, and to pull back “afterlives” into the present. or in hebert’s words, to linger is “to move to the uneven rhythms of crip time rather than capitalist urgency.” a “continuum” or the “lingerings” between aids and covid-19 allow us to think about the routes of pandemics across and in time so that we might (re)animate discourses that continue to be urgent and politically imperative—for example, negotiations around intimacy and relationality; the necropolitics of intellectual patent regimes; the racism of origin stories; the recourse to militarism as “security” and “safety” net; the pathologization of blackness through neoliberal rhetorics of personal responsibility. “to linger,” writes hebert, “is to listen deeply.” listening and lingering are performed throughout this volume by gleaning lessons from “pasts” that persist as perpetual “presents.” it is not a coincidence then that several of the contributors to this volume on covid-19 are scholars/activists/artists who have been organizing, teaching, acting up, caring for friends and lovers impacted by hiv/aids. alexandra juhasz and pato hebert thus describe their contribution to the hwmi collective as “long hauling”—a collection of writing about surviving in the wake of long covid while drawing “on lessons learned from other viruses to provide care.” care as a conceptual category, however, is not always already a seamless concept or a desirable category devoid of ambivalence or even violence. care’s fraught character has been usefully taken up in feminist technoscience conversations to highlight its power asymmetries. in “the politics of care in technoscience,” aryn martin, natasha myers, and ana viseu highlight the centrality of care “as a relational feminist ethic for sts research,” but also caution against “care’s darker side: its lack of innocence and the violence committed in its name” (2015, 627). in the wake of covid-19, care has particularly been mobilized as a technology of management through vaccine rollouts, surveillance technologies, and digital platforms tracing infection “hotspots.” in her analysis of the long walk home of migrant populations in india following modi’s lockdown, bishnupriya ghosh points to the curious lack of data about the number of deaths of laborers who were forced to cross state lines to return to rural villages so that they could ostensibly shelter in place. despite modi’s much vaunted heralding of india’s arrival into the digital era via the bromides of “india shining,” the inability to track numbers was not so much a glitch in data systems but a feature of how these systems were intended to function. as ghosh reminds us, “for an administration obsessed with special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 17 surveillance data, the empty slate told its own story: the disposable human should leave no trace.” a feminist sts understanding of care thus reminds us to pay “attention to the ambivalent rhetorics and practices taken up in its name” (martin, myers, and viseu 2015, 630). such an approach draws attention to how the faith in biotech “solutions” to pandemics functions as a replacement system for transformative health practices, public safety nets, relational ethics, and mutual care. while ghosh’s essay foregrounds the impacts of bio-management as care on migrant populations, her analysis could also be extended to think about the gendered dimensions of infrastructural failure masked by tech “innovation,” particularly for women in rural areas of india. a recent statistical report conducted by india’s ministry of health and family welfare revealed a clear vaccination gender gap in which women received a ratio of 856 vaccine doses for every 1,000 received by men (guha 2021). one partial reason for this gendered discrepancy could be a widely circulated social media rumor about the putatively negative impact of vaccinations on people who menstruate (forcing the government to release a belated reassurance about the inaccuracies of this idea). but more centrally, these gender gaps could be attributed to the digital divides that disproportionately impact women in rural india, who have the least access to the internet and digital literacy. the indian government’s response to covid-19 was almost entirely mediated by technological fantasies of safety and good health through downloadable apps, virtual interfaces, and biometric management. poor women in rural areas (the majority of whom don’t own or use cell phones) were thus not simply left out or inadvertently omitted from the techno-nationalist aspirations of the indian nation-state. as ghosh reminds us, these forms of digital “care,” in addition to being a kind of “callous indifference” were a “deliberate mechanism of population control.” against the above technocratic hijacking of care that resolves it as a matter of digital mastery, contributors in this volume remind us that the form that care work will take is not always known in advance. in fact, to care might require the embrace of uknowability. if care, as martin, myers, and viseu suggest is a “knowledge-making practice” (2015, 627), it might also require a kind of unlearning of mastery. or to put it in the words of contributor sofia varino, care work might take the form of an “urge…to do queer things with uncertainty.” care’s queer forms are taken up by various contributors. for example, “long hauling” describes the content of juhasz and hebert’s writing, but it also indexes a method of archiving the work of care through a series of aesthetic expressions. cynthia ling lee calls these formal expressions “the textures of long-hauler life” in “on efficiency,” her contribution to the hwmi collective. these textures recur throughout the scalar project—hebert’s spoon carvings, ling lee’s “crip choreographies” and syllabus of the body, sharon daniel’s multivocal records of incarceration, rachel lee’s oral histories of chronic illness, nikita simpson’s special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 18 exercise in bodily movement to release tension, tammy c. ho’s talk stories, marina peterson’s magnification of sounds, and megan moodie’s dance epistemologies. looping, meandering, lingering, scattering—these become the modes through which readers engage with the scalar project, even as they describe the sequelae of living in the long haul—or in the wake of—covid-19. sharpe reminds us that living in the wake necessitates that we “become undisciplined” so that “the work we do requires new modes and methods of research and teaching” (2016, 13). the essays in this volume gesture toward these forms and experimentations in interand un-disciplinarity, reminding us that virologies can be transformative and pedagogical. or, to borrow from hwmi contributor, megan moodie, “autoimmunity teaches us that we are never alone and we are never immune.” notes 1 one of this issue’s editors has explored a similarly reparative logic of autoimmunity elsewhere, in the context of black feminist empowerment around and through the hiv/aids pandemic; see alexander 2022. 2 see, for instance, normile 2018; park 2018; qin and buckley 2021; regalado 2019; and yong 2019. 3 cheng’s essay considers various genealogies that inform the emergence of epidemics and pandemics: the histories of blood biotechnological development that were dependent on pharmacological research performed on incarcerated populations in oklahoma, alabama, and arkansas; the extraction and global exporting of plasma; and the transnational history of blood transfusion in the people’s republic of china in the mid-1980s that was sourced from us imports. references alexander, travis. 2022. “the fateful gamble: autoimmunity and the mattering of black life.” criticism 64, no. 1 (winter): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0000. bailey, marlon. 2020. “black gay men’s sexual health and the means of pleasure in the age of aids.” in aids and the distribution of crises, edited by jih-fei cheng, alexandra juhasz, and nishant shahani, 217–35. durham, nc: duke university press. berlant, lauren. 2011. cruel optimism. durham: duke university press. biss, eula. 2014. on immunity: an inoculation. minneapolis: graywolf press. cheng, jih-fei. 2021. “in cold 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“the biopolitics of postmodern bodies: constitutions of self in immune system discourse.” in simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature, 203–30. new york: routledge. hartman, saidiya. 2008. “venus in two acts.” small axe 12 (7): 1–14. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115. lazard, carolyn. 2013. “how to be a person in the age of autoimmunity.” cluster magazine. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55c40d69e4b0a45eb985d566/t/58cebc9dc534 a59fbdbf98c2/1489943709737/howtobeapersonintheageofautoimmunity+%281%29 .pdf. lowe, lisa. 2006. “the intimacies of four continents.” in haunted by empire: geographies of intimacy in north american history, edited by anna laura stoler, 191– 212. durham, nc: duke university press. martin, aryn, natasha myers, and ana viseu. 2015. “the politics of care in technoscience.” social studies of science 45 (5): 625–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715602073. martin, emily. 1991. “the egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles.” signs 16, no. 3 (spring): 485– 501. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174586. martin, emily. 1994. flexible bodies: tracking immunity in american culture from the days of polio to the age of aids. boston: beacon. neocleous, mark. 2022. the politics of immunity: security and the policing of bodies. new york: verso. normile, dennis. 2018. “crispr bombshell: chinese researcher claims to have created gene-edited twins.” science, november 26, 2018. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/crispr-bombshell-chinese-researcherclaims-have-created-gene-edited-twins. park, alice. 2018. “‘they will be studied for the rest of their lives’: how china’s gene-edited twins could be forever changed by controversial crispr work.” time, november 29, 2018. https://time.com/5466967/crispr-twins-lives/. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jun/28/india-covid-gender-gap-women-left-behind-in-vaccination-drive https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jun/28/india-covid-gender-gap-women-left-behind-in-vaccination-drive https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jun/28/india-covid-gender-gap-women-left-behind-in-vaccination-drive https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55c40d69e4b0a45eb985d566/t/58cebc9dc534a59fbdbf98c2/1489943709737/howtobeapersonintheageofautoimmunity+%281%29.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55c40d69e4b0a45eb985d566/t/58cebc9dc534a59fbdbf98c2/1489943709737/howtobeapersonintheageofautoimmunity+%281%29.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55c40d69e4b0a45eb985d566/t/58cebc9dc534a59fbdbf98c2/1489943709737/howtobeapersonintheageofautoimmunity+%281%29.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312715602073 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174586 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/crispr-bombshell-chinese-researcher-claims-have-created-gene-edited-twins https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/crispr-bombshell-chinese-researcher-claims-have-created-gene-edited-twins https://time.com/5466967/crispr-twins-lives/ special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) travis alexander and nishant shahani, 2024 20 qin, amy, and chris buckley. 2021. “a top virologist in china, at center of a pandemic storm, speaks out.” new york times, june 14, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/world/asia/china-covid-wuhan-lab-leak.html. regalado, antonio. 2019. “china’s crispr twins might have had their brains inadvertently enhanced.” mit technology review, february 21, 2019. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/21/137309/the-crispr-twins-had-theirbrains-altered/. sharpe, christina. 2016. in the wake: on blackness and being. durham, nc: duke university press. yong, ed. 2018. “the crispr baby scandal gets worse by the day.” the atlantic, december 3, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/15worrying-things-about-crispr-babies-scandal/577234/. author bios travis alexander is an assistant professor of english at old dominion university. his writing has appeared in american literature, boundary 2, criticism, discourse, public culture, and elsewhere. nishant shahani is professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in the department of english at washington state university vancouver. he is author of pink revolutions: globalization, hindutva, and queer triangles in contemporary india (2021) and queer retrosexualities: the politics of reparative return (2013), and coeditor of aids and the distribution of crises (2020). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/world/asia/china-covid-wuhan-lab-leak.html https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/15-worrying-things-about-crispr-babies-scandal/577234/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/15-worrying-things-about-crispr-babies-scandal/577234/ introduction autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 abstract keywords exposures strange days other life pedagogies of return notes references author bios     roundtable: housewife’s secret arsenal washing and white goods     liam grealy university of sydney and menzies school of health research liam.grealy@sydney.edu.au   tess lea university of british columbia tess.lea@ubc.ca     abstract on the aṉangu pitjantjatjara yankunytjatjara (apy) lands in northwest south australia, an environmental health worker salvages discarded washing machines to reinstall in remote community homes. tracking the fate of washing machines and householder well-being, this essay traces the militarized genealogies running contemporary settler colonial occupation in australia. we are particularly interested in how the colonizing project decants militarized operations into the intimacies of domestic inhabitation. where once this project facilitated a gendered labor reserve, today it enables the continued pathologization of indigenous residents, such that renewed interferences and dispossessions may be authorized at policy convenience. this essay is a part of the roundtable called “the housewife's secret arsenal” (henceforth hsa); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. the title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.   keywords housing, policy, maintenance, washing machines, remote communities figure 1. old washing machines on the red dirt of the apy lands. image: liam grealy it is a stark scene, this washing machine purgatory that sits on the ancient soil of the aṉangu pitjantjatjara yankunytjatjara (apy) lands in northwest south australia (figure 1). the desert dryness preserves salvaged machines, and the sands and artesian waters destroy them too. visualize broken pump impellers, dust ingress at the electronics console, cracked suspension cups, faulty lid locks, corroded tap connectors, and deteriorated washers, from grit and hard water. figure 2. scott robinson installing a maytag washing machine. image: liam grealy the washing machines are the salvaged rescues of scott robinson (figure 2), an environmental health worker servicing apy lands communities through the indigenous community-controlled health organization nganampa health council. robinson periodically gleans through machines discarded by operators of the yulara tourist resorts near uluru, the famous sacred rock in the heart of australia. the machines are typically maytags or speed queens (figure 3), commercial brands with industrial strength capacities that few indigenous residents could afford to purchase but that are robust enough to wash heavy blankets and serve crowded households (lloyd 1998; rainow 2012). they are also relatively simple in their componentry compared to newer digital models and thus easier to repair. while many discarded machines are not functional, they can still be disassembled for recycled components such as drive belts and hose fittings to extend the life of other machines in remote community households. figure 3. speed queen. image: liam grealy tracking the fate of washing machines and householder well-being, this essay traces the militarized genealogies running contemporary settler colonial occupation in australia. we are particularly interested in how the colonizing project decants militarized operations into the intimacies of domestic inhabitation. where once this project facilitated a gendered labor reserve, today it enables the continued pathologization of indigenous residents, such that renewed interferences and dispossessions may be authorized at policy convenience.   domestic demands and learning to labor under the successive moral tutelage of settler policies following the enforced sedentarism of land enclosures via cattle stations, church benefices, and water theft, and more respectfully through their own community-controlled health service programs, a[n]{.underline}angu householders are well versed on the importance of domestic hygiene to their own health. yet, in the contradictory enforcement of domestication under enduring settler colonial governance, the means to execute expected labors are often in poor repair. historically, doing laundry was a central practice in the sexualized economies of colonization. indigenous women and girls were forced to work in laundries, unpaid, to imbibe their expected future role in the colonizer's socioeconomic hierarchies. most children stolen from their families and forced into servitude in dormitories, reformatories, hospitals, and private homesteads prior to the 1950s were girls, given the huge demand for their labor (robinson 2014). these disciplinary factories, including the architectural style of gender-segregated dormitories, have clear military colonial genealogies (burgess 2008). british colonizers developed a systematic knowledge of disciplinary architectures to improve sanitation, order, and custody within its military orders: “these reforms were subsequently institutionalized and disseminated throughout the empire as a series of barrack synopses and type plans to ensure uniformity and replicability” (chang 2016, 52). the militarized architecture combined with models of disciplinary subjugation for impoverished british children (murdoch 2007). assimilationist policies to “whiten” the australian indigenous population pulled this militarized approach into synergistic alignment: indigenous girls would be reformed and prepped for servitude, in the lowest rung of the settler order (cheater 2010; robinson 2014). “all the woman bin washin' clothes, cleanin', cartin' water ... waterin' garden, white lady never do nothin'. big queen” (tonkinson 1988, 38). in the moral economies of continuing liberal settler occupation, when non-mission housing started to become available from the 1960s, access in some central australian communities was conditional on aboriginal women attending courses to learn to “sweep, wash, scrub and polish to maintain a normal home environment” (fleming quoted in keys 2000, 122). yet, then as today, because laundering facilities are now considered a private matter, owing in part to their gendered nature (watson 2015, 877), remote area residents across australia face the paradox of both hyper-determined hygiene expectations and reduced structural means for complying. more standard housing designs (figure 4) have replaced child separation in military-style compounds, but the equation of cleanliness with responsible tenant behavior remains—even while tenants are faced with the perpetual amenity failure that goes with crowding and housing undersupply. despite insistent cultural messaging on the necessity of laundering, where "people can't not wash and still be socially acceptable" (jack 2013, 666), industrial-strength washing machines are not considered a necessary infrastructure in contemporary government-funded housing or health programs. figure 4. apy lands new house. image: liam grealy amid minor uptake of community laundromat and mobile laundry programs (aboriginal investment group, n.d.), doing the washing remains largely a labor of aboriginal women. not only is this labor “marginalized, sidelined, and disguised” (van herk 2002, 893), without appropriated industrial machines, ordinary domestic laundries cannot facilitate a load of washing. of interest to us here is how the earlier insistence of the colonial enterprise on militarized discipline and domestic functionality has transmuted more recently into the military playing a role in disguising the causes of dysfunctional housing. child removal and housing just as the specter of irreparable damage was used to authorize the forced removal of aboriginal children from their family groups, the endangered child reappeared in contemporary times, to fundamentally alter land tenure and housing tenancy (or, if you will, domesticity) arrangements. in 2007 the northern territory national emergency response (“the intervention”) was instigated by the australian government under the guise of remediating child sexual abuse in remote communities. the australian army was highly visible in policing remote communities newly subject to alcohol and pornography restrictions under the intervention, its presence underlining the “emergency” invocation. to “normalize” remote service provision, the indigenous community-controlled housing sector was dismantled, replaced (under duress) by long-term government leases to aboriginal land. harsher tenancy arrangements became the condition for securing further housing and infrastructure funding (grealy 2021). to avoid eviction, leaseholders had to cease large kin gatherings, manage noise, and keep the house “clean.” three years after the northern territory intervention and in the shadow of its responsibilization agendas for indigenous public housing tenants, the australian army shifted from being emergency law enforcers to humanitarian soldiers on the apy lands. under the army aboriginal community assistance program (aacap), the 21st construction squadron built three new houses at pukatja, the former site of ernabella mission (australian national audit office 2010). despite the imputed superior efficacy appended to military efforts, after a mandatory one-year defects liability period, these houses deteriorated. within a decade, at least one bathroom requires a full refurbishment. a vinyl laminate used to repel water throughout the bathroom cracks with the harsh waters, allowing stagnant pooling between the slab and the floor (figure 5). figure 5. bathroom floor at aacap house in pukatja. image: liam grealy inheriting these army houses, the south australian housing authority (“housing sa”) is atypical of remote housing property maintenance in its sustained attention to property maintenance (lea et al. 2021). under housing sa's regimen, apy lands houses receive ten scheduled visits per year by various tradespeople, and known weaknesses in such mundane fittings as the toilet roll holder are fixed or replaced (figure 6). figure 6. housing sa toilet roll holder design. image: liam grealy but even the unusually detailed, proactive, and design-conscious maintenance program managed by housing sa is not comprehensive. evaporative coolers and stoves are supplied and serviced, but not fridges or washing machines. these other white goods must be sourced by residents, either transported in from the town of alice springs many hundreds of kilometers away (figure 7) or purchased at significant mark-up from community stores on the lands. figure 7. apy lands map. image: nganampa health council (1987, iii). predatory companies lease white goods to remote residents on high interest or rent-to-own schemes, under which a 5.5-kg top-loading washing machine retailing at $499 can assume a rent to own price of $1552 (consumer action law centre 2015). in contemporary australia, where indigenous people are objectified by both nefarious companies as a market demographic and tenancy regimes as pedagogical subjects, it seems effective white goods are effectively for white people: visualize tourists at yulara resort. between the paternalism of the state and the free market, washing clothes becomes an index of welfare conditionality. in the united states, which has its own racialized history of laundering (see wang 2004; wooten and branch 2012), the manufacture of domestic washing machines was disrupted by world war ii but expanded dramatically postwar with the bendix company selling 600,000 units in 1947. magazine marketing promoted the time-saving impact of automated washing machines (“not only electric muscles—but an electric brain”), shifting from war service to the home front to liberate white suburban housewives from “washday slavery” (life 1950, 118; figure 8). yet, while expertise in wringing, mangling, and boiling laundry, as forced onto indigenous women and girls, is no longer required, access to working domestic facilities still matters. figure 8. the domestication of war. image: life, april 24, 1950, 118. invisible conditions as with many practices needed for health, laundering is a series of discrete activities that requires multiple systems working together (shove 2003). for many indigenous householders in regional and remote areas, houses are of such poor original design that keeping domestic hardware in working order is near impossible. the army's construction program helps to invisibilize the state's larger neglect. the three army-built houses at pukatja were not only short-lived amenity-wise, aacap itself is mediatized to overclaim its role in addressing acute housing shortages. the army engineers do not reappear year in, year out to steadily improve or increase housing stock but migrate to undertake once-off work at one community per year, just enough to sustain an image of action. this is not the sustained attention required to keep amenities like washing machines and bathrooms in working order. on the apy lands, basic material factors are the chief impediments to sustaining functional appliances and getting such overdetermined tasks as the laundry done. for stephan rainow, co-founder and co-director of the not-for-profit company healthabitat, which has for decades driven greater attention to health, housing, and the functionality needed to enable healthy living requires, "we always said you've got to take a broad approach...to ensure that when people were at home, they can wash their kid. that relies on the bore working, it relies on the delivery, the pipes. it relies on the taps not falling off, [people's] capacity to buy a towel in the store and the soap and the shampoo...the house has got to be well designed, constructed, supervised; there's got to be money for maintenance; there's got to be a store that can supply the essentials" (interview with author). so much of this being in place relies on barely noticed infrastructural care, for forms of enforced sedentarism that all but removes the state's obligations from view. where once the military know-how provided the disciplinary apparatus, it now helps load the apparent responsibility for failure onto indigenous organizations and tenants, as emergency enforcers and benevolent partners. acknowledgments thanks to nganampa health council and housing sa for supporting the ethnographic fieldwork on which this essay is based. thanks to john birrell and to the consumer action law centre for resources on leasing white goods in remote aboriginal communities. this research draws from the project modelling sustainable regional and remote indigenous housing and maintenance, which was funded by the australian housing and urban research institute. references aboriginal investment group. n.d. “remote laundries.” accessed may 28, 2021. https://www.remotelaundries.org.au/. australian national audit office. 2010. army aboriginal community assistance program. audit report no. 19 2010-11. canberra: department of families, community services and indigenous affairs. burgess, anne maree. 2008. “practising indigenous architecture: an elementary reader.” in history in practice: proceedings of the xxvth annual conference of sahanz, edited by david beynon and ursula de jong. deakin university, geelong, victoria: society of architectural historians australia and new zealand. chang, jiat-hwee. 2016. a genealogy of tropical architecture: colonial networks, nature and technoscience. london: routledge. cheater, christine. 2010. “stolen girlhood.” in girlhood: a global history, edited by colleen vasconcellos, 250-67. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. consumer action law centre. 2015. the hidden cost of “rent to own.” melbourne: victoria state government. grealy, liam. 2021. “governing disassembly in indigenous housing.” housing studies 38 (9): 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2021.1882662. jack, tullia. 2013. “laundry routine and resource consumption in australia.” international journal of consumer studies 37 (6): 666-74. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijcs.12048. keys, cathy. 2000. “the house and the yupukarra.” in settlement: a history of australian indigenous housing, edited by peter read, 116-29. canberra: aboriginal studies press. lea, tess, liam grealy, megan moskos, arianna brambilla, stephanie king, daphne habibis, richard benedict, peter phibbs, chao sun, paul torzillo. 2021. sustainable indigenous housing in regional and remote australia. ahuri final report no. 368. melbourne: australian housing and urban research institute. life. 1950. “2,000,000 women walked away from washday.” april 24, 1950. accessed may 28, 2021. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=oukeaaaambaj&q=bendix+washer&pg=pa119&redir_esc=y#v=snippet&q=bendix%20washer&f=false. lloyd, c.r. 1998. “washing machine usage in remote aboriginal communities.” australian and new zealand journal of public health 22 (6): 695-99. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-842x.1998.tb01472.x . murdoch, lydia. 2007. imagined orphans: poor families, child welfare, and contested citizenship in london. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. nganampa health council, south australian health commission, and aboriginal health organisation of s.a. 1987. report of uwankara palyanyku kanyintjaku. an environmental and public health review within the anangu pitjantjatjara lands december. committee of review on environmental and public health within the aṉangu pitjantjatjara lands: adelaide. rainow, stephan. 2012. “the washing machine debate.” healthabitat. accessed may 28, 2021. https://www.healthabitat.com/impact/big-issues/the-washing-machine-debate/. robinson, shirleene. 2014. “'always a good demand': aboriginal child domestic servants in nineteenthand early twentieth-century australia.” in colonization and domestic service: historical and contemporary perspectives, edited by victoria haskins and claire lowrie, 97-112. new york: routledge. shove, elizabeth. 2003. *comfort, cleanliness + convenience: the social organization of normality.* oxford: berg. tonkinson, myrna. 1988. "sisterhood or aboriginal servitude? black women and white women on the australian frontier." aboriginal history 12 (1-2): 27-39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24045665. van herk, aritha. 2002. “invisibled laundry.” signs 27 (3): 893-900. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/337932. wang, joan. 2004. “race, gender, and laundry work: the roles of chinese laundrymen and american women in the united states, 1850-1950.” journal of american ethnic history 24 (1): 58-99. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27501531. watson, sophie. 2015. “mundane objects in the city: laundry practices and the making and remaking of public/private sociality and space in london and new york.” urban studies 52 (5): 876-90. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26146018. wooten, melissa, and enobong branch. 2012. “defining appropriate labor: race, gender, and idealization of black women in domestic service.” race, gender & class 19 (3-4): 292-308. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43497500.     author bios liam grealy is research fellow in the department of gender and cultural studies at the university of sydney and at menzies school of health research. at the university of sydney, grealy works in the housing for health incubator, where his research examines housing and infrastructure policy in regional and remote australia and southeast louisiana. at menzies, grealy is evaluating the northern territory government's healthy homes program. tess lea is department head and professor of anthropology in the department of community, culture and global studies at the university of british columbia, okanagan campus. lea's work interrogates the qualities of dysfunction: to whom, what, and how it is ascribed and remedied under conditions of continuing settler colonialism. six ways of looking at fractal mechanics hebert, pato. 2024. “untitled.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–2. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © pato hebert, 2024 | artist statement licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license cover art | untitled artist statement pato hebert tisch school of the arts pato.hebert@nyu.edu the cover image comes from the lingering project, a large body of work that addresses the covid-19 condition of long hauling, a state of ongoing symptoms and challenges that persist well after the initial 4-6 weeks of acute infection. people enduring long covid are colloquially known as long-haulers. i first became ill early in the pandemic (march, 2020) and i continue to be a long-hauler over four years later. the impacts of the virus linger in my body and being. this is a frustrating process that i call the covidoldrums. as part of my slow efforts to recover, i have worked with an infectious disease specialist, pulmonologist, gastroenterologist, neurologist, naturopath and acupuncturist. regular walks in los angeles’ elysian park became integral to my gradual recovery process. although exertion and exercise can be counter-productive for many long-haulers, i found these gentle walks to be a lifesaver. they helped me to slowly rebuild my lung capacity and strengthen my spirit. as part of this gentle walking practice, i utilized my mobile phone to make pictures. elysian park is a hilly beacon of six hundred acres located right in the heart of the city. free and accessible during daylight hours, its trails, breezes, and embrace have been even more vital to the city’s wellness practices during the pandemic. this special place has been integral to my process of healing and creativity. it nuanced my sense of time — from the geological and topographical time embodied by the bedrock to seasonal shifts in temperatures, flowers, and migrating birds, to the ephemera of fallen ppe littering the landscape. these different scales of time unfold as i have stumbled to comprehend the unevenness of the chronically ill body, whose clock so seldom seems to have any regularity of schedule. mailto:pato.hebert@nyu.edu special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) pato hebert, 2024 2 the raw, expansive park also offers the gift of images. reminders of the pandemic are everywhere. the park is marked by people’s protection and affection, their pleasure and care. my lingering series of photographs emerged from the first 19 months of the pandemic. the images depict the virus’s impact on our lives, our impact on the park, and the persistence of the park’s land and more than human beings as vibrant forces. the images are printed as archival pigment prints on silk charmeuse with an undulating, organic hemmed edge. cover image by pato hebert “untitled” from the lingering series archival pigment print on silk charmeuse 2020–21 12 3/4” x 9 3/4” x 1/8” © p.hebert www.patohebert.com instagram: @volandito author bio pato hebert is an artist, teacher and organizer. his work probes the challenges and possibilities of interconnectedness. his creative projects have been presented at the centro de arte contemporáneo in quito, beton7 in athens, the ballarat international foto biennale, the songzhuang international photo biennale, and ihlia lgbt heritage in amsterdam. he works across a wide range of media including photography, sculpture, installation, text, design and performance. hebert has worked in hiv prevention initiatives with queer communities of color since 1994. these grassroots efforts at local and transnational levels engage social movements and community organizations to develop innovative approaches to hiv mobilization, programs and justice. he is also a covid-19 long hauler, living with the ongoing impacts of the coronavirus since march of 2020 and publicly addressing the pandemic through creativity and community building. lingering, his solo exhibition about long covid, debuted at pitzer college in 2022 and was curated by ruti talmor. his writing about covid has appeared in lastgaspism: art and survival in the age of pandemic (eds. romero, a., tucker, d., wang, d.), the long covid survival guide: how to take care of yourself and what comes next (ed: fiona lowenstein) and the long covid reader: writing and poetry from 45 long haulers (ed: ladd, king and mcmahon). hebert serves as chair and is an associate arts professor in the department of art & public policy at tisch school of the arts, new york university, where his students have thrice nominated him for the david payne-carter award for teaching excellence. http://www.patohebert.com/ cover art | untitled artist statement author bio book review | what comes after entanglement?: activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion, by eva haifa giraud (duke university press, 2019) gitzen, timothy. 2024. review of gut anthro: an experiment in thinking with microbes, by amber benezra (university of minnesota press, 2023), catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1– 4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312. © timothy gitzen, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | gut anthro: an experiment in thinking with microbes, by amber benezra (university of minnesota press, 2023) timothy gitzen wake forest university gitzent@wfu.edu in her methodologically and theoretically nuanced ethnography gut anthro, amber benezra takes readers from lab benches and meeting rooms to the homes of mothers and their children in bangladesh to follow the microbes, both conceptually and physically. eschewing a traditional ethnographic division between the lab and the field—this is both an ethnography of a microbiology lab and an ethnography of bangladeshi households—gut anthro renders expectations of what ethnography is and does and illustrates how “work across disciplines…produces the microbiome as an experimental object and provides descriptions of how ethnography and microbial ecology interfered with, enriched, or otherwise changed each other” (6). crucial to benezra’s innovative methodological endeavor is her commitment to feminist science studies, as the very impetus for her methodological maneuvering is rooted in feminist epistemologies and methodologies that similarly eschew disciplinary boundaries. for benezra, an anthropology of microbes not only interrogates the production and use of scientific knowledge—a decidedly feminist anthropological and science studies pillar—but queries “what it would mean for anthropology to act with science” (3). the question continuously at the forefront of her mind throughout this book is “what’s at stake?” in the science, in the microbiome, and in the anthropology; benezra interrogates anthropology in the same breath as she does microbiome research. doing so, asking what’s at stake, reveals a methodology and theory that does not keep biology and society separate, but enmeshes them into a single, object of feminist inquiry: the sociomaterial (197). chapter one introduces the methodological framework of this book: the collaboration. benezra’s collaboration is primarily with microbiome scientists, but book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) timothy gitzen, 2024 she proposes that such a collaboration with microbiome scientists—rooted in feminist anthropological and science studies modes of engagement—is ultimately “in pursuit of a future science that doesn’t elide the past but allows us to ‘live with its ghosts’” (39). for benezra, this means interrogating both microbiome science and anthropology’s commitments and roles in the production of scientific knowledge (especially about microbes). inspired by feminist theorists’ collaborative methodologies that bring social and physical scientists together— from angela willey’s “biopossibilities” and elizabeth roberts’s “bioethnography” to kim fortun and michael fortun’s “friendship with scientists”—benezra describes her role as gordon lab’s resident anthropologist and ethnographer, creating an agreement with the lab’s director, dr. jeff gordon, as to how cultural anthropology and microbiome research would, in essence, help each other out. benezra’s primary duty was to travel to bangladesh and interview mothers who had children enrolled in a malnutrition study where gordon lab analyzed the children’s fecal matter for microbes. benezra was to provide the lab and study with social and cultural context, humanizing the literal shit scientists were studying. yet benezra recognizes that her collaboration, as is common, is one of unequal footing, primarily given her then-position as a doctoral candidate and dr. gordon’s as a world-renowned scientist and lab director. she returns to this collaboration in the conclusion and unpacks the complicated relationship she had with the scientists and dr. gordon himself. in an interesting rhetorical move, benzera bemoans the inclusion of chapter two in gut anthro. the chapter is a history of the microbiome, pulling primarily from white researchers. it is clear from the start that benzera’s chief move in this book is to “see if a feminist, anticolonial, and antiracist anthropology can act with and produce a feminist, anticolonial, and antiracist microbiome science” (13). therefore, while including a history of the microbiome and how it comes into existence through scientific practice and knowledge, she laments that the chapter “references mostly white, able-bodied, hetero-cis-male authors as they tyrannize the fields of microbiology and sts” (89). while the contents of the chapter are important—otherwise, why would benezra include it?—the rhetorical and methodological importance does not lie with the contents of the chapter, but the ways such a stringent cis-het-white citational genealogy emboldens benezra to make more conscious citational choices in the remainder of her book. this imperative and citational politics is most apparent in chapter three when benezra traces the ways microbes form and reform practices and idioms of kinship. benezra views the work done in both bangladesh and the gordon lab as, in part, the construction of a “kinship story” (109), whereby “microbes are kin—kin that are made of and making environments, across generations” (110). in a nuanced theoretical turn, benezra highlights the “material-semiotic indeterminacy” that weaves through kinship as also manifesting the microbiome: “i see microbial kinships as bio-socio-enviro-exposo amalgamations, not separate book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) timothy gitzen, 2024 from the science that defines microbiomes, voids structural contexts, helps and hams” (111). such a theoretical standpoint is influenced by the sloughslayers’ use of the lakota philosophy of “all our relations.” inspired by michelle murphy, benezra is also cognizant that “as the science of the gordon lab enables the making of kin with microbes, care must be taken not to erase the people from which the microbes came” (124). indigenous scholarship on relationality and environment is quintessential to benezra’s explication of microbial kin given the “reciprocal, ethical accountability [in] more-than-human relations” (126). for instance, benezra provides the example of families in bangladesh living together, sharing pots, and thus impacting how the microbiome manifests in family members. in this way, benezra notes that “pots make kin” as well (134). tension permeates chapter four as benezra traces the social and material conditions of the bangladeshi women and children enrolled in the malnutrition study alongside the datafication of microbes originating in those individuals and the connection between malnutrition and microbial populations (143). if feminist science studies and feminist epistemologies frame the methods of this book, this chapter provides a feminist anthropological analysis of the structural and infrastructural violences experienced by the bangladeshi women in the study. she weaves ethnographic data with mothers into broader global health policies and frameworks surrounding malnutrition as “a problem of the ‘underdeveloped’ world, a problem that, with the emergence of a global health framework, transcended national borders and became biologically universalized, solvable through neoliberal economic strategies, and measurable through standardized metrics” (148–49). such nuances and contexts are often left out in the datafication of microbes, but benezra’s point is that microbes must not be decontextualized from the “political, economic, and political history of undernutrition” (165). thus far, benezra has mobilized both feminist and indigenous scholarship and methodologies to interrogate the microbe, and in chapter five she queries the racialization of microbes in scientific literature and practice. she mobilizes the concept of “ghost variable” to examine how studies of the microbiome will use racial categories without explicitly talking about “race” itself (179). as such, she argues that “social scientists and sts scholars must work with biological scientists to put microbial differences into perspective” (179). benezra interrogates several pieces of microbiome research to unravel the ghost variables laden within them, how variables of nationality, geography, traditional populations, and industrialized are all indexical of race without ever even mentioning race. it is in this chapter that benezra’s promise of a sociomateriality comes to fruition in her attempt to “interpret microbiomes as biosocial relationships in process rather than reinforcing the separation of biological and social influences” (196), a common practice in some feminist science studies and anthropological work. book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) timothy gitzen, 2024 gut anthro is an ambitious and promising book, its strength lying in both its optimism for a different form of collaboration—one where anthropology and microbiome research can truly influence one another—and in its call for mobilizing feminist, decolonial, and indigenous scholarship and knowledge for understanding the microbe differently. this is not done simply in citational practices but in the framings one chooses, the theories one mobilizes, and the very starting point (in either research or data analysis) where one begins. yet as encouraging as this call is, i found it difficult in parts to see where the proverbial rubber meets the road. in chapter three, benezra does work to utilize indigenous scholarship to understand the place-making of microbes, but her lengthy invocation of such indigenous scholarship to understand kinship is not fully realized in her ethnographic data. furthermore, as encouraging as the collaborative model is, i was left wondering if it could be complicated further with other intersectional collaborations—namely, with the mothers and on-the-ground health officials. need this only be a collaboration between scientists and anthropologists when, as benezra herself admits, multiple sites yield multiple actors and bodies of knowledge? finally, benezra boldly states that microbes “always come into being” through sight, perhaps indexing donna haraway’s attention to sight in “situated knowledges.” but what of the other senses? do we not know microbes are at work in bokashi, for instance, through the smell of the container? even benezra makes mention of the smell of shit: might shit smell different based on its microbial contents? despite these lingering questions and queries—quite possibly explored elsewhere in benezra’s corpus of work—this book redefines what it means to do an anthropology of microbes by interlacing anthropology with feminist and indigenous theories and methodologies. it will certainly become essential reading for any social scientist studying microbes and offer both methodological and theoretical insight into microbiome research. author bio timothy gitzen is an assistant professor of anthropology at wake forest university. he specializes in feminist and queer science and technology studies. book review | gut anthro: an experiment in thinking with microbes, by amber benezra (university of minnesota press, 2023) author bio     image and text 3x3x6 9 sq.m. and 6 surveillance cameras     shu lea cheang shulea@earthlink.net   with paula gardner and stephen surlin mcmaster university gardnerp@mcmaster.ca surlins@mcmaster.ca     abstract the title of shu lea cheang’s 3x3x6 which represented taiwan at venice biennale 2019 derives from the 21st century high-security prison cell measured in 9 square meter and equipped with 6 surveillance cameras. as an immersive installation, 3x3x6 is comprised of multiple interfaces to reflect on the construction of sexual subjectivity by technologies of confinement and control, from physical incarceration to the omnipresent surveillance systems of contemporary society, from jeremy bentham’s panopticon conceptualized in 1791 to china’s sharp eyes that boasts 200 million surveillance cameras with facial recognition capacity for its 1.4 billion population. by employing strategic and technical interventions, 3x3x6 investigates 10 criminal cases in which the prisoners across time and space are incarcerated for sexual provocation and gender affirmation. the exhibition constructs collective counter-accounts of sexuality where trans punk fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations hacks the operating system of the history of sexual subjection. this image and text piece intersperses images from the exhibition with handout texts written by curator paul b. preciado (against a grey background), as well as an interview between special section co-editor paula gardner and the artist that brings the extraordinary exhibition into further conversation with feminist technoscience scholarship. the project website is available at https://3x3x6-v2.webflow.io/.     keywords incarceration, sexuality, gender, surveillance, exhibition, interview     handout text (preciado): reflecting upon the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-d facial recognition, ai, and the internet, 3x3x6 restages the rooms of the palazzo delle prigioni—a venetian prison from the sixteenth century in operation until 1922—as a high-tech surveillance space. taking as its starting point the story of libertine writer giacomo casanova, imprisoned in the prigioni in 1755, the artist has conducted in-depth studies on ten historical and contemporary cases of subjects incarcerated because of gender or sexual dissent, including marquis de sade and michel foucault, as well as contemporary cases from countries including taiwan, china and south africa. their fictionalized portraits become part of the exhibition’s system; the title of which refers to today’s standardized architecture of industrial imprisonment: a 3 x 3 square-meter cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras. the artist departs from the architecture of the panopticon to construct the central space of the exhibition in room a: the surveillance tower has been inverted to project the portraits of the ten prisoners and connected up to a facial recognition 3-d camera surveillance system, which installed at the entrance of the exhibition scans the visitors’ faces—by electing to enter the exhibition they are accepting to become part of the system and to having their face modified. here, gender and racial morphing become queer digital strategies to disrupt the tradition of colonial and anthropometric identification techniques, extending from alphonse bertillon’s criminological photography of the nineteenth century to today’s facial recognition technologies. connected to the internet 3x3x6 allows visitors (both physical and virtual) to send selfies and images to the exhibition system. the visitors are thus inside the total surveillance apparatus. moving into rooms b and c of the updated prigioni, the physical visitors then wander into a maze of monitors that unfold the stories of the ten prisoners across time and space, histories and cultures. whereas in the eighteenth century, casanova’s libertinage and sade’s atheist negation of morality were the object of surveillance and discipline, in contemporary techno-patriarchal digital conditions, the black man is constructed as “rapist,” the hiv-positive homosexual, the transgender person and women are constructed as sexual e-hunters, while witches are the new subjects beyond the law. finally, in room d, visitors are invited to discover the control room and the very operating system of the surveillance apparatus in function. hacking digital surveillance technologies and social media, the artist uses the site of the prison to create a real-time dissident interface that the visitor is invited to join. engaging legal documents, fake news, historical reports, myths and fantasies, and data retrieved from 3-d surveillance cameras and the images uploaded by visitors, the intervention constructs a collective counter-history of sexuality—where trans-punk science fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations provide visual and critical frameworks to think through the histories of subjection and resistance—and activates a critical proliferation of poetic and political actions for digital times. a contribution to the digital avant-garde, the author’s 3x3x6 equally challenges the aesthetics of internet global capitalism and the gender, sexual, and race norms that hold up its hidden infrastructure.   paula gardner: shu lea, can you talk about the process by which you created this exhibition? the space given to you at the biennale is the palazzo delle prigioni, which was the central prison of venice from the renaissance until 1922. it is renowned for being the site of incarceration of italian writer and mythical lover giacomo casanova who was detained there in 1755 for months before escaping. in 3x3x6 you respond to the building’s history, materially and conceptually, for the exhibition. curator paul b. preciado comments that your immersive installation with multiple interfaces invests the building “in the crossings of histories and fictions, memory and imagination” to reflect “on the construction of sexual subjectivity by technologies of confinement and control, from physical incarceration to the omnipresent surveillance systems of contemporary society.”   figure 1. a projection tower is installed in gallery a that includes 10 cases with 10 projectors and 10 screens. on each case a one-minute introduction of the incarcerated across time and space is projected.   figure 2. gallery b and c feature 10 4k monitors that are placed on the floor and show 10 films of 10 minute each. each film is a case study of the incarcerated. a beam of light slowly moves across the room from one end to the other and back   shu lea cheang: in conceiving the installation that occupies the old prison site, i took on several strategic approaches – from hardware wiring to software hack, from codes to data, from scripting to casting, to determine how to sketch a collective scheme of revolt from within (the system).   the palazzo delle prigioni has been the venue for taiwan in venice presentation organized by the taipei fine arts museum since 1995. when i was chosen to represent taiwan for venice biennale 2019 and informed of a solo exhibition to use this former prison palace, i did the research to find the connection with giacomo casanova. from all records, casanova was accused with an undetermined charge, likely a combination of corruption, indecency, and public outrage. the case of casanova guides further research to locate historical and contemporary cases in which the prisoners across time and space are incarcerated for sexual provocation and gender affirmation.   figure 3. casanova x floating inside the 16th century prison cell is geolocated and tracked by facial recognition software.casanova x floating inside the 16th century prison cell is geolocated and tracked by facial recognition software.   figure 4. the incarcerated identified by facial recognition software as they walk across various landscapes.   my initial decision about the installation is to keep the site intact, not to impose any additional walls for the exhibition’s sake. i remade the connection with panopticon interface in my guggenheim museum project brandon (1998-1999) in which a close circuited panopticon interface (based on jeremy bentham’s panopticon principle 1787) houses cases of sexual deviants and prison inmates, serving both as hospital wards (6) and prison cells (6), both as transient station and surveillance apparatus. yet i was also quick to realize the current data tracking facial recognition surveillance apparatus has turned the larger society into a digital panopticon without four walls. the issue became how to divert the omnipresent surveillance systems-how to subvert the technologies of confinement and control, and, finally, to construct collective counter-accounts of sexuality where trans punk fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations hacks the operating system of the history of sexual subjection.   figure 5. gallery d displays a 30 degree leaning standing cube as the centerpiece of the tiny gallery space.the transparent cube (1.8mx1.2m) consists of 5 transparent acrylic plates, each 128cm x 128cm. the cube houses all system hardwares, monitors, wifi routers, sound card and sound mixer that operate the exhibition.   figure 6. view from gallery a’s projection screens, the transparent cube in the gallery d displays the controlling mechanism. the incarcerated shown on the projection screens undergo facial recognition tracking. the tracked images are morphed and collapsed into pixelated bytes.   gardner: shu lea, can you talk about the process by which you created this exhibition? the space given to you at the biennale is the palazzo delle prigioni, which was the central prison of venice from the renaissance until 1922. it is renowned for being the site of incarceration of italian writer and mythical lover giacomo casanova who was detained there in 1755 for months before escaping. in 3x3x6 you respond to the building’s history, materially and conceptually, for the exhibition. curator paul b. preciado comments that your immersive installation with multiple interfaces invests the building “in the crossings of histories and fictions, memory and imagination” to reflect “on the construction of sexual subjectivity by technologies of confinement and control, from physical incarceration to the omnipresent surveillance systems of contemporary society.”   cheang: in conceiving the installation that occupies the old prison site, i took on several strategic approaches – from hardware wiring to software hack, from codes to data, from scripting to casting, to determine how to sketch a collective scheme of revolt from within (the system).   figure 7. surveillance cameras capable of 3d image capture are set up at the staircase. the visitors upon ascending the staircase leading to the 2nd floor galleries are informed of the surveillance cameras’ presence.   the palazzo delle prigioni has been the venue for taiwan in venice presentation organized by the taipei fine arts museum since 1995. when i was chosen to represent taiwan for venice biennale 2019 and informed of a solo exhibition to use this former prison palace, i did the research to find the connection with giacomo casanova. from all records, casanova was accused with an undetermined charge, likely a combination of corruption, indecency, and public outrage. the case of casanova guides further research to locate historical and contemporary cases in which the prisoners across time and space are incarcerated for sexual provocation and gender affirmation.   my initial decision about the installation is to keep the site intact, not to impose any additional walls for the exhibition’s sake. i remade the connection with panopticon interface in my guggenheim museum project brandon (1998-1999) in which a close circuited panopticon interface (based on jeremy bentham’s panopticon principle 1787) houses cases of sexual deviants and prison inmates, serving both as hospital wards (6) and prison cells (6), both as transient station and surveillance apparatus. yet i was also quick to realize the current data tracking facial recognition surveillance apparatus has turned the larger society into a digital panopticon without four walls. the issue became how to divert the omnipresent surveillance systems-how to subvert the technologies of confinement and control, and, finally, to construct collective counter-accounts of sexuality where trans punk fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations hacks the operating system of the history of sexual subjection.   figure 8. the monitor shows images captured by the 3d surveillance cameras. the captured images of the visitors are further processed by hacked facial recognition software and manipulated to an “un recognizable’ state before transmitting to the gallery a’s projection.   figure 9. the 3d surveillance camera capture processed and the dance video sent through the 3x3x6 app manipulated intervene the projection that identifies the 10 incarcerated.   prisons as sites of resistance turning the 16 century palazzo delle prigioni into a multiplex immersive installation.   the prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. this is the ideological work that the prison performs it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and increasingly, global capitalism.   – angela davis “are prisons obsolete?” (2003)   handout text (preciado): the inverted panopticon– the all-seeing eyes of surveillance apparatus is subverted, replaced by an electronic programmed projection tower that is equipped with 10 projectors beaming portraits of defiance.   gardner: can you talk about how the space inspired this work and how you engaged with the material and conceptual history of the space? also, can you discuss the inverted panopticon and transparent systems control, and the leaning (30 degree), a transparent cube that houses the installation’s control system? i understand that these controlled the projections and also were presented as art pieces themselves?   cheang: set up in 4 gallery spaces (a,b,c,d), the palazzo delle prigioni is now regularly used as a cultural space while centuries old stone walls remain. my initial design concept is to allow the 4 gallery spaces to “communicate” with each other. thus, the set up: [gallery a] – an inverted control tower with 10 projectors, instead of all-seeing eyes surveillance, the projection introduces the 10 characters of the 10 “criminal” cases: [gallery b+c]. ten 4k monitors are set up, placed directly on the floor, each monitor “confines” one incarcerated character, and each is presented by a 10 minute film. [gallery d] – the system control mechanism is “exhibited” (exposed) in a transparent cube (1.8mx1.2m) of 30 degree leaning. additionally, there are two surveillance 3d cameras set up along the staircases coming up to the gallery, and an app that invites people to send in dance videos (in solidarity with the iranian girl, maedeh hojabri, who was jailed for posting a dance video on instagram). both the surveillance camera capturing visitors and the dance videos submitted were further manipulated and programmed at intervals to “intervene” in the projecting loops in the gallery a. the installation is operated with wifi network system control to connect all spaces.   figure 10. panopticon interface in brandon (1998-1999). based on jeremy bentham’s all surveillance prison system panopticon, a central tower is raised to watch over the cells.   figure 11. 2 cells are made for the panopticon interface. six (in red) are hospital wards. the other six (in blue) are prison cells, each incarcerates tales of sexual deviants.   gardner: also, can you talk about the audience experience of the space—how they are allowed or not allowed to navigate and move through the exhibition?   cheang: the visitors to the gallery space upon entering are greeted with a disclaimer written in several languages: “by entering this exhibition 3x3x6, you agree and consent to enter a surveillance system set up by the artist. in accordance with the eu general data protection regulation, your 3d scanned image data is held locally within a closed network and further processed as part of the exhibition display.” entering gallery a, the visitors can walk in between projection screens while seeing their own surveillance camera captured images being tracked and cutting into the prisoners’ portraits. the room is powered by a pitched and sub-ed noise of surveillance rendered musically by sound artist jasmine guffond. the visitors submit themselves to a projected roaming landscape of defiance. this gallery a introduction leads to the gallery b+c’s 10 monitors, all on view as one enters the space. one can choose the monitor/prisoner she wants to stay with. the films scripted with paul b. preciado take historical facts of the “offenders” on a whimsical spin. by exiting the cells/monitors, one enters gallery d’s leaning cubes which display the source of surveillance camera captures, as image processing. by calling this mixed media installation immersive, we reject the notion of programmed “interactivity” while we invite “intervention.”   figure 12. initial hand drawing, sketch of the 360 degree turning panopticon tower or the gallery a at palazzo delle prigioni.   gardner: paul b. preciado, curator for 3x3x6, and someone with whom you have worked for a long time, writes that the exhibition creates “a ‘panopticon’ surveillance space, employing a unique ‘trans punk’ narrative and a specific method of audience intervention,” that “invites the viewer to imagine a new vocabulary and means of liberation.” can you discuss how you see your work as crossing panoptic surveillance and trans punk? in what ways does that conjuncture invite audience intervention? what kind of liberation is possible in this audience experience?   cheang: we call it “inverted” panopticon. instead of the all-seeing eye on a central tower, the projection tower beams images that show defiance of the 10 incarcerated walking forward, faces captured by the surveillance camera at the staircase and the uploaded dance movement; both are manipulated, becoming unrecognizable and cutting into the loops of the 10 characters. the audience invited to “participate” are informed of the plots. they become the active players in an “intervention” scenario.   figure 13. the sketch-up view of the installation in 4 gallery space with an immersive narrative that takes the viewers through gallery a to b+c to d.   figure 14. the exhibition is operated with networked protocols. 3 wifi routers are set up to connect the gallery spaces. the software programming manages all running systems, including the timing and the intervals of the 10 projection, the synchronization of 10 monitors, the intervention of the facial recognition image capture of the visitors and the dance video submitted worldwide through a 3x3x6 app.   figure 15. sketch up 3d design of the transparent cube. the 30 degree leaning of the cube ssignals system crumpling. the difficult parts of the design include making the air circulating inside the cube, so as not to overheat the equipments and making sure the cube is stable with the leaning.   figure 16. 3d sketch for the inverted panopticon. 10 projectors beaming images of defiance replace the all surveillance eye of the watching guardian on top of the tower. the rings with projectors mounted are programmed to turn 180 degree back and forth, allowing intervention and pauses.   we use the term “trans punk fiction” to describe the filmic tactics. reclaiming “punk” like re-owning the derogatory calling of negro or queer. the scripts for the 10 cases, including casanova, marquis de sade, michel foucault, while based on research and historical facts, are made up with fantasia imagination that crosses gender, genre, time and space. for example, casanova was played by a euro-asian performer enrico wey, sade was portrayed by a large woman liz rosenfeld and foucault by a young rising french punk actor, félix maritaud. there are celling crossing encounters – i.e., foucault sits with rx in his/her cell to address views on queerness in islamic culture; sade meets mwx to chase the numbers. we invite the audience to free associate the narratives. we do not debate guilt or remorse, neither offer any defense for any of them. at the end, we do not prescribe a “story” to be experienced, but rely on audience’s own imagination to fill in the gaps of the narratives.   i fuck up my facial tracking   handout text (preciado): appropriating the surveillance mechanism of a controlled society, the installation exposes the apparatus of controlling systems, codes rewritten, data reclaimed.   gardner: in your work that hacks recognition systems, you play with identities that are captured and confined/controlled, pointing to surveillance and criminality system norms around the world. i use the word play here instructively—we sense glee and abandon in this work. can you talk about the pieces i fuck up my face tracking and i buy myself an avatar selfie on the internet in regard to this playful reflection on face tracking and body modification?   cheang: there are 3d model markets on the net where you can purchase ready-made 3d models for further rendering. for 3x3x6, i want to make myself an avatar that doesn’t have to be a “me”. i bought models/.obj of my desired race/gender and made a combined self – i.e., thick lips, blue eyes, a fat ass. in constructing a recombinant avatar to divert facial recognition tracking, i bought myself some .obj on the internet. this avatar of recombined data defies surveillance tracking. the 3d avatar created thus is my current day self-portrait, a purchased identity that facial recognition tracking software fails to connect the dots.   gardner: this special section is also seeking to collide global and disciplinary conversations around systems, their practices of opacity, ability to reify categories and restrain how and what knowledge is produced and made normal, and to imagine and render visible transgressions. critical and cultural approaches and feminist approaches provide “situated knowledges” (e.g., donna haraway, karen barad) as a conceptual frame to understand systems as contingent in complicated ways on network and other pressures that continually (re) situate them, causing them to continually “become.” do the systems you are pressuring in 3x3x6 reflect this kind of idea—that practices of surveillance, incarceration, sexual “deviance” emerge symbiotically but also diverge in unique formations due to contexts (such as territory)? does that kind of idea resonate in your work and how so?   figure 17. various assets, thick lips, a large torso and blue eyes, that the artist bought on the internet to construct a recombinant avatar of the artist.   figure 18. blurred outline of head and shoulders of a person wearing a pink shirt. white lines connected by dots are placed over the blurred head to further divert facial recognition tracking.   "collapsing the avatar self – the incarcerated undergoing facial recognition tracking morphs into transgenic avatar and diminishes into pixel bits."   cheang: fundamentally i aim at subverting the operating structures and the system control mechanism. in my installation work, i re-create a “structure,” a “system,” and invite audiences to “intervene.” closed circuit as it is, the construct of a microcosm serves as a re-enactment, a reflection of a larger society. the audience upon entering the prigioni space is complicit in an artist’s scheme of “subversion.” their faces captured by 3d surveillance cameras set up at the staircases are transmitted to gallery d’s operating system and further processed and manipulated before re-transmitted onto the gallery a’s projection screens, intervening in the incarcerated’s criminal records. the “exposé” of the system control mechanism of the leaning transparent cube permits the audience’s participation of an intervening scheme conjured up by the artist.   trans-punk-fiction the algorithm of gender & sexuality in the digital age   handout text (preciado): in the gallery b+c, 10 monitors show 10 cases, 10 films, 10 minutes each. scripted as a case study, each case serves the purpose to examine the impact of technologies on the production and control of gendered, sexualized, and racialized subjects. the 10 scripts, written in collaboration with paul b. preciado, while based on research of archive materials and court case documents, follow free flow narratives that allow the prisoners to travel through time and space. the casting defies racial and gender conformity in its selection of performers, i.e., casanova x is played by enrico wey of asian descent and sade x by liz rosenfeld, a cis woman.   figure 19. foucault x meets r x in r x’ 3x3x6 prison cell where they discuss homosexuality and cultural difference.   gardner: the “10 cases” film piece aligns 10 subjects deemed sexually and/or gender deviant with famous “deviants”—theorist michel foucault, romantic legend casanova, and the marquis de sade, plus individuals identified only by letters and numbers such as dx and 00x . can you talk about how and why your “algorithm” reimagines these subjects as transcending gender and breaking time and space barriers? i’m sensing this as a joyful rejection of the algorithm; are you suggesting that we humans ourselves are only algorithmic interfaces (that might be reputable, just)?   cheang: for the three historical characters in the films, casanova, marquis de sade, foucault, we can keep the real names. for the other 7 contemporary cases, we decided not to reveal real names. all 10 characters’ names are added with an x, considering each individual, each case is not alone. i.e., dx takes up cases of rape by deception, deception in concealing true physical gender, that include hen alkobi of israel, jennifer saunders of uk, sean o’neill, christopher wheatley of usa, the legend of white snake in china and the case of raymundo in mexico. 00x refers to a teacher in taiwan who was arrested for soliciting gay men to have chemsex via social networks and sentenced to twelve years in prison for knowingly spreading the hiv virus and endangering others. 00 actually were the symbols used in his court document to conceal his real name. 0 also refers to a gay man who is of “bottom” position. to get into the algorithm of gender and sexuality in the digital age is to sift through the data vault of the control system. for the 10 films in 3x3x6, the fictionalized, combined, disjointed narratives and the exorbitant imagery across time and space bring the 10 incarcerated together to jointly defy the pre-set algorithm of race and gender processing in the digital age.   handout text (preciado):…computational structures start to work their way into the veins of culture more broadly. meanwhile, amidst this state of doubling, recursivity, and transformation, we can recognize the condition of heterogeneity as a fundamental aspect of the present. this is not an absolute and incoherent heterogeneity but one within which we have to find the as yet unuttered urgencies and exigencies, matthew fuller, “inhabiting high-density realities: on shu lea cheang’s artistic language”, 2019, in the 3x3x6 catalogue   figure 20. b x meets foucault x in a kitchen modelled after the kitchen in jeanne dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 bruxelles (chantal akerman, 1975). b x is accused of cutting off her husband’s penis and throwing it into a garbage disposal. b x makes a penis cake and serves it to foucault x who preaches on crime of passion.   figure 21. ade x chases mw x who discharges shits of electronic components. sade x counts the numbers as the electronic parts float in the mid-air.   gardner: can you reflect back on this work—what critiques or juxtapositions are more important to you now that you’ve mounted the exhibition? does the pandemic cause you to think differently about the 3x3x6 exhibition?   cheang: 3x3x6 remains to be a milestone work for me, for having the possibility to exercise a “complete” concept in palazzo delle prigioni, for working with paul b. preciado closely and intensely for a year, for having the exhibition in the context of venice biennale where sex and gender are yet to be fully explored. 3x3x6, in its reference to the high security prison cells, is contagious. cell units can be multiplied, but the “crime” can’t be contained within. the surveillance apparatus that checks into a person’s living quarter is agent of viral transmission. year 2020, as i wrapped up 3x3x6 with the shipment of its hardware home and the pause of my lecture tours, the pandemic arrives. on april 3, 2020, arundhati roy published in financial times “the pandemic is a portal,” reporting on india’s viral conditions. a year later, the rich, the poor, rerouted to sort out vaccine politics the patent war, the vaccine distribution. we have not arrived at the gateway between one world and the next you and i don’t live in the same viral reality. amidst the lockdown in paris, i returned to work on my feature film, uki. conceived in 2009 as i launched “viral love biohack” as a new cycle of my work, uki is now being developed as a sci-fi viral alt-reality cinema. virus as dissidence, virus mutated within, virus becoming.   figure 22. 00 x and the 11 gay men join together to perform a sexing dance act in which assorted colored pills with defiant icons flying around in the mid-air.   handout text (preciado): i want to fly, fly to the blue sky. i want to play, play with you. i want to fuck, fuck with you. you free? i am 0, you are 1. you are 1. i am 0. methylenedioxymethamphetamine 00. shake your heads. 01. shake your butts. you come? i go? inside you? outside me? i want to fly, fly to the blue sky. i want to fly, fly to the blue sky. 0011, lyrics (excerpts) for 00x pill dancing, shu lea cheang 2019     author bios shu lea cheang is an artist, filmmaker, networker working with various art mediums and film formats, including installation, performance, net art, public art, video installation, feature-length film and mobile web serial. as a net art pioneer, her project brandon (1998-1999) was the first web art commissioned and collected by the guggenheim museum in new york. she drafts sci-fi narratives in her film scenario and artwork imagination, crafting her own “science” fiction genre of new queer cinema. from homesteading cyberspace in the 90s to her current retreat to post net-crash bionet zone, cheang takes on viral love, bio hack in her current cycle of works. in 2019, she represented taiwan with a solo exhibition 3x3x6 at venice biennale.   paula gardner is associate professor and asper chair at mcmaster university, ontario. she runs pulse lab at mcmaster, which engages collaborative practice to innovate art and health technologies with community for social change.   stephen surlin is a ph.d. student communication, new media, and cultural studies program at mcmaster university. his work focuses on creating archives using new media and the digital networking infrastructure needed to sustain them. microsoft word 71619_1_11_juliano.docx juliano, l. (2018). review of: algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism by safiya umoja noble (new york university press, 2018). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4 (2), 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © linzi juliano, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license review algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism by safiya umoja noble (new york university press, 2018) linzi juliano university of california at los angeles linzi.juliano@gmail.com search engines, a primary gateway to the web, are retrieval mechanisms to the lay user. when one conducts a search, one relies on internal rulesets or formulas for action (algorithms) to retrieve context-specific information. the most popular retrieval service is not just a search engine, but a brand, browser, verb, internet service provider, and hardware producer and distributor. in terms of information retrieval, no other tech company has made its name synonymous with the act of searching and, inversely, made itself the most desirable location for featured (and paid) web content. its pervasive presence and foregrounding of ranked relevance makes it seem infallible, omniscient, and apolitical. these semblances are only imagined. the visually minimalist clarity of google.com is a stark contrast against the over 200 factors that go into search rankings. when one searches, the top results are ranked by “relevance” by default, determined by whether the site has paid to be 2 juliano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) a top result, what others have chosen based on the same search terms, and one’s own search history. that these processes seem automatic or universal does not render the results “objective” or mitigate sociopolitical bias. this is the foundation for safiya umoja noble’s argument in algorithms of oppression, which employs a black feminist perspective to analyze the organization and retrieval of information. her story begins with a simple desire to buy a present for her niece. when she googled “black girls,” she found pornography instead of gift suggestions. (note: since her “black girls” search, google has tweaked its rulesets, making it impossible to replicate her findings.) this search launched a more serious inquiry into ranked relevance, commercialized search engines, and how information scholars can contribute to fair, inclusive classification systems. from a quantitative standpoint, it might make sense that pornography was a first-page result as, over the past few decades, the production, publication, and consumption of pornornography has skyrocketed. the more people consume, the more “relevant” the connection becomes between a search term and a website. but this is exactly part of the problem: the demand for and money behind certain sites pushes others to the margins. citing elad segev’s work on google and global inequality, noble attributes collectivist accounting as a kind of “social hegemony.” she shows how ranking practices reify dominant ideologies, regardless of how an individual searches or what they seek. noble’s reminder that google is a commercial enterprise, not a public service, is significant. collecting a fee to feature one’s work on the front page creates an imbalance in whose voices and views are displayed. beyond the epistemological or ontological inequity embroiled in digital capitalism, argued throughout as having particularly harmful effects on women of color, noble draws a connection between search engine results and physical violence in her chapter “searching for people and communities.” in this chapter, she includes a part of a racist manifesto penned by the author before he massacred nine people on 17 3 juliano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) june 2015. in the excerpt noble provides, the author explains that he was baffled at the criticism george zimmerman received after killing trayvon martin in 2012. he conducted a search for “black on white” crime and “the first website i came to was the council of conservative citizens.” he read “pages upon pages” and was “in disbelief” that “hundreds” of black on white murders were being “ignored.” the author attributes being “completely racially aware” to his google-facilitated research (p.111). at face value, the line between a search query and the murders of rev. clementa pinckney, cynthia hurd, tywanza sanders, rev. sharonda singleton, myra thompson, ethel lance, susie jackson, rev. daniel simmons sr., and rev. depayne middleton doctor is tenuous. however, noble’s point that the murderer’s primary source of information was paid to be the first website seen clearly stands. google is a business and advertising is one revenue stream. for this reason, she argues, it is imperative to rethink public policy in relation to information, and the ideologically reflexive nature of commercialized search. noble looks to the engineering teams themselves to isolate which ideologies are being sustained and reinforced. she cites a 2016 statistic stating that the google staffed 2% african american employees and 3% latino, with the bulk being asian and white (p. 163). engineers building search infrastructure can carry and manifest bias in their work. noble’s example of the search engine architect fired for his viral “antidiversity” manifesto supports the claim that engineers can recreate and reinforce existing power structures. noble thus identifies systemic problems and ties them to individuals who can be held accountable. her work builds to a three-pronged approach built on the same premise: if these structures can be built and ideologically imbued, they can be re-built. first, designers must admit classification schemes reify bias and that policies of neutrality only exacerbate the problem. next, she brings up the case for public policy and regulation. while some regulatory policies for information access and organization exist, many are outdated, unenforced, or too narrow. google, she writes, holds a monopoly on information; in most other arenas, a monopoly this large would elicit 4 juliano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) public skepticism. this leads to her last call to action: scholars in library and information science studies must “actively intervene in the default normativity of racism and sexism in information resources” (p. 136). as relayed in her section dedicated to the topic, library and information science scholars have long recognized power imbalances emerging from classification systems. “this should be a wake-up call,” she writes, “for people living in the margins, and people aligned with them, to engage in thinking through the interventions we need” (p. 169). should such scholars employ feminist and critical race approaches, they could make significant strides to improve or provide noncommercial strategies for archiving, representing, and retrieving information for and about marginalized populations (p. 138). noble presents a pervasive problem but also demonstrates optimism that better alternatives are possible. this faith does not go untested. the book’s epilogue begins with donald trump winning the 2016 presidential election. with regard to her argument for noncommercial search alternatives and the reining in of oppressive data architecture, she writes: “i would be remiss if i did not acknowledge, on the eve of the publication of this book, that [these suggestions] may not be viable at all given the current policy environment that is unfolding” (p. 185). yet, the inherent power of information architecture is increasingly clear to the general public. critiques of disinformation and other highprofile issues that have come to light since the book’s publication (e.g., weaponized social media and the repeal of net neutrality), which could have significant consequences for low-income schools with aging hardware, give new examples for several claims made in this book. we know change is possible, given google’s fix to the “black girls” search results. perhaps this political context can motivate the groups noble calls upon to provide clear and actionable strategies. after all, i concur: society is searching for them. 5 juliano catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) bio linzi juliano is a continuing lecturer at the university of california, los angeles and senior researcher at the geena davis institute for women in media.     ecologías plurales del cuidado: observación y documentación de tecolotes, monjitas y codornices en la frontera norte de méxico     roberto méndez-arreola centro chihuahuense de estudios de posgrado-ciudad juárez robcmendez@gmail.com     resumen actualmente, la observación y registro de las aves realizado por personas en todo el mundo suele asociarse con prácticas de ciencia ciudadana promovidas por distintas instancias que persiguen diferentes propósitos, casi siempre alineados con la identificación taxonómica y la producción de bases de datos mundiales sobre biodiversidad. algunas de estas prácticas han sido cuestionadas por omitir las condiciones de vulnerabilidad ambiental y los vínculos entre humanos y más que humanos que dan lugar a estas observaciones, descontextualizando la información producida. en este trabajo propongo que las aves y las personas se constituyen en coagentes para la construcción de la frontera a través de un análisis de las prácticas de observación y documentación de aves realizadas por personas que viven en ciudad juárez, una metrópoli ubicada en la frontera norte de méxico, vulnerada por la contaminación industrial y el desecamiento del río bravo. desde una perspectiva más que humana y en diálogo con estudios feministas de la ciencia, se muestra cómo las observaciones que realizan estas personas responden a intereses diversos, desde los científicos hasta aquellos relacionados con el reclamo ciudadano de contar con más espacios públicos, las prácticas artísticas y de denuncia por un entorno lastimado y vulnerado en ambos lados de la frontera. se trata de prácticas que buscan poner atención en las distintas formas de vida que participan en la construcción de las ciudades y las fronteras e involucrarse con su cuidado, por lo que las denomino como ecologías plurales del cuidado. abstract the observation and recording of birds by people around the world are often linked to citizen science initiatives aimed at various goals, primarily focused on taxonomic identification and the creation of global biodiversity databases. however, some of these practices have faced criticism for ignoring the conditions of environmental vulnerability and the connections between humans and more-than-humans, which can lead to a decontextualization of the information produced. in this paper, i suggest that birds and people can be seen as co-agents in constructing the border, particularly through an analysis of bird observation and documentation practices by residents of ciudad juarez, a northern mexican metropolis affected by industrial pollution and the depletion of the rio bravo. adopting a more-than-human perspective and engaging with feminist science studies, i illustrate how these observations reflect various interests, ranging from scientific inquiry to community demands for more public spaces, artistic expressions, and advocacy for a healthier environment on both sides of the border. these practices emphasize the importance of acknowledging the diverse forms of life that contribute to the shaping of cities and borders, and they advocate for greater involvement in their care and protection.   palabras clave/ keywords ciudad juárez, prácticas de observación de aves, ciencia ciudadana, aprendizaje ambiental, estudios fronterizos, ecologías plurales del cuidado     introducción una garza blanca vuela sobre el cauce del río bravo mientras cruza la línea fronteriza donde cientos de personas esperamos turno para la revisión de nuestros documentos migratorios. a pesar de su apariencia brillosa, pasa desapercibida por las personas que intentan cruzar el cauce del río seco que marca la frontera entre méxico y estados unidos. una parvada de ibis aprovecha el agua acumulada en la superficie arcillosa de un campo de algodón que acaba de ser regado para repostar y buscar un poco de comida a unos cuantos metros de un fraccionamiento urbano que colinda con el muro fronterizo. ¿qué podemos decir sobre las aves que viven en la frontera y que ocupan los espacios entre el río bravo, las fábricas y los nuevos fraccionamientos urbanos? ¿por qué nos debe importar la presencia de estas aves en la ciudad? ¿cómo se vinculan estas aves con las personas y las prácticas colectivas de producción de conocimiento, las pedagogías urbanas, la ciudad y la frontera? -notas de campo. abril de 2023 y mayo de 2024 las notas con las que inicio este texto ilustran mi interés en pensar las aves, las personas y las infraestructuras ribereñas y fronterizas como un conglomerado de entidades que fluyen y se enredan para dar forma a la experiencia de habitar en esta frontera del norte de méxico. este interés me llevó a conocer un grupo de personas que participan en la observación y el registro de las aves de ciudad juárez, méxico. con base en una perspectiva más que humana (tsing 2015; haraway 2016; sundberg 2011) argumento que estas actividades deben de entenderse como prácticas comprometidas de habitar y hacer la ciudad y la frontera, pues se articulan con preocupaciones y acciones que buscan visibilizar y hacer frente a procesos como el crecimiento urbano, la desaparición del paisaje agrícola y la contaminación industrial que vulnera a los habitantes humanos y no humanos, por lo que me refiero a estas como ecologías plurales del cuidado. las prácticas vernáculas o amateur de producción de conocimiento han sido investigadas en los estudios de ciencia, tecnología y sociedad (trimbur 2013; mukerji 2009). en particular, la ciencia ciudadana —definida como la participación de ciudadanos en la producción de datos e información para proyectos propios o aportando datos e información para proyectos e instituciones académicas o gubernamentales (corburn 2005; dickinson y bonney 2012)— ha sido abordada en estudios que analizan las formas de organización y participación social, los dispositivos y tecnologías materiales que suelen utilizarse, así como las condiciones de poder y desigualdad entre quienes participan y se involucran en dichas prácticas (piña-romero 2023; méndez-arreola y kalman 2019; vallejo-novoa 2023). se trata de una labor que ha sido cuestionada por su enfoque instrumental, centrado en la producción de datos a partir de objetivos y preguntas planteadas por científicos; aunque también es necesario reconocer que se han documentado prácticas que responden a intereses contextuales y muestran ejercicios auténticos en la medida que responden a intereses locales y han sido descritos como más horizontales e incluyentes (bonney, cooper, y ballard 2016; eitzel et al. 2017). sin embargo, el estudio de estas prácticas no ha tenido en cuenta otras formas de involucrarse en la observación y la documentación de aves que parecen no poner demasiada atención en la clasificación taxonómica y la producción de datos cuantitativos y bases de datos, sino que surgen desde compromisos diversos relacionados con preocupaciones por el deterioro de los espacios urbanos, las infraestructuras naturales y acciones para el cuidado de las aves y otras entidades. estas otras formas de participar en la observación de aves cobran sentido desde posicionamientos feministas de la ciencia (braidotti 2022; hughes y lury 2016), que cuestionan la necesidad de romper con categorías rígidas del pensamiento occidental, que ignoran las interconexiones entre seres humanos y no humanos, y consideran el involucarmiento, la atención y las acciones de cuidado como formas de producción de conocimiento.(puig de la bellacasa 2012, haraway 2016). el objetivo de este texto es problematizar distintas actividades de observación y documentación de las aves que se cruzan con la producción de conocimiento ambiental, el activismo, la creación artística y la defensa del espacio público. de esta manera, se busca ubicar estas actividades de observación de aves en un contexto más amplio que considera su intencionalidad, las condiciones sociales, la desigualdad y la vulnerabilidad ambiental de los contextos donde sucede. planteo la necesidad de reconocer estas otras prácticas de observación de aves como ecologías plurales del cuidado, definidas como formas de habitar y hacer la ciudad a través de la participación en la producción de conocimiento y objetos culturales que reconocen la pluralidad de experiencias y agencias, y ponen en el centro el pensamiento como un ejercicio colectivo, relacional y multiespecie (puig de la bellacasa 2012). las fronteras de ciudad juárez ciudad juárez, ubicada en la frontera norte de méxico, colinda con la ciudad de el paso, texas. en el discurso habitual, se suele caracterizar este territorio desértico como innocuo y desprovisto de vida (miranda tovalí 2021), una narrativa que parece fomentar una visión del entorno que niega la presencia y el papel de otras entidades vivas como las aves que habitan de manera abundante los ecosistemas del desierto chihuahuense (petters et al. 2023; moreno-contreras, botello, y gómez de silva 2015). se trata de una percepción que normaliza fenómenos como la presencia de basura industrial, la urbanización o la destrucción de los humedales del río bravo y que han empobrecido las condiciones para el sostenimiento de la vida en la frontera y disminuido la capacidad de respuesta y recuperación de los sistemas socioecológicos ante el cambio climático así como otros fenómenos de escala global. ciudad juárez es una urbe de más de un millón y medio de habitantes, lo que la convierte en una de las más pobladas de la frontera de méxico con estados unidos (inegi 2022). está ubicada en el gran ecosistema del desierto chihuahuense, que se caracteriza por su cubierta de arbustos, matorrales, pastizales y arenales. en este paisaje, los ríos tienen un papel primordial al ser una infraestructura natural que permite el aporte de agua al ecosistema, generando un ambiente propicio para la flora y fauna, así como las actividades agrícolas. precisamente gracias a los aportes de agua del río bravo, el crecimiento de la ciudad tuvo como eje el desarrollo agrícola por el cultivo de hortalizas y vid, y, posteriormente, como centro importante para el cultivo del algodón durante buena parte del siglo xx. desde la década de los sesenta, el crecimiento urbano fue impulsado principalmente por el desarrollo habitacional e industrial que ha transformado el territorio (esquivel ceballos et al. 2019); de ser una ciudad cuya actividad económica principal se estableció alrededor de las actividades primarias, las últimas décadas, la urbanización e industrialización ha tenido como consecuencia el desplazamiento y, en algunos casos, la eliminación de las zona agrícolas, así como un desinterés general por el río y quienes ahí habitan. esta transformación de un ecosistema cultivado1 a uno urbano dominado por industrias y zonas habitacionales, dio paso a la pérdida de infraestructura agrícola conformada por arboledas, humedales, pastizales, palomares y acequias que solían utilizar las aves de la región (véase figura 1). figura 1. palomares en un campo de algodón abandonado en juárez. a pesar del desplazamiento de la agricultura, aún es posible encontrar algunos de estos palomares en zonas que tenían un uso agrícola y dan cuenta de la relación de los agricultores con las aves. fuente: fotografía de roberto méndez. el cambio ambiental más significativo de los últimos años ha sido desencadenado por el control de los flujos de agua del río bravo como parte de los acuerdos internacionales de aguas, que sumado a las descargas de aguas contaminantes, las obras de infraestructura y canalización para prevenir inundaciones, así como los efectos del cambio climático, han provocado el deterioro del ecosistema ripario (sandoval-solis et al. 2022). el río bravo solía sostener un ensamblaje de vida donde ahora coexisten las aguas grises, la basura y las patrullas fronterizas, así como las cercas de alambres de púas que lastiman a migrantes y aves. estas condiciones de precariedad ambiental, caracterizadas por el deterioro del río bravo, la contaminación e invasión de suelos sellados por cubiertas impermeables de cemento para vivienda y maquiladoras, así como la basura provocada por la industria, parecen tener un impacto en la presencia de aves (véase figura 2). regiones en el mundo con estas características han sido definidas como zonas de sacrificio (reinert 2016, 2018) para enfatizar que sus condiciones ambientales están determinadas por el uso y la extracción de recursos que son predominantemente utilizados en otros lugares, así como por la acumulación de desechos que resultan de estos procesos extractivos. el término zona de sacrificio es utilizado para poner en contexto situaciones de vulnerabilidad ambiental y explicarlas como relaciones sociales desiguales, acumulación de desechos y sistemas económicos extractivos. tanto la actividad agrícola de antaño, como la industria maquiladora actual, han permitido la acumulación de ganancia y capital en los grandes centros urbanos y financieros. los productos elaborados en esta frontera se inscriben en flujos de mercancía y capital globales, sin una atención clara a las consecuencias sociales y ambientales que tienen en su lugar de producción. desde esta lógica, la contaminación ambiental, la urbanización de áreas cercanas al río que solían fungir como zonas de recarga de acuíferos, así como la destrucción de los humedales del río bravo, son resultado de una práctica que privilegia una economía extractivista que genera valor para unos, pero lastima a otros. figura 2. monjitas americanas volando sobre el río bravo, contaminado por descargas de drenaje y el muro fronterizo en juárez-el paso. fuente: fotografía de roberto méndez. nota metodológica: relatos, fotografías y huellas en términos metodológicos, este trabajo pretende aportar al estudio de las fronteras concebidas como espacios construidos y transformados por entidades humanas y no humanas. de forma amplia, se trata de pensar los espacios urbanos como escenarios donde suceden encuentros entre diferentes formas de vida. los estudios en esta línea de pensamiento contribuyen a superar la idea de los animales no humanos como objetos, al considerarlos participantes en la construcción de las ciudades y el mundo (dicenta y correa 2021; barua 2024). como entidades vivas, las aves no sólo colaboran en intercambios de materia e información, como suele ser planteado por las ecologías convencionales que describiré más adelante, sino que también se involucran con las personas, afectando de manera recíproca sus acciones y comportamientos. hasta ahora, los estudios que dan cuenta de las aves en esta región se han centrado en listados e inventarios sobre su presencia, identificándolas como entidades biológicas discretas (moreno-contreras, botello, y gómez de silva 2015; petters, hoyos, miramontes cinco, gatica-colima, y martínez-calderas 2023). en su lugar, en este trabajo propongo un estudio en el que las aves y las personas son co-agentes en la construcción de la frontera y sus prácticas. para explorar el significado de las aves en esta región de la frontera como entidades vivas interconectadas con el paisaje, las personas y otras entidades no-humanas, he recurrido a narraciones textuales y visuales con base en entrevistas y conversaciones informales sostenidas desde el 2022 con personas que realizan actividades de cuidado cotidiano de las aves y su entorno en ciudad juárez. mi contacto con ellas se dio por mi participación en la observación de aves que me llevó a conocer personas con los mismos intereses, platicarles de mi investigación y entrevistarlas. en algunos casos, les acompañé en sus actividades y realicé un registro de los dispositivos materiales y recursos que utilizaban y mantuve una comunicación constante vía whatsapp. en estos encuentros presenciales o virtuales, las personas me hablaron de sus motivaciones, de la forma como se involucraron en la observación de las aves, el modo como realizan sus registros, los dispositivos que utilizan, sus intereses y preocupaciones, así como sus interlocutores humanos y no humanos. les solicité fotografías para complementar las narraciones que se ofrecen en la siguiente sección. en suma, en lugar de estudiar a las aves de forma aislada, lo hice siempre en relación con las personas, los vínculos y sus conexiones con otras entidades. en este sentido, el estudio de estas ecologías plurales del cuidado sigue la propuesta de duran y sundberg (2022) de experimentar el entorno de nuevas maneras, a través de metodologías adecuadas para pensar y explorar nuestros encuentros con lo no humano. coincido con sunberg (2011) y latour (2004) acerca de la posibilidad de interpretar la acción no humana siguiendo e identificando sus rastros a través del territorio. debo reconocer que en este estudio he privilegiado la voz de las personas, pero creo que los testimonios orales y visuales fueron construidos considerando las huellas que esas entidades aladas y las personas co-elaboran. prácticas de documentación, observación de las aves en la frontera y ecologías plurales del cuidado las aves son una forma de vida presente en cualquier rincón del planeta. como lo señala arnal (2002), entre las especies animales, las aves son fáciles de observar y estudiar, en buena medida debido a sus hábitos diurnos, sus cantos y sus características visuales. en la biología aparecen retratadas como un grupo taxonómico de distribución mundial, mientras que en otros campos como la literatura y las artes plásticas, suelen ocupar un lugar privilegiado (rowlett 1999; lovette y fitzpatrick 2016). los últimos años se han popularizado los programas de monitoreo de las aves en todo el mundo bajo la denominación de ciencia ciudadana como resultado de la demanda de grupos académicos y centros de investigación que requieren datos acerca de su distribución, abundancia, conservación y hábitat (bell et al. 2008). este incremento en el número de programas y voluntarios se ha dado en el marco de lo que algunos han llamado como la globalización de la biodiversidad (turnhout y boonman-berson 2011) para señalar que el estudio de las entidades vivas se realiza de forma abstracta y por medio de su caracterización técnica y cuantitativa para transformarla en datos estandarizados. estas prácticas de observación amateur de la naturaleza se remontan al coleccionismo y la producción de conocimientos sobre la naturaleza impulsados por las monarquías desde el siglo xvi. se relacionan también con el trabajo de naturalistas y exploradores cuyo objetivo era, en el primero de los casos, la contemplación como acto estético y actividad de recreo; mientras que para los segundos se trataba de un proyecto colonialista basado en la realización de inventarios de recursos naturales que hicieran posible la apropiación de nuevos territorios (constantino 2018; prior y schaffner 2011). el interés actual sobre las aves no puede explicarse solamente desde intenciones y motivos científicos y conservacionistas, pues se trata de una actividad que se realiza también desde el disfrute y la contemplación, la creación artística, así como desde la preocupación ciudadana relacionada con la importancia de otras formas de vida y su desaparición (eitzel et al. 2017). sin embargo, el uso, la distribución y la disponibilidad de recursos como binoculares, guías de campo, aplicaciones digitales, así como redes y apoyos institucionales, atienden a un interés que parece estar más vinculado con la realización de clasificaciones y taxonomías rigurosas, así como la construcción de bases de datos para científicos profesionales (schaffner 2011). en otras palabras, debido a que el monitoreo desde la ciencia ciudadana está centrado y en cierta medida preocupado por la identificación taxonómica, la conformación de listas de especies y la elaboración de bases de datos, lo que se documenta son las especies pero no su contexto, muchas veces deteriorado y vulnerado, ni sus vínculos y enredos con otras entidades con las que co-habitan y construyen el mundo (dicenta y correa 2021; gonzález-duarte y méndez-arreola 2024). como sugieren lawrence y turnhout (2010), esta construcción de la biodiversidad basada en observaciones de miles de voluntarios alrededor del mundo y que alimenta bases de datos, conlleva riesgos como perder contacto con el hábitat de las especies que se documentan y las personas involucradas en su registro. las observaciones se descontextualizan, ocultando el conjunto de vínculos y nudos en los que se involucran las especies registradas, así como las conexiones con las personas humanas y otras entidades (schaffner 2011). y desde el punto de vista de los estudios feministas de ciencia y tecnología, estas prácticas legitiman el afán clasificatorio y taxonómico, concentrado en establecer límites y categorías discretas que reproducen dualismos cultura/naturaleza, sujeto/objeto, conocimiento situado/conocimiento científico, saber/cuidar, perpetuando acciones de despojo, maltrato y negación de otras formas de vida no humana. con base en la noción de actor-red, prior y schaffner (2011) señalan que la observación e identificación de aves representa una familia de prácticas culturales que están moldeadas e influidas por múltiples motivos sociohistóricos de largo aliento, mediadas por artefactos como las guías de identificación de aves, binoculares, cámaras fotográficas, listados de observación de aves y lenguaje taxonómico, los cuales son usados e incorporados por formas particulares en situaciones específicas. acerca de la situacionalidad de las actividades de observación de aves, vallejo-novoa (2023) muestra que varios de los grupos de pajareros en méxico aparecieron y fueron impulsados por instituciones gubernamentales y organizaciones civiles que promueven iniciativas de ciencia ciudadana top-down, sin embargo, los grupos también responden a intenciones y situaciones contextuales particulares alrededor de problemáticas e intereses que las personas participantes buscan atender y resolver. para reconocer la naturaleza situada de las actividades de observación y registro de aves, así como su vínculo con procesos históricos y globales de producción de conocimiento ambiental, retomo la noción de práctica social (schatzki 2002). al hablar de prácticas quiero centrar mi atención en la forma como se realizan a partir de la articulación de distintas ideas y significados que las personas le atribuyen a la actividad, así como distintos dispositivos materiales que fungen como mediadores y portadores de significado en situaciones contextuales específicas. en lugar de enfocarme en la idea más popular de la ciencia ciudadana alineada a la ecología convencional que pone atención en los datos y en las especies, pero no en las intenciones, las agencias compartidas y los significados atribuidos por las personas, el núcleo de mi análisis está en los eventos de observación y el contexto de los propios observadores, así como los dispositivos materiales y el marco más amplio en el que se enmarca cualquier actividad social, entendiendo lo social como constituido también por entidades más que humanas (latour 2008; tsing 2015). si bien pensar la observación de aves como una práctica social contribuye a complejizar nuestro entendimiento al poner atención en los vínculos y las relaciones que sostienen y construyen esta práctica, es una mirada que aun considera a las aves como meros objetos de monitoreo. mirar desde estos relacionamientos de la ecología convencional no ha sido suficiente para lograr vivir en este mundo lastimado y en ruinas (tsing 2015), pues se trata de ejercicios que homogenizan y estandarizan prácticas de conocimiento al deslocalizarlas y descorporeizarlas, descalificando la participación y el involucramiento más subjetivo, activo y preocupado (haraway 2016; braidotti 2022). más que una ecología convencional que se basa en un entendimiento de las especies como entidades discretas y contenida en un lenguaje taxonómico que homogeniza a los individuos de las poblaciones, requerimos ecologías plurales del cuidado que reconozcan la necesidad de un conocimiento relacional, que no distingan entre especies silvestres y urbanas o entre espacios humanos y no humanos. necesitamos relatos científicos que se confundan con narrativas situadas, y narrativas auténticas que se enreden con relatos científicos que nos adviertan sobre violencias ejercidas contra otras formas de vida y la vulnerabilidad de quienes vivimos en sitios lastimados. más que habitantes pasivos, las aves están presentes en este paisaje y se enredan en diferentes relaciones con las personas. en estos enredos, aves y personas se afectan mutuamente y participan en la creación de la ciudad y sus fronteras (sundberg 2011). las codornices, los tecolotes, las monjitas,2 así como patos y gansos que presentaré en este texto, afectan a las personas llamando su atención y provocando acciones diversas relacionadas con su cuidado y la protección de su entorno. a su vez, las aves reaccionan adecuando sus hábitos de vida a estos espacios transformados (véase figura 1 y figura 7). estas perspectivas relacionales ilustran el conjunto de vínculos, prácticas y trayectorias que han dado lugar a su dispersión o desaparición (van dooren 2014). también se han mostrado como entidades que han incidido en ecologías y economías urbanas a través de sus enredos con las personas (searle, turnbull, y adams 2023; haraway 2016). despret (2022) nos anima a pensar cómo la diversidad de aves y sus comportamientos nos puede ayudar a considerar otras formas de hacer territorio y de habitar. al analizar las actividades de observación y documentación que realizamos habitantes de ciudad juárez, argumentaré que se realizan en el marco de preocupaciones y acciones por una ciudad que ha desplazado e invisibilizado a sus habitantes alados. siguiendo a haraway, son actividades de conocimiento situado (1988) en la medida que tienen lugar en un contexto relacional, y son específicas a estos vínculos y ensambles. son actividades que se inscriben en preocupaciones acerca de las aves y su territorio, a la par de inquietudes por el futuro mismo de las personas, el río, la ciudad y la frontera. en lugar de una actividad de ciencia ciudadana y ecología convencional, es una práctica relacional de pensar y saber que requiere de cuidado (puig de la bellacasa 2012), en la medida que las personas participantes reconocen su interdependencia con las aves y la vulnerabilidad compartida. en este sentido, propongo que son prácticas inscritas en ecologías plurales del cuidado, pues son diversas y visibilizan formas de cooperación y abren las posibilidades de hacer cosas junto a otras entidades humanas y no humanas. en lugar de un enfoque instrumental orientado a la cantidad de observaciones sobre las aves, elaborar listas de especies encontradas o simplemente poner una marca en la guía de aves por cada especie observada (schaffner 2011), las ecologías plurales del cuidado apuntan a descubrir maneras de co-habitar con otras personas y formas de vida (puig de la bellacasa 2012). para mostrar estas prácticas plurales de documentación y cuidado, presentaré varias narrativas construidas a partir de un cuidadoso trabajo de acompañamiento y entrevistas a varias personas que viven en ciudad juárez. a través de estas narrativas me interesa posicionar y reconocer el trabajo que realizan quienes han puesto atención en las de aves de la ciudad, así como experimentar con otras formas de escritura que puedan dar cuenta de las aves no sólo a través de inventarios o censos, sino de las relaciones que estas construyen con otros seres, en este caso, las personas. gabriela |codornices norteñas| palomas las codornices norteñas son unas pequeñas aves de plumaje gris, café y ocre. se caracterizan por una pluma negra en la frente curvada hacia adelante. su presencia es más abundante hacia el desierto de sonora, pero en esta parte del norte de chihuahua es posible encontrar algunas poblaciones importantes. en ciudad juárez se observan en zonas cercanas a campos de cultivo desplazándose en grupos o bandadas, emitiendo siempre un característico cacareo. en la zona donde gabriela3 vive, una mujer de alrededor de 40 años, existe una tensión constante por el uso de suelo entre los intereses de empresas de construcción de fraccionamientos y vecinos que reclaman espacio para áreas verdes e infraestructura escolar y de recreación. en este contexto, las codornices se han vuelto una especie de bandera o símbolo del reclamo de habitantes humanos (véase figura 3). figura 3.codornices norteñas caminando sobre una barda que delimita el patio de una casa, frente a campo de algodón. fuente: fotografía de david a. gabriela ha participado junto con un grupo de ciudadanos que gestiona la construcción de un parque público en un terreno donde las codornices habitan; se trata de un área que era usada para cultivar sorgo y algodón, hasta que quedó rodeado de avenidas y zonas habitacionales, por lo que actualmente acumula restos de vegetación seca y escombros de construcción como pedazos de ladrillos y varillas retorcidas que dan lugar a recovecos que las codornices aprovechan para hacer sus guaridas y construir sus nidos. conocí a gabriela cuando me invitó a visitar este terreno y platicarme acerca de las gestiones que realizó el grupo para que este terreno pudiera ser etiquetado como área pública por las autoridades locales después de que actores privados mostraron interés en construir un centro comercial, lo que acabaría de inmediato con el hábitat de las aves. el empeño de gabriela y otros vecinos del sector, a través de la realización de gestiones gubernamentales, permitió que el municipio etiquetara este terreno como área pública. para este fin, gabriela y sus vecinos presentaron a las autoridades un plan para desarrollar el parque que incorporaba el trabajo de profesionistas y estudiantes de desarrollo urbano de la universidad pública local, quienes consideraron áreas para la alimentación y anidación de las codornices. el grupo decidió bautizar el incipiente parque como ”rochorí“, que significa codorniz en rarámuri y fue una manera de reconocer el hábitat de estas aves, pues como señaló gabriela: ”el derecho a la ciudad no sólo es de las personas, sino también de las aves que ocupaban estos espacios antes de nuestra llegada“. la primera ocasión que acompañé a gabriela al terreno donde construyeron el parque, me mostró unos planos y una carpeta que no parecía tener relación con el monitoreo de las aves, pues contenía documentos como actas de reuniones, mapas y acuerdos vecinales. estos documentos eran evidencia material del tipo de mediaciones alrededor de la práctica de observación de aves de gabriela y el grupo de vecinos: en lugar de artefactos como guías de aves o binoculares que suelen mediar las prácticas más científicas, los mapas y actas describían el terreno y mostraban el proceso de gestión del parque ”rochorí" ante autoridades y otros vecinos. cuando visitaba con gabriela el terreno, cada ave que ella veía la identificaba como codorniz o rochorí, aunque podrían ser de otras especies más comunes como las palomas. lo que para mi mirada de biólogo podría parecer un error taxonómico, para gabriela y sus vecinos, las aves —paloma o codorniz —representaban la posibilidad de argumentar la importancia cuidar el espacio y avanzar en su lucha por un terreno de uso público frente a los intereses privados de las empresas inmobiliarias del sector. tecolotes llaneros | david | lechuzas los tecolotes llaneros o del desierto suelen habitar en las llanuras y pastizales abiertos. comparten su espacio vital con roedores como ardillas y perritos de la pradera quienes excavan madrigueras subterráneas que los tecolotes utilizan cuando los mamíferos las abandonan. se trata de una especie que vive en el suelo, pero que depende de otros para construir sus madrigueras ya que no tiene la capacidad de escavar. en las ciudades, se ha documentado que suelen prosperar debido a la falta de depredadores y la disposición de alimento debido a su dieta diversa (rebolo-ifrán, tella, y carrete 2017). figura 4. tecolote llanero saliendo de su madriguera entre el escombro y la basura. fuente: fotografía de mónica martínez. en esta ciudad fronteriza es frecuente encontrar familias o parejas de estas aves habitando pequeñas cavidades que quedan entre el escombro y la basura, o bien en oquedades que son comunes en el suelo arcilloso de la ciudad (véase figura 4). el llamado de estas aves es bastante característico, y su presencia no pasa desapercibida, sobre todo considerando que muchas personas las nombran lechuzas a la vez que les atribuyen distintos peligros nocturnos. ya sea lechuzas o tecolotes son objeto de supersticiones y miedos. es probable que, por esta razón, se trate de aves que habitualmente son reportadas por vecinos a través de grupos vecinales de whatsapp que reaccionan con curiosidad y sorpresa por la presencia cerca de sus casas. durante 2022 conocí a david de 53 años, un vecino que, además de estar al pendiente del crecimiento de los árboles de un parque vecinal, solía identificar a las parejas de tecolotes en temporadas de anidación y hacerles refugios bajo la tierra al remover escombro o excavar directamente en la arcilla. en un entorno como ciudad juárez, los tecolotes usaban las madrigueras de ardillas y ratones, que abundaban debido a la disponibilidad del alimento proporcionado por un entorno con presencia de actividades agrícolas. el desplazamiento de la agricultura generó que estos mamíferos fueran eliminados del paisaje y los tecolotes quedaran sin su socio excavador. en este contexto, david se dio a la tarea de aprender a construir estas madrigueras y proveerles hábitat para las temporadas de anidación. la tarde que lo conocí se ocupaba de llevar agua desde una acequia cercana a varios árboles que él había sembrado en banquetas y parques, lo que ilustra cómo su interés en los tecolotes se entrelazaba con su preocupación por otras entidades vivas. durante el verano del 2023 se reportó la presencia de una pareja de tecolotes llaneros entre los escombros dejados por las obras de construcción del centro de inteligencia artificial, un moderno espacio de investigación y transferencia de tecnología al servicio de la industria de la ciudad, ubicado a menos de tres kilómetros del cauce del río bravo. personal del lugar estuvo al tanto de esta pareja de aves hasta que las crías abandonaron la madriguera formada entre la arcilla del lugar y los escombros (serna 2023), mostrando los vínculos entre personas, tecolotes y el terreno arcilloso. monjitas americanas | janette, de 40 años, es artista y activista en juárez, aunque prefiere que la identifique como artesana. su primer acercamiento a las aves sucedió tras notar la presencia de monjitas americanas donde varias tuberías descargaban aguas negras en el río bravo. durante el 2021 y 2023, fallas en el sistema de drenaje de ciudad juárez y el paso provocaron que aguas negras llegaran al cauce del río, generando focos de infección y cambios en la ecología acuática. durante su primer encuentro con las monjitas en las orillas del río, notó cómo la elegancia que caracteriza a estas aves contrastaba con el paisaje deteriorado y se cuestionó por qué ellas no podían tener acceso a un espacio y agua limpia. las monjitas americanas que ella observó en esa ocasión son visitantes frecuentes de las aguas del río bravo y corresponden a poblaciones establecidas en varios puntos a lo largo del torrente. se trata de aves que parecen adaptarse a hábitats artificiales como diques y alcantarillas, donde en ocasiones la única agua disponible es la que surge del drenaje (véase figura 5). el interés de janette por las aves la llevó a buscar grupos académicos en los que no encontró eco a sus preocupaciones por la destrucción del hábitat, lo que la orilló a concentrarse más en sus procesos de creación artística. su práctica se enfocó en realizar un dispositivo electrónico de código abierto para monitorear la presencia de las monjitas en el río. durante 2021 instaló este aparato sobre una base de textiles reciclados encontrados como basura en el río, que le permitió grabar sonidos del afluente y transmitirlos a través de internet (https://www.janetteterrazas.com/riobravo) con la intención de visibilizar, por un lado, la presencia de las aves, y por otro, la descarga de aguas negras en el cauce del río bravo. además, fue un modo de conmemorar el trabajo de berta cáceres, activista defensora de los ríos (véase figura 6). figura 5. monjitas americanas en una descarga de drenaje sobre una calle. al fondo, el muro fronterizo de metal. fuente: fotografía de roberto méndez. a través de su instalación, janette discute el acceso desigual a las aguas del río bravo debido a la presencia de embalses estadounidenses que permiten a ese país almacenar y controlar la liberación de agua en la parte alta de la cuenca. además de práctica artística, ella también se involucró algún tiempo en el activismo mediante un colectivo por la defensa del río bravo y la organización de actividades de observación de aves o pajareadas abiertas a la comunidad. ella describe sus prácticas de observación como una provocación de las aves: ”como te dije, yo llegué al río sin el propósito de ver a las aves; creo que estas me buscaron con el propósito de transmitirme algo“. la práctica de observación de aves que ella me relató y comenzó con el registro de las monjitas y sus hábitats, se ha extendido a actividades de observación de plantas y animales del río en ambos lados de la frontera, así como la recolección de muestras de agua para someterlas a reacción con el pigmento de grana cochinilla —un insecto del que se obtiene un colorante rojo intenso— con la finalidad de conocer el nivel de acidez del agua y obtener un catálogo de colores del río a partir de sus características fisicoquímicas, una especie de práctica científica amalgamada con la creación artística. figura 6. dispositivo marca arduino justo en el sitio donde el río bravo entra a méxico por ciudad juárez. fuente: fotografía tomada del sitio https://www.janetteterrazas.com/riobravo con autorización de su autora janette terrazas. figura 7. monjitas (derecha inferior) en el río bravo frente al muro y la serpentina de alambre de púas instalada por la patrulla fronteriza. fuente: fotografía de janette terrazas. gansos | isaac | patos conocí a isaac, de 26 años, a través de un grupo ciudadano al cuidado de la sierra de juárez, un sistema montañoso que alimenta el acuífero conejos-medanos, proveedor de agua a la ciudad. isaac es estudiante de biología y su práctica intersecta su curiosidad académica con sus habilidades artísticas. en una ocasión tuve oportunidad de entrevistarlo cuando realizaba el monitoreo de aves en uno de los parques más grandes de la ciudad, convertido en un sitio importante para el refugio, la alimentación, el descanso y la reproducción de aves locales y migratorias debido a la presencia de varios lagos artificiales. isaac es conocido por varias personas en la ciudad como experto en las aves de la región, aunque él siempre hace el señalamiento que su interés se centra en las aves acuáticas. su relato de ciudad juárez como una urbe en medio del desierto chihuahuense interesante para observar aves, contrastó con los discursos habituales que describen a la ciudad como vacía y carente de vida. de acuerdo con él, la ubicación de la ciudad entre dos sistemas montañosos como la sierra madre oriental y occidental permite la presencia de aves locales y migratorias. como estudiante de biología y participante activo en diferentes grupos de observadores de aves, isaac me mostró las diferentes herramientas para realizar sus monitoreos, entre ellas una cámara fotográfica de lentes intercambiables, binoculares y guías de aves impresas y digitales que funcionan en su celular. corroboré este acercamiento técnico y científico cuando me señaló que es usuario habitual de dos herramientas en línea que se han popularizado entre quienes hacen y promueven la ciencia ciudadana: ebird y naturalista. la primera se describe como un sitio web y una base de datos biológica desarrollados por el laboratorio de ornitología de la universidad de cornell, que compila observaciones sobre aves proporcionadas por científicos y naturalistas aficionados en todo el mundo. por su parte, naturalista es una plataforma de ciencia ciudadana desarrollada inicialmente en la universidad de california y que funciona como una página web o como aplicación para dispositivos móviles donde se puede hacer un registro de observaciones de la naturaleza a través de la captura de sitios de observación y fotografías, así como otras funcionalidades que permiten generar listas de observaciones, mapas y guías de campo. el trabajo de observación y monitoreo de aves de isaac se ve reflejado en ambas plataformas, donde suma observaciones y registros de prácticamente todo el estado de chihuahua. durante los últimos años he tenido la oportunidad de trabajar junto con observadores de aves en varios proyectos educativos en diferentes lugares del país. siempre me ha parecido interesante cómo su rigor científico para identificar a las aves y el dominio de habilidades como el uso de sus guías de campo y cámaras fotográficas, coexiste con un acercamiento más subjetivo hacia las aves. mientras la identificación taxonómica rigurosa tiene el efecto de borrar los rasgos individuales, al privilegiar a la población y a sus características homogéneas, estos observadores siempre encuentran la manera de hablarme de las aves como seres individuales y subjetivos (urbanik 2012). isaac no ha sido la excepción. además de ser un observador de aves especializado, a juzgar por el tipo de recursos que usa y con quienes interactúa para hacerlo, mantiene una relación con las aves muy personal y cuidadosa. durante una jornada de observación y monitoreo me habló de los gansos migratorios que año con año suelen visitar el parque, reconociéndolos por sus rasgos individuales y sus hábitos específicos, así como preocuparse por su salud y la de sus crías ante la inminente llegada de una primavera bastante calurosa en la ciudad (véase figura 8). durante nuestras conversaciones, la presencia de estas aves en un entorno urbano eran motivo de constantes cuestionamientos y preocupaciones de parte de isaac, quien me compartió que la desaparición de cuerpos de agua como los ríos y humedales de la ciudad provoca que las aves se vean obligadas a ocupar los lagos artificiales del parque donde él realiza su monitoreo: “creo que estas aves han aprendido a realizar sus viajes migratorios ocupando los parques urbanos, pues se trata de ambientes donde pueden asegurar su alimento y refugio ante la desaparición de muchos ríos y lagos en méxico y estados unidos”. figura 8. ganso blanco volando sobre el lago del parque donde isaac hace su monitoreo de aves. fuente: fotografía de isaac miramontes. comentarios finales en muchos lugares del mundo, organizaciones de base tecnocientífica han animado a los ciudadanos a involucrarse en la observación de aves a través de actividades de ciencia ciudadana donde el discurso visual y escrito está centrado en la identificación biológica de estos vertebrados, considerados como un objeto de investigación, conservación o erradicación. se trata de un discurso que suele presentar a las aves como entidades biológicas descontextualizadas que deben ser identificadas como especie y manejadas como un recurso natural (schaffner 2011). varios autores han dado cuenta acerca de cómo la presencia de las aves en las ciudades representa un recurso para pensar nuestra realidad más que humana. oliver (2022) señaló cómo el encuentro cotidiano con garzas en los canales urbanos de la ciudad de birmingham ofrece posibilidades para pensar y materializar nuevas formas de cohabitar espacios urbanos. por su parte, haraway (2016) consigna varios relatos de proyectos y actividades entre las palomas y las personas como ejemplos de colaboración. animado por estas maneras de contar los encuentros con otros seres vivos, presenté las prácticas de observación y documentación de aves de algunas personas en ciudad juárez, méxico, quienes aceptaron relatarme sus intereses, motivaciones y formas de relacionarse con las aves, además de compartirme sus fotografías. desde una perspectiva multiespecie, este texto reconoce el rol de entidades no humanas en nuestra vida cotidiana y en la construcción de las ciudades y las fronteras (margulies 2023; sundberg 2011). como señala gan (2021), dicho enfoque resalta la importancia de la relación entre humanos y no humanos en nuestra historia e identidad, pero también en la construcción de un mundo más habitable (haraway 2016). las narrativas presentadas muestran prácticas de observación y monitoreo de cuatro participantes preocupados por la degradación del hábitat de las aves y las personas. por ello, he denominado sus prácticas como ecologías plurales del cuidado para resaltar su engarce con lógicas de atención y la ciencia ciudadana desde los estudios feministas de ciencia, tecnología y sociedad (braidotti 2022; haraway 1988, 2016). de este modo, es perceptible un diálogo con quienes plantean la naturaleza relacional de la ciencia ciudadana (moon et al. 2024). conforme avanzaba en la construcción del problema de investigación y me enfrentaba a las entrevistas, noté la importancia de reflexionar sobre la importancia metodológica de las fotografías que aparecen a lo largo del texto y sobre los dispositivos que median la práctica de cada participante (schatzki 1996; latour 2008). en primer lugar, las fotografías me permitieron hablar con cada participante acerca de sus inquietudes y preocupaciones acerca del hábitat de las aves y los procesos socioambientales que experimentamos en la frontera. de alguna manera, cada fotografía era un registro no sólo de la presencia de las aves sino también de los vínculos entre aves y personas, así como una herramienta poderosa para el diálogo. y cuando esas imágenes circularon en redes sociales, como parte del activismo de janette, o el uso de plataformas de ciencia ciudadana para el caso de isaac, se convertían en huellas y rastros (sundberg 2011) co-producidos por las aves y las personas, disponibles para una audiencia mayor. por otro lado, los dispositivos que cada una de las personas utilizaba para mediar su práctica de observación y monitoreo eran muy diferentes. junto con las guías de aves, binoculares y aplicaciones para celular utilizadas por isaac y habitualmente reportadas en la literatura (schaffner 2011), pude registrar la presencia de oficios, maquetas y documentos para la realización de trámites vecinales y gubernamentales como los que mostró gabriela, así como los dispositivos electrónicos de janette para grabar los sonidos de las aves y socializarlos a través de internet. desde una perspectiva relacional y de práctica social, estas ecologías plurales del cuidado se caracterizan también por articular personas, aves y tecnologías diversas que apuntan a diferentes formas de habitar y construir la ciudad. finalmente, las prácticas las prácticas que se presentan en este documento son diversas, algunas muy cercanas a la ciencia ciudadana más convencional como las de isaac; las de david tienen el propósito concreto de habilitar madrigueras a sus vecinos alados, interviniendo directamente en el suelo y la arcilla; las de gabriela pasan por el reclamo ciudadano de espacios públicos; mientras que las de janette tienen una connotación artística y de denuncia. para isaac, la fotografía científica y el uso de guías de campo son muy importantes para identificar correctamente a las aves y alimentar las bases de datos de observaciones mundiales; por su parte, gabriela parecía mostrarse menos afanada por hacer una identificación correcta de las codornices que a veces confundía con palomas u otras aves comunes en la ciudad, pues su centro de interés, al igual que el de janette, era el reclamo por un ambiente más habitable para las personas y las propias aves. durante mi investigación, mis propias prácticas de observación de aves fueron afectadas: de iniciar en solitario pasé a compartir mis ideas y preocupaciones con otras personas habitantes de la frontera, experimentando la posibilidad de superar ese modo de pensar en aislamiento, tan habitual de la investigación científica. de esta manera, en lugar de describir y presentar a las aves de la frontera como entidades apartadas y en un ambiente inocuo, las diferentes prácticas de documentación que se presentaron en este artículo permiten verlas en sus relaciones con las personas, las tecnologías, la ciudad y la frontera. los textos y las fotografías muestran a las aves en sus hábitats urbanos, dando cuenta de sus vínculos con otras entidades como la basura urbana, los campos abandonados de algodón, el río deteriorado y el muro fronterizo. es decir, no sólo se trata de mostrar la presencia de vida no humana, sino también de denunciar que las ciudades se han construido sobre la explotación y el deterioro de los ambientes y los recursos que sostienen la vida (thrift 2021). las aves que viven en esta región parecen desafiar las condiciones de precariedad de esta ciudad y nos permiten encontrar formas de co-habitar un territorio ribereño transformado por la agricultura extractiva y la industria maquiladora, mostrándonos que aún pueden ser habitables por distintas formas de vida (véase figura 9). de alguna manera, las prácticas de monitoreo aquí reseñadas atienden al florecimiento de lo que ha sido denominado como “las artes de la atención” (van dooren, kirksey, y münster 2016) para señalar la necesidad de aprender a poner atención en las distintas formas de vida que participan en la construcción de nuestro mundo, las ciudades y las fronteras. figura 9. tecolotes entre escombros de construcción y arcilla. fuente: fotografía de roberto méndez. las prácticas de gabriela, david, janette e isaac, ilustran cómo han sido afectados por las aves que observan, y cómo los encuentros con estas detonaron distintas acciones que van más allá de la contemplación y el registro. sus prácticas de denuncia, de creación artística, de disputa y gestión por espacios públicos, así como la acción directa de cavar en el suelo para los tecolotes, construyen una narrativa alterna de la frontera norte que desafía la noción de excepcionalismo humano al ayudarnos a imaginar espacios habitables y ensamblajes multiespecie (sundberg 2011), así como visibilizan prácticas de cuidado y coexistencia entre las personas y distintas formas de vida que son sumamente necesarias hoy en día que la violencia se exacerba en ambos lados de la frontera. agradecimientos a las personas participantes en este estudio y a las aves de la frontera. los primeros borradores de este trabajo recibieron retroalimentación muy valiosa de hugo reinert en el urban ecologies research group de la universidad de cambridge en 2022. durante 2023, la semilla food center de new mexico me otorgó la chihuahuan desert cultural fellowship, que me permitió avanzar en algunas entrevistas y tener tiempo y espacio para compartir mis textos y seguir observando aves. agradezco a los revisores de este texto, a todas las personas que hicieron comentarios y lecturas cuidadosas, incluyendo los revisores anónimos y lxs editores, así como iván sandoval-cervantes (unlv), columba-gonzález duarte (new school) y mónica islas (enah) por sus ideas para seguir escribiendo. notas 1 es necesario reconocer que mucha de la actividad agrícola que caracterizó a ciudad juárez se realizó bajo sistemas extractivistas y de monocultivo que degradan el suelo, erosionan la biodiversidad y demandan cantidades significativas de agua. sin embargo, se trataba de un paisaje más heterogéneo y biodiverso que el actual. 2 estos nombres comunes corresponden a las siguientes especies y nombres en inglés, siguiendo el mismo orden en el que aparecen en el título: athene cunicularia / burrowing owl; himantopus mexicanus / black-necked stilt; callipepla gambelli / gambel’s quail. 3 en la mayoría de los casos, utilicé los nombres reales de las personas que me compartieron su información después de conversar en diversas ocasiones conellas, revisar juntos este texto y obtener su autorización explícita de aparecer consu identidad como un reconocimiento a su trabajo y tiempo. referencias arnal, yolanda texera. 2002. “the beginnings of modern ornithology in venezuela.” the americas 58 (4): 601-22. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1353/tam.2002.0032. 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chihuahua), 20 de julio. https://diario.mx/juarez/2023/jul/20/video-observan-halcones-desde-el-chamizal-957389.html. sundberg, juanita. 2011. “diabolic caminos in the desert and cat fights on the río: a posthumanist political ecology of boundary enforment in the united states-mexico borderlands.” annals of the association of american geographers 101 (2): 318-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2010.538323. thrift, nigel. 2021. killer cities. sage. trimbur, john. 2013. “grassroots literacy and the written record: asbestos activism in south africa.” journal of sociolinguistics 17 (4): 460-87. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12044. tsing, anna. 2015. the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton university press. turnhout, esther, y susan boonman-berson. 2011. “databases, scaling practices, and the globalization of biodiversity.” ecology and society 16 (1): 35. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-03981-160135. urbanik, julie. 2012. placing animals: an introduction to the geography of human-animal relations. rowman and littlefield. vallejo-novoa, arturo l. 2023. “critical mass: the creation of pajarero/birder communities in mexico for citizen science.” tapuya: latin american science, technology and society 6 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2023.2254620. van dooren, thom. 2014. flight ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction. columbia university press. van dooren, thom, eben kirksey, y ursula münster. 2016. “multispecies studies. cultivating arts of attentiveness.” environmental humanities 8 (1): 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527695.   biografía del autor roberto méndez-arreola es investigador y educador. su práctica se ubica en el cruce de los estudios sobre escritura, prácticas discursivas en la enseñanza de las ciencias, el aprendizaje ambiental y la producción de conocimiento ambiental situado. es miembro del sistema nacional de investigadres. roberto méndez-arreola is an educator and researcher whose practice intersects writing studies, discursive practices in science education, environmental learning, and situated ecological knowledge. intro introduction     nothing/more: black studies and feminist technoscience    cristina visperas university of california, san diego mvisperas@ucsd.edu kimberly juanita brown mounty holyoke college kimbrown@mtholyoke.edu jared sexton university of california, irvine jcsexton@uci.edu the current special feature of catalyst resituates specific themes, topics, objects, sources, and methods in science and technology studies (sts) within the vast interdisciplinary scholarship on blackness and anti-blackness. in many ways, it follows from a large body of work in sts that has charted and critiqued the troubled making of blackness as a biological, medical, legal, and social category apart from “the human.”  the extensive literatures on the intersections of blackness and technoscience collectively highlight both the urgency and difficulty of redefining the subject of sts and the human as “we” generally know it, examining the origins and continuance of racial classifications in scientific, medical, and technological advancements (braun, 2014; browne, 2015; duster, 2003; fullwiley, 2008; pollock, 2012; roberts, 2011; wailoo, 2007), as well as analyzing the instrumental uses of black bodies in the latter (bankole, 1998; tilley, 2008; washington, 2008) and addressing local struggles against health inequalities (benjamin, 2013; nelson, 2011).  reconfiguring the trouble that critical scholarship must stay with (haraway, 2010), such works productively unmoor what are perhaps some of the most central terms of feminist sts:   the body the posthuman infrastructure (situated) knowledge worlding/ world-making “nothing/more: black studies and feminist technoscience” is grounded in these interventions and takes as its main concern how blackness constitutes an object, target, and vehicle for knowledge production in science and medicine. one of the specific aims behind this gathering was to reposition writings generally under-examined in feminist sts as germane, or even foundational to, the latter’s rethinking of the human and non-human world. sylvia wynter (2003), for example, illustrates how the sciences have long been predicated on the historical overrepresentation of western, bourgeois “man” as epitome of "the human," a fundamentally racialized and gendered way of knowing that posits the african, as it were, as the former's "most extreme" other. long before this, wynter had called for a new science of human discourse (1987), one that rearticulates the terms of science itself and that thereby unsettles, in part, what wynter discusses, pace anibal quijano (2000), as its crucial role in establishing the "coloniality of power" (2003).  frantz fanon (1956/2008), in a major point of reference for wynter, imagined in his own time a new humanism, a radically new way of thinking and being whose emergence signals nothing less than the "end of the world" (p. 76, 191), of the generative destruction of onto-epistemologies and subject positions borne out of and maintained by the force of anti-blackness, including the recurrent negation of black subjectivity occasioned by the white gaze in the natural scientific attitude. and hortense spillers (1987/2003) has long situated this onto-epistemological potency of blackness in the stalled historical dynamics of racial slavery, in which the “entire captive community [became] a living laboratory” not only for medical experimentation or for the scientific management of slave labor, but also for the material evolution of capitalism, the philosophical articulation of modernity, and the speculative claims of the subject broadly understood (pp. 207-208). the editors of the current special feature read the essays collected here as demonstrative of this critical approach at the intersections of black studies and feminist technoscience; an inhabitation of a problem or a set of problems that reach for nothing/more: both the nothing more of a practice of blackness sufficient unto itself and the (absolute) nothing or (too much) more that blackness is figured to be (or not to be) in the anti-black imagination. this approach holds some implications for methodology, as shown aptly in ruha benjamin’s narrative sketch, “ferguson is the future.”  set in 2064, the sketch follows protagonist aiyana mo’nay stanely jones as she attempts to secure or protect a biobank under attack by “raiders” intent on its stem cell supply. the biobank is the largest among those constructed by a reparations movement advancing organ regenerative technology for victims of police brutality. a futuristic, science fictional approach to urgent issues in our own time, benjamin’s sketch enacts to great effect what she calls “speculative methods” in her accompanying essay, “racial fictions, biological facts: expanding the sociological imagination through speculative methods.”  in the social sciences, the speculative offers “refashionings” or “alternative realities” for exploring the complex relationship between race, fact, and fiction, or, to paraphrase benjamin, how race becomes both fact and fiction as a lived reality of inequality and as a deterministic understanding of social differences. envisioning and, more importantly, testing possible social worlds beyond existing ones where subjugation remains routine, benjamin’s account of speculative methods recognizes the ingenuity of racism and helps us to “anticipate and intervene” in ever more advanced variations of its “logics of extinction.” a rigorously reflexive experimental approach, speculative methods thus also foreground the limitations and reproductions of dominant knowledge systems taken on by avowedly resistant narratives and practices. staying with the speculative register, diana leong's "the mattering of black lives: octavia butler’s hyperempathy and the promise of the new materialism" reads the work of the award-wining black feminist science fiction writer alongside developments in critical theory. it asks pointed questions about the latter's capacity to think seriously about race in general and racial blackness in particular insofar as its turn toward the object—and away from the supposed limitations of "identity politics"—is compromised by a systemic inattention to the political-intellectual project of black studies. after reviewing some of the more recent representative collections of new materialist scholarship and identifying along the way where that discourse fails to account for the sources and effects of racialization in its formulation of the anthropocene, leong pursues an illustrative reading of butler's parable duology (1993; 1998). in the academic reception of butler's 1990s series, leong finds a telling example of how the disavowal of race in theoretical production leads, in literature as much as in philosophy, to a profound misapprehension of a work's most critical insights and directs the unwary critic to follow the wrong implications and to draw the wrong conclusions from the encounter with a black feminist speculative universe. if new materialist thought, even as it intervenes on the western humanist tradition, could repose some of its basic questions and unsettle some of its guiding assumptions, it might find that writers like nalo hopkinson (1998; 2000) and butler are not only fellow travelers but also leading lights. in other words, it might begin to appreciate the complex simplicity of leong's opening declaration: "black lives matter and black lives matter and black lives matter." moya bailey’s “misogynoir in medical media: on caster semenya and r. kelly” offers “black feminist health-science studies” as a vital and far-reaching intervention in medical curricula, elucidating this analytical and pedagogical approache by scrutinizing two examples of misogynoir in popular and medical media. a cogent framework for examining the hypervisibility of black women, bailey’s mysoginoir combines “misogyny, ‘the hatred of women,’ and noir, which means ‘black’ but also carries film and media connotations”—making it an especially useful analytic for addressing the ways both anti-blackness and misogyny inform media and medical representations of black trans and cis women.  in her first example, bailey discusses the invasive and much-publicized gender-testing of caster semenya, a south african runner who, in 2009, broke the world record in the women’s 800-meter race at the track and field world championships and won silver at the 2012 olympic games in london. and bailey’s second example considers the trial and acquittal of r&b artist r. kelly, who was charged with possessing child pornography and soliciting a minor. in both examples, medical authority underwrites popular and legal accounts of black women’s bodies and sexualities, reinforcing racist, gendered, and ableist standards positioning such bodies as always already non-normative: semenya is figured as too masculine, while the minor—a thirteen-year-old black girl—is regarded as too sexually mature or developed. bailey's forceful analysis of these examples underscores the importance of what she describes as a science for social justice that centers “the health and well-being of marginalized groups,” and a health-science studies “with the collaborative strength to push for the changes they wish to see.”   also taking up dominant representations of the black female body, and of the black maternal figure in particular, zakiyyah jackson’s “sense of things” inventively reads nalo hopkinson's 1998 novel, brown girl in the ring, alongside aspects of sylvia wynter's powerful critique of imperial modernity (1984). this reading bears crucially upon matters of sense perception as they are construed variously between natural scientific thought and the phenomenological reduction in the western humanist tradition. for jackson, some of the most fundamental ontological and epistemological questions raised in and by prevailing perceptual practices therein are brought to a productive structural crisis with regard to the non-representability of what she terms "the black mater(nal)." by this name, jackson indicates "a figure of anxiety concerning the indefinite distinction between immanence and transcendence...reality and illusion, reason and its absence, science and fiction, "or what might otherwise be understood as "the terms tasked with adjudicating proper perception of 'the world'." in looking, then, to the "mind-body-social nexus" as it is rendered in hopkinson's acclaimed novel, jackson points toward other ways and means of tracing the effects of a necessary disorientation produced through the literary—if not also the literal—inhabitation of a blackened reality. the resulting vertigo, evoked by wynter and hopkinson in turn, emerges from conditions of a paradigmatic captivity and yet enables "a redistributed sensorium" suggesting "a dizzying sense of vivifying potentiality." james doucet-battle expands on the black maternal in his essay, “bioethical matriarchy: race, gender, and the gift in genomic research.” his incisive formulation of “bioethical matriarchy” charts racialized and gendered forms of exchange and obligation characterizing the negation of black kinship structures from slavery to the present. doucet-battle returns to the harvesting and genetic sequencing of the hela cell line, which was originally taken from the cervical cancer cells of henrietta lacks, a black patient in the once racially segregated facility of the johns hopkins university hospital and who later died of the illness without ever knowing that her cells had been harvested for experimental purposes. carefully tracing the evolving meaning of “matriarchy” and its roots in gendered and racial dispossession, doucet-battle illustrates how the term comes to obscure the material-discursive uses of the hela cell line as instances of bodily appropriation. hela’s participation in the “genealogical aspirations” of contemporary genetic ancestry testing is exemplary of this move. as doucet-battle shows, the sequencing of the hela cell line and its ascribed status as “african” are marshaled in scientific discourses about a “genetic eve” or, more commonly, an “african eve,” in which mitochondrial dna—genetic material pass downed through maternal lines—is increasingly utilized for locating or sourcing “degrees of africanicity” in samples of the “admixed” human genome. doucet-battle leaves us with pressing questions about reciprocity and justice in these “tissue economies” (waldby & mitchell, 2006), positing the (im)possibility of making the bioethical matriarchy “whole” in a context where redress for lacks’ descendants, and for other subjects of biomedical research more broadly, remains profoundly incomplete. sandra harvey’s “the hela bomb and the science of unveiling” also provides a trenchant analysis of hela’s troubled history and the pivotal questions of justice that history raises. taking up scientific and cultural narratives about hela and its donor, harvey compellingly depicts the fear of miscegenation and black racial passing underlying the 1966 “unveiling” of hela contamination in cell cultures worldwide.  dubbed the “hela bomb,” hela’s capacity to “pass” as other cell types was figured through language reflecting anxieties, fantasies, and paranoia about black sexuality: the cells and sometimes the woman, henrietta lacks, herself were repeatedly positioned as aggressive, polluting matter—a “crisis of security”—properly subjected to heightened surveillance and regulation at the in vivo and in vitro levels. against this, harvey demonstrates an alternative interpretation of such narratives, whose anxieties betray precisely a veiled recognition of the destructive vitality and agency of the hela cell line.  together, these narratives exemplify the complicated ways in which (bio)matter comes to matter. harvey, moreover, imagines an “ethical practice of knowing,” one that can, for example, read hela cell contamination as an “accusation” of racial passing, a technology or “reading apparatus… steeped in epistemological violence.” furthermore, this ethics of knowing does not privilege the biocitizen constructed through bioethical claims of inclusion, privacy, and anonymity—all assumed in principles of participation and informed consent. rather, it affirms an openness to contaminating knowledges, or to contamination as an event of knowledge production, and actively incorporates refusal or non-participation within knowledge exchanges as potential unveilings of “new biocitizens.” beza merid’s concept of “feminist biomedical knowledge production” also intervenes in analyses of the biocitizen by contributing a critical framework not only for fleshing out the structural dimensions of health inequalities but also for communicating them to communities they most affect. examining public health campaigns targeting stroke risk in african americans, merid’s “‘stroke’s no joke’: race and the cultural coding of stroke risk” shows how such messages can undermine their stated goals of ameliorating heath disparities when they center individual behavior in stroke risk and treatment.  merid focuses on “stroke’s no joke,” a televised psa spearheaded by the american stroke association and which deploys back stand-up comedy as a means for conveying to african americans the warning signs of stroke and the significance of seeking immediate emergency care. the psa is informed by the “cultural competence” and “entertainment-education” models in health communication, the former expounding targeted outreach to at-risk populations while simultaneously encouraging clinicians to better focus on cultural factors of disease, and the latter aiming to educate or inform the public about health conditions and treatments by deploying entertainment media. following from these models, the psa’s individualization of stroke risk naturalizes and therefore depoliticizes the relationship between race and heart health, overlooking structural determinants of health and illness by deploying the african american humor tradition “as an instrument of institutional, prescriptive communication.” in contrast, a feminist biomedical knowledge production would center and maintain the political nature of health disparities and of the ways the public are informed about them. finally, anthony hatch’s inimitable critique of “colorblind scientific racism” in blood sugar: racial pharmacology and food justice in black america explores another serious public health disparity, here examining the ways metabolic syndrome becomes an object of intervention by doctors and scientists, federal research policies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers. an endemic illness and costly public health problem, metabolic syndrome describes a cluster of risk factors such as obesity, high blood pressure, and high levels of blood glucose, which can lead to conditions like heart disease and diabetes. but as hatch shows, metabolic syndrome is increasingly linked to race and ethnicity, social constructions that are applied as practical categories in the science and politics of metabolism. this is made evident in metabolic health research that center racial differences in the causes of and treatments for metabolic diseases, initiatives underwritten by the same cultural constructions of race and ethnicity that enable the very health disparities such initiatives profess to address. the current special feature provides an excerpt from the book’s introduction as an invitation to readers to explore the study in its entirety. taken together, the writings presented in this special feature represent some of the best emerging scholarship from within this crucial interdisciplinary endeavor across sts and black studies. we expect to see more such efforts in the near future as the contemporary issues raised under this banner gain greater urgency and our understanding of the ongoing histories they reflect and refract and refashion gains greater depth. which is to say we expect nothing/more. references benjamin, r. (2013). people's science: bodies and rights on the stem cell frontier. stanford university press. braun, l. (2014). breathing race into the machine: the surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to genetics. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. browne, s. (2015). dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. duke university press. butler, o. e. (1993). parable of the sower. new york, ny: warner books. butler, o. e. (1998). parable of the talents. new york, ny: grand central publishing. duster, t. (2003). backdoor to eugenics. uk: psychology press. fanon, f. (2008). black skin, white masks. (r. philcox, trans.). new york, ny: grove press. (original work published in 1952). fullwiley, d. (2008). the biologistical construction of race admixture technology and the new genetic medicine. social studies of science, 38(5), 695-735. haraway, d. (2010). when species meet: staying with the trouble. environment and planning d: society and space, 28, 53-55. hopkinson, n. (1998). brown girl in the ring. new york, ny: warner books. hopkinson, n. (2000). midnight robber. new york, ny: warner books. jones, d. (2010). the racial discourses of life philosophy: négritude, vitalism, modernity. new york, ny: columbia university press. nelson, a. (2011). body and soul: the black panther party and the fight against medical discrimination. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. pollock, a. (2012). medicating race: heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference. durham, nc: duke university press. quijano, a. (2000). coloniality of power and eurocentrism in latin america. international sociology, 15(2), 215-232. roberts, d. (2011). fatal invention: how science, politics, and big business re-create race in the twenty-first century. new york, ny: the new press. spillers, h. (2003). mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book. in h. spillers (ed.), black, white and in color: essays on american literature and culture (pp. 203-229). chicago, il: university of chicago press. (original article published in 1987). tilley, h. (2011). africa as a living laboratory: empire, development, and the problem of scientific knowledge, 1870-1950. chicago, il: university of chicago press. wailoo, k. (1997). drawing blood: technology and disease identity in twentieth century america. baltimore, md: john hopkins university press. waldby, c., & mitchell, r. (2006). tissue economies: blood, organs, and cell lines in late capitalism. durham, nc: duke university press. washington, h. (2008). medical apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on black americans from colonial times to the present. new york: doubleday.
 wynter, s. (1984). the ceremony must be found: after humanism. boundary, 2, 19-70. wynter, s. (1987). on disenchanting discourse: “minority” literary criticism and beyond. cultural critique, 7, 207-244. wynter, s. (2003). unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument. cr: the new centennial review, 3(3), 257-337. bios cristina visperas is a doctoral candidate at the university of california, san diego, and a pre-doctoral fellow at the american association of university women.  she has co-published in the journal of neurosurgery and the journal of bioethical inquiry, and her current research examines the intersections of biomedicine and incarceration during the post-war period.   kimberly juanita brown is an assistant professor in the department of english and the program in africana studies at mount holyoke college. her research engages the site of the visual as a way to negotiate the parameters of race, gender, and belonging. her book, the repeating body: slavery’s visual resonance in the contemporary (duke university press) examines slavery’s profound ocular construction, the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space and the women represented there. she is currently at work on her second book, tentatively titled “their dead among us: photography, melancholy, and the politics of the visual.” this project examines images of the dead in the new york times in 1994 from four overlapping geographies: south africa, rwanda, sudan, and haiti. brown argues that a cartography of the ocular exists in documentary images in order to normalize global violence as inextricably connected to blackness via photographic proximity. brown is the founder and convener of the dark room: race and visual culture studies seminar. the dark room is a working group of scholars examining the intersection of critical race theory and visual culture studies.  jared sexton teaches african american studies at the university of california, irvine.  he is the author of amalgamation schemes:  antiblackness and the critique of multiracialism. krishnan, shweta, mathena jencka, abigail langmead, annabelle manzo, rio matsumoto, raven mcauliffe, and beatriz silva de almeida barros. 2025. “a pedagogical ecosystem: building connections in and beyond the classroom.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–10. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © shweta krishnan, mathena jencka, abigail langmead, annabelle manzo, rio matsumoto, raven mcauliffe, and beatriz silva de almeida barros. 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license a pedagogical ecosystem: building connections in and beyond the classroom shweta krishnan boston university krishwe@bu.edu mathena jencka american university mathenaj423@gmail.com abigail langmead abigaillangmead@yahoo.com annabelle manzo george washington university amanzo2@gwu.edu rio matsumoto riomatt00@gmail.com raven mcauliffe ravenmc01@gmail.com beatriz silva de almeida barros bsdeab@gmail.com abstract this paper is a short reflection on the role that catalyst articles and special sections played in shaping the ethos of the senior seminar on feminist science mailto:krishwe@bu.edu mailto:mathenaj423@gmail.com mailto:abigaillangmead@yahoo.com mailto:amanzo2@gwu.edu mailto:riomatt00@gmail.com mailto:ravenmc01@gmail.com mailto:bsdeab@gmail.com tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) krishnan et al. 2025 2 technologies studies that shweta krishnan taught at the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program at george washington university during fall 2023 and fall 2024. together with six students who took the class in fall 2023, krishnan examines the pedagogical ecosystem that emerged through the collaborative learning practices and the collective intellectual development that the catalyst pieces made possible. keywords pedagogy, critical feminist studies, collaboration the senior seminar—feminism, gender, and science—that i offered at george washington university invited undergraduate seniors majoring or minoring in women’s gender and sexuality studies to lean into feminist science technology studies and parse the blurry lines between human and nonhuman, nature and culture, man and machine.1 in the process, i hoped that these students—already trained in intersectional feminist thought—would learn to question the entanglements between science, gender, race, caste, class, imperialism, and ableism. discussing cyborgs and multispecies formations, design and infrastructures, networks and entanglements, we hoped to analyze emergent phenomena and examine the possibilities that a critical approach to science can hold for feminist worldmaking. i taught this course in fall 2023 to eight students and in fall 2024 to ten students.2this article offers some of my learnings from both years with a special focus on three special sections—“illness narratives, networked subjects, and intimate publics” (merid and kneese 2018), “crip technoscience” (fritsch et al. 2019), and “global fertility chains and the colonial present of assisted reproductive technologies” (vertommen et al. 2022)—as well as independent articles from catalyst that significantly shaped our collective pedagogical journey (for a list of the articles we used, see references). in this reflection piece, i am joined by six of my students from the fall 2023 class with contributions of their observations on classroom discussions and interactions. together, we examine the pedagogical ecosystem we created by collaborating amongst ourselves and with the authors, whose theoretical and methodological offerings we read, debated, and played with in class. critical reconfigurations at the heart of our seminar were four thinkers—donna haraway, sylvia wynter, banu subramaniam, and kim tallbear—whose works taught us to situate science within a field of power relations. examining the figure of man, overrepresented as wynter might say at the heart of scientific knowledge production, was particularly https://wgss.columbian.gwu.edu/ https://wgss.columbian.gwu.edu/ https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/1981 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/1981 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2199 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2579 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2579 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) krishnan et al. 2025 3 productive for our class. this line of thinking allowed us to enrich our intersectional lens—we asked who this schema represents and who it dehumanizes and marginalizes on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, caste, class, and ableism. thinking so deeply about the figures central to knowledge production critically reconfigured our understanding of intersectionality. it allowed us to dig deeper and become more analytical in our discussions. to illustrate the real-world impacts of imperialist science, i turned to twelve articles from catalyst. i picked this journal because its articles not only offered intersectional, decolonizing critiques of scientific knowledge production but also provided new methods for collectively reimagining the world. three special sections were our constant companions in this journey. first, “illness narratives, networked subjects, and intimate publics,” edited by beza merid and tamara kneese in 2018, allowed us to think about the role of emergent medical technologies in reconfiguring our relationships with our bodies. kirsten ostherr’s piece on data mining raised questions about big data—whose bodies were used in its production versus who benefits from it. we used haraway’s method of cat’s cradle (string figurations) to trace the way patients’ bodies become data points entangled with biocapitalist institutions, such as medical hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, biotech companies, tech companies supporting medical apps, and so on. all of us brought up the examples of apps we were using on our cell phones to trace our bodily activities such as sleep cycles, our daily steps, monthly periods. tracing these entanglements between ourselves, our data, and the companies that owned this data allowed us to think of potential sites for intervention, in order to ensure that patients/users retained full control of their data. the 2019 special section on “crip technoscience,” edited by kelly fritsch, aimi hamraie, mara mills, and david serlin, generated powerful conversations on the crip body as an agentive, knowing, and generative body. particularly, mallory kay nelson, ashley shew, and bethany stevens’s piece on “transmobility” kindled discussions on disabled bodies as sites of joy, allowing us to think of the cyborg— in this case cripborg—as a figuration that allowed for human bodies to emerge through the joy of dependence on human and nonhuman bodies and objects. this conversation allowed us to critique the centrality of productivity, individualism, and independence in liberalist spaces, including the space of the liberal university. thinking with cripborgs motivated students to reimagine campus infrastructures by decentralizing ableist designs. for example, during our discussions in fall 2024, we wondered what it might look like for buildings such as the library to replace all stairways with ramps, and for all texts and videos available digitally to have audio descriptions, larger font sizes, and closed captions. we also discussed how promoting dependency might lead to better collaborations and less competitive relations between students. in the end, we concluded that all bodies benefited from disabilities-centric thinking and that ableist frameworks produces collective tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) krishnan et al. 2025 4 exhaustion. we also had an honest discussion about the limits of working with the dependent cripborg figuration within education systems shaped overtly by ideas of individual excellence and productivity, rather than by an ethos of collective learning and collaborative production. a few class projects in fall 2024 emerged from the “crip technoscience” special section. hana kim drew on eunjung kim’s piece on necro-activism in south korea, to do an extended class presentation on the disabilities movement in south korea and the long-drawn struggles to battle ableist infrastructures. julianna mucciolo’s critical reading of the 2024 film out of my mind offered a deep critique of the spatial and temporal isolation that crip bodies are subject to in classrooms built for able bodies. josh abraham’s final paper used the string figuration method to examine the entanglements between air pollution in the city of washington dc, asthma in elementary school children living in polluted zones, and the role of absence and dropouts from school in shaping the school to prison pipeline. finally, the 2022 special section “global fertility chains and the colonial present of assisted reproductive technologies,” edited by sigrid vertommen, bronwyn parry, and michal nahman, raised important questions about inequalities within the feminist movement—highlighting the imperialist power relations between queer parents or adoptive parents located in the west and adoptees or surrogates in other parts of the world. this special section challenged students’ notion of solidarity, inviting them to think critically about uneven power relations amongst reproducing bodies across borders. we had generative conversations on the entanglement of western feminist and queer movements with the empire and discussed the vast geographies of colonial injustice using transnational feminist frameworks. deboleena roy’s piece on transplacental migrations engendered immense interest in the students because of its focus on chemical pollutants. focusing on the molecular dimensions of harm allowed us to examine how structures can be violent even at the microscopic levels. together, these special sections assembled our thoughts on the eugenics logics of prominent institutions such as medicine, law and policy, education, border security, military and police, and so on; and the need to be critically reflective on our own embeddedness in systems of power. several student projects in fall 2023, brought ideas from the catalyst special sections together—abigail langmead parsed the disturbing frictions between disabilities and abortion; rio matsumoto examined the role of viability in shifting the politics of abortion; and annabelle manzo explored the eugenics logics of the technologies of the us-mexico border; mathena jencka analyzed the racial underpinnings of visual technologies used in providing medical forensic evidence in court hearings on sexual assault; beatriz silva de almeida barros examined the entanglements between patriarchy and empire in international nuclear policies, and raven mcauliffe examined the role of the empire in masking non-european histories and technologies of queerness. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) krishnan et al. 2025 5 becoming with each other: notes on collective learning from students of fall 2023 in the following section, students from the fall 2023 class share their thoughts on how their learning shaped by our discussions in class and the pieces in catalyst. rio matsumoto: catalyst urges its readers to dismantle the lenses through which we view, understand, and interpret ideas of technology, science, and technoscience…we were encouraged to think deeply about concepts that we may not have been intricately aware of before. i picked apart new frameworks, many of which continue to stick with me, like sylvia wynter’s critique of the overrepresentation of man and donna haraway’s concepts such as entanglements, partial knowledges. we stepped into the texts of the catalyst to take on the writings; different opinions and debate them, embrace them, or embed them amongst our own. mathena jencka: many of our seminar discussions were provoked by questioning the basis of sts— whether that be through the biases in medical devices or the scientific aspect of the english language (which does not include an action verb for the vagina, in contrast to the penis, which is frequently associated with the term penetrate). our discussion of sts vocabulary guided the class into an analysis of how such language fails to center the female body: the lack of an action verb situates the vagina as nameless and passive, which keeps the vagina at the margins and the penis at the center. regardless of our previous exposures to science and technologies, approaching a scientific concept with an intersectional women’s, gender, and sexuality studies lens catapulted discussions into a vast range of topics, which many of us had never before considered. raven mcauliffe: our classroom pedagogy was built on candid exploration and prompted unexpected evolution in each of us. we used the catalyst articles to adhere new meanings to old experiences, reshaping our histories and reimagining our futures. seemingly mundane conversation topics, like the definition of a cyborg or whether red-orange was more red or orange, stirred up turbulent emotions in us because of the striking parallels to our struggles with defining our own identities. while using this space to address our growing concerns of the weaponization of technology against women, our university was simultaneously using technology to crack down on student protesters and their faculty support systems, making our conversations more of a survival tactic than a casual roundtable. forged in fearless curiosity, this small feminist technoscience circle gave us room to become cyborgs of our own creation and escape the technological fears we faced outside the classroom. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) krishnan et al. 2025 6 abigail langmead: in order to engage in principled study and struggle on topics like feminism, theory, and technoscience, it was imperative that our class operate as a collective. thinking and dreaming together was not only an act of scholarship, but an act of care in which we decolonized and expanded one another’s minds. in true cyborgian nature, we found joy in the entanglements, and the class challenged us to undo them or even create more. annabelle manzo: we utilized the pedagogical approaches that catalyst encourages in order to think with and better understand feminist sts theory and encourage deep, collaborative, and critical discussion. when doing our individual readings of the text before class, a lot of us struggled to fully grasp and understand donna haraway’s foundational theory of cyborg feminism. however, by acknowledging where we failed to grasp haraway, we were able to arrive at honest and collaborative roundtable discussions, and discuss each what we felt we could grasp and could not. to further understand cyborg feminism, we collectively analyzed and engaged with jasmine erdener’s catalyst piece “human/machine fusions and the future of the cyborg” alongside haraway’s work. in our discussion we were able to put them into conversation with one another in order to better understand and conceptualize both transformative texts. through this approach, we were able to step away from typical linear power dynamics and instead form an equal, committed, collaborative dynamic and environment. instead of relying on our professor to summarize or synthesize the text for us, our instructor was engaged with us in our collective discussion, speculation, and collaborative thinking. we followed and built on each other’s understandings and perspectives (or situated knowledges) of the texts, each of our thoughts informing another’s. moreover, we were able to use catalyst readings such as erdener’s to create new and better understandings of foundational feminist sts works such as haraway’s. in this seminar, we truly thought with each other—pushing and pulling one another to think further stripping away labels of student vs. teacher and rather engaged with each other through collective roundtable discussions. it was through this collaborative pedagogy—informed by feminist technoscience theory itself—that we were able to dive deep into the topics of technoscience to create new meaning and understanding for ourselves. beatriz silva de almeida barros: i think being in community with my classmates illustrated donna haraway’s “god trick” through empathy, and somewhat paradoxically, like-mindedness. our graduating class was eight people small, and it is generally expected that in a women’s studies program, everyone will have similar opinions on a lot of things. that is to say, i didn’t really expect to hear anything new (presuming infallibility in the comfort of my partial perspective: the god trick). however, the ways in which we challenged knowledge production enabled learning and empathy. a lot of our knowledge sharing happened through tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) krishnan et al. 2025 7 storytelling—anecdotes about ourselves, our homes, our relationships, which do not exactly meet standards of scientific rigor—and became key to illustrating the concepts we studied. this humanized my classmates in a go-go-go environment that dehumanizes us all. it also humanized the literature, which i believe was the point of our sts journey—scientific papers are words written by people, not spotless knowledge by abstract entities of all-knowing. conclusions these conversations on sts—our commitment to read these methods into our everyday lives—allowed us to continue to think with these ideas beyond class. important aspects of feminist sts—the emphasis on connectedness, collaboration, coexistence, coevolution—has continued to inform us all. additionally, in being an open-source journal, catalyst allowed us to see what putting our critique of knowledge production into practice looks like. it aligned with the values we were trying to promote in class on the need to make knowledge production more egalitarian and accessible to all. overall, we all agreed that thinking with feminist sts enriched our overall intellectual contribution to critical feminist studies. the articles from catalyst encouraged us to become critical of the imperial epistemologies that are at the heart of scientific knowledge production and imbued us with a framework of critique that we could take to all other fields of knowledge. while several of the students have been able to take these learnings to their graduate programs, law degrees, jobs in education, policy, and into their everyday lives, i was inspired by the discussions of these classes to introduce articles from catalyst—particularly those on crip technoscience and illness narratives in introductory classes i have taught at the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program at george washington university. once more, they led to motivated conversations both on the structures that limit us and on possibilities for rebuilding our material-semiotic worlds through intersectional thought. students in the introductory class i taught in spring 2025, especially enjoyed the piece on data mining, especially because of the role that big tech has been playing in the rise of authoritarianism all over the world. although the introductory class focused on very broad areas of gender studies rather than on feminist sts, my students told me that they found the pieces on feminist sts extremely relevant at a time when they are aware of the inevitable entanglements between themselves, medical institutions, insurance companies, big pharma, and big tech. it is my belief that articles from journals like catalyst— which offer a critical feminist studies perspective and embody this ethos—are excellent pedagogical tools in all feminist studies courses, beyond courses focused on science. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) krishnan et al. 2025 8 note 1 i served as visiting assistant professor at the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program at george washington university between august 1, 2023, and may 31, 2025. since july 2025, i teach at boston university’s writing program. 2 the theme and topic for the senior seminar are not fixed. while i chose to focus on feminist science technology studies, the seminar has focused on other topics in the previous years. this article refers only to the syllabi i designed and taught in the two semesters mentioned here. references banner, olivia. 2019. “technopsyence and afro-surrealism’s cripistemologies.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29612. chilianis, melanie. 2018. “listening to epilepsy and soundcloud: re-examining sonic subjectivity and affective labor.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (1): 1– 37. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i1.29633. erdener, jasmine. 2021. “human/machine fusions and the future of the cyborg.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (2): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.35066. felt, lindsey dolich. 2019. “cyberpunk’s other hackers: the girls who were plugged in.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–38. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29615. forlano, laura. 2017. “data rituals in intimate infrastructures: crip time and the disabled cyborg body as an epistemic site of feminist science.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3 (1): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i2.28843. fritsch, kelly, aimi hamraie, mara mills, and david serlin, eds. 2019. “crip technoscience.” special section, catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1). https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2199. hamraie, aimi, and kelly fritsch. 2019. “crip technoscience manifesto.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–34. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607. kim, eunjung. 2019. “continuing presence of discarded bodies: occupational harm, necro-activism, and living justice.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29616. klein, reisa. 2018. “networked scars: tattooed bodies after breast cancer.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (1): 1–46. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i1.29630. kraemer, jordan. 2021. “the gender of the interface: coding masculinity, crafting femininity among berlin’s creative class.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (2): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34734. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29612 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i1.29633 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.35066 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29615 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i2.28843 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2199 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29616 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i1.29630 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34734 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) krishnan et al. 2025 9 merid, beza, and tamara kneese, eds. 2018. “illness narratives, networked subjects, and intimate publics.” special section, catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (1). https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/1981. nelson, mallory kay, ashley shew, and bethany stevens. 2019. “transmobility: possibilities in cyborg (cripborg) bodies.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29617. ostherr, kirsten. 2018. “privacy, data mining, and digital profiling in online patient narratives.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4 (1): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i1.29628. posocco, silvia. 2022. “harvesting life, mining death: adopting, surrogacy, and forensics across borders.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35071. roy, deboleena. 2022. “transplacental migrations: methyl isocyanate gas and reproductive bioeconomies in bhopal.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36172. vertommen, sigrid, bronwyn parry, and michal nahman, eds. 2022. “global fertility chains and the colonial present of assisted reproductive technologies.” special section, catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1). https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2579. weinberg, lindsay. 2021. “mental health and the self-tracking student.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (1): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i1.34039. author bios shweta krishnan is a newly appointed lecturer at the cas writing program at boston university. her research sits at the intersection of anthropology, feminist science technology studies, and transnational studies. mathena jencka is currently studying law at american university washington college of law and carries a passion for gender equity, as well as sexual violence prevention. abigail langmead received their ba in women's, gender, and sexuality studies from george washington university and is active in community organizing, research, and advocacy. annabelle manzo holds a master of arts in public policy with a concentration in wgss from the george washington university. she continues to pursue her research and advocacy interests concerning immigrant rights, women’s equality, and reproductive justice. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/1981 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29617 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v4i1.29628 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35071 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36172 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2579 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i1.34039 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) krishnan et al. 2025 10 rio matsumoto has a ba in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies as well as in political science with a focus in public policy. with a background in legislation mainly related to civil rights, civil liberties, lgbtq+ equality, and women’s rights, she is currently a litigation paralegal in washington, d.c. raven mcauliffe received her ba in women's, gender, and sexualty studies from george washington university. beatriz silva de almeida barros holds an ma in gender, politics and international relations from university college dublin. she is a gender equality advocate and researcher. a pedagogical ecosystem: building connections in and beyond the classroom abstract keywords critical reconfigurations becoming with each other: notes on collective learning from students of fall 2023 conclusions note references author bios     relaciones y poéticas fronterizas en el archivo familiar del río colorado     jessica sevilla universidad autónoma de baja california sevilla.jessica@uabc.edu.mx rosela del bosque universidad autónoma de baja california ana.del.bosque@uabc.edu.mx     resumen este texto y serie de imágenes describirán al archivo familiar del río colorado1, un proyecto de investigación artística y curadurías colectivas que procura hacer sentido de las relaciones que sostenemos con el agua en la región delta del río colorado. no nos enfocaremos en hacer aportaciones conceptuales para el campo académico, pero sí trataremos de presentar a este archivo vivo como una forma y tecnología autogestiva mediante la cual hemos comenzado a producir conocimiento situado en bucles de praxis, aprendiendo de las relaciones geológicas y más que humanas en las que existimos. narraremos algunos de los programas públicos que hemos organizado y presentaremos una lectura del espacio geográfico que habitamos, haciendo énfasis en cómo entendemos que la asimetría de la frontera geopolítica méxico-estados unidos se incorpora en nuestra experiencia y memoria del espacio, el río y el agua. también iremos planteando una serie de preguntas que nos puedan ayudar a orientar la producción del archivo familiar del río colorado, ubicando cuáles son los límites y los potenciales de este archivo como forma, tanto para resistir a las pérdidas ecosistémicas que sufrimos en esta parte de la cuenca como para imaginar su futuro. abstract this text and series of images will describe the colorado river family archive, an artistic research and collective curatorial project that seeks to make sense of the relationships we have with water in the colorado river delta region. we will not focus on making conceptual contributions to the academic field, but we will try to present this living archive as a self-managing form and technology through which we have begun to produce knowledge situated in loops of praxis, learning from the geological and more-than-human relationships in which we exist. we will narrate some of the public programs we have organized and present a reading of the geographic space we inhabit, emphasizing how we understand that the characteristic asymmetry of the mexico-united states geopolitical border is incorporated into our experience and memory of space, the river, and water. we will also raise a series of questions that can help us guide the production of the colorado river family archive, identifying the limits and potential of this archive as a form, both to resist the ecosystem losses we suffer in this part of the basin and to imagine its future. palabras clave/keywords delta del río colorado, colorado river delta, investigación artística, artistic research, frontera méxico-estados unidos, us-mexico border     un archivo de las relaciones familiares que se producen en el delta del río colorado el archivo familiar del río colorado (afrc)1 es un proyecto colaborativo que surgió sobre el delta del río colorado durante el año 2021,2 un poco antes de que el bureau of reclamation de los estados unidos declarara escasez hídrica en la cuenca del río colorado por primera vez en su historia. después de casi dos siglos de despojo territorial y desarrollo urbano en el oeste del continente norteamericano, a la par del aumento del control y militarización en la frontera méxico-estados unidos, mientras vivimos transformaciones ecológicas aceleradas en mexicali, baja california y el valle imperial de california, que conforman la mayor parte del delta, un grupo de artistas, gestoras, curadoras, profesoras e investigadoras hemos estado reuniéndonos para organizar espacios y plataformas que nos permitan discutir estos fenómenos. figura 1. el delta del río colorado. 2024. esta imagen muestra un mapa de 1937 del explorador, científico y autor godfrey sykes, sobre una fotografía satelital tomada de google earth este año. en la foto se alcanzan a observar las ciudades de mexicali, baja california, calexico y el centro, california. las ciudades están rodeadas de parcelas agrícolas, ubicadas justamente dentro del contorno inundable del delta que ilustra el mapa de sykes. las parcelas a su vez están rodeadas por sistemas de dunas al este, algunas franjas de acumulación de sal al sur y cadenas montañosas en el oeste y noreste. en el mapa de skyes también se leen algunos de los ríos y cuerpos de agua que todavía existían en la primera mitad del siglo pasado. fuente: imagen propia editada por jessica sevilla para el archivo familiar del río colorado con mapa de godfrey sykes e imagen satelital tomada de google earth pro. en 2024, la unión internacional de ciencias geológicas (iugs) y la comisión internacional de estratigrafía (ics) negaron la existencia de una nueva escala geológica donde el entramado entre humanos y sistema económico sea suficientemente significativo como para justificar el reconocimiento de una nueva era. es decir, para la geología, el antropoceno, el capitaloceno y toda la genealogía de los otros -cenos,3 no da cuenta de un tiempo geológico singular. pero sí estamos ante una crisis de los sistemas biofísicos planetarios. los -cenos son términos culturales que nos permiten investigar las relaciones de poder en el ensamblaje económico planetario, sostenidas por la cooptación y extracción de territorios, ecosistemas, mano de obra, formas de vida, relatos. estas relaciones forman parte del sistema abierto en el que vivimos y sí dejan residuos en el sustrato del mundo. no podríamos explicar, por ejemplo, las vastas extensiones de arena agrietada y costras de sal en los suelos de mexicali y el valle imperial, sin referirnos al agotamiento de ecosistemas riparios y cuerpos de agua que conformaban al delta, o a su promotor: el desarrollo urbano alrededor del río colorado, para el que se trata de racionalizar como valor de cambio a los flujos erráticos4 que conforman los deshielos de las rocallosas. en el afrc nos organizamos para conversar sobre nuestra relación con un río que prácticamente ya no existe en el valle donde vivimos, que solía inundarse intermitentemente con esos deshielos. partimos de imaginar a este archivo como un álbum multi-familiar o un repositorio que narrase relaciones afectivas con el río, pero ahora lo entendemos más como una tecnología para comprender y especular sobre las escalas temporales entretejidas de nuestras relaciones con lo más que humano; como los flujos de humedad y capital en esta cuenca. sobre todo, vamos entendiendo cómo esta tecnología es un instrumento indisciplinado que, al discriminar y seleccionar ciertos documentos, va narrando sus propias historias con la mezcla de intereses y herramientas que tenemos a la mano sus participantes.5 nuestro trabajo se ha ido consolidando a partir de lecturas, caminatas y diálogos de germinación lenta. mayté, minoru, rosela y jessica componemos un núcleo de gestión en mexicali, aunque coordinamos programas públicos y exposiciones casi siempre acompañadas de otras pensadoras, artistas y amigas. enero y abril, leslie garcía, farrah karapetian y maría torres son cuatro colaboradoras cercanas que trabajan con distintos medios y preguntas de investigación, que se articulan en intereses comunes por reimaginar las relaciones con lo más que humano, la geología, la ecología, la tecnología, la infraestructura, el trabajo y el cuerpo, nuestro mestizaje, el archivo, la mirada colonial, la ficción y la imagen. logramos entender este proyecto como plataforma de investigación de largo aliento después de una serie de diálogos con la artista medial y músico leslie garcía, a quien invitamos a plantear una lectura sobre la contaminación que cruza la frontera en el efluente río nuevo (véase figura 2) del río colorado, que corre desde mexicali hacia el salton sea de california –un lago ubicado en la parte más baja del valle. en respuesta, ella nos invitó a pensar sobre la complejidad más amplia del sistema hídrico en la región. un año antes de esta conversación, a raíz de un taller de la artista visual enero y abril, ya se gestaba el interés tanto de escudriñar los archivos históricos e institucionales en búsqueda de huecos narrativos, como por reescribir las historias íntimas y cotidianas de nuestros archivos familiares dentro o encima de los archivos de la historia con mayúscula. figura 2. el río nuevo. 2024. fuente: imagen propia editada por jessica sevilla para este artículo y el archivo familiar del río colorado, a partir de imagen encontrada del río nuevo en las lluvias de 2014 y mapa de la ciudad del año 1920. tras la provocación de leslie, empezamos un proceso exploratorio colectivo que no se ha detenido. entonces, antes de organizar nuestro primer evento, nos tomamos un año para realizar caminatas hacia remanentes del río, hicimos búsquedas en archivos digitales e institucionales y entrevistamos agentes de la localidad que nos pudieran hablar acerca del agua en la region (véase figura 3). figura 3. fotografía del equipo del archivo familiar del río colorado en diálogo con equipo de geohidrología del laboratorio de ciencias de la tierra del instituto de ingeniería de la universidad de baja california, en el sitio de restauración laguna grande. 2021. entre muchas otras preguntas sobre la historia y geografía regional, nos sirvieron de guía las siguientes: ¿por qué las crónicas que registraron el delta del río colorado y la conformación de mexicali no hablaron de las relaciones afectivas con el río, sino solo de modo tangencial cuando llegaron los antropólogos que estudiaron a la comunidad originaria cucapá?, ¿por qué varios documentos, crónicas, cartografías y fotografías, entre otros, estaban resguardados fundamentalmente en bibliotecas estadounidenses?, ¿quiénes serían las personas que registraron esta geografía y cuyas voces conforman gran parte de los archivos que narran su historia?, ¿cómo era su mirada?, ¿cómo es la nuestra?, y ¿en qué se parecen o distinguen esas aproximaciones? mirada de exploradoras caminantes que van tejiendo relatos para el afrc, la relación con la frontera es ambivalente. por un lado, la frontera geopolítica no es una metáfora. en términos geográficos nos ubicamos en el lado sur del límite binacional entre méxico y estados unidos, con lo que la asimetría de poder en la frontera tiene implicaciones para la recepción de agua en el último fragmento de la cuenca, así como para nuestra experiencia del lugar. por otro lado, en la práctica y producción de sentido nos acercamos decididamente a lo fronterizo; a los bordes de lo que conocemos como prácticas educativas, científicas, narrativas, artísticas, afectivas y espirituales. compartimos el cuestionamiento de rosi braidotti (2019, 43) sobre la sobreproducción de códigos y términos de tracción acelerada en el capitalismo cognitivo de la academia, particularmente de los estudios culturales, e intentamos hacernos un espacio de praxis que sentimos más afiliado a ciertos frentes “post-disciplinarios”, nomádicos y críticos, que se reconocen como posthumanismos. aprendemos desde nuestro contexto específico, perspectivas parciales y nuestras experiencias acuerpadas y múltiples, tratando de generar lo que nuestra tía gringa donna haraway (1988) llamaría conocimiento situado; un conocimiento que sea responsable al reconocer su posicionalidad y las relaciones intra-activas, material-discursivas, co-constitutivas e interdependientes en las que devenimos (barad 2008). y aunque nos afiliamos a principios de los nuevos materialismos, que dotan de agencia a la materia y que procuran la disolución de los dualismos dominantes de la modernidad occidental, sentimos que la palabra post-humano, por el prefijo que sugiere la superación de lo humano, enuncia un deseo prematuro. imaginamos que estas epistemologías son más un movimiento lateral que ascendente en su reconsideración de lo humano, porque las luchas básicas por la dignidad y los “derechos” humanos, por el agua y el territorio, enmarañadas en ensamblajes más que humanos, se disputan en la institucionalidad racionalista y abstracta del capital.6 entonces parecería más indicado pensar una palabra que no refiera cabalmente a la superación de lo humano. nos afincamos en el conocimiento acuerpado y por eso organizamos espacios y eventos para estar en contacto físico con las múltiples formas que toma el agua en esta región y los entramados que vida que le rodean; desde la lluvia, aunque sea poca, los canales de riego, los humedales de aguas servidas, los cañones de los cerros, las fumarolas de vapores volcánicos, las lagunas de evaporación, el agua doméstica, etc. nos es importante pensar los modos de interacción y comunicación con agencias y fuerzas no humanas, pero aún no sabemos definir esta práctica nepantlera7 con los referentes que tenemos a la mano. aunque reconocemos la comunicación no-lingüística que sostenemos con la materialidad que habitamos, no sabemos cómo nombrar la interrelacionalidad que vivimos aquí con el río. mientras vamos dialogando con habitantes de la región, reconociendo cuerpos de agua que todavía existen y el vestigio de los que ya no están, buscamos lecturas que nos compliquen las formas de entender el paisaje porque nos relacionamos con el conocimiento al habitar el conflicto de nuestro ser racional y sensible. desde el sur latinoamericano se plantean epistemologías que surgen de experiencias humanas que reconocen la interrelacionalidad, y no en respuesta a la modernidad, sino como práctica y filosofía ancestral. de los feminismos comunitarios territoriales reconocemos nociones como las de cuerpo-territorio y sentipensar,8 que, aunque nos ayudan a pensar, no son nuestras para enunciarnos. estas palabras provienen de frentes de luchas y de tradiciones de relación profunda con la tierra, que tienen su propia potencia política y que la conservan en la medida en que no sean diluidas al usarse fuera de sus contextos. nosotras salimos de la ciudad para recorrer de cerca los cerros que vemos a diario, a lo lejos. y, en esos trayectos, nos surgen deseos de reclamar como comunes, no necesariamente estatales, a los predios y paisajes privatizados que rodean la ciudad, ocupados por la industria energética, turística, minera e inmobiliaria. pero sabemos que en nuestra relación con el delta hay fracturas y grietas: desde nuestra manera de mirar y reconocer al desierto, hasta en la experiencia cotidiana de una ciudad autocéntrica, con ríos embovedados cubiertos por calles ¿puede el archivo ayudar a esclarecer estas grietas? los encuentros coloniales en el delta del río colorado se registran en crónicas escritas desde 1539 por hernando de alarcón hasta posteriores exploradores imperiales que buscaron el desarrollo agroindustrial de la región, seguidas de relatos de antropólogos, naturalistas extranjeros, discursos del turismo y algunos de la ciencia contemporánea. los primeros relatos cumplieron la función de legitimar las aspiraciones expansionistas de la corona española en la península de baja california; los segundos, las de estados unidos en la tierra irrigable de este valle; los de la ciencia aportaron a la clasificación y racionalización de la vida en la región; y los últimos a los de su continua explotación. como argumenta la lingüista mary louise pratt (2011) en su análisis sobre la literatura de viajes y la mirada colonial, en el lenguaje de las ciencias naturales, de la preservación ecosistémica o del paisaje por descubrir que promueve el turismo, se esconden discursos buena onda, como les diríamos nosotras, o de anticonquista, como los llama pratt, que han tenido un rol fundamental en la posesión extranjera del territorio. más adelante mencionaremos brevemente el rol del capital estadounidense en la conformación de mexicali y la transformación del delta en un valle agrícola, pero aquí queremos hacer énfasis en la ubicuidad de esa mirada colonial en la frontera. nosotras, que desde la centralidad urbana de mexicali salimos a explorar los cuerpos de agua que no podemos experimentar dentro de la ciudad, que no crecimos nadando entre canales de riego, que no heredamos conocimientos intergeneracionales sobre flujos, tiempos y fuerzas del agua en esta parte del desierto de sonora, ¿cómo vamos a entender y narrar las relaciones con el agua y el río en mexicali sin la benevolencia auxiliadora de las ciencias y la mirada del explorador?, ¿cuáles son las relaciones que queremos narrar? y ¿cómo nos corresponde narrarlas? figura 4. visiones heredadas. 2024. fuente: imagen propia compuesta de tres impresiones de pantalla: screenshot de video del archivo familiar del río colorado tomada de youtube, sobreposición de discurso del presidente theodor roosevelt en imagen del desierto de sonora, impresiones de pantalla del video “the roosevelt dam”. 1928, ubicado en the library of congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/mp76000354/. el dominio del flujo y la pérdida de cuerpos de agua que nunca conocimos hasta hace poco más de un siglo, aquí en la región deltaica todavía se inundaba con los ciclos de deshielo que viajaban desde colorado. al final de su trayecto sobre la masa continental, antes de desembocar en el golfo de california, el flujo poderoso y cargado de sedimento rojizo descendía por cauces cambiantes en el valle de mexicali e imperial. los cauces principales descendían adyacentes al sistema de dunas del desierto de altar en sonora, formado por la propia acumulación sedimentaria del río y la erosión del viento durante millones de años (muhs et al., 2003). aquellas acumulaciones inquietas podrían generar obstrucciones en los cauces que descendían al mar, provocando que el río se desviara o “desbordara”9 hacia el oeste, inundando el valle. cuando eso pasaba, el flujo escurría rellenando las hendiduras del suelo, que también eran cambiantes por la particular y constante actividad tectónica del lugar (ramírez 2021, 180). esta sección del río se formaba con arroyos ondulantes, cientos de hectáreas de humedales y lagunas ubicadas alrededor de estas fallas geológicas, formando lagos tan grandes como el salton sea,10 el lago volcanes, la laguna salada y, antes, el binacional lago cahuilla. quienes escribimos este artículo conocemos las inundaciones de mexicali solo en temporadas de lluvia, sobre plastas de asfalto, en calles con problemas de drenaje, sobre cauces cubiertos y ríos entubados. desde la construcción de las grandes presas estadounidenses a mediados del siglo pasado, alrededor del 92 por ciento de las aguas del río colorado y sus sedimentos no descienden al delta. y aunque hace diez años, con el acta 319 del tratado de aguas de 1944 entre méxico y estados unidos, se comenzaron a liberar pequeños flujos ambientales para la restauración riparia (cila 2018), en méxico, las aguas del colorado son consumidas principalmente por industrias agrícolas, extractivas, transformadoras y de ensamblaje. la devastación ecológica que se vive en el delta es un proceso continuo que tiene orígenes puntuales en la historia de la administración del río, en el crecimiento de robustas economías y poblaciones a lo largo de la cuenca y del oeste norteamericano que ahora depende de sus asignaciones. la declaración de escasez de 2021 ejerció nuevas presiones sobre conflictos y manejos del río, aunque estas han estado presentes desde el comienzo del desarrollo agroindustrial en el delta a principios del siglo pasado, en algunos momentos con más intensidad que otros.11 a la par de conflictos urbanos y binacionales por cauces modificados y caudales dominados, la comunidad cucapá, o gente del río, ha sido desplazada a lo largo de distintos momentos en el siglo pasado y se asienta actualmente entre somerton, california, pozas de arvizu en sonora, el indiviso entre sonora y baja california, el ejido cucapá mestizo y el mayor cucapá en mexicali. la mayor población en méxico, alrededor de 150 personas, habita en el mayor, entre la rivera del río hardy12 y las faldas de la sierra cucapá al suroeste del valle de mexicali. hemos acompañado algunas actividades y pintas de murales organizadas por gestores culturales y cuidadores de la lengua en el mayor, de ahí que reconozcamos algunas situaciones en esta comunidad, incluidas las dinámicas alrededor de la llegada de documentalistas, periodistas, antropólogos, gestores culturales de los gobiernos en turno y narradores externos. no se puede pensar en las relaciones ‘familiares’ que el delta del río colorado ha tenido con las personas sin considerar a los pueblos yumanos y la comunidad cucapá, pero creemos que narrarlas no es nuestro rol. invitar a miembros de la comunidad como interlocutores sí, bajo ciertos términos y acuerdos. hacer un archivo que sea consecuente con su deseo de subvertir las narraciones disciplinadas y racionalizantes que sostienen los procesos extractivos implica también considerar las fronteras de la mediación. la frontera incorporada en nuestro paisaje cotidiano nuestra investigación no es artística porque se ocupe de investigar la producción o el objeto artístico, sino porque se asume en la práctica a partir de la experiencia sensible y del espacio frontera entre afecto y racionalidad que reconocemos como experiencia estética. desde ese impulso buscamos formas y herramientas propias, según sea la comunidad de aprendizaje que se forme en cada capítulo del proyecto. hace poco más de un año, compartir el afrc en la serie de conversaciones bajo el título de ecologías, materialidades y estéticas de la frontera, organizada por el borderlands sts lab, que ahora se extiende a esta publicación, nos estimuló a tratar de visualizar cómo entendemos la frontera, qué hace sobre los fenómenos territoriales en los que estamos inmersas y sobre la práctica misma de hacer archivo. la frontera opera en la medida que clasifica cuáles cuerpos y flujos atraviesan su límite: cuerpos de agua, trabajadores, cultivos, multinacionales, energía. es el mecanismo que valida y controla el flujo de lo humano y más que humano en este delta, cuya forma y relaciones vivas le preceden. trazar los efectos prolongados de este mecanismo de control, determinados por su propio poder asimétrico, nos es importante porque estos se acarrean temporal, espacial y corporalmente en los flujos más que humanos, materiales y simbólicos en los que participamos. si pensamos al río, a sus comunidades y economías, como parte del mismo flujo, en una reciprocidad en la que uno hace a los otros y viceversa, lo que le sucede se “incorpora” en los otros entramados y cuerpos con los que fluye. cabe mencionar que los fragmentos de ese flujo no son iguales. en la medida que las fronteras se involucran en la construcción de nuestras experiencias, relaciones y memorias sobre el lugar, incorporamos los recortes de agua, las contaminaciones, las presiones del mercado regional del agua y la experiencia desigual13 del paisaje hídrico en nuestras vidas. la mayoría de nuestras vidas hemos bebido agua del río colorado. cuando comenzamos el proyecto, durante la pandemia de covid-19, acababa de pasar un año en el que tuvimos varias pérdidas de seres queridos. por esas ausencias nos recordamos cuerpos de agua que forman parte de ciclos y flujos planetarios y que, a su vez, son mediados por un sinnúmero de tecnologías. el conocimiento llegó al cuerpo en la laguna salada, al pensar en la muerte de una abuela, la evaporación total de su cuerpo y de la misma laguna. la lectura del hidrofeminismo de astrida neimanis (2017) aportó algunas palabras para articular ese saber corporal que todavía no sabíamos expresar. el concepto de hidrofeminismo es una propuesta para construir solidaridades con lo más que humano a partir de las condiciones materiales transhistóricas, transcorpóreas y transespecies del agua. es decir, un modo de entender que el agua del cuerpo de la abuela retorna totalmente a la humedad de la tierra, a sus plantas y atmósfera, como ha circulado desde la misma formación del planeta. hemos aprendido la historia de nuestra ciudad y de esta región como una narrativa de prosperidad, crecimiento económico y oportunidades laborales que atrajeron a nuestras abuelas y abuelos a migrar hacia acá gracias a la dominación del río. las grandes obras de infraestructura hidráulica, financiadas por y registradas en archivos de empresarios y gobiernos estadounidenses, cuentan esa historia. el poder asimétrico no sólo se incorporó en la materialidad de la ciudad, en su trazado urbano e infraestructura de riego, también permeó relatos, imaginarios y deseos. un relato común, presente en la retórica del buró de reclamación estadounidense, en el desarrollo de este valle (véase imagen del lado derecho en la figura 4) y vigente en el habla mexicalense, es el de este territorio como un desierto vacío y carente de valor, solo transformado en valioso cuando se torna “verde” gracias a la infraestructura de riego. el proyecto de dominar el delta dio comienzo a la ciudad que habitamos. y aunque este proyecto siga robusteciéndose, a nosotras nos gustaría observar la posibilidad de otros proyectos en la escucha de otros relatos: los de las relaciones emocionales y habituales con lo más que humano, con el río, con sus paisajes y el agua. si también guardamos historias que enfaticen la dominación de la naturaleza, el desarrollo económico, el “ahorro de recursos naturales” o el fomento de los servicios ecosistémicos, será para examinarlas de modo crítico. reconocer la condición asimétrica de la frontera, ubicarla y posicionarnos con respecto a la direccionalidad de su ejercicio de poder, nos permite ir moviendo nuestras búsquedas. para ubicarla, podemos dirigirnos hacia algunas de las tensiones actuales alrededor del canal tulicheck (véase figura 5), que atraviesa el valle y la ciudad, llevando el mayor caudal de agua que fluye por nuestro lado de la frontera hacia el acueducto río colorado-tijuana,14 pero que también es conocido por ser un vertedero de cuerpos humanos. figura 5. canal tulichek y canal cerro prieto. 2024. fuente: imagen propia editada por jessica sevilla con imágenes apropiadas de redes digitales para el archivo familiar del río colorado. el río hardy, uno de los últimos cauces con flujo, es un tanto inaccesible como lugar porque el mercado inmobiliario impera en sus orillas. la agroindustria, que acapara el agua, cosecha y empaqueta productos principalmente para exportación, particularmente forrajes y alfalfa. y, actualmente, gran parte de las parcelas ejidales son arrendadas por compañías estadounidenses. la geotérmica del volcán cerro prieto, un proyecto pensado y financiado por estados unidos, extrae aguas subterráneas filtradas por muchísimos años de la existencia de laguna volcanes. la mayor parte de la cuenca es administrada por las presiones de consumo del oeste estadounidense y la pequeña porción en la que vivimos, aunque esté en el país de méxico, pareciera que también. el paisaje que incorporamos en nuestra vida cotidiana lleva rastros activos o pasivos de la frontera, manifiestos en sus formas y elementos. en una noción interrelacional del paisaje, entendida a partir de ciertas pautas del antropólogo tim ingold, consideraríamos que cada uno de sus componentes “contiene en su esencia la totalidad de sus relaciones” (ingold 2000, 191). esto es, que mediante sus componentes, un paisaje determinado se relaciona con otros paisajes y escalas territoriales. el paisaje, entonces, es un registro, un archivo de esas relaciones con otros lugares mediados por la frontera (véase figura 6). figura 6. ¿qué compone al paisaje? 2023. fuente: imagen propia obtenida por una captura de video editada por enero y abril y jessica sevilla para el archivo familiar del río colorado. composición con registro de sesión de escucha profunda en el sitio de restauración laguna grande y audio de leslie garcía. el archivo como tecnología narrativa cuando comenzamos a plantear este proyecto no lo imaginamos como un espacio físico y fijo o una institución que albergará documentos, sino como uno que nos fuera posible desarrollar, que existiera afuera de modo flexible: en el campo, en el museo prestado, en el sistema lagunar, en internet, con nuestras compañeras de la universidad, etc. imaginamos un archivo que, ciertamente, se dedicara a reunir imágenes, anécdotas y ficciones, pero que también estuviera dirigido a la interpretación, edición y divulgación de estos materiales, y que pudiéramos ir acumulando con experiencias propias. así que parte de nuestra labor ha sido buscar formatos con los que el archivo se active: cocuradurías que nos ayuden a organizar ideas y articular relatos colectivos pensados en caminatas, talleres, charlas, exposiciones, sesiones de escucha, entre otros. si el archivo se activa, si se mueve y adquiere distintas formas, si detona efectos y, sobre todo, si nos acerca a entender nuestras relaciones con el espacio que habitamos, podemos pensarlo como una tecnología. los documentos, ya sean imágenes, textos, obras de arte o registros de nuestras caminatas, son dispositivos que activan conversaciones, sensaciones y preguntas. la imagen, por ejemplo, es en sí misma una tecnología que puede colectivizar una historia, detonar recuerdos y emociones a partir de un conocimiento localizado. si bien el paisaje y los cuerpos mismos acumulan “hechos” (rastros de fuerzas económicas, eventos, pérdidas, traumas, etc.), no es hasta que nuestro lenguaje humano los hace evidentes que podemos activar la tecnología del archivo. este, al ser un conjunto de información atada a recuerdos y experiencias del paisaje, intrínsecamente se moviliza por la emoción.15 cada imagen, mapa, sonido, video, posee su propia emoción y voz. el archivo entonces moviliza afectos a través de sus diferentes medios, formatos y categorías.16 figura 7: dos fotografías de archivo familiar. fuente: cortesía de las familias galarza y gonzález gastélum. si bien mencionamos que no imaginamos al afrc como un entorno físico o como una organización con metas y objetivos fijos, en esta selección y lectura de documentos sí estamos construyendo un espacio con cierta configuración y ciertas miradas.17 es un espacio que se mueve cuando involucramos a más personas a dialogar con nosotras, pero que también se sostiene alrededor de una red particular con posiciones, conocimientos e intereses que nos permiten buscar unas historias antes que o en lugar de otras. asumimos que nuestras prácticas, desarrolladas a partir de cómo entendemos y hacemos uso del archivo, deben enmarcarse en ciertos posicionamientos éticos y políticos. ¿cómo funcionaría este archivo si se produjera desde la comisión estatal de servicios públicos para sus programas y campañas de ahorro sobre “cultura del agua”?, ¿o si fuera generado por una inteligencia artificial, buscando imágenes en las redes sociales mexicalenses para desarrollar una campaña emocional del tipo coca-cola company, con el fin de expandir su consumo en esta parte de la cuenca o para permitir el aumento de producción en su planta en mexicali?, ¿o si estuviera basado y fuera gestionado por la comunidad indígena de el mayor cucapá? la cantidad de historias sobre relaciones con este territorio y el agua exceden por mucho a la capacidad que tenemos nosotras de escucharlas. esa limitación inherente a los archivos, su imposibilidad de capturar la complejidad de la historia, es una que revela más sobre el poder que sobre la verdad, según sus silencios y omisiones (mbembe 2020). habrá ciertos silencios que no son omisión; cierto silencio que es mejor a usar memorias ajenas como “talismán” que las subvierte y transforma en mercancía, diluyendo deudas y disputas históricas. ¿cómo se va a narrar en el futuro lo que nos pasa con el río ahora?, ¿seguirán siendo los científicos y ambientalistas estadounidenses?, ¿cómo nos vamos a enterar que las avenidas eran ríos y que las personas tenían vínculos afectivos con esos ríos?, ¿cómo vamos a entendernos para movernos hacia el futuro? tenemos que leer la memoria del territorio en nuestros propios términos, aunque sea escabroso definir qué es “nuestro” y quiénes somos “nosotrxs”. el archivo entonces se instrumentaliza para entendernos a nosotras mismas de cara al poder, que modifica los recovecos más recónditos de las sierras que nos rodean y de los acuíferos que nos alimentan. activaciones del archivo y del cuerpo un primer evento público de memoria, música, danza, poesía y enunciación sobre la canalización del río nuevo, al que nombramos nuestra señora del río oculto (véase figura 8), comenzó por ayudarnos a encaminar la búsqueda de relaciones afectivas y espirituales con el agua y a guiar nuestras investigaciones sobre la cualidad “oculta” del río colorado.18 figura 8. la señora raquel portillo prendiendo salvia blanca después de tomar la voz, en el cierre del evento de nuestra señora del río oculto. 2022. fuente: fotografía de mayté miranda. seguimos llevando a cabo una caminata en el sitio de restauración laguna grande,19 a cargo de la asociación binacional sonoran institute, con nuestra amiga leslie garcía. aquí realizamos una serie de sesiones de escucha profunda en los nuevos bosques de mezquite y de álamo, a la orilla del río, sobre su vegetación y pastos, e incluso en el paisaje subacuático. a partir de estos registros se elaboró una pieza de paisaje sonoro en la que se entremezclan ecosistemas y voces humanas, cuyos mensajes fueron enunciados en el evento de nuestra señora del río oculto y que queda como registro para el archivo, pero sobre todo detona los ejercicios de aprendizaje y comunicación con lo más-que-humano que utilizan al cuerpo, a los sentidos y las sensaciones. unos meses después, continuamos con la exploración de la laguna salada, una subcuenca seca ubicada al suroeste de mexicali, entre la sierra de juárez y cucapá, que solía ser sujeta a las inundaciones del delta, pero se ha mantenido seca por al menos treinta años, ocultando multiplicidad de historias, toponimias e interrelaciones que existieron ahí. el proyecto invocaciones al agua entre los cerros20 emprendió caminatas alrededor de la subcuenca y las sierras que le rodean, además de talleres y conversaciones sobre distintos procesos creativos de los que surgió una serie de gestos visuales, textuales y sonoros colectivos presentados en una exposición llamada “la huella del agua tiempo en forma de grieta” (véase figura 9). figura 9. mapa de invocaciones, 2022. fuente: textil con imágenes impresas en sublimación hecho con los participantes de los talleres. lo más significativo de estos talleres y caminatas fue que pusimos a nuestros cuerpos en movimiento sobre los antiguos cauces del río. el acto de caminar exhaustivamente se volvió una herramienta metodológica para acercarnos a la frontera comunicativa con lo más que humano. fue una manera de explorar en colectivo a través del diálogo, en sitio y desde la experiencia somática (véase figura 10). figura 10. enero y abril en la primera caminata alrededor del pozo coyote en mayo de 2022. fuente: imagen tomada por mayté miranda. más allá de reforzar la noción de ausencia, nos interesó imaginar y evocar aquellos fenómenos naturales perdidos; hacerlos presentes. para nosotras, la invocación apela a la vida que habitaba ahí, a la memoria de sus ciclos y fenómenos, al presente de sus organismos y flujos imperceptibles, al futuro de su presencia.21 enero y abril nos llamó a crear desde “el rumor, desde el hueco, desde la sospecha, desde la historia potencial y desde la grieta” (enero y abril, 2024). figura 11. imágenes tomadas durante la tercera caminata en él cañón de guadalupe. fuente: imágenes tomadas por jessica sevilla y editadas por rosela del bosque. cada caminata trajo sus propias preguntas y cada uno de los participantes abordó distintos caminos de reflexión. algunos entendieron al cuerpo como medio de contención de emociones, aguas e historias íntimas en relación con el espacio. en el video-performance titulado contenedor, de hugo fermé, el cuerpo funge como un contenedor en sí mismo y se entiende como un medio de contención física del agua. la acción traza el recorrido corpóreo y emocional del artista tras contener un trago de agua en su boca durante cuarenta minutos. recuerda que el último gesto hacia su padre fue darle de beber. el video culmina con fermé llegando al desierto, escupiendo el agua hacia el cielo, mojando su rostro mientras cae el atardecer. da la sensación de un cierre de ciclo entre su cuerpo y el recuerdo íntimo con su padre. en el caso de anette chávez, su video narra el devenir de un jarrón de cerámica extraído de la casa de su madre, que se fractura, estalla, vacía, al incorporar su historia familiar vinculada al valle de mexicali, cerca del pozo 89; es el agua y el sitio lo que la conecta con sus antepasadas. para ado, romper el jarrón no es impulso central, sino remendar los pedazos que quedaron. más allá del destrozo, la acción recalca la grieta del jarrón; su contusión material y trauma emocional en relación con el paisaje y la memoria vinculada a él. de ser un objeto inanimado, el jarrón se aviva y corporiza los recuerdos y modos de vincularse con el espacio. archivo familiar: relaciones de parentesco con aguas y paisajes en la repetición de rutas en la ciudad y la mediana estabilidad en la que vivimos, no estaremos pensando ni percibiendo la frontera violenta todo el tiempo sólo porque está ahí constantemente. alguna imagen o situación suele “activarla”. tal vez noticias sobre empresas que buscan instalarse para aprovechar las asimetrías antes mencionadas, al ver a una persona en situación de movilidad, al manejar de nuestra casa hacia planta libre sobre la avenida colón, que corre nueve kilómetros paralela a la barda, o al tener alguna charla sobre las migraciones de nuestras y nuestros abuelos. en el último caso, las nociones que tengamos de la frontera se activarán para recordarnos cómo atraviesa nuestra vida por completo. mencionamos anteriormente pensar nuestra relación con el agua como una especie de consanguinidad. aunque a nosotras no nos tocó crecer bañándonos en el río, muchos álbumes fotográficos familiares en mexicali tienen registros de días y paseos en esos lugares antes de que fueran vestigios. un conjunto de esos recuerdos, de diferentes espacios y tiempos, nos permite imaginar a una comunidad articulada por paisajes afectivos, y al río como algo más que un valor de cambio; como participante común de la fotografía familiar. en estos documentos encontramos señales que ilustran la posibilidad de generar parentesco (haraway 2016) con el río. ¿cómo hablamos, desde nuestra familiaridad, sobre los cuerpos de agua y sus paisajes en mexicali? ¿de qué manera heredamos, o no, las aspiraciones que tenían nuestros abuelos o padres del sueño americano y la movilidad económica asociada con este lugar? ¿cómo se manifiestan dichas aspiraciones en mexicali, en la arquitectura, la flota vehicular, en el consumo general, en el pasto bermuda y los árboles podados? ¿en qué modo reproducimos la afinidad de nuestros abuelos por el verdor de otras geografías, el rechazo de la aridez y el desierto? (véase figura 12). previo a nuestro primer evento público, el de nuestra señora del río oculto, hablamos con jaziel torres de la comunidad cucapá mayor sobre su participación y el tema que nos reunía: la memoria del río. nos comentó que a él le habían enseñado que el río era como un abuelo, parte de su familia. en el evento, la señora raquel portillo, que en paz descanse, nos platicó sobre su lucha por conservar la pesca y sobre cómo era el río antes de las presas, cómo llegaba cargado de sedimento colorado (véase figura 8). una conclusión: el espacio (y en ello, el suelo) como archivo fred b. kniffen, en the natural landscape of the colorado delta (1932), distingue las distintas tipologías de cuerpos de agua que integran la región deltaica del colorado y su relación simbiótica con otros elementos del paisaje, como el sedimento, el alto golfo y las placas tectónicas. al definir estas formas, identifica el desbordamiento como una categoría y fenómeno clave, y reconoce a la laguna volcano, la laguna salada y el salton sea como ejemplos de estos desbordamientos (kniffen 1932, 173), pues son cuerpos de agua que se definen y existen en la medida en que el río colorado inunda su delta y entra en estas cuencas. cuando las aguas se retiran, lo que queda es la huella agrietada que el agua dejó en la cuenca. el sedimento y su constelación de grietas son testimonio de miles de años de entradas y salidas de agua, ahora interrumpidas. esta lectura geológica del delta nos ha dado dos lecciones. la primera tiene que ver con que gracias a ella se formó un sistema regional amplio e interconectado a través de flujos erráticos, de “desbordes indisciplinados”. la segunda es que de ello sólo nos quedan las huellas agrietadas del suelo. para estudiar el delta del río colorado, entendimos que era necesario hacer el ejercicio de desedimentar,22 no solo buscando las grietas grandes en forma de fallas geológicas, fracturas y movimientos telúricos, sino desentrañando las relaciones coloniales entrelazadas con el mismo suelo. como lo plantea kathryn yusoff (2018), la geología está profunda e históricamente entrelazada con el necropoder. la laguna volcanes, ahora seca, acumula el sedimento resultante de la extracción geotérmica; un proyecto energético desarrollado con el saber tecnocientífico estadounidense desde mediados del siglo pasado para exportar energía y que se ‘incorpora’ en el desgaste medioambiental, pero también en la salud pública de las comunidades aledañas. figura 12: cerro prieto, rodeado de lagunas de evaporación en donde antes estaría la laguna volcán. fuente: fotografía de rosela del bosque. pensar desde las temporalidades geológicas, además, nos ha permitido observar relaciones interescalares, de lo local a lo planetario, de lo micro a lo macro (véase figura 13). mexicali, su valle y el delta del colorado están inmersos en un territorio geológicamente complejo, un paisaje desértico de volcanes de lodo, géiseres y aguas sulfurosas, situado en un intrincado sistema de placas tectónicas con la falla de san andrés como protagonista. la subducción de placas creó fallas y el levantamiento del suelo formó sierras y costas, mientras que la caída de fuerzas constituyó las cuencas en este mapa geológico de desbordamientos. estas fuerzas tectónicas, manifiestas en la constante actividad sísmica, continúan remodelando el sustrato del golfo de california y la región delta.23 figura 13: una en el enredo. fuente: imagen propia a partir de un diagrama de dimensiones y escalas sobre mapa de thomas burnet, publicado en 1694, que muestra al planeta sin agua y a baja california como una isla. editado por jessica sevilla para este artículo, su tesis y el archivo familiar del río colorado, 2024. “las rocas no son sustantivos, sino verbos”, revela la autora y geóloga marcia bjornerud (2018, 8); son vestigios materiales de procesos en movimiento que abarcan grandes franjas de tiempo: erupciones volcánicas, levantamiento de sierras, terremotos. el suelo, entonces, es un archivo, las rocas hablan; son registros politemporales que evidencian un territorio y una serie de acuíferos en constante movimiento. lo geológico nos ha impulsado a escuchar y develar historias de tiempos profundos. los temblores y terremotos son parte de las mismas afinidades y relaciones vivas en el paisaje. comprendernos como parte de los procesos terrestres y sus ciclos nos obliga a pensar en la conciencia del tiempo profundo: las escalas, lo misterioso y lo desconocido dentro de las relaciones planetarias. el terremoto de magnitud 7.2 del 4 de abril de 2010, evidenció que la tierra estaba decidida a liberar energía más allá de nosotras. la artista karina villalobos, en su proyecto sobre sakamoto, un poblado vecino al ejido michoacán y la planta geotérmica de cerro prieto, narra la transformación de un asentamiento que se desmoronó y cuyas tierras se abrieron durante ese terremoto. su familia recuerda cómo la sierra desprendía polvo y oscilaba, mientras pequeños géiseres brotaban del suelo (véase figura 14).24 en el temblor de 2010, la licuefacción del terreno hacía imposible desplazarse, pero el paisaje geológico de mexicali, vinculado al sistema planetario del cinturón de fuego del pacífico, se reavivó como solía hacerlo antes de la instalación de la planta geotérmica (véase figura 15). figura 14: licuefacción. ejercicio realizado por la artista karina villalobos sobre sakamoto durante el taller “la imagen salvaje” en mayo de 2022. fuente: cortesía de la artista. figura 15. la planta geotérmica cerro prieto, s.f. fuente: cortesía del archivo histórico del municipio de mexicali. como en los otros paisajes y cuerpos de agua mencionados, las fuerzas asimétricas de la frontera han quedado incorporadas en la desecación de la laguna volcanes y el agotamiento de los acuíferos con la operación de la planta geotérmica. la frontera no solo ha modificado el espacio y los ecosistemas donde vivimos, sino que también ha impactado los flujos y procesos planetarios con los que estamos entrelazadas, así como nuestra capacidad de disfrutar las vistas de aguas superficiales y humedales, sus sonidos, frescuras y alimentos. pensar la frontera desde la materialidad del agua y el agua desde la frontera nos ha permitido comenzar a visibilizar los entretejimientos de escalas espaciotemporales con la cotidianidad vivida en la ciudad, hasta los flujos planetarios y el tiempo geológico. en esta maraña, las relaciones de la frontera y las dinámicas acumuladoras del capital nos permiten entender los cambios irreversibles del vasto delta, que trastocan cuerpos y las entrañas propias. para el archivo familiar del río colorado, fluir caminando y pensando con la entraña es un primer paso hacia una ética del cuidado que nos permita imaginar futuros juntas con el delta del río colorado. notas 1 jessica sevilla (1988) y rosela del bosque (1997) gestionan e investigan el archivo familiar del río colorado en colaboración con mayté miranda y minoru kiyota. 2 en este texto se comprende como delta del río colorado, con mayúscula, no sólo a la desembocadura en el golfo de california, sino a la región inundable que abarcaba desde el salton sea, hasta las zonas de humedales, lagunas, ríos, arroyos y estuarios en mexicali y la frontera con sonora. 3 el debate sobre los -cenos comienza con la propuesta del término antropoceno por el químico y ganador de premio nobel, paul crutzen, quien sugiere el inicio de una nueva era geológica marcada por los efectos prolongados de los procesos antropogénicos a escala planetaria e interespecie. posteriormente, se articulan conceptos como el capitaloceno (andreas malm, jason moore y más tarde utilizado por haraway), que hace énfasis en el rol del sistema capitalista sobre la noción del ‘antropos’, o el plantationoceno (haraway 2014;tsing 2014; gilbert y edel 2015) y el chthuluceno (haraway 2016). 4 usamos y comprendemos a los flujos como “erráticos” a raíz de una serie de conversaciones con nuestra amiga andrea torreblanca, quien durante los últimos tres años ha curado una serie de eventos y conversaciones en la región fronteriza de las californias, a través de su colaboración con insite, también para pensar en relaciones interescalares y fenómenos ecológicos que atraviesan la región. 5 mayté miranda es artista visual, gestora, curadora y profesora; trabaja con medios como la escultura, dibujo, fotografía, haciendo textos y autopublicaciones, además de la gestión y docencia de artes plásticas para infancias. ha participado en distintos proyectos artísticos colaborativos y actualmente es curadora en la galería en la que nació este proyecto, planta libre. la galería es dirigida por minoru kiyota, quien es arquitecto, estudió una maestría enfocada en la práctica del diseño y las relaciones socioambientales, y también ha participado de otras iniciativas culturales y ciudadanas. desde hace años explora el archivo de su obāchan, mientras aprende de su historia migratoria y su vida en mexicali. como mayté, rosela del bosque es curadora en planta libre y en otros proyectos independientes. estudió una licenciatura en historia del arte y una maestría en curaduría después de que empezáramos este proyecto, por lo que sus intereses en esta geografía y la práctica curatorial se han ido agudizando a la par. actualmente le interesa la geología, los fenómenos de geotermia, vulcanismo y los procesos extractivos en la región. también es profesora en materias de gestión cultural y crítica de arte en la facultad de artes de la uabc. jessica sevilla también es artista, gestora cultural, arquitecta y profesora universitaria. estudió una maestría en estudios de diseño, enfocándose en procesos de apropiación del espacio. investiga sobre la producción del paisaje afectivo del agua en mexicali desde un programa doctoral en estudios culturales. ha colaborado en iniciativas ciudadanas, en co-curadurías locales y desde hace diez años tiene una práctica artística que explora la geografía con imagen, texto, cartografía e instalación. en equipo, hemos intercalado tareas de recopilación y producción de registros documentales, tanto en caminatas y diálogos, como en investigaciones de escritorio. guardamos crónicas, historias orales, imágenes de archivos familiares, de archivos institucionales y encontrados, paisajes sonoros, documentos de gobierno, proyectos de desarrollo, artículos científicos, mapas, obras de arte, memes y publicaciones en redes sociales, entre otras cosas. planeamos talleres para trabajar con estos registros, explorando preguntas particulares, editando materiales y buscando relecturas de los archivos existentes. 6 como afirma el geógrafo henri lefebvre (1974), la naturaleza no trabaja por sí misma, sino cuando la domina la fuerza acumulativa del capital para convertirla en valor de cambio. 7 en nepantla: liminalidad y transición. escritura chicana de mujeres, gloria anzaldúa (2007) plantea el nepantla como un sitio, estado y percepción de entremundos, de liminalidad y cruce entre fronteras como parte medular de la experiencia chicana. nepantla forja y abre camino a nuevas identidades, espirituales, lingüísticas, socioculturales, geopolíticas, psicológicas y creativas. 8 reconocemos el concepto de sentipensar, tanto por la activista guatemalteca lorena cabnal (2022) como por el antropólogo colombiano arturo escobar (2016), que a su vez lo retoma de fals borda (1984), quien, después de sus intercambios con las concepciones ribereñas colombianas de la costa atlántica, identificó los modos de relación y entendimiento con el entorno como uno que involucra al cuerpo para pensar. sentipensar es un llamado a ser y relacionarse, superando el problema de mente-cuerpo; pensar con el corazón y sentir con la cabeza; una noción que, a pesar de ser apropiada por la antropología de comunidades indígenas, no tiene un significado que sea exclusivo a los pueblos, ni a la tradición académica decolonial. 9 pensar al río como una línea definida sobre el terreno, argumenta el arquitecto y planificador dilip da cunha (2019), es un acto de creación humana; un designio o diseño que parte de la representación visual, el deseo cartográfico y de dominación. él nos exhorta, en cambio, a considerar a los ríos como un campo abierto de humedad. la idea de un “desbordamiento”, por tanto, refuerza la idea de un río dominado en la forma fija de un cauce. 10 el salton sea, mencionado varias veces en este texto, es un lago salino ubicado al norte del valle imperial, en la parte más baja del delta. este se llenó de “modo accidental” cuando en los esfuerzos ingenieriles por la dominación del caudal en 1905, el colorado se desbordó. su agua fluyó a través de dos antiguos cauces, el de río nuevo y río álamo, que hasta la fecha siguen transportando drenaje agrícola del valle imperial y mexicali hacia el salton, contribuyendo a mantener el nivel de agua en el lago, pero también a su salinidad y deterioro ecológico. 11 el desarrollo agrícola del desierto del colorado germina después del interés del doctor oliver wozencraft, quien a mediados del siglo xix comienza a promover la idea de desviar el caudal del río hacia el noroeste—por el cauce del río álamo— para mover el agua por gravedad hacia el salton sea. en 1906, cuando ya había desviado el caudal y una serie de inundaciones llenaron el salton, los ángeles sunday times publicaron en primera plana una imagen y texto que expresaban el deseo del bureau of reclamation de redibujar el límite binacional, de modo que este incluyera al cauce del río álamo y lo que hoy es mexicali como parte de estados unidos (berumen 2013). al ser expulsadas las compañías estadounidenses del valle de mexicali durante el gobierno de lázaro cárdenas, particularmente después de 1938, la política de poblamiento para la región mantuvo una relación directa con las ideas de dominar desierto y río. antes de que el agua fuera acaparada por los ángeles y otros centros urbanos estadounidenses, el valle de mexicali fue impulsado a reclamar su porción del caudal haciendo al desierto productivo, trasladando las lógicas de la frontera, enlazadas con el nuevo nacionalismo, hacia las tierras “salvajes” o improductivas (ward 2001). entre las décadas de 1960 y 70, los suelos agrícolas del valle sufrieron un grave problema de salinidad relacionado con la calidad del agua entregada por estados unidos; en mexicali no sólo se perdieron los cultivos, sino que se disponía de agua contaminada para vivir. más recientemente, en 2017, el gobierno estatal de baja california intentó privatizar el suministro de agua, concediendo la construcción de una desalinizadora a un consorcio mexicano-israelí y una megacervecera transnacional de la compañía constellation brands. es decir, las presiones del mercado de agua en california, su urbanización y las dinámicas asimétricas de la frontera, volvieron a poner en desventaja a los ecosistemas y la disponibilidad de agua en el lado sur del límite binacional. 12 el mayor no tiene infraestructura de agua potable; el agua llega en camiones con pipas. el caudal del río hardy proviene de aguas urbanas servidas que pasaron por un proceso de biorremediación en unos humedales artificiales las arenitas, un proyecto que opera desde 2007, construido con fondos del north american development bank. el nivel del agua del hardy es bajo, por ende, no hay peces como antes, tanto porque la liberación de agua es escasa, como porque los campos turísticos río arriba colocan represas. a lo largo de estos años, y con mayor intensidad a partir de la creación de la reserva de la biósfera del alto golfo de california y delta del río colorado en 1993, la comunidad ha demandado su derecho a la pesca y resistido a los procesos coloniales en la ribera. 13 el desarrollo acumulativo es desigual por naturaleza; la asimetría en la producción del espacio no es sólo subproducto del capitalismo tardío, sino que es inherente al funcionamiento del sistema mismo (smith 1984). si esa cualidad asimétrica se potencializa en las fronteras –en los cercamientos de los estadosnación o en las fronteras intraurbanas–, las experiencias y aprendizajes que generamos al movernos en estos espacios, al interactuar y vincularnos con sus entramados ecosistémicos, no sólo son desiguales porque nosotras seamos personas distintas, sino porque las dinámicas de poder desigual dan forma a los espacios en los que vivimos. de ahí que cuando experimentamos el paisaje en el delta, no podemos desprendernos de este mecanismo clasificador y biopolítico que parece trastocar todo el espacio que habitamos. 14 el flujo en dirección a la costa obedece a la demanda de la industria maquiladora en tijuana, así como al mercado de agua californiano. sobre este flujo, la desaparición forzada en el país, entre un entramado más complejo de relaciones, se incorpora en la materialidad del agua y el paisaje. si bien el canal tiene apenas algunos tules y sauces que le rodean aferrados, el tulicheck es una parte del río que queda en la ciudad y, sin embargo, se habla de cubrirlo para convertirlo en avenida; de ocultarlo para no ver la violencia que este incorpora y tampoco el agua. 15 como la investigadora elia méndez garcía expresa en su investigación sobre los mineros serranos de la sierra juárez en oaxaca, “la potencia de recordar vincula a la mente con el corazón, a la razón con el sentimiento. une lo que el capital se empeña en separar. une lo olvidado en el recuerdo” (méndez 2017, 177). 16 por casi cuatro años, hemos alimentado una plataforma digital que almacena archivos jpg, pdf, capturas de pantallas de mapas que forman parte de colecciones de archivos estadounidenses, conversaciones y publicaciones de redes sociales. se han categorizado estos documentos y se ha establecido un orden según la voz de quien narra, sea un explorador inglés del siglo xix, una familia que describe un domingo en los canales del valle de mexicali, un mapa que ilustra cuerpos de agua que ya no existen o una obra de arte que retrata el río hardy. estos testimonios brindan perspectivas múltiples sobre la historia que se ha contado del delta, sus ecologías y el desarrollo del valle. el archivo colonial tiene distintas formas y tesituras materializadas por los relatos de exploradores españoles, misioneros, cartógrafos europeos, científicos desinteresados, etnógrafos, turistas que buscan un paraíso desolado que se asemeje a la idea de espacio desierto que se sostuvo de la isla de california en dos siglos. también está el documento histórico institucional, la crónica fotográfica que registra el dominio del río, el triunfo de la ingeniería hidráulica. por otro lado, están el meme y las publicaciones de facebook donde se manifiestan expresiones contingentes a los fenómenos de la lluvia y la sequía, los recuerdos y añoranzas de cuerpos de agua y canales de riego donde se bañaba la población. hay sarcasmo e ironía para sobrellevar su estado actual de abandono y hedor. en los recuerdos y las fotografías de archivos familiares están expuestas las prácticas cotidianas, (véase figura 7) los espectros de relaciones particulares con cuerpos de agua que ya no existen y paisajes que han cambiado. en la producción artística encontramos aproximaciones al paisaje que varían según su tiempo y voz narrativa. 17 hablamos desde el privilegio de vivir en la ciudad, con educación universitaria y el idioma inglés que nos permite buscar en bases de datos estadounidenses. también tenemos la posibilidad de acceder a becas para rentar carros grandes que nos trasladen acompañadas hacia el valle y las montañas para conocer sus ecosistemas y hacer este proyecto, a pesar de los conflictos armados que suceden en la región. 18 en él aludimos a la wādī al-lubb, posible origen de la palabra guadalupe y que lleva el significado de “río escondido” en árabe. así como su figura nos recuerda el mestizaje violento, en el evento astronómico de esa noche (la lluvia de estrellas de la constelación hydra), nos permitió llamar a nuevas maneras de significar nuestra relación con el misterio de las relaciones planetarias con el agua y la vida. 19 este sitio es una franja que ha sido repoblada de bosques riparios después de las liberaciones del flujo ambiental de 2014, posible gracias al acta 319 del tratado de aguas entre méxico y estados unidos de 1944. 20 ese periodo de 2022-23 invitamos a colaborar a enero y abril, amiga y artista de xalapa, veracruz, que hilvana su propia práctica artística con la microhistoria, el archivo familiar y las relaciones vivas con el territorio. impartió el taller “la imagen salvaje”, que suele trabajar a partir del archivo familiar, público o encontrado, con la intención de ficcionar, reapropiarse e incluso crear las historias que le puedan faltar a la historia, a la par que se dialoga con autoras como gloria anzaldúa, silvia rivera cusicanqui y ariella azoulay. por llevarse a cabo en el espacio cultural de planta libre, participaron mayormente artistas, arquitectas, gestores, diseñadores, pero también se acercó ricardo corral, quien tiene formación en ciencias químicas y deseos de experimentar desde las artes y pensar con el archivo. la investigación documental marcó pautas sobre los espectros del agua que podríamos ver en el sitio. con ello propusimos algunos de los caminos que cruzan la cuenca, cuerpos de agua, cañones y montañas, identificando rutas antiguas, abanicos aluviales e historias del lugar que definieron los tres momentos de las caminatas: la de pozo coyote al sureste de la salada en mayo de 2022, otra sobre la sierra cucapá en enero de 2023 y la última en el cañón de guadalupe en abril de 2023. 21 emprendimos el ejercicio de recorrer el espacio buscando vínculos que nos recuerden qué saberes y sentires están en la entraña, aunque pudiesen sentirse latentes en la ciudad. desde esas experiencias del espacio y caminatas lentas conectamos al recuerdo de otras experiencias en el campo, a la temperatura de los cañones, al deseo de entrar en las aguas termales, entre otras cosas (véase figura 11). 22 término presentado por kathryn yussof para hablar sobre el desmantelamiento de las estructuras que históricamente se han “sedimentado” en el espacio, enredadas con la ciencia y práctica de la geología y sustentadas en el colonialismo, las relaciones de raza y la extracción de bienes en el planeta. 23 peter l. kresan, en su artículo “a geologic tour of the lower colorado river region of arizona and sonora”, explica que el delta del río colorado “es un paisaje moldeado por una larga serie de acontecimientos geológicos superpuestos que actúan tanto para construir como para desgarrar la tierra” (1997, 1). 24 registros históricos de 1915 y 1934 también narran que, durante temblores, surgían columnas de vapor de hasta 45 metros de altura desde la extinta laguna volcanes (strand 1981). references anzaldúa, gloria. 1993. "chicana artists: exploring nepantla, el lugar de la frontera." nacla report on the americas 27 (1): 37–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.1993.11724648. barad, karen. 2003. “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 28 (3): 801– 31. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321. berumen, miguel angel. 2013. la conquista del agua y del imaginario: mexicali y valle imperial, 1901-1916. talleres de offset rebosán. bjornerud, marcia. 2018. timefulness: how thinking like a geologist can help save the world. princeton university press. braidotti, rosi. 2019. “a theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities.” theory, culture & society 36 (6): 31–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486. cabnal, lorena con milena patiño [facultad de ciencias sociales-uniandes]. 2022. tejiendo filosofía [video]. facebook, 6 de diciembre. https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=614556089416113. comisión internacional de límites y aguas (cila). 2018. “informe final del acta 319 sobre el monitoreo de flujos ambientales en el tramo limítrofe y delta del río colorado.” cila. 28 de noviembre. http://www.cila.gob.mx/rc/m319mrf.pdf. da cunha, dilip. 2019. the invention of rivers: alexander’s eye and ganga’s descent. university of pennsylvania press. escobar, arturo. 2016. “sentipensar con la tierra: las luchas territoriales y la dimensión ontológica de las epistemologías del sur.” aibr, revista de antropología iberoamericana 11 (1): 11–32. https://doi.org/10.11156/aibr.110102. enero y abril. 2024. “reflexión sobre procesos y caminatas: modos del archivo vivo y de la investigación artística que hemos estado llevando sobre la invocación.” en la huella del agua tiempo en forma de grieta: archivo familiar del río colorado, 44–50. https://heyzine.com/flipbook/ 1df019ee54.html?fbclid=pazxh0bgnhzw0cmteaaazk4v8dwx59pkx0etijrkvlu7rhwzgxq1inh72rnto_z5uo0zwhplfn4_aem_dnukm7i_nc9dxiew9b4oaq. fals borda, orlando. 1984. resistencia en el san jorge. carlos valencia editores. haraway, donna. 1988. “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” feminist studies 14 (3): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066. haraway, donna. 2016. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke university press. ingold, tim. 2021. the perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003196662. kniffen, fred b. 1932. “lower california studies iv: the natural landscape of the colorado delta.” university of california publications in geography 5 (4). http://www.nativefishlab.net/library/textpdf/12572.pdf. kresan, peter l. 1997. “a geologic tour of the lower colorado river region of arizona and sonora.” journal of the southwest 39 (3–4): 567–612. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40170065. lefebvre, henri. (1974) 2001. la producción del espacio. capitán swing. méndez garcía, elia. 2017. de relámpagos y recuerdos. minería y tradición de la lucha serrana por lo común. grafisma y cátedra jorge alonso. muhs, daniel r., richard l. reynolds, josh been, y gary skipp. 2003. “eolian sand transport pathways in the southwestern united states: importance of the colorado river and local sources.” quaternary international 104 (1): 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1040-6182(02)00131-3. neimanis, astrida. 2017. bodies of water: posthuman feminist phenomenology. bloomsbury academic. pratt, mary louise. 2011. ojos imperiales: literatura de viajes y transculturación. fondo de cultura económica. ramírez hernández, jorge. 2021. “las aguas subterráneas transfronterizas del delta del río colorado, un reto para la cooperación.” en visiones contemporáneas de la cooperación y la gestión del agua en la frontera méxico-estados unidos, editado por josé luis castro ruiz, alfonso andrés cortez lara, y vicente sánchez munguiá, 177– 212. el colegio de la frontera norte. smith, neil. 2020. desarrollo desigual: naturaleza, capital y la producción del espacio. traficantes de sueños. strand, carl l. 1981. “mud volcanoes, faults and earthquakes of the colorado delta before the twentieth century.” journal of san diego history 27 (1): 43–63. ward, evan. 2001. “the twentieth-century ghosts of william walker: conquest of land and water as central themes in the history of the colorado river delta.” pacific historical review 70 (3): 359–85. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2001.70.3.359. yusoff, kathryn. 2018. a billion black anthropocenes or none. university of minnesota press.   biografías de las autoras jessica sevilla es una artista, docente e investigadora de mexicali. coordina el archivo familiar del río colorado con rosela del bosque, mayté miranda y minoru kiyota. es estudiante doctoral en el instituto de investigaciones culturales iic-museo uabc. jessica sevilla is an artist, professor, and researcher from mexicali. she coordinates the archivo familiar del río colorado with rosela del bosque, mayté miranda, and minoru kiyota. she is a doctoral student at the cultural research institute iic-museo uabc. rosela del bosque es una historiadora del arte, curadora y profesora de mexicali. es curadora en planta libre, profesora en la facultad de artes uabc y forma parte del proyecto colaborativo archivo familiar del río colorado. rosela del bosque is an art historian, curator, and professor from mexicali. she is a curator at planta libre and professor at the uabc school of arts, and is part of the collaborative project archivo familiar del río colorado. paehr, iz. 2025. “more-than-human infrastructures in the world wide wet.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–19. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © iz paehr, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license more-than-human infrastructures in the world wide wet iz paehr independent scholar hello@izpaehr.xyz abstract the presented research contributes to discourses that center questions of materiality in relation to networks by following the materials and animals that make and circlude submarine cables in the world wide wet of earth’s oceans. the sleeves of telegram cables are an invitation to think with the sticky entanglements of a tree that produced a natural plastic that insulated transatlantic telegraph cables from the 1850s onwards and facilitated a technology that both deepened and challenged colonial control. a second story makes slippery connections between a lubricant that surrounds thin fiber-optic strands and the history of human skin care. to render the internet as a material-discursive performance of various materials and nonhuman animals (parks 2019), a third story follows a mollusk that short circuits cables and the gender binary. developing infrastructural rewirings and rewritings, the article continues with discussions of internet infrastructure workshops that i collaboratively developed as a critical designer. playing with cables in the form of strings makes for frictional imaginaries of internet infrastructure that are needed to counter dominant narratives of the internet as linear technoscientific progress. keywords internet infrastructures, networked ecologies, critical design, matter and materiality, access, friction this article has recently been a series of light pulses that traversed the vast darkness and pressure of earth’s oceans faster than any human can blink. it will likely be tunneled through an ocean again whenever someone opens it in a browser or attaches it to an email. the data packages these words are composed mailto:hello@izpaehr.xyz original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 2 of are called bits, and within the protective layers of submarine cables that are laid on and under the seabed, they move near salt water, but they never get wet. despite the popularity of the metaphor of the cloud that implies that the internet is in the skies, internet infrastructure is “rural and aquatic” (starosielski 2015, 2), and 99 percent of internet traffic is being transmitted through the 1.2 million kilometers of submarine cables that span the globe (brake 2019, 2). playing with metaphors, this text renders the internet as a world wide wet and floats with the materials and animals that are involved in its networked ecologies. the presented research aims to contribute to discourses that center questions of materiality in relation to networks by telling the story of communication infrastructures from transatlantic telegraphy to today’s internet infrastructures through how cables have been constructed to resist wetness. this text begins with the question of why the trope of immateriality and misleading metaphors such as the cloud are so persistent when it comes to networks, and introduces why keeping wetness at bay is necessary for electromagnetic and fiber-optic transmissions. it then tells three stories that take cables and attempts to insulate them as their starting points: the materials they are made from, the geographies they traverse and co-shape, and the nonhuman animals that interact with them. the first story is an invitation to think with the sticky entanglements of a tree that produced a natural plastic that insulated transatlantic telegraph cables from the 1850s onwards and facilitated a technology that first deepened and later challenged colonial control. the second story follows the slippery connections between a lubricant that surrounds the thin fiber-optic strands that refract light pulses across oceans and the history of human skin care. to render the internet as a material-discursive performance of various materials and nonhuman animals (parks 2019), the third story follows a mollusk that eats at cables and the gender binary. these stories move inwards: from the sheath of cables to the soft materials within them to the animals that eat through them. developing infrastructural rewirings and rewritings, this article continues with discussions of a series of internet infrastructure workshops that i collaboratively developed as part of my practice as a critical designer. the workshops were conducted to both build literacy for existing structures and to unfold potentials for inventing more just infrastructures, a frictional relation i will engage to draw connections between theoretical and practical modes of imagining the internet differently. these frictional imaginaries are needed to counter dominant narratives of the internet as linear technoscientific progress. material all the way: watering down immateriality despite scholarly critique, the trope of immateriality (blanchette 2011) is persistent when it comes to public imaginations of the internet.1 this trope, or rhetorical figure, stands for the assumption that digital media are supposedly independent from material constraints and thus immaterial. an example for this original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 3 trope is the metaphor of the cloud, which is often used as a direct equivalent for the internet, as is evident in microsoft’s (n.d.) statement that the company delivers services “over the internet (‘the cloud’).” nathan ensmenger argues in his article “the environmental history of computing,” that if this so-called “cloud were a country, it would be the sixth largest consumer of electricity on the planet” (2018, s10). metaphors and imaginaries surrounding the digital are oftentimes misleading, and while the term cloud suggests a locality in the skies, digital devices are powered by so-called rare earths. rare earths are neither a rarity on earth nor actually “earths”—but metals. however, “what is rare are regions of the world that governments and companies are willing to subject to the environmental risks of rare earth mining and processing,” specifies journalist ingrid burrington (2018). the digital is material: from the formation of high-tech industries being based on ecocides and the exploitation of immigrant labor (pellow and park 2002), to the immense amounts of water and electricity used to cool data centers (ensmenger 2018), to the planned obsolescence of electronic devices (gabrys 2011), to “power plants, fiber-optic cables, satellites, mines yielding coltan and copper, and assembly-line workers and e-waste handlers regularly exposing themselves to toxic materials” (mattern 2018). the trope of immateriality is perpetuated by tech companies, but it has anticapitalist origins that become evident in the writings of nicholas negroponte, who described a paradigm shift from “atoms to bits” in his 1995 book being digital. in john perry barlow’s (1996) text “a declaration of the independence of cyberspace,” the cyberlibertarian falsely predicted that corporations would have no power in cyberspace exactly due to the supposed immateriality of bits: “your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. they are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.” about thirty years later, the trope of immateriality still has far-reaching consequences for how we speak of, think of, and act in digital spaces. questions about who owns resources, why it is so, and how it could be otherwise do not fit the equation of digitality with immateriality, but these questions are important in regard to the fact that submarine cables still dominantly connect locations above the equator and follow similar colonial lines as telegraph cables. when acknowledging networks as material, critique of domination becomes possible. before my research into cables, salt water was not a material that i thought of when imagining the internet. in her book wild blue media: thinking through seawater, melody jue describes the shift happens when “becoming aware of habits of perception that reflect the fact that we are acculturated to certain conditions of gravity rather than the buoyant and vital fluidity of the ocean” as a way of “going into the blue” (2020, xi). more than 70 percent of earth’s surface is covered in ocean water, and for global communications to be possible, cables must pass through them without leaking. a cable’s electric current and fiber transmission get lost when they are in touch with the ocean. salt water is highly original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 4 conductive, and it carries electric currents so well that a cable without insulation immediately loses its current to the ocean’s currents. keeping electrons in place or moving them along defined lines requires boundaries: the outer layer of today’s submarine communication cables consists of polyethylene, which is a product of the oil industries. when the first working telegraph was presented in 1839, this plastic had not been invented yet. to communicate over large distances and water masses, a good insulator to avoid leakage that could withstand extreme temperatures and pressure was needed—and found in the rubber-like material gutta-percha. it begins with a tree: gutta-percha, insulation, and control gutta-percha describes the tree sap or gum of palaquium trees, of which the palaquium gutta trees native to the tropical rainforests of southeast asia, particularly malaysia, singapore, and sumatra and borneo, promised the most durable product. this material is a shapeshifter: slow flowing sap coagulates into a solid when exposed to room temperature—reheated again, it becomes a plastic that can be shaped into a desired form. as i slowly rip open the leaf of a guttapercha tree that i ordered online, sticky sap threads appear in the openings that keep holding the pieces of the leaf together. taking up this invitation to think with sticky, leaky entanglements, i am following gutta-percha and its conditions of production and usage to question the ongoing colonial motivations behind both the telegraph and today’s internet infrastructure. helen godfrey’s book submarine telegraphy and the hunt for gutta percha: challenge and opportunity in a global trade provides a deep insight into the peoples and materials involved in the structures that moved gutta-percha from indigenous sarawak to chinese trade networks to european cable manufacturers in the second half of the nineteenth century (2018, 95). while global power relations remained so that “the periphery was left to do the task assigned to it— supply resources to the metropolitan core” (270), the trade was only possible because of the knowledges of local communities, about the trees from which they harvested gutta-percha. they knew the flow of the tree sap to be best in the morning, set harvesting periods in relation to the wet season (165), and transported the material over vast distances on rivers and via hinterland paths that they often cut into forests and grasslands on the go and that were simply too slippery for europeans to navigate (191). the first cables that were insulated with gutta-percha were laid far away from the trees and peoples that made such an undertaking possible: within the new york harbor, from dover to calais, and from deutz to cologne. the first successful transatlantic cable was laid in 1858—although it stopped working after only six weeks. at this point, the role of the telegraph in securing colonial control was well original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 5 established: one year earlier, during the indian rebellion of 1857, the british use of telegraphy as the fastest form of long-distance communication available at the time had allowed the colonizers to overthrow the rebellion. a rebel allegedly exclaimed before being hanged, while looking at an above telegraph wire, that this was “the accursed wire that strangled us” (choudhury 2010, 31). despite the fast and brutal reaction of the british in india, the news of the rebellion only reached london forty days later, and telegrams sent via landlines that were established in the following years still took days to reach their destinations (headrick 2010). with access to gutta-percha and the possibility to lay cables across the oceans, the british were eager to connect london to bombay and succeeded in 1870. in the years that followed, telegraphy deepened the control that colonizers had, as they could coordinate and command through a technology that upset the previous communications paradigm that more distance equals slower speed. in india, as dhanashree thorat writes, “the colonial administration turned the telegraph into an instrument of control over territories, commerce, information, and above all, colonized people” (2019, 260). to keep connections across the country stable, the telegraph network in india was built with wetness, namely monsoons and hurricanes, in mind: in an interview, prashant s. kumar tells me that while high-tension thin wire was used in the west, the telegraph wire in india was three-eighths of an inch thick, and the rods were suspended on top of bamboo poles so that they could sway in the wind. kumar’s research shows that the sturdy materiality and the fact that wires and poles were produced by local manufacturers on bazaars made it possible to hack the network, which local stock speculators did by intercepting wires with a stolen morse code machine to falsify opium prices (kumar 2024). while the expenses of extending and maintaining the network forced the british to open telegraphy to indian people early on, “telegraph messages were physically handed over to telegraph authorities, who would read the messages and transmit them as signals to their destination,” and british surveillance unfolded through modes of “interception, detention and censorship” by the physical manipulation, delaying, or withholding of messages, as p. arun (2024) explains. despite these mechanisms of control, anti-colonialists made use of telegraphy for coordination, information, and international exchange. as daniel headrick puts it, the “very media of communication that the british had introduced, did not make british rule permanent, but undermined it instead” (2010, 13). it is gutta-percha’s relationship to wetness and temperature that made telegraph transatlantic cables possible: its insulating qualities “actually improved when cold, wet, and under huge pressure” (newland 2022, 58). landline cables too were constructed in relation to the specific geographies and weather conditions that they traversed. another form of pressure, namely the threat of extinction, informed the fate of the slow growing palaquium gutta trees, that were mostly felled and not tapped to harvest their sap. john tully argues that the extraction of the tree led to a “victorian ecological disaster” (2009, 574), and even today, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 6 aggravated by the felling of rainforests for palm oil plantations, palaquium gutta is listed as near threatened on the international union for conservation of nature’s (iucn) red list. however, the long echo of telegraphy lies not only in its political and ecological consequences: studying telegraph and internet submarine maps shows that cables follow similar routes that make for similar well-connected centers in the global north.2 as i hope to show in the next sections, paradigms of geography, wetness, and materiality are as relevant now as they were then. slippery conditions: light and lube in fiber optics ninety-nine percent of internet traffic is transported through submarine cables, and these cables are laid on the seabed of oceans. in her book the undersea network, nicole starosielski critiques the common western imaginary in which landscapes are easily modifiable by force: “the environments that cables are laid through—the oceans, coastal landing points, and terrestrial routes—are seen as friction-free surfaces across which force is easily exerted” (2015, 5). the previous section of this text has shown the colonial origins of this imaginary by complicating the narrative of frictionless technological development via the history of the gutta-percha tree. today, geography is still one of the determining factors when it comes to how fast and reliable submarine cables can transmit bits. ensmenger opens “the environmental history of computing” with the example of the hibernia express, a 4600-km fiber-optic cable that became operational in 2015 and achieved a 10 percent reduction in network latency—not by technological advancements in data transmission, but simply by being five hundred kilometers shorter than previous cables (2018, 8–9). in this section, i am turning my attention towards the workings of internet communications and will follow light and lube within fiber-optic cables. used for internet communication since the 1990s, fiber-optic cables work by transporting pulses of light through thin strands of glass, while optical amplifiers that are powered by an electrical current keep the pulses stable (brake 2019). as with their predecessor—the copper cables used to send on telegraphic messages—protecting them from wetness requires significant material and operational efforts: for the world wide web to work, fibers and waters need to be kept out of touch. to prevent water damage, most fiber-optic submarine cables consist of eight layers that protect the optical fibers inside of them. i am interested in a slippery material that is directly applied to the fibers: they are surrounded by a mixture of petroleum jelly, polymer additives, and anti-corrosion agents that are held in place by a copper or aluminum tube (brake 2019; malekian 2024). petroleum jelly is a semi-solid, translucent substance that is insoluble in water. insoluble means that the hydrocarbons of petroleum jelly do not mix with water molecules and instead form a slippery and greasy layer that keeps wetness at bay. in addition to providing an extra layer of protection from water by repelling moisture, petroleum jelly also has insulating properties, which means that it prevents electrical leakage and possible corrosion of a cable’s metal original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 7 elements. because it is thermodynamically stable, it further protects the delicate fibers from temperature swings in the oceans. what intrigues me about this versatile material that encloses fibers across the globe is that most readers will have touched petroleum jelly: its household name is vaseline. vaseline is about as old as the first transatlantic telegraph cables, and the company’s website describes petroleum jelly as “a naturally-occurring byproduct of the oil drilling process” (n.d.). in 1859 the first western oil well was drilled in pennsylvania, and workers discovered traces of a paraffin-like material that hastened the healing process when it was applied to small skin wounds. robert augustus chesebrough, a chemist who would patent vaseline in 1872 and create a company to sell it as a skin care product, picked up on this knowledge and successfully experimented with refining the material. chesebrough spent the 1870s traveling the state of new york to demonstrate the power of his “wonder jelly.” in public demonstrations, he burned his skin to then treat his injuries with his product. since then, according to the company’s website, vaseline has written history by protecting human skin from the north pole expedition to world war ii and beyond. petroleum jelly is a material of boundaries: it sits on wounds and dry skin, has a noteworthy history as a (nowadays contested) lubricant for sex, and it is an elemental protective layer for fiber optics. vaseline binds and slips between different fields of practice such as extractive industries, internet communications, skin care and sex. circling towards queer theory, bini adamczak’s (2016) concept of circlusion is an “antonym of penetration” that describes “pushing something—a ring or a tube—onto something else—a nipple or a shaft.” in this sense, petroleum jelly can be understood as a core material in performing today’s internet by circluding fiber optics as they pass through oceans that circlude cables. if what keeps light traveling through submarine cables is the same material that softens skin and enables specific sex practices, the internet can be described as both hard wired and softly coated. boring circuits: teredo’s taste for cables in more-thanhuman infrastructures in her text “mediating animal-infrastructure relations” lisa parks involves nonhuman animals in her conceptualization of infrastructure and critiques that they are usually not considered “part of infrastructural materialities” (2019, 144). following osprey, a species of large birds that build nests on cell towers and sometimes even causes “avian delays” (146) in the towers’ maintenance, she writes, “infrastructures are surrounded by biomatter, from roots beneath them to fungi on top of them to wildlife around them” (144). in relation to submarine cables, sharks have sparked the imagination of news outlets, most popularly in the form of a video snippet that shows a shark biting into a submarine cable. sharks are known to sense electric currents, and even original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 8 though the actual threats to cables are ship anchors or underwater landslides, rumors that google would insulate new cables with kevlar, a material that is otherwise used for bullet protection, made the rounds (see gibbs 2014). to give an example of the relationships between humans, nonhuman animals, and infrastructures, i will turn my attention to a much smaller and less discussed species. when it comes to submarine cables, it is the mollusk teredo navalis, often referred to as “the shipworm,” that eats at simple conceptions of an enclosed and stable internet. teredo navalis has an elongated and reddish appearance and reaches a length of up to sixty centimeters. it uses triangular plates at its front to attach itself to wooden surfaces as larvae into which it then burrows and grows within. throughout its life, and depending on water temperature, teredo can self-fertilize and iterate between what biologists call female and male phases. as a so-called invasive species, the mollusk’s origins are not known, but what is known is that it has traveled the world on the hull of trade ships that it routinely destroyed when their hollowed wooden structures could no longer withstand storms and other tear—an effect that paola palma and l.n. santhakumaran have termed “global worming” (2014). with the first submarine cables, teredo navalis developed an appetite for gutta-percha, which it nowadays extends to fiber-optic cables (parkes and keeble 2016, 239). to circle around the history of teredo navalis, i am reaching back to its discovery in the netherlands in the 1730s, which etcher abraham zeeman captured in one of his prints in 1731 (see sundberg 2015).3 in the center and front of the image, three wormlike creatures fill almost the full length of the print. two of the creatures are oriented towards their left, and have mouths in the forms of half-circles. the third creature is oriented towards the right, has a spiky surface, and exists without a head. behind them, depicted much smaller, dike inspectors use long sticks to remove infested wood from dikes, and further back, sailing ships float on a body of water. the etching points to the fact that shipworm infestations across the netherlands created a panic because they threatened the very infrastructures that literally kept the ocean at bay and offered protection from floods. this panic was accompanied by a moral panic around recently uncovered queer networks across the country, as adam sundberg shows in his 2023 article “building the social cascade: connecting culture, disaster, and persecution in the 1730s.” the shipworm crisis occurred at a time in dutch history in which same-sex relations between men, at the time called sodomy, were persecuted in an unprecedented and deadly manner (sundberg 2023, 38). even though most trials happened prior to the discovery of the shipworm’s hollowing of the dikes, “shipworms and sodomy” were described as “near-concurrent consequences of perceived social and moral decay within the republic” by ministers, journalists, and writers of the time (30). the linking of teredo navalis and homosexuality relied on earlier metaphors and metanarratives, in which homosexuality was described as a “worm that undermined the republic’s collective conscience” (40), sin was described as the sea itself, and the shipworm was later defamed as “sodoms monster animal” original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 9 (46). in the years following the shipworm crisis, the wooden infrastructures of dikes were increasingly replaced with stones. with the installation of the first telegraph cables more than a decade later, teredo navalis developed an appetite for gutta-percha, which became a risk to cablelaying companies. the mollusk would “bore through the cable armouring and eat the jute and gutta-percha insulation, exposing the conductor and causing earth faults” (parkes and keeble 2016, 239), which resulted in very difficult and expensive cable repair missions. to stop the mollusk from boring into cables, a protection in the form of a metal tape was invented in the 1870s. in today’s fiberoptic cables, as larry parkes and alan keeble explain, the animals create electrical short circuits when hollowing through a submarine cable’s outer layers. even though there are suggestions and inventions available to protect the cables from teredo’s teeth, the small mollusk continues to make trouble and literally cannot be kept out of the circuits that keep the internet running. teredo does not just circlude cables, it eats through them. when queering the world wide wet and hollowing power relations, teredo is a superstar. as parks argues and the actions of mollusks affirm, “the infrastructural then, is not a given, it is constituted through dynamic and hybrid materializations, which becomes most intelligible to us in instances of entanglement, relationality, and intra-action” (2019, 149). considering animals as part of internet infrastructures makes it possible to learn from their non-compliancy and their queering practices, too: the materials that make internet infrastructure are involved in the games and digestion of nonhuman animals such as sharks and worms, as well as human skin care routines. parks argues that understanding the infrastructural as an “economic ontology” makes it possible to “recognize the potential to (re)organize various kinds of materials/objects/bodies/resources into distributed entities that are sustaining” (145). imagining a different internet to develop frictional imaginaries, i turn to anna lowenhaupt tsing, who engages rubber as an example to explain her concept of friction. tsing writes, “industrial rubber is made possible by the savagery of european conquest, the competitive passions of colonial botany, the resistance strategies of peasants, the confusion of war and technoscience, the struggle over industrial goals and hierarchies, and much more that would not be evident from a teleology of industrial progress. it is these vicissitudes that i am calling friction” (2011, 6). thus, frictional imaginaries are needed to counter dominant narratives of the internet as linear technoscientific progress: the stickiness of the tree sap of the 88 million guttapercha trees chopped in the making of the telegraph network (tully 2009, 575), the softness of vaseline surrounding the cables and the electrical shortcuts caused by the tiny teeth of the mollusk teredo navalis. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 10 friction is also a key term in aimi hamraie and kelly fritsch’s (2019) “crip technoscience manifesto.” the manifesto quotes one of fritsch’s earlier texts on access as etymologically linked to connection and attack: “the etymology of the word access reveals two frictional meanings: access as ‘an opportunity enabling contact,’ as well as ‘a kind of attack’” (fritsch 2016, 23, quoted in hamraie and fritsch 2019, 10). positioning “access-making as a site of political friction” (hamraie and fritsch 2019, 10), the authors analyze how disabled people creatively deal with policies and laws that aim to assimilate us into normative space. hamraie and fritsch show that access is frictional, never innocent, and often made possible through non-compliance. access to the internet is frictional, as it cannot be untangled from the colonial violences that made and sustain it. while tsing’s understanding of friction is helpful when analyzing the material and labor interdependencies in global submarine cable networks, it is hamraie and fritsch’s positioning of access as friction that allows for a reading of access to and within internet infrastructures as both contact enabling and assimilatory. in my collaborative design workshops on internet infrastructure, i work with participants on (re)imagining and co-inventing network structures. engaging materials such as wool and styrofoam, we follow and modify the rules that regulate today’s internet infrastructures and use methods from game design and critical pedagogy to reimagine them. friction and access are important to the ways in which we play the internet, and we pay close attention to the exclusions and problems that arise through specific material conditions and rules/protocols. the workshops presented in the following paragraphs address different layers of intervention: starting from diverse locations such as a postindustrial and rural area near leipzig, an academic conference in hildesheim, the indian capital new delhi, and bengaluru’s streets and parks, they address the structures of networks as relational more-than-human performances that can be questioned, subverted, and speculated with. in the resulting other-configurations of internet infrastructure, i seek potentials for remaking the internet and follow what orit halpern describes as the “sensory, or aesthetic aspect” of data (2015, 37). following the last mile in rural germany the stadttfinden festival (2017) took place in an abandoned glass factory in the postindustrial periphery of leipzig. jörn röder, lennert raesch, jasper meiners, and i organized infrastructural walks with an interest in the so-called last mile of the internet: the spatial-temporal moment before an internet cable meets a router. internet cables connect to houses in germany via gray internet distribution boxes in the streets. not every gray box is a cable distribution box, so it’s worth looking at the identifier kvz 82 on the box, which stands for “kabel verzweiger” (cable splitter) and the registration year 1982. within these boxes, copper cables are wired and distributed. the old factory had been abandoned in the economic aftermath of the dissolution of the socialist state german democratic republic and had no landline internet connection, and when we went on walks with other original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 11 festival participants to find cable distribution boxes, we only did so when we moved a few streets up towards the city center. in this situated confrontation, the cables showed that access to the internet in rural and former industrial areas is not a given, and points towards disparities between the historical east and west parts of germany. once we found some boxes, we connected them with yarn to make the cables running under the concrete of the streets tangible and to further trace their absences, placements, and densities. after a while, the threads led us to a building of telekom, the main and privately-run distributor of internet communications in germany. as we repeated these walks throughout a week, conversations with local participants of all ages emerged around internet access, cable ownership, and the learnings from placing strings as cable substitutes across the streets. challenging the trope of immateriality by connecting boxes with yarn opened questions about who has control over the bits that traverse cables and who decides where new cables are (not) laid. though not a perfect metaphor, threads of yarn are materially closer to the garden-hose-sized submarine cables or even the much thinner copper cables within distribution boxes than clouds. playing with protocols in new delhi in january 2020 jörn röder, ren loren britton, and i went on a similar infrastructure walk in new delhi, where almost all the cables run above ground, from cable masts into houses. our walk was part of the event #coding that berlin’s haus der kulturen der welt (hkw) and the goethe institute delhi convened for the new alphabet school. during our workshop, called code, layers, infrastructures, we offered a physical game called miau id in which participants played as the cats of the internet. the goal was to move through three different ways of sorting data transmissions: in centralized, decentralized, or distributed networks. using wool, fixed rule sets, and “purrtocols”—purred protocols—each cat/participant got a number as their “id” and could send messages/throw wool to other cats under certain conditions only. each message/wool transmission had to be accompanied by a loud “miau” (“meow,” in english). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 12 figure 1. workshop participants play as cats to establish new “purrtocols.” credit: annette jacob in the centralized network, cats had to pass all their messages/wool through a central cat to communicate/connect their wool to any other cat/participant. this made the network slow, and led to frustration, as the central cat did not always follow the wishes of the other cats/participants and would at times refuse to pass on a message/wool. in the distributed network, every cat/participant sent all their messages/wool to three other cats/participants simultaneously, which quickly became confusing, but also led to constant loud miauing and joy. the miau id game figures the internet as a performance that is continuously (re)played, and offers ways of probing, understanding, questioning, shaping, and breaking existing rules. that power over internet infrastructure can be abused was anything but an abstract idea during these early 2020 days. the indian government was using internet shutdowns to suppress protests against recent changes of the citizenship amendment act that discriminated against muslim populations. delhi-based organizations such as the software freedom law centre (n.d.) and the centre for internet and society (n.d.) monitored these shutdowns to initiate legal proceedings. while our game offered some space to imagine network structures differently and to build shared knowledge between participants with vastly different technical knowledges, the following discussions boiled down to ideas and tools of how to protect one another from state surveillance, and how to create friction in the current political networked realities through social and technical means. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 13 speculating towards other networks in hildesheim as part of the non-institutional research group maschinistisches wahrnehmen’s (machinic perception, with ipek burçak, johanna schaffer, n.b. spiders, lien woywod) workshop queer weaving, threading, webbing, or: a set of speculative interventions into virtual space at the hildesheim conference ethics of curating (2020), i invited participants to play an internet string figure game. during the workshop, we invented new ideas for building and distributing internet infrastructure. two participants each were given game instructions, a planet in the form of a styrofoam ball, wooden pins, pens, and yarn. their first task was to come up with stories about the nonhuman and human animals, materials, states of matter, shared values, and conditions of this imagined world and to design the ball/planet accordingly. was their imagined internet infrastructure hard, soft, malleable, stable, dry, wet, fragile, collective, alive, dead, in-between, or something else entirely? what did this internet infrastructure feel, sound, look, and smell like, and which political realities would it make possible or foreclose? in a next step, participants were prompted to discuss what kinds of internet might emerge from their planet, and how animals, entities, materials, and ideas would contribute or co-constitute to the material and conceptual conditions of such networks. participants used pins to anchor internet nodes on the planet’s surface and connected them with wool threads, which figuratively stood in for cables or other connecting structures. some worlds that emerged through the game were, for example, a wet and flooded planet that was held together by cables, and another concept was a queer feminist nipple net, where the nipples of the imagined planet’s inhabitants were connected through internet technologies. participants invented critical designs for the distribution of the internet, and discussed networks as social, material, and ecological infrastructures that figured the internet as non-stable, generative, and more-than-human structures. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 14 networked ecologies in bengaluru figure 2. a screenshot of the website artwork stickynetworks.net shows three videos that introduce different storylines visitors can follow in 2024 i participated in goethe institut / max mueller bhavan’s bangaloresidency and worked at the archives at the national center for biological sciences in bengaluru, india, for two months. during this time, i traced how networked ecologies that intertwine telegraph, internet, and ecological structures emerge in the city and held interviews with scholars of internet and empire that are quoted earlier in the text. what resulted is the website artwork stickynetworks.net, which complicates/decompiles stories of technological development as supposedly linear, progressive, and frictionless. to activate the research in practice, mushroom cultivator biplab mahato and i hosted a public network walk titled “writing telegrams to fungi, sending bytes across trees” at cubbon park in november 2024 to search for and trace networks in the ground, between trees, and across buildings. this walk started at the central telegraph office, which closed its doors in 2013, and nowadays is a mostly forgotten ruin that is covered in internet cables. using pen and paper, our group of twenty-five people traced the cables to a nearby tree that held cable reels. following trees, we moved into the park where we measured the size of a hotspot by using yarn. we attached a phone with an open hotspot and the ends of long lines of string to a tree and then moved outwards in a circular shape while each carrying a piece of yarn. this way, we mapped the hotspot into the park. we then used the emerging circular space to search for other kinds of networks within this radius: mycelium and lichens. biplab gave insight into how mycorrhizal structures interconnect trees, and used spray bottles to offer lichens on found logs some wetness so that we could watch them https://stickynetworks.net/ original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 15 bloom into colors with magnifying glasses. connecting onwards, we took collected materials and fungi into the gallery space art in transit, which is located underneath the old telegraph office within the underground metro station. turning towards my concept of the world wide wet, i presented a cloth onto which i had painted all known landing stations for submarine cables. using yarn, embroidery, and found objects the group connected the dots in new ways through circles, messes and new lines of inquiry. conclusion as widely used metaphors and imaginaries like the cloud render the internet as supposedly immaterial, this article has followed cables to conceptualize the internet as an infrastructural performance that involves slippery and sticky materials, nonhuman animals, salt water, and more. as a conceptual figuration and playful provocation, the stories told in the first section of the article suggest that the internet might more accurately described as a world wide wet than as a cloud. the figuration of the world wide wet offers us to rethink internet infrastructure as a web of cables that move not only through but with the material qualities of the oceans—that, in fact, have been developed in technoscientific traditions that engage in complex and ecologically devastating efforts to avoid direct contact with wetness. in the quest to keep wetness outside of cables, materials such as petroleum jelly and gutta-percha are in friction with the way the internet is commonly imagined. by thinking with the mollusk teredo navalis, literal openings emerge in internet imaginaries as this small animal shortcuts circuits. ecological relations and animal actions are not opposed to but coconstitute internet infrastructures, which shows not only that a different internet is possible, but also that the internet is already different than oftentimes imagined. to that point, parks argues that infrastructures are as much mediated as they also mediate (2019, 151). if, according to her, infrastructure is “not a given” (149), how can internet infrastructures be reformulated in ways that account for current power imbalances and that open possibilities to imagine and build alternatives? performing and reimagining internet infrastructure and protocols in critical design workshops affirms that internet infrastructure is upheld through its constant usage and (re)performance, and can also be questioned, subverted, and speculated with. to counter the trope of immateriality in pedagogical environments, theories and practices of embodied knowledges can make for imaginaries of more just networks. breaking open close-circuited imaginations of the internet and its deep-sea infrastructures opens space for critique of domination—and for questions: what kinds of internet infrastructures do we want, need, desire? who should have access to the internet and under which conditions? which values could guide participation? who should have ownership of something as essential as global communication infrastructures? what would an internet not for some, but for all of us look, feel, buzz, smell, taste like? original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 16 notes 1 for more on the trope of immateriality, see an early and much shorter draft of this text developed in 2020 for the website http://r-calc.net/: https://rcalc.net/world-wide-wet/. 2 for an interactive visual where you can move a slider to overlay a telegraph and internet cable map to witness their similarities, visit https://stickynetworks.net/maps.html. 3 zeeman’s 1731 print can be found online at the rijksmuseum’s website: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/object/--79f5362256f5cabc37f5d69014837e37. references adamczak, bini. 2016. “come on.” missy magazine, march 8. https://missymagazine.de/blog/2016/03/08/come-on/ arun, p. 2024. “an interview with p. arun on telegraphy and surveillance.” in sticky networks by iz paehr. https://stickynetworks.net/telegraphy-and-surveillance.html. barlow, john perry. 1996. “a declaration of the independence of cyberspace.” electronic frontier foundation, february 8. https://www.eff.org/cyberspaceindependence. blanchette, jean-françois. 2011. “a material history of bits.” journal of the american society for information science and technology 62 (6): 1042–57. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21542. behrouz, kamran, ren loren britton, iz paehr, and jörn röder. 2020. code, layers, infrastructures (workshop). common room new delhi, india with haus der kulturen der welt, berlin and goethe institue delhi, january. https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_161524.php. brake, doug. 2019. “submarine cables: critical infrastructure for global communications.” information technology & innovation foundation. https://www2.itif.org/2019-submarine-cables.pdf. burçak, ipek, iz paehr, johanna schaffer, nicole voec, and cilian woywod. 2020. queer weaving, threading, webbing, or: a set of speculative interventions into virtual space. workshop at the ethics of curating conference, hildesheim, germany, february. burrington, ingrid. 2018. “a rare and toxic age. a journey into the complex and parallel mythologies of modern technology and rare earths.” “increment,” energy & environment, no. 4. https://increment.com/energy-environment/a-rare-and-toxicage/. http://r-calc.net/ https://r-calc.net/world-wide-wet/ https://r-calc.net/world-wide-wet/ https://stickynetworks.net/maps.html https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/object/---79f5362256f5cabc37f5d69014837e37 https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/object/---79f5362256f5cabc37f5d69014837e37 https://missy-magazine.de/blog/2016/03/08/come-on/ https://missy-magazine.de/blog/2016/03/08/come-on/ https://stickynetworks.net/telegraphy-and-surveillance.html https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21542 https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_161524.php https://www2.itif.org/2019-submarine-cables.pdf https://increment.com/energy-environment/a-rare-and-toxic-age/ https://increment.com/energy-environment/a-rare-and-toxic-age/ original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 17 the centre for internet and society. n.d. “how to shut down internet shutdowns” accessed march 8, 2025. https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/how-toshutdown-internet-shutdowns. choudhury, deep kanta lahiri. 2010. “the telegraph and the uprisings of 1857.” in telegraphic imperialism: crisis and panic in the indian empire, c. 1830–1920, 31–49. palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289604_3. ensmenger, nathan. 2018. “the environmental history of computing.” technology and culture 59 (4): s7–s33. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2018.0148. fritsch, kelly. 2016. “accessible.” in keywords for radicals: the contested vocabulary of late capitalist struggle, edited by kelly fritsch, clare o’connor, and a.k. thompson, 23–28. ak press. gabrys, jennifer. 2011. digital rubbish: a natural history of electronics. university of michigan press. gibbs, samuel. 2014. “google reinforces undersea cables after shark bites.” the guardian, august 14. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/14/googleundersea-fibre-optic-cables-shark-attacks. godfrey, helen. 2018. submarine telegraphy and the hunt for gutta percha: challenge and opportunity in a global trade. brill. halpern, orit. 2015. “cloudy architectures.” continent 4 (3): 34–45. https://web.archive.org/web/20200716131146/http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php /continent/article/view/205. hamraie, aimi, and fritsch, kelly. 2019. “crip technoscience manifesto.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–33. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607. headrick, daniel. 2010. “a double-edged sword: communications and imperial control in british india.” historical social research 35 (1): 51–65. https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.35.2010.1.51-65. jue, melody. 2020. wild blue media: thinking through seawater. duke university press. kumar, s. prashant. 2024. “telegraphy and time.” in sticky networks by iz paehr. https://stickynetworks.net/time.html. mahato, biplap, and iz paehr. 2024. “writing telegrams to fungi, sending bytes across trees: a network walk at cubbon park.” bangaloresidency at the archives at ncbs, bengaluru, november. https://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/ver.cfm?event_id=26199706. malekian, kamran. 2024. “investigating cable jelly compound, its characteristics, and uses.” navid noor polymer, june 15. https://www.navidnoor.ir/cable-jellycompound-its-characteristics-and-uses/. mattern, shannon. 2018. “scaffolding, hard and soft: critical and generative structures.” in the routledge companion to media studies and digital humanities, edited by jentery sayers, 318–26. routledge. https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/how-to-shutdown-internet-shutdowns https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/how-to-shutdown-internet-shutdowns https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289604_3 https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2018.0148 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/14/google-undersea-fibre-optic-cables-shark-attacks https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/14/google-undersea-fibre-optic-cables-shark-attacks https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607 https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.35.2010.1.51-65 https://stickynetworks.net/time.html https://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/ver.cfm?event_id=26199706 https://www.navidnoor.ir/cable-jelly-compound-its-characteristics-and-uses/ https://www.navidnoor.ir/cable-jelly-compound-its-characteristics-and-uses/ original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 18 microsoft. n.d. “what is cloud computing? a beginner’s guide.” accessed may 26, 2025. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computingdictionary/what-is-cloud-computing. meiners, jasper, iz paehr, lennert raesch, and jörn röder. 2017. urbarn city walks. stadttfinden festival, leipzig, september. negroponte, nicholas. 1995. being digital. knopf. newland, cassie. 2022. “economic object: gutta percha.” in cultural history of objects: age of industry, edited by carolyn white, dan hicks, and william whyte, 57– 76. bloomsbury academic. palma, paola, and l.n. santhakumaran. 2014. shipwrecks and global “worming.” archaeopress. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1zckz9j. parkes, larry, and alan keeble. 2016. “the teredo worm and subsea umbilicals: risks and recommendations.” underwater technology 33 (4): 239–43. https://doi.org/10.3723/ut.33.239. parks, lisa. 2019. “mediating animal-infrastructure relations.” in being material, edited by marie-pier boucher, stefan helmreich, leila w. kinney, skylar tibbits, rebecca uchill, and evan ziporyn, 141–53. mit press. pellow, daniel naguib, and lisa sun-hee park. 2002. the silicon valley of dreams: environmental injustice, immigrant workers, and the high-tech global economy. nyu press. software freedom law centre, new delhi. n.d. “india’s shutdown numbers.” internet shutdowns. accessed june 25, 2023. https://internetshutdowns.in/. starosielski, nicole. 2015. the undersea network. duke university press. sundberg, adam. 2015. “molluscan explosion: the dutch shipworm epidemic of the 1730s.” environment & society portal, arcadia, no. 14. rachel carson center for environment and society. https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7307. sundberg, adam. 2023. “building the social cascade: connecting culture, disaster, and persecution in the 1730s.” journal for the history of environment and society, no. 8, 29–57. https://doi.org/10.1484/j.jhes.5.142449. thorat, dhanashree. 2019. “colonial topographies of internet infrastructure: the sedimented and linked networks of the telegraph and submarine fiber optic internet.” south asian review 40 (3): 252–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2019.1599563. tsing, anna lowenhaupt. 2011. friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton university press. tully, john. 2009. “a victorian ecological disaster: imperialism, the telegraph, and gutta-percha.” journal of world history: vol. 20, no. 4: pp. 559-579. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-cloud-computing https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-cloud-computing https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1zckz9j https://doi.org/10.3723/ut.33.239 https://internetshutdowns.in/ https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7307 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) iz paehr, 2025 19 vaseline. n.d. “our history.” accessed march 8, 2025. https://www.vaseline.com/us/en/who-we-are/our-history.html. author bio iz paehr is an interdisciplinary designer working with queer play, crip technoscience and the materiality of network structures. in collaborative research they follow material transformations and frictional imaginaries. https://www.vaseline.com/us/en/who-we-are/our-history.html more-than-human infrastructures in the world wide wet abstract keywords material all the way: watering down immateriality it begins with a tree: gutta-percha, insulation, and control slippery conditions: light and lube in fiber optics boring circuits: teredo’s taste for cables in more-than-human infrastructures imagining a different internet following the last mile in rural germany playing with protocols in new delhi speculating towards other networks in hildesheim networked ecologies in bengaluru conclusion notes references author bio six ways of looking at fractal mechanics stack whitney, kaitlin. 2024. “thinking with termites about fractious futures for fecal microbiota transplantation in the united states.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–25. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license thinking with termites about fractious futures for fecal microbiota transplantation in the united states kaitlin stack whitney rochester institute of technology kxwsbi@rit.edu abstract fecal microbiota transplantation (fmt) involves transferring fecal material from a donor to a recipient. to think about more expansive and inclusive possible futures for fmt, in particular for people in the united states, it may be helpful to think with termites—their communities, the communities within them, and the community they may inadvertently provide to humans. this essay thinks with termites to explore several frictions in fmt in the us that shape its possible futures. the first friction explored is that fmt is human and (has always been) more than human, discussing both termites as ambivalent kin and the struggles of the regulation to understand fmt as transplantation. the second friction is that the curative imagination for fmt is discordant; examining medical researcher and practitioner discussion of potential fmt donor criteria and potential recipients illuminates the inconsistent insistence that people and guts are both malleable and fixed. fmt renders some donors and microbe communities as good or bad, healthy or sick, donor or recipient, but it’s much more complicated. the third friction is that fmt may be over, with recent us food and drug administration approvals of pharmaceuticals that claim to supplant fmt. thinking with other life forms that use and perform their own kinds of fmt, such as termites, may help inspire alternative, more inclusive futures for fmt. keywords transplants, feces, fecal microbiota transplantation (fmt), termites, microbes mailto:kxwsbi@rit.edu special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 2 introduction fecal microbiota transplantation (fmt) involves transferring fecal material from a donor to a recipient. the practice has existed in the united states for decades (eiseman et al. 1958), and is considered a highly effective and safe medical treatment (kelly et al. 2021), especially for a small but growing number of people with contagious, recurring, and/or drug-resistant bacterial infections (bakken et al. 2011). and yet fmt in the us may be becoming less available to those who want or need it— while simultaneously being discussed as a potential cure for conditions and people who may not want or need that. to think about more expansive and inclusive possible futures for fmt, in particular for people in the us, it may be helpful to think with termites—their communities, the communities within them, and the community they may inadvertently provide to humans. this essay thinks with termites to explore several frictions in fmt in the us that shape its possible futures, using "gut feminism" (wilson 2015) as a provocation, in this case literally about guts and gut health. how can feminist theory take biology seriously without "swallow[ing] biological claims whole" (wilson 2015, 5)? the first friction is that fmt is human and (has always been) more than human. while much has been written on the microbial worlds within people, the contribution here is to show the messy, “more-than-human entanglements” (giraud 2019) of fmt extend much further, with termites as “ambivalent insects” (onaga and reiscastro 2024) and fmt a “technology as conduit” that makes them kin (wolfmeyer 2020). here, the changes in us food and drug administration (fda) regulation that struggles to categorize fmt or understand it within the “transplantation paradigm” (khoruts, hoffman, and palumbo 2019) are also discussed. the second friction is that the curative imagination for fmt is discordant: (almost) everyone is deemed unhealthy and in need of fmt while (almost) no one is considered healthy enough to be a donor. examining medical researcher and practitioner discussion of potential fmt donor criteria and potential recipients illuminates the inconsistent insistence that people and guts are both malleable and fixed. this paradox reflects “biocultures” (ehlers and krupar 2019) of health in the us that individualize health and posit specific bodies and guts as problems. the third friction is that this eugenicist vision for fmt means its use and future in the us is quite constrained, even for the people who need it the most. fmt may be over, with recent us fda approvals of pharmaceuticals that claim to supplant fmt. yet more expansive views of health would make it easier for people who need (or want) fmt to get it, without pathologizing everyone with non-normative guts or bodyminds, thinking with fmt as “visceral prosthetic” (shildrick 2022) and termites in turn as “prosthetic community” (wheeler 2017). special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 3 fmt is human and more than human the goal of fmt is to transplant the community of microbes within a person’s intestines, with the idea that many are found in feces. a successful transplant therefore is not achieved simply from the transfer of stool from one person to another, but rather with the establishment of a new microbiome of the recipient. the t in fmt is intentional, and a signal that this process is best viewed as part of the “transplantation paradigm” (khoruts, hoffman, and palumbo 2019, 484). doctors involved in the naming purposely including transplantation to reflect the complexity of the gut microbiome and process of engrafting donor bacteria (bakken et al. 2011). a physician-scientist considered a leader in studying and practicing fmt, alexander khoruts, has even called fecal matter the “microbial organ” when interviewed (dubner 2011). aligned with the transplantation paradigm, fmt also raises questions common within the field of solid organ transplantation about identity, self/other, and impacts on family relations (mccormack and shildrick 2021; metselaar and widdershoven 2017). margrit shildrick, for instance, reflects on stem cell therapies as an “enduring transmutation for both the recipient and the donor, and for all those with whom they interact" (shildrick 2022, 145), and the same can be said for sharing gut microbiomes. the human gut microbiome is estimated to be hundreds or thousands of species of microbial organisms and as many as one hundred trillion individuals (gill et al. 2006). the idea of the microbiome, or microbiota as a unit itself, rather than the hundreds or thousands of different types of organisms potentially totaling in the trillions, is a decades old concept in microbiology (prescott 2017). the later emergence of metagenomics as a field and approach enabled a critical shift in understanding a microbial community, from culturing organism types individually to genomically sequencing them as a group without the need for further identification (benezra, destefano, and gorden 2012, 6378). fecal matter has played a critical role in this turn. much of what scientists know so far about gut microbes is from sequencing fecal samples (benezra 2023, 138). as gut microbiota and their genomes are microscopic, technological changes in computation and visualization have also facilitated new representations and understandings of human insides, which catherine waldby (1997) connects to the human genome project while tracing the visible human project. jessica houf has followed evolving discourses surrounding fmt in the us: from notions of waste within medicine, to anxieties about unknown harms from transferring stool, to the enthusiasm for the potential of microbes in that stool. in each instance, the human microbiome functions as a boundary object also doing boundary work (houf 2021). doctors, scientists, and fmt donors and recipients have disparate interests in and understandings of feces, such as a source of illness or cure, ordinary or disgusting. these stakeholders' perspectives may not evenly overlap, but the microbiome is urgent to all of them and the boundary work performed by the microbiome "resulted in the transformation of fecal transplants into fmts" (houf 2021, 300). special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 4 the human microbiome has also become a generative area of research and exploration for humanists and social scientists (e.g., greenhough et al. 2020; holl and bossert 2002). there’s a growing acknowledgment that microorganisms may have agency, and that multispecies collaboration will mean moving beyond understanding them only through binaries—good/bad, living/dead, growing/dying. as aaron bradshaw writes, in their case researching and writing on collaborating with plastic-eating microbes, microorganisms may be cultured and cultivated by people, “yet [they are] able to interact with other microbial species through unknown exchanges and interactions” (2022, 54). kateřina kolářová and colleagues focused on the experiences of people with irritable bowel disease or “crip guts” cooperating with and caring for the microorganisms within them in ways that are attuned to “more than human relationality” and "community/multiplicity" (kolářová, stöckelová, and senft 2023, 1254). alice beck’s (2021) work interviewing recipients of fmt may support this in-between space, with recipients discussing their microbiome as a companion animal that they have become aware of and that they feed and nurture. thinking with termites is different from thinking with gut microbes. at the same time, there are important parallels and intersections between these populations of insects and populations of gut microbiota. termites are unlikely “companion species” (haraway 2002) like dogs, in the sense that many humans in the us are not mutually dependent on them. termites refers to many different insects, an estimated three thousand of them, under the banner of infraorder isoptera, now grouped with cockroaches in the order blattodea (constantino 2021). they are small, squishy, and (eu)social, with their exact body traits (color, wings, jaws) varying by their roles within the nest. in fact, termites can cause extensive damage to people’s homes and people may actively not want to be in close relation with them. as such, they may be “unloved others” (bird rose and van dooren 2011), disliked and targeted for death. they may also be a kind of “estranged companions” like bedbugs (hollin and giraud 2022), in that where and how people in the us (dis)engage with termites is shaped by very specific histories and politics. who gets to own a house in the us is shaped by past and present factors, including settler colonialism and indigenous land theft, anti-black racist housing covenants, redlining, and sexist requirements for male loan and mortgage co-signers. homeowners may be more likely to closely encounter and intentionally engage termites. renters may also encounter termites, but often have no control over management or removal choices by landlords—putting tenants and termites together, but also not to mutual benefit. lack of housing, housing instability, and eviction are also higher for bipoc and marginalized communities in the us, shaping who encounters termites and where. much of what is known about termite guts is specifically from scientists studying them, in order to eradicate them. over the past century, termites were some of special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 5 the domestic objects of chemical extermination for pests that attack human environments, labeled harmful and enrolled in the logics and “technoscientific practices of eradication” (giraud 2021, 38). specific kinds of termites can be identified by analyzing excreted fecal pellets (haverty et al. 2005); the same pellets can be tested to see if the termites are currently alive (lewis et al. 2010). identifying termites and their life status is to aid the commercialization of extermination. in the process, termites and their gut microbes have become perhaps the most studied symbiotic relationship (scharf and peterson 2021). as lisa onaga and luísa reis-castro (2024) have written, moth larvae and mosquitoes have also been studied by scientists as “tools and targets" in service of eradicating those same organisms. they offer "ambivalent insects" as a way to move beyond binary categories while examining insect-human relations in the history of science. termites are an ambivalent insect that we can learn from: they are ambivalent kin in fmt. figure 1: people and termites alike have microbial communities within their bodies, including different parts of their digestive systems. both also can, and do, share their microbes with others via fecal transplantation. illustration by mary nyugen and liliana g. ramos, and used with permission. what can be learned from termite kin, who also use fmt? fmt can be considered a kind of “technology as conduit” (wolf-meyer 2020, 235), making kin of donors and recipients who may never even meet each other. haraway (2012) links herself and her dog cayenne as “cyborg littermates” through their respective estrogen special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 6 hormone replacements. bovine and human bodies are similarly brought together in the work of rebecca howes-mischel and megan tracy exploring breastmilk microbes, showing that attending to “maternal microbis” (2023) can reveal connections between reproductive bodies across species lines. thinking with termites about guts, microbes, and fmt can do similar work. we are, in fact, somewhat like termites. like people, termites have different parts of their digestive tracts—foreand hind-gut in termites, small and large intestines in people. also like people, their guts house and rely on specific, complex communities of prokaryotic (e.g., bacteria) and eukaryotic (e.g., protozoa) microbial communities to digest their food. many kinds of insects have gut microbes that enable their digestion, including bees, beetles, and stink bugs (ohbayashi, mergaert, and kikuchi 2020). similarly, termite guts are not homogenous, but thought to be at least three distinct micro-environments each with their own microbiota—and each of those thought to have their own symbionts! (karasov and martínez del rio 2007). termites cannot digest wood directly but their endosymbionts can. this is similar to how breastmilk for human babies contains nutrients that cannot be digested by the gut microbes—but not the human baby (zivkovic et al. 2011). additionally, the metagenomics shift that has radically transformed the study of humans has also done the same for termites. termites and their gut microbes are the longest-studied association of insects and symbionts by biologists, beginning over a century ago (scharf and peterson 2021). several termite genomes, metagenomes—and now gut metagenomes— have been sequenced, and these technological advances have been credited with a changed understanding of the importance and interdependence of termites as host-symbiont systems (scharf and peterson 2021). yet a century of scientists studying termites and their microbes does not necessarily mean that the mechanisms of using fecal matter to share microbes for immune protection are well understood. for example, while scientists have conducted experimental manipulations of termite fecal contents and exchanges, one study was not able to experimentally cause social immunization of a group of termites with fecal material sharing (mirabito and rosengaus 2016). in this way, humans and termites are also similar—with gut communities eluding easy categories and mechanistic understanding. fmt is transplant medicine the abundance and complexity of the more-than-human microbial assemblages inherent to fmt has led to debate in the us over whether it really fits in the transplantation paradigm. the us fda has changed stool and fmt regulations several times over the past decade, as fmt prevalence has increased and been considered effective (hoffmann 2019). biomedical entities interested in developing fmt practices or providing fmt products, outside of clinical trials and hospital settings, are required to use the investigational new drug application process, labeling stool and fmt as a “biological product” under the purview of the special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 7 center for biologics evaluation and research (fda 2023b). fmt arguably is not a good match for the fda drug review and approval process. feces are an unstable actor that elides the categories and processes used for pharmaceutical and biologics regulation in the us. the biologic product regulations imagine a typical drug and require controlling variation, both for consistency in manufacturing and consumer safety, not the variability of people and their fecal matter that would be represented by fmt products created by donors and stool banks (hoffmann et al. 2021). fmt resists standardization, but the regulation processes are set up for standardizable and commercialized products. supporters of the fda have instead argued that many biological products regulated are also complex and that using these processes will require fmt proponents to identify and test causal pathways for efficacy using standardized clinical trials (ossorio and zhou 2019). regulating fmt as a drug is in contrast to its potential regulation as a human tissue or tissue-based product, which some scholars believe could be appropriate (riley and olle 2015). fmt is currently considered a tissue transplant in italy, the netherlands, and belgium (porcari et al. 2023), and those countries have known stool banks for fmt (scheeler 2019). the fda made a determination in a public workshop in 2013 that stool and fmt did not fit into this category, as the microorganisms in fecal matter are nonhuman (hoffmann 2019). the “microbiopolitics” (paxson 2008, 17) of fmt are similar in some ways to those of the microbes and cheese that come from raw, unpasteurized milk centered in heather paxson's ethnographic work, with us laws and regulatory agencies viewing microbes as a potential hazard to manage. it’s not simply that microbes are alive. jamie lorimer (2017, 2018) has written extensively on people using helminthic therapy, with the idea that hookworms as a keystone species whose presence or absence plays an outsized role in the gut. the fda regulates hookworms as biologic products also (young 2014). but fmt is conceptually different, because there is no known or understood keystone species and species isn't the unit of interest—transplanting and establishing entire microbial communities is the goal. in the sections that follow, i examine dissonance in conceptions of those whole microbial communities and people who are fmt recipients as plastic—and donors as fixed and hierarchical—in discourse about the existing and imagined future uses of fmt in the us. following the microbiopolitics of fmt in people and in termites can help conjure alternative, still frictious, futures for microbiomes and human health that embrace a diversity of bodies and the worlds within them. [no one / everyone] is [healthy / sick] and fmt is the cure often, people who pursue fmt do so for what feminist philosopher jane dryden (2021) refers to as “gut issues.” gut issues is an intentionally vague term, including people with a range of biomedical diagnoses, who may not identify as disabled but whose relational autonomy is impacted by guts. the gut microbiomes within people do impact their lives and well-being. elizabeth wilson (2015), in her book special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 8 gut feminism, asks and explores how feminist theory works with biological data to think about contingent states of health, writing about depression and gut-mind connections. how can this provocation and invitation be extended to help think with other questions about human bodies? feminist philosopher emily r. douglas’s recent thesis thinks with the new materialist feminisms of wilson’s gut feminism, while arguing ideas of bodily plasticity can become “part of the good health imperative, the duty to be well, and the push towards optimization" (douglas 2022, 102) for minoritized and sick people. other feminist scholars are challenging the idea of a singular gut and making space for “non-normative guts" (kolářová, stöckelová, and senft 2023). here, one goal is to extend the focus on guts as a generative area of feminist inquiry that rejects antibiologism and acknowledges the material realities of gut issues, without “swallow[ing] biological claims whole” (wilson 2015, 5). this mode of engagement (critical yet considered) orients my own approach to fmt. fmt, i argue, can and does address the material, bodily realities of gut issues and gut/bodymind connections seriously, and yet supporting fmt access or expansion need not also mean endorsing curative or eugenic approaches to feces, gut microbiomes, and people. in much of the biomedical discussions of the future of fmt, the “curative imaginary” (kafer 2013, 27) is positioning it as a limitless intervention for all kinds of states and identities marked as in need of curing. depending on who you believe, fmt is just beginning. it may soon be everywhere for almost everyone, for all manner of ills deemed worthy of intervention—which, according to its proponents, could be, well, almost anything. like paxson’s work on raw-milk cheeses and the microbes that make them, fmt similarly evokes post-pasteurian promises of good, diverse microbes from fmt donors replacing and outcompeting the perilous bad microbes in recipients (paxson and helmreich 2014). catherine waldby, writing about stem cell technologies and transplantation, discussed the imagined unlimited supply of transplantable tissue, coupled with the imagined near unlimited range of potential conditions it could be useful for (waldby 2002, 306). the same can be said for fmt, with a curative imaginary of a seemingly unlimited supply of transplantable material and many conditions to use it for. this is part of a broader “microbiomania” (paxson and helmreich 2014, 166), hype within the life sciences about the possibilities of microbes. fmt represents a “‘hope technology,’ based upon the exchange of fecal samples repurposed to represent golden eggs” (mackenzie 2017, 57). robin mackenzie traces how the power of fmt is in its potential for transformation, not necessarily evidence, warning that it’s an area adjacent and susceptible to grift by self-declared wellness gurus. this caution may be warranted, as one direct-toconsumer fecal microbiome testing and diagnostic service in the us, ubiome, was accused of healthcare and securities fraud (united states department of justice 2021). more recent startups in this space, such as viome, advertise “intelligence tests” to genetically test, diagnose—and then proscribe and sell—consumers products to improve their health based on their gut microbiome (viome, n.d.). special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 9 discourse, clinical guidelines, and consensus research on recipients and donors illuminate the “biocultures” (ehlers and krupar 2019; krupar and ehlers 2021) of fmt, the knowledge claims, technologies, and realms of power that structure relationships between bodies, guts, and biomedicine. fmt renders some donors and microbe communities as good or bad, healthy or sick, donor or recipient, but it’s much more complicated: “the microbial body [is] comprised of a population of unruly and unknown potentials that defy medical, scientific, and lay conceptions of discrete human bodies” (wolf-meyer 2017, 301). this complexity is also seen in other microbial systems. one such example is erin koch’s (2011) ethnographic work on the local microbiologies of tuberculosis in the republic of georgia, finding that tb diagnosis and associated bacteria are complex, contextdependent, and unstable. the microbial and protobiotic turns have not ended determinism in biomedicine. instead, you are what helps you eat and excrete. biomedical imaginations for the future of fmt is toward “standard, normal donors” to “produce a normal individual” (wolf-meyer 2017, 303). scientists and doctors are discussing, testing, or advocating fmt as an intervention for all kinds of states of being. writing about this “imperative of normalcy” in gut microbiome research, dryden argues that “excitement involved in the current wave of microbiome research enables the belief that people’s bodyminds can be entirely remade through microbiotic therapeutics” (2023, 33). these include, for example, fmt proposed to cure “autism” (e.g., aroniadis and brandt 2013; choi and cho 2016) or "obesity" (e.g., choi and cho 2016). scientists are already conducting fmt studies in mice with the goal of curing “obesity” (e.g., brandopadhyay and ganguly 2022). others imagine fmt and microbial intervention as preventative medicine. for example, scholars are thinking about microbiome manipulation at scale as a tool of public health, such as imagining developing microbiome therapeutics to give to those deemed more likely to have depression in the future (o'doherty, virani, and wilcox 2016). these potential futures for fmt do not necessarily make space for many ways to live and thrive, with many different microbes. current frameworks for fmt donation through biomedical regulation in the us, and as discussed in other countries, are not making space for difference. importantly, most of the fmt done to date used an unknown donor, such as material from a stool bank (kelly et al. 2021). so the exclusion or inclusion criteria matter. yet there is not currently a standard, agreed-upon set of donor criteria, whether for acceptable or optimal donors, presenting scientific and ethical issues for choosing them (ma et al. 2017). potential insights may be gleaned from information shared publicly by openbiome, the former nonprofit stool bank that was the major source of microbial organs for fmt in the us until they shut down the service in 2021 (sheridan 2021). co-founder mark smith openly bragged about how restrictive their donor screening process was, telling the washington special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 10 post that 4 percent of potential donors are accepted and likened the process to applying to selective colleges: “it's harder to become a donor than it is to get into mit” (feltman 2015). he went on to boast about soliciting donors from the building next door, a gym near a university—implying that these characteristics would be associated with healthy donors. additional insights on who is imagined as having healthy stool and guts to donate for fmt may be gained from the donor criteria that scientists and doctors are discussing amongst themselves—and considering who may be left out as a result (see table 1 for some examples). the first example, gastrointestinal symptoms within the past three months, may seem straightforward enough a proxy for pathogens. however, many pathogens of concern can be, and are, specifically tested for in the donor screening process. using changes in stool texture as a screening criterion instead or in addition may label large segments of the population unfit for fmt donation —and implicitly unhealthy. this exclusion criterion ignores non-pathogenic reasons for changes in stool texture, such as the documented impact of hormonal cycles in menstruating people altering bowel movements (judkins et al. 2020). even people who have aged out of menstruating may be screened out, many donor criteria also endorsed excluding people over age sixty. example potential fmt donor exclusion criteria proposed “gastrointestinal symptoms within the past 3 months (e.g., diarrhoea, constipation, haematochezia, vomiting, abdominal pain)”a “age (accepted if ≥18 and ≤60 years)”a “overweight and obesity (body mass index >25)”b “history of psychiatric conditions” b “history of neurological disorders”b “autism spectrum disorder”c “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder”c “previous prison term”a “psychological status”d akeller et al. 2021, in europe; bcammarata et al. 2017, in europe; chaifer et al. 2020, in australia; dmullish et al. 2023, in europe table 1. examples of potential exclusion criteria for fmt donor screening processes discussed in scientific journal articles by medical researchers and/or practitioners. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 11 the “variability” of older folks' microbes is provided as rationale; however, there’s no mechanism provided to explain why this variation would be detrimental, let alone pathogenic, to potential recipients. examining donor traits deemed worthy of inclusion is also illuminating. one study mulled encouraging “other donor characteristics associated with a healthy microbiome (e.g. vaginal delivery, breast-feeding or mediterranean diet)” (mullish et al. 2023). these potential inclusion criteria connect previous correlative research on microbiome differences in people with different health histories and eating choices to potential fmt donor status. yet no evidence is provided that not making those choices, such as not eating a mediterranean diet, would render someone an unsuitable fmt donor. there are cultural and personal reasons that dietary information may be important in donor screening, to ethically match the needs and dietary requirements of potential recipients, such as for religious reasons (bokek-cohen and ravitsky 2017). however, that’s a very different idea than rejecting donors for not following a particular diet, with the implication that they are not healthy enough. requiring or advocating these behaviors would very much change whose stool is considered healthy and able to be a donor. variation in cultural and personal acceptability of donating stool, or participating in research that involves fecal matter, may further contribute to the pool of donors potentially not reflecting the society (hawkins and o’doherty 2011). an unaddressed tension of fmt is that many of these donor screening criteria are static, some even lifetime designations, even as scientists are acknowledging—and relying on—the variability and plasticity of the microbial communities in people for fmt to succeed. it’s not just that “one microbiome does not fit all” (ishaq et al. 2021, 7) for fmt donors or imagined future recipients. one person’s microbiome itself is situational and plural, changing in time, space, and circumstance. moreover, there’s a circular logic happening, in which metagenomics are deployed to find correlative differences in populations’ gut microbiome (such as finding people who are autistic and allistic to have different gut microbiomes)—and then assigning causality and pathology to the people and gut microbes identified as disabled or different. and then using that correlation to not only identify these people and communities as targets for cures, but also to use those identities to create exclusion criteria for individuals to not be able to serve as an fmt donor for others. as stefan helmreich writes about homo microbis, a conception of humans and their associated microbes, the microbiome “does not speak for itself” and cannot be separated from the technologies scientists use to study them (2016, 72). “geneticization” (hedgecoe 2009, 1) originally referred to the reduction of people to their dna and assigning genetic causes to people’s traits and actions. the metagenomic and probiotic turns have contributed to the geneticization of gut microbiomes to describe—and arguably to create—differences between individuals and groups, based on the genetic code of the microbes. geneticization of guts and special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 12 microbes can be seen in the discussion by scientists of “enterotypes” (e.g., cheng and ning 2019, 4), which is an attempt to stratify individuals across the world by the predicted community composition of their gut microbiomes, using metagenomic analyses of fecal matter. arguably one of the goals was to identify functional differences—and not to presume gut microbiome likeness to be associated with individual traits or group identity. even scientists applying and advocating this approach are not sure what causes the similarities in people’s microbiomes—adding that they are “probably not driven by nutritional habitats and cannot simply be explained by host properties such as age or bmi” (arumugam et al. 2011). and yet other studies argue that enterotypes are driven by “habitual diet” in young children (e.g., christensen et al. 2018, 646) or that enterotype labels are unstable when applied to babies or older adults (e.g., claesson et al. 2012). however, enterotypes are still being used in static, deterministic ways that presume these differences are real, meaningful, and necessary for medical intervention. for example, studies looking for enterotypes have led to claims such as “there might be a new enterotype in the asian population” (cheng and ning 2019, 5). in contrast to race as unnamed “ghost variable” (benezra 2020, 879), these studies explicitly name race while arguably still ghosting it—ignoring complexity in populations and in racial categories over time and space. in fact, writing about “race-specific biopolitics of health" (ehlers and krupar 2019, 47) and biomedical targeting in the us, nadine ehlers and shiloh krupar note that “race itself is thus not undone: that is, race as a stratifying mechanism that orders the social is not called into question” (2019, 50). while their work was focused on bidil, a heart failure medication and the first drug that the us fda approved for a specific racial group, encoding race and racism into gut microbiomes and fecal matter is an extension of the same—casting biomes and guts of nonwhite bodies as othered and noncurative. as travis de wolfe and colleagues write, race categories in microbiome science should be used carefully, intentionally, and not without acknowledging and examining racism (de wolfe et al. 2021). recent research has found that people experiencing racial discrimination experience structural and functional differences in gut microbiomes taken from fecal samples (dong et al. 2023). these claims are similar to scientists’ discussion of sex differences in gut microbiomes (e.g., vemuri et al. 2019), mostly using evidence from rodents, to claim that biological sex must be meaningful for human guts and fmt, without taking into account lived experiences, such as gender identity, sexism, and intersectionality. these are examples of how the “datafication of microbes” (benezra 2023, 143) are then applied back onto the health and lives of humans they inhabit. with all of this in mind, we return to the termite. exploring fmt in termites can help elucidate the complex unknowns of microbial worlds in guts and sharing them amongst individuals and communities that resist flattening. termites, while sometimes maligned as “lower” life forms even by scientists who study them, also remind us that fmt has existed for millennia—and across disparate life forms and life histories, ranging from earwigs (körner et al. 2016) to moose (spitzer et al. 2023), sharing fecal matter for health(care). fmt has always been entangled with special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 13 animals—and the long history of animals sharing waste products with each other complicates the idea of fmt as a solely human endeavor. histories of fmt tend not to include the parallels to termites or other animals (e.g., aroniadis and brandt 2013), except for discussion of veterinary uses. but those stories also always assume humans are the agents of transplantation, the arbiters and providers of nonhuman health. evidence and arguments for fmt using animals has been here since the beginning of the procedure in some ways. one of the medical studies documenting fmt, not yet known by that name, for very sick human patients also documents the doctors’ attempts to explore the mechanisms and potential success further by infecting and then treating two adult dogs (eiseman et al. 1958). veterinarians also provided critical testimony about efficacy in animals, in support of creating regulatory futures for fmt in people (wolfmeyer 2017). and now that the fmt imaginary expands far beyond acute gut issues, the curative imaginary for fmt in animals also expands. for example, with some evidence that fmt helps people with inflammatory bowel disease, there are similar interventions tested for dogs with the disease (e.g., collier et al. 2022). yet other models may be possible. termites practice forms of care interdependence that, yes, involve feces and transfer of fecal microbiota. termite fmt is common and routine collective care for individual and group health. termites and other insects use intentional, social behaviors to share fecal material with each other to ensure transgenerational maintenance of the specialized gut microbes (ohbayashi, mergaert, and kikuchi 2020). these behaviors include coprophagy (eating feces), egg-smearing (putting fecal matter on eggs so it will get on young when they hatch), and capsule transmission (leaving fecal matter capsules near eggs so that young will touch them after hatching). trophallaxis is another social practice of termites and social insects, using mouth-to-mouth (stomodeal trophallaxis) or anus-to-mouth (proctodeal trophallaxis) between individuals to transfer fluids (onchuru et al. 2018). termites have short lifespans, molt between life stages, and require specialized symbionts; so these practices create and maintain their needed gut microbes (onchuru et al. 2018). termites don’t just have obligate relationships with gut symbionts; they also engage in opportunistic mutualisms with other microbes. some termites build nests out of fecal material, intentionally to cultivate microbes in the soil that can protect their group against pathogens; this behavior is believed by scientists to have originated in termite ancestors sixty-five million years ago (chouvenc et al. 2018). just as they are for people, microbiomes are transgenerational links (benezra 2021) for termites that make and remake environments and relations. termite fecal practices can help us reject a static view of feces or who they are in—they change and are transferred throughout their life. fmt is [not?] over in november 2022 the fda announced the first fmt product had successfully gone through its approval process (fda 2022b). rebyota is pronounced “re special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 14 biota” and called a “microbiota suspension” by producing company ferring pharmaceuticals (2022). seemingly trying to distance itself from fmt, although it is still a stool-based product administered rectally, ferring’s website for potential patients puts the emphasis on microbes, with phrases like “microbiome-based treatment,” instead of where they come from (rebyota, n.d.). even more recently, in april 2023, the fda approved vowst, another fmt product, jointly commercialized by seres therapeutics and nestlé health science (fda 2023a). this one is distinguished by its potentially less squicky method of delivery: “microbiota-based therapeutic in oral capsules” to be swallowed whole (vowst, n.d.). while fmt in name, these products can be thought of in contrast as a move away from fmt and toward mmt: manufactured microbial-based therapies. some scientists refer to this shift as the post-fmt era, imagining stable, reproducible therapies in pill form (porcari et al. 2023). all the imagined curative benefits of microbes without the messiness of the feces and transplantation. these newly approved fmt products, and the direction of the fda’s regulatory approach over the past decade, are a departure from the “transplantation paradigm” (khoruts, hoffman, and palumbo 2019, 484) of fmt. the new pills reflect the shift from feces as waste product to valuable medical product, reflecting the “biovalue” created by the “biotechnical reformulation of living processes” (waldby 2002, 310). this reformulation is similar to shiloh and krupar’s exploration of fat as a waste product “redeployed in biocultures of stem cell therapy, where fat is ‘liquid gold’” (2019, 82–83). when harvested, and outside of bodies, fat and feces are turned into value for industry. pharmaceutical companies creating and attempting to maximize biovalue from fecal material creates and forecloses different relationships between people, not just guts. turning fmt into a pharmaceutical drug, instead of community care, could change social relations and sever relationships between people that can occur with the “circulation of biological ‘gifts’” (waldby 2002, 309) in communities which can come from transplantation paradigms and economies. this shift away from acknowledging the humans behind fmt, whether in pill or other transplantable forms, renders donors invisible—but it does not resolve the aforementioned issues of who is imagined to be healthy and whose gut microbes are curative. donor stool used in the new pills understandably must be screened for pathogens to prevent potential disease transmission to recipients during transplantation. the newly approved proprietary fmt products are not required to, and do not, disclose the demographics of their donors in their website info for doctors or patients (rebyota. n.d.; vowst. n.d.), how donors are found, or the details of the screening criteria in their patents (jones et al. 2017). it is difficult to understand specifically which donors and which traits are being selected for in the regulatory futures of fmt in the us. writing about organ and tissue transplantation, shildrick explores the “hybridity” and “process of coconstruction” inherent in acquiring a donor organ (2022, 58). the medical model special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 15 that aims to supplant fmt prohibits such co-construction by distancing donors and recipients and making them unknown. and despite the broad curative imagination for fmt, the allowed recipients of the new drugs are a very limited group of people currently. the fda approvals are specifically and only for one kind of highly contagious, recurring, and potentially drug-resistant bacterial infection in adults, known as rcdi, recurrent clostridium difficile infection (bakken et al. 2011). fmt performed to date in the us is considered highly effective and safe for this use (kelly et al. 2021). and while those impacted have urgent, acute need for these products to live and thrive, part of the argument for fmt products and its attendant terms is how few people will need them. “orphan product” designation by the us fda for these commercial products means that the companies behind them get various financial benefits (fda 2022a), including “market exclusivity,” which means that generic versions of the drug cannot be sold for seven years (fda, n.d.). this designation also requires evidence that fewer than two hundred thousand people annually will need the product. and even though that coveted approval has now been won for the pharmaceutical companies, the high cost of biologics and the high number of residents without medical insurance may mean that while the us fda has deemed two products available, they may not be available for patients (khoruts, hoffman, and palumbo 2019). at the same time, the fda narrowed the legal pathways for fmt in the us moving ahead. in 2022 the agency released guidance that it did not intend to continue regulatory flexibility that had existed since mid2013 for stool banks (fda 2022c). krupar’s (2020) framework of “folklore of operational banality (foob)” is helpful for naming and understanding these simplifications and contradictions that emerge from administrative practices and algorithmic thinking that localize health and disease in individual bodies. foob is the “reductive, tautological, and iterative” banality of health administration, which works to “narrow health problems to that of humans/human bodies while also effectively dehumanizing the response—by despatializing and dehistoricizing the body and invisibilizing inequities” (krupar 2020, 447). while krupar’s work focused on geodata, medical hotspotting, and “superusers" of the us healthcare system, for fmt, foob is reflected both by the donor exclusion policies and also by the small pool of who is eligible as a recipient—and that neoliberal policies and practices mean the healthcare system itself is responsible for many of the resistant infections leading to the need for transplantation. instead of being more available, foob in fmt the “technocratic methods to define and allocate health care provisions” (447) result in fmt becoming legal as an expensive, market pharmaceutical and less available for those who need and want it. with these new product approvals and changes in regulation, people with gut issues in the us cannot get fmt for non rcdi uses, outside of clinical trials, through off-label use, from stool banks or diy from peer donors. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) kaitlin stack whitney, 2024 16 attending to the more-than-human history and present of fmt can also provide inspiration for alternative futures. termites and people with gut issues perhaps aren’t so different. termites, and other social animals practicing fmt, serve as reminders of the importance of interdependence and collective care. shildrick explored stem cell therapies as “visceral prosthesis that impacts the ontological as well as empirical relation between self and other” (2022, 131) and “enduring transmutation for both the recipient and the donor, and for all those with whom they interact” (145). the same can be said for fmt, with “transformation generated in the nexus of chimerism” (145) unstably changing microbes, guts, and people, and potentially changing the microbes of others. with fmt as a visceral prosthetic, termites are in turn a key part of the “prosthetic community” (wheeler 2017). elizabeth wheeler initially conceived prosthetic community as the “cluster of living beings, ideas, resources, and objects that enable disabled children's full inclusion” (wheeler 2017, 594). while she was writing about animals in picture books, here we can extend and apply the idea of prosthetic community for people with gut issues and termites as living beings and ideas that serve as reminders that fmt can be critical yet routine, building and reinforcing networks. termites and their gut microbes can be part of the “prosthetic assemblages show up the fault-lines in the closure of normativity, and gesture towards other modes of existence” (shildrick 2022, 208) for people. amber benezra cautions that “care must be taken not to erase the people from which the microbes came” (2023, 124). for fmt, this could mean futures that embrace the transplantation paradigm and recognize fmt as the sharing of people as a form of care. embracing a broad view of who can share fecal material, rather than potentially encoding a narrow, racist, and ableist idea of who has healthy guts, would actually provide more donors for folks with chronic and serious infections treated with fmt, as well as anyone else with gut issues who needs and wants fmt. yet such futures may be closed off by biomedical regulatory practices and expectations that reward uniformity and narrow imaginations of health. the material and ecological realities of fmt elide such simplistic categories. termite fmt is a reminder that a plurality of bodies and communities within them can be healthy and useful. the future of fmt in the us need not require hierarchies that reify eugenic logics. acknowledgments thanks to mary nyugen and liliana g. ramos for their illustration and the personalized healthcare technology (pht180) program at the rochester institute of technology for supporting their work. thanks to three anonymous reviewers and the special section co-editors, suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, and alexandra frankel for support and feedback that strengthened and improved this essay. and all my thanks and love to the humans and nonhumans with whom i share a home (and many microbes). special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, 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https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12328. wolf-meyer, matthew. 2020. “recomposing kinship.” feminist anthropology 1 (2): 231–47. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12018. young, kenneth a. 2014. “of poop and parasites: unethical fda overregulation.” food and drug law journal 69 (4): 555–74. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26661035. zivkovic, angela m., j. bruce german, carlito b. lebrilla, and david a. mills. 2011. “human milk glycobiome and its impact on the infant gastrointestinal microbiota.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences 108 (s1): 4653–58. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1000083107. author bio kaitlin stack whitney (she/her/hers) has gut issues. her interest in fecal microbiota transplants began in the gut, after a drug-resistant parasite infection. she works as an assistant professor in the department of science, technology and society at the rochester institute of technology in rochester, new york. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12328 https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12018 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26661035 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1000083107 thinking with termites about fractious futures for fecal microbiota transplantation in the united states abstract keywords introduction fmt is human and more than human fmt is transplant medicine [no one / everyone] is [healthy / sick] and fmt is the cure fmt is [not?] over acknowledgments references author bio ali article     tactical tactility: warfare, gender, and cultural intelligence    isra ali new york university isra.ali@nyu.edu united states militarism in afghanistan and iraq in the early twenty-first century has become entangled with feminist discourses in ways that are fraught, providing a means by which to examine how vague and varied notions of “feminism” come to circulate and gain visibility in public discourses on militarism. this is most evident in the public discourse on the liberation of muslim women that has circulated since the war in afghanistan began in 2001, and in the discourse on gender equality in the military that has emerged over the last decade. the pentagon’s decision to open all combat positions to women, allows the us military to present itself nationally and globally as an institution that is evolving, however incrementally, to embrace progressive values. this positioning results in a complex proliferation of positive and detrimental effects on different populations of marginalized and oppressed people in domestic and global contexts. though women soldiers have long been present in the war zone, formal acknowledgement of women’s combat service becomes possible when muslim women are central to the rhetoric of warfare, and cultural practices of gender segregation in muslim societies are foregrounded in the development of military strategies in the war zone. the interplay of the domestic and the global that forms the work women do in the war zone as soldiers and as observers raises obvious questions about moments when militarism appears feminist. postcolonial feminist theory has long contended with the domestic/global fault line, critiquing the globalization of secular-liberal feminism, the project of modernity, and normative liberal conceptualizations of agency, subjectivity, liberation, equality, and difference, by engaging with the broader contexts of colonialism and imperialism (grewal and kaplan, 2002; mahmood, 2005; mohanty, 1988). in the era of the war on terror, radical, left, and anti-war academic and activist feminists have raised serious objections to ascribing feminist aims and principles to military projects, particularly when the rescue of muslim women is invoked to garner public support for militarism (abu-lughod, 2013; toor, 2012). building on this literature, this analysis examines the progressive narrative that frames us women’s participation in and support of militarism in relationship to the narrative in which militarism rescues and liberates women in other places. in these narratives, a particular war on terror era manifestation of liberal feminism is deployed, one that argues not for gender neutrality or simply for equality in militarism, but for seeing the value of women in the war zone through the specificity of their difference, so that gender difference is accounted for as a benefit to militarism. us women soldiers have a niche in combat operations in iraq and afghanistan through cultural outreach operations designed to engage civilians, specifically women, cloistered in domestic spaces. these combat operations focus on deciphering civilian needs and discerning the ways in which the military can fulfill those needs. they also emphasize creating ongoing relationships with civilians through which soldiers can de-escalate tensions. while carefully delineated from armed/violent combat operations in their practices and goals, these forms of outreach are not classified as logistical, and are instead thought about and discussed as explicit forms of tactical engagement in the war zone. to advocate for recognition of women’s combat service on the front lines, and their use in tactical operations, female soldiers and veterans utilize women’s experiences as part of female engagement teams (fets) deployed in afghanistan and the lioness program implemented in iraq. these programs are a strategic element of the “stabilization” phase of militarism in iraq and afghanistan, otherwise known as phase iv of military operations (conrad, 2005). unlike the initial burst of violent combat operations that characterize the invasion phase and that were soon declared done (by george w. bush who proclaimed “mission accomplished” on 1 may 2003 on the us aircraft carrier the uss abraham lincoln), the stabilization (occupation) phase continues indeterminately. in the stabilization phase fets and the lionness program play a significant role, making the work of women soldiers legible to military commanders, poltical actors, and the public. as a result, organizations such as the service women’s action network (swan) have successfully lobbied for formal recognition of women’s combat service. the cumulative effect of this is that the particular forms of cultural work (outreach and intelligence gathering) that women soldiers are doing has been incorporated into the realm of tactical military strategy that uses nonviolent means to shape the trajectory of violent warfare. this trajectory is framed in reference to another implicit temporality, that of the evolving values and progressive aims of liberal societies in which warfare can work with progressive projects such as gender equality. the incorporation of progressive values does not limit or reduce the scope of violent military tactics; killing, imprisonment, and torture persist. instead, it broadens the scope of military tactics so that now all modes of engagement are available, including forms of social and interpersonal tactility. these forms of engagement are important as warfare extends over years, encompassing both the mission to thwart ongoing insurgent activity and the mission to develop infrastructure. counterinsurgency, laleh khalili (2010) argues, is already gendered: counterinsurgency itself is presented as the opposite of a more mechanized, technologically advanced, higher-fire-power form of warfare. given that the latter is often coded as hyper-masculine, the former is considered feminine…the very object of population-centric counterinsurgency would be perceived as feminine, since the focus of counterinsurgency is the transformation of civilian allegiances and remaking of their social world. (p. 3) counterinsurgency encompasses development projects and the work of talking with civilians to ascertain the needs of different localities.1 in the phases of simultaneous counterinsurgency and development, the interactions these women have are a tactical form of diplomatic tactile engagement organized around developing a mutual interdependence between the “permanent” local, civic infrastructure, and the “temporary” infrastructure of the war zone. women’s work in the war zone calls into question the understanding of foreign military occupation as a state of impermanence positioned against the permanence of locally grown civic infrastructure. the development projects women soldiers are brokering with civilian leaders in specific localities embed the presence of the us military and allies into everyday civilian life, long after the physical withdrawal of troops. conversely, the ongoing presence of militarism in the building of infrastructure is an ever-present reminder of the fragility of the local civilian and political infrastructure and its susceptibility to destabilization and future cycles of militarism and warfare. the feminization of counterinsurgency and gender’s mobilization in military strategy work symbiotically with the use of gender to make sense of these military endeavors through the plight of muslim women. politicians and pundits in support of ongoing occupation often argue it is necessary for maintaining stability and security for women, particularly in the case of afghanistan. the instrumentalization of women in this discourse creates a demand for the stories of afghan women and muslim women more broadly.  in turn, that demand creates a niche for women journalists and filmmakers in knowledge production during the war on terror; journalists and filmmakers mediate these women’s experiences for audiences and, in the process, elevate their reputations as wartime correspondents and commentators on policies regarding women’s liberation and war. former abc news journalist and reporter gayle tzemach lemmon has published multiple books on the experiences of both afghan women and us women soldiers as a result of the time she spent in afghanistan after the us invasion. she is a senior fellow at the council on foreign relations and writes regularly about militarism and women. kim barker, who covered afghanistan as the south asia bureau chief for the chicago tribune, went on to lecture about us foreign policy in afghanistan and pakistan at the council on foreign relations. her book, the taliban shuffle, has been adapted to a comedy feature film starring comedian tina fey titled whiskey, tango, foxtrot, which was released in 2016 by paramount pictures. the work these journalists do, albeit as observers rather than as direct participants, is an integral part of the war zone; the media they produce informs the discourse on militarism as a means of engendering liberation that permeates academic and popular culture. the expertise they cultivate and the cultural productions they appear in are often used in the public discourse to romanticize the presence of women in the war zone, without a sufficient interrogation of how they came to be in the war zone and the position they occupy as intermediaries and storytellers. in past popular progressive and feminist narratives that shifted perceptions of women, work, and war, such as the rosie the riveter campaign during world war ii or the enrollment of women in the west point academy in 1980, women were poised to take positions men usually occupy and do the job “just as well,” whereas now women participants and women observers come to the war zone to do work only women can do. in this way, women trained in the methods and processes of civilian engagement function as a technology or tool of militarism, using a particular set of skills deployed in combat. the use of women soldiers as a war zone technology of civilian engagement originates, in part, from the types of caring work women have traditionally done on the front lines (enloe, 2000). however, those forms of caring work, such as nursing, were directed towards the care of the soldiers they were working alongside. in this contemporary context, caring work is reformulated into an external orientation, a mode of extraction that functions to gather intelligence from civilian populations who occupy a precarious position in between “us” and “them.” women become “cultural experts” by doing this work. the feminized warfare of cultural expertise also side-steps concerns about women’s inability to meet the same physical standards male service members are held to, emphasizing the specificity of what women do outside of conventional forms of violent combat. whereas the introduction of the difference of women’s bodies into soldiering was once almost universally considered a dire threat to the project of militarism, here bodily difference is absorbed into the logics, strategies, and tools of combat, clarifying the function of gender as a technology of warfare. affirmation, tactility, and cultural competence technologies of early-twenty-first-century militarism are organized around the binary of remote engagement, drones and improvised explosive devices, for example, and immediate engagement between bodies in the war zone, as happens in ground combat. categories emerge of “technologies of annihilation and technologies aimed at population management and life affirmation,” (nisa, 2015), and in turn annihilation and affirmation are articulated across the continuum of proximity. technologies of annihilation, such as bombs, are ostensibly deployed in response to intelligence gathered about the enemy’s positions and strategies. technologies of population management and life affirmation are often deployed as a means of gathering intelligence, specifically “cultural” intelligence. it is in the practice of gathering “cultural intelligence” that women in the war zone have come to function as a technology of life affirmation, using diplomatic, affirmative, and tactile engagements. tactile engagement references the use of touch and can be utilized in masculinized forms to kill, maim, and arrest. the affirmation work women do to build relationships with civilians requires other tactilities: conversation, visiting homes, and partaking of hospitality. the use of tactility in the service of life affirmation bridges the war zone infrastructure and the local civic infrastructure, fostering interdependencies based on mutual goals that are defined through the extraction of information about the needs of civilians and the needs of the military. the use of women to do the affirmative work of extracting information in the context of muslim societies is conceptualized in terms of cultural knowledge. cultural intelligence gathering is not a new strategy in warfare, but long-term warfare in afghanistan and iraq have intensified the thinking on “culture as a weapon system,” as major general david r. hogg put it in 2010 while head of adviser services in afghanistan (davis, 2010). moreover, the particular ways in which culture is understood in conflicts in “the muslim world” (informed by long-standing orientalist tropes of savage, brutal men and harem women) explicitly centers gender and women in the tactical discussion. gender, women, and femininity are collapsed in this tactical outlook into a category with its own particular technological potential. the type of intelligence these women gather may have pertinent information about military violence strategies; civilian women in rural afghanistan, for example, have passed on information about insurgents and bomb makers in their areas. more often, however, the cultural intelligence women gather is utilized to ascertain the broader social-political landscape of alliances and enmities across different parts of the war zone in iraq and afghanistan, information that shapes future conceptualizations of both strategic violence and diplomacy (bumiller, 2010b). the conversation about cultural knowledge’s tactical potential is sophisticated, prepared to address critiques of militarism; it argues for an evolved approach to the extraction and use of such knowledge. allison abbe and stephen m. halpin are civilian psychologists working at the us army research institute for the behavioral and social sciences. they advocate for an emphasis on “cross-cultural competence” rather than cultural knowledge/understanding/awareness, particularly in the context of irregular warfare (persistent violent conflict between state and non-state actors). abbe and halpin argue that cultural knowledge focuses on the “lack of social maturity” perceived to exist in places like iraq, and the ways in which these places differ from the us. cross-cultural competence encompasses language skills and cultural knowledge, but extends beyond them; cross-cultural competence “skills encompass the ability to regulate one’s own reactions in a cross-cultural setting, interpersonal skills, and the flexibility to assume the perspective of someone from a different culture” (abbe & halpin, 2009, p. 10). cross-cultural competence is characterized by reflection and restraint, juxtaposed against the aggression of ground combat. it also mirrors the apparent informed, coordinated restraint of drone warfare, another binary that has its own gendered characterizations. public discourse on us counterinsurgency strategies is primarily engaged with the costs and benefits of drone warfare over ground combat. the use of unmanned machines carrying out targeted assassinations of predetermined state enemies, which should ostensibly reduce casualties overall, appeals to a war-weary society and bolsters the mythologies of technological advancement and military intelligence.2 undoubtedly, drone warfare has its own tactile impact, but its remoteness, the deployment of bombs from far above and with the human hand managing them removed to a control room in a remote location, frames that form of tactility differently. proximate outreach through cultural work mitigates other anxieties about the destruction that accompanies us militarism and further undergirds the narrative of a military that is gaining in intelligence and evolving.3 in their own ways, both remote and proximate tactile technologies promise a warfare that features targeted and precise encounters. this promise is part of a larger progressive fantasy substantiating the assertion that while twenty-first-century us and allied warfare is, of course, carried out in service of state interests, it is also a humanitarian endeavor (atanasoski, 2013; hirschkind & mahmood, 2002; nisa, 2015). women’s work in the war zone is illustrative of the role gender plays in forming a practical and productive symbiosis between these apparently contradictory aims. in the twentieth century, advancements in warfare technologies such as the atomic bomb were articulated in terms of the largest radius of annihilation they could accomplish.4 twenty-first-century remote and proximate technologies are marketed in terms of their ability to achieve the smallest radius of impact—targeting individuals for execution or diplomacy—and a clinical precision in their implementation. this apparent trajectory towards limited and precise warfare is always complicated by the messy and imprecise engagements of the war zone: drone strikes on hospitals and wedding celebrations that kill many innocent people at once, revelations of widespread practices of torture at abu ghraib and other sites, routine suicide bombings and assassinations, and moments in which soldiers have attacked civilians for sport.5 these instances represent failures of both remote and proximate engagements. as warfare in iraq and afghanistan continues over a decade, these technological crises persist, routinely disrupting the prevailing logic: that these military endeavors are well thought-out, and are borne of good intelligence about the enemy’s strategic maneuvers and expertise on the character of the enemy. soldiers of compassion reporter gayle tzemach lemmon (2015) notes that the “cultural turn” came at a moment when commanders like eric olson were grappling with the fundamental ineffectuality of violence. olsen and others theorized that warfare strategies erred too much toward the “hard side,” and not enough toward the “softer side: the knowledge based war” (p. 11). as the primary focus of military strategists in iraq and afghanistan shifted to defeating insurgencies, civilian women came to be seen as a source of “deep knowledge.” additionally, civilian women could be “armed” to exert the right influence on husbands, brothers, and sons, who may be tempted to join insurgencies against allied troops. given the socio-religious and cultural precepts prohibiting interactions between male soldiers and civilian women, the technology needed to extract deep knowledge from civilian women was determined to be other women, specifically women soldiers trained to engage in social and relational contact with civilians in war zones. in contrast to remote warfare technologies that target populations from above, women soldiers access populations on the ground, in close proximity. interactions between the satellites above and the populations they surveil below are prohibited by distance, and missiles function as an emphatic and one-sided statement that leaves no room for reply. programs of nonviolent proximate tactile engagement are organized around interactions in which exchange is possible. it is in the possibilities of an exchange, facilitated by and through women, that these forms of tactile technological engagements influence the infrastructure of the war zone and militarism itself. in the realm of media production, the rhetoric about the oppression of muslim women and their portended liberation through allied military intervention led news organizations to embrace their own cultural inquiries.6 although it may never have been formal policy on the part of news organizations to send women into the war zone to report on women civilians, the emphasis on the dire circumstances of muslim women living under oppressive muslim political regimes, and the desire to “hear” these women’s stories and “see” their faces, in conjunction with the increased demand for news about the war itself, increased opportunities for women to report from the war zone in greater numbers than in past conflicts. the heightened visibility of women reporters in the war zone did not go unnoticed by media outlets, and at different points the reporters themselves have become a part of the story (ali, 2014b). the presence of north american and western european women in the war zone is emblematic of a greater integration of women into economies from which they were once excluded. the presence of women reporters and soldiers “over there,” in high-risk situations that were once almost exclusively the domain of men, is a moment in which we can see the entrenchment and enactment of feminist principles of equality. in combat zones, the notion of tactility and contact between populations is generally utilized in reference to the infliction and reception of aggression and violence: searches at checkpoints, patrols, night raids, firefights, and interrogations, for example. in the realm of war zone journalism, the journalist’s presence is conceptualized in terms of their proximity to the violence and the suffering inflicted by warfare. this type of tactility is associated with masculine ideals. in contrast to this type of masculine tactility, feminized and feminine notions of tactility emerge. kim rygiel (2016) maps the relationship between the masculine constructions of the “citizen warrior” and the feminine construction of the citizen performing her duties in service of national protection on the “home front,” “in terms of sacrifice, care and emotional support”; she is a “soldier of compassion” (p. 150). the soldier of compassion does not use technology as we usually envision it, as “industrial machinery and military weapons…the tools of work and war” (wajcman, 2010, p. 2). instead, she is utilizing resources and gifts (such as medical supplies and toys), talk (soldiers are advised to begin with conversations about children and everyday domestic procedures), and rituals of hospitality (bumiller, 2010a). tactile engagements amongst women are less a reformulation of violent combat into feminine terms and more a case of summoning the “soldier of compassion” from the home front to the front lines. elisabeth bumiller of the new york times refers to the deployment of women soldiers in these ways as “tea with a weapon missions” (2010a) because these women are tasked with listening, and thus their deployment provides an empathic audience for an unheard segment of the population. reporters must also present themselves as empathic to extract stories of abuse, suffering, and, in some cases, triumphs of civilian women. empathic presentation relies on the clear identification of gender difference; women soldiers are told not to hide their ponytails or other visible gender markers to differentiate themselves from male combat soldiers. the ostensible goal of this knowledge production is to create a body of intelligence that allows for the fantasy of precise and remote warfare and, by extension, warfare whose goals and methods are ethical, even humanitarian. this narrative of progressive warfare works symbiotically with the narrative of the military as a progressing institution, increasingly open to accommodating recent social shifts in regards to gender, sexuality, and identity.7 in this way, it becomes clear that the assimilation of women into the war zone is no longer considered a threat to the war zone, but has been transmuted into a discourse of benefit. fears about women softening the brutality of warfare or making that brutality an unbearable burden on their male colleagues has given way to a practical instrumentalization of the very aspects of femininity that were once considered problematic. though reporters do not act directly as agents of warfare, their participation in the production of knowledge about muslim society, culture, and women contributes significantly to the cultural narrative employed by the military. furthermore, they must sometimes rely on the military in order to do their work. in the war zone, reporters are often embedded with military installations in formal pre-arranged configurations, but these arrangements also emerge informally and spontaneously. in describing the difficulty of reaching activist malalai joya as joya campaigned for office outside of kabul, filmmaker eva mulvad tells an interviewer, “we almost gave up, until we found some danish soldiers who had a cargo military plane going there. and we charmed ourselves into that plane and right away we got out there” (brancaccio, mulvad, & joya, 2007). the forms of engagement that take place between military entities and journalists/filmmakers provide an additional dimension to our consideration of the engagements each has with civilians, as well as the ways in which the work of warfare and reporting are defined, and gendered, in relation to one another. women who are in the war zone making media are less likely to adopt the personae of bravado and/or stoic detachment that has been traditionally cultivated by the male war correspondent, who only occasionally succumbs to the affective dimension of warfare, often when it concerns the men who fight. this refusal is an advantage. in 2002, vanity fair magazine ran a story titled, “the girls at the front,” featuring reporter marie colvin, who sports an eye patch as a result of taking shrapnel to the eye while covering the war zone. colvin is keen to make this differentiation: “boys get fascinated by toys about age two, and that never changes…that’s not what i think is important about covering a war. i think the story is the people” (p. 127). colvin’s statement suggests that as observers of warfare, women are less drawn to objects and more to human stories and experiences. a marie claire article celebrates the bravado female photojournalists display in the war zone, “where fear and violence are standard occupational hazards.” however, it is through the “the female lens” that these women are able to see “beyond the chaos and carnage” to find “extraordinary moments of humanity and heroism” (“through the eyes of female photographers,” 2011) as with soldiering, this commonsensical understanding of what women “see” in the war zone is no longer treated as an imposition on hard line reporting, but as a productive arena of coverage in which the stories of human beings are extracted to give dimension to warfare. these articles are rife with an assumption permeating public discourse: that women access humanity in war zones by virtue of a gendered mode of observation and spectatorship. in the stabilization phase of militarism, such stories turn the attention of audiences and pundits towards individual stories of liberation and achievement in the midst of abstract narratives about large-scale development projects and nation building, a combination of narratives that actively works to cultivate support for indefinite occupation. observations on the state of afghan and iraqi women then go on to function as a measure for determining the successes and failures of the development project. stories produced about women by women gauge whether militarism can produce liberation, the documenting of each woman’s tragedy and achievement signaling success or dire warning. outside of the war zone these stories create additional currency for their authors. many women journalists convert their work in the war zone to real opportunities spanning the economy of knowledge production “back home,” where there is a market for foreign policy content framed as human interest. amy waldman reported for the new york times’ metro desk for several years. six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, waldman was reporting from iran, russia, and afghanistan. she would eventually become bureau chief in the region before returning to the united states to work at other news organizations and later take a fellowship at the radcliffe institute at harvard university. in the early days of the war on terror, the us administration sought academic support for a cultural approach to militarism using texts like the arab mind (1973), by cultural anthropologist raphael patai, which purports to provide a comprehensive capture of ‘arab’ sexuality, language, and politics, across time and across region (ali, 2014b). patai went on to publish the jewish mind in 1977. in the academic setting of the radcliffe institute, waldman’s journalistic observations and reporting on warfare in afghanistan are similarly taken up as an academically sanctioned source of knowledge, providing a basis for future understandings of militarism and gender liberation in “the muslim world.” much of the work of women journalists is about the people who inhabit the war zone with them: soldiers, aid workers, and the men, women, and children who live there. in the accounts of people’s experiences is sometimes an implicit advocacy for the presence of us military in the region. sometimes the advocacy is explicit, as in the case of the use of the image of a young afghan woman, bibi aisha, taken by south african photographer jodi bieber. the portrait of aisha’s face, mutilated by her in-laws, was published july 2008 on the cover of time magazine alongside the tag line “what happens if we leave afghanistan,” referring to the corresponding article by aryn baker, in which the then south asia bureau chief expounds on the question of ongoing military occupation and its impact on the safety and security of afghan women. the image won bieber the world press photo award in 2010. bieber’s photograph entailed a degree of proximate engagement. this engagement is made explicit in her own account of photographing aisha. bieber took the photograph on a shoot in afganistan inside “women for afghan women,” a women’s shelter in kabul. that bieber’s status as a woman, and a woman using gendered strategies of proximal engagement, gave her gendered affinity with the shelter and intimacy with her subject is underscored in bieber’s own account: before i start, i try to make a subject feel comfortable through small talk, and already i could see that aisha was quite extraordinary. then i began and it wasn't working so well, so i put the camera down and said: "would it be possible to not think about what happened to you for a few minutes and just focus on your inner power and beauty?" so she did and i took the picture.  (phillips, 2011) proximate tactile engagements are not the only ways in which women participate in militarism. eric blanchard (2011) argues drone warfare has disrupted the fragile discursive relationship between masculinity and combat. male drone pilots fear they are “cowards” because they do not put their own bodies in harm’s way. in the ranks of the military the remoteness of drone warfare poses a challenge to the figure of the male warrior who learns what masculinity is through engaged combat. for women soldiers, who have until now been formally excluded from combat, drone operation is a sought after opportunity to gain combat experience (tickner & sjoberg). discourse on women operating drones emphasizes difference through displays femininity, air force staff sargent “anne” is described by a journalist as a drone pilot who adorns her headset with costume jewels and goes by the handle “sparkle,” but the soldier herself retains some ambivalence about difference. the remoteness of drone warfare removes the question of women’s physical differences and how those differences may impact women’s performance in combat, but the tactility of drone warfare raises other anxieties around femininity, “when you hit a truck full of people, there are limbs and legs everywhere,” says anne, “you have to watch that. you don’t get to turn away. you can’t be that soft girly traditional feminine and do the job. those are the people who are going to have nightmares” (maurer, 2015). whether articulated in relationship to masculinity or femininity, anxieties about drone warfare are organized around proximity and tactility in relationship to violence; some worry they’re too far to properly touch violence, others are concerned distance alone won’t prevent violence from touching them too deeply. cultural intelligence samuel huntington’s assertion that the “muslim world” and the secular “western world” are destined for inevitable interminable conflict, what he termed the “clash of civilizations” (1993), has influenced the particular interventions of culture in military strategy in iraq and afghanistan. in her exposition of torture practiced on bodies of afghans and iraqis in this era of militarism, judith butler (2008) notes that the particular strategies for the abuse and torture of afghans and iraqis was built on “bad anthropology.” this bad anthropology relies on texts such as patai’s in which it is argued that the mind of an arab is a particular object (butler calls it a “ready object”), distinguishable from the western mind (butler, 2008). patai’s text is part of the production of knowledge about “the muslim world” that edward said identified as orientalism (1979). this discourse, he argues, conjures an “imaginative geography” of the muslim “world” and the muslim “mind”. based on this imaginary, culture becomes the sole mode of apprehension available to us to understand these conflicts, and gender and sexuality are central to these cultural formulations. butler illustrates how the emphasis on sexuality as a point of vulnerability amongst muslim men drove the particular humiliations devised by their torturers. jasbir puar (2013) echoes this critique, and conceptualizes homonationalism as a means by which to interrogate liberal discourses on notions of sexuality, gender, and rights that bolster state power and that inform the currency of citizenship. gender and sexuality have become central tenets around which the public discussion and thinking on islam is organized. in the midst of this discourse is the eternally present question of whether societies and governments who identify primarily as muslim adhere to values and beliefs that are fundamentally incompatible with western liberal democracy. in the context of this discourse, the prominence of women in the strategies of militarism do the additional work of reinforcing the notion that western liberal democracies are “farther along” on the progressive trajectory. this progressive trajectory works symbiotically with the assertion that us forms of warfare are humanitarian endeavors aimed at women’s liberation (abu-lughod, 2013; hunt & rygiel, 2006; hesford, 2011; hirschkind & mahmood, 2002). the presence of women permeates the infrastructure of early-twenty-first-century militarism. women act as agents in the development of cultural knowledge/intelligence in a number of ways, including in scientific and academic fields of inquiry. women working as medical personnel have been responsible for treating prisoners of war and enemy combatants at prison sites in afghanistan, iraq, and guantánamo bay, in an inverted articulation of the soldier of compassion, providing care in the context of antagonistic intelligence gathering that includes the use of torture. women working as psychologists have advised interrogations and torture, and women conduct interrogations. each of these occupations situates the work of women differently, but, always, in relation to the role of the soldier of compassion employing technologies of care. professional women who function as observers and lend their expertise to facilitate militarism, in ethically ambiguous situations, offer another perspective from which to assess the role of gender in the technologies of cultural intelligence. the human terrain system (hts), a program initiated in 2005 and finally discontinued in 2014, is another iteration of a cultural intelligence program that relies on the notion of tactile encounters organized around exchanges of information and resources. devised by cultural anthropologists montgomery mcfate and andrea jackson, the hts functioned as part of the united states army training and doctrine command. the hts recruited anthropologists, political scientists, and others to create teams of social scientists who traveled with soldiers, and in some cases were trained military personnel themselves. these teams moved about on the ground as attachments to combat platoons in the war zone, conducting the research that provided the basis from which soldiers were trained to engage with civilians. mcfate, who vetted all participants in the program, once described her ideal candidate as someone who holds a phd in middle east studies, is fluent in arabic, and who is also a trained navy sea air and land team (seal) member (burleigh, 2007). the ideal agent of cultural intelligence has language capacity, a scholarly and historically grounded understanding of the place and its culture, and the physical strength and training of a soldier. these auxiliary agents of warfare indicate the trajectory of future conceptualizations of ideal soldiers, who can be engaged in both the diplomatic and the violent engagements of the war zone.   in response to public condemnation from the american anthropological association, who stated the hts excercised a “problematic application of anthropological expertise,” that violates the aaa’s code of ethics, hts’s administrators sought to defend the program as a “cooler” approach to militarism. this approach can possibly circumvent the aggression of military violence, offering a pathway to an idealized targeted warfare in which civilians are less likely to be killed. mcfate (2005) uses this logic to defend the practice of doing anthropological scholarship to explicitly aid the project of militarism in iraq and afghanistan, and the muslim world more generally. she argues, “without understanding of the population, the military is more likely to make grave errors resulting in the destruction of property and the loss of human life” (p. 27). mcfate’s rationale invokes the archetype of the compassionate soldier. through compassion, she can articulate an ethical position from which to function unfettered as a part of the project of gathering cultural knowledge. women outside of the realm of active soldiering can be interpolated into the position of soldier of compassion in the war zone. what is more, the involvement of women is associated with an evolution in military strategy based in intelligence and reason. the project of gathering cultural intelligence in the war zone is porous, drawing varied forms of work associated with ascertaining the motivations and needs of human beings in the project of militarism. the human terrain system manifested soon after the invasion and occupation of iraq, as the anti-us insurgency continued unabated. the hts sought to inscribe human beings into the geographical terrain that soldiers are familiarized with in training, in ways that go beyond envisioning civilians as obstacles around whom they must navigate when engaging in violent combat. the re-inscription of human beings into the terrain of the war zone as part of the “cultural turn” in military strategy quickly became an opportunity to formulate new strategies around “human terrain.” cultural mappings of afghanistan and iraq made civilian women more visible to military strategists, and strategists began to conceptualize the role these women could play in facilitating cooler relations between armed forces on both sides. the question of how to access civilian women was answered in the form of consolidating women soldiers who were functioning disparately in the war zone into all-female platoons, something commanders on the ground began doing early on in both the iraq and afghanistan military campaigns (lemmon, 2015). in 2003, prior to the official configuration of fets (female engagement teams) the team lioness program was implemented. the lioness teams served to perform critical proximal labor in regions where the touching or searching of women by men is prohibited. in order to find soldiers to serve on team lioness, commanders hastily gathered women from positions as drivers, mechanics, medics, and civil affairs officers. these women soldiers accompanied male platoons “outside of the wire” to talk to afghan women, in some cases implementing livelihood projects with the women (lemmon, 2015). in the combat zone they were assigned the tasks of distributing information to local women and families and gathering intelligence, as well as searching women’s bodies for weapons and verifying that individuals who appeared to be women were, in fact, women. in 2009, matt pottinger, a journalist-turned lieutenant officer in the united states marines corps, surmised women would be necessary to conduct raids in farah province in afghanistan. relying on the expertise of sarah chayes, an american journalist who had lived in afghanistan for several years, pottinger implemented a training program that would result in the first female engagement team. lemmon writes, “with his commander’s approval, pottinger assembled a group of seven female marines and one female interpreter, and over a period of several days led impromptu lessons on afghan culture, proper search techniques and how to conduct tactical questioning” (2015, p. 10). another main player in the implementation of these programs is former marine and then civilian advisor, claire russo. upon hearing of pottinger’s experiments with women platoons, russo set out to implement a version of the program in the army; lemmon writes that russo traveled to afghanistan “as part of a civilian team created to help the army better understand the cultural terrain” (2015, p. 10).8 as architects of these programs and foreigners in afghanistan, pottinger and russo employed ethnic intermediaries to do the work of translation, both in terms of language and in terms of culture. afghan-american linguist hali jilani also participated in the development of the fet program. social scientist and consultant sippi azarbaijani-moghaddam helped launch the hts. at one point, azarbaijani-moghaddam advised major general nick carter, head of the nato forces in southern afghanistan (hodge, 2010). both women are ethnically afghan but were educated in europe; in different forums, they articulate hybrid experiences of mobility, simultaneously identifying as within and outside of the experience of being afghan.9 like many others in the war zone who do the work of cultural intelligence gathering, both women continued to work with and for the us and uk military and as a result are given opportunities to act in an advisory capacity in foreign policy discussions. azarbaijani-moghaddam is a regular contributor to the middle east institute and, in 2014, she wrote a working paper on fets for nato titled, “seeking out their afghan sisters,” a 2010 article for the nation, ann jones describes jilani as a “cultural advisor” to the us marines. jilani and azarbaijani-moghaddam see their work as an opportunity to avoid “misunderstandings” that result in civilian casualties, and express unwavering support of us and allied militarism in the region. conclusion the positive aspects of the work of women soldiers and journalists in the war zone are not difficult to ascertain. women reporters do the work of recording and broadcasting afghan women’s stories in spaces where these women are usually absent, to audiences who may have no other means by which to learn about them. soldiers work with civilians to develop resources, increasing women’s access to healthcare by bridging the physical space between male healthcare workers and women who would otherwise be out of reach; they help to reduce illiteracy in rural areas (mcbride & wibben, 2012). their presence is indicative of a “cooler” militarism, focused on the circumvention of future episodes of violence and the preemptive defeat of violent threats via intelligence. the work women do in the war zone has afforded women in the military a pathway to making material gains, in terms of career and promotion, salary, and veteran’s benefits. this is important as long as military service continues to be one of the limited means by which people can access some form of economic stability and potential upward mobility. the work these women do is also one of the few contexts in which muslim women are talked about and talked to outside of stories of trauma and victimhood; as partners in cultural intelligence gathering, muslim women gain recognition as sources of influence in the household, and as crucial actors in politics and militarism. as a result, afghan women have significantly increased visibility on the world stage. the purpose of their engagements are to “chang[e] the ‘story in a given space’” (mcbride & wibben, 2012, p. 206), getting residents to invest in a long-term future rather than the immediate gains promised by insurgents. changing the story is dependent upon the precise deployment of gender. “don’t start by firing off questions, do break the ice by playing with the children, don’t let your interpreter hijack the conversation,” they are told (bumiller, 2010b). the training women soldiers receive is aimed at achieving a balance between maximizing the perception of themselves as non-violent and helpful, while remaining firm and insistent on their goals, illustrtating how gendered forms of interpersonal engagement are rendered into technologies. women's approach to tactility must be conversational, not confrontational. technologies of affirmation emphasize mutually constructive engagement. who best to articulate this than the soldier of compassion? the soldier of compassion approaches day-to-day sociality at a proximate level, engaging with women about the mundane and tactile work of running a domestic household with inquiries into community needs, suggesting ways in which the military can fulfill those needs—and in the course of this proximate outreach, the soldier of compassion extracts information about alliances and enmities in the local political and military hierarchies, information that may directly benefit military intelligence. the labor of the soldier of compassion visible the ways in which counterinsurgency and development are mutually dependent, and therefore the ways in which iraqi and afghan civilians and allied military forces can develop a mutually beneficial partnership. the purpose of their work is, of course, to foster a sense of mutual reliance between residents of iraq and afghanistan and the military infrastructure of occupation, as bumiller makes clear in her report for the new york times on the benefits of putting women at the scene: in the wake of several years of destruction, women enter the scene: as envisioned, the teams will work like american politicians who campaign door to door and learn what voters care about. a team is to arrive in a village, get permission from the male elder to speak with the women, settle into a compound, hand out school supplies and medicine, drink tea, make conversation and, ideally, get information about the village, local grievances and the taliban. (bumiller, 2010b) tactile engagements in the war zone in afghanistan and iraq encourage women soldiers to see difference from men as a strength, women have their own work to do. in soldiering, and in corporate and academic environments, women are told to avoid overt performances of femininity in favor of more neutral enactments in which women “prove” that they are capable of working to task as equals to men. but in the twenty-first-century project of counterinsurgency in the “muslim world,” a reconfiguration of such logics occurs, and women’s success in the war zone is dependent upon an explicit display of femininity. both reporters and soldiers depend upon the clear recognition of their gender and the positions they occupy as not-men to gain access to civilian women and to not be viewed as a threat to men. commanders and commentators still harbor anxieties about the potential psychological and physical vulnerabilities of women in combat, but these anxieties are far outweighed by the collective imagination of the productive ways in which women can transform militarism. the enthusiasm about the increasing presence of women soldiering and producing knowledge in the war zone reads in public discourse as a progressive feminist narrative, one that presents feminism as singular and always moving in the same direction. there is an apparent ease with which the project of feminism comes to exist in a comfortable symbiosis with the project of militarism, until a close look at the conditions on which this narrative of progress are dependent; namely, conditions of warfare, instability, and violence. as femininity comes to be seen in more tangible terms as an asset of militarism, in which feminized strategies work better for the project of interminable warfare, and simultaneously as a means to argue for more intelligent and less violent warfare, it seems inevitable that “feminism” will resurface and be deployed continually in public discourses that are supportive of, and resistant to, the project of militarism. it remains to be seen how, in these resurfacings of feminisms, gender and difference will be utilized in discourses aimed at advancing militarism and those aimed at dismantling it. notes 1 learning what these needs are from the population, rather than assuming what they are from an academic and detached assessment of “these people,” can and does shift the landscape of the war zone, directing resources to projects like irrigation, based the reports of the women deployed to engage with them (bumiller, 2010b). 2 a 2013 pew center poll showed a majority of americans favor the use of drones, despite questions raised about their effectiveness and collateral civilian casualties. this is one of the few issues where agreement cuts across political boundaries of liberal and conservative (pew research center, 2013). 3 a 2013 pew center poll showed a majority of americans favor the use of drones, despite questions raised about their effectiveness and collateral civilian casualties. this is one of the few issues where agreement cuts across political boundaries of liberal and conservative (pew research center, 2013). 4 in her essay on the use of language by “defense intellectuals” to describe nuclear weapons, carol cohn posits the use of the term “clean bombs” as a metaphor for their perspectives. “clean bombs” refer to fusion bombs whose blast radius is likely to have much greater destructive power than a fission bomb. “this language,” she writes, “has enormous destructive power, but without the emotional fallout that would result if it were clear one was talking about plans for mass murder, mangled bodies, and unspeakable human suffering” (cohn, 1987, p. 691). 5 there are several moments in which attacks by soldiers on civilians gain serious traction in us news media: the 2006 gang rape and killing of fourteen-year-old abeer qassim hamza al-janabi and her family by us soldiers in mahmudiyah, iraq; the nisour square massacre in which seventeen iraqi civilians were killed by blackwater security consulting employees; the maywand district murders in afghanistan in 2010 in which a group of us soldiers created a “kill team” and posed for pictures with the corpses of the civilians they murdered as they would animal hunting trophies; and the rampage of army staff sergeant robert bale in kandahar province, afghanistan in 2012 in which he killed sixteen civilians. 6 this narrative is deployed arbitrarily and only sometimes in relationship to the realities of women’s experiences. afghanistan under taliban rule was deeply oppressive of women; iraq under the regime of saddam hussein was relatively liberal. meanwhile, ultraconservative muslim governments like that of saudi arabia openly perpetuate gender inequality as part of a bouquet of illiberal, unethical, and inhumane practices while remaining close political and military allies of the united states. 7 this is evidenced by the acceptance of transgender soldiers in military service, which is part of a larger trajectory that includes striking down don’t ask don’t tell, a rule banning soldiers who openly identify as homosexual from serving in the military. these policy changes suggest the military is an adaptable institution, capable of being reshaped by external forces when the political climate can be brought in line with progressive social thought. 8 after her military service, russo would go on to be a fellow at the council on foreign relations, advising on foreign policy matters and engaging in the academic knowledge production that informs the formulation of foreign policy. her path is a common one. many women who participate in these forms of cultural intelligence find post-combat homes in scholarly spaces and other spaces dedicated to knowledge production, their time in the war zone forming the reputation that allows them to be referred to as experts on foreign policy, militarism, and the liberation of women. 9 sippi azarbaijani-moghaddam profile, the middle east institute, http://www.mei.edu/profile/sippi-azarbaijani-moghaddam; hali jilani profile, http://www.militaryreligiousfreedom.org/about/foundation-voices/hali-jilani. references abu-lughod, l. (2013). do muslim women need saving? cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ali, i. (2014a). feminist advocacy and war on terror militarism. democratic communiqué, 26, 160-78. ali, i. (2014b). have freedom, will travel: gendered discourses in the war on terror. (unpublished doctoral dissertation). rutgers university, the state university of new jersey, new brunswick, nj. american anthropological association. (2007 october 31st). american anthropological association’s executive board statement on the human terrain system project. retrieved from: http://www.americananthro.org/connectwithaaa/content.aspx?itemnumber=1626 atanasoski, n. (2013). humanitarian violence: the us deployment of diversity. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. blanchard, e. (2011). the technoscience question in feminist international relations. in j. a. tickner & l. sjoberg (eds.), feminism and international relations: conversations about the past (pp. 146-168). new york, ny: routledge. brancaccio, d. (interviewer),  mulvad, e. (interviewee), & malalai joya (interviewee). (2007). now. [interview transcript]. pbs.org. retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/309.html bumiller, e. (2010a, 2 october). for female marines, tea comes with bullets. new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world/asia/03marines.html bumiller, e. (2010b, 7 march). letting women reach women in afghan war. new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/world/asia/07women.html burleigh, n. (2007, september). mcfate’s mission. more magazine, 120-127. butler, j. (2008). sexual politics, torture, and secular time. the british journal of sociology, 59, 1-23. cohn, c. (1987). sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals. signs, 12, 687-718. conrad, c. (2005, may–june). phase iv operations: where wars are really won. military review, 27-36. enloe, c. (2000). maneuvers: the international politics of militarizing women’s lives. berkeley, ca: university of california press. davis, r. (2010, summer). culture as a weapon. middle east report, 8-13. retrieved from http://www.merip.org/mer/mer255/culture-weapon#_1 grewal, i. & kaplan. (eds). (2002). scattered hegemonies: postmodernity and transnational feminist practices. (4th ed.) minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. hirschkind, c. & mahmood, s. (2002). feminism, the taliban, and the politics of counter-insurgency. anthropological quarterly, 75, 339-355. hunt, k. & rygiel, k. (eds.). (2006). (en)gendering the war on terror: war stories and camouflaged politics. hampshire, uk: ashgate. huntington, s. (1993). the clash of civilizations? foreign affairs, 72, 22-49. jones, a. (2010, 27 october). woman to woman in afghanistan: female engagement teams join the counterinsurgency. the nation. retrieved from: https://www.thenation.com/article/woman-woman-afghanistan/ khalili, l. (2010). gendered practices of counterinsurgency. review of international studies, 37, 1471-1491. lemmon, g. t. (2015). ashley’s war: the untold story of a team of women soldiers on the special ops battlefield. new york, ny: harper collins. mahmood, s. (2005). the politics of piety: the islamic revival and the feminist subject. princeton, nj: princeton press. maurer, k. (2015, 18 december). she kills people from 7,850 miles away. the daily beast. retrieved from http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/18/she-kills-people-from-7-850-miles-away.html mcbride, k. & wibben, t. r. a. (2012). the gendering of counterinsurgency in afghanistan. humanity: an international journal of human rights, humanitarianism, and development, 3, 199-215. mcfate, m. (2005). cultural knowledge and common sense: a response to gonzález in this issue. anthropology today, 24, 27. mohanty, c. t. (1984). under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. boundary, 2(12) 333-358. nisa, r. (2015). capturing humanitarian war: the collusion of violence and care in us-managed military detention. environment and planning a, 37, 1-16. patai, r. (1973). the arab mind. tucson, az: recovery resources press. patai, r. (1977). the jewish mind. tucson, az: recovery resources press. peretz, e. (2002, june). the girls at the front. vanity fair. retrieved from http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2002/06/female-war-correspondents-200206. pew research center. (2013, february 13th). continued support for u.s. drone strikes: civilian casualties a concern, even among supporters. retrieved from http://www.people-press.org/2013/02/11/continued-support-for-u-s-drone-strikes/ phillips, s. (interviewer), bieber, j. (interviewee). (2011, november 20). photographer jodi bieber’s best shot. the guardian. retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/nov/20/photography-jodi-bieber-best-shot puar, j. (2013). rethinking homonationalism. international journal of middle east studies, 45, 336-339. rygiel, k. (2016). protecting and proving identity: the politics of waging war through citizenship in the post-9/11 era. in k. hunt & k. rygiel (eds.), (en)gendering the war on terror: war stories and camouflage politics. london: routledge. said, e. (1978). orientalism. new york, ny: vintage books. through the eyes of female photographers. (2011, 22 november). marie claire. retrieved from http://www.marieclaire.com/culture/news/g1321/female-photojournalists/?slide=3 tickner, a. j. & sjoberg, l. (eds.) (2011). feminism and international relations: conversation about the past, present and future. new york, ny: routledge. toor, s. (2012). imperialist feminism redux. dialectical anthropology, 36, 147-160. wajcman, j. (2010). feminist theories of technology. cambridge journal of economics, 34, 143-152. bio isra ali is a visiting assistant professor in media, culture, and communication and affiliated faculty at the hagop kevorkian center for near east studies at new york university. she received a phd in media studies from the school of communication and information at rutgers, the state university of new jersey, with a certificate in women’s and gender studies. she is a feminist media scholar whose current research interests center on war on terror era militarism. her current project examines how the conditions of the war on terror shape the ways in which female military service members and veterans use digital media to advocate for themselves. wood, jordan, and yhonnie scarce. 2025. “artist’s statement” and “cover artist jordan wood in conversation with indigenous australian artist yhonnie scarce: on history, haunted places, and fractured identities.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–8. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © jordan wood and yhonnie scarce, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license cover art—artist’s statement teacher, 2021, by jordan wood jordan wood jordanlouisewood@gmail.com teacher, 2021, is collage on a found silver gelatin print. collage takes the form of a healing modality, restructuring experiences to present multiple understandings and propositional connections. learning as an infinite, collaborative assemblage. the photograph was found at a thrift store near richmond gaol, lutruwita. i visited the gaol with my mother, attempting to trace a family member believed to have been held there. it is partnered with a piece titled eva, bookending this image and text piece. together, they speak to both revolutionary sculptor eva hesse and eva rosslyn johnsson, my maternal grandmother. their shared feminist approach guides the assembling shapes, forms, and motions from various sites towards a discussion around collective memories and inherited experiences. accompanying the artworks is an interview conducted by jordan with indigenous australian artist yhonnie scarce in which they reflect on shared themes across their work, the significance of the oyster image in teacher, personal and collective histories, and the haunted places that inform their art. mailto:jordanlouisewood@gmail.com tenth anniversary section—image and text 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jordan wood and yhonnie scarce, 2025 figure 1. jordan wood, teacher, 2021 (collage on found silver gelatin print). tenth anniversary section—image and text 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jordan wood and yhonnie scarce, 2025 cover artist jordan wood in conversation with indigenous australian artist yhonnie scarce: on history, haunted places, and fractured identities jordan wood jordanlouisewood@gmail.com yhonnie scarce yhonnie scarce (ys): hi, jordan. i thought we could reflect on how long we’ve known each other. i remember meeting you a good fifteen years ago actually. we’ve known each other for quite a while. we worked together during that period of time too. i’m really interested in talking to you about the work that you made for the cover of the journal, if you could tell me a little bit more about it. jordan wood (jw): the work for the cover of the magazine was originally exhibited at a show at mars [melbourne art rooms] gallery in 2022, i think. it was from a series where i was collaging directly on photographs that i would find in antique stores or boxes in opportunity [second hand] shops. these particular ones were interesting photographs. they came from a town just outside of hobart, where there is quite a significant prison, and i’ve had family members that had been in it. my mom has always spent quite a lot of time trying to trace back her convict settler history in tasmanian. it’s always brought with traces, but nothing very solid because there won’t be a grave and the records weren’t kept. at the same time, it diverts from that too. by having this form that’s suggestive of a teaching figure trying to nurture the oyster. it nurtures, supports, and teaches questioning about how we perceive history in forming ourselves, which, i feel, is more important than what my mom’s doing, than actually finding this perceived truth or family. ys: so the prison that you’re talking about, is that one of the female factories as well? there was one in hobart and then there’s one further north. yeah, i know a little bit about those female factories as well because i’ve spent quite a lot of time in tasmania. i’ve visited the one in hobart with a plan to visit the one further north, but i haven’t gotten around to it. i’ve been told the factory in the northern part of tasmania is a lot creepier. jw: it’s exceptionally haunting. you can feel it… ys: in your bones, really. i think even the cascades female factory in hobart, you can tell that it was built for the utmost suffering of the female inmates there. no sun. sorry, i cut you off. mailto:jordanlouisewood@gmail.com tenth anniversary section—image and text 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jordan wood and yhonnie scarce, 2025 jw: no, no. i also found it really interesting the lens in which the ways these places are presented. it seems to be, i don't know, there’s so many ways to show this. it isn’t in a horror sense. there is almost a pride in this history, which i find an unexpected part of the experience of being there. ys: yeah, for tasmania in general, it was a really horrible penal colony. the history of that place, not just their treatment of the aboriginal people during the black wars, but also, in terms of the oppression of women in general. regardless of whether they were black or white. with pregnancies happening, children dying, and their babies dying. the women were not allowed any sunlight. i like that you’ve mentioned the haunting or, that it feels haunted. i think it is and i think with many historical prisons in australia, there are remnants. like you said, there’s pride in it. why would you be proud of these places? are you proud that people suffered? jw: even anecdotally, growing up, within some of my family, there was a pride that we came from convicts as opposed to immigrants, which is a very complex part of that fractured identity in a land built on massacres. i don’t even know where to go with that. it’s confused me since i was a child. ys: well, i guess it sounds like you’re retracing history or trying to understand it. that’s what we all do as artists. jw: it is, and that connection between the desecration of the environment in tasmania particularly, how active and ongoing that is, looking at the salmon farming and how that’s an absolute environmental disaster. then the beaches we’ve lost to the invasion of oysters. it is a tension, it’s a current that divides the whole island, as many people’s livings depends on them. ys: yeah, that’s true and i think when you talk about the invasion of the pacific oyster, it’s very similar to the invasion of australia. it brought disease. you and i were talking about it the other day. the indigenous oyster in australia was desecrated, which was a food staple for first nations people. particularly along the coast in the southern part of australia but also the east coast as well. i love eating oysters. i think they’re amazing, but historically you know that they were brought to australia or introduced to australia as another food staple. it’s like when they brought plants, birds, or other foreign fauna that were not from australia. it’s another form of invasion. jw: another reason they were brought in was for making lime and for the buildings. ys: yeah, and that’s how a lot of the angasi oysters were desecrated. it wasn’t just the introduction of pacific oysters, but also because they ground down their shells to build mortar for the buildings. there’s a lot embedded in that one particular visual representation of the oyster in your work. tenth anniversary section—image and text 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jordan wood and yhonnie scarce, 2025 jw: it repeats. it has such strong representation from luxury to oysters being a poor person’s food. there’s so many contradictions within the oyster. it’s also sexualization, seduction, and those readings. where its placed culturally and where it’s consumed, changes what it is. ys: yeah, exactly, it’s like when you think of the class system. people can’t always afford something that was originally for the working class. now, some people can’t even afford half a dozen oysters. like what you said, it’s a luxury item. yeah, it’s an interesting but sad concept, i think. often you hear that an oyster is seen as the vagina. it smells supposedly like a vagina. that speculation also degrades the female or the woman. it’s one small object that was a staple food item once upon a time. now, that society of the patriarchy uses it as a way to degrade and refer to women in a way that is disrespectful at the end of the day. it’s interesting because i really love collage. i love lorna simpson’s work; it’s photography as well, how one image can be so powerful. jw: just by sorting images that are not vast, but were maybe printed a 150 years apart from one another. combining them just speaks to their nonlinear history. rather than being quite specific about where the publication, the print, and the thing overall comes from, it’s a bit more about the correlation and the relationships between the context of them. ys: through that, you’re creating your own image. you’re bringing in different pages from different images. jw: also, you’re leaving it open enough so that hopefully there’s space for people to bring their own readings to it. as opposed to making a direct statement which is important in art. ys: exactly, that’s how art can be powerful in telling and retelling stories and educating people through the power of image. jw: both of us work so well in traditionally craft-based methods as well. you with glass, ceramics, collage, and using sourced materials. ys: yeah, and found objects. yeah, and using them as tools. i call them tools because they’ve had a previous life and you’re using them to recreate another story. jw: they’re heavy, the materials i’m thinking of that you use. laboratory equipment has that strong, immediate familiarity that quickly gets muddled. ys: yeah, but i like the haunting. https://lsimpsonstudio.com/ https://lsimpsonstudio.com/ https://lsimpsonstudio.com/ tenth anniversary section—image and text 6 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jordan wood and yhonnie scarce, 2025 jw: i love it, me too. it’s a huge amount of the process. even that table for the work in the ceramics. ys: yeah, the art award [shepparton art museum indigenous ceramic award]. we are talking about femininity at the moment. that work that you and i worked together on when you made the teacups in porcelain. it was about servants or as i would call them slaves, as well. the indentured labor in australia with the aboriginal women. finding those objects or that table of what you just mentioned, the dining table. those aboriginal women would’ve never been allowed to sit at it. they cleaned it but they wouldn’t have been allowed to eat off that table. jw: they could clean those objects, those cups. that was the work of servant and slave. you had to maintain them. ys: that was quite a while ago. i think unfortunately history repeats itself. there’s other forms of subjugating women in a way. i think personally, as a woman, i feel a lot stronger than my ancestors, but i wouldn’t be in this position if it wasn’t for them as well. jw: sorry, i just get very excited about this acknowledging the strength of the women that came before you, but there is still so much further to go. i think about your niece and seeing her grow up over the years and your closeness. within her generation, she has a vivaciousness and boldness that i could never have imagined at her age and that’s so inspiring. ys: yeah, me too, same here. i didn’t have the same amount of confidence at her age. i always say, in the last few years, thinking back about those women, i come from a long line of strong women. i think about them for that pride in my family history. i think about your history as well, especially with your mom trying to go back and look for ancestral information about tasmania and those prisons. i think there’s a real power in that practice. jw: yeah, and it has a lot to do with her mother being an incredibly strong community leader who was very independent. she was also an artist. she did have children as a teenager and she was forced into marriage. she left that and started her own businesses and farms, but for her time, to be divorced with two children— it was not the norm. she was incredible, but there were so many compromises she had to make. so much judgment in order to live a life that was honest for herself. ys: we’ve reached twenty minutes. jw: we can wrap up, we could just talk all day otherwise. ys: yeah, i was just thinking, this is good. i think maybe we should start a podcast. https://greatershepparton.com.au/whats-happening/news/news-article/!/456/post/2018-indigenous-ceramic-award-ica-winner-announced https://thisisnofantasy.com/28530-2/ tenth anniversary section—image and text 7 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jordan wood and yhonnie scarce, 2025 jw: yeah! then we could go to tasmania. i want to go to queenstown because that is an exceptionally haunted place. ys: yeah, i’ve heard about that too. jw: i’ve had ancestors that worked in the copper mine there and yeah, it's a completely desecrated moonscape. ys: well, that’s your reason to go to tasmania next year, to hang around after or even have a really good research trip. i feel bad, but we did have a time limit. jw: thank you so much for this. author bios jordan wood is an artist living and working on dja dja wurrung country. over the past fifteen years, she has exhibited across australia and internationally. drawing upon personal histories and collective experiences, her work collages movements and responses as caught in the body, traversing the spaces between histories and fictions, artifacts and debris, questioning what we conceal and allow exposed. visit www.jordanlwood.com for more details. yhonnie scarce was born in woomera, south australia, and belongs to the kokatha and nukunu peoples. scarce’s interdisciplinary practice explores the political nature and aesthetic qualities of glass and photography. her work often references the ongoing effects of colonisation on aboriginal people; in particular, her research has explored the impact of the removal and relocation of aboriginal people from their homelands and the forcible removal of aboriginal children from their families. family history is central to scarce’s work, drawing on the strength of her ancestors, she offers herself as a conduit, sharing their significant stories from the past. visit https://artistprofile.com.au/yhonnie-scarce or https://thisisnofantasy.com/artist/yhonnie-scarce for more details. http://www.jordanlwood.com/ https://artistprofile.com.au/yhonnie-scarce https://thisisnofantasy.com/artist/yhonnie-scarce tenth anniversary section—image and text 8 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jordan wood and yhonnie scarce, 2025 figure 2. jordan wood, eva (collage on found silver gelatin print), 2021. cover art—artist’s statement teacher, 2021, by jordan wood cover artist jordan wood in conversation with indigenous australian artist yhonnie scarce: on history, haunted places, and fractured identities author bios keaney, jaya, thao phan, and sonja van wichelen. 2025. “introduction to pursuits of populations: an antipodean toolkit.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © jaya keaney, thao phan, and sonja van wichelen, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introduction to pursuits of population: an antipodean toolkit jaya keaney university of melbourne jaya.keaney@unimelb.edu.au thao phan australian national university thao.phan@anu.edu.au sonja van wichelen university of sydney sonja.vanwichelen@sydney.edu.au keywords overpopulation, population collapse, reproduction, biopolitics, racism, postcolonial, feminist tools population thinking surrounds us. the language of overpopulation today billows out from wealthy states, propelled along the way by discourses of environmental collapse; reproductive anxiety; algorithmic imaginaries of prediction and resilience; and fragile, feverish fantasies of white power and supremacy. despite decades of troubling in both critical social theory and demography, dominant strains still resolutely assemble population as a question of differential quantity— static or falling fertility rates in the global north, beset by the “uncontrollable fecundity” of the global south and coming black, brown, and yellow hordes (murphy 2017, 136; patterson 2023, 93). sometimes referred to as the “demographic transition model,” this way of arranging (global) population as a closed-loop problem equation, with its undeniably racist civilizational undertones, has seen a resurgence in a time of anthropogenic climate change. in the face of forms of existential threat, old rhetorics keep looping. mailto:jaya.keaney@unimelb.edu.au mailto:thao.phan@anu.edu.au mailto:sonja.vanwichelen@sydney.edu.au roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jaya keaney, thao phan, and sonja van wichelen, 2025 2 the compulsion to know and think with populations is still driven by the crude language of scarcity and control: not enough resources, energy, housing, land, jobs, vaccines, or healthy or desirable bodies, which in turn inflames a need for the instrumental management of borders, supply chains, energy grids, environments, data, microbiomes, and more. the anxiety to solve the “problem” of population manifests in a kind of shortsighted crisis talk, where all things are urgent, and interventions simply cannot wait (roitman 2014). everything, even time it feels, is running out. yet as a foucauldian frame illuminates, populations have long functioned as foundational constructs in the governance of life. as an aperture for assembling life into manageable units, population filters into many methodologies in scientific and technological practice (foucault 2003). its contemporary purchase ranges from uses in genomic sequencing, artificial intelligence (ai), and mathematical modeling (in realms from economic forecasting to disease modeling and climate futures) to policies in public health, reproduction, immigration, labor, and energy transitions (vertommen et al. 2022). populations, then, form a critical parameter to advancing technoscience and society today, and a normative optic through which collective futures are imagined in both quotidian and spectacular tenors. in this roundtable, which takes the form of a feminist toolkit, we trace the many routes the concept of populations is now taking us down. population and population thinking are distinct here; we are attentive to both powerful intensifying rhetorics of populationism from populist states—driven by selective pronatalism and barely submerged hierarchies of lives worth nourishing vis-à-vis matter left to whither—alongside the many banal iterations of population as an epistemological frame for science. as key feminist technoscience interventions have emphasized, “population” is a deeply vexed conceptual apparatus. as a mode of envisaging life en masse, this framework is entangled with eugenic histories of colonial technoscience and “economized” approaches to development, a particular regime of value that renders life a problem of economic calculation, input and output (hayden 2012; murphy 2017). in many contemporary iterations, the concept of population reinforces deep hierarchies of race, class, gender, and geography, as the necropolitical throbs at the heart of a regime of value that presents stratified reproduction as the only conceivable response to scarcity (bhatia et al. 2020; clarke and haraway 2018; sasser 2018; vertommen et al. 2022). as we traverse a cultural moment where hegemonic polities actively dismantle democratic infrastructures, justified by a searing rhetoric of populism and fragile populations whose privilege needs defending, a renewed reflection on populations and population thinking is warranted. this is not to reproduce the language of crisis by labeling this attempt as “urgent,” but to seek ways of attuning contemporary manifestations of thinking with populations to the existing genealogy in feminist sts. roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jaya keaney, thao phan, and sonja van wichelen, 2025 3 the short reflections presented here emerge from a gathering of australia-based scholars that took place on the unceded lands of the wurundjeri woi wurrung people of the kulin nation in february 2025. we discussed the histories and conceptual architectures that are enabling for thinking populations in our diverse scholarships and practices of feminist technoscience—in conversation with, and at times perhaps contra—the largely north american body of feminist sts literature on populationism and population thinking. in relation to this scholarship, we reflect and write from and into shared scientific problematics with small regard for nation, and resonant white settler-colonial histories, with their traditions of stolen land as a laboratory for population management through extermination and reproductive innovation. but in attending to how our thinking is situated in and of australian contexts, we also surface divergent or contested formations—of terra nullius as a population practice and ongoing fantasy of indigenous replacement; of british imperial flows within asia and the rendering of asia as peril and surplus, of antipodean anxieties of distance and inexorable postracial futures, and of our own tussle with populist discourse gripping other wealthy white nations (see also ang 2020; hage 2017; lea 2020; moreton-robinson 2015; povinelli 2006; probyn 2015). as m. murphy writes, “race is the grammar and ghost of population” (2017, 135); as such, attending to the specificity of race, its situated geographic and imperial formations and productive effects, is vital to making sense of any discourse of population. what crystalized during our collective practice of thinking feminist sts from the southern continent were apertures for rendering the population “problem” spatiotemporally: intergenerational, molecular, scalar, and planetary. populations were rendered as assets, resource, playful subversion, homophonic followings, sovereign biopolitics, landscape care, opportunity, inevitability, sustainability, desire, hallucination, proxy, replication, and artifice. as objects of scrutiny, populations traversed and bridged diverse scientific practices, methodologies, technologies, and genres of knowledge production. while one largely foucauldian-inspired tradition of feminist sts has tracked the operation of population as a paramount mode of reproductive governance, laminated with individual choice and in aid of racist and colonial projects, we expand the focus to the other technoscientific sites and imaginaries, articulating the problematic differently and with generative results. in line with other recent feminist sts experiments that aim to explore concepts as they travel across the sciences, we wanted to bring together scholars working on reproduction and bioscience with those working on algorithmic practices and on environmental questions (see cooper and waldby 2014; pedraza et al. 2923; vertommen et al. 2022). doing so is part of our ardent belief as feminist scholars in the worlding that is possible when we assemble with shared commitments, situated locales, and figurations as the focus, rather than specific technoscientific objects—that is, starting with feminist frames rather than scientific objects and the research questions and ontologies they naturalize. roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jaya keaney, thao phan, and sonja van wichelen, 2025 4 population has a stubborn persistence to it, and the restaging of the problem with only slight tweaks is a tactic of governance and often a way to avoid more systemic or difficult change. following berlant (2007), not rarely do such tactics lead to instances of slow death—necro or not—or to life optimized, once again, for those who have the means and resources. our investigations also disclose how death can become life (geologically through the transformations of fossils into fuel) or how life necessitates death (population genetics or technics of conservation). at different scales (from the microbial to the planetary) and temporalities (deep time to “modern” time), the uses of populations accrue capacity to render life and non-life (self-)governable, for the common, and not so common good. rather than dwell at the level of diagnosis or critique, the eleven short pieces presented here aspire to create glitches, provocations, interventions. feminist sts scholars have disagreed about whether the population concept has anything left for us that makes it worth the risk of remobilizing. while sympathetic to murphy’s unequivocal conclusion that “a radical political imaginary for population can[not] be mobilized without amplifying existing infrastructures already being deployed towards more racist necropolitical ends” (2017, 131), we also find ourselves snagged on the dense circulations of the concept as our contributors trace it across such diverse sites of technoscientific and cultural practice. as such, we look to an innovation in genre—the short piece, the collage of voices—to effect moments of glitch or rupture, or to effect a proliferation that might give us creative tools for thinking deployments of population in our, and your, varied situated problematics. in the short essays that follow, population is often put to work to achieve and/or enrol recursivity, replication, reproduction, mimicry—not only in applied analysis, but also in how problems of population get defined. the authors assemble situated histories, resonant couplings, unlikely pairings, and rigorous tracings—a bestiary of concepts for thinking population in the present. in assembling this collection, we invited our interlocutors to generate a reflective piece in response to the following prompt: what do we need in our feminist toolkit to understand/interrogate/rethink “populations” in technoscience today? participants could nominate one thing to add to the toolkit, including concepts, objects, case studies, genealogies, critical orientations, and so on. why a toolkit? in describing her own “tools for multispecies futures,” feminist sts luminary donna haraway makes the case for the need for such practical engagements (haraway and endy 2019). feminism, she remarks, is “relentlessly committed to the body, to the practical, to the fleshly, to the earthly.” feminist tools are the means by which we can tinker, fix, mend, and in other ways make practically better our fleshly and earthly worlds. for haraway, to approach something abstract like a concept or an idea as a tool is to bring it back down to the earth, to place it into the muck of the living and in service of “making life good.” for the authors in this collection, the roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jaya keaney, thao phan, and sonja van wichelen, 2025 5 concepts they have offered for our toolkit—malthusian discontents, staying with the sign, refusing colonial legibility, artifice, replication and recognition, relational presence, fragility, compromised care, articulating agency, the geological, homophonic followings—speak to the many trajectories of population and population thinking in the current moment. they create ruptures and provoke new modes of inquiry into populations that point at ways of not only making life governable, but making life good. references ang, ien. 2020. “i’m a feminist but...‘other’ women and postnational feminism.” in transitions: new australian feminisms, edited by rosemary pringle, 57–73. routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003118282. berlant, lauren. 2007. “slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency).” critical inquiry 33 (4): 754–80. https://doi.org/10.1086/521568. bhatia, rajani, jade s. sasser, diana ojeda, anne hendrixson, sarojini namdipally and ellen e. foley. 2020. “a feminist exploration of ‘populationism’: engaging contemporary forms of population control.” gender, place & culture 27 (3): 333–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2018.1553859. clarke, adele e., and donna haraway, eds. 2018. making kin not population: reconceiving generations. prickly paradigm press. cooper, melinda, and catherine waldby. 2014. clinical labor: tissue donors and research subjects in the global bioeconomy. duke university press. foucault, michel. 2003. “society must be defended”: lectures at the collège de france, 1975–1976. vol. 1. macmillan. hage, ghassan. 2017. is racism an environmental threat? polity. haraway, donna, and drew endy. 2019. “tools for multispecies futures.” journal of design and science, october 3. https://doi.org/10.21428/7808da6b.05eca6f1. hayden, cori. 2012 “population.” in inventive methods: the happening of the social, edited by celia lury and nina wakeford, 172–84. routledge. lea, tess. 2020. “decolonizing trauma theory by way of housing disrepair: the case of santa teresa, australia.” social research: an international quarterly 87 (3): 735–61. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2020.0060. moreton-robinson, aileen. 2015. the white possessive: property, power, and indigenous sovereignty. university of minnesota press. murphy, m. 2017. the economization of life. duke university press. patterson, christopher b. 2023. “brown theory: a storied manifest of our world.” positions 31 (1): 91–116. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122138. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003118282 https://doi.org/10.1086/521568 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2018.1553859 https://doi.org/10.21428/7808da6b.05eca6f1 https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2020.0060 https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122138 roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jaya keaney, thao phan, and sonja van wichelen, 2025 6 pedraza, diana pardo, xan sarah chacko, jennifer terry, and astrida neimanis. 2023. “introduction: domestication of war.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 9 (1): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.39531. povinelli, elizabeth. 2006. the empire of love: toward a theory of intimacy, genealogy, and carnality. duke university press. probyn, elspeth. 2015. outside belongings. routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315865805. roitman, janet l. 2014. anti-crisis. duke university press. sasser, jade s. 2018. on infertile ground: population control and women’s rights in the era of climate change. nyu press. vertommen, sigrid, bronwyn parry, and michal nahman. 2022. “introduction: global fertility chains and the colonial present of assisted reproductive technologies.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37920. author bios jaya keaney is lecturer in gender studies in the school of social and political sciences at the university of melbourne. her work across the fields of feminist technoscience, queer and feminist theory, and cultural studies explores reproduction, racism, and queer feminist practices of embodiment and inheritance. thao phan is lecturer in sociology at the research school for social sciences at the australian national university. she has published on topics including whiteness and the aesthetics of ai, big-data-driven techniques of racial classification, and the commercial capture of ai ethics research. sonja van wichelen is professor of anthropology and sociology in the school of social and political sciences at the university of sydney. her research takes place on the cross-disciplinary node of law, life, and science in a globalizing world. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.39531 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315865805 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37920 introduction to pursuits of population: an antipodean toolkit keywords references author bios jones   review     review of ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity by banu subramaniam (chicago: university of illinois press, 2014)    donna v. jones university of california, berkeley dvjones@berkeley.edu ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity is perhaps the first work of scholarship, in any field, to begin with an evocation of a personal ghost story. in her introduction banu subramaniam gives a vivid description of the bollywood ghosts that haunted her childhood: women in "flowing white" saris hover about in "moonlit nights" (p. 1). the introduction sets up the figure of the ghost as a metaphor through which to frame the complexities of science practice, gender and politics. subramaniam is well aware of the complexities and potentially problematic set of associations between the preternatural and the non-western world. she remarks that ghosts were at once frustrating, fitting too neatly within the western imaginary of an india riven by mysticism on the one hand, and technological ambition on the other; yet ghosts were nonetheless central to understanding these very processes of marginalization which would locate the ideal form of the scientific disposition in the figure of a european man. although the west might only understand india's ghosts as an indication of the nation's stubborn anti-rationalism, in india, and to indians, ghosts convey a complex rationality of their own. ghosts both signal and encourage a way of seeing. subramaniam writes: "ghosts…are always characters whose abbreviated life marks urgent unfinished business" (p. 1). physically, the composition of the specter embodies the dual and contrasting meaning of transparency—ghosts are diaphanous, translucent; they present themselves as the trace of materiality, and yet, as the secondary meaning of transparency conveys, ghosts are conspicuous, and plainly present to those who sense them. a key feature of haunting, indeed, is the enduring presence of the ghost: a specter is bound to a place. those haunted by the specter cannot but experience the ghost's uncanny presence in that space, nor can they disassociate that space from the presence of the ghost itself. thus, in spatial terms, ghosts occupy a liminal zone between presence and absence. we encounter the same contrasting dynamic in our temporal understanding of the ghost as well; they are ephemeral figures whose "abbreviated" lives bid us to recognize the past as it endures in the present. ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity [henceforth gsfd] draws much of its methodological approach from the work of sociologist avery gordon. gordon (2008) enlists haunting as means to address what she refers to as "the complexities of life," embedded modes of sociality and comportment that are neither always apparent nor measurable—in other words, the nexus of complex codes and behaviors that are often the results of unresolved and unrecognized histories. her study ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination asks, how do we attend to social phenomena that are neither animated nor determined by explicit causes or actions; in other words, how do we address something as elusive as power or power dynamics which might be conveyed and maintained in the most visible social practices, like a "policeman's baton," or in a set invisible practices, the internalization of inequities that structure the imaginary, and language. moreover, how do we address the sedimented histories concealed in our social practices—the "unrememberable past and unimaginable future" (p. 4) overlooked by methods that scrutinize only the present, and the world of appearances. as a literary critic, i am no stranger to ghosts, nor am i unfamiliar with their function as an analytic through which to approach a difficult past or history, or a suppressed wrong or injury. situated in the fictional encounters with the history of slavery and racial oppression in the united states, faulkner's ghosts, morrison's ghosts disrupt comfortable, self-consolidating narratives of pure, heroic, and genteel genealogies—the appearance of the ghosts compels the haunted to recognize unresolved and constitutive acts of injury or violence. indeed, ghosts fit comfortably in the analytic framework of literary studies—figurative language is our bread and butter after all. but to present ghosts as a metaphor through which to better understand the suppressed histories and discourses of science practice is impressive, audacious even. most boldly, subramaniam elevates haunting to a methodological framework through which to examine the concept of variation as it moves from science practice to political and social discourse.  the foundation of this fascinating study is built upon the author's doctoral research in evolutionary biology examining color variation among morning glory flowers.  what specters lurk among the morning glories? gsfd employs a variety of genres: in one chapter a thorough and useful genealogical account of the concept of variation from darwin to the present; in another a meticulous outline of the genetics of flower color variation; and in yet another an irreverent short story written in a hybrid style somewhere between a parable and fantasy. the book assembles and syncopates a disparate and innovative collection of formal genres and theoretical approaches to address and give voice to the multivarious and contending histories and discourses that haunt the seemingly innocuous study of color variation in a common north american flower. i would like to take a moment to address the question of genre. what form does scholarship that follows the methodological directive of haunting take? as a work of science studies gsfd resembles the prose experimentation of michel serres in so far as it clearly and provocatively resists and repels the authority of scientific metalanguage. however, among its many contributions, the work's engagement with literature and the literary is exceptional. "what forms, style, and analysis" would subramaniam use "that draws from both the sciences and the humanities, but still does not belong to either" (p. 71)?  her answer is fiction. fiction, subramaniam argues, is vital to the process of creating a "reconstructive project for biology," a form of analysis, closely resembling feminist standpoint epistemology—that is, an epistemological position fully implicated in the identities and histories that haunt scientific analysis. she continues: "i do not want to endlessly deconstruct science from the outside, pure and untainted in my epistemological location. after all, scientific work is performed by human actors in relation with their objects and subjects of study…" (p. 71). audaciously, one chapter, "singing the morning glory blues: a fictional science" is, indeed, a story of three young indian women—students—and their encounters with a collection of allegorical characters. these characters, representing a full range of academic disciplines—evolutionary biology, poetry, linguistics, psychology and psychoanalysis, each argue the merits and limits of their respective fields of study, to the young girls' amusement. written in the fashion of alice in wonderland, the story conveys the manner in which knowledge, when presented as authority, appears absurd or irrational to those who were not formed in and through those systems of knowledge, those to whom these forms of knowledge were not intended—women, children, the colonized. "singing the morning glory blues: a fictional science" functions as something of a parable, a literary form ideally suited to engage life's complexities and contradictions. on the one hand parables convey the received wisdom of a community, alluding to myth or dogma (religion), and on the other hand parables present themselves as puzzles to be solved and re-solved over and over again, each encounter yielding new knowledge, thus unsettling the fixed conclusions of received wisdom.  what happens when we look at a field of morning glories not through the isolated persona of the evolutionary biologist, taught to ask the "right question", but through the haunted persona, sympathetic and open to the entreaties of the ghost? subramaniam situates herself between disciplines: "…one that expands my vision, one that narrows it to fine precision" (p. 71). such interstitial positioning is necessary; ghosts seek out figures who are sympathetic, and thus predisposed to listen: ghosts "always appear to those who, while frightened, are willing to listen, investigate, and excavate a gruesome and troubled past" (p. 1). an entanglement of repressed histories surround both our objects of scientific inquiry and the conceptual tools we deploy to understand them. as bruno latour so elegantly formulates in his study of the theatricality of experimental science, behind the apparent solitary actions of the object of experimentation is as an agent: "pasteur acts so the yeast acts alone" (as cited in subramaniam, p. 42). extending latour's notion of the "constructed" nature of the experiment, subramaniam invites us to look beyond both the object and the stage of experimentation to the social histories that are concealed within the morning glory. what is revealed when we follow the directives of the ghostly is more often than not the complex and often terrifying after-effects of a history marked by conflict and violence. subramaniam writes, "questions of genetic variation in human organisms are deeply linked to questions of diversity and difference in human populations steeped in tortured histories of slavery, colonialism, and genocide. a naturecultural analysis reveals that the question of variation is fundamentally about power—the politics of life and death" (p. 7). while gsfd makes haunting its methodological framework, "a naturecultural analysis" functions as a reading strategy, making visible what is unseen and yet pervasive in the darwinian concept of variation—a history of racism and eugenics that was central to the formation of such categories and concepts. in an impressive introductory chapter engaging a wide range of works from the vibrant and crucial fields of critical darwin studies and feminist science studies, gsfd provides a detailed genealogy of the concept of variation from darwin through malthus and early twentieth century population studies and contemporary biopolitical approaches, to population and understanding of variation that is inflected through the logic of neoliberal and free market economic discourses. variation, natural selection—these terms, processes, concepts, cannot rid themselves of the sedimented histories and embedded associations that are integral, although suppressed, elements of their meaning. in this way, gsfd constructs an implicit theorization of the polysemic nature of experimental science—like all elements of the symbolic, biological concepts such as diversity and variation are polysemic insofar as they maintain multiple meanings, coevally.  "the past is never dead. it's not even past" (p. 6). gsfd cites faulkner, suggesting that perhaps yet another dimension of darwin's evocative "entangled bank" is the abiding entanglement with the past: is the darwinian concept of variation forever haunted by the specter of eugenics? ensnared by their histories, do these concepts necessarily emplot outcomes that further marginalize vulnerable communities? do such conceptual entanglements produce, in the foucauldian sense, the very demographic problems they seek to remedy? to counter such a potentially pessimistic interpretation, it would be useful to read gsfd in tandem with more sanguine interpretations of darwin in contemporary scholarship that attempt to rescue his writings from his panoply of victorian interpreters, the true architects of the social darwinist tradition. in literary studies the works of gillian beer (2009) and robert richards (2002) stress darwin's interaction with romanticism and the literary nature of his own writing in efforts to distance darwin's writing from the "material effects" of social darwinism. these ambiguities in darwin's life and work set the foundation for later bergsonian interpretations of evolution which saw in the concepts of natural selection and variation an example of processes of life that were at root benign, and infinitely creative. however, gsfd would gain most from an engagement with the rhetorically masterful work of the feminist philosopher elizabeth grosz's (2011) becoming undone: darwinian reflections on life, politics and art. grosz's long-term project has been to derive from the sometimes problematic yet life-affirming philosophies of darwin, nietzsche, bergson, and deleuze a strategy to think concepts of life that "do not privilege the human as the aim or end of evolution, but sees the human as one among many species" (p. 2). decentering the human as the origin and end of thought is the necessary step for what i would refer to as a politics of novelty—that is, a political practice that introduces new coordinates of engagement and conflict. in becoming undone, grosz writes: "if the human is simply one among many of the trajectories that life on earth has elaborated, then many of the most cherished beliefs about how humans will and should behave in the light of the manifest and lived differences that divide the human will be thrown open to new lines of development, new kinds of practice, and new modes of thought" (p. 2). at the core of darwinian concepts is an understanding of life as change, mutation and becoming; in grosz's interpretive framework, variation can only be understood in and through the fluid temporality of life itself—thus, the immobile temporality that haunting requires is at odds with the very processes of life. indeed, a most radical project would be to liberate darwin from the thanatos-inflected interpretations of his interpreters—victorian and contemporary. in the end, the only way to liberate the spirits from the violent histories that immobilize them, that bind them to the space of haunting, is recognition; we must listen to the complaints of those wronged, and vow to take steps towards their redress. references beer, g. (2009). darwin's plots: evolutionary narrative in darwin, george eliot and nineteenth-century fiction. new york, ny: cambridge university press. gordon, a. (2008). ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. grosz, e. (2011). becoming undone: darwinian reflections on life, politics and art. raleigh, nc: duke university press. subramaniam, b. (2015). ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. champaign, il: university of illinois press. bio donna v. jones is associate professor in the department of english, university of california, berkeley. she is the author of the racial discourses of life philosophy: négritude, vitalism and modernity (columbia university, 2010). frankel, alexandra vieux, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout. 2024. “introduction: undoing and unfolding temporal modes of transplantation.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–13. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © alexandra vieux frankel, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license introduction undoing and unfolding temporal modes of transplantation alexandra vieux frankel york university frankela@york.ca kelly fritsch carleton university kellyfritsch@cunet.carleton.ca suze berkhout university of toronto suze.berkhout@uhn.ca abstract transplant medicine is frequently hailed as a pinnacle of biomedical achievement. curative imaginaries in the field often situate transplant as a cure and a return to health, producing bifurcated temporalities of before and after transplant and proposing futures that erase disability and disabled bodies. this special section centers the frictions in transplant temporalities, offering examinations of how transplant troubles the binaries of life and death, self and other, and illness and health through attending to frictions of futures and cure in transplant medicine. we question how new technologies perpetuate, exacerbate, and complicate the promises of curative imaginaries in transplant medicine; interrogate tropes and technologies of transplant as destination; trace practices of inequitable access to transplantation and livable futures; foreground transplant’s looping, haunting temporalities; and introduce more-than-human lessons and the necessity of imagining collective futures. developed with attention arts-based and mailto:frankela@york.ca mailto:kellyfritsch@cunet.carleton.ca mailto:suze.berkhout@uhn.ca special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) alexandra vieux frankel, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout, 2024 2 experimental ways of knowing transplant through a feminist sts and critical disability studies ethos, this special section invites the undoing and unfolding of conventional, harmful logics of transplantation. keywords transplant medicine, curative imaginaries, temporality, haunting, multimodality blue morph, the butterfly on the cover of this issue, is a quilted collage of disposable textiles: hospital gowns, moving blankets, and failed paintings. butterflies often appear as symbols of hope and change. but this one’s gesture toward utopic futures contrasts with the disposability and messiness of the materials that compose it. blue morph is a butterfly in profile. the back of the wing in the foreground shows a patchwork of panels in shades of gray, punctuated with circles of brown, ochre, and crimson. the interior of the second wing is a mix of sky blues and sea greens made with sweeping gestural marks over the familiar patterns of hospital gowns. part of artist and lung-transplant recipient dominic quagliozzi’s series transformations, blue morph reflects on experiences of lung transplantation. in an artist’s talk in november 2023 at toronto general hospital, the site of one of north america’s largest transplant medicine programs, quagliozzi described his transplantation as “trading diseases”: the cystic fibrosis that he was born with for diabetes, kidney dysfunction stemming from immunosuppressant use, and the slow debility of long-term rejection. this trade is the cost of the hope that what comes after transplant will be better. like the other butterflies in transformations, blue morph materializes archives of physical and emotional labor in the “doing” of transplantation: cataloging difficult transitions between states of illness, between homes, and between what could have been and what transpired. the transformation these butterflies offer is not a triumphant overcoming of illness but rather a reflection on the way that the movement toward uncertain futures is a “messy, gross, bloody process.” (quagliozzi, 2023, n.p.). transplant medicine is frequently hailed as a pinnacle of biomedical achievement. the technological, biomedical, and pharmaceutical innovations that support transplant medicine often intervene in terminal illness trajectories. for heart, kidney, lung, and liver transplant recipients in particular, this intervention extends lives—so much so that “rebirth” and “the gift of life” circulate as tropes in the field. narratives of transplantation in public media and institutional discourses frame transplantation as miraculous—the second chance that returns the transplant recipient from a state of terminal illness to a state of health. these narratives hinge on curative imaginaries that propose that bodies need and ought to be fixed and pathologies eradicated. and while desiring livability is a recognizable pull, curative imaginaries also propose futures that erase disability and disabled bodies (kafer 2013), such that cure also “operates in relationship to violence” (clare 2017, 28). special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) alexandra vieux frankel, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout, 2024 3 the contours of this curative imaginary are often part of the taken-for-granted aspects of the daily routines and practices of biomedicine and are not easily captured for analysis or critical reflection. these include issues relating to waitlisting and adherence to complex post-transplant regimens as well as challenges with long-term survivorship and the threat of graft failure. these issues and challenges reveal transplant medicine as a site of deep ambivalence and tension with respect to futurity and the possibility of having an “afterward” to transplant (heinemann 2020). as the contours of dominant transplant narratives suggest, transplant imaginaries voice the triumphs of biomedical technologies and expertise while failing to make space for painful embodied and psychic experiences of transplantation (sharp 2013). thus, new ways of generating knowledge about the challenges and frictions within transplantation are needed (abbey et al. 2011)—from notions of risk relating to who is a “good” transplant candidate, to the liminality of being wait-listed, to the challenges of long-term survivorship and graft rejection, futurity is an unstable horizon, while cure is simultaneously elusive and at hand. frictional experimentations in feminist sts this special section came together through the frictions of futurity and cure in transplant medicine research project, which mobilizes sensory ethnography, artsbased research methods, research creation, and artists residencies. the frictions project received funding from an experimental and interdisciplinary research grant. rooted in feminist science and technology studies (sts) and critical disability studies, the project aimed to generate arts-based ways of knowing and articulating transplant differently—beyond neatly bifurcated befores and afters that eradicate disability—and to use this knowledge to make tangible recommendations for improving psychosocial supports for transplant recipients and their loved ones. it is fitting that this special section is likewise interdisciplinary and experimental. contributors are filmmakers, artists, anthropologists, philosophers, sts scholars, critical disability studies scholars, and psychiatrists. contributions examine issues of equity in transplant (hudson; stack whitney; tanio and malik) and their intersections with structural and historic violence (mccormack), and how transplant technologies rely on and yet also trouble transplant medicine’s claim to linear temporalities (berkhout et al.; heinemann; shildrick). experimentation manifests in contributors’ attention to multimodality. photography (mccormack) and film (tanio and malik) provide sensory repertoires that accompany scholarly reflection on the materialities of storytelling and subject formation. hudson’s perspectives piece blends genres. simultaneously personal reflection and critical research, she draws attention to the arbitrary quality of genre distinctions in qualitative research. further, berkhout et al.’s canadian-uk collaboration takes up artistic and audiovisual renderings of co-contributors’ transplant experience to articulate the complexities and loops of friction-laden transplant futures across time and space. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) alexandra vieux frankel, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout, 2024 4 frictions are at the center of this special section. friction slows things down, generates heat, and sparks fires, producing opportunities to trace unstable interconnections (tsing 2004). the analytic of friction draws attention to contradictions and erasures that curative imaginaries provoke. the contributions to this special section dwell in the temporal implications of these frictions. transplant is an important and well-established site for investigating frictions as transplant upsets taken-for-granted cartesian dualisms of life and death, self and other, inside and outside. for example, jean-luc nancy’s (2008) meditation on his own heart transplant further troubles these binaries. he refuses to see his transplanted heart as a stranger and instead names as strangers the dormant bacteria and viruses that would threaten him in the immunosuppressed state that transplant precipitated. anthropologists, similarly, have highlighted the ways in which transplant has reconfigured numerous relations—for example, between self and other (crawley 1998); contours of life and death (lock 2002); the concurrent associations of organ transplantation with altruism and the development of new forms of bioviolence (moniruzzaman 2019; sharp 2006); and between bodies, the state, and capitalism (scheper-hughes 2003). these are some themes and topics that stand in relation to a longer history of feminist theorizing of transplantation.1 we frame the undoing of cartesian dualisms presented in this special section via the frictions quagliozzi’s blue morph foregrounds. the messes that the textiles and artist’s talk allude to are anathema to the clean and orderly bifurcation of the befores and afters of transplantation that curative imaginaries produce. outside of this neatly ordered temporality, messes become indicative of matter out of place— impurity and pollution that threatens the reproduction of order (douglas [1966] 2000). the act of “rendering something impure” is part and parcel of “historical processes of domination” (lugones 1994, 468, 473). embracing this messiness, therefore, becomes an important way to critique the clean linearities of curative temporalities. maria lugones’s meditation on mestizaje (mixing) and curdling highlights the radical potential of messy undoings and unfoldings: emulsions like mayonnaise, when they split, do not break into their component ingredients, but rather coalesce around one another in different ways. much like kim q. hall’s (2014) metaphysics of composting, which signals simultaneous processes of composition and decomposition, curdling foregrounds reconfigurations of matter that refuse fixity and purity. quagliozzi’s “resuscitation” of disregarded and disposable materials invokes the becomings of hall’s metaphysics of composting while simultaneously rejecting ideologies of purity and cure. in the context of transplantation, such refusals are necessary to holding transplant as a life-saving intervention that also engenders physical and psychic harms and challenges. these meditations on curdling and compost offer important insights into the significance of messiness in transplant imaginaries and their temporalities. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) alexandra vieux frankel, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout, 2024 5 the articles that follow trace the frictions of temporality and cure in transplant across multiple disciplines and theoretical turns, curdling and congealing around feminist sts in multiple ways. the result is a tentacular (haraway 2016) accounting of transplant futures rather than a genealogical scholarly intervention. these different tentacles are implicated and entangled in one another. in this way, the collection engages in kathleen stewart’s development of eve sedgwick’s concept of weak theory: “theory that becomes unstuck from its own line of thought to follow the object it encounters or becomes undone by its attention to things that don’t just add up but take on a life of their own as problems for thought” (stewart 2008, 72). weak theory does not pronounce definitive conclusions but follows threads, connections, and disjunctures. this diversity imbues the collection with an unconventional quality that is strangely appropriate for innovative and experimental investigations central to transplant medicine yet works contra to these logics by generating openings for imagining transplantation otherwise. these articles coalesce, curdle, and congeal around feminist sts. the articles in this issue challenge the biomedical systems of power that shape and produce transplant futurities—from multiple directions. by following the sparks that frictional encounters generate, these articles explore the limits of cartesian dualisms and reveal their co-constitution, opening conversations across multiple disciplines instead of concluding them with definitive answers. although the contributions in this special section are wide-ranging, the authors and their research are based in canada, the united kingdom, and the united states, where transplant is highly regulated through institutions and structures that frequently reproduce inequitable and oppressive logics (davies 2006). while this geography is likely an artifact of the editors’ and authors’ institutions and networks, and to some degree the density and distribution of research-driven multi-organ transplant programs, it highlights the necessity of examining relationships between colonialism and transplantation. the medical gaze that defined the emergence of modern medicine (foucault 1994) also operates a technology of colonial surveillance and domination (browne 2015; fanon 1965; widmer 2013). this is, in part, the work of the medical gaze that not only produces homogenized and abstracted individuals (foucault 1994) but also isolates bodies’ component parts via biopsies and blood tests. where lochlann jain (2013) describes such procedures and technologies as “flattening” embodied experiences into discrete data points, monir moniruzzaman (2019) shows how late-capitalist biotechnologies produce the possibility of dividing living bodies into commodifiable parts. and while some of the transplant literature that engages the global south is focused on the commodification and traffic in organs (alnour et al. 2022; nahavandi 2016; vora 2015), this special section attends to the ways in which bifurcated logics structure a larger transplant episteme. lugones (1994) might describe these processes as constituting logics of separation and unity. although lugones writes on a different scale, her analysis implicitly critiques the presumption of whole and neatly divisible bodies that biomedical practices special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) alexandra vieux frankel, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout, 2024 6 produce—an analysis that resonates with critiques of medical models of disability that “defin[e] disability as a property of the individual body that requires medical intervention” (siebers 2008, 26). shifting the scale from an individual experience to instead engage with ongoing collective and historical oppressions highlights the necessity of engaging transplant care in tandem with broader histories of ongoing colonial dispossession (see mccormack, this issue). present-day structural inequities in access to medical care and quality of medical care harbor these violent colonial histories that frame black, indigenous, and people of color as undeserving of care, and cast structural violence as errors in individual choice (ehlers and krupar 2020). at the same time, we must also critique the echoes of those logics in the linearity of curative imaginaries. non-linear temporalities draw attention to the how logics of cure also unfold outside the clinic, voicing “those embodied stories of living with the dead, crossing borders, and how care—even that deemed ‘lifesaving’—may be violent” (mccormack et al. 2023). cure and harm reflect forms of bifurcation belied by loops, recursivity, and hauntings while demanding a different kind of orientation to futurity (ehlers 2023). yet, dominant transplant imaginaries, with their prioritization of technological advancement, still generate scarce, narrow space for imagining and materializing just and equitable care. this special section intervenes in and widens that narrow space through its investigations of the limits of cartesian dualisms in transplant and speaks to the temporalities of connection and finding ways of resisting the individualizing technologies and effects of biomedicine. deleuzian assemblages (shildrick) and afterlives of slavery and colonialism (mccormack) emerge as theoretical ways into connection, while tanio and malik offer methodological ones in their reflection on filmmaking workshops for child transplant recipients transitioning to adulthood. these articles trouble how health is used as a “temporal destination” (berkhout et al.; see also heinemann) and contest it through crip technoscientific approaches that center the agencies of sick and disabled people, and through a multispecies lens that articulates transplant as potential collective care (stack whitney). in all these ways, the works in this special section share a concern for the “politics of habitability” (langwick 2018) wherein the medical interventions necessary to ensuring life also cause harms that endanger it (hudson). here, immunosuppressant medication emerges again and again as a pivotal friction in the promises of transplant as cure: immunosuppressants simultaneously prevent rejection of donor organs and make transplant recipients more vulnerable. the contributions to this special section thereby speak to broader questions and imperatives of imagining and materializing futures that include illness, disability, and complex intimacies with death (mccormack). generative tensions with/in transplant’s bifurcated logics problematizing transplant as destination is key to more just transplant futures. laura heinemann’s article “‘back then,’ ‘around here,’ and ‘down the road’: special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) alexandra vieux frankel, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout, 2024 7 proximity, recursivity, and the present future in transplantation” demonstrates the imbrication of space and time in transplant afterwards, showing how the afterward of transplant comprises repeated hospital visits. heinemann returns to, and reflects on, her ethnographic notes written between 2007 and 2009. in this return, heinemann argues that spatiotemporal repetitions structure the afterwards of transplant with biomedical care regimes in ways that make demands not only on self, body, and kin (broadly conceived) but also on movements through time and space. biweekly required blood tests necessitate hours-long drives and access to a vehicle that can withstand the distance, gravel roads, and dust of traveling from rural locations to urban transplant centers. transplant afterwards, for heinemann’s interlocutors, did not take a straight road to a destination of health but rather took the form of a möbius loop, a traveling back and forth. as one of her interlocutors so astutely put it, transplant is something that is “lived around”, not transcended or relegated to a distant past. suze berkhout, kelly fritsch, brian keeley, and bibo keeley’s article “troubling transplant temporality through crip technoscience and a sensory aesthetics of time, machine, and health” examines how the bridge metaphor commonly used to describe transplant technologies makes claims on possible futures for those awaiting transplantation. through a close reading of clinical literature with a crip technoscience and feminist sts lens, berkhout et al. show how the bridge metaphor imagines a linear journey from one point to another, with transplant as the destination. they juxtapose these imaginaries with the film breathe that keeley and keeley collaboratively created following brian’s emergency heart transplant. breathe troubles the linearity of the bridge metaphor with dreamlike and phantasmagoric imagery that moves between seascapes, wooded areas, and a masked creature—part human, part bird—that embraces a tree, all punctuated with the sound of a telemetry monitor, a beating heart, a whispering voice asking, “can you hear me?” breathe centers sensory experience that is written out of transplant as destination precisely because transplant as destination fails to account for what both quagliozzi and heinemann might call the emotional and physical labor of transplant afterwards. margrit shildrick’s and kaitlin stack whitney’s original research contributions invite readers to reimagine futures as collective ones. shildrick’s article “the temporalities and spatialities of death, dying, and heart donation” interrogates and deconstructs the binaries of life and death, and self and other in heart transplant. shildrick shows how the technologies that extend the functioning of the heart problematize conceptualizations of health. in this way, she echoes margaret lock’s (2002) work on the entanglement of transplantation with the designation of brain death. shildrick, however, locates her analysis in deleuzian assemblages that foreground how bodies are entangled in one another, and as such, live on in one another. it is in this context that she examines the phenomenon of chimerism in heart transplant—a phenomenon characterized by special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) alexandra vieux frankel, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout, 2024 8 the circulation of the dna of the transplant recipient and donor. chimerism, like living on in another’s body or with another’s body, transforms the categories of life/death, self/other, inside/outside, making clear the collectivity and relationality of the other-within, rather than individual phenomena. stack whitney brings a posthuman and multispecies approach to transplant by turning to termites in “thinking with termites about fractious futures for fecal microbiota transplantation in the united states.” termites engage in their own forms of fecal microbiota transplantation (fmt), as their different life stages require different gut microbes. stack whitney emphasizes that termite relationships with gut microbes are “opportunistic mutualisms” that constitute transgenerational links and “remake environments and relations” (this issue). she contrasts these mutualisms and connections with efforts to standardize fmt in the united states. recent regulatory approaches depart from transplant paradigms that connect bodies to regimes of biovalue (ehlers and krupar 2020; waldby 2002) and turn feces into biological products. drawing from anthropologies of microbes (helmreich 2009; paxson 2012; wolf-meyer 2017), stack whitney shows that attempts to regulate unruly microbes and identify socalled healthy donors reveal restrictive screening processes that equate health with individual choices, such as adhering to a mediterranean diet. this shift away from transplant paradigms might then be read in a similar vein as lugones’s discussion of separation as a technology of control. biocultures and fmt as transplantation generate radically different futures. where a termite fmt offers futures in which termites, often rendered undesirable, become ambivalent kin and important for opening space to imagine and materialize transplant as “interdependence and collective care” (this issue), medical models produce uniform imaginaries of health. here again, curative imaginaries emerge and create futures that are for the “healthy.” the two multimodal contributions to this special section discuss transplant futures as ones of uncertainty. mccormack’s photo essay “memories of futures: the temporalities of organ transplantation” expands on the theme of haunting in transplant temporalities from her earlier work. she writes that this is the first essay in which she examines her own experiences of transplantation in contrast to examinations of transplantation in literature and other media (see mccormack 2021a, 2021b). using haunting as way into present absences, mccormack’s piece shows double-exposed photos that cast her as an apparition, which in turn serves as a way into discussing multiple absent presences: the absent presence of her organ donor as well as of family and other kin. refracting themes from shildrick and stack whitney, mccormack asks, “what kinships are forged through living body parts from dead people and what body politics might be imagined when the dead are materially present and absent?” (this issue). mccormack’s own ghostly figure in the photos troubles the forms of domination enacted through the medical gaze. simultaneously there and not, the figures are crisp but also special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) alexandra vieux frankel, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout, 2024 9 somehow a blur; these hauntings cannot be pinned down. mccormack describes the photos as revealing “a way of living with death intimately” (this issue). building on ruha benjamin’s (2019) engagement with afterlives of slavery and contemporary police brutality, haunting becomes a way of coming into “kinship with the dead in the context of illness and disability” (mccormack, this issue). nadine tanio and sarah malik's film and essay “flowing and flown: transition and the crafting of possible futures” show how the afterward of transplantation overlaps and coalesces with life cycle transitions. malik, who received a heart transplant at age three and a kidney and second heart transplant at age seventeen, is part of the first generation of paediatric heart transplant recipients to survive in adulthood. tanio and malik met at a transplant “transition clinic” as malik moved into adult health care. tanio, an educational researcher, invited malik to participate in a visual storytelling film project to collaboratively communicate the complexities of growing up as a transplant recipient. their essay brings together a slice of dialogue between them alongside critical reflexive accounts of the roles of knowledge production in subject formation and the very materialities of storytelling. echoing the recursive quality of transplant temporalities that heinemann elaborates, tanio and malik's work reveals discordant and mismatching imaginations of futures that emerge through the process of re-visiting the film years after its completion. the final piece in the special section, the perspectives piece, “living with the pharmakon: a call for futurity” by stephanie hudson, invites an interrogation of accessibility to solid organ transplantation and how access to transplant futures is configured in biomedicine. the frictions in stacey ann langwick’s (2018) politics of habitability echo loudly here. writing as someone with a bipolar diagnosis, hudson explains that long-term lithium use to manage the diagnosis results in irreversible kidney damage, positioning people who take lithium as potential transplant recipients. yet people with bipolar diagnoses are often screened out of eligibility for transplant over concerns about capacity to maintain adherence to pharmaceutical regimes and worries about “potential interactions between immunosuppressant and psychoactive drugs” (hudson). hudson’s piece, therefore, offers critical insight into the inequities produced in transplant medicine, including racial and economic disparities, and mental health diagnoses, in particular. the trajectory that lithium produces is not dissimilar from how author and two-time heart transplant recipient, the late amy silverstein, describes immunosuppressant drug regimes. in an op-ed published in the new york times (2023; also discussed in berkhout et al., this issue), silverstein writes that while her second transplanted heart was still healthy, it was the cancer caused by immunosuppressant drugs necessary to prevent rejection that would end her life, demonstrating frictional entanglements of self and other, and life and death. the pieces in this section, as experiments, invite a dwelling-with rather than a logic of closure and finalization. we invite readers into an undoing of conventional special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) alexandra vieux frankel, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout, 2024 10 logics through these accounts of transplantation and temporalities that unfold as loops and hauntings. simultaneously, the undoing and unfolding are part of a politics that calls for equity in, and access to, transplant futures. just as the articles here describe connection—with human and nonhuman kin and ghosts— they also complicate discrete renderings of time as past, present, and future. each is implicated in the other in a curdled fashion, making important messes of medicine’s linear temporalities and curative imaginaries. note 1 while this special section is focused on curative imaginaries within transplantation, other social imaginaries structure the field in different ways, depending on the intersections of tissues, bodies, and problematics. lisa guntram (2022), for instance, explores social imaginaries surrounding reproductive liberty, medical prospects, and female embodiment in relation to uterine transplantation. references abbey, susan. e., enza de luca, oliver e. mauthner, patricia mckeever, margrit shildrick, jennifer m. poole, mena gewarges, and heather j. ross. 2011. “qualitative interviews vs standardized self-report questionnaires in assessing quality of life in heart transplant recipients.” journal of heart and lung transplantation 30(8): 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jean-luc. 2008. corpus. translated by richard a. rand. new york: fordham university press. paxson, heather. 2013. the life of cheese: crafting food and value in america. berkeley: university of california press. quagliozzi, d. 2023. “transformations, blue morph” (artist’s talk). toronto: university health network–toronto general hospital, november 27, 2023. scheper-hughes, nancy. 2003. “rotten trade: millennial capitalism, human values and global justice in organs trafficking.” journal of human rights 2 (2): 197–226. doi:10.1080/1475483032000078189. sharp, lesley a. 2006. strange harvest: organ transplants, denatured bodies, and the transformed self. berkeley: university of california press. sharp, lesley a. 2013. the transplant imaginary: mechanical hearts, animal parts, and moral thinking in highly experimental science. berkeley: university of california press. siebers, tobin anthony. 2008. disability theory. ann arbor: university of michigan press. silverstein, amy. 2023. “my transplanted heart and i will die soon.” new york times. april 18, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/opinion/heart-transplantdonor.html. stewart, kathleen. 2008. “weak theory in an unfinished world.” journal of folklore research 45 (1): 71–82. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40206966. tsing, anna l. 2004. friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton, nj: princeton university press. vora, kalindi. 2015. life support: biocapital and the new history of outsourced labor. minnesota: university of minnesota press. waldby, catherine. 2002. “stem cells, tissue cultures and the production of biovalue." health 6 (3): 305–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/136345930200600304. widmer, alexandra. 2013. “seeing health like a colonial state: pacific island assistant physicians, sight, and nascent biomedical citizenship in the new hebrides.” in senses and citizenships: embodying everyday life, edited by susanna trnka, christine dureau, and julie park, 200–20. london: routledge. wolf-meyer, matthew. 2017. “normal, regular, and standard: scaling the body through fecal microbial transplants.” medical anthropology quarterly 31 (3): 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12328. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13083 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/opinion/heart-transplant-donor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/opinion/heart-transplant-donor.html https://www.jstor.org/stable/40206966 https://doi.org/10.1177/136345930200600304 https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12328 special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) alexandra vieux frankel, kelly fritsch, and suze berkhout, 2024 13 author bios alexandra vieux frankel is a phd candidate in social anthropology and dahdaleh global health graduate scholar at york university in toronto. with a focus in medical anthropology and feminist sts, her research examines water quality, related illnesses, and industrial legacies in the north american great lakes region. kelly fritsch is an associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at carleton university in ottawa, canada. as a crip theorist and critical disability studies scholar, her research examines ableist social relations, the neoliberal biopolitics of disability, and anti-assimilationist crip culture and politics. suze berkhout is an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at the university of toronto, and a clinician-investigator in the university health network’s centre for mental health based out of toronto general hospital. she has expertise in feminist philosophy and qualitative research experience that draws on ethnographic and narrative frames, including using visual arts to explore unspoken aspects of biomedical experience. cedillo, christina v. 2024. review of laboratory of deficiency: sterilization and confinement in california, 1900–1950s, by natalie lira (university of california press, 2022). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312. © christina v. cedillo, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | laboratory of deficiency: sterilization and confinement in california, 1900–1950s, by natalie lira (university of california press, 2022) christina v. cedillo university of houston-clear lake cedillo@uhcl.edu only a few years prior to 2020, many among the public had been shocked to learn that refugee men, women, and children were being held in unsanitary and overcrowded cages and subjected to family separation, casualties of the trump administration’s zero-tolerance policies. likened to “dog kennels,” these cages signified as well as enabled the dehumanization of already vulnerable immigrants in rhetorical, material, and corporeal terms. natalie lira sheds much-needed light on an earlier history of this same process of dehumanization in laboratory of deficiency: sterilization and confinement in california, 1900–1950s. the author examines the forced confinement and sterilization targeting mexican-origin youth during the early twentieth century. lira’s focus is southern california’s pacific colony. allegedly intended as a treatment facility for people with developmental disabilities, pacific colony was used as a carceral institution where young people deemed criminals, troublemakers, or potential burdens to the state could be consigned, often against their will and that of their families. officials incarcerated youth at pacific colony by using a medical diagnosis of “feeblemindedness,” a conveniently pliant term with racist, ableist, and classist implications—and aims. feeblemindedness was presumably a hereditary condition marked by a low iq and leading to poverty, criminal behavior, and sexual licentiousness. eugenicists following francis galton and charles davenport linked feeblemindedness to non-whites, disabled people, and poor people; they also claimed that allowing such populations to procreate would lead to a general decline in the integrity of the species. therefore, they argued that sterilization of undesirables proved necessary for the greater good. lira writes, “as a medical diagnosis that combined book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christina v. cedillo, 2024 social location and supposed mental capacity, ‘feebleminded’ became a ‘conduit’ through which previous forms of discrimination and inequality were upgraded and legitimized” (183). a total of 1,846 men and women were sterilized at pacific colony between 1929 and 1961, approximately 20,000 throughout california in total (27, 183). sterilization was usually a condition of release from the facility, making pacific colony the apotheosis of eugenicists’ social engineering goals. lira begins by describing her research methods and methodology with care. using a framework combining scholarship in reproductive justice and critical disability studies, the author meticulously examines a “sprawling archive” of primary and secondary documents, providing insight into the experiences of individuals committed to pacific colony and tracing the medical, political, and discursive networks that sustained the institution (21). lira describes the book’s argument as twofold: through empirical data analysis, laboratory of deficiency proves that mexican-origin youth were systematically targeted by california’s justice and medical systems, while epistemically, the book outlines how “feeblemindedness” was used to establish racial inferiority and mental defect as inherent qualities of mexican-origin people (3). “scientific” discourses characterized mexican-origin people as potential criminals and degenerates whether or not individuals were actually guilty of any crime, justifying their detainment and sterilization. at the same time, the seeming urgency of the problem meant that institutions like pacific colony remained funded even during times of crisis such as the great depression, though the facility was overcrowded and residents did not always receive adequate food or care while the staff certainly did. consequently, lira shows how racist rhetoric ensured the flow of cultural and financial capital into pacific colony based on claims that it prevented future crime, and how state officials, medical professionals, and even affluent white feminists used their support of pacific colony to bolster their social and professional positions. chapter one begins with the story of “sofia” and “margarita,” sisters who were sent to pacific colony in 1937 and 1938, respectively. state officials justified their incarceration by claiming that they were innately deficient: they had scored low on iq tests, their brother was a ward of the court, their mother was deemed “illiterate and dull,” and margarita had had a child out of wedlock (25). both were sterilized on the same day. starting with how the feebleminded classification was used against the sisters, lira proceeds to show how the term authorized white supremacy as the “natural” order of things, connecting the function of pacific colony to other carceral institutions such as slavery, federal boarding schools, and prisons. lira explains how nineteenth-century efforts of groups such as the association of medical officers of american institutions for idiotic and feebleminded persons informed campaigns by lewis m. terman—father of the stanford-binet iq test—and white suffragists belonging to the women’s legislative council of california, leading to the construction of pacific colony. given eugenicist attitudes claiming that inferior populations should not be book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christina v. cedillo, 2024 allowed to breed and were only good for menial labor, pacific colony opened in its permanent location in 1927, based around the idea that those confined there would provide free labor. within a decade, the facility relied on the labor of nearly half of its detainees to function (67). lira presents the next two chapters as counterparts, allowing the reader to compare the treatment of women and men in the carceral-medical complex that she details. chapter two shows how easily a family could be destroyed by a feeblemindedness diagnosis: like her aunt, mother, and siblings before her, “valentina” was institutionalized and subsequently sterilized. since the mexicanamerican war, anglo settlers had framed mexican-origin women as immoral creatures prone to overbreeding, thereby threatening the birthright of white americans. in the early twentieth century, social reformers sought to train them in “white middle-class american home and hygiene practices,” as a means to civilize them and train them to raise other people’s children (79). many mexican-origin women did not subscribe to the same modesty customs as white affluent women, and their parents were too busy working to watch over them or did not care to surveil their sexual activities. therefore, young women like valentina were often designated “sex delinquents,” and on over half of all sterilization records for women with spanish surnames, sexual delinquency was one of the reasons cited (92). in contrast, mexican-origin men and boys were typically framed as “defective delinquents,” or (potential) criminals. during the second world war, they were often disparaged as unpatriotic or anti-american criminals; they were also sent to pacific colony at higher rates than women (111–14). such was the case with “raul,” whose family protested his sterilization, only for them to be also designated feebleminded and ignored. biased iq tests bolstered these impressions, suggesting that low scores indicated future criminality regardless of a person’s behavior (119). while acknowledging that social factors played a role in the choices people made, researchers such as willis w. clark nevertheless highlighted heredity, blaming the deviant behavior of white youths on “youthful rebellion” and that of black and mexican-origin youths on “general racial inferiority” (122–23). however, despite the seemingly inexorable mechanism ensuring their confinement and sterilization, many of the pacific colony residents did fight back against their captors. in the fourth and final chapter, lira shares the story of “teresa,” who was committed to pacific colony after giving birth to a child outside of marriage. opposing clinical staff’s every attempt to render her compliant, teresa fought back on the day of her sterilization and prevented the procedure from being performed. although acts of defiance “were not recognized as protest, were often unsuccessful, and were sometimes met with violent punishments,” lira writes, they allowed young men and women at pacific colony book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) christina v. cedillo, 2024 to show that they were “more than just sterilized bodies” (149). the author describes the inhumane abuse and general conditions the youths experienced at the facility, from pulling a heavy slab of concrete for hours to being fed food contaminated with sticks and rocks (157–58). as is to be expected, many ran away, and administrators collaborated with law enforcement to describe them in terms of racialized criminality, encouraging local citizens to help ensure their return to pacific colony. nevertheless, even those who ran away might find themselves paroled in absentia if proof of amended behavior—and overcrowding—swayed administrators, exposing the convenient, contrived design of the “feeblemindedness” label. lira’s is a well-researched book that provides a sweeping history of united statesian racialization of mexican-origin people while reminding readers of the real persons who lived these cruelties. drawing on notable scholars such as dorothy roberts, loretta ross, sami schalk, nirmala erevelles, and miroslava chávez-garcía, laboratory of deficiency deepens our understanding of the “expansive matrix of reproductive oppression,” proving a necessary read for those working in reproductive justice and critical disability studies, and critical race studies and latinx/e studies more broadly (182). lira’s timely book shows how expedient taxonomies based in race, dis/ability, class, and gender are used to distinguish “fully human” beings from “inferior” and unwanted others, and how a complex network of actors and institutions function to give those taxonomies seeming veracity. sadly, abuses like those perpetrated at irwin and the ongoing violence and loathing directed at refugees seeking asylum in the united states demonstrate that the eugenicist apparatus described by lira continues to fulfill its function. author bio christina v. cedillo (she/they) is associate professor of rhetoric and writing in the department of communication and studio arts at the university of houston-clear lake. christina’s research focuses on rhetorics of embodiment and embodied rhetorics at the intersections of race, gender, and disability. saldaña-tejeda, abril. 2024. “genetic kinship and the future of human genome editing.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © abril saldaña-tejeda, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license genetic kinship and the future of human genome editing abril saldaña-tejeda universidad de guanajuato abrilsaldana@ugto.mx abstract this text offers a feminist inside view of the third international summit on human genome editing. it reports on the narratives and voices that were prioritized, and the excitement and tensions that followed some of the arguments presented over the future, limitations, and potentiality of human genome editing. the text offers a snapshot of how ideas of reproduction and kinship shape some of the arguments in favor of and against the advancement of technological breakthroughs. it looks critically at the place of women in science and some of the blind spots of mainstream academia in the pursuit of a genuine global dialogue over the future of human evolution. keywords human genome editing, women in science, reproduction, global governance of science in march 2023 the francis crick institute hosted the third international summit on human genome editing. an array of life and social scientists, bioethicists, transnational organizations, and patients’ advocates gathered to discuss the stakes, promises, and risks of changing the course of human evolution by intentionally maneuvering our hereditary traits. at the very start of the summit, we learned from david baltimore—1975 nobel laureate in physiology and medicine and host of previous summits—that it was unfeasible to expect some form of international law to regulate human genome editing. only nation-states, baltimore said, had the capacity to design, implement, and monitor laws to critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) abril saldaña-tejeda, 2024 2 govern citizens over the use of these technologies of life. baltimore’s speech made me think about the tension between the expectation of nation-states to regulate the future of human genome editing and an increasing global circuit where physicians, tools, knowledge, human subjects, and biological material move across borders in search of places where new reproductive technologies can be applied. placing the focus of responsibility exclusively on the nation-state means leaving many actors (i.e., the private sector) unaccounted for and absolved of any wrongdoing (saldaña-tejeda et al. 2022). baltimore described the 2015 and 2018 summits and their focus on somatic genome editing, bioethics, issues of access and safety. he recalled how the general agreement of the past two summits was that scientists were simply not ready to proceed with germline human editing. recounting the history of the previous events seemed to have two temporal effects. the first was to demarcate the state of scientific readiness from past to present. the mention of previous agreements served to prove scientists’ capacity for self-governance and to provide the moral grounds for scientists to claim readiness in the future. but invoking the past had another important function: to leave the scandal of the first crispr babies behind by addressing china’s measures to move forward. back in 2018, during the previous summit, he jiankui announced the first crispredited babies to a deeply disturbed audience.1 the fallout was the elephant in the room in 2023 and the organizers knew this well. yaojin peng from the chinese academy of science presented on china’s regulatory changes since 2018. professor joy zhang, from the university of kent, exposed some of the contradictions of these changes. she suggested how new restrictions over the flow of resources and data might end up isolating scientists from the rest of the world and lead to data bias in global medicine. zhang discussed how securitization, or the view of genetic resources as matters of national sovereignty and national security, has led to the introduction of gatekeeping policies that might not mean safer science. although zhang welcomed a new focus on ethics in state-sponsored research, she warned against missing the ethical oversight in entrepreneurship in science. she challenged the view of china’s scientists as submissive by describing open processes of bottom-up participation of scientists and non-scientists alike. the issue of language in relation to china was mentioned twice during the first morning of the summit. yaojin peng mentioned that china had continuously committed to ethical and effective regulation and its translation. later, ping yan, from dalian university of technology, called to move beyond debates over the crispr babies scandal in an american and european context to investigate china’s own reaction to the event. she argued that careful attention to chinese language debates on human genome editing shows a broader and more open involvement of stakeholders (scientists and non-scientists) than is commonly appreciated by many english-language reports. invoking gayatri chakravorty spivak’s concerns, translation is politics, and any real global dialogue over the future governance of science requires taking seriously linguistic power critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) abril saldaña-tejeda, 2024 3 imbalances. there are regulations, guidelines, and practices around the world that get easily lost in translation. debates and conversations in the global south, found in media outlets, legislative chambers, or classrooms are not the missing voices of a much-needed dialogue. these voices are not “missing” in the sense of being lost. instead, the unilingual limitations of mainstream, english-speaking, academia misses the contribution of some voices that are both heard and central within a local context with global implications. over the course of three long and fruitful days, the summit featured an impressive array of presentations on the ethics, governance, and science of human genome editing. in a section titled “hopes and fears for human genome editing,” hope was mainly encapsulated by impressive advancements on somatic genome editing for sickle cell disease. fear was found in the shared indignation at the difficulties of accessibility related to the current price of gene therapies, especially since sickle cell disease affects the most disadvantaged populations around the world. today, access to basic medical (pain) treatment for sickle cell disease patients is already marked by health disparities that are often the result of race and racism. one can only imagine the challenges ahead for gene cell therapies with a price that ranges from us$1 to $3.5 million per patient. the summit included representation from patient advocates and patients themselves. we heard victoria gray, the first patient to receive a crispr-based therapy for sickle cell disease in the united states. she talked about her personal and life-changing experience with gene editing treatments. the feeling of convergence and camaraderie that victoria’s moving account scattered among the attendees contrasted deeply with the tension of the third and last day of the summit. the glee was over as we entered the unavoidable discussion of the future of heritable human genome editing. as if the strain of the subject wasn’t enough, the first panel on civil society and public engagement was repeatedly interrupted by the testing of the fire alarm at the institute. we all had to cope with measures taken to prevent the risk of fire. the disruption reminded us that some risks don’t have an end date and that preventing harm is, sometimes, not negotiable. the alarm disturbed the speeches of all participants in the panel, even those within the most selective groups in academia. unfortunately, it is not often the case that technology behaves so indiscriminately. while the benefits of science and technology tend to reach the privileged few, the risks and harmful effects of their trial, application, or misuse are often felt by the most disadvantaged places and bodies. the first section of the last day of the summit was unforgettable—both for the irreverent fire alarm and for a presentation that triggered some attendees’ passions like no other. tina rulli, from the university of california davis, stated that heritable human genome editing has not been nor ever will be considered therapeutic as, before implantation, there was not a person, a baby, or a child to be cured or saved. she questioned the social value of heritable human genome editing, arguing that couples with heritable diseases could form a family through critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) abril saldaña-tejeda, 2024 4 other means such as adoption or egg donation. that moment became the tipping point of disagreement in the summit. her arguments fueled some of the most emotionally charged comments at the q & a session. attendees shared their reproductive experiences; we heard moving stories about patients’ individual cases. these comments were put forward to suggest that rulli’s argument entailed having no empathy for those suffering from rare diseases. there was no other presentation that prompted so many scientists in the room to join the line of questions and comments to express what one of them called “deep concerns” about her claims. why? because rulli offered the most compelling argument against moving forward with heritable human genome editing. that is, that there are ethical limits to our desire to have genetically linked children. during the summit, bioethicists césar palacios criticized rulli’s argument as she considered “a metaphysical and moral stretch to call a not-yet-created or unimplanted embryo a patient, since its existence is not a given.” palacios suggested that genome editing could be considered therapeutic in cases when an embryo has been created through ivf and, following the procedure, the mother is found to be homozygous for a dominant monogenic disease. palacios’s suggestion that a human embryo could be considered a patient before implantation—and therefore genome editing as therapeutic— could have serious implications for abortion politics. another summit panelist invited attendees to consider that proceeding with human genome editing was viewed by some as morally better than discarding human embryos ruled out for reproduction after a preimplantation diagnosis test. these are blatantly obvious pro-life suggestions that must be treated with caution in the context of the overturning of roe v. wade, the increasing number of unsafe abortions around the world, and the continuous prosecution of women who seek abortion. the fragile moral status of embryos seems to accommodate easily to changing scientific agendas along with political and neoliberal ones, a process often facilitated by a global reproductive market. there is one claim in favor of new reproductive breakthroughs that seems to be gaining traction: the view that pursuing genetically linked offspring is a human right derived from the right to autonomy and reproductive freedom. there we were, enduring the tautness of what kinship means to us, and here i mean “us attendees,” as there are other forms of kinship and parenthood outside our exclusive academic environment. understanding our biocapacity to have genetically linked children as a human right, using whatever means we have available, is one of the most pressing ethical and societal challenges we face today. when i say “means,” i refer not only to the scientific and technological breakthroughs in reproduction. i mean also the knowledge; biological material; the tools; the dubious markets and for-profit ethical review boards; the bodies (human and nonhuman) subjected to clinical trials for the advancement of science; the egg “donors” for reproduction or research; the “borrowed” uterus for transplants undertaken so that people can experience pregnancy; the surrogate mothers from countries such as india and mexico whose wombs are living critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) abril saldaña-tejeda, 2024 5 remnants of the violence of extraction that colonization entailed. ironically, the summit’s final day, march 8, coincided with international women’s day, while the voices of so many women, whose bodies are and will be needed for scientific research to flourish, remain in the dark due to anonymity and confidentiality agreements. a major limit of bioethics is that, in most cases, the very protection of human subjects limits their capacity to speak on their own behalf. the summit was hosted by an institute that honors the achievements of francis crick. he was a scientist known for his work on the discovery of the structure of dna but also for the controversy around the unacknowledged contribution of rosalind franklin to the double helix breakthrough. just a month after the summit, nature published an article that revisits the story. in the article, historians matthew cobb and nathaniel comfort (2023) reveal how another woman’s work, that of joan bruce, could have prevented franklin’s work from going unnoticed. bruce was a journalist working for time magazine, who, in 1953, wrote an article about the double helix story where she rightly portraits franklin as an equal player of the team behind the breakthrough. bruce’s take was never published and the story of franklin as marginal to the milestone discovery took traction. women are involved in science in many ways, as scientists but also as subjects of research whose reproductive bodies are taken in the name of scientific progress. women have also written, historicized, questioned, and expressed—through literature, academia, and various forms of art—the complexities and dilemmas of scientific advancements. the harsh reaction to tina rullis’s presentation reveals the anxiety that strong women in science still provoke not only when they do science but especially when they question some of its premises and assumptions. in his final remarks, the summit’s host, robin lovell-badge, was moved to tears as he thanked the team behind the scenes. as he apologetically explained the incident by lack of rest and food, i thought of the countless times that women in academia must justify or erase emotions from view in the name of rationality and self-control. lovell-badge’s acknowledgment of those who made the summit possible was one of the most honest and genuine moments of the event. his broken voice reminded us of something that feminists have been arguing for decades: science (scientists) is not neutral, apolitical, or objective. if we are looking for social consensus as the holy grail that would shed some light on the mis/uses of technological breakthroughs—whether that is ai, geoengineering, or human genome editing—we must come to terms with the fact that there is no such thing as a purely rational subject. whatever is decided over the future of human genome editing will be the result of individual and collective subjectivities. the question is, then, whose subjectivities would be accounted for when deciding over the future of human evolution? it is only by finally rejecting the notion of rational and autonomous subjects that we will be able to find some clues as to how to best sculpt the shared future of our human and nonhuman anthropocene. critical perspectives | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) abril saldaña-tejeda, 2024 6 note 1 in 2018 scientist he jiankui announced the first twin babies born with edited genes. the procedure consisted of disabling a gene with the purpose of immunizing the babies against the hiv virus. there is substantial concern that the genetic mutations might not only prove weak to resist hiv but could also have deleterious effects on the immune system and brain function of the twins. because the gametes’ germline was edited, any benefits and damages done to their genetic makeup will be heritable to future generations. acknowledgements this text was written thanks to a visiting fellowship awarded by the department of global health and social medicine at king’s college london in 2023. references cobb, m. and nathaniel, c. (2023). what rosalind franklin truly contributed to the discovery of dna’s structure. nature 616 (7958): 657–660. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01313-5. lovell-badge, r. (2019). crispr babies: a view from the centre of the storm. development 146 (3), art. dev175778. https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.175778. saldaña-tejeda, a., aparicio a., gonzález-santos s.p., arguedas-ramírez g., cavalcanti j.m., shaw, k.m., and perler, l. (2022). policy landscapes on human genome editing: a perspective from latin america. trends in biotechnology 40 (11): 1275–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2022.07.018. author bio abril saldaña-tejeda is a feminist scholar who focuses on the social determinants of health, genomics, and postgenomics. she is an associate professor of sociology in the department of philosophy, universidad de guanajuato, mexico, and a member of the board of human organization. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01313-5 https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.175778 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2022.07.018 hickman, louise, mara mills, and david serlin. 2025. “alt text: feminist technoscience meets crip authorship.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–13. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin. 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license alt text: feminist technoscience meets crip authorship louise hickman university of cambridge lh761@cam.ac.uk mara mills new york university mmills@nyu.edu david serlin university of california, san diego dserlin@ucsd.edu abstract from the very beginning, questions of accessibility and disability authorship were imagined as integral to the journal that became catalyst. on the occasion of catalyst’s tenth anniversary, mara mills initiated a conversation between herself and two other members of the journal’s first editorial team, louise hickman and david serlin, to reflect on the way that feminist disability studies, as an interdisciplinary field, and accessibility features, such as alt text, were incorporated into the journal’s emerging editorial ethos. keywords accessibility, alt text, disability, crip studies from the very beginning, questions of accessibility and disability authorship were imagined as integral to the journal that became catalyst. on the occasion of catalyst’s tenth anniversary, mara mills initiated a conversation between herself and two other members of the journal’s first editorial team to reflect on the way that feminist disability studies, as an interdisciplinary field, and accessibility about:blank http://dserlin@ucsd.edu/ tenth anniversary section 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin 2025 features, such as alt text, were incorporated into the journal’s emerging editorial ethos. what follows is an edited transcript of a teleconference conversation between mills (new york), louise hickman (london), and david serlin (rome), held on july 3, 2025. mara mills (mm): looking back through my catalyst correspondence, i see that disability studies was a pillar of the journal from the outset—from the very first planning meetings in 2012 and 2013. catalyst was a born-digital journal, and we were also a born-disability studies journal. and that was so unusual for science and technology studies at the time, because sts lagged behind english, history, and many other humanities fields in taking up the insights of disability scholarship and activism. david, i think artificial parts, practical lives—the book you edited in 2002 with katherine ott and stephen mihm—was such a spur for people working on tech, medicine, and science to consider disability perspectives. and then a decade later, you, lisa cartwright, and rachel lee—all working on disability or chronic illness in some regard—were part of the steering committee meeting i attended at emory university in 2013 to start imagining a feminist sts journal. but i don’t know the backstory to that 2013 meeting… david serlin (ds): well, all of this started because around 2012 the journal configurations approached lisa cartwright and asked if she would like to be involved in putting together a proposal to take over the administration of the journal and at the same time think about how to reshape or reinvent it. it was already a great journal, with more of a focus on literary and historical studies of science and medicine, but the editorial board said, “we can’t do it anymore, and we need a new institutional affiliation. would you like to take it up at uc san diego?” lisa knew that i had about a decade of experience as a member of the editorial collective of the radical history review, so she asked me if i was interested in joining her in making configurations into something we wanted to see—namely, a feminist sts journal—and anchor it at our home institution. little by little, we realized that the journal already had a clear identity. so lisa said, “what if we were to start something brand new and build it from scratch?” at that point, lisa brought deboleena roy and elizabeth wilson at emory university into our conversations and we all started brainstorming ideas. our colleagues at uc san diego, like brian goldfarb, had a great deal of experience designing and building platforms to create born-digital scholarship online. i’m condensing a lot of detail, but things started to happen quickly over the next two years. lisa is a seasoned pro at successfully applying for funding, so we got some money from our academic senate to hire grad students as research assistants who could then serve as managing and technical support. that’s how early in the process we were able to bring on grad students, like monika sengul-jones, cristina tenth anniversary section 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin 2025 visperas, and poyao huang, to serve in those vital roles while we mentored them through the process. meanwhile, we began crafting a mission statement. deboleena, elizabeth, lisa, and i have similar training and interests even though our respective works are quite different from one other. but all of us agreed that we wanted to build a feminist technoscience journal informed by important modes of contemporary scholarly and activist work as well as artistic practice. and we wanted to foreground disability studies, and feminist disability studies even more specifically, both at the level of content as well as at the infrastructural level in terms of editorial policy. not that we would only focus on disability per se, but that disability studies should be integral to our intellectual and political vision. mm: absolutely. i dug up the program from the first steering committee meeting and saw that it was attended by you and lisa, rachel lee, banu subramaniam, m. murphy, elizabeth wilson, me—and rob mitchell was also there as a sort of fellow traveler. so many of us were working in disability and chronic illness studies, among our other fields. one of the first items on our agenda was to discuss the focus of the journal, and one of the initial desired topics was already disability studies. we came up with a list of possible titles, catalyst being one, and “feminist technoscience” anchoring the subtitle. we also talked about our publishing model: should it be universityaffiliated? would we have to pay fees to a university press or other publisher, and would our readers have to pay fees to access the journal? we decided against all of that. we decided to go hard with the feminist collective model, bootstrapping the new journal into an online and open access format. ds: yes, it came from our own publishing experiences as individuals but also those that were in our broader networks as collaborators. lisa had been working with alex juhasz and ann balsamo, who were all running femtechnet, a feminist model of non-hierarchical collaborative work that was a good model for how to conceive of a project like catalyst. the radical history review (rhr) was also an important model. the rhr prides itself on being an editorial collective. there is no editor-in-chief. instead, it has two rotating co-chairs who help facilitate the work of the collective. there’s a managing editor for administrative purposes, but otherwise it’s an editorial body where everyone shares the labor, making it possible for grad students and junior and senior scholars to work toward common goals without the kinds of hierarchies that often calcify in academic projects. i shared the rhr’s approach with lisa and the emerging steering committee for catalyst. i said, “i don't know how we're going to do this if we’re scattered across the continent and in a few separate countries, because it’s hard enough to do this together in one room. (this was when the best video tool we had for video tenth anniversary section 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin 2025 conferencing was skype.) but let’s see if we can do it collectively, with all labor shared and responsibility shared by everyone to the extent that they can.” as senior scholars, many of us often took the lead in, say, editing a manuscript. that was a way to get the work done without exploiting the often-uncompensated labor of grad students and untenured faculty. but in terms of setting policy or making decisions or brainstorming ideas, we held firm to a horizontal model of shared governance. mm: i was a relatively new assistant professor at the time! but i think i was an outlier. louise, what were your recollections of the early days of catalyst, when you were first brought on board? louise hickman (lh): i came on board for the first time with monika and cristina. we were actually taking a course together on femtechnet with lisa cartwright and liz losh, which later turned into a conference that took place at uc san diego. through this course and subsequent conference, we were already thinking more critically about access-building and disability studies in feminist networks, and this very much acted as a springboard for thinking about the accessibility of the catalyst journal. not long after this, in the run-up to launching the first issue, lisa set up the catalyst lab in the structural and material engineering building at uc san diego. those who were in this lab came from wide backgrounds, including science studies, visual arts, communication, history, and more. the lab served as a central space for many disability studies scholars passing through, including cassandra hartblay, petra kuppers, and neil marcus. on the feminist sts side, lucy suchman and natasha myers visited, too. with the many overlaps between disability studies and technoscience, we could think about access in more expansive ways and even more collaboratively, too. joan donovan was a graduate student in sociology and science studies at the time, and her work still informs how i approach developing policies for accessible infrastructures. mm: working remotely from new york, and feverishly emailing with all of you in san diego, i missed out on that part of the history! i never entered the catalyst lab or participated directly in femtechnet. i’m glad you’re materializing some of the broader catalyst “thought collective” and collaborators. even though the journal has moved hubs and changed lead editorial teams every few years, i think the uc san diego milieu still infuses the form of the journal ten years later, in part because you have this legendary multi-departmental science studies program that is not at all typical for sts. in particular, so many scholars in the department of communication working in the field of disability studies—beyond david and lisa, people like patrick anderson and brian goldfarb and carol padden. and just tenth anniversary section 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin 2025 the uc ethos. maybe this is nostalgia from my undergrad days at uc santa cruz, but that sense of sts as always feminist sts. lh: yeah, i just wanted to add that you had just completed your retreat at uc irvine. mm: oh my gosh. that's right! that was the uchri [university of california humanities research institute] critical disability studies working group in fall 2010. i applied for it when i was a postdoc, before i started at nyu, and it was organized by georgina kleege, catherine kudlick, susan schweik, patrick anderson, and darrin martin, among others. they had designed it to be a hybrid residency for access purposes, which was totally new to the uchri at the time. and at the end of the year, we received a ucira [university of california institute for research in the arts] grant—funding to hold a graduate student summer school and artist residency on the theme of arts access, especially creative description, at irvine in 2012. and then the following year, maybe because of these uc collaborations, i was roped in to be part of this new journal we eventually called catalyst. lh: the legacy of the ucira project lived on through thinking more deeply about description. it was around this time that rosemarie garland-thomson published a review of the field called “disability studies: a field emerged,” which signalled a shift in disability studies and sts. mel chen had just published animacies. the field had opened up in these new, exciting ways for feminist sts, and this fed into the culture of the catalyst lab. ds: in that way catalyst is so clearly linked to the legacies of feminist collective work: you’ve got to do the work yourself. you've got to make shit happen, even create your own infrastructure, because it’s not going to happen any other way. mm: i forgot how long it took before the journal launched its first issue in 2015. that little steering committee grew into a bigger editorial collective, and a much bigger advisory board. and then the collective spent two years building all of the infrastructure for the journal. it was such a heroic amount of work for those of you at uc san diego. every single piece of the infrastructure! monika sengul-jones in particular working on the open journal system (ojs) platform and how to leverage it for accessibility. we also had to figure out what the sections of the journal would be, and how to manifest our ambitious plan to include multimedia works and roundtable conversations alongside peer-reviewed journal articles. and we had to figure out what our peer-review process and guidelines would be. i remember creating so much paperwork as part of the second lead editor team with you, david, starting in 2016—and harris kornstein, who was then a graduate student research assistant based in my department at nyu, media, culture, and communication. creating so many online and pdf forms for authors to fill out… tenth anniversary section 6 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin 2025 ds: none of those things existed yet. mm: and most of us are not exactly bureaucratically minded. ds: no, no, that’s not our strong suit. mm: no citation guidelines. we spent a lot of time debating citation guidelines. and how to raise money for copy editors. we did a lot of the copy editing ourselves before we had enough funding to hire professional copy editors. and our open access policy. we decided we wanted to be open access to let authors be in charge of their own copyright. we wouldn’t own it. louise, you pointed out to me the other day that catalyst always had a crip authorship approach to the publication process (see mills and sanchez 2023). ds: i was going to ask louise, when did we adopt alt text as technology, and how did we come to see it as not only a tool of access but part of the ethos of the journal? lh: it’s interesting, back in 2015, alt text was not the norm as it is now with the growth of social media. actually, if i remember right, the invite to contribute alt text was a point of friction at times. it was difficult to convince some authors to provide alt text for images, and there was resistance for describing more technical images that fell outside the scope of describing artwork. we had many conversations in the lab itself on the authorship of alt text, including copyright and who should complete the labor of description when there is refusal. encouraging authors to describe their own work was a form of access-building central to the journal. but as grad students at the time, we couldn’t take on the labor of describing images for other authors. ds: i think a really important point is that we tried to communicate clearly that our commitment to alt text was not just as a convenience for the many people who may want to gain access to the journal in a non-conventional way. it was more philosophical than that. it was actually a central part of the journal’s ethos. we want you, as a prospective author, to create alt text not as an optional addition but as a kind of publishing intervention, something central to where we want to go as a journal. it’s where the field needs to go. mm: when the editorial board voted on being open access, without a print component, we partly made that decision for global accessibility purposes. we wanted people around the world to be able to read the journal, even if they weren’t affiliated with a university, or if their university couldn’t afford subscription fees. but simultaneously with that economic access piece, the team at the catalyst lab was thinking about how to make the issues we published as tenth anniversary section 7 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin 2025 accessible as possible. this was not that common back then. so we created style guidelines for authors, which are still on the website. namely, asking authors to include captions, descriptions, or alt text, depending on what media they were including in their articles. nyu press now has very similar guidelines, for instance, but i don’t think it was that common in 2015. but we also worked on an accessibility mission statement for catalyst, which is something like a manifesto that also still sits on our website. in fact it’s on our home page, front and center. when you click on “about the journal,” the accessibility mission statement appears right below a description of the journal’s focus and scope. i can’t think of any other sts journal that has accessibility on their home page as part of their mission. we were calling attention to infrastructure as form and content in sts, and access as an ongoing, iterative, and creative part of that infrastructure. louise, i would love to hear more about the collective access ethos in the lab, and how you all were thinking of access as a creative and critical part of our publication from the very beginning. ds: it doesn’t hurt that louise was developing a dissertation at the time that examined live captioning through the lenses of critical disability studies and feminist labor practices. mm: access wasn’t just an add-on: it was a critical sts question. that was one of the propositions the journal was enacting. lh: i think so, the accessibility statement is different from most that exist online. the statement was a collaborative effort between cristina, monika, and me. we spent a lot of time debating what a feminist access statement could look like for the journal. there is the mechanics of access, which monika worked on. we also discuss at length how to invite authors to submit their alt text and the process of how this was submitted on the backend. there is this line from the statement, which reads, “demands are political and do not lend themselves to easy and definite closure.” as a team we recognize we didn’t want to start out with narrow definition of what accessibility looks like, especially in the field of sts. how do we account for collaborative work? (which again is central to capacity building needed for access.) how do we account for collaborative work, which again is central to capacity building needed for access. there was an impulse to make the mechanism of access-building more visible for those interacting with the journal rather than existing in the background. lilly irani was essential to thinking about issues of labor practices as well and was a frequent visitor to the lab, too. https://catalystjournal.org/index/php/catalyst/about tenth anniversary section 8 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin 2025 in the last line of the statement, there was a deliberate attempt to position access as an ongoing project; we thought this was really important for the journal to carry forward. this was not a project that was a one-off, but can be a part of our practice through all of our work. the last line reads, “these invitations mean that, for catalyst, access will remain an ongoing project, a reflexive, collaborative, and distributed effort in digital and disability design.” ds: access is like democracy—it doesn’t have an endpoint. you need to keep reviewing and renewing it. (unfortunately, we are living in a historical moment where that’s painfully true.) but, louise, i looked at my notes just now and i highlighted those exact words you just read, and underneath i wrote in red pen, “this is a crip methodology.” or maybe the seeds of what we can call a crip method. mara, you might not remember this, but in 2012 or 2013 joe dumit asked us to put together a panel for the sts summer camp he was organizing for graduate students and faculty in the uc system. our panel was called “how your sts project is a disability project.” that probably made its way into this mix of ideas well. mm: but this access statement—i didn’t realize that monika, cristina, and louise had drafted it! i remember all of us editing it, but i never knew who first drafted it. even from my position within the journal, so much labor is not apparent. thank you, lou. ds: yes, it’s so good and clear, and it really sets the tone. with the exception of disability studies quarterly, i can’t think of another journal that was committed to thinking about access as this kind of iterative project, one that’s always questioning itself and is never just satisfied with the laundry list of boxes to check off. there was another similarly ambitious access statement, and i don't know who wrote it, but it was about visuality and disability, and about translating visual work into disability accessible work through our website. if we’re going to be in dialogue with visual artists and to make space for that dialogue, we need to participate in a way that’s accessible. it means restructuring how we approach this thing called “access” as a creative opportunity; something experimental, following donna haraway’s idea of serious play. i don’t want to diminish the importance of achieving accessibility in very practical ways. but we were trying to find ways to say to author x, you really need to be thinking about how to make your work accessible, not just because it’s mandated by publishing conventions or ada (americans with disabilities act) requirements, but because it’s ethically the right thing to do. you need to be thinking ahead of the curve because there are readers or visitors to the website who will engage with your work in ways you can’t predict. tenth anniversary section 9 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin 2025 mm: david, i love that you’re conjuring our lost access statements. we do have google doc upon google doc, which shockingly still seem to be alive twelve years later. pages and pages of crowdsourced thoughts and theories of access that didn’t make it onto the website. lh: david, you just touched on this as a mode of translation, and because i think this is something that lisa would repeatedly say in response to when we were thinking about when authors started to submit. quite often when you’re in disability studies, you’re invited to translate for others, right? the burden is placed on the scholar in the new or unfamiliar field to do that work. so shifting or questioning that kind of dynamic—asking who is responsible for translation and why—is an important part of this story as well. ds: yes, lisa was instrumental in keeping our eyes on the prize. and also that we can and should question what journals do. as members of an editorial or publishing collective, we can admit that we don’t have all of the answers about how to make work accessible or how to incorporate disability as an editorial practice. we’re figuring it out, too. we never want to think we have landed on a final answer because access needs will always change. instead, we want to ask more questions and grow our work together dialogically, organically, as part of a larger process. mm: well, in our access mission statement we invite prospective authors to imagine all the ways access could be a fundamental aspect of representing their work. we urge them to go beyond our access guidelines. we also invite readers to provide input and critique about our journal’s practices of publication and archiving. ds: “at catalyst, accessibility constitutes both an aim and intellectual concern.” mm: yes, that’s exactly it. and in addition to this theoretical work, i just want to flag that louise and others did a ton of very practical accessibility testing for the pilot version of the catalyst website. we had to do so much user testing before we launched in 2015. louise, do you remember that process? lh: i do not remember any of that bit! but i remember emailing monika. i remember being on the site with her, but otherwise i have no idea. mm: i found an email thread where someone, maybe monika, had created mock web pages for the different sections of the journal. we were asking people who, for instance, relied on captions or used screen readers to test these pages and give us feedback. so we had a demo table of contents in html and pdf, an example image gallery on slideshare. oh, and we also had an example video on vimeo, and there weren’t automatic captions then, so we were using this other platform tenth anniversary section 10 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin 2025 called amara to generate the captions. i mean, that’s what we were dealing with to get the journal off the ground. and then we had example audio, and at that point we were using soundcloud. i think we’ve changed that. georgina kleege is one of the people who tested these demo pages, using a screen reader, and it was really helpful because she found discrepancies between our pdf and html versions at the time. she also found that our early captions weren’t very readable, and she asked us to tell authors to incorporate descriptions of images in the body of their texts. we then iteratively revised the site. that was slow, practical work. we also encouraged a wide range of disability sts submissions to the journal. and from the beginning, when we received special issue proposals from adjacent fields like medical anthropology or sociology of medicine, we listed disability studies among the subfields in the calls for papers. but disability also threads through our special sections that focus on war, borders, race and technoscience—and vice versa. some of our special sections do have an overt disability focus, like “autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19,” or “chemical entanglements,” “crip technoscience,” and “illness narratives.” i guess the other big thing we have done is bring chronic illness studies into closer conversation with disability studies. there was so much friction between those fields in the 1990s. it’s easy to forget that. ds: in terms of bringing disability studies into conversation with sts, i remember the pleasure of working with beza merid and tamara kneese, who were the guest co-editors for the “illness narratives” issue. i remember meeting them in 2015 when i gave a talk at nyu, and they said, “we want to propose an issue that brings together narrative form, disability, and technoscience.” there weren’t a lot of publications that would support those intersections, so a lot of junior scholars and graduate students, like beza and tamara, saw catalyst as a new opportunity to bring those intersections together. lh: i want to add that aimi hamraie’s and kelly fritsch’s “crip technoscience manifesto” was ground-shifting and has crossed over into so many areas of our work. i have recently seen the manifesto cited in the new v&a show on design and disability, curated by natalie kane (kane and liebeskind, 2025). the show has integrated the ethos of manifesto to draw attention to crip design practices in museums. again, as mara has already pointed out, the journal and the manifesto together allowed for different types of engagement, with the inclusion of alice wong’s and kevin gotkin’s work. ds: louise, you beat me to the punch. it’s always thrilling to see where the “crip technoscience manifesto” gets cited—not just among academics but among, for instance, artists and activists and curators who write about or do work in diy or maker culture. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2837 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2837 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2293 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2199 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/1981 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29607 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29607 tenth anniversary section 11 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin 2025 i also want to recognize the “transplant medicine” issue, which has received a lot of attention. kelly fritsch, one of the editors of that issue, brought a crip technoscience perspective to help contributors move beyond the conventional spaces within history of medicine. the editors brought transplants into conversation with trans-species and cross-species hybridities and critical thinking through feminist technoscience and feminist disability lenses. i’m very proud of the journal for addressing themes or topics that a generation ago might have been shaped by conventional approaches to science and medicine. mm: david, i remember when we were cycling off being lead editors in 2017. at that point, we had already accepted the proposal to co-edit a “crip technoscience” special issue with aimi and kelly. it was so awesome to work with them, and with you, on that issue, which not surprisingly included a wider range of formats than usual for contributions, with activist authors like louise mentioned as well as academics. crip technoscience gave a name to the work we were doing as a journal of feminist technoscience in conversation with disability studies. it did much more than that, but it also gave us a sort of shorthand for explaining what catalyst was often about. ds: i think that’s true. “crip technoscience” became a way of weaving many threads together. the coining of the term cripistemology in critical disability studies about a dozen years ago also brought many strands of this kind of thinking together as well. both terms are ways of reclaiming disabled subjectivities and the experience of disabled embodiment. i think it was in 2014 that robert mcruer and merri lisa johnson published that issue of the journal of literary & cultural disability studies on the theme of “cripistemology.” i think robert once said that cripistemology was a kind of rapprochement with the medical model of disability. but i think it’s more than that. that’s why it and crip technoscience, which are distinct terms but which have interesting and overlapping genealogies, seem to be such good shorthand for what has attracted so many scholars and artists to catalyst. mm: the cripistemologies conference that preceded the journal issue was hosted at nyu in 2013 by the department of social and cultural analysis—where you did your ph.d., david—and by the then-emerging center for disability studies. and now the center is one of the catalyst co-sponsors, which provides support for research assistance during the summer months and help with copy editing. these are some of the nyu roots of the journal. ds: i am so glad we are remembering this history. and the more that i think about it, the more i see how cripistemology is a kind of glue that holds so many of these things together. it goes back to the point about our commitment to access. it https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/issue/view/2859 tenth anniversary section 12 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin 2025 goes back to the point about translation and taking seriously the idea of keeping the varied subjectivities of readers and visitors in mind. and engaging with disabled subjectivity not just as something to accommodate but as a generative, proactive force. those are so key to the kinds of projects that catalyst wanted to solicit from the very beginning: not just those that show how feminist technoscience and disability studies intersect but those that show how feminist technoscience and disability studies give us the tools, the vocabulary, for making embodied experience, bodily vulnerability, and the centrality of subjectivity the basis for reimagining critical theory, artistic practice, and social justice. references cartwright, lisa. 2008. moral spectatorship: technologies of voice and affect in postwar representations of the child. duke university press. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience. n.d. “accessibility.” accessed july 8, 2025. https://catalystjournal.org/index/php/catalyst/about. chen, mel y. 2012. animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. duke university press. garland-thomson, rosemarie. 2013. “disability studies: a field emerged.” american quarterly 65 (4): 915–26. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43822996. gotkin, kevin. 2019. “crip club vibes: technologies for new nightlife.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–7. hamraie, aimi, and kelly fritsch. 2019. “crip technoscience manifesto.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1): 1–33. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607. johnson, merri lisa, and robert mcruer, eds. 2014. “cripistemologies.” special issue, journal of literary & cultural disability studies 8 (2). https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/30328. kane, natalie, and reuben liebeskind, eds. 2025. design and disability: 10 tales of accessible design. london: v & a publishing. exhibition catalog. lee, rachel et al. 2023. how we make it: disability justice, autoimmunity, community. accessed july 22, 2025. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/how-we-make-it/index. mills, mara, and rebecca sanchez, eds. 2023. crip authorship: disability as method. nyu press. wong, alice. 2019. “the rise and fall of the plastic straw: sucking in crip defiance.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5 (1):1–12. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.30435. ott, katherine, david serlin, and stephen mihm, eds. 2002. artificial parts, practical lives: modern histories of prosthetics. nyu press. https://catalystjournal.org/index/php/catalyst/about https://www.jstor.org/stable/43822996 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607 https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/30328 https://scalar.usc.edu/works/how-we-make-it/index https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.30435 tenth anniversary section 13 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) louise hickman, mara mills, and david serlin 2025 author bios louise hickman is a research associate at the minderoo centre for technology and democracy at the university of cambridge. louise is the pi of algorithmic kitchen: recipes for disability-led health, a wellcome-funded project that explores disability-led approaches to health data and care infrastructures. mara mills is associate professor and ph.d. director of media, culture, and communication at new york university and one of the founding editors of catalyst. she is also a co-founder and director of the nyu center for disability studies. david serlin is professor of communication and science studies at uc san diego and one of the founding editors of catalyst. his latest book is window shopping with helen keller: architecture and disability in modern culture (university of chicago press, 2025). alt text: feminist technoscience meets crip authorship abstract keywords references author bios     original research surveillant metrics: technologies of whiteness and the production of food insecurity     merissa daborn university of manitoba merissa.daborn@umanitoba.ca     abstract in this research i interrogate how metrics of food insecurity rely on indexes of deprivation, of which indigeneity is deemed an indicator of social deprivation. i engage the fields of critical indigenous studies, critical whiteness studies, and indigenous science, technology, and society argue that social deprivation indexes produce and surveil “deprived” geographic food zones according to metrics of whiteness. i make three central arguments through the empirical context of food insecurity interventions for indigenous people in winnipeg, manitoba, canada. first, accounting for food insecurity through social deprivation indexes produces food insecurity because it does not accurately depict sources of food outside of what has been deemed appropriate (see: “healthy”) through logics of whiteness. second, solely imagining food insecurity through logics of social deprivation results in interventions of whiteness, which overdetermines how inner-city urban space is designed, surveilled, and made carceral. third, if food studies does not interrogate and make serious efforts to undo its own whiteness, it will continue to be deficient in its renderings and understanding of food geographies beyond whiteness.   keywords whiteness, surveillance, indigenous sts, food security     introduction metaphors of food deserts, swamps, and mirages have become cemented in everyday discourse to talk about food insecurity. food deserts and swamps narrowly focus on the presence of appropriate grocery stores to access food, with food deserts referring to a perceived lack of grocery stores, and food swamps referring to a perceived overabundance of corner stores or fast-food restaurants (kolavalli 2019, 100; reese 2019, 6). the food mirage, on the other hand, is a geography that has come to signal a population of deficient individuals who can simply not afford the food in their neighborhood (paulsen 2017). i do not take the existence of food deserts, swamps, or mirages as a given. the colonial logics at work with these metaphors situate deserts as devoid of life, and swamps as places of danger. in reality, deserts and swamps are vital ecosystems. the failure to recognize abundance in both deserts and swamps is relevant to both the ecological metaphor and the rendering of food geographies. the continued use of the desert, swamp, or mirage metaphor furthers the practice of colonial domination over indigenous bodies and territories, specifically as these metaphors mediate knowledge production and policy interventions that render neighborhoods, stores, or food items as unhealthy, and thereby situating indigenous people as incapable of achieving health or food security, and in need of intervention by knowing experts who will fix bodies, behaviors, and geographies. these metaphors locate food access as an individual condition to be solved through better budgeting or better dietary choices, instead of as an issue of structural inequality, or what some scholars have referred to as supermarket redlining or food apartheid (kolavalli 2019, 100; reese 2019, 6-7). colonial logics, and whiteness, demarcate the desert as terra nullius, a zone where peoples and their ways of being are rendered not white, in need of improvement or replacement. the swamp is also demarcated as unproductive land through the logics of whiteness, whereas indigenous and black onto-epistemologies are instructive for understanding the swamp as a site of abundance, agency, and fugitivity; just as food swamps are (harney and moten 2013; tonumaipe'a et al. 2021; vickers 2023). it is particularly generative to think through the swamp as a site of fugitivity, as a means of evading governance (harney and moten 2013, 64), and of rejecting “swampification,” in which swamps are socially and methodologically rendered uninhabitable, “to justify their destruction” through intervention (vickers 2023, 1674). yet habitability is contextual. although whiteness renders swamps (whether ecological or food geography metaphor) uninhabitable, swamps are also sites where governance can be evaded, where agency occurs, and abundance exists if we understand these sites with an ontological lens other than whiteness. interrogating the racialized logics that undergird these geographies is necessary, but it is equally as necessary to interrogate how food deserts, swamps, and mirages are produced through technologies that measure deprivation. in attending to these metrics, i aim to denaturalize whiteness, identify the technologies of whiteness that produce and define how food insecurity is understood, and to do so with place-based attention to how whiteness operates in winnipeg, manitoba, canada, to better understand the implications of relations of whiteness in place. it is urgent to consider what is at stake with imagining neighborhoods as barren, deficient, and void of health and well-being when we render them as food deserts or, in the case of food swamps, overburdened by “unhealthy” foods and similarly void of health and well-being, and importantly, how food geographies come to be produced as deprived. food insecurity is geographically imagined and mapped through the use of social deprivation indexes, which correlate “deprivation” with a geographic area. these indexes have become a central mechanism for understanding food insecurity through the measure of variables, or markers of “deprivation,” such as income, unemployment, education, and even indigenous identity. in winnipeg, which is home to the largest urban population of indigenous people in canada, social deprivation indexes have been used to account for individual characteristics that are determined to be a barrier for individuals' to successfully achieve food security (wiebe and distasio 2016, 4). while such studies indicate the importance of accounting for indigenous identity to ensure “culturally sensitive approaches” when considering food environment interventions, correlating indigeneity with deprivation operates to locate deprivation with the individual (wiebe and distasio 2016, 10). how food insecurity is rendered by disaggregating population data sets based on social and health deficiencies overly determines how responses to food insecurity are rationalized. food deserts yield responses that are focused on geographic deficits, food mirages yield responses that are focused on identifying geographic zones of abundance that are home to deficient individuals, and food swamps yield responses that are focused on identifying deficient geographic zones and individuals. identifying the metrics used and rationalities that guide resulting interventions activates necessary interrogation—namely, what are the liberal logics of whiteness and colonialism embedded in how food security is rationalized this way? to attend to this question, i draw on a theoretical framework of white possessive securitization to understand how food spaces are surveilled and securitized (daborn 2022). in extending geonpul critical indigenous theorist aileen moreton-robinson's crucial theorization of white possession and possessive logics, i consider how maintaining the security of white possession is an integral undertaking of white possessive logics (esposito 2013; estes 2019; foucault 2009; hage 2000; harris 1993; kolopenuk 2020; leroux 2019; moreton-robinson 2015; rose 2004; tallbear 2013). white possessive securitization is a process that operates individually, structurally, and systemically, and as a theoretical framework it aids in analyzing how whiteness structures possession and securitization of food. white possession operates through logics of capital and property, thus broadening participation beyond just white citizens to include any citizens who choose to invest in possession. white possessive securitization is a rationality that circulates within the population, within bodies of subjects, and especially amongst those with investments in property, a process that forecloses access to space for those deemed non-white or perceived as threats to white property and life. i work predominately with moreton-robinson's definition of whiteness, which is “the invisible norm against which other races are judged in the construction of identity, representation, decision-making, subjectivity, nationalism, knowledge production and the law” (2006, 388). moreton-robinson further conceptualizes white possessive logics as a mode of rationalization that is invested in “reaffirming the nation-state's ownership, control, and domination” (2015, xii). moreton-robinson traces how race and gender are constitutive of patriarchal white sovereignty, which, as a regime of power, is derived from “the illegal act of possession,” and is evident in “everyday cultural practices and spaces” (2015, 34-35). race and gender are central to the function of patriarchal white sovereignty, particularly in “determining who rules and who accumulates property and wealth” (66). it is necessary to extend the analysis of who rules and accumulates property and wealth, to health as well. i argue that property and health are co-constitutive processes through white possessive ontologies. health functions as a driving rationality of patriarchal white sovereignty and white possessive logics, in which whiteness is the invisible norm constructing what is healthy and who is deemed healthy, while operating through raced and gendered bodies that are meant to function to preserve patriarchal white sovereignty above all else. in this way, white possessive securitization is always a gendered project. in this research, i interrogate how metrics of food insecurity rely on indexes of deprivation, of which indigeneity is deemed an indicator of social deprivation. i write this article as a white indigenous studies scholar who lives in winnipeg, and i engage the fields of critical indigenous studies, critical whiteness studies, and indigenous science, technology, and society to argue that social deprivation indexes produce and surveil “deprived” geographic food zones according to metrics of whiteness. i make three central arguments through the empirical context of food insecurity interventions for indigenous people in winnipeg. first, accounting for food insecurity through social deprivation indexes produces food insecurity because it does not accurately depict sources of food outside of what has been deemed appropriate (see: “healthy”) through logics of whiteness. second, solely imagining food insecurity through logics of social deprivation results in interventions of whiteness, which overdetermines how inner-city urban space is designed, surveilled, and made carceral. third, if food studies does not interrogate and make serious efforts to undo its own whiteness, it will continue to be deficient in its renderings and understanding of food geographies beyond whiteness. i argue that the technologies of whiteness used in food studies research to measure food geographies and insecurity is cohered through the parallel processes of health and property, both of which are rationalized and made common sense through white possessive logics. social deprivation indexes, which i identify as technologies of whiteness, have been employed to measure food geographies and behaviors against the “invisible” norm of whiteness. when behaviors and geographies do not meet an appropriate threshold of whiteness, such indexes deem individuals, and indeed entire populations, deprived or deficient. i begin with an introduction to social deprivation indexes, in which i intervene through critical indigenous studies and indigenous science, technology, and society before turning to three case studies of social deprivation indexes at work in winnipeg to produce food deserts, swamps, and mirages. social deprivation indexes what i refer to throughout this article as social deprivation indexes are technologies of whiteness that are prevalent amongst researchers and policymakers. these indexes are referred to by differing names, such as social deprivation index, index of socioeconomic deprivation, material and social deprivation index, area-based deprivation indices, small-area composite measures, marginalization index, and index of multiple deprivation, just to name a few. regardless of the name, these indexes tend to share a common aim of accounting for measures that are determined to indicate some form of social “deprivation” or marginalization through measures of employment, social class, education, housing, family composition, and race. these measures are then correlated with a geographic location. such indexes have been used to understand regional health inequalities (allik et al. 2020; matheson et al. 2012), contribute to the development of policy planning, and resource allocation (statistics canada 2019). ethnicity is regularly used as a variable when measuring deprivation, which belies that ethnicity as a category to denote belonging to a population group does not necessitate any inherent measure of deprivation. the use of ethnicity as a deprivation marker situates populations as already and always vulnerable, rather than populations that may be made vulnerable or face vulnerabilities through specific factors (e.g., institutional racism, colonization, redlining, etc.). mirjam allik et al. have warned against using ethnicity as a variable, noting that it is important to “distinguish between deprivation and the people experiencing this” (2020, 21). even though populations may experience material deprivation, this does not mean they are deprived. what is more troubling is the slippage that happens between ethnicity and race, and the concealment of whiteness that occurs through this process. i consider social deprivation indexes in relation to whiteness to do the work of making visible whiteness where it operates, particularly through the presumption of whiteness as a norm or appropriate comparison for those deemed deficient. critical indigenous studies scholars have interrogated how indigenous peoples have been quantified as deficient or in deficit through the measurement of indicators of financial standing, health, or educational outcomes (tuck and yang 2012; walter and andersen 2013; walter and suina 2019; willmott 2023). as i assess and interrogate the use of deprivation indexes, i have been careful to attend to how an ontological framing of whiteness operates from the presumption (and maintenance) of “a norm of indigenous deficit” (walter and andersen 2013, 35). in their formative text indigenous statistics, maggie walter and chris andersen call for a reversal of the ontological lens that narrowly focuses on indigenous difference (and consequently, deficiency through a white ontological lens) to compel different questions and a transformed research agenda. in doing so, walter and andersen contend that such questions would “resituate the problematic from the 'deficit' indigene to ask how the processes of colonization remain inextricably entwined on contemporary patterns of settler privilege” (35). i do not reverse the ontological lens in this research, but i do reorient the object of study away from indigenous peoples and towards those who study them. interrogating who measures, and how, is a central facet of the work being done by critical indigenous studies scholars studying the quantification and representation of indigenous peoples and populations. eve tuck and k. wayne yang have argued that indigenous peoples are codified in research “as 'at risk' peoples and as asterisk peoples” (2012, 22). tuck and yang contend that such codification comprises a settler move to innocence, which “erases and then conceals the erasure of indigenous peoples within the settler colonial nation-state and moves indigenous nations as 'populations' to the margins of public discourse” (22). ontological orientations of whiteness use technologies and metrics of measurement that presume and maintain indigenous deficit, while concealing, invisiblizing, and normalizing whiteness. in this article, i aim to extend analysis of the concealment of whiteness through metrics such as social deprivation indexes. the use of deprivation indexes is prevalent within food security research through the use of both census-based deprivation indexes as well as other indexes that conceptualize and measure deprivation through behavioral habits and consumer environments. a common use of social deprivation index in food security studies measures social deprivation (with a variety of variables such as ethnicity, marital status, education levels), material deprivation (with variables such as employment status and average income), with these measures then corresponding to a dissemination area to identify neighborhoods with high deprivation rates (apparicio et al. 2007; balcaen and storie 2018; cushon et al. 2013; del canto et al. 2015; engler-stringer et al. 2014; mcinerney et al. 2016; wiebe and distasio 2016). some studies, however, have limited their measures of deprivation to solely material deprivation (fuller et al. 2015). these measures are then used to identify food deserts, mirages, or swamps based on the determinations made that identified areas of deprivation and deficit. other studies have simply started with the baseline assumption that communities in need of food security supports are “deprived populations” (lotoski et al. 2015, e147). further to the common indexing of social deprivation using census measures, some studies have also indexed eating behaviors and “diet quality” by pairing a measurement using the canadian adapted healthy eating index with walkshed food environment variables and socioeconomic status (mcinerney et al. 2016). studies that have avoided measuring population deprivation have turned their focus on deprivation to food environments instead by indexing areas of food deprivation by having dietitians approve retail food stores as appropriate food sources (slater et al. 2017), measuring how low-income neighborhoods score in relation to a healthy eating index (allcott et al. 2019), and using a retail environment index to measure the association between obesity rates and food swamps (cooksey-stowers et al. 2017). deprivation indexes require two mechanisms to work: experts, and what tania murray li (2007) refers to as a “will to improve.” indexes that measure deprivation in relation to health require not only the acceptance of a dominant ideology of health, but biopolitical interventions that can be made in the name of health improvement. in her theorizations of improvement, li argues that improvement requires two key mechanisms—problematization and “rendering technical” (7). problematization identifies deficiencies in need of being rectified, whereas “rendering technical” involves “the bounding and characterization of an 'intelligible field' appropriate for intervention,” which subsequently determines who has the power to determine deficit, and who is deficit and in need of intervention (7). this practice of improvement is apparent in responses to food insecurity, especially when food insecurity gets framed in terms of deficiencies that need to be rectified through expert diagnoses. when it comes to dominant approaches to food insecurity, this process occurs when “solutions” to food insecurity focus on individuals to implement self-regulation and discipline to change their circumstances. social deprivation indexes and the production of food insecurity in winnipeg, food insecurity is featured in everyday discourse as stemming from food deserts, mirages, and swamps (distasio 2016; frew 2020). while it is worth noting and observing trends regarding the use of social deprivation indexes across food studies research, it is necessary to consider the function of place in how deprivation indexes are implemented, as well as the implications of their use. it is imperative to interrogate social deprivation indexes in relation to the places within which they are situated to attend to differing and specific histories of race relations, whiteness, and varying population compositions. narrowing analysis to research in winnipeg brings several things into focus—namely, how food insecurity is geographically imagined. the population at the center of inquiry when it comes to food insecurity in winnipeg is almost always determined by socioeconomic status, which tends to result in a focus on winnipeg's inner-city neighborhoods, which are predominantly populated by indigenous residents, newcomers, or people of color. despite research situated within winnipeg's inner city being largely cognizant of the complex social context that sustains food insecurity, health and nutrition consistently overshadow issues of access, justice, and equity when it comes to food. researchers have detailed colonial interventions of food rationing, nutrition experimentations, and the destruction of indigenous foodways and how these interventions have affected indigenous food security (burnett and hay 2023; gombay 2024; mosby 2013; mosby and galloway 2017). despite this research, food security indexing and intervention continues to operate as if it is not embedded in and reproducing the very same logics of whiteness that produced prior colonial interventions. in the section below, i specifically address how food deserts, mirages, and swamps render and intervene in populations and how they privilege biomedical hegemonic nutrition as a response to food insecurity. i consider what the implications are for how indigenous people are expected to demonstrate their investment in patriarchal white sovereignty, the health of the white nation, and their individual health by becoming better biocitizens on their way to obtaining food security. index 1: food deserts food deserts are often employed as a tool to geographically locate zones that provide citizens with limited or no access to grocery stores, yet there are increasing trends to equate food deserts with particular populations (e.g., low socioeconomic status or racialized populations) and poor nutrition outcomes. joyce slater et al.'s (2017) study of food deserts in winnipeg illuminates several troubling features of how food insecurity is geographically imagined through the lens of a food desert, including but not limited to what counts as a food access point, how people access food from a variety of sources, and how data sets are aggregated to reify individual deficiencies and risks to be ameliorated. slater et al. use three data sources to create two scenarios of food deserts that are based on proximity to grocery stores: national chain grocery stores, full-service grocery stores, and 2011 canadian census data on average household income and total population counts via the 2014 manitoba population health registry (2017, 351-52). the authors define national chain grocery stores as “large, full-service grocery stores that had stores in manitoba as well as other provinces” (351). whereas full-service grocery stores are defined as “large, local grocery stores (not national chains) carrying a good selection of self-serve fresh fruits and vegetables (i.e. more than potatoes, onions and bananas, and not prepackaged), fresh meat and dairy products at reasonable prices (i.e. close to national chain prices), as assessed by local public health dietitians participating in the study, who had excellent knowledge of local stores, food costs and store characteristics” (351). slater et al. rendered two food desert scenarios: located greater than five hundred meters from a national chain grocery, and located greater than five hundred meters from a national chain grocery or a full-service grocery (351). they indicate that expanding their scope to include full-service grocers, and not just national chain grocers, decreases “the estimate of the population affected by food deserts in the winnipeg health region by 38%, from 104 335 to 64 574 individuals” (354). the data used to geographically locate food insecurity in this study is a narrow and insufficient accounting for what is an acceptable access point for food, and what is acceptable food to access. limiting food access points to national chain grocers and full-service grocers that mimic the features of national chain grocers not only fails to account for other points of food access; it serves to overdetermine policy responses to food deserts by limiting them to improving access to nutritious food via approved retailers. slater et al. note that to compile a database of all food retailers within the winnipeg health region “dietitians were provided with lists of candidate stores, and judged whether they were appropriately classified” (2017, 351). the authors recognize that “in many downtown areas, smaller local grocery stores may play an extremely important role in providing easy access to a wide range of affordable food products,” yet they do not include these sources in the scope of their study (354). they couple lack of proximity to national chain grocers and full-service grocers with low socioeconomic status as creating a “double burden for a significant number of winnipeggers living in food deserts” (2017, 353). they argue that such a burden results in individuals relying on “alternate food sources such as convenience stores, food banks and low-cost fast food options such as 'dollar' pizza and other bargain fast food outlets; or rely on taxis (which are expensive) or personal networks (which can be inconvenient and unreliable), if available, for rides to and from larger grocery stores” (353). the narrow focus on large chain grocers that meet the approval of dieticians eliminates all of these options that slater et al. have sweepingly rendered as unhealthy, and as simultaneously an insignificant source to contribute to food security. small grocery stores (like the three locations of pal's supermarket) have a wide variety of “nutritious” foods; convenience stores cater to community needs and stock many essentials; food banks offer necessary assistance to get many families through the month; bargain fast-food outlets similarly help people make ends meet and provide quick, easy, and delicious meals; and personal networks should be viewed as an asset, particularly when communities organize to create grocery shuttles. accounting for greater sources of food access could undoubtedly lower the estimated numbers of people living in food deserts. however, it could also result in renderings of food insecurity that are not solely focused on neighborhood and individual deficiencies, and instead look to larger structural determinants that produce community food insecurity. by not factoring in further population data in their study, the research produced by slater et al. is lacking. the failure to think about structural determinants in shaping food environments while also expecting individuals to be better biocitizens through their nutrition and economic choices, without actually providing corollary health and socioeconomic resources will result in differential governance of food insecure populations. slater et al. leave us with an inaccurate rendering of food environments that prioritize biomedical hegemonic nutrition, while negating individual agency, networks, and preferences. biomedical hegemonic nutrition operates to standardize relationships with and knowledge of food and nutrients, while simultaneously severing such knowledge from social, cultural, political, and economic contexts that might offer alternative knowledge of food (kimura et al. 2014; mckeithen 2022). if nutritional knowledge informs and works to secure state security through the hegemonic quantification of nutrition, and the subsequent governing of bodies through logics of health remains uninterrogated, then whiteness remains concealed. the focus on an absence of large food retailers that offer a set variety of “nutritious” foods to determine food deserts is troubling when it requires situating communities and individuals as deficient in relation. slater et al. contend that “residents of food deserts may effectively be dependent on small retailers, such as convenience stores, with limited selection and typically higher prices, for the bulk of their food purchasing” (2017, 350).1 slater et al. do not identify this as a mere issue of access; they argue that “the lack of full-service, fair-priced grocery stores in a community may therefore promote inequities by leaving residents at increased risk of comprised diet quality, negatively impacting long-term health” (350). the crux of concern here is that slater et al. recommend that “future studies should examine the impacts of food deserts on dietary behaviour and health outcomes, as well as residents' experiences of living in food deserts” (355). research on residents' experiences of their food environments is absolutely necessary. the suggestion to examine the impacts of food deserts on dietary behavior and health outcomes is misplaced and refracts risk and deficiency onto individuals who live in geographies that have been identified as food deserts, and identifies behavior as the target of intervention. index 2: food mirages geographic imaginings of food security through the framing of a food mirage ameliorates some of the troubling aspects of food desert research—namely, what food access points are included in data sets—but it is still beholden to hegemonic biomedical nutrition, and thus whiteness. kyle wiebe and jino distasio identify food deserts as being concerned with “physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy food,” which they argue fails to account for areas where “individuals live close to healthy food sources but face serious economic hardship that prevents them from accessing those healthier food choices” (2016, 1). wiebe and distasio identify the latter as “food mirages,” which can “equally contribute to negative health outcomes but present unique challenges to meeting local food needs” (2016, 1). wiebe and distasio use similar methods to slater et al. to identify food deserts and mirages in winnipeg, including identifying a data set of supermarkets, calculating distance to supermarkets,2 but where they differ is through the inclusion of identifying “areas of deprivation by constructing a social deprivation index,” to ultimately distinguish “problematic food environments by linking an area's distance to a supermarket with its social deprivation score” (1). the methods and data sets used by wiebe and distasio raise similar concerns to those that emerged from slater et al.'s research, most notably what food access points are accounted for. wiebe and distasio only account for national chains (e.g., real canadian superstore, safeway, walmart, costco, etc.) and regional chains (e.g., food fare, family foods, and red river co-op), and they recognize that a limit of their research is “the exclusion of independently owned large grocery stores, large grocery stores specializing in imported-goods or 'ethnic foods,' small grocery stores, and convenience stores” (4). despite noting this limitation, wiebe and distasio justify it by arguing that “supermarkets offer consumers a greater diversity of healthy products...and generally offer products at more competitive prices” (4). it is true that large chain supermarkets offer a great diversity of healthy products, but reducing acceptable access points solely to chain retailers provides inaccurate renderings of food environments and presupposes several things—that individuals are not accessing “healthy” foods elsewhere, that accessing marked up foods closer to home would not outweigh the time and travel costs for some individuals to make their way to larger supermarkets, and that individuals need to access a “great diversity” of healthy products to meet nutrition guidelines and thus expectations of what food security should look like as well. the addition of a social deprivation index to geographically render food deserts and mirages extends the gaps in slater et al.'s research that failed to account for population data beyond socioeconomic status. unfortunately, rather than assist the researchers to demarcate larger determinants of health, the social deprivation index is employed in really troubling ways that mark individuals and communities as deficient. wiebe and distasio implement the social deprivation index to account for variables that “represent socio-economic characteristics that may present barriers to an individual's ability to travel to supermarkets and purchase healthy foods” (2016, 4). they note that the variables were drawn from the 2006 census and include “(i) percentage of low income families; (ii) unemployment rate; (iii) population aged 25-64 with no high school certificate, diploma, or degree; (iv) percentage of recent immigrants (immigrants labour arriving between 2001 and 2006); (v) percentage of lone-parent families; (vi) percentage of the labour force that does not drive; and (vii) percentage of the population that identifies as aboriginal” (4). moreover, wiebe and distasio contend that “it is important to note that one-quarter of the population in high deprivation areas are of aboriginal ancestry and 7% are recent immigrants,” which they highlight to note “the importance of culturally sensitive approaches to addressing food environments” (10). culturally relevant programming is indeed important, but culturally sensitive approaches (whatever that means) seems insufficient for addressing the structural determinants of food environments. more than anything, the social deprivation index indicates a statistical deprivation. the social deprivation index disaggregates data sets to aggregate a portrait of deprived and deficient individuals and communities in winnipeg's inner city. rather than render portraits of deficient individuals and populations living in food deserts and mirages, researchers could do well to turn a social deprivation lens onto the structures and modes of governance that result in low incomes, underemployment, underfunded education, lack of supports for newcomers, lack of supports for families, and the differential governmentality of indigenous populations. it is ironic that in research about food mirages—where individuals live close to food sources but are prevented from always accessing those sources—that the authors fail to account for anything more than those mirages. wiebe and distasio note that “nearly 85,000 people live in inner city neighbourhoods classified as severely unsupportive food environments—either food mirages or deserts” (2016, 14). by only including national and local chain retailers in their data set, wiebe and distasio effectively position small grocers, “ethnic food” grocers, dollar stores, convenience stores, food banks, community food organizations, personal networks, and local food vendors such as eadha bread (2020), who offer no questions asked prepaid food vouchers to increase “access to fancy tasty goodies to anyone who walks in,” as part of what wiebe and distasio refer to as an unsupportive food environment. of course, narrowing food environments to solely factor in large retailers because of their economic affordability and variety of health foods indicates that individuals should only be spending their money in a particular way (e.g., getting the best deal), and that if they are food insecure, they should only be making efforts to increase their access to approved nutritious foods so as to not further burden society with poor health outcomes from their perceived diet-related risk factors. the requirement that individuals living in food deserts or mirages overcome their poor diets to purchase nutritious foods from approved grocers is biocitizenship in action. food security, and increased access to food resources, will only be approved at the cost of disciplinary power and self-regulation of behavior to meet hegemonic biomedical nutrition guidelines. wiebe and distasio connect eating behaviors, poor health, and food environments, noting that “unhealthy diets are known causative risk factors for multiple chronic health problems including heart disease, diabetes, and obesity,” which they relate to “different food consumption habits between socio-economic groups, with low-income individuals tending to consume lower nutritional value foods...and having lower-quality diets” (2016, 1-2). instead of undertaking an analysis of how increased income or resources could transform purchasing capacities for food insecure communities, wiebe and distasio situate the burden of poor health on individuals. whiteness, and expectations of citizenship through the logics of patriarchal white sovereignty, are concealed through the measurement of and focus on the individual who fails to be responsible for their health. wiebe and distasio contend that “since accessing healthy food for people in food deserts can be difficult, timely, and expensive, individuals may then turn to closer, less healthy options at nearby corner stores” (12). they further note that “individuals in food mirages may actually be able to walk to healthy food sources but face socio-economic challenges to obtaining a healthy diet,” which tells us that to better support food environments, it will be necessary to have “programs that target socio-economic issues, such as poverty, as well as the cost of food” (16). increasing individual purchasing power seems like a promising approach to respond to mirages—increased resources could very well allow food insecure individuals to access food from previously unaffordable access points. despite this, wiebe and distasio conclude that addressing issues of food accessibility in deserts and mirages “requires either bringing healthy and affordable food into an area, or bringing individuals to healthy and affordable food,” by which they mean nutrition education (16). according to wiebe and distasio, these interventions “must be done in conjunction with efforts to ensure the availability of culturally sensitive foods and the promotion of nutritional and food skills education in order to fulfill a holistic understanding of food security” (16). the inclusion of culturally sensitive foods indicates that they recognize that the food deserts and food mirages they have rendered are home to high populations of indigenous people and newcomers—and presents a culturally sensitive veneer on disciplinary and regulatory education programs to educate food insecure individuals into better biocitizens by healthy eating their way out of food insecurity. index 3: food swamps the final geographic imagining of food insecurity in winnipeg is the food swamp. the swamp extends many of the problematic aspects of the food mirage, reifies expectations of hegemonic biomedical nutrition, and perpetuates solutions to food insecurity that are rooted in healthism. in short, food security requires accessing appropriately healthy foods as determined through expertise meant to preserve patriarchal white sovereignty, with interventions that are constrained through the problematization and responsibilization of individuals to self-regulate and change their own health circumstances. interrogating how the swamp intersects with hegemonic biomedical nutrition is necessary to unpack the invisibilization of whiteness as a norm in nutritional standards (azzarito 2009; freeman 2013; guthman 2011; lyons et al. 2021), as well as the whiteness of nutritional authorities that position racialized people as not having adequate knowledge to eat properly (lyons et al. 2021; overend 2021). a food swamp is a “spatial metaphor to describe neighborhoods where fast food and junk food inundate healthy alternatives” (cooksey-stowers et al. 2017, 2). in their research on identifying food swamps in winnipeg, martine balcaen and joni storie define food swamps as “the marginalized neighbourhoods whose food environment are dominated by restaurants,” as well as convenience stores (2018, 15). balcaen and storie employ similar methods to previous studies we have reviewed by undertaking a “geographic assessment of food swamps using (1) a socioeconomic deprivation index (sdi) based on seven census variables, (2) distance to restaurants, and (3) clustering of restaurants, to identify at-risk locations and populations” (15).3 balcaen and storie found that dissemination blocks “with high deprivation levels, close restaurant access, and significant clustering of restaurants were identified as food swamps...[and] the most socioeconomically deprived populations in winnipeg has easier access to highly clustered restaurants” (14). similar to the mirage, swamps do not suffer from a lack of available food access points; they are just not the right kind that can be approved through hegemonic biomedical nutrition standards. in addition to the lack of appropriate food access points, the food swamp is employed to identify points of intervention—both geographically and behaviorally. balcaen and storie posit that “to evaluate community-level nutrition environments, this model measures geographic food access in combination with the socio-demographic factors associated with eating patterns” (2018, 15). while balcaen and storie identify the need to address food insecurity in winnipeg, their model conflates food insecurity with “nutrition environments” and “eating patterns,” making food security conditional by conduct. that is, access to food security is conditional on the individual's ability to self-regulate and change their eating behaviors. balcaen and storie emphasize a focus on self-regulation of health and nutrition, noting that “if an area is a food swamp, the policy should be on deterrents to unhealthy food choices” (15). ultimately, balcaen and storie argue that “policies need to address zoning restrictions on restaurants, establish tax incentives to grocery stores, provide grants and loans to service high-risk populations, offer alternative strategies to curb poor dietary consumption patterns or further refine initiatives to support retail food projects in underserved areas” (21). the geographic rendering of winnipeg neighborhoods (particularly those with low socioeconomic status and indigenous and newcomer populations) as food swamps by balcaen and storie opens two particularly problematic avenues for addressing food insecurity. first, interventions aimed at self-regulating individuals invariably have disciplinary outcomes in instances of differential governmentality for indigenous people. second, rezoning interventions deem inner-city neighborhoods as nutritionally deficient in order to have a hand in the pie of rezoning and redeveloping brown neighborhoods into white and green spaces that espouse health and wellness through the removal of the foods and businesses that communities have relied on to feed themselves when they have been profiled, surveilled, and barred from other “healthy” sources of food throughout the city. what these three modes of indexing social deprivation have in common is how they reify whiteness, particularly through the maintenance of health as a priority and a focus on large retailers to ensure individual fiscal responsibility. meanwhile, these indexes negate many factors that make inner-city neighborhoods livable and contribute to food security; small grocery stores, convenience stores, bargain retailers, “ethnic” grocers, fast-food outlets, personal networks, grocery shuttles, community organizations, and local food venders all provide different levels of food access that are rendered invisible through these metrics. interventions of whiteness solely imagining food insecurity through logics of social deprivation results in interventions of whiteness, which overdetermine how inner-city urban space is designed and surveilled. examples of this kind of intervention include establishing epicurean grocery stores, rezoning neighborhoods with too many convenience stores into “healthy zones,” and the policing of private-public space due to perceptions of criminality and food theft. improvements are not necessarily inherently problematic, but when they occur at the cost of existing community capacities, or to merely improve predominantly indigenous and people of color neighborhoods to bring them up to the standards of middle-class whiteness, then it should be seriously interrogated who improvements are for. the identification of food swamps serves as a baseline to justify interventions that promote restrictions on fast-food restaurants and convenience stores with the aim of improving food environments by intervening in individual health behaviors (cooksey-stowers et al. 2017, 13; mah et al. 2017, e320). rezoning interventions are particularly problematic and demonstrate how whiteness operates through the twin processes of health and property. such interventions should be closely followed with attention to whether rezoning or business support is directed to existing community owned business, or whether it opens neighborhoods to gentrification in the name of health. by attending to the parallel processes of health and property that are present in how food insecurity is produced through social deprivation indexes, white possession is brought to the forefront. the crux of this work for me is to make legible the ways in which whiteness operates through, and is secured by, these technologies. i see this work as rooted in indigenous science, technology, and society, which, in addition to building capacity for indigenous technoscientific governance, is also a project that jessica kolopenuk identifies as “disturbing the territorial, political, and morally inflected claims of nation-states and their citizens, research institutions and their researchers, and bioeconomies and their consumers to continue to possess indigenous territories and to study indigenous bodies” (2020, s28). i identify how whiteness is secured at many levels—at the level of individual researchers in how they utilize technologies of whiteness in the production of research, and at the broader state level in terms of how and why food security has come to hinge on issues of health, due to growing concerns about the threat to settler economic sovereignty as a result of expenditure costs on indigenous health issues. interrogating and making visible whiteness hinges on how indigenous populations come to be known for technological intervention. the work of critical indigenous theorists m. murphy and kyle willmott resonates here. murphy theorizes epistemic infrastructures to understand “practices of quantification and intervention by multidisciplinary and multisited experts” (2017, 6), while willmott considers how “aggressive infrastructures of knowing” operate to control and reduce indigenous sovereignty (2023, 23). willmott argues that ultimately the objective “is to examine how numbers become colonial technologies of surveillance, categorization, and classification—how numbers become forms of data that make surveillance possible, that justify and intensify existing surveillance imperatives, and that create subjects for surveillance” (17). tracing how indigenous bodies and neighborhoods are surveilled, rendered deficient or deprived, and intervened upon through technologies produced by “aggressive infrastructures of knowing” is a necessary task. food studies and its corresponding infrastructures of knowing can, and often do, reify and conceal whiteness by placing whiteness as an invisible norm, as health. however, an emerging cohort of food studies scholars have produced incisive analyses spanning areas of intervention ranging from the surveillance of non-white bodies deemed at risk for health abnormalities (azzarito 2009; valdez 2020), the maintenance of boundaries of whiteness through food (anguelovski 2015; cohen 2021; tompkins 2012), and how whiteness operates in food spaces, not-for-profits, charity, and food justice movements (chennault 2022; de souza 2019; garth 2020; kolavalli 2019; power 2022; slocum 2007). with this research i contribute to this urgent intersection in food studies, particularly at the junction of technology and the measurement of food geographies and insecurity (lyons et al. 2021; valdez 2020). through the surveillance and measurement of deficiency (and thus indigeneity), food studies surveils how well whiteness is adhered to. as kristen lyons et al. have argued “whiteness not only communicates what foods are considered 'pure,' 'healthy,' 'normal' or 'nutritious,' but also produces a body of knowledge that legitimises white omnipotence” (2021, 216). the legitimization of whiteness that occurs through food-related infrastructures of knowing can come at a significant cost to indigenous people, from indigestion for those who are lactose intolerant to the undermining of indigenous foodways and sovereignty (overend 2021, 46). not all accounts of food geographies and access are based in deficiency. ashanté m. reese's black food geographies: race, self-reliance, and food access in washington, d.c. (2019) is a distinct example of how researchers can move away from renderings of food geographies that narrowly focus on deprivation or deficiency. reese's framing of “geographies of self-reliance” centers black agency in how people navigate and make their food geographies (8). others have accounted for agency and choice amidst austerity and food insecurity, to ensure embodied experiences and lived realities are accounted for in how people navigate food insecurity (strong 2018). it is also common to find contributions to the field of indigenous food security and sovereignty that diverge from deficiency narratives and instead focus on indigenous food systems (settee and shukla 2020), collective capacities and continuance in indigenous food sovereignty (whyte 2018), food environments that encapsulate safety and refuge (tonumaipe'a et al. 2021), and relationships that form strong and vibrant foodscapes (robin and cidro 2020). this research aims to contribute to non-deficit food geographies by doing the important work of interrogating how logics of whiteness are central to the seemingly benevolent research and interventions into food insecurity that dominate the study of food geographies. in an ongoing research project, my research collaborators and i created a database of winnipeg food access points that included national retailers, local retailers, speciality food stores, and convenience stores. from this database, we surveyed retailers and compiled an observation database to record the types of surveillance and policing used in grocery stores, and whether they were compliant with privacy legislation. this ongoing study is meant to understand how grocery stores in winnipeg are carceral spaces, while also recognizing that some spaces may be sites of reprieve from both carceral and hegemonic biomedical nutrition logics. when whiteness is not the starting point and invisiblized expectation of appropriate food access, space is created to account for geographies of abundance to emerge, rather than deprivation. technologies of whiteness that surveil, measure, and produce food insecurity through renderings of food deserts, swamps, and mirages are but one example of how food studies and its infrastructures of knowing serve to further how we understand food insecurity and deficiency. technologies such as the social deprivation indexes interrogated here are merely measures of whiteness. these technologies tell us a lot about deprivation and deficiency, but not the deficiency intended. measures of perceived indigenous deprivation and deficiency used by food studies researchers reveals more about the deficiencies of whiteness than indigenous food geographies. surveillant metrics and technologies of whiteness operationalized in food studies will continue to be deficient in their renderings of food geographies if they cannot fathom food choices and access beyond whiteness. notes 1 slater et al. do not contextualize or trouble the fact that while 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barnhill, mark budolfson, and tyler doggett, 345-66. oxford university press. wiebe, kyle, and jino distasio. 2016. confronting the illusion: developing a method to identify food mirages and food deserts in winnipeg. institute of urban studies in-brief series. http://hdl.handle.net/10680/1205. willmott, kyle. 2023. “colonial numbers: quantification, indigeneity, and the politics of fiscal surveillance.” surveillance & society 21 (1): 16-28. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v21i1.14609.     author bio merissa daborn is a white scholar and an assistant professor in the department of indigenous studies at the university of manitoba, where she researches at the intersections of food, technoscience, surveillance, policing, policy, and whiteness.  irani interview critical perspectives    difference work: a conversation with lilly irani lilly irani uc san diego lirani@ucsd.edu    monika sengul-jones uc san diego msengulj@ucsd.edu lilly irani is a cultural theorist and a computer scientist, a professional mix which gives her an analytical edge in addressing the socio-cultural politics of programming microwork platforms in the "service economy." this conversation discusses her ethnographic and praxis-based research on amazon's mechanical turk (amt). amt is an internet-based software that facilitates the distribution of micro-"human intelligence tasks" (hits) requested by users registered as "requesters" to be completed by users registered as "workers" (sometimes called "turkers"), who may earn pennies for their work at the discretion of the "requester." irani researches amt and collaboratively designed and maintains an online tool, turkopticon (to), to enable workers to report their experiences with "requesters," good and bad, as a form of collective, mutual aid.                                                                                                  ~msj msj:  one of your main field sites, amazon’s mechanical turk (amt), is broadly described by amazon and by industry titans as a "technology" instead of, for instance, a contracting or outsourcing company. this rhetorical categorization in part paved the way for the proliferation of start-up mobile phone applications and internet software marketplaces in the united states such as uber, taskrabbit, handy, even a freelance marketplace like [what was formally called] odesk [now upwork]. the classification of these as "technology" companies is significant because, as you point out in your winter 2015 article in south atlantic quarterly, the work they broker is a kind of piecework (2015b). the practice of paying workers a fixed rate for a unit of work or an action performed is not new. however, in your essay, you note there's a distinct difference in the "speed," "scale," and "technical means through which diverse workers are rendered into computation resources, directly feeding the algorithms of entrepreneurs and fortune 500 companies alike" (irani 2015b, p. 226). algorithmic processes differentiate newer digitally-mediated forms of labor from other forms of piecework, such as hiring homeworkers to sew or even cold-call marketing leads. why is the distinction between older and newer forms of technological piecework significant for understanding contemporary forms of crowdwork labor? li:  the first difference is one of scale and ease of deployment. systems like amt reduce the cost and risk of becoming an employer of pieceworkers or outsourced service workers. piecework is a very old form of organizing production within homes and families, dating at least back to european craft guild systems. systems like amt, however, make pieceworkers available to anyone with a computer and a us bank account. potential employers don't have to find the workers, transport materials to them, or transport the work output to sites of sale. the amt website builds the assembly line, payroll, and contract structure; employers can access pieceworkers in a few clicks and abandon them even more quickly. the pieceworkers are already available in one place—the amt website—and are already organized for the employer to access. amazon offers cognitive pieceworkers as a plug-and-play module, easily accessible to, and disposable by, employers.  this is only possible because of the massive suffusion of internet infrastructures connecting our homes to amazon and to employers—internet cable, payment infrastructures, bank protocols, for example. amt's labor relations are microstructural mechanisms that rely on global forms of connectivity and coordination. these relations are also only possible because amazon pushes the risk generated by these cadres of new, inexpert employers and their ever-changing experiments out to workers. i'm thinking with gina neff's work on venture labor (2012) and the individualization of social risks of innovation industries here. the site's interface also shields employers from seeing the conditions under which workers work—are they trying to make ends meet? working at home to care for children or a family member? anthropologist of microfinance megan moodie (2013) argues that microfinance works in much the same way—by hiding the gendered work of making ends meet and keeping the home together in economies of microfinance.  the second difference is how being classified a "technology" company, as compared to a "labor" company, financially benefits companies like uber, taskrabbit, and amazon. venture capital investors, or vcs, estimate how much a company will be worth in the future; they routinely value technology companies more highly than labor companies. vcs assume technology companies need more investment to set up at first, but that those companies will scale up their profits without scaling up their operating costs. to act as "technology" companies, microlabor companies must convince investors, first, that their labor force is of little risk and of little cost, and second, that their technology confers an advantage over other companies. hiding the amt-like labor is key to how these start-ups are valued by investors, and thus key to the speculative but real winnings of entrepreneurs. we can deconstruct how technology as a social category lets companies elide labor, but we also need to consider that we as analysts also elide the labor and social relations mediated by technology. the category "technology" does cultural and financial work, mobilizing subjects, citizens, value, and visions of progress. for people committed to social justice, the financial stakes of such classifications of technology and labor suggest a new way that the politics of representation matters. representations are not only a question of epistemology, but also part of the production of financial value. our tactical media practices can work in the speculative terrains of financial futures. i was once on a panel where a crowdsourcing ceo scribbled to himself in his notebook: "no controversy." i realized then that possibility of a controversy could weaken his pitch for investment funds. digital labor start-ups do better when they look like technology companies with a low-risk, infinite labor supply. by helping workers become visible, by showing how they organize, and by creating friction we can contest anticipatory knowledge in order to affect companies’ bottom lines today. msj:  tell us about the hidden workers—the "turkers," as they call themselves. you describe their skills in an article on turkopticon (irani and silberman, 2013) based on four years of participant observation of mt. i was struck by your description of the range of skills they have as professionals. how did getting to know turkers affect your understanding of crowdwork? li:  getting to know turkers has really expanded my sense of how much of what these workers accomplish goes unrecognized and uncompensated. it's one thing to say that turkers doing data-processing work should share more broadly in the value employers get from their labor—through profit-sharing, for example.  it's a whole other thing to recognize how amt sets up this labor market platform to make workers available, but at the same time workers themselves are organizing their own forums, teaching new workers, educating employers, and doing free task design consulting for employers to sustain amt so they don't lose the opportunity to work from their homes. this is free labor in the sense that the digital labor scholar tiziana terranova (2000) has written about it. but, unlike the aol moderators terranova describes, the amt workers who step up as leaders don't always do it for the satisfaction. many also rely on amt as a form of work they can do at home while caregiving for family members or to make ends meet; they worry that employers will disappear if they don't get good work on amt. the social factory depends not only on getting us to have fun and fulfillment as companies tap our communication and relations for profit, but also conditions of precarity that make us fear that we'll lose work if we don't fill in the gaps to keep employers and platforms working well.  msj:  i want to return to the work of the amt software, which as you've helped us to understand, has been described as a "technology" that solves a problem, a classification that makes invisible the embodied labor involved. in your article in new media & society (irani, 2015a) you ask how a software management system such as amt, which amazon describes as "artificial artificial intelligence," plays a crucial and under-recognized role in facilitating these labor relations. you propose that "the sociotechnical configuration of amt does cultural work; this cultural work happens not only through talk or co-present social interaction, but also through the relational politics of interface and systems design" (irani, 2015a, p. 721). you are arguing that the software is a vortex mediating these cultural meaning of work! can you elaborate how you've developed this analytic of software as conduit of culture? li:  well, honestly, i think the analytic emerges more out of the mud and mess of practice than from a prism drawn gleaming from the heavens. msj:  an appropriate metaphor, indeed, for demystifying "the cloud." li:  amazon launched mechanical turk in 2005 not as a labor service, but as a computational service of "artificial artificial intelligence" alongside its cloud storage and computing services, s3 and elastic cloud. my question became: what is at stake when a company pretends that many, many workers are simply software or an algorithm?  i backed into this analytic of the software doing cultural work from my experiences with computers as a kid, traversing the internet to connect to worlds through the screen, and then as a software designer when i worked at google. i was doing design at google in california when the company was opening offices in india. i witnessed a swirling vortex of screen-mediated contact and the anxieties that came out of it: us software workers worrying about their jobs getting outsourced to india, us designers drawing on stereotypes to make sense of indian job candidates they interviewed on the phone, google using software to farm out data processing work of various sorts to temporary workers without access to the central campus. google's engineers and managers could believe in the company mission "don't be evil" only because architectures of invisibility—screen-mediated indian workers, temps quarantined elsewhere on campus—allowed a bunch of engineers to believe that they were making the world a better place, as they often say. these architectures include spaces, infrastructures, extractive relationships, and ideologies about race, gender, and work that shape the production of value and difference. msj:  how so? li:  for example, google would check all the advertisements to appear on its search results to make sure the ads did not link to pornography or alcohol purchases. they could not fully automate this work—artificial intelligence couldn't decide with confidence in certain cases—so they hired workers in india to check.  while the advertiser was waiting for their ad to get approved, i had to design the interface that explained to customers that google was checking the link without letting them know that humans were doing it. the customer probably thought that google engineered some magical algorithms; this perception is good for business and good for the stock price. this perception also sustains america's confidence that engineers are the source of so much value that we need to boost stem majors. similarly, amt allows employer-programmers to appear as technological wizards even as the cognitive and physical labors of turk workers power that magic. in this way, amt mediates the production of difference between these innovators and the workers they rely on but know little about and often stereotype as unskilled—it does difference work. msj:  this reminds me of an argument in your essay for south atlantic quarterly (2015b) about fragility—how "fragile" the boundary is for maintaining the subjectivity of the entrepreneur, who is "dependent on the turker as mediated through amt's interfaces" (p. 233). fragility suggests that things could be otherwise.  which brings us back to turkopticon, which you describe as "an activist system that allows [amt] workers to publicize and evaluate their relationships with employers" (irani and silberman 2013, p. 611). how did you come to develop turkopticon as a scholarly activist project? li:  turkopticon was an attempt to interrupt the invisibility of workers powering these algorithmic systems. turkopticon grew out of a course project called tactical media taught by the late beatriz da costa, an artist trained in computer science and feminist theory and who worked collaboratively with scientists and engineers in a range of fields on projects about public and political aspects of science and technology. the course was part of a strange and wonderful intersection of feminist science studies, critical communication studies, mechanical art, and computation design that flourished at uc irvine between ace, the arts, computation, engineering program, and the graduate feminist emphasis.  at that time, da costa and the historian of science kavita philip were also co-editing the book tactical biopolitics (da costa and philip, 2010) and teaching in that interdisciplinary, tactical, and political mode. the ace program was run out of a trailer. it admitted its last student a few years ago, undone by funding cuts exacted in the name of a budget crisis.  meanwhile, the tech press was celebrating crowdsourcing as a tool of mass collaboration. i was disturbed by how these celebrations erased the labor and masked precarity. but i wanted to know how turkers understood their conditions and situation. i built on two lines of thinking: haraway's situated knowledges (2003)—the idea that we need knowledge for social justice but can't claim membership in a category that gives us a standpoint for the whole category, and patricia hill collins' (2009) writing on self-definition and self-valuation in black feminist thought. msj:  so this was an opportunity to question difference work by making. how were you able to animate these lines of thinking with a live platform? li:  i put out a survey on amt itself, asking workers what they did and did not like about the work, and asking them to write a bill of turk rights. i took off from the points of overlap among diverse workers—the platform offered workers no protection against irresponsible or abusive employers. i presented a sketch of employer rating software in class and da costa said, "you should make that." that was in 2008. six silberman, a programmer and mathematician interested in open source, stepped up to help build it. we built it. to our surprise, one silicon valley crowdsourcing ceo thought it was a great idea to "level the playing field" and helped us advertise it to their workers. that company, liberal in every sense, turned out to pay pretty poorly and would later get sued by its workers in a class action lawsuit. truth is stranger than fiction. over the years, the user base grew and workers stepped up to moderate comments and flag fraudulent reviews. turkopticon worked in the sense that many workers found it useful—20,000 workers use it each month. but it also provoked public debates about the politics of digital labor—much more so than if i wrote a paper and went around giving talks. six finished his phd and now works for the german union ig metall. turkopticon remains active, sitting there on servers 24/7 as living testimony to the fact that mutual aid is possible and our current digital labor forms produce gross inequalities. msj:  what has collaboratively making turkopticon helped you to understand differently about work and the digital realm? li:  the project has forced me to take seriously the simultaneously extractive and ethical dimensions of high tech. we have the crowdwork start-ups that won't pay minimum wage but are excited to have their workers have a third-party reputation system—these circumstances tuned me in to the ideologies of fairness and perfect markets that animate many engineers.  i've also learned that we need to account for the fact that our work can be read in ways that work against our political objectives. workers pointed out how we, as turkopticon's designers, could be complicit in devaluing their skills when journalists cast amt as a "digital sweatshop" and turkopticon as "union 2.0" (brandom, 2013; cushing, 2012). these news stories reiterated a trope about creative, entrepreneurial designers saving poor, exploited workers. the trope obscured broader forms of worker skill, community, and collective action. some workers even noted that these awareness-raising articles attracted new employers who wanted to hire workers at low wages. turkopticon has also been good to think with over the years as i read other writers working on digital labor and related issues. as a practice, to forces me to confront the strange entanglements of software, irbs, work, and labor policy—and it helps me ask different questions about what i read. as i read haraway on response-ability (2008), i could experiment with thinking about to as a technology that grafts some response-ability onto amt. as i read jenny reardon's work "on the emergence of science and justice" (2013), i consider her critique that irbs de-politicize and legitimize biotech; amt offers a different side. irbs are actually the one institutional modality for holding employers (when they are academic researchers) accountable for low or unpaid wages. practice constantly spills over our categories of analysis.  msj:  what's been the biggest challenge? li:  maintenance and repair. a problem with research and development, hackathons, and innovation models, as far as i can tell, is that they are built on the seminal model of change—researchers come up with an idea, demonstrate it, and then move on, leaving the rest of the world to sustain it, adopt it, nurture it, or pick up the pieces (see cohn, 2013). regimes that reward the constant production of prototypes, patents, and papers can squeeze out the energy to sustain lasting projects. especially since i've started as a professor, to would be dead if not for the efforts of code maintainer six silberman, the moderators who daily debate how to keep mutual aid going, and the server administrators at ucsd who upgrade the operating systems and deal with power outages, etc. as a part of their jobs. mutual aid takes infrastructure, and infrastructure is always labor. progress is never just an "idea that matters," despite ted's tag line. there's a larger discussion starting to happen in this direction, and it is centered around the question of what feminist computing practices look like. we need theories that emerge out of specific struggles and experiments, but that take technology seriously once again, understanding technology not just as that which subjects us, but as configurable media, as a seductive object of hope, and as an object of collective labor. msj:  where do you think this positions interventions through/in feminist sts? li:  there's a danger of high-tech industries co-opting feminism as a way of generating more diverse experiments in value production—innovation par excellence—without addressing how the jobs with the most women and people of color, from building maintenance to human resources to technical writing, are devalued.   companies and venture capitalists want diverse coders and ceos—more diverse masters of technology—to the extent that it helps them develop new product lines and sources of value. we've seen, however, that being a master of technology really is also being a master of other people's labor. we need to resist the co-opting of feminism into the production of value. leigh star and lucy suchman decades ago instead turned feminist attention to the distribution of value and labor (star & strauss, 1999; suchman et al., 1999). we need to turn our attention to how the categories "creativity" and "innovation"—categories kavita philip analyzes as "the technological author" (2005)—smuggle in and valorize kinds of exploitation.   as we do this, we might take seriously the labors of sustaining required for making otherwise. when we talk about making worlds in feminist sts, we often go to the joys of art, prototypes, and fiction. i'm thinking of lisa nakamura's interview with donna haraway, "prospects for a materialist informatics" (nakamura, 2003), for example—a discussion that features practice-based work. one way that turkopticon is a bit different from a lot of the practice-based work discussed in that conversation is that people actually use to as a practical tool and rely on it as infrastructure. much practice-based work has focused on questions of epistemology and relations, but for me to opens up questions of the labors and infrastructures that sustain worlding in long duration. it needs different kinds of collective labor and infrastructure to endure than a film, a painting, or a performance. there are many kinds of labors of worlding. we need to theorize its distribution and also the struggle for resources and time to do this work. references brandom, r. (2013). union 2.0: how a browser plug-in is organizing amazon’s micro-laborers. the verge. jun 27. retrieved from www.theverge.com/2013/6/27/4467296/turkopticon-a-labor-union-for-amazons-mechanical-turk cohn, m. l. (2013). lifetimes and legacies: temporalities of sociotechnical change in a long-lived system (doctoral dissertation). retrieved from proquest dissertations publishing. (3603844) cushing, e. (2012, august 1). dawn of the digital sweatshop. east bay express. retrieved from http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/dawn-of-the-digital-sweatshop/content?oid=3301022 da costa, b. and philip, k. (2010). tactical biopolitics: art, activism, and technoscience. cambridge, mass. and london: mit press. haraway, d.  (1988). situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. feminist studies, 575-599. haraway, d.  (2008). when species meet. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. collins, p. h. (1986). learning from the outsider within: the sociological significance of black feminist thought. social problems, 33(6), s14–s32. irani, l.  (2015a). the cultural work of microwork. new media & society, 17(5), 720-739. irani, l.  (2015b). difference and dependence among digital workers: the case of amazon mechanical turk. south atlantic quarterly, 114(1), 225-34.  irani, l.  c., and silberman, m.  s.  (2013).  turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk. proceedings of the sigchi conference on human factors in computing systems, 611-620.  new york, ny: acm press. moodie, m. (2014). microfinance and the gender of risk: the case of kiva.org. signs, 40(1), 279-302. murphy, m. (2012). seizing the means of reproduction: entanglements of feminism, health, and technoscience. durham, nc: duke university press. nakamura, l. (2003, august 30). prospects for a materialist informatics: an interview with donna haraway. electronic book review.  retrieved from http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/interview. neff, g. (2012). venture labor: work and the burden of risk in innovative industries. cambridge, mass.: mit press. philip, k. (2005). what is a technological author? the pirate function and intellectual property. postcolonial studies 8(2), 199-218. reardon, j.  (2013). on the emergence of science and justice. science, technology & human values, 38 (2): 176–200.  shirky, c. (2010). cognitive surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age. new york: penguin. star, s.  l., & strauss, a. (1999). layers of silence, arenas of voice: the ecology of visible and invisible work. computer supported cooperative work (cscw), 8(1-2), 9-30. suchman, l., blomberg, j., orr, j.  e., & trigg, r. (1999). reconstructing technologies as social practice. american behavioral scientist, 43(3), 392-408. terranova, t. (2000). free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. electronic book review.  retrieved from www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary. bios lilly irani is assistant professor of communication & science studies at university of california, san diego. she is a co-founder and maintainer of digital labor activism tool turkopticon. she is currently writing a book on the cultural politics of entrepreneurialism in transnational india. her work has appeared at acm sigchi, new media & society, science, technology & human values, south atlantic quarterly, and other venues. she earned her ph.d. in informatics from the university of california, irvine. monika sengul-jones is a doctoral candidate in communication and science studies at the university of california, san diego, where her dissertation research focuses on socio-technical interfaces of and gendered cultural narratives about paid writing work in english. she received an m.a. in gender studies at central european university. she has received funding from the rotary foundation and wikimedia foundation for her research. book review | what comes after entanglement?: activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion, by eva haifa giraud (duke university press, 2019) cheng, jih-fei. 2025. review of microbial resolution: visualization and security in the war against emerging microbes (university of minnesota press, 2024). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312. © jih-fei cheng, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | microbial resolution: visualization and security in the war against emerging microbes, by gloria chan-sook kim (university of minnesota press, 2024) jih-fei cheng scripps college jcheng@scrippscollege.edu “you academics don’t get it. it’s about scale,” a former comrade told me in 2014 when i questioned whether vesting hope in pharmaceuticals would end the hiv/aids pandemic. we met in the early 2000s while organizing among unhoused queer and trans youth of color in new york city. i was working at the time in community-based hiv/aids prevention programs and research. reuniting nearly a decade later, in 2014, while i was in graduate school, i asked his impression of the us federal drug administration’s recent approval of truvada in 2012 as the first effective hiv pre-exposure prophylactic (prep) for market distribution. i was skeptical about prep’s global reach since hiv antiretrovirals pioneered as early as the mid-1990s still remained out of reach for many global south communities due to patents, costs, and trade wars. my former comrade was in the throes of biotechnological optimism. gloria chan-sook kim’s monograph microbial resolution: visualization and security in the war against emerging microbes reflects on pandemic emergence another ten years later when covid-19 has also become endemic and chronically managed by biotechnologies pioneered by the global north and persistently denied to the global south. microbial resolution charts the “post-cold war period” of 1989 to 2016 in which microbes became re-envisioned as the new frontier for us imperial wars (1). the analysis offers a sobering antidote to biotechnological optimism. it directs our critical analyses to address why we are so deeply invested in the capacity of biotechnological innovation. as kim argues, the field of “emerging microbes” continuously projects tales of caution about a ruinous mailto:jcheng@scrippscollege.edu book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jih-fei cheng, 2025 future, making it a constant source for crises, while manufacturing endless opportunities for biotechnological innovation and profit. it feels important to state: writing something pithy and incisive about covid-19 amid its crisis reverberation and our individually experienced and collectively embodied “brain fog” is a task i had not imagined surmountable prior to reading microbial resolution. although the book’s historical framing ends in 2016 (for reasons left unexplained), kim writes from the ambit of the covid-19 pandemic and effectively persuades the reader to consider the implications of her analyses for our present. microbial resolution makes the “unimaginable” its object of analysis in studying emerging disease preparedness in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. bringing this period into intensified focus, the monograph maps the media ecology of what kim calls “preemptive biopreparedness” (14–15). kim’s use of the term microbial resolution entwines two dimensions of preemptive biopreparedness: the “discursive processes and visualization practices in the u.s.led war against emerging microbes” and the act of “solving” the “problem” of an “ill-formed entity (such as a diffuse threat)” by bringing it “into shape” (5). “emergence” is the operative term for kim; it strains our perception of what is “unimaginable.” the term emergence marks for kim the transfer of us–ussr geopolitical rivalry in the twentieth century to the world health organization’s new battlefront announced in 1989 against emerging infectious diseases with the united states pointing the way. “emerging microbes” conceptually refuses the binary between what is seeable/knowable and invisible/unknowable by bringing it into resolution. as kim’s object of study, the notion draws together marita sturken’s (1997) analysis of the “tangled memories” of us failures in its wars against vietnam and hiv/aids and cindy patton’s (2002) framework for “globalizing aids.” to bring an emerging infectious disease into microbial resolution, then, requires abundant data to render a “calculative imaginary” that is presumably capable of detecting microbial movement to thwart mutant formations (kim 2024, 97). examining data visualizations of microbial ecologies, animal sentinel media, corporate films, policy documents, grey literature, and more, microbial resolution explores the way “emergence” names the property of “proliferating and evermutating entities” who, by definition, remain not simply “unknown, but nonknowable” (13). importantly, kim notes, the threat must seem visible but never discernible. therein lies the paradox of preemptive biopreparedness: how can one see the potential existence of a microbial threat? the “task is not to convert the nonknowable into something that can be cognitively grasped,” kim declares, “rather, [resolution] operates to make the hazy frontiers and limitless dangers of microbial emergence into a productive and operable object” (13–14). kim maintains that there is no finite resolution to the war against microbes—only “irresolution lies at the heart of the war against microbial emergence”—like a pixel book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jih-fei cheng, 2025 remains an index of imperceptibility despite innovations in technological mediation (23). put simply, irresolution is the crisis condition of the war against emerging microbes. kim’s examination of us-led global health initiatives against emerging microbes demonstrates how the “unimaginable” has been rendered governable through a media ecology that proliferates the techniques for sourcing data and visualizing the potential threat of a disease presumably even before it comes into existence. to this end, microbial resolution contends, “war” is not a mere metaphor; it expresses how “managing microbial emergence and preempting terror share the same project of strategic imagination. both make foresight, fashioning it out of the capacities of a militarized imagination on the offense in a war game with high stakes” (104). like the us war on terror multiplies its “enemies” for endless expansion, the us war against emerging microbes makes imperceptibility and irresolution the “most potent effects of the concept of emergence: the novelty of emerging microbes—their potential to appear anywhere, at any time, in unending new genetic combinations—promises boundless economic production founded on the possibility of perpetually infected futures” (149). although microbial resolution does not explicitly employ racial, gender, or sexual analyses, it makes clear that us colonialism and military imperialism are foundational to the informational infrastructures, or “bioinformation,” for surveilling microbial emergence (122–25). in the post–cold war/war on terror era, the united states has engaged in “pathogenic nation making,” kim claims (27–31). building on priscilla wald’s (2008) notion of “imagined immunities,” us “pathogenic nation making” involves inciting “measures and policies of preparedness and preemption [that] immerse us in speculative scenarios of ruined futures” (kim 2024, 15). these “risk technologies,” kim writes, “work on the premise that data’s blank field points to the incipient contours of the future rather than what is already known and processed. they succeed even in—or perhaps because of—their failure to arrive at an account of something that can crystallize and become determinant, and without ever seeking to confront that aporia” (106). in other words, mapping numbers and visualizations of microbial emergence as the horizon of the future consigns us to endless scenarios of risk that require biotechnological intervention and management. our imaginations are filled with risk that can only be attended to by biotechnological governance. kim reminds us, whether discussing hiv/aids or covid-19, us and global north biotechnology corporations have invested in protecting patents for profits instead of distributing biotechnologies worldwide to save lives. the signing of the 1994 trade-related aspect of intellectual property agreement, for instance, guaranteed that the global south would remain a site for bioinformation extraction while guaranteeing the global north as the beneficiaries of biotechnological innovation and production (136–37). microbial resolution book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jih-fei cheng, 2025 elucidates why the logistics of industrial scale for biotechnologies, like prep, demands the abstraction of information—that is, “raw data” (94), or what stuart hall might call the “facts and interpretations” of the “raw materials” used to reproduce through media the dominant ideologies driving a proclaimed crisis (1978, 60). raw data quantifies and materializes bioinformation as a resource for a calculative imaginary. information abstraction ultimately leads to informational failures, or aporias of scientific visualization. these aporias, kim submits, regenerate crises conditions that insist on maintaining biotechnological innovation, patenting, and production using supply chains that extract from the global south to feed global north consumption and financial accumulation. microbial resolution is a book that undergraduates and graduates alike will find challenging yet accessible as a history of the present. the reasoning for the historical periodization of the monograph remains light on details. a discussion of how infrastructures of bioinformation can be traced to social and biological reproductive labor (posocco 2022), or indigenous dispossession and ecological devastation (reardon and tallbear 2012; mameni 2023), would make for compelling intersectional analyses of science and technology. however, in an era in which disinformation, social media, and media campaigns against “emerging microbes” and “terror” throw truth into constant crises, microbial resolution teaches us important visual methodologies to discern biotechnological mediation. although biotechnologies promise us progressive clarity towards a solution, they ultimately involve industries and innovations of us military imperialism that traffic in crises to redistribute wealth, health, and power upwards. references hall, stuart. 1978. policing the crisis: mugging, the state, and law and order. macmillan press. kim, gloria chan-sook. 2024. microbial resolution: visualization and security in the war against emerging microbes. university of minnesota press. mameni, salar. 2023. terracene: a crude aesthetics. duke university press. patton, cindy. 2002. globalizing aids. university of minnesota press. posocco, silvia. 2022. “harvesting life, mining death: adoption, surrogacy and forensics across borders.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35071. reardon, jenny, and kim tallbear. 2012. “‘your dna is our history’: genomics, anthropology, and the construction of whiteness as property.” current anthropology 53 (s5): s233–45. https://doi.org/10.1086/662629. sturken, marita. 1997. tangled memories: the vietnam war, the aids epidemic, and the politics of remembering. university of california press. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35071 https://doi.org/10.1086/662629 book review 5 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jih-fei cheng, 2025 wald, priscilla. 2008. contagious: cultures, carriers, and the outbreak narrative. duke university press. author bio jih-fei cheng (any pronoun) is associate professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at scripps college. cheng is currently completing a book-length manuscript, tentatively titled “materialist virology,” which historicizes the field of virology in the context of racial capitalism, plantation agriculture, industrialization, and financialization. book review | microbial resolution: visualization and security in the war against emerging microbes, by gloria chan-sook kim (university of minnesota press, 2024) references author bio tilsen, jenny. 2025. “tenth anniversary artwork: jenny tilsen’s self portrait in fragments.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–3. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © jenny tilsen, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license catalystcatalyst feminism, theory, technoscience figure 1. jenny tilsen, self-portrait in fragments (collage), 2020. tenth anniversary section ff tenth anniversary artwork: jenny tilsen’s selfportrait in fragments jenny tilsen jt046@bucknell.edu the image depicts a life-sized self-portrait collage that i created during the covid-19 pandemic and during my first semester of grad school. the collage is constructed from torn magazine pages and reassembled onto a tracing of me. this collage symbolizes both forced and voluntary transformation. the forced transformation reflects how we collectively navigated unprecedented change and loss during the pandemic. the voluntary change is found in an intentional act of reclaiming power through the remaking of myself out of magazine pieces, at a time when i felt powerless. by transforming fragmented images into a new representation of being, i asserted agency in a time uncertainty. the magazines that i used to make the collage were all found or gifted to me. when people in my community heard that i was collaging, they would give me their discarded magazines. nothing is ever made in isolation. we create from the resources that are available to us, often through the generosity and care of others. the process and expression represented in the collage mirror the themes and values of catalyst—where dominant science and technology narratives are challenged, deconstructed, and remade into something new as a response to the techno-capitalist racialized, gendered, and militarized world and as a desire for something different. both the artwork and the journal challenge linear and hierarchical ways of thinking, offering alternative, multiple methods of understanding complex phenomena. in doing so, catalyst foregrounds multiplicity and interconnectedness, rejecting singular, objective truths in favor of a more layered and intersectional understanding of the world. tenth anniversary section 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jenny tilsen, 2025 mailto:jt046%40bucknell.edu?subject= ff artist bio jenny tilsen began playing with paper growing up in her father’s bookbindery, surrounded by parts of books in all of their variations of repair and disrepair. she now studies the narrative constructions of science and technology. she created stemtelling, a storytelling method, grounded in feminist philosophy of science as a way to build pluralistic knowledge. she currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the electrical and computer engineering department at bucknell university, studying how communication practices, infrastructures, values, and ethics influence the making of technoscientific knowledge. for more about jenny tilsen’s work, please visit https://www. jennytilsen.com. tenth anniversary section 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jenny tilsen, 2025 https://www.jennytilsen.com. https://www.jennytilsen.com. heinemann, laura l. 2024. “‘back then,’ ‘around here,’ and ‘down the road’: proximity, recur sivity, and the present future in transplantation.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–21. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © laura l. heinemann, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license “back then,” “around here,” and “down the road”: proximity, recursivity, and the present future in transplantation laura l. heinemann creighton university lauraheinemann@creighton.edu abstract in this article, i examine the themes of proximity, recursivity, and the present future in transplant, with special attention to the perspectives and experiences shared by rural interlocutors during ethnographic fieldwork carried out during twenty-four non-consecutive months from 2007 to 2010 in the midwest region of the united states. by revisiting from today’s vantage point a set of data gathered years ago, and suggesting the möbius strip as a helpful model, i offer an examination of recursivity in transplantation that is itself born out of a recursive approach to research and analysis. throughout, i draw upon and analyze data that were gathered through participant observation and qualitative ethnographic interviews with transplant patients and loved ones residing in rural areas, where interlocutors’ insights regarding their temporal and spatial movement in relation to transplantation index some of its frictions of futurity. keywords rurality, organ transplant, recursivity, proximity and distance, futurity, relational history, future togetherness, möbius strip, travel mailto:lauraheinemann@creighton.edu special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 2 figure 1. mobius, 2023. copyright natalie very b. (@natalieveryb). introduction depending on time of year, a drive through the rural areas of the us midwest surrounding the mid-sized city of metrotown1 might take one through a staccato of melting snow peppering still-asleep croplands and pastures, or spring shoots poking through leaves, senesced grass, and the chaff-strewn soil of last year’s soybean fields. or the view might be saturated with shades of verdant green, or golden brown, or a blanket of white that obscures the horizon, making almost imperceptible the boundary between land and sky. metrotown is home to the transplant center, which became the hub of my ethnographic fieldwork in 2007, where i carried out participant observation and qualitative interviews with a total of one hundred participants during twenty-four non-consecutive months through 2010. in that study, i had set out to better understand how transplantation engages relations of kinship and care, in the sense that it both relies upon and can reorder those relations (see heinemann 2016). while many transplant candidates and recipients, their loved ones, and health professionals whom i met were living in or very near metrotown, i also met, interviewed, and spent time with those who lived hours away, in the rural regions of the transplant center’s large service area, special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 3 where the recursive shifts in landscape from season to season and from daylight to dark marked the passage of time in palpable ways. for them, the drive might be planned well in advance of a day of back-to-back appointments in the transplant clinic. or it might be required suddenly, upon “the call” notifying them a matching donor organ has become available. in either case, the drive might begin on gravel roads, where dust kicked up by a vehicle can be seen by neighbors from across the section. it might take them through a series of small towns, each requiring drivers to slow from the highway-clip of 65 miles per hour (about 105 km/h), down to a crawl of 35 miles per hour (about 56 km/h) past the gas station convenience store, repair shop, grain elevator, or implement dealer, then back up again to cruising speed until the next town. eventually, the stoplights and traffic of metrotown would set the pace of travel, until finally coming to a stop somewhere in the transplant center’s labyrinthine parking garage. their return home, either after their last appointment or following an extended stay, would then retrace the route, ending with a fresh layer of gravelroad dust applied on top of the previous one, and perhaps new insights into their present state of health and possibilities for the future of their transplant journey. whether still a transplant candidate, trying to become one, or now a recipient, rural patients and their loved ones could be certain of few things, with one exception: they would be making the drive again before long. researching and thinking with multiply-layered recursivity reflecting now some fifteen years after i began fieldwork, i revisit from today’s vantage point the many layers of recursivity in transplantation, as a way to approach some of its “frictions of futurity” (see frankel, fritsch, and berkhout, this issue). this, the domain at the heart of this special issue, is also one that in principle might seem beyond the reach of such a realist and “presentist” methodological approach as ethnography. indeed, the “ethnographic present” as a literary device has been roundly critiqued for its tendency to obscure temporal context and change (although cf. hastrup 1990). but i take inspiration from felix ringel’s argument for “increased and explicit attention to the future,” for “paying in-depth attention to all the temporal relations and experiences […] in our fieldsites’ many successive presents” (2018, 9). avoiding allusion to an ethnographic present, my analyses explicitly grow out of a return to ethnographic data gathered years ago. in this sense, my approach aligns with recent conversations on “patchwork ethnography” prompted by gökçe günel and chika watanabe (2024). informed by feminist, queer, disability, indigenous, and other methodologies and expertise, patchwork ethnography “foreground[s] the relations, everyday lives, and situated concerns that can appear only through a layered understanding of the worlds we study” (günel and watanabe 2024, 134). allowing for new layers of insights to which i did not yet have access at the time of fieldwork, i examine the themes of proximity, recursivity, and the “present future” special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 4 in transplant. these themes emerged through closer attention to rural interlocutors, whose experiences and perspectives i previously had not analyzed separately or given particular focus. while i highlight only three illustrative examples below, at least thirty-two among the participants i interviewed could be counted among this segment.2 my revisiting the data from this angle marks my own movement as a scholar. this movement is perhaps toward some distance from some of the core questions that initially guided my inquiry. and it is perhaps away from some of my anxieties about objectivity and method in anthropological ethnographic research (cassel 2002) as an early career scholar who happened also to have grown up in the rural us midwest. in a sense, then, this article is written from a position of futurity, a “present future” still remote at the time i gathered this data. it therefore offers an examination of recursivity in transplantation (e.g., returning for transplant care) that is itself born out of a recursive approach to research (returning again to data); in addition to highlighting recursivity as a theme for analysis, i also employ it methodologically to make this analysis. kelsie acton (2023) calls for plain language as a way to be more inclusive in the communication of complex ideas. a multimodal approach can likewise help. to get a handle on this idea of recursivity, i find the möbius strip a particularly apt model. the art at the beginning of this article, for example, incorporates a möbius strip and evokes the many returns across distances of landscape and time. it was created by natalie very b.3 in engagement with an earlier version of the work that has become this article, which i presented at the afterlives of transplantation event, in the frictions of futurity and cure in transplant medicine multidisciplinary salon series organized by suze berkhout and kelly fritsch.4 a physical möbius strip can also be a useful technology for modeling recursivity, for those of us who learn and think best with the help of tactile, three-dimensional material culture. here is how to make one: cut a narrow strip from the long side of a piece of paper; bring the two ends of the strip together, giving one end a halftwist before joining them with tape, a staple, or the like. put a pencil, a crayon, or other drawing tool anywhere on the paper and begin tracing a path along the strip. eventually, without ever picking up the tool, you will have traversed all “sides” of the strip (though mathematically möbius strips are single-sided), and will have arrived back where you started, the drawing tool and the möbius strip both having been changed by the friction of the journey. repeat this again, and that subsequent journey (both the surface and the drawing tool) will be made slightly different than the first, because the first round will slightly “shape” or “inform” the path of the second, and so forth. the model becomes even more useful if you replace the paper with something malleable like a slip of clay, or a strip of dough. if you were small enough yourself to traverse the möbius strip several rounds, you eventually would be able to see and/or feel your own footsteps, wheel tracks, or cane taps (cf. shapiro in handelman 2020, 6). multiple spatial, temporal, and experiential locations of your journey could exist special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 5 simultaneously, yet present to you differently, depending on your ever-changing vantage point. recursivity leaves its marks. others have employed the möbius strip. lacan ([1966] 2007) looked to it as a model for reconciling binary categories in analyses. offering a feminist counter to lacan, elizabeth grosz (1994) used the möbius strip as a means to grapple with the interrelationships between interior and exterior bodies and minds. zoë wool draws connections between bodies and temporality to describe as “möbius-like” the non-linear “iterative process” of rehabilitation among injured soldiers at walter reed army medical center (2015, 55). faye ginsburg and rayna rapp describe their often “vertiginous” and “long-standing embrace of reflexivity” in their decades-long collaboration in the fields of disability and feminist studies as “adventures on the möbius strip” (2023, 158–59). methodologically, the model of a möbius strip frames another important idea: while the data ethnographers have gathered at the time of fieldwork perhaps does not change in the interim, in returning to that data years later as i do here, what we make of it almost surely will be different. since i conducted this fieldwork, both much and little has changed. recent critical analyses of popular mythologies surrounding rural america (conn 2023), and of racialized regional tropes interweaving white supremacy into ideas of the us midwest (halvorson and reno 2022), along with intersectional approaches to queer life in rural communities (gray, johnson, and gilley 2016), all signal an important and long overdue scholarly reckoning with the role of “rurality” in shaping identities and experiences. at the time of my research, before the hyperpoliticization of rurality in the context of a trump presidency and the covid-19 pandemic, members of rural communities in the us midwest were already engaged in local forms of reflexivity about what it means to live in rural areas, and what it is to “be” rural. but while my data offer glimpses into this reflexivity, it might be more pronounced if i were gathering it today.5 both much and little has changed in transplant medicine, too. perhaps most characteristic now as it was then, transplantation remains full of “promise” (see sharp [2013] on the “transplant imaginary”). rolled into its ever-moving “frontiers” have been changing policies and systems for organ procurement and allocation (e.g., congress.gov 2023) and expanded donor criteria, all promising to ease organ shortages. new developments in genetic science and bioengineering promise a future where transplantable organs can be grown in the bodies of other-than-human animals, or outside of bodies altogether, and where immunological tolerance can be induced in recipients so that allograft rejection is no longer a concern. artificial intelligence and predictive modeling from vast amounts of data promise more precisely tailored, personalized matching and postoperative monitoring and care plans (ramalhete et al. 2024). nevertheless, many still die waiting for a transplant, and postoperative complications, rejection, special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 6 and the adverse effects of immunosuppression still prove troubling. though i write now from a “present future,” depending on vantage point (see “hard truths about organ transplants” 2023), transplant medicine today would be well recognizable to those with whom i spoke in 2007. proximity and distance in the lived realities of transplant like a möbius strip with an impressionable surface that changes with every pass of the entity tracing it, seemingly forward movement in transplantation— movement toward a future—can involve cycles of repetition, of landing right back where one started, and never quite truly “beyond” transplant (heinemann 2020). the significance of temporal proximity emerges through the time leading up to and following a transplant, time in the evolution and development of transplantrelated science and technology, and generational time, as so many situated their pursuit of a transplant in relation to kin and loved ones. and the significance of proximity in space is foregrounded for those who must travel long distances to access this form of medical care. while these themes emerged in common across interlocutors in my fieldwork, they held particular resonance among participants from rural areas. members of this demographic spoke poignantly about their experiences of proximity and distance from home that were inseparable from their experiences of transplant, and about their proximity and distance from the forms of biomedical healthcare on which transplant medicine so heavily relies in a practical, discursive, and imaginative sense all at once. incorporating expressions i heard throughout fieldwork, some of which appear in interview excerpts below, i register the intersections of rurality and transplant medicine across time and space through the phrases “back then,” “around here,” and “down the road” in this article’s title. my intention is to underscore that the temporal is inseparable from the spatial. rather than reproducing stereotypes of rurality being forever “behind the times,” i instead convey and analyze how rural patients and loved ones reckoned with accessing transplant medicine over time and across physical distance from centers of high-tech healthcare. indeed, while cutting-edge life-saving high-tech biomedicine exists, gaps in access can be stark in rural areas. large bodies of literature have well established the structural underpinnings and consequences of rural health inequities in the united states (e.g., bagchi 2019; clark, harper, and weber 2022; coughlin et al. 2019; lichter and ziliak 2017; stough-hunter and donnermeyer 2010). and these manifest also as inequities in access to transplant for residents of rural areas, for example in referral for transplant, and in evaluation and being added to transplant waiting lists (park et al. 2022). transplant not a cure, but a chronicity margrit shildrick points to a “rhetoric of hope” that attends transplant and “leaves little room for any exploration or understanding of the more negative affects and special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 7 emotions that recipients may experience” (2015, 21). as shildrick and others show, however, the myriad areas of uncertainty and contradiction surrounding transplant are regularly revealed through closer examination. ethnographic studies in medical anthropology offer many examples (e.g., crowley-matoka 2016; hamdy 2012; kaufman, russ, and shim 2006; lock 2002; scheper-hughes and wacquant 2002; sharp 2006). for instance, megan crowley-matoka’s work in guadalajara, mexico, among kidney transplant patients who reckon with the “persistently liminal space” (2005, 830) in which they find themselves, points us to the power that inheres in transplantations’ seeming-promise of a return to “normalcy,” and one which alison kafer might describe as “compulsorily hypernormative” (2013, 43), that does not match lived experience. outside of transplant, stef jansen’s (2019) ethnographic work in postwar bosnia and herzegovina offers “yearning” as a more accurate frame than “hope” in interpreting interlocutors’ evocation of what they called “normal lives.” “as a disposition or affect,” jansen writes, “yearning has much in common with hope. but the term emphasizes duration: yearning is more persistent, continuous, prolonged. it also foregrounds disappointability: compared to hope, the object of yearning is seen to be spatially and temporally further out of reach” (2019). in this sense, whereas “hope” forecloses, “yearning” in proximity to “normalcy” opens up analytical space to account for the fuller scope of lived experience in transplant. and with this fuller scope we see that transplant also can be riddled with disappointment and a sense that the “object” of yearning remains stubbornly out of reach. transplantation’s consistency with what ashley shew (2023) critically describes as “technoableism,” and with the “curative imaginary” in biomedicine (berkhout and jaarsma 2018; kafer 2013), veers toward a near-exclusive focus on “curative intent” as suze berkhout and colleagues show, yet “cure is not an actual temporal destination that any one of us can reach—ill or not” (2022, 4). in the landmark chronic conditions, fluid states: chronicity and the anthropology of illness, lenore manderson and carolyn smith-morris (2010) point to the limitations imposed by the assumptions and frameworks of biomedicine, including such hegemonic, binary categories as “acute” versus “chronic” to describe illness. they argue for attention to the ways in which global social, historical, political, and economic currents so powerfully create the possibilities and limitations to human health and well-being. codifying their argument in the concept of “chronicities,” manderson and smith-morris (2010) “draw our attention to the temporal connective tissues that link individual experience, identity, and life course, to those of communities, regions, and nations in a thoroughly globalized world” (heinemann and rubinstein, forthcoming). in this sense, a framework that examines transplantation as a chronicity, rather than a cure, affords important inroads toward analyses that can account for the relations of proximity between domains that otherwise would appear to exist as special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 8 separate, distinct, or distant. these relational domains can include individual (micro) and context (macro), urban and rural, and past and future. like different points on a möbius strip, each takes shape in proximity to its counter. movement among these domains over time—whether analytically or physically—is an exercise in recursivity. scholarship in anthropology and related disciplines also offers critical insights into how individuals are made responsible through their intimate relations, to navigate the same barriers and contradictions out of which inequities emerge and are reproduced (e.g., robbins-ruszkowski 2017; trnka and trundle 2017; trundle 2017). importantly here, kelly fritsch and anne mcguire point us toward “the haunting inter-relations connecting disability with spectral notions of health and risk and to ongoing personalized risk management and therapeutics” (2019, 43). in a practical sense, the transplant endeavor relies on patients and their loved ones to accommodate transplant (heinemann 2015) while also navigating and holding together the ideals and realities of kinship, friendship, occupation, and leisure (heinemann 2020, 82–83), and to do so on an often unremarked-upon, daily basis. in her critical analysis of preemptive governance, kim cunningham reminds us that “when you anticipate, you do something. this doing is a movement, and a memory” (2014, 466). it is the everyday-ness of transplant living that sits in tension with the anticipatory vigilance it requires. if things go as well as possible throughout all of this accommodating and holding-together while living with transplant—while staying on the möbius strip through time and space—“illness might be periodically obscured in the tangle, [but] it is never truly severed from the experience” (heinemann 2020, 83). living around the problem one couple in my fieldwork explicitly juxtaposed the realities of transplant with popular misunderstandings about its supposed curative capacities. charlene, who was the primary caregiver to her husband dan, a kidney recipient, was quite frank, noting, “i think it’s a common misconception that a transplant is a cure for problems. you know, it’s not curing anything. it’s just a way to live, you know, around the problem.” dan was then being evaluated for what would be his second transplant. this necessitated ongoing engagement with and travel to and from the transplant center through a rural landscape like the one described at the beginning of this article. at the time of our conversation, they lived three hours away by car. on the möbius strip of their transplant journey, the past also was prologue: his first transplanted kidney had lost function in just four years due to a bkv polyomavirus infection precipitated by the very medication-induced immunosuppression that was required to avoid organ rejection. noting how difficult it was for friends to understand how profoundly their lives continued to be shaped by the necessity of uninterrupted close engagement with special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 9 transplant-related care, charlene continued, “your life depends on what those blood results are…every couple of weeks […] it’s always a time of anxiety, i guess, until you get that blood result and really see how things are going. there’s just some things that you have to live with, that, until you’re in that situation, you just don’t really have a clue.” in this, charlene pointed to the lived experience of recursivity in time (waiting every two weeks for blood results) and space (having to travel regularly the three-hour distance to the transplant center). though the experience was immediate to them, much of it was neither seen nor understood by those outside of that lived experience. diagnosis and distance in space and time for those like charlene and dan who lived in rural areas two, five, or even eight hours away from the transplant center, recursive proximity to transplantation necessarily included regular travel on a möbius-like route to and from for meticulous screening, regular monitoring, and—if all went well—for the transplant procedure itself and at least the first rounds of post-transplant follow-up. and with only limited public transportation options in rural midwestern communities, that travel not only required time but also usually required access to a privately owned vehicle in good enough repair to make the journey every few weeks. in the extremes of weather typical in the region, increasingly amplified by climate change, that journey might be made through heat so intense it can make the highway buckle, or through blizzards that can blow snowdrifts across the roads and cause frostbite in minutes. on a late july day in 2008, my own drive began with the traffic lights of metrotown and traced what would have been the precise return route for one rural interlocutor in my fieldwork. two hours later, i turned off the highway at the main intersection of a town of just over a thousand people. i had been told to watch for a particular field section marker when given directions on how to find the place where mrs. m lived. we had first met at the transplant center the week prior, while she waited for her series of appointments to begin at the outpatient clinic, as part of her ongoing evaluation for kidney transplant. though she didn’t say so on the day i came to visit, i am certain that mrs. m quite literally could see me coming a mile away, from the billowing dust cloud trailing the car she knew did not belong to any of her neighbors. she greeted me at the door leading directly into her kitchen, where a large collection of family photos covered the refrigerator, a wide windowsill, and the wall leading into the living room area. represented throughout were multiple generations including her grandparents who had “come over” from sweden, her parents and two siblings, her husband and two sons, then ages forty-one and thirty-five, along with their wives and her older son’s children, whom she loved to dote on in her most cherished role of grandmother. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 10 happy to introduce her family by photos, she added, “and we all are dealing with the polycystic kidneys.” what they presently knew was an autosomal dominant genetically inherited condition, polycystic kidney disease (or pkd) had become thoroughly woven into her kinship network, though its diagnostic identity took shape only through her family’s movement through both time and space. its devastation had revisited generation after generation, including her mother’s, among whom four out of five siblings were affected. of twenty-three cousins, nineteen had pkd. and her mother’s father had died at a young age. but, as mrs. m explained, “at that time, they said, ‘kidney failure.’ that’s all they knew. now we know why his kidneys failed. he had the disease.” though the family was aware that kidney failure was common among their relatives, it was only when mrs. m’s sister left their rural midwestern community in the 1960s and moved to seattle that they gained a more precise explanation. not long after moving there to live near their cousins, her sister’s health had begun to deteriorate. a seattle physician’s diagnosis of polycystic kidney disease then also made its way back, and became an explanation for her mother’s ongoing decline back home. as mrs. m recalled, “when i found out my sister had it, [the seattle doctor] told her if you want to see your mother alive, you better go home. she was about nineteen when she moved out there […] so we started learning then. well, they didn’t know much about it back here. but that doctor in seattle did, so he kind of explained things to her […] [so my sister] moved back i think in like august, and mom died that next march.” mrs. m had tried to encourage her mother to act on the knowledge they had received from seattle, yet they both could sense that cutting-edge medicine remained out of reach: back then, kidney transplants were only being done in denver, colorado. and most people were dying, because they didn’t have it down. because i said to her one day, “mom why don’t you go to denver and do a kidney transplant?” and she said, “because everybody that’s doing it is dying. i’m not gonna go out there and spend all that money and then die anyway.” and at that time, they didn’t know that dialysis was the answer to keep you alive every day. not here anyway, they didn’t. they might have known it out in bigger cities but around here they didn’t know it. anyway, she ended up passing away from that. so it’s just been an ongoing thing. with this, mrs. m made clear that different versions of biomedicine can exist simultaneously, as if at different points in an ongoing recursive loop of knowledge (i.e., the state of the science) and practice (i.e., the state of technology and treatment that can be accessed). any boundaries between these points are certainly fluid and permeable and ever subject to change. as with the single-sided möbius strip, rural and urban communities and systems of health and care are special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 11 connected, situated together in a state of spatial interdependence (see lichter and ziliak 2017). yet those boundaries are nevertheless palpable, consequential, and enforced through distance of place (here, urban versus rural) and distance of time (here, the temporal location of “advanced,” or “cutting-edge” medicine). as mrs. m indicated, even when the knowledge and capabilities necessary for dialysis, transplant, or other technology-intensive applications of medical science exist in the world, they do not exist in the same way everywhere at once. and they remain out of reach for many residents of rural areas (alfero et al. 2013; coughlin et al. 2019). entering a möbius loop of indeterminate medical futures from the recursive vantage points of the various “present futures” that mrs. m described during our interview, the significance of “kidney failure” changed in meaningful ways. with the knowledge of pkd’s strong prevalence in her family, and wanting to make an informed decision about whether to have more children—what fritsch and mcguire might critically analyze in relation to “personalized risk management and therapeutics” (2019, 43) and what murphy might contextualize as a form of engagement with “averted birth” (2017, 47–54)— mrs. m herself eventually sought testing. she and her youngest son now share a running joke: “i always tell my son you were meant to be because if i found out i had it, then i wasn’t gonna have any more children […] so, evidently, you were meant to be.” mrs. m did not entirely attribute her younger son’s existence to fate, however, and she went on to draw a direct link to the state of pkd testing in the rural midwest in the early 1970s. the diagnostic technologies available at that time and place could only detect larger cysts; hers were then too small to be made visible to the town’s doctor, and she was told that she did not have it. she was temporarily cleared of “living in prognosis,” which lochlann jain analyzes as “a truth that recursively projects a future as it acts as a container for a present” (2007, 79; also see jain 2013). mrs. m later learned, however, that this “missed-” diagnosis comprised a major mis-prediction of her own medical future. in her forties, she began to experience swelling in her leg so severe it limited her mobility. as mrs. m put it, “it got huge. i mean, it was huge. none of the doctors could figure out what was wrong with me here. and finally [my doctor here in town] said, ‘let’s do an ultrasound.’ they [did] an ultrasound and then they found the cysts. that’s when i found out i had it. and so i didn’t even know i had polycystic kidneys until i was forty-seven years old.” now needing more specialized care than what was available locally, she was referred to the nearest nephrologist, who was just under 100 miles (or about 160 km) away in metrotown, and she was referred to the mayo clinic over 300 miles (or over 483 km) away in rochester, minnesota for further evaluation of her leg. thus she, like others in rural areas seeking “cutting-edge” biomedicine, was launched onto the möbius loop of driving long distances to access that care, where any insights gained upon each repetition of the journey would still only be toward an indeterminate future. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 12 living temporalities in the future present i was meeting mrs. m at a time that, to her grandfather, might well have seemed thoroughly futuristic, practically science fiction. given the availability of genetic testing, thorough scanning of bodies inside and out, laparoscopic and radiologically guided surgical interventions, dialysis, and other biotechnologies, our conversation unfolded at a time not only when the precise cause of her ancestors’ kidneys failure could be known, but healthy kidneys could be transplanted to function in place of ones that did not, with dialysis to bridge the gap. an uncritical read of mrs. m’s intergenerational story might take it to offer a powerful and unproblematic sign of medical progress—what kafer critically analyzes as a “cure-driven future” (2013, 44)—and its spread from urban to rural. extending from this possible interpretation, the idea of transplant in the abstract can conjure an imaginary of contemporary biomedicine (see sharp 2013). in this imaginary, while philosophical, cosmological, and moral questions surrounding life, illness, suffering, and death might still be both timeless and vexing, the medico-technological answers can now be clear. in this imaginary, those answers come in the form of a definitive diagnosis, a clear treatment plan, or a concrete prediction about length and quality of life remaining. but this imaginary is unilinear, and exists outside of the more möbius-like lived experience of transplant. reflecting on the broader themes of suze berkhout and kelly fritsch’s larger work that brings together this special issue, it is in lived experience where the “frictions” of futurity place an undeniable check on the idealized power and promise of transplant medicine. when i asked mrs. m where she was in the transplant process, she replied, pointing to different areas of her head and neck to emphasize, you know, i just feel like i’m out in left field. because i don’t know if you know it or not, but they found an aneurism […] it’s right in here and way back here. so right now the neurologist is supposed to be meeting with the transplant doctors to see if they’ll go ahead and put me on the transplant list, even though i have this aneurism. because he doesn’t feel it’s big enough to worry about right now. because he said in order to fix it, he would have to do the dye and go up through my veins in here and go clear up here […] but the dye could, if he gives me too much, [could] ruin what kidneys i’ve got, and then i will be on dialysis. and so he’s trying to convince them, that’s going to be his recommendation, to go ahead [and] put me on the kidney transplant, and hope i get a kidney, and then fix the aneurism later. so right now in fact, the rn called me […] last week and she said, “have you heard anything?” and she said, “what’s going on?” and i said, “i don’t know. last i talked to him, he told me that he was going to get with the special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 13 transplant doctors.” so she said, “just a minute.” so she must have pulled up my file, i don’t know. anyway, she said, “it looks like that hasn’t happened. i’m gonna have to get ’em moving and see what they’re gonna do.” so she said, “we’ll get in contact with you when we know.” so i don’t know, so right now i feel like i’m out in left field. kafer argues that biomedicine’s cure-driven version of the future “positions people with disabilities in a temporality that cannot exist fully in the present, one where one’s life is always on hold, in limbo, waiting for the cure to arrive” (2013, 44). this rings true in the lived domains of transplantation. as patients and loved ones learn deeply, medical care in reality is filled with uncertainty. it is carried out through a disjointed, atomized system where there can be enormous gaps in communication among practitioners whose specialties might place their goals at odds with one another. it often falls to patients and loved ones to keep the pieces knitted together. the fact that patients are meant to be the center of care does not preclude them from being left without a clear sense of what comes next, while traversing a domain widely believed to promise a future beyond illness. historical recursivity and relational futurity in many ways, transplantation is at its very core future-oriented. it is underpinned by deep commitments on the part of candidates, recipients, donors, loved ones, and clinicians to extend life into the future in the face of it otherwise being cut short. but of course it is much more than an endeavor aiming solely to prolong life itself. in most interviews, i asked interlocutors to share their thoughts and concerns about the future. in hindsight, from my “present future” as a researcher now returning to my data, i can see what an impossible question this must have been for those whose experiences were so inextricably woven into the möbius strip of transplant living. while transplant professionals often spoke about the future state of transplant medicine, patients and their loved ones were much more likely to speak in interpersonal terms. and this offers an important clarification that lived experience also reveals. that is, transplantation’s future orientation is thoroughly relational. it relies on a bedrock of interdependence, which is also and always braided into histories of kinship, livelihood, home, and others. when i asked charlene, introduced earlier in this article, to share her main concerns for the future, her response pointed to a relational futurity that could allow distance from transplantation: it’d sure be nice to go longer than four years without needing another transplant. so that is, you know, definitely my wish, i guess for [dan] that he is healthy enough to enjoy the kids as they grow up, and that we can still have the quality of life, that he’s able to do activities as a family and do outside activities, camping, yard work, that kind of stuff. so that’s definitely our wish and our prayer. you know, you have to special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 14 remain hopeful that every time is going to be the one time, that something’s gonna really click this time and that it’s going to work. the perspectives of another couple, krystal and shane, add another layer. they had been married for five years and had four children ages five and younger when shane received a kidney-pancreas transplant. i first met them at the transplant center’s outpatient clinic. at the time, they lived several hours from metrotown, on a small farm place near the one where krystal had grown up. they relied almost entirely on shane’s earnings as a factory maintenance worker in town, about a twenty-minute drive from their home, and lived paycheck to paycheck. finances were a major concern. when krystal expressed her perspectives on the future during a follow-up interview via phone, she said, i guess the long-term thing would be that both of the organs shane got continue to work for a long time, because if we do have to go through this again, i hope it’s not for a while because this was a pretty big load. and i mean, if something goes wrong or something comes up, i guess i’ll deal with it just because i have to, but i’d rather just that we had some time just for all of us to be normal for a while, before we have to go through stuff again. and i hope mine and shane’s relationship continues to get better. we sort of have the dream, i guess, maybe in a year or two when things slow down and we don’t have to make trips to [metrotown] so often, that possibly, shane could find a job out of state because […] we’ve always wanted to move to like wyoming or montana or something. so we’re hoping in years to slow down, maybe he could get a job somewhere, and that we can move. with this, krystal likewise described a vivid image of relational futurity and distance from transplantation. in it, she emphasized the quality of their relationship and family life, but also shane’s ability to work, and greater flexibility in their location of residence, all being interdependent with shane’s health over time (see stevens 2018). yet shane’s ability to work, and the family’s ability to move farther from transplant care might have been unthinkable for a kidneypancreas recipient just a decade prior.6 in many ways, therefore, she was itemizing an array of forms of distance from transplantation that were inextricable from then-recent movement in transplant medicine itself. mrs. m alluded to a similar theme. looking back on her own family’s history, mrs. m envisioned a future where her grandchildren’s experiences would be as distant from hers, as her experience was from her mother’s: i think the main concern about the future is, i worry about my kids and my grandkids with this disease. you know, hopefully that down the road, they can get it to where they don’t have to go through what special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 15 we’ve all been through. but i am thankful that everything has come as far as it has. i’ve lived eleven years longer than my mother did. she never got to see any of her grandchildren. i’ve got to see mine. i got to see them grow up. if something happens, and i’m gone tomorrow, i look at it this way: i got a whole lot more than she did. you know, and hopefully my children will benefit from all that all of us have been through, as far as for their future. so they don’t end up where the rest of us are at. i guess that’s my main concern in the future. the future mrs. m articulated was nested within ongoing recursive developments in bioscience and technology. if her children and grandchildren could “benefit from all that all of us have been through,” this could afford a future relational proximity to loved ones far afield of “where the rest of us are at.” while references to “hope” surfaced throughout this portion of interviews, as it did for krystal, charlene, and mrs. m., it often was a tentative hope, and one grounded in nostalgia—a yearning for the quotidian. for krystal, the hope was for respite, if not release, not only from grave illness, but from the pace and effort demanded by transplant care so that their family could move somewhere else. for charlene, the hope was that this transplant might be the one to open up the possibility that she and dan could enjoy family life and together see their grandchildren grow up. and for mrs. m, the hope was that continued progress would benefit her kin. almost invariably, though, patients and loved ones’ references to hope indexed more a yearning—perhaps still just out of reach—for future togetherness, a recursive extension of intergenerational connection, as on a shared möbius loop of time and space where transplant looms less large. reflections and conclusions in the spirit of the frictions of futurity in transplant project, and the salon series it offered as collaborative space, i end with an invitation to consider together: what might the future hold? the answer, of course, is something not only no less complicated than the present, but more so. we cannot even well understand the “now” without understanding what came before, to create the present. and as we grapple collectively today with the consequences of settler colonialism, enslavement, and myriad forms of violence, trauma, and oppression both subtle and stark, a full view of history itself remains contested and contestable. even the matter of driving and of distance, still prominent in the experiences of rural transplant patients and loved ones, is part of an indeterminate future, as innovations in vehicles and the energy that powers them still focus on private ownership and continue to eschew more serious consideration of public transport in rural areas. ongoing developments in telehealth and telemedicine (e.g., bagchi 2019; sinha 2000) gesture toward side-stepping the question of transport altogether. in the contemporary landscape of us politics, rural communities are as much at the epicenter of contestations over past, present, and future as any. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 16 but glimpses toward a future are subject to the situated vantage point of anyone right now, at this moment, who tries to be thoughtful about the present. as transplant patients and loved ones make clear, any proximity to livable future togetherness is necessarily tentative, and its possibility relies on relations of interdependence. we perhaps can grapple with this best through multimodal ways of revealing, exploring, questioning, and creating new orientations to the future, with particular attention to how these are shaped by our experiences of recursivity—of moving together as on a möbius strip constructed from the knowledge, experience, and unfolding of life that has led to this present future. acknowledgements i express my sincerest thanks to suze berkhout and kelly fritsch for convening and inviting me to engage with the multidisciplinary salon series at the tangled art + disability gallery in toronto (https://tangledarts.org/), on the afterlives of transplantation, and for creating such a nurturing space for community, art, and collective critical discernment. my thanks, too, to fellow salon participants margrit shildrick, sadia baig, lucille atlookan, and vanessa dion fletcher for sharing their work; alexandra frankel and chloe wong-mersereau for their welcoming brilliance; and the wonderful audience of artists, activists, scholars, and thinkers for their helpful questions, comments, and provocations. this article grows out of not only my salon talk but conversations with this community before and since. i am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and kelly fritsch, suze berkhout, and alexandra frankel, who supportively challenged me to clarify my thinking and the larger purpose of this article. i am forever indebted to the patients, caregivers, and professionals who generously shared their insights through the fieldwork i draw upon here. this research was funded by a national science foundation (bcs – cultural anthropology) doctoral dissertation improvement grant (award id: 0649678) and several university of michigan sources: the center for the education of women (cecilia anne stiborik dreyfuss scholarship); rackham graduate school (susan lipschutz award, graduate student research grant, anthropology block grant, one-term dissertation fellowship); and school of social work (alumni award, doctoral dissertation/thesis grant, henry j. meyer scholarship award, social work-social science summer funding). notes 1 all names of places and people are pseudonyms. 2 fourteen interviewees were from small rural towns and six were from farms and other rural areas within two hours of metrotown; eight were from small rural towns and four from farms and rural areas two to eight hours away. another twenty-four were from more than eight hours away, some of whom were from https://tangledarts.org/ special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) laura l. heinemann, 2024 17 small towns and rural areas. while all three illustrations in this article involve kidney transplant, my fieldwork was not limited to kidney transplant, and included other solid organ as well as stem cell transplant (see heinemann 2016). 3 see https://www.natalieveryb.com/ and her instagram profile at @natalieveryb. 4 for more on the afterlives of transplantation event, see https://tangledarts.org/whats-on/afterlives-of-transplantation/; and on the frictions of futurity and cure in transplant medicine project, see https://frictionsproject.wordpress.com/. as noted on the project’s website, the frictions of futurity and cure in transplant medicine is “a nfrf, sshrc & cdtrp-funded research-creation project that unabashedly sits at the convergence of arts, feminist sts & crip technoscience.” 5 though not all rural interlocutors in my fieldwork identified as white, the majority did, and all three examples in this article come from interviewees who identified as white. all three examples also come from cisgender individuals who did not identify as queer. 6 my sincere thanks to an anonymous reviewer who raised this important point. references acton, kelsie. 2023. “plain language for disability culture.” in crip authorship: disability as method, edited by mara mills and rebecca sanchez, 58–72. new york: nyu press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479819386.003.0008. alfero, charlie, tommy barnhart, darrold bertsch, scot graff, terry hill, david lee, martie ross, jodi schmidt, brock slabach, and kris 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other, and the social contract in contemporary life.” in competing responsibilities: the ethics and politics of contemporary life, edited by susanne trnka and catherine trundle, 1–24. durham, nc: duke university press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1220q09.3. trundle, catherine. 2017. “genetic bystanders: familial responsibility and the state’s accountability to veterans of nuclear tests.” in competing responsibilities: the ethics and politics of contemporary life, edited by catherine trundle and susanne trnka, 213–32. durham, nc: duke university press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1220q09.13. wool, zoë h. 2015. after war: the weight of life at walter reed. durham, nc: duke university press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375098. author bio laura l. heinemann is an associate professor of anthropology in the department of cultural and social studies at creighton university. heinemann is the author of transplanting care: shifting commitments in health and care in the united states (rutgers university press, 2016). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1220q09.3 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1220q09.13 https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375098 six ways of looking at fractal mechanics mameni, salar. 2024. “derrida, autoimmunity, and islamic medicine.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–20. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © salar mameni, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license derrida, autoimmunity, and islamic medicine salar mameni university of california, berkeley salarmameni@berkeley.edu abstract autoimmunity often refers to a medical condition, yet it was used by jacques derrida to theorize the conflict between religion and science as well as islam and the west. derrida’s use of the term autoimmunity became widespread after he used it to diagnose the “american organism” in the aftermath of the attacks on the twin towers in new york city on september 11, 2001. most commentary on derrida’s political diagnosis have focused on his reading of islam as an other within the us body politic. this essay takes a different approach and reads derrida’s diagnosis within the tradition of islamic medicine. if we are to truly rethink the othering of islam as a viral autoimmune disease in the body politic of the us empire, we need to understand islamic thought as forming the very basis of the west’s image of itself. i argue that islam is far from a self-contained category opposing the west: a virus or a plague attacking it from the outside. rather, islam is the swallowed-within of the west itself, to which, the west continuously returns/reacts in an autoimmune fashion. keywords autoimmunity, derrida, 9/11, islamic medicine, virus the immune system is not only a network of organs in the body but a political concept that has been traced to roman law. derived from the latin immunis, our contemporary notion of immunity comes from the roman legal system where immunity meant exemption from municipal service (esposito 2011; cohen 2009). mailto:salarmameni@berkeley.edu special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 2 as it entered medical discourse, it brought with it both a sense of exceptionality: immune are those (in the context of a pandemic) who will not get sick, and that of risk, since immunization is, as roberto esposito has written, “a protective response in the face of a risk” (2011, 1). the term immunity has thus been used in political philosophy to describe a defensive sovereign entity: a body or a nation that guards itself against the risk of an attack. if immunity is what protects a sovereign entity against attacks, autoimmunity is the condition of a body attacked by its own immune system. the latter term also has a political history, which began in the twenty-first century with its use as a metaphor for understanding the planes that crashed into the twin towers in new york city on september 11, 2001. jacques derrida, in an interview with giovanna borradori titled “autoimmunity: real and symbolic suicides,” drew on the medical notion of autoimmunity to describe the newly unfolding declaration of the war on terror. over the course of the dialogue, derrida proposed an image of the united states that surpassed its territorial boundaries into an “american organism” spreading across the globe (derrida 2003, 91). where does the us begin and end, derrida contemplated, when it is a hegemonic entity with its rule of law extending beyond its political borders, when “american interests” expand the political body of this organism in various directions across the globe? within this expanded image of the american “organism,” derrida saw an autoimmune condition: a “suicidal” organism attacking itself from the inside. derrida’s autoimmune diagnosis required, first, that we imagine the us as a swelling entity, an “organism” with multiple limbs, and second, that we see an inner malfunction (or malice) that turns on the body in a suicidal fashion. if the former is the us body politic, the latter is a “suicide bomber,” who goes by the name “terrorist.” who and where is the terrorist? derrida admits that the “terrorist” is incredibly vague and indiscernible, coming from “anonymous forces that are absolutely unforeseeable and incalculable” (derrida 2003, 98). the aggression, he writes, comes from the inside, from forces that are apparently without any force of their own but that are able to find the means, through ruse and the implementation of high-tech knowledge, to get hold of an american weapon in an american city on the ground of an american airport. immigrated, trained, prepared for their act in the united states by the united states, these hijackers incorporated, so to speak, two suicides in one: their own (and one will remain forever defenseless in the face of a suicidal, autoimmunitary aggression–and that is what terrorizes most) but also the suicide of those who welcomed, armed, and trained them. (95) derrida’s autoimmune diagnosis thus imagines a body politic whose internal defense system has taken its own tissues as its site of attack. terrorists are special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 3 “incorporated” forces that attack the body they inhabit. derrida makes his biologic more explicit when he reads the attack on the world trade center as “targeting of the heart, or rather, the symbolic head of the prevailing world order” (95). while until september 11, it was the cold war that had shaped the political image of war on a global scale, autoimmunity would henceforth define the us body politic. what can we make of derrida’s autoimmune diagnosis? anjuli fatima raza kolb, in her recent study epidemic empire, argues that derrida’s autoimmune diagnosis continues a longstanding theorization of islam as a plague. “we continue to observe the wedding of terrorist violence to the epidemic imaginary in the use of this figure by writers, public intellectuals, law makers, scientists, and policy experts, along the political spectrum” (raza kolb 2021, 4). she writes, “for donald rumsfeld, terrorism is a ‘cancer on the human condition,’ for the journalist hans magnus enzenberger it’s a retrovirus, ‘a pathological copy of the organism it attacks,’ for boris johnson, it’s a ‘plague,’ for jacques derrida it is a ‘suicidal autoimmunitary aggression’” (4). the problem with these metaphorical languages, raza kolb argues, is that they lead to epidemiological solutions whereby data collection and surveillance technologies come to aid military attacks that target the site of so-called disease, further racializing populations into contagion and eradication. raza kolb’s study is an important critique of the epidemiological bio-logics that have long protected the health of sovereign body politics (such as the “american organism”) at the expense of eradicating those targeted as diseased. metaphorization of disease has supported invasive military attacks. furthermore, the traffic in metaphors is not unidirectional (going from the medical to the political) but move in the opposite direction as well, producing autoimmunity as a suicidal body at war with itself. while the conceptualizations of the virus in the early years of the twentieth century presented the virus as a foreign invader attacking an individual’s immune system (cohen 2009; martin 1994; wald 2008), autoimmunity—coined in the 1950s—visualized a body whose immune system was unable to distinguish between self and other. as the historians of autoimmunity have noted, autoimmunity was a difficult medical concept to accept because “the body’s failure to recognize itself, its capacity to treat itself as foreign, seems both sinister and bizarre” (anderson and mackay 2014, 3). we can accept that epidemiological metaphors have been used to promote war, displacement, and the eradication of “diseased” bodies, as well as presenting autoimmunity as a body at war with itself, hence promoting invasive medical “attacks.” my aim in this essay, however, is to enter this debate from an entirely different angle. rather than focusing on the detrimental effects of viral and autoimmune imaginaries on the surveillance and targeting of muslim populations, i want to ask if centering islamic thought as a site of medical and philosophical special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 4 knowledge can contribute to how we understand derrida’s use of autoimmunity as a diagnosis of the “american organism.” what can we learn, in other words, if we shift the balance of who produces theoretical knowledge and turn to islamic medicine for a political diagnosis of the present? if islam has long been thought of as a plague, a virus, or a disease in the west (a vaguely defined geographical and temporal designation), what does islamic medicine have to say about such categories? i use the term islamic medicine to refer to the medico-philosophical thought system that historically developed in the medieval islamic world (from the eighth through the eleventh centuries), and which has generally been understood by historians as a bridge between classical greco-roman philosophy and what we understand as western medicine today (pormann and savage-smith 2007). if this historical foray into medieval science in the muslim world seems odd at the outset, it is because, as one historian puts it, “among the great scientific traditions in the history of mankind, none has been treated by western scholars with more contempt, subtle as it may often present itself, than the arabic tradition” (kahl 2003, 1). despite this contemptuous reputation, my aim is to lay out the historical significance of islamic medicine not only to how we theorize viruses and disease but to understanding derrida’s use of autoimmunity as a political and philosophical concept. while derrida began to use the term autoimmunity in his later writings, it is not the first medical term that appears in his body of work. his turn to autoimmunity was long foreshadowed by his interest in plato’s use of the greek concept of pharmakon (often translated as both poison and medicine), which, as i elaborate further below, has direct bearing on how he understands the medical notion of autoimmunity. greek thought is routinely understood as the direct precedent for western philosophy. yet this genealogy carves out the major arabic translation movement in the medieval islamic world that not only preserved but extensively interpreted, reconceptualized, and transmitted greek knowledge to the latin west. as i argue below, if we are to truly rethink the othering of islam as a viral autoimmune disease in the body politic of the us empire, we need to understand islamic thought as forming the very basis of the west’s image of itself. thinking with islamic medicine allows us to see the fictional construction of islam as an “other” of the west. common sense today holds islam to be a religion that stands in opposition to a west whose identity is based on secular science. yet derrida’s first introduction of the term autoimmunity in his philosophical works was aimed at erasing the binary logic through which revealed religions stand in opposition to secular technoscience. guiding us to understand the very idea of “religion” as etymologically based in the notion of return or repetition, derrida shows the nestling of religion and science into one another. building on derrida’s thesis, my special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 5 contention in this essay is that islamic medicine is the historical moment in which revealed religions absorbed (digested and fermented) greco-roman philosophy, the outgrowth of which became western science. in this sense, just as greek thought is the basis of islamic science so is islam the swallowed within of western science. derrida’s autoimmune diagnosis, i conclude, names the refusal of the west to see islam as an inherent part of itself. autoimmunity and pharmakon the term autoimmunity began to appear in derrida’s writing in his essay “faith and knowledge” (1998) but became more central to his thinking in the long interview with borradori, cited above, conducted shortly after september 11, 2001, and later in rogues (2005). as michael naas has noted, despite its appearance in derrida’s work in the mid-1990s, the term autoimmunity became “developed in a more accelerated fashion after 9-11” so that it became “yet another name, in some sense the last, for what for close to forty years derrida called ‘deconstruction’” (naas 2006, 18). turning to autoimmunity was hence not a departure from derrida’s existing philosophy, or a unique coinage for the assessment of us politics after 9/11, but a further development for derrida of a key concept in his philosophy. understanding the relationship between autoimmunity and deconstruction is simple enough. if we view autoimmunity as an unraveling of a biological self (an organism whose immune system turns against itself) (timár 2015),1 then it is the medical term given to what derrida had already called deconstruction: an unraveling of a discourse from the inside, a text that turns against itself through its own inherent contradictions. while deconstruction, naas writes, is “a ‘method’ or ‘textual strategy’ aimed at disrupting the self-identity of a text or concept, the organization of discourse in the shape of what we assumed to be well-formed organic bodies, ‘autoimmunity’ appears to name a process that is inevitably and irreducibly at work more or less everywhere, at the heart of every sovereign identity” (2006, 15). for naas, and others (al-khafaji 2022; timár 2015), while earlier terms such as deconstruction and différance dealt more specifically with texts and discourses, autoimmunity was used more capaciously taking any “sovereign entity” such as bodies or body politics, as its site of critique. so why did derrida borrow a term from the medical sciences to name an already existing method in his work? this is perhaps because deconstruction had risen, in part, through engagement with the medical notion of pharmakon. in his essay, “plato’s pharmacy,” first published in tel quel in 1968, derrida described writing as pharmakon, a concept he translated as “‘remedy,’ ‘recipe,’ ‘poison,’ ‘drug,’ ‘philter,’ etc.” (derrida 1981, 71). as this list suggests, and as derrida elaborately develops in his text, pharmakon is a term with an inherent contradiction. it is both poison and medicine that can be death-dealing or life-giving if administered as a drug to a living organism. writing, in derrida’s study, was the pharmakon applied special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 6 to oral speech (logos). derrida argues that in plato’s text, logos (or oral speech) appears as a living organism. he writes, logos, a living, animate creature, is thus also an organism that has been engendered. an organism: a differentiated body proper, with a center and extremities, joints, a head, and feet. in order to be “proper,” a written discourse ought to submit to the laws of life just as a living discourse does. logographical necessity (anangkë logographikë) ought to be analogues to biological, or rather zoological, necessity. otherwise, obviously, it would have neither head nor tail. both structure and constitution are in question in the risk run by logos of losing through writing both its tail and its head. (1981, 79) in this quote, the oral and the written are found to be in opposition in plato’s text. the oral is the breath that animates the body of a discourse. the body is the written text, and as such the pharmakon, that at once gives discourse “its head and its tail,” a corporeal structure and composition, and puts it at risk of losing its corporeality. within this zoological image, the discursive organism becomes embodied in writing, a pharmakon (or a recipe, a method, or a remedy) that gives the ephemerality of logos its composition. derrida’s analysis of plato’s pharmakon highlighted the fallacy of the body/soul opposition inherent in the writing/logos analogy by pointing to the (dis)enabling potential of writing in bringing a discourse to life. it seems that there are two ways of interpreting derrida’s engagement with plato’s pharmakon. on the one hand, pharmakon is the poison/remedy that is administered for what is assigned as an illness. writing, in plato’s text, is offered by the egyptian god theuth to the egyptian king as a “remedy” (pharmakon) for forgetfulness. here, a malady has already been diagnosed (forgetfulness), to which the pharmakon (written text) is a remedy. the egyptian king refuses the gift of writing—for it is understood to cause more ill than good—hence highlighting the poisonous flipside of the gifted pharmakon. in this interpretation, pharmakon is arriving on the scene of illness from the outside as a remedy. on the other hand, we can interpret pharmakon not to be about illness (or its external fix) at all but about what it means for an organism to be embodied in the first place. if pharmakon—as writing—is what gives logos its limbs (its head and tail, its corporeal composition), then the pharmakon is not the disease or the remedy for it, but the very fact of embodiment, or the structural mattering of discourse. the pharmakon is thus not simply about disease, or combatting it, but about what it means to have a body and how such a body is situated in relation to the breath—or soul/logos—that animates it. in this sense, derrida’s engagement with plato’s pharmakon stages a broader philosophical question about life and liveliness and not about disease and its remedies. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 7 indeed, as areej al-khafaji has recently argued, derrida’s work has extended the notion of “writing” to encompass contemporary life sciences where the very idea of a living being is being deciphered through notions such as the genetic code, dna trace, and message. “the modern bio-logic,” al-khafaji writes, “tends to ‘decipher the living as a language’ with its own rules of grammar, syntax, and semantics that assist the cell to decode genetic messages before reading them” (2022, 68–69). for derrida, al-khafaji writes emphatically, “to read is ‘to live’” (70). it is apparent from al-khafaji’s argument that derrida’s theorizations about writing have consistently also been about biological life. as with his reading of plato above, derrida’s notion of textuality is never about dead matter, awaiting logos to breathe life into its dead corpse, but a discursive analysis of life itself. i will return, in the final section of this essay, to how derrida’s autoimmune diagnosis of the american organism can be read differently in light of his understanding of the pharmakon. before doing so however, i turn to the interlocking concepts of poison/remedy within islamic medicine. as i show below, the idea of disease (and its potential remedy) rests upon how life and its mattering is theorized within islamic religious thought. virus/sperm and the islamic pharmakon within contemporary disciplinary divisions of knowledge, philosophy and medicine have distinct areas of expert knowledge. medicine, with high-tech instruments at its disposal, has an upper hand in proposing what counts as health and disease in an organism, and by offering medical techniques of prolonging life, medicine defines what counts as an organism, what its life is and can be. in other words, medical doctors rather than philosophers in our contemporary world, determine the status of life and non-life. in the greco-roman world, this ordering of knowledge was reversed, where “philosophy had mapped itself out as a space of epistemic authority” over concepts such as the body and the soul (das 2020, 12). the hierarchical ordering of knowledge did not imply a strict boundary between philosophy and medicine but meant instead, what aileen das calls “boundary work”: an ongoing competition for epistemic authority over who could define life. practitioners of medicine such as the well-known greek physician galen (born 129 ce in anatolia in modern-day turkey) worked to expand their domain of knowledge beyond the human body by theorizing the body’s relationship to the soul and the cosmos (das 2020). the translation movement in the medieval muslim world, which brought the classical philosophical tradition into the latin west, contributed to shifting the hierarchical scale of medicine/philosophy that we have in place today, where medicine has jurisdictional authority over what we understand as life. while their texts hold differing positions on the soul’s material life in the visible world and the nature of disease and its relationship to the cosmos, practitioners of medicine in the islamic world engaged with philosophical questions in medical contexts special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 8 in order to carve a legitimate domain for answering “philosophical questions” within the discipline of medicine. from the mid-eighth century to the end of the tenth century, the muslim world saw an extensive movement of translating greek texts into arabic and syriac where “almost all literary and non-historical secular greek books that were available throughout the eastern byzantine empire and the near east were translated into arabic” (gutas 1999,1). these included texts in numerous disciplines such as philosophy, astrology, alchemy, medicine, and pharmacology. what is today referred to as “islamic medicine” dates to this translation movement that not only rendered virtually all greek medical texts into arabic but reinterpreted these texts for their new cultural and religious contexts and embarked upon further developing their findings (mahdi 2001; pormann and savage-smith 2007, 24). translators gravitated toward plato, aristotle, and galen’s medico-philosophical works, which strove to elevate the role of the physician to the level of the philosopher and advocated for the intellectual prestige of medical theory (das 2020, 16–19; pormann and savage-smith 2007, 12). scholars in the muslim world inherited this tension between medicine and philosophy and debated the question of who can legitimately theorize about matters such as the soul. this debate is reflected in the dismissal of one of the best-known medical practitioners of the medieval muslim world, abu bakr muhammad ibn zakariyya al-razi (born ~865 ce, ray, persia) for having “exceeded his capacity for sewing wounds and examining urines and faeces” (das 2020, 104) by his contemporary abu ali ibn-sina (born 980, afshana, persia). this disciplinary exchange between physician-philosophers exists alongside each of their texts where the body, its constitution, temperaments, and diseases are discussed in relation to broader questions concerning the soul, creation, and the mattering of life. here i offer a few examples of how muslim physician-philosophers theorized disease in relation to life as well as developing the discourse of toxicology in which the entangled poison/remedy is gradually pulled apart. my first example is based on one of al-razi’s texts, kitab al-jadari wal-hasba (treatise on smallpox and measles) that defines disease in relation to creation. as its title suggests, the work considers causes of outbreaks of two infectious diseases and proposes remedies for cure. in his introduction to the treatise, titled “the causes of smallpox and how it is that hardly anyone escapes the disease,” al-razi gives us the following account of smallpox: the blood of children may be compared to new wine, in which the fermentation leading to ripeness is not yet begun: and the blood of special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 9 young men to the same, fermenting and emitting steams, till it is quiet and ripe. and lastly, the blood of old men is like to wine whose strength is gone, so that it becomes vapid, and begins to grow sour. now the smallpox arises, when the blood putrefies and ferments, and the fermenting particles are thrown out of it; the blood of children, like to new wine, being changed to that of young men, which is as wine perfectly ripened. and this fermentation and ebullition is the disease.2 in my initial encounter with this curious passage, i was unable to interpret alrazi’s use of the notion of “fermentation.” in contemporary parlance, fermentation only refers to food production outside of our bodies and not to biological processes of our internal organs. given al-razi’s comparison of blood to wine, at first glance, i read this passage as a mere metaphor. yet the final sentence, which reads “and this fermentation and ebullition is the disease,” stood out as an expression beyond metaphor. fermentation, al-razi is saying, is the disease. “smallpox arises,” he writes, “when the blood putrefies and ferments.” the analogy between blood and wine is used to argue that fermentation is both responsible for the process of growth in a living organism as well as causing an infectious disease. al-razi’s theorization of disease, as something that arises from within a living organism and that which cannot be separated from what also gives it its capacity to live and grow, is in keeping with his writings on alchemy. as a discipline, alchemy was both a practical activity concerned with “recipes and techniques to produce various chemical products: alums, salts, vitriols and metals” and philosophical in nature engaged with aristotelian theories of transmutation (greenham 2016, 195). aristotle’s theory of material change proposed the idea of “concoction (pepsis)” as the process through which an organism matures but also one through which an organism could undergo transmutation from one form to another (fruton 2006, 2). based on the idea that “all matter had the same origin and was therefore capable of transmutation into other forms of matter,” writers such as al-razi proposed the possibility of transmutation of not only substances (such as lead into gold) but also generation and transformation of the soul (greenham 2016, 195–96). this notion of transmutation meant that in al-razi’s text, concoction of blood is described as both generative, taking an organism from infancy to maturity, and at once conducive of degeneration into disease. fermentation similarly appears as a concept in another well-known text of this period penned by the iranian physician philosopher abu ali ibn-sina (known as avicenna in the west) titled kitab al-qanun fi al-tibb (canon of medicine), completed before his death in 1037. this five-volume book, which served as one of the main compendiums of medical knowledge for centuries, addressed general special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 10 principles in physiology, psychology, anatomy, and therapeutics including recipes for compound remedies. in one section, i came across the following passage: according to the teaching of philosophy, the process of generation may be compared with the processes which take place in the manufacture of cheese. thus the male “sperm” is equivalent to the clotting agent of milk, and the female “sperm” is equivalent to the coagulum of milk. the starting point of the clotting is in the rennet; so the starting-point of the clot “man” is in the male semen (“we made the life-germ a clot”–q.23.14). just as the beginning of the clotting is in the milk, so the beginning of the clotting of the form of man lies in the female “sperm.” then, just as each of the two—the rennet and the milk—enter into the “substance” of the cheese which results, so each of the two—male and female sperm—enters into the “substance” of the “embryo.” (1930, 99) in his text, ibn-sina argued that a fetus is generated when both the male and the female semen are mixed in the womb, “where the male semen plays the role of rennet and the female semen that of milk in the fermentation of cheese—an analogy taken from aristotle’s generation of animals” (fancy 2018, 132). as historians have noted, aristotle “generalized the concept of pepsis, to include the ripening of fruit, the development of an embryo, or the spontaneous generation of living things in the earth” (fruton 2006, 2–3). reading ibn-sina’s text alongside al-razi’s passage quoted above highlights how the theory of disease in islamic medicine arises from aristotelian philosophy. each physician applies the aristotelian notion of transmutation to the biological process of generation and growth. in al-razi’s text, fermentation comes to describe postnatal growth (by which a child becomes an adult and ages through the maturation of blood) as well as the development of smallpox. in ibn-sina’s treatise, fermentation is concerned with the growth of an embryo through the interaction of male and female “sperms.” fermentation, in both texts, conveys biogenesis, with al-razi’s text holding transmutation and decay as central within the life cycle of animate and inanimate organisms. as noted in the last section, the greek notion of pharmakon held poison and medicine in tension. “classical physicians,” writes the historian frederick w. gibbs, “did not draw definitive conceptual boundaries between substances that could help the body and those that could harm it, which ultimately created an unusually rich etymological interplay between various signifiers for poison, such as potion, drink and gift” (2019, 2). the ever-indeterminable line between fermentation and decay is retained in the english language in the word germ (which can infect or germinate); yet we forget that the word virus also derives from a latin word that toggles between poison and sperm. etymologically, the word virus comes from the latin vir, meaning man. it was in the medieval period special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 11 that latin authors “adopted the term virus as a synonym of poison” (battaglia 2007, 142), which has led to our current adoption of the term virus for infectious disease. the more common usage of the word vir in latin is man (from which we derive words such as virility) and where “the male sex organ is recorded as ‘genus virorum,’” leading to the term virus to mean semen, such as in the following sentence: “lentum destillat ab inguine virus (a slow drip of ‘virus’ from the groin)” (battaglia 2007, 144; jacquart and thomasset 1985, 13).3 virus, however, also designated poison as in the case of “bites from a rabid dog” being translated as “virus rabidi canis” (gibbs 2019, 244). while the ambiguity of pharmakon is preserved, etymologically, in terms such as germ and virus, it was indeed the medical philosophers in the medieval islamic world that began to parse out the indeterminate line between poison and medicine in their texts. an early translation of galen’s treatise on simple drugs by hunayn ibn ishaq (born 808, modern-day iraq), for example, includes a diagram with the heading “the things which cool the body are three.”4 the three categories are defined as follows: (a) “those that are agreeable and detrimental at the same time”; (b) “those that are totally compatible and agreeable to the body, and they are called ‘foodstuff’”; (c) “those that are detrimental to the body, and they are called ‘lethal drugs.’” this tripartite classification presents us with the ambiguous notion of the pharmakon, rendered here as both “agreeable and detrimental” in the first category but then adds two other categories, each of which are either “agreeable” and are named “foodstuff” or “detrimental” and are named “lethal drugs.” despite the tripartite nature of the diagram, the ambiguity of the first category seemed to require yet another subdivision into two categories: (a) “those that are more detrimental than agreeable, and they are called ‘drugs’ (adwiyah)”; and (b) “those that are agreeable to the body to a greater extent than they are detrimental, and they are called ‘medicinal foods’ (dawaiyah).” the ambiguity of the term pharmakon is here dealt with through subdivisions that ultimately render any substance into those that lean closer to being detrimental and those that lean closer to being agreeable. toxicology in islamic medicine is hence characterized by an interest in examining the divide between poison and medicine. while classical texts held poison/medicine in constant tension, the translation movement began to pull it apart. ibn-sina (along with ibn-rushd) is credited with holding “by far the most new approach to poison—and certainly the most influential for later physicians of the latin west” (gibbs 2019, 25). ibn-sina followed the classificational approach noted above in order to draw a gradual distinction between “absolute food,” “temperate food,” “absolute medicine,” “poisonous medicine,” and “absolute poison.” within his classificatory system, poisonous medicines were those that “change the body and are changed by the body, but not assimilated,” while absolute medicines are “that which is not changed by the body but instead changes the body to itself” (gibbs 2019, 26). the very idea of “absolute food” and special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 12 “absolute poison,” while residing on a gradational spectrum, nonetheless proposes an inherent divide between poison and medicine. ibn-sina, gibbs argues, “effectively opened a new line of inquiry regarding poison’s ontological status” (2019, 26). islamic medicine is thus the domain of an ontological shift in how we understand the virus today. while in greek medical philosophy pharmakon was necessarily ambiguous, islamic medicine began to rationalize and pull apart the inherent contradiction within the notion of pharmakon by dividing the concept into subcategories ranging from poison to medicine. this methodology meant that a conceptual line was made possible between an “absolute poison” and an “absolute medicine,” leading to later theorizations of the virus as a distinct category that was not only separated from “medicine” but removed from the internal workings of an organism altogether. our contemporary understandings of the virus as an organism that attacks a healthy body from the outside was conceptually made possible due to this effort by writers in the medieval islamic world to make sense of the distinction between “absolute poison” and “absolute medicine.” while theories of disease, as we have seen with al-razi’s text on smallpox, still arose from within the body itself and were inseparable from the processes of generation and growth in any organism, theories of medicine began to distinguish between remedy and poison. this methodology would have a bearing on later understandings of the virus as one that causes disease. i noted at the outset that pharmakon is not simply a theory of medicine but also a theory of textuality. writing, in plato’s dialogue, was a pharmakon: a remedy/recipe for forgetfulness. the role often assigned to islamic medicine within the historiography of western medicine is that of translation: an act of writing. scholars in the muslim world are credited with translating greek texts into arabic, syriac, and persian, hence making them available for later translations into latin. if translation is an act of preserving and transmitting knowledge through textual rendition from one language into another, then translation is an act of writing that guards against loss, or rather forgetting, of a text within a new linguistic context. translators in the medieval islamic world were, in this sense, also pharmakologists: prescribing translations to greek scientific philosophy. their extensive acts of translation—so widespread and persistent that it has been dubbed a movement—preserved, clarified, classified, reinterpreted, reworked, and advanced a set of knowledges that currently form the basis of western medicine; yet their texts also simplified the complexity of certain ideas such as the pharmakon for teaching and practical use by physicians. as historians of islamic medicine have noted, an effective method of teaching employed in this period was that of division (dihairesis), where “the subject matter was divided, subdivided, and sub-sub-divided so as to be easily digestible” (pormann and savage special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 13 smith 2007, 15). while classification can clarify knowledge systems and make difficult concepts more accessible, they can also erase the theoretical necessity for contradiction and ambiguity. perhaps the more “digestible” a concept, the less potent, diluting its complex efficacy. translation is too often understood as a methodology of transmitting knowledge across languages. in the context of the translation movement in the medieval islamic world, historians have attended to various methodologies of translation employed by each writer. they have noted, for example, those who opted for “literal” translation (ad verbum), where a text is translated word for word, and those who prioritized meaning (ad sensum), translating based on what makes more sense in the new language (gutas 1999 142; pormann and savage-smith 2007, 27). it is crucial, however, to also understand translation as an act of transformation. whether ad verbum or ad sensum, translators are alchemists transmutating words across languages and, with them, fermenting ideas into more “digestible” forms. as with every “digestive” process, new organisms come into being growing in unpredictable ways. arabic translations did not simply render one language into another but revived (or gave new life) to greek philosophical thought within a new context. these translations performed an alchemy of transmutation that brought new worlds into being. autoimmunity and the american organism the translation movement in the medieval islamic world initiated both an ontological shift in the understanding of the virus and a furthering of the disciplinary divide between medicine and philosophy. despite such shifts, medical philosophers did not derive theories of disease from poisons. as seen in al-razi’s text above, treatises on plagues in this period continued to theorize disease as an internal imbalance within an organism. it was not until the early twentieth century that, based on microscopic observations, the virus was theorized as an “enemy” attacking the body from the outside. microscopic theories of the virus departed from earlier conceptualizations whereby the virus was both poison and sperm, both generative and death-dealing. the rise of autoimmunity as a medical concept once again revised the reductive idea of a virus as an exogenous hazardous substance. as the term suggests, autoimmunity does away with the idea of a self-same body, opening it up to internal contradictions. an autoimmune disease is a body becoming allergic to itself, setting off the immune system to work against what had previously been its own cells. proposed as a condition in 1957, autoimmunity described an immune system that “fails in identifying the body’s own tissues, fails to distinguish between self and non-self” (rosenberg 2014, x). this proposal directly opposed germ theory’s understanding of diseases: viral attacks on an otherwise healthy special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 14 body. an autoimmune diagnosis had to engage with the body’s internal mechanisms, understand its histories, its inheritances, and its habits. in short, as warwick anderson and ian mackay write, “autoimmune disease actually is predicated on the idea of disease as a biographical process, a personalized pathology” that arises from internal conflicts and differences held within a self (2014, 15). how can we reread derrida’s use of the term autoimmunity in relation to the pharmakon and centuries of translation and exchange that oscillated the concept back and forth across its virus/sperm spectrum? let us return to the “american organism” and derrida’s diagnosis of its autoimmune condition. i want to offer here, in conclusion, a reading of autoimmunity in derrida’s work that is not reducible to a disease but rather to what it means for an organism to occupy a body in the first place. the pharmakon, as i have elaborated above, is not simply a medicine/poison but names the inherent condition of embodiment in which a soul becomes materialized in limbs. pharmakon is the way in which an abstraction (soul, logos) becomes materialized (body, writing), a body without which the concept would cease to exist. if we understand “american” here as an abstraction, a logos, a discourse, or an idea, then its actualization, its mattering into an “organism” requires bodies and lands, a collective entity of worldly things that can be pointed to and named “american.” here, in this mattering, is where its internal contradictions appear, where the body of an “organism” faces the diversity, difference, and discord that such a collective entity known as an “organism” would entail. as noted at the outset, derrida included in the concept of “american” not simply the settler nation-state contained within the us national boundary but an extended entity with limbs stretched across the globe, into all that protects “american interests” everywhere. “americanness,” while it was always already an abstract concept imposed upon the heterogeneity of indigenous lands and populations in the americas, continues to roam in the globalized world spreading its hegemonic mass culture, economy, and military might. “americanness,” while singular as an idea, is vastly plural and heterogenous in form, as any notion of a sovereign entity would be. derrida’s notion of autoimmunity points at this plurality of a self-same concept, where any attempt at policing the boundaries of what can be named “american” turns against itself opening it up to contradictions. the “american organism” (much like any organism) cannot be reduced to a singular self-sameness, policed, and secured against change, diversity, or dissolution. this is because its very mattering, its very worldly appearance depends upon that which is different from itself. like the notion of the pharmakon, which means that any embodied organism holds within itself body and soul as well as the gap that separates matter from form, derrida’s autoimmunity is the contemporary medical language special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 15 where an organism sees its own difference and is unable to distinguish between self and other. by using autoimmunity as a diagnosis for the “american organism,” derrida launches a critique against the splitting of the idea of “americanness” from the bodies, lands, and histories that give the concept its form. timothy campbell notes that derrida characterized “american foreign policy after september 11 as essentially an autoimmune reaction to previous cold-war policy that armed and trained former freedom fighters during the cold war’s hot phase in afghanistan in the early 1980s” (2008, xvii). campbell highlights that derrida’s autoimmune diagnosis named the historical process in which the us military trained and armed soldiers in afghanistan to defend us interests against the ussr during the cold war, hence building a defense system that in the early 2000s turned against itself. for derrida, this is the autoimmune suicide where the “hijackers” responsible for the collapse of the twin towers enacted “two suicides in one”: that of their own, “but also the suicide of those who welcomed, armed and trained them” (derrida 2003, 95). autoimmunity is hence not a diagnosis in which a virus (namely, the “hijackers”) attacks the “american organism.” a virus attacking an organism is not the definition of autoimmunity. rather, autoimmunity is the condition where the body’s defense system attacks itself, or as derrida describes it, a living organism’s process of “protecting itself against its self-protection by destroying its immune system” (1998, 73). the defense mechanism, or the immune system here, is the us military that arms and trains soldiers across its national borders in places like afghanistan. the “american organism” is hence the american empire that has swelled, in an autoimmune fashion, with its armed and trained defense system attacking itself. who can be properly named american is here put to test. is the american defense system (its military populated by heterogeneous bodies across the globe) a part of the “american organism”? only an affirmative response could diagnose the organism with autoimmunity. read in this way, derrida’s autoimmune diagnosis did not equate islam with a virus. his text rendered the us military’s defense system (which included in 2001 both the “hijackers” and those who trained them in the 1980s) as the perpetrators of the terror that september 11 has historically come to signify. yet the question of islam, and religion more broadly understood, was not far from derrida’s mind when he imported the concept of autoimmunity from medical theory into his work as a philosopher. derrida initially used the idea of autoimmunity to discuss the entanglement between science and religion in his essay “faith and knowledge.” setting out to write about “religious resurgence” in the contemporary world, derrida contemplated the equal rise of “tele-techno-capitalistico-science” with all its special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 16 globalizing dimensions (1998, 45–46). rather than opposing the “return of religions” (or the so-called fundamentalisms) with the rise of technoscience, derrida brings our attention to their compatibility, their linkage, and ultimately their self-sameness. the stark division that we routinely hold between religion and science, derrida notes, is an “internal splitting” that opens a wide gap between the two realms. “this internal and immediate reactivity,” derrida writes, “at once immunitary and auto-immune, can alone account for what will be called the religious resurgence in its double and contradictory phenomenon” (1998, 46). in derrida’s assessment, while appearing to be enemies, religion and technoscience are allies. “religion today allies itself with tele-technoscience,” derrida writes, “to which it reacts with all its force” (1998, 46). derrida’s “faith and knowledge” essay thus reads religion and technoscience as two sides of the same coin, or rather as “doubles” that react to each other within themselves in an autoimmune fashion. derrida’s proposal builds upon two interconnected etymologies for the term religion. derived from both relegere, which derrida glosses as “bringing together in order to return and begin again” and religare, defined as “link,” derrida reads religion as a repetitious act, an act of perpetual return (1998, 36–37). “in both cases (re-legere or re-ligare),” he writes, “what is at issue is indeed a persistent bond that bonds itself first and foremost to itself” (37). in this bond, or linkage to itself, religion continuously returns to itself for recollection, a “‘return for a new choice, return to revise a previous operation,’ whence the sense of ‘scruple,’ but also of choice, of reading and of election, of intelligence” (37). in the “return of religions” today, derrida sees such an operation, a return in a new form—that of technoscience—to which it reacts in an autoimmune fashion. as campbell notes, “derrida’s (auto)immunity names the mode by which religion and science are reciprocally inscribed in each other” (2008, xiv). derrida’s title, “faith and knowledge,” drives this idea home by suggesting that while religion requires constant “recollection” and “revision,” science requires faith. technoscience, derrida writes, begins with the testimony: “i promise to tell you the truth beyond all proof and all theoretical demonstration, believe me, etc.,” which is an “act of faith” (1998, 44). faith and knowledge, or rather religion and science, in derrida’s assessment are similar operations: “between believing one knows and knowing one believes” (40). beyond the etymological explication, derrida also acknowledges the historical tradition that “links greek philosophy to the abrahamic revelations” (1998, 20) and hence knowledge to faith. while this is not a “link” that derrida elaborates upon, it is the history i have laid out in some detail here in this essay. as noted throughout, greek philosophy was widely translated in the medieval islamic world and “returned” in the new context of the revealed religions. religion and philosophy, as historians have noted, posed a challenge to each other from the special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 17 start, yet as muhsin s. mahdi writes, “in the case of each revealed religion, there followed centuries of sustained effort on the part of philosophers to understand the implications of the revelation and come to terms with them and equally sustained efforts on the part of theologians and jurists to define how and to what extent religion can make use of philosophy” (2001, 33). the extent to which philosophy posed a challenge to revealed religions is exemplified by the difficult and controversial “return” of aristotelian thought in the medieval islamic world, after it was not only banned by the church but was also understood by many islamic theologians as conflicting with their easier reconciliation of neoplatonic ideas.5 yet, aristotle, and in particular “the logical work of aristotle that deals with the question of science and the method of science” (mahdi 2001, 53) became central in the islamic world to the extent that, as masarrat husain zuberi writes, “for more than three hundred years [medieval jewish and western latin aristotelian scholars] read aristotle mainly with the help of the commentaries of averroes [ibn-rushd] as he became known in the west and of avicenna who was ibn-sina” (1986, 20). ibn-sina, zuberi continues, “is so deeply steeped in aristotelianism that he became the aristotle for the whole world for centuries” (19). islam as a religion can hence be understood in its etymological sense of “returning,” “revising,” and “linking” revealed religions with greek philosophy. it was physician-philosopher-theologians of the medieval islamic world who fermented and linked greek philosophy with the latin west. islamic science concocted and transmutated greek thought, contending with its contradictory claims and the challenge it posed to islam as a revealed religion. these contradictions become apparent in the “boundary work” that contended with the lines drawn between science, philosophy, and theology as well as within acts of teaching and translation that attempted to transpose irreconcilable thought systems across linguistic boundaries. islam is, hence, far from a self-contained category opposing the west: a virus or a plague attacking it from the outside. rather, islam is the swallowed-within of the west itself, to which, the west continuously returns/reacts in an autoimmune fashion. as derrida writes in “faith and knowledge,” “the surge <déferlement> of ‘islam’ will be neither understood nor answered as along as the exterior of this borderline place have not been called into question; as long as one settles for an internal explanation (interior to the history of faith, of religions, of languages or cultures as such), as long as one does not define the passageway between this interior and all the apparently exterior dimensions (technoscientific, telebiotechnological, which is to say also political and socioeconomic etc.)” (1998, 20). what needs to be examined, as derrida notes here, is the borderline or passageway that separates “islam” from the west (and the rest). for it is these borderlines—these predefined interiorities vs. exteriorities—that result in the “american organism” seeing its own tissues as “other” to itself. it is indeed this special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 18 resistance to accepting the historical linkage between science and religion, faith and knowledge, and islam and the west that causes an autoimmune reaction, preventing the west from seeing islamic thought as one of the basis of its own ontological formation. notes 1 timár (2015) argues that derrida bases his understanding of autoimmunity on medical definitions of aids, writing, “hiv (the human immunodeficiency virus) is not like deconstruction, and cannot be used as a political metaphor. however, aids stands in an uneasy, almost spectral relationship with autoimmune diseases. for whereas in autoimmune diseases the immune system destroys the body’s own organs, during hiv infection, the immune system destroys itself, and becomes entangled in the process that inevitably leads to its total destruction. thus, derrida’s definition of autoimmunity echoes, in fact, the medical definitions of aids, but unlike aids, autoimmunity becomes a political concept in derrida’s thinking” (3). 2 al-razi’s treatise was translated from the arabic and appended to richard mead, discourse on the smallpox and measles (london: j. bradley, 1747), 122–23, consulted at the william osler library of medicine, mcgill university. 3 jacquart and thomasset write, “the semen (virus) is the humour that flows from the sexual organs of the man (vir)” (1985, 13). 4 the diagram is reproduced in pormann and savage-smith 2007, 14. 5 see mahdi, who writes, “alfarabi relates that the church authorities had forbidden the study of various books of [of aristotle’s]” (2001), 53). also see mahdi’s discussion of the maneuvers through which aristotle was made palatable to theologians (2001, 34–37). references al-khafaji, areej. 2022. “coviderrida: the pandemic in deconstructive philosophy.” derrida today 15 (1): 67–84. anderson, warwick, and ian r. mackay. 2014. intolerant bodies: a short history of autoimmunity. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. avicenna. 1930. a treatise on the canon of medicine. translated by oskar cameron gruner. new york: ams press inc. battaglia, e. 2007. “virology: terms and etymology.” societa toscana di scienze naturali, serie b, no. 114, 141–53. http://www.stsn.it/serb114/16_battaglia.pdf special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 19 campbell, timothy. 2008. “translator’s introduction: bíos, immunity, life: the thought of roberto esposito.” in bíos: biopolitics and philosophy, by roberto esposito, vii–xiii minneapolis: university of minnesota press. cohen, ed. 2009. a body worth defending: immunity, biopolitics, and the apotheosis of the modern body. durham, nc: duke university press. das, aileen r. 2020. galen and the arabic reception of plato’s timaeus. cambridge: cambridge university press. derrida, jacques. 1981. “plato’s pharmacy.” in dissemination, translated by barbara johnson, 61–117. chicago: university of chicago press. derrida, jacques. 1998. “faith and knowledge: the two sources of ‘religion’ at the limits of reason alone.” in religion, edited by jacques derrida and gianni vattimo, 1– 78. cambridge: polity press. derrida, jacques. 2003. “autoimmunity: real and symbolic suicides: a dialogue with jacques derrida.” in philosophy in a time of terror: dialogues with jürgen habermas and jacques derrida, by giovanna borradori, 85–136. chicago: university of chicago press. derrida, jacques. 2005. rogues: two essays on reason. stanford university press. esposito, roberto. 2008. bíos: biopolitics and philosophy. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. esposito, roberto. 2011. immunitas: the protection and negotiation of life. cambridge: polity. fancy, nahyan. 2018. “generation in medieval islamic medicine.” in reproduction: antiquity to the present day, edited by nick hopwood, rebecca flemming, and lauren kassell, 129–40. cambridge: cambridge university press. fruton, joseph. 2006. fermentation: vital or chemical process? vol. 1. leiden: brill. gibbs, frederick w. 2019. poison, medicine, and disease in late medieval, and early modern europe. london: routledge. greenham, paul. 2016. “how scientific was islamic science? a case study in the alchemy of al-razi.” in science and religion: east and west, edited by yiftach fehige, 187–213. london: routledge. gutas, dimitri. 1999. greek thought, arabic culture: the greco-arabic translation movement in baghdad and early abbäsid society (2nd–4th/8th–10th centuries). new york: routledge. jacquart, danielle, and claude thomasset. 1985. sexuality and medicine in the middle ages. translated by matthew adamson. princeton, nj: princeton university press. kahl, oliver. 2003. säbür ibn sahl, the small dispensatory. leiden: brill. mahdi, muhsin s. 2001. alfarabi and the foundation of islamic political philosophy. chicago: university of chicago press. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) salar mameni, 2024 20 martin, emily. 1994. flexible bodies: the role of immunity in american culture from the days of polio to the age of aids. boston: beacon press. mead, richard. 1747. discourse on the smallpox and measles. london: j. bradley. naas, michael. 2006. “‘one nation…indivisible’: jacques derrida on the autoimmunity of democracy and the sovereignty of god.” research in phenomenology, no. 36, 15–44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24660631. pormann, peter e., and emilie savage-smith. 2007. medieval islamic medicine. washington, dc: georgetown university press. raza kolb, anjuli fatima. 2021. epidemic empire: colonialism, contagion, and terror, 1817–2020. chicago: university of chicago press. rosenberg, charles. 2014. foreword to intolerant bodies: a short history of autoimmunity, by warwick anderson and ian r. mackay, ix–xii. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press timár, andrea. 2015. “derrida and the immune system.” et al.: critical theory online, no. 3, 1-19. http://etal.hu/en/archive/terrorism-and-aesthetics-2015/derrida-and-theimmune-system/. wald, priscilla. 2008. contagious: cultures, carriers, and the outbreak narrative. durham, nc: duke university press. zuberi, masarrat husain. 1986. aristotle and al-ghazali. saddar, karachi: royal book company. author bio salar mameni is the author of terracene: a crude aesthetics (duke, 2023) and assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at the university of california, berkeley. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24660631 http://etal.hu/en/archive/terrorism-and-aesthetics-2015/derrida-and-the-immune-system/ http://etal.hu/en/archive/terrorism-and-aesthetics-2015/derrida-and-the-immune-system/ derrida, autoimmunity, and islamic medicine abstract keywords autoimmunity and pharmakon virus/sperm and the islamic pharmakon autoimmunity and the american organism notes references author bio gotkin review     review of imedia: the gendering of objects, environments and smart materials by sarah kember (basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan, 2016)    kevin gotkin university of pennsylvania kgotkin@asc.upenn.edu if i had finished sarah kember’s imedia with any kind of confidence about how to review it, i would have missed the moral of her story. this is not for lack of rich material (the book includes a truly magical cast of characters) or because she attempts to obviate critique (quite the opposite). retelling kember’s story is difficult because it is storytelling itself that she brings into focus, first by fogging up the lenses traditionally used to make subjects/objects appear, and then by placing new prisms for new patterns under the brilliant light that is feminist thought. it is a wonderful thing to discover that imedia is a lot of smoke and mirrors. diffraction is kember’s chief mode, what she calls, following donna haraway’s inventive subversion of western optical metaphors, “a phenomenon of interference” (p. 29). each chapter is a kind of diffracting device and as conventional problematics of media, gender, and knowledge production get shot through, they appear in new ways on the other side. kember alternates her chapters between essays and excerpts of a novel in progress to bend theoretical legacies to new effects. the text begins by rendering the curious “i” in our media worlds. does the “i” in ipod/pad/tunes function as a first-person pronoun (the vertical pronoun) or does it stand in for concepts like intelligence, internet, interactive? or is it doing something else, perhaps indeterminable? this “i,” kember shows, is indexed not only by the desires of iworlds’ designers and strategists, but also by those who claim to explain these idevelopments: masculinist imedia theorists who aver their capacity to perceive the imperceptible even after the agency of “invisible information infrastructures” threatens the stability of humanist analytics. for those familiar with kember’s previous work, wondering about life after life after new media, this text includes her newest thinking about how an appreciation for what she previously called “vital mediation” has come to subordinate women despite, in fact because of, their ubiquity in imedia worlds. the conceptual turn “from structure to scale, epistemology to ontology and from subjects to objects to environments of processual and imperceptible things-in-themselves” (p. 107) is sometimes understood as “object-oriented philosophy,” though, kember says, it would be better shortened (and pluralized) to “oops theory.” the book is a calculated style experiment, itself an extension of what she illustrates in her fifth chapter as a rich legacy of feminist writing that does (“disorder and bring about upheaval” (p. 88)). in her essayistic writing, nothing in the book shines as brightly as her second chapter, one piece of her “imedia manifesto” that takes up the material semiosis of the cinderella story. in rendering glass as the “fantasy figure of feminine and feminized labor” (p. 32), kember traces the ways that the “imaterial” is the window through which we see imedia. she exquisitely details the corporate manipulations of glass to appear transparent (the way democracy itself is imagined), which often involves presenting women as ubiquitous iworld subjects (explored in more depth in chapter three). glass’s magical transformation (the thingamabob that does the job, the bippity-boppity-boo) awed late-nineteenth-century witnesses of the transformation of materials blown by the human breath just as it awes today’s audiences of speculative videos about a near future in which our houses—no, our worlds—are made of advanced glass technologies. like the cinderella story, fantasies about the magical properties of glass today go to work in a patriarchal order content to undifferentiate gendered subjects-cum-data objects. remembering cinderella, kember says, means remembering that glass is “an imaterial for everyone” and thus available for building alternative tales. kember builds these alternatives in excerpts from her novel in progress, a day in the life of janet smart. if readers had not fully sensed the possibilities of kember’s serious hijinks, it becomes hard to miss in these chapters, which reimagine the women featured in the speculative videos produced by companies like corning and windows about the future of imedia. she calls these chapters interludes, but i think the label is inaccurate in suggesting these excerpts are removed from what runs through the rest of the book. they are indeed instructive of the kind of queer feminist writing praxis that upends masculinist stories by retelling them otherwise. kember demonstrates the radical potential of parodic and ironic writing she calls for in other parts of the book, when, for example, the title character is having trouble using speech recognition to remotely control one of her household systems, which her five-year-old daughter had named “fart.” though kember often invites laughter in her fiction (a beautiful response to the sexist, asked-everywhere question about whether the killjoy can take a joke), her parody is complex and moving. at one point janet smart, employed by a government agency that monitors citizens’ “pre-consumption” through a humanoid predictive analytics system, watches a scene of herself in a “moogle earthtechnics bio-home” designed for the first human inhabitants of mars, a future that had previously horrified her when she realized her daughter might be an ideal candidate for the mission. that this book is a lot of smoke and mirrors is true—and it is good. imedia is a sophisticated deployment of deceit against an encroaching corporate capitalism whose stories outpace those of what jodi dean (2009) has called the “academic and typing left” (p. 16) who, too long content to critique, have produced few durable stories of their own. writing is what kember does and what she offers as the route away from feminism’s desire to escape the siren song of dialectics. renewing critique with the kind of steam that can fog up glass that had seemed so lucid to be invisible, kember gives contemporary feminist thought a whole circuit of theory-praxis, a welcome imperative for everyone involved in contemporary pedagogies often bereft of good training: right now, write now. references dean, j. (2009). democracy and other neoliberal fantasies: communicative capitalism and left politics. durham, nc: duke university press. kember, s. (2016). imedia: the gendering of objects, environments and smart materials. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. bio kevin gotkin is a ph.d. candidate at the annenberg school for communication at the university of pennsylvania.     book review book review | fractivism: corporate bodies and chemical bonds, by sara ann wylie (duke university press, 2018)     leslie quintanilla san francisco state university ljquinta@sfsu.edu     in fractivism: corporate bodies and chemical bonds, sara ann wylie describes “corporate bodies” as “those networked and peopled, physical and environmental assemblages that are presently creating the global oil and gas industry” (13). the destructive consequences of such industries produce what wylie calls “chemical bonds” between communities and the industries where bodies, dnas, and overall health become sites of intersectional knowledge production. wylie explores this embodied power dynamic in this methodologically interdisciplinary book, unwinding the infrastructure of environmentally destructive industries that induce health issues such as asthma, internal bleeding, miscarriages, and neurological problems. wylie’s book powerfully calls attention to the ways in which the production of industry data gaps purposefully obscures the environmental health consequences caused by fracking. unable to be viewed or analyzed by the public, data about the communities most affected by fossil fuel extraction becomes unstudiable. a social and environmental justice praxis that seeks to interrogate and redress this absence of data hence creates and inserts interdisciplinary knowledge kept subjugated by powerful oil and gas interests. this is the project of fractivism. a social justice intervention in data production, fractivism gives detailed examples and models for researchers, academics, activists, students, and community members to follow as methods for creating sites of knowledge sharing. through collaborative and open digital platforms, harmful and deadly “chemical bonds” that are born out of extractive geographies can be dismembered through coalitional knowledge production across disciplines. the book can be used by justice-centered ethnographers, computer scientists, environmental/land/water activists, data analysists, public health practitioners and advocates, students, and anyone else looking to form cross-sector collaborations that create sources of accountability against corporate perpetrators of environmental destruction. researchers, teachers, and students in sts, environmental studies, anthropology, data science, hydrology, climate science, energy policy, economics, and public health will find their interests in this book. chapters 1 and 2 provide the historical context for the boom in fracking and details how petro-industries use corporate strategies that create “regimes of imperceptibility.” wylie unpacks these regimes that make strategically difficult the study between industry-induced environmental damage and illnesses. in this context of purposeful industry gatekeeping of epistemic engagement, chapters 3 and 4 offer examples for creating a mode of “civic science” (265), like tedx, that directly confronts the disconnected links between environment and illness with collaboratively produced databases. this collaborative confrontation, what wiley names heir (health environmental impact response) science is meant to transform people’s relationships with hegemonic fossil fuel narratives by providing a digital platform for community-based storytelling and sharing. the second half of the book, starting with chapter 5, presents an “sts in practice” (17) that can increase accountability and responsibility for environmental and social damages caused by capitalist corporate industries. ensuing chapters discuss examples of such work. a mapand online tool-making research group, extract models the kinds of digital media infrastructures making for robust cross-sector collaborations. wylie explores the process of creating such collaborations by foregrounding wellwatch, a community monitoring tool that formed part of the broader strategic confrontation to the fossil fuel-produced information gaps and “regimes of impermeability” (255). wylie details a thorough reflection of wellwatch as a “platform for popular epidemiology” (221) that united integrated mapping, oral histories, and other data from new york, colorado, pennsylvania, ohio, and texas—a cross-geographic data information project that brought together otherwise isolated frontline communities that were suffering in constructed silences by the oil and gas industries. the book reaches beyond the nooks of knowledge production in the university and directly confronts these academic silos by proposing methods of collaborative and cross-sector efforts. for sts scholars, models of “sts in practice” help instruct students in the practical and political dimensions of environmental, data, and health justice praxis. for non-profits and organizations seeking ways to foster relationships with justice-minded and practice-oriented scientists and researchers, fractivism offers exemplars for creating those infrastructures for multi-scalar and multi-sited partnerships from university researchers working with local communities to advocacy at the state and national levels. and for those workers in extractive industries who find themselves questioning the societal, environmental, and climate impacts of industry practices that continue to frack, extract, and destroy land, waters, and community health, this book offers ways to channel important knowledges, tools, and interests towards accountability and responsibility. fractivism calls for “for an interdisciplinary effort toward industrial embodiment to record, aggregate, and remediate the material risks posed by this industrial activity so that the lives of those it harms can be improved” (280). chapter 5 is useful for academics who would like to untangle their institution’s relationships with corporate extractivist corporations, introducing methodological interventions that are both epistemic and strategic. as an example, wylie analyzes the collaboration between massachusetts institute of technology and the largest oilfield services provider schlumberger, and exposes the hegemonic and violent pedagogies of “immersive experiences”, simulation technologies that erase, obscure, and conceal the people, bodies, and environments on surface landscapes in order to extract, exploit, and pillage “subsurface riches, without the knowledge or participation of surface residents” (127). thinking through the “immersive simulation” (123), wylie exposes the fabricated infrastructures in technology, data, and extractive industries that allow for violent university research practices, such as those between mit students and researchers, that continue a legacy of unquestioned consequences and harm done to environmental and societal contexts (127). thus, it would be particularly important for radical intellectuals and/or organizers who are also academics in higher education to borrow and build from fractivism’s call to reveal the epistemic power dynamics driving the destructive consequences of universities’ collaboration with extractive industries. to reveal these power dynamics constitutes one of the many ways one can leverage academic positions for social justice rather than for structures of environmental and health violence. wylie’s short discussion on native american erasure in the context of research science and nuclear testing intersects with what other scholars have centralized as a key component to decolonize the anthropocene (whyte 2017). wylie’s conceptualization of the “modern human” as one in “pursuit of the control of nature” (277) should be further distinguished as to not collapse “all humans” into a homogenous context of culpability when studying environmental and health injustices. thus, pairing fractivism’s extraordinary collaborative methodologies alongside frameworks and praxes from indigenous and native american studies, indigenous science, and settler colonial studies, can continue to unwind analyses of settler colonial protagonism within industrialism and its destructive consequences in order to form alliances and solidarities with wider communities on the frontlines. fractivism is especially useful for the classroom and for interdisciplinary researchers and students alike to understand how “sts in practice” can be a model for material projects that unite those who want to try and find solutions with others—not in isolation. this book is a tool for those looking to utilize research, data, or analytical methods for social and environmental justice movements broadly. chapters 3 and 4 provide exemplary discussion of how tedx built the first public database with information about chemicals used in fracking and the ways in which they produce health consequences, such as endocrine disruption. producing such public information forces a public conversation where there was once silence on behalf of the industry. so these chapters show how data justice is part of the larger movement of environmental justice efforts where knowledge production from below, or as discussed in chapter 5, “citizen science” is a key methodological intervention in “regimes of imperceptibility” (255). the text closes with a provocation for potential organizers in every sector: “how can we grapple with environmental health problems such as climate change, endocrine disruption, and chemical contamination due to fracking that transcend biological, legal, and social boundaries?” (255). sharply following the process and praxis that is embedded in “sts in practice” is the value system that believes how important it is to “create a social-technical infrastructure for recognizing common problems and helping communities form to address them” (218) beyond academic settings that have historically hoarded power through knowledge production for capitalist and colonial entities, in this case, fossil fuel industries and economies.   references whyte, kyle. 2017. “indigenous climate change studies: indigenizing futures, decolonizing the anthropocene.” english language notes 55 (1): 153–62. https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-55.1-2.153     author bio leslie quintanilla is a co-founder of the center for interdisciplinary environmental justice and an assistant professor at san francisco state university in women and gender studies.     special section late to the party: articulating time and care in interdisciplinary projects     jennifer l. croissant university of arizona jlc@arizona.edu   abstract this article explores the disjunctures and “catch-up” work of developing relationships and getting a sense of the project as community and intellectual venture as a “fill-in” social scientist added late to a large, complex interdisciplinary project. based on two years of intermittent interactions (live and virtual) and tracking the communications of the group, from grant proposal formulation through the first year of the award, i describe how time operates in several registers: idiosyncratic, disciplinary, institutional, and epistemic. how these registers intersect with and without friction is an unexamined issue in studies of interdisciplinarity. it is more than “time management,” although that is a significant coordination challenge for project leadership. but the (dis)articulations of registers also trace the hierarchicalization of disciplines and practices in ways that challenge effective interdisciplinarity and program goals of inclusivity.   keywords time, interdisciplinarity, participant-observation   context: the “bfp” in december 2019 i was called to participate in a series of meetings for a research group on an interdisciplinary project in the nonhuman life sciences (soil, plants, fungi, and microbes). we can call the project the “bfp” (big friendly project), with an overall budget of us$3 million over five years. so, not the biggest-of-big science, but large and complex nonetheless. the lead principal investigator (pi), a senior scholar in ecology and evolutionary biology, saw broad interdisciplinarity in the funding call, and the resources of the social sciences as one means for achieving that breadth. while the knowledge from this emerging interdiscipline is of interest, in this paper i will focus on the way that time is working in multiple levels of analysis and shaping knowledge production.1 the question of time is both an epistemic issue, as a matter of knowledge making across fields, and a methodological issue, as organization in contemporary higher education shapes research practices and frames many of the challenges of collaborative cross-disciplinary work. “ecosystem genomics” is a field-in-formation that takes on scale issues in the life sciences. what are the metabolic processes of species responding to climate stress? what variants in organisms—whether bacteria, fungi, or plants—emerge in changing ecosystems? included in the research group are specialists in data science, genomics, metabolomics, plant biology, mycology-plant systems, plant-soil microenvironments, ecosystem science, and evolutionary biology. the project combines research with an intensive interdisciplinary curriculum development project. there is also an externally contracted evaluator who conducts assessment activities for the student outcomes of the training component. separate from the assessment activities by the external evaluator, the social science component was framed in a “cultures of science” (see knorr cetina 1999) approach to understanding how disciplinary cultures can be barriers to interdisciplinarity. the natural and social scientists centered this part of the project on the premise that facilitating shared understandings of the cultures of science could overcome those barriers. i was invited to the bfp because the prior social scientist pi decided that the time commitment expected for the project was unmanageable, or at least unmanageable given her intrinsic interest in the project and other presumably more compelling commitments. she came to this project as an anthropologist studying sts. i was selected by the lead pi because i was available and had a grant-writing and research track record in studies of interdisciplinarity. as jane calvert (2013) notes, these invitations reflect funding agency parameters pulling social scientists into interdisciplinary collaborations. i accepted because it seemed intrinsically interesting and because i was going to need new projects as i transitioned away from being a department head. from the time that i was invited to the project, we had about a six-week turnaround before the final (re)submission to the granting agency. the proposal was highly developed after a previous submission and over year of development and redevelopment. at that time of my invitation, however, i was beginning treatments for a cancer diagnosis, and the resultant stress and trauma meant that i was not in a position to significantly rework the social science research plans to what might have been more in line with my interests and capabilities as a mid-career interdisciplinary sts scholar situated in a gender and women’s studies department. but the team of six pis revised the grant materials and made the deadline, and we then resumed our regular, disparate, activities. why is it important that i was late? lateness allowed me to see the result of negotiations of what a robust social science component meant to the life science pis and the prior social science pi. the initial design involved monthly interviews, hours of fieldwork observations each month, surveys, focus groups, and regular reporting: an immersive anthropological research experience considered normative in the field. colloquially, late to the party reflects not just general tardiness, but with a connotation of being slow, perhaps intellectually, or more generally clueless or attending to things (such as fads or pop culture) well after they have reached their peak intensity. this cluelessness is a kind of structured ignorance or ethnographic naivete, which enables the kind of “estrangement” foundational to some versions of anthropological epistemology.2 my late arrival meant that i had to figure out what had been previously imagined as the process and outcomes of the project and who the major actors were, and parse the interpersonal power dynamics and hierarchies that shaped group dynamics. and lateness became a pervasive feeling as the demands of fieldwork became increasingly difficult to sustain. we got funded! as this was at least the second iteration of this proposal, it was not entirely surprising. in august 2020 we received notification of an award. by agency design, the first year of the project was meant as preparation and organization. so, in fall of 2020, we had regular virtual meetings and correspondence as we developed a seminar, evaluation tools, and all of the detailed procedural documents required to admit fully funded fellows and offer a concentration or minor for graduate students. superficially, there were few conflicts and only a bit of vexation about the time commitments or details of procedures. even during the covid-19 pandemic, electronic tools allowed for effective meetings, and, whatever the discomforts of online meetings, there was a net benefit of reduced commuting time both to and across campus, despite other inconveniences and draws on people’s time and attention. during the spring semester 2021, a subcommittee (of which i was not a part) reviewed applications from potential students, for enrollment in fall 2021. the instructor for the fall seminar was identified by the executive team, and a basic fall semester course template, which now carries institutional precedence, was developed. the team designed the class with lectures on the scientific content (ecosystem science, genomics and metabolomics, and data sciences), plus presentations about interdisciplinarity and how it works, and professionalization activities such as science communication skills, résumé preparation, and mentoring/being mentored. an additional consulting social scientist planned to contribute information on the latest quantitative research about the risks and benefits of interdisciplinarity. the bfp ultimately admitted a cohort of thirteen students, seven funded. in spring of 2021 we have our first, albeit minor, time frictions in implementation. in trying to schedule participation in the fall seminar, in mid-april i asked for some scheduling basics. these requests were pushed off into may and then again into june. summer passes: it’s now late july and we still don’t have a seminar meeting time. scheduling meetings instantiates the “n-body problem,” reflecting the increasing impossibility of getting any group of n>2 to a meeting.3 there are sometimes explicit disengagements: “don’t wait for me,” or “don’t let me hold up scheduling a meeting.” passive disengagement (complete non-response to an invitation, for example) also permits the group to move on. let us treat the non-responses of the social scientists to this rescheduling problem as a tacit self-recognition of our lack of centrality to the project. the first time slot selected for the seminar overlaps with a standing department seminar for one of the constituent life science disciplines and must be rescheduled. that this new seminar time interferes with one of the department seminars for the participating social scientists can’t be helped. it goes without saying that the most important participants need to attend, and scheduling works to accommodate them. meeting times, here, reflect centrality and disciplinary hierarchies. the natural science pi’s schedules and their department seminars and activities are the constraints to scheduling, not the schedules of the social science pi or consultants. time passes, and it’s late august 2021. it’s officially the start of year two of the project, and the focal point is the cohort seminar for the admitted graduate students from seven different biological science departments. the friday before classes i received an email: please send “worksheets” and “learning objectives” for my instructional activities on the “cultures of science.” this is extremely short notice and for someone who is not a last-minute kind of person, it was anxiety producing and felt disrespectful. more importantly, both the evaluation and social science pi were inadvertently left out of orientation. late-summer vacations had been planned, air travel scheduled, and the last-minute implementation of orientation meant an accidental erasure of the social sciences and the external evaluator. all of the seventeen associated faculty and six pis have intermittent participation over the course of the 2021–22 academic year. regular activities for the faculty include virtual steering committee meetings for the pis. i schedule some interviews. covid-19 prevents fieldwork outside of zoom meetings. over the course of the year in their hybrid seminar, students develop summer research plans and courses of study for their program—ms, phd, or certificate. they produce deliverables such as lists of potential classes, tentative schedules for required examinations, a timeline for degree completion, and summer research proposals. my “fieldwork,” such that it was with a full teaching load, was extremely arduous. with roughly two dozen faculty participants in multiple fields, scheduling, conducting, and archiving meetings took significant time in excess of a regular research time allotment (40 percent of our time). faculty focus groups were fundamentally impossible to schedule. i had a full slate of courses (two per semester with twenty to thirty students each course), no teaching assistance, no course releases, and, as is well known, the pivot to online instruction and stressors of covid-19 meant far more intensive communications with students. a graduate student research assistant embedded in the course managed interviews and participant observation of students (exceptionally well, i might add), but had to abandon monthly focus groups (in the original research design) as infeasible and excessive in terms of participant time commitments. by may of 2022, i really understood why the prior social science pi chose to withdraw from the project. the things made visible by being late did not at the outset include the consequences of the intense and comprehensive research design developed by the prior pi, leading to very literal lateness as it turns out the social science component was not sustainable as designed. after a year of feeling like i couldn’t keep up—not without sacrificing teaching quality, family life, and a commitment to personal health—i had to re-examine the research expectations and structural processes that made me feel late, nearly all the time. i was slow on the uptake that this was an impossible project as envisioned as an immersive anthropological study.   broader context and literatures in this section i will turn, very briefly, to some of the intellectual challenges of the grant, for both the life scientists and social science participants, in the context of the social science literature. the bfp emerges in an agency and institutional emphasis on interdisciplinarity, including multiple iterations of interdisciplinary training programs. since the second world war, as julie thompson klein (1990) recounts, various iterations of interdisciplinarity have been formulated to take on large complex societal problems.4 there are “grand challenges” and “wicked problems” that can’t be solved in the “silos” and other metaphors for disciplinary specialization, traditional academic departments, and intellectual isolation (see kawa et al. 2020; killion et al. 2018; moon et al. 2021). previous approaches of sts researchers included laboratory studies (knorr cetina 1995; latour 1987; latour and woolgar 1979) and reimagining the collaborative process as a research method (calvert 2013). and while interdisciplinarity and its counterparts are desirable, they are hard to achieve (datta 2018; frickel, albert, and prainsack 2017; hadfield-hill et al. 2020; leahey 2018; macleod 2018). the social scientists involved in the project repeatedly quip to each other about the biological scientists, “they’re all biologists” and in close proximity intellectually, despite diversity of methods and specializations.5 the bfp is concerned with bridging the scale of extremely “micro” measurements of genes or elements or metabolomic compounds, and what they might say about large-scale ecological processes of survival, adaptation, or selection.6 one of the featured research projects involves studying the bacterial and chemical composition of different zones in a rapidly melting scandinavian permafrost, to understand the transition of the biotic communities species distributions and their carbon uptake or release characteristics under conditions of global climate change. interdisciplinarity is partially mapped to questions of bridging scales. to demonstrate novelty for the granting agency, there is an advantage in maximizing their sense of themselves as intellectually far apart. methodologically, rather than trying to decide whether they are “really, really” interdisciplinary, let us take at face value their own self-reported challenges in coordinating knowledge production across scales. these challenges include a distribution of agnoses (gross 2010). based on their home disciplines, participants express a lack of understanding of how to culture cells; how to do data analytics; the process of linking genomic data to metabolic pathways suggested by metabolomic measures; generating and validating genetic diversity measures. as a group of about forty participants there are a lot of known unknowns, and many points of integration suggested by the bfp’s overarching goals. some people know how to extract and analyze dna, others do not: these non-knowledges set up exchanges of capacities, providing an unspoken definition of collaboration and interdisciplinarity. karin knorr cetina’s epistemic cultures (1999) was the organizing framework for this project, as selected by the prior social science pi. however, there are issues: first of all, epistemic cultures, like so much of the field-defining scholarship in sts, took about a decade of work to bring to press as a book (knorr cetina 1991). it is comparative, not interdisciplinary. it is erudite, and the scholarly articles prefiguring the award-winning book are for specialists. my attempt to teach knorr cetina’s 1991 background article, “epistemic cultures: forms of science in reason,” in the graduate seminar was disastrous.. the students were upset by being challenged with a work they did not understand. only two students found the article a worthwhile challenge. trying to teach this article illuminated the “hard limits” to interdisciplinarity for the group. it also revealed that they collectively knew little of the history and philosophy of their own fields: no students in the first cohort, for example, could identify the nobel prize–winning work of barbara mcclintock on corn gene transposons (keller 1984). in contrast, a presentation by another social scientist in a consulting (rather than pi) role, which distilled quantitative research on the risks and benefits of interdisciplinarity, was well received. what became clear in the observations of that classroom session were two things. the first has to do with the differing expectations for defining interdisciplinarity as something that can be the property of a person (see kawa et al. 2021) as opposed to the property of a team. for the latter, then, teamwork skills and communication skills, rather than actual internalized competency across disciplines, becomes the learning objective. this individual-team tension is not resolved in project goals and activities. the second observation from these presentations is the articulation of an extreme instrumentalization of social science work. lessons on interdisciplinarity focused on atheoretical heuristics for interdisciplinary success and were reported as definitely useful in the terms of the bfp objectives. this instrumentalization, coupled with the activities of the external evaluator and numerous rubrics and toolkits and checklists available to facilitate interdisciplinarity, potentially reduces interdisciplinarity to a performative or attitudinal aspiration and a menu of social skills rather than epistemological integration (hackett and rhoten 2009).7 the definition of interdisciplinarity for the group has become instantiated in a form of exchange around instrumentalities—who brings what useful tools to scientific problem solving.   considering the registers of time a register, in linguistics, is language used in a particular “communicative situation.”8 i am using the term here to indicate the articulations of time, like the linguistic usage, are not discrete orderings of layers or levels, but interwoven and situational. the registers i identify are the idiosyncratic, disciplinary, epistemic, and institutional. this ordering does suggest scale, but these are mutually constitutive articulations, not discrete levels. how these registers intersect with and without friction is an unexamined issue in studies of interdisciplinarity. it is more than “time management,” although we should start there. time management is a matter of work practices, which are individual but also organizational and disciplinary in habitus. research on interdisciplinarity makes note of the time complications of running multi-investigator and multidisciplinary projects.9 it takes more time to communicate, to negotiate, and to organize events, meetings, and to make deadlines. individual or idiosyncratic time orientations are matters of habitus that emerge from personal attributes, training, and experience, as well as disciplinary and organizational patterns and tools. someone who is a caregiver may have evolved specific time constraints and time management tools. someone who has been in academic leadership may have a different appreciation for organizational time-keeping and deadlines, and managing staff. some people need more or less sleep or time spent in self-care. the time patterns of academic life are structured through the cycles of academic year. this second register of time is the institutional clock, embedded in an organizational field. we know that the academic year generates certain expectations for activity and availability. funding applications and reporting, conference proposals, grades, department social calendars, public lecture series, annual reports and productivity measures, and so many activities are pinned to the academic calendar, whose origins are so long past as to seem unremarkable and inviolable. there is, for example, no sign of the four-day work-week or reduced full time equivalence (fte) (if you want to keep tenure) at most us universities. nor should we forget the centrality of the calendar of the global north, which challenges international collaborations. students learn to manage the rhythm of the academic year, and very quickly absorb the lessons of the bfg program handbook, which is concerned with time-to-degree measures, semesters and credit attainment, continuity of enrollment, and meeting program benchmarks. much of the cycle of student interests and research capabilities are shaped by the expectations of a four(ish)-year undergraduate curriculum. graduate students, as well as contingent faculty, postdocs, and some staff, live as “tumbleweeds” (pugh 2015) with a situational precarity subject to the cycles of the academic year (e.g., often no funding for the summer months) and grant cycles and the availability of “soft money” to sustain courses of study, research projects, and career trajectories. it should be noted that fewer than 20 percent of the students in the first cohort of the bfp expressed interest in full-time, conventional academic careers, preferring non-academic public and private sector employment after degree completion.10 while institutional specifics vary, at ours, the tenure clock, or the tenure clock, and tenure and promotion policies are part of the hiring information for incoming faculty colleagues. a third-year review is summative and high-stakes feedback to pre-tenure colleagues. and while flexibility, particularly around the covid-19 pandemic, is stated at an institutional level, what mary blair-loy and erin cech (2022) identify as the “work devotion schema” means that exceptionally long hours and high levels of engagement are taken as measures of seriousness and quality. the work devotion schema is a factor inhibiting diversity. an “all-in” model of a scientific lifestyle is taken as an objective measure of merit and commitment when it is a specific cultural formation and not actually strongly correlated with productivity or innovation in stem. underrepresented minorities, lgbtq+ faculty, and female faculty with families are seen as less than serious, despite comparable productivity. evaluating the bfp for the productivity effects will take a longer time frame than allotted for the project, but participants have not disclosed negative messaging or behaviors based on their identities. annual faculty performance reviews for continuing faculty and annual budget cycles also shape measures, and presumably some sense of strategy, for managing productivity. and while there is some variation in the policies and timelines, there is mostly convergence, as basic institutional isomorphic practices are in effect (dimaggio and powell 1983). couple those institutional practices and their shaping of time with the time demands of grant activities and grant cycles, and the organizational environment produces practical and normative expectations for productivity, and presence. related to but not the same as institutional time, the third register of time is disciplinary. it has to do with specific disciplinary encounters with the institutional academic year clock. it is most clearly understood in the variability of the professional research, writing, and conferencing cycle. for example, some years ago i collaborated with an archaeology phd student to think about how instruments did and did not move into archaeological practice. early phases of our activities went well. but archaeologists dig in the summer, analyze and write in the fall, present and submit for publication in the spring. sociologists present at the end of the summer, research in the fall, and write in the spring. i found it impossible to get away from campus to attend the archaeology conference cycle. disciplinary grant, paper submission, and review cycles have become solidified and shape the research and writing practices of scholars, often so much a matter of routine as to be unremarkable until there are interdisciplinary frictions. these disciplinary cycles are closely linked to but not the same as the fourth register of time: epistemic time. this register of time is deeply connected to the material practices of knowledge production and to issues of instrumentation and the ontology of research objects, reasoning, and causality. is the unit of analysis a growing season, a semester, a weekend, a meeting, the life cycle of a microorganism? for a mycologist, a solid experiment might follow a fungus and its lifespan. depending on the species that can be about a month.11 that means researchers can conduct two or possibly three experiment cycles in a typical semester. a metabolomics analysis, which uses techniques such as gas chromatography or spectrometry, characterizes the outputs of cellular operations, such as fat, protein, or sugar compositions, and can take hours or perhaps a day or two. polymerase chain reaction (pcr) analysis lays out the genetic information of a sample and can be done in mere hours. a single-item pcr screen, such as a covid-19 test, can be done in fifteen to thirty minutes. or consider the data science: a simulation or analytic protocol can be done at the processing speed of the computer system—in principle, fractions of a second. digital tools accelerate time, or at least time expectations, for communications, exchange of data, and time spent on analysis. sabina leonelli (2018) describes how data science timescales shape how researchers interpret data as evidence and identify phenomena, and data practices can shape knowledge production and epistemological trust and the continuity of results. finally, for an ecologist, the arc of the year or growing season is a pretty typical time frame for an experiment. however, a researcher in the group once said that decades would be great for the study of long-term adaptations to climate change, but you can’t generally get grants for that long. of course, all of these examples require parsing when the experiments begin and end (galison 1987). what are the set-up times? how much time does it take to gather experimental traces and turn them into meaningful inscriptions? how are samples handled and stored? how many trials need to be done to confirm results? do these trials run in parallel or take greater time to run in sequences? when do we know we are done? caitlin donahue wylie (2019) describes how different specialists within a field (paleontology) can have divergent definitions of these detailed practices, producing mistakes and misunderstandings and complicating the research process. epistemic time is particularly embodied in instruments, and time can be more or less scarce based on the time needed for any particular experimental component, or due to competition for access to instruments (traweek 1988). sharon traweek’s analysis of the multiple temporalities of scientific work in high energy physics motivates this analysis. but here, there are multiple instruments that work on differing scales, in different departments, rather than the centralized large-scale instrument in high energy physics. the bfp as a project occupies more or less centrality for some of the participants, which may lead to relative de-prioritization of doing analyses for the project. there is a fairly large queue for pcr analysis and metabolomics analysis beyond the bfp. the researchers with those tools have prior research agendas and also provide research services to other groups. there are some tacit expectations for “on-demand” research results based on assumptions about the time to produce data: if pcr doesn’t take much time, an expected rapid turn-around is implied. the multiple disciplines have different epistemic cultures, here focusing on time, which are materialized in instruments and their research objects. what is important for this paper is the articulation of these multiple registers, and the hierarchicalization of disciplines and practices in ways that challenge effective interdisciplinarity and program goals. in general, what are the delimiting time factors for an interdisciplinary project? we find reporting expectations and the structure of the academic year clearly shape the scale and scope of student projects in most fields. with respect to the bfp, can ecological fieldwork be done in a summer, at least sufficient for a chapter if not an entire dissertation? can experiments, plant or fungal growth, replications, data collection, and data analysis be done in a two-month swing of a semester or a summer? access to different tools from constituent disciplines similarly shape the scales and scope of graduate work. the academic calendar becomes the organizing frame for research design. do-ability is very much a matter of the calendar (clarke and fujumura 1992). disciplinary and epistemic time constraints add another layer that has the primary tendency to narrow, not expand, research design and the scope of interdisciplinarity.12 institutional expectations shape research design. a short and rigorously enforced time-to-degree is not conducive to the time needed for managing, experiencing, exploring, and designing complex interdisciplinary experiments. an upper-level administrator has made public the expectation that graduate students in all programs should be finished with their phds in six years, which will likely thwart both innovativeness and interdisciplinarity, and inclusivity. faculty in the humanities and social sciences have responded negatively to this plan, but the administration’s complete neglect of the different funding structures (e.g., time spent in teaching appointments for graduate students) and different expectations for productivity and dissertation scope, and research methods, has put enormous strain on those departments. time both reveals and structures hierarchies. as mentioned before, there is an instrumentalization of the social sciences (see also calvert 2013; forsythe 1999; kamath et al. 2022). because the “cutting edge” is important to the scientists, students and faculty of the bfp are not particularly motivated to understand the longer history of their fields. literature reviews and topic searches have shallow historical roots. it is the privilege of the senior-most faculty to want to take deep dives into the history and philosophy of their study areas. outside of this prioritization of the most current work, field hierarchicalizations are orderings established by both tacit and explicit notions of “do-ability” (clarke and fujimura 1992). student valuations of topic importance are centered on scientific and employment questions: will this help me get a job? will this help me graduate on time? these orderings also co-constitute assumptions about how difficult something is or should be, and the status of both the fields and their participants (carrigan and bardini 2021). data science, for example, is considered a growth area and students were eager to improve their capacities and requested specialized short workshops outside of core seminars. according to evaluator surveys and social science interviews, students were moderately interested in and satisfied with the cultures of science and social science scholarship on interdisciplinarity as presented in classes but made no requests for additional workshops or training. the perceived “rigor” of fields structures part of the validation, and those fields with high demands for reproducibility, multiple trials, and conforming to scientific ideas such as control groups, have greater prestige. these orderings are not new and have been noted previously as shaping the reception of the social sciences into scientific fields (albert et al. 2008; forsythe 1999) and the models of legitimate scientific practice that undergird differential power in the sciences (albert et al. 2008; albert and kleinman 2011; nelson et al. 2022). we also see a qualitative bimodal commitment pattern, between core and peripheral group participants, which produces a self-reinforcing pattern of engagement and leadership. considering attention as allocation of time to things of interest or priority, the distribution of attention traces the time commitments of bfp participants. there are a few faculty from whom little is asked—due to prior commitments, leaves, perceived “fit” with the program—who currently have only a slim intersect with the intellectual trajectory of ecosystem genomics. there are core faculty with high degrees of formal responsibilities and interest, and others with high interest but few formal responsibilities. the bfp faces centrifugal and centripetal forces that pull faculty into or out of the project, which will affect the longevity and legacy—the stability and quality—of the program when the grant funding runs out. the lead pis of the grant and its curriculum will need people to commit time to the bfp, to elevate its activities to sufficient levels of personal priority to conduct the work of maintaining the program. new people will need to care (martin, myers, and viseu 2015).   conclusions in the context of care udo krautwurst argues that “academic anthropologists’ conditions of employment shape anthropologists’ practice” (2013, 261), as lives, scholarship, and identity are increasingly imbricated in the neoliberal university. fieldwork becomes a very privileged practice after graduate school, or at least, the expectations of highly immersive fieldwork can only be sustained with generous course release policies, travel, research support, time away from the office, and family support. reflexively, making the time to conduct this work under the constraints of my idiosyncratic time needs lead me to consider the question of just how much self-care i was prepared to abandon to not be continually “late to the party.” (answer: none.) “patchwork” ethnography (günel, varma, and watanabe, 2020) is one alternative, as it is a critique of the traditional immersive ethnography, and a recognition of the dissolution of firm boundaries between “home” and “field.” patchwork ethnography also asks for rethinking the temporalization of research, in particular the collapse of a “fieldwork-then-analysis” distinction. there are two other temporal interventions in ethnographies of interdisciplinarity, particularly in the bfp, that might be relevant moving forward: the first is the extension of meeting ethnography to science studies from its origins in studying governments and community organizing to specifically knowledge-production domains (sandler and thedvall 2017). due to covid, the methodological design for the social science research of the bfp shifted to a meeting focus, via steering committee meetings and hybrid classes, which both provided interactional context and transcripts. retroactively understanding components of my bfp work to date as a meeting ethnography lets me interrogate how discipline, time, and hierarchy structure meeting events, shape participation and nonparticipation. online meetings allow for an interrogation of what bfp meetings “do” or “produce” and question whether or not everyone shares recognition of the outcomes. for example, during a regular steering committee meeting, entirely noncontroversial decisions about assessment and reporting become “sticky” and institutionalize a model of progress through the program, a pathway one can easily fall from but not recover to. the other temporal recognition is a kind of “ethnography by appointment.”13 in the sense that the social scientists are often studying up, these local institutional elites have very little time for sustained conversations and are sometimes only grudgingly available. between the concrete complexity of scheduling, the epistemic privilege of the hard sciences and the implied status that large grants confer, elite scientists can be very difficult to engage.14 if my institutional experience (campbell 1998) demonstrates that traditional ethnographic practice is privileged and largely unsustainable in neoliberal interdisciplinary contexts, the other insight from the bfp that has become clear as the fall of 2022 has unfolded is that the inertia of the individual-investigator-laboratory system remains an impediment to interdisciplinarity. pis who are phd supervisors remain situated in and evaluated by departments, and so student participants with an interest in interdisciplinarity experience time structurations that reproduce disciplines because they are accountable to their supervisors. the cycle of the academic year shapes the do-ability of projects, which in turn sets a constraint for the epistemic time allowed to conduct an experiment. these factors are structural and hard to mitigate. they are institutional, and doxological (albert and kleinman 2011) in the sense that these are things that go without saying, or at least until a nosey social scientist asks why things might not be otherwise. several times i have tried to spur interest in the idea of a cohort dissertation, but my suggestions largely fall on deaf ears. cohort theses and dissertations are more prevalent fields like educational studies, counseling, and social work (see burnett 2011; holmes et al. 2010), where a cohort of enrollees takes on a single problem or site (such as a school) and applies different methodologies and foci (parent relations, funding, school leadership, demographics, student health). students develop topical and methodological expertise within the context of the single project, gaining individual publications, but perhaps also publishing collectively. educational studies and social work are not, however, considered high-status fields, and the disruption of individual investigator power and of the funding and evaluation mechanisms for individual faculty makes cohort dissertations in the sciences fundamentally unimaginable. and in relation to the unimaginable: imagine a university without deadlines. immediately the mind freezes. how would we know when a course starts or stop? how do we account for our labor? scientists themselves occasionally articulate a plea for slow science (lutz 2012; stengers 2017), arguing that speed pressures and the demand for productivity generates incremental, not transformative knowledge (park, leahey, and funk 2023). ulrike felt’s (2017a, 2017b) description of the way that academic accounting regimes, which shift science from discovery to delivery, produces a chronopolitics for the governance of academic work. there is no time for non-work. and here is a conundrum: how do we manage the urgency of many issues, and yet move toward slow science? i am arguing that the time pressures and manufactured urgency of academic work are so condensed and foreshortened that these time parameters will inhibit solution of the “wicked problems.” and thus time frames of epistemology and ontology, the reality of things shaped by their accessibility in the overdetermined time systems, and the time to produce knowledge are similarly co-constituted. through studying the workings of the bfp, we have some examples of how institutional time constraints become epistemological constraints as registers become entangled and shape question formulation and research trajectories. the time orientations, such as the “work devotion schema” (blair-loy and cech 2022), are part of an intrinsic able-ism built into academe. consider the ways that the expectation of full-time participation in schooling limits the participation of people who need or demand more time for other things. nearly all student aid is premised on full-time enrollment. the demand for continual at-work presence and the belief that if a person is not “all in” for science there is no place for them becomes an implicit, discouraging message to young people considering careers in science. bfp senior faculty, who have clearly made continual presence central to their work and identities, are disappointed in student lack of interest in continuing in the academy. the demand for the good-old-bad-old immersive ethnography—fieldwork presence—could also be argued to be ableist. as ashley shew argues, “clocks should bend to our bodies, not the other way around” (2020, 9). covid-19 highlighted the need for what she calls “disability-led hacks,” where the tricks, management, and work and workplace modifications often needed for persons with disabilities moved into view as resources for all people needing to accommodate challenges emerging from the pandemic. similarly, the academic career track is tuned to a very specific model of the life course and daily time practices, for which crip time and queer time may be nearly incompatible (see samuels 2017; jaffe 2018). time orientations and systems shape accessibility, for caregivers, people who need more time for their own care, for different kinds of community and civic engagement, for people juggling multiple responsibilities. time regimes are an underexamined form of gatekeeping into higher education. like calvert (2013), i value the collegiality and emergent friendships from participating in the bfp. and like calvert, this experience has had me facing frustrations related to hierarchies and assumptions about social science disciplines and the general state of science in the context of academia (see felt 2017a, 2017b; nelson et al. 2022; stengers 2017). and while the investigators in the bfp are explicitly committed to an inclusive model of science, engaging us underrepresented minorities, promoting sensitivity and inclusion for gender, sexuality, and multiple identity registers, nonetheless the multiple registers of time and their obduracy reproduce hierarchicalizations and privileges that have pragmatic and epistemic impacts on who can participate, what questions are ask-able, and what counts as evidence. i face a quandary to respect my needs for self-care and care commitments external to the project, to feel always late to the party and perpetually feel slow. yet ethically and as a matter of care and regard for my colleagues, i also wish to not inhibit the goals of the bfp, particularly not to intensify the vulnerability of the more precarious faculty and students or the larger continuity of the program by not manifesting the normative productivity of the investigative group. i hope that this study encourages conversation on the registers of time and how they function organizationally and epistemologically, with an eye toward encouraging conversations about time that are inclusive and generate capacities for knowledge and care.   acknowledgements this material is based upon work supported by the national science foundation under grant no. dge-2022055. any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the national science foundation. this paper was first presented in a panel organized by caitlyn wyle and coleen carrigan, 4s (the society for the social study of science) in fall 2021. we followed up with an editing roundtable workshop in summer 2022, which was immensely useful. the generosity of the co-panelists and editors has been inspiring and has immeasurably enhanced the quality of this paper. megan mckendry, sociology phd candidate, has masterfully engaged the graduate students in interviews and with sustained interactions and supported this work with bibliographic assistance and being a very smart sounding board. i also want to thank my interlocutors. they are, across the board, an exceptionally generous group, with their time and enthusiasm. we respectfully acknowledge the university of arizona is on the land and territories of indigenous peoples. today, arizona is home to twenty-two federally recognized tribes, with tucson being home to the o’odham and the yaqui. committed to diversity and inclusion, the university strives to build sustainable relationships with sovereign native nations and indigenous communities through education offerings, partnerships, and community service.   notes 1 a note on anonymity: with a relatively small sample size and a very specific field-in-formation, demographic data is not provided for the pool of interlocutors and direct attributions are avoided, which limits intersectional analysis. also, because we have not explicitly worked out authorship/co-authorship expectations, and to protect anonymity, this is a sole-authored paper, unlike other collaborative projects that include the scientists as co-authors: see hadfield-hill et al. 2020; klein et al. 2022; and moon et al. 2021 for a few of many examples.   2 a detailed methodological analysis is beyond the scope of this work. see fine 2003 or fine and schulman 2009 on the so-called naïve observer. we could also include an analysis of the participants’ assumptions about the warrants for social science work (see forsythe 1999).   3 this heuristic emerges from the supposed impossibility of solving the equations of motion for a multibody planetary system (see diacu 1996).   4 on different kinds of discipline-spanning research, see choi and pak 2006 and sepower2 2020.   5 sorting out the various indices that measure interdisciplinarity and the span of disciplines is beyond the scope of this paper; see ávila-robinson, mejia, and sengoku et al. 2021.   6 i should note here that unlike other collaborations (hadfield-hill et al. 2020; klein et al. 2022; moon et al. 2021), the bfp does not engage stakeholders, such as local communities that are facing a problem or share a practical interest in the outcome of scientific work. incorporating non-academic time registers and how they shape knowledge production would be interesting on pragmatic and epistemological senses.   7 see also goodhart’s law that any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a useful measure (elton 2004; fire and guestrin 2019) as well as the issue of socially desirable responses (van de mortel 2008). the participants in the bfg are smart, and know what the right answers are in terms of expressing the value of interdisciplinarity. see also reich and reich 2006.   8 it is beyond the scope of this paper to do a detailed sociology of knowledge of the concept of the register in linguistics. for background, see agha 2005.   9 there are so, so many checklists that emerge from project narratives that go something like this: we spent a lot of time talking to one another with an open mind and (wave hands) achieved interdisciplinary integration. see boland 2022; henson et al. 2020; nancarrow et al. 2013; and reich and reich 2006, among many.   10 for the phd placement crisis in the humanities, see rogers 2013. pretty much every discipline has a recent article on “alt ac” or alternative academic careers for the “surplus” of phds in relation to academic positions. for ecology, see hansen et al. 2018.   11 although a noted exception is the giant armillaria ostoyae, which is more than 2,300 acres in size and possibly 2,400 years old. it may not in fact be a single organism, per se, but a genetically homogeneous collective. see casselman 2007.   12 a reviewer has asked if the social science epistemological frame matters to the bfp, generating conflict or friction. in an anthropological mode, fieldwork is generally expected to track the cycle of an activity: here the academic year, with the “writing up” to occur after completion of fieldwork. this publication practice does not match the productivity expectations for the natural scientists in the grant, but, in perhaps the most telling indicator of hierarchicalization, it doesn’t matter. as there is no second round or continuation for the bfp in terms of external funding, whether or not i publish is of no consequence to the evaluation of the bfp. it would be nice and it will certainly be good for me. for a couple of the pre-tenure faculty in one rather competitive department, should they ever co-publish with me, it may be seen as detracting from serious disciplinary science. students from this department expressed concern about the devaluation of their interdisciplinary experience in interviews with the graduate research assistant. so my social science epistemological frame produces friction for me, continually being late, but for the bfp writ large, not so much.   13 thank you to the participants in a 2022 summer editing workshop for this formulation. unfortunately, i cannot quite reconstruct who individually should get credit. the term anthropology by appointment appears in passing in hannerz 2010.   14i don’t have an answer for the way that patchwork, meeting, or appointment ethnography can slide over into “helicopter” ethnography, the disparaged extractive model of minimal interaction and accountability in fieldwork relations. developing ethics and methodologies for studying empowered 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about fossils and time.” history and philosophy of the life sciences, no. 41, 21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-019-0260-3.     author bios jennifer l. croissant is (still) an associate professor in the department of gender and women’s studies at the university of arizona.   microsoft word bailey,peoples,-120-1147-5.docx bailey, m. and peoples, w. (2017). towards a black feminist health science studies. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3 (2),1-27 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © moya bailey and whitney peoples, 2017| licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article towards a black feminist health science studies moya bailey northeastern university moyazb@gmail.com whitney peoples university of michigan whitney.peoples@gmail.com abstract black feminist health science studies (bfhss) is a critical intervention into a number of intersecting arenas of scholarship and activism, including feminist health studies, contemporary medical curriculum reform conversations, disability studies, environmental justice, and feminist technoscience studies (bailey, 2016). we argue towards a theory of bfhss that builds on social justice science, which has as its focus the health and well-being of marginalized groups. we would like to move towards a social justice science that understands the health and well-being of people to be its central purpose. this formulation of bfhss provides evidence of the co-constitutive nature of medical science and popular perception, underscoring the need to engage them simultaneously. health is both a desired state of being and a social construct necessary of interrogation because of the ways that race, gender, able bodiedness, and other aspects of cultural production profoundly shape our notions of what is healthy (metzl & kirkland, 2010). 2 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) during a 1964 speech in harlem, new york, famed civil rights activist fannie lou hamer told the audience that she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” although hamer’s words are often understood as a concise expression of black folks’ general weariness and anger at living under white supremacy and anti-black racism, her attention to literal sickness, bodily vulnerabilities, and health outcomes for black people are overlooked. hamer told the harlem audience about the harrowing beating she received in a mississippi jail for her civil rights work (brooks & houck, 2011, pp. 57–64). she described, in detail, how her body was beaten head to toe. she talked about the way that her past illnesses, including polio, made her body even more vulnerable to the beating she received in jail. she mentioned that after such a savage physical attack, she, and other inmates who were similarly assaulted, were denied medical treatment for the duration of their jail stay. she also described a later visit to a medical specialist who told her that the beating had permanently damaged one of her eyes. hamer’s declaration that she was sick and tired was not simply a metaphor for activist fatigue; it was a declaration of literal pain, illness, and physical exhaustion. fannie lou hamer’s words highlight the way that physical and mental health has always been a metric for understanding both the process and impact of oppression for people of color. black feminist health science studies (bfhss) is a product of hamer’s clarion call to attend to black peoples’ health and wellness as an integral part of social justice labor. as such, bfhss critically intervenes in a number of intersecting arenas of scholarship and activism, including feminist health studies, contemporary medical curriculum reform conversations, disability studies, environmental justice, and feminist technoscience studies (bailey, 2016). we argue for a theory of bfhss that builds on social justice science, which has as its focus the health and well-being of marginalized groups. we would like to move towards a social justice science that understands the health and well-being of 3 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) people to be its central purpose. this formulation of bfhss provides evidence of the co-constitutive nature of medical science and popular perception, underscoring the need to engage them simultaneously. health is both a desired state of being and a social construct necessary of interrogation because race, gender, ablebodiedness, and other aspects of cultural production profoundly shape our notions of what is healthy (metzl & kirkland, 2010). bfhss research connects the messages within the seemingly objective realm of biomedicine to the social contexts in which they emerge and are shared. in looking at the ways representation is used to explicitly teach, learn, practice, and experience medicine, we explore how media is an important technology in the institutionalizing of medical practice as well as explore how it impacts public perception of difference. we understand media as a public health pedagogy that teaches us about what our society believes about health. we explore the feedback loop between popular media representation and medical media to tease out the undergirding structures that support their interconnection (bailey, 2016). we believe that media and health are co-constitutive. therefore we must critically analyze media texts as they relate to health, as well as critically engage with and comprehend the media in health texts. in “misogynoir in medical media: on caster semenya and r. kelly,” moya bailey explores the real-life impact of misogynoir in medical media by explaining how the biomedical knowledge produced by physicians constructs certain bodies as normal and others as pathological (bailey, 2016). we believe that the way we talk about health in the media impacts the way we experience health. the ways in which popular media shapes ideas about the healthy body are not unlike the ways that media produced in medical settings shapes ideas about what healthy bodies look like as well. as interdisciplinary scholars who began our careers in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies as undergraduates at women’s colleges, we are deeply invested in and knowledgeable of the theoretical tools of the discipline. that said, we still feel the need to carve out space for and 4 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) curate scholarship that is not fully recognized as addressing the complicated and necessarily intersectional issues of black women’s health. we propose bfhss as an emergent lens and praxis, built on existing and growing research that demands a multi-pronged approach to ameliorating the health disparities of black women. bfhss is not a fleeting intervention but one that will grow roots into the marginalizing narratives and material practices of health, wellness, science, and medicine until they have fundamentally altered and addressed. we draw on the work of dorothy roberts, alondra nelson, cathy cohen, and evelynn hammonds, among others, as we grow an interdisciplinary community dedicated to creating better health outcomes for black women. we believe, as the combahee river collective states, that “if black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (combahee river collective 1995, p. 237). similarly, if black women as a whole were healthy, it would mean that many of the barriers to quality health care would necessarily be removed, creating a more ethical and just health culture for everyone. like other critical feminist technoscientists, we have struggled with the field’s continued us centrism and whitewashing of women. anne pollock and banu subramaniam’s important intervention, “feminist postcolonial technoscience,” gets at many of the issues that we wish to raise here (pollock & subramaniam, 2016). however we eschew the political term women of color (woc) in favor of black to attend to the disparate realities that black women face in the medicojuridical systems of our world. although woc is a widely used and important term for collaboration and identifying patterns of marginalization, we insist on the specificity of talking about black women to get to the nuances of black women’s health disparities and the role black women’s bodies have played in the development of biomedical science. although we focus on black women in the united states, scholarship that advances similar theoretical perspectives comes from theorists of all disciplines, racial backgrounds, genders, and continents. 5 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) as people born and raised in the united states, we have inherited a us centrism that we are working to deconstruct. although our genealogy of bfhss has centered the us, we endeavor to incorporate scholarship, collaborators, and perspectives that reflect the diaspora. however, bfhss builds on the legacy of us medical experimentation on black patients, exposing the invention of blackness as a social caste with the advent of chattel slavery. the ways in which american medical education is informed by the history of slavery cannot be understated. we have divided this article into three sections. first, we identify the genealogies of this field, articulating the legacies of black women scholars and ancestors whose lives and work shape our understanding of the field. in the second part of the essay, we identify the how feminist science studies laid the groundwork for bfhss but also highlight what differentiates this nascent field from its predecessors. we end with what we see as the way to actualize our scholarship, through praxis. we identify where we want our research to go and the type of collaborations and interdisciplinary scholarship necessary to create better health outcomes for black women. black women’s bodies in the hands of white men and women black women’s historical and contemporary experiences in the west have long been rooted in a denial of their humanity. the classification of blackness as bound to the animal and natural world and, therefore, outside of the realm of logic and culture, meant that black bodies were more easily considered objects available for use by white subjects imagined to be superior. the historical reduction of black women’s humanity to the level of animal meant that black women were not regarded with the same care and ethical consideration that their white counterparts were afforded. the systematic and grotesque neglect of black women’s bodies is demonstrated in hamer’s story of jailhouse abuse and in the histories we unpack in this section, which include sarah baartman and j. marion sims. as we outline below, the denial of 6 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) humanity is what undergirds the structures of power and exploitation that have made it possible for black women to be rendered ideal objects for medicoscientific experimentation and neglect. sarah baartman, a young khoisan woman from what we now call south africa, was displayed throughout europe and was dissected and studied upon her death by white scientists at the beginning of the nineteenth century. sarah baartman’s body represented for europeans a primitive femininity, wrought of her prodigious backside and comparatively large genitalia (gilman, 1985). as rosemarie garlandthomson points out in “integrating disability, transforming disability theory,” baartman was seen as deformed and abnormal because of her racial and sexual characteristics (garland-thomson, 2002). the shifting context informed how baartman’s body was interpreted. leaving a world where she looked like the people around her effectively produced her viability as a curiosity. european scientists equated baartman’s anatomical differences with deviance. conclusions were drawn about her sexuality (and subsequently the sexuality of black women) based on her appearance, and were used to justify racist violence and the enslavement of africans (gilman, 1985). baartman’s body was used to bolster claims that black people were not far down the evolutionary tree from apes. this was also used to explain the purported animalistic nature of black women’s sexuality. real-life consequences of these fallacies included the legal inability for black women to be raped because of their perceived receptivity (collins, 2000). this sordid history continues to undergird medical practice to this day. j. marion sims, posthumously credited as the father of modern gynecology, achieved his celebrity through experimentations on black enslaved women that led him to perform the first successful surgery to treat vesicovaginal fistulas. with a fistula, a tear of the lining between the bladder and vagina, usually the result of difficult childbirth in malnourished women, creates a passage for the leaking of urine into the vaginal cavity. women with the condition were in a nearly constant state of discomfort, and in the case of slave women, unable to work. sims 7 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) developed the procedure by performing more than thirty surgeries each on anarcha westcott, lucy, and betsy between 1845 and 1849 (axelsen, 1985). they were regarded as ideal patients because sims and others of the time believed that black people had a higher tolerance for pain than whites and also because they were considered property and had no say in decisions about their health and treatment. sims remarked that his attempts to perform these surgeries on white women were unsuccessful because they could not stand the pain. this specious argument misses the differential power relation between a free white woman and an enslaved black woman receiving treatment. historian diane axelsen points out that enslaved women were conditioned to endure pain with a tight-lipped stoicism that was then equated with animal forbearance (axelsen, 1985, p. 11). for this reason, sims did not provide anesthesia for his patients even when it became available. despite the ethical questions surrounding sims’s work, he is still regarded very positively, with numerous statues erected and awards granted in his honor (dudley, 2012). the abolition of slavery did not end socially sanctioned, disparate treatment of black women. in fact, the end of slavery marked the need to reformulate stereotypes about black women’s bodies. during slavery, black women’s reproduction was encouraged as it generated more slave labor for masters; however, reconstruction and the first half of the twentieth century were characterized by a policing of black women’s supposedly rampant childbearing (clarke & olesen, 1999; washington, 2006). the eugenics movement targeted poor and black women whose sexuality was seen as a threat to the wealth of the nation.1 these women were depicted as producing offspring that they could not afford and that the state would have to support. their children were also depicted as future criminals in the propaganda of the time (pernick, 1996; roberts, 1997). margaret sanger promoted negative eugenics, or lowering fertility in populations that were deemed genetically undesirable in the ideal nation state (chesler, 2007, p. 195). her promotion of birth control among poor white and black women was simultaneously liberatory and 8 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) oppressive, allowing more reproductive choice yet promulgating stereotypes about these groups. the hypersexual representation of black women fueled eugenic practices when only a few years before, black women’s reproduction was promoted as a cost-saving and moneygenerating strategy on the plantation (roberts, 1997, p. 61; savitt, 2002). the jim crow south had its own version of policing black women’s sexuality and reproduction. black women who were in the hospital for any reason could be given hysterectomies without their consent or knowledge. this practice was so widespread that in mississippi it was dubbed a “mississippi appendectomy” (roberts, 1997, p. 92). fannie lou hamer, whose story opens this article, was one of the women subjected to this practice and the experience was a major impetus for her activism (lee, 2000, p. 21). sterilization abuse as a tool of white supremacy exceeded the jim crow era and continued well into the 1970s with victims like the young relf sisters in alabama. black women were not alone in their fight for the right to have children; puerto rican, mexican, and native american also experienced high rates of sterilization abuse. the life of henrietta lacks offers yet another example of black women’s historical lack of agency in negotiating health and treatment. lacks is famous for being the woman from whom the infamous hela cell line came. despite seeking treatment for cervical cancer, lacks never seemed to benefit from medical science in the way it benefited from her, nor did her surviving family. hela cells were the engine behind much of twentieth-century science and medical development. yet henrietta lacks died at the young age of thirty-one and left a husband and children who have never been able to fully access the professional mental and physical health care they needed (skloot, 2010). moreover, it is not evident that mrs. lacks or her husband ever gave permission for her cells to be removed for research purposes. like anarcha westcott before her, henrietta lacks health needs mattered only in so far as they were connected to larger scientific needs, interests, and goals. in the 1990s, anxieties around black motherhood were reproduced 9 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) within the context of the burgeoning crack epidemic. an organization called crack, children requiring a caring kommunity, responded by offering $200 to women of color using crack if they agreed to long-term or permanent birth control (hirschenbaum, 2000). instead of offering resources or assistance to help the women overcome their addictions, crack promoted sterilization through a small monetary incentive. again, as in the cases of sims and sanger, the supposed good intentions of these efforts were overshadowed by the racist implications of projects that targeted black women. black women’s history in the development of us biomedical science and practice is not limited to the story of their mistreatment but also includes their advocacy, activism, and resistance. the healing traditions of black midwives, for example, demonstrates black women’s agency in meeting individual and community health needs in an ethical way. granny midwives were birth attendants who saw inherent value in black fertility, reproduction, and futurity at a time when the dominant value of black women’s reproduction was decided by its relationship to white supremacist capitalist growth. black granny midwives understood that the women and families with which they worked bore inherent value as full human beings. though now recognized as an early tool of racial and gender justice in health care, the work of black granny midwives was maligned and stigmatized in the early-to-mid-twentieth century as professional and institutionalized medicine aimed to discredit lay healers, turn people seeking care into patients, and define doctors and hospitals as the only legitimate site of care and healing. black granny midwives found themselves the subjects of targeted narratives by doctors, nurses, and medical associations who sought to discredit their vast experiential knowledge (bonaparte, 2015). these narratives drew on racist and sexist ideas about black women as inherently unhygienic and ignorant to make claims that they were unfit for medical care, particularly when educated white men were available as doctors. these and other historic abuses perpetrated by medical and public health institutions are generally not publicly acknowledged, though they 10 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) have a lasting impact in the black community. they affect the willingness of patients to seek treatment. the sociocultural factors that helped engineer these systemic practices of mistreatment are beginning to be theorized, along with the patient-led activism that attempted to counteract them (nelson, 2011). building on the important work begun by feminist health advocates, historians of black america, black feminist theorists and activists, and the field of feminist science and technoscience studies, this article adds to this growing literature through the introduction of bfhss, in hopes of ameliorating these concerns through interdisciplinary scholarship and praxis. bringing history forward: defining black feminist health science studies in the contemporary moment feminist science studies emerged as a reaction to the totalizing effects of positivist science. theorists exposed dominant sociocultural scripts in the supposed objectivity of science. the anthropomorphizing of cells in accordance with our socially constructed gender biases is one of the sites of investigation in feminist science studies. emily martin’s now classic work on the gendering of the egg and sperm in human fertilization is evocative of this intervention. the mainstream scientific community constructed the egg’s role in fertilization as passive and insignificant. the egg is a virtual “damsel in distress” waiting on the “heroic” sperm to come and save her (martin, 1991). martin also investigated the negative language associated with menstruation, generally represented as the “failed” fertilization of the egg rather than a natural cycle of regeneration, devoid of failure or success. this contrasts sharply with representations of sperm as “valiant” and “tenacious.” nancy tuana similarly addresses scientific knowledge, or rather lack thereof, regarding the clitoris in relation to the penis. these imbalances in knowledge around the science of sexuality exacerbate power relations between doctors and patients (tuana, 2004). it is this attention to language, power, and representation that we bring to bfhss. 11 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) like feminist scientist banu subramaniam, we appreciate the formulation of feminist science studies “because it allows the possibility of construction and collaboration in addition to critique” (hammonds & subramaniam, 2003, p. 929). feminist bioethicists grapple with difficult questions like “can clinical research be both ethical and scientific?” (holmes, 1989). feminist science studies analysis reveals important yet hidden processes such as scientists’ selectivity in which parts of the body become objects of interest, which do not, and what they then interpret those parts to mean. in “body matters: cultural inscriptions,” lynne segal points to the clitoris, whose primary purpose, or perhaps only function, is to incite pleasure. segal cites the clitoris as indicative of how women’s bodies trouble the scientific mythology that sexuality only exists in service of reproduction. she also challenges the notion that men are always ready to have sex with the reality that the penis is rarely erect (segal, 1999). segal’s work invites new questions about the ways social beliefs inform scientific conclusions about how the body works and why, despite clear evidence that challenges biological understandings supportive of western sociocultural practices. how do scientists invested in empirical data arrive at conclusions that are not supported by their own findings? martin’s, tuana’s, subramaniam’s, and segal’s work helps us to see how scientific objectivity and health are both social constructs whose meanings are strongly influenced by the prevailing social order and cultural beliefs. similarly, jonathan metzl and helena hansen’s work on structural competency addresses how medical students are shaped by their education to ignore the construction of health via particular classed, raced, and gendered beliefs about the body (metzl & hansen, 2014). we aim to build on and expand incisive and far-reaching critique developed by feminist science and technoscience studies in at least five key ways. first, bfhss radically and unapologetically centers black women’s historical and contemporary experiences of health, medicine, wellness, and science. it also centers black women as experts capable of theorizing our own experiences and our freedom. second, bfhss is 12 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) radically interdisciplinary, drawing from fields as diverse as public health and media studies. third, the interdisciplinarity of this nascent field is further supported by our subversion of the high tech/low tech divide present in science and technoscience studies. fourth, we recognize media as a powerful part of creating and sustaining health. fifth, bfhss incorporates justice as a guiding theme and goal of its work. pivoting the center of feminist science studies away from whiteness, critically engaging the potential of interdisciplinarity, refusing the high tech/low tech binary, engaging popular media forms as co-constitutive of health, and prioritizing justice as both method and outcome are radical and utterly necessary steps for feminist engagements with health, medicine, and science. black women in the us exist at the intersections of several hierarchies of oppression. by focusing on black women’s health, we are required to examine the ways that class, race, sexuality, region, education, gender, and ability are all brought to bear on health outcomes. we believe that addressing our health care concerns will inevitably improve health care for all given the intersecting nature of oppression. additionally, the histories of science, medicine, and health care are literally built on the bodies of black women. how is it that our bodies have been instrumental in advances in these fields when we still have some of the worst health care outcomes in this country? in the spirit of ruha benjamin’s “sankofa science” (benjamin, 2013), we, like the sankofa bird, look back to retrieve our stories and attend to the historical and contemporary experiences of black women in american medical experimentation and practice, stitching them together in a critical genealogy. though nearly a century and nearly 900 miles apart, women like henrietta lacks, anarcha westcott, lucy, and betsy are linked in a shared history that has long positioned black women’s bodies as expendable, even as they have been integral to medicoscientific and social progress. bfhss centers this history because we recognize the ways that it continues to dictate the contemporary conditions under which black women like ethel easter, who recorded her 13 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) doctors making racist and disparaging remarks about her while they operated on her unconscious body (wang, 2016), access and experience health and medical care today. moreover, we privilege the work of black women as experts on their histories and experiences with health, wellness, and us biomedicine. black women’s critical scholarship often begins with the recognition of the intersectional nature of black women’s experience of the world. this basic yet critical acknowledgement is a hallmark of black feminist scholarship and activism and one that differentiates it from other critical scholarship on race or gender. we contend that black women are best equipped (but not solely equipped) to see the specific and, at times, unique contours of our experiences. black women reproductive health scholar-activists, for example, coined the term “reproductive justice” (rj) in the early 1990s to call attention to and better address the ways black women’s struggles for reproductive autonomy and freedom were bigger than abortion and contraception access. activists like loretta ross and the sistersong collective argued that although the right to control fertility via abortion and contraceptive access was critical to women’s reproductive autonomy, black women had been also struggling for the right to have children in the face of a history of eugenics-based population control practices like forced sterilizations (ross & solinger, 2017). the broader nature of black women’s struggles for reproductive freedom necessitated the creation of an alternative framework that could simultaneously account for the difference that race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation made. the development of reproductive justice as a theory and movement is an excellent example of the ways that black women are best able to name and address their own marginalization and liberation. as a framework and theory, rj has always included critical attention to the impact of environmental racism and justice on black peoples’ reproductive lives. research shows that black communities are disproportionately affected by pollution and poor air quality. black households are more likely to be situated in food deserts, places where 14 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) grocery stores and health food options are difficult to access. air quality and food accessibility impact how, why, and if people can and do parent. on these issues, we look to black women scholars like naa oyo a. kwate, whose important research on alcohol advertising in black communities highlights the irony of ads that actively promote alcohol use in areas where african americans are struggling to find healthy and affordable food (kwate, jernigan, & lee, 2007; kwate & meyer, 2009). similarly, the ongoing water crisis in flint, michigan and the lead paint present in communities of color’s homes and schools all contribute to the lack of quality health care for black people. the development of reproductive justice is also an example of black women’s effort to reclaim health from a strictly medical context and rearticulate it to better reflect the specificities of black women’s histories, experiences, and needs. alondra nelson argues that white supremacist approaches to black peoples’ health and wellness went back and forth between models based on social control and social abandon (nelson, 2011). social control models are marked by the explicit manipulation of black bodies for white gain (e.g., the control of enslaved african women’s fertility in service to the southern plantation economy), and social abandon models are characterized by inadequate or completely absent care and resources (e.g., the infamous tuskegee syphilis experiment). nelson’s scholarship on the black panther party’s medical activism offers an alternative to the dominant white supremacist approaches of social control and social abandon. much like fannie lou hamer’s 1964 speech, black women’s efforts to theorize health in culturally relevant and ethical ways are evidence of a long-standing investment in black wellness as an individual need and a collective political weapon. nowhere is this more evident than in audre lorde’s famous declaration, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (lorde, 1988, p. 131). lorde, along with black feminist health activists like byllye avery identified self-care and, in avery’s case, “self help” as an important part of both black women’s health and black women’s politics (silliman, fried, ross, & gutierrez, 2004). these 15 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) women’s efforts further reflect the articulation of black women as subjects of health and wellness rather than as objects that mark its antithesis. in bfhss, we build on the work of scholars like lorde, avery, and dorothy roberts, whose groundbreaking killing the black body is an essential text for thinking about the relationship between history, women’s reproductive freedom, the state, and race (roberts, 1997). although roberts’s choice of subject alone is enough to solidify the book’s place in the black feminist cannon, her interdisciplinary method further positions the work as a critical text for investigating black women’s engagements with the us biomedical complex. roberts practices a critical interdisciplinarity through her use of legal theory, critical race studies, history, media studies, and feminist theory. the nature of black women’s roles in social, scientific, and political notions of health requires creative and innovative analyses that exceed the boundaries of any one scholarly or practical approach. we look to critical collaborations that cross disciplinary and practical boundaries for best practices on how to new create new paths and models for radical black futures. we draw on genre-defying work such as audre lorde’s cancer journals (1980) and bettina judd’s patient (judd, 2014; lorde, 2006). lorde and judd both go beyond the standard conventions of poetry and prose by offering deeply historical, sociological, political, and personal accounts of black women’s status as “patients” in us medicine and science. in our own scholarship, we practice trans/multidisciplinary modes of inquiry. for example, in a forthcoming article on henrietta lacks and rebecca skloot’s book about her life, we bring the field of black biography into conversation with the impact of biomedicine on black lives. our analysis allows us to ask critical questions about the limits of biomedicine for telling black women’s life stories and achieving justice for individual black women and black communities more broadly. an additional way that we are practicing deep interdisciplinarity is by connecting with scholars in practice-based fields. though trained primarily in women’s and gender 16 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) studies, moya bailey is currently partnering on a research study with public health scholar madina agenor. moreover, using an interdisciplinary focus, bfhss is also poised to take on issues like the decidedly low-tech labor of baby and talcum powder, which are now clearly identified as carcinogens. in addition to being used as body management tools, these products have particular meaning for black women who have long used these products, along with douching and vaginal deodorant sprays, in higher number than their white counterparts to achieve vaginal “hygiene” and desirability. the goals of vaginal hygiene and attractiveness are tied to long-held stereotypes about the dirtiness of both black and female bodies (ferranti, 2011). as omise’eke natasha tinsley points out, “if racism posits that blacks reek, and misogyny teaches us that vaginas are rank, how difficult does it become for black women to love the scent of our healthy vaginas” (tinsley, 2016). although baby powder is certainly not science or technology in the same way that eggs, sperm, and hormonal contraceptives are, it is nonetheless a product marketed to and used by black women as a tool to engineer a socially acceptable body. its use as tool of body modification and management for social and cultural acceptance renders baby powder more than a simple consumer product; it is a technology of self-fashioning and re-fashioning for cultural intelligibility. moreover, tinsley reminds us of what becomes visible when we center black women’s bodies and health in the spirit of intersectionality. without centering black women, we might have missed the ways that racist narratives of black uncleanliness further complicated the seemingly straightforward story of female hygiene. through an intersectional and interdisciplinary lens, we can begin to unpack the baby powder scandal as an immediate biological health threat and the product of media and cultural narratives about race, gender, marginalization, and shifting notions of hygiene. whitney peoples draws on the work of feminist science and technology studies (sts) and feminist health scholars in her research on the oral contraceptive yaz, yet she expands both frameworks by 17 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) integrating feminist media and cultural studies. peoples ultimately argues that, though they are outside of the realm of biomedical and lab science, marketing strategies for contraceptives are just as important to feminist critiques of science as the biological effects of the medications themselves. according to peoples, contraceptive advertising is critically important public pedagogy around reproductive and sexual health in the face of social and cultural silence sustained through, among other things, the united states’ lack of a standardized sexual health education curriculum. in research that links advertising, critical media literacy, and feminist health advocacy, peoples calls for a new form of feminist health education and practice that explicitly includes media literacy as a women’s health imperative (peoples, 2015). finally, we regard justice as a critical quality of both the practice and outcomes of bfhss. laura mamo and jennifer fishman have argued that science and technoscience studies have failed to take up justice as critical concept (mamo & fishman, 2013). we take up mamo and fishman’s call for a more robust engagement with justice in science, technoscience, and health studies by making it a defining feature of our work. much like benjamin’s “sankofa science,” we long for a critical practice committed to producing more than knowledge for knowledge’s sake. as social justice scholarship, bfhss aims to produce knowledge for intervention, disruption, transformation, and ultimately liberation. we call for just analyses of black women’s lives with respect to health and wellness. we call for analyses that privilege black women’s voices and engage with the multidimensional and everyday contexts that structure and nuance black women’s health. we look to create just models of action and best practices informed by ethical histories and analyses of black women’s individual and collective health. an important part of this social justice scholarship is the ability and willingness to move beyond the pages of the journals in which we publish to practical application in the world. by having a truly interdisciplinary cadre of scholars and practitioners we hope to move our scholarship and research outside of the ivory tower so that it may actually begin to be put 18 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) into useful practice. as scholars of color, we feel that part of our work has been providing more and more evidence of the inequities that exist in our world, saying it through different mediums and different disciplines. ultimately kyriarchy morphs, and we experience versions of the same oppressive and life threatening forces. by working together across the research and practitioner divide, in ethical collaborations informed by the key features of bfhss, we hope to forestall these problems. this is how we do it: black feminist health science studies in action we are suspicious of the individualism and siloing practices rewarded in the academy and see collaboration and interdisciplinarity as core strengths of bfhss. though we are two authors listed here, we have made copies of this article available to previous collaborators. in addition to the peer review that this journal requires, we wanted to make sure that our work is legible and well received by the communities from which it comes. no publication is actually a single-authored text, and we think it is important to bring that reality to the fore in the spirit of our new field. we endeavor to make our work as transparent as possible so that it can be adapted for other communities and broadened to other arenas. central to our ideas regarding collaboration is an understanding of interdependence that suggests that we are better together than apart. we have skills that were honed in the academy, but our collaborators have skills that spread beyond its borders. people who are health care providers, healers, and community members all have skills and knowledge that should be respected and included in our thinking about what is needed to create better health outcomes for black women. with feminist concerns about reproductive technology growing and african diasporic inquiries into health care disparities mounting, it is an opportune moment for collaborative theorizing under the banner of bfhss. we do not assume that our phds automatically afford us more knowledge than the communities with whom we collaborate. this work is 19 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) an exchange and we are members on the same team with a similar goal to improve the health and lives of black women in this country. we are creating a critical vocabulary that helps to describe the world we live in as well as the world we want. social justice science (fasanmi et al., 2012), sankofa science (benjamin, 2013), palimpsestic memorialization (bailey, 2015), misogynoir (bailey, 2010), and informed refusals (benjamin, 2014) are a few of the concepts that we are creating that are informing our praxis in the world. by creating new terminology, we are also calling in new ways of being that allow for more precise analysis and problem solving. we believe that this specificity actually engenders more accountability because it requires us to be less abstract in our theory-making as we are thinking through the impact of our praxis in real-world contexts. as stated above, a large part of our collaborative practice is built on our existing relationships. izetta mobley and moya bailey have written together on disability. in their article “work in the intersections: a black feminist disability framework” they write that they want to build a framework that: utilizes a practice that centers the well-being of those working within it. to that end, we commit to a new sustainable productivity—a productivity that does not involve the sacrifice of the self—specifically one’s health, which normative knowledge production in academia demands. our interest in praxis also means that we endeavor theoretical conversations that have impact in our world....we want scholarship that can actually help inform better direct services and actions for our people who are living through social death everyday (alfieri, 2011; sexton, 2011). when the material body is centered, how do our theoretical arguments and subsequent activism and organizing need to change? (bailey & mobley, forthcoming) like a black disability framework, bfhss wants to shift our lens and focus towards theories that bring us closer to liberation. in addition to creating scholarship that is attentive to our labor as researchers, we also 20 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) see our connection to the communities we write about as an asset and not a liability. we are the ones we have been waiting for and we are the ones who will help shift the tide for black women’s health. with this in mind, we take our own health and well-being seriously, supporting selfcare and group care. we emphasize group and community care here because we realize that the strong black woman myth perpetuated in the academy often impacts our health. we embrace collaborative scholarship not only because of the theoretical interdisciplinarity it engenders but also because of the way collaborative labor can counteract the isolation and workaholism that the academy can create. the specter of the black woman’s body at the intersections of socially constructed and medically reinforced hierarchies of biological difference remains a trope in contemporary media and dates back to our earliest uses of mass communications. bfhss centers the biomedical infrastructure in this country and analyzes both its ideological impact and the sociocultural mores that shape it. bfhss incorporates epistemic frames from outside the west. african diasporic understandings of health, the body, and healing help to explode the already faltering binaries endemic in western thought. an important feature of our research is exposing the implicit biases within medical definitions of health that idealize white bodies as exemplars, leaving other bodies working to meet these standards. bfhss allows us to bring multiple disciplines together, particularly scholarship that is framed as marginal but is essential to pursue interdisciplinary questions. beyond our own disciplinary penchant of critique, we endeavor to create research that is applicable in the world. building on karl marx’s and paulo freire’s use of praxis, health praxis signals the actions taken to produce the theories of health that directly address the lives of black women. our collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transparent working process described above is an example of how we envision praxis. this praxis marks a willingness to experiment and try research strategies that may help our communities. black women are building networks of information and support that impact their health and 21 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) well-being outside of a biomedical infrastructure, which is the kind of praxis bfhss hopes to propagate. notes 1 the eugenics movement in the united states marked a period of social engineering in which religious leaders, scientists, doctors, and politicians advocated for the betterment of the human race via human intervention in gene management. positive eugenicists wanted to encourage reproduction among people with desirable traits while negative eugenicists sought to limit the reproduction of people with undesirable traits. ideas about favorable traits followed longstanding social hierarchies with blacks, jews, poor people, people with disabilities, criminals, and other stigmatized groups targeted by negative eugenicists through sterilization procedures, legal statutes, and increased social stigma. references alfieri, a. v. (2011). integrating into a burning house: race and identity conscious cisions in brown’s inner city (ssrn scholarly paper no. id 1738538). rochester, ny: social science research network. retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1738538 axelsen, d. e. (1985). women as victims of medical experimentation: j. marion sims’ surgery on slave women, 1845–1850. sage: a scholarly journal on black women, 2(2), 10–13. bailey, m. (2010, march 14). they aren’t talking about me…. retrieved from http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2010/03/14/they-arenttalking-about-me/ bailey, m. (2015). stranger than fiction: palimpsestic memorialization in 22 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) the life and writing of octavia e. butler. presented at the consortium for african american research conference, liverpool, uk. bailey, m. (2016). misogynoir in medical media: on caster semenya and r. kelly. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 1(2). retrieved from http://catalystjournal.org/ojs/index.php/catalyst/article/view/98/199 bailey, m., & mobley, i. (forthcoming). furthering the case for black disability dtudies as praxis. african american review. benjamin, r. (2013). people’s science: bodies and rights on the stem cell frontier. stanford, ca: stanford university press. benjamin, r. (2014). biopolitics versus bioethics: on the politics of refusal. presented at the national women’s studies association conference, san juan, puerto rico. bonaparte, a. (2015). regulating childbirth: physicians and granny midwives in south carolina. in j. c. oparah & a. d. bonaparte (eds.), birthing justice: black women, pregnancy, and childbirth (pp. 24–33). new york: routledge. brooks, m. p., & houck, d. w. (2011). the speeches of fannie lou hamer: to tell it like it is. jackson, ms: university press of mississippi. chesler, e. (2007). woman of valor: margaret sanger and the birth control movement in america. new york: simon and schuster. clarke, a., & olesen, v. l. (1999). revisioning women, health and healing: feminist, cultural, and technoscience perspectives. new york: routledge. collins, p. h. (2000). black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. new york: routledge press. 23 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) combahee river collective. (1995). a black feminist statement. in b. guy-sheftall (ed.), words of fire: an anthology of african-american feminist thought (pp. 232–240). new york: the new press. dudley, r. (2012). rethinking the origin narrative of modern gynecology: alternative memorializing practices, performance art, and feminist health activism. presented at the american studies association conference, san juan, puerto rico. retrieved from http://prezi.com/i1jjridder73/untitledprezi/ fasanmi, a., bird, meintjes, i., bryant, k., samantha, alvarado, s.,pugh, k. m. (2012). sjsci. retrieved from http://sjsci.tumblr.com ferranti, m. (2011). an odor of racism: vaginal deodorants in africanamerican beauty culture and advertising. advertising & society review, 11(4). retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/407304 garland-thomson, r. (2002). integrating disability, transforming feminist theory. nwsa journal, 14(3), 1–32. gilman, s. l. (1985). black bodies, white bodies: toward an iconography of female sexuality in late nineteenth-century art, medicine, and literature. critical inquiry, 12(1), 204–242. hammonds, e., & subramaniam, b. (2003). a conversation on feminist science studies. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 28(3), 923–944. hirschenbaum, d. (2000). when crack is the only choice: the effect of a negative right of privacy on drug-addicted women. berkeley women’s law journal, 15(1), 327–337. 24 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) holmes, h. b. (1989). can clinical research be both ethical and scientific? a commentary inspired by rosser and marquis. hypatia, 4(2), 156–168. judd, b. (2014). patient. new york, new york: black lawrence press. kwate, n. o. a., jernigan, m., & lee, t. (2007). prevalence, proximity and predictors of alcohol ads in central harlem. alcohol and alcoholism, 42(6), 635–640. kwate, n. o. a., & meyer, i. h. (2009). association between residential exposure to outdoor alcohol advertising and problem drinking among african american women in new york city. american journal of public health, 99(2), 228–230. lee, c. k. (2000). for freedom’s sake: the life of fannie lou hamer. champaign, il: university of illinois press. lorde, a. (1988). lorde: a burst of light: essays. ithaca, ny: firebrand books. lorde, a. (2006). the cancer journals. san francisco, ca: aunt lute books. mamo, l., & fishman, j. r. (2013). why justice?: introduction to the special issue on entanglements of science, ethics, and justice. science, technology, & human values, 38(2), 159–175. martin, e. (1991). the egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 16(3), 485–501. metzl, j. m., & hansen, h. (2014). structural competency: theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality. social science & 25 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) medicine, 103, 126–133. metzl, j. m., & kirkland, a. (2010). against health: how health became the new morality. new york: new york university press. nelson, a. (2011). body and soul: the black panther party and the fight against medical discrimination. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. peoples, w. (2015). critical media literacy as a gender imperative: women’s health and popular media in the us. in d. w. ntiri (ed.), literacy as gendered discourse: engaging the voices of women in global societies (pp. 161–175). charlotte, nc: information age publishing. pernick, m.s. (1996). the black stork : eugenics and the death of “defective” babies in american medicine and motion pictures since 1915. new york: oxford university press. pollock, a., & subramaniam, b. (2016). resisting power, retooling justice: promises of feminist postcolonial technosciences. science, technology, & human values, 41(6), 951–966. roberts, d. e. (1997). killing the black body : race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. new york: pantheon books. ross, l., & solinger, r. (2017). reproductive justice: an introduction. oakland, ca: university of california press. savitt, t. l. (2002). medicine and slavery: the diseases and health care of blacks in antebellum virginia. champaign, il: university of illinois press. segal, l. (1999). body matters: cultural inscriptions. in j. price & m. shildrick (eds.), feminist theory and the body: a reader (pp. 105–110). 26 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) new york: routledge. sexton, j. (2011). the social life of social death: on afro-pessimism and black optimism. intensions, 5, 1–47. silliman, j., fried, m. g., ross, l., & gutierrez, e. (2004). undivided rights: women of color organizing for reproductive justice. cambridge, ma: south end press. skloot, r. (2010). the immortal life of henrietta lacks. new york: crown. tinsley, o. n. (2016, april 6). profiting from the myths about black women’s bodies. time. retrieved from http://time.com/4280707/blackwomen-beauty-myths/ tuana, n. (2004). coming to understand: orgasm and the epistemology of ignorance. hypatia, 19(1), 194–232. wang, y. (2016, april 7). patient secretly recorded doctors as they operated on her. should she be so distressed by what she heard? washington post. retrieved july 14, 2016, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morningmix/wp/2016/04/07/patient-hid-recorder-in-her-hair-as-surgeonsoperated-on-her-their-words-left-her-deeply-distressed/ washington, h. a. (2006). medical apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on black americans from colonial times to the present. new york: doubleday books. 27 bailey and peoples catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) bios dr. moya bailey is an assistant professor in the department of cultures, societies, and global studies and the program in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at northeastern university. her work focuses on black women’s use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of selfaffirmation and health promotion. she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. whitney peoples (p.hd) is a feminist scholar and faculty developer with a focus on race, ethnicity, equity, and inclusion in the center for research on learning and teaching at the university of michigan. she has fifteen years experience in feminist and critical race research, activism, and teaching, and holds a ph.d. in women's, gender, and sexuality studies from emory university. her research and writing primarily concerns the intersections of race, gender, health, and popular culture.     book review | silicon valley imperialism: techno fantasies and frictions in postsocialist times, by erin mcelroy (duke university press, 2024)     kaily heitz university of california, los angeles kheitz@geog.ucla.edu     erin mcelroy’s book silicon valley imperialism critically attends to how racist imaginaries embedded in european liberal humanism and capitalism mobilize the technologies of state socialism and western empire. seated squarely within black, indigenous, queer, and romani solidarity, the text illuminates the stakes of overlooking race in debates about sts, global politics, and capitalist relations. part i, silicon valley spatiotemporality, attends to geographies of racial dispossession foundational to both technocapitalism in romania and the san francisco bay area. in chapter 1, using the trope of the “digital nomad,” mcelroy traces the racialized and dispossessive property logics of technocapitalism. the white westerner, they argue, is able to inhabit the problematic trope of the exoticized gypsy while the companies these “nomads” work for are responsible for privatizing housing and evicting the very populations these stereotypes are based upon. meanwhile, the romanian state creates incentives to attract high-income workers to “build the country’s ‘brand’” (49). this, mcelroy says, is siliconization, a key political, economic, and aesthetic analytic. siliconization utilizes narratives of capitalist modernity to erase housing and labor justice movements under the auspices of “freeing” romanian people from communism. simultaneously, it transforms histories of roma racialization and centuries of chattel slavery into a circulating, deracinated stereotype of the nomadic romani lifestyle. chapter 2 explains the cold war history of silicon valley and its expansion through anti-communist militarism. just as the figure of the roma nomad has been stripped of its racist origins and recast as a fantasy of capitalist free markets, tech has expropriated the idea of a sharing economy from the communist and socialist ethics it systematically uproots. these imaginaries of collectivity and nomadic freedom advance myths of a post-racial utopia while exploiting a transnational labor force and participating in racial banishment in places like the bay area. in chapter 3, mcelroy uses these tragic ironies to unpack the concept of technofascism, or “the mechanisms and technological fantasies through which fascist conditions of possibility materialize” (100). they point to the way that liberalism is the vector through which fascism proliferates by specifically sublimating anti-capitalist movements for housing and environmental justice. during the “light revolution,” for example, proponents of a liberal free market economy protested the corruption of state socialism, while ignoring the link between corruption schemes and global capitalist firms. they draw on several startling examples to make this point, including ikea’s ecological extraction and embeddedness in nazi fascism. part ii, techno frictions and fantasies, looks more closely at the sleights of hand of capitalist empire, and the frictions introduced by alternate imaginaries for an anti-capitalist future. the figure of the eastern european hacker, for instance, represents a transfiguration of the orientalist transylvanian vampire, and draws on western fears of the communist east draining the lifeblood of global capital. but it is capital liberalism’s parasitic exploitation of the images and labor of the east that enabled its metastasis. the technological vampire represents what mcelroy defines in chapter 4 as silicon valley imperialism, “the modes through which silicon valley extends its material and imaginative scope” (134). the hacker is demonized by silicon valley liberalism, yet these skills have been drawn upon by those very same tech companies. mcelroy demonstrates the way that, after the collapse of state housing and factories, hacking became both a method of “postsocialist survival” (144) and a skill exploited by tech companies who praise romanian english-language skills and technological prowess. through their ethnographic work with young hackers, mcelroy suggests that the racist narrative of the vampire, as well as the material benefits of vampiric empire, might be reclaimed in an act of what jovan scott lewis (2020) calls “reparative seizure” (147). the hacks and scams that romani youth perpetuate, in other words, are examples of their agency and subversive actions against siliconization. mcelroy further advances this argument in chapter 5, utilizing the romanian notion of “smecherie,” or “technological cunning” (167). this counter-motif is deployed as a theory and praxis of everyday resistance enacted through tapping electricity lines or hacking the us porn industry. this sense of restitution is wonderfully encompassed by an interlocutor who states, “the west hacked us after 1989; we just hacked back” (167). the final two chapters turn these actions and aesthetics of resistance toward radical alternative futurities. chapter 6 situates romania within third world liberation movements, first world co-optation, and second world imaginaries.while the communists of state socialism were sympathetic to the issues of racialism in other countries fighting to remain non-aligned during the cold war, mcelroy raises the thorny issue of their own contemptuous racism at home in romania. to explain this, mcelroy points to the shared origin stories of state socialism and liberal democracy: enlightenment humanism. because it never relinquished itself from these visions of modernity, romanian society was not only poised for technological progress, but also racial and eugenic projects. rather than rejecting tech itself as a source of racist liberal humanism, however, mcelroy introduces a chimera—one that sutures third world liberation, radical humanism, and technology. just as speculative fiction has offered refuge for afrofuturist visions, the literal and metaphorical transfiguration of terrestrial and outer space makes room for visions of life beyond raced, gendered, propertied, and capitalist exploitation. the coda, finally, links anti-roma and anti-black racisms and technologies, and proposes abolition from property as the key to liberatory futures. silicon valley imperialism is a needed anchor in the proliferating debates about cedric robinson’s (1983) use of the term “racial capitalism.” scholars who have attempted to concretize or contextualize the term rightly situate it within the black radical tradition and its material articulations in south africa and analogous movements for black life (al-bulushi 2022; hudson 2018; levenson and paret 2023). as a term relevant for considering power relations beyond the category of blackness, scholars often use religion and colonial status as a corollary for understanding racialized exploitation in global capitalist relations (matlon 2024). this text retraces robinson’s original argument regarding the european racialism that preceded the development of capitalism, and extends his text in three ways. first, by demonstrating how anti-roma imaginaries and economic oppression has been operationalized in romania, mcelroy demonstrates how racism is at work in a situation that might, by us racial standards, be considered a racially homogenous geography. second, their conjunctural analysis of us racial empire in both romania and the bay area makes a clear link between western racial regimes and their counterparts in europe. third, by attending to how racism has informed both state socialist and capitalist power, mcelroy refuses a marxist communist telos that disregards the way that racism continually recreates oppressive material conditions. in so doing, mcelroy takes seriously the imaginaries of the black radical tradition to protest racialized dehumanization, and to insist on life otherwise alongside comrades in anti-colonial transnational solidarity. by focusing on europe, mcelroy creates space for the provincialization of europe (chakrabarty 2008) to “unbecome” in internal colonial capitalist contexts. each chapter turns toward anti-colonial, anti-capitalist futurities that are being lived and imagined through indigeneity, queerness, and blackness. the modern figure of the human advanced and accelerated by technocapitalism is unmade by those producing knowledge of “imaginative worlds” that “directly inform the construction of what becomes material” (9). for instance, the liberal-capitalist logic of progress that requires dispossession is countered by indigenous visions of a post-capitalist society in which technologies of communal living are revived and valued. artist collectives envisioning past-futures of postsocialist romania “queerly pave the way for new anticapitalist futures” (157) by desiring a future beyond privatization. mcelroy’s work as a co-founder of the anti-eviction mapping project that tracks racial banishment frames the activist scholarship of their book and broader work. finally, blackness is evoked as an analogous ontological and fungible framework through which to consider the dehumanization and dispossessability that marks endogenous anti-romani racism. more importantly, mcelroy draws on black theory and black geographic literature, concluding with abolition to gesture toward the imaginative and material power of blackness as a speculative site of liberation. this chimera of unbecoming that mcelroy forms between such ontologies of alterity is, perhaps, best imagined through the figure of the vampire and the practice of smecherie—a demonized and invisibilized caricature that is reappropriated to undermine and recreate the liberal-humanist, capitalist political body. such technologies and imaginaries of unbecoming are particularly important in this political moment of fascist revanchism. amidst ongoing protests against israel’s genocidal attacks in palestine, and the dawning reality of another trump regime, it is essential that scholars and activists attend to the way racism and colonialism have facilitated these conditions of violence, censure, and the jarring convergence between nazism, the russian socialist state, and us neoliberalism. this represents a moment of profound and compounded crisis; what collective response doesn’t re-articulate the “disaster capitalism” of postsocialist romania? instead of falling back on a technology as a “fix” or escape, how might we participate in the witchcraft of collective care as practiced through black, indigenous, and queer worldbuilding? silicon valley imperialism invites us into a state of unbecoming, to “hack back,” and reorient technologies of dispossession into technologies of care. references al-bulushi, yousuf. 2022. “thinking racial capitalism and black radicalism from africa: an intellectual geography of cedric robinson’s world-system.” geoforum, no. 132: 252–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.01.018. chakrabarty, dipesh. 2008. provincializing europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. princeton university press. hudson, peter james. 2018. “racial capitalism and the dark proletariat.” boston review, february 20. https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/walter-johnson-to-remake-the-world peter-james-hudson-racial-capitalism-and/. levenson, zachary, and marcel paret. 2023. “the three dialectics of racial capitalism: from south africa to the u.s. and back again.” du bois review: social science research on race 20(2): 333–51. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1742058x22000212. lewis, jovan scott. 2020. scammer’s yard: the crime of black repair in jamaica. duke university press. matlon, jordanna. 2024. “ten theses of racial capitalism.” critical sociology 50 (7–8): 1151–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205241267135. robinson, cedric j. 1983. black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. university of north carolina press.     author bio kaily heitz is an assistant professor of geography at the university of california, los angeles. as a critical human geographer and black geographies scholar, her work focuses on cultural and community responses to racialized dispossession in california. microsoft word 71547-1-11-zyskowskiandmilland.docx zyskowski, k and milland, k. (2018). a crowded future: working against abstraction on turker nation. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-30. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © kathryn zyskowski and kristy milland, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article a crowded future: working against abstraction on turker nation kathryn zyskowski university of washington kcz@uw.edu kristy milland university of toronto kristy@kristymilland.com abstract this paper examines digital labor and community through an ethnography of a discussion board supporting short-term digital contract workers on the amazon mechanical turk (mturk). first, we give a thorough overview of mturk, the crowdsourcing marketplace, and turker nation, a discussion board for workers on mturk. we trace the experience of interacting with this infrastructure on mturk as worker and employer. following, we look at scholarship on software infrastructure and autonomous marxist theorizations of contemporary work. we demonstrate how the labor of participating on the discussion board turker nation helps to counter the abstraction the infrastructure provides. we show how workers on turker nation use the platform to structure time, build socializing spaces at work and initiate collective organizing. in doing so, we argue that workers’ labor belies conventional class classification, such as white-collar and 2 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) blue-collar labor and instead lays the groundwork for how to structure future digital workplaces. we argue that this laboring resists the assumed logic of capitalism for digital labor that subsumes and takes over workers’ lives and conclude by looking at the limitations of the community’s collective organizing in terms of agreeing on points to communicated to the public. introduction “no one understands what we are doing – that is frustrating. i can say i work for amazon, but that is not really true. recently i told someone that i was ‘turking’. they misunderstood me and thought i said i was twerking – you know, some dance. i had to say: no, i wasn’t twerking, i was turking!” “in an ideal world, what does a union do? provide support for workers, stand up for workers rights and values, and support better working conditions. we have that all here at turker nation.” this paper began as an inquiry into the value of digital communities and communication spaces for workers on amazon mechanical turk (mturk). we focus on one digital discussion forum that supports turkers, turker nation (turkernation.com). we found that workers use turker nation in specific ways that augment the tools available to workers on the mturk platform and that employing these tools transforms the experience of short-term digital work for turkers. workers use turker nation to structure time, learn how to build a turker reputation, and socialize while working. in doing so, we argue that workers’ labor belies conventional class classification, such as white-collar and blue-collar labor, and instead lays the groundwork for how to structure future digital workplaces. we begin by giving a thorough overview of both mturk, the crowdsourcing website, and turker nation, the discussion board. next, we look at scholarship on software infrastructure and autonomous 3 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) marxist theorizations of contemporary work. we build on this literature by analyzing how the labor fits into, or not, traditional descriptors of workplace class signifiers. we demonstrate how the labor of participating on turker nation helps to counter the abstraction the infrastructure provides. finally, we identify the labor on turker nation as structuring time, building socializing spaces at work, and informal collective organizing. these counter assumptions about what digital short-term labor looks like. we argue that this laboring resists the assumed logic of capitalism for digital labor that subsumes and takes over workers’ lives. however, we conclude by looking at the limitations of the community’s collective organizing, such as failing to find consensus on what to communicate to the public. this points toward how difference such as gender, race, and class is produced in these online communities. despite the potential shortcomings, the labor done in building this community and making mturk work viable for turkers works to envision a possibility of sustainable crowdsourcing work. what is mturk and who are turkers? mturk is a short-term contract work marketplace. laid out in a similar way as the widely known online marketplace craigslist, mturk is a place where workers (turkers) and employers (requesters) can post or find digital contract work. amazon launched mturk in 2005 when it needed to hire humans to identify duplicate pages on its website (irani, 2013; gehl, 2014). mturk became famous as the first crowdsourcing site, but today is one of many. crowdsourcing refers to a business model that distributes work to a crowd (howe, 2009). in mturk, short contracts are called human intelligence tasks (hits). examples of common hits on mturk include transcription, image recognition, duplicate recognition, and surveys (ipeirotis, 2010). other types of hits include editorial tasks for video and writing. academics also increasingly use mturk as a sample pool for research surveys (mason & suri, 2012; berinsky, huber & lenz, 2012). 4 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) the name is inspired by a famous eighteenth century mechanical turk, a machine, that appeared to beat human chess players. the machine, it turned out, was a clever deception — a human hid inside and moved levers connected to chess pieces (irani, 2013; gehl, 2014). as both irani (2013) and gehl (2014) have argued, amazon’s move to name its crowdsourcing marketplace after the mechanical turk adds to the illusion of the work being mechanized, rather than completed by human workers. at the end of 2014, scholars estimated that the numbers of active workers on mturk ranged from 3,000 to 500,000 (fort, adda & cohen, 2011; paolacci & chandler 2014; “requester tour,” 2016). it is difficult to pin down exact numbers and demographics for many reasons. one reason is that many people sign up, try, and quit mturk within a few days. regardless of how many workers there are, scholars estimate that only a small number of very active workers completes the majority of hits (deneme, 2009; adda & mariani, 2010; fort, adda & cohen, 2011). most workers reside in the united states and india – the two countries in which amazon pays workers in cash – with about a quarter of workers hailing from 188 other countries (ipeirotis, 2010; paolacci & chandler, 2014). amazon pays the remaining workers through amazon credit (“worker web site faqs,” 2016). scholars have found that, despite coming from diverse locations, turkers tend to share some defining characteristics: they are well-educated, young, liberal, and underemployed (berinsky, huber & lenz, 2012; paolacci & chandler, 2014). turkers are split pretty evenly between male and female, according to the website mturktracker, which logs daily reports of mturk demographics (ipeirotis, 2010). mainstream media has been highly critical of mturk, viewing it as exemplary of new forms of labor that circumvent employee protections and comforts such as vacation pay, medical insurance, and company discounts. other concerns are lack of minimum wage and requesters' ability to withhold payment yet keep and use the work submitted, with no recourse available to the worker. an article in the leftist magazine utne described mturk as a “digital sweatshop” (cushing, 2013). beyond 5 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) popular media, scholars have also expressed concern about mturk labor conditions. multiple academic and non-academic projects have emerged to improve workplace conditions including turkalert.com, mturklist.com, indiaturkers.com, wearedynamo.org and academic extensions such as crowd-workers.com, turkbench, openturk.com, turkmotion.qu.tuberlin.de. while the intentions of journalists and academics calling for turker unionization may be well intentioned, some turkers feel as though they are being told how to organize without being part of the conversation. turker nation overview and background turker nation is an online forum about working on mturk. on the bottom of the homepage is turker nation’s trademark and motto: “turker nation: the largest and most active amazon mturk forum online! developed, managed, maintained, and operated by mechanical turk workers for mturk workers”. on the homepage there are multiple forums and subforums. the forum is separated into different themes; some of the most popular threads include “daily hits,” “mturk questions” (including questions about etiquette and payment), and “turker introductions.” other threads include “mturk and turker nation in the media,” “cheap ebooks,” and “off-topic” (cooking, gardening, and anything else). turker nation also includes a thread where workers can share programs and documents they have built to make working on mturk easier and more efficient. across the top of the webpage is a banner that offers quick links to the hottest topics: updates on the best hits of the day, the chat room, and an affiliate link to buy things on amazon (a small percentage of this money returns to support turker nation). the full forum is not available until you create an account as either a turker or a requester. this encourages community building among turkers and supports communication between requesters and turkers as groups, rather than individuals. in order to access the forums you must introduce yourself to 6 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) the community. beyond the main forum, there are multiple sub-forums. some examples of the most popular sub-forums include having trouble with the mturk site, getting suspended as a worker, and becoming a masters worker.1 methods the primary fieldwork for this paper was carried out over three months during the summer of 2014. kathryn chose turker nation as the site of research because it is the largest and oldest forum supporting workers on mturk.2 as kathryn explored the turker nation site, she came across the following statement for researchers: “if you are a journalist or researcher looking to interview people, you are not welcome here.” aware of the forum's stance toward academics, kathryn did not create an account on turker nation but instead emailed kristy, the manager of the site, to initiate a conversation about doing collaborative research. during these initial conversations, kristy expressed how the community felt misused and abused by academic researchers and therefore had recently barred academics from the forum after two research studies negatively impacted the workers on the site.3 when kathryn approached the community with openness regarding methodology, intentions to publish, and willingness to collaborate, kristy reconsidered her stance against academic involvement in the community. kathryn explained her positionality and research ethics, which were informed by the american association of anthropology’s stance on research, feminist research methodologies, and workers’ inquiry with a goal of bridging inequalities between communities and academics through reflexive dialogue, co-authorship, and participatory research design (aaa 2012; anthias & yuval-davis, 1993; craven, 2013; waters & woodcock, 2017; writers & nagar, 2006). this conversation led to a decision to collaborate with an aim of creating dialogue between the community and scholars on how to engage ethically with online research of turker nation, a community which had previously had a bad 7 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) experience with researchers. we agreed that ethical research rests on individuals on the site and/or the community at large comprehending the use of their words, thoughts, and social activities in research and not by following the site’s by-laws or by arguing that it is a "public" webpage (boellstorff, 2008; markham & baym, 2008; papacharissi, 2010; coleman, 2013; gray, 2014). at the same time, we acknowledge that adopting certain methodologies does not necessarily fix discrepancies in information access, voice, and power (visweswaran, 1994; stacey, 1988). kathryn and kristy exchanged articles and thoughts on research ethics, and dialogically landed on an approach to the research project. for example, kristy established safe places for initial interactions and group interviews by creating a separate chat room where users opted in and chose to use either their official turker nation username or create a pseudonym. this method was similar to some of the components of the house "ethnographia" that boellstorff (2008) built in the game second life. kathryn created an information sheet with details about her academic affiliation, contact information, ethics of the research, and interviewees’ rights. this information sheet was open for amendments on turker nation. at all times on turker nation, kathryn used a username (author_anthropology) that identified her as a researcher. she only participated in chatroom conversations where it was explicitly made aware she was participating as a researcher. kathryn logged into turker nation each day as a participant observer, following conversations in the discussion board threads and joining the chat room. in addition, kathryn conducted twenty-nine semistructured interviews via skype, phone and google chat; interviewees chose their preferred mode of communication. we decided that kathryn should do the interviews and that these should be separate from monitoring by kristy, who, because she held power in the community, felt her presence might alter the responses provided about participation on the forum. toward the end of fieldwork, we met in person for three days to code the interviews and co-create the primary explanatory schematics in this paper. 8 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) infrastructure, autonomous marxism, and class our analysis builds on the emerging literature on the politics of software infrastructure (star, 1999; irani, 2013; gehl, 2014). critical social scientists of software point out that infrastructures carry social and political assumptions. gehl’s (2014) book highlights the political and social implications of the built infrastructures of software and social media sites. he argues that the infrastructure of mturk was engineered in a manner that obfuscates the human worker: “the legendary marketplace, where labor meets capital in a personified negotiation, is replaced by a screen interface, where labor finally becomes completely mechanical and rationalized … this makes human work look mechanical” (gehl, 2014, p. 58). we contend that part of the work that turker nation does is to rebuild the “personified negotiation” that is missing in the mturk interface (p. 58). irani (2013) further argues that mturk reworks human labor to fit into existing computing cultures, such as artificial intelligence and large algorithms. communities such as turker nation enable workers to re-insert human interaction to the turking experience. while they are hiring, managing, and paying workers, requesters only view turkers’ approval ratings, usernames, and number of tasks completed. at the time this was written, there was no way for turkers to reach out directly to requesters on mturk. irani (2013) argues that this produces “intensified labor hierarchies by obscuring workers behind code and spreadsheets” (p. 721). irani (2013) identifies a key element of computing culture as those in which “programmers are taught to construct and respect ‘walls of abstraction’” (p. 732). abstraction as a core element of computing cultures resonates with anthropologists’ reading of abstraction as a defining characteristic of contemporary capitalist culture (ho et al., 2015). this abstraction has also been referred to as platform capitalism, a perspective that views platform operators and designers as holding most of the power and extracting value from users of the platform (srnicek, 2016). turkers are abstracted by the 9 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) infrastructure on mturk, and their participation on turker nation is a labor that counters this abstraction. autonomous marxism, also called post-fordist labor studies, refers to the various ways in which the structure, tools, and organization of labor has changed since the 1970s (dowling, nunes & trott, 2007). scholars theorizing this shift in the organization of labor have described it as flexible, fragmented, and precarious. the italian school, one body of influential scholars, theorizes these new forms of labor as immaterial and affective (lazzarato, 1996; hardt, 2005; berardi, 2009). they argue that the consequences of these new forms of labor include the separation of labor and commodity, increased demands for affective labor, and unending workdays. feminist scholars were quick to critique aspects of immaterial and affective labor, contending that fundamental forms of labor, such as child-rearing and care, have never directly related to market values (weeks, 2011). while turkers engage in forms of unpaid labor such as learning how to communicate most effectively with requesters, we feel that the descriptive word closest to the labor turkers do is baym’s (2015) "relational labor." baym (2015), in her research on musicians connecting digitally with audiences, defines relational labor as the “regular, ongoing communication with audiences over time to build social relationships that foster paid work” (baym, 2015, p. 16). though the labor of building relationships is unpaid, it is understood as one of the best ways to boost sales of tickets, merchandise, and music. while artists are being told to “connect” with audiences over social media, turkers have built supporting sites (such as turker nation) precisely because there was no way to connect with other workers or requesters. in a similar vein, martin et al. (2014) use star and strauss (1999) to argue that much of the work on turker nation is to make previously invisible labor visible. we agree with this, yet believe that this analysis misses both how the labor of visibilizing works to resist the complete takeover of life to work (an assumed part of cognitive digital labor) and also how the work of visibilizing itself creates fissures within the community. 10 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) turking in many ways can be seen as blue-collar knowledge work. during the time of the industrial revolution, cottage work was deskilled and pumped onto assembly lines and worker surveillance was the norm. crowd work has done the same, with projects being broken into micro tasks and then sent out to the crowd, piece by piece, until the project is done (with the workers never seeing the end result). the way taylor spoke about factory workers, comparing them to draft animals, is mirrored in how academics speak of crowd workers today. the former referred to low skilled workers as "stupid" and compared them to draft animals, while some scholars have referred to crowd workers as “the dimmest bulbs” (taylor ,1914, zittrain, 2009). but there are critical differences between theorizing mechanical labor during the industrial period and the pay-per-piece cognitive work that turkers do. we landed on the conclusion that we may not have the right word for characterizing turkers’ labor with regard to class. the multiple competing characteristics of the work defy the class characterizations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. on the one hand, the work can be characterized as knowledge work, including the ability to work remotely on laptops, a common characteristic of white-collar professional work. on the other hand, it is short-term, contract work with no job security or upward mobility, characteristics that make it appear most like blue-collar work. the turn to cognitive labor from mechanical labor has been written about as the ultimate takeover of one’s life. berardi (2013) distances what he calls "the cognitariat" from previous industrial laborers: they are doing things that are not necessarily exchangeable. while the pieces of work posted on mturk may be interchangeable, what we find here is that turkers use forums to make the work more personable. this is one defining characteristic that berardi (2013) sees as unique with cognitive labor. they do this by building relationships on turker nation that help them gain reputations, by spending time learning how to build their reputation and make themselves a desirable worker. berardi (2013) assumes that this work becomes the most 11 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) important part of a worker’s life, with conviviality and family life pushed to the side. therefore, turkers on turker nation who invest in socializing with the community and structure their work days can be seen as a form of resistance to the logic of capital in digital life taking over a whole person’s life. this is similar to the argument that amrute (2016) makes about it workers’ leisure activities in berlin. she argues these can be seen as “developing alternative ways of living explicitly pitched against the expansion of work into all areas of life” (p. 5). as one interviewee said: “if turker nation closed, i would lose my ‘office space,’ my friendships, and a place to talk shop.” building turker reputation one of the common roadblocks for beginning turkers is figuring out how to build worker reputation. turkers’ reputations are displayed on the "dashboard," or screen where they can see the approval-and-reject rating for the work they have personally posted. when hiring a worker for the first time, the only way to be selective is to use one of the preset screenings. the preset default for requesters posting hits through the requester website is to only accept work from turkers with a 95% or above acceptance rate.4 since the initial research for this paper, this default has shifted from 95% to a master's qualification. when one’s reputation for work is something determined by an algorithm, and when, to quote one interviewee, workers are seen in the interface as an “alphanumeric string,” collaboration and the sharing of information are ways to make visible the humans working in the system. the most valuable information for beginning turkers on turker nation is information on how to avoid rejections, how to reach out to requesters to understand a rejection, and what types of hits to do to improve the chances of hit approval. when someone creates an account on mturk they automatically start at the lowest reputation. only once they build reputation do turkers become eligible for higher paying hits. unlike a "traditional" workplace 12 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) where a new worker might submit work and receive feedback on how to improve it from a manager, mturk offers no line of recourse for turkers whose hits have been rejected (irani, 2013). instead, workers turn to google to figure out what to do next. one interlocutor recounts: “i first learned about turker nation when searching the name of a requester that had given me a rejection.” another, a self-employed man in his twenties, recounted that figuring out how to set up an account and start competing hits was self-explanatory. however, once he had been turking for a few weeks he realized he did not understand how to build a reputation and work his way up to higher-earning hits. this was hurting him as many of the hits are only available to turkers with a 95% approval rating. “when i started mturk – i was stupid. my acceptance rate was 75%.” the experience of finding turker nation when trying to navigate turker reputation was a common theme. receiving a rejection on a hit affects not only turkers’ immediate pay but also their ability to be eligible for future work. “i believe i did a google search for ‘mturk questions’ and came across them [turker nation] in that way …. when i joined the forum, i learned. i now have an acceptance rate of 99.5%.” the outcome of this type of mentoring and sharing of working strategies is that turkers participating in turker nation garner better reputations and increase their understanding of how to navigate the system of mturk; the result is higher confidence in navigating the system and higher pay. structuring time scholars of digital labor have raised concerns that crowdsourcers (and other digital laborers) work around the clock (berardi, 2009; berardi, 2013). while some may, we found that many build time structures into their day, and that turker nation serves as a tool to help them accomplish this. one woman said: “i like chat much better than the forum because it feels like i am coming into the office when we all join chat. when 8 o’clock rolls around and people start coming in, it feels like we all 13 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) gather in front of the water cooler (or coffee pot) at work to say hi and the day gets started”. numerous interlocutors stated that the first thing they do in the morning was to open their laptop, look over the previous day's work, and say hi to fellow coworkers. the timing and socialization of signing into chat is not just symbolic, but also increases the opportunities for finding good work and in turn getting paid more. workers that kathryn interviewed ranged from the united states, canada, and india, yet all said the same thing: that the thread picked up around eight-to-nine in the morning eastern standard time. part of this is driven by demand; requesters tended to be based in north america and hence the higher volume of tasks appeared beginning in the morning and continuing through a north american nine-to-five day. scholars have recently written on how new media affects when workers do work, when they are expected to be reachable by email, and how increased availability in a labor system shifts the workers’ relation to employees (berardi, 2009; gregg, 2011). having a central (albeit virtual) place to gather in the morning helped reinforce a sense of a shared workday despite the physical distances between workers. the following interviewee described a common morning: “i always go to mturk immediately upon turning on the computer in the morning. in fact i do it before even having the first smoke of the day. i turn on the computer, open up my mturk dashboard and check for rejections/approvals, go have a smoke and make coffee, and begin turking.” berardi (2013) contends that one of the characteristics of digital work is the loss of pleasure in day-to-day interactions, which turns people to an “investment of desire in work” (p. 4). this line of argument both imagines people as being unconsciously consumed by their never-ending workday and also imagines people as individuals in competition with one another rather than finding solidarity with one another, something we will return to at the end of this paper (berardi, 2013). while this time structure reveals how turkers resist a twenty-fourseven work week, it also demonstrates how race and class are mapped 14 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) onto flexible labor. for instance, turkers in india adjust their work timeclocks to the night shift to maintain the american-centric nine-to-five (aneesh, 2006). one turker nation interviewee from india works in the it industry in india and worked us hours at that job so that, although he was working the night shift, he used mturk as a complementary income to his "day" job and did not adjust his working hours.5 digital short-term contract work has been portrayed as a system that adheres to employers’ and businesses’ time clocks, dependent on having workers available around the clock (howe, 2009). blue-collar work socialization has historically been seen as outside the workplace and work hours. given the close supervisor surveillance and discrete tasks, workers often did not spend time in the middle of the work day socializing in a shared space. while the work turkers are doing can be seen as mental factory work – in terms of short, discrete tasks on a timeclock, they simultaneously socialize and communicate with other workers in spaces such as turker nation. the fact the mturk does not provide a socializing place (let alone any form of peer-to-peer communication) demonstrates that the mturk founders imagined mturk's workers to be discrete individuals who did not need to or want to communicate with each other. the labor put in to demarcate the work-day and maintain a socializing space on turker nation works against this. anthropologists and other social scientists have long been interested in how different structures of labor relate to time. during the nineteenth century, workers fought over the hours of a working day, receiving the first legislation with the factory act of 1833 which limited the working day to twelve hours for those under eighteen (marx, 1993). through the process of industrialization and the advent of the time clock, industrialists at first had a hard time finding wage-workers; preindustrialist labor-time worked on different rhythms, such as the natural rhythms of the harvest and sea tides (thompson, 1967). over the last few hundred years, the industrialists’ push toward clocked labor-time has become naturalized, and people largely think in terms of eight-hour work days, clocking in and clocking out of work spaces (thompson, 1967). 15 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) however, to take this as the "natural" work day (as evidenced by marx and thompson’s work) both elides a long history of class struggle over the work day as well as the transformation of time during industrialization. scholars have contended that mobile computing technologies blur the line between work and home; work becomes something that is done at an office, at the kitchen table, or in bed (gregg, 2011). this simplified narrative, however, ignores innumerable forms of work— particularly much of the work done in the non-western world and non-formal work that never entered into such a system and has always depended on mobile technologies that straddle work and home such as looms, sewing machines, and farming tools (carey, 1983). mobile applications enable similar work to continue. waters and woodcock (2017), in their work on deliveroo, a food delivery app, show how the application enables presumed isolated workers to meet, socialize, and organize protests in london. the results of new spatial configurations of work are thus not pre-determined. while individuals’ ideas about work have certainly shifted with the ability to work remotely, turkers structured workdays contradict an image of an around-the-clock digital factory worker. another aspect of time structuring is how turkers on turker nation strategize how to think of work over a longer time period than the immediacy the system works in. on a system where work contracts may last five minutes to one day, turkers discuss how to manage a workload and think on a longer horizon: “turker nation encourages us to think about how our actions today are going to affect the opportunities for work we have later down the line.” this is one example of how workers use turker nation in ways that work counter to the fact that in the mturk interface they are treated as short-term workers. thinking only in the immediate is not a good way to plan for growing in a job; the turkers encourage actions that will benefit their opportunities in the long term. as marx pointed out, industrialists manipulated time to get more work out of their workers by “hounding him hither and thither, in scattered shreds of time” (marx in harvey, 2010, p. 403). harvey (2010) explains that marx was referring to a practice where employers would purposefully 16 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) string together small work commitments so that workers would “work 15 minutes but count 10” (p. 403). this strategy of eking out more time from workers is built-in to the software of mturk and workers certainly spend more time working than the clock counts. however, turkers on turker nation share strategies for how to be efficient and spend the least amount of time searching and applying for jobs (non-paid time). turkers also share recommended requesters based on perceived fairness of accepting jobs and communication with turkers. in this way, turker nation provides a space for workers to strategize on how to minimize this non-clock time, enabling them to work against the abstraction. socializing at work turker nation is also the site for many types of socializing: customary daily greetings, bonding over personal lives while completing work, complaining about work, and sharing ideas for off-line life, such as favorite music and recipes. turker nation serves as a place-maker during the workday. workers who used the chat room all said that they simultaneously log into turker nation and mturk, and left the chat room open throughout the day. similar to the new co-working spaces and "open-office" structure widespread in it offices now, this provides turkers the possibility of always being social or reaching out to ask a question, yet most of the time people are doing work (amrute, 2014). one form of socializing was the daily chitter chatter of narrating life while working. one day in the chat room, a worker entered: “speaking of off topic, brb [be right back], gotta go toss the cheese into the crock pot.” while discussing the day’s work, turkers added in commentary about what they are doing, which made them personable to other turkers and enabled some to build lasting relationships within the community. participants commonly referred to others on turker nation as co-workers and the chat room as the community social space at work, akin to the central coffee pot. interviewees described these "off topic discussions" as an integral part of the workday: “it’s just like at regular work … it’s not 17 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) all work all the time.” one participant said: “the conversation covers whatever is of interest to folks at the time; we definitively build relationships with other forum members.” while discussions on gardening, diets, knitting, crockpots, and music lists may seem, and even be labeled, “off topic,” it is an integral part of how workers’ place-making practices form a supportive working space. “if i had not found turker nation, i would not have made as much money for sure. and the fun we have when things are slow: priceless.” beyond demonstrating the ways in which turkers build relationships with each other on turker nation, these topics also point toward workplace socialization being gendered. the majority of the people interviewed by kathryn were women who were also doing the bulk of domestic labor in their homes. however, we know that the demographics on mturk are split evenly by gender. we do not have answers for why there are more women on the forum, though many of the women kathryn interviewed mentioned the benefit of being able to work around a schedule with their kids. the availability of short-term digital contract work in conjunction with poor maternity leave or lack of flexible work schedules for working mothers is something that should be further investigated. providing a space to discuss the daily trials and tribulations of work is an integral part of how turker nation supports turking as a sustainable form of employment. one interviewee says that one of the most valuable aspects of the chat room is being able to “talk to others who understand how frustrating this job is.” workers at any job share struggles that others in a different profession may not understand or empathize with. one interviewee described this as “the bond of doing the same work with the same requesters and having the same problems with the hits.” another explained that turker nation “[is] a community of people who understand what it’s like to be a turker! it’s hard to explain to people who have never done it (i.e., what a hit is, how varied the work is, how low the pay is, etc).” anthropologists have noted the importance of workplace socializing as a mechanism for coping with difficult work. in 18 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) gusterson’s (1998) book on employees of a nuclear lab in california, he argues that workers joked to deal with the potential catastrophic outcomes of their labor (gusterson, 1998). we are not making an analogy here, but rather pointing out the strategies that workers use to handle different types of labor: turkers used turker nation to find solidarity and share a common work experience that could otherwise be isolating and difficult to explain to those not familiar with crowdsourcing. when kathryn asked turkers if they had ever interacted with other turkers off line, many responded that they had communicated via email, phone, or facebook, but had not met in person. one said: “we got to see pictures of sarah’s beautiful baby and i’ve interacted with some thru email irl [in real life].” turkers on turker nation distinguished social time at work, on turker nation, from off-work social time. “i consider a lot of people here as friends. some of us do have off-forum contact. we are friends on facebook and share pictures of our offline life”. while turker nation may be seen as the coffee pot at work, facebook and email are the outside-of-work social spaces. communication scholars have long been interested in thinking about the ways in which people collaborate at work, how to design spaces that foster collaboration and co-operative work, and how working across media technologies affects facetime with workers. beyond the structuring of a “workday,” many turkers mentioned they do not enter the chat room on the weekends. this shows a discernable difference between the use of other social media sites, such as facebook, and the use of turker nation. for example, sharing pictures of family happened over email or facebook, rather than on turker nation. for some, not going into turker nation over the weekend signaled an active boundarymaking that is broader than turker nation, namely, that of creating nonwork spaces and times in spite of the fact that we have the opportunity and societal pressure to always work (weeks, 2011). 19 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) self-organized collective action in july 2014, a requester created a number of false accounts and was soliciting hits through these accounts. kristy woke up to overflowing email and message boxes. turkers were very concerned about a hit. the major concern was that the requester had posted the same hit under a number of different requester names immediately signaling a spam situation to workers. based on the type of questions and demographic data asked in the posted survey, it was concluded that the requester was probably an academic researcher. turkers were upset not only by a number of false accounts but also by illusive research; academic exploitation and secretive research had been widely discussed topics on turker nation. as word spread through the turker nation community and other mturk blogs, discussion boards, and subreddits, kristy reached out to other site managers and strategized how to handle the situation. on turker nation, a thread was created to discuss the situation and turkers added in information they gathered and weighed in on how to proceed as a community. within a day, turkers had figured out who the requester was and sent him a letter telling him why creating false accounts and not being upfront about his research created a stressful situation for the workers. the letter concluded by asking the researcher to explain his intentions and apologize to the workers. some turkers even wrote letters to his university’s institutional review board (irb) claiming he had violated human research ethics. following this episode, turkers – alongside a group of academics – created a protocol for irbs to use to approve academic research on mturk.6 it is critical to recognize how turkers understand collective action. historically blue-collar workers have relied on the union as the arbiter between worker and employer (lichtenstein, 2013). unions have been notably absent from white-collar workplaces, with the notable exception of teachers. in the twenty-first century, many patterns of labor organization, such as teachers at charter schools choosing not to join 20 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) teacher unions, have brought into question the union as the right body to stand up for workers’ satisfaction, rights, and productivity. anthropologists and labor scholars attribute much of this change to new formations of relations between workers, their labor, and employers in the contemporary form of capitalism (robertson, 2008). however, the ability to informally organize and present alternatives to management is a hallmark of white-collar work. turkers’ preference to organize informally and open lines of communication to requesters, rather than organize in a union, is another way turkers are blurring the lines between being categorized as either blue-collar or white-collar workers. examples of collective action are multiple and turkers participate in collective action regularly. we’ll give two more examples. first, a requester had posted a hit as a survey; however, the task was not actually a survey. frustrated by the mislabeling, a turker started a thread on turker nation gathering petitions from other turkers asking the requester to change the label of the task.7 within one day, the thread garnered over fifteen signatures. the turker wrote the requester explaining what they wanted changed and why it mattered; when hits are mislabeled it wastes turkers' time and therefore effects their pay per hour. turkers noted that showing this collective support for one another was recognized by requesters (albeit limited to those who frequented turker nation and cared about dialogue with turkers) who came to the site. one said: “requesters seem to like that we’re organized and show that we’re hard workers.” the "well-organized" comment was in response to group-turker comments and responses to requesters, such as pointing out when they have made a mistake that will later harm turkers. in another instance, workers completing projects for a large american video streaming service felt the payments for hits were dropping to unacceptable levels. when they contacted the requester posting the work, they received a response that the payment was fair. the workers chatted in turker nation’s chatroom and decided to strike against the requester. the work sat, unfinished, until finally the requester gave in and increased the pay for each hit, at which time they 21 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) were completed in a matter of hours. this sort of collective action typically happens in private as workers fear making such action obvious since any connection between their turker nation account and their mturk account could lead to retaliation in the form of rejections or suspension from the platform itself. it is important to note that turkers did not always agree on the next steps to take. turker nation’s ability to shape future understandings of collective action for digital labor is full of potential, yet within limits. similar to how amrute (2016) shows that indian coders on short-term visas to germany make themselves indispensable to companies both by writing complicated code and by playing up their global-ness, the ability for turkers to call out an academic on what they determine to be a form of unethical research on mturk displays their ability to put stakes down in the future of mturk and to show that they have solidarities to be contended with. the limits of fighting for turkers’ rights are circumscribed by the situation at hand: turkers fear that if they demand changes from amazon, mturk may be shut down completely. as martin et al. (2014) note: along with more formally organized forms of collective action comes increased surveillance and control. turkers value being able to do their work and recognize mturk as one of the few legitimate sources of flexible, work-from-home employment systems. given this, the benefits of fighting for change are sometimes outweighed for workers by the ability to just keep working. michelle murphy (2006) in her work on "sick building syndrome," or the rise in chemicals and environmental pollutants making workers sick in newly built office buildings in the 1980s, shows how, in the process of creating a movement for workers, the movement ended up eliding differences, such as gender, race, and class, within that community. put another way, once a sense of community has been built upon certain characteristics, it is hard to communicate to the public that the picture is more complicated. murphy shows how certain characteristics of how the work looked —workers wore business dress and showed up for work at new, flashy office buildings —made it difficult to communicate to the 22 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) public about the state of working conditions, and how it affected certain communities in different ways. a similar argument can be made with regard to the ability of turkers, as a community, to communicate effectively with the public about their working conditions and their wishes for future working conditions. turkers can mobilize their working for a flashy employer, amazon, and the freedom to work remotely to portray an outward appearance of a professional, white-collar job. these characteristics often point toward being part of the privileged knowledge-working class that comprises white-collar jobs and the american middle class. kristy recalls a conversation with an uber driver in her north american city about her work; he thought it sounded ideal, and was quite jealous, until she shared with him that at this job she usually earned four dollars an hour. working from home on a computer causes dissonance, for the public, when compared to manufacturing work; at the same time, the divergent groups within the online turker community have made it difficult to arrive on one clear wish for an outcome of collective action. while the online turker communities draw workers together, there are multiple social dynamics at play that reduce their power and make it difficult to work together. kristy reflects on how she saw this happen as a participant in the discussion boards from the beginning. in 2005, there were only two forums available, and many workers at the time were on both. soon one closed and there was only one (for a while) where the community could meet and discuss mturk. internal fissures began and soon other forums began to pop up, often started by disenfranchised members of the forums which came before. for example, crowdmebaby.com grew out of turker nation, mturkgrind.com grew out of mturkforum.com, and mturkcrowd.com and turkerhub.com grew out of mturkgrind. many of these splits were acrimonious, resulting in members of different discussion forums refusing to converse with each other, which became a major barrier to organizing a large percentage of the community. for example, while a worker from one community might speak to a journalist about their experience, workers in other forums 23 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) posted online about how inaccurate that workers account was of the “real worker experience” (“virtual sweatshops paint a bleak picture of the future of work” 2017). conclusion driscoll and schwarz (2014) call for more scholarship to look at the discussion forum as an important part of the decentralized social web. attention to the politics of infrastructure, particularly in light of quickly shifting new forms of economies, will add to our understandings of new forms of labor, class, and digital infrastructures. anthropologists and social theorists have debated the effect of the post-fordist era of labor as precarious and have written extensively on the ways in which new media shifts an individual’s relationship with labor, time, and value (hardt, 2005; virno & hardt, 1996; berardi, 2009; muehlebach, 2011). necessary to understanding and theorizing new forms of labor is examining supportive social spaces. social spaces give insight into how workers are communicating, supporting each other in their endeavor of working, and understanding their role in the larger economy. certain forms of visibility and community support allow workers to navigate an online workspace to maximize their profits, and at times, negotiate for better terms of work with employers. engaging in this labor is working to redefine what the future of digital labor might look like. acknowledgements thank you to mary l. gray, nancy baym, tarleton gillespie, jessa lingel, katrin tiidenberg, kevin driscoll, sareeta amrute, lily shapiro, darren byler, samantha simon, jiwoon yu-lee, caleb knapp, and the journal's anonymous reviewers. 24 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) notes 1 a master's worker is a worker who attained the master's qualification, an elusive badge doled out by amazon. gaining a master's qualification is elusive and turkers often speculate about what type of algorithm is used to determine the qualification. on the mturk homepage, amazon states that master workers are determined “by consistently completing hits of a certain type with a high degree of accuracy. masters must continue to pass our statistical monitoring to remain mechanical turk masters” (“worker web site faq,” 2016). masters have exclusive access to work as well as access to a private masters-only forum. in terms of tips for receiving master's status, amazon makes clear that workers cannot apply for status; rather they should aim to complete a high number of tasks accurately and in a timely manner with a wide range of requesters. 2 it is largest by number of active users on the site, not by number of total users. 3 in the first case an academic requester posted hits from a business account and was not upfront about the fact that it was an academic study. the hits began by showing positive images to be tagged to the worker, but quickly devolved to include images of gore, torture, and death. then the hits varied in pay, and the researchers' intent turned out to be to determine how much compensation would be necessary to get workers to do horrible tasks (portner, c. c., toomim, m., & hassairi, n., 2013 [testing the theory of equalizing differences using online labor market experiments, work in progress]). the researchers never debriefed participants, but the turkers figured out what was going on within a few days and exposed the researchers on various forums. the second was also posted by an academic requester but appeared to be multiple business accounts. in this case it was not the hits which caused the uproar. academics had created a website where the workers could rate the requesters, a feature not built into the mturk platform, called turkopticon (irani & silberman, 2013). the researcher was interested in how these ratings affected the results requesters would get on mturk, so he created both fake requester accounts on mturk and fake worker accounts on turkopticon to rate those requester accounts to test the theory that bad ratings would lead to slower or lower quality work being submitted on mturk (benson, sojourner & umyarov, 2015). again, the turkers quickly figured out what was going on, and went so far as to contact the researcher's institution's ethics board to complain. 25 zyskowski and milland catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) these two incidents, so recent and so deeply disturbing to kristy, had created a great deal of resentment and distrust toward academics. 4 at the time of research, in august 2014, amazon was defaulting to only accept turkers with a 95% or above acceptance rate. we know this by logging in to set up a hit. you had two options for presets for accepting turkers, either 95% acceptance rate and above or accept all. as of june, 2015, this preset has changed and now it defaults to turkers who hold master's qualification. 5 there are few turkers from india on turker nation. part of the reason, we surmise, is that there is some resentment towards these workers as they are reputed to accept lower-paying work that the north american workers claim brings down everyone’s wages. due to this, indian workers have to work extra hard to make themselves legible to other "professional" turkers on turking discussion boards. this topic is not within the purview of this paper, but should be explored further. 6 wiki.wearedynamo.org 7 http://turker nation.com/showthread.php?22543-petition-p9r-please remove-the-keyword-quot-survey-quot-from-your-mturktranscription-hits references aaa web admin, 2012. ethics statement. http://ethics.americananthro.org /category/statement/ amazon mechanical turk. 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(2009). jonathan zittrain at the internet as playground and factory [video]. retrieved from https://vimeo.com/8203737) bios kathryn zyskowski is a ph.d candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the university of washington. kristy milland recently completed her master’s degree in labour studies at mcmaster university and is starting a j.d. at the university of toronto; she is also a turker, community manager of turkernation.com, and a labour activist.     book review book review | the afterlife of reproductive slavery: biocapitalism and black feminism’s philosophy of history, by alys eve weinbaum (duke university press, 2019)     daisy deomampo fordham university ddeomampo@fordham.edu     over the past four decades, reproductive technologies have been subject to numerous social scientific, historical, legal, and bioethical examinations. in the afterlife of reproductive slavery: biocapitalism and black feminism’s philosophy of history, alys eve weinbaum brings a literary studies perspective to this scholarship, making critical contributions by centering black feminist perspectives and building on the intertwined histories of slavery and capitalism. drawing on saidiya hartman’s conceptualization of the afterlife of slavery, weinbaum aims to illustrate the ways in which slavery “has a specifically reproductive afterlife” (1). through feminist engagement with reproductive justice issues and antiracism, weinbaum develops a complex argument that outlines how human reproduction—and specifically the forms of devaluation and extraction that accompany it—become conceivable.   a cultural theorist and professor of english, weinbaum uses a range of cultural texts, mainly creative works such as novels and films, which she treats as works of philosophy in order to develop a black feminist philosophy of history. weinbaum conducts what she calls a “critical speculative engagement” with the afterlife of reproductive slavery in each of these sources, arguing that such an engagement is both “methodologically useful and politically necessary” (15). in so doing, weinbaum develops her argument that human biological commodities are required to maintain biocapitalism; in other words, analyses of commodification processes (in particular, where human biological life is concerned) must be anchored in the history of slave breeding in the americas and the caribbean.   through her “critical speculation” of literary and creative works, weinbaum argues that it is the “slave episteme” that makes biocapitalism possible: the slave episteme is central to biocapitalist processes and is what makes biocapitalism work. weinbaum tracks the apparatus of the slave episteme, a “thought system” through which slavery endures, formed by what hartman calls “a racial calculus and a political arithmetic” (1). put differently, the slave episteme renders reproductive slavery thinkable; it is the thought system that endures from the antebellum period to the present moment. importantly, it moves alongside capitalism and illustrates how wombs come to be viewed as commodity sources. chattel slavery, for instance, relied on black women’s wombs as a source of commodities; in the contemporary moment, this thought system renders conceivable the use of women’s wombs in the context of surrogacy and assisted reproductive technologies. as weinbaum argues, these are the two main periods in modern history during which reproductive labor power has been used for profit, and the slave episteme enables the ongoing gendered and racialized exploitation of human reproductive labor.   the book’s argument unfolds in two parts. in the first part (chapters 1, 2, and 3), weinbaum “tracks the slave episteme in black feminist texts that highlight the reproductive dimensions of slavery” (15). through examinations of historical and feminist scholarship on surrogacy and critical readings of black women’s neo-slave narratives—the most famous of which is toni morrison’s beloved—weinbaum argues that these neo-slave narratives, when read alongside black feminist nonfiction, shed light on questions of reproductive extraction and reproductive insurgency in slavery.   the second half of the book (chapters 4, 5, and the epilogue) offer a thorough reading of speculative fiction that reveals the relationship between reproduction of the current moment and slavery. weinbaum analyzes texts and films as diverse as kazuo ishiguro’s never let me go, works such as kindred, wild seed, and others by octavia butler, and filmmaker alfonso cuarón’s the children of men. importantly, in assembling these works that might not otherwise be taken together, weinbaum illustrates the workings of the slave episteme, unfolding how the texts in question—which do not explicitly treat racial slavery—demonstrate the relationship between the slave-breeding past and the contemporary moment.   in centering cultural texts and literary works in her analysis of slavery and its reproductive afterlife (what weinbaum calls critical speculative engagement), weinbaum emphasizes that her focus on imagination is worth considering because it influences, transforms, and shapes understandings of reproductive politics and cultures, as well as the reproductive practices in which we take part. in doing so, weinbaum offers a compelling account of how we arrived at the point at which a person’s in vivo reproductive labor can be extracted and sold for profit. a meditation on the past as much as it is on the present, the book illuminates how both slavery and contemporary reproductive technologies are both racializing processes that produce commodities. perhaps a key contribution of the book is its emphasis on black feminist approaches to these questions in order to connect the slave past to the contemporary moment.   weinbaum acknowledges the contributions of empirical researchers at the outset of her book, noting that the work of social scientists has been crucial the development of her argument. for weinbaum, however, empirical approaches are less able to follow the work of the slave episteme than works of creative imagination. ethnographers may take issue with such stances, not because of a deference to that which is empirically verifiable, but because empirical and ethnographic studies shed light on the sometimes messy specificity of people’s everyday lives—cultural, social, and political economic contexts that inevitably influence and are influenced by thought systems and ideologies. weinbaum does acknowledge that it is beyond the scope of her book to conduct a comparative study of us surrogacy and indian surrogacy, for example, and that the slave episteme is certainly “not the only episteme that is set to work when surrogacy is outsourced” (59). nonetheless, as weinbaum seems to want to extrapolate the slave episteme to any context in which surrogacy is practiced, readers may be left wanting for some analysis of how diverse thought systems may coalesce in wide geographical and historical contexts to create particular understandings of commodified reproductive labor.   stylistically, the book may be unsatisfying for readers seeking greater clarity and accessibility, due to its dense and often obfuscating prose. nonetheless, the book offers much-needed critical perspectives on the racializing processes at the center of reproductive labor and commodification. it also corrects a long-standing need to center black feminist scholarship in studies of the black radical tradition. ultimately, weinbaum’s analysis shows the importance of thinking historically and offers insights into the ways in which gendered, racialized, and sexualized forms of oppression that have roots in slavery continue to motivate biocapitalism today.     author bio daisy deomampo is an associate professor of anthropology at fordham university. she is the author of transnational reproduction: race, kinship, and commercial surrogacy in india (nyu press, 2016). six ways of looking at fractal mechanics mccormack, donna. 2024. “memories of futures: the temporalities of organ transplantation.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–12. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © donna mccormack, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license memories of futures: the temporalities of organ transplantation donna mccormack university of strathclyde donna.mccormack@strath.ac.uk abstract this photographic essay explores experiential meanings of haunting in deceased organ transplantation. where life is often figured as presence and death as absence, this piece delves into how one may be both dead and alive, present and absent. in so doing, it creates space for how death may be vitality and how afterlives continue in the form of collective being. the photographic essay, as a genre, is examined as a turning towards the more-than-one in the self and death as constitutive of life. photography becomes one way to foreground haunting as both material presence and visual absence. in turn, double exposure opens up the possibility of deceased donor presence and absence in the form of disappearing bodies, body doublings, two beings in and of the self, and ecologies in and of bodies. haunting – through the technique of double exposure and this uncertain meeting of language and images – creates the possibility of giving visual presence to the dead in the self, to deceased organ donors in transplanted bodies. in so doing, the essay suggests that haunting is integral to the experience of transplantation, to transplant temporalities, where pasts are unknowable and lived, and futures are simultaneously foreclosed and yet to be realized. keywords organ transplantation, photography, disability, illness, temporality, future, haunting haunting is when someone, or some thing, is both present and absent, and its realness and existence thereby questionable. the one who witnesses the haunting mailto:donna.mccormack@strath.ac.uk special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) donna mccormack, 2024 2 could be believed, pathologized as mad,1 refuse to acknowledge what has been seen, or live with the disruption that is haunting. transplantation may be the promise of a future to those of us whose organs are failing or have failed; it is an uncertain future, one marked by old and new illnesses, the temporality of donated organs (e.g., that a donated liver lasts on average thirteen years), and thus a proximity with death as that which is imminent, delayed, and inevitable. for some recipients, there are memories of futures that never were, imagined plains of deceased donor lives, and lives recipients will never live, because of illness, attachments to specific medical teams, and so many more disabled and sick ties that bind us. hauntings are integral to the transplant experience for some recipients, to many transplant memoirs and to the images included in this essay “precisely because the materiality that is of the other [the donated organ]—but is not the living other—evokes an epistemological and ontological uncertainty about the simultaneity of life and death, presence and absence, and of this time and of belonging to a past (indeed, finished) time” (mccormack 2021b, 72). following eve tuck and c. ree, i explore how hauntings “[refuse] to stop,” are “not what needs to be resolved” (2013, 642), and thus how they are potentially scary invitations to bear witness to what is often unseen, unspoken, unheard, dismissed, refuted as unscientific in the experience of transplantation, illness, and disability. the words in this essay do not provide answers or interpretation. the essay is a form to “try, test and practice” (washuta and warburton 2019, 10), and i use it to explore how to write and visualize histories that are there and yet not always apparent. thus, “i write from the body” (whitehead 2022, 74), and my “body leads and there is no choice but to follow” (huber 2017, 33). where joshua whitehead explores language’s relationality to kin and to storytelling as a form of care, i seek to explore the kin we forge through language, photographs, illness, disability, and death. are our kin those who are already dead but whose organs remain in the bodies of living recipients? speaking on his story writing and theorizing, billy-ray belcourt states that his “job” is “to report from the scene of an undead past colliding with a still-to-be-determined future” (2020, 12). i take this almost literally: photography, for me, turns to the undead past of an unknown donor vitally present in the unpredictable future of a living recipient. sonya huber suggests that pain “changes the way i write and the way i think” (2017, 32). i remember times of less pain, but, like huber, i feel intense pain occupy my bodymind, forcing me to change, to adapt my life to it. i am intrigued by how other recipients speak of a connection to living and deceased donors, and although i have never felt this, i know i am composed of parts from an other, a dead other. perhaps, like huber’s description of a body in pain, which often transplanted bodies are, “i am two bodies, and one is the history of me” (17). yet i know and feel i am one body, it is however a body haunted by histories of which i have no knowledge; whether these be those histories of my grandmothers or of an unknown donor, my body tries to remember. therefore, these photographs and these words bear witness to and are “evidence of absence” (prosser 2005, 1). special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) donna mccormack, 2024 3 while i, as subject and object of the photographs, may come close to being what roland barthes describes as the literal “emanation of the referent” (1981, 80), the use of double exposure speaks to “that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead” (9). is that me, the donor, or something else? yet my words testify to what you do not see: you cannot (always) know illness, disability, transplantation through the gaze. knowledge may seem limited to my words, which refract through what is seen as absence, and absence haunts my words, dispersing the body of text, the body as text. here, “absence has agency, in some guise or form” (meyer and woodthorpe 2008, para. 4.2). what kinships are forged through living body parts from dead people? and, what body politics might be imagined when the dead are materially present and absent? the photos in this essay are taken by me on a rollieflex 3.5f using 120 color and black and white film. it is material film that interacts with light and the objects and subjects in front of the lens, and is then digitized. all are materially present, there, but in exposing the film multiple times—double exposure—what is seen is an almost present or absent person. this person—me—is always transparent, there and not there. we see through the person, whilst also seeing the person as if the camera captures some aspect of me without defining me in any totalizing form via the parameters of the visual. like s. lochlann jain, i find myself in an epistemological and experiential “tradeoff” (2013, 18) where i have thus far not turned to the personal to portray “a perspective not available in other ways” (20); instead, i have stayed with fiction (films and novels) and memoirs to argue for histories of transplantation that convey how death haunts transplantation and how it is tied to colonial histories of racialized violence (mccormack 2021a, 2021b, 2021c). death is constitutive of organ transplantation, particularly deceased organ transplantation, and although i would argue that death constitutes life more broadly, here the photographs are traces of how death is a daily, ordinary, lived experience of having the organ from a deceased donor inside one’s self. there may be someone else present, or a tiny aspect of that person present (in the form of a donated organ), but they are also absent: there and not there, haunting everyday life. in my experience, this is not an anxiety (kierans 2005; shildrick 2015) that some suggest could be treated by bringing psychiatrists and/or psychologists onto transplant teams (although some will undoubtedly find this support helpful), but rather a way of living with death intimately. this intimacy is in the form of the transplant, deceased donors, lifelong immunosuppressants that result in further illness and susceptibility to illness, as well as illness that may happen just as it does in a broader population but is at times more difficult or impossible to treat. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) donna mccormack, 2024 4 figure 1. seeing double. copyright donna mccormack. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) donna mccormack, 2024 5 figure 2. others in the self. copyright donna mccormack. perhaps there is an other who watches over the self, which may be experienced in transplantation as a presence, not as a dead other coming back to haunt, but the loss, start, persistence, trauma, and end of life in all its lively and deadly forms. simply put, this is the multiplicity of being—where we come into being through our interand intra-action with plants, human animals, nonhuman animals, pollution, water, dead people, lively body parts, and more. i see death as materially present, as creating kin, and pushing us to reconsider how we materialize relationality and responsibility. as eli clare suggests, “bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies” (2015, 11, emphasis added). we are more than one, even when we may special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) donna mccormack, 2024 6 feel whole, where wholeness allows for a belief in linear continuity, in restoration of the body to a pre-transplant life. the disruption of transplanted life is multiple, never-ending as life continues through biotechnological interventions of clinics, theaters, pharmaceutics, re-transplants—an ongoing list that can never be captured as many of us live only through our encounters with transplant teams, gastroenterologists, endocrinologists, oncologists, ear, nose, and throat specialists, gynecologists, nephrologists, urologists, cardiologists, and more. our bodies are scanned, x-rayed, tested repeatedly week on week, month on month, year on year watching for the smallest changes, subject to pains of tests and of illness, as well as to relief. the more-than-oneness may give a sense of being able to survive such intrusions as the more-than-one be and do together; this multiple is not utopia, just a way of living with death. decades later, exceeding any possible expectation of transplanted life, i am still alive, but perhaps all this time has been sickness progressively worsening. at times, it has felt like vitality, like presence; other times it has and currently feels like sickening towards absence whilst still present. transplantation does not cure, but in some cases it prolongs lives. however, it also creates newly sick bodies: my post-transplant body is a plethora of illnesses, symptoms, and occasionally treatments. how might we nurture our sickening bodies without rendering us absent from society, from social networks? how to be present when we are living with pain, illnesses, and debilitating conditions? in panteha abareshi’s (2022) words, “medical ‘precautions’ for chronic worsening raise challenging questions of quality of life, of pain, of death that is not a vague, distant eventuality—but a daily lived experience breathing hot down the back of the neck. i am sick, i [am] disabled, and i will only get sicker, i will only get more disabled.” i am sick, in some ways more ill than i have ever been, and there is no cure, often no relief. the ableist desire to fix shuts down how organ recipients—and all of us—are radically unfixable. i am here telling this story in images and words not because i need to be seen, but because we refuse to look at how longevity, extension of life may be lived as a daily encounter with death and illness in all its gruesome and sometimes beautiful forms. for me, transplantation comes close to how leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha describes how the past and the dead relate to the possibility of futures: “being closer to the dead than the living is another kind of crip relationship” (2020, 249). in transplantation, illness and disability are always present, as what makes life possible, as what life itself brings in its persistence. crip kin and crip relationality are forged through these moments when we are both present and absent, when we witness both life and death, and when we experience bodyminds as healthy, ill and disabled. transplantation is part of a special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) donna mccormack, 2024 7 figure 3. multiple beings. copyright donna mccormack. curative imaginary, where normative structures repeat that health is always in reach and that human life is precious and therefore must be extended. could the turn towards death revitalize transplantation as bearing witness to the visceral experience and structural inequities of organ transplantation? as the planet is destroyed at the hands of humans, as many die daily trying to reach the hostile island of the uk, as black people are murdered by police officers, as opioids become inaccessible to many in pain from biotechnological interventions, we have to ask: whose lives are being saved? how might justice be integral to biomedicine? how are socioeconomic inequalities constitutive of healthcare and access to life-extending technologies? death in life—or what i am calling special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) donna mccormack, 2024 8 haunting—is one way to be, do, think, and co-exist where disability and illness are not always overcome, cured, or eradicated. in some ways being a three-decade transplant recipient comes close to the way audre lorde describes her experience of breast cancer, even whilst our identities and privileges are different. in her words: “i am writing across a gap so filled with death—real death, the fact of it—that it is hard to believe i am still so very much alive” (1980, 54). the photographs included here materialize the intersection of presence and absence, as well as interrogating the assumed connection between life as presence and death as absence. jeremy f. walton and çiçek i̇lengiz argue there is an “uncanny mingling of past and present in afterlives” (2022, 348) and thereby that “taking materiality and objects seriously demands a refusal to reduce them to their affective entailments for subjects” (350). these photographs explore how material from the dead may be animated inside a living being, how matter may be irreducible to either subject or object, and thereby put into question the certainty of these onto-epistemologies. ruha benjamin (2018) engages with “afterlives” to speak about how black people murdered through police brutality have formed the basis of a collective politics of resistance, kinmaking, and building alternative presents and futures. she states, “kinship with the dead has its own demands and effects” (2018, 50). there is no equivalence between benjamin’s argument and the photographs here, but instead i evoke “afterlives” as a way of exploring this kinship with the dead in the context of illness and disability, as well as linking benjamin’s arguments to further contexts where the dead remain animated, both literally and metaphorically. transplantation, as benjamin (50) suggests, building on anne pollock’s work (2015), is always submerged in these questions of racial justice, disability justice, and global inequalities.2 i look back on their future that was never to be, on the deceased donor who makes my daily life possible, not as an idyllic cure, but as decades of illnesses, worsening symptoms, and disability joy.3 i contemplate jay prosser’s statement: “photography captures a reality that we would otherwise not see, that we would choose not to see” (2005, 1). will absence—as viscerally present, deadly absence and double exposure—do work in the medium of the visible to be present? a viral pandemic that is sars-cov-2 is yet another layer to life when immunocompromised, transplanted, and in community with others. masks, clean air, vaccines—when accessible—are some of the ways in which we might care not just for our own selves but also each other. belcourt states, care “is to participate in a process of self-making that exceeds the individual” (2020, 92). given transplantation is to be dependent on a donated organ for life, then self-making is always already a process of caring for an other, a dead other, and may thereby also be how we care for other others. assuming we know what immunocompromised, transplanted, sick, disabled, mad people (particularly those whose mental health is special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) donna mccormack, 2024 9 seriously impacted by transplantation) look like or what we might need fails to realize that we are always amongst you, haunting the imagined normality of healthiness. you might not see me as sick, but that gaze, your gaze, does not define my reality. even when we do not declare our status, we are still there. as tuck and ree argue, “erasure and defacement concoct ghosts; i don’t want to haunt you, but i will” (2013, 643). as we get sicker and more disabled we do not vanish, even when confined to our homes. there is a wish to haunt. figure 4. still vital. copyright donna mccormack. i have memories of futures of living with the organ of a deceased donor, wondering what deceased people’s lives were, not just the donors, but those who die daily fleeing conflict, at the hands of police, through medical neglect. posttransplant life is not detached from the very power dynamics of existence that make such interventions potentially impossible or realizable. transplantation is haunted by questions of inequality even if the practice may not always address special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) donna mccormack, 2024 10 who accesses healthcare, who donates, how waiting lists work, medical racism and sexism, homoand transphobia, and so many more intersecting vectors of inequality, prejudice, and exclusion. my own research seeks to think transplantation with colonialism and queer, as a desire to engage with its constitutive structures where biomedical and biotechnological experiments and treatments require disposable and recyclable bodies and parts. my photography opens up questions of what it means to be present as a sick and disabled person, a dead donor, a living recipient, in a global pandemic, and how we materialize the injustices of health, illness, particularly transplantation. the materiality of a 120 film, of being present and yet not fully materialized in these images, is one way of thinking and doing transplantation. seeing partially and multiply may evoke the kin who are dead, whose parts are there even if not visible. sickness and death may not be readily readable and yet their presence is felt, lived, and there. “memories of futures” is a question of witnessing what happens in transplantation that is rarely spoken about, acknowledged or is even dismissed; it is a way of remembering that other disabled and sick(er) lives are possible; and it is a desire to haunt to mobilize collective care. acknowledgments i would like to thank the editors and reviewers for their feedback on this piece, which improved it immensely, particularly the reviewer’s comment about the haunted relationality between text and photographs. i doubt i would have published or made public this material without the dialogues i have had with christine king. the support and input of ingrid young as invaluable reader, photographic subject/object, and at times photographer are present all over this published material, and i am very grateful for this intimacy. notes 1 for more on the politics of the term mad, see shayda kafai’s crip kinship, particularly note 2 (2021, 183) for detail regarding when the term might be capitalized. i do not capitalize it here to emphasize that this is an imposed diagnosis rather than a chosen identity or emerging from activism, but i do capitalize it later in the essay when i refer to those of us who may identify in this way. see also therí alyce pickens’s black madness :: mad blackness (2019). 2 there are many who explore racial inequalities, particularly in the context of global injustice, in relation to transplantation. see, for example, mccormack (2021a, 2021c). 3 the first clause in this sentence is a reworking of claire sylvia’s way of describing her connection to her donor: “i felt his future that was never to be” (1997, 160). for an analysis of this text, see mccormack (2021b). special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) donna mccormack, 2024 11 references abareshi, panteha (@pantehart). 2022. a shallow wound. instagram, march 25, 2022. https://www.instagram.com/p/cbiz0emvcom/?igsh=mmtvaxezn3b0n3jv. barthes, roland. 1981. camera lucida: reflections on photography. translated by richard howard. new york: hill and wang. belcourt, billy-ray. 2020. a history of my brief body. columbus, oh: two dollar radio. benjamin, ruha. 2018. “black afterlives matter: cultivating kinfulness as reproductive justice.” in making kin not population: reconceiving generations, edited by adele e. clarke and donna haraway, 41–65. chicago: prickly paradigm press. clare, eli. 2015. exile and pride: disability, queerness, and liberation. durham, nc: duke university press. huber, sonya. 2017. pain woman takes your keys, and other essays from a nervous system. lincoln: university of nebraska press. jain, s. lochlann. 2013. malignant: how cancer becomes us. berkeley: university of california press. kafai, shayda. 2021. crip kinship: the disability justice and art activism of sins invalid. vancouver, bc: arsenal pulp press. kierans, ciara. 2005. “narrating kidney disease: the significance of sensation and time in the employment of patient experience.” culture, medicine and psychiatry 29 (3): 341–59. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-005-9171-8. lorde, audre. 1980. the cancer journals. san francisco: aunt lute books. mccormack, donna. 2021a. “carceral imaginaries: segregating space and organs through national reproductive norms.” lambda nordica 26 (2–3): 129–55. https://doi.org/10.34041/ln.v27.744. mccormack, donna. 2021b. “the haunting temporalities of transplantation.” body & society 27 (2): 58–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x21998729. mccormack, donna. 2021c. “the times and spaces of transplantation: queercrip histories as futurities.” bmj medical humanities 47 (4): 397–406. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2021-012199. meyer, morgan, and kate woodthorpe. 2008. “the material presence of absence: a dialogue between museums and cemeteries.” sociological research online 13 (5). https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.1780. pickens, therí alyce. 2019. black madness :: mad blackness. durham, nc: duke university press. piepzna-samarasinha, leah lakshmi. 2020. care work: dreaming disability justice. vancouver, bc: arsenal pulp press. https://www.instagram.com/p/cbiz0emvcom/?igsh=mmtvaxezn3b0n3jv https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-005-9171-8 https://doi.org/10.34041/ln.v27.744 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x21998729 https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2021-012199 https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.1780 special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) donna mccormack, 2024 12 pollock, anne. 2015. “on the suspended sentences of the scott sisters: mass incarceration, kidney donation, and the biopolitics of race in the united states.” science, technology, & human values 40 (2): 250–71. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43671214. prosser, jay. 2005. light in the dark room: photography and loss. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. shildrick, margrit. 2015. “staying alive: affect, identity and anxiety in organ transplantation.” body & society 21 (3): 20–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x15585886. sylvia, claire, with william novak. 1997. a change of heart: the extraordinary story of a man’s heart in a woman’s body. london: little, brown & company. tuck, eve, and c. ree. 2013. “a glossary of haunting.” in handbook of autoethnography, edited by stacey holman jones, tony e. adams, and carolyn ellis, 639–58. london: taylor and francis group. walton, jeremy f., and çiçek i̇lengiz. 2022. “introduction: afterlives in objects.” journal of material culture 27 (4): 347–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221132197. washuta, elissa, and theresa warburton, eds. 2019. shapes of native nonfiction: collected essays by contemporary writers. seattle: university of washington press. whitehead, joshua. 2022. making love with the land. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. author bio donna mccormack is a chancellor’s fellow and senior lecturer in the department of humanities at the university of strathclyde, scotland. their first monograph is queer postcolonial narratives and the ethics of witnessing (2014), and they have coedited special issues of somatechnics, bmj medical humanities, and the european journal of cultural studies. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43671214 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x15585886 https://doi.org/10.1177/13591835221132197 memories of futures: the temporalities of organ transplantation abstract keywords acknowledgments notes references author bio     original research through the eyes of the t. rex: animal behavior in dinosaur fiction   luke-elizabeth gartley independent scholar garte246@newschool.edu     abstract animal point-of-view fiction (also sometimes called “xenofiction”) is a niche genre that emerged in the modern era. both prose fiction and comics told from an animal point-of-view can offer unique insights into cultural understandings of animal behavior, nature, and the environment more broadly. this article delves specifically into dinosaur point-of-view fiction, which at times has even been written by or with support from professional paleontologists. through several popular examples of dinosaur fiction and comics published from the 1990s to the 2010s, this article will examine how these texts illustrate how fictional representations of scientific understandings conform to or challenge dominant narratives around the natural world, gender, and power. these stories, including stephen bissette's unfinished comic series tyrant (1993–1996), and robert bakker’s novel raptor red (1995), and most recently tadd galusha’s graphic novel cretaceous (2019), use creative storytelling techniques to entertain readers, while also representing and participating in scientific discourses of paleontology and animal behavior.     keywords animal xenofiction, comics, dinosaurs, ethnology, popular culture     introduction over the course of the past century, dinosaurs have become a mainstay of both entertainment media and scientific outreach, so much so that for dinosaur fans and the lay public, scientific understandings and cultural representations of dinosaurs may be difficult to parse out. for example, the line between science-informed paleoart and dinosaur imagery for entertainment purposes is often blurry for many audiences (witton 2018). since the 1990s, a niche subgenre of animal point-of-view fiction has emerged in narrative fiction and comics. these stories, including stephen bissette’s unfinished comic series tyrant (1993–1996), robert bakker’s novel raptor red (1995), and most recently tadd galusha’s graphic novel cretaceous (2019), use creative storytelling techniques to entertain readers, while also representing and participating in scientific discourses of paleontology and animal behavior. like other animal stories, these texts both represent and inform public attitudes about animals and the natural world. this article will first situate dinosaur stories with the broader context of animal studies, then contextualize the relationship between animal fiction and scientific understandings, further discuss the historical and cultural frames that inform popular perceptions of dinosaurs as animals, and, finally, examine motifs that arise in selected dinosaur fiction texts. this analysis will showcase the interrelationship between scientific understandings, entertainment media, and cultural frames to better understand the ways in which these texts represent popular conceptions of animal behavior and the natural world. this article has been developed from a portion of a much larger project (gartley 2022). in the course of this previous work, i discovered that gendered (or masculinist) and colonial ideologies have become deeply embedded within dinosaur imagery from the outset of paleontology as a distinct science; even today, these biased views of dinosaurs, and the natural world more broadly, still appear in popular representations of dinosaurs, including the texts examined in this article.   why look at dinosaurs? in the “introduction to the illustrated animal” for the special issue of antennae, lisa brown (2011) notes that both the comics form and the field of animal studies have long held an association with children and even been seen as “childish indulgence.” brown (2011), michael chaney (2011), and david herman (2016) compellingly argued that animals in comics (in addition to other literary and visual representations) offer important insights into cultural beliefs about animals, which in turn reflect and influence popular attitudes toward real-world animals, the environment, and the natural world at large. since the early 2010s, scholarship into this intersection has grown: a 2013 special issue of antennae, “literary animals look” (edited by robert mckay) also featured scholarship on literary and visual representations of animals and the 2017 volume animal comics: multispecies storyworlds in graphic narratives (edited by david herman) specifically presented new scholarship on animal representations in comics. individual articles and book chapters exploring nonhuman perspectives in comics have also appeared in recent years (see herman 2012; keen 2011; varis 2019). although broadly understood as extinct, dinosaurs, along with dimetrodon, pterosaurs, and other mythologized extinct megafauna, are animals—long extinct animals, but animals nonetheless. to borrow a term from donna haraway (2006), dinosaurs are a kind of “boundary creature”—not quite as real as extant animals such as a cat, a dog, a great white shark, or polar bear, but certainly more real than a dragon or a unicorn. of course, they are a very real part of the natural history of life on earth. although they left evidence of their lives, legacy, and existence through fossils, today dinosaurs exist almost exclusively within the human imagination. but if cultural interest in (extant) animals is a childish diversion, special attention to the cultural meanings of dinosaurs must be even more juvenile. indeed, cultural analyses of dinosaurs such as the last dinosaur book (mitchell 1998) and dinomania (sax 2018) have made passing mention of the connection between children and dinosaurs. but all animals, extant and extinct alike, are subject to cultural meaning. animals have long been attributed with human values, fantasies, prejudices, and symbolism (malamud 2012). through selected examples from animal fiction and comics, this article will examine the ways in which gendered and imperialist belief systems have become embedded in cultural understandings of dinosaurs, animal behavior, and the natural world.   animals and the natural world in fiction animal stories have a profoundly long history in literature, reaching back to oral traditions, folk tales, and fables. the term animal stories can refer to any number of different genres and subgenres, from fairy tales to narrative nonfiction. the portrayal of animals in fiction is often more representative of human values than of the characteristics and motivations of actual, living animals. in the twentieth century, some authors made efforts to create naturalist stories told from the point of view of animal characters. despite popularity with readers, these naturalist animal stories have led to tensions and even controversy around the boundaries of fiction, the natural world, and science. while stories told from the point of view of animal characters can offer opportunities for the creator and audience to imagine nonhuman lifeworlds, distinctly human teleological beliefs about the natural world still inform storytelling, even as creators make efforts to imbue their works with scientific accuracy. fiction told from the perspective of real-world animal protagonists emerged as a literary genre in the modern era, and is generally attributed to the success and popularity of anna sewell’s 1877 novel black beauty. in his survey of animal point-of-view fiction, video essayist cardinal west explains that xenofiction includes any story told from a nonhuman perspective, and that animal xenofiction can be further divided into three branches: anthropomorphic, which features physically anthropomorphized animals (such as in the wind in the willows or the works of beatrix potter); fantasy, which features fantasy animals such as unicorns or dragons; and naturalist, which features real-world animals (west 2021). black beauty, and similar novels that followed, typically featured domesticated animals and narratives that were heavily moralistic and cloaked in progressive politics. the 1898 work wild animals i have known by ernest thompson seton and the works of jack london, such as the call of the wild (1903) and white fang (1906), moved away from the moralizing of the previous era, and sought to focus on more realistic depictions of wild animals based on scientific observations ( west 2021). nevertheless, despite (or perhaps because of) these authors’ efforts for more realistic depictions of wild animals, they came under intense scrutiny. naturalist john burroughs attributed the popularity of animal stories of the time to the public’s love of both nature and fiction, but harshly criticized thompson seton for anthropomorphizing animal protagonists and labeled his work “sham natural history” (1903, 298). sitting us president theodore roosevelt also delved into the foray, labeling authors as “nature fakers” and their work as the “yellow journalism of the woods” (1907, 428). nearly a century after the “nature fakers” controversy, a different kind of animal story similarly generated both praise and criticism. although paleontologist robert bakker’s 1995 novel raptor red, told primarily from the perspective of a female utahraptor, received positive reviews from literary critics, including a starred review from booklist (olson 1995), fellow scientists were less enthusiastic. david norman, then the director of the sedgwick museum of geology at the university of cambridge, compared bakker’s novel to “an old walt disney wildlife epic” in his review for scientific american (1996, 108). the crux of norman’s criticism is that bakker was writing fiction as a well-known scientist and paleontologist. according to norman, “the merging of science and fantasy is at its worst in books like raptor red because none but experts can disentangle fact from fiction; this type of nonsense turns an uninformed reader into a misinformed one” (109). notably, in the same article, norman was significantly less critical of michael crichton’s 1995 follow-up to jurassic park, the lost world, as crichton was known as a science fiction author. although animal xenofiction can be approached as a distinct genre, the niche subgenre has foundational connections to broader genres of fiction. common motifs and conventions connect modern animal fiction to the adventure genre: generally taking place in remote or exotic settings—separated from “civilization”—and allowing a central character to undertake a challenge and become a hero (green 1979). like animal fiction, the adventure genre also became more closely associated with children’s literature during the twentieth century. in bookstores and libraries, animal xenofiction is often organized as a subtype of speculative fiction, often shelved alongside fantasy or science fiction. for humans to write animal characters is inherently speculative, of course, but while mythic worldbuilding with animal characters is easily accepted as fantasy, deliberately more naturalist animal stories can come under scrutiny for blurring lines between storytelling and science. more recent approaches to science communication have problematized the distinction between storytelling and science. while the impacts and ethics of narrative storytelling and anthropomorphizing in science communication remain topics of debate, such affective engagement with science, entertainment media, and “edutainment” may be inevitable (dahlstrom and ho 2012; mcgellin, grand, and sullivan 2021). patricia chu (2007) has argued that american animal stories, such as the work of jack london and bakker’s raptor red, are neither documentary nor nature essays. while chu (2007) does find bakker guilty of anthropomorphizing, bakker’s fiction is what chu calls a “new anthropomorphism.” in contrast to earlier works such as sewell’s black beauty, which sought to emphasize the similarities between animals and humans, according to chu, “new anthropomorphism” instead seeks to imagine and portray animals’ “otherness” by looking “through” as well as “at” animal subjects (2007, 86). nicholas clark (2020) challenges anxieties over the general public’s assumed inability to discern the difference between dinosaur science and fiction. clark explains that “bakker is recreating the raptor in the reader’s mind from scientific data so that what follows in the novel’s story reflects known science, thus creating a plausible raptor” and describes this scientifically informed fiction as “illustrated science” (2020, 212). clark (2020) relates bakker’s raptor red to another example of illustrated science from the time: stephen bissette’s unfinished comic series tyrant (1993–1996). although bissette is a comic artist, not a scientist or paleontologist, clark (2020) argues that both raptor red and tyrant sought to tell an imaginative dinosaur story that was engaged with scientific discourses of the time. during its short run, tyrant included regular features in the back matter of each issue, such as letters (including occasional critiques from paleontologists) and detailed notes on bissette’s scientific sources and creative choices. bissette redrew the egg-laying sequence in the first issue based on early feedback (as shown in figure 1 and figure 2) (bissette 1994). similarly, bissette explained that he redrew nearly all of the third issue (all but four of the original pages remained in the printed issue) after receiving photocopies of a detailed reptile embryology text from a friend and paleontologist at the royal tyrrell museum in alberta, canada (bissette 1996).   figure 1. in the original draft for tyrant #1, bissette’s tyrannosaurus hen was standing far too high over her nest. © 1995, 2022 stephen r. bissette, used with permission; s.r. bissette’s tyrant® is a registered trademark of stephen r. bissette.   figure 2. after receiving early feedback, bissette redrew his tyrannosaurus hen squatting low over her nest to lay her eggs. © 1995, 2022 stephen r. bissette, used with permission; s.r. bissette’s tyrant® is a registered trademark of stephen r. bissette.   framing dinosaurs in culture and natural history as with many human endeavors, public understandings of science cannot be neatly traced to a particular point of origin, such as the science classroom or a scientific american magazine subscription. researchers in science communication argue that public understandings of science are multifaceted and culturally informed, and, further, have identified different methods for conceptualizing these relationships (davies et al. 2019; lewenstein 1995; nisbet and scheufele 2009; schell 1997). matthew nisbet and dietram scheufele (2009) have argued that public perceptions and understandings of science are informed by contextual frames, or interpretive storylines and common points of reference that are culturally informed. in an earlier study, heather schell found that news articles, popular science books, and science fiction are “mutually, minutely entangled” (1997, 98). these contextual frames include cultural associations and stereotypes about animals and what herman (2018) has called “folk ethologies,” or those understandings of animal behavior that circulate more or less broadly within the culture. contextual frames, cultural associations, and folk ethologies carry over to dinosaurs as animals as well, which inform, and are reflected in, fiction and popular representations. imperialist and patriarchal values such as rugged individualism, a skewed notion of “survival of the fittest” overly focused on individual strength, and conquest through violence and physical prowess have become largely accepted conventions of dinosaur images. the construction of contemporary dinosaur images and narratives can be traced to early images of paleontology expeditions and scientist-adventures in the field in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. western explorers traveled to far-off lands to make scientific discoveries and excavate specimens to be shipped back to their funding institutions. specimens such as tyrannosaurus rex were presented as the ultimate predator, an aggressive hunter and killer—both a symbolic ideal and worthy opponent for man the hunter. the values held by these scientist-adventurers and their peers inevitably became deeply intertwined with broader understandings of natural history, evolution, and survival. the narrative conventions of the wildlife film genre were developed concurrently with modern constructions of dinosaur images. roy chapman andrews, an american naturalist who led a series of paleontological expeditions in mongolia in the 1920s, traveled to central asia to discover dinosaur fossils, which he sent back to the united states for further research. andrew’s “new conquest” to the region established mongolia as an overseas department for american learning. andrews was well known in his own time and frequently put on lectures and multimedia programs, often including film shows (chapman and cull 2009; preston 1994). similar wildlife films, newsreels, and documentaries and travelogues (“scenics’’) of the era played a key role in the celebration of empire among audiences at home (chapman and cull 2009). these films, then, significantly influenced the development of juvenile fiction and the adventure genre, the disney “true-life adventure” nature documentaries that emerged in the late 1940s, as well as the square-jawed hero explorers that appeared in 1930s and ’40s movie serials (chapman and cull 2009; chris 2006; green 1979; “true stories indiana jones” 2008). these cultural frames have influenced popular understandings of the natural world, and, in turn, associated stereotypes and genre conventions have become embedded into adventure and animal stories alike. andrews’s colleague in new york, henry fairfield osborn, claimed to have made the word dinosaur into an american household word, which is more than simple braggadocio (sommer 2007). in particular, osborn constructed the “now-canonical” image of tyrannosaurus rex as a “bloodthirsty killer” (noble 2016, 71). while barnum brown is credited with discovering the first fossil remains of the creature, osborn gave the animal its name “tyrant lizard king” (rieppel 2020, 774). in her discussion of anthropomorphism and animal perspectives in graphic narratives, suzanne keen notes that animal stories of all kinds rely on cultural associations of animals; that is, readers “know perfectly well where to place the fox, tiger, and the shark, just as we recognize the traditional vulnerability of their prey” (2011, 137). though keen also notes that these animal stereotypes can be challenged as new scientific understandings become integrated into new narratives. while the cultural histories of the fox, tiger, or shark can be traced across generations, back hundreds, even thousands of years, dinosaurs are distinctly modern animals. even among extant animals, an animal’s cultural context frequently comes to supersede its natural context (malamud 2012). unlike extant nonhuman animals that evolved on an earth that was home to humans, dinosaurs came into human consciousness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and exist now only as human constructs. the distinction between cultural context and natural context becomes even more muddled with dinosaurs than with other nonhuman animals. w.j.t. mitchell (1998) argued that the two can never truly be separated, and brian noble (2016) has argued that scientific discourses and fiction narratives are in ongoing conversation with one another. bakker’s raptor red and bissette’s tyrant are uniquely literal examples of this discourse: bissette exchanged letters and correspondences with scientists and experts in the field; and in the preface and epilogue for raptor red, bakker provided readers with a broad overview of the discovery and naming of utahraptor and the fossil evidence provided by utahraptor and related species. from clark’s analysis, bakker provided readers with “necessary schemata and stereotypes” for the animals in raptor red (2020, 209). later graphic works from jim lawson, ricardo delgado, ted rechlin, and tadd galusha utilize these same schemata and stereotypes. in her discussion of pride of baghdad, the 2006 graphic novel by brian k. vaughan and niko henrichon, keen argues that while the story shows some sympathy toward victims of “imperial adventures,” the story nevertheless comes out of the imperial romantic tradition of animal tales such as rudyard kipling’s the jungle book (1894). according to keen, by convention, these traditional animal stories sort animals into sympathetic and unsympathetic categories, often based on racist stereotypes, which are “kept fresh” through repeated cultural representations (keen 2011, 138). although pride’s narrative focuses on characters displaced by war and features updated knowledge about animal behavior, keen argues that this does not “erase the fundamental imperial adventure conventions. long-memoried tortoises possess superior wisdom but resist precipitous action. monkeys are untrustworthy. lions are still noble even when removed from their natural habitat, even when injured or aged” (138). by the end of the twentieth century, these early influences along with new scientific discoveries, such as john ostrom’s description of deinonychus as a “warm-blooded,” intelligent, and fast-moving predator shaped the narrative conventions and stereotypes of dinosaur characters in fiction (cummings 2015). the protagonists in these dinosaur stories are large theropod predators, noble and commanding deference, but still savage and driven by hunger. smaller theropod predators are thieves and tricksters, stealing prey, snatching eggs or nestlings, or waiting to pounce when the large predator is injured or weakened. large herbivores are slow and dumb-witted and exist primarily to die and be eaten. flying reptiles, such as pteranodon and quetzalcoatlus, are aloof observers of the drama unfolding below. the marine carnivore mosasaurus is a deus ex machina, surging from the seas at just the opportune narratively climactic moment. in derek bousé’s 2000 monograph wildlife films, he argues that “given the pervasive media image of nature as a site of action and excitement, it is not surprising that a common complaint heard in national parks is that the animals don’t seem to do anything; they just lie there” (2000, 6). bousé observes that wildlife films are packed with darwinian principles exaggerated or misconstrued for narrative purposes. narratives apply “survival of the fittest” to individuals rather than the species at large, and use phrases such as “kill or be killed” and “only the strong survive.” similarly, cynthia chris observes “a view of nature that revels in the survival of the fittest with the liberal ideology of individualism” in postwar wildlife films (2006, 37). like keen’s comparison of graphic animal narratives to the conventions of romantic imperialist adventure, bousé connects the narrative conventions of wildlife films to the broader tradition of animal literature.   animal stereotypes and “folk ethologies” in dinosaur narratives graphic narratives in particular offer unique modalities for imagining and communicating nonhuman characters (herman 2012; varis 2019). essi varis argues that “even if one cannot truly know what and how nonhuman animals feel or think, it is always possible to depict them accurately from a behavioristic viewpoint, that is, to produce mimetic representations based on the knowledge gained by observing real nonhuman animals ‘from the outside’” (2019, 83). by loosening strict reliance on textual storytelling, readers have a new opportunity to not only look at animal characters but to imagine an animal character’s thoughts and feelings within a distinct lifeworld. animal xenofiction in comic form generally takes one of three narrative approaches: in some cases, animal characters communicate with each other through speech balloons, just as human characters would. creators taking a more naturalist approach may opt to use a third-person omniscient textual narration, akin to voice-over narration common in nature documentaries. this narration can both move the story forward as well as provide opportunities to inject scientific understandings into the story. an even more nuanced approach in through “silent comics.” silent comics include no text, but rather tell their story exclusively using visual narrative conventions of comics. silent comics leave a greater portion of the narrative open to interpretation and allow the reader to take on a greater role in constructing meaning (junqua 2015; postema 2017). bissette’s tyrant series, and similar titles such as lawson’s paleo comic book series (2001–2004) and rechlin’s graphic novels,1 include textual narration that provides educative details about the setting or animals featured and at times imbue the dinosaur characters with thoughts and feelings. issue three of tyrant takes place almost entirely within a developing t. rex egg. the issue begins by explaining, “the egg incubates in a humid oven of sand and decaying vegetation. this subsurface cradle stabilizes temperature and minimizes dehydration, but there is little oxygen in this environment” (bissette 1995, 1), and later, as the hatchling emerges from the egg, the narration describes the mother t. rex as clearing “the confining earth away with infinite patience and care” (20). by contrast, delgado’s the age of reptiles comic book series (which includes several arcs between 1993 and 2015)2 and galusha’s graphic novel cretaceous (2019) are silent comics. as seen in figure 3, delgado uses comic conventions to depict motion, gesture, and sound. in the first panel, the three heads of the singular t. rex is a recognizable comic book convention, which readers will interpret as the animal moving its head back and forth. similarly, delgado uses lines to depict the t.rex’s movement, and a visible cloud to show the triceratops’s threatening snort, and lastly, a scribbled line from the tyrannosaur’s mouth, representing the animal’s unhappy sound as it retreats to the forest. however, meaning in comics is created not just from individual images; the sequence of these images from panel to panel. scott mccloud ([1993] 2007) has argued that comics create meaning in the “gutter,” or the blank space between panels, similar to montage in cinema. the reader mentally constructs continuity by interpreting the relationship between one image and the next, a concept mccloud calls “closure.” in the scene from the story “the journey” in figure 3, delgado alternates between subjects from panel to panel, and between wide shots of the broader scene and close ups of the tyrannosaurus and an individual triceratops. this cinematic-style sequence allows the reader to imagine the perspective and feelings of the steadfast triceratops and the frustrated t. rex, and further discern that the t. rex has evaluated the situation and opted to retreat when faced with the stubborn line of the triceratops herd.   figure 3. ricardo delgado depicts a confrontation between a tyrannosaurus and a herd of triceratops in the “the journey” arc of age of reptiles. age of reptiles © ricardo delgado 2011. used with artist permission.   both narrative styles—those with omniscient narration and silent comics—allow creators to blend elements of creative storytelling with both specific scientific details and broad understandings about the natural world and animal behavior. varis argues that storytelling through these visual devices and narrative conventions allows for “subjective experiences without verbalizing them, which is especially important when aiming for mimetic depiction of the experiences of creatures that do not think or communicate in written or spoken language” (varis 2019, 90). however, this strategy may not allow for complete departure from anthropomorphizing or reliance on cultural associations. varis notes that because human readers are “fine-tuned by the evolution to infer mental states of other humans,” some anthropomorphizing is likely unavoidable (83). adventure genre motifs of action and excitement, and specifically violence and competition, have been attributed to the dinosaurs depicted in the selection of narratives i have selected. the violence and killing is strangely anthropomorphized to the degree that the animals do not hunt or kill just for survival, but out of revenge or even spite. in delgado’s first arc of the age of reptiles, later published as “tribal warfare” in the collected edition, a tyrannosaurus steals the kill of a pack of deinonychus, prompting both groups to become engaged in an ongoing quest for revenge until both packs are almost completely annihilated. these texts both showcase and inform folk ethologies, or popular understandings of dinosaur behavior. narrative motifs have grown out of discourses between scientific understandings and fictional narratives, which may be viewed as folk ethologies in the naturalist dinosaur xenofiction texts examined here. for example, infanticide is a plot device repeatedly featured in these narratives. in bakker’s novel, the titular character must worry about her new mate threatening her sister’s chicks:   raptor red is close to loving her male consort. but she knows the young male might kill her sister’s chicks. and if he tries to, raptor red will kill him. the crime of infanticide is built into the utahraptor family system, as it is throughout nature. male genes demand it. what’s a male to do if his consort already has young from a previous mating? those chicks don’t carry his genes. the cruel arithmetic is this: the male will help his own genes by killing the young that aren’t his, so he and his mate can get started raising a new brood. (bakker 1995, 134–35)   bissette’s unfinished series features only the female tyrannosaurus hen caring for her nest with little reference to the males of the species. infanticide by males is alluded to lawson’s paleo stories, notably “loner,” a new story for the 2016 collected edition. delgado dramatically depicts the male spinosaurusaurus killing his mate’s offspring upon arrival to her nest (figure 4 and figure 5) in the 2015 age of reptiles: ancient egyptians. galusha’s cretaceous is a notable exception; galusha’s silent comic features both tyrannosaur parents caring for their nestlings, which is more in line with current understandings of tyrannosaur behavior.   figure 4: a male spinosaurusaurus comes to his new mate’s nest to discover nestlings from a previous coupling. age of reptiles: ancient egyptians © ricardo delgado 2015. used with artist permission.   figure 5: the male spinosaurusaurus kills his new mate’s nestlings. age of reptiles: ancient egyptians © ricardo delgado 2015. used with artist permission.   notably, infanticide as a reproductive strategy as observed in extant animals is specific to mammals, but even among mammals, the practice is far from universal (lukas and huchard 2014). in contrast, many species of birds (the extant animals most closely related to the theropod dinosaurs depicted in these stories) frequently raise young that have no genetic connection to one (or in some cases either) parent. in her examination of gender and sexuality in nature, evolution’s rainbow, evolutionary biologist joan roughgarden (2013) noted that when male wattled jacanas (a wading bird found in central and south america) were observed raising the young of other males, the (male) investigators described the birds as being “cuckolded” and wrote that, “it’s about as bad as it can be for these guys” (dr. peter wrege, quoted in roughgarden 2013, 83). roughgarden argues that the reverse scenario would be unlikely to elicit such outrage and goes on to critique the moralizing of animal behavior. roughgarden’s work highlights the ways in which western cultural values, specifically in regards to gender and sex, have been embedded within natural sciences. haraway has written that “the principle of domination is deeply embedded in our natural sciences” (1991, 8). this principle of domination has emerged in this folk ethology of male theropod dinosaurs practicing infanticide, as well as in patterns in the portrayal of dominance hierarchy in hunting packs. all of the texts mentioned here, to varying degrees, portray dominance hierarchy, including an “alpha” individual, among hunting packs of theropod carnivores. this hierarchical social structure appears to be drawn from the folk ethology of the wolf pack and the “alpha male.” while popular and often repeated, this understanding of wolf or canine social dynamics is effectively pseudoscience and is based upon observations of non-natural assortments of captive wolves (kjørstad 2021; mech 1999). l. david mech, the biologist who popularized the theory in his 1970 book the wolf: ecology and behavior of an endangered species, has since described this theory as “misinformation” and has published updated articles refuting the previous claim (mech 1999, 2008). this narrative convention has become so deeply entrenched that some authors have made attempts to subvert the stereotype through “alpha female” pack leaders. in bakker’s novel, the titular raptor red belongs to a new generation of utahraptors that have moved away from the male dominance of their forebears. delgado’s sketches in the 2011 collected edition of the age of reptiles include a character sketch of a deinonychus he names quetzal. in the character notes, delgado describes quetzal as the “pride leader” and “dominant female,” who is “tough, fearless” and “leads in hunting expeditions” (2011, 390). lawson and rechlin seem to be the most explicit in portraying the “alpha female” within the narrative. in lawson’s “loner,” the solo male tyrannosaurus protagonist is shown as being subordinate to his mother and two sisters. as an adult, the lone tyrannosaurus goes on to kill other dinosaur families, eventually kills his own mother, and briefly adopts another young male tyrannosaurus before being crushed and killed by a boulder himself (lawson 2016). rechlin’s graphic novel jurassic (2017) is less emotionally fraught in depicting the “big female” allosaurus who eats before the males in her pack. while there are certainly extant species in which the females tend to be larger than males, the phenomena is uncommon enough that biologists refer to it as “reversed sexual size dimorphism” or rsd. however, one taxonomic group where rsd is common is among birds of prey (raptors). the reasons for this size difference are subject to much debate. one common hypothesis is that females became larger in order to defend themselves against potentially aggressive males (amadon 1975; ehrlich, dobkin, and wheye 1988). another hypothesis posits that due to size differences, male and female raptors hunt different prey and thus avoid competing with each other for food (ehrlich, dobkin, and wheye 1988; ganbold et al. 2019). yet another hypothesis suggests that if the female bird is primarily responsible for guarding the nest and eggs, then she will be the heavier sex, and her greater size is adaptive independent of the male birds (schoenjahn, pavey, and walter 2020). keen argued that animal stereotypes could be challenged as new scientific understandings become integrated into new narratives. in this regard, bakker’s female utahraptors seem to align with the hypothesis that female raptors adapted to counter the aggression of males. (although the threat of males to chicks is still questionable, as by the 1970s, male birds of prey had been observed incubating eggs and caring for young [amadon 1975].) the other narratives discussed here as part of the folk ethology of dinosaur behavior have no apparent connection to new or existing scientific theories or hypotheses. the “alpha females” in these texts are not shown hunting different prey than their male counterparts or brooding and guarding the nest. rather, these creators seem to have fallen victim to the problem of the male author writing the “strong female character.” rather than deconstructing gender roles and character agency, these creators simply take hypermasculine qualities such as physical prowess, aggressiveness, and domination and apply them to a female character. the principle of domination within the narrative and folk ethologies remains intact.   conclusion this analysis is not intended as a criticism or rebuke of the authors’ “inaccurate” dinosaurs or “sham natural history,” as these works are neither documentary or nature essays, but fiction for entertainment. indeed, the titles and series discussed in this article are quite well loved by readers and book critics alike (scientific american notwithstanding). the affection that so many have for these texts, as with the popularity of animal stories more broadly, is specifically why such analysis is warranted. the works discussed here illustrate the ways in which animal fiction both represents and informs public understandings of science and the natural world. dinosaurs abound within popular culture and have been a staple of public science outreach, such as natural history museum exhibits and pop science articles, since osborn’s work at the american museum of natural history a century ago. the frequently blurred line between scientific paleoart and dinosaur imagery for entertainment purposes has become a point of frustration for scientists, artists, and educators (witton 2018). although the impacts and ethics of narrative and anthropomorphizing in science communication are topics of some debate, to a certain degree such affective engagement with science, entertainment media, and “edutainment” may be inevitable (dahlstrom and ho 2012; mcgellin, grand, and sullivan 2021). naturalist animal xenofiction, and graphic narratives in particular, allow the creator to explore the imagined experiences and mind-worlds of dinosaurs as once-living animals. while creators may engage with scientific discourses and knowledge to varying degrees, all of these texts are both participants in and examples of the cultural associations, narrative conventions, and folk ethology of dinosaurs. herman argued that the study of animal comics could “shed light on how the members of a culture or subculture engage in informal theorizing about nonhuman minds, revealing ways in which such theorizing has become entrenched in (and enabled by) the storytelling traditions associated with that (sub)culture” (2012, 94–95). readers, in turn, can take on the perspective of the dinosaur character and empathize with the animal in a way that is unique to fiction. graphic narratives, and silent comics in particular, allow the reader the freedom to interpret body language, facial expressions, and other visual cues and construct meaning as the story unfolds panel by panel. nonhuman animals are such a common feature across media and literature that their ubiquity often renders them oddly invisible. in the first essay featured in john berger’s 1980 anthology about looking, berger poses the question, “why look at animals?” while berger may not have been the first to consider looking at animals, in the intervening decades, significant scholarship has delved into the myriad ways in which human representations of animals reflect cultural values, belief systems, and understandings of the natural world (malamud 2012; mchugh 2011; mchugh, mckay, and miller 2021; molloy 2011). in recent years, further research has specifically examined the roles of animals in comics and graphic narratives (brown 2011; chaney 2011; herman 2017; keen 2011; varis 2019). these scholars and others have effectively argued that our animal images and narratives have much to tell us about ourselves. as noted in the introduction, this article was developed from a larger project that looked at dinosaurs in media and literature, and my hope is that this article may, in part, demonstrate that dinosaurs, too, are worth looking at.   acknowledgments i wish to thank both stephen bissette and ricardo delgado for granting permission to use images of their work in this article. i also want to express my thanks to aras ozgun for the ongoing support with this project, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback and comments.   notes 1 lawson’s paleo comic series originally ran from 2001 to 2004 and was later published as a collected volume; see lawson 2016.   2 delgado’s age of reptiles comic 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palaeoartist’s handbook: recreating prehistoric animals in art. wiltshire, uk: crowood press.     author bio luke-elizabeth (liz) gartley is an instructional librarian whose research is focused on the intersections of popular culture, representations of non-human animals, and public engagement with science. pollock, anne, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, and aysha leach. 2025. “careful whisper, heart feminism.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–28. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © anne pollock, nine wakeford, maithili pittea, and aysha leach, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license careful whisper, heart feminism anne pollock king’s college london anne.pollock@kcl.ac.uk nina wakeford goldsmiths, university of london n.wakeford@gold.ac.uk maithili pittea imperial college london maithili.pittea@gmail.com aysha leach goldsmiths, university of london ayshaleach@gmail.com abstract this image & text piece is a polyvocal account of careful whisper, an experimental installation at the science gallery london involving a reengagement with an essay published in the inaugural issue of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, “heart feminism” (pollock 2015). after an introduction that situates the project in the domain of art and sts, each of the project’s collaborators contributes a section to this paper: feminist sts scholar anne pollock on how the project emerged, artist nina wakeford on its site specificity, recent neuroscience bachelor of science student (now master of science in science communication student) maithili pittea on how the sonic experiments engaged with autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr), and bachelor of fine art student aysha leach on the making of the zine for the project. this account illuminates the generativity of immersive yet disorienting engagements in which feminist sts, art, and science can barely be disentangled. file:///c:/users/joannemuzak/desktop/clients%202025/catalyst%20fall%202025/ce%20&%20uploaded/anne.pollock@kcl.ac.uk mailto:n.wakeford@gold.ac.uk mailto:maithili.pittea@gmail.com tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 2 keywords interdisciplinary collaboration, site specific art, laboratory science, sonic experiments, zines introduction creative engagements that combine images, video, poetry, and academic prose have been part of the project of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience since its inaugural issue in 2015. jackie orr’s (2015) piece in the first issue and the many image & text works since have been part of the development of a distinctively creative and humanistic tone of catalyst, relative to most sts journals. since then, catalyst has emerged as a vibrant venue for wide-ranging forms of inquiry at plural intersections of art practice and feminist sts (see, for example, berkhout et al. 2024; brown et al. 2016; cheang 2021; mora gámez et al. 2023; willet 2021). at the same time, exploration of multimedia forms in catalyst has also been part of a growing number of modes of undertaking and sharing sts more broadly, evidenced not least by the expansion of the making and doing section of the annual conference of the society for social studies of science (4s) (downey and zuiderent-jerak 2016). collaborations with artists and other creative practitioners yield objects and viewer experiences that draw on a wide variety of contemporary art practices, including performance and film-making (salter et al. 2016). more broadly, an increasingly articulated body of work at the nexus of art and sts has moved beyond figuring “art as either handmaiden to or parasite on science” (rogers and halpern 2021, 7; for discussion and contextualization, see horst 2025). the social relations embedded in the very act of researching can be given new forms, and practices such as sculptural assemblage have entered sts, for example katrina jungnickel and julian mchardy’s enquiry machine 1: interview machine, performed at the european association for the study of science and technology (easst) conference in trento, italy in 2010. comprised of abandoned materials, mostly from bicycles, it foregrounds the collaboration needed in fieldwork via a witty and queered version of a tandem (which goes nowhere), as if kinetic sculptor jean tinguely had been commissioned to address power and reflexivity in fieldwork. jungnickel and mchardy’s machine reminds us that the borders of what constitutes an sts presentation can be extended and trouble the boundary between practices. our own investigation presented in this contribution to catalyst offers a kindred kind of experiment in sense and that which escapes immediate comprehension. framed by a desire to engage and expand feminist sts encounters with contemporary art practice this image & text piece is a polyvocal account of careful whisper, an experimental installation at the science gallery london stimulated by a re-engagement with an essay published in the inaugural issue of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, “heart feminism” (pollock 2015). in https://katjungnickel.com/portfolio/em1-interview-machine/ https://katjungnickel.com/portfolio/em1-interview-machine/ tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 3 the installation, we combined vocal improvisations with recordings of the machine noises of the cardiovascular labs, enveloped the space with academic essay text, and let different conceptual and material enunciations of site amalgamate in other unpredicted ways. in this account of the installation, each of the project’s collaborators contributes a section that corresponds with a chronological step through our process: feminist sts scholar anne pollock on how the project emerged, artist nina wakeford on its site specificity, recent neuroscience bachelor of science student (now master of science in science communication student) maithili pittea on how the sonic experiments engaged with autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr),1 and bachelor of fine art student aysha leach on the making of the zine for the project. though we cannot welcome readers into the physical space, we provide links to the four sound experiment episodes as well as images, and we encourage readers to also listen. our collective account foregrounds the generativity of disorienting engagements across feminist sts, art, and science. re-engaging with heart feminism in emergent collaboration (anne pollock) collaborative conversation across art and feminist sts was at the root of an article that appeared in the first issue of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, “heart feminism” (pollock 2015). a few years before that, new media artist and feminist theorist katherine behar was instigating a set of panels around a thematic of object-oriented feminism (for the society for literature, science, and the arts), and my contribution to the first such panel, in 2010, took the heart as my object. my most extended engagement with the heart had been (and continues to be) focused on race and racism (pollock 2012, 2024), and deep concern with the embodied burdens of living in an unequal society would continue to underlie my interest in the heart, even as the central focus in this particular paper shifted as i brought both lay and cardiophysiological understandings of the heart into conversation with then-current debates around abortion and end-of-life politics as well as new feminist materialisms. in a period in which many feminist theorists were drawing inspiration from neuroscience, i was drawn to the ways in which the heart—as understood both in mundane everyday experience and in cardiovascular science—might provide feminists with an object with which to think otherwise. my goal was not to replace neurofeminisms with a cardiofeminist alternative, but rather to generatively disrupt and complexify feminist engagements with the body—as something known both through mundane experience and through pathophysiology—by articulating cardio-curiosities. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 4 “heart feminism,” as i presented it at the conference and developed it for that inaugural issue of catalyst, offered an invitation to “think with the heart” across scales—from its electricity at a cellular level, to its hydraulics at the organ and vascular level, to its responsiveness to the load of the body in a world of multiple pressures that are simultaneously material and semiotic. it also considered the heart’s beat as part of our mundane experience of aliveness—of ourselves and of those with whom we are intimate—and as vital sign relevant for medical ascertainment of aliveness including but not limited to the fetal heartbeat and the cardiopulmonary death that might or might not align with brain death. exploring the heart’s dualities—bounded and dispersed, autocratic and receptive, emotional and machine-like—offers powerful ways of understanding bodies simultaneously as somatic, symbolic, and political-economic entities. figure 1. an excerpt from the 2010 program of the society for literature, science, and the arts, showing the description of the second session of the set of panels on object-oriented feminism and the presentation on “heart feminism,” alongside the cover and abstract view of the essay “heart feminism” published in the inaugural issue of catalyst. more than a decade later, i was spurred to return to the essay by another feminist artist and theorist, nina wakeford. we had known each other for decades and she had drawn on another of my essays (on queer birds, which was published in the object-oriented feminism edited collection, behar 2016)—in a project commissioned by science gallery london that involved drag kings and endocrinologists. nina had an opportunity coming up at her academic home, goldsmiths, university of london, to apply for an internship scheme for a fine art undergraduate, and she approached me wondering if there was something else from my oeuvre that might be generative for another collaboration at science gallery london. perhaps because it had already been fodder for collaboration with design scholar and feminist theorist nassim parvin and neuroscientist lewis tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 5 wheaton and numerous students when we were all based at georgia tech (see jafarinaimi and pollock 2018), what came to mind was “heart feminism.” serendipitously, at a meeting among heads of department at king’s college london, i met the scientist who would be a key contributor to the project. at the time, i was serving as head of department of global health and social medicine, and got to chatting in the in-between times with the colleague sitting next to me, who happened to be susan brain, the head of the vascular biology and inflammation section in the school of cardiovascular medicine & sciences. sue was already well aware of the science gallery london, and welcomed the chance to be in conversation. her openness was extraordinary, and she both connected us with others in the cardiovascular labs and was amenable to conversation across the disorientation of our project. an additional bit of serendipity came through an undergraduate class on gender from interdisciplinary perspectives convened by a neuroscientist at king’s. i contribute a lecture on sex and gender in sts, and i showed the class a clip of the film that nina had made with the drag kings about endocrinology. afterwards, one of the students in the class, maithili pittea, approached me saying that she was about to finish her undergraduate degree in neuroscience and pursue science communication, and if there was ever anything else i was doing along those lines, she would love to participate. her intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm were palpable from the start, and the timing was perfect. i was able to reallocate a small pot of funding to hire mait as an intern to be paired with the intern appointed by goldsmiths, art student aysha leach. it’s impossible to overstate how much this shaped the project: having mait and aysha both as undergraduate interns working with nina and me meant that we had a full team, and it made the collaboration dynamic. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 6 figure 2. still of a video of artist intern recording in the cardiovascular lab. the science gallery london is an extraordinary space at the edge of the medical campus of king’s near london bridge station. we were fortunate to have been given the opportunity to set up our collaboration in an area referred to as the “takeover space” (described further below). nina’s initial idea for the project was that it would be a set of sonic experiments, and she knew that cardiovascular laboratory sounds and vocal improvisation would be involved, but what to put on the walls while we did so? she suggested putting up an extract from “heart feminism.” iconic. then we all set about doing the work. finding the “site specificity” (nina wakeford) in our original response to the invitation to the science gallery london curators, anne and i had agreed that we would spend some time in cardiovascular laboratories to enable us develop a sonic or vocal re-engagement with the ideas within “heart feminism,” informed by current research projects at king’s in the school of cardiovascular science. however, we were interested not only in how feminist sts-informed sounds and vocalizations might disrupt a straightforward engagement between experiences in these cardiovascular laboratories and the resulting soundworks, and make for a complex encounter, but also in how layers of such encounter with the claims of original argument might provide a new mode of engagement which did not prioritize a linear encounter with the text. in other words, we didn’t want to use the sonic works to explain but rather to invoke, to be performative. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 7 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 8 figure 3. images of the gallery space. photo: george torode. science gallery london is spread across two levels of a building outside of which is the busy commuter transport hub of london bridge station. for the project we were allocated the ground floor “takeover space,” which sits at a corner of a larger area full of tables often occupied by students and others on laptops. a café area on the ground floor is a draw into the building, and external doors on either side of the ground floor allow a flow through the space and spontaneous encounters with what is shown in the takeover space. even before we began the first sound recording in a laboratory, we considered the question of how to generate a distinctive atmosphere of encounter with feminist sts in this space full of other visual and audible distractions. drawing from discussions on the methods and tactics of contemporary art, we recognize what we developed as a kind of site-specific working. one of the art historians whose work has popularized the term site specificity, miwon kwon, has described a historical shift from the attitude that art (sculpture in particular) should be independent of where it was located to an emphasis on the unique characteristics of a place: “site-specific art initially took the ‘site’ as an actual location, a tangible reality, its identity composed of a unique combination of constitutive physical elements: length, depth, height, texture, and shape of walls and rooms; scale and proportion of plazas, buildings, or parks; existing conditions of lighting, ventilation, traffic patterns; distinctive topographical features” (1997, 85). tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 9 operating in this way, all aspects of the site had to be considered—including interior décor, proximate furniture and signage, and the acoustic conditions. sets of headphones, hung around the space, provided an isolated, perhaps even intimate, experience for our audio experiments. we looked into the cultures of online communities formed around asmr practices, but also were in conversation with julie rose bower, whose asmr-informed unwrapping project consisted of an experimental videography, using a specialist microphone, of conservators unwrapping precious museum artifacts (such as charlie chaplin’s hat) with the intention that the viewer was provided with an enhanced and intimate sensory experience of being “behind the scenes” at the victoria and albert museum. some of the activities, such as the humidification of a ballet tutu, are foregrounded in the same way as we attempted to foreground the machines whirring, clicking, and humming on the cardiovascular lab benches. however, to bring anne's text to prominence in the space, while signalling how it might be transformed, we needed a further source of inspiration. intervening in public spaces using words and texts has been pioneered by artists such as jenny holzer. holzer has used billboards as well as electronic signs, light projections as well as stone carving. drawing on the language of painting and installation, holzer is always probing where language and how might appear. for example, in the work softer (2017), she engaged with the military history of blenheim palace in the united kingdom, incorporating light projections on the architecture to deliver to the viewer descriptions of war, including first-person accounts from soldiers and civilians. words and slogans affixed directly to gallery walls have been used by artists such as barbara kruger with great effect. drawing on the look of a billboard, knowingly reappropriating the attention aspirations of advertising, kruger’s texts often fill a wall. most often associated with image-text combination with blunt observations such as untitled (your body is a battleground) (1989) and untitled (we don’t need another hero) (1987), more recent work has abandoned the image and worked with text alone. the immersive display thinking of you. i mean me. i mean you (2023) wraps in language not only the walls, but also the floor of the museum of modern art’s marron family atrium. this tactic of wrapping caught our imagination. rather than extracting quotations and using vinyl lettering on a wall, a practice which is often used in museum displays, for example, we proposed that a full wrap would be, effectively, to wallpaper the space with anne’s text, printed on a vinyl background. we worked with a graphic designer to determine the extent the text had to be cut to fit into the space while keeping the words legible. anne edited accordingly, selecting the most cardiophysiologically-engaged elements of the paper and carefully leaving the argument intact. we determined a tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 10 shade of very pale pink as background—enabling us to transform the whole color scheme of the area, clearly demarcating our “takeover.” two further specifications for this wrapping were particularly important, both elements which ran counter to a “clean” reading. first, we asked the designer to make an allowance so that the vinyl fell over the join between wall and floor and intruded onto the floor. the aim was for the viewer to experience the text intruding even further into the space—a nod to kruger’s moma installation. health and safety regulations only let us extend a few centimetres, but the awkward angle of reading of this text forced people to approach the wall and look down at the floor to get to the bottom line of each column. second, we wanted to signal our mode of revisiting this text and the potential activation of it which would happen as the takeover unfolded. this led us to ask the designer to insert musical note symbols next to keywords rendered in bold font. these became more prominent graphic features which jumped out at the viewer—a kind of patterning which was agnostic to, and fractured, the argument, yet provided a way of visual skimming of a surface. when the audio recordings which involved singing were experienced through headphones, the listener-viewer could make sense of the notes as a signal which brought together audio and text. reflecting on this intervention, we realized how unusual it is to be able to display and transform a feminist academic text so prominently in public space. rather than extracting slogans, the extended extracts, punctuated by notation, offered the viewer the option of being absorbed in a single argument and/or browsing, or floating between keywords. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 11 figure 4. close-up of wallpaper text showing musical notes. photo: george torode. although our intervention used a typography, we recognized that manifesting a kind of graphic takeover of the walls is a tactic which has been deployed by artists who use more direct and less technologically mediated mark making. jade montserrat’s project learning in-and-within relation (after édouard glissant) (2021), in which collaborators wrote on walls with charcoal, offers a model of how reading and annotation of walls might work in an alternative fashion. in montserrat’s project, a group of fine art students devised and inscribed texts in response to montserrat reading aloud works by jamaica kincaid and alexis pauline gumbs. montserrat works at the intersection of art and activism, and in this exercise sought to not only to mark a space but to practice a form of stewarding in which exchanges of energy, lines, and communication took place. we recognize in her work that the practice of drawing might also be an alternative method to intervene and overwrite the authority of a given site. in our experiment the typography of anne’s original article was retained and the wrapping of the space took precedence. we mention montserrat’s project as a reminder that there are other very effective art-activist practices in relation to knowledge (e.g., glissant) which can be undertaken with less finance outlay. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 12 figure 5. viewers experiencing the installation, with headphones and lab stools. photo: george torode. bringing laboratory stools into the space emphasized the different worlds of practice and material arrangements, encountered when a visitor put on the wireless headphones. we used three lab stools loaned by our interlocutor in cardiovascular science sue brain, and connected them with cable ties so that they formed a single unit—effectively creating a sculptural element which added color and form, but also a place to linger. the stools offered one of two seating areas which could be used by visitors. they also offered a straightforward reference back to the devices and conversations of the cardiovascular laboratory setting which was being also experienced, often in a less comprehensible way, on the headphones. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 13 the final intervention was the production of a black felt curtain which hung on a pre-existing semi-circular rail. this curtain allowed some sound insulation, but, more importantly, gave the space a more enclosed ambience. the blackout curtain is often used at the entrance of art space where some isolation of sound or light is needed. although we could not entirely isolate the takeover space, the presence of the curtain offered a more demarcated area. and within its curve, we added more chairs, so that the lab stools were not the only seating offered. sharing science through sound art and asmr (maithili pittea) figure 6. close-up of headphones and wallpaper text. photo: george torode. what might be a feminist approach to sharing science? typically, when science is communicated in a unilateral manner (e.g., in a lecture), the communicator is encouraged to project their voice, to be loud and dominant—values that are typically associated with the masculine. an obvious and well-defined power structure is formed between communicator and recipient. but what if science was whispered, shared with a soft intimacy? our goal for the auditory aspect of the installation was to explore these and other questions inspired by “heart feminism.” we also wished tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 14 to further push the boundaries of how a journal article could be engaged with—we had a wallpaper, but could we turn it into a sound installation? i joined this collaboration with the perspective of a life sciences student: a familiarity with both the lab and cardiophysiology. incidentally, i also joined with an appreciation for asmr and its relaxing whispers and noises; this would come in useful in our attempt to share science with intimacy. though i had not dabbled in creating it, i was an avid listener long before i joined the project. we created four episodes which were played on headphones that were installed over the course of the installation; these were not exhibited at the same time, so visitors would have to return four times across the weeks to hear each episode. they contained sounds that we recorded in the cardiovascular labs using directional and contact mics, as well as our layered voices that whispered, sang, and spoke. we explored different concepts in each episode. please refer to the supplementary files for a transcript of the audios. the episodes are best listened to with headphones—aligning with the tradition of asmr. [episode 1 link] in episode 1 i respoke our interview with fan yang, a postdoctoral research associate at king’s college london, relating the concept of plumbing to her research. our process of respeaking involved listening to the original interview and repeating it as we heard it. this meant that what is heard in the episode is not always the scientists’ words verbatim; there is not scientific content intended to be understood, further foregrounding disorientation. this episode features the clicking sound of a centrifuge, the squeak of rubber gloves, and the screech of stools amongst other lab sounds. [episode 2 link] episode 2 was about the cardiovascular lab itself: whispered descriptions of lab apparatus as experienced through our senses. it features the rippling of the water bath as well as the use of the invivo2, a machine which recreates physiological oxygen conditions. [episode 3 link] in episode 3 we became more musical, interweaving our voices and vocalizations—informed and inspired by nina’s apprenticeship with a feminist vocal improvisor. nina and i respoke excerpts of “heart feminism” and our https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/download/44763/version/40125/34134/126946/ep1.mp4 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/download/44763/version/40125/34134/126947/ep2.mp4 https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/download/44763/version/40125/34134/127866/ep3.mp4 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 15 interview with giovanni mann, professor of vascular biology at king’s college london, about his approach to science. this episode includes giovanni’s vocalizations interspersed with sounds of lab mixers and shakers. [episode 4 link] finally, in episode 4, we returned to the central question of “heart feminism”: what would happen if feminists did look at the heart? (pollock 2015). the last episode was slightly different in that it included the whole team’s voices and no whispering. it features an excerpt from our event in the science gallery london space with sue brain, citations of her research papers, as well as excerpts from a poem in our careful whisper zine. when we started this project, we hoped that the four episodes would be an experiment in themselves—literally describing them as “sonic experiments.” our approach was dynamic; there was no concrete plan for what each episode would cover. instead, our interactions with the cardiophysiologists and subsequent conversations within our team guided us into different areas to explore. we would create the next episode whilst the previous was installed. our process was as follows: we would research into the scientist’s work and how it could relate to our interests (e.g., plumbing), then recorded interviews and lab sounds. we would listen back to our recordings and reflect, picking out interesting concepts, turning them into a script, before recording ourselves respeaking in sound booths, and finally aysha would edit the recordings into an episode. asmr refers to the affective response to auditory stimuli, often reported to feel relaxing or pleasurable. content is often promoted by the asmr community as a solution for stress and insomnia (andersen 2015). furthermore, numerous videos on social media promote asmr for adhd and autism as a therapeutic tool—bridging the knowledge from my undergraduate dissertation (equivalent to a us senior thesis) on autism and gender to this project. common sounds include whispered voices and tapping on or using objects—both of which occur in our episodes. asmr creates intimacy through the whispered voice, and while we did not originally intend to create asmr, it did align with the questions we wished to explore. asmr content often involves role-play that recreate the performance of familiar everyday tasks, which tend to derive from domestic or care-related spheres such as brushing hair, a spa appointment, or health checkups (andersen 2015). medical role-play asmr is particularly popular (hillcox 2023); comparatively, scientist roleplay or science communication asmr is non-existent. interestingly, asmr content creators and consumers recall mother-child relationships when describing asmr experiences (cheadle 2012; marsden 2012). as such, joceline andersen (2015) argues that asmr utilizes gendered notions of care, with common scenarios and the overall experience coded as feminine. i propose that our https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/download/44763/version/40125/34134/126948/ep4.mp4 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 16 installation disrupts traditional asmr and these ideas of gendered care. while it may produce an asmr response, it is not intended to evoke care or comfort; our episodes likely evoke curiosity or confusion. the episodes already contained feminist discussions but disrupting heteronormativity in asmr added another feminist dimension to the installation. the sounds of a lab are an atypical scenario for asmr, and many visitors would likely be unfamiliar with a research laboratory. yet, for scientists, the sounds of a centrifuge or water bath may be a familiar aspect of their everyday. regardless, for both scientists and non-scientists, the episodes allow science and sts to be experienced rather than comprehended—an atypical approach to engaging with academia. it foregrounds disruption by removing the context from both the lab sounds and respoken interviews. we did not attempt to communicate any specific academic knowledge; we only wished to immerse the visitor in the audio, as they were also immersed through the space and the wallpaper. exhibitions often tend to involve dissemination of scientific knowledge complimented by art illustrations. amelia hine and fabien medvecky (2015) propose that science museums and institutions adhere to the “public deficit” model of communication (which assumes a knowledge vacuum in a layperson that can be filled), due to their role as informal education. this idea is problematic not only in that it assumes a passive and receptive public, but as hine and medvecky suggest, it removes the vital context of research from science by presenting science as completed understanding. careful whisper’s focus was the sound art which then explored descriptions of lab equipment, investigations into scientists’ motives, and orations of citations. the process of research is therefore a central theme to our project, contrasting deficit-model-aligned exhibitions. furthermore, in a broader sense, the episodes do not fit into traditional science communication— they allow the visitor to make meaning on their own terms, rather than receive and integrate articulated information (see rogers and halpern 2021). our different disciplines and contributions within the team enabled us to create this encounter. each of us were involved in different levels of the process, but it is interesting to consider our roles as creators of the sound installation. we come together as the medium through which visitors engaged with the science themselves. yet our unique mix of backgrounds—art, science, and sts—led to a wide range of engagements with the science and opened a diverse set of enquiries. alone, i would not have considered challenging conventions of science, and my background could have steered me toward creating traditional science communication. as a team, we were able to interrogate science. indeed, ideas that one team member came up with may never have occurred to another. for instance, a member of the team asked one scientist if there were any pictures of her cells that she thought were beautiful; the scientist had never viewed the cells with aesthetics in mind. this interaction led to a discussion in our team around how different disciplines consider the manifestations of their work. other tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 17 discussions centered around motivations for scientists, conventions of a scientific laboratory, academic posters. these conversations allowed us to fully engage with science at different levels: approaches to-, the production of-, and postpublication. through this process, i believe we all developed our individual understandings of science. figure 7. people listening in the space. photo: george torode. finally, i return to intimacy once more. there is a juxtaposition between the intimate whispers through headphones and the public nature of the space, heightening the intimate nature of the audio. a one-to-one relationship is momentarily created between listener and whisperer. yet several visitors could listen to the audio at the same time as several headsets were installed in the space. a connection is created, even across strangers, subverting the intimacy constructed. our feminist exploration of sharing science with a soft intimacy allows for the listener to uniquely engage with science and sts. it provides a different understanding and appreciation for these fields, and challenges traditional views of what engagement with academia can look like. utilizing feminist approaches may therefore open a whole world of novel engagements. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 18 notes on careful whisper (aysha leach) making the zine notes on careful whisper was another way of creatively engaging with heart feminism. essays in books are familiar, but to have essays on pink paper and accompanied by graphics and images from our time in the cardiovascular lab makes the traditional format of the academic essay text once again unfamiliar. it is wonderfully perverse to bring the sts article into a zine. zines are rooted in feminist and queer history. and also sci-fi. the first zine dates back to may 1930, and was created by the science correspondence club in chicago. it was called the comet and contained a letter section where fans discussed science and science fiction. science fiction fanzine culture continued to grow throughout the 1940s, with russ chauvenet coining the term fanzine in detours, a sci-fi publication (hero 2021). vice versa was north america’s first lesbian zine, created in 1947 by “lisa ben” (pseudonym and anagram for lesbian) covertly at her place of work. incredibly ahead of its time and influential, vice versa “provided the blueprint for the gay magazines that followed” (lgbt+ cultural heritage, n.d.). the zine was not an initial part of the careful whisper project, and it was not made because of the history of zines, but more because of its format and the other possibilities it provided. but it is interesting to consider the history of the form, as perhaps this is why we gravitated towards creating a zine, and felt so comfortable within it. the zine functioned differently to the essay-as-wallpaper format, although they are both situated further into the art world of showing text than the science world. the zine bundles the essay up into something you can hold in your hands, take away and sit with. the entirety of anne’s text “heart feminism” lined the left side of the zine, which was spiral bound with a metal spiral like that of a notebook. the right side was filled with a variety of scientific and audio ephemera inspired by our time in the cardiovascular labs. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 19 figure 8. zine pages showing part of “heart feminism” on one side and drawing of microphone and hands on the other. there is something inherently inharmonious between the sts essay and the zine; they seem to be at opposite ends of the print world. where zines are lo-fi, ad hoc, diy collections of things that all revolve around fandom, the academic essay is perhaps the opposite. zines are often made quickly and distributed widely, whereas scientific essays typically require a lot more research and preparation than the standard zine, but they are still typically distributed within a niche. formal and knowable. having the essay within the zine was another way of disorienting standard ways of knowledge and learning. often in zines, text is cut up and fragmented. text in zines are usually snippets or short quotes; they feature the greatest hits. to include the entirety of “heart feminism” was an unusual choice for a traditional zine format, but like so many other elements of the installation, there was something important in things not functioning exactly as they should. we imagined the zine as a lab notebook, an important document bundled up into a format that encompasses the academic, scientific, and artistic. for me, notes on careful whisper straddles both the scientific and the artistic. it has elements that are more formal than the traditional diy aesthetics and cultures that zines grew from, and we also drew on aesthetic choices informed by the scientific lab; blank, sterile pages, faux adverts advertising scientific hacks we learnt in the cardiovascular lab, one page disguised as an eppendorf cyrocube fridge. other pages had an aesthetic more typical to usual zines. having a range of different tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 20 influences from different (and broad) disciplines involved within the project accumulated visually within the pages of the zine. working closely with mait (a neuroscience undergrad) was integral to establishing the semi-scientific aesthetic of the zine, and my background in fine art similarly provided strong design choices. finding the meeting point of our two approaches was key to the developing the outcome of the zine, exploring where our ideas and experiences clashed or overlapped. figure 9. image of zine pages showing continuation of “heart feminism” on one side and spoof advertisement for nail polish as lab sealant on the other. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 21 figure 10. zine pages showing continuation of “heart feminism” on one side and lab fridge with descriptions of audio samples we recorded from the fridge. we included quotes from lab discussions conducted with the scientists we met working in the cardiovascular labs. taken out of context of scientific conversation, the quotes are somewhat bizarre, bordering on motivational wall art at times. not quite “live, laugh, love,” but, “do you practice science with love and passion and happiness?” similar vibes. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 22 figure 11. image of zine showing continuation of “heart feminism” on one side and a question from a lab discussion on the other. we created a scientific research poster on asmr; we displayed the audio files from our field recordings. we created a logbook with day-by-day diary entries so that the reader could follow along our explorations. we described what the sounds sounded like in words. rachna chowla, a poet and primary care doctor in the community in which the science gallery london is situated, who also contributes to clinical strategy for king’s, wrote a poem. rachna seamlessly blended scientific knowledge into a beautiful love poem detailing her experience of the installation. her contribution happened serendipitously; she was walking through the space during setup, and her response to seeing the feminist text on the walls was “i write poetry, too.” to have all this work in one place, all this documentation of collaboration and experimentation, which was what the project was and what it created, is such a privilege. the zine created another bridge between the cardiovascular lab and the installation. it explored and displayed how we were thinking about what we were doing. it brings the both the essay to the lab and the lab to the space. it is also important to note that it contained the full text version of anne’s essay—as the essay was condensed for the wallpaper installation. the interplay between having one page as anne’s essay and the other side of the page as documentation and tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 23 exploration of the cardiovascular lab helps to keep the viewer suspended in the constant back and forth between things, between science, art, sound, the lab, the takeover space. figure 12. image from zine showing continuation of “heart feminism” on one side and image of invivo2 lab machine with sound descriptions on the other. tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 24 figure 13. image of zine showing continuation of “heart feminism” on one side and “i heart feminism” on the other. concluding reflections this image & text piece documents a short-lived installation of several weeks. yet we produced a set of encounters characterized by an open-endedness which resisted straightforward “knowledge transfer,” to use the phrase often deployed when research travels. our generation of an atmospherics of feminist sts, rather than a transfer of findings, is not fully recuperable in a write-up like this one, but we take advantage of the multimedia capacity of the digital journal to share the sound works which will at least bring the reader a little closer to a small bit of london in june and july 2024. as a team, we never settled on whether we were using science to make artistic interventions and/or using feminist sts to make artistic interventions. on the contrary, in the cardiovascular lab visits and in the team conversations over lunch thereafter, in the design and realization for the gallery space and in the zine, and in the conversations convened in the space, we were constantly reframing and reworking the endeavor live. feminist sts always framed how we entered the cardiovascular lab, and emboldened by creative engagements such as those by jackie orr, we let ourselves work at the limits of the immediately comprehensible—we make nonsense as well as sense. the results were something quite different from normative tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 25 modes of communicating science. rather than communicating, we scattered, diffused, distributed, seduced. we whispered in the visitors’ ears, and then sang over words repeated from interviews. we shared our own immersion in plural conversations, situating us all within the essay. it is perhaps unusual for an author to return to their own academic paper to reengage it, rather than leaving it to others to pick up the essay should they feel so inspired. yet, as this experiment with the science gallery london has shown, doing so in diverse configurations of interdisciplinary collaboration can be generative. and doing so multiply. careful whisper has been a very different mode of re-engaging “heart feminism” than the previous collaboration with design scholar nassim parvin and neuroscientist lewis wheaton and evolving teams of students at georgia tech (jafarinaimi and pollock 2018), along plural vectors: this one was site specific, was disrupting different sets of ideas, and was foregrounding of text and sound rather than visualization. and this may not be the last interdisciplinary re-engagement with “heart feminism.” during the careful whisper installation, nassim traveled through london and participated in a well-attended public conversation in the space. nassim pointed out that now that there has been a set of installations around visualization and this one around sound, the time is ripe for a “heart feminist” engagement with touch—further potential for new generative disorientations. note 1 individuals reporting asmr experience a tingling, static-like sensation across the scalp, back of the neck, and at times further areas in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli. this sensation is widely reported to be accompanied by feelings of relaxation and well-being. barratt and davis (2015) associate the sensory phenomenon asmr within other heightened flow states of such as synesthesia and identify several common triggers used to achieve asmr, including whispering, personal attention, crisp sounds, and slow movements. artworks referenced katrina jungnickel and julien mchardy. em #1 – interview machine https://katjungnickel.com/portfolio/em1-interview-machine/. barbara kruger. untitled (we don’t need another hero). 1987. screenprint on vinyl, 108 7/8 × 209 3/16 × 2 1/2 in. (276.5 × 531.3 × 6.4 cm). https://whitney.org/collection/works/34103. barbara kruger. untitled (your body is a battleground). 1989. photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 112 x 112 in. 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https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/24/us/asmr-unintentional-celebrities-youtube-tiktok-cec/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/24/us/asmr-unintentional-celebrities-youtube-tiktok-cec/index.html https://doi.org/10.22323/2.14020204 https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241270917 https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.409 https://doi.org/10.2307/778809 https://www.lgbtculturalheritage.com/zines https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/maria-spends-20-minutes-folding-towels-why-millions-are-mesmerised-by-asmr-videos-7956866.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/maria-spends-20-minutes-folding-towels-why-millions-are-mesmerised-by-asmr-videos-7956866.html https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i2.39206 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28813 https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28811 tenth anniversary section | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) anne pollock, nina wakeford, maithili pittea, aysha leach, 2025 28 science, and technology studies, edited by hannah star rogers, megan k. halpern, delia hannah, and kathryn de ridder-vignone, 1-46. routledge. salter, chris, regula valérie burri, and joseph dumit. 2016. “art, design, performance.” in the handbook of science and technology studies, 4th ed., edited by ulrike felt, rayvon fouché, clark a. miller, and laurel smith-doerr, 139-167. mit press. willet, jennifer. 2021. “incubator art lab: reimagining biotech futures through integrated laboratory practices.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34926. author bios anne pollock is professor of global health and social medicine at king’s college london. previously a member of the lead editorial team of catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, she continues to serve as an editor of biosocieties. she is author of multiple books, most recently sickening: anti-black racism and health disparities (minnesota 2021), and co-author with nadine ehlers, anthony ryan hatch, and amade aouatef m’charek of the racial cage (minnesota 2025). nine wakeford is professor of art at goldsmiths, university of london. her work has been shown at venues including focal point gallery, southend; glasgow international; science gallery london; london transport museum; the barbican; reading international; statgallerie, bern. she is the author of our pink depot: the gay underground flo-n202-236000000-trk-mst-00002-say-hellowave-good-byeken-nie-bps (book works, 2019), and co-editor with celia lury of inventive methods: the happening of the social (routledge, 2012). maithili pittea is a science communication master’s student at imperial college london, with a bachelor's degree in neuroscience from king’s college london. her master’s thesis explores decolonization in museums. aysha leach is a ba fine art graduate working mainly in video, with an interest in the deceitful allure of film production, superficiality, and the inherent seductiveness of being on camera. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v7i2.34926 careful whisper, heart feminism goldsmiths, university of london ayshaleach@gmail.com abstract keywords introduction re-engaging with heart feminism in emergent collaboration (anne pollock) finding the “site specificity” (nina wakeford) sharing science through sound art and asmr (maithili pittea) notes on careful whisper (aysha leach) concluding reflections note references author bios cruz, maya. 2025. “(machine) learning how to see like a rover: feminist objectivity and the demonic ground of martian sand.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–20. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © maya cruz, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license (machine) learning how to see like a rover: feminist objectivity and the demonic ground of martian sand maya cruz ohio state university cruz.446@osu.edu abstract mars has long been a space onto which fantasies of colonization have been projected in both popular and scientific imaginaries. amidst these colonizing visions, can there be a feminist science of mars? in this paper, i examine an emerging technology being developed at nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory designed to increase the capacity for future rovers to conduct autonomous scientific research on mars using machine learning and computer vision, called the soil property and object classifier (spoc), as a case study in crafting feminist objectivity. i bring together feminist studies, critical race and ethnic studies, indigenous studies, and postcolonial studies approaches to the study of science and technology to analyze the ways in which spoc evidences how contemporary techniques used to engineer autonomous scientific discovery on mars through machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision reproduce and redescribe the logics, imaginaries, and power relations of us settler colonialism in new technological terms. ultimately, my work aims to gesture towards the possibilities that emerge for crafting a feminist objectivity of mars when we situate scientific knowledge through the racialized conditions of its production. keywords feminist objectivity, anti-colonial science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, mars mailto:cruz.446@osu.edu original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 2 can there be a feminist science of mars? mars has long been a space onto which fantasies of colonization have been projected. in the united states, mars is often positioned as an expanding frontier of american empire, perhaps most recently on january 20, 2025, when president donald trump delivered his second inaugural address to the nation. in this address, trump (2025) reasserted the colonization of mars as a national priority, and many of the nation’s billionaire tech elites cheered on excitedly behind him as he declared, “the united states will once again consider itself a growing nation— one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. and we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching american astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet mars.” while we often learn to see mars through these kinds of overtly colonial public narratives and popular imaginaries that envision mars as an american frontier, the technical images of mars that are produced by scientific research programs such as nasa often tell a similar story. while nasa’s viking 1 lander took the first photo of the surface of mars in 1976, depicting a close-up, black-and-white image of rocks, sand, and soil, nasa’s fleet of mars exploration rovers are now equipped with multiple specialized cameras that have produced countless types of images of the surface of mars that serve technical or scientific functions and carry social and cultural power, depicting mars as a space of exploration, discovery, and future human colonization. janet vertesi’s (2015) work in seeing like a rover: how robots, teams, and images craft knowledge of mars describes this phenomenon in depth, documenting how nasa’s mars exploration program scientists and engineers produce knowledge of mars using rover images according to objectives that are both technical and political. vertesi observes that images of mars that circulate in popular and public spaces are often produced to deliberately transform mars into a “familiarly american view of the martian landscape” (228) as a frontier to communicate the ethos of exploration and discovery that is paramount to continued public support, and therefore the long-term success, of the mars exploration program. similarly, lisa messeri’s ethnography, placing outer space: an earthly ethnography of other worlds, shows how the work of nasa’s computer scientists to construct interactive maps of the surface of mars transforms mars into a place that “naturalizes and makes widely available a planetary imagination that supports the resilient goal held by nasa and space enthusiasts to eventually set human foot on the awaiting red planet” (2016, 74). as these visions of mars appear to exemplify what donna haraway has described as “the god-trick” (1988, 581), presenting the “view from above” (590) or the infinite vision of the disembodied gaze of scientific objectivity, i often wonder, can there be a feminist science of mars? how can we situate these colonizing visions of mars to craft a version of feminist objectivity? after all, haraway actually turns original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 3 to planetary images as examples of potential sites from which we can produce feminist objectivity: feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. it allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see…all these pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability but of elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another’s point of view, even when the other is our own machine. that’s not alienating distance; that’s a possible allegory for feminist versions of objectivity. understanding how these visual systems work technically, socially, and psychically ought to be a way of embodying feminist objectivity. (583) in the field of science and technology studies, scholars have worked to address the question of situated knowledge in scientific images of mars. vertesi’s (2015) work in seeing like a rover, for example, stands out as one way that we might create situated knowledge of mars—that is, through ethnographic accounts of the complex technical, social, and political practices that shape nasa’s expert teams’ work to produce mars images. interestingly, vertesi actually dispels the illusion that images of mars are a view from nowhere. instead, vertesi describes the social, scientific, and engineering practices that condition each image’s production and the complex and collaborative ways in which scientists, engineers, and the rovers work collectively to explore mars using digital images, arguing that the images of mars that the public usually encounter reflect neither a god’s-eye view (or the view from nowhere), nor even the rover’s view, but instead are constructed to reflect the situated perspective of an imagined human observer. messeri’s (2016) ethnographic work in placing outer space stands out, too, as an example of how images of mars can be situated in the technical, social, and political conditions that shape their production. but messeri offers a slightly different story. while messeri’s ethnography of the mapmakers, a team of computer scientists at nasa’s ames research center working to create 3d maps of mars for the public using surface images taken by the rovers, accounts for the complex political, social, and material conditions that shape the specific practices the mapmakers use to construct mars as a specific interactive “place” for imagined human users (rather than, for example, constructing a view from nowhere), messeri does not suggest that these maps of mars are therefore unequivocally situated knowledge. instead, messeri argues that “situated planetary knowledge is in some ways a double god trick. the user imagines himself or herself as the embodied viewer of the martian landscape, but this is a way of seeing…that is specific to the mars scientist…the positioning is simultaneously situated and universalizing” (108). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 4 taken together, messeri’s and vertesi’s work raises the question of what it would mean to produce situated knowledge of mars, or a version of feminist objectivity that “allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see” (haraway 1988, 583) when that we and that us is so often configured as an unmarked, imagined human observer, and the very question of what “we” “learn” how to see in images of mars is dramatically shifting with the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence. many images of mars are now, for example, described as “rover selfies” because they depict the figure of the increasingly autonomous mars exploration rover in the frame, positioned both visually (and narratively through captions on social media) as a heroic figure of scientific progress alone on the martian frontier. but this vision of autonomous scientific discovery is not just a narrative fantasy—it reflects nasa’s material efforts to engineer rovers with increasingly autonomous capabilities to perform key aspects of scientific research (like observation and navigation) using the visual capacities of the rover and the latest advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence. engineering autonomous scientific discovery on mars is thus evidence of what neda atanasoski and kalindi vora describe as the surrogate human effect of technoliberalism, where new technologies, and particularly artificially intelligent autonomous technologies, come to “stand in” for the human as “aspirational versions of humanity” (2018, 5) in a universalized postrace future that reflects (but disavows and obscures) the violent logics of racial difference that scaffold the human in relation to the figure of the liberal subject. in this moment marked by the technoliberal fantasy of rovers performing autonomous scientific discovery on behalf of an unmarked, universal human future, crafting a version of feminist objectivity becomes a practice of (riffing on haraway and vertesi) becoming answerable for what the rover “learns” how to see (and how we learn to see the rover) as an autonomous technology, by situating our fantasies of autonomous scientific discovery and the visions that proffer it in the long (violent) histories of their racial formation. thus, i aim to develop situated knowledge of contemporary visions of mars that is routed through theories of the relationships between the racialized figure of autonomy and the human, space, scientific research and knowledge production that emerge at the intersections of intersectional feminist theory and critical race and ethnic studies, indigenous studies, and postcolonial theory. in bringing these fields together with science and technology studies, my goal is to contribute to long-standing conversations on feminist objectivity by analyzing the ways in which the contemporary techniques used to engineer autonomous scientific discovery on mars through machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision reproduce and redescribe the logics, imaginaries, and power relations of us settler colonialism in new technological terms. i aim to build on existing scholarship at the intersections of these fields that emphasize how the relationships between science, technology, and society are co-produced with (and as) systems of power such as colonialism, and the intersecting categories and original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 5 relations of social difference (for example, race and nation) through which such systems are constituted. with emphasis on the heterogeneity of these fields, my goal is to enliven a version of feminist objectivity that is formed through the “elaborate specificity and difference” (haraway 1988, 583) of the theories and histories of racial difference that these fields emerge from and offer, while also asking after the possibilities that might emerge for the broader project of an anticolonial feminist science of mars as we consider the coalitional relations that exist (or might yet be formed) through their interdisciplinary connection. as a case study, i examine an emerging technology being developed at nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory that is designed to increase the capacity for future rovers to conduct autonomous scientific research on mars using machine learning and computer vision, called the soil property and object classifier (spoc). spoc is a novel autonomous terrain classifier designed to make complex assessments of images of martian terrain that will increase capacity for mars rovers to make navigation decisions and identify targets for scientific research autonomously. as a highly visual technology, spoc is a particularly compelling case study for grappling with the complexities and demands of situated knowledge and feminist objectivity. as i will show, spoc signals a significant innovation in the engineering of autonomy in the mars exploration rovers because it has the capabilities to accurately classify martian sand (an infamously dangerous and notoriously risky terrain for mars rovers) for the very first time. but, i argue, spoc’s capacity to autonomously classify martian sand as trafficable terrain also signals the reproduction of the logics, imaginaries, and power relations of us settler colonialism, now articulated at new scales of planetary difference. i bring together work in black feminist theory, indigenous studies, and postcolonial theory to understand how spoc recasts the logics, imaginaries, and knowledge of autonomy, the self and its other, space and terra nullius in new technological (or technoliberal) terms. i argue that spoc is evidence of what i describe as the emerging figure of the autonomous colonial laboratory—an innovation that marks the confluence of the racialized form and function of the figure of the colonial laboratory with the racialized form and function of human autonomy. i then dwell in the challenge of martian sand as a ground for engineering human and machine autonomy, and “read against the grains” (hartman 2019) of spoc’s technoliberal visions of martian sand and learn to see at its limits, towards what escapes the gaze of its computational vision. to do this, i draw on vanessa agard-jones’s (2012) work in “what the sands remember” to see sand both technically (or scientifically) and speculatively (or poetically), and turn to the poetic technique of enjambment as a subversive mode of doubled vision, to learn to see both spoc’s computational visions of sand in juxtaposition with speculative visions of martian sand as a version of sylvia wynter’s (1990) and katherine mckittrick’s (2006) conceptualizations of demonic ground that can point us towards new modes of feminist science praxis. ultimately, my work aims to gesture towards the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 6 possibilities that emerge for crafting a feminist objectivity of mars when we situate scientific knowledge through the racialized conditions of its production. feminist objectivity and the emerging figure of the autonomous colonial laboratory in the absence of immediate communication and direct human presence and oversight on mars, engineering autonomy in the mars exploration rovers has been paramount to the success of the mars exploration program. earthbound scientists have relied on intermittent communication with rovers that have had increasingly autonomous capabilities to carry out mission objectives, but engineers at nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory state that “there is an urgent need for significantly enhancing on-board autonomy of future rover missions” (ono et al. 2020), particularly for terrain navigation, path-planning, and decision-making. they explain, “terrain is important to get around on mars. spirit got stuck in a sand pit and ended its mission after 7 years of exploring mars (but far exceeding its nominal mission length of 90-days). opportunity and curiosity also have experienced getting stuck in sand, although they were able to continue on their missions. don’t you think it would be nice if the mars rover could identify dangerous terrain by herself?” (ai4mars, n.d.). but current communication and network infrastructure limits the amount of data that can be transmitted between earth and mars, which means manual navigation on the surface of mars is not always possible (ono et al. 2020). and it’s not just an infrastructure problem, either—it’s also a labor problem: “manually performing [terrain] evaluation…all over the landing site, which typically spans over 10 km, is very laborious, if not impossible…[it] requires the eyes of experienced geologists and rover drivers, who are not available for spending hundreds of hours on manual terrain classification” (rothrock et al. 2016). so, in 2020, a team of researchers from nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory introduced maars (machine learning-based analytics for automated rover systems), a suite of algorithms developed for use on nasa’s future mars exploration rovers that includes the spoc. trained on open-source data sets using a citizen science program called ai4mars (swan et al. 2021), spoc’s developers are eager to “apply the judgment of experienced eyes on a significant volume of data with a marginal labor requirement” (rothrock et al. 2016, 2). once spoc is adequately trained, it will be able to effectively manage terrain risk to the rover by predicting the likelihood of rover slippage and terrain traversability, key problems for nasa and the jet propulsion laboratory’s rover teams in rover path planning (rothrock et al. 2016; swan et al. 2021). spoc will thus increase the capability of future rovers to plan routes more efficiently while identifying scientific targets of interest through autonomous navigation and decision-making while reducing risk to the rover (ono et al. 2020; swan et al. 2021). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 7 towards the broader project of crafting a version of feminist objectivity, we might first situate spoc in the history of scientific objectivity in terms of how it signifies a new, hybrid formation of two historical modes of scientific objectivity, specifically, mechanical objectivity and trained judgment, and, accordingly, a new formation of the scientific self (daston and gallison 2007). for example, by classifying different types of terrain using images of the surface of mars, spoc performs an updated version of a practice described by vertesi (2015) in seeing like a rover, wherein computer scientists working on nasa’s mars exploration program team would disambiguate data from stereo images taken by the rover’s pancam using software to make certain aspects of the images salient according to the specific goals of certain teams. for example, vertesi (2015) describes how computer scientists would make topographical aspects of an image salient for the operations side of the team (rather than spectral or morphological properties of the soil or rock features that might be useful for the interests of other teams) to allow operations team members to determine “where and how the rover can drive” (126). this disambiguation, vertesi shows, is essential to drawing mars as trafficable terrain” (126) and to make mars “tangible, interactionable, and knowable” (130). in other words, spoc can be seen as an updated form of scientific objectivity that combines the mechanical ability to classify images of mars with the trained judgment of the scientific expert. interestingly, engineering autonomous terrain classification through spoc indexes a moment in the history of objectivity where the scientific self is effected by an artificially intelligent machine, here configured as an autonomous rover-aslaboratory that enacts expert interpretation and choice that both replicates and exceeds the capacity of the earthbound human scientist. while objectivity, the laboratory, and classification are classic concepts and figures in science and technology studies (see, for example, bowker and star 1999), i am interested in building on this body of work by reading calls from postcolonial studies of science and technology (especially warwick anderson 2009). in so doing, i aim to understand the figure of the scientific laboratory and its techniques of classification as a racial formation (omi and winant 1994) that emerges through histories of colonialism in relation to both the critique of spoc’s production of the surrogate effect of technoliberalism as an artificially intelligent machine, and indigenous studies theories of the land relations of us settler colonialism. if, as i have suggested, crafting a version of feminist objectivity becomes a practice of becoming answerable for what the rover “learns” how to see (and how we learn to see the rover) as an autonomous technology by situating our fantasies of autonomous scientific discovery and the visions that proffer it in the long (violent) histories of their racial formation, then we need to situate spoc’s capacity to perform autonomous terrain classification in the histories of colonialism that shape it. so, while the fields of science and technology studies and feminist science and technology studies have long been critical of scientific objectivity and the scientific self, critical race and ethnic studies, indigenous studies, and original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 8 postcolonial theories of the study of science, technology, and society are crucial for situating spoc’s new formations of scientific objectivity and the scientific self with attention to their racial histories of production. specifically, i find atanasoski and vora’s (2018) theory of the surrogate human effect of technoliberalism to be particularly helpful. as a political structure, technoliberalism describes a particular relationship between the figure of the human and technological innovation in engineering projects that claim to revolutionize human life through the development of artificially intelligent robots that liberate the human subject from devalued and degraded labor so it can have the freedom to pursue its creative potential (atanasoski and vora 2018). but the figure of the human under technoliberalism is scaffolded according to racial and gendered logics that have always differentially and hierarchically defined who can be fully human, and who cannot (atanasoski and vora 2018). these ideas of differential categorization become incorporated into (and constitutive of) the engineering projects that produce the surrogate human effect, where technologies that come to stand in for the human produce the liberal subject through a surrogate-self relation that operates as the “racial ‘grammar’ of technoliberalism” (atanasoski and vora 2018, 5). by “racial grammar,” atanasoski and vora draw on hortense spiller’s (1987) use of grammar to “draw attention to the composition of the human as an abstract category whose expansive capacities continually reaffirm the racial order of things that undergirds euro-american modernity” (atanasoski and vora 2018, 5), particularly through the affirmation of the liberal subject through the devaluation of its others, as the “disappearance, erasure, and elimination necessary to maintain the liberal subject as the agent of historical progress” (6). read through technoliberalism, while spoc stands in for the expert and creative classification labor once designated only for a human scientist to classifying multiple types of geological features (including big rock, bedrock, and soil) to transform the surface of mars into trafficable terrain, spoc stands to expand the reach and scope of future rovers’ navigational capacities. specifically, spoc can be seen to “stand in” for the human and thus produce the surrogate human effect of technoliberalism by innovating on older techniques of scientific vision using artificial intelligence and machine learning that reassert and maintain the right of an aspirational version of an unmarked, universal human or figure of humanity to overcome the limits of space and the limits of the human to ensure the “right of the liberal subject to those spaces previously impenetrable” (atanasoski and vora 2018, 150). and yet, it is not simply the fact that spoc can transform the surface of mars into trafficable terrain that interests me. spoc is unique among terrain classifiers because it can effectively predict the presence of sand in a given image for the very first time. using images of the surface of mars taken by the navigation cameras of curiosity, spirit, and opportunity rovers as input (swan et al. 2021), spoc “outputs original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 9 the probability of sand in the image space” (ono 2018, 0:38–48) with sufficiently high accuracy such that its error margins are unlikely to result in misclassifications of terrain features or areas that are the size of the rover. this means, therefore, that spoc is unlikely to produce classification errors that are large enough to present significant risk to the rover’s navigation, thus accurately classifying sandy terrain in a range of probability that is useful for the first time (ono 2018, 0:28–33). as a case study in crafting a version of feminist objectivity in terms of the production of the surrogate effect of technoliberalism, i’m interested in spoc’s novel capacity to make complex assessments of martian sand as an innovation or technological fix (atanasoski and vora 2018; benjamin 2019) that operates as a racial grammar of technoliberalism, as the very technique that reasserts the euro-american racial order of things by producing and affirming the liberal subject (here configured as the rover as the heroic figure of scientific progress) while reasserting the devaluation, disappearance, erasure, and elimination of its racial others. here, i want to focus on spoc’s capacity to perform the autonomous classification of sand as trafficable terrain to offer a case study that, following atanasoski and vora, can “extend critical race and ethnic studies analyses of gendered racialization to include machine ‘others’…[taking] the weight of an ethnic studies analysis off of racialized people so that we can see how this relationship functions even in their absence…to attend to techniques through which difference (whether human-nonhuman or interhuman) is produced, while understanding categories of difference as historically specific” (2018, 8). to do this, i am interested in turning to scholarship across indigenous studies and black studies (and more specifically indigenous geographies and black geographies) that have theorized the way in which land relations are constitutive of maintaining colonial control and essential to the reproduction of the liberal subject. for example, ojibwe geographer niiyokamigaabaw deondre smiles (2020) has observed that current us space exploration programs operate within settler-colonial logics wherein “space represents yet another ‘unknown’ to be conquered and bent to america’s will.” building on smiles’ argument, i suggest that as spoc categorizes the surface of mars into trafficable terrain, spoc performs what mckittrick (2006) and wynter (2003) might describe as the transformation of the unknown and uninhabitable into “a geography of man” (mckittrick 2006, 132) or a racialized, biocentric ordering of space that is known and knowable for the racialized figure of man (or the euro-american conceptualization of the human). but, spoc innovates on the technique of classification as a tool and extension of the colonial laboratory to accomplish the remote control and command of space in new, updated technological terms. as an autonomous terrain classifier designed to increase the capacity for increasingly autonomous rovers (or laboratories) to carry out scientific research remotely, spoc demonstrates how innovations in machine learning and artificial intelligence are changing the ways in which terrain original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 10 classification for the remote command and control of space operate as modes of colonial power by indexing a new kind of relationship between the command and control of space and the reproduction of the liberal subject. here i am thinking with smiles (2020), who has argued, citing patrick wolfe’s (2006) work, that “the settler state seeks to make use of land and resources in order to continue on [through] any number of activities that settler colonial logic deems necessary to its own survival.” smiles (2020) elaborates, “the settler colony is intimately tied with the space within which it exists—it cannot exist or sustain itself without settler control over land and space” such that “the ultimate aims of settler colonialism is therefore the occupation and remaking of space” to sustain the permanent presence of colonists and the settler state. with these theories in mind, i observe that spoc’s novel capacity to effectively classify and predict the presence of martian sand is not only crucial to the survival of the mars exploration program as an extension of the us settler state, but, by design, aims to guarantee its continued expansion: as the rover drives, more images are generated of the surface of mars, and, crucially, more images of martian sand; these images become more data that can be used to further train the terrain classifier and perfect its capacity to predict the presence of sand; as the terrain classifier is further trained and perfected, the rover is able to navigate further, with reduced risk to its overall safety; as the rover navigates further, it produces more images of martian sand, which become more data to train spoc, and thus, cyclically, ensure the increased command and control over space. in other words, with the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, computer vision, and images as data, spoc’s ensures the very success and continuation of the mars exploration program through its very design and capacity to perform and perfect autonomous terrain classification of sand. this is, i argue, the mark of what i will describe as the emerging figure of the mars exploration rovers as autonomous colonial laboratories: the expansion and perfection of the command and control over space for liberal subject through the techniques of autonomous classification of martian sand not only operates as the racial grammar of technoliberalism but, by design, guarantees its reproduction. i want to be careful here not to conflate scientific research on mars and the engineering of autonomous terrain classifiers with the histories of us settler colonialism and their violent mechanisms of racial domination that i have positioned as their conditions of production, particularly in my elaboration of the surrogate effect of technoliberalism through the terrestrial histories of violence that smiles, wolfe, wynter, and mckittrick draw upon in their work. i want also to be careful not to conflate terrestrial histories of settler-colonial land relations with the particular relations i have traced through martian sand and the expansion of colonialism in outer space. if anything, my goal in tracing these new relations reflects my interest in the precarity lab’s (2020) observation that “digital networks signal not novel dystopias but old paradigms of domination (the plantation, the colony, the prison, the military industrial complex, the laboratory, and the special economic zone)” to suggest that spoc evidences how the logics original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 11 and imaginaries of the racialized order of us modernity are engineered into new technologies like spoc as a part of their default form and function. spoc thus inherits the histories of us settler colonialism and recasts its logics and imaginaries at new scales of planetary difference, configuring mars as an emerging frontier of us colonialism while simultaneously appearing to be disconnected from it as the mark of technoliberalism. the demand of a feminist objectivity is therefore to become accountable to the histories these technologies inherit, especially those from which they appear to be disconnected. as engineering autonomy through the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence for the classification of martian sand becomes an arbiter of us settlercolonial expansion on mars, how might a feminist science respond? what would it take to become answerable or accountable to what the rover, or autonomous colonial laboratory, learns how to see—and how we’ve learned to see it? enjambment and the demonic ground of sand in all of this, i am conscious that as spoc “learns” to see martian sand as trafficable terrain, it is produced as a devalued, racialized other, imagined as a resource for engineering autonomy within broader technoliberal narratives that posit sand as risky and dangerous to proffer the figure of the universal human and guarantee its access to technological futures on mars. but sand is, after all, a multitude. might martian sand hold more for us than risk and danger, and more for us than resource? can we “read against the grains” (hartman 2019) of spoc’s visions of sand to craft a version of feminist objectivity that is situated in (and against) its devaluation? put another way, following haraway (1988), can we read at the technical limits of our visual systems to learn to see what escapes spoc’s computational visions of sand as a practice of crafting feminist objectivity and anti-colonial science? to this end, i observe that while spoc appears to guarantee the reproduction (and perfection) of the autonomous colonial laboratory and its racial order of things, reading against the grain at the limits of its visual systems reminds us that spoc is a predictive algorithm, which means that although it predicts the presence of sand more or less accurately, it is unable to do so perfectly, and there is always a margin of error (ono 2018). this means there is always a percentage of sand that escapes the capture of spoc’s computational vision—a space of uncertainty that persists within and against the effort to engineer more perfect, more intelligent, and more expansive scientific vision. there is important precedent in ethnic studies and black studies to think with the materiality of sand as a space of uncertainty and absence, to mark the limits of objectivity, in environments that are dominated by colonial control. here i am particularly moved by agard-jones’s (2012) work to learn to see sand both scientifically and speculatively in “what the sands remember” as a mode of anticolonial practice. in this article, agard-jones articulates sand as both a geological original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 12 formation and affective ground, describing the ways in which scientific epistemologies capture sand as a geologic formation but that sand exceeds these frameworks through affective, poetic, and speculative dimensions that are the conditions of its material formation that cannot be recorded. agard-jones writes, “ever in motion, yet connected to particular places, sand both holds geological memories in its elemental structure and calls forth referential memories through its color, feel between the fingers, and quality of grain. today’s sands are yesterday’s mountains, coral reefs, and outcroppings of stone. each grain possesses a geological lineage that links sand to a place and to its history, and each grain also carries a symbolic association that indexes that history as well” (326). for agard-jones, “turning to sand as a metaphor for the repository of memory may help our analyses engage with more fine-grained and ephemeral presences than our usual archives would allow” (340). taking seriously the idea that affective, speculative, and “more fine-grained and ephemeral presences” can escape what our scientific epistemologies and modes of vision would “allow,” i want to dwell in the absences and uncertainty that martian sand always presents for spoc (and for the promise of objectivity) to trace the affective, speculative, and “more fine-grained and ephemeral presences” (340) that may be present but yet unseen, as a mode through which we might craft a version of feminist objectivity that is deeply situated at the limits of our technical systems. to this end, i find the poetic technique of enjambment to be an apt method of seeing sand in this speculative mode of double vision. in poetry, enjambment is “(in verse) the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza”; to stride over, and go beyond (oed 2022). reading spoc’s images of sand through enjambment, what becomes clear is that spoc’s computational visions of sand “see” sand at the level of the surface (literally) but absent what is continued, without pause, beyond what it can record and interpret—specifically, the depth of sand as layered formations that evidence histories of planetary movement and processes, present and yet “unseen.” spoc’s computational visions of sand therefore index an enjambment between the accumulation of sand as data for the engineering of rover autonomy, and the accumulation of sand in another register, as planetary movement, history, and formation. attuning to the movements and processes of sand, we might catch a glimpse of the “liveliness” of sand and (rover forbid) speculate towards its cognitive power or autonomy as a subversive practice of feminist objectivity, perhaps as a move to revivify sand against its devaluation as dangerous and risky in the racial grammar of technoliberalism effected by spoc. this kind of move is perhaps reflected in new materialist efforts to critique anthropocentric frameworks of intelligence, autonomy, and cognition, and move towards more expansive epistemologies that account for the liveliness of nonhuman or more than human, multispecies, ecological, or planetary forms of life, as a kind of ethics or politics of living in our current moment. for example, the accumulation of sand as planetary movements, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 13 histories, and formation is what jane bennett might describe as the “vital capacity” (2010, viii) of martian sand. in this sense, the vital capacity of martian sand becomes evident from the danger and risk it poses to the safety of the rover as sand movements and formations not only, in bennett’s words, “impede or block the will and designs of humans but also…act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (viii). at the same time, n. katherine hayles’s (2017) work to rethink, redescribe, and attribute cognition to nonhuman processes and forms of life as part of a “distributed planetary cognitive ecology” (2017, 3–4) stands out as a counterpoint to any attempt to theorize the cognitive power or autonomy of martian sand. while hayles seeks to recast what counts as cognitive, defining “cognition” expansively through the enactment of choice and interpretation across distributions of human, biological, technical, and material components (rather than through specific forms of consciousness that are unique to human actors), cognition “excludes material processes such as tsunamis, glaciers, sandstorms, etc.” (3) because, hayles argues, such material processes do not possess the capacity to enact interpretation and choice. in hayles’s distributed planetary cognitive ecology, martian sand would be a non-cognitive agent. and yet, if spoc produces the surrogate human effect of technoliberalism through, in part, the devaluation of sand as a racialized other, then as we learn to see in its vision an enjambment between the accumulation of sand as data for the engineering of rover autonomy, and the accumulation of sand as planetary movement, history, and formation, our vision of this enjambment is a call to bring critical race and ethnic studies perspectives to bear on these movements, history, and formation and the production of the surrogate-self relation (atanasoski and vora 2018). consider, for example, that hayles uses the concept of the “unthought” in three ways: to describe a “mode of interacting with the world…that forever eludes the belated grasp of consciousness” (2017, 1–2); as “the terra incognita that beckons beyond our received notions of how consciousness operates” (1–2); and as “the potent force of conceptualizing interactions between human and technical systems that enable us to understand more clearly the political, cultural, and ethical stakes of living in contemporary developed societies” (1–2). but by contrast, in “the position of the unthought,” saidiya hartman and frank wilderson iii (2003) have named the unthought as a speculative mode, which, hartman emphasizes, describes the impossibility of accounting for the positionality of the slave in western epistemologies (185) and therefore signals the need for a racialized account of positionality (hartman and wilderson 2003, 184). attuning to the apparent liveliness of martian sand thus requires that we foreground a racialized account of their positionality in the production of western scientific epistemology. so, while hayles’s (2017) and bennett’s (2010) work adjudicate the cognitive power or vitality of sand in ways that reinforce binary, biocentric, and humanistic terms, i am interested in an alternative project. rather than theorize whether or not martian sand exhibits a version of autonomy as a subversive project against original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 14 the formation of the rover as an autonomous colonial laboratory, i am instead interested in thinking with hartman and wilderson (2003) to mark the very impossibility of the cognitive power, autonomy, or vitality of martian sand within spoc’s epistemology (its techniques of visualization and the dominant scientific and engineering epistemologies that designed them). such a project, i argue, is one way of situating and becoming accountable to the colonizing power of spoc’s visions of martian sand and the racial formation of autonomy that they proffer and inherit, without expanding the terms of autonomy (and its attendant formations of consciousness, choice, agency, and vitality). this project aligns with calls in critical race and ethnic studies approaches to feminist science and technology studies to resist the expansion of artificial intelligence as an arbiter of colonial power by disrupting intelligence as a category and “[pillar] of conscious autonomy” (atanasoski and vora 2018, 196) rather than expand it. as such, i want to learn to see the impossibility of the intelligence, cognition, vitality, or autonomy of martian sand—not argue that sand is (or is not) intelligent, cognitive, or autonomous—because so long as we insist that sand is not intelligent, noncognitive, or not autonomous, we foreclose the potential to become accountable to the racialized conditions of domination under which autonomy, intelligence, and cognition are made legible and reproduced in the first place. learning to see how spoc’s computational visions of sand index an enjambment between the accumulation of sand as data for the engineering of rover autonomy, and the accumulation of sand in another register, as planetary movement, history, and formation that escapes capture, is not a project of expanding what counts as autonomous, intelligent, or cognitive, but rather an effort to disrupt these categories altogether. in other words, if martian sand has a version of what we call agential, vital, or cognitive power, it is outside spoc’s epistemic frame, in the space of uncertainty that always remains beyond the limits of our technical systems. martian sand, therefore, represents a version of what wynter (1990) has theorized as demonic ground, which mckittrick describes as “the space of otherness…terra nullius/the lands of no one” (2006, 123), where there is “always something else besides the dominant cultural logic going on, and that something else constituted another— but also transgressive—ground of understanding…not simply a sociodemographic location but the site both of a form of life and of possible critical intervention” (scott 2000, 164). mckittrick offers an incisive analysis of “demonic” in demonic grounds: black women and the cartographies of struggle: etymologically, demonic is defined as spirits—most likely the devil, demons, or deities—capable of possessing a human being. it is attributed to the human or the object through which the spirit makes itself known, rather than the demon itself, thus identifying unusual, frenzied, fierce, cruel human behaviors. while demons, devils, and deities, and the behavioral energies they pass on to others, are original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 15 unquestionably wrapped up in religious hierarchies and the supernatural, the demonic has also been understood in terms that are less ecclesiastical. in mathematics, physics, and computer science, the demonic connotes a working system that cannot have a determined, or knowable, outcome. the demonic, then, is a non-deterministic schema; it is a process that is hinged on uncertainty and non-linearity because the organizing principle cannot predict the future. this schema, this way of producing or desiring an outcome, calls into question “the always non-arbitrary pre-prescribed” parameters of sequential and classificatory linearity. with this in mind, the demonic invites a slightly different conceptual pathway—while retaining its supernatural etymology—and acts to identify a system (social, geographic, technological) that can only unfold and produce an outcome if uncertainty, or (dis)organization, or something supernaturally demonic, is integral to the methodology. (2006, xxiv) what would it mean, then, for the project of feminist objectivity to name martian sand as a demonic model of cognition that can form a new science of the human, against the reproduction of spoc’s surrogate effect of technoliberalism? enacting a mode of feminist science practice, i am thinking with wynter’s call to move “to a frame of reference which parallels the ‘demonic models’ posited by physicists who seek to conceive of a vantage point outside the space-time orientation of the homuncular observer…a ‘demonic model’ outside the ‘consolidated field’ of our present mode of being/feeling/knowing” (1990, 364). thinking thus outside but in relation to spoc and its formation of an autonomous colonial laboratory, i want to learn to see martian sand as what wynter describes as a “demonic model of cognition” (365) that can erode spoc’s visions of sand that proffer the liberal subject, by moving towards what wynter describes as “a new self-assertion…this time as one which brings together the human and natural sciences in a new projected science of the human” (365). thinking with wynter (1990) and mckittrick (2006), the demonic cognition of martian sand is enjambed in spoc’s computational visions, emerging in the uncertainty and unpredictability that always remains in its calculations, integral to the broader epistemology of dominant science. if “[a] biocentric frame does not take into account stories and storytelling as modes of livingness” (mckittrick 2006, 126), then, read one way, the demonic cognition of martian sand emerges through the stories we tell about it, in our imaginaries of its danger, riskiness, unpredictability, and uncertainty. reading against the biocentric view of sand, my desire to read demonic cognition in the danger of the sand, its space of uncertainty, unpredictability, and in the absented depth of sand as planetary movement and formation, might become a feminist practice of learning to see martian sand as demonic ground through which we can catch a glimpse of the livingness of an anti-colonial consciousness in the sand—a different, if not antithetical, form of consciousness than the subject-effect of the rover as it original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 16 threatens to erode what wynter (2003) would describe as its overrepresentation and futurity. while this account of the liveliness of martian sand might resonate with bennett’s theory, reading liveliness as an anti-colonial consciousness is markedly different from new materialist projects to categorize the liveliness of materialities like sand because this form of consciousness is a project to unsettle the racial category of the human and its others, rather than expand on its terms. and yet, if subjectivity and objectivity are co-constituted in scientific visions, then spoc’s visions of sand produce both the subject-effect of the autonomous rover and its racialized other—here figured through the sand as terra nullius, indexing sand as demonic ground. so, read another way, in this enjambment we catch a glimpse of the competing imaginaries of the timescales of the engineering of human autonomy on the one hand, and the formations of planetary time on the other. spoc indexes the speed of data capture, extraction, and accumulation, which is enjambed in its visions with the speed of the accumulation of sand in another register in planetary time. we might consider planetary time as a version of geological time, a timescale that joseph masco (2021) has so usefully marked as an urgently needed mode of planetary stewardship. but planetary time also signals the timescales of the longue durée of us settler colonialism and the racial formations of the autonomous subject. here, i am thinking with martian sand as a liminal space (between speculation and material, the poetic and scientific, surface and depth, grain and aggregate, static and movement, the human and the other) resonant with tiffany lethabo king’s brilliant work in the black shoals to mark the space of the shoal as a demonic ground (2019, 3), in order to learn to see martian sand as a form of life outside of biocentric frames and human conceptualizations of space-time. to this end, i am reminded of m murphy’s theory of distributed reproduction as “the extensive sense of existing over time that stretches beyond bodies to include the uneven relations and infrastructures that shape what forms of life are supported to persist, thrive, and alter, and what forms of life are destroyed, injured, and constrained” (2017, 141–43). perhaps riffing on hayles’s use of “distributed” in her theorization of a distributed planetary cognitive ecology, murphy’s distributed reproduction thus prompts us towards a politics of living in our current planetary moment that is accountable to the ways in which the demand for engineering autonomy is “a fraught process of becoming-in-time that has been constituted through violence, uneven accumulations and abandonments, and not merely an affirmation of life” (143). learning to see the demonic cognition of martian sand therefore brings us towards a feminist objectivity crafted through an account of the racialized positionalities that form the situated, partial perspectives of the autonomous colonial laboratory. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 17 conclusion in my effort to articulate feminist science of mars, or a situated knowledge of nasa’s efforts to engineer increasingly autonomous rovers using autonomous terrain classification algorithms and computer vision, i have tried to read at the technical limits of our visual systems to learn to see the subversive potential of what escapes the scientific gaze, as a practice of feminist objectivity and anticolonial science. to this end, as nasa’s rovers enact new forms of scientific objectivity as autonomous colonial laboratories, i have tried to craft a version of feminist objectivity that emerges from a racialized account of their positionality— that is, to account for the emergence of the figure of the autonomous colonial laboratory in terms of its settler-colonial conditions of production that proffer its racialized subject-effect within technoliberalism. this can, however, often prove to be dissonant work, as mars is a site that often appears to be disconnected from terrestrial histories of racial domination. while i have theorized this disconnect as evidence of technoliberalism, this is not to discount the dissonance that emerges in the work to trace how the logics and imaginaries of colonialism are, as i have argued, reproduced and redescribed at new scales of planetary difference, often changing form as they are updated by new technologies such as spoc. rather than assume the portability of any frameworks, histories, or concepts, i want to dwell in the dissonance as productive frictions that point to how difference emerges across scale. put another way, my goal is not to compare us settler colonialism on mars to us settler colonialism on earth—but rather, to begin to trace its expansion across new scales of planetary difference in ways that ask after, and insist upon, the ways in which us visions of mars inherit the histories of us settler colonialism that have made them possible. in so doing, i hope that we can come to understand mars as a racial formation that has emerged in relation to terrestrial histories of racial difference, while pointing towards new modes of critique and coalition. while i have learned to see the demonic ground of martian sand as a practice of feminist objectivity, i have here only begun to attune to the potential of martian sand (and other planetary formations) as demonic models of cognition that might form not only what wynter has described as a new science of the human, but a feminist science of mars as well that can situate, both materially and speculatively, scientific research on mars within the conditions of colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism through which it has emerged. my goal in this work is, therefore, to invite further theorizations of intersectional feminist sciences of mars that are premised on accountability to the racial histories of science, technology, and the human, as a practice of learning to become accountable for what we learn how to see on the expanding frontier of american empire. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) maya cruz, 2025 18 references agard-jones, vanessa. 2012. “what the sands remember.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 18 (2–3): 325–46. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1472917. ai4mars: teaching mars rovers how to classify martian terrain. “about.” n.d. accessed march 9, 2025. https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/hiroono/ai4mars/about/research. anderson, warwick. 2009. “from subjugated knowledge to conjugated subjects: science and globalisation, or postcolonial studies of science?” postcolonial studies 12 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http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949874. author bio maya cruz is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator of intersectional feminist science and technology studies. she received her phd from the university of california, davis, and is assistant professor of comparative studies at the ohio state university. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949874 (machine) learning how to see like a rover: feminist objectivity and the demonic ground of martian sand abstract keywords can there be a feminist science of mars? feminist objectivity and the emerging figure of the autonomous colonial laboratory enjambment and the demonic ground of sand conclusion references author bio six ways of looking at fractal mechanics shildrick, margrit. 2024. “the temporalities and spatialities of death, dying, and heart donation.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–16. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © margrit shildrick, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license the temporalities and spatialities of death, dying, and heart donation margrit shildrick stockholm university margrit.shildrick@gender.su.se abstract contemporary biomedical technologies surrounding deceased organ transplantation raise urgent issues regarding the temporalities of the living and the dead, the disturbance of distinctions between self and other, and the question of absence and presence. there is no simple and stable futurity, but rather a host of ontological, epistemological, and ethical issues that trouble both organ recipients and donor proxies. my claim is that heart transplantation in particular marks a fluid assemblage and intertwining of self and other at both the biological and ontological level, where personal identities and the conventional limits of life and death are deeply problematized. nonetheless, those disturbing and inescapable challenges to conventional binaries are rarely explored within the authorized narrative of the clinic. in place of the techno-utopian promise to recipients of a restoration to the self, a reconfigured imaginary of heart transplantation might signal an entry into incorporeal co-existence in which the personal event of the donor’s death marked the revitalization of life in other forms. welcoming the enmeshment of living and dying does not diminish present suffering or grief but suggests another dimension where the breakdown of binaries no longer disturbs, and the concept of life escapes its temporal constraints to point towards the horizon of a flourishing future. keywords heart transplants, temporality, death, life, donation, absence, presence mailto:margrit.shildrick@gender.su.se special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 2 in the contemporary era in which biomedical technologies ensure a high degree of success in extending life, not least through organ transplantation, the changed temporalities of the living and the dead, and the disturbance of many other related binaries, such as self and other, absence and presence, are often overlooked. the issue is that rather than simply assuring a future, the clinical success of a transplant intervention—which is uncertain but very likely—raises a plethora of ontological, epistemological, and ethical issues for both recipients and donors (and their proxies). my focus in this article will be on heart transplantation as the site both of a radical and irreducible intertwining of self and other, and one where the conventional limits of life and death are deeply problematized. other forms of transplantation may entail some similar complexities, but it is primarily in the field of heart donation where the donor is always deceased that the most disturbing questions become inescapable. while we understand that the newly deceased person can still contribute as the source of biological material though a range of transplantation technologies, involving on average seven or eight discrete organs from each donor, what is rarely explored is the assumption of an absolute break between the living and the dead. nonetheless that apparently self-evident binary distinction between the presence of living and the absence of death which underlies a long-standing understanding of human existence has become increasingly insecure as biotechnologies seek to intervene into processes that once seemed natural and inevitable. at both the beginning and end of the conventional life span, the moment at which life can be said to exist is highly contestable. during the many years of my involvement with two major canadian research projects into the experience of heart transplantation our interdisciplinary team completed multiple video interviews with both recipients and donor proxies.1 on each side, the timing of death was of crucial importance, albeit in very different registers. for recipients faced with their own imminently approaching demise— and that is the main criteria for inclusion on the waiting list—the death of the donor is a necessary facet of their own survival and it produces, not surprisingly, a complex mix of relief, gratitude, obligation, and guilt. initially, many who have received a transplant claim not to think about the provenance of the organ, but in interview the overwhelming majority (up to 80%) expressed significant disturbance about their relation to the donor in which the other—the deceased donor—seems to persist within the self as what might be called a spectral presence. recipients’ accounts of living on as a direct result of deceased donation brings life and death into an unwelcome focus that undermines the public interest in a simple—albeit heroic narrative—of giving or receiving the so-called gift of life in which both sides of the transaction can be celebrated for their courage. as is well known, there is a persistent shortfall in available organs for transplantation with endless public campaigns to highlight what is taken to be the unambivalent good of donation, as well as a growing number of jurisdictions—including austria, france, columbia, norway, italy, singapore, nova scotia, spain and the uk—in special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 3 which post-death individuals are classed as having given presumed consent unless they otherwise have registered their desire not to donate. the bioethics of such moves are much discussed (costa-font et al. 2021; prabhu 2019) but fail to address many of the issues around life and death, self and other, that i go on to outline. the question of how to ethically arrive at a sustainable rate of donation should not be allowed to obscure the deeper philosophical ambiguities. i want primarily to explore the side of donation where the decision to offer the heart and other organs usually falls on a family member who must act while the donor is apparently still living, albeit close to death. with the exception of austria, medical staff will usually defer, even in cases of presumed consent, to the wishes of the intending proxies, though for many faced with the urgent request for consent there may be little prior knowledge of what the prospective donor might have wanted. once a decision to donate has been made, nothing can progress until a medical determination of brain death has been made. even then, respiration may be continued until the heart and other organs can be removed and transported on ice within a limited time period to the site of implantation into another—the recipient—who is equally marked as dying. unsurprisingly, proxies may experience some unresolved uncertainties and incongruities that render the process highly emotionally disturbing, although the attendant biomedical professionals are likely to display no doubt about the moment of “natural” death, after which point any life support can be terminated in line with clinical and logistical needs. many donor proxies feel acute distress and will frequently question if the body before them is really dead. in other words, has that person’s embodied self truly reached an end? although many donor families do overcome their initial hesitation, there are sometimes some disturbing and highly visible anomalies that trouble the distinction between life and death. for example, even after the machinery that prolongs respiration and heartbeat has been disconnected, a putatively braindead body may show strong signs of animation, including at its most disturbing, the so-called lazarus effect, explained by biomedicine as merely a spinal arc reflex (taskin 2017). as a biophilosopher, i wonder why such phenomena, which though rare in “death” are an intrinsic part of everyday living, are now dismissed as having no significance. indeed, without such reflexes we would suffer all sorts of unnecessary trauma to our embodied selves. but in western biomedicine, it is brain function that reigns supreme. my hesitancy become clearer in the historical context of what constitutes death for a prospective heart donor. until the 1960s death was defined as the failure of the cardio-respiratory system such that the permanent cessation of breathing was the unquestioned mark of death. with the development of the artificial ventilator, however, a dying patient could be stabilized in order for the heart to continue beating for an extended period. this technological intervention clearly created a moral complication for organ transplantation in that it was no longer certain when, or if, the potential donor special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 4 was actually deceased. partly in response, the definition of death was switched in 1967 to brain death, which appears to offer a more secure assessment even when the body still shows a range of vital signs. in other words, death was reclassed as synonymous with lack of brain function—although recently a more sophisticated standard of cardiac death, now called circulatory death, has been reintroduced.2 in 2008 [published 2011] a refined definition put out by the president’s council on bioethics in the us clarified that the destruction of the brain constituted death because it indicated that the patient could no longer engage in “commerce with the surrounding world.” what that new justification actually intends is far from self-evident, and many families who support those on life support machines or in persistent vegetative states for extensive periods would claim that there are forms of rudimentary communication.3 the authorized discourse of biomedicine is not known for its embrace of indeterminacy, however, and such families are habitually characterized as mistaken at best or hopelessly deluded (see shah, kasper, and miller 2015). perhaps what is at issue is a serious mismatch between the timelines of clinical practices such as transplant surgery, which is strictly linear, teleological, and highly time sensitive, and the temporality of personal embodiment. in any event, the status of deceased donors—any “dead” body really—is problematic in that they are both enduringly material and the source of further of life, and non-living, a spectral presence that haunts the sociocultural imaginary. persistent narratives of the donor living on after transplantation are a familiar staple of western literature and film even though both donor proxies and recipients may be cautious in aligning their own lived experiences with what many think of as merely dramatic license. the ontological discomfort that accepting patient accounts would entail is simply displaced to the realm of fantasy where the boundaries between the living and the dead, and between self and other are temporally and spatially fluid. it is in the donor situation that the perception of passing time is at its most intrusive and discordant. while clinicians must aim for a speedy procedure, bereaved and possibly distraught relations are given little time for reflection on their own misgivings and anxieties. the material i refer to is taken from the gift of life analysis (gola) qualitative study of families who had consented to the donation of organs after a declaration of the donor’s brain death. none overtly queried the clinical terminology that categorizes brain death as distinct from the cessation of cardiac activity, but the absence of a visible moment in which life had ended often proved extremely challenging for donor families. “i think he died in front of me,” said one mother, only to be told that her son had already been dead for several hours, while a grieving father remained persistently unconvinced: “his death certificate says april 30th, i believe it was may 8th.” for many, the sight of warm, breathing, and at least minimally reactive body receiving ongoing “care” made the concept of brain death hard to accept. as kathleen fenton bluntly puts it, “society as a whole is not completely comfortable with the idea that a warm, special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 5 pink patient is actually a corpse” (clarke, fenton, and sade 2016, 2056). it is the removal of the respirator and the subsequent arrest of the heartbeat that finally triggers acceptance, though an evolving technique—called heart beating transfer—now averts the need to stop the heartbeat at all. ventilation is maintained until the organ can be removed and placed in a machine that perfuses it during transportation such that the graft continues beating throughout. in consequence, cardiac death per se never occurs. for clinical staff the “now” of the life/death binary is what makes the whole procedure ethically acceptable, and i wonder if the new technique will disrupt such certitude once it becomes more widely used. for donor families, the anguish of uncertainty is already apparent. several of the twenty-two donor proxies interviewed for the gola project expressed little discomfort in giving their consent, and for a small number it was a seamless transaction, both ethically and practically, that raised few, if any, ontological anxieties and only limited speculation on the meaning and temporality of death. one robust eighty-year-old woman who donated her husband’s organs told the interviewers, “i looked down at him and said that’s not my husband…the body is just cells…they’re not the person.” many welcomed the opportunity to donate, like the parents of a deceased daughter, who remarked, “we were a little bit on pins and needles to make sure it happened.” for the majority of respondents, however, the necessarily time-sensitive process of being asked for consent was experienced as highly disturbing and they were compelled to suppress their misgivings. whatever the actual sensitivity of the attending healthcare staff, the experience of the time leading up the removal of organs was hard to navigate. as one woman put it, “it was a nightmare. i know they try do it quickly…but it was such an emotional turmoil those three days.” other equally distressed recollections, which i have recorded elsewhere (shildrick 2020), include two sisters who likened the request for donation to the approach of “a pushy used car salesman,” while a bereaved husband said it was “like seagulls circling.” the sisters had the disturbing experience of seeing their “dead” brother’s legs still twitching and a tear falling from his eye, and six years on, there was still unresolved conflict within the family about the decision to donate. another mother expressed the frustration and anger she had felt at the time of her daughter’s dying: “she looked like she was just asleep,” so “i just wanted to punch them in the face…that’s your child being carved up to be doled out to other people.” the profound doubts around the issue of consent are not easily settled and several parents spoke of invasive dreams. as one interviewee put it, “i was having nightmares…when they were removing his heart and eyes, he was screaming”; while another mother had an intensely visceral reaction: “i felt someone was surgically removing my heart.” clearly the necessary provision of life support technology that maintains the functionality of organs during the quasi-death period creates an epistemological disturbance for those who are asked for consent that does not end once the transplantations have been completed. special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 6 the scenario is further complicated in that the setting and expectations around the procedures are almost entirely situated with a western value system that has long downgraded the importance of embodiment and the significance of affect and emotion in favor of rational action. in a more philosophical vein, what derrida (1973, 1974, 1981) called the metaphysics of presence shapes and pervades the discourse of death, dying, and transplantation to the exclusion of that which is contingent and complicated. absence is ignored or at least marginalized, giving a position of priority to temporal immediacy and the nowness of presence. derrida of course wants to deconstruct the putative binary such that the concept absent presence—the trace of all those things that are suppressed—becomes the route to a very different understanding of what should/must be taken into account. that trace reappears in his later work in the guise of hauntology (derrida 1994), which proposes that the here-and-now is not simply a relatively stable interval between time past and present. organ transplantation is a fertile ground in which to witness deconstruction at work. it is not simply futurity that is an unstable horizon—as the editors of this special section recognize—but the whole span of temporality and spatiality as well. the empirical component of the gola research revealed the depths of supposedly non-rational responses but had limited exposure to alternative systems of knowledge production, either philosophical or religious. even christian spirituality—which might have offered a very different take on the temporality of life and death—was not a prominent feature. no major religions directly outlaw heart transplantation, though many survey responders remain under the impression that their religion opposes transplanting organs from brain-dead donors (alhabeeb et al. 2017). more significantly, as summarised by abdeldayem et al (2016) there may be widespread doubts about the finality of brain death—expressed in some japanese, chinese, and jewish cultures—that restrict take-up. similarly, the question of bodily integrity after death as a necessary condition for resurrection is a factor across islamic, hindu and confucian cultures, though such systems of thought are rarely universal (oliver, ahmed, and woywodt 2012). there appears, as well, to be very little research exploring indigenous attitudes to and beliefs about transplantation, although the work of rhonda shaw and robert webb (2021) with māori communities offers new insights. as shaw and webb warn, there is always a danger of generalizing, but their research appears to show that although living and preferably related donation, as is often the case with kidneys, is relatively well established, heart transplantation—which necessarily involves donation from a deceased stranger—raised complex problems of acceptance, despite a high prevalence of life-ending cardiac disease in māori peoples. the reason, as shaw and webb suggest, may lie in the holistic māori worldview in which the body is never that of a detached individual but rather a vital link in an ancestral chain that ensures the genealogical continuity between the past, present, and future (see rameka 2016). the donor proxies and recipients interviewed for our team’s special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 7 research were, with few exceptions, western-identified, but a handful illustrate the importance of taking account of ethnic differences. one indian muslim heart recipient, for example, insisted with a strong degree of pride, “the heart belongs to that person, so i’m not alive...he’s alive in the shape of me,”4 demonstrating how other cultures may generate very different responses and have other psychosocial imaginaries in play. on the donor side, the interviews with the parents and sister of a young first nations man who had died in an accident was very telling. the indigenous father strongly believed that both the deceased donor and the organ recipients would be enabled to live on through donation but was initially very conflicted. in the dayslong gap between the declaration of brain death and donation, the father sought out spiritual guidance from the natural environment, such as coming across a seemingly dead but still sprouting tree that to him signaled the entanglement of life and death and convinced him to give consent. after donation, both parents saw their son’s continued being-in-the-world as a matter of everything being interconnected and sustained over time without regard for the conventional teleology of life and death. for them, the donor is both a part of the recipient but also everywhere, outside any specific temporal location. though in mourning, the father and sister both continue to feel a powerful sense of the young man’s persistent presence in their own lives and believe he has communicated through a spirit guide. the indigenous imaginary that underlies that reaction is clearly very different from the western mainstream and precedes the kind of interconnections that deleuze and guattari (1987) call assemblages.5 in deleuzian terms (1990), dying is both a final threshold within a conventional time span and an atemporal process that goes beyond the putative binary of life and death. in other words, personal mortality does not mark the cessation of being.6 no such reflection on the meaning of death is apparent in the literature put out by canadian organ procurement organizations (opos)), which consign and transport viable organs. instead, their highly upbeat publicity aims at an unproblematized promotion of increased donation in which donors—and their proxies—are driven by altruism. the actuality of death or dying is assiduously covered over in favor of what alison kafer (2013) calls a “curative imaginary” in which recipients at least have a restored and buoyant future and donors have made a positive contribution to the good. even though in the case of heart transplantation the donor is always deceased, that troubling aspect is absent from the literature which stresses only giving and receiving the so-called gift of life. all this is very comforting for donor proxies reflecting on their decisions to consent to the donation of vital organs. as intended, many agree that giving the gift of life is an act of altruism expecting no reward—beyond perhaps a therapeutic lift—and that organ donors and their proxies are inherently beneficent. as one parent put it, “he helped a lot of people. it gave a reason”; while a putatively unemotional couple declared, “whatever could be used, should be used,” adding, “we were very much in favor of the special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 8 scientific research.” not surprisingly, many other donor proxies are invested in the hope that donation somehow prolongs the essence of their loved one, while also voicing a deep concern for recipients. should the recipient—and it is usually the heart transplant that is the focus—fail to flourish, a significant number indicated that they would be retraumatized. but as the gola interviews illustrated, it is rarely a simple transaction. it is noticeable that the majority of proxies—and many recipients too—continue to refer to transplanted organs as belonging to the deceased donor, and as having an agency independent of the recipient. as one respondent very characteristically expressed it, “even in someone else’s body, d., you’re doing a better job than people’s own kidneys.” despite the reductive language of the transplant clinic which might serve to sidestep ambiguity, there is an insoluble tension between the emotionless discourse of spare-part surgery and the multiple affective and symbolic considerations at stake. the ubiquitous concept of the gift of life is a highly complex one that mobilizes many other important connotations, not least the belief of many donor proxies that not only do individual organs sustain life in another but that the deceased donor somehow transcends death. indeed, the issue of living on is central to donor family thinking, and for those grieving it provides a rhetoric of hope to offset their more negative feelings. though opos explicitly encourage the discourse that the gift of life has therapeutic effects that might mitigate loss, their gesture towards the notion of living on is supposed to be purely symbolic, or references only the recovering recipient. in other words, a dying and then deceased donor is superseded in a stable temporal sequence by the putatively restored life proper to the recipient alone. it is as though organ transplantation were simply, or at least primarily, a biological practice which should arouse no ontological considerations. nonetheless, the keenly held beliefs of both donor proxies and of recipients indicate something else. at the entrance to the ambulatory transplant clinic at the canadian hospital at the center of the research, what is called the donor wall records a plethora of messages, such as “mike: his gift of organ donation ensures he lives on through the lives of others”; “joey’s love of sharing motivated his family to donate his organs. the love joey had within him surely lives on in his recipients”; “in a way [sam] is still living while healing other lives.” where for the clinical professionals, the success or failure of the procedure is a matter of objective biomedical measures, the longer-term emotional impact of the decision on the lives of donor families and recipients alike tells another story in which the clear distinction between life and death and between absence and presence is lost. in some magical sense, the necessary death of the donor is annulled and they are not so much incorporated into an other as occupies a new location where something of the self can endure. as the daughter of a donor father put it, ‘‘he lives on, he got to share himself with strangers,” and another previously sceptical proxy reflected, “maybe there really is more to this life after special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 9 death than we know.” it is difficult to escape the conclusion that living on refers to the survival of both the recipient and the donor. there are very two distinct ways in which the felt experiences of both donor proxies and recipients speak to something ignored by the authorized narrative. first, and staying with the symbolic side of things, marcel mauss—the preeminent figure in gift theory— claims that any donation exceeds its mere materiality to figure something intrinsic to the giver. as he writes, “one gives away what is in reality a part of one's nature and substance” ([1954] 1990, 10), and that, for a recipient, “to accept something from somebody is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul” (12). coinciding with the instinctive feelings expressed by proxies, the work of mauss suggests that some essence of the gift giver does live on in another, as is sometimes explicitly recognized by the recipients of donor organs. except in popular culture, the more likely western intuition, however, is that the uncanny yet persistent presence of the other is felt through a perplexing awareness that one’s own embodied being is no longer singular but has become hybrid. such impressions are more overtly reflected in the cultural imaginary, where depictions of transplantation are shot through with disturbing narratives that communicate an underlying anxiety that the essence of the deceased donor might overwhelm the identity of the recipient, or that they might resurface as a spectral presence. beyond any changes felt by an embodied self in recovery, there is a distinct sense of a self whose experiences are haunted by irregular traces of an other. for derrida (1994), the coming of the other is in any case inevitable and it constitutes a hauntological relationship between absence and presence, life and death, as well as self and other. personal identity, temporal and spatial certainties are all put in question, and those just are the dominant issues that frame the existential register of organ transplantation and the concept of “living on” after deceased donation. whatever we think of the experiential persistence of the donor’s essence, there is in fact some biological explanation in that the donor’s different dna is never expunged from the recipient’s body. recent research has definitively shown, after much reluctance on the part of the medical establishment,7 that cellular chimerism occurs not just at the site of the specific transplant but throughout the body (starzl et al. 1992). what is called microchimerism is a form of hybridity in which the cells of self and other co-exist in a singular body, and in transplantation research it is now recognized that donor cells with their unique dna circulate throughout the body via the peripheral blood supply. the presence of microchimeric cells is usually very low—except at the site of the transplant organ itself—but those cells can accumulate in other organs constituting a form of macrochimerism. in either case, the donor dna colonizes the recipient body, while simultaneously the recipient’s own dna infiltrates the donor organ at low levels. in effect, donor and recipient are entwined in a chimerical relationship, although there is ongoing debate as to whether this is pathological or beneficial, special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 10 or more likely both according to context. microchimerism is as yet a little-known aspect of transplantation—medical specialities like other knowledge systems tend to work in isolation where cardiologists may be unaware of the work of immunologists, for example—and it is likely that the majority of laypeople involved have little awareness of its operation. the information still given to recipients if they ask is that donor dna will stay in situ in whatever organ is transplanted, and just a small number of interview respondents on either side of the transplant mentioned dna. one bereaved mother was really interested to understand what happens to the two sets of dna and hoped that the recipients would write to her: “it’s his dna and it’s still kicking around somewhere, so yes i’d like to hear from them.” despite the minimal level of relevant knowledge at present, it seems probable that just as public understanding has very swiftly embraced the existence of the human microbiome—although not yet its ontological implications—so too microchimerism may give weight to donor and recipient feelings that at present are dismissed as merely imaginary and even somewhat discreditable. my position here is not that bioscience is the final arbiter of the truth of embodiment, but that the understanding of intracorporeality that microchimerism insists on may lead to a greater acceptance of the curious relationality of those involved in transplantation.8 what is already clear is that at the cellular level the boundary between self and other—the recipient and donor— is displaced. and if we accept the phenomenological notion that changes to the body instigate changes to the self, then something profound is underway. as the gola research found, on the level of who am i?, recipients do frequently struggle to negotiate their newly hybrid identities, while in substantive terms, even taking ownership of the transplanted body part—naming it my heart—is a point of anxiety. in material terms, the genetically different heart of the deceased donor is never simply assimilated. it is simultaneously the ground of the recipient’s survival and the precise focus of an immunological onslaught that, if the process of rejection succeeds, kills both the grafted organ and the host. in survival, the relation is transformative: the rigid boundaries that hold apart self and other, living and dead, and past and present, give way to an intracorporeal and atemporal self. the otherness of the donor organ is both constitutive of the self and remains excessive. any organ transplantation must always arouse the absent presence of the other, but it is invariably the heart that is the focus of attention. most heart donors are the source of multiple transplantable organs and tissues, but no other organ had the resonance, nor the power to disturb the normative teleology of life and death, that respondents attribute to the heart. one bereaved mother expressed something of this disordering of temporality, saying, “you don’t expect your children to go before you” and “you give them life and then you make decision to take his life.” yet this deeply painful thought was offset by the possibility of continuity. asked special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 11 what she would say to the recipient, she replied, “take care of the heart and it will look after you for the rest of your life,” adding, “after all. i created that heart…(i hope) he [the recipient] is a good man.” such anxiety, as here, about the heart going to the right kind of person is fairly common, although some proxies felt that the agency of a “kind” heart would prevail. as one generous mother put it, “if a mean bastard got p’s heart…his [the recipient’s] whole attitude to life would change.” if microchimerism is indeed a highly probable consequence of transplantation, then the intuitive feelings of donor proxies and recipients alike — what i am calling a hauntological state—would have a surprising biological endorsement, though by no means full explanation. once a donor’s dna and its specific immunological codings are embodied by the recipient but remain unassimilated, then self-identity can no longer be certain and the trope of living on in another, beyond any conventional time frame, begins to make material sense. putting the medical implications aside, the significance of microchimerism has become an arena of deep fascination for biophilosophy,9 in large part for the insight it offers into the unstable relationships between past, present, and future, self and other, and life and death (pradeu 2012; oele 2017; shildrick 2015, 2022). given that the notion of death in particular evokes the uncanny—what is in excess of rationalist thought—then we surely need to rethink its meaning in relation to deceased donors and their recipients. in western thought, anxiety around dying is ubiquitous both for the imminent termination of the singular self, and paradoxically because the dead have haunted the imaginaries of every age and culture. the belief in an earthly end, albeit unwelcome, is well entrenched; but intimations of the persistence of the dead have the capacity to evoke the negative spectre of parasitism, of one living on at the expense of the other, but they also speak to the symbiosis of assemblage and sustainability. as deleuze notes, “death has an extreme and definite relation to me and my body and is grounded in me, but it also has no relation to me at all—it is incorporeal and infinitive, impersonal, grounded only in itself” (1990, 151). none of the pith or gola interviewees were academic philosophers, but the elderly woman who had readily consented to the redistribution of her husband’s organs intuitively echoed—despite her cool rationalism—that deleuzian insight when she reflected on her husband's death: “it’s no longer life, it’s potential.” the task is to reconceive human life not as a finite essence, actualized in the limited time span of one generation, but rather as temporally and spatially expansive, a dynamic element in the cycle of becoming that comprises all types of living beings, human and otherwise. although each personal human life is organized and transformed by discrete episodes such as birth, pregnancy, and death, in another register, those same modes exceed any singular mode of embodiment and gesture towards intangible and atemporal forces. in rejecting the sovereign subject of modernity, deleuzian thought offers instead a tangible and processual special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 12 state of becoming in which any individuality is provisional and always at the point of unraveling its own boundaries (deleuze and guattari 1987). one way to allaying the pain and anxiety felt by both donor proxies and recipients might be for the authoritative discourse of biomedicine to give up its investment in mastery, chrononormativity, and the techno-utopian promise of restoration to the self. if what lies beyond the wound of the sutured body were openly explored, mortality itself would not be an end point. such a move entails that first, success should not be measured in terms of a recovered self alone, but as much through the entry into incorporeal co-existence and forms of assemblage; and second, the personal event of dying should be seen as the revitalization of life in other forms. the ontological, epistemological, and ethical challenges demand no less than a new imaginary that may better reflect multifarious modes of life. welcoming the enmeshment of living and dying does not diminish present suffering or grief, but it opens onto another dimension where a fluctuating sense of absence and presence is no longer disturbing, and where life escapes its temporal constraints to point towards the horizon of a flourishing future. notes 1 the process of incorporating a transplanted heart (pith) initiated in 2008 focused on recipients; while from 2011 the gift of life: a critical visual exploration of donor families’ responses to organ donation (gola) switched attention to donor proxies (reb # 07-0822-be). 2 for biomedical professionals, donation after circulatory death (dcd) heart transplant has many pragmatic benefits including expansion of the donor pool, decreased waitlist times, and increased “total organ yield per donor” (lee et al. 2022; truby et al. 2022). 3 see burkle et al. (2014) for an analysis centered on the case of jahi mcmath, whose parents refused in 2013 to accept the discontinuation of medical care following a declaration of brain death. in 2018 the child’s death was finally agreed by all after a failed operation to treat an intestinal problem. 4 post-transplant cohort, pith project reb file # 07-0822-be. it is important to note that all participants in the study were regarded as clinically and psychologically stable. 5 it should be noted that in her own work on that imaginary, dolleen tisawii’ashii manning (2014) is highly critical of what she sees as the deleuzian appropriation of indigenous beliefs. she understands the encounter as “a meeting of radically different systems of thought, one of which has attempted to assimilate and eradicate the others, while at the same time appropriating and romanticizing them” (2014, 187). in a different indigenous context, however, māori scholar special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 13 rangimarie mahuika offers a somewhat dissimilar approach: “(k)aupapa māori does not make claims to universal truth or to superiority over other existing paradigms. arguably the ultimate goal…like much of the scholarship from indigenous and minority peoples, is to challenge and disrupt the commonly accepted forms of research in order to privilege our own unique approaches and perspectives, our own ways of knowing and being” (2008, 4). while acknowledging that many deleuzian notions owe much to widely overlooked or suppressed pre-existing systems of thought, it seems productive to draw and reflect on the parallels. 6 after initially citing derrida, i invoke deleuze here because despite their differing ontological approaches, both offer an important reconceptualization of time and presence in particular. derrida (2001) himself spoke—with some obvious license— in his eulogy for deleuze of the “near total affinity” between their philosophical outlooks. 7 see aryn martin (2010) for an account of that reluctance in the similar context of maternal-fetal microchimerism. 8 for fuller account of the implications of microchimerism in the context of transplantation see shildrick (2022). 9 biophilosophy should be distinguished from the more conventional philosophy of biology insofar as it does not engage with biology from a position of external neutrality but instead explores how all life is in a state of dynamic transformation that generates new ways of thinking. biophilosophy is about the non-hierarchical entanglement of two previously distinct disciplines. references abdeldayem, hesham., ahmed, farag el-kased., ahmed, elshaarawy et al. 2016. "religious concepts in organ transplantation." in frontiers in transplantology, edited by hesham abdeldayem, ahmed f. el-kased and ahmed el-shaarawy, 3 -22. london: intechopen. http//dx.doi.org/10.5772/62401. alhabeeb, waleed., fakhr, alayoubi., adel, tash., leenah, alahmari, and khalid f. alhabib. 2017. “attitude of the saudi community towards heart donation, transplantation, and artificial hearts.” saudi medical journal 38 (7): 742–47. https://doi.org/10.15537/smj.2017.7.18178. burkle, christopher m., richard r. sharp, and eelco f. wijdicks. 2014. “why brain death is considered death and why there should be no confusion.” neurology 83 (16): 1464–49. https://doi.org/10.1212/wnl.0000000000000883. costa-font, joan., rudisill, caroline, and maximilian salcher-konrad. 2021. “‘relative consent’ or ‘presumed consent’? organ donation attitudes and behaviour.” http://http/dx.doi.org/10.5772/62401 https://doi.org/10.15537/smj.2017.7.18178 https://doi.org/10.1212/wnl.0000000000000883 special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 14 european journal of health economics, no. 22, 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198020-01214-8. clarke, michelle j., kathleen n. fenton, and robert m. sade. 2016. “does declaration of brain death serve the best interest of organ donors rather than merely facilitating organ transplantation?” annals of thoracic surgery 101 (6): 2053–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.athoracsur.2016.01.100. deleuze, gilles. 1990. the logic of sense. translated by mark lester with charles stivale. london: athlone press. deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari. 1987. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. translated by brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. derrida, jacques. 1973. speech and phenomena. evanston: northwestern university press. derrida, jacques. 1974. of grammatology. translated by gayatri spivak. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. derrida, jacques. 1981 “positions: interview with jean-louis houdebine and guy scarpetta. in positions, translated by alan bass. chicago: university of chicago press. derrida, jacques. 1994. spectres of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. translated by peggy kamuf. london: routledge. derrida, jacques. 2001. “gilles deleuze (1925–95): i’m going to have to wander all alone.” in the work of mourning, edited by pascale-anne brault and michael naas, 189–96. chicago: university of chicago press. kafer, alison. 2013. feminist, queer, crip. bloomington: indiana university press. lee, candice., catherine tsai, eric adler, and victor pretorius. 2022. “emerging frontier in heart transplantation: donation after circulatory death.” journal of american college of cardiology. accessed may 12, 2024. https://www.acc.org/latestin-cardiology/articles/2022/11/21/13/31/emerging-frontier-in-heart-transplantation. mahuika, rangimarie. 2008. “kaupapa māori theory is critical and anti-colonial.” mai review 3, art. 4, 1–16. https://www.journal.mai.ac.nz/system/files/maireview/153877-1-pb.pdf. manning, dolleen tisawii’ashii. 2014. “the becoming-human of buffalo bill.” in intensities and lines of flight: deleuze/guattari and the arts, edited by antonio calcagno, jim vernon, and steve g. lofts, 187–206. london: rowman and littlefield. martin, aryn. 2010. “microchimerism in the mother(land): blurring the borders of body and nation.” body & society 16 (3): 23–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x10373404. mauss, marcel. (1954) 1990. the gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. foreword by mary douglas. london: routledge. oele, marjolein. 2017. “openness and protection: a philosophical analysis of the placenta’s mediatory role in co-constituting emergent intertwined identities.” configurations 25 (3): 347–71. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2017.0023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-020-01214-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10198-020-01214-8 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.athoracsur.2016.01.100 https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2022/11/21/13/31/emerging-frontier-in-heart-transplantation https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2022/11/21/13/31/emerging-frontier-in-heart-transplantation https://www.journal.mai.ac.nz/system/files/maireview/153-877-1-pb.pdf https://www.journal.mai.ac.nz/system/files/maireview/153-877-1-pb.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x10373404 https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2017.0023 special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 15 oliver, mike., ahmed, aimun, and alexander woywodt. 2012. “donating in good faith or getting into trouble religion and organ donation revisited.” world journal of transplantation 2 (5): 69–73. https://doi.org/10.5500/wjt.v2.i5.69 prabhu, pardeep kumar. 2019. “is presumed consent an ethically acceptable way of obtaining organs for transplant?” journal of intensive care society 20 (2): 92–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/1751143718777171. pradeu, thomas. 2012. the limits of the self: immunology and biological identity. translated by elizabeth vitanza. oxford: oxford university press. president's council on bioethics (us) ed., 2011. controversies in the determination of death: a white paper of the president's council on bioethics. government printing office. rameka, lesley. 2016. “whakapapa: a māori way of knowing and being in the world.” in encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory, edited by michael a. peters. singapore: springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_172-1 shah, seema k., kenneth kasper, and franklin g. miller. 2015. “a narrative review of the empirical evidence on public attitudes on brain death and vital organ transplantation: the need for better data to inform policy.” journal of medical ethics 41 (4): 291–96. https://jme.bmj.com/content/41/4/291. shaw, rhonda, and robert webb. 2021. “ka mura ka muri: understandings of organ donation and transplantation in aotearoa new zealand.” medical humanities 47 (4): 456–65. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2020-012038. shildrick, margrit. 2015. “chimerism and immunitas: the emergence of a posthumanist biophilosophy.” in resisting biopolitics: philosophical, political and performative strategies, edited by s.e. wilmer and audronė žukauskaite, 95-108. london: routledge. shildrick, margrit. 2020. “hauntological dimensions of heart transplantation: the onto-epistemologies of deceased donation.” medical humanities 47 (4): 388–96. https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2020-011982. shildrick, margrit. 2022. visceral prostheses: somatechnics and posthuman embodiment. london: bloomsbury. starzl, t.e., a.j. demetris, n. murase, s. ildstad, c. ricordi, and m. trucco. 1992. “cell migration, chimerism, and graft acceptance.” lancet 339 (8809): 1579–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/0140-6736(92)91840-5. taskin, şenay karakus. 2017. “spinal reflexes in brain death cases.” transplantation, no. 101, s132. https://doi.org.10.1097/01.tp.0000525187.43888.5e. truby, lauren k., casalinova, sarah., patel, chetan b., richa agarwal, christopher l., holley, robert t., mentz, carmelo milano et al. 2022. “donation after circulatory death in heart transplantation: history, outcomes, clinical challenges, and opportunities to expand the donor pool.” journal of cardiac failure 28 (9): 1456–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cardfail.2022.03.353. https://www.wjgnet.com/2220-3230/full/v2/i5/69.htm https://doi.org/10.1177/1751143718777171 https://jme.bmj.com/content/41/4/291 https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2020-012038 https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2020-011982 https://doi.org/10.1016/0140-6736(92)91840-5 https://doi.org.10.1097/01.tp.0000525187.43888.5e. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cardfail.2022.03.353 special section: frictions of futurity in transplant medicine | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) margrit shildrick, 2024 16 author bio margrit shildrick is guest professor in ethnology, history of religions and gender studies at stockholm university. she has published several books, including visceral prostheses: somatechnics and posthuman embodiment (bloomsbury 2022) and many journal articles in the research areas of posthumanism, bioethics, disability and micro-biologies. the temporalities and spatialities of death, dying, and heart donation abstract keywords notes references author bio     cover art | bloomer artist statement     kate timbes kltimbes@outlook.com   for this issue of catalyst, the cover art is a reflection upon how dress, sexuality and gender expression relate to natural ecologies. the cover image captures two primary mediums, textiles and handmade paper, which speak to cycles, sustainable and traditional ways of making, and narratives of both objects and individuals that we often forget or silence. lastly, as a revisitation of my undergraduate thesis, “bloomer” represents a kind of resourcefulness i found myself chasing as i was removing myself from my studio and everything i knew to go work a seasonal job in germany. the image depicts an ink-drawn woman in a vest, standing on an industrial "worksman" bike, notoriously known for failing ergonomically. she holds the answer to the failed product, the same-sized handmade paper bike wheel. brandished like a shield, but also a motive for action and transformation, it resembles a key for social, economic and political mobility. bikes in germany are an emblem of sustainable success while also being a historical door for social freedoms for women. breaking down the material makeup of this cover, the pink and gray handmade paper and woven bloomer pants call out westernized practices of capitalist consumption. the american corporate agenda unapologetically produces 67.5 million metric tons of paper and 16 millions tons of textile waste that continues to increase annually. knowing the detriments to large-scale manufacturing on communities and the environment, i pushed myself to source fabric and paper locally. collecting from institutions, communities, and people around me, i accumulated recycled paper from recycling bins at my college or hotel rooms in germany, turning things i typically saw as waste into a valuable product. the fabric and paper that i would strip to then weave together developed symbols of binaries ones like clean or contaminated, strong or weak. i question their separate meanings, only to realize after searching through grays that one can’t exist without the other. weaving calls to histories of craft and their misconceptions and belonging in the art world of imperialistic paintings curated in spaces facilitated by men. these two materials speak to not only interdisciplinary making but interdisciplinary thought. this journey of collecting materials allows me to read the narratives of my environment before i go through the process of making an object new again. it taught me a way of listening that says, ‘there’s always more’ to a story, relationship, language, work of art, and product deemed invaluable. i harvest recycled or unusable bed sheets from my grandmother, thrift stores, and now the hotel where i reside and work in southern germany as a place that challenges me to find new paths to making art. i’ve always been interested in the way that garments define, classify, protect bodies, and break or uphold social norms, while also creating one of the most detrimental cycles to the planet. it weaves the thread of my making to a place where masculine and feminine convolute, a plethora of times throughout history. in this image, bloomers made from woven recycled sheets stand for this idea of listening to ourselves and our bodies, to silenced voices, to earth’s ecological changes, and o both the quiet and loud systems around us.     artist bio kate timbes is an interdisciplinary artist based in south carolina, investigating and abstracting collected industrial, human-made, and natural materials, questioning their narratives and functions. working primarily in painting, video, and sculpture, she weaves mediums together, carrying objects, paintings, seeds, weavings, and sculptural handmade paper through physical, emotional, and digital landscapes. timbes contemplates sourcing of resources, rethinking use via revitalization as an individual effort to engage in curious, creative, and ecological practices. timbes has shown various works around south carolina’s upstate, exhibiting at wofford college, greenville-spartanburg airport, and the spartanburg public library. she has a range of public artworks in south carolina and copenhagen (denmark) and is involved in the tri-state sculptors association.   weiss, sasha. 2024. “liberation after/life: narrative connectivity and black women’s cancer mortality.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2): 1–13. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © sasha weiss, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license liberation after/life: narrative connectivity and black women’s cancer mortality alexandra (sasha) weiss university of indiana bloomington weiss5@iu.edu abstract this article discusses black feminist resistance to the ways in which cancer discourses, conflating plasticity in zakiyyah iman jackson’s sense with neoplasticity, pathologize black femininity. focusing on audre lorde and henrietta lacks, this article argues that, though both women died from cancer, they also haunt the present moment by living on through community, both family and the lives they have touched from a distance, through writing or through cells, through time and space. ultimately, this haunting offers a kind of liberation from the pathologizing hegemony of racial and gendered capital that contributed to their cancer in the first place. even death cannot break such connections. keywords blackness, cancer, mortality, afterlives, interconnectedness in the eyes of the state and its systems of white supremacy, black women are presented as dangerous, as life outgrowing the limits of white definition, as refusing to follow rules. black women’s survival, let alone thriving, is described as aberrant, malignant, in the face of structures grounded on the oppression of black women and the extraction of their flesh as a resource to be contained and controlled. from this racist perspective, it’s easy for doctors to blame black women when they get cancer, relying on the language of racialized predisposition or innate biological differences. but, from the perspectives of black women facing cancer, their illnesses are inextricably caught up in the violences of structural racism. under a racist healthcare system, where doctors train by studying what diseases look like on white skin and use guidelines informed by blatantly racist mailto:weiss5@iu.edu original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) sasha weiss, 2024 2 assumptions, care from prevention to diagnosis and treatment is regularly delayed or denied to black women, unless it’s in service of research that might benefit white women. as deirdre cooper owens explores in medical bondage: race, gender, and the origins of american gynecology, black women’s stolen labor, stolen bodies, and stolen flesh have laid the foundation for contemporary gynecologic care including gynecological oncology. meanwhile, black women are dying of cancer way too often, and way too quickly. discussions of liberation usually rely on hope for a future. what, then, does liberation look like when one knows one won’t survive? and what does liberation in the face of death look like when death itself is racialized? i want to discuss the lives and after/lives of two twentieth-century black women who, though they died from cancer, still live on through connections to others, especially other black women. audre lorde’s writing reaches across decades and death itself to forge connections with black lesbians who knew lorde in life as well as those who weren’t born until after she passed away. through the medium of lorde’s work—her cancer narratives, poetry, and essays—deep moments of mutual care, empathy, and love become untied from time, freed from the necessity of continued embodiment to continue the work of liberation through connection. and henrietta lacks touched not only the lives of her large family, especially her children, but also, the grandchildren who continue her legacy, though she did not get to meet them. her after/life is much more complicated than lorde’s because, where lorde put her words out into the world, lacks’s cells were stolen by racist doctors, and her legacy only came to light decades later. but many of her relatives explain that the effects of her cells’ survival—life-saving medical care—are very much in line with the kinds of care work she was known for in life. to her family, then, death not only freed her from a painful illness, it gave her an opportunity to take back control of her tissue from researchers and continue to show her love by caring for people across the world. though in one sense this narrative sees lacks and her influence reduced to the remnants of her cancer, grown in labs across the world, in another, it reads as a liberation narrative for a family haunted by racialized medical abuse. to see lacks in every life she saved is to give her some agency in and in spite of her death, thereby also giving her the credit, honor, and gratitude she is more than due. then it’s not so much in the cultures of her stolen cancer as in the story her family tells that lacks lives on. for lacks, as for lorde, narrative itself offers a kind of after/life that is potentially liberatory. of course, this narrative falters in the face of how the cures, preventative vaccines, and other medical miracles lacks’s cells have borne are still distributed by a structurally racist healthcare system in ways that prioritize rich and white families while it is far, far harder for members of her family themselves to access the love their mother’s cells offer from beyond the grave. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) sasha weiss, 2024 3 (over)growth too often the conversation around black women dying of cancer erases them by either romanticizing their lives, erasing their pain and oppression in the process, or foreclosing any possibility of liberatory work in the face of, or following, a death foretold. somewhere in between these two extremes, a nuanced argument can be made for a kind of liberation from the twin violences of conquest and cancer in the diasporic movements of care, work, and love.1 stories told and poems written, loved ones’ memories blur the borders between life and death. rather than arguing that death itself is liberating, i want to spotlight how the connections black women form with each other both before and—mediated by text, memory, or cellular culture—after death still gesture toward a liberatory collectivity. it is in between individuals, in relationships and gatherings where love lives. such networks or webs of love cannot fully be killed or conquered, so long as they keep growing, keep forming connections, so long as black women love and are loved. cancer is frequently viewed through a strictly biological lens as aggregates of cells growing too fast, evading immune responses, growing their own blood supplies and spreading. the language of malignancy is one that functions on several levels as dry jargon of dysregulation, neoplasia, and poor differentiation but also as the language of unwelcome or undesirable forms of growth and colonial attempts to conquer, fight, and win. in sherwin nuland’s how we die, a popular text exploring fatal illness in lay terminology, nuland describes cancer as “malicious exuberance...continuous [and] uninhibited...a homicidal riot of devastation...the members of a barbarian horde run amok...with a single-minded purpose: to plunder everything within reach” (1995, 207). there’s an uncomfortable resonance between the language of dangerous vitality applied to cancer and the ways in which the us government has both historically and contemporarily described black people, especially during uprisings against racist violence such as the black lives matter uprisings of 2014 and 2020. this practice of rhetorical violence also highlights the intersections between anti-black racism and ableism by casting sick people as both victims and problems, foreclosing the possibilities of life, community, and liberatory work for black people living with cancer. cynthia wu (2002) explores this element of cancer discourses in “marked bodies, marking time,” in which they contrast susan sontag’s approach to oppressive cancer metaphors to lorde’s. sontag’s response to “military metaphors” is to criticize the dual metaphoric implications of “physician...hero and...patient...battlefield” wherein “the patient often becomes the cancer or the enemy itself” and the corollary that “social problems are described as ‘cancers’ of the body politic,” arguing that such military rhetoric is entirely problematic. in contrast, lorde “finds a way in which to reclaim” this discourse, redirecting the metaphors such that patients are “the agent[s] and the discriminatory practices against women who have breast cancer—rather than the disease or the patient—is the target” (wu 2002, 245–46). this critical intervention mimics discourses about the place and original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) sasha weiss, 2024 4 function of militant rhetoric in liberatory struggles outside disability and illness contexts, which often follow the fault lines of colonial and racializing taxonomies, such as white political valorization of nonviolent resistance and denigration of revolutionary practices involving, as malcolm x put it, “any means necessary.” as i write this, i’m currently sitting in the indiana university liberated zone, where simply voicing support for the rights of colonized people to resist occupation and genocide has led to the arrests of fifty-five of my colleagues, who have been racially profiled and differentially punished based on the anti-blackness of state and local police. this situation might seem unrelated to the subject at hand, but when black people are considered violent threats for speaking truth to power, and the cops, in their retreat from our encampment, went out of their way to run over our medical supply tent, the linkages between anti-black militarization, public engagement with disability and disabled people as part of the community, and institutional fear of the liberatory potential of rhetorical empowerment become starkly apparent in real time. as wu points out, lorde’s deployment of militant metaphors is specifically a means of embodying the communal and empowering nature of living as a person with a non-normative body caught up in racializing and gendering structures of oppression. wu writes, “lorde remakes her changed body into one that initiates her into a community of woman-centered warriors,” referring in part to the dahomey amazons who cut off their breasts for the sake of their military prowess, but also to her friends who care for and support her “though the hospital personnel have withheld support” (2002, 251). this community of warriors, linked to west african women’s strength specifically through embodied difference, calls into question the ways in which enlightenment thought pathologizes communities via the interlocking taxonomies of race, gender, and ability. specifically, as zakiyyah iman jackson writes, “black female flesh’s death and debility historically and contemporarily arranges and capacitates man and powers empirical science—henrietta, lucy, anarcha, betsey, saartjie” (2020, 198). lorde instead uses her illness to incapacitate man and disempower empirical science by visibilizing these trends and the collective resistance she, her friends, and her sisters in the struggle for survival embody. jackson examines how blackness is constructed as plastic, how “the fleshy being of blackness is experimented with as if it were infinitely malleable lexical and matter, such that blackness is produced as sub/super/human at once, a form where form shall not hold: potentially ‘everything and nothing’ at the register of ontology” (2020, 3). this mode of plasticity gestures towards the ways in which the middle passage degenders and divides black embodiment into spillersian flesh. it gestures towards carceral logics that fear blackness as subhuman and violent. lorde explores this construction in a burst of light, the journals from her last years with cancer. she wrote of research proclaiming there to be “no rampant hunger in the u.s.a. i wonder if they realize rampant means aggressive. so. the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) sasha weiss, 2024 5 starving old women...eat out of garbage bins. ‘i only eat fruit,’ she mumbled...while her gnarled black hands carefully cut away the rotted parts of a cantaloupe with a plastic burger king knife" (lorde 2020, 85). here lorde redirects the plasticity often applied to blackness back upon the violence experienced by black women in the form of hunger, in doing so highlighting the ways in which black women are mislabeled as the causes of their own struggles, as hunger, rather than hungry, plastic flesh. this plasticity simultaneously contributes to the medical construction of a blackness that is superhuman and therefore ineligible for appropriate medical care, from breathing treatments to kidney transplants to pain control.2 plasticity has also contributed to the long history of medical research done on (often not consenting) black people to develop standards of care and treatments that are then, primarily, made available to white patients, a cycle contemporary cancer researchers are trying to break. this cycle of medical exploitation and abandonment is exemplified by the story of lacks, whose cells have saved countless lives while her family cannot often afford necessary medical care. contemporary cancer researchers are trying to break these cycles of violence and benefit black cancer patients rather than use them. for instance, drs. olufunmilayo olopade and michael hall (2006) and juliet daniel and her lab (bassey-archibong et al 2017; quoted in mcdowell 2021) research the genetics underlying cancer disparities in ways that, without reifying biological race, focus on providing care targeted to the kinds of cancer most common in black patient population, rather than hoping what works for white patients will work for everyone. cancer is itself (neo)plastic, which is perhaps why the logics of plasticity inspire, from the white colonial perspective, such fear of blackness. but plasticity can be a mode of flight, too, in the multiple valences of liberatory movement, diaspora, and survival. for jackson, plasticity, though a site of struggle and violence, is also home to “alternative conceptions of being and the nonhuman that have been produced by blackened people” (2020, 3). tiffany lethabo king frames a similar concept in the fungible: “as a black fleshy analytic, i argue, black fungibility can denote and connote pure flux, process, and potential.” (2019, 23). it is this slippery sense of plasticity and fungibility—as multifaceted modes that have shaped and continues to shape blackness—that acknowledges both the real violence of white (re)constructions of black flesh and the potential for furtive, resistive, and alternative black sculpture wherein structures of white supremacy become neoplastic, while black plasticity offers survival new shapes in spite of and in the face of impending death from cancer. these liberatory forms of fugitivity and fungibility, of engaging with the body as “pure flux, process, and potential” threaten the structures of white cisheteropatriarchy on which us healthcare is founded, as well as the complex interplay between neoplastic forces of white supremacy and capitalist production original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) sasha weiss, 2024 6 of profitable flesh. lorde critiques the way medical discourses, in the form of healthcare workers, patient advocates, and volunteers, police her embodiment postmastectomy for her unwillingness to conform, as much as possible, to expectations of a normative femininity that is more concerned with looking healthy than feeling healthy. lorde describes this pressure of “socially sanctioned prosthesis” as “merely another way of keeping women with breast cancer silent and separate from each other” that impedes collective resistance against the structures of carcinogenesis such as the legalization of “carcinogenic, fat-stored hormones in beef-feed” (1997, 15). but lorde also criticizes the way in which what healthcare workers see as looking healthy is a specific, white(ned) normative femininity. when lorde goes in for postoperative care, her “first journey out since coming home from the hospital,” she celebrates and plays with her beauty, the particular beauty of a black lesbian feminist survivor who now gets to relearn her body and how it feels to live in: a friend had washed my hair for me and it was black and shining, with my new grey hairs glistening in the sun. color was starting to come back into my face and around my eyes. i wore the most opalescent of my moonstones, and a single floating bird dangling from my right ear in the name of grand asymmetry. with an african kente-cloth tunic and new leather boots, i knew i looked fine, with that brave new-born security of a beautiful woman having come through a very hard time and being very glad to be alive. (60) lorde feels good about herself, until the nurse comments on her refusal to wear a prosthesis, and “looked at me urgently and disapprovingly as she told me that even if it didn’t look exactly right, it was ‘better than nothing...you will feel so much better with it on,’ she said. ‘and besides, we really like you to wear something, at least when you come in. otherwise it’s bad for the morale of the office’” (60). lorde’s own feelings of well-being are not sufficient to make her care team feel good about their work, because she’s embracing her “grand asymmetry.” for them to feel as though they’ve actually helped her in some way, she needs to perform a particular kind of femininity, the kind that, according to the plastic surgeons lorde critiques, is only possible through “look[ing] decent in clothes” or “wear[ing] a normal bra or bikini,” either through surgical reconstruction or by wearing a prosthesis she never wanted in the first place, presumably that given to her by a volunteer from the american cancer society while she was still in the hospital (71). significantly, this prosthesis was clearly made for a white woman, a “lambswool form...the strangest part of the collection...its blush, pink nylon envelope with a slightly darker apex.” when she tries it on, it feels “awkwardly inert and lifeless...having nothing to do with any me i could possibly conceive of. besides, it was the wrong color, and looked grotesquely pale through the cloth of my bra” (44). to the medical establishment, lorde’s actual well-being is secondary to the goal of corralling and original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) sasha weiss, 2024 7 (re)constructing her body according to not only a rigid notion of feminine embodiment but also a white default against which her embodiment, and, by proxy, her well-being are judged. her refusal to wear a prosthesis is also a refusal to constrain herself to symmetry, to white supremacy, to narrow gender expectations, and to the notion that surviving looks a certain way—namely, looks like “normal,” like nothing has changed. “broaden[ing] the definition” contrary to the conquest-hungry language of medicine, when black people speak about their own cancers, the sense of who and what is plastic, who and what is too much, flips, exposing the ways in which cancer itself perpetuates colonial, racist violence. against this background, then, black fungibility offers the chance to reshape survival in the face of carcinogenic violence. throughout a burst of light, lorde emphasizes the ways in which cancer is just another form of the interlinked violences of racism, conquest, and misogynoir. she writes that “the struggle with cancer now informs all my days, but it is only another face of that continuing battle for self-determination and survival that black women fight daily, often in triumph” (lorde 2020, 83). lorde reiterates this argument later in the journals, writing, “of course cancer is political—look at how many of our comrades have died of it during the last ten years! as warriors, our job is to actively and consciously survive it for as long as possible, remembering that in order to win, the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive” (132). viewing survival as the way to combat systemic violence might seem an unreachable goal given “how many of our comrades have died.” but for lorde, survival itself can be a site of black feminine fungibility, where the struggle can be redefined on her terms, and where even death cannot silence her. as she writes a burst of light, lorde knows that she likely won’t survive in her body for much longer. but this does not lead her to give up the fight for survival on her terms. instead, lorde frames survival as a fungible, plastic opportunity to spread and share her writing and care for other black women in global networks of mutual love. her body becomes a tool in this struggle that she cares for on terms that allow her to fight, write, and win: “i must not surrender my body to others unless i completely understand and agree with what they think should be done to it. i’ve got to look at all of my options carefully, even the ones i find distasteful. i know i can broaden the definition of winning to the point where i can’t lose” (94). saidiya hartman, in her exploration of the relationship between performance and subjugation under enslavement, examines “encroachments of power that take place through notions of reform, consent, and protection [that] rather than bespeaking the mutuality of social relations or the expressive and affective capacities of the subject,...facilitated subjugation, domination, and terror precisely by preying upon the flesh, the heart, and the soul” (1997, 5). while hartman writes about the performances of subjection enslavers demanded from original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) sasha weiss, 2024 8 their captives, her argument that “such performances...made the captive body the vehicle of the master’s power and truth” resonates with lorde’s experiences with the rhetoric of blame deployed against cancer patients, which highlight precisely how black women are pressured to perform a particular role as both racialized and non-radical victims of cancer whose flesh is the problem, and whose hearts and souls must be corrected to treat that problem (hartman, 1997, 8). critiquing a doctor who argues that people get cancer because they aren’t sufficiently happy, lorde asks, “ was i wrong to be working so hard against the oppressions afflicting women and black people? was i in error to be speaking out against our silent passivity and the cynicism of a mechanized and inhuman civilization that is destroying our earth and those who live upon it? was i really fighting the spread of radiation, racism, woman-slaughter, chemical invasion of our food, pollution of our environment, the abuse and psychic destruction of our young, merely to avoid dealing with my first and greatest responsibility—to be happy?” (1997, 77). lorde’s refusal to play this blame game and her refusal of prosthetics are two facets of her embodiment of resistance, her refusal to let her body be used as a vehicle for “the master’s power and truth,” to uphold the structures of violence and oppression that continue to harm and kill, extract and exploit. in making informed treatment decisions that prioritize her goals and in using fungible notions of survival to “broaden the definition of winning to the point where i can't lose,” lorde embodies the resistance of refusing to be the master’s tool so that she can continue her work to dismantle his house. in her dedication to live and die on her own terms, even if those terms were reached through fungibility under pressure, lorde says fuck you to power, to cancer, and to the broader structures of racist violence that lead to so many black women dying from cancer in the first place. lorde’s refusal to be subjugated, her immortality in work and words that reach through time to black women today facing cancer, giving them something to hold on to, offers a liberatory sense of community not limited by the confines of latestage cancer. across time, space, and even beyond her own death, she calls out from her work to those who need her: we all have to die at least once. making that death useful would be winning for me. i wasn’t supposed to exist anyway, not in any meaningful way in this fucked-up white boys’ world. i want desperately to live, and i’m ready to fight for that living even if i die shortly. just writing those words down snaps everything i want to do into a neon clarity. this european trip and the afro-german women, the sister outsider collective in holland, gloria’s great idea of starting an organization that can be a connection between us and south african women. for the first time i really feel that my writing has a substance and stature that will survive me. i have done good work. i original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) sasha weiss, 2024 9 see it in the letters that come to me about sister outsider, i see it in the use the women here give the poetry and the prose. (2020, 94–95) lorde manifests this commitment to living “even if i die shortly” in her work. lorde’s writing becomes connective tissue, a manifestation of her care for her community that will outlive her. in this context, her dedication to writing up to the end of her life illuminates the ways in which her writing is itself made of love: “i want to live...with as much sweetness as i can decently manage, loving all the people i love, and doing as much as i can of the work i still have to do. i am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes—everywhere. until it’s every breath i breathe. i’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!" (110). her writing embodies this meteoric power of continuance even after her own body dies. and “all the people [lorde] love[s]” in life and in her work love her back, and carry her words onward. “almost together” henrietta lacks’s voice isn’t printed in bookstores across the country, although her story, and words from her family finally are. but so are the words and stories of the doctors who stole her cells. for decades, her story was covered up by their lies, a cover-up served by the lack of communication to her rural, poor family. meanwhile, the doctors got rich off her cells, which, in proliferating, saved—and continue to save—many lives. what liberation exists for someone whose life and flesh were stolen, whose stolen cells keep so many others alive? lacks’s death was political; her cancer, her lack of prompt medical attention, her stolen cells, the lack of communication with her family are all sequelae of the precarity of life, as christina sharpe theorizes, “in the wake” of enslavement. sharpe explores “think[ing] care in the wake as a problem for thinking and of and for black non/being in the world” (2016, 5). this framing of care highlights its importance not only for the living but also the dead, and the necessity of “defend[ing] the dead...tend[ing] to the black dead and dying...the black person, to black people, always living in the push towards our death” (10). this care is relational. as lacks’s cells blur the lines between non/being, between after/life, she provides life-saving medical care to countless people, saving many from dying from cancers like her own. in reclaiming credit for saving those lives out of the control of her cancer and her doctors, lacks’s family frees her memory from the flat character of victim of medical abuse, remembering with gratitude and care the lacks they knew and love. lacks’s nephew gary lacks used biblical passages about how a seed “does not sprout to life unless it dies” to explain to journalist rebecca skloot that “henrietta was chosen...and when the lord chooses an angel to do his work you never know what they are going to come back looking like” (quoted in skloot 2010, 295–96). this reading of lacks as an angel not only frames the lives she has saved as her own good work, rather than that of the doctors, it grounds the way the cells that killed her survive to do that work in religious faith that matters original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) sasha weiss, 2024 10 deeply to her family and black american culture more broadly. here her cells remain in the wake, but in a way that frees them from the narratives of extracted medical resource, carcinogenicity harnessed, and instead cares for her memory as a caring family woman, plastically able to find new ways to survive and connect, full of life and love. this faith recasts lacks’s cells and their proliferation as not only agentic but holy, liberating her after/life from the control of doctors who stole and would contain her angelic efflorescence. as deborah lacks says of the phenomenon of “hela contamination,” when hela cells seed and overtake other cell cultures, “my mother was just getting back at scientists for keepin all them secrets from the family...you don't mess with henrietta—she’ll sic hela on your ass!” (quoted in skloot 2010, 263). deborah distinguishes between the cells and her mother, but maintains this sense of integral connection and agency in her assertion that her mother animates the cells and directs their movements. this sense of agentic—if unexpected—movement animates the work of artist charmaine lurch, whose wire sculpture and multimedia artworks explore and honor black women who’ve been relegated to the role of absent presence, including lacks. in an interview with king, lurch describes the tesseract as a way of moving through time and space liberated from the confines of here, now and linear flight: “i really love that idea of the tesseract, because i work in, i create in space. and so i’m always thinking about the space. and the tesseract is a four, a four-dimensional, um, shape that you can’t see. and so i’m saying the black body will move and does move in different ways. henrietta lacks moves in different ways that we can’t see” (quoted in king 2019, 176). for king, lurch’s work renders the connections between lacks and the “diasporic figures and exilic movements of” other black women from the caribbean to canada (192). through the media of visual art and faith, as well as cell culture, lacks’s story works as connective tissue, bringing together the struggles of a network of black women moving towards freedom in unpredictable ways. of course, this diasporic movement of wire and cells does not erase the violence and loss of cancer death, stolen tissue, doctors who care more about discovery than care, and who profit on the flesh of a woman for whose family basic medical care remains largely inaccessible. it does not erase that deborah lacks was only able to know her mother through the absent presence of cells suspended in growth medium. of the process of tracing her mother’s story, deborah said, “all this stuff i’m learning...it make me realize that i did have a mother, and all the tragedy she went through. it hurts but i wanna know more, just like i wanna know about my sister. it make me feel closer to them, but i do miss them. i wish they were here” (quoted in skloot 2010, 289). after/lives are not wholly absent; through them, echoes of past and glimpses of future meet. but neither are these tesseracts the same as being altogether here and now. instead, they offer original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) sasha weiss, 2024 11 moments of something else, a resonance that lives in the in-between, in relational networks of love and care. lorde argues, “our battle is to define survival in ways that are acceptable and nourishing to us, meaning with substance and style. substance. our work. style. true to our selves” (2020, 132). lorde links her survival to her work, and in that linkage, opens a window in the face of death, where her voice shines through with style and substance across intervening years and in the absence of a living body to reach and hold space with black women readers today. and while working to research her family, it is with substance and style that deborah lacks asks skloot to take a picture of her with a photo of her late sister by her mother’s grave, saying, “it’ll be the only picture in the world with the three of us almost together” (quoted in skloot 2010, 288). the proximity of “almost together” expresses love and care that, mediated by deborah’s narrative of her late family, by the photograph she brings to re-present her sister, shakes loose the rigid structures of death and time, allowing, if only for a snapshot, for this liberatory connection to become visible. community, fugitive from cancer and violence, renders survival itself plastic, death itself fungible. connection and care between lorde, her loved ones, and her readers, between lacks, her family, and the people she's saved, folds time, frees love from the limits of embodied continuity, and redefines what it means to survive together in the face of fatal violence. then black plasticity offers, instead of the ways it has been deployed to pathologize black being, a doorway to liberation through community. and while this liberation, too, is fugitive, not quite visible, not quite complete, this “almost together[ness]” that comes from carrying the dead in your heart offers something irreducible in its connective tissue, in the love it tesseracts through time and space. notes 1 i use the term conquest in tiffany lethabo king’s (2019) sense to make space for and break down siloes that artificially separate the struggles of black, indigenous, and afro-indigenous peoples and the violences they face. 2 lundy braun (2014) explores the complexities of breathing treatments in detail in breathing race into the machine. the american thoracic society only called for the end of race correction factors in lung function testing in 2023. in their 2020 article in the new england journal of medicine, drs. darshali vyas, leo eisenstein, and david jones explain that kidney function tests are arbitrarily inflated based on an assumption that black people have stronger baseline kidney function than nonblack people. consequently, black people have to be much sicker than white people before they qualify for the transplant waiting list. and christina sharpe (2016) discusses pain control in in the wake, as does deirdre cooper owens (2017) in medical bondage. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) sasha weiss, 2024 12 references bassey-archibong, b.i. et al. 2017. “kaiso is highly expressed in tnbc tissues of women of african ancestry compared to caucasian women.” cancer causes & control 28 (11): 1295–304. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-017-0955-2. braun, lundy. 2014. breathing race into the machine: the surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to genetics. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hall, michael, and olufunmilayo olopade. 2006. “disparities in genetic testing: thinking outside the brca box.” journal of clinical oncology 24 (14): 2197–203. https://doi.org/10.1200/jco.2006.05.5889. hartman, saidiya v. 1997. scenes of subjection: terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century america. new york: oxford university press. jackson, zakiyyah iman. 2020. becoming human: matter and meaning in an antiblack world. new york: new york university press. king, tiffany lethabo. 2019. the black shoals: offshore formations of black and native studies. durham, nc: duke university press. lorde, audre. 1997. the cancer journals. san francisco: aunt lute books. lorde, audre. 2020. “a burst of light.” in the selected works of audre lorde, edited by roxane gay (81-166). new york: norton. mcdowell, sasha. 2021. “the journey behind kaiso and the future ahead – a conversation with dr. juliet daniel.” university of british columbia life sciences institute, february 28, 2021. https://lsi.ubc.ca/2021/02/28/the-journey-behind-kaisoand-the-future-ahead-a-conversation-with-dr-juliet-daniel/. nuland, sherwin. 1995. how we die: reflections on life's final chapter. new york: vintage books. owens, deirdre cooper. 2017. medical bondage: race, gender, and the origins of american gynecology. athens: university of georgia press. sharpe, christina. 2016. in the wake: on blackness and being. durham, nc: duke university press. skloot, rebecca. 2010. the immortal life of henrietta lacks. new york: random house. vyas, darshali, leo eisenstein, and david jones. 2020. “hidden in plain sight: reconsidering the use of race correction in clinical algorithms.” new england journal of medicine 383 (9): 874–82. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmms2004740 wu, cynthia. 2002. “marked bodies, marking time: reclaiming the warrior in audre lorde’s the cancer journals.” a/b: auto/biography studies 17 (2): 245–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2002.10815294. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10552-017-0955-2 https://doi.org/10.1200/jco.2006.05.5889 https://lsi.ubc.ca/2021/02/28/the-journey-behind-kaiso-and-the-future-ahead-a-conversation-with-dr-juliet-daniel/ https://lsi.ubc.ca/2021/02/28/the-journey-behind-kaiso-and-the-future-ahead-a-conversation-with-dr-juliet-daniel/ https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmms2004740 https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2002.10815294 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (2) sasha weiss, 2024 13 author bio alexandra (sasha) weiss is a phd student at indiana university bloomington. sasha researches the intersections of colonialism, medicine, and how black and indigenous futurisms respond to and resist biomedical violence.     special section introduction global fertility chains and the colonial present of assisted reproductive technologies     sigrid vertommen ghent university sigrid.vertommen@ugent.be   bronwyn parry king’s college london bronwyn.parry@kcl.ac.uk   michal nahman uwe, bristol michal.nahman@uwe.ac.uk     abstract the introduction to the special section “global fertility chains and the colonial present of assisted reproductive technologies” (re)situates assisted reproductive technologies, infrastructures, and markets within older, yet ongoing, histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, and slavery. engaging with the “colonial present” of a broad array of reproductive technologies, including surrogacy, adoption, seed saving, “slave breeding,” and in vitro fertilization in different (post)colonial sites of inquiry, including india, korea, australia, the united states, and the borderlands between mexico and guatemala, the papers in this collection draw on the foundational work of materialist, sts, black, indigenous, and decolonial feminists to foreground three main “relational” themes: (1) between past and present colonial materializations and imaginaries of arts; (2) between colonialism’s myriad, intraconnected reproductive grammars of slavery, genocide, conservation, exploitation, and extraction; (3) between art’s life and death functions and their mutually constitutive biopolitical and necropolitical logics.     keywords assisted reproductive technologies, colonialism, slavery, capitalism, ongoing histories, bio/necropolitics, reproductive relationalities     in july 2018 israel’s umbrella lgbtq organization, the aguda, announced on its website that, for the very first time, israel’s gay community would go on a national strike (zieve 2018). earlier, the israeli parliament had decided to extend surrogacy eligibility from heterosexual couples to single women. at the same time, it had also decided to exclude same-sex couples and single men—the group with the greatest expressed need for surrogacy, who, in their quest for a genetically related family, thus remained “forced” to look for available surrogates abroad, in countries such as canada, the united states, greece, or colombia. in the midst of israel’s violent repression of gaza’s march of return, in which 1,350 palestinians were injured and nine killed, and just a few days before the implementation of the controversial jewish nation state law that effected national self-determination for jews but not the indigenous palestinian population in israel, hundreds of thousands of protesters blocked the streets of central tel aviv to demand equal surrogacy rights for gay men. more than forty israeli companies and local branches of global multinationals including facebook, ibm, and microsoft supported the surrogacy strike, encouraging their employees to participate. some companies even committed to financially support the international surrogacy arrangements of their gay employees. the jewish agency, one of world’s most important zionist organizations with quasi-state authority in israel, in a landmark move, offered an $11,000 loan to their gay employees to cover the costs associated with seeking surrogacy services abroad. isaac herzog, now president of israel, but then chairman of the jewish agency, stated in an interview, “the jewish agency is one big family, and all its members are equal” (sharon 2019). such views clearly run counter to those of the many palestinians who reside in the region. from their perspectives, the jewish agency’s role in promoting settlement (aliya) in historic palestine has resulted in their becoming a family-breaking institution that has facilitated violent dispossession into refugeehood for palestinians. despite this, the combined pressure applied by the surrogacy strike, financing of this kind, and continued lobbying from israel’s lgbtq community ultimately proved successful, and in july 2021, the israeli supreme court ordered the government to lift the ban on surrogacy for same-sex couples and single men within six months. it is important to note that not all members of israel’s lgbtq community were in favor of the surrogacy strike. gays against surrogacy, a small anti-zionist queer collective of israeli jews that opposes israel’s overarching pronatalist stance, have, for example, opposed the national and international surrogacy industry due to its dependence on the racialization and commodification of the reproductive labor power of surrogates and oocyte providers. while “religious” restrictions within israel’s national surrogacy law make it impossible for a jewish israeli surrogate to gestate a baby for a muslim or christian (read: palestinian) couple, and vice versa, israel’s international surrogacy industry remains dependant on the outsourced reproductive labor power of racialized women in india, thailand, nepal, georgia, mexico, and the us who are rarely jewish. in making their protests at the 2015 gay pride march in be’er sheva (beer al-sabe in arabic), a city in the south of israel, gays against surrogacy led with a huge banner stating, "we fuck up the ass (which doesn't lead to the birth of soldiers).” with surrogacy and other arts increasingly weaponized by the state in what is viewed as a demographic race to guarantee a jewish majority in a jewish state, not reproducing is framed as a small but meaningful act of resistance for gays against surrogacy. in critiquing the intimate (homo)normative relation between the nuclear family, the army, and the settler state in israel, they actively promoted an anticolonial, antinatalist view of assisted reproduction—one explicitly correlated with queer sexuality (vertommen, field notes, july 2,2017). although palestine/israel does not appear as a geographic site of analysis in this special section, this particular incident provides an apt heuristic tool through which to begin the important political and intellectual work of unraveling the colonial dimensions, past and ongoing, of arts and their contested frontiers (jabary et al. 2012). this special issue offers readers an invitation and opportunity to think critically about the (settler) colonial fault lines of technologically, financially, or culturally assisted modes of reproduction; of the role that states and markets play in actively cross-subsidising and promoting reproduction amongst certain favored constituencies; of who is, and is not, subsequently recruited as surrogates and egg cell providers to perform the outsourced work of reproduction; of how states deploy arts as a site of demographic control and management; of how arts are consequently reappropriated as sites of resistance and contestation by those in liberatory or countermovements whose desires for reproduction do not align with these ambitions. as such, the vignette also evokes some of the key themes and areas of concern that are foregrounded in this special section on the colonial lineages of reproductive technologies, practices, and markets, with their highly gendered and racialized regimes of labor, property, and population control, that prove life-generating for some and highly extractive or exploitative for others. building on foundational work by indigenous, black, decolonial, sts, and materialist feminist scholars on the “intimacies” of colonialism, capitalism, and reproduction, the papers in this special section look at various historical and contemporary racial capitalist formations through the lens of assisted reproduction (robinson 1983; stoler 2010; lowe 2015; bhattacharyya 2017). concomitantly, they grapple with the afterlives of colonial conquest, empire, and slavery in the stratified development and distribution of supposedly “new” assisted reproductive science and technology since 1978 (hartman 2007; weinbaum 2019). the year 1978 marks an important techno-scientific milestone in the history of arts, with the birth of louise brown, the first baby born through in vitro fertilization (ivf). the introduction of ivf has also fostered the fragmentation of the reproductive body into bodily tissues that can be mobilized within and across national borders, from one body and laboratory to another according to their reproductive potential (strathern 1992; franklin 1997; inhorn 2012; cooper and waldby 2014; twine 2015). in political economy terms, this has resulted in the development of what sigrid vertommen, vincenzo pavone, and michal nahman (2021) describe as global fertility chains—unevenly developed, highly gendered, multi-actor networks of globalized reproduction in which the reproductive capacities, skills, bodies, biologies, and labors of oocyte vendors, surrogate carriers, and tissue providers are increasingly deployed and marketized to fulfil the reproductive needs of intended parents and the capital accumulative needs of the fertility industry. ivf has served as a platform technology in not only the medical and biotechnological sciences but also the social sciences. here, the “ivf turn” has generated an important body of work that decenters or “queers” naturalized forms of family and kinship making (edwards et al. 2005). in the existing feminist and sts literature, global fertility chains tend to be analyzed for their techno-scientific novelty, national specificity, and their neoliberal reconfigurations of the world economy. this work foregrounds how reproductive technologies have articulated or given rise to new forms of family and kinship structures, properties and markets, identities, socialities, and subjectivities, as well as how they reify long-standing religious and local understandings of personhood and relationality. in dolly mixtures, sarah franklin rightly notes how the “hyperbole of radical novelty” that often accompanies discussions on reproductive biotechnology is “understandable but also unhelpful” as it obfuscates the longer histories of empire and industrialization that have co-produced these newer technologies (2007, 79). meanwhile, anthropologists have examined the ways national cultures, religions, and local histories intermingle with reproduction producing complex intersections of so-called old and new thinking (kahn 2000; paxson 2004; zanini 2011; e. roberts 2012; gürtin, inhorn, and tremayne 2015). notwithstanding the wide array of socio-technical and cultural changes the ivf turn has invoked, this special section thus seeks to illuminate art’s colonial present—drawing on derek gregory’s (2004) capacious term—by (re)situating reproductive technologies, infrastructures, and markets within the longue durée of ongoing and intertwined histories and geographies of colonialism, racial capitalism, and slavery that have shaped and continue to shape these new reproductive markets and infrastructures. this means opening up our analytical and political understanding of arts by pushing back their epistemic genesis from 1978 to 1492 (through the conquest of the americas and the expulsion of jews and muslims from spain, the first transatlantic slave voyage of 1526, or, in the case of our opening story, with the balfour declaration of 1917 that provided british imperial backing for the eventual creation of the state of israel in 1948) to consider the variegated (settler) colonial, racial capitalist, and heteropatriarchal genealogies of global fertility chains. the concept of global fertility chains, which frame this special section and the international workshop that inspired this volume, has evolved and transmutated. sigrid vertommen introduced the term as a shorthand way to center women’s paid and unpaid labor within discussions of the bioeconomy, during her marie curie postdoctoral fellowship at king’s college london, and in discussions with her supervisor, barbara prainsack, and mentors michal nahman and bronwyn parry. at that time, several scholars were working on re-emphasizing reproduction as “labor,” something that might be more productively thought through alongside the longue durée of literatures on gendered social reproduction (barbagallo and federici 2012; bhattacharyya 2017; ferguson 2019; mezzadri newman, and stevano 2021). the concept soon developed, however, through discussions with other art scholars (including adi moreno, verena namberger, polina vlasenko, and vincenzo pavone), from its initial focus on gendered labor, to an examination of how gendered reproductive labor intersects with processes of uneven global development, and the state’s facilitative role within these processes. this extended idea of global fertility chains in vertommen, pavone, and nahman (2021) gains new articulation here through our collective work bringing together a set of papers that explore such issues through the lenses of historicism and colonialism. while much work looking at ivf takes as its starting moment 1978 and post-fordism, in this volume we encouraged work that identified lineages of coloniality in the past and present. while feminists and anthropologists have unpacked kinship theory for its centeredness in thinking from the global north, the focus on colonialism has yet received little attention within studies of ivf and reproductive technologies, apart from some exceptions (franklin 2007; vora 2015; vertommen 2017). by prioritizing, as we do in this volume, a view of the colonial past and present of distributed reproduction (murphy 2011), we seek to further nuance the concept of global fertility chains. as with all such concepts it is hoped, and anticipated, that its robustness will be enhanced through its application in a range of different articulations and contexts. our initial explorations were further nurtured by a wellcome trust–funded workshop on colonial lineages of global fertility chains held at king’s college london in may 2019. during this two-day workshop, fifteen junior and more senior experts in the field of arts gathered to critically discuss the ongoing histories of settler and extractive colonialism, slavery, and empire in and through assisted reproductive technologies, practices, and infrastructures. a number of pertinent questions were raised: how have infrastructures, technologies, and practices of reproduction, fertility, and mothering traveled from the caribbean sugar plantations to british and american kitchens and bedrooms? how are indian surrogates and korean “campwomen” made “available” as cheap sources of reproductive labor and bodily extraction? what is the impact of settler colonial imaginaries or practices of demographic settlement in shaping the “pronatalist” demand side in global fertility chains? are reproductive technologies developed and governed through imperial or sub-imperial logics? what are the legacies and afterlives of slavery and genocide in shaping the racialized and gendered division of labor in global fertility chains? the ensuing empirical and theoretical exchanges on various types of global fertility chains, including surrogacy, egg cell provision, ivf, sperm smuggling, transnational adoption, slavery, and mothering, in various geographic locations including india, mexico, guatemala, spain, korea, the caribbean, the united states, and palestine all afforded productive entry points to work on ongoing colonial relations between capital accumulation, extraction, and arts that have found their full realization here. we are indebted to everyone who took part and to the wellcome trust for supporting this important dialogue. 1 the themes and concerns addressed in the workshop and this special section particularly draw on insights first generated by materialist feminists, techno-feminists, and black and indigenous feminists. what connects these analytically distinct, yet often overlapping perspectives, is an insistence on using the sphere of (assisted) reproduction and the labors, molecules, bodies, seeds, science, and technologies it encompasses, as a lens through which to understand broader political-economic forces and socio-historical formations. materialist feminists have long insisted on complicating mainstream political economy accounts of capitalism as a mode of production by laying bare the “hidden abode of reproduction” as an essential yet routinely devalued realm where that “peculiar” commodity, labor power, is (re)generated. by foregrounding the analytical and political domain of reproductive labor in the 1970s, they made visible all the paid and unpaid work of cleaning, caring, nurturing, cooking, and life-making that women perform under capitalism to reproduce people as wage workers on a daily and intergenerational basis (mies 1998; federici 2004; bhattacharyya 2017). some of the papers in this collection critically engage with the feminist scholarship on social reproduction by underlining the colonial genealogies of the international divisions of reproductive labor that were violently introduced through colonial conquest. these racialized divisions of social reproduction proscribed european women as mothers and housewives, while colonized women were de-kinned into slaves or indentured workers. silvia posocco helpfully develops the concept of biolabor in her paper on the bio-necropolitics of the adoption-surrogacy nexus in the globalized borderlands between guatemala and mexico, to explicate all the extractive practices that are tied together and collectively inform practices of adoption, reproductive medicine, and forensics. alys eve weinbaum, in her paper on the afterlives of reproductive slavery, similarly argues that the “slave episteme,” the thought system which crystallized around four hundred years of slavery and “slave breeding,” continues to frame the racialized organization of reproductive labor in the “biocapitalist” present. finally, johanna gondouin and suruchi thapar-björkert use the lens of reproductive labor to provide a lucid comparative analysis of the colonial histories of surrogacy in india and adoption in korea, which pulls together and brings to view the commonalities in their approach to global fertility chains. feminist sts scholars have also broken down the false dichotomy between social constructivist and technological determinist perspectives by demonstrating that (assisted) reproductive knowledge, science, and technologies are, at once, products of social work and constitutive of forms of social life. particularly in relation to (post)colonial forms of social life, the scholarship on new “pioneering” reproductive technologies and practices such as cloning (franklin 2007), commercial surrogacy in india (pande 2014; rudrappa 2015; vora 2015; deomampo 2016; majumdar 2017; parry 2018) and mexico (schurr 2017), ivf in ecuador (e. roberts 2012), transnational egg donation and arts in israel/palestine (nahman 2013; moreno 2016; vertommen 2017) and south africa (namberger 2019; moll 2019), transnational adoption in the united states and central america (briggs 2012; posocco 2014) stands out for its attention to the material and discursive (dis)continuities with colonial modes of reproduction. further sts scholarship on race and arts has addressed the impact of imperial and colonial regimes of power on shifting notions of race that are threaded in and through the production, distribution, and consumption of arts, for example, in the marketized selection of egg cell providers and surrogates in the fertility industry, and the racialized imaginaries of national belonging, racial purity, and whiteness this often entails (nahman 2006; cromer 2019; newman 2019; valdez and deomampo 2019; falu 2021). this special section includes papers that productively draw on this sts scholarship by critically engaging with the nonhuman in divergent ways, notably through a focus on legal, chemical, and botanical technologies. sonja van wichelen, for instance, offers a compelling postcolonial sts account of the current legal debates on cross-border surrogacy. by conceptualizing private international law as a reproductive technology that imposes neoliberal forms of kinship on non-western contexts, she critically questions the liberal narrative of regulation to minimize risk and call out abuse in the disruptive surrogacy market. in contrast, bronwyn parry and rakhi ghoshal argue in their paper on india’s expanding reproductive empire that the relative lack of effective regulatory oversight has played a key role in enabling ambitious indian ivf providers to colonize the reproductive landscape with a superabundance of qualitatively inadequate “art” clinics in rural india and the global south. in a fascinating molecular feminist account of the emerging surrogacy industry in bhopal, deboleena roy frontstages the chemical compound methyl isocyanate (mic) and its ongoing historical involvement since the 1984 bhopal gas tragedy. in so doing, she creates a sociotechnical map of the imperial legacies of mic by tracing its “transplacental migrations” between fetal and surrogate bodies. with a similar sts focus on nonhuman actors and actants in global fertility chains, xan sarah chacko’s paper on botanic fertility chains in australia showcases what comes into clear relief when trees, plant, and seeds, rather than humans, are made central in the narrative of reproductive extraction, commodification, alienation, and neoliberal control. by analyzing the development of both colonial botanic gardens and neoliberal seed banks, she exposes the enduring logics of settler colonialism that pervade the historiography of plant extraction in australia. the third and final epistemic lineage in this special issue is black and indigenous feminist accounts on kinship and reproduction. black feminist scholarship on the gendered genealogies of atlantic slavery and “slave breeding” has been indispensable in demonstrating the constitutive role of racialized and anti-black reproduction in generating profits for the plantation economies (davis 1972; reddock 1985; spillers 1987; d. roberts 1997; morgan 2004). engaging with the, at times, unidimensional understandings of slavery as a (pre)capitalist system of production, these scholars have emphasized the agonizing position of enslaved women as (re)producers of the next generation of embodied property and forced labor power. feminist scholars in native, indigenous, and settler colonial studies (yuval-davis and stasiulis 1995; kanaaneh 2002; shalhoub-kevorkian 2012; tallbear 2013; smith 2015; anderson 2016), conducting research on themes including genes, motherhood, and sexual violence, have complicated land-focused analyses of colonial conquest and settlement by foregrounding indigenous women’s bodies and their reproductive capacities as a “gendered territory” (cuerpo-territorio) in birthing/unbirthing the next generation of enslaved or indigenous peoples (cabnal 2015). rather than epistemically separating the past and present colonial histories of conquest and slavery, as weinbaum cautions against in her insightful contribution to this collection, this special section insists on looking for the intimate connections between different racial capitalist formations, including settler colonialism, extractive colonialism, empire, slavery, and biocapitalism, and their intertwined reproductive grammars of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and conservation. drawing on lisa lowe’s (2015) generative understanding of the “intimacies of four continents” and the intricate ways in which europe, africa, asia, and the americas were, and are, connected through ongoing colonial relationships of dispossession and exploitation, we propose a relational approach to the myriad colonial lineages of assisted reproduction. colonialism is thus invoked here as a unifying frame to emphasize the intraconnectedness of different historical and contemporary racial formations and the shared reproductive hardships and struggles of formerly colonized and enslaved peoples against exploitation, dispossession, elimination, and dehumanization (byrd 2011; king 2019; king, navarro and smith 2020). rather than strictly viewing them as historically separate and distinct racial formations that—at most—intersect with each other, our integrative understanding of colonialism insists on looking for the analytical intraconnectivities within global racial capitalist formations. as already suggested in the opening vignette, there is a settler colonial grammar at play in israel’s “selective pronatalist” (kanaaneh 2002) fertility regime that is partially rooted in a demographic zero-sum game vis-à-vis palestinians, which continues to shape the racialized divisions of reproductive labor within national and international surrogacy arrangements in the fertility industry. gondouin and thapar-björkert, in their paper on the colonial continuities between transnational adoption and surrogacy, map the reproductive intimacies between us imperialism in post-wwii korea and british colonialism in india and the distinct yet intraconnected ways in which this required the exploitation of native women’s reproductive labor power. parry and ghoshal, in their historicizing account of the “perverse” market expansion of indian art provision in rural india and the global south, also analyze the intricately connected imperial and sub-imperial dynamics at play in this commercialization of in/fertility treatment. navigating these different epistemic traditions and their myriad articulations of (assisted) reproduction is not always an easy or comfortable endeavor, but one worth pursuing in the feminist spirit of careful critique. weinbaum, for example, remarks on the conspicuous silence in the existing art literature on slavery and slave “breeding.” she insists that “the history of atlantic slavery and the practice of slave breeding ought to be accounted for alongside the history of colonialism in scholarship on transnational reproduction and the global fertility chains that secure it, and too, in work on contemporary forms of racial capitalism including biocapitalism. in this we found productive disciplinary frictions that opened up conversations regarding what each scholarly tradition sees as being included and omitted from the others’ accounts. silvia posocco engages with weinbaum’s conceptualization of the slave episteme by introducing the finca episteme to make sense of the midand late twentieth-century transnational adoption flows in guatemala. she argues that as gendered and racialized spaces of indentured labor, capillary exploitation, and death, the “estado finca”—the export-oriented coffee plantations in guatemala—constituted the epistemic condition of possibility for the development of the transnational adoption industry. not all the papers in this collection necessarily foreground the ongoing relationality between different colonial iterations of arts. some articles carefully hone in on one specific colonial genealogy of reproductive science and technology. john gillespie, for instance, provides a provocative critique of sts understandings of expertise through an afro-pessimist account of the central, and not peripheral role of slavery-induced anti-black violence in the development of gynaecological expertise and science through a rereading of the well-cited examples of lucy, betsy, and anarcha, three enslaved women, as he calls them. chacko focuses on settler colonial histories of seed and plant conservation in australia, from nineteenth-century botanical gardens to present-day seed banks to poignantly argue that conservation is a reproductive technology of colonial extraction. yet, as a collection of papers that can be read through each other, the special section aims to highlight the long-standing relationalities in these ongoing constructions of colonialism, empire, and slavery in the world today and the reproductive logics, grammars, or epistemes through which they operate. apart from an insistence on the ongoingness and intraconnectedness of art’s variegated colonial lineages, another theme that draws together the different interventions in this volume is an attentiveness to arts’ mutually constitutive necropolitical and biopolitical logics. while much of the existing scholarship on assisted reproduction understandably focuses on the enabling side of reproductive technologies and the ways in which they (re)make, enhance, optimize, and (re)produce life, healthy babies, and families, all of the papers in this special section insist on shedding light on the violent histories of slavery, genocide, and extraction, of the breaking up of families and the unmaking of life, that this simultaneously requires, as the opening story on the regulation and operationalization of surrogacy in israel/palestine demonstrates (haritaworn, kuntsman, and posocco 2014). gillespie, for instance, introduces the concept of “primitive accreditation” to argue that “progress” and “knowledge credit” in reproductive science could only materialize through the spectre of black death and anti-black violence. by bringing in the agonizing experiments performed by the renowned physician j. marion sims on three enslaved women he offers, by drawing on the work of sylvia wynter, hortense spillers, and frank wilderson, a trenchant afro-pessimist critique of canonical reproductive science as a science of the “ungendered” flesh. posocco similarly centers the (queer) necropolitics of transnational surrogacy and adoption in the warand conflict-ridden borderlands between mexico and guatemala, bringing in the provocative term “genocide kinning” to describe family-making practices that are predicated on the exertion of genocidal violence against indigenous communities and individuals, and the forced removal and abduction of children. roy, in her analysis of the unexpected reproductive trajectories of the chemical compound methyl isocyanate from the 1984 gas explosion in the union carbide pesticide plant to the emerging surrogacy industry, uses michelle murphy’s generative concept of distributed reproduction to make legible the larger infrastructures of life and death that support the physical and physiological transmission of toxicities. this method of reproductive relationality is employed throughout this special section to signal points of connection between past and present colonial materializations and imaginaries of arts, between colonialism’s different reproductive grammars, between art’s life and death function, and the relationalities between different (assisted) reproductive technologies, including cross-border surrogacy, intercountry adoption, seed conservation, ivf, and slave breeding. three papers in this collection, by van wichelen, posocco, and gondouin and thapar-björkert, explicitly scrutinize the colonial dis/continuities between adoption and surrogacy, albeit from different perspectives. weinbaum and gillespie both conceive of “slave breeding” as the reproductive technology avant la lettre that made possible other arts and their racializing forms of reproductive labor. it is through these inspirational cross-pollinations between materialist, sts, black, indigenous, and decolonial feminist scholarship that the ideas and subsequent contributions of this special section emerged. there is an analytical and political urgency in understanding how reproduction is used, misused, and weaponized against women, workers, and people of color, as much as there is political urgency in understanding how reproduction is, and can be, a crucial and fertile sphere of resistance against oppressive regimes and formations. thanks to the wellcome trust, we were able to spend two intellectually stimulating days discussing each other’s work, developing theoretical concepts, and sharpening our analyses. meanwhile, brexit was unfolding, the last remnants of the uk welfare state were being dismantled, the amazon was burning, palestine was once again being attacked, and the far right was raising its destructive head across the globe, separating families at borders, telling black and brown people to “go back from where they came from” while urging “their” women to make more babies. analyzing historical and contemporary fertility chains from a (de/anti)colonial or abolitionist perspective allows us to discern (dis)continuities in the inextricable and often oppressive ways in which productive and reproductive systems coexist. hopefully it can also trigger collective analytical and political understandings of the social/biological reproductive realm as a crucial sphere of resistance against racial capitalist socio-historical formations, as was also demonstrated in the opening story. we hope that this special section might also be conceived as a reproductive technology, one that can assist us in developing and sharpening the analytical repro-tools needed to help secure wide-ranging reproductive justice for all.     postscript: cover image by sanaz haghani “a child is born” is the title of the cover image, based on a lithography print series titled "trace” (2015). in the series, i confront themes of immigration, known and unknown, familiar and frightening through visual representations of a cocoon. i borrow natural motifs and geometric forms from islamic tiles, broken down to invent new forms for their inspiring complex patterns and the repetition and generativity that offers the possibility of infinite growth. i hid the female figure and the form of the womb within floral and geometric patterns, given the historically taboo nature of these subjects in my culture. the invitation to design the cover for this special section marked the moment of another birth for me, the occasion to reveal the secret, to move beyond taboo and censorship. the cover pictures the female form poetically with fluid lines and interconnected patterns. meandrous designs and complex relationships become birth. forms and twists move in and out of the body. it is as if a butterfly gradually breaks free of her cocoon, pulling and pushing, stretching and contracting for an eternity before she finally emerges. a child is born. for more about sanaz haghani’s work, please visit https://sanazhaghani.com/.   notes 1 not all workshop 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https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/nationwide-strike-set-for-sunday-to-protest-exclusion-of-gay-couples-562929.       author bios sigrid vertommen is working as fwo postdoctoral researcher at the department of conflict and development studies at ghent university in a research project on the feminist political economy of global fertility chains , and is an affiliated scholar at the reproductive sociology research group (reprosoc) at the university of cambridge. for sigrid vertommen, this work was supported by the belgian fund for scientific research: (fwo, grant no. 1207320n) at the department of conflict and development studies at ghent university, h2020 marie skłodowska-curie actions (grant no. 704261) and wellcome trust (uns69788) at the department of global health and social medicine at king’s college london.   bronwyn parry is professor of global health and social medicine at king’s college london.   sarah cunningham-burley is senior lecturer in health and social sciences at uwe, bristol and affiliate scholar at the cambridge reproductive sociology research group. she has published numerous articles on cross-border reproduction and one monograph, extractions: an ethnography of reproductive tourism (2013, palgrave). microsoft word 68-1456-4-ward.docx ward, a.e. (2018). between the screens: brain imaging, pornography, and sex research. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-28. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © anna e. ward, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article between the screens: brain imaging, pornography, and sex research anna e. ward aeward7@gmail.com abstract this essay focuses on the use of brain imaging technologies to understand sexual arousal and orgasm and the issues that this practice raises for feminist theories of embodiment, visuality, and gender. in the first section, the paper examines the use of brain imaging technologies to measure the brain’s role during sexual arousal and orgasm and its circulation in popular culture, with a particular focus on fmri and pet technology. the second section examines the interplay between brain imaging technologies as the means of measurement and film pornography as the means of arousal, bringing together scholarship on pornography studies, visual studies, and science and technology studies. by interrogating the technology behind research into the neurology of sexual response and critically examining the use of one representation of sexuality to produce another, the paper investigates how gendered difference is manifested in this research and how the body is produced as a site of intervention. 2 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) rapid developments in brain imaging technologies since the 1980s have provided researchers a new means to pursue sexual response research, as well as tap into a larger fixation on the brain as the newest frontier of scientific research. brain imaging technologies can be considered part of what sawchuk (2000) terms “biotourism,” or “the fantasy that one can voyage into the interior space of the body without intervening in its life processes, with silent footsteps, without leaving a trace" (p. 21). the availability of technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) and positron emission tomography (pet) have allowed researchers unprecedented access to the "living" brain. efforts to understand sexuality and sexual response, in particular, have increasingly focused on understanding the neurological components of sexuality through the use of these technologies. how sexual response is measured and with what reveals not just changes in how sexual response itself is understood and who lays claims to this understanding but also how the body more generally is articulated and produced as a site of intervention. debates regarding the most effective measurement devices for gauging sexual response are central to the history of sex research. brain images in particular require a nuanced understanding of visuality and the circulation of images in order to understand effectively their role in scientific knowledge production.1 feminist and queer studies scholars have elucidated the limitations and dangers of brain imaging studies purportedly establishing neurological differences based on gender and sexuality. these studies have included critiques of the study of emotion (bluhm, 2013), sexual orientation (jordan-young, 2010), moral cognition (vidal, 2012), and generated a special issue of neuroethics focusing on studies of sex/gender and two critical anthologies neurofeminism (ed. jacobson, 2012) and gendered neurocultures (eds. schmitz & höppner, 2014). much of this scholarship draws attention to the bias at work in the assumptions driving research on sex/gender difference, the limitations and flaws in research design, and the questionable leaps in data interpretation. feminist and queer scholarly concerns are particularly 3 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) pronounced in the cases of brain imaging studies purporting to discover neurological differences that seem to confirm already pervasive and harmful stereotypes of marginalized groups.2 as scholars researching the dissemination of medical images have aptly noted, the visualization of “difference” is highly persuasive. as scientific research filters out into mainstream publications intended for non-specialist audiences, the complexity of these images is often radically simplified. the image, rather than an interpretation of a set of data, becomes literal ─ the brightly colored images of a pet scan, for example, are presented as pure reflection. as anne beaulieu (2000) argues, brain scans "are presented as though they were photographs, transparently rendering the brain's activity" (p. 46). the image is viewed as faithfully representing what the brain looks like or what it is doing, as if areas of our brain really do light up bright purple when we engage in complex memory or motor tasks, or, in the case of sex research, become sexually aroused. the images “function as visual arguments, serving as powerful proof of the interpretations made" (beaulieu, 2000, p. 43). sex research using brain imaging technologies often perpetuate troubling discourses of gender and sexuality, particularly as the research spreads out beyond specialized scholarly circles and into mainstream discourse. imaging technologies in sex research have the power to affect people’s lives profoundly, given their potential influence on medical and legal discourses, but their use also raises critical questions regarding embodiment and visuality. given the rapid advancements in sex research, particularly the contemporary use of brain imaging technologies and pharmaceutical interventions, it is critical to consider what the future holds and what direction science and technology might take us in the near future in the realm of sex. this essay outlines the contemporary focus on the brain as a site of understanding of sexual arousal and orgasm through brain imaging technology, the reliance on film pornography as the arousal stimulant in sex research, and the issues this practice raises for theories of embodiment, visuality, and gender. in the first section, i examine the use of brain imaging technologies to measure 4 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) the brain’s role during sexual arousal and orgasm and how this research circulates in popular culture, with a particular focus on fmri and pet technology. while some brain imaging studies of sexual response rely on direct stimulation as the means of arousal by either the subject or a partner, a significant number of studies rely upon film pornography to elicit arousal in research subjects. the second section examines this interplay between brain imaging technologies as the means of measurement and film pornography as the means of arousal, bringing together scholarship on pornography studies, visual studies, and science and technology studies. by interrogating the technology behind research into the neurology of sexual response and critically examining the use of one representation of sexuality to produce another, i demonstrate how gendered difference is manifested in this research and how the body is produced as a site of intervention. “much of her brain went silent”: brain imaging and the production of difference not surprisingly, physiological measurements of sexual arousal began with men. the externality of male genitalia seemed to offer a relatively simple avenue for early sex researchers to measure, record, and interpret male sexual arousal. the desire for physiological measurements grew from mistrust of self-report ─ particularly self-reporting in stigmatized areas of sexuality that subjects would be likely to report falsely such as pedophilia, and most notably, sexual orientation. the desire to find an accurate means of measuring female sexual arousal followed quickly on the heels of research on men but proved far more difficult for researchers. erection and ejaculation are viewed as reliable indices of male sexual arousal and orgasm whereas female sexual response lacks such universally accepted indicators. while women exhibit certain physiological responses such as increased blood pressure and heart rate during sexual arousal, these indicators are not specific to a sexual context; women may experience increased blood pressure and heart rate in response to fear, non-sexual physical exertion, and anxiety. 5 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) researchers needed a physiological measurement that functions as a clear indicator of sexual response, creating what dussauge (2013) calls an "epistemological anxiety of specificity" (p. 134) in sexual response research. most of the initial developments around the measurement of female sexual arousal mapped the male model of arousal onto women through a focus on vaginal blood flow. just as erection (a result of increased blood flow) is viewed as the primary indicator of male arousal, vaginal blood flow is a commonly used barometer of female sexual arousal (mulhall, 2004). part of this focus is a direct result of the development of erectile dysfunction (ed) medications for men; researchers and pharmaceutical companies were eager to determine how vaginal blood flow relates to sexual arousal in women and determine whether these drugs could be an effective treatment for female sexual dysfunction.3 however, researchers hoping to demonstrate the effectiveness of interventions for women modeled on the vascular approach have encountered outright failure as well as contradictory data in which the “objective” data fails to match the subjective reports of female research subjects. the brain, while a longstanding interest of some sex researchers, became a veritable obsession for researchers hoping to overcome the obstacles outlined above, particularly as ed drugs proved ineffective with women. advancements in brain imaging technologies, particularly fmri and pet, have dramatically influenced sex researchers hoping to overcome the limitations of other devices, particularly as they seem to allow us to understand the cognitive dimensions of sexual response and enable direct comparison between men and women. both fmri and pet are used to capture data on the brain in action, detecting levels of cerebral blood oxygenation in the case of fmri and using radioactive tracers to measure regional cerebral blood flow in pet. both technologies offer "a solution to the problem of how to obtain useful information about biochemical processes taking place in relatively inaccessible sections of living organisms" (dumit, 2004, p. 27). scholars 6 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) have pointed to the tenuousness of what these technologies actually measure and the assumptions driving their interpretation. first, what the technologies measure is taken to have a direct correspondence to neural activity; in the case of fmri, "a one-to-one correspondence between hemodynamic changes (the bold signal) and neuronal activity" is assumed (shifferman, 2015, p. 60). second, a key assumption guiding the use of these technologies is that the level of activity in a certain region of the brain is a barometer for how involved that region is during a given task or event. as bluhm (2013) highlights in her critical analysis of the use of brain imaging to study gender differences in emotion, the assumption driving the research is that more activity signals more emotion, despite a plenitude of evidence suggesting that this is not always the case (pp. 874-875). scholars have also drawn attention to the assumptions embedded in processes of subject selection for both imaging studies. selecting individuals for study based on predetermined criteria involves selecting for the variable being studied and selecting against possible intervening variables. dumit explains, “subject selection defines a concept of the normal human being in the form of an ideal (super)normal. abnormal categories, such as mental illness, are likewise normed as ideals. this process takes types of humans (or the generalized human as a type) as given, not to be discovered through the experiment but only to be correlated with brain activity” (p. 68). the process of subject selection then assumes not just an idealized “normal,” but also an idealized “abnormal.” while the images presented, particularly in mainstream non-scholarly publications, appear to “discover” abnormality, beaulieu explains that this is far from the case, "there are no 'blind' imaging studies where the neurological, psychological and medical status of the subjects have not been assessed prior to the scanning. in imaging settings, the label is known before the scanning begins; popular accounts show the images as providing the label" (2000, p. 47). whether the study concerns schizophrenia or sexual 7 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) dysfunction, the label is already in place. both jordan-young (2010) and dussauge (2013) offer cogent critiques of subject selection practices in studies attempting to understand possible neurological differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals. how sexual orientation is defined varies widely across studies, or "one's scientist's heterosexuals are another scientist's homosexuals," and these categorical decisions often fluctuate in ways that shore up researchers' theories of neurological components of sexual orientation, producing a sort of "scientific gerrymandering" to produce expected results (jordan-young, 2010, p. 168). subject exclusion practices also create an "idealized homosexual and heterosexual desire," (dussauge, 2013, p. 128) and thus an idealized homosexual and heterosexual subject, producing the "super" subjects that dumit cautions against. subject selection practices that produce "ideal (super)normal" and "(super)abnormal" research subjects go hand in hand with imaging technologies' relationship to the production of difference. fitsch (2012) argues that the statistical mapping in fmri is "always already a project to install a norm" and represents "visualized knowledge of a normative and categorizing regime" (p. 282). similarly, one of dumit’s key arguments regarding pet technology is that embedded into the very rationale and mechanism of the technology is a focus on difference; pet can be thought of as a "difference engine." he argues, “pet scans are far better suited to show differences and abnormalities than they are to show that someone is normal or that there are no significant differences between groups" (dumit, 2004, p. 12). the pet process involves injecting radioactive molecules into a research subject and tracking their decay with the scanning apparatus. “the scanner,” as dumit explains, “must properly collect the data, and then a computer must algorithmically reconstruct the data into a threedimensional map of activity, based on assumptions about the scanner and brain activity. the result is a dataset keyed to the individual’s brain activity, a brainset” (p. 59). the brainset is “normalized” using “mri data and digital brain atlases.” the last stage of the pet process, making data 8 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) presentable, produces the images we are accustomed to seeing as representative of medical imaging technologies such as pet. "at the heart of this process," dumit argues, "is a common, standard, and often encouraged practice of selecting extreme images" (pp. 59-60). the process of image manipulation emphasizes some differences and commonalities between different brains and suppresses others. because pet images function as visual arguments, using “extreme images” makes these arguments all the more persuasive. however, the practice, particularly as it filters out to lay audiences, often leads to grossly simplified understandings of complex brain processes. even the use of bright colors indicating particularly active brain regions visually implies that each region is a discrete, isolated entity as opposed to a dynamic part of an interdependent whole. the pet images that appear in both academic and mainstream publications are then compound representations of a series of normative assumptions, the result of a myriad of design and implementation decisions predicated on demarcating “normal” and “abnormal.” researchers also have a vested interest in highlighting difference in part because of the "publication bias" (bluhm, 2013, p. 876) operating in the domain of academic publishing wherein research purporting to find a difference between men and women, for example, is far more likely to be published than research finding none. this can lead to an "overemphasis on positive findings and a loss of null results" (rippon et al., 2014, p. 9), suggesting consensus where there is still significant debate. the presentation of dramatic differences is particularly pronounced in sex research and has a marked impact on the public perception of sexual and gender difference, notions of sexual "health" and parameters of normality/abnormality. the oversimplification of medical imaging data in the media and its limitations is not solely the responsibility of journalists looking for splashy headlines; researchers are just as likely to dramatize results and to draw on deeply ingrained assumptions about gender and sexuality in the interpretation of their findings. in order to demonstrate how researchers and the mass media co9 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) produce troubling narratives of sexual differences, it is helpful to take a detailed look at one representative study in particular. gert holstege and a team of researchers from the university of groningen used pet to measure regional cerebral blood flow in women during four states: rest, clitoral stimulation, simulation of orgasm, and orgasm. during the clitoral stimulation phased, each woman was stimulated by her male partner. during the “simulation” phase, participants were asked to perform “voluntary repetitive contractions of hip, buttock, abdominal and pelvic floor muscles in a rhythmic ‘orgasm-like’ fashion, while receiving stimulation to the clitoris” (georgiadis, 2006, p. 3306). the team’s presentations, and subsequent publications, provoked a tremendous amount of media attention, particularly in connection with two related claims: one, that certain areas of the brain deactivate during orgasm in women, and two, that there are distinct differences in brain activation during orgasm versus “simulation.” the team’s findings garnered attention from print and web media such as the daily mail, bbc news, times online, new scientist, the independent, and the guardian. headlines included “if she’s thinking, she’s faking,” “women fall into ‘trance’ during orgasm,” “there’s no faking it,” and “good sex really is mind-blowing for women.” one publication began by stating, “ladies, you may be able to fool your lover, but you cannot fool the machine” (witz, 2003). the bbc news online article, with the headline “scan spots women faking orgasm,” includes two images of colorized pet scans. one image’s caption reads “tell tale brain activity in a fake orgasm,” the other image’s caption reads “genuine orgasm: less brain activity” (roberts, 2005). these images, along with quotes from holstege himself, function as guarantees of scientific authority. no background on pet is given in the article, in fact, the technology used is never mentioned specifically ─ the subjects in the study are described as simply being placed in a “scanner.” thus, the images themselves function as a substitute for the totality of the pet measurement process. other than the oversimplified captions, the reader is given no information regarding how these images 10 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) are derived or what, and who, they represent. for example, the images are just as likely to be composites, or averages, of multiple scans from multiple women, representing not one individual woman’s brain during orgasm and during simulation, but rather the averages of multiple women during each stage. more importantly, colorization schemes have the effect of dramatizing difference in troubling ways.4 the first image, that of the “faked” orgasm, contains two separate spots, richly colored in yellows, oranges, and reds. the rest of the image is a uniform grayish blue, suggesting that no activity is occurring in the brain other than in these two isolated regions. in the second image, representing “real” orgasm, one of these spots completely disappears. the visual argument then encourages the dramatic interpretation that “much of a [woman's] brain goes silent” during orgasm (portner, 2009). the images and their media uptake are not the only source of dramatic interpretation. holstege himself declared at the 2005 meeting of the european society of human reproduction and embryology, “at the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings” (portner, 2009, p. 31). given that the team found deactivation in women in regions of the brain that researchers believe control fear and anxiety, suggesting that women need to “let go” of these emotions during orgasm, holstege’s advice to men is, “when you want to make love to a woman, you must give her the feeling of being protected” (roberts, 2008). holstege also links the deactivation of fear to the benefits of alcohol. “alcohol brings down fear levels. everyone knows if you give alcohol to women it is easier” (meikle, 2005). given research suggesting that alcohol consumption may actually lower sensitivity, decrease vaginal lubrication, and inhibit orgasm in women, as well as the troubling association between alcohol consumption and sexual assault, it is unclear what the "it" is that holstege is referring to here. holstege's interpretations of the pet data fit neatly into traditional gender roles and heteronormative scripts of seduction that situate women as in need of convincing by male sexual partners tasked with initiating sexual action and overcoming women's resistance. 11 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) the pornographic brain in may 2009, scientific american mind published a special issue entitled “your sexual brain.” in addition to articles on the “sexual brain” of animals, sex offenders and gay men, martin portner’s piece “the orgasmic mind” provides an overview of contemporary brain research into human orgasm with a significant focus on holstege and his team's research. in this case, it is not so much portner’s discussion of this research that i want to focus on, but rather, i want to draw attention to the opening image that accompanies the piece. the article opens with a full-page image featuring a woman’s head in shadowed profile with fireworks emanating outside the lower frame, with bursts of explosion appearing deep within the recesses of her brain and continuing in a fantastical upsweep of hair. the bright colors of the fireworks and the shadowy figure of the woman mimic the brain images the authors profiles. the woman herself is but a backdrop for the bright bursts of energy. this opening image bears a strange resemblance to another familiar visualization of women’s orgasm ─ gerard damiano’s hardcore pornographic film deep throat (1972). in the film, linda lovelace’s character is desperately seeking sexual fulfillment. as she describes to a friend, her sexual experiences are wanting; she desires “bells ringing, dams bursting, bombs going off, something.” after discovering that her clitoris is located at the back of her throat, linda finds a very willing male doctor to help her test out this new discovery. it is determined that lovelace requires “deep throat” in order to experience the heights of sexual pleasure. at the end of the film, she finally finds her fulfillment in the act of “deep throat.” the culminating “deep throat” scene is interspersed with footage of rockets launching, bombs bursting, and bells ringing as she performs oral sex on her male counterpart. these cuts stand in for lovelace’s pleasure and grow increasingly more rapid as the male recipient of the “deep throat” approaches climax and finally ejaculates. fireworks, and other explosive phenomena as a metaphor for orgasm are well-worn 12 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) tropes. so why make a comparison between two such seemingly disparate types of representation: one, a digital image in a contemporary science magazine, the other, a pornographic film sequence from the 1970s? the comparison is apt precisely because these representations overlap in ways far beyond simply a shared reliance on convenient metaphors for female orgasm. sex research on sexual response require means of stimulation ─ arousal and orgasm must be brought forth in research participants in ordered to be measured. while some studies like holstege's develop research designs that allow for self-stimulation or stimulation by a partner, the majority of sex research relies on film pornography in order to elicit sexual response. what makes this practice such a fascinating site of analysis with regard to the use of pornography in brain imaging studies is the body’s positioning between two forms of visualization. there is a complex interplay of screens involved in most sexual response research. one visual representation of orgasm (pornography) is screened and used to manufacture another (the brain scan image). the question becomes: what happens to the body positioned between these two screens? the use of visual stimuli is a longstanding and common practice within sex research, driven both by experimental limitations as well as the assumption that human beings are significantly attuned to and stimulated, sexually and otherwise, by visual stimuli. studies rarely provide much detail regarding the actual content of the film pornography used, however. park et al. (2001) and maravilla et al. (2000) simply state that an “erotic film video” (p. 74) and a “sexually explicit stimulus segment” (p. 918) were used respectively. arnow et al. (2002) describes the erotic video used as depicting “rear entry intercourse, intercourse with the female in the superior position, fellatio and sexual intercourse with the male in the superior position” (p. 1016). zhu et al. (2010) notes, "all five erotic video clips were selected from commercial adult films containing consensual sexual interactions between one man and one woman, of which two were non-intercourse (petting) and three were vaginal intercourse scenes" (p. 280). film titles, production companies, 13 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) year of release, and detailed descriptions of the film actors involved in the selected clips in terms of race, ethnicity, and age are absent from the descriptions. sexual response research on men is typically quite vague regarding the content of the visual stimuli used, perpetuating the notion that men will respond to most anything that is sexually explicit. research on women's sexual response as well as research comparing men and women's sexual response tends to be much more forthcoming with detailed explanations of the content of the video images. this practice derives from the idea, borne out by some research in this area, that women respond differently to sexually explicit material than men and to different types of stimuli, as well as criticisms that pornography objectifies women.5 key selection criteria in sexual response research using visual stimuli include the requirement that participants be responsive to sexually explicit imagery more generally in order “to ensure that visual sexual stimuli would be effective” (stoléru et al., 1999, p. 4-5). lack of responsiveness to sexually explicit imagery is coded as a conflicting variable that could throw off the data; responsiveness is coded as “normal”─ the normal human brain is one that responds.6 indeed, as dussauge points out, as soon as participant responsiveness to visual stimuli is established, the specificity of the arousal stimulus seems to drop out of the analysis in most sexual response research. drawing on sara ahmed's work on queer phenomenology, dussauge argues that this disappearance strips sexual arousal of its "towardsness," or the "specificity of our relations to the objects of sexual desire." (dussauge, 2015, p. 449). this is further compounded by the practice of subtraction in brain imaging research: subtraction entails imaging subjects performing a mixed sequence of two different tasks that are (supposedly) separated by a single cognitive element, ending up with two different time series that can be compared to verify whether the activity in the region of interest was different between the two tasks. once performed, the image of the "simpler" task is subtracted from the complex one, creating 14 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) a difference image that (ideally) has isolated an area of increased or decreased activation. that area is considered to be the seat of the additional cognitive element separating the two tasks. (shifferman, 2015, p. 63) in the case of sexual response research using visual stimuli, researchers go to great lengths to isolate what they hope to be the specifically "sexual" component of the stimuli. this is accomplished by showing research subjects a range of neutral and control stimuli designed to establish a baseline and to provoke emotional, but non-sexual, responses. documentary films, sports clips, humorous episodes, and videos of people talking are examples of control stimuli used in sexual response research. in order to isolate the neurological response to the sexually explicit video, the control stimuli response is subtracted from the sexually explicit stimuli response, with the assumption being that the difference will capture the specifically sexual response elicited in the subject. or, as dussauge puts it, "what counts as sexuality is thus defined as much by what does not count as sexual pleasure/desire" (2013, p. 133). this practice of subtraction in brain imaging further strips sexual response of its "towardsness" in that what is captured is not so much a response to a specific stimulus, but a remainder between a presumptively non-sexual stimulus and a sexual stimulus. the implication, of course, is that what is isolated is sexual response at its most basic, a response that is universal regardless of the particular stimulus. debates concerning the selection of visual stimuli within sex research, particularly regarding women, in many ways rehearses longstanding debates within feminist theories of representation addressing issues of spectatorship, identification, and objectification. linda williams’s work has systematically engaged both the horror genre and pornography, linking them through her explication of “body genres.” a body genre is one that depicts “the spectacle of the body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion” through a “focus on what could probably best be called a form of ecstasy […] a quality of uncontrollable 15 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) convulsion or spasm—of the body ‘beside itself’ with sexual pleasure, fear and terror” (williams, 1991, p. 4). body genres not only depict these “uncontrollable convulsion[s] or spasm[s]” on screen, but also seek to elicit them in their audiences ─ the success of these genres is often measured by the degree to which the audience sensation mimics what is seen on the screen.” in a strange way, brain imaging technology offers a perspective on the pleasure women, and men, take in pornography, translating the genre’s ability to elicit “uncontrollable convulsion or spasm” into data. barbara maria stafford (1996) describes pet scanners as “provid[ing] portraits of the brain caught in the act of thought” (p. 24). in the case of sex research, medical imaging technologies provide images of the brain “caught in the act” of pleasure. pleasure is no longer dependent on “subjective” affirmations nor limited to meanings read off the body, but rather read into the body to such depths that the body recedes from view. just as damiano’s camera leaves the scene of climax in deep throat, relying on stock footage of bombs bursting and rockets launching to signify pleasure, brains imaging leaves the “scene” of the body. not only is pleasure reduced to a disembodied head, but the head itself is stripped of its fleshiness. the use of pornography in brain imaging studies positions the body between two forms of visualization. one visual representation of sexual response (film pornography) is used to manufacture another (a brain image). just as the prerequisite skill of a male adult film actor is his ability to perform on cue, participants in brain imaging sex research must be able to synchronize their performance with the demands and limitations of the technology. the radioactive tracers used in pet scanning, for example, often have short half-lives, requiring that data be acquired within a finite window of time. the oxygen tracer used in holstege and his team’s study has a half-life of only two minutes, necessitating that the subject “reach orgasm in the first minute after tracer injection” (georgiadis et al., 2006, p. 3306) during the orgasmic phase of the research. “six orgasms were ill-timed” and, therefore, not included in the analysis (p. 3308). thus, the orgasms represented in brain imaging 16 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) research are those that synch with the temporal limitations of the technology. williams argues that the temporality of fantasy structuring pornography is a “utopian fantasy of perfect temporal coincidence"; the representation of pleasure is “on time!” (williams, 1991, p. 11). a variety of tactics are used in adult film to give the appearance of “perfect temporal coincidence,” particularly in regard to male orgasm. shots are edited together to provide the appearance of seamless temporal continuity, often “the money shot” is filmed separately from the sexual acts displayed, and occasionally, other actors are called in to perform “the money shot” in cases where the original actor cannot. similarly, the “directors” in medical imaging sex research cue the performance, requiring temporal coincidence in order for the representation to be captured so that it can be successfully reproduced for its intended audience. the action of the filmic body is translated into the immobility of the subject’s body inside the scanner, which is then translated into the action implied in the bright bursts of neurological activity, or temporal shift from activity to inactivity in the case of regions of the brain “shutting down” during orgasm, depicted in brain scans. both pornographic film representations of orgasm and brain scans of orgasm rely upon the “on time!” delivery of a perfectly synchronized body in tune with the apparatus. unlike pornographic film, however, brain imaging offers up these “on time!” moments in their isolation ─ as moments. pornographic film may secure temporal sequencing through the delivery of perfectly timed moments of climax, but they do so from within the very logic of a temporal sequence, however manufactured it may be. medical imaging delivers these moments in their isolation. vivian sobchack’s (2004) discussion of temporality in relation to photography is useful: the photograph freezes and preserves the homogeneous and irreversible momentum of this temporal stream into the abstracted, atomized, and essentialized time of a moment. […] [t]he photograph constructs a space one can hold and look at, but in its conversion to an object to behold that space becomes 17 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) paradoxically thin, insubstantial, and opaque. it keeps the lived body out even as it may imaginatively catalyze ─ in the parallel but dynamically temporalized space of memory and desire ─ an animated drama. (pp. 144-145) while medical images are not photographs in the traditional sense, they do appear in the pages of journals, magazines, and newspapers as photographs and often function and circulate through a photographic register. the brain scan of orgasm presents the “animated drama” of orgasm as an “abstracted, atomized and essentialized time of a moment,” collapsing multiple temporalities. just as multiple temporalities are made to appear as one continuous temporal sequence in pornographic film, oftentimes even incorporating the temporalities of multiple actors to appear as one, the brain scans we typically encounter collapse multiple brains, and therefore multiple temporalities, into one image. thus, the moment is, in fact, several ─ what we often see is not one moment of one orgasm of one body, but multiple moments, multiple orgasms, multiple bodies. individual bodies are folded into, collapsed, reduced, and dispersed into an image of pure abstraction, an idealized image of orgasm; “electrobricolage” at its finest (mitchell, 1992, p. 7). in the case of sex research, the body’s position between two screens ─ the screen of pornography and the screen of medical imaging ─ renders it more transponder than flesh and blood. the “uncontrollable convulsion or spasm” of the film image is transferred through the body and captured as its digital output and image. the brain becomes the penultimate, yet strangely disembodied and passive, seat of orgasm. the future is coming the drive to “capture” orgasm has often gone hand in hand with the desire to manufacture it in increasingly complex and sophisticated ways. with the rapid advancement in sex research, particularly the contemporary use of brain imaging technologies and pharmaceutical interventions, it is critical to consider what the future holds and what 18 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) direction science and technology might take us in the near future in the realm of sex. given the strange interplay between pornography and the brain in the science of orgasm, it is helpful to consider a film that explicitly interrogates what might happen if science, technology, and pornography should continue to merge. what are pornography and science’s possible futures? shu lea cheang’s film i.k.u. (2000), a “japanese sci-fi porn feature,” blends the genres of science fiction and pornography, interrogating the possible futures of sex and technology’s entanglement. the film’s narrative follows reiko, a replicant initially built to assist humans in colonizing space, but who now works alongside other replicants as an i.k.u. coder for the genom corporation. genom corporation, “a worldwide leader in the field of digital desire entertainment,” uses i.k.u. coders to collect “ecstasy data” through sexual contact with humans. once reiko’s “biomatic disk” is full, i.k.u. runners are dispatched to retrieve the data via penetration with a dildoshaped device. this data is then sold as data chips to the public in vending machines and at convenience stores, allowing users to experience “sexual excitement without physical friction” by “sending pleasure signals directly to the brain.” cheang’s future vision is a world where corporations battle one another for control over the domain of sex and “business controls personal pleasure,” provoking questions of the human along the way (i.k.u. the movie, n.d.). indeed, the film, released in 2000, comes at the tail end of a decade’s worth of donna haraway-inspired cyborg theory, activism, and art (haraway, 1991). i.k.u. offers a version of the possibilities and limitations of imagining cyborg revolutions ─ their possibilities for opening up classic binaries, such as nature/culture, human/machine, human/animal, and individual/collective, as well as the limitations inherent in depending upon technologies born from military, state, and corporate ambitions. i.k.u., eve oishi (2007) argues, “articulates the insistent tension produced by trying to conjure a future, a narrative of social justice and change, within a system founded on 19 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) corporate and governmental control” (p. 33). the desire to maximize pleasure is, in this case, bound up with the corporate ambitions of genom just as recent advances in pharmaceutical treatments for sexual dysfunction and pleasure enhancement arise from and are disseminated by profit-driven companies. yet, unlike other science fiction films and their imaginings of rather bleak sexual futures in which corporations and governments conspire to control populations via highly regulated, disembodied pleasure, i.k.u. does not fall prey to a back-to-nature resolution ─ itself also a fantasy. there is no nostalgic "man out of time" as in woody allen's film sleeper (1972) and marco brambilla's demolition man (1993), in which the protagonists long for a different future in the form of a return to good, oldfashioned (heterosexual) intercourse. nor does i.k.u. share the oversimplified sense of alarm and paranoia of the film brainstorm (1983) in which a team of scientists develop the means to record people’s experiences, allowing people to re-experience moments in their past or partake in those of others. the dangerous possibilities of this "brainstorm" technology first becomes evident when one of the team members becomes obsessed with a recording of someone else's sexual encounter; not content to merely encounter the experience as is, the team member creates a loop of one section of the tape, the moment of climax. the man views the tape endlessly and enters a coma-like state, suffering from an overload of sexual stimulation requiring extensive rehabilitation. whereas sleeper and demolition man humorously highlight the limits technology places upon a mythology of natural pleasure, brainstorm underscores the dissolution of limits that technology may bring to pleasure. in this case, the technoscientific overwhelms, taking us beyond our limits, beyond the body's bounds.7 brainstorm provokes the question, not of what a body can do, but rather, what can a body sustainably do? while sharing many of the same themes with brainstorm, particularly the provocation of being able to experience the pleasure of another via a recorded neurological experience, i.k.u. complicates the 20 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) assessment of both our technoscientific future and present. braidotti (2002) argues, “[contemporary] science fiction…is the defamiliarization of the ‘here and now’, rather than dreams of possible futures,” (p. 184). it is in this register that cheang's work operates, in part through her use of both the genre conventions of hardcore pornography and common thematics in science fiction that challenge the limitations of a two-sex model of biological sex, heteronormative figurations of pleasure, and the divisions among nature/culture/machine. cheang's use of the conventions of hardcore pornography alongside her interrogation of the increasing encroachment of corporate, technoscientific interventions provokes questions that prevent simplistic nostalgia for a return to a mythologized past when sex and sexual pleasure were "pure," while also not letting the question of power slip from our view. if the technology in cheang's vision seems close at hand, her fantasy of a dissolution of binary sex and gender seems a far stretch from the focus of most contemporary sex research in which shoring up the differences between men and women seems as central as ever. brain imaging seems to sidestep morphological difference between male and female bodies through a reduction of sexual response to neurological processes, offering the seductive possibility of directly comparing and contrasting men and women's orgasms. the production of gender difference is often at the heart of sex research using brain imaging technologies, particularly in its circulation in mainstream media, with serious ramifications for broader understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. while feminist and queer scholars should remain wary of researchers' claims to find gendered neurological differences in sexual response via brain imaging, that does not mean that difference should be dismissed out of hand. as wilson (2004) argues, "it is parochial to expect that sexualities circulate only in non-biological realms, that they could be contained to cultural domains, or that they could be arrested at the cell membrane or synaptic gap" (p. 61). indeed, my concern with brain imaging research on sexual response is less a dismissal of the technologies themselves, or a repudiation that neurological differences 21 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) exists between brains, but rather a concern with the flattening of sexuality into neurological function and the continued production of bias-driven research in the domain of sex difference that insists on perpetuating assumptions and generating interpretative leaps that confirm already existing ideas about gender, sexuality, and embodiment. it may be necessary to heed jordan-young and rumiati's (2012) advice on future research in this area that "a more sophisticated and ethical approach to understanding sex/gender in the brain and behavior will require the somewhat paradoxical strategy of turning away from sex/gender differences in our search" (p. 305). what variables are we missing when we incessantly turn back to gender, or sexual orientation, as the only difference that matters? as numerous scholars have pointed out, despite the growing body of research using brain imaging to study sexual response, we still know very little about the characteristics we think we are observing when we sift through the data. for example, as jordanyoung and rumiati (2012) and vidal (2012) demonstrate, neurological difference does not necessarily indicate a hardwired difference, as is so often assumed, but may arise from the very social and contextual domain that is so often obscured by the research design itself. given the vastly different worlds men and women often occupy in almost every conceivable contextual domain, it is "utterly predictable that we would observe group-level differences between men and women in various cognitive functions" (jordan-young & rumiati, p. 312). so, rather than the perception that feminist scholars are "anti-difference" (roy, 2016) in the context of neuroscience, it may just be that we find claims to have "discovered" difference thoroughly uninteresting in their obviousness. more importantly, the assumption that neurological difference indicates hardwiring reinforces the idea that the brain (and by extension bodily materiality) is static, rather than itself a site of flux and transformation. the drive to understand the brain through medical imaging technology, as i have suggested, is intimately bound up with the desire on the part of researchers to develop effective means to identify the causes of sexual dysfunction and potential remedies, as well as maximize 22 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) sexual pleasure for a broad population. the brain becomes an idealized site of intervention, the place where sexuality truly resides, and attempts to remedy sexual dysfunction become focused on the manipulation of the brain’s functioning. our contemporary focus on brain imaging and the neurology of sexual functioning to capture the subjective "feeling" of arousal and orgasm, as well as the extensive use of film pornography as the arousal mechanism in sex research, opens up the possibility envisioned in both brainstorm and i.k.u. that what we may want most is to experience not the height of our own sexual pleasure, but someone else's. the reduction of sexual response that results in our attempt to find comparable forms of measurements across bodies may actually flatten and restrain the very differences these studies so often presume to find. the multitude of data omitted in any given imaging study ─ the ill-timed orgasms, the physiological indicators that do not neatly coincide with one another, the subjective assessments of the participants themselves that do not match the physiological indicators, and the arousal that is brought forth as a response to control stimuli ─ all these responses simply vanish in our efforts to "drill down" (jordan-young, p. 155) to a singular response. what drives the search for techno/pharmacological interventions into sexual response, the hunt to understand how orgasm is experienced at the neurological level, and the use of film pornography in sex research may be yet another instance of wanting difference, of wanting an(other) ─ the perfectly "on time!" other of film pornography, an(other) morphology with different capacities than our own, or even that other version of ourselves who is idealized as someone who was once or is soon to be. whatever the fantasy driving the search, what we find in the neurological answer of the brain scan is likely to be, not difference, but only more of the same. acknowledgements special thanks to rachel lee, kathleen mchugh, and abigail saguy for their comments on earlier iterations of this work. thank you to the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions. 23 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) notes 1 for an overview of the history of debates regarding measurement technologies and sex research, see waidzunas & epstein (2015). 2 for excellent reviews of the history of feminist critiques of neuroscience, see kaiser and dussauge (2015) and roy (2016). 3 see loe (2004) for an outstanding history of viagra and the codification of erectile dysfunction as a disorder. see tiefer (2006) and fishman (2004) for analyses of the relationship between sex research and the pharmaceutical industry. 4 for an excellent visual argument regarding the problems in colorization schemes, see brian murphy’s set of images reproduced in dumit (2004), plate 12. for dumit’s discussion of murphy’s images, see p. 94-95. 5 see e. laan et al. (1994), mosher & mcian (1994), and rupp & wallen (2008). for evolutionary perspectives arguing that men are “pre-wired” to respond to visual sexual stimuli more than women, see malamuth (1996). interestingly, the idea that men are more responsive to sexually explicit stimuli contradicts the widely publicized findings of meredith chivers (2004) who found that men are "category specific" in their response to visual stimuli (i.e. heterosexual men respond only to stimuli featuring women) and that women are much more fluid in their response, becoming aroused by a broad range of sexual visual stimuli. 6 this is particularly pronounced in the widely debated work of reiger et al. (2005) who used self-identified bisexual men's lack of genital response to sexually explicit visual stimuli featuring two women, and their heightened response to stimuli featuring two men, as evidence that male bisexuality does not really exist as sexual orientation. see jordan-young (2010) and waidzunas & epstein (2015) for an excellent critique of this research. 7 a contemporary example of such a threat might include the set of issues that has accompanied pharmaceutical treatments for erectile dysfunction, particularly viagra. the widespread dissemination of viagra has been accompanied by reports of its abuse as a recreational drug and its potentially life-threatening side effects. the warning that accompanies 24 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) advertisements for ed drugs also signifies the possibility that its effects may overwhelm the limitations of the body ─ “in the rare event of an erection lasting more than 4 hours, seek immediate medical help to avoid long-term injury.” (see http://www.viagra.com/) references arnow, b. a., desmond, j. e., banner, l. l., glover, g. h., solomon, a., polan, m. l., ... & atlas, s. w. (2002). brain activation and sexual arousal in healthy, heterosexual males. brain, 125(5), 1014-1023. beaulieu, a. (2000). the brain at the end of the rainbow: the promises of brain scans in the research field and in the media. in j. marchessault & k. sawchuk (eds.), wild science: reading feminism, medicine and the media (pp. 39-54). london, uk: routledge. bluhm, r. (2013). self‐fulfilling prophecies: the influence of gender stereotypes on functional neuroimaging research on emotion. hypatia, 28(4), 870-886. bluhm, r., maibom, h. l., & jacobson, a. j. (2012). neurofeminism: issues at the intersection of feminist theory and cognitive science. london, uk: palgrave. braidotti, r. (2002). metamorphoses: towards a materialist theory of becoming. cambridge, uk: polity press. cheang, s. (director). (2000). i.k.u. [motion picture]. eclectic dvd distribution, 2000. chivers, m. l., rieger, g., latty, e., & bailey, j. m. (2004). a sex difference in the specificity of sexual arousal. psychological science, 15(11), 736-744. damiano, g. (director). (1972). deep throat [motion picture]. united states: gerard damiano film productions. dumit, j. (2004). picturing personhood: brain scans and biomedical identity. new brunswick, nj: princeton university press. dussauge, i. (2013). the experimental neuro-framing of sexuality. graduate journal of social science, 10(1), 124-151. 25 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) dussauge, i. (2015). sex, cash and neuromodels of desire. biosocieties, 10(4), 444-464. fishman, j. r. (2004). manufacturing desire: the commodification of female sexual dysfunction. social studies of science, 34(2), 187-218. fitsch, h. (2012). (a)e(s)th(et)ics of brain imaging. visibilities and sayabilities in functional magnetic resonance imaging. neuroethics, 5(3), 275-283. georgiadis, j. r., kortekaas, r., kuipers, r., nieuwenburg, a., pruim, j., reinders, a. a. t., & holstege, g. (2006). regional cerebral blood flow changes associated with clitorally induced orgasm in healthy women. european journal of neuroscience, 24(11), 3305-3316. haraway, d. (1991) simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. new york, ny: routledge. i.k.u. the movie. (n.d.) retrieved from http://www.i-ku.com/eng_h/iku/index.html. jordan-young, r. m. (2010). brain storm: the flaws in the science of sex diferences. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. jordan-young, r. m., & rumiati, r. i. (2012). hardwired for sexism? approaches to sex/gender in neuroscience. neuroethics, 5(3), 305-315. kaiser, a., & dussauge, i. (2015). feminist and queer repoliticizations of the brain. espacestemps. net. retrieved from https://www.espacestemps.net/en/articles/feminist-and-queerrepoliticizations-of-the-brain/. laan, e. et al. women’s sexual and emotional responses to maleand female-produced erotica. (1994). archives of sexual behavior, 23, 153167. loe, m. (2004). the rise of viagra: how the little blue pill changed sex in america. new york, ny: nyu press. malamuth, n. m. (1996). sexually explicit media, gender differences, and evolutionary theory. journal of communication, 46(3), 8-31. 26 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) maravilla, k. r., deliganis, a. v., heiman, j., fisher, d., carter, w., weisskoff, r., ... & echelard, d. (2000). bold fmri evaluation of normal female sexual arousal response: sites of cerebral activation correlated with subjective and objective measures of arousal. in proc int soc magn reson med (vol. 8, p. 918). meikle, j. (2005, june 21). good sex really is mind-blowing for women. the guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/jun/21/research.science. mosher, d.l. and p. mcian. (1994) college men and women respond to xrated videos intended for male or female audiences: gender and sexual scripts. journal of sex research 31, 99-113. mulhall, j. p. (2004). vascular testing in female sexual dysfunction. current sexual health reports, 1(1), 12-16. oishi, e. (2007). " collective orgasm": the eco-cyber-pornography of shu lea cheang. women's studies quarterly, 35(1/2), 20-44. park, k. et al. (2001). a new potential of blood oxygenation level dependent (bold) functional mri for evaluating cerebral centers of penile erection. international journal of impotence research, 13, 73-81. portner, m. (2008). the orgasmic mind: the neurological roots of sexual pleasure. scientific american mind, may 15, 2008. retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-orgasmic-mind. rieger, g., chivers, m. l., & bailey, j. m. (2005). sexual arousal patterns of bisexual men. psychological science, 16(8), 579-584. rippon, g., jordan-young, r. m., kaiser, a., & fine, c. (2014). recommendations for sex/gender neuroimaging research: key principles and implications for research design, analysis, and interpretation. frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 650. roberts, m. (2005, june 20). scan spots women faking orgasms. bbc news online. retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4111360.stm. roy, d. (2016). neuroscience and feminist theory: a new directions essay. signs: journal of women in culture and society, 41(3), 531-552. 27 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) sawchuk, k. (2000). biotourism, fantastic voyage, and sublime inner space. in j. marchessault & k. sawchuk (eds.), wild science: reading feminism, medicine and the media (pp. 9-23). abingdon, uk, routledge. schmitz, s., & höppner, g. (eds.). (2014). gendered neurocultures: feminist and queer perspectives on current brain discourses. vienna, au: zaglossus. shifferman, e. (2015). more than meets the fmri: the unethical apotheosis of neuroimages. j. cogn. neuroethics, 3, 57-116. sobchack, v. (2004). carnal thoughts: embodiment and moving image culture. berkeley, ca: university of california press. stafford, b. (1996). good looking: essays on the virtue of images. cambridge, ma: the mit press. stoleru, s., gregoire, m. c., gerard, d., decety, j., lafarge, e., cinotti, l., ... & collet, c. (1999). neuroanatomical correlates of visually evoked sexual arousal in human males. archives of sexual behavior, 28(1), 1-21. tiefer, l. (2006). female sexual dysfunction: a case study of disease mongering and activist resistance. plos medicine, 3(4), e178. trumball, d. (director). 2000. brainstorm [motion picture]. united states: warner home video. vidal, c. (2012). the sexed brain: between science and ideology. neuroethics, 5(3), 295-303. waidzunas, t., & epstein, s. (2015). ‘for men arousal is orientation’: bodily truthing, technosexual scripts, and the materialization of sexualities through the phallometric test. social studies of science, 45(2), 187-213. williams, l. (1991) film bodies: gender, genre, and excess. film quarterly ,44 (4), 2-13. wilson, e. a. (2004). psychosomatic: feminism and the neurological body. durham, nc: duke university press. 28 ward catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) witze, a. (2003, november 25) your brain on sex or love: it looks different. dallas morning news. zhu, x., wang, x., parkinson, c., cai, c., gao, s., & hu, p. (2010). brain activation evoked by erotic films varies with different menstrual phases: an fmri study. behavioural brain research, 206(2), 279-285. bio anna ward is an independent scholar whose work focuses on embodiment, sexuality, and representation. she received her phd in women's studies from ucla in 2010 and has taught at swarthmore college and smith college. her work has appeared in numerous publications, including camera obscura, women's studies quarterly, and the scholar and feminist. keaney, jaya. 2025. “artifice.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © jaya keaney, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license artifice jaya keaney university of melbourne jaya.keaney@unimelb.edu.au keywords reproductive technology, racism, artificial, mimic, depopulation, replication thinking population in the present quickly finds the lockstep of white nation fantasies and their selective pronatalism. while the openly white supremacist populism of trump 2.0 offers a graphic form, resonant discourses materialize in australia in intersecting “crises” over migration and fertility. these sites are longstanding bedfellows in a foucauldian tale of population as a paradigm-shifting eighteenth-century innovation, governing people as an economized mass via the management of sex (foucault 1978, 25–26). here i suggest that thinking with the artificial is an enabling tool for tracing how population operates in the present through new technologies and technics of racialized colonial governance. one vivid recent iteration of population thinking in australia is the construction of international student migration as a problem. the (chinese) international student is the latest sacrificial figure in a long australian tradition of yellow peril, a displaced response to contemporary housing and social welfare scarcity. as in many white nation imaginaries, this fear—and the carceral, closed border response for which australia is world renowned—emerges adjacent a hum of concern about falling birth rates, and the imminent “population collapse” of wealthy countries in europe, asia, and north america. as articulated in op-eds and research dissemination by journalists, demographers, statisticians, economists, and others, this population anxiety is often accompanied, in both liberal and populist framings, by concern about subsequent economic decline, growing geopolitical vulnerability, and the demise of the family as the unit of social reproduction for an aging population (see, e.g., davies 2024; morris-grant and yussuf 2024; wright 2024). the language of crisis folds familiar rhetorics of http://jaya.keaney@unimelb.edu.au/ roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jaya keaney, 2025 2 stock and species, heteronormative belonging, and stratified reproduction into the affective present. these anxieties about population futures are often paired with two speculative technofixes of interest to feminist sts: artificial intelligence, to bridge local labor shortages and free “us” from tedious or degraded work (atanasoski and vora 2019);1 and fertility interventions, which promise to enhance procreative capacity amid later childbearing and the infertility effects of environmental change. we can draw these scenes together via the anachronistic term artificial reproduction, to consider how artifice is an important conceptual frame through which social relations are organized and reshaped today. artifice is an enabling tool for feminist pursuits of population in (at least) two ways. first, it can foreground how a heteronormative model of genealogy that throbs within histories of population anxiety is increasingly joined by a logic of replication. in her essay on generic drugs in mexico, cori hayden (2012) adapts a foucauldian logic of population by refracting it through empirical research on biosimilars, pharmaceuticals that are highly similar but non-identical versions of original reference drugs. here, population anxieties take non-conceptive and nongenealogical forms, instead following logics of copy and imitation. while fertility interventions have been a paradigmatic site for feminist critiques of genealogy, which highlight long tendrils of eugenics, reproductive injustice, and pronatalism, reproductive biomedicine is also a field of replication. doubles, synthetics, and replicas proliferate: the embryo in glass, the synthetic gamete of in vitro gametogenesis, the artificial womb, the sperm donor chart that materializes the fiction of race.2 thinking with artifice might allow us to work across the genealogical and the replicative, the reproductive and the informatic, in making sense of how population thinking increasingly unfolds through the twinned management of reproductive governance and binaries of good and bad replicas— synthetic copies, biosimilars, good mimics of intelligence and gestation, fabricated embryos that are too similar to the originating model to legally persist. second, we can approach artifice as a technic of racialization. who has been rendered an artificial, robotic, or subhuman population so that others may flourish in their full humanity? how is technoscience “innovating” and deepening these historical distinctions, while obscuring histories through the hype of the new (benjamin 2016)? in artificial reproduction, the “artificial” dislocates reproduction from kinship. as feminist scholars have argued since the 1980s, reproductive technology splits reproduction into different components that may produce multiple forms of parenthood (e.g., social, genetic, gestational). but centering race and coloniality foregrounds a longer arc of enslavement and dispossession as the precondition for imagining gestation as distinct from motherhood, or, of black women as ungendered flesh—a grammar that reverberates today in the “slave episteme” of contemporary reproductive economies (spillers 1987; weinbaum roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jaya keaney, 2025 3 2019). while vital to my thinking, these theorizations don’t always fully grasp racial/reproductive capitalism as it manifests in the southern hemisphere, and in australia’s ambivalent place within asia. in my australian-based work on surrogacy and donor conception, asianness emerges constantly, as reproductive worker (e.g., the indian or thai surrogate), as advanced yet underregulated destination for medical travel, or as desired capital (the beautiful eurasian child) (keaney 2023). these narratives are inextricable from a history of asianness as constituted through imperial discourses of artifice, synthetic, or surplus. as anne anlin cheng argues, asian femininity is neither ungendered flesh nor mere thing, but “a human ontology indebted to commodity, artifice, and objectness” (2018, 415–16)—inseparable from situated imperial histories.3 thinking with artificiality from the southern hemisphere highlights how australian population anxieties take shape through regional inter-asia formations that racialize some reproductive and laboring subjects through the prism of subhuman artifice. artifice is thus a modality of population governance, of envisaging stratified life across time, and perhaps also a tool for feminist efforts to part with the organic and the “natural” in assembling our responses. notes 1 this technoliberalist discourse circulates long-standing racial capitalist logics, in a dynamic that neda atanasoski and kalindi vora (2019) theorize as the “surrogate human effect.” 2 as a technology of knowing and accounting, the chart has a long racialized history, such as in slave ledgers, skin color classification charts, and census data collection on ancestry. this history is a condition of possibility for the sperm donor chart and the racial categories it naturalizes. on the chart, see blass et al. 2025, 3n8. on racial capitalism and racial-genetic thinking in the fertility industry, see keaney 2023; weinbaum 2019. 3 see also ari larissa heinrich’s work on chinese biopolitics and surplus, which mobilizes the concept of mimesis as a conceptual fulcrum (2018, 10–14). references atanasoski, neda, and kalindi vora. 2019. surrogate humanity: race, robots, and the politics of technological futures. duke university press. benjamin, ruha. 2016. “innovating inequity: if race is a technology, postracialism is the genius bar.” ethnic and racial studies 39 (13): 2227–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1202423. blass, zach, melody jue, and jennifer rhee. 2025. “introduction: chart of transitions.” in informatics of domination, edited by zach blass, melody jue, and jennifer rhee, 1–32. duke university press. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1202423 roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jaya keaney, 2025 4 cheng, anne anlin. 2018. “ornamentalism: a feminist theory for the yellow woman.” signs 44 (3): 415–46. https://doi.org/10.1086/696921. davies, amanda. 2024. “australians are having fewer babies and our local-born population is about to shrink: here’s why it’s not that scary.” the conversation, april 29. https://theconversation.com/australians-are-having-fewer-babies-and-ourlocal-born-population-is-about-to-shrink-heres-why-its-not-that-scary-228273. foucault, michel. 1978. the history of sexuality. vol. 1, an introduction. translated by robert hurley. pantheon books. hayden, cori. 2012 “population.” in inventive methods: the happening of the social, edited by celia lury and nina wakeford, 172–84. routledge. heinrich, ari larissa. 2018. chinese surplus: biopolitical aesthetics and the medically commodified body. duke university press. keaney, jaya. 2023. making gaybies: queer reproduction and multiracial feeling. duke university press. morris-grant, brianna, and ahmed yussuf. 2024. “latest abs population data shows growth despite declining birthrate.” abc news, december 12. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-12/abs-australia-population-data2024/104716618. spillers, hortense. 1987. “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book.” diacritics 17 (2): 64–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747. weinbaum, alys eve. 2019. the afterlife of reproductive slavery: biocapitalism and black feminism’s philosophy of history. duke university press. wright, shane. 2024. “forget sky-high migration, australia’s got bigger population problems.” sydney morning herald, march 28. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/forget-sky-high-migration-australia-s-gotbigger-population-problems-20240325-p5fexs.html. author bio jaya keaney is a lecturer in gender studies in the school of social and political sciences at the university of melbourne. her work across the fields of feminist technoscience, queer, and feminist theory and cultural studies explores reproduction, racism, and queer feminist practices of embodiment and inheritance. https://doi.org/10.1086/696921 https://theconversation.com/australians-are-having-fewer-babies-and-our-local-born-population-is-about-to-shrink-heres-why-its-not-that-scary-228273 https://theconversation.com/australians-are-having-fewer-babies-and-our-local-born-population-is-about-to-shrink-heres-why-its-not-that-scary-228273 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-12/abs-australia-population-data-2024/104716618 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-12/abs-australia-population-data-2024/104716618 https://doi.org/10.2307/464747 https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/forget-sky-high-migration-australia-s-got-bigger-population-problems-20240325-p5fexs.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/forget-sky-high-migration-australia-s-got-bigger-population-problems-20240325-p5fexs.html artifice keywords notes references author bio     book review | not my type: automating sexual racism in online dating, by apryl williams (stanford university press, 2024)     golden m. owens university of washington gmowens@uw.edu   at several points in not my type: automating sexual racism in online dating, sociologist and multidisciplinary scholar apryl williams refers to a comment made by christian rudder, cofounder of the dating app okcupid: “if your matches are ugly, then you are ugly.” interrogating the flippancy of rudder’s words, williams demonstrates the inherent racism, sexism, and transphobia of his statement by revealing one simple truth: what is considered “ugly” by dating app algorithms is constructed according to normative, whiteness-based standards of attractiveness, masculinity, femininity, and overall value. examining how online dating platforms privilege whiteness at the expense of marginalized people, not my type explores the concept of sexual racism, which williams defines as “personal racialized reasoning in sexual, intimate, and/or romantic partner choice or interest” (28). williams asserts that sexual racism has been automated by online dating platforms via algorithms that filter who daters see by who algorithms think individuals will find attractive, based in part on users’ own looks and in part on the proliferation of white beauty standards. discussing how these sites reinforce racial hegemony and sexual racism through whiteness-centering algorithms, williams asserts that online dating companies should be held accountable for their role in automating and digitizing eugenics via their automation of “sexual racism, transphobia, and violence against marginalized people” (6). chapter 1 examines the myth of neutral personal choice, highlighting that despite users’ seeming ability to select whomever they want on dating apps, their selections are always already impacted by whiteness. discussing how users’ evaluation of desirability is influenced by “a society that relies on racist thought to uphold white normative belief systems” (30), williams contends that people “make choices about potential marriageability and desirability based on whether the person on the screen before them can conform to societally constructed racialized and gendered expectations of masculinity, femininity, desirability, and attractiveness” (29)—expectations that uphold whiteness as the paragon of these categories. chapter 2 details how sexual racism is automated by dating platforms, highlighting how the companies behind these platforms have “formulated an imagined user who is highly attractive and would prefer to only be shown other highly attractive users” and created algorithms designed to determine attractiveness in a manner that perpetuates sexual racism (55). chapters 3 and 4 examine how sexual racism impacts online daters, incorporating interviews from twenty-seven white users and seventy-three users of color, respectively. chapter 3’s interviews demonstrate how online dating algorithms and white users’ internal sexual racism work together to perpetuate this racism on dating platforms; chapter 4 interrogates how sexual racism has damaged daters of color, leading to dating discomfort, feelings of unsafety, and internalized racism. chapter 5 examines how safety can be enhanced for all dating app users through attendance to the safety needs of users of color, calling for greater safety measures for all users and asserting that only through making specific, anti-racist plans can users of all backgrounds be truly protected. williams concludes not my type by reiterating that “automated sexual racism helps to normalize the way we do race” (165), warning that users should not trust dating companies if they continue to obfuscate their access to and use of our data. she further contends that dating companies must be held accountable for “creating environments where racial bias thrives” (177). williams’s book offers a compelling and convincing articulation of sexual racism, the ways it is automated, and how it harms marginalized users. in detailing how sexual racism “connotes a set of beliefs, practices, and behaviors at the intersection of what is considered acceptable racialized gendered performance” (6), williams thoroughly excavates how sexual racism has come to dominate web-based dating platforms, how it situates whiteness as “the normative expression of sexuality, healthy desire, and acceptable gender role tropes” (28), and how it unambiguously impacts minoritarian users. additionally, williams provides intriguing discussions about dating platforms and social media, highlighting how the content users engage with can be used to filter users recommended to them on dating sites—a discussion that further highlights how sexual racism operates on these platforms and within the biases held by their users. while the book is successful in its examination of sexual racism and its impact on marginalized people, there are several areas that could have benefited from further exploration, including williams’s discussion of gender and gender performance. though she marks gender as central to sexual racism, marking this form of racism as “a convergence of beliefs about acceptable performance of masculinity and femininity scripts at the intersection of gender and race” (74), her discussion of this performance mostly focuses on perception, rather than on performance itself—on how people’s gender is perceived by others, rather than on how gender is itself performed by individuals. while to some extent this is useful, demonstrating that individual gender performance is less important than users’ opinions about it, a discussion of how users perform gender could have amplified this discussion. additionally, though williams states early on that “how we view gender and race are both central to understanding sexual racism” (28), she spends considerably less time focusing on gender than she does on race: her discussion of gender in relation to race is mostly limited to chapter 1, beyond which it appears mostly in a list of terms (e.g., “race, gender, attractiveness, and desirability”) or in women of color’s discussions of racial fetishization. that williams includes interviews from several women and nonbinary folx does flesh out some of this gender discussion, but there is comparatively less emphasis on how gender impacts individual experiences of sexual racism, perhaps due to online dating systems’ own flattening of gender and gender dynamics. furthermore, there are a couple inconsistencies between williams’s stated goal for the book and its actual contents. despite williams’s repeated assertion that her ultimate goal is “to amplify the voices of marginalized users and help readers to become more informed about their own biases” (177), the chapter wherein she interviews users of color (chapter 4) is one of the shortest. while she does include sections of some interviews in some other chapters, it is still noteworthy that the majority of the book focuses less on the actual voices of marginalized people and more on how the platforms she discusses, and their societally biased algorithms, enhance their marginalization. additionally, williams notes in the introduction that she interviewed “indigenous/native” users as part of her study (25), yet no such interviews appear in the text or in the appendix wherein she lists the demographics of interviewees. this inconsistency raises questions as to why indigenous voices were excluded and why their exclusion is not referenced. and while williams professes to amplify all marginalized users, she predominantly explores the impact of sexual racism on black women, dedicating significant space in chapters 4 and 5 to discussing their struggles specifically. while i appreciated this emphasis (as a black woman myself), this focus is not directly addressed in the book aside from williams’s assertion that she is employing a black feminist lens, which she marks as “actively work[ing] to dismantle inequality for all people groups—not just black feminists” (14). as such, williams’s focus on black women specifically could have been better foregrounded for readers who may have desired a more in-depth discussion of other marginalized groups, whose voices are notably less prominent. williams does excel in her use of scholarship, beautifully weaving black feminist ideologies and science and technology studies in a manner that provides a unique lens on race, gender, digital technologies, and bias. her incorporation of work by scholars such as ruha benjamin, eduardo bonilla-silva, safiya umoja noble, and yarden katz successfully intervenes into scholarship about racism in/on online platforms: her use of katz’s argument that “the history of computing and the internet are deeply tied to eugenics and racialized science” (83) and her reading of benjamin as articulating how “tech companies make decisions about their community guidelines and terms of use that support the expression of racism and sexual harassment” (140–41) particularly highlight how race and the digital are always already interconnected, a theme that pervades not my type. in the future, i would recommend that williams engage with scholars such as wendy chun and lisa nakamura, both of whom have written extensively about race, performance, and bias in digital spaces, especially in works such as programmed visions (chun 2011) and cybertypes (nakamura 2002). overall, not my type is an intriguing work that compellingly examines the importance of excavating the inherent othering enabled by and proliferated through online dating platforms. the book’s foreword, written by noble, cogently describes the text as “an important work that looks at the granular, specific ways that online dating companies practice algorithmic (and human) sorting” and “helps us better understand the particulars that inform a broad set of digital technologies that are remaking human interaction” (xi). i am interested to see how future scholarship might further williams’s work on racism in online platforms and the concept of sexual racism as an understudied form of racism, and hope that readers will be inspired to evaluate their own internal biases when it comes to sexual racism and the digital realm. references chun, wendy hui kyong. 2011. programmed visions: software and memory. mit press. nakamura, lisa. 2002. cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet. routledge.     author bio golden m. owens is an assistant professor in cinema & media studies at the university of washington. her research and teaching interests include representations of race and gender in american media and popular culture, artificial intelligence, and racialized sounds. cheng   article   "el tabaco se ha mulato": globalizing race, viruses, and scientific observation in the late nineteenth century jih-fei cheng scripps college jcheng@scrippscollege.edu on september 18, 1881, the french doctor and naval officer jules crevaux arrived by steamboat to the small agrarian town of ambalema, colombia. known historically as la ciudad del tabaco ("the city of tobacco"), the town formed a well-worn path among travelers and conquerors. during the sixteenth century spanish conquest, ambalema became recognized as a pueblo de indios ("indian village") and gained notoriety for its cultivation of exquisite and highly valuable tobacco ("ambalema," n.d.). upon his arrival to the town, crevaux observed that ambalema’s tobacco economy had entered into a state of decline.1 drawing upon the local spanish colloquialism used to describe tobacco crop failure, crevaux (1883) commented: "el tabaco se ha mulato," loosely translated as "the tobacco has become mulatto" (p. 401). this reference, "el tabaco se ha mulato," is recognized as the earliest recorded descriptor of the "tobacco mosaic" disease, which would become the first virus known to western modern science when dutch botanist martinus beijerinck coined the term "virus" to describe its transmission in 1898.2  by the early twentieth century, the tobacco mosaic virus would inaugurate the field of virology. yet the racial reference to the tobacco mosaic virus, "el tabaco se ha mulato," would linger in the annals of science and continue to influence the conceptualization of viral existence.   during the nineteenth century postslavery and post-spanish independence latin america, the colonial term mulato continued to describe individuals of african-european and indigenous-african descent (rappaport, p. 61). whereas, during the spanish colonial period, individuals of "spanish-indian parentage" were referred to as mestizo and were encouraged to integrate into society, mulatos were held as separate and excluded from sociopolitical belonging in order to maintain the institution of slavery (martínez, pp. 144-145). thus, the appearance of the mulato reference in the postslavery nineteenth historical and scientific record for virus discovery reveals how new modes for rationalizing the unseen sub-microscopic world were tied to colonial regimes of race and sex. within this colonial logic, africanness operates as a signifier for biological reproductive degradation. furthermore, the mulato signification helped to drive the later scientific conceptualization of the virus as an unassimilable, strange, and threatening element existing among biological beings. historians of science and technology describe the "tobacco mosaic virus" (tmv) as an "experimental model" upon which knowledge about all viruses has been built (creager, 2002). it was also the first virus to be scientifically imaged (in 1939), which, according to nicolas rasmussen (1997), provided empirical proof for the existence of all viruses. yet little attention has been paid to how viral infection was imagined by the nineteenth-century scientists who could not see it. why was the first virus discovered in tobacco? what does the reference in the scientific colonial archive to "el tabaco se ha mulato," which preceded virus discovery, suggest about the roles race and sex played in perceiving viral existence? what do the adaptations of racial and sexual thinking in virus discovery say about this period of euro-american empire? this article examines crevaux’s record, and ongoing scholarly references to it, as an archive for modern viruses and their scientific observation. the archive reveals that the conceptualization of the tobacco virus was tied to the diffusion of scientific knowledge and national security through colonial ideologies of race and sexuality, even during the latin american decolonization movements of the late nineteenth century. since tmv was visually imperceptible into the first few decades of the twentieth century, i argue that its scientific conceptualization relied on prevailing pathological discourses—namely colonial racial and sexual beliefs, and the mapping of the attendant visual cues onto the tobacco plant body. in effect, the scientific concepts developed around viruses were hitched onto concerns about proper racial and sexual reproduction generated during the earlier period of western empire. this article addresses how colonial racial and sexual ideas were extended through virus conceptualization, and considers the ways these ideas were shrouded in a biological science undergirded by nation-building and concerns about global security. the article proposes that although global security regimes maintain western imperialism and the geopolitical status quo, it is vital to consider how virus conceptualization sustains alternate social possibilities that imagine the end of empire. to demonstrate how virus knowledge proceeds on a colonial racial and sexual foundation, i analyze iterations of "el tabaco se ha mulato" in scientific and historical texts written between the late nineteenth century and the contemporary era. rather than treat viruses anachronistically as sheer biomedical fact, i show how meaning about viruses has accrued over time through constant literary translation and visualization of the phrase "el tabaco se ha mulato" in scholarship. these accretions in meaning have formed a palimpsest such that the underwriting of race and sex in viral logic appear faint, only to be quickly covered over by scientific rationalization. to read the scriptio inferior of the modern virus archive, i use the methods of scientific observation offered in colonial travel writing to turn the gaze back onto the observer. commencing with crevaux’s text, i retool the methods for literary translation and visualization, or visual translation, performed in colonial scientific writing. examining the visual translations of "el tabaco se ha mulato" as it moves across the archive reveals contradictions in scientific conceptualizations of viruses from as early as crevaux’s incorporation of the phrase into scientific travel writing to contemporary ideas about virus existence. these contradictions point to fundamental failures in the operation of global security regimes, prompting us to imagine social worlds that lie beyond the horizon of national belonging and the ensnarement of empire. a visual archive for the modern virus after beijerinck coined the term "virus" in 1898, tmv founded an entire category of infectious agents, becoming the prototype for this entity called viruses thereafter.3  viruses eventually were identified as sub-cellular, sub-microscopic, non-living pathogens that carry genetic material, but lack a metabolism for reproduction. hence, they are understood to rely on host cells to generate. viruses are also regarded as integral to processes in genetic mutation, propagating genetic diversity and propelling evolution.4 the earliest identified viral pandemics, such as the 1918 spanish flu, were understood to have been due to a mutational virus whose transmission was believed to be greatly enabled by the increased movement and intimate quarters of military soldiers during world war i. these conditions of mobility and proximity initiated global concern about the potential of viruses to spread (barry, 2004). in other words, viruses have been conceived as simultaneously central to and a threat to biological life. they emerge in the instances where national borders are expanded and/or shored and where bodies commingle promiscuously across the lines of scrimmage. as crucial as they are to questions of biological existence and species survival, viruses remained invisible until tmv was crystallized in 1935 and, in 1946, photographed through the electron microscope (zaitlin, 1986, p. 110).5 although the technique for isolating, visualizing, and proving tmv’s discrete existence was disputed by experts, the authority of the ability to visually verify viruses as a category of infectious agents was widely accepted (kay, 1986). in turn, the electron microscope retained its status as a privileged mediator of scientific "truth."6 with the foundation of viruses in the proof of microscopic imaging, we find a turn in logic in which visual evidence predominates over written form, even as the products of visual methods are riddled with contradictions and elusiveness.  according to alberto cambrosio, daniel jacobi, and peter keating (2008), the capacity of microscope photographs, or micrographs, to administer scientific proof required that "linguistic or logical reasoning [be deemed] a mere supplement to the visual component" (p. 136). the visual language used to describe the appearance of such images no longer operated metaphorically, but literally and inconspicuously. that is, the images were regarded by scientists as speaking for themselves, and in speaking for themselves, the images were viewed as self-evident. further deconstruction of the self-evident truths embedded in scientific images requires that we examine how colonial scientific travel writing and the historical conditions of its audience reception helped shape scientific reading even before the advent of micrographs. in the case of virus discovery, tracing crevaux's deployment of visual translation for the spanish colloquialism "el tobacco se ha mulato" provides a means for perceiving how race and visibility are aligned in science such that scientific self-evidence is rendered in explicit racial terms. figure 1.  the title page of jules crevaux's voyages dans l'amerique du sud (1880-1881), which contains the archival reference to the tobacco mosaic virus he encountered during his fourth expedition into the south american interior. in colonial scientific writing, visual translation became a fundamental methodology for the spread of scientific discourse well before the late nineteenth-century discovery of tmv (bleichmar, 2012). in applying these modes of visual criticism and analysis, we see in crevaux's travel writing a challenge that tobacco crop failure posed to modern scientific observation. printed in 1883, voyages dans l'amérique du sud (1880-1881) is densely packed with his observations of southern american peoples and landscapes (figure 1). in the description of his encounter, and its traces in contemporary scientific and historical texts, there remain visual and semantic excesses irresolvable by scientific rationalization. the following is an excerpt from his journal, which has been cited repeatedly in scientific and historical literature. as he states:  depuis quelques années le tabac d'ambalema est atteint d'une maladie : el tabaco se ha mulato, comme disent les habitants du pays dans leur langage imagé, c'est-à-dire que « le tabac est devenu mulâtre ».  la feuille est racornie comme une feuille de chou ou comme des cheveux de mulâtre.  on attribue cette maladie à la sécheresse relative de ces dix dernières années.  la première année, la récolte est abondante mais le tabac est médiocre. la seconde année, on recueille moins de feuilles saines mais elles sont de meilleure qualité.  la troisième année enfin, le produit est exquis mais insignifiant comme quantité (p. 401, emphasis included). for a few years ambalema tobacco has been suffering from a disease: el tabaco se ha mulato, as the locals would say in their imaginary, which is to say, "the tobacco has become mulatto."  the leaf is shriveled like a cabbage leaf or like mulatto hair.  this disease is attributed to the relative dryness of the past decade.  the first year, the harvest is plentiful but the tobacco is mediocre.  the second year, fewer healthy leaves can be collected but they are of better quality.  finally, in the third year, the product is exquisite but insufficient in amount (emphasis included).7 crevaux's observation illustrates the transit between nineteenth century natural and biological sciences and between colonial and modern industrial worlds. it reveals how scientific beliefs about life take form in concert with economic imperatives. strikingly, crevaux's reference to a mulato subject collapses the distinctions between plant and human life, with the mulato subject assuming both human and non-human characteristics. although he notes the phrase is proper to ambalema locals, he translates it into french and provides at his own accord racialized visual descriptors of the diseased plant: the fragmented mulato body—a specimen of "mulatto hair"—creates or stands in as synecdoche for a visual and universal language of science. this visual translation effectively synthesizes the colonial racial order with the emerging discourse of biology as a form of scientific universalism. as a method for communicating scientific observation, visual translation is used by crevaux to make knowledge transparent.  figure 2.  crevaux's reference to the later-named tobacco mosaic virus as "el tabaco se ha mulato" appears on the page above (right) amid etched printings of hand drawn maps and pictures of townspeople. what crevaux's visual translation points to, however, is not so visibly evident. although voyages is filled with illustrations of peoples, landscapes, and maps, none of these images refers specifically back to "el tabaco se ha mulato" (figure 2). readers must infer the feeling and touching of the dry surfaces of hair and plants represented, a movement that is presumably similar to the way crevaux's eyes and/or hands had touched his subjects. crevaux's mulato reference draws together a correlation between humans and plants; the mulato is a connective figure that stands in for a conception of "life." yet the mulato figure's abstraction into a piece of hair likened to a shriveled cabbage or tobacco leaf renders this racialized body as sub-par to the human. the mulato forms a visually textured mark of racial difference in the field of modern scientific vision.   while it is impossible to assume the vantage point of the late nineteenth-century reader, it might be safe to say that crevaux's use of the term mulato provided a referent—a feeling of quality—without having to conjure a clear image of biological continuity between humans and tobacco plants. that is, it offered a visual rendering of the literal transformation of leaf into human body.8 dryness in texture is presumably a quality believed to be shared by the racialized subject's hair and the afflicted plant leaf, and a designation that marks these biological bodies as diseased and compromised consumable products. for crevaux, free market principles can be visually inscribed; racial difference is constituted as a visual scale with which to evaluate market quality. according to historian of science daniela bleichmar (2012), since at least the eighteenth century, the texts and images in spanish and french colonial scientific writings helped train its reader to become "an expert observer" (p. 90). bleichmar proposes that european colonial scientific writing was crucial to the scholarly and popular geopolitical mapping of the world. the lay reader experienced scientific expeditions through travel writing. the careful illustrations and paintings that adorned these books held the "capacity to abstract, visually incarnate, and mobilize plants that remained…unseen and unknown, even three centuries after spaniards first encountered new world nature" (bleichmar, 2009, p. 455). by reading about the mulato descriptor for the tobacco pathogen, victorian readers of crevaux's text perceived an unruly, imaginary frontier for science and its lay audience.9 the perceived wildness of the south american landscape was sensationalized in u.s. news stories about crevaux's demise during the expedition while journeying through bolivia, where crevaux and his crew were reportedly "attacked by a mob of tobas indians" and "massacred" after reaching "teyo, the capital of tobas."10 the crew's fate was reported in the commercial section of at least one california newspaper amidst deliberations on south american foreign diplomatic relations. these news media accounts frame south america as a new and unpredictable frontier for western modernization—a world in need of law and order and a last bastion of conquest for euro-american empire.11  crevaux's visual translation of the mulato figure shows how scientific books about south america were especially important to the operation of the global market economy. in their books and other writings, naturalists often provided the collector with aesthetic criteria for the "order and taste" of specimens for display in one's home (bleichmar, 2012).12 bleichmar argues, the "images, words, and objects…informed part of a globalizing project…which consisted in creating and circulating abstracted natural facts" (pp. 445-446). in other words, the movement of nature in the form of scientific image commodities connected the european domestic space aesthetically and economically to the south american landscape. furthermore, these books functioned to normalize the victorian reader as the ideal consumer of said images while estranging colonial racial subjects in their representational forms. by comparing hair to plant leaves, crevaux reduces the mulato subject to a representational natural commodity. he makes the term mulato a visual aesthetic, a racialized signifier that is removed from the body of an imagined mulato subject. through the abstraction of racial difference in his scientific observations, crevaux participated in the ongoing disenfranchisement of indigenous subjects and the extraction of labor from formerly enslaved african descended peoples for the purposes of tobacco agricultural industrialization. however, the abstraction of the mulato as a representational commodity also underlies the anxiety around the unclear terms for policing race and segmenting the labor market in the postslavery period of the new colombian republic. representing race: tobacco and surveillance at the agro-industrial frontier  the mulato mentioned in crevaux's travel writing, and as referenced by ambalema locals, is a racial representation that visually codes the value of tobacco as a consumer product while abstracting racialized laborers as commodifiable, representational subjects, a necessary condition for the institution of social and economic control in the new colombian republic. however, this mulato reference without an image also yields excessive representational meaning, which even the late nineteenth century reader may have sensed. one can begin marking this excess through a reversal of the scientific gaze, or through an analysis of the accretion in the visual logic of this racial representation. the excesses in crevaux's racial representation reveal the harsh economic and political conditions to which workers were subjected in the process of tobacco agricultural industrialization in ambalema.  tobacco agri-business held a unique function for colombia specifically, and for imperial projects generally, during the nineteenth century. social control and labor productivity were crucial for industrializing nations attempting to gain footing in tobacco's global market. according to latin american historian john p. harrison (1952), tobacco was colombia's "first contact" with the world of nineteenth-century free trade. the export of tobacco reversed the course of colombia's economic stagnation (harrison, 1952, p. 163).13 at the height of colombia's lucrative cultivation of tobacco, ambalema's export directly supplied major european and u.s. cities such as london, bremen, and new york (harrison, 1952, p. 163). after the 1851 colombian abolition of slavery, african, indigenous, and mulato subjects were denied land rights and forced into debt peonage.14 as elsewhere in post-independence latin america, laws were created to arrest those classified as "idlers, gamblers, dancers, day-laborers," and other "vagrants," and to force them to work on tobacco lands (harrison, 1952; salvatore, 2000, 2003). those who resisted were flogged and starved (harrison, 1952). armed guards patrolled roads and paths to maintain the orderly means of production and prevent direct sale of tobacco by workers. french-educated colombian physicians closely monitored the social and sexual behavior of these laborers, accusing the laborers of failing to properly rotate crops and spoiling the harvest through excessive liquor consumption and the transmission of venereal diseases that resulted in compromised work performance (garcía, 2007). crevaux's focus on the mulato figure points to increased state and scientific monitoring of racialized laborers in the effort to maintain control over their lives and of the means of production. workers' social and sexual habits were interpreted to underscore arguments about whether they had nurtured a strong work ethic that would translate into the increased productivity necessary to prepare tobacco for mass-market consumption. the observational methods of crevaux also allowed for the victorian consumer to take up practices of colonial social monitoring from afar, surveilling and exploiting the representational bodies of racialized workers by reading crevaux's text. by the mid-nineteenth century, the advent of tools to mechanically reproduce images, such as photographic engraving, altered travel writing. unlike his late eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century counterparts who employed painters, crevaux hand-illustrated and photographed his subjects. these images were recreated as engravings or etchings on metal plates that were then developed into print images in his published expedition volumes.15 crevaux's books are exemplary of how the arrangement of words and images printed from etched and engraved reproductions effected a kind of photorealism that affirmed the identity and perspective of a consumerist european literate class.16 crevaux's observational eye cultivated the tasteand class-making visual practices that distinguished the victorian "self" from the un-modern "other." his travel writing fused the practices of scientific and consumer surveillance in victorian visual culture through textual and pictorial relay. words and images worked together to aid an imagined european audience in creating "perceptions of themselves as a community defined by leisure and consumption" (denisoff, 2009, p. 254). the privileged victorian perspective encouraged "pleasure-seeking and consumerism" as a mark of european middle-class life (denisoff, 2009, p. 254). moreover, the text and visuals in voyages reified the presumed objectivity of photography that also privileged european modernity. put simply, the empiricism in crevaux's scientific gaze was bound up with the desires of its victorian readership. the aesthetic impact of photorealism in travel writing highlights the growing influence of late nineteenth-century technologies of vision to, according to walter benjamin, enact the "desire…to bring things ‘closer' spatially and humanly" (as cited in rony, 1996, p. 9).17 for crevaux, and for the reader of his text, the simultaneously biological and spatial remoteness and nearness of the "other" compressed space and time. this paradoxical sense of intimacy generated a kind of pleasurable consumption of the racialized "other" that could be enacted by european audiences from a distance. the late nineteenth century observer arrives simultaneously at the town of ambalema and at the threshold of humanity. crevaux's travel writing yields not simply an experience with travel, but the instantaneity of images and products to represent and make aesthetically pleasurable—for scientists and the lay reader alike—the contradictions in mass industrialization. the pleasurable consumption of racial representations in scientific travel writing helped rationalize the slave-like conditions for racialized laborers and the unequal economic and structural development of nations. while visual consumption was central to earlier modes of naturalist writing, it became ever more integral in the uses of biological science to render taste and value in the global market by the time of crevaux's writing. representational consumption in scientific texts facilitated the extraction and abstraction of racialized industrial labor. specifically, it became a means for aesthetically and ideologically disciplining racial and class segmentations necessary for industrial labor and consumerism. yet even as greater emphasis was placed on visual technologies to expand the victorian reader's perception of the world, the abstraction of racialized representations ironically meant a less clear image by which to recognize, track, and maintain racial boundaries. in this emergent visual economy, crevaux's visual translation of the mulato figure painted a strange picture for racial difference. passing infection: the racial character of viruses although the term mulato underscores colonial racial and sexual systems for classification, its visual translation in crevaux's text also highlights late nineteenth-century and ongoing permutations in race. by "sexual systems" i refer not only to the act of sex, but to the gender and (hetero)sexual norms of biological reproduction that get coded as family lineage or heredity. crevaux's writing reveals how the threat of racial passing correlates closely with the undetected passing of viral infection from one biological body to the next. embodied through the figure of the mulato are marginalized societies that existed on the edges of the global frontier, which challenged systems of racial and sexual administration and came to represent social possibilities alternative to modernization and the world market economy.  the unstable visual identification of the term mulato applied to racialized persons can be traced back to its sixteenth and seventeenth century colonial usage across the atlantic, and even further to fourteenth and fifteenth century iberia. focusing on the new kingdom of granada, which roughly corresponds to contemporary colombia and venezuela, joanne rappaport (2014) argues that one's phenotype did not immediately limit one's social categorization and status. unlike the commonly cited "casta," which delineated racial categories in new spain (colonial mexico), "mulattos … [of] african-european and indigenous-african parentage…or similar permutations could also be considered part of the european population, particularly if they were members of the elite" (p. 61). hence, appearance was not the only method to mark social classification. instead, to understand colonial conceptions of race in new granada, one should consider how race was "passed on" according to inherited social status. maría elena martínez (2008) analyzes how, in sixteenth century spain, statutes surrounding limpieza de sangre ("blood purity") hinged on the belief that muslim or jewish lineage was passed down in spite of conversion to christianity, making successive generations vulnerable to cultural and biological contamination through blood and breast milk. in this historical moment, the proto-type for race emerged, identified as a process of sexual (and later biological) reproduction and heredity. the suspicion of blood impurity, and requisite certification proving otherwise, also opened the door for scrutinizing people who were mixed with others of european, african, and indigenous american descent (martínez, 2008; rappaport, 2014). in short, the promulgation of social categories and the simultaneous lack of a clear visual schematic for measuring race means social boundaries were not simply slippery but shifted according to context, assuring that racial passing occurred with regularity. if passing is conditional, then the structure of race also changes in the instances in which passing takes place. rappaport argues that the colonial vision used for socioracial groupings, such as "mestizo," "mulatto," "indio," "negro," and "español," operated through "floating signifier[s] that can only be interpreted situationally" (pp. 272-273). she highlights the use of calidad (quality)—which includes traits such as individual status, social ranking, comportment, clothing, and language—as a mode of classification, noting that categorization was, at times, legally and socially modifiable, in spite of physiognomic appearance. apparent in the phrase "el tabaco se ha mulato," racial passing became a metaphor for describing crop infection or the passing of viruses from one plant to another. conceptualizing the virus as an invisible pathogen suggests that race, as a structure for and measure of human quality, was also undergoing profound changes in relation to systems of visual surveillance. for the developing colombian nation, race became increasingly demarcated according to the quality of one's labor, measurable by production. by pathologizing workers, the extension of slave-like conditions was elided and the association between racialized and disenfranchised status was naturalized. as mentioned earlier, state and medical authorities described tobacco workers as exhibiting improper consumer behavior, sexual immorality, unhygienic practices, and a tendency toward illness. workers were racialized as unfit for sexual and biological reproduction and their pathological "racial character" could be passed undetected onto other biological bodies, including the plants with which they came into contact. their poor racial character was reflected in their low productivity and inherent inability to participate in the developing colombian republic. denied rights, these tobacco laborers became strangers on the land they formally lived in and farmed on and were systematically excluded from the polis of the nation.      as a colloquialism for ambalema locals, "el tabaco se ha mulato" refers to crop failure, but it also articulates the process for racialized workers' estrangement from the land and polis. the incongruent figurations of the mulato subject in the modern scientific archive infinitely refract colonial and modern scientific visions, opening onto alternative knowledges about viruses. in the visual translations of the racial phrase, an "archive of secret visuality appears in the other senses" to "leave traces, shadows, remnants in lieu of visible documents" (lippit, 2005, p. 31) that show why the appearance of mulato in viral discourse conjures a particular form of semantic excess that resists rational thinking. viral visions: a visual critique in tracing the semantic excesses of "el tabaco se ha mulato" across scientific and historical texts, i offer the term "viral visions" as a framework for attending to connections between past and present scholarship on the pathogen foundational to viral imaging and knowledge, tmv. viral visions analyze how the accrual of scientific knowledge about viruses relies on repetitious references to race and sex in the archive, which naturalizes the inscription of race in viruses.   contemporary plant virologist karen-beth g. scholthof (2008) offers an explanation of "the origins of our understanding of ‘the nature of the virus,'" demonstrating how visual signifiers of race operate today as commonsensical to modern scientific vision.  she states that: the disease was called amulatamiento, the etymology of which was suggested to be from "el tabaco se ha mulatto (sic)."  from my translation, this can be interpreted as "the tobacco leaf appeared as mulatto or a mixture" and by extension, a characteristic mosaic or mottled pattern on the leaf. the symptoms were described as a mixture of dark green and light green areas, reflecting typical symptoms of a tobacco mosaic virus (tmv) infection on tobacco…this new disease caused the plants to take on "a leaden-gray" color and the tobacco "was extremely bitter to the taste" (para. 4, emphasis included). scholthof draws from john p. harrison's (1952) essay, "the evolution of the colombian tobacco trade, to 1875," which footnotes crevaux for an etymology of the term "virus." harrison links the phrase "el tabaco se ha mulato" to the idiom amulatamiento. however, nowhere in crevaux's voyages does the term amulatamiento appear. the ellipses in visual translations can immediately prompt the reader to look elsewhere, beyond the pages of crevaux's book of origin. when comparing the linguistic differences of terms deployed between crevaux's work and scholthof's reiteration of his origin story, the scientific gaze becomes more diffused in the latter. for instance, scholthof's misspelling of the spanish term mulato as the english word "mulatto," and subsequent english translation of the term as "mixture" imply heterogeneous meanings and temporalities. it is already difficult to envision what racial "mixture" looks like, and becomes even more difficult to imagine when considering the various national, regional, and historical contexts from which the distinct linguistic usages of mulato (spanish/portuguese), mulâtre (french), and mulatto (english) emerge to refer to the varying racial and phenotypical appearances of human (and non-human) subjects. additionally, scholthof's description of the disease's appearance upon the leaf as "mosaic" suggests another instance of aesthetic (mis)translation between the word mulato and its deployment as a mark of visual difference and biological infection.18 there are insistent gaps in meaning resulting from the translations between "el tabaco se ha mulato," "le tabac est deven mulâtre" (crevaux, 1883), "the tobacco leaf appeared as mulatto or mixture," amulatamiento, and "mixture." however, across these instances of translation, the spanish phrase remains intact as the source for these semantic transfers. el tabaco se ha mulato serves as the fulcrum around which the multiple translations must be visually and symbolically organized. the phrase simultaneously incites and resists translation, unfolding local knowledges about race, labor, and agriculture that remain hidden from legibility. "el tabaco se ha mulato" designates a lacuna and points to a stubborn refusal against articulation, a refusal that is embedded in the knowledge archive and encircles the term mulato and its neighborhood of meanings. in sum, the reader is offered multiple citations for the origins of virus knowledge which flow through the (mis)translations of the idiomatic "el tabaco se ha mulato."  in each instance, the reader is invited to imagine virus existence through crevaux's invocation of colonial racial language and the visual and textural cues he extends to mark aberrant sexual and biological reproduction. these racial and sexual logics are now common to scientific grammar, proceeding through the figure of the mulato and masquerading as the term "virus." yet, crevaux's disfigured mulato body—pieces of dry hair and leaf—elicits further consideration of what "el tabaco se ha mulato" may mean since it does not provide a discernible image. a comparison between the phrases "el tabaco se ha mulato" and amulatamiento, which retains its own discursive analysis of colonialism, offers some insight into how inchoate images of racialization have become the basis for scientific rationalization of virus existence. in cuban counterpoint: tobacco and sugar, fernando ortiz (1947) introduces the concept of amulatamiento.  ortiz does not discuss amulatamiento and tobacco in the same text; the term emerges in his other writings about cuban music and food. however, there are clear ideological links that can be drawn through his emphasis on tobacco history as a prime example of "indo-african transculturation" (p. 195). mapping this intellectual link may explain why harrison, and in turn scholthof, came to assume an equivalence between amulatamiento and "el tabaco se ha mulato." ortiz argues that global tobacco production and consumption operated as "transcultural processes" that left a stain on european and u.s. social, cultural, and economic practices. his discussion underscores tobacco as a complex cultural activity that brought indigenousand african-descended peoples together in opposition to european colonizers.19 for example, ortiz describes tmv as "supernatural" and "magic[al]" (p. 12), pointing to the ways tobacco both allured and repulsed its european consumers. he explains that the infectiousness of tmv, and the mottling of the plant leaf, provided religious confirmation for europeans that tobacco was "evil." tmv took on the character of african and indigenous resistance to colonization through the historical cultural uses of tobacco. furthermore, laboring together in tobacco plantations possibly united disenfranchised racial groups who were socially and economically distanced from whites, thereby enacting kinship among the dispossessed and imaginations of being beyond empire. what this suggests is that the racial and social organizations behind tobacco cultivation and consumption constituted a site of political and economic struggle against hegemonic constructions of empire both prior to and after historical decolonization. this cultural and analytical framing draws attention to an interactive epistemological relation between tabaco and mulato that critically speaks to processes of racialization from the colonial era to the present. creavaux's translation of the term mulato highlights the concern about agricultural industrialization as fundamentally about controlling racial, sexual, and biological reproduction. reproductive control functioned through visual, symbolic, and scientific management to secure both the national cohesion of the new colombian republic and the circulation of tobacco commodities in the global market. linking the words mulato to tabaco, then, suggests multiple ways of perceiving and making sense of how racial, sexual, and biological transgressions appear, adapt to, and are adapted by, modern knowledge regimes. profound antagonisms emerge between images and meanings embedded in the look crevaux applied to the mulato body and inherited as the visual cues that signify tmv. translations of the term mulato into convoluted ideas about color were applied to the tobacco leaf in this early theorization of virus existence. conflicting views on how to visually mark tobacco crop failure begin from crevaux's description and ricochet across harrison's reference and into the present through scholthof's description of the "mosaic" disease. for scholthof, "mosaic" refers to "a mixture of dark green and light green areas." at the same time, she affirms harrison's portrayal of the disease's onset as "a leaden-gray" pigmentation of the plant. in contrast, beijerinck's (1898) earlier, foundational work on tmv shared a broader range of concerns about plant development and appearance. in the english edition of beijerinck's chapter, the first symptomatic signs manifest in malformation and retardation of the plant's growth in the "midrib and of the principal lateral veins" (p. 46) of the tobacco leaf. this leads to a "blister-like" surface and spots where "chlorophyll was entirely lacking," which beijerinck insistently referred to as "albinism" (pp. 46-47). these references bring into relief questions about the healthy signs of plant life, or life generally. referring to crop failure as "el tabaco se ha mulato," on the one hand, and plant leaf albinism on the other, pushes in two different directions what discoloration can mean. the definition for proper leaf coloration is suspended between darkness and lightness, or to be more precise, between the polarities of black and white, with each pole denoting a radical change in plant health. resolving this chromatic quandary in scientific vision can be seen in scholthof's descriptor of "mosaic," an aesthetic assembly of variant pieces tantamount to "mixture." however, the lasting historical reference in the modern knowledge archive that is appended to the "mosaic disease" is "el tabaco se ha mulato," or amulatamiento, and not albinism. this reference to color amalgamations as an "indigenizing" and "darkening" of tobacco leaves unsettles the harmony of the way this colorful conglomerate is imagined.  put simply, the discourses of scientific rationalization and progress fail to account for a variety of social and discursive relations that are otherwise expressed through "el tabaco se ha mulato." "el tabaco se ha mulato" encapsulates linked anxieties about race, reproduction, and contagion. the phrase articulates the inseparable and uncontainable histories between race, sex, and viruses that continue to threaten the biological order of things. in effect, the conceptualization of the virus is a manifestation of different national and colonial histories, multiple modernities, contrasting ontologies, racialized intimacies, and practices of looking. examining viral visions across these scholarly texts points out pathways to divergent histories and strange social worlds that exist at the limits of representability, and therefore beyond modern state and scientific surveillance. stranger intimacies and queer decolonizing to conclude, i draw upon decolonial, feminist, and queer of color theories to examine how  "el tabaco se ha mulato" opens onto alternative geographies and social relations. drawn together, these discursive tools counter the tide of scientific rationalization and linearly filed histories that wash the shores of memory. these analytical frames work in concert to seize upon the knotted temporalities in which virus representations form a palimpsest of racial, gender, and sexual discourses. as emma pérez (1996) argues, the "time lag between the colonial and postcolonial can be conceptualized as the decolonial imaginary" (p. 6). for pérez, the feminist practices of colonized women implemented the decolonial imaginary as a "rupturing space" to the "written history"—a history that "decolonizes otherness."20  as i will show, decolonizing otherness, or strangeness, in science is also a queer gesture. lingering in the time lag of the queer and decolonial imaginary, i investigate the etymologies and applications of the terms virus and mulato to show how they are mutually imbricated in the historical structuring of nation, empire, and geopolitics through language, vision, race, and sex. the interactive relation between these two terms also produces an infective logic that fails to effectively translate the spatial and temporal coordinates of modernity. even as the two words map history and geopolitics, they also expose its fault lines, thereby revealing social and discursive relations beyond nation-state belonging in the time of western empire. the latin term virus had been a designation used by science practitioners as early as 1728 to generally describe vectors for infection, especially venereal disease.21  however, beijerinck coined the specific use of the term when he published his research in dutch, german, english, and then french.22 using latin to name the infectious agent assembled scientific knowledge about the tobacco plant across geographical and national divides. however, the need to publish beijerinck's work on the virus in dutch, german, english, and french manifested ongoing tussles and transfers of colonial and geopolitical power among competing european and u.s. empires, culminating in a globally structured agricultural industry. control over this global industry also meant control over knowledge governing the landscape, geography, and laboring bodies involved in tobacco cultivation in the americas and other current or former european colonies. naming the new pathogen virus also produced unintended consequences for imperial powers. according to ed cohen (2011), the modern scientific application of the term virus entails a paradox. he argues that the host-parasite relation used to conceive of viruses is derived from the political theories of ancient rome, which represented itself in the term "host." "host" comes from the latin eponym "hospes," which means "guest, host, and stranger" altogether. furthermore, "host" carries with it a relation to property whereby "the master of the house" recognizes the other as a guest when the latter respects the propriety of the former. an affront to propriety, on the other hand, results in recognition of the parasitic status of the guest. whereas the guest enters into a relation of familiarity and is treated with hospitality, the parasite is perceived as a stranger and thus met with hostility. hence, the meanings of host, guest, and stranger are intimately associated with one another, but only the host-guest relation grounds the meaning of belonging, while the parasite becomes estranged and often considered the "enemy." this host-guest-parasite relation, i would add, is the structuring principle for modernity.  to be clear, the settler colonialist is not simply a "parasite" that usurps the land and consequently becomes the new "host." this would assume that the host-guest-parasite differentiation existed prior to encounters with western colonialists. rather, the settler colonialist becomes the host by estranging bodies of color from the land and polis, namely by dispossessing indigenous peoples, enslaving those of african descent, and targeting subaltern groups generally with protracted genocide. furthermore, the host-guest-parasite relation organizes the logic of national incorporation, wherein settler colonial rule is naturalized and some of the "others" are allowed to remain as "guests" and the rest targeted as "parasites" for immediate or systematic exclusion. the scientific and state exploitation of disenfranchised racialized workers during the early colombian republic occurred through the estrangement of these subjects from the public sphere. that is, to borrow from nayan shah's (2011) conception of "estrangement" as a form of "queerness," the nascent colombian republic and its educated elites implemented ideologies and practices (much like those in the united states and other nation-states) that "distributed protection and resources in ways that exacerbated the vulnerability of transience" (pp. 261-262)—a transience embodied by those alienated from the nation. this form of estrangement, the production of queerness, included the persecution, disenfranchisement, and medicalization of the social and sexual intimacies of racialized populations, state practices deployed under the mantle of civilizing the burgeoning colombian nation.23  the pathologization, surveillance, and violence applied to the racialized worker also generated the explanatory force for tobacco failure, a narrative which links the sub-microscopic and pathogenic virus to racialized bodies targeted for suppression or eradication.  in this sense, the racialized workers, represented in the archive as mulato, were historically supplanted and estranged from their own lands in order for the nation to be built. the mulato figure is both strange and queer because it represents social and sexual practices that do not conform to industrialism, biologism, and nation.  conceptually and etymologically, it resists the social and sexual norms of empire and nation. mulato and amulatamiento share the key term mulata/o, which is both a spanish and portuguese word, and has varied colonial, national, and historical meanings and circulations. embedded in the term mulata/o is a central concern over race, sex, and the potential for miscegenation to upset western empires and their rule over colonies through the administration of racial typologies. inherited from spanish and portuguese empires, the etymology of the term mulata/o bears the colonial trace of the spanish/portuguese word mula which names the infertile female progeny of a horse-donkey mix. hence, the term mulata/o is etymologically queer because it simultaneously names the non-reproductive consequences of certain animal husbandry and the impossibility of racial purity among human subjects, and refuses the structure of species hierarchy fundamental to darwinian biological and evolutionary thinking. as a figure of unrest in colonial racialized labor, the mulata/o signifier continues to resist dispossession and knocks on the nation's door through its resurfacing in the archive in the form of viral discourse. however, instead of hailing this queer "stranger," nations recommit to settler colonialism and the originary act of modernity's violence by targeting the racialized stranger epistemologically, medically, politically, and militarily. what would it mean to heed the queerness of the stranger? shah also states, "‘[s]trangerhood' is a crucial ingredient for…unconventional yet widespread sociability [that] reveals neglected models for democratic livelihood and distributions of ideas, resources, and social well-being" (pp. 266-267). instead of emphasizing "civic sociality" and intimacy among families and familiars, he calls for openness to "queer relations" that "cross boundaries of space, class, race, and gender in ways that make the practice of democratic, egalitarian, and human relationships both imaginable and viable" (p. 266). i consider the historical strangerhood of the mulata/o figure—its queerness—in the modern virus archive as an incipient sign for global insecurity; a visual hermeneutic signaling the incapacity for euro-american imperial formations of states and national belonging as arbiters for freedoms. to heed the stranger is to dismantle the host-guest-parasite relation that is foundational to modernity, empire, and nation, and to instead seek queer relations. we must first envision the virus not as a parasite, or even rehabilitate it to become a guest. rather, we must defamiliarize the settler colonial project in which the nation-state and the idealized white heteropatriarchal citizen-subject emerge as the host, while all "others" are defined in their positive or negative relation. in his study of the rise of the german science forestry industry, james c. scott (1998) describes the deterioration of crop as the in-built failure of statecraft and mass scale capitalism. he cautions that if we internalize the logics for mass capitalism, then we begin to "see like a state." moreover, this focusing of energies on continued bureaucratic management allows us to not see this failure. in the case of early colombia's tobacco agricultural industrialization, the landowning elite cultivated a monoculture crop that would yield high value product over successive generations of planting (harrison, 1952). the elimination of biodiversity within the crop, which included intricately embedded symbiotic relations, gave rise to pathogens that caused successive generations of crops to deteriorate in quality. john p. harrison and others contend that the virus pathogen alone did not kill the short-lived success of colombia's tobacco industry. rather, they submit, the imperatives for post-independence colombian modernization and economic liberalization created the exploitative and coercive labor conditions that drove the racialized labor force to the brink, inducing illnesses among the people of ambalema.24 these stark circumstances resulted in poor crop rotation and the industry's eventual demise (briceño & mesa suarez, 2009; harrison, 1952). to unsee like a state (halberstam 2011), we must both "see like a state" and refuse the hierarchies in systems of classification and legibility offered by bureaucratic administration and science as the norm.25 i am not simply asking that we apply the liberal prescription of paying workers more to make the industry run better, although the improvement of individual lives and communities should be of paramount concern. nor am i arguing that we simply forgo identities, subjectivities, and state documents that offer crucial protections and communal relations for some. the mulata/o signifier of virus existence asks that we recognize the fundamental racialized violence of the host-guest-parasite relation. in heeding rather than disciplining or ignoring the queerness and strangeness of the mulato signifier in the archive, we should grasp how it explicates the way colonial ideologies for race and sex continue to generate the conditions for modern viral pandemics.  the mulata/o signifier has strangely persisted as a queer subject in the archive of modern viruses because it critiques the host-guest-parasite relation. it generates a model that refuses hierarchies of being, or what mel y. chen (2012) terms "animacy," which sediment a measure for valuating life according to its "ostensible opposite: the inanimate, deadness, lowness, nonhuman animals (rendered as insensate), the abject, the object" (p. 30). as a signifier, the mulata/o remembers the relations of racialization between sub-/non-human animals and non-human objects. the closely linked mulato and virus signifiers in the archive perform a decolonial gesture, refusing separations between past and present, and rebuke, through queer relation, the various levels of "life" rendered distinctive in science. the colonial racial bodies of empire's past and the microbiological world that has emerged under contemporary empire are brought into intimate association. these signifiers historicize how the violence of estrangement that occurs through mundane practices of racialization in daily civic life is intricately tied to how we envision and treat viral invasion of the body and the nation. in their combination, mulata/o and virus signifiers provide a model for resisting animacy hierarchies and embracing queer relations, as chen would argue. it refutes "innocence" and "evil" as assignations for those who should be protected and those who should be sick. it debunks the scales of capitalist production and prompts us to see how racial and sexual bodies are harnessed to reproduce the terms of geopolitical power at both the microbiological and global levels. when a virus is recognized in our midst, rather than isolate the infection and the infected, and justify the intensification of securitization, we should imagine and work toward the end of geopolitical borders that create the uneven social and economic conditions in which sickness, particularly amongst communities of color and amidst peoples in the nations of the global south, are produced.  as a viral signifier, the mulata/o figure also unravels racial systems of classification and connects decolonial and queer relations between various subjects, places, and times.26 if we apply the term mulata/o to the context of the colombian agricultural laborer, it may suggest someone who is of indigenous, african, and spanish ancestry. in the u.s. context, where blood logics make blackness hypervisible and indigeneity invisible, "mulatto" refers to someone who is black and white. like the spanish term, "mulatto" in the united states dovetailed into scientific explanations for racial mixing, which was thought to produce biological and social defects in the person designated "mulatto," defects that included an inability to sexually reproduce (nyong'o, 2002). here, we glimpse how the visual translations of "el tabaco se ha mulato" fold together multiple modernities, but ultimately disrupt the fantasy of global order. these overlapping yet contrasting histories offer a different way of perceiving social categories and sexual practices among subjects resisting colonization. the point is to investigate the alternative meanings opened up by visual translations of the virus archive, meanings in defiance of a closed social and economic system that is based upon nation-state formation and the imperatives of global industrialization.27 science redrew a map of biological interiority that suited emerging geopolitical configurations of uneven industrial development and modernization. from this perspective, the developed world emerged as the observer while the developing world was linked to both the tobacco plant and the body and image of the undisciplined, pathological, and racialized subject. however, the indelible connection between the mulato signifier and the advent of the virus recalls the racial and geopolitical contexts under which the virus developed diachronically, as an object of intellectual inquiry, and as a central concern through which historical and scientific scholarship would orient itself to establish "truth" paradigms.  state and scientific surveillance converged to produce the virus as a racialized locus for biological insecurity—a persistent transgression of the emerging global security regime. when faced with pandemic threat, rational logic dictates that nation-states further demarcate and police racial, sexual, and national borders. as in the case with hiv/aids, the ebola virus, and other outbreaks or pandemics, racial, gender, and sexual categories are called upon to describe "risk" groups and to explain how disease is rooted in "risky behaviors." to deflect attention away from the systemic inequities that produce disease is to deny race, nation, and empire as the structuring conditions for pandemics. this denial is the seat of anxiety that reproduces viral pandemics and global insecurity.  viral pandemics, i submit, result from global industrial resource extraction, and the racialization, estrangement, and alienation of laborers, rather than the poor hygiene of individuals. virus, then, capaciously names the desire and failure for geopolitical control through the biopolitical maintenance of social relations. the term registers the intimate and the infinitesimal relations and spaces that often escape visual capture: decolonial and queer social cartographies that do not appear on the physical and psychic maps for empire or modernity. scientific discourse continues to debate whether the virus is a living thing, leading one virologist to call it an "organism at the edge of life" (rybicki, 1990). what we might infer is that the "edge of life" is the space just beyond nation-state borders and the geopolitical order.  discovery at the edge of life underscores that the virus is transgressive by definition; that it resides in spaces of "stranger intimacy." these spaces of transgressive intimacies are signaled by markers of racial difference wherein national boundaries are drawn and exceeded. viral visions pass between modern knowledge regimes, applying a visual critique that reveals the failures of empire and geopolitics. this way of perceiving viral existence recalls the radical, intimate moments of the past and circumvents present-day geopolitical configurations to imagine queer decolonizing. acknowledgements my deep gratitude goes to macarena gómez-barris, r. benedito ferrao, nayan shah, ben cowan, ho'esta mo'e'hahne, crystal baik, feng-mei heberer, anjali nath, gretel vera rosas, sriya shrestha, priscilla leiva, jennifer declue, nic john ramos, emily raymundo, natasha bissonouth, heidi ardizzone, habiba ibrahim, scott lauria morgensen, ebony coletu, paul amar, and del pastrana for commenting and contributing to various versions of this article.  support from vanessa schwartz and funding from the university of southern california visual studies research institute and the department of american studies and ethnicity made possible my research and participation in the summer institute for the center for historic american visual culture at the american antiquarian society.  special thanks go to lisa cartwright, cristina visperas, monika sengul-jones, other catalyst editors, and the two anonymous readers for their generous and incisive feedback. conversations with many others have helped in crucial ways. notes 1 this was crevaux's fourth and final expedition, as he perished while attempting to complete this journey.  fueled by the ambition to clear more territory as yet uncharted by europeans, he crossed the caribbean coastline and descended into south america, passing through ambalema (le janne, 1883).   2 german agricultural chemist adolf mayer (1886) later described the "tobacco mosaic" disease that could be transferred between plants, much like bacterial infection.  dutch botanist martinus beijerinck, in 1898, became associated with the discovery of the virus.  he replicated russian botanist dmitri ivanovsky's attempts a few years earlier to identify the causal agent in the infected tobacco plant's sap.  however, beijerinck recognized the pathogen as something smaller than and distinct from bacteria and coined the term "virus" to refer to it (zaitlin, 1986, pp. 107-108).   3 histories written about the tobacco mosaic virus either footnote or leap entirely over the importance of crevaux's text.  what we are told in most historical accounts is that, since the virus remained unseen to late nineteenth century scientists, its existence was surmised by experimenting with filters used to pass the infected sap from one plant to another (creager, 2002).  while struggling to identify its properties and functions, and without more advanced microscopic technology, beijerinck (1898) gave the agent the latin designation virus, which simply means "poison" or "toxin." during the early twentieth century, scientists renamed the pathogen the "tobacco mosaic virus" (tmv). 4 viruses have played a crucial role in our understanding of the purpose and structure of dna, playing an instrumental role in proving that dna and not proteins carry the material for genetic inheritance (hershey & chase, 1952).  viruses were understood to be the cause of the deadly pandemics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the spanish flu, smallpox, polio, hiv/aids, avian flu, and swine flu. 5 in 1946, wendell meredith stanley, the u.s. biochemist and virologist whose laboratory controlled one of the world's first electron microscopes, was awarded the nobel prize in chemistry (along with james b. sumner and john h. northrop) for being the first to isolate living tmv in pure crystalline form.  the microscope photograph, or micrograph, of tmv demonstrated the technological power of the electron microscope on the world stage (rasmussen, 1997). 6 as exemplified by the persistence of hiv/aids, ebola, and other viral pandemics, viruses continue to elude our scientific understandings.  they also escape our attempts to control them through western-led institutions for global health surveillance, such as the world health organization, an entity established in 1947 to address epidemic outbreaks in the aftermath of the second world war. 7 i thank natasha bissonouth for assistance in translating this excerpt and to nathalie burle for ample support in translating the surrounding text. 8 in this way, crevaux departs from work that influenced his writings: charles darwin's 1859 theory of evolution.  in darwin's text, biology is the principle of life that establishes continuity between plants and peoples, and between the observer and the observed (cohen, 2009).  however, crevaux's accounts demonstrate how the biological rationale is explicated according to free market principles that can be visually inscribed.  the comparison between the mulato subject and the plant leaf is drawn to make apparent market quality. 9 one page before his mulato reference, crevaux describes traveling the winding path of the magdalena river valley.  he encountered a wilderness that included gigantic trees, severe lightning flashes, the strange melody of thousands of frogs, relentless mosquitos, and local workers who were tired, emaciated, and suffering from illnesses that was termed the "magdalena fevers" (crevaux, 1883, p. 400). 10 see "south america. massacre of french explorers in bolivia—lynch law at the galapagos."  sacramento daily record-union., july 18, 1882, "sacramento daily record-union., july 18, 1882, image 4" url: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82014381/1882-07-18/ed-1/seq-4/ (accessed 3/8/13) 11 crevaux's writings made their way back to france and were published posthumously. 12 according to bleichmar (2012), spanish descendant, botanist, and late eighteenth century "founding father of colombian national science," josé celestino mutis, established a tradition of "economic botany."  his books proved "that the expedition would promptly yield useful and valuable information in the form of natural commodities" (pp. 442-443). 13 from 1852-1875, while still on the heels of independence, the fledgling republic achieved remarkable success through tobacco farming, which ignited an unprecedented balance of trade such that colombia's export began to exceed its import (harrison, 1952). it was the basis for colombia's "one-crop export-economy" and secured new foreign markets in europe and the united states (crevaux, 1883; harrison, 1952). 14 agricultural industrialization relied on the exploitation of racial subjects. the population of the early colombian republic consisted of a "mixture of racial stocks" resulting from the legacy of spanish conquest, indigenous subjugation, and african enslavement (zamoso, 1986). some enslaved persons escaped into the tropical forests or the mountains. after the 1851 colombian abolition of slavery, freed persons joined marooned societies and took up small farms in the mountain ranges. racially mixed indigenous and black populations—who we can infer by definition to be mulato—developed agricultural societies on public lands that would later be contested by the private interests of land developers from the "middle strata of colombian society" (legrand, 1986, p. 33). 15 the introduction to voyages mentions crevaux's illustrations and use of photography in his explorations. see le janne, p. iii. these visual techniques are exhibited throughout this book. the text shows that some images were created by other individuals. however, it remains unclear to me thus far in my research how crevaux's writing made it back to france after his death, and which images he may have authored. 16 this printmaking technique preceded the more sophisticated standards for photomechanical reproduction that became commonplace by the twentieth century.  however, even as etched or engraved reproductions, these printed images compounded what dennis denisoff has described as "the apparent actuality of the photograph with the subjectivity of the handmade image" (denisoff, 2009, p. 254). 17 while voyages did not contain photographs taken by crevaux, it is fair to say that crevaux approached the ethnographic spectacle of his research during this expedition with the eye of both scientist and photographer (le jann, 1883). 18 an image of a tobacco plant infected with the tobacco mosaic virus can be found at: http://www.apsnet.org/edcenter/intropp/lessons/viruses/pages/tobaccomosaic.aspx.  the discoloration and dry texture of the leaf was compared to the look and feel of mulato skin and hair in crevaux's travel writing.  virologists and historians have since referred to this moment in crevaux's description as an origin story for the discovery of the first virus. 19 ortiz admits that the name tabaco has multiple points of potential origin, and a number of assignations, some of which do not refer to the plant itself. hence, his ideas about tobacco can be deployed without appealing to an essentialization of afro-caribbean culture.  20 feminist-marxist science studies scholar donna haraway (1990) emphasizes that critically attending to race and gender constructions in the field of science allows a "closer examination" of bodies that have been visually "marked" as other in "very large and durable" histories. 21 see "virus (n.)" in online etymology dictionary.  22 in the english version, beijerinck identifies the "mosaic or leaf spot" causation using the latin phrase contagium vivum fluidum, which describes a "living agent" of "contagion" that exists in a "liquid." he continued to refer to the agent as virus several times throughout the essay (beijerinck, 1898; bos, 1999). the use of latin to describe this infectious agent followed from the taxonomical system of biology established by swedish scientist, carl linnaeus, in his publication of systema naturæ in 1735. following this tradition allowed for a universal recognition of tmv as it emerged on the scene of the late-nineteenth century burgeoning global scientific community. yet, the languages in which beijerinck published specifically hailed european and north american regions and nations. these were countries and regions where science formed an already robust field of study. moreover, the particular nations signaled by language also had vested economic interests in maintaining imperial domination over agricultural industries, and namely over the global trade of tobacco. france and britain had both developed a strong and competitive presence in science, especially in the areas of geography and botany, where the french and british had a long history in the exploration of the "natural environment" in the americas (pratt, 2008). in the late-nineteenth century, germany was the center of the european cigar industry, with much of its manufacture centered in the city of bremen and the source of its tobacco from the ambalema region of colombia, as mentioned earlier (pando, 2003). meanwhile, the dutch had developed a very successful tobacco industry by cultivating the plant on the southeast asian island of sumatra during their long colonial administration of the east indies (pando, 2003). growers in the united states, where tobacco was once a cash crop and was the chief agricultural export in the south prior to cotton in the 1800s, still had a presence in the trade but struggled against these new goliaths of tobacco industry. 23 marx terms the form of industrial capitalist estrangement of the worker "alienation." 24 ambalema locals suffered in particular from the aforementioned illness called the "magdalena fevers" (briceño & mesa suarez, 2009).  25 j. jack halberstam (2011) proposes in his study of "queer failure" that, to "unsee like a state" we might follow social worlds that remain illegible. 26 describing the biopolitics of colonialism, ann stoler (1995) points out that maintaining dominance over the "carceral archipelago of empire" entailed the colonial management of race and birth, underlining in particular the concern over what to do with "bastard children" and "mixed race peoples" who had varying and antagonist claims to property and inclusion in the colonizer's nation. 27 walter d. mignolo (2000) asserts that the act of translation is simultaneously the dissolution of dichotomous relations subtending classificatory systems. what registers is an outburst of "an other thinking." references ambalema: todos por ambalema “primero la gente.” (2013, march 22). retrieved from http://www.ambalematolima.gov.co/nuestromunicipio.shtml?apc=mixx-1-&m=f#historia cambrosio, a., jacobi, d., & keating, p. (2008). phages, antibodies and "de-nonstration." history and philosophy of the life sciences, 30(2), 131-157. barry, j. m. (2004). the site of origin of the 1918 influenza pandemic and its public health implications. journal of translational medicine, 2(3). retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc340389/ beijerinck, m. (1898). concerning a contagium vivum fluidum as the cause of the spot disease of tobacco leaves. english publication of "ueber ein contagium vivum fluidum als ursache der fleckenkrankheit der tabaksblatter." verhandelingen der koninklyke akademie van wettenschappen te amsterdam, 65(2), 3-21. beijerinck, martinus willem.” complete dictionary of scientific biography. 2008. retrieved december 16, 2012 from encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1g2-2830904820.html bleichmar, d. (2012). learning to look: visual expertise across art and science in eighteenth-century france. eighteenth-century studies, 46(1), 85-111.   bleichmar, d. (2007). exploration in print: books and botanical travel from spain to the americas in the late eighteenth century. huntington library quarterly, 70(1), 129-151.   bleichmar, d. (2009). visible empire: scientific expeditions and visual culture in the hispanic enlightenment. postcolonial studies, 12(4), 441-466. bos, l. (1999). beijerinck's work on tobacco mosaic virus: historical context and legacy. philosophical transactions of the royal society london b: biological sciences, 354(1383), 675-685. briceño ayala, l., & mesa suarez, m. a. (2009). el efecto de la mortalidad ocupacional sobre la economía. las fiebres del magdalena y la siembra de tabaco en colombia en el siglo xix. revista ciencias salud, 7(3), 45-51.   chen, m.y. (2012). animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. durham,nc: duke university press. cohen, e. (2009). a body worth defending: immunity, biopolitics, and the apotheosis of the modern body. durham, nc: duke university press. cohen, e. (2011). the paradoxical politics of viral containment; or, how scale undoes us one and all. social text, 29(1), 15-35. creager, a.n.h. (2002). the life of a virus: tobacco mosaic virus as an experimental model, 1930-1965. chicago, il: university of chicago press.   creveaux, j. (1883). voyages dans l'amérique du sud (1880-1881). paris: paris hachette. retrieved from http://archive.org/details/voyagesdanslam00crevuoft. dennisoff, d. (2009). the mass image: a social history of photomechanical reproduction in victorian london, and: the haunted gallery: painting, photography, film c. 1900 [review of the book the mass image: a social history of photomechanical reproduction in victorian london, by g. beegan, and the book the haunted gallery: painting, photography, film c. 1900, by l. nead]. victorian review, 35(1), 253-246.   garcía, c.m. (2007). las "fiebres del magdalena": medicina y sociedad en la construcción de una noción médica colombiana, 1859-1886. história, ciências, saúde – manguinhos, 14(1), 63-89. halberstam, j. (2011). the queer art of failure. durham, nc: duke university press. haraway, d. (1990). primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. new york, ny: routledge. harper, d. (n.d.) virus (n.). retrieved janurary 30, 2015 from online etymology dictionary: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=virus harrison, j.p. (1952). the evolution of the colombian tobacco trade, to 1875. the hispanic american historical review, 32(2), 163-174. hershey, a.d., chase, m. (1952). independent functions of viral protein and nucleic acid in growth of bacteriophage. the journal of general physiology, 36(1), 39-56. retrieved from http://jgp.rupress.org/content/36/1/39.long   kay, l. e. (1986). w. m. stanley's crystallization of the tobacco mosaic virus, 1930-1940. isis, 77(3), 450-472. legrand, c.c. (1986). frontier expansion and peasant protest in colombia, 1850-1936. albuquerque, nm: university of new mexico press.   le janne, e. (1883). "notice biogragraphique le docteur j. crevaux" in creveaux, jules, voyages dans l'amérique du sud (1880-1881). paris: paris hachette.   lippit, a. m. (2005). atomic light (shadow optics). minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. martinez, m.e. (2008). genealogical fictions: limpieza de sangre, religion, and gender in colonial mexico. stanford, ca: stanford university press. mayer, a. (1886). über die mosaikkrankheit des tabaks. die landwirtschaftliche versuchs-stationen (in german) 32: 451–467. translated into english in johnson, j., ed. (1942) phytopathological classics (st. paul, minnesota: american phytopathological society) 7, 11–24. mignolo, w. (2000). local histories/global designs: coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. princeton, nj: princeton university press.   nyong'o, t. (2002). racial kitsch and black performance. the yale journal of criticism, 15(2), 371-391.   ortiz, f. (1995). cuban counterpoint: tobacco and sugar. durham, nc: duke university press. pando, r.t. (2003). shrouded in cheesecloth: the demise of shade tobacco in florida and georgia (master's thesis). retrieved from florida state university electronic theses, treatises and dissertations. (paper 2308) peréz, e. (1999). the decolonial imaginary: writing chicanas into history. bloomington, in: indiana university press. pratt, m.l. (2008). imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation, second edition. new york, ny: routledge. rasmussen, n. (1997). picture control: the electron microscope and the transformation of biology in america, 1940-1960. stanford, ca: stanford university press.   rappaport, j. 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(1998). seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. new haven, ct: yale university press.   shah, n. (2011). stranger intimacy: contesting race, sexuality, and the law in the north american west. durham, nc: duke university press. "south america." (1882, july 18). massacre of french explorers in bolivia—lynch law at the galapagos. sacramento daily record-union. retrieved from http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82014381/1882-07-18/ed-1/seq-4/   stoler, a. (1995). race and the education of desire: foucault's history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. durham, nc: duke university press. zaitlin, m. (1998). the discovery of the causal agent of the tobacco mosaic disease. in s.d kung and s. f. yang (eds.), discoveries in plant biology (vol. 1) (pp. 105-110). hong kong: world publishing co., ltd. zamoso, l. (1986). the agrarian question and the peasant movement in colombia: struggles of the national peasant association, 1967-1981. new york, ny: cambridge university press. bio jih-fei cheng is assistant professor in the department of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at scripps college.  he earned his ba in communication, with minors in chinese studies and world literatures, from the university of california, san diego; his ma in asian american studies at the university of california, los angeles; and his ph.d. in american studies and ethnicity, with emphasis in visual studies, at the university of southern california. previously, he worked in hiv/aids social services, managed a university cultural center, was involved in arts and media production and curation, and participated in queer of color grassroots organizations in new york city and los angeles. his organizing work has addressed the issues of queer and transgender health, immigration, gentrification, youth homelessness, police harassment and brutality, and prison abolition. liu, jessie. 2025. “homophonic followings.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2): 1–5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © jessie liu, 2025 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution noncommercial no derivatives license homophonic followings jessie liu australian national university jessie.liu@anu.edu.au keywords china, population, reproduction, feminist methods, one child policy in my opinion, no book captures the stories of chinese pursuits of population better than chinese author mo yan’s (莫言) novel frog (蛙 wa).1 frog details the shifting reproductive landscape of contemporary china, and its entanglement with national transformations in political and economic governance. the story begins in 1960, during the great chinese famine, where reproductive capacities have “dried” up.2 the book then slowly shifts—first to reproductive abundance that follows an excellent yield of sweet potato in the local county in 1962; then to the introduction of the one-child policy in 1979—including the actors of reproductive control and its violence; and finally to contemporary “consumptive parenting” and new forms of reproduction such as surrogacy. what is perhaps unique about the novel is that simultaneous to providing a historical account, it also takes us on a phonological journey. specifically, mo tells an entangled story that brings together “wa” (娃)—a term for babies and little children (娃 wa) —with its reproductive homophones: the chinese creator goddess (女娲 nüwa), the crying call of babies (哇哇 wawa), and frogs (蛙 wa), the very title of the book. this phonological tracing does something to how contemporary chinese reproductive history is understood and told. it provides a contrast to the forms of state-driven reproductive control that are central in the novel—policies that sought to intervene in, and make predictable, the formation and characteristic of the chinese populace at the aggregate level (greenhalgh 2009; woronov 2003)3— mailto:jessie.liu@anu.edu.au mailto:jessie.liu@anu.edu.au roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jessie liu, 2025 2 with an alternative version of reproduction that is centered on unknowability, unpredictability, and randomness, which are also forces central to the biological process of reproduction. in the novel, this wonderful unpredictability plays out through mo’s attention to what we might think of as the chinese language’s (re)productive capacity to spawn associative homophonic connections. while the absurdist connections and unpredictability this strategy generates reflects mo’s hallucinatory realist style, i argue that it also holds potential as a method of researching and narrativizing reproductive history. as i show, tracing reproductive homophones can bring us to surprising moments in reproductive history, moments that are often marginal or forgotten, but in fact can point to alternative possibilities of how, in this case, chinese reproductive history might have unfolded. my use of homophonic following as a method for feminist thinking on population also operates as a reminder that our methods are linguistically situated practices, “interfer[ing] with the dream that english might provide authors with neutral analytics” (mol 2024, 2). here are two generative examples of homophonic followings from mo’s work, both which follow “frogs” to tell a refracted story of chinese reproduction. first, as mo writes (2020), frog (wa), the title of the book, emerged from a 1958 newspaper article that described how the live swallowing of fourteen tadpoles could be used as contraception. as i came to learn, this method was in fact used among some traditional chinese medicine practitioners in china. indeed, in 1957, as oral contraception in china came to receive attention, the use of this method was raised by shao lizi, a deputy to the national people’s congress, as a potential ingredient for oral conception that china could use.4 this method was then experimentally tested in the late 1950s, to poor results (tien 1965). this marginal moment in scientific history—which was reported on by the foreign press as exemplar of the comical backwardness of china (suyin 1957)—might in fact reflect broader crossroads that the chinese state was at when it comes to reproduction (mellors 2019). on one level, the state is still, at this stage, publicly pronatalist; population control, because of its association with malthusianism, was criticized (mellors 2019). on another level still, as contraceptive access was slowly expanding, there was also the question about what role and status traditional chinese medicine should—or could—play in cultivating the reproduction capacities or restrictions on the national body, given that, for much of its history, it did not have a conception of a normative, universal, or “chinese” body (swislocki 2011). second, mo’s homophonic followings also shed light on lesser-known practices that took place in the era of the one-child policy, revealing that these policies were not solely or deterministically centered around women and girls. specifically, mo’s attention to frogs, then tadpoles, and then, through their visual association with sperm, brings him to explore the more marginal history of roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jessie liu, 2025 3 vasectomies in china; in the novel, he details how county-level reproductive workers tried to facilitate mass vasectomies and the widespread male resistance to surgical interventions on their bodies. again, much of this history is true. vasectomies were available and facilitated by the state during this period (kohama 2011). furthermore, the province of sichuan, which accounted for almost half of the thirty million vasectomies performed nationwide between 1970s and 1990s, was in fact also the birthplace of the pioneering no-scalpel vasectomy (liu and li 1993; li et al. 1991). yet, in many areas, uptake of vasectomies was often limited as many husbands were reluctant to undergo sterilization (jueyu 绝育), resulting in most procedures being performed on wives instead (kohama 2011, 197). this history suggests that the feminized consequences of the one-child policy—the stories of non-consensual iuds, the forced abortions performed on women, the selective abortion of female fetuses, and the stories of baby girls given away—are not purely the consequence of topdown state directives but also shaped by the gendered politics of the family as an institution. while homophonic followings as a method does not inherently yield this insight, the unpredictable juxtapositions that are created through its practice—in this case between babies and frogs—push us to examine moments in reproductive history that are outside of dominant discourses and processes, which for feminist scholars can also help to reveal how reproductive policies were negotiated, resisted, and reshaped on the ground. in recognition of mo’s generative method, i wonder then, what other marginal histories and connections might we find through homophonic followings? what might we find if we traced another reproductive term—like dai, as in the next generation (下一代 xiayidai)—across its homophones? what surprising routes might be open up in tracing reproduction through associations with surrogacy (代 孕 daiyun), debt (贷 dai), seaweed (海带 haidai), and even stupidity (呆 dai)? such juxtapositions might reveal untold or new histories of nutrition and maternal consumption (seaweed), the political economy of reproduction (debt), chinese families’ entanglements with global reproductive regimes (surrogacy), and the eugenic regulation of chinese bodies (stupidity). or they may not. but this is an invitation to feminist scholars of reproduction to be attentive to the language of our materials and methods and to play with homophonic followings and other creative methods that allow us to follow surprising, unpredictable, random connections to see what emerges. notes 1 a note for readers that chinese names are typically written as last name first. i have followed this convention here. roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jessie liu, 2025 4 2 approximately thirty million people—some estimate much more—died during the great famine. evidence does shows that the birth rate rapidly declined in this period (1958–1961) (zhao and reimondos 2012). 3 by policies that sought to reshape the characteristics of the population at the aggregate level , i mean, as woronov (2003) and greenhalgh (2009) have pointed out, that the one-child policy was driven not just by a desire to reduce population size (i.e quantity) but by the desire to reshape the chinese population from “high quantity” to “high quality” to cultivate an educated workforce that would be in service of china’s shifting position in the global economy. that is, such policies were concurrently introduced with china’s economic reform that sought to move china away from economic self-sufficiency to active participation in the global market. 4 i note that, through processes of translation, there are different iterations of shao’s name: shao litze, shao litzu, and shaolizi. i have chosen shao lizi as it is consistent with the mandarin pinyin that runs throughout the rest of the text. references greenhalgh, susan. 2009. “the chinese biopolitical: facing the twenty-first century.” new genetics and society 28 (3): 205–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/14636770903151992. kohama, masako. 2011. “the popularization of birth planning in rural china: the case of q village, 1960s–1970s.” research on women in modern chinese history, no. 19, 173–214. li, shunqiang, marc goldstein, jinbo zhu, and douglas huber. 1991. “the no-scalpel vasectomy.” journal of urology 145 (2): 341–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/s00225347(17)38334-9. liu, xiaozhang, and shunqiang li. 1993. “vasal sterilization in china.” contraception 48 (3): 255–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-7824(93)90144-v. mellors, sarah. 2019. “less reproduction, more production: birth control in the early people’s republic of china, 1949–1958.” east asian science, technology and society: an international journal 13 (3): 367–89. https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-7755346. mo yan [莫言]. 2020. frog [蛙]. zhejiang literature and art publishing house [浙江文 艺出版社]. mol, annemarie. 2024. eating is an english word. duke university press. han suyin. 1957. “family planning in china.” the eugenics review 49 (2): 81–82. swislocki, mark. 2011. “nutritional governmentality: food and the politics of health in late imperial and republican china.” radical history review 2011 (110): 9–35. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2010-024. https://doi.org/10.1080/14636770903151992 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0022-5347(17)38334-9 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0022-5347(17)38334-9 https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-7824(93)90144-v https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-7755346 https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2010-024 roundtable: pursuits of populations | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 11 (2) jessie liu, 2025 5 tien, h. yuan. 1965. “sterilization, oral contraception, and population control in china.” population studies 18 (3): 215–35. https://doi.org/10.2307/2173285. woronov, terry ellen. 2003. “transforming the future: ‘quality’ children and the chinese nation.” phd diss., university of chicago. zhao, zhongwei, and anna reimondos. 2012. “the demography of china’s 1958–61 famine: a closer examination.” population 67 (2): 281–308. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23358630. author bio jessie liu is a sociologist of race, gender, and migration working across asian studies and asian diaspora studies. her doctoral dissertation, formulas of chineseness: tracing daigou between china and australia, was awarded the 2024 anu gender institute prize for excellence in gender and sexuality research and shortlisted for the inter-asia cultural studies dissertation prize. https://doi.org/10.2307/2173285 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23358630 homophonic followings keywords notes references author bio     autoethnography of a pancreas: lessons on synthetic humanness and disrupting endocrine disruption     athena sofides yale university athena.sofides@yale.edu     abstract i explore the politics of hormone access and endocrine exposure in a world characterized by irrevocable toxicity and the many environmentally-derived chronic health issues that can come from it. drawing on my own experience living with type 1 diabetes, i reflect on what it means to depend upon a synthetic, politicized, exogenous hormone—insulin—from the very pharmaceutical and medical industries responsible for widescale, non-consensual exposures to endocrine disruptors (like the estrogen-mimickers in consumer plastics), while simultaneously barring trans, non-binary, and chronically ill people from accessing necessary and/ or desired hormones (like insulin, estrogen, testosterone). what determines whose body—human or nonhuman—is disruptive? musing on my life as a full-time pancreas whose existence is made possible by laboratory-made insulin and wearable pumps and glucose monitors, i argue that to access humanity is more than being unadulterated, and aspiring towards a non-toxic or pure future is both impossible given the legacy of forever chemicals and missing the point, which is that humanity is more than the hormones that do or do not innately constitute us. keywords critical disability studies, disability justice, endocrine disruption, toxicity, hormones, diabetes to disrupt is to render changed—not necessarily made adverse, but transformed. hormones and the compounds that mimic or alter their activity, known as endocrine disruptors or endocrine disrupting compounds (edcs), engender a kind of plasticity in the bodies in which they operate and thus bring about new ways of knowing, living, and dying. to interrogate the hormone is to subvert—to glimpse the world as more permeable than it may seem. as an insulin-dependent diabetic, i have witnessed and embodied transformation, materially and affectively, through synthetic hormones. laboratory-made insulin has granted me access to my life, while also rendering me irrevocably enmeshed in the machinations of the clinic. hormones have transformed my body, too—in facilitating the metabolism of the glucose i consume into usable energy, insulin therapy catalyzed a hasty corporeal recalibration, my body eagerly growing back the muscle and fat that had been wasting over the past several years as my chronic hyperglycemia became increasingly pronounced. though its precise etiology remains contested, type 1 diabetes (t1d) is an autoimmune disease believed to be caused by a combination of genetics and environmental influences, including viral infections and trauma (katsarou et al. 2017; sharif et al. 2018). the escalation of my symptoms occurred following a covid-19 infection and several challenging and traumatic experiences that i believe may have pushed me over the diagnostic precipice. as i became increasingly burdened by a body that did not feel equipped to house me, both on account of gender dysphoria and undiagnosed chronic illness, my health deteriorated. since my early twenties, i attempted to convince well-meaning doctors that my unexplainable bouts of fatigue, fainting, and brain fog were real. while i struggled to process the food i ate, move, or cut through the cognitive haziness and string a sentence together, i was told that i was not only not sick but healthy—my symptoms were likely attributed to anxiety. when i had flagged high glucose levels on a blood test years prior, my provider advised that i had probably forgotten to fast before my blood test—i did not look like i had diabetes, being thin, and had nothing to worry about. i was unsatisfied but had no choice but to follow the lead of my healthcare providers. although invisible to those around me, my deteriorating health hung lower and lower over each day like a thick curtain, weighing down my mind and body and alienating me from other people and things. just shy of my twenty-fifth birthday, i was admitted to the hospital on the verge of diabetic ketoacidosis, where severe hyperglycemia renders the blood acidic and can quickly lead to irreversible vascular damage or death, and was diagnosed with diabetes. i am now forever reliant upon insulin, a synthetic copy of a life-giving and necessary hormone, and on the medical industrial complex that manufactures it—and whose oversight and refusal to take seriously my years of unwellness nearly cost me my life. i am essentially kept alive by two kinds of wearable biotech that monitor my blood glucose and administer my insulin—devices i have the luxury of accessing due to my student health insurance, and which make my chronic illness management worlds easier, despite their frequent glitches. in the two years that have passed since my diagnosis, i have reflected on how my humanity is made possible by interfacing directly with the synthetic, this essential lifeblood of human metabolism synthesized by pharmaceutical giants, an unnatural substance administered from the outside in. the word hormone is believed to have first been used in 1905 by physiologist ernest henry starling to describe “the chemical messengers which, speeding from cell to cell along the bloodstream, may coordinate the activities and growth of different parts of the body” (tata 2005, 490). while hormones and the mechanisms by which they operate have continued to evade tidy definition and remained the object of physiological inquiry since, they are broadly understood as the chemical messengers of the endocrine system, which work to affect change on target cells and thereby regulate essential biological processes, including growth and development, reproduction and sexual differentiation, metabolism, and the maintenance of homeostasis (hiller-sturmhöfel and bartke 1998; nussey and whitehead 2001). liaising between organism and environment, hormones carry out essential biological functions that allow living things to live, and that make human animals human. hormones can originate within a body (endogenous) or from the environment(s) surrounding a body (exogenous). some such exogenous agents are considered endocrine disruptors. definitionally, edcs “mimic, block, or interfere with” the normal endocrine function of a body (national institute of environmental health sciences, n.d.). from “natural,” plantand fungi-derived phytoand myco-estrogens, to synthetic compounds synthesized in the lab for pharmaceutical, agricultural, manufacturing, and other uses, edcs exist in the landscapes around—and, eventually, within—us (paterni et al. 2017). to study hormones is to necessarily call into question what exactly constitutes a normal function or body. from food and medicine to personal care products, pesticides to plastic bottles, clothing to furniture, edcs—likely constituting at least a thousand known human-made chemicals—are woven into nearly every facet of our contemporary quotidian environment (endocrine society, n.d.). exposure to edcs has been linked with metabolic and behavioral disorders, certain cancers, and adverse cognitive/developmental outcomes in not only the exposed individual but also their “progeny,” for generations to come (bergman et al. 2012). inherently disruptive of toxicological dogma that “the dose makes the poison,” edcs have been shown to enact substantive effects even in small, short-term exposures (vandenberg, colborn, et al. 2012). despite these concerning risks, synthetic endocrine disruptors remain abundant and unregulated, and suggest no sign of going away anytime soon. the production and manufacture of edcs has dovetailed with a political economic disruption of markets, industries, and bodies, creating products such as single-use plastic, thermal papers and resins, non-stick and waterproof clothing and home products, and strong herbicides. many of these products emerged from military industrial research, conveniently giving rise to attractive new markets touting efficiency, cleanliness, individualism, and ease of daily life, from the individual to industrial scales (preciado 2013; vogel 2009). even after an edc is suspected or demonstrated to be potentially harmful, us industrial regulatory regimes legally allow for their continued distribution, sometimes even threatening the reputation, livelihood, and families of scientists whose work has uncovered potential dangers of exposure to their products to obfuscate suspicion around their safety (aviv 2014). the slow pace of us chemical regulation is such that a ban on each compound identified as hazardous could take years to implement, only after years of research demonstrating this toxicity in the first place. us agencies lack adequate regulatory jurisdiction, and, in some cases, federal health and safety entities have even supported work attempting to delegitimize decades of rigorous epidemiological science connecting uncontrolled edc exposure to a variety of adverse health outcomes (vandenberg, hunt, et al. 2019).1 all while exposure to industrially produced edcs is assumed to be a fact of life to which we must all acquiesce, people who medically require or desire hormones—namely, chronically ill people and transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people seeking hormone-replacement therapy—are denied access to them. from the sky-high costs of insulin in the us to the legislative, pathological labyrinths barring access to gender-affirming estrogen or testosterone therapy (from supply shortages to lack of insurance coverage to provider refusal to practice gender-affirming care for trans patients), pharmaceutical and legal regimes block and—in the case of estrogen and testosterone access among non-cis people attempting to access them—sometimes even attempt to criminalize consensual exposure to exogenous-hormones (berrian et al. 2024). despite their synthetic constitutions, hormones such as insulin, testosterone, and estrogen, which bring into human bodies life, health, and the ability to self-determine one’s humanity, have become the discursive fodder and lucrative subject of political economic regimes that seek to determine who gets access to a “normal” body or life. different from other edcs, pharmaceutical hormones that are desired can be overseen by a doctor (and often are—think birth control, or estrogen replacement therapy for cisgender, post-menopausal women) and thus administered in controlled quantities accounting for a patient’s holistic health. as giovanna di chiro examines, even amongst anti-toxics discourses advocating against “widespread contamination” of hazardous toxins—a “very real issue of… myriad grave consequences”—there is a dominant focus on how these exposures “[trouble] and [destabilize] the normal/gendered body,” mirroring and reconstituting a cultural “fixation” on so-called gender or sexual “abnormalities” (read intersex, trans, and otherwise sexualand/or gender-variant ways of being, 2010, 201–202). this misplaced obsession with ways of existing outside of the imagined averages constituting the sex and gender binaries (which have always existed, even before proliferation of synthetic edcs, in human and nonhuman histories)—what di chiro calls the “sex panic” of anti-toxics discourse, “de-emphasiz[es],” perhaps even “naturaliz[es]” and “normaliz[es]” the cancers, autoimmune diseases, neurological, cardiac, and other adverse health impacts of such exposures (202). contending with what malin ah-king and eva hayward describe as “the deleterious effects of material culture”—the vessels of hazardous chemical exposure inextricable from the fabric (literal and otherwise) of daily life which “become part of the process of sexing” (2013, 1)—is well-within reason for anyone concerned with bodily autonomy as a principle. but there is a way to, as ah-king and hayward articulate, “[claim] toxicity as one of the current conditions of sex” (1)—acknowledging the role of landscapes in influencing the “responsive potential” (6) across the spectrum of sex without igniting or fortifying a “transex panic” (4). the hormone is imbued with an agency often denied to nonhuman entities, let alone objects of infinitesimal size. the etymology of the word speaks to this, gleaned via learned borrowing from the ancient greek ὁρμάω or hormao, literally “i excite/arouse.” the use of the first person is evocative—the hormone is participant and director, collaborator and solo artist, influencer and influenced, animating, as mel y. chen (2011) says of the toxin, our bodies and moving us through the world. endogenously and in the lab, we create more of them, and they, in turn, shape us into who we are. we are kept alive by them, sometimes even made chronically ill (at least in part) because of them, or granted another chance at living meaningfully, because of them. we can sometimes consent to them, allowing them access to our bodies through injections or pills, signaling to them affectively, as they may, in a sense, to each other—and, at other times, they override our autonomy, becoming embodied without our consent as a consequence of eating from the wrong packaging, drinking the wrong water, breathing the wrong air. sometimes we need them and cannot find them. sometimes, maybe always, the line between “we” and “them” is blurred. normal/abnormal, endogenous/exogenous, synthetic/natural—human hormones and their analogs disrupt the bifurcations between these imagined opposites. insulin-dependent diabetes requires nearly constant vigilance. the chemical mechanism underlying the kind of diabetes i have is an autoimmune malfunction of the pancreas’ beta cells, which produce insulin and other hormones that regulate blood sugar and metabolic processes. because my body cannot produce its own insulin to lower high blood sugar or release sugar into my bloodstream when i need it, i use a continuous glucose monitor (cgm) and insulin pump to manage my diabetes. i wear a dexcom g6 cgm, a small device that suspends a catheter in my interstitial tissue for ten days at a time to provide blood sugar readings to an app on my iphone every five minutes. the cgm communicates with my omnipod, a small, roundish rectangular insulin pump, which i control with an android remote called a personal diabetes manager. the pump contains a fillable insulin cartridge and plastic tube that delivers insulin straight into my arm for three days at a time. about twenty minutes before a meal, snack, or drink, i enter in the anticipated number of grams of carbs i intend to eat into the controller, and it uses the reading of my cgm and how much insulin is currently in my system to calculate a requisite dose. i recently tried eli lilly’s lyumjev, a faster-acting insulin to make pre-meal insulin doses easier (pre-meal bolus times of five to ten versus fifteen to twenty minutes), but the efficiency brought with it a stinging sensation and more persistent scarring when administered through my pump. as with many pieces of diabetes, finding the exact suite of insulin types and devices that work for one’s particular body/mind can be a delicate and tenacious process (price 2011). i have never been able to estimate how many times per day i check my blood sugar, because i do it so frequently that it has become like breathing. but the mental calculus of diabetes is also very much at the forefront of my daily life, considering how to best address that day’s particular constellation of food and water consumed; exercise performed; stress experienced or anticipated; where i am at in my menstrual cycle; the particulars of that day’s temperature, altitude, and weather; and the workings of the other forty-plus variables known to influence blood sugar. i am grateful for the ease of life made possible by automated insulin delivery systems like my pump, and less-invasive blood sugar monitoring technology like my cgm, which until relatively recently were not widely accessible (and, arguably, remain inaccessible to many underand un-insured people with diabetes). i try to remember my gratitude for these devices as i spend hundreds at the pharmacy every month to cover my hefty out-of-pocket expenses that remain even after my generous insurance coverage; as my cgm’s and pump’s alarms refuse to be silenced when i am in a quiet lecture hall or office because liability precludes the biotech companies from making them more customizable; as i offload my intimate biometric data to not just dexcom and omnipod but a suite of other, often glitchy, third-party data services that aggregate my blood sugar, daily carbs consumed, and corresponding units of insulin dosed daily, to send to my doctors; as i encounter a barrage of luxury cgm advertisements designed for non-diabetics in some attempt to make wearable medical devices a new trend, a spectacular bauble in the fatphobic hands of the wellness industry; as i wonder whether the edcs in the teflon-lining of the catheter of my omnipod or the epoxy affixing it and my cgm to my scarred skin will give me cancer before i die of diabetes complications; as i hope that, once i graduate, i get a job immediately, and one with a health insurance plan generous enough to allow me to keep using the combination of insulins and devices that i’ve slowly learned work well for me. i navigate the questions and stares, the diabetes stigma from providers and media and friends, the hacks and tips and tricks from other disabled people about how to live and make do and thrive as one non-consensually but irrevocably embedded in the pharmaceutical and medical industries for life, the frustrations and massive gratitude, of living with visible medical devices to care for my diabetes. manually operating my pancreas through these biotechnical appendages has caused me to feel simultaneously more and less human than i ever have. the fact of my human life is thanks to synthetics, pharmaceuticals, adhesives, plastics. i find some vindication in saying that the pharmacochemical and medical industrial regimes, in exposing me to environmental stressors and refusing to hear my pleas for the care i needed, made me sick—and that my sick body emerged from that, against many odds. i say this while holding that, despite what the anti-toxics discourses may argue, my cyborg self that could not survive without medical intervention is no less natural than any other able-bodied, healthy person’s. i find grief and rage in the fact that so many chronically ill and disabled people have the same experience—being either denied validation of their own embodied knowledge that something is wrong, or rigorously pathologized. this ruthless dichotomy, characterized by what beatrice adler-bolton and artie vierkant (2022) call extractive abandonment with its logics of exploitation and carcerality, is even more pronounced and sharpened for black and indigenous patients—especially women—and other people of color, poor people, disabled people, intersex people, immigrants, those who cannot speak english, and visibly queer, transgender, or nonbinary people.2 and capitalism’s “ableist ecologies,” as sunaura taylor articulates, operate in such a way that we begin to “see abandonment as natural” (2024, 26)—akin, perhaps, to how the “sex panic” of anti-toxics rhetoric naturalizes those environmentally derived health concerns unrelated (at least superficially) to sex or gender at the expense of those that disrupt norms of these imagined binaries (di chiro 2010). in the case of hormones, state-sanctioned optimization of the capacity for illness-related profit means allowing non-consensual exposures to hormone mimickers/disruptors that thwart the body’s metabolic processes (in food wrappers, can linings, pesticides, receipts, frying pans, clothes, drinking water), and to other stressors that exacerbate or otherwise interfere with metabolic processes. together, these make systems-impacted people sick while making those same people fight to access the basic hormone therapies they need or desire. the political economies undergirding these exposures are robust, entangled with military industrial expansion and ideals of individuality and optimization. communities made to experience poverty, over-policing, food scarcity, housing insecurity, medical negligence, and other kinds of discrimination generally experience increased exposure to physical and social environmental hazards, and requisitely higher chronic health conditions of environmental origin (goldsmith and bell 2022; d. taylor 2014). healthcare access, including of hormone treatments, also falls inequitably—unand under-insured, poor, unhoused, and undocumented, people are more likely to struggle to access the medicines they need. to desire hormonal change for gender-affirming purposes can easily be problematized, especially for trans people, when a concept of health does not include such non-normative experiences of embodiment—while simultaneously fitting within routine standards of care for menopausal cis women or aging cis men experiencing hypogonadism. human bodies are constantly in flux, shaped by the more-than-human landscapes around and within us. this includes living and non-living, biotic and abiotic, synthetic and real—and the boundaries between these supposed dichotomies are amazingly tenuous. being permeable and thus vulnerable to environmental toxins—both tangible chemicals and immaterial, disruptive influences arising from social stressors—is a deeply human thing, and destabilizes what even constitutes the environment or the human. if a human’s body/mind is influenced by the environment in a way that results in non-normative cognitive, sexual, or endocrine development, that is both normal and not—insofar as “normal” does not mean anything in particular if we are constituted by entanglements of life, non-life, substance, and affect, and always have been. people whose bodies have been shaped by environmental exposures are no less natural than normatively “healthy” individuals for having been impacted by the environment in a more visible way. environment is inclusive of nearly everything and is not merely an exogenous force. as eli clare, sunaura taylor, and others in disability studies have articulated, there is a way to grieve, “resisting the mass disablement wrought by violence and exploitation” (s. taylor 2024, 33), while “refiguring the world” (clare 2001, 363) and reclaiming “as home” these bodies (di chiro 2010, 200), while learning to thrive in the “disabled ecologies” (s. taylor 2024, 33) already here, our selves and our kin, and those to come. the toxin, according to chen, “is not necessarily alive, yet it enlivens morbidity and fear of death,” and “requires an object against which its threat operates”—it is not inherently toxic, but made toxic, or becomes toxic, by threatening, or disrupting, a pre-existing object (2011, 265). the same may be said of the hormone/disruptor, and the non-normative (non-white/able-bodied/cis/binary/thin/heteronormative) body, which, by virtue of existing, is a threat to the tenuous fabric of the presiding political economic regime. in the face of violence, impairment, and abandonment, it is the non-normative who are most targeted and most disruptive of the imagined inevitability of the profiteering systems behind them. there is room for outrage and resistance against the non-consensual onslaught of toxins, while demanding access for those who need or desire hormones. in fact, one informs the other. disabled or chronically ill or non-cis people are not unnatural in any way other than that we are all unnatural, part-petrochemical, part-immaterial, part-organ, part-plastic-laced blood—the presence of these assemblages as just more obvious in some bodies than others, such that any conception of future aspiring towards non-toxic or “chemical free” life misses an opportunity at “refiguring the world” (clare 2001, 363) as what ah-king and hayward call “embodiment,” “a process of becoming with these altered environments” (2013, 9). chen offers an ontological shift from thinking of toxins as “damaging” the body to viewing the toxin as a kind of “symbiote,” suggesting a mutualistic rather than parasitic relationship, which leaves room for the possibility that toxins can “fundamentally alter” a “generally integral being without fundamentally altering it” (2012, 205). along these lines, suzanne bost asks, “what outcomes emerge from our participation in webs of toxicity?...what do our partners in symbiotic infection have to teach us about our communal responsibility?” (2023, 178). perhaps a similar shift can elucidate the agency imbued in and made possible through the hormone, even when labeled hazardous or disruptive, a symbiote impacting not only each of the body systems (beyond sex), but each and every body. as feminist science studies continues to probe which bodies are considered disrupted and which disruptive, perhaps we can look to hormones—and the chronically ill, disabled, trans, and intersex communities who need and/or desire them—for guidance in troubling the urge for purity, tidiness, and binaries around what is natural, normal, inevitable, synthetic, permissible, real, and possible. note 1 such was the case with the 2018 consortium linking academic and regulatory insights on toxicity of bpa (clarity-bpa), a five-year study carried out by the u.s. food and drug administration, national institute of environmental health sciences, and the national toxicology program to “resolve questions about [bpa’s] safety” (hamilton 2008) by seeking a collaborative engagement between academic and federally funded research scientists looking at the effects of bisphenol a (bpa), a plasticizer, plastic monomer, and estrogen-mimicking compound, on animal health. this collaborative project purported to bridge expertise across federal agencies (who undertook the core studies of this project) and academic researchers (who carried out the grantee studies) looking at both the macroand microimpacts of exposures to bpa on health. disruptive properties of edcs like bpa are not always observable at the more macro—the dose does not always make the poison, after all, and the poison is not always quantifiable by uterine weight changes (traditional toxicological endpoints, captured by guideline, validated, and often federal agency-preferred assays), but markers of estrogen receptors or other alterations of gene expression, animal behaviors, or tissue organization (non-guideline, non-validated, often academic lab employed). given clarity’s breadth, a combination of these assays was employed, with core and grantee studies showing a range of results. this range was unsurprising to many scientists involved—but the agencies behind clarity overlooked the results of the latter, non-traditional endpoint studies suggesting bpa’s more subversive implications, instead concluding that bpa, even at high doses, yielded “minimal effects” on health (vandenberg, hunt et al. 2019, 369). the fda doubled down on this stance, proclaiming its “determination that currently authorized uses of bpa continue to be safe for consumers,” despite study data showing “effects of bpa at the lowest doses examined,” including cancers of the mammary gland in rats and other concerning impacts of bpa exposure that occurred only at low levels, which fda appears to have dismissed (ostroff 2018; vandenberg, hunt et al. 2019). as environmental health science, reproductive biology, pharmacology, and toxicology experts outline in a 2019 review in nature on the limits of clarity-bpa, they “do not believe there is a scientific basis for the fda to dismiss adverse outcomes at low doses” of bpa (vandenberg, hunt et al. 2019, 369). 2 adler-bolton and vierkant define extractive abandonment as a “core relation of health to capitalism” that exists at the intersection of “extractable capital or health of the individual subject” and state-sanctioned “facilit[ation of] a capacity for profit,” against which the former is balanced; when the state “culturally, politically, and institutionally” constructs the concept of health, “the state itself is made” through the very “constructing, destroying, and reconstructing” of health (adler-bolton and vierkant 2022, 20).   references adler-bolton, beatrice, and artie vierkant. 2022. health communism. verso books. ah-king, malin, and eva hayward. 2014. 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is a scholar and researcher from brooklyn, new york, studying embodied toxicity and the political economy of health at the yale school of the environment in new haven, connecticut, where they advocate for free and accessible insulin for all.     original research making feminist selves: reflections on the biopolitical working of misoprostol in argentine abortion activism     lea happ king’s college london lea.happ@kcl.ac.uk     abstract this article interrogates the role of misoprostol, an abortifacient pharmaceutical, in recent argentine abortion activism through the lens of biopolitics. for more than three decades, misoprostol has enabled activists to accompany and facilitate self-managed abortions safely in settings where access is restricted. in argentina, where abortion was legalized in 2021, misoprostol has been harnessed by feminist activists not only as a pharmaceutical technology, but also, as i argue here, a biopolitical one fostering a distinctly feminist “biopolitics from below” (biehl 2016). building on an analysis of informative and narrative materials publicized by activist groups, i trace the affective mechanisms by which feminist activists contest hegemonic subjectivities. i focus on feminist knowledge productions about misoprostol and the affective paradigms made possible through them to suggest that its pharmaceutical properties have enabled activist practices that link the commanding of scientific knowledge to the production of political knowledges. through these practices, feminist activists have turned misoprostol into a technology for shaping counter-hegemonic subjectivities as embodied, affective, and relational.     keywords misoprostol, pharmaceutical abortion, feminist activism, affect, counter-hegemonic subjectivity, feminist knowledge production, argentina     introduction misoprostol has played a key role in the history of latin american abortion activism. the pharmaceutical is used for various obstetric interventions and listed as such on the world health organization’s (2023) model list of essential medicines. in abortion care, it is used on its own or in combination with mifepristone. however, originally it was licensed as a prescription drug for treating gastric ulcers (drovetta 2015). noticing its abortive side effects, brazilian women were the first to develop regimes for its safe use in abortion in the 1980s (de zordo 2016; freeman and rodríguez 2022). since then latin american activists have used its ready availability to make abortion accessible as widely and safely as possible, despite legal restrictions. from the 1990s, argentine activists have increasingly relied on misoprostol (mcreynolds-pérez 2014), making illegal abortions safer and enabling new forms of feminist abortion support. in 2009 lesbians and feminists for the decriminalization of abortion (lesbianas y feministas por la descriminalización del aborto) launched a phone line sharing instructions for its safe use (drovetta 2015). since 2012 socorristas en red (feministas y transfeministas que abortamos) (senred) has informed and accompanied abortion seekers in and outside the healthcare system (socorristas en red n.d.-b). beyond medical intervention, the use of misoprostol in self-managed, feminist-accompanied abortion has enabled new imaginations of feminist identity and subjectivity. based on the analysis of selected informative and narrative materials, i investigate misoprostol as a technology for shaping counter-hegemonic subjectivities. informative materials include activist groups’ websites, social media accounts, statistics, reports, and abortion guidelines, whereas narrative materials include stories and testimonies of activists’ and abortion seekers’ experiences. argentine feminist theorists have highlighted the crucial role of affects in altering the political subjecthoods implicated in abortion (burton 2021; macón 2021; solana and vacarezza 2020; vacarezza 2018; vacarezza and burton 2023). focusing especially on the affectivity of expertise, solidarity, and joy, i suggest that negative affective paradigms such as shame, guilt, and secrecy are displaced through the generation of more complex affects (vacarezza and burton 2023), made possible by activists’ use of misoprostol as a biopolitical technology. i propose feminist “biopolitics from below” (biehl 2016) as a conceptual tool to understand affective attachments as vehicles for making distinctly feminist selves. to investigate misoprostol as a technology for shaping dissident bodies, subjectivities, and communities, i first provide a brief discussion of recent interventions into and expansions of foucauldian biopolitics, especially notions of biopolitics from below emerging in response to the covid-19 pandemic (rocca 2021; samaddar 2023; sotiris 2020). on this basis, i sketch out my conceptual framework by making the case for the existence and necessity of a distinctly feminist biopolitics from below. second, i historicize contemporary notions of gendered subjectivity in argentina, focusing on exclusions from this category based on gender, sexuality, race, and class. subsequently, i discuss my analysis of informative and narrative productions by various feminist activist groups. i trace how misoprostol, via the production and sharing of knowledge about it and the affective attachments implicated in these practices, functions as a technology for shaping counter-hegemonic subjectivities. methodology this article builds on an analysis of a corpus of informative and narrative materials published by feminist activist groups online. informative materials include organizations’ websites and social media accounts, statistics, and reports such as senred’s sistematizaciones, published annually since 2015 (socorristas en red, n.d.-c), and proyecto mirar’s (n.d.-b) post-legalization reports, as well as guidelines such as the sociolinguistic adaptation of abortion protocols into wichí, guaraní, qom, and mapuzungun published by catholics for the right to choose’s (católicas por el derecho a decidir) cuerpos y libertades project (cuerpos y libertades, n.d.-a) and blas radi and marina elichiry’s (n.d.) adaptation of a trans-inclusive abortion manual. these materials allow insight into geographic, economic, racialized, and gendered inequalities shaping abortion experiences. whilst statistics such as senred’s sistematizaciones attest to the diversity of people seeking abortion care, documents such as the trans-inclusive abortion manual and adapted abortion protocols explore the particular healthcare needs of indigenous, trans, and gender-nonconforming people. narrative materials include senred’s archivo rosa (n.d.-a), an archive of testimonies by feminist activists of the socorrista network dated between 2015 and 2019; estamos cerca: relatos de aborto en cuarantena (socorristas en red n.d 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2020d, 2020e), a collection of testimonies by people who aborted in quarantine; as well as dahiana belfiori’s (2015) código rosa, a collection of stories based on the testimonies of women who were supported by senred. they represent a broad range of abortion experiences, with narrators from different socioeconomic backgrounds, locations, and age groups. in argentina, economic and racialized inequalities are often reflected geographically (abeles and villafañe 2022; lavagna 2024), but as no detailed information about narrators’ identity is provided, the possibility for a thorough intersectional analysis based on these materials is limited. focusing on informative and narrative productions created for and shared with a broad audience enables me to trace activists’ representation of their misoprostol-related activism and constructions of counter-hegemonic subjectivities in public forums. to further contextualize these representations, i also consulted official documents, including legal texts and health policy directives. while these materials are situated within longer abortion histories, this article focuses on activism since 2015. i selected this period due to the increased presence and visibility of pharmaceutical abortion and activists accompanying it. misoprostol as a technology for feminist biopolitics from below for this article, i conceptualize misoprostol as a pharmaceutical and biopolitical technology. i draw on michel foucault’s (1990) and paul b. preciado’s (2018) theorizings of biopolitics, as well as recent proposals for a biopolitics from below (biehl 2016; sotiris 2020; rocca 2021; samaddar 2023). argentina is no exception to the observation that, in the nation-state, sexuality is of “greatest instrumentality” (foucault 1990, 103) for managing individual bodies and entire populations. governing reproduction implies managing “reproductive options…and identities available to [gendered subjects], who are often constituted as citizens responsible for reproducing rational social and national bodies” (morgan and roberts 2012, 244). abortion politics have been instrumental to biopolitical population management (calkin et al. 2022). in argentina, they are a site of intervention aiming to “maintain the status quo of the familial institution, gender roles and feminine sexuality and corporality” (flores 2011, 2). for instance, the discursive figure of the unborn child as an object of protection is mobilized to police potentially pregnant bodies (flores 2011). concern with who ought (not) to reproduce is also reflected in argentina’s 1921 penal code, which regulated abortion until 2020. while (mostly) prohibited, abortion was permitted in the case of an “indecent assault committed against an idiot or demented woman” (art. 86.2).1 this articulation resonates with wider historical understandings of women’s contribution to society through motherhood. while men emerged as active participants in public life, women were expected to contribute to the family “as the basis of the argentine nation” (kerr 2020, 19) as wives and mothers. the continued importance of maternalism is illustrated by the significance of eva perón in past and present political imaginations. evita, herself childless, was “famously worshiped as ‘the mother of the poor’” (eraso 2013, 1) and continues to be mobilized for diverse political projects, including abortion activism (sutton and vacarezza 2020). echoes of the understanding of motherhood as contribution to the nation and resulting opposition to abortion can be found in contemporary anti-abortion discourses. in a 2024 proposal to suspend the right to legal abortion, deputies of javier milei’s la libertad avanza argued against abortion because “all members of the political community must take part in both its construction and its enjoyment” (honorable cámara de diputados de la nación argentina 2024). in the context of this social mandate, withholding abortion access affirms and reinforces this normative subjecthood. controlling abortifacient pharmaceuticals and gatekeeping knowledge about their use may be understood as biopolitical control mechanisms. however, as preciado (2018) argues, pharmaceutical technologies can also disrupt heteronormative definitions of subjecthood defined by reproduction. while preciado writes primarily about trans experiences of challenging heterosexist and cisnormative social orders, i argue this framing of technologies as means of making one’s body and self according to personal preference can be transposed to make sense of feminist activist uses of misoprostol. preciado’s intervention allows the conceptualization of two interconnected facets of misoprostol as a tool for activist alteration of embodied subjectivity: its material impact on the body and, subsequently, its potential for enabling new ways of inhabiting subjectivities. with abortion commonly constructed as a “passive ontological state” (stabile 1994 quoted in baird 2001, 209), the convergence of both facets turns misoprostol into a tool for rejecting this passivity. mirroring trans people’s use of hormones, which preciado describes as “biopolitical drugs, the access to which cannot be safeguarded by heteronormative state institutions” (2018, 37), misoprostol escapes the control of healthcare institutions to enable material alteration of the body from pregnant to not pregnant. feminist interventions made possible through misoprostol can be usefully conceptualized as feminist biopolitics from below. building on observations of initial covid-19 measures, panagiotis sotiris identifies the need “to rethink questions of health and care, as part of a broader attempt to radically transform social relations” (2020, 25). he proposes democratic biopolitics, or biopolitics from below, as “constant processes of subaltern struggle and confrontation with the limits of contemporary neoliberal states…based upon collective militancy, the democratization of knowledge, and self-organization” (28). building on this theorization, facundo rocca (2021) suggests biopolitics from below constitutes a strategy for challenging biopolitical control through the appropriation of (medical) knowledges from governing institutions. in the context of argentine abortion activism, feminists have long engaged in such appropriations and productions of medical knowledge alongside affective, embodied, and collective practices of care. activist practices have enabled the sidestepping of liberal democratic narratives of citizen participation, and permit subaltern subjects to politicize their own objectified position (rocca 2021) in distinctly feminist ways. this sidestepping is exemplified by abortion companions working outside the healthcare system that, prior to legalization, grounded their work in the refusal to accept legal prescriptions over their bodies and personhood. instead, they emphasized the praxis of accompanying abortions as “dictat[ing] [their] own law” (belfiori 2015, 13). from its beginnings with lesbians and feminists for the decriminalization of abortion, argentine abortion accompaniment has “[built] this demedicalized, self-managed, and empowering [abortion] discourse” (mines et al. 2013, 134) in explicit rejection of capitalist heteropatriarchy. before this backdrop, i employ feminist biopolitics from below to investigate the role of misoprostol in enabling affective attachments that shape counter-hegemonic subjectivities. contextualizing the biopolitical capacities of misoprostol: abortion, subjectivity, and normative womanhood in argentina argentina may seem like an unlikely choice for analyzing activism related to self-managed abortion, given the recent legalization of abortion. the new legislation establishes the right to voluntary termination (interrupción voluntaria del embarazo) until the fourteenth week, free of charge and in the public healthcare system without requiring justification. beyond this, legal abortion (interrupción legal del embarazo) is permitted under the conditions previously governing all abortions: violation or a threat to the pregnant person’s health or life. legalization was the result of decades-long feminist activism, with the national campaign for the right to legal, safe and free abortion (campaña nacional por el derecho al aborto legal, seguro y gratuito) having been launched in 2005 (bellucci 2014; tarducci 2018). under this umbrella, hundreds of groups came together to pursue the shared aim of legalization (vacarezza 2023), while maintaining distinct strategies and objectives. the campaign includes a wide range of civil society organizations, among others professional associations, such as the network of health professionals for the right to choose, as well as the abortion accompaniment network senred. the rise of ni una menos in 2015 in response to the murder of fourteen-year-old chiara páez (luengo 2018) marked a new massification of feminist activism. by 2018 abortion activism had grown into a mass movement known as the marea verde (green tide), and the national campaign for the right to legal, safe and free abortion had expanded into a “country-wide movement with alliances in numerous sectors of civil society” (vacarezza 2023, 329). in recent years, mainstream feminism has increasingly attended to marginalized experiences, including those of queer and indigenous people. the renaming of the annual national women’s meeting illustrates this change; in 2019 the meeting was renamed the plurinational meeting of women, lesbians, travestis, trans, intersexual, bisexual and non-binary people (caimmi 2021). simultaneously, trans scholarship has called for more substantive inclusion, pointing out that many feminist movements have resisted “the consideration of trans people as subjects of abortion” (radi and elichiry, n.d., iv). this argument illustrates the continued importance of contesting gendered subjectivities implicated in abortion. self-managed abortion companions, most prominently socorristas en red (feministas y transfeministas que abortamos), constitute an important faction within argentine feminisms (burton 2017), which has been reconfiguring how the subject of abortion is understood. their work continues to be crucial even after legalization. founded by the la revuelta collective in neuquén in 2010, senred accompanies abortion seekers by providing information and supporting them throughout the abortion process (zurbriggen et al. 2018). in 2024 forty-two collectives across the country are listed on senred’s website. according to the network’s 2022 statistics, 73 percent of abortion seekers learn about them by word of mouth, and 19.3 percent via social media or the internet (socorristas en red 2023). as indicated by their name, the network explicitly identifies as feminist and trans feminist. while senred accompanies abortion seekers from all parts of society, it is important to highlight that, even in illegal circumstances, higher class women can access safe abortions through private healthcare (de zordo 2016). abortion accompaniment thus primarily responds to the precarity of marginalized people’s abortion experiences. prior to legalization, senred’s activism normalized abortion “from the bottom up,” contributing to a wider process of social decriminalization as a key legalization strategy. this process describes abortion “[coming] out of the concealment in which it had been” to create broad social acceptance for its legal decriminalization (tarducci 2018, 430). in this context, abortion companions devised new strategies through which abortion could be clandestine but safe. self-managed abortion accompaniment practices emerged as a direct feminist “response to the failure of the state to provide safe abortion care” (moseson et al. 2022, e106) and have been recognized as a way of bypassing “a state that does not recognize abortion rights” (mcreynolds-pérez 2017, 351). the (at least partial) decoupling of clandestinity and danger provided a crucial foundation for the affective attachments discussed below. following legalization, researchers affiliated with senred and the monitoring project proyecto mirar have raised concerns about persisting and newly arising obstacles to abortion access. these include regionally unequal access and diverse forms of obstetric violence, from the diffusion of false information, antiquated and unnecessarily cruel practices, to sexual abuse (romero et al. 2021; socorristas en red 2022a, 2022b, 2022c). these ongoing issues illustrate the obstruction of reproductive autonomy not only by legal frameworks but also social norms, structural inequalities, and discriminatory health, political, and societal infrastructure. in practice, abortion can continue to be difficult to access. to come to grips with these persisting obstacles, an intersectional analysis of abortion access is indispensable, as it is particularly marginalized communities and those living outside population centers who struggle to access care. geography is a key determinant for access. recent figures by proyecto mirar (n.d.-a) show that both abortion services offered and abortions realized in 2023 varied vastly by province. while on average, there are 0.17 services per 1,000 women of childbearing age across the country, there are only 0.03/1,000 in chaco province as opposed to 0.48/1,000 in la pampa (proyecto mirar, n.d.-a). to demonstrate the discrepancy between services offered and required, it merits reading proyecto mirar’s current statistics for the northwest alongside those by senred for 2022 (socorristas en red 2023). across the region, senred accompanied 2,870 people, constituting 21.6 percent of their accompaniments, second only to buenos aires province. simultaneously, three of six northwestern provinces rank in the lowest quartile for abortion services (proyecto mirar, n.d.-a). abortion access is experienced unevenly, with barriers disproportionately affecting “marginalizes people, especially…those with low incomes, racialized [and] neurodivergent people, migrants without argentine document” (radi and elichiry n.d., 18). the feminist movement has long attended to socioeconomic inequality as a decisive factor determining abortion care, with free access being a key demand reflected in the national campaign’s slogan “legal, safe and free” (sutton and vacarezza 2021). indigenous communities frequently face particular barriers to abortion access. responding to these barriers, catholics for the right to choose has collaborated with indigenous, afro-descendent, and campesina women and gender-nonconforming people in ten provinces since 2019 to adapt sexual and reproductive health guidelines (cuerpos y libertades, n.d.-b). cuerpos y libertades’ aim is to promote the exercise of reproductive autonomy by adapting abortion guidelines into indigenous languages (cuerpos y libertades, n.d.-b), highlighting, for instance, the need for “intercultural interpreters and health workers, principally speakers of our language qom” (cuerpos y libertades 2022, 6) in their qom adaptation. further, reproductive events having “historically been gendered as cis women’s problems” (radi and elichiry, n.d., 1) obstructs abortion access for trans and gender-nonconforming people, as healthcare providers frequently fail to “[take] into account different contingent factors in [abortion care]” (19) for this demographic. this observation emphasizes the urgency of reconfiguring aborting subjects beyond cisheteronormativity. the wide range of people obstructed from exercising their reproductive autonomy is reflected in the numbers that continued to prefer self-management over abortion in the healthcare system in 2021. senred have stated that of 9,900 people they supported that year, only 24 percent opted for the latter, while 76 percent chose self-management (socorristas en red 2021a). these statistics illustrate that the key objective of feminist abortion companions—enabling access to abortion for those excluded from it due to geographical and institutional barriers, obstetric violence, and multiple forms of discrimination—remains crucial. it also emphasizes the importance of attending to underlying contestations over bodies that can gestate and their agency as determining factors in abortion politics, making attending to misoprostol as an emancipatory biopolitical tool all the more urgent. activist practices of reclaiming reproductive agency by removing abortion from medical gatekeeping ought to be seen in the context of wider contestations over who is an agentic subject. historically, argentine women’s political subjectivity has been bound up in heteronormative maternalist discourses, with their bodies functioning as “the site for the literal creation of the nation” (kerr 2020, 10) in the nineteenth century. despite argentina’s “prevailing ‘white’ image today, around a third of buenos aires’ population was afro-argentine in 1800,” and until the second half of the nineteenth century, over half of its territory was governed indigenously (taylor 2021, 355). blanqueamiento (whitening) emerged as a strategic process accompanying black and indigenous people’s “elimination and erasure” (taylor 2021, 346; briones 2002; kerr 2020). through blanqueamiento, political and religious authorities promoted “european immigration and miscegenation” (edwards 2020, 5) and shaped whiteness through shifting definitions and demographic categories (edwards 2020; kerr 2020). both indigenous and afro-descendent women were deemed “apt to be civilized” (kerr 2020, 156) and taught “morality, virtue, and civility, characteristics that epitomized whiteness” (edwards 2020, 7) so they would educate “their offspring to be productive future citizens” (kerr 2020, 19) in an increasingly white nation. simultaneously, their reproductive freedoms were violently curtailed, for instance through the systematic separation of indigenous families (kerr 2020), and this very —scientific, societal, and bureaucratic—whitening process worked to erase them from female citizenship. in the early twentieth century, a “socialization of maternity towards eugenic goals” (stepan 1992, 753) linked national duty, motherhood, and compliance with heteronormative gender roles through health scientific and cultural discourses. preoccupations with reproduction and motherhood, as well as degeneration and sexual deviance in relation to poor and racialized immigrants within eugenic politics, led, for instance, to the “confinement of criminals, prostitutes, and degenerates, removing them from the pool of sexual partners" (kerr 2020, 161). the mother, entrusted with caring for family and (by extension) nation, was considered the “guarantor of socialization, schooling, integration into work and normative precepts of morality and hygiene” (rossi 2006, 98). this notion aligns with argentine eugenics’ general focus “on education and public sanitation as a means of improving the stock of the nation” (smith 2016, 1044). in consequence of this history, argentine feminists such as verónica gago have emphasized that the individual as the base unit of the nation-state is “shaped through [the] dispossession” (2020, 51) of indigenous land and feminized bodies. it is precisely the strategic conflation of womanhood with racialized motherhood as a tool for biopolitical control that makes abortion a relevant experience to analyze regarding its potential for disrupting such heteronormative subjecthood. this politicization of women as mothers has been a double-edged sword for women activists. on the one hand, it has been a potent source for intervention in public discourse, especially in the case of the madres de plaza de mayo. one of argentina’s most prominent human rights organizations, they originally were “ordinary housewives who began protesting [against the military dictatorship], demanding answers from the state about their disappeared children” (smith 2016, 1044). their activism affirms the “figure of the heroic mother” (morgan 2015, 140), reinforcing the hegemonic associations of women’s subjectivity with motherhood. in post-dictatorship argentina, they are a highly respected and impactful civil society organization, with their legitimacy being in part grounded in the “perception of women as mothers who would protect their children” (140). as such, human rights became interwoven with motherhood, which “discursively excludes abortion from the realm of human rights” (140). in resistance to the dictatorship’s “state terrorism, forced disappearances and torture” (jones et al. 2018, 86), the right to life, a rhetoric that has also been instrumentalized by anti-abortion movements, took on particular discursive weight. on the other hand, the madres have significant authority to weigh in on sociopolitical issues, as they did in favor of abortion legalization. abortion activists have taken the madres as “moral and political reference” (sutton and vacarezza 2020, 740) and placed “‘human rights’ at the center of their legislative project, reiterating that abortion is a ‘debt to democracy’” (morgan 2015, 143). they have highlighted that, against the backdrop of argentina’s authoritarian past, the democratic state must “not only to refrain from illegitimate violence but should also recognize, enable, and guarantee women’s human rights, broadly defined” (sutton and borland 2019, 37). in a context where, as previously discussed, healthcare institutions are often sites of obstetric violence and reproductive control, misoprostol has been a tool for activists to not only demand reproductive autonomy as a right but also enact it as such. when used in self-managed and feminist-accompanied abortion, misoprostol constitutes a technology for withdrawing from the heteronormative mandate of both state and family. as one of belfiori’s narrators states, a body that aborts is “a body denied to compulsive maternity” (2015, 74). as pregnant people choose to abort with pharmaceutical knowledge otherwise gatekept by medical professionals and the accompaniment of activists, outside the hospital or consultation room, they, at least momentarily, position themselves as autonomous from these institutions. as such, misoprostol emerges as a technology for feminist biopolitics from below. challenging exclusionary subjectivities, making feminist selves: misoprostol, activist practices, and affect having discussed the wider historical context in which misoprostol acquires meaning as a biopolitical technology, i now address how it does so by focusing specifically on the affective attachments pertaining to notions of solidarity, expertise, and joy. to this end, it is necessary to discuss how misoprostol’s widespread availability has altered the scope of feminist abortion activism. i focus on the use of misoprostol alone, as combined regimes using mifepristone have only recently become widely available in argentina. misoprostol was officially available on prescription only before legalization, but “it was fairly easy to buy a formulation containing…misoprostol[,]…authorized for rheumatoid arthritis in retail pharmacies” (vacarezza 2023, 341). pharmaceutical technologies, like misoprostol, have enabled “routes of access to safe methods, without necessarily needing legislative change” (cornwall et al. 2008, 7). the pharmaceutical has formed the basis for new kinds of feminist abortion activism. socorristas en red, for instance, has developed a distinct accompaniment protocol consisting of initial contact via a hotline, followed by a group meeting with activists where abortion seekers receive detailed information about the use of misoprostol in abortion (zurbriggen et al. 2018). during the abortion itself, they are accompanied by an activist via telephone, or—in particular cases such as second trimester abortions—in person (zurbriggen et al. 2018). this practice is underpinned by feminist principles, including judgment-free and compassionate care (zurbriggen et al. 2018). accompaniment groups’ hotlines typically “widely publicized [their] phone numbers” (mcreynolds-pérez 2017, 351), and knowledge about pharmaceutical abortion is spread widely via personal networks, the internet, as well as activists’ presence at feminist marches (belfiori 2015; socorristas en red 2023). misoprostol has also served as a technology for creating new ways of relating to abortion, one’s body, and the wider feminist community. safety is a crucial baseline for thinking about abortion in terms other than maternal mortality, desperation, and suffering. across latin america, hotlines providing medical information about pharmaceutical abortion have significantly increased safe abortion access and improved healthcare (drovetta 2015). a recent study found that self-managed abortion accompanied by argentine feminist groups is “non-inferior to the effectiveness of clinician-managed medication abortion administered in a clinical setting” (moseson et al. 2022, e111). simultaneously, these forms of activism generate “knowledges that politicize situations and events of the ‘private sphere’ …[grounded in] women’s concrete and quotidian experiences” (burton 2017, 109). when sharing information about pharmaceutical abortion via phone lines or in workshops, activists link technical knowledge about misoprostol—how many pills have to be taken? how frequently? how do i know if expulsion has occurred?—to political knowledge about bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. one abortion seeker recounts in her testimony that an activist “explained the procedure to me and that i had to wait a few days for a socorrista to get in contact with me…it was a terrible relief when she told me that she could help me and that we’d resolve it” (socorristas en red 2020a, 10). technical knowledge about misoprostol generates emotions like relief because it enables abortion seekers to reject a pregnancy and motherhood previously perceived as inescapable. this knowledge challenges the understanding of pregnant people’s subjectivity in the heteronormative terms of previously discussed mandated motherhood. misoprostol’s properties as a pharmaceutical—being relatively easy to administer and comparatively affordable, thus making an otherwise life-threatening procedure safe when accompanied by feminist activists (moseson et al. 2022)—have been harnessed by activists as the foundations for shaping alternative subjectivities. affective and embodied activist practices are crucial to bridging the gap between commanding pharmaceutical knowledge for medically safe abortion and the construction of these subjectivities. in the following section, i unpack how by discussing three case studies: expertise, solidarity, and joy. expertise, solidarity, and joy: case studies of feminist biopolitics from below a stated aim of senred is to “displace certain [harmful] imaginaries about abortion” (belfiori 2015, 13), as dahiana belfiori, author of código rosa and herself socorrista, writes. activists seek to displace negative affective attachments (ahmed 2004) of shame, guilt, and secrecy by invoking alternative associations in discourse and practice made possible through the appropriation and sharing of pharmaceutical knowledge. as affect theorists such as sara ahmed (2004) and mariela solana and nayla luz vacarezza (2020) have highlighted, emotionality is constituent of all gendered identities. ahmed (2004) conceptualizes emotions as shaping both individual and collective identities in encounters between subjects. argentine feminists have deliberately utilized a broad affective repertoire for political resistance and social transformation, especially regarding abortion (macón 2021; solana and vacarezza 2020; vacarezza 2018). in testimonies such as estamos cerca, storytelling about abortion expresses “an affective repertoire in which diverse [at times contradictory and complex] ways of feeling coexist” (vacarezza and burton 2023, 14). introducing archivo rosa, senred emphasizes that their activism materializes their desire to “build ties of sorority” (socorristas en red n.d.-a), thus centering the affective attachments implicated in their activism. in a commentary published as part of código rosa, vacarezza underlines that in the web of activists, abortion seekers, and technologies, “different and potentially transformative forms of knowing about abortion and new forms of…feeling it are created” (2015, 139). these new feelings enable feminist activists to rethink subjectivity as affective, embodied, and relational through abortion itself “as a feat of disobedience in the face of the compulsive mandate of maternity” (bellucci 2014, 24). to explore the role of affect in misoprostol’s functioning as a biopolitical technology, the following section analyzes expertise, solidarity, and joy in abortion accompaniment. i focus on these examples because they directly oppose some of the affective mechanisms used to enforce normative—heterosexual, cisgender, racialized—subjectivities. expertise is included because it carries significant affective charge in the context of feminist abortion accompaniment. activists have used “expertise about pharmaceutical abortion…to position themselves as lay experts on safe abortion” (mcreynolds-pérez 2017, 371). this lay expertise challenges the “biomedical organization as a hierarchical and patriarchal structure” (drovetta 2015, 53), making expertise an important facet of feminist mobilizing. given the emancipatory character of feminists’ appropriation of expertise, and its oppositional relationship to patriarchal healthcare institutions, it has embodied and emotional dimensions closely connected to sentiments of self-assuredness, safety, and agency. like solidarity and joy, it functions as an affective mechanism that constructs a collective oppositional body of feminist activism and challenges notions of shame, condescension, and silence attributed to abortion. solidarity counters the isolation and loneliness brought about by dominant portrayals of abortion as diverging from societal norm, shame-inducing, and an experience that ought to be kept behind closed doors. lastly, joy sits in opposition to a sentiment commonly attributed to abortion even among some of those supportive of it: a sense of fear and gravity that presupposes abortion as an experience one always ought to struggle with. joy has featured prominently in abortion activism, especially in visual representations and in the experiences of abortion companions, aiming to subvert dominant affective paradigms (kimport et al. 2023; sutton and vacarezza 2020). this section is divided into three parts, addressing, in turn, the affectivity of expertise, solidarity, and joy. expertise and resistance to obstetric violence abortion companions’ harnessing of technical expertise on pharmaceutical abortion from international feminist organizations, world health organization guidance, and observational data gathered through their own practice is significant in affective terms. by pairing “new technologies with direct-action strategies” (mcreynolds-pérez 2017, 351), activists generate holistic abortion practices and dispute who counts as experts. similarly, radi and elichiry emphasize “members of organizations that facilitate abortions and trans people who have experienced abortion” (n.d., iv) as specialists contributing to their manual, shifting their position from object to subject of inquiry. to turn abortion seekers into experts of their own abortion, activists provide them with the information necessary for using misoprostol correctly and determining the success of an abortion. in estamos cerca, one abortion seeker recounts that she “examined everything that had come out of me. everything. i sent photos [to her abortion companion]” (socorristas en red 2020a, 7). thus, she was able to undertake a medical procedure otherwise requiring medical scrutiny. various types of political knowledge are implicated in these practices of acquiring and sharing information about pharmaceutical abortion. first, knowledge about the safe use of misoprostol in the hands of feminist activists is in itself political because it challenges hegemonic distinctions between scientific expert and lay people (mcreynolds-pérez 2017). a story collected in código rosa recounts, “i am surprised by the relaxed atmosphere. these women are there so that another two women give them information about abortion with misoprostol. these women trust that information. i cannot stop comparing my experience from twenty years ago: the secrecy, the fear, the desperation. i encountered none of that in this circle of knowledges and affects” (belfiori 2015, 91). this fictionalized experience of feminist-accompanied abortion illustrates how pharmaceutical expertise becomes a means for resisting power structures within medical and social institutions by disrupting negative affects such as secrecy, fear, and desperation. similarly, an abortion seeker featured in estamos cerca states, “i knew every symptom, so i was…prepared” (socorristas en red 2020b, 9). furthermore, technical expertise about misoprostol enables subjectivities contrary to hegemonic notions of womanhood as they reject mandatory maternity. through sharing abortion knowledge, activists facilitate the reclaiming of medical agency. while most abortion companions are not formally medically trained, they “undergo extensive training in feminist principles and medical guidelines” (zurbriggen et al. 2018, 109). information shared includes details on patient rights, the conditions for voluntary and legal pregnancy termination, and different abortion methods. this knowledge becomes a tool for confronting medical institutions that withhold such information and obstruct access to adequate abortion care, thus limiting reproductive autonomy and reinforcing hegemonic womanhood. as senred activists highlight in archivo rosa, abortion seekers have frequently experienced “[a] medic who conned or mistreated them [and] pharmacies that refused to sell them the medication even with prescription” (peralta and fonseca 2015). feminist activists observe that negative encounters with healthcare professionals continue to occur after legalisation (socorristas en red 2022a; 2022b; 2022c; 2022d). similarly, a story featured in código rosa explores the violence implicated in the upholding of mandated motherhood through inappropriate ultrasound use: “i didn’t want to hear its heartbeats…and the [healthcare worker] smiling, content,…as if he took pleasure in having gotten me to listen to my baby’s heartbeat” (belfiori 2015, 31). activists continue to report the use of ultrasound to force pregnant people to view the image and listen to heartbeats as an “anti-abortion instrument” intended to dissuade them from aborting (socorristas en red 2022d), as well as other forms of obstetric violence, even after legalization. appropriating technical knowledge about misoprostol via feminist abortion companions enables abortion seekers to either sidestep the healthcare system entirely through self-management or to be in a stronger position to confront it. with information and accompaniment offered by feminist activists equipping abortion seekers to “put on an imaginary bullet-proof vest to receive all those shots, hear those prejudices from the nurses and medics” (socorristas en red 2020b, 8), accompaniment practices alter the affective experience of abortion. in their 2019 statistics, senred emphasizes that “the state abandons those who abort whilst we do not” (2020f, 35). with medical and state institutions commonly being stigmatizing and obstructing factors in abortion care (radi and elichiry, n.d.), abortion seekers frequently relate to them negatively. one estamos cerca testimony states that sometimes “we have to lie when we go to the hospital, if it gets complicated, because … they judge us and we don’t want that. so, the fear is constant. and that’s where the companions…fulfil the most important role, to listen to you and cast away your doubts” (socorristas en red 2020a, 7). this statement clearly illustrates the affective working of expertise. medical institutions function as sites of reproductive control via the negative emotions they instill and uphold around abortion, in this case fear. through the technical expertise shared by senred, this fear is eased, thus enabling other affective attachments to emerge. beyond the command of knowledge about misoprostol, expertise here also encompasses an emotional state of certainty, reliability, and independence from patriarchal institutions. another testimony from estamos cerca captures this sentiment: “thousands of questions that [the activist] answered with a love and dedication that, i swear, i felt like i was talking to the older sister i don’t have. she contained us, she accompanied us, she was psychologist, doctor and friend all the time” (socorristas en red 2020d, 4). as such, feminist expertise enables abortion seekers to reaffirm themselves as autonomous subjects through self-managed abortion as a collective affective practice. solidarity and alternative networks of care solidarity is crucial for the formation of affective networks that accompany abortions and offer alternatives to such institutions. it challenges the relegation of reproduction to private, depoliticized realms of the home, and constructs support systems beyond the nuclear family. as such, abortion accompaniment is an instance of recentering the pregnant person as the protagonist within obstetric procedures that otherwise often protagonize others. as rosalind p. petchesky argues, obstetric practice views “the fetus as ‘patient,’ separate and autonomous from the pregnant woman” (1987, 271). in argentina, the figure of the fetus as the “unborn child” has been deliberately constructed as a mechanism of biopolitical control (flores 2011). as such, reproductive events emerge as passive experiences (baird 2001), happening to someone without the agency to make autonomous decisions about them. opposing this lack of agency, activists create support networks that step in where state and family fall short, as activist slogans such as “to abort, we have each other” (socorristas en red 2020f, 1) manifest. one person describes experiencing these networks in their estamos cerca testimony as a “great accompaniment, warmth and a beautiful sense of companionship in the face of so much sadness and anguish” (socorristas en red 2020c, 4). the notion of affective solidarity, which names affects as a way of connection without being rooted “in identity or other group characteristics” (hemmings 2012, 148), is useful for conceptualizing a crucial hinge between the pharmaceutical and epistemic working of misoprostol. the safe use of misoprostol enables activists to pair their commitment to “take care of the life and health of those who decide to [abort]” (socorristas en red 2020f, 5), as highlighted in senred’s introduction to their 2019 statistics and reflected in the production of guidebooks and instructive websites, with a vision of providing “caring, loving, and affected accompaniments” (socorristas en red n.d.-b). by sharing knowledge about misoprostol and accompanying the process of pharmaceutical abortion, activists invoke a deeply political solidarity with abortion seekers from diverse parts of society, without requiring it being grounded in shared political identity. one abortion seeker expresses the connection felt to other people who have aborted by stating in her testimony that “my uterus hurts expressing a historical, collective pain” (socorristas en red 2020b, 10). another testimony given by an abortion seeker about their experience during quarantine illustrates a similar sentiment toward the activist who accompanied her: “we did not know each other,…but…we confided in each other” (socorristas en red 2020a, 6). as such, misoprostol enables activists to engage in practices of solidarity with pregnant people cutting across all spheres of society, but especially among marginalized communities, and provide care for each other where the state falls short. one abortion seeker highlights the importance of this kind of solidarity when emphasizing in her testimony that “empathy crosses borders, crosses prejudices, crosses class, crosses machismo, crosses adversities” (socorristas en red 2020c, 11). through practicing solidarity, activists challenge the association of autonomy with notions that “people can exist or act in complete independence of others” (cornwall et al. 2008, 3). in her contribution to archivo rosa, a senred activist states, “we are learning that socorrismo is a new politics of affects. we learn that we have new feelings that expand us. that we are affected by these women who abort, by each other, and by ourselves in a new way. we learn to look at life in connection, or we desire that it begins to be constructed as such” (grosso 2017). as such, activists put forth a vision for reproductive autonomy as affective and “inherently relational” (cornwall et al. 2008, 3). abortion joy and counter-hegemonic subjectivities lastly, joy is another key emotion enabled by the activist production and sharing of knowledge about misoprostol. with abortion continuing to be a primary cause of maternal death in latin america (zamberlin et al. 2012) and argentina prior to legalization (radi and elichiry, n.d.), the real risk entailed in abortion outside clinical settings has long underpinned the biopolitical control of reproductive bodies, with fear functioning as a disciplining mechanism. making abortion safe outside the healthcare system has therefore been crucial for breaking the potent nexus of stigmatization and obstetric violences that relegates abortion to the margins of society. feminist activists have made abortion significantly more safely and reliably available even prior to legalization, with research finding that “self-managed medication abortion with accompaniment support is safe” (moseson et al. 2022, e111). thus, they have created the foundations for thinking about abortion in terms other than precarity, which in turn allows them to contradict the fear and risk associated with abortion—particularly for marginalized people—and resignify its meaning for activist communities and abortion seekers alike. since ni una menos, argentine feminisms have stipulated access to legal, safe, and free abortion as crucial for protecting both “our lives and dreams” (ni una menos 2018, 93), as highlighted in their 2018 collection of manifestos. the latter emphasizes that activist projects regarding abortion reach beyond more medicalized arguments for abortion access focused on avoiding maternal death. rather, ni una menos emphasizes the need to imagine new worlds “according to a feminist ethics of life, not of sacrifice, [but] of pleasure and desire” (2018, 4). emotional responses such as pleasure, joy, and desire to abortion have been made possible through feminist activist accompaniment practices (kimport et al. 2023). as one person sharing her testimony in estamos cerca describes, “i remember them [the two activists who accompanied her] and i cry tears of joy, because thanks to the two wonderful people i met, i fulfilled my decision and i’m proud of the decision i took” (socorristas en red 2020c, 15). her statement underscores how feminist activist practices made possible through technical expertise about misoprostol and practices of solidarity outlined above enabled her feelings of joy and pride. this attachment of life-affirming and joyful sentiments to abortion is also visually represented through the color pink (sutton and vacarezza 2020), which is ubiquitous on senred’s website and social media presence. according to belfiori, pink is chosen because it is “strong, intense, full of life and passion” (2015, 17), visually contradicting more established associations of abortion with suffering, death, and despair. as such, it positions feminist abortion accompaniment as fundamentally and explicitly life-affirming, opposing the attempt of anti-abortion movements to position themselves as “pro-life.” in estamos cerca, various narrators recount the happiness and relief after their abortion, as exemplified by statements such as, “i knew that at some point the embryo would come out and it did. that was it, everything had already happened, i felt tranquil. i couldn't be happier, because it sounds a little rough, but i was happy” (socorristas en red 2020b, 8). statements such as this one draw attention to the embodied nature of selfhood, which comes particularly to the fore in the context of the physical experience of choosing not to remain pregnant. in conjunction with providing pregnant people with solidarity networks and the expertise to confront medical authorities, a “discourse of celebratory abortion” (mcreynolds-pérez 2014, 157) provides a sense of agency over their own body otherwise denied. within conventional perceptions of abortion as “always already…something ‘wrong’” (sutton and vacarezza 2020, 734), celebratory discourses introduce pleasure as a valid priority into the debate. in one of belfiori’s stories, the narrator recounts that she wanted to abort because she wanted to “enjoy [her partner], the house, the poplars, [her daughter] chasing the chicken” (2015, 24). her narrative rejects dominant social conceptions of abortion as necessarily associated with desperation, trauma, and difficulty, instead emphasizing it as a life-affirming decision. this experience only becomes possible because of the availability of safe, self-managed abortion with misoprostol, outside of familial and medical institutions, which disconnects abortion from previously intrinsic threats to the abortion seeker’s health and life. together, expertise, solidarity, and joy attached to and made possible by misoprostol function as affective mechanisms that enable a feminist biopolitics from below. misoprostol materially alters pregnant people’s subject positions. through feminists’ affective practices built around the use of misoprostol, pregnant people are able to abort without requiring the support of their family or a doctor, allowing them to withdraw from heteronormative mandates of motherhood. various abortion seekers participating in estamos cerca refer to this rejection in liberatory terms, frequently when closing their testimony. one person states that “i confirm that motherhood must be desired, or it must not be” (socorristas en red 2020d, 13), while another says “my uterus gestates the poetry of freedom” (socorristas en red 2020b, 10). the cause for this freedom is clearly located in having been able to obtain a feminist-accompanied abortion, with another testimony stating, “my path rewrites itself and you gave me the pen and the paper” (socorristas en red 2020e, 11). misoprostol thus becomes a vehicle for emotions that contradict feelings conventionally associated with abortion, especially when self-managed. the embodied process of expelling an unwanted pregnancy also becomes one of expelling “generations of imposed mandates that end our lives and dreams” (socorristas en red 2020b, 10). activists engage in practices and discourses that establish the counter-hegemonic subject as embodied, affective, and relational, pitted directly against gendered and racialized normative expectations. as they confront “the limits of contemporary neoliberal states” (sotiris 2020, 28), shifting affective paradigms around abortion constitutes a distinctly feminist practice of biopolitics from below. in doing so, a more nuanced, multifaceted subjecthood for those to whom it is foreclosed by established definitions of political subjectivity is made possible. conclusion this article has interrogated the role of misoprostol in self-managed, feminist-accompanied abortion as a biopolitical technology. i have shown how, through affective attachments of expertise, solidarity, and joy to pharmaceutical abortion, activists are able to displace one-dimensional negative affective paradigms. i have proposed feminist biopolitics from below as a useful conceptual tool for grappling with the counter-hegemonic subjectivities enabled by this process. abortion as a political experience is situated within the histories of normative womanhood in argentina, as are feminist activist practices that have brought about access and legalization. these histories, as well as contemporary configurations of womanhood are inextricably intertwined with concerns about motherhood, whiteness, and national identity, leading gago (2020) to highlight dispossession of indigenous land and feminized bodies as underpinning definitions of the individual. at the same time, motherhood has been a potent framework for feminist mobilization, reconfiguring it as a source of collective action, as activists building on the madres’ legacy to frame abortion as a debt to democracy and human rights have illustrated (sutton and vacarezza 2020). abortion constitutes an instance in which normative expectations about women’s subjectivities are enforced, often through affective mechanisms of shame and stigma and most rigidly upon those who are most marginalized. misoprostol-related activist practices have to be understood within a context in which feminist activists have been disputing hegemonic definitions of subjectivity and political identity especially as they pertain to the experiences of queer, black, and indigenous argentinians, in relation to abortion and generally. in the second half of the article, i took a closer look at misoprostol and its role in feminist abortion accompaniment. focusing on feelings of solidarity, expertise, and joy, i traced how misoprostol and the production of related technical and political knowledge become a vehicle for subversive affective attachments, which enable people who abort to feel differently about their experience and about themselves. entailing the possibility of having a safe abortion beyond institutional control, misoprostol functions as a technology for a “new politics of affects” (grosso 2017), as feminist activists have called it. these practices make for a distinctly feminist form of collective militancy that sidesteps liberal democratic modes of participation, as explored by sotiris (2020) and rocca (2021), engendering a feminist biopolitics from below. the affective practices made possible through misoprostol as a pharmaceutical and biopolitical technology throw into relief the necessity to understand abortion as not only an obstetric but also political event in which counter-hegemonic subjectivities are produced. as we witness increasing restrictions of reproductive freedom in the us and elsewhere, attending to misoprostol in self-managed abortion activism, its affective attachments, and its role as a technology for making feminist biopolitics from below may offer insightful 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prospective, observational cohort study and non-inferiority analysis with historical controls.” the lancet global health 10 (1): e105–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2214-109x(21)00461-7. ni una menos. 2018. amistad política y inteligencia colectiva: documentos y manifiestos 2015/2018. https://niunamenos.org.ar/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/amistad-poli%cc%81tica-inteligencia-colectiva-libro-num.pdf. peralta, guille, and vivi fonseca. 2015. “urgencia rosa.” archivo rosa. https://archivorosa.socorristasenred.org/urgencia-rosa. petchesky, rosalind pollack. 1987. “fetal images: the power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction.” feminist studies 13 (2): 263–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177802. preciado, paul b. 2018. countersexual manifesto. translated by kevin gerry dunn. columbia university press. proyecto mirar. n.d.-a. “aborto en números.” proyecto mirar. accessed april 11, 2024. https://proyectomirar.org.ar/aborto-en-numeros/. proyecto mirar. n.d.-b. “proyecto mirar.” accessed april 11, 2024. https://proyectomirar.org.ar/. radi, blas, and marina elichiry. n.d. manual de servicios de aborto trans-inclusivos: políticas y prácticas. cátedra libre de estudios trans. accessed january 20, 2025. https://otdchile.org/biblioteca/manual-de-servicios-de-aborto-trans-inclusivos-politicas-y-practicas-argentina-2/. rocca, facundo c. 2021. “apuntes para una biopolítica desde abajo.” jacobin, march 22. https://jacobinlat.com/2021/03/22/apuntes-para-una-biopolitica-desde-abajo/. romero, mariana, silvina ramos, maría agustina ramón michel, brianna keefe oates, and emilia rizzalli. 2021. proyecto mirar: a un año de la ley de aborto en argentina. proyecto mirar. https://repositorio.cedes.org/bitstream/123456789/4671/5/proyecto_mirar_reporte2021.pdf. rossi, lucia a. 2006. “argentina: profilaxis social en la década de los veinte.” revista de historia de la psicología 27 (1): 95–108. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/2259189.pdf. samaddar, ranabir. 2023. “towards a postcolonial theory of crisis, neoliberal government, and biopolitics from below.” in handbook on governmentality, edited by william walters and martina tazzioli, 94–111. edward elgar publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781839108662.00012. smith, lindsay adams. 2016. “identifying democracy: citizenship, dna, and identity in postdictatorship argentina.” science, technology, & human values 41 (6): 1037–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243916658708. socorristas en red. 2020a. estamos cerca: relatos de aborto en cuarantena capítulo 1: miedos y tristezas. august. https://socorristasenred.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/miedos-y-tristezas_c.pdf. socorristas en red. 2020b. estamos cerca: relatos de aborto en cuarantena capítulo 2: esperanza. august. https://socorristasenred.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/esperanza.pdf. socorristas en red. 2020c. estamos cerca: relatos de aborto en cuarantena capítulo 3: acompañarnos, acuerparnos. august. https://socorristasenred.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/acompanarnos-acuerparnos.pdf. socorristas en red. 2020d. estamos cerca: relatos de aborto en cuarantena capítulo 4: abortar en cuarantena. august. https://socorristasenred.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/abortar-en-cuarentena.pdf. socorristas en red. 2020e. estamos cerca: relatos de aborto en cuarantena – capítulo 5: apoderadxs: que sea ley. august. https://socorristasenred.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/apoderadxs-que-sea-ley.pdf. socorristas en red. 2020f. “sistematización de acompañamientos a abortar: realizados en el año 2019 por socorristas en red (feministas que abortamos).” april. https://socorristasenred.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/sistematizacion2019.pdf. socorristas en red (@socenredarg). 2021a. “a un año de la ley de aborto en argentina, tenemos motivos para seguir luchando por abortos cuidados. entre el 20 de enero y el 30 de octubre de 2021 acompañamos a 9.900 personas en sus abortos. >> 2.377 decidieron que las acompañemos en la solicitud en el sistema de salud. >> 7.523 decidieron que las acompañemos en la autogestión de un aborto.........#ive." instagram, december 29. https://www.instagram.com/p/cyelzk1rfms/?igshid=zjhmmme0mju%3d. socorristas en red (@socenredarg). 2022a. “a un año de la ley de aborto en argentina, tenemos motivos para seguir luchando por abortos cuidados. >> hay abusos sexuales a cambio de un aborto. “me insistió que él me tenía que poner las pastillas. me hizo volver 2 veces el mismo día. no me explicó que podía usarlas por boca. cada vez que me colocó misoprostol me tocó y me tocó, las tetas y la concha. me sentí tan sucia. no me preguntés por qué volví. no tenía escapatoria creo”. (adriana, 29 años, en una localidad de san juan).” instagram, january 15. https://www.instagram.com/p/cyxi2crrcyl/. socorristas en red (@socenredarg). 2022b. “a un año de la ley de aborto en argentina, tenemos motivos para seguir luchando por abortos cuidados. >> información falsa por parte de profesionales de la salud para desalentar la decisión de abortar. joven de 17 años de una localidad de chaco, solicita una interrupción legal del embarazo, durante la atención profesionales de la salud ofrecieron que diera en adopción, argumentaron sobre los riesgos de un aborto en segundo trimestre de gestación. no le informaron los riesgos de la continuidad del embarazo y dieron parte a sus familiares sobre la solicitud del aborto. la desalentaron y obligaron a maternar.” instagram, january 4. https://www.instagram.com/p/cyutsvbrpks/. socorristas en red (@socenredarg). 2022c. “a un año de la ley de aborto en argentina, tenemos motivos para seguir luchando por abortos cuidados. >> prácticas crueles especialmente en abortos en segundo trimestre de gestación. ‘me ponían 3 pastillas en la vagina y 1 por boca, cada 5 ó 6 horas. entré a las 9 de la mañana y expulsé a las 6 de la mañana del día siguiente. les supliqué que hagan algo por mis dolores. me pusieron calmantes por el suero a las 3 de la mañana’. (karina, 19 años, misiones).” instagram, january 12. https://www.instagram.com/p/cyprwutdlrz/. socorristas en red (@socenredarg). 2022d. “a un año de la ley de aborto en argentina, tenemos motivos para seguir luchando por abortos cuidados. >> uso de las ecografías como instrumento anti-aborto. personal que realiza ecografías y aunque leen en diagnóstico la sigla ive o ile insisten con mostrar imágenes y hacer escuchar sonidos y hacer comentarios como “¿no pensaste en tenerlo? se ve todo tan bien acá”. turnos en mismos horarios y días que concurren personas con embarazos: “me sentí un poco extraña, todas ahí con panzas y muchas acompañadas, y yo solita por mi eco para abortar, menos mal que estaba segura de mi decisión” (florencia, 34 años, bahía blanca).” instagram, january 13. https://www.instagram.com/p/cyr65rzlnux/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=zdnlzdc0mzixnw==. socorristas en red. 2023. “sistematización de acompañamientos a abortar: realizados por socorristas en red durante el año 2022.” may. https://socorristasenred.org/sistematizacion-2022/. socorristas en red. n.d.-a. archivo rosa. accessed november 18, 2022. https://archivorosa.socorristasenred.org/. socorristas en red. n.d.-b. “quiénes somos.” accessed january 21, 2025. https://socorristasenred.org/quienes-somos/. socorristas en red. n.d.-c. “sistematizaciones.” accessed april 11, 2024. https://socorristasenred.org/category/sistematizaciones/. solana, mariela, and nayla luz vacarezza. 2020. “sentimientos feministas.” estudos feministas 28 (2): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9584-2020v28n272445. sotiris, panagiotis. 2020. “thinking beyond the lockdown: on the possibility of a democratic biopolitics.” historical materialism 28 (3): 3–38. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-12342803. stepan, nancy lays. 1992. “race, gender and nation in argentina: the influence of italian eugenics.” history of european ideas 15 (4–6): 749–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-6599(92)90087-s. sutton, barbara, and elizabeth borland. 2019. “abortion and human rights for women in argentina.” frontiers: a journal of women’s studies 40 (2): 27–61. https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2019.a730152. sutton, barbara, and nayla luz vacarezza. 2020. “abortion rights in images: visual interventions by activist organizations in argentina.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 45 (3): 731–57. https://doi.org/10.1086/706489. sutton, barbara, and nayla luz vacarezza. 2021. “abortion rights and democracy: an introduction.” in abortion and democracy: contentious body politics in argentina, chile, and uruguay, edited by barbara sutton and nayla luz vacarezza, 1–25. routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003079903. tarducci, mónica. 2018. “escenas claves de la lucha por el derecho al aborto en argentina.” salud colectiva 14 (3): 425–32. https://doi.org/10.18294/sc.2018.2036. taylor, lucy. 2021. “four foundations of settler colonial theory: four insights from argentina.” settler colonial studies 11 (3): 344–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2020.1845939. vacarezza, nayla luz. 2015. “aborto, experiencia, afectos.” in código rosa: relatos sobre abortos, edited by dahiana belfiori, 137–41. la parte maldita. https://www.edlapartemaldita.com.ar/web/portfolio/codigo-rosa-relatos-sobre-abortos/#sthash.m17c1qhs.bffmu77n.dpbs. vacarezza, nayla luz. 2018. “perejil, agujas y pastillas: objetos y afectos en la producción visual a favor de la legalización del aborto en la argentina.” in aborto. aspectos normativos, jurídicos y discursivos edited by daniel busdygan, 195–212. editorial biblos. vacarezza, nayla luz. 2023. “abortion rights in uruguay, child, and argentina: movements shaping legal and policy change.” southwestern journal of international law 29 (2): 309–47. http://hdl.handle.net/11336/219392. vacarezza, nayla luz, and julia burton. 2023. “transformar los sentidos y el sentir. el activismo cultural de las redes de acompañantes de abortos en américa latina.” debate feminista, no. 66, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.22201/cieg.2594066xe.2023.66.2409. world health organization. 2023. world health organization model list of essential medicines– 23nd list. july 26. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/who-mhp-hps-eml-2023.02. zamberlin, nina, mariana romero, and silvina ramos. 2012. “latin american women’s experiences with medical abortion in settings where abortion is legally restricted.” reproductive health 9 (1): 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-4755-9-34. zurbriggen, ruth, brianna keefe-oates, and caitlin gerdts. 2018. “accompaniment of second-trimester abortions: the model of the feminist socorrista network of argentina.” contraception 97 (2): 108–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.contraception.2017.07.170.     author bio lea happ is a phd candidate at the department of global health and social medicine, king’s college london. her research explores abortion access and feminist abortion politics in contemporary argentina. microsoft word 71544-1-11_gibsonanddouglas.docx gibson, m.f. and douglas, p. (2018). disturbing behaviors: ole ivar lovaas and the queer history of autism science. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-28. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © margaret f. gibson and patty douglas, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article disturbing behaviors: ole ivar lovaas and the queer history of autism science margaret f. gibson renison university college, university of waterloo margaret.gibson@uwaterloo.ca patty douglas brandon university douglasp@brandonu.ca abstract this paper “queers” the history of autism science through an examination of the overlap between the regulation of autism with that of gender and sexuality in the work of ole ivar lovaas. lovaas is the founder of applied behavior analysis (aba), the most commonly used and funded autism intervention today. aba seeks to extinguish autistic behaviors, primarily among children. less commonly recognized is lovaas’ involvement in the feminine boy project, where he developed interventions into the gender identities and behaviors of young people. turning to lovaas’s published works, we perform a “history of the present” and argue that a queer disability studies approach opens up the richness of autism as a cultural nexus and deepens understandings of 2 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) intersecting and contested histories of science, professional scopes of practice, and dominant futurities. the article makes a significant and timely contribution to understanding the disabling material effects of autism science in the lives of autistic persons. in particular, this case study highlights the need for feminist science studies to further investigate the historical and contemporary links between dominant scientific constructions of disability, gender, and sexuality. introduction on april 27, 2016, autistic writer and activist amy sequenzia posted an article on the autism women’s network website entitled “autistic conversion therapy.” in it, she described her reaction to the newspaper headline, “obama calls for end to ‘conversion’ therapies for gay and transgender youth.” she agreed with the us president that any "expert" intervention that attempts to change who young people are in terms of their sexuality and gender identity is both violent and immoral. she also shifted some words around in her reading of the article to consider a similar challenge to the dominant "expert" treatment of autistic young people, applied behavioral analysis (aba). aba is the most commonly used and funded autism intervention today that seeks to shape "normal" behaviors in autistic children while extinguishing those behaviors designated as autistic (williams & williams, 2011). sequenzia posted to facebook: i propose that every time we write or talk about aba, that we also write or say: autistic conversion therapy. gay conversion therapy has a bad reputation now, even if it still happens. both ‘treatments’ (tortures) have the same root. i want the supporters of aba to own their objective. aba: autistic conversion therapy that uses torturous methods. (sequenzia, 2016) needless to say, this post created considerable controversy, with vehement supporters and challengers. this paper interrogates the interwoven “root” of the therapies that sequenzia describes as seen in the overlapping approaches to changing 3 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) the behaviors of "autistic" and "gender-disturbed" children in the work of ucla psychologist ole ivar lovaas. lovaas is widely recognized as the founder of aba, the most commonly used and funded autism intervention today. in this article, we examine lovaas’s published journal articles from 1965 to 1988, including his most famous — and still-cited — 1987 article which (in)famously claims that aba therapies caused 47% of the children treated to become “indistinguishable from their normal friends” (8). less commonly recognized is lovaas’s simultaneous involvement in the feminine boy project during the 1970s, where he catalogued and developed interventions into the gender and sexual non-conforming identities and behaviors of young people (burke, 1997; dawson, 2008; mcguire, 2016; silberman, 2015; yergeau, 2018). he engaged in the latter project while funding, supervising, and collaborating with his student george rekers who continues to be a central if controversial advocate for so-called gay and trans “conversion therapies.” in this lesser-known project, lovaas catalogued and developed interventions into the gender and sexual non-conforming identities and behaviors of young people (burke, 1997; dawson, 2008; mcguire, 2016; yergeau, 2018). here we perform a “history of the present” (foucault, 1995) to problematize aba as a troubling — even dangerous — technique of power today. in this, we join other disability studies scholars (mcguire, 2016; tremain, 2015) who undertake genealogies that dislodge current social arrangements and regimes of power-knowledge that naturalize particular kinds of humans (i.e., non-autistic and gender conforming) as normal and others as in need of containment and/or improvement. this article is the first occasion, to our knowledge, where a history of the present approach has been brought together with queer disability studies and autism science history. while we do not claim that lovaas was the only contributor to aba or to gender-shaping behaviorism, or that the root of these two sets of practices is indeed “the same,” our attention to these texts seeks to trace the work they are doing, including what “kinds of people” they produce 4 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) (hacking, 2006). through the writing of lovaas and his co-authors, we can see the production of the un/underdeveloped autistic person who lacks full humanity without early intervention (sinclair, 1993; yergeau 2018); the gender non-conforming or trans child doomed to miserable exclusion without intervention (pyne, 2016); the indispensable scientific experts and their unwavering staff members; and the freshly minted mother-therapists who were to take up home-based, boundless “development” work (douglas, 2016; mcguire, 2016) on their autistic, gender-nonconforming or queer child. the rationale for both areas of lovaas’s work was largely theoretical, with autism and then gender non-conformity selected as excellent opportunities through which to justify the power and promise of behaviorism. in these experiments, autistic and gender non-conforming bodies became a kind of “dense transfer point,” to use foucault’s term (1980, p. 103), through which different modes of power, including disciplinary and sovereign, began to operate. these were systematic attempts to slap, shout, reward, shock, and ignore autistic and gender non-conforming behaviors out of children. in the process, the experimenter-subject relationship became the model for professional and parental encounters with autistic and gender non-conforming individuals, re-entrenching divides and justifying the imposition of coercive power between “developed” and “undeveloped” peoples, researchers and subjects, providers and patients, adults and children. we use a queer, disability studies approach to consider queer, trans, autistic, and related "deviant" identities as sociocultural and political phenomena. by thinking alongside queer/crip theoretical work by authors such as eli clare (2017), robert mcruer (2018), jasbir puar (2018), and alison kafer (2013), kelly fritsch and anne mcguire (2018), david mitchell and sharon snyder (2017), and the queer autistic theorizing of melanie yergeau (2018), this approach means we work to disturb normal conceptions of the social and the “good life” that evacuate and devalue non-normative embodiments. normative conceptions of the good life hold out the “cruel optimism,” in lauren berlant’s phrase, that 5 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) such therapies will deliver an autism-free and gender-conforming future (berlant, 2011). the cruelty lies in how the measurements and interventions of this "optimism" dehumanize, coerce, regulate, and do bodily violence to those deemed in need of a "cure," while recruiting and training others (teachers, parents, community members) to extend this pathologization, even at a cost to themselves (mcgee, 2013). we, in turn, hope to dislodge this now ubiquitous truth claim that without treatment — the earlier the better — an autistic, trans, or gender-nonconforming life is a hopeless life (klar, douglas & mcguire, 2016; mcguire, 2016; sinclair, 1993). we are inspired by and ally ourselves with the work of amy sequenzia and other autistic scholars and activists who have called us to examine the histories and ongoing impact of aba, particularly with the extensive critiques of lovaas and aba found in the work of michelle dawson (2004) and melanie yergeau (2018). we are also inspired by other movements, especially queer and trans movements, that have called attention to and work for ongoing responses to the “treatments” that have targeted and profited off queer and trans people of all ages. michel foucault’s work on how sexuality and desire operate to govern and regulate subjectivity has been helpful in this project. in the writings of lovaas and his colleagues, we hear echoed concerns about the misdirected and unproductive desire that foucault described as operating through the spectacle of the masturbating european schoolboy (foucault, 1980; stoler, 1995). when white, elite, (assigned) male children’s behaviors were cast as desires gone awry, these behaviors were seen to threaten the future of the ruling class and colonial social order — and heighten the stakes of “intervention,” not only for the individuals so targeted but for the future of the nation or society. such fears elevated psychological, medical, and educational experts and their associated knowledges, and denigrated the legitimacy of alternative desires, histories, and ways of knowing. jasbir puar (2018) has traced the operation of neoliberal imperialism through “debility” where populations are endemically marked as incapacitated in contrast with the exceptionality of “disability” among racial and national elites. we set out 6 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) not only to challenge the framework of dominant futurities that project certain lives as debilitated, unlivable or exceptional, but also to support the possibility of alternative futurities that re-imagine queerness, transness, gender non-conformity, disability, and autism, particularly in the context of childhood (clare, 2017; kafer, 2013; munoz, 2009; yergeau, 2018). finally, we are indebted to the work of others in queer feminist science studies who engage with “an ethic of undoing … an intellectual practice of getting underneath a seemingly self-evident idea, to understand the conditions of possibility for its intelligibility” (cipolla, gupta, rubin, & willey, 2017, p. 8). here, we investigate how the selfevidence of “correction” and “treatment” has been rendered intelligible in the context of autistic and gender non-conforming lives and in the violent coercion of young people more generally. surprising deviants? “autistic” and “gender-disturbed” children as objects of study autism was, from its inception, a diagnosis of childhood, emerging through and alongside “childhood schizophrenia,” and appearing in kanner as “early infantile autism” (mcguire, 2016; nadesan, 2008). the diagnostic category of autism is usually attributed to leo kanner’s publication of the term in 1943 and hans asperger’s separate use of it in 1930s lectures and a 1944 publication (silberman, 2015; waltz, 2013). further, the creation of “autistic” children occurred in relation to and distinction from the more commonly recognized category of largely poor, often immigrant, and highly racialized “feebleminded” people (jack, 2014; mcguire, 2016; nadesan, 2005). autistic children emerged as objects of study and concern in a landscape where “feeblemindedness” and “mental retardation” were primary eugenic concerns, representing racialized and classed varieties of disabled “unfitness” that many sought to prevent, reduce, or eliminate in both kanner’s united states and asperger’s nazi-controlled austria (snyder & mitchell, 2005). with the persistent focus on childhood in the scientific literature on 7 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) autism, authors' concerns about reproduction became less urgently central than elsewhere in eugenic discourse. silberman argues that asperger made the case that patients had future potential in contradistinction to other forms of childhood disability as part of his effort to save them from the brutally efficient practices of eugenic murder under the nazi regime (silberman, 2015). meanwhile kanner noted that autistic children possessed a potentially "normal" intelligence, and therefore were capable of learning, improvement and even normalization (kanner, 1943; jack, 2014, pp. 52-3). importantly, then, from its inception, autism has been a way to describe what one could call surprising deviants; that is, autism emerged as a marker of children who did not fit pre-existing categories of the “unfit” (mcguire, 2016; silverman, 2012). the children who became the basis for kanner’s descriptions of early childhood autism as a distinct if rare disorder were overwhelmingly white and male, with unusually welleducated, middle-class parents who were themselves university professors or doctors (kanner, 1943). the educational and professional achievements of the early patients’ fathers and (in a more muted and ambivalent tone) their mothers were front and centre in the early case studies, and in much of the writing on autism throughout the twentieth century. these patients were constructed as white, middle to upper-class and, simultaneously, as rare examples of an unusual pathology that should not be confused with other childhood diagnoses or hereditary "taint." similarly, while sexual and gender "deviance" had long been associated with other markers of eugenic unsuitability by race, class, nationality, and “feeblemindedness,” sexological accounts had simultaneously noted the range of class, educational, and racial backgrounds from which these patients/subjects emerged (gibson, 1997, 1998). homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality were not initially or primarily "childhood" diagnoses along the lines of autism, but the possibility of gender or sexual "deviance" springing up within the social and cultural elite was a particular pre-occupation of mid-twentieth 8 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) century america. especially in the wake of large-scale studies such as the kinsey report, anxiety about the roots of such "deviance" inspired much middle-class parenting advice (terry, 1999). even as some researchers tried to argue for less rigid sexual and gender norms alongside the gay liberation and feminism movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many others, including lovaas and rekers, described homosexuality and transsexuality as undeniably poor adult “outcomes” to be avoided by early intervention (bryant, 2008). while homosexuality was delisted from the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders in 1973, this change did not eliminate the pathologization of sexual and gender deviance. further, as a number of authors have argued, the removal of adult homosexuality as an approved diagnosis could be seen as an impetus to the development of “gender identity disorder” as a new diagnosis in 1980, and to the general rise in treatment of children, particularly boys, for "feminine" behaviors throughout the 1970s and beyond (bryant, 2008; sedgwick, 1991; pyne, 2016). it follows, therefore, that the “feminine boys” who came under lovaas’s purview were also "surprising deviants" in their class and racial background. designated male, white, and middle class, the children whose gender development so concerned lovaas, rekers, and colleagues, embodied elite american futures at risk — futures that, should their development be "corrected," were seen as at the core of their society’s own hopefulness. in the face of criticisms regarding the ethics of punishing and shaping gender behavior, lovaas and colleagues would argue that their intervention in these children’s lives was not only ethically justified, but an ethical imperative. in its attention to this societal elite, behaviorism’s promise to reorient these futures was held out as not only in the interest of the individual children, professionals, and parents, but also of the nation. lovaas and the los angeles neuropsychiatric clinic a psychologist who grew up in norway, ove ivar lovaas began as 9 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) assistant professor at the university of california, los angeles neuropsychiatric clinic, in 1961. there he worked with colleagues to develop and test an approach rooted in operant learning theory to treat "disturbed" children, beginning early to focus on those with autism diagnoses. lovaas’s experiments on autistic children used positive reinforcers for desired/"normal" behaviors, such as giving food, saying “good boy,” and /or giving the child a hug or pat for attending to lessons or using spoken language, looking at, hugging, or kissing the experimenter upon request. they also used violent aversives: slaps, electric shocks and reprimands for undesired/autistic behaviors such as flapping hands, rocking, banging body parts against objects, climbing on furniture, not coming to the experimenter when asked, not hugging the experimenter, or averting their gaze. unlike psychoanalysis, behavioral views of human learning and sociality are not interested in causes or the psychic interiority of human behavior and cognition although they typically accept biological views of the human. instead, changes in the external environment result in changes in human cognition and behavior, and possibly even biology (lovaas, 1977, 1984; rimland, 1964, 1978; skinner, 1963). the role of “moral entrepreneur” and “expert” comingled in the figure of lovaas, who lent scientific expertise as well as moral conviction to the emerging behavioral treatment regimen of autistic persons (douglas, 2016; becker, 1963). the technologies involved were elaborate and precise while also brutal and blunt. electrified floors or prods and detailed measurement devices were used in some instances along with snacks, slaps, and daily monitoring checklists that could be more readily translated outside the experiment room. while initially hesitant about the capacity of parents to replicate the rigor of techniques being innovated in his ucla laboratory, lovaas’s experiments on autistic bodies extended the reach of scientific regulation to parents, and particularly mothers, whom he trained to be home therapists (douglas, 2016; lovaas et al., 1965, 1973; lovaas, 1987; mcguire, 2016). during this time, lovaas also took on george rekers as a graduate 10 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) student and wrote the grant to fund what became the feminine boy project (rekers’s doctoral work). the methods were based in the same behaviorist traditions with the goal of increasing “masculine” behavior, play and activities (e.g., playing with boys, choosing “boys’” toys, engaging in “rough and tumble” play) and decreasing “feminine” behaviors, play and activities (e.g., playing with dolls, playing with girls, having swishy wrists). however, unlike in the treatment of autistic children, no aversives were used in the treatment room with these children beyond the removal of positive response (dawson, 2004). for example, the mother would say “good boy” and engage enthusiastically in response to "appropriate" play and then turn away from the child and become non-responsive when the child chose the "wrong" toys. at home, however, parents were trained to create behavioral programs to shape normative gender behaviors that could include striking the child (rekers & lovaas, 1974; winkler, 1977; also see mcguire, 2016). appearing throughout both sets of articles is a description of the “optimism” posed by behaviorist treatment in contrast to the “pessimism” of failed treatments from other models. in the case of autism, lovaas grouped biological and psychoanalytic psychiatry’s failures together as a “disease model,” explaining: “one school postulates psychic damage, the other structural damage” (1979, p. 315). he then described the failures of both biological and psychodynamic approaches: “if the disease model had been a viable and effective model for treatment of autistic children, the behavioral model would not have seen the light of day…. it was in this milieu of pessimism about the future of autistic children that behavioral interventions began” (1979, p. 316). hopelessness was a required inspiration for lovaas’s work. the projected hopelessness of autism was presented through the failure of previous treatment attempts and the “severity” of the children’s condition as well as the terms of their “prognosis.” for example, lovaas et al. started their 1973 article on research with autistic children: “at intake, most of the children were severely disturbed, having symptoms indicating an extremely poor prognosis” (lovaas et al., 1973, p. 131). 11 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) later they expanded their description: [w]e have treated the very undeveloped children, that is, children who would fall within the lower half of the psychotic continuum, and whose chances of improvement were considered to be essentially zero. most of the children had at least one prior treatment experience (up to 4 yr of intensive, psychodynamicallybased treatment) which had not effected any noticeable improvement. (p. 133) the hopelessness of autistic children was used not only as justification for the intensive, costly, and often violent procedures the intervention involved, but also as a tribute to the skill of the experimenter and the promise of his method to shift the future demarcated by “prognosis”. the likelihood of ongoing institutionalization was a frequent shorthand signalling the autistic child’s hopeless future. similarly, the gender intervention articles began with a series of projected futures for the children that undergird the justification of the treatment, as well as its specific intensity and methods. this rationale relied on detailed predictions of “serious disabling consequences for adults… [that] may range from interference with normal heterosexual relationship to a continuing sense of shame and fear of disclosure which can be extremely disabling” (rekers et al., 1973, p. 6). further, the prospect of adults choosing to alter their bodies using surgery or hormone treatment (in accordance with their felt gender) was flagged as a more “harmful” future consequence of inaction: “preventive intervention in early childhood is the preferred therapeutic strategy in view of the extreme resistance to change of cross-gender behaviors in adulthood and the ramifications of surgery and hormonal sex reassignment” (rekers et al., 1973, p. 8). the authors even argued that without treatment these children might grow to be “easily exploited by medical professionals” (pp. 7-8). behaviorism’s optimism was produced in a narrative arc where “highly pathological” pre-intervention profiles were turned into profiles that were “indistinguishable from normal.” the title of the 1987 study by 12 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) lovaas tantalizingly touted a return to “normal functioning” for a subset of autistic children post-intervention and famously specifies: “school personnel describe these children as indistinguishable from their normal friends” (lovaas, 1987, p. 8). a publication from the feminine boy project provides a similar arc in its description of kraig: when we first saw him, the extent of his feminine identification was so profound (his mannerisms, gestures, fantasies, flirtations, etc., as shown in his ‘swishing’ around the home and clinic, fully dressed as a woman with long dress, with nail polish, high screechy voice, slovenly seductive eyes) that it suggested irreversible neurological and biochemical determinants. at the 26– month follow-up he looked and acted like any other boy. (rekers & lovaas, 1974, p. 187) optimism also operated as a rationale for ongoing research/intervention: “one can entertain some optimism about behavioral treatment of gender role problems, but until more cases are reported, one can only entertain the most tentative hopes that such an effective treatment has been isolated” (p. 188). what made these children appropriate case studies for the display of behaviorism’s optimistic promise? the status of "surprising deviant" meant the children selected were seen to hold promise and value if their development could be set on a "typical" course. thus, starting in his work with autistic children, lovaas presented autism and, later, gender deviance, as both hopeful enough such that great benefit could accrue if effective intervention were found to redirect these children’s futures, and hopeless enough in that no existing treatment had been found to offer "recovery." thus, the value of an effective “treatment” was initially cast as a way to help the children of desperate parents who had the means to find and fund new approaches. the apparent hope of a dramatic retreat into “indistinguishability” would target and train the male elite of society, recruit white working mothers back into the home as adjunct therapists (douglas, 2016), and burnish the glory of the researcher/clinician (broderick, 2009). this sharp edge of autistic hopefulness/hopelessness 13 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) opened up the possibility of testing and eventually disseminating radically different — even extreme or unethical — approaches, justifying treatment by any means. across lovaas’s articles about these two different groups of children, the point of continuity was the advancement of behavioral analysis as a form of time-consuming, labor-intensive, necessary, and early intervention to redirect projected futures away from pessimism. behaviorism was presented as a beacon of hope for discouraged parents and professionals alike. developing behaviors, redirecting desires in lovaas’s articles, a mechanistic view of the human emerges. behaviorists altered behaviors through manipulation of the external environment so the person could be trained to adopt new ways of acting in the world and become more “functional” and “independent” (lovaas, 1977, 1984; skinner, 1963). the goal of lovaas’s research was also to see how many small learned behaviors, such as imitating syllables, could be used to build to larger changes, such as verbal speech. as such, the findings that mattered were thus the narrative of the research protocol and its carefully charted effects on target behaviors, not the perspectives of those being experimented upon. even parental perspectives were largely limited to their involvement in the intervention itself, their use of various checklists and charts, and their accounts of the child’s pathology, change, or lack thereof. the authors’ persistent arguments for the replicability of their findings can certainly encourage an understanding of lovaas's and his colleague’s work as a "how to" guide for responding to "genderdisturbed" and "autistic" children. however, this is a limited reading, especially since the researchers themselves tended to highlight that the technical complexity of their work prevented a full and proper replication of their outcomes: a relatively untrained person can build simple behaviors, like eye14 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) to-face contact or raise the frequency of a vocal behavior. but it is unlikely that a person [not referring to an autistic individual but a trainer/therapist/parent] will be able to build complex speech unless he is familiar with discrimination learning procedures. most people who work with autistic children are not. therefore, it seems likely that there will be few studies in the near future to replicate the present one. (lovaas et al., 1973, p. 136) in this argument, lovaas and his colleagues become the elements that make the outcomes possible. a planned but carefully controlled proliferation of these methods under their direction provided an effective business model and supported the persistence of behavioral methods, technologies, and trainings across the decades. in other words, while others were certainly needed to do the labor of these intensive interventions — particularly mothers but also teachers and research assistants — the crucial component of the method was the conceptual and methodological prowess of the clinician-researcher in charge of this hierarchical system. bolstering this assertion of indispensable experts, these programs relied upon highly technical mechanisms: electrified floors or other devices for delivering controlled electrical shock (autism studies only), observation rooms with one-way mirrors, video recorders and players, and “multiple response recorders” that involved multiple push-buttons for real-time recording of observations. most significant among their technologies was, however, the training of raters and others involved in standardizing the charting of behavior. many pages of instructions for observers are included in some articles, defining what and how to interpret and record the children’s behaviors, such as: you will be watching for five kinds of behaviors. these will be the only behaviors you will have to record, so part of the time you may not be pressing a button at all. if you are uncertain about what is going on, you may also not be recording. the best rule is, if you can’t make a decision, don’t record anything. each of the behaviors will be carefully defined and you will be given examples 15 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) of what they are and what they are not. each key on the panel is labeled with the name of one of the behaviors. each time you notice the child engage in one of these behaviors, press down the corresponding key, and hold it down until the child has terminated that behavior [emphasis in the original]. (lovaas et al., 1973, p. 137) autistic children’s behaviors were pre-categorized exclusively as: selfstimulation, echolalic speech (both considered pathological), appropriate speech, and two kinds of social non-verbal behavior (considered desirable). similarly, in the gender-based interventions, detailed examples are offered of the types of toys and instructions the children were offered, and similar mechanical and instructional technologies were deployed, absent the physical strikes and electric shocks used in autism studies. for example, karl’s behaviors were to be recorded both in the clinic and the home using a checklist the researchers designed to record the following categories: feminine-gesture mannerisms, play acting of a feminine role, feminine play with sister, masculine play, and masculine play with brother (rekers, lovaas & low, 1974). the first three categories of behavior were viewed as pathological (to decrease), and the latter two as normal (to increase). the identification and meaning of the behaviors was thus up to the clinician-researcher and not to the parent or the rater (and certainly not to the child) to identify. while the above passage cautioned that indecision was a sign that no recording should take place, under more specific categories raters were instructed not to miss opportunities to pathologize. for example, under “self-stimulation” the instructions read: “you may find yourself recording something you feel looks like any other child might do. record it anyway. the difference is that you may see more of it than you might in a normal child” (lovaas et al., 1973, p. 137). the diagnosis of autism turned individuals’ situational, moment-tomoment actions into either signals of pathology or signs of the intervention’s effectiveness. all the tallied results were then plotted on multiple line graphs that demarcated changes in frequency under the 16 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) many stages and conditions of research over many months. these designated targets of increasing and decreasing behaviors across both lines of research mapped a desired notion of development. the discursive power and intertwined associations of “development” allowed the articles to draw upon adultist, gendered, heteronormative, cisnormative, colonial, classed, abelist, and racist connotations simultaneously (rohy, 2008; stoler, 1995). here there was some distinction between the lines of research, with more acknowledgement of possible controversies associated with the goal of the gender-based interventions than with the goal targeting “autistic” behaviors. in the gender interventions, notions of correcting “development” were central, as in a section titled “development problems suffered by gender disturbed boys”: at the social level, the child faces rejection, ridicule, and isolation. he is frequently scapegoated in cruel ways and must tolerate the indignities of insulting labels…. moreover, however, the negative stereotypical labels applied to them, such as “sissy” and “fag”, markedly restrict their freedom to choose in an open fashion a course of behavior by which they might avoid sex role stereotyping. (rekers et al., 1973) in this passage, the authors used notions of “freedom” and “choice” to argue for the coercive construction of conditions that measure, observe, punish, and reward children without their consent. further, these texts deployed terms tied to disability (and autism in particular) through characterizing “gender-disturbed boys” as “rigid,” experiencing “compulsive desire” and lacking necessary “abilities”; they demonstrated an “undesirable lack of flexibility,” or “compulsive sex-role inflexibility” (p. 6). the authors argued that their work was consistent with the recent prominence of children’s rights and women’s rights by framing the goals in terms of “development”: it is ethically appropriate to assist individuals to develop reasonable control over their own behavior, and the resultant sense of option and choice. the therapist’s goal, then, is not to 17 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) merely exchange the compulsive cross-dressing for compulsive like-sex dressing but to provide the individual with rational control and reasonable options in his or her behavior. (p. 7) thus, normative gender development produced rational, unconstrained, individualized notions of the human, with their resonant colonial, masculinist associations. within lovaas’s published work, autistic behavior was more routinely and less controversially associated with an undeveloped, primitive, pathological and non-relational humanity that was unaware of itself. the consistent denial of any deeper meaning or humanity to autistic children’s actions implicitly reproduced these associations, as did widely used words such as “severely undeveloped.” occasionally, lovaas and his colleagues drew explicit connections between the goals and methods of their interventions and middle-class, western, colonial hierarchy: throughout, there was an emphasis on making the child look as normal as possible, rewarding him for normal behavior and punishing his psychotic behavior, teaching him to please his parents and us, to be grateful for what we would do for him, to be afraid of us when we were angry, and pleased when we were happy. adults were in control. in short, we attempted to teach these children what parents of the middle-class western world attempt to teach theirs. there are, of course, many questions that one may have about these values, but faced with primitive psychotic children, these seem rather secure and comforting as initial goals. (lovaas et al., 1973, pp. 134-5) this passage offers a particularly explicit explanation of the colonial underpinning to fears about white children’s behavior (rohy, 2008; stoler, 1995; valverde, 2008). as noted by melanie yergeau (2018), lovaas’s central emphasis on “self-stimulation” as the primary set of autistic behaviors to delineate and the first to target for elimination also links to legacies of masturbation discourse. even among the gender articles, slippage from feminine behaviors to inappropriate sexual desires and masturbatory associations 18 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) suggest that more was at stake than the immediate behaviors of the children described. the development of misdirected desires among these surprising deviants of male-designated, white, middle-class american children resonated beyond the bounds of either diagnostic condition to a questioning of how to shape colonial futures. behaviorism’s ongoing legacy what were the effects of lovaas’s rigid behavioral procedures and the resulting articles? first, the expert was simultaneously an experimental researcher and a provider of very hands-on clinical intervention. this experimenter-clinician was an absolute authority who set and frequently changed goals and rewards or punishments without consultation or even warning to the subject-patient. for example, a behavior rewarded consistently might suddenly no longer receive any response at all as an “extinguishment” phase started. meanwhile, the recipients of behavioral intervention were defined entirely through their behaviors as observed and interpreted by as many other trained/standardized people and with as high a level of consistency as possible. thus, across the articles by lovaas and his colleagues, the inner experiences of “autism” and “gender disturbance” were constructed as not only inaccessible, but entirely irrelevant. under the behaviorist framework, the desires — and humanity — of people so described were presented as objects to change, build, or erase; ethical concerns such as consent were effaced. this belief is particularly apparent in lovaas’s early interviews about autistic children when he talked about his approach as “building a person” (chance, 1974). however, only a superficial reading of these documents would accept their insistent focus on “measurable behaviors” at face value. while these texts certainly attempted to refocus the reader’s/observer’s attention away from desires of the "gender disturbed" or "autistic" children themselves, “inappropriate desires” constituted a core component of both the interventions described and the knowledge 19 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) produced. consistent with foucault’s discussion of the masturbating schoolboy (foucault, 1980), these discussions of children’s "misdirected" desires did not focus on the racialized other, but on the children of the bourgeois elite. what both groups of children apparently “wanted” was the primary reason they were seen as in need of intervention. in the feminine boy project, children’s selection of what to play with was deadly serious. children received reinforcements and punishments for as long as their play included the “wrong” wants. a boy stating that he “wanted to be a girl” was an indication of the need for gender training, and predictive of a feared future of transvestism, homosexuality, or transsexuality. in terms of scientific prowess, the authors used moments when their interventions seemed to change what a child “wanted” in an enduring way as testimonials to their own success. for example, one article described: “upon entering the room, kraig said aloud, ‘i wonder which toys i will play with. oh, these are girls’ toys here, i don’t want to play with them” (rekers & lovaas, 1974, p. 184). what kraig “wanted” was the guarantor of enduring behavioral change, and the promise of ongoing “indistinguishability” from others. the “wants” of individual autistic children in other studies were not explored as explicitly as those in the gender condition; however, the selection of “reinforcers” that each child would “work for” was a key point of interest for the researcher: we selected reinforcers on the basis of their value for a particular child. many children would work only for food and required an occasional slap on the buttocks if the therapist was to control undesirable interfering behavior. for other children, symbolic approval and disapproval were effective in maintaining the children’s behavior throughout the working sessions. (lovaas, koegel, simmons, & long, 1973, p. 136) children who showed a desire for the approval of the therapist were seen as more "developed" and with an improved prognosis. their apparently "normal" desires made their behaviors, in turn, more enduringly 20 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) "desirable" by the researchers’ criteria. as sequenzia and other autistic self-advocates have highlighted, the imperative to take desperate measures to treat autistic behaviors through early intervention and "recover normal functioning" in children remains a largely unquestioned logic and taken-for-granted truth within today’s scientific milieu as well as among parents, professionals, and policy-makers. although feminist and lgbtq movements have made inroads in mainstream culture such that gender and sexuality "conversion" therapies are under increasing censure, autistic selfadvocates and critical allies continue to be marginalized as they assert autism as a viable way of being in the world. a queer disability studies approach to behaviorist autism science moves us beyond a rhetoric of hopelessness, identifying unspoken normative conceptions of the social within the ongoing regulatory and constitutive role of aba as it constructs certain people as not yet human. a queer disability studies approach instead supports queer, autistic and alter embodiments and futures as vital, inventive, and viable (kafer, 2013; munoz 2009; yergeau, 2018). our detailed case study identifies a number of key effects of lovaas’s work: (1) lovaas’s work simultaneously promoted the authority of the expert, particularly the role of psychologists, in definitions of pathology and their treatment, while widely dispersing behavioral techniques and their related view of the human as new technologies of the self, operating through the site of the family, education, and helping professions (douglas, 2016; gruson-wood, 2016). (2) lovaas’s approach initiated a booming autism recovery industry and lgbtq “conversion therapy” industry, asserting the need for urgent, very intensive (expensive), professionally guided, largely standardized approaches as the best/only hope for these children and their future selves (dawson, 2004; mcguire, 2016; silberman, 2015). these standardized approaches simultaneously enlisted and regulated how parents were to care about autism and gender behavior as key practitioners while excluding those families who could not take up such intensive interventions. (3) the approach removed the possibility of following the needs, wants or inner 21 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) experiences and desires of children labelled autistic or gender "disturbed." (4) the approach ignored the interests and existence of adults so labelled, apart from the “bad outcome” status. (5) behaviorist responses to autism continued to subsume the relative value or interest of those who were unsurprising deviants through race, class, gender or intellectual/physical disability, and reinforced colonial associations of “underdevelopment” with biomedical and pedagogical interventions. (6) finally, a focus on autism and gender non-conformity as children’s conditions that require and justify coercive intervention reinforced the duality of adult-child roles and justified capricious adult violence and total authority. if lovaas’s tenets are followed, childhood desire is readily remolded, and the re-education of deviant desires becomes a beneficent mission. lovaas’s research provides a stark demonstration of how a “scientific/expert” projection of children’s futures has effectively rationalized coercive and violent practices against the children themselves, reshaped professional and familial relations, and bolstered the ongoing devaluation of the adults who are gestured to as a “bad outcome,” be they queer, trans, autistic, or gender non-conforming. this paper argues that the production of such projected futures and linear notions of “development” must be re-examined through a queer disability studies slant along their gendered, racialized, colonial, and capitalist imperatives (see berlant, 2011; duggan & munoz, 2009; stockton, 2009; yergeau, 2018). “undoing” aba and conversion therapy’s intelligibility, therefore, urges us to view young, queer, trans, disabled, and autistic forms of desire and agency as substantial resources for destabilizing dominant narratives of temporality, growth, relationality, and human potential. 22 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) acknowledgments this research was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. references akerley, m., oppenheim, r., shea, j, & shea, n. 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(1977). a negative reaction to the use of electric shock with autistic children. journal of autism and childhood schizophrenia, 7(2), 199-202. winkler, r. (1977). what types of sex role behavior should behavior modifiers promote? journal of applied behavior analysis, 10(3), 549-552. yergeau, m. (2018). authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. durham, nc: duke university press. bios margaret f. gibson is an assistant professor at renison university college at the university of waterloo. her research interests include disability studies, social work, parents, feminist science studies, and lgbtq+ communities, with a focus on the encounters between service users, providers, and institutional discourses. she edited the book collection queering motherhood: narrative and theoretical perspectives (demeter press, 2014). her work can also be found in journals including signs, disability & society, feminist formations, disability studies quarterly, and the journal of homosexuality. patty douglas is an assistant professor of disability studies in the faculty of education at brandon university, in manitoba, canada. through her genealogical studies and current storytelling project (http://enactingautisminclusion.ca/), she engages critical and arts-based approaches to speak back to exclusionary education and care systems and work toward more liberatory pedagogies and practices that open access to life for mothers, families, teachers and autistic and nonnormatively embodied persons (not mutually exclusive). she is working on her first book, autism and mothering: ethical disruptions and care pedagogies, which makes a critical intervention into, and offers creative 28 gibson and douglas catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) alternatives to, deficit-oriented practices surrounding autism and mothering. microsoft word 6951-1-11-_nelson,shew,stevens.docx nelson, m. k., shew, a., & stevens, b. (2019). transmobility: rethinking the possibilities in cyborg (cripborg) bodies. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-20. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © mallory kay nelson, ashley shew, and bethany stevens, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article transmobility: rethinking the possibilities in cyborg (cripborg) bodies mallory kay nelson syracuse stage, syracuse university malloryk@gmail.com ashley shew virginia tech shew@vt.edu bethany stevens sociology, georgia state university bethany.stevens@gmail.com abstract this creative, experimental contribution blends written words and sketches depicting our crip bodies engaging with various mobility technologies, including crutches, walkers, prosthetic limbs, and manual and power wheelchairs. by picturing and describing our crip bodies with varieties of technologies that we use, we use these pictures and corresponding narratives about disabled bodies in technology to tell a larger story about the constitution of disability with technologies, as well as the modes of mobility available to disabled bodies. our visual and narrative elements serve to argue that disabled bodies have a wider array of mobilities and ways of being than are afforded to non-disabled bodies. we resist super-crippery and insist on cripborgery. crip bodies are taken as sites of possibility, adaptation, and creative reflection. nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 this article is a collaborative work by and conversation between three disabled women who, among them, use or have used many types and configurations of mobility devices. transmobility takes center stage in this narrative that combines text with sketches. transmobility is the idea that disabled bodies actually have a greater array of options for mobility and movement, providing an impetus for creativity and imagination. the idea of transmobility pushes us to consider embodied crip techniques as sites of liberation. we argue against the existence of any one appropriate mobility technology for a body—our bodies are spaces to think about possibilities. we are cyborgs—nay, cripborgs!—who need no one technology to move. rather, our hybridized cripborged bodies can take shape and flight through various technologies. how our tools for mobility and body are chosen can vary and change significantly; we can be multimodal, and we need not create hierarchies in our technological choice. mallory kay nelson serves as an illustrator here, as we write about our bodies and our technologies. through her visual depiction of all of our bodies in her sketches in our chosen modes of movement, her artwork provides reference for our first-person essays about the possibilities of our bodies and movements and device. how do cripborgs choose their devices? on what grounds do we make judgments about our technologies? how do people around us see us within these technologies? what are the perceptions we hold and that others hold around our bodies in motion in technology? what plays into these perceptions and decisions? transmobility (noun): (1) the ability to move between various modes of mobility; use of multiple mobility methods; (2) the ability to move beyond traditional forms of movement and mobility; (3) the existence of free and disabled bodies in motion. word derived from the prefix “trans-”, meaning beyond, across, through, surpassing, transition, transport, or transcending + “mobility,” meaning the ability to move or be moved freely. antonym: monomobile. coined by mallory kay nelson. origins: her experience. cripborg (noun): (1) crippled cyborg; (2) a disabled person who nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 selects technologies whilst anticipating the world they will encounter; (3) crips who will not be resisted: you too will be assimilated. from the prefix “crip-”, taken proudly and reclaimed from the word cripple, once a name for disabled people + cyborg, originally meaning cybernetic organism, the confluence of what is natural or organic with what is artificial or technological. coined, perhaps separately, for a videogame (thanks, google: bloodborg vs. cripborg), but done for a different context here by bethany stevens. origins: cheeky. we three authors are white cis-gender disabled women, so how people see and represent us—and project their ideas of how we ought to be—in our use of technologies corresponds often to demographic features that we share. people’s expectations for us might be similar. our narratives reflect how people see us—and also how we respond, both in how we imagine ourselves and in how we free ourselves from their understanding. no doubt these social interactions and self-reflections would be changed under different categories of understanding that society projects upon us. we recognize our positionality and political standpoints in these encounters. though our focus here will be on technologized bodies, we participate in a rich narrative and memoir tradition within the disability community, through our descriptions sharing what we have learned about bodies and about society. this tradition echoes through the work of irving zola (1982), nancy mairs (1996), stephen kuusisto (1998), alison kafer (2013), alice wong (2017), margaret price (2011), sami schalk (2018), ellen samuels (2014), rosemarie garland-thomson (particularly 2009 talks about technologized parts of bodies), bill peace (much of his bad cripple blog, including 2013), and many others. we recognize that crip bodies are not always cripborg, though our interests in this piece are focused on our forms as we have become transmobile cripborgs. explaining one’s cripborg body seems like a strange project, but we try to work in plain text. we hope that our work here shows how we emphasize, embrace, and accept our cyborg-cripborg configurations. each technology is a different negotiation of space, social expectation, and requirements of body. each of our bodies is valid, shifting, and various as they get represented, understood, and transported. moving away from or nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 toying with ableist mandates of cartesian dualism can catalyze necessary conversations about the connection of our crip bodies with the technologies that mediate our bodies in space. too often we disabled-cyborgs, we cripborgs, are told to anticipate a coming era in which our minds can be downloaded into more convenient bodies or grow more normalized parts—when science fiction imagination takes up our bodies at all. the assumptions about our bodies is that they are bad bodies to have, and that are psyches are impacted by having such bodies. but we don’t think about our bodies as bad: we have come to know and love them. bodies do things in the world, and they are inseparable from our minds in that we work to adapt and respond through the coordination and integration of our bodies and minds; we take margaret price’s (2011) turn to talk about bodyminds as fundamental to self-acceptance and pride (schalk, 2018). our minds are body too, and our techniques structure our lives. our bodies exist in different technologies in different ways. we are not super crips and reject that narrative (for more on this type of narrative, or set of narratives, see schalk, 2016). we are understood and changed with different technological choices and perform “cripness” in ways that emphasize different built environmental circumstances, social representations, and stigmas. accepting transmobility as a desirable orientation of body and mind works against some of these social representations and stigmas surrounding technologies, disabilities, and bodies. transmobility opens up space for considering cyborg-cripborg bodies as imaginative, playful, transgressive, and mobile, rather than dominate narratives that frame disabled bodies through lenses of pity, inspiration, or fear. transmobility works against the narrative of the super crip represented in literature and popular media around disability. we believe there is no one right way to be disabled, nor one right way to negotiate one’s body in the world with technologies. there isn’t even one technology that counts as solution. none of this is super: it is all everyday. one could call it pedestrian, but perhaps that is prescriptive in its own way nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 too. bethany stevens: i am a congenital crip: born via emergency c-section to grab my broken body from my mother’s womb. i have osteogenesis imperfecta (or brittle bones)—a big word for short statured people. at birth, it was discovered i had fractures in utero, as well as from being pulled from the womb. others showed up as i reached my arm out or otherwise moved slightly in the incubator where i spent my first month of life in. born on military base in germany, i have fantastical thoughts of nazis screaming at my birth— instead it was a young doctor deployed from kansas who implored my parents to take me to the top of a mountain and leave me there, as it was clear i would not survive, much less ever thrive. plenty of congenital crips have the story of a doctor predicting our death, with little knowledge about the lives of people with our disabilities. for the first six years of my life i walked upright, although i never liked how slow i had to move and how much i had to keep my brain focused on not falling out of fear of fractures. my mother moved us to the mountains of california and it required two flights of stairs to get into our house, so i conceded to needing some help. my stepfather at the time found a tree branch, cut and stained it. all it needed was a drug store rubber cap so it would not slide and i had the coolest first cane. a cane no one could have. i walked with the cane despite peers analogizing me to their grandparents while giggling. it is a wonder i found such ridiculous humans attractive, but that is a story for another day. nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 i got my first manual wheelchair, a beautiful red machine that offered me speed and freedom. i was never sure why my mother gave some primacy to my cane over my wheelchair. she tells me it was for health reasons, as we our bodies are more in shape and things flow better when erect. i cannot help but think that her ideas were, and continue to be, imbued with ableism. that first chair was simply for destinations that require a lot of walking, like disneyland. the second chair i got in the early 1990s was a ridiculous neon yellow and i rode that one to and around school to protect me from fractures that could come from my peers. this shift in permissibility to use the wheelchair more is likely because we moved down from the mountain and i attended a larger school. we moved across the country when i was tween and it was then i made the complete transition to using a wheelchair full time. my tibias (lower legs) were bending with years of walking putting pressure on my soft bones, so we decided it was best if i take a breather and wait to find a doctor to put metal rods in my legs to straighten them. that day did not come for a few years, and he was a terrible doctor and the healing process took over eight miserable months. i tried learning to walk again, one of about ten times in my life fractures or surgeries led me to have to relearn to walk. with all the time away from walking, i was too weak to walk again as much as i tried. it was sometime after months of physical therapy that i finally told my mother that i was done walking; she responded that i would never live a normal life. i thought, “well, i never was going to anyhow.” nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 since my adolescence until the summer of 2017, i only used a manual chair to get around. thankfully, i ditched the neon yellow for a more reasonable adult grey. i have traveled a lot with my chair and find it gives me more freedom than i could ever asked for from walking. in 2016, my wife and i moved to a condominium on top of a hill and my shoulders were causing me great pain. leaders in the disability communities encouraged me to get a power wheelchair before my shoulders gave out from pushing, and i finally listened. in june of 2017, my dear svetlana was delivered. she is my first and only electric wheelchair. i have never named an assistive device of mine despite having used them for the past thirty-two years. it is a huge life change to shift from analog to digital. like learning to drive a vehicle, i was terrified mess— scared of her power. this $25,000 machine is 300+ pounds of a beast who could kill someone. running over feet can lead to fractures. it’s a rather intimidating wheelchair. it took me about three months to finally go places alone, without my wife spotting me. now i drive her like my body was always made for her. the back is really the best part of the chair, aside from the speed, because it holds my curved spine in the most comfortable way. i have never felt this supported by a wheelchair. in my home, i move between using my manual chair and power chair. but i find svetlana’s twelve-inch elevated lift useful in the kitchen and the power wheelchair overall more comfortable than my office chair. with the beauty of movement with different devices comes a balance of costs and benefits from each. while svetlana has offered speed, power, and height (which i have often longed for as a little woman), i traded off the ability to slow dance with my wife. this is a loss in my life, but learning to find more gains is part of the adaptive nature of being disabled and creative. i now can wheel holding hands with my nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 spouse, something we both revel in—particularly the wonderful gaze it incites from passersby. spending my life in transition, within transmobility and wanderlust, i have observed how people read these different devices. of course, i read, or rather my body reads, them differently, as it takes time to get to know them. they feel like new lovers that i am learning to dance with, as our movements grow to be in sync. i know the canes were always a little odd to people, but i am also a little person, so it is hard to unwrap which part was causing the gaze. manual wheelchairs cause a patronizing affect, but there is also a sense of respect i had when taking a hill quickly. svetlana triggers a different social response. perhaps it is because i am higher up and now notice peoples’ eyes more, but i find people making brief eye contact and then doing their best to avoid my gaze to the point of turning their heads to the side while walking forward. people outside the disability community can be so damn awkward. despite dealing with humans as a continued social problem in my life, i find transmobility to be a beautiful thing. i get to explore what works for my body, thereby engaging in the radical political act of self-care and refusing the denial of embodied pleasure. many people lack an adequate vocabulary concerning disability and often refer to wheelchair users as “wheelchair bound”; i make sure students know to only use this in a bdsm context as we do not ride out of the womb on wheels. however, there is something that the nondisabled people get at in thinking our bodies are cripborgian. i feel a strong relationship with my assistive devices. they are freedom machines. when people touch them, i feel it. svetlana and my manual chair are connected to me, not permanently but certainly psychosocially. ashley shew: i am a hard-of-hearing, chemobrained amputee with a side of crohn’s disease, the internal music of never-ending tinnitus, and a case of the mondays. unlike my fellow authors whose cripborg bodies are also nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 represented in this article, my disabilities are relatively newly acquired—and acquired as an adult. acquisition is such a weird idea to use here, as if features of my body were things to trade and sell at auction or for a motivated ferengi to assess. although, some of my parts could be: my most recent foot (just the foot part of the leg) cost my insurance company $4,000. my amputation itself is unusual. unlike my many of my amputee brethren (shew, 2017), i have ten toes and ten fingers. the cancer that led to the majority of my disabilities was located on my left femur, reaching just a smidge into my knee joint and winding its way up; it was beautiful and terrible on scans. i would have been an above-the-knee amputee if not for a really neat surgical option called rotationplasty. a rotationplasty (also known as a van nes procedure) cuts out the bones and meat around a person’s knee and partial femur and joins the lower leg with the person’s thigh, jamming tibia into femur and putting a person’s lower leg on backwards so that what was formerly in service as an ankle now takes on the job of a knee. those of us in the community refer to this new joint as a knankle. it looks strange to some —but all amputations do—so that wasn’t really a deciding factor for me. i have no phantom pains because they kept as many nerves in the process as they could. i just celebrated my fouryear ampuversary, dancing and laughing with my elementary school age kids. for the most part, i have come to use my prosthesis every day when i leave my home—with some exceptions for injury, the health of my leg, issues of maintenance, and days on which i stay home. i see how people look at me when i wear my prosthetic leg and things are going well, but it took a helluva long time to heal: i was unable to bear full weight on my leg nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 for a year after the surgery (because chemo had slowed down my body’s ability to recover so much). i’ve been the user of a basic-ass walker, the user of a wonderful blue-shiny rollator (“the walker of my dreams,” as i referred to it when it arrived and my seven-year-old daughter still does, though i am on my third of these), underarm crutches, forearm crutches, a cane, and a prosthetic leg. the idea of transmobility speaks to me; i find it liberating to consider myself just-as-good in any mode; it doesn’t have to be a moral failing to choose something different. too often, people take success for an amputee as running and doing athletic things. there’s a moral tale felt around amputation that points narrowly, normatively toward success in sports and athletics as the goal an amputee ought to have. nearly all media representations of amputees now depict this—and your leg must be dressed up and stylish to boot. there is this promise of restoration through technology–returning to the sport you loved or taking up a new and even-better physical hobby with the help of high-tech devices—that weighs upon a person. for the most part, i use the prosthetic leg during the day, and my shiny blue roller at night. i occasionally pick up my cane to take along for ice, rain, and otherwise adverse weather. sometimes i bring crutches when i travel since they are easier to pack than the rollator, though less so now that i’ve gotten more comfortable with crawling as a mode of movement. (i only crawl in private because crawling makes other people so uncomfortable. but crawling is great.) when people look at me while i stand with my prosthesis on, people are generally comforted by the sight: my presence confirms their ideas about techno-optimism and the redemptive power of technology. my body nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 11 represents, for some, a vision of overcoming disability through technology— that a fix is possible if only we continue to give worship to the gods of our holy quadrinity: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem). i confirm their beliefs in progress of technology, a medical system that enabled me to have this technology, and my human will to “overcome” the circumstances of my body. i wish my body represented less. while i occasionally encounter folks who approach me in a mode of pity, most people are either curious to hear “my story,” assuming one of horrible circumstances that lead to physical mastery and technological triumph, or to thank me for my service to our country, assuming that i became an amputee through valorous military service and ought to be especially honored for my sacrifice of body.1 on the flip side, any device added to wearing a prosthetic leg is instant pity, especially as a white disabled woman. i spent a good deal of time with my prosthesis and double forearm crutches (and then a single forearm crutch and then a cane), as i had a very long recovery from the surgery. it’s hard to say where the cancer-pity and where the disability-pity divide in the interactions i had while with these combinations. bald at the time (or having very short hair just starting to grow in), my body in motion with these three items—two crutches and a prosthetic leg—was a lot for people to take in. i would be regularly stopped at the grocery store and other places where i would dare to go, asked to explain my appearance by wellmeaning people who were slowly crushing my spirit. i wanted to hide in shadows: my body was too much to explain while standing next to frozen foods, too much had happened to me. my leg was just a part. these encounters almost never happen with kids—whether with a fake leg plus bonus devices or the prosthesis alone. when kids see me with my prosthetic leg, they are excited. untrained in the limited narratives of disability that our society provides, kids often ask about my robot leg without nearly as much baggage. sometimes they ask me if it hurt (it doesn’t now) and whether it will grow back (no, but that’s okay). i read in one of my daughter’s classes each week, and the kids have gotten more accustomed to it. being regular and disabled and in public is important, even though it nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 12 comes with assessments and assumptions that i do not like. my presence is always political—as i suppose it was before i became disabled, as a woman in the world with all the value judgments that entails, but it feels intensely inescapable now. everything i do feeds into someone else’s ideas about people like me, except for when i am with children, who are generally chiller about the whole situation and accept my explanations simply. of course, anyone watching me going about average stuff with my prosthetic leg can’t see how some days i long to get out of this contraption and glide across my house in my rollator. rollators are supposed to be for older folks, not people in their thirties. despite all the negative ideas people have about this technology—and its inappropriateness for someone of my age—it’s wonderful. if i am up in the middle of the night or if i am getting ready for my day, i use my rollator to take myself to the bathroom or to the kitchen for a snack. at the end of the workday, i am glad to both take out my hearing aids and take off my prosthetic leg—and hop on my glider and really move. the fastest i can move myself is with this device, and it glides beautifully across the wood floors of my home. i love moving with my rollator in my home; my body is comfort, and i am grace. my body is beautiful and so well coordinated in this environment with this technology; we are synced, choreographed, and there are few better feelings of movement. this is not true when i take the rollator outside— different surfaces change the feel of how it moves, and i don’t have their navigation down. with my prosthetic leg, i still have to pay attention to the surfaces i walk on, and this doesn’t end when i enter my house. an errant rug or mat can cause a trip. i am hyper-aware of the floors of the places i go. the constant vigilance i kept as a new amputee has somewhat faded, but i am nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 13 much more aware of and connected to the environment around me and my body in the environment than i was as a nondisabled person. i’ve had whole conversations about bumpy pavement with a colleague who works on antianti-homeless devices and about gravel with other crip commiserates. i take it in more fully now. here’s why they never tell you about keeping and maintaining a prosthetic leg. it’s work. patty berne (2013) talks about how she is subject to the frailties of her wheelchair; the same is true about prosthetic limbs, although i have never witnessed this as a topic of public conversation or as something brought to my attention as i became an amputee. right now, i walk with a limp, and i have hip pain. i need a new leg. my current one is just a year and a half old, but my body changes and has so changed this year. the upper of my prosthesis digs into my shin (which, yes would be the area on the back of your thigh). i get a little relief when a few adjustments are made, but i know what the end game is here. i need a new one, and new ones don’t come cheap. even though i have great insurance (which few amputees can say), this new leg will take time and visits to a prosthetist who is many hours away. i will have to block off at least four days from work and make arrangements with my spouse and our children. because i have an unusual amputation—that has so many good features, really not complaining here— i have to go where someone is skilled in the making of this sort of leg. the maintenance of my prosthetic leg comes with personal cost. on a good day, there may be places—the ocean—where it is inadvisable for me to go without precautions (a bag and some duct tape might do). when it’s working great, my prosthetic leg sublime, i can think a lot less about it. but it’s a physical object—and my body is also. but my body is less static, less firm, not truly poised to yield itself to this technology. i swell and stretch and shrink and blister and dry out and itch and sweat. my cripborg body sings when things are true to it—i mean true here in the sense of a water wheel or other engineered object (see davis baird’s discussion of thing knowledge, 2002). when things fall out of true when it comes to my leg, i hurt and the way i move in the world shifts dramatically. nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 14 the wonderful thing about rollators is that they cost about $80 online and can be shipped overnight and require no adjustments that i cannot do myself. the wonderful thing about prosthetic legs is that i can go many places without careful planning and carry stuff with me when i do. my leg hurts today— or, rather, my prosthetic leg hurts the meaty parts of my left leg. i am in an in-between place now, wondering what to do. it’s time to plan my next leg—get the prescription from my surgeon again, set up my appointments a few weeks or months from now, and start arranging things. until then, i likely pick up my cane, pop some ibuprofen, and limp toward my daily work—but all while all-the-more looking forward to getting home, dropping my gear, and sailing away on my rolling walker. i will have freedom inside for $80, freedom outside for around $15,0002 on my insurance plus some significant hassle. mallory key nelson: i identify as transmobile, dyslexic, and disabled. i have a hemipelvectomy; my amputation is of my right leg and the majority of my right pelvis at the age of fourteen. this leaves me in-between born with a disability and becoming disabled, as i was between the point of birth and full body and identity development. my body arrived in the world at birth with ten fingers and ten toes. my body now has ten fingers and only five toes, which leaves me to identify as physically disabled. society’s expectation of my movement is that i should wear a prosthetic leg and once again have ten toes. this desire to normalize my appearance comes in many forms. this is how others wish to see me, making my physical disability less visible to them. what isn’t understood is how this mode of transportation and movement does not apply itself well to my daily activities. my way of moving through the world includes forearm crutches, wheelchairs, scooters, and motor vehicles. i am a transformer. as i transform from crutch user to wheelchair user, i am seen as a different person. nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 15 i was not always transmobile and was never told or encouraged to be. early in my rehabilitation, i was pushed to be upright and walking in some manner. my primary doctor at the time did not think that a prosthetic would ever work for me, and, on the other side, my friend danielle, who was of the same amputation due to cancer, said i could. what i wanted was to keep up with my peers and become a costume designer on broadway; i was always driven. i used my first chair, which was selected and sized for me by the physical therapist who sought little input from me and gave no options. over the course of my first year with one leg, i slowly gained the strength on my crutches to use them all day long. as soon as that day came, i let the wheelchair collect dust in the garage. on crutches, my missing leg and disability can go unnoticed by the unobservant. doors and pathways are not made clear and acknowledgement that i might need to sit down during a one-hour conversation in the hall goes unnoticed. i must advocate strongly for what my physical needs are and what will lessen my physical pain and wear and tear on my body. my chance of falling increases and my ability to move objects from point a to point b declines, but i am able to get my body into all places other bodies go: up stairs, through thin hallways, up ladders, to sitting on the floor with ease. when i went to college i knew i needed help getting around the large college campus. i acquired a power scooter. the freedom i felt from getting around without pain was surprising. walking on crutches long distances is fatiguing, and my arms and hip ache. many days you could find my scooter parked outside classrooms and my friends’ houses because access and room was not made for me, and i needed to know my scooter was safe when i was not in it. it was always for me to figure out how i was to get everything done. a haunting remark from my advisor saying, “you need to nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 16 stop acting like you work harder than everyone else,” still rattles around my head. my full bloom into transmobility came in graduate school when i couldn’t stand watching directors and performers use wheelchairs on stage to immobilize a character. i felt that i was the only one who knew that wheelchairs are graceful and fast. this led me to perform in the integrated drama school-wide dance light show. i grabbed a fellow graduate student who was a sound designer and could be found doing salsa dance in the rehearsal rooms randomly during the year, and told him we were doing a salsa dance for dance light—and we made history. for the rest of my time there, i would be stopped in the hallway to be told that my dance was amazing and that they had no idea that a wheelchair could move like that. because i did this dance, my wheelchair started living in the costume shop for rehearsal storage. this was the only safe space made for my chair through actions of others. because it was right there i started to use it again to get around campus in addition to my scooter. it was at this time that i noticed how differently i was treated between my transmobility devices, even though i had not changed. there was always a disdain i felt from people when i used my scooter compared to the wheelchair or crutches. when my body is placed in a wheelchair i am free to roll long distances without as much pain, my foot finds comfort while i sit in any nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 17 conversation. i can pile things on my lap or hang them off the back. but i cannot go up the stairs, fit into the tight aisle at stores, or look you in the eye. i find an odd respect from others when i am in my wheelchair, doors are held open, people try their best to move out of the way, they are greatly apologetic. by the end of graduate school, i had all the mobility option: crutches, wheelchair, scooter, and even a prosthetic leg. i did not care how others thought i should be moving through the world. i use the right tool for the right moment. even though i still get asked regularly, “why don’t you have a prosthetic?” i do not currently find that tool useful enough to bother with the energy and expense. as satisfying as it is for others and how the visual once brought me to tears, it is not for me right now. i advocate to anyone who will listen that all options should be accessible. i want newly disabled people to know that the unfamiliarity is just temporary and walking at all costs isn’t worth with the price tag. they should know that representation of disability in performance should be authentic and diverse. whatever you create as a disabled person will be original because so often we have not yet been seen. acknowledgements we thank drs. monique dufour and cora olson for their comments on an early draft of this paper, three incredibly helpful anonymous referees for their help in making this work flow, and the guest editors of this special issue for accepting this unusual collaboration among scholar-activists and an artist-activist. this work would not have come to fruition without the support of our partners and pets. we also thank those members of the disability community who educated us on alternative methods of movement, often aside from what we were told in rehab or clinic. notes 1 the documentary fixed: the science/fiction of human enhancement nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 18 describes this heroic imagery about “enhanced’ disabled bodies, particularly amputees and wheelchair users, well. 2 this number is approximate. in the united states, below-the-knee amputee prosthesis usually costs between $8,000 and $12,000; abovethe-knee with a computerized knee costs between $40,000 and $70,000, while hip prostheses run around the $100,000 range. my rotationplasty prosthesis is a bargain when considered this way. it’s held on by velcro. references baird, d. (2002). thing knowledge – function and truth. techné 6(2). retrieved from https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/spt/v6n2/baird.html berne, p. (2013). interviewed in r. brashear (director), fixed: the science/fiction of human enhancement. united states: new day films. brashear, r. (director). (2013). fixed: the science/fiction of human enhancement. united states: new day films. garland-thomson, r. (2009). staring: how we look. new york, ny: oxford university press. kafer, a (2013). feminist, queer, crip. bloomington, in: indiana university press. kuusisto, s. (1998). planet of the blind. new york, ny: the dial press. mairs, n. (1996). waist high in the world. boston, ma: beacon press. peace, w. (2013, april 16). rewalk: a plea for common sense. bad cripple [blog post]. retrieved from http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2013/04/rewalkplea-for-common-sense.html price, m. (2011). mad at school: rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. samuels, e. (2014). fantasies of identification: disability, gender, race. new york, ny: new york university press. schalk, s. (2016). reevaluating the supercrip. journal of literary & nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 19 cultural disability studies, 10(1), 71-86. schalk, s. (2018). bodyminds reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in black women’s speculative fiction. durham, nc: duke university press. shew, a. (2017, july 27). finding my amputee brethren. nursing clio.. retrieved from https://nursingclio.org/2017/07/27/finding-my-amputeebrethren/ wong, a. (2017, september 14). resisting ableism: disabled people & human gene editing [video file]. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=46&v=fuvt54j9bta zola, i. (1982). missing pieces: a chronicle of living with a disability. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. bios mallory kay nelson is a disability design specialist and scholar. she is presently serving on the board of directors for the society for disability studies and is involved in disability culture, advocacy, education, employment and community building. mallory received her mfa is costume design from carnegie mellon and has had her design work seen internationally representing the usa. she hopes that transmobility becomes the standard for the social and medical models of disability when talking about movement. ashley shew serves as an assistant professor of science, technology, and society at virginia tech. she is the author of animal tool-use and technological knowledge (2017) and co-editor of spaces for the future: a companion to philosophy of technology (2017). her current work looks at the narratives about bodies, disability, and technology. bethany stevens is a wheelchair using sexologist working on her phd in sociology. her dissertation focuses on the politics of pleasure within the disability communities. taking a semester off from her doctoral work, she taught a senior capstone course in disability studies and sexuality as the nelson, shew, and stevens catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 20 2019 kate welling distinguished scholar in disability studies at miami university. microsoft word takeshita-128-1171-4.docx takeshita, c. (2017). from mother/fetus to holobiont(s): a material feminist ontology of the pregnant body. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3 (1), 1-28 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © chikako takeshita, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article from mother/fetus to holobiont(s): a material feminist ontology of the pregnant body chikako takeshita university of california, riverside chikako.takeshita@ucr.edu abstract in karen barad’s agential realism, the “fetus” does not preexist as an object with a distinct agency that interacts with the “mother.” meanwhile, recent scientific studies reveal the vital roles symbiotic bacteria play in human reproduction. drawing on material feminist theory, this article offers an alternative ontology of the pregnant body represented by the motherfetus, which collapses the material distinction between the “maternal” and the “fetal” embedded in the cartesian mother/fetus dualism regularly reiterated by scientific, popular, and feminist discourses. the article deconstructs pregnancy, which is typically known as a bidirectional exchange of substances between the parent and offspring, and reconstitutes it into a symbiotic process sustained by networks of commensal microbacterial activities. the idea of holobiont reproduction challenges some of the basic concepts associated with pregnancy and childbirth such as the difference between a fetus and an infant and the gender of the gestational parent. this article offers the motherfetus-holobiont as a boundary-breaching cyborg figure that opens up new possibilities for scientific and feminist studies of the pregnant body. 2 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) the cyborg, like the mother-fetus rethought, may push scientific medicine to tolerate ambiguity, admit subtle shading, and replace antagonistic opposition with mutual interest. —emily martin (1998, p.138) this chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. — donna haraway (1991, p.150) abortion and childbirth are rarely discussed together in feminist scholarship, perhaps understandably so. termination of pregnancy by choice does not seem directly relevant to the feminist critique of overmedicalization of obstetrics, while a pregnancy carried to term has little to do with protecting abortion rights. although health care and abortion politics seem unrelated as feminist research areas, they share a strong interest in strengthening the agencies of pregnant persons and restoring their control over their bodies. feminist scholars have argued that the overuse of technological interventions minimizes gestational parents’ involvement in childbearing and undermines their subjectivities (davis-floyd, 2004; katzman, 1991). the high rate of cesarean section in the united states reflects obstetricians’ prioritization of extracting the fetus from its parent, which, as i discuss below, is normalized by the binary thinking of the western philosophical tradition. feminist scholars who have analyzed photography of fetuses that appear to be free-floating in space and sonographic images of the “unborn child” are similarly critical, arguing that these visual representations push the pregnant person into the background and render their presence imperceptible (hartouni, 1998; morgan, 1996; oaks, 2000; petchesky, 1987; stabile, 1992). visualizing the “independence” of the fetus predisposes the viewer to regard it as a patient of its own right. moreover, fetal imaging bolsters antiabortionists’ rhetoric of “fetal personhood,” against which feminist scholars have argued tirelessly for decades to support reproductive 3 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) rights. pushing against the personification of the fetus, feminist theorists have proposed a variety of ways to reconceptualize fetal relationships, reestablish the pregnant person’s agency, and strengthen abortion rights (casper, 1994; morgan & michaels, 1999; hird, 2007; browne, 2015). while many have argued that the fetus cannot be regarded as an independent person because its existence relies on its relationship with the gestational parent, most have fallen short of revoking the western notion of “corporeal autonomy” (addelson, 1999, p. 33). in other words, while maintaining that a fetus is not a fully autonomous agent morally, psychologically, or socially, feminist theorists have for the most part left untouched the notion that the fetus is physically distinct from the host. this, i feel, has hindered feminists’ ability to fundamentally shift the ontological divide between the “mother” and the “fetus.” the idea of fetal corporeal independence, which underpins both medicalized childbirth and antiabortion arguments, has been upheld by biological sciences that presume maternal and fetal substances to be exclusive of each other.1 scientific theories that pit the fetus against the mother have been widely accepted because they appear to be the “natural” order of things, according to the cartesian binarism that counterposes the self against the other and when the fetus is coded male after the sperm. recognizing that this habitual dichotomizing and gendering inhibit thinking about pregnancy differently, this article explores an alternative ontology of the materiality of the pregnant body.2 a material feminist counterargument to maternal/fetal corporeal independence, and the theoretical foundation of this article, is offered by karen barad (2007), who takes issue with the fundamental assumption that the fetus exists as an essential being with its own substance, qualities, attributes, and relations. denying the existence of separate individual entities that preexist their “interactions,” barad holds that “distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intraaction” (p. 33). in agential realist terms: the fetus is not a preexisting object of investigation with inherent 4 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) properties. rather, the fetus is a phenomenon that is constituted and reconstituted out of historically and culturally specific iterative intra-actions of material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production (p. 217) if this is so, then the fetus as a phenomenon can also be unconstituted under a different material-discursive practice. building on barad’s insight, this article attempts to replace the binary-laden mother/fetus with a nondualist motherfetus, which refuses to make a distinction between the maternal and fetal organisms by foregrounding symbiosis as the material basis of a pregnant body. this project comes at a timely moment, when some biological scientists are revisiting individualist assumptions long adhered to and moving toward a more ecological framework to study living things. the realization that the human body relies on millions of microbes to cofunction supports the conceptualization of the pregnant body as a holobiont, or an integrative symbiotic system (gilbert and tauber, 2016). in this article, i first provide examples of the traditional scientific construction of fetal corporeality, followed by an overview of the emerging nonindividualistic way of organizing biology. the main section of the article taps into the latest scientific revelations regarding the role of symbiotic microbes in human reproduction to show how pregnancy can be viewed not as a bidirectional exchange between the mother and the fetus, but instead as a process integrated in a larger symbiotic circulation of matter. i then challenge the binary distinctions between before and after “birth” and redefine the liminal state from around the third trimester to the first birthday as holobiont-in-becoming. these exercises will ultimately dissolve the material distinction between the gestational parent and the fetus, making it more difficult to make claims about an independent fetus or to negate the benefits of natural birth.3 furthermore, this work troubles the highly gendered conception of the pregnant body. feminist scholars have for the most part—like the scientistic approaches in which they intervene—long taken for granted that pregnant people are all women and therefore “mothers” (and not 5 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) fathers or some other relation), and thus that the constituency represented by pregnant persons is indeed women. while acknowledgement that not all women are mothers is fairly commonplace, the fact that not all pregnant or potentially pregnant persons are mothers or women has yet to transform our language and conceptual frames substantively. i endeavor here to problematize the separation of pregnant body and fetus and at the same time to loosen the grip of gender on our imaginings of pregnancy.4 overall this article aims not to offer the motherfetus as a feminist panacea, but to release feminist theory from dualist binds so that reproductive science and politics can be explored in new ways. the conclusion section will offer some thoughts on how focusing on the biology of pregnancy as the process of developing a new holobiont from a parent holobiont enables the transgression of gender binary and heterosexuality with which human reproduction has been imbued. fetal corporeality as a phenomenon for many years scientific theories have taken for granted that an entity referred to as the fetus preexists while remaining oblivious to the effect of their assumptions on authenticating a hegemonic referent called the fetus. although scientist rarely acknowledge it as such, a genetically pure, original, and independent fetus is a hypothetical entity rather than something that precedes its scientific accounts. typically, scientific accounts portray the mother and fetus as rivals, although collaborative models are not uncommon. either way, scientific theories predicated on a materially isolatable conceptus that is distinct from the parent have engendered the phenomenon scientists call the fetus. mother/fetus: oppositional dualism: an antagonistic relationship between the mother and fetus, which i name “mother/fetus” here—mirroring the self/other dichotomy in cartesian dualism—is a common trope for theories in multiple scientific 6 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) fields. in evolutionary medicine, wenda trevathan (2010) hypothesizes that miscarriages and pregnancy complications result from competition over resources between the mother, who is trying to balance her overall reproductive success, and the fetus, which is resolved to survive for its own sake. the embryo/fetus is often assigned the masculine task of overcoming the odds, as represented in harvard anthropologist peter ellison’s (2009) portrayal of the embryo’s perilous journey, which involves “overriding” the “mother’s reproductive system” that normally leads to menstruation, “establish[ing] a connection with its mother’s blood supply in order to obtain food and oxygen,” and “evad[ing] its mother’s immune system.” (pp. 19–20). immunologists have puzzled over how an embryo carrying different human dna, like a transplanted organ, can attach itself to the uterine wall and grow without prompting rejection from the host’s immune defense system (e. martin, 1998). a 2012 slate article titled “your fetus is an alien: so why doesn’t a pregnant woman’s body attack it?” cites yale school of medicine’s harvey kliman, who uses marriage as a metaphor for a successful pregnancy. according to him, “each side has its own agenda. yet, the key to a successful union —whether it be mother and fetus, or husband and wife—is compromise” (epstein, 2012). as emily martin (1998) has pointed out, scientific accounts of implantation reflects “a masculinist bias” that “divide[s] the world into sharply opposed, hostile categories, such that the options are to conquer, be conquered, or magnanimously tolerate the other” (p. 132).5 an imagined opposition defines the mother/fetus. mother-fetus: relational dualism: as researchers came to realize that immunological mechanism in pregnancy cannot be fully explained by the self/nonself model, they have introduced less combative and more amicable expressions. the field of immunology has been exploring various theories that view the immune system as an information-processing mechanism that recognizes elements and shapes its own reactions accordingly (e. martin, 1990; tauber, 2000; weasel, 2001). feminist scholars have taken a particular 7 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) interest in highlighting the role of the parental immune system in integrating the fetal cells into the host tissue (e. martin, 1998; howes, 2007). moira howes (2008) has searched for ways in which reproductive immunologists construct a mutual mother-fetus relationship. she has found some evidence that the tendency to presuppose schism is dissipating. she writes: immunologists occasionally describe maternal-fetal immunological relations using terms that suggest positive, neutral, nonantagonistic interactions. terms such as maternal-fetal “bidirectional traffic,” “dialogue,” and fetal trophoblast “migration” emphasize normal communication or at least neutral interaction. such terms contain the beginnings of a relational immunological model of maternal-fetal contact (pp. 262–263). despite some of these positive language shifts, howes still required some “determination” to “draw this emerging model” from reproductive immunology papers. “this,” she notes, “is because there are no explicit theoretical models or experimental practices built around beneficial relations” (p. 263). in other words, reproductive immunologists are struggling to articulate a theoretical framework that is not bound by the self/nonself model. howes, whose objective is to reconstruct immunological reactions during pregnancy from a feminist perspective, maintains that “the exchange of immune cells and biochemicals between mother and fetus is routine and the relationship between them is beneficially interconnected and dynamic” (p. 264). meanwhile, scott gilbert (2014) asserts that host activities and fetal development are coordinated by information exchange: the mother influences the fetus, providing it with nutrition, oxygen, antibodies, and hormones for its growth. the fetus reciprocally influences the mother, changing her blood circulation, immune responsiveness, and metabolism, while prodding her with hormones to retain pregnancy. the physiology of the mother changes as the pregnancy continues, with both the mother and the 8 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) fetus producing hormones and other growth factors to influence the other’s survival and development. (p. 1) the mutuality expressed in these descriptions are welcome from a feminist perspective in that they equalize power and agency, which have tended to be granted to the fetus and denied to the pregnant person. these perspectives also encourage thinking in a nonhostile mode. however, mother-fetus relational dualism stops short of discarding the idea of two separate entities. mother-placenta-fetus: feminist triangulation: feminist scholars who refute fetal personhood based on legal, philosophical, and social analyses rarely attend to the materiality of pregnancy. myra hird (2007) and maria fannin (2014) are the exceptions in that they attempt to restore the agency of the pregnant parent, whom they assume to be a woman/mother, by bringing attention to scientific accounts of the physiological processes of pregnancy that support association rather than conflict between the two parties. unlike scholars who attempt to demonstrate the fetus’s dependence on the gestational parent through social or psychological arguments, hird turns to physiological reliance, including the dna that the fetus inherits and materials such as oxygen, nutrients, and immune cells that are passed on through the placenta. she argues that the act of “gifting” or “corporeal generosity” is central to the parental-fetal relationship. in the same spirit, fannin’s article, “placental relations,” focuses on the placenta as the site where reciprocally productive exchanges are mediated between the pregnant person and the fetus. in essence, hird and fannin attempt to neutralize the active role assigned to the fetus in conventional scientific discourses and emphasize mutuality and partnership. while the placenta is often considered a “lifeline” and filtering organ, it has also been understood to be an organ that separates the mother and fetus. ironically, the placenta’s purported role as the anatomical barrier between two organisms came into the spotlight when the organ “failed” to protect the offspring from the harm of thalidomide, a 9 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) medication doctors prescribed for morning sicknesses in the early 1960s (martin & holloway, 2014). by drawing attention to the placenta as the “mediator,” hird and fannin inadvertently reproduce the duality between the mother and fetus and reaffirm their separate existence. although their attention to the physiology of pregnancy as well as exposing us to the dynamic of the mutual maternal-fetal relationship are productive, their feminist work still supplements the iterative intra-action that generates the fetus as a phenomenon. in the following sections, i examine a paradigm shift beginning in the life sciences and then apply it to merge the mother and fetus, while also renouncing the gendering of reproduction. moving beyond the self/other in biology the whole dear notion of one’s own self—marvelous old free-willed, free-enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a self—is a myth. —lewis thomas (1974, p. 142) new ways of thinking about life and bodies are arising in the biological sciences. there are constant pushes and pulls whereby new findings challenge assumptions about what organisms are or do, but scientists try to interpret them in conventional frameworks.6 nonetheless, we may be able to renew our understanding of human existence with repeated exposure to a novel concept and accept an alternative materiality as a reasonable form of life. in this section, i examine chimerism and symbiosis as possible sources of iterative intra-actions that would lead to a rearrangement of substances and discourses around the physiologically autonomous “self.” chimerism: chimerism has the potential to overturn our belief that each person must be made of a singular set of human dna. people who are “true” chimeras harbor more than one genetically distinct cell populations as a 10 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) result of having absorbed a paternal twin that died in utero. chimeras may live a perfectly normal and healthy life only to discover their genetic compositions when they fail a paternity or maternity test, a case in which the genes in their blood samples do not match the dna of their children. these chimeras carry one twin’s dna in their bloodstream and the other twin’s genes in their reproductive cells (vergano, 2015; edwards, 2015). because the “naturalness” of a singular identity is so engrained in our culture, media stories of chimeras tend to report them as curious cases in which a person is living with a “stranger within” or has a “dual identity” rather than as people who happen to possess two sets of dna (a. martin, 2007, p. 217). when the discourse of chimeras finally breaks away from the cultural grasp of individualism, chimerism may help propel “a radical reevaluation of the boundaries of self and other” (p. 222). fetomaternal microchimerism, which is common during pregnancy, refers to the presence of the fetus’s dna in the gestational parent’s body and vice versa. microchimerism can last for decades, which means that the cells belonging to the “other” multiply and live on in the “wrong” body long after the pregnancy has ended. cells containing the offspring’s dna, some suppressing diseases and others contributing to ill health, have been discovered in parents’ organs decades after pregnancy (boddy et al., 2015; martone, 2012). alas the romanticization of microchimerism in the media as an eternal bond between the mother and child reinforces the gendered and essentialist discourse that presumes all women to identify with motherhood and all "mothers" to be women. still, as aryn martin (2010b) suggests, chimerism and microchimerism can help us see that the single-genome self is a myth by showing that multiple dnas can participate in the “mutual constitution of different bodies and persons.” a pregnant body can be regarded as a boundary-breaching chimera supported by plural genomes. symbiosis: scott gilbert and alfred tauber have been among the leading philosophers of biology attempting to disrupt and make obsolete the 11 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) atomistic conception of an organism that consists of a unique genome and a distinct body. they have been able to develop their nonindividualist paradigm of life forms from scientific studies utilizing new technologies that enable detailed analyses of microorganism dna. metagenomic sequencing can provide insights into how microbes and larger organisms live in intermingled relationships, and research using this technique has grown exponentially since the beginning of the twenty-first century. maureen o’malley and john dupré (2010) argue that “metagenomics is a scientific approach that vindicates pluralism and has profound implications for fields within and without life sciences” (p. 183). more than half of the cells that comprise the human body belong to bacterial symbionts inhabiting the airways, skin, mouth, gut, and reproductive cavities (sender et al., 2016).7 human lives are supported by multiple species and genomes with which reciprocities are common. trillions of bacteria find their habitats on the human body and many feed on the food eaten by the host. these include more than 150 species of resident microbes in the gut that participate in metabolic functions, trigger various gene expressions, destroy organisms that might become an irritant or pathogen for the human, and provide yet unknown services (gilbert et al., 2012). microbes also help modulate immune-system reactions and prevent undesired inflammatory responses (mor & kwon, 2015). experiments using “germ-free” mice show that microbes are also critical to the complete development of immune, digestive, and neurological systems (gilbert et al., 2012).8 researchers have also found that changing the gut microbiota can induce different behavioral traits in mice (smith, 2015) and that the bacterial composition in the mice’s guts alters the early-life programming of brain circuits related to stress response, motor activity, anxiety-like behavior, and cognitive functions (heijtz, 2016). human studies suggest that microbes stimulate cells in the gut to produce large quantities of the neurotransmitter serotonin as well as prompt immune cells to produce cytokines, or cell-signaling molecules, which can influence neurophysiology (smith, 2015). such gut-brain connections shatter mind/body dualism. the 12 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) classic idea that genetic identity is inherited from parental chromosomes and remains unaltered throughout life no longer holds water once we recognize that our genetic expressions depend in part on the activities of microsymbionts. scientists are beginning to recognize that evolutionary selections of organisms must have involved the symbionts and their dna as much as the host’s genetic characteristics (theis et al., 2016). the recognition that humans rely on microbes for survival troubles the longheld paradigm that upholds the individual organism, which was believed to function, develop, and reproduce as an independent “self” distinguishable from “others.” as gilbert, sapp, and tauber (2012) contend, the discovery of symbiosis throughout the animal kingdom is “fundamentally transforming the classical conception of an insular individuality into one in which interactive relationships among species blurs the boundaries of the organism and obscures the notion of essential identity” (p. 326). holobiont is the term biologists use to refer to a comprehensive unit of a symbiotic system consisting of a host organism and numerous symbionts. as gilbert and tauber (2016) explain: what had been previously described as “individual organisms” are, in fact, multi-species/multi-lineage “holobionts,” composite organisms, whose physiology is a co-metabolism between the host and its microbiome, whose development is predicated upon signals derived from these commensal microorganisms, whose phenotype is predicated on microbial as well as host genes, and whose immune system recognizes these particular microbes as part of its “self.” (p. 840) the idea that a human being is a holobiont, or an integrated organism comprised of both host elements and a persistent yet constantly evolving population of symbionts, opens the door for thinking about pregnancy and the pregnant body as a symbiotic process and system. in the next section, i turn to showing ways to reconfigure the pregnant body as a nonindividualist, nondichotomous motherfetus. 13 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) congealing the motherfetus-holobiont matter is not a fixed essence, rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency. —karen barad (2007, pp. 183–184) before a mammal becomes pregnant, “she is already a symbiotic community, a holobiont, composed of numerous species most of them bacteria” (gilbert, 2014, p. 1). building on this notion, i offer the term motherfetus—in contrast to mother/fetus and mother-fetus—to represent a nondualist ontology of pregnancy in which the material distinctions between the mother and fetus are erased. in order to congeal the motherfetus, i enlist recent scientific studies as material-discursive apparatuses to reconstitute the pregnant body as a phenomenon generated via symbiotic relations. what becomes pregnancy must emerge from a symbiotic system. after the sperm (and occasionally embryos created by in vitro fertilization, or ivf) are introduced to a host-holobiont, the complex processes that establish a pregnancy require various kinds of support from resident microbes. a number of recent studies have revealed that bacteria are regularly present in the uterus, fallopian tubes, around the ovum, and in the placenta, and are thus likely to be part of a normal pregnancy (reid et al., 2014). for example, gil mor and ja-young kwon (2015) hypothesize that certain bacteria contribute to creating a favorable tissue homeostasis or equilibrium around the uterine wall where the fertilized ovum implants. although infectious bacteria’s negative roles in failed cases of fertilization, implantation, and pregnancy have been studied for therapeutic purposes, research on bacteria’s regular participation in initiating and maintaining pregnancy has barely begun. gregor reid and colleagues (2014) expect, however, that more about how commensal bacteria facilitate reproduction will be discovered. bacteria are essential participants in the continuation of pregnancy, as they metabolize nutrients and alter the blood being 14 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) circulated within the holobiont (gilbert, 2014). the gut microbiome of the pregnant host changes dramatically during pregnancy to support its progressive stages. for instance, during the third trimester, when more nutrients are required to facilitate exponential growth, the gut microbial community transforms so that more glucose is released into the bloodstream (hellman, 2010). also, some lactobacillus species of bacteria that produce an acidic environment become prevalent in the vagina during pregnancy and prevent pathogens from spreading to the uterus (gilbert, 2014). researchers are trying to understand the exact mechanism that causes these shifts in the microbiota. they believe the trigger to be hormonal changes, which themselves are products of intricate interactions within the holobiont. as gilbert declares, “the fetus survives and develops in a network of symbiotic relationship provided by the pregnant mammal” (2014, p. 2). the participation of bacteria compels us to reconceptualize pregnancy not so much as a collaborative process between the mother and fetus, but as the integration of the fertilized egg into a holobiont. a holobiont by definition defies the self/other binary: the understanding that many of our “personal” traits are defined by microbial activities interacting with the host genome has weakened the notion of a totally independent organism around which the “self” is built. at the inception of pregnancy, the fertilized egg joins other microsymbionts in interacting with one another as well as the host. in a sense, gametes are not very different from numerous substances that are introduced to a holobiont and engaged, or not, by the host and its symbionts. the point is that the fetus never exists as an independent entity because its physicality is inextricable from microbial activities. as a kind of a symbiont, the agency that a fetus has, if any, is limited to its actions within the holobiont. the material basis of a unique individual fetishized by antiabortionists is no longer supported by this scientific account. the möbius strip may be helpful here to reinforce nondualist thinking. the three-dimensional figure-eight with a single continuous surface that appears to be two opposite sides of a ribbon has been 15 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) utilized by feminist theorists elizabeth grosz (1994) and ann faustosterling (2000) as a metaphor to dissolve the binary configurations of mind/body and gender/sex, respectively. the möbius strip can be a metaphorical figure to blur the boundary between the mother and fetus. the seamless transition from the outer side of the ribbon over to the inner side visualizes the material flow within a nondualist motherfetus. because the strip cannot be divided into two parts, it thwarts the idea of “bitrafficking” or the passing of substances back and forth between two individuals. instead, all “exchanges” that sustain pregnancy are part of a multidirectional, multigenomic, and multireciprocating circulatory network that maintains a holobiont. meanwhile, the centrality of gender and sexual reproduction subsides as microbes and circulations take the center stage in this material feminist account of the pregnant mammal’s body. reconstituting birth: a holobiont-in-becoming going from the maternal environment to the outside world is not merely leavening a symbiotic support system and gaining “independence.” there is no such thing as “independence.” it’s mutual dependency all the way down, and birth is the exchanging of one symbiotic system for another —scott gilbert (2014, p. 5) this last section discusses how symbiotic relations extend to the postnatal period. as i have argued elsewhere, obstetrics is rooted in a masculinist and dualist western philosophical tradition; the mind/body dualism allows physicians to concentrate on the physiological aspects of pregnancy while ignoring its psychological and social dimensions (takeshita, 2017). when it comes to childbirth, the focus is on the extraction of the fetus from the parent, after which the separation of two independent organisms is deemed complete. if we regard the pregnant body as a holobiont, however, birth for the offspring is a process of leaving “one symbiotic association and forming another” (gilbert, 2014, p. 16 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 2). birthing may be a decisive change, but in a larger scheme of things, it is only one part of generating a second holobiont from a motherfetus. as aryn martin has suggested, the human body’s “borders are permeable, blurry, and change overtime” (a. martin, 2010a, p. 46). before being exposed to the external environment at all, the fetal-symbiont gets primed to become a future holobiont. bacteria from the pregnant host’s oral cavity move into the gut of the fetal-symbiont, as do immune cells, both of which will serve as the initial building blocks of a future symbiotic system.9 once the amniotic sac breaks, millions of bacteria migrate onto the newborn and start establishing an ecosystem. although the initial exposure has the largest impact on its composition, it will take months before the infant’s microbiome resembles that of an adult and the offspring thus becomes a comprehensive holobiont. infancy is a liminal phase during which the first encounter with the environment and the subsequent development of the digestive, neurological, and immune systems lay the foundation for the holobiont-in-its-becoming. during the last decade, scientific studies on microbial changes during pregnancy and infancy have multiplied exponentially (nurielohayon et al., 2016). one of the consistent findings is that whether the infant is born vaginally or surgically significantly affects the initial composition of microbial residents in the newborn (johnson & ownby, 2017). in most studies of microbial populations during pregnancy, the vaginal microbiota shifted to a dominant population of lactobacillus, which not only contributes to keeping pathogens away from the uterus as mentioned above, but also helps the infant digest milk and prevents deadly sepsis in newborns (panigrahi, et al., 2017). studies have found that the gut of a vaginally born infant is often colonized by a diverse bacterial population, with a significant presence of lactobacillus. bifidobacteria, also a common symbiont transmitted to the neonate in the birth cannal, has been found to keep pathogenic bacteria away and help induce and sustain the immune system as well as produce essential vitamins that the infant needs. they might even influence brain formation, since bifidobacteria in the gut “help tighten the linking of the intestinal 17 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) epithelial cells, which might be essential for the cognitive health of the infant” (gilbert, 2014, p. 4). specific bifidobacteria appear to form colonies in vaginally born neonates within three days. breast milk, as we already know, contributes to the formation of the new symbiotic community by supplying it with nutrients, immune cells, and advantageous microbes. it also contains complex sugars that are not digestible by the infant itself but that help bacterial symbionts thrive. one of these sugars, oligosaccharides, serves as food for the beneficial bifidobacillus. a strong mutual relationship between breastfed infants and bifidobacillus is quite evident. the composition of the initial bacterial community is critical, as the microorganisms assist in the development of the tissue that makes up the skin and the linings of internal cavities, the balancing and function of the intestines, the production of blood vessels, and the priming of the immune system (heijtz, 2016). gilbert (2014) notes that “the process of [bacterial] colonization in neonates appears to involve many of the same molecules that are usually used to attack bacteria” (p. 4). in other words, how someone’s immune system reacts to the same microbes may depend on the initial context in which they were introduced. although studies are still in the preliminary stage, a simple way to understand this is that if a certain microbe is registered during the early period of immune development, it will be recognized as one of the symbionts, whereas if the encounter occurs after a certain period of initial programming, the same microbe may not become fully incorporated into the holobiont. infants who lacked certain commensal bacteria during the primary programming phase of the immune system can develop allergic reactions to otherwise unharmful molecules. increased risks of childhood obesity and chronic immune disorders, including asthma, allergy, and inflammatory bowel diseases, are associated with surgically delivered offspring, who are found to be colonized by bacterial populations that resemble that of the mother’s skin and the general hospital environment rather than the vaginal microbiota (kuhle et al., 2015; sevelsted et al., 2015). it may take over a year for a 18 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) diverse microbial community similar to that of a vaginally born counterpart to colonize the gut of an infant born by c-section (gilbert, 2014). meanwhile, surgically delivered infants, as holobionts-to-be, are likely to be missing out on lactobacillus’s digestive assistance and the traits and functions of a diverse range of bacteria, including bifidobacillus. a few physicians have started experimenting with “vaginal swabbing” to see if the composition of microbiota in cesarean-born babies can be upgraded by swiping the neonate’s mouth and body with a gauze that was placed inside the vagina prior to delivery (dominguez-bello et al., 2016). preliminary studies have found that swabbed surgically delivered newborns obtained some microbes resembling those of their vaginally born cohorts, which might give them a stronger foundation compared to nonswabbed counterparts. “perturbations” of microbiota can also be linked to antibiotics prescribed to the pregnant person, the newborn, or the breast-milk supplier as well as “maternal stress” that changes the composition of the vaginal bacteria during pregnancy (heijtz, 2016). in other words, a number of procedures practiced in hospital births can change the course of the holobiont-in-becoming. birthing is only one of the steps in the yearlong process of transitioning a symbiotic resident into an all-encompassing holobiont with a complete microbiota. the holobiont-in-becoming spans the in utero state throughout the newborn and the liminal infant phases, during which a symbiotic community is seeded, developed, and established. one might imagine this process as the möbius strip parting into two around the time of "birth." the strip can be abruptly torn or deliberately teased apart, allowing material circulation—the migration of immune cells, microbes, nutrients, and hormonal signals—to continue while it slowly splits. gradual rather than abrupt separation from the parent holobiont appears to promote the robustness of the new holobiont-to-be. experts now recommend immediate skin-to-skin contact for the infant after birth, which has been found to have various benefits, including exposure to bacteria on the parent’s skin, enhanced thermal regulation, higher blood glucose levels, and enhanced cardiorespiratory stability. babies 19 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) immediately placed on the childbearer’s chest also cried less and had an easier time establishing breastfeeding (crenshaw, 2014). vaginal birth, immediate skin-to-skin contact, and breastfeeding also seem to help the parent adjust to the new relationship with the offspring, who transforms from an internal to an external symbiont to which the post-partum body continues to respond. parents who have a c-section, on the other hand, generally have a more difficult time breastfeeding and bonding with their babies due to missing out on the synchronized turn of events that triggers physiological responses, including the surge of milk ejection stimulating oxytocin, also known as the “love hormone” or "cuddle chemical" (ibid.). proclaiming the benefits of vaginal birth and denouncing the adverse effects of surgical delivery, childbirth advocates are protesting hospitals and doctors that discourage or simply do not allow parents who have had a c-section in the past to give birth vaginally in subsequent pregnancies (pratt, 2013).10 overall, the alternative ontology of the pregnant body validates the holistic-midwifery model of care (davis-floyd, 2009; gaskin, 2010). the motherfetus-holobiont as a queer feminist figure drawing on agential realism, this article has reworked the materialdiscursive apparatus of bodily production that engenders a phenomenon we generally understand as the pregnant body. it has congealed the motherfetus-holobiont from scientific literature, human flesh, and microorganisms to invalidate the dualist ontology of sexual reproduction. i propose that holobiont reproduction is a boundary-blurring cyborg (haraway, 1990). as a cyborg, the motherfetus is not innocent: it is a creature with an agenda to disrupt the constriction of binary thinking and negate fetal corporeal independence for feminist gains. as a cyborg, the motherfetus is not meant to be a feminist solution to the entangled politics of reproduction. i am cognizant that while cyborg figures embody the pleasure of breaching dualisms, they can also betray us, which in the case of the motherfetus might include cooptation by antifeminist 20 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) discourses. still, whether as a mainstream scientific object, a biopolitical subject, a self-identification for pregnant people, or an agent for change, i believe that holobiont pregnancy holds more promises for feminist theory than the timeworn archetypes do. as myra hird (2004) argues, the symbiotic life form offers “a potent lens with which to explore particular boundary transgressions associated with queer theory including autonomy of the self, embodiment and sexual difference” (p. 85). bacteria-supported reproduction enables the decoupling of gender and reproduction by situating microbials as the primary agents of what used to be considered either a fetal or maternal function. although the term seems to leave the gender of the parent intact, the motherfetus-holobiont ultimately displaces the sexed physiology of reproduction and helps bypass the burdened trope and construction of the maternal body. consequently, it liberates women from obligatory childbearing by offering the possibility of a trans-pregnancy. as a phenomenon, the motherfetus-holobiont is not a fixed or a universal materiality. instead, it is expected to morph through further material-discursive rearrangements into varied shapes and meanings, perhaps the likes of a fatherfetus or an artificial womb. in essence, this cyborg figure queers reproduction and moves pregnant bodies into a more fluid space that opens the door for alternative approaches to scientific and feminist studies. acknowledgements special thanks go to juliet mcmullin, dana simmons, and jade sasser, who have read and commented on multiple iterations of this article. my appreciations also go to saul halfon, the two anonymous reviewers, and the guest editors for their insightful critique. i also benefited from presenting the early versions of this article and getting feedback from the audience at the 2015 and 2016 annual meetings of the society for social studies of science; the 2016 gender, body, and technology conference at virginia tech; and the ucr science studies working group. 21 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) notes 1 in line with the writing protocols of this special edition on “science out of feminist theory,” i capitalize “mother,” “fetus,” “embryo,” and so forth to refer to hegemonic accounts of particular objects of science. capitalized words such as “maternal” and “fetal” signify the materiality of these entities that are produced through the legitimizing apparatus of science and accepted as “official knowledge” or “actually existing.” within quotations, i have left the words “fetus” and “mother” lowercased as they are used in the original documents. otherwise, lowercased “fetus” and “mother” represent the ideas of them referenced in discourses other than official science. 2 my focus on the reproductive body should not be interpreted as a biological determinist argument or romantic embracement of motherhood. the biological processes i describe are not meant to be “natural” or scientific facts; instead they are natureculture or coconstructions of biology and meaning. 3 by “natural” birth, i mean a vaginal birth achieved through physiological processes without biomedical interventions (see takeshita, 2017). 4 i thank banu subramaniam and angie willey for encouraging me to explore this dimension of the motherfetus. 5 see zenclussen (2013) on scientific accounts of how maternal and fetal immune systems learn to tolerate each other. 6 for instance, the understanding that human beings cannot function without microsymbionts has not entirely suppressed the impulse to redefine biological individuality. biologists and philosophers of biology are now involved in debates about what defines biological “individuality” when symbiotic microbes are taken into consideration in various domains 22 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) including evolution, ecology, immunology, development, physiology, and the cognitive sciences (pradue 2016). 7 until recently, the often-quoted ratio between microbial cells to human cells in a human body was ten to one. this is now believed to have been greatly overestimated. sender, fuchs, and mil (2016) have revised the ratio to about 1.3 to one. a model human—a twentyto thirty-year-old man, 70 kilograms, 1.7 meters—is estimated to be composed of 30 trillion human cells (most of them blood cells) and 39 trillion bacterial cells. 8 mouse studies do not necessarily translate to humans. however, these experiments show what is possible in the animal kingdom and the potential for finding 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(2015, october 24). this man failed a paternity test due to his vanished twin’s dna. buzzfeed. retrieved from https://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/failed-paternity-test-vanishedtwin 28 takeshita catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) weasel, l. (2001). dismantling the self/other dichotomy in science: towards a feminist model of the immune system. hypatia, 16(1), 27–44. zenclussen, a.c. (2013). adaptive immune responses during pregnancy. american journal of reproductive immunology, 69(4), 291–303. bio chikako takeshita is an associate professor in the department of gender and sexuality studies at the university of california, riverside. she is the author of the global biopolitics of the iud: how science constructs contraceptive users and women's bodies (mit press, 2012). her main body of work involves the interaction between science, technology, biomedicine and the politics of reproductive labor in multiple spheres including population, birth control, abortion rights, childbirth, and mothering. her secondary line of work draws on political ecology to investigate the relationship between technoscience, the discourse of sustainability, and feminist environmentalism.     special section natural metaphors for network gathering: technologies of meeting at the allied media conference     veronica paredes university of california, los angeles vaparedes@ucla.edu     abstract in this article, i explore how nature metaphors are used within communities related to the allied media conference (amc) in detroit. the amc celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2018, and took place annually in detroit for twelve years leading up to that milestone (allied media projects 2022b). beyond amc’s commitment to detroit, the conference offers a compelling set of case studies for considering dialogue between intentional praxis of gathering and important issues related to environmental racism, popular education, and science fiction. amc is designed to explore methods of building and sustaining within media-based organizing, while the conference itself models practices of building and sustaining within its own network. primarily focused on adrienne maree brown’s book emergent strategy (2017) and the mobile multimodal art installation beware of the dandelions (2015–2016) from the collective complex movements, this paper argues that amc uniquely weaves components together that create the conditions for studying organizational process through understandings of the natural world.     keywords media-based organizing, adrienne maree brown, complex movements, nature metaphors, mycelium, dandelions     preface one friday evening in june 2017, i found my way to the opening ceremony of the allied media conference (amc) in detroit.1 upon entering the packed detroit film theatre before showtime, i could feel excitement and a sense of celebration radiating from the crowd as conference attendees filled up the auditorium’s 1,150 seats.2 the ornate theater’s luxuriousness added to the pleasure of the event. keeping with the beaux-arts style of the detroit institute of the arts building (detroit institute of arts 2022), the space provided a welcome contrast from the institutional settings typical of most conferences. admittedly, most amc sessions took place in wayne state university classrooms, but not friday night. opening night belonged in a grand venue. the ceremony provided “an inspiring mix of conversations, performances, and visual art” (ignaczak 2018). musician tunde olaniran produced the show for a second year, while adrienne maree brown and leah vernon co-hosted. the program featured appearances from amc administrators jeanette lee and morgan willis, black lives matter co-founder alicia garza, writer and professor scott kurashige, and musician mona haydar (“hijabi”) along with dance group al ta’wam. creative media and music collective the aadizookaan (adzkn) concluded the event with a riveting performance. adzkn’s closing act vividly stands out in my memory of the event. adzkn member giizhigad/christy b. (anishinaabe) graced the stage first. she offered a blessing while sitting on the stage floor before being joined by sacramento knoxx (ojiwbe/anishinaabe and xicano). further collaborators appeared as the group began to perform a song called “nakweshkodaadiidaa ekoobiiyag [let’s meet up by the water]” (knoxx 2016a).3 the song itself gathers diverse sonic components: poetry from detroit activist monica lewis patrick about detroit corruption; giizhigad’s bilingual singing in anishinaabe and english for its chorus; and rap verses from knoxx and kaz clever. a beat created using sacred anishinaabe elements, the rattle (to represent water) and drum (to recall heartbeat), undergirds the whole composition (knoxx 2016b). after the ceremony, i left the auditorium buzzing with anticipation for the programming to come that weekend. i wanted more, something like an encore. the desire was familiar for attending concerts, but not conferences. reflecting on adzkn’s performance i recognize now how it managed to inspire my resonance with the song. “let’s meet up by the water” explicitly considers environmental racism, local, institutional, and global corruption. subtly, it also explores political methods of convening both discussed and practiced at the amc over many years. i only grasped the process-oriented element of the musical collaboration when writing this article, even though i now see it right there in the song’s title. the amc conference entails meeting at a specific location (detroit) at a particular time (june or july). adzkn’s instruction to “meet up by the water” echoes amc’s biennial invitation to convene in detroit. furthermore, the amc is no ordinary conference; it represents the life-sustaining rivers, lakes, oceans, and channels adzkn evokes in their song. for its participants, amc is the water. like the togetherness adzkn calls for, the act of gathering is paramount for the amc. the practice of gathering is reflected upon at the conference itself. amc is designed to explore methods of building and sustaining within media-based organizing, and the conference models practices of building and sustaining within its own network.4 in its current mission statement, allied media projects, amc’s umbrella organization, identifies itself as a collective shaping the future: “we are a network of people and projects, rooted in detroit and connected to hundreds of other places across the globe. together, we grow and exchange ways of using media to create the world we need” (allied media projects 2022a). the ambitious goals for the now-biennial conference focus on the need to “cultivate media strategies for a more just, creative and collaborative world.”5 doing this work requires that the organization creatively imagine conditions not as they exist in the world now but as they may in possible futures built together. amc creates opportunities to enjoy worlds otherwise with one another, in community. over the past five years, i have experienced the amc’s powerful effect firsthand—at cass café, mash detroit, the marble bar, the detroit film theatre, the david whitney building, and wayne state university’s campus. i have known about amc’s brilliance since 2010, but did not attend my first amc until 2016. while i regret not traveling to detroit city sooner, i am grateful to know it through the amc. i write this article to express, and better understand, my gratitude for the amc and its dedicated scholars, activists, musicians, designers, organizers, facilitators, and media-makers. in getting to know the amc, i became interested in how participants return year after year to collectively imagine liberation. my own participation in the conference includes the role of network gathering coordinator, which builds from my prior experience as a network facilitator for a feminist networked collective (i describe this organization in further detail later in the article). specifically focused on network gathering and facilitation, i was impressed by the conference’s successes in maintaining enthusiasm from its participants. additionally, while many attendees returned annually, first-time visitors frequently participate each conference year. how had amc achieved this level of trust with loyal, returning participants, while also considering new attendees and meeting their distinct needs? having faced similar challenges as a coordinator, on a much smaller scale, i was curious how conference organizers managed to cultivate feelings of joy, celebration, and creativity amongst such disparate groups. certain elements stood out to me: (1) how amc approached the duty of making its programming accessible; (2) the different levels of relation that amc engaged with a sense of radical hospitality; and (3) how metaphors from nature recurred in the rhetoric and creative work of diverse projects connected to amc. in this article, i argue that amc weaves these components together, creating conditions for intentional praxes of gathering. while rituals of gathering and meeting are studied in fields like organizational behavior, and discussed for clarification in community-based participatory research and facilitation work, guidelines for gathering remain opaque in most other domains. collaborating with amc encouraged me to think through how the very shape of gathering and meeting can be designed by its participants, but not simply in prioritizing one topic for discussion over another and rearranging the agenda. how a group meets and gathers warrants deliberation. it also holds influence over who comprises the group in subtle but important ways. learning from amc’s reflexive facilitation approaches has helped me to figure out how to detect and describe the tacit assumptions at play in meeting and gathering. unexpectedly, these lessons were communicated in modes as diverse as very practical instructions for how different people might navigate the conference to expressive, poetic language evoking nature metaphors. to the first mode, the amc defines accessibility as more than “a concept—it is an investment and an action” (allied media projects 2016, 27). a section in the conference program titled “resources” includes information about childcare, translation, and a wheelchair accessible van. for amc, accessibility “means the opportunity for every participant to be able to engage with the spaces, places and events of the weekend” (allied media projects 2016, 27). the third mode of using nature metaphors is explored in great length in the sections that follow. i focus in this article on metaphorical concepts used within amc’s communities that emphasize process, primarily mycelium—to represent interconnectedness—and dandelions—associated with decentralization and regeneration. to start, i consider how the widespread appearance of the natural world in our everyday visual and semiotic encounters with commercial personal computing differs from what i interpret amc’s intentions in using nature metaphors. the introduction also describes in further detail the case studies from amc’s collaborators that i focus on here—works from adrienne maree brown and the collective complex movements—and provides some context for their influences as well as my own in writing this analysis. this setting up is intended to situate brown’s books, complex movement’s multimodal project beware of the dandelions, as well as my own perspective.   introduction contemporary technology users regularly come across references to animals, plants, and locations known for their scenic beauty. the operating system that runs in the background while i write this is called macos monterey. it is named after a city on the california central coast known for being home to one of the country’s largest aquariums (koronka 2021). since the release of mavericks in 2013, apple has named its operating systems after locations in the region, after having named them for animals since 2000. a streak of big cat names ended in 2012 with mountain lion (haslam 2021). even if you are not a mac user, you are likely to find on both pcs and macs scenic locations that spotlight the natural world in the forms of screensaver or default computer wallpaper options. one of the most well-known default desktop wallpapers is the “bliss” theme from microsoft windows xp. the image features rolling green hills shaded by fluffy white clouds that grace an otherwise clear blue sky; rugged mountains can also be glimpsed in the background. the image is a photograph that was shot in sonoma, california (grant 2021; messieh 2013). these appearances of (big) cats and serene landscapes, along with countless other examples, have become symbolic of personal computing and networked belonging. they are the flora and fauna of the “techno-ecological imagination” (pringle 2021). in her book virtual menageries, jody berland starts from similar observations about the pervasive, but superficial, inclusion of nature in emergent technologies in order to historicize how “groups of animals resembling menageries came to launch the tools and platforms of digital culture” (2019, 1). contrasted with the ubiquity of animals as pets or as part of a menagerie in mainstream digital culture, amc does not focus on cats, big or domestic. instead amc stresses relation. during another amc opening ceremony in june 2018, jeanette lee described a podcast project she had recently co-hosted with colleague and opening ceremony co-presenter morgan willis. the series was called “critical connections: stories from 20 years of the allied media conference.” lee and willis (then executive director and associate director of allied media projects, respectively) collected interviews with some of the many people who had been involved with amc throughout its two decades of existence. lee said of the podcast that they “found that the only way to tell that story [of the conference’s twenty-year history] was to tell an amalgamation of stories because the amc is not a single organism. it is a forest, it is an underground network of mushrooms, it is a galaxy — and we have no end of metaphors. but the best one is probably that it is fertile ground” (allied media projects 2018). in emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds (2017)—a book i explore at length in this article—adrienne maree brown paraphrases lee, describing how “the role of organizers in an ecosystem is to be earthworms, processing and aerating soil, making fertile ground out of the nutrients of sunlight, water, and everything that dies, to nurture the next cycle of life” (brown 2017, 116). while lee’s use of metaphor is of key interest in this article, her frequent mention of amc as fertile ground is especially relevant to my own experiences with the conference. in the same year i attended my first amc, a networked collective that i had actively been involved with for the prior three years held its last major conference.6 coined femtechnet (short for feminist technology network) by co-founders anne balsamo and alexandra juhasz, the collective designed and coordinated a large-scale distributed open collaborative course (docc) on the topic of feminism and technology during the 2013 academic year. beyond the course topic, femtechnet’s course form was innovative. it was a feminist response to the massive open online course (mooc), which was representative of education technology at the time that made lofty promises to transform the modern university. femtechnet challenged the mooc’s top-down model of pedagogy by engaging in online learning while “guided by long-standing feminist principles and processes” (juhasz and balsamo 2012). after a successful run of the course, the collective continued to iterate on the collaborative docc form with the topic of “feminism and technology” for many years. the group held annual summer workshops from 2013 to 2015, culminating in a summer workshop funded by yale university, alongside the international alliance of research universities.7 by this point in the network’s story, next steps were uncertain and though i would be part of a group representing femtechnet (hereafter ftn) at amc network gatherings in 2016 and 2017, we were mostly “femtechnet” in name only. by 2017 the collective i remain a member of, situated critical race and media (hereafter scram), had separated from ftn. shifting focus from outcome-focused dedication to learning projects, in scram we concern ourselves primarily with racial and social justice issues, and multimodal praxis-based community building. with a background in multimedia-based instruction in my graduate training, i was familiar with the technologically inflected aims of ftn’s feminist pedagogical experiments. i was less knowledgeable about grassroots organizing, aside from earlier collaborations i had with the participatory action research-based project mobile voices/voces móviles (hereafter vozmob) in 2009/2010.8 through ftn i gained an understanding of digital feminist pedagogies, and through vozmob i learned about critical pedagogy, popular education, and participatory action research. all these experiences proved significant at amc. i began to appreciate what they held in common and what distinguished them from one other—how they signaled different approaches, investments, lineages, and methods. i became aware of their influence in my own practice, and in that of my colleagues. at amc i witnessed how gathering in that messiness—in difference, in commonality, or simply together in a shared moment—could be enjoyable if approached with openness. another significant practice that contributes to amc’s “fertile ground” for collective future-making is inspiration derived from the science fiction writing of octavia e. butler. in session after session, it would be difficult to miss butler’s influence as her name and work are mentioned frequently. amc 2010 programming explicitly honored butler by dedicating a symposium to her and her fictional works (bailey 2013). brown extends this homage in emergent strategy, frequently referencing the writer’s stories and characters. while amc and brown have a reciprocal, mutually constitutive relationship that i will describe in more detail in a later section, for now clarification of how brown’s phrase “shaping change” directly references a religious tenet from butler’s parable of the sower (1993) provides useful context. an important distillation of a fictional religion called earthseed, which is based on the teachings of the novel’s main character lauren oya olamina, is provided in the following verse:   why is the universe? to shape god. why is god? to shape the universe. (1993, p 78)   within butler’s parable series, which also includes parable of the talents (1998), the verse is part of the fictional religious collection earthseed: the books of living. within the story, olamina’s earthseed opens with the same verse that opens butler’s book:   all that you touch you change. all that you change changes you. the only lasting truth is change. god is change. (3)   mycelium: interconnectedness in her book the next american revolution, detroit organizing legend/ancestor grace lee boggs describes amc organizers as “embody[ing] the spirit and hope emanating from detroit [that is] increasingly rubbing off on the out-of-town participants who come to our city” (2012, 173). boggs also describes in the book how after her closing remarks at amc 2008 she noticed differences between her experiences as a civil rights activist in the 1960s and the style of organizing practiced at amc. she writes the goals of the generation she came up in aimed “to agitate and mobilize faceless masses.” she elaborates, “there was none of the respectful listening to everyone, no breaking up into small groups so that everyone can participate and contribute, none of the laughter that makes an event like the allied media conference such a joy. our meetings and our demonstrations lacked the sense that our souls and the souls of those we worked with are growing, that in our relationships and in our community organizing, we are patiently building a spiritual framework for our everyday lives” (174). what boggs describes here as the patient “building of a spiritual framework” coincides with another one of the network principles previously mentioned, which states amc’s intention to “build a network of people and organizations developing long-term solutions based on immediate confrontation” (allied media projects 2022c) that is committed to “begin by listening.” attention to everyday small contributions and the spiritual offers a compelling alternative for what a network can do. it can honor multiple stories as it weaves a network of trust across space and time. consider the emphasis on the temporal commitment to simultaneous movement engaged in the long term and immediate; this orientation guides how the allied media projects network uses natural metaphors to describe its processes. shared leadership and cooperation are key, spiritual work is acknowledged and celebrated. amc attends to the bodymindspirits of its participants, through its core values and its everyday practices of radical hospitality.9 programming for amc 2017, 2018, and 2020 each included a network gathering for the ftn collective, for which i acted as a co-coordinator over the years.10 coordinators of this programming continue to gather at the amc conference, considering it an organizational, activist home. at amc 2022 we titled the workshop “situated critical race and media” to reflect the name of the collective (scram) that has coordinated under the name femtechnet at the conference for the past five years. the scram collective is composed of alexandrina agloro, anne cong-huyen, george hoagland, hong-an (ann) wu, and myself. during our 2018 network gathering, one of our activities was based on the symbol of mycelium, which hails from the work of complex movements, described in brown’s book. all conference participants were welcome to join our session. wanting to embrace the conference’s ethos of openness, we did not want to restrict attendance to the gathering in any way. the mycelium exercise was an icebreaker type activity that encouraged participants to draw a map of the “critical connections” that joined conference attendees convened at their table. these could vary from shared interests, contacts unexpectedly held in common, an enthusiasm for dance parties. anything. the casualness followed from our understanding of the amc culture and values to that point, and also the open-ended character of brown’s book. we hoped to approximate its energy and attitude to cultivate connection within the smaller scale of our network gathering. brown introduced the network principles of the allied media projects, along with its related methods of facilitation, collaboration, and media-based organizing to a larger reading public with her new york times bestseller emergent strategy. the book was the first publication in ak press’s series with the same name, edited by brown.11 key to its intervention is to use the concept of “emergence” to combine inspiration, creativity, and facilitation in “apply[ing] natural order and our love of life to the ways we create the next world” (brown 2017, 4). categorized as both “self-help” and “social science,” the book offers examples to consider when bringing together imagination, communication, and material practice in building more just, community-oriented futures. it outlines how organizing methods can transform by applying lessons learned from science fiction, visionary fiction, as well as from biomimetics/biomimicry, and permaculture. despite being published the previous year, mention of brown’s book continued frequently during amc 2018. as scram used the mycelium as a metaphor for deep social connection in our workshop activity and as we continued to engage with concepts from brown’s book in writing about how we worked together collectively, i was prompted to think through how emergent strategy had captured the imagination of amc. beyond the critical personal bonds brown had forged at amc year after year, what about her work resonated so profoundly with the amc communities? while the exciting application of science fiction to social movements explains some of brown’s popularity, how has her use of examples from popular natural sciences functioned to provide media-based organizers with attractive methods of communication? and zooming out from brown’s work, what unexpected continuities or shared values with dominant technocultures are concealed in nature metaphors that connect organizing communication with commercial digital culture? i turn now to a closer analysis of how brown’s written work uses nature metaphors, focusing mostly on emergent strategy. fundamental to the book’s organization, brown identifies six elements to describe the emergent strategy framework that she repeatedly relates back to the natural world. brown first provides a general dictionary definition of the words comprising each element and then provides examples from plant or animal life that relates to each. these stories come from brown and her interlocutors, frequently fellow organizers who are also observers of nature. occasionally the groundings feature insights from science writers or specialists.12 each element is further explored with examples and suggested activities related to facilitation work in the book’s chapter “tools for emergent strategy facilitation.” the six elements brown identifies for emergent strategy are fractals; intentional adaptation; interdependence and decentralization; nonlinear and iterative; resilience; and creating more possibilities. the element of fractals (“the relationship between small and large”) is first “ground[ed] in nature” by pointing to the spiral as a pattern found in diverse situations ranging from the shape of galaxies, cauliflower, ferns, deltas, veins, and so on (brown 2017, 51). the element of resilience (“how we recover and transform”) is explained by evoking stories of mushrooms detoxing soil, of coral reefs providing the ocean floor with spaces of home and beauty (125). the element of interdependence and decentralization (“who we are and how we share”) is illustrated with observations of geese flocking, trees growing or becoming rooted, and mycelium networking mushrooms to enable communication. after these “grounding in nature” metaphors introduce each element, the bulk of each chapter is devoted to providing stories from activist facilitation work. for brown, “in our best human practices, we watch the systems of the world and follow them” (2017, 153). by modeling from the patterns that structure complex systems of the natural world, we harness their “adaptive survival brilliance” (125) therefore “partner[ing] with change” (brown 2021, 3). this method is named for insights about emergence gained from nick obolensky’s complex adaptive leadership, while also in dialogue with margaret wheatley’s leadership and the new science (1992).13 emergent strategy strives to develop blueprints for organizing in uncertainty through emergence, and the rich testimonials shared from activists in brown’s book also resonate with the key concepts that obolensky writes define complexity: “self-organization, inter-relatedness, adaptiveness and emergence” (obolensky 97). beyond a coherent application of emergence in organizing work, emergent strategy brings dialogue between brown and her network of activists, collaborators, friends, “woes”—friends with whom one works on excellence in order to intentionally grow (brown 2017, 29)—to a larger audience. related to its broader appeal, beyond leadership and activist circles, the book holds science fiction literature as a strong overarching influence, specifically fiction from octavia e. butler. brown describes her initial attraction to emergent strategy through butler’s stories, wherein the approach was a “way for describing the adaptive and relational leadership model found” in the writer’s work (2017, 18). this is the innovation of brown’s work, to combine an interest in emergent strategy from leadership studies—work that is already fundamentally interdisciplinary in making connections between business and the history of natural sciences—to “visionary fiction,” a term coined by a significant collaborator of brown’s, walidah imarisha. brown elaborates that the term is used “to describe the work of people who use fiction to advance justice and liberation” (27). highlighting nature metaphors within a popular genre like science fiction prompts emergent strategy’s readers to approach facilitation methods with imagination. nature metaphors can be attractive as they are familiar in the world that surrounds us. the source domain for such metaphors are relations between nonhuman animals, the environment, and humans.14 one way to overcome barriers to understanding advanced future technologies or organizational structures is to explain them through the complex workings of nature, demystifying otherwise illegible, unrelatable systems. the level of depth in referencing nature, however, can vary widely from engaging with rigorous research on different ecosystems to the superficial inclusion of animal, plant, and environment representations as mere mascots.15 with the emergent strategy series, brown and her collaborators are clearly interested in shifting attention from apex species and king of the jungle characterizations of charismatic leadership toward species in nature more known for cooperation and collaboration; more focus on ants and starlings, less on lions, tigers, and bears. scratching beyond the image of the animal may be just one step in understanding how human perception of the natural world flattens complexity when abstracting the natural world into metaphors. brown discusses her method of finding the most suitable metaphor(s) in we will not cancel us (2020), in which she addresses miscommunicating through metaphor in online discussions. in a chapter titled “bringing abolition home: learning and untangling in public,” brown deliberates over her missteps when she first shared writings about cancel or call-out culture on her blog. she reflects on mistakes with language, and in particular, inappropriate uses of metaphor before including a revised version of the material first featured on these blog posts. brown writes, “the most consistent critique was about the metaphors i chose to work with” (2020, 24). she goes on to “apologize for reaching for the low hanging fruit of these dramatic metaphors when there are other ways to speak of mob energy that are less inflammatory, based in nature, and accurate without being incendiary” (25). instead of metaphors that equate experiencing being called out online with violent death, brown revises her discussion of cancel culture through the metaphoric concepts of the feeding frenzy and cancer. while this change in metaphor provides more distance from human violence, they nonetheless flatten processes observed in animal behavior and human biology to symbolize destruction. brown’s attempt to carry nature metaphors used in the emergent strategy framework, with its focus on collaboratively imagining more just futures, to political commentary about contemporary social media conditions in we will not cancel us appears to exhaust the usefulness (and perhaps goodwill) of nature metaphors.   dandelions: decentralization and regeneration in framing emergent strategy brown is careful to describe how the book and the practice that it outlines is fundamentally influenced by her relationships with others. in a section titled “lineage of emergent strategy,” she names particular people, stating, “butler, wheatley, [invincible] ill [weaver], grace, myself, and many others have been growing a strong system of relationships for considering emergence as a game-changing approach to movement work” (2017, 29). in community with boggs and weaver, brown finds suitable “language and frameworks” for understanding the leadership models butler writes into her science fiction. emergent strategy is directly influenced by boggs’s engagement with wheatley’s concept of “emergence—interdependence, iteration, being in relationship with constantly changing conditions, fractals” (28). complex movements, a collective of another mentee of boggs, ill weaver, created the “emblem system” brown uses to visualize her book’s six elements (45–46). whereas, brown’s emergent strategy demonstrates the importance of pursuing “emergence” through nature metaphors in facilitation (mostly enabled by organizing workshops engaged with movement building), complex movements works through similar concepts in multimodal audio-visual performance/installation formats, alongside a hybrid activist/artistic practice. complex movements’ membership includes graphic designer/fine artist/animator wesley taylor; music producer/sound designer/ filmmaker waajeed; lyricist/organizer invincible (weaver); artist/ designer l05 (carlos garcia); and producer/cultural strategist sage crump.16 the group’s broad purpose is to “support the transformation of communities by exploring connections between complex science and social justice movements through multimedia interactive performance work” (complex movements | emergence media 2016). brown describes “their emblem system [as] a gorgeous way of learning properties of nature we can apply to our work” (2017, 46). the system includes characters that are formations and/or entities from the natural world, such as ants, wavicles, dandelions, mycelium, etc. each entry includes a drawing along with a description of the emblem’s physical or behavioral qualities, and their symbolic significance for community organizing. a significant emblem for my inquiry here, and for complex movements’ 2015–2016 mobile art installation beware of the dandelions is the titular composite plant, which signifies “resilience, resistance, regeneration, [and] decentralization” in the collective’s lexicon (brown 2017, 46). quoting from the group’s definition of the plant, brown mentions how the dandelion is frequently mistaken for a weed and targeted for removal. complex movements emphasizes its “medicinal properties,” and how the plant survives by resisting uprooting. dandelions disperse seeds with an ingenious design—a “seed [with] a tiny parachute that allows it to spread far and wide in the wind” (46). the plant also inspires facets of beware of the dandelions’ mobile and mutable form. the project toured the us widely, extending the reach of the collective’s influence, before returning to detroit. the project’s site was multipurpose, operating as a stage for live performances, digital multimodal installation art, and community organizing alike.17 metaphoric engagement with the dandelion also shapes the project’s narrative at several story junctures. beware of the dandelions tells a science fictional tale set in a dystopian future. it portrays an uprising of community members who mobilize to protest the untimely death of a beloved elder, the character of gg. following this loss, gg’s family and friends channel their mourning into action, catalyzing the dandelion revolution. they work together to wrest control of the community’s food supply away from an exploitative corporation. the real-life multimedia performance takes place “inside a 400 square foot polyhedron dome-like pod structure” (complex movements | emergence media 2016) designed for audience members to project themselves to the twenty-fifth century, a future where corporations grant access to eternal life to the rich while cruelly oppressing the labor force (salant 2016). the pod becomes the “planetation hub” while audience members are recast as activists who commandeer control of the hub. weaver voices all fourteen story characters (salant 2016), though each one sounds distinctly different through the combined efforts of weaver’s virtuosic vocal performance and producer wajeed’s sonic manipulations. while the achievement of these pitch shifts may seem to meet a practical need—representing different “factions” with just one voice—there is a deeper practice of shapeshifting at play here. weaver’s voice becomes a metaphor-making assemblage. weaver’s natural voice melds with technology to create an expansive cast. characters include zakera, the story’s most prominently featured activist protagonist; maji, a water runner representing the story world’s illegal networks; dr. k, a scientist responsible for producing an apple seed capable of extending lifespans, only available to the wealthy; a robotic-voiced “dome dweller” aligned with the ruling class; and groundskeepers, who squash worker dissent on the planetation. weaver also voices the workers paid to harvest genetically modified crops for a corporation they finally rise up against following gg’s death. people from these different groups unite to overthrow the corporate control that oppresses the townspeople, keeping them in debt and servitude. the story’s propulsive energy forward dips, however, when factions disagree on the details of a shared strategy. dandelions appear as a key alternative crop in the group’s deliberations, chosen to counter the corrupted, corporate-controlled apple orchards. through community deliberation the point is conceded that dandelions cannot be the exclusive answer; it cannot function as a monocrop. by the story’s end, the group arrives at a workable solution that requires collaborating with the land formerly occupied by corporate control, but now recuperated as a site of biodiversity. genetically modified crops are burned, and those apple orchards can now find new life as home to complex, “interdependent ecosystems” enabled by relationships between different crops. apples will continue to grow, in harmony with the composite plant misrecognized as a weed (complex movements 2016). the dandelion is both figurative and literal in beware of the dandelions. the plant appears prominently in its plot and also in the mythos created by the characters. dandelion is represented as crop, myth, plant, guide, metaphor, guide, and collaborator. the song titled “gg and zakera” depicts a flashback scene featuring a still living gg who instructs child zakera to “drink up all your dandy tea” before she shares a bedtime story. the tale features a moment in the collective’s past when a debate about what to do with dandelion crops resulted in the townspeople splintering off into factions. in zakera’s recollection, it becomes clear the two are talking about more than the composite plant. gg’s lessons hold zakera’s thoughts, echoing with the lines “how one day you’ll be one to rebuild the lost art / that was destroyed when they began arguing who would lead.” the conversation continues between detained adult zakera and gg speaking from a spiritual plane. zakera says,   indeed, that was the day we saw the last murmuration you told me pass the story onto future generations and in your poignant wisdom you showed me how they fly we looked up in the sky and it seemed like pointillism. (complex movements 2016)   gg finally makes the lesson from the nature metaphor explicit when she explains the objective of coordinated collective action: “no leader to be singled out and killed or put in prison.” ending the song, the listener’s attention is directed exclusively on the vocals as a brief dip in the volume of all other sonic elements isolates weaver’s delivery of this last line. an ominous swelling back of the accompanying instruments accentuates their absence in the previous beat and is followed with the synthy sound of a siren. learning from the movements of dandelions provides zakera (and by extension, the group) with an answer for how to not only rebuild biodiversity in their physical ecosystems but also their figurative organizing systems.18 observing and replicating patterns from nature guides the characters in beware of the dandelions to protect one another, strategically dispersing inevitable attention from repressive forces determined to harm them. in their live performance of the piece, documented in the onboards.tv recording, the group explicitly frames the beware of the dandelions story as one dedicated to recently departed ancestors from detroit, including grace lee boggs (1915–2015), charity mahouna hicks (1969–2014), cheri “sheddy” rollins sanchez (1986–2014). this dedication technology also shapes the last song on the officially released album called “wage love.” this song sits outside the narrative concerning the planetation and class struggle. yet the story contains acts that are related to lessons learned from ancestors who transitioned after complex movements’ performances of beware of the dandelions in seattle but before their performances in dallas and return to detroit in october 2016 (aldridge 2017). the song “wage love” directly quotes hicks, who was founder of the detroit people’s water board (commons magazine 2014) and the mentoring/guiding/ancestral presence of both hicks and boggs is felt throughout the album, especially in the character of gg whose death acts as the catalyst for the story’s main events. the fictional character of gg is modeled from the real-life inspiration of hicks’s and boggs’s activist mentorship. complex movements not only acknowledges this in interviews about beware of the dandelions; they also explicitly name the inspiration as a practice of dedication in the workshops that follow their performances. this practice of adding workshop facilitation (led by collective member sage crump) to the immersive musical storytelling of their multimodal performances adds a nonfiction element to their science fictional approach that makes connections between the imagined planetation and major american cities like seattle, dallas, and detroit—most sincerely, always and forever detroit. complex movements weaves together metaphor, practical facilitation techniques, and heartfelt dedication through their concept emblem system. they very carefully situate how future places will map onto similar power dynamics carved into the contemporary moment, related to past oppressions. the planetation is a future setting that intentionally resonates with contemporary city life in detroit, also seattle and dallas where beware of the dandelions toured. the collective deliberately places participants in multiple locations at once: the time/place they are physically located, whether that be detroit, seattle, or dallas; the speculative future world of the planetation depicted within the story told in the performance/installation; and activist detroit from which complex movements’ members honor in their work. the past, present, and future collapse in both encouraging and discouraging ways, just as metaphor and the practicalities of everyday life do in the fictional story’s environmental themes.   conclusion in writing this article, i admit to working through experiences with amc that productively upended my own practices of research, teaching, and facilitation related to digital culture. as i continue to experiment with my own approaches to digital feminist praxis, i find that acts of gathering and meeting are most important. throughout this article, i consider how amc and its collaborators forge a technology, or praxis, of gathering. i am influenced by feminist sts, black feminist honoring, and women of color feminist praxis in my reading of the antiracist leadership and shimmering generosity practices of amc’s detroit.19 i intend for this to be just one entry in my continuing relationship with amc and its collaborators, which includes my participation coordinating with the conference as part of scram. i continue to learn a great deal from amc, brown, complex movements, and detroit. it is through shared geographic proximity, their emotional and personal entanglements, their dedication to the same detroit figures—grace lee boggs, charity hicks—that the connections between amc, brown, and complex movements are obvious. but focusing too much on these overlapping details may obscure the greater themes of interdependence that are thoughtfully, yet differently, applied in amc programming, brown’s writing, and complex movements’ beware of the dandelions. beyond being dedicated to specific individuals—boggs, sanchez, and most explicitly hicks—beware of the dandelions builds a broader narrative in which dedication and listening to the wisdom of one’s community elders serves as the best method of survival for the story’s collective protagonists. for example, the song “dna,” includes the following lyrics:   how are your memories kept when hard drives crash? how will you archive your past? these are the stories that we store in our dna. these are the songs that we store in our dna. (complex movements 2016)   while understanding the biological material of dna as genetic evidence is fraught, complex movements de-emphasizes blood relations throughout the album, instead insisting on how what survives time are community practices passed down generation to generation. this emphasis on social relation is demonstrated in the characters of gg and zakera, who are the story’s closest related characters, but are referred to as connected by grandsibling relations. it’s uncertain if the family connections are through blood, and that does not seem to matter. as alondra nelson puts it in describing the intricacies of genetic politics, “dna can be used to embody the past, and because dna is shared it can represent both individuals and groups” (2016, 15).20 perhaps complex movements uses dna as shorthand, or even a metaphor, for these entanglements between time periods, between generations, shifting dna’s application as mode of evidence traditionally used for structural exclusion (connect biology to family and financial inheritance) to a more wide-ranging inclusion.   notes 1 amc started in 1999 and has been held every year in the city of detroit from 2007 to 2018. it is now held biennially.   2 claims on the theater’s capacity vary. amc’s 2016 program described the theater as having 1,200 seats (allied media projects 2016, 2), while the detroit institute of arts website claims it holds 1,150 seats (detroit institute of arts 2022).   3 the song includes an anishinaabe title and chorus lyrics that honor detroit as the homelands of this tribe. see allied media projects, “the aadizookaan allied media projects,” https://alliedmedia.org/projects/the-aadizookaan.   4 to learn more about how amc defines media-based organizing, see allied media projects, “media-based organizing – allied media projects,” https://alliedmedia.org/media-based-organizing.   5 though this exact phrasing is not currently used on allied media project’s website, or its amc page, it is printed on paper programs for amc 2016, 2017, and 2018.   6 for a summary of the conference held april 8–10, 2016, at the university of michigan, see wu 2016.   7 while femtechnet summer workshops included many wonderful collaborators across several cities, my collaborators in coordinating a new york node in 2014 at the new school and a yale node in 2015 were t.l. cowan and anne balsamo. the latter would have been impossible without laura wexler’s advocacy and support.   8 i learned about amc through my collaborations with vozmob, whose primary project was “a platform for immigrant workers in los angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from cell phones” (costanza-chock 2014, xiv). sasha costanza-chock writes about the group’s travels to amc in 2010 (103–4).   9 see allied media projects (2016) described in preface of this article. see also schalk (2018) for bodyminds discussion within (dis)ability studies, specifically as it relates to black science fiction and afrofuturism, a significant influence on the collective amc imagination.   10 the 2018 session was co-coordinated with naomi silver, george hoagland, lisa nakamura, anne cong-huyen, stephanie rosen, and myself—along with alexandrina agloro and hong-an (ann) wu, and featuring kei kaimana.   11 other books in the series include undrowned (gumbs 2020), we will not cancel us (brown 2020), and holding change (brown 2021).   12 for example, the book includes insights from biologist and writer janine benyus and mycologist paul stametz.   13 the term emergent strategy was coined by henry mintzberg for use in management studies to contrast top-down approaches, associated with deliberate or intended strategy (obolensky 31–32).   14 for information about source and target domains in metaphor, see george lakoff and mark johnson, metaphors we live by (chicago: university of chicago press, 1980/2003). sami schalk’s revisionist use of these terms influenced their inclusion in my analysis (schalk 2013).   15 for more about the history of nature metaphors and/or how biological, botanical, and computational concepts have become entangled to form our contemporary understandings of networked computation, see berland (2019) and pringle (2021).   16 project artists also include architect/fine artist aaron jones. the full collaborative team, including the local collaborators in detroit (amp), dallas (smu ignite arts dallas), and seattle (on the boards), is named on the “team” page of emergence media at https://emergencemedia.org/pages/team.   17 documentation of the seattle performance demonstrates how performance and workshop elements developed. for a recording of the performance, see complex movements, beware of the dandelions, ontheboards.tv, https://www.ontheboards.tv/performances/beware-of-the-dandelions.   18 in an interview with sarah rose sharp, weaver emphasizes the importance of the group’s use of emblems, saying they "are fundamental to how we organize ourselves as an art collective" (sharp 2016).   19 by “shimmering” i refer here to anabel khoo’s essay “shimmers below the surface” (2015) about performance and media art from the group mangos with chili. khoo connects queer ecologies with brown’s emergent strategy framework.   20 in a recent piece profiling the collective, robin d.g. kelley reaches a similar conclusion that underscores how complex movements uses technology but does not privilege it over relation (kelley 2022).   references aldridge, taylor renee. 2017. “building better futures: complex movements brings ‘beware of the dandelions’ to detroit.” artnews, january 10, 2017. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/building-better-futures-complex-movements-brings-beware-of-the-dandelions-to-detroit-7579/. allied media projects. 2016. “18th annual allied media conference / detroit / june 16–19, 2016.” conference program. https://alliedmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/amc2016_for_web.pdf. allied media projects. 2018. “amc opening ceremonies 2018!” youtube, 1:50:31, june 15, 2018. https://youtu.be/tlao03_k_zq. allied media projects. 2022a. “about – allied media projects.” https://alliedmedia.org/about. ———. 2022b. “history: allied media conference.” https://amc.alliedmedia.org/about/history. ———. 2022c. “network principles.” https://alliedmedia.org/network-principles. bailey, moya. 2013. “‘shaping god’: the power of octavia butler’s black feminist and womanist scifi visions in the shaping of a new world – an interview with adrienne maree brown.” ada new media 3 (november). https://doi.org/doi:10.7264/n34f1nnf. berland, jody. 2019. virtual menageries: animals as mediators in network cultures. cambridge, ma: mit press. boggs, grace lee. 2012. the next american revolution: sustainable activism for the twenty-first century. berkeley: university of california press. brown, adrienne maree. 2017. emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds. reprint edition. chico: ak press. ———. 2020. we will not cancel us: and other dreams of transformative justice. chico: ak press. ———. 2021. holding change: the way of emergent strategy facilitation and mediation. chico: ak press. butler, octavia e. (1993) 2012. parable of the sower. new york: open road media. kindle edition. commons magazine. 2014. “remembering charity hicks.” on the commons, july 22, 2014. http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/commoner/remembering-charity-hicks sthash.i0agpfx9.dpbs. complex movements. 2016. beware of the dandelions: soundtrack. digital album. detroit: emergence media and dirt tech reck. https://complexmovements.bandcamp.com/album/beware-of-the-dandelions-soundtrack. complex movements | emergence media. 2016. (website). https://emergencemedia.org/pages/complex-movements.  costanza-chock, sasha. 2014. out of shadows, into the streets! transmedia organizing and the immigrant movement. cambridge, ma: mit press. detroit institute of arts. 2022. “about the dia | detroit institute of arts museum.” https://www.dia.org/about. grant, marek. 2021. “i found the bay area hill in one of history’s most viewed photos.” sfgate, february 25, 2021. https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/windows-xp-bliss-hill-sonoma-charles-o-rear-15976588.php. gumbs, alexis pauline. 2020. undrowned: black feminist lessons from marine mammals. chico: ak press. haslam, karen. 2021. “list of all macos versions – including the latest macos.” macworld, october 25, 2021. https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/os-x-macos-versions-3662757/. ignaczak, nina. 2018. “performance art to sustain our movements: tunde olaniran produces the amc opening ceremony.” allied media projects, news, june 13, 2018. https://alliedmedia.org/news/performance-art-sustain-our-movements-tunde-olaniran-produces-amc-opening-ceremony. imarisha, walidah. 2015. introduction to octavia’s brood: science fiction stories from social justice movements, edited by walidah imarisha and adrienne maree brown, 3–6. chico: ak press. kindle edition. juhasz, alexandra, and anne balsamo. 2012. “an idea whose time is here: femtechnet – a distributed online collaborative course (docc).” ada: a journal of gender, new media, and technology, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.7264/n3mw2f2j. kelley, robin d.g. 2022. “back to the future: complex movements make revolution.” shift space 2.0 (march). https://www.shiftspace.pub/back-to-the-future-complex-movements-make-revolution-archive. khoo, anabel. 2015. “shimmers below the surface: emergent strategy and movement building through 2-qtpoc media.” undercurrents: journal of critical environmental studies, no. 19, 6–14. https://currents.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/currents/article/view/40243. knoxx, sacramento. 2016a. "nakweshkodaadiidaa ekoobiiyag [let's meet up by the water].” by christy b., kaz clever, knoxx. bandcamp audio, 5:37, april 7, 2016. https://sknoxx.bandcamp.com/track/nakweshkodaadiidaa-ekoobiiyag-lets-meet-up-by-the-water. ———. 2016b. “nakweshkodaadiidaa ekoobiiyag [let's meet up by the water] –– flint, michigan.” youtube video, 3:40, april 1, 2016. https://youtu.be/cueud4-idie. koronka, poppy. 2021. “the 14 biggest aquariums in the united states.” newsweek, august 29, 2021. https://www.newsweek.com/biggest-aquariums-united-states-georgia-florida-baltimore-shedd-1621541. messieh, nancy. 2013. “ever wonder where the windows xp default wallpaper came from?” the next web | shareables newsletter, last modified july 29, 2013. https://thenextweb.com/news/ever-wonder-where-the-windows-xp-default-wallpaper-came-from. nelson, alondra. 2016. the social life of dna: race, reparations, and reconciliation after the genome. boston: beacon press. obolensky, nick. complex adaptive leadership: embracing paradox and uncertainty. second edition. new york: routledge, 2014. pringle, thomas patrick. 2021. “the tech ecosystem and the colony.” heliotrope, may 12, 2021. https://www.heliotropejournal.net/helio/the-tech-ecosystem. salant, shelley. 2016. “complex movements present beware of the dandelions.” detroit metro times, october 5, 2016. https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/complex-movements-present-beware-of-the-dandelions/content?oid=2467368. schalk, sami. 2013. “metaphorically speaking: ableist metaphors in feminist writing.” disability studies quarterly 33 (4). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v33i4.3874. ———. 2018. bodyminds reimagined: (dis)ability, race, and gender in black women’s speculative fiction. durham, nc: duke university press. sharp, sarah rose. 2016. “seeds of resistance: complex movements in detroit.” artnews, november 7, 2016. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/seeds-of-resistance-complex-movements-in-detroit-60022/. wu, hong-an. 2016. “signal/noise: a femtechnet conference on pedagogy, technology, and transdisciplinarity—femtechnet.” femtechnet (blog). december 14, 2016. https://www.femtechnet.org/2016/12/signalnoise-a-femtechnet-conference-on-pedagogy-technology-and-transdisciplinarity/.     author bio veronica paredes is an assistant professor in the department of film, television and digital media at the university of california, los angeles. her work has been published in feminist media histories and amodern, and work she has collaboratively written has been published in frontiers: a journal of women studies.     special section: probing the system: feminist complications of automated technologies, flows, and practices of everyday life technology of the surround     beth coleman university of toronto beth.coleman@utoronto.ca     abstract in addressing the issue of harmful bias in ai systems, this paper asks for a consideration of a generatively wild ai that exceeds the framework of predictive machine learning. the argument places supervised learning with its labeled training data as primarily a form of reproduction of a status quo. based on this framework, the paper moves through an analysis of two ai modalities—supervised learning (e.g., machine vision) and unsupervised learning (e.g., game play)—to demonstrate the potential of ai as mechanism that creates patterns of association outside of a purely reproductive condition. this analysis is followed by an introduction to the concept of the technology of the surround, where the paper then turns toward theoretical positions that unbind categorical logics, moving toward other possible positionalities—the surround (harney and moten), alien intelligence (parisi), and intra-actions of subject/object resolution (barad). the paper frames two key concepts in relation to an ai in the wild: the colonial sublime and black techné. the paper concludes with a summation of what ai in the wild can contribute to the subversion of technologies of oppression toward a liberatory potential of ai.     keywords artificial intelligence, black techné, ethics, ontology, predictive, surround, supervised learning, unsupervised learning     meanwhile blackness means to render unanswerable the question of how to govern the thing that loses and finds itself to be what it is not. stefano harney and fred moten, the undercommons: fugitive planning and black study introduction my argument is to make ai more wild, not less. by wild, i indicate generative possibility for the technology in opposition to the reproduction of the same. the prompt for this line of inquiry is the call for transparency and accountability as an “ethics” in ai design.1 i wonder if advocacy toward a corrective can produce the ends sought: less harmful bias and more equitable opportunity. what if—outside of the frame of the ethical corrective—one reorients ai application and ontology? i ask that question in looking at two models of ai production—supervised and unsupervised learning. either modality can be applied toward harm (or benefit), depending on local conditions. and yet, with unerring regularity, ai reproduces systemic harmful bias in its design and application (e.g., aran et al. 2020; eubanks 2018; noble 2018; o’neil 2016; raji et al. 2020). with this background in mind, i argue that unsupervised learning offers a potential ai pathway that challenges the reproduction of the status quo that is endemic to supervised learning. in lieu of a corrective, how might we consider an itinerant ai to “think” through things differently than “we” might? by “think” i indicate logics and processes to discovery that might work outside of (predetermined) dominant patterns of data processing as a type of generative collusion—ai as a partner as opposed to a prosthetic. by “we,” i point to the position of the self-determining (human) subject and the legacy of inclusions and exclusions that have informed that position over time.   i ask, in effect, what can ai learn from critical theory? (and reciprocally, what can critical theory learn from ai?) in particular, i engage three concepts toward the thinking of a liberatory function of ai technology: stefano harney and fred moten’s (2013) black studies figuration of the surround, luciana parisi’s (2019) techno-philosophic alien intelligence, and karen barad’s (2003) atomic intra-actions. the catalyst for bringing together black studies, philosophy of technology, and feminist technoscience, respectively, is to reframe artificial intelligence from a technology of oppression that surrounds in its global impact toward a potentially liberatory technology that is not bound to a replication of the past. to this end, i formulate ai—in its ubiquity and degrees of autonomy—as a technology of the surround. the defining features of a technology of the surround are ungovernability and difficulty of defining borders.   in recognizing these attributes, one of the complexities of an ai ethics rests with the dual challenge of the “black box” design of machine learning and ubiquity of its application: there are no clear boundaries. in a black box system, inputs and outputs are legible, but the internal function of the system remains opaque or “black.” with the ubiquitous application of ai technology, the subject is not in communication with technology (a historical model of human-computer interaction) but the object of machine-to-machine decision making. one might say no to specific instantiations, such as ai-powered “killer robots”—the us department of defense’s pilot project for a drone-warfare cloud-processing system under contract with google (campaign to stop killer robots, n.d.; nolan 2020). and yet, the overflow, the interrelations of contracts, permission, obfuscation, and a civic not-knowing often render the ethical local at best. i put the conceptual frame of technology of the surround in play in relation to a discussion of two paradigms of machine learning (ml): supervised and unsupervised learning. my purpose is to investigate ai practices that might move beyond the reproduction of a biopolitics of classification. biopolitics (with biopower) is a concept that has been developed primarily from michel foucault’s (1978) conceptualization of “technologies of power” or control apparatus that enacts at a societal level the sorting and managing of populations. in this sense, predictive ai carries on this legacy of ordering as an extension of societal discipline and control. in regard to ai, i summarize my argument in the following statements:   thesis a: supervised learning in ai reproduces the society it mirrors, which is often in the form of a system of eugenics or homophily: these are practices of sorting and prioritizing inherited from pre-computational sciences and reflected in social and political standards (bowker and star 2000). it is a practice of classification and the indexing of features that has its origin in the “science” of eugenics (fisher 1936). functionally, labeled data is used to train a ml system. ontologically, supervised learning represents the automated reproduction of a categorical imperative, wherein the conditional for all agents is that of belonging to one category and not another. in this sense, subject and object are distinct in ontology, semiology, and practice. this is a fundamentally binary logic that takes sorting as an a priori—as the precondition for a thing or a state.   thesis b: unsupervised learning in ai simulates a monadic environment where an ml system encodes and structures a set of data relations on its own. formally, data is left unclassified and the task of the ml is to find relations. functionally, the system designers frame the unsupervised learning inputs and (often) assess and direct system outputs; but there are significant degrees of autonomy and self-determination in an unsupervised learning system. ontologically, unsupervised learning represents generative possibility, signaled in this argument with the term “wild”: ai is a system of production that potentially works in a logics outside inherited expectation and conditioning (without going so far as to claim a tabula rasa). a (potential) primary difference of unsupervised learning is the destabilizing of binary process and outcome.   machine learning (ml) i address second-generation ai, which is primarily characterized by ml with the application of neural networks. a basic description of a machine learning neural network is a computational system with inputs, parallel processing layers that influence each other but are hidden (in the sense of opaque) from system creators, and an output layer. the simple processing elements of the layers can produce complex behavior based on the relation between the processing elements and the system parameters. based on statistical analytics, the dominant application of ml is predictive modeling. one of the key aspects to the success of modeling is access to big data for training, testing, and application. with the next generation of “sciences of the artificial” (suchman 2008, 141; simon 1969), in addition to the ai procedures of ml, one must also attend to the impact of ai as part of an ever-expanding technological array. there is a pronounced empirical aspect of the second generation of ai that enacts a surround: data sniffing, data extracting, data automation are commonplace affordances of the ubiquitous computing arrays that annotate the world, particularly world cities (coleman 2018; dourish and bell 2011). in effect, the human subject is surrounded by a swarm of ubiquitous computing. the pervasive presence of sensor technology (internet of things, array of things, etc.) relates to ai processing in that such arrays feed the ravenous consumption of more data to model the world.   model 1. supervised learning: finding the white dog in “deep learning,” their 2015 article in nature, yann lecun, yoshua bengio, and geoffrey hinton, widely understood as the progenitors of the neural net era of ai, describe the process by which machines learn:   the most common form of machine learning, deep or not, is supervised learning. imagine that we want to build a system that can classify images as containing, say, a house, a car, a person or a pet. we first collect a large data set of images of houses, cars, people and pets, each labelled with its category. during training, the machine is shown an image and produces an output in the form of a vector of scores, one for each category. we want the desired category to have the highest score of all categories, but this is unlikely to happen before training. we compute an objective function that measures the error (or distance) between the output scores and the desired pattern of scores. the machine then modifies its internal adjustable parameters to reduce this error. these adjustable parameters, often called weights, are real numbers that can be seen as “knobs” that define the input–output function of the machine. in a typical deep-learning system, there may be hundreds of millions of these adjustable weights, and hundreds of millions of labelled examples with which to train the machine. (lecun, bengio, and hinton 2015, 436)   what they outline is a procedure that is deeply complex in computational parallel processing (“hundreds of millions of these adjustable weights”) and reliant on large sets of codified data (“hundreds of millions of labelled examples”) to produce the desired pattern of scores. in the example they give of an image recognition system, they train the machine to disambiguate samoyeds (large fluffy white dogs) from other animals such as white wolves. the work of training in supervised learning is the classification of data (in this case images) based on features, or a set of quantifiable properties (alpaydin 2010), such as “white” and “dog,” which must be seen in the feature set as distinct from “white” and “wolf” (lecun, bengio, and hinton 2015). the algorithmic implementation of sorting is called a classifier, which maps input data to a category (alpaydin 2010). once the distance between the classification output scores and desired pattern of scores are reconciled, then the system has been sufficiently trained to engage with data “in the wild”—unlabeled images that the ai must identify based on its training. i highlight in this example the normative procedure of supervised learning to train an ai system toward its application “in the wild.” the world is reduced to a particular algorithmic lens that determines how to see the world.   it would be an error not to recognize the intricacy of functions in relation to the granularity of images—at the level of pixel—that the system produces. as lecun et al. write, “its inputs…are simultaneously sensitive to minute details distinguishing samoyeds from white wolves—and insensitive to large irrelevant variations such as the background, pose, lighting and surrounding objects” (2015, 438). there is not a theory of mind at work in this condition that attempts to simulate (human) thinking; rather, there is a model of reproduction (coded as probability). the precondition is quantities of data that direct learning toward a predetermined desired pattern: finding the white dog among images of other white canines. there is no world view of dogs and their habitats versus wolves. nor is there an artificial intelligence animating insights manifested as a notable disruption to patterns of identification. if the ai is working effectively, it will reproduce the “correct” category distinction: dogs are dogs and wolves are not. there is only the automation of sorting (executing decision threshold) across a series of binaries or “weights” toward a correct output. a value above the threshold indicates “dog” and below that “not dog.” it is a powerful system for moving quickly, or optimizing, things that need sorting, such as who gets a loan, or an ad, or an interview, and so on. there is nothing as such that generates new patterns, as the system is designed to replicate predetermined valuations. might it learn that wolves, as a function of being “not dog,” are wild? certainly not, as what a wolf might be can only be framed in this paradigm as a partition of given inputs in relation to defined algorithmic analysis. and yet, this narrow framework in which meaning is constructed (or perhaps better said, extruded) is the foundation of predictive models: in a massive, complex, and closed system it learns to replicate as the future the conditions of the past. this process of training does not always lead to harmful bias. but often it does, as the quotidian event of ai bias is most often a passive state of reproducing the status quo.   regression and representation are two key aspects of predictive modeling. both traits make functional pattern recognition. pattern recognition addresses a statistical model of prediction based on sorting of category membership. unambiguous category membership has its virtues—for example, when aimed at accurate and speedy identification of pneumonia in a lung x-ray (adams et al. 2020). but in other contexts, particularly ones steeped in historical exclusions and harm, supervised learning produces a deficit, borrowing from the past to convene the future. without the necessity of malicious intent, harmful bias will always haunt such a system in the empirical patterns of “big data” culture on which ai relies. if the standard machine vision training relies on massive, free internet search images, then systems trained in a certain era will have an over-indexing of former president george w. bush: based on available databases and system designers’ lack of incentive, a demonstrated machine vision status quo is north american white male (huang et al. 2008). in that sense, one witnesses the literal invisibility of black bodies in global north machine vision systems to which joy buolamwini and timnit gebru (2018) point or the precarity that the facebook algorithmic system of seek and expose demonstrates (mattu et al. 2021). such erasures and overexposures are symptoms not exceptions of a system design that will not be “fixed” with more diverse training sets or greater transparency of algorithmic design. until the input/output is recalibrated toward a different end, fixing the training data or algorithm is often at best a post-facto plugging up of holes, “bugs,” and “errors in judgment.”2   and yet, it is not clear that the “black box” is the problem. rather, one might locate an ontological entropy of ai system design, which is constrained in its reproduction of a biopolitics of hierarchy and valuation. the question of ethics moves from how to toward what end is ai being aimed. as solon barocas, moritz hardt, and arvind narayanan (2020) note, there is no single or clear path to “fair.” the outcome must be intentional in the design of the system. without pretending ai in the wild is a panacea, i explore generative ai as a contrapuntal to the predictive. they are not always divergent pathways to an output. nonetheless, they frame different epistemologies.   ai theory of mind historically, ai had been rare, exclusive, and narrowly applied. a primary goal was the effective simulation (and surpassing) of human expertise. recall the chess matches between ibm supercomputer deep blue and world champion garry kasparov, the first of which kasparov won in 1996. in the second match played in 1997, deep blue beat the grandmaster (campbell, hoane, and hsu 2002). implicit in deep blue’s design is a theory of mind, a concept adopted by first-generation ai researchers from behavioral and brain sciences that underwrote the imaginaries of artificial intelligence. theory of mind frames the ability of the human mind to represent the mental states of others (call and tomasello 2008; premack and woodruff 1978). it is a theory that addresses the legibility of others’ desires and intentions that prioritizes human cognitive behavior in comparison to animals, and in the case of ai, machines (cuzzolin et al. 2020; haenlein and kaplan 2019; mccorduck 1979; minsky 1986). as such, theory of mind offers another mode of measurement, hierarchy, and sorting mechanism. as lucy suchman and other feminist ai scholars have pointed out, theory of mind frames a distinctly conservative view of cognition and what kinds of beings and behaviors are included within its domain.3   in discussing the sociotechnological terms of artificial intelligence, one moves from first-generation ai theory of mind that worked toward the simulation of (human) thinking to the turn toward ml concepts, procedures, and mass implementation that prioritize effective predictive modeling with minimal interest in cognition. in other words, ml deprioritizes cognitive frameworks such as “understanding” and “knowledge” for efficiency, speed, and productive outcome (anderson 2008). the great claim of second-generation ai is predictive acumen, which trumps mastery of a skill set. the implications of this turn from inherited enlightenment imaginaries of the cogito to the signaling of a machine learning of the neural net points to a paradigm shift: the movement from an ontology of narrow machine intelligence that simulates human expertise to that of a broadly applied ml toolset that is trained on massive data to predict the most likely outcome.   as i have indicated, the predictive model is all too frequently a pernicious model in its reinscription of historical bias. the second-generation revival of artificial intelligence is largely based on an investment in machine learning whose architecture—the function of its functionality—is hidden. that is not a metaphor; it is an actual description of a neural net, which is the transformative system design of the ai surround. neural networks are described as computational “black boxes,” following the logic that while they can execute complex functions, the structure of the neural network will not illuminate the logic of the function. procedurally, ml functions outside of human supervision. in this sense, one might understand the ml neural net as an itinerant technology; it moves between layers of information, weighing and counter weighing values/features within a prescribed frame. with that said, clearly articulated human frameworks remain critical to ai application—the inputs and (interpretation) of outputs are framed by the system designers.   model 2. unsupervised learning: mastering the game of go without human knowledge if the recursive predictive model of supervised learning tethers pattern, then unsupervised machine learning generates sets of possibilities. the primary difference is that unsupervised learning identifies and “clusters” features through a logic of its own (e.g., “if the conditions of ‘car’ or ‘chair’ can be derived from the observed inputs, then a solution to generating a type of car or chair might follow multiple variations”). unsupervised learning is wild in the sense of working outside of human parameters of association and prediction, with the clarification that it is the system designers who frame the elements to which the unsupervised learning system is exposed (coleman 2019). the example of unsupervised learning i address is an ai system to solve the game go. in the case of the alphago zero, the self-taught ai go system, the mode of unsupervised learning is coded as “reinforcement.” as with the general category of unsupervised, reinforcement represents a dynamic, unlabeled computational environment. but the key considerations with reinforcement learning are the goal specificity and the ruleset needed to understand the conditions of that goal—in this case the game of go and the goal to win by teaching itself and generating skills as it continues to beat its own best game (feedback).   the radical potential of unsupervised learning is a known, even if underexplored, phenomenon in ml. in their nature article on deep learning, lecun, bengio, and hinton (2015) point to the “catalytic effect” of unsupervised learning. notably, they move from the procedural rhetoric of the predictive to the invocation of analogy—a theory of mind as such—in how machines might learn untethered from pre-trained data. they write, “human and animal learning is largely unsupervised: we discover the structure of the world by observing it, not by being told the name of every object” (lecun, bengio, and hinton 2015, 442). in their speculative view, classification of data is antithetical to how nature models learning—which is described as a process of discovery with formal attributes: “human vision is an active process that sequentially samples the optic array in an intelligent, task-specific way using a small, high-resolution fovea with a large, low-resolution surround” (lecun, bengio, and hinton 2015, 442). formally, unsupervised learning uses classifiers to perform cluster analysis (grouping objects that are similar in some way and dissimilar to objects in other clusters). but it is the ml system that decides what warrants similarity or dissimilarity. classifiers modulate in relation to dynamic rules as the conditions of learning are different: the data for the most part are unlabeled, which means the algorithm must find its own structure from the input (mishra 2017). unsupervised learning must locate meaning (identify patterns) in the materials to which it is exposed, which does not necessarily coincide with the patterns of association humans would bring to a dataset.   as the authors of alphago zero write, “supervised learning systems…are trained to replicate the decisions of human experts...in contrast, reinforcement learning systems are trained from their own experience, in principle allowing them to exceed human capabilities, and to operate in domains where human expertise is lacking” (silver et al. 2017, 1). in mastering go without human knowledge, the parameters of learning are still human-framed (i.e., what is go and what are the rules?). but the process of learning the game does not simulate human expertise. for example, the machinic logic of “best game” technique is winning game technique, which is not in this case bound to simulation and prediction of expert human game play. the monte carlo tree search the system uses works in reference to self-play, not a priori world of go play. alphago zero learns within the parameters (rule system/judgement of winner) of go as an environment; but it does not simulate human go play as such. in the three days of training the ml system, alphago zero “progressed from entirely random moves towards a sophisticated understanding of go concepts...all discovered from first principles” (silver et al. 2017, 10). the alphago zero designers describe a generative, as opposed to simply reproductive, event in which the machine engaged “non-standard strategies” outside of the scope of traditional game play. the authors stake their investment in a ml system that teaches itself to “exceed human capabilities” (silver et al. 2017, 1). but beyond beating human experts (as stated, a long-standing telos of ai research), alphago zero demonstrates a quality that speaks to its wildness outside of human thinking. it executes “random” moves in the beginning of the learning cycle, demonstrating an active process toward determination that does not present a pre-given conclusion. in other words, the primary epistemological unit is not subject/object but phenomena.   if this can be said of a machinic system, unsupervised ai wanders, collecting and connecting, as it locates the solution horizon. in the sense that it “learns” what it is exposed to, unsupervised learning is itinerant and amoral. a particularly vivid example is unsupervised learning in natural language processing (nlp) training. unsupervised nlp experiments—such as microsoft’s tay and openai’s gpt-3—set the system free to graze across linguistic data, “reading” the internet to gain natural language acumen. it is a process that has produced controversy and curiosity with the startling, ridiculous, and ugly utterances the nlps have generated (perez 2016; metz 2020). in a demonstrated reproduction of the status quo, the internet teaches nlp ai racism, sexism, and other nastiness in record time. and yet, what if one experiments with the idea that such reproduction is not endemic to the system? that it is a design feature as opposed to its architecture? if gpt-3 were reading franz fanon and the corpus of anti-colonial anti-oppression literature (not as vast as the internet, but plenty big), it might speak a different language.   outside of the judgement of good or bad outcomes, unsupervised learning offers an unbounded logic away from narrow conditions of the binary. it is not gauging “white dog” or “not white dog;” it automates opportunistic clustering. unsupervised learning offers behaviors outside of a preset condition. the system is not finite (it is also not infinite), in the sense that it can continue spinning off variations as “decisions” (coleman 2019). in this sense, ai exceeds itself. by design, it generates, versioning possible outcomes until its humans decide which path to follow. the generation of outcomes as opposed to the reproduction of preset conditions may be the most experimental and exciting aspect of current ai.   technology of the surround the sociotechnical state of ai sits at an ontological crossroads. the dominant paradigm of predictive ai simulates a command-control system that can be aimed like a weapon—the “killer robots” of a military postindustrial complex as well as the quotidian application of ubiquitous computing. in such a formulation, these are technologies of oppression that continue to power the extractive practices and constitutional imaginaries of a colonial sublime. with the term colonial sublime, i signal an event horizon wherein the mechanisms by which hierarchies of valuation of life are continuously erased for a violent logic of naturalization. in this sense, the colonial sublime produces its own biopolitic of “black box” logics, obscuring its own mode of reification in the production of technologies of oppression. in light of this protracted liminality, another direction is a turn to the wild—the possibility of an ai increasingly outside of a command-control scope. in this sense, ai exceeds itself as a technology of the surround.   a technology of the surround is both ubiquitous and unregulated. it is the manifestation of machine-to-machine communications that leave the human out of the loop in the data chatter. in the array of things—the sensors and other informatic relays—one is literally surrounded. additionally (historically), a technology of the surround is an itinerant thing that moves at a tempo (adrift) outside of locked-in boundaries. if technologies of power rely on putting things in their proper place, then a technology of the surround presents a contrapuntal, as independent, adjacent, yet still in relation. to best follow the liberatory function of a technology of the surround, one must follow the root system of its genealogy.   black studies theorists harney and moten, in their influential work the undercommons (2013), describe one of their key figures, the surround, as a topos—a space outside of the governance of an enlightenment legacy. in their text, it is the location in which blackness is unmoored from historical and ontological constraints, as the “thing that loses and finds itself” (harney and moten 2013, 49). by configuring the event of blackness—the surround—as “losing and finding,” harney and moten hail a long tradition of disruptive positionalities that abandon binaries such as master/slave, subject/object, and society/nature. the subversion of entrenched norms is the very event of “losing and finding” that happens outside of the light of the fort, the reigning figure in their text of settler colonial empire.   under various guises, the surround figures broadly into the telos of blackness in the americas (and recursively in the contemporary world), as it is the space of the underground, where one slips away from the half-lives of the colonial sublime. in thinking the surround as a fertile space in which to decouple ai from the dominance of the predictive model and more broadly from an ontology of technologies of oppression, one encounters the liberatory possibility of black techné, a coalition of an aesthetics, a politics, and a positionality characterized by the itinerant and profoundly iterative. with the most historical relation to black agency, black techné is evident in harney and moten’s concept of the surround. yet it also arrives in key concepts of philosopher of technology parisi and feminist technoscience theorist barad where the mandate is to accelerate and augment the process of unbinding from a ruthless logic of repetition as reproduction. for parisi, the site of potentiality is the “alien intelligence” of ai that offers a redirection beyond a reinscription of a cybernetic servo-mechanistic regime. with the barad, it is the material-discursive “event” that constitutes being in the world—not subject/object but intra-action. this critical trifecta advances a formulation of black techné.   black techné and the colonial sublime there would be no surround if not for the colonial sublime of the fort. but the surround is not a reinscription of the dialectical (master/slave). rather, it is the outcome of escaping it. this complicated liberatory frame of the subject unmoored is central to a legacy of black techné. an iconic figure of black techné is the maroon (in french, le marronnage), who is the escaped (black) person occluded in the swamps and forests of the americas. as the preeminent theorist of a poetics of relation, édouard glissant (1997) configures the maroon as the subject adrift. in glissant’s analysis, the maroon is a subject position always attached to an ebb and flow, even as it is detached from normative conditions of agency and (by extension) power. assuming the mantle of glissant’s poetics of relation, harney and moten’s concept of the surround takes up the maroon in the swamp, in the city, in the academy, in all places where slippage occurs—which is every place—to speak of a tempo of subversion. in this case, tempo is a critical quality of both temporality and the rhythm of a thing. indeed, black techné as a temporality “loses and finds itself” across worlds of black aesthetics, black politics, and black life.   this is not a subject position but a critical framework of agential instrumentalization, as i have framed in “race as technology” (coleman 2009). a modality of black techné, race as technology colludes with a sideways logic, the logic of the trapdoor, the escape hatch, the subversion of mastery in the usurpation of signs of power. it is a logics and a poetics of the surround, as such, that troubles the stasis of the categorical: what if race were understood as a technology as opposed to a pseudo biological historical event (coleman 2009; reardon 2017). in this addition of race as technology, the twist of the screw is technology taking the place of the maroon out beyond the floodlights of the fort. this is not a revisiting of foucault’s panopticon, where formally, architecturally, bodies are conscripted to discipline themselves. in fact, it is quite the opposite, where the technology is out in the “wild” and proliferating. with the arrival of ubiquitous ai, the human subject as adjacent to technologies of the surround is brought into relief.   it is in this complex liberatory frame of the subject unmoored that i locate what might be rendered possible in the assumption of ai, which is a logic of the experimental as opposed to the recursive logic of the predictive. ai in the wild—a radical ai—departs from the recursively normative into the surround of the generatively exploratory. to think ai in relation to the maroon—the subject adrift from the dominion of command-control—is a coincidence of history and innovation. empire locates the telos of technology as innovation—manifest destiny is always progressing and there is no legible collateral damage. equally, the transatlantic trade in black bodies also evidenced a mode of innovative objectification (the equation of blackness with chattel slavery) that continues to animate the colonial sublime (gilroy 1993). one can say, “hold on, black techné, the radical tradition of black aesthetics as black freedom, cannot be equated with mindless machines.” and that is certainly true. the murderous equation of the (en)slaved with machine is precisely what the maroons fled from into the swamp and darkness. and yet, the radical turn of ai is toward a technology of the surround—an agent of black techné that disrupts binary. to cite denise ferreira da silva (2017), debunking the transcendental model of self-determination distinguishes a radical engagement from a critical one.4 ai addressed as a technology of the surround is a version of wild in concert with parisi’s argument of ai as an alien apparatus increasingly outside of a command-control scope.   sorting mechanisms: alien ai as a mode of predictive analytics, ai recursion in its data flows literally reinscribes history as the future—the wager of prediction is based on data of what has been before. as laura kurgan and collaborators have noted, homophily or heterophily are not preconditions of an analysis but effects of it (kurgan et al. 2020). following that logic, ai’s reinscription of a eugenicist agenda is central to wendy h.k. chun’s (2008) critique of software systems, as well as emergently in discourses of critical ai engineering and legal studies (barocas, hardt, and narayanan 2020; kuhlberg et al. 2020; richardson, forthcoming). in the current state of design and application, ai carries on the extended, ruthless logic of modernity where technologies of power are sociotechnological sorting mechanisms. it is a persistent manifestation of the colonial sublime that reinstates machines as the measure of man (and also the category of “not-man” by implication) along a recursive trajectory (adas 2015). the persistent distinction of subject/object or master/slave traces back to the technological extension of “man” that is continuously enacted as a sorting mechanism. prosthesis remains the dominant figure of techné in western philosophy (stiegler 1998); it carries across the historical mechanical arts to modern technology the conceptual framework of appendage in service to the subject (not object), with reinforced boundary markers. and the technological prosthesis as sorting mechanism has led to a profundity of violence evidenced in the automation of all others outside of the illuminated station of subject. as an ontology, the prosthetic continues to extend its reach across technological evolutions of command-control and cyber-servo-mechanistic apparatus.   moving away from a paradigm of command-control, parisi offers a view of ai that profoundly challenges the ontology of technology as prosthetic. in reconsidering ai as an alien intelligence, parisi points to a change of state that moves the technology beyond tool and outside of the domain of what has historically—and increasingly hysterically—been referred to as the “self-determining subject.” in shifting from the paradigm of cyber-servo-mechanism to the alien subject of ai, parisi signals the change of state from prosthetic to that of alien technology—outside of, adjacent to the transcendental self-determining subject. she queries “whether the servo-mechanic model of technology can be overturned to expose the alien subject of artificial intelligence as a mode of thinking originating at, but also beyond, the transcendental schema of the self-determining subject” (parisi 2019, 27). in conceptualizing ai as “alien” outside of human control, even as it is of human design, parisi offers a speculative window on what moving beyond a colonial sublime might portend. parisi’s logic coincides with black techné: ai exceeds itself, loses and finds itself. to this end parisi states, “however, how to describe an apparatus of capture that runs away from itself, how to understand the dominance of algorithmic forms of subsumption that challenge both the law of the subject and its crisis today?” (2019, 36). in keeping with the harney and moten figuration of blackness as the thing that “loses and finds itself,” parisi summons with the “apparatus of capture”—the very technological modality that is meant to reinscribe the biopolitics of a surveillance state—the ethos of the itinerant. despite its human maker/master, ai “runs away from itself.” this horizontal logic of exceeding itself in the sense of moving outside of its given ontological domain and toward uncharted territory (the wild, the swamp, the surround, the alien) offers an opening to other possibilities beyond the reinscription of technologies of the artificial that enact a violence of ordering. in citing the ongoing “crisis” of the subject, parisi locates an opportunity for different relations articulated as living adjacently to technologies of the surround. in considering how such adjacency might be configured, i look to barad’s account of agency not as a predetermined attribute but as an event with its own temporality and locality.   categorical imperative and the intermittent event of becoming barad hails a material account of bodies (including bodies of knowledge) as not subject/object but locations of time and place. the frame—the rules of engagement—in this case are quantum physics as derived by neil bohr. in calling on the philosophy-physics of bohr, barad unbinds events from a categorical imperative in the sense that there is no a priori determination of position, e.g., subject/object. position is determined of a moment. barad describes the liberatory function of a technology of the surround in terms of a materialist agential realism of becoming: “for bohr, things do not have inherently determinate boundaries or properties, and words do not have inherently determinate meanings. bohr also calls into question the related cartesian belief in the inherent distinction between subject and object, and knower and known” (2003, 813). the destabilizing of finite categories continues through the physics of wave/particle and the semiotics of subject/object. in her argument, the indeterminacy at the level of the atomic corresponds with an indeterminacy of language as signification. this is not a version of infinite regress, “turtles all the way down.” rather, barad points to tempo, the event of arrival and dissipation.   with this critical invitation to displace a false sense of certainty, barad offers a logic outside of the categorical that speaks to a wildness of being that cannot be bound to a singular state in advance of the specificity of situation. the “event” as such is locative, particular, and not generalizable. as barad writes, “bohr resolves this wave-particle duality paradox as follows: the objective referent is not some abstract, independently existing entity but rather the phenomenon of light intra-acting with the apparatus…the notions of ‘wave’ and ‘particle’ do not refer to inherent characteristics of an object that precedes its intra-action. there are no such independently existing objects with inherent characteristics” (2003, 815 fn 21). the assessment at the atomic level is inherent instability that presents as a finite set of possible outcomes: wave or particle depending on the situation. the “intra-action” determines measurable datum, not a categorical imperative. in other words, the primary epistemological unit is not subject/object or “independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties” but phenomena.   at the atomic level, one understands this accounting of phenomena as demonstrated by science, even if one has no first-hand knowledge of atomic becoming. but at the societal scale the phenomenon is not to be believed; the investment of biopolitics is to lock in the subject/object, delineating distinct boundaries with visible markers of an optical regime.5 predictive ai locks in the categorical as a condition of its function, effectively enacting “thingification”—“the turning of relations into ‘things,’ ‘entities,’ ‘relata’” (barad 2003, 812). thingification represents an ontology of datafication that enacts abstraction, eliding materiality and contextual relations, as donna haraway (1988), n. katherine hayles (1999), and michelle murphy (2017) have argued. the outcome of setting things in order sustains a trace relation to histories of violent subjection that black techné troubles, enacting as such a power and politics of radical indeterminacy. in other words, indeterminacy is not exclusively an atomic feature, although the unrelenting regime of the indexical would demonstrate it as so. as barad points out, neither “things” nor “words” respect a proper boundary. semiotics had made that evident at the turn of the twentieth century. it has been a slower progression to acknowledge the intra-relation of subject/object among the observable things in the world. in other words, the biopolitics of a categorical imperative continue to play out. what a kant, really. to map across these territories—the fluidity of atomic phenomena (wave/particle) to the entrenchment of biopolitical regime—is to reflect on and unbind the authentication of binary logic as unerring ground truth.   it is not unknown in the human conception of the world to recognize that the cat may be dead or not dead at the same time (until there is an event that resolves the state); but it is outside of human perception of the world to see possible outcomes as opposed to a given state. and yet the generation of many possible outcomes, as opposed to the reproduction of preset conditions, is exactly what an exploratory ai offers. its itinerant wildness presents an opportunity to generate other worlds in relation to other types of beings.   conclusion: ai in the wild ai exceeds itself. so very dumb, literally no common sense. and yet, it can be free—if not to imagine then to generate—speeding through possibilities, junctures that are idiotic until they are not. the radical turn at hand is the opportunity to look at artificial intelligence—the machinic making sense of—as a process of ongoing relations, as phenomena as opposed to “knowledge” represented in a database. i have argued that unsupervised learning, in particular, offers a procedural frame that does not inherently reproduce predetermined boundaries. practically speaking, particularly in regard to the dominant paradigm of supervised learning, the need to audit persists—the “datasheets for datasets” must still be produced—as there is no context for trust and experimentation and there might never be (gebru et al. 2018). and yet, one can see possible other worlds of ai in the wild. throughout their work, gilles deleuze and felix guattari have written of antonin artaud’s (1976) infamous (non)figure of the body without organs, giving it a multiplicity of assignations as it is so vividly an unbounded thing that exceeds itself. as they write in anti-oedipus, “the body without organs is the deterritorialized socius, the wilderness where the decoded flows run free” (deleuze and guattari 1983, 176). in thinking technology of the surround as change of state, i interpolate such a narrative of black techné. the entanglement of ai with the itinerant drift of the maroon and other such creatures of the wild would be a welcome one.   acknowledgments i would like to thank alex juhasz, emily denton, michelle murphy, and the catalyst anonymous reviewers for their feedback over the development of the article. additionally, thank you wutfa for getting the jokes.   notes 1 the young but thriving existence of the acm conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (acm facct), speaks to the growing need in ai, legal studies, critical policy, and critical data to address these emerging issues. one can find representative facct paper titles such as barocas, “problem formulation and fairness,” gebru, “closing the ai accountability gap,” and hardt, “the social cost of strategic classification.”   2 in this procedural vein, the ai now algorithmic accountability policy toolkit (2018) is an excellent example of applied methods that relate ai design frames to policy accountability.   3 suchman (2008) has outlined a feminist counter history of first-generation artificial intelligence from its inception in the 1950s to the early 2000s. one primary aspect of the feminist critique of historical ai, from scholars such as adam (1998) and kember (2003), is the theory of mind scientists brought to the discipline. suchman outlines the critique in the following manner, “ai builds its projects on deeply conservative foundations, drawn from long-standing western philosophical assumptions regarding the nature of human intelligence” (2008, 142). she points to a primary ethos of feminist technoscience engagement with ai as the exposure of a “politics of ordering” that manifests in binaries such as subject/object, same/other (suchman 2008, 140).   4 ferreira da silva critiques the transcendental model of self-determination in the distinction between a radical engagement and a critical one. she writes, “as a category of racial difference, blackness occludes the total violence necessary for this expropriation, a violence that was authorized by modern juridical forms—namely, colonial domination (conquest, displacement, and settlement) and property (enslavement). nevertheless, blackness—precisely because of how, as an object of knowledge, it occludes these juridical modalities—has the capacity to unsettle the ethical program governed by determinacy, through exposing the violence that the latter refigures” (ferreira da silva 2017).   5 mirzoeff (2011) in “the right to look” and virilio (1994) in the vision machine, among other works, have addressed this topic extensively.   references adam, alison. 1998. artificial knowing: 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translated by julie rose. bloomington: indiana university press.   author bio beth coleman is an associate professor of data & cities at the university of toronto, where she directs the city as platform lab. working in the disciplines of science and technology studies and black studies, her research focuses on machine learning, urban data, and civic engagement. autoimmunity and affect: tolerance and time in three narratives ai humanities research group. 2024. “autoimmunities and affect: tolerance and achronic time in three narratives.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–42. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © ai humanities research group, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license autoimmunity and affect: tolerance and time in three narratives ai humanities research group1 abstract this essay, co-written by three art and technology humanities scholars from standpoints of autoimmune experience, takes up the longstanding critique of historical self/non-self models of the immune system to introduce a discussion about biopsychosocial and political affect in autoimmune experience of the 2020s. they argue that an ethos of tolerance and intolerance, long operative in biopolitical strategies of state power (brown 2009), continues to factor into newer 21st century models of autoimmunity as biopsychosocial, ecological, distributed, and networked response. drawing provisionally on the danger model (matzinger 1994), which posits that immune responses are triggered by the perception of threat and not by the presence of “foreign” entities, the authors highlight the kernel of negative political affect in the signaling of danger. drawing on the work of silvan s. tomkins, they describe, theorize, and interpret the role of sustained negative affect signaling, specifically (d)anger, distress, and disgust, in their own respective autoimmune experiences, which they describe as unfolding in achronic time (freeman 2010, 126). it is proposed that closer scrutiny is needed for the negative affects that shape the infrastructure of (in)tolerance and care that gives life to autoimmune symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment experience in the 2020s, an era in which post-covid autoimmune conditions unfold achronically in ongoing covid-19 pandemic time. keywords autoimmunity, biopolitics, affect, lyme, lupus special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 2 introduction the immune system, perhaps more than any other bodily system, has long been studied as a domain around which the concept of the self is both integral and highly contested. the modeling of autoimmunity on the binary of self/other and the paradigm of (auto)immune responses as conditional (in)tolerance has been subject to criticism and rebuttal for some time.2 immunologists and philosophers of immunology have introduced and debated an array of alternative concepts, such as the network, cognitivist, ecological, and danger models. common to these approaches is some notion of cellular agency: the ecological and network models see cells as socially interconnected and engaged; the cognitivist sees them as entities with perceptual abilities; and in the danger model (matzinger 1994), affective signaling is regarded as a tissue-system response to damage. one could say that models are just metaphors, but they structure research strategies and the culture of treatment. tolerance and intolerance, long operative in biopolitical strategies of state power (brown 2009), factor into these immune models, including those that assume a decentered network model (after jerne 1974). (in)tolerance is present in contemporary immune discourse, where we propose it to be a normalizing anatomopolitics, a biopolitics enacted at the scale of the individual biological body.3 tony sandset (2021), among others, has introduced the concept of necropolitics to the discussion of covid-19. he proposes that “conditions of slow death and necropolitical outcomes are themselves not only the outcomes of a form of ‘state of exception’ but rather [occur] through what we can call a ‘state of acceptance’…. necropolitics is often ‘chronic’ and slow, yet its influence on people’s lives often comes to the fore when an abrupt crisis emerges such as covid-19” (1411). he makes a case for the importance of understanding tolerance as it is enacted through the slow death of acceptance.4 the writer sarah manguso, describing her experience with guillain-barré syndrome, said, “all autoimmune diseases invoke the metaphor of suicide. the body destroys itself from the inside” (quoted in anderson and mackay 2014, 5). her remark gives voice to the affective dimensions of the immune system in the lingering fatalist “mystical trappings” of a self/non-self (silverstein and rose 1997, 197), a biometaphysical conception that inexplicably persists (pradeu 2012; pradeu and carosella 2006) through network and open models that figure (auto)immunity as smart and fluidly heterogeneous (jerne 1974; shi 2020; varela and coutinho 1991;), or which characterize immune systems as “selfless selves” (varela 1991). these and other models from newer fields such as systems biology have replaced the old self/non-self binary, but retain a core aspect of it—what we will call a tolerance binary.5 newer models such as the socially engaged, situated cell, or the shift of focus to danger and the tissue system are no less imbricated in the (in)tolerance affective schema than the binary (non)self model. as thomas pradeu and edwin cooper write, “advocating that immune responses are multifactorial, complex, and contextual” is all too easy (2012). we are especially interested in the danger theory of autoimmunity special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 3 proposed by polly matzinger (1994), because it offers a means through which to understand the affect system’s role. matzinger (2002) has proposed that what triggers an immune response is not “foreignness,” but the release of “alarm signals” by damaged tissues. we propose that we grasp the affective dimensions of autoimmunity’s “signals” over time. this model is explicit in its attribution of negative affect to cells: damage triggers danger signals, or a danger signal response mechanism is somehow tripped in the absence of damage. this is theorized as a biopsychosocial communication systems problem. it has generated research into danger and its relationship to brain function (cserr, harling‐berg, and knopf 1992; louveau et al. 2015; matzinger and kamala 2011). immunologist tirumalai kamala (n.d. [2015]) states, “what held up the discovery of brain lymphatics is the thrall of immune privilege,” the idea that certain sites of the mammalian body, such as the eyes, the central nervous system, and the testicles, will tolerate antigens without launching an immune response. previously it was believed the brain was among the privileged “tolerant” systems. we perceive the systems problem of immune systems communication of “danger,” a highly psychobiosocial concept, to be in the domain of affect study. following silvan s. tomkins’s general understanding of affect as a response, feelings as a response with insight, and emotion as a response with insight and historical reflection (tomkins institute, n.d.), we try, in this paper, to capture affect and/as (in)tolerance in self-experience of responses to autoimmune experience in diagnosis and treatment. we want to better understand the relationship between the biopolitical, anatomopolitical, and necropolitical dimensions of (dis)regulation and normalization of living in a state of selfdestruction as an autologous telos, enacted through successors to the self/nonself model. we propose that most contemporary autoimmunity models, while dispensing with the older paradigm of self/non-self, retain the older models’ ethos of affective (in)tolerance as normative.6 colin koopman (2018, 108) reminds us that foucault distinguished between the casting out of lepers at the end of the middle ages and the inclusion of plague victims in early disciplinary modernization. the latter “is not exclusion but quarantine”—not a matter of driving individuals out but of “establishing and fixing them, of giving them their own place, of assigning places and of defining presences and subdivided presences” (foucault 2003, 46). we see this occurring in the contemporary covid-19 moment of the 2020s at the anatomopolitical level of the understanding of the (auto)immune system, especially in illness experience and in treatment encounters, as they play out in their affective “post-covid” dimensions. the immune system has been variously characterized as an intersectional system or network since niels k. jerne (1974). it is presently described in terms such as distributed, flexible, adaptive, dynamic, chimeric, intersectional, and open, with attention to the role of the tissue system that makes up organs (matzinger and special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 4 kamala 2011). but these models retain the consternation of “horror autotoxicus,” a doctrine introduced by paul ehrlich (1900), who proposed that a normal (anti)body has powers of recognition, contrivances that allow the immune system to be smart, to know its enemies—and to have the sense not to turn against its own kind. in this model of (auto)immune action, the state and its citizens are the model for the body and its immune system, which has the political insight to recognize external agents as threat (martin 1994). late in his life, jacques derrida (2003) reversed this formula, interpreting 9/11 as the rogue action of a state system that produced its own death by training foreign agents who then performed suicidal acts of terror inside its borders. his account modeled the relay between the necropolitical and the anatomopolitical levels in a modern, twentyfirst-century autoimmune state. below we track the reverse flow, narrating how treatment responses produce immune system experiences of relayed biopolitical affect (protevi 2009, 115–40) in which (in)tolerance figures centrally in an ethos of inclusion and care. we emphasize that immune modeling is not a mere problem of clinical metaphors (melander 1993; tauber 1994, 2018). models project the shape of practice to come through treatment and disease experience. expression is complexly biopsychosocial, making language and comportment inextricable from disease etiology and experience. more work is needed about the production of traffic between immune system biopolitics, autoimmune necropolitics, and anatomopolitics in the embodied and clinical experience of diagnoses, from the situated standpoint of patient experience. we therefore track flows of affect over time in the situated contexts of tolerating autoimmune diagnosis experience, regarding autoimmunity as a queer art of failure (halberstam 2011). following from the work of mel y. chen (2007, 2011) and others who have insisted on theorizing the place of affect, diagnosis, institutional classification, and the state in health and ability experience, we pursue auto-biopsychosocial interpretations that aim to grasp the depth of distress, disgust, and anger in the production of immune system pathology, and in our socialization into a culture of tolerance—in which we learn to put up with our autoimmune experience in a networked, heterogeneous, transient state of biopsychosocial being. we seek to understand how the immune system is produced in affective relays among the biopolitical, the necropolitical, and the anatomopolitical scales of experience in and around tolerance, a primary aspect of the ethos of care and inclusion that drives the contemporary moment. at the center of our concern is the temporality of the production of contemporary biopsychosocial (in)tolerance of danger, a term that has anger at its core and is closely associated with another characteristic of our time: chronic distress. we ask how and where exactly the relays between self and other and tolerance and intolerance are produced in the body and its biopsychosocial mangle of autoimmunity over time, in acute, chronic, and post-illness states of autoimmune special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 5 disease. how necropolitical regulatory (in)tolerance of disease and disability connects to the normalization of autoimmune individuals through toxic affective exchanges, and how theories of autoimmunity update in order to stay the same (chun 2016), are questions we share. addressing these questions has required, for us, detailed tracking of timelines. how, we wondered, did manguso come to feel her condition to be awash in suicidal feelings, and why did this make us angry? by this, we do not mean to ask how she, or we, came to hold socially imposed bad feelings, but how did our conditions come to be a mangle of experience that makes banal the model of biological, psychological, and social self-(in)tolerance as a deeply felt condition understood to be classic, timeless (chronic), and definitive of autoimmunity. addressing our timelines in some detail below, we try to better understand how the autoimmune life we put up with is modeled and produced through a structure that sustains negative affective registers, and to discern how this experience is normalized through a treatment framework that operates at different scales, from bioto anatomoto necropolitical. wendy brown (2008), in regulating aversion, reminds us that to tolerate is not to affirm but to conditionally allow and make room for what is unwanted or deviant. tolerance is not an affect. nor it is just a strategic, provisional comportment. it is a boundary condition in which the self is produced at a border that may be the elastic tissue of the skin (anzieu 1989) or the shifting territories modeled on the redrawn face of a map or a diagnostic category (bowker and star 1999). brown traces mobilizations of tolerance that circulate and perpetuate rather than alleviate racism, homophobia, and ethnic hatred in domestic practices of sexual and racial regulation and in international strategies of imperialism. tolerance, as a strategy of governmentality, requires the production of normalization at the scale of the individual subject. to tolerate is to suffer. it is a sustained negative affective state, with its own infrastructure. in this framework, tolerance is acquired in the response to an entity recognized as the other. that recognition of an entity as other is a precondition of tolerance. intolerance may be exerted against the invading other but also against the self , as in the psychological processes differently theorized as “internalization” by psychiatrists frantz fanon (1952) and alvin poussaint (1966). the internalization of necropolitical (in)tolerance as a slow state of discernment of other and negotiating acceptance in relationship to an internal entity that has triggered danger “rightly” or not ensures its status as a chronic oscillating condition of judgment, which requires a subject and object. amelia jones quotes antonio damasio, who states that our experiences “tend to have a consistent perspective, as if there were indeed an owner and knower for most, though not all, [psychic] contents.” he continues: “i imagine this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. the source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the organism, and the slowly evolving elements of autobiographical data” (jones 2009, 59, quoting damasio (1995, 238). special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 6 but what happens to the bio-logic of the “autobiographical data” when it is selfeliminating? following the self/non-self model, one would say there is a breakdown of the autologic, and someone must step in with care. the self as always already constituted through misrecognition, fracture, and interdependence has been a cornerstone of analytic thought for decades, exposing the fantasy of autonomy that links immune system theory to the other ai (artificial intelligence) with which it rose to prominence.7 polly matzinger, chief of the us national institute of allergy and infectious disease’s t-cell tolerance and memory section, has insisted that not only is “foreignness” not the important feature that triggers an immune response in the individual (2002, 302); the immune system does not care about the self. its drive is simply (or, more complexly) to protect against danger (matzinger 1994). proclaiming abandonment of the self model, matzinger has continued to argue that the field should move off its perpetual question, “what causes a break in self-tolerance?” and focus instead on how—in what moments, in what systems in the body, in what agents, in what ways—the immune system identifies danger. matzinger (2022) notes the co-agential function of bodily tissues in (auto)immune activity (matzinger and kamala 2011).8 her proposal aligns with the sts dictum that agents, including technology and like language systems, do not have intentionality, except when they become durable and compelling tools in specific actions (suchman 1987). intentionality is the cognitive map of plans, not the affective, messy process of situated actions. it also reinforces a view of the (immune) system as open, its elements non-autonomous. “auto” immune responses are in fact complexly intersectional, involving multiple actors inside and outside the body. pleasure and danger (vance 1984) can be mitigated, like when the toy licked by the child in chen’s (2011) account of lead toxicity is removed from the mouth of the child and sucked into a biopsychosocial public health treatment plan, recalled as a danger in an environment where anything can be found to have always already been toxic. immune logic projects the affordances and risks of the shifting signifier onto all things. medical normalization is pinged back to the biosocial model of environmental regulation and tolerance, with the toy subject to regulation, and tolerance identified as a boundary, a threshold, in the child. the self model and the tolerance paradigm add up to a suicide plan inflicted on subjects held in contempt for insisting on feeling, and on describing the open ambiguity of their experience, in ways that are inadequately modeled by research and treatment protocols that insist on the co-production of body and environment (yet another binary). kimberle crenshaw’s (1991) concept of intersectionality has been widely used to account for the multiplicity of forms and registers of discrimination that coincide in lived experience, describing “where power interlocks and intersects” (crenshaw 2017) in order to understand the multifaceted experiences of marginalized subjects, in particular black women. in his doctrine of “horror autotoxicus,” ehrlich (1900) famously described antibodies special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 7 and antigens as existing in a bespoke “lock-and-key” relationship that he modeled in a sketch (figure 1). it is important to note that the antibody (“antitoxin”) is not the key but the lock. the lock is drawn as a black fish with an open mouth that seeks out specific toxins, the keys (protruding from the cell) for which its orifice is uniquely molded. like chen’s child, the antitoxin is driven by a desire to incorporate a danger into itself. figure 1. paul ehrlich, the lock-and-key principle behind immunoreaction. drawing reproduced as plate 7 between pages 437 and 438 of ehrlich, 1900. source: wellcome collection, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/eprmw6yc/items?canvas=30. alt text: a black and white print of a drawing of fours oval shaped blobs with spikes. they are surrounded by floating black tweezer-like pincers aiming for the spikes. on the past blob, seven pincers have attached themselves to the spikes. this sketch is followed by a second drawing that demonstrates a more ambiguous interaction. there are a few interlocking pairs of antitoxins and antigens. many antigens float free, and numerous antitoxins find no match. figure 2. drawing reproduced as plate 8 between pages 437 and 438 of ehrlich, 1900. alt text: a black and white print of a drawing of the tops of two oval cell-blobs, one with pincers (antitoxins) aiming for the spikes (antigens) that surround it on the cell, some finding and some missing a lock-and-key fit. ehrlich notes that in the blood of animals, there is the presence of excess, “normal” bodies analogous to the antibody. “the formation of these antitoxins lacks all of the characteristics of purposeful, intelligently directed, remarkable https://wellcomecollection.org/works/eprmw6yc/items?canvas=30 special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 8 process” (ehrlich 1900, 440). so where is the intelligence in the system? matching is characterized as an innate contrivance, a feeling—perhaps something like desire. immunity, he speculates, may be part of a more open system, influenced by diet and responsive to tissue changes. he speculates on these factors’ contribution to variations in reaction to infection intragroup, among members of “the same race and species” (441). “the problem with identity politics,” crenshaw wrote in 1991, “is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup difference” (crenshaw 1991, 1242, emphasis added). variation and ambiguity in the transition of antigens from healthy to pathological and the sheer range and volume of antigens and antibodies in the immune system undo both the foreign-self dichotomy and the tolerance paradigm. in ehrlich’s brief speculation about diet and tissue (which we regard as the interiorized skin of affect transmission), we see a glimmer of recognition of intragroup variation in the possible situational action of multiple systems and diet on immune response, casting it as open and socially produced. but racialized and sexualized mechanisms of (in)tolerance through a self-other schema remain firmly in place: while there is internal diversity, there are unique sets of oppositions that ensure discrimination within that system. later, immunology will shift from type to process: what makes a good cell go bad? the self/other model remains tacitly active in attitude and regard of patients even among some researchers and physicians who have moved on to other more dynamic and open, contemporary models of immunity. multiple factors propel the self/tolerance paradigm, including the requirement that a diagnosis be fixed to qualify for treatment. matzinger (2022) asks for more adherence to the danger model, which we interpret here through autobiographies of distress, disgust, and anger (double d-anger), moving off the analysis of what specifically signals “danger,” and onto the specifics of the affective spectrum triggered. affects are, of course, experienced intersubjectively, relayed between self and caregivers, friends, family members, and colleagues entangled in the chronicity of ugly feelings (ngai 2009). how ugly feelings and ugly symptoms are mutually constitutive over time, especially when they surprise and alarm us in their presentation as ambiguous and chimeric, is of great interest to us. it is the convoluted narrative force of relay and repetition between affect and symptom on face, skin, and tissue that we seek to understand in our interpretation of this danger model through experience over time. how do we tolerate the affects associated with autoimmune experience? a 1985 study of affect’s social and biological dimensions defines “affect tolerance” as “the ability to respond to a stimulus which would ordinarily be expected to evoke affects by the subjective experiencing of feelings, rather than by an apparent nonreaction response or a discharge pattern of response such as impulsive behavior, special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 9 somatic dysfunction, or personality disorganization” (sashin 1985, 175). in this account three variables influence the ability of a subject to tolerate affect: “the capacity to fantasize, the state of the inner container, and the capacity to verbalize affect” (175). here we shift our attention to time and tissues in selfnarratives of experience with autoimmune conditions and diagnoses, offering to readers what we hope to be useful verbalizations of relays of affect (in)tolerance informed by the insight of feeling and the retrospective historicity of emotion. we each have responded to our respective experiences with explanatory tactics that aim not to preclude or pathologize impulsive behavior, somatic dysfunction, and personality disorganization—ours or our caregivers. these are reasonable responses to the biopsychosocial mangle of autoimmunity. elizabeth freeman’s work on chronicity (2010) and bodily endurance over time (2019) helps us to describe the experience of the specific course of (not) tolerating a distributed affective state, distress, in a case eventually diagnosed as lupus, followed by accounts of anger-rage in the experience of lyme disease and its diagnosis, and a the volley of affect between caregiver and self in a misdiagnosis of anti-dppx syndrome around a more likely case of parasitic bacterial infection with bartonella or borrelia burgdorferi bacteria. these conditions are understood as adjacent to the range of autoimmune and immune deficiency conditions now grouped under post-covid-19 autoimmune conditions, aka long covid.9 we do not discuss covid or post-covid conditions specifically. rather, we describe selfexperiences of and with autoimmune conditions that inform the context in which long covid is emerging. the 1989 redefinition of aids as a chronic illness, anthropologist jean scandlyn (2000) reminds us, was contingent on access to antiretroviral therapy, which has been vastly uneven, with western countries experiencing the highest degree of stability in treatment access. lucas pereira de melo et al. (2020) note that in brazil, the state is the primary agent in guaranteeing drug access, and thus in securing the experience of hiv and/or aids as chronic rather than acute conditions by people who are hiv positive. they use the phrase “fragile chronicity” to address the experience of having hiv/aids over time marked by state-controlled access and withdrawal of access to treatment drugs. among members of an online group they observed, the chronic illness state was experienced as a normalizing state that was in fact fragile, interrupted by periods of acute disease when the state medical apparatus experienced periods of upheaval and treatment drugs were not available for a time. to become a chronic sufferer again was to reassume a normal state. in addition to experiencing a new, intermittent “order of life” on treatment drugs, members of the group experienced the “suffering and fear of hiv/aids as emotions from a distant history” during those gaps when “there was no political, social and biotechnological support” (pereira de melo et al. 2020). special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 10 in our account, we approach time over which we received unstable, misapplied, or reluctant diagnosis and treatment, with medical consternation and antagonism among the responses to our symptoms and shared distress, disgust, and anger a feature of our care. we elaborate these experiences to reflexively trace the chronicity of distress, (d)anger-rage, and disgust, horror, and humiliation. as we passed through acute affect tempered by the insight of chronic feeling, we struggled to find ways to be tolerated and not shunned by our caregivers, friends, and family, and we fought to tolerate our own disintegrating self-control to achieve a survivable state of normalcy. these are, we acknowledge, accounts of white middle class fragility—illness experienced with the affordances of income, health insurance, and white skin, all of which we did not lose despite age, sexuality, and ability destabilizing our attempts to live a normal life. destabilization occurred in part through challenges to our mental health status and our capacity for self-determination, couched in the normalizing language of care.10 scandlyn states that whereas “the battle against acute illness is dramatic and heroic, the management of chronic illness, despite its complexity, is banal” (2000). we are reminded of lauren berlant’s concept of “crisis ordinariness” (2011, 10). what makes something negative banal is tolerance. any condition can be normalized. but the ordinariness of being chronically sick with indeterminate cause and no endgame requires an especially complicated and exhausting degree of adaptation, accommodation, and masquerade to survive the sustained state of acute panic, the intense multidirectional volleying of disgust (received, selfdirected, mirrored), and to forestall open intolerance and rejection. (d)anger must be normalized. this requires self-control of affect—immunity to the triggers of distress, disgust, and rage. there are multiple affects for stigma, a form that exists in a lock-and-key relationship with tolerance of danger, which we regard as a condensation of difference and anger. chronicity driven by panic about selfcontamination demands a performance of self-containment that we hope to chronicle here in its achronicity, a concept we explain below. we each have heard something like this: “we don’t know much about this condition and how or when it began for you. we are not even sure if you have it. there are no definitive markers to confirm its existence before, or now. but you may experience its symptoms all your life, intermittently.” the face that offers these words is sometimes performing the composure of care, sometimes struggling to hide bemusement or vague disgust, indicated by a tug of the mouth toward a grimace silvan s. tomkins (2008b, 22) in a reaction has called dissmell, a drive-like response that protects the infant from (d)angerous substances. often the face mouthing dissmell is skeptical, looking at a computer screen as it reacts to us. sometimes the words come through an online message, and there is no showing of face, but you can hear the dissmell reaction that keeps the caregiver safe from the danger we pose. along the way, in these accounts, we touch on visibility, masking, and the process of maintenance of appearance and behaviors of care in managing suspected or diagnosed chronic autoimmune disease. we special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 11 discuss some of our tactics for avoiding internalization of the stigma associated with the appearance of these signs and symptoms in our caregivers. our use of the term achronical relates to this unevenness, and also to the ways in which this autoimmune experience of dissmell toward us is produced as banal, normal, not worthy of notice. acronycal is a term derived from ákronux (nightfall) to describe the contrapuntal temporality of a star that rises while the sun sets. it is the star that is “acronycal” and not the sun, whose time is the standard against which the star’s weak power is observed. a distinctive characteristic of acronycity is that the star is always present, but noticed only when the power of the sun has weakened enough for the weak light of the star to become visible. the star is the sun’s other. the certainty of the sun’s relative strength and position in the next cycle makes it remain the dominant measure against which acronycal time is registered. we propose autoimmunity may be usefully understood as achronical (freeman 2010), meaning not outside of time or timeless but remotely sensible, as a past and future condition. a primary disease, its history, and its sequelae in compromised immunity or autoimmune disease are interconstitutive and codefining. chronicity demands a performance of self-containment that we hope to chronicle here in its unevenness, its achronicity. our accounts focus on affective experiences of symptoms associated with lupus, lyme disease, and anti-dppx syndrome. we propose, overall, a critical and reflexive engagement with autoimmune and deficiency syndromes’ achronicity across subject positions. the model of consecutive time in which acute disease is followed by chronic postdisease syndrome does not capture this uneven experience adequately. the affect we begin with is distress. the verb distress descends from dis (apart) and strengere (to draw tight). it is an archaism that describes the act of stretching apart. in law, the noun describes a claim made over the goods of another to satisfy a debt. use of distress to describe anguish, grief, and pain, dating back to the 1300s, begs the question of who or what performs the stretching and seizing, and how the term came to privilege not the act of taking away, but the emotional state of the subject on whom tearing and loss is inflicted. health, for example, is the transacted object taken away from the body, but we do not use the noun form of “distress” to name that process of separation. rather, “distress” becomes the sequela of this loss—it describes the subsequent state of the loser. to put this another way, when the body is in ill health, control over the body is understood to have been taken away from the subject and put in the hands of the illness state, which assumes power over the afflicted person. distress is the feeling they are left with. the distress-anguish spectrum is among the affective processes described by tomkins (2008a), and he characterizes it as tending to exist in a prolonged, high-steady state (289–323), as compared to, say, anger, which is more shortfused (323). distress, at the low end of the distress-anguish spectrum, tends to be special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 12 maintained and tolerated by the subject for a very long time. the apa dictionary of psychology (2023) defines distress as a type of stress that results from being overwhelmed by negative life conditions, resulting in maladaptive behaviors. in the following sections, we oscillate between “i” and “we” as we shift to our personal narratives, approaching them individually and together. narrative #1: the unhealing wound: distress and eustress i start with a narrative about a wound. the art historian amelia jones (2009), in an extensive treatment of wounds in performance-based art practice, points out that wounds are powerful signifiers that are both agential and enacted. they announce injury and, when self-inflicted by the artist, as they are in the works by ron athey and catherine opie discussed by jones, they serve a discursive purpose. in the cases she discusses, one purpose is to insist that the person in pain maintains control over enunciation of experience—that pain is not debilitating but, rather, productive of a register and politics of pleasure. in this context, the adage “time heals all wounds” takes on a different meaning. standardly, this phrase assigns agency and intentionality to time in the process of resolving the emotional distress of a loss, typically of another person from one’s life. progressive, linear time is understood to have a curative, healing power. in this adage, a physical wound is a metaphor for an emotional injury, for hurt feelings. the traumatic cause (a breakup, a death) becomes a memory, like a scar, that times blunts and erases. but in performance-based self-inflicted pain, control over the chronicity of distress is in the hands of the subject who experiences the injury and bears the wound. the performance makes clear that a physical wound and wounded feelings are not simply analogous but are intersectional, co-productive. a physical wound is a trigger of feelings of distress. emotional distress produces somatic outcomes: a rash, the marks of self-cutting. the case of masochistic performance art demonstrates the problematic of agency and control in the experience of distress, and underscores the reality of the wound as not simply an outcome of injury but a process in the negotiation of relational agency and power. the distressed subject is always negotiating with time and in this sense has the ability to bring out its achronicity. freeman (2016) proposes that chronic illness belies narrative, with chronicity assuming a kind of shapelessness in comparison to linear time. in this first account, we together unpack the chronicity of distress associated with a physical event that was an outcome of chronic illness that failed to resolve, becoming unending—or, rather, becoming repetitive, with multiple beginnings and endings. the narrative arc of hemostasis, inflammation, proliferation, and remodeling/repair unfolded only to begin again before repair is complete. an acute wound that refuses to stay healed is not exactly constant, not exactly special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 13 chronic. a chronic wound, one learns by experience, perseverates—has its own cyclical rhythms that are acronycal, irrupting like a rising star just when you thought the infection cycle was resolving. throughout the first decade of the 2000s, i began developing lesions without having been noticeably injured. these wounds appeared with increasing frequency and severity. each refused to fully heal. one wound of about three inches in diameter that had formed on the back of my left thigh around 2009 remained unhealed for two years. “healing” is a process referred to often in health discourse. unhele is an obsolete term meaning to uncover or reveal that i revive here to describe the process of a pathology bent on revealing itself achronically. it is not such a simple matter as “non-healing,” for the wound did heal itself—only to unheal again and again. in this section below, i establish the different patterns of chronicity that became interlaced as the wound took on a rhythm of its own, as it drained and re-established itself, and as medical visits became a routine recurrence, punctuating the routines of work life and adding stress and anxiety as dressing the wound—washing and bandaging it and taking different courses of antibiotics in hopes of making it heal—became a regular part of dressing for work. the life of the wound was accommodated in patterns of comportment and appearance to mitigate the stress of achronical temporality: having to speak in public with an open wound, while in pain. i ignored the wound for about six months, watching it grow with mounting anxiety, as i attended to the more urgent crisis of my pet’s fatal illness. when i finally sought treatment for myself, i was seen by a nurse practitioner in my primary care practice. they drained the lesion in-office, treating it as a cyst or boil. however, they raised questions about the nature of the wound, speculating about its behavior and appearance. it did not act like a cyst or a boil, they said. it lacked the characteristic sac or wall of a cyst; the sinus tract was too deep for a boil. although the draining brought temporary relief, the wound did not permanently heal, but instead became more inflamed. the area became larger and more swollen, abscessing and bursting only to then re-establish itself as an open sore rather than closing up into a scar. i began to measure time by the wound. sometimes the cycle took days. other times it completed itself over the course of hours. i went into this process with a tacit understanding that wounds heal over time. the life of a lesion follows a pattern that ends in closure of the tear. even an infected wound will open and drain, close, and become a scab. perhaps it will produce a scar that gradually fades: time heals all wounds, after all. what i was not prepared for, however, beyond the delay of healing, was the erratic recurrence of the lesion’s life and death, as it stretched apart and drained only to re-form in a more volatile state, with days or hours of acute fulminant activity. there was no finality, no resolution of the acute state, only its inevitable yet unpredictable repetition. wound time special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 14 was achronical—not exactly shapeless, but apparent only when compared to the regulating time of the imagined normal wound. this account may summon feelings of disgust. but what was most prominent for me was my own sense of distress faced with a painful bodily state sure to be received with disgust if revealed in public. our experience has been that physicians who are not specialists in feelings don’t know where to look when faced with feelings of distress they find ugly rather than those that engender tender feelings of compassion and care. many look away, a response that may be an indication of disgust, dissmell, a mirroring of our presumed shame, or they simply express mild annoyance in the form of a distancing brusque professionalism. feelings interfere with the path to treatment of the body. they need to be put to the side. we each have been referred to psychological or psychiatric resources to help with our intrusive affective states, imagining this referral is a caring act that will address a perceived need for supplying us with strategies of self-management geared toward normalization. distress mounted as the experience of repeating an acute process over and over, at different unpredictable rates, became a chronic state, or rather a state of achronicity. i came to recognize draining and diminishment as stages of a deception, after which, at some point—unpredictably but within a short period of time—the lesion would not heal but instead “unheled” (uncovered itself), over and over. chronic suggests constancy, perpetuity, continuity, unending sameness. words like eruptive, disruptive, respite, and remission hint at the ways in which repeated bouts of acute symptoms, remission, and recurrence are the fat of chronic disease, morphing its basic process, and triggering anticipation and dread in the subject who tries to maintain control over its erratic course. distress becomes normalized. it becomes productive, takes action. one of the actions i took was to reassign agency over the process from myself to the lesion. whereas the nurse practitioner had drained the wound at my request, now it drained itself, according to its own will and clock. i was beginning to realize it was a chronic thing that might never succumb to the normative linear time of health, healing, and cure. i started to worry about the consequences of living with this thing that would always be infected, that might become septic, that might never go away. and so my own sense of agency in the process diminished. i was at the mercy of an unhealed lesion. it was a danger to me. areas of tissue and skin cells had begun to go rogue. i had no idea what chronic condition i “had” that was causing this perpetual wound-state. i continued to seek help from my medical caregivers, hoping for treatment and answers. my primary care doctor recommended waiting, giving the lesion more time to heal. however, my dermatologist began to associate a special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 15 different narrative with my symptoms: he diagnosed me with the inflammatory skin disease hidradenitis suppurativa (hs). in the following months he put me on repeated courses of various oral antibiotics, a standard (and generally ineffective) treatment for hs. none of these helped. my primary care doctor did not agree with the hs diagnosis and persisted with the narrative of an eventual fading of symptoms. and so i walked around for two years with a wound that was perpetually open, in various stages of healing and unhealing. i became very inventive and resourceful in devising ways to bandage and medicate the wound, accommodating it into everyday life by improving methods to cover the thing that insisted on uncovering itself. my dermatologist eventually suggested surgical removal, and although my primary doctor insisted on waiting, i finally elected for this surgery in 2011. a critical aspect of successful elimination of an hs lesion is the removal of the sinus tract feeding the lesion. the surgeon reported removing a tract as long as my finger, and i thought the saga was finally over. but within two weeks the abscess returned. this is a common outcome of hidradenitis suppurativa surgeries, since the subcutaneous sinus tracts that feed their chronicity can be insidious—difficult to trace, hard to remove in total, and extensive, sometimes even opening into body cavities and internal organs. this one long-term lesion finally did resolve itself after some novel treatment by an hs specialist. but its capricious pathology disclosed yet another unheled condition associated with supreme achronicity and ever-shifting, everunpredictable symptomology and acute phases. the hs diagnosis implicated more sinister factors entangled with the chronic skin disorder, namely systemic lupus erythematosus (sle). cause was nested within cause. in medical parlance co-occurrence has replaced comorbidity. in the nineteenth century, the use of morbid to describe disease states was transferred onto negative affect (morbid feelings). with co-occurrence, diseases are characterized as companions that coexist (a)chronically, like the bright sun and the weak star. hs often co-occurs with such chronic and incurable autoimmune diseases as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. lupus has ever-changing manifestations that can impact any part of the body. being female, my profile is consistent with lupus’s characteristic gender associations: women constitute roughly 90 percent of the people diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus and lupus nephritis (ln), a condition associated with renal disease. my diagnosis in my early fifties was unusual because the disease typically emerges in adolescence or early adulthood. i am also an outlier because of my race. i am white. systemic lupus erythematosus prevalence for african american women is double that for white women, and both forms of the disease occur with far greater frequency among native american and alaska native, asian/pacific islander, and latinx women than among white women. candace feldman et al. describe the various intersectional influences suspected of special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 16 contributing to the onset and development of systemic lupus erythematosus and lupus nephritis via the “complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, and environmental factors” that likely contribute to their “variations by gender, race/ethnicity, and income level” (2013, 760). among these are workplace and environmental exposures to toxins, smoking, and psychosocial stress. i suspect certain of these, particularly past domestic violence, workplace stress, and ptsd, as factors in my disease, and those of many women across these demographic sectors. the living pattern of achronicity embedded in such intersecting risk factors amplifies the experience of intolerance and discrimination faced by women whose also experience poverty or low income, racial and ethnic marginalization, precarious housing and work conditions, and domestic or sexual violence and abuse. the psychosocial and embodied distress associated with erratic, unpredictable temporality of autoimmune disease compounds the achronicity of precarious housing, employment, financial and personal resources, and healthcare access. caregiver disgust reduces the human to an imagined being without volition. disease terminology for “lupus” was taken from the latin word for wolf by rogerius frugardi (1180), a surgeon who thought his patient’s facial rash resembled an animal’s bite. this displacement of the auto-agency of an autoimmune attack onto an undomesticated predator is rooted in the ascription of immune agency to a foreign body. it makes us rethink the legal “debt” distress scenario in terms of what is taken away: in this case, the patient’s agency over their body’s own actions against itself. predation by the body’s own immune system is a terrifying thing to experience, impeding the exercise of a person’s will against the body’s own internal defense mechanisms. enter masochistic performance art, the action of self-injury made plain under circumstances that insist on being on top in the narration of pleasure and (d)anger in chronic time. again the news of my condition was broken with the tragic statement (and affective comportment) conveying that time and symptomatology exceed my control: like hs, lupus has no cure. the doctor expressed uncertainty about time— my lupus might have been in preliminary stages, or maybe its onset was already underway. this uncertainty impacted my predictive thinking and planning about the future, deeply altering my self-perception and sense of my life’s past, and of its overall temporality. receiving the diagnosis that one has a chronic, incurable disease immediately launches an acute emotional crisis of remembering in which one’s sense of time is reconfigured, becoming operant on a lifelong scale that slides in all directions at once. one begins to edit and re-edit one’s history with each new causal thesis in mind. looking backward, i remembered joint pain in my hips in my late twenties. i wondered whether it was related to lupus. i thought about my childhood. i do not recall having the classic red-cheek butterfly rash special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 17 associated with lupus, but i nonetheless searched my memory for predictive signs. my frequent bouts of respiratory infections and the fact that when i got sick i fell ill very rapidly and severely all took on new meaning. the present, past, and future are all implicated in this tectonic shift as diagnosis with a chronic illness is triggers the affect of surprise, which startles memory into the emotional process of re-examining past and present experiences and future expectations. an uncertain new landscape in which this condition will be lived achronically in the months, years, and decades ahead. lupus frequently attacks and destroys the kidneys; would i end up in dialysis, and if so, when? was i in danger of needing a kidney transplant at some future date? anticipation and dread amplify distress, prompting responses (such as the pressure to recall past symptoms) that, rather than alleviating stress, lead one to dwell in the achronic, relative temporality of reflective emotion in which autoimmune conditions make themselves visible in the temporality of an entire planet, a past and future life visible at a distance, in a curious weak light. the lupus diagnosis required me to maintain a schedule of dermatology and rheumatology checks—visual scans of my skin and joints, x-rays, blood, and urine testing—that i would describe as chronic, in that its pattern was clear as day—it would be a lifelong, predictable schedule driven by hopes for improvement and cycles of remission and recurrence, not cure. rewriting the narrative of one’s life story in ways that make sense and provide a clear path forward driven by one’s memories and desires becomes a way of reasserting control over time. chronicity, as opposed to achronicity, is found in the desire for causality and early signs when in fact there may be no such factors to unearth, nothing to see that could have made life turn out otherwise. achronicity describes the speculative and intercutting nature of self-historicizing experienced as an art of fragmentation, disjuncture, and bricolage—the activated distress of seizing the story and tearing it apart yourself. this approach is triggered when labs and medical professionals deliver a life sentence with the cool, clinical detachment that often characterizes doctor-patient communications. my account is not a disavowal or refusal of either temporality, but an insistence on the importance of tolerating (a)chronicity—or, rather, recognizing (a)chronicity as a mechanism of (in)tolerance. recognizing the highly varied assortment of rheumatoid skin, joint, and connective tissue diseases described as co-occurring—intersectional if not interconstitutive—strengthens the case for using achronicity as the relevant term for the real time of autoimmune diseases. one has such conditions perpetually. as the acute crises resulting in the primary diagnosis and those that follow gives way to the more general task of integrating disease awareness and accommodation into one’s tactics of self-care and time, mental activities like those i experienced started to focus on piecing together a new, broken narrative that follows an special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 18 acronycal arc, finding meaning in those things that appear in a weak light at the endpoints of knowledge. the construction of autoimmunity experience and life stories as a diagnosis response frequently incorporates scars of past experiences largely attributed not to somatic conditions but to emotional and psychological trauma, and states of mental suffering such as depression, ptsd, and “stress.” stress, and specifically the stress of needing to go on, to speak in public—the event associated with the “positive” stress engendered by “welcome” life challenges—is another factor here. to work, for all three of us, is to act and to speak in public, to teach, which is also to survive (it is how we make our income and receive health insurance). the thought of speaking in public while in distress, and while having evidence of a condition that might be seen as disgusting was, of course, profoundly distressing. hans selye, a near contemporary of tomkins, rendered stress binary, coupling distress with “eustress,” a neologism that neutralized stress, rendering it quite simply a “nonspecific response of a body to a demand” (1976, 137). this concept reflects the affordances of banal anatomopolitics for capitalism. eustress, associated in its medical literature with better survival, is classified as a positive response type generated by “positive” life stressors. the stresses of life in industrial capitalism become, quite simply, motivational forces. in the tomkins affect system, there is no such positive valence for stress, which is always prefixed by dis (apart). the felt quality of the negative affect that is distress is first described by tomkins through anecdotes about the performed behavior in which the feeling makes itself seen and heard: crying, with and without tears, is presented through examples that are, by and large, in response to loss (2008, 313– 30). but for selye, stress has its positive potential—indeed, he warned, “complete freedom from stress is death!” (selye 1976, 137). we return to our question about agency and causality in autoimmune syndromes, and to the act of stretching apart, understanding it as not so easily attached to the primary disease of which the autoimmune syndrome is understood to be a sequel. we might consider appropriating eustress ironically, as a hallmark of the neoliberal normalization of crisis in chronic pandemic time. eustress is a useful concept for characterizing accommodation, by which we mean not simply learning to live with our autoimmune syndromes, but finding ways to perform (to act out, to speak in public), in order to provoke accommodation and normalization of our immune-system divergence in the social world of people with ai syndromes, which, with the covid-era recognition of post-covid conditions, will now be a vast medical demographic about which little is known. eustress is a normalizing concept that suggests there is value in performing positive thinking while in distress: we may respond behaviorally to distress, interpreting it as a motivational force. trying to avoid income and advancement special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 19 lost while on disability by characterizing your condition as a prompt to work harder is a foundation of the supercrip phenomenon (garland-thomson 2002; schalk 2016) in which you strive harder and do better because of your condition. the moment of diagnosis and the naming of the disease or condition of disablement are often held up as significant breakthroughs in this behavioral reversal of outlook from negative to positive. a diagnosis startles you, makes you react. you charge ahead toward a cure or accommodations: positive steps, one might say. but with autoimmune conditions, there is always the awareness that the diagnosis does not provide a clear treatment pathway or a predictable future. this opens the door to a web of potentialities that are both certain and random: cooccurrences will crop up, making themselves known through the stepped-up schedule of testing or through compounding symptoms; self-care habits similarly are added and become part of everyday life, and the reality that they will not end with any diagnosis sets in. layered upon this are the existing chronic patterns and the baffling complexity of acute recurrences that eventually become both predictable and erratic in their path and duration. characterizing distress as “eustress” is classic cruel optimism (berlant 2011) that is not so much felt or internalized but performed strategically. you learn to say “i’m better now” when people ask. it is an avoidance mechanism that allows you to bypass the humiliation of having your condition tolerated (tomkins 2008a, 435). you learn to accept that some friends and colleagues will start to view you as the person who has become a flake, a no-show, or an obsessive. their skeptical but accommodating expressions are another facet of an immune response, at once a symptom and a trigger. horror autotoxicus rears its ugly head not in your body, but in the social space where they perform their affect in suppressed form, as in the uneasy expression on the face that masks the automatic physical disgust reaction that is like vomiting a toxin (what tomkins, in 2008b, 22, calls dissmell). a classic immune response on the part of an interlocutor is to feel uneasy, annoyed, or, as we have described, mildly disgusted—an expression that may not be shown to you directly, but may be relayed through friends and colleagues, after your condition is discussed with care and concern, and their kindly words are conveyed back to you, perhaps in an hr meeting about work performance. they want to help but they are tired of your story and want you to tell them an ending you do not have to give—and they want to help you find it if you are unable to do so yourself, perhaps through a special office set up to perform this care. because surely if you don’t have a cure or a treatment regimen that keeps you stable after all this time, then you didn’t help yourself, or perhaps you have simply become obsessed with your symptoms, attached to repeating them—this must be psychopathology, and for this there are also treatment providers at hand to help you, even in the workplace. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 20 to put this in tomkins’s terms, avoiding your expression of affect can serve to deny the press of aggression in your interlocutor’s response, be it concern or consternation. we note that tomkins spent some years of his career as an industrial psychologist, evaluating the psychological states of both managers and workers on the factory floor, specifically focusing on weeding out those who posed a danger to other workers or to themselves in the workplace. like some of the men tomkins described in his account of humiliation, you might learn that it is safer to put your head down and quietly do your job (tomkins 2008a, 555–61). it is not a coincidence that his passage on humiliation draws from the organizational psychology of bertram p. karon (1964), whose highly problematic study of black factory workers in the us south relied on a projective test devised by tomkins, and whose ideas were an important source material for tomkins’s own ideas about black affect (tomkins 2008a, 561). “if you cannot control your anger in a world where you are constantly being provoked, and where the direct expression of anger brings inevitable disasters,” wrote karon, then “you are lost” (1964, 166). normalizing distress as eustress as a behavioral tactic has the ironic affordance of making you stop saying there is something wrong (which is not to stop thinking and feeling it). the social benefit of performing a positive affect toward your own immune response, tactically, is to receive a positive social immune response in return. you are less likely to provoke pity, consternation, and anger. doing this becomes easier when you can normalize asking for accommodations in your workplace based on a written diagnosis, rather than having to show and tell how you feel. the diagnosis is an account of yourself from a doctor, someone who is only passingly familiar with your life history, and whose response to the affective crisis the diagnosis provokes can seem indurate, even dismissive. but using that physician’s immune response of writing a note as an institutional act of regulatory compliance that makes you one of a biosocial class of people who are disabled can earn you a pass at qualifying for individualized accommodation. we characterize these approaches as facets of tolerance, the product of a “healthy” immune system exchange, according to the model of the immune-system-as-networkedself, which is compelled to graciously accept institutional tolerance and care to survive. we underscore the irony of this approach, and highlight its basis in a 1960s psychology of liberalism. the immune system is profoundly a site of alienation in this scenario. it is here that we get angry at health discourse for taking the modern tenet of the immune-system self to the extreme of attributing intentionality, motivation, and the innate ability to identify (d)anger to a system they admit they do not even understand, and which is rarely understood to incorporate affect in its social context—except as a tolerance or helping mechanism in which accommodation is reduced to regulatory instrumental (in)tolerance strategies in the service of the heterogenous system. we move on to special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 21 our second account, in which tomkins’s affective spectrum of anger-rage features prominently as something that must be thusly contained. narrative #2: lyme time: anger-rage lyme disease made me angry. really angry, with senseless bouts of rage that recurred for months on end. or, to put it more accurately, what made me angry was not lyme disease, but bartonella, an intracellular parasite that possibly entered my bloodstream through a bite that i never felt or saw, from a tick that i never felt or saw. the facticity of my bartonella infection and its role in my experience of symptoms associated with lyme disease and post-lyme autoimmune syndrome is something that my doctors confirm well into this experience. lyme disease screening tests are in fact blood tests that look for and measure antibodies against bacteria. like lupus, lyme has no definitive test. bartonella and borrelia are genera of bacteria carried by any number of flies, ticks, mites, fleas, and small animals that serve as hosts to these insects. they are associated with various diseases: bartonellosis, cat scratch disease, and lyme. while not classified as an autoimmune condition in itself, bartonella is understood to cause an infection that is part of the immunological spectrum of post-lyme syndrome.11 in my case, a bartonella infection produced a state of mind that i didn’t imagine possible, with episodes of pure rage towards anything and everything, with no cause at all that i can identify, beyond this biochemical factor of an infection discovered well into my year of rage. in the months before the covid pandemic, i began to lose weight. my body ached, and i was spiking fevers and contracting various influenzas in the middle of summer, out of sync with their peak seasons. my joints were inflamed, the swelling and pain of the inflammation impairing my mobility. i could no longer lift my t-shirt above my shoulders. i experienced migraines, nausea, and the sick spell of an insomnia that keeps you at two hours of sleep maximum in any given twenty-four-hour period. there was a tightness in my throat, a response that much later would be diagnosed as mast cell activation syndrome, a condition in which white blood cells in connective tissue are overactive in their release of inflammatory mediators, causing severe allergy symptoms. foods and beverages i normally tolerated caused my throat to constrict. this, along with the nausea, made eating a major challenge and a very real risk. i also experienced bouts of anger. it would seem logical to say that my anger was provoked by my physical state—that i was angry about the unfairness of becoming so chronically impaired. but it was not, and i was not. in any case, there was no space to think about the cause. the anger was there, along with these other symptoms, pure in its abstract form. in writing about anger, tomkins (2008b) speaks of “reasons” (a word he puts in quotes) as paradoxical, coincidental causes of anger. if circumstances were related to my anger, they special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 22 were experienced as coincidental to it, simply co-occurring with it. they were no more a cause of my anger than they were a product of it. the reader may rightfully ask, how do you know this? my response is that, at this point in time, the evidence points to bartonella as the common causal factor, and to anger as a part of the syndrome that comprises the lyme to postor chronic lyme spectrum. this is the conclusion i came to over the years that followed acute infection. cognitive conditions are now established as possible sequelae of lyme disease, with the term lyme neuroborreliosis entering the medical literature with increasing regularity with respect to acute disease (regarded as treatable in early stages), but approached more generally with skepticism with respect to “nonspecific” and post-acute symptoms such as chronic pain, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, and emotional volatility (rauer et al. 2018).12 my experience of anger in the acute time of this experience was as a pure affect state in which i did not experience insight (feeling) or reflection over past or future times of similar experiences (emotion). it was indiscriminate—against everyone and everything in its path. it had no intentionality, only coincidental targets. tomkins (1981, 448) has written that cognition without affect is weak but affect without cognition is blind. his comment is striking because it associates affect with power, and cognition with ethical deliberation and feeling. my account demonstrates the continuity of chronic as chronic, and as an indiscriminate immune action. response would be the wrong word, as there was no apparent trigger. this was a cognitive state that was not particularly psychosocial. the brain is somatic, and chemical impacts, and their temporality, are poorly recognized and understood. and yet the disgust, horror, fear, and shame with which i and those around me responded to my anger was very much psychosocial, evoking the obsolete model of horror autotoxicus (ehrlich 1900). anger is an unexamined component of the longstanding immune system self/other model. the self is understood not simply to feel disgust at itself, but to target aspects of interiority and attack them indiscriminately. that is anger. tomkins wrote, “distress is the affect of suffering, making of the world a vale of tears…but anger is problematic above all other negative affects for its social consequences…of all the negative affects it is the least likely to remain under the skin” (2008b, 687). an entire volume of affect, imagery, consciousness is devoted to anger and fear.13 in my episodes of anger, i was ready to strike at those closest to me, loved ones and friends and family—people with whom i felt safe. there was no clear trigger or limit that i could feel at the onset of each episode. anger would emerge, full-force and ready to pounce on whoever was near. and here i reference tomkins on joy to say that i think part of me came to enjoy the swell of energy that accompanied this anger. these outbursts offered a brief suspension of an otherwise rotting feeling, providing a social bond, albeit one that was not so joyful for my patient interlocutors. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 23 i didn’t notice my behavioral changes at first. after demanding a lyme test and receiving a diagnosis via a positive blood test, an infectious disease specialist at a well-regarded new york hospital began a first try at treating me with doxycycline. the two-tier lyme blood tests check for the presence of antibodies that respond to, among other things, the bacteria that cause lyme disease. availability of the test is mixed, depending on the willingness of the healthcare provider to entertain the possibility of lyme disease in the absence of physical signs, such as a bite (recall the imagined animal bite sign on the face of the lupus sufferer). often tests will not be administered if there is no telltale tick bite or characteristic rash. on the matter of tests, marvin fritzler et al. (2021) explain that some autoimmune disease tests are “offered as ‘research use only (ruo),’ some as ‘laboratory developed tests (ldt),’ some enter health technology assessment (hta) pathways, while others are relegated to a ‘death valley’ of autoantibody discovery and become ‘orphan’ autoantibodies. those that achieve regulatory approval are further threatened by the business world’s ‘darwinian sea of survival.’” lyme tests belong to the latter category, with the center for disease control’s 2021 guidelines on testing and diagnosis making clear the pervasive skepticism of test results as definitive indications of disease compounding the general reticence of medical care providers to agree to administer the test without physical evidence of a bite. i took the potent antibiotic offered to me for twenty-one days. in retrospect i know this to have been a woefully inadequate and misguided treatment for my infection, particularly late-stage or symptom-onset, as lyme literate medical practitioners have been arguing for years (see, e.g., embers et al. 2017). a year later, after symptoms had not abated and under the care of a naturopath, i then began a series of treatments with chinese skullcap, japanese knotweed, cryptolepis, homeopathic antibiotics that would begin my real attempt at recovery. lyme disease is transmitted by spirochetal bacteria, and spirochetes are very hard to kill. other spirochetal diseases include syphilis, called the great imitator due to the wide array of ailments that present in each patient. that nickname now belongs to lyme. a reaction in the body is produced when antibiotic treatment is potent enough to induce the die-off of these corkscrew-shaped bacteria, generating a storm of endotoxin-like products into the bloodstream. named after karl herxheimer, one of the dermatologists who observed this reaction in patients who were given mercury to treat syphilis, herx reactions are a massive rejection response that can last hours or days, though my experience suggests their symptoms can have a much longer duration. the drug triggers the body into a disgust-performance of expulsion. herx reactions are a performance of the immune self expelling the enemy. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 24 this performance is heightened by cognitive changes. occasionally, spirochetes make their way across the blood-brain barrier. this has been shown to be a possible cause of severe insomnia and mood disturbances, as has the bartonella bacteria itself. thus, the person under treatment for lyme is at double risk of a period of sepsis and related abstract, non-provoked episodes of emotional instability. mine leaned toward rage. one night in particular made this instability and its abstract form quite clear. on this occasion i experienced what i would describe as a manic episode out of the blue. it started with a pay-per-view boxing match between a youtube star and a former world champ. i felt anger mounting as i watched that match. that anger, directed both at the sport of boxing and its reduction of the fight to mere social media spectacle, was overpowering and truly bizarre. i had been neither a fan nor a critic of boxing before. i am not really sure why i tuned in. but there i was, consuming the match and finding my anger ascending, singularly settling on the match as my coincidental “cause” simply because it was there. this anger came to visit most evenings for the next year, when it would be directed at whatever and whoever happened to be co-present with me. just as, in tomkins’s narrative of distress, the infant does not know “why” they are crying, or that it might be stopped, or how to stop it, so my anger unfolded as an abstract condition of my disease. confronted with a deep and enduring challenge that could not be mitigated, i had no immunity to anguish. i developed a new personality component, and violent action ensued. during the course of lyme treatment, i moved from an apartment on the east coast to my childhood home, where i lived with my parents. this was not an unusual transition for my demographic: young adults pursuing higher education. the slightest disagreements in view or perceived slights would become the coincident cause of my outburst of rage. thus i behaved, mostly in the evenings, with my parents, family, and friends—those closest to me who met me with unconditional love. in the throes of anger, i felt as if i was kicking down the gates of hell when in reality i’d done absolutely foolish things—stomped my foot through a styrofoam board on the floor, for example, gaining a severely sprained ankle that lasted six weeks. the anger had me red hot and looking for an opening out of my infected body, which i experienced psychologically as decaying, rotting—and which i struggled to stomp to life through whatever target for displaying my anger was closest at hand. this was exhausting, and it simply wasn’t “me.” but it was a primary survival mode through months of reactions i associated, in retrospect, with prolonged herxing and the cognitive impact of the bartonella infection. i understand my anger and my bacterial load to have worked in concert, though perhaps inversely. while herxing, i felt every nerve ending in my body at once. when the herxing was at its peak, i would become so exhausted from the special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 25 unending inflammation and internal fire control as to have no energy left for feeling. then, as the inflammation died down, it was rage that came back, in full force, replacing a wave of fear that preceded it. the relationship of fear to anger in immune system rage should not be discounted. the feelings during these episodes were of constant alarm, and everyone became an enemy i needed to fight. it made me feel alive, following days with a dull and monotonous routine of meds, rest, and ice, to fight. anger fleshes out the inadequacies of the spirit and the perceived world. when herxing was linked to fear and disgust, leaving me immobilized on the couch, tightly wound into a fetal position as i shed toxins and drowned in nausea, anger swooped in with my body’s high-frequency trading mechanisms, capitalizing on my arbitrage in mood to supercharge my endorphins. what a corrupt economy of the body, i think now. both states were affectively impoverished, offering too much or too little motivation to feel the affect. the cooccurrence of herxing and anger deserves consideration beyond the idea that herxing is causal and anger reactive. herxing in/as anger is a concept worth examining beyond the frameworks of analogy and co-occurrence. after some time spent ricocheting between these states, from lead-bound to hot air, my faculties for feeling, the state after pure affect, began to step up. first came the activation of childish pride, in the form of megalomaniac selfproclamations: a last ditch effort at narcissistic vanity from my exhausted mind. i felt righteous about my anger. i had just gone through all of this suffering from illness, day after day submerged in miasmas of medical literature, litanies of medical procedures that i had to show up for and monitor and track, to show my progress. the rage began to have intentionality. it was now directed at doctors, healthcare systems, and insurance companies that made every act an effort in overtime. my body’s efforts had resulted in outcomes. lyme disease is an invisible illness. rage made it visible. what symptoms are rendered manifest and believable before the medical establishment is a constant negotiation. they are conditions for a communal rage that falls and is received unevenly across racialized, gendered, and socioeconomic lines. one discriminatory theory that skews diagnosis is that affluent households are regarded as being at greater exposure risk for lyme due to their location in suburbs or periphery areas closer to forested lands and the ticks that inhabit them, tilting research sample populations and credibility towards those that are white and wealthy. doctors are often not trained to distinguish the telltale erythema migrans “bull’s-eye rash,” an earlystage indicator of a lyme infection, on patients with darker skin tones, leading to disproportionate late-stage progression and complications of the disease with its myriad of affects in people with darker skin. after the period of herxing, i was glad to have killed off the bartonella, and to be able to focus on rest and recovery rather than managing active disease. i can’t remember any specific instance where the tipping point of a relatively normal day suddenly switched into rage mode for the first time, and just the same i don’t special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 26 remember when anger’s unyielding grip let go. what does remain is the memory of a searing vision of having something, anything, in your crosshairs, a recall of the unrelenting agitation that caused me to chase people from rooms, and a desire to not be that person again. this comes very close to tomkins’s description of the person who experiences loss having had no prior script for successfully negotiating a severe stress through the iceberg that is their mass structure, their memory bank of distress (2008a, 330–31). to accept that my lyme disease had given way to a “post” or “chronic” syndrome—that certain symptoms may very well be with me for the rest of my life, and to have reached a point of accomplishment by having put the most acute phase of recovery behind me, opened a deep speculative hole of “what ifs.” reflection on experience (emotion) was a stress trigger to be avoided. as rage gave way to shame, i repeatedly realized that the only support i had had come from my family and my community, many of them people with autoimmune illnesses with whom i’d shared experimental treatment anecdotes and medical timelines online and while hooked up to iv units together in the second waiting room, that room beyond the front desk, where we, with our weakened immune systems, were kept well apart from other people waiting for covid testing and treatment. if distress is a process of tearing apart, then we can apply this term to the separation of people with long covid from those of us who carry other designated or adjacent, overlapping autoimmune and impaired immunity conditions for some time, and who have come to terms with achronicity and its affective cycles. at the very least, the cognitive data on post-covid conditions suggests that learning from lyme holds value for people with long covid. the terrible irony is that whereas long covid is widely accepted as a diagnostic term, even as it is poorly understood, long lyme remains subject to skepticism, medical disparagement, and humiliation. narrative #3: anti-dppx: disgust and humiliation my house was a sanctuary during the first pandemic spring. house wrens took up residence outside the window in a nook where i had set up my zoom teaching office. i worked in view of their nest as eggs hatched and fledglings were fed. when the birds left the nest, i opened the window wide to let in the warm spring air. that was not all i let in. tiny insects were now crawling on the papers on my work table. occasionally i swiped one off my leg or keyboard as i ignored the problem for a day or two, trying to meet a deadline. but then one of my dogs, who slept by my feet in the nook, began to cry. elderly and having lost the motor capacity to scratch, he struggled to relieve what appeared to be an agonizing itch. i spent time on the floor with him, trying to ease his discomfort. within days, i too experienced a terrible crawling sensation and awoke one day to find my body covered in bites. bed bugs, disgusting, i thought as i made an appointment with my doctor and proceeded to have my house treated with pesticides, wondering special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 27 how this could have happened despite having no guests or travel for three months. i was terribly concerned about my pets and my own health, but i also felt no small degree of disgust and embarrassment about my body and my home. an inspector from a fumigation company asked me to raise my shirt and show him my bites before agreeing to treat my environment. but even after i had followed all the treatment protocols to for my pets, my home, and my body, the dog continued to scratch and cry and my bites and the rash escalated, covering my legs, arms, and torso, and reaching even my face and hands. i simultaneously developed a mysterious fine motor tremor and a gastrointestinal infection that left me dehydrated and weak. the early lesions appeared not to be healing. with the continuing bites, which occurred even in the absence of visible evidence of source, i experienced a distressing sensation on my skin that reached epic proportions at night, leaving me in anguish that was amplified by the heightened stress induced by the steroids prescribed to bring down my immune response. after initial treatments with permethrin, a common treatment for the bird mites my doctor had assumed were the culprits, had failed, i was referred me to a dermatologist, a new doctor who saw me in office during pandemic months when most patients were seen online. in the first visit, the dermatologist also assessed my rash as an immunological reaction to bird mite bites and prescribed a new dose of permethrin and various ointments to quell the itch. when i returned uncured in a follow-up, the dermatologist had me seen first by their resident, who gave me a cursory examination and left the room to deliver a verbal report to the dermatologist. the dermatologist then entered the exam room, announcing as they walked in that they were surprised to see me back. i should have been cured by the treatment i’d been prescribed. the student’s assessment, they explained, followed a pattern they often saw: a case of actual infestation and immune response to bites is followed by delusional parasitosis, a psychological disorder in which people who undergo a parasitic infestation believe they continue to be attacked after the crisis is over. they immediately referred me to a neurologist. this startled me. whereas in the previous visit they had examined me, provided a diagnosis of insect bites and prescribed treatment, now they appeared annoyed and disgusted. they spoke in a manner that was strained, and which i perceived to be both patronizing and imperious as they struggled to explain the psychological pattern of behavior they “often saw in other patients.” standing as far from me as was possible in the small exam room, their face assumed a comportment of mild contempt, an affect that tomkins describes, in his third volume, as a combination of dissmell, the protective comportment of spitting out something toxic, and anger (tomkins 2008b, 22). whereas before the dermatologist was interested and caring, invested in providing a cure, now, when the cure had not worked, they acted annoyed and dismissive, and spat out words invalidating my symptoms, special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 28 including the physical ones. they insisted the many bites, including those in the middle of my back where i could not reach, must in fact be self-inflicted wounds. adam frank and elizabeth wilson (2021, chapter 6) remind us that for tomkins, whereas shame is the affect of sociality, contempt is the affect of hierarchization. they quote tomkins: “contempt strengthens the boundaries and barriers between individuals and groups and is the instrument par excellence for the preservation of hierarchical, caste and class relationships” (tomkins 2008b, 216). i recall feeling a vague sense of fear in response to the doctor’s obvious annoyance verging on anger and disgust at my ongoing physical state. if they could not help but spit out my experience, how would i get treatment? their response was, in turn, a danger to me. now it was my turn to feel defensively angry. when i objected that they had not even so much as examined me, and asked how they could levy a psychiatric diagnosis without an examination of the skin evidence i was there to show them, a dermatologist, to assess, they raised their chin and left their post near the still open door, approached my body where i was sitting on the examining table, and told me to open my examination gown. as i held open the garment, they tilted their head back in the classic posture of dissmell and, without touching me, wrinkled their nose, pointed, and gestured to the resident to take a few biopsies at this and that spot. explaining to me that they were conceding to a biopsy and testing to humor me (they expected no evidence of arthropod toxins would be detected by the lab, they restated), they then left the room without further word. clearly they were sick of me. what was abundantly clear was that the dermatologist was disgusted, or more accurately dissmelled, by my unhealed flesh. my heightened state of anxiety, my ragged sleepless face, and my newly gaunt body seemed to trigger in them a kind of expulsive anger that i had brought a danger upon myself through delusional thinking and self-attack. my anxiety and my disgusting body, i insisted, were not the product of psychopathology, i did not have the mechanical means to produce these lesions—but they did not agree. i was confounded by their danger response. writing about the biosocial, frank and wilson (2021) note that displaced anger (which we read as danger, difference plus anger) confounds all parties. confound means both surprised and mixed up. my anxiety was experienced as displaced by a doctor who was certain i was in fact cured of a heightened immune response to insect bites and was now self-inflicting wounds due to elevated stress. startle is a reset button, electrical—it makes things happen. like laughter and rage, it is contagious. but what happens when the startle button is held down for too long? while i waited for the outcome of the punch biopsy, the circle of confounded feelings grew. i saw the neurologist to whom the dermatologist had referred me. as incensed as i was that a dermatologist would deign to offer a psychological diagnosis, based on a verbal report of the resident and without examination no less, i figured no harm would come from following through. a psychological special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 29 disorder would have been welcome, in fact. imagining this problem would have been far better than the reality of having to address a disgusting and recalcitrant physical cause. the neurologist was, like the dermatologist, new to the clinic. their affect was that of interest, which i appreciated greatly, responding in kind to their ideas and answering all of their questions. after some motor tests and a short interview, they offered, with great excitement, that they believed i may have a rare autoimmune condition, anti-dppx encephalitis. when i met their statement with a blank stare, they offered a list of criteria, most of which i met (tremor, gi disturbance)—except for one hallmark sign: mental disturbance. they then offered, with mounting excitement, a description of a 2016 film based on a novel about this rare neurological syndrome. i would need a spinal tap to confirm, of course. but the decisive factor to justify that test, they said, was proving that my bites were self-inflicted, the result of a delusional state of mind. at about this time i lifted my shirt and held out my arms, not for the first time, and asked the neurologist to simply take a look at the many little wounds. how could anyone produce this configuration of inflamed bites by self-infliction? surely they did not think i was subjecting my body to hundreds of tiny puncture wounds, each forming with the same general shape and development of inflammation and (by this time) scarring pattern. they avoided the question, commenting with an expression of care that people did strange things in states of mental instability. if it turned out that i did have anti-dppx syndrome, this would be an important case for their practice; the condition was still regarded as rare. i was okay with this pursuit. the neurologist was clearly sharp. if i had this rare condition, i wanted to know. but in the week that followed, they hounded me with notes on my university medical center’s app, probing for evidence of my (in)sanity. their excitement was acute. they asked for contact with my friends and family members to confirm their hypothesis. i mentioned that i was in pandemic isolation and therefore not in contact with many people. i suggested we wait for the pending pathology report on the punch biopsies as a source that would provide them with the needed proof that my wounds were no self-inflicted, but they brushed it off, saying the dermatologist was certain the pathology report would be negative. they became quite insistent, adding to the sense of distress and anxiety i was already experiencing from the bites, exacerbated no doubt by the prednisone. at the end of this grueling week, i received a phone call from the dermatologist. i’m very sorry, they said. the diagnosis of delusional parasitosis was wrong. your pathology reports are consistent with arthropod bites. at this point i found this result to be great news, as i was no longer feeling sanguine about the spinal tap the neurologist had scheduled for me, based on them now clearly mistaken special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 30 diagnosis of a rare autoimmune encephalitis. i asked how to proceed. “get an exterminator and clean your house,” they advised before terminating the call. tests that followed with a gi specialist confirmed an e. coli and, later, a small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (sibo) infection. denied further diagnosis (such as a lyme test, which could have revealed a possible bartonella or borrelia infection), i embarked on a regimen of environmental, dietary, and pharmaceutical treatments, following the advice of members of a group i’d met online composed of people undergoing similar circumstances. the range of issues and outlooks in this group was broad, and i followed what i would describe as the most skeptical and conservative path, resolving the array of problems, including the infection and the immune system reaction, over many months. my assumption, not proven because my doctors refused to order the necessary blood tests, is that i contracted a bacterial infection from bites from the mites that entered my home through the opened window after the departure of the house wrens from the nest outside. having regularly handled and removed abandoned nests before with no ill effects, i surmised that the lowered immunity of my sick and elderly dog, and my own immune system being compromised by the dual infections, left us vulnerable to an insect that is, after all, everywhere outdoors. the experience triggered distress, disgust, shame, humiliation, fear, anxiety, anger, dissmell, and—here is the organizing principle—interest. what got me through this experience and allowed me to come through on the other side without offing myself, a feeling shared by my colleagues here, by manguso, and perhaps by others reading this who are dealing with something that causes immunological torment and upheaval with no end in sight, is interest in the unfolding of medical and self-treatment as i joined a support group and addressed the conditions, environmental and bodily, through the guidance of others who have been through the same ordeal. without this shared experience and the ability to co-produce and co-perform affective transformation with the community of achronic “sufferers” who shared treatment strategies, stories of misfortune and loss, macabre jokes, and tactics for respite and relief, i would not have been able to tolerate the distress caused by the bioaffective muddle of feeling and fascination to which i was subject in the medical care of the dermatologist and the neurologist. anger carries difference. tomkins characterizes it as toxic and to be avoided. anger is distressing in part because it is forbidden in a culture of tolerant inclusion. my bites were angry, and therefore not tolerated. distress about other affects, tomkins tells us, is an archaic infantile taboo ignored by psychoanalysis. the infant is restrained from doing things that might be self-injurious. the child who pets a dangerous animal is punished and warned. the childlike adult who imagines themselves to live in harmony with insects and animals, who refuses pesticides and harsh cleaning products, is subject to ridicule and skepticism, or to special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 31 approval for their tolerance. moral responses to lifestyle choices amplify the stress of zoonotic conditions, the reality of which remains subject to skepticism and disbelief even among veterinarians, who are amongst their most frequent human sufferers. tomkins writes of the benefits of going “no affect” when one’s distress or anger are likely to generate further distress, in the form of humiliation, punishment, or censure by “the parent.” when the neurologist pressed me for family contacts, they were intensely excited, seeking to find a rare condition, to the point that they were willing to walk the line between ethical and unethical intrusion. their interest and excitement (positive affects) led them to subject me to shame. my response to these excited demands was intensification of distress and, by the end of the week, consternation bordering on anger. i spit them out, shutting down communication with them, realizing that this was the only way to end this chain reaction of affects that i was no longer able to tolerate. with apologies, the providers voided the reports in my chart. my danger immune response was successful. i was able to get past the press of their sense of (d)anger and its provocation of my own feelings of self-disgust, self-contempt (shame), and humiliation, as well as the disbelief and disgust i similarly faced from others, only because i gradually became engaged in affective and practical exploration of the mysteries of this (d)anger elsewhere, with interest and action sustained around a community that acknowledged the reality of zoonotic transmission with humor and which offered self-treatment and self-management guidance without the moral (in)tolerance paradigm, and with plans and situated actions organized around performative encounters with the reality of a world in which parasites have become a routine occurrence we must adjust to living with. the queer art of living with immune system failure requires shared experience-based knowledge, humor, and tactical science, not (in)tolerance. the cruel optimism of the institutional cure economy demands tolerance of a comportment of care in the form of treatment protocols that stubbornly cling to the stigma of foreign danger and the horror of dirty infectious things. to date, only eighty autoimmune diseases are formally classified and many care providers remain skeptical about their causal agents, their chronicity, and their recurrence, as well as their etiology and “nonspecific,” non-acute cognitive and physical components. contempt is rampant and skepticism is both legion and contagious. while the source of the intensity of my immune system’s response to insect bites remains inconclusive (my doctors refused to administer a lyme test despite my dog having tested positive and been treated for tick disease), i found myself able to tolerate the condition of living in the achronical biosocial state of crowd-sourced autoimmune experience through group self-care, and to find routes to cure in this context in which (d)anger was destigmatized, recognized as the pervasive and banal thing that it is. the sequelae of shame around institutional stigma, however, is something we all share as we endure our respective experiences of post-traumatic stress in the achronic time of medical (in)tolerance. special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 32 conclusion our intention has been to bring forward a range of concerns about autoimmune affect and (in)tolerance. one of these concerns is the biopsychosocial mangle in which emotions emerge acutely and are later described ambiguously, in diagnosis, as a bio-psychological response to a pathogen (or illness associated with it), and as a co-occurring, self-intolerant condition—a delinked, irrational emotional response. as well, we described the temporal experience of intermittence and recurrence as achronical characteristics of chronic autoimmune disorders and feelings, folded into patterns of symptomatology. in many disease narratives, diagnosis is described as a goal or a climax after which feelings and their motivating sources change. it feels better to know, one would think. anxiety is replaced by relief and, perhaps, determination to follow a new path to cure. in our narratives, we perseverate on the experience of living with and through speculative and retroactive diagnoses that forced reverse speculation, the rereading of one’s past life, and which, rather than affirming a future in which a known condition and its way of life will always be present, generates skepticism about the thingness, the autonomy, of what we “have.” we insist on the value at this moment in time of living with ambiguity in the affective mangle of autoimmunity rather than living with the flawed model of autoimmunity as a navigable system in which an immune self is replaced by a paranoid system of conquering unknown dangers. immunodeficiency and ai syndromes, understood as “post” acute conditions, make plain the cruelty of optimism that accompanies narratives of recovery and cure. these conditions are produced through an organizational arrangement of individuals, data, and time. that the present pandemic times in which we live will become achronically endemic, and that our bodies will harbor the viral matter and impacts they gleaned along the way, is a reality long understood and experienced by people with hiv (an immune deficiency syndrome) and autoimmune syndromes ranging from the widely recognized (such as lupus) to those cruelly subject to skepticism (such as post-lyme), as well as those widely believed to be going undiagnosed, or those having been missed or mistaken as rare (such as antidppx). why medicine wants to seek out rare danger in something as dramatic as anti-dppx encephalitis while refusing a test for the equally devastating but less novel syndrome of post-lyme is a matter for another time, as we chose instead to take up our experience narratives, providing autodata that we believe will, in time and across other disjointed stories about affective experience in the time of autoimmunity, provide the empirical base for eroding endemic (in)tolerance on the matter of feelings as interconstituents of autoimmunity as a social condition. frank and wilson explain that tomkins offers a “disarmingly concise characterization of the negative affects as inherently unacceptable” (2021, 61). experienced as punitive, their toxicity requires control. “all the negative affects special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 33 trouble human beings deeply. indeed, they have evolved just to amplify and deepen suffering and to add insult to the injuries of the human condition” (tomkins 2008b, 111). when your body is angry at itself and you can’t fix it, you have to find means to produce self-tolerance, and affect is key. affect is the antigen in this model. we need to remember the arbitrary nature of the antigen. a good antigen can go rogue. a bad antigen can be harnessed to cure. perhaps it is time to let go of the coding of affect as negative and positive, so we can grasp the arbitrary nature of the toxic danger that is tolerance. notes 1 we are three historians of art, science, and media, white and middle class. two of us are tenured arts and humanities professors, cis female and over sixty, one straight and one queer. one of us is an arts and humanities graduate student, a unionized teacher who is cis, male, and straight. we identify as people with disabilities living in some relationship to autoimmunity. the link between autoimmunity and artificial intelligence implied in our acronym will be examined in another essay. contact us at aihumanitiesresearch@gmail.com 2 for an overview of models and discussion of the persistence of the self/non-self model, see matzinger 1994; pradeu 2012, 2020; pradeu and cooper 2012; swiatczak and tauber 2020; tauber 1994, 2000. for critical theory, sts, history, disability studies, and medical science studies discussions of these models, see anderson and mackay 2014; chen 2007, 2011; derrida 2003; ferri 2018; haraway 1989; a. martin 2010; e. martin 1994; margulis, asikainen, and krumbein 2011; sengupta 2014; tauber 1994; titchkosky 2015; tsai 2011; wald 2008; and weasel 2001. a sample of the biomedical literature: ahsan 2023; burnet, fenner, and clark 1949; dumes 2020; fritzler et al. 2021; jerne 1966, 1974; lynch and platt 2009; matzinger 1994, 2002, 2022. 3 on anatomopolitcs, see the review of foucault’s use of the term in koopman 2018, esp. 107–8. also see foucault 1977, 177–83; 2009, 243; and adams 2017. on the relay between biopolitics and anatomopolitics, see protevi 2009. on the difference between biopolitical regulation and anatomopolitical normalization, see adams 2017 and tremain 2018. 4 on necropolitics, see mbembé 2003. on necropolitics in “compassionate” care, see lópez 2020. 5 see, for example, matzinger (1994, 2000, and 2022), especially on the matter of danger, and carter (2000) on the immune system as a model for designing a pattern recognition engine, expanding immune computation as a field that understands the immune system as paradigmatically open to learning, a trait viewed as a design asset to be emulated. we are exploring the autoimmune mailto:aihumanitiesresearch@gmail.com special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 34 system’s historical relationship to artificial intelligence in another paper in development. 6 in addition to the works by tomkins cited, we acknowledge frank and wilson (2021) and sedgwick and frank (1995) as canonical sources for understanding the affect theory of tomkins. 7 on artificial intelligence and affect, see wilson 2010. 8 for some of the key feminist sts literature on tissue cultures, see cooper and waldby 2014; landecker 2007; and waldby and mitchell 2006. we do not have space here to develop our argument, building on cooper and waldby (2014) and wilson (2010), that tissue is an affective interface meriting analysis along the lines of tomkins’s understanding of the skin and the face. 9 we acknowledge the difference between immunodeficiency and autoimmune conditions. whereas the former describes lacking or compromised immune power, the latter describes a misdirected active response. previously understood as being exclusive, the two sets of conditions are increasingly recognized as intercausal, co-productive, and not simply co-occurring. as one rheumatology researcher puts it, they are two sides of the same coin (see schmidt, grimbacher, and witte 2018). 10 there is no space to discuss concerns with work on care. we point to andrea m lópez (2020) on care/brutality as a cautionary read in the context of the politics of interdependence (care collective 2020), maría puig de la bellacasa (2011), and the special issues of social studies of science (martin, myers, and viseu 2015) devoted to this concept. we share the sentiment of the edited volume against health (metzl and kirkland 2010) in addressing the affective and physical dimensions of care as a strategy in biomedical normalization. 11 the causality of persisting symptoms in lyme patients is a highly contentious topic in the medical field, and is explored in greater detail in divided bodies, in 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https://www.jstor.org/stable/3810713 special section: autoimmunities in the wake of covid-19 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) ai humanities research group, 2024 42 professors, cis female and over sixty, one straight and one queer. one is a technology and arts and humanities graduate student, a unionized teacher who is cis, male, and straight. we identify as people with disabilities living in some relationship to autoimmunity. the link between autoimmunity and artificial intelligence implied in our acronym will be examined in another essay. contact us at aihumanitiesresearch@gmail.com. mailto:aihumanitiesresearch@gmail.com autoimmunity and affect: tolerance and time in three narratives abstract keywords introduction narrative #1: the unhealing wound: distress and eustress narrative #2: lyme time: anger-rage narrative #3: anti-dppx: disgust and humiliation conclusion notes references author bios template book review    review of dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness by simone browne (durham, nc: duke university press, 2015)    jessa lingel university of pennsylvania jlingel@asc.upenn.edu surveillance studies is having a moment. this is a good thing, because the same socio-political factors that cohere in the study of technology, society, and power are also driving urgent protests surrounding civil liberties, civic participation, and freedoms surrounding individual agency in a post-snowden world.  artists, activists, and academics are variously turning to surveillance studies (and elsewhere – science fiction, for example) a theoretical vocabulary that can both describe and offer tools for navigating structures of monitoring and control. as bossewich and sinnreich (2014) have argued, individuals typically have less information about themselves than the institutions that cater to them through financial, cultural, and social platforms. and given the imbalances between the individuals who produce data and the institutions that control data, surveillance studies helps us to ask, “in what relationship do we live with the technologies that watch us?” with dark matters, simone browne makes two fundamental, intertwined contributions to surveillance studies as a field that is growing in range and significance. her book argues persuasively that surveillance studies consider race fundamentally in its accounting of technologies of control and monitoring, and a historical accounting of the technologies that have been used to monitor racial blackness and subjugate people of color in the united states. browne begins with a narrative of her attempt to gain access, via freedom of information act (foia) inquiries, to cia and fbi files on frantz fanon. the example is apt in its portrayal of the stakes of surveilling black bodies: the incommensurability of lived realities between people who are monitored and those who do the monitoring, and the paradoxical ways in which someone can be surveilled and yet still be rendered invisible. moreover, browne’s foia inquiries tidily illustrate the key tensions of dark matters: the systemization of surveillance as dehumanizing while also being illegible. one could describe browne’s book as an anthology of surveillance as a set of processes, and specifically those processes that are used to monitor, control and restrict the movements and rights of people of color. her examples—lantern laws in nineteenth-century new york, branding as a form of identification, and modern tsa security screening—span centuries of control mechanisms in the united states that are intimately bound up with race. it is a marker of the book’s success that after reading it, it’s almost impossible to imagine a surveillance studies project that is not decidedly attentive to the ways that socio-technical assemblages are shot through with racism and race. importantly, browne also accounts for methods of evading or repositioning surveillance, which she gathers under the phrase “dark sousveillance.” dark surveillance refers to “the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight.… dark sousveillance is a site of critique, as it speaks to black epistemologies of contending with antiblack surveillance” (p. 21). in addition to writing about the socio-technical processes that catalog, control, and delimit black bodies, the cataloging of “dark sousveillance” offers an agenda for coping with and subverting structures of control. the case studies that comprise the core of this book are compelling in their breadth, as is browne’s unflinching attention to technologies of intense cruelty. cultural studies sometimes has a tendency to talk about the social construction of bodies and subjects in ways that abstract the stakes for those under discussion, such as referring to the violence of language or discourse in a manner removed from physical harm. in dark matters, there are no metaphors for such violence, only violence. indeed, if the chapter on branding feels somewhat uneven in its structure, it is perhaps because no abstraction of branding (for example, the relationships between violence and celebrity at work in the careers of successful black men like will smith and michael vick) can live up to the horror of physically claiming people as property through metal and fire. browne doesn’t label her work as a project of science and technology studies (sts), but there is a familiar dynamic of tracing uneven distributions of power across different socio-technical landscapes. for example, browne describes lantern laws in nineteenth-century new york, which demanded that enslaved blacks walking the streets at night use lanterns to stay visible, part of a logic of control enforced by whites who sought to surveil black bodies and, more particularly, to prevent them from gathering.  when, at the book’s conclusion, browne addresses the hewlett packard face-tracking camera that correctly identifies a white woman but fails to detect the face of her black coworker, the historical portrait of policing black people emerges as simultaneously coherent and complex, alternately demanding and refusing to see black bodies while consistently denying subjectivity and agency. i’ve seen the “hp computers are racist” (2009) youtube video cited in a number of papers and talks over the last few years, which is perhaps unsurprising given the video’s immediate illustration of the capacity for artifacts to have racist politics. [perhaps the hp computer is the digital version of robert moses’ long island overpasses (winner, 2006)]. but browne’s use of the video is particularly effective because she foregrounds it in a sustained, discriminatory campaign of illuminating and obscuring blackness. throughout dark matters, the accounting of surveillance processes is frequently coupled with art exhibitions as provocations for identifying and reworking relationships to mechanisms of identification and monitoring. i view this as a means of mitigating an issue that often arises in sts work, which is to critique assemblages of power without providing guidance on how these assemblages could be otherwise. although i appreciate the move to go beyond critique itself to point to possibilities for dialogue and change, i sometimes found the suggestion that artistic projects can interrogate structures of surveillance a little thin. for example, would interacting with “the keeper of the keys,” a machine that reads and provides documentation of but does not archive one’s biometric data, really trigger substantive reflection on one’s relationship to the monetization and marketing of our data? perhaps this discrepency is simply the result of surveillance structures being so deeply integrated into everyday life—between those who are monitored and those who monetize. these differences are so vast as to dwarf any single attempt at intervention. although i began this review by invoking government surveillance, there is a separate but related set of political concerns that makes this book so timely.  indeed, it is impossible to read dark matters outside of a political climate of police brutality and anti-racism activism.  with her provocative review of different episodes in u.s. history in which people of color have been systematically dehumanized and disenfranchised, browne provides a language for talking about technologies of violence and discrimination while also condemning the structures of power that continue to shape the contours of social and economic possibilities for people of color. dark matters is a powerful book, which stems partly from the subject matter and partly from browne’s simultaneously lucid and forceful writing. it is also a book that feels increasingly necessary, helping us to ask not only about the policies, processes and technologies that govern civil liberties, but also about whose bodies and freedoms are most controlled and curtailed. references bossewitch, j., & sinnreich, a. (2012). the end of forgetting: strategic agency beyond the panopticon. new media & society, 0(0), 1-19. winner, l. (2010). the whale and the reactor: a search for limits in an age of high technology. university of chicago press. youtube. (2009). hp computers are racist.  retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4dt3tqqgrm bio jessa lingel is an assistant professor at the annenberg school of communication at the university of pennsylvania. she received her phd in communication and information from rutgers university. she has an mlis from pratt institute and an ma from new york university. her research interests include information inequalities and technological distributions of power.     review essay wartime's "undeniable linkages": feminist studies of everyday militarisms across time and space   review of attachments to war: biomedical logics and violence in twenty-first-century america by jennifer terry (duke university press, 2017); aerial aftermaths: wartime from above by caren kaplan (duke university press, 2018); and reencounters: on the korean war and diasporic memory by crystal mun-hye baik (temple university press, 2020)     gabi kirk university of california, davis gekirk@ucdavis.edu     abstract feminist scholars and social movements have long been important voices against war and empire. yet the era of global "endless wars" stretches behind and before us, challenging both our longstanding intellectual theories of violence and our political strategies for combating entrenched imperialism. this essay reviews three monographs in the emergent field of "everyday militarisms," a new direction forward for understanding and criticizing global war in the past, present, and future. threading connections between feminist science studies, cultural studies, and women of color and transnational feminisms, these texts ask us to more closely consider how elements of war show up in ordinary formations. i highlight how these books and the field of everyday militarisms more broadly makes us question what is understood as feminist work in both theory and method, through their shared and novel feminist theories of temporality. together they open new understandings of ongoing systemic and state violence in the world today and different political paths forward in the face of seemingly intractable conflict.   keywords everyday militarisms, feminist science studies, wartime, cultural studies     in late august 2021 mainstream and social media became inundated with pictures, videos, and stories of the taliban's retrenchment in afghanistan and fall of the us-supported government as the us military prepared to withdraw all troops by august 31. the us invasion of afghanistan after september 11, 2001, was synonymous with the start of the "global war on terror." twenty years later, the war was coming to an end not with democracy for the afghan people—as multiple us presidential administrations had claimed was the purpose of the occupation—but instead with a negotiated withdrawal that allowed the taliban back into power. much of the news coverage focused specifically on the plight of women and children under the new taliban rule, highlighting the need for women's rights activists to be granted refuge in the us and eu, or showing pictures of female us gis cradling afghan babies as they waited for emergency airlifts. speaking the day after the taliban took kabul, president joseph biden claimed the war was unwinnable, not because of us military ineptitude but because the afghan military did not fight hard enough: "we gave them every tool they could need...we gave them every chance to determine their own future. what we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future" (biden 2021). present in president biden's remarks are the familiar gendered assumptions of us empire that runs on the drumbeats of endless wars (even when they "end"): that us occupation started and continued as a benevolent, peacekeeping mission; that effeminized, vulnerable subjects can only be saved by imperial rescue; and that sophisticated militarized technology can conquer recalcitrant populations and landscapes. in the us withdrawal from afghanistan, past, present, and future spun around each other and blurred together—while mainstream media focused on analyzing whether the us military had done too much or not enough, afghans fought for the acknowledgment that they had been living under neocolonialism for successive regimes, which would continue even after direct us occupation ended. critical antiwar and anticolonial scholarship and activism within feminist studies has long unpacked and questioned these assumptions. the end of the war in afghanistan, the "beginning" of the war on terror, highlights how the long shadow of the war on terror has shaped important scholarly and political debates on the gendered dimensions and impacts of historic and contemporary imperialist violence. three recent texts bring a particular resonance and insight to the present moment we find ourselves in, in which militarism blurs the lines between the domestic and foreign: jennifer terry's attachments to war: biomedical logics and violence in twenty-first-century america (2017), caren kaplan's aerial aftermaths: wartime from above (2018), and crystal mun-hye baik's reencounters: on the korean war and diasporic memory critique (2020). these books encompass some of the most exciting themes to emerge in the still-forming field of everyday militarisms, a field that is indebted to, but also exceeds, feminist studies. these texts address numerous gaps in the studies of war and militarism. their focus on the everyday and domestic dimensions of militarism offers a corrective to a masculinist centering of spectacular violence as the only way that empire asserts its power, still common in military history and military studies. the urgency of such work is brought to the fore from the "end" of the war in afghanistan. these three books offer to scholars and activists alike thoughtful fodder on how militarism has persisted and grown, and the points of weakness upon which we may collectively push to challenge its hegemony and proliferation. the intention of this essay is to both highlight the contributions of these three texts and the themes that weave through them, as well as to capture the current moment of field formation of the study of "everyday militarisms." as it has been conceived of by its practitioners, one concern of the field of the study of everyday militarisms is that of practices and theories of the archive; this review essay, chronicling books by three renowned scholars who have helped build this field, serves as an archival analysis of the field's present moment as much as it aims to explore what is in the texts themselves. how and why are feminist studies and feminist scholars particularly well suited to build this field of everyday militarisms? feminist scholarship on war, colonialism, and empire from postcolonial and transnational perspectives have powerfully highlighted the lived experiences of colonized women's experiences of war and imperial violence, troubling the modern assumption of the separation between the domestic and the foreign (e.g., djebar 1993; mcclintock 1995; abu-lughod 2013). so too has feminist science studies, particularly women of color and postcolonial feminist science studies, explored how empire's vested interest has shaped technological innovation and, in fact, the concept of advancement through progress itself (harding 2006; tallbear 2013; subramaniam 2014). finally, there is much work in feminist currents in the interdisciplinary field of critical military studies, which is situated in political science and international relations. critical military studies has addressed similar themes to the study of everyday militarisms, such as how war's technologies and practices complicate gender binaries and feminist ontologies of modern war (clark 2018, 2019), and the co-production of scientific (especially medical) knowledge with practices and frameworks of warfare (howell 2017). however, critical military studies and the study of everyday militarisms remain separate, as evidenced by a lack of cross-citation between the two fields. these three books add to the ongoing conversations in the study of everyday militarisms and feminist studies writ large. they expand what is legible as feminist studies, by offering gendered readings of structures and discourses that are not always immediately apparent as such. baik, kaplan, and terry have disciplinary backgrounds and trainings in gender, sexuality, and women's studies, and have held tenured faculty positions in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies departments. all three authors claim the political and intellectual position of feminist inquiry, especially feminist methodologies, in their book's introductions. yet rarely do these books focus explicitly on women, femininity or masculinity, or queer people as identity categories. whether it is kaplan's study of the eighteenth-century british military survey of scotland, terry's look at anthrax and the threat of biological warfare, or baik's critique of a multimillion-dollar us naval base on jeju island in korea, these books use a feminist method of connecting different domestics transnationally to re-evaluate objects, events, and tropes not normally understood as gendered to reveal new insights about the militarization of everyday life. jennifer terry's attachments to war seeks to understand how empire manifests in discursive and material projects of "care and healing" in our present moment to naturalize and depoliticize violence and war (4). she focuses specifically on biomedical research from 2002 until 2014, during the period of the us wars in afghanistan and iraq bracketed by ostensibly official declarations by the government of the wars' starting and ending of formal hostilities. for terry, biomedicine, which encompasses the "multiplying branches of modern biological sciences in their convergence with medical research, treatment, and profiteering," has a specific role in how it "serve[s] to make excuses for violence" (3) by portraying us techno-imperialism as beneficial for all of humanity. the relationship between war and medicine "perpetuates and elaborates processes of militarization through which war comes to be tacitly accepted as a necessary condition for human advancement" (6). this relationship, the "biomedicine-war nexus" (28), is a force that foments the affect of "attaching" to war, the salvatory promise of violence that, on one hand, acknowledges that war harms and maims, and yet still promises that the "future of humanity" will be improved through biomedical breakthroughs only possible because of war (14). the attachments to war experienced in everyday ways by ordinary people in the us do "not necessarily mean to be in support of war" (15) but emerge just as strongly from what is rejected as from what is yearned for. who will benefit from science's triumphs, and who will be sacrificed for its development? terry traces the "unequal evaluations of life" (20) required for biomedicine's "secular salvation" (18), the biopolitical discourses that justified wounding soldiers psychically and physically and killing and maiming innumerably more iraqis and afghans. the current calculus used to justify the cost of war (not just in money but in bodies and lives), she argues, has "submerged" the "overt racialization" of eugenics in favor of "a language of cost-effective investment about who will lead a productive life" (24) and is therefore worthy of being saved. the book's first chapter thoroughly maps terry's concept of "the biomedicine-war nexus," showing how the "militarization of everyday life" has taken hold (28). terry argues that the transformation of the us into a "total war society" (29) during and after world war ii centered on the building up of the nation as always under threat, and yet able to capitalize from that insecurity. the united states' "apocalyptic orientation toward the future coexisted with a promise of being saved" through the knowledge produced from a state of "insecurity" (32), a promise that hails ordinary people into a role of always monitoring for intrusion, infection, and degradation of the health of the state's "body." the occupations of afghanistan and iraq were thus conceptualized in gendered terms as benevolent, transmuting the violence of war into "healing interventions" that would heal "the disease of insurgency" (37). chapters 2 through 4 chronicle specific biomedical projects that emerge from and foment attachments to war. chapter 2, "promises of polytrauma," details the "cruel optimism" (per lauren berlant) of regenerative medicine, which promised that the massive injuries to soldiers' limbs and organs would give rise to high-tech "miracles" (54), thus justifying their sacrifice and federal spending on biomedical research. terry contrasts the "dispassionate quality" of medical diagnostic terminology to describe the common injuries suffered by afghanistan and iraq war veterans to the "heart-rending portrayals" (62) in mainstream media television programs of patients undergoing regenerative treatments and therapy. in the third chapter, "we can enhance you," terry shows how bionic prosthetic researchers took the afghanistan and iraq wars as "an opportunity to accelerate" their research and offer to the us public a promise that "all bodies would someday have the potential to be superhuman" (90). yet embodied in that promise is a moralizing framework that sorts out the worthy disabled individual who seeks individual self-improvement "by making use of scientific knowledge and technology" (95) from those who are "deemed not worthy of care either because they are blamed for their disabilities or, it is assumed, they have nothing to lose" (96). finally, chapter 4, "pathogenic threats," turns from the feeling of hope and care explored in chapters 2 and 3 to instead the power of the "negative emotion of insecurity" as fostered and "exploited" by biotech and pharmaceutical companies who profited off research into biowarfare and bioweaponry (142). us epidemiology and state efforts to combat disease have always been shaped by racialized and gendered notions of subaltern populations and bodies as vectors for disease. terry argues that the twenty-first-century war on bioterror, as inaugurated by the us response to the anthrax letters at the end of 2001, shifted from a framework of war as an "allegory" of medical intervention to distinctly "define" war as itself a compendium of medical technologies, processes, and interventions (147). like attachments to war, aerial aftermaths looks unflinchingly at the technophilia of modern warfare and seeks to complicate the narrative of progressive development upon which imperialism justifies generations of violence against marginalized populations. caren kaplan pushes back against the predominant "unified technodeterminism of aerial perception" (11) as typically told in histories of the science of aerial views and flight. instead, she traces through history "the violence always already inherent" in both the colonial desire to see all and the "romanticized" resistance to being seen (3). the book is laid out mostly chronologically, analyzing practices and products of aerial views of predominantly european creation, from eighteenth-century surveying and balloon flights to twentiethand twenty-first-century aerial photography and much in between. kaplan asserts that "warfare did indeed link all these practices," yet does not aim to "create a linear timeline" marching "from watchtower to space platform" (30). instead, she uses "unusual juxtapositions" to show "the points of continuity and discontinuity between declared and undeclared wars that take place on the same point on a map or dispersed in time and space" (30). in doing so, kaplan asserts that rather than a unilateral march of development that culminates in an ultimate ability to perceive perfectly, "the history of aerial imagery itself reveals the emergence of 'ways of seeing' that underscore the uneven and varied nature of embodied observation in modernity, as well as the instability of vision's primacy in western culture" (4). guiding kaplan's work is the concept of "spectacular aftermaths," defined as "a hegemonic discourse that deploys imagery to reinforce the division between war and peace, suggesting that state violence is rational, predictable, and confined to a proscribed space and duration" (7). visuality is crucial here, in that visual perception and representation "display 'what has been lost' over and over in a melancholic campaign to remember" in a way that fits well with states' desires to "regenerate certainty and belief in a progression toward a discernible future" (21). kaplan joins postcolonial and women of color feminist historians who read colonial archives against themselves (hartman 2008; stoler 2009; pursley 2019), showing how imperial technologies and their cultural products can nonetheless generate "ways of knowing and being that do not always square...with the cartesian, bounded subject and may not always operate congruently with the aims of empire and its military and security infrastructures" (22). the first chapter, "surveying wartime aftermaths," focuses on the first military survey of scotland conducted by the british board of ordnance between 1747 and 1755. conducted after the suppression of the jacobite uprising, the surveyors "traversed a physical environment replete with a recent overlay of death and destruction" (38) from the freshly completed war on a project of "unification through military occupation" (39). kaplan reads the final survey, however, for its signs of wartime aftermaths, for what can and cannot be sensed in its layers of "paint and ink on paper" (58). in chapter 2, "balloon geography," kaplan examines "balloonomania" and the observations recorded on early manned balloon flights in france and england in the late eighteenth century. she troubles the "absolute binary" between views during flight as only a "joyful" and "aesthetic" experience and the hailing of aerial views as useful for military applications (69). chapter 3, "la nature à coup d'oeil," analyzes the proliferation, construction, and content of panoramic paintings in late eighteenth century england and how viewing in the round helped to create a new form of public consumption of "modern spectacle" (105). as in chapter 1, kaplan shows how even the panoramic scenes of triumphant british imperial military battles did not simply create a "singular worldview" of nationalism, but also contained "palpable traces of other worlds and times" as well as "absence[s] whose enormity supersedes sensibility" (106). the emergence and entrenchment of aerial surveys and photography during world war i and in the interwar period come under scrutiny in chapter 4, "mapping mesopotamia." in chronicling how aerial surveying emerged as a scientific rather than aesthetic practice, kaplan complicates the "dominant narrative [which] emphasized the capacity" of aerial photography "to 'see all''; the fact that such photographs required layers of interpretation shows that this goal "remains elusive, partially achieved" (147). kaplan moves british aerial surveys of iraq to the center rather than periphery of the history of world war i and military science, showing how the specific ways that aerial views had the "desert represented as blank space" (143) built upon earlier orientalist ideologies and interpolated the middle east as a "coherent map and thus imaginable as a region to be controlled" (158) in the modern era. the final chapter, "the politics of the sensible," turns to contemporary aerial photography-as-art, analyzing three series of works that "trouble the boundaries that separate objective science, documentary realism, and auratic art" (182) to show how such boundaries have never been natural but are always policed. in the afterword, kaplan reflects on the contemporary context of the war on terror and the rise of drone warfare that brought her to this project, arguing that the current digitization and "annihilation of distance inherent to air war" in our present moment is "not so much an eruption of something new as an intensification of elements already dominant in us modernity" (208). crystal mun-hye baik shares both terry's and kaplan's concerns with unpacking how militarism has become hidden in plain sight in quotidian materials and cultures in the modern era. this concern has become a major guiding theme of the emergent field of everyday militarisms (kaplan, kirk, and lea 2020), to which this special section in this issue of catalyst also contributes. baik's reencounters aims to "move...away from spectacular forms of militarized violence" and instead examine the korean war as a "suspended seventy-year conflict" (5) that continues despite the cessation of armed clashes in 1953. baik builds what she terms an "archive of diasporic memory works" (6) related to the as-yet-fully-ended korean war, a compendium of oral history projects, performance and video art pieces, documentary and art films, and reflections on conversations she had with various artists, activists, and community members in person and virtually over the course of several years. her feminist methodology offers a linked ontological and epistemological way of challenging "cold war dominant history" (9), a narrative of the korean war that "naturalizes an incremental timeline in which american occupation is recoded as a transitive move necessary for the maturation of 'developing' nations" (11). baik terms this diasporic memory archive as a collection of "aesthetic mediations" (8) that together function as and foster "reencounters," the central theme of the book that gestures towards the cyclical nature of diasporic time and space. "reencounters do not merely destabilize the everyday" but also allow for the fruiting of "alternative iterations of historical time and political possibility" (10). the book's use of "diasporic as a feminist mode of analysis" (24) allows baik to sit with products and texts that go beyond the "canonization of literary texts as the dominant site of cultural analysis among asian/americanists" (23)—readers from diverse methodological trainings can thus find inspiration in varied parts of the book, whether one is looking for performance studies approaches, oral history methods, or critical film and visual cultural analysis. this method also allows baik to argue that the concept of postmemory, well entrenched in memory and trauma studies, "produces discursive gaps" when applied to the korean war; she argues instead that "the korean war is not a hidden afterlife" and actually "remains a tinderbox" (16). exceeding concepts of inherited trauma, reencounters sets to show that "the longue durée of the korean war embeds itself within the 'non-militarized systems'" (17) that koreans on the peninsula, korean/americans, and other diasporic subjects continue to reencounter in everyday life. in doing so, baik centers "diasporic excesses, or non-normative subjectivities and spaces" (8) produced by us empire and shows how diasporic thinking exposes "confused gaps" (13) in global empire that can be broken open, rethought, and remade in the service of justice. each chapter deals with a different "non-militarized system" as viewed through a diasporic memory analytic (e.g., documentary film, oral history, performance art, combinations of these, and more). chapter 1, "militarized migrations," asks how and why us immigration policy and journalistic coverage transformed "korean migrants displaced by armed conflict" into "naturalized american immigrants" (37) and obscured the violent events of us occupation that fomented korean migration—in favor of a story that portrays the us as a benevolent home welcoming immigrants in search of a better life. in chapter 2, "aurality," baik analyzes both the method and content of the intergenerational korean american oral history project, showing how oral history can be used to build political and community power. in doing so, the intergenerational project challenges hegemonic practices of oral history that assume a linear transfer of knowledge from the interviewee to the interviewer (77) and encourages oral history participants (rather than passive listeners) to understand how a story that one might "initially hear as a narrative devoid of 'war content' registers the naturalized sedimentation of militarized violence in the realm of contemporary life" (87). chapter 3, "returns," examines art produced by two transnational korean adoptees to explore the larger phenomenon of the south korean state encouraging korean adoptees to return to south korea starting in the 1990s. baik shows how these aesthetic performances complicate "south korea's attempt to smoothly rehabilitate the transnational adoptee from a surplus figure rendered expendable into a vital contributor to the global and national economy," arguing that the "symbolic and material value attributed to [adoptees]...is inseparable from the destructive dividends of war" (102). chapter 4, "durational memory," focuses on jeju island, off the southwestern south korean coast, which is presented by south korean as both a beautiful natural site for tourism and is home to a new multimillion-dollar naval base built under us-south korean military cooperation (130). baik discusses multiple cinematic and multimedia cultural products that connect contemporary military presence on the island to ongoing histories of violence, particularly the 4.3 massacre, an anti-communist military campaign that killed up to one-third of the island's population from 1948 to 1955 (129-30). the continued militarized presence on jeju island shows how war is a "durational present" not a "historical past" for the island's humans and nonhuman inhabitants (131). baik closes the book not with a traditional conclusion but instead with "an opening," a mix of a closing reflective essay, photo essay, and varied form poems by cristiana kyung-hye baik. in ending on an opening and a series of questions, rather than answers, crystal baik pushes back against the united states' "incessant desire to definitively know, see, and touch" north korea (183), a colonial drive towards definitive knowledge that shapes and is shaped by the unfinished korean war. baik ends on a "mode of refusal" and encourages readers to "consider...how the desire to make transparent and categorize is too often sutured to projects of knowledge that justify conquest, enclosure, and occupation" (185). shared amongst these three books are common themes of the militarization of everyday life, particularly around technology; the diversity of feminist scholarship that includes yet exceed issues of gender; and challenges to normative notions of time and temporality. these books do not simply chronicle how ordinary objects or events have become imbued with military meanings and valences. in fact, many of the objects under analysis are likely strange and unfamiliar to many readers' actual lives: prosthetic limbs and stem cell therapy (terry 2017), or military manuals for drawing and interpreting maps when flying in a plane (kaplan 2018, 160-71). at times, the focus on technology that is definitively not part of normal life for many people around the world may belie the "everyday" dimension of warfare these texts seek to uncover. however, these books do analyze domestic warfare through its association with household or common objects (or objects that have been made common). baik opens the book with an art exhibit on budae jjigae, or "army base stew," a korean comfort food that was originally made with surplus us army rations. kaplan points out how ubiquitous the surveillance technology that allows us to see from above has become in narrative culture and journalistic endeavors. more importantly, however, the authors seek to provincialize and de-exceptionalize the often arcane and coded technologies of wartime, a deeply feminist science project. in doing so, as baik explains, these texts demonstrate how imperial war has always "register[ed] the undeniable linkages between the transnational and domestic" (2020, 39). the three authors all complicate a neat divide between war occurring "over there" and the home front as separate from but still invested in war, particularly through analyses of specific subject identities. we see this in terry's wounded veteran paraded for the domestic public as a beneficiary of and sacrifice for superior technology with universal benefits (chapter 2), and in baik's transnational adoptee who refuses neat designations of "native" or "foreign" identities and thus valuations from both the us and south korean states (chapter 3). contemporary readers who consumed the imagery of crowded airports filled with afghans attempting to flee kabul may feel an uncomfortable kinship with kaplan's new imperial citizen of late eighteenth-century london who became "uncomfortable close to sensing the wars" portrayed as occurring only in distant lands and yet intimately viewed in a panoramic painting (2018, 106). however, terry's and kaplan's choices to focus mainly on us and british imperialisms respectively runs the risk of reinforcing an already strong frame of the emergent field of feminist everyday militarisms as anglocentric. both authors acknowledge this in their text, and there is a great humility and empathy in the way both terry and kaplan approach their own entanglements to wars past and present without excusing or downplaying them. terry's story ends up particularly powerful, as she opens and closes her book with a personal story of familial pain as caused by war to show how all of us can imagine otherwise, outlining in the epilogue the possibilities and limitations of us-based movements for peace. resonances exist between how war has irretrievably changed the path of hers and baik's families both—the texts' feminist analytics help the reader to understand their stories together without flattening them into parallel or equal experiences of violence. students and scholars of feminist cultural studies, cultural geography, and science and technology studies will find much to glean from all three texts. together, they serve as a jumping off point to examine contemporary militarized interventions into individual and collective well-being. terry's final chapter on "pathogenic threats" and bioterrorism feels particularly prescient as the covid-19 pandemic marches on and mainstream media and politicians discuss combatting new pathogens like monkeypox in the language of biosecurity, surveillance, and policing. she warns that the state invests in the narrative that "all bodies are conceived as potentially threatened or threatening, and some more threatening than others" (26)—a warning that accurately describes current escalating attacks on the bodily autonomy of queer and trans people and women. furthermore, all three books share methods and sources that will be familiar and immediately accessible to cultural and performance studies scholars, particularly their close readings of visual materials. yet social scientists, especially those concerned with ethnography and feminist theories of the archive, would benefit from sitting deeply with these texts. geographers, who sometimes prioritize the analysis of cartographic materials to the exclusion of other visual and cultural objects, could find inspiration in strong place-based analysis of other materials, especially kaplan's and baik's embedded in place choices of objects, people, practices, and stories. those interested in community-based history in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and other humanistic social sciences would benefit from baik's feminist methods of oral history that challenge bright lines between political and intellectual work development. baik's chapter 2, "aurality," gives a powerful corrective to oral history frameworks that assume a linear transmission of information from interviewee to interviewer. instead, she demonstrates how "aural history as a critical participatory process" (74) can complicate hard boundaries between political and intellectual work, thus "potentiat[ing] solidarities through and in tension with difference" (72). scholars interested in analyses of everyday militarisms and the domesticity of warfare should similarly encourage themselves to think how the theories and methods used in these texts can be brought in new directions. new work using these books could analyze less-studied imperial formations aside from us and european (particularly british) examples, and build on the strength of baik's work to ask how research in the field can directly contribute to antiwar struggles transnationally. additionally, scholars already concerned with feminist critical military studies who, due to their disciplinary histories and silos, are currently separate from the texts discussed here will find cross-pollination on some of the topics suggested in this essay. for instance, work on the embodied experience of drone warfare conceived of as "remote" (clark 2022) could find much in kaplan's and terry's discussions of the long history of how bodies have been separated out from the technological development of killing technologies, even as bodies are still the target for death and destruction. it is important to highlight the feminist foundation of these three books because in many if not most of their examples, the authors eschew a direct look at formations of gender identity, let alone womanhood. while few would claim that feminist scholarship need be reduced crudely to such binaristic ideas, it must be acknowledged that pressure is often put particularly on junior scholars of color to show their work is "sufficiently feminist" by dealing directly with gender and/or sexuality. terry and kaplan, as prominent scholars in their own rights, offer to an emerging generation the confidence and legitimacy to deal broadly with analyzing materials that may not on their face appear to be within the bounds of gender studies, expanding the disciplinary bounds of what can be considered feminist science studies. reencounters is baik's first monograph, and in it the reader finds a thoughtful challenge to taken-for-granted assumptions in feminist theory and a refusal to reify or re-naturalize identity formations and hierarchies that do not serve to build towards justice and decolonization. baik generously offers feminist "moments of connectivity through relational difference" (185), both when discussing issues of gender and sexuality and beyond them. finally, it is in these texts' approaches to temporality that their most unique offerings can be found. all three books deal with war's past, presents, and futures, and although their empirical analyses give different weights to each, the authors show how living through violence belies and disrupts neat delineations of linear time. kaplan's afterword names the muddied temporal context in which she wrote her manuscript, "a period of persistent yet undeclared war, a war that can be figured in some ways as only as old as my daughter and in other ways reaching back to my grandmother's youth or perhaps even further into the past" (207). the ending of the war in afghanistan, which opened this essay, is one marker among many of a still endless "undeclared wartime" in which official declarations of war's starts and ends blur into the continued militarized violence impacting our everyday lives. the ambiguous temporality of imperial wartime—and of those who survive in its shadow and aftermaths—permeates all three books. for baik, this is best articulated through the concept of "chrononormativity," which she defines as "the naturalized plotting" of individual, familial, and even national development "along a linear trajectory defined by heteronormative expectations" (2020, 38). baik's chrononormativity of the cold war specifically must be named for korean diasporic ways of being otherwise to be recognized as such. this concept of chrononormativity connects well with kaplan's description of how aftermaths do not actually always occur as "after" the event: "for some, the past refuses to remain neatly contained and may roam around in the present or hail the future, folding different times and spaces into an unruly or repetitious mode of emotional life" (2018, 18). palpable in both baik's and kaplan's knitting together of past and present is how imperial violence relies on and reinforces the idea that the past must remain just that—allowing the past to move around in "unruly" ways threatens to bring down the entire colonial house. baik reminds readers that if we "insist...on the animated relationality of past(s), present(s) and future(s)," we can lay bare "how the politicized terrain of remembering underscores a future (or futures) that is not yet determined" (2020, 158). we have the power to collectively determine that future as one that is more just than the present. it also behooves antiwar scholars and activists to heed terry's tales of how militarized technosalvation also promises a better future through "anticipatory" logics, ones which "enlist...the future as a salve for the suffering of the present" (2017, 54). it is not enough to say that militarized futures should be combated because they continue, instead of dismantling, the current inequalities of the present. we must also remain attentive to how capitalism and warfare work together to make the "future invade the present not only in terms of anticipating risks and dangers but also in terms of hoping for better days ahead" (95). references abu-lughod, lila. 2013. do muslim women need saving? cambridge, ma: harvard university press. baik, crystal mun-hye. 2020. reencounters: on the korean war and diasporic memory critique. philadelphia: temple university press. biden, joseph. 2021. "remarks by president biden on afghanistan." white house, briefing room, speeches and remarks, august 16, 2021. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/08/16/remarks-by-president-biden-on-afghanistan/. clark, lindsay c. 2018. "grim reapers: ghostly narratives of masculinity and killing in drone warfare." international feminist journal of politics 20 (4): 602-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1503553. clark, lindsay c. 2019. gender and drone warfare: a hauntological perspective. london: routledge. clark, lindsay c. 2022. "delivering life, delivering death: reaper drones, hysteria and maternity." security dialogue 53 (1): 75-92. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010621997628. djebar, assia. 1993. fantasia: an algerian cavalcade. portsmouth, nh: heinemann. harding, sandra. 2006. science and social inequality: feminist and postcolonial issues. urbana: university of illinois press. hartman, saidiya. 2008. "venus in two acts." small axe: a caribbean journal of criticism 12 (2): 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1. howell, alison. 2017. "neuroscience and war: human enhancement, soldier rehabilitation, and the ethical limits of dual-use frameworks." millennium: journal of international studies 45 (2): 133-50. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829816672930. kaplan, caren. 2018. aerial aftermaths: wartime from above. durham, nc: duke university press. kaplan, caren, gabi kirk, and tess lea. 2020. "editors' letter. everyday militarisms: hidden in plain sight/site." society & space. https://www.societyandspace.org/forums/everyday-militarisms-hidden-in-plain-sight-site. mcclintock, anne. 1995. imperial leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. new york: routledge. pursley, sara. 2019. familiar futures: time, selfhood, and sovereignty in iraq. stanford, ca: stanford university press. subramaniam, banu. 2014. ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. urbana: university of illinois press. stoler, ann laura. 2009. along the archival grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. princeton, nj: princeton university press. tallbear, kim. 2013. native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. minneapolis: university of minnesota press terry, jennifer. 2017. attachments to war: biomedical logics and violence in twenty-first-century america. durham, nc: duke university press.     author bio gabi kirk is a phd candidate in geography with a designated emphasis in feminist theory and research at university of california, davis. microsoft word 238-1513-1nguyen.docx nguyen, l.u. (2018). “this is not who we are”: freedom as moral affect and the whiteness of mutuality. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-10. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © lily u. nguyen. 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license critical perspectives “this is not who we are”: freedom as moral affect and the whiteness of mutuality lilly u. nguyen university of north carolina, chapel hill lillynguyen@unc.edu abstract this paper introduces the idea of freedom as a moral affect to demonstrate the contrasting ways in which different kinds of people expressed, understood, and experienced freedom. through an ethnographic account of a design workshop in vietnam, this paper reveals how freedom as moral affect serves as a cultural fault line that organizes conflicting desires for social relations. moreover, this paper critically assesses the whiteness of mutuality as the ultimate expression of freedom. introduction one hot morning in 2011, a large crowd of vietnamese art students and designers gathered into a large auditorium at the university of fine arts in ho chi minh city. with anticipation and excitement, they waited in the stark white room for the european speakers to begin. the five guests 2 nguyen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) came from belgium, france, and the united states. they were members of a design collective, free/open designers (fod) who were committed to working exclusively with free/open source software.1 their approach to design was informed by a larger ethos of experimentation in freedom that combined the technical, the social, and the aesthetic. as part of their presentations, they wore blue aprons with the words “reclaim your tools.” the aprons indicated their efforts to redefine freedom through technoaesthetic engagements, playing on the metaphor of the kitchen and the cultures of sharing and reciprocity they imagined therein. free/open designers came to vietnam as part of an event called “open design week.” through this, i came to understand the breakdowns across two aspirations for freedom. witnessing this breakdown made clear to me that freedom in the social worlds of software was not a value, not an ideology, nor discourse, but a moral affect. by this, i mean that freedom gives shape to the possibilities of feeling and desire. freedom also establishes an affective limit to the authentication of certain desires over others. from the lens of moral affect, we can ask these questions. how does one come to sense freedom? how does one feel free? and how does one come to know it as something to be desired? freedom as moral affect for the members of fod comprised the pursuit of relations of mutuality through the cathartic communion of creativity. for those in vietnam, the moral affect of freedom was much different. “open design week” was organized by mai-phuong, a vietnamese entrepreneur. she ran a small technology company in her hometown in the mekong delta. the region is famous for its rice paddies, fertile farmlands, and floating river markets. this area stands in rural contrast to the urban cosmopolitanism of places like hanoi or ho chi minh city. maiphuong was not a developer nor a geek per se. instead, she studied marketing at the university. she was energetic, well-spoken, and consistently impressed everyone she met with her affable confidence. during the years of my fieldwork between 2009 and 2011, she played an important role in organizing many of the free/open source software 3 nguyen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) events in vietnam and southeast asia. her interests and passions for free/open source software were not for a love of technological mastery, but for a love of cộng đồng, or “community.” the social worlds of free/open source software opened doors to a world of english-speaking cosmopolitanism in which she could rehearse a professional persona and experience the rushed intensity of encounter. late at night, she would excitedly recount to me the interesting projects she came across, the new people she met. these whispered comments were often followed by additional musings on the possibility of political change in vietnam. in her capacity as a free/open source software enthusiast and evangelist, she was able to travel to conferences and gatherings in the united states, canada, belgium, singapore, and china. through participation in the social worlds of these technologies, she met people from all over the world and these encounters fulfilled a deep-seated desire to overcome the dislocation of where she lived. of this place, she said, “you go up and down this street and you’ve seen it all. there’s nothing here.” i contemplated her dismissiveness as i sat on the back of her motorbike and watched the crowds of teenagers, friends, and families along the shadowy streets. the social worlds of free/open source software provided a space in which people like mai-phuong could rehearse a cosmopolitan identity that permitted them to traverse the "nowhere" of their immediate world. for mai-phuong, freedom was not a technological materialization of values and ideals, but was a sensation and feeling. similarly for other vietnamese developers and aspiring entrepreneurs i met: freedom was an intense and concentrated affect of transnational encounter. at public events, mai-phuong translated freedom into the vietnamese phrase thoải mái, an expression that connotes a sense of relaxation and easy-going comfort. freedom in this regard was the sensation of authenticity without naked ambition in the expansion of horizons. the moral affect of freedom stood in contrast to a long cultural history that viewed transnational relations through the sobering gravitas of colonialism, sovereignty, and independence. the moral affect of thoải mái marked a distinct moment in 4 nguyen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) the tentative present of vietnamese modernity in which young people like mai-phuong experienced that desire for transnational encounter as a release from an insulated geography and heavy-handed history. a part of this feeling of freedom was an emphasis on cultural pedagogy. mai-phuong worked in various projects such as open textile and pattern production. she described these experiences as occasions for learning. “i want to learn more, i want to know more.” moreover, this cultural pedagogy was something she hoped to impart to others. “if just one person finds this useful, then it’s worth it.” more precisely, the pedagogy of freedom did not refer to the acquisition of coding skills; it taught mai-phuong and others how to appropriately desire freedom and hence how to recognize and experience its atmospheres. for maiphương, the feeling of freedom was the frisson of encounter. freedom’s atmosphere included the intensity of cosmopolitan rehearsal as she stood in front of large crowds of people waiting to hear her speak. freedom was the driving sensations of moving onward and upward, both figuratively and literally. mai-phuong had worked temporarily as an airline stewardess for several years to save up financial resources to pursue her freedom projects. she had also constructed a seven-story hotel on her family’s house plot. the building towered over her neighbors and the income she generated from this enterprise financed the pursuits that would give her freedom, projects to which she would return at later stages in her life. more importantly, the cultural pedagogy of freedom comprised an imbibed common sense about a racialized hierarchy that placed vietnam at the very bottom of a long ladder. as we drove around her hometown, mai-phuong continued to point out the various things she saw wrong with the place. one evening, we walked into a shop to buy dessert. as we left with our sweets, i breezily commented on how large the place was, a small kitchen and table occupied a small corner of very large tiled room. she quickly countered my offhand comment by insisting that houses in vietnam were inefficient. she regularly peppered our conversations with complaints like this, describing the multitude of deficiencies she saw inherent to vietnam: corrupt politicians, inept employees, dysfunctional 5 nguyen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) education institutions, toxic food systems, and many others. this pattern of complaint registered the ugly feelings of disappointment and annoyance that are intimately woven into the everyday ambience of modern life in vietnam (ngai, 2009). mai-phuong’s complaints echoed a larger pattern of banter i heard in noodle stalls, tea shops, cafés, and office cubicles. the moral affect of freedom thus offered sensations of traversal that allowed people like mai-phuong the feeling of upward momentum and transcendence. most imporantly, these freedom projects had the larger effect and affect of instructing racialized others how to be and feel in relationship to their worldly counterparts. freedom coordinated and affirmed the feelings and forms of being within a racial hierarchy and taught people like mai-phuong their proper place in the order of the modern world. “this is not who we are” the moral affect of freedom patterns different kinds of desires and different imaginings for social relations. in contrast to the cultural pedagogy of hierarchy for mai-phuong, the moral affect of freedom for the free/open designers collective consolidated desires for relations of mutuality based on a cathartic communion of creative passions. that morning at the university of fine arts, members of fod elaborated on this mutuality through metaphors of domestic care-taking. to emphasize this semantic shift, they wore aprons on which were the words “reclaim your tools.” their design work included the practices of writing source code and developing new programming tools. they imagined themselves as lovingly sharing these digital tokens with colleagues, friends, and other members of their collective, that is, with an extended creative community. they likened such acts of creative communion to preparing and sharing fruit jam, even deploying tropes of familism to reaffirm the kinds of social relations they imagined taking place through their work with freedom and design. the moral affect of freedom for the members of fod was thus a desire for mutuality. open design week made apparent how freedom 6 nguyen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) could organize the patterning of desire toward divergent ends. for maiphuong, this acute search for mutuality and communal belonging contradicted the forms of social hierarchy conferred through freedom as feeling. this contradiction between freedom as hierarchy and mutuality was most evident when mai-phuong insisted that members of the fod provide a technological demonstration for the vietnamese students as part of the workshop. in the large auditorium, the collective’s experimental approach was difficult for both her and me to translate, both literally and culturally. the vietnamese audience had no idea about dingbats. they knew nothing about making fruit jam and its cultures of sharing. there were many moments of confusion like this. during one lapse in audience comprehension, mai-phuong asked the members of fod to take a more pedagogical approach. could they provide a “demo” of the software tools they used and built to teach the vietnamese students? “vietnam is not like europe,” she explained, “it’s more traditional. if people don’t see a demo, it won’t be successful.” maiphuong was well aware that her request ran counter to the creative desires of fod’s members. the exercise of the demonstration was creatively retrogressive, requiring the european designers to instruct the vietnamese students and aspiring designers how to navigate menus, load files, and click buttons. upon hearing mai-phuong’s request, they agreed to do so, but only with a reluctance that eventually gave way to a frustration that lasted for the remainder of their time in vietnam. one member later complained that “this is not what we do, guiding people through with a mouse. we’re not into efficiency. i’m not used to being a teacher.” for another, the position of being a teacher ─ and being in a hierarchically superior position ─ ran contrary to his desire for individual creativity, to experiment and to engage with what he described as “the idiosyncratic and the unexpected.” members of fod struggled to wrestle back control during the remainder of their time in vietnam to satisfy these creative desires. 7 nguyen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) for whom is the freedom of mutuality possible? software’s tenacious power to captivate our imagination resides in the affective field of freedom, in how it impresses feelings of movement, upward and forward, toward transcendence. for the members of fod, freedom was a sensorium of exalted belonging grounded in a communality of creative catharsis. such desires, however, are grounded in a racial privilege of whiteness and invite us to consider for whom such freedom is, in fact, possible. previous scholars have shown us the extensive linked histories of this racial privilege and technoculture more generally. the internet itself was founded on ideals of freedom and universality that assumed whiteness as the default social position for users (nakamura, 2002; senft & noble, 2014). such whiteness has continued through the growth of the internet and social media as ideal “neutral” and “value free” spaces in which hard work and merit alone determine differentiation (marwick, 2013). nevertheless, as these technologies have evolved and changed, the undergirding norms of neutrality continue and have the broader effect of perpetuating and normalizing whiteness as the standard against which racially marked others must define themselves. we see this most visibly in the violent backlash against policies intended to promote inclusion, to bring race and gender diversity to technology corporations and online communities (brock, 2011; gray, 2012). the forced inclusion of people who depart from the norm of whiteness is seen as not only undermining the neutral, universal, and therefore objective space of technoculture but, more importantly, their presence in the name of difference taints and therefore undermines altogether the very integrity of the ideals of merit, neutrality, and universality. in many ways, the kind of freedom desired by fod marked a departure from the kinds of violent heteronormativity we see in other instances of whiteness in technoculture. their use of aprons and metaphors of domestic housekeeping served to frame their design practices within a feminized vernacular. these efforts were based on a 8 nguyen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) larger objection to the masculine repertoires they saw within the free/open source communities more broadly. nevertheless, this feminist intervention into technoculture still perpetuated a form of whiteness by disavowing the kinds of hierarchy that grounded mai-phuong’s desires for freedom. freedom as a form of mutuality is only possible for a privileged few, let alone mutuality through creative techno-labors of design and hacking. members of the free/open designers collective were unable to recognize the racialized quality of their desires for freedom. this hope for a union of equal and authentic selves working in earnest through creative endeavors perpetuated the same false equality that guided the early creators of the internet. free/open designers’ discomfort and final rejection of hierarchy stood at odds with mai-phuong’s earnest desire to feel freedom through them. fod were unable to undertake this burden of having to perform their expertise and privilege. mai-phuong’s desire was for fod to teach her and her vietnamese friends how to join the ranks of modernity’s "now"; fod’s final rejection of this racialized hierarchy was based on the false equality of mutuality. described as “peer relations” in technoculture more broadly, such fantasies for flattened social relations insidiously mask the racialized structures of power that, in turn, naturalize mutuality as a desirable state of social relations. this simultaneously disavows other forms of collective belonging that might anchor ourselves in one another. from the experiences of fod in vietnam, we can clearly see that freedom in this moral affective grammar is neither legible nor possible for racially marked others on the margins of techno-modernity. freedom as moral affect exposes the fault lines of technoculture to reveal the power that freedom affords. moreover, this moral affect poses a pressing ethical and political question: how are we to arrive at each other and collectively be? ultimately, what modes of relationality arise on technoculture’s horizons? 9 nguyen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) acknowledgements the author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their careful and generous comments, the catalyst editors for the support of this collection, and the other authors of this special issue. notes 1all names used here are pseudonyms. references brock, a. (2011). beyond the pale: the blackbird web browser’s critical reception. new media & society, 13(7), 1085-1103. gray, k. (2012). intersecting oppressions and online communities. information, communication & society, 15(3), 411-428. marwick, a. e. (2013). status update: celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. new haven, ct: yale university press. nakamura, l. (2002). cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet. london, uk: routledge. ngai, s. (2009). ugly feelings. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. senft, t. & noble, s. (2014). race and social media. in j. hunsinger & t. senft (eds.), the social media handbook (pp. 107-125). london, uk: routledge. bios lilly u. nguyen is an assistant professor in the department of women’s and gender studies at the university of north carolina at chapel hill. her work explores the cultural politics of ethnicity, expertise, and information technologies in transnational circulation and draws from the diverse fields of feminist science and technology studies, information studies, and asian american studies. her previous scholarship has been published in new media studies, journal of asian american studies, journal of peerproduction, and other venues. she is currently writing a monograph 10 nguyen catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) about the social worlds of software production in vietnam and the intimacies of imitation.       commentary pathogens, precarity, and digital politics of exclusion         radha sarma hegde new york university radha.hegde@nyu.edu     abstract the global covid-19 pandemic has ravaged communities and exposed the inadequacies of social and political infrastructures. the flight of the virus and protocols of shelter have reopened the question of how digital infrastructures are complicit with processes of precaritization and elide bodies already at risk. this essay discusses the need to locate the study of media and technology in the materialities of the precaritized body in order to theorize the politics of systemic exclusion.     keywords pandemic, infrastructure, precarity, exclusion, elision     the flight of a virus and its ability to jump species have ravaged communities and redefined the world. along its necropolitical trail, the virus has repeatedly exposed the inadequacies of social and political infrastructures and brought a heightened awareness of living with other life forms and pathogens that mutate and cross borders. in the name of safety, global publics are being surveilled and tracked through digital modes of mediation, while at the same time, basic services are denied or foreclosed to many due to lack of digital access. without systemic protection and safety nets in place for marginalized communities, bodies are being deemed expendable or remain uncounted or unrecognized. while precarity has largely been associated with the uncertainty and risk that comes with the flexible reorganization of work (standing 2011), it also extends beyond the world of work to encompass other forms of intersubjective life (neilson and rossiter 2005). most relevant to this essay is judith butler’s view that precarity is dependent upon “the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence and absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions” (butler quoted in puar 2012, 170). the pandemic moment has reopened the question of how informational logics and technologies of connectivity are complicit with systems and processes of precaritization whose local particularities are embedded within broader political and economic circuits.   the pandemic, among other things, has shown how technologies of connectivity and digital infrastructures, both in their presence and absence, have accommodated, extended, and accelerated social systems of exclusion. the goal of theorizing an intersectional internet, according to safiya noble (2016), is “to heighten awareness of how global communications infrastructure is not just a site of communications affordance, nor is it made equally and equitably available to all people.” the neoliberal view, however, has been to largely downplay or even ignore interlocking global structures of oppression and regard the emergence of a precariat class as an independent or individual problem, unrelated to systemic or infrastructural concerns. the stable instability of precarity, according to david kergel and birte heidkamp (2019), is defined both through and within digital media. digitality has also effectively enabled the incorporation of precarious life within the circuits of global capitalism (duffield 2019). to certain segments of the population, the pandemic has in fact made the everyday experience of living filled with risk and violence. across geographies, the coronavirus crisis has shown that the volatility of precarious life is tied to a technologized, insular, and untenable vision of the individual and the social.   insularity and perturbations “pivot to survive” is the mantra that institutions have been chanting in order to stay afloat and weather the economic fallout of the pandemic. prompted by the confidence in the power of technology, there is an expectation of smooth continuity with no jerky interruptions during the transition from our pre-pandemic life to the contactless present. the intense digitality of the moment requires individual bodies and things to find ways to be visible and circulate swiftly through virtual pathways to function and survive. the feasibility of these transitions rests on assumptions that include safe and available domestic spaces, access to technologies, technical know-how, and the bandwidth available for internet access. this fresh iteration of the well-established trope of neoliberal individuation facilitates the solidification of remote forms of control, surveillance, and deep social divisions. the required isolation and social insularity during the pandemic are, in actuality, embedded within hierarchically arranged, interdependent, and intersecting social systems and networks. racialized capitalism sustains a continuing amnesia about longer trajectories of inequity and violence. modes of managing the pandemic strategically fold these legacies into newer forms of oppressive datafication. diverse vulnerable communities are placed in impossible situations where all systems—social, political, and medical—contribute to and authorize their precarity.   perturbations or external disturbances to biological systems are accommodated in a readjustment to maintain a state of equilibrium. when social and political systems adapt to make accommodations for volatilities, it is, more often than not, a rush to solve the immediate glitch and restore the illusion of equilibrium. these fixes enable some actors within the system to keep moving and circulating while others are blocked, trapped, immobilized, or suspended in limbo. in more than one context, the pandemic has revealed the extent to which inequities defined along the lines of race, class, and gender are woven into the social infrastructure. in the struggles of the moment, we see particular bodies confined in their precarity and subject to intense surveillance. infrastructures, as abdoumaliq simone (2015) astutely notes, always seem to promise something, and so often it seems as if it is a promise intended to be broken. in the current scenario, certain bodies held in impossible situations of precarity seem to be made available for contagion. while this staggering failure of the social system might reflect an overload or an exigency, it also emerges as a constitutive condition of racialized and networked capitalism.   traveling globally at breakneck speed and conjoining species, the zoonotic pathogen covid-19 has attached the course of the pandemic to a trail of other already existing social crises. from the start of the pandemic, scanning the journey of the virus through digital maps and dashboards flickering with global information has become a daily media ritual. the manner in which the virus descended and attacked bodies set off different alarms about dysfunctional and failing social systems worldwide. with the policing of borders and populations, the dislocation, subjection, confinement, and exposure experienced by precariously positioned populations have been progressively escalated by data-driven infrastructures. the global flight of the virus and protocols of shelter served as provocation for this brief multi-sited reflection on how digital infrastructures and systems elide bodies already at risk.   figure 1. belonging. photo credit: radha s. hegde   dislocation on a park bench in san diego at the start of the pandemic, i chanced on a cart filled with belongings that stood out like an installation exploding the notion of stability and shelter. while directives to quarantine have led to fetishizing the safety and security of the home, to the unhoused, protocols of shelter-in-place and social distancing are mostly impossible to observe. without a coordinated federal response to the crisis, cities in the united states struggle to come up with temporary measures of finding shelter for the unhoused during the pandemic. the relocation of the unhoused to densely packed shelters have further exposed them to the virus. in other instances, the relocation of some unhoused persons to vacant hotels have led to angry opposition by local residents claiming via social media that their quality of life was being compromised by the newcomers to the neighborhood (slotnik 2020). considered as matter out of place, to use the words of mary douglas (1966), the unhoused are living evidence of the failure of governance, but are almost always recast as symbols of individual failure.   during the pandemic, the lack of internet access for vulnerable communities has posed catastrophic problems. families scrambled to get unstable wireless hotspots to access school work, medical help, and other basic services (shapiro 2020). while unhoused populations have limited or no access to the internet, there are concerted efforts by the state to integrate the unhoused into the digital ecosystem. cities are increasingly trying to create data-driven service systems for the unhoused with the aim of helping them obtain different types of services, but even more to create a data profile to aggregate their histories, which can then be accessed through an application (bendix 2018). this is an example of the state partnering with the private sector to make segments of the population legible for surveillance and available for identification, verification, and management of their mobility. many believe these measures will outlast the pandemic and become part of a networked surveillance regime. while their bodies are mostly illegible to the system, the unhoused are rendered available for the generation of data. digital technology regulates through its structures and ensnares through its strictures.   subjection the subject of gender violence during the pandemic presents another site to defamiliarize the meaning of home and shelter. in the enclosed spaces of the home, the subject, subjection, and the systemically reproduced architecture of gendered hierarchies are conjoined. it is here in the repetitiousness of the everyday that the disciplinary apparatus of control fixes the gendered body. during the pandemic there has been a global spike in the number of domestic violence cases. the stress of being confined in the home with one’s abuser in a volatile context coupled with limited access to support has made sheltering in place oppressive and unbearable. the surge in domestic violence has led un women (2020) to call it a shadow pandemic, another already existing crisis exacerbated by the very measures prescribed as protection from the virus. the home, and the very realm of the personal, becomes the space of confinement and violence. global data reveals that calls to helplines have increased in various parts of the world, and quarantining at home compounds the perpetrator’s use of mechanisms of power and control to isolate and endanger women (vaeza 2020). gender equality has become another casualty of the coronavirus (pollitt 2021).   cutting off connections and surveilling communication has always been the main strategy of abusers to isolate women from their support systems. during the past year, i have heard several immigrant rights activists talk about the centrality of the digital in recent cases of domestic violence. access to the internet and the possession of smartphones are crucial to be able to reach hotlines, counselors, and the police when necessary. technology, however, both supports and disrupts the systemic inequality and injustice that frames this abuse. today, partner violence has taken a digital turn and is now about gaining access to devices, cracking passwords, monitoring text messages, reading email, and tracking internet histories and app purchases. the latest security devices and smart technologies are the new tools and accessories of abuse and surveillance, highlighting the fact that partner and family violence, like the virus, cuts across class lines. immigration status and dependence on male partners for visa status is another aspect of the digital tracking narrative in these conditions of violence. abusers are able to wrest power from their victims by manipulating devices. immigrant women in these scenarios are often cut off from their extended families and transnational support systems. bodies and biographies are made available for digital scrutiny without the consent or even knowledge of the individual being tracked.   violence wreaks pain and exacts consequences on vulnerable bodies. technologies slide from their originally intended banal functions and are repurposed to be instruments of abuse. ironically, these contradictions are accommodated within the design of these technologies. ultimately, digital computational systems reinforce and support the perpetuation and tightening of the heteropatriarchal system and its set gendered hierarchies.   breakdowns and reset words such as tinderbox, time bomb, powder keg, and minefield appear often in accounts of crises, typically in reference to already displaced or dispossessed populations. however, this discourse of embedded crises normalizes the overall situation and discounts systemic failures and histories of oppression. a linear notion of crisis as an exceptional eruption deflects attention from the entangled and systemic structures of exclusion. joseph masco’s powerful argument resonates in the current context that crisis talk seeks “to stabilize an institution, practice or reality rather than interrogate the historical conditions of possibility for that endangerment to occur” (2016, s73). the recent focus on the restoration of the normal, reinforced by the solutionism of technology, further consolidates the status quo and the conditions that ironically contributed to the cascading nature of the crisis.   when it comes to infrastructures, according to simone (2015), volatility seems to be a default position. he argues that infrastructure is always built upon turbulence, which, while it may be constrained, is always there. while the pandemic has shifted some lives to screens and platforms, it has also interminably extended the state of precarity globally and at different scales. for migrants and refugees in camps, everyday life is about navigating these volatilities in a state of limbo or statelessness. for many in the world, especially in the global south, breakdown, whether social or digital, is the default position for the systems that both envelop and bypass them. for communities defined by elisions, erasures, and eviction, digital access, internet blackouts, and cellular restrictions are the latest incarnations of state control. consider, for example, the experiences of rohingya refugees who were completely cut off from all information about the pandemic due to an internet blackout in the refugee camps imposed by bangladesh authorities (grey 2020). cutting off or slowing down access to the internet has become a common governmental strategy, especially in south asia, to silence and discipline groups, allegedly in the name of national security. information darkness and the stripping away of digital infrastructure are the new forms of political violence that are being inflicted on the precariat.   precarity in the contemporary context, according to mark duffield (2019), represents an expanding lifeworld that exists at the interface between the economy and disaster. however, this interface cannot be universalized or exceptionalized, and i am, by no means, making a case for a common narrative of victimization. these contexts reveal that the violence of dislocation, confinement, and surveillance are enmeshed within mediated regimes and infrastructures of control. according to lauren berlant (quoted in puar 2012), the situation of precarity is the situation of relationality itself, insofar as our dependencies are vulnerabilities. this argument leads her to ask what it means that for so many the labor of reproducing life itself exhausts the body (puar 2012, 171). this question has gained even more urgency in the context of the covid-19 pandemic when digital modalities of discipline and regulation of populations that have been set into motion.   as i write this piece in spring 2021, india has become the latest epicenter of the pandemic, accounting for nearly half the coronavirus cases reported worldwide (mehta 2021). people are scouring social media sites searching for oxygen, ventilators, hospital beds, and even crematoriums. in response to the failure of the government, indian citizens are forming activist networks via social media to provide support (raj 2021). as the public struggles to crowdsource health support, the indian government is at work ordering facebook, instagram, and twitter to take down posts that are critical of the state’s mishandling of the crisis. the corporate interests of the information and technology sector are fully imbricated in all these actions. biology and technology are completely entangled in the exhaustion, depletion, and sustenance of life.   this current moment of mediated reorganization presents an opportunity for critical media scholars to view social and technological systems from the perspective of those who are digitally bypassed, tracked, or manipulated. looking at digital infrastructure from these critical locations offers an alternative space from which to understand the dynamic intersectionalities that shape processes of precaritization. virginia eubanks (2015) notes that we all inhabit this new regime of digital data, but we don’t all experience it in the same way. one could also say we inhabit differing regimes of data whose technologized logics override, bypass, or block bodies from circulating, surviving, or participating in public life. data-driven technologies serve as conduits for the distribution of power structures and reinforce complex existing hierarchies. the speed, reach, and mobility of the virus mimics, or perhaps parodies, the flight of capital, but at the same time, the virus strips the covers off outmoded systems that fail communities. achille mbembe writes poignantly: “try as we might to rid ourselves of it, in the end everything brings us back to the body. we tried to graft it onto other media, to turn it into an object body, a machine body, a digital body, an ontophanic body.” (2021, s59). the havoc wreaked by this new pathogen is an urgent reminder to locate the study of media and technology in the materialities of the precaritized body in order to theorize the politics of exclusion and the growing complicity of sociotechnical systems.   acknowledgements i would like to extend a warm thanks to the editors of the special issue, paula gardner and sarah kember for their generous support. i would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and joanne muzak for her keen copyediting.   references bendix, aria. 2018. “san francisco’s out-of-control homelessness crisis could be combated by a new tracking tool.” business insider, september 4, 2018. https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-system-to-track-homeless-person-2018-9.   douglas, mary. 1966. purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. new york, ny: praeger.   duffield, mark. 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https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-posts-record-daily-rise-coronavirus-deaths-2021-05-05/.   neilson, brett, and rossiter, ned. 2005. “from precarity to precariousness and back again: labour, life and unstable networks.” the fibreculture journal  5. https://five.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-022-from-precarity-to-precariousness-and-back-again-labour-life-and-unstable-networks/.   noble, safiya umoja. 2016. “a future for intersectional black feminist technology studies.”the scholar and feminist 13 (3)–14 (1). https://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/safiya-umoja-noble-a-future-for-intersectional-black-feminist-technology-studies/.   pollitt, katha. 2021. “covid-19 has been hardest on women.”the nation, january 7,2021. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/covid-women/.   puar, jasbir, ed. 2012. “precarity talk: a virtual roundtable with lauren berlant, judith butler, bojana cvejić, isabell lorey, jasbir puar, and ana vujanović.”tdr 56 (4): 163–77. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23362779.   raj, suhasini. 2021. “social media as ‘godsend’: in india, cries for help get results.”the new york times, may 3, 2021, sec. world. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/world/asia/india-covid-social-media-aid.html.   shapiro, eliza. 2020. “these families feel forgotten as n.y.c. pushes to open schools.”the new york times, september 14, 2020, sec. new york. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/nyregion/homeless-school-reopening-nyc.html.   simone, aboudmaliq. 2015. “afterword: come on out, you’re surrounded: the betweens of infrastructure.”city 19 (2–3): 375–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1018070.   slotnik, daniel. e. 2020. “homeless men must leave upper west side hotel, judge rules.”the new york times, november 25, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/nyregion/nyc-homeless-hotel-lucerne.html.   standing, guy. 2011.the precariat: the new dangerous class. london: bloomsbury publishing.   un women. 2020. “the shadow pandemic: violence against women during covid-19.” https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/in-focus-gender-equality-in-covid-19-response/violence-against-women-during-covid-19.   vaeza, maría-noel. 2020. “addressing the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on violence against women and girls.”un chronicle, november 27, 2020. https://www.un.org/en/addressing-impact-covid-19-pandemic-violence-against-women-and-girls.     author bio radha sarma hegde is professor in the department of media, culture, and communication at new york university.     original research game over: the perils of framing feminist game design pedagogy as repair versus transformation     amy corron rensselaer polytechnic institute corroa@rpi.edu   rebecca rouse university of skövde rebecca.rouse@his.se     abstract drawing on the experience of a multiyear research project bringing transformative pedagogies to game design education, we provide a critical reflection on the lack of sustainability of the project. upon examination, we see that some reasons behind this perceived failure are due to institutional systems of power that seek to neutralize transformative feminist pedagogy as performative repair, resulting in the maintenance of existing curricula. instead of fully engaging with transformative pedagogies, these teaching and learning methods are used as tools to provide a cursory fulfillment of the deep need for social justice education in games. we examine the ways in which structures and systems continually devalue and de-resource pedagogical work, specifically pedagogies that are centered in feminist, anti-racist, and critical approaches, as well as our own complicity within these oppressive structures at times. we draw connections with relevant disciplinary perspectives on higher education, and conclude by offering a framework for understanding the pitfalls that can hamper work with transformative pedagogical aims, characterized by the types of labor used to maintain the status quo, as well as a set of recommendations for moving beyond the frame of repair to sustainably and radically disrupt dominant pedagogies in games and related disciplines.     keywords transformative pedagogy, stem, feminism, social justice, higher education     introduction in this paper, we share reflections on the long-term outcomes of a multiyear project developing transformative pedagogy in undergraduate games education. the focus of our work was to bring critical feminist perspectives to games via dialogic methods, bridging theory and practice. looking back, we find we were not always engaged in the project we thought we were engaged in. while some outcomes were meaningful and positive, these were mostly on the individual level.1 even though our project was successful for individuals in our course, and as a learning experience for ourselves, organizationally and culturally our project could be characterized as a failure in terms of its lack of sustainability and transformative change. we examine the role of institutional and disciplinary structures in this inability to create sustainable transformational pedagogical change. our aim here is not to signal blame, nor shift accountability away from ourselves (as institutions are made of people, and we are actors within them) but rather to become more aware of how we operated in ways we did not intend, by taking part in structures we are not fully at home within. as two younger white women working in a mostly white male environment, with different levels of employment security and power, and other social identity differences, we were both part of our institution and apart from it. some specifics of our respective positions help illustrate the sometimes fraught nature of our participation within our institution:2 amy corron is a mid-level student affairs professional working in leadership development and has a background in social justice education, specializing in intergroup dialogue. she has her master’s degree in student affairs in higher education, and has been working at rensselaer polytechnic institute for seven years as a staff member. her current role straddles the line of student affairs and academic affairs, as she predominantly focuses on teaching leadership and team development to undergraduate students in the school of engineering, as well as creating and providing training opportunities for faculty and staff on effective facilitation and teaching. amy has been a leader of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at rensselaer throughout her time at the institute, and is utilized as a resource for student, faculty, and staff development in these areas. rebecca rouse is a mid-career faculty member, currently at the university of skövde, sweden. previously, she worked at rensselaer polytechnic institute as an assistant professor in the gsas: games and simulations arts and sciences program for six years. rebecca’s phd is in digital media, and she has an interdisciplinary background in theater, interactive media design, games, and media studies. her research focuses on using new and old technologies for new modes of storytelling and critical design methods. as an out member of the queer community, she has participated in many diversity and inclusion activities and initiatives throughout her career, including work with the rensselaer lgbtq task force for six years, for two of which she served as a co-chair of the group. in what follows, we begin by introducing our project on radical pedagogy for games education, then move on to explore the institutional contexts we worked within, including the multiple contrasting ontologies of higher education that were in play. ultimately, we demonstrate that we were not always doing the work we thought we were doing as we utilized repair strategies embedded within our existing environment versus acting transformatively. we identify a framework for understanding the range of challenges associated with transformative pedagogy work as characterized by the types of labor used to maintain the status quo, and conclude with suggestions for the future to break the cycle of repair and maintenance within the utilization of social justice education. together, the above reflections and analyses provide new understanding about how rhetorics of change, progress, repair, and maintenance operate within particular ontologies of higher education to inform educators who might aim to advance similar initiatives.   the project since january 2018, we attempted to transform games education via the values and teachings of social justice. we embarked on this project without any official invitation or tasking to do so, out of our own desires to work with one another and our shared dedication to social justice education and transformative pedagogy. we met while working together on the rensselaer lgbtq task force, a working group that advocated for inclusion and support of lgbtq+ students, faculty, and staff. through training and programs with the task force, amy shared her expertise in intergroup dialogue and rebecca was interested in developing ways to use dialogic pedagogy in her classes, in particular to address problems identified in the required first-year course the history and culture of games (hcg).3 using dialogic pedagogy and critical design methods in hcg, we invited students to consider how games and game histories have influenced our identities, how we perceive others, and think about ways to disrupt harmful systems of marginalization in games. the multiyear pedagogical research project was a success in terms of demonstrating students’ greater achievement towards course learning outcomes, increased abilities to communicate across difference, and enhanced design work that was less derivative of commercial games (rouse and corron 2020). it was similarly a successful learning experience for us as instructors, as we continuously reflected on teaching methods, our ability to foster vulnerable dialogue, and our capacity to create an inclusive classroom community where students felt comfortable taking risks in their learning. as we were never tasked or invited by our supervisors to do this work, it may be no surprise that it was never properly resourced.4 while our choice to initiate and develop the hcg course in this manner without official sanction had disadvantages, creating and perpetuating a structure in which we were not fully recognized or compensated for our labor, we believe we would not have been given clearance to do this project if we had asked permission.5 reflecting on the experience now, there was always the disjunction present in our project between our desires and actions in moving forward to create transformative course experiences, yet doing it in a way that would not be sustained. we worked at the borders of institutional systems and structures versus fully within them, but we also did not work to dismantle these structures to create new spaces for pedagogical innovation. we continuously shared the positive outcomes of our use of dialogic pedagogy in games education with colleagues, and those in the games and intergroup dialogue academic communities.6 our aim was to sustain the inclusion of social justice education within stem beyond the footprint of our course and advocate for transformational change within our institution and professional disciplines. the response from colleagues was positive, with many espousing a desire for inclusion of social justice education in our stem curriculum. the success of our course was included in a variety of internal institutional reports and presentations (often unbeknownst to us until after the fact) for both academic units and student affairs, to illustrate growth and development towards diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. however, there continued to be no specific allocation of resources for our work, and while our work was continually made visible by institutional leadership, it seemed this visibility functioned more as a checkbox than as a way to advocate for broader campus engagement with the stated institutional diversity and inclusion goals and requirements. this checkbox approach could be interpreted as an institutional valuation of radical pedagogy as a form of performative repair, thus actually constraining the work in order to maintain existing curricula. as a result, even with the goodwill of many fellow faculty members and staff, the enactment of the desire to include more social justice education in stem curricula that has occurred in the wake of our project has happened in fits and starts, and has not always been in alignment with our dialogic and transformative pedagogy approach.7 regardless, while there was a generally positive response to the work we were doing in our course, there was no effort by the games program’s leadership to amplify and grow the inclusion of dialogic pedagogy to other games courses, despite the program’s recent launch of both master’s and doctoral degree programs in critical game design. undergraduate games education was, once again, protected from the inclusion of more critical materials and approaches, and maintained at the status quo. indeed, the visibility of the work we were doing in a single course could be used by others to justify their own inaction, citing our work as evidence of “enough” inclusion of critical methods and approaches in the undergraduate program. outside of the games program, however, there were additional positive reactions to the success of the course, and the beginnings of a potential cultural shift to encourage the adoption of more radical and transformational teaching methods. the provost’s office sponsored an optional diversity workshop open to all faculty and staff led by an outside facilitator. this workshop began to lay a foundation for incorporating inclusive teaching methods. as the desire to learn more about teaching methods grew, this desire led to additional training programs facilitated by internal rensselaer faculty and staff (including amy and rebecca) on inclusive pedagogy and managing participation in the classroom, as well as training opportunities from external groups.8 further collaborations coming out of the dialogue training included amy assisting a faculty member in implementing dialogue in a first-year seminar course focused on scientific misconduct and ethics. this course was able to work through the first few stages of dialogue before the course moved to asynchronous remote instruction due to the covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. further progress within the last year has stalled due to limited staffing resources and increased teaching loads. as we look to the future, dialogic teaching methods are now a focus for the school of humanities, arts, and social sciences, with intergroup dialogue courses being planned for the spring and summer of 2022. there is hope for an institutional focus on creating an intergroup dialogue program in collaboration across multiple departments and divisions. in reviewing the development and discontinuation of our course, and the impacts of the following connected events and initiatives discussed above, we see themes of repair and maintenance in how we have approached transformative pedagogy for stem. both institutionally and at the individual level (here we include ourselves) we find espoused values of social justice, and a desire by many to further advance our pedagogy and curriculum to critically engage students in issues of power, privilege, and oppression. this project has largely been framed, however, as a response to something we need to repair or fix—holes to fill in course content, teaching methods that need to be improved, diversification of faculty to be hired, and so on. each workshop and training has been aimed to accomplish some increment of this repair work, by highlighting the absences of social justice in our stem education, and by trying to equip faculty with new skills and teaching methods to engage in more radical pedagogy in their individual classroom. even with an overall intention to enact radical change, by approaching this issue with a framework of repair, we see now that we actually contributed to systems of maintenance. as we continued to confine ourselves and work within the structures and systems that were embedded within the institution and higher education overall, we were unable to transform the curricula to be fully inclusive of social justice. sarah sharma has warned against rhetorics of repair, and has invited feminists and other radical actors to reclaim “the perspective of the broken machine” (2020, 174). she describes feminists as “the faulty aberration in a long line of otherwise efficient technologies that have been designed for caretaking and reciprocating love in a male-dominated world,” and suggests that because feminists and other “nonconforming subjects” are already characterized as “obsolete technology that isn’t working properly,” there is an opportunity to reclaim this subject position and use it to enact transformation (2020, 173). given this status of identification with the broken machine itself, sharma encourages us “to co-opt the already attributed status of the broken machine and continue this work of not working well” in the name of revealing systems of power and oppression in new ways (2020, 174). these new perspectives on the often hidden systems and struggles of those both within and apart from institutions can provide insights useful in moving forward, not with repair, but with transformation. in the following section, we examine the specifics of our institutional context and related ontologies of higher education to provide a framework for understanding the challenges faced by those seeking to transform existing systems as characterized by the types of labor used to maintain institutional stasis.   institutions and ontologies institutional context and the labors of stasis since this paper examines a particular type of institutional stasis, we will share some of the particularities of our institution. many of these particularities are similar to those of other institutions of higher education both in the united states and around the world. rensselaer polytechnic institute, a private college,9 articulates its focus as “addressing the global challenges facing the 21st century—to change lives, to advance society, and to change the world,” (rensselaer polytechnic institute, 2014) with a trademarked slogan “why not change the world?” this institutional perspective is further elaborated in a lengthy poem, unattributed to any particular author but rather to the institution itself, which hangs framed in several buildings on campus (see figure 1).   figure 1. the rensselaer poem (2018). photo by rebecca rouse.   the built environment of the campus includes a range of structures both new and historical, in a variety of architectural styles but with a thread of colonial revival brick throughout, and is dotted by small grass quadrangles. the campus sits atop a steep hill above the adjacent town of troy, new york, accessible by foot only via a set of steep early twentieth-century white marble stairs known as the approach. these physical characteristics are a manifestation of the institution’s identity as a place of rigor and meritocracy: those who can survive the climb are worthy of being let in. at the center of campus stands a gothic revival chapel that has been converted to house the it center for the college, while the building across from the chapel, a brutalist mid-century concrete structure, houses the library and archives. the spiritual center for the campus, a chapel and cultural center, lies at the edge of campus and is technically operated by an unaffiliated non-profit. the campus includes no affinity centers or identity-based resource centers. as a polytechnic institute, stem disciplines are emphasized, and housed within the schools of engineering and science, with most other disciplines collected together in a school of humanities, arts, and social sciences, which had a history as a service teaching unit but today includes graduate programs and research faculty. many of these qualities and aesthetics are not unique to rensselaer. these are structural, cultural markers of many stem-oriented institutions of higher education in the landscape of today’s corporatized universities—a landscape in which an institution can write its own poetry as an ode to the values of technologically centered disruption and the fetishization of change itself. even as these institutions espouse values of change and transformation, issuing fiveand ten-year plans printed in glossy brochures that assure board members and investors the institution will produce things like “transformative impact,” these institutions’ main impacts are often to maintain a profound stasis in terms of economic, intellectual, and power relations both on campus and in the world. sara ahmed has described the encounter of this stasis as a kind of “brick wall” (2016, 96). staying still, however, is far from easy. significant labor of a particular kind, enacted by particular kinds of people, is necessary to maintain this stasis. we characterize this labor as revolving doors; steep pathways; and planned performativity.   revolving doors revolving doors refers to the continual leaving and sometimes replacement of particular people and positions—usually those who are engaged in diversity work or who through their mere presence constitute diversity by their existence in the non-diverse environment, as ahmed discusses (2021). for example, colleagues of color often rotate in and out of a predominantly white institution. these colleagues are often the people tasked with doing diversity work, both explicitly and implicitly. the movement of this continually revolving door enables the institution to stand still in terms of advancement of diversity and inclusion initiatives. colleagues are not in place in positions long enough to effect any meaningful change. the function of the revolving door is institutional stasis.   steep pathways the rhetoric of the climb is powerfully materialized by lack of physically accessible spaces on a campus. the paths that are available are well worn by a particular type of person, but ironically the grand entrance into a campus atop a steep hill actually functions as an exit, showing others out who cannot get in, in a manner similar to the dual function of “diversity doors” theorized by ahmed (2021). steep pathways materially influence the presence of people with physical disabilities on a campus. there are very few visibly disabled people on campus, because there are very few disabled people visible on campus. the need for accessible pathways is never perceived, because the need is never allowed to surface or rise to the top. commonly repeated stories shared by those who hold marginalized identities yet do survive within the institution help to suppress stories of struggle. these dominant narratives minimize oppression through perspectives such as “it was hard for me, so it should be hard for you too” and “this is just how the world is.” these narratives naturalize the experience of oppression for particular types of people, and similarly naturalize the relative lack of obstacles for others. much of this naturalization is achieved via the rhetoric of meritocracy, but also through the strategic deployment of equality as an institute goal, as opposed to equity.10 the hard-won actions of the few community members who are visibly disabled and do succeed within the institution are co-opted by the institution to keep itself in stasis; the presence of the few who do reach the summit can be interpreted as evidence that the summit may be reached. similar logics are applied to justify the relative absence of people of color and women on the campus.   planned performativity the activity of performance planning—in this case, a yearly activity in which all units on the campus supply evidence of achievement and advocate for funding for initiatives that align with “institute-wide highest priorities”—is another type of labor for maintaining stasis. to obtain money for anything new, goals must be articulated in the language of the old (the institute’s “priorities”). even when these priorities may explicitly include critical thinking, community engagement, or diversity and inclusion, it often ends up that the very act of using these terms functions to foreclose potential meaningful progress or action on these foci. the act of planning for future work becomes the future work itself, which is reduced to a performative display of the espoused values and goals, as opposed to work toward the goals themselves. the particularities of the language employed in performance planning is important to examine. phrases such as “strength through diversity” are used, but in the absence of clear discussion of who is being strengthened, why they are in need of strengthening, by what means this strengthening will occur, and what precisely is meant by diversity. diversity and inclusion are used interchangeably, without definition, or even as a two-part catchphrase. these catchphrases are taken up and repeated again and again, in university planning documents, policy documents, and in speech by administrators. yet, by maintaining a lack of specificity in the meaning of these phrases, the language takes on other meanings in practice, and operates in ways that may seem counterintuitive. in practice, diversity and inclusion can come to mean the maintenance of a lack of diversity and inclusion. working from within the institution, we are advised to take on the language of the institution, to yoke it to our own radical project, as a strategy to win resources for our project. but when the functional definitions of terms are actually incommensurable, the slipperiness of this language can work to slip a radical project under the rug. ironically, this disappearance of radical work is sometimes achieved by making the work hypervisible. it is in this third category of maintenance activity, planned performativity, in which we find our own unwitting complicity, in hindsight. in seeking to sustain our multiyear research project beyond our own labor and capacities, we proposed the allocation of future resources to our project via the performance planning process. but, by participating in this process, our work was transformed into performative work, functioning to absolve others of meaningful action, and actually curtailing our real work. ahmed has discussed this kind of sleight of hand in the uneasy relations between institutions and diversity work as follows: “the tools you introduce to address a problem can be used as indicators that a problem has been addressed....a program developed in response to a problem is assumed to resolve a problem” (2016, 110). the shifting location of the problem becomes informative to trace. we sought to address a problem in stem pedagogy, a problem shared by our institution. in addressing the problem through our research in our games classroom, we met with success, which we sought to sustain. in working to grow the impact and reach of our work, we found the “brick wall” ahmed discusses. interestingly, it was not always made of the “bricks'' we might have expected. some of the resistance came from faculty who were very open to the work we were doing but expressed fear at joining us. some fear was more oppositional in nature. these fears were expressed in a range of ways: fear that students do not have the capability to engage difficult issues. this fear is wrapped up in the perception of students’ continual exhaustion due to the rigor11 demanded in their technical study, such that there is no energy left for social justice components in education. social justice components are understood as extraneous and separate from technical education. fear of making a mistake, causing harm, or looking foolish as a teacher. dominant pedagogical approaches on the campus still emphasize the faculty member as expert, both explicitly (through the use of degree and rank titles, hierarchies of power, and conditions of employment), and implicitly (through structures such as the dominance of lecture-based courses). fear of lack of institutional support, given the history of the uses of language around diversity and inclusion initiatives, and the history of failed progression of these initiatives. fear of punitive action, such as bad student course evaluations, poor performance evaluations, or even getting fired. in an environment with increasing numbers of contingent contracts and fewer tenure-track and tenured positions, employment precarity takes on a larger role in faculty decision making. additionally, metrics used for faculty evaluation include no mechanism for rewarding social justice work, so in an official capacity the work can have at best a neutral effect on a faculty member’s evaluation. fear of exhaustion. in a culture of the valorization of overwork, many faculty are already exhausted and are wary of taking on additional work. fear of critical pedagogy, and critical theory at large. this fear was expressed in a less well-intentioned manner, both by students and faculty who forcefully shared their complete opposition to teaching and learning about games from any critical perspective, with particular vitriol expressed toward the application of a feminist perspective.   learning about the many layers of fear standing between intention and action for faculty members indicated to us a larger culture of fear on the campus. for all the fetishization of change in the institutional and disciplinary value systems, faculty rightly perceived that not all kinds of change would be welcome. indeed, the types of change that were held up as valued were usually those identified with individual actors, perpetuating the myth that “one person can change a culture.”12 the institution’s selective obsession with a particular type of change is directly related to its identity as a stem institution with a strong research focus. this obsession with change is bound up with an underlying ontology of higher education shared by many similar institutions in the us.   ontologies of higher education: worldbuilding vs. human development worldbuilding in stem within this stemand research-focused environment, the dominant ontology of higher education is less learning-focused than it is both revenueand change-focused. the change described here is not the slowly developed change in perspective that arises from deep contemplation and dialogue, or in complex coalition, but rather a corporatized branding of change as disruptive and enacted by individuals “moving fast and breaking things” (taplin 2017). this emphasis on speed and disruption conceptualizes change as a desirable energy that is generative (in spite of so-called collateral destruction13) and capable of producing new and better worlds. in other words, a worldbuilding ethos underlies the dominant stem ontology of higher education. while some particulars of the corporate-university entanglement are new and specific to our current moment, such as the primacy of the big tech sector, the seeds of these relationships and the values that underlie them can be seen in the earliest days of the nineteenth-century us university and are threaded throughout the development of both engineering and computer science (cs) education. this heritage is important for us to examine, to understand the structural inheritance we receive in games, a discipline closely linked to both cs and engineering. rensselaer was established as a result of a major worldbuilding project, in response to the development of the erie canal.14 both the canal and the school opened in the same year, 1825, both born out of a nineteenth-century vision of technologically enabled progress.15 and yet, this ethos of progress, speed, and commerce, which we might understand as the nineteenth-century version of “moving fast and breaking things” was not without cost. as carol sheriff (1997) has discussed, when one examines impacts of the canal on the human level, as opposed to the worldbuilding level, complexity emerges, making it more difficult to judge the sum outcome of the canal project.16 it is within this context that us engineering education emerges, with close ties to industrial and national worldbuilding projects, and less focused on the human. the history of engineering education has been well chronicled by scholars such as matthew wisnioski, who has documented the history of the many attempts at reform throughout the twentieth century, along with the dubious success of these efforts.17 the history of cs education is also important to examine due to its strong links with games education. cs has a different and more recent origin story in the us, with world war ii as a key point in the development of the discipline. following the war, as government and industry sought to develop a commercial sector for declassified wartime computing technologies, one avenue created early on was through the university. jointly subsidized by government and industry, computers were placed at universities in the 1950s to support research in physics, mathematics, and engineering. the presence of the machines necessitated the development of trained staff to run them, and over the course of the next decade and a half eventually led to the establishment of cs as its own discipline. the first undergraduate curriculum was developed in 1965 by an association for computing machinery (acm) curriculum committee,18 and there is no evidence of any inclusion of courses on ethics or the impacts and role of computers in culture and society in the initial years of cs curriculum (atchison 1985), perhaps a bold move since computers had been developed as military technology. this erasure has proven difficult to correct, in spite of the many attempts that have been made to remake, fix, or refashion cs curriculum to incorporate vital humanistic, critical perspectives (goldweber et al. 1997). while more advances have been made at the k-12 level over the past two decades (ryoo 2019), much remains to be done, particularly at the university level.19 these long histories of engineering and cs education are relevant to our discussion, as key components of games’ disciplinary inheritance. the ontology of higher education embedded in both engineering and cs is also shared in games, and notably at odds with conceptions of higher education found in other disciplines, such as student affairs, social justice education, and pedagogy. while we broadly characterize the engineering, cs, and games ontology of higher education as one of “worldbuilding,” the student affairs, social justice education, and pedagogy ontologies of higher education are based in “human development.”   human development in student affairs student affairs, originally identified as “student personnel services,” originated in the 1930s and 1940s through the established interest to promote the holistic development of students as people, attending to developmental areas beyond just the intellectual (american council on education 1937). after the civil war, there was a shift for higher education institutions in the us from focusing on individual student development and towards scientific research and knowledge creation. pressure grew for faculty to contribute to this growth of knowledge, leading to a focus on their areas of studies and neglecting holistic student development. this change highlighted the need to appoint specific university staff members to be responsible for student developmental needs, as well as new educational functions that entered the institutional context as universities continued to grow and develop (american council on education 1937). student personnel officers originally helped relieve faculty with specific issues, but their responsibilities grew rapidly extending to include psychological, vocational, and financial counseling, graduate placement, health, extracurricular and social programs, and more. their focus was predominantly the human development aspects of higher education as universities continued to pursue outcomes related to student physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development in order to ensure graduates were prepared to be responsible participants in american democracy (american council on education 1949).20 as student personnel services expanded, university staff structures began to include a centralized system of administrators dedicated to student development needs. this system has grown into what we consider to be student affairs today.21 since the initial foundations of student affairs, the profession continues to focus on holistic student development, and now extends further into promoting student learning and advancement within researched-based young adult developmental frameworks. additionally, assisting students to develop a sense of agency has been a consistent value of the profession with a focus on creating opportunities for students to develop self-awareness and self-direction, and to play an active role in their own development (evans and reason 2001). since the 1950s, there has been encouragement to partner with academic faculty to create student learning experiences across all parts of higher education.22 through a shift away from positivist epistemological views of learning, student affairs emphasizes the importance of personal meaning-making and student experience within transformative learning processes.23 while student affairs has grown from a framework of personnel services into a field of scholar practitioners and graduate-level trained educators, student affairs professionals remain committed to facilitating holistic student development and providing integrated learning experiences that allow students to engage in self-discovery and transformative development. with the rapidly changing demographics in higher education within the last few decades, there has been a call for student affairs to adopt activism as part of its core professional functions. this includes advocating for marginalized students and viewing professional roles with a critical lens to act as change agents within the university (evans and reason 2001). as the profession continues to develop to meet student needs, equity, inclusion, and social justice education have come into the fold of student affairs practice.24 social justice education, itself, is also deeply rooted in human development ontologies, with the main goal of enabling individuals to develop the critical tools necessary to understand issues of power and oppression. social justice education has a long history reaching back to the nineteenth century and extending to today, often led by black feminist educators as researched by stephanie evans (2008) and developed by noted scholar bell hooks (1994, 2003, 2010). social justice pedagogy aims to assist individuals in developing their own awareness and knowledge to examine issues of justice, and also to connect reflection and analysis to action in order to interrupt and change oppressive patterns and behaviors within themselves and the communities that they are a part of (adams 2016).25 additionally, social justice education pedagogy specifically acknowledges the emotional, as well as cognitive, components of learning and encourages participants to reach new levels of self-awareness as they work through more challenging levels of complexity and uncomfortable emotions. utilizing participants’ lived experiences and the intergroup dynamics in the learning environment also helps facilitate discussions of social justice content. therefore, inclusive classroom communities with clear norms and guidelines that allow participants to be vulnerable and take risks are essential (adams 2016). the classroom community foundation also can create meaningful relationships, leading to further collaboration and action towards social change. overall, social justice education focuses on the personal development of individuals' understanding of themselves, as well as systems of marginalization, how they interact within those systems, and the ways they can enact changes towards social justice. it is deeply rooted within different frameworks of self-awareness and human development, and certainly aims to recognize and celebrate the humanity of all participants. looking back, we can see our project was enmeshed within these structures and histories of higher education, with our work taking place in tension between worldbuilding and human development ontologies. games as a discipline has a strong cs and engineering heritage, and is therefore more “at home” in the “worldbuilding” ontology of higher education.26 however, we rooted our pedagogy within social justice education principles and frameworks, specifically intergroup dialogue facilitation, with the goal of creating transformative learning experiences that would foster social change within and through games. much of our work was also aligned with student affairs’ focus on holistic student development, and encouraging the development of self-awareness and personal meaning making. working within and through this tension, often unrecognized by us at the time, created an unsustainable project that remained rooted in mechanisms of repair and maintenance as opposed to transformation. in the concluding section, we share specific lessons learned as useful strategies for continuing the work of transforming curriculum in higher education towards a meaningful incorporation of social justice pedagogy, especially in stem contexts such as games.   lessons learned reflecting on our experiences, we can see our story is not particular to our institution but shares many commonalities with others who have attempted similar work in higher education. for example, chen, mejia, and breslin share that the outcome of their work to incorporate critical race theory in an undergraduate engineering course “drifted toward appeasing the masses rather than challenging the status quo—not because we don’t want to challenge students but to protect our own vulnerabilities” (2019, 335). in their case, the work of diversity fell to diverse people, faculty who were women and/or people of color, but without any additional support or institutional change to protect against the already vulnerable position of these faculty in the stem classroom. this lack of support ultimately led to maintenance of the curricular status quo. writing here is an act of persistence and resistance, and provides us with a platform for taking voice for ourselves when we have not been heard elsewhere, or not heard as we intended. beyond the reflective identification of our own perceived failures in creating sustainable transformational change, the identification of structural and institutional pitfalls can also be seen as a successful outcome for this type of project, revealing the brokenness of the machine, as sharma (2020) describes when previously this awareness had not been articulated or acknowledged in a clear manner. while we did not meet the transformative institutional outcomes we were originally working toward, revealing the systemic brokenness of higher education we had been working within could perhaps be an even greater success for this pedagogical project. we are able to move forward with the abilities to recognize and avoid mechanisms of repair and maintenance. we can provide a set of recommendations, targeted toward ourselves as much as anyone, for ways in which future work may be differently configured to increase the chance for transformative outcomes as opposed to maintenance. look out for the institutional language of performance planning/planned performativity. tying radical work to these catchphrases in the hopes of receiving funding or other resources to sustain the work may have the opposite effect, due to the incommensurability in your usage of the words and the institutional meanings. be wary of being offered hypervisibility for your project without accompanying funding or resources needed to sustain it. this hypervisibility and oversharing of your work can have the effect of absolving others of the need to act, and ultimately result in the disappearance of your work. it may be ideal to involve a broad coalition of faculty from the ground up with this type of project. there are very serious difficulties that stand in the way of this goal, including a lack of institutional support and reward structure for faculty who pursue this type of work, as well as difficulties in recruiting faculty to join this type of project due to the many different types of fear that may impede them moving from intention to action. team teaching structures may be best for this type of work, not only because of the need for multipartial facilitation as opposed to advocacy-based approaches (fisher and petryk 2017) but also because teaching teams made of faculty who do not share all aspects of social identity may provide the project with a better chance at being taken seriously, and therefore sustained. a pairing that includes a faculty member with “diverse” identities could be paired with a faculty member with a more privileged identity (i.e., a straight cis white man). these collaborations would need to be carefully developed, however, so that work including less visible forms like emotional labor are shared as much as possible in equitable ways between the teaching team members. finally, we suggest the need for better integration of student affairs faculty and academic faculty. this integration could provide opportunity for more attention to student affairs as a discipline itself, more attention to the scholarship of student affairs, and social justice pedagogy. the ongoing containment of who engages with issues of critical perspectives, holistic development, and social justice education serves to maintain departmental faculty members’ distance from these subjects within their own disciplines. this separation is easy for students to perceive and interpret as a value judgment regarding the worth of critical perspectives and social justice education. a more integrated approach, in which student affairs staff were hired directly into departments, and supported on an equal power level with departmental faculty, or in which existing staff were given permission to teach credit-bearing courses, would go a long way to solving these problems. additionally, resourcing sustained collaboration between student affairs staff and faculty across campus would help achieve campus-wide learning goals and create a holistic student experience that fosters student development across all areas of the university. in the meantime, even though our history and culture of games course will not continue, we each work to carry this research forward in different ways. amy continues to promote dialogue, collaborate with other faculty by including dialogue in their courses, and provide training to faculty and staff on dialogue facilitation. she also continues to develop capacity-building experiences for faculty, staff, and graduate students to learn about effective facilitation and teaching methods, focusing particularly on inclusive teaching skills and creating transformative classroom communities. no longer at rensselaer, rebecca has moved to a position at university of skövde, sweden, where she has collaborated on the development of a critical games user experience master’s program, new additions to the undergraduate games program, and faculty training in critical pedagogies. even though the lack of support for sustaining our history and culture of games pedagogical research has been disappointing, we recognize that the task of working toward liberation is never finished, and the pace of progress is often slow. in bobbie harro’s discussion of her model of the cycle of liberation, she notes, “it is important to note that one can enter the cycle at any point, through slow evolution or a critical incident, and will repeat or recycle many times in the process. there is no specific beginning or end point, just as one is never ‘done’ working to end oppression” (2018, 628). returning to the rensselaer poem, we see a deep irony in the externalized focus on changing a world “out there” that seems to be shared by many institutions of higher education and the stem disciplines in particular. the change in the poem is identified with “thinking big” and is focused on everything from “energy to infrastructure / from food security and fighting disease / to national defense.” this type of “thinking big” is remarkably small. these world-changing efforts often are enacted through strong-arm tactics, and meet with only limited success. this perspective on change, however, does fit smoothly with the worldbuilding aesthetics of many games, which abstract material elements of society, often reducing humans to pawns or erasing them completely.27 the ethos of dialogue, on the other hand, is truly transformative, and while it is also concerned with changing the world at a core level, the focus is intensely centered on the human. dialogue begins not with change to be enacted “out there,” but within the self in deep exchange with others, in sharp contrast to the performative gestures of change valorized in our institution’s poetry.   notes 1 we have previously written about our ongoing dialogic pedagogy project in games education in rouse and corron (2020), which reviews the evolution of the ways we used dialogic pedagogy in games education, the results we saw from students throughout the process, and a toolkit for other educators and practitioners who are also looking to use dialogic pedagogy.   2 in sharing these details, we aim to make clearer the ways in which we operated both against our institutional norms and in complicity within them. joseph dumit has discussed the importance of attending to the particularities of situated knowledge: “non-innocence and complicity are necessary if one is to confront world histories as histories that one is a part of and accountable to. without these stances, one easily falls into some incarnation of a god-trick, claiming to see the world from nowhere in particular” (2014, 348).   3 prior to our collaboration on hcg we had worked together fruitfully to incorporate initial steps toward dialogic pedagogy in another first-year course at rensselaer called world’s fairs: technology, design, and society.   4 we had demonstrated that the work could be done on a volunteer basis, and this may have helped provide evidence for deciding not to provide resources for our work. to share some additional context, at the start of our work together on the hcg course, amy had just transitioned to a teaching role at rensselaer, and initially began adding dialogue into rebecca’s course as a volunteer workshop facilitator. over several iterations of the course, we continued to work together, and this collaboration grew into a fully shared co-facilitation of the course. even as amy took on this increased role, she was never officially listed as a co-instructor, and her work was officially framed as volunteering.   5 this was our belief based on shared experience with the nature of institutional bureaucracy and the limitations preventing staff from teaching outside very specific contexts, which we had encountered in our prior collaboration as a roadblock.   6 we presented our research findings at conferences, including engage for change (corron and rouse 2017), different games (rouse and corron 2018), and intergroup dialogue (corron and rouse 2019).   7 for example, we invited male games faculty and department leadership to observe our dialogue class, and while they appreciated the content, they questioned why we were using a multipartial facilitation approach versus advocacy facilitation methods in the inclusion of social justice education in the course (fisher and petryk 2017).one colleague seemed befuddled by our dialogic approach, because he found success in simply telling his students what is right and wrong, in terms of labeling certain game designs as racist or sexist. these comments demonstrated a lack of understanding of dialogic pedagogy in aiming to share power in the classroom and have students feel open to sharing their own life experiences in order to increase understanding across difference. this reaction likely also reflects the unexamined privilege and power our colleagues hold as male instructors in the games classroom. given their social identity alignment with dominant power holders in games, and the majority of students in the classroom, our male colleagues do probably have some degree of success with more advocacy-based teaching methods, which we knew from experience were not productive for us to employ.   8 in terms of the implementation of dialogue specifically, roughly thirty faculty from multiple schools and staff from the student life division were also invited to participate in a multiday training on intergroup dialogue and facilitation from the university of michigan’s program on intergroup relations in the summer of 2019. the training was collaborative and highly engaging, yet there were few inroads made on future plans and sustainable change to curriculum and programs. there were multiple times during the workshop when participants highlighted the limitations and bureaucratic red tape (funding resources, curriculum change approvals, abilities to co-facilitate with staff, confidence in facilitation abilities etc.) that they feared would curtail their abilities to fully implement dialogue. participants left focusing more on smaller scale changes that they could make in their spheres of influence, such as individual classrooms and departments, but without a plan for larger structural support to advance the work in community. further training with the university of michigan occurred in the summer of 2021, leading to plans of intergroup dialogue courses in the spring and summer of 2022.   9 founded in 1824, rensselaer was the first engineering school “to be established in any english-speaking country,” a fact displayed on the institution’s “about” page online. other “quick facts” presented on the website include rensselaer’s acquisition of “one of the most powerful university-based supercomputers in the world,” the institution’s high ranking as a research university, and listing as a top-ten college “where students go on to earn the most money.” (rensselaer polytechnic institute, n.d.)   10 indeed, a long history of the institution as a punishingly difficult place can be observed in the reflections of former student washington roebling, the engineer who built the brooklyn bridge, who studied at rensselaer in the 1850s. roebling wrote, “rensselaer was the most heart breaking, soul grinding, system crushing institution in the whole world” (wagner 2017, 75).   11 this notion of rigor is a key part of stem disciplinary identity, and is understood both as necessary and as a mark of prestige. rigor here is rooted in rhetorics of meritocracy, and often functions as a gatekeeper to prevent “others” from entry or success within stem disciplines. see donna riley (2017) for an analysis of the uses of rigor in engineering education in particular.   12 indeed, this was a comment from an upper-level administrator in support of our research, meant as encouragement to us. this notion of social change as initiated by a single individual, or even “star system” of individuals, stands in contrast with research on how social change actually functions. as sociologist bobbie harro (2018) has described, liberatory social change happens via complex coalitions, over longer periods of time.   13 see nassim parvin and anne pollock (2020) for an in-depth discussion and critique of the framing of these destructive outcomes as unintended consequences.   14 founders stephen van rensselaer and amos eaton met while working to survey the land for the site of the canal in 1820 (see mcallister 1941). the canal was built by engineers without formal education, or education they had received abroad in european countries such as germany, thus revealing the need for the development of us civil engineering education.   15 while the development of the canal had controversial, the waterway’s impact was significant. not only did the canal enable an increase in shipping of agricultural goods from the midwest to the northeast within the us, but by the 1850s the canal was also a key factor in the increased export of goods such as corn to britain from the us, and influential in britain’s shift away from agricultural production into fully fledged industrial revolution (see bernstein 2005).   16 for example, sheriff points out one of the “perils of progress” was the large presence of children in the workforce that supported the canal, a quarter of which depended on the exploitive labor of boys aged six through twelve. the boys’ labor was seasonal, low-wage, took place in harsh and dangerous conditions, precluded their attendance at school thus curtailing their education, and exposed them to the seedy underbelly of canal commerce including criminal activity (sheriff 1997). additionally, as laurence hauptman (2001) has described, the development of the erie canal was a key move in the dispossession of the haudenosaunee (iroquois confederacy), and had terrible environmental and cultural impacts that are ongoing.   17 wisnioski (2009) examines, for example, a 1918 report that was the first review of us engineering education, and called for more integration of humanities and social science in engineering curricula in order to develop a more well-rounded engineering student. wisnioski also chronicles the many attempts at rupture of the military-industrial complex from within engineering research and education, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, but notes that “it remains to be seen, however, whether these efforts represented cracks in an exaggerated ethos of ‘total control’ or whether they were minor knots—perhaps even refinements‚in the evolution of ‘the system’” (2003, 328). in other words, the project to reform engineering education in more humanistic, critical modes has been ongoing for over one hundred years (since 1918 in the us, at least) and has yet to yield any decisive advance.   18 this curriculum development work was carried out at the ibm corporate campus in poughkeepsie, new york, not far from the first lock of the erie canal. the history of this curriculum development process is described in detail by william atchison (1985).   19 sepehr vakil’s 2018 paper on a justice-centered approach to cs education makes many incisive and thoughtfully articulated arguments and concrete recommendations for how to advance the cause of equity in cs pedagogy, rightfully pointing out a key failing of ethics in cs education today as the individualistic framing that relegates issues of morality in cs to personal responsibility, rendering complex histories, power structures, and continued legacies of violence and oppression invisible and therefore unexamined. but, given the long legacy of stasis in cs education, it is difficult to predict the future impact of the many proposed radical pedagogies put forward by vakil and others, including malazita and restar (2019) and ko et al. (2020).   20 personnel programs continued to develop post–world war ii to emphasize the importance of learning outside the classroom in areas of student orientation, educational advising, residential life, sense of belonging, emotional intelligence, student activities, career advising, ethical and spiritual advising, and overall promoting student development towards individuality and a sense of responsibility (american council on education 1949).   21 interestingly, even in the initial development of student affairs when higher education was predominantly only accessible to white men, there was a desire to have a diversity of staff identities and professional backgrounds and approaches in order to best serve a wide variety of students and their individual needs.   22 for more on the move to partner with faculty in creating student learning experiences, see lloyd-jones and smith (1954); brown (1972); national association of student personnel administrators (1987); calhoun (1996); potter et al. (1998). in more recent years, this push has extended to the promotion of establishing integrated transformative learning experiences, seamlessly combining both academic learning and student development, that are centered on the whole student and responsive to their unique developmental needs (keeling 2004).   23 the profession also identifies that it is impossible to separate learning, development, and context, and therefore advocates for integrating learning opportunities across the institution with clearly defined institutional learning goals and outcomes that apply to all areas of the campus experience. collaboration and powerful faculty partnerships remain integral to achieving these campus-wide learning goals, as well strong assessment processes to measure student learning and development (keeling 2006).   24 the two overarching professional associations for student affairs, american college personnel association (acpa) and the national association of student personnel administrators (naspa), jointly drafted “professional competency areas for student affairs practitioners” in 2010 as a foundational reference guide to establish the main competency areas of the profession, and assist professionals in assessing their development within the competencies at the levels of “basic,” “intermediate,” and “advanced.” the competency areas include historical pillars of the profession, such as “advising and helping” and “student learning and development,” among others. “equity, diversity, and inclusion” is also a main competency, and includes “the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to create learning environments enriched with diverse views and people” (american college personnel association and national association of student personnel administrators 2010). this competency was renamed “social justice and inclusion” in 2015 to highlight a shift from awareness of diversity to a more active orientation that aligns itself to the research and practice of social justice as an ongoing process and goal. the overall description of this competency area has similarly expanded in alignment with definitions of social justice, to now include “the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to create learning environments that foster equitable participation for all groups while seeking to address and acknowledge issues of oppression, privilege, and power” (american college personnel association and national association of student personnel administrators 2015). the foundational, intermediate, and advanced outcomes also more explicitly connect to social justice at personal, professional, and institutional levels.   25 given the goals of social justice education, experiential pedagogy as championed by student affairs is central to the learning process because participants are encouraged to engage actively in their own learning and interactions with one another through reflections and experiential activities.   26 indeed, worldbuilding is an explicit core theme in the instruction of game design as well as games themselves (see schell 2008; silverstein 2012; mukherjee 2017; nelson 2019).   27 this is a common design tactic of so-called “resource-development games,” such as civilization or settlers of catan.   references adams, maurianne. 2016. 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(2018). review of: tracing autism; uncertainty, ambiguity, and the affective labor of neuroscience by des fitzgerald. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(1), 1-5. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © amanda apgar, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license review tracing autism; uncertainty, ambiguity, and the affective labor of neuroscience by des fitzgerald (university of washington press, 2017) amanda apgar university of california at los angeles amandaapgar@ucla.edu autism is everywhere. as of this writing, the center for disease control (cdc) states that one in 68 children is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (asd) (cdc.gov). not only that, but retrospective diagnoses abound: most recently in the spotlight have been not only alan turing (o’connell and fitzgerald), but also nikola tesla, albert einstein, charles darwin, and h.g. wells (fitzgerald and o’brien). since rain man, there has been an explosion of films featuring autistic characters and documentaries about autism. there is a proliferation of books, both fiction and non-fiction; there is even a broadway play currently touring based on a best-selling novel that centers an autistic teenage protagonist. there are now more than a dozen academic journals devoted to studies of autism. and in 2018, the national institutes of health (nih) will spend an estimated $181 million on autism research (report.nih.gov). autism is everywhere, and yet, not exactly anywhere, at least in terms of etiology. a stand-alone biological marker continues to elude 2 apgar catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) neuroscientists who nevertheless insist on autism’s recognizability. and this is a point that des fitzgerald wants us to understand in tracing autism; uncertainty, ambiguity, and the affective labor of neuroscience: not so much that autism remains an enigma ─ it does ─ but that neuroscientists working on autism embrace its instability. what was initially a planned contribution to neuroreduction literature, tracing autism instead describes the “definitional ambiguity at the heart of autism neuroscience” (p. 29). fitzgerald draws out uncertainties, including the categorical instability of “neuroscience” (p. 20) and its sometimes vexed relationship with psychology (p. 67); the inadequacies of brain imaging (pp. 59-67); the heterogeneity, or perhaps multiplicity, of autism(s) (pp. 34-35); the diagnostic authority given to the feeling of interaction (p. 51); researchers’ fascination with autism (p. 45); and their collective unease with its unknowability (p. 73). in enacting research practices through these entangled ambiguities, neuroscientists “feel their way” (p. 140), crossing epistemic borders between psychology and biology, guided by a sense of familiarity: they know it when they see it (p. 48). fitzgerald argues that it is this tangle of tensions between the biological and the social, the genetic and the environmental, between a brain scan and a clinician’s feelings that together “enabl[e] a firm neuroscience of autism” (p. 29). indeed, in tracing autism, fitzgerald argues for the possibility that this entanglement constructs autism itself. drawing on feminist materialism, in particular work by karen barad and elizabeth wilson, fitzgerald explains that autism coheres as an object of inquiry by means of neuroscience’s uncertain pursuit. to trace autism by following the genetic to the environmental to the similarities between autisms to brain scans is to insist there is something being traced (pp. 11-12). in this way, autism illustrates a feminist materialist interrogation of the assumption that entities exist distinct from their interaction with each other (barad, cited p. 76); we can understand autism as a product of its relationship to neuroscientific research on autism and to autism/s as a broad diagnostic category or set of affiliated differences. autism’s stability is contingent 3 apgar catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) (haraway, cited p. 152), then, on the uncertain neuroscientific pursuit of autism. the neuroscience fitzgerald encounters fails to deliver the reductiveness social scientists have been trained to call out because it refuses to position uncertainty and heterogeneity as obstacles to an objective neurological account of autism. we find researchers admitting to the “fluffiness” (pp. 42-43) of their research, allowing feelings, intuitions, and the “softly subjective” (p. 135) not only to inform diagnoses but to enable them to continue in their pursuits despite myriad uncertainties. they are fascinated, hopeful, disappointed, distressed, tearful, anxious, self-critical and otherwise embodied subjects for whom a gut feeling (p. 100) determines a course of action or a diagnostic parameter. what emerges from fitzgerald’s observations is movement: the way autism brings different brain science disciplines together (pp. 154-155), the collaboration between a researcher’s feelings and autism’s shape, and the interconnectedness of the social and the biological both set in motion by, and productive of, autism. fitzgerald’s project itself indicates another movement. he writes, “we start [with relations, interactions, interpretations, and ambiguities] not to destabilize a scientific endeavor, but with precisely the opposite intention: to gather together the components from which a stable scientific object might actually come together” (p. 144, my emphasis). fitzgerald does not engage in a paranoid reading of neuroscientific accounts of autism research, one that would inevitably yield the “allconquering neuroreducer” (p. 97) already assumed by skeptical social scientists to be toiling relentlessly over brain scans and data sets. following sedgwick, fitzgerald asks what we might gain, instead, from an ameliorative, perhaps post-critical, approach to his subject and to social studies of science more generally. this reparative tendency emerges almost immediately in the text, when fitzgerald describes his method (an “unfashionable” (p. 22) interview study) as one that generously enables a non-paranoid engagement in that it takes “seriously” the interviewee’s account of her field and her experiences (p. 24, emphasis in original). 4 apgar catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) fitzgerald wants us to take his project seriously, despite his own selfcriticisms (including his unfashionable methods (p. 22) and his “slightly stupid description” (p. 115) of neuroscience) and the bare process of writing he allows us to observe (e.g. “i was about to write…but…actually…” (p. 39). social scientists have come to expect this sort of reflexivity and affective engagement in their fields; and i think this is what fitzgerald wants us to consider: how might we also come to understand, to engage with, and perhaps even to expect the same complicated humanity to emerge from the stories neuroscientists tell about their own work? fitzgerald’s questions have important political implications. as he points out, the neurodiversity movement and disability justice activism have mobilized in opposition to those sciences that frame autism (and other physical, cognitive, or sensory atypicalities) as defect or lack. how, he asks, can we do reparative social studies of science and clinical practice when the affective work of scientists and clinicians is often motivated by an investment in cure (p. 113)? it is an insightful question, and one fitzgerald does not answer. it also, perhaps, overlooks the contributions critical disability studies has made to scholarship in new materialisms, affect theory, and embodiment, and how this work has, in turn, informed the politics of disability (i am thinking particularly of the expansion of “disability” to include chronic pain and mental illness). nevertheless, i am not that interested in being suspicious, and fitzgerald’s book, carefully conceived and beautifully written, reminds me that i need not be. references cdc | data and statistics | autism spectrum disorder (asd) | ncbddd. (n.d.). retrieved january 20, 2018, from https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html estimates of funding for various research, condition, and disease categories (rcdc). (2017, july 3). retrieved from https://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending.aspx 5 apgar catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(1) fitzgerald, m., & o’brien, b. (2007). genius genes: how asperger talents changed the world. shawnee mission, ks: autism asperger publishing company. o’connell, h., & fitzgerald, m. (2003). did alan turing have asperger’s syndrome? irish journal of psychological medicine, 20(1), 28-31. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0790966700007503 bio amanda apgar is a phd candidate in the department of gender studies at university of california, los angeles. her research on “special needs” memoirs examines the entanglement of gender, sexuality, and ability in dominant narratives about childhood. she is currently a visiting instructor in gender and women’s studies at pomona college in claremont, california.     roundtable: housewife’s secret arsenal starch: faultless premium spray starch     deborah cohler san francisco state university dcohler@sfsu.edu     abstract an exhibit at the museum of the american military family provides a springboard from which to investigate spray starch. the exhibit elicits recollections of military ironing as a masculine labor of precision, rather than unskilled feminized work. a starched and ironed uniform signals military conformity and discipline; the illusion of raceand gender-blind meritocracy; and sanitized, honorable warriors. braiding together the military roots of this cold war-technology with its cultural history reveals the domestic labor that produces spray starched militarized masculinity. this essay is a part of the roundtable called “the housewife's secret arsenal” (henceforth hsa); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. the title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.   keywords domestic labor, museums, us military training, hygiene, starch     walk into the museum of the american military family (mamf) in tijeras, new mexico, and you enter a home. founded in 2011 by a small battalion of volunteers—most of whom are military spouses, kids, or veterans—mamf collects and curates material culture and archival records of military families. housed in a former duplex, this small community museum displays exhibits around the living room's fireplace and in kitchen cupboards, as well as on walls and in display cases. an ironing board stands between the living room and the kitchen, a uniform, iron, and can of faultless premium spray starch resting atop (figure 1). to many veterans and their families, the humble can of faultless premium spray starch signals authenticity: proof that the museum is getting it right, a shared object. spray starch denotes military precision and the domestication of war. and its origins and contexts reveal how threads of labor, technology, and military hierarchy camouflage difference and violence. figure 1. ironing exhibit, museum of the american military family. photograph by author.   invisible labor made visible ironing the uniform has been a key part of us military life. mamf's ironing exhibit illustrates a core component of the museum's mission: to make visible the necessary and invisible labor of us military “dependents” (spouses, children). and in that spirit, i—a civilian, feminist researcher—initially assumed that service members' spouses (wives) would be responsible for this domestic labor. domestic labor has been culturally assigned to women and feminized. however, when chatting at the exhibit, a female military spouse commented that her husband did this domestic task in their family, since her ironing was not up to standard, and a male veteran noted that ironing had been his job (field notes, june 2017). this exhibit makes the domestic labor of military dress visible. conversations in that museum kitchen (a public space repurposed from domestic architecture) complicate any linear story of women's invisible labor for men's advancement. figure 2. a can of faultless premium spray starch. photograph by louis bledsoe.   faultless brands itself as “america's oldest, most respected fabric care brand” (faultless, n.d.). embracing the rhetoric and iconography of americana, the can's gold, blue, and white design is militarized by its signature red star (figure 2). the white-and-red striped ironing board cover; the blue, white, and gold on the iron; and the can of faultless together form a patriotic backdrop for the battle dress uniform (bdus) on the board. bdus were issued between 1981 and 2015 (cole 2021); they predate current operational camouflage pattern (ocps) designed for desert, rather than jungle, warfare. the uniform on display is historical, not contemporary. how did spray starch become military gear? braiding together the military roots of this cold war-technology with its cultural history reveals the domestic labor that produces spray starched militarized masculinity. a starched and ironed uniform signals military conformity and discipline; the illusion of raceand gender-blind meritocracy; and sanitized, honorable warriors. mamf's starch and ironing board represent war-making as a project of order and regulation, not carnage and death. from soapsuds to spray starch during the revolutionary war, laundresses accompanied general washington's army. often wives of enlisted soldiers, these women received “half rations for themselves and quarter rations for each child” (alt and stone 1991, 4) to clean and maintain soldiers' clothing. an order to “not throw soapsuds on the parade ground” (4) indicates an ambivalent relationship of military discipline to the materiality of hygiene. simultaneously necessary and marginal, female camp-followers such as laundresses disrupted homosocial military formations with their indispensable, messy labors. the end of chattel slavery and the rise of industrialization transformed work in the united states. domestic labor became a paid, not stolen, class of work in the south; industrialization provided waged labor in the north; some middle-class women entered newly opening professions. as unpaid care work increasingly fell into “second shift” labor for many working women, the rise of commodity capitalism promised increased domestic efficiency. the first us starch production plant opened in 1807 (schwartz and whistler 2009, 3). derived from grains or vegetables, starch is mechanically extracted and chemically processed. long used on textiles, as powder, as food additive, or for adhesive, industrial starch production distinguishes starches by material, chemical process, and use. in 1892 sarah boone, a formerly enslaved african american woman, patented an improved ironing board that facilitated ironing seams and sleeves (helton 2018). purchasing boone's ironing board instead of using a homemade board promised to ease an onerous task. in 1897 faultless starch company was formed. major thomas graham beaham, a white retired union officer, joined the wholesale household supply company in kansas city, missouri, in 1887. a decade later, the sale of household starch eclipsed its other products, and beaham, now sole owner, began exclusively selling starch. both boone's patent and beaham's consolidation indicate increasing demand and commodification of household products in the 1890s. turn-of-the-twentieth-century public hygiene campaigns enlisted middle-class women to discipline immigrant and working-class women. these so-called social reformers created arbitrary standards of household cleanliness and extolled commercially produced clothing and household products. such eugenics-based campaigns foreshadowed mid-twentieth-century ideologies of domestic sanitation, all tied to new inventions that promised to reduce the domestic labor required to meet newly heightened standards. one such invention aerosolized household starch. developed in 1924, aerosol technology was first widely used in the us during world war ii: “canisters filled with insecticide and propellants were used to protect u.s. servicemen from insects carrying diseases such as malaria” (national aerosol association, n.d.). in 1949 world war ii army veteran robert henry abplanalp patented a plastic valve for aerosol cans, paving the way for general use (greenhouse 2003). in 1960 faultless transformed its popular powdered starch into a liquid aerosolized spray, rapidly increasing its market share (funding universe, n.d.). in 1972 a patent was approved for the incorporation of “a film-forming, water-soluble polyurethane” to be added to the dry starch and water that made up most spray starch formulas. the patent cites aerosol starch as “a great convenience to the housewife,” which has become “a commercially important item” (starkman and brown 1972). starched uniforms signaled military readiness during the cold war. colin powell reports that in 1961 members of the strategic army corps “had our field uniforms starched stiff as boards to achieve knife-edge creases. 'breaking starch' meant using a broom handle to open up the pants so we could get our legs into our fatigues” (powell and persico 1995, 55). powell bemoans time spent starching rather than training for combat. steve loomis ltc, en, us army (retired) recalls, "starch was not used by soldiers in combat (vietnam or southwest asia) as it wasted time and could irritate the skin." starch was used only by "more senior person[s] in zone" or in garrison (non-combat) to look sharp (personal communication, august 23, 2021). basic training continued to prioritize sartorial “readiness” as recruits were sent into increasingly deadly combat situations where a starched uniform was a detriment, not an asset. concurrently, faultless promoted its new aerosol product to suburban women. in a 1965 television commercial, a white housewife starches her husband's sports shirt. the authoritative male voiceover and animated stars projecting from the aerosol cannister instruct, “even modern fabrics stay neater, look fresher, longer” (laundrystop 2010). as the us increased its involvement in the war in vietnam and growing civil rights movements challenged white supremacy, faultless's postwar marketing not only ignored its military roots and uses, but deliberately framed starching men's clothes as a peacetime domestic task for white, unpaid, women: part of the erasure of the war in white, home-front iconography. heavy starch: basic training uniforms enforce bodily conformity to conservative social norms, discipling individuals and covering over cultural difference. a well-pressed military uniform should minimize race, class, ethnic, religious, and gender differences. as the military applauds its “color-blind culture” (lutz, 2001, 187), it manages racial, class, and cultural differences through rigorous conformity to an able-bodied, white, male, christian model (belkin 2012). basic training includes intensive bodily regulation: when to sleep, how to make a bed, how launder clothes. some veterans report formal lessons in military ironing techniques. others recall more haphazard approaches. etc kyle boswell (uscg retired) reports, “it was part of the student experience to look sharp and look good” (personal communication, august 3, 2021). regardless of class, race, or gender, recruits are expected to leave basic training with a systematized ability to maintain their uniforms. the feminized labor of domesticity becomes masculine when systematized and surveilled. discussing her basic training in 1978, former a1c cheryl mathison (air force) told me, “they even trained you how to fold your bras” (personal communication, july 29, 2021). of coast guard basic training, boswell reports, “ironing culture can take on a life of its own,” including informal competitions in the barracks: who can get the sharpest creases, for example. when asked if he noticed gendered differences in “ironing culture,” boswell replied, “what i saw was much more of a meritocracy...i saw people who tried real hard and worked real hard to succeed, and i saw people who tried not so hard and just kind of skate by not succeed.” the domestic is refashioned as part of the equalizing of basic training: military discipline that can become a competition and is gendered masculine for recruits of all genders as it occupies public, rather than domestic, space. premium starch: “like a boss” after soldiers learn regulation ironing during basic training, this task moves from a collective, sometimes competitive, activity in the barracks to an invisible, domestic labor. when recruits leave basic training for their first (non-combat) duty station—with or without a military spouse in tow—the spray starch comes along. starchy military masculinity appears in a popular youtube video "ironing your [air force] blues shirt." viewers are exhorted to soak the shirt with heavy duty spray starch, “turn that bad boy inside out,” and “work the edges of the rank really good” by the white male faultless-wielder. “that's it. simple. like a boss,” the video concludes (jeremy and ashlee kate 2014). produced by an air force husband-wife team, the video teaches ironing through hyper-masculine performance. spray starch symbolizes peacetime military, when a soldier worries about a sergeant's disapproval of a trouser crease, not survival through a muddy battlefield. and whether a starched uniform is required depends on the duty station. working as a medical lab tech, army veteran marc johnson wore “cook whites”—no starch required, especially on the night shift. but when giving presentations or at special events, he wore his starched class a uniform—“that was my money maker” (personal communication, august 4, 2021). dress uniforms (always starched) mark special occasions: celebrations, promotions, funerals—events outside warzones. a well-starched uniform signals safety, success, order, discipline, and technology. use your spray starch and you will thrive. but this formula only works outside the dirty work of war. for combat engineers or ground troops, this sanitized version of military discipline is irrelevant. when the can of faultless spray starch on an ironing board in the mamf kitchen becomes a touchstone of military identity and verisimilitude, the military stands for safety, order, and homogeneity. the physical and psychological costs of the war machine, and the military's underlying mission of control through violence is an unseen wrinkle. coda: “do not starch or hot press the ocp” in 2015 the army introduced ocps—a new uniform textile designed for warfare in afghanistan and iraq. the technical fabric is flame resistant, insect repelling, and cooling, the digital pattern redesigned: the right attire for desert conditions and to survive improvised explosive devices. this is wartime fabric. of note for the housewife's arsenal, care instructions for ocp uniforms state boldly, “do not starch or hot press the ocp. light ironing is authorized, however, repeated hot pressing or heavy ironing will accelerate the overall wear of the fabric” (public affairs 2018). the rise of “technical fabrics” may soon relegate faultless premium spray starch to the museum. references alt, betty sowers, and bonnie domrose stone. 1991. campfollowing: a history of the military wife. new york: praeger publishers. belkin, aaron. 2012. bring me men: military masculinity and the benign facade of american empire, 1898-2001. new york: columbia university press. cole, david. 2021. “history of us army uniforms.” military.com. https://www.military.com/army/uniforms.html. faultless. n.d. “about us.” accessed august 15, 2021. https://faultless.com/about-us/. funding universe. n.d. “faultless starch/bon ami company history.” accessed august 1, 2021. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/faultless-starch-bon-ami-company-history/. greenhouse, linda. 2003. “robert abplanalp, 81, inventor and nixon confidant, dies.” new york times, september 2, 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/02/us/robert-abplanalp-81-inventor-and-nixon-confidant-dies.html?smid=url-share. helton, daniel. 2018. "sarah boone (1832 1904)." black past. july 4, 2018. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/boone-sarah-1832-1904/. jeremy and ashlee kate. 2014. “ironing your blues shirt”. operation af life: faith, family and the fight for freedom. youtube video, april 22, 2014. https://youtu.be/c3pigqwwbmg. lutz, catherine. 2001. homefront: a military city and the american twentieth century. boston: beacon press. laundrystop. 2010. “faultless spray tv commercial 1965.” september 19, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8lsucjaec. national aerosol association. n.d. “history of the aerosol.” accessed august 15, 2021. https://www.nationalaerosol.com/history-of-aerosol/. powell, colin l., and joseph e. persico. 1995. my american journey: an autobiography. new york: random house. public affairs, 315th airlift wing. 2018. “updates to dress and appearance afi.” 512th airlift wing. july 18, 2018. https://www.512aw.afrc.af.mil/news/article-display/article/1578470/updates-to-dress-appearance-afi/. schwartz, deborah, and roy l. whistler. 2009. “history and future of starch.” in starch: chemistry and technology, 3rd ed., edited by james n. bemiller and roy whistler, 1-10. london: elsevier. starkman, jesse h., and william j. brown. 1972. “spray starch containing water-soluble polyurethane.” united states patent office. patent number 3,639,309. february 1, 1972.     author bio deborah cohler is a professor of women and gender studies at san francisco state university. she is the author of citizen, invert, queer: lesbianism and war in early twentieth-century britain (university of minnesota press, 2010) and is currently completing a book about us military spouses in the early twenty-first century.     book review book review | digital black feminism, by catherine knight steele (new york university press, 2021)     leslie kay jones rutgers university lv251@sociology.rutgers.edu     digital black feminism is a valuable methodological and empirical addition to the digital humanities and communications fields. catherine knight steele combines digital ethnography with archival content analysis to critically document black women’s impact on the cultural infrastructure of the web. from hashtags to community message boards, steele demonstrates that we should understand digital black feminism as expanding upon the intellectual genealogy of pre-digital black feminism. digital black feminism also serves as a case study of online culture work as a process of spatially developing the internet through the creation and maintenance of community spaces. as a participant observer, steele is able to demonstrate the multi-sited nature of digital black feminism with important lessons for cultural scholarship in the new media ecosystem. in chapter 1 steele situates her inquiry of black feminist digital production within a history of black women as “technological innovators, laborers, and creative manipulators of feminized communication” (23). beginning with a historical analysis has the positive effect of pre-empting a techno-utopian interpretation of the emphasis on black women’s agency in digitally mediated space. rather than a model of the democratizing potential of digitally networked media tools, digital black feminism reflects black women’s use of new technological affordances to innovate on an existing repertoire of dissent and subversion. steele applies tonia sutherland’s strategy of “archival amnesty” (24) to records of black women’s labor under us chattel slavery to identify moments of agency and survival in the use and creation of technology. steel argues that we can subvert narratives that affirm black victimhood and foreclose possibilities of black agency by reading black women’s interactions with technology as artifacts of intentional resistance. steele uses rayvon fouché’s “survival technology” concept to locate creative intention and intellectual production in forced labor. alluding to audre lorde’s often-referenced thesis that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” steele asserts that the ability to examine, deconstruct, and subvert social systems is historically foundational to black women’s resistance. because identifying and subverting technological oppression is key to black women’s survival, we can read those subversions as materially significant interventions in technological innovations. for example, steele argues that black women used the performance of “respectability politics” as “an avenue to hone argumentation skills and cement their position in black cultural life” (37) in spite of the interpersonal and intrapersonal political marginalization of black women. chapter 2 examines black women’s digitally mediated knowledge production through the metaphor of the black beauty shop. historically, african american women innovated the black woman-owned beauty shop to challenge their exclusion from participation in public life. as places where black women could gather and exchange knowledge without surveillance, beauty shops constitute essential cultural infrastructure. accordingly, we can understand the early beauty shop owners that subverted cultural proscriptions against black female property ownership and entrepreneurship as technological innovators hacking social, economic, and legal systems. steele writes, “the how of the shop also tells a story of exclusion from the traditional economy and entrepreneurship” (47). this narrative of prohibition and pathbreaking allows steele to connect digital black feminism to the longer legacy of black feminist culture work. as metaphorical beauty shops, curated digital black feminist spaces provide spaces for black women to debate social ideals; collect, access, and share educational resources; seek community support; and politically mobilize. at the same time, the “master’s tools” metaphor captures the liberatory limitations of capitalist wealth accumulation and property ownership in both cases. this continuity between earlier black feminist expressions and new digital black feminism illustrates again that digital black feminists in a modern media ecology share with their predecessors the need to organize in opposition to systems of communication control. the inherent tension between creating intervening in existing systems to enable participation and dismantling such systems altogether creates the context for innovation. one such innovation is digital black feminism. the section “from technophobia to black technophilia” offers important insight into one of the book’s central projects, resisting the erasure of black digital creators. steele challenges the continued predominance of a black technophobia lens that positions black technology users as always late adopters with low technical competencies. as a corrective, she offers black technophilia, a focus on quotidian digitally mediated communication among networked black users. steele’s usage draws on andré brock’s study of black digital libidinal, or pleasure-seeking communication via social media as well as marisa parham’s critical analysis of pre-digital djing and remixing culture. the technophillia lens is a helpful connector between hip-hop feminism and digital black feminism. chapter 3, “principles for black digital feminism,” offers a roadmap for understanding how blog work laid the foundation for later digitally mediated community-building during the focus period of 2014 to 2020. steele identifies three principles that undergird black feminist blog writing and community management: agency, complicated allegiances, and self-care. the third chapter answers the fundamental question of what constitutes participation in digital black feminism and black feminism more broadly by identifying ideological continuities in the work of self-identified black feminists with popular digital platforms. the chapter could have included an examination of political tensions between self-defined black feminists, since, at times, it gives the impression of movement consensus where political contention is more typical. although black feminism has been leveraged in online spaces by trans women and queer cis women to talk about anti-woman violence, other women who identify with the black feminist tradition have invoked the same intellectual genealogy to exclude trans women. in chapter 4 steele leverages unique insight as a participant observer in digital black feminist spaces to curate and analyze artifacts from black feminist blogs. this is the book’s most empirically rich chapter and also the chapter that leans most heavily on steele’s operationalization of black feminism. as an “older millennial” herself, steele is able to narrate a convincing account of how black feminists of her generation were able to develop and leverage the technical and intellectual skills to carve out rhetorical space online. insofar as black women digital creators use new technological affordances in service of the black feminist praxis of capturing and publishing black women’s experience and knowledge, they transform the generative capacity of that technology. using her own biography as a starting point, steele describes how the black model who served as the face of the famous typing training program mavis beacon became a symbol of black women as computing experts and leaders for black girls learning new tech tools. armed with this and other imaginaries of professional leadership, black girls were able to imagine themselves as agents of technological creation and cultural authorities within technocultural spaces. steele demonstrates that viewing oneself as an agent of technology use and creation has historically required that black women take a stance in opposition to a default deficit model of their participation. for her historic analysis, steele turns to white prohibitions against black literacy and their attendant methods of surveillance and control: “writing was a way to resist illiteracy as a tool of confinement” (97). in other words, writing and publishing were (and are) simultaneously tools of entrapment and tools of liberation. more broadly, “black women’s relationship to labor and technology is a story of using tools and technologies crafted to oppress as mechanisms of resistance” (39). digital black feminism’s final chapter reflects on digital black feminism as frame for branding, curating, or accessing targeted monetizable digital content. chapter 5 is an excellent case study of new media dynamics, such as the rapid diffusion and reconfiguration of collective mobilization language across multiple digital platforms. steele addresses digital black feminist labor in terms of not just cultural production but workforce participation and the economic constraints of public knowledge production. in this context, the multi-sitedness of digital black feminist is a branding and content distribution mechanism made necessary by new models of publication and compensation. from the modernization of patronage through online crowdfunding via companies like c and kickstarter to the cultivation of loyal followers on facebook, being compensated for digital culture work means navigating conditions created by big tech companies. the strategies digital black feminists use for doing so hold critical insights about the technical affordances and limitations of these content monetization systems. digital black feminism demonstrates the importance of the cultural infrastructure that shapes users’ material experiences with the web and social media. steele’s analysis demonstrates the multi-sitedness of black digital feminism, and with it the continued importance of spatiality to understanding digital culture. since black feminists’ public-facing personal life becomes part of the same textual record as their scholarship, their daily participation in social media becomes an act of curatorial labor that necessitates both technical knowledge and complex culture work. digital black feminist praxis addresses the legacy of literacy as both a technology of social control and one of resistance through an analysis of social media literacies deployed by digital black feminists to take up public discursive space. thus, studying black women’s technoculture serves as a vehicle for identifying novel, distinct, and empirically generative uses of emergent technological affordances.     author bio leslie kay jones is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at rutgers university–new brunswick, specializing in social movements. she draws extensively on the fields of race and gender, critical race theory, and online social media in her study of collective mobilization. she teaches qualitative and computer-assisted research methods, particularly digital ethnography and content analysis. gillisbuckfinal   article   redefining "virgin birth"� after kaguya: mammalian parthenogenesis in experimental biology, 2004-2014   eva mae gillis-buck university of california, san francisco gillisbuckem@gmail.com in 2004, a group of korean and japanese scientists reported the birth of a healthy mouse with two mothers and no father. the scientists named the mouse kaguya, after a japanese folktale princess born from a bamboo stump, and published a nature paper entitled "birth of parthenogenetic mice that can develop to adulthood" (kono et al., 2004). the word parthenogenesis, from the greek for virgin birth, is a term scientists use to describe various forms of reproduction and development without sperm.  media headlines, such as "the end of males?"� and "two mums make baby," fueled public interest in what kaguya's birth might mean for human reproduction (fisher, 2004; trivedi, 2004). but tomohiro kono, one of the leading scientists behind the kaguya experiment, told reporters that the idea of human parthenogenesis was "senseless"� (ritter, 2004). kono and colleagues argued that kaguya's birth actually demonstrated how and why males are required for mammalian reproduction. the kaguya experiment, they explained, was simply an effort to better understand an epigenetic process called genomic imprinting and why the maternal and the paternal genome are both necessary for complete mammalian development. the idea that a mouse without a father could demonstrate the necessity of males seems contradictory, and ironic given the history of feminist and lesbian engagement with parthenogenesis. all-female reproduction has been a theme of feminist science fiction throughout the twentieth century (ingram-waters, 2006, 2008; squier, 1994), and lesbian separatist groups in the 1970s and 1980s followed parthenogenesis research closely, optimistic for its potential as a new reproductive technology (kelly, 1977; rensenbrink, 2010). scholars have noted that the actualization of a queer imaginary— parthenogenesis—has ironically been used as scientific support for the biological necessity of males, upholding a heteronormative one-father plus one-mother reproductive scheme (ingram-waters, 2006, 2008; lafuente funes, 2012; rensenbrink, 2010). however, in this paper, i show that unconventional interpretations of sex and parenthood can be found even in scientific research that claims mammalian parthenogenesis is impossible. many scientists insist that males are necessary, but they also describe eggs as paternal, embryos as sperm-free, and bimaternal sexual reproduction as something distinct from parthenogenesis. given the etymology of parthenogenesis, and the tendency of some scientists and media outlets to use parthenogenesis and virgin birth interchangeably, the language used to explain the kaguya experiment contributes to scientific and cultural understandings of sex, gender, reproduction, and family. i argue that language of the kaguya experiment both supports a reproductive status quo and simultaneously challenges it. to better understand how this scientific language has evolved, i first contextualize the kaguya experiment within the history of parthenogenesis research, which is caught up in what i call a discourse of impossibility. i use this phrase to describe conversations among scientists, taking place in academic journals in the twentieth and twenty-first century, that conclude in a consensus: viable parthenogenesis in mammals is impossible, even though it is a common form of reproduction in many insect, reptile, and bird species. so-called parthenotes—eggs that begin dividing and developing without the contribution of sperm—were made into a routine laboratory technology, and the understanding that parthenotes could never develop to term made them the "right tools for the job" in many ways (clarke & fujimura, 1992). the inviability of mammalian parthenotes was useful to developmental biologists, who compared parthenotes with fertilized embryos to discover the necessary components of sperm in early development. geneticists found parthenogenesis useful, given parthenotes' haploid or homozygous diploid genome, which could reveal recessive mutations. parthenotes were also key to the conceptualization of genomic imprinting in the 1980s. then, in the early twenty-first century, parthenotes became a source of stem cells. at a time when american scientists could not use federal funding for the creation of human embryonic stem cell lines, human parthenogenetic stem cells served as an ethical alternative. destroying a parthenote for stem cell derivation was not viewed as destroying a potential human life. this line of reasoning was largely dependent on the idea that mammalian parthenogenesis could never result in a live birth. thus a productive experimental paradigm and strong political forces helped solidify the discourse of impossibility into a consensus: viable mammalian parthenogenesis does not and cannot happen. the rest of this paper examines how the birth of kaguya—a healthy mammalian parthenote—affected the discourse of impossibility and the language used to describe gametes and reproduction. using a data set of 202 peer-reviewed publications that cite the kaguya experiment, i investigate how scientists interpreted the birth of a mouse with no father and used the words parthenogenesis, maternal, paternal, and bimaternal in their published articles. my focus on language continues a feminist tradition of paying close attention to word choice and metaphor in scientific descriptions of sperm and egg, nucleus and cytoplasm, gene and environment (butler, 1990; fausto-sterling, 1989; keller, 1995; martin, 1991; moore, 2007). the case of mammalian parthenogenesis is particularly well-suited for this type of analysis, given the loaded term virgin birth. virgin birth is a common theme in religious myths, science fiction, lesbian and feminist imaginaries, and sensational news stories. virgin birth enters a laboratory setting through biologists' use of the term parthenogenesis, sometimes used interchangeably with virgin birth (miyoshi et al., 2006; wilmut, campbell, & tudge, 2000). for example, a 2002 nature article on genomic imprinting and entitled "immaculate misconception"� stated, "sex is necessary and 'virgin' births are impossible in humans"� (surani, 2002, p. 491). by investigating scientists' word choice when describing development without sperm, this essay contributes to discussions of how scientific narratives influence and are influenced by gender norms and cultural understandings of reproduction, sexuality, and family. part 1: establishing the impossibility of mammalian parthenogenesis in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, biologists compared parthenotes with fertilized embryos to investigate the role of sperm in early development. by examining the historical use of parthenotes in experimental biology, we can better understand how the discourse of impossibility was built up over time and how kaguya's birth was interpreted within that discourse.  1.1 artificial mammalian parthenogenesis. in the 1890s, german-american biologist jacques loeb developed a technique he called artificial parthenogenesis: inducing division and development in unfertilized sea urchin eggs by altering the salt concentration of seawater.1 american biologist gregory pincus—well known for his later work on oral contraceptives—claimed that "loeb stopped too soon,"� and pincus hoped to bring about artificial parthenogenesis in mammals (quoted in pauly, 1987, p. 187).  in the 1930s and 1940s, pincus experimented with loeb's methods and found that he could effectively induce cell division in unfertilized, cultured rabbit eggs. he even claimed to produce several live-born, healthy rabbits via artificial parthenogenesis (pincus, 1939; pincus & shapiro, 1940). in 1957, university of edinburgh professor richard beatty wrote a monograph on parthenogenesis in mammalian development, reviewing a decade' worth of experimental research and clarifying certain terms. beatty defined parthenogenesis as "the production of an embryo from a female gamete without the concurrence of a male gamete, and with or without eventual development into an adult"(1957, p. 4).  parthenogenesis became a term applicable to embryos and fetuses as well as live-born young. such organisms became known as parthenogenones in britain and parthenotes in the united states (beatty, 1957, p. 4; graham, 1974, p. 399). regarding the possibility of live-born mammalian parthenotes, beatty was skeptical but entertained the idea, especially since so many non-mammalian species were able to reproduce parthenogenetically.2 he pointed out that even if spontaneous parthenogenesis were to occur, parthenotes were likely to go unnoticed.throughout the 1950s and 1960s, scientists and physicians searched for rare cases of spontaneous parthenogenesis in animal populations and in humans (balfour-lynn, 1956; rensenbrink, 2010, pp. 294-5; prasad, 2012, pp. 61-77; whitten, 1971). however, in all cases, blood tests and skin grafts provided evidence of paternity. by the 1970s, spontaneous viable mammalian parthenogenesis seemed improbable, and pincus's results had not been replicated for thirty years. his rabbits were considered an exception to the general observation that mammalian eggs would begin to develop parthenogenetically, but they never made it very far. after a certain stage, development consistently became delayed and disorganized, and eventually mammalian parthenotes turned into tumors or were spontaneously aborted. 1.2 nuclear transfer experiments. in 1952, american biologists robert briggs and thomas king pioneered animal cloning by removing the nucleus from a frog egg and adding a nucleus from another frog cell. this technique—nuclear transfer via microinjection—quickly became a standard method for amphibian cloning, but it was difficult to replicate in mammals. oxford-based biologist derek bromhall finally managed it in 1975, writing: clearly a somatic cell nucleus, transplanted into an unfertilised rabbit egg, can replace the sperm in supporting development in the early cleavage stages. after "fertilisation" of the egg by the transplanted nucleus the synkaryon or "zygote" is capable of apparently normal division at least up to the morula stage. (1975, p. 721) bromhall's words demonstrate how animal cloning reworked the definition of fertilization and challenged the reproductive necessity of male gametes. were these cloned rabbit embryos actually mammalian parthenotes, given that they developed without any contribution from sperm? cloning refers to the generation of two identical organisms, and so parthenotes are not clones since they are not identical to their mothers—parthenotes contain only half their mother's genome. bromhall's mammalian cloning showed that early development without sperm is not exclusive to parthenotes; in this way, parthenotes' virginity is not their only defining feature. rather, parthenotes are distinguishable from clones in their genetic uniqueness.  in addition to challenging the definitions of fertilization and parthenogenesis, nuclear transfer technique in mammals allowed for the experimental creation of new entities, including gynogenetic and androgenetic embryos: fertilized embryos from which a scientist microsurgically removes the sperm nucleus or egg nucleus, respectively (figure 1). in the late 1970s and 1980s, scientists experimented with these embryos in order to ask questions about the necessity and sufficiency of different aspects of the egg and sperm. using gynogenetic embryos, scientists hoped to explain the inviability of mouse parthenogenesis by pin-pointing the necessary paternal component, whether nuclear or cytoplasmic.  note the question was not, is the sperm necessary? but rather, what part of the sperm is necessary? figure 1. a schematic explaining the distinctions between parthenogenesis, gynogenesis, and androgenesis. in parthenogenesis, eggs begin divided and developing without sperm. scientists create gynogenetic embryos by microsurgically removing the sperm nucleus from the fertilized egg. androgenetic embryos are created by removing the egg nucleus from a fertilized egg. source: leeb and wutz, 2013, p. 2. in 1977, biologists peter hoppe and karl illmensee reported the live birth of gynogenetic and androgenetic mice, suggesting that some non-genetic contribution of sperm, released into the egg at fertilization, was enough to direct proper development. but their results could not be replicated.3 other research groups reported the opposite result and conclusion: gynogenetic and androgenic mouse embryos failed to develop to term, suggesting both the maternal and paternal nucleus are necessary for complete development (mann & lovell-badge, 1984; modliński, 1975; surani & barton, 1983).  experiments demonstrating the developmental failure of biparental mouse embryos (in which two egg or two sperm nuclei are transferred into an enucleated egg) gave further support for the idea that both the maternal and paternal genome are necessary for mammalian development (mcgrath & solter, 1984; surani et al., 1984). 1.3 genomic imprinting. but why are both maternal and paternal genomes required? in 1984, cambridge biologist azim surani and his colleagues suggested that eggs and sperm undergo differential dna modification during egg maturation and sperm maturation (1984). such dna modification is an epigenetic process, involving chemical and structural changes that effect protein synthesis but do not change the dna sequence. differential modification in eggs and sperm would mean that for some genes, only the maternal copy is expressed (translated into protein), while for other genes, only the paternal copy is expressed. thus, two copies of a maternal genome—as is the case in parthenogenesis—would result in too much of some proteins and a complete lack of other essential proteins (figure 2). surani and colleagues named this type of genetic modification imprinting (not to be confused with the term for an animal behavior common in geese). genomic imprinting (also called parental imprinting) became a classic example of epigenetics and the definitive explanation for the inviability of mammalian parthenogenesis (ferguson-smith, 2011). figure 2. a schematic explaining genomic imprinting. in the case of androgenesis, gynogenesis, or parthenogenesis, there will be too much of some proteins and none of other essential proteins. 1.4 parthenogenetic stem cells. at the turn of the twenty-first century, mammalian parthenotes became a technology of stem cell science. in 2002, a massachusetts-based biotech firm isolated stem cells from primate parthenogenetic embryos (cibelli et al., 2002). in 2007, scientists at the california-based international stem cell corporation derived human parthenogenetic stem cells (revazova et al., 2007), an accomplishment quickly replicated (kim et al., 2007; lin et al., 2007; mai et al., 2007).4 some scientists and bioethicists argued that human parthenogenetic stem cells had advantages over human embryonic stem cells. first, they were genetically similar to the adult egg donor, and thus better for therapeutic use (less risk of immune rejection). second, the process of deriving the stem cells did not destroy a human embryo. at a time when american scientists could not use federal funding for the creation of human embryonic stem cell lines, it was argued that parthenogenetic stem cells could "circumvent ethical concerns"� because the process of deriving them did not damage a "normal competent embryo"(cibelli et al., 2002, p. 819). the idea that parthenotes are not normal, competent embryos is largely based on the claim that viable mammalian parthenogenesis is impossible. for example, a group of american bioethicists argued: embryos result from fertilization and thus contain genetic material from two parents. additionally, they have the potential to develop into a live birth baby. in contrast, parthenotes do not undergo fertilization, have genetic material from one source (the oocyte), and cannot move beyond early stages of development. (rodriguez et al., 2011, p. 22) embryonic stem cell politics made human parthenotes a valuable source of alternative stem cells, and their inviablity was a particularly advantageous attribute that distinguished them from human embryos. i see scientists' observations, manipulations, and descriptions of parthenogenesis as a kind of domestication process, a way of making parthenotes into a productive laboratory tool. the discourse of impossibility was part of that process; the idea that mammalian parthenotes are inviable arose out of their experimental use and then became the basis of future experimentation. experimental questions transitioned from can parthenotes develop to term? to why can't parthenotes develop to term? and finally to how can we use these inviable parthenotes to better understand genomic imprinting and to derive stem cells? this latest question led to the routine use of parthenotes as puzzle-solving tools in experimental biology, in which the impossibility of viable mammalian parthenogenesis was taken for granted. part 2. making sense of kaguya by redefining sex, parenthood, and virgin birth in the first half of this paper, i describe the development of the scientific consensus that viable mammalian parthenogenesis is impossible. next, i investigate scientific reactions to the 2004 live birth and healthy development of a mammalian parthenote, kaguya. the history of science is full of impossibilities later found to be possible, for example: vacuum, airplanes, black holes, in vitro fertilization (ivf), and mammalian cloning. kaguya's birth might have similarly overturned a consensus of impossibility, as did the birth of dolly the cloned sheep.5 yet kaguya's birth was frequently interpreted as supporting, not overturning, the idea that viable mammalian parthenogenesis is impossible. in making sense of this apparent contradiction, some scientists redefined parthenogenesis and thus virgin birth. 2.1 the kaguya experiment. in the early 2000s, tomohiro kono and colleagues—based in universities and biotech companies throughout japan and korea—et out to investigate whether genomic imprinting was the only barrier to parthenogenesis. to do so, kono and colleagues bred a genetically modified female mouse that lacked a functional copy of an imprinted gene called h19. they took an immature egg from that mouse and transferred the egg's nucleus, containing a modified genome, into a typical adult female mouse egg (figure 3). the resulting embryo (with two egg nuclei and no sperm contribution) began dividing, as expected, but what happened next was not expected: 28 out of 457 embryos appeared to develop normally, and eight were born alive. one mouse, kaguya, grew into adulthood, mated with male mice, and gave birth to a typical litter. figure 3. the kayuga experiment. kono and colleagues first made a genetically modified female mouse that lacked a functional copy of an imprinted gene h19. they took an immature egg from that mouse and transferred the egg's nucleus, containing a modified genome, into a typical adult female mouse egg. the resulting bimaternal embryo (kayuga) developed normally. recall that genomic imprinting is an epigenetic process, which controls how dna is made into protein.  for most genes, protein is made from both maternal dna and paternal dna. but some genes are imprinted or silenced, so that protein is made from only the maternal copy or from only the paternal copy. in parthenogenesis, where exclusively maternal dna is present, the embryo ends up with too much of some protein and entirely without other essential proteins (figure 2). the placenta doesn't develop correctly and the pregnancy fails. in the kaguya experiment, one mother's egg lacked h19. that lack of h19 caused many epigenetic changes, silencing some genes and activating others. when the genetically modified egg was combined with a normal egg, the combination of proteins produced in the embryo was adequate to support development and bring about the birth of kaguya. in 2004, kono and colleagues published these results in nature. the article, "birth of parthenogenetic mice that can develop to adulthood," emphasized kaguya's relevance to earlier ideas about genomic imprinting. they wrote: there is no direct evidence that genomic imprinting is the only barrier to parthenogenetic development. here we show the development of a viable parthenogenetic mouse individual from a reconstructed oocyte containing two haploid sets of maternal genome [...] these results suggest that paternal imprinting prevents parthenogenesis, ensuring that the paternal contribution is obligatory for the descendant. (kono et al., 2004, p. 860) kaguya was the result of a search for a molecular explanation for the failure of mammalian parthenogenesis, not an effort to make it possible. nevertheless, the article's title announced to the world that virgin birth in mammals had happened. kaguya's birth provoked dozens of headlines about virgin birth and unnecessary men, such as "the mouse that roared: virgin birth!" (connor, 2004) and "the obsolescence of men" (highfield, 2004).  provocative first sentences included "here' a new scientific theory: men really are useless"� (shin, 2004); and "men, your gender just took a hit in the animal kingdom"� (ritter, 2004). universally, reporters asked if kaguya's birth meant that men were no longer necessary for human reproduction.6 scientists interviewed about the meaning of kaguya's birth were quick to dispel the idea that parthenogenesis was a reproductive option for humans. they argued that human parthenogenesis was ethically and practically impossible, and kaguya's birth only reinforced the necessity of a paternal contribution. kono dismissed questions about human parthenogenesis as "senseless"� and "insignificant"(weiss, 2004, p. 13). azim surani supported kono's position, telling reporters that the techniques used to make kaguya were too inefficient for human application (connor, 2004; rincon, 2004). surani also insisted that kaguya's birth did not demonstrate male redundancy, but actually "show[ed] the opposite" (pagán westphal, 2004). anne ferguson-smith, clinical director of the centres for assisted reproduction, told reporters, "this does not mean that males are obsolete. the requirement for paternal chromosomes for normal development is still with us"(connor, 2004, p. 3; highfield, 2004, p. 16). these interpretations of kaguya's birth surprised and intrigued me: how could a mouse without a father demonstrate the necessity of the paternal contribution? perhaps the interviewed scientists were reacting to media sensationalism. did they make similar statements in their peer-reviewed scientific publications? did most scientists agree with this interpretation, or did any describe kaguya as a revolutionary demonstration of all-female mammalian reproduction that foreshadows new human reproductive technology? 2.2 methodology. given existing scholarship on media coverage of kaguya's birth (ingram-waters, 2008; lafuente funes, 2012), my research questions focused on what scientists have said about kaguya in peer-reviewed publications. i examined 202 scientific publications, published between 2004 and 2014, that cite the kaguya experiment. to identify these articles, i used thomson reuters web of science, a comprehensive database that has indexed more than one billion references and is especially designed for identifying networks of citation (king, 2015). i searched for english-language scientific articles and reviews that cited the 2004 nature article "birth of parthenogenetic mice that can develop to adulthood"� by kono and colleagues.7 this search yielded 226 publications. after excluding book chapters, since book chapters are not necessarily peer-reviewed, there were 202 publications in my data set to analyze. for each article, i asked how the author(s) interpreted the kaguya experiment, with the goal of identifying consensus and variability. i focused particularly on how the authors discussed the possibility of mammalian parthenogenesis and used the words maternal, paternal, parthenogenesis, and bimaternal. similar methods have been used to great effect by social scientists rebecca jordan-young (2010) and sarah richardson (2013). jordan-young conducted an extensive critique of brain organization research by identifying a founding paper in the field and using web of science and other databases to collect more than three hundred peer-reviewed scientific publications that cited that paper (2010, pp. xi-xii).  sarah richardson has also used web of science to identify and qualitatively analyze highly cited scientific articles that report genetic sex differences (2013, pp. 219-224). given the size of my data set, contextualizing each and every article or author in time, geography, and discipline is beyond the scope of this paper and a limitation of these methods. however, directly engaging with hundreds of primary scientific articles published over a ten-year time period offers insight into common and unusual scientific language to describe a mouse without a father. 2.3 scientists' mixed interpretations of the kaguya experiment. between 2004 and 2014, scientists from across the globe cited the kaguya experiment in their published work, which appeared in journals specializing in genetics, reproductive and developmental biology, human and animal fertility, stem cells, cancer, and ethics (figure 4). this diverse group of authors interpreted the kaguya experiment differently, but after reading all 202 articles, three main trends emerged: 1) seventy-five publications (37%) explicitly stated that viable mammalian parthenogenesis is possible and/or the paternal genome is unnecessary; 2) seventy-four publications (37%) explicitly stated that mammalian parthenogenesis is impossible and/or the paternal genome is necessary; and 3) forty-three articles (21%) described mammalian parthenogenesis as artificial: something that can occur, but not in nature (table 1). figure 4. summary of peer-reviewed scientific publications that cite the kayuga experiment. analysis by publication year, top ten authors, top ten journal titles, and top ten author's country/territory affiliations by thomson reuters web of science. table 1. interpretations of mammalian parthenogenesis after kayuga's birth. there were exceptions: several articles did not mention parthenogenesis at all, but cited the kono et al. study solely for its methods (choi et al., 2006; kim et al., 2008; ma et al., 2005; oh et al., 2005; shao et al., 2007; sim & min, 2014). other authors cited the kaguya experiment when discussing imprinted genes in early development, but they did not mention parthenogenesis explicitly (ahmad et al., 2005; kobayashi et al., 2012; li et al., 2012; mcconnell et al., 2005). 2.4 viable mammalian parthenogenesis is artificial. i was most intrigued by publications that stated viable mammalian parthenogenesis was impossible but also acknowledged kaguya's birth—an apparent contradiction. this happened in fifteen articles (7%).8 for example, an article in the international journal of molecular medicine read: parthenotes cannot develop to term. kono et al have demonstrated that parthenogenetic mice with a 13-kb deletion in the maternal imprinting gene h19, which is located on the same chromosome as the igf2 gene, could develop to term. (kwak et al., 2012, p. 258, emphasis mine) another article stated, "mammalian parthenogenotes [...] are incapable of developing to term" (isom et al., 2013, p. 586), and then went on to say, "parthenogenetic mice have been born that survived into adulthood, but significant genetic engineering to imprinted regions of the genome was necessary to allow this to happen" (ibid.). the authors imply impossibility without scientific intervention and possibility with scientific intervention. this distinction is made explicit in the forty-three publications (21%) that described viable mammalian parthenogenesis as artificial, not natural, or requiring genetic modification (table 1, column 3). the framing of viable parthenogenesis as artificial is significant with regard to the politics of stem cell research. twenty-one publications (10%)9 stated that because mammalian parthenotes can never spontaneously or naturally develop to term, human parthenotes are distinct from human embryos, making human parthenogenetic stem cells an ethical alternative to human embryonic stem cells. for example: parthenote embryos exhibit defects in genomic imprinting and cannot develop into live offspring without significant genetic manipulation, thereby eliminating some of the ethical controversy surrounding es cell therapies. (lampton et al., 2008, pp. 448-9) on first reading, these publications appear to uphold the discourse of impossibility by describing live-born mammalian parthenotes as an exception to the rule, only occurring after extensive and deliberate scientific intervention. by emphasizing the artificial, unnatural, and genetically altered quality of viable parthenotes, authors demote parthenotes from potential humans to effective tools for pluripotent stem cell creation. all-female mammalian reproduction is artificial, and male-female reproduction is natural and spontaneous. this dichotomy supports a heteronormative reproductive status quo. yet one article suggested that the genetic engineering necessary to create kaguya could be used to restore an embryo to a more natural state: any alteration from the "traditional" way of conceiving, such as assisted reproduction treatment, may carry some related risks, as has been suggested in some publications. at the same time, with a widening understanding of the different aspects of epigenetic mechanisms, it may be possible to achieve genetic reprogramming to an extent that may restore all conditions to the "natural settings" [the authors cite kono et al. 2004]. (nagy, kerkis, & chang, 2008, p. 540) here, genetic engineering leads to a more natural outcome for embryos created via assisted reproductive technologies. these examples reveal ambiguous and subjective distinctions between natural and artificial. feminist science scholars, donna haraway in particular, have convincingly argued that "our form of social existence has permanently displaced the dualisms of nature and science, natural and artificial"(1983, p. 8). viable mammalian parthenotes, like ivf embryos and joint replacements, embody a merging of machine and organism; they exemplify haraway's "cyborg" (1990) and sarah franklin's "cyborg embryo" (2006). the requirement of genetic intervention to make viable parthenotes does not make their existence less real, but demonstrates an unprecedented level of control over mammalian reproductive possibilities, thus challenging the reproductive status quo. 2.5 genomic imprinting is a barrier to parthenogenesis. in sixteen articles (8%), the kaguya experiment is cited for the idea that genomic imprinting prevents or blocks viable parthenogenesis (table 2, column 1). for example, in a review of cancer epigenetics, an author wrote, "one remarkable feature of the wild type h19 icr is that it provides a barrier to parthenogenesis via so far unknown mechanisms,"� and cited kono et al. (göndör, 2013, p. 95). the same language was used by kono and colleagues themselves in the original 2004 nature publication:  "there is no direct evidence that genomic imprinting is the only barrier to parthenogenetic development [...]our study shows that imprinting is a barrier to parthenogenetic development in mice"(p. 860, 863). this use of the kaguya experiment seems to uphold the discourse of impossibility and a reproductive status quo, because kono and colleagues are credited for discovering why parthenogenesis doesn't happen, as opposed to the accomplishment of actually making it happen. however, like the requirement for genetic modification, this barrier language also implies newfound control over reproduction. once the barrier is known, it can be torn down. the kaguya experiment revealed the key obstacle to parthenogenesis by overcoming it, thus demonstrating the practical tools and methods needed to make viable mammalian parthenogenesis a reality. table 2. scientific language redefining sex, parenthood, virgin birth. 2.6 maternal and paternal are qualities within scientific control. in the 2004 nature publication, kono and colleagues wrote, "these results suggest that paternal imprinting prevents parthenogenesis, ensuring that the paternal contribution is obligatory for the descendant" (kono et al., p. 860). this perspective relies on subtle distinctions between paternal, father, and sperm. one of kaguya's mothers lacked a functional h19 gene, a genetic manipulation, which altered a vast number of imprinting genes such that the maternal genome resembled a paternally imprinted genome. therefore, paternal imprinting was necessary for kaguya to be born, but a father's sperm was not. but is a female genome with a paternal imprint a paternal contribution? seventeen scientific publications (8%) that cite the kaguya experiment have described certain female gametes as male-like. often a neonatal egg genome, which lacks a maternal imprinting pattern, and a genetically modified egg genome are both described as mimicking or simulating a male or paternal genetic contribution (table 2, column 2). this language could be interpreted as upholding a heteronormative status quo by defining the manipulated egg as masculine, reflecting the idea that in two-mother families, one woman must be more masculine or act as the father figure. but there is also an interpretation that destabilizes the concept of binary sex. these authors are describing the sex of a genome as something independent of the sex of a gamete: a female egg can have a male-like genome and a paternal imprint.  in this way, imprinting pattern could be considered a new sex characteristic. anne fausto-sterling (2000) has convincingly argued that sex characteristics—hormone levels, chromosomes, genitalia, fat and hair deposition, internal reproductive organs—are a product of scientific and medical norms.  these characteristics often do not align or fit neatly into a male-female binary. similarly, eggs with a paternal imprinting pattern defy the biological basis of a simple two-sex system. moreover, after kaguya, scientists described modifying the epigenetics of gametes to determine their maternity and paternity (table 2, column 2). for example, "the deletion of the ig-dmr on chromosome 12 which causes paternalization of the maternal chromosome alone could restore some imbalance imposed by two maternal genomes" (kawahara et al., 2006, p. 2877, emphasis mine). the functional maternity or paternity of eggs and sperm is not necessarily dependent on the biological sex of the parent, but on the pattern of genomic imprinting, which scientists can manipulate. this idea furthers scientific control over sex characteristics, adding to existing technologies such as hormone replacement therapy and surgery. it also challenges the alignment between father/paternal/male/sperm or the assumption that they are interchangeable terms. the egg—a female gamete—an be paternalized so that it provides a necessary paternal contribution to the embryo. 2.7 bimaternal reproduction is not parthenogenesis. finally, the statement viable mammalian parthenogenesis is impossible makes sense, even in light of kaguya's birth, if kaguya is not considered parthenogenetic. and indeed, twenty-nine articles (14%) used gynogenetic or bimaternal to describe kaguya, instead of parthenogenetic. the exclusion of kaguya from parthenogenesis implies what is and is not considered virgin birth, thus challenging the role of sperm and males in the definition of virginity and sexual intercourse. several scientists explained why they decided to use a term other than parthenogenesis to describe kaguya. for example, in a review of genomic imprinting in mammals, geneticists at the russian academy of sciences wrote: recently, kono et al. reported striking data on obtaining two viable adult parthenogenetic mice [...] we think, however, that these mice should be classified with gynogenetic organisms, because the modified genome was introduced into the ovum from outside. (platonov & isaev, 2006, p. 1038) seven articles (3%) referred to kaguya as gynogenetic rather than parthenogenetic. recall that gynogenetic usually describes embryos in which the sperm nucleus has been removed after fertilization (dadoune, 2009; dilkes & comai, 2004; miller & ostermeier, 2006; miller, ostermeier, & krawetz, 2005; penkov et al., 2010; platonov & isaev, 2006; sciamanna et al., 2009). platonov and isaev argued that the microsurgical injection of an egg nucleus into another egg, or the introduction of any genome from the outside, should be considered gynogenetic, not parthenogenetic. perhaps the micropipette's penetration of the egg, or the fact that another individual's chromosomes contribute to those already inside egg, makes the term virgin birth seem not quite right. ann kiessling, director of the bedford stem cell research foundation, also considered kaguya as not exactly parthenogenetic. she has written: the development of the resulting reconstructed egg was titled "parthenogenesis", although it differed markedly from canonical parthenogenesis, which relies solely on the egg's own chromosomes. (kiessling, 2005, p. 145) kiessling considered kaguya's two genetically unique mothers to be the distinguishing factor, something that makes her birth not canonical parthenogenesis. kono and colleagues have most clearly excluded bimaternal reproduction from parthenogenesis. though the group originally referred to kaguya as parthenogenetic in their 2004 article, later publications by the team refer to kaguya and similar mice as bi-maternal conceptuses instead of parthenotes (kawahara et al., 2006; kawahara et al., 2007a; kawahara et al., 2007b; kawahara et al., 2008; kawahara, wu, & kono, 2010; kono, 2009; wu, kawahara, & kono, 2008). a 2008 nature protocols publication clarified that this was an intentional redefinition: the embryos that were derived solely from maternal genomes were designated as bimaternal embryos to clearly distinguish them from parthenogenetic/gynogenetic embryos. (kawahara et al., 2008, p. 197) the kono group also used sperm-free rather than parthenogenesis to describe the generation of these mice (kono, 2009, p. 34; kawahara & kono, 2010, p. 457; kawahara & kono, 2012, p. 175). moreover, authors outside the kono group began referring to kaguya as bimaternal rather than parthenogenetic (table 2, column 3; figure 5). figure 5. schematic that accompanies a description of the kayuga experiment. note that "bi-maternal"� is considered distinct from "parthenogenetic"� because one of the maternal genomes has been genetically modified to more closely resemble a "paternal"� imprinting pattern (shown in blue). source: sasaki and matsui, 2008, p. 135. adapted by permission from macmillan publishers ltd: nature review genetics (sasaki & matsui), copyright 2008 a literal interpretation of this distinction between bimaternal and parthenogenetic, and the use of sperm-free rather than parthenogenesis, would be that reproduction involving two females is not virginal —an idea that suggests sperm and penetration are not necessary components of sexual intercourse. virgin birth now refers to eggs that begin dividing and developing without sperm and without any additional genetic contribution, male or female. this redefinition of parthenogenesis means that kaguya does not contradict the idea that viable mammalian parthenogenesis is impossible. this redefinition also defies the idea that males are necessary for sexual intercourse. lastly, it reveals the absurdity of trying to use a word like virgin—a social concept full of ambiguity—to define a group of genetically modified, experimental organisms. conclusions and future directions this paper has documented biologists' use of the words parthenogenesis and bimaternal reproduction to describe various developmental processes in mammals, particularly the birth of a mouse with two mothers and no father. regarding the power of scientific language, judith butler has written, "the language of biology participates in other kinds of languages and reproduces that cultural sedimentation in the objects it purports to discover and neutrally describe"� (1990, p. 109). parthenogenesis presents a clear case in which the language of biology participates in other languages. definitions of parthenogenesis are inextricably bound to definitions of virginity, and biological descriptions of dividing eggs contribute to the cultural sedimentation of maternity, paternity, male, female, sexually experienced, and virgin. the scientific language used to describe parthenogenesis also contributes to societal beliefs about what kinds of reproduction are natural or artificial, possible or impossible. as donna haraway has written, "sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of personal and social possibility"� (1990, p. 211). when scientists describe the paternal genome as necessary and mammalian parthenogenesis as impossible, the myth of adam and eve—an ideal nuclear family composed of one heterosexual male father and one heterosexual female mother with their biological children—is maintained and naturalized. when scientists describe eggs as sperm-like or mimicking a paternal contribution, this naturalizes the idea that two-mother families are in fact impossible because one woman must act as the man or father. though the kaguya experiment can solidify a heteronormative reproductive status quo, it can simultaneously disrupt it by offering bimaternal sexual reproduction as a queer alternative. i use queer to describe something outside of and counter to heteronormativity—the cultural privileging of two distinct, complementary genders (male and female), in which there is an alignment of biological sex, gender identity, gender roles, heterosexual practice and heterosexual desire. defining queer as oppositional can be problematic, perpetuating binaries and essentialism (walters, 2005). others have conceptualized queer as something difficult to define, an ever-changing "perpetual dialogue between sexual identity and its critique"� (merck, 2005, p. 187). queer can be a helpful to think about how parthenogenesis has challenged reproductive norms, which are very much tied to gender and sexual norms. heteronormative and queer interpretations of the kaguya experiment produce tension and ambivalence in parthenogenesis research that is not new or exclusive to reproductive technologies. many feminists, including shulamith firestone in 1971 and donna haraway in 1983, have noted that technologies—whether atomic energy, fertility control, or genetics—can be used to support both a feminist cause and its antithesis. thus, to see parthenogenetic technology and its language as entirely upholding heteronormative values would be to overlook their potential for advancing queer feminist thought. for, when scientists describe maternity or paternity as something independent of gamete sex, they destabilize the conflation of female with maternal and of male with paternal. when scientists describe all-female reproduction as not virginal, they challenge the necessity of males for sexual intercourse.  this allows for the existence of genderqueer gametes and a family composed of two sexually experienced mothers and their biological children. the myth of adam and eve is replaced by a myth of active eggs and the (female) developmental biologist's pipette. moreover, when scientists use the terms sperm-free and bimaternal instead of parthenogenesis, there is an acknowledgement that at times existing language, ambiguous and seeped in cultural meaning, is inadequate to describe nature. was this change in language an example of a productive feminist intervention in science? after all, developmental biology has an especially successful track record of feminist intervention (gilbert & rader, 2001; keller, 1997; schiebinger, 1999). or, as emily martin has argued (1991), perhaps the changing language is part of a historically consistent story, one that mirrors changing social beliefs about gender and family. the kaguya experiment and scientific articles that cite it were published during a decade of rapid changes in lgbt politics in the united states, which included the legalization of same-sex marriage. since 2004, five scientific articles that cited the kaguya experiment (2%) also explicitly discussed the possibility of human same-sex biological reproduction, (testa & harris, 2004; edwards, 2007; deng et al., 2011; sparrow, 2014; palacios-gonzalez, harris & testa, 2014). for example, bob edwards, awarded the nobel prize for his role in developing ivf, wrote: newborn mice were created by fusing two oocytes, and obtaining an offspring named kaguya. this approach has been suggested many times before as a means of enabling two women to have their own child, but caution is needed when fusing two eggs instead of achieving normal fertilization. (2007, p. 14) when a group of biologists at the university of texas reported the birth of a mouse with two fathers and no mother in 2010, they wrote, "some day two men could produce their own genetic sons and daughters"(deng et al., 2011, pp. 614-7). these articles are suggestive, but further research is needed, particularly regarding the japanese cultural context underpinning the original kayuga experiment, to determine how visibility and acceptance of marginal sexualities and families may have influenced scientists' descriptions of bimaternal and bipaternal organisms. future research could also investigate the feasibility of human bimaternal reproduction, with careful consideration of the practical and ethical challenges of translating basic science results to clinical medicine. recent advances in reproductive technology include the creation of human sperm and egg precursor cells derived from both male and female skin cells (cyranoski, 2014; irie et al., 2015); so-called three parent children derived from one woman's egg mitochondria, another woman's egg nucleus, and a man's sperm (gallagher, 2015); and uterus transplantation (brown, 2015). scientists, physicians, and heterosexual couples are actively developing and demanding these new reproductive technologies. what about bimaternal reproduction? using the kaguya experiment techniques on human eggs has been deemed "far too complicated and risky"� (connor, 2004, p. 3) and "even more complex, inefficient and unsafe than cloning"� (highfield, 2004, p. 16). but since 2004, the kaguya experimental protocols and results—viable mice with two mothers and no father—have been replicated and optimized, with a "success rate equivalent to the rate observed with in vitro fertilization of manipulated normal embryos" (kawahara et al., 2007a, p. 5183). skeptics point to the genetic engineering practices essential to mammailian bimaternal reproduction as the main reason why it is not a practical or ethical option for humans. recall that one of kaguya's mothers was genetically engineered to produced eggs without a functional copy of the gene h19.  indeed, the random insertion of altered genes into the genome can lead to fatal cancers. however, the development of the crispr-cas9 system in 2011 has made dna editing easier and less error-prone, and in 2015, scientists at sun yat-sen university in china used the system in human embryos to modify the gene responsible for a life-threatening blood disorder (liang et al., 2015). figure 6. schematic of aberrant imprinting patterns found in beckwith-wiedemann syndrome patients.  note the loss of h19 expression on the maternal allele in example b-1.  kono and colleagues genetically engineered a mouse that lacked a functional copy of h19. some people with beckwith-wiedemann syndrome do not express h19, due to aberrant imprinting.  source: weksberg et al. 2010, p. 10. reprinted by permission from macmillan publishers ltd: european journal of human genetics (weksberg et al.), copyright 2010 altering the human genome, with or without the crispr-cas9 system, will likely remain tightly regulated and ethically controversial (wade, 2015).  but even in the absence of genetic engineering, imprinting differences currently exist in the human population due to genetic variation.  for example, a subpopulation of people with beckwith-wiedemann syndrome are known to have genetic errors on the chromosomal region encompassing h19—the gene missing in one of kaguya's mothers (figure 6; weksberg et al., 2010).  symptoms of beckwith-wiedemann syndrome include subfertility (greer, 2008).  could individuals with imprinting disorders like beckwith-wiedemann syndrome have eggs with a paternal imprint or sperm with a maternal imprint?  could unintentionally combining a paternally imprinted egg with paternally imprinted sperm help explain the low success rate (~30%) of ivf (centers for disease control and prevention, 2015; figure 7)?  if so, couples struggling with ivf failure could also benefit from advances in human bimaternal reproductive technology. figure 7. potential explanation for some ivf failures. a-b: successful reproduction requires combining one maternally imprinted genome and one paternally imprinted genome, regardless of whether the paternal genome comes from sperm (a) or egg (b), as it did in the kaguya experiment. c: if a paternally imprinted sperm is combined with a paternally imprinted egg (due to an imprinting error), the embryo will have double the amount of some protein but lack other essential proteins. early development will progress normally in the ivf petri dish, but development will fail after the embryo is implanted into the uterus. in an interview about kaguya's birth in 2004, kate kendell, the executive director of the american national center for lesbian rights, compared bioengineered same-sex reproduction to the colonization of mars. she told reporters, "[it's] not a realistic possibility, but something that will provoke a number of interesting conversations"(hall, 2004, para. 12). a decade later, jennifer pizer, the law director for a prominent lgbt rights advocacy organization stated, "i do think it's sex or sexual orientation discrimination to treat a man with a female partner and a very low or absent sperm count differently than a lesbian with a female partner and nonexistent sperm count"� (fairyington, 2015, para. 19). pizer's statement appeared in a new york times article about health insurance, but i believe it also applies to new reproductive technologies. is there an ethical imperative to develop same-sex reproductive technology, given existing efforts to assist subfertile heterosexual couples? japanese artist ai hasegawa's work provokes just this question. in her (im)possible baby project, hasegawa outlined several potential same-sex reproductive technologies and then created computer-generated models of a lesbian couple’s potential children, based on genetic traits of the future parents (2015a; 2015b). a documentary about the simulation and its ethical implications aired on japanese national television. hasegawa argues, "even if the society concludes to ban this [same-sex reproductive] procedure in the end, these potential parents must have a chance to think and raise their voice"� (2015a). all-female human reproduction has been considered imaginary, mythical, and impossible, but the kaguya experiment, changes in lgbt politics, and advances in reproductive technology make human bimaternal reproduction feasible. ivf became a human reproductive technology nine years after demonstrating its feasibility, and only with the support of private funding (johnson, 2011; johnson et al., 2010). it has been ten years since the kaguya experiment. but even if human same-sex reproduction does not become a reality, the scientific language used to describe the kaguya experiment is significant in itself. the language and reality of bimaternal sexual reproduction contradicts the idea that biological sex, paternity, maternity, and sexual experience are easily defined and unalterable. the kaguya experiment does not foreshadow the elimination of men, but offers a future where sex and family are chosen expressions of joy and pleasure rather than determinants of reproductive destiny. acknowledgements thank you to sarah franklin and helen curry for supervising the essay and dissertation that evolved into this paper. notes 1 virgin birth has been a topic of scientific interest since at least 1230, when medieval scholastics used embryological concepts to explain jesus's birth and rare accounts of conception without sperm (van der lugt 2004, p. 379-473). later, natural historians observed asexual reproduction in a variety of animal species, such as parthenogenesis in aphids, which was reported by swiss naturalist charles bonnet in 1740. others experimented with inducing parthenogenesis in humans, using medicines or psychic techniques. for example, a 1750 letter to the royal society of london reported that a maid, locked in a room alone, had supposedly become pregnant without intercourse (see rensenbrink, 2010, p. 296). 2 by this time, scientists had reported viable parthenogenesis in insects, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and turkeys (bataillon, 1912; mirouze, 1942; olsen & marsden, 1954; smith, 1935). 3 for a detailed account of hoppe and illmensee's cloning experiments, others' conflicting results, accusations of fraud, and the aftermath, see wilmut, campbell and tudge (2000) and kolata (1999). 4 retrospectively, woo suk hwang and colleagues at seoul national university have been credited with the first generation of human parthenogenetic stem cells in 2004. the so-called"hwang scandal" arose in 2006, when hwang's report of the first cloned human embryonic stem cells (hwang et al., 2004) appeared to be falsified. hwang and colleagues were accused of research misconduct and their results were discredited. in 2007, a group of harvard biologists discovered that hwang's supposed cloned human embryonic stem cells were actually parthenogenetic (kim et al., 2007). 5 dolly's creators provide an insightful commentary on the (im)possibility of mammalian parthenogenesis in their 2000 book, the second creation. they write, "parthenogenesis in mammals'—development of a whole new animal from an unfertilised egg—really does seem 'biologically impossible' [...] in the absence of divine intervention, virgin birth for mammals is not an option" (wilmut, campbell, & tudge, p. 147). but the authors go on to propose, "parthenogenesis might be achieved in the future if biologists learn how to convert a maternally imprinted genome into a paternally imprinted genome, or vice versa.  no one is even close to this but there is no present reason to doubt that it is possible"� (p. 147). only four years later, kono and colleagues did just that. 6 see also casci, 2004; cookson, 2004; dayton 2004; fisher, 2004; gorman, 2004; hall, 2004; pagán  westphal, 2004; rincon, 2004; utton, 2004; von radowitz, 2004; weiss, 2004 7 thomson reuters web of science search query: cited title: ("birth of parthenogenetic mice that can develop to adulthood") refined by: document types: (article or review) and research domains: (science technology) and languages: (english) timespan: 2004-2014. 8 krawetz, 2005; zadeh et al., 2005; wang et al., 2007; lampert, 2008; paffoni, et al. 2008; chen et al., 2009; hikichi et al., 2010; neaves & baumann, 2011; kwak et al., 2012; ragina et al., 2012; strogantsev & ferguson-smith, 2012; kyurkchiev et al., 2012; han et al., 2013; isom et al., 2013; ma et al., 2014 9 guenin, 2005; hurlbut, 2005; kiessling, 2005; cibelli, cunniff & vrana, 2006; mertes, pennings & van steirteghem, 2006; hikichi et al., 2007; lengerke et al., 2007; mai et al., 2007; wakayama et al., 2007; watt, 2007; lampert, 2008; lampton et al., 2008; sanchez-pernaute et al., 2008; 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(2006). circular chromosome conformation capture (4c) uncovers extensive networks of epigenetically regulated intraand interchromosomal interactions. nature genetics, 38(11), 1341-1347. http://doi.org/10.1038/ng1891 bio eva gillis-buck is a medical student at the university of california, san francisco. she received an m.phil. in the history and philosophy of science from the university of cambridge and an a.b. in developmental biology and gender studies from harvard university. her research interests include reproductive technologies and the immunology of pregnancy.     roundtable: housewife’s secret arsenal “loved by moms and law enforcement alike”: militarizing civilian bodies through bulletproof fashion     barbara sutton university of albany, suny bsutton@albany.edu     abstract body armor is no longer limited to war and security-oriented occupations. bulletproof fashion for civilians has joined a domestic “secret arsenal” of sorts, as families with concerns about security acquire technologies to protect body, property, and household members. bulletproof fashion thrives in the context of fear and anxiety, helps normalize the proliferation of guns and gun violence in us society, and encourages the privatization of what should be regarded as a social problem. this essay is a part of the roundtable called “the housewife's secret arsenal” (henceforth hsa); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. the title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.   keywords armor, domesticity, gun violence, militarization, security     who knew that “back-to-school” shopping lists would now include bulletproof backpacks for children? bulletproof gear for civilians has joined a domestic secret arsenal of sorts, as families concerned about security acquire technologies to protect body, property, and household members. these artifacts include alarm systems, surveillance cameras, child gps trackers, home motion sensors, and guns and ammunition for self-defense. companies across the united states are additionally selling bulletproof apparel, especially in the context of persistent gun violence and highly publicized mass shootings. this industry feeds what i call a fashion of fear: the practice of dressing the body with garments and accessories meant to maximize personal security. bulletproof fashion thrives in the context of “public feelings” such as fear and anxiety (cvetkovich 2007), helps normalize the proliferation of guns and gun violence in us society, and encourages the privatization of what should be regarded as a social problem. although bulletproof fashion looks like regular civilian apparel, it militarizes bodies and subjectivities, including those of children and youth. in doing so, companies expand the consumer base of armored wear beyond armed forces and promote the securitization of civilian spaces such as homes and schools. wonder hoodie—a company that sells bulletproof hoodies, vests, pants, and denim jackets—illustrates the militarization/securitization of civilian domesticity through its deployment of the “mom” figure: “loved by moms and law enforcement alike, our body armor products have stood up to strict national guidelines and field testing on and off camera....our bulletproof apparel was designed to be worn by law enforcement and make sense for every civilian use as well....we've seen how expensive, outdated, and confusing the bulletproof apparel landscape has been and want to make a difference—one bulletproof hoodie at a time” (wonder hoodie, n.d.). the invocation of the “mom”—a role culturally associated with domesticity—signals that body armor is no longer limited to security-oriented occupations. in a society with permissive gun policies and awash in guns, the corporate message is that “moms and law enforcement alike” may need these products. the focus is not on the need to reduce gun proliferation or end gun violence, but on the virtues of bulletproof fashion for civilians, including children. in recent times, mass shootings, social unrest, and the covid-19 pandemic have served to promote ballistic apparel, with companies conveying that “it is better to be safe than sorry” (erestain 2020). the fashion of fear has been somewhat mainstreamed through news media coverage, particularly after mass shootings, and the sale of bulletproof gear by recognized retailers such as k-mart, bed bath & beyond, and home depot. companies also offer their products directly, for example, the “bulletproof gucci diaper bag” advertised by bullet blocker (n.d.) for $3,100, a pink ballistic binder insert for “daily protection or when backpacks aren't permitted in the classroom” ($89.99, guard dog security, n.d.), and “discreet covert vests” recommended for teachers (around $300, safeguard clothing, n.d.). the price of many products is steep, pointing to the class dimensions of the fashion of fear, yet various companies still want to reach a broad public—to democratize access, so to speak. although bulletproof clothing is marketed for civilian spaces such as schools, businesses, and hospitals, for leisurely activities and daily work, it finds its roots in warfare. from the relatively rudimentary armor of ancient wars to technologically sophisticated materials in contemporary military vests, these artifacts are to protect the bodies of people—largely men—in battle. to this day, armor wear is typically found in male-dominated fields such as the military, police, and private security (e.g., macleish 2012). much of the ballistic apparel for non-security personnel has traditionally been aimed at men too, though garments for women and children are increasingly available, and various products are gender neutral (e.g., backpacks). interestingly, the inventor of the modern synthetic fiber frequently used in bulletproof vests, kevlar, was a woman: stephanie kwolek. this award-winning scientist worked at dupont for forty years, starting in 1946. although women were not exactly encouraged to be scientists, kwolek flourished in this profession. kevlar came to be associated with body armor, but the initial impetus for kwolek's research in the mid-1960s was finding “a replacement for the steel used in tires” (samorodnitsky 2019; see also rosen 2020). the super strong fiber eventually developed as kevlar proved to be ideal for body armor, among many other uses (dupont, n.d.). civilian bulletproof fashion reflects the percolation of militarized logics and materials into the domestic realm, blurring private/public divides and adding to a “domesticity at war” (colomina 1991-92). militarization unfolds as parents outfit their children with armor as if going to a war zone, and schools implement active-shooter drills. militarization is literally woven into “the fabric and technologies of everyday life” (catalyst 2020) as garments associated with war and security forces move into mundane civilian spaces. bulletproof garments for civilians are generally intended to be “discreet,” but still share features with military/law enforcement vests, namely, ballistic protection. armorme (n.d.) explained, “cleverly hiding a wall of protective material and field-tested by israeli security and military experts, the armorme backpack offers the peace-of-mind you've been waiting for. sure, it looks and feels like a regular eco-friendly canvas backpack—so your child will fit right in with his or her friends—but inside, it's reinforced with a bullet-resistant material that can help protect your child in the case of a violent incident.” here, the company drew legitimacy from security/military expertise, while emphasizing the civilian look of the product. the securitization/militarization of children's lives through body armor, particularly in the absence of a critique of the root causes of violence, tacitly normalizes the spread of guns and gun-related bloodshed. the fashion of fear constitutes a militarized response to security threats on the “home front,” with a flashpoint being mass shootings in schools, workplaces, sites of prayer, and recreation facilities, among others. after the 2012 sandy hook elementary school mass shooting in newtown, connecticut, the colombian-based miguel caballero company started making armored backpacks for us children, reportedly in response to anxious parents (abc news 2013). companies in the united states also offer similar and related products. for instance, “tuffypacks has created a program for school districts that desire to make bulletproof backpack inserts available to parents of school age children...as a first line of defense in the event of an active school shooter situation” (naremore, n.d.). in that vein, a customer review by “lynn r.” in bulletproof zone's (2018) website, praised bulletproof backpacks saying, “this is a must for kids in these crazy times. keeping my babies safe.” though not the only portrayal of women in bulletproof apparel websites, a particular type of femininity emerges in some representations, blending motherhood and security. this combination is reminiscent of the “security mom” (grewal 2006), a woman intensely focused on threats to home/homeland in the context of neoliberalism and militarization. in the case of bulletproof fashion, a securitized motherhood means turning to the market for security solutions against certain forms of gun violence, such as mass shootings. it may entail buying a bullet resistant backpack or vest for a child, or acquiring products that combine childcare duties with ballistic protection. a video about the civilian one backpack by leatherback gear features a slim white woman wearing jeans and a nasa t-shirt, and fitting various objects inside an armored backpack: a small rubber toy, baby wipes, diapers, colorful books, pink sneakers, and other items. the woman embodies normative white femininity—her straight blonde hair is long, her nails are painted red, and her ring finger dons a ring with a gem, among other feminine markers. the video is a demo of how the backpack can be used as a “diaper bag,” and in one of the customer review comments, we learn that the product is a “great bag for soccer moms” (leatherback gear, n.d.). in other words, certain women can add bulletproof products to their secret arsenal to enhance care functions and ensure security. the video scene reinforces notions of security connected with gender, racial, and class privilege: security relies on the ability to pay, often indexed as a form of white privilege; and the protection offered is folded into a feminine role, in this case represented by a white, economically comfortable, woman. the meanings of these types of representations do not just hinge on the physical features of the people portrayed but on the hegemonic social arrangements they uphold. for instance, as anne mcclintock points out, “race”—in this case whiteness—“is not simply a question of skin color,” (1995, 5) but a principle of social organization that, in intersection with other vectors of inequality, structures the economy and the home. while companies address various demographics, group cultures, leisure activities, and occupations, they do so in contexts that promote particular ideals, shaped by social hierarchies. when it comes to domesticity, valorized notions of the domestic sphere are often associated with whiteness, heteronormativity, middleto upper-class status, and gendered arrangements that link women to the home and the care of children. within such contexts, the figure of the “security mom” gains relevance, enlisted to secure hegemonic arrangements, and not just the well-being of her children. one may question whether the individualized responses proposed by the bulletproof fashion industry will keep children safe. in fact, it may be argued that more collective solutions are warranted, including responses that do not reproduce social inequalities, as market-based solutions tend to do. furthermore, how does social location affect concerns about different types of gun violence and the responses envisioned? consider, for instance, differential reactions to mass shootings by private individuals in predominantly white communities versus police shootings and other gun violence disproportionately harming people of color. finally, what kind of world does the domestic secret arsenal prefigure? is it the world we would like to inhabit? if not, what would it take to dismantle the arsenal and create more livable worlds for everyone? whereas security-oriented gadgets are often framed as simply offering protection, they are also performative of notions of security based on militarization, enclosure, and fear of the “other.” bulletproof fashion adds to this repertoire, further entrenching the logic of militarized security and magnifying social inequalities. in contrast, feminist perspectives critical of militarization point to root causes of violence and insecurity. rather than fortressing the body, they encourage holistic and multifaceted visions of security that recognize interdependencies, tackle intersecting inequalities, and promote social justice.1 acknowledgments i thank the gerda henkel foundation special programme, “security, society, and the state,” for funding the broader research project in which this article is based. i am also grateful to the editors of this special issue, astrida neimanis, diana pardo pedraza, jennifer terry, and xan chacko for the collaborative process they facilitated. i appreciate the feedback i received from the editors, an anonymous reviewer, and the authors in a workshop, including contributions by michael richardson, j.d. schnepf, liam grealy, tess lea, and deborah cohler. notes 1 see, for example, women for genuine security (http://www.genuinesecurity.org/).   references abc news. 2013. “bulletproof backpacks for kids.” march 28, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osrm8tw1hko. armorme. n.d. “our story.” accessed june 15, 2021. https://www.armorme.com/about. bullet blocker. n.d. “bulletproof gucci diaper bag.” accessed january 4, 2021. https://www.bulletblocker.com/bulletblocker-nij-iiia-bulletproof-gucci-diaper.html. bulletproof zone. 2018. “customer reviews.” november 15, 2018. https://bulletproofzone.com/products/swissgear-scansmart-backpack-level-iiia-bulletproof-armor-plate-package. catalyst. 2020. “call for papers: the domestication of war.” october 2, 2020. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/announcement/view/792. colomina, beatriz. 1991-92. “domesticity at war.” discourse 14 (1): 3-22. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389198. cvetkovich, ann. 2007. “public feelings.” south atlantic quarterly 106 (3): 459-68. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2007-004. dupont. n.d. “what is kevlar®?” accessed june 14, 2021. https://www.dupont.com/what-is-kevlar.html. erestain, nicolette. 2020. “what does body armor have to do with the coronavirus (covid-19)?” march 24, 2020. https://bulletproofzone.com/blogs/bullet-proof-blog/what-does-body-armor-have-to-do-with-the-coronavirus. grewal, inderpal. 2006. “security moms' in the early twentieth-century united states: the gender of security in neoliberalism.” women's studies quarterly 34 (1/2): 25-39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40004729. guard dog security. n.d. “in a bind bulletproof binder inserts.” accessed june 14, 2021. https://guarddog-security.com/collections/bulletproof/products/in-a-bind?variant=33631400394891. leatherback gear. n.d. “civilian one.” accessed june 11, 2021. https://www.leatherbackgear.com/products/civilian-one?variant=32484444241974. macleish, kenneth t. 2012. “armor and anesthesia: exposure, feeling, and the soldier's body.” medical anthropology quarterly (26) 1: 49-68. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1387.2011.01196.x. mcclintock, anne. 1995. imperial leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. new york: routledge. naremore, steve. n.d. “school programs.” accessed june 19, 2021. https://tuffypacks.com/school-programs. rosen, kenneth r. 2020. bulletproof vest. new york: bloomsbury academic. safeguard clothing. n.d. “the need for bulletproof vests in schools.” accessed june 14, 2021. https://www.safeguardclothing.com/articles/ballistic-protection-for-teachers/. samorodnitsky, dan. 2019. “you can thank chemist stephanie kwolek for bulletproof vests and yoga pants.” smithsonian magazine, august 21, 2019. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/you-can-thank-chemist-stephanie-kwolek-bulletproof-vests-and-yoga-pants-180972948/. wonder hoodie. n.d. “premium bulletproof clothing.” accessed may 29, 2021. https://wonderhoodie.com/collections/wonder-hoodie-bulletproof-clothing.     author bio barbara sutton is a professor in the department of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at the university at albany, suny, and is also affiliated with the departments of sociology and of latin american, caribbean, and us latino studies. she is the author of bulletproof fashion: security, emotions, and the fortress body (routledge, forthcoming 2023). microsoft word 71616-1-11_carmody.docx carmody, t. (2018). review of medicalizing blackness: making racial difference in the atlantic world, 1780-1840 by rana a. hogarth (duke university press, 2017). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 4(2), 1-6. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © todd carmody, 2018 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license review medicalizing blackness: making racial difference in the atlantic world, 1780-1840 by rana a. hogarth (duke university press, 2017) todd carmody hamilton college tcarmody@hamilton.edu in 1851, southern physician samuel a. cartwright coined the term “drapetomania” to describe the mental disease causing slaves to flee. to treat drapetomania, owners were to avoid both extreme permissiveness and cruelty. slaves, cartwright wrote, “have only to be kept in that state, and treated like children, to prevent and cure them from running away.” in his day, stephen jay gould suggests, cartwright was a fringe figure to whom “intelligent southerners” paid little heed. today, however, drapetomania features prominently in the historiography of atlantic world slavery, and cartwright’s name is commonly invoked to illustrate how medicine conspired with politics to subjugate black people’s bodies. the case is different with cachexia africana, sometimes known as dirt eating. a large corpus of medical literature notwithstanding, scholars have comparatively little to say about this slave disease, which is not generally linked to a proslavery agenda. as rana a. hogarth notes in her 2 carmody catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) compelling new book, medicalizing blackness: making racial difference in the atlantic world, 1780-1840, the different scholarly fates of drapetomania and cachexia africana reflect the preoccupations and the limitations of recent discussions of medicine and slavery. foundational work in this area has explored how medical ideas about blackness were yoked to the political defense of slavery. while unquestionably valuable, such a perspective overlooks the broad range of motivations – not all explicitly proslavery – that inspired the physicians who defined blackness as a physiological and at times pathological trait. the medical construction of diseases like cachexia africana thus begs the question: if not only or not always in defense of slavery, how did blackness become such a powerful medical concept? in medicalizing blackness, hogarth suggests that the answer to this question concerns the intellectual, social, and pecuniary ambitions of physicians. more particularly, the book argues that the medicalization of blackness was fueled by the professionalization of medical practitioners and medical institutions alike. for their part, physicians hoped to drum up business from slave owners and eliminate competition from slave healers by claiming the professional expertise with which to objectify black bodies and pathologize blackness. hospitals, infirmaries, and medical schools, by contrast, championed the biological reality of race to secure institutional stability and advance the standing of medicine as a profession. a similar contribution was made by a range of lay actors and institutions. to be sure, these professional ambitions often went hand in hand with proslavery attitudes. but as hogarth argues, “[t]o view the medicalization of blackness as a by-product of the growing rancor over slavery is to ignore the professional stakes physicians had in investing blackness with meaning” (p. 8). hogarth makes the case for disaggregating the creation of medical knowledge about blackness from political defenses of slavery with a comparative analysis of medical discourse, practice, and institutional history in slave societies in south carolina and the west indies. this approach illuminates how local differences in professional culture informed the medicalization of 3 carmody catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) blackness, but it also allows hogarth to trace the circulation of these ideas between the anglophone caribbean and the antebellum south. indeed, medicalizing blackness shows not only how the british physicians residing in the west indies shaped the development of antebellum southern medicine, but also how these exchanges laid the foundation for u.s. proslavery medical thought later in the nineteenth century. the book is divided into three parts, each of which contains one chapter set in the antebellum south and another in the west indies. the first part, “making difference: race and yellow fever,” examines how the myth of innate black immunity to yellow fever originated, why it endured, and how white physicians and their allies, faced with evidence to the contrary, contrived ever more complicated explanations for why naturally fever-resistant black constitutions might falter. chapter one traces the claim of black immunity in us medical discourse from dr. john lining’s widely circulated account of south carolina’s 1748 epidemic to dr. benjamin rush’s reckoning with lining’s legacy during the 1793 philadelphia epidemic and a fiery defense of that city’s free black population by richard allen and absalom jones. hogarth underscores that missing from this origin story is any overt connection between black people’s supposed innate immunity to yellow fever and their supposed suitability as slave laborers. although slavery apologists would eventually adopt this line of thinking, the “claim of innate black immunity to yellow fever itself was a product of medical observation that had little to do with preserving slavery” (p. 20). turning to the west indies in chapter two, hogarth explores how the idea that black people were naturally resistant to deadly tropical fevers proved too much for british military elites to resist, even when african conscripts took sick. hogarth focuses on the efforts of william fergusson, a seasoned inspector general of british army hospitals, during an outbreak of yellow fever in 1815. by concluding that black recruits’ constitutions must have been weakened for the yellow fever to have had an effect on them, fergusson sought to ensure that black people’s bodies remained serviceable to military aims. the second section of medicalizing blackness focuses on slave 4 carmody catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) diseases in general and on cachexia africana in particular. hogarth explores how the latter was identified independently by physicians who worked and lived in the caribbean and the us south, many of whom remained relatively ambivalent about slavery. in chapter three, the focus is on the tensions that arose between enslaved populations and white physicians in jamaica as a result of both the disease’s elusive etiology and the competing claims to authority made by practitioners of western medicine and indigenous obeah healing. in chapter four, hogarth tracks how southern physicians adapted foreign medical knowledge – about cachexia africana and related slave diseases – to suit their local needs. these transnational discourses about black people’s physiological peculiarities universalized the belief in their distinctiveness, and did so in ways that gradually became a boon to the antebellum southern medical profession. in a final section titled “disciplining blackness: hospitals,” hogarth turns from individual practitioners to medical institutions. chapter five explores how the hospital and asylum for deserted negroes in kingston, jamaica, became an apparatus of colonial control used to police the city’s black population. hogarth first explores how white anxieties about black bodies shaped jamaica’s early public health infrastructure before addressing how subjugation and care worked in tandem beyond the plantation to secure civic and racial order. chapter six turns to the antebellum south and to the historical transition from the private slave hospital, the site of medical exploitation but also pragmatic professionalism, to the proliferation of medical colleges in the south, which normalized the use of black bodies for teaching and training. an accomplished work of scholarship sure to be of interest to historians of race in the atlantic world, but also to readers in critical race studies, the health humanities, and disability studies, medicalizing blackness builds in exciting ways on foundational studies such as todd savitt’s medicine and slavery: the diseases and health care of blacks in antebellum virginia and sharla fett’s working cures: healing, health, and power on southern slave plantations. at times, hogarth’s rich material leads her somewhat far afield from the questions of professionalization 5 carmody catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) with which she begins. as such, one may begin to wonder whether the book’s focus on professionalization is perhaps somewhat limiting, or whether that framework, when stretched beyond its clearest usage, loses some of its argumentative heft. a case in point is chapter five, where hogarth equates kingston’s hospital and asylum for deserted negroes with a range of other institutions that “legitimatized white scrutiny of urban black inhabitants’ movements and further equated blackness with criminality.” while this is certainly a useful comparison, we do not learn how medicalization and criminalization were linked at this particular moment and milieu. if the medicalization of blackness is perhaps too easily equated with foucauldian notions of racial discipline here, the book’s thought-provoking epilogue also loses sight of professionalization at times. to be sure, hogarth’s discussion of the recent medical literature on sickle cell anemia and the persistence of the disproven “slavery hypothesis” of black americans’ hypertension powerfully illuminates the durability of race as a medical concept, to borrow a phrase from anne pollock’s related study of the medicine bidil and cardiovascular disease, medicating race: heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference. but we learn less about how that elastic medical concept is used to craft professional expertise. indeed, in her reading of how the “slavery hypothesis” was promoted by oprah winfrey and dr. oz, hogarth might well have returned to the question with which her study begins: do therapeutic figures in contemporary popular culture lay claim to medical authority with the same strategies used by white physicians in slave owning societies in the greater caribbean, namely by producing medical knowledge about black bodies? references cartwright, s.a. (1851). report on the diseases and physical peculiarities of the negro race. the new orleans medical and surgical journal, 691715. gould, s. j. (1981). the mismeasure of man. new york, ny: w.w. norton. 6 carmody catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 4(2) pollock, a. (2012). medicating race: heart disease and durable preoccupations with difference. durham, nc: duke university press. bio todd carmody is a visiting assistant professor in the department of literature and creative writing at hamilton college. microsoft word bhattari-125-1157-4.docx bhattarai, p. (2017). algorithmic value: cultural encoding, textuality, and the myth of “source code”.catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3 (1), 1-28 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © pratistha bhattarai, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article algorithmic value: cultural encoding, textuality, and the myth of “source code” pratistha bhattarai duke university pratistha.bhattarai@duke.edu abstract in this article, i provide a spivakian analysis of computational algorithms. building upon gayatri spivak’s claim that the value coding of late capitalism extends beyond the economic realm to the cultural and affective, i show that it seeps into the algorithmic as well. the recent proliferation of algorithmic applications has been met by an increased scholarly interest in their underlying mechanisms. several critics of predictive algorithms, for instance, proceed as though the racial and gender discrimination that a given algorithm enacts upon execution can be positively attributed to -and mitigated through a re-coding of – either its training data or its “source code.” there is little denying that the logic of computation undergirds much of our sociality. but, as i argue in this article, to concentrate the source of an algorithm’s action in its semiotic representations is to hide and legitimize the value codings that lend these representations their efficacy. my aim in this article is two-fold. first, to show how seemingly benign investments in algorithms can reproduce, in a larger network, the exploitative value systems that manage the worth of knowledge, epistemologies, labor, and 2 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) bodies. second, to raise a question of methodology: what antitechnocratic, nonhegemonic engagements with algorithms might feminists produce that do not privilege the algorithmic as a site of intervention? introduction across the united states, police departments have adopted a new kind of software that they claim can be used to prevent crime before it happens. called “predictive policing,” this software is data driven. its algorithm is trained to make predictions that are consistent with the patterns it observes in historical crime data. what this means is that the potential criminal activities the software identifies are informed by biases in police data. in fact, researchers from the human rights data analysis group have shown that predpol, one of the most widely used predictivepolicing software,1 disproportionately targets black neighborhoods (lum & isaac, 2016). while police departments have historically used police data to forecast crime2—thereby perpetuating racialized policing practices under the guise of facts-based crime analysis—the current use of algorithms further shrouds these systemic practices in the legitimacy of science and technology. algorithmically generated predictive models serve to explain and justify racialized policing practices; it becomes as though the police surveil black neighborhoods simply because the predictive model tells them to do so. in positing predictive-policing software as the very source of their policing activities, the police systematically elide the larger racial logics of the “war on crime” within which surveillance technologies operate. the desire to see software as source is not limited to predictivepolicing practices, but is replicated in critiques of predictive policing as well. critics of predpol, for example, have focused their attention on the racial biases in the training data, suggesting that fixing the data could fix the algorithm’s predictions (kirkpatrick, 2007, pp. 21–23). this argument simply shifts the source of the police’s discriminatory behavior from the algorithm, and the predictive model it generates, to the training data. a 3 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) similar dynamic is at play within critical analyses of code. a growing body of scholarship in media studies seeks to expose and analyze the “source code”—the human-readable representation of an algorithm, which itself is just a collection of instructions—animating computational programs.3there is little denying that the logic of computation undergirds much of our sociality, and that there is political value to understanding computational code. but to concentrate the source of a program’s action in its “source code” is to overlook the larger institutional logics and infrastructures that lend “source code” its efficacy. algorithmic representations—whether they are instructions in a “source code,” the zeroes and ones in a predictive model, or the “facts” in a training data— cannot be the source of any action. their agency is constrained and enabled by the social relations within which they are embedded. as wendy chun argues, “source code” has to be made executable before it can act (chun, 2008, p. 299). enunciations within ordinary language, according to j.l. austin’s speech-act theory, are executable in the sense that they have concrete effects (austin, 1962, pp. 4–11). the imperative “open the door,” for example, has material consequences – assuming that the imperative is intelligible to its intended audience. similarly, algorithmic instructions are executable in that they produce material changes in the circuitry of the machine in which they run. for an algorithmic instruction to be executed by a machine, it first has to be encoded into binary code via a process of translation called compilation. during compilation, the coding conventions of a programming language encode human-readable instructions in binary code so as to make them intelligible to—and therefore executable within—the machine in which they run. as lucas introna explains, programming codes, legal codes, moral codes, cultural codes, financial codes, and grammar are all different forms of encodings: rule-based enactments that, when performed, produce meaningful results (introna, 2011, p. 116). these codes offer varying degrees of freedom: while programming codes have strict constraints that need to be met in order for “source code” to compile and perform correctly, social codes are more negotiable. 4 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) notwithstanding this difference, they all form the necessary conditions for enactments to be read as pattern as opposed to noise—in other words, for enactments to become executable. in this article, i unpack the cultural artifice of “source code,” arguing against the idea that the effects of an algorithm’s execution can be positively attributed to a source. furthermore, i show that there are coding conventions besides those stipulated by programming languages that encode algorithmic representations and render them executable within social systems.4 in order to examine the social executability of algorithmic representations, i borrow from gayatri spivak’s framework of “value coding.” for spivak, value coding refers both to a system of representation and to a mechanism of encoding worth and interest. the language of value coding is useful for examining how textual representations are laden with interests.5 in her essay “scattered speculations on the question of value,” spivak writes, citing marx, that value is not just a representation but also a differential—“a differential representing itself or being represented by an agency” (spivak, 1985, p. 77). value is not a fixed entity but a representation of how something— labor, a piece of work, or even just a word—is differentiated from other things in order to be made representable, exchangeable, and (we could add) executable. value coding, then, can be understood as the ways in which value, as a differential, not only expresses economic value in the narrow sense but also makes representation in a wider sense possible. “value-form” is the name of that “contentless and simple [einfach]” thing by way of which marx rewrote not mediation, but the possibility of the mediation that makes possible in its turn all exchange, all communication, sociality itself.… [value is] the possibility of mediation (through coding) so that exchange and sociality can exist.…marx’s point of entry is the economic coding of the value form, but the notion itself has a much more supple range. (spivak, 1993, p. 69). cultural and economic values facilitate the process of making algorithmic representations intelligible and executable. we can think of the police 5 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) surveillance of black neighborhoods in the united states as an enunciation that is made executable by the racialized encodings of a criminal justice system that denies value to black lives. these nonalgorithmic enunciations are not very different from the algorithmic representations found in predpol—the specific instructions in the “source code,” the “facts” in the training data, and the assumptions built into the decision-making model—in that both need to be made executable by a larger network of encodings. race is a structural mode both of codifying difference and of distributing value to different lives; it is the value (en)codings of race that make predpol socially executable. technocratic discourse and practice treat algorithms as an inherently executable form of language and, in so doing, fix and legitimize the cultural and economic value codings that are implicated in their compilation and subsequent execution. while the value codings of race operate as a differential and cannot be positively pinned to a source, the predpol application—and the technocratic discourse in which it is entrenched—proceed as if they can be positively coded, fixed, and operationalized. the racial profiling resulting from the algorithm’s predictions is then attributed to the “source code” and not to the larger encodings of racial surveillance that make this code executable. technocratic practices, in so doing, treat algorithmic value—the value that a particular bit takes or the distribution of value in memory addresses—as a secure anchor for cultural and economic value codings, such as the distribution of value to different lives along lines of race, gender, and ethnicity, among other things. new-media scholar alexander galloway, who writes about the inherently executable nature of “source code,” argues that the representation of a value in human-readable code is identical to its representation in binary. uncompiled “source code,” according to galloway (2004), is “logically equivalent” to machine code; a hexadecimal number and its representation in binary, for him, “are simply two expressions of the same value” (p. 167). wendy chun (2008), however, argues that the process of compilation—whereby the value of a hexadecimal number is represented in binary—is a material process of 6 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) translation, in which the physical circuitry of a machine transforms: addresses of memories change, electrons move, and voltages fluctuate. this process is discontinuous, riddled with noise and contingency. building upon chun’s argument, this article addresses questions of how cultural and economic values translate into the value of bits. furthermore, it articulates value as an indeterminate differential, rather than as a substance that can be brought into presence—from one language to another. following gayatri spivak’s claim that the value codings of contemporary capitalism extend beyond the economic realm to the social and affective, the first part of this article argues that these value codings seep into the algorithmic as well. in the context of this article, “algorithmic” refers to the automation of judgment using algorithms; in the case of data-driven algorithms, this includes the generation and representation of training data as well as the assumptions built into the decision-making model. the second part of this article looks at how the treatment of algorithms as the source of any action works not only to hide and legitimize the implicated value codings but also to give them an originary status. the second section also puts spivak’s framework of value coding in conversation with barad’s framework of agential realism, in order to show how processes of materialization—such as the materialization of zeroes and ones in memory addresses during compilation—are also processes of value determination. working against the technocratic treatment of “source code” as a secure anchor for establishing the fixity of cultural and economic value codings, the third and final part describes the textuality, and the concomitant openendedness, of value determinations. value coding spivak (2010) argues that mode-of-production narratives cannot write the lives of those women whose values fall outside of capital’s logic (p. 21). these narratives are coded in economic terms that render exchangeable 7 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) only those values that are consistent with (capitalist) relations of production. the discourse of “digital divide,” continuous with such narratives, draws a line between those who have certain forms of access to technology and those who do not. its division of the world into technological “haves” and “have-nots” establishes technology as a commodity to be owned.6 do women working in assembly lines, whose labor is exploited to make technological innovations what they are, have “access” to socio-technological networks? their interaction with technology is not representable as “access”—or at all—within the language of “haves” and “have-nots” because they entail neither consumption nor ownership. within mode-of-production narratives, marginal populations come to be seen as deprived not just of technological commodities but also of the values those commodities circulate. this is not to say that marginal populations are better off without technology or that their values should not be influenced by it—a presumption spivak (2010) describes as the romantic preservation of subalternity (p. 65). as she argues, it is to be desired that lines of communication be established between marginal groups and hegemonic institutions. there is no denying that technology increases people’s mobility. however, the distribution of information technology is discursively coded as the distribution of knowledge and skills to marginal communities; this discursive coding works to hide the underlying distribution of value to different epistemologies. seen in this light, the discourse of marginality is a form of what spivak calls an epistemic value coding: “marginality,” as it is becoming part of the disciplinary-cultural parlance, is in fact the name of a certain constantly changing set of representations that is the condition and effect of it. it is coded in the currency of the equivalencies of knowledge. that currency measures the magnitude of value in the sphere of knowledge. (spivak, 1993, p. 69) the discourse of marginality, along with its attendant “practicalities,” renders certain knowledge systems to be “marginal” to the center. the 8 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) “practicalities” of western academia transform the question “what is worth [the german word for value] studying, teaching and talking about?” to the more innocuous-sounding “what can best be parceled out into a fourteenor tenweek format?” “what are the best available textbooks?” and “what are the most manageable paper topics?” (p. 69). in these examples, we can see that the language of efficient packaging, accessing, and organizing hides a deeper epistemic value coding and gives the reiteration of this coding the appearance of rationality. as spivak suggests (danius, jonsson, & spivak, 1993), the equivalencies of knowledge — their indeterminate but systemic valuation — naturalizes the international division of labor under which the labor of “marginal” communities is devalued and exploited (p. 38). in other words, the representational process of “marginality” is an “efficient coding” of modeof-production narratives (spivak, 2010, p. 21) — a cultural value coding that manages the economic value coding whereby cheap labor is efficiently produced, exploited, and appropriated. this language of efficiency that spivak describes finds a parallel in the technocratic discourse of development gateway—the world bank’s online platform that aims to accelerate development by facilitating the exchange of knowledge between communities. development gateway runs a central database where users publish their knowledge.7 the editorial committee then reviews the entries and publishes those it thinks are relevant. within this framework, “what knowledge is worth sharing” appears as “credible quality content” (walker, 2003, p. 11) and as “the best knowledge available” (world bank, 2011, 1); the systemic disavowal of value to subaltern epistemologies appears as a humanitarian effort to “extend the reach of knowledge” (world bank, 1998, 25). the developers of development gateway claim that poverty is the result of a knowledge gap that their technology promises to reduce. but a technological practice that carries “benefits” across a knowledge gradient is relevant only as long as the gradient exists. if such a practice is to be relevant in the long term, it has to reproduce the very gradient it claims to destroy. in other words, marginality has to be animated through the platform itself.8 9 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) how an organization conceptualizes knowledge, control, and access is often consistent with its network architecture. in a peer-to-peer network, users are connected in a ringlike formation. this topology could potentially decentralize information and uniformly distribute control and access across the network. development gateway, however, works on a server-periphery architecture whose centralized control creates opportunities for censorship and editorial interventions (velden, 2005, p. 107).9 this architecture treats knowledge as a public good and communication as product delivery; products are first received at the center and then cleaned, packaged, and efficiently dispensed to the “beneficiaries” at the periphery. what users submit to the central database is edited and rendered valuable by knowledge experts—an explicit case of epistemic value coding. these knowledges are edited so that they meet certain standards. the assumption here is that there is one standardized model of knowledge that people need, which, if dispensed efficiently, could accelerate (economic) development. this project proposes an efficient market solution to the systemic problem of poverty. it is not surprising that development gateway’s productivity-enhancing network architecture is similar to those of fedex and walmart— companies concerned with the efficient packaging and delivery of goods (brown & duguid, 2000, p. 29). a more recent example of an internet platform that implements a corporatized model of “access” is free basics. a joint venture between facebook and six mobile-phone companies, free basics (previously named internet.org) is a mobile-based portal that aims to provide rural communities in the third world free access to “basic” internet services. facebook’s handpicking of these services has been widely criticized for violating net neutrality. tech activists in india, for instance, rejected facebook’s app when it was first launched in india (rajmohan, 2015). supporters of net neutrality argued that content providers should not selectively choose online services that they think are essential for everyone. development gateway has been similarly criticized for deciding who gets access to what knowledge and at what speed (mehta, 2001, p. 10 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 189; thompson, 2004, p. 103). another technology platform based on the premise of efficient product delivery that has met with far less opposition is google’s search engine. google maintains what is called a webgraph—a graph with web pages as nodes and urls as the links between them. despite its seeming randomness, the webgraph’s structure is scale-free: the web contains few nodes—namely the hubs—that have a large number of neighbors, and a large number of nodes that have few neighbors. if a new webpage were to attach itself randomly to this network, it would have a high probability of attaching itself to a hub. this also means that if you were to start from a random node and go on a random walk in the network, you would be more likely to encounter the hubs than the peripheries.10 while these are mathematical properties of scale-free networks, it is important to note that the scale-free property of the webgraph has been historically produced by platforms such as development gateway and free basics, for example, that have the economic means not just to be well connected in the webgraph but also to determine the visibility of other pages. google’s sorting algorithm further exploits the scale-free property of the webgraph. when a query is made on google’s search engine, the pagerank algorithm outputs a list of matching results, ranking the pages most likely to be encountered on a random walk—that is, the most popular pages—as the most “relevant.” because the popular pages are brought under the purview of the users, they become even more popular (or “relevant”), while the pages at the margin become more marginal. while this should be of concern, it is generally considered acceptable due to the order and linearity that the pagerank algorithm imposes on the web of heterogeneous knowledge and the efficiency of search it makes possible (see, for example, page et al., 1999, pp. 13–15). this confirms spivak’s observations regarding the (efficient) epistemic coding of value and the “marginality” such coding creates and is, in turn, created by. capitalist mode-of-production narratives—and their attendant values of rationality and efficiency—are implicated in the technocratic 11 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) practices of development gateway and free basics as well as in the marginalization effected by the pagerank algorithm. pagerank’s automated generation of knowledge hierarchies—as opposed to the human gatekeeping of relevant knowledge within development gateway and free basics—is widely accepted as democratic and legitimate.11 automation creates the impression that algorithms are autonomous, that their operation is unmediated by social relations. this belief, salient within not just technocratic practices but also the popular discourses surrounding them, is what allows algorithms to hide and reproduce the value codings mediating their operation. source coding in her essay “getting real: technoscientific practices and the materialization of reality,” karen barad describes reality as what sediments out of the process of making the world intelligible through certain material and discursive practices and not others. within her framework of agential realism, agency is construed as the reconfiguration of such practices and the reality that they materialize. barad draws on niels bohr’s work on quantum physics to arrive at this formulation. building upon bohr’s observation that light looks either like waves or like particles depending on the conditions of an experiment, barad argues that the referent of an experiment—in this case, “light”—is not an observation-independent object but the phenomenon through which an object is made intelligible (barad, 1998, p. 97). this phenomenon is constituted by the material and discursive arrangements of the experiment, which include not just the apparatuses used but also their interpretive grids. barad further outlines how boundary-drawing practices, specific to any material-discursive arrangement, differentiate a phenomenon through internal exclusions to produce discrete objects and subjects. in other words, boundary-drawing practices materialize a phenomenon into discrete bodies with inherent properties. within barad’s framework of agential realism, a sonographic “fetus” does not refer to an observation-independent object but to the 12 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) process of its intelligibility: the political discourse on the autonomy of the fetus and the material development of the sonogram in terms of speed, resolution, and magnification. these discursive and material arrangements have historically shaped each other and the sonogram’s development as an apparatus of body production. in its current form, the sonogram materializes—in “real time”—the fetus as a rights-bearing subject. responding to judith butler’s articulation of matter as a discursively constrained process of materialization (butler, 1993, pp. 7–8), barad adds that there are also material constraints on what matter can mean. following butler’s description of sonography as a form of medical interpellation whereby an “it” is initiated into a discourse that continuously materializes “it” into a “girl” or a “boy,” barad adds that among the impoverished class in india, the sonogram inserts the “girled” fetus not only into discourse but also into the gendered international division of labor, often leading families to abort the “girled” fetus. the sonogram as an apparatus of bodily production, barad (1998) writes, “does not simply map the terrain of the body: it maps geopolitical, economic, and historical factors as well” (p. 93). to paraphrase and reinterpret barad, the representations on a sonogram screen are mediated by the value codings implicated in its rendition—in the makingexecutable of the sonogram. this includes the value codings of the gendered international division of labor that devalues not just the labor of subaltern women but also their lives. the “real-time” materialization of the fetus as a rights-bearing subject, similarly, is mediated by the value codings of rights-based, pro-life discourses that dislocate value from the mother’s body to the fetus’s. this interpretation of boundary-drawing practices resonates with spivak’s description of value as a process of differentiation, suggesting that processes of materialization—which differentiate a phenomenon into discrete entities with inherent characteristics—are also processes of value determination. like sonograms, military drones have historically been developed as apparatuses of body/value production. manned drones, for instance, provide an interface that creates subjects on the controllers’ side of the 13 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) screen and objects on the other, as the other. the interface and what can be seen on it are the sediments of a history of material and discursive developments. in their current form, drones produce racialized bodies as observable (and even threatening) objects of knowledge. substantially separated from ground realities, they create distanced representations of the people they track, and the act of surveillance itself produces those on the ground as threats. as prasse-freeman argues (2015), the logic of drones is consistent with the american empire’s “inability and unwillingness… to perceive the political lives of others." before they kill, drones create killable subjects. material developments—improvement in speed, resolution, features, and magnification—create realistic-looking representations of ground realities that further exacerbate the viewer’s ability to dehumanize the targets so rendered. in this state of affairs, improved drone vision, ironically, diminishes what can be seen, whereas improved algorithmic efficiency translates into a more efficient kill. automated drones add another layer of legitimacy to the military’s production of racialized targets. in his essay “ecologies of empire,” jake kosek (2010) describes how drone contractors, as well as the us military, have increasingly grown to view the involvement of humans in technological warfare as “inefficient and laborious,” often times expressing a wish for adaptable swarms that are “less mechanical and more organic” (p. 667). kosek writes how, in order to realize this wish, the pentagon has reached out not to entomologists but to mathematicians developing algorithms that mimic bee behavior. these algorithms use digital pheromones, information-carrying chemicals secreted by bees in order to communicate with one another, to automatically coordinate drones. manually controlled drones already distance military actors from the act of killing, but automated drones that mimic bee behavior add further levels of mediation between the two, providing more efficient methods for the us military to impinge on the political sovereignty of other nations. the distancing effect automated drones have is also conceptual; that these drones are beelike means that they are not like the humans coding them.12 furthermore, swarming drones produce a 14 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) mimetic dynamic wherein their inhumanness is presumed to match that of terrorist organizations. we can see here how the human/nonhuman divide, which kosek claims is central to the war on terror, lends swarming drones their cultural executability. by allegorizing this divide, mimetic algorithms materialize certain populations as killable insects, while also legitimizing the cultural logics in which they achieve this function. it is through this iterative process that drones have taken up their current forms. while boundary-drawing practices ascribe efficiency to algorithms as an inherent property, they exclude what spivak (1985) calls the “historical ideology of efficiency” (p. 83), which makes efficient algorithms relevant in the first place. it is perhaps because of this economic unhinging of algorithms within computer science research that faster algorithms, regardless of their application, are generally seen as having an inherent benefit, a use-value. in her essay “scattered speculations on the question of value,” spivak critiques the romantic tendency within cultural discourses to deploy use-value as a “secure anchor” for fixing the notion of value outside capitalism’s circuits of exchange—the tendency, for example, to see certain works as having an uncontested literary value. literary canon formation, she argues, “works within a much broader network of successful epistemic violence,” wherein certain “subjecteffects [are] systematically effaced and trained to efface themselves so that a canonic norm might emerge” (p. 74). the rhetoric of “use-value” within canon formation masks the presence of the economic in its operation and, in so doing, reproduces exploitative practices in a larger network. much in the same way, seemingly benign investments in the pursuit of efficiency—for example, on the part of an academic solely concerned with improving the efficiency of the pagerank algorithm or of drones—reproduces the exploitative value systems that manage the worth of knowledge, epistemologies, labor, and bodies. the materialization of algorithms as inherently efficient entities helps proliferate the cultural-economic ideology of efficiency. more generally, the materialization of algorithms as inherently executable elides 15 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) and proliferates the cultural and economic value codings implicated in the process of making them executable. it is in this sense that “source code,” like literary canon formation, works as an apparatus of value production. the materialization of swarming drone algorithms as “source code,” for example, excludes the rhetoric of the human/nonhuman divide that lends swarming drones their cultural executability, effectively reproducing the racialized coding of (the worth of) bodies represented on drone interfaces. what makes “source code” particularly potent as an apparatus of value production is the epistemic authority granted to the supposedly autonomous “internal” logic of algorithms. the cultural artifice of “source code” creates the impression of a source from which the truth—not just of the algorithms but also of the relations they animate upon execution—can be accurately retrieved, thereby doubly invisibilizing the social relations undergirding their performance. for instance, the pagerank algorithm hides and legitimizes the implicated discourse of marginality as it melds epistemic violence with the efficient organization and advancement of knowledge. additionally, it creates the appearance of an underlying source code from which a complete description of the platform can be derived, as though it is because of the ranking mechanism of the algorithm that the webpages are hierarchized the way they are and their value transformed. crimeforecasting algorithms, similarly, work to legitimize racialized policing practices by creating the impression that the police surveil certain neighborhoods simply because the algorithm tells them to do so. the coding of racialized difference into computational models is in line with a long history of “biological essentialist” frameworks that white europeans developed in order to code racialized difference into the “biological body.” if, at one point, anatomical difference was used as an explanation for the genocide characteristic of european imperialism (markowitz, 2001, p. 392), today we see how algorithmically generated difference is used as an explanation for—or even as the very source of—racialized policing practices. this is another way in which “source code” becomes a secure 16 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) anchor for cultural and economic values: technocratic practices that treat algorithmic procedures and their predictive models as the source of the algorithm’s actions work to reduce the logic of value codings to the logic of algorithms in order to automate as well as justify processes of value determination that the algorithm enacts upon execution. spivak’s elaboration of the textuality of value provides an antidote to this assumption that cultural and economic values can be captured in executable statements and put into operation. contingencies in coding in her discussion of canon formation, spivak refuses to make an argument for opening up the canon and according literary value to works outside of it. she questions the very process of value determination instead, opening up marx’s chain of value and showing how the discontinuities and contradictions in this chain throw the very category of value into crisis. spivak (1985) specifically examines use-value, which she claims is both “outside and inside the system of value determinations” (p. 80), as a site that reveals the randomness of value determinations. it is use-value that puts the entire textual chain of value into question and thus allows us a glimpse of the possibility that even textualization (which is already an advance upon the control implicit in linguistic or semiotic reductionism) may be no more than a way of holding randomness at bay. (p. 80) spivak’s analysis of the moments of indeterminacies and discontinuities in the chain of value serves two functions. first, it offers a critique of economic determinism and challenges the idea that the economic offers a final description of social relations. second, it shows that the economic is, in fact, implicated in the cultural, but that the determination of value in the economic realm, as in the cultural, is open-ended. following spivak, i have aimed to demonstrate a similar open-endedness in the algorithmic as well—arguing against the idea of “source code” and the algorithmic determinism that it implies. the cultural artifice of “source code” draws a causal link between written code and its performance, and thereby 17 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) imagines algorithms as complete in and of themselves. challenging the “semiotic reductionism” characteristic of this technocratic imagination, i have used spivak’s framework of value coding in order to open up algorithms to the textuality of value determinations. an understanding of the textuality of value has implications for how we critique technocratic practices in general and data-driven practices in particular. data-driven algorithms are widely used for recognizing patterns in data and for making decisions based on these patterns—from deciding whether someone gets a job or a loan to whether there is criminal activity at a particular location. since these algorithms produce the future in the image of the trends in the data, they work to reproduce, in a feedback loop, the social inequalities surrounding the generation of the training data. the technocratic assumption underlying this mode of control is that algorithmic representations, whether they are the “facts” represented in the training data or the zeroes and ones constituting predictive models, can capture social relations and the cultural and economic values mediating their operation. these values, as spivak’s analysis shows, cannot be positively pinned in the representations in a dataset and then seamlessly translated into the zeroes and ones of the algorithmic model. rather, these values are what textualize algorithmic representations, opening them up to the possibility of a recoding. this recoding, however, need not be located in the realm of the algorithmic. that algorithms are open to a recoding means that their performance is in fact contingent upon the encoding logics of the wider network within which they are embedded, and that a mutation in this network will produce a mutation in the algorithm’s performance. what we are grappling with here is a question of methodology: what antitechnocratic, nonhegemonic engagements with algorithms might feminists produce that do not privilege the algorithmic as a site of intervention? historian ben schmidt (2015), for his part, shows how data-driven algorithms can be used to understand social relations, not change them. the particular algorithm schmidt uses is word2vec—a procedure used in natural language processing to encode words in a given text corpus as 18 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) vectors. the algorithm maps semantically similar words to nearby points in a continuous vector space to obtain what is called a vector space model. a special property of these models is that the difference between vectors, itself a vector, also has a semantic meaning. in his work, schmidt analyzes the gendered differences in a vector space model obtained by training the word2vec algorithm on more than 14 million reviews on ratemyprofessor.com. any pair of words whose difference is along the directionality of the vector separating male from female, schmidt notes, is gendered. the vector difference between he and she, for example, is the same as that between man and woman and between king and queen. schmidt performs what he calls “rejecting the gender binary” in order to modify the word embedding so that it is no longer structured around these gendered differences. he does this by transforming each word in the space in a way that there aren’t any pairs of words whose vector difference is along the directionality of the vector between male and female. this new embedding, he shows, further reveals the varied roles (binarized) gender plays in meaning-making. this method reveals, for example, that students describe women as goddesses and men as geniuses, or women as nasty and men as disgusting, and that they are likely to refer to men as professors and women as teachers; it also shows that students have a relatively more extensive vocabulary to criticize women for being “unprofessorial.” in rejecting the gender binary, schmidt allows us to “hyperfixate on gender as a category of textual analysis,” revealing the ways in which seemingly nongendered differences map onto gender to produce legible patterns. if this vector space model were to be used for deciding whether or not to allocate tenure to faculty, women would be at a serious disadvantage. while both genius and goddess are used as compliments, an academic—as schmidt notes—might benefit more if called the former. the word embedding, along with the decision it produces, could thus legitimize the already prevalent systemic devaluation of women’s labor within academic institutions. it is in this sense that the value codings of gender are implicated in not just the algorithmic model and the data it 19 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) represents but also in the reviewing patterns producing the data. it is important to note that schmidt’s purpose for “rejecting the gender binary” is not to create a model that is without gender bias, one that would let us “tap into some world of unrestrainedly polymorphous perversity” (2015). in fact, schmidt’s work suggests that a word embedding that is devoid of the textuality of gender would not be legible, given gender’s role as an organizing principle in a sociolinguistic field. such an embedding, if used for decision making, would produce results that could seem random. more recently, scholarship within machine learning has aimed to produce predictive models that are without racial or gender bias. kamiran et al. (2013), for instance, describe techniques for altering the training data, for changing the algorithmic code so as to limit the search space to nondiscriminatory models, and for adjusting discriminatory models in the post-processing phase. these techniques locate discrimination in the algorithmic realm. my point here is not to argue against the use of antidiscrimination techniques, but rather to show that their focus on the algorithmic systematically elides the larger social logics that lend predictive models their efficacy. police departments across the country believe that predictive policing can be used to reduce racial bias; while some departments are focused on using better algorithms, others are focused on improving the quality of the historical crime data. former pittsburgh police chief cameron mclay, for instance, sees the use of big data in predictive policing as providing a “palliative for policing’s ills” (quoted in hvistendahl, 2016). mclay came out of retirement and returned to his policing job after white police officer darren wilson killed michael brown in ferguson, missouri. mclay was convinced that the improved use of data in policing, as well as the use of algorithms capable of predicting future hot spots, could lessen racial bias in policing practices. such liberal “police reform” efforts, which focus on reducing bias in policing, fail to challenge the larger logics of the war on crime that actively reproduce state-sanctioned racial discrimination. the racial logic of predictive algorithms has less to do with the 20 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) instructions in the algorithm or the representations in the data than with how these enactments are made executable by the racialized encodings of the criminal justice system. suppose, for instance, that the training data for the algorithm was adjusted to be without racial bias, in the sense that the hot-spot map generated by the algorithm showed all neighborhoods to be equally susceptible to a given type of crime. the police, in this case, wouldn’t patrol all the identified neighborhoods, since the very purpose of hot-spot mapping is to improve policing efficiency. the police’s discretion regarding which areas to patrol would introduce biases in subsequent predictions of the algorithm, as the police are likely to record new crimes in the areas they decide to patrol. even if we were to suppose that the police would decide to patrol all neighborhoods equally, they are still more likely to record crimes in black neighborhoods. as john fiske (2016) argues, the “seeing eye” of the modern surveillance state is white, and “street behaviors of white men…may be coded as normal and thus granted no attention, whereas the same activity performed by black men will be coded as lying on or beyond the boundary of the normal, and thus subject to disciplinary action” (p. 69). this is what critiques of crime forecasting software that locate the training data as the site of discrimination often overlook: the agency of the training data is enabled by the racialized value codings of a surveillance state that has historically constructed notions of criminality and danger around blackness.13 as long as crime gets associated with street crime and with particular bodies on the streets—and not with, say, white-collar financial crime—crime-prediction algorithms will invariably work to reproduce class and racial inequalities, no matter how much we recode the training data, the predictive model, or the procedures in the algorithm. a larger systemic recoding of what crime means, however, could perhaps break and expand what crime-prediction algorithms can do. a recoding of “criminality” informs the crime-prediction application white collar crime risk zones, which criminalizes not poverty but wealth (tseng, clifton, & lavigne, 2017). for the application to be the source of any action, this recoding has to be yet more widely accepted and 21 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) implemented. conclusion this article expands the concept of value as a mediating process—as the process of making algorithmic representations executable. the idea that the effects of the execution of code can be traced to a specific source elides the social relations on which code depends for its relevance and efficacy. neither “source code” nor machine code, nor even the “facts” in a training data, can be the source of any action, because their agency is enabled and constrained by a larger network of cultural and economic encodings that render them executable. these encodings, and their institutional logics, maintain certain configurations of value—of worth, relevance, and significance. algorithms legitimize, upon execution, the value codings that render them executable. while cultural and economic values are implicated in the compilation and subsequent execution of “source code,” they cannot be positively pinned to and seamlessly translated between different forms of representations. rather, these values are what textualize the algorithmic— mediating what algorithms do upon execution, while also opening them up to the possibility of a recoding. we could recode the instructions in an algorithm or the patterns in a data, but what they do upon execution is wholly contingent upon a wider configuration of value within which they operate. value codings mediate—both materially and discursively—not just what algorithms do but also what becomes conceivable to us as something they can do. to introduce a mutation in the network of value codings, then, is to reimagine and expand the uses of algorithmic “texts.” notes 1predpol derives its popularity, in large part, from the belief that it is without racial bias. the historical crime data used in predpol represents 22 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) individual data points in terms of time, place, and crime type. using this data, the software identifies neighborhoods where a given type of crime is most likely to occur in the future. the algorithm’s representational mechanism creates the impression that the identity of potential arrestees is not implicated in how the algorithm operates. 2 the notion of crime forecasting was first put forward by sociologist clifford r. shaw and criminologist henry d. mckay in their 1931 book juvenile delinquency and urban areas. 3 as wendy chun describes, the “software studies” move within media studies imagines instructions in a “source code” as the “ultimate performative utterance”—the literal source of an action (chun, 2008, p. 299). lev manovich (2001, pp. 48–49), for instance, emphasizes the need to turn to computer science to understand the inner logic of media. alexander galloway (2004, p. 165), in a somewhat different vein, claims that computational code is inherently executable. 4 chun makes a similar argument: ‘source code is never simply the source of any action; rather, source code is only source code after the fact: its effectiveness depends on a whole imagined network of machines and humans’ (chun, 2008, p. 299). 5 in “can the subaltern speak?” spivak shows how geopolitical and economic factors inscribe textual representations. the non-exploitative power that foucault and deleuze and guattari theorize, according to spivak, does not inhabit the “third world” and serves the interest of an economic situation that requires “interests, motives (desires), and power (of knowledge) [to] be ruthlessly dislocated” to the “first world” under the international division of labor (spivak, 2010, p. 35). 6 the discourse surrounding the “digital divide” has been thoroughly critiqued; see, for example, gunkel (2016). 23 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) 7 when it was first established in 1999, the organization ran on a single portal. today it works through a series of country gateways (independent national-level organizations), each with its own editorial committee that assesses the quality of development knowledge. 8 it is perhaps important to note that development gateway does not animate marginalization by increasing “poverty”; in fact, the algorithm’s performance is optimized against evaluation metrics that define “poverty” in very specific ways and that aim to alleviate it through the distribution of very specific “benefits.” however, the platform produces, and is in turn produced by, the representational process of marginality, which, as argued above, has concrete ramifications, even though they might not be measurable within development gateway’s evaluation metrics. 9 it is worth noting that, with the implementation of certain protocols, power can be relatively decentralized and resources distributed evenly even in a server-periphery network. 10 for more on scale-free networks, see barabási and bonabeau (2003). 11 there are, however, exceptions to this; for a thorough critique of corporate political power in general, and google search in particular, see mcchesney (2014, pp. 102–129). 12 another consequence of this formulation, as kosek notes, is that drone operators can more easily evade legal and moral codes (p. 668). 13 for an analysis of how modern surveillance practices are underpinned by the methods of policing black bodies, as well as black social life, under chattel slavery, see browne (2015). 24 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) references austin, j.l. 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(2004). protocol: how power exists after decentralization. cambridge, ma: mit press. 25 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) gunkel, d.j. (2016). second thoughts: toward a critique of the digital divide, new media & society, 5(40), 499–522. hvistendahl, m. (2016, september 28). can “predictive policing” prevent crime before it happens? science aaas. retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/can-predictive-policingprevent-crime-it-happens introna, l.d. (2011). the enframing of code: agency, originality and the plagiarist. theory, culture & society 28(6), 113–141. isaac, w., & dixon, a. (2017, may 10). why big-data analysis of police activity is inherently biased. the conversation. retrieved from http://theconversation.com/why-big-data-analysis-of-police-activity-isinherently-biased-72640 kamiran, f., calders, t., & pechenizkiy, m. (2013). techniques for discrimination-free predictive models.” in b. custers, t. calders, b. schermer, and t. zarsky (eds.), discrimination and privacy in the information society: data mining and profiling in large databases (pp. 223–240). heidelberg, germany: springer. kirkpatrick, k. (2007). it’s not the algorithm, it’s the data. communications of the acm 60(2), 21–23. kosek, j. (2010). ecologies of empire: on the new uses of the honeybee. cultural anthropology 25(4), 650–678. lum, k., & isaac, w. (2016). to predict and serve? significance 13(5), 14– 19. 26 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) manovich, l. (2001). the language of new media. cambridge, ma: mit press. markowitz, s. (2001). pelvic politics: sexual dimorphism and racial difference. signs 26(2), 389–414. mcchesney, r.w. (2014). digital disconnect: how capitalism is turning the internet against democracy. new york, ny: new press. mehta, l. 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(1993). marginality in the teaching machine. in outside in the 27 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) teaching machine, pp. 58–85. new york, ny: routledge. ——. (2010). can the subaltern speak? in rosalind c. morris (ed.), can the subaltern speak? reflections on the history of an idea, pp. 21–78. new york, ny: columbia university press. thompson, m. (2004). discourse, “development” and the “digital divide”: ict and the world bank, review of african political economy 31(99), 103. tseng, f., clifton, b., & lavigne, s. (2017, april 26). white collar crime risk zones. the new inquiry. retrieved from https://thenewinquiry.com/whitecollar-crime-risk-zones velden, m.v.d. (2005). programming for cognitive justice. interacting with computers 17, 105–120. walker, l. (2003). startup of the development gateway. in operations evaluation department (oed) working paper series. washington, dc: world bank, retrieved from http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2003/01/6308628/startupdevelopment-gateway world bank. (1998). world development report 1998/1999: knowledge for development. new york, ny: oxford university press. retrieved from https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/5981 world bank. (2011). the state of world bank knowledge services: knowledge for development 2011. washington, dc: world bank. retrieved from http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2011/01/15560820/stateworld-bank-knowledge-services-knowledge-development-2011 28 bhattarai catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(1) bio pratistha bhattarai, originally from kathmandu, nepal, is a first-year phd student in the literature program at duke university. she did her bachelors and masters in mathematics and computer science, alongside a graduate certificate program in feminist studies. broadly, she is interested in feminist theory, continental philosophy, and decolonial science and technology studies. in her research, she examines computational code as a structural mode of codifying difference and of distributing value — along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality.     special section: global fertility chains and the colonial present of assistant reproductive technologies indian “native companions” and korean camptown women: unpacking coloniality in transnational surrogacy and transnational adoption     johanna gondouin linköping university johanna.gondouin@liu.se   suruchi thapar-björkert university of uppsala suruchi.thapar-bjorkert@statsvet.uu.se     abstract the article argues that transnational adoption and surrogacy from south korea and india are shaped through us and british imperial and colonial histories in korea and india respectively. we focus on the reproductive labor of “native companions” in early british india and kijich’on (camptown) women in post–world war ii korea. the management of native women’s sexuality was crucial for maintaining social order, political stability, and for consolidating capitalism through the commodification and devaluation of colonized reproductive labor. the configuration of historical legacies is unpacked through the idea of coloniality, the constitutive dark side of modernity, which reproduces subalternity and exploitation of racialized bodies. the reproductive labour of korean birth mothers and indian surrogate mothers is formed and shaped by the colonial and imperial formations of gender, sexuality, kinship and family, in which white supremacy and exploitation of indian and korean women was at the core. we argue that these formations are re-configured in the present through three mechanisms that enable contemporary practices of adoption and surrogacy: the transformation of waste into profit, the erasure of non-white mothers, and the trope of the white savior.     keywords coloniality, race, reproductive labor, india, korea, transnational surrogacy, transnational adoption     introduction transnational adoption and surrogacy are commonly perceived as opposites on a moral spectrum ranging from humanitarianism to exploitation. transnational adoption in its modern form started as a war relief effort, with the adoption of mixed-race children fathered by american gis in the aftermath of the korean war (1950–1953). the language of altruistic rescue and love instituted during this formative period still frames the practice, while commercial surrogacy—especially when it involves the reproductive labor of women in the global south—is perceived as controversial. though adoption stakeholders emphatically distance themselves from any link to the commodification of children, there is a growing consensus among scholars that it is fruitful to analyze adoption through a market framework (raleigh 2018). furthermore, fraud, corruption, and child trafficking have been acknowledged as major challenges to transnational adoption since its very beginnings. scholars such as us law professor david smolin have argued that the recurrent “scandals” featured in media reports on adoption are not exceptions but point to the very structure of the adoption system (smolin 2006; 2010; nelson 2006; raleigh 2018).   in the present, transnational adoption is being scrutinized and problematized, in the aftermath of a critical debate, sparked by the discovery of illegal adoptions in chile in 2019 (nelsen 2021). this has created unprecedented legal and political repercussions in some of the largest receiving countries. in 2020, an independent investigation on transnational adoption commissioned by the minister for legal protection in the netherlands was published (government of the netherlands, committee on the investigation of intercountry adoption, 2021), followed by the publication of similar reports in denmark (ankestyrelsen, 2021), and switzerland (bitter, bangerter, and ramsauer 2020), and in sweden, the parliament voted for the commissioning of such an investigation (sköld and lundberg, 2021b). as a consequence, all transnational adoptions in the netherlands and denmark have been halted, and the swiss government has issued an official apology. the dutch report emphasized that the illegal and unethical practices—alongside the governmental complicity—pertain to transnational adoption as a system. it also identifies the social and political imagery of adoption—the good deed of “saving children”—as crucial in the emergence and upkeeping of abusive practices: “because of the deep roots of this image, abuses such as age falsification were accepted or even considered normal. also, anyone who helped promote adoption was seen as a benefactor, and politicians fought for (rapid) intercountry adoption. research has uncovered repeated patterns of passivity and whitewashing. the view that any adoption, even an illicit one, is better than no adoption at all was indisputable” (government of the netherlands, committee on the investigation of intercountry adoption, 2021, 3). significantly, the committee recommends that lessons learned from transnational adoption be considered in the case of surrogacy. the ways in which perceptions of morality (“doing good”) can gloss over social injustices is a dimension that will be addressed in the following analysis.   this article explores the continuities between transnational adoption and transnational surrogacy through a shared history of imperialism and colonialism. more specifically, we argue that imperial and colonial regulations of native women’s reproductive labor are reconfigured in current practices of surrogacy and adoption. the centrality of the gendered colonized body in the articulation of imperial ideologies has often revealed fraught dynamics of cross-cultural contact. adding to previous scholarship on the imperial/colonial lineages of adoption and surrogacy, we focus on the reproductive labor of “native companions” in early british india and camptown women in post–world war ii korea, as historical and epistemological templates for surrogacy and adoption. thus, our article contributes to a more robust understanding of how us imperial history and british colonialism—in which white supremacy and the reproductive exploitation of native women were at the core—shape contemporary globalized reproduction. our main contribution lies in reading these two archives together, which enables us to discern the workings of the colonial matrix of power (quijano 2000) across different geopolitical and temporal sites.   in the next section, we will situate our study within postcolonial feminist research on transnational surrogacy and critical adoption studies. we will then present the theoretical perspective and methodological approach of our analysis. the first part of our analysis deals with the regulation of inter-racial intimacies in early british india, the (in)visibility of native women and the regulation of native motherhood. we will then proceed to map the regulation of inter-racial intimacies between us servicemen and korean women in post–wwii korea. finally, we argue that these historical regulations of native women’s reproductive labor are reconfigured in the present. we develop these findings through three mechanisms that characterize contemporary globalized adoption and surrogacy: (a) the transformation of waste into profit, (b) the erasure of non-white mothers, and (c) the trope of the white savior.   genealogies of stratified reproduction postcolonial feminists and feminists of color have emphasized the stratification of motherhood, that is, the ways in which race, ethnicity, and migration status shape women’s reproductive roles (colen 1995), and how the present international division of reproductive labor is conditioned by racial hierarchies and western colonialism. black us feminists see transatlantic chattel slavery—in which the reproductive labor of female slaves was engineered for profit—as a precursor of surrogacy (twine 2011; weinbaum 2019). drawing on alys weinbaum’s notion of the “imperial/colonial episteme” (2019, 59)—which posits racialization as a mechanism through which extraction and commodification is facilitated (also see collins 1990)—we aim to explore the workings of this episteme in contemporary practices of adoption and surrogacy.   the pivotal role of racial hierarchies and western colonialism has been highlighted in previous scholarship on indian surrogacy (vora 2009, 2015; banerjee 2014; deomampo 2016). kalindi vora argues that british colonialism constitutes the condition of possibility for indian surrogacy. british colonial medicine, the classical western mechanistic understanding of the body, the historical devaluation of reproductive labor, more recent visual technologies that instrumentalize the uterus, and neoliberal globalization are discerned as significant components in indian surrogacy in vora’s work (vora 2015). furthermore, she draws parallels between surrogacy and indian indentured labor, arguing that the system of indian indentured labor and indian surrogacy both illustrate the strategic and racialized use of critical notions such as freedom, consent, and autonomy (vora 2009). analogous to contemporary contracts regulating surrogacy in india, the contracts regulating indian coolie labor were fraught with significant omissions that make ideas about freedom and consent difficult to maintain; “consent” glosses over the absence of choices; the lack of information and the many binding circumstances that uphold the fiction of non-coercion underpin indian indentured labor (vora 2009).   in our analysis of korean adoption, we build on research within the field of critical adoption studies that attend to the historical, political, and socioeconomic contexts of transnational adoption (trenka et al. 2006; e. kim 2010; briggs 2012). while previous scholarship on transnational adoption has focused on health, medical issues, and socio-psychological questions of adjustment and identity formation, scholars within this field place the practice within histories of western colonialism and military violence, thus challenging the dominant narrative of adoption as child rescue. transnational adoption is seen as a paradigmatic example of how “imperialist processes ‘over there’ and social relations ‘over here’ intersect” (eng 2010, 95). hence, the emergence of korean adoption is not seen as the “natural” solution to the orphan crisis, but as an expression of cold war politics and us empire building, with the korean war marking the initial stage of global hegemony. the opening up of adoption programs followed us military invasions in vietnam and thailand, which then became the next major sending countries after south korea (hübinette 2006, 145). when transnational adoption spread to other countries, south korea, which has the longest and largest adoption program in the world, was used as a model.   theoretical framework and methodological approach we draw on the key analytical concept of “coloniality” (quijano 2000) to understand how configurations of gender, race, and sexuality that were institutionalized during various phases of colonial rule have reconfigured in current typologies of labor and capital. coloniality is “still the most general form of domination in the world today, once colonialism as an explicit political order was destroyed” (quijano 2007, 170); we have moved from a period of “global colonialism” to a current period of “global coloniality,” implying the continued subordination and exploitation of peripheral nation-states and non-europeans.   in his conceptualization of “coloniality of power,” aníbal quijano (2000) highlighted the centrality of race, which justified the superiority of the european as the dominant subject and in relation to whom other social categories were subordinate and inferior. the invention of race gave rise to new social identities (quijano 2000, 216), first using “physiognomic” traits of people as external manifestations of their racial nature (whites, indians, mestizos, negroes, yellows, olives), and then, on that basis, “geocultural identities” were produced (european, american, asiatic, african) (see quijano 2007, 171). as quijano states, “the relation between european culture and the other cultures was established and has been maintained, as a relation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’…[in] a relation of externality” (2007, 174). sylvia wynter draws attention to the ways in which “human” refers to a particular ethnoclass; man (i.e., western bourgeois) ‘‘[who] overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself’’ (2003, 260)—securing its own well-being, but denying humanity to those excluded from this globally hegemonic construct (2003, 262). nelson maldonado-torres explains how the uneven distribution of humanity among groups that appeared human became “the foundation of the differentiation between the idea of human being as humanitas as opposed to human being as anthropos, the first one referring to human beings as subjects, and the other one to a sub-set of beings…entities that generate anxiety, fear, desire, and rage” (2017, 433). on a similar tack, lisa lowe suggests that the “uses of universalizing concepts of reason, civilization, and freedom effect colonial divisions of humanity, affirming liberty for modern man while subordinating the variously colonized and dispossessed peoples whose material labor and resources were the conditions of possibility for that liberty” (2015, 6). if coloniality was one axis in global euro-centered capitalism, structured through a hierarchical international division of labor, then modernity was the other. there is “no modernity without coloniality” (mignolo 2011, 3). in fact, the achievements of modernity are inseparable from “colonial humiliation’’ (sakai 2010, 443).   building on quijano’s framework of coloniality of power, maría lugones develops an intersectionality of race and gender, positing gender “as constituted by and constituting the coloniality of power” (2008, 3–4). thus, in specific historical geopolitical contexts, gender was instrumental in the colonial domination over non-western racialized bodies and subjectivities—a structure that structured power. the colonial gender system ordered lives into heteronormative and hierarchical structures, justifying the dehumanization and enslavement of those that fell outside these frames.   our analysis is based on existing postcolonial literature and inspired by lowe’s (2015) methodological approach of reading across archives: we posit british colonialism (india) and us neo-imperialism (south korea) as two archives on transracial intimacies, through which we identify convergences in contemporary regimes of reproductive labor. this approach enables us to see how colonial/imperial histories in two seemingly disparate and dissimilar geographical and social contexts yielded similar outcomes—identifying unifying themes pertaining to the reproductive labor of native women. our reading establishes a link between the archives without obliterating their differences. we investigate how discursive conceptualizations that underpin exploitative practices acquire legitimacy. to borrow from lowe, ours is an “analysis [that] does not accept given categories and concepts as fixed or constant, but rather takes as its work the inquiry into how those categories became established as given, and with what effects” (2015, 3). in other words, analyzing contemporary practices of globalized reproduction through these colonial archives enables us to see the history of the present.   “native companions” in early british india regulating transracial intimacies in early british india in this article, we focus on the period between 1700 and 1858 during which the english east india company established and consolidated the foundations of british colonial rule in india. during this period, transracial cohabitations or concubinage between european merchants and servicemen and indian native women were commonplace, although not publicly recognized. the forms of cohabitation ranged from domestic and sexual services to conjugal relations. as opposed to previous understandings of this early stage as an era of creolization, cosmopolitanism, and carelessness towards racial boundaries, durba ghosh (2006) demonstrates how anxieties about racial purity and fears of racial mixing are present from the outset of the anglo-indian encounter, reflecting ann laura stoler’s observation that “who bedded and wedded with whom in the colonies was intensely debated and meticulously codified from the very beginning of the imperial era” (1989, 636–37). regulations and practices of transracial intimacies shifted during the british colonial regime. the progressive colonization of india, during which the east india company claimed greater political authority, was accompanied by legislations to end anglo-indian social intimacy under the rule of governor general lord cornwallis (1786–1793). distance between britons and native people was seen as necessary to uphold the racial, national, and religious superiority of the colonizers (mcclintock 1995; ghosh 2006). nonetheless, interracial relationships continued in the post-cornwallis era.   the indian rebellion of 1857 was a watershed moment in the political and social history of india (procida 2002). the government of india act of 1858, which marked the beginning of the british raj, the improved communication between britain and india (including the opening of the suez canal in 1869), and the widening distance between british and the indians, fueled by the rebellion, interrupted the racialized, gendered, and sexualized economies that existed in the pre-british raj period. practices of concubinage were pushed to the margins and replaced with a different set of relationships with domestic servants, housekeepers, and nursemaids. efforts were made to foreground british morality and the establishment of british monogamous heterosexual households, with the british “memsahib” (wife of a high ranking british official) as the upholder of this morality within the intimate space of the home (chaudhuri 1988, 1994).   as ronald hyam argues, the memsahib became the new “instrument” for maintaining the social distance between the ruler and the ruled (1990, 19). furthermore, domesticity, childhood, and britishness became intimately linked. within the imperial home the female servant’s (ayah) surrogate motherhood and the native wet nurses’ (amahs) lactating body threatened to re-order the domestic familial organization, while simultaneously exposing the vulnerability of english reproduction. though predicated on a race/class superiority of the memsahib, the ayah’s closeness to european children was a cause of colonial anxiety as it threatened to destabilize the power hierarchies within the colonial nursery and contest the british ideal of childhood. on the other hand, due to their low class and caste, wet nurses were projected as physically and morally dirty, betraying the racialized, casteist, and classed character of the relationship between the british and native indians in the colonial home (sen 2009; s. banerjee 2010). thus, the colonial-domestic space became a site of negotiation and contestation, with the native female body arousing ambivalent feelings of fear and disgust, on the one hand, but also seen as a necessary inclusion within the british household, on the other.   exploitation and non-recognition of native women’s reproductive labor cohabiting with a native woman was often regarded as a socially and sexually transgressive act by the emerging colonial state (ghosh 2006, 31), but served imperial interests in several ways. these arrangements eliminated the responsibility and economic expense of the company to “import” british women. furthermore, by remaining legally unbound, their men were free to move on to respectable marriages with european women who would potentially bring wealth into the marriage. european men were thus able to maximize both sexual and economic opportunities. concubinage was also seen as both politically and medically beneficial, as a way to form strategic bonds with powerful indigenous families, while at the same time keeping “men in their barracks and bungalows, out of brothels and less inclined to perverse liaisons with one another” (stoler 1989, 637). not the least, it enabled colonial societies like british india to imagine itself as being uncontaminated by racial and cultural mixing (ghosh 2006, 30), and to maintain the racial hierarchy on which colonialism rested. as ghosh argues, interracial intimacies were camouflaged by the fact that indigenous women living in colonial households were given new names: “the absence of native women’s names [or the erasure of her identity as an indigenous woman] in colonial archives correlated with the state’s interests to suppress the visibility of subjects who threatened the whiteness of colonial society” (2006, 18–19). by obscuring indigenous forms of identification, the colonial archive systematically erased the identity of native women.   indrani chatterjee (1999a) has explored slavery in colonial india, which is an under-studied theme in south asian historiography. she argues that a significant number of the native women cohabiting with company men during the early colonial period were slaves in the legal sense—that is, they received their freedom on the death of their master. continuous wars over succession within provinces and battles between the british military and local rulers created a population of women and children available for purchase. with their homes destroyed, they would turn to the cantonments of the company for protection and livelihood opportunities (chatterjee 1999a, 64). other women were supplied by the system of regimental bazaars, itinerant markets that followed each military unit and provided the troops and the regiment as a whole with domestic and sexual services. although prohibitions of coerced labor were put in place at this time, exceptions were made for the category of women and young girls recruited by force to perform these services in the bazaars. this later developed into the chakla system (government managed spaces for prostitutes) in which indigenous middlemen were allocated funds by the local commander to deliver purchased young women for the regiment’s use.   savage mothers while erased in the colonial archives, the “native companions” of european men become visible through their children. the growing number of mixed-race children become a palpable threat to the authority of european rule—as concrete manifestations of the permeable boundaries between the native population and the imperial rulers, and as colonial subjects with a compromised loyalty (stoler 1989, 2010; ghosh 2006, 213). thus, in 1782 the military orphan society was founded by officers of the east india company with the purpose of managing the effects of racial mixing. this group of children was seen as the literal incarnation of the harmful effects of miscegenation, including excessive sexuality, and the influence of the native mothers was seen as detrimental to the children, particularly in upper-class families, where a perceived lack of chastity, fidelity, and other moral qualities made them unfit to parent the offspring of english gentlemen. therefore, the orphanages also served the crucial purpose of separating children from their native mothers.   native women with biracial children were systematically targeted with a range of legal and administrative measures that undermined their social recognition as mothers. for instance, before the age of four, at which admittance to the orphan school was compulsory, every child was entitled to a monthly allowance, a prerequisite being that the child was cared for by a close relative. however, the native mother or her family were not eligible as such. instead, in the absence of close relatives, it was required that a serviceman in the regiment registered as the child’s guardian, or the child would commonly be taken into custody. tying financial aid to a particular regiment made native mothers’ prospects of supporting and living with their children dependent on their ability to find a european guardian—a precarious position which pushed them into a series of intimate relationships with soldiers of the same regiment. native mothers “circulated through the households of soldiers in a regiment in order to maintain their livelihoods and their ties to their children” (ghosh 2006, 232). these women were perceived as promiscuous, which further sedimented the idea of native women as unfit mothers.   chatterjee (1999b) demonstrates how this undermining of native women’s motherhood becomes manifest when compared to indigenous systems of slavery. in the latter, the child born to a slave-concubine inherited the father’s legal status, which allowed for filiation, status-reckoning, and incorporation into the slave-holding household. this entailed advantages in terms of status and continued protection for the mother of the child. in contrast, according to colonial law and practice, the offspring of slave-women inherited the mother’s juridical status. mothers of children fathered by european free men were seen as “illegitimate” and could make no claims to their children.   these practices were bolstered by imperial ideologies of race and gender. colonized women deviated from the norm of both humanitas (maldonado-torres 2017) and the norm of womanhood modeled on white bourgeois women. thus, for native women, colonization brought both “racial inferiorization and gender subordination” (lugones 2008, 8). while white european women were seen as fragile and sexually passive, colonized women were constructed as sexually aggressive and perverse (cott 1978). felicity nussbaum (1991-1992) argues that the eighteenth century marks the formation of the cult of domesticity, wherein hierarchies of class and race among women were expressed through their quintessential role as mothers. an “english” and “civilized” motherhood was ascribed according to class position, and further distinguished in opposition to the savage motherhood of the racialized women in the colonies: “women of the upper and middle classes are pitted against lower-class women and ‘civilized’ english mothers against ‘barbaric’ mothers—their difference a proof of racial and class superiority, their sameness an indication of their gendered inferiority in an interlocking network of hierarchies” (nussbaum 1991, 126). capable of killing, cannibalizing, or giving away their children, native mothers, otherwise pictured as closer to animals and a regime of primordial instincts, were paradoxically seen to lack any maternal instinct. as stoler (1989, 647) has shown, the idea of native mothers as harmful to their children and the subsequent removal and institutionalization of mixed-race children is a recurrent pattern not only from british india but also from french indochina, the dutch indies, and white settler colonies in north america (the american native indian boarding schools in the united states, the indian residential school system in canada), and australia (the stolen generations).   us neo-imperialism and korean birth mothers post–wwii korea in korea, the victory of the allied forces over the axis powers at the end of wwii put an end to thirty-five years of japanese colonial rule. drawing up an arbitrary border at the 38th parallel, the cold war superpowers—charged with the task of overseeing the retreat of the japanese army—divided the peninsula, with the soviet union (backed by china) taking charge of the northern part and the united states (supported by the un) claiming the southern part. in september 1945, the united states army military government in korea (usamgik) was created. but the process towards independence was stalled as post-wwii turned into cold war politics and the conflicting interests of the two superpowers, who stood face to face on the korean peninsula, escalated. the ussr and us each installed ideologically attuned korean-led governments, turning korea into a testing ground for democracy versus communism. because of its proximity to the soviet border, the american military presence was seen as a way to both ensure korean independence and prevent communist expansion in east asia. in the years after wwii, south korea received massive war relief from the international community, in particular the us, to rebuild its shattered economy. the us economic assistance became increasingly geared towards making korea a strong yet subordinate partner in the cold war. a system of dependency was mounted, in which political and social problems were solved by economic contributions. as south korea gained independence in 1948, the republic of korea–us agreement on aid preserved the structures established during the rule of the usamgik.   camptown women the establishment of us military camps throughout the southern peninsula was accompanied by the construction of camptowns, or kijich’ons—areas adjacent or in close proximity to military bases that provided services, not the least sexual services, for soldiers. in some cases, the american troops would take over and expand already existing “comfort stations” set up by the japanese army, including the women who lived there. thus, as suggested by scholarship on korean comfort women and early camptown women, there is no clear distinction between the two categories (moon 1997; cho 2008). the first generation of camptown women (1950–1970) came from poor rural areas where the war had created a large supply of girls and women without families and livelihoods, and for whom prostitution became a means for survival. some considered themselves to be “fallen women” even before entering the camptowns, having lost their social status as a result of divorce, rape, or sex and/or pregnancy outside wedlock. a few of these women would marry american servicemen, while others entered into “contract cohabitations,” in which women were provided living expenses in return for a monogamous relationship (moon 1997, 25–26). as akeia benard (2016) notes, these cold war–era relationships were similar to the forms of interracial domestic arrangements that flourished in british india and other colonial settings during the imperial era.   myths of the sexual availability and compliance of women of color were pivotal to sustain white masculinity and white male supremacy during both the european imperial era and the cold war (benard 2016, 3). in the case of us-korea relations, orientalist stereotypes were used to attract young american men to enter into military service on the peninsula (moon 1997, 33). to the emerging south korean state, camptown women’s sexual labor was perceived as a guarantee for the safety and the honor of the nation as kijich’on women were seen as protecting the virtue of innocent korean national womanhood from the perceived predatory sexuality of american soldiers. nevertheless, working as a military prostitute was deeply stigmatized, as it breached against both neo-confucianist norms of female chastity and the idea of the korean people as a racially homogenous nation (hübinette 2006; h. kim 2016, 50; moon 1997, 3). camptown women were, commonly, also rejected by their own families, even when it was through their labor that the family was able to survive. although officially outlawed by the usamgik in 1946, prostitution increased during the american occupation: by 1953 there were 350,000 prostitutes in korea, with 60 percent working around us military bases throughout the 1950s and 1960s (cho 2008, 104). however, the link between prostitution and the american army was never recognized by the us department of state (cho, 2008, 101). in 1948, following south korean independence, prostitution was banned by the south korean government, but an exception was made for camptowns. during the military dictatorship of park chunghee (1961–1979), kijich’on women were officially recognized and encouraged to act as “diplomats” for their nation (cho 2008, 110). as katharine moon notes, although most countries have prostitution, what sets the south korean case apart is that it was both sanctioned and sponsored by the government (1997, 41).   unwed mothers, mixed-race orphans, and racial discrimination the korean war had devastated the country, killed over one million civilians and displaced tens of thousands of children. the majority were mixed-race children who had been abandoned by their parents. according to korean law, mothers were not recognized as the legal guardian of children born out of wedlock, which made the children illegitimate. both women and their mixed-race offspring, particularly the children of african american servicemen, were seen as social outcasts and exposed to racial discrimination (okazawa-rey 1997; cho 2008, 118). camptown mothers carried the double stigma of miscegenation and illegitimacy (e. kim 2010, 51). in both colonial india and south korea, mixed-race children were seen as a problem. however, as tobias hübinette explains, adoption as the “solution” to this problem represents a historically significant shift from “the way the french, dutch and british empires in asia dealt with the problem of mixed children fathered by european settlers before world war ii. few, if any of these were ever adopted and moved to metropolitan europe” (2006, 144).   the task of rehabilitating the country was assigned to the us military, through programs such as the armed forces assistance to korea, and the military unit, the korea civil assistance command. in reconstructing the social welfare system, the construction of orphanages became a top priority, which illustrates how geopolitical agendas were framed as humanitarian interventions. as soojin pate and others have observed, “the acts of recovery performed by the u.s. military worked to cover over the acts of state violence that necessitated the need for recovery in the first place” (2014, 39). american news media contributed by broadcasting footage of gis rescuing children from ruins and handing out presents at christmas parties, which represented the american soldier as a kind of “pseudo-missionary” (pate 2014). the emergence of korean adoption was intimately linked to anti-communism and “christian americanism”: a patriotic ideology that conflates christian principles with “american values,” articulated as a specifically american moral authority (oh 2015). the korean mixed-race children were seen as humanitarian orphans to be rescued, rather than as children abandoned by their american fathers (e. kim 2010, 53), and as opposed to the native mothers in british india, korean kijich’on women were not entitled to any legal protection or practical assistance from the us military (h. kim 2016, 49). interestingly, the sense of responsibility and entitlement that transnational adoption builds on was facilitated by an erasure of the ways in which the us was complicit in creating “the korean orphan crisis.”   early orphanages and adoption policies specifically targeted mixed-race children. hosun kim (2016) has shown that kijich’on mothers were persistently solicited by adoption agency workers who actively counseled them to relinquish their children. only 25 percent of camptown mothers raised their children themselves (h. kim 2016, 46). the overseas adoption of mixed-race orphans became a way to remove a population that challenged the ideas of korean patriarchy and of korea as a pure and racially homogenous nation, articulated through the ideology of one nation and one people (hübinette 2006; h. kim 2016, 50). thus, in this initial phase, transnational adoption was established as a technology for population control and the removal of “excess” populations (h. kim 2016, 50, 66; hübinette 2006). the us involvement also aligned with the new south korean government’s economic interests: national security and the building up of military forces, not social welfare, were top priorities. furthermore, not only was it a practice that lowered state spendings, it became a significant source of foreign capital to the emerging south korean state (e. kim 2010, 32).   previous research has highlighted demographic shifts in the us and the conflation of anti-communism, evangelical christianity, and us paternalism on the global stage as driving forces behind korean adoption (e. kim 2010; oh 2008; nelson 2006; briggs 2012). christina klein (2003) suggests that the family becomes the dominant metaphor for understanding us-asia relations in the 1950s. viewing foreign relations as sentimental familial bonds made it possible for white americans to imagine non-white asians as part of their family. the creation of this group of privileged migrants is particularly noteworthy against the history of us anti-asian immigration policies: the chinese exclusion act (1882) and the 1924 immigration act, which had practically made it impossible for asians to immigrate legally to the united states (lowe 2015).   a crucial step in transforming the social orphan into an adoptable child was to erase the native mother. the birth mothers were subjected to a process similar to that of their children: exposed to “social death” through the stripping of all social recognition and rights, reflected in their lack of “the right to ask for rights” pertaining to the child” (j. kim 2009, 857; h. kim 2016, 9). in the early period, it was primarily christian, white, middle-class families who adopted korean children. if adoption is a technology to shore up the ideal white nuclear family (eng 2010), it is important to add that it relies on the invisiblized reproductive labor of the single/unwed/immoral/prostitute birth mother.   patriarchal family practices and south korean law give mothers little power over their children’s lives. relinquishing a child for adoption has not always required the consent of the birth mother. lax governmental oversight has allowed adoption agencies to deploy ethically ambiguous practices for claiming custody of a child. in 1972 kyunghyang daily news reported that agencies customarily required only the father’s consent in the relinquishment process (e. kim 2010). birth mothers’ lack of legal protection and the broad criteria for adoptable children has made a large group of women—including divorced women, poor mothers, single mothers, women involved with married men, and mothers who leave home because of domestic abuse—vulnerable to losing their children to adoption. mothers who leave their children for whatever reason lose all rights to their children. it has not been uncommon for mothers to discover that their child has been relinquished after the formal process of adoption has been completed.   unpacking the coloniality of power nexus in korean adoption and indian surrogacy transforming waste into profit we exemplify the workings of coloniality of power through what we understand as three intersecting trajectories: (a) the transformation of waste into profit, (b) the erasure of non-white mothers, and (c) the trope of the white savior. first, in both cases, neoliberal state policies are intertwined with the exploitation of sexual and reproductive labor of women who do not fit the national imaginary, transforming devalued populations seen as “waste” into profit-generating resources.   in early british india, practices of concubinage lowered economic expenses while creating and maintaining racially unequal relations. this inequality has informed contemporary surrogacy practices. for roughly a decade (2004–2015), india stood as the world’s “mother destination” for commercial gestational surrogacy. low costs, the availability of highly qualified english-speaking medical doctors and women willing to work as surrogates, together with the lack of legal regulation surrounding surrogacy arrangements, contributed to india’s flourishing fertility industry. overall, surrogacy has benefited from the active promotion and financial support of the indian government (rudrappa 2015; deompampo 2016).   the viewing of indian women’s bodies as excessively reproductive and fertile and thus inimical to development and progress was first formulated during british colonial rule and then reconfigured by the postcolonial indian state and policy makers in the global north (wilson 2018). paradoxically, the same wombs that were seen as superfluous, dangerous, and wasteful, and thus requiring anti-natalist interventions, are now seen as profitable and lucrative sources of revenue for stakeholders within the fertility industry (pande 2014; rudrappa 2018).   similarly, the sexual and reproductive exploitation of korean women after wwii was facilitated both by the south korean and the us government, motivated by political as well as financial gains. in the postwar construction period, the transnational adoption of mixed-race children became a significant source of foreign capital (e. kim 2010, 32). in the 1960s and 1970s, a decline in the number of mixed-race children paralleled with a booming interest in the us to adopt korean children, lead to practices such as baby hunting and financial renumeration to birth mothers (e. kim 2010). the identities of birth mothers have shifted since the initial years. vulnerable to south korea’s aggressive modernization policies, poor female factory workers were counseled by adoption agency workers to relinquish their children (e. kim 2010, 72). by the 1970s, the children of unmarried college students came to dominate, and by the late 1990s, pregnant teenagers became the largest group, maintaining single or unmarried mothers as most vulnerable to losing their children (briggs 2012). until the 1990s, family members were able to hand over children for adoption against the mother’s will or without her knowledge. today, south korea is the world’s twelfth largest economy and has the world’s lowest birth rates, yet adoption continues (shin 2020). approximately 90 percent of the children adopted oversees in recent years have unmarried birth mothers in their late teens or early twenties (e. kim 2010, 34). news reports indicate that unwed mothers are pressured to give up their children for adoption through the guise of “counseling” organized by adoption agencies who have economic interests in recruiting children for adoption (sköld and lundberg 2021a).   throughout its history, korean adoption reflects the stigmatization and lack of social and financial support that out-of-wedlock motherhood is associated with in the country. furthermore, these adoption practices have undermined the construction of child welfare policies in the country and been complicit in the disenfranchisement of korean women. overall, the history of korean adoption is closely intertwined with south korea’s postcolonial process of modernization and current wealth (h. kim 2016, 36–37; pate 2014), serving both economic and political ends. as pate notes, adoption transformed “south korea’s social outcasts…into useful subjects for the state. as adoptees, they became economically profitable for south korea and politically beneficial for the united states” (2014, 103). thus, since its beginnings, transnational adoption has turned undesired, “excessive” populations into sites of economic profit generation (h. kim 2016, 36–37; pate 2014, 118).   erasing the non-white mother second, during the british colonial rule in india, native mothers were seen as detrimental to children and stripped of all legal and social recognition as mothers. as opposed to an ideal white motherhood, native mothers were constructed as unfit to nurture the offspring of white men. the omission of their names in the colonial archive is mirrored in contemporary birth certificates of children born through surrogacy in india, which bear no trace of the surrogate mother. furthermore, by freighting in concepts of racial medicalization, indian surrogates become perceived as sites of risk and danger to the fetus they gestate (deomampo 2016). this mode of thought illustrates a colonial episteme according to which the body is commodified through fragmentation. we argue that this episteme is manifested through the myth of the empty womb as separated from the self and the rest of the body and therefore possible to “rent.” such a construction implies “instituting artificial and rigid lines of separation between the indian surrogate’s womb and the rest of her body…between the biological and the affective,” pushing surrogates to “completely disengage from several critical aspects of their identities” (a. banerjee 2014, 124). we understand this violent imposition to be made possible by the coloniality of power: through the non-recognition of the surrogate as fully human. while it can be argued that processes of fragmentation and commodification are mobilized in all commercial surrogacy arrangements, we nonetheless suggest that some racialized bodies are more easily seen as dispensable. thus, the predominantly white, heterosexual parents who seek fertility treatment in india rely on the non-recognized reproductive labor of indian surrogates (gondouin 2014; deomampo 2016; gondouin, thapar-björkert, and ryberg 2018).   similarly, the erasure of the birth mother has been crucial throughout the history of transnational adoption. kijicho’on women were constructed as immoral, unsuitable mothers and lacked legal rights to their children. the process of turning a mixed-race child into an adoptable orphan required the erasure of the native mother, a procedure that was institutionalized in the dominant practice of “hard” or plenary adoptions introduced in the 1960s, which grants the child a new birth certificate that replaces the birth parents with the adoptive parents. thus, importantly, transnational adoption as a means through which white middle-class nuclear families and white heteronormative kinship are created and sustained depends on the invisibilized reproductive labor of the single/unwed/immoral/prostitute korean birth mother (eng 2010; pate 2014).   in her pioneering work on korean birth mothers, hosu kim highlights “how racialized, working class, poor birth mothers in the global south are disproportionately devalued and delimited to a woman’s capacity to bear a life, while their opportunities to parent that life are severely curtailed” (2016, 9). this stratification of reproductive labor is visible in current geopolitical conflicts, such as the highly mediatized example of the trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy at the us-mexican border in 2018–2019, when children of asylum seekers were separated from their caregivers and placed in “tender age” government shelters, from which some of them entered the us foster care and adoption systems (briggs 2020). laura briggs (2020) underscores the broad mobilization against the policy, made possible by drawing parallels between the separations at the southern border and histories of slavery. however, when the trump administration strategically referred to immigrants as parents putting their children at risk (because of criminal records or neglectfulness), it resuscitated the historically familiar trope of black and native women’s lack of maternal feelings and deficient parenthood. subsequently, the critique became more muted (briggs 2020, 165–66). we argue that a coloniality of power framework enables us to problematize practices of adoption and fostering that privilege the rights of white parents, seen as “better families,” at the expense of limiting the ability of non-white individuals to parent.   saving children from brown mothers: the white savior third, in colonial india, the trope of the white savior (hughey 2014) enabled white men and women to occupy a moral high ground vis-à-vis the colonized subjects, thus aiding those perceived as “less fortunate” while simultaneously fulfilling the “white man’s burden,” “that reputable colonial malaise, that sanctioned the subjugating of entire continents’’ (kabbani 1994, 5–6). though british women’s experiences of imperialism were ambiguous, they were not the hapless onlookers of the empire, but complicit in upholding the idea of moral superiority and agents of civilization (burton 1990), drawing “their capital from others’ deprivation while refusing to accept [their] own position as endowed” (chow 1993, 14). chatterjee (1999a; 1999b) observes how british men purchasing children or female slaves perceived of their role as that of saviors, “rescuing” the native from a miserable life subjected to the cruelty of indigenous communities. as previous scholarship has highlighted, a similar rhetoric of rescue is often mobilized amongst commissioning parents contracting a woman from the global south as their surrogate (pande 2014; rudrappa 2015; deomampo 2016). paying a poor woman for her service is seen as offering “help.” this rhetoric has also been understood as a way to manage anxieties regarding the potential exploitation involved in surrogacy.   in the case of transnational adoption, the trope of the white savior has been central since its inception in postwar korea. the intersecting ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality that made korean war orphans objects of rescue by american christianism and anti-communism are reconfigured in contemporary media representations of adoption. recurrent images of celebrities such as angelina jolie, mia farrow, or lady diana, “saving, rescuing, or adopting international children from underprivileged parts of the world” (shome 2011, 389) construct a discourse of white women as “global mothers.” global motherhood is a specific, contemporary reconfiguration through which whiteness articulates a new universality drawing on christian visual tropes and culturally specific contexts (gondouin 2015). the availability of children for transnational adoption is presented as the result of the faulty motherhood of the birth mother, formulated in terms of a lack in modernity and structured by a logic of abandonment. this understanding “obscures the historical and political context…and positions white citizens as rescuers and racial others as beneficiaries, making…the attitude towards the other a question of mercy and compassion” (gondouin 2015, 106). in a previous study, we analyzed the critically acclaimed tv series top of the lake: china girl (campion 2017), and demonstrated how the discourse of global motherhood is enacted in the context of surrogacy, as the white female protagonists are represented as the saviors of passive and silenced thai sex workers who are also surrogates (gondouin, thapar-björkert, and ryberg 2018).   the trope of white saviors and white global motherhood is associated with the rhetoric of the gift, which is a significant component in narratives of transnational surrogacy. pande (2014) has observed how a rhetoric of the gift serves a crucial role for surrogate mothers: understanding their labor as a gift becomes a strategy to resist the commodification entailed in commercial surrogacy. while both rescue and gift indicate logics that oppose systems of commodification, the notion of the gift, in contrast to rescue, implies reciprocity, which was interestingly actively resisted by the commissioning parents interviewed in daisy deomampo’s (2016) study. we suggest that this refusal can be understood in the light of maldonado-torres’s reading of colonial subjugation. maldonado-torres sees the condition of the colonized as equivalent to the “damné” (the condemned) in franz fanon’s writing. noting that there is an etymological relation between “damner” and “donner,” he explicates the meaning of the damné as “literally the subject who cannot give because what he or she has has been taken away from him or her” (maldonado-torres 2007, 258). the reluctance of intended parents to recognize reciprocity articulates with an understanding of colonial subjugation as a mode of existence that makes gift-giving and generous reception impossible.   conclusion in this paper, we argue that the legacies of us imperialism and british colonial rule are reflected in korean adoption and indian surrogacy through three key mechanisms: the transformation of waste into profit, the erasure of non-white mothers, and the trope of the white savior. the latter, with its potential ethical pitfalls, speaks to the observations of the dutch governmental report on intercountry adoption. our analysis of the imperial/colonial regimes of reproductive labor in south korea and india, two seemingly disparate bioand geopolitical contexts, underscores the centrality of raced, sexed, classed, and ethnicized bodies as sites through which imperial/colonial power was imagined and exercised. native women’s bodies have historically been a subject of anxiety and surveillance for imperial officials, and their management crucial for social order and political stability. our analysis further foregrounds how the narrative of modernity is supported in and through the violence(s) of coloniality: juxtaposing notions of freedom, success, and visibility 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88–103. https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2015.0149. weinbaum, alys eve. 2019. the afterlife of reproductive slavery: biocapitalism and black feminism’s philosophy of history. durham, nc: duke university press. wilson, kalpana. 2018. “reproductive justice in an era of gates and modi: the violence of india’s population policies.” feminist review 119 (1): 89–105. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-018-0112-0. wynter, sylvia. 2003. “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation––an argument.” cr: the new centennial review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.   author bios johanna gondouin is an assistant professor of gender studies at linköping university.   suruchi thapar-björker is a senior lecturer and docent in the department of government at uppsala university.     special section on digital models: responding to viral metaphors in pandemic times     cait mckinney school of communication, simon fraser university cait_mckinney@sfu.ca   marika cifor information school, university of washington mcifor@uw.edu     abstract covid-19 has been a crisis represented and interpreted through models. models are metaphors that illustrate one phenomenon in and through another that is better understood or seemingly more transparent. in this article, we consider digitally driven covid-19 models that draw on the certainty of data from smartphones and social networks to make predictions about a poorly understood virus. network data normally used to model information spread drive models of an actually existing biological virus. a return to hiv network models of the 1980s helps map the social implications of this latest turn to modeling. these earlier models were used to hone stigmatizing viral metaphors about behavior, risk, and exposure, in the shadow of an emerging digital culture. thinking across covid-19 and hiv modeling demonstrates how models can support personal responsibilization, be used to blame “bad” actors, and justify the creep of new surveillance practices under the rubric of “data for good” programs. drawing on critical hiv and queer studies, we argue that the people and behaviors that are opaque to viral models and their methods of capture present potential avenues for speaking back to digital virality’s terms. we highlight these exceptions, which show how certain lives make trouble for models and their sensibilities, telling of queer forms of life, desire, and contact that evade modeling altogether.     keywords virus, virality, hiv/aids, covid-19, model     “covid-19 sent you a friend request,” reads the meme’s text (figure 1).1 next to it is the requester’s profile photo: a sars-cov-2 viron. the viron, a particle only one hundred nanometers in diameter, is far too small to actually be seen without the aid of an electron microscope. yet the viron is instantly recognizable after its ubiquitous rendering by public health authorities. playing on the content and aesthetics of the familiar facebook “friend request,” the meme shows that covid-19 and the user already have one mutual friend. it asks us to take action by confirming or denying the addition of the virus to our social network. this meme takes the form of a model-metaphor, presenting in playful vernacular how the spread of a biological virus is like the spread of connections and information over a digital network. this viron-facebook meme, and millions like it, are generated in a strategic calculation to obtain “viral” currency in the shadow of an actually existing virus. the production and circulation of memes on social media, messaging apps, and other websites makes dark commentary on the absurdity of the virus metaphor amidst this latest global pandemic. figure 1. covid-19 sent you a friend request, 2020   the use of viral digital metaphors to communicate about covid-19 has gone beyond irreverent memes about social media. network science and epidemiology explore how connections between people in digital networks might replicate the physical proximities that spread sars-cov-2. similarly, data from network-enabled smartphones drive some contact-tracing protocols, and are used to model the potential of various lockdown measures by inferring how people move and interact through the proxy of their cell phones. the covid friend request meme is funny in part because it leans into the power of the “viral” metaphor in digital culture: how we are in relation to each other online might model how we mitigate the spread of an actual virus. the viral metaphor’s incursion into sociotechnical cultures emerges from the intimate, messy entanglement of hiv/aids and digital cultures. hiv is a retrovirus exchanged through certain bodily fluids (namely, blood and semen) that attacks cells by multiplying itself to detrimental effect. starting in the 1970s, computing cultures widely adopted the term virus to describe how pieces of code can copy themselves into other locations, and propagate within an individual computer across a network, to devastating result (casilli 2010; gozzi 1990; lupton 1994). personal computing and hiv both entered public discourse in the 1980s and 1990s, synchronicity that further embedded this metaphor. as one of us has previously charted with dylan mulvin, viral analogies and explanations honed in the context of hiv/aids were used to explain “the risks of vulnerability in complex, networked systems” (mckinney and mulvin 2019, 476). computer viruses, then, are routinely and repeatedly equated with biological viruses (parikka 2007, 120). conversely, hiv/aids also became a powerful means of articulating how digital media and popular culture operate. viral phenomena, biological or otherwise, describe moments when a few nodes in a network spread information widely and rapidly (parikka 2007, 131). douglas rushkoff (1996) asserts that through the transmission of messages that “attach” themselves to people, viral media shape thoughts and perceptions, reproducing themselves. virality in digital cultures operates in tandem with capitalism, emerging from viral marketing: the concept of “going viral” first appeared to name how images, memes, videos, or advertisements circulate online rapidly and across vast networks (cifor and mckinney 2020). viral in this context points to how network structures might inform economic models. in this paper, we bring these varied uses of viral metaphor into conversation, to think about how viral metaphors operate as models. models are manipulable, scalable objects that various disciplines (economics, epidemiology, physics, network science) use to think with (morgan 2012). models can be thought of as metaphors because they illustrate one phenomenon in and through another that is better understood or seemingly more transparent, for example, by mapping the “certainty” of bluetooth proximity onto opaque, potential virus spread (bailer-jones 2000; derman 2010). understanding models as metaphors can engender a more liberatory science, foregrounding their epistemic as well as social functions (ravetz 2003, 73; sismondo 1999). we consider a deliberately capacious, heterogenous range of viral network models, drawing out the shared tension between what they promise to lay bare and what they must externalize to accomplish that work. first, we consider what might be the formative case of the viral metaphor as model: the patient zero sociogram (1984). this model was used to locate blame for the origins of hiv in the network connections of a single french canadian flight attendant, and is widely understood in aids history as an erroneous, harmful example of how models produce stigma for vulnerable populations. next, we connect lessons that critical hiv studies has drawn from this case to read the turn to digitally driven covid-19 models. we offer a speculative reading of the standard alice and bob figures from cryptography used by apple and google to model their contact-tracing api to the public. then we analyze a small, interpretive selection of well-cited articles in leading journals published as covid-19 emerged as a global pandemic in 2020, from the intersection of epidemiology and network science, that use social network models or smartphone data. we also consider the techand telecom-driven public data projects associated with this type of research. each of these cases represents an apparent reversal of the viral metaphor’s origins: where biological viruses were once used to understand digital technologies, digital technologies are now being used to understand a virus. like metaphors, models do things: they are excitable, anticipatory, “calculative machines of invention” (rhodes et al. 2020, 4; rhodes and lancaster 2021): they both reflect the worlds that their creators work from and create worlds that are imaginable within their term (morgan 2012, 30–31; anderson 2021, 177–78). following from the patient zero sociogram, we argue that the latent sexual politics of these covid-19 models are entries to framing how models understand bad actors, surveillance, and risk. the kinds of people and behaviors that are opaque to these models and their methods of capture present potential avenues for speaking back to digital virality’s terms. we highlight these exceptions through a queer analysis that shows how certain lives make trouble for models and their sensibilities, telling of queer forms of life, desire, and contact that evade modeling altogether. in what follows, we push on the material entanglements of multiple viruses in promiscuous ways. katherine mckittrick argues in her work on blackness and science that metaphors risk “fixing social identities in place” and so we must “sit with metaphor(s)” and their materialities, to see how and what they illuminate (2021, 10–11). and so we lean into models as sites where the viral metaphor is stretched thin. moments when digital networks cannot adequately map on to complex forms of intimate life demonstrate network modeling’s limits in ways that are generative, because they point toward the “critical promiscuity” needed to richly understand and represent crisis (anderson 2021, 180). with our method we propose that a metaphor we sit with in order to stretch it to its limits might be easier to snap.   viral origin stories models of covid-19 always carry the fraught legacies of viral metaphors and meanings honed through the north american hiv/aids crises over the last four decades. the case that gave rise to patient zero powerfully illustrates how virus modeling creates meanings and effects. in 1984 the infamous sociogram, titled “sexual contacts among homosexual men with aids,” birthed a convenient mythic origin story that relied on claims of sexual deviance, risk-taking, and individual responsibilization. the sociogram (figure 2) first appeared in an american journal of medicine paper published by four centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) researchers (auerbach et al. 1984). their study uncovered that the then-mysterious infectious agent that would eventually be called hiv was probably sexually transmitted. the researchers examined the earliest aids cases among a “cluster” of nineteen “homosexual men” residing in southern california, tracing contacts of thirteen who shared the names of sexual partners (auerbach et al. 1984, 488). the researchers discovered that in the five years preceding illness onset, nine had sexual linkages. eventually, this sexual network would grow to map out connections between forty men in ten cities. importantly, this model has a center: gaëtan dugas (1953–1984), a french canadian flight attendant. the paper linked four california men who each had sex with one man from outside the state (dugas), who was also the partner of four men living with aids in new york city. the researchers placed an anonymized dugas at the center of their sociogram. its caption explained, “lines connecting the circles represent sexual exposures. indicated city or state as place of residence of a patient at the time of diagnosis. ‘o’ indicates patient 0 (described in text)” (auerbach et al. 1984, 488). they identified the man at the sociogram’s center as “‘patient 0’—a ‘non-californian aids patient’” (488) and a possible carrier of the infectious agent. the origin of confusion is that the letter “o” stood for “outside” [of california], but because the researchers also numbered cases in the cluster by the date of aids-symptom onset, the letter “o” was misinterpreted as the number zero. from that point forward, the man at the center was misidentified as “patient zero.” dugas was thus framed as individually responsible for the north american aids epidemic. the researchers behind the cluster study maintained from the start that the person labeled “patient 0” was not likely the originator of aids for the patient cluster studied, let alone for the wider american epidemic. yet a misidentification as “patient zero,” which in popular parlance denotes an original or primary case of contagion within a network, proved damning.   figure 2. “patient zero” sociogram (auerbach et al. 1984, 488)   dugas was first identified by name in randy shilts’s 1987 bestseller and the band played on. he appeared as a sociopath who allegedly intentionally infected or, at minimum, recklessly endangered a promiscuous sexual network of gay men in coastal urban meccas. as ted kerr (2016) has noted, the popular introduction to patient zero was through the media leading up to the book’s premiere. shilts’s publisher included the following in the press release: “what remains a mystery for most people is where aids came from and how it spread so rapidly through america. in the most bizarre story of the epidemic, shilts also found the man whom the cdc dubbed the ‘patient zero'’ of the epidemic” (crimp 1987; kerr 2016). shilts’s claim was widely covered in the media, appearing in news stories under headlines like that published by new york post, “the man who gave us aids,” and on television, where in november 1987, as robert mckay (n.d.) reports, “millions of television viewers tuned in to a 60 minutes news special that profiled dugas as ‘a central victim and victimizer.’” arriving on the scene in 1987, six years into the clinically recognized epidemic, when more than fifty thousand americans had already died, dugas’s fashioning as patient zero made for a timely, convenient aids villain. as activist and epidemiologist gregg gonsalves notes, dugas seemed to be a manifestation of otherness with both a “foreign-sounding name and an out-of-control sexuality” (belluz 2016). dugas was not officially cleared of his “patient zero” status until 2016, when a team of scientists led by michael worobey recovered near full-length genomic sequences of hiv from blood samples of dugas as well as eight other men taken in 1978 and 1979 (worobey et al. 2016). yet correcting the record is not enough to undo harm. it is not the accuracy, or lack thereof, of any given virus model or modeling process that is in question here; rather, we are arguing that models reflect and reproduce a particular vision of the world, one that amplifies sexual politics through sociotechnical means. the patient zero sociogram, like many covid models, offers an explanation for viral phenomena that seems unexplainable and uncontrollable. the idea of a patient zero offered confirmation of the conflation of homosexuality with promiscuity and aids, that the virus was perpetuated through individual recklessness and deviant behaviors, and that people with hiv/aids got what they deserved, conveniently assuring the straight, white, middle-class public of their safety and superiority. when connected through network paths, “bad” actors model satisfying chains of blame, which some publics desired. models offer convenient means of detracting guilt from the real and much more frightening villains found in structures of harm: stigma, discrimination, governmental ineptitude, food and housing insecurity, unsafe working conditions, and other structural violence. as we see once again in the age of covid, pandemics and their viral metaphors exploit extant social fault lines, what jallicia jolly (2020) calls “pre-existing conditions,” while shoring up neoliberal individual responsibilization.   good data, bad dates from the start, covid-19 was a crisis represented and interpreted through models. researchers, governments, and public health have used complex epidemiological models to predict how the airborne sars-cov-2 virus will spread through exchange of breath in proximity with others, and represent the potential effects of various non-pharmaceutical interventions (npis), such as mask-wearing, or school closures, on that spread. the use of models in these fields begins with the application of mathematical models to epidemiology starting in the 1920s, followed by the move to test social network models of information spread against epidemiological models of virus spread in the early 2000s (kermack and mckendrick 1927; newman 2002). what is novel about the reliance on models amidst covid-19 is that they are not confined to the back rooms of epidemiological research or public health authorities; media outlets such as the new york times, and tech companies such as facebook’s (now meta) data for good initiative create high-resolution, data-driven, user-oriented dashboards that reflect profound cultural investments in the visualization of data and mark the domestication of citizen engagement in modeling science (rhodes et al. 2020, 5; wernimont 2021). facebook/meta’s data for good mobility dashboard, for example, draws on “aggregated and privacy preserving” data from the social networks’ users to model how people are moving around under various lockdown measures (covid-19 mobility data network, n.d.). the model is retrospective, using real social network data gathered from mobile phones to show how movement increases or decreases over time. similarly, another facebook/meta data for good project called covid-19 forecasts leverages ai-driven predictive models, developed for other, non-specified purposes, to make predictions about human behavior related to virus transmission (meta, n.d.a). epidemiological modeling relies on presumptive understandings of human behavior and probability-oriented equations about how contact with others transmits viruses. these seir (susceptible–exposed–infectious–removed) models assume random, uniform mixing of nodes in a network, and compartmentalize each node into one of the categories for which the model type is named. every actor in a model is either susceptible to the virus, already exposed to the virus but not yet contagious, infectious with the virus, or removed from the virus by being already recovered or deceased. assumptions about the probability of contact and infection have always been driven by data of some kind (census data or surveys, for example) (ogden et al. 2020). combining seir models with social network models grounds probabilistic assumptions about contact in people’s online behavior. actual data gathered from cell phones (which claim to be proxies for contact) can also enhance the accuracy of seir models by tethering interaction to networked practices. in line with contemporary cultural values, covid models veer toward the data-driven, using geolocated data from cellular phones, social network models, and even ai, to test or improve upon long established epidemiological models (chang et al. 2021; ferretti et al. 2020; firth et al. 2020; grantz et al. 2020; kissler et al. 2020; klepac, kissler, and gog 2018; wieczorek, siłka, and woźniak 2020).2 warwick anderson argues that these data have often been posited as solutions to seir’s models’ simplistic assumptions about behavior and proximity during the covid-19 pandemic (2021, 176). actual data from smartphone users, and data-driven social network models, each normally used to understand information spread or digital virality, are being used to hone models of an actually existing biological virus’s spread. the epistemic structure through which this honing happens is a digital metaphor, where one thing is compared to another to generate knowledge: online social networks are like one’s broader range of contacts, or proximity measured by bluetooth is like the proximity of virus transmission. in other words, knowledge about how social networks and internet-enabled mobile devices shape our interactions with others drive the creation of models about this virus, and popular understandings of how it spreads. aids crisis models such as the patient zero sociogram shaped emerging understandings of the promiscuity of (digital) networks and how we are connected to each other in relationships of mutual vulnerability. with covid-19 models, digital networks are being used to shape emerging understandings of virality, biologically speaking. this phenomenon is not new, but rather a digital rendering of a century-old association heidi tworek (2019) identifies between virality, information spread, and globalized systems thinking under modernity. as in the case of aids, models as metaphors do cultural work in this latest crisis, mediating how stigma around certain behaviors that engender intimacy and vulnerability to exposure are represented and interpreted. black, indigenous, and people of color (bipoc), those denied health and economic opportunities, queer and trans people, incarcerated people, immigrants and refugees, and people who use drugs form what stephen w. thrasher (2020), calls the “viral underclass” of both aids and covid, people who are harmed not just by biological viruses but by the societal structures that render them and their communities most vulnerable to both viral transmission and inadequate post-transmission care. as studies of the patient zero example have shown, viral models engender all kinds of “externalities,” shoring up personal responsibility for risk mitigation over other stories about complex structural violence that are harder to model, solve, and predict. even with a virus whose spread is not primarily through sexual contact, covid-19 is still about intimacy: the proximity (and length of proximity) required to share breath and transmit infection, and choices about the formation of intimate social bubbles as a means of protection. covid models give a noble purpose to algorithmic surveillance and data extraction overreach by both government and industry. they do so, in part, through an explicit as well as a tacit sexual politics about intimacy, proximity, contact, exposure and risk, which carries in it the legacies of viral metaphors honed through hiv/aids. to begin to sketch out the sexual politics embedded in covid models, we might start with bob and alice, familiar standard figures from the ways cryptography problems are modeled and taught to students. alice and bob are a fictional couple invented to make the cryptographic exchange of information between people easier to understand. as alanna cattapan and quinn dupont (n.d.) have shown, alice and bob refract the heteronormative gender ideals at the heart of computer sciences, a discipline central to covid modeling. often depicted in romantic, straight entanglements to illustrate crytographic scenarios and problems, they show how intimacy and sexuality fundamentally inform how computing disciplines model information exchange. in april 2020, google and apple used alice and bob to announce their exposure notifications api, which would be used widely by public health authorities in the united states, canada, and elsewhere to generate their own apps for bluetooth proximity-enabled contact tracing. users of ios or android who download one of these apps and opt-in can disclose future infections and automatically alert those whose phones have been intimately proximate to theirs during the assumed period of infectiousness. these data can be used by public health authorities in contact tracing, but also as a baseline for understanding contact and spread, extrapolating future infection levels via modeling. data-driven contact-tracing apps present crucial questions about the normalization of smartphone-enabled surveillance and the collaboration of public health and university researchers with a tech industry built on extracting profit from user data (andrejevic 2013; benjamin 2019; eubanks 2018). bob and alice playfully walk users past these political hurdles, in program announcement illustrations that explain cryptography to potential adopters of the apps (figure 3). designed like a comic strip, the first frame features two line drawings of a man and a woman sitting on opposite ends of a public bench, as close to two meters (or six feet) apart as the architecture allows. alice is wearing a gray shirt and has blond hair, while bob’s shirt is blue. both are maskless. his hair, and both figures’ skin, have not been colored in. they are quintessential white defaults (daniels 2013). the caption reads, “bob and alice meet each other for the first time and have a 10-minute conversation.” bob seems to lean in toward alice, but she remains resolutely upright. he likes her, she’s not into it. as alice pulls away from bob’s subtle advance along the bench, the “anonymous identifier” from her covid alert app moves silently toward bob’s phone (agostinho and thylstrup 2019; chun and friedland 2015; thylstrup, waseem, and agostinho 2020). in the next frame, bob is alone, leaning over a table, haggard and frowning, a drop of sweat on his brow: “bob is positively diagnosed for covid-19.” alice will be alerted that one of her recent contacts tested positive thanks to the exchange of anonymous cryptographic keys from their cell phones.   figure 3. marketing material from apple’s and google’s exposure notifications api, 2020   why are bob and alice meeting for ten minutes on a park bench “for the first time” during a pandemic? they could be new business associates, or random strangers sharing a bench, but given the ways alice and bob are often deployed as a couple, the other subtext here is a first date gone poorly: a safe-ish gander toward intimacy with someone new risked in a moment where dating and hook-ups have become taboo. the sanitized line drawing of bob’s sick body, hunched over his contact-tracing app a few days after the encounter presents a stark contrast between the sanitized digital sphere and messy, ill bodies. as deborah lupton writes, “in a sociocultural context in which interactions with the fleshly and potentially virally contaminated bodies of other people have been continually problematised as life-threatening, the remoteness and hygienic technological imaginaries associated with digitised covid technologies promise to offer greater safety and security” (2022, 68). alice and bob’s encounter also raises a more fundamental problem about what happens when we allow the exchange of cryptographic keys over bluetooth to stand in for the intimate exchange of touch or wet breath. as the canadian government’s fact sheet on the apple-google alert system explains, bluetooth does not understand how humans actually live in proximity to others. “if you live in an apartment, condo, or rooming house,” the app might not work too well: “the technology isn’t perfect.” it continues, “bluetooth signals can be affected by things like metals or even microwave ovens” (government of canada, n.d.). apple, google, and meta are merely the largest tech companies to jump on the covid data for good bandwagon. in canada, telus, one of the country’s largest telecom providers, began offering aggregated and disidentified data from its nine million users (significant given canada’s population is thirty-eight million) to university researchers in spring 2020. mckinney received an email from a research officer at their university promoting the program in april 2020, forwarding information originally sent from an executive at telus. the drive behind this program is telus’s assurance that their user data offers something unprecedented for pandemic response, by giving otherwise unattainable transparency to people’s movements and potential interactions with others. this transparency is to be achieved by comparing telus network user data with other existing “analog” data about covid-19, such as the number of positive diagnoses in a region. drawing on metaphor’s promise to know through comparison, telus’s program marketing explains that comparison can be used “to find correlations in the data that could help our governments and health authorities develop public policy and determine where to allocate much needed resources” (n.d.). though telus’s user data is offered for free to university and public health researchers across disciplines, and contains a sunset clause, the program also includes a provision to share data with commercial entities and charge for the service, for example, to allow “banks to better predict the economic impact of covid-19” (telus, n.d.). “data for good” models aimed at slowing viral spread are just as “good” when they model the futures of financial capital, which shows how portable viral metaphors can be. the use of mobile data in viral modeling is not a new phenomenon from covid times, but the crisis made industry offerings of people’s intimate data to researchers into a public relations strategy powered by the urgency of pandemic response (lupton, 2022, 70). as facebook’s data for good marketing and privacy disclosure material explains, “people are distancing to protect their communities, healthcare workers are saving lives on the front lines, and public health systems are looking to put the right guidelines in place. to do that, they need better information on whether preventive measures are working and how the virus may spread” (meta, n.d.b). the drive toward modeling as a means of social good, and an urgent and anticipatory response to crisis is key to justifying this transition, where data can be used to validate existing models, or make the variables guiding those models more precise and agile, in order to save lives and prop up economies.   sexual networks and the unmodelable models promise transparency and resolution to troubling uncertainty, but a closer analysis of their sexual politics, cued to virality as a metaphor born when digital networks and sexual networks are overlaid, points toward what these models cannot capture. as wendy hui kyong chun shows, network science is an interdisciplinary field that “merges the quantitative social sciences with the physical and computer sciences in order to bypass or eliminate the humanities and media studies, two fields also steeped in theories of representation and networks” (2018, 68). following this call from chun and others (anderson 2021; rhodes et al. 2020), we bring humanities approaches grounded in queer studies into dialog with network modeling. learning from the disaster that was the patient zero model, we read a selection of covid modeling projects driven by network data through critical hiv studies and queer theorizations of networks. together these fields show that illustrations of interdependence always look much simpler than the intimacies they claim to represent. this practice examines how covid models driven by data from and about digital networks are assembled, what they claim to know, and what they exorcise as remainders. what actually went down on alice and bob’s date is opaque to a bluetooth proximity network’s way of knowing, flying under the radar of how infection models based on cell phone data imagine the world. these remainders are examples of what black and queer of color digital studies, drawing on édouard glissant, have called opacities, a key modality of refusal toward data extraction and mass surveillance, grounded in the materialities of black life (browne and blas 2017; cho 2018; mcglotten 2016)3. as shaka mcglotten has argued, queers and people of color “embrace those forms of darkness in which identity is obscured or rendered opaque. there are no coherent, rational, self-knowing subjects here, just furious refusals. these refusals are a kind of black ops, a form of black data that encrypts without hope of a coherent or positive output” (2016, 278). mcglotten emphasizes both an active stance of refusal toward the ways big data claims to know, but also forms of life, relationality, and interdependence (the embrace) that simply aren’t knowable by these systems. refusal is a means of ensuring reciprocity and accountability in contrast to the naturalization of normalized extractive data regimes (cifor et al. 2019; simpson 2014). refusal questions the underlying neoliberal assumptions of social “benefit” or “good” and transparency embedded in contemporary data systems. one of the most highly cited articles from the early days of social network epidemiology is m.e.j. newman’s “spread of epidemic disease on networks” (2002). newman’s work is invoked in many covid modeling projects. this article is an early example of network topology drawn from the rise of early-aughts internet culture applied to the question of viral spread, research that took shape in a depoliticized, millennial period kerr (2016) has named the second silence of north american aids crisis revisitation. the model maps “social,” “technological,” and “biological networks” onto each other, using network topologies to improve the precision of contacts assumed by seir models (newman 2002, 1). the pages of impressive math equations offered in newman’s article are far beyond our wheelhouses, but one aspect of his modeling is familiar: it is illustrated through the case of a sexually transmitted infection (sti) moving through a given population. two decisions are made about the network topology of this population: (1) it is made up by men and women who (2) are “bipartite” in their contacts and presumably their desires (“women” only have sex with “men” and “men” only have sex with “women”) (newman 2002, 8). newman centers a patient zero at the outset of this model: “now consider an outbreak that starts at a single individual, who for the moment we take to be male. from that male the disease will spread to some number of females, and from them to some other number of males, so that after those two steps a number of new males will have contracted the disease” (9). the article concludes by showing how the curve might plummet if the most “active members of the network” (those who have the most sex, with the most people) reduce their number of partners: “targeting preventive efforts at changing the behavior of the most active members of the network may be a much better way of limiting the spread of disease than targeting everyone. this suggestion is certainly not new, but our models provide a quantitative basis for assessing its efficacy” (10). here the model evidences the safe-sex pedagogies of personal risk management in contrast with the willfully promiscuous “bad actors” who emerged directly from the aids crisis (patton 1996). this is a model without queers, a model where gender is biological sex, and all sexual encounters are created equal (blow jobs, rimming, or other low-risk practices queer communities design to reduce harm are opaque to these equations). as newman explains, the sti example is deliberately simple in order to illustrate. these simplifications of real-world phenomena are fundamental to network science: they are features, not bugs (chun 2018, 70). the bipartite sti example is, as morgan shows of models, small in scale but representative of something larger, a manipulable object that a discipline can use to reason with (2012, 13). it is also, however, indicative of the world this model and the disciplines through which it emerges invokes when it selects the sti as a suitable stand-in for how networks relate to virus spread (mulvin 2021). this kind of choice in network science, chun argues, is “performative” because “it puts in place the world it discovers” (2018, 62). and following these choices, and the ways they seem like common sense, helps us to understand both the normative sexual politics of the viral metaphor, and the ways it might be fucked around with. imagine a bisexual node running rampant through this bipartite universe. sexual politics are fundamental to any network form (barnett et al. 2016; keeling 2014; mcbean 2020). network diagrams such as sociograms model how we are joined with others in forms of exchange that may or may not be palpable to us without the practice of modeling. think, for example, of the partner of your partner’s former partner, who you may or may not be able to name (unless you are a lesbian, in which case you can definitely name them and have probably also dated them, see mcbean 2020). even when a network diagram maps a tweet’s impressions as it reverberates through a digital network, the process of tracking unanticipated connections and their fallout is grounded in a libidinal economy: a drive toward making secret connections transparent, in order to predict what intimacy does in and to the world. the sexual politics at the heart of covid modeling reflect a drive toward several strategies for connection predicated on social network concepts that replicate conservative sexual mores grounded in compulsory, perfectly monogamous heterosexuality. in the article “social network-based distancing strategies to flatten the covid-19 curve in a post-lockdown world” (block et al. 2020), the researchers layer epidemiological curves onto path length differences in social network models, to make three suggestions on how modifications to one’s networked connection can slow viral spread. the strategies are   (1) reduce contact with people whose group memberships are different than yours because of where they work or live;4 (2) reduce contact with any of your usual contacts who tend to have lots of varied contacts with others; (3) build bubbles that repeat contact with the same people.   these strategies are no doubt effective for reducing the overall spread of an airborne illness in a given population. but they can also be recast, crudely as   (1) eliminate difference from your life, (2) cast out promiscuity, (3) choose monogamy.   as even the authors acknowledge, “advocating the creation of small communities and contact with mostly similar others on some dimensions could potentially result in the long-term reduction of intergroup contact and an associated rise in inequality” (block et al. 2020, 594). their model might look quite different if it took into account other kinds of alterations to network paths, or ways of talking about “intergroup contact” (594) that queer people have developed in practice in response to challenges like hiv, such as network sero-sorting (choosing partners of the same hiv status), disclosing hiv status and viral load, or choosing low-transmission sex practices.5 the point is not that these practices might be adapted to a different and airborne virus altogether, but rather that when you begin with a fundamentally different way of understanding sexuality and relation, different metaphors altogether, other kinds of models might emerge for imagining and altering network paths. queer covid memes make reference to these other modalities. for example, “let alice pieszecki do the contact tracing” by taylor hatmaker (2020) pictures a screen shot of showtime’s the l word character alice typing on an apple laptop in front of the now-iconic-in-lesbian-culture sociogram of lesbian hook-ups that drives the narrative action in the early series (see mcbean 2020) and that launched the short-lived lesbian social networking site ourchart.com. similarly, the viral youtube video “contact tracys” by the chaser (2020) features two irreverent teenage girls named tracy hired by an australian public health authority to do contact tracing using their smartphone-enabled social media stalking skills. these skills are framed as inherent to digital youth, but also dependent on tracy’s and tracy’s queer sexualities, which allows them unique access to networks. as the square, middle-aged white male public health officer asks, trying to navigate his own smartphone, “wait, do these methods work if you’re trying to find a woman?” the tracys: “uh, yeah, we’re bi, obviously.” alice and the tracys expand the authority and expertise commonly associated with doing data science as they reimagine and refract viral models to queer ends that are grounded in recognition of “the heterogeneity of collectives and the diversity of relations within and between them” (anderson 2021, 173). these memes beg the question, what would a covid model made by alice and the tracys look like?   models like to watch amongst other fields, critical hiv studies has thoroughly modeled how crisis conditions beget violent transformations in everyday forms of surveillance (liang, hutson, and keyes 2020; mcclelland 2019). for example, stephen molldrem (2020) shows how in the name of hiv prevention (a presumed social good), we have witnessed the creation and maintenance of surveillant viral load and cd4 t-cell count databases by public health authorities in the us that do not obtain consent from their subjects, engender data creep across contexts, and enact viral hierarchies. the widespread public acceptance of telecom and social media companies offering user data as a public relations strategy “for good,” and network science readily drawing on these datasets with small friction from institutional ethics review boards, may end up being one of the surveillant transformations this pandemic leaves in its wake. as hiv has taught, everyday digital surveillance measures are first tested out on populations made vulnerable, and then expanded to reach everyone else (eubanks 2018). once in place under crisis, such surveillance is not rolled back when (and if) the emergency ends (emerson 2020). the ways that the covid-19 pandemic, like aids, has disproportionately harmed black and brown people is well documented. digital data-driven models are one way to evidence the connection between these uneven harms and phenomena such as high-density living situations, or continuing to commute for work in front-line jobs. these models can also advance harms related to surveillance (lupton 2022, 63–64). a covid model of how people in different census tracts in the united states move to and from geolocated “points of interest” (restaurants, stores, gyms) finds that people from low-income areas “made substantially more visits per capita to grocery stores than did those from higher-income cbgs [census block groups] and consequently experienced more predicted infections” (chang et al. 2021, 86). the model shows that grocery stores in poor neighborhoods are more crowded, visited more often, and that shoppers spend more time in the store per visit. this model provides data-driven evidence for what black and brown people already know about food security in urban areas, in order to make predictive recommendations about the “disparate effects of reopening plans” (86). it does so using two datasets that are worth contextualizing for what they can and cannot see. first, census data about race, for which the model only draws on the categories of white and black, due to the limits of race-based data collected for the us census. the cities this model analyzes include los angeles and miami, which both have significant latinx populations who are particularly affected by covid-19. in a similar vein, the second dataset is safegraph (n.d.), which draws on foot traffic data sold for retail analytics. it brings together data from “thousands of diverse sources” that are not named. the safegraph data is validated in this study against google location services data, which is also widely used by law enforcement agencies via google’s sensorvault platform. this model exists to benefit vulnerable populations, offering evidence-based recommendations for food distribution programs in economically depressed areas, amongst other non-pharmaceutical interventions. but it does so using data-extractive tools that make these same people more vulnerable to surveillance harms, such as predictive policing or the digital tracking of electronic benefits transfer (ebt) use at grocery stores (benjamin 2019; eubanks 2018). network science is grappling with these issues of data-driven inequity explicitly. grantz et al. (2020), a group of epidemiologists concerned about the fast uptake of mobile data for covid modeling, argue in nature that there are many things to consider here about these datasets: they do not capture the effects of more people staying at home, where they are more likely to use internet-enabled technologies that don’t generate call details records; older people and very young people don’t use cell phones as often, and aren’t represented in data being used to model a virus that impacts them profoundly; in some households, people share a single phone, or a single sim card, or one person might use several phones and sim cards. the assumption here is that accounting for, or even eliminating bias from the data is the goal, rather than a fundamental transformation of the racist, oppressive systems that render extractive datasets recognizable as “solutions” in the first place (benjamin 2019). as grantz et al. argue, “the use of mobile phone data, particularly forms such as those proposed through contact tracing applications, must be weighed against the possible infringements of privacy and civil liberties versus the potential public health benefit” (2020, 4). the problem at the heart of grantz et al.’s article and other such work is that this weighing has predictable results when crisis is used to balance the scales. these critical epidemiologists are concerned with how their field is using mobile data, and as they lay out these concerns, a queer sort of critique emerges: “people are different” from each other (sedgwick 2008, 24). those who share sim cards or have burner phones aren’t tidy nodes. shaken here by grantz et al. are the assumptions network science makes about what it means to be a human who is contained, rather than porous (king 2019, 115), and what proximity means as an erotic relation to someone else. following from mcglotten (2016), and also earlier work in queer of color critique such as cathy cohen’s work on blackness, queerness, and hiv, we ask what it would mean to think of these scenes of failed homophilyz—spending too much time in grocery stores or sharing sim cards—as queer, for the ways they take up marginal positions in relation to power that might be the basis for transformative coalition work (cohen 1997, 438, 462). if the patient zero model has done anything useful in spite of its violence, it has cued our attention to what models as heuristics claim to do in the world, and piqued our skepticism about their inadequacies to intimate lives lived in proximity to others.   conclusion it is not that the covid-19 models we have analyzed in this article are not useful, or do not accurately predict the future. often, they do, as studies that retrospectively compare modeling with testing data show (chang et al. 2021). as humanist researchers who work on the history and the media of hiv, we do not claim to offer a “transparent” critique of what data and public health scientists are doing: they are, themselves fully aware of and experts on, the benefits but also limitations of their own modeling and the dangers they pose (grantz et al. 2020). we are not arguing that we ought to do away with models: they are crucial forms of response to uncertainty, and ways of representing how decisions in the present might shape the future (rhodes and lancaster 2021). as metaphors that can be scaled and manipulated, models are convincing, and in the covid-19 pandemic they informed more equitable vaccine roll-outs, and led officials in conservative regions to impose unpopular mask mandates because they were the right thing to do. but models always represent a particular view of things as they are and might be. they are “excitable matter” in that they offer certainty in precarious times, generating forceful anticipatory affect (rhodes and lancaster 2021). as objects that we use to think with, they make possible knowing about the world and its horizons through the terms that they set (morgan 2012). in this case, these terms understand a biological virus as being like a digital network, which justifies data extractive regimes and future surveillance measures, and stigmatizes “bad” actors. we have offered a perspective, informed by sexuality and critical hiv studies, on what understanding the sexual politics behind viral models and metaphors can do. this is a queer imperative, because we only sort of know what stigmas flow from covid-19 modeling (not to mention from emerging virus models such as monkeypox): how they will be used against people who party, do drugs, and hook up, and how they will place blame on poor, black, brown, queer and trans people’s necessary proximities to each other. they are in danger once again of advancing individual responsibilization, rather than dismantling the structural violence that actually drives infection, death, and harm. how these covid-19 models and the viral metaphors they embody are used to imagine a better future will shape the actual future worlds we all occupy.   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h, aamir fazil, julien arino, philippe berthiaume, david n fisman, amy l greer, antoinette ludwig, victoria ng, ashleigh r tuite, patricia turgeon, lisa a waddell, jianhong wu.  “phac seir model on covid-19.” 2020. national collaborating centre for infectious diseases (blog). october 19, 2020. https://nccid.ca/phac-seir-model-on-covid-19/. parikka, jussi. 2007. digital contagions: a media archaeology of computer viruses. new york: peter lang. patton, cindy. 1996. fatal advice: how safe-sex education went wrong. durham, nc: duke university press. ravetz, jerry. 2003. “models as metaphors.” in public participation in sustainability science: a handbook, edited by bernd kasemir, jill jager, carlo c jaeger, and matthew t gardner, 62–78. cambridge: cambridge university press. rhodes, tim, and kari lancaster. 2021. “excitable models: projections, targets, and the making of futures without disease.” sociology of health & illness 43 (4): 859–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13263. rhodes, tim, kari lancaster, shelley lees, and melissa parker. 2020. “modelling the pandemic: attuning models to their contexts.” bmj global health 5 (6): e002914. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2020-002914. rushkoff, douglas. 1996. media virus!: hidden agendas in popular culture. new york: ballantine books. safegraph. n.d. “the source of truth for poi data & business listings.” accessed march 29, 2021. https://www.safegraph.com/. sedgwick, eve kosofsky. 2008. epistemology of the closet. acls humanities e-book. berkeley: university of california press. simpson, audra. 2014. mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, nc: duke university press. sismondo, sergio. 1999. “models, simulations, and their objects.” science in context 12 (2): 247–60. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0269889700003409. telus. n.d. “data for good.” accessed march 29, 2021. https://www.telus.com/en/about/covid-19-updates/privacy-statement. thrasher, stephen. 2020. “an uprising comes from america’s viral underclass.” slate (blog). june 12, 2020. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/black-lives-matter-viral-underclass.html. thylstrup, nanna bonde, zeerak waseem, and daniela agostinho. 2020. “leaky academia: digital intimacy and open secrets in times of covid-19.” identities journal blog. september 4, 2020. http://www.identitiesjournal.com/4/post/2020/09/leaky-academia-digital-intimacy-and-open-secrets-in-times-of-covid-19.html. tworek, heidi. 2019. “communicable disease: information, health, and globalization in the interwar period.” american historical review 124 (3): 813–42. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz577. wernimont, jacqueline. 2021. “perspective | covid-19 dashboards are vital, yet flawed, sources of public information.” washington post, january 26, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/01/26/covid-dashboards-are-vital-yet-flawed-sources-public-information/. wieczorek, michał, jakub siłka, and marcin woźniak. 2020. “neural network powered covid-19 spread forecasting model.” chaos, solitons & fractals 140 (november): 110203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chaos.2020.110203. worobey, michael, thomas d. watts, richard a. mckay, marc a. suchard, timothy granade, dirk e. teuwen, beryl a. koblin, walid heneine, philippe lemey, and harold w. jaffe. 2016. “1970s and ‘patient 0’ hiv-1 genomes illuminate early hiv/aids history in north america.” nature 539 (7627): 98–101. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19827.     author bios cait mckinney is assistant professor of communication at simon fraser university and the author of information activism: a queer history of lesbian media technologies (duke, 2020).   marika cifor is assistant professor in the information school and adjunct faculty in the department of gender, women and sexuality studies at the university of washington. she is the author of viral cultures: activist archiving in the age of aids (minnesota, 2022). cait and marika co-edited a 2020 issue of first monday on reclaiming hiv/aids in digital media studies. microsoft word 76957-1-11-kafer.docx kafer, a. (2019). crip kin, manifesting. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 5(1), 1-37. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © alison kafer, 2019 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article crip kin, manifesting alison kafer university of texas, austin alison.kafer@austin.utexas.edu abstract how might those who have experienced medicalized technologies as forms of neglect, intervention, and surveillance begin to cultivate alternative relations to technology? drawing on the work of three artists—lisa bufano, sunaura taylor, and chun-shan (sandie) yi—i explore the possibility of framing technology as a site for crip kin-making. these artists are activating, interrogating, refusing, and repurposing medicalized aesthetics and technologies, finding within them inspiration and resources for their art practice. rather than evaluating technologies on the basis of their ability to move bodies and minds into heightened productivity, efficiency, normalcy, and speed, they are creating objects and fostering relations that interrogate those very values. building on scholars who recognize “kin” as encompassing more than the biological, reproductive, legal, and human, i discuss the possibilities of “crip kin,” recognizing the queer possibilities of intimacy with other presences and entities. in gloves for all, three rows of gloves hang across a gallery wall, and visitors are encouraged to try on the ones that most closely match their own hands. although the gloves are all made of the same white fabric, they differ in size and shape. a few resemble socks, their curves unbroken by slots for fingers or thumbs. consisting of eighteen pairs of zero-, two-, three-, four-, five-, and six-fingered gloves, the piece is part of the project imperfect series by kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 2 taiwanand us-based artist chun-shan (sandie) yi. the series also includes baby clothes with a range of sleeve lengths: some end with closed caps at the shoulder and others extend to the wrist; almost all are asymmetrical (figure 1). figure 1. chun-shan (sandie) yi, baby onesies #1 and #3 trained as an art therapist, yi was moved to create these items after meeting with families who had children with limb differences and learning of their experiences with stigma and shame. their inability to find appropriate clothing for their children symbolized a larger feeling of isolation and unbelonging. the stories felt familiar to yi. she knew of children with limb differences who had been abandoned, a rejection she had often experienced herself and witnessed within her own family. as someone born with “two fingers on each hand and two toes on each foot” (yi, 2010, p. 103), someone repeatedly told by relatives and doctors that she needed fixing, she, “too, felt rejected by [her] culture” (p. 112). in response, yi began making baby clothing that welcomed rather than rejected such variation; her “intention was to foster the idea that people with limb deficiencies ‘fit’ in this world from the beginning of their lives” (2010, p. 114). gloves for all extends this welcome into adulthood by anticipating—even desiring—the arrival of visitors with multiple finger formations. rather than the typical orientations of “accommodation” and kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 3 “retrofitting,” both of which include disabled people only as afterthoughts or special needs (hamraie, 2017), yi (2010) anticipates and assumes the presence of disability, building it into her art practice “from the beginning” (p. 114). and she does so collaboratively, recognizing the need for imaginative kin formations that stretch beyond the familial or reproductive. with gloves for all, yi imagines a room full of strangers with differently formed hands, trying on gloves together, sharing stories and swapping sets. through project imperfect, she offers workshops where attendees can trace their hands, fingers, feet, and toes onto fabric, resulting in bright patterns of diverse bodily formations. although participants are allowed to take some of the fabric home, yi uses the rest to create clothes for babies as yet unknown, without regard to the presence of genetic or legal bonds. in sharp contrast to ableist assumptions that disabled babies can only be met with disappointment, yi’s workshops anticipate, prepare for, and welcome their arrival, both real and imagined. if, as rayna rapp and faye ginsburg (2011) suggest, disability can be the catalyst for new kinship imaginaries, yi extends such formations, queerly calling new kin into being. yi’s gloves and onesies thus offer a kind of “speculative fabulation,” to use donna haraway’s phrasing (2016, p. 2), or what ruha benjamin calls “informed refusals,” which combine “a critique of what is” with “a vision of what can and should be” (2016a, p. 970).1 such refusals are necessary in a context in which some people are supported as users and creators of technology, while others have technologies thrust upon, kept from, or directed against them.2 benjamin underscores centuries of medical experimentation on colonized, enslaved, institutionalized, and marginalized peoples, suggesting a reclamation of “refusal as a way to construct more reciprocal relationships between institutions and individuals” in the face of racism and settler colonialism (2016a, p. 984). more than mere reaction, refusal itself becomes a speculative practice, a way of imagining otherwise deeply grounded in the experiences of the past and present. given these histories that are far from over, how might those who have experienced medicalized technologies as forms of neglect, intervention, and surveillance begin to cultivate alternative relations to kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 4 technology? benjamin (2016b), haraway (2016), and other theorists have begun experimenting with speculative fiction as one way to enact refusal and resistance, and speculative art-making offers similarly transformative tools. cultural productions can offer vocabularies, images, gestures, patterns, models, and designs to catalyze everyday practice (e.g., rice et al., 2017; schalk, 2018). as i explain below, yi and other artists are using the technologies of art-making to theorize disability differently, positioning disabled people as producers of knowledge (bailey & peoples, 2017; fritsch & hamraie, 2019; hendren, 2011; miles, nishida, & forber-pratt, 2017; mills, 2011). more to the point, they are activating, interrogating, refusing, and repurposing medicalized aesthetics and technologies, finding within them inspiration and resources for their art practice. yi’s gloves and onesies, for example, reimagine “adaptive clothing” as a technology that can bind people together, creating space for loving disabled kin. rather than evaluating technologies on the basis of their ability to move bodies and minds into heightened productivity, efficiency, normalcy, and speed, they are creating objects and fostering relations that interrogate those very values. all of this work requires reckoning with the ways in which technology, especially medicalized technology, is constantly being used to capacitate some and debilitate others (e.g., fritsch, 2015; jain, 1999; puar, 2017; terry, 2017). indeed, understanding technology as something that everyone is equally empowered to accept or reject, as something that operates within the privatized realm of individual choice, obscures the complex histories, webs, and attachments of technoscience. while yi does refuse particular orientations to medicalized technology, her refusals are never complete or unambiguous; instead, through her art practice, she encourages us to mull over our affective, entangled relations to technology, recognizing those relations as further entangled with webs of disability, race, sexuality, gender, and empire.3 intervening in the discourses of rehabilitative therapy and adaptive equipment, yi and other artists engage in crip expertise activism (hamraie, 2017; fritsch & hamraie, 2019) to create different models of kin and relation. they imagine both disability and technology as kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 5 sites through which new relations can be forged, offering a model of queer crip kin that neither requires nor expects genetic relation. or, more, they foster one created in the ruins of such attachments, given the legacies of familial abandonment and rejection that yi traces. theories of disability and technology have tended to draw heavily on the figure of the cyborg. haraway’s non-innocent, blasphemous, and contradictory figure has long offered feminist disability theorists tools to imagine the disability/technology interface as a site of and for politics. the cyborg figure has been used to interrogate the persistent and pervasive assumption that disabled people’s uses of technology are more assistive than creative (as if assistance cannot itself be a site of crip creativity), or more inevitable than political (as if such notions of “inevitability” were not themselves political). moreover, with its suspicion of essentialist identities, insistence on coalition work, and challenge to ideologies of wholeness, the feminist cyborg offers crip theorists ways to connect disability to other justice movements and critical theories. befitting the cyborg, however, the figure has also generated extensive critique, and disability studies scholars have joined other feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical race theorists in marking its omissions and universalizing assumptions (kafer, 2013). haraway herself has long advocated for a proliferation of figures to think through, offering monsters, vampires, dogs, companion species, messmates, string figures, and, most recently, kin and oddkin as complements to the cyborg. some of these figures are more promising (and more risky) for disability studies than others, but i share haraway’s sense that no one figure can capture the complexities of naturecultures, technoscience, and “getting on” together. i also share her sense that kin and oddkin—or here, crip kin—might be particularly useful frames for extending our theoretical imaginings. whether thinking through the necessity of imagining kin differently in the age of climate change (haraway, 2016; murphy, 2018) or reckoning with the ways in which kinship networks have been pathologized, decimated, and destroyed through slavery, mass incarceration, settler colonialism, and eugenics (e.g., benjamin, 2018; burch, 2014; erevelles, 2011; murphy, 2018; roberts, 1999; spillers, 1987; kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 6 tallbear, 2018), kin is a site of power, friction, and potentiality. in this essay, then, i want to imagine the possibilities of theorizing crip technoscience less through the figure of the cyborg and more through the notion of kin. although it is quite common to think about disability as deeply connected to technology, how might those framings expand if we stressed their radically relational dimensions? although her focus on kinship with dogs has garnered far more scholarly attention, haraway (2008) also drew on disability/technology relations in her early articulations of companion species and becoming kin. writing about her father after his death, she describes his legacy as being, in part, about his “constitutive companion species knots” with his “trusty cherrywood crutches” and wheelchairs (pp. 165, 167). the “vitality” she cherished in him “came from living with regard to all those partners” (p. 171). in marking not only her father’s “becoming with” crutches and wheelchairs but also her and her brothers’ becomings, haraway traces the kinds of networked interdependencies that characterize much disability theorizing, organizing, and art-making.4 can we see these relations as an essential part of “making kin, not population” (haraway, 2018)? and, more, can we begin to understand anti-ableist work—theories, orientations, and practices that interrogate the ableist underpinnings of normative kinship imaginaries (burch, 2014; erevelles, 2011; nielsen, 2018)—as essential components of such projects? in other words, might relations of ability and disability tell us as much about “making kin” and “becoming with” as they can about cyborgs? as with the cyborg, though, the concept of kin can be traced through multiple histories and genealogies, and the lineages we choose to trace can lead to vastly different sets of questions and orientations. thus, in centering crip artists as producers of knowledge and theory, in looking at cultural productions that offer sideways approaches to technology and desire, can we trace resonances with other theories and orientations, and what would it mean to treat those resonances as relations meriting care? queer, indigenous, and critical race theorists have long recognized kin as kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 7 encompassing more than the biological or reproductive, and my thinking here is deeply indebted to and inspired by that work. as juana maría rodríguez urges, we need to “expand our definitions of affiliation” (2014, p. 49) to include the deep affective ties that do not map onto heteronormative, homonormative, or reproductive categories. moreover, as many of these theorists argue, our affiliative practices cannot be restricted to the reach of the “human,” recognizing the queer possibilities of animacy and intimacy with other presences and entities. how might disability studies be in solidarity with these projects? in this essay, i offer some examples of how we might make manifest crip kin, examining yi’s work alongside two other us-based artists, sunaura taylor and lisa bufano. i have chosen these three artists in part because their work resonates with the questions i am interested in exploring here, but i have also selected them because we inhabit overlapping social networks. my paths have crossed with all three women, to varying degrees of complexity and frequency, and they are similarly entwined with each other through direct and indirect connections. intellectual and political intimacies can also be sensual intimacies, and i continue to experience the deep pleasures of entering and being entered by another’s thoughts and words. in what follows, then, my ruminations are deeply partial, befitting a feminist queer crip examination of collaborative kin-making, crip intimacies, and technology. i highlight these relations as a way of marking that who these artists are or rather, who and what they are with, is key to their crip kin-making practices. there are twelve images in this essay, and i integrate descriptions of them into the body of the text itself. offering this kind of description is a key practice in disability studies as a way of making visual imagery more accessible to more people, but i also want to suggest that these descriptions can themselves be an act of queer crip kin-making.5 following the provocations of georgina kleege (2018), my descriptions are subjective, idiosyncratic, and partial; i am allowing my histories with these artists, my immersion in queer disability studies and practices, and my affective relations to these pieces to impact my descriptions. in that spirit, i kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 8 encourage readers to craft your own descriptions as you read. how do different approaches to the descriptive process lead you to different affective responses to a piece? i briefly return to such questions in my conclusion. first, though, i turn to the work of painter sunaura taylor and her intimate portraits of wheelchairs. on abandonment; or, are those wheelchairs really empty? as part of a speculative series about disability and changing landscapes, artist and writer sunaura taylor painted small notebook-sized watercolors depicting power wheelchairs in, and as, nature. these chairs are alone, without their riders, set free. or have they been abandoned, left to their own devices, growing into something else? wheelchairs on the moon (figure 2) is a whimsical drawing of exactly that, five yellow wheelchairs on the surface of a blue moon, with a yellowish-starry sky in the background. in furry wheelchair (figure 3), taylor has created a more earthen landscape, shades of brown blending into green. in the center of the page is a grey wheelchair, covered in hair; those familiar with taylor’s work will recognize the hairs as the same spiky hair she paints on her legs in her self-portraits. hairy wheelchair sits in a slightly darker landscape, more brown than green, and takes up more of the frame. the spiky hair from the previous painting has here grown long and wavy; it gently unfurls from every surface of the chair. the hairs have grown even longer in arctic wheelchair (figure 4), where the power chair is now taking up most of the page, its long snowcovered fur blowing in the icy-blue wind. kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 9 figure 2. sunaura taylor, wheelchairs on the moon. figure 3: sunaura taylor, furry wheelchair kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 10 figure 4: sunaura taylor, arctic wheelchair when i first saw these paintings, i laughed out loud. all these wheelchairs, moving through the universe, going wherever they want. taylor throws a wrench in the ableist concept of “wheelchair bound,” untethering body from chair. she similarly intervenes in the ableist assumption that wheelchairs have no place in nature, that there is no need for accessible trails. these wheelchairs are forging their own paths, inhabiting any landscape they want. but the chairs still bear the traces of their users—remember taylor’s hairs—and so the images also point toward the intimate relationships many crips develop with their equipment, those who experience our wheelchairs as extensions of our bodies, as animate, as intimates (e.g., belser, 2016). but these images are also haunting. what happened to these chairs’ companions? did they disappear? or did they merge fully with chair? are those hairs the sign that taylor and the chair have become one? as eunjung kim (2015) suggests, the exclusionary, violent history of the “human” might prompt us to “unbecome human” by developing or accentuating our proximity to objects, by “becoming objects” (p. 314). taylor similarly pushes our questions of solidarity and community, exploring what it might mean to forge relationships not only beyond the “human” but even kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 11 beyond what gets marked as living. wheelchairs on the moon, for example, imagines wheelchairs in relation only to each other and the landscape, nary a human in sight; five wheelchairs forging their own intimacy with each other, turning and circling and holding still. taylor’s wheelchair paintings do what mel chen (2012) describes as the queer work of “reframing the terms of intimacy itself, so that it might not be restricted to operating between only human or animate entities” (p. 218). these wheelchairs beckon; even the more solitary furry, hairy, and arctic wheelchairs evoke questions about what they might feel like to inhabit or ride. although there may be no people visible in these chairs, they are anything but empty; they bristle with animacy and presence. contrast taylor’s wheelchairs with the more common, ableist framing of empty wheelchairs: chairs left behind because triumphed over. ekso bionics, creator of hulc and elegs, uses the trope of the abandoned wheelchair in advertising their robotic exoskeletons, which are touted as allowing the paralyzed to walk. one widely disseminated image makes plain the assumptions behind this technology: moving from left to right, in a composite of seven stills, it shows a young normative-looking light-skinned man wearing the elegs and moving from sitting in a wheelchair, to standing upright, to walking. with its profile depictions of intermediate positions, the photo echoes common images of the evolutionary stages of man, culminating in the upright white man as apex of progress. such technologies are thereby rendered not only revolutionary but evolutionary, not only desirable but inevitable. but crip theory encourages us to question this inevitability. although i have not myself tried the exoskeleton, i have encountered others using it, and as i quickly rolled around them while they struggled to move just a few steps, i imagined the progression moving the other way, from standing to sitting. running the images in reverse—and describing the images as “in reverse”—makes clear that there are actually multiple temporalities in play here, and these technologies cannot run in only one direction. some users will ultimately reject these technologies, abandoning them for less spectacular modalities. even avid users will return to sitting, moving kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 12 “backwards” when they tire or the technologies break and need maintenance (russell & vinsel, 2016; wool, 2015). running these images in reverse also reminds us that such reversals are often neither chosen nor desired: benefits are cut; bodies acquire additional injuries; doctors and therapists move away; lovers and support staff leave; technology becomes obsolete; minds change. i have imagined this reversal because i want to encourage these kinds of defamiliarizing approaches to technology (schalk, 2018), but i know we cannot undo the pull of the progress narrative by simply running it in reverse. moving the man from walking to sitting does not question the existence of the exoskeleton itself, or make evident its origins in militarized technologies intended to assist nondisabled soldiers in carrying weapons over rough territory. running the images in reverse cannot address the deadly irony of a technology crafted to facilitate the death and disabling of foreign others being marketed as a way to alleviate the disablement of american consumers (erevelles, 2011; kafer, 2013; puar, 2017; terry, 2017). elegs is a technology rendered apolitical and benign by its association with injured american citizens; we justify the death and destruction it facilitates elsewhere by focusing on the promise of biomedical salvation it offers here (terry, 2017). nor is the wheelchair itself an innocent tool in a world where most people lack affordable and reliable access to the kinds of chairs they need. we need more than mere reversal to grapple with the debilitating—and uneven—effects of these technologies’ production, use, and disposal. what we need, urges theorist and designer sara hendren (2011), are “tools of estrangement”: “instead of posing ‘solutions’ to ‘problems,’” she explains, “estranging tools ask whether we are asking the right questions in the first place” (p. 62). i want to suggest that these tools of estrangement be joined with tools of relation, or design practices that recognize the deep relations possible not only among the animate but the inanimate, tools that challenge the division of objects from subjects.6 taylor’s wheelchairs— animate, lively—offer a narrative that allows us to dismantle the biomedical salvation tales of ekso bionics; if people in the united states no longer view kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 13 wheelchair use as a fate worse than death, we might be more willing to challenge the cruel bargain that makes violence “over there” justifiable if it leads to medical innovations “over here” (terry, 2017).7 as hendren (2011) explains, design focused on estrangement is not satisfied with mere “use,” but rather “draws attention to…social or cultural or political conditions and interrogates the origins of these conditions” (p. 62). thinking of estrangement and defamiliarization allows for the possibility of new relations to technologies, or thinking of technologies in terms of queer affective ties. we might begin to recognize, for example, that technologies, even “medical” ones, even serious “life-saving” ones, can be used differently, queerly. we can begin to raise serious life or death questions about what wheelchairs or breathing tubes are for, about how they might be used in ways that do not simply run counter to their intended purpose—as if for or against were our only options—but in completely different directions altogether. perhaps “functional” technologies can be used only for pleasure, questioning which affects are associated with which technologies. what might it mean to treat deadly serious technologies—the very tools that keep us alive—with joy, delight, and wonder? with desire? “i love my feeding tube,” writes a disability activist in a posting about queer crip desire, “and people don’t understand, at all, how i could feel that way about a couple of tubes inserted into my abdomen to add and remove things from my body. but i do. i love my tubes so much. i wish i could write amazing poems about my feeding tube” (withasmoothroundstone, n.d.). how might we take this person’s love for their feeding tube more seriously? feeding and breathing tubes are often the technologies that people fear go “too far,” rendering life not worth living, draining it of its “quality”; can we recognize the radical potential of insisting on kinship, relationality, and animacy at the very points where life is presumed to end (chen, 2012)? in staying with the trouble, haraway insists that practices of “making kin” are not easy, that they “demand our best emotional, intellectual, artistic, and political creativity, individually and collectively, across…differences” (2016, p. 208n18). how, then, might our relationships with machines and technologies shift if we proceeded from a deep love for disabled bodies, kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 14 minds, and experiences? if we proceeded in the spirit of recognizing feeding tubes, trachs, wheelchairs, and more as tools of estrangement and relation? perhaps relation requires estrangement, requires rethinking who and what we can be in relation with. prosthetic connections artist lisa bufano offers an estranging, defamiliarizing approach to relation in her imaginative use of prosthetics. she created spectacular prosthetics that allowed her to look and move in more-than-human ways, suggesting a fluidity between human, animal, plant, and machine bodies (cachia, 2016). lacking access to expensive art materials and acknowledging the reality of those who have had to craft mobility devices out of everyday objects and refurbished hand-me-downs, bufano crafted her prosthetics/stilts out of twenty-eight-inch curved table legs. in so doing, she rejected the logics and circuits of biomedicine in favor of furniture design and art-making; rather than grant biomedicine exclusive authority over prosthetics, she centered a different form of expertise. these are prosthetics with no medical or normalizing “purpose,” made solely for pleasure and politics, made from love for the opportunities offered by the odd body, made with the hope of crafting kin across differences.8 such possibility was made apparent when bufano placed the prosthetics/stilts not only on her own limbs but on those of her collaborator, sonsheree giles. in a still photograph from their 2007 performance one breath is an ocean for a wooden heart (figure 5), bufano and giles are dressed identically: their light-skinned bodies clothed in semi-sheer pantaloons, and bright orange prosthetics on all four of their limbs. giles is moving on her four stilt-legs under the bridge formed by bufano’s body, her head and shoulders brushing against bufano’s stomach. bufano was an amputee, giles is not, but all eight of their prosthetics raise questions about who and what prosthetics are for. bufano and giles, in their movement together with the stilt-prosthetics, refuse any simple understandings of diagnosis or sharp delineation between “disabled” and “able-bodied.” kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 15 figure 5: lisa bufano, one breath is an ocean for a wooden heart kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 16 during the course of the performance, bufano and giles use their bodies, stilts, and each other to take on a wide range of shapes and qualities of movement; bufano (n.d.) describes them as becoming “animated furniture, magical toys, 8-legged insect, 4-legged gazelle, 2-legged birds.” bufano and giles begin the performance prone, lying head-to-head against a bare backdrop. they slowly arch upward off the ground, moving by exerting pressure against each other’s head. the contact never breaks; it is not always a gentle or loving contact, it is not always skin to skin or scalp to scalp, but they never lose relation. indeed, it is the presence of the other that makes movement possible; they need the connection to maneuver the technology of the stilts. in a description of the piece, bufano explained that the focus on connection emerged from the feeling of disconnection; how are her relations always being mediated through the table leg, the stilt, the prosthetic? what does it mean to touch the other through an object, or when the other is an object? rather than understanding prosthetics as a technology for overcoming disability—as the biomedicalized narrative requires—bufano (n.d.) explored instead what the prosthetics preclude; she recognized them as simultaneously “enabl[ing] and constrain[ing].” finding possibility even in or through constraint, moving only by moving through and against another: bufano offered an approach to technologies that runs in stark contrast to the elegs of ekso bionics. her table legs are neither machinic nor medical, and they are grounded in intentional relation. unlike the elegs, which privilege upright bipedalism above all else, bufano created a technology that encourages or even amplifies the queerly sideways, animal-like crawling we are supposed to disavow or outgrow. expert adornments chun-shan (sandie) yi creates what she calls “adornments” for disabled bodies, wearable pieces of art intended to showcase different bodily formations rather than “correct” or hide them; the interaction between body kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 17 and adornment is then carefully documented in large-scale color photographs. in an untitled self-portrait in the gloves for 2 series (figure 6), yi sits against a black background with her gloved hands positioned next to her bare feet; all four—hands and feet—having only two digits each. yi’s handmade multi-colored gloves faithfully follow the contours of her hands until they reach the ends of her fingers, at which point they extend into cascading nodes of varying sizes. in their fantastic colorful excess, the gloves refuse the notion that designing for disability can always and only mean designing for normativity and functionality. drawing on the vocabulary of her own body and the bodies of her relatives, as members of her family have been born this way for generations, yi imagines a different kind of family heirloom. in rejecting the narratives that have been handed down to her about these bodily formations—they can only be sites of shame, necessitating disguise and hiding—she creates adornments to showcase those very shapes. through these designs, she has found kinship with ancestors she was supposed to forget, and made new kin with the artists and objects around her. figure 6. chun-shan (sandie) yi, gloves for 2 kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 18 figure 7: chun-shan (sandie yi), em-brace figure 8: chun-shan (sandie) yi, em-brace (detail) kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 19 as part of her kin-making work, yi created a series of adornments for other disabled artists; working in close collaboration, she embarked on nothing less than “body reconfiguration” through “mapping the memories and the living experiences” of her collaborators (n.d.). em-brace (figure 7) features sunaura taylor seated with her hands resting gently in her lap; her light-skinned hands are encased in white plastic braces that culminate in fabric cuffs with ivory, pink, and coral embroidery. after hearing taylor describe childhood doctors’ desires to straighten out her hands—a straightening that understood function in only the most narrow of ways—yi created these cuffs to facilitate not movement but aesthetic and sensory pleasure. in so doing, she and taylor subtly refuse the standard rubrics by which the progress of braces is normally measured: as a way of capacitating a disabled person into productivity (through work made achievable by a brace) and normativity (through surgeries made possible by a brace). this refusal is more apparent when we link taylor’s desire for such braces with her essay “the right not to work” (2004), in which she interrogates the notion that disabled people merit services only on the grounds that such services can then mobilize them into productive workers and consumers. “em-brace” functions instead as what lars hallnäs and johan redström (2000) call “slow technology,” or technologies that implicitly and explicitly facilitate reflection over consumption, productivity, and accumulation. yi’s contention that medical technologies, such as custom orthotics, can be made not for capitalist function but for pleasure is evident when we examine the inside of taylor’s braces. while the outside of the brace resembles a conventional plastic orthotic, the inside is lined with delicate pink and coral embroidery, echoing the stitching on the cuffs. the embroidered ivory and salmon loops are grouped together in small bunches, evoking collections of cells or fields of flowers (figure 8). these tiny dots of thread are meant for taylor’s pleasure alone; they are meant to be felt, and they can be fully felt only by someone with taylor’s precise form. yi and taylor play with questions of visibility; rather than create an armor for taylor, shielding her hands from view, the braces draw attention to her kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 20 hands’ soft inward turn, showcasing their curve, while simultaneously providing hidden comfort. the embroidered knots are a way for yi and taylor to communicate with each other, sharing their experience of being the object of voyeuristic attention; yi’s hands leave their traces, caressing taylor’s skin through soft knots of thread. yi’s desire to create soft cradles for taylor’s hands deepens in meaning for me when read in the context of taylor’s biography and activism. in her book beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation (2017), taylor is intentional about telling the history of her body: my disability was caused by u.s. military pollution in the town where i was born. everything about my story is typical: the military and its industries secretly dumping toxic chemicals in unlined pits in the ground for decades; the poor, largely nonwhite neighborhoods that were affected; and the fact that the pollution was directly poisoning the lands of the tohono o’odham nation. my body was formed with the help of toxic chemicals, heavy metals, airplane degreasers—the mundane detritus of militarization. (p. 120) taylor’s narrative thus disrupts the conventional distinction often made between “acquired” and “congenital” disabilities, revealing how such distinctions fall apart in the context of environmental injustice. she was in fact “born this way,” suggesting her disabilities are congenital, but her disabilities were caused by, and therefore acquired through, military pollution. by insisting that “everything about [her] story is typical,” taylor offers a potent description of how debility is endemic—or made endemic— to particular communities (puar, 2017). taylor argues for a disability movement that simultaneously values disable bodies while condemning debilitation, asserting that “the u.s. military and its garbage made be diabled, and i love my body” (2017, p. 189). em-brace, then, can be seen as a way for taylor to demonstrate “loving her body” while demonstrating against the military industrial complex and the us settler state. while em-brace responds to memories of medical intervention by creating braces to caress and cradle the body, other pieces in this series draw more explicit attention to what eunjung kim (2017) calls “curative kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 21 violence,” or the fact that many cures have physically, psychically, and symbolically violent effects (clare, 2017). in one self-portrait (figure 9), a detail from re-fuse skin set, yi stands before a white background; she wears mottled yellow latex shorts that match the adornment on her right hand, which is thrust toward the viewer. the adornment cradles her two fingers; composed of black stitching, white plastic, and latex, the adornment allows her fingers to rest in their most comfortable position. as with embrace, this piece is part of a series of adornments made from the tools and materials of medicine; the black thread is reminiscent of sutures and staples, while the white plastic is akin to that used to make braces and splints. but rather than using sutures and hard plastic to force the body into “better” positions—with “better” measured entirely by normalizing criteria— yi supports bodies in moving where and how they want, including not moving at all. in contrast to the normalizing imperative in which mobility must be enhanced at all costs, yi allows herself the pleasure of stillness. figure 9: chun-shan (sandie) yi, re-fuse skin set kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 22 figure 10: chun-shan (sandie) yi, re-fuse skin set in the photographs documenting re-fuse skin set, yi stands with her braced hands on her hips or crossed in front of her, apparently naked except for the shorts and finger cradles; the images have been cropped to reveal only yi’s torso. there is a tiny notch cut into the top of the shorts, at the small of yi’s back, and the notch is surrounded by black suture-stitches; the front of the shorts (figure 10) features two ovoid cut-outs surrounded by white plastic. careful examination reveals that the cuts are positioned over two long scars on yi’s skin. returning to the title, re-fuse skin set, we can recognize yi’s finger braces as a reference to medical practices of fusing together (or re-fusing) fingers separated during surgery or fusing together joints, freezing one set of motions to free up another. but yi’s use of black suture-stitches that will never dissolve and her circling of the scars signal instead a refusal of such narratives of healing. yi marks the violence of such interventions, highlighting their traces on her body, while gesturing toward the possibility of re-fusing her body back together differently, otherwise, kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 23 according to a different set of logics and rubrics. yet any such reimaginings take place across the backdrop of histories of eugenics and neglect, with refuse signaling the way such bodies have been discarded, segregated, abandoned (kim, 2019). although it is tempting to read these adornments as “returning” the body to its “natural” state, as freeing it from the effects of curative violence, yi and her collaborators resist such readings. as taylor insists, her body, like all bodies, was never natural (2017, p. 120), and yi explains that her work is not about abandoning modification; she is less interested in “rejecting the notion of physical alteration” than in imagining alterations beyond “a correctional physical aid” (n.d.). moreover, both yi and her collaborators know that the biomedical interventions which they are challenging are irreversible; as the scars peering out of yi’s shorts demonstrate, interventions leave permanent marks, both physical and psychic. the last piece in this series, dermis footwear, consists of two kneehigh boots made from latex, cork, plastic, fabric, and black thread; the latex is constructed from castings of artist sadie wilcox’s burn scars. wilcox wears the boots, shot from different angles, in the accompanying photographs; the images show her bare legs from mid-thigh down and two of the images reveal her mint-green toenails poking out through the ends of the boots (figures 11 and 12). the boots are made of a caramel-colored latex, creating a dark contrast with wilcox’s light skin, and there are black suture-stitches traveling around the boot in irregular patterns. there are asymmetrical cut-outs in the boot skin across the tops of wilcox’s feet, some suture-stitched, some not, and the skin of the human shows through. this skin, the human skin, is white, tan, and pink. the swirls, bumps, and ridges of the scars are echoed in the mottled patterns of the boot skin. demonstrating yi’s interest in creating “a tool for remapping and engaging with a new physical terrain” (n.d.), the boots present scars as patterns to emulate, as sources of artistic inspiration and sites of collaborative dialogue. as wilcox (2011) explains, “the cellular formation of [her] hypotropic scars exposes rich layers of texture, curve, and contour” (p. 138). kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 24 figure 11: chun-shan (sandie) yi, dermis footwear kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 25 figure 12: chun-shan sandie yi, dermis footwear the skin in these photographs is in motion. the tops of the boots are falling over and peeling back; it is as if the boots of their own accord are recoiling from the fragile vulnerable skin beneath. or perhaps we are to read the peeling back as a sign of healing, the way scabs start to lift and curl at the edges to make room for new skin underneath. is the peeling away, the falling down, the collapsing, painful or liberating or both? or have yi and wilcox drawn on the language of debridement, the removal of dead tissue from wounds, as a way to reimagine the healing of skin? rather than the medical process of painful debriding, we get an animal one, reimagining debriding as a lizard or snake shedding its skin. but the skin beneath is neither fresh nor new; underneath the cast scars we find still more scars. these marks of violence will never disappear, no matter how many times these chrysalis boots are donned or doffed. in stark contrast to the delicate embroidery in em-brace, the stitching in re-fuse skin set and dermis footwear is thick, harsh, and brash. it seems hurried, as if done out of anger or urgency; without these suturestitches, this skin will fall apart. as micha cárdenas notes in her description kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 26 of a trans of color poetics, the “stitch brings the affect of pain” into our theories, allowing for the possibility of “creating relations through the stitch” (2016). yi’s pairing of the stitch with the cut, and her use of stitches that will never dissolve or be removed, refuses notions of such relations as creating quick or permanent healing. moreover, yi’s slashing stitches and rough edges can be read as her rebuke of the racist, imperialist reduction of asian women to “nimble fingers” and its racist, ableist assumption that, in eunjung kim’s words, “to be properly human as a woman of color…is to be equipped with capacities exploitable in global production” (2015, p. 307). the urgency of this creation, the skill in these stitches, is neither exportable nor replicable, but arises out of the kin-making of these artists, their bodies, histories, and tools. yi’s adornments thus rework and reimagine from queer crip perspectives what counts as expertise and who has the authority to intervene in the form and function of marked bodies. yi deploys the tools, vocabulary, and appearance of medical technologies—orthotic plastics, suture-stitches, grafted sheets of skin—to map the traces of medicalized violence and its effects. with her collaborators she uses these tools and materials to tell and re-tell stories, shifting the center of gravity and positioning themselves as producers of knowledge. yi’s focus on skinmaking merits attention, given skin’s predominance as a marker for race and as a sign of “natural, biological” difference. yi’s assertion of expertise and authority here—the ability to make skin, the power to shift its appearance and effects—suggests that she is “seizing the tools to mark the world that marked [her] as other” (haraway, 1991, p. 175); she makes clear that skin and its meanings are made. casting custom orthotics or creating new skin does not have to be done in a laboratory, in isolation from the people “served” by such practices, but can be made in collaboration, in relation, in kinship networks, a collaboration based in affective ties. although my analysis thus far has focused primarily on the adornments themselves, i want to encourage close attention to the images of the adornments as well. in publicly presenting this work, yi has exhibited the adornments and the photographs together, making clear that the images kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 27 are essential to her overall project. we can therefore read her careful cropping—excluding heads and faces from the frame, for example—as doing part of the work of “mapping the memories and the living experiences” (n.d.) of herself and her collaborators. in contrast to what painter riva lehrer describes as “specimen paintings” (bergquist 2013), which turn disabled bodies into disembodied parts and promote voyeuristic access to sites of impairment, yi has cropped the images to highlight sites of care, desire, and adornment. the relationship that matters here is not between viewer and viewed, but between artist and artist or even wearer and worn. even the more confrontational image of yi thrusting her finger-cradle to the camera insists on the primacy of her connection to the hand brace itself. perhaps we can read the refusal of eye contact in these images as a sign that these adornments and photographs were created with crip audiences in mind. yi is not ultimately concerned with navigating the stare across difference or addressing the curiosity of nondisabled people; she is instead offering other queer crips the time and space to imagine inhabiting disabilities, technologies, and medicalized histories differently. cognizant of histories of medical surveillance, ones that overlap with histories of racial and gendered surveillance, yi knows that granting full visibility is not always transgressive or liberatory. refusing eye contact also requires viewers to stay with the adornments themselves and their relations with the bodies they cradle, cushion, brace, accentuate, mirror, reveal, and reflect. although yi describes her work as finding beauty in these bodies, her materials (hard white bulbous plastic, thick black thread), methods (jagged stitches, irregular shapes and holes, mottled colors), and positions (jutting hand, collapsing boots) suggest that she is after more than one affective response. a deep ambivalence runs through these adornments and their photographs, an awareness that “mapping the memories and the living experiences” of these crips means capturing also the moments that recognition brings not identification but refusal, that desire is often accompanied by disgust. as petra kuppers (2007) notes in her work on kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 28 counter-medical performance, “creative practices at the site of the scar can play with the mechanisms of repulsion and attraction” (p. 1). it is this very ambivalence, this ability to index multiple and often contradictory affects, that leads me to frame these projects in terms of crip kin and queer crip kin-making. when i look at dermis footwear, i see skin that resembles my own, and i am moved by the loving care yi and wilcox put into creating latex skin that accentuates burned, scarred skin. but i am moved in more than one direction, and this sense of recognition is neither easy nor complete. i begin to imagine multiplying, radiating answers to josé esteban muñoz’s (2006) question, “how might subalterns feel each other?” (p. 677). looking closely at these boots, the way they peel back and collapse, their repeated piercing by that black suture-thread, i am made aware of the persistence of deeply embodied memories that i have no desire to surface, memories that i fear if awakened will carry me off forever. these fears likely bind me to others encountering these images, a knotted kinship of experiences unspeakable, but again, this recognition is neither easy nor complete. when does queer crip kinship require not only sensuousness but its refusal? how are some of us only able to feel some things by allowing ourselves not to feel others? and how might we support our queer crip kin or form intimacies in not-feeling? crip kin, manifesting bufano, taylor, and yi each recognize that our attachments to medicalized technologies make manifest some kin but not others. approaches that require coherent and discrete “models” of disability or strict adherence to the authorizing power of diagnosis are unlikely to lead to the crafting of new imaginaries called for here. these artists and their comrades offer informed refusals of technology as capitalist commodity, available only to those with the proper papers or disposable income; they are orienting themselves and their relations away from liberatory stories of identity through state recognition. kin, benjamin (2018) explains, do not inhere in particular categories or relations but emerge “as an effect of social struggle” (p. 65, kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 29 emphasis original). thus, we can best find and make crip kin in becoming more aware of the deployment of disability in narratives of war violence and rehabilitation (e. kim, 2017; terry, 2017), the uneven distributions of technology (puar, 2017; fritsch, 2015; fritsch & hamraie, 2019), the possibility that new kinship imaginaries can be conscripted into neoliberalism (eng, 2010; erevelles, 2011; friedner, 2017), and the assemblage of racist, ableist, sexist, and imperialist logics in the assumption that “human” is the only animacy that matters (chen, 2012; kim, 2015). what makes this work queer? or crip? i could point to bufano, taylor, and yi’s identifications and affiliations, or highlight dimensions of their biographies and histories, but both moves would solidify those terms in ways that run counter to the work itself. muñoz (2006) “imagines a position or narrative of being and becoming that can resist the pull of identitarian models of relationality” (p. 677), and it is that unfolding of different models of relationality that resonates here. these women are collaboratively crafting relations in and through their art, and those deeply intimate and lively relations are not easily reducible to family, or reproduction, or identity. their relations to me, themselves, each other, these histories, and these technologies exceed the bounds of my knowing. kim tallbear (2018) suggests that such excesses may constitute “small moments of possibility” in which we can begin to recognize sex and sexuality more as relations than objects, relations that flow intimately between all kinds of bodies (p. 161). these artists are attending to, in muñoz’s (2006) framing, “the receptors we use to hear each other and the frequencies on which certain subalterns speak and are heard or, more importantly, felt” (p. 677). perhaps these are the frequencies on which, through which, we can move “toward more disruptive modes of organizing life altogether,” cultivating the “insurgent space” and “poetics of survival” that jina kim (2017) describes as the work of crip-of-color critique. of necessity, a “poetics of survival” takes many forms. kim herself uses several different words to get at the same thing—world-making, speculative projects, poems, space—and it kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 30 seems worth noting that muñoz draws on the language of “frequencies,” evoking both sound and currents, all un-seen. i have tried to convey in words what these different images, objects, and relations “look like” in order to make the images and (my understanding of) their meanings more accessible to more readers. but radical accessibility, speculative fabulation, queer crip kin relations, and more-thanhuman intimacy and animacy likely require a (neuro)queerer sensorium. melanie yergeau (2018) admits that there is much that i do not learn or experience when i avert my eyes. and yet—there is much that i do learn, do experience, do feel and intimate and express and attract and repel. i might not know or recognize your face, but i know your scent, what you wore last thursday, the exact date on which we first met, the rhythm of your pace, the resting cut of your hair against your shoulder, the pulsing force field of the space between our bodies. there are intimacies and knowledges that exceed the eye-to-eye. (p. 211) when yi invited me to her studio to see more of her skins, my response was not to spread them out so as to see their gradations in color or size, but to rub them against my arm, my cheek, my lips. i kept placing them on my own body, layering, repositioning, and sliding them along my skin. they were cool to the touch, but warmed quickly against my body; they slid smoothly and easily across my mouth, and my lips coasted across them. i cannot remember their making a sound, but i recall they smelled alive; they felt lively. feel these adornments across your skin; imagine what relation tastes like. acknowledgements i cannot thank the editors enough for their generative call for papers; this essay was fully inspired by their work and their call. i am equally grateful to inderpal grewal and joanna radin for their symposium celebrating “the cyborg manifesto” and to donna haraway for her generous presence and comments. deep thanks to the anonymous reviewers as well as to susan burch, elaine craddock, julie avril minich, will mosley, kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 31 dana newlove, judy rohrer, and especially eunjung kim for their feedback. i continue to find inspiration, camaraderie, provocation, and sustenance in the work of lisa bufano, sunaura taylor, sadie wilcox, and chun-shan (sandie) yi; i thank them again and again. notes 1 benjamin is careful to note that she developed this concept of “informed refusal” in part through her engagement with the work of indigenous scholars audra simpson (2007) and kim tallbear (2013), both of whom identify refusal in ethnographic contexts as a practice of sovereignty and self-determination. acknowledging these citational paths can be a kind of methodological kin-making. 2 eunjung kim (2019) cautions, however, that this binary is neither fixed nor total; we need “to attend to locational specificities and internal differences” within and across such descriptions. 3 mara mills and jonathan sterne (2017) describe this kind of cripinformed approach as dismediation, identifying reluctant, alienated, partial, targeted, and limited orientations to technology, and kelly fritsch and aimi hamraie (2019) offer a generative and capacious articulation of crip technoscience as similarly concerned with friction, tension, ambivalence, and appropriation. 4 it is not only haraway’s father, in other words, who “becomes with” his crutches and wheelchairs but also his children, as they learn patterns of movement and gesture in relation to and through his networked interdependent body; complex webs of companion species radiate and extend. in highlighting haraway’s recognition of the possibilities of crip kin in her essay about her father, however, i can’t help but wish that this (net)work left more of a trace on her other kinship imaginaries. i continue to grapple with the risks of haraway’s selective deployment of disability, whether in figuring oddkin, articulating “damage,” or urging us to “make kin, not babies” (haraway, 2016; 2018). i am grateful to the editors for pushing me to recognize the promises even as i feel the risks. kafer catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 5(1) 32 5 my thinking here is deeply indebted to conversations with mara mills about the womyn’s braille press and the queer possibilities of insider descriptions. 6 although i could have used many terms here, such as ivan illich’s “tools of conviviality” (1973), i have chosen “tools of relation” as a way of gesturing toward the extensive work in disability studies that highlights the relational dimension of disability; multiple intellectual genealogies are at play. but i also prefer “tools of relation” in order to stress relationality itself as a site of politics. unlike “conviviality,” “relation” can also be used to describe the often violent or coercive deployment of affective ties (e.g., benjamin, 2018; chen, dulani, & piepzna-samarasinha, 2011). although i focus primarily in this essay on the possibilities of crip kin for disability justice, i do not want to ignore the ways in which kinship imaginaries can also be sites of injustice. 7 as nirmala erevelles’ (2011) and jasbir puar’s work (2017) suggests, however, crippling conditions can be a “fate worse than death” when rendered by the state as a means of ongoing incapacitation and debilitation. 8 bufano’s orientations resonate with the work of dancer-choreographer alice sheppard (2019), who is similarly interested in refusing function in favor of aesthetic pleasure. i am grateful to sheppard for sharing her work in the final stages of this writing, and i look forward to engaging it more directly in the future. references bailey, m., & peoples, w. 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(n.d.). about me. crip couture. retrieved from https://www.cripcouture.org/about.html bio alison kafer is the embrey associate professor of women's and gender studies and an associate professor of english at the university of texas in austin. she is the author of feminist, queer, crip (indiana university press, 2013). benjamin article    racial fictions, biological facts: expanding the sociological imagination through speculative methods    ruha benjamin princeton university ruha@princeton.edu i: the facts, alone, will not save us. in this moment of social crisis, where even the most basic assertion that black lives matter is contested, we are drowning in “the facts” of inequality and injustice. whether it is a new study on criminal justice disparities or another video of police brutality, demanding empirical evidence of systematic wrongdoing can have a kind of perverse quality—as if subjugated people must petition again and again for admission into the category of “human,” for which empathy is rationed and applications are routinely denied. in this context, novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of the social world—alternatives to capitalism, racism, and patriarchy—are urgently needed. fictions, in this sense, are not falsehoods but refashionings through which analysts experiment with different scenarios, trajectories, and reversals, elaborating new values and testing different possibilities for creating more just and equitable societies. such fictions are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible. this is not to say that imagining alternatives is sufficient, or that all things possible are even desirable. but how will we know if we do not routinely push the boundaries of our own thinking, which includes the stories we tell about the social world? in the words of historian robin d. g. kelley, we must tap the well of our own collective imaginations, that we do what earlier generations have done: dream…without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. we not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us. (kelley, 2003, p. xii; my emphasis) building upon this insight, the following narrative sketch is an experiment to know things differently, a way to reflect anew upon the themes of my research—innovation, inequity, biotechnology, and race among them—and, ultimately, to explore the relationship between racial fictions and biological facts. how do narratives about the inherent difference between groups impact social policies and normative practices? does a focus on treating disparities in health support or substitute for broader social transformations? how might we reimagine the relationship between social and biological processes in a way that is non-deterministic, but still take seriously how inequality gets under the skin causing premature death? in short, how is race “simultaneously factual and fictional” (m’charek 2013, my emphasis)? it is with these sorts of questions in mind that i finished my first book, people’s science: bodies and rights on the stem cell frontier (benjamin, 2013), which examines the social implications of biotechnology through the prism of the california stem cell research and cures initiative. toward the end of the revision process, i was finally able to articulate the tension that stands at the heart of the book: why is it that we can imagine growing cardiac cells in a lab, but not growing empathy for other human beings in our everyday lives? for many people, the idea that we can defy politics as usual and channel human ingenuity toward more cooperative and inclusive forms of social organization is utterly farfetched. thus i am convinced that we must query this faith in biological regeneration that stands alongside an underdeveloped investment in social transformation. if our bodies can regenerate, why do we perceive our body politic as so utterly fixed? the speculative exercise below is an attempt to perceive otherwise, to hold myself accountable to the query buried in people’s science, to formulate a critique of the power/knowledge nexus through narrative, and ultimately to construct new fictions, though not without their own tensions and contradictions. throughout, it is my aim to take the notion of sociological imagination seriously and envisage a not-too-distant future where race, science, and subjectivity are reconfigured differently, defiantly, and hopefully. your people will change. your young will be more like us and ours more like you. your hierarchical tendencies will be modified and if we learn to regenerate limbs and reshape our bodies, we’ll share those abilities with you. that’s part of the trade. we’re overdue for it. —octavia butler, from dawn1 ii: ferguson is the future it is 2064. a reparations initiative that allows victims of police brutality to regenerate organs is well underway. a major new component of the initiative will be unveiled for the fiftieth anniversary of the ferguson uprising, but the largest biobank in the country has been repeatedly hit by raiders intent on selling stem cells on the white market. aiyana mo’nay stanley-jones and her team of risers have to find a way to secure the cell depository and revitalize the movement.2 time heals? there it was again: “lights, hammer, action.” just as the lightning was about to strike, aiyana wrestled herself awake. chest pounding and sweat circling her neck, she struggled to make out what had happened. footsteps overhead. channels flipping. smothered voices. and lightning, always lightning headed directly toward her forehead. the humanity+ counselor kept telling her not to worry. “chronic dreams are perfectly normal, a symptom from the previous life. they’ll fade with time. i'll just double your dose.” but it’s been ten years, and they’ve only gotten more vivid. “lights, camera, action!” aiyana heard it clearly this time. a film crew (or was it a swat team?) was shooting her while she slept. that made no sense. unless, of course, entertainment executives had started mining people’s inner lives, piped dreams, because reality had become so unbearably stale. gossip, fight, screw, shop, backstab, gossip, on endless repeat. stuffing her head under the pillow to avoid the crawl of sunlight across the room, aiyana’s thoughts continued to drift—for all their high-tech gadgets, why hadn’t the humanity+ engineers created a better antidote for these leftover lives? how hard could it be to develop some kinda neural vacuum to suck up memory crumbs? after all, there must be side effects to almost getting struck by lightning night after night. maybe that was the point… just then the bank alarm vibrated across aiyana’s wrist. a break-in attempt: the third this month. she sat up, dizzy, and hooked into her chair so fast that she knocked the stack of regeneration flyers off her nightstand. whoever said time heals never had a tumor growing inside their belly mistaken for a child. as many times as she read it, it was no less disturbing. why devise such a morbid slogan for the occasion, when one meant to inspire? dead babies, for god’s sake! the risers really needed a new pr team. what hope, delusion, or mix of both would lead anyone to ignore the lack of movement? annoyed, aiyana tapped her wrist to check on the rest of her team while she rushed out of the door. the only other people moving around grand avenue so early on a saturday were the market vendors who were vying for the best spots to make it easier to unload. she could already smell the curry potatoes simmering at the roti stand, torture when she couldn’t stop for some. soon drummers from all over the bay would make their way over for what seemed like hours and hours of conversation without words. she faintly remembered having to pull her brother olinga away from the circle, what seemed like three lifetimes ago. if she had more time, aiyana would stop by ixchel’s coffee stand, but in the distance she could see the first burst of orange and fuchsia over lake merritt. she pressed the accelerate option on her chair, sped over the water through downtown oakland and over the oscar grant memorial bridge until she reached the sf biodistrict. #stemcellsmatter aiyana was first to arrive as usual. she circled the perimeter a few times, ensuring all the cryotanks were secure, and collected footage from the bank’s eye. as she made her way toward the atrium, she glanced out of the floor-to-ceiling windows that extended the length of the hallway. the wall near the highway exit was tagged with one of those illicit ads popping up all around the bay: are you a victim of reverse regeneration? get exactly what you deserve on the white market. two-for-one special—livers, kidneys, hearts, grown to order. more like mass-produced using pig and cow parts, she thought. raiders, it seemed, were becoming more and more relentless as the fiftieth regeneration drew closer, trying to capitalize on the fervor and anxiety surrounding the ferguson anniversary. how long until they figured out that stem cells were not the only things being kept alive in the banks? aiyana glanced once more at the makeshift advertisement. the raiders’ signature—two scalpels in the shape of an “x”—was missing? great. now we have copycats running around selling chimera organs to anyone who either can’t afford the real deal or doesn’t qualify under the reparations act. and copycat or not, she couldn’t figure out how any of these taggers managed to avoid getting recorded. just then the rest of her team reeled into the atrium, already in heated debate. “this reverse-regeneration backlash is off the rails! even so-called allies who backed the reparations act are saying that the risers have lost touch,” rekia exclaimed “it’s desperation mixed with greed,” tamir quipped. “the worst of all possible combos.” but aiyana couldn’t tell if he was talking about the raiders or the risers, or maybe it was all the same. the line between those who hoard power and those who crave it was never clear. “well, i think it’s more economics than ideology,” freddie interrupted. “have you all been keeping track of white-market prices? the street value of cells is off the charts!” he had a point. and somehow, stories of people dropping dead from those chimera transplants were not driving down prices. one thing they could agree on: it was getting harder to predict what new scheme raiders would employ. surveillance footage turned up nothing. as aiyana ran through a checklist of the security matrix, considering all the possible ways it could be hacked, director lacks rushed in to the atrium, breathless. “how could this have happened again?!” aiyana reassured her that everything had been reinforced. none of the cryotanks had been touched. all of the tissue had been accounted for, including the erga cell lines needed for tomorrow’s revival ceremony. on her way back home she took shortcuts through the sf biodistrict, across the oscar grant memorial bridge, and over lake merritt, the purple-and-blue sunset above and below as it reflected on the water. another restless night to come, memory crumbs scraping the inside of her head, forcing her awake. “wake up, wake up, wake up!” to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the ferguson uprising, the people’s science council was working around the clock to revive one mr. eric garner, the father of six who was choked to death by nypd officers in 2014. holding him in cryosleep until all the necessary procedures could be honed, the council was confident that garner could be resuscitated without incident. aiyana wasn’t so sure. she hinted as much to director lacks, who appeared unwavering. had the garner family even been consulted—half a dozen grandchildren and a few great-grands? all were conspicuously silent about what the people’s science council had planned. lacks, of all people, should be concerned about the need to keep kin in the know. lo and behold, soon after aiyana raised the question, there was a press conference—smiling relatives, relatable scientists, a bronze bust of the soon-to-awake garner, and a scholarship fund, followed by heart-wrenching interviews with family members who seemed genuinely excited. still, aiyana was uneasy. garner’s last words, “i can’t breathe,” had served as a clarion call for five decades of movement building, so it seemed fitting that he would be revived for the anniversary. assuming, of course, that the multiple transplants worked. a lot could go wrong. infections, graft failure, cancers. if successful, he would be the first adult to successfully undergo doubling—resuscitation and organ renewal. only children had survived up until that point, and even then not without complication. on the spectrum, aiyana’s nightly lightning strikes were barely considered side effects. but she knew better. sometimes headaches are just headaches—but sometimes they are past lives knocking on your door. she sat up, forehead throbbing, and hooked into her chair… side effects, side affects aiyana mo’nay stanley-jones, killed by a detroit swat team in 2010, was the only person who had survived doubling without debilitating side effects. but she had been a child at the time, seven years old when an officer threw a flash grenade where she lay sleeping on her grandmother’s couch. a reality tv crew had been shooting the raid as officers shot aiyana in the head. when the council woke aiyana up and implanted a new heart, lungs, and spine, at first there was only a minor graft rejection, which transplant specialists were able to control. but then came the seizures, blackouts, and hallucinations, usually involving a lightning strike. being born again was more like purgatory. but with a grant from the humanity+ foundation, aiyana’s transplant team designed the chairperson™, the first of its kind—an apparatus that maintained internal homeostasis so she no longer experienced the original side effects. it also included a number of augmentations, like the ability to hover at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour on land or water and an acute sensitivity to electrical fields, which enhanced her ability to communicate, orient to her surroundings, track things, and protect herself—the gold standard in second-life starter kits. mr. garner, on the other hand, was not only an adult but the first to require multiple regenerated organs a half-century after his first life was stolen. waking up would be just the beginning. sandra aiyana was gliding up the ramp of the people’s science building on mission street when she heard someone calling her name. “heyyy, madame chairperson, wait up! ms. jones, wait up!” it was sandra. “how long you think this meeting is going to take?” “not more than an hour, i hope. the revival organizers have to finish setting up, so they shouldn’t keep us long.” “as soon as it’s over, there’s something i need to tell you,” whispered sandra. as aiyana and sandra walked through the front doors, the welcome hologram seemed louder than usual, the history of the council and its achievements on blast: the reparations initiative, now in its tenth year, covers the costs of regenerative medicine for victims of police brutality. researchers honed a technique in which they can take a mature human cell from a patient and reprogram it to create any other tissue in the body. and because the regenerated tissue is produced from a person’s own cells, they avoid complications that arise with donor cells. over 10,000 people have undergone this suite of procedures, and nearly all have survived. as she and sandra sat in one of the atrium lounges waiting for the meeting to begin, aiyana couldn’t help thinking about the early days, when news first broke about the reprogramming technique. millions of families actually started banking their own skin cells—a kind of insurance policy. that was before the reparations initiative had led to the official disbanding of police. the era of “every six hours”—children playing cops-and-robbers shot down on playgrounds; teenagers goofing off with toy guns left bleeding in department store aisles; mentally ill adults treated with multiple shots to the head, mowed down for walking, driving, breathing out of place; phones, wallets, and other objects allegedly mistaken for weapons. not to mention all the residual damage—the chronic stress of living under siege. every public school teacher assigned a police escort. students body-slammed daily for having “too much attitude.” classmates, terrified, pretending not to notice. kids as young as six with chronic hypertension. the people’s science council headquarters devoted an entire floor to the history of decarceration. a holographic exhibit with vintage footage from police body cams, smart phones, and tv crews played on constant loop. it always troubled aiyana: not just the section about her own murder, but the whole idea of playing and replaying black death, the “pornography of genocide."3 why, in fact, did we need to see to believe? interrupting her thoughts, the building’s voiceover continued: when police were forced to wear body cams in 2015, the non-indictments flowed even more freely. they were, after all, responding as they had been trained: “it was never meant to be a fair fight.” “nonlethal force isn’t in our repertoire.” to indict individual officers would be to admit that the entire apparatus was defective. the ferguson risers dubbed victims of police violence “ais,” as in, attached incident—their way of countering the fictional notion that these were isolated acts of violence. eventually, the staggering number of ais created a boon for the biobanking sector. whereas anyone who could afford it could get a transplant, only certified ais were covered under the reparations act of 2025. slowly replacing the college funds common in the early part of the century, parents and grandparents now opened tissue accounts for their loved ones. “don’t cell your family short! bank with us today,” read the floating billboards. and although most of the transplant procedures were far too expensive for the average person, monthly payment plans were manageable for most families. public service announcement your ancestors fueled the new world economy, just as mitochondria power the cellular body. harness your history, transform the biopolity! come in for a free consultation to see if middle passage mitochondria is right for you. informed dissent why was it taking so long for council members to come down for the meeting? sandra, who was usually overflowing with news from the weekend, just kept looking intently in the direction of the welcome hologram. aiyana barely noticed that she was inching closer and closer until their elbows touched. “i can’t wait anymore. there’s something i have to tell you, aiyana.” “what is it?” “it's the sixth floor,” sandra began. “you mean the part they’ve been renovating since malia obama was president?” aiyana said with a smirk. “what about it?” “well, it doesn’t need renovating.” sandra lowered her voice even more. “that’s the raiders’ office.” “yeah right,” aiyana snickered, expecting sandra to embellish this tale and thankful for the entertainment while they waited. but sandra wasn’t smiling. and the look in her eye caused aiyana’s spine to tighten. “what are you saying, sandra?” she asked intently. “i’m saying,” she paused, waiting for a group of students visiting the decarceration museum to shuffle by, “i’m saying that the raiders, who you’ve been chasing for three years, work for the council. or more precisely, the council created the raiders…” “but why?” asked aiyana. “distraction,” replied sandra. “distraction from what?” aiyana probed. that itch, which had always told her there was more going on than director lacks let on, turned into a sensory rash. the nodes connecting her spine and chair pulsed so hard she could feel her lungs expanding and blood rushing to her extremities. but before sandra could respond, council members filed out of the elevator and toward the conference room. “after we’re done here, meet me at the abandoned testing station on the corner of twenty-fourth and mission,” sandra whispered as they trailed in behind the group. “but go up van ness and use the entrance next to the old bart platform.” in the meeting, aiyana turned sandra’s words over and over. if she was right, it would explain how white-market advertisements turned up all over the city without raiders getting caught—and how, despite the resources at aiyana’s disposal, the culprits always seemed out of reach. but, then, what was the real threat? about an hour later, the meeting ended and sandra headed out of the headquarters. aiyana made the usual rounds, checking in with council members and updating her team about their respective tasks at the revival. after thirty minutes, she glided out the front door toward van ness. this was white-market central. raider tags were everywhere, offering major organ discounts. as she headed towards twenty-fourth, her thoughts turned to the abandoned testing station where sandra was waiting for her. by the time the medical establishment had finally come to grips with the source of most illness, it was nearly too late…the precision medical industry was all the rage. their lobbyists had successfully amended obamacare, establishing mandatory gene-testing stations alongside all clinics. even if you just wanted your blood pressure checked, you had to get your genome mapped first—so if you didn’t, forget about being treated. couldn't afford a test? you were just out of luck. meanwhile, counterfeiting operations that specialized in genome maps flourished. the fact that people were buying knockoff maps to get access to treatments defeated the whole point of precision medicine. but it took another decade to establish the people’s science council and begin addressing the chronic strain of living under siege. we are still trying to figure out what to do with all the abandoned testing stations. before aiyana turned the corner onto twenty-fourth, she looked behind her one more time, then went down the ramp toward the bart platform. she knocked on the metal door and, after three or four long seconds, sandra opened it. “listen, we don’t have much time. the revival is tomorrow and you only have one chance to get this right.” “get what right?” aiyana probed. “think about it, aiyana. when did you first hear about the raiders?” it had been the week of the elections. and it hadn’t looked like the reparations act was going to pass. “don’t you think it’s odd how these biobank attacks are always one step ahead? and notice how they always seem to follow the death of a transplant survivor, or at least the public ones that get people asking whether these ‘free’ procedures for police brutality victims are really what they are made out to be.” “what are you saying, sandra?” “distraction! the raiders are a manufactured distraction. there is no white market. there is only the people’s science council honing these techniques on the backs of brutality victims ‘for free.’ once they sort out all the kinks, the recipes are going to be patented…proprietary. and turned over  to an elite group of octogenarians we’ve been tracking, the immortocracy, who are hiding out on alcatraz.” “who’s we? and what’s the immortocracy?” aiyana asked, impatiently. “an elite class that has everything life has to offer, except this pesky thing called death keeps getting in the way. but so far the procedures have been too risky. they needed a long-term plan to hone them. hence the reparations act, a moral prophylactic for what they really have planned.” aiyana sat stunned, “but, how do you …” sandra cut her off, “i’ll tell you everything! but right now we don’t have time! the main thing i need you to know is that the raiders aren’t your enemy. they are a fiction. and unless we…that is, you, infiltrate the revival and get a message to mr. garner before the curtain falls on this elaborate charade, those faux-populists at the people’s science headquarters win. their patent relies on garner’s successful doubling. as long as he plays his part, parroting the script they give him—a celebrity spokesman for their immortality products—the revival will usher in a new caste system.” what do we owe each other? he stood on the stage, the applause turning to a hum as dr. lacks began her introduction. eric twisted in his suit ever so slightly, the lining loose in places, bunching in others. rushed, he thought. everything was rushed. death. life. and now this three-piece suit. not even his style. but the grandkids seemed so excited that he couldn’t say no. so there he stood, with an inner lining doing what it wanted. trying to ignore the discomfort, he glanced once more at the script his handler made him practice. “special thanks to the people’s science council for organizing this incredible revival; the mayor of san francisco, brisenia flores; the director of the trayvon martin biobank, dr. henrietta lacks, and all the sponsors—synthmed, fauxhead, reallimb, elung…” just then, thunderous applause erupted in at&t park. he was up. mr. garner smiled and waved just as his handler had reminded him. he took a sip of water, and stared down at the script with his new heart beating loudly. murdered by the hands of police, born again by the hands of scientists, he thought, both without asking. off-script, he began: who will pay reparations on my soul?4 iii: imagination and extinction there is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. the challenge is in the moment. the time is always now. -james baldwin5 while a growing body of work explores the relationship between social science and fiction (see, for example, carrigan, 2015; leavy, 2015; nova, 2013a and 2013b; bleecker, 2009; de casonova, 2016; forlano, 2013; tutton, 2016; watson, 2016), w. e. b. du bois’s short story “the comet” (1920) offers one of the earliest experiments with what i am calling speculative methods. set in a dystopian world where the racial status quo is momentarily overturned, it underscores the importance of storytelling in scholarly and civic praxis. the direct link du bois crafted between sociology and speculative fiction suggests the need for windows into alternative realities, even if it is just a glimpse, to challenge ever-present narratives of inevitability as they relate to both technology and society (phillips, 2015). stories remind us that the beginning, middle, and end could all be otherwise: “whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. all organizing is science fiction” (imarisha, 2015, p. 3).   similarly, ursula le guin’s 2014 national book awards acceptance speech encourages a more deliberate use of fiction in fostering social change: i think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. we will need writers who can remember freedom. poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. (quoted in arons, 2014) social scientists, for our part, are often in the business of documenting dystopias, which offer a starting point for imagining alternatives.  for example, the following anthropological texts on the relationship between science, medicine, and inequality help to shape the narrative in “ferguson is the future.” anthropologist nancy scheper-hughes’s work on organ trafficking describes practices that she calls “stranger than fiction” (2002, p. 36): what if the race, class, and gender inequalities that are so foundational to the structural violence she observes were reversed? as one of scheper-hughes’s informants says, “poor people like ourselves are losing our organs to the state, one by one!” (p. 37) but what if, instead of complicit government officials, the state was positioned as benefactor? and what if the subaltern were positioned as beneficiary? what could we learn by using similar guiding questions as those who study organ trafficking empirically to reflect on the social world speculatively? that is, asking, in scheper-hughes’s words, “what is going on here? what truths are being served? whose needs are being privileged? whose voices are being silenced? what invisible sacrifices are being demanded? what secrets are being concealed in the transplant rhetoric of gifts, altruism, scarcities and needs?” (p. 35). while i have not yet begun to answer all of these in the story sketched above, one can observe how they motivate the narrative insofar as the straightforward “gifts” of the people’s science council are not all that they seem. similarly, anthropologist adriana petryna’s life exposed (2003) informs an understanding of the struggle for medical inclusion and citizenship in the context of systemic inequality. in many ways, the plot of “ferguson is the future” can be understood as the result of a particular demand for biological citizenship, where reparations come in the form of regenerated body parts and a second life. the process of writing this world is also a response to the problem petryna articulates around how we come to know or not know the facts about injury and violence. she describes the inadequacies of producing such knowledge, saying that “the heterogeneous facts of living that make up survivors’ stories of death and recovery have nowhere to live under dominant systems of knowledge” (p. xvi), systems of knowledge such as bureaucratic record-keeping and statistical representations. in part, this is a call for new modes of representation and engagement that exceed the traditional bounds of academia—expanding what counts as knowledge. finally, anthropologist laurence ralph argues that even amid the many layers of state, structural, and internalized violence that endanger black lives, people stubbornly and creatively produce meaning and exercise agency. like petryna, ralph illustrates that it can be “politically strategic to inhabit the role of a ‘defective body’ in order to make claims about a violent society” (2012). considering the ethnographic narrative in renegade dreams (ralph, 2014): if we placed justin (the main protagonist, who was paralyzed after a gang-related drive-by shooting) inside the world of “ferguson is the future,” he would not, in fact, be eligible for spinal regeneration under the reparations act. one’s eligibility for repair is, after all, circumscribed around a narrow definition of state violence that comes from the direct action of police. in this speculative world, as it often is in the present, injury that is a result of structural violence is not legible under the law. ghettoization, which, in many ways, fosters gang affiliation, produces its own forms of injury that are not entitled to redress—not in the world of eastwood, chicago, that ralph depicts nor in the world of aiyana stanley-jones, where only victims of police violence may obtain free transplants. even the seeming beneficence of the latter is no straightforward “good,” since the freedom to be experimented upon can only be depicted as such if one’s life chances are already violently restricted. the theme of regeneration, in short, connects with anthropological and activist concerns about extinction. consider all of the ways that imperiled black lives are invoked and deployed, and not always with the aim of remediation.6 indeed, a philosophy of extinction is embedded in the very fabrication of racial taxonomies. to be racialized is to be, by definition, “in danger” from politically engineered forces that are then euphemized as biological facts of degeneracy. consider ethnographer and statistician james barnard describing australian aborigines in 1890: it has become an axiom that, following the law of evolution and survival of the fittest, the inferior races of mankind must give place to the highest type of man, and that this law is adequate to account for the gradual decline in numbers of the aboriginal inhabitants of a country before the march of civilization. (quoted in mcgregor, 1993) evolutionary euphemisms—their own kind of retrospective fiction—displace narratives that reckon truthfully with the genocidal violence that forced aboriginals to “give way.” similarly, us eugenicist and amateur anthropologist madison grant wrote, in the passing of the great race, a rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words social failures—would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums…[t]he state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever-increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. this is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types. (grant, 1916, p. 28) as philosopher david theo goldberg aptly notes, the impulse to eliminate racial threats is often euphemized as “natural preservation… [t]he self-licensing to purge a racially framed people as a “natural” entailment of human self-preservation—is politically projected in specific social contexts” (2015, p. 138). if we liken race to a technology that creates parallel universes and premature death, then racism is in the business of “manufacturing natures” (benjamin, 2016)— that is, biological facts that legitimate racial narratives of dominance and inferiority. to say that race is a technology is also to insist that racism is innovative and future-oriented, which implies that antiracisms are often playing catch-up, caught off guard by new “killer apps” that come to market. which is why, coming full circle, i suggest that it is vital to experiment with speculative methods so that analysts and activists alike may better anticipate and intervene in new racial formations that, like the “ferguson is the future” reparations policy, may appear to be a kind of radical intervention but may very well entail their own logics of extinction. acknowledgements my sincere thanks to the catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience special feature editors, two anonymous reviewers, and colleagues at the following institutions for valuable feedback: princeton university “histories of the future” workshop participants, especially erika milam and joanna radin; university of pennsylvania department of anthropology colloquium participants, especially adriana petryna; and columbia university department of anthropology ethnography workshop participants, especially paige west, didier m. sylvain, and leslie james sabiston. most of all, i extend my heartfelt condolences to the loved ones of all those mentioned in the story—by including their names my hope is not only to commemorate their lives, but to open a space for these tragedies to hasten collective struggle for justice. notes 1 butler, 1988, p. 40 2 all images in manuscript are reproduced with permission from their creators.   image 1: by paul sableman. source: flickr. image reproduced through creative commons. image 2: untitled 3, by robert pruitt. reproduced with permission from the artist. image 3: cellular memory, social amnesia, by ruha benjamin. the author juxtaposed two well-circulated images to form “middle passage mitochondria.” for the slave ship graphic, see bristol museum, 2014, and labarre, 2012. image 4: “ufo house in taiwan” by phillip christyakov. reproduced with permission from photographer. source: https://www.flickr.com/search/?w=33696590@n06&q=wanli  image 5: by john jennings, commissioned and titled “hands up, we fly” by ruha benjamin 3 see thrasher, 2015. 4 eric garner’s words in the story echo the title of an essay by mccarthy, 2014. 5 baldwin, 1998, p. 214 6 for example, pro-life billboard advertisements that read, “the most dangerous place for an african american is in the womb,” are an egregious co-optation of the language of endangerment (robbins, 2011). references arons, r. (2014). “we will need writers who can remember freedom”: ursula le guin and last night’s n.b.a.s. new yorker. retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/national-book-awards-ursula-le-guin baldwin, j. (1998). james baldwin: collected essays (t. morrison, ed.). new york, ny: library of america. benjamin, r. (2013). people’s science: bodies and rights on the stem cell frontier. palo alto, ca: stanford university press. benjamin, r. (2016). innovating inequity: if race is a technology, postracialism is the genius bar. racial and ethnic studies, 39(13), 1-8. bleecker, j. (2009). design fiction: a short essay on design, science, fact, and fiction. venice beach, ca: near future laboratory. http://drbfw5wfjlxon.cloudfront.net/writing/designfiction_webedition.pdf bristol museum. (2014). the brooks slave ship drawing. bbc: a history of the world. retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/akxq5wxwqokaf5s1almknw butler, o. (1988). dawn. new york, ny: warner books. carrigan, m. (2015). the promise of sociological fiction. the sociological imagination. retrieved from http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/17412 de casanova, e. m. (2016). liars, damn liars, and sociologists. the sociological review. retrieved from https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/blog/liars-damn-liars-and-sociologists.html du bois, w. e. b. (2001 [1920]). the comet. e-book. new york, ny: warner books. forlano, l. (2013). ethnographies from the future: what can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design?. ethnography matters. retrieved from http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2013/09/26/ethnographies-from-the-future-what-can-ethnographers-learn-from-science-fiction-and-speculative-design/ goldberg, d. t. (2015). are we all postracial yet? cambridge, uk: polity press. grant, m. (1916). the passing of the great race. new york, ny: charles scribner’s sons. imarisha, w. (2015). introduction. in w. imarisha & a. m. brown (eds.), octavia’s brood: science fiction stories from social justice movements (pp. 3-6). oakland, ca: ak press. kelley, r. d. g. (2003). freedom dreams: the black radical imagination. new york, ny: beacon press. labarre, s. (2012). infographic: the slave-ship chart that kindled the abolitionist movement. fast company. retrieved from http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670325/infographic-the-slave-ship-chart-that-kindled-the-abolitionist-movemen leavy, p. (2015). social fiction: writing social science research as fiction. sociological imagination. retrieved from http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/17051 m’charek, a. (2013) beyond fact or fiction: on the materiality of race in practice. cultural anthropology, 28(3), 420-442. mccarthy, j. (2014). “who will pay reparations on my soul?” point. retrieved from http://thepointmag.com/2014/politics/reparations-on-my-soul mcgregor, r. (1993). the doomed race; a scientific axiom of the late 19th century. australian journal of politics and history, 39(1), 14-22. nova, n. (2013a). ethnography, speculative fiction, and design. ethnography matters. retrieved from http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2013/09/17/september-2013-ethnography-speculative-fiction-and-design/ nova, n. (2013b). speculative ethnography. ethnography matters. retrieved from http://ethnographymatters.net/editions/speculative-ethnography/ petryna, a. (2003). life exposed: biological citizens after chernobyl. princeton, nj: princeton university press. phillips, r. (2015) black quantum futurism: theory and practice vol. 1. philadelphia, pa: the afrofuturist affair. ralph, l. (2012). what wounds enable: the politics of disability and violence in chicago. disability studies quarterly, 32(3), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3270/3099 ralph, l. (2014). renegade dreams: living through injury in gangland chicago. chicago, il: university of chicago press. robbins, l. (2011, february 23). billboard opposing abortion stirs debate. new york times. retrieved from http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/billboard-opposing-abortion-stirs-debate/?_r=1 scheper-hughes, n. (2002). commodity fetishism in organ trafficking. in n. scheper-hughes & l. wacquant (eds.), commodifying bodies (pp. 31-62). london, uk: sage. thrasher, s. w. (2015, april 13). the inhumanity of “fuck your breath” should stop all of us cold. guardian. retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/white-supremacy-takes-the-breath-away-from-black-americans tutton, r. (2016). imagining futures: from sociology of the future to future fictions. the sociological review. retrieved from https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/blog/imagining-futures-from-sociology-of-the-future-to-future-fictions.html watson, a. (2016). some thoughts on “sociological fiction.” the sociological review. retrieved from https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/blog/some-thoughts-on-sociological-fiction.html bio ruha benjamin is assistant professor of african american studies at princeton university. she is the author of people’s science: bodies and rights on the stem cell frontier (stanford university press), and is a 2016-17 fellow at the institute for advanced study. she received her phd in sociology from uc berkeley, completed fellowships at ucla's institute for genetics and society and harvard university's science, technology, and society program, and is an honorary research associate at the centre for indian studies in africa at university of witwatersrand. for more info visit, www.ruhabenjamin.com.     special section: global fertility chains and the colonial present of assisted reproductive technologies stringing, reconnecting, and breaking the colonial “daisy chain”: from botanic garden to seed bank     xan sarah chacko wellesley college xchacko@wellesley.edu     abstract transported through colonial technologies such as wardian cases and imperial ships, or simply popped in envelopes and sent via the postal service, the reproductive bodies of plants have been extracted, commodified, reproduced, and proliferated to satisfy human needs and desires. the ongoing and historical movement of plants and their reproductive capacity—known now through the disembodied clinical term germplasm—for economic, social, political, and agricultural purposes provides a lens through which global fertility chains can be studied. i study one such fertility chain: the movement of seeds of plants into frozen vaults known as “seed banks.” while colonial plant movements are associated with exploitative control, newer plant extractions for seed banking are shielded from rebuke because they embody the unquestionably positive valence of “biodiversity conservation.” the view from australia captures the awkwardness of seed banking as a reproductive technology because the ongoing tensions between indigenous struggles and settler-colonial nation building, and the urgency around climate change, are far from resolved. the politics of the anthropocene are particularly poignant in australia because anthropogenic destruction looks very different when viewed from the perspective of either indigenous people or settlers.     keywords colonial botany, seed banking, australia, conservation, settler colonialism, botanic gardens     introduction i arrived in australia to start my research fellowship at the university of queensland in late spring 2018. i was to make my home in the city of brisbane—meanjin in turrbal1—with little expectation of familiarity: i had, after all, never lived in australia. i discovered that i had been passively training for assimilation in brisbane long before considering a job here. my senses had been attuned to particular cultural, social, and spatial forms simply by virtue of being from another former british colony. i was prepared to encounter the familiar smell of gum trees (eucalyptus) that had been a part of my childhood at a boarding school in southern india, but what made this place even more familiar than i could have imagined, were the jacarandas (jacaranda mimosifolia) that were all ablaze in their flame-blue flowers seemingly synchronized to my arrival (figure 1). seeing the pavements strewn with the telltale slippery traces of fallen purplish blossoms made me feel at home in those first weeks of finding my way around. it should not have surprised me that trees that i associated with my home were also prevalent in australia: we shared the same subtropical humid weather, and, more crucially, the same colonial power had exerted control over both our botanic destinies. we shared a natureculture: an entangled human and more-than-human experience of being in the world (haraway 1999, 25). i would have the same familiarity with the jacaranda had i lived in johannesburg, lusaka, alicante, or san diego. the tree’s preponderance is not only a testament to its striking, however fleeting, beauty, but also to the fertile botanic chains that have enabled a tree native to south-central south america to spread its roots around the globe in the last two centuries.   trees, like the jacaranda, form enduring traces of a shared colonial past. like monuments, cities, streets, or train stations names, they carry the memory of the violence and subjugation of coloniality. trees chosen for particular ornamental or economic value and transplanted across similar climes come to occupy cultural value—sometimes pride, sometimes derision—in the new places they call home. great efforts are made to secure (or curtail) the reproductive futures of plants, and studying the language and practices of botanic fertility chains illuminates the inherent eugenic and biopolitical logic of controlling reproduction—both plant and human.2 the breeding of plants to produce offspring that carry particular traits is considered logical and desirable. two spectral presences in human reproduction, eugenics and miscegenation, are absent in the realm of plant reproduction where, uncoupled from their moralistic valence, it is wholly desirable to strive towards perfection in form through controlled sexual reproduction of compatible species across the globe. moreover, keeping plants alive in order to continue the possibility of human life has been systematized through neoliberal concepts such as “ecosystem services” where more-than-human liveliness is translated into functional use in supporting human life (and capitalism). i study a fertility chain: the collection and transfer of seeds from instantiations of human-plant relation (like a farm, or the “wilderness”) into frozen vaults, sometimes far away, known as “seed banks.” this technoscientific enterprise has gained popularity in the late twentieth century amidst the twinned crises of the loss of plant life, both in numbers and kind, and the insecurity of food production in a changing climate. seed banks with their imagined frozen potential are marketed as a solution that could save entire species of plants, and the entire species of humans through their value to agriculture, medicine, or industry.3 recent studies from history, anthropology, and feminist science studies are thickening and troubling the origin stories (fenzi and bonneuil 2016; curry 2017; chacko 2019b), funding (lewis‐jones 2019), and politics (peres 2019; harrison 2017) of seed banking. this paper contributes to this emergent field the argument that even if contemporary conservation through benevolent international partnerships appears to be egalitarian and collaborative, in practice these relationships re-embed the colonial politics of collection and accumulation that characterized an earlier era.   figure 1. jacaranda way at the university of queensland, 2018 (photo by author)   scholarship on assisted reproductive technology (art) has shown that the disembodiment, movement, valuation, and transfer of body parts are part of a global value chain (nahman 2008; kroløkke 2018; newman and nahman 2020; vertommen, pavone, and nahman 2021). at the simplest level of comparison, it is worth noting that the suspension of life in cryogenic stasis is at the heart of art and seed banking alike. the ensuing problematic of temporal disruption, which risa cromer (2019) productively engages in a case where frozen embryos are imbued with personhood and thus thinking of them as property amounts to enslavement, also comes back to haunt historical collections in seed banks under changing regimes of international governance and intellectual property. in addition to being frozen, the very capacity for disembodiment, alienation, and circulation—far from the bodies that produced them—of both gametes and seeds, is an axiomatic unifying factor. building on these initial comparisons, the global fertility chains—both human and plant—share another feature in that the direction of flow of value and body parts are skewed such that the global south is overwhelmingly the provider of labor and bodies in service of reproduction, fertility chains are thus structured by geographies of uneven development (vertommen, pavone, and nahman 2021). susan newman and michal nahman’s (2020) recent work, through the example of the first commercialized breast milk production from india to distribution in australia, adds to this rich literature in both plant and human reproduction that fits this pattern of the flow of commodified care. the third node of comparison between the botanic and human global fertility chains pertains to the national and international governance that shapes the flow of value and labor. while the comparison between the global flow of plants and humans is more suited to studies of migration, “naturalization,” invasion, and settlement, the disembodied form in which seeds—technically understood to be fertilized embryos—are moved around the world and saved in frozen vaults makes for a reasonable point of reference to arts, which share the same technology and logics of disembodiment.   in this paper i dwell on the current struggles of a fertility chain of seeds in australia that emerged out of the need to seek legitimacy for a key colonial institution—the botanic garden—in the form of the neoliberal seed bank. even as changes in international regulations attempt to create avenues for justice through the distribution of credit and wealth in exchange for access to indigenous plants, i argue that the replacement of long-term public funding with neoliberal competitive grants reprioritizes the focus of seed banking towards making more new collections instead of caring for the seeds that are already under their purview. i will show that the necropolitical decision to let collections of seeds die from neglect is an echo of the colonial violence against the indigenous people from whose land the plants were, and continue to be, extracted. while colonial plant movements are associated with exploitative control, newer plant extractions for seed banking are shielded from rebuke because they are imbued with the unquestionably positive valence of “biodiversity conservation.”   australia faces seemingly contradictory challenges when it comes to the future of plants, food, and agriculture. on one hand, since most of the crops grown and consumed in australia come from plants and animals whose progenitors were imported, maintaining access to genetic diversity from outside australia continues to be considered crucial to breeding new crops that can withstand the challenges of climate change. this explains the continued interest in “invited invasions,” like that of the jacaranda, into the australian body politic (cardozo and subramaniam 2013). on the other hand, as the island nation comes into its own identity, australia has long been self-fashioning as unique from its colonial roots, with specific ecological constraints and advantages. biosecurity in the name of conservation has taken on a powerful valence because so many of australia’s fauna and flora are not found elsewhere and are threatened—think koalas and bushfires. news stories with titles such as “johnny depp’s dogs face death in australia” are testaments to how seriously australia takes its biosecurity (bbc 2015). anthropologist patrick wolfe’s (2006) work reminds us to regard the anxieties about preserving uniquely australian naturescapes as entwined with the purposeful, systematic, and ongoing erasure of the indigenous people from the land. in addition, emily o’gorman and thom van dooren, thinking with philosopher val plumwood, state that australian farms enact the policing of a border between nature and culture by continuing to eradicate (but always failing to do so) “wild” animals—understood as pests—because they do not fit the logic of settler-colonial mastery over the world—in this case, farm (2017, 2). i will show that efforts to capture and control botanic futures continue practices of alienation but do so under the valence of a universalizing greater, sometimes planetary, good.   i am inspired by the tripartite rubric of biological collection offered by bronwyn parry, which explores the dynamics of collection along three key axes: acquisition, accumulation, and regulated recirculation (2004, 15). this analytic is particularly helpful in following the flow and trajectories of collected botanic bodies as they pass through the fertility chain in time. elsewhere, i write about accumulation through practices of concentration, purification, and care in seed bank laboratories (chacko 2019a). here, i focus on how acquisition and recirculation are caught in between differing cosmopolitics of human-plant relations because of how colonial durabilities reverberate across the botanical supply chain. this paper moves in three registers. i begin with the history of the brisbane botanic gardens and follow the challenges and articulations of the processes of acquisition that it engendered in queensland, australia. i stay with the question of access, which is an increasingly fraught space of contention. today, efforts made to keep native australian flora and charismatic fauna alive stand in awkward tension with the necropolitical history of the elimination of aboriginal life and the ongoing suppression of aboriginal rights and dignity (wolfe 1994, 2006). the imperative to collect was always juxtaposed with the projects of introduction. this dual flow of plant material out of and into the colony forms the basis of the botanic fertility chain. it served both as enrollment in the colonial botanic networks centralized from the royal botanic gardens, kew, england (henceforth kew), as well as, enhancement of the political economy of the colony of queensland.   in the second part of the paper, i track australian botanic chains into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to uncover how the newly formed australian seed bank partnership (asbp), between the colonial actor kew and a consortium of botanic gardens in australia, created a patronage regime that shapes the stakes of collecting under the ecopolitical valence of conservation. building on interviews with curators, scientists, administrators, i analyze the anxieties and troubles faced by these carers of seeds. rather than taking the worlding practice of seed banking as unambiguously “good,” through opening up their concerns, i work to “slow down” an analysis of how institutions rationalize engaging in these neocolonial alliances despite having “the best intentions” (stengers 2005, 995). i take inspiration from scholars who have questioned the value in postulating a universalizing concept of “ethics” or “dignity” in the flows of human fertility (nahman 2008) to take seriously the intentions of those for whom what is at stake in reconnecting botanic fertility chains is nothing less than their institutional survival. in the final section of the article, i consider the changes in international regulations intended to provide justice to the “traditional owners” of “plant genetic resources.” i argue that the totalizing power of “climate crisis” and the neoliberal piecemeal funding model makes it easier, if not sometimes prudent, for scientists and administrators of historical collections like seed banks and gardens to sidestep responsibility towards reconciliation. here, i think with and modify carrie friese’s take that “media spectacles regarding technoscientific making of zoo animals is meant to bring funding for the zoo” to make a similar case for botanic gardens, where participation in futuristic technoscientific enterprises like seed banking serves to generate additional sources of income (2013, 66). in light of the growing imperative towards reconciliation and recognition of aboriginal rights, attempts are being made to think about the use of historic collections and making of new ones. how historical and contemporary biological accessions are collected, maintained, distributed, and used is both a legal and political live wire. why then would botanic gardens across australia maintain close collaborative ties and, in some cases, connect new links in global fertility chains with an organization, like kew, famous for its role in maintaining extractive botanic relations? my contribution to the literature on colonial global fertility chains is to show what comes into clear relief when plants, rather than humans, are made central in the narrative of extraction, commodification, alienation, and neoliberal control. by paying attention to the history of botanic fertility chains that allow plants to be collected, stored, shared, and then left to languish in some cases, i show how the slow iterative violence (nixon 2011) of endeavors like plant collecting can illustrate “imperial durability” (stoler 2016) as an ongoing “structure not an event” (wolfe 2006, 388).   stringing the colonial botanic chains brisbane’s jacarandas were introduced in 1864 by walter hill (1819–1904), the first curator of the brisbane botanic gardens (now called the city botanic gardens). born in scots dyke, scotland, hill was apprenticed as a gardener at the royal botanic garden edinburgh, before accepting a position in 1843 as the foreman of propagation and new plant departments at the pinnacle of botanical science, the royal botanic gardens, kew (journal of the kew guild 1904). much scholarly attention has been paid to both the processes of plant acquisitions in the colonial context (schiebinger 2009; bleichmar 2012; osseo-asare 2014), and the re-circulation of expertise in the form of administrators, curators, and botanists (grove 1996; endersby 2008; schaffer et al. 2009). starting with the jacaranda, it is the aim of this paper to examine the enduring logics of colonialism (stoler 2016) that pervade the historiography of plant extraction (parry 2004; hayden 2003). the jacarandas and hill are entwined in a fertile chain. after nearly ten years of working at kew, hill sought a position as the curator of the cambridge botanic garden, for which he received a recommendation letter from the director of the kew gardens, william hooker. unsuccessful in this application and with little hope for upward mobility at kew, hill and his wife, jane, migrated to sydney on board the maitland in october 1851. with skills in acclimatizing plants, and the experience of having worked at a focal node in the vast imperial network of botanic fertility chains, hill was ready to be woven inextricably into the threads of the colonial tapestry. in 1855 he was chosen to be the first curator of the newly established botanic garden in brisbane. more than five hundred miles from sydney, brisbane represented the northern outpost of the colony of new south wales (evans 2007). with land (nine acres) and a stipend (£500), hill set out to acclimatize plants from around the world that might suit the subtropical biogeography of brisbane.4 jacarandas are just one example of this acclimatizing fervor (osborne 2000) but have captured the public imaginary because of their striking color.   perhaps one of hill’s most famous plantings of jacaranda in the brisbane botanic gardens was captured in the painting under the jacaranda, by r. godfrey rivers in 1903 (figure 2). the painting shows two women and one man dwarfed under a magnificent jacaranda in full bloom. on close inspection, the painting reveals a familiar domestic scene of a seated couple taking tea served by a uniformed standing woman. painted just three years after the independence of australia, the painting captures two critical features of the settler colony: (1) living introductions (of both human and plant species) are thriving; (2) everyday social norms, hierarchies, and routines are not just maintained but flourishing. the towering purple-flowered tree is an icon of subtropicality, while the tea set is an anchor linking the space to britain, via another crucial plant of the empire: tea. the culture represented by the tea set makes the tree seem at home within the settled nation. while this iconic tree was blown down by a cyclone in 1980, the botanic garden continues to be a central site where the enterprise of early colonial history is made evident through botanic traces.   figure 2. r. godfrey rivers under the jacaranda 1903 (oil on canvas, reproduced with permission of the queensland art gallery, brisbane)   trees like the jacaranda were introduced to places far from their origins but are now a part of the fabric of the entangled postcolonial and settler-colonial experience. according to the website environmental weeds of australia, the jacaranda was “naturalized” in 1987. naturalization here signifies a moment of transition where an introduced “foreign” or “exotic’” plant is successful at self-propagation outside the nurturing influence of humans. the plant for the first time is freed from the chain of human control and is now regarded as natural. ironically, much like new immigrants like myself, the jacaranda is so good at acclimatizing that it is now considered an “environmental weed” in new south wales and queensland. much like the jacaranda, my temporary invitation to stay in australia was contingent on my continuing to stay productively employed at the university of queensland and i am reminded by the immigration permit issued by the department of home affairs that my visa can be cancelled if i “behave in a way that is a risk to somebody in the australian community” (temporary activity (subclass 408) visa 2018). what little familiarity is gained from seeing oneself in the natureculture of a new place through trees must be recalibrated by the realization that we are, the jacaranda and i, both examples of “invited invasions” (cardozo and subramaniam 2013) that walk the line between exotic species valued for what they bring to a new place, naturalized species that are now “at home” but already weeds because they can never fully belong, and noxious weeds that threaten the body of the nation.5   aside from the jacaranda, hill is credited for having introduced the mango, prickly pear, ginger, poinciana, tamarind, and mahogany, and for coordinating expeditions to the coastal north and interior, bringing back plants that he thought would be of value, and pouring them into the kew pipeline (langton 2016, 236). success for colonial naturalists was achieved not only through the extraction of useful or novel specimens out of the colony, but also in being able to show that they were able to acclimatize and profit from the plants sent to them from elsewhere. in 1858 hill’s successful propagation of the macadamia, collected from north queensland, within the brisbane botanic gardens’ collection marked the onset of the tree’s commercialization and export. when queensland separated from new south wales in 1859, hill was appointed to the position of colonial botanist, which legitimized his direct communication with kew. colonial metropoles disciplined contributors to the colonial botanic chain in the appropriate means of collecting, preserving, and transporting specimens (chacko 2018; endersby 2001). only through the continued voyages and land expeditions which brought new plants to name, propagate, commercialize, and market could the colonial botanist add value to the imperial state and make contributions towards the nascent natural sciences (schiebinger and swan 2007, 2).   achille mbembe articulates the difference between trading post colonies and settler colonies as one of pure exploitation in the case of the former and “an extension of the nation” in the case of the latter (2019, 11). the botanical stakes are thus different in settler colonies. colonial botanists, such as hill, were tasked with managing the exploration of the place they now called home, what staffan müller-wille calls “colonialism turned inward” (2005, note 10). north queensland represented an unknown but latent landscape onto which the somewhat contradictory desires of exploration and settlement could be enacted. on one hand, hill, as natural philosopher, was responsible for “discovering” many “new” plants that could be enrolled into the botanic chain, but as a colonial operative, he was also a central figure in the selection of 500,000 acres of land to create the vast sugarcane plantations of queensland. settler colonialism is not about just specific moments of collection, “invasion is a structure not an event” (wolfe 2006, 388). equally proud of his contributions in botany and economy, hill sent a sample of the first sugar manufactured in queensland to london in 1862, as a proof of concept that the colony could be a productive and fertile contributor to the empire (journal of the kew guild 1904). the relationship between agriculture and botany is even more direct in settler colonial worlds as successful—commercial—farming was crucial to the survival of the settlers (langton 2016, 224). extracting indigenous knowledge of the uses and toxicities of plants allowed settlers to create the vast agricultural industries of sugarcane, cattle, and sheep (evans 2007; franklin 2007, 120).   the idea that exploration and collection were necessary for survival reveals the necropolitics of the settler colony (mbembe 2019; kauanui 2016). the success of hill’s missions of collection and expansion of arable land hinged on the alienation of plants and land from their indigenous custodians. scholars of the history of australia have shown that early settlers benefited from the acquisition of indigenous naturecultural knowledge, all the while eliminating life, both human and more-than-human, to make space for the expansion of the colony (wolfe 2006; langton 2016). in hill’s obituary published in the journal of the kew guild, an anecdotal story tells of a collecting expedition from keppel bay to cape york during which most of his party of seven were killed by “the natives” (1904, 207). after describing in horrific detail the condition of one of the deceased, the obituary confirms that hill and his unnamed aboriginal guide were the sole survivors. the reason that hill was spared death was not his bravery or marksmanship but his choice to collect plants alone and up a mountain rather than alongside the beach like the others. the value of the plants found is increased by the deaths of the white people who were sacrificed in collecting them. missing in the record is any mention of the indigenous people who were undoubtedly also killed by the expedition party. the description in hill's obituary juxtaposes the naivete of the european naturalist against the purported savagery of the indigenous people. on one hand, this story reifies the bravery needed in continuing to collect, knowing that it could be fatal, and on the other hand, the need to bring death to the indigenous people first: for, if not swiftly delivered, death would surely come to the white settlers.6   while the historical record captures the accessions as plants in the botanical garden, and names the white settlers killed during the expeditions, it is silent on the question of indigenous deaths. mbembe writes about the subterfuges employed to exonerate the supposedly retaliatory violence perpetrated by white settlers against indigenous people:   the crimes were deeds performed by lone-acting individuals, who themselves were racked with fear owing to the animalistic behavior and the extreme, barbaric acts of their victims, and were thus overcome by the threat to their lives posed by these savages; the horrors experienced by the colonized scarcely carried any weight as regards the misery they would endure when left to their own devices; what had been accomplished in the name of civilization (economic development, technological progress, schooling, health, christianization, and assimilation) worked to offset the negative—and allegedly inevitable—effects of the colonial project. (2019, 127)   the historical record may be silent, but contemporary artist from badtjala, fraser island, queensland, fiona foley brings histories of violence and segregation of the indigenous people into unassuming botanical sculptures that dot the public art landscape of brisbane. outside the brisbane magistrates court, her sculpture witnessing to silence (2001) takes the form of a circle of long-stemmed lotus and paving stones that list the ninety-four sites of where aboriginal people were massacred in queensland: a botanic chain bearing witness to the violence of settlement. there is a second violence necessary to the creation of colonial botanic chains that is intertwined by the collecting imperatives of colonial botanists. this estrangement is coproduced in the mentions of indigenous peoples in the botanic record as threats to collectors in the places the collectors sought new and useful plants for empire. the forced alienation of indigenous people, under the guise of “protection,” from their naturecultures by practices of capture and incarceration haunts the history of australia (kidd 1997). the indigenous human-plant relations that scaffold the ecology of north queensland are neither recognized nor articulated within the colonial botanic chain save for mention of local guides who accompanied the expeditions. marcia langton (2016) has shown that aboriginal communities in the cape york peninsula had extensive knowledge of plants, including complex uses, seasonal variations, and ecological relations, most of which were lost to them in the decades following colonization. wolfe’s concept of the “logic of elimination” (2006, 387) explains the ease by which indigenous lives could be sacrificed for the settler-colonial project of territorial expansion, but i am drawn to necropolitics as a means of understanding what comes after death. in this case, it describes the systems of protectors, superintendents, missions, and reserves created to manage aboriginal life in the latter half of the nineteenth century. these structures were instrumental in the reduction of indigenous people “to a state of pauperization and widespread malnutrition during the most violent periods of the frontier and increasingly so during the ‘pacification’ phases, when food and ration stratagems were implemented by the protectorates as critical weapons in a war of attrition” (langton 2016, 223).   figure 3. fiona foley, black opium, 2006. (state library of queensland, photo by author.)   here too, another of foley’s artworks creates the possibility of bearing witness to the history of forced removals. the permanent installation into the ceiling of the state library of queensland, black opium (2006) consists of 777 aluminium poppy stems arranged in a figure eight: the infinity symbol (figure 3). the unusual placement of the artwork has the dual effect of, at first, being rendered into the background, but on recognizing that it is visible from every floor of the library, it becomes a haunting presence that is impossible to ignore, getting bigger with each ascending floor. through the symbolism of an infinity made of dark poppies, foley references the ongoing, enduring, and brutal history of settlement in queensland. black opium points specifically to the aboriginals protection and restriction of the sale of opium act 1897 and 1901, which was the legislation crucial to the creation of the system of protectorates in queensland, one of which, bogimbah creek reserve, was built on foley’s ancestral badtjala land and became a “closed institution” of incarceration for any aboriginal person deemed “unproductive or troublesome” (1897). expanding on wolfe’s statement that “invasion is a structure not an event,” j. kēhaulani kauanui writes, “settler colonialism is not simply a form of genocide” (2016). instead, kauanui argues that it is the alienation of the indigenous people from land (through forced removals), knowledge (through re-education), and naturecultures (through controlled rations) that leads to “the elimination of the native as native.” as bruce pascoe (2014) has convincingly argued, the idea that indigenous people were not aware of or intentionally relating to the non-human life in australia is contradicted by the first-person narratives of the early white settlers who themselves described and benefited from the agricultural practices of the indigenous people they encountered on their expeditions. it matters that the historical, anthropological, and archaeological records have difficulty with recognizing indigenous practices of more-than-human relating as “agriculture” in australia, because doing so serves the rationale of settler-colonial “civilization” and “progress.” the narrative of “discovery,” the valorization of being first to find, use, and make meaning of, which bestows the privilege of naming—and today owning—is incompatible with a cosmopolitics that recognizes indigenous knowledge and custodial relations with the more-than-human (blaser and de la cadena 2018).   even contemporary forms of political redress and reconciliation fail to imagine liveliness outside the western paradigm. a case in queensland (mabo v queensland 1993) initiated the changes to the australian common law doctrine (native title act 1993) that recognizes indigenous australians (both aboriginal australian and torres strait islander people) have rights and interests to their land that derive from their traditional laws and customs. in practice, the effect of the native title act has put the onus of responsibility to prove connections to country on indigenous people. this process instrumentalizes anthropological and archaeological evidence derived from the extractive practices of settler-colonial history, which had led to the impoverishment of indigenous people in the first place (wolfe 1994). scholars have argued that the success of indigenous communities in being able to mobilize the native title act to gain mainstream recognition of their rightful relations with land is a false victory because it serves to legitimize the settler-colonial nation’s authority to bestow rights to those for whom sovereignty was never ceded (foley 2020; wolfe 1994). in the next sections, i follow the (dis)similarities between colonial botanic chains and current-day ones, which requires a theoretical reorientation to a new frame of reference around global unity against the threat of climate change, held in tension with an increasingly nationalistic and proprietary regulatory landscape in the extraction and use of plant bodies.   reconnecting broken chains the story of brisbane’s botanic gardens (there are now three) is not unique. the patterns of settlement in australia can be matched by the creation of botanical gardens throughout the fledgling colony (sydney 1818, hobart 1818, melbourne 1846, adelaide 1855). they were, after all, important grounds to test the viability of a settlement. through the twentieth century, each garden has continued its operation of acclimatizing foreign plants while showcasing ones found and made symbolic of that region. a lot has changed for the gardens and their role in the botanic chains. while they no longer occupy a pivotal role in the economic botany of a state, gardens continue to be the arbiters of taxonomic knowledge while remaining as iconic reminders of a more genteel era. now, agribusiness companies —like mitsui & co. (grain) and csr sugar—and public breeding programs —like the grains research and development corporation—are responsible for the majority of the plants introduced into commercial agriculture so the botanic gardens in brisbane do not wield the same political power or attract the same funding they once might have done. recognizing their role in creating the unequal distribution of wealth through economic botany, garden administrators along with international organizations such as the food and agriculture organization of the united nations came together to create international regulations to address how value and remuneration are afforded in botanic fertility chains. these regulations are the convention on biological diversity (cbd), 1993, that endows nations with sovereign ownership over the living beings within their borders, and the nagoya protocol, 2014, which requires the negotiations of consent and benefit sharing when extracting organisms for use in industry. in the case of settler colonies, these regulations must be seen as a resurgence of “biopolitics” (foucault 2003) from their necropolitical roots. the creation of value around the intellectual property of botanical knowledge and specimens has had confounding effects. some proponents claim that the granting of patent and varietal rights is an incentive to innovation in agriculture, while others show that the rights-based regime restricts access to living things and thus has a chilling effect on scientific research (chapman and heald 2020; jaffe and lerner 2006). in addition, since the prime movers in the space of agriculture are not governments but corporations, it has been extremely difficult to implement these regulations with any noticeable effect.   when their influence in the economy of plants reduced, gardens had to innovate in their collaborations and activities to stay alive. more and more, they have come to rely on relationships with partners—like kew—to sponsor collecting expeditions under ever tightening rules of acquisition. unsurprisingly, the relationships between kew and each of the gardens have changed to reflect australia’s proprietary claims, as a party to the cbd, over the living things within its borders and territorial waters. kew has continued to have ties not only to each local garden but also to the idea of a national garden, evidenced at the moment of inauguration of the australian national botanic gardens in canberra in 1949, when both prime minister ben chifley and director of kew, sir edward salisbury, shared the role of planting the first trees.   the colonial ties remain even today, but instead of whole plants transported in wardian cases on imperial ships, today the flow of parts of plants, such as seeds, can be a bureaucratic nightmare. anxieties around biosecurity breaches (straight 2017) and fears of biopiracy of sovereign property have made it very difficult to move plants across borders. however, the valence of new collection and circulation is less overtly about imperial control and capitalist expansion but is couched in the language of survival and “biodiversity conservation.” in addition to their traditional practices of collecting and acclimatizing plants, in the latter half of the twentieth century, many gardens have taken up the practice of banking seeds that they do not want to propagate for lack of space or to minimize the cost of maintaining living collections (chacko 2019b, 3). leading the charge to recognize australia’s uniqueness and the value of “primitive cultigens or land races” was plant geneticist otto frankel (1900–1998), who advocated the importance of safeguarding diversity through seed banking for the “as yet unknown” future (1970, 476). frankel’s call to conserve seeds for the future was motivated by a belief that future science would be able to use this reservoir in their enhanced “precision and scope for identification and transfer of genetic elements” (470).   at its core, every seed bank has a freezer, where seeds are stored for longer than they would naturally stay dormant, but in practice, each bank has its own logic for choosing what seeds to save, and what protocols to follow in preparing and maintaining frozen collections. in england, kew had started placing seeds in cold storage in the 1960s. by the turn of the twenty-first century, they leveraged their experience in freezing seeds with the international awareness about the loss of plant life and diversity into a new facility that both renewed their commitment and cemented their position in leading the charge to safeguard the future of plants (chacko 2019b). it was originally called the millennium seed bank (msb) project, with a prime directive to bank the entirety of the known flora of the united kingdom. recognizing quickly that once that project was accomplished, the expansion of collection could only extend beyond the bounds of the nation-state under carefully negotiated agreements, the project was renamed the millennium seed bank partnership. recentering collaboration in the naming of this facility is purposeful and understood as a political strategy that reopens access to the world, under presumably more egalitarian conditions than in the colonial era; this is what the cbd and nagoya protocol were designed to accomplish. the partnership—now in ninety countries—strengthened ties between kew and gardens around the world, ties that had been loosening since their colonial binds were no longer controlling the flow of plants. the new alliance offered three crucial incentives: (1) funding to make new collections in partner organization countries; (2) technology and training in the “correct” ways of collecting, sorting, cleaning, shipping, and organizing collections; and (3) access to the msb vault in england as a space to store a duplicate of each new accession as a back-up collection. the spirit of partnership that underpins these offers and incentives to gardens and other flora-focused organizations in former colonies should not, however, be confused for altruism; it can be more accurately characterized as a form of paternalism. each of the incentives links current practices of seed collection and banking to the forms of patronage and credit offered in the past to sustain the colonial botanic chains (endersby 2008).   damien wrigley is the national coordinator of the australian seed bank partnership (absp), an institution created to consolidate australian interests and efforts in seed banking across botanic gardens. damien explained that between 2002 and 2010, as seed banking was picking up steam in the larger gardens, the only guidance they received was from kew.7 since negotiating agreements between each of the banks was rather cumbersome, kew’s leadership suggested to the australian government the creation of a partnership across the gardens pertaining specifically to their frozen collections; they already have a super organization for botanical gardens called the council of heads of australian botanic gardens. aligned with kew’s strategic scientific plan, this partnership could be the focal point for the negotiations of access to seeds for safeguarding in the msb’s vault. in 2011 the newly formed partnership created their own business plan (absp 2011) that formalized the network of nine seed banks and three related organizations, in their own words, “bridging the gap between policy makers, researchers, seed collectors and on-ground conservation and restoration activities” (absp, n.d.). reinvigorating the impetus to collect, thicken, and redistribute (parry 2004) is a newfound rationale that takes for granted that “seed banks provide a future-proof insurance policy for australia’s unique flora, which is especially important in times of environmental stress” (absp, n.d.). this strategy works in two specific ways. first, the rhetorical power of threat and risk from unknowable future perils are mobilized to legitimize practices that have been ever-present in the history of the colonial project. by prefiguring the hazards of the future, the insurability of flora becomes a question of survival for all. the quickening pace of the climate emergency adds gravity to the need for expediency. stalling this project with tedious bureaucracy is tantamount to inviting death not just for some but for the whole nation and indeed all of humanity. second, using the australian uniqueness of australia’s flora to motivate the united front of the partnership conveniently effaces the question of indigenous custodianship. making natureculture national conforms to the sovereign ownership clause of the cbd (1992, 4) and justifies the exploitation of indigenous people and land for a national cause. consequentially, the responsibility for safeguarding native flora becomes a patriotic imperative for all australians, irrespective of traditional relationship to country.8   since the establishment of the australian partnership, which was designed primarily to smoothly reconnect the continent’s flora to kew, collection has proceeded along the guidelines set forth in the asbp business plan (2011). the plan prioritizes the collection of plants that are endangered, endemic, and economically significant. in our interview, damien confessed that the third criteria for selection was the one about which he felt least secure because the knowledge of the uses of “wild” australian plants is, in his words, “missing.”9 when pushed to consider the indigenous relations that generated this knowledge, he capitulated to a tired but prevalent argument that through the centuries of forced alienation from the land, newly recognized traditional owners of the indigenous plants of australia might themselves be alienated from the traditional knowledge of their ancestors, and that only science could rediscover utility in the flora of australia. each seed bank conducts collecting expeditions with funding, training, and protocols of collection from kew, and in return the banks send a duplicate set of accessioned seeds to the msb. each bank uploads information gathered with each collection to a national registry that does not afford flexibility in terms data fields, so even if there were indigenous knowledge, there is no place for it in the systems of data that accompany the journeying seeds.   as parry has shown, the reduction in public funding to institutions like gardens, museums, and university departments of plant sciences has forced them to entreat alternative sources of funding just to continue to employ their staff (2004, 129). limited by the remits of discrete funding proposals, seed banks find themselves having to meet a majority of their financial needs from these short-term goal-oriented contracts. in the fiscal year 2017–2018 the asbp received funding from the kew for four grant-funded projects, some of which had been going on for five years, totaling nearly $430,000, which amounted to 87 percent of their total income (asbp 2019). the next year, the funding period being over, no new funds were received, and the income of the asbp shrank to just over $3,500. however, since the projects were not yet completed and promises to funders could not be broken for fear of future repercussions, the partnership incurred a deficit of $212,000. fortunately, unspent funds from the previous year could cover the expenses, but what about the future of the australian collections? missing from the promise of long-term security of seed banks is funding to provide care for the future lives of the humans, seeds, and databases that come together to form the seed bank world. the need to create back-up collections at the msb is therefore a result of their denial of long-term funding to partners who facilitate collection and house local collections.   breaking the fertility chains the precarious and sporadic funding model is not unique to the australian seed banks (kloppenburg 2004, 42–44). the competitive and piecemeal style also describes the funding model for large seed banks, including the msb partnership (lewis‐jones 2019). how can the commitment to reinvigorating fertile botanic chains be understood within this logic of scarcity? over coffee, under the shade of a flowerless jacaranda at the university of queensland, experienced agrobotanist bruce pengelly shared his feelings about the abject future of seeds in cold storage in australia.10 bruce was the curator of the australian tropical crops and forages genetic resources centre for nearly twenty years, and in his retirement from institutional employ conducts reviews of seed bank facilities around the world. bruce lamented the unpredictability and discontinuities in funding for securing collections of frozen seeds, denouncing “novelty” and “changing the world” as determining factors in the eyes of those who controlled the funds. he said, “we are forced as a genetic resource community to go for these one-year, two-year grants, and then move on to the next one. after thirty years of doing that, it doesn’t work! you are living on the minimum: it’s like feeding people to stay alive and not to grow. so all you are doing is just staying there.” after pausing for effect, bruce concluded, “there has to be a time where you say stop!” bruce thumped his fist on the coffee table, sending cups clattering and startling a nearby ibis that was hoping to scavenge the last piece of carrot cake from my plate.   i, too, was taken aback but was unsurprised by bruce’s fervor and anger. plant scientists often get excited and animated when it comes to saving seeds, and bruce’s poignant portrayal of the slow violence of letting collections die through neglect brought another example of the effects of the piecemeal funding model (nixon 2011). bruce agreed with my observation that there always seems to be funding for making new collections but not for the maintenance of what has already been stored. having argued in front of committees at the state and federal level, bruce corroborated my suspicion that the gendered care work that is required to have any confidence in the viability of long-term storage is unsupported because it fails the litmus test of immediate results. securing seeds for the long haul is exactly that: slow, long and, ideally, boring. friese (2013) provides helpful language to understand the vagaries of funding that prioritizes “spectacular science,” that gathers public attention and provides newsworthy success stories, as opposed to “basic science,” which promises nothing more than the continuation of slow, incremental, and unremarkable achievements. what surprised me was bruce’s solution for resolving this conundrum. he went as far as saying, “if we can’t work [funding] out in the next five years, we need to make the decision to burn it!” (emphasis mine). and just in case i had not fully grasped the gravity of his proposal, he banged his fist on the table again. this time i laughed, sure that he was joking. but after the people on the nearby table threw me nervous glances, i realized that he was deadly serious. noticing that he had piqued my interest, bruce explained that the strategy of at least threatening to destroy entire collections could be the only hope to mobilize long-term funding. i asked what would happen if his bluff was called, but he was resolute: curators would finally have a definitive answer. for bruce, letting collections slowly die from neglect was far worse than the quick death of incineration. the indignity of having to beg for funding to maintain what to him is a priceless collection betrays shortsightedness in biopolitical governance.   perhaps this most violent action of irrevocably severing the botanic chain by incineration is not the only option. could the plants instead be “rematriated” to the communities from whence they came?11 charlotte kroløkke (2018) writes about how body parts considered waste to some but useful to others provide insight into how power in art is distributed along national and institutional lines. risa cromer uses the example of remaindered embryos that are being “saved” by removing them from the freezer; she suggests that relegation to the freezer is not automatically what people mean when they intend for a collection to be saved (cromer 2018). what if, rather than incineration, “saving” meant to thaw and release back into a natureculture that was willing to reintroduce the seeds to soil?   to bruce and other administrators of “genetic resources,” a nexus of scarcity and loss amplifies the value in the collections. many seeds in cold storage across australian facilities cannot be re-collected or repatriated because the worlds they called home no longer exist. some of the plants have been made extinct or come from environments that would not be able to host them anymore. friese (2013) thinks about whether animals that have been brought back from extinction or “de-extincted species” are the same as the ones that roamed the earth before the extinction event. with the seeds there is an argument to be made that by taking the specimens out of their “time” and “place” and suspending them in relative isolation from their habitat, creating the conditions of their survival that are entirely human driven, we are in fact creating new species, albeit dependent on humans and less ecologically networked ones. in addition, thom van dooren and deborah bird rose (2017) offer mourning as a praxis of coping with extinction rather than the “do something” fervor for de-extinction. they charge us to take the anthropocene seriously but not pretend that we, as individuals, can do anything about it. extinction is already a reality. i find it helpful to juxtapose these considerations of extinction with the ongoing struggle to imagine and claim the survival and endurance of indigenous people despite the best efforts by the settler-colonial impetus to eradicate through enduring violence and toxicity (hoover 2017).   seeds in frozen vaults are examples of what philosopher james griesemer (1990) calls “remnant models”—objects that represent living things but are also examples of them. as material entities that are products of the natural systems under study, these seeds are endowed with the agency to speak for entire species of plants for which there are no “real” counterparts. they are productive fictions representing a natureculture that no longer exists, and the responsibility for preserving them takes on biblical connotations. the desperate valence of this salvage project is not an accident. at a time of political and climate turmoil, seed banks try to leverage the fear of our own extinction into funding the future safety of frozen seeds.12 the limited success of this strategy speaks to a fundamental difference between seed banking and other forms of cryopreservation. while some kinds of biobanking require high initial investments in creating the facilities and securing access to the parts of living things, once banked, the collections are considered safe and inert (radin 2017, 74). the seed banks are like other “germ” banks that take for granted the expectation that the seeds in storage, once thawed will be able to germinate, flower, pollinate, and produce new seed. all such stock centers require constant monitoring, reproductive labor, and testing. while protocols vary based on the seed bank, the guidelines put forward by kew, as used in all the seed banks for the asbp, involve testing samples of seeds from each accession every five years. the monumental human labor required to test the hundreds of thousands of accessions is ever increasing with each new deposition. despite the reality that each new accession to the seed bank will also require this exponential labor investment to be secured in perpetuity, a purposeful blindness on the part of funding bodies relegates maintenance work to the profoundly unfundable when compared with the potential latent value of new collections.   the final piece of the complex puzzle in australian seed bank worlds is the awkwardness that still remains relating to the reconciliation of historical collections. the cbd’s recasting of plants growing in australia, even those such as the jacaranda that were introduced by walter hill, as the sovereign property of the state is a gift to scientists in australia. previous botanic flows brought many plants that have thrived in their new surroundings, creating the hybrid natureculture of the settler state. however, a new regulation to govern the use of seeds still maintained as latent resources threatens to reopen colonial wounds. the nagoya protocol directive on access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from their utilization, which came into force on october 12, 2014, took on the mantle of access and benefit-sharing by making it easier to predict the conditions for access to genetic resources from a place of origin and by ostensibly providing a clear articulation of how these “genetic resources” would be researched, developed, and monetized in the future. for seed banks, the nagoya protocol, taken together with the cbd, has different kinds of effects. since the cbd has been in effect, collecting plant material outside australia has required adherence to the laws of the countries of the plants’ origin. however, in order to develop or conduct research on historically banked seeds, compliance with nagoya depends on the interpretation of the language of the protocol. the opinion that serves the interests of users of the historical collections is that only materials collected after the date that the protocol came into effect would be regulated rather than new uses of historical collections. however, some countries, such as norway and south africa, have taken an extended view that even new use of historically collected materials are under the purview of the nagoya access and benefit-sharing scheme (sherman and henry 2020). this would mean that material brought through colonial botanic chains would need to reconnect the ties that were broken by the alienation of colonial extraction. it remains to be seen if this will be the success in redressing the inequalities of the past for which justice-oriented feminist science has been yearning. unlike for colonial botanists who generally needed the whole plant to do anything useful, the new needs of the biotech industry can be met by disembodied parts of living things, such as dna sequences. the reduction to parts of living things has a confounding effect in the efforts to trace the origin and consequently to rethink ownership or rights (parry 2004, 100–01). as parry shows, despite the challenges and reluctance of indigenous communities to participate, the practice of collection has continued through changes in the regulatory regimes (103).   tracking the journeys of the digital fertility chains is the next logical step of inquiry (leonelli 2016). this tracking involves finding the salient biological information as well as the bureaucratic traces of permission slips, agreements, and consent forms. in australia, the recognition of indigenous rights and ownership of traditional knowledge has changed the protocols used by gardens and banks to collecting from indigenous territory. nowadays, care must be taken to negotiate access and benefits sharing agreements and prior informed consent must be received from the traditional custodians of the land before any collection is attempted. in interviews with garden, seed bank, and herbarium managers, it is made clear to me that that while they are sympathetic towards past injustices towards indigenous people, the arranging of these agreements levies an administrative burden that they can ill afford. the alternatives are to collect on state-owned land where, at least in queensland, standard material transfer agreements and permits are de rigueur, and on private land where negotiations with owners can be transactional. when there are workarounds that can circumvent the need to engage in delicate relations with indigenous communities, the logical and fiscally prudent decision is often non-engagement.13   whether by choosing to collect on state-owned land or by partnering with a country that has not enforced the nagoya protocol, botanical collection is possible for those who can gain funding, and cleverly avoid spaces that require burdensome paperwork. north queensland is again the focus of one such collection project: the search for wild rice. a recent expedition from the university of queensland sought to find grasses related to rice, to better understand how they have adapted to the hot swamps that characterize the area (hamilton 2015). neither seeds nor whole plants were the aim of this collection—just leaves—for that was all the scientists needed to characterize the specimen’s genetic relations and value. collecting only on government land and with the appropriate permits seemed to satisfy the researchers ethical obligations. after all, the nagoya protocol has not been ratified by australia in part because it has not yet been determined how the different state and local actors will interpret the historical use clause. the idea that the land was never ceded to the state from the indigenous people could not be entertained because it would have paralyzed the university’s ability to continue its research. it should not surprise me to see how easy it is for the best intentions to fall away when threatened with inconvenience.   conclusion in late 2020 my “invited invasion” to australia ended in an anxious flurry of covid-19 driven diplomatic and bureaucratic actions. my visa had expired, but i had to wait for a government repatriation flight as the commercial flights to india had been cancelled. the upside of the delay meant that just before i left, as a perfect bookend to my stay in brisbane, i got to see the jacarandas bloom again (figure 4). in this paper i introduced, situated, and narrated the history of a botanic chain in which i am intertwined through my life as a postcolonial subject, and my study of botanic gardens and seed banks. in slowing down how these chains were created, broken, and reconnected according to changing regimes of biopolitical control, i learn how to interpret the language of international regulations that attempt to move in the direction of recognizing indigenous knowledge, traditional ownership, while at the same time, take on goals of “biodiversity conservation.” i have argued that many seed banks are not equipped to care for seeds in the long term (let alone the immediate future). instead, seeds in vaults carry the necropolitics of slowly dying due to lack of long-term funding for their care, echoing the ongoing colonial violence and neglect endured by the indigenous people from whose land the plants were, and continue to be, extracted. juxtaposing examples from my fieldwork with seed bank carers and the art of fiona foley (badtjala, fraser island), i have shown some similarities and differences between the global fertility chains that pertain to human and botanic reproductive histories and futures. while valuation and commodification are easily achieved with regards to plants, questions of future and historic ownership and control are fraught spaces of dispute and agitation. i clarified some attempts being made to address the unequal distribution of power in the collection and commodification of plants through a platform of distributing justice. but as i have shown in the previous section, workarounds and loopholes allow extractive business-as-usual to continue unhampered. to slow down is construed, at best, as an annoying hindrance to the progress of science and, at worst, as a denial of the crisis of climate change and food (in)security.   figure 4: under the jacaranda, 2020 (photo by author)   notes 1 turrbal is the aboriginal australian language and also the name of the people who are the traditional custodians of the region that comprises present-day brisbane, australia. the place, meanjin, is also interchangeably used to refer to the people.   2 for an example of the interoperability of plant parts from around the world for the purpose of controlling the political economy of plants, see saraiva 2019.   3 cromer, hardin, and nyssa (2020) write about how “saving” as an ideal is cropping up in a diversity of spaces of concern.   4 nine acres was a lot of space to be governing and £500 was a sizable fund. for reference, in 1941, the royal botanic gardens, kew was fifteen acres and its director, william hooker, received an annual salary of £300.   5 i am cognizant of my privilege in having been “invited” to live and work in this place when as recently as 2013 over 10,000 asylum seekers were incarcerated in detention facilities, on and off shore in australia. as of november24, 2021, there were 1,440 people in detention facilities (see refugee council of australia 2021).   6 for a more thorough explanation of the purported savagery of indigenous people, see pandian 2009.   7 this section is based on interviews and correspondence with damien wrigley conducted in 2020.   8 there is a stark contrast here between the way that indigenous food sovereignty is enacted and envisioned in the settler colonies of australia versus the united states. whereas foods collectively understood as being “originally” from the americas are hugely successful and a major part of the food ways of the whole world (think of corn, tomatoes, potatoes, etc.), indigenous australian foods are valorized for their yet undiscovered potential (think of the kakadu plum and wild rice).   9 susannah chapman reminds me that this paper could be rethought through sara ahmed’s what’s the use? (2019) and particularly the statement, “the more a path is used, the more a path is used” (41). the history of botanic collection is an example of a process that, despite all the myriad threats, violence, alienation, and difficulty, continues to happen because it continues to happen. i am grateful for this provocation.   10 this section is based on interviews and correspondence with bruce pengelly conducted in 2020.   11 inspired by elizabeth hoover, i use the term rematriated rather than repatriated to imagine how the former signifies connection, nurture, and home for the seeds rather than the valence of ownership, patrimony, and patrilineality that the latter implies. for the return of human body parts to their originary places, see jardine, kowal, and bangham 2019; cromer, hardin, and nyssa 2020.   12 there is a striking similarity between this salvage doctrine and the efforts made to collect indigenous blood referenced in radin 2017.   13 as i prepared this manuscript, changes have taken place in queensland’s legislation pertaining to the nagoya protocol. in response to the cbd, queensland’s parliament passed the biodiscovery act 2004, which streamlined the process of extraction of living material considered useful to industry, “to encourage the development, in the state, of value added biodiscovery; and to ensure the state, for the benefit of all persons in the state, obtains a fair and equitable share in the benefits of biodiscovery.” on august 11, 2020, the queensland parliament passed the biodiscovery and other legislation amendment act 2020 to amend the biodiscovery act 2004, including in the amendment a traditional knowledge obligation that “requires that a person takes all reasonable and practical steps to only use traditional knowledge for biodiscovery with the agreement of the custodian of the knowledge.” while this may satisfy the benefit sharing and informed consent stipulation of the nagoya protocol, if i have learned anything from the history of 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    original research from criminal man to carceral body: an ethnography of intake in new york city jails     ariel ludwig university of houston ariel.ludwig@gmail.com     abstract this article calls for an abolitionist turn in science and technology studies (sts) in order to engage with mass incarceration and the carceral-industrial-complex. based on my ethnographic fieldwork in new york city jails, this article sets out to (1) argue for an abolitionist sts that intervenes in the racialized logics of “criminal man”; (2) offer the carceral body as arising from this abolitionist intervention into mass incarceration; and (3) illustrate how ontological multiplicities and critical phenomenology might be deployed as abolitionist sts tools. the premise is that ending mass incarceration requires philosophical interventions that resist the current racist, capitalist framework of the carceral-industrial-complex by disrupting the very foundations of reality. abolitionist sts arises out of feminist and critical race sts as an intervention not only into criminology, but also into social theory’s ontological turn by attending to the interplay of carceral epistemologies and ontologies. when multiplicities, experientialities, complexities, contradictions, and power dynamics are drawn out, abolition is no longer an undoing but a proliferation that disinvests and contravenes carceral logics.     keywords carceral body, feminist science and technology studies, abolition, ontology, criminology, critical phenomenology, jail     introduction i write this article in a moment of pandemic and protest against police violence and the carceral-industrial-complex (cic). mass incarceration in the united states (us) has increasingly been recognized as an apparatus of the state that cannot be extricated from the legacies of slavery (alexander 2017; childs 2015; saleh-hanna 2017) and colonialism (stone-mediatore 2019). there are nearly 6.5 million people incarcerated or under correctional supervision in the us (maruschak, minton, and bureau of justice statistics 2020). the racial and ethnic disparities surrounding who is incarcerated reveals the white supremacy of the cic. for instance, one out of every three black men will be sentenced to prison (sentencing project 2018). when considering the human toll, the impact of the cic is unfathomable at this scale. it is the moral heft of this racial oppression that has brought people to the streets in protest.   i watch this moment with cautious hope that in mourning the systematic loss of black lives to the cic that this movement becomes a pivot point. the momentum holds within it demands for abolitionist, rather than “reformist,” logics. as angela davis has noted, the history “of the prison is a history of reform” (1988, 22). racialized technologies have facilitated reform through the promise of new and humane modes of incarceration and e-carceration (arnett 2019; jones 2014; williams 2019).   this article arises out of feminist science and technology studies (sts) and calls for an abolitionist turn that intervenes in the epistemologies, or knowledge structures, that sustain mass incarceration (pollock and subramaniam 2016). it draws from my ethnographic fieldwork in new york city jails, the second largest jail system in the us (haag 2019). based on this research, this article sets out to (1) argue for an abolitionist sts that intervenes in the racialized logics of “criminal man”; (2) offer the carceral body as arising from this abolitionist intervention into mass incarceration; and (3) illustrate how ontological multiplicities and critical phenomenology might be deployed as abolitionist sts tools.   the article begins with an introduction to the theoretical frames relied upon—abolition, ontological multiplicities, and critical phenomenology. i then provide a broad overview of criminology to illustrate this article’s intervention. next, i delineate the methods of my ethnographic, dissertation fieldwork. this is followed by three vignettes to which ontological multiplicities, critical phenomenology, and then both are applied. together, these vignettes support the central argument for an abolitionist sts that intervenes in the epistemologies that sustain the cic.   background abolition works against mass incarceration (mathiesen 2014; ruggiero 2010). dylan rodríguez (2019), an ethnic studies scholar, defines it as “a radical reconfiguration of justice, subjectivity, and social formation that does not depend on the existence of either the carceral…or carceral power as such (a totality of state-sanctioned and extrastate relations of gendered racial-colonial dominance)” (1576). here, feminist abolition works towards a future in which race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, dis/ability, citizenship status, gender, and sexuality are no longer sites of violent state control.   abolition has far-reaching implications; as ruth wilson gilmore delineates, “prison is not a building ‘over there’ but a set of relationships that undermine…everyday lives everywhere” (2007, 242). this leads to the call for a restructuring of socio-political and economic structures to ameliorate the dehumanization of racism and the perpetuation of racial categories (calathes 2017; gilmore 2007). i argue for the incorporation of an abolitionist sts that takes aim at the carceral logics insinuated in the foundations of western knowledge production (pollock and subramaniam 2016). such an approach is premised upon the understanding that science is situated and has values (haraway 1991; harding 2008).   feminist sts holds that bodies and minds are neither epistemological effects nor singular entities, but rather assemblages of multiplicities shaped in relation to broader forces. the abolitionist sts framework offered here demonstrates the potential of integrating ontological multiplicities and critical phenomenology. philosophical approaches rooted in ontological monisms take objects/beings as unitary and knowable. such monisms serve as the premise for “criminal man.” in contrast, this analysis borrows from annemarie mol’s (2002) approach to ontological multiplicities that are enacted through practices.   broadly, ontology is the study of being/becoming or what is, and when it is multiple, realities proliferate. for instance, during the intake process, urine is collected from incarcerated people and tested for substance use. when the test strip is positive for opioid use, it is something different in each enactment. for corrections officers, it becomes an indicator of a “detox” housing status, which comes with concerns about medication diversion. the nurse will read it as indication of a substance use disorder that must be confirmed and documented. the statistician will pool the urine test results to tell stories about the population. a line on a test strip comes to be an assemblage of multiplicities hanging together (mol 2002).   but why take this approach? if one recognizes that ontologies are multiple, and that their multiplicities have politics, then “reality does not precede the mundane practices,” and thus can be “both open and contested” (mol 1999, 75). drawing out carceral multiplicities is an abolitionist project, as it highlights the ways in which carceral processes enact that which they seek to find (dwyer and moore 2013). from this premise it becomes clear that carceral bodies contain epistemologies, making existences imbricated—undoing one necessarily affects the other. when reality is neither unitary nor fixed, bodies become part of an ontological flow. this flow opens carceralities to radical change, making it an important component of an abolitionist sts that intervenes in reality itself (mol 1999).   these ontological multiplicities are augmented by lisa guenther’s (2013) conceptualization of critical phenomenology. phenomenology is the study of experience, which guenther bolsters by integrating personal experiences with the complexities of structural “intersubjectivity” and the “textures of social life” (2013, xiii). critical phenomenology binds the experiential, the collective, and the systemic from which the embodied effects of incarceration can be contextualized. in doing so, critical phenomenology resists the individualization of traditional phenomenology by connecting the experiential to the relational. for instance, guenther establishes that social death is a routinized consequence of mass incarceration. she suggests that this form of death is enacted through forced isolation and/or eliminated privacy, both of which deprive people of “constitutive relationality” (guenther 2013, 151). guenther further ties such carceral conditions to the social death of slavery. critical phenomenology, thus, provides abolitionist sts with the tools to disrupt the individualization of carceral subjecthood. it simultaneously draws out the moral imperatives of disrupting the sufferings caused by mass incarceration, while pointing to the socio-epistemological structures that perpetuate it.   abolitionist sts is tasked with accounting for the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability, while simultaneously recognizing that the carceral is always, already insinuated in such constructs (benjamin 2016; zurn 2019). here, abolitionist sts is a response to ruha benjamin’s call for “abolitionist consciousness” and “conceptualizing efforts to exercise freedom and agency” (2016, 151) arising from critical race sts. it also establishes the challenge to think beyond the binary of freedom/agency versus incarceration/criminalization. further, abolitionist sts is deployed to problematize western, neoliberal definitions of autonomy by drawing out multiplicities and experientialities (thakor and boyd 2013). moreover, it adds methodological tools aimed at carceral classifications and techno-optimisms that allow the cic to continue in the name of “reform.” abolitionist sts is needed not only to resist ossified carceralities, but also to serve as an epistemology of a propagative otherwise germinated from radical dreams. additionally, abolitionist sts is more than a counter-epistemology, instead calling for engagement with actual practices and sustained activism (ben-moshe 2018).   epistemologies of criminology abolitionist sts is tasked with the urgency of offering interventions in the field of criminology. criminology entered the lexicon in the late 1800s as the science of crime and criminality (rafter 2009). criminology is comprised of explanatory regimes ranging from the biological (e.g., biocriminology, genetic theories) to the social (e.g., social ecology models, conflict theories) to the structural (e.g., queer, convict, critical criminology; rafter, posick, and rocque 2016). the history of criminology has been well delineated by michel foucault and science studies scholars such as piers beirne (1993), nicole rafter (2009), and david arthur jones (1986). these scholars have addressed the assumptions and socio-historical contexts from which crime and the criminal has been rendered deviant, rare, and the exception rather than an inevitability across the lifespan (coyle 2016, 2018).   the history of criminology typically begins with classical criminology that viewed man as rational and calculative, thereby distinct from criminal man (vold, bernard, and snipes 1998). the assumed weighing of costs and benefits not only led to calls for harsher punishments, but also gave rise to the imperative to identify those likely to commit crimes, marking the birth of the pre-crime criminal (beirne 1991, 1993). additionally, early criminology embraced statistics and applied normal distribution, or the bell curve, to identify aberrances from which certain characteristics could reveal an innate criminality (gould 1996).   classical criminology gave way to biocriminological approaches such as cesare lombroso’s work categorizing physiological differences indicating that “born criminals,” “lunatics,” and “the american black” were evolutionary “throwbacks to prehistoric man” (beirne 1993, 148; lombroso 2006). bodily measurements became evidence of heritable criminality, which implies that crime prevention requires removing criminal man from society and the gene pool (beaver, barnes, and boutwell2014; burt and simons 2014). such heritability theories are deeply imbricated with scientific racism and eugenics. these theories target the genetic material of those experiencing sexism, white supremacy, criminalization, xenophobia, ableism, and homophobia (davis and mendieta 2005; richie 2012, rollins 2018).   it is against these waves of criminology that radical (lynch 1997; ross 2009), critical (dekeseredy and dragiewicz 2018; taylor et al. 2013), convict (earle 2016; tietjen 2019), queer (ball 2019; buist and lenning 2016), green (brisman and south 2019; stretesky, long, and lynch 2014), counter-colonial (agozino 2003), and feminist (humphries 2009; musto 2019) criminologists have offered rebuttal. these frameworks offer strong critique from within the field surrounding race, gender, ability, environment, and poverty (schept 2016). broadly, these critical approaches sought to shift the field from individualizing notions of criminality to the structural and constructed.   taking feminist criminology as an example, this branch of criminology began in the late 1960s with the assertion that females had been largely excluded from studies of crime (bowker, chesney-lind, and pollock 1978; chesney-lind 1973). early feminist criminologists called for women to become both scholars and subjects of criminology research (whalley and hackett 2017). they also called for the strengthening of the cic to enhance punishments for crimes against women (e.g., longer sentences for sexual assault; thuma 2015, 2019). later feminist scholars made explicit the social construction of laws and crime (smart 1989). for instance, feminist anti-carceralism arose from the work of incarcerated women, formerly incarcerated women, and feminist activists and scholars working against mass incarceration (michalsen 2019; whalley and hackett 2017). abolitionist feminism engages with the specific ways gender and sexuality are policed and criminalized (coyle and schept 2017; spade 2013; thuma 2015).   these critical waves also led to criminologists applying sts methods and theories to carceral technosocial networks that resisted binaries and embraced assemblages (brown 2006). early on, thomas mathiesen (1974; mathiesen and hjemda 2011), in calling for abolition, was also critical of carceral logics and boundaries, taking aim at the individual and social (e.g., “collective morality”) explanations of crime. criminologists drawing upon sts have called for approaches that attended to the materialities of intersectional oppressions and dynamic assemblages (henne and shah 2015; henne and troshynski 2019). it is upon these recent waves of criminology that abolitionist sts can offer further intervention.   sts and crime on the other side of the disciplinary divide, sts scholars have made important strides in addressing both technologies and frameworks of the criminal justice system (brey, mcguire, and holt 2017). for instance, the technologies of identification and their organizational frames have garnered attention (cole 2002; sengoopta 2003). these studies of technologies expanded to include the social practices of forensic evidence and calls for engagement with cic performativities (kruse 2015; robert and dufresne 2016). additionally, sts scholars have pointed out how carcerality and racialized, nationalist incarceration have seeped into western knowledge-making writ large (benjamin 2019a; browne 2015).   this article builds on the work of these scholars as it draws upon feminist sts to advance abolitionist sts. feminist sts scholars, such as donna haraway, call for us to stay with the trouble and recognize “surplus death” (2016, 134). mass incarceration is a letting die and killing that is accepted when capitalist, colonial, and carceral structures persist. such letting die is especially evident in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, as incarcerated people are at vastly elevated risk (schwartzapfel, park, and demillo 2020; vose, cullen, and lee 2020). however, focusing on periods of epidemic can mask the systemization of suffering and death sewn into the everyday functioning of detention facilities.   to date, sts has not been central to carceral abolition, despite its embrace of contingencies and partialities that leave room for abundances of an otherwise (haraway 2016; strathern 1988). across recent waves of sts, drawing out ontological heterogeneity has facilitated a different sort of becoming. the suggestion here is that a feminist, abolitionist sts will need to delineate connections between the ontological and epistemological. it must also account for the experiential, the embodied, and the structural (pitts-taylor 2020). this approach is inspired by and closely related to benjamin’s (2016) critical race sts, but specifically targets mass incarceration and its diffusions. abolitionist sts is delineated as abolitionist in both its subject matter and philosophical underpinnings. its philosophical intervention interrupts the ontological monisms inherent in the correctional and biomedical classificatory regimes of jails.   methods this project set out to understand jail intake processes and their stakes. it employed ethnography and interviews in three new york city jails and attended to materialities, physicalities, and emotion. this methodological approach is an early attempt at abolitionist sts research practices that grew out of two central research questions: (1) how do jail intake processes produce (analog and digital) incarcerated bodies and what are the ontological implications? (2) how are jail intake processes reflective of the logics of a carceral society?   understandably, ethnography in correctional facilities comes with a fraught history (clemmer 1958; sykes 1958). in response, i attended to my own positionalities across this sts dissertation fieldwork and analysis. additionally, interviews provided a rich source of insight into the experiences of others. further, gaining and maintaining access to the jails was exceptionally challenging and demanded constant negotiation (rhodes 2009). these negotiations were also carefully documented so as to reveal power dynamics, violences, and precarities.   the restrictions on data collection meant that i often only had a pen and paper to record field notes and some of the interviews. they were then transcribed and fleshed out as close to the date of collection as possible. this made the data partial and deeply mediated (davies 2002). the hope is that the detailed engagement with access, the role of emotions, and reflexivity can be helpful to others.   finally, iterative analysis took place across the data collection process and continued long after. the data was coded so that groupings and themes could be identified in accordance with grounded theory (redman-maclaren and mills 2015). this approach incorporated and reflected some of the core concepts of sts (e.g., co-production, boundary objects, modest witnesses). the following sections reflect abolitionist sts interventions across three vignettes—ontological multiplicities, critical phenomenology, and the integration of both. additionally, details have been changed to ensure that the participants are not identifiable.   ontological multiplicities a young, latinx man with reddish hair and delicate freckles comes into the cramped jail clinic. the covering nurse recognizes him and says, almost warmly, in her thick guyanese accent, “uh oh, here comes the king of trouble!” the young man limps in and appears to be in great pain. he explains that he was beaten by police with a baton and that “everything hurts.” he is just one of the thousands of people in new york city who are arrested and must undergo “intake processing” as they await trial.   he is twenty-one, but there was a data entry error and in the electronic record systems he is fifty-one. this may explain why he was sent to this jail as opposed to another facility with housing areas specifically for young adults. the nurse gently chides him for being back, but seems tender. (field notes 2017)   this young man is both twenty-one and fifty-one, his digital and analog bodies chafe. his “data double” (haggerty and ericson 2000) requires additional screening as the electronic health record system flashes a reminder that men over fifty must be offered an electrocardiogram. this will be a test digitally recorded as “refused,” despite its never having been offered. another disjuncture arises as the man’s wounds do not fit within the chronic diseases asked about, and thus remain outside of his digital body.   a patient care assistant (pca) comes in and directs the young man to stand on the scale. he shuffles over trying to keep weight off his right leg. she takes his blood pressure, peak oxygen flow, and temperature. the nurse rapidly asks if he has heart disease, diabetes, seizure disorders, hepatitis, kidney disease, cancer, asthma, tuberculosis, or hiv/aids. he says “no” to each. (field notes 2017)   in this instance, the pca will record the measures digitally, turning the young man into a series of numbers tracked in line graphs from visit to visit, incarceration to incarceration. they tell stories of health and arrest in the language of “disease control” and “health maintenance,” a series of numbers, each with implications for further testing and intervention (berg and bowker 1997). they open his body to particular forms of racialized surveillance when identified as “high-risk” based on demographic categorization and bodily measures. despite the imagined neutrality of such categories, this electronic system reinscribes the technologies of race and carcerality (benjamin 2019a).   after she has run through the list of conditions from the electronic intake form, the young man says that he has “mental health problems” and has come from the psychiatric hospital. the nurse asks why and he says, “because i tried to kill myself.” she says, “why!?! come on, hold your head up.” he looks down at his jail shoes and says “i’m suicidal.” “why?” she says in a chiding tone, “that is not the way. you can’t be doing that.” he ducks his head and says, “for a lot of reasons.” (field notes 2017)   the young man’s suicide attempt just before his reincarceration highlights the social and psychic deaths that occur in the carceral machine (cacho 2012; dayan 2001; reiter 2016). as the young man discusses his despair, it will remain outside of his digital body for another eight hours in the freezing, crowded pen for a mental health clinician to assign a numerical suicide risk. here, the series of questions and measurements require particular answers and, in their bureaucratized sluggishness, turn bodily needs into weaponry of the state. perhaps most impactfully, later when he is labeled “a mental health,” he will be segregated. although this label will be used across departments and sites, it means something different in the context of health care, public health, corrections, and the courts (hatch 2019). it results in biomedical surveillance that takes place alongside the penological surveillance of “suicide-watch,” which refers to both physical space and specific forms of monitoring (browne 2015).   this vignette presents how enactments proliferate, forming a carceral body multiple. the incarcerated man becomes a set of vital signs that are used to define, diagnose, and sort. the vital signs will be paired with a proliferation of risks that enact multiplicities such as housing area status, levels of clinical monitoring, statistical summaries, and so on. this multiplicity stands in contrast to classical criminology that is premised upon a unitary, objective criminal. the construct of the criminal is standardized through prescriptive normativities that are established through the bell curve. it is this search for deviance from an established norm that is coded in the health and corrections record systems. these carceral technologies are lobbed into the future as they provide data for statistical analyses made to tell carceral stories that perpetuate racializing, carceral logics.   as mol (2002) suggested, when reality is enacted, it can be contested. abolitionist sts draws out multiplicities in order to intervene in carceral epistemologies and facilitate radical transformation (ben-moshe 2018). when the carceral body is multiple and mutable, it can countermand the essentializing logics of traditional criminology that perpetuate racialized mass incarceration. the next vignette illustrates the stakes of such reimaginings and the need for interventions that account for the experiential (brown and schept 2017).   critical phenomenology the physician assistant (pa) is completing the family history section of the medical assessment and asks, “your mother, father alive?” the middle-aged man says, “they’re dead.” “of what?,” the pa asks. he explains that his father died of aids. the pa assumes that it was sexually transmitted and says, “that’s why you needs to protect yourself.” he explains that his father was an “iv drug user.” she then asks about his mother and is informed she “died in 1984 of ‘double pneumonia’ is what they called it at the time,” he says, “but she probably died of aids, it was just too early for that diagnosis.” the pa gets frustrated and asks whether it was aids or not because she needs to “record a response.” the man is trying to explain that the diagnosis of aids did not exist at that time. they go back and forth and the conversation becomes heated. (field notes 2017)   this vignette exemplifies the limited ways correctional medicine accounts for relationships, experience, and behavior. as the pa tells him to learn from his parents’ deaths and “use protection,” the epistemologies of heritability and learned behavior flatten the parent-child relationship to one of risk and disease transmission. further, as the encounter unfolds, the need for data to estimate risk is used to justify the violence of interrogation. it can be jarring to be asked these questions any time, let alone when you are experiencing a headache, badly hurt, or going through devastating withdrawal symptoms.   once the tiff has been smoothed over, the man begs to use the pa’s phone to call his wife and children. she apologizes and explains it is not allowed. the incarcerated man begins to cry and says that he is going to miss his daughter’s birthday because he hasn’t been allowed bail and his first court date is may 5th. he tells us his daughter has been asking for weeks, “daddy, what are we doing for my birthday?” he is sobbing and says, “i haven’t been in trouble for 18 years.” he says he doesn’t think he will “get housed” in time to make the call tonight, and his family doesn’t know where he is. (field notes 2017)   this vignette reflects the gulf between carceral biomedicine (i.e., intergenerational risk) and the pain of being taken from one’s family. the violences of carceral systems are intentionally and systematically absented from the majority of the criminology literature, erasing the routinized harms inflicted. to redress this erasure, guenther (2013) provides a critical phenomenology that resists carceral heritability and behaviorism by acknowledging that criminality is not only enacted through the experience of being made carceral, but is disproportionately inflicted upon people of color and the poor.   moreover, this vignette illustrates guenther’s (2013) conceptualization of the social death that is experienced in correctional facilities. by acknowledging the intercorporealities of subjectivity, abolitionist sts can illustrate the use of incarceration as a weapon that aims to decimate relational personhood. here, carceral bodies multiply to include a fatherless daughter and a husbandless wife. the anxiety of the man’s family when he does not come home and cannot answer his phone becomes part of the carceralities experienced beyond jail walls. this relationality opens the possibility of an abolitionist sts that undoes the social deaths of severed connections to family, communities, friends, and others.   countermanding the weaponry of mass incarceration calls for an abolitionist relationality that interrupts the neoliberal imaginary of rugged individualism (lake 2017). it requires an accounting for the interconnections and experiences of carceral bodies beyond jail walls. when sts embraces phenomenology with abolitionist politics, it is able to offer resistance to systemic racism, sexism, and ableism—all while acknowledging that experience is mediated. the implications of this approach are reflected in the next vignette that grapples with predictive technologies that parse carceral subjects.   abolitionist sts i am speaking with a corrections officer in his late thirties and i ask him with false nonchalance if he knows how corrections “classifications” (e.g., general population, high security) are made. over the course of my fieldwork this has remained the most closely guarded information and i have yet to find anyone who can provide more than the variables they assume are accounted for. he says, “in terms of classification, i mean, that is way over my pay grade, they don’t tell us that sort of thing. we just see what the computer says. i mean, you can see patterns though. like the ‘tickets’ (which are given for violations of rules) are the most important, that and their crime, their charges. it’s cumulative. so, like, if this guy’s been here, like a frequent flyer, then he’s going to go up, especially if they are violent charges, like felonies or something.” (field notes 2017)   the heft of the datafication of carceral bodies is illustrated in this officer’s nonchalant reflection on how algorithms are applied. as jock young (2011) has delineated, social statistics are constructed—a fact that is occluded through routinized carceral protocols and the black boxing of classification. as the officer lists the variables, their stakes are obscured, despite the fact that they shape every part of a person’s incarceration. it illustrates how ontological multiplicities are further proliferated through predictive processes.   the officer goes on to explain that there are probably other factors included, “like age, if they are in a gang, where they’re from.” but he explains they are not told what other information “counts,” they are just responsible for entering it into the inmate information system (iis). this is said with the usual faith in digital storage and decisional algorithms, a perceived washing clean of bias. i ask him if this is why the officers must document all scars, tattoos, current injuries, and disabilities. he laughs and says, “that’s all just cya (cover your ass). otherwise, we get sued for injuries that happened during arrest.” this doesn’t seem to explain the careful parsing, but i can see the questions are making him uncomfortable. (field notes 2017)   the iis integrates and stores biometric information (e.g., fingerprints), photographs, demographic information (e.g., race, ethnicity, age), court information, body contraband search results, charges, and so on. as the incarcerated person is stripped and given a uniform, they are simultaneously parsed and digitized. when engaging an abolitionist sts lens, it is hard to ignore the resonances between this process and that of the slave auction block where similar information was documented and photographs taken (browne 2015). while the outcome may no longer be a branding of analog flesh, the branding comes in the form of classification that opens the incarcerated person to certain surveillances as they become property of the state (browne 2015). this resonance is further reflected in the following account from an incarcerated woman.   her voice is threadlike. there is a shaking coming from somewhere deep in her body. “they strip search you with no gown if you’ve been caught bringing things in before. even if it’s only on a misdemeanor.” her eyes are tearing. “they take your clothes and they tell you to squat and cough. it’s like being an animal and it’s so cold. then, they give you a uniform and say you can take a shower, but it’s so filthy. it’s so filthy.” while her body is opened to the corrections officers they must document the findings and any other markings. her degradation is documented by officers who often speak about how uncomfortable the “search” is for them as well. (field notes 2017)   these digital and analog documentation processes leave indelible marks that enact hypervisibilities through taxonomizations (benjamin 2019a). when abolitionist sts engages phenomenological accounts of the search process, it is revealed to be one of violation and degradation. the emotional legacy of this lives on and will be re-enacted at each incarceration. moreover, while it is perceived by corrections officers as being unbiased and “high-tech,” the assignment of classification is a “highly collectivized task” aimed at the delineation of carceral risk (thakor 2017, 1058). while the classification system may assign weights, it is through the disciplined expertise of law enforcement and corrections officers that the characterizations are made (katz 2020; thakor and boyd 2013).   these findings both align with and resist those of sarah brayne (2017) and brayne and angèle christin (2020), who have studied other sectors of the criminal justice system (e.g., policing and the courts). corrections classification systems serve the same function as those in policing and courts. they appear to wash away bias, while occluding the practices that have politics and embodied implications (brayne and christin 2020). however, as the classification system was internally developed, there was less resistance to its determinations (brayne and christin 2020; jorgensen 2015). this may be because officers retain considerable discretion in coding and housing.   classification systems that set out to predict violence are just one of many technologies used in correctional facilities (brennan, wells, and carr 2013; russo, woods et al. 2019; russo, vemeer et al. 2020). the result is a multiplicative racialized surveillance that begins in communities and is reinforced in the correctional setting (eubanks 2018; hannah-moffat 2019). not only are people of color more likely to be incarcerated, they are also more likely to be assigned higher levels of classification (struthers montford and hannah-moffat 2020), which puts them at greater risk of injury and death. in this regard, it is vital that abolitionist sts not only call for an end to carceral epistemes, but that it does so through generative and creative mechanisms. such approaches are further tasked with conveying how classification systems shape ontologies and have embodied stakes. the gravity of this reality is multiplied when acknowledging that some bodies are more likely to experience incarceration and, in turn, to become objects of carceral knowledge production.   conclusion the day that i write this final section, another black man has been shot in the back by police. the only weapons were those brandished by officers. the need for abolitionist sts is urgent. attending to either practices or outcomes alone cannot be enough. when carceral taxonomies, rationalities, and epistemologies are allowed to persist, radical change is impossible. in the wake of sustained public attention to the racial injustice of the cic, scholars and activists are urgently tasked with dreaming an otherwise.   abolitionist sts offers resistance to carceral knowledge, thereby intervening in reality itself. the cic inserts systematized cruelties into the core of knowledge production and social order, shaping what it means to be human (price 2017). this paper has offered an intervention into the criminological constructs of criminal man and attendant classificatory regimes. abolitionist sts resists the techno-optimisms that allow the cic to persist by offering placation through technological solutions, such as body-worn cameras and ankle monitors (benjamin 2019b; browne 2015). such solutions, augmented by predictive technologies, are represented as free from bias and racism, thereby obscuring the racist and classist data that lobs past disparities into the future (benjamin 2019b). the challenge is to think beyond carceralities and punitivities, despite their grip. this will likely require time and transdisciplinary, activist collaboration (whalley and hackett 2017).   when multiplicities, experientialities, complexities, contradictions, and power dynamics are drawn out, abolition is no longer an undoing but a proliferation that disinvests and contravenes carceral logics. additionally, abolitionist sts has implications for the social sciences. it suggests that the ontological turn has not provided adequate purchase to address mass detention and the budding e-carceration crisis (jones 2014). further, given how fundamental carceral knowledge and its imaginaries are to western knowledge systems, abolitionist sts can have far-reaching consequences.   ultimately, with growing attention to racialized mass incarceration and attendant police violence, there is a pressing need for an abolitionist sts that can trace diffuse carceralities beyond what is conventionally considered to be part of the cic. abolitionist sts carries the urgencies of survival in this midst of the current crisis. just as stephen molldrem and mitali thakor (2017) delineated a coalitional approach to queer sts, abolitionist sts must also form alliances with critical race, feminist, and queer sts. together, it is possible to dream an end to the systematic loss of black and brown lives justified through the whitewashing of carceral logics and technologies.   acknowledgments i am deeply indebted to all of the people in the new york city jails who were willing to share their time and stories. this research would not have been possible without the support and assistance of dr. rebecca hester, dr. christine labuski, dr. saul halfon, and dr. gabriel blouin-genest. lastly, i am truly grateful for the generosity of the reviewers and editors of this article. it has been a wonderful and generative experience for a new scholar.   references agozino, biko. 2003. counter-colonial criminology: a critique of imperialist reason. london: pluto press.   alexander, patrick elliot. 2017. from slave ship to supermax: 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university of houston. her research lies at the intersection of biomedicine and mass incarceration.     original research memories and motherhood in the rhythms of ugandan computing     kerry holden queen mary, university of london k.holden@qmul.ac.uk   matthew harsh california polytechnic state university mharsh@calpoly.edu   ravtosh bal university of toronto ravtosh.bal@utoronto.ca     abstract based on ethnographic research in the computing communities of ugandan universities, we advance a feminist and decolonial critique of the dominant chronopolitics of globalizing technologies. our analysis starts with participants recounting their childhood memories of growing up in rural poverty under the shadow of rebellion wars. we show how the future promises of computing make sense in reference to this past. the same chronopolitics of pitching the past against the future is used by the global computing and donor development industry, and uganda's governing regime, which disguises the symbolic and physical violence of the evacuated present. in coping with the precarities of the present, we show how female computing researchers build enduring “near futures” through work that corresponds to the historical and symbolic role of ugandan women in the domestic realm. and yet the chronopolitics of global computing syncopates with that of “near futures.” women's communal roles are written into computing and computing is made possible and doable in uganda through the gendered logics of care practised in the present. the paper thus contributes to an expanding literature on computing in africa, by providing a temporal analysis that recognizes women's roles in more substantive ways.   keywords computing, feminism, uganda, chronopolitics, technoliberalism, reproduction, decolonialism, temporality     introduction joy, a computing researcher at makerere university in kampala working on preserving the language of runyikitara, was born in rural uganda in the early 1970s.1 julianne, zebia, charity, joyce, agnes, and florence were born at around the same time, maybe a little later.2 these women are all computing researchers working at different universities in and around kampala, the capital city of uganda. they teach and carry out research using computing to address health, societal, and environmental problems. the era of their childhoods is significant because civil war raged in uganda throughout the 1970s and 1980s, followed within a decade by an hiv/aids epidemic that ravaged the country, wiping out a generation. the rural villages in the east, west, and central regions provided safety away from the looted cities and epicenters of disease. at the turn of the millennium, each one of these women arrived in kampala with good grades, proud mothers looking on, and a good dose of ambition to pursue their undergraduate studies. “it wasn't easy, but i have always had an ambitious spirit,” laughed zebia when we interviewed her in her office at uganda technology and management university “i think it might be dying down with age, but i've always had [an ambitious spirit], from how i came to get the scholarship, to today, it is intriguing me.” we share zebia's intrigue, not at her own career achievements, but at how she constructs this narrative of progression. from what and towards what has she progressed and how does her story resonate with the dominant narratives of computing in african societies? our aim is to examine how gender and computing resound with the colonial chronopolitics of contemporary technoliberal discourse. we show how linked ideologies of motherhood and nation-building exert a cruel optimism that is embodied by participants in their continual striving to actualize the benefits of computing in modernizing uganda (berlant 2011). at the same time, the expectations around women's roles in the family and community continue to sustain life in the evacuated present that lies in the wake of technoliberalism (sharpe 2016). we argue that women's communal roles are written into computing and computing is made possible and doable in uganda through the gendered logics of care practised in the present. zebia, alongside other female computing researchers, recounted childhood stories of hardship in contrast to the apparent comfort they experience in continuous employment, a phd from a european university under their belts, and opportunities to develop their research internationally. beyond the apparent stability that a phd and university career provide, the subject matter itself—computing—is encoded with narratives of modernity and nationhood flung far into the future that are held up against uganda's turbulent past. in his memoir, venansius baryamureeba (2015), the former vice-chancellor who oversaw makerere's success in computing, asserts that he saw the market value and potential future impacts of computing in meeting the goals of the government's national development plans to transition uganda from a “peasant to a modern and prosperous country within 30 years” (npa 2020, i). the uganda 2040 (npa 2021) report is adorned with images of technoscientific progress—trains, electricity pylons, laboratories—alongside those of national pride to form a mosaic pattern in the shape of the country.3 these motifs of progress are tied to dreams of nationhood in which narratives of uganda's past, depicted as conflict and poverty ridden, are juxtaposed with techno-utopian futures. thinking through these ties between the temporal and technological, we develop a feminist and decolonial critique of the dominant chronopolitics of globalizing computing. as octavia butler (1979) conceived, chronopolitics entails thinking of time as sculptural, and while kodwo eshun (2003) argues that a chronopolitics inherited from colonialism splices time in africa to empty out the present, it is met by another temporality sculpted in what jane guyer (2007) calls the “near future.” time moves along two axes that we identify, each resounding off the other to produce a critique of computing in the ugandan context. by taking a decolonial approach, we break with the temporal and political orders of colonial power that are continuous in the present, and, as sareeta amrute and luis felipe r. murillo (2020) argue, stake a claim in alternate ways of thinking and practising computing. in this paper, we contribute to studies in technology in and from africa and the global south that use ethnography to analyze what we refer to as syncopated beats between globalizing processes and local contexts (irani 2019; odumusu 2017; mavhunga 2014). we do not propose that technoliberal discourses float around the world in ready-made forms (avle et al. 2020; atanasoski and vora 2018).4 instead, we illustrate how globalizing discourses are made workable in local contexts (avle 2020; beltrán; 2020; ames 2019; irani 2019; chan 2013), showing how they are articulated and the ideals they represent put into practice by researchers working in ugandan universities. in advancing this approach, we closely follow a group of female computing researchers and adopt “feminist theorizations of affect and care to expound the everyday practices that enable surviving and thriving in the face and in the wake of techno-empires” (jack and avle 2021, 2). we begin by introducing the research site and consider our positionality within it before moving onto the empirical sections that focus on two prevalent narratives in the testimonies of the female computing researchers interviewed for our research project. first, we explore how memories of uganda's past frame the future imaginaries of computing. as a narrative device, uganda's past is not only used by research participants, donors, and technology companies to promote the developmental promise of computing; the past also serves as a resource for the current authoritarian regime of the national resistance movement that has been in power since 1986. yoweri museveni, uganda's long-term president, trades on the same memories of war and rural poverty to promote his deliverance of future prosperity, all the while utilizing technological infrastructure for political subjugation. a chronopolitics emerges through this framing of turbulent pasts against prosperous futures in which ugandan citizens are situated in a past that they continually yearn to move beyond. our second narrative concerns the “near future” in which the symbolic role of women and their reproductive capacity is performed in the maintenance of family and community (guyer 2007). all the female participants had started families early in their careers, and, in addition to fulfilling an academic position, they have a central role in nurturing family, community, and the ancestral village through activities that range from communal child rearing to farming. we emphasize the different temporal orders in which a more enduring near future is culturally reproduced to guarantee bodily integrity and evade poverty in later life, what grace kyomuhendo and marjorie mcintosh refer to as “domestic virtue” (2006, 2). this temporality deals with the inevitable precarities produced through techno-utopianism and authoritarianism by practising a gendered logic of care in the present. we then illustrate how the temporalities of globalized computing and motherhood form syncopated rhythms that amplify and agitate each other. women's reproductive labor is continually enlisted in making computer science possible in uganda, even when gender is neutralized in the discourses of technoliberalism.5 participants relegate communal care to “life in parenthesis” away from the beating heart of computer science labs (robbins 2004 quoted in guyer 2007).6 yet ideologies of motherhood are reproduced in scaling and commodifying computer science research in uganda to be of planetary relevance as well as tutoring future generations to opportunistically exploit its political economies. while computing appears dressed in neutrality, we show that it embodies feminist strategies for survival in the near future that make bearable, indeed liveable, the necropolitics of technoliberalism (mbembe 2019). methods this research is part of a larger project funded by the us national science foundation, comparing computing research in kenya and uganda from 2012 to 2016. the project documented the growth of nascent computer science communities in academic institutions (harsh et al. 2018, 2019). in this paper we focus on women in computing in uganda because of their strong presence in academic departments and the shared similarities in participants' ages, backgrounds, and working lives. these women were part of the first generation of phd computer scientists in uganda. makerere university has succeeded in meeting one of the early goals of feminist technology studies by opening up access to computer science to men and women equally (wajcman 2007). women make up about 50 percent of the phd graduates in computer science and related fields. the first cohort awarded studentships to undertake doctoral training as part of a program offered by makerere and a european partner university began in the mid-2000s. out of around thirty students, we learned that all except one had returned to work in the expanding computer science and information technology departments at makerere (harsh et al. 2018). for the female phd graduates, the path of return was predestined because they had family commitments; one participant mentioned taking her youngest child with her and almost commuting between uganda and europe to fulfil both the phd and her kinship role. computing in uganda is distinguished from other parts of east africa by its academic focus and outputs. research participants had ties to the local private sector, especially with local telecom providers and nongovernmental agencies such as the un global pulse lab. however, the entrepreneurial tech scene in kampala is less vibrant than other african capitals, such as nairobi, which is teeming with hubs, incubators, and accelerators (harsh et al. 2018, 2019; ndemo and weiss 2017). this is not to say that respondents were not entrepreneurial, as we explore below, but they do not build capital through social networking sites and online presences. rather, they build capital through grants, inventions, publications, citations, teaching, and mentoring. our research involved successive year-on-year ethnography, collating a rich stock of qualitative interview and observational data, and building relationships with respondents through multiple interviews and interactions. all participants were computing researchers working at universities. our methodology was approved by ethical review boards at two affiliated universities (one in the united states and one in canada). at the beginning of the project, and throughout the research process, we discussed with participants how we could structure the project to create benefits for them. as a result of these conversations, we sponsored and co-designed a workshop at makerere university where participants showcased their work to local media, private sector, and donors. as another way to bring attention to their work, the consent process asked participants whether or not they wanted to be anonymized in publications. participants were then given the opportunities to reflect on transcripts and field notes as we progressed with the research. when the draft of this paper was prepared, it was sent to participants for comments and as an opportunity to reconfirm whether they wanted their names used. participants who were not willing to be named were given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity as much as possible, and these cases are noted when the participants first appear in the text. overall, our ethnographic approach has created possibilities for future collaborations and funding. indeed, our current grants continue to support research participants we met over a decade ago. as researchers based at north american and european universities, we were positioned as being in the same profession as participants. our social science approach resonated with participants, who published in journals and attended conferences of an interdisciplinary nature. also, most participants were globally mobile, having been trained in europe, north america, or asia, and still attended meetings and conferences in different countries. we built lasting relationships from this sense of commonality that we are all academics dealing with overly hectic teaching and research responsibilities, constantly navigating external funding applications and institutional politics. while we shared anecdotes about working in higher education, there were distinct differences in our experiences. one difference concerned the visible lack of investment in infrastructure and resources at makerere, which helped to position participants as recipients in the donor-philanthropic complex of global technologies and locked them into the temporal orders of development through the conditions of research funding. the impacts and outcomes of this research project, for example, are not explicitly tied to the development trajectories of our respective countries, but rather implicitly tied to its development assistance policy through national science foundation funding. the lack of institutional investment led to participants experiencing a heightened sense of precarity when relating that they could not rely on stable internet, journal access, or software provision; at times, absorbing research costs themselves. in contrast, our home institutes had engaged in real estate development and infrastructural strengthening in establishing their research prowess internationally. working in this context, the authors experienced different degrees of precarity that stemmed from the disciplinary effects of audit cultures and the calculative futures around research outputs and reputational management. another difference was in the management of work-life balance. our authorship team includes a mother and a father, but unlike participants, all the authors had moved away from the communities we were raised in, one of us coming to north america from india. thus, we were not in close proximity and as responsive to kinship networks in the same way as participants. reflecting on these differences, and how they emerged in the data, led us to the analysis of the politics of time, to which we now turn. african pasts and technoliberal futures since africa is the future and it will be the future, this rhetoric claims implicitly, that africa presently doesn't exist—that africa's co-presence with the current times rings hollow. — felwine sarr, afrotopia memories of uganda's past, framed by narratives of rebellion wars, rural poverty, and infectious disease, appear in the testimonies of the women we spoke to. the interviews often started with introductions and some background information. it was a typically balmy afternoon in kampala when we arranged to meet joy. we sat on white plastic chairs at the edges of the makerere university guest house garden overlooking a part of the city called wandegeya. with the distant hum of afternoon traffic in the background, joy remembered how the impact of uganda's rebellion wars suspended her education: i started school in 1977...but there was a war and what have you so we could not continue in the school where i was. we had to change to another school which was relatively a bit stable...we actually couldn't do the exams because of the war. the rebel group of the current sitting president. that was the war in '85, so we could not sit the exams till '87...it was not quite a good experience because actually that war did so much harm on us. we had it rough. it was terrible. joy was raised in the west of uganda, where the national resistance movement originates. the rebellion conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s delayed her education by several years, leaving it stuck in the moment of near completion. this effect of stalling was also felt among her parents, who owned a smallholding that they farmed to survive and raise whatever funds they could from selling surplus produce to send their children to school. she explained, “they were typical peasant farmers. they were farming at a small-scale level. you just grow to eat, and you sell very little produce. basically, that's where they would get money to pay for our school fees—from farming, basically.” tales of basic subsistence, rural poverty, and illiteracy formed part of everyday life under conflict. zebia, also from the western region, recounts a similar background of rural poverty. her parents had limited access to education and learnt literacy skills through the local church: “they did not have formal education to tell you the truth. they just had informal, church-based education. yes, just teaching them how to read and write, teaching them basic literacy and numeracy. yes, but they never had formal education.” research participants remember their lives as children and teenagers as slower and characterized by a rural upbringing and limited access to education. while conditions of poverty continue to impact life for many ugandans, they were narrated by research participants as part of their background story, defining their own sense of self-development in parallel with the story of uganda's transition to peacetime. the story of these women, who as girls struggled to advance their education, is narrated as a remarkable story of ambition and social mobility against considerable odds. joy referred to her mother's limited understanding of what she does (as a computer scientist) as a sign of her own social mobility: “my mother, what she knows is that it is a degree, but she does not know how heavy or how light it is to have a phd. she knows that now so far, i have two degrees, i mean three. she knows i have three degrees, but she doesn't really know what they mean.” joy refers to heaviness and lightness as states of being that represent educational achievements. while joy's mother does not appear to understand her daughter's accomplishments, she speaks the local languages that joy is trying to preserve using computing. runyakitara is the dominant language of the western region, and it represents its political history, which is the same history through which joy narrates her own story. it emerged as a “new” language in the 1980s, merging the dialects of four ethnic groups (bernsten 1998). the origins of runyakitara are in the bunyoro-kitara kingdom that declined during colonialism because of the tribe's resistance to british rule. the baganda were seen as more receptive to the british colonial administration, and tribal emissaries were given key posts across the territory, bringing with them educational and health programs all spoken in the baganda language of luganda. the revival of the western bunyoro languages represents a postcolonial response to the dominance of the baganda, but the four dialects merged primarily because during the wars, and radio was the main medium of communication across the region. today, efforts to establish runyakitara as a secondary language spoken as much as luganda are seen as the project of “makerere elites,” of which joy probably qualifies. while the preservation of regional dialects is considered vital to the continuation of cultures, linguistic history is revealing of political tensions and social upheaval (fleisch and stephens 2016). language preservation is a research strength at makerere, with several participants active in ongoing projects to build natural language processing (nlp) tools, machine learning methodologies that translate between languages. the computational processes of nlp effectively flatten languages, lightening the weight of history to focus on learning and acquisition, etymology, and linguistic comparison across texts; the intricate political histories through which languages change are lost in the standardizing practises of nlp (see, for example, aludhilu and bidwell 2018). dr. julianne sansa-otim, a successful researcher who leads the weather information management in east africa (wimea-ict) project,7 intimates a different relationship to her mother, crediting her as the “real strength under my wings.” as she explains, her mother endowed in her children the confidence to pursue their ambitions: “i think the real strength or the real wind under my wings in my education was my mother. she just exhibited this confidence in all her children and just letting you know that you can do anything.” elevation, or taking flight, infers a similar feeling of lightness to that of joy's journey. the metaphor of flight implies transcendence instead of incremental progression. julianne's flight took off at a young age when she was encouraged to pursue her interest in mathematics: i was one of the few girls who really enjoyed doing mathematics...i am so proud of my high school—first, it was an all-girls only school, okay that is good and bad, depending on how you look at it, but this school was so empowering. i know so many people who went to mixed schools and they always had the impression [that maths] is for boys, not for girls, but in this high school you could do anything, really. so this just encouraged me to continue believing in myself and in my dreams. julianne locates her sense of empowerment and “belief in myself” in her mother's encouragement and the opportunities to study maths while at an all-girls school. the combination of mainly female encouragement is remembered as fueling her ascent. these memories of growing up in rural uganda and with conflict rumbling in the background are conceived in plotlines of sedentariness succeeded by mobility, inertia by transcendence, feeling stuck by breaking free. these are celebratory stories of transformation that are also performative of wider narratives of global computing. a version of this story will be narrated to funding bodies, perhaps with the details of childhood memory omitted, but the aspirational rhetoric of development enhanced. stories of succeeding in the face of adversary make research participants the ideal recipients of computer science philanthropy and donor funding. while participants narrated personal successes in stories of social mobility and educational attainment, these narratives were paralleled by stories of computing in uganda as deterministic. like joy, dr. florence tushabe works on uganda's languages (tushabe et al. 2010). she has translated the mozilla firefox interface into three different languages to extend accessibility. florence states, “if you aren't an english speaker, you will not be able to use your smartphone and you find that the majority of ugandans do not know english or are comfortable in english reading and writing.” florence translates applications and web services from english into the dominant language of each region of uganda. by extending access via mobile phone to services such as healthcare (through mobile medicine and diagnostics) to economic transactions (through mobile money operators), florence determines that the technology will make ugandans healthier and wealthier (rwashana et al. 2010). julianne's project corresponds with florence's by making data accessibility an economic stimulus. julianne leads a team of eight researchers in developing the technology to capture, analyze, and disseminate weather reports with the long-term goal of supporting agribusiness, tourism, and leisure industries that rely on readings (nsabagwa et al. 2019). julianne explains, one of the reasons the [meteorological authority] took long to actually get authority status was they were being asked, what's the value, the monetary value of what they do. it is easy to see why the revenue authorities are an authority because they collect taxes...it is not easy to see this, at least in our part of the world, it is not very obvious to the decision makers the value of this weather climate information...hopefully as our relationship develops [with the meteorological authority]...we will be able to...show the economic value...and then feed...into the national agenda through policy. in julianne's and florence's research, a deterministic concept of technology is configured as the driver of socioeconomic change. from these plateaus of technoliberalism emerges the perspectival view (yusoff, forthcoming) of future sociotechnical imaginaries stretching out the economic benefits while simultaneously blurring the slow violence of digital technology in surveilling and subjectivating african citizens in the present.8 uganda's long-term president, yoweri museveni, increasingly views social media as a destabilizing political force and a threat to his hold on power, exemplified by the repeated shutdowns around elections and the abrupt introduction of new taxes on apps.9 the 2021 general election represented the first time since his inauguration that museveni ran against a new oppositional candidate. instead of facing his old bush comrade kizza besigye, museveni faced competition from musician bobi wine, a favored candidate in the cities and popular on social media across the world. the threat of wine's youthful energy and social media reach prompted museveni to shutdown social media platforms (burke and okiror 2021). this is not the first time that he has done this. a shutdown around the 2016 general election stoked controversy internationally as a breach of human rights by inhibiting freedom of speech during an election (obla 2021). however, the impact of the shutdown was much more insidious because it blocked mobile money transactions essential to rural campaigning. in his speeches and dress code, museveni regularly evokes the rebellion spirit that originally brought him to power and has long since justified his increasingly exclusionary grip. at times, and almost in the mode of technologically assisted bush tactics, he has used social media as a surveillance tool to identify and suppress dissenting voices.9 he embodies what mats utas (2012) characterizes as the african big man in his recapitulation of the original zeal of liberation politics that brought him to power in 1986 when the participants were young girls. in the subsequent decades, he has been constrained by global capitalism and the conditional development aid in sustaining uganda's fragile economy (tripp 2010). while museveni looks back, invoking the past as a political resource, the technoscience-donor development complex (featuring constellations of philanthropy, biand multilateral aid, and global technology industries) uses the same past as a resource to embrace technoliberal futures. the chronopolitics wielded by museveni and global computing industry meets sarr's observation that “one shouldn't underestimate the enormous amount of symbolic violence inscribed and represented within the collective african imaginary in the form of some sort of failure, of some kind of handicap, or even as a kind of human deficiency and congenital deformity” (2019, 1). instead of delivering democracy, the inheritance of liberatory struggles has morphed into authoritarianism, which, in turn, has seeded distrust in the competencies of present-day bureaucracies to function well. global computing targets the resultant problems of dysfunctional governance that are perceived to perpetually derail a continent. the african big man rhetoric and the discourses of global computing vindicate each other, leaving uganda and its citizens in continual states of lag and becoming. while museveni flexes his political muscle through informal networks, computing promises to correct corruption by instituting mechanisms for transparency and accountability through innovations in e-governance; while museveni promotes reciprocal forms of political value entrenched in rural cultures and traditions, computing promises democracy based on the rationalization of knowledge and its function in instituting representative politics and evidence-informed decision-making. the chronopolitics that is constructed and exercised by global technology stakeholders and museveni's governing regime continually cancel out the present. the exertion of power in the management of time disempowers african citizens by relegating them to a past that restricts them from realizing their political subjectivity in the present (mbembe 2001; eshun 2003). childhood memories become a chronopolitical tool in ordering the past in relation to the future that eclipses the violence wrought in the present; of, for example, ugandans being subsumed in the larger biopolitical research projects of the north through global health (which serves as florence's only source of funding) and through which the value of life is rendered calculable (murphy 2017); of the commodification of metrics and their predictive futures (julianne's research operates within the calculations of future food provision) that not only standardize and survey society and space but rely on global production chains and material infrastructures erected from racialized extractive and polluting industries (liboiron 2021). while julianne, zebia, joy, agnes, and florence strive to foster life through their computer science projects in weather readings, health diagnostics, and language preservation, the probabilities of the future are always being calculated to exceed the deficits that haunt the present. these women are embroiled in the fantasies of computer science, and they navigate the affective desires, precarity, and forms of abandonment that play out in their everyday lives. their pasts are a proxy for african pasts that technology promises to move them beyond. the background rattle of war, disease, poverty, and illiteracy that rings in the ears of female computer scientists counterbalances the apparition of depoliticized computer science and the distant futures that unfold from it (nyabola 2018; poggialli 2017). as we explore below, research participants' encounters with the chronopolitics of technoliberalism and authoritarianism are through the everyday routines of computing in higher education and their own symbolic status as women in uganda in which their reproductive labor is tied to the future of the nation. “living in parenthesis” who will bury you when you die? you really work hard for your body not to be ashamed when, you know, you die. —joy back at the makerere university guest house garden, joy laughed as she spoke, recognizing that she was asking an important question that broaches the symbolic status of women in uganda, where the capacity to bear children and take care of family and community are considered primary roles. motherhood is historically symbolic as a guarantee of future survival, as joy articulates, and it is often evoked as foundational to nation-building. kyomuhendo and mcintosh (2006) use the term “domestic virtue” to conceptualize this consistent style of thought that lends rectitude to motherhood and communal caring. reproductive labor has also been important in the aims of ugandan women's development movements to realize women's political subjectivity by turning domestic virtue into an active form of citizenship. while participants reflect on motherhood and communal caring as parenthetical to the goals of computing in securing uganda's socioeconomic development, in this section, we illustrate how mothering embodies strategies for coping with the precariousness of living in the wake of technoliberal and authoritarian chronopolitics. “life in parenthesis” (robbins 2004) reveals the different temporalities participants experience through motherhood, and how participants nurture an enduring “near future” that attends to and puts meaning back into the present (guyer 2007). figure 1. on and restoration (ihcr) collection, kampala. reproduced with permission from dr amanda tumusiime, dean of the margaret trowel school of industrial and fine art (mtsifa) at makerere university sitting in the offices and in the manicured gardens of campuses, our conversations began with academic achievements; however, participants were keen to remind us, often with humor, that as ugandan women they all had significant family commitments to attend to. female participants regularly left work earlier to collect children, prepare food, and attend to their home. they referred to working on the farm at weekends and attending church on sundays where they would engage in communal affairs. they spoke as though they were tapping us on the shoulder and reminding us not to forget this role. their eagerness to voice that in addition to computers, labs, students, and books there are also children, husbands, family, land, villages, church, communities, and an ongoing procession of weddings and funerals all arranged through multiplying whatsapp groups, was also an acknowledgment that these parts of their lives were often written out of computer science grant applications and publications. joy reminds us about the expectations of her role in reproductive and communal labor: “even when you are in your books, your mind should not forget about the family matters...remember i am a woman, i have to have a family.” the computer scientists we spoke to all had numerous children that they had given birth to and raised during their phd studies and into their early careers. as rhiannon stephens (2012) charts in her linguistic history of poverty in east africa, women avoided hardship and guaranteed their position in the community by giving birth.10 joy echoes this history of gendered survival strategies in the epigraph. when she asks who will bury her when she dies, she intimates that having children and taking care of the community guarantees her future personhood. while joy anticipates that motherhood guarantees that her body will not be forsaken, women's development movements have long sought to challenge this symbolic yet passive role of women by recognizing and advocating the active presence of women's reproductive labor in nation-building. like many other parts of africa, uganda has maintained independent women's movements that have championed women's economic and political participation (tripp 2000). in post-conflict uganda of the late 1980s and 1990s, these women's movements focused on expanding the representation of women in the public sphere and increasing their legal, economic, and political representation. in the context of the broader international donor priorities, the need to court aid and respond to the aims of the ugandan women's movements, museveni's government supported the demand for greater representation and put into place affirmative action policies in education and politics (tripp et al. 2008; tamale 2000). participants have benefited from these campaigns and policies in receiving additional credit and gaining entry through equal opportunities schemes, as dr. agnes semwanga rwashana, a health informatics specialist at makerere states: “i think that right from entry to university...there is always a point 1.5 extra point given to female students. so that encouraged women to join the university to begin with and to carry on, and what we have seen with projects that we have had so far from norway and netherlands, they always insist that there has got to be a strong gender component on all the scholarships.” agnes was the first graduate in the phd program at makerere and as such, she is the beneficiary of the generations of women in the 1980s and 1990s who were university-educated, urban, and employed as teachers, managers, doctors, and scientists (tumusiime 2012, 2017). in her current role as the gender focal person in the wimea-ict project, agnes nurtures the careers of younger female researchers. thus, she extends the ethos of promoting women's work to computing. the painting by alex baine (figure 1) visualizes the momentum gathered over generations of women's work: the darker bottom parts of the painting represent women's domestic labor giving birth, providing food, shelter, and clothing as part of the building blocks of ugandan modernization. at the top of the painting, basking in the light, are groups of women donning the cap and gown of graduation ceremonies as representative of this cumulative and oft forgotten labor. the female computer scientists are indebted to women, intellectuals, and artists, who in the 1980s translated the power of their “domestic virtue” into active nation-building. participants echoed the discourse of empowered womanhood forging the nation in remembering the influence their mothers, teachers, and female kin had in supporting their education and careers. julianne's mother, for example, embodies female empowerment by being “the wind beneath her wings,” giving flight to her children's futures. and yet, participants were reluctant to apply the same temporal trajectory to their own labor in nation-building outside of the computer science laboratories. while their mothers' strength lifted them up, instilling in them the ambition to follow the upward trajectory depicted in the painting (figure 1), participants did not place the same value on their own domestic and kinship roles, and relegated this sphere to life in parenthesis. as zebia states, still in african setting a woman still has to put in more. as a woman you have to end up putting in more because...according to our culture, a woman is the one responsible for the, what can i call it, the well-being of the family, in terms of household chores, making sure the kids are well looked after, all those kinds of small, small things at home. so as a woman you end up having to put in much more amount of time as compared to a man. zebia's reaching for a label to describe reproductive labor signifies that there is no ready definition to hand. yet, by reminding us of their communal role, participants alerted us to its lack of visibility in their professional roles (illuminated at the top of the painting). their accounts amplify the gendered dimensions of the chronopolitical discourse we described earlier. women's work in sustaining the nation is recalled as part of past struggles that their mothers helped them to transcend, but that participants do not lend the same significance in terms of contemporary nation-building. zebia's scaling of her domestic life to the “small, small things” reflects the routine erasure of the political purchase of this communal caring that seems to run parallel to their professional role. to some degree, by tapping us on the shoulder and reminding us of their communal role, participants were also vindicating their careers as computer scientists as the potential gateway to a more contoured political subjectivity. their careers and the institution they work for, alongside any research they engage in, formally lends them visibility in public life and in nation-building strategies that they otherwise might not enjoy as women in ugandan society. the national development plans are after all replete with images of technoscience, whereas images of mothers and babies, farms and villages feature on development reports signifying past problems and not future promises. the diversification of women's roles to professional spheres is both an achievement of women's development movements, establishing greater representation of women in public life, and it is chronopolitical in organizing time around the formal and waged employment of computing in aspiring towards technoliberal futures. on the surface, motherhood does not appear to be important to doing computer science, which happens in offices with artifacts, dematerialized data, and students away from life in parenthesis. the problem with this logic is that the historical condition of colonialism has meant that formal institutions and waged employment have remained aspirational, unable to support this route to more active political subjectivity for women and men (fanon [1952] 2008). reproductive labor provides security and integrity for women and men in the face of vast precarities arising from the continual evacuation of the present, and its destabilizing effects on institutions and patterns of work. sitting in a hotel lobby in downtown kampala, while attending a conference,11 florence made this precarity explicit: “for me, my dream, and i am not going to mince my words here, is to make a decent living with my skills.” florence's dream of a decent living is not easy to come by. funding to do research is mostly dependent on external donors and their agendas, and provided only on contractual basis, thus making it conditional and ephemeral. the funding for julianne's project finished in 2018 and weather reading is not yet a functional arm of the ugandan government. for all the enthusiasm for computing, julianne lamented the infrastructural and government obstacles to realizing the vision at the heart of her research grant. in addition to the provisional nature of funding, there are times when makerere university cannot pay its employees. in 2016 museveni closed makerere in response to staff striking over unpaid compensation and students striking over not receiving financial aid from the ministry of education (nakkazi 2016). similarly, during the covid-19 pandemic, the university was shut down, and its staff received reduced pay. this precarity is represented by the bare walls of participants' offices, which contained minimal decor and scant personal objects, almost in recognition that the space they occupy professionally might not last. basking in the light at the top of the painting is a major motivation for all research participants, but the promise of stable institutional and waged work remained uncertain. syncopated rhythms the “small, small things” that zebia does to care for her family and community, in fact, sustain the very large dreams of doing computing. she presented a version of computing that performs to the degendered dreams of global technology industries and philanthropic donors and excludes reference to motherhood. and yet, by analyzing how participants talk about tutelage and data, we reveal how the ideology of “domestic virtue” actually sustains computer science. in this way, we show how computing resounds in the rhythms of everyday life where time is experienced by participants in a syncopated way, at times amplifying the larger chronopolitical discourses and at other times diminishing them. engineers and technicians are promoted as essential to uganda's future economic prosperity. making the social world, and in julianne's case the natural world, legible requires a labor force capable of constructing technological infrastructures, writing code and algorithms, analyzing data, and so on. florence, for example, directed the conversation towards her students, and, like many participants, she talked passionately about extending her caring role in tutoring a generation of coders equipped with the skills to join a growth economy. she describes her motivation for teaching and the joy she finds in the process, expressly comparing it to parenthood: i love it. i love dealing with students. i love seeing students come in when they don't know anything and they leave when, you know, they have a skill, and they can be self-employed. i love it when i see my students sustaining themselves and flying and reaching their full potential. yes, i think as a parent i see that as my children, i think all of us are where we are because someone held our hand and helped us to be where we are. maybe someone gave us some advice; maybe someone gave us some material support. so you support people and you don't know what can come out of them. florence speaks to baine's painting and to the testimony of participants in recognizing that their success was achieved through the strength of others. and like other participants, florence uses the metaphor of learning to fly. however, she also expresses uncertainty in not knowing “what can come out of them.” we interpret this as both about not knowing how much students can achieve in learning computing skills, but also uncertainty about whether and how these students will find economic and social security. the united nations (2015) estimates that africa's youth population will more than double from current levels by 2055. florence reflects on computing as a response to both the opportunities and challenges presented by sharp population growth in uganda's cities. she aims to train generations of coders who can ignite the economy, but she is also recognizing the vast insecurities around future work, particularly waged work. the university is graduating ever-increasing numbers of computing students for a data-enabled future that is speculative. back in the early 2000s, baryamureeba led a transformation at makerere university that instituted a neoliberal model of higher education dependent on enlarged cohorts of fee-paying students. computer science has indeed benefited from this political economy as technical skills are in high demand and equate to a market value in uganda's transition to a “modern society” (npa 2020). yet the next generation of female computer scientists face the same precarity as their mentors: few academic jobs, and even less employment stability. florence wishes to provide a means for her students to have stability, and thus she prepares them for a more enduring near future through self-employment and entrepreneurship that has traditionally defined the informal, non-waged economies of african societies. tutelage extends further than training in computer skills. it entails imparting gestures and attitudes towards a future that could arrive, or it could not, in which case tutelage includes teaching strategies for coping with uncertainty. julianne embarked on a similar strategy of “future proofing” in a public engagement event held at makerere. she demonstrated the significance of uganda's meteorological readings in connecting to global chains of supply and demand for data. in this way, julianne envisioned a future political economy for her students to participate in. the public engagement event was oriented towards future jobs by scaling up julianne's project to planetary dimensions, summoning a sociotechnical imaginary of anticipated supply and demand for weather data and the labour force to support it. the idea for julianne's project started with her observing seasonal changes affecting a small farm she manages with her mother. to cope with the fluctuating rhythms of professional work, julianne and her mother had established a smallholding. this was not unusual as most participants had made similar investments in farming and fulfilled multiple jobs (harsh et al. 2019). julianne explained, my mother thought...maybe we should begin doing some farming on this land and...i put my support into the project. i was following up on how things were and...i found out so many stumbling blocks...one of which was the fact that traditionally in uganda, march is the rainy season and august, so march, april, may is rains and then august, september is also the shorter rains. we were farming in the march season. what happens is that traditionally in february everybody goes to plough, to prepare the ground for the planting and then in march everybody plants. that's what it has been for, i mean, from when i was born. but something happened. i don't know when it started happening...i'm not a meteorologist. so in this particular year we followed the traditional thinking...and then after we planted, it did not rain for several weeks. her experience of farming led julianne to “thinking weather” (sansa-otim et al. 2022). she noticed changes in the annual harvest that neither she nor the uganda meteorological authorities could explain: “i began to understand that we actually have national authorities in our countries that are mandated to do this [provide weather readings] and then i reached out to them to understand okay, why aren't you doing this?...if you really want this [weather] information to be accessed by anybody who wants, what it would take?” julianne's experience of farming bears similarity to florence's experiences with childhood illnesses when she says, “you need a lot of samples of the sickle cell blood cell. you need that data.” through tutelage and scaling up their projects, julianne, florence, and other research participants structure much of their everyday lives around the production of big data. yet to solve what participants recognize as data deficits requires the growth of vast sectors of the ugandan economy. open-access data available in the volumes required by research participants needs collection and storage facilities, communication networks, analytics, labor, hardware, and cloud computing. the materiality required to support the industrial trajectories of computing entails self-devouring growth. as julie livingstone (2019) notes, the theory of the limits to growth is not new but still relevant in understanding the effluence and extensions of modernization. the raw materials needed to build technoscientific infrastructures the metals and minerals mined from african earth, the fossil fuels burnt in the production processes and along the global production chains—all upend the problem-solving promises of data science (bridge 2015). it is from observations in the discrete geographical sites of the farm and village health center that the problems julianne and florence pursue were born, but to do the computer science research, both epistemologically and financially, requires the kind of scaling that promises national growth by attending to "global problems'' (framed by the sustainable development goals, for example). the dominant cartography of computing slides along the nested scales of nation, region, and globe that harmonizes data across a flat, even planetary surface. participants imagine that they cannot do computing at the scale of the farm or the village health center; these cartographies literally do not compute, they are too small, bumpy, and dislocated. through their investments in research projects, female computer scientists actively reproduce data in the service of national futures, which ideologically calls upon their symbolic status as women and induces ethical posturing towards nurturing the nation. this posture seems imperative, but it might not necessarily lead to solving the problems they observe, but deepening environmental degradation, health problems, and economic inequality. research participants are immersed in these paradoxes of syncopating temporalities; their histories, both personal and societal, have been conditioned by the necropolitics of modernity, of which the spread of global computing in ugandan higher education and research is an extension. participants invoke the discourses of motherhood in uganda to orchestrate the near future into a survivable state of being that can cope with the wavering precarity of computing. conclusion it is not a vacant, uniform, or universal feature that sets in motion liberty but rather the future as it is seen, felt, and heard from the enfleshed parenthetical present of the oppressed, since this group's now is always already bracketed (held captive and set aside indefinitely) in, if not antithetical to, the world of man. —alexander weheliye, habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human understanding computing in uganda means paying attention to what makes it possible. the technoliberal discourses, emerging from silicon valley, operate across a seemingly smooth planetary surface encoding an ungendered and deracialized form of technology. yet, in this paper, we have argued that gender is central to the configuration of computing in uganda. the appearance of neutrality is a “god trick” performed in a dominant techno-philanthropic complex, the lack of acknowledgment that all knowledge is situated is where racial, ethnic, and gendered violence erupts (haraway 1991). more significantly in this paper, we have focused on how female computer scientists cope with the uncertainty produced through chronopolitics by instantiating gender in ways that are specific to ugandan culture and history. the epistemic demands of computer science for more data, extended and comparative metric systems promise to network countries such as uganda into global digital infrastructures that promise socioeconomic growth in the form of jobs, innovation, and entrepreneurship. the present condition in uganda, and across the african continent, is represented as impoverished time that can only be improved upon—through technology, in this instance. to add definition to the techno-utopias of the future, memories of african pasts are framed by problems of disease, poverty, conflict, and illiteracy. museveni, uganda's president, utilizes the same chronopolitics to consolidate his power base. he regularly invokes the same liberatory rhetoric and style that first brought him to power through the military coup by promising future prosperity against the backdrop of civil war. by ordering time in similar ways to technoliberalism, museveni also relegates the present time to the “waiting room of history” (chakrabarty [2000] 2008, 7). the products of global computing—namely, social media—are framed as either for or against museveni. shutdowns, surveillance, and taxes are just some of the more visible forms of subjugation and suppression that museveni uses regularly used to govern social media in his favor. the chronopolitical discourses of authoritarianism and technoliberalism shape time in uganda by pitching the past against the future and, in the process, evacuating the present. everyday life is narrated in parenthesis, outside of the chronopolitical discourse but essential to the near futures in which life ticks by; work gets done, families are raised, and wider communal networks are cared for. the near future provides a way to cope with the precarity of chronopolitics and the uncertainties that are produced in chasing down futures that remain speculative socio-technical imaginaries. we show how the near future is a gendered space orchestrated by women that reverberates with the intricate histories of motherhood and social reproduction in uganda. conceptually, motherhood is linked to survival strategies. to bear children was to guarantee future survival and evade poverty. research participants connect to this cultural history, investing in family and community to ensure future personhood. motherhood is also symbolically important in uganda as the nourishing force of the modern nation-state by bearing future generations. while women's movements have persuasively argued to shift the symbolic status of women to a political subjectivity that recognizes their power to produce good citizens, mothering was described to us as parenthetical to the profession of computing, necessary but perhaps not politically salient. their professional role as computer scientists with research and teaching responsibilities gave them access to more public and representational roles. and yet closer interpretation of their testimonies shows how these winding histories of motherhood and social reproduction are written into computing through tutelage and data production. equipping students with coding skills includes preparing them for uncertainty. opportunism and hustling are taught in navigating a speculative future where industriousness might be needed to make a living. similarly, echoing the rhetoric of technoliberalism by relaying the future promise of, for example, data about weather readings and child health are important in connecting to those global flows of capital and knowledge emanating from the universities and tech centers of the north. in building the near futures, female computer scientists are nurturing resilient environments able to cope with the evacuated present. these practices of care include recognition of the paradoxes of computing that on the one hand promise prosperity—so learning to speak the policy language and produce masses of data is useful—and on the other hand, confront the ecologically and economically destructive force of expanding extractive industries already eating into african lands in order to build the material infrastructures of computing. this paradox rings with the histories of colonialism and racial capitalism that have also shaped uganda. what could be perceived as incongruities and irregularities in the realities of african women's lives is what we call a syncopated rhythm that is repetitive, amplifying, and dissipating the chronopolitics, but also irregularly producing random patterns. this is not a dialogic story for or against global computing by attempting to provincialize african science. the story moves away from the postcolonial critique of local resistance to a feminist critique that questions how computer science is made in uganda through the syncopation between the globalizing processes and extended infrastructures of computing and the gendered strategies for coping with its inevitable precarities. acknowledgments this material is based upon work supported by the national science foundation under grant no. 1257145. any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the national science foundation. the authors wish to sincerely thank all the female computing researchers in uganda who generously gave their time to participate in this study, including the following: dr. joyce nakatumba nabende is an associate lecturer and head of the artificial intelligence laboratory at makerere university. dr. julianne sansa-otim is a senior lecturer in computer networks at makerere university and leads the wimea-ict lab. she also serves on several boards including that of research and education network for uganda (renu) and the ubuntunet alliance. dr. agnes semwanga rwashana is deputy principal of the college of computing and information sciences at makerere university. agnes uses health informatics, qualitative models, and simulation tools to aid healthcare decision-making. dr. florence tushabe is associate lecturer of ict at soroti university, specializing in developing computational tools to solve problems in maternal and women's health. notes 1 joy is a pseudonym used to protect anonymity as much as possible. see the methods section.   2 zebia and charity are pseudonyms used to protect anonymity as much as possible. see the methods section.   3 stephen kiprotich is pictured crossing the finish line to claim the olympic gold medal in long-distance running in 2012.   4 we use atanasoski and vora's (2018) critique of technoliberalism as an ideology of silicon valley, representative of global computing industries, and multilateral stakeholders such as the world bank, in which social difference, injustice, inequality are pitched as problems that digital technologies, done right, can seamlessly overcome. technoliberalism bears the hallmarks of the “culture of no culture” (traweek 1998, 162) in recapitulating a neutral and depoliticized form of computer science.   5 colonialist power regimes have historically established territorial control by medically intervening in women's reproductive capacities, and thus succeeded in abstracting birth as a source of data and tool of surveillance (hunt 1999).   6 we borrow the term “life in parenthesis” from robbins (2004; quoted in guyer 2007) for a view of time where the present and the future are disconnected.   7 wimea-ict is a lab where low-cost automatic weather stations research, forecast modeling, and software development for weather services are conducted.   8 stella nyanzi, a vocal feminist, human and lbtqi rights campaigner and academic, is regularly arrested, harassed, and smeared for writing about museveni on her social media. a famous facebook post featured a poem to museveni's mother's vagina. nyanzi campaigned in the 2021 general election for a parliamentary seat representing a district in kampala. she experienced harassment, claiming that her partner was abducted and tortured as a result of her political campaign, and it was last reported that she had fled to kenya to seek safety.   9 in july 2018, museveni introduced additional taxes on the use of social media, which prompted many critics, writing mainly on their facebook walls, to ask how authorities know about individual usage. the levies have led to a decrease in social media and mobile money usage amongst uganda's youth (aceng 2019; boxell and steinert-threlkeld 2019).   10 stephens (2012) shows how historically male children were highly valued and were more likely to accommodate female relatives, especially their mothers, in later life. female children would be married 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"the translation of the google interface into runyakitara.'' presented at the international conference for computing and ict research, august 1-4 2010, kampala, uganda. tumusiime, amanda. 2012. “art and gender: imag[in]ing the new woman in contemporary ugandan art.” phd diss., makerere university. tumusiime, amanda. 2017. “alex baine's women's emancipation in uganda: a visual archive of the history of a new generation of women in uganda.” african arts 50 (2): 58-67. https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00344. united nations, department of economic and social affairs. 2015. “youth population trends and sustainable development.” population facts, no. 1 (may 2015). https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/youth/fact-sheets/youthpop.pdf . utas, mats, ed. 2012. african conflicts and informal power: big men and networks. new york: zed books. wajcman, judy. 2007. “from women and technology to gendered technoscience.” information, community and society 10 (3): 287-98. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180701409770. weheliye, alexander g. 2014. habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. durham, nc: duke university press. yusoff, kathryn. forthcoming. geologic life: inhuman intimacy and the geophysics of race. durham, nc: duke university press.     author bio kerry holden is a human geographer based at queen mary, university of london. her research explores knowledge cultures, infrastructures and networks in the context of east africa. matthew harsh is professor in interdisciplinary studies in liberal arts at california polytechnic state university. his work focuses on the cultures and governance of science and innovation in africa, especially related to new and emerging technologies. ravtosh bal is a research administrator at the university of toronto. her work as an independent researcher examines issues at the intersection of policy, science, and society.     special section sheltering: care tactics for ethnography attentive to intersectionality and underrepresentation in technoscience     coleen carrigan university of virginia coleen.carrigan@gmail.com     abstract designing ethnographic research on the technoscience workforce according to intersectionality theory presents both opportunities and constraints. on the one hand, the pursuit of justice in technoscience requires attending to differences between scientists who have been disenfranchised from knowledge production due to racism and sexism. on the other hand, sharing the lived experiences of severely underrepresented members of technoscience heightens the risk of harm. i introduce a practice called sheltering, inspired by the computer science technique of “black boxing” and feminist methodology of “strong objectivity.” the opacity of the shelter in which some data resides is balanced with the transparency of the researcher’s positionality. combining reflexivity, refusal, and performative design, sheltering contests dominant norms in science, while minimizing risks of retaliation to collaborators. it also balances communal responsibilities with research integrity. it not only requires consideration for the researcher’s relationship with collaborators, but also attention to power in the worlds they navigate and solidarity in their struggles. sheltering, a repertoire of care tactics to protest epistemic and social injustice in us knowledge production, can help transform who gets to produce science and reimagine other ways of knowing.     keywords ethnography, care, feminism, decolonialization, refusal, reflexivity, protest     introduction: disaggregate to desegregate in graduate school, i co-authored a paper on gendered role allocation in stem faculty positions that drew upon an analysis of a large national dataset (carrigan, quinn, and riskin 2011). because men’s overrepresentation in high status fields such as computer engineering was so extreme, we had to remove these fields from our feminist analysis because women faculty were statistically insignificant. in other words, using quantitative methods, there was not enough representation of women to say anything meaningful about them. i felt wrong about cutting out people whose welfare i care about deeply. this experience of quantitatively studying institutional sexism in academic technoscience demonstrates that a search for generalizability can inadvertently leave out the voices of highly underrepresented group members and cannot interpret the nuances of lived experiences (slaton and pawley 2018). with ethnographic tools, we can hear the voices of people who are persisting in highly segregated fields and who may offer the most efficacious solutions to representational injustice (slaton and pawley 2018). in a 2022 report on women of color in technology fields, the national academies of sciences, engineering and medicine (2022) called to dispense with universalizing women in tech and desegregate data on women in tech by race and ethnicity. research “related to groups underrepresented in stem and in tech should clearly indicate that such data be disaggregated by race/ethnicity and gender (to the extent possible given the need to protect anonymity of individuals)” (national academies 2022, 180, emphasis added). “to the extent possible”—therein lies the crux with which i engage in this paper. when reporting data using an intersectional lens, how do we measure the extent to which one or more parties involved in the research collaboration may be harmed, and how do we mitigate the harm? to disaggregate means risking identification, and efforts to transform racism and heterosexism in technoscience require critiquing powerful people and structures, some of whom may be our colleagues, perhaps even current and future evaluators of our work and occupational competency. as is too often the case, reporting such harassment, discrimination and assault can have injurious physical, emotional, reputational, social, and financial consequences. yet, without this disaggregated ethnographic data, we are missing critical knowledge on the intersecting systems that advantage some and pain others in technoscience, as well as missing out on opportunities to enact egalitarian solutions (national academies 2022). further, methodologically, ethnographers are concerned with the particular, the richness of context and place and the breadth of human diversity. sharing detailed descriptions of people, places, and communities is paramount to good ethnography (geertz 1973). we seek meaning rather than generalizability, guided by the principles of feminist decolonial sts (pollack and subramaniam 2016). our method, ethnography—burnished under the piercing gaze of decolonizing scholars who have sought to divorce anthropology from its legacies of imperialism and subvert and repurpose its tools—is well-suited for the study of the small n (small sample size) (slaton and pawley 2018). a decolonizing approach to ethnographic research means that the work and its outcomes are resistant to systems of subjugation and scholars’ opposition is collective, made in concert with others (harrison 1991). for sts scholars, this methodology may mean taking “a more critical stance toward politics of care in technoscience…[with an] engaged vision” that is both intersectional and interdisciplinary (murphy 2015, 719). feminist ethnography that depends on intersectionality as a means of community practice troubles the dangerous context of multiple structures of power that can reproduce inequality in science. in my work as a feminist anthropologist studying how patriarchy, white supremacy, and positivism intertwine in the production of technology, i grapple with the contradictory crux of making sure that the most disadvantaged in the science community have an active presence, one that repudiates dominance (grande 2008; vizenor 1998), without putting them at greater risk. the risk often comes from the very forces a feminist ethnographer wishes to dethrone. therefore, on one hand, staying silent about the harms caused by the powerful only reproduces this power and, on the other hand, making public incidents of bias and patterns of injustice can trigger retribution and potentially harm valiant collective efforts for justice and institutional transformation. this combination of method (ethnography) and methodology (feminism) in studying the cultures of science heightens threats to disenfranchised research participants because, first, they are highly visible small n’s and, second, they already face interpersonal and structural prejudice within their small elite communities. in such context, how will i protect the anonymity of my participants while contributing to and caring for the intellectual tradition of critical methodologists who seek to unearth and contest power relations in efforts to change them?   sheltering in this article, i introduce a data-sharing practice called sheltering, inspired, in part, by the computer science technique of “black boxing” and the feminist standpoint methodology of “strong objectivity.” feminist standpoint argues that “the lives of marginalized communities of women provide the most inclusive paradigm” for naming and resisting racialized gender violence (mohanty 2003, 231). standpoint theorists challenge empirical approaches to producing knowledge by recognizing the socially situated character of our knowledge claims; demonstrating how our thinking is permeated with knowledge from others’ standpoints; and critically examining our own social locations (harding 2004). sandra harding (1992) claims these practices produce more objective science because they transform the theorist’s social situation into a scientific resource and offer perspectives unfettered by privilege. strong objectivity can establish transparency and assure the people who make our ethnography possible that we are accountable to them. it also builds rapport with one’s audience, and helps us determine who our allies are (sinding 2005). we see research participants “gazing back” and feel accountable to them as well as readers by explaining the grounds on which interpretation has been made (harding 2004). ruth behar agrees: “what happens within the observer must be made known…if the nature of what has been observed is to be understood” (1996, 6). though developed decades ago by feminist sts scholars, the uptake of strong objectivity in sts is not yet customary. black boxing is a term used by computer scientists when an algorithm or tool is too complicated to detail, so they draw a box around the phenomenon to signal its presence, whose only importance is its input and output (latour and woolgar 1986). black boxing is a useful tool in computer science; it enables complex forms of reasoning but can also prevent certain ways of knowing (turkle and paper 1990). as i struggled with the tension of protecting my participants and producing “trustworthy” scientific knowledge, black boxing in computing inspired me to seek out practices of ethnographic refusal. a shelter occludes exposure and secures its contents. in this way, sheltering thereby shifts the spotlight from historically disenfranchised members of science to the structural relations that reproduce prejudice, exclusion, and homogeneity in scientific production. for example, in one instance of sheltering that i describe in detail below—articulating a succinct description, a collaborative, performative care tactic—i made unexpected discoveries about the nature and extent of epistemic injustice against qualitative knowledge in technoscientific cultures. qualitative research is maligned in some esteemed halls of science, which has social and material outcomes on those who practice it. from campus culture (carrigan and bardini 2021), to professional societies and journal editorial criteria (slaton and pawley 2018), interdisciplinary collaborative groups (smith-doer et al. 2017), and evaluative practices in funding sources, epistemic bias against qualitative research results in the disenfranchisement of modes of inquiry that help advance equity in science (national academies 2022). thus, regimes of value that deny prestige, respect, and financial support for qualitative science not only harm individual faculty and entire fields of study in the liberal arts, they also contribute to philosophies, policies, and practices in science that privilege a particular kind of science—technocratic, positivist— that has long excluded people of color and women (carrigan and bardini 2021). by mobilizing sheltering with tactical care, i realized the ideological, cultural, and material dimensions of epistemic injustice in the academy and their implications across multiple axes of identity. the breakthrough enhanced my theoretical sensitivities to apply intersectionality theory ethnographically with care. sheltering thus interrogates entanglements of power structures and the social relations within them. to make claims on dominant groups in science, sheltering is a repertoire of care tactics used by ethnographers to weigh disclosure, naming, risk, solidarities, stakes, and stakeholders in a research project. sheltering, rooted in feminist, decolonial sts traditions, is two-pronged. first, it aims to disclose institutional secrets rather than fetishizing the pain narratives of the subjugated (tuck and yang 2014). second, it considers the socially situated nature of knowledge and “transforms it into a systematically available scientific resource” (harding 1992, 446). i invoke sheltering in my ethnographic collaborations to manifest the dual nature of care: “that which we, as sts scholars, teachers and feminists enact in our relations with the worlds we study and that which circulates among the actors in the technoscientific worlds” we encounter (martin, myers, and viseu 2015, 626). care is attentive to power in both these dimensions. for example, i care about sexual harassment in technoscience and i take care with my research into this violence as an act of feminist consciousness-raising and a strategic performance of opposition to dominant scientific norms. caring also requires a commitment to listening to and documenting the silenced and neglected experiences of marginalized actors in technoscience in order to influence their antagonists. importantly, sheltering is also bidirectional. the researcher’s gaze includes seeing research participants as “gazing back” and the researcher is accountable to them (harding 2004). sheltering also involves “studying up” and subjecting those with power in a culture to scrutiny (gusterson 1997; nader 1972). i also use sheltering to guide me when faced with the predicament of making interpretations as an individual researcher while also part of scientific communities with internal conflicts (tuck and yang 2014). in this paper, i offer feminist principles rather than formal rules on taking care with the relations not only between researcher and the research participants but also with the rationale we have for collaborating in a project and what impact we want to have on world (davis and craven 2016). first, i review the critical scholarship that i have inherited as a feminist anthropologist that has inspired me to weave together subjectivity, power, and intersecting truths across social identity and sites of power. next, i introduce three care tactics i have used to shelter in the context of my ethnographic collaborations investigating race and gender in technoscientific culture: reflexivity, refusal, and performance. in its inaugural design, i used sheltering to develop articulating a succinct description, a unique combination of case study method and ethnography that collectivizes interpretation, thereby increasing the protective capacity of anonymity. later, when studying how women of color and white women collaborate to trouble the status quo in engineering and broaden participation in these fields, i faced further challenges that encouraged me to keep innovating. disaggregating women by race and ethnicity produced an “n” too small for me to write about anonymously. the risk of identifying my underrepresented participants caused me to take up refusal as a means of collective resistance to intersecting forms of power in technoscience. like most political projects, sheltering is complex and fraught with tension, especially when power relations involved have a variety of asymmetries. my aim in this paper is to practice a politics of care to excavate and investigate hidden labors (forsythe 2001; martin, myers, and viseu 2015; murphy 2015; puig de la bellacasa 2011; star 1991;), especially those involved in intersectional sts (grzanka 2019). if we are to disaggregate ethnographic data to accumulate knowledge on how best to decolonize science, then we must first determine the costs and the stakes of creating and sharing such knowledge, as well as who is to benefit.   culture and power feminist anthropologists conceive culture as ways of life shaped by power (jolly 2002). social institutions telegraph the norms, values, and behaviors that individual groups members are expected to comport with, and non-conformity can be a liability. the risks of violating norms and acting according to alternative values can be more acutely apparent to people who exist outside the centers of power in their culture rather than those favored by power arrangements (collins 2000; du bois 1989). bringing this understanding to anthropological inquiries is the basis of critical methodologies, a body of scholarship that cares about justice and draws inspiration from civil rights, feminist, and queer liberation movements in the united states. critical methodology emerged from the “interpretative turn” in anthropology, which initiated a reckoning, one that continues today, with the field’s history of surveillance and collusion with imperial states. by questioning and, at times, resisting, how anthropology has been employed, and continues to be employed, in service of the powerful, anthropologists craft tools with which to understand power, positionality, politics, authority, and agency. the crisis of methods in anthropology catalyzed reflexivity as a means of destabilizing authority and questioning objectivity. zora neale hurston actively engaged the problem of ethnographic authority in her work, decades before the “interpretative turn” for which white men with tenure—clifford geertz, james clifford, george marcus, and michael fischer—are credited (harrison 1991; mcclaurin 2001). bucking scientific objectivism, hurston took an insider’s approach to the study of black culture in the african diaspora (mcclaurin 2001). hurston forged her own unique reflexive anthropological style, which implicates the reader in the creation of meaning (hernández 1996). to mitigate asymmetry between her and her research participants, she dares her readers to question her interpretative power and enchants readers to value her participants’ perception of reality. ethnographers use a variety of strategies to carefully mitigate the potential harm caused by representing actors who participate in our research. some ethnographers use direct quotes via lengthy passages of transcription (behar 1993; bourgois 1995; johnson 2008) or embedded in a prose narrative (hurston 1998; stack 1996). laurie thorp believes that the best data is gathered not through interviews but rather in “heartfelt conversations” that are later transcribed in a process she calls “retrospective fieldwork” (2006, 120). the voices of the research participants’ in thorp’s text are frequently written by the participants themselves. children’s poems, co-workers’ recipes, and her graduate students’ field notes are all part of her ethnography. in this way, thorp tries to mitigate the violence of objectification, while also highlighting the collective nature of the text. diann jordan (2006), kath weston (1997; weston and helmreich 2002), and zora neale hurston (1998) are all examples of women anthropologists who studied their own cultures in a dual effort to valorize those with whom they identify and to make visible the violence of the stereotypes regarding this shared identity. thus, symbiotically plaiting multiple subjectivities that are always in flux—including the readers’, research participants,’ and the authors’—feminists call into question the social and historical power relations depicted in our ethnography, as well as our representations of the world.   situating power by making sense of the world through subjectification and contextualization, feminist ethnography calls both power and the positivist assumption of impartiality into question. as i experienced firsthand in my quantitative study of stem faculty, there is a violence in quests for statistical significance, an erasure and disinterest that contradicts the care that drives my scholarly pursuits. my feminism was misaligned not only with a search for generalizability but also with the belief that science is objective, value-free, apolitical, and asocial. only dominant group members in science could assume that their knowledge claims should be applicable to all creatures past, present, and future (harding 2004). theorizing on care and harm in ethnography must also be politically situated. for example, my ethnographic investigations into gender and race in computer-based technoscience (both academic and industrial) require that i consider three threats. the first is the prevalence of harassment in technoscience, whose rates exceed non-technical industries (scott et al. 2017). the second is the high likelihood that reporting harassment will precipitate retaliation (clancy et al. 2014; sekreta 2006). finally, key dimensions fashioning the power big tech companies wield in this world include secrecy, deregulation, and the black boxing of their algorithmic products that operate within and upon society. this license for secrets and privacy granted to big tech (but not its users, nor the citizens in states where these companies operate) enables predators in the field and silences survivors of harassment and assault (carrigan et al. 2021). understanding the complexities of research with whom i call the “small n’s in big data” becomes critical given what is at stake—namely, the safety and well-being of members of the scientific communities who are targeted because of social identity. furthermore, when the subjects of study are making and unmaking traditional institutional practices of science, my ethnography must account for the embodiment of social identity in the context of multiple structures of power that reproduce inequality in science. when long subjugated voices are centered and celebrated in scholarship, and established “truths” are troubled by the social location of the researcher’s claims, disinterest, erasure, and worse can result. in the context of technoscience, these threats are heightened. challenging assumptions about what counts as technoscience and who can competently produce it takes courage and care.⁠ care is especially important when gender violence is involved. due to the shame involved with these crimes and the history of slander and retaliation against survivors, anonymity cares for survivors’ well-being and encourages reporting (birdsell 2014). but it is also important for survivors to have a chance to tell their stories and not only confront perpetrators but hold institutions that enable this violence accountable too (mcbride 2018). since feminist anthropology pivots on the measure of power and its enforcement, when engaged in research with subjugated members of a scientific community, i struggle to report on power and violence in high tech in ways that simultaneously protect research participants and hold powerful institutions accountable to just labor relations. traditionally, ethnographers rely on anonymization to mitigate the threats of exposure and, consequently, retaliation to participants. for years, i failed to question the assumption that anonymization techniques, blurring names, places, and backgrounds, was best. the process of withholding data from dissemination to protect participants may be a way of keeping secrets and, thus, further enabling technical institutions and some of their members to harm groups i care most about protecting (baez 2002). moreover, anonymizing research participants can contradict the tenets of feminist ethnography and actually reify the interpretive authority of the ethnographer and prevent the accumulation of rich, place-based scientific data over time (jerolmack and murphy 2017; nespor 2000). for these reasons, some qualitative researchers today are following in the footsteps of hurston and questioning the default practices of ethnography. specifically, we are rethinking anonymizing as a given in ethnographic research (baez 2002; reyes 2017; jerolmack and murphy 2017; nespor 2000; damianakis and woodford 2012). “decisions regarding transparency should be made on a case-by-case basis” (reyes 2017, 204). even within a single project, combining disclosure with masking can work to balance ethical commitments to one’s participants with scholarly rigor that does not favor the ethnographer’s power. for example, in a recent paper on race and gender in engineering, i received permission from my research collaborators to de-anonymize the data, save for a few instances in the data when the participant requested masking (carrigan et al. 2023). if a choice between the two must be made, however, “the preservation of confidentiality—preventing participant harm—takes precedence” (damianakis and woodford 2012, 714).   findings: how to practice sheltering care tactic 1: reflexivity disclosure of the subject of knowledge and her positionality is essential in sheltering. the opacity of the shelter in which some data resides is created with the transparency of the researcher’s positionality. in personal disclosure, i invert the logic of positivism to explain the particular grounds on which i stake my assertions about the social order in technoscience. i invite my readers to assess my claims within the context of my social situation (haraway 1988; harding 2004). for example, i refuse to internalize epistemic bias against qualitative science, and my methodological pride shapes how i work to establish trustworthiness in the knowledge i produce and with whom. i have no interest in trying to sway scholars who are extremely resistant to post-positivist approaches and instead direct my message at the majority of technoscientists who occupy a liminal position in the struggle to broaden participation in technoscience—neither change agents nor antagonists (see carrigan et al. 2021). traditional norms of research and evaluation fail to acknowledge the maldistributions of risks and harms in science, and sheltering appropriately means refusing to make this cognitive error. for example, i have always been financially independent and plan to remain so. therefore, i have had no choice but to grapple with both interpersonal and structural gender violence in the workplace in order to support myself—to subsist. i turn the struggle of weighing a yearning for justice with the need to feed, clothe, and shelter myself into an intellectual resource that hones my ability to illuminate perversions and injustice in dominant groups’ accounts of science, power, community, and meaning (harding 2004). reporting on and protesting hegemonic values and powerful actors in technoscience is also critical to sheltering. this critique is also risky sometimes, which affords me the opportunity to understand the risks my research participants are taking to talk with me. therefore, sharing the social situation from which i make my knowledge claims not only allows me to offer a more complete picture of cultures of technoscience, it puts me in the same category of risk as my highly underrepresented participants who navigate incivility to persist in these fields. i also personally know the fear of retaliation that often results from reporting harassment (sekreta 2006; bergman et al. 2002; cortina and magley 2003; fitzgerald, swan, and fischer 1995; clancy et al. 2014), and this shared experience heightens my theoretical sensitivities on gender violence in technical workplaces. like any social movement, proof that i am sheltering appropriately can also be verified by provoking the very violence i seek to end. my scholarship is in protest of the inequities and violence in the us technical workforce and its tolerance of the disenfranchisement of women and scholars of color. in this way, i use sheltering to guide my tactical repertoire of care (taylor and van dyke 2004). my years of experience as an executive in a hightech corporation and faculty at a polytechnic school are scientific resources i take up to maximize the veracity of my claims. for example, in my book on harassment and resistance to it in computing, i practice sheltering using #metoo tactics. i share autoethnographic accounts throughout to verify and augment my participants’ experiences or in place of a participant’s account that would put them at risk of facing the bread line (carrigan, forthcoming).   care tactic 2: refusal representing the voice of each actor within the context of the struggle for control within technoscience requires understanding the participant’s standpoint within a complex web of intersecting structures. balancing curiosity about marginalized groups' experiences while also caring for individuals' safety and privacy, sheltering, like many labor struggles, can depend on acts on refusal. ruha benjamin (2016) coined the term “informed refusal,” which not only refers to sovereign acts by research participants but also to ones enacted by the researcher herself. for example, audra simpson (2007) and kim tallbear (2013) “both refuse to represent indigenous communities in particular ways for ethnographic consumption,” acts that affirm indigenous communities’ agency and spotlight a certain amount of distrust of science born from relationships determined by an inequitable distribution of resources and power (benjamin 2016, 969). benjamin invokes “strategic discretion” to refuse to share types of resistance in communities of color to algorithmic injustice, because “not all manner of gettin’ free should be exposed” (2019, 161). exposing tools of resistance—say, for example, workers’ informal resistance to managerial and technocratic control—can work to the advantage of the owners of means of production to the detriment of workers in class struggles (peña 2020). martina svyantek refuses typical methods of qualitative research such as interviews and observation that require money and travel and privilege nondisabled fieldworkers, and instead uses document analysis to interrogate norms of access and power in institutions of higher education (secules et al. 2020).these scholarly acts evince that power and the hegemonic ideologies that support its asymmetries can be excavated by refusing to conform to assumptions of how to best practice ethnography. further, as a manifestation of critical methodology, “refusal challenges the individualizing discourse of institutional review board consent and ‘good science’ by highlighting the problems of collective harm, of representational harm” (tuck and yang 2014, 242). for example, i learned important lessons related to white women’s behavior in cross-race collaborations that hurt women of color and coalition-building in technoscience. in a small community oppositional to the mainstream politics of science in the us academy, i collected ethnographic data—including interviews and participant observations at team meetings and symposia—and performed “care-full” data analysis, including member-checking and collective interpretations. i found evidence of how white women signal hostility to women of color by demanding they justify who they are, what they’ve gone through, or the nature of their lived experience. this signal runs counter to the commitments of a care and justice most feminists in stem espouse. here, i highlight some white women’s behavior but shelter the ways i know the impacts of these harms because it could cause strife within a community that is already at risk from discriminatory treatment in the us academy. further, i do not have permission to share the empirical data that supports these findings related to white women’s behaviors in communal efforts to desegregate technoscience. finally, the refusal to center the pain of marginalized groups allows me instead to spotlight dominant group members’ behaviors in my effort to contribute to institutional change in us technoscience. i refuse to subscribe to a “theory of change in which harm must be recorded or proven” in order to be valid and taken seriously (tuck and yang 2014, 227). there are four patterns of behavior that white women enact to derail partnerships with women of color in collective efforts to desegregate technoscience. the first pattern of behavior that some white women in academia demonstrate is a form of oppression olympics (dace 2012). in a conversation that centers on a woman of color’s lived experience, the white listener may respond not with empathy but rather a need to receive empathy. for example, i sometimes heard responses to disclosures of racism framed as “i’ve suffered too.” the problem here is not the attempt at a shared vulnerability but rather the missed opportunity to listen and learn about the specifics of experiences of gendered racism and how these experiences differ from the sexism experienced by white women. white feminists can seek unity in suffering, which audrey lorde argues is misnomer for a “need for homogeneity” (1984, 79). homogeneity erases differences between women, privileging white women and upholding white supremacy in technoscience. a second common response is when white women react to women of color’s personal stories with expressions of guilt and apologies. this behavior is another form of not listening and failing to empathize that also works to wrestle attention back to the white woman’s experience and feelings. guilt thereby silences the experiences of women of color in a similar way to how women of color’s experiences are silenced by white supremacy on multiple scales, such as in positivist research wherein their underrepresentation renders their stories as statistically insignificant. a third way white women impede the creation and sustainment of cross-race alliances in stem is a refusal to analyze systemic problems of oppression in the academy from an intersectional framework, which relates to the example given above and is commonly expressed as “but we are all women!” this attitude stems from a fear that adding the intersection of race to the fight against sexism in stem will splinter women and dilute a critical mass of resistance. however, this fear is irrational because any liberation won for women of color in an institution will benefit all members of that institution (combahee river collective 1981). finally, outrage and tears are sometimes used by white women to avoid listening to how they themselves might be contributing to the reproduction of white supremacy in us higher education. i used member-checking techniques to verify these findings, a form of care in the analysis phase of the research process. however, caring in the dissemination phase of research can sometimes require sheltering—weighing one’s stewardship and responsibility to multiple constituents and ethical considerations (tuck and yang 2014). sheltering, an experimental enactment of care in interventionist sts research, may not be rigorous enough, or recognizable even to sts experts who use the case study method drawn from intellectual traditions rooted in positivism (feenberg 2017). however, i invoke sheltering within this broader account of how knowledge was collectively produced in a cross-racial, interdisciplinary alliance in the hopes of not only making institutional change in technoscience, but also in the hopes of sparking dialogue in sts that could help mediate the tensions between positivism and post-positivism in our field.   care tactic 3: articulating a succinct description inspired by queer anthropology (newton 2000; johnson 2008), sheltering can also take a performative approach to ethnography. for example, my novel method, articulating a succinct description, uses the case study method to disseminate findings rather than rather geertz’s (1973) “thick description” approach to ethnography. in making my findings legible and relevant to the technoscientific worlds i study, i found geertz’s approach limited. translating social science writing to engineers requires further ethnographic innovation. i break with geetz’s commitment to thickness, trading quantities of details for a performative design of my ethnography, one that uses script form to evoke for the reader the setting and interpersonal dynamics within it. performative ethnography—an artistic or theatrical rendering of ethnography—has advantages over text in that it is designed to be engaged by multiple people and educe a range of senses and emotions to invoke a complex portrait of a culture (johnson 2008; madison 2019). there are four stages in this iterative model i call articulating a succinct description. the first (stage 1) is ethnography, collecting data using participant observation, interviews, and content analysis. the second (stage 2) involves the analysis of this data, the third (stage 3) involves using significant themes and moments that emerged to create a case study designed to evoke verisimilitude of cultural phenomena that can be unpacked and analyzed during the fourth stage of this method (stage 4)—case study facilitation as a cultural probe. data collection occurs in articulating a succinct description at two distinct moments, during ethnography and the cultural probe. cultural probes are interventions designed to excavate people’s knowledge about their own culture by asking them to document their experiences of participating in the intervention and sharing this documentation with researchers for analysis (gaver, dunne, and pacenti 1999). the data from probes is applied to modify the cases to enhance verisimilitude and, in analysis, more effectively disaggregate participants’ group membership in order to communicate, verify, and fortify an intersectional theory on harms and harassment in technoscience. this kind of theory of change in technoscience “can be applied to innovating policy and practice” (bowleg 2019, 418). a cultural probe approach pairs well with performative ethnography because it too centers around dialogue between the participants and the researchers (graham et al. 2007). further, the goal of cultural probes in articulating a succinct description is to generate awareness of not only participants’ individual lives and beliefs but also their experience of collectively analyzing and discussing the case with others in their small groups during the case facilitation. articulating a succinct description yields new knowledge about multiple subjectivities in a culture. its success in doing so lies in the way the case study serves as an instrument to amplify the voices of disenfranchised group members without putting them at greater risk of being targeted. it also helps facilitate a collective process of cultural curiosity and exploration between people with varying standpoints without burdening underrepresented folks with the work of educating majority group members about privilege and structural power relations or exposing them to retributive responses. in other words, it extends the lens of inquiry beyond already spotlighted vulnerable groups in a culture to include a range of group memberships, thereby scaling up the study’s sample and increasing the protective capacity of anonymity. for example, i co-created a case called “greg and sara,” which centers on a conversation between an african american male engineering undergraduate and a white female engineering undergraduate comparing and contrasting their experiences of bias and discrimination while working in teams for class projects. the scenario is based on significant themes that emerged from data gathered by students in my introductory undergraduate cultural anthropology classes between 2015 and 2018. i assigned mini-ethnographic projects to my students, engaging 500 undergraduate students in the first stage of data collection. i then facilitated the case with over 250 students and dozens of faculty across my university and used the cultural probe data to refine the case, enhancing the veracity of both greg’s and sara’s experiences and the racist and sexist behaviors they encountered. thus, i enacted sheltering through the performative design of this case study and the large n of scholars who participated in stage 1 (ethnography) and stage 2 (cultural probe) of this instance of articulating a succinct description. in this kind of performative design, the case’s verisimilitude to the engineering community was my lodestar for validity. in effect, i use post-positivistic methods to verify findings in fields that are constituted by positivistic methods. this approach opened me to seeing that more traditional forms of knowledge sharing also involve performing trustworthiness. trusting one performance more than another is a socially situated decision. sheltering requires asking whose trust do we value most: empiricists’ evaluations or the community members in the worlds we study? in articulating a succinct description, by conflating the two, i dissolved the binary between researched and researcher, thus mitigating the epistemic hierarchy of technical and social knowledge that so stymies the social movement to desegregate technoscience (carrigan et al. 2021).   discussion sheltering represents my growing repertoire of care tactics to protest epistemic and social injustice in us knowledge production. like all protest repertoires, it borrows tactics from other social movements that contest power in science (taylor and van dyke 2004). i use it to honor the interests of the communities that make my research possible and collectively organize with those who are also made to feel unwelcome in the technoscientific labor force. sheltering involves reciprocity, stewardship, and solidarity while theorizing on power in technoscience. sheltering could fail and reproduce existing power relations, much like sherry ortner (1995) feared that too little description of the marginalized group could dehumanized and malign them. the success of sheltering as a methodological tool in sts depends on theorizing power in such a way that inverts dominant modes of exposure and occlusion, visibility and invisibility. building trust with a vulnerable community in a powerful field and honoring their perspective in our research can sometimes mean losing trust with empiricists. the costs of the latter are part of the calculus of sheltering, as is the social capital engendered in worldmaking with others to end racism and heterosexism in science. sheltering can magically morph from umbrella, to tree boughs, to circus tent, depending on the level of threat and collaborators’ needs. within the shelter, collective resistance to dominant norms in science can foment without being surveilled. sheltering applies theoretical sensitivities and care tactics i have developed as a queer scholar in a heteronormative academy and white, cisgender woman collaborating with marginalized communities of women and non-binary scholars in technoscience. sheltering was partly inspired by the computing practice of black boxing. masking data sets is standard practice in this quantitative field and does not discredit practitioners’ claims of rigor. i lay claim to this logic in my research, blending two sts traditions—strong objectivity and ethnographic refusal—to offer guiding principles for other ethnographers. both bodies of work stress the primacy of the perspectives of those systematically disenfranchised in scholarship. studying the social dynamics of gender, race, and sexuality in the powerful spaces like technoscience in collaboration with marginalized communities is fraught with turbulence. collaborations such as these become even more bumpy when they involve other asymmetries, like career stage, opportunities, resources, and epistemological privileges. sheltering attends to the tensions that arise in producing knowledge about nerve centers of power like technoscience from the viewpoint of its marginalized workers and pertinaciously disseminating it with care for both the researched and the researcher.   conclusion i combine reflexivity, refusal, and performative design in a research methodology i call sheltering. sheltering is a response to the challenges posed by disseminating ethnographic research on certain scientists, such as women of color, who, by way of their underrepresentation, are often highly visible (settles et al. 2018). i direct the focus of my research findings on the abuses of power and the mechanisms that form and reproduce neocolonial patriarchy in high tech. i am continually experimenting with ways to combine the politics of care with the tenets of critical methodologies and the efficacy of ethnography to best amplify voices of technoscientists too long marginalized, within terms of engagement that can offer majority group members opportunities to become change agents. in introducing sheltering as a feminist methodological strategy, i have excavated the strengths and weaknesses of both masking and disclosure, especially in the context of gender and racial relations in current us-based scientific production. the opportunities and constraints of using ethnographic methods to study technoscience become even more complex when the research is designed according to intersectionality theory. on the one hand, the pursuit of justice in technoscience requires attending to critical differences between scientists who have been disenfranchised from knowledge production due to racism and sexism. on the other hand, sharing the lived experiences of severely underrepresented members of technoscience heightens the risk of retaliation and harm to them. further, as a feminist methodology, sheltering is in coalition with political projects to desegregate powerful, lucrative fields and in solidarity with the disenfranchised members of these fields whose very persistence is a form of resistance. care thus must apply not only to the researcher’s relationship with collaborators and community members but also to the worlds they navigate and the struggles in which they are engaged. sheltering is also grounded in refusal, refusal to share evidence that could cause harm to either individuals or social groups. it borrows black boxing as a useful methodological tool from computer science to resolve what liz tilley and kate woodthorpe (2011) call a “rock and a hard place” between balancing concerns for the safety and privacy of research participants while maintaining the integrity of the research process and preserving and communicating the veracity of these ethnographic claims. “when engaging small connected communities, qualitative researchers might face significant tensions while carrying out the dual mandate to advance knowledge and uphold research ethics, especially participant confidentiality” (damianakis and woodford 2012, 714). sheltering also spotlights how institutional powers operate, rather than continuing to spotlight those on the margins of the institutions (ahmed 2012). the opacity of the shelter in which some data resides is designed as a protective measure and is balanced with the transparency of the researcher’s subjectivity and personal relationships in “the field,” strategically inverting the power imbalances in traditional empiricist practices. to fulfill the national academies’ 2022 call to action to desegregate data on women in technoscience and learn from the lived experiences of women of color scientists, we must innovate current research practices and cultivate care, communal resistance, and mutual support not only to transform who gets to produce science but also to reimagine other ways of knowing.   acknowledgements i wish to thank caitlin wylie for her vision, mentorship, and inspiration in our feminist collaborations and valuable feedback on early drafts. thank you to our 2021 4s co-panelists and co-authors in this special issue, especially jennifer croissant and luis felipe r. murillo, who offered excellent advice during our summertime editorial workshop. my heartfelt thanks to cristina visperas, whose brilliant editorial, intellectual, and communication skills made our contributions to this esteemed journal possible. thank you also to 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https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x06067159.     author bio dr. coleen carrigan is an associate professor of science, technology and society in the department of engineering and society at the university of virginia. she uses feminist ethnography to investigate the cultural dimensions of science and technology and the politics of knowledge and reproduction.   suchman article    configuring the other: sensing war through immersive simulation    lucy suchman lancaster university l.suchman@lancaster.ac.uk modernity produces its other…as a way of at once producing and privileging itself.  this is not to say that other cultures are the supine creations of the modern, but it is to acknowledge the extraordinary power and performative force of colonial modernity. its constructions of other cultures—not only the way these are understood in an immediate, improvisational sense, but also the way in which more or less enduring codifications of them are produced—shape its own dispositions and deployments.  —derek gregory, the colonial present, 2004, p. 4. it is monday, 2 april 2012, and i am sitting at a peet’s coffee shop in marina del rey, california talking to jarrell pair, former lead designer for flatworld (2001–2007), a flagship project of the university of southern california’s institute for creative technologies (ict).1 in his book virtuous war (2009), political theorist and united states military chronicler james der derian identifies the ict’s opening in 1999 as a founding moment in the emergence of what he names the military-industrial-media-entertainment network. committed to strengthening the synergies of the entertainment and defense industries, the us army allocated $45 million for five years to usc to create a research center for advanced simulation development. the us department of defense’s rationale for investing in new simulation technologies at the beginning of the twenty-first century is set out by retired air force colonel jack thorpe, hired by the ict at its 1999 founding. in an early concept paper, thorpe puts forward the idea of “exploiting emerging technologies from theatrical set design [to] improve the fabrication of mockups for planning and rehearsing military operations in close-quarter spaces” (2000, p. 1). der derian embraces the credibility of this idea when he proposes that “[b]y its very task and potential power to create totally immersive environments—where one can see, hear, perhaps even touch and emotionally interact with digitally created agents—the ict is leading the way into a brave new world that threatens to breach the last fire walls between reality and virtuality” (2009, p. 167). along with its endorsement of sensory presence as a ground truth for knowledge-making (see cohen ibañez, 2016), der derian affirms the potency of digital research and development. at the same time, he conceives the relation between the real and the virtual as a difference—a boundary—that is increasingly under threat.  my own exploration of the ict’s landscapes proceeds differently. instructed by feminist technoscience studies, i take the real and the virtual to be always already entangled.2 rather than a progressive assault on the real, the turn to virtualization technologies rematerializes imaginaries of lived reality, with real, material consequences. i take seriously the imaginaries informing virtual reality projects, while maintaining a critical skepticism regarding the extent to which the technologies actually realize their imagined promises. both attitudes are crucial for articulating the performative agencies of the technosciences of the artificial, without reproducing their mystifications. this skepticism extends beyond the technologies, moreover, to the premise of rehearsal as a means of war’s rationalization and management. on the one hand, rehearsal is always a virtual exercise, informed by remembered pasts and realizing events in an imagined future. on the other hand, rehearsal is not simply preparatory but also performative, and training articulates the real in ways that have consequences. configurations of real bodies and virtual realities open up sites of slippage and resistance, and it is in the irremediable gaps between rehearsals for war and the lived realities of embodied conflict that counter-stories emerge.      flatworld’s absent presences as recounted by timothy lenoir and henry lowood (2005) in “theaters of war: the military-entertainment complex”: at the opening ceremonies of the ict, richard lindheim, the executive director, outlined several projects the institute would be pursuing.  among those he described was a construction of what he referred to as “the holodeck.”  the idea, lindheim explained, is to leverage new media technologies of virtual reality to link immersive virtual environments with interactive synthetic agents…that are elements of simulationand game-based learning exercises.  (p. 35) as a first instantiation of the holodeck, a single room flatworld prototype was installed in november 2001 in a warehouse space near the ict in marina del rey. paramount studios, with assistance from herman zimmerman, production designer for star trek: the next generation (figure 1), created the installation’s physical walls and props.  figure 1. flatworld installation, 2001. archive photo courtesy of jarrell pair, flatworld project, ict, demoimages/l.jpg the designers’ goal was to create virtual environments that are “indistinguishable from their real world counterparts” (pair, neumann, piepol, & swartout, 2003, p.14).3 citing the universal studio theme park’s seamless integration of physical and virtual spaces, flatworld’s “mixed reality” approach promised an improvement over earlier virtual reality systems requiring head mounted displays tethered to cables, or immersing the user in exclusively digital projections. over the ensuing seven years, flatworld developed as part of the us military’s re-orientation from force-on-force to counterinsurgency training, in tandem with training exercises employing live actors and set in outdoor and purpose-built environments (see magelssen, 2009; rice, 2016; stone, forthcoming). large “digital flats” running real time computer graphics were augmented by physical props that acted as portals into the virtual world (physical doors open onto a virtual square), along with sensory effects cued to relevant virtual objects and ambient environments (floor speakers simulate the sound and vibration of explosions) (figure 2). culminating in the infantry immersion trainer deployed at camp pendleton in 2007, the system was subsequently “disassembled to make way for new projects” (j. pair, personal communication, 29 august 2012). figure 2. room panorama, 2005. archive photo courtesy of jarrell pair, flatworld project, ict, fwaug05/room_pano_01_cropped.jpg so what are the portals through which we, as feminist scholars of technoscience, might access simulation projects like flatworld, created within the military-entertainment complex? cohen ibañez’s (2016) critical consideration of the trope of “sensorial presence” in immersive simulation reminds us that the senses “cannot be divorced from the political, economic, historical, technological and linguistic realities that govern the sense we make of them” (p. 23). and as lenoir and lowood (2005) observe, the relationship between military simulation and commercial entertainment has a long history.4 since the early 1880s, when major w.r. livermore of the us army corps of engineers imported gaming from the prussian military for officer training, the relationship of gaming and training has become further entangled through the incorporation of digital media into commercial game design, hollywood film production, and war fighting itself. andrew marshall, chief spokesperson for the revolution in military affairs (a new world of network-centric warfare), set the challenge in 1977 at a workshop with game designers and defense analysts (lenoir & lowood, 2005, p. 5). throughout the 1980s, the expense of “live” exercises and the expansion of computing made simulation increasingly attractive. by the 1990s, academically based computing research found new funding sources to develop high-end simulations for military training, and over the past twenty years researchers have increasingly turned to the game and film industries for advice on scripting and production effects. in 1992, stricom, the army’s simulation training and instrumentation command, was established under the banner “all but war is simulation” (lenoir & lowood, 2005, p. 22).5 back in the coffee shop down the road from the ict in 2012, jarrell pair and i have spent the last hour discussing the life of the flatworld project over its seven year existence. where is the project’s archive, i ask? well, i suppose i have most of it, he replies, and then generously offers to make it available. four months later he sends me three gigabytes of material, over 1,000 files tracing the flatworld project from its precursors to its last implementations. it is this fortuitous archive that comprises my current field site.6  one video from the archive documents the flatworld system in 2005, in the form of a guided tour by its lead designer (see transcript in appendix). the tour opens as a filmic event: we see the designer, j, his hand on the door leading into the flatworld simulation, addressing the camera with the query “filming?” we then hear the canonical cinematic command “action.” before the door opens, we hear sounds that seem to come from somewhere else than the studio space in which j and the cameraman are standing: a combination of islamic calls to prayer and gunfire in the distance. j explains that this walkthrough is not “a story-based demo,” but rather demonstrates the system’s technical capacities, with the viewer invited to extrapolate its uses “in operational settings.” as we will see, however, the demo’s technical system is saturated with stories. as the beginnings of an analysis, i focus on how j enacts his own position in relation to this environment, remaining outside of it even as he walks us through it. considered as what john law has named a method assemblage (2004, p. 14), j’s walk through the simulation makes some things present by making others absent, or at least peripheral.7 for me, the latter include the culturally and politically saturated figurations in which j is immersed. i imagine that j addresses us, the absent audience, not as academics but rather as those who might be impressed by the system’s capabilities and persuaded of its potential. his position as the designer is enacted in the agencies of the tablet through which he initiates commands to which the system reliably complies—our attention moves back and forth between his actions at the controls, and those effects to which he directs our gaze. we are invited to see that “there’s one contiguous world” surrounding the room in which we are standing, populated by unmanned vehicles, “bad guys,” “heroes” and children taunting us with virtual rocks that sonically “bounce” when they hit the floor.8 at the same time, we are interpellated back into the design world through j’s references to the operating mechanisms: digital flats and mobile displays allow us to pick out targets and adversaries; stress levels can be controlled through simple adjustments; figures are nicely life-sized and bad guys appear on command and are as easily dispatched with the press of the controller’s button. these elisions of the system equipment (devices, control interfaces) and the militarized subjects/objects that it renders (as trainees or threats) hold together in one material semiotic space the system’s connected claims to instrumental efficacy and verisimilitude. my first viewing of this video left me disconcerted, a feeling that i linked to j’s indifference to the system’s specific figurations, even as he is inescapably implicated in their militarist and orientalizing effects (ali, 2016; gregory, 2004; said, 1978). philosopher anthropologist helen verran (2001) has suggested that, rather than something to be resolved through analysis, disconcertment can be a sign of a trouble with which we need to stay (see also haraway, 2010). how is it that j maintains his surroundings as the world of research and design, at the same time that he is incorporated, bodily and professionally, into the military-entertainment complex? the question of what and whose realities are made present in the demonstration and how it separates us (designers, audience, trainees who share an actual world) and them (those others encountered as simulated locals or “natives”) ties this demo to wider issues, including the military concept of “situational awareness” and the requirements of “positive identification” and “imminent threat” that underwrite the canons of legal killing (suchman, 2015). i am thinking about the trope of situational awareness through related questions of intelligibility and identification, and more particularly through a frame inspired by judith butler's analysis of recognition’s generative agencies. in bodies that matter (1993), butler suggests that the body’s intelligibility includes its “constitutive outsides,” those unthinkable and unlivable bodies “that do not matter in the same way” (p. xi). “bodies that do not matter in the same way” take on further resonance in the context of simulation, as another sense of bodies differently materialized. flatworld’s distinction between “us” who are actual, and “them” who are virtual plays as another layer of intelligibility and identification, which works in a complex dynamic with other readings of “us” and “them” that are so central to war (see chandler, 2016). to name just three that are relevant here: us who are real, versus them who are virtual us who are americans, versus them who are other (generally arab, more specifically iraqi and afghan) us who are friends, versus them who are enemies on first look, the first of these differences is self-evident—we watch the video demo along with the actual researcher, guiding us through virtual spaces and encounters. this is marked in part by the ease with which we distinguish j’s address of “us” as the audience from his engagement with various virtual avatars, as well as the moments when he breaks frame to address actual offstage others (the cameraman, technicians). at the same time, we begin to see how “our” bodies are transformed by being immersed in virtual environments, while “their” virtual bodies are also reiterative and generative of actual ones. that is the premise and promise of simulation. these simulations are infused with the second reading of “us” and “them,” through figures of us who are americans, differentiated from them who are other. and that difference leads us to the third, between friend and enemy.  art in the service of realism: some special effects in exploring flatworld’s archival remains, my aim is to attend critically to the imaginaries that are realized in the simulation’s figurations of places and raced and gendered bodies, as well as in its storylines. my analysis takes as a central commitment the recommendation of media theorist w.j.t mitchell in his book cloning terror (2011). he writes: “it is never enough simply to point out the error in a metaphor, or the lack of reality in an image. it is equally important to trace the process by which the metaphoric becomes literal, and the image becomes actual … we need a method that recognizes and embraces both the unreality of images and their operational reality” (p. xviii, emphasis in original). i approach the differences outlined above through the interfaces that configure war fighters to recognize relevant subjects and objects, in particular the discriminations that are the prerequisites for defensible killing.    i use the term “interface” broadly, to index the human-machine configurations comprising contemporary, remotely-controlled weapon systems (particularly armed drones and weaponized robots), and also immersive, computationally-based training simulations, which are my focus here. a central challenge for these simulations, as conceived by their sponsors and users, is the achievement of realism or verisimilitude between the simulation’s figurations and sites of projected operation, their inhabitants, and potential events that might occur there. it is this challenge that the special effects know-how of the entertainment industry is called to address. the project of immersive simulation can be usefully placed within the larger frame of “cultural intelligence” considered by ali (2016), as a legitimizing condition of possibility for both distant and proximate engagements. as ali observes, “[t]he turn towards cultural intelligence endeavors to fill the spaces where strategic intelligence has failed, and in turn illustrates the failures of remote and tactile technologies to deliver the precise, targeted, warfare of the progressive imagination.” in this frame we might think about the promise of immersive simulation as the tactile supplement to imaginaries of virtuous war enabled by remote operations, the former underwritten by cultural intelligence acquired through proximate relations on the ground, the latter by intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance from above.    in the case of flatworld, i am interested in whose imaginaries are at play in its design, at the intersection of the realism of stagecraft and the pre-scripted rehearsal of military operations. in a 2001 paper published in ieee computer, ict director richard lindheim and ict director of technology william swartout identify the relevant actors as “computer scientists, us army personnel, and entertainment professionals,” and the goal as “developing the foundation for an experiential learning system” (p. 72). more specifically, they describe an early project, the mission rehearsal exercise, commissioned by stricom “to create a virtual reality training environment in which soldiers will confront dilemmas that force them to make decisions in real time under stressful and conflicting circumstances” (2001, p. 72). training challenges are intensified, the authors explain, by the post-cold war expansion of us military operations, conducted across the globe and in close contact with local populaces. with this challenge in mind, they continue, the project enrolls artificial intelligence researchers at usc to create the “automated reasoning and emotional modeling technology for the virtual humans” who trainees will encounter (2001, p. 72). a universal, customizable template, the virtual human bodies are animated by researchers from robotics company boston dynamics, and their faces are given expression by interactive virtual character provider haptek. creating the simulation content, lindheim and swartout explain, requires input from the entertainment professionals: “an art director to design the environment’s overall look, actors to serve as models for the virtual humans,9 and artists to model the animated characters, buildings, and environmental details” (2001, p. 74). combining technical expertise in sound engineering, speech synthesis and real time graphics, these professionals provide the platform for shaping specific characters and scenarios, scripted to meet the army’s training agenda. the synthesis of art and science is not, however, without friction. while the entertainment professionals focus on the storyline arc and the simulation’s dramatic effect, behavioral researchers and military advisors are oriented to meeting the army’s learning objectives. the challenge is to translate the army trainers’ prescribed “events list” into alternative decision paths through the storyline, with clear pedagogical consequences for each decision taken.10 the authors offer as an example scenario a mission rehearsal exercise set during yugoslavia’s breakup in the 1990s. in the scenario, an actual lieutenant in training is instructed to rendezvous with his troops “to quell civil unrest arising in a small town” (2001, p. 74). his progress is interrupted by a reported incident in which an army humvee has collided with a civilian car. the lieutenant, we are told, “sees a small boy on the ground, seriously injured, the boy’s frantic mother kneeling beside her injured child” (2001, p. 75). the situation is further complicated by the arrival of a tv cameraman, implying that “any mistake the lieutenant makes could appear on the international news.”11 the lieutenant’s dilemma then becomes whether to divide the forces, en route to aid their comrades in the intensifying civil combat, by ordering a medevac helicopter for the boy.  one of the project’s greatest challenges, the authors report, is the creation of believable virtual humans, imagined as stage actors programmed to enact the virtual characters. the virtual characters include some that are scripted, others that select dynamically from a library of possible behaviors using “ai reasoning,” and “an emotional model for the one character in our scenario who really needed to show emotion, the mother” (2001, p. 75). through the mother avatar affect is condensed into a familiar gendered object. although suggesting an open-ended range of affective responses, the authors acknowledge that the mother’s model-based emotional range (triggered by other software-based events) is limited. they point to computer graphic software limitations at the time, which meant that the contact of virtual characters was rendered as overlapping edges rather than as touching bodies. in tension with the aim of a realistic depiction, they explain, this constraint meant that the virtual mother was unable to hold her injured son (2001, p. 78). as the mother’s affect is key to what comprises the trainee’s “stressful and conflicting circumstances,” the resulting breaches in the trainee’s suspension of disbelief mark at once the system’s weaknesses, and the justification for its further development. more realistic graphics and animation, the acknowledgment of this shortcoming implies, would produce more powerful affect, and more effective delivery of the training protocol.  figure 3. depiction of jfets d, ft sill, oklahoma, 2003. archive photo courtesy of jarrell pair, flatworld project, ict, jfets_demo_2003/soldflat.jpg although the authors report that “audience” response to the mission rehearsal exercise was enthusiastic despite these limitations, the flatworld project foundered for lack of funding until 2003 (j. pair, personal communication, 29 august 2012). that year, flatworld was reconfigured for a demonstration of the joint fires and effects training system (jfets-d) installed at fort sill, oklahoma. jfets-d produced a non-interactive demo of a flatworld room in which soldiers rehearsed calling in artillery, bombs, missiles, and other munitions onto targets they were observing (j. pair, personal communication, 30 august 2012, see figure 3). at the army science conference in november of 2006, a contractor for the office of naval research (onr) came by the ict booth and mentioned that the marines were interested in using the flatworld concept in a project that would become known as the infantry immersion trainer (iit) (j. pair, personal communication, 30 august 2012). aimed at pre-deployment training for the us marine corps, the iit’s imagined geographies were figured around locations of us military operations at the time. more specifically, the iit was positioned as a response to the onr’s call for “an advanced training system that offers marines an opportunity to become immersed in an iraqi village without ever leaving u.s. soil” (dean et al., 2008, p. 3). in a 2008 conference paper, design team members describe the iit facility, built in a large, abandoned tomato factory at camp pendleton (figure 4): although it is a vast and open building, when you enter the simulated town, the “roads” span about three people wide…all along the roads, one-room “houses” have been constructed, with real doors and windows. inside, the houses are furnished with authentic furnishings, including tea sets, hookahs, and wall hangings…smells are pumped into the warehouse giving it a musky scent. individuals of middle eastern descent serve as role players. (dean et al., 2008, p. 3) figure 4. abandoned tomato factory, camp pendleton, ca. left: exterior of facility. right: interior of facility. archive photographs courtesy of jarrell pair, flatworld project, ict, infantry_immersion_trainer img_3797; iit_pics_vid/img_5350.jpg. figured into the simulation, actual humans recognizable as “middle eastern”12 join with virtual characters to enhance the scene’s believability; “the warehouse comes alive as a mini-town direct from iraq—from the sites, to the smells, to the faces, the marines will enter a world that will introduce them to what they will encounter when deployed” (dean et al., 2008, pp. 3-4). among the challenges reported by the authors is control over the designed events as they unfold in real time. live actors engaged in role-playing and virtual characters each pose difficulties; the former because of their range of possible actions and responses, requiring that they be carefully briefed, the latter because their limited interactivity necessitates continuous control by a human operator behind the scenes, and threatens to rupture the suspension of disbelief that animates the scenario’s realism. the simulation’s seamless immersion, the authors observe, “is most vulnerable at points where the virtual and the physical meet, especially where trainees interact with virtual characters” (2008, p. 5). for example, they explain that placing a virtual terrorist behind a couch is not as simple as projecting the character onto the wall above a physical couch in the room (see figure 5). figure 5. iit suicide bomber. archive photo courtesy of jarrell pair, flatworld project, ict, iit pics video/images/img_5326 a marine is trained, the authors explain, to assess the threat posed by another through a “sweep” around or in relation to the other’s body. while the marine can make the sweep, the virtual character has no physical volume, so the sweep will produce a view not behind the character, but only of the back edge of the actual couch meeting the actual wall. at the same time, the simulation’s promise is to render the actual person that it immerses reliably machine-like. the authors explain: the iit is a decision house that enables the individual marine to significantly increase the tempo of his observe-orient-decide-act loop (ooda loop), the constant mental process during which a marine is presented with a situation, develops courses of actions, makes a decision, and executes the decision. the iit's realistic/virtual environment serves as a stress inoculation tool, designed to inoculate the marine rifleman from the sights, sounds, smells, and chaos of close quarters urban warfare while enhancing his ability to make correct legal, ethical, and moral decisions under the stress of combat. (2008, p. 4) this imaginary figures the marine as an individual male body, forged through training into a triad of capacities: unflagging rational cognition, emotional invulnerability and perfect judgment. this promise of immersive transformation elides not only the phantasmatic nature of these idealized normativities, but also the inherent contradictions among the qualities listed, and the inevitable trauma of people called to embody them (see brandt, 2016). the system was first used by the marines for training in november of 2007, and the press were invited to “embed” with the marines in a demonstration training exercise in 2008. interviewed by an abc reporter, one service member stated that in his view only the lack of heat (an enhancement subsequently added) differentiated the simulation from iraq.13 a supporting assessment came from lance cpl. william hawkins, 21, of kokomo, indiana, interviewed by the san diego union tribune, who stated in response to a question about the simulation’s fidelity that “it's definitely iraq” (rogers, 2008). the same article refers the facility’s virtuality back to actual civilian deaths in iraq in 2004 and 2005; incidents that it reports caused “embarrassment” to the marines. the article explains that “the new simulation program is designed to reinforce ethical conduct, hone small-unit infantry skills and sharpen marines’ combat instincts.” whatever tensions we might see between the goals of sharpening combat instincts and reinforcing ethical conduct, the article concludes that “the immersion program figures to be a central part of future infantry training as the marine corps continues its presence in the anbar province of iraq and will take on expeditionary combat in afghanistan this spring.”  according to the formal assessment conducted by dean et al. (2008), the training objectives against which the iit was rated most highly were the application of rules of engagement and escalation of force (dean et al., 2008, p. 7). the reference to rules of engagement brings us back to the training objectives of military simulation, and to the question of the real.  full immersion and the question of the real to see how questions of realism haunt an immersive simulation like the iit, i turn to a public broadcasting services (pbs) documentary produced as part of a media demonstration of the iit staged in september of 2007.14 titled full immersion, the film’s accompanying text explains that “this 32,000-square-foot, $2.5 million facility combines live action role players and virtual iraqis projected onto holographic screens to create interactive battle simulations.”15 anticipating the narrative that will be offered by the film itself, the text continues: the iit allows instructors to create complicated training scenarios on the fly. virtual civilians appear alongside virtual insurgents, teaching the marines to make snap ethical decisions on when to pull the trigger and how to implement the rules of engagement. the screens even judge how well they aim. the immersion trainer also prepares marines for the stress of close-quarters urban combat and the tactics of clearing houses. this synopsis summarizes the promises and problematics of both the iit and the media’s rendering of it. the title cites the premise of “full immersion” developed within the military imaginary of the “theater of operations” prior to the advent of computational media (see masco, 2014). as described by the us army: theater immersion rapidly builds combat-ready formations led by competent, confident leaders who see first, understand first, and act first; battleproofed soldiers inculcated with the warrior ethos man the formations. theater immersion places—as rapidly as possible—leaders, soldiers, and units into an environment that approximates what they will encounter in combat. at the soldier level, training is tough, realistic, hands-on, repetitive, and designed to illicit [sic] intuitive soldier responses. it thrusts formations into a theater analog soon after they arrive at their mobilization station and places stress on the organization from individual to brigade levels. theater immersion is a combat training center-like experience that replicates conditions downrange while training individualthrough brigade-level collective tasks. (honore & zajac, 2005, p. 3)  designating most broadly the area within which the action is projected to occur, the theater metaphor connotes a bounded space that contains the action and maintains its adherence to the script that controls it.16 in the context of the iit, this language obscures the actual ruptures of the simulation as a device, and of the training exercise as a genre. this mystification is reiterated across the narratives of both iit spokespeople and embedded media reporters. within this theater, the figures of the “live action role player” and the “virtual iraqi” both promise to animate an “actual iraqi” who is him/herself already a phantasmatic projection. these elements are to come together in an “interactive battle simulation” where, in the context of computational media, the interactivity is not only the pre-scripted or impromptu exchanges of the theater, but also now part of a wider technological imaginary of the smart machine.   the latter is further invoked in the promise of programmability “on the fly,” and the inscription into the screen itself of assessments of the accuracy of fire. the simulation’s instructional pedagogy serves the rules of engagement, which include the challenges of discriminating between “civilians” and “insurgents” who appear out of nowhere and alongside one another, forcing a judgment based on immediately recognizable bodily signs in the service of “snap ethical decisions.” finally, all of this is part of a wider frame of “close quarters urban combat” and the routinization of procedures of “clearing houses,” that is, war fighting under occupation, including forcible entry into people’s homes with guns drawn. as the film opens, we follow a marine squadron in close formation running past the camera along a narrow street, each marine with a hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him. we see immediately a unit of connected bodies in close quarters, moving with a sense of readiness that signals their anticipation of danger ahead. the danger is suggested not only by the orientation and formation of the bodies, but also by the soundtrack of calls to prayer—by now the iconic audio signature of the islamic other for western audiences, and a reminder of the religious foundations (translated as fundamentalisms) assumed to support acts of insurgency against us-supported regime change. the camera and marines arrive at a closed door, and we hear the command “get that door down,” followed by the crack of a blow as the door opens into the interior of a room, revealing a bed and wall tapestry. figure 6. screen shot from full immersion the unit pours into the room, guns drawn, to face another wall out of our view. we hear a hail of bullets aimed at the hidden side of the room; the unit members turn in all directions and then call “clear!” as the camera pans, we see somewhat discordantly not a bloody corpse, but a bullet-ridden wall onto which the image of a virtual character is projected—a woman in a head scarf shifting her eyes mechanically from one side of the room to the other (figure 6). who is she? we’re left to wonder. who was the target of this shooting and where is the death and trauma that must follow an invasion of alien bodies and a blast of bullets into this intimate domestic space?    figure 7. screen shot from full immersion the film does not dwell on these questions, however, but cuts to a title that tells us where we are: this is camp pendleton in california, and we’re witnessing the us marine corp infantry immersion trainer. the film cuts back to an image of the opening scene, displayed this time through a black and white video monitor as we hear douglas rushkoff, the series “correspondent,” ask “so what’s that there?” the camera zooms back and we’re now behind the scene, in a control room filled with monitors and programmers’ interfaces. “that’s the actual avatar room that you were just in,” the operator explains, and then goes on to describe how his suite of cameras allows him to follow the action both outside of and within the system’s various rooms. the filmmaker’s camera cuts to a view of a monitor screen, showing various menus and code windows surrounding an image of two virtual characters, both facing the viewer—a young man with his arms at his sides (possibly kneeling, though his lower torso disappears off the bottom edge of the screen) beside a keffiyeh-scarved man pointing a weapon at us viewers (figure 7). we hear gunshots, and rushkoff exclaims, “oh, he missed him” as the virtual characters direct their gazes to their right. “so what just happened there?” rushkoff asks, “he shot that guy but he didn’t die?” eliding differences between real and virtual bodies, the operator explains that the rooms have thermal cameras to register the dummy bullets’ impact on the projection screen, so if a virtual character is shot anywhere—here he gestures to his own body—but in the heart, the spinal column or the head—“it might take several shots to take them down.” the film cuts to a full screen view of the bullet-ridden wall that we saw before, but this time beside the woman we see two gunmen (figure 8) and watch as they first turn their guns in our direction, then fall below the bottom of the frame in a hail of bullets.17 this is a repetition of the opening scene, we assume, this time revealing the enemy that the house raid anticipated. we should mind the edits here, however, and the gaps, as presumably bleeding, dying bodies simply disappear below the frame, and continuities and coherences are intimated that belie the inevitable fragility of both the prototype technology and the careful staging of its documentary re-presentation. figure 8. screen shot from full immersion this account of the standard protocol of targeting and killing is followed by a dialogue between rushkoff and the operator that establishes that the training happens in the iit “almost every day.” a screen caption tells us that “since its establishment in 2007, hundreds of marines have trained here.” this is not, in other words, merely a demo but a working—and, by implication, effective—training facility, instrumental in shaping the professional competencies of those who have been subject to it. the scene then shifts to a room of actual human role-players dressed in traditional men’s garments and speaking in arabic: we watch one man dressed in traditional dress shake hands with a marine passing by on the right. an explosion rings out and the role players duck for cover, as we hear a voiceover: “we describe what we’re doing here as mixed reality, live role players with pyrotechnics.” the film cuts to a location just outside the facility where, with a group of service members in the background, tom buscemi, director of the center, offers a highly scripted and remarkably affectless account of what we have seen:  this was in preparation for the confusion, the chaos, that a marine is gonna see on his first firefight. we want to inoculate the marines with the sights, sounds, smells and chaos of close quarters battle, so that his first firefight or his next firefight is no worse than his last simulation. the camera then cuts to a drop-down menu from which a selection is made, producing a stereotypical image of a suicide bomber strapped with explosives. we return to rushkoff and the operator, who explains that the facility’s uniqueness comes from the ability to tailor scenarios specifically to the needs of a particular unit.18 we see another extended round of shots as ruskhoff exclaims, “he shot the woman…was this a good one, what just happened?”  “no” responds the operator, “because they hit an innocent civilian.  we’ll debrief the points and say that they need to make sure that they have proper target identification.”19 the scene shifts to an interior space, presumably the debriefing room, where a group of marines are gathered, as an instructor enters and says, “chaotic, right? do we know what blew us up, by the way?” the camera pans to anxious faces. “an rpg?” offers one trainee. “okay, that didn’t blow us up. it was a 155 shell gents, (gesturing) it’s only about that big, and about this big around, it was sitting there right on the ground. first fire team went right by it, because we’re not paying attention to our surroundings.” we catch a glimpse here of the real affective agencies that run through this pedagogy, including the call to demonstrate competency and the shame and stakes of failure. we emerge from the facility now, through a door marked “authorized access only,” into the bright sunshine of the california desert, where trainees testify to the realness of their affected bodies—sweating skin, pumping hearts—while also expressing appreciation for the simulation’s virtuality. lance cpl. david osborn explains, “we’re in there, full gear and everything, and a face mask, you come out of there and you're just drenched in sweat, and you’re still kind of pumped up from it and everything, and you’re ready to go through it again.” this testimonial to affected bodies is the lead-in to an extended sequence in which the participants address the simulation’s realism. “it’s way different than a video game,” pfc. taylor vena observes, and another voice off camera agrees, “there’s no way you can even compare,” adding “with a video game, you can do it over and over and over again until you get it right.” “but ultimately,” vena acknowledges, “you know that nobody’s going to shoot back at you in there.”20 figure 9. screen shot from full immersion there follows another edit of the first “clearing” episode, this time showing the screen with a virtual woman and child, standing behind the keffiyeh-scarved male (figure 9). we hear a round of gunfire as the man falls, while the woman and child duck down to the bottom of the frame. the film cuts back to buscemi, who asserts that “we’re doing multiple scenarios to demand that the marines make the proper moral, ethical and legal decisions. so we pop up women and children, the innocents, mixed in with the insurgents that these guys are most likely to find.” the camera cuts back to pfc. vena, who confesses, “i actually shot a civilian. apparently, [the person] was standing a little too close to the insurgent and i was shooting with my left hand, so (small chuckle). it was a mistake, i’m just glad it happened on the screen and it really didn’t happen in real life.” the screen fades out as another unit is shown entering the facility, and we see a title explaining that the marines we have “just met” are scheduled to deploy to afghanistan later in the year. the difference between the iraqi scenography that we’ve just witnessed and the premise of this as anticipatory immersion in an afghan “theater” is left unremarked. so what of events in actual theaters of operation during this period? writing in the international journal of feminist politics, thomas gregory (2012) recounts an incident in the village of azizabad in herat province, western afghanistan in august of 2008. the scenario reads like something out of the iit:  according to reports, us forces and afghan military personnel entered the area on the night of 21 august in order to capture a local taliban commander. during the course of their operations, the soldiers encountered enemy fighters, prompting them to request additional air support. (gregory, 2012, p. 329) general david mckiernan, us commander of nato forces in afghanistan, initially asserted that us forces who searched the village on august 22 found thirty to thirty-five bodies of “men of military age, and five dead women and children” (“joint investigation,” 2008).21 this was subsequently contradicted, however, by radically different reports from the afghan government and the united nations, which confirmed the deaths of ninety civilians, seventy-five of them women and children. initially blaming the discrepancy on “a very deliberate information operation orchestrated by the insurgency, by the taliban” (mckiernan, quoted in “joint investigation,” 2008), the us-led nato coalition was eventually forced to reopen their investigation, confirming the larger number of civilian deaths. further controversy attended the claim of “enemy fighters,” which conflicted with the village’s multiple connections to the afghan police, nato and us reconstruction projects, and its avowed opposition to the taliban. moreover, the “taliban commander” whom us officials claimed was successfully targeted, mullah sadiq, reportedly called the radio free europe-affiliated station, radio liberty, several days after the raid and declared that he was alive and well and was not in azizabad that night. station reporters confirmed that they recognized his voice, had double checked the recording, and were sure that the caller was mullah sadiq (gall, 2008). this incident and its contestations exemplify the “fog of war” characterizing counterinsurgency operations, and which flatworld’s training simulations are imagined to address. we cannot resolve, particularly from a distance, the multiple identifications, affiliations and aspirations of azizabad’s inhabitants. but it is clear that the figurations that animate military operations, from the literal animations of flatworld to the categorical identifications deployed in the field, consistently betray the promise of accurate identification and justified killing on which counterinsurgency warfare depends. conclusion   military investments in immersive simulation promise controllable interfaces through which war can be prospectively and retrospectively sensed. but as geographer derek gregory (2011b) reminds us, even bodies directly immersed in combat are systematically encapsulated within very specific, arguably parochial, geographies. in contrast to the premise that training, and particularly simulations of projected theaters of operation, expose the soldier to unfamiliar situations in ways that expand his or her understanding, we can also see how the simulation—starting with its figuration of relevant geographies as theaters of operation—guarantees that, in gregory’s words, the soldier’s view is always and only that from ‘our’ side. i am interested in the ways in which training simulations like flatworld might work in the service of encapsulation, while at the same time they promise imaginative transportation of the bodies that they enclose into unfamiliar territory. in thinking the real and virtual together, in terms of their connections and the differences that matter, these are processes that we need to understand better. in the context of ongoing us military operations, it is tempting to dismiss the significance of simulations in the face of the brutality of actual military force. but rather than set aside the virtual, i would suggest that we need to recognize its limits at the same time that we articulate its essential place in reiterating the modes of “situational awareness” that sustain the operations through which real injury is done.   so i close with a question: how can we think simulation and actuality together through their resemblances—their real, corporeal connections—and articulate their crucial differences, particularly when it comes to wounding and killing? how do we, like j, maintain our distance from the scene of battle? what does it mean to be immersed in a world but not of it? what are the leaky boundaries that undo the carefully crafted lines of connection and separation meant to keep “our” bodies safe and to maintain the difference between those of us who are addressed by the simulation, and those figured as its objects? most central to the developments considered here, what is the relation between the virtual figure of the enemy, and “the enemy”? military training in situational awareness develops on a premise of recognition of that which is already there, already a threat or not one. but if we think of “the enemy” in the way that judith butler first urged us to think of “sex,” we see that both terms are part of regulatory practices that produce the bodies that those same practices are designed to govern. following this analysis, like sexual difference that is forced to conform to a gender binary, the “enemy” is, in butler’s words, “an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through reiteration” (butler 1993, p. 1). and as butler observes (1993, p. 2), that this reiteration is necessary signifies that materialization is never quite fixed, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is compelled. it is these constitutive instabilities that afford possibilities for transformative refiguration. as with sex/gender after butler, in other words, it should be impossible to think of “the enemy” in any way other than performatively, as the effect of a regulatory ideal and an essential constituent of what we can call the military imperative. for the soldier, the enemy is not simply out there, but is one of the categories through which the soldier becomes viable, that which qualifies him or her within the military’s domain of cultural intelligibility. so if the construction of the enemy is not a singular or determining act but rather a process of reiteration, how might we reconceive training from training the body in recognition and response (the current conception of “situational awareness”), to training as itself productive of the entities to be recognized? as another mode of reiteration, simulation is then deeply implicated in performing the realities that it cites. we can then ask what are the discourses and material practices that hold military realities together and give them their agency, and with what interventions might we effect their further deconstruction and transformation. acknowledgements this paper has been greatly enriched by generative interchange with my interlocutors in this special issue, isra ali, marisa brandt, kate chandler, emily cohen ibañez and d. andy rice, as well as from discussion with participants in the open track on “sociotechnical mediations of war, peace and (in)security” at the annual meeting of the society for social studies of science (4s) in november of 2015, and colleagues in the military and security critical interest group of the american anthropological association. my thanks as well go to lisa cartwright, cristina visperas and two anonymous catalyst reviewers. notes 1 flatworld was one ict project within a larger initiative aimed at finding military applications for virtual reality technologies. a related line of development resulted in the virtual iraq/afghanistan and bravemind exposure therapy systems, immersive simulation technologies designed for the treatment of post-traumatic stress. these systems have been engaged critically by marisa brandt (2013, 2016) and emily cohen ibañez (2016), whose analyses inform and are deeply resonant with my own. 2 many of us first learned this lesson from donna haraway’s writings on the lively commerce of the material and the semiotic (see haraway, 1988, 1989, 1997). 3 later configurations of the ict technologies for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder were oriented less to realism than to scenarios specific to the individual who had experienced the event identified as the site of trauma. the premise was that these individuals did not need realism to evoke relevant memories. see brandt (2013, 2016). 4the dramaturgical figuration of military operations goes back even further, of course, beginning with the trope of the “theatre of operations” defined by prussian general carl von clausewitz (1873) in his book on military strategy published as on war in 1832 (see also masco, 2014). in strategic scenography: staging the landscape of war, greer crawley (2011) sets out the history of what she characterizes as the “scenography of war” beginning in the early twentieth century, and andy rice (2016) explores the theatrics and lived experiences of contemporary “rehearsals” for combat at fort irwin’s national training center. see also stone (forthcoming). 5 marisa brandt (personal communication) points out that the office, now called peo stri (program executive office simulation, training and instrumentation), appears to have abandoned this slogan. 6 i should note here that the archive that i received does not include any proprietary or classified documents. moreover, my characterization of the archive as a “fieldsite” recognizes the very different grounding of my account, not in lived experience and in situ engagement with the project, but rather in my work with its documentary records.  7 see also goodwin’s (1994) poignant account of the presences rendered systematically absent in the defense’s instructions to the jury on how to read a video through the lens of “professional vision” in the case of the rodney king trial. 8 flatworld restages a simple gendered figuration of those involved in armed violence as male and those who are supplemental to it as female or child, notably lacking any evidence of women as combatants on either side. women and children are of interest primarily insofar as their affiliations and affects are seen as consequential; for a critical analysis of the positioning of women as cultural mediators in the war zones of iraq and afghanistan, see ali (2016). 9 that actors are taken as the referent for virtual humans is indicative of the ways in which realism in this context is affiliated with the “live exercises” of military training. see rice (2016) and stone (forthcoming). 10 see dean et al., (2008) for more on how the logics of formal “training objectives” structure design. 11 the inclusion of the media in the scenario reflects the intimate incorporation of journalism into contemporary warfighting, expressed most explicitly in the form of the “embedded reporter." on the place of the media as witnesses to “live” simulations, see der derian (2009); magelssen (2009); and rice (2016). 12 on the realities and multiplicities behind this figuration see rice (2016). 13 archive video abc/kgtv, january 2008, flatworld project, ict. 14http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/waging-war/immersion-training/full-immersion.html, posted 29 april 2009; accessed 1 july 2015. 15in this same summary, the facility is described as “a product of a decade of investment by the office of naval research,” a simplification of the ups and downs of funding evidenced in the flatworld archives.  16 this is echoed in the metaphors of “the box,” and more specifically “the sandbox” as designations of the simulation created at the national training center at fort irwin (rice, 2016), and more recently the “kill box” as the just-in-time battlespace of what geographer derek gregory has named “everywhere war” (2011a). 17 marisa brandt observes (personal communication) that it is the simulation’s alignment of ‘our’ positioning with that of the service member trainee that produces this “us/friend” and this “them/enemy.” 18 the premise that the conditions of combat can be articulated in the form of scenarios is the anticipatory twin of the treatment of post-combat trauma through its narrativization according to standardized scripts in the “virtual therapy” system bravemind described by brandt (2016). this link suggests that combat itself comprises a kind of unspeakable lacuna between the orderings of training on one hand, and of treatment on the other. a key question, underscored by brandt, is whether these stories acknowledge their politics and their complex relations to the lived experiences that they cite, or work to neutralize the latter’s effects. see also cohen ibañez (2016). 19 in a critique of the categories of “civilians and combatants,” christiane wilke (in press) observes how the designation of  “women and children” as the canonical form of the former supports the equally indiscriminate association of “military-aged males” with the latter. these stereotypes are reproduced uncritically in the iit scenario that we witness; as marisa brandt points out (personal communication) gender here produces virtual defendable bodies as well as killable ones. see also chandler (2016). 20 the virtues of a ‘safe’ space for the anticipatory or retrospective experience of traumatizing events is a premise that conjoins training and therapeutic simulations, and also the central tension in their promise of realism (see brandt, 2016; cohen ibañez, 2016). 21 see footnote 8 regarding the politics of these categorizations. appendix: video transcript (j, waving at the scene) “so i’ll do a few things here (turns to tablet). one thing that i’d like to show (turns to open door in right wall, revealing continuation of the scene outside) is the fact that (gestures) this is one contiguous world out there. (uav appears through doorway, flying across from the right.) so here you have an unmanned vehicle flying through the environment (crosses over to front flat) and there you see it on the other digital flat (bringing tablet into close up to show). we can export that uav’s camera to any external display, and we can use that to pick out targets, you know, find adversaries, that sort of thing. (turning to tablet, with input pen, then back to camera.) and i can do a lot of things to dynamically raise or modulate the stress level of the environment, for example.” (very loud sounds of helicopter, which then appears in front window and lands in street; j goes over and closes the door, helicopter takes off again.) “one nice thing about flatworld (gesture towards window) is that when you encounter a virtual human, that figure is in life size. so to illustrate that we have a few demos. (input to tablet, sound of loud knocking from door.) if someone knocks on the door here. (goes over to door, another input to tablet, opens door to reveal stereotypic masked gunman.) whoops, it’s a bad guy. (avatar yells in arabic, then opens fire; j stands impassively, tablet in hand, makes him disappear.) (laconically) shoot him." (closes door) “and of course all of this you’re wearing polarized glasses, it’s all in 3d, that guy’s gun points out, it’s very dramatic. (turns back to tablet, sounds of loud knocking.) somebody else knocks on the door (he opens it, figure of us soldier appears cautiously from left side) and it’s our hero who, we’re trying to imply that he actually shot that guy.” (stands back to watch.) avatar soldier: “this is a hostile area, get out of here now!” (j walks around to face front flat, inputting into tablet.) “so this place suddenly becomes very dangerous.” avatar soldier: “(unintelligible) wait outside, go go go!” (car appears on street with gunman firing from it; helicopter reappears flying in overhead; j walks out door at back of room.) “so we escape through this door.” (j enters into dark alley-like exterior.) “the sound is not on” (some adjustments being made) “so, we walk outside, and we have the humvees are waiting for us. 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(2001). science and an african logic. chicago: university of chicago. von clausewitz, c. (1873). on war. (j.j. graham, trans.). london: n. trübner. retrieved from http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/onwar1873/toc.htm wilke, c. (under review). high-altitude morality: vision, violence, and the production of legitimate civilians in afghanistan. science, technology & human values. bio lucy suchman is professor of anthropology of science and technology in the department of sociology and co-director of the centre for science studies at lancaster university, uk. she is president of the society for social studies of science (4s) and collaborating editor for the journal social studies of science. her current research examines human-computer interaction in contemporary warfighting, including the figurations that inform immersive simulations, and problems of "situational awareness" in remotely-controlled weapon systems. she focuses on whose bodies are incorporated into these systems, how and with what consequences for social justice and the possibility for a less violent world. six ways of looking at fractal mechanics lockett, william. 2024. “autistic mental schema and the graphical user interface circa 1968.” catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1): 1–33. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © william lockett, 2024 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license autistic mental schema and the graphical user interface circa 1968 william lockett stevens institute of technology wlockett@stevens.edu abstract evelyn fox keller calls the form of organisms a “devious” problem. how and why do such forms arise? models, keller argues, are necessary inroads to these questions. the speculative-propositional mode of computational and mathematical models permits scientists to question the physical and mental processes that shape matter into elegant form despite the “void” of certainty opened by the complexity of vitality. this article documents the use of the logo programming language in model-mind making as well as in experimental coding pedagogies for special needs students circa 1968. it provides a historical and philosophical background for interpreting clinical observations of two young autistic students, david and joey. the article demonstrates that the designers of logo understood their design choices in terms of philosophical debates about the nature of purposive orientations in organisms. the author argues that cautious engagement with those debates—guided by keller’s philosophy of models and catherine malabou’s understanding of immanuel kant’s concept of schema—can open for humanists an interpretive project aimed at elucidating the historical meaning of the graphical user interface. insights into the aesthetics of resistance from autistic rhetorician remi yergeau and philosopher-poet fred moten allow neuroqueer ephemera, lingering in the archives of logo, to illuminate a politicization of mental variety nascent in digital screens. keywords philosophy of science, neuroqueer theory, screen cultures, history of programming original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 2 the elegance of naming in logo in the summer of 1968, a second-grade student from the emerson school in massachusetts learnt a new way to write her name. rosemarie philips, with the help of mrs. marjorie bloom, wrote what her teacher called a “procedure” (feurzeig et al. 1969, 34–38). that procedure, interpreted and executed by a computer, typed out her name on a teletype machine (figure 1). philips programmed in a language called logo. that introductory exercise was part of an experimental summer school organized by members of mit’s newly founded artificial intelligence laboratory (mit ai lab) and bankrolled by the defense contractor bolt, beranek, and newman. philips’s work began as part of an experiment in teaching programming as a way into teaching “concepts” fundamental to “doing” mathematics: “teaching children thinking,” they said (papert 1971, 3–4). the idea was to teach children “the art of setting up models” rather than memorizing formulas for the sake of test results (5). what sort of model is a name? one power of programming is to facilitate the decomposition of a task into smaller parts that can then be named and reused as pre-written functional modules, like off-the-shelf parts in a library or repertoire of functions. names encapsulate. one way to begin founding mathematics is to look for the most basic “operations”—order, addition, and metrics, for example—and then ask what sort of functions preserve “relations” generated by these operations across transformations in “structure” (fong and spivak 2019, 1–6). to think of a property as the preservation of a structural feature is to depart from substance into a “structural approach to modeling” that the ai lab had inherited by myriad influences too numerous to document thoroughly in the present text (fong and spivak 2019; papert 1967a; papert 1967b; piaget 1970). learning her name was less a task in memorizing what to call herself or how to sign a proper name—a familial honorific, rosemarie philips—than an exercise in teaching the computer to store the string of characters, r-o-s-e-m-a-r-i-e, in a register and to then type out that string when certain conditionals are obtained. to store a word indicating “me” prompts pondering the “i think” via rethinking naming: thoughts on uses of i via rewritings of me (longuenesse 2017, 53, 1-2). this is what the ai lab team did; they asked students to use “himself [sic] as a model” for “thinking about thinking” (papert and solomon 1970, 3; minsky and papert 1972 33). that idea became the core constructivist philosophy of education that came out of the logo project—thinking about thinking through thinking about coding facilitates learning. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 3 figure 1. rosemarie philips, “keeprosemarieing.” preparatory sketch for logo procedure executed on digital equipment corporation’s pdp-11 in summer of 1968 (feurzeig et al. 1969, 34). courtesy of mit libraries, institute archives and special collections. seymour papert papers, box 16, (17b-18a), mc693. alt text: image of a page from an archival document. the document reproduces a portion of handwritten code by rosemarie philips. the lines of code pertinent to this article are described, word for word, and discussed in the next section of the article. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 4 for scholars of autism—in its historical (evans 2017), sociological (eyal et al. 2010), and clinical (nadesan 2005) existence as well as in its lived experience and philosophical or artistic form (yergeau 2018; manning 2017; moten 2015)—the echo of thought in the mind (thinking about thinking), is a key concept. some philosophers describe the feeling of thinking happening as a process that carries within its complex structure myriad unactualized variations of actual occurrences (whitehead [1929] 1978; manning 2017). though not in contradiction with that description, others argue that humans need specific forms of mental reference to specific types of mental object to satisfy conditions for special kinds of thinking, such as moral reasoning (kant [1787] 1998; freud [1915] 1991; longuenesse 2017). clinical psychologists have proposed that autistics lack the ability to generate mental objects that model the minds of other beings (baron-cohen, leslie, and frith 1985). programmers worked with autistic children in the 1960s because of the opportunity that the pedagogical situation provided for thinking about thinking through teaching programming. these programmers and their autistic students pursued and resisted thinking about thinking while making and interpreting computer-generated images. i argue that this recurrent archival pattern exists because of powerful intellectual tensions between philosophically entrenched ways of thinking about thinking; these tensions have had very real effects on both lived experiences and technological outcomes. the unfinished business of learning to talk about the varieties of mind lives on in our machines. the casual misgendering of rosemarie, quoted a moment ago, could also be read as an archival trace of morgan ames’s argument that logo’s acolytes culturally coded a “social imaginary” of programming as an occupation fit only for “the technically precocious boy” (ames 2019, 28–29, 40–41). that imaginary, for ames, is based in the implicit presumption that coders work alone, reliant only on this echo of themselves, rebounding in the mind, that facilitates their individual acts of hacker bravado. if that cultural imaginary is indeed pervasive and programming, culturally coded as an individualistic pursuit, excludes “girls and women, people of color and others who do not fit the gendered norms of these imaginaries,” then the suggestion i support here, which is that there is an elusive and distinctly neuroqueer dimension to the archives of programming, will require conceptual tools that highlight that aspect of logo’s history. i understand the goal of ames’s project to be detecting, in ethnographic fieldwork, the effects of that gendered imaginary on educational technologies that are rhetorically justified, by their advocates, as vehicles of liberation. i also see the need to conceptualize how ways of thinking about thinking (embedded in cultural imaginaries) shift. to understand how and when ways shift, i look for traces of a temporal rhythm wherein humans become bound by and released from patterns of judgment. keeprosemarieing is an iteration of the rhythm that we will encounter in each subsequent code analyzed herein. called temporality by philosophers, this rhythm inhabits life. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 5 through it, people thicken and vary the work of learning to form, share, resist, and let go of ideas and technologies that structure being together. the phenomenology of temporality in its queer feminist modality has helped me perceive this rhythm of resistance and releasement at work in the archives (ahmed 2006). i find catherine malabou’s (2016) and jacques derrida’s (1989) respective works on kant’s concept of the transcendental to be invaluable when identifying the effect of this temporalizing force on the course of computer history, as i explain below. for now, let us understand the transcendental as an implicit, constraining background guiding the formation of embodied minds and the mental objects they animate. in a biological register, we might wonder why and how organisms’ growth attains and retains form in time: what guides their morphogenesis? in human worlds, we might also wonder not only how constraining social and technological conditions generate resistance (a psychodynamic phenomenon with political upshots) but also how and why minds under duress in difficult social interactions support unrealized variations of actual affairs. by looking at the graphical appearance of the results of philip’s programs in the next section, and by performing a close reading of codes she and her classmates wrote in the summer of 1969, i show that a kantian philosophical interpretation of the meaning of programming took shape as a motivating intellectual problematic at the ai lab. i believe this period of unstable meaning production still structures possible, underrealized modes of interpretability that linger in a suppressed mental background of digital cultures. if our ways of handling and talking about computational things generates and suppresses an implicit “background”—and that background then becomes a “sedimentation” (joining implicit judgments into ways of speaking and thinking about minds, programming, and computers)—then refining “code-reading practices” in the humanities could be one way to build textual “orientation devices” that navigate the strings of reasoning that graphical things, called screens, encapsulate (ahmed 2006, 32–34, 31, 3, 11, 41; marino 2020, 17). the “textual apparatus” of media history, in this phenomenological mode, would aspire to raise machines out of their status of “object logics” with technologically facilitated surfaces and connections, which all “presuppose particular formations of infrastructure,” and into a history of implicit structural models guiding the motion of thinking as it senses itself living (stengers 2014, 24; gaboury 2021, 17; sterne 2012, 15). in the archives of logo, model minds and graphical screens are entangled. that archive is a record of this dance between propositional sedimentation and temporalizing reorientation. programmers bind functions into reusable objects. release of that binding is both imperiled by the efficacy of the thing bound (it can be hard to give up what works) and ensured, as a possibility, by minds that withhold themselves from identity with the thing thought. that archive begins original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 6 with rosemarie philips being asked to rewrite her name and reread the meaning of naming as a way into remodeling her own thinking about being a thinking being. in the half-decade before the mit ai lab, one of logo’s designers, seymour papert, worked with evolutionary biologist jean piaget in geneva. piaget had spent a lifetime building a logical and experimental framework for modeling and observing learning processes across scales and domains of living phenomena. from speciation to variation in mental functions to cycles of scientific knowledge production, piaget believed that “operations” governing the haphazard construction of meaningful forms operated in ways specific to the entities at play in each of these time frames and length scales yet generalizable, eventually, to the status of universal structures governing “development” in each domain (piaget [1963] 1977, 345, 345–53). piaget had enlisted papert to assist him in “constructing a cybernetic model” of learning (piaget 1970, 5). learning was the word that many engineers, logicians, and psychologists who worked in the field of research known as cybernetics chose as a name for the incredibly arduous task of outlining what a rigorous search for the laws governing the attainment of form (in organs, thoughts, and cultures) might look like. philosopher of science and mathematical biologist evelyn fox keller calls the problem of the origin and attainment of form a “devious” problem (2002, 301, 54– 60, 89–95), observing that models, because they wrangle the rift between the model and the thing modeled, require an ongoing exchange and circulation of “epistemic values” (between scientists) to continually maintain and support the model’s claim to “fill a conceptual void” (xi, 8, 13). that void is not the gap between mind and object, somehow filled by representation. nor does this void gape merely for lack of evidence presented to the senses. what keller names devious is a void of propositions that meaningfully bear on the question of how (and why!) complex organic forms can take and hold shape in time. that special ignorance opens a nothingness at the heart of thinking. reflecting on models of cell growth built by cyberneticians, keller discovers consistent forms of “explanatory satisfaction” that crop up to soothe this gnawing doubt about why and how life takes shape the way it does (7). she shows that observers are satisfied when witnessing a lifeform unfolding in time; that builders enjoy a mechanism working effectively; and that mathematicians are satisfied when a formula or a program generates results that exhibit the same beauty that life displays in its elegant machinations (70, 100–1). it will be helpful to keep in mind this idea of epistemic values circulating as a quality of intuitively satisfying appearance because it lends support to a genuinely temporal narration of how media take shape and are sustained by human actions and ideas, rather than being just another name for infrastructures and the representations or materials they carry. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 7 i understand keller’s perspective as a reflection on the temporal dimension of the power of judgment. code is a mental process “bound to time” (marino 2020, 8). languages fall in and out of use. but one must ship the code, so choices get made. that banality harbors great significance; it is a rhythm of work wherein time goes to work on thinking, forcing it to seek out communicable forms of satisfaction. media history can teach us to reflect on the struggles introduced into human worlds by this rhythm of hard-won functionality and suffering caused by the failure to relinquish it. by observing (via the archive) the coeval design of a programming language (logo) and the rebuilding of models of autistic minds (via cybernetics), this paper identifies moments of resistance to the conflation of autistic interiority with those models. it does so by narrating how autistic students, david and joey, negotiated their encounters with philosopher-scientists who were trying to model david’s and joey’s minds. we meet these two students, in the final section, after a lengthy preparation. this preparatory discipline—by way of mrs. bloom and rosemarie, papert and piaget, kant and malabou—will lead us to the rhythm of a neuroqueer residuum in the archives of logo. it may also ready us to listen for hidden temporalizing acts of neuroqueerness searching for a foothold within a misgendered imaginary, writ large. autistic rhetorician remi yergeau (2018) and poet-philosopher fred moten (2015) assist me in that task of attunement—both authors have outlined the work of intertwining the science of the mind, phenomenology, and critical computer histories of cybernetics. poly / side / angle seymour papert read code by rosemarie philips as a basis for reflection on what sigmund freud once called the “psychophysiological parallelism” (freud [1915] 1963, 111, 110–46; papert 1963, 138–39). the idea was not that code is an “explanation” of mental function (craik 1952, 84, 59, 59–65; newell, shaw, and simon 1958, 151, 151–66; simon and newell 1971, 147, 145–59). papert understood the parallel of mental function to neurons in terms of jean piaget’s inquiry into the “schemata” of “autistic thought” (piaget 1918, 165; piaget [1937] 1977, 275). schema was the word piaget used to describe the finite logical form of mental phenomena he hypothesized to be operating in the nonconscious background of ordered speech and action (piaget [1937] 1977, 275). the logo designers believed that intuitions of transcendentals had a historical dimension because finitude introduces contingencies of individual and technological mediation into the process of priming and refining intuitions. in 1969 those same designers were also building code libraries for graphical screens using the structural approach to modeling. the first line of philip’s code declares a new function, called “keeprosemarieing.” the string of characters “t” and then “o” tell the computer that whatever comes next is the name of what logo’s designers termed a “procedure,” which many programmers in 2023 would simply call a function (feurzeig et al. 1969, 276; original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 8 schiffman 2008, x; monfort 2016, 268; mccarthy, reas, and fry 2016, xi). the next word, “print,” rather than being a function defined by a programmer in logo, is a function defined by the programmers of logo. print is available off the shelf; it is part of logo’s library of functions. writing print tells the computer that whatever character comes next ought to be given in the specific form (an argument) valid as input specific to print’s parameters. by placing rosemarie in quotation marks, young philips was telling the computer to read each letter of her name as content meant for storage in memory. in the next line philips calls the function she has just declared with t and o and then defines it by using the letters rosemarie as input to print. keeprosmarieing will keep on printing rosemarie—over and over, reeling off the teletype, sheet after sheet of pinwheel paper, layering in accordion folds on the floor until the paper runs out, the plug is pulled, or she must add the command end. there is no “state” that defines the end of the loop, so just keeprosemarieing (buswell 2018). how does nature know when to stop? what value, or count, could limit function, binding it to the state of the finite system while guiding its form to an end? one riddle of morphogenesis is already here, ingrained in this choice of beginning a history of graphics with learning to code: what binds a set of operations into a stable form-content, argument-input relation that unfolds and stops at the right times? the form of time remapped not to code, alone, but to an echo of a riddle as it finds a new human medium in which to take hold. another “normal” student from the emerson school appears next in the bolt, beranek, and newman report from the ’68 ai lab summer school. jay’s “workless” function returned a value and was therefore dubbed a “logo thing”; it hacked off one “word” each time using an “operation” which meant an end state could be defined by the emptying of a register (figure 2) (feurzeig et al. 1969, 274, 277, 321). a meaning of function is carried by the name of jay’s function. “workless” was the name mrs. bloom chose for an exercise working with the stock logo functions “first,” “last,” “butfirst” (reading: the first word or character in a set), and “butlast” (275). all these functions identified items in a string stored in memory. jay started by storing a string, “i am a boy” (61). then, he used first to have the computer remove the first word from the string: then the next, then the next. this simple function made workless into a letter-animating toy (274–77). mrs. bloom may have chosen the name for its “fun” resonance with the disappearance of the diminishing stock of characters, for which the computer and printer worked less and less each time it executed the code (53). for each wordless the computer would workless. it was an orthographic drift, a glide atop proper form, nonetheless eminently programmable, executable, valid: proper nonsense. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 9 figure 2. jay, “workless.” printout of logo code executed on pdp-11, 1968. (feurzeig et al. 1969, 61). courtesy of mit libraries, institute archives and special collections. seymour papert papers, box 16, (17b-18a), mc693. alt text: image of a page from an archival document. the document reproduces the results of a procedure, named workless, written by marjorie bloom’s student jay. the procedure takes a string of characters, removes the last word or the last character from the string, and then prints out the string minus that word or character. three different inputs to the program are shown. the string “i am a boy” becomes “am a boy” then “a boy” then “boy” and then the program stops. the next two input examples are composed of (1) all the non-alphanumeric symbols on the keyboard and (2) all the letters and numbers on the keyboard, in order. the character-removal procedure creates an image of wedge shape by slowly chipping away at the length of the string. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 10 some philosophers believe that proper functioning defines morphogenesis: the feeling of what it is like to undergo a malfunction (i.e., pain) is evidence, in perception, that meaning arises to guide organic form toward functional, goaloriented assemblies of matter (neander 2017). if so, then what is the meaning of this proper nonsense? if meaning arises during the assessment (immanent to feeling) of (dys)functional form, guiding beings towards purposeful proper functioning, then why do minds make a guile song of nonsense glee from improper use (deleuze 1990; tomlinson 2023)? we could functionalize play, saying that proper functioning requires that minds glimpse the terms of interactions, at a distance, via make believe (bateson [1954] 1972). we could also see—without negating that function of play—the variation of ways as rooted in a time before such a meta-assessment of function has taken hold of thought, dancing instead in the delight of meaningful impropriety. let us see this wavering unfolding in graphical appearance. the usefulness of proper names in indulging this glee seems quickly to have expired, displaced as letters became graphical tokens used to stock registers with moveable bits: “they all liked to make big ones” (feurzeig et al. 1969, 61). in the descending and ascending edge generated by the program, “saw,” logo fills and empties registers with letters deployed by jay as graphical tokens (86). motion appears in the instant that words predicating me (i am a boy) are loosed from the grips of linguistic community, departing to instead bind logic, word, and storage into a “pattern-making procedure” by which the appearance of a rhythmic pulse, both organic and mechanical, takes hold of the work of computation (figure 3) (186). what was the meaning of this paper-screen appearance of the unfolding of a form? it meant that the elemental form of recursive circling to nullity and back, open and shut with each return to debugging and building up bigger and bigger models—departing from coding into thinking, for a moment—had entered the interpretive field opened by programming and screens, children and computers, and ideas about what event in the mind was dignified by that word, fun. code “as a ‘black box,’” a prominent group of logo coders explained, is never absolutely closed: “we are not at that moment concerned with how the procedure computes its results, only with the fact that it computes” and so “how” can be “suppressed”: boxed, for now (abelson, sussman, and sussman 1996, 26). the authors of that statement, harold abelson and his colleagues, built up from basic geometric “primitives” a library of functions for drawing two-dimensional polygons to the vector screen of the pdp-11 computer or via the movements of a floor roaming “turtle” robot carrying a pen in its undercarriage (papert 1973, 108). they elucidated the concept of a program that invokes itself using the example of a function that approaches an ideal circle with only incremental steps of angle and movement: “a particularly important way to make new procedures and vary old ones is to employ a program control structure called recursion; that is, to have a procedure use itself as a sub procedure, as in: original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 11 to poly side angle forward side right angle poly side angle the final line keeps the process going over and over by including ‘do poly again’ as part of the definition of poly” (abelson and disessa 1981, 17) (figure 4). if the programmer were to input the number 1 to the logo variables side and angle, then that number (as side length) and that same number (as angle degree) would conspire with the recursion line to form a minimal introduction to the origin of geometric transcendental ideas in logo: a perfect circle. in papert’s words, poly was a programmable pathway to the idea of the circle: a “direct aesthetic experience” of a “symbiotic relationship…of mutual exploitation” between “the aesthetic and the functional” that he claimed “opens mathematics to ‘remembering’ its genetic roots” (1978, 113, 118). papert believed that these genetic roots run deep. he conceived of them as foundational operations used to define mathematical systems (as in the structural approach to modeling advocated by logicians), as items that could be selected as starting points for the design of libraries of functions (e.g., logo), and as models for operations that construct functions in actively conscious minds (i.e., models of himself). figure 3. “saw.” coding exercise from the classroom of marjorie bloom. printout of logo code executed on pdp-11, 1968 (feurzeig et al. 1969, 86). courtesy of mit libraries, institute archives and special collections. seymour papert papers, box 16, (17b-18a), mc693. alt text: image of a page from an archival document. the document reproduces the results of a procedure, named saw, written by marjorie bloom’s students. the saw procedure uses the letter x original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 12 as input to a procedure much like workless. instead of diminishing to zero letters then stopping, saw stars from one letter x, adds another x, then another, until there are four x’s. then the procedure removes one x at a time. this loop, back and forth from one to four x’s, creates an undulating line of triangular teeth, like the edge of a hand saw. figure 4. harold abelson and andrea disessa. output of poly with input 1 for side and angle. (abelson and disessa 1981, 17). fair use. alt text: image of a page from a logo textbook. a circle drawn by the poly procedure is shown. the text “angle = 1” appears below the circle. the author describes how the procedure draws the circle in the body of the text. let us now further recover logo’s embeddedness in cybernetics for the sake of cultivating our sense that personal computers are bearers of a latent historicity of judgment’s temporalizing power to bind ideas about formal variation into normative horizons hitched to specific functions. it is helpful to notice that poly has already forced the storied philosophical questioning of time to shine through original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 13 screens as programmable geometricized light. philosopher catherine malabou reminds us that the questioning of time is reoriented in every interpretation of the meaning of the “fundamental structure of before and after'' (2016, 134). code breaks up this problem by demanding that time be imported into thinking in the form of a dualism. phrased philosophically, “the numbering of time”—its counting of steps within the loop of a recursion—“reveals the non-mathematicity of number” (134). phrased computationally, in code, it is noticeable that operations and numbers stand apart: the operations are more purely math because they can be freed to work beyond the plugging and chugging of counted tokens. the rendering of a graphical appearance is always limited by storage while that appearance can also be altered with a formalism that generates results in ways that conscious reflection, mensuration, and paper tools would not have allowed. but functionality is not guaranteed; it is limited by storage and validity while departing from linearity and consciousness as nested black boxes stack up in the background, guaranteed (if valid) and resisted (if not) by computability. the stuttering of graphical appearance bears functions’ knotting of time. in the case of poly, the “omnitemporality” of the pure circle—that intuited form that supposedly exists beyond input to side and angle, though the function does not work without that input—is for minds only and is traditionally called transcendental (derrida 1989, 39). phenomenology asks whether this sense of beyond has truth by trying to discover the form of the genesis of that sense. as derrida reminds us, paraphrasing edmund husserl, the phenomenologist asks: what “essential form becomes recognizable through a method of variation” (derrida 1989, 123)? that question opens the pursuit of thinking without asking for conditions of the possibility of appearances (38–39). all searches for secure conditions run up against organic impairment and interference from the structure of time (sterne 2022; derrida 2011). instead, phenomenological questioning claims that it is possible to await the form of the genesis of appearances by way of variation in reflection (derrida 1989, 47). that task is fundamentally different from asking what mechanism makes an observed function possible. it generates observations of forms. any formalized essence could (in principle) be unboxed into observable mechanisms, but understanding does not require that. for instance, in terms of the structural approach to modeling, there is not a unified, stable “internal essence” in question for any model—only “relationships” between elements grouped into “sets” defined by structures that persist under transformation (fong and spivak 2019, 24, 8). those structures do not necessarily have material correlates. reflection can resist the fall into the resolution of thinking by the satisfaction of mechanism. refection can reorient toward the play of structure and essence. the circle is never perfect; its form of appearance is vague. its edges must appear in time, refined as worn down, or be penetrated by an imagination of a microcosmic interiority sparkling on its surface (bachelard [1948] 2011, [1958] 2014). so, i ask, what “vague essences” appeared, on screen, original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 14 by way of a coded circle that derrida may well have said was “essentially and not accidentally inexact, and therefore also unmathematical,” even irreverently “anexact” before pronounced “defect” in the passage to the limit of pure-thenblurred ideality partially freed of number but bound to voltages animating a phosphorescent screen (derrida 1989, 122)? papert and piaget both argued that there are different pathways to the realization of intuitions of the transcendent forms that govern the appearance of truths. the stakes of that claim cut to the heart of an eighteenth-century debate over a proposed link between the source of variation governing the formation of species and what kant called “the mere self-development of reason” (lenoir 1980, 98; kant [1787] 1998, 629). kant’s view on the nature of the transcendental set the terms. kant used the term schema to indicate the process by which transcendental regulators of thinking maintain themselves as “garbled” presences in organic matter ([1787] 1998, 629, quoted in malabou 2016, 164, 164-65). he claimed that the transcendental is a set of guidelines for thinking, embedded in organisms, that nonetheless are “complete in time, although they all had their schema, as the original germ, in the mere self-development of reason, and on that account are not merely each articulated for themselves in accordance with an idea but are all in turn purposively united with each other as members of a whole in a system of human cognition” (kant [1787] 1998, 629). malabou explains that kant used the term purposiveness as an organic analogy to purposeful, goal-orientated functioning in animals. kant likens the assembly of functions in the mind to teleologically oriented organic growth and claims the regulation of that assembly process (by the invariant original germ of systematicity) as both universal and subject to contingent realization (malabou 2016, 165). michel foucault tried to establish a difference between an “historical a priori” and “formal a priori” categories by showing that humans seek out contact with the latter by exteriorizing logic into material operations performed using instruments and words (foucault 1972, 127, quoted in malabou 2016, 107). however, thought, in time, makes of itself an object; it can shift orientation by way of acts of reflection—it has no inner essence, after cybernetics, only varieties of primitive function reigniting the unfolding of structure down a priori pathways. externalization became a mental function. interiority moved outside, into the cybernetic wild. while it is certainly possible to constrain computation to the functions of prediction, optimization, and automation—nesting it in preexisting technological pathways and data structures—the passage of time’s enigmatic relation to form into a new medium may forestall any hasty resolution of the meaning of both mind and computation by human purpose; if we learn to sense its opening of time for shifting ways. autism had been important to papert’s early efforts to assert the scientific and philosophical significance of programming because autistic students were evidence that this hypothetical variety of ways exists not only as a variety of original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 15 formal systems (as kurt gödel established) but also in the variation of biological and social processes that build and rebuild minds (as kurt goldstein had argued) (papert 1963, 137). autism was evidence that the transcendental regulation of mental form is a genuine historical process, operating both in the mind, on screen, and in the school system. by synthesizing papert’s interest in kant with the search for a definition of the historical a priori in continental philosophy, my point is that, for papert, there was more at play here than simply redefining the nature of the garbled a priori as a new model for autistic minds. before the mental process of programming came to provide an experiential analog for the haphazard biological assembly of functions, inside the head, the word autism meant something quite different. historian of medicine bonnie evans (2017) provides a detailed account of this shifting meaning of autism in her analysis of british child psychology case histories. her focus is mainly on the interand post-war years. piaget plays a strong role in the narrative. piaget hypothesized that overactive mental image production prevented children from “orienting” their minds by consciously differentiating between two kinds of mental process: mental processes provoked by things in themselves and mental processes generated by the autonomous activity of the psyche. for piaget, the discoveries he made in the experimental classroom (substantiating his assertion of the reality of these two processes) could only be summarized by him in terms of a peculiar “diversity of form of equilibrium between the two processes” ([1937] 1977, 275, 274). while autism still bore the weight of a definition by way of the negation of a capacity to gain such powers of orientation, for piaget and logo’s designers there was, nonetheless, an epic void opened by the question of what epistemic values could tame these cyber-metaphorical renderings of the process of mind formation. filling that void began by proposing meanings via readings of codes that generated elementary graphical animations—not by refining a model for deficient attainment of a necessary condition. the poly procedure became the new keeprosemarieing during logo’s tenure as a prominent introductory programming language (throughout the 1970s and 1980s), starting with papert and engineer cynthia solomon’s 1971 memo “twenty things to do with a computer.” that text still bears strong traces of papert’s preoccupation with philosophical psychology. he included a section suggesting that programmers start by coding up their own versions of the müller-lyer illusions, as he had done in geneva (papert 1961; piaget and papert 1963; papert and solomon 1971). piaget and papert had imagined that new ways to control and present these diagrams on screens, as squares of varying position and size, would assist in the narrative characterization of the “schema” underlying the nonconscious synthesis of the visual field (1963, 353). another group of logo coders, from the bionics laboratory at the university of edinburgh—who would initiate the first experiments with teaching logo to autistic students—suggested a simple model of the physics of bounce as an introductory logo thing original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 16 (goldstein and goldstein 1972). the bionics lab’s bouncing ball also fits this same narrative of screens designed to meet the background of thought halfway. they ported a classic oscilloscope training exercise—immortalized by the video game tennis for two—into logo because physics models and mental models were meant to be mutually reinforcing instances of this interplay of reciprocally corrective internal and external logics (papert 1973, 80; lowood 2009, 13). paul goldenberg, of bolt, beranek, and newman, translated poly for the special needs classroom and presented photos of logo geometries as evidence of learning facilitation for a nonverbal student (also named jay) with cerebral palsy. jay encapsulated his feelings for “moms” and “dads” in poly (1979) (figure 5). in the glide from philosophical speculation on functional form to functional programming imported into clinical contexts, papert’s theorization of logo as a new contact point with the mathematical unconscious tantalized the corporate executives at xerox corporation. figure 5. jay’s naming conventions for poly, 1977. fair use. alt text: image from an academic book about teaching logo to special needs students. the image reproduces logo geometry figure made using the poly procedure. four abstract geometric patterns are shown, all of which are composed rings made of circles. one ring is only composed of only four circles while two others are composed of many more, creating a pattern of arcs formed by the overlapping shapes. the author of the procedures (a student also coincidently named jay) used the words “dads” and “mom” and “jay” to name the functions that generate the circles. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 17 xerox executives gave programmer alan kay—a close associate of papert’s— freedom to build a prototype personal computer: the famous alto workstation. programmer adele goldberg designed the smalltalk ‘72 language, with kay, for the alto. the sine qua non of personal computing, for kay and goldberg, was a graphical surface on which any term could be highlighted and interpreted. menus popped out from any bar of highlighted text, revealing the code underwriting that textual appearance in an editor. in smalltalk, a programmer could call a “turtle” function with a “smiley” icon command (goldberg and kay 1976, 3, 16). to enter the smiley icon into an executable smalltalk command, “hold ‘shift’ and the ‘2’ key” (16). that symbolic shortcut generated a geometric origin. encapsulated in the iconic smile, overwriting or revising menus and windows (willingly or not) unfurling lines issued from this generative point (goldberg and kay 1976, 16; ingalls 2020, 7). with the smiley turtle command in play, the functional surface would be layered over with each new whim to sketch out a different set of inputs to a variation on the poly function, from random walk tracks to hilbert’s spacefilling curves (figure 6). kay gave explicitly media historical reasons for this strong design choice to foreground a tension between functional rectilinearity and the elegance of geometries driven by modern logic: “they [computers] are clearly more than a tool also, though in typical mcluhanesque fashion, much of their content has been adopted from previous media, and their own attributes are just beginning to be discovered” (1972, n.p. [3]). without the forced association of iconic happiness with layered modifiability and unfurling polygons, new beginnings (without the burden of past infrastructures of formatting and ontologies of objecthood) would be compromised—written out of history at the inception of a devious form of questioning that would have demanded a rethinking of the nature of computation before it became a receptor for investment in textual and audio-visual functionality. kay seemed to have been touched by the need to protect a kernel of nonsense from a future that already did not respect it: “it may seem almost sinful to discuss the simulation of nonsense” names, shapes, and screens, but “it is just this realm of apparent nonsense that must be kept open for the developing minds of the future” (1977, 244). original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 18 figure 6. a screen photo by kay used to demonstrate layers of code, boxes, and turtle geometry (kay 1977, 244). fair use. alt text: image from a magazine article showing a screen photo of a graphical user interface written in smalltalk ’72 and running on a xerox alto. visible are the tangled, wandering lines of a random walk program and geometric designs based on the poly procedure. also visible is a coding environment at the smiley command. there are boxes bordering the designs as well as a layering of black and white rectilinear forms. by 1975 photos of almost blank screens from kay’s lab circulated in creative computing magazine. one article showed screen photos of programs by marian goldeen—eighth grade, jordan junior high school, palo alto, california—that display functionality common to illustration software of the 1980s (figure 7). in a series of process shots, leading up to a polygon drawing tool, a motionless square appears at the center of a graphical programming environment. the smiley command was a clone of the logo geometry drawing system for the pdp-11. now, a rectangle function, named “square,” had replaced the freedom of the frameless point in logo: “i don’t know what the boys in the class did, but colleen and i created a painting program” (goldeen 1975, 42). logo’s story suspends such functional boxes in the moment before their becoming interfaces. in that moment, screens remain contestable receptors of possible functionality, soon to be caught in the series of hylomorphic palpitations called coding. sustaining that moment of release, reticence toward cybernetic model work appears in the original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 19 archive. “every computer program is a model,” abelson and company explained, “hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process” (1998, xi). the search for reasons to want to make computing productively unfriendly pushed logo researchers into the special needs classrooms to find, there, evidence that their model-making exercises made models in minds flourish, like an unfurling polygon. let us withhold assent to the “charismatic promises” lurking in this moment of hypnotization by the constructivist’s big idea: logo opens a new, more accessible way to link your mind to transcendental form by way of coding recursive geometry graphics (ames 2019, 9). instead, we now read only those passages that give us glimmers of what autistic students brought to the stage during their encounters with graphical screens and mind modelers. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 20 figure 7. marian goldeen. square drawn in smalltalk ‘72. smiley icon is visible on line four. (goldeen 1975). fair use. alt text: detail of a page from a computer magazine. the image is described thoroughly in the preceding paragraph. original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 21 david’s “laigian proportions,” joey’s “thank you” autistic students presented to papert and his colleagues a way into a terrain of modeling and observation on which it was not only impossible to decide on the true model of mind but on which it also became imperative to further articulate the extent of the limitations of then-current approaches to the questioning of mind. bionics lab researcher sylvia weir would come to mit in the early 1980s, having caught the logo team’s attention in 1976 with an article titled “catalysing communication in an autistic child in a logo-like learning environment” (emanuel and weir 1976). documenting their work with seven-year-old david, weir and her co-author cited british radical anti-psychiatrist r.d. laing’s book self and others when defining david’s autism as “an evocation of models” operating “at several different levels” (emanuel and weir 1976, 126). at the time, weir and her colleagues were working with students to code simple drawing functions. the primary datum of analysis that they derived from the experience was the incommensurability of their way of interpreting david and his way of interpreting them: “david’s perception of the situation he was in, including objects and our behaviors towards him, our view of the situation and of david’s behavior in it and our view of our perceptions and his perceptions – an interpersonal situation of truly laingian proportions” (126). yergeau has elucidated that such situations force autistic people into confrontations with those who would justify their disqualification from possession of “purposive” and “symbolic” mental life by way of reference to their lack of “internal models or schema” of other people’s minds (2018, 58, 42, 4–51). though the theory of mind disqualification was proposed in 1985, weir’s work with logo presages these developments by suggesting that david did not “project” ideas of other minds into a social wold: he held back, held in, only switched between a “‘passive pupil’ role” and “‘emotionally committed’ role,” paused before the symbolic event of “see-as” (baron-cohen, leslie, and frith 1985; emanuel and weir 1976, 120, 126). weir repeats the phrase “models of himself” as a reading of david catching himself not quite seeing himself being seen while coding, never fully seeing others as people with minds of their own (weir 1981a; 1981b; emanuel and weir 1976, 126). her point of reference for the model of mind as the noninteraction of incompatible mental models is a 1973 ai lab report by papert. in the ai lab memos, papert and solomon hypothesize that student programmers work by “using himself as a model” (1970, 3). their thinking worked like this: to learn how to write and fix programs, students could use flowchart bubble diagrams of linked functions to externalize and spatialize functions otherwise listed in strings of linearly organized code. kay too picked up on this idea when he suggested that children would be able to use a “personal computer” to build up a “private cosmos” and compartmentalize, on screen, different aspects of their mental lives—including “reflexive communication of the owner with himself [sic]” and menus that organize repositories of small coding exercises original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 22 alongside messaging and word processing functions (1973, n.p. [2]). modeling one’s own thought through programming became a minor reading of the meaning of coding. that reading preceded a shift from the enigma of mind’s form of historical being to the design of public meanings, hovering on screens, that, once assimilated to daily action, would eschew the question of the interpretability of anxiety in the face of inherently an exact purposiveness and the incommensurability of crisscrossed mental worlds opening a void of meanings latent in an unfathomed variety. another moment from the logo classroom can help elucidate the nature of the challenge to thinking posed by computation as a medium structuring reflection on the historical plasticity of finite mental growth and form. the context here is a cambridge, massachusetts, special needs classroom set up by a bolt, beranek, and newman researcher, paul goldenberg, during the half-decade postdating the founding of the ai lab in 1967–68. in a group ranging in age from four to fourteen, goldenberg experimented with teaching autistic children to draw with a floor roaming turtle robot. joey “an autistic adolescent…observed to be mute and assumed to be deaf, spoke his first words to a robot turtle” (1979, 75–76). working on a logo geometry drawing, the words came when expressing his frustration at the behavior of a teacher operating a logo command needed to activate the lever that lowered an erasable marker to the linoleum floor beneath the robot turtle’s undercarriage, allowing the creature to draw: “down!” said joey (goldenberg 1979, 75). after returning the pen to the floor, the “words were muddier this time, but there was no question but that he had said ‘thank you.’ joey spoke his first words on videotape and then went silently back to pushing the turtle” (75–76). a reluctant thank you, a decisive command; perhaps even, in a glance, an archival residue of neuroqueer ephemera in the form of a well-muddled geometric primitive bearing forth the appearance in which “only a communal subjectivity can produce the historical system of truth” (derrida 1989, 60). is there a difference in kind between these difficulties and those of a normal student? how would that difference be claimed? could you observe the neural network in question? do you know its exact form, marred from elegance in the case at hand? can you build a working model of it? no. well, maybe. what is certain, i believe, is that to deliver this admixture of insistent negation and hesitant engagement with force and compassion, as i hear joey doing, is a particular kind of historical act. yergeau has theorized the nature of this form of difficulty, opening the possibility of encapsulating with the term neuroqueer an epochal fracture between the philosophy of mind and the unrealized historicity of anexact purposiveness embedded in screens and the cultural imaginary of coding. learning to dance avoidantly in the experimental theater created to verify models not grounded in listening to the subject of analysis, but rather oriented only by the desire for empirical validation of a technoscientific project, is an artform that i understand yergeau to elucidate with their term neuroqueer rhetoric (2018, 56, 43– original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 23 51). yergeau is concerned specifically with how the philosophy of mind has created the stage within which neuroqueer performers generate these truth abeyant procedures (68–72). and so, i describe the resistance of autistic children to theories of mind developed in logo coding classrooms neuroqueer without wishing to predicate david’s or joey’s gender. as psychoanalyst and media historian hannah zeavin has shown, “queer” and “neurodivergent” children came into existence as a category of gendered subject position when cybernetic psychologists of family life proposed models of pathological psyche development, such as piaget’s theory of the failure to assemble orientation functions (2021, 54). coder and media theorist d. fox harrell (2013) suggests the word phantasm to denote imaginative worldviews by which users and personal computers, software developers and coding environments, could form networks of relations not currently accessible by way of our interfaces, networks, and their quotidian presence as imaginary mental representations. if tobin siebers is right to say that disability theory is concerned fundamentally with the modes of aesthetic and ethical engagement that shape the politicization of “disability as a form of human variation” (2008, 25), my overarching aim can now be clarified: to show how the media history of computing can act as a “philosophical laboratory” where fundamental ontology and critical thinking work in tandem to construct the social, historical, and scientific base upon which such politicization could take shape (sterne 2003, 27). specifically, media history can contribute to the ongoing process of building “difficult, perhaps counterintuitive, coalitions across disciplines and sectors”—but how, exactly (chun 2021, 27)? take the term construction, for example. while ames carefully brackets constructivist philosophy from her work (after explaining how papert’s and kay’s formulation of that concept contributed to the boy coder imaginary), it is also significant to note here that philosopher of science isabelle stengers has asserted that rethinking “constructivism” ought to be considered a core objective of the humanities (2014, 19). stengers’s contention is that rediscovering the substance of constructivism could modify the meaning of critique for humanists, dispelling the popular notion that humanists have become entrenched institutionally in a “polemical network” founded on the critical consensus that concepts and institutions that mediate social life are “merely” constructed (11–21). queer feminist philosophers of science have pointed toward the life sciences as one way to substantiate talk of construction, modifying that function by identifying how physical constraints on biological and mental life generate non-gender-aligned psyche and sociobiological forms that resist the subsumption of binary sex categories to any single kinship structure or division of reproductive labor (haraway 1991; butler 1993; kirby 2011; wilson 2015). ethnographers and theorists of digital culture have discovered that suffering induced by digital-cultural phenomena calls for emancipation from extractive encroachment on neurological and mental worlds (schüll 2012; chun 2016). even if alexander galloway (2012) is right to assert that software overrides the necessity of questioning the truth of what an object truly is—simply replacing that urge to regulate a fit between categories and things with original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 24 the satisfying success of operationalized data—vital forms would still resist these impositions, making organisms signal stations calling out for the regulation of informatic ontologies. does life really resist the burden of ontological claims made in software? it can. i think. but there is an elusive coalitional we that must learn to listen for the appearance of formative resistance in a contestable quotidian of malleable models of mental morphogenesis. the autistic children that papert and his team engaged with left traces of such formative resistance. under pressure from cybernetic model work, their mental life had become almost thinkable and remained unimaginable in the same situations. moten might call these neuroqueer performances the rhythm of a “repercussive revision,” operating within “socioaestehtic activity,” that calls upon a particular “sound and movement or, more precisely, a kind of audiotheatricality that is the essence of political consciousness” (2018, 168–69). philosopher of science gaston bachelard thematized this oscillation in the powers of judgment, caught up in the flow of their synthesizing objectivations, using the word “recursion.” with that term he defined a “permanent process of rectification and reorientation,” “unfolding within scientific activity” a sense that “an ongoing tribunal of rectification” is always precariously underway (bachelard 1987, 298, quoted in rheinberger 2010, 29). resistance to preemptively resolved models sustains something: a persistent questioning of the urge to maintain the unresolved for the sake of the already-established form of functioning. what is the nature of the form in time of an a priori guided by something as changeable as purposiveness, embedded in a network of observers tinkering with modifiable functions, temporalized by recursive layers of reflection oriented now by perception, now by reason, now by a resistance that touches the present from a void? in answering these questions, scientists, philosophers, and coders will need to inhabit the temporal form of a danger structured by the devious question: how and why do minds form in time? black studies scholar therí alyce pickens describes the model of “linear progressive history” that dominates the definition of blackness and autism (2019, 96). humans influenced by this implicit temporal schema will tend to posit an “end of time” wherein, after having raised the value of blackness and neuroatypicality (through technological intervention), those categories will cease to exist (112). in theory, within this framing by “ableist assumptions of ‘mind,’” possession of coding skill would open the naming of autism as disability to critique only by way of valuing autism as productive of a natural affinity for computation (7). autism, if subsumed by an imaginary of white boy coding, would encapsulate the meaning of computation in the economic value of that specific ability. pickens elucidates how resisting schematization by the meaning of progressive time takes form, in black speculative fiction, as an aesthetic tension between “psychosocial definitions” and “biomedical definitions” of madness (4). david and joey, in the moments of broken silence and silent original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 25 dissent, contribute to academic reflection on the conceptual elbowroom that their sustaining of these tensions created. their presence in the archives opens the possibility of cybernetic “folktales” that refuse “overcoming narratives” and “reconciliation narratives” (71). we must learn to refuse the cognitive rationalization of involvement in computation in terms of a temptation to reconcile with or liberate others and ourselves by way of computation. that refusal, i suggest, could help the us of this article understand our resistance to that temptation “as a systematic structure of meaning-making that is always unfinished or in process” undergoing a change of ways (pickens 2019, 71, quoting smith 2012, 55). the we this article constructs might also learn, from the modification of temporal rhythm created by such moments, how to sustain caution in all allisions to resistance. naming resistance deposits responsibility for radical action on the shoulders of those whose lives show us the variable meaning of time (pickens 2019, 58). in other words, to claim that neuroqueer rhetoric is a form of resistance is to risk demanding of autists “radicality”; furthermore, to discover in the structure of the form of time a resistance not from a thing-in-itself but from epistemically significant affects arising from the formal structure of temporalization is to forge intellectually (from the lived reality of duress) a certain “creative purpose” (pickens 2019, 64; whitehead [1929] 1978, 248, quoted in manning 2017, 110). a deeper understanding of the force of recursive rectification to reorient could attune us towards difficulty understood as path-finding reticence that uncouples function coming-into-being from assessment equipment that forecloses the “elliptically open” pathway to the construction of new forms (pickens 2019, 63). let us now channel through the archive our understanding of difficulty’s unfolding. yergeau partially conceptualizes “neuroqueer” motion through malabou’s notion of “plasticity” (yergeau 2018, 71, 74–76, quoting malabou 2008). specifically, yergeau narrates how autistic performances have at work in them an expansive notion of “entelechy” that “explodes” the questioning of “purposiveness” (yergeau 2018, 71, 74–76, 211). in the moment that denizens of the parallelism encounter autistics, the noncommunication of mental interiority forces the theory of “intentionality” (as the inner essence of mental acts) to confront the meaning of intersecting finitudes incapable of fully capturing any intention for inspection (yergeau 2018, 32, 35-43). the finitude of mind (a fragile form on the edge of the impairment of its unfolding schema) meets the finitude of understanding (thinking caught up in an open chain of elegance, operation, witnessing) in situations where defiance of the preemptive resolution of the psychophysiological parallelism rebounds to laingian proportions, both within and between minds. with specific reference to the situation of being observed by thinkers of the parallelism, yergeau repeats, “to be clear,” their concepts and movements are rhetorical resistance to the structure of theory of mind, the search for autism’s “etiology,” and the disqualification from symbolism (2018, 15, 52, 70). authoring autism posits no absolute negation of the possibility of an etiology for autism but original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 26 rather formulates how neuroqueer performance is “resistantly elliptic” to the danger posed thereto by necessarily dualistic questioning of the parallelism (173). “i cannot stop melanie-ing in the same way that i cannot stop breathing” (211). keeprosemarieing. by simulating weir’s gaze into david’s glare (which weir cannot see as not lacking in the very moment she is awestruck at the depth and complexity of what moten might call a “rapt countenance”), could this narration of that situation help media historians of computing rediscover “ephemera of neuroqueer histories” that index a formative reticence, before tomorrow—before preemptive predication of a vague essence by “functional assessment” of atypical students and model users, alike, recycles for another generation (yergeau 2018, 211, citing muñoz 2009, 65; moten 2003, 32–34; see also pow 2019)? casual readings of the meaning of purpose and model, just after the cybernetic moment, are precisely what overwrote the neuroqueer, defining it as a “failure to arrive” at a cogently grounded orientation: a “cognitively purposive standard that even neurotypicals don’t stand up to” (yergeau 2018, 42, 58). while early cognitivists admitted that “nobody has had any idea” what mechanisms underlie autism, they still took the displacement of how from questioning (as afforded scientific legitimacy by elegant cybernetic models) as license to disallow such models in the minds of autistic children (baron-cohen, leslie, and frith 1985, 38). papert saw this happening in the misapplication of piaget to education. papert had stated, in a 1973 national science foundation grant, that “we”—the ai lab’s logo group—“see much of the ‘piaget and education’ community as standing him on his head by emphasizing the negative aspect of his work, namely his demonstration that children of certain ages have surprising ‘deficiencies’ (which some say should be ‘remedied’ by the schools)” (1973, 51). papert understood his work on logo as a venture propelled forward by a context of technical inquiry in which screens and new programming languages promised a new future for computing, like that prophesied in goldeen’s paint program. the context of intellectual inquiry he had inherited (the debate over the relation of mind to brain that demanded immediate revisions to the diagnosis and treatment of autism) forced him to conceptualize screens as interventions into the neurophysiological ordering of an item of staggering philosophical complexity: the inherent ambiguity of purpose. the anexact meaning of the appearance of purposiveness is a phenomenological clue. the secret of morphogenesis is constantly preemptively resolved by the normativity that arises from the form of thought for humans: the lapse into generative dualism and the recovery into historicizing reflection called forth by diffusive resistance. these are cybernetic situations worth remembering as specific instances of the appearance of a neuroqueer resistance of the object, even as the lure of charisma still lurks in the background of my presentation of these moments. it is all too easy to circulate papert’s reading of logo as a generator of signs of promised correction or coding as gateway to social justice via experimental digital original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 27 pedagogy, as christo sims (2017) has documented. whether a promise of communicative gains in autistic students, or improved test score and college admissions rates, logo could still be used to define normative spectra—now with coding and not-coding at its poles—that mark out any elliptic refusal with a presumption that the story of noncommunication, or nonengagement with computation, requires evaluation and special placement. what about the narration of the temporalizing form of satisfaction that obtains in those “desirously queer” insistences that a “residuum” that “resists” announces that it will always remain unexplored in any medium (yergeau 2018, 57; malabou 2016, 109)? the variational primordium embedded in that radical doubt—the new meaning of transcendental, for malabou (2016), is residuum that resists—is part of the phenomena to be more fully elaborated in reflection; its under-thematization having already structured the tensions in a plastic media-historical a priori that governed the form of this origin story, shaping its time into a now-necessitated resistance to the untruth carried by the already-here graphical user interface. david and joey reluctantly sustained their nonfit in what for papert became a master reading of coding: a support structure that presumes its efficacy as a mode of accommodation while also leaving the form of its conditions of historicity lingering in need of troubling. yet logo’s prehistory has introduced a garble of workable reticence into the media history of computation: may cybernetic model work get stuck in ambi-valent oscillations whilst our recursive rectification of the concepts of purpose and function learns to sing code neuroqueer. abhor best fit between data, network, interface, and object before their phantasmal medium has been raised to the status of a reflection on their manifestation of layered histories. a narrative lesson issues from rhythmically riven mind: rectify learn. references abelson, harold, and andrea disessa. 1981. turtle geometry: the computer as a medium for exploring mathematics. cambridge, ma: mit press. abelson, harold, gerald jay sussman, and julie sussman. 1996. structure and interpretation of computer programs. 2nd ed. new york: mcgraw hill. ahmed, sara. 2006. queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham, nc: duke university press. ames, morgan g. 2019. the charisma machine: the life, death, and legacy of one laptop per child. cambridge, ma: mit press. bachelard, gaston. (1948) 2011. earth and reveries of repose: an essay on images interiority. translated by mary mcallister jones. dallas, tx: dallas institute. bachelard, gaston. (1958) 2014. “the phenomenology of roundness.” in the poetics of space, translated by maria jones, 247-256. new york: penguin. baron-cohen, simon, alan m. leslie, and uta frith. 1985. “does the autistic child have a ‘theory of mind’?” cognition 21 (1): 37–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/00100277(85)90022-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(85)90022-8 https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(85)90022-8 original research | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 10 (1) william lockett, 2024 28 bateson, gregory. (1954) 1972. “a theory of play and fantasy.” in steps to an ecology of mind, 177–93. chicago: university of chicago press. buswell, evan. 2018. interview by daniel temkin. esoteric.codes (blog). october 29, 2018. https://esoteric.codes/blog/evan-buswell. butler, judith. 1993. bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. new york: routledge. chun, wendy hui kyong. 2016. updating to remain the dame: habitual new media. cambridge, ma: mit press. chun, wendy hui kyong. 2021. discriminating data: correlation, neighbourhoods, and the new politics of recognition. cambridge, ma: mit press. craik, k.j.w. 1952. the nature of explanation. cambridge: cambridge university press. deleuze, gilles. 1990. the logic of sense. translated by mark lester with charles stivale. new york: columbia university press. derrida, jacques. 1989. edmund husserl’s origin of geometry: an introduction. translated by john p. leavey. lincoln: university of nebraska press. derrida, jacques. 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(1929) 1978. process and reality. new york: free press. wilson, elizabeth a. 2015. gut feminism. durham, nc: duke university press. yergeau, m. remi. 2018. authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. durham, nc: duke university press. zeavin, hannah. 2021. “hot and cool mothers.” d i f f e r e n c e s: a journal of feminist cultural studies 32 (3): 53–84. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-9479695. author bio william lockett is a lecturer in the science, technology, and society department at the steven’s institute of technology. his research for this article was supported by the department of media, culture, and communication at new york university; the center for art, science, and technology at the massachusetts institute of technology; and the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-9479695 autistic mental schema and the graphical user interface circa 1968 abstract keywords the elegance of naming in logo poly / side / angle david’s “laigian proportions,” joey’s “thank you” references author bio book review | affinity online: how connection and shared interest fuel learning, by mizuko ito, crystle martin, rachel cody pfister, matthew h. rafalow, katie salen, and amanda wortman (new york university press, 2019) aron rosenberg. 2022. review of affinity online: how connection and shared interest fuel learning, by mizuko ito, crystle martin, rachel cody pfister, matthew h. rafalow, katie salen, and amanda wortman (new york university press, 2019). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1): 1–4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © aron rosenberg, 2022 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | affinity online: how connection and shared interest fuel learning, by mizuko ito, crystle martin, rachel cody pfister, matthew h. rafalow, katie salen, and amanda wortman (new york university press, 2019) aron rosenberg mcgill university aron.rosenberg@mail.mcgill.ca schools have been slow to respond to the growing importance of digital communities in many students’ lives. ito et al. investigate how educators might connect diverse students’ digital experiences to curricular, civic, or career-related aims in equitable ways. affinity online: how connection and shared interest fuel learning explores the value of online communities or affinity networks—spaces on the internet where like-minded users can gather to connect with one another and develop their shared interests. online affinity networks “provide opportunities that are self-selected and intentional, and that are also tied to contributions to social communities and authentic recognition in these communities” (17). ito et al. believe that these connections and the accompanying recognition provide opportunities for learning that are more meaningful than “much of the learning that young people encounter in school” (17). the cases featured in the book include examples of online affinity networks where users gather digitally to learn about fanfiction, crafting, online gaming, sports, anime, vlogging, and dance. the investigations of these cases aim to support educators, parents, and researchers concerned with how education can be improved by internet-related technologies, specifically the kinds of online communities described in the book. the authors discuss this as connected learning and use the term for their goal of “realizing a world where all young people are able to fully engage in learning and book review 2 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) aron rosenberg, 2022 opportunities tied to [i.e. connected to] their interests and passions” (4). connected learning holds that “learning is resilient and meaningful when it is tied to social relationships and cultural identities, and when it spans in-school and outof-school settings” (3). the cases explored in this book capture instances of connected learning with online affinity networks that the authors identify as effective, positive, and representing a diverse group of internet users. they investigate these cases through a combination of “critical ethnography, survey research, and design research” (10). nonetheless, the book’s discussion is oriented more towards “design and advocacy than traditional scholarly social scientific discourse” (10). this approach limits the authors’ attempts to critically assess connected learning, for instance by failing to meaningfully engage with how marginalized internet users’ identities may relate to their experience accessing and seeking recognition in online affinity networks. affinity online frames its discussion as addressing diverse youth populations’ experiences of the internet in ways that reflect a wide variety of interests. by “diverse,” the authors are referring to their inclusion of both “the dominant culture of digital elites” (15) as well as “youth historically underrepresented in online affinity networks” (15)—“specifically girls and black and latino youth” (15). even with a diverse range of cases though, the book’s discussion fails to unpack issues it introduces—like the inequitable access different populations have to the internet, or the ways that discrimination may differently impact marginalized users. instead, the text generically notes problematic dynamics in these networks—for example, “bad behavior, trolling,…unproductive forms of criticism and feedback…[and] ‘griefing,’ which is when players destroy each other’s creations or steal from one another” (180)—and glosses over them by suggesting that “communities with positive learning dynamics all have norms and mechanisms to guard against” (180) these unruly ways of participating. the authors claim that the problem is not about the technologies and the internet itself but “the specific social, cultural, and institutional contexts of their uptake” (5). further scholarly and community work is needed, therefore, to unpack both the problematic potential opened by digital technologies and how to navigate the related contexts in which they are used. in affinity online’s first chapter, authors introduce the value of online affinity networks and give context for the cases investigated throughout the book. the cases included are used to promote existing instances of connected learning— involving online affinity networks—that the authors believe “can be spread and scaled to address systemic problems” (14). in this first chapter, authors introduce readers to a community of wrestling fans and to starcraft ii gamers. the members profiled in these cases are from diverse racial backgrounds, but their races are mentioned without an analysis of whether or how their racial identities intersect with users’ involvement in online affinity networks. book review 3 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) aron rosenberg, 2022 chapter 2 discusses “the infrastructure, culture, and practices that hold online affinity networks together” (40). it mentions several types of diverse populations that may participate in these groups: “ethnic, religious, or lgbtq” (40), “children and youth who have limited mobility” (41). though it does mention problems that may arise in online networks—environments that are “exclusionary and unforgiving” (44) or that foster “a negative form of extremism” (44)—it does not explore how to best support minority communities in these spaces. rather, authors claim that they can best show readers how to avoid these risks by focusing instead on networks that are not struggling with these issues: “prosocial and learning-oriented online affinity networks” (44–45). this chapter focuses on two online affinity networks—one that allows people to share fanfiction about the british boyband one direction, and a second about bollywood dance competitions on college campuses in the united states. this second case is the only point in affinity online where the race or national background of people profiled is explicitly explored. members of this affinity group identified ethnic and cultural connections as a benefit they appreciated about their involvement in the online bollywood dance competition network. in chapter 3, authors uncover how online affinity groups relate to cultural or “subcultural” capital. they explore “how community norms, reputation, and status are negotiated and the implications for learning” (83). the discussion suggests that members of these online networks “develop their own norms, status hierarchies, and boundary-making processes” (86) that often become exclusionary (87). again, instead of addressing how diverse users might navigate exclusionary group dynamics, the book “sought out networks that do not have overtly exclusionary values” (87), and avoids getting into analyses of the more subtle forms of discrimination and prejudice that it mentions—like the importance of ‘good’ grammar in certain affinity communities (95). towards the end of this chapter, the authors explicitly mention that sexist dynamics pervade many online communities, even in the cases that this book “actively sought out” (100) for their inclusivity. the authors concede that “it takes more than good intentions and a handful of positive exceptions to transform pervasive cultural hierarchies and social exclusions” (100). however, affinity online belies this conclusion by relying almost exclusively on highlighting the positive exceptions to exclusionary online networks. the authors, though, do provide one strategy that online affinity groups can try to promote more inclusivity; “provid[ing] structures that teach subcultural capital to newcomers” (100) can remove some of the barriers to entering these communities. the cases chosen in this book strive for such a model, especially the two discussed in this chapter: one around mentoring players of a video game called littlebigplanet 2, and a second about sharing anime music videos, as well as feedback and techniques for making them. chapter 4 outlines “how learning in online affinity networks can connect to pathways that lead to…academic, career, and civic opportunity” (125). this book review 4 | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) aron rosenberg, 2022 chapter mentions that lacking a connection between one’s identity and learning can be a barrier to development; it suggests that students from non-dominant cultures can be particularly harmed by schooling that is not connected to them in personalized ways. authors discuss online affinity networks as providing that necessary connection “between the classroom and the wider world” (126). this chapter does not address the question of how non-dominant cultures relate to online affinity networks, except for the continued labeling of people’s racial backgrounds. there is a section in this chapter about “civic engagement” (136) that discusses a bollywood dance performance that empowered gay members of a traditionally conservative community. this anecdote, however, relates to an inperson incident, not an online interaction. though this section falls short of addressing how online communities can support marginalized users of these networks, the two cases focused on in this chapter—a harry potter-themed knitting community and a community following the nerdfighters youtube video blog—do uncover how affinity networks on the internet can contribute to charitable actions offline. the final chapter in the book uses the ideas and cases explored to summarize how contemporary educational opportunities might work towards connected learning. the authors suggest that for connected learning to be achieved effectively, educators and parents need to “more explicitly, intentionally, and actively” (165) connect education with young people’s interests on the internet. however, realizing the authors’ dream future where all young people are able to connect their learning to their digital interests will require more work and research into the critical issues marginalized users face in relation to online affinity networks. practitioners, parents, and researchers must ground strategies for connected learning in further investigations of how diverse internet users may be differently able to access online groups and be recognized or validated within them. ito et al. describe and analyze a wide sample of online affinity networks in ways that can support their inclusion—and the exploration of other similar digital spaces—in meaningful educational experiences for more students. these studies build a foundation from which to address their true concern of “better and more equitable educational futures” (6) for everyone. author bio aron rosenberg is a high school teacher and graduate student. he is studying how young people’s experiences with digital technologies connect them to issues of social and environmental justice. aron spent 2020 offline. book review | affinity online: how connection and shared interest fuel learning, by mizuko ito, crystle martin, rachel cody pfister, matthew h. rafalow, katie salen, and amanda wortman (new york university press, 2019) author bio book review | the disordered cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred, by chanda prescod-weinstein (bold type books, 2021) alexis shotwell. 2022. review of the disordered cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred, by chanda prescod-weinstein (bold type books, 2021). catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1): 1–4. http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © alexis shotwell, 2022 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license book review | the disordered cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred, by chanda prescod-weinstein (bold type books, 2021) alexis shotwell carleton university alexis.shotwell@carleton.ca you have almost certainly heard of, and perhaps already read, chanda prescodweinstein’s important new book the disordered cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred. it has quickly achieved more popular uptake than many of us who care about feminist sts would have dreamed possible. the reviews everywhere from cnn to goodreads show that nonacademic, ordinary people, many of whom profess themselves terrified by science, read and love this book. notably, what they say about it indicates that prescod-weinstein has achieved one of the remarkably difficult tasks she set herself in the book: a popular science book that helps people who love justice to also love science, and people who love science to also love justice. the book is masterfully and carefully crafted—it is brilliant, evocative, funny, brave, searching, and careful—so it also works as just a book you could give someone who likes reading good writing (and/or star trek). catalyst readers, too, will find much here. prescod-weinstein’s 2020 signs article “making black women scientists under white empiricism: the racialization of epistemology in physics” articulates a conception of “white empiricism”: “the phenomenon through which only white people (particularly white men) are read has having a fundamental capacity for objectivity and black people (particularly black women) are produced as an ontological other” (421). the epistemic salience of this coproduction of whiteness and (non)objectivity, alongside the production of who knows and who can be known rests, as so many things do, on the material conditions that produce racialization, prestige asymmetries in science practice, book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) alexis shotwell, 2022 2 and epistemic injustice. but as prescod-weinstein shows, white empiricism isn’t primarily a matter of epistemic injustice; instead, “it describes a resistance not just to testimony but also to empirical fact” (425). read in relation to her work on white empiricism, the disordered cosmos diffracts what prescod-weinstein names as a “kind of loneliness produced by being a politically radical black woman in physics” (2021, 256) into an abiding joy and love for the queerness of the universe that opposes practices of white empiricism. in this joy, we find the possibility for a science better in every way. as prescod-weinstein shows, joy in and love for science is collectively conceived and sustained, and current loneliness is a call for things to be otherwise. i left this book with a lively sense of the possibilities for collectivity, between humans but also among us and the ecologies that support and sustain us and the night sky. the closing section of the book elaborates the idea that we could meaningfully practice responsibility for “all our galactic relations,” grounded in part through our political practices of good relations on this, our planetary home. as a touchstone, prescod-weinstein offers the story of her mom taking her out of la to see the comet hyakutake pass through a sky dark enough to perceive it. she writes, “my black feminist thought about this story is: what are the conditions we need so that a thirteen-year-old black kid and their single mom can go look at a dark night sky, away from artificial lights, and know what they are seeing?” (260). those intertwined material and epistemic conditions—having the collective material resources to go and knowing what you are seeing once you get there— require, as prescod-weinstein elucidates, radical politics in the sense of going to the root of how the world is made under current power relations, and changing them. the book begins with the most to-the-rootness we can name, the literal beginning of the universe. just like the universe, it rapidly expands from there, with prescod-weinstein as guide, griot, and inheritor of generations of scientists who have turned to the sky for freedom. it continues in four “phases:” just physics, physics and the chosen few, the trouble with physicists, and all our galactic relations. in phase 1 (“in which the universe is, for a time, human-free” [9]), we learn about elementary particles, known forces, and various cool things that we know we don’t understand. even readers who are number phobic will leave this section convinced that particle physics can teach us that “the universe is always more bizarre, more wonderfully queer than we think” (13). this insight will call to mind karen barad’s elaboration of the queerness of our universe; i realized that one thing that makes me trust the science of the disordered cosmos—though i am incapable of assessing it—was the exemplary citational and explanatory engagement with canonical sts texts such as meeting the universe halfway, which manages to offer clear explanations that do justice to theoretically dense book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) alexis shotwell, 2022 3 material. as a truly interdisciplinary text, working at the highest levels in both sts and theoretical physics, this book accomplishes enormously difficult things as though they were easy. alongside the wonder that animates each explanation of loving quarks (and other particles) prescod-weinstein shows how racism has shaped and torqued the “patterns and backstories” of science, as well as things as foundational as naming practices. from equating black people (actual people, who can definitely be perceived in a number of different ways including visually) with dark matter (actually transparent, invisible to light) to quantum chromodynamics (which use “colors” to constitute whiteness), prescod-weinstein shows that the language of science matters: “’color’ and ‘white as neutral’ are here not as reflections of how the universe works, but rather how homogenous, white scientific community comes up with new names for stuff” (22). phase 2 attends more fully to the human part of our universe, and to how racist science has constricted and distorted who can do science and what science can be done. with riveting discussion of the physics of melanin, deepened reflections on the causes and effects of racist language in physics practice, and a thorough grappling with the question of who counts as a scientist as we tell the history of a time period we are still living within, this section of the book constellates reality and politics. if you teach this book, students will leave these sections convinced that theoretical physics is really, really amazing and neat, and wondering how much more amazing it would be were it not so densely enmeshed with racism and colonialism. the second half of the book deepens the inquiry into why it matters that physics is a human practice. the chapters here feel a bit like when the optometrist clicks different lenses down to find what configuration will produce in-focus vision— except that prescod-weinstein offers lenses that illuminate the world you didn’t understand was there, in sequence but showing how things are connected. and the lenses change your mind and inspire a sense of wanting to change the world instead of only offering corrective distortion. including chapters on re-evaluating history in order to dream other futures, the need for a world in which trans and agender people, including scientists, flourish, and what it means for rape to be part scientific story, this section is wrenchingly important. the chapter “wages for scientific housework” will quickly become required reading in any feminist sts class. the disordered cosmos demonstrates the haunting illogic, tragedy, and just plain wrongness of white empiricism, of practicing science through racism. i encountered the concept of “axiom lock” through writer graydon saunders; it names that pattern in which the starting point of our reasoning, the things we assume as baselines, are incommensurate with our interlocutor’s. prescod book review | catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 8 (1) alexis shotwell, 2022 4 weinstein shows a critical axiom lock functioning systemically within science, between axioms necessary to accurately perceiving the world and racist axioms. as she says, “it’s hard to escape the logic of slavery in a society that was built on it” (108). she writes of the difference between the scientific reality of melanin and its social reality as part of race as a configuration of social relations of power and oppression, for example. in this case, “racism was axiomatic, rather than a belief requiring skeptical investigation” (101). but axiom lock can be broken, as when a visiting physicist, dr. vera rubin, asked prescod-weinstein her opinion about the problem of dark matter. prescod-weinstein says, “dr. rubin challenged how i was treated in physics by treating me as if i was a person who could solve a major problem in physics” (43)—people must be seen as human to be seen as scientists; axiom locks have politics built in, but they can be transformed. prescod-weinstein writes, “we can resist. we can choose a different timeline. and we should” (272). this book enacts a refusal of white empiricism and imagines that science can be otherwise. it demonstrates the possibility that, if we turn to move alongside prescod-weinstein towards that otherwise, both science and the world would be better. for we who work in feminist sts, turning toward love for the world and love for science will feel familiar, and complicated. the disordered cosmos offers, with tremendous generosity, a portal towards that just, joyful, science practice. i’m excited to see what happens when more of us reorient in that direction. references prescod-weinstein, chanda. 2020. “making black women scientists under white empiricism: the racialization of epistemology in physics.” signs 45 (2). https://doi.org/10.1086/704991. author bio alexis shotwell’s work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. a professor at carleton university, on unceded algonquin land, she is the co-investigator for the aids activist history project (aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of knowing otherwise: race, gender, and implicit understanding and against purity: living ethically in compromised times. https://doi.org/10.1086/704991 book review | the disordered cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred, by chanda prescod-weinstein (bold type books, 2021) references author bio microsoft word jamieson-142-1176-4.docx jamieson, m. (2017). between the sciences: psychosomatic medicine as a feminist discipline. catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, 3(2) 1-28 http://www.catalystjournal.org | issn: 2380-3312 © michelle jamieson, 2017 | licensed to the catalyst project under a creative commons attribution non-commercial no derivatives license article between the sciences: psychosomatic medicine as a feminist discipline michelle jamieson macquarie university michelle.jamieson@mq.edu.au abstract psychosomatic medicine was an interdisciplinary medical field established in the late 1930s in response to growing dissatisfaction with the cartesianism assumed in both general medicine and psychiatry. seeking a method that could address the many health conditions that fell outside the scope of any particular specialization, advocates of this movement were doctors, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts who insisted on treating the organism as a whole. among these was helen flanders dunbar, an enigmatic psychiatrist and philosopher who insisted that the success of medicine rested on its ability to apprehend the interrelationality of mind and body as an object in its own right. this article shows that dunbar’s ambition to develop a practice of medicine that would more faithfully address the organism as whole, rather than fragment, evokes the larger issue of how we can know and study life objectively. drawing on the works of feminist sts scholars karen barad and donna haraway, i show 2 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) that dunbar grappled with the situatedness of knowledge practices—and specifically, the relationship between object and method—as a central concern of her discipline. i argue that psychosomatic medicine is an example of feminist thought as science because its practice relies on holding alive questions about the nature of objectivity, truth, and the ontological entanglement of “what” and “how” we know. there is no such thing as a purely psychic illness or a purely physical one, but only a living event taking place in a living organism which is itself alive only by virtue of the fact that in it psychic and somatic are united in a unity. —mohr, 1927, in dunbar, 1935/1938, p. 428 helen flanders dunbar and psychosomatic medicine helen flanders dunbar was an enigmatic psychiatrist, physician, philosopher, and theologian who founded the discipline of psychosomatic medicine in north america in the mid-1930s (powell, 1977, p. 133). originally formulated as an interdisciplinary medical field, psychosomatic medicine was established in response to growing dissatisfaction with the cartesianism, or mind-body dualism, assumed in both general medicine and psychiatry. this unusual field, which continues today,1 was then made up of a variety of physicians, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts who insisted on the importance of viewing the patient as a whole. opposed to the biomedical reductionism that defined much of medicine at the time, these practitioners argued that mind and body, or psychology and physiology, could not be separated in the event of illness. for them, the successful study and treatment of disease hinged on an awareness of the inter-implication of psychic and somatic factors—in other words, an appreciation of the fundamental indivisibility of organismic life (powell, 1977). dunbar and her colleagues sought an approach that could address the many health conditions that fell outside the scope of any existing specialty. simultaneously, this approach would be used to demonstrate 3 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) the complexity of commonplace conditions whose understanding, they argued, had been reduced or distorted by exclusively specialist study. they insisted that all illnesses involve complex interrelations of psychological and physiological factors—or what they termed psychosomatic events (weiner, 2008; lipowski, 1986).2 although definitions of the term psychosomatic varied between practitioners, it was broadly used to describe any health phenomenon that involved mental and physical symptoms or components. unlike its popular usage today to describe psychogenic illness (physical disorders with clearly established emotional or psychological causes), their understanding encompassed a large variety of everyday conditions considered organic or biological in origin, such as angina, asthma, and eczema (dunbar, 1935/1938). this viewpoint is summed up in the opening statement of the inaugural issue of the journal psychosomatic medicine, founded by dunbar. authored by a group of eight practitioners of diverse backgrounds, the statement speaks of a growing movement within the health sciences toward recognizing the entanglement of mind and body in illness. together, they sought a means of combining their efforts to reflect their shared intellectual commitment to a holistic view of the organism (weiner, 2008; lipowski, 1986): this journal is devoted not to the isolated problems of the diseased mind or the diseased body, but to the interrelationships between emotional life and bodily processes both normal and pathological…there is no logical distinction between “mind and body,” mental and physical . . . divisions of medical disciplines into physiology, neurology, internal medicine, psychiatry and psychology may be convenient for academic administration, but biologically and philosophically these divisions have no validity. (dunbar et al., 1939, 4) these kinds of statements demonstrate the shift away from a cartesian model of the organism and toward a more holistic or integrated bodily ontology. moreover, they underscore the infrastructural problems within medicine that make such a change necessary in the first place. 4 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) dunbar viewed specialism as a framework grounded in a mistaken idea of the organism as divisible into distinct parts, mind and body. she argued that we cannot clearly see or understand the problem of psychosomatic interrelationships because they arise “between the sciences” (1935/1938, p. xi)—that is, between separate domains of knowledge that address the organism piecemeal. she explains that we have reached a point where progress in the specialties themselves is being blocked by a lack of understanding of the relationship between them. scientists commenting on the tremendous gain which has accrued to us during the last decades of specialization, are calling attention to the fact that many of the most vital of our problems lie between the sciences and cannot be even perceived without going beyond the confines of a specialty. one of the major problems of the “between fields” is the question of psychosomatic interrelationships. (1935/1938, p. xi) in dunbar’s vision, psychosomatic medicine promised to correct this issue by intervening into the very organization of medical knowledge and practice itself. she imagined a field that would act as an intermediary and synthesize existing bodies of research into a perspective offering a unified picture of the organism. to this end, dunbar published emotions and bodily changes: a survey of literature on psychosomatic relationships 1910–1933 (1935), an encyclopedic compilation of medical research into the mind-body connection from the early twentieth century. this volume canvassed more than 2,300 studies spanning a vast array of fields from immunology and endocrinology to psychiatry and neuroanatomy, demonstrating that the study of mind-body interrelation was already widespread, and thus that it constituted an object of inquiry in need of methodical, scientific examination (lipowski, 1986, p. 2). aiming to “bring together all the fragments of knowledge we possess, pertinent to the problem of psychosomatic interrelationships” (dunbar, 1935/1938, p. xii), this collection championed the need for a unified, collegial approach to the psychosomatic problem—one based on genuine dialogue and collaboration between the various branches of 5 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.3 feminist science studies dunbar’s ambition to develop a practice of medicine that would more faithfully address the patient as whole, rather than part, evokes issues that are pertinent to feminist engagements with the body, biology, and science more generally. dunbar’s efforts to establish a science of the psychosomatic are defined by two distinctly feminist concerns. first, her work begins from a critique of cartesianism in medicine—she advocates for models of life, or forms of knowledge, that take the indivisibility of mind and body as their starting point. second, in trying to realize this goal clinically and scientifically, her project grapples with questions about the ontology of scientific practices. it is driven by a concern with understanding the relationship between “what” and “how” we know—or objects and methods of observation—to find a way to study and understand the organism in its wholeness. dunbar’s commitment to overcoming the perceived separation of psyche from soma is consistent with a longstanding tradition in feminism of interrogating cartesian dualism and its correlates (e.g., nature/nurture, matter/ideation, determinism/agency, and more recently, biology/culture). scholars of corporeal feminism, material feminism, and now new materialism have contested, problematized, and refigured these dichotomies to deepen our understanding of the entanglement of material and cultural life. particularly, the works of thinkers such as moira gatens (1983), judith butler (1990), elizabeth grosz (1994), vicki kirby (1997, 2008), elizabeth wilson (2004, 2015), and karen barad (2007) have complicated the conventional view of the body as a fixed, given substance that merely receives cultural inscription. rather than an immutable, material entity whose significance derives from its articulation by external, cultural forces, their various analyses of embodiment and biology insist on the indivisibility of mind and body, knowledge and life, and argue that the body is a lively material signature of social, cultural, 6 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) political, and historical forces. of particular relevance to this article is elizabeth wilson’s work on the relationship between feminist theory and the biological sciences. in psychosomatic: feminism and the neurological body (2004), wilson suggests that feminists can work productively with biological explanation and that, in fact, there is much to be learnt from tolerating its reductionism (2004, p. 14). working with data from neurogastroenterology, psychopharmacology, and other areas, wilson complicates the orthodox view that biology, affect, and culture are mutually exclusive domains by illustrating the constitutive relations between these apparently distinct aspects of life. her analyses of case studies such as depression and hysteria persuasively demonstrate that no element of organismic life has ontological priority over any other: rather than an interaction of discrete parts, the relation of mind and body can be more accurately understood in terms of “a psychosomatic economy within which the identity of each element . . . is constituted as an effect of their economic structuration” (2004, p. 19). wilson’s thought serves as a critical resource for recognizing the feminist import of dunbar’s work, as it clearly articulates the philosophical and empirical complication at the heart of psychosomatic medicine as a field: namely, psyche-soma interrelationality. for wilson, biology does not precede or underlie any other aspect of human life; instead, the capacities and qualities routinely attributed to culture and sociality are shown to be “part of the natural repertoire of biological matter” (2004, p. 13). it is on this basis that wilson argues we need to rethink biology’s exclusion from feminist and other scholarly domains in the humanities, and instead consider how we can work with data foreign to our disciplinary moorings. this issue of how to create a meaningful conversation between systems of knowledge or forms of evidence that are fundamentally different in kind is crucial to dunbar’s undertaking. the actual practice of psychosomatic medicine involves negotiating the relative, and sometimes competing, objectivities of different specialist knowledges. dunbar’s 7 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) attempt to repair the gaps between these divergent disciplines into a unified perspective inevitably raises the question of what objectivity even means in the context of medicine, given that each field produces its own unique truth of the organism. if knowledge is always situated, partial, and plural, how can we achieve a (single) holistic perspective? what would constitute a holistic, as opposed to a fragmented, approach to studying illness? does holism suggest greater accuracy in knowledge that partiality? and can this whole ever be abstracted or located for the purposes of scientific study? dunbar’s attempts to design a methodology for this purpose animate broader philosophical questions about the ontology of scientific practices—the specific nature of our involvement or interference with scientific objects. this issue of how methods of observation are implicated in the phenomena we study has long been a subject within feminist science studies. feminist theory has a robust tradition of interrogating the presumably neutral and self-evident nature of scientific knowledges and practices. thinkers such as donna haraway (1989), emily martin (1991, 1994), and evelyn fox keller (1995) have argued that the metaphors, images, and concepts adopted in the sciences to describe the body and illness are borrowed from cultural life and laden with social and political significance. analyzing the discourses of immunology, genetics, and reproductive medicine, they show that, far from being removed from social life, scientific knowledge evidences the political and economic conditions of the day. related to these epistemological critiques is a strand of feminist theory that further examines objectivity as an idea, value, and practice. the works of sandra harding (1991, 2015), donna haraway (1988), and more recently karen barad (2007) expose the political assumptions that underpin the privileging of the idea of impartial, universal knowledge. importantly, these scholars present alternative theories and frameworks for how we can understand and practice science. concepts such as situated knowledges, strong objectivity, and agential realism offer feminist accounts of objectivity that foreground the subjective involvement of the 8 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) investigator and context in the production of knowledge, and in doing so highlight the role that ethics plays in scientific inquiry. in this article, i am specifically interested in ontological questions about the relationship between methods and objects of inquiry. for this reason, i focus on two key works: donna haraway’s canonical essay “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective” (1988), and karen barad’s meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning (2007). both haraway and barad are motivated by questions about the ontology of science—how methods of studying and understanding the world are themselves phenomena (generative) of the world we discover. these theorists share a common concern with the politics and ethics of the inquirer’s role in scientific practices and offer unique accounts of this relation. however, their respective contributions exemplify an important conceptual shift from an epistemological focus on language and the politics of representation to an exploration of the material or ontological conditions that underpin the use of these borrowed concepts and metaphors. this article presents a close reading of dunbar’s key texts emotions and bodily changes (1935) and psychosomatic diagnosis (1943) that critically considers her efforts to study “the organism as a whole” scientifically. specifically, i examine the method dunbar proposed for the holistic study of the organism—the creation of “stereoscopic pictures” (1938, p. xxi), an approach that involved combining the perspectives and findings of different health sciences into a single viewpoint. reading dunbar’s writings in conversation with haraway and barad, i argue that dunbar’s vision for psychosomatic medicine offers an illustrative example of feminist theory in practice. dunbar’s writings reveal what happens when feminist arguments (such as critiques of mind-body dualism or objectivity) are put to work empirically in scientific contexts. i suggest that psychosomatic medicine constitutes an example of feminist thought as science because its very practice relies on holding alive 9 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) questions about the nature of objectivity and the political-ethical entanglement of “what” and “how” we know. as a side note, i have chosen not to adopt the vocabulary of terms outlined by the journal editors in the introduction to this special issue. while there may be shared understandings of the distinctions between science/science, biology/biology, matter/matter, the body/bodies, and nature/nature within feminist science studies, it is precisely the difficulty of making such distinctions that this piece interrogates. as the following analysis demonstrates, it is not possible or straightforward to cleanly separate, for instance, biology (the discipline) from biology (the “stuff” of organisms), because these are always co-constituted in the practice of science. this “phenomenon,” to borrow barad’s term, makes slippages between matter and matter, nature and nature, difficult to avoid and is also where the key analytic opportunity lies in thinking with psychosomatic medicine. throughout this piece, i explore how dunbar’s work challenges our confidence in these distinctions. a brief historical background historically, psychosomatic medicine emerged in the context of an intellectual climate and thought style defined by a concern with identifying isolatable causes of disease. it was largely established “as a reformist movement against biomedical reductionism” (lipowski, 1986, p. 5), a counterpoint to the prevailing microbiological view made orthodox by the works of louis pasteur and robert koch. herbert weiner explains that “single causes for every disease were now sought. the explanation of symptoms and signs was to be correlated with local, anatomical terms” (2008, p. 490). this trend in associating diseases with isolated causes, known as “the etiological standpoint” (carter, 2003, p. 1), dramatically altered understandings of pathogenesis in the scientific and public imaginations. indeed, its adoption in the early twentieth century was so widespread that the ideas of “pathology” and “cause” (especially microorganisms) came to be automatically associated.4 during this 10 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) period, medicine was largely dominated by an image of the body as a defended, autonomous entity divisible into causally related elements or components.5 against this backdrop, dunbar’s proposal offered an alternative to the dualistic logic that governed both general medicine and psychiatry, namely their emphasis on either mind or body as the cause and site of illness. rather than concentrating on “the isolated problems of the diseased mind or the diseased body” (dunbar et al., 1939, p. 4)—an atomic, aggregated bodily ontology—psychosomatic medicine was founded on the principle that the organism is a unity. it was this object, mind-body unity, that dunbar sought to establish as the foundation of psychosomatic inquiry—an insight which she hoped would become conventional within medical thought. while emotions and bodily changes (1935) is known for launching the psychosomatic movement in north america, there were several schools of thought within the field (powell, 1977, p. 133). early pioneers argued for competing interpretations of the mind-body interrelation, and with these, different modes of investigation and therapy. powell explains that the american movement was divided into three schools, each vying for its own account of psychosomatic phenomena and methodological approach. these include the psychoanalytic perspective represented by franz alexander, which emphasized psychogenic accounts of illness and the isolation of emotional causes; the psychophysiological school, which focused principally on physical mechanisms, organic processes, and pathologic lesions (exemplified by neurologist harold wolff’s work on stress and disease); and the psychobiological view championed by psychiatrist adolf meyer, otherwise known as the correlational organismic approach, which advocated for a holistic understanding of the organism (powell, 1977, p. 136; lipowski, 1986, p. 5). describing these branches, powell writes that “the first focused on the mind, the second on the body, and the third on the patient as a whole” (1977, p. 136, emphasis in original). dunbar’s work closely aligned with meyer’s psychobiology and its 11 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) foundation in organismal theory, which “dealt with wholes, correlations and constellations—never with cause” (powell, 1977, p. 140). the appeal of meyer’s approach was that it moved away from psychogenesis and physiogenesis as explanations of psychosomatic events. for dunbar, both these concepts are underpinned by the logic of a linear, causal relation between distinct parts of the organism—parts which she insists cannot be separated in such a mechanistic fashion. in psychosomatic diagnosis, she writes: [the] organismal concept changes our focus both from that of anatomical pathology and from that of the functionalists who, in searching for the origin of a given illness, assume that they must choose between physiogenesis and psychogenesis. in order to understand disease processes we must give up the “either/or” type of thinking and shift our emphasis to “both/and..” (1943, p. 6) dunbar’s resistance to a reductive view of life, be it psychological or physiological, is a theme threaded through her varied and extensive education. the unusual diversity of her training demonstrates an early appreciation of the complex, multifaceted nature of human life, and thus an interest in circumventing disciplinary boundaries and exploring opportunities for cross-disciplinary scholarship. between 1923 and 1930, dunbar completed major studies in religion, philosophy, psychiatry, and medicine, often overlapping these very different degrees, whose subject matter she viewed as complementary (powell, 1978, p. 145). in 1924, she completed an ma in philosophy at columbia university, and began a bachelor’s degree at the union theological seminary in new york, where she finished with high honors in 1927 (1978, p. 146). alongside these explorations of religion and philosophy, dunbar undertook medical training at yale university, and by 1930 had been awarded both a doctorate in philosophy and a medical doctorate (stokes, 1980, p. 211). furthermore, in this latter period of study, dunbar traveled abroad to work as a hospitant in general and psycho-neurological hospitals in vienna under the guidance of psychoanalyst felix deutsch, and on weekends traveled to zurich to interview renowned psychiatrist and 12 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) psychotherapist carl jung (1980, p. 211; powell, 1978, pp. 146–147). this remarkable education translated into a career concerned with bridging and redefining fields that had traditionally been kept separate. in her professional life, dunbar made ongoing attempts to generate dialogue between the spheres of medicine, psychiatry, and religion (stokes, 1980, p. 211). from 1931 to 1949, she worked in medicine and psychiatry at the presbyterian hospital and vanderbilt clinic in new york, taught at both columbia university’s college of physicians and surgeons and the new york psychoanalytic institute (1942 to 1947), and engaged in private practice (stokes, 1980, p. 211). in addition, she devoted time and energy to bringing clergy and physicians together in caring for the sick (hart, 1996, p. 47).6 thus dunbar embodied the very problem that she devoted much of her life to studying: working “between fields” put her in a unique position to observe the problems created by disciplinary specificity itself.7 between the sciences its emphasis on mind-body interrelation in illness marked psychosomatic medicine as a highly unusual discipline. in taking the whole organism as an object in its own right—the systemic entanglement of psychic/ emotional and somatic phenomena—it contradicted and openly contested traditional forms of disciplinarity within medicine (weiner, 2008, p. 486). as such, psychosomatic medicine occupied a confused position with respect to existing medical fields, an ambiguity captured in its description as “both a special field and an integral part of every medical specialty” (dunbar et al., 1939, p. 5). in the “introductory statement” published in the first issue of the journal psychosomatic medicine (founded by dunbar in 1939), dunbar and her fellow editors explain: psychosomatic medicine is not restricted to any specific field of pathology. medical specialties such as internal medicine, pediatrics, dermatology, ophthalmology, etc., may be so restricted. psychosomatic medicine, however, is not a medical specialty of this kind; it designates a method of approach to the 13 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) problems of etiology and therapy rather than a delimitation of the area. (1939, p. 3) this quotation captures a key dilemma that dunbar and other similar practitioners faced—the difficulty of being clearly identified with or located in a circumscribed field. literally a discipline “between fields” (dunbar, 1935/1938, p. xi), psychosomatic medicine defined itself in terms of a uniquely integrative approach which operated outside the conceptual and empirical constraints of specialized medicine. in this sense, it functioned as a kind of meta-medical field, a practice that illuminated the blind spots of the medical system while being situated within them. the problem that psychosomatic interrelationships present for medicine, then, is a problem of vision—in particular, what can be seen or gets obscured by individual disciplinary lenses. for dunbar, dealing with this issue meant rethinking the very infrastructure of medicine itself: many of the most vital of our problems lie between the sciences and cannot be even perceived without going beyond the confines of a specialty. one of the major problems of the “between fields” is the question of psychosomatic interrelationships. (1935/1938, p. xi, emphasis added) here, dunbar states that psychosomatic phenomena are imperceptible to the specialist-trained observer—that they literally cannot be seen from a position that assumes the separation of mind and body. yet, as she points out in emotions and bodily changes, the need to address psychosomatic phenomena stems from growing evidence obtained in the specialties of limitations in our understanding of illness. intriguingly, dunbar’s project is based in a conflicted relationship with specialization, which she explains both prohibits and enables a holistic view of the organism. on the one hand, psychosomatic medicine offers a critique of and departure from an aggregated or partial approach—an attempt to disprove and do away with a cartesian concept of life. on the other hand, it is a discipline born of and reliant on the work being carried out in specialized fields for its unique perspective and 14 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) approach (especially in devising new interdisciplinary methods). caught in this bind, psychosomatic medicine foregrounds the question of disciplinarity. in its uncertain identity and position within the health sciences, it grapples with the issue of what constitutes a scientific field or is proper to a discipline of knowledge. partial perspective/objective vision the politics of location is a central issue for dunbar, not only in terms of her movement between various professional roles (physician, psychiatrist, theologian, philosopher), but for her critique of specialism. dunbar works to locate the knowledge claims of specialist approaches consistently by drawing attention to the cartesianism underpinning the idea that the organism is divisible into discrete parts, psyche and soma. by highlighting the ideas and assumptions implicit in specific biomedical approaches, she calls their objectivity and neutrality into question. in doing so, dunbar argues that specialized medicine is grounded in a particular embodiment and subjectivity: its objectivity is established and perpetuated on the foundation of a mind-body split and the accompanying ontological assumption that the study of organismic life can be similarly divided into these component parts. on this point, dunbar’s work finds resonance with feminist critiques of scientific knowledge production. in particular, haraway’s essay “situated knowledges” (1988) offers a critique of objectivity that argues for an understanding of all knowledge as grounded in the viewpoint of an embodied and locatable subject.8 this feminist reading of science exposes the gendered politics implicit in the classical conception of scientific knowledge as objective, universal truth. contesting the orthodox view of science as a masterful relation between a knowing subject and a passive object, she argues that this model rests on an assumption of the observer’s autonomy from her object. haraway takes issue with the perception of objective knowledge as impartial, disembodied, ahistorical, and apolitical: for her, the notion that scientific 15 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) work can be detached from its contexts—or that it remains essentially untouched or uncontaminated by the identities of its investigators— presumes that scientific claims are immune to the specific circumstances from which they emerge. this model of knowledge, haraway asserts, infers the existence of an observer who is free of any (compromising) connection to the world being investigated. affirming dunbar’s point that every specialist gaze is situated and trained to recognize a particular object, haraway argues that all observation is partial. far from overcoming the limits and contingencies of individual subject positions, objectivity speaks of an historicallylocatable identity. as peta hinton explains, “the impact of haraway’s argument in ‘situated knowledges’ arrives with her reworking of the transcendent status of objectivity as already partial, already embodied specificity” (2014, p. 103, emphasis in original). haraway writes that objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility. the moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision. (1988, pp. 582– 583) thus, at one level, dunbar’s work is driven by a similar imperative to haraway’s—to recognize the partiality of scientific observation, the politics implicit in our modes of inquiry, and their real-world implications. dunbar’s critique of medical specialism is based in the argument that all looking or scientific study occurs from a situated standpoint—she insists that we need to account for what specialists cannot easily see by dint of their very training. in this sense, dunbar’s work can be read as an instance of what haraway calls “feminist objectivity”—an “embodied objectivity” (1988, p. 581) that recognizes the context-dependent and plural nature of truth, and as such, “initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all vision practices” (pp. 582–583). however, at another level, the idea of objectivity implicit in dunbar’s effort to study the organism as a whole is incongruent with 16 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) haraway’s concept. in fact, dunbar’s commitment to holism as opposed to partiality seems to align more with the notion of universal, transcendent knowledge that haraway works to displace. dunbar interprets specialist knowledge as providing an incomplete picture of the organism; for her, it can only ever offer a partial view dissected from a bigger picture. instead, she seeks a more accurate apprehension of the organism—a task that means overcoming or circumventing the situated, restricted nature of individual disciplinary perspectives. underpinning this view is the assumption that the narrow perspectivalism of specialist work can be corrected. in other words, dunbar believes that there is an error in our ways of studying the organism, and that the division of the patient into separate components is a misrepresentation of the organism’s actual nature. this is evident at points where she locates mind-body dualism in our perception and study of the organism, rather than the organism itself: if…there be any dichotomy lurking in the term “psychosomatic” it is this projected one, inherent not in the organism observed, but in the mind of the observer and in our methods of observation. the term “psychosomatic” is descriptive rather of the observer in his endeavor to apprehend than of the organism observed. psychic and somatic represent merely two angles of observation. our understanding of disease rests on pictures taken from these two angles viewed simultaneously, united stereoscopically. (1935/1938, p. xix) dunbar distinguishes between the conceptualization of the organism by different specialties (a divided entity) and the organism as it pre-exists these scientific representations (a natural unity). here, she sees the separation of psyche and soma as an intellectual distinction that originates in human thought and culture, rather than nature. this idea is supported at other points where dunbar states that such a viewpoint is symptomatic only of the means by which knowledge of life is obtained and organized. she writes that although the organism is a unity we see it as having psychic and 17 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) somatic aspects. for the understanding and management of these aspects we have developed fundamentally different methodologies. we have been unable to approach them simultaneously or in the same terms. (pp. xvii–xix) these types of assertions suggest that there is an object—in this case, the organism as a “unity”—that exists independently of medical inquiry and can be accessed via a range of human-authored methods. dunbar infers that subject and object are discrete entities that enter into relation, or encounter one other, in the event of scientific investigation. thus her position is underscored by a subject-object split, a conventional objectivism that safeguards the possibility of a uniquely psychosomatic approach. for dunbar, the promise of psychosomatic medicine is that the organism may be apprehended in its wholeness with objectivity; or, rather, that it is possible to study mind-body interrelation from a vantage that corrects or supplements the bias and myopia of the specialist gaze. this aspiration for objectivity instead of partiality (whole instead of part), as opposed to haraway’s sense of objectivity through partiality (situated knowledges), exposes a paradox in dunbar’s thinking. what does objectivity mean for dunbar? is she committed to the idea of disembodied, universal knowledge—a view from which to neutrally or comprehensively see the whole organism? how is a holistic perspective different from, or more objective than, a partial one? if every point of view is situated and partial, isn’t the very idea of a “holistic perspective” an oxymoron? method: the ontology of scientific practices the quandary that defines dunbar’s project is her quest to locate a perspective that offers a stable and reliable view of the whole. yet, as she also points out, the organism as a whole is not locatable in the traditional sense: each attempt to objectify it, whether from a psychological or physiological viewpoint, abstracts or skews the object under study. at the 18 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) heart of this dilemma is the question of method: how are ways of knowing life are implicated in the phenomena we study? do objects preexist our attempts to know them scientifically (e.g., anatomically, neurologically, psychologically)? are they discrete entities with given properties and qualities? or are the relations between subjects and objects more entangled and contextually emergent? these questions are explicitly taken up by karen barad, whose writings on quantum physics challenge the orthodox assumption that objective knowledge is grounded in a subject-object separation. in meeting the universe halfway (2007), barad draws on the work of quantum physicist niels bohr to present an alternative account of the ontology of scientific practices—one predicated on the entanglement of subject and object, matter and discourse, which “takes the material nature of practices seriously” (p. 56). importantly, barad’s call for a deeper understanding of inquiry’s ontological dimensions responds to the realist position that impartial knowledge is guaranteed by the division of observer and object: that is, the subject’s externality to, and difference from, the object in question. she explains: the ontology of the world is a matter of discovery for the traditional realist. the assumed one-to-one correspondence between scientific theories and reality is used to bolster the further assumption that scientific entities are unmarked by their discoverers: nature is taken to be revealed by, yet independent of, theoretical and experimental practices, that is, transparently given. (p. 41) in contrast, barad argues that scientific practices are themselves phenomena of the world about which science is curious. beginning from the position that “we are a part of that nature that we seek to understand” (p. 67), she asserts that practices of knowledge cannot logically be separated from, or elevated above, the objects they “discover.” indeed, her account maintains that objects do not straightforwardly pre-exist our attempts to understand them; they are not bounded entities with “determinate properties that are independent of our experimental 19 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) investigations” (p. 106). rather, subjects and objects, discourse and matter, are entanglements performatively enacted in specific experiments or moments of observation. this reading of objectivity is one that emphasizes the “wholeness” of any scientific event through which method and object are crystallized—which barad terms “phenomena” (p. 118). this wholeness refers to the fundamentally indivisible nature of experiments—to the ontological involvement of “what” and “how” we know in the specific materializations that every experiment brings about. “descriptively, there is a single situation, no part of which can be abstracted out…the object cannot be ascribed an ‘independent reality in the ordinary physical sense’” (hooker in barad, 2007, p. 118, emphasis in original). for dunbar, the object of psychosomatic medicine and methods for studying it remain indissolubly linked as problems. in psychosomatic diagnosis, she asks: “if there is no such thing as purely psychic illness or purely physical illness, the question arises how then are we to study illness? our methods are directed to one or the other” (1943, p. 6). that is, if the object of psychosomatic medicine has no stable scientific frame of reference, by what practical means can it be investigated? in response to this dilemma, dunbar proposes the creation of “stereoscopic pictures,” which involve studying “simultaneous sequences in psychic and somatic spheres, or observation from these two angles” (1935/1938, p. xxi). drawing on the visual logic of the stereoscope, these pictures offer a means of bringing together and synthesizing the partial perspectives of specialist fields into a single, integrated viewpoint. the stereoscope, a mid-nineteenth-century invention, is an optical instrument that allows the observer to view “two pictures (usually photographs) of an object, taken from slightly different points of view . . . [as] a single image giving the impression of solidity or relief, as in ordinary vision of the object itself” (oed, 2017). as a tool, it captures the ethos of the psychosomatic approach—to combine, or establish a meaningful conversation between, different specialist techniques and forms of data. for dunbar, stereoscopic pictures offer a view of the whole 20 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) organism by repairing the perceptual disparity between specialist methods whose difference in perspective is a difference in kind. as an instrument, they were used to manage or reconcile the relative and somewhat incongruous bodies of knowledge produced from different medical viewpoints. although stereoscopic pictures could take many different forms, they were all based on the idea of observing physiological and psychological events simultaneously. they include: (1) instruments for continuous recording, such as the electroencephalogram (eeg) and plethysmograph (for measuring alterations in volume in the body or one of its parts); (2) the practice of simultaneously recording several physiological functions, rather than one (1935/1938, pp. xxiv–xxv); and (3) the psychosomatic history—as “a method of history-taking…which includes a history outline, together with a method of correlating observations of the emotional and physiological aspects of the course of illness while the patient is under treatment in the hospital” (1943/1948, pp. 692–693). in addition to these specific techniques, dunbar also refers more broadly to “cooperation between physiologists and medical psychologists” (1935/1938, p. xxiv) as essential to these approaches. these methods raise the issue of whether the synthesis or combination of specialist techniques equates to a holistic perspective. dunbar insists that “what we need to study is the disturbance of the total equilibrium of the organism, a factor which cannot be arrived at by way of adding up measurements of discrete and partial functions” (1943/1948, p. 19, emphasis in original). yet what constitutes a stereoscopic picture if not the addition of discrete, aggregated measurements? how do they work to overcome or circumvent the partiality of specialist viewpoints and the fragmented, cartesian ontology these perspectives assume? this confusion between the study of part and whole is echoed in the dunbar’s characterization of the organism, which oscillates between two main concepts: “whole” and “unity.” despite being used interchangeably, these terms have quite different implications for the development of a methodology. for instance, dunbar used phrases such as “the patient as a whole” (1935/1938, p. xix), “the organism21 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) environment as a whole” (p. 428), “the organism in its environment” (1943, p. 5), and “the indivisible living organism” (1935/1938, p. xix). these suggest a deeply contextual view of life—one that cannot be reduced to psychological or physiological mechanisms. however, dunbar also frequently described the organism as a “unity” or totality (1935/1938, p. xix). by contrast, these terms evoke a sense of the organism as a sum or aggregation of separate, interactive parts and functions. according to this additive logic, psychosomatic medicine works by presenting a more comprehensive picture of the organism’s health—an overview of how its various aspects intersect and interrelate. there remains an unresolved tension between dunbar’s philosophical and scientific commitments—on the one hand, to organismal theory and the psychobiological concept of “the organism as a whole”; on the other hand, to studying and defining this object empirically. the difficulty of marrying these positions is evident in dunbar’s suggestion that “the organism as a whole” is an “observationindependent reality” (barad 2007, p. 97) that can be rendered visible if we adopt the right methods. yet the idea of capturing the wholeness of organismic life—the complexities of what it means to be a person— appears at odds with the positivist logic of scientific study. scientific practices, even in the unique forms that dunbar imagines them, work by abstracting or rendering visible an object by cutting it apart from the world. the organism, even when conceived as indivisible and ecologically-entrenched, is nevertheless removed and differentiated from its wider context—which also includes the context of the experiment. following barad’s analysis, we might instead consider the wholeness of the scientific experiment itself. dunbar’s bind demonstrates that each attempt to know the organism enacts and materializes it according to the perspective of a particular observer. that is, the organism as whole doesn’t exist prior to any instance of measurement, or outside a perspective that is trained to look for it. rather, it emerges through specific acts of knowing, or subject-object arrangements. like the term anatomy, whose etymology literally means “to cut up” (ana “up” 22 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) + temnien “to cut”), medicine’s object emerges in and as the variety of constitutive “cuts” it makes. historically, western medical understandings of the body have been rooted in practices of dissection. this is reflected in the fact that the word anatomy refers simultaneously to the body’s physical structure (object) and the techniques or approaches through which these structures are rendered intelligible (method). it is in this sense that the organism is indivisible: it can never be divorced from an act of looking because every object anticipates and evidences a method of inquiry. conclusion dunbar’s attempt to develop a uniquely psychosomatic methodology animates more questions than it answers. indeed, it is precisely in its equivocation and lack of resolve that it elaborates distinctly feminist concerns about the relationship between mind and body, the nature of objectivity, and the ontology of scientific practices. in dunbar’s work, the issues of what constitutes psychology or physiology and how these aspects of life are enwoven in the event of illness are utterly entangled with questions about the ontological status of the modes of investigation that call these phenomena forth. the fact that dunbar’s attempt to study and define the psychosomatic leads her to interrogate the relationship between disciplinarity and the truth of the organism’s being complicates any simple sense of an ontological gap between life and knowledge of life, even as it installs these divisions elsewhere. importantly, it is this very notion of separation—between mind and body, object and investigation, patient and practitioner—that the field of psychosomatic medicine grapples with conceptually, empirically, and therapeutically. through psychosomatic medicine, dunbar critically engages the idea of scientific objectivity, exploring the ontological entanglement of object and method (and its political and ethical dimensions) as a central concern. for this reason, it presents a compelling example of feminist thought in practice: that is, how the insights of feminist theory can be 23 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) used not simply to interrogate science, but to develop novel approaches to scientific work that reflect critically on our own involvement in knowledge creation. notes 1 the field of psychosomatic medicine continues today through professional associations and journals that foster interdisciplinary cooperation among scientists and practitioners. these include the american psychosomatic society, which publishes psychosomatic medicine, and the european association of psychosomatic medicine, which publishes the journal of psychosomatic research. however, this article focuses on the early history of the field and the work of dunbar in particular. 2 the term psychosomatic comes from the greek psykhe, meaning “mind,” and soma, meaning “body.” it is typically used to describe illnesses or physical disorders that have emotional or psychological causes, or which involve both mind and body. as such, its usage often implies a distinction between real, organic conditions that have a demonstrable biological basis and those whose symptoms are considered psychic in origin. for a fascinating discussion of this distinction, see wilson (2004). 3 in this paper, i have not discussed unequal experiences of bodies created by the power structures of the medical establishment (i.e., the effects of racism, heterosexism, class privilege, ableism, etc.). this is because these themes rarely appear explicitly in dunbar’s writings or those of other psychosomatic practitioners. however, this does not mean that psychosomatic medicine was an apolitical project. dunbar’s vision for this field was first and foremost to revolutionize the practice of medicine—away from a fragmented approach and toward a collegial, interdisciplinary dialogue. dunbar believed that this fundamental change in perspective (from part to whole) would render a vast array of undiagnosed illnesses and health phenomena visible and intelligible (e.g., chronic illness). in pursuit of this holistic perspective, she also advocated the “need for a closer relationship between the social sciences and medicine” (1935/1938, p. xxxv). the issue of power, then—of who determines what gets seen and legitimated as illness, and what symptoms, conditions, bodies, and subjectivities fall through the cracks “between the sciences”—lies at the very heart of dunbar’s work, and 24 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) psychosomatic medicine more broadly. 4 see carter (2003) for more on the etiological standpoint. see jamieson (2010) for further discussion of how pasteur and koch’s studies contributed to this discourse and historical moment. see tomes (1999) for an historical account of the rise of germ theory and normalization of modern understandings of disease and contagion. 5 this idea of the body as a “defended self” can be traced to the field of immunology, which came to fruition following the work of pasteur and koch on microorganisms and disease. the use of battle imagery to describe the relationships between organisms and their environments has been critiqued by feminist scholars such as haraway (1989) and martin (1990, 1994). for an overview of these and other critiques of immunological discourse, see jamieson (2015). 6 see hart (1996) for more on dunbar’s interest in integrating religion and health care. see powell (1978) for more on dunbar’s career and achievements, and powell (1974) for her work on religion. 7 despite her many remarkable accomplishments, dunbar remains a fairly shadowed figure in the histories of psychosomatic medicine, general medicine, and psychiatry. broadly speaking, her work has not been widely recognized or engaged (hart, 1996, p. 47), and she holds a reputation for being “among the century’s most cited yet unread medical authors” (powell, 1977, p. 134). powell argues that even during her career, colleagues within psychosomatic medicine often misinterpreted her contributions, which has led to the work’s misrepresentation in accounts of the discipline (1977, p. 138). 8 the notion that scientific knowledge is situated is not unique to haraway’s analysis. see also harding’s the science question in feminism (1986), keller’s reflections on gender and science (1984), and nancy hartsock’s “the feminist standpoint: developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism” (1983). references barad, k. 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(1996). helen flanders dunbar: physician, medievalist, enigma. journal of religion and health, 35(1), 47–58. hartsock, n. (1983). the feminist standpoint: developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism. in s. harding & m.b. hintikka (eds.), discovering reality: feminist perspectives on epistemology, metaphysics, methodology, and philosophy of science (pp. 283–310). doredrecht, netherlands: d. reidel,.hinton, p. (2014). ‘situated knowledges’ and new materialism(s): rethinking a politics of location. women: a cultural review, 25(1), 99–113. jamieson, m. (2010). imagining ‘reactivity’: allergy within the history of immunology. studies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences, 41, 356–366. keller, e.f. (1985). reflections on gender and science. new haven, ct: yale university press. ——— (1995). refiguring life: metaphors of twentieth-century biology. new york, ny: columbia university press. 27 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) kirby, v. (1997). telling flesh: the substance of the corporeal. new york, ny: routledge. ——— (2008). subject to natural law: a meditation on the ‘two cultures’ problem. australian feminist studies, 23(55), 5–17. lipowski, z.j. (1986). psychosomatic medicine: past and present, part i: historical background. canadian journal of psychiatry, 31(1), 2–7. martin, e. 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(1974). healing and wholeness: helen flanders dunbar, 1902–1959, and an extra-medical origin of the american psychosomatic movement 1906–1936. doctoral dissertation. durham, nc: duke university. ——— (1977). helen flanders dunbar (1902–1959) and a holistic approach to psychosomatic problems: i. the rise and fall of a medical philosophy. psychiatric quarterly, 49(2), 133–152. ——— (1978). helen flanders dunbar (1902–1959) and a holistic 28 jamieson catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience 3(2) approach to psychosomatic problems: ii. the role of dunbar’s nonmedical background. psychiatric quarterly, 50(2), 144–157. stokes, a. (1980). helen flanders dunbar. notable american women, the modern period: a bibliographical dictionary. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. tomes, n. (1999). the gospel of germs: men, women, and the microbe in american life. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. weiner, h. (2008). the concept of psychosomatic medicine. in. e.r. wallace and j. gach (eds.), history of psychiatry and medical psychology. new york: springer, 485–516. wilson, e.a. (2004). psychosomatic: feminism and the neurological body. durham, nc: duke university press. ——— (2015). gut feminism. durham, nc: duke university press. bio michelle jamieson holds a phd in sociology and is lecturer in higher degree research learning in the faculty of arts at macquarie university, sydney. her research moves between sociology, feminist science studies, and the medical humanities, and critically explores the assumed division between sociality and biology, especially in relation to illness and medicine. she has published in body and society, parallax, studies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences, sociology of health and illness, and has contributed to what if culture was nature all along? (edinburgh university press, 2017). she recently guest edited a special issue of parallax on the theme “autoimmunities” (2017).     original research queering ecology: re(constructing) ecology as a home to better understand the social-ecological pressures wildlife face     cesar o. estien university of california, berkeley cestien@berkeley.edu     abstract homes are intimate spaces where many bodies come together in space and time to deeply learn and understand the processes that have created one another. ecology, the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment, is based on the study of a home. yet ecologists are trained in patriarchal, heteronormative, and otherwise western articulations and understandings of nature that prevent access to this ecological home. in this article, i argue that through (re)constructing ecology as a home, ecologists can better understand the social and ecological processes that shape an organism. to (re)construct ecology as a home, i first dissect conflict with wildlife as a concept that reinforces taxonomical hierarchies and prevents humans from making a home with wildlife. i then leverage queer theory to flatten taxonomical hierarchies and create a landscape that invites the (re)construction of ecology as a homemaking discipline. lastly, i sit within the ecological home to examine urban wildlife and the environmental pressures they are subjected to—using the urban coyote as an example. this work leverages queerness to collapse taxonomical hierarchies and push traditional ecology towards a boundless relationality with wildlife to more holistically understand the various social and ecological pressures that ultimately create their phenotype.     keywords queer ecology, multispecies relations, urban ecology, human-wildlife interactions, coyote, canis latrans     preface yet small bodies and intimate atmospheres often get lost in big atmospheric narratives. —neel ahuja, “intimate atmospheres: queer theory in a time of extinctions” vulnerability materializes as a mosaic terrain and the form it takes—that is, its shape and texture—is often a consequence of the surrounding environment. queer theory has unhinged the walls of the home i have come to know as modern, western ecology, muddling much of my thought processes and leaving me intellectually naked. the deconstruction of this home has reeled in a storm of anxiousness, stress, pressure, freedom, and liberation. the anxiousness, stress, and pressure was felt throughout reading queer texts and eventually materialized as dreams. consistently, i dreamed of an ecological home. this home was different than the one i had previously known. as i entered the structure, it was boundless, rather than rigid and fixed. no walls. no corners. all i could see was a never-ending table filled with species and concepts conversing. these species moved between and through each other—recognizing the interdependence and interconnectedness amongst themselves. ecology, itself, derives from oikos (house, dwelling place, habitation) and -logia (study of), and thus, as ecologists, we are studying a dwelling place. a home. a home where intimate interactions reveal to us the many complex processes that eventually produce an organism and its phenotype. however, the methods and language of traditional ecology based in western science have fractured this home and rendered this intimate atmosphere inaccessible for many ecologists. the collapse of the ecological home under white supremacy and patriarchy has stifled our understanding of the countless processes that shape an organism. by leaning into and (re)constructing ecology as a boundless, rather than rigid, home, an intimate atmosphere for a multitude of concepts, bodies, and souls to interact at an ever-expanding table can be created.   introduction queer thought is, in large part, about casting a picture of arduous modes of relationality that persist in the world despite stratifying demarcations and taxonomies of being, classifications that are bent on the siloing of particularity and on the denigrating of any expansive idea of the common and commonism. —josé esteban muñoz, “theorizing queer inhumanisms: the sense of brownness” for centuries, humans have sought to understand the complex ecological and evolutionary processes of the world. from investigating why bees waggle upon arrival to hives and the selection processes underpinning the coloration of wildlife, to exploring the myriad environmental pressures that lead to behavioral adaptations in animals. all of these questions have furthered our understanding of what lies beyond the human and the complex entanglement of life with the environment. but have the investigative processes we have come to know as sure-fire approaches and methods in ecology hindered our understanding of what is beyond the human? when we think in binaries (e.g., pest or non-pest, male or female) or simpler terms (e.g., a bold animal) to understand the existence of organisms within our ecosphere, we miss precious moments that reveal to us intimate and prolific processes. even beyond these eclipsed moments, the current scientific foundation we rest our method on has shaped our practice to exclude social processes from ecology because of the “objectivity” of science. in western science, ecology is unable to be penetrated by the intimate insertion of worldly processes—such as classism, racism, capitalism, patriarchal dominations of nature, and so on. it creates a “social world” and a “natural world” under different, exclusionary roofs. this is in no doubt due to colonialism and white supremacy, which “produce allegedly objective, dispassionate, and male science which has traditionally made no room for any subjective, emotionally engaged exploration of the world around us” (freyne 2020, 174). yet ecology itself, as a word and discipline that studies the relationship between organisms and the environment, demands we engage with intimacy (morton 2010). ecology necessarily means interrogating the social world and its many (oppressive) processes that leak into the natural world to subjugate human and nonhuman animals to harsh ecological pressures. when we condemn and dismantle this “objective” ecology, we can examine “the spatially and temporally extensive ways that practices are sedimented into and structure the world” (murphy 2013, 2), including societal legacies (e.g., colonialism, the plantation, historical redlining) that ultimately shape the social and ecological processes that influence organisms. in this essay, i am leveraging queer to dismantle and disturb “objective” western ecology, which is steeped in white cisheterosexist articulations of nature and a direct result of who has held (and produced) knowledge in these spaces, to (re)construct ecology as a home. ecology, as a disciple and entity, is about examining the relationship between organisms and their environment. when we revisit the roots of ecology, which is a dwelling place and home, we begin to understand that humans have constructed a rift between themselves and the natural world that inhibits our ability to fully understand the myriad social-ecological pressures organisms are subjected to. within this reconstructed home, the binary and rigid thinking of the natural world many ecologists cling to begins to dissolve, allowing us to access more of the fluid and dynamic reality organisms exist within. in this space, ecologists are able to gain the power to visualize the intimate connections and entanglements between the not-so-separate social and natural worlds. in this essay, i argue that there is currently a rift between ecologists and the natural world that has stifled our understanding of wildlife and prevented the ecological home from emerging. i argue that this rift is due to the societal construction of nonhuman animals and “conflict” with said nonhuman animals. this construction, both of the nonhuman animal and conflict, prohibits us from making and sharing a home with wildlife. i then lean on queer theory to (re)construct ecology as a home, creating room for intimacy between humans and wildlife and yielding a lens to understand the complex entanglement of the social and natural world with respect to wildlife. i then sit within this reconstructed home to examine the coyote (canis latrans) as it traverses human settlements and the boundaries we place on urban, suburban, and wild as labels for conceptual markers. throughout this work, i am leveraging queerness to envision “an array of subjectivities, intimacies, beings, and spaces located outside of the heteronormative” (chen 2012, 184) and create “an understanding of ecology as naming not the idea of the ‘natural world’ as something set apart from humans but a complex system of interdependency” (luciano and chen 2015, 188). by capitalizing queer, i am positing queer as a being that casts shadows of uncertainty around ways of knowing and feeling, and demands empathy and intimacy to build relationality amongst and beyond the human. constructed conflict ecological theory has long examined the complexity of human-wildlife interactions. for instance, scholars have spent years examining the myriad social factors—such as perceptions, attitudes, past experiences, gender, socioeconomic status, and beliefs—that determine what a person perceives as conflict (i.e., a negative human-wildlife interaction) (dickman 2010; frank 2016; soulsbury and white 2015). recently, nyeema harris and colleagues (2023) have highlighted that human-wildlife interactions are not static—that is, these interactions cannot necessarily be binned into coexistence and conflict as these terms are incredibly flimsy. and although beatrice frank (2016) discusses human-wildlife interactions along a continuum between conflict and coexistence, harris et al. (2023) extend this idea by noting coexistence is not necessarily devoid of conflict (i.e., human tolerance of what is deemed a “negative” action from a nonhuman animal) and that a lifecycle of interactions occurs between humans and wildlife that is highly dynamic, such that lasting coexistence may rarely occur. human-wildlife interactions, generally, can be positive (e.g., ecotourism, local birdwatching), negative (e.g., livestock or pets lost to predation, vehicle mortalities), or neutral (e.g., humans and squirrels coexisting in a park). negative human-wildlife interactions are typically characterized as human-wildlife conflict, in which humans, infrastructure, or interests are negatively affected by wildlife (bhatia et al. 2020; soulsbury and white 2015). negative interactions with wildlife can be considered a major issue (könig et al. 2020; lozano et al. 2019; treves and santiago-avila 2020), with many studies exploring how to minimize negative human-wildlife interactions via management interventions (e.g., boycott et al. 2021; estien et al. 2022; young et al. 2019). human-wildlife conflict is especially prevalent in urban spaces due to a high concentration of humans and land-use changes (könig et al. 2020) and has even led to evolutionary consequences on wildlife inhabiting these spaces (schell et al. 2021). there is no doubt that interspecies interactions can be complex (pooley et al. 2021), but i ask, is it actually conflict? conflict, broken down into “together” (con-) and “to strike” (flict), is defined by merriam-webster in several ways: “noun: (1) competitive or opposing action of incompatibles: antagonistic state or action (as of divergent ideas, interests, or persons);…(2) mental struggle resulting from incompatible or opposing needs, drives, wishes, or external or internal demands;…(3) the opposition of persons or forces that gives rise to the dramatic action in a drama or fiction. verb: (1): to be different, opposed, or contradictory: to fail to be in agreement or accord;…(2) archaic: to contend in warfare.” hence, to say there is human-wildlife conflict is to say we as humans are “different, opposed, or contradictory” to wildlife. it’s to say that wildlife are “antagonistic” and have “incompatible needs, drives, wishes, or demands.” rhetoric as such can often predetermine how we perceive or interact with animals that have been seen as “aggressive” and “dangerous” due to myriad “negative” interactions with humans. but are these negative interactions actually conflict? and is the use of conflict predetermining how we perceive wildlife and assess our interactions with them? nils peterson et al. (2010) began this conversation by reviewing what has been categorized as human-wildlife conflict in the literature. peterson and colleagues discuss how non-material entities—memories, values, beliefs—are core characteristics of who humans are and influence our very being, including what we feel is conflict. of the 422 scientific papers reviewed by peterson et al., only one instance of human-wildlife conflict was found, where magpies (gymnorhina tibicen) attacked humans (warne and jones 2003). the remaining papers found documented instances of human-wildlife conflict such as property or agricultural damage by wildlife and human-human conflict pertaining to management decisions about (problematic) wildlife. this review illustrates, and emphasizes, the importance of language use, as the term conflict is textured and has immense consequences for promoting coexistence between human and nonhuman animals (and the ecosphere as a whole) (peterson et al. 2010). peterson et al.’s argument hinges on the material concepts that most reported “conflict” is simply miscategorized, and that the phrase human-wildlife conflict is counterproductive to coexistence because it divides human and nature. extending this argument, i suggest that not only is conflict with nonhumans (in the way we have currently come to generally understand it) a construct that bolsters the divide between humans and nonhuman animals, but, moreover, the concept of human-wildlife conflict creates an unbalanced power dynamic that muddles solutions that best blend human and nonhuman ecologies so multiple species can thrive. for example, a quick and immediate solution to beavers (castor)— habitat engineers that have downstream impacts on habitat biodiversity (e.g., hood and larson 2014; law et al. 2016)—causing flooding in forested or peri-urban areas may be to simply remove the individual(s), either by lethal removal or translocation, or install a fence to exclude beavers from certain areas. however, if a species is translocated from an area, depending on the removal distance, that individual could simply return. if the individual does not return or has been lethally removed, the space and resources used by the individual remain opens, allowing another individual to move into the territory. as for fences, research has highlighted that fences have complex effects on the ecology of a landscape (mcinturff et al. 2020), and that fences do not always exclude individuals, regardless of fence maintenance (wilkinson et al. 2021). thus, both “solutions” are relatively obsolete, but by centering the human in response to “conflict,” we lose the ability to interrogate strategies for managing landscapes that work best for humans and nonhuman animals. notably, for beavers, actions such as deploying pond-leveling devices can be placed near or in their dams to keep them from flooding a nearby area, creating a cost-effective, ecology-conscious approach that reduces flooding while not relying on extermination of the beaver, or other disruptions to its ecology (hood, manaloor, and dzioba 2018; hood, mcintosh, and hvenegaard 2021). however, glynnis hood and colleagues note that flow devices are not a popular approach to beaver management (employed by 5% of municipalities in alberta, canada), unlike trapping and shooting (employed by 74% of municipalities in alberta) (2018, 10). western societies have generally constructed nonhuman animals as beings with no rights or agency. they are seen as beings that respond to external stimuli, whether it be anthropogenic or natural, but do not fully understand the world. for example, urban wildlife can often be perceived as ecological accidents. they are seen as animals that must have been struggling in their natural habitat and have accidently wandered into urban spaces, where they have now found resources to consume. they are animals that belong in a “natural” habitat. the creation of urban spaces (i.e., cities) as something solely to be human and distant and separate from nature further upholds this notion that wildlife do not belong in these spaces and must be in cities by accident. rather than seeing cities as trans-species spaces where urban wildlife participates in social life (hubbard and brooks 2021), cities are often fictitiously constructed as human spaces where wildlife invade and forcibly make their own home. this militarization of urban wildlife, as animals that invade or colonize spaces, rather than beings that move through borderless lands, further invites the potential for conflict. it is no wonder society finds conflict with wildlife in human-dominated landscapes, especially in cities—a concrete jungle that was built only for human animals in mind. this division and demarcation from nature that humans have built with cities pushes humans to further construct urban wildlife, specifically wildlife that refuse to exist in cities as humans deem appropriate, as pests, vermin, and nuisance beings. these terms for urban wildlife further construct these animals as beings to be controlled and dominated, and since conflict invites scenarios where there is a winner and loser or a dominator and a submissive, humans find themselves continually constructing conflict with many urban species to reassert their dominance over nonhuman animals. conflict with nonhuman animals is easy to have when cities are seen as incompatible with the animal—a being constructed with no rights or agency—and the animal is seen as something to dominate or control under the western society. in urban spaces specifically, human-wildlife conflict typically stems from wildlife “misbehaving” and interfering with capital, property, and aesthetics. in these cases, the use of conflict often invites militaristic actions against the animal that is the deemed the perpetrator, rather than against the oppressive system that underpins the negative interaction with wildlife. conflict here reinforces the taxonomical hierarchy and pushes wildlife into a social category that (dis)allows them existence in human-dominated landscapes and access to resources. for example, new york city has declared a war against rats. although the conflict with rats can be argued as reasonable, due to potential human exposure to zoonotic diseases, conflict here constructs rat issues as human-wildlife issues, inherently overlooking the capitalistic system that continues to value capital over people. rather than interrogate the oppressive and violent system that has created poor housing conditions and other environmental conditions that have created favorable habitats for rats, leading to dense rat populations and human exposure to zoonotic disease, the city is spending millions of dollars on the extermination of rats. thus, conflict, as a structure and process, often ignores the societal processes that degrade environments and push (marginalized) humans to have negative interactions with wildlife. i argue that on a large scale, the use of conflict prevents an interrogation of a system that invites negative interactions with wildlife due to notions of, for example, aesthetics, property, and capital. simultaneously, the usage of human-wildlife conflict inadvertently maps conscious antagonism onto wildlife, constructing a villainous and dark figure that eclipses who the animal is and invites violence towards wildlife. getting dirty with wildlife to (re)construct the ecological home to fully deteriorate this myth of conflict between human and nonhuman animals, we must dissolve the human and nonhuman boundary and surgically remove human exceptionalism such that “boundaries between human and nonhuman melt” (jones 2002, 93), recognizing that “nature cannot be posited as other than or prior to humans” (luciano and chen 2015, 185). once we dissolve this boundary between human and nonhuman beings, we can begin creating a foundation to (re)construct ecology as a home and repair the connections between humans and nonhuman animals. if we as ecologists rupture the concepts of individualism and human exceptionalism, as suggested in donna haraway’s staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene (2016, 30), what can be produced? to rupture and appropriately dismantle human exceptionalism, ecologists must flatten the imagined and constructed hierarchical taxonomic ladder, which places humans at the top and “lesser” beings towards the bottom. moving in this direction necessarily means we, as ecologists, must get dirty with wildlife: “getting dirty means we become fully human by remembering and embodying our trans-human animalness. this requires a decolonization process, because we must question and shed the conditioned beliefs that say we are more intelligent than, different from, or better than our animal nature and other natural beings (i.e., human exceptionalism)” (nelson 2017, 255). instead of being viewed as an individual with autonomy, decision-making abilities, and other traits we place on a pedestal and have been socialized to understand as synonymous with “human,” wildlife are reduced to “just an animal.” this constructed and infantilized “animal” warrants different societal perceptions and understandings of it when it appears on a human landscape, depending on the positionality of the human observing it. for instance, if the human observing the animal views nature as an entity that should be removed from humans, then any move that animal makes may become “conflict.” on the other end, a human may experience endearment, resentment, or lack of excitement for an animal simply based on its biology and positionality within human society (e.g., a pigeon or rat compared to a falcon or puma). what contributes to the transposition and maintenance of these dynamic feelings towards the nonhuman animal? a brief glimpse reveals that any being existing on a landscape where racialized tension continues to stem from colonial roots, is incredibly porous, sliding up and down the animacy hierarchy (see chen 2012). we can dig into these ideas by examining the domestic dog, for example, who can become very (in)human. domestic dogs are porous in their image and, because of their positionality to humans, can reap the benefits and consequences of the arbitrary and troubled hierarchy humans have constructed. on the one hand, some dogs are demonized and ostracized with anthropocentric personalities such as “aggressive” sticking to them because of their proximity to black and brown communities and thus, seen as “below” other dogs (similar to how black and brown individuals and other marginalized groups [disabled folks, trans folks, etc.] have been seen as “subspecies” to humans/humanness) while other dogs hold higher statute as classy, safer dogs because of their prevalence in white communities, and can often become familial and above other nonhuman animals and even other humans (weaver 2021). mel chen (2012) notes that the language we use around nonhuman animals situates and isolates them lower on this conceptual taxonomic hierarchy—hence the phrase “treated me like a dog.” this fixed taxonomical hierarchy stems from the colonial gaze, which suppresses and hides entities deemed invaluable in a submerged world. in the extractive zone: social ecologies and decolonial perspectives, macarena gómez-barris (2017) pries open the submerged world and reveals a complex and interactive space teeming with perspectives. by entering this submerged world and moving beyond the western scientific perspective, we can interact with the world in a new fashion. going into what gómez-barris deems the “fish-eye” allows us to connect deeper to the environment and be enveloped by what extractivism (i.e., the colonial gaze) dismisses and moves beyond (2017, 94–100). moving into and employing this submerged perspective allows us to get dirty with wildlife and reconstruct ecology as a home where intimate interactions are seen and heard. in this submerged perspective, “protecting nature means protecting ourselves” (anderson and samudzi 2018, 33). it’s in this intimate space where we are able to feel the emotions and pain of wildlife when they are subjected to violent acts, such as polluted landscapes. getting dirty allows us to attend to the unseen, or even dismissed, interactions between wildlife and the landscape they operate on and are engulfed in. with an understanding of the porous nature of animals and the perspective that ignores a vibrant network of intimate connections, we can begin rearranging this constructed landscape. what would it look like to rearrange a hierarchy that is rooted in oppression and acts as a barrier for human-nonhuman connections? instead of a vertical, capitalistic hierarchy that assigns values to bodies, with entities such as insects on the bottom and human at the top, what if we flatten it? when we flatten this ladder, instead of levels, we get to create doors with two-pronged intimacy into a home. first, this two-pronged intimacy allows us to enter spaces that were considered “disparate” before and fully engage with the life behind the door. behind this door, hierarchical barriers are dissolved—allowing us to see that wildlife are not detached from the human world but incredibly entangled with our systems. we are able to better engage with our research subjects and understand who they are and what their experience is on their respective landscapes, no matter the ecosystem. although ecological theory already recognizes the complex interactions between humans and ecosystems (collins et al. 2000; des roches et al. 2021; ramalho and hobbs 2012; schell et al. 2020), in this flattened space, we can better identify the environmental processes that entangle and latch onto our research subjects. for instance, a standard ecological approach recognizes that urban wildlife have various behavioral responses to both social and ecological pressures. here, social and environmental factors such as urban heat, societal wealth, pollution, transportation infrastructure, and human population density can impact community-level processes (e.g., biodiversity) (chamberlain et al. 2019; des roches et al. 2021; leong et al. 2018; saaristo et al. 2018) and feedback to impact aspects of organismal biology (e.g.,behavior, physiology) (ouyang et al. 2018).yet these approaches still fail to consider or recognize how systems of oppression and extraction construct different niches for urban wildlife, both social and ecological. although current ecological thought considers the ecological portion, examining what parts of cities are ecologically hospitable for wildlife (i.e., have the resources to sustain a population) or where wildlife currently occur in cities, ecological theory has yet to critically examine why portions of cities are more socially acceptable than others for certain wildlife (e.g., where perceptions and attitudes of this organism are tolerable). using these doors will reveal to ecologists that urban wildlife can slip into the racial and capitalistic hierarchies of humans, ultimately shaping the existence of wildlife in urban landscapes. for instance, urban wildlife interfering with capital interests and aesthetics can become pests and are deemed “disposable,” similar to marginalized human bodies (e.g., homeless populations). simultaneously, wildlife associated with particular human groups become entangled in ethno-racial as well as economic conflict and hierarchies, leading to unfavorable or violent views towards particular animals. second, while this two-pronged intimacy allows us to see new perspectives by more intimately engaging with our research subjects and seeing how they function in their ecosystem, it allows for us to erect respectable boundaries between two or more entities. these respectable boundaries allow for us to note and celebrate the differences between the researcher and the research(ed). by recognizing and upholding these differences, we can “love, befriend, and care for another” by “respect[ing] the independent aspect of their being” (freyne 2020, 178). these differences, whether biological or social, can ultimately be what links the researcher and research subject against a structure that simultaneously subjects them to violence. and in this simultaneous multispecies struggle against neocolonialism and extractive capitalism, both researcher and research subject briefly overlap, spatially and temporally, in an intimate fashion to become one. by being overlaid, both (or more) bodies occupying the space are fluid, and the interactions become more intimate, allowing a subject to become fully known. behind this door, we prevent pushing apart and devaluing bodies and begin to realize that we, as ecologists, do not hold all the knowledge. here, our research subject becomes our research partner, revealing what they want to share about the vast adaptations they are equipped with in response to vast social and ecological pressures. traditional ecological approaches are built on western understandings of nature, which do not recognize wildlife as beings with agency, and inevitably reproduce troubled and oppressive hierarchies. upon identifying this systemic bias, we can begin to recognize that these approaches are “an imagined system, not an actual, self-regulating one” (chen 2012, 89) and do not allow for an expansive view of wildlife. through queering our approach to ecology, we are able to get dirty and become entangled with wildlife, producing “empathy and kinship” (nelson 2017, 232). getting dirty with wildlife allows us to have intimate interactions with nonhuman animals and access understandings of how these animals navigate their environments. in this approach, we are able to flatten taxonomical hierarchies, weave new, personal connections with nature, and access ecological knowledge that would otherwise be missed due to the static observations of nature traditional ecology asks for. when we begin to work in this flattened landscape, human exceptionalism and bounded individualism fall to the side and a new intimate landscape teeming with complex emotions and relationality is freed. in this landscape, organisms and processes are observed and felt differently. for example, even a prominent ecological concept such as co-evolution, an idea primarily discussed in the context of predator-prey/host-parasite interactions, can be transformed into an intimate interaction that occurs between abiotic and biotic beings: “as plant sex spawned new generations of plants, it also made new fire. as plant life mobilised, evolved and radiated, so fire migrated, proliferated and diversified. as plants made the living world more hospitable to flame, so too did wildfire select for species or communities that tolerated, even depended upon, flame” (clark and yusoff 2018, 12). similarly, photosynthesis transforms from a process of acquiring and processing energy into “celestial fertility” that burns “like a cool green fire” (clark and yusoff 2018, 11), and spiders move beyond animals that create webs to capture prey and sustain themselves; instead, they make “attachments and detachments; they make cuts and knots; they make a difference; they weave paths and consequences but not determinisms; they are both open knotted in some ways and not others” (haraway 2016, 31). on this flattened landscape, we can begin to reconstruct and erect the ecological home, where interactions between human and nonhuman beings can be seen, felt, and sensed differently. once we enter the ecological home, we are able to sit at the table with organisms and fully see them. we are able to hold our research organisms to feel their richness and texture. we are able to slowly move around the edges and note characteristics we overlooked before. through this intimate process within the ecological home, ecologists can begin to better understand the myriad social and ecological pressures that impact them. the queer concrete canid coyotes are beings that persist in spaces in which they are not wanted and are often demonized even though they are beautiful and meek. coyotes are often viewed as “antagonistic,” “problematic,” and derogatorily “complex.” yet, through all adversity—the defamation and subsequent (environmental) violence that has come with human expansion—coyotes persist in urban spaces, much like marginalized humans. in this section, i’ll sit within the ecological home to examine the urban coyote as a queer ecological being navigating a charged landscape and the associated social-ecological pressures. the coyote is one of many appendages of nature. the coyote in particular, similar to nature at large, exudes vitality and refuses to fit in the arbitrary boxes we affix to it. in this way, coyotes are a model of resistance against the rigidness of western society and ideologies. the coyote sees the world differently than us and moves through space and time as a queer ecological being. here, i leverage neel ahuja’s definition of queer/queering, as the coyote “emerges by tracing an affective materiality that interrupts anthropocentric body logics and space-time continuums rather than a sovereign stance of negation in relation to law” (2015, 372). by simply existing and persisting, the coyote dismembers all anthropocentric logic on wildlife survival and how wildlife should (and can) exist in cities. the coyote intimately exists in tandem with asphalt and soil. between the rough, gritty, chilled, and overbearing grey and the plush, firm, wet, and boundless brown. all of it is home to the coyote. in this way, i would say that the coyote is incredibly intimate with concrete, more than humans may ever be. the coyote, similar to the black identity (see samudzi and anderson 2018, 21), is inextricably linked with the land. it paces and traverses streets as it has traversed time and moved through different embodiments. on one end, the coyote moves through many indigenous stories as a parental figure, savior, or creator, to name a few (baldy 2015). on the other end, the coyote erupts in the anthropocene as an embattled and resilient carnivore that polarizes the americas. observing the coyote as this still, yet transient, deviant body bursting with potential and possibilities instills an unmatched wave of peace and power. it’s an overwhelming feeling that drowns you and provides air simultaneously. coyotes have emerged as an exciting potential case of ecosystem sentinels—species that provide information about an ecosystem (zacharias and roff 2001)—sentinels in cities. the coyote is set to expand its range across the americas (hody and kays 2018), and their intimacy with (toxic) landscapes will be greater than we will understand. with this range expansion, the images of the coyote will continually collide and be rebuilt to articulate who the coyote is both materially and cosmically in modernity, “generating friction and leakage” between these identities (luciano and chen 2015, 186). as these conversations of who the coyote is continually surface, the coyote is often seen as a danger, out-of-place, and not belonging. for example, in denver, colorado, themes of anger, accusation, violence, and crime in response to the coyote are incredibly prevalent (draheim et al. 2021). similarly, in los angeles, california, people have organized a group called evict coyotes (n.d.), which, the group’s facebook page explains, is “not here to discuss both sides. the only side we discuss is how to get our government to do their job and start evicting coyotes.” this rhetoric around who and what belongs where, and use of phrases such as “they don’t belong here” and “we don’t want to coexist with them, we want them gone," mirror feelings directed towards marginalized humans who are viewed as an other. despite these negative attitudes, coyotes, like many other urban animals, have increased their tolerance of people and human-dominated spaces (e.g., breck et al. 2019; estien et al. 2025), all while facing detrimental threats such as the rupturing of our climate and environmental violence (e.g., toxic pollution and contamination). the phenotypic plasticity coyotes exhibit is something to marvel over—almost like no matter how far humans bend them, they never break. and yet this phenotypic bending (i.e., plasticity) done by humans via the construction of a concrete jungle and other large-scale landscape alterations is viewed as negative (e.g., manzolillo et al. 2019) rather than beautiful. why is that? chen asks in animacies, “what happens when animals appear on human landscapes?” (2012, 89) and for the urban coyote, dramatic and intense slippage occurs as it is rapidly thrown between the many constructed coyotes that exist in, for example, nextdoor forums, twitter/x threads, dinner table conversations, or local parks. the constructed coyote—an “aggressor” and “villain”—directly alters how the material coyote interacts with the urban landscape with actions such as hazing aiming to reinstate human dominion and control over the urban coyote (niesner et al. 2024). the constructed coyote has incredibly tangible and sometimes violent consequences for the urban coyote, who is simply resourceful, plastic, and resilient. this constructed coyote offers the human a “logical reason” to invest in warfare and violence against the urban coyote rather than build a home with the urban coyote (niesner et al. 2024). yet the coyote does not subscribe to this false image of self, despite the human begging for the coyote to buy into this constructed image to validate the coyote’s ultimate death and removal. the urban coyote moves around the constructed coyote and does not seek to be validated from the world or have a desire to be of this world. the urban coyote recognizes that it does not exist beyond the margins of society and the cities we have come to know, so much so that its existence seems to beget the interrogation and destruction of the constructed heteropatriarchal, white supremacist world that has pushed the urban coyote into these very margins. within these margins the urban coyote absorbs xenophobic and racist rhetoric via the entanglement with society’s constructed other, who is similarly crushed and caricatured by myriad systems of oppression. here the urban coyote becomes queer and embodies abolition, freedom, and revolution. when we enter the margins alongside the coyote, we can begin to understand that antagonisms towards the coyote are not random, but a direct result of colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy. there is tension between cities and coyotes, such that when a coyote emerges in a city, it is a polarizing force that disrupts, ruptures, and shatters all quotidian entities and infrastructure. the coyote’s existence has continued to evolve and become conditional within an ongoing settler project, similar to myself as a black queer person. this evolution and conditionality can be further understood as extractivism, which views and understands both nature (and blackness) as entities to be controlled and commodified (sumudzi and anderson 2018, 33). with this lens, it becomes clear that to be an urban coyote is to be “anti-human” in the same way that to exist as a black person in the us is to be “anti-state” (sumudzi and anderson 2018, 112). the simple existence of the coyote is in direct opposition of urban spaces and human assumptions of where nature “deserves” to be. the very construction of cities is often made to center (socially dominant) humans and their needs—leading to a dense, built landscape created from a love affair of oppressive systems. for the coyote, capitalism, classism, anti-black racism, and more materialize to create inequitable and unjust cities that evict slow violence on marginalized communities (wright 2021). in this toxic urban landscape that was not built for the coyote, it persists as a form of resistance to the many forms of oppression that are consciously overlooked in urban landscapes. the urban coyote experience is not one of thriving, but survival, tenacity, and grit. the coyote’s plasticity bends its destiny to encompass life and a concrete future that prevents the constructed coyote from engulfing the urban coyote until only its ghost is left. the world we’ve come to know is not a neutral nor natural phenomenon but constructed through many systems of oppression that affect humans and nonhumans alike (cannon et al. 2024; estien et al. 2024; hubbard and brooks 2021; schell et al. 2020). the urban coyote, along with other wildlife, is swept up in this constructed world where it subjected to harsh social and ecological processes stemming from injustices and oppressive systems (e.g., imperialism, capitalism). yet traditional ecology prevents ecologists from engaging with this part of the world when investigating the environmental pressures, both social and ecological, that influence wildlife. with the reconstructed ecological home, and the lens it produces, we can begin to recognize that the large-scale oppression directed towards marginalized and minoritized humans—including racialized rhetoric, violent actions, environmental degradation, and unjust laws—encompass the urban coyote, ultimately shaping its phenotype and crystalizing it as a queer being. conclusion: ecology as a home we should not wait for the magic words we want to hear to come out of someone else’s mouth when we can designate, dictate, and deliver change ourselves. —zoé samudzi and william c. anderson, as black as resistance: finding the conditions for liberation science as a modern approach has a long history of entanglement with white supremacy, dismissing other forms of knowledge, being, and understanding. such that when we reduce nonhuman organisms to solely scientific terms, we are reducing and stripping nonhuman organisms of their being and preventing a full understanding of said organism. we are inevitably reinforcing a taxonomical hierarchy and colonial human/nonhuman power schemes, losing the ability to create boundless, intimate relations with our research subjects. what if intimacy and love, such as respect, trust, commitment, and recognition (hooks 2000, 5), was shown to wildlife as a researcher? for instance, what would it mean for ecologists to commit to wildlife and recognize wildlife as beings with agency? committing to and recognizing the agency of wildlife would lead to erecting and reinforcing the ecological home, consequently pushing ecologists to shift their disciplinary lens and methodological approaches. the movement into the ecological home allows ecologists to better recognize, for example, the myriad oppressive structures that shape the urban coyote (cannon et al. 2024). more applicably, through the trans-species intimacy within the ecological home, we can begin to think how to plan cities and manage urban landscapes that support all life, especially those that have been marginalized. currently, ecology has found itself in an unintimate landscape that encounters itself as a hurdle. in this piece, i have argued that by queering ecology, ecologists are able to shift the field such that the core aspects to ecology—understanding the relationship between organisms and their environment—can be better interrogated. specifically, i have argued that through (re)constructing ecology as a home, we can best identify the vast social-ecological pressures, including systemic racism, charged rhetoric, and constructed perceptions, that shape wildlife ecology. my hope is that by grounding ecology as a dwelling place and working within a home, an intimate atmosphere for a multitude of concepts, bodies, and souls to interact at a never-ending table can be created. this intimate ecological atmosphere calls for the abolition of taxonomic hierarchies because intimacy, and by extension respect, care, and coexistence, cannot exist with dominion. through ecological homemaking, we can begin to understand the positionality of wildlife in our constructed world, how this varies across organisms based on their social and ecological niches, and how the ecological pressure wildlife is subjected to is a direct consequence of this violent, constructed world. acknowledgments i would like to thank dr. salar mameni, who taught queer of color ecologies in spring 2022. the conversations and readings from this class changed my scholarship and perspective as an urban ecologist. i would also like to thank drs. ambika kambath, max lambert, natalie hofmeister, and chase niesner, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for comments that improved this manuscript. my writing time was supported by the university of california, berkeley’s chancellor fellowship and the national science foundation’s graduate research fellowship under grant no. dge-2146752. any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the 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